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Title: The Complete Historical Romances of Georg Ebers
Author: Georg Ebers
Release Date: November 15, 2004 [EBook #5600]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORICAL NOVELS ***
Produced by David Widger
THE HISTORICAL ROMANCES OF GEORG EBERS
CONTENTS:
Uarda
An Egyptian Princess
The Sisters
Joshua
Cleopatra
The Emperor
Homo Sum
Serapis
Arachne
The Bride Of The Nile
A Thorny Path
In The Fire Of The Forge
Margery
Barbara Blomberg
A Word Only A Word
The Burgomaster's Wife
In The Blue Pike
A Question
The Elixir
The Greylock
The Nuts
The Story Of My Life (Autobiograpy)
UARDA
A ROMANCE OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Translated from the German by Clara Bell
Volume 1.
DEDICATION.
Thou knowest well from what this book arose.
When suffering seized and held me in its clasp
Thy fostering hand released me from its grasp,
And from amid the thorns there bloomed a rose.
Air, dew, and sunshine were bestowed by Thee,
And Thine it is; without these lines from me.
PREFACE.
In the winter of 1873 I spent some weeks in one of the tombs of the
Necropolis of Thebes in order to study the monuments of that solemn city
of the dead; and during my long rides in the silent desert the germ was
developed whence this book has since grown. The leisure of mind and body
required to write it was given me through a long but not disabling
illness.
In the first instance I intended to elucidate this story--like my
"Egyptian Princess"--with numerous and extensive notes placed at the end;
but I was led to give up this plan from finding that it would lead me to
the repetition of much that I had written in the notes to that earlier
work.
The numerous notes to the former novel had a threefold purpose. In the
first place they served to explain the text; in the second they were a
guarantee of the care with which I had striven to depict the
archaeological details in all their individuality from the records of the
monuments and of Classic Authors; and thirdly I hoped to supply the
reader who desired further knowledge of the period with some guide to his
studies.
In the present work I shall venture to content myself with the simple
statement that I have introduced nothing as proper to Egypt and to the
period of Rameses that cannot be proved by some authority; the numerous
monuments which have descended to us from the time of the Rameses, in
fact enable the enquirer to understand much of the aspect and arrangement
of Egyptian life, and to follow it step try step through the details of
religious, public, and private life, even of particular individuals. The
same remark cannot be made in regard to their mental life, and here many
an anachronism will slip in, many things will appear modern, and show the
coloring of the Christian mode of thought.
Every part of this book is intelligible without the aid of notes; but,
for the reader who seeks for further enlightenment, I have added some
foot-notes, and have not neglected to mention such works as afford more
detailed information on the subjects mentioned in the narrative.
The reader who wishes to follow the mind of the author in this work
should not trouble himself with the notes as he reads, but merely at the
beginning of each chapter read over the notes which belong to the
foregoing one. Every glance at the foot-notes must necessarily disturb
and injure the development of the tale as a work of art. The story stands
here as it flowed from one fount, and was supplied with notes only after
its completion.
A narrative of Herodotus combined with the Epos of Pentaur, of which so
many copies have been handed down to us, forms the foundation of the
story.
The treason of the Regent related by the Father of history is referable
perhaps to the reign of the third and not of the second Rameses. But it
is by no means certain that the Halicarnassian writer was in this case
misinformed; and in this fiction no history will be inculcated, only as a
background shall I offer a sketch of the time of Sesostris, from a
picturesque point of view, but with the nearest possible approach to
truth. It is true that to this end nothing has been neglected that could
be learnt from the monuments or the papyri; still the book is only a
romance, a poetic fiction, in which I wish all the facts derived from
history and all the costume drawn from the monuments to be regarded as
incidental, and the emotions of the actors in the story as what I attach
importance to.
But I must be allowed to make one observation. From studying the
conventional mode of execution of ancient Egyptian art--which was
strictly subject to the hieratic laws of type and proportion--we have
accustomed ourselves to imagine the inhabitants of the Nile-valley in the
time of the Pharaohs as tall and haggard men with little distinction of
individual physiognomy, and recently a great painter has sought to
represent them under this aspect in a modern picture. This is an error;
the Egyptians, in spite of their aversion to foreigners and their strong
attachment to their native soil, were one of the most intellectual and
active people of antiquity; and he who would represent them as they
lived, and to that end copies the forms which remain painted on the walls
of the temples and sepulchres, is the accomplice of those priestly
corrupters of art who compelled the painters and sculptors of the
Pharaonic era to abandon truth to nature in favor of their sacred laws of
proportion.
He who desires to paint the ancient Egyptians with truth and fidelity,
must regard it in some sort as an act of enfranchisement; that is to say,
he must release the conventional forms from those fetters which were
peculiar to their art and altogether foreign to their real life. Indeed,
works of sculpture remain to us of the time of the first pyramid, which
represent men with the truth of nature, unfettered by the sacred canon.
We can recall the so-called "Village Judge" of Bulaq, the "Scribe" now in
Paris, and a few figures in bronze in different museums, as well as the
noble and characteristic busts of all epochs, which amply prove how great
the variety of individual physiognomy, and, with that, of individual
character was among the Egyptians. Alma Tadelna in London and Gustav
Richter in Berlin have, as painters, treated Egyptian subjects in a
manner which the poet recognizes and accepts with delight.
Many earlier witnesses than the late writer Flavius Vopiscus might be
referred to who show us the Egyptians as an industrious and peaceful
people, passionately devoted it is true to all that pertains to the other
world, but also enjoying the gifts of life to the fullest extent, nay
sometimes to excess.
Real men, such as we see around us in actual life, not silhouettes
constructed to the old priestly scale such as the monuments show us--real
living men dwelt by the old Nile-stream; and the poet who would represent
them must courageously seize on types out of the daily life of modern men
that surround him, without fear of deviating too far from reality, and,
placing them in their own long past time, color them only and clothe them
to correspond with it.
I have discussed the authorities for the conception of love which I have
ascribed to the ancients in the preface to the second edition of "An
Egyptian Princess."
With these lines I send Uarda into the world; and in them I add my thanks
to those dear friends in whose beautiful home, embowered in green,
bird-haunted woods, I have so often refreshed my spirit and recovered my
strength, where I now write the last words of this book.
Rheinbollerhutte, September 22, 1876.
GEORG EBERS.
PREFACE
TO THE FIFTH GERMAN EDITION.
The earlier editions of "Uarda" were published in such rapid succession,
that no extensive changes in the stereotyped text could be made; but from
the first issue, I have not ceased to correct it, and can now present to
the public this new fifth edition as a "revised" one.
Having felt a constantly increasing affection for "Uarda" during the time
I was writing, the friendly and comprehensive attention bestowed upon it
by our greatest critics and the favorable reception it met with in the
various classes of society, afforded me the utmost pleasure.
I owe the most sincere gratitude to the honored gentlemen, who called my
attention to certain errors, and among them will name particularly
Professor Paul Ascherson of Berlin, and Dr. C. Rohrbach of Gotha. Both
will find their remarks regarding mistakes in the geographical location
of plants, heeded in this new edition.
The notes, after mature deliberation, have been placed at the foot of the
pages instead of at the end of the book.
So many criticisms concerning the title "Uarda" have recently reached my
ears, that, rather by way of explanation than apology, I will here repeat
what I said in the preface to the third edition.
This title has its own history, and the more difficult it would be for me
to defend it, the more ready I am to allow an advocate to speak for me,
an advocate who bears a name no less distinguished than that of G. E.
Lessing, who says:
"Nanine? (by Voltaire, 1749). What sort of title is that? What thoughts
does it awake? Neither more nor less than a title should arouse. A title
must not be a bill of fare. The less it betrays of the contents, the
better it is. Author and spectator are both satisfied, and the ancients
rarely gave their comedies anything but insignificant names."
This may be the case with "Uarda," whose character is less prominent than
some others, it is true, but whose sorrows direct the destinies of my
other heroes and heroines.
Why should I conceal the fact? The character of "Uarda" and the present
story have grown out of the memory of a Fellah girl, half child, half
maiden, whom I saw suffer and die in a hut at Abu el Qurnah in the
Necropolis of Thebes.
I still persist in the conviction I have so frequently expressed, the
conviction that the fundamental traits of the life of the soul have
undergone very trivial modifications among civilized nations in all times
and ages, but will endeavor to explain the contrary opinion, held by my
opponents, by calling attention to the circumstance, that the expression
of these emotions show considerable variations among different peoples,
and at different epochs. I believe that Juvenal, one of the ancient
writers who best understood human nature, was right in saying:
"Nil erit ulterius, quod nostris moribus addat
Posteritas: eadem cupient facientque minores."
Leipsic, October 15th, 1877.
U A R D A.
CHAPTER 1.
By the walls of Thebes--the old city of a hundred gates--the Nile spreads
to a broad river; the heights, which follow the stream on both sides,
here take a more decided outline; solitary, almost cone-shaped peaks
stand out sharply from the level background of the many-colored.
limestone hills, on which no palm-tree flourishes and in which no humble
desert-plant can strike root. Rocky crevasses and gorges cut more or less
deeply into the mountain range, and up to its ridge extends the desert,
destructive of all life, with sand and stones, with rocky cliffs and
reef-like, desert hills.
Behind the eastern range the desert spreads to the Red Sea; behind the
western it stretches without limit, into infinity. In the belief of the
Egyptians beyond it lay the region of the dead.
Between these two ranges of hills, which serve as walls or ramparts to
keep back the desert-sand, flows the fresh and bounteous Nile, bestowing
blessing and abundance; at once the father and the cradle of millions of
beings. On each shore spreads the wide plain of black and fruitful soil,
and in the depths many-shaped creatures, in coats of mail or scales,
swarm and find subsistence.
The lotos floats on the mirror of the waters, and among the papyrus reeds
by the shore water-fowl innumerable build their nests. Between the river
and the mountain-range lie fields, which after the seed-time are of a
shining blue-green, and towards the time of harvest glow like gold. Near
the brooks and water-wheels here and there stands a shady sycamore; and
date-palms, carefully tended, group themselves in groves. The fruitful
plain, watered and manured every year by the inundation, lies at the foot
of the sandy desert-hills behind it, and stands out like a garden
flower-bed from the gravel-path.
In the fourteenth century before Christ--for to so remote a date we must
direct the thoughts of the reader--impassable limits had been set by the
hand of man, in many places in Thebes, to the inroads of the water; high
dykes of stone and embankments protected the streets and squares, the
temples and the palaces, from the overflow.
Canals that could be tightly closed up led from the dykes to the land
within, and smaller branch-cuttings to the gardens of Thebes.
On the right, the eastern bank of the Nile, rose the buildings of the
far-famed residence of the Pharaohs. Close by the river stood the immense
and gaudy Temples of the city of Amon; behind these and at a short
distance from the Eastern hills--indeed at their very foot and partly
even on the soil of the desert--were the palaces of the King and nobles,
and the shady streets in which the high narrow houses of the citizens
stood in close rows.
Life was gay and busy in the streets of the capital of the Pharaohs.
The western shore of the Nile showed a quite different scene. Here too
there was no lack of stately buildings or thronging men; but while on the
farther side of the river there was a compact mass of houses, and the
citizens went cheerfully and openly about their day's work, on this side
there were solitary splendid structures, round which little houses and
huts seemed to cling as children cling to the protection of a mother. And
these buildings lay in detached groups.
Any one climbing the hill and looking down would form the notion that
there lay below him a number of neighboring villages, each with its
lordly manor house. Looking from the plain up to the precipice of the
western hills, hundreds of closed portals could be seen, some solitary,
others closely ranged in rows; a great number of them towards the foot of
the slope, yet more half-way up, and a few at a considerable height.
And even more dissimilar were the slow-moving, solemn groups in the
roadways on this side, and the cheerful, confused throng yonder. There,
on the eastern shore, all were in eager pursuit of labor or recreation,
stirred by pleasure or by grief, active in deed and speech; here, in the
west, little was spoken, a spell seemed to check the footstep of the
wanderer, a pale hand to sadden the bright glance of every eye, and to
banish the smile from every lip.
And yet many a gaily-dressed bark stopped at the shore, there was no lack
of minstrel bands, grand processions passed on to the western heights;
but the Nile boats bore the dead, the songs sung here were songs of
lamentation, and the processions consisted of mourners following the
sarcophagus.
We are standing on the soil of the City of the Dead of Thebes.
Nevertheless even here nothing is wanting for return and revival, for to
the Egyptian his dead died not. He closed his eyes, he bore him to the
Necropolis, to the house of the embalmer, or Kolchytes, and then to the
grave; but he knew that the souls of the departed lived on; that the
justified absorbed into Osiris floated over the Heavens in the vessel of
the Sun; that they appeared on earth in the form they choose to take upon
them, and that they might exert influence on the current of the lives of
the survivors. So he took care to give a worthy interment to his dead,
above all to have the body embalmed so as to endure long: and had fixed
times to bring fresh offerings for the dead of flesh and fowl, with
drink-offerings and sweet-smelling essences, and vegetables and flowers.
Neither at the obsequies nor at the offerings might the ministers of the
gods be absent, and the silent City of the Dead was regarded as a favored
sanctuary in which to establish schools and dwellings for the learned.
So it came to pass that in the temples and on the site Of the Necropolis,
large communities of priests dwelt together, and close to the extensive
embalming houses lived numerous Kolchytes, who handed down the secrets of
their art from father to son.
Besides these there were other manufactories and shops. In the former,
sarcophagi of stone and of wood, linen bands for enveloping mummies, and
amulets for decorating them, were made; in the latter, merchants kept
spices and essences, flowers, fruits, vegetables and pastry for sale.
Calves, gazelles, goats, geese and other fowl, were fed on enclosed
meadow-plats, and the mourners betook themselves thither to select what
they needed from among the beasts pronounced by the priests to be clean
for sacrifice, and to have them sealed with the sacred seal. Many bought
only part of a victim at the shambles--the poor could not even do this.
They bought only colored cakes in the shape of beasts, which symbolically
took the place of the calves and geese which their means were unable to
procure. In the handsomest shops sat servants of the priests, who
received forms written on rolls of papyrus which were filled up in the
writing room of the temple with those sacred verses which the departed
spirit must know and repeat to ward off the evil genius of the deep, to
open the gate of the under world, and to be held righteous before Osiris
and the forty-two assessors of the subterranean court of justice.
What took place within the temples was concealed from view, for each was
surrounded by a high enclosing wall with lofty, carefully-closed portals,
which were only opened when a chorus of priests came out to sing a pious
hymn, in the morning to Horus the rising god, and in the evening to Tum
the descending god.
[The course of the Sun was compared to that of the life of Man.
He rose as the child Horns, grew by midday to the hero Ra, who
conquered the Uraeus snake for his diadem, and by evening was an old
Man, Tum. Light had been born of darkness, hence Tum was regarded
as older than Horns and the other gods of light.]
As soon as the evening hymn of the priests was heard, the Necropolis was
deserted, for the mourners and those who were visiting the graves were
required by this time to return to their boats and to quit the City of
the Dead. Crowds of men who had marched in the processions of the west
bank hastened in disorder to the shore, driven on by the body of watchmen
who took it in turns to do this duty and to protect the graves against
robbers. The merchants closed their booths, the embalmers and workmen
ended their day's work and retired to their houses, the priests returned
to the temples, and the inns were filled with guests, who had come hither
on long pilgrimages from a distance, and who preferred passing the night
in the vicinity of the dead whom they had come to visit, to going across
to the bustling noisy city farther shore.
The voices of the singers and of the wailing women were hushed, even the
song of the sailors on the numberless ferry boats from the western shore
to Thebes died away, its faint echo was now and then borne across on the
evening air, and at last all was still.
A cloudless sky spread over the silent City of the Dead, now and then
darkened for an instant by the swiftly passing shade of a bat returning
to its home in a cave or cleft of the rock after flying the whole evening
near the Nile to catch flies, to drink, and so prepare itself for the
next day's sleep. From time to time black forms with long shadows glided
over the still illuminated plain--the jackals, who at this hour
frequented the shore to slake their thirst, and often fearlessly showed
themselves in troops in the vicinity of the pens of geese and goats.
It was forbidden to hunt these robbers, as they were accounted sacred to
the god Anubis, the tutelary of sepulchres; and indeed they did little
mischief, for they found abundant food in the tombs.
[The jackal-headed god Anubis was the son of Osiris and Nephthys,
and the jackal was sacred to him. In the earliest ages even he is
prominent in the nether world. He conducts the mummifying process,
preserves the corpse, guards the Necropolis, and, as Hermes
Psychopompos (Hermanubis), opens the way for the souls. According
to Plutarch "He is the watch of the gods as the dog is the watch of
men."]
The remnants of the meat offerings from the altars were consumed by them;
to the perfect satisfaction of the devotees, who, when they found that by
the following day the meat had disappeared, believed that it had been
accepted and taken away by the spirits of the underworld.
They also did the duty of trusty watchers, for they were a dangerous foe
for any intruder who, under the shadow of the night, might attempt to
violate a grave.
Thus--on that summer evening of the year 1352 B.C., when we invite the
reader to accompany us to the Necropolis of Thebes--after the priests'
hymn had died away, all was still in the City of the Dead.
The soldiers on guard were already returning from their first round when
suddenly, on the north side of the Necropolis, a dog barked loudly; soon
a second took up the cry, a third, a fourth. The captain of the watch
called to his men to halt, and, as the cry of the dogs spread and grew
louder every minute, commanded them to march towards the north.
The little troop had reached the high dyke which divided the west bank of
the Nile from a branch canal, and looked from thence over the plain as
far as the river and to the north of the Necropolis. Once more the word
to "halt" was given, and as the guard perceived the glare of torches in
the direction where the dogs were barking loudest, they hurried forward
and came up with the author of the disturbance near the Pylon of the
temple erected by Seti I., the deceased father of the reigning King
Rameses II.
[The two pyramidal towers joined by a gateway which formed the
entrance to an Egyptian temple were called the Pylon.]
The moon was up, and her pale light flooded the stately structure, while
the walls glowed with the ruddy smoky light of the torches which flared
in the hands of black attendants.
A man of sturdy build, in sumptuous dress, was knocking at the
brass-covered temple door with the metal handle of a whip, so violently
that the blows rang far and loud through the night. Near him stood a
litter, and a chariot, to which were harnessed two fine horses. In the
litter sat a young woman, and in the carriage, next to the driver, was
the tall figure of a lady. Several men of the upper classes and many
servants stood around the litter and the chariot. Few words were
exchanged; the whole attention of the strangely lighted groups seemed
concentrated on the temple-gate. The darkness concealed the features of
individuals, but the mingled light of the moon and the torches was enough
to reveal to the gate-keeper, who looked down on the party from a tower
of the Pylon, that it was composed of persons of the highest rank; nay,
perhaps of the royal family.
He called aloud to the one who knocked, and asked him what was his will.
He looked up, and in a voice so rough and imperious, that the lady in the
litter shrank in horror as its tones suddenly violated the place of the
dead, he cried out--"How long are we to wait here for you--you dirty
hound? Come down and open the door and then ask questions. If the
torch-light is not bright enough to show you who is waiting, I will score
our name on your shoulders with my whip, and teach you how to receive
princely visitors."
While the porter muttered an unintelligible answer and came down the
steps within to open the door, the lady in the chariot turned to her
impatient companion and said in a pleasant but yet decided voice, "You
forget, Paaker, that you are back again in Egypt, and that here you have
to deal not with the wild Schasu,--[A Semitic race of robbers in the cast
of Egypt.]--but with friendly priests of whom we have to solicit a favor.
We have always had to lament your roughness, which seems to me very
ill-suited to the unusual circumstances under which we approach this
sanctuary."
Although these words were spoken in a tone rather of regret than of
blame, they wounded the sensibilities of the person addressed; his wide
nostrils began to twitch ominously, he clenched his right hand over the
handle of his whip, and, while he seemed to be bowing humbly, he struck
such a heavy blow on the bare leg of a slave who was standing near to
him, an old Ethiopian, that he shuddered as if from sudden cold,
though-knowing his lord only too well--he let no cry of pain escape him.
Meanwhile the gate-keeper had opened the door, and with him a tall young
priest stepped out into the open air to ask the will of the intruders.
Paaker would have seized the opportunity of speaking, but the lady in the
chariot interposed and said:
"I am Bent-Anat, the daughter of the King, and this lady in the litter is
Nefert, the wife of the noble Mena, the charioteer of my father. We were
going in company with these gentlemen to the north-west valley of the
Necropolis to see the new works there. You know the narrow pass in the
rocks which leads up the gorge. On the way home I myself held the reins
and I had the misfortune to drive over a girl who sat by the road with a
basket full of flowers, and to hurt her--to hurt her very badly I am
afraid. The wife of Mena with her own hands bound up the child, and then
she carried her to her father's house--he is a paraschites--[One who
opened the bodies of the dead to prepare them for being embalmed.]--Pinem
is his name. I know not whether he is known to you."
"Thou hast been into his house, Princess?"
"Indeed, I was obliged, holy father," she replied, "I know of course that
I have defiled myself by crossing the threshold of these people, but--"
"But," cried the wife of Mena, raising herself in her litter, "Bent-Anat
can in a day be purified by thee or by her house-priest, while she can
hardly--or perhaps never--restore the child whole and sound again to the
unhappy father."
"Still, the den of a paraschites is above every thing unclean," said the
chamberlain Penbesa, master of the ceremonies to the princess,
interrupting the wife of Mena, "and I did not conceal my opinion when
Bent-Anat announced her intention of visiting the accursed hole in
person. I suggested," he continued, turning to the priest, "that she
should let the girl be taken home, and send a royal present to the
father."
"And the princess?" asked the priest.
"She acted, as she always does, on her own judgment," replied the master
of the ceremonies.
"And that always hits on the right course," cried the wife of Mena.
"Would to God it were so!" said the princess in a subdued voice. Then she
continued, addressing the priest, "Thou knowest the will of the Gods and
the hearts of men, holy father, and I myself know that I give alms
willingly and help the poor even when there is none to plead for them but
their poverty. But after what has occurred here, and to these unhappy
people, it is I who come as a suppliant."
"Thou?" said the chamberlain.
"I," answered the princess with decision. The priest who up to this
moment had remained a silent witness of the scene raised his right hand
as in blessing and spoke.
"Thou hast done well. The Hathors fashioned thy heart and the Lady of
Truth guides it. Thou hast broken in on our night-prayers to request us
to send a doctor to the injured girl?"
[Hathor was Isis under a substantial form. She is the goddess of
the pure, light heaven, and bears the Sun-disk between cow-horns on
a cow's head or on a human head with cow's ears. She was named the
Fair, and all the pure joys of life are in her gift. Later she was
regarded as a Muse who beautifies life with enjoyment, love, song,
and the dance. She appears as a good fairy by the cradle of
children and decides their lot in life. She bears many names: and
several, generally seven, Hathors were represented, who personified
the attributes and influence of the goddess.]
"Thou hast said."
"I will ask the high-priest to send the best leech for outward wounds
immediately to the child. But where is the house of the paraschites
Pinem? I do not know it."
"Northwards from the terrace of Hatasu,--[A great queen of the 18th
dynasty and guardian of two Pharaohs]--close to--; but I will charge one
of my attendants to conduct the leech. Besides, I want to know early in
the morning how the child is doing.--Paaker."
The rough visitor, whom we already know, thus called upon, bowed to the
earth, his arms hanging by his sides, and asked:
"What dost thou command?"
"I appoint you guide to the physician," said the princess. "It will be
easy to the king's pioneer to find the little half-hidden house again--
[The title here rendered pioneer was that of an officer whose duties
were those at once of a scout and of a Quarter-Master General. In
unknown and comparatively savage countries it was an onerous post.
--Translator.]
besides, you share my guilt, for," she added, turning to the priest, "I
confess that the misfortune happened because I would try with my horses
to overtake Paaker's Syrian racers, which he declared to be swifter than
the Egyptian horses. It was a mad race."
"And Amon be praised that it ended as it did," exclaimed the master of
the ceremonies. "Packer's chariot lies dashed in pieces in the valley,
and his best horse is badly hurt."
"He will see to him when he has taken the physician to the house of the
paraschites," said the princess. "Dost thou know, Penbesa--thou anxious
guardian of a thoughtless girl--that to-day for the first time I am glad
that my father is at the war in distant Satiland?"--[Asia].
"He would not have welcomed us kindly!" said the master of the
ceremonies, laughing.
"But the leech, the leech!" cried Bent-Anat. "Packer, it is settled then.
You will conduct him, and bring us to-morrow morning news of the wounded
girl."
Paaker bowed; the princess bowed her head; the priest and his companions,
who meanwhile had come out of the temple and joined him, raised their
hands in blessing, and the belated procession moved towards the Nile.
Paaker remained alone with his two slaves; the commission with which the
princess had charged him greatly displeased him. So long as the moonlight
enabled him to distinguish the litter of Mena's wife, he gazed after it;
then he endeavored to recollect the position of the hut of the
paraschites. The captain of the watch still stood with the guard at the
gate of the temple.
"Do you know the dwelling of Pinem the paraschites?" asked Paaker.
"What do you want with him?"
"That is no concern of yours," retorted Paaker.
"Lout!" exclaimed the captain, "left face and forwards, my men."
"Halt!" cried Paaker in a rage. "I am the king's chief pioneer."
"Then you will all the more easily find the way back by which you came.
March."
The words were followed by a peal of many-voiced laughter: the re-echoing
insult so confounded Paaker that he dropped his whip on the ground. The
slave, whom a short time since he had struck with it, humbly picked it up
and then followed his lord into the fore court of the temple. Both
attributed the titter, which they still could hear without being able to
detect its origin, to wandering spirits. But the mocking tones had been
heard too by the old gate-keeper, and the laughers were better known to
him than to the king's pioneer; he strode with heavy steps to the door of
the temple through the black shadow of the pylon, and striking blindly
before him called out--
"Ah! you good-for-nothing brood of Seth.
[The Typhon of the Greeks. The enemy of Osiris, of truth, good
and purity. Discord and strife in nature. Horns who fights against
him for his father Osiris, can throw him and stun him, but never
annihilate him.]
"You gallows-birds and brood of hell--I am coming."
The giggling ceased; a few youthful figures appeared in the moonlight,
the old man pursued them panting, and, after a short chase, a troop of
youths fled back through the temple gate.
The door-keeper had succeeded in catching one miscreant, a boy of
thirteen, and held him so tight by the ear that his pretty head seemed to
have grown in a horizontal direction from his shoulders.
"I will take you before the school-master, you plague-of-locusts, you
swarm of bats!" cried the old man out of breath. But the dozen of
school-boys, who had availed themselves of the opportunity to break out
of bounds, gathered coaxing round him, with words of repentance, though
every eye sparkled with delight at the fun they had had, and of which no
one could deprive them; and when the biggest of them took the old man's
chin, and promised to give him the wine which his mother was to send him
next day for the week's use, the porter let go his prisoner--who tried to
rub the pain out of his burning ear--and cried out in harsher tones than
before:
"You will pay me, will you, to let you off! Do you think I will let your
tricks pass? You little know this old man. I will complain to the Gods,
not to the school-master; and as for your wine, youngster, I will offer
it as a libation, that heaven may forgive you."
CHAPTER II.
The temple where, in the fore-court, Paaker was waiting, and where the
priest had disappeared to call the leech, was called the "House of
Seti"--[It is still standing and known as the temple of Qurnah.]--and was
one of the largest in the City of the Dead. Only that magnificent
building of the time of the deposed royal race of the reigning king's
grandfather--that temple which had been founded by Thotmes III., and
whose gate-way Amenophis III. had adorned with immense colossal
statues--[That which stands to the north is the famous musical statue, or
Pillar of Memmon]--exceeded it in the extent of its plan; in every other
respect it held the pre-eminence among the sanctuaries of the Necropolis.
Rameses I. had founded it shortly after he succeeded in seizing the
Egyptian throne; and his yet greater son Seti carried on the erection, in
which the service of the dead for the Manes of the members of the new
royal family was conducted, and the high festivals held in honor of the
Gods of the under-world. Great sums had been expended for its
establishment, for the maintenance of the priesthood of its sanctuary,
and the support of the institutions connected with it. These were
intended to be equal to the great original foundations of priestly
learning at Heliopolis and Memphis; they were regulated on the same
pattern, and with the object of raising the new royal residence of Upper
Egypt, namely Thebes, above the capitals of Lower Egypt in regard to
philosophical distinction.
One of the most important of these foundations was a very celebrated
school of learning.
[Every detail of this description of an Egyptian school is derived
from sources dating from the reign of Rameses II. and his
successor, Merneptah.]
First there was the high-school, in which priests, physicians, judges,
mathematicians, astronomers, grammarians, and other learned men, not only
had the benefit of instruction, but, subsequently, when they had won
admission to the highest ranks of learning, and attained the dignity of
"Scribes," were maintained at the cost of the king, and enabled to pursue
their philosophical speculations and researches, in freedom from all
care, and in the society of fellow-workers of equal birth and identical
interests.
An extensive library, in which thousands of papyrus-rolls were preserved,
and to which a manufactory of papyrus was attached, was at the disposal
of the learned; and some of them were intrusted with the education of the
younger disciples, who had been prepared in the elementary school, which
was also dependent on the House--or university--of Seti. The lower school
was open to every son of a free citizen, and was often frequented by
several hundred boys, who also found night-quarters there. The parents
were of course required either to pay for their maintenance, or to send
due supplies of provisions for the keep of their children at school.
In a separate building lived the temple-boarders, a few sons of the
noblest families, who were brought up by the priests at a great expense
to their parents.
Seti I., the founder of this establishment, had had his own sons, not
excepting Rameses, his successor, educated here.
The elementary schools were strictly ruled, and the rod played so large a
part in them, that a pedagogue could record this saying: "The scholar's
ears are at his back: when he is flogged then he hears."
Those youths who wished to pass up from the lower to the high-school had
to undergo an examination. The student, when he had passed it, could
choose a master from among the learned of the higher grades, who
undertook to be his philosophical guide, and to whom he remained attached
all his life through, as a client to his patron. He could obtain the
degree of "Scribe" and qualify for public office by a second examination.
Near to these schools of learning there stood also a school of art, in
which instruction was given to students who desired to devote themselves
to architecture, sculpture, or painting; in these also the learner might
choose his master.
Every teacher in these institutions belonged to the priesthood of the
House of Seti. It consisted of more than eight hundred members, divided
into five classes, and conducted by three so-called Prophets.
The first prophet was the high-priest of the House of Seti, and at the
same time the superior of all the thousands of upper and under servants
of the divinities which belonged to the City of the Dead of Thebes.
The temple of Seti proper was a massive structure of limestone. A row of
Sphinxes led from the Nile to the surrounding wall, and to the first vast
pro-pylon, which formed the entrance to a broad fore-court, enclosed on
the two sides by colonnades, and beyond which stood a second gate-way.
When he had passed through this door, which stood between two towers, in
shape like truncated pyramids, the stranger came to a second court
resembling the first, closed at the farther end by a noble row of
pillars, which formed part of the central temple itself.
The innermost and last was dimly lighted by a few lamps.
Behind the temple of Seti stood large square structures of brick of the
Nile mud, which however had a handsome and decorative effect, as the
humble material of which they were constructed was plastered with lime,
and that again was painted with colored pictures and hieroglyphic
inscriptions.
The internal arrangement of all these houses was the same. In the midst
was an open court, on to which opened the doors of the rooms of the
priests and philosophers. On each side of the court was a shady, covered
colonnade of wood, and in the midst a tank with ornamental plants. In the
upper story were the apartments for the scholars, and instruction was
usually given in the paved courtyard strewn with mats.
The most imposing was the house of the chief prophets; it was
distinguished by its waving standards and stood about a hundred paces
behind the temple of Seti, between a well kept grove and a clear
lake--the sacred tank of the temple; but they only occupied it while
fulfilling their office, while the splendid houses which they lived in
with their wives and children, lay on the other side of the river, in
Thebes proper.
The untimely visit to the temple could not remain unobserved by the
colony of sages. Just as ants when a hand breaks in on their dwelling,
hurry restlessly hither and thither, so an unwonted stir had agitated,
not the school-boys only, but the teachers and the priests. They
collected in groups near the outer walls, asking questions and hazarding
guesses. A messenger from the king had arrived--the princess Bent-Anat
had been attacked by the Kolchytes--and a wag among the school-boys who
had got out, declared that Paaker, the king's pioneer, had been brought
into the temple by force to be made to learn to write better. As the
subject of the joke had formerly been a pupil of the House of Seti, and
many delectable stories of his errors in penmanship still survived in the
memory of the later generation of scholars, this information was received
with joyful applause; and it seemed to have a glimmer of probability, in
spite of the apparent contradiction that Paaker filled one of the highest
offices near the king, when a grave young priest declared that he had
seen the pioneer in the forecourt of the temple.
The lively discussion, the laughter and shouting of the boys at such an
unwonted hour, was not unobserved by the chief priest.
This remarkable prelate, Ameni the son of Nebket, a scion of an old and
noble family, was far more than merely the independent head of the
temple-brotherhood, among whom he was prominent for his power and wisdom;
for all the priesthood in the length and breadth of the land acknowledged
his supremacy, asked his advice in difficult cases, and never resisted
the decisions in spiritual matters which emanated from the House of
Seti--that is to say, from Ameni. He was the embodiment of the priestly
idea; and if at times he made heavy--nay extraordinary--demands on
individual fraternities, they were submitted to, for it was known by
experience that the indirect roads which he ordered them to follow all
converged on one goal, namely the exaltation of the power and dignity of
the hierarchy. The king appreciated this remarkable man, and had long
endeavored to attach him to the court, as keeper of the royal seal; but
Ameni was not to be induced to give up his apparently modest position;
for he contemned all outward show and ostentatious titles; he ventured
sometimes to oppose a decided resistance to the measures of the Pharaoh,
[Pharaoh is the Hebrew form of the Egyptian Peraa--or Phrah. "The
great house," "sublime house," or "high gate" is the literal
meaning.]
and was not minded to give up his unlimited control of the priests for
the sake of a limited dominion over what seemed to him petty external
concerns, in the service of a king who was only too independent and hard
to influence.
He regularly arranged his mode and habits of life in an exceptional way.
Eight days out of ten he remained in the temple entrusted to his charge;
two he devoted to his family, who lived on the other bank of the Nile;
but he let no one, not even those nearest to him, know what portion of
the ten days he gave up to recreation. He required only four hours of
sleep. This he usually took in a dark room which no sound could reach,
and in the middle of the day; never at night, when the coolness and quiet
seemed to add to his powers of work, and when from time to time he could
give himself up to the study of the starry heavens.
All the ceremonials that his position required of him, the cleansing,
purification, shaving, and fasting he fulfilled with painful exactitude,
and the outer bespoke the inner man.
Ameni was entering on his fiftieth year; his figure was tall, and had
escaped altogether the stoutness to which at that age the Oriental is
liable. The shape of his smoothly-shaven head was symmetrical and of a
long oval; his forehead was neither broad nor high, but his profile was
unusually delicate, and his face striking; his lips were thin and dry,
and his large and piercing eyes, though neither fiery nor brilliant, and
usually cast down to the ground under his thick eyebrows, were raised
with a full, clear, dispassionate gaze when it was necessary to see and
to examine.
The poet of the House of Seti, the young Pentaur, who knew these eyes,
had celebrated them in song, and had likened them to a well-disciplined
army which the general allows to rest before and after the battle, so
that they may march in full strength to victory in the fight.
The refined deliberateness of his nature had in it much that was royal as
well as priestly; it was partly intrinsic and born with him, partly the
result of his own mental self-control. He had many enemies, but calumny
seldom dared to attack the high character of Amemi.
The high-priest looked up in astonishment, as the disturbance in the
court of the temple broke in on his studies.
The room in which he was sitting was spacious and cool; the lower part of
the walls was lined with earthenware tiles, the upper half plastered and
painted. But little was visible of the masterpieces of the artists of the
establishment, for almost everywhere they were concealed by wooden
closets and shelves, in which were papyrus-rolls and wax-tablets. A large
table, a couch covered with a panther's skin, a footstool in front of it,
and on it a crescent-shaped support for the head, made of ivory,
[A support of crescent form on which the Egyptians rested their
heads. Many specimens were found in the catacombs, and similar
objects are still used in Nubia]
several seats, a stand with beakers and jugs, and another with flasks of
all sizes, saucers, and boxes, composed the furniture of the room, which
was lighted by three lamps, shaped like birds and filled with kiki
oil.--[Castor oil, which was used in the lamps.]
Ameni wore a fine pleated robe of snow-white linen, which reached to his
ankles, round his hips was a scarf adorned with fringes, which in front
formed an apron, with broad, stiffened ends which fell to his knees; a
wide belt of white and silver brocade confined the drapery of his robe.
Round his throat and far down on his bare breast hung a necklace more
than a span deep, composed of pearls and agates, and his upper arm was
covered with broad gold bracelets. He rose from the ebony seat with
lion's feet, on which he sat, and beckoned to a servant who squatted by
one of the walls of the sitting-room. He rose and without any word of
command from his master, he silently and carefully placed on the
high-priest's bare head a long and thick curled wig,
[Egyptians belonging to the higher classes wore wigs on their shaven
heads. Several are preserved in museums.]
and threw a leopard-skin, with its head and claws overlaid with
gold-leaf, over his shoulders. A second servant held a metal mirror
before Ameni, in which he cast a look as he settled the panther-skin and
head-gear.
A third servant was handing him the crosier, the insignia of his dignity
as a prelate, when a priest entered and announced the scribe Pentaur.
Ameni nodded, and the young priest who had talked with the princess
Bent-Anat at the temple-gate came into the room.
Pentaur knelt and kissed the hand of the prelate, who gave him his
blessing, and in a clear sweet voice, and rather formal and unfamiliar
language--as if he were reading rather than speaking, said:
"Rise, my son; your visit will save me a walk at this untimely hour,
since you can inform me of what disturbs the disciples in our temple.
Speak."
"Little of consequence has occurred, holy father," replied Pentaur. "Nor
would I have disturbed thee at this hour, but that a quite unnecessary
tumult has been raised by the youths; and that the princess Bent-Anat
appeared in person to request the aid of a physician. The unusual hour
and the retinue that followed her--"
"Is the daughter of Pharaoh sick?" asked the prelate.
"No, father. She is well--even to wantonness, since--wishing to prove the
swiftness of her horses--she ran over the daughter of the paraschites
Pinem. Noble-hearted as she is, she herself carried the sorely-wounded
girl to her house."
"She entered the dwelling of the unclean."
"Thou hast said."
"And she now asks to be purified?"
"I thought I might venture to absolve her, father, for the purest
humanity led her to the act, which was no doubt a breach of discipline,
but--"
"But," asked the high-priest in a grave voice and he raised his eyes
which he had hitherto on the ground.
"But," said the young priest, and now his eyes fell, "which can surely be
no crime. When Ra--[The Egyptian Sun-god.]--in his golden bark sails
across the heavens, his light falls as freely and as bountifully on the
hut of the despised poor as on the Palace of the Pharaohs; and shall the
tender human heart withhold its pure light--which is benevolence--from
the wretched, only because they are base?"
"It is the poet Pentaur that speaks," said the prelate, "and not the
priest to whom the privilege was given to be initiated into the highest
grade of the sages, and whom I call my brother and my equal. I have no
advantage over you, young man, but perishable learning, which the past
has won for you as much as for me--nothing but certain perceptions and
experiences that offer nothing new, to the world, but teach us, indeed,
that it is our part to maintain all that is ancient in living efficacy
and practice. That which you promised a few weeks since, I many years ago
vowed to the Gods; to guard knowledge as the exclusive possession of the
initiated. Like fire, it serves those who know its uses to the noblest
ends, but in the hands of children--and the people, the mob, can never
ripen into manhood--it is a destroying brand, raging and
unextinguishable, devouring all around it, and destroying all that has
been built and beautified by the past. And how can we remain the Sages
and continue to develop and absorb all learning within the shelter of our
temples, not only without endangering the weak, but for their benefit?
You know and have sworn to act after that knowledge. To bind the crowd to
the faith and the institutions of the fathers is your duty--is the duty
of every priest. Times have changed, my son; under the old kings the
fire, of which I spoke figuratively to you--the poet--was enclosed in
brazen walls which the people passed stupidly by. Now I see breaches in
the old fortifications; the eyes of the uninitiated have been sharpened,
and one tells the other what he fancies he has spied, though
half-blinded, through the glowing rifts."
A slight emotion had given energy to the tones of the speaker, and while
he held the poet spell-bound with his piercing glance he continued:
"We curse and expel any one of the initiated who enlarges these breaches;
we punish even the friend who idly neglects to repair and close them with
beaten brass!"
"My father!" cried Pentaur, raising his head in astonishment while the
blood mounted to his cheeks. The high-priest went up to him and laid both
hands on his shoulders.
They were of equal height and of equally symmetrical build; even the
outline of their features was similar. Nevertheless no one would have
taken them to be even distantly related; their countenances were so
infinitely unlike in expression.
On the face of one were stamped a strong will and the power of firmly
guiding his life and commanding himself; on the other, an amiable desire
to overlook the faults and defects of the world, and to contemplate life
as it painted itself in the transfiguring magic-mirror of his poet's
soul. Frankness and enjoyment spoke in his sparkling eye, but the subtle
smile on his lips when he was engaged in a discussion, or when his soul
was stirred, betrayed that Pentaur, far from childlike carelessness, had
fought many a severe mental battle, and had tasted the dark waters of
doubt.
At this moment mingled feelings were struggling in his soul. He felt as
if he must withstand the speaker; and yet the powerful presence of the
other exercised so strong an influence over his mind, long trained to
submission, that he was silent, and a pious thrill passed through him
when Ameni's hands were laid on his shoulders.
"I blame you," said the high-priest, while he firmly held the young man,
"nay, to my sorrow I must chastise you; and yet," he said, stepping back
and taking his right hand, "I rejoice in the necessity, for I love you
and honor you, as one whom the Unnameable has blessed with high gifts and
destined to great things. Man leaves a weed to grow unheeded or roots it
up but you are a noble tree, and I am like the gardener who has forgotten
to provide it with a prop, and who is now thankful to have detected a
bend that reminds him of his neglect. You look at me enquiringly, and I
can see in your eyes that I seem to you a severe judge. Of what are you
accused? You have suffered an institution of the past to be set aside. It
does not matter--so the short-sighted and heedless think; but I say to
you, you have doubly transgressed, because the wrong-doer was the king's
daughter, whom all look up to, great and small, and whose actions may
serve as an example to the people. On whom then must a breach of the
ancient institutions lie with the darkest stain if not on the highest in
rank? In a few days it will be said the paraschites are men even as we
are, and the old law to avoid them as unclean is folly. And will the
reflections of the people, think you, end there, when it is so easy for
them to say that he who errs in one point may as well fail in all? In
questions of faith, my son, nothing is insignificant. If we open one
tower to the enemy he is master of the whole fortress. In these unsettled
times our sacred lore is like a chariot on the declivity of a precipice,
and under the wheels thereof a stone. A child takes away the stone, and
the chariot rolls down into the abyss and is dashed to pieces. Imagine
the princess to be that child, and the stone a loaf that she would fain
give to feed a beggar. Would you then give it to her if your father and
your mother and all that is dear and precious to you were in the chariot?
Answer not! the princess will visit the paraschites again to-morrow. You
must await her in the man's hut, and there inform her that she has
transgressed and must crave to be purified by us. For this time you are
excused from any further punishment.
"Heaven has bestowed on you a gifted soul. Strive for that which is
wanting to you--the strength to subdue, to crush for One--and you know
that One--all things else--even the misguiding voice of your heart, the
treacherous voice of your judgment.--But stay! send leeches to the house
of the paraschites, and desire them to treat the injured girl as though
she were the queen herself. Who knows where the man dwells?"
"The princess," replied Pentaur, "has left Paaker, the king's pioneer,
behind in the temple to conduct the leeches to the house of Pinem."
The grave high-priest smiled and said. "Paaker! to attend the daughter of
a paraschites."
Pentaur half beseechingly and half in fun raised his eyes which he had
kept cast down. "And Pentaur," he murmured, "the gardener's son! who is
to refuse absolution to the king's daughter!"
"Pentaur, the minister of the Gods--Pentaur, the priest--has not to do
with the daughter of the king, but with the transgressor of the sacred
institutions," replied Ameni gravely. "Let Paaker know I wish to speak
with him."
The poet bowed low and quitted the room, the high priest muttered to
himself: "He is not yet what he should be, and speech is of no effect
with him."
For a while he was silent, walking to and fro in meditation; then he said
half aloud, "And the boy is destined to great things. What gifts of the
Gods doth he lack? He has the faculty of learning--of thinking--of
feeling--of winning all hearts, even mine. He keeps himself undefiled and
separate--" suddenly the prelate paused and struck his hand on the back of
a chair that stood by him. "I have it; he has not yet felt the fire of
ambition. We will light it for his profit and our own."
CHAPTER III.
Pentauer hastened to execute the commands of the high-priest. He sent a
servant to escort Paaker, who was waiting in the forecourt, into the
presence of Ameni while he himself repaired to the physicians to impress
on them the most watchful care of the unfortunate girl.
Many proficients in the healing arts were brought up in the house of
Seti, but few used to remain after passing the examination for the degree
of Scribe.
[What is here stated with regard to the medical schools is
principally derived from the medical writings of the Egyptians
themselves, among which the "Ebers Papyrus" holds the first place,
"Medical Papyrus I." of Berlin the second, and a hieratic MS. in
London which, like the first mentioned, has come down to us from the
18th dynasty, takes the third. Also see Herodotus II. 84. Diodorus
I. 82.]
The most gifted were sent to Heliopolis, where flourished, in the great
"Hall of the Ancients," the most celebrated medical faculty of the whole
country, whence they returned to Thebes, endowed with the highest honors
in surgery, in ocular treatment, or in any other branch of their
profession, and became physicians to the king or made a living by
imparting their learning and by being called in to consult on serious
cases.
Naturally most of the doctors lived on the east bank of the Nile, in
Thebes proper, and even in private houses with their families; but each
was attached to a priestly college.
Whoever required a physician sent for him, not to his own house, but to a
temple. There a statement was required of the complaint from which the
sick was suffering, and it was left to the principal medical staff of the
sanctuary to select that of the healing art whose special knowledge
appeared to him to be suited for the treatment of the case.
Like all priests, the physicians lived on the income which came to them
from their landed property, from the gifts of the king, the contributions
of the laity, and the share which was given them of the state-revenues;
they expected no honorarium from their patients, but the restored sick
seldom neglected making a present to the sanctuary whence a physician had
come to them, and it was not unusual for the priestly leech to make the
recovery of the sufferer conditional on certain gifts to be offered to
the temple.
The medical knowledge of the Egyptians was, according to every
indication, very considerable; but it was natural that physicians, who
stood by the bed of sickness as "ordained servants of the Divinity,"
should not be satisfied with a rational treatment of the sufferer, and
should rather think that they could not dispense with the mystical
effects of prayers and vows.
Among the professors of medicine in the House of Seti there were men of
the most different gifts and bent of mind; but Pentaur was not for a
moment in doubt as to which should be entrusted with the treatment of the
girl who had been run over, and for whom he felt the greatest sympathy.
The one he chose was the grandson of a celebrated leech, long since dead,
whose name of Nebsecht he had inherited, and a beloved school-friend and
old comrade of Pentaur.
This young man had from his earliest years shown high and hereditary
talent for the profession to which he had devoted himself; he had
selected surgery
[Among the six hermetic books of medicine mentioned by Clement of
Alexandria, was one devoted to surgical instruments: otherwise the
very badly-set fractures found in some of the mummies do little
honor to the Egyptian surgeons.]
for his special province at Heliopolis, and would certainly have attained
the dignity of teacher there if an impediment in his speech had not
debarred him from the viva voce recitation of formulas and prayers.
This circumstance, which was deeply lamented by his parents and tutors,
was in fact, in the best opinions, an advantage to him; for it often
happens that apparent superiority does us damage, and that from apparent
defect springs the saving of our life.
Thus, while the companions of Nebsecht were employed in declaiming or in
singing, he, thanks to his fettered tongue, could give himself up to his
inherited and almost passionate love of observing organic life; and his
teachers indulged up to a certain point his innate spirit of
investigation, and derived benefit from his knowledge of the human and
animal structures, and from the dexterity of his handling.
His deep aversion for the magical part of his profession would have
brought him heavy punishment, nay very likely would have cost him
expulsion from the craft, if he had ever given it expression in any form.
But Nebsecht's was the silent and reserved nature of the learned man, who
free from all desire of external recognition, finds a rich satisfaction
in the delights of investigation; and he regarded every demand on him to
give proof of his capacity, as a vexatious but unavoidable intrusion on
his unassuming but laborious and fruitful investigations.
Nebsecht was dearer and nearer to Pentaur than any other of his
associates.
He admired his learning and skill; and when the slightly-built surgeon,
who was indefatigable in his wanderings, roved through the thickets by
the Nile, the desert, or the mountain range, the young poet-priest
accompanied him with pleasure and with great benefit to himself, for his
companion observed a thousand things to which without him he would have
remained for ever blind; and the objects around him, which were known to
him only by their shapes, derived connection and significance from the
explanations of the naturalist, whose intractable tongue moved freely
when it was required to expound to his friend the peculiarities of
organic beings whose development he had been the first to detect.
The poet was dear in the sight of Nebsecht, and he loved Pentaur, who
possessed all the gifts he lacked; manly beauty, childlike lightness of
heart, the frankest openness, artistic power, and the gift of expressing
in word and song every emotion that stirred his soul. The poet was as a
novice in the order in which Nebsecht was master, but quite capable of
understanding its most difficult points; so it happened that Nebsecht
attached greater value to his judgment than to that of his own
colleagues, who showed themselves fettered by prejudice, while Pentaur's
decision always was free and unbiassed.
The naturalist's room lay on the ground floor, and had no living-rooms
above it, being under one of the granaries attached to the temple. It was
as large as a public hall, and yet Pentaur, making his way towards the
silent owner of the room, found it everywhere strewed with thick bundles
of every variety of plant, with cages of palm-twigs piled four or five
high, and a number of jars, large and small, covered with perforated
paper. Within these prisons moved all sorts of living creatures, from the
jerboa, the lizard of the Nile, and a light-colored species of owl, to
numerous specimens of frogs, snakes, scorpions and beetles.
On the solitary table in the middle of the room, near to a writing-stand,
lay bones of animals, with various sharp flints and bronze knives.
In a corner of this room lay a mat, on which stood a wooden head-prop,
indicating that the naturalist was in the habit of sleeping on it.
When Pentaur's step was heard on the threshold of this strange abode, its
owner pushed a rather large object under the table, threw a cover over
it, and hid a sharp flint scalpel
[The Egyptians seem to have preferred to use flint instruments for
surgical purposes, at any rate for the opening of bodies and for
circumcision. Many flint instruments have been found and preserved
in museums.]
fixed into a wooden handle, which he had just been using, in the folds of
his robe-as a school-boy might hide some forbidden game from his master.
Then he crossed his arms, to give himself the aspect of a man who is
dreaming in harmless idleness.
The solitary lamp, which was fixed on a high stand near his chair, shed a
scanty light, which, however, sufficed to show him his trusted friend
Pentaur, who had disturbed Nebsecht in his prohibited occupations.
Nebsecht nodded to him as he entered, and, when he had seen who it was,
said:
"You need not have frightened me so!" Then he drew out from under the
table the object he had hidden--a living rabbit fastened down to a
board-and continued his interrupted observations on the body, which he
had opened and fastened back with wooden pins while the heart continued
to beat.
He took no further notice of Pentaur, who for some time silently watched
the investigator; then he laid his hand on his shoulder and said:
"Lock your door more carefully, when you are busy with forbidden things."
"They took--they took away the bar of the door lately," stammered the
naturalist, "when they caught me dissecting the hand of the forger
Ptahmes."--[The law sentenced forgers to lose a hand.]
"The mummy of the poor man will find its right hand wanting," answered
the poet.
"He will not want it out there."
"Did you bury the least bit of an image in his grave?"
[Small statuettes, placed in graves to help the dead in the work
performed in the under-world. They have axes and ploughs in their
hands, and seed-bags on their backs. The sixth chapter of the Book
of the Dead is inscribed on nearly all.]
"Nonsense."
"You go very far, Nebsecht, and are not foreseeing, 'He who needlessly
hurts an innocent animal shall be served in the same way by the spirits
of the netherworld,' says the law; but I see what you will say. You hold
it lawful to put a beast to pain, when you can thereby increase that
knowledge by which you alleviate the sufferings of man, and enrich--"
"And do not you?"
A gentle smile passed over Pentaur's face; leaned over the animal and
said:
"How curious! the little beast still lives and breathes; a man would have
long been dead under such treatment. His organism is perhaps of a more
precious, subtle, and so more fragile nature?"
Nebsecht shrugged his shoulders.
"Perhaps!" he said.
"I thought you must know."
"I--how should I?" asked the leech. "I have told you--they would not even
let me try to find out how the hand of a forger moves."
"Consider, the scripture tells us the passage of the soul depends on the
preservation of the body."
Nebsecht looked up with his cunning little eyes and shrugging his
shoulders, said:
"Then no doubt it is so: however these things do not concern me. Do what
you like with the souls of men; I seek to know something of their bodies,
and patch them when they are damaged as well as may be."
"Nay-Toth be praised, at least you need not deny that you are master in
that art."
[Toth is the god of the learned and of physicians. The Ibis was
sacred to him, and he was usually represented as Ibis-headed. Ra
created him "a beautiful light to show the name of his evil enemy."
Originally the Dfoon-god, he became the lord of time and measure.
He is the weigher, the philosopher among the gods, the lord of
writing, of art and of learning. The Greeks called him Hermes
Trismegistus, i.e. threefold or "very great" which was, in fact, in
imitation of the Egyptians, whose name Toth or Techud signified
twofold, in the same way "very great"]
"Who is master," asked Nebsecht, "excepting God? I can do nothing,
nothing at all, and guide my instruments with hardly more certainty than
a sculptor condemned to work in the dark."
"Something like the blind Resu then," said Pentaur smiling, "who
understood painting better than all the painters who could see."
"In my operations there is a 'better' and a 'worse;'" said Nebsecht, "but
there is nothing 'good.'"
"Then we must be satisfied with the 'better,' and I have come to claim
it," said Pentaur.
"Are you ill?"
"Isis be praised, I feel so well that I could uproot a palm-tree, but I
would ask you to visit a sick girl. The princess Bent-Anat--"
"The royal family has its own physicians."
"Let me speak! the princess Bent-Anat has run over a young girl, and the
poor child is seriously hurt."
"Indeed," said the student reflectively. "Is she over there in the city,
or here in the Necropolis?"
"Here. She is in fact the daughter of a paraschites."
"Of a paraschites?" exclaimed Nebsecht, once more slipping the rabbit
under the table, then I will go."
"You curious fellow. I believe you expect to find something strange among
the unclean folk."
"That is my affair; but I will go. What is the man's name?"
"Pinem."
"There will be nothing to be done with him," muttered the student,
"however--who knows?"
With these words he rose, and opening a tightly closed flask he dropped
some strychnine on the nose and in the mouth of the rabbit, which
immediately ceased to breathe. Then he laid it in a box and said, "I am
ready."
"But you cannot go out of doors in this stained dress."
The physician nodded assent, and took from a chest a clean robe, which he
was about to throw on over the other! but Pentaur hindered him. "First
take off your working dress," he said laughing. "I will help you. But, by
Besa, you have as many coats as an onion."
[Besa, the god of the toilet of the Egyptians. He was represented
as a deformed pigmy. He led the women to conquest in love, and the
men in war. He was probably of Arab origin.]
Pentaur was known as a mighty laugher among his companions, and his loud
voice rung in the quiet room, when he discovered that his friend was
about to put a third clean robe over two dirty ones, and wear no less
than three dresses at once.
Nebsecht laughed too, and said, "Now I know why my clothes were so heavy,
and felt so intolerably hot at noon. While I get rid of my superfluous
clothing, will you go and ask the high-priest if I have leave to quit the
temple."
"He commissioned me to send a leech to the paraschites, and added that
the girl was to be treated like a queen."
"Ameni? and did he know that we have to do with a paraschites?"
"Certainly."
"Then I shall begin to believe that broken limbs may be set with
vows-aye, vows! You know I cannot go alone to the sick, because my
leather tongue is unable to recite the sentences or to wring rich
offerings for the temple from the dying. Go, while I undress, to the
prophet Gagabu and beg him to send the pastophorus Teta, who usually
accompanies me."
"I would seek a young assistant rather than that blind old man."
"Not at all. I should be glad if he would stay at home, and only let his
tongue creep after me like an eel or a slug. Head and heart have nothing
to do with his wordy operations, and they go on like an ox treading out
corn."
[In Egypt, as in Palestine, beasts trod out the corn, as we learn
from many pictures in the catacombs, even in the remotest ages;
often with the addition of a weighted sledge, to the runners of
which rollers are attached. It is now called noreg.]
"It is true," said Pentaur; "just lately I saw the old man singing out
his litanies by a sick-bed, and all the time quietly counting the dates,
of which they had given him a whole sack-full."
"He will be unwilling to go to the paraschites, who is poor, and he would
sooner seize the whole brood of scorpions yonder than take a piece of
bread from the hand of the unclean. Tell him to come and fetch me, and
drink some wine. There stands three days' allowance; in this hot weather
it dims my sight.
"Does the paraschites live to the north or south of the Necropolis?"
"I think to the north. Paaker, the king's pioneer, will show you the
way."
"He!" exclaimed the student, laughing. "What day in the calendar is this,
then?
[Calendars have been preserved, the completest is the papyrus
Sallier IV., which has been admirably treated by F. Chabas. Many
days are noted as lucky, unlucky, etc. In the temples many
Calendars of feasts have been found, the most perfect at Medinet
Abu, deciphered by Dumich.]
The child of a paraschites is to be tended like a princess, and a leech
have a noble to guide him, like the Pharaoh himself! I ought to have kept
on my three robes!"
"The night is warm," said Pentaur.
"But Paaker has strange ways with him. Only the day before yesterday I
was called to a poor boy whose collar bone he had simply smashed with his
stick. If I had been the princess's horse I would rather have trodden him
down than a poor little girl."
"So would I," said Pentaur laughing, and left the room to request The
second prophet Gagabu, who was also the head of the medical staff of the
House of Seti, to send the blind pastophorus
[The Pastophori were an order of priests to which the physicians
belonged.]
Teta, with his friend as singer of the litany.
CHAPTER IV.
Pentaur knew where to seek Gagabu, for he himself had been invited to the
banquet which the prophet had prepared in honor of two sages who had
lately come to the House of Seti from the university of Chennu.
[Chennu was situated on a bend of the Nile, not far from the Nubian
frontier; it is now called Gebel Silsilch; it was in very ancient
times the seat of a celebrated seminary.]
In an open court, surrounded by gaily-painted wooden pillars, and lighted
by many lamps, sat the feasting priests in two long rows on comfortable
armchairs. Before each stood a little table, and servants were occupied
in supplying them with the dishes and drinks, which were laid out on a
splendid table in the middle of the court. Joints of gazelle,
[Gazelles were tamed for domestic animals: we find them in the
representations of the herds of the wealthy Egyptians and as
slaughtered for food. The banquet is described from the pictures of
feasts which have been found in the tombs.]
roast geese and ducks, meat pasties, artichokes, asparagus and other
vegetables, and various cakes and sweetmeats were carried to the guests,
and their beakers well-filled with the choice wines of which there was
never any lack in the lofts of the House of Seti.
[Cellars maintain the mean temperature of the climate, and in Egypt
are hot Wine was best preserved in shady and airy lofts.]
In the spaces between the guests stood servants with metal bowls, in
which they might wash their hands, and towels of fine linen.
When their hunger was appeased, the wine flowed more freely, and each
guest was decked with sweetly-smelling flowers, whose odor was supposed
to add to the vivacity of the conversation.
Many of the sharers in this feast wore long, snowwhite garments, and were
of the class of the Initiated into the mysteries of the faith, as well as
chiefs of the different orders of priests of the House of Seti.
The second prophet, Gagabu, who was to-day charged with the conduct of
the feast by Ameni--who on such occasions only showed himself for a few
minutes--was a short, stout man with a bald and almost spherical head.
His features were those of a man of advancing years, but well-formed, and
his smoothly-shaven, plump cheeks were well-rounded. His grey eyes looked
out cheerfully and observantly, but had a vivid sparkle when he was
excited and began to twitch his thick, sensual mouth.
Close by him stood the vacant, highly-ornamented chair of the
high-priest, and next to him sat the priests arrived from Chennu, two
tall, dark-colored old men. The remainder of the company was arranged in
the order of precedency, which they held in the priests' colleges, and
which bore no relation to their respective ages.
But strictly as the guests were divided with reference to their rank,
they mixed without distinction in the conversation.
"We know how to value our call to Thebes," said the elder of the
strangers from Chennu, Tuauf, whose essays were frequently used in the
schools,--[Some of them are still in existence]--"for while, on one hand,
it brings us into the neighborhood of the Pharaoh, where life, happiness,
and safety flourish, on the other it procures us the honor of counting
ourselves among your number; for, though the university of Chennu in
former times was so happy as to bring up many great men, whom she could
call her own, she can no longer compare with the House of Seti. Even
Heliopolis and Memphis are behind you; and if I, my humble self,
nevertheless venture boldly among you, it is because I ascribe your
success as much to the active influence of the Divinity in your temple,
which may promote my acquirements and achievements, as to your great
gifts and your industry, in which I will not be behind you. I have
already seen your high-priest Ameni--what a man! And who does not know
thy name, Gagabu, or thine, Meriapu?"
"And which of you," asked the other new-comer, may we greet as the author
of the most beautiful hymn to Amon, which was ever sung in the land of
the Sycamore? Which of you is Pentaur?"
"The empty chair yonder," answered Gagabu, pointing to a seat at the
lower end of the table, "is his. He is the youngest of us all, but a
great future awaits him."
"And his songs," added the elder of the strangers. "Without doubt,"
replied the chief of the haruspices,--[One of the orders of priests in
the Egyptian hierarchy]--an old man with a large grey curly head, that
seemed too heavy for his thin neck, which stretched forward--perhaps from
the habit of constantly watching for signs--while his prominent eyes
glowed with a fanatical gleam. "Without doubt the Gods have granted great
gifts to our young friend, but it remains to be proved how he will use
them. I perceive a certain freedom of thought in the youth, which pains
me deeply. Although in his poems his flexible style certainly follows the
prescribed forms, his ideas transcend all tradition; and even in the
hymns intended for the ears of the people I find turns of thought, which
might well be called treason to the mysteries which only a few months ago
he swore to keep secret. For instance he says--and we sing--and the laity
hear--
"One only art Thou, Thou Creator of beings;
And Thou only makest all that is created.
And again--
He is one only, Alone, without equal;
Dwelling alone in the holiest of holies."
[Hymn to Amon preserved in a papyrus roll at Bulaq, and deciphered
by Grehaut and L. Stern.]
Such passages as these ought not to be sung in public, at least in times
like ours, when new ideas come in upon us from abroad, like the swarms of
locusts from the East."
"Spoken to my very soul!" cried the treasurer of the temple, "Ameni
initiated this boy too early into the mysteries."
"In my opinion, and I am his teacher," said Gagabu, "our brotherhood may
be proud of a member who adds so brilliantly to the fame of our temple.
The people hear the hymns without looking closely at the meaning of the
words. I never saw the congregation more devout, than when the beautiful
and deeply-felt song of praise was sung at the feast of the stairs."
[A particularly solemn festival in honor of Amon-Chem, held in the
temple of Medinet-Abu.]
"Pentaur was always thy favorite," said the former speaker. "Thou wouldst
not permit in any one else many things that are allowed to him. His hymns
are nevertheless to me and to many others a dangerous performance; and
canst thou dispute the fact that we have grounds for grave anxiety, and
that things happen and circumstances grow up around us which hinder us,
and at last may perhaps crush us, if we do not, while there is yet time,
inflexibly oppose them?"
"Thou bringest sand to the desert, and sugar to sprinkle over honey,"
exclaimed Gagabu, and his lips began to twitch. "Nothing is now as it
ought to be, and there will be a hard battle to fight; not with the
sword, but with this--and this." And the impatient man touched his
forehead and his lips. "And who is there more competent than my disciple?
There is the champion of our cause, a second cap of Hor, that overthrew
the evil one with winged sunbeams, and you come and would clip his wings
and blunt his claws! Alas, alas, my lords! will you never understand that
a lion roars louder than a cat, and the sun shines brighter than an
oil-lamp? Let Pentuar alone, I say; or you will do as the man did, who,
for fear of the toothache, had his sound teeth drawn. Alas, alas, in the
years to come we shall have to bite deep into the flesh, till the blood
flows, if we wish to escape being eaten up ourselves!"
"The enemy is not unknown to us also," said the elder priest from Chennu,
"although we, on the remote southern frontier of the kingdom, have
escaped many evils that in the north have eaten into our body like a
cancer. Here foreigners are now hardly looked upon at all as unclean and
devilish."--["Typhonisch," belonging to Typhon or Seth.--Translator.]
"Hardly?" exclaimed the chief of the haruspices; "they are invited,
caressed, and honored. Like dust, when the simoon blows through the
chinks of a wooden house, they crowd into the houses and temples, taint
our manners and language;
[At no period Egyptian writers use more Semitic words than during
the reigns of Rameses II. and his son Mernephtah.]
nay, on the throne of the successors of Ra sits a descendant--"
"Presumptuous man!" cried the voice of the high-priest, who at this
instant entered the hall, "Hold your tongue, and be not so bold as to wag
it against him who is our king, and wields the sceptre in this kingdom as
the Vicar of Ra."
The speaker bowed and was silent, then he and all the company rose to
greet Ameni, who bowed to them all with polite dignity, took his seat,
and turning to Gagabu asked him carelessly:
"I find you all in most unpriestly excitement; what has disturbed your
equanimity?"
"We were discussing the overwhelming influx of foreigners into Egypt, and
the necessity of opposing some resistance to them."
"You will find me one of the foremost in the attempt," replied Ameni. "We
have endured much already, and news has arrived from the north, which
grieves me deeply."
"Have our troops sustained a defeat?"
"They continue to be victorious, but thousands of our countrymen have
fallen victims in the fight or on the march. Rameses demands fresh
reinforcements. The pioneer, Paaker, has brought me a letter from our
brethren who accompany the king, and delivered a document from him to the
Regent, which contains the order to send to him fifty thousand fighting
men: and as the whole of the soldier-caste and all the auxiliaries are
already under arms, the bondmen of the temple, who till our acres, are to
be levied, and sent into Asia."
A murmur of disapproval arose at these words. The chief of the haruspices
stamped his foot, and Gagabu asked:
"What do you mean to do?"
"To prepare to obey the commands of the king," answered Ameni, "and to
call the heads of the temples of the city of Anion here without delay to
hold a council. Each must first in his holy of holies seek good counsel
of the Celestials. When we have come to a conclusion, we must next win
the Viceroy over to our side. Who yesterday assisted at his prayers?"
"It was my turn," said the chief of the haruspices.
"Follow me to my abode, when the meal is over." commanded Ameni. "But why
is our poet missing from our circle?"
At this moment Pentaur came into the hall, and while he bowed easily and
with dignity to the company and low before Ameni, he prayed him to grant
that the pastophorus Teta should accompany the leech Nebsecht to visit
the daughter of the paraschites.
Ameni nodded consent and exclaimed: "They must make haste. Paaker waits
for them at the great gate, and will accompany them in my chariot."
As soon as Pentaur had left the party of feasters, the old priest from
Chennu exclaimed, as he turned to Ameni:
"Indeed, holy father, just such a one and no other had I pictured your
poet. He is like the Sun-god, and his demeanor is that of a prince. He is
no doubt of noble birth."
"His father is a homely gardener," said the highpriest, "who indeed tills
the land apportioned to him with industry and prudence, but is of humble
birth and rough exterior. He sent Pentaur to the school at an early age,
and we have brought up the wonderfully gifted boy to be what he now is."
"What office does he fill here in the temple?"
"He instructs the elder pupils of the high-school in grammar and
eloquence; he is also an excellent observer of the starry heavens, and a
most skilled interpreter of dreams," replied Gagabu. "But here he is
again. To whom is Paaker conducting our stammering physician and his
assistant?"
"To the daughter of the paraschites, who has been run over," answered
Pentaur. "But what a rough fellow this pioneer is. His voice hurts my
ears, and he spoke to our leeches as if they had been his slaves."
"He was vexed with the commission the princess had devolved on him," said
the high-priest benevolently, "and his unamiable disposition is hardly
mitigated by his real piety."
"And yet," said an old priest, "his brother, who left us some years ago,
and who had chosen me for his guide and teacher, was a particularly
loveable and docile youth."
"And his father," said Ameni, was one of the most superior energetic, and
withal subtle-minded of men."
"Then he has derived his bad peculiarities from his mother?"
"By no means. She is a timid, amiable, soft-hearted woman."
"But must the child always resemble its parents?" asked Pentaur. "Among
the sons of the sacred bull, sometimes not one bears the distinguishing
mark of his father."
"And if Paaker's father were indeed an Apis," Gagabu laughing, "according
to your view the pioneer himself belongs, alas! to the peasant's stable."
Pentaur did not contradict him, but said with a smile:
"Since he left the school bench, where his school-fellows called him the
wild ass on account of his unruliness, he has remained always the same.
He was stronger than most of them, and yet they knew no greater pleasure
than putting him in a rage."
"Children are so cruel!" said Ameni. "They judge only by appearances, and
never enquire into the causes of them. The deficient are as guilty in
their eyes as the idle, and Paaker could put forward small claims to
their indulgence. I encourage freedom and merriment," he continued
turning to the priests from Cheraw, "among our disciples, for in
fettering the fresh enjoyment of youth we lame our best assistant. The
excrescences on the natural growth of boys cannot be more surely or
painlessly extirpated than in their wild games. The school-boy is the
school-boy's best tutor."
"But Paaker," said the priest Meriapu, "was not improved by the
provocations of his companions. Constant contests with them increased
that roughness which now makes him the terror of his subordinates and
alienates all affection."
"He is the most unhappy of all the many youths, who were intrusted to my
care," said Ameni, "and I believe I know why,--he never had a childlike
disposition, even when in years he was still a child, and the Gods had
denied him the heavenly gift of good humor. Youth should be modest, and
he was assertive from his childhood. He took the sport of his companions
for earnest, and his father, who was unwise only as a tutor, encouraged
him to resistance instead of to forbearance, in the idea that he thus
would be steeled to the hard life of a Mohar."
[The severe duties of the Mohar are well known from the papyrus of
Anastasi I. in the Brit. Mus., which has been ably treated by F.
Chabas, Voyage d'un Egyptien.]
"I have often heard the deeds of the Mohar spoken of," said the old
priest from Chennu, "yet I do not exactly know what his office requires
of him."
"He has to wander among the ignorant and insolent people of hostile
provinces, and to inform himself of the kind and number of the
population, to investigate the direction of the mountains, valleys, and
rivers, to set forth his observations, and to deliver them to the house
of war,
[Corresponding to our minister of war. A person of the highest
importance even in the earliest times.]
so that the march of the troops may be guided by them."
"The Mohar then must be equally skilled as a warrior and as a Scribe."
"As thou sayest; and Paaker's father was not a hero only, but at the same
time a writer, whose close and clear information depicted the country
through which he had travelled as plainly as if it were seen from a
mountain height. He was the first who took the title of Mohar. The king
held him in such high esteem, that he was inferior to no one but the king
himself, and the minister of the house of war."
"Was he of noble race?"
"Of one of the oldest and noblest in the country. His father was the
noble warrior Assa," answered the haruspex, "and he therefore, after he
himself had attained the highest consideration and vast wealth, escorted
home the niece of the King Hor-em-lieb, who would have had a claim to the
throne, as well as the Regent, if the grandfather of the present Rameses
had not seized it from the old family by violence."
"Be careful of your words," said Ameni, interrupting the rash old man.
"Rameses I. was and is the grandfather of our sovereign, and in the
king's veins, from his mother's side, flows the blood of the legitimate
descendants of the Sun-god."
"But fuller and purer in those of the Regent the haruspex ventured to
retort.
"But Rameses wears the crown," cried Ameni, "and will continue to wear it
so long as it pleases the Gods. Reflect--your hairs are grey, and
seditious words are like sparks, which are borne by the wind, but which,
if they fall, may set our home in a blaze. Continue your feasting, my
lords; but I would request you to speak no more this evening of the king
and his new decree. You, Pentaur, fulfil my orders to-morrow morning with
energy and prudence."
The high-priest bowed and left the feast.
As soon as the door was shut behind him, the old priest from Chennu
spoke.
"What we have learned concerning the pioneer of the king, a man who holds
so high an office, surprises me. Does he distinguish himself by a special
acuteness?"
"He was a steady learner, but of moderate ability."
"Is the rank of Mohar then as high as that of a prince of the empire?"
"By no means."
"How then is it--?"
"It is, as it is," interrupted Gagabu. "The son of the vine-dresser has
his mouth full of grapes, and the child of the door-keeper opens the lock
with words."
"Never mind," said an old priest who had hitherto kept silence. "Paaker
earned for himself the post of Mohar, and possesses many praiseworthy
qualities. He is indefatigable and faithful, quails before no danger, and
has always been earnestly devout from his boyhood. When the other
scholars carried their pocket-money to the fruit-sellers and
confectioners at the temple-gates, he would buy geese, and, when his
mother sent him a handsome sum, young gazelles, to offer to the Gods on
the altars. No noble in the land owns a greater treasure of charms and
images of the Gods than he. To the present time he is the most pious of
men, and the offerings for the dead, which he brings in the name of his
late father, may be said to be positively kingly."
"We owe him gratitude for these gifts," said the treasurer, "and the high
honor he pays his father, even after his death, is exceptional and
far-famed."
"He emulates him in every respect," sneered Gagabu; "and though he does
not resemble him in any feature, grows more and more like him. But
unfortunately, it is as the goose resembles the swan, or the owl
resembles the eagle. For his father's noble pride he has overbearing
haughtiness; for kindly severity, rude harshness; for dignity, conceit;
for perseverance, obstinacy. Devout he is, and we profit by his gifts.
The treasurer may rejoice over them, and the dates off a crooked tree
taste as well as those off a straight one. But if I were the Divinity I
should prize them no higher than a hoopoe's crest; for He, who sees into
the heart of the giver-alas! what does he see! Storms and darkness are of
the dominion of Seth, and in there--in there--" and the old man struck
his broad breast "all is wrath and tumult, and there is not a gleam of
the calm blue heaven of Ra, that shines soft and pure in the soul of the
pious; no, not a spot as large as this wheaten-cake."
"Hast thou then sounded to the depths of his soul?" asked the haruspex.
"As this beaker!" exclaimed Gagabu, and he touched the rim of an empty
drinking-vessel. "For fifteen years without ceasing. The man has been of
service to us, is so still, and will continue to be. Our leeches extract
salves from bitter gall and deadly poisons; and folks like these--"
"Hatred speaks in thee," said the haruspex, interrupting the indignant
old man.
"Hatred!" he retorted, and his lips quivered. "Hatred?" and he struck his
breast with his clenched hand. "It is true, it is no stranger to this old
heart. But open thine ears, O haruspex, and all you others too shall
hear. I recognize two sorts of hatred. The one is between man and man;
that I have gagged, smothered, killed, annihilated--with what efforts,
the Gods know. In past years I have certainly tasted its bitterness, and
served it like a wasp, which, though it knows that in stinging it must
die, yet uses its sting. But now I am old in years, that is in knowledge,
and I know that of all the powerful impulses which stir our hearts, one
only comes solely from Seth, one only belongs wholly to the Evil one and
that is hatred between man and man. Covetousness may lead to industry,
sensual appetites may beget noble fruit, but hatred is a devastator, and
in the soul that it occupies all that is noble grows not upwards and
towards the light, but downwards to the earth and to darkness. Everything
may be forgiven by the Gods, save only hatred between man and man. But
there is another sort of hatred that is pleasing to the Gods, and which
you must cherish if you would not miss their presence in your souls; that
is, hatred for all that hinders the growth of light and goodness and
purity--the hatred of Horus for Seth. The Gods would punish me if I hated
Paaker whose father was dear to me; but the spirits of darkness would
possess the old heart in my breast if it were devoid of horror for the
covetous and sordid devotee, who would fain buy earthly joys of the Gods
with gifts of beasts and wine, as men exchange an ass for a robe, in
whose soul seethe dark promptings. Paaker's gifts can no more be pleasing
to the Celestials than a cask of attar of roses would please thee,
haruspex, in which scorpions, centipedes, and venomous snakes were
swimming. I have long led this man's prayers, and never have I heard him
crave for noble gifts, but a thousand times for the injury of the men he
hates."
"In the holiest prayers that come down to us from the past," said the
haruspex, "the Gods are entreated to throw our enemies under our feet;
and, besides, I have often heard Paaker pray fervently for the bliss of
his parents."
"You are a priest and one of the initiated," cried Gagabu, "and you know
not--or will not seem to know--that by the enemies for whose overthrow we
pray, are meant only the demons of darkness and the outlandish peoples by
whom Egypt is endangered! Paaker prayed for his parents? Ay, and so will
he for his children, for they will be his future as his fore fathers are
his past. If he had a wife, his offerings would be for her too, for she
would be the half of his own present."
"In spite of all this," said the haruspex Septah, "you are too hard in
your judgment of Paaker, for although he was born under a lucky sign, the
Hathors denied him all that makes youth happy. The enemy for whose
destruction he prays is Mena, the king's charioteer, and, indeed, he must
have been of superhuman magnanimity or of unmanly feebleness, if he could
have wished well to the man who robbed him of the beautiful wife who was
destined for him."
"How could that happen?" asked the priest from Chennu. "A betrothal is
sacred."
[In the demotic papyrus preserved at Bulaq (novel by Setnau) first
treated by H. Brugsch, the following words occur: "Is it not the
law, which unites one to another?" Betrothed brides are mentioned,
for instance on the sarcophagus of Unnefer at Bulaq.]
"Paaker," replied Septah, "was attached with all the strength of his
ungoverned but passionate and faithful heart to his cousin Nefert, the
sweetest maid in Thebes, the daughter of Katuti, his mother's sister; and
she was promised to him to wife. Then his father, whom he accompanied on
his marches, was mortally wounded in Syria. The king stood by his
death-bed, and granting his last request, invested his son with his rank
and office: Paaker brought the mummy of his father home to Thebes, gave
him princely interment, and then before the time of mourning was over,
hastened back to Syria, where, while the king returned to Egypt, it was
his duty to reconnoitre the new possessions. At last he could quit the
scene of war with the hope of marrying Nefert. He rode his horse to death
the sooner to reach the goal of his desires; but when he reached Tanis,
the city of Rameses, the news met him that his affianced cousin had been
given to another, the handsomest and bravest man in Thebes--the noble
Mena. The more precious a thing is that we hope to possess, the more we
are justified in complaining of him who contests our claim, and can win
it from us. Paaker's blood must have been as cold as a frog's if he could
have forgiven Mena instead of hating him, and the cattle he has offered
to the Gods to bring down their wrath on the head of the traitor may be
counted by hundreds."
"And if you accept them, knowing why they are offered, you do unwisely
and wrongly," exclaimed Gagabu. "If I were a layman, I would take good
care not to worship a Divinity who condescends to serve the foulest human
fiends for a reward. But the omniscient Spirit, that rules the world in
accordance with eternal laws, knows nothing of these sacrifices, which
only tickle the nostrils of the evil one. The treasurer rejoices when a
beautiful spotless heifer is driven in among our herds. But Seth rubs his
red hands
[Red was the color of Seth and Typhon. The evil one is named the
Red, as for instance in the papyrus of fibers. Red-haired men were
typhonic.]
with delight that he accepts it. My friends, I have heard the vows which
Paaker has poured out over our pure altars, like hogwash that men set
before swine. Pestilence and boils has he called down on Mena, and
barrenness and heartache on the poor sweet woman; and I really cannot
blame her for preferring a battle-horse to a hippopotamus--a Mena to a
Paaker."
"Yet the Immortals must have thought his remonstrances less
unjustifiable, and have stricter views as to the inviolable nature of a
betrothal than you," said the treasurer, "for Nefert, during four years
of married life, has passed only a few weeks with her wandering husband,
and remains childless. It is hard to me to understand how you, Gagabu,
who so often absolve where we condemn, can so relentlessly judge so great
a benefactor to our temple."
"And I fail to comprehend," exclaimed the old man, "how you--you who so
willingly condemn, can so weakly excuse this--this--call him what you
will."
"He is indispensable to us at this time," said the haruspex.
"Granted," said Gagabu, lowering his tone. "And I think still to make use
of him, as the high-priest has done in past years with the best effect
when dangers have threatened us; and a dirty road serves when it makes
for the goal. The Gods themselves often permit safety to come from what
is evil, but shall we therefore call evil good--or say the hideous is
beautiful? Make use of the king's pioneer as you will, but do not,
because you are indebted to him for gifts, neglect to judge him according
to his imaginings and deeds if you would deserve your title of the
Initiated and the Enlightened. Let him bring his cattle into our temple
and pour his gold into our treasury, but do not defile your souls with
the thought that the offerings of such a heart and such a hand are
pleasing to the Divinity. Above all," and the voice of the old man had a
heart-felt impressiveness, "Above all, do not flatter the erring man--and
this is what you do, with the idea that he is walking in the right way;
for your, for our first duty, O my friends, is always this--to guide the
souls of those who trust in us to goodness and truth."
"Oh, my master!" cried Pentaur, "how tender is thy severity."
"I have shown the hideous sores of this man's soul," said the old man, as
he rose to quit the hall. "Your praise will aggravate them, your blame
will tend to heal them. Nay, if you are not content to do your duty, old
Gagabu will come some day with his knife, and will throw the sick man
down and cut out the canker."
During this speech the haruspex had frequently shrugged his shoulders.
Now he said, turning to the priests from Chennu--
"Gagabu is a foolish, hot-headed old man, and you have heard from his
lips just such a sermon as the young scribes keep by them when they enter
on the duties of the care of souls. His sentiments are excellent, but he
easily overlooks small things for the sake of great ones. Ameni would
tell you that ten souls, no, nor a hundred, do not matter when the safety
of the whole is in question."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A dirty road serves when it makes for the goal
Colored cakes in the shape of beasts
Deficient are as guilty in their eyes as the idle
For fear of the toothache, had his sound teeth drawn
Hatred between man and man
Hatred for all that hinders the growth of light
How tender is thy severity
Judge only by appearances, and never enquire into the causes
Often happens that apparent superiority does us damage
Seditious words are like sparks, which are borne by the wind
The scholar's ears are at his back: when he is flogged
Title must not be a bill of fare
Youth should be modest, and he was assertive
UARDA
Volume 2.
By Georg Ebers
CHAPTER V.
The night during which the Princess Bent-Anat and her followers had
knocked at the gate of the House of Seti was past.
The fruitful freshness of the dawn gave way to the heat, which began to
pour down from the deep blue cloudless vault of heaven. The eye could no
longer gaze at the mighty globe of light whose rays pierced the fine
white dust which hung over the declivity of the hills that enclosed the
city of the dead on the west. The limestone rocks showed with blinding
clearness, the atmosphere quivered as if heated over a flame; each minute
the shadows grew shorter and their outlines sharper.
All the beasts which we saw peopling the Necropolis in the evening had
now withdrawn into their lurking places; only man defied the heat of the
summer day. Undisturbed he accomplished his daily work, and only laid his
tools aside for a moment, with a sigh, when a cooling breath blew across
the overflowing stream and fanned his brow.
The harbor or clock where those landed who crossed from eastern Thebes
was crowded with barks and boats waiting to return.
The crews of rowers and steersmen who were attached to priestly
brotherhoods or noble houses, were enjoying a rest till the parties they
had brought across the Nile drew towards them again in long processions.
Under a wide-spreading sycamore a vendor of eatables, spirituous drinks,
and acids for cooling the water, had set up his stall, and close to him,
a crowd of boatmen, and drivers shouted and disputed as they passed the
time in eager games at morra.
[In Latin "micare digitis." A game still constantly played in the
south of Europe, and frequently represented by the Egyptians. The
games depicted in the monuments are collected by Minutoli, in the
Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung, 1852.]
Many sailors lay on the decks of the vessels, others on the shore; here
in the thin shade of a palm tree, there in the full blaze of the sun,
from those burning rays they protected themselves by spreading the cotton
cloths, which served them for cloaks, over their faces.
Between the sleepers passed bondmen and slaves, brown and black, in long
files one behind the other, bending under the weight of heavy burdens,
which had to be conveyed to their destination at the temples for
sacrifice, or to the dealers in various wares. Builders dragged blocks of
stone, which had come from the quarries of Chennu and Suan,
[The Syene of the Greeks, non, called Assouan at the first
cataract.]
on sledges to the site of a new temple; laborers poured water under the
runners, that the heavily loaded and dried wood should not take fire.
All these working men were driven with sticks by their overseers, and
sang at their labor; but the voices of the leaders sounded muffled and
hoarse, though, when after their frugal meal they enjoyed an hour of
repose, they might be heard loud enough. Their parched throats refused to
sing in the noontide of their labor.
Thick clouds of gnats followed these tormented gangs, who with dull and
spirit-broken endurance suffered alike the stings of the insects and the
blows of their driver. The gnats pursued them to the very heart of the
City of the dead, where they joined themselves to the flies and wasps,
which swarmed in countless crowds around the slaughter houses, cooks'
shops, stalls of fried fish, and booths of meat, vegetable, honey, cakes
and drinks, which were doing a brisk business in spite of the noontide
heat and the oppressive atmosphere heated and filled with a mixture of
odors.
The nearer one got to the Libyan frontier, the quieter it became, and the
silence of death reigned in the broad north-west valley, where in the
southern slope the father of the reigning king had caused his tomb to be
hewn, and where the stone-mason of the Pharaoh had prepared a rock tomb
for him.
A newly made road led into this rocky gorge, whose steep yellow and brown
walls seemed scorched by the sun in many blackened spots, and looked like
a ghostly array of shades that had risen from the tombs in the night and
remained there.
At the entrance of this valley some blocks of stone formed a sort of
doorway, and through this, indifferent to the heat of day, a small but
brilliant troop of the men was passing.
Four slender youths as staff bearers led the procession, each clothed
only with an apron and a flowing head-cloth of gold brocade; the mid-day
sun played on their smooth, moist, red-brown skins, and their supple
naked feet hardly stirred the stones on the road.
Behind them followed an elegant, two-wheeled chariot, with two prancing
brown horses bearing tufts of red and blue feathers on their noble heads,
and seeming by the bearing of their arched necks and flowing tails to
express their pride in the gorgeous housings, richly embroidered in
silver, purple, and blue and golden ornaments, which they wore--and even
more in their beautiful, royal charioteer, Bent-Anat, the daughter of
Rameses, at whose lightest word they pricked their ears, and whose little
hand guided them with a scarcely perceptible touch.
Two young men dressed like the other runners followed the chariot, and
kept the rays of the sun off the face of their mistress with large fans
of snow-white ostrich feathers fastened to long wands.
By the side of Bent-Anat, so long as the road was wide enough to allow of
it, was carried Nefert, the wife of Mena, in her gilt litter, borne by
eight tawny bearers, who, running with a swift and equally measured step,
did not remain far behind the trotting horses of the princess and her
fan-bearers.
Both the women, whom we now see for the first time in daylight, were of
remarkable but altogether different beauty.
The wife of Mena had preserved the appearance of a maiden; her large
almond-shaped eyes had a dreamy surprised look out from under her long
eyelashes, and her figure of hardly the middle-height had acquired a
little stoutness without losing its youthful grace. No drop of foreign
blood flowed in her veins, as could be seen in the color of her skin,
which was of that fresh and equal line which holds a medium between
golden yellow and bronze brown--and which to this day is so charming in
the maidens of Abyssinia--in her straight nose, her well-formed brow, in
her smooth but thick black hair, and in the fineness of her hands and
feet, which were ornamented with circles of gold.
The maiden princess next to her had hardly reached her nineteenth year,
and yet something of a womanly self-consciousness betrayed itself in her
demeanor. Her stature was by almost a head taller than that of her
friend, her skin was fairer, her blue eyes kind and frank, without tricks
of glance, but clear and honest, her profile was noble but sharply cut,
and resembled that of her father, as a landscape in the mild and
softening light of the moon resembles the same landscape in the broad
clear light of day. The scarcely perceptible aquiline of her nose, she
inherited from her Semitic ancestors,
[Many portraits have come down to us of Rameses: the finest is the
noble statue preserved at Turin. A likeness has been detected
between its profile, with its slightly aquiline nose, and that of
Napoleon I.]
as well as the slightly waving abundance of her brown hair, over which
she wore a blue and white striped silk kerchief; its carefully-pleated
folds were held in place by a gold ring, from which in front a horned
urarus
[A venomous Egyptian serpent which was adopted as the symbol of
sovereign power, in consequence of its swift effects for life or
death. It is never wanting to the diadem of the Pharaohs.]
raised its head crowned with a disk of rubies. From her left temple a
large tress, plaited with gold thread, hung down to her waist, the sign
of her royal birth. She wore a purple dress of fine, almost transparent
stuff, that was confined with a gold belt and straps. Round her throat
was fastened a necklace like a collar, made of pearls and costly stones,
and hanging low down on her well-formed bosom.
Behind the princess stood her charioteer, an old officer of noble birth.
Three litters followed the chariot of the princess, and in each sat two
officers of the court; then came a dozen of slaves ready for any service,
and lastly a crowd of wand-bearers to drive off the idle populace, and of
lightly-armed soldiers, who--dressed only in the apron and
head-cloth--each bore a dagger-shaped sword in his girdle, an axe in his
right hand, and in his left; in token of his peaceful service, a
palm-branch.
Like dolphins round a ship, little girls in long shirt-shaped garments
swarmed round the whole length of the advancing procession, bearing
water-jars on their steady heads, and at a sign from any one who was
thirsty were ready to give him a drink. With steps as light as the
gazelle they often outran the horses, and nothing could be more graceful
than the action with which the taller ones bent over with the water-jars
held in both arms to the drinker.
The courtiers, cooled and shaded by waving fans, and hardly perceiving
the noontide heat, conversed at their ease about indifferent matters, and
the princess pitied the poor horses, who were tormented as they ran, by
annoying gadflies; while the runners and soldiers, the litter-bearers and
fan-bearers, the girls with their jars and the panting slaves, were
compelled to exert themselves under the rays of the mid-day sun in the
service of their masters, till their sinews threatened to crack and their
lungs to burst their bodies.
At a spot where the road widened, and where, to the right, lay the steep
cross-valley where the last kings of the dethroned race were interred,
the procession stopped at a sign from Paaker, who preceded the princess,
and who drove his fiery black Syrian horses with so heavy a hand that the
bloody foam fell from their bits.
When the Mohar had given the reins into the hand of a servant, he sprang
from his chariot, and after the usual form of obeisance said to the
princess:
"In this valley lies the loathsome den of the people, to whom thou, O
princess, dost deign to do such high honor. Permit me to go forward as
guide to thy party."
"We will go on foot," said the princess, "and leave our followers behind
here."
Paaker bowed, Bent-Anat threw the reins to her charioteer and sprang to
the ground, the wife of Mena and the courtiers left their litters, and
the fan-bearers and chamberlains were about to accompany their mistress
on foot into the little valley, when she turned round and ordered,
"Remain behind, all of you. Only Paaker and Nefert need go with me."
The princess hastened forward into the gorge, which was oppressive with
the noon-tide heat; but she moderated her steps as soon as she observed
that the frailer Nefert found it difficult to follow her.
At a bend in the road Paaker stood still, and with him Bent-Anat and
Nefert. Neither of them had spoken a word during their walk. The valley
was perfectly still and deserted; on the highest pinnacles of the cliff,
which rose perpendicularly to the right, sat a long row of vultures, as
motionless as if the mid-day heat had taken all strength out of their
wings.
Paaker bowed before them as being the sacred animals of the Great Goddess
of Thebes,
[She formed a triad with Anion and Chunsu under the name of Muth.
The great "Sanctuary of the kingdom"--the temple of Karnak--was
dedicated to them.]
and the two women silently followed his example.
"There," said the Mohar, pointing to two huts close to the left cliff of
the valley, built of bricks made of dried Nile-mud, "there, the neatest,
next the cave in the rock."
Bent-Anat went towards the solitary hovel with a beating heart; Paaker
let the ladies go first. A few steps brought them to an ill-constructed
fence of canestalks, palm-branches, briars and straw, roughly thrown
together. A heart-rending cry of pain from within the hut trembled in the
air and arrested the steps of the two women. Nefert staggered and clung
to her stronger companion, whose beating heart she seemed to hear. Both
stood a few minutes as if spellbound, then the princess called Paaker,
and said:
"You go first into the house."
Paaker bowed to the ground.
"I will call the man out," he said, "but how dare we step over his
threshold. Thou knowest such a proceeding will defile us."
Nefert looked pleadingly at Bent-Anat, but the princess repeated her
command.
"Go before me; I have no fear of defilement." The Mohar still hesitated.
"Wilt thou provoke the Gods?--and defile thyself?" But the princess let
him say no more; she signed to Nefert, who raised her hands in horror and
aversion; so, with a shrug of her shoulders, she left her companion
behind with the Mohar, and stepped through an opening in the hedge into a
little court, where lay two brown goats; a donkey with his forelegs tied
together stood by, and a few hens were scattering the dust about in a
vain search for food.
Soon she stood, alone, before the door of the paraschites' hovel. No one
perceived her, but she could not take her eyes-accustomed only to scenes
of order and splendor--from the gloomy but wonderfully strange picture,
which riveted her attention and her sympathy. At last she went up to the
doorway, which was too low for her tall figure. Her heart shrunk
painfully within her, and she would have wished to grow smaller, and,
instead of shining in splendor, to have found herself wrapped in a
beggar's robe.
Could she step into this hovel decked with gold and jewels as if in
mockery?--like a tyrant who should feast at a groaning table and compel
the starving to look on at the banquet. Her delicate perception made her
feel what trenchant discord her appearance offered to all that surrounded
her, and the discord pained her; for she could not conceal from herself
that misery and external meanness were here entitled to give the key-note
and that her magnificence derived no especial grandeur from contrast with
all these modest accessories, amid dust, gloom, and suffering, but rather
became disproportionate and hideous, like a giant among pigmies.
She had already gone too far to turn back, or she would willingly have
done so. The longer she gazed into the but, the more deeply she felt the
impotence of her princely power, the nothingness of the splendid gifts
with which she approached it, and that she might not tread the dusty
floor of this wretched hovel but in all humility, and to crave a pardon.
The room into which she looked was low but not very small, and obtained
from two cross lights a strange and unequal illumination; on one side the
light came through the door, and on the other through an opening in the
time-worn ceiling of the room, which had never before harbored so many
and such different guests.
All attention was concentrated on a group, which was clearly lighted up
from the doorway.
On the dusty floor of the room cowered an old woman, with dark
weather-beaten features and tangled hair that had long been grey. Her
black-blue cotton shirt was open over her withered bosom, and showed a
blue star tattooed upon it.
In her lap she supported with her hands the head of a girl, whose slender
body lay motionless on a narrow, ragged mat. The little white feet of the
sick girl almost touched the threshold. Near to them squatted a
benevolent-looking old man, who wore only a coarse apron, and sitting all
in a heap, bent forward now and then, rubbing the child's feet with his
lean hands and muttering a few words to himself.
The sufferer wore nothing but a short petticoat of coarse light-blue
stuff. Her face, half resting on the lap of the old woman, was graceful
and regular in form, her eyes were half shut-like those of a child, whose
soul is wrapped in some sweet dream-but from her finely chiselled lips
there escaped from time to time a painful, almost convulsive sob.
An abundance of soft, but disordered reddish fair hair, in which clung a
few withered flowers, fell over the lap of the old woman and on to the
mat where she lay. Her cheeks were white and rosy-red, and when the young
surgeon Nebsecht--who sat by her side, near his blind, stupid companion,
the litany-singer--lifted the ragged cloth that had been thrown over her
bosom, which had been crushed by the chariot wheel, or when she lifted
her slender arm, it was seen that she had the shining fairness of those
daughters of the north who not unfrequently came to Thebes among the
king's prisoners of war.
The two physicians sent hither from the House of Seti sat on the left
side of the maiden on a little carpet. From time to time one or the other
laid his hand over the heart of the sufferer, or listened to her
breathing, or opened his case of medicaments, and moistened the compress
on her wounded breast with a white ointment.
In a wide circle close to the wall of the room crouched several women,
young and old, friends of the paraschites, who from time to time gave
expression to their deep sympathy by a piercing cry of lamentation. One
of them rose at regular intervals to fill the earthen bowl by the side of
the physician with fresh water. As often as the sudden coolness of a
fresh compress on her hot bosom startled the sick girl, she opened her
eyes, but always soon to close them again for longer interval, and turned
them at first in surprise, and then with gentle reverence, towards a
particular spot.
These glances had hitherto been unobserved by him to whom they were
directed.
Leaning against the wall on the right hand side of the room, dressed in
his long, snow-white priest's robe, Pentaur stood awaiting the princess.
His head-dress touched the ceiling, and the narrow streak of light, which
fell through the opening in the roof, streamed on his handsome head and
his breast, while all around him was veiled in twilight gloom.
Once more the suffering girl looked up, and her glance this time met the
eye of the young priest, who immediately raised his hand, and
half-mechanically, in a low voice, uttered the words of blessing; and
then once more fixed his gaze on the dingy floor, and pursued his own
reflections.
Some hours since he had come hither, obedient to the orders of Ameni, to
impress on the princess that she had defiled herself by touching a
paraschites, and could only be cleansed again by the hand of the priests.
He had crossed the threshold of the paraschites most reluctantly, and the
thought that he, of all men, had been selected to censure a deed of the
noblest humanity, and to bring her who had done it to judgment, weighed
upon him as a calamity.
In his intercourse with his friend Nebsecht, Pentaur had thrown off many
fetters, and given place to many thoughts that his master would have held
sinful and presumptuous; but at the same time he acknowledged the
sanctity of the old institutions, which were upheld by those whom he had
learned to regard as the divinely-appointed guardians of the spiritual
possessions of God's people; nor was he wholly free from the pride of
caste and the haughtiness which, with prudent intent, were inculcated in
the priests. He held the common man, who put forth his strength to win a
maintenance for his belongings by honest bodily labor--the merchant--the
artizan--the peasant, nay even the warrior, as far beneath the godly
brotherhood who strove for only spiritual ends; and most of all he
scorned the idler, given up to sensual enjoyments.
He held him unclean who had been branded by the law; and how should it
have been otherwise? These people, who at the embalming of the dead
opened the body of the deceased, had become despised for their office of
mutilating the sacred temple of the soul; but no paraschites chose his
calling of his own free will.--[Diodorus I, 91]--It was handed down from
father to son, and he who was born a paraschites--so he was taught--had
to expiate an old guilt with which his soul had long ago burdened itself
in a former existence, within another body, and which had deprived it of
absolution in the nether world. It had passed through various animal
forms, and now began a new human course in the body of a paraschites,
once more to stand after death in the presence of the judges of the
under-world.
Pentaur had crossed the threshold of the man he despised with aversion;
the man himself, sitting at the feet of the suffering girl, had exclaimed
as he saw the priest approaching the hovel:
"Yet another white robe! Does misfortune cleanse the unclean?"
Pentaur had not answered the old man, who on his part took no further
notice of him, while he rubbed the girl's feet by order of the leech; and
his hands impelled by tender anxiety untiringly continued the same
movement, as the water-wheel in the Nile keeps up without intermission
its steady motion in the stream.
"Does misfortune cleanse the unclean?" Pentaur asked himself. "Does it
indeed possess a purifying efficacy, and is it possible that the Gods,
who gave to fire the power of refining metals and to the winds power to
sweep the clouds from the sky, should desire that a man--made in their
own image--that a man should be tainted from his birth to his death with
an indelible stain?"
He looked at the face of the paraschites, and it seemed to him to
resemble that of his father.
This startled him!
And when he noticed how the woman, in whose lap the girl's head was
resting, bent over the injured bosom of the child to catch her breathing,
which she feared had come to a stand-still--with the anguish of a dove
that is struck down by a hawk--he remembered a moment in his own
childhood, when he had lain trembling with fever on his little bed. What
then had happened to him, or had gone on around him, he had long
forgotten, but one image was deeply imprinted on his soul, that of the
face of his mother bending over him in deadly anguish, but who had gazed
on her sick boy not more tenderly, or more anxiously, than this despised
woman on her suffering child.
"There is only one utterly unselfish, utterly pure and utterly divine
love," said he to himself, "and that is the love of Isis for Horus--the
love of a mother for her child. If these people were indeed so foul as to
defile every thing they touch, how would this pure, this tender, holy
impulse show itself even in them in all its beauty and perfection?"
"Still," he continued, "the Celestials have implanted maternal love in
the breast of the lioness, of the typhonic river-horse of the Nile."
He looked compassionately at the wife of the paraschites.
He saw her dark face as she turned it away from the sick girl. She had
felt her breathe, and a smile of happiness lighted up her old features;
she nodded first to the surgeon, and then with a deep sigh of relief to
her husband, who, while he did not cease the movement of his left hand,
held up his right hand in prayer to heaven, and his wife did the same.
It seemed to Pentaur that he could see the souls of these two, floating
above the youthful creature in holy union as they joined their hands; and
again he thought of his parents' house, of the hour when his sweet, only
sister died. His mother had thrown herself weeping on the pale form, but
his father had stamped his foot and had thrown back his head, sobbing and
striking his forehead with his fist.
"How piously submissive and thankful are these unclean ones!" thought
Pentaur; and repugnance for the old laws began to take root in his heart.
"Maternal love may exist in the hyaena, but to seek and find God pertains
only to man, who has a noble aim. Up to the limits of eternity--and God
is eternal!--thought is denied to animals; they cannot even smile. Even
men cannot smile at first, for only physical life--an animal
soul--dwells in them; but soon a share of the world's soul--beaming
intelligence--works within them, and first shows itself in the smile of a
child, which is as pure as the light and the truth from which it comes.
The child of the paraschites smiles like any other creature born of
woman, but how few aged men there are, even among the initiated, who can
smile as innocently and brightly as this woman who has grown grey under
open ill-treatment."
Deep sympathy began to fill his heart, and he knelt down by the side of
the poor child, raised her arm, and prayed fervently to that One who had
created the heavens and who rules the world--to that One, whom the
mysteries of faith forbade him to name; and not to the innumerable gods,
whom the people worshipped, and who to him were nothing but incarnations
of the attributes of the One and only God of the initiated--of whom he
was one--who was thus brought down to the comprehension of the laity.
He raised his soul to God in passionate emotion; but he prayed, not for
the child before him and for her recovery, but rather for the whole
despised race, and for its release from the old ban, for the
enlightenment of his own soul, imprisoned in doubts, and for strength to
fulfil his hard task with discretion.
The gaze of the sufferer followed him as he took up his former position.
The prayer had refreshed his soul and restored him to cheerfulness of
spirit. He began to reflect what conduct he must observe towards the
princess.
He had not met Bent-Anat for the first time yesterday; on the contrary,
he had frequently seen her in holiday processions, and at the high
festivals in the Necropolis, and like all his young companions had
admired her proud beauty--admired it as the distant light of the stars,
or the evening-glow on the horizon.
Now he must approach this lady with words of reproof.
He pictured to himself the moment when he must advance to meet her, and
could not help thinking of his little tutor Chufu, above whom he towered
by two heads while he was still a boy, and who used to call up his
admonitions to him from below. It was true, he himself was tall and slim,
but he felt as if to-day he were to play the part towards Bent-Anat of
the much-laughed-at little tutor.
His sense of the comic was touched, and asserted itself at this serious
moment, and with such melancholy surroundings. Life is rich in contrasts,
and a susceptible and highly-strung human soul would break down like a
bridge under the measured tread of soldiers, if it were allowed to let
the burden of the heaviest thoughts and strongest feelings work upon it
in undisturbed monotony; but just as in music every key-note has its
harmonies, so when we cause one chord of our heart to vibrate for long,
all sorts of strange notes respond and clang, often those which we least
expect.
Pentaur's glance flew round the one low, over-filled room of the
paraschites' hut, and like a lightning flash the thought, "How will the
princess and her train find room here?" flew through his mind.
His fancy was lively, and vividly brought before him how the daughter of
the Pharaoh with a crown on her proud head would bustle into the silent
chamber, how the chattering courtiers would follow her, and how the women
by the walls, the physicians by the side of the sick girl, the sleek
white cat from the chest where she sat, would rise and throng round her.
There must be frightful confusion. Then he imagined how the smart lords
and ladies would keep themselves far from the unclean, hold their slender
hands over their mouths and noses, and suggest to the old folks how they
ought to behave to the princess who condescended to bless them with her
presence. The old woman must lay down the head that rested in her bosom,
the paraschites must drop the feet he so anxiously rubbed, on the floor,
to rise and kiss the dust before Bent-Anat. Whereupon--the "mind's eye"
of the young priest seemed to see it all--the courtiers fled before him,
pushing each other, and all crowded together into a corner, and at last
the princess threw a few silver or gold rings into the laps of the father
and mother, and perhaps to the girl too, and he seemed to hear the
courtiers all cry out: "Hail to the gracious daughter of the Sun!"--to
hear the joyful exclamations of the crowd of women--to see the gorgeous
apparition leave the hut of the despised people, and then to see, instead
of the lovely sick child who still breathed audibly, a silent corpse on
the crumpled mat, and in the place of the two tender nurses at her head
and feet, two heart-broken, loud-lamenting wretches.
Pentaur's hot spirit was full of wrath. As soon as the noisy cortege
appeared actually in sight he would place himself in the doorway, forbid
the princess to enter, and receive her with strong words.
She could hardly come hither out of human kindness.
"She wants variety," said he to himself, "something new at Court; for
there is little going on there now the king tarries with the troops in a
distant country; it tickles the vanity of the great to find themselves
once in a while in contact with the small, and it is well to have your
goodness of heart spoken of by the people. If a little misfortune
opportunely happens, it is not worth the trouble to inquire whether the
form of our benevolence does more good or mischief to such wretched
people."
He ground his teeth angrily, and thought no more of the defilement which
might threaten Bent-Anat from the paraschites, but exclusively, on the
contrary, of the impending desecration by the princess of the holy
feelings astir in this silent room.
Excited as he was to fanaticism, his condemning lips could not fail to
find vigorous and impressive words.
He stood drawn to his full height and drawing his breath deeply, like a
spirit of light who holds his weapon raised to annihilate a demon of
darkness, and he looked out into the valley to perceive from afar the cry
of the runners and the rattle of the wheels of the gay train he expected.
And he saw the doorway darkened by a lowly, bending figure, who, with
folded arms, glided into the room and sank down silently by the side of
the sick girl. The physicians and the old people moved as if to rise; but
she signed to them without opening her lips, and with moist, expressive
eyes, to keep their places; she looked long and lovingly in the face of
the wounded girl, stroked her white arm, and turning to the old woman
softly whispered to her
"How pretty she is!"
The paraschites' wife nodded assent, and the girl smiled and moved her
lips as though she had caught the words and wished to speak.
Bent-Anat took a rose from her hair and laid it on her bosom.
The paraschites, who had not taken his hands from the feet of the sick
child, but who had followed every movement of the princess, now
whispered, "May Hathor requite thee, who gave thee thy beauty."
The princess turned to him and said, "Forgive the sorrow, I have caused
you."
The old man stood up, letting the feet of the sick girl fall, and asked
in a clear loud voice:
"Art thou Bent-Anat?"
"Yes, I am," replied the princess, bowing her head low, and in so gentle
a voice, that it seemed as though she were ashamed of her proud name.
The eyes of the old man flashed. Then he said softly but decisively:
"Leave my hut then, it will defile thee."
"Not till you have forgiven me for that which I did unintentionally."
"Unintentionally! I believe thee," replied the paraschites. "The hoofs of
thy horse became unclean when they trod on this white breast. Look
here--" and he lifted the cloth from the girl's bosom, and showed her the
deep red wound, "Look here--here is the first rose you laid on my
grandchild's bosom, and the second--there it goes."
The paraschites raised his arm to fling the flower through the door of
his hut. But Pentaur had approached him, and with a grasp of iron held
the old man's hand.
"Stay," he cried in an eager tone, moderated however for the sake of the
sick girl. "The third rose, which this noble hand has offered you, your
sick heart and silly head have not even perceived. And yet you must know
it if only from your need, your longing for it. The fair blossom of pure
benevolence is laid on your child's heart, and at your very feet, by this
proud princess. Not with gold, but with humility. And whoever the
daughter of Rameses approaches as her equal, bows before her, even if he
were the first prince in the Land of Egypt. Indeed, the Gods shall not
forget this deed of Bent-Anat. And you--forgive, if you desire to be
forgiven that guilt, which you bear as an inheritance from your fathers,
and for your own sins."
The paraschites bowed his head at these words, and when he raised it the
anger had vanished from his well-cut features. He rubbed his wrist, which
had been squeezed by Pentaur's iron fingers, and said in a tone which
betrayed all the bitterness of his feelings:
"Thy hand is hard, Priest, and thy words hit like the strokes of a
hammer. This fair lady is good and loving, and I know; that she did not
drive her horse intentionally over this poor girl, who is my grandchild
and not my daughter. If she were thy wife or the wife of the leech there,
or the child of the poor woman yonder, who supports life by collecting
the feet and feathers of the fowls that are slaughtered for sacrifice, I
would not only forgive her, but console her for having made herself like
to me; fate would have made her a murderess without any fault of her own,
just as it stamped me as unclean while I was still at my mother's breast.
Aye--I would comfort her; and yet I am not very sensitive. Ye holy three
of Thebes!--[The triad of Thebes: Anion, Muth and Chunsu.]--how should I
be? Great and small get out of my way that I may not touch them, and
every day when I have done what it is my business to do they throw stones
at me.
[The paraschites, with an Ethiopian knife, cuts the flesh of the
corpse as deeply as the law requires: but instantly takes to flight,
while the relatives of the deceased pursue him with stones, and
curses, as if they wished to throw the blame on him.]
"The fulfilment of duty--which brings a living to other men, which makes
their happiness, and at the same time earns them honor, brings me every
day fresh disgrace and painful sores. But I complain to no man, and must
forgive--forgive--forgive, till at last all that men do to me seems quite
natural and unavoidable, and I take it all like the scorching of the sun
in summer, and the dust that the west wind blows into my face. It does
not make me happy, but what can I do? I forgive all--"
The voice of the paraschites had softened, and Bent-Anat, who looked down
on him with emotion, interrupted him, exclaiming with deep feeling:
"And so you will forgive me?--poor man!"
The old man looked steadily, not at her, but at Pentaur, while he
replied: "Poor man! aye, truly, poor man. You have driven me out of the
world in which you live, and so I made a world for myself in this hut. I
do not belong to you, and if I forget it, you drive me out as an
intruder--nay as a wolf, who breaks into your fold; but you belong just
as little to me, only when you play the wolf and fall upon me, I must
bear it!"
"The princess came to your hut as a suppliant, and with the wish of doing
you some good," said Pentaur.
"May the avenging Gods reckon it to her, when they visit on her the
crimes of her father against me! Perhaps it may bring me to prison, but
it must come out. Seven sons were mine, and Rameses took them all from me
and sent them to death; the child of the youngest, this girl, the light
of my eyes, his daughter has brought to her death. Three of my boys the
king left to die of thirst by the Tenat,
[Literally the "cutting" which, under Seti I., the father of
Rameses, was the first Suez Canal; a representation of it is found
on the northern outer wall of the temple of Karnak. It followed
nearly the same direction as the Fresh-water canal of Lesseps, and
fertilized the land of Goshen.]
which is to join the Nile to the Red Sea, three were killed by the
Ethiopians, and the last, the star of my hopes, by this time is eaten by
the hyaenas of the north."
At these words the old woman, in whose lap the head of the girl rested,
broke out into a loud cry, in which she was joined by all the other
women.
The sufferer started up frightened, and opened her eyes.
"For whom are you wailing?" she asked feebly. "For your poor father,"
said the old woman.
The girl smiled like a child who detects some well-meant deceit, and
said:
"Was not my father here, with you? He is here, in Thebes, and looked at
me, and kissed me, and said that he is bringing home plunder, and that a
good time is coming for you. The gold ring that he gave me I was
fastening into my dress, when the chariot passed over me. I was just
pulling the knots, when all grew black before my eyes, and I saw and
heard nothing more. Undo it, grandmother, the ring is for you; I meant to
bring it to you. You must buy a beast for sacrifice with it, and wine for
grandfather, and eye salve
[The Egyptian mestem, that is stibium or antimony, which was
introduced into Egypt by the Asiatics at a very early period and
universally used.]
for yourself, and sticks of mastic,
[At the present day the Egyptian women are fond of chewing them, on
account of their pleasant taste. The ancient Egyptians used various
pills. Receipts for such things are found in the Ebers Papyrus.]
which you have so long lead to do without."
The paraschites seemed to drink these words from the mouth of his
grandchild. Again he lifted his hand in prayer, again Pentaur observed
that his glance met that of his wife, and a large, warm tear fell from
his old eyes on to his callous hand. Then he sank down, for he thought
the sick child was deluded by a dream. But there were the knots in her
dress.
With a trembling hand he untied them, and a gold ring rolled out on the
floor.
Bent-Anat picked it up, and gave it to the paraschites. "I came here in a
lucky hour," she said, "for you have recovered your son and your child
will live."
"She will live," repeated the surgeon, who had remained a silent witness
of all that had occurred.
"She will stay with us," murmured the old man, and then said, as he
approached the princess on his knees, and looked up at her beseechingly
with tearful eyes:
"Pardon me as I pardon thee; and if a pious wish may not turn to a curse
from the lips of the unclean, let me bless thee."
"I thank you," said Bent-Anat, towards whom the old man raised his hand
in blessing.
Then she turned to Nebsecht, and ordered him to take anxious care of the
sick girl; she bent over her, kissed her forehead, laid her gold bracelet
by her side, and signing to Pentaur left the hut with him.
CHAPTER VI.
During the occurrence we have described, the king's pioneer and the young
wife of Mena were obliged to wait for the princess.
The sun stood in the meridian, when Bent-Anat had gone into the hovel of
the paraschites.
The bare limestone rocks on each side of the valley and the sandy soil
between, shone with a vivid whiteness that hurt the eyes; not a hand's
breadth of shade was anywhere to be seen, and the fan-beaters of the two,
who were waiting there, had, by command of the princess, staid behind
with the chariot and litters.
For a time they stood silently near each other, then the fair Nefert
said, wearily closing her almond-shaped eyes:
"How long Bent-Anat stays in the but of the unclean! I am perishing here.
What shall we do?"
"Stay!" said Paaker, turning his back on the lady; and mounting a block
of stone by the side of the gorge, he cast a practised glance all round,
and returned to Nefert: "I have found a shady spot," he said, "out
there."
Mena's wife followed with her eyes the indication of his hand, and shook
her head. The gold ornaments on her head-dress rattled gently as she did
so, and a cold shiver passed over her slim body in spite of the midday
heat.
"Sechet is raging in the sky," said Paaker.
[A goddess with the head of a lioness or a cat, over which the Sun-
disk is usually found. She was the daughter of Ra, and in the form
of the Uraeus on her father's crown personified the murderous heat
of the star of day. She incites man to the hot and wild passion of
love, and as a cat or lioness tears burning wounds in the limbs of
the guilty in the nether world; drunkenness and pleasure are her
gifts She was also named Bast and Astarte after her sister-divinity
among the Phoenicians.]
"Let us avail ourselves of the shady spot, small though it be. At this
hour of the day many are struck with sickness."
"I know it," said Nefert, covering her neck with her hand. Then she went
towards two blocks of stone which leaned against each other, and between
them afforded the spot of shade, not many feet wide, which Paaker had
pointed out as a shelter from the sun. Paaker preceded her, and rolled a
flat piece of limestone, inlaid by nature with nodules of flint, under
the stone pavilion, crushed a few scorpions which had taken refuge there,
spread his head-cloth over the hard seat, and said, "Here you are
sheltered."
Nefert sank down on the stone and watched the Mohar, who slowly and
silently paced backwards and forward in front of her. This incessant to
and fro of her companion at last became unendurable to her sensitive and
irritated nerves, and suddenly raising her head from her hand, on which
she had rested it, she exclaimed
"Pray stand still."
The pioneer obeyed instantly, and looked, as he stood with his back to
her, towards the hovel of the paraschites.
After a short time Nefert said, "Say something to me!"
The Mohar turned his full face towards her, and she was frightened at the
wild fire that glowed in the glance with which he gazed at her.
Nefert's eyes fell, and Paaker, saying:
"I would rather remain silent," recommenced his walk, till Nefert called
to him again and said,
"I know you are angry with me; but I was but a child when I was betrothed
to you. I liked you too, and when in our games your mother called me your
little wife, I was really glad, and used to think how fine it would be
when I might call all your possessions mine, the house you would have so
splendidly restored for me after your father's death, the noble gardens,
the fine horses in their stables, and all the male and female slaves!"
Paaker laughed, but the laugh sounded so forced and scornful that it cut
Nefert to the heart, and she went on, as if begging for indulgence:
"It was said that you were angry with us; and now you will take my words
as if I had cared only for your wealth; but I said, I liked you. Do you
no longer remember how I cried with you over your tales of the bad boys
in the school; and over your father's severity? Then my uncle died;--then
you went to Asia."
And you," interrupted Paaker, hardly and drily, "you broke your
bethrothal vows, and became the wife of the charioteer Mena. I know it
all; of what use is talking?"
"Because it grieves me that you should be angry, and your good mother
avoid our house. If only you could know what it is when love seizes one,
and one can no longer even think alone, but only near, and with, and in
the very arms of another; when one's beating heart throbs in one's very
temples, and even in one's dreams one sees nothing--but one only."
"And do I not know it?" cried Paaker, placing himself close before her
with his arms crossed. "Do I not know it? and you it was who taught me to
know it. When I thought of you, not blood, but burning fire, coursed in
my veins, and now you have filled them with poison; and here in this
breast, in which your image dwelt, as lovely as that of Hathor in her
holy of holies, all is like that sea in Syria which is called the Dead
Sea, in which every thing that tries to live presently dies and
perishes."
Paaker's eyes rolled as he spoke, and his voice sounded hoarsely as he
went on.
"But Mena was near to the king--nearer than I, and your mother--"
"My mother!"--Nefert interrupted the angry Mohar. "My mother did not
choose my husband. I saw him driving the chariot, and to me he resembled
the Sun God, and he observed me, and looked at me, and his glance pierced
deep into my heart like a spear; and when, at the festival of the king's
birthday, he spoke to me, it was just as if Hathor had thrown round me a
web of sweet, sounding sunbeams. And it was the same with Mena; he
himself has told me so since I have been his wife. For your sake my
mother rejected his suit, but I grew pale and dull with longing for him,
and he lost his bright spirit, and was so melancholy that the king
remarked it, and asked what weighed on his heart--for Rameses loves him
as his own son. Then Mena confessed to the Pharaoh that it was love that
dimmed his eye and weakened his strong hand; and then the king himself
courted me for his faithful servant, and my mother gave way, and we were
made man and wife, and all the joys of the justified in the fields of
Aalu
[The fields of the blest, which were opened to glorified souls. In
the Book of the Dead it is shown that in them men linger, and sow
and reap by cool waters.]
are shallow and feeble by the side of the bliss which we two have
known--not like mortal men, but like the celestial gods."
Up to this point Nefert had fixed her large eyes on the sky, like a
glorified soul; but now her gaze fell, and she said softly--
"But the Cheta
[An Aramaean race, according to Schrader's excellent judgment. At
the time of our story the peoples of western Asia had allied
themselves to them.]
disturbed our happiness, for the king took Mena with him to the war.
Fifteen times did the moon, rise upon our happiness, and then--"
"And then the Gods heard my prayer, and accepted my offerings," said
Paaker, with a trembling voice, "and tore the robber of my joys from you,
and scorched your heart and his with desire. Do you think you can tell me
anything I do not know? Once again for fifteen days was Mena yours, and
now he has not returned again from the war which is raging hotly in
Asia."
"But he will return," cried the young wife.
"Or possibly not," laughed Paaker. "The Cheta, carry sharp weapons, and
there are many vultures in Lebanon, who perhaps at this hour are tearing
his flesh as he tore my heart."
Nefert rose at these words, her sensitive spirit bruised as with stones
thrown by a brutal hand, and attempted to leave her shady refuge to
follow the princess into the house of the parascllites; but her feet
refused to bear her, and she sank back trembling on her stone seat. She
tried to find words, but her tongue was powerless. Her powers of
resistance forsook her in her unutterable and soul-felt
distress--heart-wrung, forsaken and provoked.
A variety of painful sensations raised a hot vehement storm in her bosom,
which checked her breath, and at last found relief in a passionate and
convulsive weeping that shook her whole body. She saw nothing more, she
heard nothing more, she only shed tears and felt herself miserable.
Paaker stood over her in silence.
There are trees in the tropics, on which white blossoms hang close by the
withered fruit, there are days when the pale moon shows itself near the
clear bright sun;--and it is given to the soul of man to feel love and
hatred, both at the same time, and to direct both to the same end.
Nefert's tears fell as dew, her sobs as manna on the soul of Paaker,
which hungered and thirsted for revenge. Her pain was joy to him, and yet
the sight of her beauty filled him with passion, his gaze lingered
spell-bound on her graceful form; he would have given all the bliss of
heaven once, only once, to hold her in his arms--once, only once, to hear
a word of love from her lips.
After some minutes Nefert's tears grew less violent. With a weary, almost
indifferent gaze she looked at the Mohar, still standing before her, and
said in a soft tone of entreaty:
'My tongue is parched, fetch me a little water."
"The princess may come out at any moment," replied Paaker.
"But I am fainting," said Nefert, and began again to cry gently.
Paaker shrugged his shoulders, and went farther into the valley, which he
knew as well as his father's house; for in it was the tomb of his
mother's ancestors, in which, as a boy, he had put up prayers at every
full and new moon, and laid gifts on the altar.
The hut of the paraschites was prohibited to him, but he knew that
scarcely a hundred paces from the spot where Nefert was sitting, lived an
old woman of evil repute, in whose hole in the rock he could not fail to
find a drink of water.
He hastened forward, half intoxicated with had seen and felt within the
last few minutes.
The door, which at night closed the cave against the intrusions of the
plunder-seeking jackals, was wide open, and the old woman sat outside
under a ragged piece of brown sail-cloth, fastened at one end to the rock
and at the other to two posts of rough wood. She was sorting a heap of
dark and light-colored roots, which lay in her lap. Near her was a wheel,
which turned in a high wooden fork. A wryneck made fast to it by a little
chain, and by springing from spoke to spoke kept it in continual
motion.--[From Theocritus' idyl: The Sorceress.]--A large black cat
crouched beside her, and smelt at some ravens' and owls' heads, from
which the eyes had not long since been extracted.
Two sparrow-hawks sat huddled up over the door of the cave, out of which
came the sharp odor of burning juniper-berries; this was intended to
render the various emanations rising from the different strange
substances, which were collected and preserved there, innocuous.
As Paaker approached the cavern the old woman called out to some one
within:
"Is the wax cooking?"
An unintelligible murmur was heard in answer.
Then throw in the ape's eyes,
[The sentences and mediums employed by the witches, according to
papyrus-rolls which remain. I have availed myself of the Magic
papyrus of Harris, and of two in the Berlin collection, one of which
is in Greek. ]
and the ibis feathers, and the scraps of linen with the black signs on
them. Stir it all a little; now put out the fire,
"Take the jug and fetch some water--make haste, here comes a stranger."
A sooty-black negro woman, with a piece of torn colorless stuff hanging
round her hips, set a large clay-jar on her grey woolly matted hair, and
without looking at him, went past Paaker, who was now close to the cave.
The old woman, a tall figure bent with years, with a sharply-cut and
wrinkled face, that might once have been handsome, made her preparations
for receiving the visitor by tying a gaudy kerchief over her head,
fastening her blue cotton garment round her throat, and flinging a fibre
mat over the birds' heads.
Paaker called out to her, but she feigned to be deaf and not to hear his
voice. Only when he stood quite close to her, did she raise her shrewd,
twinkling eyes, and cry out:
"A lucky day! a white day that brings a noble guest and high honor."
"Get up," commanded Paaker, not giving her any greeting, but throwing a
silver ring among the roots that lay in her lap,
[The Egyptians had no coins before Alexander and the Ptolemies, but
used metals for exchange, usually in the form of rings.]
"and give me in exchange for good money some water in a clean vessel."
"Fine pure silver," said the old woman, while she held the ring, which
she had quickly picked out from the roots, close to her eyes; "it is too
much for mere water, and too little for my good liquors."
"Don't chatter, hussy, but make haste," cried Paaker, taking another ring
from his money-bag and throwing it into her lap.
"Thou hast an open hand," said the old woman, speaking in the dialect of
the upper classes; "many doors must be open to thee, for money is a
pass-key that turns any lock. Would'st thou have water for thy good
money? Shall it protect thee against noxious beasts?--shall it help thee
to reach down a star? Shall it guide thee to secret paths?--It is thy
duty to lead the way. Shall it make heat cold, or cold warm? Shall it
give thee the power of reading hearts, or shall it beget beautiful
dreams? Wilt thou drink of the water of knowledge and see whether thy
friend or thine enemy--ha! if thine enemy shall die? Would'st thou a
drink to strengthen thy memory? Shall the water make thee invisible? or
remove the 6th toe from thy left foot?"
"You know me?" asked Paaker.
"How should I?" said the old woman, "but my eyes are sharp, and I can
prepare good waters for great and small."
"Mere babble!" exclaimed Paaker, impatiently clutching at the whip in his
girdle; "make haste, for the lady for whom--"
"Dost thou want the water for a lady?" interrupted the old woman. "Who
would have thought it?--old men certainly ask for my philters much
oftener than young ones--but I can serve thee."
With these words the old woman went into the cave, and soon returned with
a thin cylindrical flask of alabaster in her hand.
"This is the drink," she said, giving the phial to Paaker. "Pour half
into water, and offer it to the lady. If it does not succeed at first, it
is certain the second time. A child may drink the water and it will not
hurt him, or if an old man takes it, it makes him gay. Ah, I know the
taste of it!" and she moistened her lips with the white fluid. "It can
hurt no one, but I will take no more of it, or old Hekt will be tormented
with love and longing for thee; and that would ill please the rich young
lord, ha! ha! If the drink is in vain I am paid enough, if it takes
effect thou shalt bring me three more gold rings; and thou wilt return, I
know it well."
Paaker had listened motionless to the old woman, and siezed the flask
eagerly, as if bidding defiance to some adversary; he put it in his money
bag, threw a few more rings at the feet of the witch, and once more
hastily demanded a bowl of Nile-water.
"Is my lord in such a hurry?" muttered the old woman, once more going
into the cave. "He asks if I know him? him certainly I do? but the
darling? who can it be hereabouts? perhaps little Uarda at the
paraschites yonder. She is pretty enough; but she is lying on a mat, run
over and dying. We must see what my lord means. He would have pleased me
well enough, if I were young; but he will reach the goal, for he is
resolute and spares no one."
While she muttered these and similar words, she filled a graceful cup of
glazed earthenware with filtered Nile-water, which she poured out of a
large porous clay jar, and laid a laurel leaf, on which was scratched two
hearts linked together by seven strokes, on the surface of the limpid
fluid. Then she stepped out into the air again.
As Paaker took the vessel from her looked at the laurel leaf, she said:
"This indeed binds hearts; three is the husband, four is the wife, seven
is the chachach, charcharachacha."--[This jargon is fund in a
magic-papyrus at Berlin.]
The old woman sang this spell not without skill; but the Mohar appeared
not to listen to her jargon. He descended carefully into the valley, and
directed his steps to the resting place of the wife of Mena.
By the side of a rock, which hill him from Nefert, he paused, set the cup
on a flat block of stone, and drew the flask with the philter out of his
girdle.
His fingers trembled, but a thousand voices seemed to surge up and cry:
"Take it!--do it!--put in the drink!--now or never." He felt like a
solitary traveller, who finds on his road the last will of a relation
whose possessions he had hoped for, but which disinherits him. Shall he
surrender it to the judge, or shall he destroy it.
Paaker was not merely outwardly devout; hitherto he had in everything
intended to act according to the prescriptions of the religion of his
fathers. Adultery was a heavy sin; but had not he an older right to
Nefert than the king's charioteer?
He who followed the black arts of magic, should, according to the law, be
punished by death, and the old woman had a bad name for her evil arts;
but he had not sought her for the sake of the philter. Was it not
possible that the Manes of his forefathers, that the Gods themselves,
moved by his prayers and offerings, had put him in possession by an
accident--which was almost a miracle--of the magic potion efficacy he
never for an instant doubted?
Paaker's associates held him to be a man of quick decision, and, in fact,
in difficult cases he could act with unusual rapidity, but what guided
him in these cases, was not the swift-winged judgment of a prepared and
well-schooled brain, but usually only resulted from the outcome of a play
of question and answer.
Amulets of the most various kinds hung round his neck, and from his
girdle, all consecrated by priests, and of special sanctity or the
highest efficacy.
There was the lapis lazuli eye, which hung to his girdle by a gold chain;
When he threw it on the ground, so as to lie on the earth, if its
engraved side turned to heaven, and its smooth side lay on the ground, he
said "yes;" in the other case, on the contrary, "no." In his purse lay
always a statuette of the god Apheru, who opened roads; this he threw
down at cross-roads, and followed the direction which the pointed snout
of the image indicated. He frequently called into council the seal-ring
of his deceased father, an old family possession, which the chief priests
of Abydos had laid upon the holiest of the fourteen graves of Osiris, and
endowed with miraculous power. It consisted of a gold ring with a broad
signet, on which could be read the name of Thotmes III., who had long
since been deified, and from whom Paaker's ancestors had derived it. If
it were desirable to consult the ring, the Mohar touched with the point
of his bronze dagger the engraved sign of the name, below which were
represented three objects sacred to the Gods, and three that were, on the
contrary, profane. If he hit one of the former, he concluded that his
father--who was gone to Osiris--concurred in his design; in the contrary
case he was careful to postpone it. Often he pressed the ring to his
heart, and awaited the first living creature that he might meet,
regarding it as a messenger from his father;--if it came to him from the
right hand as an encouragement, if from the left as a warning.
By degrees he had reduced these questionings to a system. All that he
found in nature he referred to himself and the current of his life. It
was at once touching, and pitiful, to see how closely he lived with the
Manes of his dead. His lively, but not exalted fancy, wherever he gave it
play, presented to the eye of his soul the image of his father and of an
elder brother who had died early, always in the same spot, and almost
tangibly distinct.
But he never conjured up the remembrance of the beloved dead in order to
think of them in silent melancholy--that sweet blossom of the thorny
wreath of sorrow; only for selfish ends. The appeal to the Manes of his
father he had found especially efficacious in certain desires and
difficulties; calling on the Manes of his brother was potent in certain
others; and so he turned from one to the other with the precision of a
carpenter, who rarely doubts whether he should give the preference to a
hatchet or a saw.
These doings he held to be well pleasing to the Gods, and as he was
convinced that the spirits of his dead had, after their justification,
passed into Osiris that is to say, as atoms forming part of the great
world-soul, at this time had a share in the direction of the universe--he
sacrificed to them not only in the family catacomb, but also in the
temples of the Necropolis dedicated to the worship of ancestors, and with
special preference in the House of Seti.
He accepted advice, nay even blame, from Ameni and the other priests
under his direction; and so lived full of a virtuous pride in being one
of the most zealous devotees in the land, and one of the most pleasing to
the Gods, a belief on which his pastors never threw any doubt.
Attended and guided at every step by supernatural powers, he wanted no
friend and no confidant. In the fleld, as in Thebes, he stood apart, and
passed among his comrades for a reserved man, rough and proud, but with a
strong will.
He had the power of calling up the image of his lost love with as much
vividness as the forms of the dead, and indulged in this magic, not only
through a hundred still nights, but in long rides and drives through
silent wastes.
Such visions were commonly followed by a vehement and boiling overflow of
his hatred against the charioteer, and a whole series of fervent prayers
for his destruction.
When Paaker set the cup of water for Nefert on the flat stone and felt
for the philter, his soul was so full of desire that there was no room
for hatred; still he could not altogether exclude the idea that he would
commit a great crime by making use of a magic drink. Before pouring the
fateful drops into the water, he would consult the oracle of the ring.
The dagger touched none of the holy symbols of the inscription on the
signet, and in other circumstances he would, without going any farther,
have given up his project.
But this time he unwillingly returned it to its sheath, pressed the gold
ring to his heart, muttered the name of his brother in Osiris, and
awaited the first living creature that might come towards him.
He had not long to wait, from the mountain slope opposite to him rose,
with heavy, slow wing-strokes, two light-colored vultures.
In anxious suspense he followed their flight, as they rose, higher and
higher. For a moment they poised motionless, borne up by the air, circled
round each other, then wheeled to the left and vanished behind the
mountains, denying him the fulfilment of his desire.
He hastily grasped the phial to fling it from him, but the surging
passion in his veins had deprived him of his self-control. Nefert's image
stood before him as if beckoning him; a mysterious power clenched his
fingers close and yet closer round the phial, and with the same defiance
which he showed to his associates, he poured half of the philter into the
cup and approached his victim.
Nefert had meanwhile left her shady retreat and come towards him.
She silently accepted the water he offered her, and drank it with
delight, to the very dregs.
"'Thank you," she said, when she had recovered breath after her eager
draught.
"That has done me good! How fresh and acid the water tastes; but your
hand shakes, and you are heated by your quick run for me--poor man."
With these words she looked at him with a peculiar expressive glance of
her large eyes, and gave him her right hand, which he pressed wildly to
his lips.
"That will do," she said smiling; "here comes the princess with a priest,
out of the hovel of the unclean. With what frightful words you terrified
me just now. It is true I gave you just cause to be angry with me; but
now you are kind again--do you hear?--and will bring your mother again to
see mine. Not a word. I shall see, whether cousin Paaker refuses me
obedience."
She threatened him playfully with her finger, and then growing grave she
added, with a look that pierced Paaker's heart with pain, and yet with
ecstasy, "Let us leave off quarrelling. It is so much better when people
are kind to each other."
After these words she walked towards the house of the paraschites, while
Paaker pressed his hands to his breast, and murmured:
"The drink is working, and she will be mine. I thank ye--ye Immortals!"
But this thanksgiving, which hitherto he had never failed to utter when
any good fortune had befallen him, to-day died on his lips. Close before
him he saw the goal of his desires; there, under his eyes, lay the magic
spring longed for for years. A few steps farther, and he might slake at
its copious stream his thirst both for love and for revenge.
While he followed the wife of Mena, and replaced the phial carefully in
his girdle, so as to lose no drop of the precious fluid which, according
to the prescription of the old woman, he needed to use again, warning
voices spoke in his breast, to which he usually listened as to a fatherly
admonition; but at this moment he mocked at them, and even gave outward
expression to the mood that ruled him--for he flung up his right hand
like a drunken man, who turns away from the preacher of morality on his
way to the wine-cask; and yet passion held him so closely ensnared, that
the thought that he should live through the swift moments which would
change him from an honest man into a criminal, hardly dawned, darkly on
his soul. He had hitherto dared to indulge his desire for love and
revenge in thought only, and had left it to the Gods to act for
themselves; now he had taken his cause out of the hand of the Celestials,
and gone into action without them, and in spite of them.
The sorceress Hekt passed him; she wanted to see the woman for whom she
had given him the philter. He perceived her and shuddered, but soon the
old woman vanished among the rocks muttering.
"Look at the fellow with six toes. He makes himself comfortable with the
heritage of Assa."
In the middle of the valley walked Nefert and the pioneer, with the
princess Bent-Anat and Pentaur who accompanied her.
When these two had come out of the hut of the paraschites, they stood
opposite each other in silence. The royal maiden pressed her hand to her
heart, and, like one who is thirsty, drank in the pure air of the
mountain valley with deeply drawn breath; she felt as if released from
some overwhelming burden, as if delivered from some frightful danger.
At last she turned to her companion, who gazed earnestly at the ground.
"What an hour!" she said.
Pentaur's tall figure did not move, but he bowed his head in assent, as
if he were in a dream. Bent-Anat now saw him for the first time in fall
daylight; her large eyes rested on him with admiration, and she asked:
"Art thou the priest, who yesterday, after my first visit to this house,
so readily restored me to cleanness?"
"I am he," replied Pentaur.
"I recognized thy voice, and I am grateful to thee, for it was thou that
didst strengthen my courage to follow the impulse of my heart, in spite
of my spiritual guides, and to come here again. Thou wilt defend me if
others blame me."
"I came here to pronounce thee unclean."
"Then thou hast changed thy mind?" asked Bent-Anat, and a smile of
contempt curled her lips.
"I follow a high injunction, that commands us to keep the old
institutions sacred. If touching a paraschites, it is said, does not
defile a princess, whom then can it defile? for whose garment is more
spotless than hers?"
"But this is a good man with all his meanness," interrupted Bent-Anat,
"and in spite of the disgrace, which is the bread of life to him as honor
is to us. May the nine great Gods forgive me! but he who is in there is
loving, pious and brave, and pleases me--and thou, thou, who didst think
yesterday to purge away the taint of his touch with a word--what prompts
thee today to cast him with the lepers?"
"The admonition of an enlightened man, never to give up any link of the
old institutions; because thereby the already weakened chain may be
broken, and fall rattling to the ground."
"Then thou condemnest me to uncleanness for the sake of all old
superstition, and of the populace, but not for my actions? Thou art
silent? Answer me now, if thou art such a one as I took the for, freely
and sincerely; for it concerns the peace of my soul." Pentaur breathed
hard; and then from the depths of his soul, tormented by doubts, these
deeply-felt words forced themselves as if wrung from him; at first
softly, but louder as he went on.
"Thou dost compel me to say what I had better not even think; but rather
will I sin against obedience than against truth, the pure daughter of the
Sun, whose aspect, Bent-Anat, thou dost wear. Whether the paraschites is
unclean by birth or not, who am I that I should decide? But to me this
man appeared--as to thee--as one moved by the same pure and holy emotions
as stir and bless me and mine, and thee and every soul born of woman; and
I believe that the impressions of this hour have touched thy soul as well
as mine, not to taint, but to purify. If I am wrong, may the many-named
Gods forgive me, Whose breath lives and works in the paraschites as well
as in thee and me, in Whom I believe, and to Whom I will ever address my
humble songs, louder and more joyfully, as I learn that all that lives
and breathes, that weeps and rejoices, is the image of their sublime
nature, and born to equal joy and equal sorrow."
Pentaur had raised his eyes to heaven; now they met the proud and joyful
radiance of the princess' glance, while she frankly offered him her hand.
He humbly kissed her robe, but she said:
"Nay--not so. Lay thy hand in blessing on mine. Thou art a man and a true
priest. Now I can be satisfied to be regarded as unclean, for my father
also desires that, by us especially, the institutions of the past that
have so long continued should be respected, for the sake of the people.
Let us pray in common to the Gods, that these poor people may be released
from the old ban. How beautiful the world might be, if men would but let
man remain what the Celestials have made him. But Paaker and poor Nefert
are waiting in the scorching sun-come, follow me."
She went forward, but after a few steps she turned round to him, and
asked:
"What is thy name?"
"Pentaur."
"Thou then art the poet of the House of Seti?"
"They call me so."
Bent-Anat stood still a moment, gazing full at him as at a kinsman whom
we meet for the first time face to face, and said:
"The Gods have given thee great gifts, for thy glance reaches farther and
pierces deeper than that of other men; and thou canst say in words what
we can only feel--I follow thee willingly!"
Pentaur blushed like a boy, and said, while Paaker and Nefert came nearer
to them:
"Till to-day life lay before me as if in twilight; but this moment shows
it me in another light. I have seen its deepest shadows; and," he added
in a low tone "how glorious its light can be."
CHAPTER VII.
An hour later, Bent-Anat and her train of followers stood before the gate
of the House of Seti.
Swift as a ball thrown from a man's hand, a runner had sprung forward and
hurried on to announce the approach of the princess to the chief priest.
She stood alone in her chariot, in advance of all her companions, for
Pentaur had found a place with Paaker. At the gate of the temple they
were met by the head of the haruspices.
The great doors of the pylon were wide open, and afforded a view into the
forecourt of the sanctuary, paved with polished squares of stone, and
surrounded on three sides with colonnades. The walls and architraves, the
pillars and the fluted cornice, which slightly curved in over the court,
were gorgeous with many colored figures and painted decorations. In the
middle stood a great sacrificial altar, on which burned logs of cedar
wood, whilst fragrant balls of Kyphi
[Kyphi was a celebrated Egyptian incense. Recipes for its
preparation have been preserved in the papyrus of Ebers, in the
laboratories of the temples, and elsewhere. Parthey had three
different varieties prepared by the chemist, L. Voigt, in Berlin.
Kyphi after the formula of Dioskorides was the best. It consisted
of rosin, wine, rad, galangae, juniper berries, the root of the
aromatic rush, asphalte, mastic, myrrh, Burgundy grapes, and honey.]
were consumed by the flames, filling the wide space with their heavy
perfume. Around, in semi-circular array, stood more than a hundred
white-robed priests, who all turned to face the approaching princess, and
sang heart-rending songs of lamentation.
Many of the inhabitants of the Necropolis had collected on either side of
the lines of sphinxes, between which the princess drove up to the
Sanctuary. But none asked what these songs of lamentation might signify,
for about this sacred place lamentation and mystery for ever lingered.
"Hail to the child of Rameses!"--"All hail to the daughter of the Sun!"
rang from a thousand throats; and the assembled multitude bowed almost to
the earth at the approach of the royal maiden.
At the pylon, the princess descended from her chariot, and preceded by
the chief of the haruspices, who had gravely and silently greeted her,
passed on to the door of the temple. But as she prepared to cross the
forecourt, suddenly, without warning, the priests' chant swelled to a
terrible, almost thundering loudness, the clear, shrill voice of the
Temple scholars rising in passionate lament, supported by the deep and
threatening roll of the basses.
Bent-Anat started and checked her steps. Then she walked on again.
But on the threshold of the door, Ameni, in full pontifical robes, stood
before her in the way, his crozier extended as though to forbid her
entrance.
"The advent of the daughter of Rameses in her purity," he cried in loud
and passionate tones, "augurs blessing to this sanctuary; but this abode
of the Gods closes its portals on the unclean, be they slaves or princes.
In the name of the Immortals, from whom thou art descended, I ask thee,
Bent-Anat, art thou clean, or hast thou, through the touch of the
unclean, defiled thyself and contaminated thy royal hand?"
Deep scarlet flushed the maiden's cheeks, there was a rushing sound in
her ears as of a stormy sea surging close beside her, and her bosom rose
and fell in passionate emotion. The kingly blood in her veins boiled
wildly; she felt that an unworthy part had been assigned to her in a
carefully-premeditated scene; she forgot her resolution to accuse herself
of uncleanness, and already her lips were parted in vehement protest
against the priestly assumption that so deeply stirred her to rebellion,
when Ameni, who placed himself directly in front of the Princess, raised
his eyes, and turned them full upon her with all the depths of their
indwelling earnestness.
The words died away, and Bent-Anat stood silent, but she endured the
gaze, and returned it proudly and defiantly.
The blue veins started in Ameni's forehead; yet he repressed the
resentment which was gathering like thunder clouds in his soul, and said,
with a voice that gradually deviated more and more from its usual
moderation:
"For the second time the Gods demand through me, their representative:
Hast thou entered this holy place in order that the Celestials may purge
thee of the defilement that stains thy body and soul?"
"My father will communicate the answer to thee," replied Bent-Anat
shortly and proudly.
"Not to me," returned Ameni, "but to the Gods, in whose name I now
command thee to quit this sanctuary, which is defiled by thy presence."
Bent-Anat's whole form quivered. "I will go," she said with sullen
dignity.
She turned to recross the gateway of the Pylon. At the first step her
glance met the eye of the poet. As one to whom it is vouchsafed to stand
and gaze at some great prodigy, so Pentaur had stood opposite the royal
maiden, uneasy and yet fascinated, agitated, yet with secretly uplifted
soul. Her deed seemed to him of boundless audacity, and yet one suited to
her true and noble nature. By her side, Ameni, his revered and admired
master, sank into insignificance; and when she turned to leave the
temple, his hand was raised indeed to hold her back, but as his glance
met hers, his hand refused its office, and sought instead to still the
throbbing of his overflowing heart.
The experienced priest, meanwhile, read the features of these two
guileless beings like an open book. A quickly-formed tie, he felt, linked
their souls, and the look which he saw them exchange startled him. The
rebellious princess had glanced at the poet as though claiming
approbation for her triumph, and Pentaur's eyes had responded to the
appeal.
One instant Ameni paused. Then he cried: "Bent-Anat!"
The princess turned to the priest, and looked at him gravely and
enquiringly.
Ameni took a step forward, and stood between her and the poet.
"Thou wouldst challenge the Gods to combat," he said sternly. "That is
bold; but such daring it seems to me has grown up in thee because thou
canst count on an ally, who stands scarcely farther from the Immortals
than I myself. Hear this:--to thee, the misguided child, much may be
forgiven. But a servant of the Divinity," and with these words he turned
a threatening glance on Pentaur--"a priest, who in the war of free-will
against law becomes a deserter, who forgets his duty and his oath--he
will not long stand beside thee to support thee, for he--even though
every God had blessed him with the richest gifts--he is damned. We drive
him from among us, we curse him, we--"
At these words Bent-Anat looked now at Ameni, trembling with excitement,
now at Pentaur standing opposite to her. Her face was red and white by
turns, as light and shade chase each other on the ground when at noon-day
a palm-grove is stirred by a storm.
The poet took a step towards her.
She felt that if he spoke it would be to defend all that she had done,
and to ruin himself. A deep sympathy, a nameless anguish seized her soul,
and before Pentaur could open his lips, she had sunk slowly down before
Ameni, saying in low tones:
"I have sinned and defiled myself; thou hast said it--as Pentaur said it
by the hut of the paraschites. Restore me to cleanness, Ameni, for I am
unclean."
Like a flame that is crushed out by a hand, so the fire in the
high-priest's eye was extinguished. Graciously, almost lovingly, he
looked down on the princess, blessed her and conducted her before the
holy of holies, there had clouds of incense wafted round her, anointed
her with the nine holy oils, and commanded her to return to the royal
castle.
Yet, said he, her guilt was not expiated; she should shortly learn by
what prayers and exercises she might attain once more to perfect purity
before the Gods, of whom he purposed to enquire in the holy place.
During all these ceremonies the priests stationed in the forecourt
continued their lamentations.
The people standing before the temple listened to the priest's chant, and
interrupted it from time to time with ringing cries of wailing, for
already a dark rumor of what was going on within had spread among the
multitude.
The sun was going down. The visitors to the Necropolis must soon be
leaving it, and Bent-Anat, for whose appearance the people impatiently
waited, would not show herself. One and another said the princess had
been cursed, because she had taken remedies to the fair and injured
Uarda, who was known to many of them.
Among the curious who had flocked together were many embalmers, laborers,
and humble folk, who lived in the Necropolis. The mutinous and refractory
temper of the Egyptians, which brought such heavy suffering on them under
their later foreign rulers, was aroused, and rising with every minute.
They reviled the pride of the priests, and their senseless, worthless,
institutions. A drunken soldier, who soon reeled back into the tavern
which he had but just left, distinguished himself as ringleader, and was
the first to pick up a heavy stone to fling at the huge brass-plated
temple gates. A few boys followed his example with shouts, and
law-abiding men even, urged by the clamor of fanatical women, let
themselves be led away to stone-flinging and words of abuse.
Within the House of Seti the priests' chant went on uninterruptedly; but
at last, when the noise of the crowd grew louder, the great gate was
thrown open, and with a solemn step Ameni, in full robes, and followed by
twenty pastophori--[An order of priests]--who bore images of the Gods and
holy symbols on their shoulders--Ameni walked into the midst of the
crowd.
All were silent.
"Wherefore do you disturb our worship?" he asked loudly and calmly.
A roar of confused cries answered him, in which the frequently repeated
name of Bent-Anat could alone be distinguished.
Ameni preserved his immoveable composure, and, raising his crozier, he
cried--
"Make way for the daughter of Rameses, who sought and has found
purification from the Gods, who behold the guilt of the highest as of the
lowest among you. They reward the pious, but they punish the offender.
Kneel down and let us pray that they may forgive you, and bless both you
and your children."
Ameni took the holy Sistrum
[A rattling metal instrument used by the Egyptians in the service of
the Gods. Many specimens are extant in Museums. Plutarch describes
it correctly, thus: "The Sistrum is rounded above, and the loop
holds the four bars which are shaken." On the bend of the Sistrum
they often set the head of a cat with a human face.]
from one of the attendant pastophori, and held it on high; the priests
behind him raised a solemn hymn, and the crowd sank on their knees; nor
did they move till the chant ceased and the high-priest again cried out:
"The Immortals bless you by me their servant. Leave this spot and make
way for the daughter of Rameses."
With these words he withdrew into the temple, and the patrol, without
meeting with any opposition, cleared the road guarded by Sphinxes which
led to the Nile.
As Bent-Anat mounted her chariot Ameni said "Thou art the child of kings.
The house of thy father rests on the shoulders of the people. Loosen the
old laws which hold them subject, and the people will conduct themselves
like these fools."
Ameni retired. Bent-Anat slowly arranged the reins in her hand, her eyes
resting the while on the poet, who, leaning against a door-post, gazed at
her in beatitude. She let her whip fall to the ground, that he might pick
it up and restore it to her, but he did not observe it. A runner sprang
forward and handed it to the princess, whose horses started off, tossing
themselves and neighing.
Pentaur remained as if spell-bound, standing by the pillar, till the
rattle of the departing wheels on the flag-way of the Avenue of Sphinxes
had altogether died away, and the reflection of the glowing sunset
painted the eastern hills with soft and rosy hues.
The far-sounding clang of a brass gong roused the poet from his ecstasy.
It was the tomtom calling him to duty, to the lecture on rhetoric which
at this hour he had to deliver to the young priests. He laid his left
hand to his heart, and pressed his right hand to his forehead, as if to
collect in its grasp his wandering thoughts; then silently and
mechanically he went towards the open court in which his disciples
awaited him. But instead of, as usual, considering on the way the subject
he was to treat, his spirit and heart were occupied with the occurrences
of the last few hours. One image reigned supreme in his imagination,
filling it with delight--it was that of the fairest woman, who, radiant
in her royal dignity and trembling with pride, had thrown herself in the
dust for his sake. He felt as if her action had invested her whole being
with a new and princely worth, as if her glance had brought light to his
inmost soul, he seemed to breathe a freer air, to be borne onward on
winged feet.
In such a mood he appeared before his hearers. When he found himself
confronting all the the well-known faces, he remembered what it was he
was called upon to do. He supported himself against the wall of the
court, and opened the papyrus-roll handed to him by his favorite pupil,
the young Anana. It was the book which twenty-four hours ago he had
promised to begin upon. He looked now upon the characters that covered
it, and felt that he was unable to read a word.
With a powerful effort he collected himself, and looking upwards tried to
find the thread he had cut at the end of yesterday's lecture, and
intended to resume to-day; but between yesterday and to-day, as it seemed
to him, lay a vast sea whose roaring surges stunned his memory and powers
of thought.
His scholars, squatting cross-legged on reed mats before him, gazed in
astonishment on their silent master who was usually so ready of speech,
and looked enquiringly at each other. A young priest whispered to his
neighbor, "He is praying--" and Anana noticed with silent anxiety the
strong hand of his teacher clutching the manuscript so tightly that the
slight material of which it consisted threatened to split.
At last Pentaur looked down; he had found a subject. While he was looking
upwards his gaze fell on the opposite wall, and the painted name of the
king with the accompanying title "the good God" met his eye. Starting
from these words he put this question to his hearers, "How do we
apprehend the Goodness of the Divinity?"
He challenged one priest after another to treat this subject as if he
were standing before his future congregation.
Several disciples rose, and spoke with more or less truth and feeling. At
last it came to Anana's turn, who, in well-chosen words, praised the
purpose-full beauty of animate and inanimate creation, in which the
goodness of Amon
[Amon, that is to say, "the hidden one." He was the God of Thebes,
which was under his aegis, and after the Hykssos were expelled from
the Nile-valley, he was united with Ra of Heliopolis and endowed
with the attributes of all the remaining Gods. His nature was more
and more spiritualized, till in the esoteric philosophy of the time
of the Rameses he is compared to the All filling and All guiding
intelligence. He is "the husband of his mother, his own father, and
his own son," As the living Osiris, he is the soul and spirit of all
creation.]
of Ra,
[Ra, originally the Sun-God; later his name was introduced into the
pantheistic mystic philosophy for that of the God who is the
Universe.]
and Ptah,
[Ptah is the Greek Henhaistas, the oldest of the Gods, the great
maker of the material for the creation, the "first beginner," by
whose side the seven Chnemu stand, as architects, to help him, and
who was named "the lord of truth," because the laws and conditions
of being proceeded from him. He created also the germ of light, he
stood therefore at the head of the solar Gods, and was called the
creator of ice, from which, when he had cleft it, the sun and the
moan came forth. Hence his name "the opener."]
as well as of the other Gods, finds expression.
Pentaur listened to the youth with folded arms, now looking at him
enquiringly, now adding approbation. Then taking up the thread of the,
discourse when it was ended, he began himself to speak.
Like obedient falcons at the call of the falconer, thoughts rushed down
into his mind, and the divine passion awakened in his breast glowed and
shone through his inspired language that soared every moment on freer and
stronger wings. Melting into pathos, exulting in rapture, he praised the
splendor of nature; and the words flowed from his lips like a limpid
crystal-clear stream as he glorified the eternal order of things, and the
incomprehensible wisdom and care of the Creator--the One, who is one
alone, and great and without equal.
"So incomparable," he said in conclusion, "is the home which God has
given us. All that He--the One--has created is penetrated with His own
essence, and bears witness to His Goodness. He who knows how to find Him
sees Him everywhere, and lives at every instant in the enjoyment of His
glory. Seek Him, and when ye have found Him fall down and sing praises
before Him. But praise the Highest, not only in gratitude for the
splendor of that which he has created, but for having given us the
capacity for delight in his work. Ascend the mountain peaks and look on
the distant country, worship when the sunset glows with rubies, and the
dawn with roses, go out in the nighttime, and look at the stars as they
travel in eternal, unerring, immeasurable, and endless circles on silver
barks through the blue vault of heaven, stand by the cradle of the child,
by the buds of the flowers, and see how the mother bends over the one,
and the bright dew-drops fall on the other. But would you know where the
stream of divine goodness is most freely poured out, where the grace of
the Creator bestows the richest gifts, and where His holiest altars are
prepared? In your own heart; so long as it is pure and full of love. In
such a heart, nature is reflected as in a magic mirror, on whose surface
the Beautiful shines in three-fold beauty. There the eye can reach far
away over stream, and meadow, and hill, and take in the whole circle of
the earth; there the morning and evening-red shine, not like roses and
rubies, but like the very cheeks of the Goddess of Beauty; there the
stars circle on, not in silence, but with the mighty voices of the pure
eternal harmonies of heaven; there the child smiles like an infant-god,
and the bud unfolds to magic flowers; finally, there thankfulness grows
broader and devotion grows deeper, and we throw ourselves into the arms
of a God, who--as I imagine his glory--is a God to whom the sublime nine
great Gods pray as miserable and helpless suppliants."
The tomtom which announced the end of the hour interrupted him.
Pentaur ceased speaking with a deep sigh, and for a minute not a scholar
moved.
At last the poet laid the papyrus roll out of his hand, wiped the sweat
from his hot brow, and walked slowly towards the gate of the court, which
led into the sacred grove of the temple. He had hardly crossed the
threshold when he felt a hand laid upon his shoulder.
He looked round. Behind him stood Ameni. "You fascinated your hearers, my
friend," said the high-priest, coldly; "it is a pity that only the Harp
was wanting."
Ameni's words fell on the agitated spirit of the poet like ice on the
breast of a man in fever. He knew this tone in his master's voice, for
thus he was accustomed to reprove bad scholars and erring priests; but to
him he had never yet so spoken.
"It certainly would seem," continued the high-priest, bitterly, "as if in
your intoxication you had forgotten what it becomes the teacher to utter
in the lecture-hall. Only a few weeks since you swore on my hands to
guard the mysteries, and this day you have offered the great secret of
the Unnameable one, the most sacred possession of the initiated, like
some cheap ware in the open market."
"Thou cuttest with knives," said Pentaur.
"May they prove sharp, and extirpate the undeveloped canker, the rank
weed from your soul," cried the high-priest. "You are young, too young;
not like the tender fruit-tree that lets itself be trained aright, and
brought to perfection, but like the green fruit on the ground, which will
turn to poison for the children who pick it up--yea even though it fall
from a sacred tree. Gagabu and I received you among us, against the
opinion of the majority of the initiated. We gainsaid all those who
doubted your ripeness because of your youth; and you swore to me,
gratefully and enthusiastically, to guard the mysteries and the law.
To-day for the first time I set you on the battle-field of life beyond
the peaceful shelter of the schools. And how have you defended the
standard that it was incumbent on you to uphold and maintain?"
"I did that which seemed to me to be right and true," answered Pentaur
deeply moved.
"Right is the same for you as for us--what the law prescribes; and what
is truth?"
"None has lifted her veil," said Pentaur, "but my soul is the offspring
of the soul-filled body of the All; a portion of the infallible spirit of
the Divinity stirs in my breast, and if it shows itself potent in me--"
"How easily we may mistake the flattering voice of self-love for that of
the Divinity!"
"Cannot the Divinity which works and speaks in me--as in thee--as in each
of us--recognize himself and his own voice?"
"If the crowd were to hear you," Ameni interrupted him, "each would set
himself on his little throne, would proclaim the voice of the god within
him as his guide, tear the law to shreds, and let the fragments fly to
the desert on the east wind."
"I am one of the elect whom thou thyself hast taught to seek and to find
the One. The light which I gaze on and am blest, would strike the
crowd--I do not deny it--with blindness--"
"And nevertheless you blind our disciples with the dangerous glare-"
"I am educating them for future sages."
"And that with the hot overflow of a heart intoxicated with love!"
"Ameni!"
"I stand before you, uninvited, as your teacher, who reproves you out of
the law, which always and everywhere is wiser than the individual, whose
defender the king--among his highest titles--boasts of being, and to
which the sage bows as much as the common man whom we bring up to blind
belief--I stand before you as your father, who has loved you from a
child, and expected from none of his disciples more than from you; and
who will therefore neither lose you nor abandon the hope he has set upon
you--
"Make ready to leave our quiet house early tomorrow morning. You have
forfeited your office of teacher. You shall now go into the school of
life, and make yourself fit for the honored rank of the initiated which,
by my error, was bestowed on you too soon. You must leave your scholars
without any leave-taking, however hard it may appear to you. After the
star of Sothis
[The holy star of Isis, Sirius or the dog star, whose course in the
time of the Pharaohs coincided with the exact Solar year, and served
at a very early date as a foundation for the reckoning of time among
the Egyptians.]
has risen come for your instructions. You must in these next months try
to lead the priesthood in the temple of Hatasu, and in that post to win
back my confidence which you have thrown away. No remonstrance; to-night
you will receive my blessing, and our authority--you must greet the
rising sun from the terrace of the new scene of your labors. May the
Unnameable stamp the law upon your soul!"
Ameni returned to his room.
He walked restlessly to and fro.
On a little table lay a mirror; he looked into the clear metal pane, and
laid it back in its place again, as if he had seen some strange and
displeasing countenance.
The events of the last few hours had moved him deeply, and shaken his
confidence in his unerring judgment of men and things.
The priests on the other bank of the Nile were Bent-Anat's counsellors,
and he had heard the princess spoken of as a devout and gifted maiden.
Her incautious breach of the sacred institutions had seemed to him to
offer a welcome opportunity for humiliating--a member of the royal
family.
Now he told himself that he had undervalued this young creature that he
had behaved clumsily, perhaps foolishly, to her; for he did not for a
moment conceal from himself that her sudden change of demeanor resulted
much more from the warm flow of her sympathy, or perhaps of her,
affection, than from any recognition of her guilt, and he could not
utilize her transgression with safety to himself, unless she felt herself
guilty.
Nor was he of so great a nature as to be wholly free from vanity, and his
vanity had been deeply wounded by the haughty resistance of the princess.
When he commanded Pentaur to meet the princess with words of reproof, he
had hoped to awaken his ambition through the proud sense of power over
the mighty ones of the earth.
And now?
How had his gifted admirer, the most hopeful of all his disciples, stood
the test.
The one ideal of his life, the unlimited dominion of the priestly idea
over the minds of men, and of the priesthood over the king himself, had
hitherto remained unintelligible to this singular young man.
He must learn to understand it.
"Here, as the least among a hundred who are his superiors, all the powers
of resistance of his soaring soul have been roused," said Ameni to
himself. "In the temple of Hatasu he will have to rule over the inferior
orders of slaughterers of victims and incense-burners; and, by requiring
obedience, will learn to estimate the necessity of it. The rebel, to whom
a throne devolves, becomes a tyrant!"
"Pentuar's poet soul," so he continued to reflect "has quickly yielded
itself a prisoner to the charm of Bent-Anat; and what woman could resist
this highly favored being, who is radiant in beauty as Ra-Harmachis, and
from whose lips flows speech as sweet as Techuti's. They ought never to
meet again, for no tie must bind him to the house of Rameses."
Again he paced to and fro, and murmured:
"How is this? Two of my disciples have towered above their fellows, in
genius and gifts, like palm trees above their undergrowth. I brought them
up to succeed me, to inherit my labors and my hopes.
"Mesu fell away;
[Mesu is the Egyptian name of Moses, whom we may consider as a
contemporary of Rameses, under whose successor the exodus of the
Jews from Egypt took place.]
and Pentaur may follow him. Must my aim be an unworthy one because it
does not attract the noblest? Not so. Each feels himself made of better
stuff than his companions in destiny, constitutes his own law, and fears
to see the great expended in trifles; but I think otherwise; like a brook
of ferruginous water from Lebanon, I mix with the great stream, and tinge
it with my color."
Thinking thus Ameni stood still.
Then he called to one of the so-called "holy fathers," his private
secretary, and said:
"Draw up at once a document, to be sent to all the priests'-colleges in
the land. Inform them that the daughter of Rameses has lapsed seriously
from the law, and defiled herself, and direct that public--you hear me
public--prayers shall be put up for her purification in every temple. Lay
the letter before me to be signed within in hour. But no! Give me your
reed and palette; I will myself draw up the instructions."
The "holy father" gave him writing materials, and retired into the
background. Ameni muttered: "The King will do us some unheard-of
violence! Well, this writing may be the first arrow in opposition to his
lance."
CHAPTER VIII.
The moon was risen over the city of the living that lay opposite the
Necropolis of Thebes.
The evening song had died away in the temples, that stood about a mile
from the Nile, connected with each other by avenues of sphinxes and
pylons; but in the streets of the city life seemed only just really
awake.
The coolness, which had succeeded the heat of the summer day, tempted the
citizens out into the air, in front of their doors or on the roofs and
turrets of their houses; or at the tavern-tables, where they listened to
the tales of the story-tellers while they refreshed them selves with
beer, wine, and the sweet juice of fruits. Many simple folks squatted in
circular groups on the ground, and joined in the burden of songs which
were led by an appointed singer, to the sound of a tabor and flute.
To the south of the temple of Amon stood the king's palace, and near it,
in more or less extensive gardens, rose the houses of the magnates of the
kingdom, among which, one was distinguished by it splendor and extent.
Paaker, the king's pioneer, had caused it to be erected after the death
of his father, in the place of the more homely dwelling of his ancestors,
when he hoped to bring home his cousin, and install her as its mistress.
A few yards further to the east was another stately though older and less
splendid house, which Mena, the king's charioteer, had inherited from his
father, and which was inhabited by his wife Nefert and her mother
Isatuti, while he himself, in the distant Syrian land, shared the tent of
the king, as being his body-guard. Before the door of each house stood
servants bearing torches, and awaiting the long deferred return home of
their masters.
The gate, which gave admission to Paaker's plot of ground through the
wall which surrounded it, was disproportionately, almost ostentatiously,
high and decorated with various paintings. On the right hand and on the
left, two cedar-trunks were erected as masts to carry standards; he had
had them felled for the purpose on Lebanon, and forwarded by ship to
Pelusium on the north-east coast of Egypt. Thence they were conveyed by
the Nile to Thebes.
On passing through the gate one entered a wide, paved court-yard, at the
sides of which walks extended, closed in at the back, and with roofs
supported on slender painted wooden columns. Here stood the pioneer's
horses and chariots, here dwelt his slaves, and here the necessary store
of produce for the month's requirements was kept.
In the farther wall of this store-court was a very high doorway, that led
into a large garden with rows of well-tended trees and trellised vines,
clumps of shrubs, flowers, and beds of vegetables. Palms, sycamores, and
acacia-trees, figs, pomegranates, and jasmine throve here particularly
well--for Paaker's mother, Setchem, superintended the labors of the
gardeners; and in the large tank in the midst there was never any lack of
water for watering the beds and the roots of the trees, as it was always
supplied by two canals, into which wheels turned by oxen poured water day
and night from the Nile-stream.
On the right side of this plot of ground rose the one-storied dwelling
house, its length stretching into distant perspective, as it consisted of
a single row of living and bedrooms. Almost every room had its own door,
that opened into a veranda supported by colored wooden columns, and which
extended the whole length of the garden side of the house. This building
was joined at a right angle by a row of store-rooms, in which the
garden-produce in fruits and vegetables, the wine-jars, and the
possessions of the house in woven stuffs, skins, leather, and other
property were kept.
In a chamber of strong masonry lay safely locked up the vast riches
accumulated by Paaker's father and by himself, in gold and silver rings,
vessels and figures of beasts. Nor was there lack of bars of copper and
of precious stones, particularly of lapis-lazuli and malachite.
In the middle of the garden stood a handsomely decorated kiosk, and a
chapel with images of the Gods; in the background stood the statues of
Paaker's ancestors in the form of Osiris wrapped in mummy-cloths.
[The justified dead became Osiris; that is to say, attained to the
fullest union (Henosis) with the divinity.]
The faces, which were likenesses, alone distinguished these statues from
each other.
The left side of the store-yard was veiled in gloom, yet the moonlight
revealed numerous dark figures clothed only with aprons, the slaves of
the king's pioneer, who squatted on the ground in groups of five or six,
or lay near each other on thin mats of palm-bast, their hard beds.
Not far from the gate, on the right side of the court, a few lamps
lighted up a group of dusky men, the officers of Paaker's household, who
wore short, shirt-shaped, white garments, and who sat on a carpet round a
table hardly two feet high. They were eating their evening-meal,
consisting of a roasted antelope, and large flat cakes of bread. Slaves
waited on them, and filled their earthen beakers with yellow beer. The
steward cut up the great roast on the table, offered the intendant of the
gardens a piece of antelope-leg, and said:
[The Greeks and Romans report that the Egyptians were so addicted to
satire and pungent witticisms that they would hazard property and
life to gratify their love of mockery. The scandalous pictures in
the so-called kiosk of Medinet Habu, the caricatures in an
indescribable papyrus at Turin, confirm these statements. There is
a noteworthy passage in Flavius Vopiscus, that compares the
Egyptians to the French.]
"My arms ache; the mob of slaves get more and more dirty and refractory."
"I notice it in the palm-trees," said the gardener, "you want so many
cudgels that their crowns will soon be as bare as a moulting bird."
"We should do as the master does," said the head-groom, "and get sticks
of ebony--they last a hundred years."
"At any rate longer than men's bones," laughed the chief neat-herd, who
had come in to town from the pioneer's country estate, bringing with him
animals for sacrifices, butter and cheese. "If we were all to follow the
master's example, we should soon have none but cripples in the servant's
house."
"Out there lies the lad whose collar-bone he broke yesterday," said the
steward, "it is a pity, for he was a clever mat-platter. The old lord hit
softer."
"You ought to know!" cried a small voice, that sounded mockingly behind
the feasters.
They looked and laughed when they recognized the strange guest, who had
approached them unobserved.
The new comer was a deformed little man about as big as a five-year-old
boy, with a big head and oldish but uncommonly sharply-cut features.
The noblest Egyptians kept house-dwarfs for sport, and this little wight
served the wife of Mena in this capacity. He was called Nemu, or "the
dwarf," and his sharp tongue made him much feared, though he was a
favorite, for he passed for a very clever fellow and was a good
tale-teller.
"Make room for me, my lords," said the little man. "I take very little
room, and your beer and roast is in little danger from me, for my maw is
no bigger than a fly's head."
"But your gall is as big as that of a Nile-horse," cried the cook.
"It grows," said the dwarf laughing, "when a turn-spit and spoon-wielder
like you turns up. There--I will sit here."
"You are welcome," said the steward, "what do you bring?"
"Myself."
"Then you bring nothing great."
"Else I should not suit you either!" retorted the dwarf. "But seriously,
my lady mother, the noble Katuti, and the Regent, who just now is
visiting us, sent me here to ask you whether Paaker is not yet returned.
He accompanied the princess and Nefert to the City of the Dead, and the
ladies are not yet come in. We begin to be anxious, for it is already
late."
The steward looked up at the starry sky and said: "The moon is already
tolerably high, and my lord meant to be home before sun-down."
"The meal was ready," sighed the cook. "I shall have to go to work again
if he does not remain all night."
"How should he?" asked the steward. "He is with the princess Bent-Anat."
"And my mistress," added the dwarf.
"What will they say to each other," laughed gardener; "your chief
litter-bearer declared that yesterday on the way to the City of the Dead
they did not speak a word to each other."
"Can you blame the lord if he is angry with the lady who was betrothed to
him, and then was wed to another? When I think of the moment when he
learnt Nefert's breach of faith I turn hot and cold."
"Care the less for that," sneered the dwarf, "since you must be hot in
summer and cold in winter."
"It is not evening all day," cried the head groom. "Paaker never forgets
an injury, and we shall live to see him pay Mena--high as he is--for the
affront he has offered him.
"My lady Katuti," interrupted Nemu, "stores up the arrears of her
son-in-law."
Besides, she has long wished to renew the old friendship with your house,
and the Regent too preaches peace. Give me a piece of bread, steward. I
am hungry!"
"The sacks, into which Mena's arrears flow seem to be empty," laughed the
cook.
"Empty! empty! much like your wit!" answered the dwarf. "Give me a bit of
roast meat, steward; and you slaves bring me a drink of beer."
"You just now said your maw was no bigger than a fly's head," cried the
cook, "and now you devour meat like the crocodiles in the sacred tank of
Seeland. You must come from a world of upside-down, where the men are as
small as flies, and the flies as big as the giants of the past."
"Yet, I might be much bigger," mumbled the dwarf while he munched on
unconcernedly, "perhaps as big as your spite which grudges me the third
bit of meat, which the steward--may Zefa bless him with great
possessions--is cutting out of the back of the antelope."
"There, take it, you glutton, but let out your girdle," said the steward
laughing, "I had cut the slice for myself, and admire your sharp nose."
"All noses," said the dwarf, "they teach the knowing better than any
haruspex what is inside a man."
"How is that?" cried the gardener.
"Only try to display your wisdom," laughed the steward; for, if you want
to talk, you must at last leave off eating."
"The two may be combined," said the dwarf. "Listen then! A hooked nose,
which I compare to a vulture's beak, is never found together with a
submissive spirit. Think of the Pharaoh and all his haughty race. The
Regent, on the contrary, has a straight, well-shaped, medium-sized nose,
like the statue of Amon in the temple, and he is an upright soul, and as
good as the Gods. He is neither overbearing nor submissive beyond just
what is right; he holds neither with the great nor yet with the mean, but
with men of our stamp. There's the king for us!"
"A king of noses!" exclaimed the cook, "I prefer the eagle Rameses. But
what do you say to the nose of your mistress Nefert?"
"It is delicate and slender and moves with every thought like the leaves
of flowers in a breath of wind, and her heart is exactly like it."
"And Paaker?" asked the head groom.
"He has a large short nose with wide open nostrils. When Seth whirls up
the sand, and a grain of it flies up his nose, he waxes angry--so it is
Paaker's nose, and that only, which is answerable for all your blue
bruises. His mother Setchem, the sister of my lady Katuti, has a little
roundish soft--"
"You pigmy," cried the steward interrupting the speaker, "we have fed you
and let you abuse people to your heart's content, but if you wag your
sharp tongue against our mistress, I will take you by the girdle and
fling you to the sky, so that the stars may remain sticking to your
crooked hump."
At these words the dwarf rose, turned to go, and said indifferently: "I
would pick the stars carefully off my back, and send you the finest of
the planets in return for your juicy bit of roast. But here come the
chariots. Farewell! my lords, when the vulture's beak seizes one of you
and carries you off to the war in Syria, remember the words of the little
Nemu who knows men and noses."
The pioneer's chariot rattled through the high gates into the court of
his house, the dogs in their leashes howled joyfully, the head groom
hastened towards Paaker and took the reins in his charge, the steward
accompanied him, and the head cook retired into the kitchen to make ready
a fresh meal for his master.
Before Paaker had reached the garden-gate, from the pylon of the enormous
temple of Amon, was heard first the far-sounding clang of hard-struck
plates of brass, and then the many-voiced chant of a solemn hymn.
The Mohar stood still, looked up to heaven, called to his servants--"The
divine star Sothis is risen!" threw himself on the earth, and lifted his
wards the star in prayer.
The slaves and officers immediately followed his example.
No circumstance in nature remained unobserved by the priestly guides of
the Egyptian people. Every phenomenon on earth or in the starry heavens
was greeted by them as the manifestation of a divinity, and they
surrounded the life of the inhabitants of the Nile-valley--from morning
to evening--from the beginning of the inundation to the days of
drought--with a web of chants and sacrifices, of processions and
festivals, which inseparably knit the human individual to the Divinity
and its earthly representatives the priesthood.
For many minutes the lord and his servants remained on their knees in
silence, their eyes fixed on the sacred star, and listening to the pious
chant of the priests.
As it died away Paaker rose. All around him still lay on the earth; only
one naked figure, strongly lighted by the clear moonlight, stood
motionless by a pillar near the slaves' quarters.
The pioneer gave a sign, the attendants rose; but Paaker went with hasty
steps to the man who had disdained the act of devotion, which he had so
earnestly performed, and cried:
"Steward, a hundred strokes on the soles of the feet of this scoffer."
The officer thus addressed bowed and said: "My lord, the surgeon
commanded the mat-weaver not to move and he cannot lift his arm. He is
suffering great pain. Thou didst break his collar-bone yesterday.
"It served him right!" said Paaker, raising his voice so much that the
injured man could not fail to hear it. Then he turned his back upon him,
and entered the garden; here he called the chief butler, and said: "Give
the slaves beer for their night draught--to all of them, and plenty."
A few minutes later he stood before his mother, whom he found on the roof
of the house, which was decorated with leafy plants, just as she gave her
two-years'-old grand daughter, the child of her youngest son, into the
arms of her nurse, that she might take her to bed.
Paaker greeted the worthy matron with reverence. She was a woman of a
friendly, homely aspect; several little dogs were fawning at her feet.
Her son put aside the leaping favorites of the widow, whom they amused
through many long hours of loneliness, and turned to take the child in
his arms from those of the attendant. But the little one struggled with
such loud cries, and could not be pacified, that Paaker set it down on
the ground, and involuntarily exclaimed:
"The naughty little thing!"
"She has been sweet and good the whole afternoon," said his mother
Setchem. "She sees you so seldom."
"May be," replied Paaker; "still I know this--the dogs love me, but no
child will come to me."
"You have such hard hands."
"Take the squalling brat away," said Paaker to the nurse. "Mother, I want
to speak to you."
Setchem quieted the child, gave it many kisses, and sent it to bed; then
she went up to her son, stroked his cheeks, and said:
"If the little one were your own, she would go to you at once, and teach
you that a child is the greatest blessing which the Gods bestow on us
mortals." Paaker smiled and said: "I know what you are aiming at--but
leave it for the present, for I have something important to communicate
to you."
"Well?" asked Setchem.
"To-day for the first time since--you know when, I have spoken to Nefert.
The past may be forgotten. You long for your sister; go to her, I have
nothing more to say against it."
Setchem looked at her son with undisguised astonishment; her eyes which
easily filled with tears, now overflowed, and she hesitatingly asked:
"Can I believe my ears; child, have you?--"
"I have a wish," said Paaker firmly, "that you should knit once more the
old ties of affection with your relations; the estrangement has lasted
long enough."
"Much too long!" cried Setchem.
The pioneer looked in silence at the ground, and obeyed his mother's sign
to sit down beside her.
"I knew," she said, taking his hand, "that this day would bring us joy;
for I dreamt of your father in Osiris, and when I was being carried to
the temple, I was met, first by a white cow, and then by a wedding
procession. The white ram of Anion, too, touched the wheat-cakes that I
offered him."--[It boded death to Germanicus when the Apis refused to eat
out of his hand.]
"Those are lucky presages," said Paaker in a tone of conviction.
"And let us hasten to seize with gratitude that which the Gods set before
us," cried Setchem with joyful emotion. "I will go to-morrow to my sister
and tell her that we shall live together in our old affection, and share
both good and evil; we are both of the same race, and I know that, as
order and cleanliness preserve a house from ruin and rejoice the
stranger, so nothing but unity can keep up the happiness of the family
and its appearance before people. What is bygone is bygone, and let it be
forgotten. There are many women in Thebes besides Nefert, and a hundred
nobles in the land would esteem themselves happy to win you for a
son-in-law."
Paaker rose, and began thoughtfully pacing the broad space, while Setchem
went on speaking.
"I know," she said, that I have touched a wound in thy heart; but it is
already closing, and it will heal when you are happier even than the
charioteer Mena, and need no longer hate him. Nefert is good, but she is
delicate and not clever, and scarcely equal to the management of so large
a household as ours. Ere long I too shall be wrapped in mummy-cloths, and
then if duty calls you into Syria some prudent housewife must take my
place. It is no small matter. Your grandfather Assa often would say that
a house well-conducted in every detail was a mark of a family owning an
unspotted name, and living with wise liberality and secure solidity, in
which each had his assigned place, his allotted duty to fulfil, and his
fixed rights to demand. How often have I prayed to the Hathors that they
may send you a wife after my own heart."
"A Setchem I shall never find!" said Paaker kissing his mother's
forehead, "women of your sort are dying out."
"Flatterer!" laughed Setchem, shaking her finger at her son. But it is
true. Those who are now growing up dress and smarten themselves with
stuffs from Kaft,--[Phoenicia]--mix their language with Syrian words, and
leave the steward and housekeeper free when they themselves ought to
command. Even my sister Katuti, and Nefert--
"Nefert is different from other women," interrupted Paaker, "and if you
had brought her up she would know how to manage a house as well as how to
ornament it."
Setchem looked at her son in surprise; then she said, half to herself:
"Yes, yes, she is a sweet child; it is impossible for any one to be angry
with her who looks into her eyes. And yet I was cruel to her because you
were hurt by her, and because--but you know. But now you have forgiven, I
forgive her, willingly, her and her husband."
Paaker's brow clouded, and while he paused in front of his mother he said
with all the peculiar harshness of his voice:
"He shall pine away in the desert, and the hyaenas of the North shall
tear his unburied corpse."
At these words Setchem covered her face with her veil, and clasped her
hands tightly over the amulets hanging round her neck. Then she said
softly:
"How terrible you can be! I know well that you hate the charioteer, for I
have seen the seven arrows over your couch over which is written 'Death
to Mena.'
"That is a Syrian charm which a man turns against any one whom he desires
to destroy. How black you look! Yes, it is a charm that is hateful to the
Gods, and that gives the evil one power over him that uses it. Leave it
to them to punish the criminal, for Osiris withdraws his favor from those
who choose the fiend for their ally."
"My sacrifices," replied Paaker, "secure me the favor of the Gods; but
Mena behaved to me like a vile robber, and I only return to him the evil
that belongs to him. Enough of this! and if you love me, never again
utter the name of my enemy before me. I have forgiven Nefert and her
mother--that may satisfy you."
Setchem shook her head, and said: "What will it lead to! The war cannot
last for ever, and if Mena returns the reconciliation of to-day will turn
to all the more bitter enmity. I see only one remedy. Follow my advice,
and let me find you a wife worthy of you."
"Not now!" exclaimed Paaker impatiently. "In a few days I must go again
into the enemy's country, and do not wish to leave my wife, like Mena, to
lead the life of a widow during my existence. Why urge it? my brother's
wife and children are with you--that might satisfy you."
"The Gods know how I love them," answered Setchem; "but your brother
Horns is the younger, and you the elder, to whom the inheritance belongs.
Your little niece is a delightful plaything, but in your son I should see
at once the future stay of our race, the future head of the family;
brought up to my mind and your father's; for all is sacred to me that my
dead husband wished. He rejoiced in your early betrothal to Nefert, and
hoped that a son of his eldest son should continue the race of Assa."
"It shall be by no fault of mine that any wish of his remains
unfulfilled. The stars are high, mother; sleep well, and if to-morrow you
visit Nefert and your sister, say to them that the doors of my house are
open to them. But stay! Katuti's steward has offered to sell a herd of
cattle to ours, although the stock on Mena's land can be but small. What
does this mean?"
"You know my sister," replied Setchem. "She manages Mena's possessions,
has many requirements, tries to vie with the greatest in splendor, sees
the governor often in her house, her son is no doubt extravagant--and so
the most necessary things may often be wanting."
Paaker shrugged his shoulders, once more embraced his mother and left
her.
Soon after, he was standing in the spacious room in which he was
accustomed to sit and to sleep when he was in Thebes. The walls of this
room were whitewashed and decorated with pious glyphic writing, which
framed in the door and the windows opening into the garden.
In the middle of the farther wall was a couch in the form of a lion. The
upper end of it imitated a lion's head, and the foot, its curling tail; a
finely dressed lion's skin was spread over the bell, and a headrest of
ebony, decorated with pious texts, stood on a high foot-step, ready for
the sleeper.
Above the bed various costly weapons and whips were elegantly displayed,
and below them the seven arrows over which Setchem had read the words
"Death to Mena." They were written across a sentence which enjoined
feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, and clothing the naked;
with loving-kindness, alike to the great and the humble.
A niche by the side of the bed-head was closed with a curtain of purple
stuff.
In each corner of the room stood a statue; three of them symbolized the
triad of Thebes-Anion, Muth, and Chunsu--and the fourth the dead father
of the pioneer. In front of each was a small altar for offerings, with a
hollow in it, in which was an odoriferous essence. On a wooden stand were
little images of the Gods and amulets in great number, and in several
painted chests lay the clothes, the ornaments and the papers of the
master. In the midst of the chamber stood a table and several
stool-shaped seats.
When Paaker entered the room he found it lighted with lamps, and a large
dog sprang joyfully to meet him. He let him spring upon him, threw him to
the ground, let him once more rush upon him, and then kissed his clever
head.
Before his bed an old negro of powerful build lay in deep sleep. Paaker
shoved him with his foot and called to him as he awoke--
"I am hungry."
The grey-headed black man rose slowly, and left the room.
As soon as he was alone Paaker drew the philter from his girdle, looked
at it tenderly, and put it in a box, in which there were several flasks
of holy oils for sacrifice. He was accustomed every evening to fill the
hollows in the altars with fresh essences, and to prostrate himself in
prayer before the images of the Gods. To-day he stood before the statue
of his father, kissed its feet, and murmured: "Thy will shall be
done.--The woman whom thou didst intend for me shall indeed be mine--thy
eldest son's."
Then he walked to and fro and thought over the events of the day.
At last he stood still, with his arms crossed, and looked defiantly at
the holy images; like a traveller who drives away a false guide, and
thinks to find the road by himself.
His eye fell on the arrows over his bed; he smiled, and striking his
broad breast with his fist, he exclaimed, "I--I--I--"
His hound, who thought his master meant to call him, rushed up to him. He
pushed him off and said--"If you meet a hyaena in the desert, you fall
upon it without waiting till it is touched by my lance--and if the Gods,
my masters, delay, I myself will defend my right; but thou," he continued
turning to the image of his father, "thou wilt support me."
This soliloquy was interrupted by the slaves who brought in his meal.
Paaker glanced at the various dishes which the cook had prepared for him,
and asked: "How often shall I command that not a variety, but only one
large dish shall be dressed for me? And the wine?"
"Thou art used never to touch it?" answered the old negro.
"But to-day I wish for some," said the pioneer." Bring one of the old
jars of red wine of Kakem."
The slaves looked at each other in astonishment; the wine was brought,
and Paaker emptied beaker after beaker. When the servants had left him,
the boldest among them said: "Usually the master eats like a lion, and
drinks like a midge, but to-day--"
"Hold your tongue!" cried his companion, "and come into the court, for
Paaker has sent us out beer. The Hathors must have met him."
The occurrences of the day must indeed have taken deep hold on the inmost
soul of the pioneer; for he, the most sober of all the warriors of
Rameses, to whom intoxication was unknown, and who avoided the banquets
of his associates--now sat at the midnight hours, alone at his table, and
toped till his weary head grew heavy.
He collected himself, went towards his couch and drew the curtain which
concealed the niche at the head of the bed. A female figure, with the
head-dress and attributes of the Goddess Hathor, made of painted
limestone, revealed itself.
Her countenance had the features of the wife of Mena.
The king, four years since, had ordered a sculptor to execute a sacred
image with the lovely features of the newly-married bride of his
charioteer, and Paaker had succeeded in having a duplicate made.
He now knelt down on the couch, gazed on the image with moist eyes,
looked cautiously around to see if he was alone, leaned forward, pressed
a kiss to the delicate, cold stone lips; laid down and went to sleep
without undressing himself, and leaving the lamps to burn themselves out.
Restless dreams disturbed his spirit, and when the dawn grew grey, he
screamed out, tormented by a hideous vision, so pitifully, that the old
negro, who had laid himself near the dog at the foot of his bed, sprang
up alarmed, and while the dog howled, called him by his name to wake him.
Paaker awoke with a dull head-ache. The vision which had tormented him
stood vividly before his mind, and he endeavored to retain it that he
might summon a haruspex to interpret it. After the morbid fancies of the
preceding evening he felt sad and depressed.
The morning-hymn rang into his room with a warning voice from the temple
of Amon; he cast off evil thoughts, and resolved once more to resign the
conduct of his fate to the Gods, and to renounce all the arts of magic.
As he was accustomed, he got into the bath that was ready for him. While
splashing in the tepid water he thought with ever increasing eagerness of
Nefert and of the philter which at first he had meant not to offer to
her, but which actually was given to her by his hand, and which might by
this time have begun to exercise its charm.
Love placed rosy pictures--hatred set blood-red images before his eyes.
He strove to free himself from the temptations, which more and more
tightly closed in upon him, but it was with him as with a man who has
fallen into a bog, who, the more vehemently he tries to escape from the
mire, sinks the deeper.
As the sun rose, so rose his vital energy and his self-confidence, and
when he prepared to quit his dwelling, in his most costly clothing, he
had arrived once more at the decision of the night before, and had again
resolved to fight for his purpose, without--and if need were--against the
Gods.
The Mohar had chosen his road, and he never turned back when once he had
begun a journey.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Blossom of the thorny wreath of sorrow
Eyes kind and frank, without tricks of glance
Money is a pass-key that turns any lock
Repugnance for the old laws began to take root in his heart
Thou canst say in words what we can only feel
Whether the form of our benevolence does more good or mischief
UARDA
Volume 3.
By Georg Ebers
CHAPTER IX.
It was noon: the rays of the sun found no way into the narrow shady
streets of the city of Thebes, but they blazed with scorching heat on the
broad dyke-road which led to the king's castle, and which at this hour
was usually almost deserted.
To-day it was thronged with foot-passengers and chariots, with riders and
litter-bearers.
Here and there negroes poured water on the road out of skins, but the
dust was so deep, that, in spite of this, it shrouded the streets and the
passengers in a dry cloud, which extended not only over the city, but
down to the harbor where the boats of the inhabitants of the Necropolis
landed their freight.
The city of the Pharaohs was in unwonted agitation, for the storm-swift
breath of rumor had spread some news which excited both alarm and hope in
the huts of the poor as well as in the palaces of the great.
In the early morning three mounted messengers had arrived from the king's
camp with heavy letter-bags, and had dismounted at the Regent's palace.
[The Egyptians were great letter-writers, and many of their letters
have come down to us, they also had established postmen, and had a
word for them in their language "fai chat."]
As after a long drought the inhabitants of a village gaze up at the black
thunder-cloud that gathers above their heads promising the refreshing
rain--but that may also send the kindling lightning-flash or the
destroying hail-storm--so the hopes and the fears of the citizens were
centred on the news which came but rarely and at irregular intervals from
the scene of war; for there was scarcely a house in the huge city which
had not sent a father, a son, or a relative to the fighting hosts of the
king in the distant northeast.
And though the couriers from the camp were much oftener the heralds of
tears than of joy; though the written rolls which they brought told more
often of death and wounds than of promotion, royal favors, and conquered
spoil, yet they were expected with soul-felt longing and received with
shouts of joy.
Great and small hurried after their arrival to the Regent's palace, and
the scribes--who distributed the letters and read the news which was
intended for public communication, and the lists of those who had fallen
or perished--were closely besieged with enquirers.
Man has nothing harder to endure than uncertainty, and generally, when in
suspense, looks forward to bad rather than to good news. And the bearers
of ill ride faster than the messengers of weal.
The Regent Ani resided in a building adjoining the king's palace. His
business-quarters surrounded an immensely wide court, and consisted of a
great number of rooms opening on to this court, in which numerous scribes
worked with their chief. On the farther side was a large, veranda-like
hall open at the front, with a roof supported by pillars.
Here Ani was accustomed to hold courts of justice, and to receive
officers, messengers, and petitioners. To-day he sat, visible to all
comers, on a costly throne in this hall, surrounded by his numerous
followers, and overlooking the crowd of people whom the guardians of the
peace guided with long staves, admitting them in troops into the court of
the "High Gate," and then again conducting them out.
What he saw and heard was nothing joyful, for from each group surrounding
a scribe arose a cry of woe. Few and far between were those who had to
tell of the rich booty that had fallen to their friends.
An invisible web woven of wailing and tears seemed to envelope the
assembly.
Here men were lamenting and casting dust upon their heads, there women
were rending their clothes, shrieking loudly, and crying as they waved
their veils "oh, my husband! oh, my father! oh, my brother!"
Parents who had received the news of the death of their son fell on each
other's neck weeping; old men plucked out their grey hair and beard;
young women beat their forehead and breast, or implored the scribes who
read out the lists to let them see for themselves the name of the beloved
one who was for ever torn from them.
The passionate stirring of a soul, whether it be the result of joy or of
sorrow, among us moderns covers its features with a veil, which it had no
need of among the ancients.
Where the loudest laments sounded, a restless little being might be seen
hurrying from group to group; it was Nemu, Katuti's dwarf, whom we know.
Now he stood near a woman of the better class, dissolved in tears because
her husband had fallen in the last battle.
"Can you read?" he asked her; "up there on the architrave is the name of
Rameses, with all his titles. Dispenser of life,' he is called. Aye
indeed; he can create--widows; for he has all the husbands killed."
Before the astonished woman could reply, he stood by a man sunk in woe,
and pulling his robe, said "Finer fellows than your son have never been
seen in Thebes. Let your youngest starve, or beat him to a cripple, else
he also will be dragged off to Syria; for Rameses needs much good
Egyptian meat for the Syrian vultures."
The old man, who had hitherto stood there in silent despair, clenched his
fist. The dwarf pointed to the Regent, and said: "If he there wielded the
sceptre, there would be fewer orphans and beggars by the Nile. To-day its
sacred waters are still sweet, but soon it will taste as salt as the
north sea with all the tears that have been shed on its banks."
It almost seemed as if the Regent had heard these words, for he rose from
his seat and lifted his hands like a man who is lamenting.
Many of the bystanders observed this action; and loud cries of anguish
filled the wide courtyard, which was soon cleared by soldiers to make
room for other troops of people who were thronging in.
While these gathered round the scribes, the Regent Ani sat with quiet
dignity on the throne, surrounded by his suite and his secretaries, and
held audiences.
He was a man at the close of his fortieth year and the favorite cousin of
the king.
Rameses I., the grandfather of the reigning monarch, had deposed the
legitimate royal family, and usurped the sceptre of the Pharaohs. He
descended from a Semitic race who had remained in Egypt at the time of
the expulsion of the Hyksos,
[These were an eastern race who migrated from Asia into Egypt,
conquered the lower Nile-valley, and ruled over it for nearly 500
years, till they were driven out by the successors of the old
legitimate Pharaohs, whose dominion had been confined to upper
Egypt.]
and had distinguished itself by warlike talents under Thotmes and
Amenophis. After his death he was succeeded by his son Seti, who sought
to earn a legitimate claim to the throne by marrying Tuaa, the
grand-daughter of Amenophis III. She presented him with an only son, whom
he named after his father Rameses. This prince might lay claim to perfect
legitimacy through his mother, who descended directly from the old house
of sovereigns; for in Egypt a noble family--even that of the
Pharaohs--might be perpetuated through women.
Seti proclaimed Rameses partner of his throne, so as to remove all doubt
as to the validity of his position. The young nephew of his wife Tuaa,
the Regent Ani, who was a few years younger than Rameses, he caused to be
brought up in the House of Seti, and treated him like his own son, while
the other members of the dethroned royal family were robbed of their
possessions or removed altogether.
Ani proved himself a faithful servant to Seti, and to his son, and was
trusted as a brother by the warlike and magnanimous Rameses, who however
never disguised from himself the fact that the blood in his own veins was
less purely royal than that which flowed in his cousin's.
It was required of the race of the Pharaohs of Egypt that it should be
descended from the Sun-god Ra, and the Pharaoh could boast of this high
descent only through his mother--Ani through both parents.
But Rameses sat on the throne, held the sceptre with a strong hand, and
thirteen young sons promised to his house the lordship over Egypt to all
eternity.
When, after the death of his warlike father, he went to fresh conquests
in the north, he appointed Ani, who had proved himself worthy as governor
of the province of Kush, to the regency of the kingdom.
A vehement character often over estimates the man who is endowed with a
quieter temperament, into whose nature he cannot throw himself, and whose
excellences he is unable to imitate; so it happened that the deliberate
and passionless nature of his cousin impressed the fiery and warlike
Rameses.
Ani appeared to be devoid of ambition, or the spirit of enterprise; he
accepted the dignity that was laid upon him with apparent reluctance, and
seemed a particularly safe person, because he had lost both wife and
child, and could boast of no heir.
He was a man of more than middle height; his features were remarkably
regular--even beautifully, cut, but smooth and with little expression.
His clear blue eyes and thin lips gave no evidence of the emotions that
filled his heart; on the contrary, his countenance wore a soft smile that
could adapt itself to haughtiness, to humility, and to a variety of
shades of feeling, but which could never be entirely banished from his
face.
He had listened with affable condescension to the complaint of a landed
proprietor, whose cattle had been driven off for the king's army, and had
promised that his case should be enquired into. The plundered man was
leaving full of hope; but when the scribe who sat at the feet of the
Regent enquired to whom the investigation of this encroachment of the
troops should be entrusted, Ani said: "Each one must bring a victim to
the war; it must remain among the things that are done, and cannot be
undone."
The Nomarch--[Chief of a Nome or district.]--of Suan, in the southern
part of the country, asked for funds for a necessary, new embankment. The
Regent listened to his eager representation with benevolence, nay with
expressions of sympathy; but assured him that the war absorbed all the
funds of the state, that the chests were empty; still he felt
inclined--even if they had not failed--to sacrifice a part of his own
income to preserve the endangered arable land of his faithful province of
Suan, to which he desired greeting.
As soon as the Nomarch had left him, he commanded that a considerable sum
should be taken out of the Treasury, and sent after the petitioner.
From time to time in the middle of conversation, he arose, and made a
gesture of lamentation, to show to the assembled mourners in the court
that he sympathized in the losses which had fallen on them.
The sun had already passed the meridian, when a disturbance, accompanied
by loud cries, took possession of the masses of people, who stood round
the scribes in the palace court.
Many men and women were streaming together towards one spot, and even the
most impassive of the Thebans present turned their attention to an
incident so unusual in this place.
A detachment of constabulary made a way through the crushing and yelling
mob, and another division of Lybian police led a prisoner towards a side
gate of the court. Before they could reach it, a messenger came up with
them, from the Regent, who desired to be informed as to what happened.
The head of the officers of public safety followed him, and with eager
excitement informed Ani, who was waiting for him, that a tiny man, the
dwarf of the Lady Katuti, had for several hours been going about in the
court, and endeavoring to poison the minds of the citizens with seditious
speeches.
Ani ordered that the misguided man should be thrown into the dungeon; but
so soon as the chief officer had left him, he commanded his secretary to
have the dwarf brought into his presence before sundown.
While he was giving this order an excitement of another kind seized the
assembled multitude.
As the sea parted and stood on the right hand and on the left of the
Hebrews, so that no wave wetted the foot of the pursued fugitives, so the
crowd of people of their own free will, but as if in reverent submission
to some high command, parted and formed a broad way, through which walked
the high-priest of the House of Seti, as, full robed and accompanied by
some of the "holy fathers," he now entered the court.
The Regent went to meet him, bowed before him, and then withdrew to the
back of the hall with him alone. "It is nevertheless incredible," said
Ameni, "that our serfs are to follow the militia!"
"Rameses requires soldiers--to conquer," replied the Regent.
"And we bread--to live," exclaimed the priest.
"Nevertheless I am commanded, at once, before the seed-time, to levy the
temple-serfs. I regret the order, but the king is the will, and I am only
the hand."
"The hand, which he makes use of to sequester ancient rights, and to open
a way to the desert over the fruitful land."
["With good management," said the first Napoleon, "the Nile
encroaches upon the desert, with bad management the desert
encroaches upon the Nile."]
"Your acres will not long remain unprovided for. Rameses will win new
victories with the increased army, and the help of the Gods."
"The Gods! whom he insults!"
"After the conclusion of peace he will reconcile the Gods by doubly rich
gifts. He hopes confidently for an early end to the war, and writes to me
that after the next battle he wins he intends to offer terms to the
Cheta. A plan of the king's is also spoken of--to marry again, and,
indeed, the daughter of the Cheta King Chetasar."
Up to this moment the Regent had kept his eyes cast down. Now he raised
them, smiling, as if he would fain enjoy Ameni's satisfaction, and asked:
"What dost thou say to this project?"
"I say," returned Ameni, and his voice, usually so stern, took a tone of
amusement, "I say that Rameses seems to think that the blood of thy
cousin and of his mother, which gives him his right to the throne, is
incapable of pollution."
"It is the blood of the Sun-god!"
"Which runs but half pure in his veins, but wholly pure in thine."
The Regent made a deprecatory gesture, and said softly, with a smile
which resembled that of a dead man:
"We are not alone."
"No one is here," said Ameni, "who can hear us; and what I say is known to
every child."
"But if it came to the king's ears--" whispered Ani, "he--"
"He would perceive how unwise it is to derogate from the ancient rights
of those on whom it is incumbent to prove the purity of blood of the
sovereign of this land. However, Rameses sits on the throne; may life
bloom for him, with health and strength!"--[A formula which even in
private letters constantly follows the name of the Pharaoh.]
The Regent bowed, and then asked:
"Do you propose to obey the demand of the Pharaoh without delay?"
"He is the king. Our council, which will meet in a few days, can only
determine how, and not whether we shall fulfil his command."
"You will retard the departure of the serfs, and Rameses requires them at
once. The bloody labor of the war demands new tools."
"And the peace will perhaps demand a new master, who understands how to
employ the sons of the land to its greatest advantage--a genuine son of
Ra."
The Regent stood opposite the high-priest, motionless as an image cast in
bronze, and remained silent; but Ameni lowered his staff before him as
before a god, and then went into the fore part of the hall.
When Ani followed him, a soft smile played as usual upon his countenance,
and full of dignity he took his seat on the throne.
"Art thou at an end of thy communications?" he asked the high-priest.
"It remains for me to inform you all," replied Ameni with a louder voice,
to be heard by all the assembled dignitaries, "that the princess
Bent-Anat yesterday morning committed a heavy sin, and that in all the
temples in the land the Gods shall be entreated with offerings to take
her uncleanness from her."
Again a shadow passed over the smile on the Regent's countenance. He
looked meditatively on the ground, and then said:
"To-morrow I will visit the House of Seti; till then I beg that this
affair may be left to rest."
Ameni bowed, and the Regent left the hall to withdraw to a wing of the
king's palace, in which he dwelt.
On his writing-table lay sealed papers. He knew that they contained
important news for him; but he loved to do violence to his curiosity, to
test his resolution, and like an epicure to reserve the best dish till
the last.
He now glanced first at some unimportant letters. A dumb negro, who
squatted at his feet, burned the papyrus rolls which his master gave him
in a brazier. A secretary made notes of the short facts which Ani called
out to him, and the ground work was laid of the answers to the different
letters.
At a sign from his master this functionary quitted the room, and Ani then
slowly opened a letter from the king, whose address: "To my brother Ani,"
showed that it contained, not public, but private information.
On these lines, as he well knew, hung his future life, and the road it
should follow.
With a smile, that was meant to conceal even from himself his deep inward
agitation, he broke the wax which sealed the short manuscript in the
royal hand.
"What relates to Egypt, and my concern for my country, and the happy
issue of the war," wrote the Pharaoh, "I have written to you by the hand
of my secretary; but these words are for the brother, who desires to be
my son, and I write to him myself. The lordly essence of the Divinity
which dwells in me, readily brings a quick 'Yes' or 'No' to my lips, and
it decides for the best. Now you demand my daughter Bent-Anat to wife,
and I should not be Rameses if I did not freely confess that before I had
read the last words of your letter, a vehement 'No' rushed to my lips. I
caused the stars to be consulted, and the entrails of the victims to be
examined, and they were adverse to your request; and yet I could not
refuse you, for you are dear to me, and your blood is royal as my own.
Even more royal, an old friend said, and warned me against your ambition
and your exaltation. Then my heart changed, for I were not Seti's son if
I allow myself to injure a friend through idle apprehensions; and he who
stands so high that men fear that he may try to rise above Rameses, seems
to me to be worthy of Bent-Anat. Woo her, and, should she consent freely,
the marriage may be celebrated on the day when I return home. You are
young enough to make a wife happy, and your mature wisdom will guard my
child from misfortune. Bent-Anat shall know that her father, and king,
encourages your suit; but pray too to the Hathors, that they may
influence Bent-Anat's heart in your favor, for to her decision we must
both submit."
The Regent had changed color several times while reading this letter. Now
he laid it on the table with a shrug of his shoulders, stood up, clasped
his hand behind him, and, with his eyes cast meditatively on the floor,
leaned against one of the pillars which supported the beams of the roof.
The longer he thought, the less amiable his expression became. "A pill
sweetened with honey,
[Two recipes for pills are found in the papyri, one with honey for
women, and one without for men.]
such as they give to women," he muttered to himself. Then he went back to
the table, read the king's letter through once more, and said: "One may
learn from it how to deny by granting, and at the same time not to forget
to give it a brilliant show of magnanimity. Rameses knows his daughter.
She is a girl like any other, and will take good care not to choose a man
twice as old as herself, and who might be her father. Rameses will
'submit'--I am to I submit!' And to what? to the judgment and the choice
of a wilful child!"
With these words he threw the letter so vehemently on to the table, that
it slipped off on to the floor.
The mute slave picked it up, and laid it carefully on the table again,
while his master threw a ball into a silver bason.
Several attendants rushed into the room, and Ani ordered them to bring to
him the captive dwarf of the Lady Katuti. His soul rose in indignation
against the king, who in his remote camp-tent could fancy he had made him
happy by a proof of his highest favor. When we are plotting against a man
we are inclined to regard him as an enemy, and if he offers us a rose we
believe it to be for the sake, not of the perfume, but of the thorns.
The dwarf Nemu was brought before the Regent and threw himself on the
ground at his feet.
Ani ordered the attendants to leave him, and said to the little man
"You compelled me to put you in prison. Stand up!" The dwarf rose and
said, "Be thanked--for my arrest too."
The Regent looked at him in astonishment; but Nemu went on half humbly,
half in fun, "I feared for my life, but thou hast not only not shortened
it, but hast prolonged it; for in the solitude of the dungeon time seemed
long, and the minutes grown to hours."
"Keep your wit for the ladies," replied the Regent. "Did I not know that
you meant well, and acted in accordance with the Lady Katuti's fancy, I
would send you to the quarries."
"My hands," mumbled the dwarf, "could only break stones for a game of
draughts; but my tongue is like the water, which makes one peasant rich,
and carries away the fields of another."
"We shall know how to dam it up."
"For my lady and for thee it will always flow the right way," said the
dwarf. "I showed the complaining citizens who it is that slaughters their
flesh and blood, and from whom to look for peace and content. I poured
caustic into their wounds, and praised the physician."
"But unasked and recklessly," interrupted Ani; "otherwise you have shown
yourself capable, and I am willing to spare you for a future time. But
overbusy friends are more damaging than intelligent enemies. When I need
your services I will call for you. Till then avoid speech. Now go to your
mistress, and carry to Katuti this letter which has arrived for her."
"Hail to Ani, the son of the Sun!" cried the dwarf kissing the Regent's
foot. "Have I no letter to carry to my mistress Nefert?"
"Greet her from me," replied the Regent. "Tell Katuti I will visit her
after the next meal. The king's charioteer has not written, yet I hear
that he is well. Go now, and be silent and discreet."
The dwarf quitted the room, and Ani went into an airy hall, in which his
luxurious meal was laid out, consisting of many dishes prepared with
special care. His appetite was gone, but he tasted of every dish, and
gave the steward, who attended on him, his opinion of each.
Meanwhile he thought of the king's letter, of Bent-Anat, and whether it
would be advisable to expose himself to a rejection on her part.
After the meal he gave himself up to his body-servant, who carefully
shaved, painted, dressed, and decorated him, and then held the mirror
before him.
He considered the reflection with anxious observation, and when he seated
himself in his litter to be borne to the house of his friend Katuti, he
said to himself that he still might claim to be called a handsome man.
If he paid his court to Bent-Anat--if she listened to his suit--what
then?
He would refer it to Katuti, who always knew how to say a decisive word
when he, entangled in a hundred pros and cons, feared to venture on a
final step.
By her advice he had sought to wed the princess, as a fresh mark of
honor--as an addition to his revenues--as a pledge for his personal
safety. His heart had never been more or less attached to her than to any
other beautiful woman in Egypt. Now her proud and noble personality stood
before his inward eye, and he felt as if he must look up to it as to a
vision high out of his reach. It vexed him that he had followed Katuti's
advice, and he began to wish his suit had been repulsed. Marriage with
Bent-Anat seemed to him beset with difficulties. His mood was that of a
man who craves some brilliant position, though he knows that its
requirements are beyond his powers--that of an ambitious soul to whom
kingly honors are offered on condition that he will never remove a heavy
crown from his head. If indeed another plan should succeed, if--and his
eyes flashed eagerly--if fate set him on the seat of Rameses, then the
alliance with Bent-Anat would lose its terrors; there would he be her
absolute King and Lord and Master, and no one could require him to
account for what he might be to her, or vouchsafe to her.
CHAPTER X.
During the events we have described the house of the charioteer Mena had
not remained free from visitors.
It resembled the neighboring estate of Paaker, though the buildings were
less new, the gay paint on the pillars and walls was faded, and the large
garden lacked careful attention. In the vicinity of the house only, a few
well-kept beds blazed with splendid flowers, and the open colonnade,
which was occupied by Katuti and her daughter, was furnished with royal
magnificence.
The elegantly carved seats were made of ivory, the tables of ebony, and
they, as well as the couches, had gilt feet. The artistically worked
Syrian drinking vessels on the sideboard, tables, and consoles were of
many forms; beautiful vases full of flowers stood everywhere; rare
perfumes rose from alabaster cups, and the foot sank in the thick pile of
the carpets which covered the floor.
And over the apparently careless arrangement of these various objects
there reigned a peculiar charm, an indescribably fascinating something.
Stretched at full-length on a couch, and playing with a silky-haired
white cat, lay the fair Nefert--fanned to coolness by a negro-girl--while
her mother Katuti nodded a last farewell to her sister Setchem and to
Paaker.
Both had crossed this threshold for the first time for four years, that
is since the marriage of Mena with Nefert, and the old enmity seemed now
to have given way to heartfelt reconciliation and mutual understanding.
After the pioneer and his mother had disappeared behind the pomegranate
shrubs at the entrance of the garden, Katuti turned to her daughter and
said:
"Who would have thought it yesterday? I believe Paaker loves you still."
Nefert colored, and exclaimed softly, while she hit the kitten gently
with her fan--
"Mother!"
Katuti smiled.
She was a tall woman of noble demeanor, whose sharp but delicately-cut
features and sparkling eyes could still assert some pretensions to
feminine beauty. She wore a long robe, which reached below her ankles; it
was of costly material, but dark in color, and of a studied simplicity.
Instead of the ornaments in bracelets, anklets, ear and finger-rings, in
necklaces and clasps, which most of the Egyptian ladies--and indeed her
own sister and daughter--were accustomed to wear, she had only fresh
flowers, which were never wanting in the garden of her son-in-law. Only a
plain gold diadem, the badge of her royal descent, always rested, from
early morning till late at night, on her high brow--for a woman too high,
though nobly formed--and confined the long blue-black hair, which fell
unbraided down her back, as if its owner contemned the vain labor of
arranging it artistically. But nothing in her exterior was
unpremeditated, and the unbejewelled wearer of the diadem, in her plain
dress, and with her royal figure, was everywhere sure of being observed,
and of finding imitators of her dress, and indeed of her demeanor.
And yet Katuti had long lived in need; aye at the very hour when we first
make her acquaintance, she had little of her own, but lived on the estate
of her son-in-law as his guest, and as the administrator of his
possessions; and before the marriage of her daughter she had lived with
her children in a house belonging to her sister Setchem.
She had been the wife of her own brother,
[Marriages between brothers and sisters were allowed in ancient
Egypt. The Ptolemaic princes adopted this, which was contrary to
the Macedonian customs. When Ptolemy II. Philadelphus married his
sister Arsinoe, it seems to have been thought necessary to excuse it
by the relative positions of Venus and Saturn at that period, and
the constraining influences of these planets.]
who had died young, and who had squandered the greatest part of the
possessions which had been left to him by the new royal family, in an
extravagant love of display.
When she became a widow, she was received as a sister with her children
by her brother-in-law, Paaker's father. She lived in a house of her own,
enjoyed the income of an estate assigned to her by the old Mohar, and
left to her son-in-law the care of educating her son, a handsome and
overbearing lad, with all the claims and pretensions of a youth of
distinction.
Such great benefits would have oppressed and disgraced the proud Katuti,
if she had been content with them and in every way agreed with the giver.
But this was by no means the case; rather, she believed that she might
pretend to a more brilliant outward position, felt herself hurt when her
heedless son, while he attended school, was warned to work more
seriously, as he would by and by have to rely on his own skill and his
own strength. And it had wounded her when occasionally her brother-in-law
had suggested economy, and had reminded her, in his straightforward way,
of her narrow means, and the uncertain future of her children.
At this she was deeply offended, for she ventured to say that her
relatives could never, with all their gifts, compensate for the insults
they heaped upon her; and thus taught them by experience that we quarrel
with no one more readily than with the benefactor whom we can never repay
for all the good he bestows on us.
Nevertheless, when her brother-in-law asked the hand of her daughter for
his son, she willingly gave her consent.
Nefert and Paaker had grown up together, and by this union she foresaw
that she could secure her own future and that of her children.
Shortly after the death of the Mohar, the charioteer Mena had proposed
for Nefert's hand, but would have been refused if the king himself had
not supported the suit of his favorite officer. After the wedding, she
retired with Nefert to Mena's house, and undertook, while he was at the
war, to manage his great estates, which however had been greatly
burthened with debt by his father.
Fate put the means into her hands of indemnifying herself and her
children for many past privations, and she availed herself of them to
gratify her innate desire to be esteemed and admired; to obtain admission
for her son, splendidly equipped, into a company of chariot-warriors of
the highest class; and to surround her daughter with princely
magnificence.
When the Regent, who had been a friend of her late husband, removed into
the palace of the Pharaohs, he made her advances, and the clever and
decided woman knew how to make herself at first agreeable, and finally
indispensable, to the vacillating man.
She availed herself of the circumstance that she, as well as he, was
descended from the old royal house to pique his ambition, and to open to
him a view, which even to think of, he would have considered forbidden as
a crime, before he became intimate with her.
Ani's suit for the hand of the princess Bent-Anat was Katuti's work. She
hoped that the Pharoah would refuse, and personally offend the Regent,
and so make him more inclined to tread the dangerous road which she was
endeavoring to smooth for him. The dwarf Nemu was her pliant tool.
She had not initiated him into her projects by any words; he however gave
utterance to every impulse of her mind in free language, which was
punished only with blows from a fan, and, only the day before, had been
so audacious as to say that if the Pharoah were called Ani instead of
Rameses, Katuti would be not a queen but a goddess for she would then
have not to obey, but rather to guide, the Pharaoh, who indeed himself
was related to the Immortals.
Katuti did not observe her daughter's blush, for she was looking
anxiously out at the garden gate, and said:
"Where can Nemu be! There must be some news arrived for us from the
army."
"Mena has not written for so long," Nefert said softly. "Ah! here is the
steward!"
Katuti turned to the officer, who had entered the veranda through a side
door:
"What do you bring," she asked.
"The dealer Abscha," was the answer, "presses for payment. The new Syrian
chariot and the purple cloth--"
"Sell some corn," ordered Katuti.
"Impossible, for the tribute to the temples is not yet paid, and already
so much has been delivered to the dealers that scarcely enough remains
over for the maintenance of the household and for sowing."
"Then pay with beasts."
"But, madam," said the steward sorrowfully, "only yesterday, we again
sold a herd to the Mohar; and the water-wheels must be turned, and the
corn must be thrashed, and we need beasts for sacrifice, and milk,
butter, and cheese, for the use of the house, and dung for firing."
[In Egypt, where there is so little wood, to this day the dried dung
of beasts is the commonest kind of fuel.]
Katuti looked thoughtfully at the ground.
"It must be," she said presently. "Ride to Hermonthis, and say to the
keeper of the stud that he must have ten of Mena's golden bays driven
over here."
"I have already spoken to him," said the steward, "but he maintains that
Mena strictly forbade him to part with even one of the horses, for he is
proud of the stock. Only for the chariot of the lady Nefert."
"I require obedience," said Katuti decidedly and cutting short the
steward's words, "and I expect the horses to-morrow."
"But the stud-master is a daring man, whom Mena looks upon as
indispensable, and he--"
"I command here, and not the absent," cried Katuti enraged, "and I
require the horses in spite of the former orders of my son-in-law."
Nefert, during this conversation, pulled herself up from her indolent
attitude. On hearing the last words she rose from her couch, and said,
with a decision which surprised even her mother--
"The orders of my husband must be obeyed. The horses that Mena loves
shall stay in their stalls. Take this armlet that the king gave me; it is
worth more than twenty horses."
The steward examined the trinket, richly set with precious stones, and
looked enquiringly at Katuti. She shrugged her shoulders, nodded consent,
and said--
"Abscha shall hold it as a pledge till Mena's booty arrives. For a year
your husband has sent nothing of importance."
When the steward was gone, Nefert stretched herself again on her couch
and said wearily:
"I thought we were rich."
"We might be," said Katuti bitterly; but as she perceived that Nefert's
cheeks again were glowing, she said amiably, "Our high rank imposes great
duties on us. Princely blood flows in our veins, and the eyes of the
people are turned on the wife of the most brilliant hero in the king's
army. They shall not say that she is neglected by her husband. How long
Mena remains away!"
"I hear a noise in the court," said Nefert. "The Regent is coming."
Katuti turned again towards the garden.
A breathless slave rushed in, and announced that Bent-Anat, the daughter
of the king, had dismounted at the gate, and was approaching the garden
with the prince Rameri.
Nefert left her couch, and went with her mother to meet the exalted
visitors.
As the mother and daughter bowed to kiss the robe of the princess,
Bent-Anat signed them back from her. "Keep farther from me," she said;
"the priests have not yet entirely absolved me from my uncleanness."
"And in spite of them thou art clean in the sight of Ra!" exclaimed the
boy who accompanied her, her brother of seventeen, who was brought up at
the House of Seti, which however he was to leave in a few weeks--and he
kissed her.
"I shall complain to Ameni of this wild boy," said Bent-Anat smiling. "He
would positively accompany me. Your husband, Nefert, is his model, and I
had no peace in the house, for we came to bring you good news."
"From Mena?" asked the young wife, pressing her hand to her heart.
"As you say," returned Bent-Anat. "My father praises his ability, and
writes that he, before all others, will have his choice at the dividing
of the spoil."
Nefert threw a triumphant glance at her mother, and Katuti drew a deep
breath.
Bent-Anat stroked Nefert's cheeks like those of a child. Then she turned
to Katuti, led her into the garden, and begged her to aid her, who had so
early lost her mother, with her advice in a weighty matter.
"My father," she continued, after a few introductory words, "informs me
that the Regent Ani desires me for his wife, and advises me to reward the
fidelity of the worthy man with my hand. He advises it, you understand-he
does not command."
"And thou?" asked Katuti.
"And I," replied Bent-Anat decidedly, "must refuse him."
"Thou must!"
Bent-Anat made a sign of assent and went on:
"It is quite clear to me. I can do nothing else."
"Then thou dost not need my counsel, since even thy father, I well know,
will not be able to alter thy decision."
"Not God even," said Anat firmly. "But you are Ani's friend, and as I
esteem him, I would save him from this humiliation. Endeavor to persuade
him to give up his suit. I will meet him as though I knew nothing of his
letter to my father."
Katuti looked down reflectively. Then she said--"The Regent certainly
likes very well to pass his hours of leisure with me gossiping or playing
draughts, but I do not know that I should dare to speak to him of so
grave a matter."
"Marriage-projects are women's affairs," said Bent-Anat, smiling.
"But the marriage of a princess is a state event," replied the widow. "In
this case it is true the uncle
[Among the Orientals--and even the Spaniards--it was and is common
to give the name of uncle to a parent's cousin.]
only courts his niece, who is dear to him, and who he hopes will make the
second half of his life the brightest. Ani is kind and without severity.
Thou would'st win in him a husband, who would wait on thy looks, and bow
willingly to thy strong will."
Bent-Anat's eyes flashed, and she hastily exclaimed: "That is exactly
what forces the decisive irrevocable 'No' to my lips. Do you think that
because I am as proud as my mother, and resolute like my father, that I
wish for a husband whom I could govern and lead as I would? How little
you know me! I will be obeyed by my dogs, my servants, my officers, if
the Gods so will it, by my children. Abject beings, who will kiss my
feet, I meet on every road, and can buy by the hundred, if I wish it, in
the slave market. I may be courted twenty times, and reject twenty
suitors, but not because I fear that they might bend my pride and my
will; on the contrary, because I feel them increased. The man to whom I
could wish to offer my hand must be of a loftier stamp, must be greater,
firmer, and better than I, and I will flutter after the mighty
wing-strokes of his spirit, and smile at my own weakness, and glory in
admiring his superiority."
Katuti listened to the maiden with the smile by which the experienced
love to signify their superiority over the visionary.
"Ancient times may have produced such men," she said. "But if in these
days thou thinkest to find one, thou wilt wear the lock of youth,
[The lock of youth was a curl of hair which all the younger members
of princely families wore at the side of the head. The young Horus
is represented with it.]
till thou art grey. Our thinkers are no heroes, and our heroes are no
sages. Here come thy brother and Nefert."
"Will you persuade Ani to give up his suit!" said the princess urgently.
"I will endeavor to do so, for thy sake," replied Katuti. Then, turning
half to the young Rameri and half to his sister, she said:
"The chief of the House of Seti, Ameni, was in his youth such a man as
thou paintest, Bent-Anat. Tell us, thou son of Rameses, that art growing
up under the young sycamores, which shall some day over-shadow the
land-whom dost thou esteem the highest among thy companions? Is there one
among them, who is conspicuous above them all for a lofty spirit and
strength of intellect?"
The young Rameri looked gaily at the speaker, and said laughing: "We are
all much alike, and do more or less willingly what we are compelled, and
by preference every thing that we ought not."
"A mighty soul--a youth, who promises to be a second Snefru, a Thotmes,
or even an Amem? Dost thou know none such in the House of Seti?" asked
the widow. "Oh yes!" cried Rameri with eager certainty.
"And he is--?" asked Katuti.
"Pentaur, the poet," exclaimed the youth. Bent-Anat's face glowed with
scarlet color, while her, brother went on to explain.
"He is noble and of a lofty soul, and all the Gods dwell in him when he
speaks. Formerly we used to go to sleep in the lecture-hall; but his
words carry us away, and if we do not take in the full meaning of his
thoughts, yet we feel that they are genuine and noble."
Bent-Anat breathed quicker at these words, and her eyes hung on the boy's
lips.
"You know him, Bent-Anat," continued Rameri. "He was with you at the
paraschites' house, and in the temple-court when Ameni pronounced you
unclean. He is as tall and handsome as the God Mentli, and I feel that he
is one of those whom we can never forget when once we have seen them.
Yesterday, after you had left the temple, he spoke as he never spoke
before; he poured fire into our souls. Do not laugh, Katuti, I feel it
burning still. This morning we were informed that he had been sent from
the temple, who knows where--and had left us a message of farewell. It
was not thought at all necessary to communicate the reason to us; but we
know more than the masters think. He did not reprove you strongly enough,
Bent-Anat, and therefore he is driven out of the House of Seti. We have
agreed to combine to ask for him to be recalled; Anana is drawing up a
letter to the chief priest, which we shall all subscribe. It would turn
out badly for one alone, but they cannot be at all of us at once. Very
likely they will have the sense to recall him. If not, we shall all
complain to our fathers, and they are not the meanest in the land."
"It is a complete rebellion," cried Katuti. "Take care, you lordlings;
Ameni and the other prophets are not to be trifled with."
"Nor we either," said Rameri laughing, "If Pentaur is kept in banishment,
I shall appeal to my father to place me at the school at Heliopolis or
Chennu, and the others will follow me. Come, Bent-Anat, I must be back in
the trap before sunset. Excuse me, Katuti, so we call the school. Here
comes your little Nemu."
The brother and sister left the garden.
As soon as the ladies, who accompanied them, had turned their backs,
Bent-Anat grasped her brother's hand with unaccustomed warmth, and said:
"Avoid all imprudence; but your demand is just, and I will help you with
all my heart."
CHAPTER XI.
As soon as Bent-Anat had quitted Mena's domain, the dwarf Nemu entered
the garden with a letter, and briefly related his adventures; but in such
a comical fashion that both the ladies laughed, and Katuti, with a lively
gaiety, which was usually foreign to her, while she warned him, at the
same time praised his acuteness. She looked at the seal of the letter and
said:
"This is a lucky day; it has brought us great things, and the promise of
greater things in the future." Nefert came close up to her and said
imploringly: "Open the letter, and see if there is nothing in it from
him."
Katuti unfastened the wax, looked through the letter with a hasty glance,
stroked the cheek of her child, and said:
"Perhaps your brother has written for him; I see no line in his
handwriting."
Nefert on her side glanced at the letter, but not to read it, only to
seek some trace of the well-known handwriting of her husband.
Like all the Egyptian women of good family she could read, and during the
first two years of her married life she had often--very often--had the
opportunity of puzzling, and yet rejoicing, over the feeble signs which
the iron hand of the charioteer had scrawled on the papyrus for her whose
slender fingers could guide the reed pen with firmness and decision.
She examined the letter, and at last said, with tears in her eyes:
"Nothing! I will go to my room, mother."
Katuti kissed her and said, "Hear first what your brother writes."
But Nefert shook her head, turned away in silence, and disappeared into
the house.
Katuti was not very friendly to her son-in-law, but her heart clung to
her handsome, reckless son, the very image of her lost husband, the
favorite of women, and the gayest youth among the young nobles who
composed the chariot-guard of the king.
How fully he had written to-day--he who weilded the reed-pen so
laboriously.
This really was a letter; while, usually, he only asked in the fewest
words for fresh funds for the gratification of his extravagant tastes.
This time she might look for thanks, for not long since he must have
received a considerable supply, which she had abstracted from the income
of the possessions entrusted to her by her son-in-law.
She began to read.
The cheerfulness, with which she had met the dwarf, was insincere, and
had resembled the brilliant colors of the rainbow, which gleam over the
stagnant waters of a bog. A stone falls into the pool, the colors vanish,
dim mists rise up, and it becomes foul and clouded.
The news which her son's letter contained fell, indeed, like a block of
stone on Katuti's soul.
Our deepest sorrows always flow from the same source as might have filled
us with joy, and those wounds burn the fiercest which are inflicted by a
hand we love.
The farther Katuti went in the lamentably incorrect epistle--which she
could only decipher with difficulty--which her darling had written to
her, the paler grew her face, which she several times covered with her
trembling hands, from which the letter dropped.
Nemu squatted on the earth near her, and followed all her movements.
When she sprang forward with a heart-piercing scream, and pressed her
forehead to a rough palmtrunk, he crept up to her, kissed her feet, and
exclaimed with a depth of feeling that overcame even Katuti, who was
accustomed to hear only gay or bitter speeches from the lips of her
jester--
"Mistress! lady! what has happened?"
Katuti collected herself, turned to him, and tried to speak; but her pale
lips remained closed, and her eyes gazed dimly into vacancy as though a
catalepsy had seized her.
"Mistress! Mistress!" cried the dwarf again, with growing agitation.
"What is the matter? shall I call thy daughter?"
Katuti made a sign with her hand, and cried feebly: "The wretches! the
reprobates!"
Her breath began to come quickly, the blood mounted to her cheeks and her
flashing eyes; she trod upon the letter, and wept so loud and
passionately, that the dwarf, who had never before seen tears in her
eyes, raised himself timidly, and said in mild reproach: "Katuti!"
She laughed bitterly, and said with a trembling voice:
"Why do you call my name so loud! it is disgraced and degraded. How the
nobles and the ladies will rejoice! Now envy can point at us with
spiteful joy--and a minute ago I was praising this day! They say one
should exhibit one's happiness in the streets, and conceal one's misery;
on the contrary, on the contrary! Even the Gods should not know of one's
hopes and joys, for they too are envious and spiteful!"
Again she leaned her head against the palm-tree. "Thou speakest of shame,
and not of death," said Nemu, "and I learned from thee that one should
give nothing up for lost excepting the dead."
These words had a powerful effect on the agitated woman. Quickly and
vehemently she turned upon the dwarf saying.
"You are clever, and faithful too, so listen! but if you were Amon
himself there is nothing to be done--"
"We must try," said Nemu, and his sharp eyes met those of his mistress.
"Speak," he said, "and trust me. Perhaps I can be of no use; but that I
can be silent thou knowest."
"Before long the children in the streets will talk of what this tells
me," said Katuti, laughing with bitterness, "only Nefert must know
nothing of what has happened--nothing, mind; what is that? the Regent
coming! quick, fly; tell him I am suddenly taken ill, very ill; I cannot
see him, not now! No one is to be admitted--no one, do you hear?"
The dwarf went.
When he came back after he had fulfilled his errand, he found his
mistress still in a fever of excitement.
"Listen," she said; "first the smaller matter, then the frightful, the
unspeakable. Rameses loads Mena with marks of his favor. It came to a
division of the spoils of war for the year; a great heap of treasure lay
ready for each of his followers, and the charioteer had to choose before
all the others."
"Well?" said the dwarf.
"Well!" echoed Katuti. "Well! how did the worthy householder care for his
belongings at home, how did he seek to relieve his indebted estate? It is
disgraceful, hideous! He passed by the silver, the gold, the jewels, with
a laugh; and took the captive daughter of the Danaid princes, and led her
into his tent."
"Shameful!" muttered the dwarf.
"Poor, poor Nefert!" cried Katuti, covering her face with her hands.
"And what more?" asked Nemu hastily.
"That," said Katuti, "that is--but I will keep calm--quite calm and
quiet. You know my son. He is heedless, but he loves me and his sister
more than anything in the world. I, fool as I was, to persuade him to
economy, had vividly described our evil plight, and after that
disgraceful conduct of Mena he thought of us and of our anxieties. His
share of the booty was small, and could not help us. His comrades threw
dice for the shares they had obtained--he staked his to win more for us.
He lost--all--all--and at last against an enormous sum, still thinking of
us, and only of us, he staked the mummy of his dead father.
[It was a king of the fourth dynasty, named Asychis by Herodotus,
who it is admitted was the first to pledge the mummies of his
ancestors. "He who stakes this pledge and fails to redeem the debt
shall, after his death, rest neither in his father's tomb nor in any
other, and sepulture shall be denied to his descendants." Herod.
11. 136.]
He lost. If he does not redeem the pledge before the expiration of the
third month, he will fall into infamy, the mummy will belong to the
winner, and disgrace and ignominy will be my lot and his."
Katuti pressed her hands on her face, the dwarf muttered to himself, "The
gambler and hypocrite!" When his mistress had grown calmer, he said:
"It is horrible, yet all is not lost. How much is the debt?"
It sounded like a heavy curse, when Katuti replied, "Thirty Babylonian
talents."--[L7000 sterling in 1881.]
The dwarf cried out, as if an asp had stung him. "Who dared to bid
against such a mad stake?"
"The Lady Hathor's son, Antef," answered Katuti, "who has already gambled
away the inheritance of his fathers, in Thebes."
"He will not remit one grain of wheat of his claim," cried the dwarf.
"And Mena?"
"How could my son turn to him after what had happened? The poor child
implores me to ask the assistance of the Regent."
"Of the Regent?" said the dwarf, shaking his big head. "Impossible!"
"I know, as matters now stand; but his place, his name."
"Mistress," said the dwarf, and deep purpose rang in the words, "do not
spoil the future for the sake of the present. If thy son loses his honor
under King Rameses, the future King, Ani, may restore it to him. If the
Regent now renders you all an important service, he will regard you as
amply paid when our efforts have succeeded, and he sits on the throne. He
lets himself be led by thee now because thou hast no need of his help,
and dost seem to work only for his sake, and for his elevation. As soon
as thou hast appealed to him, and he has assisted thee, all thy
confidence and freedom will be gone, and the more difficult he finds it
to raise so large a sum of money at once, the angrier he will be to think
that thou art making use of him. Thou knowest his circumstances."
"He is in debt," said Katuti. "I know that."
"Thou should'st know it," cried the dwarf, "for thou thyself hast forced
him to enormous expenses. He has won the people of Thebes with dazzling
festive displays; as guardian of Apis
[When Apis (the sacred bull) died under Ptolemy I. Soter, his
keepers spent not only the money which they had received for his
maintenance, in his obsequies but borrowed 50 talents of silver from
the king. In the time of Diodurus 100 talents were spent for the
same purpose.]
he gave a large donation to Memphis; he bestowed thousands on the leaders
of the troops sent into Ethiopia, which were equipped by him; what his
spies cost him at, the camp of the king, thou knowest. He has borrowed
sums of money from most of the rich men in the country, and that is well,
for so many creditors are so many allies. The Regent is a bad debtor; but
the king Ani, they reckon, will be a grateful payer."
Katuti looked at the dwarf in astonishment. "You know men!" she said.
"To my sorrow!" replied Nemu. "Do not apply to the Regent, and before
thou dost sacrifice the labor of years, and thy future greatness, and
that of those near to thee, sacrifice thy son's honor."
"And my husband's, and my own?" exclaimed Katuti. "How can you know what
that is! Honor is a word that the slave may utter, but whose meaning he
can never comprehend; you rub the weals that are raised on you by blows;
to me every finger pointed at me in scorn makes a wound like an ashwood
lance with a poisoned tip of brass. Oh ye holy Gods! who can help us?"
The miserable woman pressed her hands over her eyes, as if to shut out
the sight of her own disgrace. The dwarf looked at her compassionately,
and said in a changed tone:
"Dost thou remember the diamond which fell out of Nefert's handsomest
ring? We hunted for it, and could not find it. Next day, as I was going
through the room, I trod on something hard; I stooped down and found the
stone. What the noble organ of sight, the eye, overlooked, the callous
despised sole of the foot found; and perhaps the small slave, Nemu, who
knows nothing of honor, may succeed in finding a mode of escape which is
not revealed to the lofty soul of his mistress!"
"What are you thinking of?" asked Katuti.
"Escape," answered the dwarf. "Is it true that thy sister Setchem has
visited thee, and that you are reconciled?"
"She offered me her hand, and I took it?"
"Then go to her. Men are never more helpful than after a reconciliation.
The enmity they have driven out, seems to leave as it were a
freshly-healed wound which must be touched with caution; and Setchem is
of thy own blood, and kind-hearted."
"She is not rich," replied Katuti. "Every palm in her garden comes from
her husband, and belongs to her children."
"Paaker, too, was with you?"
"Certainly only by the entreaty of his mother--he hates my son-in-law."
"I know it," muttered the dwarf, "but if Nefert would ask him?"
The widow drew herself up indignantly. She felt that she had allowed the
dwarf too much freedom, and ordered him to leave her alone.
Nemu kissed her robe and asked timidly:
"Shall I forget that thou hast trusted me, or am I permitted to consider
further as to thy son's safety?" Katuti stood for a moment undecided,
then she said:
"You were clever enough to find what I carelessly dropped; perhaps some
God may show you what I ought to do. Now leave me."
"Wilt thou want me early to-morrow?"
"No."
"Then I will go to the Necropolis, and offer a sacrifice."
"Go!" said Katuti, and went towards the house with the fatal letter in
her hand.
Nemu stayed behind alone; he looked thoughtfully at the ground, murmuring
to himself.
"She must not lose her honor; not at present, or indeed all will be lost.
What is this honor? We all come into the world without it, and most of us
go to the grave without knowing it, and very good folks notwithstanding.
Only a few who are rich and idle weave it in with the homely stuff of
their souls, as the Kuschites do their hair with grease and oils, till it
forms a cap of which, though it disfigures them, they are so proud that
they would rather have their ears cut off than the monstrous thing. I
see, I see--but before I open my mouth I will go to my mother. She knows
more than twenty prophets."
CHAPTER XII.
Before the sun had risen the next morning, Nemu got himself ferried over
the Nile, with the small white ass which Mena's deceased father had given
him many years before. He availed himself of the cool hour which precedes
the rising of the sun for his ride through the Necropolis.
Well acquainted as he was with every stock and stone, he avoided the high
roads which led to the goal of his expedition, and trotted towards the
hill which divides the valley of the royal tombs from the plain of the
Nile.
Before him opened a noble amphitheatre of lofty lime-stone peaks, the
background of the stately terrace-temple which the proud ancestress of
two kings of the fallen family, the great Hatasu, had erected to their
memory, and to the Goddess Hathor.
Nemu left the sanctuary to his left, and rode up the steep hill-path
which was the nearest way from the plain to the valley of the tombs.
Below him lay a bird's eye view of the terrace-building of Hatasu, and
before him, still slumbering in cool dawn, was the Necropolis with its
houses and temples and colossal statues, the broad Nile glistening with
white sails under the morning mist; and, in the distant east, rosy with
the coming sun, stood Thebes and her gigantic temples.
But the dwarf saw nothing of the glorious panorama that lay at his feet;
absorbed in thought, and stooping over the neck of his ass, he let the
panting beast climb and rest at its pleasure.
When he had reached half the height of the hill, he perceived the sound
of footsteps coming nearer and nearer to him.
The vigorous walker had soon reached him, and bid him good morning, which
he civilly returned.
The hill-path was narrow, and when Nemu observed that the man who
followed him was a priest, he drew up his donkey on a level spot, and
said reverently:
"Pass on, holy father; for thy two feet carry thee quicker than my four."
"A sufferer needs my help," replied the leech Nebsecht, Pentaur's friend,
whom we have already seen in the House of Seti, and by the bed of the
paraschites' daughter; and he hastened on so as to gain on the slow pace
of the rider.
Then rose the glowing disk of the sun above the eastern horizon, and from
the sanctuaries below the travellers rose up the pious many-voiced chant
of praise.
Nemu slipped off his ass, and assumed an attitude of prayer; the priest
did the same; but while the dwarf devoutly fixed his eyes on the new
birth of the Sun-God from the eastern range, the priest's eyes wandered
to the earth, and his raised hand fell to pick up a rare fossil shell
which lay on the path.
In a few minutes Nebsecht rose, and Nemu followed him.
"It is a fine morning," said the dwarf; "the holy fathers down there seem
more cheerful to-day than usual."
The surgeon laughed assent. "Do you belong to the Necropolis?" he said.
"Who here keeps dwarfs?"
"No one," answered the little man. "But I will ask thee a question. Who
that lives here behind the hill is of so much importance, that a leech
from the House of Seti sacrifices his night's rest for him?"
"The one I visit is mean, but the suffering is great," answered Nebsecht.
Nemu looked at him with admiration, and muttered, "That is noble, that is
----" but he did not finish his speech; he struck his brow and exclaimed,
"You are going, by the desire of the Princess Bent-Anat, to the child of
the paraschites that was run over. I guessed as much. The food must have
an excellent after-taste, if a gentleman rises so early to eat it. How is
the poor child doing?"
There was so much warmth in these last words that Nebsecht, who had
thought the dwarf's reproach uncalled for, answered in a friendly tone:
"Not so badly; she may be saved."
"The Gods be praised!" exclaimed Nemu, while the priest passed on.
Nebsecht went up and down the hillside at a redoubled pace, and had long
taken his place by the couch of the wounded Uarda in the hovel of the
paraschites, when Nemu drew near to the abode of his Mother Hekt, from
whom Paaker had received the philter.
The old woman sat before the door of her cave. Near her lay a board,
fitted with cross pieces, between which a little boy was stretched in
such a way that they touched his head and his feet.
Hekt understood the art of making dwarfs; playthings in human form were
well paid for, and the child on the rack, with his pretty little face,
promised to be a valuable article.
As soon as the sorceress saw some one approaching, she stooped over the
child, took him up board and all in her arms, and carried him into the
cave. Then she said sternly:
"If you move, little one, I will flog you. Now let me tie you."
"Don't tie me," said the child, "I will be good and lie still."
"Stretch yourself out," ordered the old woman, and tied the child with a
rope to the board. "If you are quiet, I'll give you a honey-cake
by-and-bye, and let you play with the young chickens."
The child was quiet, and a soft smile of delight and hope sparkled in his
pretty eyes. His little hand caught the dress of the old woman, and with
the sweetest coaxing tone, which God bestows on the innocent voices of
children, he said:
"I will be as still as a mouse, and no one shall know that I am here; but
if you give me the honeycake you will untie me for a little, and let me
go to Uarda."
"She is ill!--what do you want there?"
"I would take her the cake," said the child, and his eyes glistened with
tears.
The old woman touched the child's chin with her finger, and some
mysterious power prompted her to bend over him to kiss him. But before
her lips had touched his face she turned away, and said, in a hard tone:
"Lie still! by and bye we will see." Then she stooped, and threw a brown
sack over the child. She went back into the open air, greeted Nemu,
entertained him with milk, bread and honey, gave him news of the girl who
had been run over, for he seemed to take her misfortune very much to
heart, and finally asked:
"What brings you here? The Nile was still narrow when you last found your
way to me, and now it has been falling some time.
[This is the beginning of November. The Nile begins slowly to rise
early in June; between the 15th and 20th of July it suddenly swells
rapidly, and in the first half of October, not, as was formerly
supposed, at the end of September, the inundation reaches its
highest level. Heinrich Barth established these data beyond
dispute. After the water has begun to sink it rises once more in
October and to a higher level than before. Then it soon falls, at
first slowly, but by degrees quicker and quicker.]
Are you sent by your mistress, or do you want my help? All the world is
alike. No one goes to see any one else unless he wants to make use of
him. What shall I give you?"
"I want nothing," said the dwarf, "but--"
"You are commissioned by a third person," said the witch, laughing. "It
is the same thing. Whoever wants a thing for some one else only thinks of
his own interest."
"May be," said Nemu. "At any rate your words show that you have not grown
less wise since I saw you last--and I am glad of it, for I want your
advice."
"Advice is cheap. What is going on out there?" Nemu related to his mother
shortly, clearly, and without reserve, what was plotting in his
mistress's house, and the frightful disgrace with which she was
threatened through her son.
The old woman shook her grey head thoughtfully several times: but she let
the little man go on to the end of his story without interrupting him.
Then she asked, and her eyes flashed as she spoke:
"And you really believe that you will succeed in putting the sparrow on
the eagle's perch--Ani on the throne of Rameses?"
"The troops fighting in Ethiopia are for us," cried Nemu. "The priests
declare themselves against the king, and recognize in Ani the genuine
blood of Ra."
"That is much," said the old woman.
"And many dogs are the death of the gazelle," said Nemu laughing.
"But Rameses is not a gazelle to run, but a lion," said the old woman
gravely. "You are playing a high game."
"We know it," answered Nemu. But it is for high stakes--there is much to
win."
"And all to lose," muttered the old woman, passing her fingers round her
scraggy neck. "Well, do as you please--it is all the same to me who it is
sends the young to be killed, and drives the old folks' cattle from the
field. What do they want with me?"
"No one has sent me," answered the dwarf. I come of my own free fancy to
ask you what Katuti must do to save her son and her house from dishonor."
"Hm!" hummed the witch, looking at Nemu while she raised herself on her
stick. "What has come to you that you take the fate of these great people
to heart as if it were your own?"
The dwarf reddened, and answered hesitatingly, "Katuti is a good
mistress, and, if things go well with her, there may be windfalls for you
and me."
Hekt shook her head doubtfully.
"A loaf for you perhaps, and a crumb for me!" she said. "There is more
than that in your mind, and I can read your heart as if you were a ripped
up raven. You are one of those who can never keep their fingers at rest,
and must knead everybody's dough; must push, and drive and stir
something. Every jacket is too tight for you. If you were three feet
taller, and the son of a priest, you might have gone far. High you will
go, and high you will end; as the friend of a king--or on the gallows."
The old woman laughed; but Nemu bit his lips, and said:
"If you had sent me to school, and if I were not the son of a witch, and
a dwarf, I would play with men as they have played with me; for I am
cleverer than all of them, and none of their plans are hidden from me. A
hundred roads lie before me, when they don't know whether to go out or
in; and where they rush heedlessly forwards I see the abyss that they are
running to."
"And nevertheless you come to me?" said the old woman sarcastically.
"I want your advice," said Nemu seriously. "Four eyes see more than one,
and the impartial looker-on sees clearer than the player; besides you are
bound to help me."
The old woman laughed loud in astonishment. "Bound!" she said, "I? and to
what if you please?"
"To help me," replied the dwarf, half in entreaty, and half in reproach.
"You deprived me of my growth, and reduced me to a cripple."
"Because no one is better off than you dwarfs," interrupted the witch.
Nemu shook his head, and answered sadly--
"You have often said so--and perhaps for many others, who are born in
misery like me--perhaps-you are right; but for me--you have spoilt my
life; you have crippled not my body only but my soul, and have condemned
me to sufferings that are nameless and unutterable."
The dwarf's big head sank on his breast, and with his left hand he
pressed his heart.
The old woman went up to him kindly.
"What ails you?" she asked, "I thought it was well with you in Mena's
house."
"You thought so?" cried the dwarf. "You who show me as in a mirror what I
am, and how mysterious powers throng and stir in me? You made me what I
am by your arts; you sold me to the treasurer of Rameses, and he gave me
to the father of Mena, his brother-in-law. Fifteen years ago! I was a
young man then, a youth like any other, only more passionate, more
restless, and fiery than they. I was given as a plaything to the young
Mena, and he harnessed me to his little chariot, and dressed me out with
ribbons and feathers, and flogged me when I did not go fast enough. How
the girl--for whom I would have given my life--the porter's daughter,
laughed when I, dressed up in motley, hopped panting in front of the
chariot and the young lord's whip whistled in my ears wringing the sweat
from my brow, and the blood from my broken heart. Then Mena's father
died, the boy, went to school, and I waited on the wife of his steward,
whom Katuti banished to Hermonthis. That was a time! The little daughter
of the house made a doll of me,
[Dolls belonging to the time of the Pharaohs are preserved in the
museums, for instance, the jointed ones at Leyden.]
laid me in the cradle, and made me shut my eyes and pretend to sleep,
while love and hatred, and great projects were strong within me. If I
tried to resist they beat me with rods; and when once, in a rage, I
forgot myself, and hit little Mertitefs hard, Mena, who came in, hung me
up in the store-room to a nail by my girdle, and left me to swing there;
he said he had forgotten to take me down again. The rats fell upon me;
here are the scars, these little white spots here--look! They perhaps
will some day wear out, but the wounds that my spirit received in those
hours have not yet ceased to bleed. Then Mena married Nefert, and, with
her, his mother-in-law, Katuti, came into the house. She took me from the
steward, I became indispensable to her; she treats me like a man, she
values my intelligence and listens to my advice,--therefore I will make
her great, and with her, and through her, I will wax mighty. If Ani
mounts the throne, we wilt guide him--you, and I, and she! Rameses must
fall, and with him Mena, the boy who degraded my body and poisoned my
soul!"
During this speech the old woman had stood in silence opposite the dwarf.
Now she sat down on her rough wooden seat, and said, while she proceeded
to pluck a lapwing:
"Now I understand you; you wish to be revenged. You hope to rise high,
and I am to whet your knife, and hold the ladder for you. Poor little
man! there, sit down-drink a gulp of milk to cool you, and listen to my
advice. Katuti wants a great deal of money to escape dishonor. She need
only pick it up--it lies at her door." The dwarf looked at the witch in
astonishment.
"The Mohar Paaker is her sister Setchem's son. Is he not?"
"As you say."
"Katuti's daughter Nefert is the wife of your master Mena, and another
would like to tempt the neglected little hen into his yard."
"You mean Paaker, to whom Nefert was promised before she went after
Mena."
"Paaker was with me the day before yesterday."
"With you?"
"Yes, with me, with old Hekt--to buy a love philter. I gave him one, and
as I was curious I went after him, saw him give the water to the little
lady, and found out her name."
"And Nefert drank the magic drink?" asked the dwarf horrified. "Vinegar
and turnip juice," laughed the old witch. "A lord who comes to me to win
a wife is ripe for any thing. Let Nefert ask Paaker for the money, and
the young scapegrace's debts are paid."
"Katuti is proud, and repulsed me severely when I proposed this."
"Then she must sue to Paaker herself for the money. Go back to him, make
him hope that Nefert is inclined to him, tell him what distresses the
ladies, and if he refuses, but only if he refuses, let him see that you
know something of the little dose."
The dwarf looked meditatively on the ground, and then said, looking
admiringly at the old woman: "That is the right thing."
"You will find out the lie without my telling you," mumbled the witch;
"your business is not perhaps such a bad one as it seemed to me at first.
Katuti may thank the ne'er-do-well who staked his father's corpse. You
don't understand me? Well, if you are really the sharpest of them all
over there, what must the others be?"
"You mean that people will speak well of my mistress for sacrificing so
large a sum for the sake--?"
"Whose sake? why speak well of her?" cried the old woman impatiently.
"Here we deal with other things, with actual facts. There stands
Paaker--there the wife of Mena. If the Mohar sacrifices a fortune for
Nefert, he will be her master, and Katuti will not stand in his way; she
knows well enough why her nephew pays for her. But some one else stops
the way, and that is Mena. It is worth while to get him out of the way.
The charioteer stands close to the Pharaoh, and the noose that is flung
at one may easily fall round the neck of the other too. Make the Mohar
your ally, and it may easily happen that your rat-bites may be paid for
with mortal wounds, and Rameses who, if you marched against him openly,
might blow you to the ground, may be hit by a lance thrown from an
ambush. When the throne is clear, the weak legs of the Regent may succeed
in clambering up to it with the help of the priests. Here you
sit-open-mouthed; and I have told you nothing that you might not have
found out for yourself."
"You are a perfect cask of wisdom!" exclaimed the dwarf.
"And now you will go away," said Hekt, "and reveal your schemes to your
mistress and the Regent, and they will be astonished at your cleverness.
To-day you still know that I have shown you what you have to do;
to-morrow you will have forgotten it; and the day after to-morrow you
will believe yourself possessed by the inspiration of the nine great
Gods. I know that; but I cannot give anything for nothing. You live by
your smallness, another makes his living with his hard hands, I earn my
scanty bread by the thoughts of my brain. Listen! when you have half won
Paaker, and Ani shows himself inclined to make use of him, then say to
him that I may know a secret--and I do know one, I alone--which may make
the Mohar the sport of his wishes, and that I may be disposed to sell
it."
"That shall be done! certainly, mother," cried the dwarf. "What do you
wish for?"
"Very little," said the old woman. "Only a permit that makes me free to
do and to practise whatever I please, unmolested even by the priests, and
to receive an honorable burial after my death."
"The Regent will hardly agree to that; for he must avoid everything that
may offend the servants of the Gods."
"And do everything," retorted the old woman, "that can degrade Rameses in
their sight. Ani, do you hear, need not write me a new license, but only
renew the old one granted to me by Rameses when I cured his favorite
horse. They burnt it with my other possessions, when they plundered my
house, and denounced me and my belongings for sorcery. The permit of
Rameses is what I want, nothing more."
"You shall have it," said the dwarf. "Good-by; I am charged to look into
the tomb of our house, and see whether the offerings for the dead are
regularly set out; to pour out fresh essences and have various things
renewed. When Sechet has ceased to rage, and it is cooler, I shall come
by here again, for I should like to call on the paraschites, and see how
the poor child is."
CHAPTER XIII.
During this conversation two men had been busily occupied, in front of
the paraschites' hut, in driving piles into the earth, and stretching a
torn linen cloth upon them.
One of them, old Pinem, whom we have seen tending his grandchild,
requested the other from time to time to consider the sick girl and to
work less noisily.
After they had finished their simple task, and spread a couch of fresh
straw under the awning, they too sat down on the earth, and looked at the
hut before which the surgeon Nebsecht was sitting waiting till the
sleeping girl should wake.
"Who is that?" asked the leech of the old man, pointing to his young
companion, a tall sunburnt soldier with a bushy red beard.
"My son," replied the paraschites, "who is just returned from Syria."
"Uarda's father?" asked Nebsecht.
The soldier nodded assent, and said with a rough voice, but not without
cordiality.
"No one could guess it by looking at us--she is so white and rosy. Her
mother was a foreigner, and she has turned out as delicate as she was. I
am afraid to touch her with my little finger--and there comes a chariot
over the brittle doll, and does not quite crush her, for she is still
alive."
"Without the help of this holy father," said the paraschites, approaching
the surgeon, and kissing his robe, "you would never have seen her alive
again. May the Gods reward thee for what thou hast done for its poor
folks!"
"And we can pay too," cried the soldier, slapping a full purse that hung
at his gridle. "We have taken plunder in Syria, and I will buy a calf,
and give it to thy temple."
"Offer a beast of dough, rather."
[Hogs were sacrificed at the feasts of Selene (the Egyptian
Nechebt). The poor offer pigs made of dough. Herodotus II., 47.
Various kinds of cakes baked in the form of animals are represented
on the monuments.]
replied Nebsecht, "and if you wish to show yourself grateful to me, give
the money to your father, so that he may feed and nurse your child in
accordance with my instructions."
"Hm," murmured the soldier; he took the purse from his girdle, flourished
it in his hand, and said, as he handed it to the paraschites:
"I should have liked to drink it! but take it, father, for the child and
my mother."
While the old man hesitatingly put out his hand for the rich gift, the
soldier recollected himself and said, opening the purse:
"Let me take out a few rings, for to-day I cannot go dry. I have two or
three comrades lodging in the red Tavern. That is right. There,--take the
rest of the rubbish."
Nebsecht nodded approvingly at the soldier, and he, as his father
gratefully kissed the surgeon's hand, exclaimed:
"Make the little one sound, holy father! It, is all over with gifts and
offerings, for I have nothing left; but there are two iron fists and a
breast like the wall of a fortress. If at any time thou dost want help,
call me, and I will protect thee against twenty enemies. Thou hast saved
my child--good! Life for life. I sign myself thy blood-ally--there."
With these words he drew his poniard out of his girdle. He scratched his
arm, and let a few drops of his blood run down on a stone at the feet of
Nebsecht--"Look," he said. "There is my bond, Kaschta has signed himself
thine, and thou canst dispose of my life as of thine own. What I have
said, I have said."
"I am a man of peace," Nebsecht stammered, "And my white robe protects
me. But I believe our patient is awake."
The physician rose, and entered the hut.
Uarda's pretty head lay on her grandmother's lap, and her large blue eyes
turned contentedly on the priest.
"She might get up and go out into the air," said the old woman. "She has
slept long and soundly." The surgeon examined her pulse, and her wound,
on which green leaves were laid.
"Excellent," he said; "who gave you this healing herb?"
The old woman shuddered, and hesitated; but Uarda said fearlessly; "Old
Hekt, who lives over there in the black cave."
"The witch!" muttered Nebsecht. "But we will let the leaves remain; if
they do good, it is no matter where they came from."
"Hekt tasted the drops thou didst give her," said the old woman, "and
agreed that they were good."
"Then we are satisfied with each other," answered Nebsecht, with a smile
of amusement. "We will carry you now into the open air, little maid; for
the air in here is as heavy as lead, and your damaged lung requires
lighter nourishment."
"Yes, let me go out," said the girl. "It is well that thou hast not
brought back the other with thee, who tormented me with his vows."
"You mean blind Teta," said Nebsecht, "he will not come again; but the
young priest who soothed your father, when he repulsed the princess, will
visit you. He is kindly disposed, and you should--you should--"
"Pentaur will come?" said the girl eagerly.
"Before midday. But how do you know his name?"
"I know him," said Uarda decidedly.
The surgeon looked at her surprised.
"You must not talk any more," he said, "for your cheeks are glowing, and
the fever may return. We have arranged a tent for you, and now we will
carry you into the open air."
"Not yet," said the girl. "Grandmother, do my hair for me, it is so
heavy."
With these words she endeavored to part her mass of long reddish-brown
hair with her slender hands, and to free it from the straws that had got
entangled in it.
"Lie still," said the surgeon, in a warning voice.
"But it is so heavy," said the sick girl, smiling and showing Nebsecht
her abundant wealth of golden hair as if it were a fatiguing burden.
"Come, grandmother, and help me."
The old woman leaned over the child, and combed her long locks carefully
with a coarse comb made of grey horn, gently disengaged the straws from
the golden tangle, and at last laid two thick long plaits on her
granddaughter's shoulders.
Nebsecht knew that every movement of the wounded girl might do mischief,
and his impulse was to stop the old woman's proceedings, but his tongue
seemed spell-bound. Surprised, motionless, and with crimson cheeks, he
stood opposite the girl, and his eyes followed every movement of her
hands with anxious observation.
She did not notice him.
When the old woman laid down the comb Uarda drew a long breath.
"Grandmother," she said, "give me the mirror." The old woman brought a
shard of dimly glazed, baked clay. The girl turned to the light,
contemplated the undefined reflection for a moment, and said:
"I have not seen a flower for so long, grandmother."
"Wait, child," she replied; she took from a jug the rose, which the
princess had laid on the bosom of her grandchild, and offered it to her.
Before Uarda could take it, the withered petals fell, and dropped upon
her. The surgeon stooped, gathered them up, and put them into the child's
hand.
"How good you are!" she said; "I am called Uarda--like this flower--and I
love roses and the fresh air. Will you carry me out now?"
Nebsecht called the paraschites, who came into the hut with his son, and
they carried the girl out into the air, and laid her under the humble
tent they had contrived for her. The soldier's knees trembled while he
held the light burden of his daughter's weight in his strong hands, and
he sighed when he laid her down on the mat.
"How blue the sky is!" cried Uarda. "Ah! grandfather has watered my
pomegranate, I thought so! and there come my doves! give me some corn in
my hand, grandmother. How pleased they are."
The graceful birds, with black rings round their reddish-grey necks, flew
confidingly to her, and took the corn that she playfully laid between her
lips.
Nebsecht looked on with astonishment at this pretty play. He felt as if a
new world had opened to him, and some new sense, hitherto unknown to him,
had been revealed to him within his breast. He silently sat down in front
of the but, and drew the picture of a rose on the sand with a reed-stem
that he picked up.
Perfect stillness was around him; the doves even had flown up, and
settled on the roof. Presently the dog barked, steps approached; Uarda
lifted herself up and said:
"Grandmother, it is the priest Pentaur."
"Who told you?" asked the old woman.
"I know it," answered the girl decidedly, and in a few moments a sonorous
voice cried: "Good day to you. How is your invalid?"
Pentaur was soon standing by Uarda; pleased to hear Nebsecht's good
report, and with the sweet face of the girl. He had some flowers in his
hand, that a happy maiden had laid on the altar of the Goddess Hathor,
which he had served since the previous day, and he gave them to the sick
girl, who took them with a blush, and held them between her clasped
hands.
"The great Goddess whom I serve sends you these," said Pentaur, "and they
will bring you healing. Continue to resemble them. You are pure and fair
like them, and your course henceforth may be like theirs. As the sun
gives life to the grey horizon, so you bring joy to this dark but.
Preserve your innocence, and wherever you go you will bring love, as
flowers spring in every spot that is trodden by the golden foot of
Hathor.
[Hathor is frequently called "the golden," particularly at Dendera
She has much in common with the "golden Aphrodite."]
May her blessing rest upon you!"
He had spoken the last words half to the old couple and half to Uarda,
and was already turning to depart when, behind a heap of dried reeds that
lay close to the awning over the girl, the bitter cry of a child was
heard, and a little boy came forward who held, as high as he could reach,
a little cake, of which the dog, who seemed to know him well, had
snatched half.
"How do you come here, Scherau?" the paraschites asked the weeping boy;
the unfortunate child that Hekt was bringing up as a dwarf.
"I wanted," sobbed the little one, "to bring the cake to Uarda. She is
ill--I had so much--"
"Poor child," said the paraschites, stroking the boy's hair; "there-give
it to Uarda."
Scherau went up to the sick girl, knelt down by her, and whispered with
streaming eyes:
"Take it! It is good, and very sweet, and if I get another cake, and Hekt
will let me out, I will bring it to you.
"Thank you, good little Scherau," said Uarda, kissing the child. Then she
turned to Pentaur and said:
"For weeks he has had nothing but papyrus-pith, and lotus-bread, and now
he brings me the cake which grandmother gave old Hekt yesterday."
The child blushed all over, and stammered:
"It is only half--but I did not touch it. Your dog bit out this piece,
and this."
He touched the honey with the tip of his finger, and put it to his lips.
"I was a long time behind the reeds there, for I did not like to come out
because of the strangers there." He pointed to Nebsecht and Pentaur. "But
now I must go home," he cried.
The child was going, but Pentaur stopped him, seized him, lifted him up
in his arms and kissed him; saying, as he turned to Nebsecht:
"They were wise, who represented Horus--the symbol of the triumph of good
over evil and of purity over the impure--in the form of a child. Bless
you, my little friend; be good, and always give away what you have to
make others happy. It will not make your house rich--but it will your
heart!"
Scherau clung to the priest, and involuntarily raised his little hand to
stroke Pentaur's cheek. An unknown tenderness had filled his little
heart, and he felt as if he must throw his arms round the poet's neck and
cry upon his breast.
But Pentaur set him down on the ground, and he trotted down into the
valley. There he paused. The sun was high in the heavens, and he must
return to the witch's cave and his board, but he would so much like to go
a little farther--only as far as to the king's tomb, which was quite
near.
Close by the door of this tomb was a thatch of palm-branches, and under
this the sculptor Batau, a very aged man, was accustomed to rest. The old
man was deaf, but he passed for the best artist of his time, and with
justice; he had designed the beautiful pictures and hieroglyphic
inscriptions in Seti's splendid buildings at Abydos and Thebes, as well
as in the tomb of that prince, and he was now working at the decoration
of the walls in the grave of Rameses.
Scherau had often crept close up to him, and thoughtfully watched him at
work, and then tried himself to make animal and human figures out of a
bit of clay.
One day the old man had observed him.
The sculptor had silently taken his humble attempt out of his hand, and
had returned it to him with a smile of encouragement.
From that time a peculiar tie had sprung up between the two. Scherau
would venture to sit down by the sculptor, and try to imitate his
finished images. Not a word was exchanged between them, but often the
deaf old man would destroy the boy's works, often on the contrary improve
them with a touch of his own hand, and not seldom nod at him to encourage
him.
When he staid away the old man missed his pupil, and Scherau's happiest
hours were those which he passed at his side.
He was not forbidden to take some clay home with him. There, when the old
woman's back was turned, he moulded a variety of images which he
destroyed as soon as they were finished.
While he lay on his rack his hands were left free, and he tried to
reproduce the various forms which lived in his imagination, he forgot the
present in his artistic attempts, and his bitter lot acquired a flavor of
the sweetest enjoyment.
But to-day it was too late; he must give up his visit to the tomb of
Rameses.
Once more he looked back at the hut, and then hurried into the dark cave.
CHAPTER XIV.
Pentauer also soon quitted the but of the paraschites.
Lost in meditation, he went along the hill-path which led to the temple
which Ameni had put under his direction.
[This temple is well proportioned, and remains in good preservation.
Copies of the interesting pictures discovered in it are to be found
in the "Fleet of an Egyptian queen" by Dutnichen. Other details may
be found in Lepsius' Monuments of Egypt, and a plan of the place has
recently been published by Mariette.]
He foresaw many disturbed and anxious hours in the immediate future.
The sanctuary of which he was the superior, had been dedicated to her own
memory, and to the goddess Hathor, by Hatasu,
[The daughter of Thotmes I., wife of her brother Thotmes II., and
predecessor of her second brother Thotmes III. An energetic woman
who executed great works, and caused herself to be represented with
the helmet and beard-case of a man.]
a great queen of the dethroned dynasty.
The priests who served it were endowed with peculiar chartered
privileges, which hitherto had been strictly respected. Their dignity was
hereditary, going down from father to son, and they had the right of
choosing their director from among themselves.
Now their chief priest Rui was ill and dying, and Ameni, under whose
jurisdiction they came, had, without consulting them, sent the young poet
Pentaur to fill his place.
They had received the intruder most unwillingly, and combined strongly
against him when it became evident that he was disposed to establish a
severe rule and to abolish many abuses which had become established
customs.
They had devolved the greeting of the rising sun on the temple-servants;
Pentaur required that the younger ones at least should take part in
chanting the morning hymn, and himself led the choir. They had trafficked
with the offerings laid on the altar of the Goddess; the new master
repressed this abuse, as well as the extortions of which they were guilty
towards women in sorrow, who visited the temple of Hathor in greater
number than any other sanctuary.
The poet-brought up in the temple of Seti to self-control, order,
exactitude, and decent customs, deeply penetrated with a sense of the
dignity of his position, and accustomed to struggle with special zeal
against indolence of body and spirit--was disgusted with the slothful
life and fraudulent dealings of his subordinates; and the deeper insight
which yesterday's experience had given him into the poverty and sorrow of
human existence, made him resolve with increased warmth that he would
awake them to a new life.
The conviction that the lazy herd whom he commanded was called upon to
pour consolation into a thousand sorrowing hearts, to dry innumerable
tears, and to clothe the dry sticks of despair with the fresh verdure of
hope, urged him to strong measures.
Yesterday he had seen how, with calm indifference, they had listened to
the deserted wife, the betrayed maiden, to the woman, who implored the
withheld blessing of children, to the anxious mother, the forlorn
widow,--and sought only to take advantage of sorrow, to extort gifts for
the Goddess, or better still for their own pockets or belly.
Now he was nearing the scene of his new labors.
There stood the reverend building, rising stately from the valley on four
terraces handsomely and singularly divided, and resting on the western
side against the high amphitheatre of yellow cliffs.
On the closely-joined foundation stones gigantic hawks were carved in
relief, each with the emblem of life, and symbolized Horus, the son of
the Goddess, who brings all that fades to fresh bloom, and all that dies
to resurrection.
On each terrace stood a hall open to the east, and supported on two and
twenty archaic pillars.
[Polygonal pillars, which were used first in tomb-building under the
12th dynasty, and after the expulsion of the Hyksos under the kings
of the 17th and 18th, in public buildings; but under the subsequent
races of kings they ceased to be employed.]
On their inner walls elegant pictures and inscriptions in the finest
sculptured work recorded, for the benefit of posterity, the great things
that Hatasu had done with the help of the Gods of Thebes.
There were the ships which she had to send to Punt
[Arabia; apparently also the coast of east Africa south of Egypt as
far as Somali. The latest of the lists published by Mariette, of
the southern nations conquered by Thotmes III., mentions it. This
list was found on the pylon of the temple of Karnak.]
to enrich Egypt with the treasures of the east; there the wonders brought
to Thebes from Arabia might be seen; there were delineated the houses of
the inhabitants of the land of frankincense, and all the fishes of the
Red Sea, in distinct and characteristic outline.
On the third and fourth terraces were the small adjoining rooms of Hatasu
and her brothers Thotmes II. and III., which were built against the rock,
and entered by granite doorways. In them purifications were accomplished,
the images of the Goddess worshipped, and the more distinguished
worshippers admitted to confess. The sacred cows of the Goddess were kept
in a side-building.
As Pentaur approached the great gate of the terrace-temple, he became the
witness of a scene which filled him with resentment.
A woman implored to be admitted into the forecourt, to pray at the altar
of the Goddess for her husband, who was very ill, but the sleek
gate-keeper drove her back with rough words.
"It is written up," said he, pointing to the inscription over the gate,
"only the purified may set their foot across this threshold, and you
cannot be purified but by the smoke of incense."
"Then swing the censer for me," said the woman, and take this silver
ring--it is all I have."
"A silver ring!" cried the porter, indignantly. "Shall the goddess be
impoverished for your sake! The grains of Anta, that would be used in
purifying you, would cost ten times as much."
"But I have no more," replied the woman, "my husband, for whom I come to
pray, is ill; he cannot work, and my children--"
"You fatten them up and deprive the goddess of her due," cried the
gate-keeper. "Three rings down, or I shut the gate."
"Be merciful," said the woman, weeping. "What will become of us if Hathor
does not help my husband?"
"Will our goddess fetch the doctor?" asked the porter. "She has something
to do besides curing sick starvelings. Besides, that is not her office.
Go to Imhotep or to Chunsu the counsellor, or to the great Techuti
herself, who helps the sick. There is no quack medicine to be got here."
"I only want comfort in my trouble," said the woman.
"Comfort!" laughed the gate-keeper, measuring the comely young woman with
his eye. "That you may have cheaper."
The woman turned pale, and drew back from the hand the man stretched out
towards her.
At this moment Pentaur, full of wrath, stepped between them.
He raised his hand in blessing over the woman, who bent low before him,
and said, "Whoever calls fervently on the Divinity is near to him. You
are pure. Enter."
As soon as she had disappeared within the temple, the priest turned to
the gate-keeper and exclaimed: "Is this how you serve the goddess, is
this how you take advantage of a heart-wrung woman? Give me the keys of
this gate. Your office is taken from you, and early to-morrow you go out
in the fields, and keep the geese of Hathor."
The porter threw himself on his knees with loud outcries; but Pentaur
turned his back upon him, entered the sanctuary, and mounted the steps
which led to his dwelling on the third terrace.
A few priests whom he passed turned their backs upon him, others looked
down at their dinners, eating noisily, and making as if they did not see
him. They had combined strongly, and were determined to expel the
inconvenient intruder at any price.
Having reached his room, which had been splendidly decorated for his
predecessor, Pentaur laid aside his new insignia, comparing sorrowfully
the past and the present.
To what an exchange Ameni had condemned him! Here, wherever he looked, he
met with sulkiness and aversion; while, when he walked through the courts
of the House of Seti, a hundred boys would hurry towards him, and cling
affectionately to his robe. Honored there by great and small, his every
word had had its value; and when each day he gave utterance to his
thoughts, what he bestowed came back to him refined by earnest discourse
with his associates and superiors, and he gained new treasures for his
inner life.
"What is rare," thought he, "is full of charm; and yet how hard it is to
do without what is habitual!" The occurrences of the last few days passed
before his mental sight. Bent-Anat's image appeared before him, and took
a more and more distinct and captivating form. His heart began to beat
wildly, the blood rushed faster through his veins; he hid his face in his
hands, and recalled every glance, every word from her lips.
"I follow thee willingly," she had said to him before the hut of the
paraschites. Now he asked himself whether he were worthy of such a
follower.
He had indeed broken through the old bonds, but not to disgrace the house
that was dear to him, only to let new light into its dim chambers.
"To do what we have earnestly felt to be right," said he to himself, "may
seem worthy of punishment to men, but cannot before God."
He sighed and walked out into the terrace in a mood of lofty excitement,
and fully resolved to do here nothing but what was right, to lay the
foundation of all that was good.
"We men," thought he, "prepare sorrow when we come into the world, and
lamentation when we leave it; and so it is our duty in the intermediate
time to fight with suffering, and to sow the seeds of joy. There are many
tears here to be wiped away. To work then!" The poet found none of his
subordinates on the upper terrace. They had all met in the forecourt of
the temple, and were listening to the gate-keeper's tale, and seemed to
sympathize with his angry complaint--against whom Pentaur well knew.
With a firm step he went towards them and said:
"I have expelled this man from among us, for he is a disgrace to us.
To-morrow he quits the temple."
"I will go at once," replied the gate-keeper defiantly, "and in behalf of
the holy fathers (here he cast a significant glance at the priests), ask
the high-priest Ameni if the unclean are henceforth to be permitted to
enter this sanctuary."
He was already approaching the gate, but Pentaur stepped before him,
saying resolutely:
"You will remain here and keep the geese to-morrow, day after to-morrow,
and until I choose to pardon you." The gate-keeper looked enquiringly at
the priests. Not one moved.
"Go back into your house," said Pentaur, going closer to him.
The porter obeyed.
Pentaur locked the door of the little room, gave the key to one of the
temple-servants, and said: "Perform his duty, watch the man, and if he
escapes you will go after the geese to-morrow too. See, my friends, how
many worshippers kneel there before our altars--go and fulfil your
office. I will wait in the confessional to receive complaints, and to
administer comfort."
The priests separated and went to the votaries. Pentaur once more mounted
the steps, and sat down in the narrow confessional which was closed by a
curtain; on its wall the picture of Hatasu was to be seen, drawing the
milk of eternal life from the udders of the cow Hathor.
He had hardly taken his place when a temple-servant announced the arrival
of a veiled lady. The bearers of her litter were thickly veiled, and she
had requested to be conducted to the confession chamber. The servant
handed Pentaur a token by which the high-priest of the great temple of
Anion, on the other bank of the Nile, granted her the privilege of
entering the inner rooms of the temple with the Rechiu, and to
communicate with all priests, even with the highest of the initiated.
The poet withdrew behind a curtain, and awaited the stranger with a
disquiet that seemed to him all the more singular that he had frequently
found himself in a similar position. Even the noblest dignitaries had
often been transferred to him by Ameni when they had come to the temple
to have their visions interpreted.
A tall female figure entered the still, sultry stone room, sank on her
knees, and put up a long and absorbed prayer before the figure of Hathor.
Pentaur also, seen by no one, lifted his hands, and fervently addressed
himself to the omnipresent spirit with a prayer for strength and purity.
Just as his arms fell the lady raised her head. It was as though the
prayers of the two souls had united to mount upwards together.
The veiled lady rose and dropped her veil.
It was Bent-Anat.
In the agitation of her soul she had sought the goddess Hathor, who
guides the beating heart of woman and spins the threads which bind man
and wife.
"High mistress of heaven! many-named and beautiful!" she began to pray
aloud, "golden Hathor! who knowest grief and ecstasy--the present and the
future--draw near to thy child, and guide the spirit of thy servant, that
he may advise me well. I am the daughter of a father who is great and
noble and truthful as one of the Gods. He advises me--he will never
compel me--to yield to a man whom I can never love. Nay, another has met
me, humble in birth but noble in spirit and in gifts--"
Thus far, Pentaur, incapable of speech, had overheard the princess.
Ought he to remain concealed and hear all her secret, or should he step
forth and show himself to her? His pride called loudly to him: "Now she
will speak your name; you are the chosen one of the fairest and noblest."
But another voice to which he had accustomed himself to listen in severe
self-discipline made itself heard, and said--"Let her say nothing in
ignorance, that she need be ashamed of if she knew."
He blushed for her;--he opened the curtain and went forward into the
presence of Bent-Anat.
The Princess drew back startled.
"Art thou Pentaur," she asked, "or one of the Immortals?"
"I am Pentaur," he answered firmly, "a man with all the weakness of his
race, but with a desire for what is good. Linger here and pour out thy
soul to our Goddess; my whole life shall be a prayer for thee."
The poet looked full at her; then he turned quickly, as if to avoid a
danger, towards the door of the confessional.
Bent-Anat called his name, and he stayed his steps:
"The daughter of Rameses," she said, "need offer no justification of her
appearance here, but the maiden Bent-Anat," and she colored as she spoke,
"expected to find, not thee, but the old priest Rui, and she desired his
advice. Now leave me to pray."
Bent-Anat sank on her knees, and Pentaur went out into the open air.
When the princess too had left the confessional, loud voices were heard
on the south side of the terrace on which they stood.
She hastened towards the parapet.
"Hail to Pentaur!" was shouted up from below. The poet rushed forward,
and placed himself near the princess. Both looked down into the valley,
and could be seen by all.
"Hail, hail! Pentaur," was called doubly loud, "Hail to our teacher! come
back to the House of Seti. Down with the persecutors of Pentaur--down
with our oppressors!"
At the head of the youths, who, so soon as they had found out whither the
poet had been exiled, had escaped to tell him that they were faithful to
him, stood the prince Rameri, who nodded triumphantly to his sister, and
Anana stepped forward to inform the honored teacher in a solemn and
well-studied speech, that, in the event of Ameni refusing to recall him,
they had decided requesting their fathers to place them at another
school.
The young sage spoke well, and Bent-Anat followed his words, not without
approbation; but Pentaur's face grew darker, and before his favorite
disciple had ended his speech he interrupted him sternly.
His voice was at first reproachful, and then complaining, and loud as he
spoke, only sorrow rang in his tones, and not anger.
"In truth," he concluded, "every word that I have spoken to you I could
but find it in me to regret, if it has contributed to encourage you to
this mad act. You were born in palaces; learn to obey, that later you may
know how to command. Back to your school! You hesitate? Then I will come
out against you with the watchman, and drive you back, for you do me and
yourselves small honor by such a proof of affection. Go back to the
school you belong to."
The school-boys dared make no answer, but surprised and disenchanted
turned to go home.
Bent-Anat cast down her eyes as she met those of her brother, who
shrugged his shoulders, and then she looked half shyly, half
respectfully, at the poet; but soon again her eyes turned to the plain
below, for thick dust-clouds whirled across it, the sound of hoofs and
the rattle of wheels became audible, and at the same moment the chariot
of Septah, the chief haruspex, and a vehicle with the heavily-armed guard
of the House of Seti, stopped near the terrace.
The angry old man sprang quickly to the ground, called the host of
escaped pupils to him in a stern voice, ordered the guard to drive them
back to the school, and hurried up to the temple gates like a vigorous
youth. The priests received him with the deepest reverence, and at once
laid their complaints before him.
He heard them willingly, but did not let them discuss the matter; then,
though with some difficulty, he quickly mounted the steps, down which
Bent-Anat came towards him.
The princess felt that she would divert all the blame and
misunderstanding to herself, if Septah recognized her; her hand
involuntarily reached for her veil, but she drew it back quickly, looked
with quiet dignity into the old man's eyes, which flashed with anger, and
proudly passed by him. The haruspex bowed, but without giving her his
blessing, and when he met Pentaur on the second terrace, ordered that the
temple should be cleared of worshippers.
This was done in a few minutes, and the priests were witnesses of the
most painful, scene which had occurred for years in their quiet
sanctuary.
The head of the haruspices of the House of Seti was the most determined
adversary of the poet who had so early been initiated into the mysteries,
and whose keen intellect often shook those very ramparts which the
zealous old man had, from conviction, labored to strengthen from his
youth up. The vexatious occurrences, of which he had been a witness at
the House of Seti, and here also but a few minutes since, he regarded as
the consequence of the unbridled license of an ill-regulated imagination,
and in stern language he called Pentaur to account for the "revolt" of
the school-boys.
"And besides our boys," he exclaimed, "you have led the daughter of
Rameses astray. She was not yet purged of her uncleanness, and yet you
tempt her to an assignation, not even in the stranger's quarters--but in
the holy house of this pure Divinity." Undeserved praise is dangerous to
the weak; unjust blame may turn even the strong from the right way.
Pentaur indignantly repelled the accusations of the old man, called them
unworthy of his age, his position, and his name, and for fear that his
anger might carry him too far, turned his back upon him; but the haruspex
ordered him to remain, and in his presence questioned the priests, who
unanimously accused the poet of having admitted to the temple another
unpurified woman besides Bent-Anat, and of having expelled the
gate-keeper and thrown him into prison for opposing the crime.
The haruspex ordered that the "ill-used man" should be set at liberty.
Pentaur resisted this command, asserted his right to govern in this
temple, and with a trembling voice requested Septah to quit the place.
The haruspex showed him Ameni's ring, by which, during his residence in
Thebes, he made him his plenipotentiary, degraded Pentaur from his
dignity, but ordered him not to quit the sanctuary till further notice,
and then finally departed from the temple of Hatasu.
Pentaur had yielded in silence to the signet of his chief, and returned
to the confessional in which he had met Bent-Anat. He felt his soul
shaken to its very foundations, his thoughts were confused, his feelings
struggling with each other; he shivered, and when he heard the laughter
of the priests and the gatekeeper, who were triumphing in their easy
victory, he started and shuddered like a man who in passing a mirror
should see a brand of disgrace on his brow.
But by degrees he recovered himself, his spirit grew clearer, and when he
left the little room to look towards the east--where, on the farther
shore, rose the palace where Bent-Anat must be--a deep contempt for his
enemies filled his soul, and a proud feeling of renewed manly energy. He
did not conceal from himself that he had enemies; that a time of struggle
was beginning for him; but he looked forward to it like a young hero to
the morning of his first battle.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Bearers of ill ride faster than the messengers of weal
Do not spoil the future for the sake of the present
Exhibit one's happiness in the streets, and conceal one's misery
Impartial looker-on sees clearer than the player
Learn to obey, that later you may know how to command
Man has nothing harder to endure than uncertainty
Many creditors are so many allies
One should give nothing up for lost excepting the dead
Our thinkers are no heroes, and our heroes are no sages
Overbusy friends are more damaging than intelligent enemies
Prepare sorrow when we come into the world
The experienced love to signify their superiority
We quarrel with no one more readily than with the benefactor
UARDA
Volume 4.
By Georg Ebers
CHAPTER XV.
The afternoon shadows were already growing long, when a splendid chariot
drew up to the gates of the terrace-temple. Paaker, the chief pioneer,
stood up in it, driving his handsome and fiery Syrian horses. Behind him
stood an Ethiopian slave, and his big dog followed the swift team with
his tongue out.
As he approached the temple he heard himself called, and checked the pace
of his horses. A tiny man hurried up to him, and, as soon as he had
recognized in him the dwarf Nemu, he cried angrily:
"Is it for you, you rascal, that I stop my drive? What do you want?"
"To crave," said the little man, bowing humbly, "that, when thy business
in the city of the dead is finished, thou wilt carry me back to Thebes."
"You are Mena's dwarf?" asked the pioneer.
"By no means," replied Nemu. "I belong to his neglected wife, the lady
Nefert. I can only cover the road very slowly with my little legs, while
the hoofs of your horses devour the way-as a crocodile does his prey."
"Get up!" said Paaker. "Did you come here on foot?"
"No, my lord," replied Nemu, "on an ass; but a demon entered into the
beast, and has struck it with sickness. I had to leave it on the road.
The beasts of Anubis will have a better supper than we to-night."
"Things are not done handsomely then at your mistress's house?" asked
Paaker.
"We still have bread," replied Nemu, "and the Nile is full of water. Much
meat is not necessary for women and dwarfs, but our last cattle take a
form which is too hard for human teeth."
The pioneer did not understand the joke, and looked enquiringly at the
dwarf.
"The form of money," said the little man, "and that cannot be chewed;
soon that will be gone too, and then the point will be to find a recipe
for making nutritious cakes out of earth, water, and palm-leaves. It
makes very little difference to me, a dwarf does not need much--but the
poor tender lady!"
Paaker touched his horses with such a violent stroke of his whip that
they reared high, and it took all his strength to control their spirit.
"The horses' jaws will be broken," muttered the slave behind. "What a
shame with such fine beasts!"
"Have you to pay for them?" growled Paaker. Then he turned again to the
dwarf, and asked:
"Why does Mena let the ladies want?"
"He no longer cares for his wife," replied the dwarf, casting his eyes
down sadly. "At the last division of the spoil he passed by the gold and
silver; and took a foreign woman into his tent. Evil demons have blinded
him, for where is there a woman fairer than Nefert?"
"You love your mistress."
"As my very eyes!"
During this conversation they had arrived at the terrace-temple. Paaker
threw the reins to the slave, ordered him to wait with Nemu, and turned
to the gate-keeper to explain to him, with the help of a handful of gold,
his desire of being conducted to Pentaur, the chief of the temple.
The gate-keeper, swinging a censer before him with a hasty action,
admitted him into the sanctuary. "You will find him on the third terrace,"
he said, "but he is no longer our superior."
"They said so in the temple of Seti, whence I have just come," replied
Paaker.
The porter shrugged his shoulders with a sneer, and said: "The palm-tree
that is quickly set up falls down more quickly still." Then he desired a
servant to conduct the stranger to Pentaur.
The poet recognized the Mohar at once, asked his will, and learned that
he was come to have a wonderful vision interpreted by him.
Paaker explained before relating his dream, that he did not ask this
service for nothing; and when the priest's countenance darkened he added:
"I will send a fine beast for sacrifice to the Goddess if the
interpretation is favorable."
"And in the opposite case?" asked Pentaur, who, in the House of Seti,
never would have anything whatever to do with the payments of the
worshippers or the offerings of the devout.
"I will offer a sheep," replied Paaker, who did not perceive the subtle
irony that lurked in Pentaur's words, and who was accustomed to pay for
the gifts of the Divinity in proportion to their value to himself.
Pentaur thought of the verdict which Gagabu, only two evenings since, had
passed on the Mohar, and it occurred to him that he would test how far
the man's superstition would lead him. So he asked, while he suppressed a
smile:
"And if I can foretell nothing bad, but also nothing actually good?"--
"An antelope, and four geese," answered Paaker promptly.
"But if I were altogether disinclined to put myself at your service?"
asked Pentaur. "If I thought it unworthy of a priest to let the Gods be
paid in proportion to their favors towards a particular person, like
corrupt officials; if I now showed you--you--and I have known you from a
school-boy, that there are things that cannot be bought with inherited
wealth?"
The pioneer drew back astonished and angry, but Pentaur continued
calmly--
"I stand here as the minister of the Divinity; and nevertheless, I see by
your countenance, that you were on the point of lowering yourself by
showing to me your violent and extortionate spirit.
"The Immortals send us dreams, not to give us a foretaste of joy or
caution us against danger, but to remind us so to prepare our souls that
we may submit quietly to suffer evil, and with heartfelt gratitude accept
the good; and so gain from each profit for the inner life. I will not
interpret your dream! Come without gifts, but with a humble heart, and
with longing for inward purification, and I will pray to the Gods that
they may enlighten me, and give you such interpretation of even evil
dreams that they may be fruitful in blessing.
"Leave me, and quit the temple!"
Paaker ground his teeth with rage; but he controlled himself, and only
said as he slowly withdrew:
"If your office had not already been taken from you, the insolence with
which you have dismissed me might have cost you your place. We shall meet
again, and then you shall learn that inherited wealth in the right hand
is worth more than you will like."
"Another enemy!" thought the poet, when he found himself alone and stood
erect in the glad consciousness of having done right.
During Paaker's interview with the poet, the dwarf Nemu had chatted to
the porter, and had learned from him all that had previously occurred.
Paaker mounted his chariot pale with rage, and whipped on his horses
before the dwarf had clambered up the step; but the slave seized the
little man, and set him carefully on his feet behind his master.
"The villian, the scoundrel! he shall repent it--Pentaur is he called!
the hound!" muttered the pioneer to himself.
The dwarf lost none of his words, and when he caught the name of Pentaur
he called to the pioneer, and said--
"They have appointed a scoundrel to be the superior of this temple; his
name is Pentaur. He was expelled from the temple of Seti for his
immorality, and now he has stirred up the younger scholars to rebellion,
and invited unclean women into the temple. My lips hardly dare repeat it,
but the gate-keeper swore it was true--that the chief haruspex from the
House of Seti found him in conference with Bent-Anat, the king's
daughter, and at once deprived him of his office."
"With Bent-Anat?" replied the pioneer, and muttered, before the dwarf
could find time to answer, "Indeed, with Bent-Anat!" and he recalled the
day before yesterday, when the princess had remained so long with the
priest in the hovel of the paraschites, while he had talked to Nefert and
visited the old witch.
"I should not care to be in the priest's skin," observed Nemu, "for
though Rameses is far away, the Regent Ani is near enough. He is a
gentleman who seldom pounces, but even the dove won't allow itself to be
attacked in is own nest."
Paaker looked enquiringly at Nemu.
"I know," said the dwarf "Ani has asked Rameses' consent to marry his
daughter."
"He has already asked it," continued the dwarf as Paaker smiled
incredulously, "and the king is not disinclined to give it. He likes
making marriages--as thou must know pretty well."
"I?" said Paaker, surprised.
"He forced Katuti to give her daughter as wife to the charioteer. That I
know from herself. She can prove it to thee."
Paaker shook his head in denial, but the dwarf continued eagerly, "Yes,
yes! Katuti would have had thee for her son-in-law, and it was the king,
not she, who broke off the betrothal. Thou must at the same time have
been inscribed in the black books of the high gate, for Rameses used many
hard names for thee. One of us is like a mouse behind the curtain, which
knows a good deal."
Paaker suddenly brought his horses to a stand-still, threw the reins to
the slave, sprang from the chariot, called the dwarf to his side, and
said:
"We will walk from here to the river, and you shall tell me all you know;
but if an untrue word passes your lips I will have you eaten by my dogs."
"I know thou canst keep thy word," gasped the little man. "But go a
little slower if thou wilt, for I am quite out of breath. Let Katuti
herself tell thee how it all came about. Rameses compelled her to give
her daughter to the charioteer. I do not know what he said of thee, but
it was not complimentary. My poor mistress! she let herself be caught by
the dandy, the ladies' man-and now she may weep and wail. When I pass the
great gates of thy house with Katuti, she often sighs and complains
bitterly. And with good reason, for it soon will be all over with our
noble estate, and we must seek an asylum far away among the Amu in the
low lands; for the nobles will soon avoid us as outcasts. Thou mayst be
glad that thou hast not linked thy fate to ours; but I have a faithful
heart, and will share my mistress's trouble."
"You speak riddles," said Paaker, "what have they to fear?"
The dwarf now related how Nefert's brother had gambled away the mummy of
his father, how enormous was the sum he had lost, and that degradation
must overtake Katuti, and her daughter with her.
"Who can save them," he whimpered. "Her shameless husband squanders his
inheritance and his prize-money. Katuti is poor, and the little words
"Give me! scare away friends as the cry of a hawk scares the chickens. My
poor mistress!"
"It is a large sum," muttered Paaker to himself. "It is enormous!" sighed
the dwarf, "and where is it to be found in these hard times? It would
have been different with us, if--ah if--. And it would be a form of
madness which I do not believe in, that Nefert should still care for her
braggart husband. She thinks as much of thee as of him."
Paaker looked at the dwarf half incredulous and half threatening.
"Ay--of thee," repeated Nemu. "Since our excursion to the Necropolis the
day before yesterday it was--she speaks only of thee, praising thy
ability, and thy strong manly spirit. It is as if some charm obliged her
to think of thee."
The pioneer began to walk so fast that his small companion once more had
to ask him to moderate his steps.
They gained the shore in silence, where Paaker's boat was waiting, which
also conveyed his chariot. He lay down in the little cabin, called the
dwarf to him, and said:
"I am Katuti's nearest relative; we are now reconciled; why does she not
turn to me in her difficulty?"
"Because she is proud, and thy blood flows in her veins. Sooner would she
die with her child--she said so--than ask thee, against whom she sinned,
for an "alms."
"She did think of me then?"
"At once; nor did she doubt thy generosity. She esteems thee highly--I
repeat it; and if an arrow from a Cheta's bow or a visitation of the Gods
attained Mena, she would joyfully place her child in thine arms, and
Nefert believe me has not forgotten her playfellow. The day before
yesterday, when she came home from the Necropolis, and before the letter
had come from the camp, she was full of thee--
["To be full (meh) of any one" is used in the Egyptian language for
"to be in love with any one."]
nay called to thee in her dreams; I know it from Kandake, her black
maid." The pioneer looked down and said:
"How extraordinary! and the same night I had a vision in which your
mistress appeared to me; the insolent priest in the temple of Hathor
should have interpreted it to me."
"And he refused? the fool! but other folks understand dreams, and I am
not the worst of them--Ask thy servant. Ninety-nine times out of a
hundred my interpretations come true. How was the vision?"
"I stood by the Nile," said Paaker, casting down his eyes and drawing
lines with his whip through the wool of the cabin rug. "The water was
still, and I saw Nefert standing on the farther bank, and beckoning to
me. I called to her, and she stepped on the water, which bore her up as
if it were this carpet. She went over the water dry-foot as if it were
the stony wilderness. A wonderful sight! She came nearer to me, and
nearer, and already I had tried to take her hand, when she ducked under
like a swan. I went into the water to seize her, and when she came up
again I clasped her in my arms; but then the strangest thing
happened--she flowed away, she dissolved like the snow on the Syrian
hills, when you take it in your hand, and yet it was not the same, for
her hair turned to water-lilies, and her eyes to blue fishes that swam
away merrily, and her lips to twigs of coral that sank at once, and from
her body grew a crocodile, with a head like Mena, that laughed and
gnashed its teeth at me. Then I was seized with blind fury; I threw
myself upon him with a drawn sword, he fastened his teeth in my flesh, I
pierced his throat with my weapon; the Nile was dark with our streaming
blood, and so we fought and fought--it lasted an eternity--till I awoke."
Paaker drew a deep breath as he ceased speaking; as if his wild dream
tormented him again.
The dwarf had listened with eager attention, but several minutes passed
before he spoke.
"A strange dream," he said, "but the interpretation as to the future is
not hard to find. Nefert is striving to reach thee, she longs to be
thine, but if thou dost fancy that she is already in thy grasp she will
elude thee; thy hopes will melt like ice, slip away like sand, if thou
dost not know how to put the crocodile out of the way."
At this moment the boat struck the landing-place. The pioneer started up,
and cried, "We have reached the end!"
"We have reached the end," echoed the little man with meaning. "There is
only a narrow bridge to step over."
When they both stood on the shore, the dwarf said,
"I have to thank thee for thy hospitality, and when I can serve thee
command me."
"Come here," cried the pioneer, and drew Nemu away with him under the
shade of a sycamore veiled in the half light of the departing sun.
"What do you mean by a bridge which we must step over? I do not
understand the flowers of speech, and desire plain language."
The dwarf reflected for a moment; and then asked, "Shall I say nakedly
and openly what I mean, and will you not be angry?"
"Speak!"
"Mena is the crocodile. Put him out of the world, and you will have
passed the bridge; then Nefert will be thine--if thou wilt listen to me."
"What shall I do?"
"Put the charioteer out of the world."
Paaker's gesture seemed to convey that that was a thing that had long
been decided on, and he turned his face, for a good omen, so that the
rising moon should be on his right hand.
The dwarf went on.
"Secure Nefert, so that she may not vanish like her image in the dream,
before you reach the goal; that is to say, ransom the honor of your
future mother and wife, for how could you take an outcast into your
house?"
Paaker looked thoughtfully at the ground.
"May I inform my mistress that thou wilt save her?" asked Nemu. "I
may?--Then all will be well, for he who will devote a fortune to love
will not hesitate to devote a reed lance with a brass point to it to his
love and his hatred together."
CHAPTER XVI.
The sun had set, and darkness covered the City of the Dead, but the moon
shone above the valley of the kings' tombs, and the projecting masses of
the rocky walls of the chasm threw sharply-defined shadows. A weird
silence lay upon the desert, where yet far more life was stirring than in
the noonday hour, for now bats darted like black silken threads through
the night air, owls hovered aloft on wide-spread wings, small troops of
jackals slipped by, one following the other up the mountain slopes. From
time to time their hideous yell, or the whining laugh of the hyena, broke
the stillness of the night.
Nor was human life yet at rest in the valley of tombs. A faint light
glimmered in the cave of the sorceress Hekt, and in front of the
paraschites' but a fire was burning, which the grandmother of the sick
Uarda now and then fed with pieces of dry manure. Two men were seated in
front of the hut, and gazed in silence on the thin flame, whose impure
light was almost quenched by the clearer glow of the moon; whilst the
third, Uarda's father, disembowelled a large ram, whose head he had
already cut off.
"How the jackals howl!" said the old paraschites, drawing as he spoke the
torn brown cotton cloth, which he had put on as a protection against the
night air and the dew, closer round his bare shoulders.
"They scent the fresh meat," answered the physician, Nebsecht. "Throw
them the entrails, when you have done; the legs and back you can roast.
Be careful how you cut out the heart--the heart, soldier. There it is!
What a great beast."
Nebsecht took the ram's heart in his hand, and gazed at it with the
deepest attention, whilst the old paraschites watched him anxiously. At
length:
"I promised," he said, "to do for you what you wish, if you restore the
little one to health; but you ask for what is impossible."
"Impossible?" said the physician, "why, impossible? You open the corpses,
you go in and out of the house of the embalmer. Get possession of one of
the canopi,
[Vases of clay, limestone, or alabaster, which were used for the
preservation of the intestines of the embalmed Egyptians, and
represented the four genii of death, Amset, Hapi, Tuamutef, and
Khebsennuf. Instead of the cover, the head of the genius to which
it was dedicated, was placed on each kanopus. Amset (tinder the
protection of Isis) has a human head, Hapi (protected by Nephthys)
an ape's head, Tuamutef (protected by Neith) a jackal's head, and
Khebsennuf (protected by Selk) a sparrow-hawk's head. In one of the
Christian Coptic Manuscripts, the four archangels are invoked in the
place of these genii.]
lay this heart in it, and take out in its stead the heart of a human
being. No one--no one will notice it. Nor need you do it to-morrow, or
the day after tomorrow even. Your son can buy a ram to kill every day
with my money till the right moment comes. Your granddaughter will soon
grow strong on a good meat-diet. Take courage!"
"I am not afraid of the danger," said the old man, "but how can I venture
to steal from a dead man his life in the other world? And then--in shame
and misery have I lived, and for many a year--no man has numbered them
for me--have I obeyed the commandments, that I may be found righteous in
that world to come, and in the fields of Aalu, and in the Sun-bark find
compensation for all that I have suffered here. You are good and
friendly. Why, for the sake of a whim, should you sacrifice the future
bliss of a man, who in all his long life has never known happiness, and
who has never done you any harm?"
"What I want with the heart," replied the physician, "you cannot
understand, but in procuring it for me, you will be furthering a great
and useful purpose. I have no whims, for I am no idler. And as to what
concerns your salvation, have no anxiety. I am a priest, and take your
deed and its consequences upon myself; upon myself, do you understand? I
tell you, as a priest, that what I demand of you is right, and if the
judge of the dead shall enquire, 'Why didst thou take the heart of a
human being out of the Kanopus?' then reply--reply to him thus, 'Because
Nebsecht, the priest, commanded me, and promised himself to answer for
the deed.'"
The old man gazed thoughtfully on the ground, and the physician continued
still more urgently:
"If you fulfil my wish, then--then I swear to you that, when you die, I
will take care that your mummy is provided with all the amulets, and I
myself will write you a book of the Entrance into Day, and have it wound
within your mummy-cloth, as is done with the great.
[The Books of the Dead are often found amongst the cloths, (by the
leg or under the arm), or else in the coffin trader, or near, the
mummy.]
That will give you power over all demons, and you will be admitted to the
hall of the twofold justice, which punishes and rewards, and your award
will be bliss."
"But the theft of a heart will make the weight of my sins heavy, when my
own heart is weighed," sighed the old man.
Nebsecht considered for a moment, and then said: "I will give you a
written paper, in which I will certify that it was I who commanded the
theft. You will sew it up in a little bag, carry it on your breast, and
have it laid with you in the grave. Then when Techuti, the agent of the
soul, receives your justification before Osiris and the judges of the
dead, give him the writing. He will read it aloud, and you will be
accounted just."
[The vignettes of Chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead represent the
Last Judgment of the Egyptians. Under a canopy Osiris sits
enthroned as Chief Judge, 42 assessors assist him. In the hall
stand the scales; the dog headed ape, the animal sacred to Toth,
guides the balance. In one scale lies the heart of the dead man, in
the other the image of the goddess of Truth, who introduces the soul
into the hall of justice Toth writs the record. The soul affirms
that it has not committed 42 deadly sins, and if it obtains credit,
it is named "maa cheru," i.e. "the truth-speaker," and is therewith
declared blessed. It now receives its heart back, and grows into a
new and divine life.]
"I am not learned in writing," muttered the paraschites with a slight
mistrust that made itself felt in his voice.
"But I swear to you by the nine great Gods, that I will write nothing on
the paper but what I have promised you. I will confess that I, the priest
Nebsecht, commanded you to take the heart, and that your guilt is mine."
"Let me have the writing then," murmured the old man.
The physician wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and gave the
paraschites his hand. "To-morrow you shall have it," he said, "and I will
not leave your granddaughter till she is well again."
The soldier engaged in cutting up the ram, had heard nothing of this
conversation. Now he ran a wooden spit through the legs, and held them
over the fire to roast them. The jackals howled louder as the smell of
the melting fat filled the air, and the old man, as he looked on, forgot
the terrible task he had undertaken. For a year past, no meat had been
tasted in his house.
The physician Nebsecht, himself eating nothing but a piece of bread,
looked on at the feasters. They tore the meat from the bones, and the
soldier, especially, devoured the costly and unwonted meal like some
ravenous animal. He could be heard chewing like a horse in the manger,
and a feeling of disgust filled the physician's soul.
"Sensual beings," he murmured to himself, "animals with consciousness!
And yet human beings. Strange! They languish bound in the fetters of the
world of sense, and yet how much more ardently they desire that which
transcends sense than we--how much more real it is to them than to us!"
"Will you have some meat?" cried the soldier, who had remarked that
Nebsecht's lips moved, and tearing a piece of meat from the bone of the
joint he was devouring, he held it out to the physician. Nebsecht shrank
back; the greedy look, the glistening teeth, the dark, rough features of
the man terrified him. And he thought of the white and fragile form of
the sick girl lying within on the mat, and a question escaped his lips.
"Is the maiden, is Uarda, your own child?" he said.
The soldier struck himself on the breast. "So sure as the king Rameses is
the son of Seti," he answered. The men had finished their meal, and the
flat cakes of bread which the wife of the paraschites gave them, and on
which they had wiped their hands from the fat, were consumed, when the
soldier, in whose slow brain the physician's question still lingered,
said, sighing deeply:
"Her mother was a stranger; she laid the white dove in the raven's nest."
"Of what country was your wife a native?" asked the physician.
"That I do not know," replied the soldier.
"Did you never enquire about the family of your own wife?"
"Certainly I did: but how could she have answered me? But it is a long
and strange story."
"Relate it to me," said Nebsecht, "the night is long, and I like
listening better than talking. But first I will see after our patient."
When the physician had satisfied himself that Uarda was sleeping quietly
and breathing regularly, he seated himself again by the paraschites and
his son, and the soldier began:
"It all happened long ago. King Seti still lived, but Rameses already
reigned in his stead, when I came home from the north. They had sent me
to the workmen, who were building the fortifications in Zoan, the town of
Rameses.--[The Rameses of the Bible. Exodus i. ii.]--I was set over six
men, Amus,--[Semites]--of the Hebrew race, over whom Rameses kept such a
tight hand.
[For an account of the traces of the Jews in Egypt, see Chabas,
Melanges, and Ebers, AEgypten und die Bucher Moses]
Amongst the workmen there were sons of rich cattle-holders, for in
levying the people it was never: 'What have you?' but 'Of what race are
you?' The fortifications and the canal which was to join the Nile and the
Red Sea had to be completed, and the king, to whom be long life, health,
and prosperity, took the youth of Egypt with him to the wars, and left
the work to the Amus, who are connected by race with his enemies in the
east. One lives well in Goshen, for it is a fine country, with more than
enough of corn and grass and vegetables and fish and fowls, and I always
had of the best, for amongst my six people were two mother's darlings,
whose parents sent me many a piece of silver. Every one loves his
children, but the Hebrews love them more tenderly than other people. We
had daily our appointed tale of bricks to deliver, and when the sun burnt
hot, I used to help the lads, and I did more in an hour than they did in
three, for I am strong and was still stronger then than I am now.
"Then came the time when I was relieved. I was ordered to return to
Thebes, to the prisoners of war who were building the great temple of
Amon over yonder, and as I had brought home some money, and it would take
a good while to finish the great dwelling of the king of the Gods, I
thought of taking a wife; but no Egyptian. Of daughters of paraschites
there were plenty; but I wanted to get away out of my father's accursed
caste, and the other girls here, as I knew, were afraid of our
uncleanness. In the low country I had done better, and many an Amu and
Schasu woman had gladly come to my tent. From the beginning I had set my
mind on an Asiatic.
"Many a time maidens taken prisoners in war were brought to be sold, but
either they did not please me, or they were too dear. Meantime my money
melted away, for we enjoyed life in the time of rest which followed the
working hours. There were dancers too in plenty, in the foreign quarter.
"Well, it was just at the time of the holy feast of Amon-Chem, that a new
transport of prisoners of war arrived, and amongst them many women, who
were sold publicly to the highest bidder. The young and beautiful ones
were paid for high, but even the older ones were too dear for me.
"Quite at the last a blind woman was led forward, and a withered-looking
woman who was dumb, as the auctioneer, who generally praised up the
merits of the prisoners, informed the buyers. The blind woman had strong
hands, and was bought by a tavern-keeper, for whom she turns the handmill
to this day; the dumb woman held a child in her arms, and no one could
tell whether she was young or old. She looked as though she already lay
in her coffin, and the little one as though he would go under the grass
before her. And her hair was red, burning red, the very color of Typhon.
Her white pale face looked neither bad nor good, only weary, weary to
death. On her withered white arms blue veins ran like dark cords, her
hands hung feebly down, and in them hung the child. If a wind were to
rise, I thought to myself, it would blow her away, and the little one
with her.
"The auctioneer asked for a bid. All were silent, for the dumb shadow was
of no use for work; she was half-dead, and a burial costs money.
"So passed several minutes. Then the auctioneer stepped up to her, and
gave her a blow with his whip, that she might rouse herself up, and
appear less miserable to the buyers. She shivered like a person in a
fever, pressed the child closer to her, and looked round at every one as
though seeking for help--and me full in the face. What happened now was a
real wonder, for her eyes were bigger than any that I ever saw, and a
demon dwelt in them that had power over me and ruled me to the end, and
that day it bewitched me for the first time.
"It was not hot and I had drunk nothing, and yet I acted against my own
will and better judgment when, as her eyes fell upon me, I bid all that I
possessed in order to buy her. I might have had her cheaper! My
companions laughed at me, the auctioneer shrugged his shoulders as he
took my money, but I took the child on my arm, helped the woman up,
carried her in a boat over the Nile, loaded a stone-cart with my
miserable property, and drove her like a block of lime home to the old
people.
"My mother shook her head, and my father looked as if he thought me mad;
but neither of them said a word. They made up a bed for her, and on my
spare nights I built that ruined thing hard by--it was a tidy hut once.
Soon my mother grew fond of the child. It was quite small, and we called
it Pennu--[Pennu is the name for the mouse in old Egyptian]--because it
was so pretty, like a little mouse. I kept away from the foreign quarter,
and saved my wages, and bought a goat, which lived in front of our door
when I took the woman to her own hut.
"She was dumb, but not deaf, only she did not understand our language;
but the demon in her eyes spoke for her and understood what I said. She
comprehended everything, and could say everything with her eyes; but best
of all she knew how to thank one. No high-priest who at the great hill
festival praises the Gods in long hymns for their gifts can return thanks
so earnestly with his lips as she with her dumb eyes. And when she wished
to pray, then it seemed as though the demon in her look was mightier than
ever.
"At first I used to be impatient enough when she leaned so feebly against
the wall, or when the child cried and disturbed my sleep; but she had
only to look up, and the demon pressed my heart together and persuaded me
that the crying was really a song. Pennu cried more sweetly too than
other children, and he had such soft, white, pretty little fingers.
"One day he had been crying for a long time, At last I bent down over
him, and was going to scold him, but he seized me by the beard. It was
pretty to see! Afterwards he was for ever wanting to pull me about, and
his mother noticed that that pleased me, for when I brought home anything
good, an egg or a flower or a cake, she used to hold him up and place his
little hands on my beard.
"Yes, in a few months the woman had learnt to hold him up high in her
arms, for with care and quiet she had grown stronger. White she always
remained and delicate, but she grew younger and more beautiful from day
to day; she can hardly have numbered twenty years when I bought her. What
she was called I never heard; nor did we give her any name. She was 'the
woman,' and so we called her.
"Eight moons passed by, and then the little Mouse died. I wept as she
did, and as I bent over the little corpse and let my tears have free
course, and thought--now he can never lift up his pretty little finger to
you again; then I felt for the first time the woman's soft hand on my
cheek. She stroked my rough beard as a child might, and with that looked
at me so gratefully that I felt as though king Pharaoh had all at once
made me a present of both Upper and Lower Egypt.
"When the Mouse was buried she got weaker again, but my mother took good
care of her. I lived with her, like a father with his child. She was
always friendly, but if I approached her, and tried to show her any
fondness, she would look at me, and the demon in her eyes drove me back,
and I let her alone.
"She grew healthier and stronger and more and more beautiful, so
beautiful that I kept her hidden, and was consumed by the longing to make
her my wife. A good housewife she never became, to be sure; her hands
were so tender, and she did not even know how to milk the goat. My mother
did that and everything else for her.
"In the daytime she stayed in her hut and worked, for she was very
skillful at woman's work, and wove lace as fine as cobwebs, which my
mother sold that she might bring home perfumes with the proceeds. She was
very fond of them, and of flowers too; and Uarda in there takes after
her.
"In the evening, when the folk from the other side had left the City of
the Dead, she would often walk down the valley here, thoughtful and often
looking up at the moon, which she was especially fond of.
"One evening in the winter-time I came home. It was already dark, and I
expected to find her in front of the door. All at once, about a hundred
steps behind old Hekt's cave, I heard a troop of jackals barking so
furiously that I said to myself directly they had attacked a human being,
and I knew too who it was, though no one had told me, and the woman could
not call or cry out. Frantic with terror, I tore a firebrand from the
hearth and the stake to which the goat was fastened out of the ground,
rushed to her help, drove away the beasts, and carried her back senseless
to the hut. My mother helped me, and we called her back to life. When we
were alone, I wept like a child for joy at her escape, and she let me
kiss her, and then she became my wife, three years after I had bought
her.
"She bore me a little maid, that she herself named Uarda; for she showed
us a rose, and then pointed to the child, and we understood her without
words.
"Soon afterwards she died.
"You are a priest, but I tell you that when I am summoned before Osiris,
if I am admitted amongst the blessed, I will ask whether I shall meet my
wife, and if the doorkeeper says no, he may thrust me back, and I will go
down cheerfully to the damned, if I find her again there."
"And did no sign ever betray her origin?" asked the physician.
The soldier had hidden his face in his hand; he was weeping aloud, and
did not hear the question. But, the paraschites answered:
"She was the child of some great personage, for in her clothes we found a
golden jewel with a precious stone inscribed with strange characters. It
is very costly, and my wife is keeping it for the little one."
CHAPTER XVII.
In the earliest glimmer of dawn the following clay, the physician
Nebsecht having satisfied himself as to the state of the sick girl, left
the paraschites' hut and made his way in deepest thought to the 'Terrace
Temple of Hatasu, to find his friend Pentaur and compose the writing
which he had promised to the old man.
As the sun arose in radiance he reached the sanctuary. He expected to
hear the morning song of the priests, but all was silent. He knocked and
the porter, still half-asleep, opened the door.
Nebsecht enquired for the chief of the Temple. "He died in the night,"
said the man yawning.
"What do you say?" cried the physician in sudden terror, "who is dead?"
"Our good old chief, Rui."
Nebsecht breathed again, and asked for Pentaur.
"You belong to the House of Seti," said the doorkeeper, "and you do not
know that he is deposed from his office? The holy fathers have refused to
celebrate the birth of Ra with him. He sings for himself now, alone up on
the watch-tower. There you will find him."
Nebsecht strode quickly up the stairs. Several of the priests placed
themselves together in groups as soon as they saw him, and began singing.
He paid no heed to them, however, but hastened on to the uppermost
terrace, where he found his friend occupied in writing.
Soon he learnt all that had happened, and wrathfully he cried: "You are
too honest for those wise gentlemen in the House of Seti, and too pure
and zealous for the rabble here. I knew it, I knew what would come of it
if they introduced you to the mysteries. For us initiated there remains
only the choice between lying and silence."
"The old error!" said Pentaur, "we know that the Godhead is One, we name
it, 'The All,' 'The Veil of the All,' or simply 'Ra.' But under the name
Ra we understand something different than is known to the common herd;
for to us, the Universe is God, and in each of its parts we recognize a
manifestation of that highest being without whom nothing is, in the
heights above or in the depths below."
"To me you can say everything, for I also am initiated," interrupted
Nebsecht.
"But neither from the laity do I withhold it," cried Pentaur, "only to
those who are incapable of understanding the whole, do I show the
different parts. Am I a liar if I do not say, 'I speak,' but 'my mouth
speaks,' if I affirm, 'Your eye sees,' when it is you yourself who are
the seer. When the light of the only One manifests itself, then I
fervently render thanks to him in hymns, and the most luminous of his
forms I name Ra. When I look upon yonder green fields, I call upon the
faithful to give thanks to Rennut, that is, that active manifestation of
the One, through which the corn attains to its ripe maturity. Am I filled
with wonder at the bounteous gifts with which that divine stream whose
origin is hidden, blesses our land, then I adore the One as the God Hapi,
the secret one. Whether we view the sun, the harvest, or the Nile,
whether we contemplate with admiration the unity and harmony of the
visible or invisible world, still it is always with the Only, the
All-embracing One we have to do, to whom we also ourselves belong as
those of his manifestations in which lie places his self-consciousness.
The imagination of the multitude is limited. . . . "
"And so we lions,
["The priests," says Clement of Alexandria, "allow none to be
participators in their mysteries, except kings or such amongst
themselves as are distinguished for virtue or wisdom." The same
thing is shown by the monuments in many places]
give them the morsel that we can devour at one gulp, finely chopped up,
and diluted with broth as if for the weak stomach of a sick man."
"Not so; we only feel it our duty to temper and sweeten the sharp potion,
which for men even is almost too strong, before we offer it to the
children, the babes in spirit. The sages of old veiled indeed the highest
truths in allegorical forms, in symbols, and finally in a beautiful and
richly-colored mythos, but they brought them near to the multitude
shrouded it is true but still discernible."
"Discernible?" said the physician, "discernible? Why then the veil?"
"And do you imagine that the multitude could look the naked truth in the
face,
[In Sais the statue of Athene (Neith) has the following,
inscription: "I am the All, the Past, the Present, and the Future,
my veil has no mortal yet lifted." Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 9, a
similar quotation by Proclus, in Plato's Timaeus.]
and not despair?"
"Can I, can any one who looks straight forward, and strives to see the
truth and nothing but the truth?" cried the physician. "We both of us
know that things only are, to us, such as they picture themselves in the
prepared mirror of our souls. I see grey, grey, and white, white, and
have accustomed myself in my yearning after knowledge, not to attribute
the smallest part to my own idiosyncrasy, if such indeed there be
existing in my empty breast. You look straight onwards as I do, but in
you each idea is transfigured, for in your soul invisible shaping powers
are at work, which set the crooked straight, clothe the commonplace with
charm, the repulsive with beauty. You are a poet, an artist; I only seek
for truth."
"Only?" said Pentaur, "it is just on account of that effort that I esteem
you so highly, and, as you already know, I also desire nothing but the
truth."
"I know, I know," said the physician nodding, "but our ways run side by
side without ever touching, and our final goal is the reading of a
riddle, of which there are many solutions. You believe yourself to have
found the right one, and perhaps none exists."
"Then let us content ourselves with the nearest and the most beautiful,"
said Pentaur.
"The most beautiful?" cried Nebsecht indignantly. "Is that monster, whom
you call God, beautiful--the giant who for ever regenerates himself that
he may devour himself again? God is the All, you say, who suffices to
himself. Eternal he is and shall be, because all that goes forth from him
is absorbed by him again, and the great niggard bestows no grain of sand,
no ray of light, no breath of wind, without reclaiming it for his
household, which is ruled by no design, no reason, no goodness, but by a
tyrannical necessity, whose slave he himself is. The coward hides behind
the cloud of incomprehensibility, and can be revealed only by himself--I
would I could strip him of the veil! Thus I see the thing that you call
God!"
"A ghastly picture," said Pentaur, "because you forget that we recognize
reason to be the essence of the All, the penetrating and moving power of
the universe which is manifested in the harmonious working together of
its parts, and in ourselves also, since we are formed out of its
substance, and inspired with its soul."
"Is the warfare of life in any way reasonable?" asked Nebsecht. "Is this
eternal destruction in order to build up again especially well-designed
and wise? And with this introduction of reason into the All, you provide
yourself with a self-devised ruler, who terribly resembles the gracious
masters and mistresses that you exhibit to the people."
"Only apparently," answered Pentaur, "only because that which transcends
sense is communicable through the medium of the senses alone. When God
manifests himself as the wisdom of the world, we call him 'the Word,'
'He, who covers his limbs with names,' as the sacred Text expresses
itself, is the power which gives to things their distinctive forms; the
scarabaeus, 'which enters life as its own son' reminds us of the ever
self-renewing creative power which causes you to call our merciful and
benevolent God a monster, but which you can deny as little as you can the
happy choice of the type; for, as you know, there are only male scarabei,
and this animal reproduces itself."
Nebsecht smiled. "If all the doctrines of the mysteries," he said, "have
no more truth than this happily chosen image, they are in a bad way.
These beetles have for years been my friends and companions. I know their
family life, and I can assure you that there are males and females
amongst them as amongst cats, apes, and human beings. Your 'good God' I
do not know, and what I least comprehend in thinking it over quietly is
the circumstance that you distinguish a good and evil principle in the
world. If the All is indeed God, if God as the scriptures teach, is
goodness, and if besides him is nothing at all, where is a place to be
found for evil?"
"You talk like a school-boy," said Pentaur indignantly. "All that is, is
good and reasonable in itself, but the infinite One, who prescribes his
own laws and his own paths, grants to the finite its continuance through
continual renewal, and in the changing forms of the finite progresses for
evermore. What we call evil, darkness, wickedness, is in itself divine,
good, reasonable, and clear; but it appears in another light to our
clouded minds, because we perceive the way only and not the goal, the
details only, and not the whole. Even so, superficial listeners blame the
music, in which a discord is heard, which the harper has only evoked from
the strings that his hearers may more deeply feel the purity of the
succeeding harmony; even so, a fool blames the painter who has colored
his board with black, and does not wait for the completion of the picture
which shall be thrown into clearer relief by the dark background; even
so, a child chides the noble tree, whose fruit rots, that a new life may
spring up from its kernel. Apparent evil is but an antechamber to higher
bliss, as every sunset is but veiled by night, and will soon show itself
again as the red dawn of a new day."
"How convincing all that sounds!" answered the physician, "all, even the
terrible, wins charm from your lips; but I could invert your proposition,
and declare that it is evil that rules the world, and sometimes gives us
one drop of sweet content, in order that we may more keenly feel the
bitterness of life. You see harmony and goodness in everything. I have
observed that passion awakens life, that all existence is a conflict,
that one being devours another."
"And do you not feel the beauty of visible creation, and does not the
immutable law in everything fill you with admiration and humility?"
"For beauty," replied Nebsecht, "I have never sought; the organ is
somehow wanting in me to understand it of myself, though I willingly
allow you to mediate between us. But of law in nature I fully appreciate
the worth, for that is the veritable soul of the universe. You call the
One 'Temt,' that is to say the total--the unity which is reached by the
addition of many units; and that pleases me, for the elements of the
universe and the powers which prescribe the paths of life are strictly
defined by measure and number--but irrespective of beauty or
benevolence."
"Such views," cried Pentaur troubled, "are the result of your strange
studies. You kill and destroy, in order, as you yourself say, to come
upon the track of the secrets of life. Look out upon nature, develop the
faculty which you declare to be wanting, in you, and the beauty of
creation will teach you without my assistance that you are praying to a
false god."
"I do not pray," said Nebsecht, "for the law which moves the world is as
little affected by prayers as the current of the sands in your
hour-glass. Who tells you that I do not seek to come upon the track of
the first beginning of things? I proved to you just now that I know more
about the origin of Scarabei than you do. I have killed many an animal,
not only to study its organism, but also to investigate how it has built
up its form. But precisely in this work my organ for beauty has become
blunt rather than keen. I tell you that the beginning of things is not
more attractive to contemplate than their death and decomposition."
Pentaur looked at the physician enquiringly.
"I also for once," continued Nebsecht, "will speak in figures. Look at
this wine, how pure it is, how fragrant; and yet it was trodden from the
grape by the brawny feet of the vintagers. And those full ears of corn!
They gleam golden yellow, and will yield us snow-white meal when they are
ground, and yet they grew from a rotting seed. Lately you were praising
to me the beauty of the great Hall of Columns nearly completed in the
Temple of Amon over yonder in Thebes.
[Begun by Rameses I. continued by Seti I., completed by Rameses II.
The remains of this immense hall, with its 134 columns, have not
their equal in the world.]
How posterity will admire it! I saw that Hall arise. There lay masses of
freestone in wild confusion, dust in heaps that took away my breath, and
three months since I was sent over there, because above a hundred workmen
engaged in stone-polishing under the burning sun had been beaten to
death. Were I a poet like you, I would show you a hundred similar
pictures, in which you would not find much beauty. In the meantime, we
have enough to do in observing the existing order of things, and
investigating the laws by which it is governed."
"I have never clearly understood your efforts, and have difficulty in
comprehending why you did not turn to the science of the haruspices,"
said Pentaur. "Do you then believe that the changing, and--owing to the
conditions by which they are surrounded--the dependent life of plants and
animals is governed by law, rule, and numbers like the movement of the
stars?"
"What a question! Is the strong and mighty hand, which compels yonder
heavenly bodies to roll onward in their carefully-appointed orbits, not
delicate enough to prescribe the conditions of the flight of the bird,
and the beating of the human heart?"
"There we are again with the heart," said the poet smiling, "are you any
nearer your aim?"
The physician became very grave. "Perhaps tomorrow even," he said, "I may
have what I need. You have your palette there with red and black color,
and a writing reed. May I use this sheet of papyrus?"
"Of course; but first tell me. . . . "
"Do not ask; you would not approve of my scheme, and there would only be
a fresh dispute."
"I think," said the poet, laying his hand on his friend's shoulder, "that
we have no reason to fear disputes. So far they have been the cement, the
refreshing dew of our friendship."
"So long as they treated of ideas only, and not of deeds."
"You intend to get possession of a human heart!" cried the poet. "Think
of what you are doing! The heart is the vessel of that effluence of the
universal soul, which lives in us."
"Are you so sure of that?" cried the physician with some irritation,
"then give me the proof. Have you ever examined a heart, has any one
member of my profession done so? The hearts of criminals and prisoners of
war even are declared sacred from touch, and when we stand helpless by a
patient, and see our medicines work harm as often as good, why is it?
Only because we physicians are expected to work as blindly as an
astronomer, if he were required to look at the stars through a board. At
Heliopolis I entreated the great Urma Rahotep, the truly learned chief of
our craft, and who held me in esteem, to allow me to examine the heart of
a dead Amu; but he refused me, because the great Sechet leads virtuous
Semites also into the fields of the blessed.
[According to the inscription accompanying the famous
representations of the four nations (Egyptians, Semites, Libyans,
and Ethiopians) in the tomb of Seti I.]
And then followed all the old scruples: that to cut up the heart of a
beast even is sinful, because it also is the vehicle of a soul, perhaps a
condemned and miserable human soul, which before it can return to the
One, must undergo purification by passing through the bodies of animals.
I was not satisfied, and declared to him that my great-grandfather
Nebsecht, before he wrote his treatise on the heart, must certainly have
examined such an organ. Then he answered me that the divinity had
revealed to him what he had written, and therefore his work had been
accepted amongst the sacred writings of Toth,
[Called by the Greeks "Hermetic Books." The Papyrus Ebers is the
work called by Clemens of Alexandria "the Book of Remedies."]
which stood fast and unassailable as the laws of the world; he wished to
give me peace for quiet work, and I also, he said, might be a chosen
spirit, the divinity might perhaps vouchsafe revelations to me too. I was
young at that time, and spent my nights in prayer, but I only wasted
away, and my spirit grew darker instead of clearer. Then I killed in
secret--first a fowl, then rats, then a rabbit, and cut up their hearts,
and followed the vessels that lead out of them, and know little more now
than I did at first; but I must get to the bottom of the truth, and I
must have a human heart."
"What will that do for you?" asked Pentaur; "you cannot hope to perceive
the invisible and the infinite with your human eyes?"
"Do you know my great-grandfather's treatise?"
"A little," answered the poet; "he said that wherever he laid his finger,
whether on the head, the hands, or the stomach, he everywhere met with
the heart, because its vessels go into all the members, and the heart is
the meeting point of all these vessels. Then Nebsecht proceeds to state
how these are distributed in the different members, and shows--is it not
so?--that the various mental states, such as anger, grief, aversion, and
also the ordinary use of the word heart, declare entirely for his view."
"That is it. We have already discussed it, and I believe that he is
right, so far as the blood is concerned, and the animal sensations. But
the pure and luminous intelligence in us--that has another seat," and the
physician struck his broad but low forehead with his hand. "I have
observed heads by the hundred down at the place of execution, and I have
also removed the top of the skulls of living animals. But now let me
write, before we are disturbed."
[Human brains are prescribed for a malady of the eyes in the Ebers
papyrus. Herophilus, one of the first scholars of the Alexandrine
Museum, studied not only the bodies of executed criminals, but made
his experiments also on living malefactors. He maintained that the
four cavities of the human brain are the seat of the soul.]
The physician took the reed, moistened it with black color prepared from
burnt papyrus, and in elegant hieratic characters
[At the time of our narrative the Egyptians had two kinds of
writing-the hieroglyphic, which was generally used for monumental
inscriptions, and in which the letters consisted of conventional
representations of various objects, mathematical and arbitrary
symbols, and the hieratic, used for writing on papyrus, and in
which, with the view of saving time, the written pictures underwent
so many alterations and abbreviations that the originals could
hardly be recognized. In the 8th century there was a further
abridgment of the hieratic writing, which was called the demotic, or
people's writing, and was used in commerce. Whilst the hieroglyphic
and hieratic writings laid the foundations of the old sacred
dialect, the demotic letters were only used to write the spoken
language of the people. E. de Rouge's Chrestomathie Egyptienne.
H. Brugsch's Hieroglyphische Grammatik. Le Page Renouf's shorter
hieroglyphical grammar. Ebers' Ueber das Hieroglyphische
Schriftsystem, 2nd edition, 1875, in the lectures of Virchow
Holtzendorff.]
wrote the paper for the paraschites, in which he confessed to having
impelled him to the theft of a heart, and in the most binding manner
declared himself willing to take the old man's guilt upon himself before
Osiris and the judges of the dead.
When he had finished, Pentaur held out his hand for the paper, but
Nebsecht folded it together, placed it in a little bag in which lay an
amulet that his dying mother had hung round his neck, and said, breathing
deeply:
"That is done. Farewell, Pentaur."
But the poet held the physician back; he spoke to him with the warmest
words, and conjured him to abandon his enterprise. His prayers, however,
had no power to touch Nebsecht, who only strove forcibly to disengage his
finger from Pentaur's strong hand, which held him as in a clasp of iron.
The excited poet did not remark that he was hurting his friend, until
after a new and vain attempt at freeing himself, Nebsecht cried out in
pain, "You are crushing my finger!"
A smile passed over the poet's face, he loosened his hold on the
physician, and stroked the reddened hand like a mother who strives to
divert her child from pain.
"Don't be angry with me, Nebsecht," he said, "you know my unlucky fists,
and to-day they really ought to hold you fast, for you have too mad a
purpose on hand."
"Mad?" said the physician, whilst he smiled in his turn. "It may be so;
but do you not know that we Egyptians all have a peculiar tenderness for
our follies, and are ready to sacrifice house and land to them?"
"Our own house and our own land," cried the poet: and then added
seriously, "but not the existence, not the happiness of another."
"Have I not told you that I do not look upon the heart as the seat of our
intelligence? So far as I am concerned, I would as soon be buried with a
ram's heart as with my own."
"I do not speak of the plundered dead, but of the living," said the poet.
"If the deed of the paraschites is discovered, he is undone, and you
would only have saved that sweet child in the hut behind there, to fling
her into deeper misery."
Nebsecht looked at the other with as much astonishment and dismay, as if
he had been awakened from sleep by bad tidings. Then he cried: "All that
I have, I would share with the old man and Uarda."
"And who would protect her?"
"Her father."
"That rough drunkard who to-morrow or the day after may be sent no one
knows where."
"He is a good fellow," said the physician interrupting his friend, and
stammering violently. "But who 'would do anything to the child? She is so
so . . . . She is so charming, so perfectly--sweet and lovely."
With these last words he cast down his eyes and reddened like a girl.
"You understand that," he said, "better than I do; yes, and you also
think her beautiful! Strange! you must not laugh if I confess--I am but a
man like every one else--when I confess, that I believe I have at length
discovered in myself the missing organ for beauty of form--not believe
merely, but truly have discovered it, for it has not only spoken, but
cried, raged, till I felt a rushing in my ears, and for the first time
was attracted more by the sufferer than by suffering. I have sat in the
hut as though spell-bound, and gazed at her hair, at her eyes, at how she
breathed. They must long since have missed me at the House of Seti,
perhaps discovered all my preparations, when seeking me in my room! For
two days and nights I have allowed myself to be drawn away from my work,
for the sake of this child. Were I one of the laity, whom you would
approach, I should say that demons had bewitched me. But it is not
that,"--and with these words the physician's eyes flamed up--"it is not
that! The animal in me, the low instincts of which the heart is the
organ, and which swelled my breast at her bedside, they have mastered the
pure and fine emotions here--here in this brain; and in the very moment
when I hoped to know as the God knows whom you call the Prince of
knowledge, in that moment I must learn that the animal in me is stronger
than that which I call my God."
The physician, agitated and excited, had fixed his eyes on the ground
during these last words, and hardly noticed the poet, who listened to him
wondering and full of sympathy. For a time both were silent; then Pentaur
laid his hand on his friend's hand, and said cordially:
"My soul is no stranger to what you feel, and heart and head, if I may
use your own words, have known a like emotion. But I know that what we
feel, although it may be foreign to our usual sensations, is loftier and
more precious than these, not lower. Not the animal, Nebsecht, is it that
you feel in yourself, but God. Goodness is the most beautiful attribute
of the divine, and you have always been well-disposed towards great and
small; but I ask you, have you ever before felt so irresistibly impelled
to pour out an ocean of goodness on another being, whether for Uarda you
would not more joyfully and more self-forgetfully sacrifice all that you
have, and all that you are, than to father and mother and your oldest
friend?"
Nebsecht nodded assentingly.
"Well then," cried Pentaur, "follow your new and godlike emotion, be good
to Uarda and do not sacrifice her to your vain wishes. My poor friend!
With your--enquiries into the secrets of life, you have never looked
round upon itself, which spreads open and inviting before our eyes. Do
you imagine that the maiden who can thus inflame the calmest thinker in
Thebes, will not be coveted by a hundred of the common herd when her
protector fails her? Need I tell you that amongst the dancers in the
foreign quarter nine out of ten are the daughters of outlawed parents?
Can you endure the thought that by your hand innocence may be consigned
to vice, the rose trodden under foot in the mud? Is the human heart that
you desire, worth an Uarda? Now go, and to-morrow come again to me your
friend who understands how to sympathize with all you feel, and to whom
you have approached so much the nearer to-day that you have learned to
share his purest happiness."
Pentaur held out his hand to the physician, who held it some time, then
went thoughtfully and lingeringly, unmindful of the burning glow of the
mid-day sun, over the mountain into the valley of the king's graves
towards the hut of the paraschites.
Here he found the soldier with his daughter. "Where is the old man?" he
asked anxiously.
"He has gone to his work in the house of the embalmer," was the answer.
"If anything should happen to him he bade me tell you not to forget the
writing and the book. He was as though out of his mind when he left us,
and put the ram's heart in his bag and took it with him. Do you remain
with the little one; my mother is at work, and I must go with the
prisoners of war to Harmontis."
CHAPTER XVIII.
While the two friends from the House of Seti were engaged in
conversation, Katuti restlessly paced the large open hall of her
son-in-law's house, in which we have already seen her. A snow-white cat
followed her steps, now playing with the hem of her long plain dress, and
now turning to a large stand on which the dwarf Nemu sat in a heap; where
formerly a silver statue had stood, which a few months previously had
been sold.
He liked this place, for it put him in a position to look into the eyes
of his mistress and other frill-grown people. "If you have betrayed me!
If you have deceived me!" said Katuti with a threatening gesture as she
passed his perch.
"Put me on a hook to angle for a crocodile if I have. But I am curious to
know how he will offer you the money."
"You swore to me," interrupted his mistress with feverish agitation, that
you had not used my name in asking Paaker to save us?"
"A thousand times I swear it," said the little man.
"Shall I repeat all our conversation? I tell thee he will sacrifice his
land, and his house-great gate and all, for one friendly glance from
Nefert's eyes."
"If only Mena loved her as he does!" sighed the widow, and then again she
walked up and down the hall in silence, while the dwarf looked out at the
garden entrance. Suddenly she paused in front of Nemu, and said so
hoarsely that Nemu shuddered:
"I wish she were a widow." "The little man made a gesture as if to
protect himself from the evil eye, but at the same instant he slipped
down from his pedestal, and exclaimed:
"There is a chariot, and I hear his big dog barking. It is he. Shall I
call Nefert?"
"No!" said Katuti in a low voice, and she clutched at the back of a chair
as if for support.
The dwarf shrugged his shoulders, and slunk behind a clump of ornamental
plants, and a few minutes later Paaker stood in the presence of Katuti,
who greeted him, with quiet dignity and self-possession.
Not a feature of her finely-cut face betrayed her inward agitation, and
after the Mohar had greeted her she said with rather patronizing
friendliness:
"I thought that you would come. Take a seat. Your heart is like your
father's; now that you are friends with us again it is not by halves."
Paaker had come to offer his aunt the sum which was necessary for the
redemption of her husband's mummy. He had doubted for a long time whether
he should not leave this to his mother, but reserve partly and partly
vanity had kept him from doing so. He liked to display his wealth, and
Katuti should learn what he could do, what a son-in-law she had rejected.
He would have preferred to send the gold, which he had resolved to give
away, by the hand of one of his slaves, like a tributary prince. But that
could not be done so he put on his finger a ring set with a valuable
stone, which king Seti I., had given to his father, and added various
clasps and bracelets to his dress.
When, before leaving the house, he looked at himself in a mirror, he said
to himself with some satisfaction, that he, as he stood, was worth as
much as the whole of Mena's estates.
Since his conversation with Nemu, and the dwarf's interpretation of his
dream, the path which he must tread to reach his aim had been plain
before him. Nefert's mother must be won with the gold which would save
her from disgrace, and Mena must be sent to the other world. He relied
chiefly on his own reckless obstinacy--which he liked to call firm
determination--Nemu's cunning, and the love-philter.
He now approached Katuti with the certainty of success, like a merchant
who means to acquire some costly object, and feels that he is rich enough
to pay for it. But his aunt's proud and dignified manner confounded him.
He had pictured her quite otherwise, spirit-broken, and suppliant; and he
had expected, and hoped to earn, Nefert's thanks as well as her mother's
by his generosity. Mena's pretty wife was however absent, and Katuti did
not send for her even after he had enquired after her health.
The widow made no advances, and some time passed in indifferent
conversation, till Paaker abruptly informed her that he had heard of her
son's reckless conduct, and had decided, as being his mother's nearest
relation, to preserve her from the degradation that threatened her. For
the sake of his bluntness, which she took for honesty, Katuti forgave the
magnificence of his dress, which under the circumstances certainly seemed
ill-chosen; she thanked him with dignity, but warmly, more for the sake
of her children than for her own; for life she said was opening before
them, while for her it was drawing to its close.
"You are still at a good time of life," said Paaker.
"Perhaps at the best," replied the widow, "at any rate from my point of
view; regarding life as I do as a charge, a heavy responsibility."
"The administration of this involved estate must give you many, anxious
hours--that I understand." Katuti nodded, and then said sadly:
"I could bear it all, if I were not condemned to see my poor child being
brought to misery without being able to help her or advise her. You once
would willingly have married her, and I ask you, was there a maiden in
Thebes--nay in all Egypt--to compare with her for beauty? Was she not
worthy to be loved, and is she not so still? Does she deserve that her
husband should leave her to starve, neglect her, and take a strange woman
into his tent as if he had repudiated her? I see what you feel about it!
You throw all the blame on me. Your heart says: 'Why did she break off
our betrothal,' and your right feeling tells you that you would have
given her a happier lot."
With these words Katuti took her nephew's hand, and went on with
increasing warmth.
"We know you to-day for the most magnanimous man in Thebes, for you have
requited injustice with an immense benefaction; but even as a boy you
were kind and noble. Your father's wish has always been dear and sacred
to me, for during his lifetime he always behaved to us as an affectionate
brother, and I would sooner have sown the seeds of sorrow for myself than
for your mother, my beloved sister. I brought up my child--I guarded her
jealously--for the young hero who was absent, proving his valor in
Syria--for you and for you only. Then your father died, my sole stay and
protector."
"I know it all!" interrupted Paaker looking gloomily at the floor.
"Who should have told you?" said the widow. "For your mother, when that
had happened which seemed incredible, forbid us her house, and shut her
ears. The king himself urged Mena's suit, for he loves him as his own
son, and when I represented your prior claim he commanded;--and who may
resist the commands of the sovereign of two worlds, the Son of Ra? Kings
have short memories; how often did your father hazard his life for him,
how many wounds had he received in his service. For your father's sake he
might have spared you such an affront, and such pain."
"And have I myself served him, or not?" asked the pioneer flushing
darkly.
"He knows you less," returned Katuti apologetically. Then she changed her
tone to one of sympathy, and went on:
"How was it that you, young as you were, aroused his dissatisfaction, his
dislike, nay his--"
"His what?" asked the pioneer, trembling with excitement.
"Let that pass!" said the widow soothingly. "The favor and disfavor of
kings are as those of the Gods. Men rejoice in the one or bow to the
other."
"What feeling have I aroused in Rameses besides dissatisfaction, and
dislike? I insist on knowing!" said Paaker with increasing vehemence.
"You alarm me," the widow declared. "And in speaking ill of you, his only
motive was to raise his favorite in Nefert's estimation."
"Tell me what he said!" cried the pioneer; cold drops stood on his brown
forehead, and his glaring eyes showed the white eye-balls.
Katuti quailed before him, and drew back, but he followed her, seized her
arm, and said huskily:
"What did he say?"
"Paaker!" cried the widow in pain and indignation. "Let me go. It is
better for you that I should not repeat the words with which Rameses
sought to turn Nefert's heart from you. Let me go, and remember to whom
you are speaking."
But Paaker gripped her elbow the tighter, and urgently repeated his
question.
"Shame upon you!" cried Katuti, "you are hurting me; let me go! You will
not till you have heard what he said? Have your own way then, but the
words are forced from me! He said that if he did not know your mother
Setchem for an honest woman, he never would have believed you were your
father's son--for you were no more like him than an owl to an eagle."
Paaker took his hand from Katuti's arm. "And so--and so--" he muttered
with pale lips.
"Nefert took your part, and I too, but in vain. Do not take the words too
hardly. Your father was a man without an equal, and Rameses cannot forget
that we are related to the old royal house. His grandfather, his father,
and himself are usurpers, and there is one now living who has a better
right to the throne than he has."
"The Regent Ani!" exclaimed Paaker decisively. Katuti nodded, she went up
to the pioneer and said in a whisper:
"I put myself in your hands, though I know they may be raised against me.
But you are my natural ally, for that same act of Rameses that disgraced
and injured you, made me a partner in the designs of Ani. The king robbed
you of your bride, me of my daughter. He filled your soul with hatred for
your arrogant rival, and mine with passionate regret for the lost
happiness of my child. I feel the blood of Hatasu in my veins, and my
spirit is high enough to govern men. It was I who roused the sleeping
ambition of the Regent--I who directed his gaze to the throne to which he
was destined by the Gods. The ministers of the Gods, the priests, are
favorably disposed to us; we have--"
At this moment there was a commotion in the garden, and a breathless
slave rushed in exclaiming "The Regent is at the gate!"
Paaker stood in stupid perplexity, but he collected himself with an
effort and would have gone, but Katuti detained him.
"I will go forward to meet Ani," she said. "He will be rejoiced to see
you, for he esteems you highly and was a friend of your father's."
As soon as Katuti had left the hall, the dwarf Nemu crept out of his
hiding-place, placed himself in front of Paaker, and asked boldly:
"Well? Did I give thee good advice yesterday, or no?"
Put Paaker did not answer him, he pushed him aside with his foot, and
walked up and down in deep thought.
Katuti met the Regent half way down the garden. He held a manuscript roll
in his hand, and greeted her from afar with a friendly wave of his hand.
The widow looked at him with astonishment.
It seemed to her that he had grown taller and younger since the last time
she had seen him.
"Hail to your highness!" she cried, half in joke half reverently, and she
raised her hands in supplication, as if he already wore the double crown
of Upper and Lower Egypt. "Have the nine Gods met you? have the Hathors
kissed you in your slumbers? This is a white day--a lucky day--I read it
in your face!" "That is reading a cipher!" said Ani gaily, but with
dignity. "Read this despatch."
Katuti took the roll from his hand, read it through, and then returned
it.
"The troops you equipped have conquered the allied armies of the
Ethiopians," she said gravely, "and are bringing their prince in fetters
to Thebes, with endless treasure, and ten thousand prisoners! The Gods be
praised!"
"And above all things I thank the Gods that my general Scheschenk--my
foster-brother and friend--is returning well and unwounded from the war.
I think, Katuti, that the figures in our dreams are this day taking forms
of flesh and blood!"
"They are growing to the stature of heroes!" cried the widow. "And you
yourself, my lord, have been stirred by the breath of the Divinity. You
walk like the worthy son of Ra, the Courage of Menth beams in your eyes,
and you smile like the victorious Horus."
"Patience, patience my friend," said Ani, moderating the eagerness of the
widow; "now, more than ever, we must cling to my principle of
over-estimating the strength of our opponents, and underrating our own.
Nothing has succeeded on which I had counted, and on the contrary many
things have justified my fears that they would fail. The beginning of the
end is hardly dawning on us."
"But successes, like misfortunes, never come singly," replied Katuti.
"I agree with you," said Ani. "The events of life seem to me to fall in
groups. Every misfortune brings its fellow with it--like every piece of
luck. Can you tell me of a second success?"
"Women win no battles," said the widow smiling. "But they win allies, and
I have gained a powerful one."
"A God or an army?" asked Ani.
"Something between the two," she replied. "Paaker, the king's chief
pioneer, has joined us;" and she briefly related to Ani the history of
her nephew's love and hatred.
Ani listened in silence; then he said with an expression of much disquiet
and anxiety:
"This man is a follower of Rameses, and must shortly return to him. Many
may guess at our projects, but every additional person who knows them may
be come a traitor. You are urging me, forcing me, forward too soon. A
thousand well-prepared enemies are less dangerous than one untrustworthy
ally--"
"Paaker is secured to us," replied Katuti positively. "Who will answer
for him?" asked Ani.
"His life shall be in your hand," replied Katuti gravely. "My shrewd
little dwarf Nemu knows that he has committed some secret crime, which
the law punishes by death."
The Regent's countenance cleared.
"That alters the matter," he said with satisfaction. "Has he committed a
murder?"
"No," said Katuti, "but Nemu has sworn to reveal to you alone all that he
knows. He is wholly devoted to us."
"Well and good," said Ani thoughtfully, but he too is imprudent--much too
imprudent. You are like a rider, who to win a wager urges his horse to
leap over spears. If he falls on the points, it is he that suffers; you
let him lie there, and go on your way."
"Or are impaled at the same time as the noble horse," said Katuti
gravely. "You have more to win, and at the same time more to lose than
we; but the meanest clings to life; and I must tell you, Ani, that I work
for you, not to win any thing through your success, but because you are
as dear to me as a brother, and because I see in you the embodiment of my
father's claims which have been trampled on."
Ani gave her his hand and asked:
"Did you also as my friend speak to Bent-Anat? Do I interpret your
silence rightly?"
Katuti sadly shook her head; but Ani went on: "Yesterday that would have
decided me to give her up; but to-day my courage has risen, and if the
Hathors be my friends I may yet win her."
With these words he went in advance of the widow into the hall, where
Paaker was still walking uneasily up and down.
The pioneer bowed low before the Regent, who returned the greeting with a
half-haughty, half-familiar wave of the hand, and when he had seated
himself in an arm-chair politely addressed Paaker as the son of a friend,
and a relation of his family.
"All the world," he said, "speaks of your reckless courage. Men like you
are rare; I have none such attached to me. I wish you stood nearer to me;
but Rameses will not part with you, although--although--In point of fact
your office has two aspects; it requires the daring of a soldier, and the
dexterity of a scribe. No one denies that you have the first, but the
second--the sword and the reed-pen are very different weapons, one
requires supple fingers, the other a sturdy fist. The king used to
complain of your reports--is he better satisfied with them now?"
"I hope so," replied the Mohar; "my brother Horus is a practised writer,
and accompanies me in my journeys."
"That is well," said Ani. "If I had the management of affairs I should
treble your staff, and give you four--five--six scribes under you, who
should be entirely at your command, and to whom you could give the
materials for the reports to be sent out. Your office demands that you
should be both brave and circumspect; these characteristics are rarely
united; but there are scriveners by hundreds in the temples."
"So it seems to me," said Paaker.
Ani looked down meditatively, and continued--Rameses is fond of comparing
you with your father. That is unfair, for he--who is now with the
justified--was without an equal; at once the bravest of heroes and the
most skilful of scribes. You are judged unjustly; and it grieves me all
the more that you belong, through your mother, to my poor but royal
house. We will see whether I cannot succeed in putting you in the right
place. For the present you are required in Syria almost as soon as you
have got home. You have shown that you are a man who does not fear death,
and who can render good service, and you might now enjoy your wealth in
peace with your wife."
"I am alone," said Paaker.
"Then, if you come home again, let Katuti seek you out the prettiest wife
in Egypt," said the Regent smiling. "She sees herself every day in her
mirror, and must be a connoisseur in the charms of women."
Ani rose with these words, bowed to Paaker with studied friendliness,
gave his hand to Katuti, and said as he left the hall:
"Send me to-day the--the handkerchief--by the dwarf Nemu."
When he was already in the garden, he turned once more and said to Paaker
"Some friends are supping with me to-day; pray let me see you too."
The pioneer bowed; he dimly perceived that he was entangled in invisible
toils. Up to the present moment he had been proud of his devotion to his
calling, of his duties as Mohar; and now he had discovered that the king,
whose chain of honor hung round his neck, undervalued him, and perhaps
only suffered him to fill his arduous and dangerous post for the sake of
his father, while he, notwithstanding the temptations offered him in
Thebes by his wealth, had accepted it willingly and disinterestedly. He
knew that his skill with the pen was small, but that was no reason why he
should be despised; often had he wished that he could reconstitute his
office exactly as Ani had suggested, but his petition to be allowed a
secretary had been rejected by Rameses. What he spied out, he was told
was to be kept secret, and no one could be responsible for the secrecy of
another.
As his brother Horus grew up, he had followed him as his obedient
assistant, even after he had married a wife, who, with her child,
remained in Thebes under the care of Setchem.
He was now filling Paaker's place in Syria during his absence; badly
enough, as the pioneer thought, and yet not without credit; for the
fellow knew how to write smooth words with a graceful pen.
Paaker, accustomed to solitude, became absorbed in thought, forgetting
everything that surrounded him; even the widow herself, who had sunk on
to a couch, and was observing him in silence.
He gazed into vacancy, while a crowd of sensations rushed confusedly
through his brain. He thought himself cruelly ill-used, and he felt too
that it was incumbent on him to become the instrument of a terrible fate
to some other person. All was dim 'and chaotic in his mind, his love
merged in his hatred; only one thing was clear and unclouded by doubt,
and that was his strong conviction that Nefert would be his.
The Gods indeed were in deep disgrace with him. How much he had expended
upon them--and with what a grudging hand they had rewarded him; he knew
of but one indemnification for his wasted life, and in that he believed
so firmly that he counted on it as if it were capital which he had
invested in sound securities. But at this moment his resentful feelings
embittered the sweet dream of hope, and he strove in vain for calmness
and clear-sightedness; when such cross-roads as these met, no amulet, no
divining rod could guide him; here he must think for himself, and beat
his own road before he could walk in it; and yet he could think out no
plan, and arrive at no decision.
He grasped his burning forehead in his hands, and started from his
brooding reverie, to remember where he was, to recall his conversation
with the mother of the woman he loved, and her saying that she was
capable of guiding men.
"She perhaps may be able to think for me," he muttered to himself.
"Action suits me better."
He slowly went up to her and said:
"So it is settled then--we are confederates."
"Against Rameses, and for Ani," she replied, giving him her slender hand.
"In a few days I start for Syria, meanwhile you can make up your mind
what commissions you have to give me. The money for your son shall be
conveyed to you to-day before sunset. May I not pay my respects to
Nefert?"
"Not now, she is praying in the temple."
"But to-morrow?"
"Willingly, my dear friend. She will be delighted to see you, and to
thank you."
"Farewell, Katuti."
"Call me mother," said the widow, and she waved her veil to him as a last
farewell.
CHAPTER XIX.
As soon as Paaker had disappeared behind the shrubs, Katuti struck a
little sheet of metal, a slave appeared, and Katuti asked her whether
Nefert had returned from the temple.
"Her litter is just now at the side gate," was the answer.
"I await her here," said the widow. The slave went away, and a few
minutes later Nefert entered the hall.
"You want me?" she said; and after kissing her mother she sank upon her
couch. "I am tired," she exclaimed, "Nemu, take a fan and keep the flies
off me."
The dwarf sat down on a cushion by her couch, and began to wave the
semi-circular fan of ostrich-feathers; but Katuti put him aside and said:
"You can leave us for the present; we want to speak to each other in
private."
The dwarf shrugged his shoulders and got up, but Nefert looked at her
mother with an irresistible appeal.
"Let him stay," she said, as pathetically as if her whole happiness
depended upon it. "The flies torment me so, and Nemu always holds his
tongue."
She patted the dwarf's big head as if he were a lap-dog, and called the
white cat, which with a graceful leap sprang on to her shoulder and stood
there with its back arched, to be stroked by her slender fingers.
Nemu looked enquiringly at his mistress, but Katuti turned to her
daughter, and said in a warning voice:
"I have very serious things to discuss with you."
"Indeed?" said her daughter, "but I cannot be stung by the flies all the
same. Of course, if you wish it--"
"Nemu may stay then," said Katuti, and her voice had the tone of that of
a nurse who gives way to a naughty child. "Besides, he knows what I have
to talk about."
"There now!" said Nefert, kissing the head of the white cat, and she gave
the fan back to the dwarf.
The widow looked at her daughter with sincere compassion, she went up to
her and looked for the thousandth time in admiration at her pretty face.
"Poor child," she sighed, "how willingly I would spare you the frightful
news which sooner or later you must hear--must bear. Leave off your
foolish play with the cat, I have things of the most hideous gravity to
tell you."
"Speak on," replied Nefert. "To-day I cannot fear the worst. Mena's star,
the haruspex told me, stands under the sign of happiness, and I enquired
of the oracle in the temple of Besa, and heard that my husband is
prospering. I have prayed in the temple till I am quite content. Only
speak!--I know my brother's letter from the camp had no good news in it;
the evening before last I saw you had been crying, and yesterday you did
not look well; even the pomegranate flowers in your hair did not suit
you."
"Your brother," sighed Katuti, "has occasioned me great trouble, and we
might through him have suffered deep dishonor--"
"We-dishonor?" exclaimed Nefert, and she nervously clutched at the cat.
"Your brother lost enormous sums at play; to recover them he pledged the
mummy of your father--"
"Horrible!" cried Nefert. "We must appeal at once to the king;--I will
write to him myself; for Mena's sake he will hear me. Rameses is great
and noble, and will not let a house that is faithfully devoted to him
fall into disgrace through the reckless folly of a boy. Certainly I will
write to him."
She said this in a voice of most childlike confidence, and desired Nemu
to wave the fan more gently, as if this concern were settled.
In Katuti's heart surprise and indignation at the unnatural indifference
of her daughter were struggling together; but she withheld all blame, and
said carelessly:
"We are already released, for my nephew Paaker, as soon as he heard what
threatened us, offered me his help; freely and unprompted, from pure
goodness of heart and attachment."
"How good of Paaker!" cried Nefert. "He was so fond of me, and you know,
mother, I always stood up for him. No doubt it was for my sake that he
behaved so generously!"
The young wife laughed, and pulling the cat's face close to her own, held
her nose to its cool little nose, stared into its green eyes, and said,
imitating childish talk:
"There now, pussy--how kind people are to your little mistress."
Katuti was vexed daughter's childish impulses.
"It seems to me," she said, "that you might leave off playing and
trifling when I am talking of such serious matters. I have long since
observed that the fate of the house to which your father and mother
belong is a matter of perfect indifference to you; and yet you would have
to seek shelter and protection under its roof if your husband--"
"Well, mother?" asked Nefert breathing more quickly.
As soon as Katuti perceived her daughter's agitation she regretted that
she had not more gently led up to the news she had to break to her; for
she loved her daughter, and knew that it would give her keen pain.
So she went on more sympathetically:
"You boasted in joke that people are good to you, and it is true; you win
hearts by your mere being--by only being what you are. And Mena too loved
you tenderly; but 'absence,' says the proverb, 'is the one real enemy,'
and Mena--"
"What has Mena done?" Once more Nefert interrupted her mother, and her
nostrils quivered.
"Mena," said Katuti, decidedly, "has violated the truth and esteem which
he owes you--he has trodden them under foot, and--"
"Mena?" exclaimed the young wife with flashing eyes; she flung the cat on
the floor, and sprang from her couch.
"Yes--Mena," said Katuti firmly. "Your brother writes that he would have
neither silver nor gold for his spoil, but took the fair daughter of the
prince of the Danaids into his tent. The ignoble wretch!"
"Ignoble wretch!" cried Nefert, and two or three times she repeated her
mother's last words. Katuti drew back in horror, for her gentle, docile,
childlike daughter stood before her absolutely transfigured beyond all
recognition.
She looked like a beautiful demon of revenge; her eyes sparkled, her
breath came quickly, her limbs quivered, and with extraordinary strength
and rapidity she seized the dwarf by the hand, led him to the door of one
of the rooms which opened out of the hall, threw it open, pushed the
little man over the threshold, and closed it sharply upon him; then with
white lips she came up to her mother.
"An ignoble wretch did you call him?" she cried out with a hoarse husky
voice, "an ignoble wretch! Take back your words, mother, take back your
words, or--"
Katuti turned paler and paler, and said soothingly:
"The words may sound hard, but he has broken faith with you, and openly
dishonored you."
"And shall I believe it?" said Nefert with a scornful laugh. "Shall I
believe it, because a scoundrel has written it, who has pawned his
father's body and the honor of big family; because it is told you by that
noble and brave gentleman! why a box on the ears from Mena would be the
death of him. Look at me, mother, here are my eyes, and if that table
there were Mena's tent, and you were Mena, and you took the fairest woman
living by the hand and led her into it, and these eyes saw it--aye, over
and over again--I would laugh at it--as I laugh at it now; and I should
say, 'Who knows what he may have to give her, or to say to her,' and not
for one instant would I doubt his truth; for your son is false and Mena
is true. Osiris broke faith with Isis--but Mena may be favored by a
hundred women--he will take none to his tent but me!"
"Keep your belief," said Katuti bitterly, "but leave me mine."
"Yours?" said Nefert, and her flushed cheeks turned pale again. "What do
you believe? You listen to the worst and basest things that can be said
of a man who has overloaded you with benefits! A wretch, bah! an ignoble
wretch? Is that what you call a man who lets you dispose of his estate as
you please!"
"Nefert," cried Katuti angrily, "I will--"
"Do what you will," interrupted her indignant daughter, "but do not
vilify the generous man who has never hindered you from throwing away his
property on your son's debts and your own ambition. Since the day before
yesterday I have learned that we are not rich; and I have reflected, and
I have asked myself what has become of our corn and our cattle, of our
sheep and the rents from the farmers. The wretch's estate was not so
contemptible; but I tell you plainly I should be unworthy to be the wife
of the noble Mena if I allowed any one to vilify his name under his own
roof. Hold to your belief, by all means, but one of us must quit this
house--you or I."
At these words Nefert broke into passionate sobs, threw herself on her
knees by her couch, hid her face in the cushions, and wept convulsively
and without intermission.
Katuti stood behind her, startled, trembling, and not knowing what to
say. Was this her gentle, dreamy daughter? Had ever a daughter dared to
speak thus to her mother? But was she right or was Nefert? This question
was the pressing one; she knelt down by the side of the young wife, put
her arm round her, drew her head against her bosom, and whispered
pitifully:
"You cruel, hard-hearted child; forgive your poor, miserable mother, and
do not make the measure of her wretchedness overflow."
Then Nefert rose, kissed her mother's hand, and went silently into her
own room.
Katuti remained alone; she felt as if a dead hand held her heart in its
icy grasp, and she muttered to herself:
"Ani is right--nothing turns to good excepting that from which we expect
the worst."
She held her hand to her head, as if she had heard something too strange
to be believed. Her heart went after her daughter, but instead of
sympathizing with her she collected all her courage, and deliberately
recalled all the reproaches that Nefert had heaped upon her. She did not
spare herself a single word, and finally she murmured to herself: "She
can spoil every thing. For Mena's sake she will sacrifice me and the
whole world; Mena and Rameses are one, and if she discovers what we are
plotting she will betray us without a moment's hesitation. Hitherto all
has gone on without her seeing it, but to-day something has been unsealed
in her--an eye, a tongue, an ear, which have hitherto been closed. She is
like a deaf and dumb person, who by a sudden fright is restored to speech
and hearing. My favorite child will become the spy of my actions, and my
judge."
She gave no utterance to the last words, but she seemed to hear them with
her inmost ear; the voice that could speak to her thus, startled and
frightened her, and solitude was in itself a torture; she called the
dwarf, and desired him to have her litter prepared, as she intended going
to the temple, and visiting the wounded who had been sent home from
Syria.
"And the handkerchief for the Regent?" asked the little man.
"It was a pretext," said Katuti. "He wishes to speak to you about the
matter which you know of with regard to Paaker. What is it?"
"Do not ask," replied Nemu, "I ought not to betray it. By Besa, who
protects us dwarfs, it is better that thou shouldst never know it."
"For to-day I have learned enough that is new to me," retorted Katuti.
"Now go to Ani, and if you are able to throw Paaker entirely into his
power--good--I will give--but what have I to give away? I will be
grateful to you; and when we have gained our end I will set you free and
make you rich."
Nemu kissed her robe, and said in a low voice: "What is the end?"
"You know what Ani is striving for," answered the widow. "And I have but
one wish!"
"And that is?"
"To see Paaker in Mena's place."
"Then our wishes are the same," said the dwarf and he left the Hall.
Katuti looked after him and muttered:
"It must be so. For if every thing remains as it was and Mena comes home
and demands a reckoning--it is not to be thought of! It must not be!"
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Ardently they desire that which transcends sense
Every misfortune brings its fellow with it
Medicines work harm as often as good
No good excepting that from which we expect the worst
Obstinacy--which he liked to call firm determination
Only the choice between lying and silence
Patronizing friendliness
Principle of over-estimating the strength of our opponents
Provide yourself with a self-devised ruler
Successes, like misfortunes, never come singly
The beginning of things is not more attractive
UARDA
Volume 5.
By Georg Ebers
CHAPTER XX.
As Nemu, on his way back from his visit to Ani, approached his mistress's
house, he was detained by a boy, who desired him to follow him to the
stranger's quarter. Seeing him hesitate, the messenger showed him the
ring of his mother Hekt, who had come into the town on business, and
wanted to speak with him.
Nemu was tired, for he was not accustomed to walking; his ass was dead,
and Katuti could not afford to give him another. Half of Mena's beasts
had been sold, and the remainder barely sufficed for the field-labor.
At the corners of the busiest streets, and on the market-places, stood
boys with asses which they hired out for a small sum;
[In the streets of modern Egyptian towns asses stand saddled for
hire. On the monuments only foreigners are represented as riding on
asses, but these beasts are mentioned in almost every list of the
possessions of the nobles, even in very early times, and the number
is often considerable. There is a picture extant of a rich old man
who rides on a seat supported on the backs of two donkeys. Lepsius,
Denkmaler, part ii. 126.]
but Nemu had parted with his last money for a garment and a new wig, so
that he might appear worthily attired before the Regent. In former times
his pocket had never been empty, for Mena had thrown him many a ring of
silver, or even of gold, but his restless and ambitious spirit wasted no
regrets on lost luxuries. He remembered those years of superfluity with
contempt, and as he puffed and panted on his way through the dust, he
felt himself swell with satisfaction.
The Regent had admitted him to a private interview, and the little man
had soon succeeded in riveting his attention; Ani had laughed till the
tears rolled down his cheeks at Nemu's description of Paaker's wild
passion, and he had proved himself in earnest over the dwarf's further
communications, and had met his demands half-way. Nemu felt like a duck
hatched on dry land, and put for the first time into water; like a bird
hatched in a cage, and that for the first time is allowed to spread its
wings and fly. He would have swum or have flown willingly to death if
circumstances had not set a limit to his zeal and energy.
Bathed in sweat and coated with dust, he at last reached the gay tent in
the stranger's quarter, where the sorceress Hekt was accustomed to alight
when she came over to Thebes.
He was considering far-reaching projects, dreaming of possibilities,
devising subtle plans--rejecting them as too subtle, and supplying their
place with others more feasible and less dangerous; altogether the little
diplomatist had no mind for the motley tribes which here surrounded him.
He had passed the temple in which the people of Kaft adored their goddess
Astarte, and the sanctuary of Seth, where they sacrificed to Baal,
without letting himself be disturbed by the dancing devotees or the noise
of cymbals and music which issued from their enclosures. The tents and
slightly-built wooden houses of the dancing girls did not tempt him.
Besides their inhabitants, who in the evening tricked themselves out in
tinsel finery to lure the youth of Thebes into extravagance and folly,
and spent their days in sleeping till sun-down, only the gambling booths
drove a brisk business; and the guard of police had much trouble to
restrain the soldier, who had staked and lost all his prize money, or the
sailor, who thought himself cheated, from such outbreaks of rage and
despair as must end in bloodshed. Drunken men lay in front of the
taverns, and others were doing their utmost, by repeatedly draining their
beakers, to follow their example.
Nothing was yet to be seen of the various musicians, jugglers,
fire-eaters, serpent-charmers, and conjurers, who in the evening
displayed their skill in this part of the town, which at all times had
the aspect of a never ceasing fair. But these delights, which Nemu had
passed a thousand times, had never had any temptation for him. Women and
gambling were not to his taste; that which could be had simply for the
taking, without trouble or exertion, offered no charms to his fancy, he
had no fear of the ridicule of the dancing-women, and their
associates--indeed, he occasionally sought them, for he enjoyed a war of
words, and he was of opinion that no one in Thebes could beat him at
having the last word. Other people, indeed, shared this opinion, and not
long before Paaker's steward had said of Nemu:
"Our tongues are cudgels, but the little one's is a dagger."
The destination of the dwarf was a very large and gaudy tent, not in any
way distinguished from a dozen others in its neighborhood. The opening
which led into it was wide, but at present closed by a hanging of coarse
stuff.
Nemu squeezed himself in between the edge of the tent and the yielding
door, and found himself in an almost circular tent with many angles, and
with its cone-shaped roof supported on a pole by way of a pillar.
Pieces of shabby carpet lay on the dusty soil that was the floor of the
tent, and on these squatted some gaily-clad girls, whom an old woman was
busily engaged in dressing. She painted the finger and toenails of the
fair ones with orange-colored Hennah, blackened their brows and
eye-lashes with Mestem--[Antimony.]--to give brilliancy to their glance,
painted their cheeks with white and red, and anointed their hair with
scented oil.
It was very hot in the tent, and not one of the girls spoke a word; they
sat perfectly still before the old woman, and did not stir a finger,
excepting now and then to take up one of the porous clay pitchers, which
stood on the ground, for a draught of water, or to put a pill of Kyphi
between their painted lips.
Various musical instruments leaned against the walls of the tent,
hand-drums, pipes and lutes and four tambourines lay on the ground; on
the vellum of one slept a cat, whose graceful kittens played with the
bells in the hoop of another.
An old negro-woman went in and out of the little back-door of the tent,
pursued by flies and gnats, while she cleared away a variety of earthen
dishes with the remains of food--pomegranate-peelings, breadcrumbs, and
garlic-tops--which had been lying on one of the carpets for some hours
since the girls had finished their dinner.
Old Hekt sat apart from the girls on a painted trunk, and she was saying,
as she took a parcel from her wallet:
"Here, take this incense, and burn six seeds of it, and the vermin will
all disappear--" she pointed to the flies that swarmed round the platter
in her hand. "If you like I will drive away the mice too and draw the
snakes out of their holes better than the priests."
[Recipes for exterminating noxious creatures are found in the
papyrus in my possession.]
"Keep your magic to yourself," said a girl in a husky voice. "Since you
muttered your words over me, and gave me that drink to make me grow
slight and lissom again, I have been shaken to pieces with a cough at
night, and turn faint when I am dancing."
"But look how slender you have grown," answered Hekt, "and your cough
will soon be well."
"When I am dead," whispered the girl to the old woman. "I know that most
of us end so."
The witch shrugged her shoulders, and perceiving the dwarf she rose from
her seat.
The girls too noticed the little man, and set up the indescribable cry,
something like the cackle of hens, which is peculiar to Eastern women
when something tickles their fancy. Nemu was well known to them, for his
mother always stayed in their tent whenever she came to Thebes, and the
gayest of them cried out:
"You are grown, little man, since the last time you were here."
"So are you," said the dwarf sharply; "but only as far as big words are
concerned."
"And you are as wicked as you are small," retorted the girl.
"Then my wickedness is small too," said the dwarf laughing, "for I am
little enough! Good morning, girls--may Besa help your beauty. Good day,
mother--you sent for me?"
The old woman nodded; the dwarf perched himself on the chest beside her,
and they began to whisper together.
"How dusty and tired you are," said Hekt. I do believe you have come on
foot in the burning sun."
"My ass is dead," replied Nemu, "and I have no money to hire a steed."
"A foretaste of future splendor," said the old woman with a sneer. "What
have you succeeded in doing?"
"Paaker has saved us," replied Nemu, "and I have just come from a long
interview with the Regent."
"Well?"
"He will renew your letter of freedom, if you will put Paaker into his
power."
"Good-good. I wish he would make up his mind to come and seek me--in
disguise, of course--I would--"
"He is very timid, and it would not suggest to him anything so
unpracticable."
"Hm--" said Hekt, "perhaps you are right, for when we have to demand a
good deal it is best only to ask for what is feasible. One rash request
often altogether spoils the patron's inclination for granting favors."
"What else has occurred?"
"The Regent's army has conquered the Ethiopians, and is coming home with
rich spoils."
"People may be bought with treasure," muttered the old woman, "I
good--good!"
"Paaker's sword is sharpened; I would give no more for my master's life,
than I have in my pocket--and you know why I came on foot through the
dust."
"Well, you can ride home again," replied his mother, giving the little
man a small silver ring. "Has the pioneer seen Nefert again?"
"Strange things have happened," said the dwarf, and he told his mother
what had taken place between Katuti and Nefert. Nemu was a good listener,
and had not forgotten a word of what he had heard.
The old woman listened to his story with the most eager attention.
"Well, well," she muttered, "here is another extraordinary thing. What is
common to all men is generally disgustingly similar in the palace and in
the hovel. Mothers are everywhere she-apes, who with pleasure let
themselves be tormented to death by their children, who repay them badly
enough, and the wives generally open their ears wide if any one can tell
them of some misbehavior of their husbands! But that is not the way with
your mistress."
The old woman looked thoughtful, and then she continued:
"In point of fact this can be easily explained, and is not at all more
extraordinary than it is that those tired girls should sit yawning. You
told me once that it was a pretty sight to see the mother and daughter
side by side in their chariot when they go to a festival or the
Panegyrai; Katuti, you said, took care that the colors of their dresses
and the flowers in their hair should harmonize. For which of them is the
dress first chosen on such occasions?"
"Always for the lady Katuti, who never wears any but certain colors,"
replied Nemu quickly.
"You see," said the witch laughing, "Indeed it must be so. That mother
always thinks of herself first, and of the objects she wishes to gain;
but they hang high, and she treads down everything that is in her
way--even her own child--to reach them. She will contrive that Paaker
shall be the ruin of Mena, as sure as I have ears to hear with, for that
woman is capable of playing any tricks with her daughter, and would marry
her to that lame dog yonder if it would advance her ambitious schemes."
"But Nefert!" said Nemu. "You should have seen her. The dove became a
lioness."
"Because she loves Mena as much as her mother loves herself," answered
Hekt. "As the poets say, 'she is full of him.' It is really true of her,
there is no room for any thing else. She cares for one only, and woe to
those who come between him and her!"
"I have seen other women in love," said Nemu, "but--"
"But," exclaimed the old witch with such a sharp laugh that the girls all
looked up, "they behaved differently to Nefert--I believe you, for there
is not one in a thousand that loves as she does. It is a sickness that
gives raging pain--like a poisoned arrow in an open wound, and devours
all that is near it like a fire-brand, and is harder to cure than the
disease which is killing that coughing wench. To be possessed by that
demon of anguish is to suffer the torture of the damned--or else," and
her voice sank to softness, "to be more blest than the Gods, happy as
they are. I know--I know it all; for I was once one of the possessed, one
of a thousand, and even now--"
"Well?" asked the dwarf.
"Folly!" muttered the witch, stretching herself as if awaking from sleep.
"Madness! He--is long since dead, and if he were not it would be all the
same to me. All men are alike, and Mena will be like the rest."
"But Paaker surely is governed by the demon you describe?" asked the
dwarf.
"May be," replied his mother; "but he is self-willed to madness. He would
simply give his life for the thing because it is denied him. If your
mistress Nefert were his, perhaps he might be easier; but what is the use
of chattering? I must go over to the gold tent, where everyone goes now
who has any money in their purse, to speak to the mistress--"
"What do you want with her?" interrupted Nemu. "Little Uarda over there,"
said the old woman, "will soon be quite well again. You have seen her
lately; is she not grown beautiful, wonderfully beautiful? Now I shall
see what the good woman will offer me if I take Uarda to her? the girl is
as light-footed as a gazelle, and with good training would learn to dance
in a very few weeks."
Nemu turned perfectly white.
"That you shall not do," said he positively.
"And why not?" asked the old woman, "if it pays well."
"Because I forbid it," said the dwarf in a choked voice.
"Bless me," laughed the woman; "you want to play my lady Nefert, and
expect me to take the part of her mother Katuti. But, seriously, having
seen the child again, have you any fancy for her?"
"Yes," replied Nemu. "If we gain our end, Katuti will make me free, and
make me rich. Then I will buy Pinem's grandchild, and take her for my
wife. I will build a house near the hall of justice, and give the
complainants and defendants private advice, like the hunch-back Sent, who
now drives through the streets in his own chariot."
"Hm--" said his mother, "that might have done very well, but perhaps it
is too late. When the child had fever she talked about the young priest
who was sent from the House of Seti by Ameni. He is a fine tall fellow,
and took a great interest in her; he is a gardener's son, named Pentaur."
"Pentaur?" said the dwarf. "Pentaur? He has the haughty air and the
expression of the old Mohar, and would be sure to rise; but they are
going to break his proud neck for him."
"So much the better," said the old woman. "Uarda would be just the wife
for you, she is good and steady, and no one knows--"
"What?" said Nemu.
"Who her mother was--for she was not one of us. She came here from
foreign parts, and when she died she left a trinket with strange letters
on it. We must show it to one of the prisoners of war, after you have got
her safe; perhaps they could make out the queer inscription. She comes of
a good stock, that I am certain; for Uarda is the very living image of
her mother, and as soon as she was born, she looked like the child of a
great man. You smile, you idiot! Why thousands of infants have been in my
hands, and if one was brought to me wrapped in rags I could tell if its
parents were noble or base-born. The shape of the foot shows it--and
other marks. Uarda may stay where she is, and I will help you. If
anything new occurs let me know."
CHAPTER XXI.
When Nemu, riding on an ass this time, reached home, he found neither his
mistress nor Nefert within.
The former was gone, first to the temple, and then into the town; Nefert,
obeying an irresistible impulse, had gone to her royal friend Bent-Anat.
The king's palace was more like a little town than a house. The wing in
which the Regent resided, and which we have already visited, lay away
from the river; while the part of the building which was used by the
royal family commanded the Nile.
It offered a splendid, and at the same time a pleasing prospect to the
ships which sailed by at its foot, for it stood, not a huge and solitary
mass in the midst of the surrounding gardens, but in picturesque groups
of various outline. On each side of a large structure, which contained
the state rooms and banqueting hall, three rows of pavilions of different
sizes extended in symmetrical order. They were connected with each other
by colonnades, or by little bridges, under which flowed canals, that
watered the gardens and gave the palace-grounds the aspect of a town
built on islands.
The principal part of the castle of the Pharaohs was constructed of light
Nile-mud bricks and elegantly carved woodwork, but the extensive walls
which surrounded it were ornamented and fortified with towers, in front
of which heavily armed soldiers stood on guard.
The walls and pillars, the galleries and colonnades, even the roofs,
blazed in many colored paints, and at every gate stood tall masts, from
which red and blue flags fluttered when the king was residing there. Now
they stood up with only their brass spikes, which were intended to
intercept and conduct the lightning.--[ According to an inscription first
interpreted by Dumichen.]
To the right of the principal building, and entirely surrounded with
thick plantations of trees, stood the houses of the royal ladies, some
mirrored in the lake which they surrounded at a greater or less distance.
In this part of the grounds were the king's storehouses in endless rows,
while behind the centre building, in which the Pharaoh resided, stood the
barracks for his body guard and the treasuries. The left wing was
occupied by the officers of the household, the innumerable servants and
the horses and chariots of the sovereign.
In spite of the absence of the king himself, brisk activity reigned in
the palace of Rameses, for a hundred gardeners watered the turf, the
flower-borders, the shrubs and trees; companies of guards passed hither
and thither; horses were being trained and broken; and the princess's
wing was as full as a beehive of servants and maids, officers and
priests.
Nefert was well known in this part of the palace. The gate-keepers let
her litter pass unchallenged, with low bows; once in the garden, a lord
in waiting received her, and conducted her to the chamberlain, who, after
a short delay, introduced her into the sitting-room of the king's
favorite daughter.
Bent-Anat's apartment was on the first floor of the pavilion, next to the
king's residence. Her dead mother had inhabited these pleasant rooms, and
when the princess was grown up it made the king happy to feel that she
was near him; so the beautiful house of the wife who had too early
departed, was given up to her, and at the same time, as she was his
eldest daughter, many privileges were conceded to her, which hitherto
none but queens had enjoyed.
The large room, in which Nefert found the princess, commanded the river.
A doorway, closed with light curtains, opened on to a long balcony with a
finely-worked balustrade of copper-gilt, to which clung a climbing rose
with pink flowers.
When Nefert entered the room, Bent-Anat was just having the rustling
curtain drawn aside by her waiting-women; for the sun was setting, and at
that hour she loved to sit on the balcony, as it grew cooler, and watch
with devout meditation the departure of Ra, who, as the grey-haired Turn,
vanished behind the western horizon of the Necropolis in the evening to
bestow the blessing of light on the under-world.
Nefert's apartment was far more elegantly appointed than the princess's;
her mother and Mena had surrounded her with a thousand pretty trifles.
Her carpets were made of sky-blue and silver brocade from Damascus, the
seats and couches were covered with stuff embroidered in feathers by the
Ethiopian women, which looked like the breasts of birds. The images of
the Goddess Hathor, which stood on the house-altar, were of an imitation
of emerald, which was called Mafkat, and the other little figures, which
were placed near their patroness, were of lapis-lazuli, malachite, agate
and bronze, overlaid with gold. On her toilet-table stood a collection of
salve-boxes, and cups of ebony and ivory finely carved, and everything
was arranged with the utmost taste, and exactly suited Nefert herself.
Bent-Anat's room also suited the owner.
It was high and airy, and its furniture consisted in costly but simple
necessaries; the lower part of the wall was lined with cool tiles of
white and violet earthen ware, on each of which was pictured a star, and
which, all together, formed a tasteful pattern. Above these the walls
were covered with a beautiful dark green material brought from Sais, and
the same stuff was used to cover the long divans by the wall. Chairs and
stools, made of cane, stood round a very large table in the middle of
this room, out of which several others opened; all handsome, comfortable,
and harmonious in aspect, but all betraying that their mistress took
small pleasure in trifling decorations. But her chief delight was in
finely-grown plants, of which rare and magnificent specimens,
artistically arranged on stands, stood in the corners of many of the
rooms. In others there were tall obelisks of ebony, which bore saucers
for incense, which all the Egyptians loved, and which was prescribed by
their physicians to purify and perfume their dwellings. Her simple
bedroom would have suited a prince who loved floriculture, quite as well
as a princess.
Before all things Bent-Anat loved air and light. The curtains of her
windows and doors were only closed when the position of the sun
absolutely required it; while in Nefert's rooms, from morning till
evening, a dim twilight was maintained.
The princess went affectionately towards the charioteer's wife, who bowed
low before her at the threshold; she took her chin with her right hand,
kissed her delicate narrow forehead, and said:
"Sweet creature! At last you have come uninvited to see lonely me! It is
the first time since our men went away to the war. If Rameses' daughter
commands there is no escape; and you come; but of your own free will--"
Nefert raised her large eyes, moist with tears, with an imploring look,
and her glance was so pathetic that Bent-Anat interrupted herself, and
taking both her hands, exclaimed:
"Do you know who must have eyes exactly like yours? I mean the Goddess
from whose tears, when they fall on the earth, flowers spring."
Nefert's eyes fell and she blushed deeply.
"I wish," she murmured, "that my eyes might close for ever, for I am very
unhappy." And two large tears rolled down her cheeks.
"What has happened to you, my darling?" asked the princess
sympathetically, and she drew her towards her, putting her arm round her
like a sick child.
Nefert glanced anxiously at the chamberlain, and the ladies in waiting
who had entered the room with her, and Bent-Anat understood the look; she
requested her attendants to withdraw, and when she was alone with her sad
little friend--"Speak now," she said. "What saddens your heart? how comes
this melancholy expression on your dear baby face? Tell me, and I will
comfort you, and you shall be my bright thoughtless plaything once more."
"Thy plaything!" answered Nefert, and a flash of displeasure sparkled in
her eyes. "Thou art right to call me so, for I deserve no better name. I
have submitted all my life to be nothing but the plaything of others."
"But, Nefert, I do not know you again," cried Bent-Anat. "Is this my
gentle amiable dreamer?"
"That is the word I wanted," said Nefert in a low tone. "I slept, and
dreamed, and dreamed on--till Mena awoke me; and when he left me I went
to sleep again, and for two whole years I have lain dreaming; but to-day
I have been torn from my dreams so suddenly and roughly, that I shall
never find any rest again."
While she spoke, heavy tears fell slowly one after another over her
cheeks.
Bent-Anat felt what she saw and heard as deeply as if Nefert were her own
suffering child. She lovingly drew the young wife down by her side on the
divan, and insisted on Nefert's letting her know all that troubled her
spirit.
Katuti's daughter had in the last few hours felt like one born blind, and
who suddenly receives his sight. He looks at the brightness of the sun,
and the manifold forms of the creation around him, but the beams of the
day-star blind its eyes, and the new forms, which he has sought to guess
at in his mind, and which throng round him in their rude reality, shock
him and pain him. To-day, for the first time, she had asked herself
wherefore her mother, and not she herself, was called upon to control the
house of which she nevertheless was called the mistress, and the answer
had rung in her ears: "Because Mena thinks you incapable of thought and
action." He had often called her his little rose, and she felt now that
she was neither more nor less than a flower that blossoms and fades, and
only charms the eye by its color and beauty.
"My mother," she said to Bent-Anat, "no doubt loves me, but she has
managed badly for Mena, very badly; and I, miserable idiot, slept and
dreamed of Mena, and saw and heard nothing of what was happening to
his--to our--inheritance. Now my mother is afraid of my husband, and
those whom we fear, says my uncle, we cannot love, and we are always
ready to believe evil of those we do not love. So she lends an ear to
those people who blame Mena, and say of him that he has driven me out of
his heart, and has taken a strange woman to his tent. But it is false and
a lie; and I cannot and will not countenance my own mother even, if she
embitters and mars what is left to me--what supports me--the breath and
blood of my life--my love, my fervent love for my husband."
Bent-Anat had listened to her without interrupting her; she sat by her
for a time in silence. Then she said:
"Come out into the gallery; then I will tell you what I think, and
perhaps Toth may pour some helpful counsel into my mind. I love you, and
I know you well, and though I am not wise, I have my eyes open and a
strong hand. Take it, come with me on to the balcony."
A refreshing breeze met the two women as they stepped out into the air.
It was evening, and a reviving coolness had succeeded the heat of the
day. The buildings and houses already cast long shadows, and numberless
boats, with the visitors returning from the Necropolis, crowded the
stream that rolled its swollen flood majestically northwards.
Close below lay the verdant garden, which sent odors from the rose-beds
up to the princess's balcony. A famous artist had laid it out in the time
of Hatasu, and the picture which he had in his mind, when he sowed the
seeds and planted the young shoots, was now realized, many decades after
his death. He had thought of planning a carpet, on which the palace
should seem to stand. Tiny streams, in bends and curves, formed the
outline of the design, and the shapes they enclosed were filled with
plants of every size, form, and color; beautiful plats of fresh green
turf everywhere represented the groundwork of the pattern, and
flower-beds and clumps of shrubs stood out from them in harmonious
mixtures of colors, while the tall and rare trees, of which Hatasu's
ships had brought several from Arabia, gave dignity and impressiveness to
the whole.
Clear drops sparkled on leaf and flower and blade, for, only a short time
before, the garden by Bent-Anat's house had been freshly watered. The
Nile beyond surrounded an island, where flourished the well-kept sacred
grove of Anion.
The Necropolis on the farther side of the river was also well seen from
Bent-Anat's balcony. There stood in long perspective the rows of
sphinxes, which led from the landing-place of the festal barges to the
gigantic buildings of Amenophis III. with its colossi--the hugest in
Thebes--to the House of Seti, and to the temple of Hatasu. There lay the
long workshops of the embalmers and closely-packed homes of the
inhabitants of the City of the Dead. In the farthest west rose the Libyan
mountains with their innumerable graves, and the valley of the kings'
tombs took a wide curve behind, concealed by a spur of the hills.
The two women looked in silence towards the west. The sun was near the
horizon--now it touched it, now it sank behind the hills; and as the
heavens flushed with hues like living gold, blazing rubies, and liquid
garnet and amethyst, the evening chant rang out from all the temples, and
the friends sank on their knees, hid their faces in the bower-rose
garlands that clung to the trellis, and prayed with full hearts.
When they rose night was spreading over the landscape, for the twilight
is short in Thebes. Here and there a rosy cloud fluttered across the
darkening sky, and faded gradually as the evening star appeared.
"I am content," said Bent-Anat. "And you? have you recovered your peace
of mind?"
Nefert shook her head. The princess drew her on to a seat, and sank down
beside her. Then she began again "Your heart is sore, poor child; they
have spoilt the past for you, and you dread the future. Let me be frank
with you, even if it gives you pain. You are sick, and I must cure you.
Will you listen to me?"
"Speak on," said Nefert.
"Speech does not suit me so well as action," replied the princess; "but I
believe I know what you need, and can help you. You love your husband;
duty calls him from you, and you feel lonely and neglected; that is quite
natural. But those whom I love, my father and my brothers, are also gone
to the war; my mother is long since dead; the noble woman, whom the king
left to be my companion, was laid low a few weeks since by sickness. Look
what a half-abandoned spot my house is! Which is the lonelier do you
think, you or I?"
"I," said Nefert. "For no one is so lonely as a wife parted from the
husband her heart longs after."
"But you trust Mena's love for you?" asked Bent-Anat.
Nefert pressed her hand to her heart and nodded assent:
"And he will return, and with him your happiness."
"I hope so," said Nefert softly.
"And he who hopes," said Bent Anat, "possesses already the joys of the
future. Tell me, would you have changed places with the Gods so long as
Mena was with you? No! Then you are most fortunate, for blissful
memories--the joys of the past--are yours at any rate. What is the
present? I speak of it, and it is no more. Now, I ask you, what joys can
I look forward to, and what certain happiness am I justified in hoping
for?
"Thou dost not love any one," replied Nefert. "Thou dost follow thy own
course, calm and undeviating as the moon above us. The highest joys are
unknown to thee, but for the same reason thou dost not know the bitterest
pain."
"What pain?" asked the princess.
"The torment of a heart consumed by the fires of Sechet," replied Nefert.
The princess looked thoughtfully at the ground, then she turned her eyes
eagerly on her friend.
"You are mistaken," she said; "I know what love and longing are. But you
need only wait till a feast day to wear the jewel that is your own, while
my treasure is no more mine than a pearl that I see gleaming at the
bottom of the sea."
"Thou canst love!" exclaimed Nefert with joyful excitement. "Oh! I thank
Hathor that at last she has touched thy heart. The daughter of Rameses
need not even send for the diver to fetch the jewel out of the sea; at a
sign from her the pearl will rise of itself, and lie on the sand at her
slender feet."
Bent-Anat smiled and kissed Nefert's brow.
"How it excites you," she said, "and stirs your heart and tongue! If two
strings are tuned in harmony, and one is struck, the other sounds, my
music master tells me. I believe you would listen to me till morning if I
only talked to you about my love. But it was not for that that we came
out on the balcony. Now listen! I am as lonely as you, I love less
happily than you, the House of Seti threatens me with evil times--and yet
I can preserve my full confidence in life and my joy in existence. How
can you explain this?"
"We are so very different," said Nefert.
"True," replied Bent-Anat, "but we are both young, both women, and both
wish to do right. My mother died, and I have had no one to guide me, for
I who for the most part need some one to lead me can already command, and
be obeyed. You had a mother to bring you up, who, when you were still a
child, was proud of her pretty little daughter, and let her--as it became
her so well-dream and play, without warning her against the dangerous
propensity. Then Mena courted you. You love him truly, and in four long
years he has been with you but a month or two; your mother remained with
you, and you hardly observed that she was managing your own house for
you, and took all the trouble of the household. You had a great pastime
of your own--your thoughts of Mena, and scope for a thousand dreams in
your distant love. I know it, Nefert; all that you have seen and heard
and felt in these twenty months has centred in him and him alone. Nor is
it wrong in itself. The rose tree here, which clings to my balcony,
delights us both; but if the gardener did not frequently prune it and tie
it with palm-bast, in this soil, which forces everything to rapid growth,
it would soon shoot up so high that it would cover door and window, and I
should sit in darkness. Throw this handkerchief over your shoulders, for
the dew falls as it grows cooler, and listen to me a little longer!--The
beautiful passion of love and fidelity has grown unchecked in your dreamy
nature to such a height, that it darkens your spirit and your judgment.
Love, a true love, it seems to me, should be a noble fruit-tree, and not
a rank weed. I do not blame you, for she who should have been the
gardener did not heed--and would not heed--what was happening. Look,
Nefert, so long as I wore the lock of youth, I too did what I fancied--I
never found any pleasure in dreaming, but in wild games with my brothers,
in horses and in falconry; they often said I had the spirit of a boy, and
indeed I would willingly have been a boy."
"Not I--never!" said Nefert.
"You are just a rose--my dearest," said Bent-Anat. "Well! when I was
fifteen I was so discontented, so insubordinate and full of all sorts of
wild behavior, so dissatisfied in spite of all the kindness and love that
surrounded me--but I will tell you what happened. It is four years ago,
shortly before your wedding with Mena; my father called me to play
draughts.
[At Medinet Habu a picture represents Rameses the Third, not Rameses
the Second, playing at draughts with his daughter.]
You know how certainly he could beat the most skilful antagonist; but
that day his thoughts were wandering, and I won the game twice following.
Full of insolent delight, I jumped up and kissed his great handsome
forehead, and cried 'The sublime God, the hero, under whose feet the
strange nations writhe, to whom the priests and the people pray--is
beaten by a girl!' He smiled gently, and answered 'The Lords of Heaven
are often outdone by the Ladies, and Necheb, the lady of victory, is a
woman. Then he grew graver, and said: 'You call me a God, my child, but
in this only do I feel truly godlike, that at every moment I strive to
the utmost to prove myself useful by my labors; here restraining, there
promoting, as is needful. Godlike I can never be but by doing or
producing something great! These words, Nefert, fell like seeds in my
soul. At last I knew what it was that was wanting to me; and when, a few
weeks later, my father and your husband took the field with a hundred
thousand fighting men, I resolved to be worthy of my godlike father, and
in my little circle to be of use too! You do not know all that is done in
the houses behind there, under my direction. Three hundred girls spin
pure flax, and weave it into bands of linen for the wounds of the
soldiers; numbers of children, and old women, gather plants on the
mountains, and others sort them according to the instructions of a
physician; in the kitchens no banquets are prepared, but fruits are
preserved in sugar for the loved ones, and the sick in the camp. Joints
of meat are salted, dried, and smoked for the army on its march through
the desert. The butler no longer thinks of drinking-bouts, but brings me
wine in great stone jars; we pour it into well-closed skins for the
soldiers, and the best sorts we put into strong flasks, carefully sealed
with pitch, that they may perform the journey uninjured, and warm and
rejoice the hearts of our heroes. All that, and much more, I manage and
arrange, and my days pass in hard work. The Gods send me no bright
visions in the night, for after utter fatigue--I sleep soundly. But I
know that I am of use. I can hold my head proudly, because in some degree
I resemble my great father; and if the king thinks of me at all I know he
can rejoice in the doings of his child. That is the end of it,
Nefert--and I only say, Come and join me, work with me, prove yourself of
use, and compel Mena to think of his wife, not with affection only, but
with pride." Nefert let her head sink slowly on Bent-Anat's bosom, threw
her arms round her neck, and wept like a child. At last she composed
herself and said humbly:
"Take me to school, and teach me to be useful." "I knew," said the
princess smiling, "that you only needed a guiding hand. Believe me, you
will soon learn to couple content and longing. But now hear this! At
present go home to your mother, for it is late; and meet her lovingly,
for that is the will of the Gods. To-morrow morning I will go to see you,
and beg Katuti to let you come to me as companion in the place of my lost
friend. The day after to-morrow you will come to me in the palace. You
can live in the rooms of my departed friend and begin, as she had done,
to help me in my work. May these hours be blest to you!"
CHAPTER XXII.
At the time of this conversation the leech Nebsecht still lingered in
front of the hovel of the paraschites, and waited with growing impatience
for the old man's return.
At first he trembled for him; then he entirely forgot the danger into
which he had thrown him, and only hoped for the fulfilment of his
desires, and for wonderful revelations through his investigations of the
human heart.
For some minutes he gave himself up to scientific considerations; but he
became more and more agitated by anxiety for the paraschites, and by the
exciting vicinity of Uarda.
For hours he had been alone with her, for her father and grandmother
could no longer stop away from their occupations. The former must go to
escort prisoners of war to Hermonthis, and the old woman, since her
granddaughter had been old enough to undertake the small duties of the
household, had been one of the wailing-women, who, with hair all
dishevelled, accompanied the corpse on its way to the grave, weeping, and
lamenting, and casting Nile-mud on their forehead and breast. Uarda still
lay, when the sun was sinking, in front of the hut.
She looked weary and pale. Her long hair had come undone, and once more
got entangled with the straw of her humble couch. If Nebsecht went near
her to feel her pulse or to speak to her she carefully turned her face
from him.
Nevertheless when the sun disappeared behind the rocks he bent over her
once more, and said:
"It is growing cool; shall I carry you indoors?"
"Let me alone," she said crossly. "I am hot, keep farther away. I am no
longer ill, and could go indoors by myself if I wished; but grandmother
will be here directly."
Nebsecht rose, and sat down on a hen-coop that was some paces from Uarda,
and asked stammering, "Shall I go farther off?"
"Do as you please," she answered. "You are not kind," he said sadly.
"You sit looking at me," said Uarda, "I cannot bear it; and I am
uneasy--for grandfather was quite different this morning from his usual
self, and talked strangely about dying, and about the great price that
was asked of him for curing me. Then he begged me never to forget him,
and was so excited and so strange. He is so long away; I wish he were
here, with me."
And with these words Uarda began to cry silently. A nameless anxiety for
the paraschites seized Nebsecht, and it struck him to the heart that he
had demanded a human life in return for the mere fulfilment of a duty. He
knew the law well enough, and knew that the old man would be compelled
without respite or delay to empty the cup of poison if he were found
guilty of the theft of a human heart.
It was dark: Uarda ceased weeping and said to the surgeon:
"Can it be possible that he has gone into the city to borrow the great
sum of money that thou--or thy temple--demanded for thy medicine? But
there is the princess's golden bracelet, and half of father's prize, and
in the chest two years' wages that grandmother had earned by wailing he
untouched. Is all that not enough?"
The girl's last question was full of resentment and reproach, and
Nebsecht, whose perfect sincerity was part of his very being, was silent,
as he would not venture to say yes. He had asked more in return for his
help than gold or silver. Now he remembered Pentaur's warning, and when
the jackals began to bark he took up the fire-stick,
[The hieroglyphic sign Sam seems to me to represent the wooden stick
used to produce fire (as among some savage tribes) by rapid friction
in a hollow piece of wood.]
and lighted some fuel that was lying ready. Then he asked himself what
Uarda's fate would be without her grandparents, and a strange plan which
had floated vaguely before him for some hours, began now to take a
distinct outline and intelligible form. He determined if the old man did
not return to ask the kolchytes or embalmers to admit him into their
guild--and for the sake of his adroitness they were not likely to refuse
him--then he would make Uarda his wife, and live apart from the world,
for her, for his studies, and for his new calling, in which he hoped to
learn a great deal. What did he care for comfort and proprieties, for
recognition from his fellow-men, and a superior position!
He could hope to advance more quickly along the new stony path than on
the old beaten track. The impulse to communicate his acquired knowledge
to others he did not feel. Knowledge in itself amply satisfied him, and
he thought no more of his ties to the House of Seti. For three whole days
he had not changed his garments, no razor had touched his chin or his
scalp, not a drop of water had wetted his hands or his feet. He felt half
bewildered and almost as if he had already become an embalmer, nay even a
paraschites, one of the most despised of human beings. This
self-degradation had an infinite charm, for it brought him down to the
level of Uarda, and she, lying near him, sick and anxious, with her
dishevelled hair, exactly suited the future which he painted to himself.
"Do you hear nothing?" Uarda asked suddenly. He listened. In the valley
there was a barking of dogs, and soon the paraschites and his wife
appeared, and, at the door of their hut, took leave of old Hekt, who had
met them on her return from Thebes.
"You have been gone a long time," cried Uarda, when her grandmother once
more stood before her. "I have been so frightened."
"The doctor was with you," said the old woman going into the house to
prepare their simple meal, while the paraschites knelt down by his
granddaughter, and caressed her tenderly, but yet with respect, as if he
were her faithful servant rather than her blood-relation.
Then he rose, and gave to Nebsecht, who was trembling with excitement,
the bag of coarse linen which he was in the habit of carrying tied to him
by a narrow belt.
"The heart is in that," he whispered to the leech; "take it out, and give
me back the bag, for my knife is in it, and I want it."
Nebsecht took the heart out of the covering with trembling hands and laid
it carefully down. Then he felt in the breast of his dress, and going up
to the paraschites he whispered:
"Here, take the writing, hang it round your neck, and when you die I will
have the book of scripture wrapped up in your mummy cloths like a great
man. But that is not enough. The property that I inherited is in the
hands of my brother, who is a good man of business, and I have not
touched the interest for ten years. I will send it to you, and you and
your wife shall enjoy an old age free from care."
"The paraschites had taken the little bag with the strip of papyrus, and
heard the leech to the end. Then he turned from him saying: "Keep thy
money; we are quits. That is if the child gets well," he added humbly.
"She is already half cured," stammered Nebsecht. "But why will you--why
won't you accept--"
"Because till to day I have never begged nor borrowed," said the
paraschites, "and I will not begin in my old age. Life for life. But what
I have done this day not Rameses with all his treasure could repay."
Nebsecht looked down, and knew not how to answer the old man.
His wife now came out; she set a bowl of lentils that she had hastily
warmed before the two men, with radishes and onions,
[Radishes, onions, and garlic were the hors-d'oeuvre of an Egyptian
dinner. 1600 talents worth were consumed, according to Herodotus.
during the building of the pyramid of Cheops--L360,000 (in 1881.)]
then she helped Uarda, who did not need to be carried, into the house,
and invited Nebsecht to share their meal. He accepted her invitation, for
he had eaten nothing since the previous evening.
When the old woman had once more disappeared indoors, he asked the
paraschites:
"Whose heart is it that you have brought me, and how did it come into
your hands?"
"Tell me first," said the other, "why thou hast laid such a heavy sin
upon my soul?"
"Because I want to investigate the structure of the human heart," said
Nebsecht, "so that, when I meet with diseased hearts, I may be able to
cure them."
The paraschites looked for a long time at the ground in silence; then he
said:
"Art thou speaking the truth?"
"Yes," replied the leech with convincing emphasis. "I am glad," said the
old man, "for thou givest help to the poor."
"As willingly as to the rich!" exclaimed Nebsecht. "But tell me now where
you got the heart."
"I went into the house of the embalmer," said the old man, after he had
selected a few large flints, to which, with crafty blows, he gave the
shape of knives, "and there I found three bodies in which I had to make
the eight prescribed incisions with my flint-knife. When the dead lie
there undressed on the wooden bench they all look alike, and the begger
lies as still as the favorite son of a king. But I knew very well who lay
before me. The strong old body in the middle of the table was the corpse
of the Superior of the temple of Hatasu, and beyond, close by each other,
were laid a stone-mason of the Necropolis, and a poor girl from the
strangers' quarter, who had died of consumption--two miserable wasted
figures. I had known the Prophet well, for I had met him a hundred times
in his gilt litter, and we always called him Rui, the rich. I did my duty
by all three, I was driven away with the usual stoning, and then I
arranged the inward parts of the bodies with my mates. Those of the
Prophet are to be preserved later in an alabaster canopus,
[This vase was called canopus at a later date. There were four of
them for each mummy.]
those of the mason and the girl were put back in their bodies.
"Then I went up to the three bodies, and I asked myself, to which I
should do such a wrong as to rob him of his heart. I turned to the two
poor ones, and I hastily went up to the sinning girl. Then I heard the
voice of the demon that cried out in my heart 'The girl was poor and
despised like you while she walked on Seb,
[Seb is the earth; Plutarch calls Seb Chronos. He is often spoken
of as the "father of the gods" on the monuments. He is the god of
time, and as the Egyptians regarded matter as eternal, it is not by
accident that the sign which represented the earth was also used for
eternity.]
perhaps she may find compensation and peace in the other world if you do
not mutilate her; and when I turned to the mason's lean corpse, and
looked at his hands, which were harder and rougher than my own, the demon
whispered the same. Then I stood before the strong, stout corpse of the
prophet Rui, who died of apoplexy, and I remembered the honor and the
riches that he had enjoyed on earth, and that he at least for a time had
known happiness and ease. And as soon as I was alone, I slipped my hand
into the bag, and changed the sheep's heart for his.
"Perhaps I am doubly guilty for playing such an accursed trick with the
heart of a high-priest; but Rui's body will be hung round with a hundred
amulets, Scarabaei
[Imitations of the sacred beetle Scarabaeus made of various
materials were frequently put into the mummies in the place of the
heart. Large specimens have often the 26th, 30th, and 64th chapters
of the Book of the Dead engraved on them, as they treat of the
heart.
will be placed over his heart, and holy oil and sacred sentences will
preserve him from all the fiends on his road to
Amenti,--[Underworld]--while no one will devote helping talismans to the
poor. And then! thou hast sworn, in that world, in the hall of judgment,
to take my guilt on thyself."
Nebsecht gave the old man his hand.
"That I will," said he, "and I should have chosen as you did. Now take
this draught, divide it in four parts, and give it to Uarda for four
evenings following. Begin this evening, and by the day after to-morrow I
think she will be quite well. I will come again and look after her. Now
go to rest, and let me stay a while out here; before the star of Isis is
extinguished I will be gone, for they have long been expecting me at the
temple."
When the paraschites came out of his but the next morning, Nebsecht had
vanished; but a blood-stained cloth that lay by the remains of the fire
showed the old man that the impatient investigator had examined the heart
of the high-priest during the night, and perhaps cut it up.
Terror fell upon him, and in agony of mind he threw himself on his knees
as the golden bark of the Sun-God appeared on the horizon, and he prayed
fervently, first for Uarda, and then for the salvation of his imperilled
soul.
He rose encouraged, convinced himself that his granddaughter was
progressing towards recovery, bid farewell to his wife, took his flint
knife and his bronze hook,
[The brains of corpses were drawn out of the nose with a hook.
Herodotus II. 87.]
and went to the house of the embalmer to follow his dismal calling.
The group of buildings in which the greater number of the corpses from
Thebes went through the processes of mummifying, lay on the bare
desert-land at some distance from his hovel, southwards from the House of
Seti at the foot of the mountain. They occupied by themselves a fairly
large space, enclosed by a rough wall of dried mud-bricks.
The bodies were brought in through the great gate towards the Nile, and
delivered to the kolchytes,--[The whole guild of embalmers]--while the
priests, paraschites, and tariclleutes,--[Salter of the bodies]--bearers
and assistants, who here did their daily work, as well as innumerable
water-carriers who came up from the Nile, loaded with skins, found their
way into the establishment by a side gate.
At the farthest northern building of wood, with a separate gate, in which
the orders of the bereaved were taken, and often indeed those of men
still in active life, who thought to provide betimes for their suitable
interment.
The crowd in this house was considerable. About fifty men and women were
moving in it at the present moment, all of different ranks, and not only
from Thebes but from many smaller towns of Upper Egypt, to make purchases
or to give commissions to the functionaries who were busy here.
This bazaar of the dead was well supplied, for coffins of every form
stood up against the walls, from the simplest chest to the richly gilt
and painted coffer, in form resembling a mummy. On wooden shelves lay
endless rolls of coarse and fine linen, in which the limbs of the mummies
were enveloped, and which were manufactured by the people of the
embalming establishment under the protection of the tutelar goddesses of
weavers, Neith, Isis and Nephthys, though some were ordered from a
distance, particularly from Sais.
There was free choice for the visitors of this pattern-room in the matter
of mummy-cases and cloths, as well as of necklets, scarabaei, statuettes,
Uza-eyes, girdles, head-rests, triangles, split-rings, staves, and other
symbolic objects, which were attached to the dead as sacred amulets, or
bound up in the wrappings.
There were innumerable stamps of baked clay, which were buried in the
earth to show any one who might dispute the limits, how far each grave
extended, images of the gods, which were laid in the sand to purify and
sanctify it--for by nature it belonged to Seth-Typhon--as well as the
figures called Schebti, which were either enclosed several together in
little boxes, or laid separately in the grave; it was supposed that they
would help the dead to till the fields of the blessed with the pick-axe,
plough, and seed-bag which they carried on their shoulders.
The widow and the steward of the wealthy Superior of the temple of
Hatasu, and with them a priest of high rank, were in eager discussion
with the officials of the embalming-House, and were selecting the most
costly of the patterns of mummy-cases which were offered to their
inspection, the finest linen, and amulets of malachite, and lapis-lazuli,
of blood-stone, carnelian and green felspar, as well as the most elegant
alabaster canopi for the deceased; his body was to be enclosed first in a
sort of case of papier-mache, and then in a wooden and a stone coffin.
They wrote his name on a wax tablet which was ready for the purpose, with
those of his parents, his wife and children, and all his titles; they
ordered what verses should be written on his coffin, what on the
papyrus-rolls to be enclosed in it, and what should be set out above his
name. With regard to the inscription on the walls of the tomb, the
pedestal of the statue to be placed there and the face of the
stele--[Stone tablet with round pediment.]--to be erected in it, yet
further particulars would be given; a priest of the temple of Seti was
charged to write them, and to draw up a catalogue of the rich offerings
of the survivors. The last could be done later, when, after the division
of the property, the amount of the fortune he had left could be
ascertained. The mere mummifying of the body with the finest oils and
essences, cloths, amulets, and cases, would cost a talent of silver,
without the stone sarcophagus.
The widow wore a long mourning robe, her forehead was lightly daubed with
Nile-mud, and in the midst of her chaffering with the functionaries of
the embalming-house, whose prices she complained of as enormous and
rapacious, from time to time she broke out into a loud wail of grief--as
the occasion demanded.
More modest citizens finished their commissions sooner, though it was not
unusual for the income of a whole year to be sacrificed for the embalming
of the head of a household--the father or the mother of a family. The
mummifying of the poor was cheap, and that of the poorest had to be
provided by the kolchytes as a tribute to the king, to whom also they
were obliged to pay a tax in linen from their looms.
This place of business was carefully separated from the rest of the
establishment, which none but those who were engaged in the processes
carried on there were on any account permitted to enter. The kolchytes
formed a closely-limited guild at the head of which stood a certain
number of priests, and from among them the masters of the many thousand
members were chosen. This guild was highly respected, even the
taricheutes, who were entrusted with the actual work of embalming, could
venture to mix with the other citizens, although in Thebes itself people
always avoided them with a certain horror; only the paraschites, whose
duty it was to open the body, bore the whole curse of uncleanness.
Certainly the place where these people fulfilled their office was dismal
enough.
The stone chamber in which the bodies were opened, and the halls in which
they were prepared with salt, had adjoining them a variety of
laboratories and depositaries for drugs and preparations of every
description.
In a court-yard, protected from the rays of the sun only by an awning,
was a large walled bason, containing a solution of natron, in which the
bodies were salted, and they were then dried in a stone vault,
artificially supplied with hot air.
The little wooden houses of the weavers, as well as the work-shops of the
case-joiners and decorators, stood in numbers round the pattern-room; but
the farthest off, and much the largest of the buildings of the
establishment, was a very long low structure, solidly built of stone and
well roofed in, where the prepared bodies were enveloped in their
cerements, tricked out in amulets, and made ready for their journey to
the next world. What took place in this building--into which the laity
were admitted, but never for more than a few minutes--was to the last
degree mysterious, for here the gods themselves appeared to be engaged
with the mortal bodies.
Out of the windows which opened on the street, recitations, hymns, and
lamentations sounded night and day. The priests who fulfilled their
office here wore masks like the divinities of the under-world. Many were
the representatives of Anubis, with the jackal-head, assisted by boys
with masks of the so-called child-Horus. At the head of each mummy stood
or squatted a wailing-woman with the emblems of Nephthys, and one at its
feet with those of Isis.
Every separate limb of the deceased was dedicated to a particular
divinity by the aid of holy oils, charms, and sentences; a specially
prepared cloth was wrapped round each muscle, every drug and every
bandage owed its origin to some divinity, and the confusion of sounds, of
disguised figures, and of various perfumes, had a stupefying effect on
those who visited this chamber. It need not be said that the whole
embalming establishment and its neighborhood was enveloped in a cloud of
powerful resinous fumes, of sweet attar, of lasting musk, and pungent
spices.
When the wind blew from the west it was wafted across the Nile to Thebes,
and this was regarded as an evil omen, for from the south-west comes the
wind that enfeebles the energy of men--the fatal simoon.
In the court of the pattern-house stood several groups of citizens from
Thebes, gathered round different individuals, to whom they were
expressing their sympathy. A new-comer, the superintendent of the victims
of the temple of Anion, who seemed to be known to many and was greeted
with respect, announced, even before he went to condole with Rui's widow,
in a tone full of horror at what had happened, that an omen, significant
of the greatest misfortune, had occurred in Thebes, in a spot no less
sacred than the very temple of Anion himself.
Many inquisitive listeners stood round him while he related that the
Regent Ani, in his joy at the victory of his troops in Ethiopia, had
distributed wine with a lavish hand to the garrison of Thebes, and also
to the watchmen of the temple of Anion, and that, while the people were
carousing, wolves
[Wolves have now disappeared from Egypt; they were sacred animals,
and were worshipped and buried at Lykopolis, the present Siut, where
mummies of wolves have been found. Herodotus says that if a wolf
was found dead he was buried, and Aelian states that the herb
Lykoktonon, which was poisonous to wolves, might on no account be
brought into the city, where they were held sacred. The wolf
numbered among the sacral animals is the canis lupaster, which
exists in Egypt at the present day. Besides this species there are
three varieties of wild dogs, the jackal, fox, and fenek, canis
cerda.]
had broken into the stable of the sacred rams. Some were killed, but the
noblest ram, which Rameses himself had sent as a gift from Mendes when he
set out for the war--the magnificent beast which Amon had chosen as the
tenement of his spirit, was found, torn in pieces, by the soldiers, who
immediately terrified the whole city with the news. At the same hour news
had come from Memphis that the sacred bull Apis was dead.
All the people who had collected round the priest, broke out into a
far-sounding cry of woe, in which he himself and Rui's widow vehemently
joined.
The buyers and functionaries rushed out of the pattern-room, and from the
mummy-house the taricheutes, paraschites and assistants; the weavers left
their looms, and all, as soon as they had learned what had happened, took
part in the lamentations, howling and wailing, tearing their hair and
covering their faces with dust.
The noise was loud and distracting, and when its violence diminished, and
the work-people went back to their business, the east wind brought the
echo of the cries of the dwellers in the Necropolis, perhaps too, those
of the citizens of Thebes itself.
"Bad news," said the inspector of the victims, cannot fail to reach us
soon from the king and the army; he will regret the death of the ram
which we called by his name more than that of Apis. It is a bad--a very
bad omen."
"My lost husband Rui, who rests in Osiris, foresaw it all," said the
widow. "If only I dared to speak I could tell a good deal that many might
find unpleasant."
The inspector of sacrifices smiled, for he knew that the late superior of
the temple of Hatasu had been an adherent of the old royal family, and he
replied:
"The Sun of Rameses may be for a time covered with clouds, but neither
those who fear it nor those who desire it will live to see its setting."
The priest coldly saluted the lady, and went into the house of a weaver
in which he had business, and the widow got into her litter which was
waiting at the gate.
The old paraschites Pinem had joined with his fellows in the lamentation
for the sacred beasts, and was now sitting on the hard pavement of the
dissecting room to eat his morsel of food--for it was noon.
The stone room in which he was eating his meal was badly lighted; the
daylight came through a small opening in the roof, over which the sun
stood perpendicularly, and a shaft of bright rays, in which danced the
whirling motes, shot down through the twilight on to the stone pavement.
Mummy-cases leaned against all the walls, and on smooth polished slabs
lay bodies covered with coarse cloths. A rat scudded now and then across
the floor, and from the wide cracks between the stones sluggish scorpions
crawled out.
The old paraschites was long since blunted to the horror which pervaded
this locality. He had spread a coarse napkin, and carefully laid on it
the provisions which his wife had put into his satchel; first half a cake
of bread, then a little salt, and finally a radish.
But the bag was not yet empty.
He put his hand in and found a piece of meat wrapped up in two
cabbage-leaves. Old Hekt had brought a leg of a gazelle from Thebes for
Uarda, and he now saw that the women had put a piece of it into his
little sack for his refreshment. He looked at the gift with emotion, but
he did not venture to touch it, for he felt as if in doing so he should
be robbing the sick girl. While eating the bread and the radish he
contemplated the piece of meat as if it were some costly jewel, and when
a fly dared to settle on it he drove it off indignantly.
At last he tasted the meat, and thought of many former noon-day meals,
and how he had often found a flower in the satchel, that Uarda had placed
there to please him, with the bread. His kind old eyes filled with tears,
and his whole heart swelled with gratitude and love. He looked up, and
his glance fell on the table, and he asked himself how he would have felt
if instead of the old priest, robbed of his heart, the sunshine of his
old age, his granddaughter, were lying there motionless. A cold shiver
ran over him, and he felt that his own heart would not have been too
great a price to pay for her recovery. And yet! In the course of his long
life he had experienced so much suffering and wrong, that he could not
imagine any hope of a better lot in the other world. Then he drew out the
bond Nebsecht had given him, held it up with both hands, as if to show it
to the Immortals, and particularly to the judges in the hall of truth and
judgment, that they might not reckon with him for the crime he had
committed--not for himself but for another--and that they might not
refuse to justify Rui, whom he had robbed of his heart.
While he thus lifted his soul in devotion, matters were getting warm
outside the dissecting room. He thought he heard his name spoken, and
scarcely had he raised his head to listen when a taricheut came in and
desired him to follow him.
In front of the rooms, filled with resinous odors and incense, in which
the actual process of embalming was carried on, a number of taricheutes
were standing and looking at an object in an alabaster bowl. The knees of
the old man knocked together as he recognized the heart of the beast
which he had substituted for that of the Prophet.
The chief of the taricheutes asked him whether he had opened the body of
the dead priest.
Pinem stammered out "Yes." Whether this was his heart? The old man nodded
affirmatively.
The taricheutes looked at each other, whispered together; then one of
them went away, and returned soon with the inspector of victims from the
temple of Anion, whom he had found in the house of the weaver, and the
chief of the kolchytes.
"Show me the heart," said the superintendent of the sacrifices as he
approached the vase. "I can decide in the dark if you have seen rightly.
I examine a hundred animals every day. Give it here!--By all the Gods of
Heaven and Hell that is the heart of a ram!"
"It was found in the breast of Rui," said one of the taricheutes
decisively. "It was opened yesterday in the presence of us all by this
old paraschites."
"It is extraordinary," said the priest of Anion. "And incredible. But
perhaps an exchange was effected.--Did you slaughter any victims here
yesterday or--?"
"We are purifying ourselves," the chief of the kolchytes interrupted, for
the great festival of the valley, and for ten days no beast can have been
killed here for food; besides, the stables and slaughterhouses are a long
way from this, on the other side of the linen-factories."
"It is strange!" replied the priest. "Preserve this heart carefully,
kolchytes: or, better still, let it be enclosed in a case. We will take
it over to the chief prophet of Anion. It would seem that some miracle
has happened."
"The heart belongs to the Necropolis," answered the chief kolchytes, "and
it would therefore be more fitting if we took it to the chief priest of
the temple of Seti, Ameni."
"You command here!" said the other. "Let us go." In a few minutes the
priest of Anion and the chief of the kolchytes were being carried towards
the valley in their litters. A taricheut followed them, who sat on a seat
between two asses, and carefully carried a casket of ivory, in which
reposed the ram's heart.
The old paraschites watched the priests disappear behind the tamarisk
bushes. He longed to run after them, and tell them everything.
His conscience quaked with self reproach, and if his sluggish
intelligence did not enable him to take in at a glance all the results
that his deed might entail, he still could guess that he had sown a seed
whence deceit of every kind must grow. He felt as if he had fallen
altogether into sin and falsehood, and that the goddess of truth, whom he
had all his life honestly served, had reproachfully turned her back on
him. After what had happened never could he hope to be pronounced a
"truth-speaker" by the judges of the dead. Lost, thrown away, was the aim
and end of a long life, rich in self-denial and prayer! His soul shed
tears of blood, a wild sighing sounded in his ears, which saddened his
spirit, and when he went back to his work again, and wanted to remove the
soles of the feet
[One of the mummies of Prague which were dissected by Czermak, had
the soles of the feet removed and laid on the breast. We learn from
Chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead that this was done that the
sacred floor of the hall of judgment might not be defiled when the
dead were summoned before Osiris.]
from a body, his hand trembled so that he could not hold the knife.
CHAPTER XXIII.
The news of the end of the sacred ram of Anion, and of the death of the
bull Apis of Memphis, had reached the House of Seti, and was received
there with loud lamentation, in which all its inhabitants joined, from
the chief haruspex down to the smallest boy in the school-courts.
The superior of the institution, Ameni, had been for three days in
Thebes, and was expected to return to-day. His arrival was looked for
with anxiety and excitement by many. The chief of the haruspices was
eager for it that he might hand over the imprisoned scholars to condign
punishment, and complain to him of Pentaur and Bent-Anat; the initiated
knew that important transactions must have been concluded on the farther
side of the Nile; and the rebellious disciples knew that now stern
justice would be dealt to them.
The insurrectionary troop were locked into an open court upon bread and
water, and as the usual room of detention of the establishment was too
small for them all, for two nights they had had to sleep in a loft on
thin straw mats. The young spirits were excited to the highest pitch, but
each expressed his feelings in quite a different manner.
Bent-Anat's brother, Rameses' son, Rameri, had experienced the same
treatment as his fellows, whom yesterday he had led into every sort of
mischief, with even more audacity than usual, but to-day he hung his
head.
In a corner of the court sat Anana, Pentaur's favorite scholar, hiding
his face in his hands which rested on his knees. Rameri went up to him,
touched his shoulders and said:
"We have played the game, and now must bear the consequences for good and
for evil. Are you not ashamed of yourself, old boy? Your eyes are wet,
and the drops here on your hands have not fallen from the clouds. You who
are seventeen, and in a few months will be a scribe and a grown man!"
Anana looked at the prince, dried his eyes quickly; and said:
"I was the ring-leader. Ameni will turn me out of the place, and I must
return disgraced to my poor mother, who has no one in the world but me."
"Poor fellow!" said Rameri kindly. "It was striking at random! If only
our attempt had done Pentaur any good!"
"We have done him harm, on the contrary," said Anana vehemently, "and
have behaved like fools!" Rameri nodded in full assent, looked thoughtful
for a moment, and then said:
"Do you know, Anana, that you were not the ringleader? The trick was
planned in this crazy brain; I take the whole blame on my own shoulders.
I am the son of Rameses, and Ameni will be less hard on me than on you."
"He will examine us all," replied Anana, "and I will be punished sooner
than tell a lie."
Rameri colored.
"Have you ever known my tongue sin against the lovely daughter of Ra?" he
exclaimed. "But look here! did I stir up Antef, Hapi, Sent and all the
others or no? Who but I advised you to find out Pentaur? Did I threaten
to beg my father to take me from the school of Seti or not? I was the
instigator of the mischief, I pulled the wires, and if we are questioned
let me speak first. Not one of you is to mention Anana's name; do you
hear? not one of you, and if they flog us or deprive us of our food we
all stick to this, that I was guilty of all the mischief."
"You are a brave fellow!" said the son of the chief priest of Anion,
shaking his right hand, while Anana held his left.
The prince freed himself laughing from their grasp.
"Now the old man may come home," he exclaimed, "we are ready for him. But
all the same I will ask my father to send me to Chennu, as sure as my
name is Rameri, if they do not recall Pentaur."
"He treated us like school-boys!" said the eldest of the young
malefactors.
"And with reason," replied Rameri, "I respect him all the more for it.
You all think I am a careless dog--but I have my own ideas, and I will
speak the words of wisdom."
With these words he looked round on his companions with comical gravity,
and continued--imitating Ameni's manner:
"Great men are distinguished from little men by this--they scorn and
contemn all which flatters their vanity, or seems to them for the moment
desirable, or even useful, if it is not compatible with the laws which
they recognize, or conducive to some great end which they have set before
them; even though that end may not be reached till after their death.
"I have learned this, partly from my father, but partly I have thought it
out for myself; and now I ask you, could Pentaur as 'a great man' have
dealt with us better?"
"You have put into words exactly what I myself have thought ever since
yesterday," cried Anana. "We have behaved like babies, and instead of
carrying our point we have brought ourselves and Pentaur into disgrace."
The rattle of an approaching chariot was now audible, and Rameri
exclaimed, interrupting Anana, "It is he. Courage, boys! I am the guilty
one. He will not dare to have me thrashed--but he will stab me with
looks!"
Ameni descended quickly from his chariot. The gate-keeper informed him
that the chief of the kolchytes, and the inspector of victims from the
temple of Anion, desired to speak with him.
"They must wait," said the Prophet shortly. "Show them meanwhile into the
garden pavilion. Where is the chief haruspex?"
He had hardly spoken when the vigorous old man for whom he was enquiring
hurried to meet him, to make him acquainted with all that had occurred in
his absence. But the high-priest had already heard in Thebes all that his
colleague was anxious to tell him.
When Ameni was absent from the House of Seti, he caused accurate
information to be brought to him every morning of what had taken place
there.
Now when the old man began his story he interrupted him.
"I know everything," he said. "The disciples cling to Pentaur, and have
committed a folly for his sake, and you met the princess Bent-Anat with
him in the temple of Hatasu, to which he had admitted a woman of low rank
before she had been purified. These are grave matters, and must be
seriously considered, but not to-day. Make yourself easy; Pentaur will
not escape punishment; but for to-day we must recall him to this temple,
for we have need of him to-morrow for the solemnity of the feast of the
valley. No one shall meet him as an enemy till he is condemned; I desire
this of you, and charge you to repeat it to the others."
The haruspex endeavored to represent to his superior what a scandal would
arise from this untimely clemency; but Ameni did not allow him to talk,
he demanded his ring back, called a young priest, delivered the precious
signet into his charge, and desired him to get into his chariot that was
waiting at the door, and carry to Pentaur the command, in his name, to
return to the temple of Seti.
The haruspex submitted, though deeply vexed, and asked whether the guilty
boys were also to go unpunished.
"No more than Pentaur," answered Ameni. "But can you call this
school-boy's trick guilt? Leave the children to their fun, and their
imprudence. The educator is the destroyer, if he always and only keeps
his eyes open, and cannot close them at the right moment. Before life
demands of us the exercise of serious duties we have a mighty
over-abundance of vigor at our disposal; the child exhausts it in play,
and the boy in building wonder-castles with the hammer and chisel of his
fancy, in inventing follies. You shake your head, Septah! but I tell you,
the audacious tricks of the boy are the fore-runners of the deeds of the
man. I shall let one only of the boys suffer for what is past, and I
should let him even go unpunished if I had not other pressing reasons for
keeping him away from our festival."
The haruspex did not contradict his chief; for he knew that when Ameni's
eyes flashed so suddenly, and his demeanor, usually so measured, was as
restless as at present, something serious was brewing.
The high-priest understood what was passing in Septah's mind.
"You do not understand me now," said he. "But this evening, at the
meeting of the initiated, you shall know all. Great events are stirring.
The brethren in the temple of Anion, on the other shore, have fallen off
from what must always be the Holiest to us white-robed priests, and will
stand in our way when the time for action is arrived. At the feast of the
valley we shall stand in competition with the brethren from Thebes. All
Thebes will be present at the solemn service, and it must be proved which
knows how to serve the Divinity most worthily, they or we. We must avail
ourselves of all our resources, and Pentaur we certainly cannot do
without. He must fill the function of Cherheb
[Cherheb was the title of the speaker or reciter at a festival. We
cannot agree with those who confuse this personage with the chief of
the Kolchytes.]
for to-morrow only; the day after he must be brought to judgment. Among
the rebellious boys are our best singers, and particularly young Anana,
who leads the voices of the choir-boys.
"I will examine the silly fellows at once. Rameri--Rameses' son--was
among the young miscreants?"
"He seems to have been the ring-leader," answered Septah.
Ameni looked at the old man with a significant smile, and said:
"The royal family are covering themselves with honor! His eldest daughter
must be kept far from the temple and the gathering of the pious, as being
unclean and refractory, and we shall be obliged to expel his son too from
our college. You look horrified, but I say to you that the time for
action is come. More of this, this evening. Now, one question: Has the
news of the death of the ram of Anion reached you? Yes? Rameses himself
presented him to the God, and they gave it his name. A bad omen."
"And Apis too is dead!" The haruspex threw up his arms in lamentation.
"His Divine spirit has returned to God," replied Ameni. "Now we have much
to do. Before all things we must prove ourselves equal to those in Thebes
over there, and win the people over to our side. The panegyric prepared
by us for to-morrow must offer some great novelty. The Regent Ani grants
us a rich contribution, and--"
"And," interrupted Septah, "our thaumaturgists understand things very
differently from those of the house of Anion, who feast while we
practise."
Ameni nodded assent, and said with a smile: "Also we are more
indispensable than they to the people. They show them the path of life,
but we smooth the way of death. It is easier to find the way without a
guide in the day-light than in the dark. We are more than a match for the
priests of Anion."
"So long as you are our leader, certainly," cried the haruspex.
"And so long as the temple has no lack of men of your temper!" added
Ameni, half to Septah, and half to the second prophet of the temple,
sturdy old Gagabu, who had come into the room.
Both accompanied him into the garden, where the two priests were awaiting
him with the miraculous heart.
Ameni greeted the priest from the temple of Anion with dignified
friendliness, the head kolchytes with distant reserve, listened to their
story, looked at the heart which lay in the box, with Septah and Gagabu,
touched it delicately with the tips of his fingers, carefully examining
the object, which diffused a strong perfume of spices; then he said
earnestly:
"If this, in your opinion, kolchytes, is not a human heart, and if in
yours, my brother of the temple of Anion, it is a ram's heart, and if it
was found in the body of Rui, who is gone to Osiris, we here have a
mystery which only the Gods can solve. Follow me into the great court.
Let the gong be sounded, Gagabu, four times, for I wish to call all the
brethren together."
The gong rang in loud waves of sound to the farthest limits of the group
of buildings. The initiated, the fathers, the temple-servants, and the
scholars streamed in, and in a few minutes were all collected. Not a man
was wanting, for at the four strokes of the rarely-sounded alarum every
dweller in the House of Seti was expected to appear in the court of the
temple. Even the leech Nebsecht came; for he feared that the unusual
summons announced the outbreak of a fire.
Ameni ordered the assembly to arrange itself in a procession, informed
his astonished hearers that in the breast of the deceased prophet Rui, a
ram's heart, instead of a man's, had been found, and desired them all to
follow his instructions. Each one, he said, was to fall on his knees and
pray, while he would carry the heart into the holiest of holies, and
enquire of the Gods what this wonder might portend to the faithful.
Ameni, with the heart in his hand, placed himself at the head of the
procession, and disappeared behind the veil of the sanctuary, the
initiated prayed in the vestibule, in front of it; the priests and
scholars in the vast court, which was closed on the west by the stately
colonnade and the main gateway to the temple.
For fully an hour Ameni remained in the silent holy of holies, from which
thick clouds of incense rolled out, and then he reappeared with a golden
vase set with precious stones. His tall figure was now resplendent with
rich ornaments, and a priest, who walked before him, held the vessel high
above his head.
Ameni's eyes seemed spell-bound to the vase, and he followed it,
supporting himself by his crozier, with humble inflections.
The initiated bowed their heads till they touched the pavement, and the
priests and scholars bent their faces down to the earth, when they beheld
their haughty master so filled with humility and devotion. The
worshippers did not raise themselves till Ameni had reached the middle of
the court and ascended the steps of the altar, on which the vase with the
heart was now placed, and they listened to the slow and solemn accents of
the high-priest which sounded clearly through the whole court.
"Fall down again and worship! wonder, pray, and adore! The noble
inspector of sacrifices of the temple of Anion has not been deceived in
his judgment; a ram's heart was in fact found in the pious breast of Rui.
I heard distinctly the voice of the Divinity in the sanctuary, and
strange indeed was the speech that met my ear. Wolves tore the sacred ram
of Anion in his sanctuary on the other bank of the river, but the heart
of the divine beast found its way into the bosom of the saintly Rui. A
great miracle has been worked, and the Gods have shown a wonderful sign.
The spirit of the Highest liked not to dwell in the body of this not
perfectly holy ram, and seeking a purer abiding-place found it in the
breast of our Rui; and now in this consecrated vase. In this the heart
shall be preserved till a new ram offered by a worthy hand enters the
herd of Anion. This heart shall be preserved with the most sacred relics,
it has the property of healing many diseases, and the significant words
seem favorable which stood written in the midst of the vapor of incense,
and which I will repeat to you word for word, 'That which is high shall
rise higher, and that which exalts itself, shall soon fall down.' Rise,
pastophori! hasten to fetch the holy images, bring them out, place the
sacred heart at the head of the procession, and let us march round the
walls of the temple with hymns of praise. Ye temple-servants, seize your
staves, and spread in every part of the city the news of the miracle
which the Divinity has vouchsafed to us."
After the procession had marched round the temple and dispersed, the
priest of Anion took leave of Ameni; he bowed deeply and formally before
him, and with a coolness that was almost malicious said:
"We, in the temple of Anion, shall know how to appreciate what you heard
in the holy of holies. The miracle has occurred, and the king shall learn
how it came to pass, and in what words it was announced."
"In the words of the Most High," said the high priest with dignity; he
bowed to the other, and turned to a group of priests, who were discussing
the great event of the day.
Ameni enquired of them as to the preparations for the festival of the
morrow, and then desired the chief haruspex to call the refractory pupils
together in the school-court. The old man informed him that Pentaur had
returned, and he followed his superior to the released prisoners, who,
prepared for the worst, and expecting severe punishment, nevertheless
shook with laughter when Rameri suggested that, if by chance they were
condemned to kneel upon peas, they should get them cooked first.
"It will be long asparagus
[Asparagus was known to the Egyptians. Pliny says they held in
their mouths, as a remedy for toothache, wine in which asparagus had
been cooked.]
--not peas," said another looking over his shoulder, and pretending to be
flogging. They all shouted again with laughter, but it was hushed as soon
as they heard Ameni's well-known footstep.
Each feared the worst, and when the high-priest stood before them even
Rameri's mirth was quite quelled, for though Ameni looked neither angry
nor threatening, his appearance commanded respect, and each one
recognized in him a judge against whose verdict no remonstrance was to be
thought of.
To their infinite astonishment Ameni spoke kindly to the thoughtless
boys, praised the motive of their action--their attachment to a
highly-endowed teacher--but then clearly and deliberately laid before
them the folly of the means they had employed to attain their end, and at
what a cost. "Only think," he continued, turning to the prince, "if your
father sent a general, who he thought would be better in a different
place, from Syria to Kusch, and his troops therefore all went over to the
enemy! How would you like that?"
So for some minutes he continued to blame and warn them, and he ended his
speech by promising, in consideration of the great miracle that gave that
day a special sanctity, to exercise unwonted clemency. For the sake of
example, he said, he could not let them pass altogether unpunished, and
he now asked them which of them had been the instigator of the deed; he
and he only should suffer punishment.
He had hardly clone speaking, when prince Rameri stepped forward, and
said modestly:
"We acknowledge, holy father, that we have played a foolish trick; and I
lament it doubly because I devised it, and made the others follow me. I
love Pentaur, and next to thee there is no one like him in the
sanctuary."
Ameni's countenance grew dark, and he answered with displeasure:
"No judgment is allowed to pupils as to their teachers--nor to you. If
you were not the son of the king, who rules Egypt as Ra, I would punish
your temerity with stripes. My hands are tied with regard to you, and yet
they must be everywhere and always at work if the hundreds committed to
my care are to be kept from harm."
"Nay, punish me!" cried Rameri. "If I commit a folly I am ready to bear
the consequences."
Ameni looked pleased at the vehement boy, and would willingly have shaken
him by the hand and stroked his curly head, but the penance he proposed
for Rameri was to serve a great end, and Ameni would not allow any
overflow of emotion to hinder him in the execution of a well considered
design. So he answered the prince with grave determination:
"I must and will punish you--and I do so by requesting you to leave the
House of Seti this very day."
The prince turned pale. But Ameni went on more kindly:
"I do not expel you with ignominy from among us--I only bid you a
friendly farewell. In a few weeks you would in any case have left the
college, and by the king's command have transferred your blooming life,
health, and strength to the exercising ground of the chariot-brigade. No
punishment for you but this lies in my power. Now give me your hand; you
will make a fine man, and perhaps a great warrior."
The prince stood in astonishment before Ameni, and did not take his
offered hand. Then the priest went up to him, and said:
"You said you were ready to take the consequences of your folly, and a
prince's word must be kept. Before sunset we will conduct you to the gate
of the temple."
Ameni turned his back on the boys, and left the school-court.
Rameri looked after him. Utter whiteness had overspread his blooming
face, and the blood had left even his lips. None of his companions
approached him, for each felt that what was passing in his soul at this
moment would brook no careless intrusion. No one spoke a word; they all
looked at him.
He soon observed this, and tried to collect himself, and then he said in
a low tone while he held out his hands to Anana and another friend:
"Am I then so bad that I must be driven out from among you all like
this--that such a blow must be inflicted on my father?"
"You refused Ameni your hand!" answered Anana. "Go to him, offer him your
hand, beg him to be less severe, and perhaps he will let you remain."
Rameri answered only "No." But that "No" was so decided that all who knew
him understood that it was final.
Before the sun set he had left the school. Ameni gave him his blessing;
he told him that if he himself ever had to command he would understand
his severity, and allowed the other scholars to accompany him as far as
the Nile. Pentaur parted from him tenderly at the gate.
When Rameri was alone in the cabin of his gilt bark with his tutor, he
felt his eyes swimming in tears.
"Your highness is surely not weeping?" asked the official.
"Why?" asked the prince sharply.
"I thought I saw tears on your highness' cheeks."
"Tears of joy that I am out of the trap," cried Rameri; he sprang on
shore, and in a few minutes he was with his sister in the palace.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Ask for what is feasible
I know that I am of use
Like the cackle of hens, which is peculiar to Eastern women
Think of his wife, not with affection only, but with pride
Those whom we fear, says my uncle, we cannot love
UARDA
By Georg Ebers
Volume 6.
CHAPTER XXIV.
This eventful day had brought much that was unexpected to our friends in
Thebes, as well as to those who lived in the Necropolis.
The Lady Katuti had risen early after a sleepless night. Nefert had come
in late, had excused her delay by shortly explaining to her mother that
she had been detained by Bent-Anat, and had then affectionately offered
her brow for a kiss of "good-night."
When the widow was about to withdraw to her sleeping-room, and Nemu had
lighted her lamp, she remembered the secret which was to deliver Paaker
into Ani's hands. She ordered the dwarf to impart to her what he knew,
and the little man told her at last, after sincere efforts at
resistance--for he feared for his mother's safety--that Paaker had
administered half of a love-philter to Nefert, and that the remainder was
still in his hands.
A few hours since this information would have filled Katuti with
indignation and disgust; now, though she blamed the Mohar, she asked
eagerly whether such a drink could be proved to have any actual effect.
"Not a doubt of it," said the dwarf, "if the whole were taken, but Nefert
only had half of it."
At a late hour Katuti was still pacing her bedroom, thinking of Paaker's
insane devotion, of Mena's faithlessness, and of Nefert's altered
demeanor; and when she went to bed, a thousand conjectures, fears, and
anxieties tormented her, while she was distressed at the change which had
come over Nefert's love to her mother, a sentiment which of all others
should be the most sacred, and the most secure against all shock.
Soon after sunrise she went into the little temple attached to the house,
and made an offering to the statue, which, under the form of Osiris,
represented her lost husband; then she went to the temple of Anion, where
she also prayed a while, and nevertheless, on her return home, found that
her daughter had not yet made her appearance in the hall where they
usually breakfasted together.
Katuti preferred to be undisturbed during the early morning hours, and
therefore did not interfere with her daughter's disposition to sleep far
into the day in her carefully-darkened room.
When the widow went to the temple Nefert was accustomed to take a cup of
milk in bed, then she would let herself be dressed, and when her mother
returned, she would find her in the veranda or hall, which is so well
known to the reader.
To-day however Katuti had to breakfast alone; but when she had eaten a
few mouthfuls she prepared Nefert's breakfast--a white cake and a little
wine in a small silver beaker, carefully guarded from dust and insects by
a napkin thrown over it--and went into her daughter's room.
She was startled at finding it empty, but she was informed that Nefert
had gone earlier than was her wont to the temple, in her litter.
With a heavy sigh she returned to the veranda, and there received her
nephew Paaker, who had come to enquire after the health of his relatives,
followed by a slave, who carried two magnificent bunches of flowers, and
by the great dog which had formerly belonged to his father. One bouquet
he said had been cut for Nefert, and the other for her mother.
[Pictures on the monuments show that in ancient Egypt, as at the
present time, bouquets of flowers were bestowed as tokens of
friendly feeling.]
Katuti had taken quite a new interest in Paaker since she had heard of
his procuring the philter.
No other young man of the rank to which they belonged, would have allowed
himself to be so mastered by his passion for a woman as this Paaker was,
who went straight to his aim with stubborn determination, and shunned no
means that might lead to it. The pioneer, who had grown up under her
eyes, whose weaknesses she knew, and whom she was accustomed to look down
upon, suddenly appeared to her as a different man--almost a stranger--as
the deliverer of his friends, and the merciless antagonist of his
enemies.
These reflections had passed rapidly through her mind. Now her eyes
rested on the sturdy, strongly-knit figure of her nephew, and it struck
her that he bore no resemblance to his tall, handsome father. Often had
she admired her brother-in-law's slender hand, that nevertheless could so
effectually wield a sword, but that of his son was broad and ignoble in
form.
While Paaker was telling her that he must shortly leave for Syria, she
involuntarily observed the action of this hand, which often went
cautiously to his girdle as if he had something concealed there; this was
the oval phial with the rest of the philter. Katuti observed it, and her
cheeks flushed when it occurred to her to guess what he had there.
The pioneer could not but observe Katuti's agitation, and he said in a
tone of sympathy:
"I perceive that you are in pain, or in trouble. The master of Mena's
stud at Hermonthis has no doubt been with you--No? He came to me
yesterday, and asked me to allow him to join my troops. He is very angry
with you, because he has been obliged to sell some of Mena's gold-bays. I
have bought the finest of them. They are splendid creatures! Now he wants
to go to his master 'to open his eyes,' as he says. Lie down a little
while, aunt, you are very pale."
Katuti did not follow this prescription; on the contrary she smiled, and
said in a voice half of anger and half of pity:
"The old fool firmly believes that the weal or woe of the family depends
on the gold-bays. He would like to go with you? To open Mena's eyes? No
one has yet tried to bind them!"
Katuti spoke the last words in a low tone, and her glance fell. Paaker
also looked down, and was silent; but he soon recovered his presence of
mind, and said:
"If Nefert is to be long absent, I will go."
"No--no, stay," cried the widow. "She wished to see you, and must soon
come in. There are her cake and her wine waiting for her."
With these words she took the napkin off the breakfast-table, held up the
beaker in her hand, and then said, with the cloth still in her hand:
"I will leave you a moment, and see if Nefert is not yet come home."
Hardly had she left the veranda when Paaker, having convinced himself
that no one could see him, snatched the flask from his girdle, and, with
a short invocation to his father in Osiris, poured its whole contents
into the beaker, which thus was filled to the very brim. A few minutes
later Nefert and her mother entered the hall.
Paaker took up the nosegay, which his slave had laid down on a seat, and
timidly approached the young woman, who walked in with such an aspect of
decision and self-confidence, that her mother looked at her in
astonishment, while Paaker felt as if she had never before appeared so
beautiful and brilliant. Was it possible that she should love her
husband, when his breach of faith troubled her so little? Did her heart
still belong to another? Or had the love-philter set him in the place of
Mena? Yes! yes! for how warmly she greeted him. She put out her hand to
him while he was still quite far off, let it rest in his, thanked him
with feeling, and praised his fidelity and generosity.
Then she went up to the table, begged Paaker to sit down with her, broke
her cake, and enquired for her aunt Setchern, Paaker's mother.
Katuti and Paaker watched all her movements with beating hearts.
Now she took up the beaker, and lifted it to her lips, but set it down
again to answer Paaker's remark that she was breakfasting late.
"I have hitherto been a real lazy-bones," she said with a blush. But this
morning I got up early, to go and pray in the temple in the fresh dawn.
You know what has happened to the sacred ram of Amion. It is a frightful
occurrence. The priests were all in the greatest agitation, but the
venerable Bek el Chunsu received me himself, and interpreted my dream,
and now my spirit is light and contented."
"And you did all this without me?" said Katuti in gentle reproof.
"I would not disturb you," replied Nefert. "Besides," she added coloring,
"you never take me to the city and the temple in the morning."
Again she took up the wine-cup and looked into it, but without drinking
any, went on:
"Would you like to hear what I dreamed, Paaker? It was a strange vision."
The pioneer could hardly breathe for expectation, still he begged her to
tell her dream.
"Only think," said Nefert, pushing the beaker on the smooth table, which
was wet with a few drops which she had spilt, "I dreamed of the
Neha-tree, down there in the great tub, which your father brought me from
Punt, when I was a little child, and which since then has grown quite a
tall tree. There is no tree in the garden I love so much, for it always
reminds me of your father, who was so kind to me, and whom I can never
forget!"
Paaker bowed assent.
Nefert looked at him, and interrupted her story when she observed his
crimson cheeks.
"It is very hot! Would you like some wine to drink---or some water?"
With these words she raised the wine-cup, and drank about half of the
contents; then she shuddered, and while her pretty face took a comical
expression, she turned to her mother, who was seated behind her and held
the beaker towards her.
"The wine is quite sour to-day!" she said. "Taste it, mother."
Katuti took the little silver-cup in her hand, and gravely put it to her
lips, but without wetting them. A smile passed over her face, and her
eyes met those of the pioneer, who stared at her in horror. The picture
flashed before her mind of herself languishing for the pioneer, and of
his terror at her affection for him! Her selfish and intriguing spirit
was free from coarseness, and yet she could have laughed with all her
heart even while engaged in the most shameful deed of her whole life. She
gave the wine back to her daughter, saying good-humoredly:
"I have tasted sweeter, but acid is refreshing in this heat."
"That is true," said the wife of Mena; she emptied the cup to the bottom,
and then went on, as if refreshed, "But I will tell you the rest of my
dream. I saw the Neha-tree, which your father gave me, quite plainly; nay
I could have declared that I smelt its perfume, but the interpreter
assured me that we never smell in our dreams. I went up to the beautiful
tree in admiration. Then suddenly a hundred axes appeared in the air,
wielded by unseen hands, and struck the poor tree with such violence that
the branches one by one fell to the ground, and at last the trunk itself
was felled. If you think it grieved me you are mistaken. On the contrary,
I was delighted with the flashing hatchets and the flying splinters. When
at last nothing was left but the roots in the tub of earth, I perceived
that the tree was rising to new life. Suddenly my arms became strong, my
feet active, and I fetched quantities of water from the tank, poured it
over the roots, and when, at last, I could exert myself no longer, a
tender green shoot showed itself on the wounded root, a bud appeared, a
green leaf unfolded itself, a juicy stem sprouted quickly, it became a
firm trunk, sent out branches and twigs, and these became covered with
leaves and flowers, white, red and blue; then various birds came and
settled on the top of the tree, and sang. Ah! my heart sang louder than
the birds at that moment, and I said to myself that without me the tree
would have been dead, and that it owed its life to me."
"A beautiful dream," said Katuti; "that reminds me of your girlhood, when
you would be awake half the night inventing all sorts of tales. What
interpretation did the priest give you?"
"He promised me many things," said Nefert, "and he gave me the assurance
that the happiness to which I am predestined shall revive in fresh beauty
after many interruptions."
"And Paaker's father gave you the Neha-tree?" asked Katuti, leaving the
veranda as she spoke and walking out into the garden.
"My father brought it to Thebes from the far cast," said Paaker, in
confirmation of the widow's parting words.
"And that is exactly what makes me so happy," said Nefert. "For your
father was as kind, and as dear to me as if he had been my own. Do you
remember when we were sailing round the pond, and the boat upset, and you
pulled me senseless out of the water? Never shall I forget the expression
with which the great man looked at me when I woke up in its arms; such
wise true eyes no one ever had but he."
"He was good, and he loved you very much," said Paaker, recalling, for
his part, the moment when he had dared to press a kiss on the lips of the
sweet unconscious child.
"And I am so glad," Nefert went on, "that the day has come at last when
we can talk of him together again, and when the old grudge that lay so
heavy in my heart is all forgotten. How good you are to us, I have
already learned; my heart overflows with gratitude to you, when I
remember my childhood, and I can never forget that I was indebted to you
for all that was bright and happy in it. Only look at the big dog--poor
Descher!--how he rubs against me, and shows that he has not forgotten me!
Whatever comes from your house fills my mind with pleasant memories."
"We all love you dearly," said Paaker looking at her tenderly.
"And how sweet it was in your garden!" cried Nefert. "The nosegay here
that you have brought me shall be placed in water, and preserved a long
time, as greeting from the place in which once I could play carelessly,
and dream so happily."
With these words she pressed the flowers to her lips; Paaker sprang
forward, seized her hand, and covered it with burning kisses.
Nefert started and drew away her hand, but he put out his arm to clasp
her to him. He had touched her with his trembling hand, when loud voices
were heard in the garden, and Nemu hurried in to announce he arrival of
the princess Bent-Anat.
At the same moment Katuti appeared, and in a few minutes the princess
herself.
Paaker retreated, and quitted the room before Nefert had time to express
her indignation. He staggered to his chariot like a drunken man. He
supposed himself beloved by Mena's wife, his heart was full of triumph,
he proposed rewarding Hekt with gold, and went to the palace without
delay to crave of Ani a mission to Syria. There it should be brought to
the test--he or Mena.
CHAPTER XXV.
While Nefert, frozen with horror, could not find a word of greeting for
her royal friend, Bent-Anat with native dignity laid before the widow her
choice of Nefert to fill the place of her lost companion, and desired
that Mena's wife should go to the palace that very day.
She had never before spoken thus to Katuti, and Katuti could not overlook
the fact that Bent-Anat had intentionally given up her old confidential
tone.
"Nefert has complained of me to her," thought she to herself, "and she
considers me no longer worthy of her former friendly kindness."
She was vexed and hurt, and though she understood the danger which
threatened her, now her daughter's eyes were opened, still the thought of
losing her child inflicted a painful wound. It was this which filled her
eyes with tears, and sincere sorrow trembled in her voice as she replied:
"Thou hast required the better half of my life at my hand; but thou hast
but to command, and I to obey." Bent-Anat waved her hand proudly, as if
to confirm the widow's statement; but Nefert went up to her mother, threw
her arms round her neck, and wept upon her shoulder.
Tears glistened even in the princess's eyes when Katuti at last led her
daughter towards her, and pressed yet one more kiss on her forehead.
Bent-Anat took Nefert's hand, and did not release it, while she requested
the widow to give her daughter's dresses and ornaments into the charge of
the slaves and waiting-women whom she would send for them.
"And do not forget the case with the dried flowers, and my amulets, and
the images of the Gods," said Nefert. "And I should like to have the Neha
tree which my uncle gave me."
Her white cat was playing at her feet with Paaker's flowers, which she
had dropped on the floor, and when she saw her she took her up and kissed
her.
"Bring the little creature with you," said Bent-Anat. "It was your
favorite plaything."
"No," replied Nefert coloring.
The princess understood her, pressed her hand, and said while she pointed
to Nemu:
"The dwarf is your own too: shall he come with you?"
"I will give him to my mother," said Nefert. She let the little man kiss
her robe and her feet, once more embraced Katuti, and quitted the garden
with her royal friend.
As soon as Katuti was alone, she hastened into the little chapel in which
the figures of her ancestors stood, apart from those of Mena. She threw
herself down before the statue of her husband, half weeping, half
thankful.
This parting had indeed fallen heavily on her soul, but at the same time
it released her from a mountain of anxiety that had oppressed her breast.
Since yesterday she had felt like one who walks along the edge of a
precipice, and whose enemy is close at his heels; and the sense of
freedom from the ever threatening danger, soon got the upperhand of her
maternal grief. The abyss in front of her had suddenly closed; the road
to the goal of her efforts lay before her smooth and firm beneath her
feet.
The widow, usually so dignified, hastily and eagerly walked down the
garden path, and for the first time since that luckless letter from the
camp had reached her, she could look calmly and clearly at the position
of affairs, and reflect on the measures which Ani must take in the
immediate future. She told herself that all was well, and that the time
for prompt and rapid action was now come.
When the messengers came from the princess she superintended the packing
of the various objects which Nefert wished to have, with calm
deliberation, and then sent her dwarf to Ani, to beg that he would visit
her. But before Nemu had left Mena's grounds he saw the out-runners of
the Regent, his chariot, and the troop of guards following him.
Very soon Katuti and her noble friend were walking up and down in the
garden, while she related to him how Bent-Anat had taken Nefert from her,
and repeated to him all that she had planned and considered during the
last hour.
"You have the genius of a man," said Ani; "and this time you do not urge
me in vain. Ameni is ready to act, Paaker is to-day collecting his
troops, to-morrow he will assist at the feast of the Valley, and the next
day he goes to Syria."
"He has been with you?" Katuti asked.
"He came to the palace on leaving your house," replied Ani, "with glowing
cheeks, and resolved to the utmost; though he does not dream that I hold
him in my hand."
Thus speaking they entered the veranda, in which Nemu had remained, and
he now hid himself as usual behind the ornamental shrubs to overhear
them. They sat down near each other, by Nefert's breakfast table, and Ani
asked Katuti whether the dwarf had told her his mother's secret. Katuti
feigned ignorance, listened to the story of the love-philter, and played
the part of the alarmed mother very cleverly. The Regent was of opinion,
while he tried to soothe her, that there was no real love-potion in the
case; but the widow exclaimed:
"Now I understand, now for the first time I comprehend my daughter.
Paaker must have poured the drink into her wine, for she had no sooner
drunk it this morning than she was quite altered her words to Paaker had
quite a tender ring in them; and if he placed himself so cheerfully at
your disposal it is because he believes himself certainly to be beloved
by my daughter. The old witch's potion was effectual."
"There certainly are such drinks--" said Ani thoughtfully. "But will they
only win hearts to young men! If that is the case, the old woman's trade
is a bad one, for youth is in itself a charm to attract love. If I were
only as young as Paaker! You laugh at the sighs of a man--say at once of
an old man! Well, yes, I am old, for the prime of life lies behind me.
And yet Katuti, my friend, wisest of women--explain to me one thing. When
I was young I was loved by many and admired many women, but not one of
them--not even my wife, who died young, was more to me than a toy, a
plaything; and now when I stretch out my hand for a girl, whose father I
might very well be--not for her own sake, but simply to serve my
purpose--and she refuses me, I feel as much disturbed, as much a fool
as-as that dealer in love-philters, Paaker."
"Have you spoken to Bent-Anat?" asked Katuti.
"And heard again from her own lips the refusal she had sent me through
you. You see my spirit has suffered!"
"And on what pretext did she reject your suit?" asked the widow.
"Pretext!" cried Ani. "Bent-Anat and pretext! It must be owned that she
has kingly pride, and not Ma--[The Goddess of Truth]--herself is more
truthful than she. That I should have to confess it! When I think of her,
our plots seem to me unutterably pitiful. My veins contain, indeed, many
drops of the blood of Thotmes, and though the experience of life has
taught me to stoop low, still the stooping hurts me. I have never known
the happy feeling of satisfaction with my lot and my work; for I have
always had a greater position than I could fill, and constantly done less
than I ought to have done. In order not to look always resentful, I
always wear a smile. I have nothing left of the face I was born with but
the mere skin, and always wear a mask. I serve him whose master I believe
I ought to be by birth; I hate Rameses, who, sincerely or no, calls me
his brother; and while I stand as if I were the bulwark of his authority
I am diligently undermining it. My whole existence is a lie."
"But it will be truth," cried Katuti, "as soon as the Gods allow you to
be--as you are--the real king of this country."
"Strange!" said Ani smiling, Ameni, this very day, used almost exactly
the same words. The wisdom of priests, and that of women, have much in
common, and they fight with the same weapons. You use words instead of
swords, traps instead of lances, and you cast not our bodies, but our
souls, into irons."
"Do you blame or praise us for it?" said the widow. "We are in any case
not impotent allies, and therefore, it seems to me, desirable ones."
"Indeed you are," said Ani smiling. "Not a tear is shed in the land,
whether it is shed for joy or for sorrow, for which in the first instance
a priest or a woman is not responsible. Seriously, Katuti--in nine great
events out of ten you women have a hand in the game. You gave the first
impulse to all that is plotting here, and I will confess to you that,
regardless of all consequences, I should in a few hours have given up my
pretensions to the throne, if that woman Bent-Anat had said 'yes' instead
of 'no.'"
"You make me believe," said Katuti, "that the weaker sex are gifted with
stronger wills than the nobler. In marrying us you style us, 'the
mistress of the house,' and if the elders of the citizens grow infirm, in
this country it is not the sons but the daughters that must be their
mainstay. But we women have our weaknesses, and chief of these is
curiosity.--May I ask on what ground Bent-Anat dismissed you?"
"You know so much that you may know all," replied Ani. "She admitted me
to speak to her alone. It was yet early, and she had come from the
temple, where the weak old prophet had absolved her from uncleanness; she
met me, bright, beautiful and proud, strong and radiant as a Goddess, and
a princess. My heart throbbed as if I were a boy, and while she was
showing me her flowers I said to myself: 'You are come to obtain through
her another claim to the throne.' And yet I felt that, if she consented
to be mine, I would remain the true brother, the faithful Regent of
Rameses, and enjoy happiness and peace by her side before it was too
late. If she refused me then I resolved that fate must take its way, and,
instead of peace and love, it must be war for the crown snatched from my
fathers. I tried to woo her, but she cut my words short, said I was a
noble man, and a worthy suitor but--"
"There came the but."
"Yes--in the form of a very frank 'no.' I asked her reasons. She begged
me to be content with the 'no;' then I pressed her harder, till she
interrupted me, and owned with proud decision that she preferred some one
else. I wished to learn the name of the happy man--that she refused. Then
my blood began to boil, and my desire to win her increased; but I had to
leave her, rejected, and with a fresh, burning, poisoned wound in my
heart."
"You are jealous!" said Katuti, "and do you know of whom?"
"No," replied Ani. "But I hope to find out through you. What I feel it is
impossible for me to express. But one thing I know, and that is this,
that I entered the palace a vacillating man--that I left it firmly
resolved. I now rush straight onwards, never again to turn back. From
this time forward you will no longer have to drive me onward, but rather
to hold me back; and, as if the Gods had meant to show that they would
stand by me, I found the high-priest Ameni, and the chief pioneer Paaker
waiting for me in my house. Ameni will act for me in Egypt, Paaker in
Syria. My victorious troops from Ethiopia will enter Thebes to-morrow
morning, on their return home in triumph, as if the king were at their
head, and will then take part in the Feast of the Valley. Later we will
send them into the north, and post them in the fortresses which protect
Egypt against enemies coming from the east Tanis, Daphne, Pelusium,
Migdol. Rameses, as you know, requires that we should drill the serfs of
the temples, and send them to him as auxiliaries. I will send him half of
the body-guard, the other half shall serve my own purposes. The garrison
of Memphis, which is devoted to Rameses, shall be sent to Nubia, and
shall be relieved by troops that are faithful to me. The people of Thebes
are led by the priests, and tomorrow Ameni will point out to them who is
their legitimate king, who will put an end to the war and release them
from taxes. The children of Rameses will be excluded from the
solemnities, for Ameni, in spite of the chief-priest of Anion, still
pronounces Bent-Anat unclean. Young Rameri has been doing wrong and
Ameni, who has some other great scheme in his mind, has forbidden him the
temple of Seti; that will work on the crowd! You know how things are
going on in Syria: Rameses has suffered much at the hands of the Cheta
and their allies; whole legions are weary of eternally lying in the
field, and if things came to extremities would join us; but, perhaps,
especially if Paaker acquits himself well, we may be victorious without
fighting. Above all things now we must act rapidly."
"I no longer recognize the timid, cautious lover of delay!" exclaimed
Katuti.
"Because now prudent hesitation would be want of prudence," said Ani.
"And if the king should get timely information as to what is happening
here?" said Katuti.
"I said so!" exclaimed Ani; "we are exchanging parts."
"You are mistaken," said Katuti. "I also am for pressing forwards; but I
would remind you of a necessary precaution. No letters but yours must
reach the camp for the next few weeks."
"Once more you and the priests are of one mind," said Ani laughing; 'for
Ameni gave me the same counsel. Whatever letters are sent across the
frontier between Pelusium and the Red Sea will be detained. Only my
letters--in which I complain of the piratical sons of the desert who fall
upon the messengers--will reach the king."
"That is wise," said the widow; "let the seaports of the Red Sea be
watched too, and the public writers. When you are king, you can
distinguish those who are affected for or against you."
Ani shook his head and replied:
"That would put me in a difficult position; for it I were to punish those
who are now faithful to their king, and exalt the others, I should have
to govern with unfaithful servants, and turn away the faithful ones. You
need not color, my kind friend, for we are kin, and my concerns are
yours."
Katuti took the hand he offered her and said:
"It is so. And I ask no further reward than to see my father's house once
more in the enjoyment of its rights."
"Perhaps we shall achieve it," said Ani; "but in a short time
if--if--Reflect, Katuti; try to find out, ask your daughter to help you
to the utmost. Who is it that she--you know whom I mean--Who is it that
Bent-Anat loves?"
The widow started, for Ani had spoken the last words with a vehemence
very foreign to his usual courtliness, but soon she smiled and repeated
to the Regent the names of the few young nobles who had not followed the
king, and remained in Thebes. "Can it be Chamus?" at last she said, "he
is at the camp, it is true, but nevertheless--"
At this instant Nemu, who had not lost a word of the conversation, came
in as if straight from the garden and said:
"Pardon me, my lady; but I have heard a strange thing."
"Speak," said Katuti.
The high and mighty princess Bent-Anat, the daughter of Rameses, is said
to have an open love-affair with a young priest of the House of Seti."
"You barefaced scoundrel!" exclaimed Ani, and his eyes sparkled with
rage. "Prove what you say, or you lose your tongue."
"I am willing to lose it as a slanderer and traitor according to the
law," said the little man abjectly, and yet with a malicious laugh; "but
this time I shall keep it, for I can vouch for what I say. You both know
that Bent-Anat was pronounced unclean because she stayed for an hour and
more in the house of a paraschites. She had an assignation there with the
priest. At a second, in the temple of Hatasu, they were surprised by
Septah, the chief of the haruspices of the House of Seti."
"Who is the priest?" asked Ani with apparent calmness.
"A low-born man," replied Nemu, "to whom a free education was given at
the House of Seti, and who is well known as a verse-maker and interpreter
of dreams. His name is Pentaur, and it certainly must be admitted that he
is handsome and dignified. He is line for line the image of the pioneer
Paaker's late father. Didst thou ever see him, my lord?"
The Regent looked gloomily at the floor and nodded that he had. But
Katuti cried out; "Fool that I am! the dwarf is right! I saw how she
blushed when her brother told her how the boys had rebelled on his
account against Ameni. It is Pentaur and none other!"
"Good!" said Ani, "we will see."
With these words he took leave of Katuti, who, as he disappeared in the
garden, muttered to herself: "He was wonderfully clear and decided
to-day; but jealousy is already blinding him and will soon make him feel
that he cannot get on without my sharp eyes."
Nemu had slipped out after the Regent.
He called to him from behind a fig-tree, and hastily whispered, while he
bowed with deep respect:
"My mother knows a great deal, most noble highness! The sacred Ibis
[Ibis religiosa. It has disappeared from Egypt There were two
varieties of this bird, which was sacred to Toth, and mummies of
both have been found in various places. Elian states that an
immortal Ibis was shown at Hermopolis. Plutarch says, the ibis
destroys poisonous reptiles, and that priests draw the water for
their purifications where the Ibis has drunk, as it will never touch
unwholesome water.]
wades through the fen when it goes in search of prey, and why shouldst
thou not stoop to pick up gold out of the dust? I know how thou couldst
speak with the old woman without being seen."
"Speak," said Ani.
"Throw her into prison for a day, hear what she has to say, and then
release her--with gifts if she is of service to you--if not, with blows.
But thou wilt learn something important from her that she obstinately
refused to tell me even."
"We will see!" replied the Regent. He threw a ring of gold to the dwarf
and got into his chariot.
So large a crowd had collected in the vicinity of the palace, that Ani
apprehended mischief, and ordered his charioteer to check the pace of the
horses, and sent a few police-soldiers to the support of the out-runners;
but good news seemed to await him, for at the gate of the castle he heard
the unmistakable acclamations of the crowd, and in the palace court he
found a messenger from the temple of Seti, commissioned by Ameni to
communicate to him and to the people, the occurrence of a great miracle,
in that the heart of the ram of Anion, that had been torn by wolves, had
been found again within the breast of the dead prophet Rui.
Ani at once descended from his chariot, knelt down before all the people,
who followed his example, lifted his arms to heaven, and praised the Gods
in a loud voice. When, after some minutes, he rose and entered the
palace, slaves came out and distributed bread to the crowd in Ameni's
name.
"The Regent has an open hand," said a joiner to his neighbor; "only look
how white the bread is. I will put it in my pocket and take it to the
children."
"Give me a bit!" cried a naked little scamp, snatching the cake of bread
from the joiner's hand and running away, slipping between the legs of the
people as lithe as a snake.
"You crocodile's brat!" cried his victim. "The insolence of boys gets
worse and worse every day."
"They are hungry," said the woman apologetically. "Their fathers are gone
to the war, and the mothers have nothing for their children but
papyrus-pith and lotus-seeds."
"I hope they enjoy it," laughed the joiner. "Let us push to the left;
there is a man with some more bread."
"The Regent must rejoice greatly over the miracle," said a shoemaker. "It
is costing him something."
"Nothing like it has happened for a long time," said a basket-maker. "And
he is particularly glad it should be precisely Rui's body, which the
sacred heart should have blessed. You ask why?--Hatasu is Ani's
ancestress, blockhead!"
"And Rui was prophet of the temple of Hatasu," added the joiner.
"The priests over there are all hangers-on of the old royal house, that I
know," asserted a baker.
"That's no secret!" cried the cobbler. "The old times were better than
these too. The war upsets everything, and quite respectable people go
barefoot because they cannot pay for shoe-leather. Rameses is a great
warrior, and the son of Ra, but what can he do without the Gods; and they
don't seem to like to stay in Thebes any longer; else why should the
heart of the sacred ram seek a new dwelling in the Necropolis, and in the
breast of an adherent of the old--"
"Hold your tongue," warned the basket-maker. "Here comes one of the
watch."
"I must go back to work," said the baker. "I have my hands quite full for
the feast to-morrow."
"And I too," said the shoemaker with a sigh, "for who would follow the
king of the Gods through the Necropolis barefoot."
"You must earn a good deal," cried the basket-maker. "We should do better
if we had better workmen," replied the shoemaker, "but all the good hands
are gone to the war. One has to put up with stupid youngsters. And as for
the women! My wife must needs have a new gown for the procession, and
bought necklets for the children. Of course we must honor the dead, and
they repay it often by standing by us when we want it--but what I pay for
sacrifices no one can tell. More than half of what I earn goes in them--"
"In the first grief of losing my poor wife," said the baker, "I promised
a small offering every new moon, and a greater one every year. The
priests will not release us from our vows, and times get harder and
harder. And my dead wife owes me a grudge, and is as thankless as she was
is her lifetime; for when she appears to me in a dream she does not give
me a good word, and often torments me."
"She is now a glorified all-seeing spirit," said the basket-maker's wife,
"and no doubt you were faithless to her. The glorified souls know all
that happens, and that has happened on earth."
The baker cleared his throat, having no answer ready; but the shoemaker
exclaimed:
"By Anubis, the lord of the under-world, I hope I may die before my old
woman! for if she finds out down there all I have done in this world, and
if she may be changed into any shape she pleases, she will come to me
every night, and nip me like a crab, and sit on me like a mountain."
"And if you die first," said the woman, "she will follow you afterwards
to the under-world, and see through you there."
"That will be less dangerous," said the shoemaker laughing, "for then I
shall be glorified too, and shall know all about her past life. That will
not all be white paper either, and if she throws a shoe at me I will
fling the last at her."
"Come home," said the basket-maker's wife, pulling her husband away. "You
are getting no good by hearing this talk."
The bystanders laughed, and the baker exclaimed:
"It is high time I should be in the Necropolis before it gets dark, and
see to the tables being laid for to-morrow's festival. My trucks are
close to the narrow entrance to the valley. Send your little ones to me,
and I will give them something nice. Are you coming over with me?"
"My younger brother is gone over with the goods," replied the shoemaker.
"We have plenty to do still for the customers in Thebes, and here am I
standing gossiping. Will the wonderful heart of the sacred ram be
exhibited to-morrow do you know?"
"Of course--no doubt," said the baker, "good-bye, there go my cases!"
CHAPTER XXVI.
Notwithstanding the advanced hour, hundreds of people were crossing over
to the Necropolis at the same time as the baker. They were permitted to
linger late on into the evening, under the inspection of the watch,
because it was the eve of the great feast, and they had to set out their
counters and awnings, to pitch their tents, and to spread out their
wares; for as soon as the sun rose next day all business traffic would be
stopped, none but festal barges might cross from Thebes, or such boats as
ferried over pilgrims--men, women, and children whether natives or
foreigners, who were to take part in the great procession.
In the halls and work-rooms of the House of Seti there was unusual stir.
The great miracle of the wonderful heart had left but a short time for
the preparations for the festival. Here a chorus was being practised,
there on the sacred lake a scenic representation was being rehearsed;
here the statues of the Gods were being cleaned and dressed,
[The dressing and undressing of the holy images was conducted in
strict accordance with a prescribed ritual. The inscriptions in the
seven sanctuaries of Abydos, published by Alariette, are full of
instruction as to these ordinances, which were significant in every
detail.]
and the colors of the sacred emblems were being revived, there the
panther-skins and other parts of the ceremonial vestments of the priests
were being aired and set out; here sceptres, censers and other
metal-vessels were being cleaned, and there the sacred bark which was to
be carried in the procession was being decorated. In the sacred groves of
the temple the school-boys, under the direction of the gardeners, wove
garlands and wreaths to decorate the landing-places, the sphinxes, the
temple, and the statues of the Gods. Flags were hoisted on the
brass-tipped masts in front of the pylon, and purple sails were spread to
give shadow to the court.
The inspector of sacrifices was already receiving at a side-door the
cattle, corn and fruit, offerings which were brought as tribute to the
House of Seti, by citizens from all parts of the country, on the occasion
of the festival of the Valley, and he was assisted by scribes, who kept
an account of all that was brought in by the able-bodied temple-servants
and laboring serfs.
Ameni was everywhere: now with the singers, now with the magicians, who
were to effect wonderful transformations before the astonished multitude;
now with the workmen, who were erecting thrones for the Regent, the
emissaries from other collegiate foundations--even from so far as the
Delta--and the prophets from Thebes; now with the priests, who were
preparing the incense, now with the servants, who were trimming the
thousand lamps for the illumination at night--in short everywhere; here
inciting, there praising. When he had convinced himself that all was
going on well he desired one of the priests to call Pentaur.
After the departure of the exiled prince Rameri, the young priest had
gone to the work-room of his friend Nebsecht.
The leech went uneasily from his phials to his cages, and from his cages
back to his flasks. While he told Pentaur of the state he had found his
room in on his return home, he wandered about in feverish excitement,
unable to keep still, now kicking over a bundle of plants, now thumping
down his fist on the table; his favorite birds were starved to death, his
snakes had escaped, and his ape had followed their example, apparently in
his fear of them.
"The brute, the monster!" cried Nebsecht in a rage. He has thrown over
the jars with the beetles in them, opened the chest of meal that I feed
the birds and insects upon, and rolled about in it; he has thrown my
knives, prickers, and forceps, my pins, compasses, and reed pens all out
of window; and when I came in he was sitting on the cupboard up there,
looking just like a black slave that works night and day in a corn-mill;
he had got hold of the roll which contained all my observations on the
structure of animals--the result of years of study-and was looking at it
gravely with his head on one side. I wanted to take the book from him,
but he fled with the roll, sprang out of window, let himself down to the
edge of the well, and tore and rubbed the manuscript to pieces in a rage.
I leaped out after him, but he jumped into the bucket, took hold of the
chain, and let himself down, grinning at me in mockery, and when I drew
him up again he jumped into the water with the remains of the book."
"And the poor wretch is drowned?" asked Pentaur.
"I fished him up with the bucket, and laid him to dry in the sun; but he
had been tasting all sorts of medicines, and he died at noon. My
observations are gone! Some of them certainly are still left; however, I
must begin again at the beginning. You see apes object as much to my
labors as sages; there lies the beast on the shelf."
Pentaur had laughed at his friend's story, and then lamented his loss;
but now he said anxiously:
"He is lying there on the shelf? But you forget that he ought to have
been kept in the little oratory of Toth near the library. He belongs to
the sacred dogfaced apes,
[The dog faced baboon, Kynokephalos, was sacred to Toth as the
Moongod. Mummies of these apes have been found at Thebes and
Hermopolis, and they are often represented as reading with much
gravity. Statues of them have been found to great quantities, and
there is a particularly life-like picture of a Kynokephalos in
relief on the left wall of the library of the temple of Isis at
Philoe.]
and all the sacred marks were found upon him. The librarian gave him into
your charge to have his bad eye cured."
"That was quite well," answered Nebsecht carelessly.
"But they will require the uninjured corpse of you, to embalm it," said
Pentaur.
"Will they?" muttered Nebsecht; and he looked at his friend like a boy
who is asked for an apple that has long been eaten.
"And you have already been doing something with it," said Pentaur, in a
tone of friendly vexation.
The leech nodded. "I have opened him, and examined his heart.'
"You are as much set on hearts as a coquette!" said Pentaur. "What is
become of the human heart that the old paraschites was to get for you?"
Nebsecht related without reserve what the old man had done for him, and
said that he had investigated the human heart, and had found nothing in
it different from what he had discovered in the heart of beasts.
"But I must see it in connection with the other organs of the human
body," cried he; "and my decision is made. I shall leave the House of
Seti, and ask the kolchytes to take me into their guild. If it is
necessary I will first perform the duties of the lowest paraschites."
Pentaur pointed out to the leech what a bad exchange he would be making,
and at last exclaimed, when Nebsecht eagerly contradicted him, "This
dissecting of the heart does not please me. You say yourself that you
learned nothing by it. Do you still think it a right thing, a fine
thing--or even useful?"
"I do not trouble myself about it," replied Nebsecht. "Whether my
observations seem good or evil, right or heinous, useful or useless, I
want to know how things are, nothing more."
"And so for mere curiosity," cried Pentaur, "you would endanger the
blissful future of thousands of your fellow-men, take upon yourself the
most abject duties, and leave this noble scene of your labors, where we
all strive for enlightenment, for inward knowledge and truth."
The naturalist laughed scornfully; the veins swelled angrily in Pentaur's
forehead, and his voice took a threatening tone as he asked:
"And do you believe that your finger and your eyes have lighted on the
truth, when the noblest souls have striven in vain for thousands of years
to find it out? You descend beneath the level of human understanding by
madly wallowing in the mire; and the more clearly you are convinced that
you have seized the truth, the more utterly you are involved in the toils
of a miserable delusion."
"If I believed I knew the truth should I so eagerly seek it?" asked
Nebsecht. "The more I observe and learn, the more deeply I feel my want
of knowledge and power."
"That sounds modest enough," said the poet, "but I know the arrogance to
which your labors are leading you. Everything that you see with your own
eyes and touch with your own hand, you think infallible, and everything
that escapes your observation you secretly regard as untrue, and pass by
with a smile of superiority. But you cannot carry your experiments beyond
the external world, and you forget that there are things which lie in a
different realm."
"I know nothing of those things," answered Nebsecht quietly.
"But we--the Initiated," cried Pentaur, "turn our attention to them also.
Thoughts--traditions--as to their conditions and agency have existed
among us for a thousand years; hundreds of generations of men have
examined these traditions, have approved them, and have handed them down
to us. All our knowledge, it is true, is defective, and yet prophets have
been favored with the gift of looking into the future, magic powers have
been vouchsafed to mortals. All this is contrary to the laws of the
external world, which are all that you recognize, and yet it can easily
be explained if we accept the idea of a higher order of things. The
spirit of the Divinity dwells in each of us, as in nature. The natural
man can only attain to such knowledge as is common to all; but it is the
divine capacity for serene discernment--which is omniscience--that works
in the seer; it is the divine and unlimited power--which is
omnipotence--that from time to time enables the magician to produce
supernatural effects!"
"Away with prophets and marvels!" cried Nebsecht.
"I should have thought," said Pentaur, "that even the laws of nature
which you recognize presented the greatest marvels daily to your eyes;
nay the Supreme One does not disdain sometimes to break through the
common order of things, in order to reveal to that portion of Himself
which we call our soul, the sublime Whole of which we form part--Himself.
Only today you have seen how the heart of the sacred ram--"
"Man, man!" Nebsecht interrupted, "the sacred heart is the heart of a
hapless sheep that a sot of a soldier sold for a trifle to a haggling
grazier, and that was slaughtered in a common herd. A proscribed
paraschites put it into the body of Rui, and--and--" he opened the
cupboard, threw the carcase of the ape and some clothes on to the floor,
and took out an alabaster bowl which he held before the poet--"the
muscles you see here in brine, this machine, once beat in the breast of
the prophet Rui. My sheep's heart wilt be carried to-morrow in the
procession! I would have told you all about it if I had not promised the
old man to hold my tongue, and then--But what ails you, man?" Pentaur had
turned away from his friend, and covered his face with his hands, and he
groaned as if he were suffering some frightful physical pain. Nebsecht
divined what was passing in the mind of his friend. Like a child that has
to ask forgiveness of its mother for some misdeed, he went close up to
Pentaur, but stood trembling behind him not daring to speak to him.
Several minutes passed. Suddenly Pentaur raised his head, lifted his
hands to heaven, and cried:
"O Thou! the One!--though stars may fall from the heavens in summer
nights, still Thy eternal and immutable laws guide the never-resting
planets in their paths. Thou pure and all-prevading Spirit, that dwellest
in me, as I know by my horror of a lie, manifest Thyself in me--as light
when I think, as mercy when I act, and when I speak, as truth--always as
truth!"
The poet spoke these words with absorbed fervor, and Nebsecht heard them
as if they were speech from some distant and beautiful world. He went
affectionately up to his friend, and eagerly held out his hand. Pentaur
grasped it, pressed it warmly, and said:
"That was a fearful moment! You do not know what Ameni has been to me,
and now, now!"
He hardly had ceased speaking when steps were heard approaching the
physician's room, and a young priest requested the friends to appear at
once in the meeting-room of the Initiated. In a few moments they both
entered the great hall, which was brilliantly lighted.
Not one of the chiefs of the House of Seti was absent.
Ameni sat on a raised seat at a long table; on his right hand was old
Gagabu, on his left the third Prophet of the temple. The principals of
the different orders of priests had also found places at the table, and
among them the chief of the haruspices, while the rest of the priests,
all in snow-white linen robes, sat, with much dignity, in a large
semicircle, two rows deep. In the midst stood a statue of the Goddess of
truth and justice.
Behind Ameni's throne was the many-colored image of the ibis-headed Toth,
who presided over the measure and method of things, who counselled the
Gods as well as men, and presided over learning and the arts. In a niche
at the farther end of the hall were painted the divine Triad of Thebes,
with Rameses I. and his son Seti, who approached them with offerings. The
priests were placed with strict regard to their rank, and the order of
initiation. Pentaur's was the lowest place of all.
No discussion of any importance had as yet taken place, for Ameni was
making enquiries, receiving information, and giving orders with reference
to the next day's festival. All seemed to be well arranged, and promised
a magnificent solemnity; although the scribes complained of the scarce
influx of beasts from the peasants, who were so heavily taxed for the
war, and although that feature would be wanting in the procession which
was wont to give it the greatest splendor--the presence of the king and
the royal family.
This circumstance aroused the disapprobation of some of the priests, who
were of opinion that it would be hazardous to exclude the two children of
Rameses, who remained in Thebes, from any share in the solemnities of the
feast.
Ameni then rose.
"We have sent the boy Rameri," he said, "away from this house. Bent-Anat
must be purged of her uncleanness, and if the weak superior of the temple
of Anion absolves her, she may pass for purified over there, where they
live for this world only, but not here, where it is our duty to prepare
the soul for death. The Regent, a descendant of the great deposed race of
kings, will appear in the procession with all the splendor of his rank. I
see you are surprised, my friends. Only he! Aye! Great things are
stirring, and it may happen that soon the mild sun of peace may rise upon
our war-ridden people."
"Miracles are happening," he continued, "and in a dream I saw a gentle
and pious man on the throne of the earthly vicar of Ra. He listened to
our counsel, he gave us our due, and led back to our fields our serfs
that had been sent to the war; he overthrew the altars of the strange
gods, and drove the unclean stranger out from this holy land."
"The Regent Ani!" exclaimed Septah.
An eager movement stirred the assembly, but Ameni went on:
"Perhaps it was not unlike him, but he certainly was the One; he had the
features of the true and legitimate descendants of Ra, to whom Rui was
faithful, in whose breast the heart of the sacred ram found a refuge.
To-morrow this pledge of the divine grace shall be shown to the people,
and another mercy will also be announced to them. Hear and praise the
dispensations of the Most High! An hour ago I received the news that a
new Apis, with all the sacred marks upon him, has been found in the herds
of Ani at Hermonthis."
Fresh excitement was shown by the listening conclave. Ameni let their
astonishment express itself freely, but at last he exclaimed:
"And now to settle the last question. The priest Pentaur, who is now
present, has been appointed speaker at the festival to-morrow. He has
erred greatly, yet I think we need not judge him till after the holy day,
and, in consideration of his former innocence, need not deprive him of
the honorable office. Do you share my wishes? Is there no dissentient
voice? Then come forward, you, the youngest of us all, who are so highly
trusted by this holy assembly."
Pentaur rose and placed himself opposite to Ameni, in order to give, as
he was required to do, a broad outline of the speech he proposed to
deliver next day to the nobles and the people.
The whole assembly, even his opponents, listened to him with approbation.
Ameni, too, praised him, but added:
"I miss only one thing on which you must dwell at greater length, and
treat with warmer feeling--I mean the miracle which has stirred our souls
to-day. We must show that the Gods brought the sacred heart--"
"Allow me," said Pentaur, interrupting the high-priest, and looking
earnestly into those eyes which long since he had sung of--"Allow me to
entreat you not to select me to declare this new marvel to the people."
Astonishment was stamped on the face of every member of the assembly.
Each looked at his neighbor, then at Pentaur, and at last enquiringly at
Ameni. The superior knew Pentaur, and saw that no mere whimsical fancy,
but some serious motive had given rise to this refusal. Horror, almost
aversion, had rung in his tone as he said the words 'new marvel.' He
doubted the genuineness of this divine manifestation!
Ameni gazed long and enquiringly into Pentaur's eyes, and then said: "You
are right, my friend. Before judgment has been passed on you, before you
are reinstated in your old position, your lips are not worthy to announce
this divine wonder to the multitude. Look into your own soul, and teach
the devout a horror of sin, and show them the way, which you must now
tread, of purification of the heart. I myself will announce the miracle."
The white-robed audience hailed this decision of their master with
satisfaction. Ameni enjoined this thing on one, on another, that; and on
all, perfect silence as to the dream which he had related to them, and
then he dissolved the meeting. He begged only Gagabu and Pentaur to
remain.
As soon as they were alone Ameni asked the poet "Why did you refuse to
announce to the people the miracle, which has filled all the priests of
the Necropolis with joy?"
"Because thou hast taught me," replied Pentaur, "that truth is the
highest aim we can have, and that there is nothing higher."
"I tell you so again now," said Ameni. "And as you recognize this
doctrine, I ask you, in the name of the fair daughter of Ra. Do you doubt
the genuineness of the miracle that took place under our very eyes?"
"I doubt it," replied Pentaur.
"Remain on the high stand-point of veracity," continued Ameni, "and tell
us further, that we may learn, what are the scruples that shake thy
faith?"
"I know," replied the poet with a dark expression, "that the heart which
the crowd will approach and bow to, before which even the Initiated
prostrate themselves as if it had been the incarnation of Ra, was torn
from the bleeding carcass of a common sheep, and smuggled into the
kanopus which contained the entrails of Rui."
Ameni drew back a step, and Gagabu cried out "Who says so? Who can prove
it? As I grow older I hear more and more frightful things!"
"I know it," said Pentaur decidedly. "But I can, not reveal the name of
him from whom I learned it."
"Then we may believe that you are mistaken, and that some impostor is
fooling you. We will enquire who has devised such a trick, and he shall
be punished! To scorn the voice of the Divinity is a sin, and he who
lends his ear to a lie is far from the truth. Sacred and thrice sacred is
the heart, blind fool, that I purpose to-morrow to show to the people,
and before which you yourself--if not with good will, then by
compulsion--shall fall, prostrate in the dust.
"Go now, and reflect on the words with which you will stir the souls of
the people to-morrow morning; but know one thing--Truth has many forms,
and her aspects are as manifold as those of the Godhead. As the sun does
not travel over a level plain or by a straight path--as the stars follow
a circuitous course, which we compare with the windings of the snake
Mehen,--so the elect, who look out over time and space, and on whom the
conduct of human life devolves, are not only permitted, but commanded, to
follow indirect ways in order to reach the highest aims, ways that you do
not understand, and which you may fancy deviate widely from the path of
truth. You look only at to-day, we look forward to the morrow, and what
we announce as truth you must needs believe. And mark my words: A lie
stains the soul, but doubt eats into it."
Ameni had spoken with strong excitement; when Pentaur had left the room,
and he was alone with Gagabu, he exclaimed:
"What things are these? Who is ruining the innocent child-like spirit of
this highly favored youth?"
"He is ruining it himself," replied Gagabu. "He is putting aside the old
law, for he feels a new one growing up in his own breast."
"But the laws," exclaimed Ameni, "grow and spread like shadowy woods;
they are made by no one. I loved the poet, yet I must restrain him, else
he will break down all barriers, like the Nile when it swells too high.
And what he says of the miracle--"
"Did you devise it?"
"By the Holy One--no!" cried Ameni.
"And yet Pentaur is sincere, and inclined to faith," said the old man
doubtfully.
"I know it," returned Ameni. "It happened as he said. But who did it, and
who told him of the shameful deed?"
Both the priests stood thoughtfully gazing at the floor.
Ameni first broke the silence.
"Pentaur came in with Nebsecht," he exclaimed, "and they are intimate
friends. Where was the leech while I was staying in Thebes?"
"He was taking care of the child hurt by Bent-Anat--the child of the
paraschites Pinem, and he stayed there three days," replied Gagabu.
"And it was Pinem," said Ameni, "that opened the body of Rui! Now I know
who has dimmed Pentaur's faith. It was that inquisitive stutterer, and he
shall be made to repent of it. For the present let us think of
to-morrow's feast, but the day after I will examine that nice couple, and
will act with iron severity."
"First let us examine the naturalist in private," said Gagabu. "He is an
ornament to the temple, for he has investigated many matters, and his
dexterity is wonderful."
"All that may be considered Ameni said, interrupting the old enough to
think of at present."
"And even more to consider later," retorted Gagabu. "We have entered on a
dangerous path. You know very well I am still hot-headed, though I am old
in years, and alas! timidity was never my weakness; but Rameses is a
powerful man, and duty compels me to ask you: Is it mere hatred for the
king that has led you to take these hasty and imprudent steps?"
"I have no hatred for Rameses," answered Ameni gravely. "If he did not
wear the crown I could love him; I know him too, as well as if I were his
brother, and value all that is great in him; nay I will admit that he is
disfigured by no littleness. If I did not know how strong the enemy is,
we might try to overthrow him with smaller means. You know as well as I
do that he is our enemy. Not yours, nor mine, nor the enemy of the Gods;
but the enemy of the old and reverend ordinances by which this people and
this country must be governed, and above all of those who are required to
protect the wisdom of the fathers, and to point out the right way to the
sovereign--I mean the priesthood, whom it is my duty to lead, and for
whose rights I will fight with every weapon of the spirit. In this
contest, as you know, all that otherwise would be falsehood, treachery,
and cunning, puts on the bright aspect of light and truth. As the
physician needs the knife and fire to heal the sick, we must do fearful
things to save the community when it is in danger. Now you will see me
fight with every weapon, for if we remain idle, we shall soon cease to be
the leaders of the state, and become the slaves of the king."
Gagabu nodded assent, but Ameni went on with increasing warmth, and in
that rhythmical accent in which, when he came out of the holy of holies,
he was accustomed to declare the will of the Divinity, "You were my
teacher, and I value you, and so you now shall be told everything that
stirred my soul, and made me first resolve upon this fearful struggle. I
was, as you know, brought up in this temple with Rameses--and it was very
wise of Seti to let his son grow up here with other boys. At work and at
play the heir to the throne and I won every prize. He was quite my
superior in swift apprehension--in keen perception--but I had greater
caution, and deeper purpose. Often he laughed at my laborious efforts,
but his brilliant powers appeared to me a vain delusion. I became one of
the initiated, he ruled the state in partnership with his father, and,
when Seti died, by himself. We both grew older, but the foundation of our
characters remained the same. He rushed to splendid victories, overthrew
nations, and raised the glory of the Egyptian name to a giddy height,
though stained with the blood of his people; I passed my life in industry
and labor, in teaching the young, and in guarding the laws which regulate
the intercourse of men and bind the people to the Divinity. I compared
the present with the past: What were the priests? How had they come to be
what they are? What would Egypt be without them? There is not an art, not
a science, not a faculty that is not thought out, constructed, and
practised by us. We crown the kings, we named the Gods, and taught the
people to honor them as divine--for the crowd needs a hand to lead it,
and under which it shall tremble as under the mighty hand of Fate. We are
the willing ministers of the divine representative of Ra on the throne,
so long as he rules in accordance with our institutions--as the One God
reigns, subject to eternal laws. He used to choose his counsellors from
among us; we told him what would benefit the country, he heard us
willingly, and executed our plans. The old kings were the hands, but we,
the priests, were the head. And now, my father, what has become of us? We
are made use of to keep the people in the faith, for if they cease to
honor the Gods how will they submit to kings? Seti ventured much, his son
risks still more, and therefore both have required much succor from the
Immortals. Rameses is pious, he sacrifices frequently, and loves prayer:
we are necessary to him, to waft incense, to slaughter hecatombs, to
offer prayers, and to interpret dreams--but we are no longer his
advisers. My father, now in Osiris, a worthier high-priest than I, was
charged by the Prophets to entreat his father to give up the guilty
project of connecting the north sea by a navigable channel with the
unclean waters of the Red Sea.
[The harbors of the Red Sea were in the hands of the Phoenicians,
who sailed from thence southwards to enrich themselves with the
produce of Arabia and Ophir. Pharaoh Necho also projected a Suez
canal, but does not appear to have carried it out, as the oracle
declared that the utility of the undertaking would be greatest to
foreigners.]
"Such things can only benefit the Asiatics. But Seti would not listen to
our counsel. We desired to preserve the old division of the land, but
Rameses introduced the new to the disadvantage of the priests; we warned
him against fresh wars, and the king again and again has taken the field;
we had the ancient sacred documents which exempted our peasantry from
military service, and, as you know, he outrageously defies them. From the
most ancient times no one has been permitted to raise temples in this
land to strange Gods, and Rameses favors the son of the stranger, and,
not only in the north country, but in the reverend city of Memphis and
here in Thebes, he has raised altars and magnificent sanctuaries, in the
strangers' quarter, to the sanguinary false Gods of the East."
[Human sacrifices, which had been introduced into Egypt by the
Phoenicians, were very early abolished.]
"You speak like a Seer," cried old Gagabu, "and what you say is perfectly
true. We are still called priests, but alas! our counsel is little asked.
'You have to prepare men for a happy lot in the other world,' Rameses
once said; 'I alone can guide their destinies in this.'"
"He did say so," answered Ameni, "and if he had said no more than that he
would have been doomed. He and his house are the enemies of our rights
and of our noble country. Need I tell you from whom the race of the
Pharaoh is descended? Formerly the hosts who came from the east, and fell
on our land like swarms of locusts, robbing and destroying it, were
spoken of as 'a curse' and a 'pest.' Rameses' father was of that race.
When Ani's ancestors expelled the Hyksos, the bold chief, whose children
now govern Egypt, obtained the favor of being allowed to remain on the
banks of the Nile; they served in the armies, they distinguished
themselves, and, at last, the first Rameses succeeded in gaining the
troops over to himself, and in pushing the old race of the legitimate
sons of Ra, weakened as they were by heresy, from the throne. I must
confess, however unwillingly, that some priests of the true faith--among
them your grandfather, and mine--supported the daring usurper who clung
faithfully to the old traditions. Not less than a hundred generations of
my ancestors, and of yours, and of many other priestly families, have
lived and died here by the banks of the Nile--of Rameses race we have
seen ten, and only know of them that they descend from strangers, from
the caste of Amu! He is like all the Semitic race; they love to wander,
they call us ploughmen,--[The word Fellah (pl. Fellahin) means
ploughman]--and laugh to scorn the sober regularity with which we,
tilling the dark soil, live through our lives to a tardy death, in honest
labor both of mind and body. They sweep round on foraying excursions,
ride the salt waves in ships, and know no loved and fixed home; they
settle down wherever they are tempted by rapine, and when there is
nothing more to be got they build a house in another spot. Such was Seti,
such is Rameses! For a year he will stop in Thebes, then he must set out
for wars in strange lands. He does not know how to yield piously, or to
take advice of wise counsellors, and he will not learn. And such as the
father is, so are the children! Think of the criminal behavior of
Bent-Anat!"
"I said the kings liked foreigners. Have you duly considered the
importance of that to us? We strive for high and noble aims, and have
wrenched off the shackles of the flesh in order to guard our souls. The
poorest man lives secure under the shelter of the law, and through us
participates in the gifts of the spirit; to the rich are offered the
priceless treasures of art and learning. Now look abroad: east and west
wandering tribes roam over the desert with wretched tents; in the south a
debased populace prays to feathers, and to abject idols, who are beaten
if the worshipper is not satisfied. In the north certainly there are well
regulated states, but the best part of the arts and sciences which they
possess they owe to us, and their altars still reek with the loathsome
sacrifice of human blood. Only backsliding from the right is possible
under the stranger, and therefore it is prudent to withdraw from him;
therefore he is hateful to our Gods. And Rameses, the king, is a
stranger, by blood and by nature, in his affections, and in his
appearance; his thoughts are always abroad--this country is too small for
him--and he will never perceive what is really best for him, clear as his
intellect is. He will listen to no guidance, he does mischief to Egypt,
and therefore I say: Down with him from the throne!"
"Down with him!"--Gagabu eagerly echoed the words. Ameni gave the old man
his hand, which trembled with excitement, and went on more calmly.
"The Regent Ani is a legitimate child of the soil, by his father and
mother both. I know him well, and I am sure that though he is cunning
indeed, he is full of true veneration, and will righteously establish us
in the rights which we have inherited. The choice is easy: I have chosen,
and I always carry through what I have once begun! Now you know all, and
you will second me."
"With body and soul!" cried Gagabu.
"Strengthen the hearts of the brethren," said Ameni, preparing to go.
"The initiated may all guess what is going on, but it must never be
spoken of."
CHAPTER XXVII.
The sun was up on the twenty-ninth morning of the second month of the
over-flow of the Nile,
[The 29th Phaophi. The Egyptians divided the year into three
seasons of four months each. Flood-time, seed-time and Harvest.
(Scha, per and schemu.) The 29th Phaophi corresponds to the 8th
November.]
and citizens and their wives, old men and children, freemen and slaves,
led by priests, did homage to the rising day-star before the door of the
temple to which the quarter of the town belonged where each one dwelt.
The Thebans stood together like Huge families before the pylons, waiting
for the processions of priests, which they intended to join in order to
march in their train round the great temple of the city, and thence to
cross with the festal barks to the Necropolis.
To-day was the Feast of the Valley, and Anion, the great God of Thebes,
was carried over in solemn pomp to the City of the Dead, in order that
he--as the priests said--might sacrifice to his fathers in the other
world. The train marched westward; for there, where the earthly remains
of man also found rest, the millions of suns had disappeared, each of
which was succeeded daily by a new one, born of the night. The young
luminary, the priests said, did not forget those that had been
extinguished, and from whom he was descended; and Anion paid them this
mark of respect to warn the devout not to forget those who were passed
away, and to whom they owed their existence.
"Bring offerings," says a pious text, "to thy father and thy mother who
rest in the valley of the tombs; for such gifts are pleasing to the Gods,
who will receive them as if brought to themselves. Often visit thy dead,
so that what thou dost for them, thy son may do for thee."
The Feast of the Valley was a feast of the dead; but it was not a
melancholy solemnity, observed with lamentation and wailing; on the
contrary, it was a cheerful festival, devoted to pious and sentimental
memories of those whom we cease not to love after death, whom we esteem
happy and blest, and of whom we think with affection; to whom too the
throng from Thebes brought offerings, forming groups in the chapel-like
tombs, or in front of the graves, to eat and drink.
Father, mother and children clung together; the house-slaves followed
with provisions, and with torches, which would light up the darkness of
the tomb and show the way home at night.
Even the poorest had taken care to secure beforehand a place in one of
the large boats which conveyed the people across the stream; the barges
of the rich, dressed in the gayest colors, awaited their owners with
their households, and the children had dreamed all night of the sacred
bark of Anion, whose splendor, as their mothers told them, was hardly
less than that of the golden boat in which the Sun-God and his companions
make their daily voyage across the ocean of heaven. The broad landing
place of the temple of Anion was already crowded with priests, the shore
with citizens, and the river with boats; already loud music drowned the
din of the crowds, who thronged and pushed, enveloped in clouds of dust,
to reach the boats; the houses and hovels of Thebes were all empty, and
the advent of the God through the temple-gates was eagerly expected; but
still the members of the royal family had not appeared, who were wont on
this solemn day to go on foot to the great temple of Anion; and, in the
crowd, many a one asked his neighbor why Bent-Anat, the fair daughter of
Rameses, lingered so long, and delayed the starting of the procession.
The priests had begun their chant within the walls, which debarred the
outer world from any glimpse into the bright precincts of the temple; the
Regent with his brilliant train had entered the sanctuary; the gates were
thrown open; the youths in their short-aprons, who threw flowers in the
path of the God, had come out; clouds of incense announced the approach
of Anion--and still the daughter of Rameses appeared not.
Many rumors were afloat, most of them contradictory; but one was
accurate, and confirmed by the temple servants, to the great regret of
the crowd--Bent-Anat was excluded from the Feast of the Valley.
She stood on her balcony with her brother Rameri and her friend Nefert,
and looked down on the river, and on the approaching God.
Early in the previous morning Bek-en-Chunsu, the old high-priest of the
temple of Anion had pronounced her clean, but in the evening he had come
to communicate to her the intelligence that Ameni prohibited her entering
the Necropolis before she had obtained the forgiveness of the Gods of the
West for her offence.
While still under the ban of uncleanness she had visited the temple of
Hathor, and had defiled it by her presence; and the stern Superior of the
City of the Dead was in the right--that Bek-en-Chunsu himself
admitted--in closing the western shore against her. Bent-Anat then had
recourse to Ani; but, though he promised to mediate for her, he came late
in the evening to tell her that Ameni was inexorable. The Regent at the
same time, with every appearance of regret, advised her to avoid an open
quarrel, and not to defy Ameni's lofty severity, but to remain absent
from the festival.
Katuti at the same time sent the dwarf to Nefert, to desire her to join
her mother, in taking part in the procession, and in sacrificing in her
father's tomb; but Nefert replied that she neither could nor would leave
her royal friend and mistress.
Bent-Anat had given leave of absence to the highest members of her
household, and had prayed them to think of her at the splendid solemnity.
When, from her balcony, she saw the mob of people and the crowd of boats,
she went back into her room, called Rameri, who was angrily declaiming at
what he called Ameni's insolence, took his hands in hers, and said:
"We have both done wrong, brother; let us patiently submit to the
consequences of our faults, and conduct ourselves as if our father were
with us."
"He would tear the panther-skin from the haughty priest's shoulders,"
cried Rameri, "if he dared to humiliate you so in his presence;" and
tears of rage ran down his smooth cheeks as he spoke.
"Put anger aside," said Bent-Anat. "You were still quite little the last
time my father took part in this festival."
"Oh! I remember that morning well," exclaimed Rameri, "and shall never
forget it."
"So I should think," said the princess. "Do not leave us, Nefert--you are
now my sister. It was a glorious morning; we children were collected in
the great hall of the King, all in festival dresses; he had us called
into this room, which had been inhabited by my mother, who then had been
dead only a few months. He took each of us by the hand, and said he
forgave us everything we might have done wrong if only we were sincerely
penitent, and gave us each a kiss on our forehead. Then he beckoned us
all to him, and said, as humbly as if he were one of us instead of the
great king, 'Perhaps I may have done one of you some injustice, or have
kept you out of some right; I am not conscious of such a thing, but if it
has occurred I am very sorry'--we all rushed upon him, and wanted to kiss
him, but he put us aside smiling, and said, 'Each of you has enjoyed an
equal share of one thing, that you may be sure--I mean your father's
love; and I see now that you return what I have given you.' Then he spoke
of our mother, and said that even the tenderest father could not fill the
place of a mother. He drew a lovely picture of the unselfish devotion of
the dead mother, and desired us to pray and to sacrifice with him at her
resting-place, and to resolve to be worthy of her; not only in great
things but in trifles too, for they make up the sum of life, as hours
make the days, and the years. We elder ones clasped each other's hands,
and I never felt happier than in that moment, and afterwards by my
mother's grave." Nefert raised her eyes that were wet with tears.
"With such a father it must be easy to be good," she said.
"Did your mother never speak good words that went to your heart on the
morning of this festival?" asked Bent-Anat.
Nefert colored, and answered: "We were always late in dressing, and then
had to hurry to be at the temple in time."
"Then let me be your mother to-day," cried the princess, "and yours too,
Rameri. Do you not remember how my father offered forgiveness to the
officers of the court, and to all the servants, and how he enjoined us to
root out every grudge from our hearts on this day? 'Only stainless
garments,' he said, 'befit this feast; only hearts without spot.' So,
brother, I will not hear an evil word about Ameni, who is most likely
forced to be severe by the law; my father will enquire into it all and
decide. My heart is so full, it must overflow. Come, Nefert, give me a
kiss, and you too, Rameri. Now I will go into my little temple, in which
the images of our ancestors stand, and think of my mother and the blessed
spirits of those loved ones to whom I may not sacrifice to-day."
"I will go with you," said Rameri.
"You, Nefert--stay here," said Bent-Anat, "and cut as many flowers as you
like; take the best and finest, and make a wreath, and when it is ready
we will send a messenger across to lay it, with other gifts, on the grave
of your Mena's mother."
When, half-an-hour later, the brother and sister returned to the young
wife, two graceful garlands hung in Nefert's bands, one for the grave of
the dead queen, and one for Mena's mother.
"I will carry over the wreaths, and lay them in the tombs," cried the
prince.
"Ani thought it would be better that we should not show ourselves to the
people," said his sister. "They will scarcely notice that you are not
among the school-boys, but--"
"But I will not go over as the king's son, but as a gardener's boy--"
interrupted the prince. "Listen to the flourish of trumpets! the God has
now passed through the gates."
Rameri stepped out into the balcony, and the two women followed him, and
looked down on the scene of the embarkation which they could easily see
with their sharp young eyes.
"It will be a thinner and poorer procession without either my father or
us, that is one comfort," said Rameri. "The chorus is magnificent; here
come the plume-bearers and singers; there is the chief prophet at the
great temple, old Bek-en-Chunsu. How dignified he looks, but he will not
like going. Now the God is coming, for I, smell the incense."
With these words the prince fell on his knees, and the women followed his
example--when they saw first a noble bull in whose shining skin the sun
was reflected, and who bore between his horns a golden disk, above which
stood white ostrich-feathers; and then, divided from the bull only by a
few fan-bearers, the God himself, sometimes visible, but more often
hidden from sight by great semi-circular screens of black and white
ostrich-feathers, which were fixed on long poles, and with which the
priests shaded the God.
His mode of progress was as mysterious as his name, for he seemed to
float slowly on his gorgeous throne from the temple-gates towards the
stream. His seat was placed on a platform, magnificently decorated with
bunches and garlands of flowers, and covered with hangings of purple and
gold brocade, which concealed the priests who bore it along with a slow
and even pace.
As soon as the God had been placed on board his barge, Bent-Anat and her
companions rose from their knees.
Then came some priests, who carried a box with the sacred evergreen tree
of Amon; and when a fresh outburst of music fell on her ear, and a cloud
of incense was wafted up to her, Bent-Anat said: "Now my father should be
coming."
"And you," cried Rameri, "and close behind, Nefert's husband, Mena, with
the guards. Uncle Ani comes on foot. How strangely he has dressed himself
like a sphinx hind-part before!"
"How so?" asked Nefert.
"A sphinx," said Rameri laughing, it has the body of a lion, and the head
of a man,
[There were no female sphinxes in Egypt. The sphinx was called Neb,
i. e., the lord. The lion-couchant had either a man's or a rams
head.]
and my uncle has a peaceful priest's robe, and on his head the helmet of
a warrior."
"If the king were here, the distributor of life," said Nefert, "you would
not be missing from among his supporters."
"No indeed!" replied the prince, "and the whole thing is altogether
different when my father is here. His heroic form is splendid on his
golden throne; the statues of Truth and justice spread their wings behind
him as if to protect him; his mighty representative in fight, the lion,
lies peacefully before him, and over him spreads the canopy with the
Urmus snake at the top. There is hardly any end to the haruspices, the
pastophori with the standards, the images of the Gods, and the flocks and
herds for sacrifice. Only think, even the North has sent representatives
to the feast, as if my father were here. I know all the different signs
on the standards. Do you recognize the images of the king's ancestors,
Nefert? No? no more do I; but it seemed to me that Ahmes I., who expelled
the Hyksos--from whom our grandmother was descended--headed the
procession, and not my grandfather Seti, as he should have done. Here
come the soldiers; they are the legions which Ani equipped, and who
returned victorious from Ethiopia only last night. How the people cheer
them! and indeed they have behaved valiantly. Only think, Bent-Anat and
Nefert, what it will be when my father comes home, with a hundred captive
princes, who will humbly follow his chariot, which your Mena will drive,
with our brothers and all the nobles of the land, and the guards in their
splendid chariots."
"They do not think of returning yet!" sighed Nefert. While more and more
troops of the Regent's soldiers, more companies of musicians, and rare
animals, followed in procession, the festal bark of Amon started from the
shore.
It was a large and gorgeous barge of wood, polished all over and overlaid
with gold, and its edge was decorated with glittering glass-beads, which
imitated rubies and emeralds; the masts and yards were gilt, and purple
sails floated from them. The seats for the priests were of ivory, and
garlands of lilies and roses hung round the vessel, from its masts and
ropes.
The Regent's Nile-boat was not less splendid; the wood-work shone with
gilding, the cabin was furnished with gay Babylonian carpets; a
lion's-head formed the prow, as formerly in Hatasu's sea-going vessels,
and two large rubies shone in it, for eyes. After the priests had
embarked, and the sacred barge had reached the opposite shore, the people
pressed into the boats, which, filled almost to sinking, soon so covered
the whole breadth of the river that there was hardly a spot where the sun
was mirrored in the yellow waters.
"Now I will put on the dress of a gardener," cried Rameri, "and cross
over with the wreaths."
"You will leave us alone?" asked Bent-Anat.
"Do not make me anxious," said Rameri.
"Go then," said the princess. "If my father were here how willingly I
would go too."
"Come with me," cried the boy. "We can easily find a disguise for you
too."
"Folly!" said Bent-Anat; but she looked enquiringly at Nefert, who
shrugged her shoulders, as much as to say: "Your will is my law."
Rameri was too sharp for the glances of the friends to have escaped him,
and he exclaimed eagerly:
"You will come with me, I see you will! Every beggar to-day flings his
flower into the common grave, which contains the black mummy of his
father--and shall the daughter of Rameses, and the wife of the chief
charioteer, be excluded from bringing garlands to their dead?"
"I shall defile the tomb by my presence," said Bent-Anat coloring.
"You--you!" exclaimed Rameri, throwing his arms round his sister's neck,
and kissing her. "You, a noble generous creature, who live only to ease
sorrow and to wipe away tears; you, the very image of my father--unclean!
sooner would I believe that the swans down there are as black as crows,
and the rose-wreaths on the balcony rank hemlock branches. Bek-en-Chunsu
pronounced you clean, and if Ameni--"
"Ameni only exercises his rights," said Bent-Anat gently, "and you know
what we have resolved. I will not hear one hard word about him to-day."
"Very well! he has graciously and mercifully kept us from the feast,"
said Rameri ironically, and he bowed low in the direction of the
Necropolis, "and you are unclean. Do not enter the tombs and the temples
on my account; let us stay outside among the people. The roads over there
are not so very sensitive; paraschites and other unclean folks pass over
them every day. Be sensible, Bent-Anat, and come. We will disguise
ourselves; I will conduct you; I will lay the garlands in the tombs, we
will pray together outside, we will see the sacred procession and the
feats of the magicians, and hear the festive discourse. Only think!
Pentaur, in spite of all they have said against him, is to deliver it.
The temple of Seti wants to do its best to-day, and Ameni knows very well
that Pentaur, when he opens his mouth, stirs the hearts of the people
more than all the sages together if they were to sing in chorus! Come
with me, sister."
"So be it then," said Bent-Anat with sudden decision.
Rameri was surprised at this quick resolve, at which however he was
delighted; but Nefert looked anxiously at her friend. In a moment her
eyes fell; she knew now who it was that her friend loved, and the fearful
thought--"How will it end?" flashed through her mind.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
An hour later a tall, plainly dressed woman crossed the Nile, with a
dark-skinned boy and a slender youth by her side. The wrinkles on her
brow and cheeks agreed little with her youthful features; but it would
have been difficult to recognize in these three the proud princess, the
fair young prince, and the graceful Nefert, who looked as charming as
ever in the long white robe of a temple-student.
They were followed by two faithful and sturdy head-servants from among
the litter-bearers of the princess, who were however commanded to appear
as though they were not in any way connected with their mistress and her
companions.
The passage across the Nile had been accomplished but slowly, and thus
the royal personages had experienced for the first time some of the many
difficulties and delays which ordinary mortals must conquer to attain
objects which almost fly to meet their rulers. No one preceded them to
clear the river, no other vessel made way for them; on the contrary, all
tried to take place ahead of them, and to reach the opposite shore before
them.
When at last they reached the landing-place, the procession had already
passed on to the temple of Seti; Ameni had met it with his chorus of
singers, and had received the God on the shore of the Nile; the prophets
of the Necropolis had with their own hands placed him in the sacred
Sam-bark of the House of Seti, which was artistically constructed of
cedar wood and electrum set with jewels; thirty pastophori took the
precious burden on their shoulders, and bore it up the avenue of
Sphinxes--which led from the river to the temple--into the sanctuary of
Seti, where Amon remained while the emissaries from the different
provinces deposited their offerings in the forecourt. On his road from
the shore kolchytes had run before him, in accordance with ancient
custom, strewing sand in his path.
In the course of an hour the procession once more emerged into the open
air, and turning to the south, rested first in the enormous temple of
Anienophis III., in front of which the two giant statues stood as
sentinels--they still remain, the colossi of the Nile valley. Farther to
the south it reached the temple of Thotmes the Great, then, turning
round, it clung to the eastern face of the Libyan hills--pierced with
tombs and catacombs; it mounted the terraces of the temple of Hatasu, and
paused by the tombs of the oldest kings which are in the immediate
neighborhood; thus by sunset it had reached the scene of the festival
itself, at the entrance of the valley in which the tomb of Setitt had
been made, and in whose westernmost recesses were some of the graves of
the Pharaohs of the deposed race.
This part of the Necropolis was usually visited by lamp-light, and under
the flare of torches, before the return of the God to his own temple and
the mystery-play on the sacred lake, which did not begin till midnight.
Behind the God, in a vase of transparent crystal, and borne high on a
pole that all the multitude might see it, was the heart of the sacred
ram.
Our friends, after they had laid their wreaths on the magnificent altars
of their royal ancestors without being recognized, late in the afternoon
joined the throng who followed the procession. They mounted the eastern
cliff of the hills close by the tomb of Mena's forefathers, which a
prophet of Amon, named Neferhotep--Mena's great-grandfather--had
constructed. Its narrow doorway was besieged by a crowd, for within the
first of the rock-chambers of which it consisted, a harper was singing a
dirge for the long-since buried prophet, his wife and his sister. The
song had been composed by the poet attached to his house; it was graven
in the stone of the second rock-room of the tomb, and Neferhotep had left
a plot of ground in trust to the Necropolis, with the charge of
administering its revenues for the payment of a minstrel, who every-year
at the feast of the dead should sing the monody to the accompaniment of
his lute.
[The tomb of Neferhotep is well preserved, and in it the inscription
from which the monody is translated.]
The charioteer well knew this dirge for his ancestor, and had often sung
it to Nefert, who had accompanied him on her lute; for in their hours of
joy also--nay especially--the Egyptians were wont to remember their dead.
Now the three companions listened to the minstrel as he sang:
"Now the great man is at rest,
Gone to practise sweeter duties.
Those that die are the elect
Since the Gods have left the earth.
Old men pass and young men come;
Yea, a new Sun rises daily
When the old sun has found rest
In the bosom of the night.
"Hail, O Prophet! on this feast day
Odorous balsams, fragrant resins
Here we bring--and offer garlands,
Throwing flowers down before thee,
And before thy much-loved sister,
Who has found her rest beside thee.
"Songs we sing, and strike the lyre
To thy memory, and thine honor.
All our cares are now forgotten,
Joy and hope our breasts are filling;
For the day of our departure
Now draws near, and in the silence
Of the farther shore is rest."
When the song ceased, several people pressed into the little oratory to
express their gratitude to the deceased prophet by laying a few flowers
on his altar. Nefert and Rameri also went in, and when Nefert had offered
a long and silent prayer to the glorified spirits of her dead, that they
might watch over Mena, she laid her garland beside the grave in which her
husband's mother rested.
Many members of the court circle passed close to the royal party without
recognizing them; they made every effort to reach the scene of the
festival, but the crowd was so great that the ladies had several times to
get into a tomb to avoid it. In each they found the altar loaded with
offerings, and, in most, family-parties, who here remembered their dead,
with meat and fruits, beer and wine, as though they were departed
travellers who had found some far off rest, and whom they hoped sooner or
later to see again.
The sun was near setting when at last the princess and her companions
reached the spot where the feast was being held. Here stood numbers of
stalls and booths, with eatables of every sort, particularly sweet cakes
for the children, dates, figs, pomegranates, and other fruits. Under
light awnings, which kept off the sun, were sold sandals and kerchiefs of
every material and hue, ornaments, amulets, fans, and sun-shades, sweet
essences of every kind, and other gifts for offerings or for the toilet.
The baskets of the gardeners and flower-girls were already empty, but the
money-changers were full of business, and the tavern and gambling booths
were driving a brisk trade.
Friends and acquaintances greeted each other kindly, while the children
showed each other their new sandals, the cakes they had won at the games,
or the little copper rings they had had given to them, and which must now
be laid out. The largest crowd was gathered to see the magicians from the
House of Seti, round which the mob squatted on the ground in a compact
circle, and the children were good-naturedly placed in the front row.
When Bent-Anat reached the place all the religious solemnity was ended.
There stood the canopy under which the king and his family were used to
listen to the festal discourse, and under its shade sat to-day the Regent
Ani. They could see too the seats of the grandees, and the barriers which
kept the people at a distance from the Regent, the priests, and the
nobles.
Here Ameni himself had announced to the multitude the miracle of the
sacred heart, and had proclaimed that a new Apis had been found among the
herds of the Regent Ani.
His announcement of these divine tokens had been repeated from mouth to
mouth; they were omens of peace and happiness for the country through the
means of a favorite of the Gods; and though no one said it, the dullest
could not fail to see that this favorite was none other than Ani, the
descendant of the great Hatasu, whose prophet had been graced by the
transfer to him of the heart of the sacred rain. All eyes were fixed on
Ani, who had sacrificed before all the people to the sacred heart, and
received the high-priest's blessing.
Pentaur, too, had ended his discourse when Bent-Anat reached the scene of
the festival. She heard an old man say to his son:
"Life is hard. It often seems to me like a heavy burden laid on our poor
backs by the cruel Gods; but when I heard the young priest from the House
of Seti, I felt that, after all, the Immortals are good, and we have much
to thank them for."
In another place a priest's wife said to her son:
"Could you see Pentaur well, Hor-Uza? He is of humble birth, but he
stands above the greatest in genius and gifts, and will rise to high
things."
Two girls were speaking together, and one said to the other:
"The speaker is the handsomest man I ever saw, and his voice sounds like
soft music."
"And how his eyes shone when he spoke of truth as the highest of all
virtues!" replied the other. "All the Gods, I believe, must dwell in
him."
Bent-Anat colored as these words fell on her ear. It was growing dark,
and she wished to return home but Rameri wished to follow the procession
as it marched through the western valley by torch-light, so that the
grave of his grandfather Seti should also be visited. The princess
unwillingly yielded, but it would in any case have been difficult to
reach the river while every one was rushing in the opposite direction; so
the two ladies, and Rameri, let themselves be carried along by the crowd,
and by the time the daylight was gone, they found themselves in the
western valley, where to-night no beasts of prey dared show themselves;
jackals and hyenas had fled before the glare of the torches, and the
lanterns made of colored papyrus.
The smoke of the torches mingled with the dust stirred by a thousand
feet, and the procession moved along, as it were, in a cloud, which also
shrouded the multitude that followed.
The three companions had labored on as far as the hovel of the
paraschites Pinem, but here they were forced to pause, for guards drove
back the crowd to the right and left with long staves, to clear a passage
for the procession as it approached.
"See, Rameri," said Bent-Anat, pointing out the little yard of the hut
which stood only a few paces from them. "That is where the fair, white
girl lives, whom I ran over. But she is much better. Turn round; there,
behind the thorn-hedge, by the little fire which shines full in your
(her? D.W.) face--there she sits, with her grandfather."
The prince stood on tip-toe, looked into the humble plot of ground, and
then said in a subdued voice "What a lovely creature! But what is she
doing with the old man? He seems to be praying, and she first holds a
handkerchief before his mouth, and then rubs his temples. And how unhappy
she looks!"
"The paraschites must be ill," replied Bent-Anat. "He must have had too
much wine down at the feast," said Rameri laughing. "No doubt of it! Only
look how his lips tremble, and his eyes roll. It is hideous--he looks
like one possessed."
[It was thought that the insane were possessed by demons. A stele
admirably treated by F. de Rouge exists at Paris, which relates
that the sister-in law of Rameses III., who was possessed by devils,
had them driven out by the statue of Chunsu, which was sent to her
in Asia.]
"He is unclean too!" said Nefert.
"But he is a good, kind man, with a tender heart," exclaimed the princess
eagerly. "I have enquired about him. He is honest and sober, and I am
sure he is ill and not drunk."
"Now she is standing up," said Rameri, and he dropped the paper-lantern
which he had bought at a booth. "Step back, Bent-Anat, she must be
expecting some one. Did you ever see any one so very fair, and with such
a pretty little head. Even her red hair becomes her wonderfully; but she
staggers as she stands--she must be very weak. Now she has sat down again
by the old man, and is rubbing his forehead. Poor souls! look how she is
sobbing. I will throw my purse over to them."
"No, no!" exclaimed Bent-Anat. "I gave them plenty of money, and the
tears which are shed there cannot be staunched with gold. I will send old
Asnath over to-morrow to ask how we can help them. Look, here comes the
procession, Nefert. How rudely the people press! As soon as the God is
gone by we will go home."
"Pray do," said Nefert. "I am so frightened!" and she pressed trembling
to the side of the princess.
"I wish we were at home, too," replied Bent-Anat.
"Only look!" said Rameri. "There they are. Is it not splendid? And how
the heart shines, as if it were a star!"
All the crowd, and with them our three friends, fell on their knees.
The procession paused opposite to them, as it did at every thousand
paces; a herald came forward, and glorified, in a loud voice, the great
miracle, to which now another was added--the sacred heart since the night
had come on had begun to give out light.
Since his return home from the embalming house, the paraschites had taken
no nourishment, and had not answered a word to the anxious questions of
the two frightened women. He stared blindly, muttered a few
unintelligible words, and often clasped his forehead in his hand. A few
hours before he had laughed loud and suddenly, and his wife, greatly
alarmed, had gone at once to fetch the physician Nebsecht.
During her absence Uarda was to rub her grandfather's temples with the
leaves which the witch Hekt had laid on her bruises, for as they had once
proved efficacious they might perhaps a second time scare away the demon
of sickness.
When the procession, with its thousand lamps and torches, paused before
the hovel, which was almost invisible in the dusk, and one citizen said
to another: "Here comes the sacred heart!" the old man started, and stood
up. His eyes stared fixedly at the gleaming relic in its crystal case;
slowly, trembling in every limb, and with outstretched neck he stood up.
The herald began his eulogy of the miracle.
Then, while all the people were prostrate in adoration, listening
motionless to the loud voice of the speaker, the paraschites rushed out
of his gate, striking his forehead with his fists, and opposite the
sacred heart, he broke out into a mad, loud fit of scornful laughter,
which re-echoed from the bare cliffs that closed in the valley.
Horror full on the crowd, who rose timidly from their knees.
Ameni, who too, was close behind the heart, started too and looked round
on the author of this hideous laugh. He had never seen the paraschites,
but he perceived the glimmer of his little fire through the dust and
gloom, and he knew that he lived in this place. The whole case struck him
at once; he whispered a few significant words to one of the officers who
marched with the troops on each side of the procession; then he gave the
signal, and the procession moved on as if nothing had happened.
The old man tried with still more loud and crazy laughter to reach and
seize the heart, but the crowd kept him back; and while the last groups
passed on after the priests, he contrived to slip back as far as the door
of his hovel, though much damaged and hurt.
There he fell, and Uarda rushed out and threw herself over the old man,
who lay on the earth, scarcely recognizable in the dust and darkness.
"Crush the scoffer!"
"Tear him in pieces!"
"Burn down the foul den!"
"Throw him and the wench into the fire!" shouted the people who had been
disturbed in their devotions, with wild fury.
Two old women snatched the lanterns froth the posts, and flung them at
the unfortunate creatures, while an Ethiopian soldier seized Uarda by the
hair, and tore her away from her grandfather.
At this moment Pinem's wife appeared, and with her Pentaur. She had found
not Nebsecht, but Pentaur, who had returned to the temple after his
speech. She had told him of the demon who had fallen upon her husband,
and implored him to come with her. Pentaur immediately followed her in
his working dress, just as he was, without putting on the white priest's
robe, which he did not wish to wear on this expedition.
When they drew near to the paraschites' hovel, he perceived the tumult
among the people, and, loud above all the noise, heard Uarda's shrill cry
of terror. He hurried forward, and in the dull light of the scattered
fire-brands and colored lanterns, he saw the black hand of the soldier
clutching the hair of the helpless child; quick as thought he gripped the
soldier's throat with his iron fingers, seized him round the body, swung
him in the air, and flung him like a block of stone right into the little
yard of the hut.
The people threw themselves on the champion in a frenzy of rage, but he
felt a sudden warlike impulse surging up in him, which he had never felt
before. With one wrench he pulled out the heavy wooden pole, which
supported the awning which the old paraschites had put up for his sick
grandchild; he swung it round his head, as if it were a reed, driving
back the crowd, while he called to Uarda to keep close to him.
"He who touches the child is a dead man!" he cried. "Shame on
you!--falling on a feeble old man and a helpless child in the middle of a
holy festival!"
For a moment the crowd was silent, but immediately after rushed forward
with fresh impetus, and wilder than ever rose the shouts of:
"Tear him to pieces! burn his house down!"
A few artisans from Thebes closed round the poet, who was not
recognizable as a priest. He, however, wielding his tent-pole, felled
them before they could reach him with their fists or cudgels, and down
went every man on whom it fell. But the struggle could not last long, for
some of his assailants sprang over the fence, and attacked him in the
rear. And now Pentaur was distinctly visible against a background of
flaring light, for some fire-brands had fallen on the dry palm-thatch of
the hovel behind him, and roaring flames rose up to the dark heavens.
The poet heard the threatening blaze behind him. He put his left hand
round the head of the trembling girl, who crouched beside him, and
feeling that now they both were lost, but that to his latest breath he
must protect the innocence and life of this frail creature, with his
right hand he once more desperately swung the heavy stake.
But it was for the last time; for two men succeeded in clutching the
weapon, others came to their support, and wrenched it from his hand,
while the mob closed upon him, furious but unarmed, and not without great
fear of the enormous strength of their opponent.
Uarda clung to her protector with shortened breath, and trembling like a
hunted antelope. Pentaur groaned when he felt himself disarmed, but at
that instant a youth stood by his side, as if he bad sprung from the
earth, who put into his hand the sword of the fallen soldier--who lay
near his feet--and who then, leaning his back against Pentaur's, faced
the foe on the other side. Pentaur pulled himself together, sent out a
battle-cry like some fighting hero who is defending his last stronghold,
and brandished his new weapon. He stood with flaming eyes, like a lion at
bay, and for a moment the enemy gave way, for his young ally Rameri, had
taken a hatchet, and held it up in a threatening manner.
"The cowardly murderers are flinging fire-brands," cried the prince.
"Come here, girl, and I will put out the pitch on your dress."
He seized Uarda's hand, drew her to him, and hastily put out the flame,
while Pentaur protected them with his sword.
The prince and the poet stood thus back to back for a few moments, when a
stone struck Pentaur's head; he staggered, and the crowd were rushing
upon him, when the little fence was torn away by a determined hand, a
tall womanly form appeared on the scene of combat, and cried to the
astonished mob:
"Have done with this! I command you! I am Bent-Anat, the daughter of
Rameses."
The angry crowd gave way in sheer astonishment. Pentaur had recovered
from the stunning blow, but he thought he must be under some illusion. He
felt as if he must throw himself on his knees before Bent-Anat, but his
mind had been trained under Ameni to rapid reflection; he realized, in a
flash of thought, the princess's position, and instead of bowing before
her he exclaimed:
"Whoever this woman may be, good folks, she is not Bent-Anat the
princess, but I, though I have no white robe on, am a priest of Seti,
named Pentaur, and the Cherheb of to-day's festival. Leave this spot,
woman, I command you, in right of my sacred office."
And Bent-Anat obeyed.
Pentaur was saved; for just as the people began to recover from their
astonishment just as those whom he had hurt were once more inciting the
mob to fight just as a boy, whose hand he had crushed, was crying out:
"He is not a priest, he is a sword's-man. Down with the liar!"
A voice from the crowd exclaimed:
"Make way for my white robe, and leave the preacher Pentaur alone, he is
my friend. You most of you know me."
"You are Nebsecht the leech, who set my broken leg," cried a sailor.
"And cured my bad eye," said a weaver.
"That tall handsome man is Pentaur, I know him well," cried the girl,
whose opinion had been overheard by Bent-Anat.
"Preacher this, preacher that!" shouted the boy, and he would have rushed
forward, but the people held him back, and divided respectfully at
Nebsecht's command to make way for him to get at those who had been hurt.
First he stooped over the old paraschites.
"Shame upon you!" he exclaimed.--You have killed the old man."
"And I," said Pentaur, "Have dipped my peaceful hand in blood to save his
innocent and suffering grandchild from a like fate."
"Scorpions, vipers, venomous reptiles, scum of men!" shrieked Nebsecht,
and he sprang wildly forward, seeking Uarda. When he saw her sitting safe
at the feet of old Hekt, who had made her way into the courtyard, he drew
a deep breath of relief, and turned his attention to the wounded.
"Did you knock down all that are lying here?" he whispered to his friend.
Pentaur nodded assent and smiled; but not in triumph, rather in shame;
like a boy, who has unintentionally squeezed to death in his hand a bird
he has caught.
Nebsecht looked round astonished and anxious. "Why did you not say who
you were?" he asked. "Because the spirit of the God Menth possessed me,"
answered Pentaur. "When I saw that accursed villain there with his hand
in the girl's hair, I heard and saw nothing, I--"
"You did right," interrupted Nebsecht. "But where will all this end?"
At this moment a flourish of trumpets rang through the little valley. The
officer sent by Ameni to apprehend the paraschites came up with his
soldiers.
Before he entered the court-yard he ordered the crowd to disperse; the
refractory were driven away by force, and in a few minutes the valley was
cleared of the howling and shouting mob, and the burning house was
surrounded by soldiers. Bent-Anat, Rameri, and Nefert were obliged to
quit their places by the fence; Rameri, so soon as he saw that Uarda was
safe, had rejoined his sister.
Nefert was almost fainting with fear and excitement. The two servants,
who had kept near them, knit their hands together, and thus carried her
in advance of the princess. Not one of them spoke a word, not even
Rameri, who could not forget Uarda, and the look of gratitude she bid
sent after him. Once only Bent-Anat said:
"The hovel is burnt down. Where will the poor souls sleep to-night?"
When the valley was clear, the officer entered the yard, and found there,
besides Uarda and the witch Hekt, the poet, and Nebsecht, who was engaged
in tending the wounded.
Pentaur shortly narrated the affair to the captain, and named himself to
him.
The soldier offered him his hand.
"If there were many men in Rameses' army," said he, who could strike such
a blow as you, the war with the Cheta would soon be at an end. But you
have struck down, not Asiatics, but citizens of Thebes, and, much as I
regret it, I must take you as a prisoner to Ameni."
"You only do your duty," replied Pentaur, bowing to the captain, who
ordered his men to take up the body of the paraschites, and to bear it to
the temple of Seti.
"I ought to take the girl in charge too," he added, turning to Pentaur.
"She is ill," replied the poet.
"And if she does not get some rest," added Nebsecht, "she will be dead.
Leave her alone; she is under the particular protection of the princess
Bent-Anat, who ran over her not long ago."
"I will take her into my house," said Hekt, "and will take care of her.
Her grandmother is lying there; she was half choked by the flames, but
she will soon come to herself--and I have room for both."
"Till to-morrow," replied the surgeon. "Then I will provide another
shelter for her."
The old woman laughed and muttered: "There are plenty of folks to take
care of her, it seems."
The soldiers obeyed the command of their leader, took up the wounded, and
went away with Pentaur, and the body of Pinem.
Meanwhile, Bent-Anat and her party had with much difficulty reached the
river-bank. One of the bearers was sent to find the boat which was
waiting for them, and he was enjoined to make haste, for already they
could see the approach of the procession, which escorted the God on his
return journey. If they could not succeed in finding their boat without
delay, they must wait at least an hour, for, at night, not a boat that
did not belong to the train of Amon--not even the barge of a noble--might
venture from shore till the whole procession was safe across.
They awaited the messenger's signal in the greatest anxiety, for Nefert
was perfectly exhausted, and Bent-Anat, on whom she leaned, felt her
trembling in every limb.
At last the bearer gave the signal; the swift, almost invisible bark,
which was generally used for wild fowl shooting, shot by--Rameri seized
one end of an oar that the rower held out to him, and drew the little
boat up to the landing-place.
The captain of the watch passed at the same moment, and shouting out,
"This is the last boat that can put off before the passage of the God!"
Bent-Anat descended the steps as quickly as Nefert's exhausted state
permitted. The landing-place was now only dimly lighted by dull lanterns,
though, when the God embarked, it would be as light as day with cressets
and torches. Before she could reach the bottom step, with Nefert still
clinging heavily to her arm, a hard hand was laid on her shoulder, and
the rough voice of Paaker exclaimed:
"Stand back, you rabble! We are going first." The captain of the watch
did not stop him, for he knew the chief pioneer and his overbearing ways.
Paaker put his finger to his lips, and gave a shrill whistle that sounded
like a yell in the silence.
The stroke of oars responded to the call, and Paaker called out to his
boatmen:
"Bring the boat up here! these people can wait!" The pioneer's boat was
larger and better manned than that of the princess.
"Jump into the boat!" cried Rameri.
Bent-Anat went forward without speaking, for she did not wish to make
herself known again for the sake of the people, and for Nefert's; but
Paaker put himself in her way.
"Did I not tell you that you common people must wait till we are gone.
Push these people's boat out into the stream, you men."
Bent-Anat felt her blood chill, for a loud squabble at once began on the
landing-steps.
Rameri's voice sounded louder than all the rest; but the pioneer
exclaimed:
"The low brutes dare to resist? I will teach them manners! Here, Descher,
look after the woman and these boys!"
At his call his great red hound barked and sprang forward, which, as it
had belonged to his father, always accompanied him when he went with his
mother to visit the ancestral tomb. Nefert shrieked with fright, but the
dog at once knew her, and crouched against her with whines of
recognition.
Paaker, who had gone down to his boat, turned round in astonishment, and
saw his dog fawning at the feet of a boy whom he could not possibly
recognize as Nefert; he sprang back, and cried out:
"I will teach you, you young scoundrel, to spoil my dog with spells--or
poison!"
He raised his whip, and struck it across the shoulders of Nefert, who,
with one scream of terror and anguish, fell to the ground.
The lash of the whip only whistled close by the cheek of the poor
fainting woman, for Bent-Anat had seized Paaker's arm with all her might.
Rage, disgust, and scorn stopped her utterance; but Rameri had heard
Nefert's shriek, and in two steps stood by the women.
"Cowardly scoundrel!" he cried, and lifted the oar in his hand. Paaker
evaded the blow, and called to the dog with a peculiar hiss:
"Pull him down, Descher."
The hound flew at the prince; but Rameri, who from his childhood, had
been his father's companion in many hunts and field sports, gave the
furious brute such a mighty blow on the muzzle that he rolled over with a
snort.
Paaker believed that he possessed in the whole world no more faithful
friend than this dog, his companion on all his marches across desert
tracts or through the enemy's country, and when he saw him writhing on
the ground his rage knew no bounds, and he flew at the youngster with his
whip; but Rameri--madly excited by all the events of the night, full of
the warlike spirit of his fathers, worked up to the highest pitch by the
insults to the two ladies, and seeing that he was their only
protector--suddenly felt himself endowed with the strength of a man; he
dealt the pioneer such a heavy blow on the left hand, that he dropped his
whip, and now seized the dagger in his girdle with his right.
Bent-Anat threw herself between the man and the stripling, who was hardly
more than a boy, once more declared her name, and this time her brother's
also, and commanded Paaker to make peace among the boatmen. Then she led
Nefert, who remained unrecognized, into the boat, entered it herself with
her companions, and shortly after landed at the palace, while Paaker's
mother, for whom he had called his boat, had yet a long time to wait
before it could start. Setchem had seen the struggle from her litter at
the top of the landing steps, but without understanding its origin, and
without recognizing the chief actors.
The dog was dead. Paaker's hand was very painful, and fresh rage was
seething in his soul.
"That brood of Rameses!" he muttered. "Adventurers! They shall learn to
know me. Mena and Rameses are closely connected--I will sacrifice them
both."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Her white cat was playing at her feet
Human sacrifices, which had been introduced into Egypt by the
Phoenicians
The dressing and undressing of the holy images
Thought that the insane were possessed by demons
Use words instead of swords, traps instead of lances
UARDA
Volume 7.
By Georg Ebers
CHAPTER XXIX.
At last the pioneer's boat got off with his mother and the body of the
dog, which he intended to send to be embalmed at Kynopolis, the city in
which the dog was held sacred above all animals;
[Kynopolis, or in old Egyptian Saka, is now Samalut; Anubis was the
chief divinity worshipped there. Plutarch relates a quarrel between
the inhabitants of this city, and the neighboring one of Oxyrynchos,
where the fish called Oxyrynchos was worshipped. It began because
the Kynopolitans eat the fish, and in revenge the Oxyrynchites
caught and killed dogs, and consumed them in sacrifices. Juvenal
relates a similar story of the Ombites--perhaps Koptites--and
Pentyrites in the 15th Satire.]
Paaker himself returned to the House of Seti, where, in the night which
closed the feast day, there was always a grand banquet for the superior
priests of the Necropolis and of the temples of eastern Thebes, for the
representatives of other foundations, and for select dignitaries of the
state.
His father had never failed to attend this entertainment when he was in
Thebes, but he himself had to-day for the first time received the
much-coveted honor of an invitation, which--Ameni told him when he gave
it--he entirely owed to the Regent.
His mother had tied up his hand, which Rameri had severely hurt; it was
extremely painful, but he would not have missed the banquet at any cost,
although he felt some alarm of the solemn ceremony. His family was as old
as any in Egypt, his blood purer than the king's, and nevertheless he
never felt thoroughly at home in the company of superior people. He was
no priest, although a scribe; he was a warrior, and yet he did not rank
with royal heroes.
He had been brought up to a strict fulfilment of his duty, and he devoted
himself zealously to his calling; but his habits of life were widely
different from those of the society in which he had been brought up--a
society of which his handsome, brave, and magnanimous father had been a
chief ornament. He did not cling covetously to his inherited wealth, and
the noble attribute of liberality was not strange to him, but the
coarseness of his nature showed itself most when he was most lavish, for
he was never tired of exacting gratitude from those whom he had attached
to him by his gifts, and he thought he had earned the right by his
liberality to meet the recipient with roughness or arrogance, according
to his humor. Thus it happened that his best actions procured him not
friends but enemies.
Paaker's was, in fact, an ignoble, that is to say, a selfish nature; to
shorten his road he trod down flowers as readily as he marched over the
sand of the desert. This characteristic marked him in all things, even in
his outward demeanor; in the sound of his voice, in his broad features,
in the swaggering gait of his stumpy figure.
In camp he could conduct himself as he pleased; but this was not
permissible in the society of his equals in rank; for this reason, and
because those faculties of quick remark and repartee, which distinguished
them, had been denied to him, he felt uneasy and out of his element when
he mixed with them, and he would hardly have accepted Ameni's invitation,
if it had not so greatly flattered his vanity.
It was already late; but the banquet did not begin till midnight, for the
guests, before it began, assisted at the play which was performed by lamp
and torch-light on the sacred lake in the south of the Necropolis, and
which represented the history of Isis and Osiris.
When he entered the decorated hall in which the tables were prepared, he
found all the guests assembled. The Regent Ani was present, and sat on
Ameni's right at the top of the centre high-table at which several places
were unoccupied; for the prophets and the initiated of the temple of Amon
had excused themselves from being present. They were faithful to Rameses
and his house; their grey-haired Superior disapproved of Ameni's severity
towards the prince and princess, and they regarded the miracle of the
sacred heart as a malicious trick of the chiefs of the Necropolis against
the great temple of the capital for which Rameses had always shown a
preference.
The pioneer went up to the table, where sat the general of the troops
that had just returned victorious from Ethiopia, and several other
officers of high rank, There was a place vacant next to the general.
Paaker fixed his eyes upon this, but when he observed that the officer
signed to the one next to him to come a little nearer, the pioneer
imagined that each would endeavor to avoid having him for his neighbor,
and with an angry glance he turned his back on the table where the
warriors sat.
The Mohar was not, in fact, a welcome boon-companion. "The wine turns
sour when that churl looks at it," said the general.
The eyes of all the guests turned on Paaker, who looked round for a seat,
and when no one beckoned him to one he felt his blood begin to boil. He
would have liked to leave the banqueting hall at once with a swingeing
curse. He had indeed turned towards the door, when the Regent, who had
exchanged a few whispered words with Ameni, called to him, requested him
to take the place that had been reserved for him, and pointed to the seat
by his side, which had in fact been intended for the high-priest of the
temple of Amon.
Paaker bowed low, and took the place of honor, hardly daring to look
round the table, lest he should encounter looks of surprise or of
mockery. And yet he had pictured to himself his grandfather Assa, and his
father, as somewhere near this place of honor, which had actually often
enough been given up to them. And was he not their descendant and heir?
Was not his mother Setchem of royal race? Was not the temple of Seti more
indebted to him than to any one?
A servant laid a garland of flowers round his shoulders, and another
handed him wine and food. Then he raised his eyes, and met the bright and
sparkling glance of Gagabu; he looked quickly down again at the table.
Then the Regent spoke to him, and turning to the other guests mentioned
that Paaker was on the point of starting next day for Syria, and resuming
his arduous labors as Mohar. It seemed to Paaker that the Regent was
excusing himself for having given him so high a place of honor.
Presently Ani raised his wine-cup, and drank to the happy issue of his
reconnoitring-expedition, and a victorious conclusion to every struggle
in which the Mohar might engage. The high-priest then pledged him, and
thanked him emphatically in the name of the brethren of the temple, for
the noble tract of arable land which he had that morning given them as a
votive offering. A murmur of approbation ran round the tables, and
Paaker's timidity began to diminish.
He had kept the wrappings that his mother had applied round his still
aching hand.
"Are you wounded?" asked the Regent.
"Nothing of importance," answered the pioneer. "I was helping my mother
into the boat, and it happened--"
"It happened," interrupted an old school-fellow of the Mohar's, who
himself held a high appointment as officer of the city-watch of
Thebes--"It happened that an oar or a stake fell on his fingers."
"Is it possible!" cried the Regent.
"And quite a youngster laid hands on him," continued the officer. "My
people told me every detail. First the boy killed his dog--"
"That noble Descher?" asked the master of the hunt in a tone of regret.
"Your father was often by my side with that dog at a boar-hunt."
Paaker bowed his head; but the officer of the watch, secure in his
position and dignity, and taking no notice of the glow of anger which
flushed Paaker's face, began again:
"When the hound lay on the ground, the foolhardy boy struck your dagger
out of your hand."
"And did this squabble lead to any disturbance?" asked Ameni earnestly.
"No," replied the officer. "The feast has passed off to-day with unusual
quiet. If the unlucky interruption to the procession by that crazy
paraschites had not occurred, we should have nothing but praise for the
populace. Besides the fighting priest, whom we have handed over to you,
only a few thieves have been apprehended, and they belong exclusively to
the caste,
[According to Diodorous (I. 80) there was a cast of thieves in
Thebes. All citizens were obliged to enter their names in a
register, and state where they lived, and the thieves did the same.
The names were enrolled by the "chief of the thieves," and all
stolen goods had to be given up to him. The person robbed had to
give a written description of the object he had lost, and a
declaration as to when and where he had lost it. The stolen
property was then easily recovered, and restored to the owner on
the payment of one fourth of its value, which was given to the
thief. A similar state of things existed at Cairo within a
comparatively short time.]
so we simply take their booty from them, and let them go. But say,
Paaker, what devil of amiability took possession of you down by the
river, that you let the rascal escape unpunished."
"Did you do that?" exclaimed Gagabu. "Revenge is usually your--"
Ameni threw so warning a glance at the old man, that he suddenly broke
off, and then asked the pioneer: "How did the struggle begin, and who was
the fellow?"
"Some insolent people," said Paaker, "wanted to push in front of the boat
that was waiting for my mother, and I asserted my rights. The rascal fell
upon me, and killed my dog and--by my Osirian father!--the crocodiles
would long since have eaten him if a woman had not come between us, and
made herself known to me as Bent-Anat, the daughter of Rameses. It was
she herself, and the rascal was the young prince Rameri, who was
yesterday forbidden this temple."
"Oho!" cried the old master of the hunt. "Oho! my lord! Is this the way
to speak of the children of the king?"
Others of the company who were attached to Pharaoh's family expressed
their indignation; but Ameni whispered to Paaker--"Say no more!" then he
continued aloud:
"You never were careful in weighing your words, my friend, and now, as it
seems to me, you are speaking in the heat of fever. Come here, Gagabu,
and examine Paaker's wound, which is no disgrace to him--for it was
inflicted by a prince."
The old man loosened the bandage from the pioneer's swollen hand.
"That was a bad blow," he exclaimed; "three fingers are broken, and--do
you see?--the emerald too in your signet ring."
Paaker looked down at his aching fingers, and uttered a sigh of rehef,
for it was not the oracular ring with the name of Thotmes III., but the
valuable one given to his father by the reigning king that had been
crushed. Only a few solitary fragments of the splintered stone remained
in the setting; the king's name had fallen to pieces, and disappeared.
Paaker's bloodless lips moved silently, and an inner voice cried out to
him: "The Gods point out the way! The name is gone, the bearer of the
name must follow."
"It is a pity about the ring," said Gagabu. "And if the hand is not to
follow it--luckily it is your left hand--leave off drinking, let yourself
be taken to Nebsecht the surgeon, and get him to set the joints neatly,
and bind them up."
Paaker rose, and went away after Ameni had appointed to meet him on the
following day at the Temple of Seti, and the Regent at the palace.
When the door had closed behind him, the treasurer of the temple said:
"This has been a bad day for the Mohar, and perhaps it will teach him
that here in Thebes he cannot swagger as he does in the field. Another
adventure occurred to him to-day; would you like to hear it?"
"Yes; tell it!" cried the guests.
"You all knew old Seni," began the treasurer. "He was a rich man, but he
gave away all his goods to the poor, after his seven blooming sons, one
after another, had died in the war, or of illness. He only kept a small
house with a little garden, and said that as the Gods had taken his
children to themselves in the other world he would take pity on the
forlorn in this. 'Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the
naked' says the law; and now that Seni has nothing more to give away, he
goes through the city, as you know, hungry and thirsty himself, and
scarcely clothed, and begging for his adopted children, the poor. We have
all given to him, for we all know for whom he humbles himself, and holds
out his hand. To-day he went round with his little bag, and begged, with
his kind good eyes, for alms. Paaker has given us a good piece of arable
land, and thinks, perhaps with reason, that he has done his part. When
Seni addressed him, he told him to go; but the old man did not give up
asking him, he followed him persistently to the grave of his father, and
a great many people with him. Then the pioneer pushed him angrily back,
and when at last the beggar clutched his garment, he raised his whip, and
struck him two or three times, crying out: 'There-that is your portion!'
The good old man bore it quite patiently, while he untied the bag, and
said with tears in his eyes: 'My portion--yes--but not the portion of the
poor!'
"I was standing near, and I saw how Paaker hastily withdrew into the
tomb, and how his mother Setchem threw her full purse to Seni. Others
followed her example, and the old man never had a richer harvest. The
poor may thank the Mohar! A crowd of people collected in front of the
tomb, and he would have fared badly if it had not been for the police
guard who drove them away."
During this narrative, which was heard with much approval--for no one is
more secure of his result than he who can tell of the downfall of a man
who is disliked for his arrogance--the Regent and the high-priest had
been eagerly whispering to each other.
"There can be no doubt," said Ameni, that Bent-Anat did actually come to
the festival."
"And had also dealings with the priest whom you so warmly defend,"
whispered the other.
"Pentaur shall be questioned this very night," returned the high-priest.
"The dishes will soon be taken away, and the drinking will begin. Let us
go and hear what the poet says."
"But there are now no witnesses," replied Ani.
"We do not need them," said Ameni. "He is incapable of a lie."
"Let us go then," said the Regent smiling, "for I am really curious about
this white negro, and how he will come to terms with the truth. You have
forgotten that there is a woman in the case."
"That there always is!" answered Ameni; he called Gagabu to him, gave him
his seat, begged him to keep up the flow of cheerful conversation, to
encourage the guests to drink, and to interrupt all talk of the king, the
state, or the war.
"You know," he concluded, "that we are not by ourselves this evening.
Wine has, before this, betrayed everything! Remember this--the mother of
foresight looks backwards!"
Ani clapped his hand on the old man's shoulder. "There will be a space
cleared to-night in your winelofts. It is said of you that you cannot
bear to see either a full glass or an empty one; to-night give your
aversion to both free play. And when you think it is the right moment,
give a sign to my steward, who is sitting there in the corner. He has a
few jars of the best liquor from Byblos, that he brought over with him,
and he will bring it to you. I will come in again and bid you
good-night." Ameni was accustomed to leave the hall at the beginning of
the drinking.
When the door was closed behind him and his companion, when fresh
rose-garlands had been brought for the necks of the company, when lotus
blossoms decorated their heads, and the beakers were refilled, a choir of
musicians came in, who played on harps, lutes, flutes, and small drums.
The conductor beat the time by clapping his hands, and when the music had
raised the spirits of the drinkers, they seconded his efforts by
rhythmical clippings. The jolly old Gagabu kept up his character as a
stout drinker, and leader of the feast.
The most priestly countenances soon beamed with cheerfulness, and the
officers and courtiers outdid each other in audacious jokes. Then the old
man signed to a young temple-servant, who wore a costly wreath; he came
forward with a small gilt image of a mummy, carried it round the circle
and cried:
"Look at this, be merry and drink so long as you are on earth, for soon
you must be like this."
[A custom mentioned by Herodotus. Lucian saw such an image brought
in at a feast. The Greeks adopted the idea, but beautified it,
using a winged Genius of death instead of a mummy. The Romans also
had their "larva."]
Gagabu gave another signal, and the Regent's steward brought in the wine
from Byblos. Ani was much lauded for the wonderful choiceness of the
liquor.
"Such wine," exclaimed the usually grave chief of the pastophori, "is
like soap."
[This comparison is genuinely Eastern. Kisra called wine "the soap
of sorrow." The Mohammedans, to whom wine is forbidden, have
praised it like the guests of the House of Seti. Thus Abdelmalik
ibn Salih Haschimi says: "The best thing the world enjoys is wine."
Gahiz says: "When wine enters thy bones and flows through thy limbs
it bestows truth of feeling, and perfects the soul; it removes
sorrow, elevates the mood, etc., etc." When Ibn 'Aischah was told
that some one drank no wine, he said: "He has thrice disowned the
world." Ibn el Mu'tazz sang:
"Heed not time, how it may linger, or how swiftly take its flight,
Wail thy sorrows only to the wine before thee gleaming bright.
But when thrice thou st drained the beaker watch and ward
keep o'er thy heart.
Lest the foam of joy should vanish, and thy soul with anguish smart,
This for every earthly trouble is a sovereign remedy,
Therefore listen to my counsel, knowing what will profit thee,
Heed not time, for ah, how many a man has longed in pain
Tale of evil days to lighten--and found all his longing vain."
--Translated by Mary J. Safford.]
"What a simile!" cried Gagabu. "You must explain it."
"It cleanses the soul of sorrow," answered the other. "Good, friend!"
they all exclaimed. "Now every one in turn shall praise the noble juice
in some worthy saying."
"You begin--the chief prophet of the temple of Atnenophis."
"Sorrow is a poison," said the priest, "and wine is the antidote."
"Well said!--go on; it is your turn, my lord privy councillor."
"Every thing has its secret spring," said the official, "and wine is the
secret of joy."
"Now you, my lord keeper of the seal."
"Wine seals the door on discontent, and locks the gates on sorrow."
"That it does, that it certainly does!--Now the governor of Hermothis,
the oldest of all the company."
"Wine ripens especially for us old folks, and not for you young people."
"That you must explain," cried a voice from the table of the military
officers.
"It makes young men of the old," laughed the octogenarian, "and children
of the young."
"He has you there, you youngsters," cried Gagabu. "What have you to say,
Septah?"
"Wine is a poison," said the morose haruspex, "for it makes fools of wise
men."
"Then you have little to fear from it, alas!" said Gagabu laughing.
"Proceed, my lord of the chase."
"The rim of the beaker," was the answer, "is like the lip of the woman
you love. Touch it, and taste it, and it is as good as the kiss of a
bride."
"General--the turn is yours."
"I wish the Nile ran with such wine instead of with water," cried the
soldier, "and that I were as big as the colossus of Atnenophis, and that
the biggest obelisk of Hatasu were my drinking vessel, and that I might
drink as much as I would! But now--what have you to say of this noble
liquor, excellent Gagabu?"
The second prophet raised his beaker, and gazed lovingly at the golden
fluid; he tasted it slowly, and then said with his eyes turned to heaven:
"I only fear that I am unworthy to thank the Gods for such a divine
blessing."
"Well said!" exclaimed the Regent Ani, who had re-entered the room
unobserved. "If my wine could speak, it would thank you for such a
speech."
"Hail to the Regent Ani!" shouted the guests, and they all rose with
their cups filled with his noble present.
He pledged them and then rose.
"Those," said he, "who have appreciated this wine, I now invite to dine
with me to-morrow. You will then meet with it again, and if you still
find it to your liking, you will be heartily welcome any evening. Now,
good night, friends."
A thunder of applause followed him, as he quitted the room.
The morning was already grey, when the carousing-party broke up; few of
the guests could find their way unassisted through the courtyard; most of
them had already been carried away by the slaves, who had waited for
them--and who took them on their heads, like bales of goods--and had been
borne home in their litters; but for those who remained to the end,
couches were prepared in the House of Seti, for a terrific storm was now
raging.
While the company were filling and refilling the beakers, which raised
their spirits to so wild a pitch, the prisoner Pentaur had been examined
in the presence of the Regent. Ameni's messenger had found the poet on
his knees, so absorbed in meditation that he did not perceive his
approach. All his peace of mind had deserted him, his soul was in a
tumult, and he could not succeed in obtaining any calm and clear control
over the new life-pulses which were throbbing in his heart.
He had hitherto never gone to rest at night without requiring of himself
an account of the past day, and he had always been able to detect the
most subtle line that divided right from wrong in his actions. But
to-night he looked back on a perplexing confusion of ideas and events,
and when he endeavored to sort them and arrange them, he could see
nothing clearly but the image of Bent-Anat, which enthralled his heart
and intellect.
He had raised his hand against his fellow-men, and dipped it in blood, he
desired to convince himself of his sin, and to repent but he could not;
for each time he recalled it, to blame and condemn himself, he saw the
soldier's hand twisted in Uarda's hair, and the princess's eyes beaming
with approbation, nay with admiration, and he said to himself that he had
acted rightly, and in the same position would do the same again
to-morrow. Still he felt that he had broken through all the conditions
with which fate had surrounded his existence, and it seemed to him that
he could never succeed in recovering the still, narrow, but peaceful life
of the past.
His soul went up in prayer to the Almighty One, and to the spirit of the
sweet humble woman whom he had called his mother, imploring for peace of
mind and modest content; but in vain--for the longer he remained
prostrate, flinging up his arms in passionate entreaty, the keener grew
his longings, the less he felt able to repent or to recognize his guilt.
Ameni's order to appear before him came almost as a deliverance, and he
followed the messenger prepared for a severe punishment; but not
afraid--almost joyful.
In obedience to the command of the grave high-priest, Pentaur related the
whole occurrence--how, as there was no leech in the house, he had gone
with the old wife of the paraschites to visit her possessed husband; how,
to save the unhappy girl from ill-usage by the mob, he had raised his
hand in fight, and dealt indeed some heavy blows.
"You have killed four men," said Ameni, "and severely wounded twice as
many. Why did you not reveal yourself as a priest, as the speaker of the
morning's discourse? Why did you not endeavor to persuade the people with
words of warning, rather than with brute force?"
"I had no priest's garment," replied Pentaur. "There again you did
wrong," said Ameni, "for you know that the law requires of each of us
never to leave this house without our white robes. But you cannot pretend
not to know your own powers of speech, nor to contradict me when I assert
that, even in the plainest working-dress, you were perfectly able to
produce as much effect with words as by deadly blows!" "I might very
likely have succeeded," answered Pentaur, "but the most savage temper
ruled the crowd; there was no time for reflection, and when I struck down
the villain, like some reptile, who had seized the innocent girl, the
lust of fighting took possession of me. I cared no more for my own life,
and to save the child I would have slain thousands."
"Your eyes sparkle," said Ameni, "as if you had performed some heroic
feat; and yet the men you killed were only unarmed and pious citizens,
who were roused to indignation by a gross and shameless outrage. I cannot
conceive whence the warrior-spirit should have fallen on a gardener's
son--and a minister of the Gods."
"It is true," answered Pentaur, "when the crowd rushed upon me, and I
drove them back, putting out all my strength, I felt something of the
warlike rage of the soldier, who repulses the pressing foe from the
standard committed to his charge. It was sinful in a priest, no doubt,
and I will repent of it--but I felt it."
"You felt it--and you will repent of it, well and good," replied Ameni.
"But you have not given a true account of all that happened. Why have you
concealed that Bent-Anat--Rameses' daughter--was mixed up in the fray,
and that she saved you by announcing her name to the people, and
commanding them to leave you alone? When you gave her the lie before all
the people, was it because you did not believe that it was Bent-Anat?
Now, you who stand so firmly on so high a platform--now you
standard-bearer of the truth answer me."
Pentaur had turned pale at his master's words, and said, as he looked at
the Regent:
"We are not alone."
"Truth is one!" said Ameni coolly. "What you can reveal to me, can also
be heard by this noble lord, the Regent of the king himself. Did you
recognize Bent-Anat, or not?"
"The lady who rescued me was like her, and yet unlike," answered the
poet, whose blood was roused by the subtle irony of his Superior's words.
"And if I had been as sure that she was the princess, as I am that you
are the man who once held me in honor, and who are now trying to
humiliate me, I would all the more have acted as I did to spare a lady
who is more like a goddess than a woman, and who, to save an unworthy
wretch like me, stooped from a throne to the dust."
"Still the poet--the preacher!" said Ameni. Then he added severely. "I
beg for a short and clear answer. We know for certain that the princess
took part in the festival in the disguise of a woman of low rank, for she
again declared herself to Paaker; and we know that it was she who saved
you. But did you know that she meant to come across the Nile?"
"How should I?" asked Pentaur.
"Well, did you believe that it was Bent-Anat whom you saw before you when
she ventured on to the scene of conflict?"
"I did believe it," replied Pentaur; he shuddered and cast down his eyes.
"Then it was most audacious to drive away the king's daughter as an
impostor."
"It was," said Pentaur. "But for my sake she had risked the honor of her
name, and that of her royal father, and I--I should not have risked my
life and freedom for--"
"We have heard enough," interrupted Ameni.
"Not so," the Regent interposed. "What became of the girl you had saved?"
"An old witch, Hekt by name, a neighbor of Pinem's, took her and her
grandmother into her cave," answered the poet; who was then, by the
high-priest's order, taken back to the temple-prison.
Scarcely had he disappeared when the Regent exclaimed:
"A dangerous man! an enthusiast! an ardent worshipper of Rameses!"
"And of his daughter," laughed Ameni, but only a worshipper. Thou hast
nothing to fear from him--I will answer for the purity of his motives."
"But he is handsome and of powerful speech," replied Ani. "I claim him as
my prisoner, for he has killed one of my soldiers."
Ameni's countenance darkened, and he answered very sternly:
"It is the exclusive right of our conclave, as established by our
charter, to judge any member of this fraternity. You, the future king,
have freely promised to secure our privileges to us, the champions of
your own ancient and sacred rights."
"And you shall have them," answered the Regent with a persuasive smile.
"But this man is dangerous, and you would not have him go unpunished."
"He shall be severely judged," said Ameni, "but by us and in this house."
"He has committed murder!" cried Ani. "More than one murder. He is worthy
of death."
"He acted under pressure of necessity," replied Ameni. "And a man so
favored by the Gods as he, is not to be lightly given up because an
untimely impulse of generosity prompted him to rash conduct. I know--I
can see that you wish him ill. Promise me, as you value me as an ally,
that you will not attempt his life."
"Oh, willingly!" smiled the Regent, giving the high-priest his hand.
"Accept my sincere thanks," said Ameni. "Pentaur was the most promising
of my disciples, and in spite of many aberrations I still esteem him
highly. When he was telling us of what had occurred to-day, did he not
remind you of the great Assa, or of his gallant son, the Osirian father
of the pioneer Paaker?"
"The likeness is extraordinary," answered Ani, "and yet he is of quite
humble birth. Who was his mother?"
"Our gate-keeper's daughter, a plain, pious, simple creature."
"Now I will return to the banqueting hall," said Ani, after a fete
moments of reflection. "But I must ask you one thing more. I spoke to you
of a secret that will put Paaker into our power. The old sorceress Hekt,
who has taken charge of the paraschites' wife and grandchild, knows all
about it. Send some policeguards over there, and let her be brought over
here as a prisoner; I will examine her myself, and so can question her
without exciting observation."
Ameni at once sent off a party of soldiers, and then quietly ordered a
faithful attendant to light up the so-called audience-chamber, and to put
a seat for him in an adjoining room.
CHAPTER XXX.
While the banquet was going forward at the temple, and Ameni's messengers
were on their way to the valley of the kings' tombs, to waken up old
Hekt, a furious storm of hot wind came up from the southwest, sweeping
black clouds across the sky, and brown clouds of dust across the earth.
It bowed the slender palm-trees as an archer bends his bow, tore the
tentpegs up on the scene of the festival, whirled the light tent-cloths
up in the air, drove them like white witches through the dark night, and
thrashed the still surface of the Nile till its yellow waters swirled and
tossed in waves like a restless sea.
Paaker had compelled his trembling slaves to row him across the stream;
several times the boat was near being swamped, but he had seized the helm
himself with his uninjured hand, and guided it firmly and surely, though
the rocking of the boat kept his broken hand in great and constant pain.
After a few ineffectual attempts he succeeded in landing. The storm had
blown out the lanterns at the masts--the signal lights for which his
people looked--and he found neither servants nor torch-bearers on the
bank, so he struggled through the scorching wind as far as the gate of
his house. His big dog had always been wont to announce his return home
to the door-keeper with joyful barking; but to-night the boatmen long
knocked in vain at the heavy doer. When at last he entered the
court-yard, he found all dark, for the wind had extinguished the lanterns
and torches, and there were no lights but in the windows of his mother's
rooms.
The dogs in their open kennels now began to make themselves heard, but
their tones were plaintive and whining, for the storm had frightened the
beasts; their howling cut the pioneer to the heart, for it reminded him
of the poor slain Descher, whose deep voice he sadly missed; and when he
went into his own room he was met by a wild cry of lamentation from the
Ethiopian slave, for the dog which he had trained for Paaker's father,
and which he had loved.
The pioneer threw himself on a seat, and ordered some water to be
brought, that he might cool his aching hand in it, according to the
prescription of Nebsecht.
As soon as the old man saw the broken fingers, he gave another yell of
woe, and when Paaker ordered him to cease he asked:
"And is the man still alive who did that, and who killed Descher?"
Paaker nodded, and while he held his hand in the cooling water he looked
sullenly at the ground. He felt miserable, and he asked himself why the
storm had not swamped the boat, and the Nile had not swallowed him.
Bitterness and rage filled his breast, and he wished he were a child, and
might cry. But his mood soon changed, his breath came quickly, his breast
heaved, and an ominous light glowed in his eyes. He was not thinking of
his love, but of the revenge that was even dearer to him.
"That brood of Rameses!" he muttered. "I will sweep them all away
together--the king, and Mena, and those haughty princes, and many more--I
know how. Only wait, only wait!" and he flung up his right fist with a
threatening gesture.
The door opened at this instant, and his mother entered the room; the
raging of the storm had drowned the sound of her steps, and as she
approached her revengeful son, she called his name in horror at the mad
wrath which was depicted in his countenance. Paaker started, and then
said with apparent composure:
"Is it you, mother? It is near morning, and it is better to be asleep
than awake in such an hour."
"I could not rest in my rooms," answered Setchem. "The storm howled so
wildly, and I am so anxious, so frightfully unhappy--as I was before your
father died."
Then stay with me," said Paaker affectionately, and lie down on my
couch."
"I did not come here to sleep," replied Setchem. "I am too unhappy at all
that happened to you on the larding-steps, it is frightful! No, no, my
son, it is not about your smashed hand, though it grieves me to see you
in pain; it is about the king, and his anger when he hears of the
quarrel. He favors you less than he did your lost father, I know it well.
But how wildly you smile, how wild you looked when I came in! It went
through my bones and marrow."
Both were silent for a time, and listened to the furious raging of the
storm. At last Setchem spoke. "There is something else," she said, "which
disturbs my mind. I cannot forget the poet who spoke at the festival
to-day, young Pentaur. His figure, his face, his movements, nay his very
voice, are exactly like those of your father at the time when he was
young, and courted me. It is as if the Gods were fain to see the best man
that they ever took to themselves, walk before them a second time upon
earth."
"Yes, my lady," said the black slave; "no mortal eye ever saw such a
likeness. I saw him fighting in front of the paraschites' cottage, and he
was more like my dead master than ever. He swung the tent-post over his
head, as my lord used to swing his battle-axe."
"Be silent," cried Paaker, "and get out-idiot! The priest is like my
father; I grant it, mother; but he is an insolent fellow, who offended me
grossly, and with whom I have to reckon--as with many others."
"How violent you are!" interrupted his mother, "and how full of
bitterness and hatred. Your father was so sweet-tempered, and kind to
everybody."
"Perhaps they are kind to me?" retorted Paaker with a short laugh. "Even
the Immortals spite me, and throw thorns in my path. But I will push them
aside with my own hand, and will attain what I desire without the help of
the Gods and overthrow all that oppose me."
"We cannot blow away a feather without the help of the Immortals,"
answered Setchem. "So your father used to say, who was a very different
man both in body and mind from you! I tremble before you this evening,
and at the curses you have uttered against the children of your lord and
sovereign, your father's best friend."
"But my enemy," shouted Paaker. "You will get nothing from me but curses.
And the brood of Rameses shall learn whether your husband's son will let
himself be ill-used and scorned without revenging him self. I will fling
them into an abyss, and I will laugh when I see them writhing in the sand
at my feet!"
"Fool!" cried Setchem, beside herself. "I am but a woman, and have often
blamed myself for being soft and weak; but as sure as I am faithful to
your dead father--who you are no more like than a bramble is like a
palm-tree--so surely will I tear my love for you out of my heart if
you--if you--Now I see! now I know! Answer me-murderer! Where are the
seven arrows with the wicked words which used to hang here? Where are the
arrows on which you had scrawled 'Death to Mena?'"
With these words Setchem breathlessly started forward, but the pioneer
drew back as she confronted him, as in his youthful days when she
threatened to punish him for some misdemeanor. She followed him up,
caught him by the girdle, and in a hoarse voice repeated her question. He
stood still, snatched her hand angrily from his belt, and said defiantly:
"I have put them in my quiver--and not for mere play. Now you know."
Incapable of words, the maddened woman once more raised her hand against
her degenerate son, but he put back her arm.
"I am no longer a child," he said, "and I am master of this house. I will
do what I will, if a hundred women hindered me!" and with these words he
pointed to the door. Setchem broke into loud sobs, and turned her back
upon him; but at the door once more she turned to look at him. He had
seated himself, and was resting his forehead on the table on which the
bowl of cold water stood.
Setchem fought a hard battle. At last once more through her choking tears
she called his name, opened her arms wide and exclaimed:
"Here I am--here I am! Come to my heart, only give up these hideous
thoughts of revenge."
But Paaker did not move, he did not look up at her, he did not speak, he
only shook his head in negation. Setchem's hands fell, and she said
softly:
"What did your father teach you out of the scriptures? 'Your highest
praise consists in this, to reward your mother for what she has done for
you, in bringing you up, so that she may not raise her hands to God, nor
He hear her lamentation.'"
At these words, Paaker sobbed aloud, but he did not look at his mother.
She called him tenderly by his name; then her eyes fell on his quiver,
which lay on a bench with other arms. Her heart shrunk within her, and
with a trembling voice she exclaimed:
"I forbid this mad vengeance--do you hear? Will you give it up? You do
not move? No! you will not! Ye Gods, what can I do?"
She wrung her hands in despair; then she hastily crossed the room,
snatched out one of the arrows, and strove to break it. Paaker sprang
from his seat, and wrenched the weapon from her hand; the sharp point
slightly scratched the skin, and dark drops of blood flowed from it, and
dropped upon the floor.
The Mohar would have taken the wounded hand, for Setchem, who had the
weakness of never being able to see blood flow--neither her own nor
anybody's else--had turned as pale as death; but she pushed him from her,
and as she spoke her gentle voice had a dull estranged tone.
"This hand," she said--"a mother's hand wounded by her son--shall never
again grasp yours till you have sworn a solemn oath to put away from you
all thoughts of revenge and murder, and not to disgrace your father's
name. I have said it, and may his glorified spirit be my witness, and
give me strength to keep my word!"
Paaker had fallen on his knees, and was engaged in a terrible mental
struggle, while his mother slowly went towards the door. There again she
stood still for a moment; she did not speak, but her eyes appealed to him
once more.
In vain. At last she left the room, and the wind slammed the door
violently behind her. Paaker groaned, and pressed his hand over his eyes.
"Mother, mother!" he cried. "I cannot go back--I cannot."
A fearful gust of wind howled round the house, and drowned his voice, and
then he heard two tremendous claps, as if rocks had been hurled from
heaven. He started up and went to the window, where the melancholy grey
dawn was showing, in order to call the slaves. Soon they came trooping
out, and the steward called out as soon as he saw him:
"The storm has blown down the masts at the great gate!"
"Impossible!" cried Paaker.
"Yes, indeed!" answered the servant. "They have been sawn through close
to the ground. The matmaker no doubt did it, whose collar-bone was
broken. He has escaped in this fearful night."
"Let out the dogs," cried the Mohar. "All who have legs run after the
blackguard! Freedom, and five handfuls of gold for the man who brings him
back."
The guests at the House of Seti had already gone to rest, when Ameni was
informed of the arrival of the sorceress, and he at once went into the
hall, where Ani was waiting to see her; the Regent roused himself from a
deep reverie when he heard the high-priest's steps.
"Is she come?" he asked hastily; when Ameni answered in the affirmative
Ani went on meanwhile carefully disentangling the disordered curls of his
wig, and arranging his broad, collar-shaped necklace:
"The witch may exercise some influence over me; will you not give me your
blessing to preserve me from her spells? It is true, I have on me this
Houss'-eye, and this Isis-charm, but one never knows."
"My presence will be your safe-guard," said Ameni. "But-no, of course you
wish to speak with her alone. You shall be conducted to a room, which is
protected against all witchcraft by sacred texts. My brother," he
continued to one of the serving-priests, "let the witch be taken into one
of the consecrated rooms, and then, when you have sprinkled the
threshold, lead my lord Ani thither."
The high-priest went away, and into a small room which adjoined the hall
where the interview between the Regent and the old woman was about to
take place, and where the softest whisper spoken in the larger room could
be heard by means of an ingeniously contrived and invisible tube.
When Ani saw the old woman, he started back is horror; her appearance at
this moment was, in fact, frightful. The storm had tossed and torn her
garment and tumbled all her thick, white hair, so that locks of it fell
over her face. She leaned on a staff, and bending far forward looked
steadily at the Regent; and her eyes, red and smarting from the sand
which the wind had flung in her face, seemed to glow as she fixed them on
his. She looked as a hyaena might when creeping to seize its prey, and
Ani felt a cold shiver and he heard her hoarse voice addressing him to
greet him and to represent that he had chosen a strange hour for
requiring her to speak with him.
When she had thanked him for his promise of renewing her letter of
freedom, and had confirmed the statement that Paaker had had a
love-philter from her, she parted her hair from off her face--it occurred
to her that she was a woman.
The Regent sat in an arm-chair, she stood before him; but the struggle
with the storm had tired her old limbs, and she begged Ani to permit her
to be seated, as she had a long story to tell, which would put Paaker
into his power, so that he would find him as yielding as wax. The Regent
signed her to a corner of the room, and she squatted down on the
pavement.
When he desired her to proceed with her story, she looked at the floor
for some time in silence, and then began, as if half to herself:
"I will tell thee, that I may find peace--I do not want, when I die, to
be buried unembalmed. Who knows but perhaps strange things may happen in
the other world, and I would not wish to miss them. I want to see him
again down there, even if it were in the seventh limbo of the damned.
Listen to me! But, before I speak, promise me that whatever I tell thee,
thou wilt leave me in peace, and will see that I am embalmed when I am
dead. Else I will not speak."
Ani bowed consent.
"No-no," she said. "I will tell thee what to swear 'If I do not keep my
word to Hekt--who gives the Mohar into my power--may the Spirits whom she
rules, annihilate me before I mount the throne.' Do not be vexed, my
lord--and say only 'Yes.' What I can tell, is worth more than a mere
word."
"Well then--yes!" cried the Regent, eager for the mighty revelation.
The old woman muttered a few unintelligible words; then she collected
herself, stretched out her lean neck, and asked, as she fixed her
sparkling eyes on the man before her:
"Did'st thou ever, when thou wert young, hear of the singer Beki? Well,
look at me, I am she."
She laughed loud and hoarsely, and drew her tattered robe across her
bosom, as if half ashamed of her unpleasing person.
"Ay!" she continued. "Men find pleasure in grapes by treading them down,
and when the must is drunk the skins are thrown on the dung-hill.
Grape-skins, that is what I am--but you need not look at me so pitifully;
I was grapes once, and poor and despised as I am now, no one can take
from me what I have had and have been. Mine has been a life out of a
thousand, a complete life, full to overflowing of joy and suffering, of
love and hate, of delight, despair, and revenge. Only to talk of it
raises me to a seat by thy throne there. No, let me be, I am used now to
squatting on the ground; but I knew thou wouldst hear me to the end, for
once I too was one of you. Extremes meet in all things--I know it by
experience. The greatest men will hold out a hand to a beautiful woman,
and time was when I could lead you all as with a rope. Shall I begin at
the beginning? Well--I seldom am in the mood for it now-a-days. Fifty
years ago I sang a song with this voice of mine; an old crow like me?
sing! But so it was. My father was a man of rank, the governor of Abydos;
when the first Rameses took possession of the throne my father was
faithful to the house of thy fathers, so the new king sent us all to the
gold mines, and there they all died--my parents, brothers, and sisters. I
only survived by some miracle. As I was handsome and sang well, a music
master took me into his band, brought me to Thebes, and wherever there
was a feast given in any great house, Beki was in request. Of flowers and
money and tender looks I had a plentiful harvest; but I was proud and
cold, and the misery of my people had made me bitter at an age when
usually even bad liquor tastes of honey. Not one of all the gay young
fellows, princes' sons, and nobles, dared to touch my hand. But my hour
was to come; the handsomest and noblest man of them all, and grave and
dignified too--was Assa, the old Mohar's father, and grandfather of
Pentaur--no, I should say of Paaker, the pioneer; thou hast known him.
Well, wherever I sang, he sat opposite me, and gazed at me, and I could
not take my eyes off him, and--thou canst tell the rest! no! Well, no
woman before or after me can ever love a man as I loved Assa. Why dost
thou not laugh? It must seem odd, too, to hear such a thing from the
toothless mouth of an old witch. He is dead, long since dead. I hate him!
and yet--wild as it sounds--I believe I love him yet. And he loved
me--for two years; then he went to the war with Seti, and remained a long
time away, and when I saw him again he had courted the daughter of some
rich and noble house. I was handsome enough still, but he never looked at
me at the banquets. I came across him at least twenty times, but he
avoided me as if I were tainted with leprosy, and I began to fret, and
fell ill of a fever. The doctors said it was all over with me, so I sent
him a letter in which there was nothing but these words: 'Beki is dying,
and would like to see Assa once more,' and in the papyrus I put his first
present--a plain ring. And what was the answer? a handful of gold!
Gold--gold! Thou may'st believe me, when I say that the sight of it was
more torturing to my eyes than the iron with which they put out the eyes
of criminals. Even now, when I think of it--But what do you men, you
lords of rank and wealth, know of a breaking heart? When two or three of
you happen to meet, and if thou should'st tell the story, the most
respectable will say in a pompous voice: 'The man acted nobly indeed; he
was married, and his wife would have complained with justice if he had
gone to see the singer.' Am I right or wrong? I know; not one will
remember that the other was a woman, a feeling human being; it will occur
to no one that his deed on the one hand saved an hour of discomfort, and
on the other wrought half a century of despair. Assa escaped his wife's
scolding, but a thousand curses have fallen on him and on his house. How
virtuous he felt himself when he had crushed and poisoned a passionate
heart that had never ceased to love him! Ay, and he would have come if he
had not still felt some love for me, if he had not misdoubted himself,
and feared that the dying woman might once more light up the fire he had
so carefully smothered and crushed out. I would have grieved for him--but
that he should send me money, money!--that I have never forgiven; that he
shall atone for in his grandchild." The old woman spoke the last words as
if in a dream, and without seeming to remember her hearer. Ani shuddered,
as if he were in the presence of a mad woman, and he involuntarily drew
his chair back a little way.
The witch observed this; she took breath and went on: "You lords, who
walk in high places, do not know how things go on in the depths beneath
you; you do not choose to know.
"But I will shorten my story. I got well, but I got out of my bed thin
and voiceless. I had plenty of money, and I spent it in buying of
everyone who professed magic in Thebes, potions to recover Assa's love
for me, or in paying for spells to be cast on him, or for magic drinks to
destroy him. I tried too to recover my voice, but the medicines I took
for it made it rougher not sweeter. Then an excommunicated priest, who
was famous among the magicians, took me into his house, and there I
learned many things; his old companions afterwards turned upon him, he
came over here into the Necropolis, and I came with him. When at last he
was taken and hanged, I remained in his cave, and myself took to
witchcraft. Children point their fingers at me, honest men and women
avoid me, I am an abomination to all men, nay to myself. And one only is
guilty of all this ruin--the noblest gentleman in Thebes--the pious Assa.
"I had practised magic for several years, and had become learned in many
arts, when one day the gardener Sent, from whom I was accustomed to buy
plants for my mixtures--he rents a plot of ground from the temple of
Seti--Sent brought me a new-born child that had been born with six toes;
I was to remove the supernumerary toe by my art. The pious mother of the
child was lying ill of fever, or she never would have allowed it; I took
the screaming little wretch--for such things are sometimes curable. The
next morning, a few hours after sunrise, there was a bustle in front of
my cave; a maid, evidently belonging to a noble house, was calling me.
Her mistress, she said, had come with her to visit the tomb of her
fathers, and there had been taken ill, and had given birth to a child.
Her mistress was lying senseless--I must go at once, and help her. I took
the little six-toed brat in my cloak, told my slavegirl to follow me with
water, and soon found myself--as thou canst guess--at the tomb of Assa's
ancestors. The poor woman, who lay there in convulsions, was his
daughter-in-law Setchem. The baby, a boy, was as sound as a nut, but she
was evidently in great danger. I sent the maid with the litter, which was
waiting outside, to the temple here for help; the girl said that her
master, the father of the child, was at the war, but that the
grandfather, the noble Assa, had promised to meet the lady Setchem at the
tomb, and would shortly be coming; then she disappeared with the litter.
I washed the child, and kissed it as if it were my own. Then I heard
distant steps in the valley, and the recollection of the moment when I,
lying at the point of death, had received that gift of money from Assa
came over me, and then I do not know myself how it happened--I gave the
new-born grandchild of Assa to my slave-girl, and told her to carry it
quickly to the cave, and I wrapped the little six-toed baby in my rags
and held it in my lap. There I sat--and the minutes seemed hours, till
Assa came up; and when he stood before me, grown grey, it is true, but
still handsome and upright--I put the gardener's boy, the six-toed brat,
into his very arms, and a thousand demons seemed to laugh hoarsely within
me. He thanked me, he did not know me, and once more he offered me a
handful of gold. I took it, and I listened as the priest, who had come
from the temple, prophesied all sorts of fine things for the little one,
who was born in so fortunate an hour; and then I went back into my cave,
and there I laughed till I cried, though I do not know that the tears
sprang from the laughter.
"A few days after I gave Assa's grandchild to the gardener, and told him
the sixth toe had come off; I had made a little wound on his foot to take
in the bumpkin. So Assa's grandchild, the son of the Mohar, grew up as
the gardener's child, and received the name of Pentaur, and he was
brought up in the temple here, and is wonderfully like Assa; but the
gardener's monstrous brat is the pioneer Paaker. That is the whole
secret."
Ani had listened in silence to the terrible old woman.
We are involuntarily committed to any one who can inform us of some
absorbing fact, and who knows how to make the information valuable. It
did not occur to the Regent to punish the witch for her crimes; he
thought rather of his older friends' rapture when they talked of the
singer Beki's songs and beauty. He looked at the woman, and a cold shiver
ran through all his limbs.
"You may live in peace," he said at last; "and when you die I will see to
your being embalmed; but give up your black arts. You must be rich, and,
if you are not, say what you need. Indeed, I scarcely dare offer you
gold--it excites your hatred, as I understand."
"I could take thine--but now let me go!"
She got up, and went towards the door, but the Regent called to her to
stop, and asked:
"Is Assa the father of your son, the little Nemu, the dwarf of the lady
Katuti?"
The witch laughed loudly. "Is the little wretch like Assa or like Beki? I
picked him up like many other children."
"But he is clever!" said Ani.
"Ay-that he is. He has planned many a shrewd stroke, and is devoted to
his mistress. He will help thee to thy purpose, for he himself has one
too."
"And that is--?"
"Katuti will rise to greatness with thee, and to riches through Paaker,
who sets out to-morrow to make the woman he loves a widow."
"You know a great deal," said Ani meditatively, "and I would ask you one
thing more; though indeed your story has supplied the answer--but perhaps
you know more now than you did in your youth. Is there in truth any
effectual love-philter?"
"I will not deceive thee, for I desire that thou should'st keep thy word
to me," replied Hekt. "A love potion rarely has any effect, and never but
on women who have never before loved. If it is given to a woman whose
heart is filled with the image of another man her passion for him only
will grow the stronger."
"Yet another," said Ani. "Is there any way of destroying an enemy at a
distance?"
"Certainly," said the witch. "Little people may do mean things, and great
people can let others do things that they cannot do themselves. My story
has stirred thy gall, and it seems to me that thou dost not love the poet
Pentaur. A smile! Well then--I have not lost sight of him, and I know he
is grown up as proud and as handsome as Assa. He is wonderfully like him,
and I could have loved him--have loved as this foolish heart had better
never have loved. It is strange! In many women, who come to me, I see how
their hearts cling to the children of men who have abandoned them, and we
women are all alike, in most things. But I will not let myself love
Assa's grandchild--I must not. I will injure him, and help everyone that
persecutes him; for though Assa is dead, the wrongs he did me live in me
so long as I live myself. Pentaur's destiny must go on its course. If
thou wilt have his life, consult with Nemu, for he hates him too, and he
will serve thee more effectually than I can with my vain spells and silly
harmless brews. Now let me go home!"
A few hours later Ameni sent to invite the Regent to breakfast.
"Do you know who the witch Hekt is?" asked Ani.
"Certainly--how should I not know? She is the singer Beki--the former
enchantress of Thebes. May I ask what her communications were?"
Ani thought it best not to confide the secret of Pentaur's birth to the
high-priest, and answered evasively. Then Ameni begged to be allowed to
give him some information about the old woman, and how she had had a hand
in the game; and he related to his hearer, with some omissions and
variations--as if it were a fact he had long known--the very story which
a few hours since he had overheard, and learned for the first time. Ani
feigned great astonishment, and agreed with the high-priest that Paaker
should not for the present be informed of his true origin.
"He is a strangely constituted man," said Ameni, "and he is not incapable
of playing us some unforeseen trick before he has done his part, if he is
told who he is."
The storm had exhausted itself, and the sky, though covered still with
torn and flying clouds, cleared by degrees, as the morning went on; a
sharp coolness succeeded the hot blast, but the sun as it mounted higher
and higher soon heated the air. On the roads and in the gardens lay
uprooted trees and many slightly-built houses which had been blown down,
while the tents in the strangers' quarter, and hundreds of light
palm-thatched roofs, had been swept away.
The Regent was returning to Thebes, and with him went Ameni, who desired
to ascertain by his own eyes what mischief the whirlwind had done to his
garden in the city. On the Nile they met Paaker's boat, and Ani caused it
and his own to be stopped, while he requested Paaker to visit him shortly
at the palace.
The high-priest's garden was in no respect inferior in beauty and extent
to that of the Mohar. The ground had belonged to his family from the
remotest generations, and his house was large and magnificent. He seated
himself in a shady arbor, to take a repast with his still handsome wife
and his young and pretty daughters.
He consoled his wife for the various damage done by the hurricane,
promised the girls to build a new and handsomer clove-cot in the place of
the one which had been blown down, and laughed and joked with them all;
for here the severe head of the House of Seti, the grave Superior of the
Necropolis, became a simple man, an affectionate husband, a tender
father, a judicious friend, among his children, his flowers, and his
birds. His youngest daughter clung to his right arm, and an older one to
his left, when he rose from table to go with them to the poultry-yard.
On the way thither a servant announced to him that the Lady Setchem
wished to see him.
"Take her to your mistress," he said.
But the slave--who held in his hand a handsome gift in money--explained
that the widow wished to speak with him alone.
"Can I never enjoy an hour's peace like other men?" exclaimed Ameni
annoyed. "Your mistress can receive her, and she can wait with her till I
come. It is true, girls--is it not?--that I belong to you just now, and
to the fowls, and ducks, and pigeons?"
His youngest daughter kissed him, the second patted him affectionately,
and they all three went gaily forward. An hour later he requested the
Lady Setchem to accompany him into the garden.
The poor, anxious, and frightened woman had resolved on this step with
much difficulty; tears filled her kind eyes, as she communicated her
troubles to the high-priest.
"Thou art a wise counsellor," she said, "and thou knowest well how my son
honors the Gods of the temple of Seti with gifts and offerings. He will
not listen to his mother, but thou hast influence with him. He meditates
frightful things, and if he cannot be terrified by threats of punishment
from the Immortals, he will raise his hand against Mena, and perhaps--"
"Against the king," interrupted Ameni gravely. "I know it, and I will
speak to him."
"Thanks, oh a thousand thanks!" cried the widow, and she seized the
high-priests robe to kiss it. "It was thou who soon after his birth didst
tell my husband that he was born under a lucky star, and would grow to be
an honor and an ornament to his house and to his country. And now--now he
will ruin himself in this world, and the next."
"What I foretold of your son," said Ameni, "shall assuredly be fulfilled,
for the ways of the Gods are not as the ways of men."
"Thy words do me good!" cried Setchem. "None can tell what fearful terror
weighed upon my heart, when I made up my mind to come here. But thou dost
not yet know all. The great masts of cedar, which Paaker sent from
Lebanon to Thebes to bear our banners, and ornament our gateway, were
thrown to the ground at sunrise by the frightful wind."
"Thus shall your son's defiant spirit be broken," said Ameni; "But for
you, if you have patience, new joys shall arise."
"I thank thee again," said Setchem. But something yet remains to be said.
I know that I am wasting the time that thou dost devote to thy family,
and I remember thy saying once that here in Thebes thou wert like a
pack-Horse with his load taken off, and free to wander over a green
meadow. I will not disturb thee much longer--but the Gods sent me such a
wonderful vision. Paaker would not listen to me, and I went back into my
room full of sorrow; and when at last, after the sun had risen, I fell
asleep for a few minutes, I dreamed I saw before me the poet Pentaur, who
is wonderfully like my dead husband in appearance and in voice. Paaker
went up to him, and abused him violently, and threatened him with his
fist; the priest raised his arms in prayer, just as I saw him yesterday
at the festival--but not in devotion, but to seize Paaker, and wrestle
with him. The struggle did not last long, for Paaker seemed to shrink up,
and lost his human form, and fell at the poet's feet--not my son, but a
shapeless lump of clay such as the potter uses to make jars of."
"A strange dream!" exclaimed Ameni, not without agitation. "A very
strange dream, but it bodes you good. Clay, Setchem, is yielding, and
clearly indicates that which the Gods prepare for you. The Immortals will
give you a new and a better son instead of the old one, but it is not
revealed to me by what means. Go now, and sacrifice to the Gods, and
trust to the wisdom of those who guide the life of the universe, and of
all mortal creatures. Yet--I would give you one more word of advice. If
Paaker comes to you repentant, receive him kindly, and let me know; but
if he will not yield, close your rooms against him, and let him depart
without taking leave of you."
When Setchem, much encouraged, was gone away, Ameni said to himself:
"She will find splendid compensation for this coarse scoundrel, and she
shall not spoil the tool we need to strike our blow. I have often doubted
how far dreams do, indeed, foretell the future, but to-day my faith in
them is increased. Certainly a mother's heart sees farther than that of
any other human being."
At the door of her house Setchem came up with her son's chariot. They saw
each other, but both looked away, for they could not meet affectionately,
and would not meet coldly. As the horses outran the litter-bearers, the
mother and son looked round at each other, their eyes met, and each felt
a stab in the heart.
In the evening the pioneer, after he had had an interview with the
Regent, went to the temple of Seti to receive Ameni's blessing on all his
undertakings. Then, after sacrificing in the tomb of his ancestors, he
set out for Syria.
Just as he was getting into his chariot, news was brought him that the
mat-maker, who had sawn through the masts at the gate, had been caught.
"Put out his eyes!" he cried; and these were the last words he spoke as
he quitted his home.
Setchem looked after him for a long time; she had refused to bid him
farewell, and now she implored the Gods to turn his heart, and to
preserve him from malice and crime.
CHAPTER XXXI.
Three days had passed since the pioneer's departure, and although it was
still early, busy occupation was astir in Bent-Anat's work-rooms.
The ladies had passed the stormy night, which had succeeded the exciting
evening of the festival, without sleep.
Nefert felt tired and sleepy the next morning, and begged the princess to
introduce her to her new duties for the first time next day; but the
princess spoke to her encouragingly, told her that no man should put off
doing right till the morrow, and urged her to follow her into her
workshop.
"We must both come to different minds," said she. "I often shudder
involuntarily, and feel as if I bore a brand--as if I had a stain here on
my shoulder where it was touched by Paaker's rough hand."
The first day of labor gave Nefert a good many difficulties to overcome;
on the second day the work she had begun already had a charm for her, and
by the third she rejoiced in the little results of her care.
Bent-Anat had put her in the right place, for she had the direction of a
large number of young girls and women, the daughters, wives, and widows
of those Thebans who were at the war, or who had fallen in the field, who
sorted and arranged the healing herbs. Her helpers sat in little circles
on the ground; in the midst of each lay a great heap of fresh and dry
plants, and in front of each work-woman a number of parcels of the
selected roots, leaves, and flowers.
An old physician presided over the whole, and had shown Nefert the first
day the particular plants which he needed.
The wife of Mena, who was fond of flowers, had soon learnt them all, and
she taught willingly, for she loved children.
She soon had favorites among the children, and knew some as being
industrious and careful, others as idle and heedless:
"Ay! ay!" she exclaimed, bending over a little half-naked maiden with
great almond-shaped eyes. "You are mixing them all together. Your father,
as you tell me, is at the war. Suppose, now, an arrow were to strike him,
and this plant, which would hurt him, were laid on the burning wound
instead of this other, which would do him good--that would be very sad."
The child nodded her head, and looked her work through again. Nefert
turned to a little idler, and said: "You are chattering again, and doing
nothing, and yet your father is in the field. If he were ill now, and has
no medicine, and if at night when he is asleep he dreams of you, and sees
you sitting idle, he may say to himself: 'Now I might get well, but my
little girl at home does not love me, for she would rather sit with her
hands in her lap than sort herbs for her sick father.'"
Then Nefert turned to a large group of the girls, who were sorting
plants, and said: "Do you, children, know the origin of all these
wholesome, healing herbs? The good Horus went out to fight against Seth,
the murderer of his father, and the horrible enemy wounded Horus in the
eye in the struggle; but the son of Osiris conquered, for good always
conquers evil. But when Isis saw the bad wound, she pressed her son's
head to her bosom, and her heart was as sad as that of any poor human
mother that holds her suffering child in her arms. And she thought: 'How
easy it is to give wounds, and how hard it is to heal them!' and so she
wept; one tear after another fell on the earth, and wherever they wetted
the ground there sprang up a kindly healing plant."
"Isis is good!" cried a little girl opposite to her. Mother says Isis
loves children when they are good."
"Your mother is right," replied Nefert. "Isis herself has her dear little
son Horus; and every human being that dies, and that was good, becomes a
child again, and the Goddess makes it her own, and takes it to her
breast, and nurses it with her sister Nephthys till he grows up and can
fight for his father."
Nefert observed that while she spoke one of the women was crying. She
went up to her, and learned that her husband and her son were both dead,
the former in Syria, and the latter after his return to Egypt. "Poor
soul!" said Nefert. "Now you will be very careful, that the wounds of
others may be healed. I will tell you something more about Isis. She
loved her husband Osiris dearly, as you did your dead husband, and I my
husband Mena, but he fell a victim to the cunning of Seth, and she could
not tell where to find the body that had been carried away, while you can
visit your husband in his grave. Then Isis went through the land
lamenting, and ah! what was to become of Egypt, which received all its
fruitfulness from Osiris. The sacred Nile was dried up, and not a blade
of verdure was green on its banks. The Goddess grieved over this beyond
words, and one of her tears fell in the bed of the river, and immediately
it began to rise. You know, of course, that each inundation arises from a
tear of Isis. Thus a widow's sorrow may bring blessing to millions of
human beings."
The woman had listened to her attentively, and when Nefert ceased
speaking she said:
"But I have still three little brats of my son's to feed, for his wife,
who was a washerwoman, was eaten by a crocodile while she was at work.
Poor folks must work for themselves, and not for others. If the princess
did not pay us, I could not think of the wounds of the soldiers, who do
not belong to me. I am no longer strong, and four mouths to fill--"
Nefert was shocked--as she often was in the course of her new duties--and
begged Bent-Gnat to raise the wages of the woman.
"Willingly," said the princess. "How could I beat down such an assistant.
Come now with me into the kitchen. I am having some fruit packed for my
father and brothers; there must be a box for Mena too." Nefert followed
her royal friend, found them packing in one case the golden dates of the
oasis of Amon, and in another the dark dates of Nubia, the king's
favorite sort. "Let me pack them!" cried Nefert; she made the servants
empty the box again, and re-arranged the various-colored dates in
graceful patterns, with other fruits preserved in sugar.
Bent-Anat looked on, and when she had finished she took her hand.
"Whatever your fingers have touched," she exclaimed, "takes some pretty
aspect. Give me that scrap of papyrus; I shall put it in the case, and
write upon it:
"'These were packed for king Rameses by his daughter's clever helpmate,
the wife of Mena.'"
After the mid-day rest the princess was called away, and Nefert remained
for some hours alone with the work-women.
When the sun went down, and the busy crowd were about to leave, Nefert
detained them, and said: "The Sun-bark is sinking behind the western
hills; come, let us pray together for the king and for those we love in
the field. Each of you think of her own: you children of your fathers,
you women of your sons, and we wives of our distant husbands, and let us
entreat Amon that they may return to us as certainly as the sun, which
now leaves us, will rise again to-morrow morning."
Nefert knelt down, and with her the women and the children.
When they rose, a little girl went up to Nefert, and said, pulling her
dress: "Thou madest us kneel here yesterday, and already my mother is
better, because I prayed for her."
"No doubt," said Nefert, stroking the child's black hair.
She found Bent-Anat on the terrace meditatively gazing across to the
Necropolis, which was fading into darkness before her eyes. She started
when she heard the light footsteps of her friend.
"I am disturbing thee," said Nefert, about to retire.
"No, stay," said Bent-Anat. "I thank the Gods that I have you, for my
heart is sad--pitifully sad."
"I know where your thoughts were," said Nefert softly. "Well?" asked the
princess.
"With Pentaur."
"I think of him--always of him," replied the princess, "and nothing else
occupies my heart. I am no longer myself. What I think I ought not to
think, what I feel I ought not to feel, and yet, I cannot command it, and
I think my heart would bleed to death if I tried to cut out those
thoughts and feelings. I have behaved strangely, nay unbecomingly, and
now that which is hard to endure is hanging over me, something
strange-which will perhaps drive you from me back to your mother."
"I will share everything with you," cried Nefert. "What is going to
happen? Are you then no longer the daughter of Rameses?"
"I showed myself to the people as a woman of the people," answered
Bent-Anat, "and I must take the consequences. Bek en Chunsu, the
high-priest of Amon, has been with me, and I have had a long conversation
with him. The worthy man is good to me, I know, and my father ordered me
to follow his advice before any one's. He showed me that I have erred
deeply. In a state of uncleanness I went into one of the temples of the
Necropolis, and after I had once been into the paraschites' house and
incurred Ameni's displeasure, I did it a second time. They know over
there all that took place at the festival. Now I must undergo
purification, either with great solemnity at the hands of Ameni himself,
before all the priests and nobles in the House of Seti, or by performing
a pilgrimage to the Emerald-Hathor, under whose influence the precious
stones are hewn from the rocks, metals dug out, and purified by fire. The
Goddess shall purge me from my uncleanness as metal is purged from the
dross. At a day's journey and more from the mines, an abundant stream
flows from the holy mountain-Sinai," as it is called by the Mentut--and
near it stands the sanctuary of the Goddess, in which priests grant
purification. The journey is a long one, through the desert, and over the
sea; But Bek en Chunsu advises me to venture it. Ameni, he says, is not
amiably disposed towards me, because I infringed the ordinance which he
values above all others. I must submit to double severity, he says,
because the people look first to those of the highest rank; and if I went
unpunished for contempt of the sacred institutions there might be
imitators among the crowd. He speaks in the name of the Gods, and they
measure hearts with an equal measure. The ell-measure is the symbol of
the Goddess of Truth. I feel that it is all not unjust; and yet I find it
hard to submit to the priest's decree, for I am the daughter of Rameses!"
"Aye, indeed!" exclaimed Nefert, "and he is himself a God!"
"But he taught me to respect the laws!" interrupted the princess. "I
discussed another thing with Bek en Chunsu. You know I rejected the suit
of the Regent. He must secretly be much vexed with me. That indeed would
not alarm me, but he is the guardian and protector appointed over me by
my father, and yet can I turn to him in confidence for counsel, and help?
No! I am still a woman, and Rameses' daughter! Sooner will I travel
through a thousand deserts than humiliate my father through his child. By
to-morrow I shall have decided; but, indeed, I have already decided to
make the journey, hard as it is to leave much that is here. Do not fear,
dear! but you are too tender for such a journey, and to such a distance;
I might--"
"No, no," cried Nefert. "I am going, too, if you were going to the four
pillars of heaven, at the limits of the earth. You have given me a new
life, and the little sprout that is green within me would wither again if
I had to return to my mother. Only she or I can be in our house, and I
will re-enter it only with Mena."
"It is settled--I must go," said the princess. "Oh! if only my father
were not so far off, and that I could consult him!"
"Yes! the war, and always the war!" sighed Nefert. "Why do not men rest
content with what they have, and prefer the quiet peace, which makes life
lovely, to idle fame?"
"Would they be men? should we love them?" cried Bent-Anat eagerly. "Is
not the mind of the Gods, too, bent on war? Did you ever see a more
sublime sight than Pentaur, on that evening when he brandished the stake
he had pulled up, and exposed his life to protect an innocent girl who
was in danger?"
"I dared not once look down into the court," said Nefert. "I was in such
an agony of mind. But his loud cry still rings in my ears."
"So rings the war cry of heroes before whom the enemy quails!" exclaimed
Bent-Anat.
"Aye, truly so rings the war cry!" said prince Rameri, who had entered
his sister's half-dark room unperceived by the two women.
The princess turned to the boy. "How you frightened me!" she said.
"You!" said Rameri astonished.
"Yes, me. I used to have a stout heart, but since that evening I
frequently tremble, and an agony of terror comes over me, I do not know
why. I believe some demon commands me."
"You command, wherever you go; and no one commands you," cried Rameri.
"The excitement and tumult in the valley, and on the quay, still agitate
you. I grind my teeth myself when I remember how they turned me out of
the school, and how Paaker set the dog at us. I have gone through a great
deal today too."
"Where were you so long?" asked Bent-Anat. "My uncle Ani commanded that
you should not leave the palace."
"I shall be eighteen years old next month," said the prince, "and need no
tutor."
"But your father--" said Bent-Anat.
"My father"--interrupted the boy, "he little knows the Regent. But I
shall write to him what I have today heard said by different people. They
were to have sworn allegiance to Ani at that very feast in the valley,
and it is quite openly said that Ani is aiming at the throne, and intends
to depose the king. You are right, it is madness--but there must be
something behind it all."
Nefert turned pale, and Bent-Anat asked for particulars. The prince
repeated all he had gathered, and added laughing: "Ani depose my father!
It is as if I tried to snatch the star of Isis from the sky to light the
lamps--which are much wanted here."
"It is more comfortable in the dark," said Nefert. "No, let us have
lights," said Bent-Anat. "It is better to talk when we can see each other
face to face. I have no belief in the foolish talk of the people; but you
are right--we must bring it to my fathers knowledge."
"I heard the wildest gossip in the City of the Dead," said Rameri.
"You ventured over there? How very wrong!"
"I disguised myself a little, and I have good news for you. Pretty Uarda
is much better. She received your present, and they have a house of their
own again. Close to the one that was burnt down, there was a tumbled-down
hovel, which her father soon put together again; he is a bearded soldier,
who is as much like her as a hedgehog is like a white dove. I offered her
to work in the palace for you with the other girls, for good wages, but
she would not; for she has to wait on her sick grandmother, and she is
proud, and will not serve any one."
"It seems you were a long time with the paraschites' people," said
Bent-Anat reprovingly. "I should have thought that what has happened to
me might have served you as a warning."
"I will not be better than you!" cried the boy. "Besides, the paraschites
is dead, and Uarda's father is a respectable soldier, who can defile no
one. I kept a long way from the old woman. To-morrow I am going again. I
promised her."
"Promised who?" asked his sister.
"Who but Uarda? She loves flowers, and since the rose which you gave her
she has not seen one. I have ordered the gardener to cut me a basket full
of roses to-morrow morning, and shall take them to her myself."
"That you will not!" cried Bent-Anat. "You are still but half a
child--and, for the girl's sake too, you must give it up."
"We only gossip together," said the prince coloring, "and no one shall
recognize me. But certainly, if you mean that, I will leave the basket of
roses, and go to her alone. No--sister, I will not be forbidden this; she
is so charming, so white, so gentle, and her voice is so soft and sweet!
And she has little feet, as small as--what shall I say?--as small and
graceful as Nefert's hand. We talked most about Pentaur. She knows his
father, who is a gardener, and knows a great deal about him. Only think!
she says the poet cannot be the son of his parents, but a good spirit
that has come down on earth--perhaps a God. At first she was very timid,
but when I spoke of Pentaur she grew eager; her reverence for him is
almost idolatry--and that vexed me."
"You would rather she should reverence you so," said Nefert smiling.
"Not at all," cried Rameri. "But I helped to save her, and I am so happy
when I am sitting with her, that to-morrow, I am resolved, I will put a
flower in her hair. It is red certainly, but as thick as yours,
Bent-Anat, and it must be delightful to unfasten it and stroke it."
The ladies exchanged a glance of intelligence, and the princess said
decidedly:
"You will not go to the City of the Dead to-morrow, my little son!"
"That we will see, my little mother!" He answered laughing; then he
turned grave.
"I saw my school-friend Anana too," he said. "Injustice reigns in the
House of Seti! Pentaur is in prison, and yesterday evening they sat in
judgment upon him. My uncle was present, and would have pounced upon the
poet, but Ameni took him under his protection. What was finally decided,
the pupils could not learn, but it must have been something bad, for the
son of the Treasurer heard Ameni saying, after the sitting, to old
Gagabu: 'Punishment he deserves, but I will not let him be overwhelmed;'
and he can have meant no one but Pentaur. To-morrow I will go over, and
learn more; something frightful, I am afraid--several years of
imprisonment is the least that will happen to him."
Bent-Anat had turned very pale.
"And whatever they do to him," she cried, "he will suffer for my sake!
Oh, ye omnipotent Gods, help him--help me, be merciful to us both!"
She covered her face with her hands, and left the room. Rameri asked
Nefert:
What can have come to my sister? she seems quite strange to me; and you
too are not the same as you used to be."
"We both have to find our way in new circumstances."
"What are they?"
"That I cannot explain to you!--but it appears to me that you soon may
experience something of the same kind. Rumeri, do not go again to the
paraschites."
CHAPTER XXXII.
Early on the following clay the dwarf Nemu went past the restored hut of
Uarda's father--in which he had formerly lived with his wife--with a man
in a long coarse robe, the steward of some noble family. They went
towards old Hekt's cave-dwelling.
"I would beg thee to wait down here a moment, noble lord," said the
dwarf, "while I announce thee to my mother."
"That sounds very grand," said the other. "However, so be it. But stay!
The old woman is not to call me by my name or by my title. She is to call
me 'steward'--that no one may know. But, indeed, no one would recognize
me in this dress."
Nemu hastened to the cave, but before he reached his mother she called
out: "Do not keep my lord waiting--I know him well."
Nemu laid his finger to his lips.
"You are to call him steward," said he.
"Good," muttered the old woman. "The ostrich puts his head under his
feathers when he does not want to be seen."
"Was the young prince long with Uarda yesterday?"
"No, you fool," laughed the witch, "the children play together. Rameri is
a kid without horns, but who fancies he knows where they ought to grow.
Pentaur is a more dangerous rival with the red-headed girl. Make haste,
now; these stewards must not be kept waiting!"
The old woman gave the dwarf a push, and he hurried back to Ani, while
she carried the child, tied to his board, into the cave, and threw the
sack over him.
A few minutes later the Regent stood before her. She bowed before him
with a demeanor that was more like the singer Beki than the sorceress
Hekt, and begged him to take the only seat she possessed.
When, with a wave of his hand, he declined to sit down, she said:
"Yes--yes--be seated! then thou wilt not be seen from the valley, but be
screened by the rocks close by. Why hast thou chosen this hour for thy
visit?"
"Because the matter presses of which I wish to speak," answered Ani; "and
in the evening I might easily be challenged by the watch. My disguise is
good. Under this robe I wear my usual dress. From this I shall go to the
tomb of my father, where I shall take off this coarse thing, and these
other disfigurements, and shall wait for my chariot, which is already
ordered. I shall tell people I had made a vow to visit the grave humbly,
and on foot, which I have now fulfilled."
"Well planned," muttered the old woman.
Ani pointed to the dwarf, and said politely: "Your pupil."
Since her narrative the sorceress was no longer a mere witch in his eyes.
The old woman understood this, and saluted him with a curtsey of such
courtly formality, that a tame raven at her feet opened his black beak
wide, and uttered a loud scream. She threw a bit of cheese within the
cave, and the bird hopped after it, flapping his clipped wings, and was
silent.
"I have to speak to you about Pentaur," said Ani. The old woman's eyes
flashed, and she eagerly asked, "What of him?"
"I have reasons," answered the Regent, "for regarding him as dangerous to
me. He stands in my way. He has committed many crimes, even murder; but
he is in favor at the House of Seti, and they would willingly let him go
unpunished. They have the right of sitting in judgment on each other, and
I cannot interfere with their decisions; the day before yesterday they
pronounced their sentence. They would send him to the quarries of Chennu.
[Chennu is now Gebel Silsileh; the quarries there are of enormous
extent, and almost all the sandstone used for building the temples
of Upper Egypt was brought from thence. The Nile is narrower there
than above, and large stela, were erected there by Rameses II. his
successor Mernephtah, on which were inscribed beautiful hymns to the
Nile, and lists of the sacrifices to be offered at the Nile-
festivals. These inscriptions can be restored by comparison, and my
friend Stern and I had the satisfaction of doing this on the spot
(Zeitschrift fur Agyptishe Sprache, 1873, p. 129.)]
"All my objections were disregarded, and now Nemu, go over to the grave
of Anienophis, and wait there for me--I wish to speak to your mother
alone."
Nemu bowed, and then went down the slope, disappointed, it is true, but
sure of learning later what the two had discussed together.
When the little man had disappeared, Ani asked:
"Have you still a heart true to the old royal house, to which your
parents were so faithfully attached?" The old woman nodded.
"Then you will not refuse your help towards its restoration. You
understand how necessary the priesthood is to me, and I have sworn not to
make any attempt on Pentaur's life; but, I repeat it, he stands in my
way. I have my spies in the House of Seti, and I know through them what
the sending of the poet to Chennu really means. For a time they will let
him hew sandstone, and that will only improve his health, for he is as
sturdy as a tree. In Chennu, as you know, besides the quarries there is
the great college of priests, which is in close alliance with the temple
of Seti. When the flood begins to rise, and they hold the great
Nile-festival in Chennu, the priests there have the right of taking three
of the criminals who are working in the quarries into their house as
servants. Naturally they will, next year, choose Pentaur, set him at
liberty--and I shall be laughed at."
"Well considered!" said aid Hekt.
"I have taken counsel with myself, with Katuti, and even with Nemu,"
continued Ani, "but all that they have suggested, though certainly
practicable, was unadvisable, and at any rate must have led to
conjectures which I must now avoid. What is your opinion?"
"Assa's race must be exterminated!" muttered the old woman hoarsely.
She gazed at the ground, reflecting.
"Let the boat be scuttled," she said at last, "and sink with the chained
prisoners before it reaches Chennu."
"No-no; I thought of that myself, and Nemu too advised it," cried Ani.
"That has been done a hundred times, and Ameni will regard me as a
perjurer, for I have sworn not to attempt Pentaur's life."
"To be sure, thou hast sworn that, and men keep their word--to each
other. Wait a moment, how would this do? Let the ship reach Chennu with
the prisoners, but, by a secret order to the captain, pass the quarries
in the night, and hasten on as fast as possible as far as Ethiopia. From
Suan,--[The modern Assuan at the first cataract.]--the prisoners may be
conducted through the desert to the gold workings. Four weeks or even
eight may pass before it is known here what has happened. If Ameni
attacks thee about it, thou wilt be very angry at this oversight, and
canst swear by all the Gods of the heavens and of the abyss, that thou
hast not attempted Pentaur's life. More weeks will pass in enquiries.
Meanwhile do thy best, and Paaker do his, and thou art king. An oath is
easily broken by a sceptre, and if thou wilt positively keep thy word
leave Pentaur at the gold mines. None have yet returned from thence. My
father's and my brother's bones have bleached there."
"But Ameni will never believe in the mistake," cried Ani, anxiously
interrupting the witch.
"Then admit that thou gavest the order," exclaimed Hekt. "Explain that
thou hadst learned what they proposed doing with Pentaur at Chennu, and
that thy word indeed was kept, but that a criminal could not be left
unpunished. They will make further enquiries, and if Assa's grandson is
found still living thou wilt be justified. Follow my advice, if thou wilt
prove thyself a good steward of thy house, and master of its
inheritance."
"It will not do," said the Regent. "I need Ameni's support--not for
to-day and to-morrow only. I will not become his blind tool; but he must
believe that I am."
The old woman shrugged her shoulders, rose, went into her cave, and
brought out a phial.
"Take this," she said. "Four drops of it in his wine infallibly destroys
the drinker's senses; try the drink on a slave, and thou wilt see how
effectual it is."
"What shall I do with it?" asked Ani.
"Justify thyself to Ameni," said the witch laughing. "Order the ship's
captain to come to thee as soon as he returns; entertain him with
wine--and when Ameni sees the distracted wretch, why should he not
believe that in a fit of craziness he sailed past Chennu?"
"That is clever! that is splendid!" exclaimed Ani. "What is once
remarkable never becomes common. You were the greatest of singers--you
are now the wisest of women--my lady Beki."
"I am no longer Beki, I am Hekt," said the old woman shortly.
"As you will! In truth, if I had ever heard Beki's singing, I should be
bound to still greater gratitude to her than I now am to Hekt," said Ani
smiling. "Still, I cannot quit the wisest woman in Thebes without asking
her one serious question. Is it given to you to read the future? Have you
means at your command whereby you can see whether the great stake--you
know which I mean--shall be won or lost?"
Hekt looked at the ground, and said after reflecting a short time:
"I cannot decide with certainty, but thy affair stands well. Look at
these two hawks with the chain on their feet. They take their food from
no one but me. The one that is moulting, with closed, grey eyelids, is
Rameses; the smart, smooth one, with shining eyes, is thyself. It comes
to this--which of you lives the longest. So far, thou hast the
advantage."
Ani cast an evil glance at the king's sick hawk; but Hekt said: "Both
must be treated exactly alike. Fate will not be done violence to."
"Feed them well," exclaimed the Regent; he threw a purse into Hekt's lap,
and added, as he prepared to leave her: "If anything happens to either of
the birds let me know at once by Nemu."
Ani went down the hill, and walked towards the neighboring tomb of his
father; but Hekt laughed as she looked after him, and muttered to
herself:
"Now the fool will take care of me for the sake of his bird! That
smiling, spiritless, indolent-minded man would rule Egypt! Am I then so
much wiser than other folks, or do none but fools come to consult Hekt?
But Rameses chose Ani to represent him! perhaps because he thinks that
those who are not particularly clever are not particularly dangerous. If
that is what he thought, he was not wise, for no one usually is so
self-confident and insolent as just such an idiot."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Age when usually even bad liquor tastes of honey
How easy it is to give wounds, and how hard it is to heal
Kisra called wine the soap of sorrow
No one so self-confident and insolent as just such an idiot
The mother of foresight looks backwards
UARDA
Volume 8.
By Georg Ebers
CHAPTER XXXIII.
An hour later, Ani, in rich attire, left his father's tomb, and drove his
brilliant chariot past the witch's cave, and the little cottage of
Uarda's father.
Nemu squatted on the step, the dwarf's usual place. The little man looked
down at the lately rebuilt hut, and ground his teeth, when, through an
opening in the hedge, he saw the white robe of a man, who was sitting by
Uarda.
The pretty child's visitor was prince Rameri, who had crossed the Nile in
the early morning, dressed as a young scribe of the treasury, to obtain
news of Pentaur--and to stick a rose into Uarda's hair.
This purpose was, indeed, the more important of the two, for the other
must, in point of time at any rate, be the second.
He found it necessary to excuse himself to his own conscience with a
variety of cogent reasons. In the first place the rose, which lay
carefully secured in a fold of his robe, ran great danger of fading if he
first waited for his companions near the temple of Seti; next, a hasty
return from thence to Thebes might prove necessary; and finally, it
seemed to him not impossible that Bent-Anat might send a master of the
ceremonies after him, and if that happened any delay might frustrate his
purpose.
His heart beat loud and violently, not for love of the maiden, but
because he felt he was doing wrong. The spot that he must tread was
unclean, and he had, for the first time, told a lie. He had given himself
out to Uarda to be a noble youth of Bent-Anat's train, and, as one
falsehood usually entails another, in answer to her questions he had
given her false information as to his parents and his life.
Had evil more power over him in this unclean spot than in the House of
Seti, and at his father's? It might very well be so, for all disturbance
in nature and men was the work of Seth, and how wild was the storm in his
breast! And yet! He wished nothing but good to come of it to Uarda. She
was so fair and sweet--like some child of the Gods: and certainly the
white maiden must have been stolen from some one, and could not possibly
belong to the unclean people.
When the prince entered the court of the hut, Uarda was not to be seen,
but he soon heard her voice singing out through the open door. She came
out into the air, for the dog barked furiously at Rameri. When she saw
the prince, she started, and said:
"You are here already again, and yet I warned you. My grandmother in
there is the wife of a paraschites."
"I am not come to visit her," retorted the prince, "but you only; and you
do not belong to them, of that I am convinced. No roses grow in the
desert."
"And yet: am my father's child," said Uarda decidedly, "and my poor dead
grandfather's grandchild. Certainly I belong to them, and those that do
not think me good enough for them may keep away."
With these words she turned to re-enter the house; but Rameri seized her
hand, and held her back, saying:
"How cruel you are! I tried to save you, and came to see you before I
thought that you might--and, indeed, you are quite unlike the people whom
you call your relations. You must not misunderstand me; but it would be
horrible to me to believe that you, who are so beautiful, and as white as
a lily, have any part in the hideous curse. You charm every one, even my
mistress, Bent-Anat, and it seems to me impossible--"
"That I should belong to the unclean!--say it out," said Uarda softly,
and casting down her eyes.
Then she continued more excitedly: "But I tell you, the curse is unjust,
for a better man never lived than my grandfather was."
Tears sprang from her eyes, and Rameri said: "I fully believe it; and it
must be very difficult to continue good when every one despises and
scorns one; I at least can be brought to no good by blame, though I can
by praise. Certainly people are obliged to meet me and mine with
respect."
"And us with contempt!" exclaimed Uarda. "But I will tell you something.
If a man is sure that he is good, it is all the same to him whether he be
despised or honored by other people. Nay--we may be prouder than you; for
you great folks must often say to yourselves that you are worth less than
men value you at, and we know that we are worth more."
"I have often thought that of you," exclaimed Rameri, "and there is one
who recognizes your worth; and that is I. Even if it were otherwise, I
must always--always think of you."
"I have thought of you too," said Uarda. "Just now, when I was sitting
with my sick grandmother, it passed through my mind how nice it would be
if I had a brother just like you. Do you know what I should do if you
were my brother?"
"Well?"
"I should buy you a chariot and horse, and you should go away to the
king's war."
"Are you so rich?" asked Rameri smiling.
"Oh yes!" answered Uarda. "To be sure, I have not been rich for more than
an hour. Can you read?"
"Yes."
"Only think, when I was ill they sent a doctor to me from the House of
Seti. He was very clever, but a strange man. He often looked into my eyes
like a drunken man, and he stammered when he spoke."
"Is his name Nebsecht?" asked the prince.
"Yes, Nebsecht. He planned strange things with grandfather, and after
Pentaur and you had saved us in the frightful attack upon us he
interceded for us. Since then he has not come again, for I was already
much better. Now to-day, about two hours ago, the dog barked, and an old
man, a stranger, came up to me, and said he was Nebsecht's brother, and
had a great deal of money in his charge for me. He gave me a ring too,
and said that he would pay the money to him, who took the ring to him
from me. Then he read this letter to me."
Rameri took the letter and read. "Nebsecht to the fair Uarda."
"Nebsecht greets Uarda, and informs her that he owed her grandfather in
Osiris, Pinem--whose body the kolchytes are embalming like that of a
noble--a sum of a thousand gold rings. These he has entrusted to his
brother Teta to hold ready for her at any moment. She may trust Teta
entirely, for he is honest, and ask him for money whenever she needs it.
It would be best that she should ask Teta to take care of the money for
her, and to buy her a house and field; then she could remove into it, and
live in it free from care with her grandmother. She may wait a year, and
then she may choose a husband. Nebsecht loves Uarda much. If at the end
of thirteen months he has not been to see her, she had better marry whom
she will; but not before she has shown the jewel left her by her mother
to the king's interpreter."
"How strange!" exclaimed Rameri. "Who would have given the singular
physician, who always wore such dirty clothes, credit for such
generosity? But what is this jewel that you have?"
Uarda opened her shirt, and showed the prince the sparkling ornament.
"Those are diamonds---it is very valuable!" cried the prince; "and there
in the middle on the onyx there are sharply engraved signs. I cannot read
them, but I will show them to the interpreter. Did your mother wear
that?"
"My father found it on her when she died," said Uarda. "She came to Egypt
as a prisoner of war, and was as white as I am, but dumb, so she could
not tell us the name of her home."
"She belonged to some great house among the foreigners, and the children
inherit from the mother," cried the prince joyfully. "You are a princess,
Uarda! Oh! how glad I am, and how much I love you!"
The girl smiled and said, "Now you will not be afraid to touch the
daughter of the unclean."
"You are cruel," replied the prince. "Shall I tell you what I determined
on yesterday,--what would not let me sleep last night,--and for what I
came here today?"
"Well?"
Rameri took a most beautiful white rose out of his robe and said:
"It is very childish, but I thought how it would be if I might put this
flower with my own hands into your shining hair. May I?"
"It is a splendid rose! I never saw such a fine one."
"It is for my haughty princess. Do pray let me dress your hair! It is
like silk from Tyre, like a swan's breast, like golden star-beams--there,
it is fixed safely! Nay, leave it so. If the seven Hathors could see you,
they would be jealous, for you are fairer than all of them."
"How you flatter!" said Uarda, shyly blushing, and looking into his
sparkling eyes.
"Uarda," said the prince, pressing her hand to his heart. "I have now but
one wish. Feel how my heart hammers and beats. I believe it will never
rest again till you--yes, Uarda--till you let me give you one, only one,
kiss."
The girl drew back.
"Now," she said seriously. "Now I see what you want. Old Hekt knows men,
and she warned me."
"Who is Hekt, and what can she know of me?"
"She told me that the time would come when a man would try to make
friends with me. He would look into my eyes, and if mine met his, then he
would ask to kiss me. But I must refuse him, because if I liked him to
kiss me he would seize my soul, and take it from me, and I must wander,
like the restless ghosts, which the abyss rejects, and the storm whirls
before it, and the sea will not cover, and the sky will not receive,
soulless to the end of my days. Go away--for I cannot refuse you the
kiss, and yet I would not wander restless, and without a soul!"
"Is the old woman who told you that a good woman?" asked Rameri.
Uarda shook her head.
"She cannot be good," cried the prince. "For she has spoken a falsehood.
I will not seize your soul; I will give you mine to be yours, and you
shall give me yours to be mine, and so we shall neither of us be
poorer--but both richer!"
"I should like to believe it," said Uarda thoughtfully, "and I have
thought the same kind of thing. When I was strong, I often had to go late
in the evening to fetch water from the landing-place where the great
water-wheel stands. Thousands of drops fall from the earthenware pails as
it turns, and in each you can see the reflection of a moon, yet there is
only one in the sky. Then I thought to myself, so it must be with the
love in our hearts. We have but one heart, and yet we pour it out into
other hearts without its losing in strength or in warmth. I thought of my
grandmother, of my father, of little Scherau, of the Gods, and of
Pentaur. Now I should like to give you a part of it too."
"Only a part?" asked Rameri.
"Well, the whole will be reflected in you, you know," said Uarda, "as the
whole moon is reflected in each drop."
"It shall!" cried the prince, clasping the trembling girl in his arms,
and the two young souls were united in their first kiss.
"Now do go!" Uarda entreated.
"Let me stay a little while," said Rameri. "Sit down here by me on the
bench in front of the house. The hedge shelters us, and besides this
valley is now deserted, and there are no passers by."
"We are doing what is not right," said Uarda. "If it were right we should
not want to hide ourselves."
"Do you call that wrong which the priests perform in the Holy of Holies?"
asked the prince. "And yet it is concealed from all eyes."
"How you can argue!" laughed Uarda. "That shows you can write, and are
one of his disciples."
"His, his!" exclaimed Rameri. "You mean Pentaur. He was always the
dearest to me of all my teachers, but it vexes me when you speak of him
as if he were more to you than I and every one else. The poet, you said,
was one of the drops in which the moon of your soul finds a
reflection--and I will not divide it with many."
"How you are talking!" said Uarda. "Do you not honor your father, and the
Gods? I love no one else as I do you--and what I felt when you kissed
me--that was not like moon-light, but like this hot mid-day sun. When I
thought of you I had no peace. I will confess to you now, that twenty
times I looked out of the door, and asked whether my preserver--the kind,
curly-headed boy--would really come again, or whether he despised a poor
girl like me? You came, and I am so happy, and I could enjoy myself with
you to my heart's content. Be kind again--or I will pull your hair!"
"You!" cried Rameri. "You cannot hurt with your little hands, though you
can with your tongue. Pentaur is much wiser and better than I, you owe
much to him, and nevertheless I--"
"Let that rest," interrupted the girl, growing grave. "He is not a man
like other men. If he asked to kiss me, I should crumble into dust, as
ashes dried in the sun crumble if you touch them with a finger, and I
should be as much afraid of his lips as of a lion's. Though you may laugh
at it, I shall always believe that he is one of the Immortals. His own
father told me that a great wonder was shown to him the very day after
his birth. Old Hekt has often sent me to the gardener with a message to
enquire after his son, and though the man is rough he is kind. At first
he was not friendly, but when he saw how much I liked his flowers he grew
fond of me, and set me to work to tie wreaths and bunches, and to carry
them to his customers. As we sat together, laying the flowers side by
side, he constantly told me something about his son, and his beauty and
goodness and wisdom. When he was quite a little boy he could write poems,
and he learned to read before any one had shown him how. The high-priest
Ameni heard of it and took him to the House of Seti, and there he
improved, to the astonishment of the gardener; not long ago I went
through the garden with the old man. He talked of Pentaur as usual, and
then stood still before a noble shrub with broad leaves, and said, My son
is like this plant, which has grown up close to me, and I know not how. I
laid the seed in the soil, with others that I bought over there in
Thebes; no one knows where it came from, and yet it is my own. It
certainly is not a native of Egypt; and is not Pentaur as high above me
and his mother and his brothers, as this shrub is above the other
flowers? We are all small and bony, and he is tall and slim; our skin is
dark and his is rosy; our speech is hoarse, his as sweet as a song. I
believe he is a child of the Gods that the Immortals have laid in my
homely house. Who knows their decrees?' And then I often saw Pentaur at
the festivals, and asked myself which of the other priests of the temple
came near him in height and dignity? I took him for a God, and when I saw
him who saved my life overcome a whole mob with superhuman strength must
I not regard him as a superior Being? I look up to him as to one of them;
but I could never look in his eyes as I do in yours. It would not make my
blood flow faster, it would freeze it in my veins. How can I say what I
mean! my soul looks straight out, and it finds you; but to find him it
must look up to the heavens. You are a fresh rose-garland with which I
crown myself--he is a sacred persea-tree before which I bow."
Rameri listened to her in silence, and then said, "I am still young, and
have done nothing yet, but the time shall come in which you shall look up
to me too as to a tree, not perhaps a sacred tree, but as to a sycamore
under whose shade we love to rest. I am no longer gay; I will leave you
for I have a serious duty to fulfil. Pentaur is a complete man, and I
will be one too. But you shall be the rose-garland to grace me. Men who
can be compared to flowers disgust me!"
The prince rose, and offered Uarda his hand.
"You have a strong hand," said the girl. "You will be a noble man, and
work for good and great ends; only look, my fingers are quite red with
being held so tightly. But they too are not quite useless. They have
never done anything very hard certainly, but what they tend flourishes,
and grandmother says they are 'lucky.' Look at the lovely lilies and the
pomegrenate bush in that corner. Grandfather brought the earth here from
the Nile, Pentaur's father gave me the seeds, and each little plant that
ventured to show a green shoot through the soil I sheltered and nursed
and watered, though I had to fetch the water in my little pitcher, till
it was vigorous, and thanked me with flowers. Take this pomegranate
flower. It is the first my tree has borne; and it is very strange, when
the bud first began to lengthen and swell my grandmother said, 'Now your
heart will soon begin to bud and love.' I know now what she meant, and
both the first flowers belong to you--the red one here off the tree, and
the other, which you cannot see, but which glows as brightly as this
does."
Rameri pressed the scarlet blossom to his lips, and stretched out his
hand toward Uarda; but she shrank back, for a little figure slipped
through an opening in the hedge.
It was Scherau.
His pretty little face glowed with his quick run, and his breath was
gone. For a few minutes he tried in vain for words, and looked anxiously
at the prince.
Uarda saw that something unusual agitated him; she spoke to him kindly,
saying that if he wished to speak to her alone he need not be afraid of
Rameri, for he was her best friend.
"But it does not concern you and me," replied the child, "but the good,
holy father Pentaur, who was so kind to me, and who saved your life."
"I am a great friend of Pentaur," said the prince. "Is it not true,
Uarda? He may speak with confidence before me."
"I may?" said Scherau, "that is well. I have slipped away; Hekt may come
back at any moment, and if she sees that I have taken myself off I shall
get a beating and nothing to eat."
"Who is this horrible Hekt?" asked Rameri indignantly.
"That Uarda can tell you by and by," said the little one hurriedly. "Now
only listen. She laid me on my board in the cave, and threw a sack over
me, and first came Nemu, and then another man, whom she spoke to as
Steward. She talked to him a long time. At first I did not listen, but
then I caught the name of Pentaur, and I got my head out, and now I
understand it all. The steward declared that the good Pentaur was wicked,
and stood in his way, and he said that Ameni was going to send him to the
quarries at Chennu, but that that was much too small a punishment. Then
Hekt advised him to give a secret commission to the captain of the ship
to go beyond Chennu, to the frightful mountain-mines, of which she has
often told me, for her father and her brother were tormented to death
there."
"None ever return from thence," said the prince. "But go on."
"What came next, I only half understood, but they spoke of some drink
that makes people mad. Oh! what I see and hear!--I would he contentedly
on my board all my life long, but all else is too horrible--I wish that I
were dead."
And the child began to cry bitterly.
Uarda, whose cheeks had turned pale, patted him affectionately; but
Rameri exclaimed:
"It is frightful! unheard of! But who was the steward? did you not hear
his name? Collect yourself, little man, and stop crying. It is a case of
life and death. Who was the scoundrel? Did she not name him? Try to
remember."
Scherau bit his red lips, and tried for composure. His tears ceased, and
suddenly he exclaimed, as he put his hand into the breast of his ragged
little garment: "Stay, perhaps you will know him again--I made him!"
"You did what?" asked the prince.
"I made him," repeated the little artist, and he carefully brought out an
object wrapped up in a scrap of rag, "I could just see his head quite
clearly from one side all the time he was speaking, and my clay lay by
me. I always must model something when my mind is excited, and this time
I quickly made his face, and as the image was successful, I kept it about
me to show to the master when Hekt was out."
While he spoke he had carefully unwrapped the figure with trembling
fingers, and had given it to Uarda.
"Ani!" cried the prince. "He, and no other! Who could have thought it!
What spite has he against Pentaur? What is the priest to him?"
For a moment he reflected, then he struck his hand against his forehead.
"Fool that I am!" he exclaimed vehemently. "Child that I am! of course,
of course; I see it all. Ani asked for Bent-Anat's hand, and she--now
that I love you, Uarda, I understand what ails her. Away with deceit! I
will tell you no more lies, Uarda. I am no page of honor to Bent-Anat; I
am her brother, and king Rameses' own son. Do not cover your face with
your hands, Uarda, for if I had not seen your mother's jewel, and if I
were not only a prince, but Horus himself, the son of Isis, I must have
loved you, and would not have given you up. But now other things have to
be done besides lingering with you; now I will show you that I am a man,
now that Pentaur is to be saved. Farewell, Uarda, and think of me!"
He would have hurried off, but Scherau held him by the robe, and said
timidly: Thou sayst thou art Rameses' son. Hekt spoke of him too. She
compared him to our moulting hawk."
"She shall soon feel the talons of the royal eagle," cried Rameri. "Once
more, farewell!"
He gave Uarda his hand, she pressed it passionately to her lips, but he
drew it away, kissed her forehead, and was gone.
The maiden looked after him pale and speechless. She saw another man
hastening towards her, and recognizing him as her father, she went
quickly to meet him. The soldier had come to take leave of her, he had to
escort some prisoners.
"To Chennu?" asked Uarda.
"No, to the north," replied the man.
His daughter now related what she had heard, and asked whether he could
help the priest, who had saved her.
"If I had money, if I had money!" muttered the soldier to himself.
"We have some," cried Uarda; she told him of Nebsecht's gift, and said:
"Take me over the Nile, and in two hours you will have enough to make a
man rich.
[It may be observed that among the Egyptian women were qualified to
own and dispose of property. For example a papyrus (vii) in the
Louvre contains an agreement between Asklepias (called Semmuthis),
the daughter or maid-servant of a corpse-dresser of Thebes, who is
the debtor, and Arsiesis, the creditor, the son of a kolchytes; both
therefore are of the same rank as Uarda.]
But no; I cannot leave my sick grandmother. You yourself take the ring,
and remember that Pentaur is being punished for having dared to protect
us."
"I remember it," said the soldier. "I have but one life, but I will
willingly give it to save his. I cannot devise schemes, but I know
something, and if it succeeds he need not go to the gold-mines. I will
put the wine-flask aside--give me a drink of water, for the next few
hours I must keep a sober head."
"There is the water, and I will pour in a mouthful of wine. Will you come
back and bring me news?"
"That will not do, for we set sail at midnight, but if some one returns
to you with the ring you will know that what I propose has succeeded."
Uarda went into the hut, her father followed her; he took leave of his
sick mother and of his daughter. When they went out of doors again, he
said: "You have to live on the princess's gift till I return, and I do
not want half of the physician's present. But where is your pomegranate
blossom?"
"I have picked it and preserved it in a safe place."
"Strange things are women!" muttered the bearded man; he tenderly kissed
his child's forehead, and returned to the Nile down the road by which he
had come.
The prince meanwhile had hurried on, and enquired in the harbor of the
Necropolis where the vessel destined for Chennu was lying--for the ships
loaded with prisoners were accustomed to sail from this side of the
river, starting at night. Then he was ferried over the river, and
hastened to Bent-Anat. He found her and Nefert in unusual excitement, for
the faithful chamberlain had learned--through some friends of the king in
Ani's suite--that the Regent had kept back all the letters intended for
Syria, and among them those of the royal family.
A lord in waiting, who was devoted to the king, had been encouraged by
the chamberlain to communicate to Bent-Anat other things, which hardly
allowed any doubts as to the ambitious projects of her uncle; she was
also exhorted to be on her guard with Nefert, whose mother was the
confidential adviser of the Regent.
Bent-Anat smiled at this warning, and sent at once a message to Ani to
inform him that she was ready to undertake the pilgrimage to the
"Emerald-Hathor," and to be purified in the sanctuary of that Goddess.
She purposed sending a message to her father from thence, and if he
permitted it, joining him at the camp.
She imparted this plan to her friend, and Nefert thought any road best
that would take her to her husband.
Rameri was soon initiated into all this, and in return he told them all
he had learned, and let Bent-Anat guess that he had read her secret.
So dignified, so grave, were the conduct and the speech of the boy who
had so lately been an overhearing mad-cap, that Bent-Anat thought to
herself that the danger of their house had suddenly ripened a boy into a
man.
She had in fact no objection to raise to his arrangements. He proposed to
travel after sunset, with a few faithful servants on swift horses as far
as Keft, and from thence ride fast across the desert to the Red Sea,
where they could take a Phoenician ship, and sail to Aila. From thence
they would cross the peninsula of Sinai, and strive to reach the Egyptian
army by forced marches, and make the king acquainted with Ani's criminal
attempts.
To Bent-Anat was given the task of rescuing Pentaur, with the help of the
faithful chamberlain.
Money was fortunately not wanting, as the high treasurer was on their
side. All depended on their inducing the captain to stop at Chennu; the
poet's fate would there, at the worst, be endurable. At the same time, a
trustworthy messenger was to be sent to the governor of Chennu,
commanding him in the name of the king to detain every ship that might
pass the narrows of Chennu by night, and to prevent any of the prisoners
that had been condemned to the quarries from being smuggled on to
Ethiopia.
Rameri took leave of the two women, and he succeeded in leaving Thebes
unobserved.
Bent-Anat knelt in prayer before the images of her mother in Osiris, of
Hathor, and of the guardian Gods of her house, till the chamberlain
returned, and told her that he had persuaded the captain of the ship to
stop at Chennu, and to conceal from Ani that he had betrayed his charge.
The princess breathed more freely, for she had come to a resolution that
if the chamberlain had failed in his mission, she would cross over to the
Necropolis forbid the departure of the vessel, and in the last extremity
rouse the people, who were devoted to her, against Ani.
The following morning the Lady Katuti craved permission of the princess
to see her daughter. Bent-Anat did not show herself to the widow, whose
efforts failed to keep her daughter from accompanying the princess on her
journey, or to induce her to return home. Angry and uneasy, the indignant
mother hastened to Ani, and implored him to keep Nefert at home by force;
but the Regent wished to avoid attracting attention, and to let Bent-Anat
set out with a feeling of complete security.
"Do not be uneasy," he said. "I will give the ladies a trustworthy
escort, who will keep them at the Sanctuary of the 'Emerald-Hathor' till
all is settled. There you can deliver Nefert to Paaker, if you still like
to have him for a son-in-law after hearing several things that I have
learned. As for me, in the end I may induce my haughty niece to look up
instead of down; I may be her second love, though for that matter she
certainly is not my first."
On the following day the princess set out.
Ani took leave of her with kindly formality, which she returned with
coolness. The priesthood of the temple of Amon, with old Bek en Chunsu at
their head, escorted her to the harbor. The people on the banks shouted
Bent-Anat's name with a thousand blessings, but many insulting words were
to be heard also.
The pilgrim's Nile-boat was followed by two others, full of soldiers, who
accompanied the ladies "to protect them."
The south-wind filled the sails, and carried the little procession
swiftly down the stream. The princess looked now towards the palace of
her fathers, now towards the tombs and temples of the Necropolis. At last
even the colossus of Anienophis disappeared, and the last houses of
Thebes. The brave maiden sighed deeply, and tears rolled down her checks.
She felt as if she were flying after a lost battle, and yet not wholly
discouraged, but hoping for future victory. As she turned to go to the
cabin, a veiled girl stepped up to her, took the veil from her face, and
said: "Pardon me, princess; I am Uarda, whom thou didst run over, and to
whom thou hast since been so good. My grandmother is dead, and I am quite
alone. I slipped in among thy maid-servants, for I wish to follow thee,
and to obey all thy commands. Only do not send me away."
"Stay, dear child," said the princess, laying her hand on her hair.
Then, struck by its wonderful beauty, she remembered her brother, and his
wish to place a rose in Uarda's shining tresses.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
Two months had past since Bent-Anat's departure from Thebes, and the
imprisonment of Pentaur. Ant-Baba is the name of the valley, in the
western half of the peninsula of Sinai,
[I have described in detail the peninsula of Sinai, its history, and
the sacred places on it, in my book "Durch Gosen zum Sinai,"
published in 1872. In depicting this scenery in the present
romance, I have endeavored to reproduce the reality as closely as
possible. He who has wandered through this wonderful mountain
wilderness can never forget it. The valley now called "Laba," bore
the same name in the time of the Pharaohs.]
through which a long procession of human beings, and of beasts of burden,
wended their way.
It was winter, and yet the mid-day sun sent down glowing rays, which were
reflected from the naked rocks. In front of the caravan marched a company
of Libyan soldiers, and another brought up the rear. Each man was armed
with a dagger and battle-axe, a shield and a lance, and was ready to use
his weapons; for those whom they were escorting were prisoners from the
emerald-mines, who had been convoyed to the shores of the Red Sea to
carry thither the produce of the mines, and had received, as a
return-load, provisions which had arrived from Egypt, and which were to
be carried to the storehouses of the mountain mines. Bent and panting,
they made their way along. Each prisoner had a copper chain riveted round
his ankles, and torn rags hanging round their loins, were the only
clothing of these unhappy beings, who, gasping under the weight of the
sacks they had to carry, kept their staring eyes fixed on the ground. If
one of them threatened to sink altogether under his burden, he was
refreshed by the whip of one of the horsemen, who accompanied the
caravan. Many a one found it hard to choose whether he could best endure
the suffering of mere endurance, or the torture of the lash.
No one spoke a word, neither the prisoners nor their guards; and even
those who were flogged did not cry out, for their powers were exhausted,
and in the souls of their drivers there was no more impulse of pity than
there was a green herb on the rocks by the way. This melancholy
procession moved silently onwards, like a procession of phantoms, and the
ear was only made aware of it when now and then a low groan broke from
one of the victims.
The sandy path, trodden by their naked feet, gave no sound, the mountains
seemed to withhold their shade, the light of clay was a torment--every
thing far and near seemed inimical to the living. Not a plant, not a
creeping thing, showed itself against the weird forms of the barren grey
and brown rocks, and no soaring bird tempted the oppressed wretches to
raise their eyes to heaven.
In the noontide heat of the previous day they had started with their
loads from the harbor-creek. For two hours they had followed the shore of
the glistening, blue-green sea,
[The Red Sea--in Hebrew and Coptic the reedy sea--is of a lovely
blue green color. According to the Ancients it was named red either
from its red banks or from the Erythraeans, who were called the red
people. On an early inscription it is called "the water of the Red
country." See "Durch Gosen zum Sinai."]
then they had climbed a rocky shoulder and crossed a small plateau. They
had paused for their night's rest in the gorge which led to the mines;
the guides and soldiers lighted fires, grouped themselves round them, and
lay down to sleep under the shelter of a cleft in the rocks; the
prisoners stretched themselves on the earth in the middle of the valley
without any shelter, and shivering with the cold which suddenly succeeded
the glowing heat of the day. The benumbed wretches now looked forward to
the crushing misery of the morning's labor as eagerly as, a few hours
since, they had longed for the night, and for rest.
Lentil-broth and hard bread in abundance, but a very small quantity of
water was given to them before they started; then they set out through
the gorge, which grew hotter and hotter, and through ravines where they
could pass only one by one. Every now and then it seemed as if the path
came to an end, but each time it found an outlet, and went on--as endless
as the torment of the wayfarers.
Mighty walls of rock composed the view, looking as if they were formed of
angular masses of hewn stone piled up in rows; and of all the miners one,
and one only, had eyes for these curious structures of the ever-various
hand of Nature.
This one had broader shoulders than his companions, and his burden
Weighed on him comparatively lightly. "In this solitude," thought he,
"which repels man, and forbids his passing his life here, the Chnemu, the
laborers who form the world, have spared themselves the trouble of
filling up the seams, and rounding off the corners. How is it that Man
should have dedicated this hideous land--in which even the human heart
seems to be hardened against all pity--to the merciful Hathor? Perhaps
because it so sorely stands in need of the joy and peace which the loving
goddess alone can bestow."
"Keep the line, Huni!" shouted a driver.
The man thus addressed, closed up to the next man, the panting leech
Nebsecht. We know the other stronger prisoner. It is Pentaur, who had
been entered as Huni on the lists of mine-laborers, and was called by
that name. The file moved on; at every step the ascent grew more rugged.
Red and black fragments of stone, broken as small as if by the hand of
man, lay in great heaps, or strewed the path which led up the almost
perpendicular cliff by imperceptible degrees. Here another gorge opened
before them, and this time there seemed to be no outlet.
"Load the asses less!" cried the captain of the escort to the prisoners.
Then he turned to the soldiers, and ordered them, when the beasts were
eased, to put the extra burthens on the men. Putting forth their utmost
strength, the overloaded men labored up the steep and hardly
distinguishable mountain path.
The man in front of Pentaur, a lean old man, when half way up the
hill-side, fell in a heap under his load, and a driver, who in a narrow
defile could not reach the bearers, threw a stone at him to urge him to a
renewed effort.
The old man cried out at the blow, and at the cry--the paraschites
stricken down with stones--his own struggle with the mob--and the
appearance of Bent Anat flashed into Pentaur's memory. Pity and a sense
of his own healthy vigor prompted him to energy; he hastily snatched the
sack from the shoulders of the old man, threw it over his own, helped up
the fallen wretch, and finally men and beasts succeeded in mounting the
rocky wall.
The pulses throbbed in Pentaur's temples, and he shuddered with horror,
as he looked down from the height of the pass into the abyss below, and
round upon the countless pinnacles and peaks, cliffs and precipices, in
many-colored rocks-white and grey, sulphurous yellow, blood-red and
ominous black. He recalled the sacred lake of Muth in Thebes, round which
sat a hundred statues of the lion-headed Goddess in black basalt, each on
a pedestal; and the rocky peaks, which surrounded the valley at his feet,
seemed to put on a semblance of life and to move and open their yawning
jaws; through the wild rush of blood in his ears he fancied he heard them
roar, and the load beyond his strength which he carried gave him a
sensation as though their clutch was on his breast.
Nevertheless he reached the goal.
The other prisoners flung their loads from their shoulders, and threw
themselves down to rest. Mechanically he did the same: his pulses beat
more calmly, by degrees the visions faded from his senses, he saw and
heard once more, and his brain recovered its balance. The old man and
Nebsecht were lying beside him.
His grey-haired companion rubbed the swollen veins in his neck, and
called down all the blessings of the Gods upon his head; but the captain
of the caravan cut him short, exclaiming:
"You have strength for three, Huni; farther on, we will load you more
heavily."
"How much the kindly Gods care for our prayers for the blessing of
others!" exclaimed Nebsecht. "How well they know how to reward a good
action!"
"I am rewarded enough," said Pentaur, looking kindly at the old man. "But
you, you everlasting scoffer--you look pale. How do you feel?"
"As if I were one of those donkeys there," replied the naturalist. "My
knees shake like theirs, and I think and I wish neither more nor less
than they do; that is to say--I would we were in our stalls."
"If you can think," said Pentaur smiling, "you are not so very bad."
"I had a good thought just now, when you were staring up into the sky.
The intellect, say the priestly sages, is a vivifying breath of the
eternal spirit, and our soul is the mould or core for the mass of matter
which we call a human being. I sought the spirit at first in the heart,
then in the brain; but now I know that it resides in the arms and legs,
for when I have strained them I find thought is impossible. I am too
tired to enter on further evidence, but for the future I shall treat my
legs with the utmost consideration."
"Quarrelling again you two? On again, men!" cried the driver.
The weary wretches rose slowly, the beasts were loaded, and on went the
pitiable procession, so as to reach the mines before sunset.
The destination of the travellers was a wide valley, closed in by two
high and rocky mountain-slopes; it was called Ta Mafka by the Egyptians,
Dophka by the Hebrews. The southern cliff-wall consisted of dark granite,
the northern of red sandstone; in a distant branch of the valley lay the
mines in which copper was found. In the midst of the valley rose a hill,
surrounded by a wall, and crowned with small stone houses, for the guard,
the officers, and the overseers. According to the old regulations, they
were without roofs, but as many deaths and much sickness had occurred
among the workmen in consequence of the cold nights, they had been
slightly sheltered with palm-branches brought from the oasis of the
Alnalckites, at no great distance.
On the uttermost peak of the hill, where it was most exposed to the wind,
were the smelting furnaces, and a manufactory where a peculiar green
glass was prepared, which was brought into the market under the name of
Mafkat, that is to say, emerald. The genuine precious stone was found
farther to the south, on the western shore of the Red Sea, and was highly
prized in Egypt.
Our friends had already for more than a month belonged to the
mining-community of the Mafkat valley, and Pentaur had never learned how
it was that he had been brought hither with his companion Nebsecht,
instead of going to the sandstone quarries of Chennu.
That Uarda's father had effected this change was beyond a doubt, and the
poet trusted the rough but honest soldier who still kept near him, and
gave him credit for the best intentions, although he had only spoken to
him once since their departure from Thebes.
That was the first night, when he had come up to Pentaur, and whispered:
"I am looking after you. You will find the physician Nebsecht here; but
treat each other as enemies rather than as friends, if you do not wish to
be parted."
Pentaur had communicated the soldier's advice to Nebsecht, and he had
followed it in his own way.
It afforded him a secret pleasure to see how Pentaur's life contradicted
the belief in a just and beneficent ordering of the destinies of men; and
the more he and the poet were oppressed, the more bitter was the irony,
often amounting to extravagance, with which the mocking sceptic attacked
him.
He loved Pentaur, for the poet had in his keeping the key which alone
could give admission to the beautiful world which lay locked up in his
own soul; but yet it was easy to him, if he thought they were observed,
to play his part, and to overwhelm Pentaur with words which, to the
drivers, were devoid of meaning, and which made them laugh by the strange
blundering fashion in which he stammered them out.
"A belabored husk of the divine self-consciousness." "An advocate of
righteousness hit on the mouth." "A juggler who makes as much of this
worst of all possible worlds as if it were the best." "An admirer of the
lovely color of his blue bruises." These and other terms of invective,
intelligible only to himself and his butt, he could always pour out in
new combinations, exciting Pentaur to sharp and often witty rejoinders,
equally unintelligible to the uninitiated.
Frequently their sparring took the form of a serious discussion, which
served a double purpose; first their minds, accustomed to serious
thought, found exercise in spite of the murderous pressure of the burden
of forced labor, and secondly, they were supposed really to be enemies.
They slept in the same court-yard, and contrived, now and then, to
exchange a few words in secret; but by day Nebsecht worked in the
turquoise-diggings, and Pentaur in the mines, for the careful chipping
out of the precious stones from their stony matrix was the work best
suited to the slight physician, while Pentaur's giant-strength was fitted
for hewing the ore out of the hard rock. The drivers often looked in
surprise at his powerful strokes, as he flung his pick against the stone.
The stupendous images that in such moments of wild energy rose before the
poet's soul, the fearful or enchanting tones that rang in his spirit's
ear-none could guess at.
Usually his excited fancy showed him the form of Bent-Anat, surrounded by
a host of men--and these he seemed to fell to the earth, one-by-one,
as-he hewed the rock. Often in the middle of his work he would stop,
throw down his pick-axe, and spread out his arms--but only to drop them
with a deep groan, and wipe the sweat from his brow.
The overseers did not know what to think of this powerful youth, who
often was as gentle as a child, and then seemed possessed of that demon
to which so many of the convicts fell victims. He had indeed become a
riddle to himself; for how was it that he--the gardener's son, brought up
in the peaceful temple of Seti--ever since that night by the house of the
paraschites had had such a perpetual craving for conflict and struggle?
The weary gangs were gone to rest; a bright fire still blazed in front of
the house of the superintendent of the mines, and round it squatted in a
circle the overseers and the subalterns of the troops.
"Put the wine-jar round again," said the captain, "for we must hold grave
council. Yesterday I had orders from the Regent to send half the guard to
Pelusium. He requires soldiers, but we are so few in number that if the
convicts knew it they might make short work of us, even without arms.
There are stones enough hereabouts, and by day they have their hammer and
chisel. Things are worst among the Hebrews in the copper-mines; they are
a refractory crew that must be held tight. You know me well, fear is
unknown to me--but I feel great anxiety. The last fuel is now burning in
this fire, and the smelting furnaces and the glass-foundry must not stand
idle. Tomorrow we must send men to Raphidim
[The oasis at the foot of Horeb, where the Jews under Joshua's
command conquered the Amalekites, while Aaron and Hur held up Moses'
arms. Exodus 17, 8.]
to obtain charcoal from the Amalekites. They owe us a hundred loads
still. Load the prisoners with some copper, to make them tired and the
natives civil. What can we do to procure what we want, and yet not to
weaken the forces here too much?"
Various opinions were given, and at last it was settled that a small
division, guarded by a few soldiers, should be sent out every day to
supply only the daily need for charcoal.
It was suggested that the most dangerous of the convicts should be
fettered together in pairs to perform their duties.
The superintendent was of opinion that two strong men fettered together
would be more to be feared if only they acted in concert.
"Then chain a strong one to a weak one," said the chief accountant of the
mines, whom the Egyptians called the 'scribe of the metals.' "And fetter
those together who are enemies."
"The colossal Huni, for instance, to that puny spat row, the stuttering
Nebsecht," said a subaltern.
"I was thinking of that very couple," said the accountant laughing.
Three other couples were selected, at first with some laughter, but
finally with serious consideration, and Uarda's father was sent with the
drivers as an escort.
On the following morning Pentaur and Nebsecht were fettered together with
a copper chain, and when the sun was at its height four pairs of
prisoners, heavily loaded with copper, set out for the Oasis of the
Amalekites, accompanied by six soldiers and the son of the paraschites,
to fetch fuel for the smelting furnaces.
They rested near the town of Alus, and then went forward again between
bare walls of greyish-green and red porphyry. These cliffs rose higher
and higher, but from time to time, above the lower range, they could see
the rugged summit of some giant of the range, though, bowed under their
heavy loads, they paid small heed to it.
The sun was near setting when they reached the little sanctuary of the
'Emerald-Hathor.'
A few grey and black birds here flew towards them, and Pentaur gazed at
them with delight.
How long be had missed the sight of a bird, and the sound of their chirp
and song! Nebsecht said: "There are some birds--we must be near water."
And there stood the first palm-tree!
Now the murmur of the brook was perceptible, and its tiny sound touched
the thirsty souls of the travellers as rain falls on dry grass.
On the left bank of the stream an encampment of Egyptian soldiers formed
a large semicircle, enclosing three large tents made of costly material
striped with blue and white, and woven with gold thread. Nothing was to
be seen of the inhabitants of these tents, but when the prisoners had
passed them, and the drivers were exchanging greetings with the
out-posts, a girl, in the long robe of an Egyptian, came towards them,
and looked at them.
Pentaur started as if he had seen a ghost; but Nebsecht gave expression
to his astonishment in a loud cry.
At the same instant a driver laid his whip across their shoulders, and
cried laughing:
"You may hit each other as hard as you like with words, but not with your
hands."
Then he turned to his companions, and said: "Did you see the pretty girl
there, in front of the tent?"
"It is nothing to us!" answered the man he addressed. "She belongs to the
princess's train. She has been three weeks here on a visit to the holy
shrine of Hathor."
"She must have committed some heavy sin," replied the other. "If she were
one of us, she would have been set to sift sand in the diggings, or grind
colors, and not be living here in a gilt tent. Where is our red-beard?"
Uarda's father had lingered a little behind the party, for the girl had
signed to him, and exchanged a few words with him.
"Have you still an eye for the fair ones?" asked the youngest of the
drivers when he rejoined the gang.
"She is a waiting maid of the princess," replied the soldier not without
embarrassment. "To-morrow morning we are to carry a letter from her to
the scribe of the mines, and if we encamp in the neighborhood she will
send us some wine for carrying it."
"The old red-beard scents wine as a fox scents a goose. Let us encamp
here; one never knows what may be picked up among the Mentu, and the
superintendent said we were to encamp outside the oasis. Put down your
sacks, men! Here there is fresh water, and perhaps a few dates and sweet
Manna for you to eat with it.
["Man" is the name still given by the Bedouins of Sinai to the sweet
gum which exudes from the Tamarix mannifera. It is the result of
the puncture of an insect, and occurs chiefly in May. By many it is
supposed to be the Manna of the Bible.]
But keep the peace, you two quarrelsome fellows--Huni and Nebsecht."
Bent-Anat's journey to the Emerald-Hathor was long since ended. As far as
Keft she had sailed down the Nile with her escort, from thence she had
crossed the desert by easy marches, and she had been obliged to wait a
full week in the port on the Red Sea, which was chiefly inhabited by
Phoenicians, for a ship which had finally brought her to the little
seaport of Pharan. From Pharan she had crossed the mountains to the
oasis, where the sanctuary she was to visit stood on the northern side.
The old priests, who conducted the service of the Goddess, had received
the daughter of Rameses with respect, and undertook to restore her to
cleanness by degrees with the help of the water from the mountain-stream
which watered the palm-grove of the Amalekites, of incense-burning, of
pious sentences, and of a hundred other ceremonies. At last the Goddess
declared herself satisfied, and Bent-Anat wished to start for the north
and join her father, but the commander of the escort, a grey-headed
Ethiopian field officer--who had been promoted to a high grade by
Ani--explained to the Chamberlain that he had orders to detain the
princess in the oasis until her departure was authorized by the Regent
himself.
Bent-Anat now hoped for the support of her father, for her brother
Rameri, if no accident had occurred to him, might arrive any day. But in
vain.
The position of the ladies was particularly unpleasant, for they felt
that they had been caught in a trap, and were in fact prisoners. In
addition to this their Ethiopian escort had quarrelled with the natives
of the oasis, and every day skirmishes took place under their
eyes--indeed lately one of these fights had ended in bloodshed.
Bent-Anat was sick at heart. The two strong pinions of her soul, which
had always borne her so high above other women--her princely pride and
her bright frankness--seemed quite broken; she felt that she had loved
once, never to love again, and that she, who had sought none of her
happiness in dreams, but all in work, had bestowed the best half of her
identity on a vision. Pentaur's image took a more and more vivid, and at
the same time nobler and loftier, aspect in her mind; but he himself had
died for her, for only once had a letter reached them from Egypt, and
that was from Katuti to Nefert. After telling her that late intelligence
established the statement that her husband had taken a prince's daughter,
who had been made prisoner, to his tent as his share of the booty, she
added the information that the poet Pentaur, who had been condemned to
forced labor, had not reached the mountain mines, but, as was supposed,
had perished on the road.
Nefert still held to her immovable belief that her husband was faithful
to his love for her, and the magic charm of a nature made beautiful by
its perfect mastery over a deep and pure passion made itself felt in
these sad and heavy days.
It seemed as though she had changed parts with Bent-Anat. Always hopeful,
every day she foretold help from the king for the next; in truth she was
ready to believe that, when Mena learned from Rameri that she was with
the princess, he himself would come to fetch them if his duties allowed
it. In her hours of most lively expectation she could go so far as to
picture how the party in the tents would be divided, and who would bear
Bent-Anat company if Mena took her with him to his camp, on what spot of
the oasis it would be best to pitch it, and much more in the same vein.
Uarda could very well take her place with Bent-Anat, for the child had
developed and improved on the journey. The rich clothes which the
princess had given her became her as if she had never worn any others;
she could obey discreetly, disappear at the right moment, and, when she
was invited, chatter delightfully. Her laugh was silvery, and nothing
consoled Bent-Anat so much as to hear it.
Her songs too pleased the two friends, though the few that she knew were
grave and sorrowful. She had learned them by listening to old Hekt, who
often used to play on a lute in the dusk, and who, when she perceived
that Uarda caught the melodies, had pointed out her faults, and given her
advice.
"She may some day come into my hands," thought the witch, "and the better
she sings, the better she will be paid."
Bent-Anat too tried to teach Uarda, but learning to read was not easy to
the girl, however much pains she might take. Nevertheless, the princess
would not give up the spelling, for here, at the foot of the immense
sacred mountain at whose summit she gazed with mixed horror and longing,
she was condemned to inactivity, which weighed the more heavily on her in
proportion as those feelings had to be kept to herself which she longed
to escape from in work. Uarda knew the origin of her mistress's deep
grief, and revered her for it, as if it were something sacred. Often she
would speak of Pentaur and of his father, and always in such a manner
that the princess could not guess that she knew of their love.
When the prisoners were passing Bent-Anat's tent, she was sitting within
with Nefert, and talking, as had become habitual in the hours of dusk, of
her father, of Mena, Rameri, and Pentaur.
"He is still alive," asserted Nefert. "My mother, you see, says that no
one knows with certainty what became of him. If he escaped, he beyond a
doubt tried to reach the king's camp, and when we get there you will find
him with your father."
The princess looked sadly at the ground. Nefert looked affectionately at
her, and asked:
"Are you thinking of the difference in rank which parts you from the man
you have chosen?"
"The man to whom I offer my hand, I put in the rank of a prince," said
Bent-Anat. "But if I could set Pentaur on a throne, as master of the
world, he would still be greater and better than I."
"But your father?" asked Nefert doubtfully.
"He is my friend, he will listen to me and understand me. He shall know
everything when I see him; I know his noble and loving heart."
Both were silent for some time; then Bent-Anat spoke:
"Pray have lights brought, I want to finish my weaving."
Nefert rose, went to the door of the tent, and there met Uarda; she
seized Nefert's hand, and silently drew her out into the air.
"What is the matter, child? you are trembling," Nefert exclaimed.
"My father is here," answered Uarda hastily. "He is escorting some
prisoners from the mines of Mafkat. Among them there are two chained
together, and one of them--do not be startled--one of them is the poet
Pentaur. Stop, for God's sake, stop, and hear me. Twice before I have
seen my father when he has been here with convicts. To-day we must rescue
Pentaur; but the princess must know nothing of it, for if my plan
fails--"
"Child! girl!" interrupted Nefert eagerly. "How can I help you?"
"Order the steward to give the drivers of the gang a skin of wine in the
name of the princess, and out of Bent-Anat's case of medicines take the
phial which contains the sleeping draught, which, in spite of your wish,
she will not take. I will wait here, and I know how to use it."
Nefert immediately found the steward, and ordered him to follow Uarda
with a skin of wine. Then she went back to the princess's tent, and
opened the medicine case.
[A medicine case, belonging to a more ancient period than the reign
of Rameses, is preserved in the Berlin Museum.]
"What do you want?" asked Bent-Anat.
"A remedy for palpitation," replied Nefert; she quietly took the flask
she needed, and in a few minutes put it into Uarda's hand.
The girl asked the steward to open the wine-skin, and let her taste the
liquor. While she pretended to drink it, she poured the whole contents of
the phial into the wine, and then let Bent-Anat's bountiful present be
carried to the thirsty drivers.
She herself went towards the kitchen tent, and found a young Amalekite
sitting on the ground with the princess's servants. He sprang up as soon
as he saw the damsel.
"I have brought four fine partridges,"
[A brook springs on the peak called by the Sinaitic monks Mr. St.
Katherine, which is called the partridge's spring, and of which many
legends are told. For instance, God created it for the partridges
which accompanied the angels who carried St. Katharine of Alexandria
to her tomb on Sinai.]
he said, "which I snared myself, and I have brought this turquoise for
you--my brother found it in a rock. This stone brings good luck, and is
good for the eyes; it gives victory over our enemies, and keeps away bad
dreams."
"Thank you!" said Uarda, and taking the boy's hand, as he gave her the
sky-blue stone, she led him forward into the dusk.
"Listen, Salich" she said softly, as soon as she thought they were far
enough from the others. "You are a good boy, and the maids told me that
you said I was a star that had come down from the sky to become a woman.
No one says such a thing as that of any one they do not like very much;
and I know you like me, for you show me that you do every day by bringing
me flowers, when you carry the game that your father gets to the steward.
Tell me, will you do me and the princess too a very great service?
Yes?--and willingly? Yes? I knew you would! Now listen. A friend of the
great lady Bent-Anat, who will come here to-night, must be hidden for a
day, perhaps several days, from his pursuers. Can he, or rather can they,
for there will probably be two, find shelter and protection in your
father's house, which lies high up there on the sacred mountain?"
"Whoever I take to my father," said the boy, "will be made welcome; and
we defend our guests first, and then ourselves. Where are the strangers?"
"They will arrive in a few hours. Will you wait here till the moon is
well up?"
"Till the last of all the thousand moons that vanish behind the hills is
set."
"Well then, wait on the other side of the stream, and conduct the man to
your house, who repeats my name three times. You know my name?"
"I call you Silver-star, but the others call you Uarda."
"Lead the strangers to your hut, and, if they are received there by your
father, come back and tell me. I will watch for you here at the door of
the tent. I am poor, alas! and cannot reward you, but the princess will
thank your father as a princess should. Be watchful, Salich!"
The girl vanished, and went to the drivers of the gang of prisoners,
wished them a merry and pleasant evening, and then hastened back to
Bent-Anat, who anxiously stroked her abundant hair, and asked her why she
was so pale.
"Lie down," said the princess kindly, "you are feverish. Only look,
Nefert, I can see the blood coursing through the blue veins in her
forehead."
Meanwhile the drivers drank, praised the royal wine, and the lucky day on
which they drank it; and when Uarda's father suggested that the prisoners
too should have a mouthful one of his fellow soldiers cried: "Aye, let
the poor beasts be jolly too for once."
The red-beard filled a large beaker, and offered it first to a forger and
his fettered companion, then he approached Pentaur, and whispered:
"Do not drink any-keep awake!"
As he was going to warn the physician too, one of his companions came
between them, and offering his tankard to Nebsecht said:
"Here mumbler, drink; see him pull! His stuttering mouth is spry enough
for drinking!"
CHAPTER XXXV.
The hours passed gaily with the drinkers, then they grew more and more
sleepy.
Ere the moon was high in the heavens, while they were all sleeping, with
the exception of Kaschta and Pentaur, the soldier rose softly. He
listened to the breathing of his companions, then he approached the poet,
unfastened the ring which fettered his ankle to that of Nebsecht, and
endeavored to wake the physician, but in vain.
"Follow me!" cried he to the poet; he took Nebsecht on his shoulders, and
went towards the spot near the stream which Uarda had indicated. Three
times he called his daughter's name, the young Amalekite appeared, and
the soldier said decidedly: "Follow this man, I will take care of
Nebsecht."
"I will not leave him," said Pentaur. "Perhaps water will wake him." They
plunged him in the brook, which half woke him, and by the help of his
companions, who now pushed and now dragged him, he staggered and stumbled
up the rugged mountain path, and before midnight they reached their
destination, the hut of the Amalekite.
The old hunter was asleep, but his son aroused him, and told him what
Uarda had ordered and promised.
But no promises were needed to incite the worthy mountaineer to
hospitality. He received the poet with genuine friendliness, laid the
sleeping leech on a mat, prepared a couch for Pentaur of leaves and
skins, called his daughter to wash his feet, and offered him his own
holiday garment in the place of the rags that covered his body.
Pentaur stretched himself out on the humble couch, which to him seemed
softer than the silken bed of a queen, but on which nevertheless he could
not sleep, for the thoughts and fancies that filled his heart were too
overpowering and bewildering.
The stars still sparkled in the heavens when he sprang from his bed of
skins, lifted Nebsecht on to it, and rushed out into the open air. A
fresh mountain spring flowed close to the hunter's hut. He went to it,
and bathed his face in the ice-cold water, and let it flow over his body
and limbs. He felt as if he must cleanse himself to his very soul, not
only from the dust of many weeks, but from the rebellion and despondency,
the ignominy and bitterness, and the contact with vice and degradation.
When at last he left the spring, and returned to the little house, he
felt clean and fresh as on the morning of a feast-day at the temple of
Seti, when he had bathed and dressed himself in robes of snow-white
linen. He took the hunter's holiday dress, put it on, and went out of
doors again.
The enormous masses of rock lay dimly before him, like storm-clouds, and
over his head spread the blue heavens with their thousand stars.
The soothing sense of freedom and purity raised his soul, and the air
that he breathed was so fresh and light, that he sprang up the path to
the summit of the peak as if he were borne on wings or carried by
invisible hands.
A mountain goat which met him, turned from him, and fled bleating, with
his mate, to a steep peak of rock, but Pentaur said to the frightened
beasts:
"I shall do nothing to you--not I!"
He paused on a little plateau at the foot of the jagged granite peak of
the mountain. Here again he heard the murmur of a spring, the grass under
his feet was damp, and covered with a film of ice, in which were mirrored
the stars, now gradually fading. He looked up at the lights in the sky,
those never-tarrying, and yet motionless wanderers-away, to the mountain
heights around him-down, into the gorge below--and far off, into the
distance.
The dusk slowly grew into light, the mysterious forms of the
mountain-chain took shape and stood up with their shining points, the
light clouds were swept away like smoke. Thin vapors rose from the oasis
and the other valleys at his feet, at first in heavy masses, then they
parted and were wafted, as if in sport, above and beyond him to the sky.
Far below him soared a large eagle, the only living creature far or near.
A solemn and utter silence surrounded him, and when the eagle swooped
down and vanished from his sight, and the mist rolled lower into the
valley, he felt that here, alone, he was high above all other living
beings, and standing nearer to the Divinity.
He drew his breath fully and deeply, he felt as he had felt in the first
hours after his initiation, when for the first time he was admitted to
the holy of holies--and yet quite different.
Instead of the atmosphere loaded with incense, he breathed a light pure
air; and the deep stillness of the mountain solitude possessed his soul
more strongly than the chant of the priests.
Here, it seemed to him, that the Divine being would hear the lightest
murmur of his lips, though indeed his heart was so full of gratitude and
devotion that his impulse was to give expression to his mighty flow of
feelings in jubilant song. But his tongue seemed tied; he knelt down in
silence, to pray and to praise.
Then he looked at the panorama round him. Where was the east which in
Egypt was clearly defined by the long Nile range? Down there where it was
beginning to be light over the oasis. To his right hand lay the south,
the sacred birth-place of the Nile, the home of the Gods of the
Cataracts; but here flowed no mighty stream, and where was there a shrine
for the visible manifestation of Osiris and Isis; of Horns, born of a
lotus flower in a thicket of papyrus; of Rennut, the Goddess of
blessings, and of Zeta? To which of them could he here lift his hands in
prayer?
A faint breeze swept by, the mist vanished like a restless shade at the
word of the exorcist, the many-pointed crown of Sinai stood out in sharp
relief, and below them the winding valleys, and the dark colored rippling
surface of the lake, became distinctly visible.
All was silent, all untouched by the hand of man yet harmonized to one
great and glorious whole, subject to all the laws of the universe,
pervaded and filled by the Divinity.
He would fain have raised his hand in thanksgiving to Apheru, "the Guide
on the way;" but he dared not; and how infinitely small did the Gods now
seem to him, the Gods he had so often glorified to the multitude in
inspired words, the Gods that had no meaning, no dwelling-place, no
dominion but by the Nile.
"To ye," he murmured, "I cannot pray! Here where my eye can pierce the
distance, as if I myself were a god-here I feel the presence of the One,
here He is near me and with me--I will call upon Him and praise him!"
And throwing up his arms he cried aloud: "Thou only One! Thou only One!
Thou only One!" He said no more; but a tide of song welled up in his
breast as he spoke--a flood of thankfulness and praise.
When he rose from his knees, a man was standing by him; his eyes were
piercing and his tall figure had the dignity of a king, in spite of his
herdsman's dress.
"It is well for you!" said the stranger in deep slow accents. "You seek
the true God."
Pentaur looked steadily into the face of the bearded man before him.
"I know you now," he said. "You are Mesu.--[Moses]--I was but a boy when
you left the temple of Seti, but your features are stamped on my soul.
Ameni initiated me, as well as you, into the knowledge of the One God."
"He knows Him not," answered the other, looking thoughtfully to the
eastern horizon, which every moment grew brighter.
The heavens glowed with purple, and the granite peaks, each sheathed in a
film of ice, sparkled and shone like dark diamonds that had been dipped
in light.
The day-star rose, and Pentaur turned to it, and prostrated himself as
his custom was. When he rose, Mesu also was kneeling on the earth, but
his back was turned to the sun.
When he had ended his prayer, Pentaur said, "Why do you turn your back on
the manifestation of the Sun-god? We were taught to look towards him when
he approaches."
"Because I," said his grave companion, "pray to another God than yours.
The sun and stars are but as toys in his hand, the earth is his
foot-stool, the storm is his breath, and the sea is in his sight as the
drops on the grass."
"Teach me to know the Mighty One whom you worship!" exclaimed Pentaur.
"Seek him," said Mesu, "and you will find him; for you have passed
through misery and suffering, and on this spot on such a morning as this
was He revealed to me."
The stranger turned away, and disappeared behind a rock from the
enquiring gaze of Pentaur, who fixed his eyes on the distance.
Then he thoughtfully descended the valley, and went towards the hut of
the hunter. He stayed his steps when he heard men's voices, but the rocks
hid the speakers from his sight.
Presently he saw the party approaching; the son of his host, a man in
Egyptian dress, a lady of tall stature, near whom a girl tripped lightly,
and another carried in a litter by slaves.
Pentaur's heart beat wildly, for he recognized Bent-Anat and her
companions. They disappeared by the hunter's cottage, but he stood still,
breathing painfully, spell-bound to the cliff by which he stood--a long,
long time--and did not stir.
He did not hear a light step, that came near to him, and died away again,
he did not feel that the sun began to cast fierce beams on him, and on
the porphyry cliff behind him, he did not see a woman now coming quickly
towards him; but, like a deaf man who has suddenly acquired the sense of
hearing, he started when he heard his name spoken--by whose lips?
"Pentaur!" she said again; the poet opened his arms, and Bent-Anat fell
upon his breast; and he held her to him, clasped, as though he must hold
her there and never part from her all his life long.
Meanwhile the princess's companions were resting by the hunter's little
house.
"She flew into his arms--I saw it," said Uarda. "Never shall I forget it.
It was as if the bright lake there had risen up to embrace the mountain."
"Where do you find such fancies, child?" cried Nefert.
"In my heart, deep in my heart!" cried Uarda. "I am so unspeakably
happy."
"You saved him and rewarded him for his goodness; you may well be happy."
"It is not only that," said Uarda. "I was in despair, and now I see that
the Gods are righteous and loving."
Mena's wife nodded to her, and said with a sigh:
"They are both happy!"
"And they deserve to be!" exclaimed Uarda. "I fancy the Goddess of Truth
is like Bent-Anat, and there is not another man in Egypt like Pentaur."
Nefert was silent for awhile; then she asked softly: "Did you ever see
Mena?"
"How should I?" replied the girl. "Wait a little while, and your turn
will come. I believe that to-day I can read the future like a prophetess.
But let us see if Nebsecht lies there, and is still asleep. The draught I
put into the wine must have been strong."
"It was," answered Nefert, following her into the hut.
The physician was still lying on the bed, and sleeping with his mouth
wide open. Uarda knelt down by his side, looked in his face, and said:
"He is clever and knows everything, but how silly he looks now! I will
wake him."
She pulled a blade of grass out of the heap on which he was lying, and
saucily tickled his nose.
Nebsecht raised himself, sneezed, but fell back asleep again; Uarda
laughed out with her clear silvery tones. Then she blushed--"That is not
right," she said, "for he is good and generous."
She took the sleeper's hand, pressed it to her lips, and wiped the drops
from his brow. Then he awoke, opened his eyes, and muttered half in a
dream still:
"Uarda--sweet Uarda."
The girl started up and fled, and Nefert followed her.
When Nebsecht at last got upon his feet and looked round him, he found
himself alone in a strange house. He went out of doors, where he found
Bent-Anat's little train anxiously discussing things past and to come.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
The inhabitants of the oasis had for centuries been subject to the
Pharaohs, and paid them tribute; and among the rights granted to them in
return, no Egyptian soldier might cross their border and territory
without their permission.
The Ethiopians had therefore pitched Bent-Anat's tents and their own camp
outside these limits; but various transactions soon took place between
the idle warriors and the Amalekites, which now and then led to quarrels,
and which one evening threatened serious consequences, when some drunken
soldiers had annoyed the Amalekite women while they were drawing water.
This morning early one of the drivers on awaking had missed Pentaur and
Nebsecht, and he roused his comrades, who had been rejoined by Uarda's
father. The enraged guard of the gang of prisoners hastened to the
commandant of the Ethiopians, and informed him that two of his prisoners
had escaped, and were no doubt being kept in concealment by the
Amalekites.
The Amalekites met the requisition to surrender the fugitives, of whom
they knew nothing, with words of mockery, which so enraged the officer
that he determined to search the oasis throughout by force, and when he
found his emissaries treated with scorn he advanced with the larger part
of his troops on to the free territory of the Amalekites.
The sons of the desert flew to arms; they retired before the close order
of the Egyptian troops, who followed them, confident of victory, to a
point where the valley widens and divides on each side of a rocky hill.
Behind this the larger part of the Amalekite forces were lying in ambush,
and as soon as the unsuspicious Ethiopians had marched past the hill,
they threw themselves on the rear of the astonished invaders, while those
in front turned upon them, and flung lances and arrows at the soldiers,
of whom very few escaped.
Among them, however, was the commanding officer, who, foaming with rage
and only slightly wounded, put himself at the head of the remainder of
Bent-Anat's body-guard, ordered the escort of the prisoners also to
follow him, and once more advanced into the oasis.
That the princess might escape him had never for an instant occurred to
him, but as soon as the last of her keepers had disappeared, Bent-Anat
explained to her chamberlain and her companions that now or never was the
moment to fly.
All her people were devoted to her; they loaded themselves with the most
necessary things for daily use, took the litters and beasts of burden
with them, and while the battle was raging in the valley, Salich guided
them up the heights of Sinai to his father's house.
It was on the way thither that Uarda had prepared the princess for the
meeting she might expect at the hunter's cottage, and we have seen how
and where the princess found the poet.
Hand in hand they wandered together along the mountain path till they
came to a spot shaded by a projection of the rock, Pentaur pulled some
moss to make a seat, they reclined on it side by side, and there opened
their hearts, and told each other of their love and of their sufferings,
their wanderings and escapes.
At noonday the hunter's daughter came to offer them a pitcher full of
goat's milk, and Bent-Anat filled the gourd again and again for the man
she loved; and waiting upon him thus, her heart overflowed with pride,
and his with the humble desire to be permitted to sacrifice his blood and
life for her.
Hitherto they had been so absorbed in the present and the past, that they
had not given a thought to the future, and while they repeated a hundred
times what each had long since known, and yet could never tire of
hearing, they forgot the immediate changes which was hanging over them.
After their humble meal, the surging flood of feeling which, ever since
his morning devotions, had overwhelmed the poet's soul, grew calmer; he
had felt as if borne through the air, but now he set foot, so to speak,
on the earth again, and seriously considered with Bent-Anat what steps
they must take in the immediate future.
The light of joy, which beamed in their eyes, was little in accordance
with the grave consultation they held, as, hand in hand, they descended
to the hut of their humble host.
The hunter, guided by his daughter, met them half way, and with him a
tall and dignified man in the full armor of a chief of the Amalekites.
Both bowed and kissed the earth before Bent-Anat and Pentaur. They had
heard that the princess was detained in the oasis by force by the
Ethiopian troops, and the desert-prince, Abocharabos, now informed them,
not without pride, that the Ethiopian soldiers, all but a few who were
his prisoners, had been exterminated by his people; at the same time he
assured Pentaur, whom he supposed to be a son of the king, and Bent-Anat,
that he and his were entirely devoted to the Pharaoh Rameses, who had
always respected their rights.
"They are accustomed," he added, "to fight against the cowardly dogs of
Kush; but we are men, and we can fight like the lions of our wilds. If we
are outnumbered we hide like the goats in clefts of the rocks."
Bent-Anat, who was pleased with the daring man, his flashing eyes, his
aquiline nose, and his brown face which bore the mark of a bloody
sword-cut, promised him to commend him and his people to her father's
favor, and told him of her desire to proceed as soon as possible to the
king's camp under the protection of Pentaur, her future husband.
The mountain chief had gazed attentively at Pentaur and at Bent-Anat
while she spoke; then he said: "Thou, princess, art like the moon, and
thy companion is like the Sun-god Dusare. Besides Abocharabos," and he
struck his breast, "and his wife, I know no pair that are like you two. I
myself will conduct you to Hebron with some of my best men of war. But
haste will be necessary, for I must be back before the traitor who now
rules over Mizraim,--[The Semitic name of Egypt]--and who persecutes you,
can send fresh forces against us. Now you can go down again to the tents,
not a hen is missing. To-morrow before daybreak we will be off."
At the door of the hut Pentaur was greeted by the princess's companions.
The chamberlain looked at him not without anxious misgiving.
The king, when he departed, had, it is true, given him orders to obey
Bent-Anat in every particular, as if she were the queen herself; but her
choice of such a husband was a thing unheard of, and how would the king
take it?
Nefert rejoiced in the splendid person of the poet, and frequently
repeated that he was as like her dead uncle--the father of Paaker, the
chief-pioneer--as if he were his younger brother.
Uarda never wearied of contemplating him and her beloved princess. She no
longer looked upon him as a being of a higher order; but the happiness of
the noble pair seemed to her an embodied omen of happiness for Nefert's
love--perhaps too for her own.
Nebsecht kept modestly in the background. The headache, from which he had
long been suffering, had disappeared in the fresh mountain air. When
Pentaur offered him his hand he exclaimed:
"Here is an end to all my jokes and abuse! A strange thing is this fate
of men. Henceforth I shall always have the worst of it in any dispute
with you, for all the discords of your life have been very prettily
resolved by the great master of harmony, to whom you pray."
"You speak almost as if you were sorry; but every thing will turn out
happily for you too."
"Hardly!" replied the surgeon, "for now I see it clearly. Every man is a
separate instrument, formed even before his birth, in an occult workshop,
of good or bad wood, skilfully or unskilfully made, of this shape or the
other; every thing in his life, no matter what we call it, plays upon
him, and the instrument sounds for good or evil, as it is well or ill
made. You are an AEolian harp--the sound is delightful, whatever breath
of fate may touch it; I am a weather-cock--I turn whichever way the wind
blows, and try to point right, but at the same time I creak, so that it
hurts my own ears and those of other people. I am content if now and then
a steersman may set his sails rightly by my indication; though after all,
it is all the same to me. I will turn round and round, whether others
look at me or no--What does it signify?"
When Pentaur and the princess took leave of the hunter with many gifts,
the sun was sinking, and the toothed peaks of Sinai glowed like rubies,
through which shone the glow of half a world on fire.
The journey to the royal camp was begun the next morning. Abocharabos,
the Amalekite chief, accompanied the caravan, to which Uarda's father
also attached himself; he had been taken prisoner in the struggle with
the natives, but at Bent-Anat's request was set at liberty.
At their first halting place he was commanded to explain how he had
succeeded in having Pentaur taken to the mines, instead of to the
quarries of Chennu.
"I knew," said the soldier in his homely way, "from Uarda where this man,
who had risked his life for us poor folks, was to be taken, and I said to
myself--I must save him. But thinking is not my trade, and I never can
lay a plot. It would very likely have come to some violent act, that
would have ended badly, if I had not had a hint from another person, even
before Uarda told me of what threatened Pentaur. This is how it was.
"I was to convoy the prisoners, who were condemned to work in the Mafkat
mines, across the river to the place they start from. In the harbor of
Thebes, on the other side, the poor wretches were to take leave of their
friends; I have seen it a hundred times, and I never can get used to it,
and yet one can get hardened to most things! Their loud cries, and wild
howls are not the worst--those that scream the most I have always found
are the first to get used to their fate; but the pale ones, whose lips
turn white, and whose teeth chatter as if they were freezing, and whose
eyes stare out into vacancy without any tears--those go to my heart.
There was all the usual misery, both noisy and silent. But the man I was
most sorry for was one I had known for a long time; his name was Huni,
and he belonged to the temple of Amon, where he held the place of
overseer of the attendants on the sacred goat. I had often met him when I
was on duty to watch the laborers who were completing the great pillared
hall, and he was respected by every one, and never failed in his duty.
Once, however, he had neglected it; it was that very night which you all
will remember when the wolves broke into the temple, and tore the rams,
and the sacred heart was laid in the breast of the prophet Rui. Some one,
of course, must be punished, and it fell on poor Huni, who for his
carelessness was condemned to forced labor in the mines of Mafkat. His
successor will keep a sharp look out! No one came to see him off, though
I know he had a wife and several children. He was as pale as this cloth,
and was one of the sort whose grief eats into their heart. I went up to
him, and asked him why no one came with him. He had taken leave of them
at home, he answered, that his children might not see him mixed up with
forgers and murderers. Eight poor little brats were left unprovided for
with their mother, and a little while before a fire had destroyed
everything they possessed. There was not a crumb to stop their little
squalling mouths. He did not tell me all this straight out; a word fell
from him now and then, like dates from a torn sack. I picked it up bit by
bit, and when he saw I felt for him he grew fierce and said: 'They may
send me to the gold mines or cut me to pieces, as far as I am concerned,
but that the little ones should starve that--that,' and he struck his
forehead. Then I left him to say good bye to Uarda, and on the way I kept
repeating to myself 'that-that,' and saw before me the man and his eight
brats. If I were rich, thought I, there is a man I would help. When I got
to the little one there, she told me how much money the leech Nebsecht
had given her, and offered to give it me to save Pentaur; then it passed
through my mind--that may go to Hum's children, and in return he will let
himself be shipped off to Ethiopia. I ran to the harbor, spoke to the
man, found him ready and willing, gave the money to his wife, and at
night when the prisoners were shipped I contrived the exchange Pentaur
came with me on my boat under the name of the other, and Huni went to the
south, and was called Pentaur. I had not deceived the man into thinking
he would stop at Chennu. I told him he would be taken on to Ethiopia, for
it is always impossible to play a man false when you know it is quite
easy to do it. It is very strange! It is a real pleasure to cheat a
cunning fellow or a sturdy man, but who would take in a child or a sick
person? Huni certainly would have gone into the fire-pots of hell without
complaining, and he left me quite cheerfully. The rest, and how we got
here, you yourselves know. In Syria at this time of year you will suffer
a good deal from rain. I know the country, for I have escorted many
prisoners of war into Egypt, and I was there five years with the troops
of the great Mohar, father of the chief pioneer Paaker."
Bent-Anat thanked the brave fellow, and Pentaur and Nebsecht continued
the narrative.
"During the voyage," said Nebsecht, "I was uneasy about Pentaur, for I
saw how he was pining, but in the desert he seemed to rouse himself, and
often whispered sweet little songs that he had composed while we
marched."
"That is strange," said Bent-Anat, "for I also got better in the desert."
"Repeat the verses on the Beytharan plant," said Nebsecht.
"Do you know the plant?" asked the poet. "It grows here in many places;
here it is. Only smell how sweet it is if you bruise the fleshy stem and
leaves. My little verse is simple enough; it occurred to me like many
other songs of which you know all the best."
"They all praise the same Goddess," said Nebsecht laughing.
"But let us have the verses," said Bent-Anat. The poet repeated in a low
voice:
"How often in the desert I have seen
The small herb, Beytharan, in modest green!
In every tiny leaf and gland and hair
Sweet perfume is distilled, and scents the air.
How is it that in barren sandy ground
This little plant so sweet a gift has found?
And that in me, in this vast desert plain,
The sleeping gift of song awakes again?"
"Do you not ascribe to the desert what is due to love?" said Nefert.
"I owe it to both; but I must acknowledge that the desert is a wonderful
physician for a sick soul. We take refuge from the monotony that
surrounds us in our own reflections; the senses are at rest; and here,
undisturbed and uninfluenced from without, it is given to the mind to
think out every train of thought to the end, to examine and exhaust every
feeling to its finest shades. In the city, one is always a mere particle
in a great whole, on which one is dependent, to which one must
contribute, and from which one must accept something. The solitary
wanderer in the desert stands quite alone; he is in a manner freed from
the ties which bind him to any great human community; he must fill up the
void by his own identity, and seek in it that which may give his
existence significance and consistency. Here, where the present retires
into the background, the thoughtful spirit finds no limits however
remote."
"Yes; one can think well in the desert," said Nebsecht. "Much has become
clear to me here that in Egypt I only guessed at."
"What may that be?" asked Pentaur.
"In the first place," replied Nebsecht, "that we none of us really know
anything rightly; secondly that the ass may love the rose, but the rose
will not love the ass; and the third thing I will keep to myself, because
it is my secret, and though it concerns all the world no one would
trouble himself about it. My lord chamberlain, how is this? You know
exactly how low people must bow before the princess in proportion to
their rank, and have no idea how a back-bone is made."
"Why should I?" asked the chamberlain. "I have to attend to outward
things, while you are contemplating inward things; else your hair might
be smoother, and your dress less stained."
The travellers reached the old Cheta city of Hebron without accident;
there they took leave of Abocharabos, and under the safe escort of
Egyptian troops started again for the north. At Hebron Pentaur parted
from the princess, and Bent-Anat bid him farewell without complaining.
Uarda's father, who had learned every path and bridge in Syria,
accompanied the poet, while the physician Nebsecht remained with the
ladies, whose good star seemed to have deserted them with Pentaur's
departure, for the violent winter rains which fell in the mountains of
Samaria destroyed the roads, soaked through the tents, and condemned them
frequently to undesirable delays. At Megiddo they were received with high
honors by the commandant of the Egyptian garrison, and they were
compelled to linger here some days, for Nefert, who had been particularly
eager to hurry forward, was taken ill, and Nebsecht was obliged to forbid
her proceeding at this season.
Uarda grew pale and thoughtful, and Bent-Anat saw with anxiety that the
tender roses were fading from the cheeks of her pretty favorite; but when
she questioned her as to what ailed her she gave an evasive answer. She
had never either mentioned Rameri's name before the princess, nor shown
her her mother's jewel, for she felt as if all that had passed between
her and the prince was a secret which did not belong to her alone. Yet
another reason sealed her lips. She was passionately devoted to
Bent-Anat, and she told herself that if the princess heard it all, she
would either blame her brother or laugh at his affection as at a child's
play, and she felt as if in that case she could not love Rameri's sister
any more.
A messenger had been sent on from the first frontier station to the
king's camp to enquire by which road the princess, and her party should
leave Megiddo. But the emissary returned with a short and decided though
affectionate letter written by the king's own hand, to his daughter,
desiring her not to quit Megiddo, which was a safe magazine and arsenal
for the army, strongly fortified and garrisoned, as it commanded the
roads from the sea into North and Central Palestine. Decisive encounters,
he said, were impending, and she knew that the Egyptians always excluded
their wives and daughters from their war train, and regarded them as the
best reward of victory when peace was obtained.
While the ladies were waiting in Megiddo, Pentaur and his red-bearded
guide proceeded northwards with a small mounted escort, with which they
were supplied by the commandant of Hebron.
He himself rode with dignity, though this journey was the first occasion
on which he had sat on horseback. He seemed to have come into the world
with the art of riding born with him. As soon as he had learned from his
companions how to grasp the bridle, and had made himself familiar with
the nature of the horse, it gave him the greatest delight to tame and
subdue a fiery steed.
He had left his priest's robes in Egypt. Here he wore a coat of mail, a
sword, and battle-axe like a warrior, and his long beard, which had grown
during his captivity, now flowed down over his breast. Uarda's father
often looked at him with admiration, and said:
"One might think the Mohar, with whom I often travelled these roads, had
risen from the dead. He looked like you, he spoke like you, he called the
men as you do, nay he sat as you do when the road was too bad for his
chariot,
[The Mohars used chariots in their journeys. This is positively
known from the papyrus Anastasi I. which vividly describes the
hardships experienced by a Mohar while travelling through Syria.]
and he got on horseback, and held the reins."
None of Pentaur's men, except his red-bearded friend, was more to him
than a mere hired servant, and he usually preferred to ride alone, apart
from the little troop, musing on the past--seldom on the future--and
generally observing all that lay on his way with a keen eye. They soon
reached Lebanon; between it and and Lebanon a road led through the great
Syrian valley. It rejoiced him to see with his own eyes the distant
shimmer of the white snow-capped peaks, of which he had often heard
warriors talk.
The country between the two mountain ranges was rich and fruitful, and
from the heights waterfalls and torrents rushed into the valley. Many
villages and towns lay on his road, but most of them had been damaged in
the war. The peasants had been robbed of their teams of cattle, the
flocks had been driven off from the shepherds, and when a vine-dresser,
who was training his vine saw the little troop approaching, he fled to
the ravines and forests.
The traces of the plough and the spade were everywhere visible, but the
fields were for the most part not sown; the young peasants were under
arms, the gardens and meadows were trodden down by soldiers, the houses
and cottages plundered and destroyed, or burnt. Everything bore the trace
of the devastation of the war, only the oak and cedar forests lorded it
proudly over the mountain-slopes, planes and locust-trees grew in groves,
and the gorges and rifts of the thinly-wooded limestone hills, which
bordered the fertile low-land, were filled with evergreen brushwood.
At this time of year everything was moist and well-watered, and Pentaur
compared the country with Egypt, and observed how the same results were
attained here as there, but by different agencies. He remembered that
morning on Sinai, and said to himself again: "Another God than ours rules
here, and the old masters were not wrong who reviled godless strangers,
and warned the uninitiated, to whom the secret of the One must remain
unrevealed, to quit their home."
The nearer he approached the king's camp, the more vividly he thought of
Bent-Anat, and the faster his heart beat from time to time when he
thought of his meeting with the king. On the whole he was full of
cheerful confidence, which he felt to be folly, and which nevertheless he
could not repress.
Ameni had often blamed him for his too great diffidence and his want of
ambition, when he had willingly let others pass him by. He remembered
this now, and smiled and understood himself less than ever, for though he
resolutely repeated to himself a hundred times that he was a low-born,
poor, and excommunicated priest, the feeling would not be smothered that
he had a right to claim Bent-Anat for his own.
And if the king refused him his daughter--if he made him pay for his
audacity with his life?
Not an eyelash, he well knew, would tremble under the blow of the axe,
and he would die content; for that which she had granted him was his, and
no God could take it from him!
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
An admirer of the lovely color of his blue bruises
Called his daughter to wash his feet
Desert is a wonderful physician for a sick soul
He is clever and knows everything, but how silly he looks now
If it were right we should not want to hide ourselves
None of us really know anything rightly
One falsehood usually entails another
Refreshed by the whip of one of the horsemen
UARDA
Volume 9.
By Georg Ebers
CHAPTER XXXVII.
Once or twice Pentaur and his companions had had to defend themselves
against hostile mountaineers, who rushed suddenly upon them out of the
woods. When they were about two days' journey still from the end of their
march, they had a bloody skirmish with a roving band of men that seemed
to belong to a larger detachment of troops.
The nearer they got to Kadesh, the more familiar Kaschta showed himself
with every stock and stone, and he went forward to obtain information; he
returned somewhat anxious, for he had perceived the main body of the
Cheta army on the road which they must cross. How came the enemy here in
the rear of the Egyptian army? Could Rameses have sustained a defeat?
Only the day before they had met some Egyptian soldiers, who had told
them that the king was staying in the camp, and a great battle was
impending. This however could not have by this time been decided, and
they had met no flying Egyptians.
"If we can only get two miles farther without having to fight," said
Uarda's father. "I know what to do. Down below, there is a ravine, and
from it a path leads over hill and vale to the plain of Kadesh. No one
ever knew it but the Mohar and his most confidential servants. About
half-way there is a hidden cave, in which we have often stayed the whole
day long. The Cheta used to believe that the Mohar possessed magic
powers, and could make himself invisible, for when they lay in wait for
us on the way we used suddenly to vanish; but certainly not into the
clouds, only into the cave, which the Mohar used to call his Tuat. If you
are not afraid of a climb, and will lead your horse behind you for a mile
or two, I can show you the way, and to-morrow evening we will be at the
camp."
Pentaur let his guide lead the way; they came, without having occasion to
fight, as far as the gorge between the hills, through which a full and
foaming mountain torrent rushed to the valley. Kaschta dropped from his
horse, and the others did the same. After the horses had passed through
the water, he carefully effaced their tracks as far as the road, then for
about half a mile he ascended the valley against the stream. At last he
stopped in front of a thick oleander-bush, looked carefully about, and
lightly pushed it aside; when he had found an entrance, his companions
and their weary scrambling beasts followed him without difficulty, and
they presently found themselves in a grove of lofty cedars. Now they had
to squeeze themselves between masses of rock, now they labored up and
down over smooth pebbles, which offered scarcely any footing to the
horses' hoofs; now they had to push their way through thick brushwood,
and now to cross little brooks swelled by the winter-rains.
The road became more difficult at every step, then it began to grow dark,
and heavy drops of rain fell from the clouded sky.
"Make haste, and keep close to me," cried Kaschta. "Half an hour more,
and we shall be under shelter, if I do not lose my way."
Then a horse broke down, and with great difficulty was got up again; the
rain fell with increased violence, the night grew darker, and the soldier
often found himself brought to a stand-still, feeling for the path with
his hands; twice he thought he had lost it, but he would not give in till
he had recovered the track. At last he stood still, and called Pentaur to
come to him.
"Hereabouts," said he, "the cave must be; keep close to me--it is
possible that we may come upon some of the pioneer's people. Provisions
and fuel were always kept here in his father's time. Can you see me? Hold
on to my girdle, and bend your head low till I tell you you may stand
upright again. Keep your axe ready, we may find some of the Cheta or
bandits roosting there. You people must wait, we will soon call you to
come under shelter."
Pentaur closely followed his guide, pushing his way through the dripping
brushwood, crawling through a low passage in the rock, and at last
emerging on a small rocky plateau.
"Take care where you are going!" cried Kaschta. "Keep to the left, to the
right there is a deep abyss. I smell smoke! Keep your hand on your axe,
there must be some one in the cave. Wait! I will fetch the men as far as
this."
The soldier went back, and Pentaur listened for any sounds that might
come from the same direction as the smoke. He fancied he could perceive a
small gleam of light, and he certainly heard quite plainly, first a tone
of complaint, then an angry voice; he went towards the light, feeling his
way by the wall on his left; the light shone broader and brighter, and
seemed to issue from a crack in a door.
By this time the soldier had rejoined Pentaur, and both listened for a
few minutes; then the poet whispered to his guide:
"They are speaking Egyptian, I caught a few words."
"All the better," said Kaschta. "Paaker or some of his people are in
there; the door is there still, and shut. If we give four hard and three
gentle knocks, it will be opened. Can you understand what they are
saying?"
"Some one is begging to be set free," replied Pentaur, "and speaks of
some traitor. The other has a rough voice, and says he must follow his
master's orders. Now the one who spoke before is crying; do you hear? He
is entreating him by the soul of his father to take his fetters off. How
despairing his voice is! Knock, Kaschta--it strikes me we are come at the
right moment--knock, I say."
The soldier knocked first four times, then three times. A shriek rang
through the cave, and they could hear a heavy, rusty bolt drawn back, the
roughly hewn door was opened, and a hoarse voice asked:
"Is that Paaker?"
"No," answered the soldier, "I am Kaschta. Do not you know me again,
Nubi?"
The man thus addressed, who was Paaker's Ethiopian slave, drew back in
surprise.
"Are you still alive?" he exclaimed. "What brings you here?"
"My lord here will tell you," answered Kaschta as he made way for Pentaur
to enter the cave. The poet went up to the black man, and the light of
the fire which burned in the cave fell full on his face.
The old slave stared at him, and drew back in astonishment and terror. He
threw himself on the earth, howled like a dog that fawns at the feet of
his angry master, and cried out:
"He ordered it--Spirit of my master! he ordered it." Pentaur stood still,
astounded and incapable of speech, till he perceived a young man, who
crept up to him on his hands and feet, which were bound with thongs, and
who cried to him in a tone, in which terror was mingled with a tenderness
which touched Pentaur's very soul.
"Save me--Spirit of the Mohar! save me, father!" Then the poet spoke.
"I am no spirit of the dead," said he. "I am the priest Pentaur; and I
know you, boy; you are Horus, Paaker's brother, who was brought up with
me in the temple of Seti."
The prisoner approached him trembling, looked at him enquiringly and
exclaimed:
"Be you who you may, you are exactly like my father in person and in
voice. Loosen my bonds, and listen to me, for the most hideous,
atrocious, and accursed treachery threatens us the king and all."
Pentaur drew his sword, and cut the leather thongs which bound the young
man's hands and feet. He stretched his released limbs, uttering thanks to
the Gods, then he cried:
"If you love Egypt and the king follow me; perhaps there is yet time to
hinder the hideous deed, and to frustrate this treachery."
"The night is dark," said Kaschita, "and the road to the valley is
dangerous."
"You must follow me if it is to your death!" cried the youth, and,
seizing Pentaur's hand, he dragged him with him out of the cave.
As soon as the black slave had satisfied himself that Pentaur was the
priest whom he had seen fighting in front of the paraschites' hovel, and
not the ghost of his dead master, he endeavored to slip past Paaker's
brother, but Horus observed the manoeuvre, and seized him by his woolly
hair. The slave cried out loudly, and whimpered out:
"If thou dost escape, Paaker will kill me; he swore he would."
"Wait!" said the youth. He dragged the slave back, flung him into the
cave, and blocked up the door with a huge log which lay near it for that
purpose.
When the three men had crept back through the low passage in the rocks,
and found themselves once more in the open air, they found a high wind
was blowing.
"The storm will soon be over," said Horus. "See how the clouds are
driving! Let us have horses, Pentaur, for there is not a minute to be
lost."
The poet ordered Kaschta to summon the people to start but the soldier
advised differently.
"Men and horses are exhausted," he said, "and we shall get on very slowly
in the dark. Let the beasts feed for an hour, and the men get rested and
warm; by that time the moon will be up, and we shall make up for the
delay by having fresh horses, and light enough to see the road."
"The man is right," said Horus; and he led Kaschta to a cave in the
rocks, where barley and dates for the horses, and a few jars of wine, had
been preserved. They soon had lighted a fire, and while some of the men
took care of the horses, and others cooked a warm mess of victuals, Horus
and Pentaur walked up and down impatiently.
"Had you been long bound in those thongs when we came?" asked Pentaur.
"Yesterday my brother fell upon me," replied Horus. "He is by this time a
long way ahead of us, and if he joins the Cheta, and we do not reach the
Egyptian camp before daybreak, all is lost."
"Paaker, then, is plotting treason?"
"Treason, the foulest, blackest treason!" exclaimed the young man. "Oh,
my lost father!--"
"Confide in me," said Pentaur going up to the unhappy youth who had
hidden his face in his hands. "What is Paaker plotting? How is it that
your brother is your enemy?"
"He is the elder of us two," said Horus with a trembling voice. "When my
father died I had only a short time before left the school of Seti, and
with his last words my father enjoined me to respect Paaker as the head
of our family. He is domineering and violent, and will allow no one's
will to cross his; but I bore everything, and always obeyed him, often
against my better judgment. I remained with him two years, then I went to
Thebes, and there I married, and my wife and child are now living there
with my mother. About sixteen months afterwards I came back to Syria, and
we travelled through the country together; but by this time I did not
choose to be the mere tool of my brother's will, for I had grown prouder,
and it seemed to me that the father of my child ought not to be
subservient, even to his own brother. We often quarrelled, and had a bad
time together, and life became quite unendurable, when--about eight weeks
since--Paaker came back from Thebes, and the king gave him to understand
that he approved more of my reports than of his. From my childhood I have
always been softhearted and patient; every one says I am like my mother;
but what Paaker made me suffer by words and deeds, that is--I could
not--" His voice broke, and Pentaur felt how cruelly he had suffered;
then he went on again:
"What happened to my brother in Egypt, I do not know, for he is very
reserved, and asks for no sympathy, either in joy or in sorrow; but from
words he has dropped now and then I gather that he not only bitterly
hates Mena, the charioteer--who certainly did him an injury--but has some
grudge against the king too. I spoke to him of it at once, but only once,
for his rage is unbounded when he is provoked, and after all he is my
elder brother.
"For some days they have been preparing in the camp for a decisive
battle, and it was our duty to ascertain the position and strength of the
enemy; the king gave me, and not Paaker, the commission to prepare the
report. Early yesterday morning I drew it out and wrote it; then my
brother said he would carry it to the camp, and I was to wait here. I
positively refused, as Rameses had required the report at my hands, and
not at his. Well, he raved like a madman, declared that I had taken
advantage of his absence to insinuate myself into the king's favor, and
commanded me to obey him as the head of the house, in the name of my
father.
"I was sitting irresolute, when he went out of the cavern to call his
horses; then my eyes fell on the things which the old black slave was
tying together to load on a pack-horse--among them was a roll of writing.
I fancied it was my own, and took it up to look at it, when--what should
I find? At the risk of my life I had gone among the Cheta, and had found
that the main body of their army is collected in a cross-valley of the
Orontes, quite hidden in the mountains to the north-east of Kadesh; and
in the roll it was stated, in Paaker's own hand-writing, that that valley
is clear, and the way through it open, and well suited for the passage of
the Egyptian war-chariots; various other false details were given, and
when I looked further among his things, I found between the arrows in his
quiver, on which he had written 'death to Mena,' another little roll of
writing. I tore it open, and my blood ran cold when I saw to whom it was
addressed."
"To the king of the Cheta?" cried Pentaur in excitement.
"To his chief officer, Titure," continued Horus. "I was holding both the
rolls in my hand, when Paaker came back into the cave. 'Traitor!' I cried
out to him; but he flung the lasso, with which he had been catching the
stray horses, threw it round my neck, and as I fell choking on the
ground, he and the black man, who obeys him like a dog, bound me hand and
foot; he left the old negro to keep guard over me, took the rolls and
rode away. Look, there are the stars, and the moon will soon be up."
"Make haste, men!" cried Pentaur. "The three best horses for me, Horus,
and Kaschta; the rest remain here."
As the red-bearded soldier led the horses forward, the moon shone forth,
and within an hour the travellers had reached the plain; they sprang on
to the beasts and rode madly on towards the lake, which, when the sun
rose, gleamed before them in silvery green. As they drew near to it they
could discern, on its treeless western shore, black masses moving hither
and thither; clouds of dust rose up from the plain, pierced by flashes of
light, like the rays of the sun reflected from a moving mirror.
"The battle is begun!" cried Horus; and he fell sobbing on his horse's
neck.
"But all is not lost yet!" exclaimed the poet, spurring his horse to a
final effort of strength. His companions did the same, but first
Kaschta's horse fell under him, then Horus's broke down.
"Help may be given by the left wing!" cried Horus. "I will run as fast as
I can on foot, I know where to find them. You will easily find the king
if you follow the stream to the stone bridge. In the cross-valley about a
thousand paces farther north--to the northwest of our stronghold--the
surprise is to be effected. Try to get through, and warn Rameses; the
Egyptian pass-word is 'Bent-Anat,' the name of the king's favorite
daughter. But even if you had wings, and could fly straight to him, they
would overpower him if I cannot succeed in turning the left wing on the
rear of the enemy."
Pentaur galloped onwards; but it was not long before his horse too gave
way, and he ran forward like a man who runs a race, and shouted the
pass-word "Bent-Anat"--for the ring of her name seemed to give him vigor.
Presently he came upon a mounted messenger of the enemy; he struck him
down from his horse, flung himself into the saddle, and rushed on towards
the camp; as if he were riding to his wedding.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
During the night which had proved so eventful to our friends, much had
occurred in the king's camp, for the troops were to advance to the
long-anticipated battle before sunrise.
Paaker had given his false report of the enemy's movements to the Pharaoh
with his own hand; a council of war had been held, and each division had
received instructions as to where it was to take up its position. The
corps, which bore the name of the Sungod Ra, advanced from the south
towards Schabatun,
[Kadesh was the chief city of the Cheta, i. e. Aramaans, round
which the united forces of all the peoples of western Asia had
collected. There were several cities called Kadesh. That which
frequently checked the forces of Thotmes III. may have been
situated farther to the south; but the Cheta city of Kadesh, where
Rameses II. fought so hard a battle, was undoubtedly on the
Orontes, for the river which is depicted on the pylon of the
Ramesseum as parting into two streams which wash the walls of the
fortress, is called Aruntha, and in the Epos of Pentaur it is stated
that this battle took place at Kadesh by the Orontes. The name of
the city survives, at a spot just three miles north of the lake of
Riblah. The battle itself I have described from the Epos of
Pentaur, the national epic of Egypt. It ends with these words:
"This was written and made by the scribe Pentaur." It was so highly
esteemed that it is engraved in stone twice at Luqsor, and once at
Karnak. Copies of it on papyrus are frequent; for instance, papyrus
Sallier III. and papyrus Raifet--unfortunately much injured--in the
Louvre. The principal incident, the rescue of the king from the
enemy, is repeated at the Ramessetun at Thebes, and at Abu Simbel.
It was translated into French by Vicomte E. de Rouge. The camp of
Rameses is depicted on the pylons of Luqsor and the Ramesseum.]
so as to surround the lake on the east, and fall on the enemy's flank;
the corps of Seth, composed of men from lower Egypt, was sent on to Arnam
to form the centre; the king himself, with the flower of the
chariot-guard, proposed to follow the road through the valley, which
Paaker's report represented as a safe and open passage to the plain of
the Orontes. Thus, while the other divisions occupied the enemy, he could
cross the Orontes by a ford, and fall on the rear of the fortress of
Kadesh from the north-west. The corps of Amon, with the Ethiopian
mercenaries, were to support him, joining him by another route, which the
pioneer's false indications represented as connecting the line of
operations. The corps of Ptah remained as a reserve behind the left wing.
The soldiers had not gone to rest as usual; heavily, armed troops, who
bore in one hand a shield of half a man's height, and in the other a
scimitar, or a short, pointed sword, guarded the camp,
[Representations of Rameses' camp are preserved on the pylons of the
temple of Luxor and the Ramesseum.]
where numerous fires burned, round which crowded the resting warriors.
Here a wine-skin was passed from hand to hand, there a joint was roasting
on a wooden spit; farther on a party were throwing dice for the booty
they had won, or playing at morra. All was in eager activity, and many a
scuffle occurred amoung the excited soldiers, and had to be settled by
the camp-watch.
Near the enclosed plots, where the horses were tethered, the smiths were
busily engaged in shoeing the beasts which needed it, and in sharpening
the points of the lances; the servants of the chariot-guard were also
fully occupied, as the chariots had for the most part been brought over
the mountains in detached pieces on the backs of pack-horses and asses,
and now had to be put together again, and to have their wheels greased.
On the eastern side of the camp stood a canopy, under which the standards
were kept, and there numbers of priests were occupied in their office of
blessing the warriors, offering sacrifices, and singing hymns and
litanies. But these pious sounds were frequently overpowered by the loud
voices of the gamblers and revellers, by the blows of the hammers, the
hoarse braying of the asses, and the neighing of the horses. From time to
time also the deep roar of the king's war-lions
[See Diodorus, 1. 47. Also the pictures of the king rushing to the
fight.]
might be heard; these beasts followed him into the fight, and were now
howling for food, as they had been kept fasting to excite their fury.
In the midst of the camp stood the king's tent, surrounded by foot and
chariot-guards. The auxiliary troops were encamped in divisions according
to their nationality, and between them the Egyptian legions of
heavy-armed soldiers and archers. Here might be seen the black Ethiopian
with wooly matted hair, in which a few feathers were stuck--the handsome,
well proportioned "Son of the desert" from the sandy Arabian shore of the
Red Sea, who performed his wild war-dance flourishing his lance, with a
peculiar wriggle of his--hips pale Sardinians, with metal helmets and
heavy swords--light colored Libyans, with tattooed arms and
ostrich-feathers on their heads-brown, bearded Arabs, worshippers of the
stars, inseparable from their horses, and armed, some with lances, and
some with bows and arrows. And not less various than their aspect were
the tongues of the allied troops--but all obedient to the king's word of
command.
In the midst of the royal tents was a lightly constructed temple with the
statues of the Gods of Thebes, and of the king's forefathers; clouds of
incense rose in front of it, for the priests were engaged from the eve of
the battle until it was over, in prayers, and offerings to Amon, the king
of the Gods, to Necheb, the Goddess of victory, and to Menth, the God of
war.
The keeper of the lions stood by the Pharaoh's sleeping-tent, and the
tent, which served as a council chamber, was distinguished by the
standards in front of it; but the council-tent was empty and still, while
in the kitchen-tent, as well as in the wine-store close by, all was in a
bustle. The large pavilion, in which Rameses and his suite were taking
their evening meal, was more brilliantly lighted than all the others; it
was a covered tent, a long square in shape, and all round it were colored
lamps, which made it as light as day; a body-guard of Sardinians,
Libyans, and Egyptians guarded it with drawn swords, and seemed too
wholly absorbed with the importance of their office even to notice the
dishes and wine-jars, which the king's pages--the sons of the highest
families in Egypt--took at the tent-door from the cooks and butlers.
The walls and slanting roof of this quickly-built and movable
banqueting-hall, consisted of a strong, impenetrable carpet-stuff, woven
at Thebes, and afterwards dyed purple at Tanis by the Phoenicians. Saitic
artists had embroidered the vulture, one of the forms in which Necheb
appears, a hundred times on the costly material with threads of silver.
The cedar-wood pillars of the tent were covered with gold, and the ropes,
which secured the light erection to the tent-pegs, were twisted of silk,
and thin threads of silver. Seated round four tables, more than a hundred
men were taking their evening meal; at three of them the generals of the
army, the chief priests, and councillors, sat on light stools; at the
fourth, and at some distance from the others, were the princes of the
blood; and the king himself sat apart at a high table, on a throne
supported by gilt figures of Asiatic prisoners in chains. His table and
throne stood on a low dais covered with panther-skin; but even without
that Rameses would have towered above his companions. His form was
powerful, and there was a commanding aspect in his bearded face, and in
the high brow, crowned with a golden diadem adorned with the heads of two
Uraeus-snakes, wearing the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. A broad
collar of precious stones covered half his breast, the lower half was
concealed by a scarf or belt, and his bare arms were adorned with
bracelets. His finely-proportioned limbs looked as if moulded in bronze,
so smoothly were the powerful muscles covered with the shining
copper-colored skin. Sitting here among those who were devoted to him, he
looked with kind and fatherly pride at his blooming sons.
The lion was at rest--but nevertheless he was a lion, and terrible things
might be looked for when he should rouse himself, and when the mighty
hand, which now dispensed bread, should be clenched for the fight. There
was nothing mean in this man, and yet nothing alarming; for, if his eye
had a commanding sparkle, the expression of his mouth was particularly
gentle; and the deep voice which could make itself heard above the clash
of fighting men, could also assume the sweetest and most winning tones.
His education had not only made him well aware of his greatness and
power, but had left him also a genuine man, a stranger to none of the
emotions of the human soul.
Behind Pharaoh stood a man, younger than himself, who gave him his
wine-cup after first touching it with his own lips; this was Mena, the
king's charioteer and favorite companion. His figure was slight and yet
vigorous, supple and yet dignified, and his finely-formed features and
frank bright eyes were full at once of self-respect and of benevolence.
Such a man might fail in reflection and counsel, but would be admirable
as an honorable, staunch, and faithful friend.
Among the princes, Chamus sat nearest to the king;
[He is named Cha-em-Us on the monuments, i. e., 'splendor in
Thebes.' He became the Sam, or high-priest of Memphis. His mummy
was discovered by Mariette in the tomb of Apis at Saqqarah during ha
excavations of the Serapeum at Memphis.]
he was the eldest of his sons, and while still young had been invested
with the dignity of high-priest of Memphis. The curly-haired Rameri, who
had been rescued from imprisonment--into which he had fallen on his
journey from Egypt--had been assigned a place with the younger princes at
the lowest end of the table.
"It all sounds very threatening!" said the king. "But though each of you
croakers speaks the truth, your love for me dims your sight. In fact, all
that Rameri has told me, that Bent-Anat writes, that Mena's stud-keeper
says of Ani, and that comes through other channels--amounts to nothing
that need disturb us. I know your uncle--I know that he will make his
borrowed throne as wide as he possibly can; but when we return home he
will be quite content to sit on a narrow seat again. Great enterprises
and daring deeds are not what he excels in; but he is very apt at
carrying out a ready-made system, and therefore I choose him to be my
Regent."
"But Ameni," said Chamus, bowing respectfully to his father, "seems to
have stirred up his ambition, and to support him with his advice. The
chief of the House of Seti is a man of great ability, and at least half
of the priesthood are his adherents."
"I know it," replied the king. "Their lordships owe me a grudge because I
have called their serfs to arms, and they want them to till their acres.
A pretty sort of people they have sent me! their courage flies with the
first arrow. They shall guard the camp tomorrow; they will be equal to
that when it is made clear to their understanding that, if they let the
tents be taken, the bread, meat and wines-skins will also fall into the
hands of the enemy. If Kadesh is taken by storm, the temples of the Nile
shall have the greater part of the spoil, and you yourself, my young
high-priest of Memphis, shall show your colleagues that Rameses repays in
bushels that which he has taken in handfuls from the ministers of the
Gods."
"Ameni's disaffection," replied Chamus, "has a deeper root; thy mighty
spirit seeks and finds its own way--"
"But their lordships," interrupted Rameses, "are accustomed to govern the
king too, and I--I do not do them credit. I rule as vicar of the Lord of
the Gods, but--I myself am no God, though they attribute to me the honors
of a divinity; and in all humility of heart I willingly leave it to them
to be the mediators between the Immortals and me or my people. Human
affairs certainly I choose to manage in my own way. And now no more of
them. I cannot bear to doubt my friends, and trustfulness is so dear, so
essential to me, that I must indulge in it even if my confidence results
in my being deceived."
The king glanced at Mena, who handed him a golden cup--which he emptied.
He looked at the glittering beaker, and then, with a flash of his grave,
bright eyes, he added:
"And if I am betrayed--if ten such as Ameni and Ani entice my people into
a snare--I shall return home, and will tread the reptiles into dust."
His deep voice rang out the words, as if he were a herald proclaiming a
victorious deed of arms. Not a word was spoken, not a hand moved, when he
ceased speaking. Then he raised his cup, and said:
"It is well before the battle to uplift our hearts! We have done great
deeds; distant nations have felt our hand; we have planted our pillars of
conquest by their rivers, and graven the record of our deeds on their
rocks.
[Herodotus speaks of the pictures graven on the rocks in the
provinces conquered by Rameses II., in memory of his achievements.
He saw two, one of which remains on a rock near Beyrut.]
Your king is great above all kings, and it is through the might of the
Gods, and your valor my brave comrades. May to-morrow's fight bring us
new glory! May the Immortals soon bring this war to a close! Empty your
wine cups with me--To victory and a speedy return home in peace!"
"Victory! Victory! Long life to the Pharaoh! Strength and health!" cried
the guests of the king, who, as he descended from his throne, cried to
the drinkers:
"Now, rest till the star of Isis sets. Then follow me to prayer at the
altar of Amon, and then-to battle."
Fresh cries of triumph sounded through the room, while Rameses gave his
hand with a few words of encouragement to each of his sons in turn. He
desired the two youngest, Mernephtah and Rameri to follow him, and
quitting the banquet with them and Mena, he proceeded, under the escort
of his officers and guards, who bore staves before him with golden lilies
and ostrich-feathers, to his sleeping-tent, which was surrounded by a
corps d'elite under the command of his sons. Before entering the tent he
asked for some pieces of meat, and gave them with his own hand to his
lions, who let him stroke them like tame cats.
Then he glanced round the stable, patted the sleek necks and shoulders of
his favorite horses, and decided that 'Nura' and 'Victory to Thebes'
should bear him into the battle on the morrow.
[The horses driven by Rameses at the battle of Kadesh were in fact
thus named.]
When he had gone into the sleeping-tent, he desired his attendants to
leave him; he signed Mena to divest him of his ornaments and his arms,
and called to him his youngest sons, who were waiting respectfully at the
door of the tent.
"Why did I desire you to accompany me?" he asked them gravely. Both were
silent, and he repeated his question.
"Because," said Rameri at length, "you observed that all was not quite
right between us two."
"And because," continued the king, "I desire that unity should exist
between my children. You will have enemies enough to fight with
to-morrow, but friends are not often to be found, and are too often taken
from us by the fortune of war. We ought to feel no anger towards the
friend we may lose, but expect to meet him lovingly in the other world.
Speak, Rameri, what has caused a division between you?"
"I bear him no ill-will," answered Rameri. "You lately gave me the sword
which Mernephtah has there stuck in his belt, because I did my duty well
in the last skirmish with the enemy. You know we both sleep in the same
tent, and yesterday, when I drew my sword out of its sheath to admire the
fine work of the blade, I found that another, not so sharp, had been put
in its place."
"I had only exchanged my sword for his in fun," interrupted Mernephtah.
"But he can never take a joke, and declared I want to wear a prize that I
had not earned; he would try, he said, to win another and then--"
"I have heard enough; you have both done wrong," said the King. "Even in
fun, Mernephtah, you should never cheat or deceive. I did so once, and I
will tell you what happened, as a warning.
"My noble mother, Tuaa, desired me, the first time I went into
Fenchu--[Phoenicia: on monuments of the 18th dynasty.]--to bring her a
pebble from the shore near Byblos, where the body of Osiris was washed.
As we returned to Thebes, my mother's request returned to my mind; I was
young and thoughtless--I picked up a stone by the way-side, took it with
me, and when she asked me for the remembrance from Byblos I silently gave
her the pebble from Thebes. She was delighted, she showed it to her
brothers and sisters, and laid it by the statues of her ancestors; but I
was miserable with shame and penitence, and at last I secretly took away
the stone, and threw it into the water. All the servants were called
together, and strict enquiry was made as to the theft of the stone; then
I could hold out no longer, and confessed everything. No one punished me,
and yet I never suffered more severely; from that time I have never
deviated from the exact truth even in jest. Take the lesson to heart,
Mernephtah--you, Rameri, take back your sword, and, believe me, life
brings us so many real causes of vexation, that it is well to learn early
to pass lightly over little things if you do not wish to become a surly
fellow like the pioneer Paaker; and that seems far from likely with a
gay, reckless temper like yours. Now shake hands with each other."
The young princes went up to each other, and Rameri fell on his brother's
neck and kissed him. The king stroked their heads. "Now go in peace," he
said, "and to-morrow you shall both strive to win a fresh mark of honor."
When his sons had left the tent, Rameses turned to his charioteer and
said: "I have to speak to you too before the battle. I can read your soul
through your eyes, and it seems to me that things have gone wrong with
you since the keeper of your stud arrived here. What has happened in
Thebes?" Mena looked frankly, but sadly at the king:
"My mother-in-law Katuti," he said, "is managing my estate very badly,
pledging the land, and selling the cattle."
"That can be remedied," said Rameses kindly. "You know I promised to
grant you the fulfilment of a wish, if Nefert trusted you as perfectly as
you believe. But it appears to me as if something more nearly concerning
you than this were wrong, for I never knew you anxious about money and
lands. Speak openly! you know I am your father, and the heart and the eye
of the man who guides my horses in battle, must be open without reserve
to my gaze."
Mena kissed the king's robe; then he said:
"Nefert has left Katuti's house, and as thou knowest has followed thy
daughter, Bent-Anat, to the sacred mountain, and to Megiddo."
"I thought the change was a good one," replied Rameses. "I leave
Bent-Anat in the care of Bent-Anat, for she needs no other guardianship,
and your wife can have no better protector than Bent-Anat."
"Certainly not!" exclaimed Mena with sincere emphasis. "But before they
started, miserable things occurred. Thou knowest that before she married
me she was betrothed to her cousin, the pioneer Paaker, and he, during
his stay in Thebes, has gone in and out of my house, has helped Katuti
with an enormous sum to pay the debts of my wild brother-in-law, and-as
my stud-keeper saw with his own eyes-has made presents of flowers to
Nefert."
The king smiled, laid his hand on Mena's shoulder, and said, as he looked
in his face: "Your wife will trust you, although you take a strange woman
into your tent, and you allow yourself to doubt her because her cousin
gives her some flowers! Is that wise or just? I believe you are jealous
of the broad-shouldered ruffian that some spiteful Wight laid in the nest
of the noble Mohar, his father."
"No, that I am not," replied Mena, "nor does any doubt of Nefert disturb
my soul; but it torments me, it nettles me, it disgusts me, that Paaker
of all men, whom I loathe as a venomous spider, should look at her and
make her presents under my very roof."
"He who looks for faith must give faith," said the king. "And must not I
myself submit to accept songs of praise from the most contemptible
wretches? Come--smooth your brow; think of the approaching victory, of
our return home, and remember that you have less to forgive Paaker than
he to forgive you. Now, pray go and see to the horses, and to-morrow
morning let me see you on my chariot full of cheerful courage--as I love
to see you."
Mena left the tent, and went to the stables; there he met Rameri, who was
waiting to speak to him. The eager boy said that he had always looked up
to him and loved him as a brilliant example, but that lately he had been
perplexed as to his virtuous fidelity, for he had been informed that Mena
had taken a strange woman into his tent--he who was married to the
fairest and sweetest woman in Thebes.
"I have known her," he concluded, "as well as if I were her brother; and
I know that she would die if she heard that you had insulted and
disgraced her. Yes, insulted her; for such a public breach of faith is an
insult to the wife of an Egyptian. Forgive my freedom of speech, but who
knows what to-morrow may bring forth--and I would not for worlds go out
to battle, thinking evil of you."
Mena let Rameri speak without interruption, and then answered:
"You are as frank as your father, and have learned from him to hear the
defendant before you condemn him. A strange maiden, the daughter of the
king of the Danaids,
[A people of the Greeks at the time of the Trojan war. They are
mentioned among the nations of the Mediterranean allied against
Rameses III. The Dardaneans were inhabitants of the Trojan
provinces of Dardanin, and whose name was used for the Trojans
generally.]
lives in my tent, but I for months have slept at the door of your
father's, and I have not once entered my own since she has been there.
Now sit down by me, and let me tell you how it all happened. We had
pitched the camp before Kadesh, and there was very little for me to do,
as Rameses was still laid up with his wound, so I often passed my time in
hunting on the shores of the lake. One day I went as usual, armed only
with my bow and arrow, and, accompanied by my grey-hounds, heedlessly
followed a hare; a troop of Danaids fell upon me, bound me with cords,
and led me into their camp.
[Grey-hounds, trained to hunt hares, are represented in the most
ancient tombs, for instance, the Mastaba at Meydum, belonging to the
time of Snefru (four centuries B. C.).]
There I was led before the judges as a spy, and they had actually
condemned me, and the rope was round my neck, when their king came up,
saw me, and subjected me to a fresh examination. I told him the facts at
full length--how I had fallen into the hands of his people while
following up my game, and not as an enemy, and he heard me favorably, and
granted me not only life but freedom. He knew me for a noble, and treated
me as one, inviting me to feed at his own table, and I swore in my heart,
when he let me go, that I would make him some return for his generous
conduct.
"About a month after, we succeeded in surprising the Cheta position, and
the Libyan soldiers, among other spoil, brought away the Danaid king's
only daughter. I had behaved valiantly, and when we came to the division
of the spoils Rameses allowed me to choose first. I laid my hand on the
maid, the daughter of my deliverer and host, I led her to my tent, and
left her there with her waiting-women till peace is concluded, and I can
restore her to her father."
"Forgive my doubts!" cried Rameri holding out his hand. "Now I understand
why the king so particularly enquired whether Nefert believed in your
constancy to her."
"And what was your answer?" asked Mena.
"That she thinks of you day and night, and never for an instant doubted
you. My father seemed delighted too, and he said to Chamus: 'He has won
there!"
"He will grant me some great favor," said Mena in explanation, "if, when
she hears I have taken a strange maiden to my tent her confidence in me
is not shaken, Rameses considers it simply impossible, but I know that I
shall win. Why! she must trust me."
CHAPTER XXXIX.
Before the battle,
[The battle about to be described is taken entirely from the epos of
Pentaur.]
prayers were offered and victims sacrificed for each division of the
army. Images of the Gods were borne through the ranks in their festal
barks, and miraculous relics were exhibited to the soldiers; heralds
announced that the high-priest had found favorable omens in the victims
offered by the king, and that the haruspices foretold a glorious victory.
Each Egyptian legion turned with particular faith to the standard which
bore the image of the sacred animal or symbol of the province where it
had been levied, but each soldier was also provided with charms and
amulets of various kinds; one had tied to his neck or arm a magical text
in a little bag, another the mystic preservative eye, and most of them
wore a scarabaeus in a finger ring. Many believed themselves protected by
having a few hairs or feathers of some sacred animal, and not a few put
themselves under the protection of a living snake or beetle carefully
concealed in a pocket of their apron or in their little provision-sack.
When the king, before whom were carried the images of the divine Triad of
Thebes, of Menth, the God of War and of Necheb, the Goddess of Victory,
reviewed the ranks, he was borne in a litter on the shoulders of
twenty-four noble youths; at his approach the whole host fell on their
knees, and did not rise till Rameses, descending from his position, had,
in the presence of them all, burned incense, and made a libation to the
Gods, and his son Chamus had delivered to him, in the name of the
Immortals, the symbols of life and power. Finally, the priests sang a
choral hymn to the Sun-god Ra, and to his son and vicar on earth, the
king.
Just as the troops were put in motion, the paling stars appeared in the
sky, which had hitherto been covered with thick clouds; and this
occurrence was regarded as a favorable omen, the priests declaring to the
army that, as the coming Ra had dispersed the clouds, so the Pharaoh
would scatter his enemies.
With no sound of trumpet or drum, so as not to arouse the enemy, the
foot-soldiers went forward in close order, the chariot-warriors, each in
his light two-wheeled chariot drawn by two horses, formed their ranks,
and the king placed himself at their head. On each side of the gilt
chariot in which he stood, a case was fixed, glittering with precious
stones, in which were his bows and arrows. His noble horses were richly
caparisoned; purple housings, embroidered with turquoise beads, covered
their backs and necks, and a crown-shaped ornament was fixed on their
heads, from which fluttered a bunch of white ostrich-feathers. At the end
of the ebony pole of the chariot, were two small padded yokes, which
rested on the necks of the horses, who pranced in front as if playing
with the light vehicle, pawed the earth with their small hoofs, and
tossed and curved their slender necks.
The king wore a shirt of mail,
[The remains of a shirt of mail, dating from the time of Scheschenk
I. (Sesonchis), who belonged to the 22d dynasty, is in the British
Museum. It is made of leather, on which bronze scales are
fastened.]
over which lay the broad purple girdle of his apron, and on his head was
the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt; behind him stood Mena, who, with his
left hand, tightly held the reins, and with his right the shield which
was to protect his sovereign in the fight.
The king stood like a storm-proof oak, and Mena by his side like a
sapling ash.
The eastern horizon was rosy with the approaching sun-rise when they
quitted the precincts of the camp; at this moment the pioneer Paaker
advanced to meet the king, threw himself on the ground before him, kissed
the earth, and, in answer to the king's question as to why he had come
without his brother, told him that Horus was taken suddenly ill. The
shades of dawn concealed from the king the guilty color, which changed to
sallow paleness, on the face of the pioneer--unaccustomed hitherto to
lying and treason.
"How is it with the enemy?" asked Rameses.
"He is aware," replied Paaker, "that a fight is impending, and is
collecting numberless hosts in the camps to the south and east of the
city. If thou could'st succeed in falling on the rear from the north of
Kadesh, while the foot soldiers seize the camp of the Asiatics from the
south, the fortress will be thine before night. The mountain path that
thou must follow, so as not to be discovered, is not a bad one."
"Are you ill as well as your brother, man?" asked the king. "Your voice
trembles."
"I was never better," answered the Mohar.
"Lead the way," commanded the king, and Paaker obeyed. They went on in
silence, followed by the vast troop of chariots through the dewy morning
air, first across the plain, and then into the mountain range. The corps
of Ra, armed with bows and arrows, preceeded them to clear the way; they
crossed the narrow bed of a dry torrent, and then a broad valley opened
before them, extending to the right and left and enclosed by ranges of
mountains.
"The road is good," said Rameses, turning to Mena. "The Mohar has learned
his duties from his father, and his horses are capital. Now he leads the
way, and points it out to the guards, and then in a moment he is close to
us again."
"They are the golden-bays of my breed," said Mena, and the veins started
angrily in his forehead. "My stud-master tells me that Katuti sent them
to him before his departure. They were intended for Nefert's chariot, and
he drives them to-day to defy and spite me."
"You have the wife--let the horses go," said Rameses soothingly.
Suddenly a blast of trumpets rang through the morning air; whence it came
could not be seen, and yet it sounded close at hand.
Rameses started up and took his battle-axe from his girdle, the horses
pricked their ears, and Mena exclaimed:
"Those are the trumpets of the Cheta! I know the sound."
A closed wagon with four wheels in which the king's lions were conveyed,
followed the royal chariot. "Let loose the lions!" cried the king, who
heard an echoing war cry, and soon after saw the vanguard which had
preceded him, and which was broken up by the chariots of the enemy,
flying towards him down the valley again.
The wild beasts shook their manes and sprang in front of their master's
chariot with loud roars. Mena lashed his whip, the horses started forward
and rushed with frantic plunges towards the fugitives, who however could
not be brought to a standstill, or rallied by the king's voice--the enemy
were close upon them, cutting them down.
"Where is Paaker?" asked the king. But the pioneer had vanished as
completely as if the earth had swallowed him and his chariot.
The flying Egyptians and the death-dealing chariots of the enemy came
nearer and nearer, the ground trembled, the tramp of hoofs and the roar
of wheels sounded louder and louder, like the roll of a rapidly
approaching storm.
Then Rameses gave out a war cry, that rang back from the cliffs on the
right hand and on the left like the blast of a trumpet; his chariot-guard
joined in the shout--for an instant the flying Egyptians paused, but only
to rush on again with double haste, in hope of escape and safety:
suddenly the war-cry of the enemy was heard behind the king, mingling
with the trumpet-call of the Cheta, and out from a cross valley, which
the king had passed unheeded by--and into which Paaker had
disappeared--came an innumerable host of chariots which, before the king
could retreat, had broken through the Egyptian ranks, and cut him off
from the body of his army. Behind him he could hear the roar and shock of
the battle, in front of him he saw the fugitives, the fallen, and the
enemy growing each instant in numbers and fury. He saw the whole danger,
and drew up his powerful form as if to prove whether it were an equal
match for such a foe. Then, raising his voice to such a pitch, that it
sounded above the cries and groans of the fighting men, the words of
command, the neighing of the horses, the crash of overthrown chariots,
the dull whirr of lances and swords, their heavy blows on shields and
helmets, and the whole bewildering tumult of the battle--with a loud
shout he drew his bow, and his first arrow pierced a Cheta chief.
His lions sprang forward, and carried confusion into the hosts that were
crowding down upon him, for many of their horses became unmanageable at
the roar of the furious brutes, overthrew the chariots, and so hemmed the
advance of the troops in the rear. Rameses sent arrow after arrow, while
Mena covered him with the shield from the shots of the enemy. His horses
meanwhile had carried him forward, and he could fell the foremost of the
Asiatics with his battle-axe; close by his side fought Rameri and three
other princes; in front of him were the lions.
The press was fearful, and the raging of the battle wild and deafening,
like the roar of the surging ocean when it is hurled by a hurricane
against a rocky coast.
Mena seemed to be in two places at once, for, while he guided the horses
forwards, backwards, or to either hand, as the exigences of the position
demanded, not one of the arrows shot at the king touched him. His eye was
everywhere, the shield always ready, and not an eyelash of the young hero
trembled, while Rameses, each moment more infuriated, incited his lions
with wild war-cries, and with flashing eyes advanced farther and farther
into the enemy's ranks.
Three arrows aimed, not at the king but at Mena himself, were sticking in
the charioteer's shield, and by chance he saw written on the shaft of one
of them the words "Death to Mena."
A fourth arrow whizzed past him. His eye followed its flight, and as he
marked the spot whence it had come, a fifth wounded his shoulder, and he
cried out to the king:
"We are betrayed! Look over there! Paaker is fighting with the Cheta."
Once more the Mohar had bent his bow, and came so near to the king's
chariot that he could be heard exclaiming in a hoarse voice, as he let
the bowstring snap, "Now I will reckon with you--thief! robber! My bride
is your wife, but with this arrow I will win Mena's widow."
The arrow cut through the air, and fell with fearful force on the
charioteer's helmet; the shield fell from his grasp, and he put his hand
to his head, feeling stunned; he heard Paaker's laugh of triumph, he felt
another of his enemy's arrows cut his wrist, and, beside himself with
rage, he flung away the reins, brandished his battle-axe, and forgetting
himself and his duty, sprang from the chariot and rushed upon Paaker. The
Mohar awaited him with uplifted sword; his lips were white, his eyes
bloodshot, his wide nostrils trembled like those of an over-driven horse,
and foaming and hissing he flew at his mortal foe. The king saw the two
engaged in a struggle, but he could not interfere, for the reins which
Mena had dropped were dragging on the ground, and his ungoverned horses,
following the lions, carried him madly onwards.
Most of his comrades had fallen, the battle raged all round him, but
Rameses stood as firm as a rock, held the shield in front of him, and
swung the deadly battle-axe; he saw Rameri hastening towards him with his
horses, the youth was fighting like a hero, and Rameses called out to
encourage him: "Well done! a worthy grandson of Seti!"
"I will win a new sword!" cried the boy, and he cleft the skull of one of
his antagonists. But he was soon surrounded by the chariots of the enemy;
the king saw the enemy pull down the young prince's horses, and all his
comrades--among whom were many of the best warriors--turn their horses in
flight.
Then one of the lions was pierced by a lance, and sank with a dying roar
of rage and pain that was heard above all the tumult. The king himself
had been grazed by an arrow, a sword stroke had shivered his shield, and
his last arrow had been shot away.
Still spreading death around him, he saw death closing in upon him, and,
without giving up the struggle, he lifted up his voice in fervent prayer,
calling on Amon for support and rescue.
While thus in the sorest need he was addressing himself to the Lords of
Heaven, a tall Egyptian suddenly appeared in the midst of the struggle
and turmoil of the battle, seized the reins, and sprang into the chariot
behind the king, to whom he bowed respectfully. For the first time
Rameses felt a thrill of fear. Was this a miracle? Had Amon heard his
prayer?
He looked half fearfully round at his new charioteer, and when he fancied
he recognized the features of the deceased Mohar, the father of the
traitor Paaker, he believed that Amon had assumed this aspect, and had
come himself to save him.
"Help is at hand!" cried his new companion. "If we hold our own for only
a short time longer, thou art saved, and victory is ours."
Then once more Rameses raised his war-cry, felled a Cheta, who was
standing close to him to the ground, with a blow on his skull, while the
mysterious supporter by his side, who covered him with the shield, on his
part also dealt many terrible strokes.
Thus some long minutes passed in renewed strife; then a trumpet sounded
above the roar of the battle, and this time Rameses recognized the call
of the Egyptians; from behind a low ridge on his right rushed some
thousands of men of the foot-legion of Ptah who, under the command of
Horus, fell upon the enemy's flank. They saw their king, and the danger
he was in. They flung themselves with fury on the foes that surrounded
him, dealing death as they advanced, and putting the Cheta to flight, and
soon Rameses saw himself safe, and protected by his followers.
But his mysterious friend in need had vanished. He had been hit by an
arrow, and had fallen to the earth--a quite mortal catastrophe; but
Rameses still believed that one of the Immortals had come to his rescue.
But the king granted no long respite to his horses and his fighting-men;
he turned to go back by the way by which he had come, fell upon the
forces which divided him from the main army, took them in the rear while
they were still occupied with his chariot-brigade which was already
giving way, and took most of the Asiatics prisoners who escaped the
arrows and swords of the Egyptians. Having rejoined the main body of the
troops, he pushed forwards across the plain where the Asiatic horse and
chariot-legions were engaged with the Egyptian swordsmen, and forced the
enemy back upon the river Orontes and the lake of Kadesh. Night-fall put
an end to the battle, though early next morning the struggle was renewed.
Utter discouragement had fallen upon the Asiatic allies, who had gone
into battle in full security of victory; for the pioneer Paaker had
betrayed his king into their hands.
When the Pharaoh had set out, the best chariot-warriors of the Cheta were
drawn up in a spot concealed by the city, and sent forward against
Rameses through the northern opening of the valley by which he was to
pass, while other troops of approved valor, in all two thousand five
hundred chariots, were to fall upon him from a cross valley where they
took up their position during the night.
These tactics had been successfully carried out, and notwithstanding the
Asiatics had suffered a severe defeat--besides losing some of their
noblest heroes, among them Titure their Chancellor, and Chiropasar, the
chronicler of the Cheta king, who could wield the sword as effectively as
the pen, and who, it was intended, should celebrate the victory of the
allies, and perpetuate its glory to succeeding generations. Rameses had
killed one of these with his own hands, and his unknown companion the
other, and besides these many other brave captains of the enemy's troops.
The king was greeted as a god, when he returned to the camp, with shouts
of triumph and hymns of praise.
Even the temple-servants, and the miserable troops from Upper
Egypt-ground down by the long war, and bought over by Ani--were carried
away by the universal enthusiasm, and joyfully hailed the hero and king
who had successfully broken the stiff necks of his enemies.
The next duty was to seek out the dead and wounded; among the latter was
Mena; Rameri also was missing, but news was brought next day that he had
fallen into the hands of the enemy, and he was immediately exchanged for
the princess who had been sheltered in Mena's tent.
Paaker had disappeared; but the bays which he had driven into the battle
were found unhurt in front of his ruined and blood-sprinkled chariot.
The Egyptians were masters of Kadesh, and Chetasar, the king of the
Cheta, sued to be allowed to treat for peace, in his own name and in that
of his allies; but Rameses refused to grant any terms till he had
returned to the frontier of Egypt. The conquered peoples had no choice,
and the representative of the Cheta king--who himself was wounded--and
twelve princes of the principal nations who had fought against Rameses,
were forced to follow his victorious train. Every respect was shown them,
and they were treated as the king himself, but they were none the less
his prisoners. The king was anxious to lose no time, for sad suspicion
filled his heart; a shadow hitherto unknown to his bright and genial
nature had fallen upon his spirit.
This was the first occasion on which one of his own people had betrayed
him to the enemy. Paaker's deed had shaken his friendly confidence, and
in his petition for peace the Cheta prince had intimated that Rameses
might find much in his household to be set to rights--perhaps with a
strong hand.
The king felt himself more than equal to cope with Ani, the priests, and
all whom he had left in Egypt; but it grieved him to be obliged to feel
any loss of confidence, and it was harder to him to bear than any reverse
of fortune. It urged him to hasten his return to Egypt.
There was another thing which embittered his victory. Mena, whom he loved
as his own son, who understood his lightest sign, who, as soon as he
mounted his chariot, was there by his side like a part of himself--had
been dismissed from his office by the judgment of the commander-in-chief,
and no longer drove his horses. He himself had been obliged to confirm
this decision as just and even mild, for that man was worthy of death who
exposed his king to danger for the gratification of his own revenge.
Rameses had not seen Mena since his struggle with Paaker, but he listened
anxiously to the news which was brought him of the progress of his sorely
wounded officer.
The cheerful, decided, and practical nature of Rameses was averse to
every kind of dreaminess or self-absorption, and no one had ever seen
him, even in hours of extreme weariness, give himself up to vague and
melancholy brooding; but now he would often sit gazing at the ground in
wrapt meditation, and start like an awakened sleeper when his reverie was
disturbed by the requirements of the outer world around him. A hundred
times before he had looked death in the face, and defied it as he would
any other enemy, but now it seemed as though he felt the cold hand of the
mighty adversary on his heart. He could not forget the oppressive sense
of helplessness which had seized him when he had felt himself at the
mercy of the unrestrained horses, like a leaf driven by the wind, and
then suddenly saved by a miracle.
A miracle? Was it really Amon who had appeared in human form at his call?
Was he indeed a son of the Gods, and did their blood flow in his veins?
The Immortals had shown him peculiar favor, but still he was but a man;
that he realized from the pain in his wound, and the treason to which he
had been a victim. He felt as if he had been respited on the very
scaffold. Yes; he was a man like all other men, and so he would still be.
He rejoiced in the obscurity that veiled his future, in the many
weaknesses which he had in common with those whom he loved, and even in
the feeling that he, under the same conditions of life as his
contemporaries, had more responsibilities than they.
Shortly after his victory, after all the important passes and strongholds
had been conquered by his troops, he set out for Egypt with his train and
the vanquished princes. He sent two of his sons to Bent-Anat at Megiddo,
to escort her by sea to Pelusium; he knew that the commandant of the
harbor of that frontier fortress, at the easternmost limit of his
kingdom, was faithful to him, and he ordered that his daughter should not
quit the ship till he arrived, to secure her against any attempt on the
part of the Regent. A large part of the material of war, and most of the
wounded, were also sent to Egypt by sea.
CHAPTER XL.
Nearly three months had passed since the battle of Kadesh, and to-day the
king was expected, on his way home with his victorious army, at Pelusium,
the strong hold and key of Egyptian dominion in the east. Splendid
preparations had been made for his reception, and the man who took the
lead in the festive arrangements with a zeal that was doubly effective
from his composed demeanor was no less a person than the Regent Ani.
His chariot was to be seen everywhere: now he was with the workmen, who
were to decorate triumphal arches with fresh flowers; now with the
slaves, who were hanging garlands on the wooden lions erected on the road
for this great occasion; now--and this detained him longest--he watched
the progress of the immense palace which was being rapidly constructed of
wood on the site where formerly the camp of the Hyksos had stood, in
which the actual ceremony of receiving the king was to take place, and
where the Pharaoh and his immediate followers were to reside. It had been
found possible, by employing several thousand laborers, to erect this
magnificent structure, in a few weeks, and nothing was lacking to it that
could be desired, even by a king so accustomed as Rameses to luxury and
splendor. A high exterior flight of steps led from the garden--which had
been created out of a waste--to the vestibule, out of which the
banqueting hall opened.
This was of unusual height, and had a vaulted wooden ceiling, which was
painted blue and sprinkled with stars, to represent the night heavens,
and which was supported on pillars carved, some in the form of
date-palms, and some like cedars of Lebanon; the leaves and twigs
consisted of artfully fastened and colored tissue; elegant festoons of
bluish gauze were stretched from pillar to pillar across the hall, and in
the centre of the eastern wall they were attached to a large shell-shaped
canopy extending over the throne of the king, which was decorated with
pieces of green and blue glass, of mother of pearl, of shining plates of
mica, and other sparkling objects.
The throne itself had the shape of a buckler, guarded by two lions, which
rested on each side of it and formed the arms, and supported on the backs
of four Asiatic captives who crouched beneath its weight. Thick carpets,
which seemed to have transported the sea-shore on to the dry land-for
their pale blue ground was strewn with a variety of shells, fishes, and
water plants-covered the floor of the banqueting hall, in which three
hundred seats were placed by the tables, for the nobles of the kingdom
and the officers of the troops.
Above all this splendor hung a thousand lamps, shaped like lilies and
tulips, and in the entrance hall stood a huge basket of roses to be
strewn before the king when he should arrive.
Even the bed-rooms for the king and his suite were splendidly decorated;
finely embroidered purple stuffs covered the walls, a light cloud of pale
blue gauze hung across the ceiling, and giraffe skins were laid instead
of carpets on the floors.
The barracks intended for the soldiers and bodyguard stood nearer to the
city, as well as the stable buildings, which were divided from the palace
by the garden which surrounded it. A separate pavilion, gilt and wreathed
with flowers, was erected to receive the horses which had carried the
king through the battle, and which he had dedicated to the Sun-God.
The Regent Ani, accompanied by Katuti, was going through the whole of
these slightly built structures.
"It seems to me all quite complete," said the widow.
"Only one thing I cannot make up my mind about," replied Ani, "whether
most to admire your inventive genius or your exquisite taste."
"Oh! let that pass," said Katuti smiling. "If any thing deserves your
praise it is my anxiety to serve you. How many things had to be
considered before this structure at last stood complete on this marshy
spot where the air seemed alive with disgusting insects and now it is
finished how long will it last?"
Ani looked down. "How long?" he repeated. Then he continued: "There is
great risk already of the plot miscarrying. Ameni has grown cool, and
will stir no further in the matter; the troops on which I counted are
perhaps still faithful to me, but much too weak; the Hebrews, who tend
their flocks here, and whom I gained over by liberating them from forced
labor, have never borne arms. And you know the people. They will kiss the
feet of the conqueror if they have to wade up to there through the blood
of their children. Besides--as it happens--the hawk which old Hekt keeps
as representing me is to-day pining and sick--"
"It will be all the prouder and brighter to-morrow if you are a man!"
exclaimed Katuti, and her eyes sparkled with scorn. "You cannot now
retreat. Here in Pelusium you welcome Rameses as if he were a God, and he
accepts the honor. I know the king, he is too proud to be distrustful,
and so conceited that he can never believe himself deceived in any man,
either friend or foe. The man whom he appointed to be his Regent, whom he
designated as the worthiest in the land, he will most unwillingly
condemn. Today you still have the car of the king; to-morrow he will
listen to your enemies, and too much has occurred in Thebes to be blotted
out. You are in the position of a lion who has his keeper on one side,
and the bars of his cage on the other. If you let the moment pass without
striking you will remain in the cage; but if you act and show yourself a
lion your keepers are done for!"
"You urge me on and on," said Ani. "But supposing your plan were to fail,
as Paaker's well considered plot failed?"
"Then you are no worse off than you are now," answered Katuti. "The Gods
rule the elements, not men. Is it likely that you should finish so
beautiful a structure with such care only to destroy it? And we have no
accomplices, and need none."
"But who shall set the brand to the room which Nemu and the slave have
filled with straw and pitch?" asked Ani.
"I," said Katuti decidedly. "And one who has nothing to look for from
Rameses."
"Who is that?"
"Paaker."
"Is the Mohar here?" asked the Regent surprised.
"You yourself have seen him."
"You are mistaken," said Ani. "I should--"
"Do you recollect the one-eyed, grey-haired, blackman, who yesterday
brought me a letter? That was my sister's son."
The Regent struck his forehead--"Poor wretch" he muttered.
"He is frightfully altered," said Katuti. "He need not have blackened his
face, for his own mother would not know him again: He lost an eye in his
fight with Mena, who also wounded him in the lungs with a thrust of his
sword, so that he breathes and speaks with difficulty, his broad
shoulders have lost their flesh, and the fine legs he swaggered about on
have shrunk as thin as a negro's. I let him pass as my servant without
any hesitation or misgiving. He does not yet know of my purpose, but I am
sure that he would help us if a thousand deaths threatened him. For God's
sake put aside all doubts and fears! We will shake the tree for you, if
you will only hold out your hand to-morrow to pick up the fruit. Only one
thing I must beg. Command the head butler not to stint the wine, so that
the guards may give us no trouble. I know that you gave the order that
only three of the five ships which brought the contents of your winelofts
should be unloaded. I should have thought that the future king of Egypt
might have been less anxious to save!"
Katuti's lips curled with contempt as she spoke the last words. Ani
observed this and said:
"You think I am timid! Well, I confess I would far rather that much which
I have done at your instigation could be undone. I would willingly
renounce this new plot, though we so carefully planned it when we built
and decorated this palace. I will sacrifice the wine; there are jars of
wine there that were old in my father's time--but it must be so! You are
right! Many things have occurred which the king will not forgive! You are
right, you are right--do what seems good to you. I will retire after the
feast to the Ethiopian camp."
"They will hail you as king as soon as the usurpers have fallen in the
flames," cried Katuti. "If only a few set the example, the others will
take up the cry, and even though you have offended Ameni he will attach
himself to you rather than to Rameses. Here he comes, and I already see
the standards in the distance."
"They are coming!" said the Regent. "One thing more! Pray see yourself
that the princess Bent-Anat goes to the rooms intended for her; she must
not be injured."
"Still Bent-Anat?" said Katuti with a smile full of meaning but without
bitterness. "Be easy, her rooms are on the ground floor, and she shall be
warned in time."
Ani turned to leave her; he glanced once more at the great hall, and said
with a sigh. "My heart is heavy--I wish this day and this night were
over!"
"You are like this grand hall," said Katuti smiling, "which is now empty,
almost dismal; but this evening, when it is crowded with guests, it will
look very different. You were born to be a king, and yet are not a king;
you will not be quite yourself till the crown and sceptre are your own."
Ani smiled too, thanked her, and left her; but Katuti said to herself:
"Bent-Anat may burn with the rest: I have no intention of sharing my
power with her!"
Crowds of men and women from all parts had thronged to Pelusium, to
welcome the conqueror and his victorious army on the frontier. Every
great temple-college had sent a deputation to meet Rameses, that from the
Necropolis consisting of five members, with Ameni and old Gagabu at their
head. The white-robed ministers of the Gods marched in solemn procession
towards the bridge which lay across the eastern-Pelusiac-arm of the Nile,
and led to Egypt proper--the land fertilized by the waters of the sacred
stream.
The deputation from the temple of Memphis led the procession; this temple
had been founded by Mena, the first king who wore the united crowns of
Upper and Lower Egypt, and Chamus, the king's son, was the high-priest.
The deputation from the not less important temple of Heliopolis came
next, and was followed by the representatives of the Necropolis of
Thebes.
A few only of the members of these deputations wore the modest white robe
of the simple priest; most of them were invested with the panther-skin
which was worn by the prophets. Each bore a staff decorated with roses,
lilies, and green branches, and many carried censers in the form of a
golden arm with incense in the hollow of the hand, to be burnt before the
king. Among the deputies from the priesthood at Thebes were several women
of high rank, who served in the worship of this God, and among them was
Katuti, who by the particular desire of the Regent had lately been
admitted to this noble sisterhood.
Ameni walked thoughtfully by the side of the prophet Gagabu.
"How differently everything has happened from what we hoped and
intended!" said Gagabu in a low voice. "We are like ambassadors with
sealed credentials--who can tell their contents?"
"I welcome Rameses heartily and joyfully," said Ameni. "After that which
happened to him at Kadesh he will come home a very different man to what
he was when he set out. He knows now what he owes to Amon. His favorite
son was already at the head of the ministers of the temple at Memphis,
and he has vowed to build magnificent temples and to bring splendid
offerings to the Immortals. And Rameses keeps his word better than that
smiling simpleton in the chariot yonder."
"Still I am sorry for Ani," said Gagabu.
"The Pharaoh will not punish him--certainly not," replied the
high-priest. "And he will have nothing to fear from Ani; he is a feeble
reed, the powerless sport of every wind."
"And yet you hoped for great things from him!"
"Not from him, but through him--with us for his guides," replied Ameni in
a low voice but with emphasis. "It is his own fault that I have abandoned
his cause. Our first wish--to spare the poet Pentaur--he would not
respect, and he did not hesitate to break his oath, to betray us, and to
sacrifice one of the noblest of God's creatures, as the poet was, to
gratify a petty grudge. It is harder to fight against cunning weakness
than against honest enmity. Shall we reward the man who has deprived the
world of Pentaur by giving him a crown? It is hard to quit the trodden
way, and seek a better--to give up a half-executed plan and take a more
promising one; it is hard, I say, for the individual man, and makes him
seem fickle in the eyes of others; but we cannot see to the right hand
and the left, and if we pursue a great end we cannot remain within the
narrow limits which are set by law and custom to the actions of private
individuals. We draw back just as we seem to have reached the goal, we
let him fall whom we had raised, and lift him, whom we had stricken to
the earth, to the pinnacle of glory, in short we profess--and for
thousands of years have professed--the doctrine that every path is a
right one that leads to the great end of securing to the priesthood the
supreme power in the land. Rameses, saved by a miracle, vowing temples to
the Gods, will for the future exhaust his restless spirit not in battle
as a warrior, but in building as an architect. He will make use of us,
and we can always lead the man who needs us. So I now hail the son of
Seti with sincere joy."
Ameni was still speaking when the flags were hoisted on the standards by
the triumphal arches, clouds of dust rolled up on the farther shore of
the Nile, and the blare of trumpets was heard.
First came the horses which had carried Rameses through the fight, with
the king himself, who drove them. His eyes sparkled with joyful triumph
as the people on the farther side of the bridge received him with shouts
of joy, and the vast multitude hailed him with wild enthusiasm and tears
of emotion, strewing in his path the spoils of their gardens-flowers,
garlands, and palm-branches.
Ani marched at the head of the procession that went forth to meet him; he
humbly threw himself in the dust before the horses, kissed the ground,
and then presented to the king the sceptre that had been entrusted to
him, lying on a silk cushion. The king received it graciously, and when
Ani took his robe to kiss it, the king bent down towards him, and
touching the Regent's forehead with his lips, desired him to take the
place by his side in the chariot, and fill the office of charioteer.
The king's eyes were moist with grateful emotion. He had not been
deceived, and he could re-enter the country for whose greatness and
welfare alone he lived, as a father, loving and beloved, and not as a
master to judge and punish. He was deeply moved as he accepted the
greetings of the priests, and with them offered up a public prayer. Then
he was conducted to the splendid structure which had been prepared for
him gaily mounted the outside steps, and from the top-most stair bowed to
his innumerable crowd of subjects; and while he awaited the procession
from the harbor which escorted Bent-Anat in her litter, he inspected the
thousand decorated bulls and antelopes which were to be slaughtered as a
thank-offering to the Gods, the tame lions and leopards, the rare trees
in whose branches perched gaily-colored birds, the giraffes, and chariots
to which ostriches were harnessed, which all marched past him in a long
array.
[The splendor of the festivities I make Ani prepare seems pitiful
compared with those Ptolemy Philadelphus, according to the report of
an eye witness, Callexenus, displayed to the Alexandrians on a
festal occasion.]
Rameses embraced his daughter before all the people; he felt as if he
must admit his subjects to the fullest sympathy in the happiness and deep
thankfulness which filled his soul. His favorite child had never seemed
to him so beautiful as this day, and he realized with deep emotion her
strong resemblance to his lost wife.--[Her name was Isis Nefert.]
Nefert had accompanied her royal friend as fanbearer, and she knelt
before the king while he gave himself up to the delight of meeting his
daughter. Then he observed her, and kindly desired her to rise. "How
much," he said, "I am feeling to-day for the first time! I have already
learned that what I formerly thought of as the highest happiness is
capable of a yet higher pitch, and I now perceive that the most beautiful
is capable of growing to greater beauty! A sun has grown from Mena's
star."
Rameses, as he spoke, remembered his charioteer; for a moment his brow
was clouded, and he cast down his eyes, and bent his head in thought.
Bent-Anat well knew this gesture of her father's; it was the omen of some
kindly, often sportive suggestion, such as he loved to surprise his
friends with.
He reflected longer than usual; at last he looked up, and his full eyes
rested lovingly on his daughter as he asked her:
"What did your friend say when she heard that her husband had taken a
pretty stranger into his tent, and harbored her there for months? Tell me
the whole truth of it, Bent-Anat."
"I am indebted to this deed of Mena's, which must certainly be quite
excusable if you can smile when you speak of it," said the princess, "for
it was the cause of his wife's coming to me. Her mother blamed her
husband with bitter severity, but she would not cease to believe in him,
and left her house because it was impossible for her to endure to hear
him blamed."
"Is this the fact?" asked Rameses.
Nefert bowed her pretty head, and two tears ran down her blushing cheeks.
"How good a man must be," cried the king, "on whom the Gods bestow such
happiness! My lord Chamberlain, inform Mena that I require his services
at dinner to-day--as before the battle at Kadesh. He flung away the reins
in the fight when he saw his enemy, and we shall see if he can keep from
flinging down the beaker when, with his own eyes, he sees his beloved
wife sitting at the table.--You ladies will join me at the banquet."
Nefert sank on her knees before the king; but he turned from her to speak
to the nobles and officers who had come to meet him, and then proceeded
to the temple to assist at the slaughter of the victims, and to solemnly
renew his vow in the presence of the priests and the people, to erect a
magnificent temple in Thebes as a thank-offering for his preservation
from death. He was received with rapturous enthusiasm; his road led to
the harbor, past the tents in which lay the wounded, who had been brought
home to Egypt by ship, and he greeted them graciously from his chariot.
Ani again acted as his charioteer; they drove slowly through the long
ranks of invalids and convalescents, but suddenly Ani gave the reins an
involuntary pull, the horses reared, and it was with difficulty that he
soothed them to a steady pace again.
Rameses looked round in anxious surprise, for at the moment when the
horses had started, he too had felt an agitating thrill--he thought he
had caught sight of his preserver at Kadesh.
Had the sight of a God struck terror into the horses? Was he the victim
of a delusion? or was his preserver a man of flesh and blood, who had
come home from the battle-field among the wounded!
The man who stood by his side, and held the reins, could have informed
him, for Ani had recognized Pentaur, and in his horror had given the
reins a perilous jerk.
CHAPTER XLI.
The king did not return to the great pavilion till after sun-down; the
banqueting hall, illuminated with a thousand lamps, was now filled with
the gay crowd of guests who awaited the arrival of the king. All bowed
before him, as he entered, more or less low, each according to his rank;
he immediately seated himself on his throne, surrounded by his children
in a wide semicircle, and his officers and retainers all passed before
him; for each he had a kindly word or glance, winning respect from all,
and filling every one with joy and hope.
"The only really divine attribute of my royal condition," said he to
himself, "is that it is so easy to a king to make men happy. My
predecessors chose the poisonous Uraeus as the emblem of their authority,
for we can cause death as quickly and certainly as the venomous snake;
but the power of giving happiness dwells on our own lips, and in our own
eyes, and we need some instrument when we decree death."
"Take the Uraeus crown from my head," he continued aloud, as he seated
himself at the feast. "Today I will wear a wreath of flowers."
During the ceremony of bowing to the king, two men had quitted the
hall--the Regent Ani, and the high-priest Ameni.
Ani ordered a small party of the watch to go and seek out the priest
Pentaur in the tents of the wounded by the harbor, to bring the poet
quietly to his tent, and to guard him there till his return. He still had
in his possession the maddening potion, which he was to have given to the
captain of the transport-boat, and it was open to him still to receive
Pentaur either as a guest or as a prisoner. Pentaur might injure him,
whether Katuti's project failed or succeeded.
Ameni left the pavilion to go to see old Gagabu, who had stood so long in
the heat of the sun during the ceremony of receiving the conqueror, that
he had been at last carried fainting to the tent which he shared with the
high-priest, and which was not far from that of the Regent. He found the
old man much revived, and was preparing to mount his chariot to go to the
banquet, when the Regent's myrmidons led Pentaur past in front of him.
Ameni looked doubtfully at the tall and noble figure of the prisoner, but
Pentaur recognized him, called him by his name, and in a moment they
stood together, hand clasped in hand. The guards showed some uneasiness,
but Ameni explained who he was.
The high-priest was sincerely rejoiced at the preservation and
restoration of his favorite disciple, whom for many months he had mourned
as dead; he looked at his manly figure with fatherly tenderness, and
desired the guards, who bowed to his superior dignity, to conduct his
friend, on his responsibility; to his tent instead of to Ani's.
There Pentaur found his old friend Gagabu, who wept with delight at his
safety. All that his master had accused him of seemed to be forgotten.
Ameni had him clothed in a fresh white robe, he was never tired of
looking at him, and over and over again clapped his hand upon his
shoulder, as if he were his own son that had been lost and found again.
Pentaur was at once required to relate all that had happened to him, and
the poet told the story of his captivity and liberation at Mount Sinai,
his meeting with Bent-Anat, and how he had fought in the battle of
Kadesh, had been wounded by an arrow, and found and rescued by the
faithful Kaschta. He concealed only his passion for Bent-Anat, and the
fact that he had preserved the king's life.
"About an hour ago," he added, "I was sitting alone in my tent, watching
the lights in the palace yonder, when the watch who are outside brought
me an order from the Regent to accompany them to his tent. What can he
want with me? I always thought he owed me a grudge."
Gagabu and Ameni glanced meaningly at each other, and the high-priest
then hastened away, as already he had remained too long away from the
banquet. Before he got into his chariot he commanded the guard to return
to their posts, and took it upon himself to inform the Regent that his
guest would remain in his tent till the festival was over; the soldiers
unhesitatingly obeyed him.
Ameni arrived at the palace before them, and entered the banqueting-hall
just as Ani was assigning a place to each of his guests. The high-priest
went straight up to him, and said, as he bowed before him:
"Pardon my long delay, but I was detained by a great surprise. The poet
Pentaur is living--as you know. I have invited him to remain in my tent
as my guest, and to tend the prophet Gagabu."
The Regent turned pale, he remained speechless and looked at Ameni with a
cold ghastly smile; but he soon recovered himself.
"You see," he said, "how you have injured me by your unworthy suspicions;
I meant to have restored your favorite to you myself to-morrow."
"Forgive me, then, for having anticipated your plan," said Ameni, taking
his seat near the king. Hundreds of slaves hurried to and fro loaded with
costly dishes. Large vessels of richly wrought gold and silver were
brought into the hall on wheels, and set on the side-boards. Children
were perched in the shells and lotus-flowers that hung from the painted
rafters; and from between the pillars, that were hung with cloudy
transparent tissues, they threw roses and violets down on the company.
The sounds of harps and songs issued from concealed rooms, and from an
altar, six ells high, in the middle of the hall, clouds of incense were
wafted into space.
The king-one of whose titles was "Son of the Sun,"--was as radiant as the
sun himself. His children were once more around him, Mena was his
cupbearer as in former times, and all that was best and noblest in the
land was gathered round him to rejoice with him in his triumph and his
return. Opposite to him sat the ladies, and exactly in front of him, a
delight to his eyes, Bent-Anat and Nefert. His injunction to Mena to hold
the wine cup steadily seemed by no means superfluous, for his looks
constantly wandered from the king's goblet to his fair wife, from whose
lips he as yet had heard no word of welcome, whose hand he had not yet
been so happy as to touch.
All the guests were in the most joyful excitement. Rameses related the
tale of his fight at Kadesh, and the high-priest of Heliopolis observed
In later times the poets will sing of thy deeds."
"Their songs will not be of my achievements," exclaimed the king, "but of
the grace of the Divinity, who so miraculously rescued your sovereign,
and gave the victory to the Egyptians over an innumerable enemy."
"Did you see the God with your own eyes? and in what form did he appear
to you?" asked Bent-Anat. "It is most extraordinary," said the king, "but
he exactly resembled the dead father of the traitor Paaker. My preserver
was of tall stature, and had a beautiful countenance; his voice was deep
and thrilling, and he swung his battle-axe as if it were a mere
plaything."
Ameni had listened eagerly to the king's words, now he bowed low before
him and said humbly: "If I were younger I myself would endeavor, as was
the custom with our fathers, to celebrate this glorious deed of a God and
of his sublime son in a song worthy of this festival; but melting tones
are no longer mine, they vanish with years, and the car of the listener
lends itself only to the young. Nothing is wanting to thy feast, most
lordly Ani, but a poet, who might sing the glorious deeds of our monarch
to the sound of his lute, and yet--we have at hand the gifted Pentaur,
the noblest disciple of the House of Seti."
Bent-Anat turned perfectly white, and the priests who were present
expressed the utmost joy and astonishment, for they had long thought the
young poet, who was highly esteemed throughout Egypt, to be dead.
The king had often heard of the fame of Pentaur from his sons and
especially from Rameri, and he willingly consented that Ameni should send
for the poet, who had himself borne arms at Kadesh, in order that he
should sing a song of triumph. The Regent gazed blankly and uneasily into
his wine cup, and the high-priest rose to fetch Pentaur himself into the
presence of the king.
During the high-priest's absence, more and more dishes were served to the
company; behind each guest stood a silver bowl with rose water, in which
from time to time he could dip his fingers to cool and clean them; the
slaves in waiting were constantly at hand with embroidered napkins to
wipe them, and others frequently changed the faded wreaths, round the
heads and shoulders of the feasters, for fresh ones.
"How pale you are, my child!" said Rameses turning to Bent-Anat. "If you
are tired, your uncle will no doubt allow you to leave the hall; though I
think you should stay to hear the performance of this much-lauded poet.
After having been so highly praised he will find it difficult to satisfy
his hearers. But indeed I am uneasy about you, my child--would you rather
go?" The Regent had risen and said earnestly, "Your presence has done me
honor, but if you are fatigued I beg you to allow me to conduct you and
your ladies to the apartments intended for you."
"I will stay," said Bent-Anat in a low but decided tone, and she kept her
eyes on the floor, while her heart beat violently, for the murmur of
voices told her that Pentaur was entering the hall. He wore the long
white robe of a priest of the temple of Seti, and on his forehead the
ostrich-feather which marked him as one of the initiated. He did not
raise his eyes till he stood close before the king; then he prostrated
himself before him, and awaited a sign from the Pharaoh before he rose
again.
But Rameses hesitated a long time, for the youthful figure before him,
and the glance that met his own, moved him strangely. Was not this the
divinity of the fight? Was not this his preserver? Was he again deluded
by a resemblance, or was he in a dream?
The guests gazed in silence at the spellbound king, and at the poet; at
last Rameses bowed his head,
Pentaur rose to his feet, and the bright color flew to his face as close
to him he perceived Bent-Anat.
"You fought at Kadesh?" asked the king. "As thou sayest," replied
Pentaur.
"You are well spoken of as a poet," said Rameses, "and we desire to hear
the wonderful tale of my preservation celebrated in song. If you will
attempt it, let a lute be brought and sing."
The poet bowed. "My gifts are modest," he said, "but I will endeavor to
sing of the glorious deed, in the presence of the hero who achieved it,
with the aid of the Gods."
Rameses gave a signal, and Ameni caused a large golden harp to be brought
in for his disciple. Pentaur lightly touched the strings, leaned his head
against the top of the tall bow of the harp, for some time lest in
meditation; then he drew himself up boldly, and struck the chords,
bringing out a strong and warlike music in broad heroic rhythm.
Then he began the narrative: how Rameses had pitched his camp before
Kadesh, how he ordered his troops, and how he had taken the field against
the Cheta, and their Asiatic allies. Louder and stronger rose his tones
when he reached the turning-point of the battle, and began to celebrate
the rescue of the king; and the Pharaoh listened with eager attention as
Pentaur sang:--[A literal translation of the ancient Egyptian poem called
"The Epos of Pentaur"]
"Then the king stood forth, and, radiant with courage,
He looked like the Sun-god armed and eager for battle.
The noble steeds that bore him into the struggle
'Victory to Thebes' was the name of one, and the other
Was called 'contented Nura'--were foaled in the stables
Of him we call 'the elect,' 'the beloved of Amon,'
'Lord of truth,' the chosen vicar of Ra.
Up sprang the king and threw himself on the foe,
The swaying ranks of the contemptible Cheta.
He stood alone-alone, and no man with him.
As thus the king stood forth all eyes were upon him,
And soon he was enmeshed by men and horses,
And by the enemy's chariots: two thousand five hundred.
The foe behind hemmed him in and enclosed him.
Dense the array of the contemptible Cheta,
Dense the swarm of warriors out of Arad,
Dense the Mysian host, the Pisidian legions.
Every chariot carried three bold warriors,
All his foes, and all allied like brothers.
"Not a prince is with me, not a captain,
Not an archer, none to guide my horses!
Fled the riders! fled my troops and horse
By my side not one is now left standing."
Thus the king, and raised his voice in prayer.
"Great father Amon, I have known Thee well.
And can the father thus forget his son?
Have I in any deed forgotten Thee?
Have I done aught without Thy high behest
Or moved or staid against Thy sovereign will?
Great am I--mighty are Egyptian kings
But in the sight of Thy commanding might,
Small as the chieftain of a wandering tribe.
Immortal Lord, crush Thou this unclean people;
Break Thou their necks, annihilate the heathen.
And I--have I not brought Thee many victims,
And filled Thy temple with the captive folk?
And for thy presence built a dwelling place
That shall endure for countless years to come?
Thy garners overflow with gifts from me.
I offered Thee the world to swell Thy glory,
And thirty thousand mighty steers have shed
Their smoking blood on fragrant cedar piles.
Tall gateways, flag-decked masts, I raised to Thee,
And obelisks from Abu I have brought,
And built Thee temples of eternal stone.
For Thee my ships have brought across the sea
The tribute of the nations. This I did--
When were such things done in the former time?
For dark the fate of him who would rebel
Against Thee: though Thy sway is just and mild.
My father, Amon--as an earthly son
His earthly father--so I call on Thee.
Look down from heaven on me, beset by foes,
By heathen foes--the folk that know Thee not.
The nations have combined against Thy son;
I stand alone--alone, and no man with me.
My foot and horse are fled, I called aloud
And no one heard--in vain I called to them.
And yet I say: the sheltering care of Amon
Is better succor than a million men,
Or than ten thousand knights, or than a thousand
Brothers and sons though gathered into one.
And yet I say: the bulwarks raised by men
However strong, compared to Thy great works
Are but vain shadows, and no human aid
Avails against the foe--but Thy strong hand.
The counsel of Thy lips shall guide my way;
I have obeyed whenever Thou hast ruled;
I call on Thee--and, with my fame, Thy glory
Shall fill the world, from farthest east to west."
Yea, his cry rang forth even far as Hermonthis,
And Amon himself appeared at his call; and gave him
His hand and shouted in triumph, saying to the Pharaoh:
"Help is at hand, O Rameses. I will uphold thee--
I thy father am he who now is thy succor,
Bearing thee in my hands. For stronger and readier
I than a hundred thousand mortal retainers;
I am the Lord of victory loving valor?
I rejoice in the brave and give them good counsel,
And he whom I counsel certainly shall not miscarry."
Then like Menth, with his right he scattered the arrows,
And with his left he swung his deadly weapon,
Felling the foe--as his foes are felled by Baal.
The chariots were broken and the drivers scattered,
Then was the foe overthrown before his horses.
None found a hand to fight: they could not shoot
Nor dared they hurl the spear but fled at his coming
Headlong into the river."
[I have availed myself of the help of Prof. Lushington's translation
in "Records of the past," edited by Dr. S. Birch. Translator.]
A silence as of the grave reigned in the vast hall, Rameses fixed his
eyes on the poet, as though he would engrave his features on his very
soul, and compare them with those of another which had dwelt there
unforgotten since the day of Kadesh. Beyond a doubt his preserver stood
before him.
Seized by a sudden impulse, he interrupted the poet in the midst of his
stirring song, and cried out to the assembled guests:
"Pay honor to this man! for the Divinity chose to appear under his form
to save your king when he 'alone, and no man with him,' struggled with a
thousand."
"Hail to Pentaur!" rang through the hall from the vast assembly, and
Nefert rose and gave the poet the bunch of flowers she had been wearing
on her bosom.
The king nodded approval, and looked enquiringly at his daughter;
Bent-Anat's eyes met his with a glance of intelligence, and with all the
simplicity of an impulsive child, she took from her head the wreath that
had decorated her beautiful hair, went up to Pentaur, and crowned him
with it, as it was customary for a bride to crown her lover before the
wedding.
Rameses observed his daughter's action with some surprise, and the guests
responded to it with loud cheering.
The king looked gravely at Bent-Anat and the young priest; the eyes of
all the company were eagerly fixed on the princess and the poet. The king
seemed to have forgotten the presence of strangers, and to be wholly
absorbed in thought, but by degrees a change came over his face, it
cleared, as a landscape is cleared from the morning mists under the
influence of the spring sunshine. When he looked up again his glance was
bright and satisfied, and Bent-Anat knew what it promised when it
lingered lovingly first on her, and then on her friend, whose head was
still graced by the wreath that had crowned hers.
At last Rameses turned from the lovers, and said to the guests:
"It is past midnight, and I will now leave you. To-morrow evening I bid
you all--and you especially, Pentaur--to be my guests in this banqueting
hall. Once more fill your cups, and let us empty them--to a long time of
peace after the victory which, by the help of the Gods, we have won. And
at the same time let us express our thanks to my friend Ani, who has
entertained us so magnificently, and who has so faithfully and zealously
administered the affairs of the kingdom during my absence."
The company pledged the king, who warmly shook hands with the Regent, and
then, escorted by his wandbearers and lords in waiting, quitted the hall,
after he had signed to Mena, Ameni, and the ladies to follow him.
Nefert greeted her husband, but she immediately parted from the royal
party, as she had yielded to the urgent entreaty of Katuti that she
should for this night go to her mother, to whom she had so much to tell,
instead of remaining with the princess. Her mother's chariot soon took
her to her tent.
Rameses dismissed his attendants in the ante-room of his apartments; when
they were alone he turned to Bent-Anat and said affectionately.
"What was in your mind when you laid your wreath on the poet's brow?"
"What is in every maiden's mind when she does the like," replied
Bent-Anat with trustful frankness.
"And your father?" asked the king.
"My father knows that I will obey him even if he demands of me the
hardest thing--the sacrifice of all my--happiness; but I believe that
he--that you love me fondly, and I do not forget the hour in which you
said to me that now my mother was dead you would be father and mother
both to me, and you would try to understand me as she certainly would
have understood me. But what need between us of so many words. I love
Pentaur--with a love that is not of yesterday--with the first perfect
love of my heart and he has proved himself worthy of that high honor. But
were he ever so humble, the hand of your daughter has the power to raise
him above every prince in the land."
"It has such power, and you shall exercise it," cried the king. "You have
been true and faithful to yourself, while your father and protector left
you to yourself. In you I love the image of your mother, and I learned
from her that a true woman's heart can find the right path better than a
man's wisdom. Now go to rest, and to-morrow morning put on a fresh
wreath, for you will have need of it, my noble daughter."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
He who looks for faith must give faith
I have never deviated from the exact truth even in jest
Learn early to pass lightly over little things
Trustfulness is so dear, so essential to me
UARDA
Volume 10.
By Georg Ebers
CHAPTER XLII
The cloudless vault of heaven spread over the plain of Pelusium, the
stars were bright, the moon threw her calm light over the thousands of
tents which shone as white as little hillocks of snow. All was silent,
the soldiers and the Egyptians, who had assembled to welcome the king,
were now all gone to rest.
There had been great rejoicing and jollity in the camp; three enormous
vats, garlanded with flowers and overflowing with wine, which spilt with
every movement of the trucks on which they were drawn by thirty oxen,
were sent up and down the little streets of tents, and as the evening
closed in tavern-booths were erected in many spots in the camp, at which
the Regent's servants supplied the soldiers with red and white wine. The
tents of the populace were only divided from the pavilion of the Pharaoh
by the hastily-constructed garden in the midst of which it stood, and the
hedge which enclosed it.
The tent of the Regent himself was distinguished from all the others by
its size and magnificence; to the right of it was the encampment of the
different priestly deputations, to the left that of his suite; among the
latter were the tents of his friend Katuti, a large one for her own use,
and some smaller ones for her servants. Behind Ani's pavilion stood a
tent, enclosed in a wall or screen of canvas, within which old Hekt was
lodged; Ani had secretly conveyed her hither on board his own boat. Only
Katuti and his confidential servants knew who it was that lay concealed
in the mysteriously shrouded abode.
While the banquet was proceeding in the great pavilion, the witch was
sitting in a heap on the sandy earth of her conical canvas dwelling; she
breathed with difficulty, for a weakness of the heart, against which she
had long struggled, now oppressed her more frequently and severely; a
little lamp of clay burned before her, and on her lap crouched a sick and
ruffled hawk; the creature shivered from time to time, closing the filmy
lids of his keen eyes, which glowed with a dull fire when Hekt took him
up in her withered hand, and tried to blow some air into his hooked beak,
still ever ready to peck and tear her.
At her feet little Scherau lay asleep. Presently she pushed the child
with her foot. "Wake up," she said, as he raised himself still half
asleep. "You have young ears--it seemed to me that I heard a woman scream
in Ani's tent. Do you hear any thing?"
"Yes, indeed," exclaimed the little one. "There is a noise like crying,
and that--that was a scream! It came from out there, from Nemu's tent."
"Creep through there," said the witch, "and see what is happening!"
The child obeyed: Hekt turned her attention again to the bird, which no
longer perched in her lap, but lay on one side, though it still tried to
use its talons, when she took him up in her hand.
"It is all over with him," muttered the old woman, "and the one I called
Rameses is sleeker than ever. It is all folly and yet--and yet! the
Regent's game is over, and he has lost it. The creature is stretching
itself--its head drops--it draws itself up--one more clutch at my
dress--now it is dead!"
She contemplated the dead hawk in her lap for some minutes, then she took
it up, flung it into a corner of the tent, and exclaimed:
"Good-bye, King Ani. The crown is not for you!" Then she went on: "What
project has he in hand now, I wonder? Twenty times he has asked me
whether the great enterprise will succeed; as if I knew any more than he!
And Nemu too has hinted all kinds of things, though he would not speak
out. Something is going on, and I--and I? There it comes again."
The old woman pressed her hand to her heart and closed her eyes, her
features were distorted with pain; she did not perceive Scherau's return,
she did not hear him call her name, or see that, when she did not answer
him, he left her again. For an hour or more she remained unconscious,
then her senses returned, but she felt as if some ice-cold fluid slowly
ran through her veins instead of the warm blood.
"If I had kept a hawk for myself too," she muttered, "it would soon
follow the other one in the corner! If only Ani keeps his word, and has
me embalmed!
"But how can he when he too is so near his end. They will let me rot and
disappear, and there will be no future for me, no meeting with Assa."
The old woman remained silent for a long time; at last she murmured
hoarsely with her eyes fixed on the ground:
"Death brings release, if only from the torment of remembrance. But there
is a life beyond the grave. I do not, I will not cease to hope. The dead
shall all be equally judged, and subject to the inscrutable
decrees.--Where shall I find him? Among the blest, or among the damned?
And I? It matters not! The deeper the abyss into which they fling me the
better. Can Assa, if he is among the blest, remain in bliss, when he sees
to what he has brought me? Oh! they must embalm me--I cannot bear to
vanish, and rot and evaporate into nothingness!"
While she was still speaking, the dwarf Nemu had come into the tent;
Scherau, seeing the old woman senseless, had run to tell him that his
mother was lying on the earth with her eyes shut, and was dying. The
witch perceived the little man.
"It is well," she said, "that you have come; I shall be dead before
sunrise."
"Mother!" cried the dwarf horrified, "you shall live, and live better
than you have done till now! Great things are happening, and for us!"
"I know, I know," said Hekt. "Go away, Scherau--now, Nemu, whisper in my
ear what is doing?" The dwarf felt as if he could not avoid the influence
of her eye, he went up to her, and said softly--"The pavilion, in which
the king and his people are sleeping, is constructed of wood; straw and
pitch are built into the walls, and laid under the boards. As soon as
they are gone to rest we shall set the tinder thing on fire. The guards
are drunk and sleeping."
"Well thought of," said Hekt. "Did you plan it?" "I and my mistress,"
said the dwarf not without pride. "You can devise a plot," said the old
woman, "but you are feeble in the working out. Is your plan a secret?
Have you clever assistants?"
"No one knows of it," replied the dwarf, "but Katuti, Paaker, and I; we
three shall lay the brands to the spots we have fixed upon. I am going to
the rooms of Bent-Anat; Katuti, who can go in and out as she pleases,
will set fire to the stairs, which lead to the upper story, and which
fall by touching a spring; and Paaker to the king's apartments."
"Good-good, it may succeed," gasped the old woman. "But what was the
scream in your tent?" The dwarf seemed doubtful about answering; but Hekt
went on:
"Speak without fear--the dead are sure to be silent." The dwarf,
trembling with agitation, shook off his hesitation, and said:
"I have found Uarda, the grandchild of Pinem, who had disappeared, and I
decoyed her here, for she and no other shall be my wife, if Ani is king,
and if Katuti makes me rich and free. She is in the service of the
Princess Bent-Anat, and sleeps in her anteroom, and she must not be burnt
with her mistress. She insisted on going back to the palace, so, as she
would fly to the fire like a gnat, and I would not have her risk being
burnt, I tied her up fast."
"Did she not struggle?" said Hekt.
"Like a mad thing," said the dwarf. "But the Regent's dumb slave, who was
ordered by his master to obey me in everything to-day, helped me. We tied
up her mouth that she might not be heard screaming!"
"Will you leave her alone when you go to do your errand?"
"Her father is with her!"
"Kaschta, the red-beard?" asked the old woman in surprise. "And did he
not break you in pieces like an earthenware pot?"
"He will not stir," said Nemu laughing. "For when I found him, I made him
so drunk with Ani's old wine that he lies there like a mummy. It was from
him that I learned where Uarda was, and I went to her, and got her to
come with me by telling her that her father was very ill, and begged her
to go to see him once more. She flew after me like a gazelle, and when
she saw the soldier lying there senseless she threw herself upon him, and
called for water to cool his head, for he was raving in his dreams of
rats and mice that had fallen upon him. As it grew late she wanted to
return to her mistress, and we were obliged to prevent her. How handsome
she has grown, mother; you cannot imagine how pretty she is."
"Aye, aye!" said Hekt. "You will have to keep an eye upon her when she is
your wife."
"I will treat her like the wife of a noble," said Nemu. "And pay a real
lady to guard her. But by this time Katuti has brought home her daughter,
Mena's wife; the stars are sinking and--there--that was the first signal.
When Katuti whistles the third time we are to go to work. Lend me your
fire-box, mother."
"Take it," said Hekt. "I shall never need it again. It is all over with
me! How your hand shakes! Hold the wood firmly, or you will drop it
before you have brought the fire."
The dwarf bid the old woman farewell, and she let him kiss her without
moving. When he was gone, she listened eagerly for any sound that might
pierce the silence of the night, her eyes shone with a keen light, and a
thousand thoughts flew through her restless brain. When she heard the
second signal on Katuti's silver whistle, she sat upright and muttered:
"That gallows-bird Paaker, his vain aunt and that villain Ani, are no
match for Rameses, even when he is asleep. Ani's hawk is dead; he has
nothing to hope for from Fortune, and I nothing to hope for from him. But
if Rameses--if the real king would promise me--then my poor old
body--Yes, that is the thing, that is what I will do."
She painfully raised herself on her feet with the help of her stick, she
found a knife and a small flask which she slipped into her dress, and
then, bent and trembling, with a last effort of her remaining strength
she dragged herself as far as Nemu's tent. Here she found Uarda bound
hand and foot, and Kaschta lying on the ground in a heavy drunken
slumber.
The girl shrank together in alarm when she saw the old woman, and
Scherau, who crouched at her side, raised his hands imploringly to the
witch.
"Take this knife, boy," she said to the little one. "Cut the ropes the
poor thing is tied with. The papyrus cords are strong, saw them with the
blade."
[Papyrus was used not only for writing on, but also for ropes. The
bridge of boats on which Xerxes crossed the Hellespont was fastened
with cables of papyrus.]
While the boy eagerly followed her instructions with all his little
might, she rubbed the soldier's temples with an essence which she had in
the bottle, and poured a few drops of it between his lips. Kaschta came
to himself, stretched his limbs, and stared in astonishment at the place
in which he found himself. She gave him some water, and desired him to
drink it, saying, as Uarda shook herself free from the bonds:
"The Gods have predestined you to great things, you white maiden. Listen
to what I, old Hekt, am telling you. The king's life is threatened, his
and his children's; I purpose to save them, and I ask no reward but
this-that he should have my body embalmed and interred at Thebes. Swear
to me that you will require this of him when you have saved him."
"In God's name what is happening?" cried Uarda. "Swear that you will
provide for my burial," said the old woman.
"I swear it!" cried the girl. "But for God's sake--"
"Katuti, Paaker, and Nemu are gone to set fire to the palace when Rameses
is sleeping, in three places. Do you hear, Kaschta! Now hasten, fly after
the incendiaries, rouse the servants, and try to rescue the king."
"Oh fly, father," cried the girl, and they both rushed away in the
darkness.
"She is honest and will keep her word," muttered Hekt, and she tried to
drag herself back to her own tent; but her strength failed her half-way.
Little Scherau tried to support her, but he was too weak; she sank down
on the sand, and looked out into the distance. There she saw the dark
mass of the palace, from which rose a light that grew broader and
broader, then clouds of black smoke, then up flew the soaring flame, and
a swarm of glowing sparks.
"Run into the camp, child," she cried, "cry fire, and wake the sleepers."
Scherau ran off shouting as loud as he could.
The old woman pressed her hand to her side, she muttered: "There it is
again."
"In the other world--Assa--Assa," and her trembling lips were silent for
ever.
CHAPTER XLIII.
Katuti had kept her unfortunate nephew Paaker concealed in one of her
servants' tents. He had escaped wounded from the battle at Kadesh, and in
terrible pain he had succeeded, by the help of an ass which he had
purchased from a peasant, in reaching by paths known to hardly any one
but himself, the cave where he had previously left his brother. Here he
found his faithful Ethiopian slave, who nursed him till he was strong
enough to set out on his journey to Egypt. He reached Pelusium, after
many privations, disguised as an Ismaelite camel-driver; he left his
servant, who might have betrayed him, behind in the cave.
Before he was permitted to pass the fortifications, which lay across the
isthmus which parts the Mediterranean from the Red Sea, and which were
intended to protect Egypt from the incursions of the nomad tribes of the
Chasu, he was subjected to a strict interrogatory, and among other
questions was asked whether he had nowhere met with the traitor Paaker,
who was minutely described to him. No one recognized in the shrunken,
grey-haired, one-eyed camel-driver, the broad-shouldered, muscular and
thick-legged pioneer. To disguise himself the more effectually, he
procured some hair-dye--a cosmetic known in all ages--and blackened
himself.
[In my papyrus there are several recipes for the preparation of
hair-dye; one is ascribed to the Lady Schesch, the mother of Teta,
wife of the first king of Egypt. The earliest of all the recipes
preserved to us is a prescription for dyeing the hair.]
Katuti had arrived at Pelusium with Ani some time before, to superintend
the construction of the royal pavilion. He ventured to approach her
disguised as a negro beggar, with a palm-branch in his hand. She gave him
some money and questioned him concerning his native country, for she made
it her business to secure the favor even of the meanest; but though she
appeared to take an interest in his answers, she did not recognize him;
now for the first time he felt secure, and the next day he went up to her
again, and told her who he was.
The widow was not unmoved by the frightful alteration in her nephew, and
although she knew that even Ani had decreed that any intercourse with the
traitor was to be punished by death, she took him at once into her
service, for she had never had greater need than now to employ the
desperate enemy of the king and of her son-in-law.
The mutilated, despised, and hunted man kept himself far from the other
servants, regarding the meaner folk with undiminished scorn. He thought
seldom, and only vaguely of Katuti's daughter, for love had quite given
place to hatred, and only one thing now seemed to him worth living
for--the hope of working with others to cause his enemies' downfall, and
of being the instrument of their death; so he offered himself to the
widow a willing and welcome tool, and the dull flash in his uninjured eye
when she set him the task of setting fire to the king's apartments,
showed her that in the Mohar she had found an ally she might depend on to
the uttermost.
Paaker had carefully examined the scene of his exploit before the king's
arrival. Under the windows of the king's rooms, at least forty feet from
the ground, was a narrow parapet resting on the ends of the beams which
supported the rafters on which lay the floor of the upper story in which
the king slept. These rafters had been smeared with pitch, and straw had
been laid between them, and the pioneer would have known how to find the
opening where he was to put in the brand even if he had been blind of
both eyes.
When Katuti first sounded her whistle he slunk to his post; he was
challenged by no watchman, for the few guards who had been placed in the
immediate vicinity of the pavilion, had all gone to sleep under the
influence of the Regent's wine. Paaker climbed up to about the height of
two men from the ground by the help of the ornamental carving on the
outside wall of the palace; there a rope ladder was attached, he
clambered up this, and soon stood on the parapet, above which were the
windows of the king's rooms, and below which the fire was to be laid.
Rameses' room was brightly illuminated. Paaker could see into it without
being seen, and could bear every word that was spoken within. The king
was sitting in an arm-chair, and looked thoughtfully at the ground;
before him stood the Regent, and Mena stood by his couch, holding in his
hand the king's sleeping-robe.
Presently Rameses raised his head, and said, as he offered his hand with
frank affection to Ani:
"Let me bring this glorious day to a worthy end, cousin. I have found you
my true and faithful friend, and I had been in danger of believing those
over-anxious counsellors who spoke evil of you. I am never prone to
distrust, but a number of things occurred together that clouded my
judgment, and I did you injustice. I am sorry, sincerely sorry; nor am I
ashamed to apologize to you for having for an instant doubted your good
intentions. You are my good friend--and I will prove to you that I am
yours. There is my hand-take it; and all Egypt shall know that Rameses
trusts no man more implicitly than his Regent Ani. I will ask you to
undertake to be my guard of honor to-night--we will share this room. I
sleep here; when I lie down on my couch take your place on the divan
yonder." Ani had taken Rameses' offered hand, but now he turned pale as
he looked down. Paaker could see straight into his face, and it was not
without difficulty that he suppressed a scornful laugh.
Rameses did not observe the Regent's dismay, for he had signed to Mena to
come closer to him.
"Before I sleep," said the king, "I will bring matters to an end with you
too. You have put your wife's constancy to a severe test, and she has
trusted you with a childlike simplicity that is often wiser than the
arguments of sages, because she loved you honestly, and is herself
incapable of guile. I promised you that I would grant you a wish if your
faith in her was justified. Now tell me what is your will?"
Mena fell on his knees, and covered the king's robe with kisses.
"Pardon!" he exclaimed. "Nothing but pardon. My crime was a heavy one, I
know; but I was driven to it by scorn and fury--it was as if I saw the
dishonoring hand of Paaker stretched out to seize my innocent wife, who,
as I now know, loathes him as a toad--"
"What was that?" exclaimed the king. "I thought I heard a groan outside."
He went up to the window and looked out, but he did not see the pioneer,
who watched every motion of the king, and who, as soon as he perceived
that his involuntary sigh of anguish had been heard, stretched himself
close under the balustrade. Mena had not risen from his knees when the
king once more turned to him.
"Pardon me," he said again. "Let me be near thee again as before, and
drive thy chariot. I live only through thee, I am of no worth but through
thee, and by thy favor, my king, my lord, my father!"
Rameses signed to his favorite to rise. "Your request was granted," said
he, "before you made it. I am still in your debt on your fair wife's
account. Thank Nefert--not me, and let us give thanks to the Immortals
this day with especial fervor. What has it not brought forth for us! It
has restored to me you two friends, whom I regarded as lost to me, and
has given me in Pentaur another son."
A low whistle sounded through the night air; it was Katuti's last signal.
Paaker blew up the tinder, laid it in the bole under the parapet, and
then, unmindful of his own danger, raised himself to listen for any
further words.
"I entreat thee," said the Regent, approaching Rameses, "to excuse me. I
fully appreciate thy favors, but the labors of the last few days have
been too much for me; I can hardly stand on my feet, and the guard of
honor--"
"Mena will watch," said the king. "Sleep in all security, cousin. I will
have it known to all men that I have put away from me all distrust of
you. Give the my night-robe, Mena. Nay-one thing more I must tell you.
Youth smiles on the young, Ani. Bent-Anat has chosen a worthy husband, my
preserver, the poet Pentaur. He was said to be a man of humble origin,
the son of a gardener of the House of Seti; and now what do I learn
through Ameni? He is the true son of the dead Mohar, and the foul traitor
Paaker is the gardener's son. A witch in the Necropolis changed the
children. That is the best news of all that has reached me on this
propitious day, for the Mohar's widow, the noble Setchem, has been
brought here, and I should have been obliged to choose between two
sentences on her as the mother of the villain who has escaped us. Either
I must have sent her to the quarries, or have had her beheaded before all
the people--In the name of the Gods, what is that?"
They heard a loud cry in a man's voice, and at the same instant a noise
as if some heavy mass had fallen to the ground from a great height.
Rameses and Mena hastened to the window, but started back, for they were
met by a cloud of smoke.
"Call the watch!" cried the king.
"Go, you," exclaimed Mena to Ani. "I will not leave the king again in
danger."
Ani fled away like an escaped prisoner, but he could not get far, for,
before he could descend the stairs to the lower story, they fell in
before his very eyes; Katuti, after she had set fire to the interior of
the palace, had made them fall by one blow of a hammer. Ani saw her robe
as she herself fled, clenched his fist with rage as he shouted her name,
and then, not knowing what he did, rushed headlong through the corridor
into which the different royal apartments opened.
The fearful crash of the falling stairs brought the King and Mena also
out of the sleeping-room.
"There lie the stairs! that is serious!" said the king cooly; then he
went back into his room, and looked out of a window to estimate the
danger. Bright flames were already bursting from the northern end of the
palace, and gave the grey dawn the brightness of day; the southern wing
or the pavilion was not yet on fire. Mena observed the parapet from which
Paaker had fallen to the ground, tested its strength, and found it firm
enough to bear several persons. He looked round, particularly at the wing
not yet gained by the flames, and exclaimed in a loud voice:
"The fire is intentional! it is done on purpose. See there! a man is
squatting down and pushing a brand into the woodwork."
He leaped back into the room, which was now filling with smoke, snatched
the king's bow and quiver, which he himself had hung up at the bed-head,
took careful aim, and with one cry the incendiary fell dead.
A few hours later the dwarf Nemu was found with the charioteer's arrow
through his heart. After setting fire to Bent-Anat's rooms, he had
determined to lay a brand to the wing of the palace where, with the other
princes, Uarda's friend Rameri was sleeping.
Mena had again leaped out of window, and was estimating the height of the
leap to the ground; the Pharaoh's room was getting more and more filled
with smoke, and flames began to break through the seams of the boards.
Outside the palace as well as within every one was waking up to terror
and excitement.
"Fire! fire! an incendiary! Help! Save the king!" cried Kaschta, who
rushed on, followed by a crowd of guards whom he had roused; Uarda had
flown to call Bent-Anat, as she knew the way to her room. The king had
got on to the parapet outside the window with Mena, and was calling to
the soldiers.
"Half of you get into the house, and first save the princess; the other
half keep the fire from catching the south wing. I will try to get
there."
But Nemu's brand had been effectual, the flames flared up, and the
soldiers strained every nerve to conquer them. Their cries mingled with
the crackling and snapping of the dry wood, and the roar of the flames,
with the trumpet calls of the awakening troops, and the beating of drums.
The young princes appeared at a window; they had tied their clothes
together to form a rope, and one by one escaped down it.
Rameses called to them with words of encouragement, but he himself was
unable to take any means of escape, for though the parapet on which he
stood was tolerably wide, and ran round the whole of the building, at
about every six feet it was broken by spaces of about ten paces. The fire
was spreading and growing, and glowing sparks flew round him and his
companion like chaff from the winnowing fan.
"Bring some straw and make a heap below!" shouted Rameses, above the roar
of the conflagration. "There is no escape but by a leap down."
The flames rushed out of the windows of the king's room; it was
impossible to return to it, but neither the king nor Mena lost his
self-possession. When Mena saw the twelve princes descending to the
ground, he shouted through his hands, using them as a speaking trumpet,
and called to Rameri, who was about to slip down the rope they had
contrived, the last of them all.
"Pull up the rope, and keep it from injury till I come."
Rameri obeyed the order, and before Rameses could interfere, Mena had
sprung across the space which divided one piece of the balustrade from
another. The king's blood ran cold as Mena, a second time, ventured the
frightful leap; one false step, and he must meet with the same fearful
death as his enemy Paaker.
While the bystanders watched him in breathless silence--while the
crackling of the wood, the roar of the flames, and the dull thump of
falling timber mingled with the distant chant of a procession of priests
who were now approaching the burning pile, Nefert roused by little
Scherau knelt on the bare ground in fervent and passionate prayer to the
saving Gods. She watched every movement of her husband, and she bit her
lips till they bled not to cry out. She felt that he was acting bravely
and nobly, and that he was lost if even for an instant his attention were
distracted from his perilous footing. Now he had reached Rameri, and
bound one end of the rope made out of cloaks and handkerchiefs, round his
body; then he gave the other end to Rameri, who held fast to the
window-sill, and prepared once more to spring. Nefert saw him ready to
leap, she pressed her hands upon her lips to repress a scream, she shut
her eyes, and when she opened them again he had accomplished the first
leap, and at the second the Gods preserved him from falling; at the third
the king held out his hand to him, and saved him from a fall. Then
Rameses helped him to unfasten the rope from round his waist to fasten it
to the end of a beam.
Rameri now loosened the other end, and followed Mena's example; he too,
practised in athletic exercises in the school of the House of Seti,
succeeded in accomplishing the three tremendous leaps, and soon the king
stood in safety on the ground. Rameri followed him, and then Mena, whose
faithful wife went to meet him, and wiped the sweat from his throbbing
temples.
Rameses hurried to the north wing, where Bent-Anat had her apartments; he
found her safe indeed, but wringing her hands, for her young favorite
Uarda had disappeared in the flames after she had roused her and saved
her with her father's assistance. Kaschta ran up and down in front of the
burning pavilion, tearing his hair; now calling his child in tones of
anguish, now holding his breath to listen for an answer. To rush at
random into the immense-burning building would have been madness. The
king observed the unhappy man, and set him to lead the soldiers, whom he
had commanded to hew down the wall of Bent-Anat's rooms, so as to rescue
the girl who might be within. Kaschta seized an axe, and raised it to
strike.
But he thought that he heard blows from within against one of the
shutters of the ground-floor, which by Katuti's orders had been securely
closed; he followed the sound--he was not mistaken, the knocking could be
distinctly heard.
With all his might he struck the edge of the axe between the shutter and
the wall, and a stream of smoke poured out of the new outlet, and before
him, enveloped in its black clouds, stood a staggering man who held Uarda
in his arms. Kaschta sprang forward into the midst of the smoke and
sparks, and snatched his daughter from the arms of her preserver, who
fell half smothered on his knees. He rushed out into the air with his
light and precious burden, and as he pressed his lips to her closed
eyelids his eyes were wet, and there rose up before him the image of the
woman who bore her, the wife that had stood as the solitary green
palm-tree in the desert waste of his life. But only for a few
seconds-Bent-Anat herself took Uarda into her care, and he hastened back
to the burning house.
He had recognized his daughter's preserver; it was the physician
Nebsecht, who had not quitted the princess since their meeting on Sinai,
and had found a place among her suite as her personal physician.
The fresh air had rushed into the room through the opening of the
shutter, the broad flames streamed out of the window, but still Nebsecht
was alive, for his groans could be heard through the smoke. Once more
Kaschta rushed towards the window, the bystanders could see that the
ceiling of the room was about to fail, and called out to warn him, but he
was already astride the sill.
"I signed myself his slave with my blood," he cried, "Twice he has saved
my child, and now I will pay my debt," and he disappeared into the
burning room.
He soon reappeared with Nebsecht in his arms, whose robe was already
scorched by the flames. He could be seen approaching the window with his
heavy burden; a hundred soldiers, and with them Pentaur, pressed forward
to help him, and took the senseless leech out of the arms of the soldier,
who lifted him over the window sill.
Kaschta was on the point of following him, but before he could swing
himself over, the beams above gave way and fell, burying the brave son of
the paraschites.
Pentaur had his insensible friend carried to his tent, and helped the
physicians to bind up his burns. When the cry of fire had been first
raised, Pentaur was sitting in earnest conversation with the high-priest;
he had learned that he was not the son of a gardener, but a descendant of
one of the noblest families in the land. The foundations of life seemed
to be subverted under his feet, Ameni's revelation lifted him out of the
dust and set him on the marble floor of a palace; and yet Pentaur was
neither excessively surprised nor inordinately rejoiced; he was so well
used to find his joys and sufferings depend on the man within him, and
not on the circumstances without.
As soon as he heard the cry of fire, he hastened to the burning pavilion,
and when he saw the king's danger, he set himself at the head of a number
of soldiers who had hurried up from the camp, intending to venture an
attempt to save Rameses from the inside of the house. Among those who
followed him in this hopeless effort was Katuti's reckless son, who had
distinguished himself by his valor before Kadesh, and who hailed this
opportunity of again proving his courage. Falling walls choked up the way
in front of these brave adventurers; but it was not till several had
fallen choked or struck down by burning logs, that they made up their
minds to retire--one of the first that was killed was Katuti's son,
Nefert's brother.
Uarda had been carried into the nearest tent. Her pretty head lay in
Bent-Anat's lap, and Nefert tried to restore her to animation by rubbing
her temples with strong essences. Presently the girl's lips moved: with
returning consciousness all she had seen and suffered during the last
hour or two recurred to her mind; she felt herself rushing through the
camp with her father, hurrying through the corridor to the princess's
rooms, while he broke in the doors closed by Katuti's orders; she saw
Bent-Anat as she roused her, and conducted her to safety; she remembered
her horror when, just as she reached the door, she discovered that she
had left in her chest her jewel, the only relic of her lost mother, and
her rapid return which was observed by no one but by the leech Nebsecht.
Again she seemed to live through the anguish she had felt till she once
more had the trinket safe in her bosom, the horror that fell upon her
when she found her escape impeded by smoke and flames, and the weakness
which overcame her; and she felt as if the strange white-robed priest
once more raised her in his arms. She remembered the tenderness of his
eyes as he looked into hers, and she smiled half gratefully but half
displeased at the tender kiss which had been pressed on her lips before
she found herself in her father's strong arms.
"How sweet she is!" said Bent-Anat. "I believe poor Nebsecht is right in
saying that her mother was the daughter of some great man among the
foreign people. Look what pretty little hands and feet, and her skin is
as clear as Phoenician glass."
CHAPTER XLIV.
While the friends were occupied in restoring Uarda to animation, and in
taking affectionate care of her, Katuti was walking restlessly backwards
and forwards in her tent.
Soon after she had slipped out for the purpose of setting fire to the
palace, Scherau's cry had waked up Nefert, and Katuti found her
daughter's bed empty when, with blackened hands and limbs trembling with
agitation, she came back from her criminal task.
Now she waited in vain for Nemu and Paaker.
Her steward, whom she sent on repeated messages of enquiry whether the
Regent had returned, constantly brought back a negative answer, and added
the information that he had found the body of old Hekt lying on the open
ground. The widow's heart sank with fear; she was full of dark
forebodings while she listened to the shouts of the people engaged in
putting out the fire, the roll of drums, and the trumpets of the soldiers
calling each other to the help of the king.
To these sounds now was added the dull crash of falling timbers and
walls.
A faint smile played upon her thin lips, and she thought to herself:
"There--that perhaps fell on the king, and my precious son-in-law, who
does not deserve such a fate--if we had not fallen into disgrace, and if
since the occurrences before Kadesh he did not cling to his indulgent
lord as a calf follows a cow."
She gathered fresh courage, and fancied she could hear the voice of
Ethiopian troops hailing the Regent as king--could see Ani decorated with
the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, seated on Rameses' throne, and
herself by his side in rich though unpretending splendor. She pictured
herself with her son and daughter as enjoying Mena's estate, freed from
debt and increased by Ani's generosity, and then a new, intoxicating hope
came into her mind. Perhaps already at this moment her daughter was a
widow, and why should she not be so fortunate as to induce Ani to select
her child, the prettiest woman in Thebes, for his wife? Then she, the
mother of the queen, would be indeed unimpeachable, and all-powerful. She
had long since come to regard the pioneer as a tool to be cast aside, nay
soon to be utterly destroyed; his wealth might probably at some future
time be bestowed upon her son, who had distinguished himself at Kadesh,
and whom Ani must before long promote to be his charioteer or the
commander of the chariot warriors.
Flattered by these fancies, she forgot every care as she walked faster
and faster to and fro in her tent. Suddenly the steward, whom she had
this time sent to the very scene of the fire, rushed into the tent, and
with every token of terror broke to her the news that the king and his
charioteer were hanging in mid air on a narrow wooden parapet, and that
unless some miracle happened they must inevitably be killed. It was said
that incendiaries had occasioned the fire, and he, the steward, had
hastened forward to prepare her for evil news as the mangled body of the
pioneer, which had been identified by the ring on his finger, and the
poor little corpse of Nemu, pierced through by an arrow, had been carried
past him.
Katuti was silent for a moment.
"And the king's sons?" she asked with an anxious sigh.
"The Gods be praised," replied the steward, "they succeeded in letting
themselves down to the ground by a rope made of their garments knotted
together, and some were already safe when I came away."
Katuti's face clouded darkly; once more she sent forth her messenger. The
minutes of his absence seemed like days; her bosom heaved in stormy
agitation, then for a moment she controlled herself, and again her heart
seemed to cease beating--she closed her eyes as if her anguish of anxiety
was too much for her strength. At last, long after sunrise, the steward
reappeared.
Pale, trembling, hardly able to control his voice, he threw himself on
the ground at her feet crying out:
"Alas! this night! prepare for the worst, mistress! May Isis comfort
thee, who saw thy son fall in the service of his king and father! May
Amon, the great God of Thebes, give thee strength! Our pride, our hope,
thy son is slain, killed by a falling beam."
Pale and still as if frozen, Katuti shed not a tear; for a minute she did
not speak, then she asked in a dull tone:
"And Rameses?"
"The Gods be praised!" answered the servant, "he is safe-rescued by
Mena!"
"And Ani?"
"Burnt!--they found his body disfigured out of all recognition; they knew
him again by the jewels he wore at the banquet."
Katuti gazed into vacancy, and the steward started back as from a mad
woman when, instead of bursting into tears, she clenched her small
jewelled hands, shook her fists in the air, and broke into loud, wild
laughter; then, startled at the sound of her own voice, she suddenly
became silent and fixed her eyes vacantly on the ground. She neither saw
nor heard that the captain of the watch, who was called "the eyes and
ears of the king," had come in through the door of her tent followed by
several officers and a scribe; he came up to her, and called her by her
name. Not till the steward timidly touched her did she collect her senses
like one suddenly roused from deep sleep.
"What are you doing in my tent?" she asked the officer, drawing herself
up haughtily.
"In the name of the chief judge of Thebes," said the captain of the watch
solemnly. "I arrest you, and hail you before the high court of justice,
to defend yourself against the grave and capital charges of high treason,
attempted regicide, and incendiarism."
"I am ready," said the widow, and a scornful smile curled her lips. Then
with her usual dignity she pointed to a seat and said:
"Be seated while I dress."
The officer bowed, but remained standing at the door of the tent while
she arranged her black hair, set her diadem on her brow, opened her
little ointment chest, and took from it a small phial of the rapid poison
strychnine, which some months before she had procured through Nemu from
the old witch Hekt.
"My mirror!" she called to a maid servant, who squatted in a corner of
the tent. She held the metal mirror so as to conceal her face from the
captain of the watch, put the little flask to her lips and emptied it at
one mouthful. The mirror fell from her hand, she staggered, a deadly
convulsion seized her--the officer rushed forward, and while she fixed
her dying look upon him she said:
"My game is lost, but Ameni--tell Ameni that he will not win either."
She fell forward, murmured Nefert's name, struggled convulsively and was
dead.
When the draught of happiness which the Gods prepare for some few men,
seems to flow clearest and purest, Fate rarely fails to infuse into it
some drop of bitterness. And yet we should not therefore disdain it, for
it is that very drop of bitterness which warns us to drink of the joys of
life thankfully, and in moderation.
The perfect happiness of Mena and Nefert was troubled by the fearful
death of Katuti, but both felt as if they now for the first time knew the
full strength of their love for each other. Mena had to make up to his
wife for the loss of mother and brother, and Nefert to restore to her
husband much that he had been robbed of by her relatives, and they felt
that they had met again not merely for pleasure but to be to each other a
support and a consolation.
Rameses quitted the scene of the fire full of gratitude to the Gods who
had shown such grace to him and his. He ordered numberless steers to be
sacrificed, and thanksgiving festivals to be held throughout the land;
but he was cut to the heart by the betrayal to which he had fallen a
victim. He longed--as he always did in moments when the balance of his
mind had been disturbed--for an hour of solitude, and retired to the tent
which had been hastily erected for him. He could not bear to enter the
splendid pavilion which had been Ani's; it seemed to him infested with
the leprosy of falsehood and treason.
For an hour he remained alone, and weighed the worst he had suffered at
the hands of men against that which was good and cheering, and he found
that the good far outweighed the evil. He vividly realized the magnitude
of his debt of gratitude, not to the Immortals only, but also to his
earthly friends, as he recalled every moment of this morning's
experience.
"Gratitude," he said to himself, "was impressed on you by your mother;
you yourself have taught your children to be grateful. Piety is gratitude
to the Gods, and he only is really generous who does not forget the
gratitude he owes to men."
He had thrown off all bitterness of feeling when he sent for Bent-Anat
and Pentaur to be brought to his tent. He made his daughter relate at
full length how the poet had won her love, and though he frequently
interrupted her with blame as well as praise, his heart was full of
fatherly joy when he laid his darling's hand in that of the poet.
Bent-Anat laid her head in full content on the breast of the noble Assa's
grandson, but she would have clung not less fondly to Pentaur the
gardener's son.
"Now you are one of my own children," said Rameses; and he desired the
poet to remain with him while he commanded the heralds, ambassadors, and
interpreters to bring to him the Asiatic princes, who were detained in
their own tents on the farther side of the Nile, that he might conclude
with them such a treaty of peace as might continue valid for generations
to come. Before they arrived, the young princes came to their father's
tent, and learned from his own lips the noble birth of Pentaur, and that
they owed it to their sister that in him they saw another brother; they
welcomed him with sincere affection, and all, especially Rameri, warmly
congratulated the handsome and worthy couple.
The king then called Rameri forward from among his brothers, and thanked
him before them all for his brave conduct during the fire. He had already
been invested with the robe of manhood after the battle of Kadesh; he was
now appointed to the command of a legion of chariot-warriors, and the
order of the lion to wear round his neck was bestowed on him for his
bravery. The prince knelt, and thanked his father; but Rameses took the
curly head in his hands and said:
"You have won praise and reward by your splendid deeds from the father
whom you have saved and filled with pride. But the king watches over the
laws, and guides the destiny cf this land, the king must blame you, nay
perhaps punish you. You could not yield to the discipline of school,
where we all must learn to obey if we would afterwards exercise our
authority with moderation, and without any orders you left Egypt and
joined the army. You showed the courage and strength of a man, but the
folly of a boy in all that regards prudence and foresight--things harder
to learn for the son of a race of heroes than mere hitting and slashing
at random; you, without experience, measured yourself against masters of
the art of war, and what was the consequence? Twice you fell a prisoner
into the hands of the enemy, and I had to ransom you.
"The king of the Danaids gave you up in exchange for his daughter, and he
rejoices long since in the restoration of his child; but we, in losing
her, lost the most powerful means of coercing the seafaring nations of
the islands and northern coasts of the great sea who are constantly
increasing in might and daring, and so diminished our chances of securing
a solid and abiding peace.
"Thus--through the careless wilfulness of a boy, the great work is
endangered which I had hoped to have achieved. It grieves me particularly
to humiliate your spirit to-day, when I have had so much reason to
encourage you with praise. Nor will I punish you, only warn you and teach
you. The mechanism of the state is like the working of the cogged wheels
which move the water-works on the shore of the Nile-if one tooth is
missing the whole comes to a stand-still however strong the beasts that
labor to turn it. Each of you--bear this in mind--is a main-wheel in the
great machine of the state, and can serve an end only by acting
unresistingly in obedience to the motive power. Now rise! we may perhaps
succeed in obtaining good security from the Asiatic king, though we have
lost our hostage."
Heralds at this moment marched into the tent, and announced that the
representative of the Cheta king and the allied princes were in
attendance in the council tent; Rameses put on the crown of Upper and
Lower Egypt and all his royal adornments; the chamberlain who carried the
insignia of his power, and his head scribe with his decoration of plumes
marched before him, while his sons, the commanders in chief, and the
interpreters followed him. Rameses took his seat on his throne with great
dignity, and the sternest gravity marked his demeanor while he received
the homage of the conquered and fettered kings.
The Asiatics kissed the earth at his feet, only the king of the Danaids
did no more than bow before him. Rameses looked wrathfully at him, and
ordered the interpreter to ask him whether he considered himself
conquered or no, and the answer was given that he had not come before the
Pharaoh as a prisoner, and that the obeisance which Rameses required of
him was regarded as a degradation according to the customs of his
free-born people, who prostrated them selves only before the Gods. He
hoped to become an ally of the king of Egypt, and he asked would he
desire to call a degraded man his friend?
Rameses measured the proud and noble figure before him with a glance, and
said severely:
"I am prepared to treat for peace only with such of my enemies as are
willing to bow to the double crown that I wear. If you persist in your
refusal, you and your people will have no part in the favorable
conditions that I am prepared to grant to these, your allies."
The captive prince preserved his dignified demeanor, which was
nevertheless free from insolence, when these words of the king were
interpreted to him, and replied that he had come intending to procure
peace at any cost, but that he never could nor would grovel in the dust
at any man's feet nor before any crown. He would depart on the following
day; one favor, however, he requested in his daughter's name and his
own--and he had heard that the Egyptians respected women. The king knew,
of course, that his charioteer Mena had treated his daughter, not as a
prisoner but as a sister, and Praxilla now felt a wish, which he himself
shared, to bid farewell to the noble Mena, and his wife, and to thank him
for his magnanimous generosity. Would Rameses permit him once more to
cross the Nile before his departure, and with his daughter to visit Mena
in his tent.
Rameses granted his prayer: the prince left the tent, and the
negotiations began.
In a few hours they were brought to a close, for the Asiatic and Egyptian
scribes had agreed, in the course of the long march southwards, on the
stipulations to be signed; the treaty itself was to be drawn up after the
articles had been carefully considered, and to be signed in the city of
Rameses called Tanis--or, by the numerous settlers in its neighborhood,
Zoan. The Asiatic princes were to dine as guests with the king; but they
sat at a separate table, as the Egyptians would have been defiled by
sitting at the same table with strangers.
Rameses was not perfectly satisfied. If the Danaids went away without
concluding a treaty with him, it was to be expected that the peace which
he was so earnestly striving for would before long be again disturbed;
and he nevertheless felt that, out of regard for the other conquered
princes, he could not forego any jot of the humiliation which he had
required of their king, and which he believed to be due to
himself--though he bad been greatly impressed by his dignified manliness
and by the bravery of the troops that had followed him into the field.
The sun was sinking when Mena, who that day had leave of absence from the
king, came in great excitement up to the table where the princes were
sitting and craved the king's permission to make an important
communication. Rameses signed consent; the charioteer went close up to
him, and they held a short but eager conversation in a low voice.
Presently the king stood up and said, speaking to his daughter:
"This day which began so horribly will end joyfully. The fair child who
saved you to-day, but who so nearly fell a victim to the flames, is of
noble origin."
"She cones of a royal house," said Rameri, disrespectfully interrupting
his father. Rameses looked at him reprovingly. "My sons are silent," he
said, "till I ask them to speak."
The prince colored and looked down; the king signed to Bent-Anat and
Pentaur, begged his guests to excuse him for a short time, and was about
to leave the tent; but Bent-Anat went up to him, and whispered a few
words to him with reference to her brother. Not in vain: the king paused,
and reflected for a few moments; then he looked at Rameri, who stood
abashed, and as if rooted to the spot where he stood. The king called his
name, and beckoned him to follow him.
CHAPTER XLV.
Rameri had rushed off to summon the physicians, while Bent-Anat was
endeavoring to restore the rescued Uarda to consciousness, and he
followed them into his sister's tent. He gazed with tender anxiety into
the face of the half suffocated girl, who, though uninjured, still
remained unconscious, and took her hand to press his lips to her slender
fingers, but Bent-Anat pushed him gently away; then in low tones that
trembled with emotion he implored her not to send him away, and told her
how dear the girl whose life he had saved in the fight in the Necropolis
had become to him--how, since his departure for Syria, he had never
ceased to think of her night and day, and that he desired to make her his
wife.
Bent-Anat was startled; she reminded her brother of the stain that lay on
the child of the paraschites and through which she herself had suffered
so much; but Rameri answered eagerly:
"In Egypt rank and birth are derived through the mother and Kaschta's
dead wife--"
"I know," interrupted Bent-Anat. "Nebsecht has already told us that she
was a dumb woman, a prisoner of war, and I myself believe that she was of
no mean house, for Uarda is nobly formed in face and figure."
"And her skin is as fine as the petal of a flower," cried Rameri. "Her
voice is like the ring of pure gold, and--Oh! look, she is moving. Uarda,
open your eyes, Uarda! When the sun rises we praise the Gods. Open your
eyes! how thankful, how joyful I shall be if those two suns only rise
again."
Bent-Anat smiled, and drew her brother away from the heavily-breathing
girl, for a leech came into the tent to say that a warm medicated bath
had been prepared and was ready for Uarda. The princess ordered her
waiting-women to help lift the senseless girl, and was preparing to
follow her when a message from her father required her presence in his
tent. She could guess at the significance of this command, and desired
Rameri to leave her that she might dress in festal garments; she could
entrust Uarda to the care of Nefert during her absence.
"She is kind and gentle, and she knows Uarda so well," said the princess,
"and the necessity of caring for this dear little creature will do her
good. Her heart is torn between sorrow for her lost relations, and joy at
being united again to her love. My father has given Mena leave of absence
from his office for several days, and I have excused her from her
attendance on me, for the time during which we were so necessary to each
other really came to an end yesterday. I feel, Rameri, as if we, after
our escape, were like the sacred phoenix which comes to Heliopolis and
burns itself to death only to soar again from its ashes young and
radiant--blessed and blessing!"
When her brother had left her, she threw herself before the image of her
mother and prayed long and earnestly; she poured an offering of sweet
perfume on the little altar of the Goddess Hathor, which always
accompanied her, had herself dressed in happy preparation for meeting her
father, and--she did not conceal it from herself--Pentaur, then she went
for a moment to Nefert's tent to beg her to take good care of Uarda, and
finally obeyed the summons of the king, who, as we know, fulfilled her
utmost hopes.
As Rameri quitted his sister's tent he saw the watch seize and lead away
a little boy; the child cried bitterly, and the prince in a moment
recognized the little sculptor Scherau, who had betrayed the Regent's
plot to him and to Uarda, and whom he had already fancied he had seen
about the place. The guards had driven him away several times from the
princess's tent, but he had persisted in returning, and this obstinate
waiting in the neighborhood had aroused the suspicions of an officer; for
since the fire a thousand rumors of conspiracies and plots against the
king had been flying about the camp. Rameri at once freed the little
prisoner, and heard from him that it was old Hekt who, before her death,
had sent Kaschta and his daughter to the rescue of the king, that he
himself had helped to rouse the troops, that now he had no home and
wished to go to Uarda.
The prince himself led the child to Nefert, and begged her to allow him
to see Uarda, and to let him stay with her servants till he himself
returned from his father's tent.
The leeches had treated Uarda with judgment, for under the influence of
the bath she recovered her senses; when she had been dressed again in
fresh garments and refreshed by the essences and medicines which they
gave her to inhale and to drink, she was led back into Nefert's tent,
where Mena, who had never before seen her, was astonished at her peculiar
and touching beauty.
"She is very like my Danaid princess," he said to his wife; "only she is
younger and much prettier than she."
Little Scherau came in to pay his respects to her, and she was delighted
to see the boy; still she was sad, and however kindly Nefert spoke to her
she remained in silent reverie, while from time to time a large tear
rolled down her cheek.
"You have lost your father!" said Nefert, trying to comfort her. "And I,
my mother and brother both in one day."
"Kaschta was rough but, oh! so kind," replied Uarda. "He was always so
fond of me; he was like the fruit of the doom palm; its husk is hard and
rough, but he who knows how to open it finds the sweet pulp within. Now
he is dead, and my grandfather and grandmother are gone before him, and I
am like the green leaf that I saw floating on the waters when we were
crossing the sea; anything so forlorn I never saw, abandoned by all it
belonged to or had ever loved, the sport of a strange element in which
nothing resembling itself ever grew or ever can grow."
Nefert kissed her forehead. "You have friends," she said, "who will never
abandon you."
"I know, I know!" said Uarda thoughtfully, "and yet I am alone--for the
first time really alone. In Thebes I have often looked after the wild
swans as they passed across the sky; one flies in front, then comes the
body of the wandering party, and very often, far behind, a solitary
straggler; and even this last one I do not call lonely, for he can still
see his brethren in front of him. But when the hunters have shot down all
the low-flying loiterers, and the last one has lost sight of the flock,
and knows that he never again can find them or follow them he is indeed
to be pitied. I am as unhappy as the abandoned bird, for I have lost
sight to-day of all that I belong to, and I am alone, and can never find
them again."
"You will be welcomed into some more noble house than that to which you
belong by birth," said Nefert, to comfort her.
Uarda's eyes flashed, and she said proudly, almost defiantly:
"My race is that of my mother, who was a daughter of no mean house; the
reason I turned back this morning and went into the smoke and fire again
after I had escaped once into the open air--what I went back for, because
I felt it was worth dying for, was my mother's legacy, which I had put
away with my holiday dress when I followed the wretched Nemu to his tent.
I threw myself into the jaws of death to save the jewel, but certainly
not because it is made of gold and precious stones--for I do not care to
be rich, and I want no better fare than a bit of bread and a few dates
and a cup of water--but because it has a name on it in strange
characters, and because I believe it will serve to discover the people
from whom my mother was carried off; and now I have lost the jewel, and
with it my identity and my hopes and happiness."
Uarda wept aloud; Nefert put her arm around her affectionately.
"Poor child!" she said, "was your treasure destroyed in the flames?"
"No, no," cried Uarda eagerly. "I snatched it out of my chest and held it
in my hand when Nebsecht took me in his arms, and I still had it in my
hand when I was lying safe on the ground outside the burning house, and
Bent-Anat was close to me, and Rameri came up. I remember seeing him as
if I were in a dream, and I revived a little, and I felt the jewel in my
fingers then."
"Then it was dropped on the way to the tent?" said Nefert.
Uarda nodded; little Scherau, who had been crouching on the floor beside
her, gave Uarda a loving glance, dimmed with tears, and quietly slipped
out of the tent.
Time went by in silence; Uarda sat looking at the ground, Nefert and Mena
held each other's hands, but the thoughts of all three were with the
dead. A perfect stillness reigned, and the happiness of the reunited
couple was darkly overshadowed by their sorrow. From time to time the
silence was broken by a trumpet-blast from the royal tent; first when the
Asiatic princes were introduced into the Council-tent, then when the
Danaid king departed, and lastly when the Pharaoh preceded the conquered
princes to the banquet.
The charioteer remembered how his master had restored him to dignity and
honor, for the sake of his faithful wife; and gratefully pressed her
hand.
Suddenly there was a noise in front of the tent, and an officer entered
to announce to Mena that the Danaid king and his daughter, accompanied by
body-guard, requested to see and speak with him and Nefert.
The entrance to the tent was thrown wide open. Uarda retired modestly
into the back-ground, and Mena and Nefert went forward hand in hand to
meet their unexpected guests.
The Greek prince was an old man, his beard and thick hair were grey, but
his movements were youthful and light, though dignified and deliberate.
His even, well-formed features were deeply furrowed, he had large,
bright, clear blue eyes, but round his fine lips were lines of care.
Close to him walked his daughter; her long white robe striped with purple
was held round her hips by a golden girdle, and her sunny yellow hair
fell in waving locks over her neck and shoulders, while it was confined
by a diadem which encircled her head; she was of middle height, and her
motions were measured and calm like her father's. Her brow was narrow,
and in one line with her straight nose, her rosy mouth was sweet and
kind, and beyond everything beautiful were the lines of her oval face and
the turn of her snow-white throat. By their side stood the interpreter
who translated every word of the conversation on both sides. Behind them
came two men and two women, who carried gifts for Mena and his wife.
The prince praised Mena's magnanimity in the warmest terms.
"You have proved to me," he said, "that the virtues of gratitude, of
constancy, and of faith are practised by the Egyptians; although your
merit certainly appears less to me now that I see your wife, for he who
owns the fairest may easily forego any taste for the fair."
Nefert blushed.
"Your generosity," she answered, "does me more than justice at your
daughter's expense, and love moved my husband to the same injustice, but
your beautiful daughter must forgive you and me also."
Praxilla went towards her and expressed her thanks; then she offered her
the costly coronet, the golden clasps and strings of rare pearls which
her women carried; her father begged Mena to accept a coat of mail and a
shield of fine silver work. The strangers were then led into the tent,
and were there welcomed and entertained with all honor, and offered bread
and wine. While Mena pledged her father, Praxilla related to Nefert, with
the help of the interpreter, what hours of terror she had lived through
after she had been taken prisoner by the Egyptians, and was brought into
the camp with the other spoils of war; how an older commander had
asserted his claim to her, how Mena had given her his hand, had led her
to his tent, and had treated her like his own daughter. Her voice shook
with emotion, and even the interpreter was moved as she concluded her
story with these words: "How grateful I am to him, you will fully
understand when I tell you that the man who was to have been my husband
fell wounded before my eyes while defending our camp; but he has
recovered, and now only awaits my return for our wedding."
"May the Gods only grant it!" cried the king, "for Praxilla is the last
child of my house. The murderous war robbed me of my four fair sons
before they had taken wives, my son-in-law was slain by the Egyptians at
the taking of our camp, and his wife and new-born son fell into their
hands, and Praxilla is my youngest child, the only one left to me by the
envious Gods."
While he was still speaking, they heard the guards call out and a child's
loud cry, and at the same instant little Scherau rushed into the tent
holding up his hand exclaiming.
"I have it! I have found it!"
Uarda, who had remained behind the curtain which screened the sleeping
room of the tent--but who had listened with breathless attention to every
word of the foreigners, and who had never taken her eyes off the fair
Praxilla--now came forward, emboldened by her agitation, into the midst
of the tent, and took the jewel from the child's hand to show it to the
Greek king; for while she stood gazing at Praxilla it seemed to her that
she was looking at herself in a mirror, and the idea had rapidly grown to
conviction that her mother had been a daughter of the Danaids. Her heart
beat violently as she went up to the king with a modest demeanor, her
head bent down, but holding her jewel up for him to see.
The bystanders all gazed in astonishment at the veteran chief, for he
staggered as she came up to him, stretched out his hands as if in terror
towards the girl, and drew back crying out:
"Xanthe, Xanthe! Is your spirit freed from Hades? Are you come to summon
me?"
Praxilla looked at her father in alarm, but suddenly she, too, gave a
piercing cry, snatched a chain from her neck, hurried towards Uarda, and
seizing the jewel she held, exclaimed:
"Here is the other half of the ornament, it belonged to my poor sister
Xanthe!"
The old Greek was a pathetic sight, he struggled hard to collect himself,
looking with tender delight at Uarda, his sinewy hands trembled as he
compared the two pieces of the necklet; they matched precisely--each
represented the wing of an eagle which was attached to half an oval
covered with an inscription; when they were laid together they formed the
complete figure of a bird with out-spread wings, on whose breast the
lines exactly matched of the following oracular verse:
"Alone each is a trifling thing, a woman's useless toy
But with its counterpart behold! the favorite bird of Zeus."
A glance at the inscription convinced the king that he held in his hand
the very jewel which he had put with his own hands round the neck of his
daughter Xanthe on her marriage-day, and of which the other half had been
preserved by her mother, from whom it had descended to Praxilla. It had
originally been made for his wife and her twin sister who had died young.
Before he made any enquiries, or asked for any explanations, he took
Uarda's head between his hands, and turning her face close to his he
gazed at her features, as if he were reading a book in which he expected
to find a memorial of all the blissful hours of his youth, and the girl
felt no fear; nor did she shrink when he pressed his lips to her
forehead, for she felt that this man's blood ran in her own veins. At
last the king signed to the interpreter; Uarda was asked to tell all she
knew of her mother, and when she said that she had come a captive to
Thebes with an infant that had soon after died, that her father had
bought her and had loved her in spite of her being dumb, the prince's
conviction became certainty; he acknowledged Uarda as his grandchild, and
Praxilla clasped her in her arms.
Then he told Mena that it was now twenty years since his son-in-law had
been killed, and his daughter Xanthe, whom Uarda exactly resembled, had
been carried into captivity. Praxilla was then only just born, and his
wife died of the shock of such terrible news. All his enquiries for
Xanthe and her child had been fruitless, but he now remembered that once,
when he had offered a large ransom for his daughter if she could be
found, the Egyptians had enquired whether she were dumb, and that he had
answered "no." No doubt Xanthe had lost the power of speech through
grief, terror, and suffering.
The joy of the king was unspeakable, and Uarda was never tired of gazing
at his daughter and holding her hand.
Then she turned to the interpreter.
"Tell me," she said. "How do I say 'I am so very happy?'"
He told her, and she smilingly repeated his words. "Now 'Uarda will love
you with all her heart?'" and she said it after him in broken accents
that sounded so sweet and so heart-felt, that the old man clasped her to
his breast.
Tears of emotion stood in Nefert's eyes, and when Uarda flung herself
into her arms she said:
"The forlorn swan has found its kindred, the floating leaf has reached
the shore, and must be happy now!" Thus passed an hour of the purest
happiness; at last the Greek king prepared to leave, and the wished to
take Uarda with him; but Mena begged his permission to communicate all
that had occurred to the Pharaoh and Bent-Anat, for Uarda was attached to
the princess's train, and had been left in his charge, and he dared not
trust her in any other hands without Bent-Anat's permission. Without
waiting for the king's reply he left the tent, hastened to the banqueting
tent, and, as we know, Rameses and the princess had at once attended to
his summons.
On the way Mena gave them a vivid description of the exciting events that
had taken place, and Rameses, with a side glance at Bent-Anat, asked
Rameri:
"Would you be prepared to repair your errors, and to win the friendship
of the Greek king by being betrothed to his granddaughter?"
The prince could not answer a word, but he clasped his father's hand, and
kissed it so warmly that Rameses, as he drew it away, said:
"I really believe that you have stolen a march on me, and have been
studying diplomacy behind my back!"
Rameses met his noble opponent outside Mena's tent, and was about to
offer him his hand, but the Danaid chief had sunk on his knees before him
as the other princes had done.
"Regard me not as a king and a warrior," he exclaimed, "only as a
suppliant father; let us conclude a peace, and permit me to take this
maiden, my grandchild, home with me to my own country."
Rameses raised the old man from the ground, gave him his hand, and said
kindly:
"I can only grant the half of what you ask. I, as king of Egypt, am most
willing to grant you a faithful compact for a sound and lasting peace; as
regards this maiden, you must treat with my children, first with my
daughter Bent-Anat, one of whose ladies she is, and then with your
released prisoner there, who wishes to make Uarda his wife."
"I will resign my share in the matter to my brother," said Bent-Anat,
"and I only ask you, maiden, whether you are inclined to acknowledge him
as your lord and master?"
Uarda bowed assent, and looked at her grandfather with an expression
which he understood without any interpreter.
"I know you well," he said, turning to Rameri. "We stood face to face in
the fight, and I took you prisoner as you fell stunned by a blow from my
sword. You are still too rash, but that is a fault which time will amend
in a youth of your heroic temper. Listen to me now, and you too, noble
Pharaoh, permit me these few words; let us betroth these two, and may
their union be the bond of ours, but first grant me for a year to take my
long-lost child home with me that she may rejoice my old heart, and that
I may hear from her lips the accents of her mother, whom you took from
me. They are both young; according to the usages of our country, where
both men and women ripen later than in your country, they are almost too
young for the solemn tie of marriage. But one thing above all will
determine you to favor my wishes; this daughter of a royal house has
grown up amid the humblest surroundings; here she has no home, no
family-ties. The prince has wooed her, so to speak, on the highway, but
if she now comes with me he can enter the palace of kings as suitor to a
princess, and the marriage feast I will provide shall be a right royal
one."
"What you demand is just and wise," replied Rameses. "Take your
grand-child with you as my son's betrothed bride--my future daughter.
Give me your hands, my children. The delay will teach you patience, for
Rameri must remain a full year from to-day in Egypt, and it will be to
your profit, sweet child, for the obedience which he will learn through
his training in the army will temper the nature of your future husband.
You, Rameri, shall in a year from to-day--and I think you will not forget
the date--find at your service a ship in the harbor of Pelusium, fitted
and manned with Phoenicians, to convey you to your wedding."
"So be it!" exclaimed the old man. "And by Zeus who hears me swear--I
will not withhold Xanthe's daughter from your son when he comes to claim
her!"
When Rameri returned to the princes' tent he threw himself on their necks
in turn, and when he found himself alone with their surly old
house-steward, he snatched his wig from his head, flung it in the air,
and then coaxingly stroked the worthy officer's cheeks as he set it on
his head again.
CHAPTER XLVI.
Uarda accompanied her grandfather and Praxilla to their tent on the
farther side of the Nile, but she was to return next morning to the
Egyptian camp to take leave of all her friends, and to provide for her
father's internment. Nor did she delay attending to the last wishes of
old Hekt, and Bent-Anat easily persuaded her father, when he learnt how
greatly he had been indebted to her, to have her embalmed like a lady of
rank.
Before Uarda left the Egyptian camp, Pentaur came to entreat her to
afford her dying preserver Nebsecht the last happiness of seeing her once
more; Uarda acceded with a blush, and the poet, who had watched all night
by his friend, went forward to prepare him for her visit.
Nebsecht's burns and a severe wound on his head caused him great
suffering; his cheeks glowed with fever, and the physicians told Pentaur
that he probably could not live more than a few hours.
The poet laid his cool hand on his friend's brow, and spoke to him
encouragingly; but Nebsecht smiled at his words with the peculiar
expression of a man who knows that his end is near, and said in a low
voice and with a visible effort:
"A few breaths more and here, and here, will be peace." He laid his hand
on his head and on his heart.
"We all attain to peace," said Pentaur. "But perhaps only to labor more
earnestly and unweariedly in the land beyond the grave. If the Gods
reward any thing it is the honest struggle, the earnest seeking after
truth; if any spirit can be made one with the great Soul of the world it
will be yours, and if any eye may see the Godhead through the veil which
here shrouds the mystery of His existence yours will have earned the
privilege."
"I have pushed and pulled," sighed Nebsecht, "with all my might, and now
when I thought I had caught a glimpse of the truth the heavy fist of
death comes down upon me and shuts my eyes. What good will it do me to
see with the eye of the Divinity or to share in his omniscience? It is
not seeing, it is seeking that is delightful--so delightful that I would
willingly set my life there against another life here for the sake of
it." He was silent, for his strength failed, and Pentaur begged him to
keep quiet, and to occupy his mind in recalling all the hours of joy
which life had given him.
"They have been few," said the leech. "When my mother kissed me and gave
me dates, when I could work and observe in peace, when you opened my eyes
to the beautiful world of poetry--that was good!"
And you have soothed the sufferings of many men, added Pentaur, "and
never caused pain to any one."
Nebsecht shook his head.
"I drove the old paraschites," he muttered, "to madness and to death."
He was silent for a long time, then he looked up eagerly and said: "But
not intentionally--and not in vain! In Syria, at Megiddo I could work
undisturbed; now I know what the organ is that thinks. The heart! What is
the heart? A ram's heart or a man's heart, they serve the same end; they
turn the wheel of animal life, they both beat quicker in terror or in
joy, for we feel fear or pleasure just as animals do. But Thought, the
divine power that flies to the infinite, and enables us to form and prove
our opinions, has its seat here--Here in the brain, behind the brow."
He paused exhausted and overcome with pain. Pentaur thought he was
wandering in his fever, and offered him a cooling drink while two
physicians walked round his bed singing litanies; then, as Nebsecht
raised himself in bed with renewed energy, the poet said to him:
"The fairest memory of your life must surely be that of the sweet child
whose face, as you once confessed to me, first opened your soul to the
sense of beauty, and whom with your own hands you snatched from death at
the cost of your own life. You know Uarda has found her own relatives and
is happy, and she is very grateful to her preserver, and would like to
see him once more before she goes far away with her grandfather."
The sick man hesitated before he answered softly:
"Let her come--but I will look at her from a distance."
Pentaur went out and soon returned with Uarda, who remained standing with
glowing cheeks and tears in her eyes at the door of the tent. The leech
looked at her a long time with an imploring and tender expression, then
he said:
"Accept my thanks--and be happy."
The girl would have gone up to him to take his hand, but he waved her off
with his right hand enveloped in wrappings.
"Come no nearer," he said, "but stay a moment longer. You have tears in
your eyes; are they for me or only for my pain?"
"For you, good noble man! my friend and my preserver!" said Uarda. "For
you dear, poor Nebsecht!" The leech closed his eyes as she spoke these
words with earnest feeling, but he looked up once more as she ceased
speaking, and gazed at her with tender admiration; then he said softly:
"It is enough--now I can die."
Uarda left the tent, Pentaur remained with him listening to his hoarse
and difficult breathing; suddenly:
Nebsecht raised himself, and said: "Farewell, my friend,--my journey is
beginning, who knows whither?"
"Only not into vacancy, not to end in nothingness!" cried Pentaur warmly.
The leech shook his head. "I have been something," he said, "and being
something I cannot become nothing. Nature is a good economist, and
utilizes the smallest trifle; she will use me too according to her need.
She brings everything to its end and purpose in obedience to some rule
and measure, and will so deal with me after I am dead; there is no waste.
Each thing results in being that which it is its function to become; our
wish or will is not asked--my head! when the pain is in my head I cannot
think--if only I could prove--could prove----"
The last words were less and less audible, his breath was choked, and in
a few seconds Pentaur with deep regret closed his eyes.
Pentaur, as he quitted the tent where the dead man lay, met the
high-priest Ameni, who had gone to seek him by his friend's bed-side, and
they returned together to gaze on the dead. Ameni, with much emotion, put
up a few earnest prayers for the salvation of his soul, and then
requested Pentaur to follow him without delay to his tent. On the way he
prepared the poet, with the polite delicacy which was peculiar to him,
for a meeting which might be more painful than joyful to him, and must in
any case bring him many hours of anxiety and agitation.
The judges in Thebes, who had been compelled to sentence the lady
Setchem, as the mother of a traitor, to banishment to the mines had,
without any demand on her part, granted leave to the noble and most
respectable matron to go under an escort of guards to meet the king on
his return into Egypt, in order to petition for mercy for herself, but
not, as it was expressly added--for Paaker; and she had set out, but with
the secret resolution to obtain the king's grace not for herself but for
her son.
[Agatharchides, in Diodorus III. 12, says that in many cases not
only the criminal but his relations also were condemned to labor in
the mines. In the convention signed between Rameses and the Cheta
king it is expressly provided that the deserter restored to Egypt
shall go unpunished, that no injury shall be done "to his house, his
wife or his children, nor shall his mother be put to death."]
Ameni had already left Thebes for the north when this sentence was
pronounced, or he would have reversed it by declaring the true origin of
Paaker; for after he had given up his participation in the Regent's
conspiracy, he no longer had any motive for keeping old Hekt's secret.
Setchem's journey was lengthened by a storm which wrecked the ship in
which she was descending the Nile, and she did not reach Pelusium till
after the king. The canal which formed the mouth of the Nile close to
this fortress and joined the river to the Mediterranean, was so
over-crowded with the boats of the Regent and his followers, of the
ambassadors, nobles, citizens, and troops which had met from all parts of
the country, that the lady's boat could find anchorage only at a great
distance from the city, and accompanied by her faithful steward she had
succeeded only a few hours before in speaking to the high-priest.
Setchem was terribly changed; her eyes, which only a few months since had
kept an efficient watch over the wealthy Theban household, were now dim
and weary, and although her figure had not grown thin it had lost its
dignity and energy, and seemed inert and feeble. Her lips, so ready for a
wise or sprightly saying, were closely shut, and moved only in silent
prayer or when some friend spoke to her of her unhappy son. His deed she
well knew was that of a reprobate, and she sought no excuse or defence;
her mother's heart forgave it without any. Whenever she thought of
him--and she thought of him incessantly all through the day and through
her sleepless nights-her eyes overflowed with tears.
Her boat had reached Pelusium just as the flames were breaking out in the
palace; the broad flare of light and the cries from the various vessels
in the harbor brought her on deck. She heard that the burning house was
the pavilion erected by Ani for the king's residence; Rameses she was
told was in the utmost danger, and the fire had beyond a doubt been laid
by traitors.
As day broke and further news reached her, the names of her son and of
her sister came to her ear; she asked no questions--she would not hear
the truth--but she knew it all the same; as often as the word "traitor"
caught her ear in her cabin, to which she had retreated, she felt as if
some keen pain shot through her bewildered brain, and shuddered as if
from a cold chill.
All through that day she could neither eat nor drink, but lay with closed
eyes on her couch, while her steward--who had soon learnt what a terrible
share his former master had taken in the incendiarism, and who now gave
up his lady's cause for lost--sought every where for the high-priest
Ameni; but as he was among the persons nearest to the king it was
impossible to see him that day, and it was not till the next morning that
he was able to speak with him. Ameni inspired the anxious and sorrowful
old retainer with, fresh courage, returned with him in his own chariot to
the harbor, and accompanied him to Setchem's boat to prepare her for the
happiness which awaited her after her terrible troubles. But he came too
late, the spirit of the poor lady was quite clouded, and she listened to
him without any interest while he strove to restore her to courage and to
recall her wandering mind. She only interrupted him over and over again
with the questions: "Did he do it?" or "Is he alive?"
At last Ameni succeeded in persuading her to accompany him in her litter
to his tent, where she would find her son. Pentaur was wonderfully like
her lost husband, and the priest, experienced in humanity, thought that
the sight of him would rouse the dormant powers of her mind. When she had
arrived at his tent, he told her with kind precaution the whole history
of the exchange of Paaker for Pentaur, and she followed the story with
attention but with indifference, as if she were hearing of the adventures
of others who did not concern her. When Ameni enlarged on the genius of
the poet and on his perfect resemblance to his dead father she muttered:
"I know--I know. You mean the speaker at the Feast of the Valley," and
then although she had been told several times that Paaker had been
killed, she asked again if her son was alive.
Ameni decided at last to fetch Pentaur himself,
When he came back with him, fully prepared to meet his heavily-stricken
mother, the tent was empty. The high-priest's servants told him that
Setchem had persuaded the easily-moved old prophet Gagabu to conduct her
to the place where the body of Paaker lay. Ameni was very much vexed, for
he feared that Setchem was now lost indeed, and he desired the poet to
follow him at once.
The mortal remains of the pioneer had been laid in a tent not far from
the scene of the fire; his body was covered with a cloth, but his pale
face, which had not been injured in his fall, remained uncovered; by his
side knelt the unhappy mother.
She paid no heed to Ameni when he spoke to her, and he laid his hand on
her shoulder and said as he pointed to the body:
"This was the son of a gardener. You brought him up faithfully as if he
were your own; but your noble husband's true heir, the son you bore him,
is Pentaur, to whom the Gods have given not only the form and features
but the noble qualities of his father. The dead man may be forgiven--for
the sake of your virtues; but your love is due to this nobler soul--the
real son of your husband, the poet of Egypt, the preserver of the king's
life."
Setchem rose and went up to Pentaur, she smiled at him and stroked his
face and breast.
"It is he," she said. "May the Immortals bless him!"
Pentaur would have clasped her in his arms, but she pushed him away as if
she feared to commit some breach of faith, and turning hastily to the
bier she said softly:
Poor Paaker--poor, poor Paaker!"
"Mother, mother, do you not know your son?" cried Pentaur deeply moved.
She turned to him again: "It is his voice," she said. "It is he."
She went up to Pentaur, clung to him, clasped her arm around his neck as
he bent over her, then kissing him fondly:
"The Gods will bless you!" she said once more. She tore herself from him
and threw herself down by the body of Paaker, as if she had done him some
injustice and robbed him of his rights.
Thus she remained, speechless and motionless, till they carried her back
to her boat, there she lay down, and refused to take any nourishment;
from time to time she whispered "Poor Paaker!" She no longer repelled
Pentaur, for she did not again recognize him, and before he left her she
had followed the rough-natured son of her adoption to the other world.
CHAPTER XLVII.
The king had left the camp, and had settled in the neighboring city of
Rameses' Tanis, with the greater part of his army. The Hebrews, who were
settled in immense numbers in the province of Goshen, and whom Ani had
attached to his cause by remitting their task-work, were now driven to
labor at the palaces and fortifications which Rameses had begun to build.
At Tanis, too, the treaty of peace was signed and was presented to
Rameses inscribed on a silver tablet by Tarthisebu, the representative of
the Cheta king, in the name of his lord and master.
Pentaur followed the king as soon as he had closed his mother's eyes, and
accompanied her body to Heliopolis, there to have it embalmed; from
thence the mummy was to be sent to Thebes, and solemnly placed in the
grave of her ancestors. This duty of children towards their parents, and
indeed all care for the dead, was regarded as so sacred by the Egyptians,
that neither Pentaur nor Bent-Anat would have thought of being united
before it was accomplished.
On the 21st day of the month Tybi, of the 21st year of the reign of
Rameses, the day on which the peace was signed, the poet returned to
Tanis, sad at heart, for the old gardener, whom he had regarded and loved
as his father, had died before his return home; the good old man had not
long survived the false intelligence of the death of the poet, whom he
had not only loved but reverenced as a superior being bestowed upon his
house as a special grace from the Gods.
It was not till seven months after the fire at Pelusium that Pentaur's
marriage with Bent-Anat was solemnized in the palace of the Pharaohs at
Thebes; but time and the sorrows he had suffered had only united their
hearts more closely. She felt that though he was the stronger she was the
giver and the helper, and realized with delight that like the sun, which
when it rises invites a thousand flowers to open and unfold, the glow of
her presence raised the poet's oppressed soul to fresh life and beauty.
They had given each other up for lost through strife and suffering, and
now had found each other again; each knew how precious the other was. To
make each other happy, and prove their affection, was now the aim of
their lives, and as they each had proved that they prized honor and
right-doing above happiness their union was a true marriage, ennobling
and purifying their souls. She could share his deepest thoughts and his
most difficult undertakings, and if their house were filled with children
she would know how to give him the fullest enjoyment of those small
blessings which at the same time are the greatest joys of life.
Pentaur finding himself endowed by the king with superabundant wealth,
gave up the inheritance of his fathers to his brother Horus, who was
raised to the rank of chief pioneer as a reward for his interposition at
the battle of Kadesh; Horus replaced the fallen cedar-trees which had
stood at the door of his house by masts of more moderate dimensions.
The hapless Huni, under whose name Pentaur had been transferred to the
mines of Sinai, was released from the quarries of Chennu, and restored to
his children enriched by gifts from the poet.
The Pharaoh fully recognized the splendid talents of his daughter's
husband; she to his latest days remained his favorite child, even after
he had consolidated the peace by marrying the daughter of the Cheta king,
and Pentaur became his most trusted adviser, and responsible for the
weightiest affairs in the state.
Rameses learned from the papers found in Ani's tent, and from other
evidence which was only too abundant, that the superior of the House of
Seti, and with him the greater part of the priesthood, had for a long
time been making common cause with the traitor; in the first instance he
determined on the severest, nay bloodiest punishment, but he was
persuaded by Pentaur and by his son Chamus to assert and support the
principles of his government by milder and yet thorough measures. Rameses
desired to be a defender of religion--of the religion which could carry
consolation into the life of the lowly and over-burdened, and give their
existence a higher and fuller meaning--the religion which to him, as
king, appeared the indispensable means of keeping the grand significance
of human life ever present to his mind--sacred as the inheritance of his
fathers, and useful as the school where the people, who needed leading,
might learn to follow and obey.
But nevertheless no one, not even the priests, the guardians of souls,
could be permitted to resist the laws of which he was the bulwark, to
which he himself was subject, and which enjoined obedience to his
authority; and before he left Tanis he had given Ameni and his followers
to understand that he alone was master in Egypt.
The God Seth, who had been honored by the Semite races since the time of
the Hyksos, and whom they called upon under the name of Baal, had from
the earliest times never been allowed a temple on the Nile, as being the
God of the stranger; but Rameses--in spite of the bold remonstrances of
the priestly party who called themselves the 'true believers'--raised a
magnificent temple to this God in the city of Tanis to supply the
religious needs of the immigrant foreigners. In the same spirit of
toleration he would not allow the worship of strange Gods to be
interfered with, though on the other hand he was jealous in honoring the
Egyptian Gods with unexampled liberality. He caused temples to be erected
in most of the great cities of the kingdom, he added to the temple of
Ptah at Memphis, and erected immense colossi in front of its pylons in
memory of his deliverance from the fire.
[One of these is still in existence. It lies on the ground among
the ruins of ancient Memphis.]
In the Necropolis of Thebes he had a splendid edifice constructed-which
to this day delights the beholder by the symmetry of its proportions in
memory of the hour when he escaped death as by a miracle; on its pylon he
caused the battle of Kadesh to be represented in beautiful pictures in
relief, and there, as well as on the architrave of the great
banqueting--hall, he had the history inscribed of the danger he had run
when he stood "alone and no man with him!"
By his order Pentaur rewrote the song he had sung at Pelusium; it is
preserved in three temples, and, in fragments, on several papyrus-rolls
which can be made to complete each other. It was destined to become the
national epic--the Iliad of Egypt.
Pentaur was commissioned to transfer the school of the House of Seti to
the new votive temple, which was called the House of Rameses, and arrange
it on a different plan, for the Pharaoh felt that it was requisite to
form a new order of priests, and to accustom the ministers of the Gods to
subordinate their own designs to the laws of the country, and to the
decrees of their guardian and ruler, the king. Pentaur was made the
superior of the new college, and its library, which was called "the
hospital for the soul," was without an equal; in this academy, which was
the prototype of the later-formed museum and library of Alexandria, sages
and poets grew up whose works endured for thousands of years--and
fragments of their writings have even come down to us. The most famous
are the hymns of Anana, Pentaur's favorite disciple, and the tale of the
two Brothers, composed by Gagabu, the grandson of the old Prophet.
Ameni did not remain in Thebes. Rameses had been informed of the way in
which he had turned the death of the ram to account, and the use he had
made of the heart, as he had supposed it, of the sacred animal, and he
translated him without depriving him of his dignity or revenues to
Mendes, the city of the holy rams in the Delta, where, as he observed not
without satirical meaning, he would be particularly intimate with these
sacred beasts; in Mendes Ameni exerted great influence, and in spite of
many differences of opinion which threatened to sever them, he and
Pentaur remained fast friends to the day of his death.
In the first court of the House of Rameses there stands--now broken
across the middle--the wonder of the traveller, the grandest colossus in
Egypt, made of the hardest granite, and exceeding even the well-known
statue of Memnon in the extent of its base. It represents Rameses the
Great. Little Scherau, whom Pentaur had educated to be a sculptor,
executed it, as well as many other statues of the great sovereign of
Egypt.
A year after the burning of the pavilion at Pelusium Rameri sailed to the
land of the Danaids, was married to Uarda, and then remained in his
wife's native country, where, after the death of her grandfather, he
ruled over many islands of the Mediterranean and became the founder of a
great and famous race. Uarda's name was long held in tender remembrance
by their subjects, for having grown up in misery she understood the
secret of alleviating sorrow and relieving want, and of doing good and
giving happiness without humiliating those she benefitted.
THE END.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Drink of the joys of life thankfully, and in moderation
It is not seeing, it is seeking that is delightful
The man within him, and not on the circumstances without
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE COMPLETE "UARDA":
A dirty road serves when it makes for the goal
Age when usually even bad liquor tastes of honey
An admirer of the lovely color of his blue bruises
Ardently they desire that which transcends sense
Ask for what is feasible
Bearers of ill ride faster than the messengers of weal
Blossom of the thorny wreath of sorrow
Called his daughter to wash his feet
Colored cakes in the shape of beasts
Deficient are as guilty in their eyes as the idle
Desert is a wonderful physician for a sick soul
Do not spoil the future for the sake of the present
Drink of the joys of life thankfully, and in moderation
Every misfortune brings its fellow with it
Exhibit one's happiness in the streets, and conceal one's misery
Eyes kind and frank, without tricks of glance
For fear of the toothache, had his sound teeth drawn
Hatred for all that hinders the growth of light
Hatred between man and man
He is clever and knows everything, but how silly he looks now
He who looks for faith must give faith
Her white cat was playing at her feet
How easy it is to give wounds, and how hard it is to heal
How tender is thy severity
Human sacrifices, which had been introduced into Egypt by the
Phoenicians
I know that I am of use
I have never deviated from the exact truth even in jest
If it were right we should not want to hide ourselves
Impartial looker-on sees clearer than the player
It is not seeing, it is seeking that is delightful
Judge only by appearances, and never enquire into the causes
Kisra called wine the soap of sorrow
Learn early to pass lightly over little things
Learn to obey, that later you may know how to command
Like the cackle of hens, which is peculiar to Eastern women
Man has nothing harder to endure than uncertainty
Many creditors are so many allies
Medicines work harm as often as good
Money is a pass-key that turns any lock
No good excepting that from which we expect the worst
No one so self-confident and insolent as just such an idiot
None of us really know anything rightly
Obstinacy--which he liked to call firm determination
Often happens that apparent superiority does us damage
One falsehood usually entails another
One should give nothing up for lost excepting the dead
Only the choice between lying and silence
Our thinkers are no heroes, and our heroes are no sages
Overbusy friends are more damaging than intelligent enemies
Patronizing friendliness
Prepare sorrow when we come into the world
Principle of over-estimating the strength of our opponents
Provide yourself with a self-devised ruler
Refreshed by the whip of one of the horsemen
Repugnance for the old laws began to take root in his heart
Seditious words are like sparks, which are borne by the wind
Successes, like misfortunes, never come singly
The beginning of things is not more attractive
The scholar's ears are at his back: when he is flogged
The man within him, and not on the circumstances without
The dressing and undressing of the holy images
The experienced love to signify their superiority
The mother of foresight looks backwards
Think of his wife, not with affection only, but with pride
Those whom we fear, says my uncle, we cannot love
Thou canst say in words what we can only feel
Thought that the insane were possessed by demons
Title must not be a bill of fare
Trustfulness is so dear, so essential to me
Use words instead of swords, traps instead of lances
We quarrel with no one more readily than with the benefactor
Whether the form of our benevolence does more good or mischief
Youth should be modest, and he was assertive
AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS, Complete
By Georg Ebers
Volume 1.
Translated from the German by Eleanor Grove
PREFACE TO THE SECOND GERMAN EDITION
Aut prodesse volunt ant delectare poetae,
Aut simul et jucunda et idonea dicere vitae.
Horat. De arte poetica v. 333.
It is now four years since this book first appeared before the public,
and I feel it my duty not to let a second edition go forth into the world
without a few words of accompaniment. It hardly seems necessary to assure
my readers that I have endeavored to earn for the following pages the
title of a "corrected edition." An author is the father of his book, and
what father could see his child preparing to set out on a new and
dangerous road, even if it were not for the first time, without
endeavoring to supply him with every good that it lay in his power to
bestow, and to free him from every fault or infirmity on which the world
could look unfavorably? The assurance therefore that I have repeatedly
bestowed the greatest possible care on the correction of my Egyptian
Princess seems to me superfluous, but at the same time I think it
advisable to mention briefly where and in what manner I have found it
necessary to make these emendations. The notes have been revised,
altered, and enriched with all those results of antiquarian research
(more especially in reference to the language and monuments of ancient
Egypt) which have come to our knowledge since the year 1864, and which my
limited space allowed me to lay before a general public. On the
alteration of the text itself I entered with caution, almost with
timidity; for during four years of constant effort as academical tutor,
investigator and writer in those severe regions of study which exclude
the free exercise of imagination, the poetical side of a man's nature may
forfeit much to the critical; and thus, by attempting to remodel my tale
entirely, I might have incurred the danger of removing it from the more
genial sphere of literary work to which it properly belongs. I have
therefore contented myself with a careful revision of the style, the
omission of lengthy passages which might have diminished the interest of
the story to general readers, the insertion of a few characteristic or
explanatory additions, and the alteration of the proper names. These last
I have written not in their Greek, but in their Latin forms, having been
assured by more than one fair reader that the names Ibykus and Cyrus
would have been greeted by them as old acquaintances, whereas the
"Ibykos" and "Kyros" of the first edition looked so strange and learned,
as to be quite discouraging. Where however the German k has the same
worth as the Roman c I have adopted it in preference. With respect to the
Egyptian names and those with which we have become acquainted through the
cuneiform inscriptions, I have chosen the forms most adapted to our
German modes of speech, and in the present edition have placed those few
explanations which seemed to me indispensable to the right understanding
of the text, at the foot of the page, instead of among the less easily
accessible notes at the end.
The fact that displeasure has been excited among men of letters by this
attempt to clothe the hardly-earned results of severer studies in an
imaginative form is even clearer to me now than when I first sent this
book before the public. In some points I agree with this judgment, but
that the act is kindly received, when a scholar does not scorn to render
the results of his investigations accessible to the largest number of the
educated class, in the form most generally interesting to them, is proved
by the rapid sale of the first large edition of this work. I know at
least of no better means than those I have chosen, by which to instruct
and suggest thought to an extended circle of readers. Those who read
learned books evince in so doing a taste for such studies; but it may
easily chance that the following pages, though taken up only for
amusement, may excite a desire for more information, and even gain a
disciple for the study of ancient history.
Considering our scanty knowledge of the domestic life of the Greeks and
Persians before the Persian war--of Egyptian manners we know more--even
the most severe scholar could scarcely dispense with the assistance of
his imagination, when attempting to describe private life among the
civilized nations of the sixth century before Christ. He would however
escape all danger of those anachronisms to which the author of such a
work as I have undertaken must be hopelessly liable. With attention and
industry, errors of an external character may be avoided, but if I had
chosen to hold myself free from all consideration of the times in which I
and my readers have come into the world, and the modes of thought at
present existing among us, and had attempted to depict nothing but the
purely ancient characteristics of the men and their times, I should have
become unintelligible to many of my readers, uninteresting to all, and
have entirely failed in my original object. My characters will therefore
look like Persians, Egyptians, &c., but in their language, even more than
in their actions, the German narrator will be perceptible, not always
superior to the sentimentality of his day, but a native of the world in
the nineteenth century after the appearance of that heavenly Master,
whose teaching left so deep an impression on human thought and feeling.
The Persians and Greeks, being by descent related to ourselves, present
fewer difficulties in this respect than the Egyptians, whose
dwelling-place on the fruitful islands won by the Nile from the Desert,
completely isolated them from the rest of the world.
To Professor Lepsius, who suggested to me that a tale confined entirely
to Egypt and the Egyptians might become wearisome, I owe many thanks; and
following his hint, have so arranged the materials supplied by Herodotus
as to introduce my reader first into a Greek circle. Here he will feel in
a measure at home, and indeed will entirely sympathize with them on one
important point, viz.: in their ideas on the Beautiful and on Art.
Through this Hellenic portico he reaches Egypt, from thence passes on to
Persia and returns finally to the Nile. It has been my desire that the
three nations should attract him equally, and I have therefore not
centred the entire interest of the plot in one hero, but have endeavored
to exhibit each nation in its individual character, by means of a fitting
representative. The Egyptian Princess has given her name to the book,
only because the weal and woe of all my other characters were decided by
her fate, and she must therefore be regarded as the central point of the
whole.
In describing Amasis I have followed the excellent description of
Herodotus, which has been confirmed by a picture discovered on an ancient
monument. Herodotus has been my guide too in the leading features of
Cambyses' character; indeed as he was born only forty or fifty years
after the events related, his history forms the basis of my romance.
"Father of history" though he be, I have not followed him blindly, but,
especially in the development of my characters, have chosen those paths
which the principles of psychology have enabled me to lay down for
myself, and have never omitted consulting those hieroglyphic and
cuneiform inscriptions which have been already deciphered. In most cases
these confirm the statements of Herodotus.
I have caused Bartja's murder to take place after the conquest of Egypt,
because I cannot agree with the usually received translation of the
Behistun inscription. This reads as follows: "One named Cambujiya, son of
Curu, of our family, was king here formerly and had a brother named
Bartiya, of the same father and the same mother as Cambujiya. Thereupon
Cambujiya killed that Bartiya." In a book intended for general readers,
it would not be well to enter into a discussion as to niceties of
language, but even the uninitiated will see that the word "thereupon" has
no sense in this connection. In every other point the inscription agrees
with Herodotus' narrative, and I believe it possible to bring it into
agreement with that of Darius on this last as well; but reserve my proofs
for another time and place.
It has not been ascertained from whence Herodotus has taken the name
Smerdis which he gives to Bartja and Gaumata. The latter occurs again,
though in a mutilated form, in Justin.
My reasons for making Phanes an Athenian will be found in Note 90. Vol.
I. This coercion of an authenticated fact might have been avoided in the
first edition, but could not now be altered without important changes in
the entire text. The means I have adopted in my endeavor to make Nitetis
as young as possible need a more serious apology; as, notwithstanding
Herodotus' account of the mildness of Amasis' rule, it is improbable that
King Hophra should have been alive twenty years after his fall. Even this
however is not impossible, for it can be proved that his descendants were
not persecuted by Amasis.
On a Stela in the Leyden Museum I have discovered that a certain Psamtik,
a member of the fallen dynasty, lived till the 17th year of Amasis'
reign, and died at the age of seventy-five.
Lastly let me be permitted to say a word or two in reference to Rhodopis.
That she must have been a remarkable woman is evident from the passage in
Herodotus quoted in Notes 10, and 14, Vol. I., and from the accounts
given by many other writers. Her name, "the rosy-cheeked one," tells us
that she was beautiful, and her amiability and charm of manner are
expressly praised by Herodotus. How richly she was endowed with gifts and
graces may be gathered too from the manner in which tradition and fairy
lore have endeavored to render her name immortal. By many she is said to
have built the most beautiful of the Pyramids, the Pyramid of Mycerinus
or Menkera. One tale related of her and reported by Strabo and AElian
probably gave rise to our oldest and most beautiful fairy tale,
Cinderella; another is near akin to the Loreley legend. An eagle,
according to AElian--the wind, in Strabo's tale,--bore away Rhodopis'
slippers while she was bathing in the Nile, and laid them at the feet of
the king, when seated on his throne of justice in the open market. The
little slippers so enchanted him that he did not rest until he had
discovered their owner and made her his queen.
The second legend tells us how a wonderfully beautiful naked woman could
be seen sitting on the summit of one of the pyramids (ut in una ex
pyramidibus); and how she drove the wanderers in the desert mad through
her exceeding loveliness.
Moore borrowed this legend and introduces it in the following verse:
"Fair Rhodope, as story tells--
The bright unearthly nymph, who dwells
'Mid sunless gold and jewels hid,
The lady of the Pyramid."
Fabulous as these stories sound, they still prove that Rhodopis must have
been no ordinary woman. Some scholars would place her on a level with the
beautiful and heroic Queen Nitokris, spoken of by Julius Africanus,
Eusebius and others, and whose name, (signifying the victorious Neith)
has been found on the monuments, applied to a queen of the sixth dynasty.
This is a bold conjecture; it adds however to the importance of our
heroine; and without doubt many traditions referring to the one have been
transferred to the other, and vice versa. Herodotus lived so short a time
after Rhodopis, and tells so many exact particulars of her private life
that it is impossible she should have been a mere creation of fiction.
The letter of Darius, given at the end of Vol. II., is intended to
identify the Greek Rhodopis with the mythical builder of the Pyramid. I
would also mention here that she is called Doricha by Sappho. This may
have been her name before she received the title of the "rosy-cheeked
one."
I must apologize for the torrent of verse that appears in the love-scenes
between Sappho and Bartja; it is also incumbent upon me to say a few
words about the love-scenes themselves, which I have altered very
slightly in the new edition, though they have been more severely
criticised than any other portion of the work.
First I will confess that the lines describing the happy love of a
handsome young couple to whom I had myself become warmly attached, flowed
from my pen involuntarily, even against my will (I intended to write a
novel in prose) in the quiet night, by the eternal Nile, among the palms
and roses. The first love-scene has a story of its own to me. I wrote it
in half an hour, almost unconsciously. It may be read in my book that the
Persians always reflected in the morning, when sober, upon the
resolutions formed the night before, while drunk. When I examined in the
sunshine what had come into existence by lamplight, I grew doubtful of
its merits, and was on the point of destroying the love-scenes
altogether, when my dear friend Julius Hammer, the author of "Schau in
Dich, und Schau um Dich," too early summoned to the other world by death,
stayed my hand. Their form was also approved by others, and I tell myself
that the 'poetical' expression of love is very similar in all lands and
ages, while lovers' conversations and modes of intercourse vary according
to time and place. Besides, I have to deal with one of those by no means
rare cases, where poetry can approach nearer the truth than prudent,
watchful prose. Many of my honored critics have censured these scenes;
others, among whom are some whose opinion I specially value, have
lavished the kindest praise upon them. Among these gentlemen I will
mention A. Stahr, C. V. Holtei, M. Hartmann, E. Hoefer, W. Wolfsohn, C.
Leemans, Professor Veth of Amsterdam, etc. Yet I will not conceal the
fact that some, whose opinion has great weight, have asked: "Did the
ancients know anything of love, in our sense of the word? Is not romantic
love, as we know it, a result of Christianity?" The following sentence,
which stands at the head of the preface to my first edition, will prove
that I had not ignored this question when I began my task.
"It has often been remarked that in Cicero's letters and those of
Pliny the younger there are unmistakable indications of sympathy
with the more sentimental feeling of modern days. I find in them
tones of deep tenderness only, such as have arisen and will arise
from sad and aching hearts in every land and every age."
A. v. HUMBOLDT. Cosmos II. P. 19.
This opinion of our great scholar is one with which I cheerfully coincide
and would refer my readers to the fact that love-stories were written
before the Christian era: the Amor and Psyche of Apuleius for instance.
Indeed love in all its forms was familiar to the ancients. Where can we
find a more beautiful expression of ardent passion than glows in Sappho's
songs? or of patient faithful constancy than in Homer's Penelope? Could
there be a more beautiful picture of the union of two loving hearts, even
beyond the grave, than Xenophon has preserved for us in his account of
Panthea and Abradatas? or the story of Sabinus the Gaul and his wife,
told in the history of Vespasian? Is there anywhere a sweeter legend than
that of the Halcyons, the ice-birds, who love one another so tenderly
that when the male becomes enfeebled by age, his mate carries him on her
outspread wings whithersoever he will; and the gods, desiring to reward
such faithful love, cause the sun to shine more kindly, and still the
winds and waves on the "Halcyon days" during which these birds are
building their nest and brooding over their young? There can surely have
been no lack of romantic love in days when a used-up man of the world,
like Antony, could desire in his will that wherever he died his body
might be laid by the side of his beloved Cleopatra: nor of the chivalry
of love when Berenice's beautiful hair was placed as a constellation in
the heavens. Neither can we believe that devotion in the cause of love
could be wanting when a whole nation was ready to wage a fierce and
obstinate war for the sake of one beautiful woman. The Greeks had an
insult to revenge, but the Trojans fought for the possession of Helen.
Even the old men of Ilium were ready "to suffer long for such a woman."
And finally is not the whole question answered in Theocritus'
unparalleled poem, "the Sorceress?" We see the poor love-lorn girl and
her old woman-servant, Thestylis, cowering over the fire above which the
bird supposed to possess the power of bringing back the faithless Delphis
is sitting in his wheel. Simoetha has learnt many spells and charms from
an Assyrian, and she tries them all. The distant roar of the waves, the
stroke rising from the fire, the dogs howling in the street, the tortured
fluttering bird, the old woman, the broken-hearted girl and her awful
spells, all join in forming a night scene the effect of which is
heightened by the calm cold moonshine. The old woman leaves the girl, who
at once ceases to weave her spells, allows her pent-up tears to have
their way, and looking up to Selene the moon, the lovers' silent
confidante, pours out her whole story: how when she first saw the
beautiful Delphis her heart had glowed with love, she had seen nothing
more of the train of youths who followed him, "and," (thus sadly the poet
makes her speak)
"how I gained my home
I knew not; some strange fever wasted me.
Ten days and nights I lay upon my bed.
O tell me, mistress Moon, whence came my love!"
"Then" (she continues) when Delphis at last crossed her threshold:
"I
Became all cold like snow, and from my brow
Brake the damp dewdrops: utterance I had none,
Not e'en such utterance as a babe may make
That babbles to its mother in its dreams;
But all my fair frame stiffened into wax,--
O tell me mistress Moon, whence came my love!"
Whence came her love? thence, whence it comes to us now. The love of the
creature to its Creator, of man to God, is the grand and yet gracious
gift of Christianity. Christ's command to love our neighbor called into
existence not only the conception of philanthropy, but of humanity
itself, an idea unknown to the heathen world, where love had been at
widest limited to their native town and country. The love of man and wife
has without doubt been purified and transfigured by Christianity; still
it is possible that a Greek may have loved as tenderly and longingly as a
Christian. The more ardent glow of passion at least cannot be denied to
the ancients. And did not their love find vent in the same expressions as
our own? Who does not know the charming roundelay:
"Drink the glad wine with me,
With me spend youth's gay hours;
Or a sighing lover be,
Or crown thy brow with flowers.
When I am merry and mad,
Merry and mad be you;
When I am sober and sad,
Be sad and sober too!"
--written however by no poet of modern days, but by Praxilla, in the
fifth century before Christ. Who would guess either that Moore's little
song was modelled on one written even earlier than the date of our story?
"As o'er her loom the Lesbian maid
In love-sick languor hung her head.
Unknowing where her fingers stray'd,
She weeping turned away and said,'
Oh, my sweet mother, 'tis in vain,
I cannot weave as once I wove;
So wilder'd is my heart and brain
With thinking of that youth I love.'"
If my space allowed I could add much more on this subject, but will
permit myself only one remark in conclusion. Lovers delighted in nature
then as now; the moon was their chosen confidante, and I know of no
modern poem in which the mysterious charm of a summer night and the magic
beauty which lies on flowers, trees and fountains in those silent hours
when the world is asleep, is more exquisitely described than in the
following verses, also by Sappho, at the reading of which we seem forced
to breathe more slowly, "kuhl bis an's Herz hinan."
"Planets, that around the beauteous moon
Attendant wait, cast into shade
Their ineffectual lustres, soon
As she, in full-orb'd majesty array'd,
Her silver radiance pours
Upon this world of ours."
and:--
"Thro' orchard plots with fragrance crown'd,
The clear cold fountain murm'ring flows;
And forest leaves, with rustling sound,
Invite to soft repose."
The foregoing remarks seemed to me due to those who consider a love such
as that of Sappho and Bartja to have been impossible among the ancients.
Unquestionably it was much rarer then than in these days: indeed I
confess to having sketched my pair of lovers in somewhat bright colors.
But may I not be allowed, at least once, to claim the poet's freedom?
How seldom I have availed myself of this freedom will be evident from the
notes included in each volume. They seemed to me necessary, partly in
order to explain the names and illustrate the circumstances mentioned in
the text, and partly to vindicate the writer in the eyes of the learned.
I trust they may not prove discouraging to any, as the text will be found
easily readable without reference to the explanations.
Jena, November 23, 1868.
GEORG EBERS, DR.
PREFACE TO THE FOURTH GERMAN EDITION.
Two years and a half after the appearance of the third edition of "An
Egyptian Princess," a fourth was needed. I returned long since from the
journey to the Nile, for which I was preparing while correcting the
proof-sheets of the third edition, and on which I can look back with
special satisfaction. During my residence in Egypt, in 1872-73, a lucky
accident enabled me to make many new discoveries; among them one treasure
of incomparable value, the great hieratic manuscript, which bears my
name. Its publication has just been completed, and it is now in the
library of the Leipzig University.
The Papyrus Ebers, the second in size and the best preserved of all the
ancient Egyptian manuscripts which have come into our possession, was
written in the 16th century B. C., and contains on 110 pages the hermetic
book upon the medicines of the ancient Egyptians, known also to the
Alexandrine Greeks. The god Thoth (Hermes) is called "the guide" of
physicians, and the various writings and treatises of which the work is
composed are revelations from him. In this venerable scroll diagnoses are
made and remedies suggested for the internal and external diseases of
most portions of the human body. With the drugs prescribed are numbers,
according to which they are weighed with weights and measured with hollow
measures, and accompanying the prescriptions are noted the pious axioms
to be repeated by the physician, while compounding and giving them to the
patient. On the second line of the first page of our manuscript, it is
stated that it came from Sais. A large portion of this work is devoted to
the visual organs. On the twentieth line of the fifty-fifth page begins
the book on the eyes, which fills eight large pages. We were formerly
compelled to draw from Greek and Roman authors what we knew about the
remedies used for diseases of the eye among the ancient Egyptians. The
portion of the Papyrus Ebers just mentioned is now the only Egyptian
source from whence we can obtain instruction concerning this important
branch of ancient medicine.
All this scarcely seems to have a place in the preface of a historical
romance, and yet it is worthy of mention here; for there is something
almost "providential" in the fact that it was reserved for the author of
"An Egyptian Princess" to bestow the gift of this manuscript upon the
scientific world. Among the characters in the novel the reader will meet
an oculist from Sais, who wrote a book upon the diseases of the visual
organs. The fate of this valuable work exactly agrees with the course of
the narrative. The papyrus scroll of the Sais oculist, which a short time
ago existed only in the imagination of the author and readers of "An
Egyptian Princess," is now an established fact. When I succeeded in
bringing the manuscript home, I felt like the man who had dreamed of a
treasure, and when he went out to ride found it in his path.
A reply to Monsieur Jules Soury's criticism of "An Egyptian Princess" in
the Revue des deux Mondes, Vol. VII, January 1875, might appropriately be
introduced into this preface, but would scarcely be possible without
entering more deeply into the ever-disputed question, which will be
answered elsewhere, whether the historical romance is ever justifiable.
Yet I cannot refrain from informing Monsieur Soury here that "An Egyptian
Princess" detained me from no other work. I wrote it in my sick-room,
before entering upon my academic career, and while composing it, found
not only comfort and pleasure, but an opportunity to give dead scientific
material a living interest for myself and others.
Monsieur Soury says romance is the mortal enemy of history; but this
sentence may have no more justice than the one with which I think myself
justified in replying: Landscape painting is the mortal enemy of botany.
The historical romance must be enjoyed like any other work of art. No one
reads it to study history; but many, the author hopes, may be aroused by
his work to make investigations of their own, for which the notes point
out the way. Already several persons of excellent mental powers have been
attracted to earnest Egyptological researches by "An Egyptian Princess."
In the presence of such experiences, although Monsieur Soury's clever
statements appear to contain much that is true, I need not apply his
remark that "historical romances injure the cause of science" to the
present volume.
Leipzig, April 19, 1875.
GEORG EBERS.
PREFACE TO THE FIFTH GERMAN EDITION.
Again a new edition of "An Egyptian Princess" has been required, and
again I write a special preface because the printing has progressed so
rapidly as unfortunately to render it impossible for me to correct some
errors to which my attention was directed by the kindness of the
well-known botanist, Professor Paul Ascherson of Berlin, who has
travelled through Egypt and the Oases.
In Vol. I, page 7, I allow mimosas to grow among other plants in
Rhodopis' garden. I have found them in all the descriptions of the Nile
valley, and afterwards often enjoyed the delicious perfume of the golden
yellow flowers in the gardens of Alexandria and Cairo. I now learn that
this very mimosa (Acacia farnesiana) originates in tropical America, and
was undoubtedly unknown in ancient Egypt. The bananas, which I mentioned
in Vol. I, p. 64, among other Egyptian plants, were first introduced into
the Nile valley from India by the Arabs. The botanical errors occurring
in the last volume I was able to correct. Helm's admirable work on
"Cultivated Plants and Domestic Animals" had taught me to notice such
things. Theophrastus, a native of Asia Minor, gives the first description
of a citron, and this proves that he probably saw the so-called
paradise-apple, but not our citron, which I am therefore not permitted to
mention among the plants cultivated in ancient Lydia. Palms and birches
are both found in Asia Minor; but I permitted them to grow side by side,
thereby committing an offense against the geographical possibility of
vegetable existence. The birch, in this locality, flourishes in the
mountainous region, the palm, according to Griesbach (Vegetation of the
Earth, Vol. I, p. 319) only appears on the southern coast of the
peninsula. The latter errors, as I previously mentioned, will be
corrected in the new edition. I shall of course owe special thanks to any
one who may call my attention to similar mistakes.
Leipzig, March 5, 1877
GEORG EBERS
PREFACE TO THE NINTH GERMAN EDITION.
I have nothing to add to the ninth edition of "An Egyptian Princess"
except that it has been thoroughly revised. My sincere thanks are due to
Dr. August Steitz of Frankfort on the Main, who has travelled through
Egypt and Asia Minor, for a series of admirable notes, which he kindly
placed at my disposal. He will find that they have not remained unused.
Leipzig, November 13, 1879.
GEORG EBERS
AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS.
By Georg Ebers
Volume 1.
CHAPTER I.
The Nile had overflowed its bed. The luxuriant corn-fields and blooming
gardens on its shores were lost beneath a boundless waste of waters; and
only the gigantic temples and palaces of its cities, (protected from the
force of the water by dikes), and the tops of the tall palm-trees and
acacias could be seen above its surface. The branches of the sycamores
and plane-trees drooped and floated on the waves, but the boughs of the
tall silver poplars strained upward, as if anxious to avoid the watery
world beneath. The full-moon had risen; her soft light fell on the Libyan
range of mountains vanishing on the western horizon, and in the north the
shimmer of the Mediterranean could faintly be discerned. Blue and white
lotus-flowers floated on the clear water, bats of all kinds darted softly
through the still air, heavy with the scent of acacia-blossom and
jasmine; the wild pigeons and other birds were at roost in the tops of
the trees, while the pelicans, storks and cranes squatted in groups on
the shore under the shelter of the papyrus-reeds and Nile-beans. The
pelicans and storks remained motionless, their long bills hidden beneath
their wings, but the cranes were startled by the mere beat of an oar,
stretching their necks, and peering anxiously into the distance, if they
heard but the song of the boatmen. The air was perfectly motionless, and
the unbroken reflection of the moon, lying like a silver shield on the
surface of the water, proved that, wildly as the Nile leaps over the
cataracts, and rushes past the gigantic temples of Upper Egypt, yet on
approaching the sea by different arms, he can abandon his impetuous
course, and flow along in sober tranquillity.
On this moonlight night in the year 528 B. C. a bark was crossing the
almost currentless Canopic mouth of the Nile. On the raised deck at the
stern of this boat an Egyptian was sitting to guide the long pole-rudder,
and the half-naked boatmen within were singing as they rowed. In the open
cabin, which was something like a wooden summer-house, sat two men,
reclining on low cushions. They were evidently not Egyptians; their Greek
descent could be perceived even by the moonlight. The elder was an
unusually tall and powerful man of more than sixty; thick grey curls,
showing very little attempt at arrangement, hung down over his short,
firm throat; he wore a simple, homely cloak, and kept his eyes gloomily
fixed on the water. His companion, on the contrary, a man perhaps twenty
years younger, of a slender and delicate build, was seldom still.
Sometimes he gazed into the heavens, sometimes made a remark to the
steersman, disposed his beautiful purple chlanis in fresh folds, or
busied himself in the arrangement of his scented brown curls, or his
carefully curled beard.
[The chlanis was a light summer-mantle, worn especially by the more
elegant Athenians, and generally made of expensive materials. The
simpler cloak, the himation, was worn by the Doric Greeks, and
principally by the Spartans.]
The boat had left Naukratis, at that time the only Hellenic port in
Egypt, about half an hour before.
[This town, which will form the scene of a part of our tale, lies in
the northwest of the Nile Delta, in the Saitic Nomos or district, on
the left bank of the Canopic mouth of the river. According to
Strabo and Eusebius it was founded by Milesians, and Bunsen reckons
749 B. C. It seems that in the earliest times Greek ships were only
allowed to enter this mouth of the Nile in case of necessity. The
entire intercourse of the Egyptians with the hated strangers was, at
that time, restricted to the little island of Pharos lying opposite
to the town of Thonis.]
During their journey, the grey-haired, moody man had not spoken one word,
and the other had left him to his meditations. But now, as the boat
neared the shore, the restless traveller, rising from his couch, called
to his companion: "We are just at our destination, Aristomachus! That
pleasant house to the left yonder, in the garden of palms which you can
see rising above the waters, is the dwelling of my friend Rhodopis. It
was built by her husband Charaxus, and all her friends, not excepting the
king himself, vie with one another in adding new beauties to it year by
year. A useless effort! Let them adorn that house with all the treasures
in the world, the woman who lives within will still remain its best
ornament!"
[We are writing of the month of October, when the Nile begins to
sink. The inundations can now be accurately accounted for,
especially since the important and laborious synoptical work of H.
Barth and S. Baker. They are occasioned by the tropical rains, and
the melting of the snows on the high mountain-ranges at the Equator.
In the beginning of June a gradual rising of the Nile waters can be
perceived; between the 15th and 20th June, this changes to a rapid
increase; in the beginning of October the waters reach their highest
elevation, a point, which, even after having begun their retreat,
they once more attempt to attain; then, at first gradually, and
afterwards with ever increasing rapidity, they continue to sink. In
January, February and March, the Nile is still drying up; and in May
is at its lowest point, when the volume of its waters is only one-
twentieth of that in October.]
The old man sat up, threw a passing glance at the building, smoothed the
thick grey beard which clothed his cheeks and chin, but left the lips
free,--[The Spartans were not in the habit of wearing a beard on the
upper lip.]--and asked abruptly: "Why so much enthusiasm, Phanes, for
this Rhodopis? How long have the Athenians been wont to extol old women?"
At this remark the other smiled, and answered in a self-satisfied tone,
"My knowledge of the world, and particularly of women, is, I flatter
myself, an extended one, and yet I repeat, that in all Egypt I know of no
nobler creature than this grey-haired woman. When you have seen her and
her lovely grandchild, and heard your favorite melodies sung by her
well-practised choir of slave-girls, I think you will thank me for having
brought you hither."--"Yet," answered the Spartan gravely, "I should not
have accompanied you, if I had not hoped to meet Phryxus, the Delphian,
here."
"You will find him here; and besides, I cannot but hope that the songs
will cheer you, and dispel your gloomy thoughts." Aristomachus shook his
head in denial, and answered: "To you, sanguine Athenians, the melodies
of your country may be cheering: but not so to me; as in many a sleepless
night of dreams, my longings will be doubled, not stilled by the songs of
Alkman."
[Alkman (Attic, Alkmaeon) flourished in Sparta about 650 B. C. His
mother was a Lydian slave in Sardes, and he came into the possession
of Agesides, who gave him his freedom. His beautiful songs soon
procured him the rights of a Lacedaemonian citizen. He was
appointed to the head-directorship in the entire department of music
in Lacedaemon and succeeded in naturalizing the soft Lydian music.
His language was the Doric-Laconian. After a life devoted to song,
the pleasures of the table and of love, he is said to have died of
a fearful disease. From the frequent choruses of virgins
(Parthenien) said to have been originally introduced by him, his
frequent songs in praise of women, and the friendly relations in
which he stood to the Spartan women (more especially to the fair
Megalostrata), he gained the name of the woman's poet.]
"Do you think then," replied Phanes, "that I have no longing for my
beloved Athens, for the scenes of our youthful games, for the busy life
of the market? Truly, the bread of exile is not less distasteful to my
palate than to yours, but, in the society afforded by this house, it
loses some of its bitterness, and when the dear melodies of Hellas, so
perfectly sung, fall on my ear, my native land rises before me as in a
vision, I see its pine and olive groves, its cold, emerald green rivers,
its blue sea, the shimmer of its towns, its snowy mountain-tops and
marble temples, and a half-sweet, half-bitter tear steals down my cheek
as the music ceases, and I awake to remember that I am in Egypt, in this
monotonous, hot, eccentric country, which, the gods be praised, I am soon
about to quit. But, Aristomachus, would you then avoid the few Oases in
the desert, because you must afterwards return to its sands and drought?
Would you fly from one happy hour, because days of sadness await you
later? But stop, here we are! Show a cheerful countenance, my friend, for
it becomes us not to enter the temple of the Charites with sad
hearts."--[The goddesses of grace and beauty, better known by their Roman
name of "Graces."]
As Phanes uttered these words, they landed at the garden wall, washed by
the Nile. The Athenian bounded lightly from the boat, the Spartan
following with a heavier, firmer tread. Aristomachus had a wooden leg,
but his step was so firm, even when compared with that of the
light-footed Phanes, that it might have been thought to be his own limb.
The garden of Rhodopis was as full of sound, and scent and blossom as a
night in fairy-land. It was one labyrinth of acanthus shrubs, yellow
mimosa, the snowy gelder-rose, jasmine and lilac, red roses and
laburnums, overshadowed by tall palm-trees, acacias and balsam trees.
Large bats hovered softly on their delicate wings over the whole, and
sounds of mirth and song echoed from the river.
This garden had been laid out by an Egyptian, and the builders of the
Pyramids had already been celebrated for ages for their skill in
horticulture. They well understood how to mark out neat flower-beds,
plant groups of trees and shrubs in regular order, water the whole by
aqueducts and fountains, arrange arbors and summerhouses, and even
inclose the walks with artistically clipped hedges, and breed goldfish in
stone basins.
At the garden gate Phanes stopped, looked around him carefully and
listened; then shaking his head, "I do not understand what this can
mean," he said. "I hear no voices, there is not a single light to be
seen, the boats are all gone, and yet the flag is still flying at its gay
flag-staff, there, by the obelisks on each side of the gate."
[Obelisks bearing the name of the owner were sometimes to be seen
near the gates of the Egyptian country-houses. Flags too were not
uncommon, but these were almost exclusively to be found at the gates
of the temples, where to this day the iron sockets for the flagstaff
can still be seen. Neither were flags unknown to the Greeks. It
appears from some inscriptions on the staffs of the Pylons, that if
the former were not actually erected for lightning-rods, it had been
noticed that they attracted the electricity.]
"Rhodopis must surely be from home; can they have forgotten?"--Here a
deep voice suddenly interrupted him with the exclamation, "Ha! the
commander of the body-guard!"
"A pleasant evening to you, Knakais," exclaimed Phanes, kindly greeting
the old man, who now came up. "But how is it that this garden is as still
as an Egyptian tomb, and yet the flag of welcome is fluttering at the
gate? How long has that white ensign waved for guests in vain?"
"How long indeed?" echoed the old slave of Rhodopis with a smile. "So
long as the Fates graciously spare the life of my mistress, the old flag
is sure to waft as many guests hither as the house is able to contain.
Rhodopis is not at home now, but she must return shortly. The evening
being so fine, she determined on taking a pleasure-trip on the Nile with
her guests. They started at sunset, two hours ago, and the evening meal
is already prepared; they cannot remain away much longer. I pray you,
Phanes, to have patience and follow me into the house. Rhodopis would not
easily forgive me, if I allowed such valued guests to depart. You
stranger," he added, turning to the Spartan, "I entreat most heartily to
remain; as friend of your friend you will be doubly welcome to my
mistress."
The two Greeks, following the servant, seated themselves in an arbor, and
Aristomachus, after gazing on the scene around him now brilliantly
lighted by the moon, said, "Explain to me, Phanes, by what good fortune
this Rhodopis, formerly only a slave and courtesan can now live as a
queen, and receive her guests in this princely manner?"
[The mistresses (Hetaere) of the Greeks must not be compared with
modern women of bad reputation. The better members of this class
represented the intelligence and culture of their sex in Greece, and
more especially in the Ionian provinces. As an instance we need
only recall Aspasia and her well-attested relation to Pericles and
Socrates. Our heroine Rhodopis was a celebrated woman. The
Hetaera, Thargalia of Miletus, became the wife of a Thessalian king.
Ptolemy Lagi married Thais; her daughter was called Irene, and her
sons Leontiskus and Lagus. Finally, statues were erected to many.]
"I have long expected this question," answered the Athenian. "I shall be
delighted to make you acquainted with the past history of this woman
before you enter her house. So long as we were on the Nile, I would not
intrude my tale upon you; that ancient river has a wonderful power of
compelling to silence and quiet contemplation. Even my usually quick
tongue was paralyzed like yours, when I took my first night-journey on
the Nile."
"I thank you for this," replied the Spartan. "When I first saw the aged
priest Epimenides, at Knossus in Crete, he was one hundred and fifty
years old, and I remember that his age and sanctity filled me with a
strange dread; but how far older, how far more sacred, is this hoary
river, the ancient stream 'Aigyptos'! Who would wish to avoid the power
of his spells? Now, however, I beg you to give me the history of
Rhodopis."
Phanes began: "When Rhodopis was a little child playing with her
companions on the Thracian sea-shore, she was stolen by some Phoenician
mariners, carried to Samos, and bought by Iadmon, one of the geomori, or
landed aristocracy of the island. The little girl grew day by day more
beautiful, graceful and clever, and was soon an object of love and
admiration to all who knew her. AEsop, the fable-writer, who was at that
time also in bondage to Iadmon, took an especial pleasure in the growing
amiability and talent of the child, taught her and cared for her in the
same way as the tutors whom we keep to educate our Athenian boys.
The kind teacher found his pupil tractable and quick of comprehension,
and the little slave soon practised the arts of music, singing and
eloquence, in a more charming and agreeable manner than the sons of her
master Iadmon, on whose education the greatest care had been lavished. By
the time she had reached her fourteenth year, Rhodopis was so beautiful
and accomplished, that the jealous wife of Iadmon would not suffer her to
remain any longer in the house, and the Samian was forced, with a heavy
heart, to sell her to a certain Xanthus. The government of Samos at that
time was still in the hands of the less opulent nobles; had Polykrates
then been at the head of affairs, Xanthus need not have despaired of a
purchaser. These tyrants fill their treasuries as the magpies their
nests! As it was, however, he went off with his precious jewel to
Naukratis, and there gained a fortune by means of her wondrous charms.
These were three years of the deepest humiliation to Rhodopis, which she
still remembers with horror.
Now it happened, just at the time when her fame was spreading through all
Greece, and strangers were coming from far to Naukratis for her sake
alone, that the people of Lesbos rose up against their nobles, drove them
forth, and chose the wise Pittakus as their ruler.
[According to Herodotus the beauty of Rhodopis was so great that
every Greek knew her by name.]
The highest families of Lesbos were forced to leave the country, and
fled, some to Sicily, some to the Greek provinces of Italy, and others to
Egypt. Alcaeus, the greatest poet of his day, and Charaxus, the brother
of that Sappho whose odes it was our Solon's last wish to learn by heart,
came here to Naukratis, which had already long been the flourishing
centre of commercial communication between Egypt and the rest of the
world. Charaxus saw Rhodopis, and soon loved her so passionately, that he
gave an immense sum to secure her from the mercenary Xanthus, who was on
the point of returning with her to his own country; Sappho wrote some
biting verses, derisive of her brother and his purchase, but Alcaeus on
the other hand, approved, and gave expression to this feeling in glowing
songs on the charms of Rhodopis. And now Sappho's brother, who had till
then remained undistinguished among the many strangers at Naukratis,
became a noted man through Rhodopis. His house was soon the centre of
attraction to all foreigners, by whom she was overwhelmed with gifts. The
King Hophra, hearing of her beauty and talent, sent for her to Memphis,
and offered to buy her of Charaxus, but the latter had already long,
though secretly, given Rhodopis her freedom, and loved her far too well
to allow of a separation. She too, loved the handsome Lesbian and refused
to leave him despite the brilliant offers made to her on all sides. At
length Charaxus made this wonderful woman his lawful wife, and continued
to live with her and her little daughter Kleis in Naukratis, until the
Lesbian exiles were recalled to their native land by Pittakus. He then
started homeward with his wife, but fell ill on the journey, and died
soon after his arrival at Mitylene. Sappho, who had derided her brother
for marrying one beneath him, soon became an enthusiastic admirer of the
beautiful widow and rivalled Alcaeus in passionate songs to her praise.
After the death of the poetess, Rhodopis returned, with her little
daughter, to Naukratis, where she was welcomed as a goddess. During this
interval Amasis, the present king of Egypt, had usurped the throne of the
Pharaohs, and was maintaining himself in its possession by help of the
army, to which caste he belonged.
[Amasis, of whom much will be said in our text, reigned 570-526 B.
C. His name, in the hieroglyphic signs, was Aahmes or young moon
but the name by which he was commonly called was Sa-Nit "Son of
Neith." His name, and pictures of him are to be found on stones in
the fortress of Cairo, on a relief in Florence, a statue in the
Vatican, on sarcophagi in Stockholm and London, a statue in the
Villa Albani and on a little temple of red granite at Leyden. A
beautiful bust of gray-wacke in our possession probably represents
the same king.]
As his predecessor Hophra had accelerated his fall, and brought the army
and priesthood to open rebellion by his predilection for the Greek
nation, and for intercourse with foreigners generally, (always an
abomination in the eyes of the Egyptians), men felt confident that Amasis
would return to the old ways, would rigorously exclude foreigners from
the country, dismiss the Greek mercenaries, and instead of taking counsel
from the Greeks, would hearken only to the commands of the priesthood.
But in this, as you must see yourself, the prudent Egyptians had guessed
wide of the mark in their choice of a ruler; they fell from Scylla into
Charybdis. If Hophra was called the Greeks' friend, Amasis must be named
our lover. The Egyptians, especially the priests and the army, breathe
fire and flame, and would fain strangle us one and all, off hand, This
feeling on the part of the soldiery does not disturb Amasis, for he knows
too well the comparative value of their and our services; but with the
priests it is another and more serious matter, for two reasons: first,
they possess an unbounded influence over the people; and secondly. Amasis
himself retains more affection than he likes to acknowledge to us, for
this absurd and insipid religion--a religion which appears doubly sacred
to its adherents simply because it has existed in this eccentric
land--unchanged for thousands of years. These priests make the king's
life burdensome to him; they persecute and injure us in every possible
way; and indeed, if it had not been for the king's protection, I should
long ago have been a dead man. But I am wandering from my tale! As I said
before, Rhodopis was received at Naukratis with open arms by all, and
loaded with marks of favor by Amasis, who formed her acquaintance. Her
daughter Kleis, as is the case with the little Sappho now--was never
allowed to appear in the society which assembled every evening at her
mother's house, and indeed was even more strictly brought up than the
other young girls in Naukratis. She married Glaucus, a rich Phocaean
merchant of noble family, who had defended his native town with great
bravery against the Persians, and with him departed to the newly-founded
Massalia, on the Celtic coast. There, however, the young couple both fell
victims to the climate, and died, leaving a little daughter, Sappho.
Rhodopis at once undertook the long journey westward, brought the orphan
child back to live with her, spent the utmost care on her education, and
now that she is grown up, forbids her the society of men, still feeling
the stains of her own youth so keenly that she would fain keep her
granddaughter (and this in Sappho's case is not difficult), at a greater
distance from contact with our sex than is rendered necessary, by the
customs of Egypt. To my friend herself society is as indispensable as
water to the fish or air to the bird. Her house is frequented by all the
strangers here, and whoever has once experienced her hospitality and has
the time at command will never after be found absent when the flag
announces an evening of reception. Every Greek of mark is to be found
here, as it is in this house that we consult on the wisest measures for
encountering the hatred of the priests and bringing the king round to our
own views. Here you can obtain not only the latest news from home, but
from the rest of the world, and this house is an inviolable sanctuary for
the persecuted, Rhodopis possessing a royal warrant which secures her
from every molestation on the part of the police.
[A very active and strict police-force existed in Egypt, the
organization of which is said to have owed much to Amasis' care. We
also read in inscriptions and papyrus rolls, that a body of mounted
police existed, the ranks of which were generally filled by
foreigners in preference to natives.]
Our own songs and our own language are to be heard here, and here we take
counsel on the best means for delivering Greece from the ever fresh
encroachments of her tyrants.
In a word, this house is the centre of attraction for all Hellenic
interests in Egypt, and of more importance to us politically, than our
temple, the Hellenion itself, and our hall of commerce.
In a few minutes you will see this remarkable grandmother, and, if we
should be here alone, perhaps the grandchild too; you will then at once
perceive that they owe everything to their own rare qualities and not to
the chances of good fortune. Ah! there they come! they are going towards
the house. Cannot you hear the slave-girls singing? Now they are going
in. First let them quietly be seated, then follow me, and when the
evening is over you shall say whether you repent of having come hither,
and whether Rhodopis resembles more nearly a queen or a freed
bond-woman."
The houses was built in the Grecian style. It was a rather long,
one-storied building, the outside of which would be called extremely
plain in the present day; within, it united the Egyptian brilliancy of
coloring with the Greek beauty of form. The principal door opened into
the entrance-hall. To the left of this lay a large dining-room,
overlooking the Nile, and, opposite to this last was the kitchen, an
apartment only to be found in the houses of the wealthier Greeks, the
poorer families being accustomed to prepare their food at the hearth in
the front apartment. The hall of reception lay at the other end of the
entrance-hall, and was in the form of a square, surrounded within by a
colonnade, into which various chambers opened. This was the apartment
devoted to the men, in the centre of which was the household fire,
burning on an altar-shaped hearth of rich AEginetan metal-work.
It was lighted by an opening in the roof, which formed at the same time,
an outlet for the smoke. From this room (at the opposite end to that on
which it opened into the entrance-hall), a passage, closed by a
well-fastened door, led into the chamber of the women. This was also
surrounded by a colonnade within, but only on three sides, and here the
female inhabitants were accustomed to pass their time, when not employed,
spinning or weaving, in the rooms lying near the back or garden-door as
it was termed. Between these latter and the domestic offices, which lay
on the right and left of the women's apartment, were the sleeping-rooms;
these served also as places of security for the valuables of the house.
The walls of the men's apartment were painted of a reddish-brown color,
against which the outlines of some white marble carvings, the gift of a
Chian sculptor, stood out in sharp relief. The floor was covered with
rich carpets from Sardis; low cushions of panthers' skins lay ranged
along the colonnade; around the artistically wrought hearth stood quaint
Egyptian settees, and small, delicately-carved tables of Thya wood, on
which lay all kinds of musical instruments, the flute, cithara and lyre.
Numerous lamps of various and singular shapes, filled with Kiki oil, hung
against the walls. Some represented fire-spouting dolphins; others,
strange winged monsters from whose jaws the flames issued; and these,
blending their light with that from the hearth, illumined the apartment.
In this room a group of men were assembled, whose appearance and dress
differed one from the other. A Syrian from Tyre, in a long crimson robe,
was talking animatedly to a man whose decided features and crisp, curly,
black hair proclaimed him an Israelite. The latter had come to Egypt to
buy chariots and horses for Zerubbabel, the governor of Judah--the
Egyptian equipages being the most sought after at that time. Close to him
stood three Greeks from Asia Minor, the rich folds of whose garments (for
they wore the costly dress of their native city Miletus), contrasted
strongly with the plain and unadorned robe of Phryxus, the deputy
commissioned to collect money for the temple of Apollo at Delphi, with
whom they were in earnest conversation. Ten years before, the ancient
temple had been consumed by fire; and at this time efforts were being
made to build another, and a more beautiful one.
Two of the Milesians, disciples of Anaximander and Anaximenes, were
staying then in Egypt, to study astronomy and the peculiar wisdom of the
Egyptians at Heliopolis, and the third was a wealthy merchant and
ship-owner, named Theopompus, who had settled at Naukratis.
[Anaximander of Miletus, born 611-546, was a celebrated
geometrician, astronomer, philosopher and geographer. He was the
author of a book on natural phenomena, drew the first map of the
world on metal, and introduced into Greece a kind of clock which he
seems to have borrowed from the Babylonians. He supposes a primary
and not easily definable Being, by which the whole world is
governed, and in which, though in himself infinite and without
limits, everything material and circumscribed has its foundation.
"Chaotic matter" represents in his theory the germ of all created
things, from which water, earth, animals, nereids or fish-men, human
beings &c. have had their origin.]
Rhodopis herself was engaged in a lively conversation with two Samian
Greeks: the celebrated worker in metals, sculptor and goldsmith
Theodorus, and the Iambic poet Ibykus of Rhegium, who had left the court
of Polykrates for a time in order to become acquainted with Egypt, and
were bearers of presents to Amasis from their ruler. Close to the fire
lay Philoinus of Sybaris, a corpulent man with strongly-marked features
and a sensual expression of face; he was stretched at full-length on a
couch covered with spotted furs, and amused himself by playing with his
scented curls wreathed with gold, and with the golden chains which fell
from his neck on to the long saffron-colored robe that clothed him down
to his feet.
[Sybaris was a town in Lower Italy notorious throughout the ancient
world for its luxury. According to Strabo it was founded by
Achaeans 262. About 510 it was conquered and destroyed by the
Crotoniates and then rebuilt under the name of Thurii.]
Rhodopis had a kind word for each of her guests, but at present she
occupied herself exclusively with the two celebrated Sarnians; their talk
was of art and poetry. The fire of youth still glowed in the eyes of the
Thracian woman, her tall figure was still full and unbent; her hair,
though grey, was wound round her beautifully formed head in luxuriant
waves, and laid together at the back in a golden net, and a sparkling
diadem shone above her lofty forehead.
Her noble Greek features were pale, but still beautiful and without a
wrinkle, notwithstanding her great age; indeed her small mouth with its
full lips, her white teeth, her eyes so bright and yet so soft, and her
nobly-formed nose and forehead would have been beauty enough for a young
maiden.
Rhodopis looked younger than she really was, though she made no attempt
to disavow her age. Matronly dignity was visible in every movement, and
the charm of her manner lay, not in a youthful endeavor to be pleasing,
but in the effort of age to please others, considering their wishes, and
at the same time demanding consideration in return.
Our two friends now presenting themselves in the hall, every eye turned
upon them, and as Phanes entered leading his friend by the hand, the
heartiest welcome met him from all sides; one of the Milesians indeed
exclaimed: "Now I see what it is that was wanting to our assembly. There
can be no merriment without Phanes."
And Philoinus, the Sybarite, raising his deep voice, but not allowing
himself for a moment to be disturbed in his repose, remarked: "Mirth is a
good thing, and if you bring that with you, be welcome to me also,
Athenian."
"To me," said Rhodopis, turning to her new guests, "you are heartily
welcome, but not more in your joy than if borne down by sadness. I know
no greater pleasure than to remove the lines of care from a friend's
brow. Spartan, I venture to address you as a friend too, for the friends
of my friends are my own." Aristomachus bowed in silence, but Phanes,
addressing himself both to Rhodopis and to the Sybarite, answered: "Well
then, my friends, I can content you both. To you, Rhodopis, I must come
for comfort, for soon, too soon I must leave you and your pleasant house;
Philoinus however can still enjoy my mirth, as I cannot but rejoice in
the prospect of seeing my beloved Hellas once more, and of quitting, even
though involuntarily, this golden mouse-trap of a country."
"You are going away! you have been dismissed? Whither are you going?"
echoed on all sides.
"Patience, patience, my friends," cried Phanes. "I have a long story to
tell, but I will rather reserve it for the evening meal. And indeed, dear
friend, my hunger is nearly as great as my distress at being obliged to
leave you."
"Hunger is a good thing," philosophized the Sybarite once more, "when a
man has a good meal in prospect."
"On that point you may be at ease, Philoinus," answered Rhodopis. "I told
the cook to do his utmost, for the most celebrated epicure from the most
luxurious city in the world, no less a person than Philoinus of Sybaris,
would pass a stern judgment on his delicate dishes. Go, Knakias, tell
them to serve the supper. Are you content now, my impatient guests? As
for me, since I heard Phanes' mournful news, the pleasure of the meal is
gone." The Athenian bowed, and the Sybarite returned to his philosophy.
"Contentment is a good thing when every wish can be satisfied. I owe you
thanks, Rhodopis, for your appreciation of my incomparable native city.
What says Anakreon?
"To-day is ours--what do we fear?
To-day is ours--we have it here.
Let's treat it kindly, that it may
Wish at least with us to stay.
Let's banish business, banish sorrow;
To the gods belongs to-morrow."
"Eh! Ibykus, have I quoted your friend the poet correctly, who feasts
with you at Polykrates' banquets? Well, I think I may venture to say of
my own poor self that if Anakreon can make better verses, I understand
the art of living quite as well as he, though he writes so many poems
upon it. Why, in all his songs there is not one word about the pleasures
of the table! Surely they are as important as love and play! I confess
that the two last are clear to me also; still, I could exist without
them, though in a miserable fashion, but without food, where should we
be?"
The Sybarite broke into a loud laugh at his own joke; but the Spartan
turned away from this conversation, drew Phryxus into a corner, and quite
abandoning his usually quiet and deliberate manner, asked eagerly whether
he had at last brought him the long wished for answer from the Oracle.
The serious features of the Delphian relaxed, and thrusting his hand into
the folds of his chiton,--[An undergarment resembling a shirt.]--he drew
out a little roll of parchment-like sheepskin, on which a few lines were
written.
The hands of the brave, strong Spartan trembled as he seized the roll,
and his fixed gaze on its characters was as if it would pierce the skin
on which they were inscribed.
Then, recollecting himself, he shook his head sadly and said: "We
Spartans have to learn other arts than reading and writing; if thou
canst, read the what Pythia says."
The Delphian glanced over the writing and replied: "Rejoice! Loxias
(Apollo) promises thee a happy return home; hearken to the prediction of
the priestess."
"If once the warrior hosts from the snow-topped mountains descending
Come to the fields of the stream watering richly the plain,
Then shall the lingering boat to the beckoning meadows convey thee
Which to the wandering foot peace and a home will afford.
When those warriors come, from the snow-topped mountains descending,
Then will the powerful Five grant thee what long they refused."
To these words the Spartan listened with intense eagerness; he had them
read over to him twice, then repeated them from memory, thanked Phryxus,
and placed the roll within the folds of his garment.
The Delphian then took part in the general conversation, but Aristomachus
repeated the words of the Oracle unceasingly to himself in a low voice,
endeavoring to impress them on his memory, and to interpret their obscure
import.
CHAPTER II.
The doors of the supper-room now flew open. Two lovely, fair-haired boys,
holding myrtle-wreaths, stood on each side of the entrance, and in the
middle of the room was a large, low, brilliantly polished table,
surrounded by inviting purple cushions.
[It was most probably usual for each guest to have his own little
table; but we read even in Homer of large tables on which the meals
were served up. In the time of Homer people sat at table, but the
recumbent position became universal in later times.]
Rich nosegays adorned this table, and on it were placed large joints of
roast meat, glasses and dishes of various shapes filled with dates, figs,
pomegranates, melons and grapes, little silver beehives containing honey,
and plates of embossed copper, on which lay delicate cheese from the
island of Trinakria. In the midst was a silver table-ornament, something
similar to an altar, from which arose fragrant clouds of incense.
At the extreme end of the table stood the glittering silver cup in which
the wine was to be mixed.
[The Greeks were not accustomed to drink unmingled wine. Zaleukus
forbade to all citizens the pure juice of the grape under penalty of
death, and Solon under very severe penalties, unless required as
medicine. The usual mixture was composed of three-fifths water to
two-fifths wine.]
This was of beautiful AEginetan workmanship, its crooked handles
representing two giants, who appeared ready to sink under the weight of
the bowl which they sustained.
Like the altar, it was enwreathed with flowers, and a garland of roses or
myrtle had been twined around the goblet of each guest.
The entire floor was strewed with rose-leaves, and the room lighted by
many lamps which were hung against the smooth, white, stucco walls.
No sooner were the guests reclining on their cushions, than the
fair-haired boys reappeared, wound garlands of ivy and myrtle around the
heads and shoulders of the revellers, and washed their feet in silver
basins. The Sybarite, though already scented with all the perfumes of
Arabia, would not rest until he was completely enveloped in roses and
myrtle, and continued to occupy the two boys even after the carver had
removed the first joints from the table in order to cut them up; but as
soon as the first course, tunny-fish with mustard-sauce, had been served,
he forgot all subordinate matters, and became absorbed in the enjoyment
of the delicious viands.
Rhodopis, seated on a chair at the head of the table, near the wine-bowl,
not only led the conversation, but gave directions to the slaves in
waiting.
[The women took their meals sitting. The Greeks, like the
Egyptians, had chairs with backs and arms. The form of the solia or
throne has become familiar to us from the discoveries at Pompeii and
the representations of many gods and distinguished persons. It had
a high, almost straight back, and supports for the arms.]
She gazed on her cheerful guests with a kind of pride, and seemed to be
devoting her attention to each exclusively, now asking the Delphian how
he had succeeded in his mission, then the Sybarite whether he was content
with the performances of her cook, and then listening eagerly to Ibykus,
as he told how the Athenian, Phrynichus, had introduced the religious
dramas of Thespis of Ikaria into common life, and was now representing
entire histories from the past by means of choruses, recitative and
answer.
Then she turned to the Spartan, remarking, that to him alone of all her
guests, instead of an apology for the simplicity of the meal, she felt
she owed one for its luxury. The next time he came, her slave Knakias,
who, as an escaped Helot, boasted that he could cook a delicious
blood-soup (here the Sybarite shuddered), should prepare him a true
Lacedaemonian repast.
When the guests had eaten sufficiently they again washed their hands; the
plates and dishes were removed, the floor cleansed, and wine and water
poured into the bowl.
[The Symposium began after the real meal. Not till that was over
did the guests usually adorn themselves with wreaths, wash their
hands with Smegma or Smema (a kind of soap) and begin to drink.]
At last, when Rhodopis had convinced herself that the right moment was
come, she turned to Phanes, who was engaged in a discussion with the
Milesians, and thus addressed him:
"Noble friend, we have restrained our impatience so long that it must
surely now be your duty to tell us what evil chance is threatening to
snatch you from Egypt and from our circle. You may be able to leave us
and this country with a light heart, for the gods are wont to bless you
Ionians with that precious gift from your very birth, but we shall
remember you long and sadly. I know of no worse loss than that of a
friend tried through years, indeed some of us have lived too long on the
Nile not to have imbibed a little of the constant, unchanging Egyptian
temperament. You smile, and yet I feel sure that long as you have desired
to revisit your dear Hellas, you will not be able to leave us quite
without regret. Ah, you admit this? Well, I knew I had not been deceived.
But now tell us why you are obliged to leave Egypt, that we may consider
whether it may not be possible to get the king's decree reversed, and so
keep you with us."
Phanes smiled bitterly, and replied: "Many thanks, Rhodopis, for these
flattering words, and for the kind intention either to grieve over my
departure, or if possible, to prevent it. A hundred new faces will soon
help you to forget mine, for long as you have lived on the Nile, you are
still a Greek from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, and may
thank the gods that you have remained so. I am a great friend of
constancy too, but quite as great an enemy of folly, and is there one
among you who would not call it folly to fret over what cannot be undone?
I cannot call the Egyptian constancy a virtue, it is a delusion. The men
who treasure their dead for thousands of years, and would rather lose
their last loaf than allow a single bone belonging to one of their
ancestors to be taken from them, are not constant, they are foolish. Can
it possibly make me happy to see my friends sad? Certainly not! You must
not imitate the Egyptians, who, when they lose a friend, spend months in
daily-repeated lamentations over him. On the contrary, if you will
sometimes think of the distant, I ought to say, of the departed, friend,
(for as long as I live I shall never be permitted to tread Egyptian
ground again), let it be with smiling faces; do not cry, 'Ah! why was
Phanes forced to leave us?' but rather, 'Let us be merry, as Phanes used
to be when he made one of our circle!' In this way you must celebrate my
departure, as Simonides enjoined when he sang:
"If we would only be more truly wise,
We should not waste on death our tears and sighs,
Nor stand and mourn o'er cold and lifeless clay
More than one day.
For Death, alas! we have no lack of time;
But Life is gone, when scarcely at its prime,
And is e'en, when not overfill'd with care
But short and bare!"
"If we are not to weep for the dead, how much less ought we to grieve for
absent friends! the former have left us for ever, but to the latter we
say at parting, 'Farewell, until we meet again'"
Here the Sybarite, who had been gradually becoming more and more
impatient, could not keep silent any longer, and called out in the most
woe begone tone: "Will you never begin your story, you malicious fellow? I
cannot drink a single drop till you leave off talking about death. I feel
cold already, and I am always ill, if I only think of, nay, if I only
hear the subject mentioned, that this life cannot last forever." The
whole company burst into a laugh, and Phanes began to tell his story:
"You know that at Sais I always live in the new palace; but at Memphis,
as commander of the Greek body-guard which must accompany the king
everywhere, a lodging was assigned me in the left wing of the old palace.
"Since Psamtik the First, Sais has always been the royal residence, and
the other palaces have in consequence become somewhat neglected. My
dwelling was really splendidly situated, and beautifully furnished; it
would have been first-rate, if, from the first moment of my entrance, a
fearful annoyance had not made its appearance.
"In the day-time, when I was seldom at home, my rooms were all that could
be wished, but at night it was impossible to sleep for the tremendous
noise made by thousands of rats and mice under the old floors, and
couches, and behind the hangings.
"Even in the first night an impudent mouse ran over my face.
"I was quite at a loss what to do, till an Egyptian soldier sold me two
large cats, and these, in the course of many weeks, procured me some rest
from my tormentors.
"Now, you are probably all aware that one of the charming laws of this
most eccentric nation, (whose culture and wisdom, you, my Milesian
friends, cannot sufficiently praise), declares the cat to be a sacred
animal. Divine honors are paid to these fortunate quadrupeds as well as
to many other animals, and he who kills a cat is punished with the same
severity as the murderer of a human being."
Till now Rhodopis had been smiling, but when she perceived that Phanes'
banishment had to do with his contempt for the sacred animals, her face
became more serious. She knew how many victims, how many human lives, had
already been sacrificed to this Egyptian superstition, and how, only a
short time before, the king Amasis himself had endeavored in vain to
rescue an unfortunate Samian, who had killed a cat, from the vengeance of
the enraged populace.
[The cat was probably the most sacred of all the animals worshipped
by the Egyptians. Herod tells that when a house was on fire the
Egyptians never thought of extinguishing the fire until their cats
were all saved, and that when a cat died, they shaved their heads in
sign of mourning. Whoever killed one of these animals, whether
intentionally or by accident, suffered the penalty, of death,
without any chance of mercy. Diod. (I. 81.) himself witnessed the
murder of a Roman citizen who had killed a cat, by the Egyptian
people; and this in spite of the authorities, who in fear of the
powerful Romans, endeavored to prevent the deed. The bodies of the
cats were carefully embalmed and buried, and their mummies are to be
found in every museum. The embalmed cat, carefully wrapped in linen
bandages, is oftener to be met with than any other of the many
animals thus preserved by the Egyptians. In spite of the great care
bestowed on cats, there can have been no lack of mice in Egypt. In
one nomos or province the shrew-mouse was sacred, and a satirical,
obscene papyrus in Turin shows us a war between the cats and mice;
the Papyrus Ebers contains poisons for mice. We ourselves possess a
shrew-mouse exquisitely wrought in bronze.]
"Everything was going well," continued the officer, "when we left Memphis
two years ago.
"I confided my pair of cats to the care of one of the Egyptian servants
at the palace, feeling sure that these enemies of the rats would keep my
dwelling clear for the future; indeed I began to feel a certain
veneration for my deliverers from the plague of mice.
"Last year Amasis fell ill before the court could adjourn to Memphis, and
we remained at Sais.
"At last, about six week ago, we set out for the city of the Pyramids. I
betook me to my old quarters; not the shadow of a mouse's tail was to be
seen there, but instead, they swarmed with another race of animals not
one whit dearer to me than their predecessors. The pair of cats had,
during my two years' absence, increased twelve-fold. I tried all in my
power to dislodge this burdensome brood of all ages and colors, but in
vain; every night my sleep was disturbed by horrible choruses of
four-footed animals, and feline war-cries and songs.
"Every year, at the period of the Bubastis festival, all superfluous cats
may be brought to the temple of the cat-headed goddess Pacht, where they
are fed and cared for, or, as I believe, when they multiply too fast,
quietly put out of the way. These priests are knaves!
"Unfortunately the journey to the said temple" did not occur during the
time of our stay in Memphis; however, as I really could not tolerate this
army of tormentors any longer, I determined at least to get rid of two
families of healthy kittens with which their mothers had just presented
me. My old slave Mus, from his very name a natural enemy of cats, was
told to kill the little creatures, put them into a sack, and throw them
into the Nile.
"This murder was necessary, as the mewing of the kittens would otherwise
have betrayed the contents of the sack to the palace-warders. In the
twilight poor Muss betook himself to the Nile through the grove of
Hathor, with his perilous burden. But alas! the Egyptian attendant who
was in the habit of feeding my cats, had noticed that two families of
kittens were missing, and had seen through our whole plan.
"My slave took his way composedly through the great avenue of Sphinxes,
and by the temple of Ptah, holding the little bag concealed under his
mantle. Already in the sacred grove he noticed that he was being
followed, but on seeing that the men behind him stopped before the temple
of Ptah and entered into conversation with the priests, he felt perfectly
reassured and went on.
"He had already reached the bank of the Nile, when he heard voices
calling him and a number of people running towards him in haste; at the
same moment a stone whistled close by his head.
"Mus at once perceived the danger which was threatening him. Summoning
all his strength he rushed down to the Nile, flung the bag in, and then
with a beating heart, but as he imagined without the slightest evidence
of guilt, remained standing on the shore. A few moments later he was
surrounded by at least a hundred priests.
"Even the high-priest of Ptah, my old enemy Ptahotep, had not disdained
to follow the pursuers in person.
"Many of the latter, and amongst them the perfidious palace-servant,
rushed at once into the Nile, and there, to our confusion, found the bag
with its twelve little corpses, hanging entirely uninjured among the
Papyrus-reeds and bean-tendrils. The cotton coffin was opened before the
eyes of the high-priest, a troop of lower priests, and at least a
thousand of the inhabitants of Memphis, who had hurried to the spot, and
when the miserable contents were disclosed, there arose such fearful
howls of anguish, and such horrible cries of mingled lamentation and
revenge, that I heard them even in the palace.
"The furious multitude, in their wild rage, fell on my poor servant,
threw him down, trampled on him and would have killed him, had not the
all-powerful high-priest-designing to involve me, as author of the crime,
in the same ruin--commanded them to cease and take the wretched
malefactor to prison.
"Half an hour later I was in prison too.
"My old Mus took all the guilt of the crime on himself, until at last, by
means of the bastinado, the high-priest forced him to confess that I had
ordered the killing of the kittens, and that he, as a faithful servant,
had not dared to disobey.
"The supreme court of justice, whose decisions the king himself has no
power to reverse, is composed of priests from Memphis, Heliopolis and
Thebes: you can therefore easily believe that they had no scruple in
pronouncing sentence of death on poor Mus and my own unworthy Greek self.
The slave was pronounced guilty of two capital offences: first, of the
murder of the sacred animals, and secondly, of a twelve-fold pollution of
the Nile through dead bodies. I was condemned as originator of this, (as
they termed it) four-and-twenty-fold crime.
[According to the Egyptian law, the man who was cognizant of a crime
was held equally culpable with the perpetrator.]
"Mus was executed on the same day. May the earth rest lightly on him! I
shall never think of him again as my slave, but as a friend and
benefactor! My sentence of death was read aloud in the presence of his
dead body, and I was already preparing for a long journey into the nether
world, when the king sent and commanded a reprieve.
[This court of justice, which may be compared with the Areopagus at
Athens, and the Gerusia at Sparta, (Diod. I, 75.), was composed of
30 judges taken from the priestly caste, (10 from Heliopolis, 10
from Memphis, 10 from Thebes). The most eminent from among their
number was chosen by them as president. All complaints and defences
had to be presented in writing, that the judges might in no way be
influenced by word or gesture. This tribunal was independent, even
of the king's authority. Much information concerning the
administration of justice has been obtained from the Papyrus Abbott,
known by the name of the 'Papyrus judiciaire'. Particulars and an
account of their literature may be found in Ebers "Durch Gosen zum
Sinai," p. 534 and following.]
"I was taken back to prison. One of my guards, an Arcadian Taxiarch, told
me that all the officers of the guard and many of the soldiers,
(altogether four thousand men) had threatened to send in their
resignation, unless I, their commander, were pardoned.
"As it was beginning to grow dusk I was taken to the king.
"He received me graciously, confirmed the Taxiarch's statement with his
own mouth, and said how grieved he should be to lose a commander so
generally beloved. I must confess that I owe Amasis no grudge for his
conduct to me, on the contrary I pity him. You should have heard how he,
the powerful king, complained that he could never act according to his
own wishes, that even in his most private affairs he was crossed and
compromised by the priests and their influence.
[See the parallel in the history of 2000 years later in the reigns
of Henry III. and IV. confronting the Jesuit influence, finally
culminating in assassination. D.W.]
"Had it only depended on himself, he could easily have pardoned the
transgression of a law, which I, as a foreigner, could not be expected to
understand, and might (though unjustly) esteem as a foolish superstition.
But for the sake of the priests he dare not leave me unpunished. The
lightest penalty he could inflict must be banishment from Egypt.
"He concluded his complaint with these words: 'You little know what
concessions I must make to the priests in order to obtain your pardon.
Why, our supreme court of justice is independent even of me, its king!'
"And thus I received my dismissal, after having taken a solemn oath to
leave Memphis that very day, and Egypt, at latest, in three weeks.
"At the palace-gate I met Psamtik, the crown-prince. He has long been my
enemy, on account of some vexatious matters which I cannot divulge, (you
know them, Rhodopis). I was going to offer him my parting salutation, but
he turned his back upon me, saying: Once more you have escaped
punishment, Athenian; but you cannot elude my vengeance. Whithersoever
you may go, I shall be able to find you!'--'That remains to be proved,' I
answered, and putting myself and my possessions on board a boat, came to
Naukratis. Here, by good fortune, I met my old friend Aristomachus of
Sparta, who, as he was formerly in command of the Cyprian troops, will
most likely be nominated my successor. I should rejoice to know that such
a first-rate man was going to take my place, if I did not at the same
time fear that his eminent services will make my own poor efforts seem
even more insignificant than they really were."
But here he was interrupted by Aristomachus, who called out: "Praise
enough, friend Phanes! Spartan tongues are stiff; but if you should ever
stand in need of my help, I will give you an answer in deeds, which shall
strike the right nail on the head."
Rhodopis smiled her approval, and giving her hand to each, said:
"Unfortunately, the only conclusion to be drawn from your story, my poor
Phanes, is that you cannot possibly remain any longer in this country. I
will not blame you for your thoughtlessness, though you might have known
that you were exposing yourself to great danger for a mere trifle. The
really wise and brave man never undertakes a hazardous enterprise, unless
the possible advantage and disadvantage that may accrue to him from it
can be reckoned at least as equal. Recklessness is quite as foolish, but
not so blamable as cowardice, for though both do the man an injury, the
latter alone can dishonor him.
"Your thoughtlessness, this time, has very nearly cost your life, a life
dear to many, and which you ought to save for a nobler end. We cannot
attempt to keep you here; we should thereby only injure ourselves without
benefitting you. This noble Spartan must now take your place as head and
representative of the Greek nation at the Egyptian court, must endeavor
to protect us against the encroachment of the priests, and to retain for
us the royal favor. I take your hand, Aristomachus, and will not let it
go till you have promised that you will protect, to the utmost of your
power, every Greek, however humble, (as Phanes did before you), from the
insolence of the Egyptians, and will sooner resign your office than allow
the smallest wrong done to a Hellene to go unpunished. We are but a few
thousands among millions of enemies, but through courage we are great,
and unity must keep us strong. Hitherto the Greeks in Egypt have lived
like brothers; each has been ready to offer himself for the good of all,
and all for each, and it is just this unity that has made us, and must
keep us, powerful.
"Oh! could we but bestow this precious gift on our mother-country and her
colonies! would the tribes of our native land but forget their Dorian,
Ionian or AEolian descent, and, contenting themselves with the one name
of Hellenes, live as the children of one family, as the sheep of one
flock,--then indeed we should be strong against the whole world, and
Hellas would be recognized by all nations as the Queen of the Earth!"
[This longing desire for unity was by no means foreign to the
Greeks, though we seldom hear it expressed. Aristotle, for example,
says VII. 7.: "Were the Hellenes united into one state, they could
command all the barbarous nations."]
A fire glowed in the eyes of the grey-haired woman as she uttered these
words; and the Spartan, grasping her hand impetuously and stamping on the
floor with his wooden leg, cried: "By Zeus, I will not let a hair of
their heads be hurt; but thou, Rhodopis, thou art worthy to have been
born a Spartan woman."
"Or an Athenian," cried Phanes.
"An Ionian," said the Milesians, and the sculptor: "A daughter of the
Samian Geomori--"
"But I am more, far more, than all these," cried the enthusiastic woman.
"I am a Hellene!"
The whole company, even to the Jew and the Syrian, were carried away by
the intense feeling of the moment; the Sybarite alone remained unmoved,
and, with his mouth so full as to render the words almost unintelligible,
said:
"You deserve to be a Sybarite too, Rhodopis, for your roast beef is the
best I have tasted since I left Italy, and your Anthylla wine' relishes
almost as well as Vesuvian or Chian!"
Every one laughed, except the Spartan, who darted a look of indignation
and contempt at the epicure.
In this moment a deep voice, hitherto unknown to us, shouted suddenly
through the window, "A glad greeting to you, my friends!"
"A glad greeting," echoed the chorus of revellers, questioning and
guessing who this late arrival might prove to be.
They had not long to wait, for even before the Sybarite had had time
carefully to test and swallow another mouthful of wine, the speaker,
Kallias, the son of Phaenippus of Athens, was already standing by the
side of Rhodopis. He was a tall thin man of over sixty, with a head of
that oval form which gives the impression of refinement and intellect.
One of the richest among the Athenian exiles, he had twice bought the
possessions of Pisistratus from the state, and twice been obliged to
surrender them, on the tyrant's return to power. Looking round with his
clear keen eyes on this circle of acquaintances, he exchanged friendly
greetings with all, and exclaimed:
"If you do not set a high value on my appearance among you this evening,
I shall think that gratitude has entirely disappeared from the earth."
"We have been expecting you a long time," interrupted one of the
Milesians. "You are the first man to bring us news of the Olympic games!"
"And we could wish no better bearer of such news than the victor of
former days?" added Rhodopis. "Take your seat," cried Phanes impatiently,
"and come to the point with your news at once, friend Kallias."
"Immediately, fellow-countryman," answered the other. "It is some time
ago now since I left Olympia. I embarked at Cenchreae in a fifty-oared
Samian vessel, the best ship that ever was built.
"It does not surprise me that I am the first Greek to arrive in
Naukratis. We encountered terrific storms at sea, and could not have
escaped with our lives, if the big-bellied Samian galley, with her Ibis
beak and fish's tail had not been so splendidly timbered and manned.
"How far the other homeward-bound passengers may have been driven out of
their course, I cannot tell; we found shelter in the harbor of Samos, and
were able to put to sea again after ten days.
"We ran into the mouth of the Nile this morning. I went on board my own
bark at once, and was so favored by Boreas, who at least at the end of my
voyage, seemed willing to prove that he still felt kindly towards his old
Kallias, that I caught sight of this most friendly of all houses a few
moments since. I saw the waving flag, the brightly lighted windows, and
debated within myself whether to enter or not; but Rhodopis, your
fascination proved irresistible, and besides, I was bursting with all my
untold news, longing to share your feast, and to tell you, over the
viands and the wine, things that you have not even allowed yourselves to
dream of."
Kallias settled himself comfortably on one of the cushions, and before
beginning to tell his news, produced and presented to Rhodopis a
magnificent gold bracelet in the form of a serpent's, which he had bought
for a large sum at Samos, in the goldsmith's workshop of the very
Theodorus who was now sitting with him at table.
"This I have brought for you,"' he said, turning to the delighted
Rhodopis, "but for you, friend Phanes, I have something still better.
Guess, who won the four-horse chariot-race?"
"An Athenian?" asked Phanes, and his face glowed with excitement; for the
victory gained by one citizen at the Olympic games belonged to his whole
people, and the Olympic olive-branch was the greatest honor and happiness
that could fall to the lot, either of a single Hellene, or an entire
Greek tribe.
"Rightly guessed, Phanes!" cried the bringer of this joyful news, "The
first prize has been carried off by an Athenian; and not only so, your
own cousin Cimon, the son of Kypselos, the brother of that Miltiades,
who, nine Olympiads ago, earned us the same honor, is the man who has
conquered this year; and with the same steeds that gained him the prize
at the last games.
[The second triumph won by the steeds of Cimon must have taken
place, as Duneker correctly remarks, about the year 528. The same
horses won the race for the third time at the next Olympic games,
consequently four years later. As token of his gratitude Cimon
caused a monument to be erected in their honor in "the hollow way"
near Athens. We may here remind our readers that the Greeks made
use of the Olympic games to determine the date of each year. They
took place every four years. The first was fixed 776 B. C. Each
separate year was named the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th of such or such an
Olympiad.]
"The fame of the Alkmaeonidae is, verily, darkening more and more before
the Philaidae. Are not you proud, Phanes? do not you feel joy at the
glory of your family?"
In his delight Phanes had risen from his seat, and seemed suddenly to
have increased in stature by a whole head.
With a look of ineffable pride and consciousness of his own position, he
gave his hand to the messenger of victory. The latter, embracing his
countryman, continued:
"Yes, we have a right to feel proud and happy, Phanes; you especially,
for no sooner had the judges unanimously awarded the prize to Cimon, than
he ordered the heralds to proclaim the tyrant Pisistratus as the owner of
the splendid team, and therefore victor in the race. Pisistratus at once
caused it to be announced that your family was free to return to Athens,
and so now, Phanes, the long-wished for hour of your return home is
awaiting you."
But at these words Phanes turned pale, his look of conscious pride
changed into one of indignation, and he exclaimed:
"At this I am to rejoice, foolish Kallias? rather bid me weep that a
descendant of Ajax should be capable of laying his well-won fame thus
ignominiously at a tyrant's feet! No! I swear by Athene, by Father Zeus,
and by Apollo, that I will sooner starve in foreign lands than take one
step homeward, so long as the Pisistratidae hold my country in bondage.
When I leave the service of Amasis, I shall be free, free as a bird in
the air; but I would rather be the slave of a peasant in foreign lands,
than hold the highest office under Pisistratus. The sovereign power in
Athens belongs to us, its nobles; but Cimon by laying his chaplet at the
feet of Pisistratus has acknowledged the tyrants, and branded himself as
their servant. He shall hear that Phanes cares little for the tyrant's
clemency. I choose to remain an exile till my country is free, till her
nobles and people govern themselves, and dictate their own laws. Phanes
will never do homage to the oppressor, though all the Philaidae, the
Alkmaeonidae, and even the men of your own house, Kallias, the rich
Daduchi, should fall down at his feet!"
With flashing eyes he looked round on the assembly; Kallias too
scrutinized the faces of the guests with conscious pride, as if he would
say:
"See, friends, the kind of men produced by my glorious country!"
Taking the hand of Phanes again, he said to him: "The tyrants are as
hateful to me as to you, my friend; but I have seen, that, so long as
Pisistratus lives, the tyranny cannot be overthrown. His allies, Lygdamis
of Naxos and Polykrates of Samos, are powerful; but the greatest danger
for our freedom lies in his own moderation and prudence. During my recent
stay in Greece I saw with alarm that the mass of the people in Athens
love their oppressor like a father. Notwithstanding his great power, he
leaves the commonwealth in the enjoyment of Solon's constitution. He
adorns the city with the most magnificent buildings. They say that the
new temple of Zeus, now being built of glorious marble by Kallaeschrus,
Antistates and Porinus (who must be known to you, Theodorus), will
surpass every building that has yet been erected by the Hellenes. He
understands how to attract poets and artists of all kinds to Athens, he
has had the poems of Homer put into writing, and the prophecies of
Musaeus collected by Onomakritus. He lays out new streets and arranges
fresh festivals; trade flourishes under his rule, and the people find
themselves well off, in spite of the many taxes laid upon them. But what
are the people? a vulgar multitude who, like the gnats, fly towards every
thing brilliant, and, so long as the taper burns, will continue to
flutter round it, even though they burn their wings in doing so. Let
Pisistratus' torch burn out, Phanes, and I'll swear that the fickle crowd
will flock around the returning nobles, the new light, just as they now
do around the tyrant.
"Give me your hand once more, you true son of Ajax; for you, my friends,
I have still many an interesting piece of news untold.
"The chariot-race, as I have just related, was won by Cimon who gave the
olive-branch to Pisistratus. Four finer horses than his I never saw.
Arkesilaus of Cyrene, Kleosthenes of Epidamnus, Aster of Sybaris,
Hekataeus of Miletus and many more had also sent splendid teams. Indeed
the games this time were more than brilliant. All Hellas had sent
deputies. Rhoda of the Ardeates, in distant Iberia, the wealthy
Tartessus, Sinope in the far East on the shores of Pontus, in short,
every tribe that could boast of Hellenic descent was well represented.
The Sybarite deputies were of a dazzling beauty; the Spartans, homely and
simple, but handsome as Achilles, tall and strong as Hercules; the
Athenians remarkable for their supple limbs and graceful movements, and
the men of Crotona were led by Milo, strongest of mortal birth. The
Samian and Milesian deputies vied in splendor and gorgeousness of attire
with those from Corinth and Mitylene: the flower of the Greek youth was
assembled there, and, in the space allotted to spectators, were seated,
not only men of every age, class and nation, but many virgins, fair and
lovely maidens, who had come to Olympia, more especially from Sparta, in
order to encourage the men during the games by their acclamations and
applause. The market was set up beyond the Alphaeus, and there traders
from all parts of the world were to be seen; Greeks, Carthaginians,
Lydians, Phrygians and shrewd Phoenicians from Palestine settled weighty
business transactions, or offered their goods to the public from tents
and booths. But how can I possibly describe to you the surging throngs of
the populace, the echoing choruses, the smoking festal hecatombs, the
bright and variegated costumes, the sumptuousness of the equipages, the
clang of the different dialects and the joyful cries of friends meeting
again after years of separation; or the splendid appearance of the
envoys, the crowds of lookers-on and venders of small wares, the
brilliant effect produced by the masses of spectators, who filled to
overflowing the space allotted to them, the eager suspense during the
progress of the games, and the never ending shouts of joy when the
victory was decided; the solemn investiture with the olive-branch, cut
with a golden knife by the Elean boy, (whose parents must both be
living), from the sacred tree in the Altis planted so many centuries ago
by Hercules himself; or lastly, the prolonged acclamations which, like
peals of thunder, resounded in the Stadium, when Milo of Crotona
appeared, bearing on his shoulders the bronze statue of himself cast by
Dameas, and carried it through the Stadium into the Altis without once
tottering. The weight of the metal would have crushed a bull to the
earth: but borne by Milo it seemed like a child in the arms of its
Lacedaemonian nurse.
"The highest honors (after Cimon's) were adjudged to a pair of Spartan
brothers, Lysander and Maro, the sons of Aristomachus. Maro was victor in
the foot race, but Lysander presented himself, amidst the shouts of the
spectators, as the opponent of Milo! Milo the invincible, victor at Pisa,
and in the Pythian and Isthmian combats. Milo was taller and stouter than
the Spartan, who was formed like Apollo, and seemed from his great youth
scarcely to have passed from under the hands of the schoolmaster.
"In their naked beauty, glistening with the golden oil, the youth and the
man stood opposite to one another, like a panther and a lion preparing
for the combat. Before the onset, the young Lysander raised his hands
imploringly to the gods, crying: 'For my father, my honor, and the glory
of Sparta!' The Crotonian looked down on the youth with a smile of
superiority; just as an epicure looks at the shell of the languste he is
preparing to open.
"And now the wrestling began. For some time neither could succeed in
grasping the other. The Crotonian threw almost irresistible weight into
his attempts to lay hold of his opponent, but the latter slipped through
the iron grip like a snake. This struggle to gain a hold lasted long, and
the immense multitude watched silently, breathless from excitement. Not a
sound was to be heard but the groans of the wrestlers and the singing of
the nightingales in the grove of the Altis. At last, the youth succeeded,
by means of the cleverest trick I ever saw, in clasping his opponent
firmly. For a long time, Milo exerted all his strength to shake him oft,
but in vain, and the sand of the Stadium was freely moistened by the
great drops of sweat, the result of this Herculean struggle.
"More and more intense waxed the excitement of the spectators, deeper and
deeper the silence, rarer the cries of encouragement, and louder the
groans of the wrestlers. At last Lysander's strength gave way.
Immediately a thousand voices burst forth to cheer him on. He roused
himself and made one last superhuman effort to throw his adversary: but
it was too late. Milo had perceived the momentary weakness. Taking
advantage of it, he clasped the youth in a deadly embrace; a full black
stream of blood welled from Lysander's beautiful lips, and he sank
lifeless to the earth from the wearied arms of the giant. Democedes, the
most celebrated physician of our day, whom you Samians will have known at
the court of Polycrates, hastened to the spot, but no skill could now
avail the happy Lysander,--he was dead.
"Milo was obliged to forego the victor's wreath"; and the fame of this
youth will long continue to sound through the whole of Greece.
[By the laws of the games the wrestler, whose adversary died, had no
right to the prize of victory.]
I myself would rather be the dead Lysander, son of Aristomachus, than the
living Kallias growing old in inaction away from his country. Greece,
represented by her best and bravest, carried the youth to his grave, and
his statue is to be placed in the Altis by those of Milo of Crotona and
Praxidamas of AEgina". At length the heralds proclaimed the sentence of
the judges: 'To Sparta be awarded a victor's wreath for the dead, for the
noble Lysander hath been vanquished, not by Milo, but by Death, and he
who could go forth unconquered from a two hours' struggle with the
strongest of all Greeks, hath well deserved the olive-branch.'"
Here Kallias stopped a moment in his narrative. During his animated
description of these events, so precious to every Greek heart, he had
forgotten his listeners, and, gazing into vacancy, had seen only the
figures of the wrestlers as they rose before his remembrance. Now, on
looking round, he perceived, to his astonishment, that the grey-haired
man with the wooden leg, whom he had already noticed, though without
recognizing him, had hidden his face in his hands and was weeping.
Rhodopis was standing at his right hand. Phanes at his left, and the
other guests were gazing at the Spartan, as if he had been the hero of
Kallias's tale. In a moment the quick Athenian perceived that the aged
man must stand in some very near relation to one or other of the victors
at Olympia; but when he heard that he was Aristomachus-the father of that
glorious pair of brothers, whose wondrous forms were constantly hovering
before his eyes like visions sent down from the abodes of the gods, then
he too gazed on the sobbing old man with mingled envy and admiration, and
made no effort to restrain the tears which rushed into his own eyes,
usually so clear and keen. In those days men wept, as well as women,
hoping to gain relief from the balm of their own tears. In wrath, in
ecstasy of delight, in every deep inward anguish, we find the mighty
heroes weeping, while, on the other hand, the Spartan boys would submit
to be scourged at the altar of Artemis Orthia, and would bleed and even
die under the lash without uttering a moan, in order to obtain the praise
of the men.
For a time every one remained silent, out of respect to the old man's
emotion. But at last the stillness was broken by Joshua the Jew, who
began thus, in broken Greek:
"Weep thy fill, O man of Sparta! I also have known what it is to lose a
son. Eleven years have passed since I buried him in the land of
strangers, by the waters of Babylon, where my people pined in captivity.
Had yet one year been added unto the life of the beautiful child, he had
died in his own land, and had been buried in the sepulchres of his
fathers. But Cyrus the Persian (Jehovah bless his posterity!) released us
from bondage one year too late, and therefore do I weep doubly for this
my son, in that he is buried among the enemies of my people Israel. Can
there be an evil greater than to behold our children, who are unto us as
most precious treasure, go down into the grave before us? And, may the
Lord be gracious unto me, to lose so noble a son, in the dawn of his
early manhood, just at the moment he had won such brilliant renown, must
indeed be a bitter grief, a grief beyond all others!"
Then the Spartan took away his hands from before his face; he was looking
stern, but smiled through his tears, and answered:
"Phoenician, you err! I weep not for anguish, but for joy, and would have
gladly lost my other son, if he could have died like my Lysander."
The Jew, horrified at these, to him, sinful and unnatural words, shook
his head disapprovingly; but the Greeks overwhelmed the old man with
congratulations, deeming him much to be envied. His great happiness made
Aristomachus look younger by many years, and he cried to Rhodopis:
"Truly, my friend, your house is for me a house of blessing; for this is
the second gift that the gods have allowed to fall to my lot, since I
entered it."--"What was the first?" asked Rhodopis. "A propitious
oracle."--"But," cried Phanes, "you have forgotten the third; on this day
the gods have blessed you with the acquaintance of Rhodopis. But, tell
me, what is this about the oracle?"--"May I repeat it to our friends?"
asked the Delphian.
Aristomachus nodded assent, and Phryxus read aloud a second time the
answer of the Pythia:
"If once the warrior hosts from the snow-topped mountains descending
Come to the fields of the stream watering richly the plain,
Then shall the lingering boat to the beckoning meadows convey thee
Which to the wandering foot peace and a home will afford.
When those warriors come from the snow-topped mountains descending
Then will the powerful Five grant thee what they long refused."
Scarcely was the last word out of his mouth, when Kallias the Athenian,
springing up, cried: "In this house, too, you shall receive from me the
fourth gift of the gods. Know that I have kept my rarest news till last:
the Persians are coming to Egypt!"
At this every one, except the Sybarite, rushed to his feet, and Kallias
found it almost impossible to answer their numerous questions. "Gently,
gently, friends," he cried at last; "let me tell my story in order, or I
shall never finish it at all. It is not an army, as Phanes supposes, that
is on its way hither, but a great embassy from Cambyses, the present
ruler of the most powerful kingdom of Persia. At Samos I heard that they
had already reached Miletus, and in a few days they will be here. Some of
the king's own relations, are among the number, the aged Croesus, king of
Lydia, too; we shall behold a marvellous splendor and magnificence!
Nobody knows the object of their coming, but it is supposed that King
Cambyses wishes to conclude an alliance with Amasis; indeed some say the
king solicits the hand of Pharaoh's daughter."
"An alliance?" asked Phanes, with an incredulous shrug of the shoulders.
"Why the Persians are rulers over half the world already. All the great
Asiatic powers have submitted to their sceptre; Egypt and our own
mother-country, Hellas, are the only two that have been shared by the
conqueror."
"You forget India with its wealth of gold, and the great migratory
nations of Asia," answered Kallias. "And you forget moreover, that an
empire, composed like Persia of some seventy nations or tribes of
different languages and customs, bears the seeds of discord ever within
itself, and must therefore guard against the chance of foreign attack;
lest, while the bulk of the army be absent, single provinces should seize
the opportunity and revolt from their allegiance. Ask the Milesians how
long they would remain quiet if they heard that their oppressors had been
defeated in any battle?"
Theopompus, the Milesian merchant, called out, laughing at the same time:
"If the Persians were to be worsted in one war, they would at once be
involved in a hundred others, and we should not be the last to rise up
against our tyrants in the hour of their weakness!"
"Whatever the intentions of the envoys may be," continued Kallias, "my
information remains unaltered; they will be here at the latest in three
days."
"And so your oracle will be fulfilled, fortunate Aristomachus!" exclaimed
Rhodopis, "for see, the warrior hosts can only be the Persians. When they
descend to the shores of the Nile, then the powerful Five,' your Ephori,
will change their decision, and you, the father of two Olympian victors,
will be recalled to your native land.
[The five Ephori of Sparta were appointed to represent the absent
kings during the Messenian war. In later days the nobles made use
of the Ephori as a power, which, springing immediately from their
own body, they could oppose to the kingly authority. Being the
highest magistrates in all judicial and educational matters, and in
everything relating to the moral police of the country, the Ephori
soon found means to assert their superiority, and on most occasions
over that of the kings themselves. Every patrician who was past the
age of thirty, had the right to become a candidate yearly for the
office. Aristot. Potit, II. and IV. Laert. Diog. I. 68.]
"Fill the goblets again, Knakias. Let us devote this last cup to the
manes of the glorious Lysander; and then I advise you to depart, for it
is long past midnight, and our pleasure has reached its highest point.
The true host puts an end to the banquet when his guests are feeling at
their best. Serene and agreeable recollections will soon bring you hither
again; whereas there would be little joy in returning to a house where
the remembrance of hours of weakness, the result of pleasure, would
mingle with your future enjoyment." In this her guests agreed, and Ibykus
named her a thorough disciple of Pythagoras, in praise of the joyous,
festive evening.
Every one prepared for departure. The Sybarite, who had been drinking
deeply in order to counteract the very inconvenient amount of feeling
excited by the conversation, rose also, assisted by his slaves, who had
to be called in for this purpose.
While he was being moved from his former comfortable position, he
stammered something about a "breach of hospitality;" but, when Rhodopis
was about to give him her hand at parting, the wine gained the ascendancy
and he exclaimed, "By Hercules, Rhodopis, you get rid of us as if we were
troublesome creditors. It is not my custom to leave a supper so long as I
can stand, still less to be turned out of doors like a miserable
parasite!"
"Hear reason, you immoderate Sybarite," began Rhodopis, endeavoring with
a smile to excuse her proceeding. But these words, in Philoinus'
half-intoxicated mood, only increased his irritation; he burst into a
mocking laugh, and staggering towards the door, shouted: "Immoderate
Sybarite, you call me? good! here you have your answer: Shameless slave!
one can still perceive the traces of what you were in your youth.
Farewell then, slave of Iadmon and Xanthus, freedwoman of Charaxus!" He
had not however finished his sentence, when Aristomachus rushed upon him,
stunned him with a blow of his fist, and carried him off like a child
down to the boat in which his slaves were waiting at the garden-gate.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Did the ancients know anything of love
Folly to fret over what cannot be undone
Go down into the grave before us (Our children)
He who kills a cat is punished (for murder)
In those days men wept, as well as women
Lovers delighted in nature then as now
Multitude who, like the gnats, fly towards every thing brilliant
Olympics--The first was fixed 776 B.C.
Papyrus Ebers
Pious axioms to be repeated by the physician, while compounding
Romantic love, as we know it, a result of Christianity
True host puts an end to the banquet
Whether the historical romance is ever justifiable
AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS.
By Georg Ebers
Volume 2.
CHAPTER III.
The guests were all gone. Their departing mirth and joy had been smitten
down by the drunkard's abusive words, like fresh young corn beneath a
hail storm. Rhodopis was left standing alone in the empty, brightly
decorated (supper-room). Knakias extinguished the colored lamps on the
walls, and a dull, mysterious half-light took the place of their
brilliant rays, falling scantily and gloomily on the piled-up plates and
dishes, the remnants of the meal, and the seats and cushions, pushed out
of their places by the retiring guests. A cold breeze came through the
open door, for the dawn was at hand, and just before sunrise, the air is
generally unpleasantly cool in Egypt. A cold chill struck the limbs of
the aged woman through her light garments. She stood gazing tearlessly
and fixedly into the desolate room, whose walls but a few minutes before
had been echoing with joy and gladness, and it seemed to her that the
deserted guest-chamber must be like her own heart. She felt as if a worm
were gnawing there, and the warm blood congealing into ice.
Lost in these thoughts, she remained standing till at last her old female
slave appeared to light her to her sleeping apartment.
Silently Rhodopis allowed herself to be undressed, and then, as silently,
lifted the curtain which separated a second sleeping apartment from her
own. In the middle of this second room stood a bedstead of maplewood, and
there, on white sheets spread over a mattress of fine sheep's wool, and
protected from the cold by bright blue coverlets's, lay a graceful,
lovely girl asleep; this was Rhodopis' granddaughter, Sappho. The rounded
form and delicate figure seemed to denote one already in opening
maidenhood, but the peaceful, blissful smile could only belong to a
harmless, happy child.
One hand lay under her head, hidden among the thick dark brown hair, the
other clasped unconsciously a little amulet of green stone, which hung
round her neck. Over her closed eyes the long lashes trembled almost
imperceptibly, and a delicate pink flush came and went on the cheek of
the slumberer. The finely-cut nostrils rose and fell with her regular
breathing, and she lay there, a picture of innocence, of peace, smiling
in dreams, and of the slumber that the gods bestow on early youth, when
care has not yet come.
Softly and carefully, crossing the thick carpets on tiptoe, the
grey-haired woman approached, looked with unutterable tenderness into the
smiling, childish face, and, kneeling down silently by the side of the
bed, buried her face in its soft coverings, so that the girl's hand just
came in contact with her hair. Then she wept, and without intermission;
as though she hoped with this flood of tears to wash away not only her
recent humiliation, but with it all other sorrow from her mind.
At length she rose, breathed a light kiss on the sleeping girl's
forehead, raised her hands in prayer towards heaven, and returned to her
own room, gently and carefully as she had come.
At her own bedside she found the old slave-woman, still waiting for her.
"What do you want so late, Melitta?" said Rhodopis, kindly, under her
breath. "Go to bed; at your age it is not good to remain up late, and you
know that I do not require you any longer. Good night! and do not come
to-morrow until I send for you. I shall not be able to sleep much
to-night, and shall be thankful if the morning brings me a short repose."
The woman hesitated; it seemed that she had some thing on her mind which
she feared to utter.
"There is something you want to ask me?" said Rhodopis.
Still the old slave hesitated.
"Speak!" said Rhodopis, "speak at once, and quickly."
"I saw you weeping," said the slave-woman, "you seem ill or sad; let me
watch this night by your bedside. Will you not tell me what ails you? You
have often found that to tell a sorrow lightens the heart and lessens the
pain. Then tell me your grief to-day too; it will do you good, it will
bring back peace to your mind."
"No," answered the other, "I cannot utter it." And then she continued,
smiling bitterly: "I have once more experienced that no one, not even a
god, has power to cancel the past of any human being, and that, in this
world, misfortune and disgrace are one and the same. Good night, leave
me; Melitta!"
At noon on the following day, the same boat, which, the evening before,
had carried the Athenian and the Spartan, stopped once more before
Rhodopis' garden.
The sun was shining so brightly, so warmly and genially in the dark blue
Egyptian sky, the air was so pure and light, the beetles were humming so
merrily, the boatmen singing so lustily and happily, the shores of the
Nile bloomed in such gay, variegated beauty, and were so thickly peopled,
the palm-trees, sycamores, bananas and acacias were so luxuriant in
foliage and blossom, and over the whole landscape the rarest and most
glorious gifts seemed to have been poured out with such divine
munificence, that a passer-by must have pronounced it the very home of
joy and gladness, a place from which sadness and sorrow had been forever
banished.
How often we fancy, in passing a quiet village hidden among its orchards,
that this at least must be the abode of peace, and unambitious
contentment! But alas! when we enter the cottages, what do we find?
there, as everywhere else, distress and need, passion and unsatisfied
longing, fear and remorse, pain and misery; and by the side of these, Ah!
how few joys! Who would have imagined on coming to Egypt, that this
luxuriant, laughing sunny land, whose sky is always unclouded, could
possibly produce and nourish men given to bitterness and severity? that
within the charming, hospitable house of the fortunate Rhodopis, covered
and surrounded, as it was, with sweet flowers, a heart could have been
beating in the deepest sadness? And, still more, who among all the guests
of that honored, admired Thracian woman, would have believed that this
sad heart belonged to her? to the gracious, smiling matron, Rhodopis
herself?
She was sitting with Phanes in a shady arbor near the cooling spray of a
fountain. One could see that she had been weeping again, but her face was
beautiful and kind as ever. The Athenian was holding her hand and trying
to comfort her.
Rhodopis listened patiently, and smiled the while; at times her smile was
bitter, at others it gave assent to his words. At last however she
interrupted her well-intentioned friend, by saying:
"Phanes, I thank you. Sooner or later this last disgrace must be
forgotten too. Time is clever in the healing art. If I were weak I should
leave Naukratis and live in retirement for my grandchild alone; a whole
world, believe me, lies slumbering in that young creature. Many and many
a time already I have longed to leave Egypt, and as often have conquered
the wish. Not because I cannot live without the homage of your sex; of
that I have already had more than enough in my life, but because I feel
that I, the slave-girl and the despised woman once, am now useful,
necessary, almost indispensable indeed, to many free and noble men.
Accustomed as I am, to an extended sphere of work, in its nature
resembling a man's, I could not content myself in living for one being
alone, however dear. I should dry up like a plant removed from a rich
soil into the desert, and should leave my grandchild desolate indeed,
three times orphaned, and alone in the world. No! I shall remain in
Egypt.
"Now that you are leaving, I shall be really indispensable to our friends
here. Amasis is old; when Psamtik comes to the throne we shall have
infinitely greater difficulties to contend with than heretofore. I must
remain and fight on in the fore-front of our battle for the freedom and
welfare of the Hellenic race. Let them call my efforts unwomanly if they
will. This is, and shall be, the purpose of my life, a purpose to which I
will remain all the more faithful, because it is one of those to which a
woman rarely dares devote her life. During this last night of tears I
have felt that much, very much of that womanly weakness still lingers in
me which forms at once the happiness and misery of our sex. To preserve
this feminine weakness in my granddaughter, united with perfect womanly
delicacy, has been my first duty; my second to free myself entirely from
it. But a war against one's own nature cannot be carried on without
occasional defeat, even if ultimately successful. When grief and pain are
gaining the upperhand and I am well nigh in despair, my only help lies in
remembering my friend Pythagoras, that noblest among men, and his words:
'Observe a due proportion in all things, avoid excessive joy as well as
complaining grief, and seek to keep thy soul in tune and harmony like a
well-toned harp.'"
[There is no question that Pythagoras visited Egypt during the reign
of Amasis, probably towards the middle of the 6th century (according
to our reckoning, about 536 B. C.) Herod. II. 81-123. Diod. I. 98.
Rich information about Pythagoras is to be found in the works of the
very learned scholar Roeth, who is however occasionally much too
bold in his conjectures. Pythagoras was the first among Greek
thinkers (speculators). He would not take the name of a wise man or
"sage," but called himself "Philosophos," or a "friend of wisdom."]
"This Pythagorean inward peace, this deep, untroubled calm, I see daily
before me in my Sappho; and struggle to attain it myself, though many a
stroke of fate untunes the chords of my poor heart. I am calm now! You
would hardly believe what power the mere thought of that first of all
thinkers, that calm, deliberate man, whose life acted on mine like sweet,
soft music, has over me. You knew him, you can understand what I mean.
Now, mention your wish; my heart is as calmly quiet as the Nile waters
which are flowing by so quietly, and I am ready to hear it, be it good or
evil."
"I am glad to see you thus," said the Athenian. "If you had remembered
the noble friend of wisdom, as Pythagoras was wont to call himself a
little sooner, your soul would have regained its balance yesterday. The
master enjoins us to look back every evening on the events, feelings and
actions of the day just past.
"Now had you done this, you would have felt that the unfeigned admiration
of all your guests, among whom were men of distinguished merit,
outweighed a thousandfold the injurious words of a drunken libertine; you
would have felt too that you were a friend of the gods, for was it not in
your house that the immortals gave that noble old man at last, after his
long years of misfortune, the greatest joy that can fall to the lot of
any human being? and did they not take from you one friend only in order
to replace him in the same moment, by another and a better? Come, I will
hear no contradiction. Now for my request.
"You know that people sometimes call me an Athenian, sometimes a
Halikarnassian. Now, as the Ionian, AEolian and Dorian mercenaries have
never been on good terms with the Karians, my almost triple descent (if I
may call it so) has proved very useful to me as commander of both these
divisions. Well qualified as Aristomachus may be for the command, yet in
this one point Amasis will miss me; for I found it an easy matter to
settle the differences among the troops and keep them at peace, while he,
as a Spartan, will find it very difficult to keep right with the Karian
soldiers.
"This double nationality of mine arises from the fact that my father
married a Halikarnassian wife out of a noble Dorian family, and, at the
time of my birth, was staying with her in Halikarnassus, having come
thither in order to take possession of her parental inheritance. So,
though I was taken back to Athens before I was three months old, I must
still be called a Karian, as a man's native land is decided by his
birthplace.
"In Athens, as a young nobleman, belonging to that most aristocratic and
ancient family, the Philaidae, I was reared and educated in all the pride
of an Attic noble. Pisistratus, brave and clever, and though of equal,
yet by no means of higher birth, than ourselves, for there exists no
family more aristocratic than my father's, gained possession of the
supreme authority. Twice, the nobles, by uniting all their strength,
succeeded in overthrowing him, and when, the third time, assisted by
Lygdamis of Naxos, the Argives and Eretrians, he attempted to return, we
opposed him again. We had encamped by the temple of Minerva at Pallene,
and were engaged in sacrificing to the goddess, early, before our first
meal, when we were suddenly surprised by the clever tyrant, who gained an
easy, bloodless victory over our unarmed troops. As half of the entire
army opposed to the tyrant was under my command, I determined rather to
die than yield, fought with my whole strength, implored the soldiers to
remain steadfast, resisted without yielding a point, but fell at last
with a spear in my shoulder.
"The Pisistratidae became lords of Athens. I fled to Halikarnassus, my
second home, accompanied by my wife and children. There, my name being
known through some daring military exploits, and, through my having once
conquered in the Pythian games, I was appointed to a command in the
mercenary troops of the King of Egypt; accompanied the expedition to
Cyprus, shared with Aristomachus the renown of having conquered the
birthplace of Aphrodite for Amasis, and finally was named
commander-in-chief of all the mercenaries in Egypt.
"Last summer my wife died; our children, a boy of eleven and a girl of
ten years, remained with an aunt in Halikarnassus. But she too has
followed to the inexorable Hades, and so, only a few days ago I sent for
the little ones here. They cannot, however, possibly reach Naukratis in
less than three weeks, and yet they will already have set out on their
journey before a letter to countermand my first order could reach them.
"I must leave Egypt in fourteen days, and cannot therefore receive them
myself.
"My own intentions are to go to the Thracian Chersonese, where my uncle,
as you know, has been called to fill a high office among the Dolonki. The
children shall follow me thither; my faithful old slave Korax will remain
in Naukratis on purpose to bring them to me.
"Now, if you will show to me that you are in deed and truth my friend,
will you receive the little ones and take care of them till the next ship
sails for Thrace? But above all, will you carefully conceal them from the
eyes of the crown-prince's spies? You know that Psamtik hates me
mortally, and he could easily revenge himself on the father through the
children. I ask you for this great favor, first, because I know your
kindness by experience; and secondly, because your house has been made
secure by the king's letter of guarantee, and they will therefore be safe
here from the inquiries of the police; notwithstanding that, by the laws
of this most formal country, all strangers, children not excepted, must
give up their names to the officer of the district.
"You can now judge of the depth of my esteem, Rhodopis; I am committing
into your hands all that makes life precious to me; for even my native
land has ceased to be dear while she submits so ignominiously to her
tyrants. Will you then restore tranquillity to an anxious father's heart,
will you--?"
"I will, Phanes, I will!" cried the aged woman in undisguised delight.
"You are not asking me for any thing, you are presenting me with a gift.
Oh, how I look forward already to their arrival! And how glad Sappho will
be, when the little creatures come and enliven her solitude! But this I
can assure you, Phanes, I shall not let my little guests depart with the
first Thracian ship. You can surely afford to be separated from them one
short half-year longer, and I promise you they shall receive the best
lessons, and be guided to all that is good and beautiful."
"On that head I have no fear," answered Phanes, with a thankful smile.
"But still you must send off the two little plagues by the first ship; my
anxiety as to Psamtik's revenge is only too well grounded. Take my most
heartfelt thanks beforehand for all the love and kindness which you will
show to my children. I too hope and believe, that the merry little
creatures will be an amusement and pleasure to Sappho in her lonely
life."
"And more," interrupted Rhodopis looking down; "this proof of confidence
repays a thousand-fold the disgrace inflicted on me last night in a
moment of intoxication.--But here comes Sappho!"
CHAPTER IV.
Five days after the evening we have just described at Rhodopis' house, an
immense multitude was to be seen assembled at the harbor of Sais.
Egyptians of both sexes, and of every age and class were thronging to the
water's edge.
Soldiers and merchants, whose various ranks in society were betokened by
the length of their white garments, bordered with colored fringes, were
interspersed among the crowd of half-naked, sinewy men, whose only
clothing consisted of an apron, the costume of the lower classes. Naked
children crowded, pushed and fought to get the best places. Mothers in
short cloaks were holding their little ones up to see the sight, which by
this means they entirely lost themselves; and a troop of dogs and cats
were playing and fighting at the feet of these eager sight-seers, who
took the greatest pains not to tread on, or in any way injure the sacred
animals.
[According to various pictures on the Egyptian monuments. The
mothers are from Wilkinson III. 363. Isis and Hathor, with the
child Horus in her lap or at her breast, are found in a thousand
representations, dating both from more modern times and in the Greek
style. The latter seem to have served as a model for the earliest
pictures of the Madonna holding the infant Christ.]
The police kept order among this huge crowd with long staves, on the
metal heads of which the king's name was inscribed. Their care was
especially needed to prevent any of the people from being pushed into the
swollen Nile, an arm of which, in the season of the inundations, washes
the walls of Sais.
On the broad flight of steps which led between two rows of sphinxes down
to the landing-place of the royal boats, was a very different kind of
assembly.
The priests of the highest rank were seated there on stone benches. Many
wore long, white robes, others were clad in aprons, broad jewelled
collars, and garments of panther skins. Some had fillets adorned with
plumes that waved around brows, temples, and the stiff structures of
false curls that floated over their shoulders; others displayed the
glistening bareness of their smoothly-shaven skulls. The supreme judge
was distinguished by the possession of the longest and handsomest plume
in his head-dress, and a costly sapphire amulet, which, suspended by a
gold chain, hung on his breast.
The highest officers of the Egyptian army wore uniforms of gay colors,97
and carried short swords in their girdles. On the right side of the steps
a division of the body-guard was stationed, armed with battleaxes,
daggers, bows, and large shields; on the left, were the Greek
mercenaries, armed in Ionian fashion. Their new leader, our friend
Aristomachus, stood with a few of his own officers apart from the
Egyptians, by the colossal statues of Psamtik I., which had been erected
on the space above the steps, their faces towards the river.
In front of these statues, on a silver chair, sat Psamtik, the heir to
the throne: He wore a close-fitting garment of many colors, interwoven
with gold, and was surrounded by the most distinguished among the king's
courtiers, chamberlains, counsellors, and friends, all bearing staves
with ostrich feathers and lotus-flowers.
The multitude gave vent to their impatience by shouting, singing, and
quarrelling; but the priests and magnates on the steps preserved a
dignified and solemn silence. Each, with his steady, unmoved gaze, his
stiffly-curled false wig and beard, and his solemn, deliberate manner,
resembled the two huge statues, which, the one precisely similar to the
other, stood also motionless in their respective places, gazing calmly
into the stream.
At last silken sails, chequered with purple and blue, appeared in sight.
The crowd shouted with delight. Cries of, "They are coming! Here they
are!" "Take care, or you'll tread on that kitten," "Nurse, hold the child
higher that she may see something of the sight." "You are pushing me into
the water, Sebak!" "Have a care Phoenician, the boys are throwing burs
into your long beard." "Now, now, you Greek fellow, don't fancy that all
Egypt belongs to you, because Amasis allows you to live on the shores of
the sacred river!" "Shameless set, these Greeks, down with them!" shouted
a priest, and the cry was at once echoed from many mouths. "Down with the
eaters of swine's flesh and despisers of the gods!"
[The Egyptians, like the Jews, were forbidden to eat swine's flesh.
This prohibition is mentioned in the Ritual of the Dead, found in a
grave in Abd-el-Qurnah, and also in other places. Porphyr. de
Abstin. IV. The swine was considered an especially unclean animal
pertaining to Typhon (Egyptian, Set) as the boar to Ares, and
swineherds were an especially despised race. Animals with bristles
were only sacrificed at the feasts of Osiris and Eileithyia. Herod.
I. 2. 47. It is probable that Moses borrowed his prohibition of
swine's flesh from the Egyptian laws with regard to unclean
animals.]
From words they were proceeding to deeds, but the police were not to be
trifled with, and by a vigorous use of their staves, the tumult was soon
stilled. The large, gay sails, easily to be distinguished among the
brown, white and blue ones of the smaller Nile-boats which swarmed around
them, came nearer and nearer to the expectant throng. Then at last the
crown-prince and the dignitaries arose from their seats. The royal band
of trumpeters blew a shrill and piercing blast of welcome, and the first
of the expected boats stopped at the landing-place.
It was a rather long, richly-gilded vessel, and bore a silver
sparrow-hawk as figure-head. In its midst rose a golden canopy with a
purple covering, beneath which cushions were conveniently arranged. On
each deck in the forepart of the ship sat twelve rowers, their aprons
attached by costly fastenings.
[Splendid Nile-boats were possessed, in greater or less numbers, by
all the men of high rank. Even in the tomb of Ti at Sakkara, which
dates from the time of the Pyramids, we meet with a chief overseer
of the vessels belonging to a wealthy Egyptian.]
Beneath the canopy lay six fine-looking men in glorious apparel; and
before the ship had touched the shore the youngest of these, a beautiful
fair-haired youth, sprang on to the steps.
Many an Egyptian girl's mouth uttered a lengthened "Ah" at this glorious
sight, and even the grave faces of some of the dignitaries brightened
into a friendly smile.
The name of this much-admired youth was Bartja.
[This Bartja is better known under the name of Smerdis, but on what
account the Greeks gave him this name is not clear. In the
cuneiform inscriptions of Bisitun or Behistun, he is called Bartja,
or, according to Spiegel, Bardiya. We have chosen, for the sake of
the easy pronunciation, the former, which is Rawlinson's simplified
reading of the name.]
He was the son of the late, and brother of the reigning king of Persia,
and had been endowed by nature with every gift that a youth of twenty
years could desire for himself.
Around his tiara was wound a blue and white turban, beneath which hung
fair, golden curls of beautiful, abundant hair; his blue eyes sparkled
with life and joy, kindness and high spirits, almost with sauciness; his
noble features, around which the down of a manly beard was already
visible, were worthy of a Grecian sculptor's chisel, and his slender but
muscular figure told of strength and activity. The splendor of his
apparel was proportioned to his personal beauty. A brilliant star of
diamonds and turquoises glittered in the front of his tiara. An upper
garment of rich white and gold brocade reaching just below the knees, was
fastened round the waist with a girdle of blue and white, the royal
colors of Persia. In this girdle gleamed a short, golden sword, its hilt
and scabbard thickly studded with opals and sky-blue turquoises. The
trousers were of the same rich material as the robe, fitting closely at
the ankle, and ending within a pair of short boots of light-blue leather.
The long, wide sleeves of his robe displayed a pair of vigorous arms,
adorned with many costly bracelets of gold and jewels; round his slender
neck and on his broad chest lay a golden chain.
Such was the youth who first sprang on shore. He was followed by Darius,
the son of Hystaspes, a young Persian of the blood royal, similar in
person to Bartja, and scarcely less gorgeously apparelled than he. The
third to disembark was an aged man with snow-white hair, in whose face
the gentle and kind expression of childhood was united, with the
intellect of a man, and the experience of old age. His dress consisted of
a long purple robe with sleeves, and the yellow boots worn by the
Lydians;--his whole appearance produced an impression of the greatest
modesty and a total absence of pretension.
[On account of these boots, which are constantly mentioned, Croesus
was named by the oracle "soft-footed."]
Yet this simple old man had been, but a few years before, the most envied
of his race and age; and even in our day at two thousand years' interval,
his name is used as a synonyme for the highest point of worldly riches
attainable by mankind. The old man to whom we are now introduced is no
other than Croesus, the dethroned king of Lydia, who was then living at
the court of Cambyses, as his friend and counsellor, and had accompanied
the young Bartja to Egypt, in the capacity of Mentor.
Croesus was followed by Prexaspes, the king's Ambassador, Zopyrus, the
son of Megabyzus, a Persian noble, the friend of Bartja and Darius; and,
lastly, by his own son, the slender, pale Gyges, who after having become
dumb in his fourth year through the fearful anguish he had suffered on
his father's account at the taking of Sardis, had now recovered the power
of speech.
Psamtik descended the steps to welcome the strangers. His austere, sallow
face endeavored to assume a smile. The high officials in his train bowed
down nearly to the ground, allowing their arms to hang loosely at their
sides. The Persians, crossing their hands on their breasts, cast
themselves on the earth before the heir to the Egyptian throne. When the
first formalities were over, Bartja, according to the custom of his
native country, but greatly to the astonishment of the populace, who were
totally unaccustomed to such a sight, kissed the sallow cheek of the
Egyptian prince; who shuddered at the touch of a stranger's unclean lips,
then took his way to the litters waiting to convey him and his escort to
the dwelling designed for them by the king, in the palace at Sais.
A portion of the crowd streamed after the strangers, but the larger
number remained at their places, knowing that many a new and wonderful
sight yet awaited them.
"Are you going to run after those dressed-up monkeys and children of
Typhon, too?" asked an angry priest of his neighbor, a respectable tailor
of Sais. "I tell you, Puhor, and the high-priest says so too, that these
strangers can bring no good to the black land! I am for the good old
times, when no one who cared for his life dared set foot on Egyptian
soil. Now our streets are literally swarming with cheating Hebrews, and
above all with those insolent Greeks whom may the gods destroy!
[The Jews were called Hebrews (Apuriu) by the Egyptians; as brought
to light by Chabas. See Ebers, Aegypten I. p. 316. H. Brugsch
opposes this opinion.]
"Only look, there is the third boat full of strangers! And do you know
what kind of people these Persians are? The high-priest says that in the
whole of their kingdom, which is as large as half the world, there is not
a single temple to the gods; and that instead of giving decent burial to
the dead, they leave them to be torn in pieces by dogs and vultures."
[These statements are correct, as the Persians, at the time of the
dynasty of the Achaemenidae, had no temples, but used fire-altars
and exposed their dead to the dogs and vultures. An impure corpse
was not permitted to defile the pure earth by its decay; nor might
it be committed to the fire or water for destruction, as their
purity would be equally polluted by such an act. But as it was
impossible to cause the dead bodies to vanish, Dakhmas or burying-
places were laid out, which had to be covered with pavement and
cement not less than four inches thick, and surrounded by cords to
denote that the whole structure was as it were suspended in the air,
and did not come in contact with the pure earth. Spiegel, Avesta
II.]
"The tailor's indignation at hearing this was even greater than his
astonishment, and pointing to the landing-steps, he cried:
"It is really too bad; see, there is the sixth boat full of these
foreigners!"
"Yes, it is hard indeed!" sighed the priest, "one might fancy a whole
army arriving. Amasis will go on in this manner until the strangers drive
him from his throne and country, and plunder and make slaves of us poor
creatures, as the evil Hyksos, those scourges of Egypt, and the black
Ethiopians did, in the days of old."
"The seventh boat!" shouted the tailor.
"May my protectress Neith, the great goddess of Sais, destroy me, if I
can understand the king," complained the priest. "He sent three barks to
Naukratis, that poisonous nest hated of the gods, to fetch the servants
and baggage of these Persians; but instead of three, eight had to be
procured, for these despisers of the gods and profaners of dead bodies
have not only brought kitchen utensils, dogs, horses, carriages, chests,
baskets and bales, but have dragged with them, thousands of miles, a
whole host of servants. They tell me that some of them have no other work
than twining of garlands and preparing ointments. Their priests too, whom
they call Magi, are here with them. I should like to know what they are
for? of what use is a priest where there is no temple?"
The old King Amasis received the Persian embassy shortly after their
arrival with all the amiability and kindness peculiar to him.
Four days later, after having attended to the affairs of state, a duty
punctually fulfilled by him every morning without exception, he went
forth to walk with Croesus in the royal gardens. The remaining members of
the embassy, accompanied by the crown-prince, were engaged in an
excursion up the Nile to the city of Memphis.
The palace-gardens, of a royal magnificence, yet similar in their
arrangement to those of Rhodopis, lay in the north-west part of Sais,
near the royal citadel.
Here, under the shadow of a spreading plane-tree, and near a gigantic
basin of red granite, into which an abundance of clear water flowed
perpetually through the jaws of black basalt crocodiles, the two old men
seated themselves.
The dethroned king, though in reality some years the elder of the two,
looked far fresher and more vigorous than the powerful monarch at his
side. Amasis was tall, but his neck was bent; his corpulent body was
supported by weak and slender legs: and his face, though well-formed, was
lined and furrowed. But a vigorous spirit sparkled in the small, flashing
eyes, and an expression of raillery, sly banter, and at times, even of
irony, played around his remarkably full lips. The low, broad brow, the
large and beautifully-arched head bespoke great mental power, and in the
changing color of his eyes one seemed to read that neither wit nor
passion were wanting in the man, who, from his simple place as soldier in
the ranks, had worked his way up to the throne of the Pharaohs. His voice
was sharp and hard, and his movements, in comparison with the
deliberation of the other members of the Egyptian court, appeared almost
morbidly active.
The attitude and bearing of his neighbor Croesus were graceful, and in
every way worthy of a king. His whole manner showed that he had lived in
frequent intercourse with the highest and noblest minds of Greece.
Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes of Miletus, Bias of Priene, Solon of
Athens, Pittakus of Lesbos, the most celebrated Hellenic philosophers,
had in former and happier days been guests at the court of Croesus in
Sardis. His full clear voice sounded like pure song when compared with
the shrill tones of Amasis.
[Bias, a philosopher of Ionian origin, flourished about 560 B. C.
and was especially celebrated for his wise maxims on morals and law.
After his death, which took place during his defence of a friend in
the public court, a temple was erected to him by his countrymen.
Laert. Diog. I. 88.]
"Now tell me openly," began king Pharaoh--[In English "great house," the
high gate or "sublime porte."]--in tolerably fluent Greek, "what opinion
hast thou formed of Egypt? Thy judgment possesses for me more worth than
that of any other man, for three reasons: thou art better acquainted with
most of the countries and nations of this earth; the gods have not only
allowed thee to ascend the ladder of fortune to its utmost summit, but
also to descend it, and thirdly, thou hast long been the first counsellor
to the mightiest of kings. Would that my kingdom might please thee so
well that thou wouldst remain here and become to me a brother. Verily,
Croesus, my friend hast thou long been, though my eyes beheld thee
yesterday for the first time!"
"And thou mine," interrupted the Lydian. "I admire the courage with which
thou hast accomplished that which seemed right and good in thine eyes, in
spite of opposition near and around thee. I am thankful for the favor
shown to the Hellenes, my friends, and I regard thee as related to me by
fortune, for hast thou not also passed through all the extremes of good
and evil that this life can offer?"
"With this difference," said Amasis smiling, "that we started from
opposite points; in thy lot the good came first, the evil later; whereas
in my own this order has been reversed. In saying this, however," he
added, "I am supposing that my present fortune is a good for me, and that
I enjoy it."
"And I, in that case," answered Croesus, "must be assuming that I am
unhappy in what men call my present ill-fortune."
"How can it possibly be otherwise after the loss of such enormous
possessions?"
"Does happiness consist then in possession?" asked Croesus. "Is happiness
itself a thing to be possessed? Nay, by no means! It is nothing but a
feeling, a sensation, which the envious gods vouchsafe more often to the
needy than to the mighty. The clear sight of the latter becomes dazzled
by the glittering treasure, and they cannot but suffer continual
humiliation, because, conscious of possessing power to obtain much, they
wage an eager war for all, and therein are continually defeated."
Amasis sighed, and answered: "I would I could prove thee in the wrong;
but in looking back on my past life I am fain to confess that its cares
began with that very hour which brought me what men call my good
fortune."--"And I," interrupted Croesus, "can assure thee that I am
thankful thou delayedst to come to my help, inasmuch as the hour of my
overthrow was the beginning of true, unsullied happiness. When I beheld
the first Persians scale the walls of Sardis, I execrated myself and the
gods, life appeared odious to me, existence a curse. Fighting on, but in
heart despairing, I and my people were forced to yield. A Persian raised
his sword to cleave my skull--in an instant my poor dumb son had thrown
himself between his father and the murderer, and for the first time after
long years of silence, I heard him speak. Terror had loosened his tongue;
in that dreadful hour Gyges learnt once more to speak, and I, who but the
moment before had been cursing the gods, bowed down before their power. I
had commanded a slave to kill me the moment I should be taken prisoner by
the Persians, but now I deprived him of his sword. I was a changed man,
and by degrees learnt ever more and more to subdue the rage and
indignation which yet from time to time would boil up again within my
soul, rebellious against my fate and my noble enemies. Thou knowest that
at last I became the friend of Cyrus, and that my son grew up at his
court, a free man at my side, having entirely regained the use of his
speech. Everything beautiful and good that I had heard, seen or thought
during my long life I treasured up now for him; he was my kingdom, my
crown, my treasure. Cyrus's days of care, his nights so reft of sleep,
reminded me with horror of my own former greatness, and from day to day
it became more evident to me that happiness has nothing to do with our
outward circumstances. Each man possesses the hidden germ in his own
heart. A contented, patient mind, rejoicing much in all that is great and
beautiful and yet despising not the day of small things; bearing sorrow
without a murmur and sweetening it by calling to remembrance former joy;
moderation in all things; a firm trust in the favor of the gods and a
conviction that, all things being subject to change, so with us too the
worst must pass in due season; all this helps to mature the germ of
happiness, and gives us power to smile, where the man undisciplined by
fate might yield to despair and fear."
Amasis listened attentively, drawing figures the while in the sand with
the golden flower on his staff. At last he spoke:
"Verily, Croesus, I the great god, the 'sun of righteousness,' 'the son
of Neith,' 'the lord of warlike glory,' as the Egyptians call me, am
tempted to envy thee, dethroned and plundered as thou art. I have been as
happy as thou art now. Once I was known through all Egypt, though only
the poor son of a captain, for my light heart, happy temper, fun and high
spirits. The common soldiers would do anything for me, my superior
officers could have found much fault, but in the mad Amasis, as they
called me, all was overlooked, and among my equals, (the other
under-officers) there could be no fun or merry-making unless I took a
share in it. My predecessor king Hophra sent us against Cyrene. Seized
with thirst in the desert, we refused to go on; and a suspicion that the
king intended to sacrifice us to the Greek mercenaries drove the army to
open mutiny. In my usual joking manner I called out to my friends: 'You
can never get on without a king, take me for your ruler; a merrier you
will never find!' The soldiers caught the words. 'Amasis will be our
king,' ran through the ranks from man to man, and, in a few hours more,
they came to me with shouts, and acclamations of 'The good, jovial Amasis
for our King!' One of my boon companions set a field-marshal's helmet on
my head: I made the joke earnest, and we defeated Hophra at Momempliis.
The people joined in the conspiracy, I ascended the throne, and men
pronounced me fortunate. Up to that time I had been every Egyptian's
friend, and now I was the enemy of the best men in the nation.
"The priests swore allegiance to me, and accepted me as a member of their
caste, but only in the hope of guiding me at their will. My former
superiors in command either envied me, or wished to remain on the same
terms of intercourse as formerly. But this would have been inconsistent
with my new position, and have undermined my authority. One day,
therefore, when the officers of the host were at one of my banquets and
attempting, as usual, to maintain their old convivial footing, I showed
them the golden basin in which their feet had been washed before sitting
down to meat; five days later, as they were again drinking at one of my
revels, I caused a golden image of the great god Ra be placed upon the
richly-ornamented banqueting-table.
[Ra, with the masculine article Phra, must be regarded as the
central point of the sun-worship of the Egyptians, which we consider
to have been the foundation of their entire religion. He was more
especially worshipped at Heliopolis. Plato, Eudoxus, and probably
Pythagoras also, profited by the teaching of his priests. The
obelisks, serving also as memorial monuments on which the names and
deeds of great kings were recorded, were sacred to him, and Pliny
remarks of them that they represented the rays of the sun. He was
regarded as the god of light, the director of the entire visible
creation, over which he reigned, as Osiris over the world of
spirits.]
"On perceiving it, they fell down to worship. As they rose from their
knees, I took the sceptre, and holding it up on high with much solemnity,
exclaimed: 'In five days an artificer has transformed the despised vessel
into which ye spat and in which men washed your feet, into this divine
image. Such a vessel was I, but the Deity, which can fashion better and
more quickly than a goldsmith, has made me your king. Bow down then
before me and worship. He who henceforth refuses to obey, or is unmindful
of the reverence due to the king, is guilty of death!'
"They fell down before me, every one, and I saved my authority, but lost
my friends. As I now stood in need of some other prop, I fixed on the
Hellenes, knowing that in all military qualifications one Greek is worth
more than five Egyptians, and that with this assistance I should be able
to carry out those measures which I thought beneficial.
"I kept the Greek mercenaries always round me, I learnt their language,
and it was they who brought to me the noblest human being I ever met,
Pythagoras. I endeavored to introduce Greek art and manners among
ourselves, seeing what folly lay in a self-willed adherence to that which
has been handed down to us, when it is in itself bad and unworthy, while
the good seed lay on our Egyptian soil, only waiting to be sown.
"I portioned out the whole land to suit my purposes, appointed the best
police in the world, and accomplished much; but my highest aim, namely:
to infuse into this country, at once so gay and so gloomy, the spirit and
intellect of the Greeks, their sense of beauty in form, their love of
life and joy in it, this all was shivered on the same rock which
threatens me with overthrow and ruin whenever I attempt to accomplish
anything new. The priests are my opponents, my masters, they hang like a
dead weight upon me. Clinging with superstitious awe to all that is old
and traditionary, abominating everything foreign, and regarding every
stranger as the natural enemy of their authority and their teaching, they
can lead the most devout and religious of all nations with a power that
has scarcely any limits. For this I am forced to sacrifice all my plans,
for this I see my life passing away in bondage to their severe
ordinances, this will rob my death-bed of peace, and I cannot be secure
that this host of proud mediators between god and man will allow me to
rest even in my grave!"
"By Zeus our saviour, with all thy good fortune, thou art to be pitied!"
interrupted Croesus sympathetically, "I understand thy misery; for though
I have met with many an individual who passed through life darkly and
gloomily, I could not have believed that an entire race of human beings
existed, to whom a gloomy, sullen heart was as natural as a poisonous
tooth to the serpent. Yet it is true, that on my journey hither and
during my residence at this court I have seen none but morose and gloomy
countenances among the priesthood. Even the youths, thy immediate
attendants, are never seen to smile; though cheerfulness, that sweet gift
of the gods, usually belongs to the young, as flowers to spring."
"Thou errest," answered Amasis, "in believing this gloom to be a
universal characteristic of the Egyptians. It is true that our religion
requires much serious thought. There are few nations, however, who have
so largely the gift of bantering fun and joke: or who on the occasion of
a festival, can so entirely forget themselves and everything else but the
enjoyments of the moment; but the very sight of a stranger is odious to
the priests, and the moroseness which thou observest is intended as
retaliation on me for my alliance with the strangers. Those very boys, of
whom thou spakest, are the greatest torment of my life. They perform for
me the service of slaves, and obey my slightest nod. One might imagine
that the parents who devote their children to this service, and who are
the highest in rank among the priesthood, would be the most obedient and
reverential servants of the king whom they profess to honor as divine;
but believe me, Croesus, just in this very act of devotion, which no
ruler can refuse to accept without giving offence, lies the most crafty,
scandalous calculation. Each of these youths is my keeper, my spy. They
watch my smallest actions and report them at once to the priests."
"But how canst thou endure such an existence? Why not banish these spies
and select servants from the military caste, for instance? They would be
quite as useful as the priests."
"Ah! if I only could, if I dared!" exclaimed Amasis loudly. And then, as
if frightened at his own rashness, he continued in a low voice, "I
believe that even here I am being watched. To-morrow I will have that
grove of fig-trees yonder uprooted. The young priest there, who seems so
fond of gardening, has other fruit in his mind besides the half-ripe figs
that he is so slowly dropping into his basket. While his hand is plucking
the figs, his ear gathers the words that fall from the mouth of his
king."
"But, by our father Zeus, and by Apollo--"
"Yes, I understand thy indignation and I share it; but every position has
its duties, and as a king of a people who venerate tradition as the
highest divinity, I must submit, at least in the main, to the ceremonies
handed down through thousands of years. Were I to burst these fetters, I
know positively that at my death my body would remain unburied; for, know
that the priests sit in judgment over every corpse, and deprive the
condemned of rest, even in the grave."
[This well-known custom among the ancient Egyptians is confirmed,
not only by many Greek narrators, but by the laboriously erased
inscriptions discovered in the chambers of some tombs.]
"Why care about the grave?" cried Croesus, becoming angry. "We live for
life, not for death!"
"Say rather," answered Amasis rising from his seat, "we, with our Greek
minds, believe a beautiful life to be the highest good. But Croesus, I
was begotten and nursed by Egyptian parents, nourished on Egyptian food,
and though I have accepted much that is Greek, am still, in my innermost
being, an Egyptian. What has been sung to us in our childhood, and
praised as sacred in our youth, lingers on in the heart until the day
which sees us embalmed as mummies. I am an old man and have but a short
span yet to run, before I reach the landmark which separates us from that
farther country. For the sake of life's few remaining days, shall I
willingly mar Death's thousands of years? No, my friend, in this point at
least I have remained an Egyptian, in believing, like the rest of my
countrymen, that the happiness of a future life in the kingdom of Osiris,
depends on the preservation of my body, the habitation of the soul.
[Each human soul was considered as a part of the world-soul Osiris,
was united to him after the death of the body, and thenceforth took
the name of Osiris. The Egyptian Cosmos consisted of the three
great realms, the Heavens, the Earth and the Depths. Over the vast
ocean which girdles the vault of heaven, the sun moves in a boat or
car drawn by the planets and fixed stars. On this ocean too the
great constellations circle in their ships, and there is the kingdom
of the blissful gods, who sit enthroned above this heavenly ocean
under a canopy of stars. The mouth of this great stream is in the
East, where the sun-god rises from the mists and is born again as a
child every morning. The surface of the earth is inhabited by human
beings having a share in the three great cosmic kingdoms. They
receive their soul from the heights of heaven, the seat and source
of light; their material body is of the earth; and the appearance or
outward form by which one human being is distinguished from another
at sight--his phantom or shadow--belongs to the depths. At death,
soul, body, and shadow separate from one another. The soul to
return to the place from whence it came, to Heaven, for it is a part
of God (of Osiris); the body, to be committed to the earth from
which it was formed in the image of its creator; the phantom or
shadow, to descend into the depths, the kingdom of shadows. The
gate to this kingdom was placed in the West among the sunset hills,
where the sun goes down daily,--where he dies. Thence arise the
changeful and corresponding conceptions connected with rising and
setting, arriving and departing, being born and dying. The careful
preservation of the body after death from destruction, not only
through the process of inward decay, but also through violence or
accident, was in the religion of ancient Egypt a principal condition
(perhaps introduced by the priests on sanitary grounds) on which
depended the speedy deliverance of the soul, and with this her
early, appointed union with the source of Light and Good, which two
properties were, in idea, one and indivisible. In the Egyptian
conceptions the soul was supposed to remain, in a certain sense,
connected with the body during a long cycle of solar years. She
could, however, quit the body from time to time at will, and could
appear to mortals in various forms and places; these appearances
differed according to the hour, and were prescribed in exact words
and delineations.]
"But enough of these matters; thou wilt find it difficult to enter into
such thoughts. Tell me rather what thou thinkest of our temples and
pyramids."
Croesus, after reflecting a moment, answered with a smile: "Those huge
pyramidal masses of stone seem to me creations of the boundless desert,
the gaily painted temple colonnades to be the children of the Spring; but
though the sphinxes lead up to your temple gates, and seem to point the
way into the very shrines themselves, the sloping fortress-like walls of
the Pylons, those huge isolated portals, appear as if placed there to
repel entrance. Your many-colored hieroglyphics likewise attract the
gaze, but baffle the inquiring spirit by the mystery that lies within
their characters. The images of your manifold gods are everywhere to be
seen; they crowd on our gaze, and yet who knows not that their real is
not their apparent significance? that they are mere outward images of
thoughts accessible only to the few, and, as I have heard, almost
incomprehensible in their depth? My curiosity is excited everywhere, and
my interest awakened, but my warm love of the beautiful feels itself in
no way attracted. My intellect might strain to penetrate the secrets of
your sages, but my heart and mind can never be at home in a creed which
views life as a short pilgrimage to the grave, and death as the only true
life!"
"And yet," said Amasis, "Death has for us too his terrors, and we do all
in our power to evade his grasp. Our physicians would not be celebrated
and esteemed as they are, if we did not believe that their skill could
prolong our earthly existence. This reminds me of the oculist Nebenchari
whom I sent to Susa, to the king. Does he maintain his reputation? is the
king content with him?"
"Very much so," answered Croesus. "He has been of use to many of the
blind; but the king's mother is alas! still sightless. It was Nebenchari
who first spoke to Cambyses of the charms of thy daughter Tachot. But we
deplore that he understands diseases of the eye alone. When the Princess
Atossa lay ill of fever, he was not to be induced to bestow a word of
counsel."
"That is very natural; our physicians are only permitted to treat one
part of the body. We have aurists, dentists and oculists, surgeons for
fractures of the bone, and others for internal diseases. By the ancient
priestly law a dentist is not allowed to treat a deaf man, nor a surgeon
for broken bones a patient who is suffering from a disease of the bowels,
even though he should have a first rate knowledge of internal complaints.
This law aims at securing a great degree of real and thorough knowledge;
an aim indeed, pursued by the priests (to whose caste the physicians
belong) with a most praiseworthy earnestness in all branches of science.
Yonder lies the house of the high-priest Neithotep, whose knowledge of
astronomy and geometry was so highly praised, even by Pythagoras. It lies
next to the porch leading into the temple of the goddess Neith, the
protectress of Sais. Would I could show thee the sacred grove with its
magnificent trees, the splendid pillars of the temple with capitals
modelled from the lotus-flower, and the colossal chapel which I caused to
be wrought from a single piece of granite, as an offering to the goddess;
but alas! entrance is strictly refused to strangers by the priests. Come,
let us seek my wife and daughter; they have conceived an affection for
thee, and indeed it is my wish that thou shouldst gain a friendly feeling
towards this poor maiden before she goes forth with thee to the strange
land, and to the strange nation whose princess she is to become. Wilt
thou not adopt and take her under thy care?"
"On that thou may'st with fullest confidence rely," replied Croesus with
warmth, returning the pressure of Amasis' hand. "I will protect thy
Nitetis as if I were her father; and she will need my help, for the
apartments of the women in the Persian palaces are dangerous ground. But
she will meet with great consideration. Cambyses may be contented with
his choice, and will be highly gratified that thou hast entrusted him
with thy fairest child. Nebenchari had only spoken of Tachot, thy second
daughter."
"Nevertheless I will send my beautiful Nitetis. Tachot is so tender, that
she could scarcely endure the fatigues of the journey and the pain of
separation. Indeed were I to follow the dictates of my own heart, Nitetis
should never leave us for Persia. But Egypt stands in need of peace, and
I was a king before I became a father!"
CHAPTER V.
The other members of the Persian embassy had returned to Sais from their
excursion up the Nile to the pyramids. Prexaspes alone, the ambassador
from Cambyses, had already set out for Persia, in order to inform the
king of the successful issue of his suit.
The palace of Amasis was full of life and stir. The huge building was
filled in all parts by the followers of the embassy, nearly three hundred
in number, and by the high guests themselves, to whom every possible
attention was paid. The courts of the palace swarmed with guards and
officials, with young priests and slaves, all in splendid festal raiment.
On this day it was the king's intention to make an especial display of
the wealth and splendor of his court, at a festival arranged in honor of
his daughter's betrothal.
The lofty reception-hall opening on to the gardens, with its ceiling sown
with thousands of golden stars and supported by gaily-painted columns,
presented a magic appearance. Lamps of colored papyrus hung against the
walls and threw a strange light on the scene, something like that when
the sun's rays strike through colored glass. The space between the
columns and the walls was filled with choice plants, palms, oleanders,
pomegranates, oranges and roses, behind which an invisible band of harp
and flute-players was stationed, who received the guests with strains of
monotonous, solemn music.
The floor of this hall was paved in black and white, and in the middle
stood elegant tables covered with dishes of all kinds, cold roast meats,
sweets, well-arranged baskets of fruit and cake, golden jugs of wine,
glass drinking-cups and artistic flower-vases.
A multitude of richly-dressed slaves under direction of the high-steward,
busied themselves in handing these dishes to the guests, who, either
standing around, or reclining on sumptuous seats, entertained themselves
in conversation with their friends.
Both sexes and all ages were to be found in this assembly. As the women
entered, they received charming little nosegays from the young priests in
the personal service of the king, and many a youth of high degree
appeared in the hall with flowers, which he not only offered to her he
loved best, but held up for her to smell.
The Egyptian men, who were dressed as we have already seen them at the
reception of the Persian embassy, behaved towards the women with a
politeness that might almost be termed submissive. Among the latter few
could pretend to remarkable beauty, though there were many bewitching
almond-shaped eyes, whose loveliness was heightened by having their lids
dyed with the eye-paint called "mestem." The majority wore their hair
arranged in the same manner; the wealth of waving brown locks floated
back over the shoulders and was brushed behind the ears, one braid being
left on each side to hang over the temples to the breast. A broad diadem
confined these locks, which as the maids knew, were quite as often the
wig-maker's work as Nature's. Many ladies of the court wore above their
foreheads a lotus-flower, whose stem drooped on the hair at the back.
They carried fans of bright feathers in their delicate hands. These were
loaded with rings; the finger-nails were stained red, according to
Egyptian custom, and gold or silver bands were worn above the elbow, and
at the wrists and ankles.
[This custom (of staining finger-nails) is still prevalent in the
East; the plant Shenna, Laosonia spinosa, called by Pliny XIII.
Cyprus, being used for the purpose. The Egyptian government has
prohibited the dye, but it will be difficult to uproot the ancient
custom. The pigment for coloring the eyelids, mentioned in the
text, is also still employed. The Papyrus Ebers alludes to the
Arabian kohl or antimony, which is frequently mentioned under the
name of "mestem" on monuments belonging to the time of the
Pharaohs.]
Their robes were beautiful and costly, and in many cases so cut as to
leave the right breast uncovered. Bartja, the young Persian prince, among
the men, and Nitetis, the Pharaoh's daughter, among the women, were
equally conspicuous for their superior beauty, grace and charms. The
royal maiden wore a transparent rose-colored robe, in her black hair were
fresh roses, she walked by the side of her sister, the two robed alike,
but Nitetis pale as the lotus-flower in her mother's hair.
Ladice, the queen, by birth a Greek, and daughter of Battus of Cyrene,
walked by the side of Amasis and presented the young Persians to her
children. A light lace robe was thrown over her garment of purple,
embroidered with gold; and on her beautiful Grecian head she wore the
Urmus serpent, the ornament peculiar to Egyptian queens.
Her countenance was noble yet charming, and every movement betrayed the
grace only to be imparted by a Greek education.
Amasis, in making choice of this queen, after the death of his second
wife, (the Egyptian Tentcheta, mother of Psamtik the heir to the throne,)
had followed his prepossession in favor of the Greek nation and defied
the wrath of the priests.
The two girls at Ladice's side, Tachot and Nitetis, were called
twin-sisters, but showed no signs of that resemblance usually to be found
in twins.
Tachot was a fair, blue-eyed girl, small, and delicately built; Nitetis,
on the other hand, tall and majestic, with black hair and eyes, evinced
in every action that she was of royal blood.
"How pale thou look'st, my child!" said Ladice, kissing Nitetis' cheek.
"Be of good courage, and meet thy future bravely. Here is the noble
Bartja, the brother of thy future husband."
Nitetis raised her dark, thoughtful eyes and fixed them long and
enquiringly on the beautiful youth. He bowed low before the blushing
maiden, kissed her garment, and said:
"I salute thee, as my future queen and sister! I can believe that thy
heart is sore at parting from thy home, thy parents, brethren and
sisters; but be of good courage; thy husband is a great hero, and a
powerful king; our mother is the noblest of women, and among the Persians
the beauty and virtue of woman is as much revered as the life-giving
light of the sun. Of thee, thou sister of the lily Nitetis, whom, by her
side I might venture to call the rose, I beg forgiveness, for robbing
thee of thy dearest friend."
As he said these words he looked eagerly into Tachot's beautiful blue
eyes; she bent low, pressing her hand upon her heart, and gazed on him
long after Amasis had drawn him away to a seat immediately opposite the
dancing-girls, who were just about to display their skill for the
entertainment of the guests. A thin petticoat was the only clothing of
these girls, who threw and wound their flexible limbs to a measure played
on harp and tambourine. After the dance appeared Egyptian singers and
buffoons for the further amusement of the company.
At length some of the courtiers forsook the hall, their grave demeanor
being somewhat overcome by intoxication.
[Unfortunately women, as well as men, are to be seen depicted on the
monuments in an intoxicated condition. One man is being carried
home, like a log of wood, on the heads of his servants. Wilkinson
II. 168. Another is standing on his head II. 169. and several
ladies are in the act of returning the excessive quantity which they
have drunk. Wilkinson II. 167. At the great Techu-festival at
Dendera intoxication seems to have been as much commanded as at the
festivals of Dionysus under the Ptolemies, one of whom (Ptolemy
Dionysus) threatened those who remained sober with the punishment of
death. But intoxication was in general looked upon by the Egyptians
as a forbidden and despicable vice. In the Papyrus Anastasi IV.,
for instance, we read these words on a drunkard: "Thou art as a
sanctuary without a divinity, as a house without bread," and
further: "How carefully should men avoid beer (hek)." A number of
passages in the Papyrus denounce drunkards.]
The women were carried home in gay litters by slaves with torches; and
only the highest military commanders, the Persian ambassadors and a few
officials, especial friends of Amasis, remained behind. These were
retained by the master of the ceremonies, and conducted to a
richly-ornamented saloon, where a gigantic wine-bowl standing on a table
adorned in the Greek fashion, invited to a drinking-bout.
Amasis was seated on a high arm-chair at the head of the table; at his
left the youthful Bartja, at his right the aged Croesus. Besides these
and the other Persians, Theodorus and Ibykus, the friends of Polykrates,
already known to us, and Aristomachus, now commander of the Greek
body-guard, were among the king's guests.
Amasis, whom we have just heard in such grave discourse with Croesus, now
indulged in jest and satire. He seemed once more the wild officer, the
bold reveller of the olden days.
His sparkling, clever jokes, at times playful, at times scornful, flew
round among the revellers. The guests responded in loud, perhaps often
artificial laughter, to their king's jokes, goblet after goblet was
emptied, and the rejoicings had reached their highest point, when
suddenly the master of the ceremonies appeared, bearing a small gilded
mummy; and displaying it to the gaze of the assembly, exclaimed. "Drink,
jest, and be merry, for all too soon ye shall become like unto this!"
[Wilkinson gives drawings of these mummies (II. 410.) hundreds of
which were placed in the tombs, and have been preserved to us.
Lucian was present at a banquet, when they were handed round. The
Greeks seem to have adopted this custom, but with their usual talent
for beautifying all they touched, substituted a winged figure of
death for the mummy. Maxims similar to the following one are by no
means rare. "Cast off all care; be mindful only of pleasure until
the day cometh when then must depart on the journey, whose goal is
the realm of silence!" Copied from the tomb of Neferhotep to Abd-
el-Qurnah.]
"Is it your custom thus to introduce death at all your banquets?" said
Bartja, becoming serious, "or is this only a jest devised for to-day by
your master of the ceremonies?"
"Since the earliest ages," answered Amasis, "it has been our custom to
display these mummies at banquets, in order to increase the mirth of the
revellers, by reminding them that one must enjoy the time while it is
here. Thou, young butterfly, hast still many a long and joyful year
before thee; but we, Croesus, we old men, must hold by this firmly. Fill
the goblets, cup-bearer, let not one moment of our lives be wasted! Thou
canst drink well, thou golden-haired Persian! Truly the great gods have
endowed thee not only with beautiful eyes, and blooming beauty, but with
a good throat! Let me embrace thee, thou glorious youth, thou rogue! What
thinkest thou Croesus? my daughter Tachot can speak of nothing else than
of this beardless youth, who seems to have quite turned her little head
with his sweet looks and words. Thou needest not to blush, young madcap!
A man such as thou art, may well look at king's daughters; but wert thou
thy father Cyrus himself, I could not allow my Tachot to leave me for
Persia!"
"Father!" whispered the crown-prince Psamtik, interrupting this
conversation. "Father, take care what you say, and remember Phanes." The
king turned a frowning glance on his son; but following his advice, took
much less part in the conversation, which now became more general.
The seat at the banquet-table, occupied by Aristomachus, placed him
nearly opposite to Croesus, on whom, in total silence and without once
indulging in a smile at the king's jests, his eyes had been fixed from
the beginning of the revel. When the Pharaoh ceased to speak, he accosted
Croesus suddenly with the following question: "I would know, Lydian,
whether the snow still covered the mountains, when ye left Persia."
Smiling, and a little surprised at this strange speech, Croesus answered:
"Most of the Persian mountains were green when we started for Egypt four
months ago; but there are heights in the land of Cambyses on which, even
in the hottest seasons, the snow never melts, and the glimmer of their
white crests we could still perceive, as we descended into the plains."
The Spartan's face brightened visibly, and Croesus, attracted by this
serious, earnest man, asked his name. "My name is Aristomachus."
"That name seems known to me."
"You were acquainted with many Hellenes, and my name is common among
them."
"Your dialect would bespeak you my opinion a Spartan."
"I was one once."
"And now no more?"
"He who forsakes his native land without permission, is worthy of death."
"Have you forsaken it with your own free-will?"
"Yes."
"For what reason?"
"To escape dishonor."
"What was your crime?"
"I had committed none."
"You were accused unjustly?"
"Yes."
"Who was the author of your ill-fortune?"
"Yourself."
Croesus started from his seat. The serious tone and gloomy face of the
Spartan proved that this was no jest, and those who sat near the
speakers, and had been following this strange dialogue, were alarmed and
begged Aristomachus to explain his words.
He hesitated and seemed unwilling to speak; at last, however, at the
king's summons, he began thus:
"In obedience to the oracle, you, Croesus, had chosen us Lacedaemonians,
as the most powerful among the Hellenes, to be your allies against the
might of Persia; and you gave us gold for the statue of Apollo on Mount
Thornax. The ephori, on this, resolved to present you with a gigantic
bronze wine-bowl, richly wrought. I was chosen as bearer of this gift.
Before reaching Sardis our ship was wrecked in a storm. The wine-cup sank
with it, and we reached Samos with nothing but our lives. On returning
home I was accused by enemies, and those who grudged my good fortune, of
having sold both ship and wine-vessel to the Samians. As they could not
convict me of the crime, and had yet determined on my ruin, I was
sentenced to two days' and nights' exposure on the pillory. My foot was
chained to it during the night; but before the morning of disgrace
dawned, my brother brought me secretly a sword, that my honor might be
saved, though at the expense of my life. But I could not die before
revenging myself on the men who had worked my ruin; and therefore,
cutting the manacled foot from my leg, I escaped, and hid in the rushes
on the banks of the Furotas. My brother brought me food and drink in
secret; and after two months I was able to walk on the wooden leg you now
see. Apollo undertook my revenge; he never misses his mark, and my two
worst opponents died of the plague. Still I durst not return home, and at
length took ship from Gythium to fight against the Persians under you,
Croesus. On landing at Teos, I heard that you were king no longer, that
the mighty Cyrus, the father of yonder beautiful youth, had conquered the
powerful province of Lydia in a few weeks, and reduced the richest of
kings to beggary."
Every guest gazed at Aristomachus in admiration. Croesus shook his hard
hand; and Bartja exclaimed: "Spartan, I would I could take you back with
me to Susa, that my friends there might see what I have seen myself, the
most courageous, the most honorable of men!"
"Believe me, boy," returned Aristomachus smiling, every Spartan would
have done the same. In our country it needs more courage to be a coward
than a brave man."
"And you, Bartja," cried Darius, the Persian king's cousin, "could you
have borne to stand at the pillory?" Bartja reddened, but it was easy to
see that he too preferred death to disgrace.
"Zopyrus, what say you?" asked Darius of the third young Persian.
"I could mutilate my own limbs for love of you two," answered he,
grasping unobserved the hands of his two friends.
With an ironical smile Psamtik sat watching this scene--the pleased faces
of Amasis, Croesus and Gyges, the meaning glances of the Egyptians, and
the contented looks with which Aristomachus gazed on the young heroes.
Ibykus now told of the oracle which had promised Aristomachus a return to
his native land, on the approach of the men from the snowy mountains, and
at the same time, mentioned the hospitable house of Rhodopis.
On hearing this name Psamtik grew restless; Croesus expressed a wish to
form the acquaintance of the Thracian matron, of whom AEsop had related
so much that was praiseworthy; and, as the other guests, many of whom had
lost consciousness through excessive drinking, were leaving the hall, the
dethroned monarch, the poet, the sculptor and the Spartan hero made an
agreement to go to Naukratis the next day, and there enjoy the
conversation of Rhodopis.
CHAPTER VI.
On the night following the banquet just described, Amasis allowed himself
only three hours' rest. On this, as on every other morning, the young
priests wakened him at the first cock-crow, conducted him as usual to the
bath, arrayed him in the royal vestments and led him to the altar in the
court of the palace, where in presence of the populace he offered
sacrifice. During the offering the priests sang prayers in a loud voice,
enumerated the virtues of their king, and, that blame might in no case
light on the head of their ruler, made his bad advisers responsible for
every deadly sin committed in ignorance.
They exhorted him to the performance of good deeds, while extolling his
virtues; read aloud profitable portions of the holy writings, containing
the deeds and sayings of great men, and then conducted him to his
apartments, where letters and information from all parts of the kingdom
awaited him.
Amasis was in the habit of observing most faithfully these daily-repeated
ceremonies and hours of work; the remaining portion of the day he spent
as it pleased him, and generally in cheerful society.
The priests reproached him with this, alleging that such a life was not
suited to a monarch; and on one occasion he had thus replied to the
indignant high-priest: "Look at this bow! if always bent it must lose its
power, but, if used for half of each day and then allowed to rest, it
will remain strong and useful till the string breaks."
Amasis had just signed his name to the last letter, granting the petition
of a Nornarch--[Administrator of a Province]--for money to carry on
different embankments rendered necessary by the last inundation, when a
servant entered, bringing a request from the crown-prince Psamtik for an
audience of a few minutes.
Amasis, who till this moment had been smiling cheerfully at the cheering
reports from all parts of the country, now became suddenly serious and
thoughtful. After long delay he answered: "Go and inform the prince that
he may appear."
Psamtik appeared, pale and gloomy as ever; he bowed low and
reverentially, on entering his father's presence.
Amasis nodded silently in return, and then asked abruptly and sternly:
"What is thy desire? my time is limited."
"For your son, more than for others," replied the prince with quivering
lips. "Seven times have I petitioned for the great favor, which thou
grantest for the first time to-day."
"No reproaches! I suspect the reason of thy visit. Thou desirest an
answer to thy doubts as to the birth of thy sister Nitetis."
"I have no curiosity; I come rather to warn thee, and to remind thee that
I am not the only one who is acquainted with this mystery."
"Speakest thou of Phanes?"
"Of whom else should I speak? He is banished from Egypt and from his own
country, and must leave Naukratis in a few days. What guarantee hast
thou, that he will not betray us to the Persians?"
"The friendship and kindness which I have always shown him."
"Dost thou believe in the gratitude of men?"
"No! but I rely on my own discernment of character. Phanes will not
betray us! he is my friend, I repeat it!"
"Thy friend perhaps, but my mortal enemy!"
"Then stand on thy guard! I have nothing to fear from him."
"For thyself perhaps nought, but for our country! O father, reflect that
though as thy son I may be hateful in thine eyes, yet as Egypt's future I
ought to be near thy heart. Remember, that at thy death, which may the
gods long avert, I shall represent the existence of this glorious land as
thou dost now; my fall will be the ruin of thine house, of Egypt!"
Amasis became more and more serious, and Psamtik went on eagerly: "Thou
knowest that I am right! Phanes can betray our land to any foreign enemy;
he is as intimately acquainted with it as we are; and beside this, he
possesses a secret, the knowledge of which would convert our most
powerful ally into a most formidable enemy."
"There thou art in error. Though not mine, Nitetis is a king's daughter
and will know how to win the love of her husband."
"Were she the daughter of a god, she could not save thee from Cambyses'
wrath, if he discovers the treachery; lying is to a Persian the worst of
crimes, to be deceived the greatest disgrace; thou hast deceived the
highest and proudest of the nation, and what can one inexperienced girl
avail, when hundreds of women, deeply versed in intrigue and artifice,
are striving for the favor of their lord?"
"Hatred and revenge are good masters in the art of rhetoric," said Amasis
in a cutting tone. "And think'st thou then, oh, foolish son, that I
should have undertaken such a dangerous game without due consideration?
Phanes may tell the Persians what he likes, he can never prove his point.
I, the father, Ladice the mother must know best whether Nitetis is our
child or not. We call her so, who dare aver the contrary? If it please
Phanes to betray our land to any other enemy beside the Persians, let
him; I fear nothing! Thou wouldst have me ruin a man who has been my
friend, to whom I owe much gratitude, who has served me long and
faithfully; and this without offence from his side. Rather will I shelter
him from thy revenge, knowing as I do the impure source from which it
springs."
"My father!"
"Thou desirest the ruin of this man, because he hindered thee from taking
forcible possession of the granddaughter of Rhodopis, and because thine
own incapacity moved me to place him in thy room as commander of the
troops. Ah! thou growest pale! Verily, I owe Phanes thanks for confiding
to me your vile intentions, and so enabling me to bind my friends and
supporters, to whom Rhodopis is precious, more firmly to my throne."
"And is it thus thou speakest of these strangers, my father? dost thou
thus forget the ancient glory of Egypt? Despise me, if thou wilt; I know
thou lovest me not; but say not that to be great we need the help of
strangers! Look back on our history! Were we not greatest when our gates
were closed to the stranger, when we depended on ourselves and our own
strength, and lived according to the ancient laws of our ancestors and
our gods? Those days beheld the most distant lands subjugated by Rameses,
and heard Egypt celebrated in the whole world as its first and greatest
nation. What are we now? The king himself calls beggars and foreigners
the supporters of his throne, and devises a petty stratagem to secure the
friendship of a power over whom we were victorious before the Nile was
infested by these strangers. Egypt was then a mighty Queen in glorious
apparel; she is now a painted woman decked out in tinsel!"
[Rameses the Great, son of Sethos, reigned over Egypt 1394-1328 B.
C. He was called Sesostris by the Greeks; see Lepsius (Chron. d.
Aegypter, p. 538.) on the manner in which this confusion of names
arose. Egypt attained the zenith of her power under this king,
whose army, according to Diodorus (I. 53-58). consisted of 600,000
foot and 24,000 horsemen, 27,000 chariots and 400 ships of war.
With these hosts he subdued many of the Asiatic and African nations,
carving his name and likeness, as trophies of victory, on the rocks
of the conquered countries. Herodotus speaks of having seen two of
these inscriptions himself (II. 102-106.) and two are still to be
found not far from Bairut. His conquests brought vast sums of
tribute into Egypt. Tacitus annal. II. 60. and these enabled him to
erect magnificent buildings in the whole length of his land from
Nubia to Tanis, but more especially in Thebes, the city in which he
resided. One of the obelisks erected by Rameses at Heliopolis is
now standing in the Place de la Concorde at Paris, and has been
lately translated by E. Chabas. On the walls of the yet remaining
palaces and temples, built under this mighty king, we find, even to
this day, thousands of pictures representing himself, his armed
hosts, the many nations subdued by the power of his arms, and the
divinities to whose favor he believed these victories were owing.
Among the latter Ammon and Bast seem to have received his especial
veneration, and, on the other hand, we read in these inscriptions
that the gods were very willing to grant the wishes of their
favorite. A poetical description of the wars he waged with the
Cheta is to be found in long lines of hieroglyphics on the south
wall of the hall of columns of Rameses II. at Karnal, also at Luxor
and in the Sallier Papyrus, and an epic poem referring to his mighty
deeds in no less than six different places.]
"Have a care what thou sayest!" shouted Amasis stamping on the floor.
"Egypt was never so great, so flourishing as now! Rameses carried our
arms into distant lands and earned blood; through my labors the products
of our industry have been carried to all parts of the world and instead
of blood, have brought us treasure and blessing. Rameses caused the blood
and sweat of his subjects to flow in streams for the honor of his own
great name; under my rule their blood flows rarely, and the sweat of
their brow only in works of usefulness. Every citizen can now end his
days in prosperity and comfort. Ten thousand populous cities rise on the
shores of the Nile, not a foot of the soil lies untilled, every child
enjoys the protection of law and justice, and every ill-doer shuns the
watchful eye of the authorities.
"In case of attack from without, have we not, as defenders of those
god-given bulwarks, our cataracts, our sea and our deserts, the finest
army that ever bore arms? Thirty thousand Hellenes beside our entire
Egyptian military caste? such is the present condition of Egypt! Rameses
purchased the bright tinsel of empty fame with the blood and tears of his
people. To me they are indebted for the pure gold of a peaceful welfare
as citizens--to me and to my predecessors, the Saitic kings!"
[The science of fortification was very fairly understood by the
ancient Egyptians. Walled and battlemented forts are to be seen
depicted on their monuments. We have already endeavored to show
(see our work on Egypt. I. 78 and following) that, on the northeast,
Egypt defended from Asiatic invasion by a line of forts extending
from Pelusium to the Red Sea.]
"And yet I tell thee," cried the prince, "that a worm is gnawing at the
root of Egypt's greatness and her life. This struggle for riches and
splendor corrupts the hearts of the people, foreign luxury has given a
deadly blow to the simple manners of our citizens, and many an Egyptian
has been taught by the Greeks to scoff at the gods of his fathers. Every
day brings news of bloody strife between the Greek mercenaries and our
native soldiery, between our own people and the strangers. The shepherd
and his flock are at variance; the wheels of the state machinery are
grinding one another and thus the state itself, into total ruin. This
once, father, though never again, I must speak out clearly what is
weighing on my heart. While engaged in contending with the priests, thou
hast seen with calmness the young might of Persia roll on from the East,
consuming the nations on its way, and, like a devouring monster, growing
more and more formidable from every fresh prey. Thine aid was not, as
thou hadst intended, given to the Lydians and Babylonians against the
enemy, but to the Greeks in the building of temples to their false gods.
At last resistance seemed hopeless; a whole hemisphere with its rulers
lay in submission at the feet of Persia; but even then the gods willed
Egypt a chance of deliverance. Cambyses desired thy daughter in marriage.
Thou, however, too weak to sacrifice thine own flesh and blood for the
good of all, hast substituted another maiden, not thine own child, as an
offering to the mighty monarch; and at the same time, in thy
soft-heartedness, wilt spare the life of a stranger in whose hand he the
fortunes of this realm, and who will assuredly work its ruin; unless
indeed, worn out by internal dissension, it perish even sooner from its
own weakness!"
Thus far Amasis had listened to these revilings of all he held dearest in
silence, though pale, and trembling with rage; but now he broke forth in
a voice, the trumpet-like sound of which pealed through the wide hall:
"Know'st thou not then, thou boasting and revengeful son of evil, thou
future destroyer of this ancient and glorious kingdom, know'st thou not
whose life must be the sacrifice, were not my children, and the dynasty
which I have founded, dearer to me than the welfare of the whole realm?
Thou, Psamtik, thou art the man, branded by the gods, feared by men--the
man to whose heart love and friendship are strangers, whose face is never
seen to smile, nor his soul known to feel compassion! It is not, however,
through thine own sin that thy nature is thus unblessed, that all thine
undertakings end unhappily. Give heed, for now I am forced to relate what
I had hoped long to keep secret from thine ears. After dethroning my
predecessor, I forced him to give me his sister Tentcheta in marriage.
She loved me; a year after marriage there was promise of a child. During
the night preceding thy birth I fell asleep at the bedside of my wife. I
dreamed that she was lying on the shores of the Nile, and complained to
me of pain in the breast. Bending down, I beheld a cypress-tree springing
from her heart. It grew larger and larger, black and spreading, twined
its roots around thy mother and strangled her. A cold shiver seized me,
and I was on the point of flying from the spot, when a fierce hurricane
came from the East, struck the tree and overthrew it, so that its
spreading branches were cast into the Nile. Then the waters ceased to
flow; they congealed, and, in place of the river, a gigantic mummy lay
before me. The towns on its banks dwindled into huge funereal urns,
surrounding the vast corpse of the Nile as in a tomb. At this I awoke and
caused the interpreters of dreams to be summoned. None could explain the
vision, till at last the priests of the Libyan Ammon gave me the
following interpretation 'Tentcheta will die in giving birth to a son.
The cypress, which strangled its mother, is this gloomy, unhappy man. In
his days a people shall come from the East and shall make of the Nile,
that is of the Egyptians, dead bodies, and of their cities ruinous heaps;
these are the urns for the dead, which thou sawest."
Psamtik listened as if turned into stone; his father continued; "Thy
mother died in giving birth to thee; fiery-red hair, the mark of the sons
of Typhon, grew around thy brow; thou becam'st a gloomy man. Misfortune
pursued thee and robbed thee of a beloved wife and four of thy children.
The astrologers computed that even as I had been born under the fortunate
sign of Amman, so thy birth had been watched over by the rise of the
awful planet Seb. Thou . . ." But here Amasis broke off, for Psamtik, in
the anguish produced by these fearful disclosures had given way, and with
sobs and groans, cried:
"Cease, cruel father! spare me at least the bitter words, that I am the
only son in Egypt who is hated by his father without cause!"
Amasis looked down on the wretched man who had sunk to the earth before
him, his face hidden in the folds of his robe, and the father's wrath was
changed to compassion. He thought of Psamtik's mother, dead forty years
before, and felt he had been cruel in inflicting this poisonous wound on
her son's soul. It was the first time for years, that he had been able to
feel towards this cold strange man, as a father and a comforter. For the
first time he saw tears in the cold eyes of his son, and could feel the
joy of wiping them away. He seized the opportunity at once, and bending
clown over the groaning form, kissed his forehead, raised him from the
ground and said gently:
"Forgive my anger, my son! the words that have grieved thee came not from
my heart, but were spoken in the haste of wrath. Many years hast thou
angered me by thy coldness, hardness and obstinacy; to-day thou hast
wounded me again in my most sacred feelings; this hurried me into an
excess of wrath. But now all is right between us. Our natures are so
diverse that our innermost feelings will never be one, but at least we
can act in concert for the future, and show forbearance one towards the
other."
In silence Psamtik bowed down and kissed his father's robe "Not so,"
exclaimed the latter; "rather let my lips receive thy kiss, as is meet
and fitting between father and son! Thou needest not to think again of
the evil dream I have related. Dreams are phantoms, and even if sent by
the gods, the interpreters thereof are human and erring. Thy hand
trembles still, thy cheeks are white as thy robe. I was hard towards
thee, harder than a father. . . ."
"Harder than a stranger to strangers," interrupted his son. "Thou hast
crushed and broken me, and if till now my face has seldom worn a smile,
from this day forward it can be naught but a mirror of my inward misery."
"Not so," said Amasis, laying his hand on his son's shoulder. "If I
wound, I can also heal. Tell me the dearest wish of thy heart, it shall
be granted thee!"
Psamtik's eyes flashed, his sallow cheeks glowed for a moment, and he
answered without consideration, though in a voice still trembling from
the shock he had just received: "Deliver Phanes, my enemy, into my
power!"
The king remained a few moments in deep thought, then answered: "I knew
what thou wouldst ask, and will fulfil thy desire: but I would rather
thou hadst asked the half of my treasures. A thousand voices within warn
me that I am about to do an unworthy deed and a ruinous--ruinous for
myself, for thee, the kingdom and our house. Reflect before acting, and
remember, whatever thou mayst meditate against Phanes, not a hair of
Rhodopis' head shall be touched. Also, that the persecution of my poor
friend is to remain a secret from the Greeks. Where shall I find his
equal as a commander, an adviser and a companion? He is not yet in thy
power, however, and I advise thee to remember, that though thou mayst be
clever for an Egyptian, Phanes is a clever Greek. I will remind thee too
of thy solemn oath to renounce the grandchild of Rhodopis. Methinks
vengeance is dearer to thee than love, and the amends I offer will
therefore be acceptable! As to Egypt, I repeat once again, she was never
more flourishing than now; a fact which none dream of disputing, except
the priests, and those who retail their foolish words. And now give ear,
if thou wouldst know the origin of Nitetis. Self-interest will enjoin
secrecy."
Psamtik listened eagerly to his father's communication, indicating his
gratitude at the conclusion by a warm pressure of the hand.
"Now farewell," said Amasis. "Forget not my words, and above all shed no
blood! I will know nothing of what happens to Phanes, for I hate cruelty
and would not be forced to stand in horror of my own son. But thou, thou
rejoicest! My poor Athenian, better were it for thee, hadst thou never
entered Egypt!"
Long after Psamtik had left, his father continued to pace the hall in
deep thought. He was sorry he had yielded; it already seemed as if he saw
the bleeding Phanes lying massacred by the side of the dethroned Hophra.
"It is true, he could have worked our ruin," was the plea he offered to
the accuser within his own breast, and with these words, he raised his
head, called his servants and left the apartment with a smiling
countenance.
Had this sanguine man, this favorite of fortune, thus speedily quieted
the warning voice within, or was he strong enough to cloak his torture
with a smile?
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Avoid excessive joy as well as complaining grief
Cast off all care; be mindful only of pleasure
Creed which views life as a short pilgrimage to the grave
Does happiness consist then in possession
Happiness has nothing to do with our outward circumstances
In our country it needs more courage to be a coward
Observe a due proportion in all things
One must enjoy the time while it is here
Pilgrimage to the grave, and death as the only true life
Robes cut as to leave the right breast uncovered
The priests are my opponents, my masters
Time is clever in the healing art
We live for life, not for death
AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS.
By Georg Ebers
Volume 3.
CHAPTER VII.
Psamtik went at once from his father's apartments to the temple of the
goddess Neith. At the entrance he asked for the high-priest and was
begged by one of the inferior priests to wait, as the great Neithotep was
at that moment praying in the holiest sanctuary of the exalted Queen of
Heaven.
[The temples of Egypt were so constructed as to intensify the
devotion of the worshipper by conducting him onward through a series
of halls or chambers gradually diminishing in size. "The way
through these temples is clearly indicated, no digression is
allowed, no error possible. We wander on through the huge and
massive gates of entrance, between the ranks of sacred animals. The
worshipper is received into an ample court, but by degrees the walls
on either side approach one another, the halls become less lofty,
all is gradually tending towards one point. And thus we wander on,
the sights and sounds of God's world without attract us no longer,
we see nothing but the sacred representations which encompass us so
closely, feel only the solemnity of the temple in which we stand.
And the consecrated walls embrace us ever more and more closely,
until at last we reach the lonely, resonant chamber occupied by the
divinity himself, and entered by no human being save his priest."
Schnaase, Kunstaeschirhtc I. 394.]
After a short time a young priest appeared with the intelligence that his
superior awaited the Prince's visit. Psamtik had seated himself under the
shadow of the sacred grove of silver poplars bordering the shores of the
consecrated lake, holy to the great Neith. He rose immediately, crossed
the temple-court, paved with stone and asphalte, on which the sun's rays
were darting like fiery arrows, and turned into one of the long avenues
of Sphinxes which led to the isolated Pylons before the gigantic temple
of the goddess. He then passed through the principal gate, ornamented, as
were all Egyptian temple-entrances, with the winged sun's disc. Above its
widely-opened folding doors arose on either side, tower-like buildings,
slender obelisks and waving flags. The front of the temple, rising from
the earth in the form of an obtuse angle, had somewhat the appearance of
a fortress, and was covered with colored pictures and inscriptions.
Through the porch Psamtik passed on into a lofty entrance-chamber, and
from thence into the great hall itself, the ceiling of which was strewn
with thousands of golden stars, and supported by four rows of lofty
pillars. Their capitals were carved in imitation of the lotus-flower, and
these, the shafts of the columns, the walls of this huge hall, and indeed
every niche and corner that met the eye were covered with brilliant
colors and hieroglyphics. The columns rose to a gigantic height, the eye
seemed to wander through immeasurable space, and the air breathed by the
worshippers was heavy with the fragrance of Kyphi and incense, and the
odors which arose from the laboratory attached to the temple. Strains of
soft music, proceeding from invisible hands, flowed on unceasingly, only
occasionally interrupted by the deep lowing of the sacred cows of Isis,
or the shrill call of the sparrow-hawk of Horus, whose habitations were
in one of the adjoining halls. No sooner did the prolonged low of a cow
break like distant thunder on the ear, or the sharp cry of the
sparrow-hawk shoot like a flash of lightning through the nerves of the
worshippers, than each crouching form bent lower still, and touched the
pavement with his forehead. On a portion of this pavement, raised above
the rest, stood the priests, some wearing ostrich-feathers on their bald
and shining heads; others panther-skins over their white-robed shoulders.
Muttering and singing, bowing low and rising again, they swung the
censers and poured libations of pure water to the gods out of golden
vessels. In this immense temple man seemed a dwarf in his own eyes. All
his senses even to the organs of respiration, were occupied by objects
far removed from daily life, objects that thrilled and almost oppressed
him. Snatched from all that was familiar in his daily existence, he
seemed to grow dizzy and seek support beyond himself. To this the voice
of the priests directed him and the cries of the sacred animals were
believed to prove a divinity at hand.
Psamtik assumed the posture of a worshipper on the low, gilded and
cushioned couch set apart for him, but was unable to pay any real
devotion, and passed on to the adjoining apartment before mentioned,
where the sacred cows of Isis-Neith and the sparrow-hawk of Horus were
kept. These creatures were concealed from the gaze of the worshippers by
a curtain of rich fabric embroidered with gold; the people were only
allowed an occasional and distant glimpse of the adorable animals. When
Psamtik passed they were just being fed; cakes soaked in milk, salt and
clover-blossoms were placed in golden cribs for the cows, and small birds
of many-colored plumage in the beautifully-wrought and ornamented cage of
the sparrow-hawk. But, in his present mood, the heir to the throne of
Egypt had no eye for these rare sights; but ascended at once, by means of
a hidden staircase, to the chambers lying near the observatory, where the
high-priest was accustomed to repose after the temple-service.
Neithotep, a man of seventy years, was seated in a splendid apartment.
Rich Babylonian carpets covered the floor and his chair was of gold,
cushioned with purple. A tastefully-carved footstool supported his feet,
his hands held a roll covered with hieroglyphics, and a boy stood behind
him with a fan of ostrich-feathers to keep away the insects.
The face of the old man was deeply lined now, but it might once have been
handsome, and in the large blue eyes there still lay evidence of a quick
intellect and a dignified self-respect.
His artificial curls had been laid aside, and the bald, smooth head
formed a strange contrast to the furrowed countenance, giving an
appearance of unusual height to the forehead, generally so very low among
the Egyptians. The brightly-colored walls of the room, on which numerous
sentences in hieroglyphic characters were painted, the different statues
of the goddess painted likewise in gay colors, and the snow-white
garments of the aged priest, were calculated to fill a stranger not only
with wonder, but with a species of awe.
The old man received the prince with much affection, and asked:
"What brings my illustrious son to the poor servant of the Deity?"
"I have much to report to thee, my father;" answered Psamtik with a
triumphant smile, "for I come in this moment from Amasis."
"Then he has at length granted thee an audience?"
"At length!"
"Thy countenance tells me that thou hast been favorably received by our
lord, thy father."
"After having first experienced his wrath. For, when I laid before him
the petition with which thou hadst entrusted me, he was exceeding wroth
and nearly crushed me by his awful words."
"Thou hadst surely grieved him by thy language. Didst thou approach him
as I advised thee, with lowliness, as a son humbly beseeching his
father?"
"No, my father, I was irritated and indignant."
"Then was Amasis right to be wrathful, for never should a son meet his
father in anger; still less when he hath a request to bring before him.
Thou know'st the promise, 'The days of him that honoreth his father shall
be many.'
[This Egyptian command hears a remarkable resemblance to the fifth
in the Hebrew decalogue, both having a promise annexed. It occurs
in the Prisse Papyrus, the most ancient sacred writing extant.]
In this one thing, my scholar, thou errest always; to gain thine ends
thou usest violence and roughness, where good and gentle words would more
surely prevail. A kind word hath far more power than an angry one, and
much may depend on the way in which a man ordereth his speech. Hearken to
that which I will now relate. In former years there was a king in Egypt
named Snefru, who ruled in Memphis. And it came to pass that he dreamed,
and in his dream his teeth fell out of his mouth. And he sent for the
soothsayers and told them the dream. The first interpreter answered: 'Woe
unto thee, O king, all thy kinsmen shall die before thee!' Then was
Snefru wroth, caused this messenger of evil to be scourged, and sent for
a second interpreter. He answered: 'O king, live for ever, thy life shall
be longer than the life of thy kinsmen and the men of thy house!' Then
the king smiled and gave presents unto this interpreter, for though the
interpretations were one, yet he had understood to clothe his message in
a web of fair and pleasant words. Apprehendest thou? then hearken to my
voice, and refrain from harsh words, remembering that to the ear of a
ruler the manner of a man's speech is weightier than its matter."
"Oh my father, how often hast thou thus admonished me! how often have I
been convinced of the evil consequences of my rough words and angry
gestures! but I cannot change my nature, I cannot . . ."
"Say rather: I will not; for he that is indeed a man, dare never again
commit those sins of which he has once repented. But I have admonished
sufficiently. Tell me now how thou didst calm the wrath of Amasis."
"Thou knowest my father. When he saw that he had wounded me in the depths
of my soul by his awful words, he repented him of his anger. He felt he
had been too hard, and desired to make amends at any price."
"He hath a kindly heart, but his mind is blinded, and his senses taken
captive," cried the priest. "What might not Amasis do for Egypt, would he
but hearken to our counsel, and to the commandments of the gods!"
"But hear me, my father! in his emotion he granted me the life of
Phanes!"
"Thine eyes flash, Psamtik! that pleaseth me not. The Athenian must die,
for he has offended the gods; but though he that condemns must let
justice have her way, he should have no pleasure in the death of the
condemned; rather should he mourn. Now speak; didst thou obtain aught
further?"
"The king declared unto me to what house Nitetis belongs."
"And further naught?"
"No, my father; but art thou not eager to learn . . .?"
"Curiosity is a woman's vice; moreover, I have long known all that thou
canst tell me."
"But didst thou not charge me but yesterday to ask my father this
question?"
"I did do so to prove thee, and know whether thou wert resigned to the
Divine will, and wert walking in those ways wherein alone thou canst
become worthy of initiation into the highest grade of knowledge. Thou
hast told us faithfully all that thou hast heard, and thereby proved that
thou canst obey--the first virtue of a priest."
"Thou knewest then the father of Nitetis?"
"I myself pronounced the prayer over king Hophra's tomb."
"But who imparted the secret to thee?"
"The eternal stars, my son, and my skill in reading them."
"And do these stars never deceive?"
"Never him that truly understands them."
Psamtik turned pale. His father's dream and his own fearful horoscope
passed like awful visions through his mind. The priest detected at once
the change in his features and said gently: "Thou deem'st thyself a lost
man because the heavens prognosticated evil at thy birth; but take
comfort, Psamtik; I observed another sign in the heavens at that moment,
which escaped the notice of the astrologers. Thy horoscope was a
threatening, a very threatening one, but its omens may be averted, they
may . . ."
"O tell me, father, tell me how!"
"They must turn to good, if thou, forgetful of all else, canst live alone
to the gods, paying a ready obedience to the Divine voice audible to us
their priests alone in the innermost and holiest sanctuary."
"Father, I am ready to obey thy slightest word."
"The great goddess Neith, who rules in Sais, grant this, my son!"
answered the priest solemnly. "But now leave me alone," he continued
kindly, "lengthened devotions and the weight of years bring weariness. If
possible, delay the death of Phanes, I wish to speak with him before he
dies. Yet one more word. A troop of Ethiopians arrived yesterday. These
men cannot speak a word of Greek, and under a faithful leader, acquainted
with the Athenians and the locality, they would be the best agents for
getting rid of the doomed man, as their ignorance of the language and the
circumstances render treachery or gossip impossible. Before starting for
Naukratis, they must know nothing of the design of their journey; the
deed once accomplished, we can send them back to Kush.--[The Egyptian
name for Ethiopia.] Remember, a secret can never be too carefully kept!
Farewell." Psamtik had only left the room a few moments, when a young
priest entered, one of the king's attendants.
"Have I listened well, father?" he enquired of the old man.
"Perfectly, my son. Nothing of that which passed between Amasis and
Psamtik has escaped thine ears. May Isis preserve them long to thee!"
"Ah, father, a deaf man could have heard every word in the ante-chamber
to-day, for Amasis bellowed like an ox."
"The great Neith has smitten him with the lack of prudence, yet I command
thee to speak of the Pharaoh with more reverence. But now return, keep
thine eyes open and inform me at once if Amasis, as is possible, should
attempt to thwart the conspiracy against Phanes. Thou wilt certainly find
me here. Charge the attendants to admit no one, and to say I am at my
devotions in the Holy of holies. May the ineffable One protect thy
footsteps!"
[Isis, the wife or sister of Osiris, is the phenomena of nature, by
means of which the god is able to reveal himself to human
contemplation.]
..................................
While Psamtik was making every preparation for the capture of Phanes,
Croesus, accompanied by his followers, had embarked on board a royal
bark, and was on his way down the Nile to spend the evening with
Rhodopis.
His son Gyges and the three young Persians remained in Sais, passing the
time in a manner most agreeable to them.
Amasis loaded them with civilities, allowed them, according to Egyptian
custom, the society of his queen and of the twin-sisters, as they were
called, taught Gyges the game of draughts, and looking on while the
strong, dexterous, young heroes joined his daughters in the game of
throwing balls and hoops, so popular among Egyptian maidens, enlivened
their amusements with an inexhaustible flow of wit and humor.
[The Pharaohs themselves, as well as their subjects, were in the
habit of playing at draughts and other similar games. Rosellini
gives its Rameses playing with his daughter; see also two Egyptians
playing together, Wilkinson II. 419. An especially beautiful
draught-board exists in the Egyptian collection at the Louvre
Museum. The Egyptians hoped to be permitted to enjoy these
pleasures even in the other world.]
[Balls that have been found in the tombs are still to be seen; some,
for instance, in the Museum at Leyden.]
"Really," said Bartja, as he watched Nitetis catching the slight hoop,
ornamented with gay ribbons, for the hundredth time on her slender ivory
rod, "really we must introduce this game at home. We Persians are so
different from you Egyptians. Everything new has a special charm for us,
while to you it is just as hateful. I shall describe the game to Our
mother Kassandane, and she will be delighted to allow my brother's wives
this new amusement."
"Yes, do, do!" exclaimed the fair Tachot blushing deeply. "Then Nitetis
can play too, and fancy herself back again at home and among those she
loves; and Bartja," she added in a low voice, "whenever you watch the
hoops flying, you too must remember this hour."
"I shall never forget it," answered he with a smile, and then, turning to
his future sister-in-law, he called out cheerfully, "Be of good courage,
Nitetis, you will be happier than you fancy with us. We Asiatics know how
to honor beauty; and prove it by taking many wives."
Nitetis sighed, and the queen Ladice exclaimed, "On the contrary, that
very fact proves that you understand but poorly how to appreciate woman's
nature! You can have no idea, Bartja, what a woman feels on finding that
her husband--the man who to her is more than life itself, and to whom she
would gladly and without reserve give up all that she treasures as most
sacred--looks down on her with the same kind of admiration that he
bestows on a pretty toy, a noble steed, or a well-wrought wine-bowl. But
it is yet a thousand-fold more painful to feel that the love which every
woman has a right to possess for herself alone, must be shared with a
hundred others!"
"There speaks the jealous wife!" exclaimed Amasis. "Would you not fancy
that I had often given her occasion to doubt my faithfulness?"
"No, no, my husband," answered Ladice, "in this point the Egyptian men
surpass other nations, that they remain content with that which they have
once loved; indeed I venture to assert that an Egyptian wife is the
happiest of women.
[According to Diodorus (I. 27) the queen of Egypt held a higher
position than the king himself. The monuments and lists of names
certainly prove that women could rule with sovereign power. The
husband of the heiress to the throne became king. They had their
own revenues (Diodorus I. 52) and when a princess, after death, was
admitted among the goddesses, she received her own priestesses.
(Edict of Canopus.) During the reigns of the Ptolemies many coins
were stamped with the queen's image and cities were named for them.
We notice also that sons, in speaking of their descent, more
frequently reckon it from the mother's than the father's side, that
a married woman is constantly alluded to as the "mistress" or "lady"
of the house, that according to many a Greek Papyrus they had entire
disposal of all their property, no matter in what it consisted, in
short that the weaker sex seems to have enjoyed equal influence with
the stronger.]
Even the Greeks, who in so many things may serve as patterns to us, do
not know how to appreciate woman rightly. Most of the young Greek girls
pass their sad childhood in close rooms, kept to the wheel and the loom
by their mothers and those who have charge of them, and when
marriageable, are transferred to the quiet house of a husband they do not
know, and whose work in life and in the state allows him but seldom to
visit his wife's apartments. Only when the most intimate friends and
nearest relations are with her husband, does she venture to appear in
their midst, and then shyly and timidly, hoping to hear a little of what
is going on in the great world outside. Ah, indeed! we women thirst for
knowledge too, and there are certain branches of learning at least, which
it cannot be right to withhold from those who are to be the mothers and
educators of the next generation. What can an Attic mother, without
knowledge, without experience, give to her daughters? Naught but her own
ignorance. And so it is, that a Hellene, seldom satisfied with the
society of his lawful, but, mentally, inferior wife, turns for
satisfaction to those courtesans, who, from their constant intercourse
with men, have acquired knowledge, and well understand how to adorn it
with the flowers of feminine grace, and to season it with the salt of a
woman's more refined and delicate wit. In Egypt it is different. A young
girl is allowed to associate freely with the most enlightened men. Youths
and maidens meet constantly on festive occasions, learn to know and love
one another. The wife is not the slave, but the friend of her husband;
the one supplies the deficiencies of the other. In weighty questions the
stronger decides, but the lesser cares of life are left to her who is the
greater in small things. The daughters grow up under careful guidance,
for the mother is neither ignorant nor inexperienced. To be virtuous and
diligent in her affairs becomes easy to a woman, for she sees that it
increases his happiness whose dearest possession she boasts of being, and
who belongs to her alone. The women only do that which pleases us! but
the Egyptian men understand the art of making us pleased with that which
is really good, and with that alone. On the shores of the Nile,
Phocylides of Miletus and Hipponax of Ephesus would never have dared to
sing their libels on women, nor could the fable of Pandora have been
possibly invented here!"
[Simonides of Amorgos, an Iambic poet, who delighted in writing
satirical verses on women. He divides them into different classes,
which he compares to unclean animals, and considers that the only
woman worthy of a husband and able to make him happy must be like
the bee. The well-known fable of Pandora owes its origin to
Simonides. He lived about 650 B. C. The Egyptians too, speak very
severely of bad women, comparing them quite in the Simonides style
to beasts of prey (hyenas, lions and panthers). We find this
sentence on a vicious woman: She is a collection of every kind of
meanness, and a bag full of wiles. Chabas, Papyr. magrque Harris.
p. 135. Phocylides of Miletus, a rough and sarcastic, but
observant man, imitated Simonides in his style of writing. But the
deformed Hipponax of Ephesus, a poet crushed down by poverty, wrote
far bitterer verses than Phocylides. He lived about 550 B. C. "His
own ugliness (according to Bernhardy) is reflected in every one of
his Choliambics." ]
"How beautifully you speak!" exclaimed Bartja. "Greek was not easy to
learn, but I am very glad now that I did not give it up in despair, and
really paid attention to Croesus' lessons."
"Who could those men have been," asked Darius, "who dared to speak evil of
women?"
"A couple of Greek poets," answered Amasis, "the boldest of men, for I
confess I would rather provoke a lioness than a woman. But these Greeks
do not know what fear is. I will give you a specimen of Hipponax's
Poetry:
"There are but two days when a wife,
Brings pleasure to her husband's life,
The wedding-day, when hopes are bright,
And the day he buries her out of his sight."
"Cease, cease," cried Ladice stopping her ears, that is too had. Now,
Persians, you can see what manner of man Amasis is. For the sake of a
joke, he will laugh at those who hold precisely the same opinion as
himself. There could not be a better husband.
"Nor a worse wife," laughed Amasis. "Thou wilt make men think that I am a
too obedient husband. But now farewell, my children; our young heroes
must look at this our city of Sais; before parting, however, I will
repeat to them what the malicious Siuionides has sung of a good wife:
"Dear to her spouse from youth to age she grows;
Fills with fair girls and sturdy boys his house;
Among all women womanliest seems,
And heavenly grace about her mild brow gleams.
A gentle wife, a noble spouse she walks,
Nor ever with the gossip mongers talks.
Such women sometimes Zeus to mortals gives,
The glory and the solace of their lives."
"Such is my Ladice! now farewell!"
"Not yet!" cried Bartja. "Let me first speak in defence of our poor
Persia and instil fresh courage into my future sister-in-law; but no!
Darius, thou must speak, thine eloquence is as great as thy skill in
figures and swordsmanship!"
"Thou speakst of me as if I were a gossip or a shopkeeper,"--[This
nickname, which Darius afterwards earned, is more fully spoken
of]--answered the son of Hystaspes. "Be it so; I have been burning all
this time to defend the customs of our country. Know then, Ladice, that
if Auramazda dispose the heart of our king in his own good ways, your
daughter will not be his slave, but his friend. Know also, that in
Persia, though certainly only at high festivals, the king's wives have
their places at the men's table, and that we pay the highest reverence to
our wives and mothers. A king of Babylon once took a Persian wife; in the
broad plains of the Euphrates she fell sick of longing for her native
mountains; he caused a gigantic structure to be raised on arches, and the
summit thereof to be covered with a depth of rich earth; caused the
choicest trees and flowers to be planted there, and watered by artificial
machinery. This wonder completed, he led his wife thither; from its top
she could look down into the plains below, as from the heights of
Rachined, and with this costly gift he presented her. Tell me, could even
an Egyptian give more?"
[This stupendous erection is said to have been constructed by
Nebuchadnezzar for his Persian wife Amytis. Curtius V. 5.
Josephus contra Apion. I. 19. Antiquities X. II. 1. Diod. II. 10.
For further particulars relative to the hanging-gardens, see later
notes.]
"And did she recover?" asked Nitetis, without raising her eyes.
"She recovered health and happiness; and you too will soon feel well and
happy in our country."
"And now," said Ladice with a smile, what, think you, contributed most to
the young queen's recovery? the beautiful mountain or the love of the
husband, who erected it for her sake?"
"Her husband's love," cried the young girls.
"But Nitetis would not disdain the mountain either," maintained Bartja,
"and I shall make it my care that whenever the court is at Babylon, she
has the hanging-gardens for her residence."
"But now come," exclaimed Amasis, "unless you wish to see the city in
darkness. Two secretaries have been awaiting me yonder for the last two
hours. Ho! Sachons! give orders to the captain of the guard to accompany
our noble guests with a hundred men."
"But why? a single guide, perhaps one of the Greek officers, would be
amply sufficient."
"No, my young friends, it is better so. Foreigners can never be too
prudent in Egypt. Do not forget this, and especially be careful not to
ridicule the sacred animals. And now farewell, my young heroes, till we
meet again this evening over a merry wine-cup."
The Persians then quitted the palace, accompanied by their interpreter, a
Greek, but who had been brought up in Egypt, and spoke both languages
with equal facility.
[Psamtik I. is said to have formed a new caste, viz.: the caste of
Interpreters, out of those Greeks who had been born and bred up in
Egypt. Herod. II. 154. Herodotus himself was probably conducted by
such a "Dragoman."]
Those streets of Sais which lay near the palace wore a pleasant aspect.
The houses, many of which were five stories high, were generally covered
with pictures or hieroglyphics; galleries with balustrades of carved and
gaily-painted wood-work, supported by columns also brightly painted, ran
round the walls surrounding the courts. In many cases the proprietor's
name and rank was to be read on the door, which was, however, well closed
and locked. Flowers and shrubs ornamented the flat roofs, on which the
Egyptians loved to spend the evening hours, unless indeed, they preferred
ascending the mosquito-tower with which nearly every house was provided.
These troublesome insects, engendered by the Nile, fly low, and these
little watch-towers were built as a protection from them.
The young Persians admired the great, almost excessive cleanliness, with
which each house, nay, even the streets themselves, literally shone. The
door-plates and knockers sparkled in the sun; paintings, balconies and
columns all had the appearance of having been only just finished, and
even the street-pavement looked as if it were often scoured.
[The streets of Egyptian towns seem to have been paved, judging from
the ruins of Alabastron and Memphis. We know at least with
certainty that this was the case with those leading to the temples.]
But as the Persians left the neighborhood of the Nile and the palace, the
streets became smaller. Sais was built on the slope of a moderately high
hill, and had only been the residence of the Pharaohs for two centuries
and a half, but, during that comparatively short interval, had risen from
an unimportant place into a town of considerable magnitude.
On its river-side the houses and streets were brilliant, but on the
hill-slope lay, with but few more respectable exceptions, miserable,
poverty-stricken huts constructed of acacia-boughs and Nile-mud. On the
north-west rose the royal citadel.
"Let us turn back here," exclaimed Gyges to his young companions. During
his father's absence he was responsible as their guide and protector, and
now perceived that the crowd of curious spectators, which had hitherto
followed them, was increasing at every step.
"I obey your orders," replied the interpreter, "but yonder in the valley,
at the foot of that hill, lies the Saitic city of the dead, and for
foreigners I should think that would be of great interest."
"Go forward!" cried Bartja. "For what did we leave Persia, if not to
behold these remarkable objects?"
On arriving at an open kind of square surrounded by workmen's booths, and
not far from the city of the dead, confused cries rose among the crowd
behind them.
[Artisans, as well among the ancient as the modern Egyptians, were
accustomed to work in the open air.]
The children shouted for joy, the women called out, and one voice louder
than the rest was heard exclaiming: "Come hither to the fore-court of the
temple, and see the works of the great magician, who comes from the
western oases of Libya and is endowed with miraculous gifts by Chunsu,
the giver of good counsels, and by the great goddess Hekt."
"Follow me to the small temple yonder," said the interpreter, "and you
will behold a strange spectacle." He pushed a way for himself and the
Persians through the crowd, obstructed in his course by many a sallow
woman and naked child; and at length came back with a priest, who
conducted the strangers into the fore-court of the temple. Here,
surrounded by various chests and boxes, stood a man in the dress of a
priest; beside him on the earth knelt two negroes. The Libyan was a man
of gigantic stature, with great suppleness of limb and a pair of piercing
black eyes. In his hand he held a wind-instrument resembling a modern
clarionet, and a number of snakes, known in Egypt to be poisonous, lay
coiling themselves over his breast and arms.
On finding himself in the presence of the Persians he bowed low, inviting
them by a solemn gesture to gaze at his performances; he then cast off
his white robe and began all kinds of tricks with the snakes.
He allowed them to bite him, till the blood trickled down his cheeks;
compelled them by the notes of his flute to assume an erect position and
perform a kind of dancing evolution; by spitting into their jaws he
transformed them to all appearance into motionless rods; and then,
dashing them all on to the earth, performed a wild dance in their midst,
yet without once touching a single snake.
Like one possessed, he contorted his pliant limbs until his eyes seemed
starting from his head and a bloody foam issued from his lips.
Suddenly he fell to the ground, apparently lifeless. A slight movement of
the lips and a low hissing whistle were the only signs of life; but, on
hearing the latter, the snakes crept up and twined themselves like living
rings around his neck, legs and body. At last he rose, sang a hymn in
praise of the divine power which had made him a magician, and then laid
the greater number of his snakes in one of the chests, retaining a few,
probably his favorites, to serve as ornaments for his neck and arms.
The second part of this performance consisted of clever conjuring-tricks,
in which he swallowed burning flax, balanced swords while dancing, their
points standing in the hollow of his eye; drew long strings and ribbons
out of the noses of the Egyptian children, exhibited the well-known
cup-and-ball trick, and, at length, raised the admiration of the
spectators to its highest pitch, by producing five living rabbits from as
many ostrich-eggs.
The Persians formed no unthankful portion of the assembled crowd; on the
contrary, this scene, so totally new, impressed them deeply.
They felt as if in the realm of miracles, and fancied they had now seen
the rarest of all Egyptian rarities. In silence they took their way back
to the handsomer streets of Sais, without noticing how many mutilated
Egyptians crossed their path. These poor disfigured creatures were indeed
no unusual sight for Asiatics, who punished many crimes by the amputation
of a limb. Had they enquired however, they would have heard that, in
Egypt, the man deprived of his hand was a convicted forger, the woman of
her nose, an adulteress; that the man without a tongue had been found
guilty of high treason or false witness; that the loss of the ears
denoted a spy, and that the pale, idiotic-looking woman yonder had been
guilty of infanticide, and had been condemned to hold the little corpse
three days and three nights in her arms. What woman could retain her
senses after these hours of torture?--[Diodorus I. 77.]
The greater number of the Egyptian penal laws not only secured the
punishment of the criminal, but rendered a repetition of the offence
impossible.
The Persian party now met with a hindrance, a large crowd having
assembled before one of the handsomest houses in the street leading to
the temple of Neith. The few windows of this house that could be seen
(the greater number opening on the garden and court) were closed with
shutters, and at the door stood an old man, dressed in the plain white
robe of a priest's servant. He was endeavoring, with loud cries, to
prevent a number of men of his own class from carrying a large chest out
of the house.
"What right have you to rob my master?" he shrieked indignantly. "I am
the guardian of this house, and when my master left for Persia (may the
gods destroy that land!) he bade me take especial care of this chest in
which his manuscripts lay."
"Compose yourself, old Hib!" shouted one of these inferior priests, the
same whose acquaintance we made on the arrival of the Asiatic Embassy.
"We are here in the name of the high-priest of the great Neith, your
master's master. There must be queer papers in this box, or Neithotep
would not have honored us with his commands to fetch them."
"But I will not allow my master's papers to be stolen," shrieked the old
man. "My master is the great physician Nebenchari, and I will secure his
rights, even if I must appeal to the king himself."
"There," cried the other, "that will do; out with the chest, you fellows.
Carry it at once to the high-priest; and you, old man, would do more
wisely to hold your tongue and remember that the high-priest is your
master as well as mine. Get into the house as quick as you can, or
to-morrow we shall have to drag you off as we did the chest to-day!" So
saying, he slammed the heavy door, the old man was flung backward into
the house and the crowd saw him no more.
The Persians had watched this scene and obtained an explanation of its
meaning from their interpreter. Zopyrus laughed on hearing that the
possessor of the stolen chest was the oculist Nebenchari, the same who
had been sent to Persia to restore the sight of the king's mother, and
whose grave, even morose temper had procured him but little love at the
court of Cambyses.
Bartja wished to ask Amasis the meaning of this strange robbery, but
Gyges begged him not to interfere in matters with which he had no
concern. Just as they reached the palace, and darkness, which in Egypt so
quickly succeeds the daylight, was already stealing over the city, Gyges
felt himself hindered from proceeding further by a firm hand on his robe,
and perceived a stranger holding his finger on his lips in token of
silence.
"When can I speak with you alone and unobserved?" he whispered.
"What do you wish from me?"
"Ask no questions, but answer me quickly. By Mithras," I have weighty
matters to disclose."
"You speak Persian, but your garments would proclaim you an Egyptian."
"I am a Persian, but answer me quickly or we shall be noticed. When can I
speak to you alone?"
"To-morrow morning."
"That is too late."
"Well then, in a quarter of an hour, when it is quite dark, at this gate
of the palace."
"I shall expect you."
So saying the man vanished. Once within the palace, Gyges left Bartja and
Zopyrus, fastened his sword into his girdle, begged Darius to do the same
and to follow him, and was soon standing again under the great portico
with the stranger, but this time in total darkness.
"Auramazda be praised that you are there!" cried the latter in Persian to
the young Lydian; "but who is that with you?"
"Darius, the son of Hystaspes, one of the Achaemenidae; and my friend."
The stranger bowed low and answered, "It is well, I feared an Egyptian
had accompanied you."
"No, we are alone and willing to hear you; but be brief. Who are you and
what do you want?"
"My name is Bubares. I served as a poor captain under the great Cyrus. At
the taking of your father's city, Sardis, the soldiers were at first
allowed to plunder freely; but on your wise father's representing to
Cyrus that to plunder a city already taken was an injury to the present,
and not to the former, possessor, they were commanded on pain of death to
deliver up their booty to their captains, and the latter to cause
everything of worth, when brought to them, to be collected in the
market-place. Gold and silver trappings lay there in abundance, costly
articles of attire studded with precious stones . . ."
"Quick, quick, our time is short," interrupted Gyges.
"You are right. I must be more brief. By keeping for myself an
ointment-box sparkling with jewels, taken from your father's palace, I
forfeited my life. Croesus, however, pleaded for me with his conqueror
Cyrus; my life and liberty were granted me, but I was declared a
dishonored man. Life in Persia became impossible with disgrace lying
heavily on my soul; I took ship from Smyrna to Cyprus, entered the army
there, fought against Amasis, and was brought hither by Phanes as a
prisoner-of-war. Having always served as a horse-soldier, I was placed
among those slaves who had charge of the king's horses, and in six years
became an overseer. Never have I forgotten the debt of gratitude I owe to
your father; and now my turn has come to render him a service."
"The matter concerns my father? then speak--tell me, I beseech you!"
"Immediately. Has Croesus offended the crown prince?"
"Not that I am aware of."
"Your father is on a visit to Rhodopis this evening, at Naukratis?"
"How did you hear this?"
"From himself. I followed him to the boat this morning and sought to cast
myself at his feet."
"And did you succeed?"
"Certainly. He spoke a few gracious words with me, but could not wait to
hear what I would say, as his companions were already on board when he
arrived. His slave Sandon, whom I know, told me that they were going to
Naukratis, and would visit the Greek woman whom they call Rhodopis."
"He spoke truly."
"Then you must speed to the rescue. At the time that the market-place was
full."
[The forenoon among the Greeks was regulated by the business of the
market. "When the market-place begins to fill, when it is full,
when it becomes empty." It would be impossible to define this
division of time exactly according to our modern methods of
computation, but it seems certain that the market was over by the
afternoon. The busiest hours were probably from 10 till 1. At the
present day the streets of Athens are crowded during those hours;
but in Summer from two to four o'clock are utterly deserted.]
"Ten carriages and two boats, full of Ethiopian soldiers under the
command of an Egyptian captain, were sent off to Naukratis to surround
the house of Rhodopis and make captives of her guests."
"Ha, treachery!" exclaimed Gyges.
"But how can they wish to injure your father?" said Darius. "They know
that the vengeance of Cambyses--"
"I only know," repeated Bubares, "that this night the house of Rhodopis,
in which your father is, will be surrounded by Ethiopian soldiers. I
myself saw to the horses which transport them thither and heard Pentaur,
one of the crown-prince's fan-bearers, call to them, 'Keep eyes and ears
open, and let the house of Rhodopis be surrounded, lest he should escape
by the back door. If possible spare his life, and kill him only if he
resist. Bring him alive to Sais, and you shall receive twenty rings of
gold.'"
[It is no longer a matter of question, that before the time of the
Persians, and therefore at this point of our history, no money had
been coined in Egypt. The precious metals were weighed out and used
as money in the shape of rings, animals, etc. On many of the
monuments we see people purchasing goods and weighing out the gold
in payment; while others are paying their tribute in gold rings.
These rings were in use as a medium of payment up to the time of the
Ptolemies. Pliny XXXIII. I. Balances with weights in the form of
animals may be seen in Wilkinson. During the reigns of the
Ptolemies many coins were struck.]
"But could that allude to my father?"
"Certainly not," cried Darius.
"It is impossible to say," murmured Bubares. "In this country one can
never know what may happen."
"How long does it take for a good horse to reach Naukratis?"
"Three hours, if he can go so long, and the Nile has not overflowed the
road too much."
"I will be there in two."
"I shall ride with you," said Darius.
"No, you must remain here with Zopyrus for Bartja's protection. Tell the
servants to get ready."
"But Gyges--"
"Yes, you will stay here and excuse me to Amasis. Say I could not come to
the evening revel on account of headache, toothache, sickness, anything
you like."
"I shall ride Bartja's Nicaean horse; and you, Bubares, will follow me on
Darius's. You will lend him, my brother?"
"If I had ten thousand, you should have them all."
"Do you know the way to Naukratis, Bubares?"
"Blindfold."
"Then go, Darius, and tell them to get your horse and Bartja's ready! To
linger would be sin. Farewell Darius, perhaps forever! Protect Bartja!
Once more, farewell!"
CHAPTER VIII.
It wanted two hours of midnight. Bright light was streaming through the
open windows of Rhodopis' house, and sounds of mirth and gaiety fell on
the ear. Her table had been adorned with special care in Croesus' honor.
On the cushions around it lay the guests with whom we are already
acquainted: Theodorus, Ibykus, Phanes, Aristomachus, the merchant
Theopompus of Miletus, Croesus and others, crowned with chaplets of
poplar and roses.
Theodorus the sculptor was speaking: "Egypt seems to me," he said, "like
a girl who persists in wearing a tight and painful shoe only because it
is of gold, while within her reach he beautiful and well-fitting slippers
in which she could move at ease, if she only would."
"You refer to the Egyptians' pertinacity in retaining traditional forms
and customs?" asked Croesus.
"Certainly I do," answered the sculptor. "Two centuries ago Egypt was
unquestionably the first of the nations. In Art and Science she far
excelled us; but we learnt their methods of working, improved on them,
held firm to no prescribed proportions, but to the natural types alone,
gave freedom and beauty to their unbending outlines, and now have left
our masters far behind us. But how was this possible? simply because the
Egyptians, bound by unalterable laws, could make no progress; we, on the
contrary, were free to pursue our course in the wide arena of art as far
as will and power would allow."
"But how can an artist be compelled to fashion statues alike, which are
meant to differ from each other in what they represent?"
"In this case that can be easily explained. The entire human body is
divided by the Egyptians into 21 1/4 parts, in accordance with which
division the proportion of each separate limb is regulated. I, myself,
have laid a wager with Amasis, in presence of the first Egyptian
sculptor, (a priest of Thebes), that, if I send my brother Telekles, in
Ephesus, dimensions, proportion and attitude, according to the Egyptian
method, he and I together can produce a statue which shall look as if
sculptured from one block and by one hand, though Telekles is to carve
the lower half at Ephesus, and I the upper here in Sais, and under the
eye of Amasis."
[These numbers, and the story which immediately follows, are taken
from Diodorus I. 98. Plato tells us that, in his time, a law
existed binding the Egyptian artists to execute their works with
exactly the same amount of beauty or its reverse, as those which had
been made more than a thousand years before. This statement is
confirmed by the monuments; but any one well acquainted with
Egyptian art can discern a marked difference in the style of each
epoch. At the time of the ancient kingdom the forms were compressed
and stunted; under Seti I. beauty of proportion reached its highest
point. During, and after the 20th dynasty, the style declined in
beauty; in the 26th, under the descendants of Psammetichus, we meet
with a last revival of art, but the ancient purity of form was never
again attained.]
"And shall you win your wager?"
"Undoubtedly. I am just going to begin this trick of art; it will as
little deserve the name of a work of art, as any Egyptian statue."
"And yet there are single sculptures here which are of exquisite
workmanship; such, for instance, as the one Amasis sent to Samos as a
present to Polykrates. In Memphis I saw a statue said to be about three
thousand years old, and to represent a king who built the great Pyramid,
which excited my admiration in every respect. With what certainty and
precision that unusually hard stone has been wrought! the muscles, how
carefully carved! especially in the breast, legs and feet; the harmony of
the features too, and, above all, the polish of the whole, leave nothing
to be desired."
"Unquestionably. In all the mechanism of art, such as precision and
certainty in working even the hardest materials, the Egyptians, though
they have so long stood still in other points, are still far before us;
but to model form with freedom, to breathe, like Prometheus, a soul into
the stone, they will never learn until their old notions on this subject
have been entirely abandoned. Even the pleasing varieties of corporeal
life cannot be represented by a system of mere proportions, much less
those which are inner and spiritual. Look at the countless statues which
have been erected during the last three thousand years, in all the
temples and palaces from Naukratis up to the Cataracts. They are all of
one type, and represent men of middle age, with grave but benevolent
countenances. Yet they are intended, some as statues of aged monarchs,
others to perpetuate the memory of young princes. The warrior and the
lawgiver, the blood-thirsty tyrant and the philanthropist are only
distinguished from each other by a difference in size, by which the
Egyptian sculptor expresses the idea of power and strength. Amasis orders
a statue just as I should a sword. Breadth and length being specified, we
both of us know quite well, before the master has begun his work, what we
shall receive when it is finished. How could I possibly fashion an infirm
old man like an eager youth? a pugilist like a runner in the foot-race? a
poet like a warrior? Put Ibykus and our Spartan friend side by side, and
tell me what you would say, were I to give to the stern warrior the
gentle features and gestures of our heart-ensnaring poet."
"Well, and how does Amasis answer your remarks on this stagnation in
art?"
"He deplores it; but does not feel himself strong enough to abolish the
restrictive laws of the priests."
"And yet," said the Delphian, "he has given a large sum towards the
embellishment of our new temple, expressly, (I use his own words) for the
promotion of Hellenic art!"
"That is admirable in him," exclaimed Croesus. "Will the Alkmaeonidae
soon have collected the three hundred talents necessary for the
completion of the temple? Were I as rich as formerly I would gladly
undertake the entire cost; notwithstanding that your malicious god so
cruelly deceived me, after all my offerings at his shrine. For when I
sent to ask whether I should begin the war with Cyrus, he returned this
answer: I should destroy a mighty kingdom by crossing the river Halys. I
trusted the god, secured the friendship of Sparta according to his
commands, crossed the boundary stream, and, in so doing, did indeed
destroy a mighty kingdom; not however that of the Medes and Persians, but
my own poor Lydia, which, as a satrapy of Cambyses, finds its loss of
independence a hard and uncongenial yoke."
"You blame the god unjustly," answered Phryxus. It cannot be his fault
that you, in your human conceit, should have misinterpreted his oracle.
The answer did not say 'the kingdom of Persia,' but 'a kingdom' should be
destroyed through your desire for war. Why did you not enquire what
kingdom was meant? Was not your son's fate truly prophesied by the
oracle? and also that on the day of misfortune he would regain his
speech? And when, after the fall of Sardis, Cyrus granted your wish to
enquire at Delphi whether the Greek gods made a rule of requiting their
benefactors by ingratitude, Loxias answered that he had willed the best
for you, but was controlled by a mightier power than himself, by that
inexorable fate which had foretold to thy great ancestor, that his fifth
successor was doomed to destruction."
"In the first days of my adversity I needed those words far more than
now," interrupted Croesus. "There was a time when I cursed your god and
his oracles; but later, when with my riches my flatterers had left me,
and I became accustomed to pronounce judgment on my own actions, I saw
clearly that not Apollo, but my own vanity had been the cause of my ruin.
How could 'the kingdom to be destroyed' possibly mean mine, the mighty
realm of the powerful Croesus, the friend of the gods, the hitherto
unconquered leader? Had a friend hinted at this interpretation of the
ambiguous oracle, I should have derided, nay, probably caused him to be
punished. For a despotic ruler is like a fiery steed; the latter
endeavors to kick him who touches his wounds with intent to heal; the
former punishes him who lays a hand on the weak or failing points of his
diseased mind. Thus I missed what, if my eyes had not been dazzled, I
might easily have seen; and now that my vision is clearer, though I have
nothing to lose, I am far more often anxious than in the days when none
could possibly lose more than I. In comparison with those days, Phryxus,
I may be called a poor man now, but Cambyses does not leave me to famish,
and I can still raise a talent for your temple."
Phryxus expressed his thanks, and Phanes remarked "The Alkmaeonida; will
be sure to erect a beautiful edifice, for they are rich and ambitious,
and desirous of gaining favor with the Amphiktyons, in order, by their
aid, to overthrow the tyrants, secure to themselves a higher position
than that of the family to which I belong, and with this, the guidance of
state-affairs."
"Is it true, as people say," asked Ibykus, "that next to Agarista with
whom Megakles received so rich a dowry, you, Croesus, have been the
largest contributor to the wealth of the Alkmaeonidae?"
"True enough," answered Croesus laughing.
"Tell us the story, I beg," said Rhodopis.
"Well," answered Croesus, "Alkmaeon of Athens once appeared at my court;
his cheerfulness and cultivation pleased me well, and I retained him near
me for some time. One day I showed him my treasure-chambers, at the sight
of which he fell into despair, called himself a common beggar and
declared that one good handful of these precious things would make him a
happy man. I at once allowed him to take as much gold away as he could
carry. What think you did Alkaemmon on this? sent for high Lydian
riding-boots, an apron and a basket, had the one secured behind him, put
the others on, and filled them all with gold, till they could hold no
more. Not content with this, he strewed gold-dust in his hair and beard
and filled his mouth to that extent that he appeared in the act of
choking. In each hand he grasped a golden dish, and thus laden dragged
himself out of the treasure-house, falling exhausted as he crossed the
threshold. Never have I laughed so heartily as at this sight."
"But did you grant him all these treasures?" said Rhodopis.
"Yes, yes, my friend; and did not think even then, that I had paid too
dearly for the experience that gold can make fools even of clever men."
"You were the most generous of monarchs," cried Phanes.
"And make a tolerably contented beggar," answered Croesus. "But tell me,
Phryxus, how much has Amasis contributed to your collection?"
"He gave fifty tons of alum."
"A royal gift!"
"And the prince Psamtik?"
"On my appealing to him by his father's munificence, he turned his back
on me, and answered with a bitter laugh: 'Collect money for the
destruction of your temple, and I am ready to double my father's
donation!'"
"The wretch!"
"Say rather: the true Egyptian! to Psamtik everything foreign is an
abomination."
"How much have the Greeks in Naukratis contributed?"
"Beside munificent private donations, each community has given twenty
minae."
"That is much."
"Philoinus, the Sybarite, alone sent me a thousand drachmm," and
accompanied his gift with a most singular epistle. May I read it aloud,
Rhodopis?"
"Certainly," answered she, "it will show you that the drunkard has
repented of his late behaviour."
The Delphian began: "Philoinus to Phryxus: It grieves me that at
Rhodopis' house the other night I did not drink more; for had I done so I
should have lost consciousness entirely, and so have been unable to
offend even the smallest insect. My confounded abstemiousness is
therefore to blame, that I can no longer enjoy a place at the best table
in all Egypt. I am thankful, however, to Rhodopis for past enjoyment, and
in memory of her glorious roastbeef (which has bred in me the wish to buy
her cook at any price) I send twelve large spits for roasting
oxen,--[Rhodopis is said to have sent such a gift to Delphi. Herod.]--and
beg they may be placed in some treasure-house at Delphi as an offering
from Rhodopis. As for myself, being a rich man, I sign my name for a
thousand drachmae, and beg that my gift may be publicly announced at the
next Pythian games. To that rude fellow, Aristomachus of Sparta, express
my thanks for the effectual manner in which he fulfilled my intention in
coming to Egypt. I came hither for the purpose of having a tooth
extracted by an Egyptian dentist said to take out teeth without causing
much pain.
[The Egyptian dentists must have been very skilful. Artificial
teeth have been discovered in the jaws of mummies. See Blumenbach
on the teeth of the ancient Egyptians, and on mummies.]
Aristomachus, however, knocked out the defective tooth and so saved me
from an operation, the thought of which had often made me tremble. On
recovering consciousness, I found that three teeth had been knocked into
my mouth, the diseased one and two others, which though healthy, would
probably at some future time have caused me pain. Salute Rhodopis and the
handsome Phanes from me. You I invite to an entertainment at my house in
Sybaris, this day year. We are accustomed to issue invitations somewhat
early, on account of my necessary preparations. I have caused this
epistle to be written by my slave Sophotatus in an adjoining chamber, as
merely to behold the labor of writing causes cramp in my fingers."
A burst of laughter arose at these words, but Rhodopis said: "This letter
gives me pleasure; it proves that Philoinus is not bad at heart. Brought
up a Sybarite." . . . She was suddenly interrupted by the voice of a
stranger, who had entered unperceived, and, after apologizing to the
venerable hostess and her guests for appearing without invitation among
them, continued thus: "I am Gyges the son of Croesus; and it has not been
merely for pastime, that I have ridden over from Sais in two hours lest I
should arrive too late!"
"Menon, a cushion for our guest!" cried Rhodopis. "Be welcome to my house
and take some repose after your wild, thoroughly Lydian, ride."
"By the dog, Gyges!" exclaimed Croesus.
[An oath of Rhadamanthus used in order to avoid mentioning the names
of the gods. Schol. Aristoph. Aves. 520.]
"What brings thee here at this hour? I begged thee not to quit Bartja's
side. . . . But how thou look'st! what is the matter? has aught happened?
speak, speak!"
In the first moment Gyges could not answer a word. To see his beloved
father, for whose very life he had been in such anxiety, a safe and happy
guest at this rich banquet, seemed to rob him of his speech a second
time. At last, however, he was able to say: "The gods be praised, my
father, that I see thee safe once more! Think not I forsook my post
thoughtlessly. Alas! I am forced to appear as a bird of evil omen in this
cheerful assembly. Know at once, ye guests, for I dare not lose time in
preparing my words, that a treacherous assault awaits ye!"
They all sprang up as if struck by lightning. Aristomachus silently
loosened his sword in its scabbard; Phanes extended his arms as if to
discern whether the old athletic elasticity still dwelt there.
"What can it be?--what is their design?" echoed from all sides.
"This house is surrounded by Ethiopian soldiers!" answered Gyges. "A
faithful fellow confided to me that the crown-prince had designs on one
of your number; he was to be taken alive if possible, but killed if he
resisted. Dreading lest thou shouldst be this victim, my father, I sped
hither. The fellow had not lied. This house is surrounded. My horse shied
on reaching your garden-gate, Rhodopis, jaded as he was. I dismounted,
and could discern behind every bush the glitter of weapons and the eager
eyes of men lying in ambush. They allowed us, however, to enter
unmolested."
At this moment Knakias rushed in crying, "Important news! On my way to
the Nile to fetch water with which to prepare the wine-cup, I have just
met a man who, in his haste, nearly ran over me.
[The water of the Nile has a very agreeable flavor. It is called by
one traveller the champagne among the waters. The ladies of the
Sultan's harem send for this water even from Constantinople, and the
Arabs say, that if Mahomet had drunk thereof he would have desired
to live for ever.]
It was an Ethiop, one of Phanes' boatmen, and he tells that just as he
sprang out of the boat to bathe, a royal bark came alongside and a
soldier asked the rest of the crew in whose service they were. On the
helmsman answering, 'in Phanes' service,' the royal boat passed on
slowly. He, however, (the rower who was bathing), seated himself in fun
on the rudder of the royal boat, and heard one Ethiopian soldier on board
say to another, 'Keep that craft well in sight; now we know where the
bird sits, and it will be easy to catch him. Remember, Psamtik has
promised us fifty gold rings if we bring the Athenian to Sais dead or
alive.' This is the report of Sebek, who has been in your service seven
years, O Phanes."
To both these accounts Phanes listened calmly. Rhodopis trembled.
Aristomachus exclaimed, "Not a hair of your head shall be touched, if
Egypt perish for it!" Croesus advised prudence. A tremendous excitement
had mastered the whole party.
At last Phanes broke silence, saying: "Reflection is never more necessary
than in a time of danger. I have thought the matter over, and see clearly
that escape will be difficult. The Egyptians will try to get rid of me
quietly. They know that I intend going on board a Phoecean trireme, which
sets sail for Sigeum at a very early hour to-morrow morning, and have
therefore no time to lose, if they will seize me. Your garden, Rhodopis,
is entirely surrounded, and were I to remain here, your house would no
longer be respected as a sanctuary; it would be searched and I taken in
it. There can be no doubt that a watch has been set over the Phoecean
ship also. Blood shall not be shed in vain on my account."
"But you dare not surrender!" cried Aristomachus.
"No, no, I have a plan," shouted Theopompus the Milesian merchant. "At
sunrise to-morrow a ship sails for Miletus laden with Egyptian corn, but
not from Naukratis, from Canopus. Take the noble Persian's horse and ride
thither. We will cut a way for you through the garden."
"But," said Gyges, "our little band is not strong enough to carry out
such an attempt. We number in all ten men, and of these only three have
swords; our enemies, on the other hand, number at least a hundred, and
are armed to the teeth."
"Lydian!" cried Aristomachus, "wert thou ten times more fainthearted than
thou art, and were our enemies double their number, I at least, will
fight them!"
Phanes grasped his friend's hand. Gyges turned pale. This brave warrior
had called him fainthearted; and again he could find no words to answer;
for at every stirring emotion his tongue failed him. Suddenly the blood
mounted to his face; his words came quickly and with decision: "Athenian,
follow me! and thou, Spartan, who art not wont to use words heedlessly,
call no man fainthearted again before thou knowest him. Friends, Phanes
is safe, Farewell, father!"
The remaining guests surveyed these two departing men in silent wonder.
As they stood there, silently listening, the sound of two horses
galloping swiftly away fell on their ear, and after a longer interval a
prolonged whistle from the Nile and a cry of distress.
"Where is Knakias?" said Rhodopis to one of her slaves.
"He went into the garden with Phanes and the Persian," was the answer,
and as it was being spoken, the old slave re-entered, pale and trembling.
"Have you seen my son?" cried Croesus. "Where is Phanes?"
"I was to bid you farewell from them both."
"Then they are gone.--Whither? How was it possible?" . . .
"The Athenian and the Persian," began the slave, "had a slight dispute in
the anteroom. This over, I was told to divest both of their robes. Phanes
then put on the stranger's trousers, coat and girdle; on his own curls he
placed the pointed Persian cap. The stranger wrapped himself in the
Athenian's chiton and mantle, placed the golden circlet above his brow,
caused the hair to be shaved from his upper lip, and ordered me to follow
him into the garden. Phanes, whom in his present dress, none could
imagine to be other than a Persian, mounted one of the horses still
waiting before the gate; the stranger called after him, 'Farewell Gyges,
farewell beloved Persian, a pleasant journey to thee, Gyges!' The
servant, who had been waiting, followed on the other horse. I could hear
the clatter of arms among the bushes, but the Athenian was allowed to
depart unmolested, the soldiers, without doubt, believing him to be a
Persian.
"On returning to the house the stranger's orders were: 'Accompany me to
Phanes' bark, and cease not to call me by the Athenian's name.' 'But the
boatmen will betray you,' I said. 'Then go alone to them,' he answered,
'and command them to receive me as their master, Phanes.' Then I prayed
him to allow me to take the dress of the fugitive and become a prey to
the pursuers; but he would by no means allow this, and said my gait and
carriage would betray me. There alas! he spoke truly, for only the free
man can walk erect; the neck of the slave is bent; the schools in which
the noble and the freeborn learn grace and beauty of movement are not for
him. And so it must remain, the children must be even as the fathers; can
the unclean onion-root produce a rose, or the unsightly radish a
hyacinth? Constant bondage bows the neck of the slave, but the
consciousness of freedom gives dignity to the stature."
"But what has become of my son?" interrupted Croesus.
"He would not accept my poor offer, and took his seat in the bark,
sending a thousand greetings unto thee, O king! I cried after him,
'Farewell Phanes! I wish thee a prosperous journey, Phanes!' At that
moment a cloud crossed the moon; and from out the thick darkness I heard
screams, and cries for help; they did not, however, last long, a shrill
whistle followed, then all was silent; and the measured strokes of oars
were the only sounds that fell on my ear. I was on the point of returning
to relate what I had seen, when the boatman Sebek swam up once more and
told as follows: The Egyptians had caused a leak to be made in Phanes'
boat, and at a short distance from land it had filled and began to sink.
On the boatmen crying for help, the royal bark, which was following, had
come up and taken the supposed Phanes on board, but had prevented the
rowers from leaving their benches. They all went down with the leaking
boat, the daring Sebek alone excepted. Gyges is on board the royal boat;
Phanes has escaped, for that whistle must have been intended for the
soldiers in ambush at the garden-gate. I searched the bushes, the
soldiers were gone, and I could hear the sound of their voices and
weapons on their way back to Sais."
The guests listened with eager attention to this tale. At its close a
mingled feeling of relief and anxiety was felt by all; relief that their
favorite companion had escaped so fearful a danger, anxiety for the brave
young Lydian who had risked his life to save him. They praised his
generosity, congratulated Croesus on possessing such a son, and finally
agreed in the conclusion, that, when the crown-prince discovered the
error into which his emissaries had fallen, he must certainly release
Gyges, and even make him compensation for what he had suffered at their
hands.
The friendship already shown by Amasis, and the fear in which he
evidently stood of the Persian power, were the thoughts which had power
to calm Croesus, who soon left, in order to pass the night at the house
of Theopompus, the Milesian merchant. At parting, Aristomachus said:
"Salute Gyges in my name; tell him I ask his forgiveness, and hope one
day either to enjoy his friendship, or, if that cannot be, to meet him as
a fair foe on the field of battle."
"Who knows what the future may bring?" answered Croesus giving his hand
to the Spartan.
CHAPTER IX.
The sun of a new day had risen over Egypt, but was still low in the east;
the copious dew, which, on the Nile, supplies the place of rain, lay
sparkling like jewels on the leaves and blossoms, and the morning air,
freshened by a north-west wind, invited those to enjoy it who could not
bear the heat of mid-day.
Through the door of the country-house, now so well known to us, two
female figures have just passed; Melitta, the old slave, and Sappho, the
grandchild of Rhodopis.
The latter is not less lovely now, than when we saw her last, asleep. She
moves through the garden with a light quick step, her white morning robe
with its wide sleeves falling in graceful drapery over her lithe limbs,
the thick brown hair straying from beneath the purple kerchief over her
head, and a merry, roguish smile lurking round her rosy mouth and in the
dimples of her cheeks and chin.
She stooped to pick a rose, dashed the dew from it into the face of her
old nurse, laughing at her naughty trick till the clear bell-like tones
rang through the garden; fixed the flower in her dress and began to sing
in a wonderfully rich and sweet voice--
Cupid once upon a bed
Of roses laid his weary head;
Luckless urchin! not to see
Within the leaves a slumbering bee.
The bee awak'd--with anger wild
The bee awak'd, and stung the child.
Loud and piteous are his cries;
To Venus quick he runs, he flies;
"Oh mother! I am wounded through--
"I die with pain--in sooth I do!
"Stung by some little angry thing.
"Some serpent on a tiny wing,
"A bee it was--for once, I know,
"I heard a rustic call it so."
"Isn't that a very pretty song?" asked the laughing girl. "How stupid of
little Eros to mistake a bee for a winged snake! Grandmother says that
the great poet Anacreon wrote another verse to this song, but she will
not teach it me. Tell me, Melitta, what can there be in that verse?
There, you are smiling; dear, darling Melitta, do sing me that one verse.
Perhaps though, you don't know it yourself? No? then certainly you can't
teach it me."
"That is a new song," answered the old woman, evading her darling's
question, "I only know the songs of the good old times. But hark! did not
you hear a knock at the gate?"
[The last lines which contain the point of this song are:
Thus he spoke, and she, the while,
Heard him with a soothing smile;
Then said, "My infant, if so much
"Thou feel the little wild bee's touch,
"How must the heart, ah! Cupid be,
"The hapless heart that's stung by thee?"
--Translation from one of Anacreon's songs]
"Yes, of course I did, and I think the sound of horses' hoofs too. Go and
see who seeks admission so early. Perhaps, after all, our kind Phanes did
not go away yesterday, and has come to bid us farewell once more."
"Phanes is gone," said Melitta, becoming serious, "and Rhodopis has
ordered me to send you in when visitors arrive. Go child, that I may open
the gate. There, they have knocked again."
Sappho pretended to run in, but instead of obeying her nurse's orders,
stopped and hid herself behind a rose-bush, hoping to catch sight of
these early guests. In the fear of needlessly distressing her, she had
not been told of the events of the previous evening, and at this early
hour could only expect to see some very intimate friend of her
grandmother's.
Melitta opened the gate and admitted a youth splendidly apparelled, and
with fair curling hair.
It was Bartja, and Sappho was so lost in wonder at his beauty, and the
Persian dress, to her so strange, that she remained motionless in her
hiding-place, her eyes fixed on his face. Just so she had pictured to
herself Apollo with the beautiful locks, guiding the sun-chariot.
As Melitta and the stranger came nearer she thrust her little head
through the roses to hear what the handsome youth was saying so kindly in
his broken Greek.
She heard him ask hurriedly after Croesus and his son; and then, from
Melitta's answer, she gathered all that had passed the evening before,
trembled for Phanes, felt so thankful to the generous Gyges, and again
wondered who this youth in royal apparel could possibly be. Rhodopis had
told her about Cyrus's heroic deeds, the fall of Croesus and the power
and wealth of the Persians, but still she had always fancied them a wild,
uncultivated people. Now, however, her interest in Persia increased with
every look at the handsome Bartja. At last Melitta went in to wake her
grandmother and announce the guest, and Sappho tried to follow her, but
Eros, the foolish boy whose ignorance she had been mocking a moment
before, had other intentions. Her dress caught in the thorns, and before
she could disengage it, the beautiful Bartja was standing before her,
helping her to get free from the treacherous bush.
Sappho could not speak a word even of thanks; she blushed deeply, and
stood smiling and ashamed, with downcast eyes.
Bartja, too, generally so full of fun and spirit, looked down at her
without speaking, the color mounting to his cheeks.
The silence, however, did not last long, for Sappho, recovering from her
fright, burst into a laugh of childish delight at the silent stranger and
the odd scene, and fled towards the house like a timid fawn.
In a moment Bartja was himself again; in two strides he reached the young
girl, quick as thought seized her hand and held it fast, notwithstanding
all her struggles.
"Let me go!" she cried half in earnest and half laughing, raising her
dark eyes appealingly to him.
"Why should I?" he answered. "I took you from the rose-bush and shall
hold you fast until you give me your sister there, the other rose, from
your bosom, to take home with me as a keepsake."
"Please let me go," repeated Sappho, "I will promise nothing unless you
let my hand go."
"But if I do, you will not run away again?"
"Certainly not."
"Well, then, I will give you your liberty, but now you must give me your
rose."
"There are plenty on the bush yonder, and more beautiful ones; choose
whichever you like. Why do you want just this one?"
"To keep it carefully in remembrance of the most beautiful maiden I ever
saw."
"Then I shall certainly not give it to you; for those are not my real
friends who tell me I am beautiful, only those who tell me I am good."
"Where did you learn that?"
"From my grandmother Rhodopis."
"Very well, then I will tell you you are better than any other maiden in
the whole world."
"How can you say such things, when you don't know me at all? Oh,
sometimes I am very naughty and disobedient. If I were really good I
should be indoors now instead of talking to you here. My grandmother has
forbidden me ever to stay in the garden when visitors are here, and
indeed I don't care for all those strange men who always talk about
things I cannot understand."
"Then perhaps you would like me to go away too?"
"Oh no, I can understand you quite well; though you cannot speak half so
beautifully as our poor Phanes for example, who was obliged to escape so
miserably yesterday evening, as I heard Melitta saying just this minute."
"Did you love Phanes?"
"Love him? Oh yes,--I was very fond of him. When I was little he always
brought me balls, dolls ninepins from Memphis and Sais; and now that I am
older he teaches me beautiful new songs."
[Jointed dolls for children. Wilkinson II. 427. Note 149. In the
Leyden Museum one of these jointed toys is to be seen, in very good
preservation.]
"As a parting gift he brought me a tiny Sicilian lapdog, which I am going
to call Argos, because he is so white and swiftfooted. But in a few days
we are to have another present from the good Phanes, for. . . . There, now
you can see what I am; I was just going to let out a great secret. My
grandmother has strictly forbidden me to tell any one what dear little
visitors we are expecting; but I feel as if I had known you a long time
already, and you have such kind eyes that I could tell you everything.
You see, when I am very happy, I have no one in the whole world to talk
to about it, except old Melitta and my grandmother, and, I don't know how
it is, that, though they love me so much, they sometimes cannot
understand how trifles can make me so happy."
"That is because they are old, and have forgotten what made them happy in
their youth. But have you no companions of your own age that you are fond
of?"
"Not one. Of course there are many other young girls beside me in
Naukratis, but my grandmother says I am not to seek their acquaintance,
and if they will not come to us I am not to go to them."
"Poor child! if you were in Persia, I could soon find you a friend. I
have a sister called Atossa, who is young and good, like you."
"Oh, what a pity that she did not come here with you!--But now you must
tell me your name."
"My name is Bartja."
"Bartja! that is a strange name! Bartja-Bartja. Do you know, I like it.
How was the son of Croesus called, who saved our Phanes so generously?"
"Gyges. Darius, Zopyrus and he are my best friends. We have sworn never
to part, and to give up our lives for one another," and that is why I
came to-day, so early and quite in secret, to help my friend Gyges, in
case he should need me."
"Then you rode here for nothing."
"No, by Mithras, that indeed I did not, for this ride brought me to you.
But now you must tell me your name."
"I am called Sappho."
"That is a pretty name, and Gyges sings me sometimes beautiful songs by a
poetess called Sappho. Are you related to her?"
"Of course. She was the sister of my grandfather Charaxus, and is called
the tenth muse or the Lesbian swan. I suppose then, your friend Gyges
speaks Greek better than you do?"
"Yes, he learnt Greek and Lydian together as a little child, and speaks
them both equally well. He can speak Persian too, perfectly; and what is
more, he knows and practises all the Persian virtues."
"Which are the highest virtues then according to you Persians?"
"Truth is the first of all; courage the second, and the third is
obedience; these three, joined with veneration for the gods, have made us
Persians great."
"But I thought you worshipped no gods?"
"Foolish child! who could live without a god, without a higher ruler?
True, they do not dwell in houses and pictures like the gods of the
Egyptians, for the whole creation is their dwelling. The Divinity, who
must be in every place, and must see and hear everything, cannot be
confined within walls."
"Where do you pray then and offer sacrifice, if you have no temples?"
"On the grandest of all altars, nature herself; our favorite altar is the
summit of a mountain. There we are nearest to our own god, Mithras, the
mighty sun, and to Auramazda, the pure creative light; for there the
light lingers latest and returns earliest."
[From Herodotus (I. 131 and 132.), and from many other sources, we
see clearly that at the time of the Achaemenidae the Persians had
neither temples nor images of their gods. Auramazda and
Angramainjus, the principles of good and evil, were invisible
existences filling all creation with their countless train of good
and evil spirits. Eternity created fire and water. From these
Ormusd (Auramazda), the good spirit, took his origin. He was
brilliant as the light, pure and good. After having, in the course
of 12000 years, created heaven, paradise and the stars, he became
aware of the existence of an evil spirit, Ahriman (Angramainjus),
black, unclean, malicious and emitting an evil odor. Ormusd
determined on his destruction, and a fierce strife began, in which
Ormusd was the victor, and the evil spirit lay 3000 years
unconscious from the effects of terror. During this interval Ormusd
created the sky, the waters, the earth, all useful plants, trees and
herbs, the ox and the first pair of human beings in one year.
Ahriman, after this, broke loose, and was overcome but not slain.
As, after death, the four elements of which all things are composed,
Earth, Air, Fire and Water, become reunited with their primitive
elements; and as, at the resurrection-day, everything that has been
severed combines once more, and nothing returns into oblivion, all
is reunited to its primitive elements, Ahriman could only have been
slain if his impurity could have been transmuted into purity, his
darkness into light. And so evil continued to exist, and to produce
impurity and evil wherever and whenever the good spirit created the
pure and good. This strife must continue until the last day; but
then Ahriman, too, will become pure and holy; the Diws or Daewa
(evil spirits) will have absorbed his evil, and themselves have
ceased to exist. For the evil spirits which dwell in every human
being, and are emanations from Ahriman, will be destroyed in the
punishment inflicted on men after death. From Vuller's Ulmai Islam
and the Zend-Avesta.]
"Light alone is pure and good; darkness is unclean and evil. Yes, maiden,
believe me, God is nearest to us on the mountains; they are his favorite
resting-place. Have you never stood on the wooded summit of a high
mountain, and felt, amid the solemn silence of nature, the still and
soft, but awful breath of Divinity hovering around you? Have you
prostrated yourself in the green forest, by a pure spring, or beneath the
open sky, and listened for the voice of God speaking from among the
leaves and waters? Have you beheld the flame leaping up to its parent the
sun, and bearing with it, in the rising column of smoke, our prayers to
the radiant Creator? You listen now in wonder, but I tell you, you would
kneel and worship too with me, could I but take you to one of our
mountain-altars."
"Oh! if I only could go there with you! if I might only once look down
from some high mountain over all the woods and meadows, rivers and
valleys. I think, up there, where nothing could be hidden from my eyes, I
should feel like an all-seeing Divinity myself. But hark, my grandmother
is calling. I must go."
"Oh, do not leave me yet!"
"Is not obedience one of the Persian virtues?"
"But my rose?"
"Here it is."
"Shall you remember me?"
"Why should I not?"
"Sweet maiden, forgive me if I ask one more favor."
"Yes, but ask it quickly, for my grandmother has just called again."
"Take my diamond star as a remembrance of this hour."
"No, I dare not."
"Oh, do, do take it. My father gave it me as a reward, the first time
that I killed a bear with my own hand, and it has been my dearest
treasure till to-day, but now you shall have it, for you are dearer to me
than anything else in the world."
Saying this, he took the chain and star from his breast, and tried to
hang it round Sappho's neck. She resisted, but Bartja threw his arms
round her, kissed her forehead, called her his only love, and looking
down deep into the eyes of the trembling child, placed it round her neck
by gentle force.
Rhodopis called a third time. Sappho broke from the young prince's
embrace, and was running away, but turned once more at his earnest
entreaty and the question, "When may I see you again?" and answered
softly, "To-morrow morning at this rose-bush."
"Which held you fast to be my friend."
Sappho sped towards the house. Rhodopis received Bartja, and communicated
to him all she knew of his friend's fate, after which the young Persian
departed for Sais.
When Rhodopis visited her grandchild's bed that evening, she did not find
her sleeping peacefully as usual; her lips moved, and she sighed deeply,
as if disturbed by vexing dreams.
On his way back, Bartja met Darius and Zopyrus, who had followed at once
on hearing of their friend's secret departure. They little guessed that
instead of encountering an enemy, Bartja had met his first love. Croesus
reached Sais a short time before the three friends. He went at once to
the king and informed him without reserve of the events of the preceding
evening. Amasis pretended much surprise at his son's conduct, assured his
friend that Gyges should be released at once, and indulged in some
ironical jokes at the discomfiture of Psamtik's attempt to revenge
himself.
Croesus had no sooner quitted the king than the crown-prince was
announced.
CHAPTER X.
Amasis received his son with a burst of laughter, and without noticing
Psamtik's pale and troubled countenance, shouted: "Did not I tell thee,
that a simple Egyptian would find it no easy task to catch such a Greek
fox? I would have given ten cities to have been by, when thy captive
proved to be the stammering Lydian instead of the voluble Athenian."
Psamtik grew paler and paler, and trembling with rage, answered in a
suppressed voice: "Is it well, my father, thus to rejoice at an affront
offered to thy son? I swear, by the eternal gods, that but for Cambyses'
sake that shameless Lydian had not seen the light of another day. But
what is it to thee, that thy son becomes a laughing-stock to these
beggarly Greeks!"
"Abuse not those who have outwitted thee."
"Outwitted! my plan was so subtly laid, that . . .
"The finer the web, the sooner broken."
"That that intriguing Greek could not possibly have escaped, if, in
violation of all established precedents; the envoy of a foreign power had
not taken it upon himself to rescue a man whom we had condemned."
"There thou art in error, my son. We are not speaking of the execution of
a judicial sentence, but of the success or failure of an attempt at
personal revenge."
"The agents employed were, however, commissioned by the king, and
therefore the smallest satisfaction that I can demand of thee, is to
solicit from Cambyses the punishment of him who has interfered in the
execution of the royal decrees. In Persia, where men bow to the king's
will as to the will of a god, this crime will be seen in all its
heinousness. The punishment of Gyges is a debt which Cambyses owes us."
"But I have no intention of demanding the payment of this debt," answered
Amasis. "On the contrary, I am thankful that Phanes has escaped. Gyges
has saved my soul from the guilt of shedding innocent blood, and thine
from the reproach of having revenged thyself meanly on a man, to whom thy
father is indebted."
"Wilt thou then conceal the whole affair from Cambyses?"
"No, I shall mention it jestingly in a letter, as my manner is, and at
the same time caution him against Phanes. I shall tell him that he has
barely escaped my vengeance, and will therefore certainly endeavor to
stir up the power of Persia against Egypt; and shall entreat my future
son-in-law to close his ears to this false accuser. Croesus and Gyges can
help us by their friendship more than Phanes can injure by his hatred."
"Is this then thy final resolve? Can I expect no satisfaction?"
"None. I abide by what I have said."
"Then tremble, not alone before Phanes, but before another--before one
who holds thee in his power, and who himself is in ours."
"Thou thinkest to alarm me; thou wouldst rend the bond formed only
yesterday? Psamtik, Psamtik, I counsel thee to remember, that thou
standest before thy father and thy king."
"And thou, forget not that I am thy son! If thou compell'st me to forget
that the gods appointed thee to be my father--if I can hope for no help
from thee, then I will resort to my own weapons."
"I am curious to learn what these may be."
"And I need not conceal them. Know then that the oculist Nebenchari is in
our power."
Amasis turned pale.
"Before thou couldst possibly imagine that Cambyses would sue for the
hand of thy daughter, thou sentest this man to the distant realm of
Persia, in order to rid thyself of one who shared thy knowledge of the
real descent of my, so-called, sister Nitetis. He is still there, and at
a hint from the priests will disclose to Cambyses that he has been
deceived, and that thou hast ventured to send him, instead of thine own,
the child of thy dethroned predecessor Hophra. All Nebenchari's papers
are in our possession, the most important being a letter in thine own
hand promising his father, who assisted at Nitetis' birth, a thousand
gold rings, as an inducement to secrecy even from the priests."
"In whose hands are these papers?" asked Amasis in a freezing tone.
"In the hands of the priesthood."
"Who speak by thy mouth?"
"Thou hast said it."
"Repeat then thy requests."
"Entreat Cambyses to punish Gyges, and grant me free powers to pursue the
escaped Phanes as it shall seem good in mine eyes."
"Is that all?"
"Bind thyself by a solemn oath to the priests, that the Greeks shall be
prevented from erecting any more temples to their false gods in Egypt,
and that the building of the temple to Apollo, in Memphis, shall be
discontinued."
"I expected these demands. The priests have discovered a sharp weapon to
wield against me. Well, I am prepared to yield to the wishes of my
enemies, with whom thou hast leagued thyself, but only on two conditions.
First, I insist that the letter, which I confess to have written to the
father of Nebenchari in a moment of inconsideration, be restored to me.
If left in the hands of thy party, it could reduce me from a king to the
contemptible slave of priestly intrigue."
"That wish is reasonable. The letter shall be returned to thee, if. . . . "
"Not another if! on the contrary, know that I consider thy petition for
the punishment of Gyges so imprudent, that I refuse to grant it. Now
leave me and appear not again before mine eyes until I summon thee!
Yesterday I gained a son, only to lose him to-day. Rise! I demand no
tokens of a love and humility, which thou hast never felt. Go to the
priests when thou needest comfort and counsel, and see if they can supply
a father's place. Tell Neithotep, in whose hands thou art as wax, that he
has found the best means of forcing me to grant demands, which otherwise
I should have refused. Hitherto I have been willing to make every
sacrifice for the sake of upholding Egypt's greatness; but now, when I
see that, to attain their own ends, the priests can strive to move me by
the threat of treachery to their own country, I feel inclined to regard
this privileged caste as a more dangerous enemy to Egypt, than even the
Persians. Beware, beware! This once, having brought danger upon Egypt
through my own fatherly weakness, I give way to the intrigues of my
enemies; but, for the future, I swear by the great goddess Neith, that
men shall see and feel I am king; the entire priesthood shall be
sacrificed rather than the smallest fraction of my royal will!
Silence--depart!"
The prince left, but this time a longer interval was necessary, before
the king could regain even outward cheerfulness sufficient to enable him
to appear before his guests.
Psamtik went at once to the commander of the native troops, ordered him
to banish the Egyptian captain who had failed in executing his revengeful
plans, to the quarries of Thebais, and to send the Ethiopians back to
their native country. He then hurried to the high-priest of Neith, to
inform him how much he had been able to extort from the king,
Neithotep shook his head doubtfully on hearing of Amasis' threats, and
dismissed the prince with a few words of exhortation, a practice he never
omitted.
Psamtik returned home, his heart oppressed and his mind clouded with a
sense of unsatisfied revenge, of a new and unhappy rupture with his
father, a fear of foreign derision, a feeling of his subjection to the
will of the priests, and of a gloomy fate which had hung over his head
since his birth.
His once beautiful wife was dead; and, of five blooming children, only
one daughter remained to him, and a little son, whom he loved tenderly,
and to whom in this sad moment he felt drawn. For the blue eyes and
laughing mouth of his child were the only objects that ever thawed this
man's icy heart, and from these he now hoped for consolation and courage
on his weary road through life.
"Where is my son?" he asked of the first attendant who crossed his path.
"The king has just sent for the Prince Necho and his nurse," answered the
man.
At this moment the high-steward of the prince's household approached, and
with a low obeisance delivered to Psamtik a sealed papyrus letter, with
the words: "From your father, the king."
In angry haste he broke the yellow wax of the seal bearing the king's
name, and read: "I have sent for thy son, that he may not become, like
his father, a blind instrument in the hands of the priesthood, forgetful
of what is due to himself and his country. His education shall be my
care, for the impressions of childhood affect the whole of a man's later
life. Thou canst see him if thou wilt, but I must be acquainted with thy
intention beforehand."
[Signet rings were worn by the Egyptians at a very early period.
Thus, in Genesis 41. 42., Pharaoh puts his ring on Joseph's hand.
In the Berlin Museum and all other collections of Egyptian
antiquities, numbers of these rings are to be found, many of which
are more than 4000 years old.]
Psamtik concealed his indignation from the surrounding attendants with
difficulty. The mere wish of a royal father had, according to Egyptian
custom, as much weight as the strictest command. After reflecting a few
moments, he called for huntsmen, dogs, bows and lances, sprang into a
light chariot and commanded the charioteer to drive him to the western
marshes, where, in pursuing the wild beasts of the desert, he could
forget the weight of his own cares and wreak on innocent creatures his
hitherto baffled vengeance.
Gyges was released immediately after the conversation between his father
and Amasis, and welcomed with acclamations of joy by his companions. The
Pharaoh seemed desirous of atoning for the imprisonment of his friend's
son by doubling his favors, for on the same day Gyges received from the
king a magnificent chariot drawn by two noble brown steeds, and was
begged to take back with him to Persia a curiously-wrought set of
draughts, as a remembrance of Sais. The separate pieces were made of
ebony and ivory, some being curiously inlaid with sentences, in
hieroglyphics of gold and silver.
Amasis laughed heartily with his friends at Gyges' artifice, allowed the
young heroes to mix freely with his family, and behaved towards them
himself as a jovial father towards his merry sons. That the ancient
Egyptian was not quite extinguished in him could only be discerned at
meal-times, when a separate table was allotted to the Persians. The
religion of his ancestors would have pronounced him defiled, had he eaten
at the same table with men of another nation.
[Herodotus II. 41. says that the Egyptians neither kissed, nor ate
out of the same dish with foreigners, nay, indeed, that they refused
to touch meat, in the cutting up of which the knife of a Greek had
been used. Nor were the lesser dynasties of the Delta allowed,
according to the Stela of Pianchi, to cross the threshold of the
Pharaohs because they were unclean and ate fish. In the book of
Genesis, the brethren of Joseph were not allowed to eat bread with
the Egyptians.]
When Amasis, at last, three days after the release of Gyges, declared
that his daughter Nitetis would be prepared to depart for Asia in the
course of two more weeks, all the Persians regretted that their stay in
Egypt was so near its close.
Croesus had enjoyed the society of the Samian poets and sculptors. Gyges
had shared his father's preference for Greek art and artists. Darius, who
had formerly studied astronomy in Babylon, was one evening observing the
heavens, when, to his surprise, he was addressed by the aged Neithotep
and invited to follow him on to the temple-roof. Darius, ever eager to
acquire knowledge, did not wait to be asked twice, and was to be found
there every night in earnest attention to the old priest's lessons.
On one occasion Psamtik met him thus with his master, and asked the
latter what could have induced him to initiate a Persian in the Egyptian
mysteries.
"I am only teaching him," answered the high-priest, "what is as well
known to every learned Chaldee in Babylon as to ourselves, and am thereby
gaining the friendship of a man, whose stars as far outshine those of
Cambyses as the sun outshines the moon. This Darius, I tell thee, will be
a mighty ruler. I have even seen the beams of his planet shining over
Egypt. The truly wise man extends his gaze into the future, regards the
objects lying on either side of his road, as well as the road itself.
Thou canst not know in which of the many houses by which thou passest
daily, a future benefactor may not have been reared for thee. Leave
nought unnoticed that lies in thy path, but above all direct thy gaze
upward to the stars. As the faithful dog lies in wait night after night
for thieves, so have I watched these pilgrims of the heavens fifty years
long--these foretellers of the fates of men, burning in ethereal space,
and announcing, not only the return of summer and winter, but the arrival
of good and bad fortune, honor and disgrace. These are the unerring
guides, who have pointed out to me in Darius a plant, that will one day
wax into a mighty tree."
To Bartja, Darius' nightly studies were especially welcome; they
necessitated more sleep in the morning, and so rendered Bartja's stolen
early rides to Naukratis, (on which Zopyrus, to whom he had confided his
secret, accompanied him), easier of accomplishment. During the interviews
with Sappho, Zopyrus and the attendants used all their endeavors to kill
a few snipes, jackals or jerboas. They could then, on their return,
maintain to their Mentor Croesus, that they had been pursuing
fieldsports, the favorite occupation of the Persian nobility.
The change which the power of a first love had wrought in the innermost
character of Bartja, passed unnoticed by all but Tachot, the daughter of
Amasis. From the first day on which they had spoken together she had
loved him, and her quick feelings told her at once that something had
happened to estrange him from herself. Formerly his behavior had been
that of a brother, and he had sought her companionship; but now he
carefully avoided every approach to intimacy, for he had guessed her
secret and felt as if even a kind look would have been an offence against
his loyalty to Sappho.
In her distress at this change Tachot confided her sorrows to Nitetis.
The latter bade her take courage, and the two girls built many a castle
in the air, picturing to themselves the happiness of being always
together at one court, and married to two royal brothers. But as the days
went by, the visits of the handsome prince became more and more rare, and
when he did come, his behavior to Tachot was cold and distant. Yet the
poor girl could not but confess that Bartja had grown handsomer and more
manly during his stay in Egypt. An expression of proud and yet gentle
consciousness lay beaming in his large eyes, and a strange dreamy air of
rest often took the place of his former gay spirits. His cheeks had lost
their brilliant color, but that added to his beauty, while it lessened
hers, who, like him, became paler from day to day.
Melitta, the old slave, had taken the lovers under her protection. She
had surprised them one morning, but the prince had given her such rich
presents, and her darling had begged, flattered and coaxed so sweetly,
that at last Melitta promised to keep their secret, and later, yielding
to that natural impulse which moves all old women to favor lovers, had
even given them every assistance in her power. She already saw her "sweet
child" mistress of a hemisphere, often addressed her as "my Princess" and
"my Queen" when none were by to hear, and in many a weak moment imagined
a brilliant future for herself in some high office at the Persian court.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A kind word hath far more power than an angry one
Abuse not those who have outwitted thee
Cannot understand how trifles can make me so happy
Confess I would rather provoke a lioness than a woman
Curiosity is a woman's vice
I cannot. . . . Say rather: I will not
In this immense temple man seemed a dwarf in his own eyes
Know how to honor beauty; and prove it by taking many wives
Mosquito-tower with which nearly every house was provided
Natural impulse which moves all old women to favor lovers
Sent for a second interpreter
Sing their libels on women (Greek Philosophers)
Those are not my real friends who tell me I am beautiful
Young Greek girls pass their sad childhood in close rooms
AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS.
By Georg Ebers
Volume 4.
CHAPTER XI.
Three days before the time fixed for the departure of Nitetis, Rhodopis
had invited a large number of guests to her house at Naukratis, amongst
whom Croesus and Gyges were included.
The two lovers had agreed to meet in the garden, protected by the
darkness and the old slave, while the guests were occupied at the
banquet. Melitta, therefore, having convinced herself that the guests
were thoroughly absorbed in conversation, opened the garden-gate,
admitted the prince, brought Sappho to him, and then retired, promising
to warn them of any intruder by clapping her hands.
"I shall only have you near me three days longer," whispered Sappho. "Do
you know, sometimes it seems to me as if I had only seen you yesterday
for the first time; but generally I feel as if you had belonged to me for
a whole eternity, and I had loved you all my life."
"To me too it seems as if you had always been mine, for I cannot imagine
how I could ever have existed without you. If only the parting were over
and we were together again!"
"Oh, believe me, that will pass more quickly than you fancy. Of course it
will seem long to wait--very long; but when it is over, and we are
together again, I think it will seem as if we had never been parted. So
it has been with me every day. How I have longed for the morning to come
and bring you with it! but when it came and you were sitting by my side,
I felt as if I had had you all the time and your hand had never left my
head."
"And yet a strange feeling of fear comes over me, when I think of our
parting hour."
"I do not fear it so very much. I know my heart will bleed when you say
farewell, but I am sure you will come back and will not have forgotten
me. Melitta wanted to enquire of the Oracle whether you would remain
faithful; and to question an old woman who has just come from Phrygia and
can conjure by night from drawn cords, with incense, styrax, moon-shaped
cakes, and wild-briar leaves; but I would have none of this, for my heart
knows better than the Pythia, the cords, or the smoke of sacrifice, that
you will be true to me, and love me always."
"And your heart speaks the truth."
"But I have sometimes been afraid; and have blown into a poppy-leaf, and
struck it, as the young girls here do. If it broke with a loud crack I
was very happy, and cried, 'Ah! he will not forget!' but if the leaf tore
without a sound I felt sad. I dare say I did this a hundred times, but
generally the leaf gave the wished-for sound, and I had much oftener
reason to be joyful than sad."
"May it be ever thus!"
"It must be! but dearest, do not speak so loudly; I see Knakias going
down to the Nile for water and he will hear us."
"Well, I will speak low. There, I will stroke back your silky hair and
whisper in your ear 'I love you.' Could you understand?"
"My grandmother says that it is easy to understand what we like to hear;
but if you had just whispered, 'I hate you,' your eyes would have told me
with a thousand glad voices that you loved me. Silent eyes are much more
eloquent than all the tongues in the world."
"If I could only speak the beautiful Greek language as you do, I would.."
"Oh, I am so glad you cannot, for if you could tell me all you feel, I
think you would not look into my eyes so lovingly. Words are nothing.
Listen to the nightingale yonder! She never had the gift of speech and
yet I think I can understand her."
"Will you confide her secret to me? I should like to know what Gulgul, as
we Persians call the nightingale, has to talk about to her mate in the
rose-bush. May you betray her secret?"
"I will whisper it softly. Philomel sings to her mate 'I love thee,' and
he answers, (don't you hear him?), 'Itys, ito, itys.'"
"And what does that mean, 'Ito, ito?'"
"I accept it."
"And Itys?"
"Oh, that must be explained, to be rightly understood. Itys is a circle;
and a circle, I was always taught, is the symbol of eternity, having
neither beginning nor end; so the nightingale sings, 'I accept it for
eternity.'"
"And if I say to you, 'I love thee?'"
"Then I shall answer gladly, like the sweet nightingale, 'I accept it for
to-day, to-morrow, for all eternity!'"
"What a wonderful night it is! everything so still and silent; I do not
even hear the nightingale now; she is sitting in the acacia-tree among
the bunches of sweet blossoms. I can see the tops of the palm-trees in
the Nile, and the moon's reflection between them, glistening like a white
swan."
"Yes, her rays are over every living thing like silver fetters, and the
whole world lies motionless beneath them like a captive woman. Happy as I
feel now, yet I could not even laugh, and still less speak in a loud
voice."
"Then whisper, or sing!"
"Yes, that is the best. Give me a lyre. Thank you. Now I will lean my
head on your breast, and sing you a little, quiet, peaceful song. It was
written by Alkman, the Lydian, who lived in Sparta, in praise of night
and her stillness. You must listen though, for this low, sweet
slumber-song must only leave the lips like a gentle wind. Do not kiss me
any more, please, till I have finished; then I will ask you to thank me
with a kiss:
"Now o'er the drowsy earth still night prevails,
Calm sleep the mountain tops and shady vales,
The rugged cliffs and hollow glens;
The wild beasts slumber in their dens;
The cattle on the bill. Deep in the sea
The countless finny race and monster brood
Tranquil repose. Even the busy bee
Forgets her daily toil. The silent wood
No more with noisy hum of insect rings;
And all the feathered tribe, by gentle sleep subdued,
Roost in the glade and hang their drooping wings."
--Translation by Colonel Mure.
"Now, dearest, where is my kiss?"
"I had forgotten it in listening, just as before I forgot to listen in
kissing."
"You are too bad. But tell me, is not my song lovely?"
"Yes, beautiful, like everything else you sing."
"And the Greek poets write?"
"Yes, there you are right too, I admit."
"Are there no poets in Persia?"
"How can you ask such a question? How could a nation, who despised song,
pretend to any nobility of feeling?"
"But you have some very bad customs."
"Well?"
"You take so many wives."
"My Sappho . . ."
"Do not misunderstand me. I love you so much, that I have no other wish
than to see you happy and be allowed to be always with you. If, by taking
me for your only wife, you would outrage the laws of your country, if you
would thereby expose yourself to contempt, or even blame, (for who could
dare to despise my Bartja!) then take other wives; but let me have you,
for myself alone, at least two, or perhaps even three years. Will you
promise this, Bartja?"
"I will."
"And then, when my time has passed, and you must yield to the customs of
your country (for it will not be love that leads you to bring home a
second wife), then let me be the first among your slaves. Oh! I have
pictured that so delightfully to myself. When you go to war I shall set
the tiara on your head, gird on the sword, and place the lance in your
hand; and when you return a conqueror, I shall be the first to crown you
with the wreath of victory. When you ride out to the chase, mine will be
the duty of buckling on your spurs, and when you go to the banquet, of
adorning and anointing you, winding the garlands of poplar and roses and
twining them around your forehead and shoulders. If wounded, I will be
your nurse; will never stir from your side if you are ill, and when I see
you happy will retire, and feast my eyes from afar on your glory and
happiness. Then perchance you will call me to your side, and your kiss
will say, 'I am content with my Sappho, I love her still.'"
"O Sappho, wert thou only my wife now!--to-day! The man who possesses
such a treasure as I have in thee, will guard it carefully, but never
care to seek for others which, by its side, can only show their miserable
poverty. He who has once loved thee, can never love another: I know it is
the custom in my country to have many wives, but this is only allowed;
there is no law to enjoin it. My father had, it is true, a hundred female
slaves, but only one real, true wife, our mother Kassandane."
"And I will be your Kassandane."
"No, my Sappho, for what you will be to me, no woman ever yet was to her
husband."
"When shall you come to fetch me?"
"As soon as I can, and am permitted to do so."
"Then I ought to be able to wait patiently."
"And shall I ever hear from you?"
"Oh, I shall write long, long letters, and charge every wind with loving
messages for you."
"Yes, do so, my darling; and as to the letters, give them to the
messenger who will bring Nitetis tidings from Egypt from time to time."
"Where shall I find him?"
"I will see that a man is stationed at Naukratis, to take charge of
everything you send to him. All this I will settle with Melitta."
"Yes, we can trust her, she is prudent and faithful; but I have another
friend, who is dearer to me than any one else excepting you, and who
loves me too better than any one else does, but you--"
"You mean your grandmother Rhodopis."
"Yes, my faithful guardian and teacher."
"Ah, she is a noble woman. Croesus considers her the most excellent among
women, and he has studied mankind as the physicians do plants and herbs.
He knows that rank poison lies hidden in some, in others healing
cordials, and often says that Rhodopis is like a rose which, while fading
away herself, and dropping leaf after leaf, continues to shed perfume and
quickening balsam for the sick and weak, and awaits in patience the wind
which at last shall waft her from us."
"The gods grant that she may be with us for a long time yet! Dearest,
will you grant me one great favor?"
"It is granted before I hear it."
"When you take me home, do not leave Rhodopis here. She must come with
us. She is so kind and loves me so fervently, that what makes me happy
will make her so too, and whatever is dear to me, will seem to her worthy
of being loved."
"She shall be the first among our guests."
"Now I am quite happy and satisfied, for I am necessary to my
grandmother; she could not live without her child. I laugh her cares and
sorrows away, and when she is singing to me, or teaching me how to guide
the style, or strike the lute, a clearer light beams from her brow, the
furrows ploughed by grief disappear, her gentle eyes laugh, and she seems
to forget the evil past in the happy present."
"Before we part, I will ask her whether she will follow us home."
"Oh, how glad that makes me! and do you know, the first days of our
absence from each other do not seem so very dreadful to me. Now you are
to be my husband, I may surely tell you everything that pains or pleases
me, even when I dare not tell any one else, and so you must know, that,
when you leave, we expect two little visitors; they are the children of
the kind Phanes, whom your friend Gyges saved so nobly. I mean to be like
a mother to the little creatures, and when they have been good I shall
sing them a story of a prince, a brave hero, who took a simple maiden to
be his wife; and when I describe the prince I shall have you in my mind,
and though my little listeners will not guess it, I shall be describing
you from head to foot. My prince shall be tall like you, shall have your
golden curls and blue eyes, and your rich, royal dress shall adorn his
noble figure. Your generous heart, your love of truth, and your beautiful
reverence for the gods, your courage and heroism, in short, every thing
that I love and honor in you, I shall give to the hero of my tale. How
the children will listen! and when they cry, 'Oh, how we love the prince,
how good and beautiful he must be! if we could only see him? then I shall
press them close to my heart and kiss them as I kiss you now, and so they
will have gained their wish, for as you are enthroned in my heart, you
must be living within me and therefore near to them, and when they
embrace me they will embrace you too."
"And I shall go to my little sister Atossa and tell her all I have seen
on my journey, and when I speak of the Greeks, their grace, their
glorious works of art, and their beautiful women, I shall describe the
golden Aphrodite in your lovely likeness. I shall tell her of your
virtue, your beauty and modesty, of your singing, which is so sweet that
even the nightingale is silent in order to listen to it, of your love and
tenderness. But all this I shall tell her belongs to the divine Cypris,
and when she cries, 'O Aphrodite, could I but see thee!' I too shall kiss
my sister."
"Hark, what was that? Melitta surely clapped her hands. Farewell, we must
not stay! but we shall soon see each other again."
"One more kiss!"
"Farewell!"
Melitta had fallen asleep at her post, overcome by age and weariness. Her
dreams were suddenly disturbed by a loud noise, and she clapped her hands
directly to warn the lovers and call Sappho, as she perceived by the
stars that the dawn was not far off.
As the two approached the house, they discovered that the noise which had
awakened the old slave, proceeded from the guests, who were preparing for
departure.
Urging her to make the greatest haste, Melitta pushed the frightened girl
into the house, took her at once to her sleeping-room, and was beginning
to undress her when Rhodopis entered.
"You are still up, Sappho?" she asked.
"What is this, my child?"
Melitta trembled and had a falsehood ready on her lips, but Sappho,
throwing herself into her grandmother's arms, embraced her tenderly and
told the whole story of her love.
Rhodopis turned pale, ordered Melitta to leave the chamber, and, placing
herself in front of her grandchild, laid both hands on her shoulders and
said earnestly, "Look into my eyes, Sappho. Canst thou look at me as
happily and as innocently, as thou couldst before this Persian came to
us?"
The girl raised her eyes at once with a joyful smile; then Rhodopis
clasped her to her bosom, kissed her and continued: "Since thou wert a
little child my constant effort has been to train thee to a noble
maidenhood and guard thee from the approach of love. I had intended, in
accordance with the customs of our country, to choose a fitting husband
for thee shortly myself, to whose care I should have committed thee; but
the gods willed differently.
[The Spartans married for love, but the Athenians were accustomed to
negotiate their marriages with the parents of the bride alone.]
Eros mocks all human efforts to resist or confine him; warm AEolian blood
runs in thy veins and demands love; the passionate heart of thy Lesbian
forefathers beats in thy breast.
[Charaxus, the grandfather of our heroine, and brother of the
poetess Sappho, was, as a Lesbian, an AEolian Greek.]
What has happened cannot now be undone. Treasure these happy hours of a
first, pure love; hold them fast in the chambers of memory, for to every
human being there must come, sooner or later, a present so sad and
desolate, that the beautiful past is all he has to live upon. Remember
this handsome prince in silence, bid him farewell when he departs to his
native country, but beware of hoping to see him again. The Persians are
fickle and inconstant, lovers of everything new and foreign. The prince
has been fascinated by thy sweetness and grace. He loves thee ardently
now, but remember, he is young and handsome, courted by every one, and a
Persian. Give him up that he may not abandon thee!"
"But how can I, grandmother? I have sworn to be faithful to him for
ever."
"Oh, children! Ye play with eternity as if it were but a passing moment!
I could blame thee for thus plighting thy troth, but I rejoice that thou
regardest the oath as binding. I detest the blasphemous proverb: 'Zeus
pays no heed to lovers' oaths.' Why should an oath touching the best and
holiest feelings of humanity be regarded by the Deity, as inferior in
importance to asseverations respecting the trifling questions of mine and
thine? Keep thy promise then,--hold fast thy love, but prepare to
renounce thy lover."
"Never, grandmother! could I ever have loved Bartja, if I had not trusted
him? Just because he is a Persian and holds truth to be the highest
virtue, I may venture to hope that he will remember his oath, and,
notwithstanding those evil customs of the Asiatics, will take and keep me
as his only wife."
"But if he should forget, thy youth will be passed in mourning, and with
an embittered heart . . ."
"O, dear kind grandmother, pray do not speak of such dreadful things. If
you knew him as well as I do, you would rejoice with me, and would tell
me I was right to believe that the Nile may dry up and the Pyramids
crumble into ruins, before my Bartja can ever deceive me!"
The girl spoke these words with such a joyful, perfect confidence, and
her eyes, though filled with tears, were so brilliant with happiness and
warmth of feeling, that Rhodopis' face grew cheerful too.
Sappho threw her arms again round her grandmother, told her every word
that Bartja had said to her, and ended the long account by exclaiming:
"Oh, grandmother, I am so happy, so very happy, and if you will come with
us to Persia, I shall have nothing more to wish from the Immortals."
"That will not last long," said Rhodopis. "The gods cast envious glances
at the happiness of mortals; they measure our portion of evil with lavish
hands, and give us but a scanty allowance of good. But now go to bed, my
child, and let us pray together that all may end happily. I met thee this
morning as a child, I part from thee to-night a woman; and, when thou art
a wife, may thy kiss be as joyful as the one thou givest me now.
To-morrow I will talk the matter over with Croesus. He must decide
whether I dare allow thee to await the return of the Persian prince, or
whether I must entreat thee to forget him and become the domestic wife of
a Greek husband. Sleep well, my darling, thy grandmother will wake and
watch for thee."
Sappho's happy fancies soon cradled her to sleep; but Rhodopis remained
awake watching the day dawn, and the sun rise, her mind occupied with
thoughts which brought smiles and frowns across her countenance in rapid
succession.
The next morning she sent to Croesus, begging him to grant her an hour's
interview, acquainted him with every particular she had heard from
Sappho, and concluded her tale with these words: "I know not what demands
may be made on the consort of a Persian king, but I can truly say that I
believe Sappho to be worthy of the first monarch of the world. Her father
was free and of noble birth, and I have heard that, by Persian law, the
descent of a child is determined by the rank of the father only. In
Egypt, too, the descendants of a female slave enjoy the same rights as
those of a princess, if they owe their existence to the same father."
"I have listened to you in silence," answered Croesus, "and must confess,
that, like yourself, I do not know in this moment whether to be glad or
sorry for this attachment. Cambyses and Kassandane (the king's and
Bartja's mother) wished to see the prince married before we left Persia,
for the king has no children, and should he remain childless, the only
hope for the family of Cyrus rests on Bartja, as the great founder of the
Persian empire left but two sons,--Cambyses, and him who is now the
suitor of your granddaughter. The latter is the hope and pride of the
entire Persian nation, high and low; the darling of the people; generous,
and noble, handsome, virtuous, and worthy of their love. It is indeed
expected that the princes shall marry in their own family, the
Achaemenidae; but the Persians have an unbounded predilection for
everything foreign. Enchanted with the beauty of your granddaughter, and
rendered indulgent by their partiality for Bartja, they would easily
forgive this breach of an ancient custom. Indeed, if the king gives his
approval, no objection on the part of his subjects can be entertained.
The history of Iran too offers a sufficient number of examples, in which
even slaves became the mothers of kings. The queen mother, whose
position, in the eyes of the people, is nearly as high as that of the
monarch himself, will do nothing to thwart the happiness of her youngest
and favorite son. When she sees that he will not give up Sappho,--that
his smiling face, in which she adores the image of her great husband
Cyrus, becomes clouded, I verily believe she would be ready to sanction
his taking even a Scythian woman to wife, if it could restore him to
cheerfulness. Neither will Cambyses himself refuse his consent if his
mother press the point at a right moment."
"In that case every difficulty is set aside," cried Rhodopis joyfully.
"It is not the marriage itself, but the time that must follow, which
causes me uneasiness," answered Croesus.
"Do you think then that Bartja . . .?"
"From him I fear nothing. He has a pure heart, and has been so long proof
against love, that now he has once yielded, he will love long and
ardently."
"What then do you fear?"
"You must remember that, though the charming wife of their favorite will
be warmly received by all his friends of his own sex, there are thousands
of idle women in the harems of the Persian nobles, who will endeavor, by
every artifice and intrigue in their power, to injure the newly-risen
star; and whose greatest joy it will be to ruin such an inexperienced
child and make her unhappy."
"You have a very bad opinion of the Persian women."
"They are but women, and will naturally envy her, who has gained the
husband they all desired either for themselves or for their daughters. In
their monotonous life, devoid of occupation, envy easily becomes hatred,
and the gratification of these evil passions is the only compensation
which the poor creatures can obtain for the total absence of love and
loss of freedom. I repeat, the more beautiful Sappho is, the more
malicious they will feel towards her, and, even if Bartja should love her
so fervently as not to take a second wife for two or three years, she
will still have such heavy hours to encounter, that I really do not know
whether I dare congratulate you on her apparently brilliant future."
"That is quite my own feeling. A simple Greek would be more welcome to me
than this son of a mighty monarch."
In this moment Knakias brought Bartja into the room. He went to Rhodopis
at once, besought her not to refuse him the hand of her granddaughter,
spoke of his ardent love, and assured her that his happiness would be
doubled, if she would consent to accompany them to Persia. Then turning
to Croesus, he seized his hand and entreated forgiveness for having so
long concealed his great happiness from one who had been like a father to
him, at the same time begging him to second his suit with Rhodopis.
The old man listened to the youth's passionate language with a smile, and
said: "Ah, Bartja, how often have I warned thee against love! It is a
scorching fire."
"But its flame is bright and beautiful."
"It causes pain."
"But such pain is sweet."
"It leads the mind astray."
"But it strengthens the heart."
"Oh, this love!" cried Rhodopis. "Inspired by Eros, the boy speaks as if
he had been all his life studying under an Attic orator!"
"And yet," answered Croesus, "these lovers are the most unteachable of
pupils. Convince them as clearly as you will, that their passion is only
another word for poison, fire, folly, death, they still cry, 'Tis sweet,'
and will not be hindered in their course."
As he was speaking Sappho came in. A white festal robe, with wide
sleeves, and borders of purple embroidery, fell in graceful folds round
her delicate figure, and was confined at the waist by a golden girdle.
Her hair was adorned with fresh roses, and on her bosom lay her lover's
first gift, the flashing diamond star.
She came up modestly and gracefully, and made a low obeisance to the aged
Croesus. His eyes rested long on the maidenly and lovely countenance, and
the longer he gazed the kindlier became his gaze. For a moment he seemed
to grow young again in the visions conjured up by memory, and
involuntarily he went up to the young girl, kissed her affectionately on
the forehead, and, taking her by the hand, led her to Bartja with the
words: "Take her, thy wife she must be, if the entire race of the
Achaemenidae were to conspire against us!"
"Have I no voice in the matter?" said Rhodopis, smiling through her
tears.
On hearing these words, Bartja and Sappho each took one of her hands, and
gazed entreatingly into her face. She rose to her full stature, and like
a prophetess exclaimed: "Eros, who brought you to each other, Zeus and
Apollo defend and protect you. I see you now like two fair roses on one
stem, loving and happy in the spring of life. What summer, autumn and
winter may have in store for you, lies hidden with the gods. May the
shades of thy departed parents, Sappho, smile approvingly when these
tidings of their child shall reach them in the nether world."
.................................
Three days later a densely packed crowd was once more surging round the
Sais landing-place. This time they had assembled to bid a last farewell
to their king's daughter, and in this hour the people gave clear tokens
that, in spite of all the efforts of the priestly caste, their hearts
remained loyal to their monarch and his house. For when Amasis and Ladice
embraced Nitetis for the last time with tears--when Tachot, in presence
of all the inhabitants of Sais, following her sister down the broad
flight of steps that led to the river, threw her arms round her neck once
more and burst into sobs--when at last the wind filled the sails of the
royal boat and bore the princess, destined to be the great king's bride,
from their sight, few eyes among that vast crowd remained dry.
The priests alone looked on at this sad scene with unmoved gravity and
coldness; but when the south wind at last bore away the strangers who had
robbed them of their princess, many a curse and execration followed from
the Egyptians on the shore; Tachot alone stood weeping there and waving
her veil to them. For whom were these tears? for the play-fellow of her
youth, or for the handsome, beloved prince?
Amasis embraced his wife and daughter in the eyes of all his people; and
held up his little grandson, Prince Necho, to their gaze, the sight
eliciting cries of joy on all sides. But Psamtik, the child's own father,
stood by the while, tearless and motionless. The king appeared not to
observe him, until Neithotep approached, and leading him to his father,
joined their hands and called down the blessing of the gods upon the
royal house.
At this the Egyptians fell on their knees with uplifted hands. Amasis
clasped his son to his heart, and when the high-priest had concluded his
prayer, the following colloquy between the latter and Amasis took place
in low tones:
"Let peace be between us for our own and Egypt's sake!"
"Hast thou received Nebenchari's letter?"
"A Samian pirate-vessel is in pursuit of Phanes' trireme."
"Behold the child of thy predecessor Hophra, the rightful heiress of the
Egyptian throne, departing unhindered to a distant land!"
"The works of the Greek temple now building in Memphis shall be
discontinued."
"May Isis grant us peace, and may prosperity and happiness increase in
our land!"
............................
The Greek colonists in Naukratis had prepared a feast to celebrate the
departure of their protector's daughter.
Numerous animals had been slaughtered in sacrifice on the altars of the
Greek divinities, and the Nile-boats were greeted with a loud cry of
"Ailinos" on their arrival in the harbor.
A bridal wreath, composed of a hoop of gold wound round with scented
violets, was presented to Nitetis by a troop of young girls in holiday
dresses, the act of presentation being performed by Sappho, as the most
beautiful among the maidens of Naukratis.
On accepting the gift Nitetis kissed her forehead in token of gratitude.
The triremes were already waiting; she went on board, the rowers took
their oars and began the Keleusma.
[The measure of the Keleusma was generally given by a flute-player,
the Trieraules. AEschylus, Persians 403. Laert. Diog. IV. 22. In
the Frogs of Aristophanes the inhabitants of the marshes are made to
sing the Keleusma, v. 205. The melody, to the measure of which the
Greek boatmen usually timed their strokes.]
Ailinos rang across the water from a thousand voices. Bartja stood on the
deck, and waved a last loving farewell to his betrothed; while Sappho
prayed in silence to Aphrodite Euploia, the protectress of those who go
down to the sea in ships. A tear rolled down her cheek, but around her
lips played a smile of love and hope, though her old slave Melitta, who
accompanied her to carry her parasol, was weeping as if her heart would
break. On seeing, however, a few leaves fall from her darling's wreath,
she forgot her tears for a moment and whispered softly: "Yes, dear heart,
it is easy to see that you are in love; when the leaves fall from a
maiden's wreath, 'tis a sure sign that her heart has been touched by
Eros.
CHAPTER XII.
Seven weeks after Nitetis had quitted her native country, a long train of
equipages and horsemen was to be seen on the king's highway from the west
to Babylon, moving steadily towards that gigantic city, whose towers
might already be descried in the far distance.
[The great road called the "king's road," of which we shall have
more to say, was made by Cyrus and carefully kept up by Darius.]
The principal object in this caravan was a richly-gilded, four-wheeled
carriage, closed in at the sides by curtains, and above by a roof
supported on wooden pillars. In this vehicle, called the Harmamaxa,
resting on rich cushions of gold brocade, sat our Egyptian Princess.
[Harmamaxa--An Asiatic travelling carriage. The first mention of
these is in Xenophon's Anabasis, where we find a queen travelling in
such a vehicle. They were later adopted by the Romans and used for
the same object.]
On either side rode her escort, viz.: the Persian princes and nobles whom
we have already learnt to know during their visit to Egypt, Croesus and
his son.
Behind these, a long train, consisting of fifty vehicles of different
kinds and six hundred beasts of burden, stretched away into the distance,
and the royal carriage was preceded by a troop of splendidly-mounted
Persian cavalry.
The high-road followed the course of the Euphrates, passing through
luxuriant fields of wheat, barley and sesame yielding fruit two, and
sometimes even three, hundred-fold. Slender date-palms covered with
golden fruit were scattered in every direction over the fields, which
were thoroughly irrigated by means of canals and ditches.
It was winter, but the sun shone warm and bright from a cloudless sky.
The mighty river swarmed with craft of all sizes, either transporting the
products of Upper Armenia to the plains of Mesopotamia, or the wares of
Greece and Asia Minor from Thapsakus to Babylon.
[Thapsakus--An important commercial town on the Euphrates, and the
point of observation from which Eratosthenes took his measurements
of the earth.]
Pumps and water-wheels poured refreshing streams over the thirsty land,
and pretty villages ornamented the shores of the river. Indeed every
object gave evidence that our caravan was approaching the metropolis of a
carefully governed and civilized state.
Nitetis and her retinue now halted at a long brick house, roofed with
asphalte, and surrounded by a grove of plane-trees.
[Asphalte--Nearly all authorities, ancient as well as modern, report
that bitumen, which is still plentifully found in the neighborhood
of Babylon, was used by the Babylonians as mortar. See, besides the
accounts of ancient writers, W. Vaux, 'Nineveh and Persepolis'.
Burnt bitumen was used by Assyrians for cement in building.]
Here Croesus was lifted from his horse, and approaching the carriage,
exclaimed: "Here we are at length at the last station! That high tower
which you see on the horizon is the celebrated temple of Bel, next to the
Pyramids, one of the most gigantic works ever constructed by human hands.
Before sunset we shall have reached the brazen gates of Babylon. And now
I would ask you to alight, and let me send your maidens into the house;
for here you must put on Persian apparel, to appear well-pleasing in the
eyes of Cambyses. In a few hours you will stand before your future
husband. But you are pale! Permit your maidens to adorn your cheeks with
a color that shall look like the excitement of joy. A first impression is
often a final one, and this is especially true with regard to Cambyses.
If, which I doubt not, you are pleasing in his eyes at first, then you
have won his love for ever; but if you should displease him to-day he
will never look kindly on you again, for he is rough and harsh. But take
courage, my daughter, and above all, do not forget the advice I have
given you." Nitetis dried her tears as she answered: "How can I ever
thank you, O Croesus, my second father, my protector and adviser, for all
your goodness? Oh, forsake me not in the days to come! and if the path of
my life should lead through grief and care, be near to help and guide me
as you did on the mountain-passes of this long and dangerous journey. A
thousand times I thank thee, O my father!"
And, as she said these words, the young girl threw her arms around the
old man's neck and kissed him tenderly.
On entering the court-yard, a tall stout man, followed by a train of
Asiatic serving-maidens, came forward to meet them. This was Boges, the
chief of the eunuchs, an important official at the Persian court. His
beardless face wore a smile of fulsome sweetness; in his ears hung costly
jewelled pendents; his neck, arms, legs and his effeminately long
garments glittered all over with gold chains and rings, and his crisp,
stiff curls, bound round by a purple fillet, streamed with powerful and
penetrating perfumes.
Making a low and reverential obeisance before Nitetis, and holding, the
while, his fat hands overloaded with rings before his mouth, he thus
addressed her: "Cambyses, lord of the world, hath sent me to thee, O
Queen, that I may refresh thy heart with the dew of his salutations. He
sendeth thee likewise by me, even by me the lowest of his servants,
Persian raiment, that thou, as befitteth the consort of the mightiest of
all rulers, mayest approach the gates of the Achaemenidae in Median
garments. These women whom thou seest are thy handmaidens, and only await
thy bidding to transform thee from an Egyptian jewel into a Persian
pearl."
The master of the caravansary then appeared, bearing, in token of
welcome, a basket of fruits arranged with great taste.
Nitetis returned her thanks to both these men in kind and friendly words;
then entering the house laid aside the dress and ornaments of her native
land, weeping as she did so, allowed the strangers to unloose the plait
of hair which hung down at the left side of her head, and was the
distinctive mark of an Egyptian princess, and to array her in Median
garments.
[In almost all the Egyptian pictures, the daughters and sons of the
Pharaohs are represented with these locks of hair, plaited and
reaching from the forehead to the neck. Rosellini, Mon. stor. II.
123. Lepsius, Denkmaler. The daughter of Rameses II. is drawn
thus, and we have examples of the same in many other pictures.]
In the meantime, a repast had been commanded by the princes who
accompanied her. Eager and agile attendants rushed to the
baggage-waggons, fetching thence, in a few moments, seats, tables, and
golden utensils of all kinds. The cooks vied with them and with each
other, and as if by magic, in a short space of time a richly-adorned
banquet for the hungry guests appeared, at which even the flowers were
not wanting.
During the entire journey our travellers had lived in a similar luxury,
as their beasts of burden carried every imaginable convenience, from
tents of water-proof materials inwrought with gold, down to silver
foot-stools; and in the vehicles which composed their train were not only
bakers, cooks, cup-bearers and carvers, but perfumers, hair-dressers and
weavers of garlands. Beside these conveniences, a well-fitted up
caravansary, or inn, was to be found about every eighteen miles along the
whole route, where disabled horses could be replaced, the plantations
around which afforded a refreshing shelter from the noonday heat, or
their hearths a refuge from the snow and cold on the mountain-passes.
The kingdom of Persia was indebted for these inns (similar to the
post-stations of modern days) to Cyrus, who had endeavored to connect the
widely-distant provinces of his immense dominions by a system of
well-kept roads, and a regular postal service. At each of these stations
the horseman carrying the letter-bag was relieved by a fresh man on a
fresh steed, to whom the letters were transferred, and who, in his turn,
darted off like the wind, to be again replaced at a similar distance by
another rider. These couriers, called Angari, were considered the
swiftest horsemen in the world.
[Herodotus V. 14. 49-52. Persian milestones are still to be found
among the ruins of the old king's road, which led from Nineveh to
Ecbatana. The Kurds call them keli-Shin (blue pillars).]
Just as the banqueters, amongst whom Boges had taken his seat, were
rising from table, the door opened, and a vision appeared, which drew
prolonged exclamation of surprise from all the Persians present. Nitetis,
clad in the glorious apparel of a Median princess, proud in the
consciousness of her triumphant beauty, and yet blushing like a young
girl at the wondering admiration of her friends, stood before them.
The attendants involuntarily fell on their faces before her, according to
the custom of the Asiatics, and the noble Achaemenidae bowed low and
reverentially; for it seemed as if Nitetis has laid aside all her former
bashfulness and timidity with her simple Egyptian dress, and with the
splendid silken garments of a Persian princess, flashing as they were
with gold and jewels, had clothed herself in the majesty of a queen.
The deep reverence paid by all present seemed agreeable to her, and
thanking her admiring friends by a gracious wave of the hand, she turned
to the chief of the eunuchs and said in a kind tone but mingled with a
touch of pride; "Thou hast performed thy mission well; I am content with
the raiment and the slaves that thou hast provided and shall commend thy
circumspection to the king, my husband. Receive this gold chain in the
meanwhile, as a token of my gratitude."
The eunuch kissed the hem of her garment, and accepted the gift in
silence. This man, hitherto omnipotent in his office, had never before
encountered such pride in any of the women committed to his charge. Up to
the present time all Cambyses' wives had been Asiatics, and, well aware
of the unlimited power of the chief of the eunuchs, had used every means
within their reach to secure his favor by flattery and submission.
Boges now made a second obeisance before Nitetis, of which, however, she
took no notice, and turning to Croesus said: "Neither words nor gifts
could ever suffice to express my gratitude to you, kindest of friends,
for, if my future life at the court of Persia prove, I will not venture
to say a happy, but even a peaceful one, it is to you alone that I shall
owe it. Still, take this ring. It has never left my finger since I
quitted Egypt, and it has a significance far beyond its outward worth.
Pythagoras, the noblest of the Greeks, gave it to my mother, when he was
tarrying in Egypt to learn the wisdom of our priests, and it was her
parting gift to me. The number seven is engraved upon the simple stone.
This indivisible number represents perfect health, both to soul and body
for health is likewise one and indivisible.
[Seven, the "motherless" number, which has no factor below ten.]
The sickness of one member is the sickness of all; one evil thought,
allowed to take up its abode within our heart, destroys the entire
harmony of the soul. When you see this seven therefore, let it recall my
heart's wish that you may ever enjoy undisturbed bodily health, and long
retain that loving gentleness which has made you the most virtuous, and
therefore the healthiest of men. No thanks, my father, for even if I
could restore to Croesus all the treasures that he once possessed, I
should still retrain his debtor. Gyges, to you I give this Lydian lyre;
let its tones recall the giver to your memory. For you, Zopyrus, I have a
golden chain; I have witnessed that you are the most faithful of friends;
and we Egyptians are accustomed to place cords and bands in the hands of
our lovely Hathor, the goddess of love and friendship, as symbols of her
captivating and enchaining attributes. As Darius has studied the wisdom
of Egypt and the signs of the starry heavens, I beg him to take this
circlet of gold, on which a skilful hand has traced the signs of the
Zodiac.
[Diodorus (I. 49.) tells, that in the tomb of Osymandyas (palace of
Rameses II. at Thebes) there lay a circle of gold, one ell thick and
365 ells in circumference, containing a complete astronomical
calendar. The circle of the zodiac from Dendera, which is now in
Paris,--an astronomical ceiling painting, which was believed at the
time of its discovery to be of great age, is not nearly so ancient
as was supposed, dating only from the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty.
Letronne was the first to estimate it correctly. See Lepsius,
Chron. p.63. and Lauth, 'les zodiaques de Dendera'. Munich 1865.]
And lastly, to my dear brother-in-law Bartja I commit the most precious
jewel in my possession--this amulet of blue stone. My sister Tachot hung
it round my neck as I kissed her on the last night before we parted; she
told me it could bring to its wearer the sweet bliss of love. And then,
Bartja, she wept! I do not know of whom she was thinking in that moment,
but I hope I am acting according to her wishes in giving you her precious
jewel. Take it as a gift from Tachot, and sometimes call to mind our
games in the Sais gardens."
Thus far she had been speaking Greek, but now, addressing the attendants
who remained standing in an attitude of deep reverence, she began in
broken Persian: "Accept my thanks also. In Babylon you shall receive a
thousand gold staters." Then turning to Boges, she added: "Let this sum
be distributed among the attendants at latest by the day after to-morrow.
Take me to my carriage, Croesus."
The old king hastened to do her bidding, and as he was leading her
thither she pressed his arm and whispered gently, "Are you pleased with
me, my father?"
"I tell you, girl," the old man answered, "that no one but the king's
mother can ever be your equal at this court, for a true and queenly pride
reigns on your brow, and you have the power of using small means to
effect great ends. Believe me, the smallest gift, chosen and bestowed as
you can choose and bestow, gives more pleasure to a noble mind than heaps
of treasure merely cast down at his feet. The Persians are accustomed to
present and receive costly gifts. They understand already how to enrich
their friends, but you can teach them to impart a joy with every gift.
How beautiful you are to-day! Are your cushions to your mind, or would
you like a higher seat? But what is that? There are clouds of dust in the
direction of the city. Cambyses is surely coming to meet you! Courage, my
daughter. Above all try to meet his gaze and respond to it. Very few can
bear the lightning glance of those eyes, but, if you can return it freely
and fearlessly, you have conquered. Fear nothing, my child, and may
Aphrodite adorn you with her most glorious beauty! My friends, we must
start, I think the king himself is coming." Nitetis sat erect in her
splendid, gilded carriage; her hands were pressed on her throbbing heart.
The clouds of dust came nearer and nearer, her eye caught the flash of
weapons like lightning across a stormy sky. The clouds parted, she could
see single figures for a moment, but soon lost them as the road wound
behind some thickets and shrubs. Suddenly the troop of horsemen appeared
in full gallop only a hundred paces before her, and distinctly visible.
Her first impression was of a motley mass of steeds and men, glittering
in purple, gold, silver and jewels. It consisted in reality of a troop of
more than two hundred horsemen mounted on pure white Nicaean horses,
whose bridles and saddle-cloths were covered with bells and bosses,
feathers, fringes, and embroidery. Their leader rode a powerful
coal-black charger, which even the strong will and hand of his rider
could not always curb, though in the end his enormous strength proved him
the man to tame even this fiery animal. This rider, beneath whose weight
the powerful steed trembled and panted, wore a vesture of scarlet and
white, thickly embroidered with eagles and falcons in silver.
[Curtius III. 3. Xenoph. Cyrap, VIII. 3. 7. Aeschylus, Persians
835. 836. The king's dress and ornaments were worth 12,000 talents,
or L2,250,000 (estimate of 1880) according to Plutarch, Artaxerxes
24.]
The lower part of his dress was purple, and his boots of yellow leather.
He wore a golden girdle; in this hung a short dagger-like sword, the hilt
and scabbard of which were thickly studded with jewels. The remaining
ornaments of his dress resembled those we have described as worn by
Bartja, and the blue and white fillet of the Achaemenidae was bound
around the tiara, which surmounted a mass of thick curls, black as ebony.
The lower part of his face was concealed by an immense beard. His
features were pale and immovable, but the eyes, (more intensely black, if
possible, than either hair or beard), glowed with a fire that was rather
scorching than warming. A deep, fiery-red scar, given by the sword of a
Massagetan warrior, crossed his high forehead, arched nose and thin upper
lip. His whole demeanor expressed great power and unbounded pride.
Nitetis' gaze was at once riveted by this man. She had never seen any one
like him before, and he exercised a strange fascination over her. The
expression of indomitable pride, worn by his features, seemed to her to
represent a manly nature which the whole world, but she herself above all
others, was created to serve. She felt afraid, and yet her true woman's
heart longed to lean upon his strength as the vine upon the elm. She
could not be quite sure whether she had thus pictured to herself the
father of all evil, the fearful Seth, or the great god Ammon, the giver
of light.
The deepest pallor and the brightest color flitted by turns across her
lovely face, like the light and shadow when clouds pass swiftly over a
sunny noonday sky. She had quite forgotten the advice of her fatherly old
friend, and yet, when Cambyses brought his unruly, chafing steed to a
stand by the side of her carriage, she gazed breathless into the fiery
eyes of this man and felt at once that he was the king, though no one had
told her so.
The stern face of this ruler of half the known world relaxed, as Nitetis,
moved by an unaccountable impulse, continued to bear his piercing gaze.
At last he waved his hand to her in token of welcome, and then rode on to
her escort, who had alighted from their horses and were awaiting him,
some having cast themselves down in the dust, and others, after the
Persian manner, standing in an attitude of deep reverence, their hands
concealed in the wide sleeves of their robes.
He sprang from his horse, an example which was followed at once by his
entire suite. The attendants, with the speed of thought, spread a rich
purple carpet on the highway, lest the foot of the king should come in
contact with the dust of the earth, and then Cambyses proceeded to salute
his friends and relations by offering them his mouth to kiss.
He shook Croesus by the right hand, commanding him to remount and
accompany him to the carriage, as interpreter between himself and
Nitetis.
In an instant his highest office-bearers were at hand to lift the king
once more on to his horse, and at a single nod from their lord, the train
was again in motion.
Cambyses and Croesus rode by the side of the carriage.
"She is beautiful, and pleases me well," began the king. "Interpret
faithfully all her answers, for I understand only the Persian, Assyrian
and Median tongues."
Nitetis caught and understood these words. A feeling of intense joy stole
into her heart, and before Croesus could answer, she began softly in
broken Persian and blushing deeply: "Blessed be the gods, who have caused
me to find favor in thine eyes. I am not ignorant of the speech of my
lord, for the noble Croesus has instructed me in the Persian language
during our long journey. Forgive, if my sentences be broken and
imperfect; the time was short, and my capacity only that of a poor and
simple maiden."
[Diodorus tells us that Themistocles learnt the Persian language
during the journey to Susa. We are not, therefore, requiring an
impossibility of Nitetis.]
A smile passed over the usually serious mouth of Cambyses. His vanity was
flattered by Nitetis' desire to win his approbation, and, accustomed as
he was to see women grow up in idleness and ignorance, thinking of
nothing but finery and intrigue, her persevering industry seemed to him
both wonderful and praise worthy. So he answered with evident
satisfaction: "I rejoice that we can speak without an interpreter.
Persevere in learning the beautiful language of my forefathers. Croesus,
who sits at my table, shall still remain your instructor."
"Your command confers happiness!" exclaimed the old man. "No more eager
or thankful pupil could be found, than the daughter of Amasis."
"She justifies the ancient report of the wisdom of Egypt," answered the
king, "and I can believe that she will quickly understand and receive
into her soul the religious instructions of our Magi."
Nitetis dropped her earnest gaze. Her fears were being realized. She
would be compelled to serve strange gods.
But her emotion passed unnoticed by Cambyses, who went on speaking: "My
mother Kassandane will tell you the duties expected from my wives.
To-morrow I myself will lead you to her. The words, which you innocently
chanced to hear, I now repeat; you please me well. Do nothing to alienate
my affection. We will try to make our country agreeable, and, as your
friend, I counsel you to treat Boges whom I sent as my forerunner, in a
kind and friendly manner. As head over the house of the women, you will
have to conform to his will in many things."
"Though he be head over the house of the women," answered Nitetis,
"surely your wife is bound to obey no other earthly will than yours. Your
slightest look shall be for me a command; but remember that I am a king's
daughter, that in my native land the weaker and the stronger sex have
equal rights, and that the same pride reigns in my breast, which I see
kindling in your eyes, my lord and king! My obedience to you, my husband
and my ruler, shall be that of a slave, but I can never stoop to sue for
the favor, or obey the orders of a venal servant, the most unmanly of his
kind!"
Cambyses' wonder and satisfaction increased. He had never heard any woman
speak in this way before, except his mother; the clever way in which
Nitetis acknowledged, and laid stress on, his right to command her every
act, was very flattering to his self-love, and her pride found an echo in
his own haughty disposition. He nodded approvingly and answered: "You
have spoken well. A separate dwelling shall be appointed you. I, and no
one else, will prescribe your rules of life and conduct. This day the
pleasant palace on the hanging-gardens shall be prepared for your
reception."
"A thousand, thousand thanks," cried Nitetis. "You little know the
blessing you are bestowing in this permission. Again and again I have
begged your brother Bartja to repeat the story of these gardens, and the
love of the king who raised that verdant and blooming hill, pleased us
better than all the other glories of your vast domains."
"To-morrow," answered the king, "you can enter your new abode. But tell
me now how my messengers pleased you and your countrymen."
"How can you ask? Who could know the noble Croesus without loving him?
Who could fail to admire the beauty of the young heroes, your friends?
They have all become dear to us, but your handsome brother Bartja
especially, won all hearts. The Egyptians have no love for strangers, and
yet the gaping crowd would burst into a murmur of admiration, when his
beautiful face appeared among them."
At these words the king's brow darkened; he struck his horse so sharply
that the creature reared, and then turning it quickly round he gallopped
to the front and soon reached the walls of Babylon.
...........................
Though Nitetis had been brought up among the huge temples and palaces of
Egypt, she was still astonished at the size and grandeur of this gigantic
city.
Its walls seemed impregnable; they measured more than seventy-five
feet--[Fifty ells. The Greek ell is equal to one foot and a half
English.]--in height and their breadth was so great, that two chariots
could conveniently drive abreast upon them. These mighty defences were
crowned and strengthened by two hundred and fifty high towers, and even
these would have been insufficient, if Babylon had not been protected on
one side by impassable morasses. The gigantic city lay on both shores of
the Euphrates. It was more than forty miles in circumference, and its
walls enclosed buildings surpassing in size and grandeur even the
Pyramids and the temples of Thebes.
[These numbers and measurements are taken partly from Herodotus,
partly from Diodorus, Strabo and Arrian. And even the ruins of this
giant city, writes Lavard, are such as to allow a very fair
conclusion of its enormous size. Aristotle (Polit. III. I.) says
Babylon's dimensions were not those of a city, but of a nation.]
The mighty gates of brass, through which the royal train entered the
city, had opened wide to receive this noble company. This entrance was
defended on each side by a strong tower, and before each of these towers
lay, as warder, a gigantic winged bull carved in stone, with a human
head, bearded and solemn. Nitetis gazed at these gates in astonishment,
and then a joyful smile lighted up her face, as she looked up the long
broad street so brightly and beautifully decorated to welcome her.
The moment they beheld the king and the gilded carriage, the multitude
burst into loud shouts of joy, but when Bartja, the people's darling,
came in sight, the shouts rose to thunder-peals and shrieks of delight,
which seemed as if they would never end. It was long since the populace
had seen Cambyses, for in accordance with Median customs the king seldom
appeared in public. Like the Deity, he was to govern invisibly, and his
occasional appearance before the nation to be looked upon as a festival
and occasion of rejoicing. Thus all Babylon had come out to-day to look
upon their awful ruler and to welcome their favorite Bartja on his
return. The windows were crowded with eager, curious women, who threw
flowers before the approaching train, or poured sweet perfumes from above
as they passed by. The pavement was thickly strewn with myrtle and palm
branches, trees of different kinds had been placed before the
house-doors, carpets and gay cloths hung from the windows, garlands of
flowers were wreathed from house to house, fragrant odors of incense and
sandal-wood perfumed the air, and the way was lined with thousands of
gaping Babylonians dressed in white linen shirts, gaily-colored woollen
petticoats and short cloaks, and carrying long staves headed with
pomegranates, birds, or roses, of gold or silver.
The streets through which the procession moved were broad and straight,
the houses on either side, built of brick, tall and handsome. Towering
above every thing else, and visible from all points, rose the gigantic
temple of Bel. Its colossal staircase, like a huge serpent, wound round
and round the ever-diminishing series of stories composing the tower,
until it reached the summit crowned by the sanctuary itself.
[This temple of Bel, which many consider may have been the tower of
Babel of Genesis XI., is mentioned by Herodotus I. 181. 182. 183.
Diodorus II. 8. 9. (Ktesias), Strabo 738 and many other ancient
writers. The people living in its neighborhood now call the ruins
Birs Nimrod, the castle of Nimrod. In the text we have
reconstructed it as far as possible from the accounts of classical
writers. The first story, which is still standing, in the midst of
a heap of ruins, is 260 feet high. The walls surrounding the tower
are said to be still clearly recognizable, and were 4000 feet long
and 3000 broad. ]
The procession approached the royal palace. This corresponded in its
enormous size to the rest of the vast city. The walls surrounding it were
covered with gaily-colored and glazed representations of strange figures
made up of human beings, birds, quadrupeds and fishes; hunting-scenes,
battles and solemn processions. By the side of the river towards the
north, rose the hanging-gardens, and the smaller palace lay toward the
east on the other bank of the Euphrates, connected with the larger one by
the wondrous erection, a firm bridge of stone.
Our train passed on through the brazen gates of three of the walls
surrounding the palace, and then halted. Nitetis was lifted from her
carriage by bearers; she was at last in her new home, and soon after in
the apartments of the women's house assigned to her temporary use.
Cambyses, Bartja and their friends already known to us, were still
standing in the gaily-carpeted court of the palace, surrounded by at
least a hundred splendid dignitaries in magnificent dresses, when
suddenly a sound of loud female voices was heard, and a lovely Persian
girl richly dressed, her thick fair hair profusely wreathed with pearls,
rushed into the court, pursued by several women older than herself. She
ran up to the group of men; Cambyses with a smile placed himself in her
path, but the impetuous girl slipped adroitly past him, and in another
moment was hanging on Bartja's neck, crying and laughing by turns.
The attendants in pursuit prostrated themselves at a respectful distance,
but Cambyses, on seeing the caresses lavished by the young girl on her
newly-returned brother, cried: "For shame, Atossa! remember that since
you began to wear ear-rings you have ceased to be a child!
[Ear-rings were given to the Persian girls in their fifteenth year,
the marriageable age. Vendid. Farlard XIV. 66. At this age too
boys as well as girls were obliged to wear the sacred cord, Kuctl or
Kosti as a girdle; and were only allowed to unloose it in the night.
The making of this cord is attended with many ceremonies, even among
the Persians of our own day. Seventy-two threads must be employed,
but black wool is prohibited.]
It is right that you should rejoice to see your brother again, but a
king's daughter must never forget what is due to her rank, even in her
greatest joy. Go back to your mother directly. I see your attendants
waiting yonder. Go and tell them, that as this is a day of rejoicing I
will allow your heedless conduct to pass unpunished, but the next time
you appear unbidden in these apartments, which none may enter without
permission, I shall tell Boges to keep you twelve days in confinement.
Remember this, thoughtless child, and tell our mother, Bartja and I are
coming to visit her. Now give me a kiss. You will not? We shall see,
capricious little one!" And so saying the king sprang towards his
refractory little sister, and seizing both her hands in one of his own,
bent back her charming head with the other and kissed her in spite of her
resistance. She screamed from the violence of his grasp, and ran away
crying to her attendants, who took her back to her apartments.
When Atossa had disappeared, Bartja said; "You were too rough with the
little one, Cambyses. She screamed with pain!"
Once more the king's face clouded, but suppressing the harsh words which
trembled on his lips, he only answered, turning towards the house: "Let
us come to our mother now; she begged me to bring you as soon as you
arrived. The women, as usual, are all impatience. Nitetis told me your
rosy cheeks and fair curls had bewitched the Egyptian women too. I would
advise you to pray betimes to Mithras for eternal youth, and for his
protection against the wrinkles of age!"
"Do you mean to imply by these words that I have no virtues which could
make an old age beautiful?" asked Bartja.
"I explain my words to no one. Come."
"But I ask for an opportunity of proving, that I am inferior to none of
my nation in manly qualities."
"For that matter, the shouts of the Babylonians today will have been
proof enough, that deeds are not wanted from you, in order to win their
admiration."
"Cambyses!"
"Now come! We are just on the eve of a war with the Massagetae; there you
will have a good opportunity of proving what you are worth."
A few minutes later, and Bartja was in the arms of his blind mother. She
had been waiting for her darling's arrival with a beating heart, and in
the joy of hearing his voice once more, and of being able to lay her
hands again on that beloved head, she forgot everything else--even her
first-born son who stood by smiling bitterly, as he watched the rich and
boundless stream of a mother's love flowing out to his younger brother.
Cambyses had been spoiled from his earliest infancy. Every wish had been
fulfilled, every look regarded as a command; and thus he grew up totally
unable to brook contradiction, giving way to the most violent anger if
any of his subjects (and he knew no human beings who were not his
subjects) dared to oppose him.
His father Cyrus, conqueror of half the world--the man whose genius had
raised Persia from a small nation to the summit of earthly greatness--who
had secured for himself the reverence and admiration of countless
subjugated tribes--this great king was incapable of carrying out in his
own small family-circle the system of education he had so successfully
adopted towards entire countries. He could see nought else in Cambyses
but the future king of Persia, and commanded his subjects to pay him an
unquestioning obedience, entirely forgetful of the fact that he who is to
govern well must begin by learning to obey.
Cambyses had been the first-born son of Kassandane, the wife whom Cyrus
had loved and married young; three daughters followed, and at last,
fifteen years later, Bartja had come into the world. Their eldest son had
already outgrown his parents' caresses, when this little child appeared
to engross all their care and love. His gentle, affectionate and clinging
nature made him the darling of both father and mother: Cambyses was
treated with consideration by his parents, but their love was for Bartja.
Cambyses was brave; he distinguished himself often in the field, but his
disposition was haughty and imperious; men served him with fear and
trembling, while Bartja, ever sociable and sympathizing, converted all
his companions into loving friends. As to the mass of the people, they
feared the king, and trembled when he drew near, notwithstanding the
lavish manner in which he showered rich gifts around him; but they loved
Bartja, and believed they saw in him the image of the great Cyrus the
"Father of his people."
Cambyses knew well that all this love, so freely given to Bartja, was not
to be bought. He did not hate his younger brother, but he felt annoyed
that a youth who had as yet done nothing to distinguish himself, should
be honored and revered as if he were already a hero and public
benefactor. Whatever annoyed or displeased him he considered must be
wrong; where he disapproved he did not spare his censures, and from his
very childhood, Cambyses' reproofs had been dreaded even by the mighty.
The enthusiastic shouts of the populace, the overflowing love of his
mother and sister, and above all, the warm encomiums expressed by
Nitetis, had excited a jealousy which his pride had never allowed
hitherto. Nitetis had taken his fancy in a remarkable degree. This
daughter of a powerful monarch, like himself disdaining everything mean
and inferior, had yet acknowledged him to be her superior, and to win his
favor had not shrunk from the laborious task of mastering his native
language. These qualities, added to her peculiar style of beauty, which
excited his admiration from its rare novelty, half Egyptian half Greek,
(her mother having been a Greek), had not failed to make a deep
impression on him. But she had been liberal in her praise of Bartja; that
was enough to disturb Cambyses' mind and prepare the way for jealousy.
As he and his brother were leaving the women's apartments, Cambyses
adopted a hasty resolution and exclaimed: "You asked me just now for an
opportunity of proving your courage. I will not refuse. The Tapuri have
risen; I have sent troops to the frontier. Go to Rhagae, take the command
and show what you are worth."
"Thanks, brother," cried Bartja. "May I take my friends, Darius, Gyges
and Zopyrus with me?"
"That favor shall be granted too. I hope you will all do your duty
bravely and promptly, that you may be back in three months to join the
main army in the expedition of revenge on the Massagetae. It will take
place in spring."
"I will start to-morrow."
"Then farewell."
"If Auramazda should spare my life and I should return victorious, will
you promise to grant me one favor?"
"Yes, I will."
"Now, then, I feel confident of victory, even if I should have to stand
with a thousand men against ten thousand of the enemy." Bartja's eyes
sparkled, he was thinking of Sappho.
"Well," answered his brother, "I shall be very glad if your actions bear
out these glowing words. But stop; I have something more to say. You are
now twenty years of age; you must marry. Roxana, daughter of the noble
Hydarnes, is marriageable, and is said to be beautiful. Her birth makes
her a fitting bride for you."
"Oh! brother, do not speak of marriage; I . . ." "You must marry, for I
have no children."
"But you are still young; you will not remain childless. Besides, I do
not say that I will never marry. Do not be angry, but just now, when I am
to prove my courage, I would rather hear nothing about women."
"Well, then, you must marry Roxana when you return from the North. But I
should advise you to take her with you to the field. A Persian generally
fights better if he knows that, beside his most precious treasures, he
has a beautiful woman in his tent to defend."
"Spare me this one command, my brother. I conjure thee, by the soul of
our father, not to inflict on me a wife of whom I know nothing, and never
wish to know. Give Roxana to Zopyrus, who is so fond of women, or to
Darius or Bessus, who are related to her father Hydarnes. I cannot love
her, and should be miserable . . ."
Cambyses interrupted him with a laugh, exclaiming: "Did you learn these
notions in Egypt, where it is the custom to be contented with one wife?
In truth, I have long repented having sent a boy like you abroad. I am
not accustomed to bear contradiction, and shall listen to no excuses
after the war. This once I will allow you to go to the field without a
wife. I will not force you to do what, in your opinion, might endanger
your valor. But it seems to me that you have other and more secret
reasons for refusing my brotherly proposal. If that is the case, I am
sorry for you. However, for the present, you can depart, but after the
war I will hear no remonstrances. You know me."
"Perhaps after the war I may ask for the very thing, which I am refusing
now--but never for Roxana! It is just as unwise to try to make a man
happy by force as it is wicked to compel him to be unhappy, and I thank
you for granting my request."
"Don't try my powers of yielding too often!--How happy you look! I really
believe you are in love with some one woman by whose side all the others
have lost their charms."
Bartja blushed to his temples, and seizing his brother's hand, exclaimed:
"Ask no further now, accept my thanks once more, and farewell. May I bid
Nitetis farewell too, when I have taken leave of our mother and Atossa?"
Cambyses bit his lip, looked searchingly into Bartja's face, and finding
that the boy grew uneasy under his glance, exclaimed abruptly and
angrily: "Your first business is to hasten to the Tapuri. My wife needs
your care no longer; she has other protectors now." So saying he turned
his back on his brother and passed on into the great hall, blazing with
gold, purple and jewels, where the chiefs of the army, satraps, judges,
treasurers, secretaries, counsellors, eunuchs, door-keepers, introducers
of strangers, chamberlains, keepers of the wardrobe, dressers,
cup-bearers, equerries, masters of the chase, physicians, eyes and ears
of the king, ambassadors and plenipotentiaries of all descriptions--were
in waiting for him.
[The "eyes and ears" of the king may be compared to our police-
ministers. Darius may have borrowed the name from Egypt, where such
titles as "the 2 eyes of the king for Upper Egypt, the 2 ears of the
king for Lower Egypt" are to be found on the earlier monuments, for
instance in the tomb of Amen en, heb at Abd el Qurnah. And in
Herodotus II. 114. the boy Cyrus calls one of his playfellows "the
eye of the king," Herod. (I, 100.)]
The king was preceded by heralds bearing staves, and followed by a host
of fan, sedan and footstool-bearers, men carrying carpets, and
secretaries who the moment he uttered a command, or even indicated a
concession, a punishment or a reward, hastened to note it down and at
once hand it over to the officials empowered to execute his decrees.
In the middle of the brilliantly-lighted hall stood a gilded table, which
looked as if it must give way beneath the mass of gold and silver
vessels, plates, cups and bowls which were arranged with great order upon
it. The king's private table, the service on which was of immense worth
and beauty, was placed in an apartment opening out of the large hall, and
separated from it by purple hangings. These concealed him from the gaze
of the revellers, but did not prevent their every movement from being
watched by his eye. It was an object of the highest ambition to be one of
those who ate at the king's table, and even he to whom a portion was sent
might deem himself a highly-favored man.
As Cambyses entered the hall, nearly every one present prostrated
themselves before him; his relations alone, distinguished by the blue and
white fillet on the tiara, contented themselves with a deferential
obeisance.
After the king had seated himself in his private apartment, the rest of
the company took their places, and then a tremendous revel began.
Animals, roasted whole, were placed on the table, and, when hunger was
appeased, several courses of the rarest delicacies followed, celebrated
in later times even among the Greeks under the name of "Persian dessert."
[Herodotus (I. 133.) writes that the Persians fancied the Greeks'
hunger was never satisfied, because nothing special was brought to
the table at the end of the meal.]
Slaves then entered to remove the remains of the food. Others brought in
immense jugs of wine, the king left his own apartment, took his seat at
the head of the table, numerous cup-bearers filled the golden
drinking-cups in the most graceful manner, first tasting the wine to
prove that it was free from poison, and soon one of those drinking-bouts
had begun under the best auspices, at which, a century or two later,
Alexander the Great, forgot not only moderation but even friendship
itself.
Cambyses was unwontedly silent. The suspicion had entered his mind, that
Bartja loved Nitetis. Why had he, contrary to all custom, so decidedly
refused to marry a noble and beautiful girl, when his brother's
childlessness rendered marriage an evident and urgent duty for him? Why
had he wished to see the Egyptian princess again before leaving Babylon?
and blushed as he expressed that wish? and why had she, almost without
being asked, praised him so warmly?
It is well that he is going, thought the king; at least he shall not rob
me of her love. If he were not my brother I would send him to a place
from whence none can return.
After midnight he broke up the banquet. Boges appeared to conduct him to
the Harem, which he was accustomed to visit at this hour, when
sufficiently sober.
"Phaedime awaits you with impatience," said the eunuch.
"Let her wait!" was the king's answer. "Have you given orders that the
palace on the hanging-gardens shall be set in order?"
"It will be ready for occupation to-morrow."
"What apartments have been assigned to the Egyptian Princess?"
"Those formerly occupied by the second wife of your father Cyrus, the
deceased Amytis."
"That is well. Nitetis is to be treated with the greatest respect, and to
receive no commands even from yourself, but such as I give you for her."
Boges bowed low.
"See that no one, not even Croesus, has admission to her before my. . . .
before I give further orders."
"Croesus was with her this evening."
"What may have been his business with my wife?"
"I do not know, for I do not understand the Greek language, but I heard
the name of Bartja several times, and it seemed to me that the Egyptian
had received sorrowful intelligence. She was looking very sad when I
came, after Croesus had left, to inquire if she had any commands for me."
"May Ahriman blast thy tongue," muttered the king, and then turning his
back on the eunuch he followed the torch-bearers and attendants, who were
in waiting to disrobe him, to his own private apartments.
At noon on the following clay, Bartja, accompanied by his friends and a
troop of attendants, started on horseback for the frontier. Croesus went
with the young warriors as far as the city gates, and as their last
farewells and embraces were being exchanged, Bartja whispered to his old
friend: "If the messenger from Egypt should have a letter for me in his
bag, will you send it on?"
"Shall you be able to decipher the Greek writing?"
"Gyges and love will help me!"
"When I told Nitetis of your departure she begged me to wish you
farewell, and tell you not to forget Egypt."
"I am not likely to do that."
"The gods take thee into their care, my son. Be prudent, do not risk your
life heedlessly, but remember that it is no longer only your own.
Exercise the gentleness of a father towards the rebels; they did not rise
in mere self-will, but to gain their freedom, the most precious
possession of mankind. Remember, too, that to shew mercy is better than
to shed blood; the sword killeth, but the favor of the ruler bringeth joy
and happiness. Conclude the war as speedily as possible, for war is a
perversion of nature; in peace the sons outlive the fathers, but in war
the fathers live to mourn for their slain sons. Farewell, my young
heroes, go forward and conquer!"
CHAPTER XIII.
Cambyses passed a sleepless night. The feeling of jealousy, so totally
new to him, increased his desire to possess Nitetis, but he dared not
take her as his wife yet, as the Persian law forbade the king to marry a
foreign wife, until she had become familiar with the customs of Iran and
confessed herself a disciple of Zoroaster.
[Zoroaster, really Zarathustra or Zerethoschtro, was one of the
`greatest among founders of new religions and lawgivers. His name
signified "golden star" according to Anquetil du Perron. But this
interpretation is as doubtful, as the many others which have been
attempted. An appropriate one is given in the essay by Kern quoted
below, from zara golden, and thwistra glittering; thus "the gold
glittering one." It is uncertain whether he was born in Bactria,
Media or Persia, Anquetil thinks in Urmi, a town in Aderbaijan. His
father's name was Porosehasp, his mother's Dogdo, and his family
boasted of royal descent. The time of his birth is very,--Spiegel
says "hopelessly"--dark. Anquetil, and many other scholars would
place it in the reign of Darius, a view which has been proved to be
incorrect by Spiegel, Duncker and v. Schack in his introduction.]
According to this law a whole year must pass before Nitetis could become
the wife of a Persian monarch? but what was the law to Cambyses? In his
eyes the law was embodied in his own person, and in his opinion three
months would be amply sufficient to initiate Nitetis in the Magian
mysteries, after which process she could become his bride.
To-day his other wives seemed hateful, even loathsome, to him. From
Cambyses' earliest youth his house had been carefully provided with
women. Beautiful girls from all parts of Asia, black-eyed Armenians,
dazzlingly fair maidens from the Caucasus, delicate girls from the shores
of the Ganges, luxurious Babylonian women, golden-haired Persians and the
effeminate daughters of the Median plains; indeed many of the noblest
Achaemenidae had given him their daughters in marriage.
Phaedime, the daughter of Otanes, and niece of his own mother Kassandane,
had been Cambyses' favorite wife hitherto, or at least the only one of
whom it could be said that she was more to him than a purchased slave
would have been. But even she, in his present sated and disgusted state
of feeling, seemed vulgar and contemptible, especially when he thought of
Nitetis.
The Egyptian seemed formed of nobler, better stuff than they all. They
were flattering, coaxing girls; Nitetis was a queen. They humbled
themselves in the dust at his feet; but when he thought of Nitetis, he
beheld her erect, standing before him, on the same proud level as
himself. He determined that from henceforth she should not only occupy
Phaedime's place, but should be to him what Kassandane had been to his
father Cyrus.
She was the only one of his wives who could assist him by her knowledge
and advice; the others were all like children, ignorant, and caring for
nothing but dress and finery: living only for petty intrigues and useless
trifles. This Egyptian girl would be obliged to love him, for he would be
her protector, her lord, her father and brother in this foreign land.
"She must," he said to himself, and to this despot to wish for a thing
and to possess it seemed one and the same. "Bartja had better take care,"
he murmured, "or he shall know what fate awaits the man who dares to
cross my path."
Nitetis too had passed a restless night.
The common apartment of the women was next to her own, and the noise and
singing there had not ceased until nearly midnight. She could often
distinguish the shrill voice of Boges joking and laughing with these
women, who were under his charge. At last all was quiet in the wide
palace halls and then her thoughts turned to her distant home and her
poor sister Tachot, longing for her and for the beautiful Bartja, who,
Croesus had told her, was going to-morrow to the war and possibly to
death. At last she fell asleep, overcome by the fatigue of the journey
and dreaming of her future husband. She saw him on his black charger. The
foaming animal shied at Bartja who was lying in the road, threw his rider
and dragged him into the Nile, whose waves became blood-red. In her
terror she screamed for help; her cries were echoed back from the
Pyramids in such loud and fearful tones that she awoke.
But hark! what could that be? That wailing, shrill cry which she had
heard in her dream,--she could hear it still.
Hastily drawing aside the shutters from one of the openings which served
as windows, she looked out. A large and beautiful garden, laid out with
fountains and shady avenues, lay before her, glittering with the early
dew.
[The Persian gardens were celebrated throughout the old world, and
seem to have been laid out much less stiffly than the Egyptian.
Even the kings of Persia did not consider horticulture beneath their
notice, and the highest among the Achaemenidae took an especial
pleasure in laying out parks, called in Persian Paradises. Their
admiration for well-grown trees went so far, that Xerxes, finding on
his way to Greece a singularly beautiful tree, hung ornaments of
gold upon its branches. Firdusi, the great Persian epic poet,
compares human beauty to the growth of the cypress, as the highest
praise he can give. Indeed some trees were worshipped by the
Persians; and as the tree of life in the Hebrew and Egyptian, so we
find sacred trees in their Paradise.]
No sound was to be heard except the one which had alarmed her, and this
too died away at last on the morning breeze. After a few minutes she
heard cries and noise in the distance, then the great city awaking to its
daily work, which soon settled down into a deep, dull murmur like the
roaring of the sea.
Nitetis was by this time so thoroughly awakened from the effect of the
fresh morning air, that she did not care to lie down again. She went once
more to the window and perceived two figures coming out of the house. One
she recognized as the eunuch Boges; he was talking to a beautiful Persian
woman carelessly dressed. They approached her window. Nitetis hid herself
behind the half-opened shutter and listened, for she fancied she heard
her own name.
"The Egyptian is still asleep." said Boges. "She must be much fatigued by
the journey. I see too that one of her windows is still firmly closed."
"Then tell me quickly," said the Persian. "Do you really think that this
stranger's coming can injure me in any way?"
"Certainly, I do, my pretty one."
"But what leads you to suppose this?"
"She is only to obey the king's commands, not mine."
"Is that all?"
"No, my treasure. I know the king. I can read his features as the Magi
read the sacred books."
"Then we must ruin her."
"More easily said than done, my little bird."
"Leave me alone! you are insolent."
"Well, but nobody can see us, and you know you can do nothing without my
help."
"Very well then, I don't care. But tell me quickly what we can do."
"Thanks, my sweet Phaedime. Well, for the present we must be patient and
wait our time. That detestable hypocrite Croesus seems to have
established himself as protector of the Egyptian; when he is away, we
must set our snares."
The speakers were by this time at such a distance, that Nitetis could not
understand what they said. In silent indignation she closed the shutter,
and called her maidens to dress her. She knew her enemies now--she knew
that a thousand dangers surrounded her, and yet she felt proud and happy,
for was she not chosen to be the real wife of Cambyses? Her own worth
seemed clearer to her than ever before, from a comparison with these
miserable creatures, and a wonderful certainty of ultimate victory stole
into her heart, for Nitetis was a firm believer in the magic power of
virtue.
"What was that dreadful sound I heard so early?" she asked of her
principal waiting-woman, who was arranging her hair.
"Do you mean the sounding brass, lady?"
"Scarcely two hours ago I was awakened by a strange and frightful sound."
"That was the sounding brass, lady. It is used to awaken the young sons
of the Persian nobles, who are brought up at the gate of the king. You
will soon become accustomed to it. We have long ceased even to hear it,
and indeed on great festivals, when it is not sounded, we awake from the
unaccustomed stillness. From the hanging-gardens you will be able to see
how the boys are taken to bathe every morning, whatever the weather may
be. The poor little ones are taken from their mothers when they are six
years old, to be brought up with the other boys of their own rank under
the king's eye."
"Are they to begin learning the luxurious manners of the court so early?"
"Oh no! the poor boys lead a terrible life. They are obliged to sleep on
the hard ground, to rise before the sun. Their food is bread and water,
with very little meat, and they are never allowed to taste wine or
vegetables. Indeed at times they are deprived of food and drink for some
days, simply to accustom them to privations. When the court is at
Ecbatana or Pasargadae, and the weather is bitterly cold, they are sure
to be taken out to bathe, and here in Susa, the hotter the sun, the
longer and more difficult the marches they are compelled to take."
[The summer residences of the kings cf Persia, where it is sometimes
very cold. Ecbatana lies at the foot of the high Elburs (Orontes)
range of mountains in the neighborhood of the modern Hamadan;
Pasargadae not far from Rachmet in the highlands of Iran]
"And these boys, so simply and severely brought up, become in after life
such luxurious men?"
"Yes, that is always the case. A meal that has been waited for is all the
more relished when it comes. These boys see splendor and magnificence
around them daily; they know how rich they are in reality, and yet have
to suffer from hunger and privation. Who can wonder, if, when at last
they gain their liberty, they plunge into the pleasures of life with a
tenfold eagerness? But on the other hand, in time of war, or when going
to the chase, they never murmur at hunger or thirst, spring with a laugh
into the mud regardless of their thin boots and purple trousers, and
sleep as soundly on a rock as on their beds of delicate Arabian wool. You
must see the feats these boys perform, especially when the king is
watching them! Cambyses will certainly take you if you ask him."
"I know those exercises already. In Egypt the girls as well as the boys
are kept to such gymnastic exercises. My limbs were trained to
flexibility by running, postures, and games with hoops and balls.
"How strange! Here, we women grow up just as we please, and are taught
nothing but a little spinning and weaving. Is it true that most of the
Egyptian women can read and write?"
"Yes, nearly all."
"By Mithras, you must be a clever people! Scarcely any of the Persians,
except the Magi and the scribes, learn these difficult arts. The sons of
the nobles are taught to speak the truth, to be courageous, obedient, and
to reverence the gods; to hunt, ride, plant trees and discern between
herbs; but whoever, like the noble Darius, wishes to learn the art of
writing, must apply to the Magi. Women are forbidden to turn their minds
to such studies.--Now your dress is complete. This string of pearls,
which the king sent this morning, looks magnificent in your raven-black
hair, but it is easy to see that you are not accustomed to the full silk
trousers and high-heeled boots. If, however, you walk two or three times
up and down the room you will surpass all the Persian ladies even in your
walk!"
At this moment a knock was heard and Boges entered. He had come to
conduct Nitetis to Kassandane's apartments, where Cambyses was waiting
for her.
The eunuch affected an abject humility, and poured forth a stream of
flattering words, in which he likened the princess to the sun, the starry
heavens, a pure fount of happiness, and a garden of roses. Nitetis
deigned him not a word in reply, but followed, with a beating heart, to
the queen's apartment.
In order to keep out the noonday sun and produce a salutary half-light
for the blind queen's eyes, her windows were shaded by curtains of green
Indian silk. The floor was covered with a thick Babylonian carpet, soft
as moss under the foot. The walls were faced with a mosaic of ivory,
tortoise-shell, gold, silver, malachite, lapis-lazuli, ebony and amber.
The seats and couches were of gold covered with lions' skins, and a table
of silver stood by the side of the blind queen. Kassandane was seated in
a costly arm-chair. She wore a robe of violet-blue, embroidered with
silver, and over her snow-white hair lay a long veil of delicate lace,
woven in Egypt, the ends of which were wound round her neck and tied in a
large bow beneath her chin. She was between sixty and seventy years old;
her face, framed, as it were, into a picture by the lace veil, was
exquisitely symmetrical in its form, intellectual, kind and benevolent in
its expression.
The blind eyes were closed, but those who gazed on her felt that, if
open, they would shine with the gentle light of stars. Even when sitting,
her attitude and height showed a tall and stately figure. Indeed her
entire appearance was worthy the widow of the great and good Cyrus.
On a low seat at her feet, drawing long threads from a golden spindle,
sat the queen's youngest child Atossa, born to her late in life. Cambyses
was standing before her, and behind, hardly visible in the dim light,
Nebenchari, the Egyptian oculist.
As Nitetis entered, Cambyses came towards her and led her to his mother.
The daughter of Amasis fell on her knees before this venerable woman, and
kissed her hand with real affection.
"Be welcome here!" exclaimed the blind queen, feeling her way to the
young girl's head, on which she laid her hand, "I have heard much in your
praise, and hope to gain in you a dear and loving daughter."
Nitetis kissed the gentle, delicate hand again, saying in a low voice: "O
how I thank you for these words! Will you, the wife of the great Cyrus,
permit me to call you mother? My tongue has been so long accustomed to
this sweet word; and now after long weeks of silence, I tremble with joy
at the thought that I may say 'my mother' once more! I will indeed try to
deserve your love and kindness; and you--you will be to me all that your
loving countenance seems to promise? Advise and teach me; let me find a
refuge at your feet, if sometimes the longing for home becomes too
strong, and my poor heart too weak to bear its grief or joy alone. Oh, be
my mother! that one word includes all else!"
The blind queen felt the warm tears fall on her hand; she pressed her
lips kindly on the weeping girl's forehead, and answered: "I can
understand your feelings. My apartments shall be always open to you, my
heart ready to welcome you here. Come when you will, and call me your
mother with the same perfect confidence with which I, from my whole
heart, name you my daughter. In a few months you will be my son's wife,
and then the gods may grant you that gift, which, by implanting within
you the feelings of a mother, will prevent you from feeling the need of
one."
"May Ormuszd hear and give his blessing!" said Cambyses. "I rejoice,
mother, that my wife pleases you, and I know that when once she becomes
familiar with our manners and customs she will be happy here. If Nitetis
pay due heed, our marriage can be celebrated in four months."
"But the law--" began his mother.
"I command--in four months, and should like to see him who dare raise an
objection. Farewell! Nebenchari, use your best skill for the queen's
eyes, and if my wife permit, you, as her countryman, may visit her
to-morrow. Farewell! Bartja sends his parting greetings. He is on the
road to the Tapuri."
Atossa wiped away a tear in silence, but Kassandane answered: "You would
have done well to allow the boy to remain here a few months longer. Your
commander, Megabyzus, could have subdued that small nation alone."
"Of that I have no doubt," replied the king, "but Bartja desired an
opportunity of distinguishing himself in the field; and for that reason I
sent him."
"Would he not gladly have waited until the war with the Massageta; where
more glory might be gained?" asked the blind woman.
"Yes," said Atossa, "and if he should fall in this war, you will have
deprived him of the power of fulfilling his most sacred duty, of avenging
the soul of our father!"
"Be silent!" cried Cambyses in an overbearing tone, "or I shall have to
teach you what is becoming in women and children. Bartja is on far too
good terms with fortune to fall in the war. He will live, I hope, to
deserve the love which is now so freely flung into his lap like an alms."
"How canst thou speak thus?" cried Kassandane. "In what manly virtue is
Bartja wanting? Is it his fault, that he has had no such opportunity of
distinguishing himself in the field as thou hast had? You are the king
and I am bound to respect your commands, but I blame my son for depriving
his blind mother of the greatest joy left to her in her old age. Bartja
would have gladly remained here until the Massagetan war, if your
self-will had not determined otherwise."
"And what I will is good!" exclaimed Cambyses interrupting his mother,
and pale with anger, "I desire that this subject be not mentioned again."
So saying, he left the room abruptly and went into the reception-hall,
followed by the immense retinue which never quitted him, whithersoever he
might direct his steps.
An hour passed, and still Nitetis and the lovely Atossa were sitting side
by side, at the feet of the queen. The Persian women listened eagerly to
all their new friend could tell them about Egypt and its wonders.
"Oh! how I should like to visit your home!" exclaimed Atossa. "It must be
quite, quite different from Persia and everything else that I have seen
yet. The fruitful shores of your great river, larger even than the
Euphrates, the temples with their painted columns, those huge artificial
mountains, the Pyramids, where the ancient kings be buried--it must all
be wonderfully beautiful. But what pleases me best of all is your
description of the entertainments, where men and women converse together
as they like. The only meals we are allowed to take in the society of men
are on New Year's Day and the king's birthday, and then we are forbidden
to speak; indeed it is not thought right for us even to raise our eyes.
How different it is with you! By Mithras! mother, I should like to be an
Egyptian, for we poor creatures are in reality nothing but miserable
slaves; and yet I feel that the great Cyrus was my father too, and that I
am worth quite as much as most men. Do I not speak the truth? can I not
obey as well as command? have I not the same thirst and longing for
glory? could not I learn to ride, to string a bow, to fight and swim, if
I were taught and inured to such exercises?"
The girl had sprung from her seat while speaking, her eyes flashed and
she swung her spindle in the air, quite unconscious that in so doing she
was breaking the thread and entangling the flax.
"Remember what is fitting," reminded Kassandane. "A woman must submit
with humility to her quiet destiny, and not aspire to imitate the deeds
of men."
"But there are women who lead the same lives as men," cried Atossa.
"There are the Amazons who live on the shores of the Thermodon in
Themiscyra, and at Comana on the Iris; they have waged great wars, and
even to this day wear men's armor."
"Who told you this?"
"My old nurse, Stephanion, whom my father brought a captive from Sinope
to Pasargadae."
"But I can teach you better," said Nitetis. "It is true that in
Themiscyra and Comana there are a number of women who wear soldier's
armor; but they are only priestesses, and clothe themselves like the
warlike goddess they serve, in order to present to the worshippers a
manifestation of the divinity in human form. Croesus says that an army of
Amazons has never existed, but that the Greeks, (always ready and able to
turn anything into a beautiful myth), having seen these priestesses, at
once transformed the armed virgins dedicated to the goddess into a nation
of fighting women."
"Then they are liars!" exclaimed the disappointed girl.
"It is true, that the Greeks have not the same reverence for truth as you
have," answered Nitetis, "but they do not call the men who invent these
beautiful stories liars; they are called poets."
"Just as it is with ourselves," said Kassandane. "The poets, who sing the
praises of my husband, have altered and adorned his early life in a
marvellous manner; yet no one calls them liars. But tell me, my daughter,
is it true that these Greeks are more beautiful than other men, and
understand art better even than the Egyptians?"
"On that subject I should not venture to pronounce a judgment. There is
such a great difference between the Greek and Egyptian works of art. When
I went into our own gigantic temples to pray, I always felt as if I must
prostrate myself in the dust before the greatness of the gods, and
entreat them not to crush so insignificant a worm; but in the temple of
Hera at Samos, I could only raise my hands to heaven in joyful
thanksgiving, that the gods had made the earth so beautiful. In Egypt I
always believed as I had been taught: 'Life is asleep; we shall not awake
to our true existence in the kingdom of Osiris till the hour of death;'
but in Greece I thought: 'I am born to live and to enjoy this cheerful,
bright and blooming world.'"
"Ah! tell us something more about Greece," cried Atossa; "but first
Nebenchari must put a fresh bandage on my mother's eyes."
The oculist, a tall, grave man in the white robes of an Egyptian priest,
came forward to perform the necessary operation, and after being kindly
greeted by Nitetis, withdrew once more silently into the background. At
the same time a eunuch entered to enquire whether Croesus might be
allowed to pay his respectful homage to the king's mother.
The aged king soon appeared, and was welcomed as the old and tried friend
of the Persian royal family. Atossa, with her usual impetuosity, fell on
the neck of the friend she had so sorely missed during his absence; the
queen gave him her hand, and Nitetis met him like a loving daughter.
"I thank the gods, that I am permitted to see you again," said Croesus.
"The young can look at life as a possession, as a thing understood and
sure, but at my age every year must be accepted as an undeserved gift
from the gods, for which a man must be thankful."
"I could envy you for this happy view of life," sighed Kassandane. "My
years are fewer than yours, and yet every new day seems to me a
punishment sent by the Immortals."
"Can I be listening to the wife of the great Cyrus?" asked Croesus. "How
long is it since courage and confidence left that brave heart? I tell
you, you will recover sight, and once more thank the gods for a good old
age. The man who recovers, after a serious illness, values health a
hundred-fold more than before; and he who regains sight after blindness,
must be an especial favorite of the gods. Imagine to yourself the delight
of that first moment when your eyes behold once more the bright shining
of the sun, the faces of your loved ones, the beauty of all created
things, and tell me, would not that outweigh even a whole life of
blindness and dark night? In the day of healing, even if that come in old
age, a new life will begin and I shall hear you confess that my friend
Solon was right."
"In what respect?" asked Atossa.
"In wishing that Mimnermos, the Colophonian poet, would correct the poem
in which he has assigned sixty years as the limit of a happy life, and
would change the sixty into eighty."
"Oh no!" exclaimed Kassandane. "Even were Mithras to restore my sight,
such a long life would be dreadful. Without my husband I seem to myself
like a wanderer in the desert, aimless and without a guide."
"Are your children then nothing to you, and this kingdom, of which you
have watched the rise and growth?"
"No indeed! but my children need me no longer, and the ruler of this
kingdom is too proud to listen to a woman's advice."
On hearing these words Atossa and Nitetis seized each one of the queen's
hands, and Nitetis cried: "You ought to desire a long life for our sakes.
What should we be without your help and protection?"
Kassandane smiled again, murmuring in a scarcely audible voice: "You are
right, my children, you will stand in need of your mother."
"Now you are speaking once more like the wife of the great Cyrus," cried
Croesus, kissing the robe of the blind woman. "Your presence will indeed
be needed, who can say how soon? Cambyses is like hard steel; sparks fly
wherever he strikes. You can hinder these sparks from kindling a
destroying fire among your loved ones, and this should be your duty. You
alone can dare to admonish the king in the violence of his passion. He
regards you as his equal, and, while despising the opinion of others,
feels wounded by his mother's disapproval. Is it not then your duty to
abide patiently as mediator between the king, the kingdom and your loved
ones, and so, by your own timely reproofs, to humble the pride of your
son, that he may be spared that deeper humiliation which, if not thus
averted, the gods will surely inflict."
"You are right," answered the blind woman, "but I feel only too well that
my influence over him is but small. He has been so much accustomed to
have his own will, that he will follow no advice, even if it come from
his mother's lips."
"But he must at least hear it," answered Croesus, "and that is much, for
even if he refuse to obey, your counsels will, like divine voices,
continue to make themselves heard within him, and will keep him back from
many a sinful act. I will remain your ally in this matter; for, as
Cambyses' dying father appointed me the counsellor of his son in word and
deed, I venture occasionally a bold word to arrest his excesses. Ours is
the only blame from which he shrinks: we alone can dare to speak our
opinion to him. Let us courageously do our duty in this our office: you,
moved by love to Persia and your son, and I by thankfulness to that great
man to whom I owe life and freedom, and whose son Cambyses is. I know
that you bemoan the manner in which he has been brought up; but such late
repentance must be avoided like poison. For the errors of the wise the
remedy is reparation, not regret; regret consumes the heart, but the
effort to repair an error causes it to throb with a noble pride."
"In Egypt," said Nitetis, "regret is numbered among the forty-two deadly
sins. One of our principal commandments is, 'Thou shalt not consume thine
heart.'"
[In the Ritual of the Dead (indeed in almost every Papyrus of the
Dead) we meet with a representation of the soul, whose heart is
being weighed and judged. The speech made by the soul is called the
negative justification, in which she assures the 42 judges of the
dead, that she has not committed the 42 deadly sins which she
enumerates. This justification is doubly interesting because it
contains nearly the entire moral law of Moses, which last, apart
from all national peculiarities and habits of mind, seems to contain
the quintessence of human morality--and this we find ready
paragraphed in our negative justification. Todtenbuch ed. Lepsius.
125. We cannot discuss this question philosophically here, but the
law of Pythagoras, who borrowed so much from Egypt, and the contents
of which are the same, speaks for our view. It is similar in form
to the Egyptian.]
"There you remind me," said Croesus "that I have undertaken to arrange
for your instruction in the Persian customs, religion and language. I had
intended to withdraw to Barene, the town which I received as a gift from
Cyrus, and there, in that most lovely mountain valley, to take my rest;
but for your sake and for the king's, I will remain here and continue to
give you instruction in the Persian tongue. Kassandane herself will
initiate you in the customs peculiar to women at the Persian court, and
Oropastes, the high-priest, has been ordered by the king to make you
acquainted with the religion of Iran. He will be your spiritual, and I
your secular guardian."
At these words Nitetis, who had been smiling happily, cast down her eyes
and asked in a low voice: "Am I to become unfaithful to the gods of my
fathers, who have never failed to hear my prayers? Can I, ought I to
forget them?"
"Yes," said Kassandane decidedly, "thou canst, and it is thy bounden
duty, for a wife ought to have no friends but those her husband calls
such. The gods are a man's earliest, mightiest and most faithful friends,
and it therefore becomes thy duty, as a wife, to honor them, and to close
thine heart against strange gods and superstitions, as thou wouldst close
it against strange lovers."
"And," added Croesus, "we will not rob you of your deities; we will only
give them to you under other names. As Truth remains eternally the same,
whether called 'maa', as by the Egyptians, or 'Aletheia' as by the
Greeks, so the essence of the Deity continues unchanged in all places and
times. Listen, my daughter: I myself, while still king of Lydia, often
sacrificed in sincere devotion to the Apollo of the Greeks, without a
fear that in so doing I should offend the Lydian sun-god Sandon; the
Ionians pay their worship to the Asiatic Cybele, and, now that I have
become a Persian, I raise my hands adoringly to Mithras, Ormuzd and the
lovely Anahita. Pythagoras too, whose teaching is not new to you,
worships one god only, whom he calls Apollo; because, like the Greek
sun-god, he is the source of light and of those harmonies which
Pythagoras holds to be higher than all else. And lastly, Xenophanes of
Colophon laughs at the many and divers gods of Homer and sets one single
deity on high--the ceaselessly creative might of nature, whose essence
consists of thought, reason and eternity.
[A celebrated freethinker, who indulged in bold and independent
speculations, and suffered much persecution for his ridicule of the
Homeric deities. He flourished at the time of our history and lived
to a great age, far on into the fifth century. We have quoted some
fragments of his writings above. He committed his speculations also
to verse.]
"In this power everything has its rise, and it alone remains unchanged,
while all created matter must be continually renewed and perfected. The
ardent longing for some being above us, on whom we can lean when our own
powers fail,--the wonderful instinct which desires a faithful friend to
whom we can tell every joy and sorrow without fear of disclosure, the
thankfulness with which we behold this beautiful world and all the rich
blessings we have received--these are the feelings which we call
piety--devotion.
"These you must hold fast; remembering, however, at the same time, that
the world is ruled neither by the Egyptian, the Persian, nor the Greek
divinities apart from each other, but that all these are one; and that
one indivisible Deity, how different soever may be the names and
characters under which He is represented, guides the fate of men and
nations."
The two Persian women listened to the old man in amazement. Their
unpractised powers were unable to follow the course of his thoughts.
Nitetis, however, had understood him thoroughly, and answered: "My mother
Ladice was the pupil of Pythagoras, and has told me something like this
already; but the Egyptian priests consider such views to be sacrilegious,
and call their originators despisers of the gods. So I tried to repress
such thoughts; but now I will resist them no longer. What the good and
wise Croesus believes cannot possibly be evil or impious! Let Oropastes
come! I am ready to listen to his teaching. The god of Thebes, our Ammon,
shall be transformed into Ormuzd,--Isis or Hathor, into Anahita, and
those among our gods for whom I can find no likeness in the Persian
religion, I shall designate by the name of 'the Deity.'"
Croesus smiled. He had fancied, knowing how obstinately the Egyptians
clung to all they had received from tradition and education, that it
would have been more difficult for Nitetis to give up the gods of her
native land. He had forgotten that her mother was a Greek, and that the
daughters of Amasis had studied the doctrines of Pythagoras. Neither was
he aware how ardently Nitetis longed to please her proud lord and master.
Even Amasis, who so revered the Samian philosopher, who had so often
yielded to Hellenic influence, and who with good reason might be called a
free-thinking Egyptian, would sooner have exchanged life for death, than
his multiform gods for the one idea "Deity."
"You are a teachable pupil," said Croesus, laying his hand on her head,
"and as a reward, you shall be allowed either to visit Kassandane, or to
receive Atossa in the hanging-gardens, every morning, and every afternoon
until sunset."
This joyful news was received with loud rejoicings by Atossa, and with a
grateful smile by the Egyptian girl.
"And lastly," said Croesus, "I have brought some balls and hoops with me
from Sais, that you may be able to amuse yourselves in Egyptian fashion."
"Balls?" asked Atossa in amazement; "what can we do with the heavy wooden
things?"
"That need not trouble you," answered Croesus, laughing. "The balls I
speak of are pretty little things made of the skins of fish filled with
air, or of leather. A child of two years old can throw these, but you
would find it no easy matter even to lift one of those wooden balls with
which the Persian boys play. Are you content with me, Nitetis?"
[In Persia games with balls are still reckoned among the amusements
of the men. One player drives a wooden hall to the other, as in the
English game of cricket. Chardin (Voyage en Perse. III. p. 226.)
saw the game played by 300 players.]
"How can I thank you enough, my father?"
"And now listen to my plan for the division of your time. In the morning
you will visit Kassandane, chat with Atossa, and listen to the teaching
of your noble mother."
Here the blind woman bent her head in approval. "Towards noon I shall
come to teach you, and we can talk sometimes about Egypt and your loved
ones there, but always in Persian. You would like this, would you not?"
Nitetis smiled.
"Every second day, Oropastes will be in attendance to initiate you in the
Persian religion."
"I will take the greatest pains to comprehend him quickly."
"In the afternoon you can be with Atossa as long as you like. Does that
please you too?"
"O Croesus!" cried the young girl and kissed the old man's hand.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A first impression is often a final one
Assigned sixty years as the limit of a happy life
At my age every year must be accepted as an undeserved gift
Cambyses had been spoiled from his earliest infancy
Devoid of occupation, envy easily becomes hatred
Easy to understand what we like to hear
Eros mocks all human efforts to resist or confine him
Eyes are much more eloquent than all the tongues in the world
For the errors of the wise the remedy is reparation, not regret
Greeks have not the same reverence for truth
He who is to govern well must begin by learning to obey
In war the fathers live to mourn for their slain sons
Inn, was to be found about every eighteen miles
Lovers are the most unteachable of pupils
The beautiful past is all he has to live upon
The gods cast envious glances at the happiness of mortals
Unwise to try to make a man happy by force
War is a perversion of nature
Ye play with eternity as if it were but a passing moment
Zeus pays no heed to lovers' oaths
AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS.
By Georg Ebers
Volume 5.
CHAPTER XIV.
The next day Nitetis removed to the country-house in the hanging-gardens,
and began a monotonous, but happy and industrious life there, according
to the rules laid down by Croesus. Every day she was carried to
Kassandane and Atossa in a closely shut-up litter. Nitetis soon began to
look upon the blind queen as a beloved and loving mother, and the merry,
spirited Atossa nearly made up to her for the loss of her sister Tachot,
so far away on the distant Nile. She could not have desired a better
companion than this gay, cheerful girl, whose wit and merriment
effectually prevented homesickness or discontent from settling in her
friend's heart. The gravity and earnestness of Nitetis' character were
brightened by Atossa's gaiety, and Atossa's exuberant spirits calmed and
regulated by the thoughtful nature of Nitetis.
Both Croesus and Kassandane were pleased and satisfied with their new
daughter and pupil, and Oropastes extolled her talents and industry daily
to Cambyses. She learnt the Persian language unusually well and quickly;
Cambyses only visited his mother when he hoped to find Nitetis there, and
presented her continually with rich dresses and costly jewels. But the
highest proof of his favor consisted in his abstaining from visiting her
at her house in the hanging-gardens, a line of conduct which proved that
he meant to include Nitetis in the small number of his real and lawful
wives, a privilege of which many a princess in his harem could not boast.
The grave, beautiful girl threw a strange spell over this strong,
turbulent man. Her presence alone seemed enough to soften his stubborn
will, and he would watch their games for hours, his eyes fixed on her
graceful movements. Once, when the ball had fallen into the water, the
king sprang in after it, regardless of his costly apparel. Nitetis
screamed on seeing his intention, but Cambyses handed her the dripping
toy with the words: "Take care or I shall be obliged to frighten you
again." At the same time he drew from his neck a gold chain set with
jewels and gave it to the blushing girl, who thanked him with a look
which fully revealed her feelings for her future husband.
Croesus, Kassandane and Atossa soon noticed that Nitetis loved the king.
Her former fear of this proud and powerful being had indeed changed into
a passionate admiration. She felt as if she must die if deprived of his
presence. He seemed to her like a, glorious and omnipotent divinity, and
her wish to possess him presumptuous and sacrilegious; but its fulfilment
shone before her as an idea more beautiful even than return to her native
land and reunion with those who, till now, had been her only loved ones.
Nitetis herself was hardly conscious of the strength of her feelings, and
believed that when she trembled before the king's arrival it was from
fear, and not from her longing to behold him once more. Croesus, however,
had soon discovered the truth, and brought a deep blush to his favorite's
cheek by singing to her, old as he was, Anacreon's newest song, which he
had learnt at Sais from Ibykus
"We read the flying courser's name
Upon his side in marks of flame;
And by their turban'd brows alone
The warriors of the East are known.
But in the lover's glowing eyes,
The inlet to his bosom lies;
Through them we see the tiny mark,
Where Love has dropp'd his burning spark"
--Paegnion 15
And thus, in work and amusement, jest, earnest, and mutual love, the
weeks and months passed with Nitetis. Cambyses' command that she was to
be happy in his land had fulfilled itself, and by the time the
Mesopotamian spring-tide (January, February and March), which succeeds
the rainy month of December, was over, and the principal festival of the
Asiatics, the New Year, had been solemnized at the equinox, and the May
sun had begun to glow in the heavens, Nitetis felt quite at home in
Babylon, and all the Persians knew that the young Egyptian princess had
quite displaced Phaedime, the daughter of Otanes, in the king's favor,
and would certainly become his first and favorite wife.
Boges sank considerably in public estimation, for it was known that
Cambyses had ceased to visit the harem, and the chief of the eunuchs had
owed all his importance to the women, who were compelled to coax from
Cambyses whatever Boges desired for himself or others. Not a day passed
on which the mortified official did not consult with the supplanted
favorite Phaedime, as to the best means of ruining Nitetis, but their
most finely spun intrigues and artifices were baffled by the strength of
king's love and the blameless life of his royal bride.
Phaedime, impatient, mortified, and thirsting for vengeance, was
perpetually urging Boges to some decided act; he, on the contrary,
advised patience.
At last, however, after many weeks, he came to her full of joy,
exclaiming: "I have devised a little plan which must ruin the Egyptian
woman as surely as my name is Boges. When Bartja comes back, my treasure,
our hour will have arrived."
While saying this the creature rubbed his fat, soft hands, and, with his
perpetual fulsome smile, looked as if he were feasting on some good deed
performed. He did not, however, give Phaedime the faintest idea of the
nature of his "little plan," and only answered her pressing questions
with the words: "Better lay your head in a lion's jaws, than your secret
in the ears of a woman. I fully acknowledge your courage, but at the same
time advise you to remember that, though a man proves his courage in
action, a woman's is shown in obedience. Obey my words and await the
issue in patience." Nebenchari, the oculist, continued to attend the
queen, but so carefully abstained from all intercourse with the Persians,
that he became a proverb among them for his gloomy, silent ways. During
the day he was to be found in the queen's apartments, silently examining
large rolls of papyri, which he called the book of Athotes and the sacred
Ambres; at night, by permission of the king and the satraps of Babylon,
he often ascended one of the high towers on the walls, called
Tritantaechmes, in order to observe the stars.
The Chaldaean priests, the earliest astronomers, would have allowed him
to take his observations from the summit of the great temple of Bel,
their own observatory, but he refused this offer decidedly, and persisted
in his haughty reserve. When Oropastes attempted to explain to him the
celebrated Babylonian sun-dial, introduced by Anaximander of Miletus into
Greece, he turned from the Magian with a scornful laugh, saying: "We knew
all this, before you knew the meaning of an hour."
Nitetis had shown Nebenchari much kindness, yet he took no interest in
her, seemed indeed to avoid her purposely, and on her asking whether she
had displeased or offended him, answered: "For me you are a stranger. How
can I reckon those my friends, who can so gladly and so quickly forget
those they loved best, their gods, and the customs of their native land?"
Boges quickly discovered this state of feeling on the part of Nebenchari,
and took much pains to secure him as an ally, but the physician rejected
the eunuch's flatteries, gifts, and attentions with dignity.
No sooner did an Angare appear in the court of the palace with despatches
for the king, than Boges hastened to enquire whether news from the Tapuri
had arrived.
At length the desired messenger appeared, bringing word that the rebels
were subdued, and Bartja on the point of returning.
Three weeks passed--fresh messengers arrived from day to day announcing
the approach of the victorious prince; the streets glittered once more in
festal array, the army entered the gates of Babylon, Bartja thanked the
rejoicing multitude, and a short time after was in the arms of his blind
mother.
Cambyses received his brother with undisguised warmth, and took him to
the queen's apartments, when he knew that Nitetis would be there.
For he was sure the Egyptian girl loved him; his previous jealousy seemed
a silly fancy now, and he wished to give Bartja an opportunity of seeing
how entirely he trusted his bride.
Cambyses' love had made him mild and gentle, unwearied in giving and in
doing good. His wrath slumbered for a season, and around the spot where
the heads of those who had suffered capital punishment were exhibited as
a warning to their fellow-men, the hungry, screeching crows now wheeled,
in vain.
The influence of the insinuating eunuchs (a race who had never been seen
within the gates of Cyrus until the incorporation of Media, Lydia and
Babylon, in which countries they had filled many of the highest offices
at court and in the state), was now waning, and the importance of the
noble Achaemenidae increasing in proportion; for Cambyses applied oftener
to the latter than to the former for advice in matters relating to the
welfare of the country.
The aged Hystaspes, father of Darius, governor of Persia proper and
cousin to the king; Pharnaspes, Cambyses' grandfather on the mother's
side; Otanes, his uncle and father-in-law. Intaphernes, Aspathines,
Gobryas, Hydarnes, the general Megabyzus, father of Zopyrus, the envoy
Prexaspes, the noble Croesus, and the old warrior Araspes; in short, the
flower of the ancient Persian aristocracy, were now at the court of
Cambyses.
To this must be added that the entire nobility of the realm, the satraps
or governors of the provinces, and the chief priests from every town were
also assembled at Babylon to celebrate the king's birthday.
[The king's birthday was the principal feast among the Persians, and
called "the perfect feast." Herod. I. 133. Birthdays were held in
much honor by the ancients, and more especially those of their
kings. Both the great bilingual Egyptian tablets, which we possess
(the Rosetta stone, line 10 of hieroglyphic text; Gr. text, line 46.
and the edict of Canopus ed. Lepsius, hieroglyphic text 1. 3. Gr.
text 1. 5.) mention the celebration of the birthday of one of the
Ptolemies; and even of Rameses II., so early as the 14th century B.
C. we read: "There was joy in heaven on his birthday."]
The entire body of officials and deputies streamed from the provinces up
to the royal city, bringing presents to their ruler and good wishes; they
came also to take part in the great sacrifices at which horses, stags,
bulls and asses were slaughtered in thousands as offerings to the gods.
At this festival all the Persians received gifts, every man was allowed
to ask a petition of the king, which seldom remained unfulfilled, and in
every city the people were feasted at the royal expense. Cambyses had
commanded that his marriage with Nitetis should be celebrated eight days
after the birthday, and all the magnates of the realms should be invited
to the ceremony.
The streets of Babylon swarmed with strangers, the colossal palaces on
both shores of the Euphrates were overfilled, and all the houses stood
adorned in festal brightness.
The zeal thus displayed by his people, this vast throng of human beings,
--representing and bringing around him, as it were, his entire kingdom,
contributed not a little to raise the king's spirits.
His pride was gratified; and the only longing left in his heart had been
stilled by Nitetis' love. For the first time in his life he believed
himself completely happy, and bestowed his gifts, not only from a sense
of his duty as king of Persia, but because the act of giving was in
itself a pleasure.
Megabyzus could not extol the deeds of Bartja and his friends too highly.
Cambyses embraced the young warriors, gave them horses and gold chains,
called them "brothers" and reminded Bartja, that he had promised to grant
him a petition if he returned victorious.
At this Bartja cast down his eyes, not knowing at first in what form to
begin his request, and the king answered laughing: "Look, my friends; our
young hero is blushing like a girl! It seems I shall have to grant
something important; so he had better wait until my birthday, and then,
at supper, when the wine has given him courage, he shall whisper in my
ear what he is now afraid to utter. Ask much, Bartja, I am happy myself,
and wish all my friends to be happy too." Bartja only smiled in answer
and went to his mother; for he had not yet opened his heart to her on the
matter which lay so near it.
He was afraid of meeting with decided opposition; but Croesus had cleared
the way far him by telling Kassandane so much in praise of Sappho, her
virtues and her graces, her talents and skill, that Nitetis and Atossa
maintained she must have given the old man a magic potion, and
Kassandane, after a short resistance, yielded to her darling's
entreaties.
"A Greek woman the lawful wife of a Persian prince of the blood!" cried
the blind woman. "Unheard of! What will Cambyses say? How can we gain his
consent?"
"On that matter you may be at ease, my mother," answered Bartja, "I am as
certain that my brother will give his consent, as I am that Sappho will
prove an ornament and honor to our house."
"Croesus has already told me much in favor of this maiden," answered
Kassandane, "and it pleases me that thou hast at last resolved to marry;
but never-the-less this alliance does not seem suitable for a son of
Cyrus. And have you forgotten that the Achaemenidae; will probably refuse
to recognize the child of a Greek mother as their future king, if
Cambyses should remain childless?"
"Mother, I fear nothing; for my heart is not set upon the crown. And
indeed many a king of Persia has had a mother of far lower parentage than
my Sappho." I feel persuaded that when my relations see the precious
jewel I have won on the Nile, not one of them will chide me."
"The gods grant that Sappho may be equal to our Nitetis!" answered
Kassandane, "I love her as if she were my own child, and bless the day
which brought her to Persia. The warm light of her eyes has melted your
brother's hard heart; her kindness and gentleness bring beauty into the
night of my blind old age, and her sweet earnestness and gravity have
changed your sister Atossa from an unruly child into a gentle maiden. But
now call them, (they are playing in the garden), and we will tell them of
the new friend they are to gain through you."
"Pardon me, my mother," answered Bartja, "but I must beg you not to tell
my sister until we are sure of the king's consent."
"You are right, my son. We must conceal your wish, to save Nitetis and
Atossa from a possible disappointment. A bright hope unfulfilled is
harder to bear than an unexpected sorrow. So let us wait for your
brother's consent, and may the gods give their blessing!" Early in the
morning of the king's birthday the Persians offered their sacrifices on
the shores of the Euphrates. A huge altar of silver had been raised on an
artificial hill. On this a mighty fire had been kindled, from which
flames and sweet odors rose towards heaven. White-robed magi fed the fire
with pieces of daintily-cut sandal-wood, and stirred it with bundles of
rods.
A cloth, the Paiti-dhana, was bound round the heads of the priests, the
ends of which covered the mouth, and thus preserved the pure fire from
pollution by human breath.
[The Persians were ordered to hold this little square piece of cloth
before their mouths when they prayed. It was from 2 to 7 fingers
broad. Anquetil gives a drawing of it in his Zend-Avesia. Strabo
speaks of the Paiti-dhana p. 733. He says the ends of the cloth
used as a covering for the head hung down over the mouth.]
The victims had been slaughtered in a meadow near the river, the flesh
cut into pieces, sprinkled with salt, and laid out on tender grasses,
sprouts of clover, myrtle-blossoms, and laurel-leaves, that the beautiful
daughter of Ormuzd, the patient, sacred Earth, might not be touched by
aught that was dead or bleeding.
Oropastes, the chief Destur,--[Priest]--now drew near the fire and cast
fresh butter into it. The flames leapt up into the air and all the
Persians fell on their knees and hid their faces, in the belief that the
fire was now ascending to their great god and father. The Magian then
took a mortar, laid some leaves and stalks of the sacred herb Haomas
within it, crushed them and poured the ruddy juice, the food of the gods,
into the flames.
After this he raised his hands to heaven, and, while the other priests
continually fed the flames into a wilder blaze by casting in fresh
butter, sang a long prayer out of the sacred books. In this prayer the
blessing of the gods was called down on everything pure and good, but
principally on the king and his entire realm. The good spirits of light,
life and truth; of all noble deeds; of the Earth, the universal giver; of
the refreshing waters, the shining metals, the pastures, trees and
innocent creatures, were praised: the evil spirits of darkness; of lying,
the deceiver of mankind; of disease, death and sin; of the rigid cold;
the desolating heat; of all odious dirt and vermin, were cursed, together
with their father the malignant Ahriman. At the end all present joined in
singing the festival prayer: "Purity and glory are sown for them that are
pure and upright in heart."
The sacrificial ceremony was concluded with the king's prayer, and then
Cambyses, arrayed in his richest robes, ascended a splendid chariot drawn
by four snow-white Nicoean horses, and studded with topazes, cornelian
and amber, and was conveyed to the great reception-hall, where the
deputies and officers from the provinces awaited him.
As soon as the king and his retinue had departed, the priests selected,
for themselves, the best pieces of the flesh which had been offered in
sacrifice, and allowed the thronging crowd to take the rest.
The Persian divinities disdained sacrifices in the light of food,
requiring only the souls of the slaughtered animals, and many a poor man,
especially among the priests, subsisted on the flesh of the abundant
royal sacrifices.
The prayer offered up by the Magian was a model for those of the Persian
people. No man was allowed to ask anything of the gods for himself alone.
Every pious soul was rather to implore blessings for his nation; for was
not each only a part of the whole? and did not each man share in the
blessings granted to the whole kingdom? But especially they were
commanded to pray for the king, in whom the realm was embodied and
shadowed forth. It was this beautiful surrender of self for the public
weal, that had made the Persians great. The doctrines of the Egyptian
priesthood represented the Pharaohs as actual divinities, while the
Persian monarchs were only called "sons of the gods;" yet the power of
the latter was far more absolute and unfettered than that of the former;
the reason for this being that the Persians had been wise enough to free
themselves from priestly domination, while the Pharaohs, as we have seen,
if not entirely under the dominion of the priestly caste, were yet under
its influence in the most important matters.
The Egyptian intolerance of all strange religions was unknown in Asia.
The conquered Babylonians were allowed by Cyrus to retain their own gods,
after their incorporation in the great Asiatic kingdom. The Jews, Ionians
and inhabitants of Asia Minor, in short, the entire mass of nations
subject to Cambyses remained unmolested in possession of their hereditary
religions and customs.
Beside the great altar, therefore, might be seen many a smaller
sacrificial flame, kindled in honor of their own divinities, by the
envoys from the conquered provinces to this great birthday feast.
Viewed from a distance, the immense city looked like a gigantic furnace.
Thick clouds of smoke hovered over its towers, obscuring the light of the
burning May sun.
By the time the king had reached the palace, the multitude who had come
to take part in the festival had formed themselves into a procession of
interminable length, which wandered on through the straight streets of
Babylon towards the royal palace.
Their road was strewn with myrtle and palm-branches, roses, poppy and
oleander-blossoms, and with leaves of the silver poplar, palm and laurel;
the air perfumed with incense, myrrh, and a thousand other sweet odors.
Carpets and flags waved and fluttered from the houses.
Music too was there; the shrill peal of the Median trumpet, and soft tone
of the Phrygian flute; the Jewish cymbal and harp, Paphlagonian
tambourines and the stringed instruments of Ionia; Syrian kettle-drums
and cymbals, the shells and drums of the Arians from the mouth of the
Indus, and the loud notes of the Bactrian battle-trumpets. But above all
these resounded the rejoicing shouts of the Babylonian multitude,
subjugated by the Persians only a few short years before, and yet, like
all Asiatics, wearing their fetters with an air of gladness so long as
the fear of their tyrant was before their eyes.
The fragrant odors, the blaze of color and sparkling of gold and jewels,
the neighing of the horses, and shouts and songs of human beings, all
united to produce a whole, at once bewildering and intoxicating to the
senses and the feelings.
The messengers had not been sent up to Babylon empty-handed. Beautiful
horses, huge elephants and comical monkeys; rhinoceroses and buffaloes
adorned with housings and tassels; double-humped Bactrian camels with
gold collars on their shaggy necks; waggon-loads of rare woods and ivory,
woven goods of exquisite texture, casks of ingots and gold-dust, gold and
silver vessels, rare plants for the royal gardens, and foreign animals
for the preserves, the most remarkable of which were antelopes, zebras,
and rare monkeys and birds, these last being tethered to a tree in full
leaf and fluttering among the branches. Such were the offerings sent to
the great king of Persia.
They were the tribute of the conquered nations and, after having been
shown to the king, were weighed and tested by treasurers and secretaries,
either declared satisfactory, or found wanting and returned, in which
case the niggardly givers were condemned to bring a double tribute later.
[At the time of which we are writing, the kings of Persia taxed
their kingdom at whatever time and to whatever extent seemed good in
their own eyes. Cambyses' successor, Darius, was the first to
introduce a regular system of taxation, in consequence of which he
was nicknamed "the shopkeeper." Up to a much later period it still
remained the duty of certain districts to send natural products to
the court Herod. I. 192. Xenoph. Anab. IV. 5.]
The palace-gates were reached without hindrance, the way being kept clear
by lines of soldiers and whipbearers stationed on either side of the
street.
If the royal progress to the place of sacrifice, when five hundred
richly-caprisoned horses had been led behind the king's chariot, could be
called magnificent, and the march of the envoys a brilliant spectacle,
the great throne-room presented a vision of dazzling and magic beauty.
In the background, raised on six steps, each of which was guarded, as it
were, by two golden clogs, stood the throne of gold; above it, supported
by four golden pillars studded with precious stones, was a purple canopy,
on which appeared two winged discs, the king's Feruer.
[The Feruer or Ferwer is the spiritual part of every man-his soul
and reason. It was in existence before the man was horn, joins him
at his birth and departs at his death. The Ferwer keeps up a war
with the Diws or evil spirits, and is the element of man's
preservation in life. The moment he departs, the body returns to
its original elements. After death he becomes immortal if he has
done well, but if his deeds have been evil he is cast into hell. It
is right to call upon the Ferwer and entreat his help. He will
bring the prayer before God and on this account is represented as a
winged disc.]
Fan-bearers, high in office at the court, stood behind the throne, and,
on either side, those who sat at the king's table, his relations and
friends, and the most important among the officers of state, the priestly
caste and the eunuchs.
The walls and ceiling of the entire hall were covered with plates of
burnished gold, and the floor with purple carpets.
Before the silver gates lay winged bulls, and the king's body-guard-their
dress consisting of a gold cuirass under a purple overcoat, and the high
Persian cap, their swords in golden scabbards glittering with jewels, and
their lances ornamented with gold and silver apples, were stationed in
the court of the palace. Among them the band of the "Immortals" was
easily to be distinguished by their stately forms and dauntless bearing.
Officers, whose duty consisted in announcing and presenting strangers,
and who carried short ivory staves, led the deputies into the hall, and
up to the throne, where they cast themselves on the ground as though they
would kiss the earth, concealing their hands in the sleeves of their
robes. A cloth was bound over the mouth of every man before he was
allowed to answer the king's questions, lest the pure person of the king
should be polluted by the breath of common men.
Cambyses' severity or mildness towards the deputations with whose chiefs
he spoke, was proportioned to the obedience of their province and the
munificence of their tribute-offerings. Near the end of the train
appeared an embassy from the Jews, led by two grave men with sharply-cut
features and long beards. Cambyses called on them in a friendly tone to
stop.
The first of these men was dressed in the fashion of the Babylonian
aristocracy. The other wore a purple robe woven without seam, trimmed
with bells and tassels, and held in at the waist by a girdle of blue, red
and white. A blue garment was thrown over his shoulders and a little bag
suspended around his neck containing the sacred lots, the Urim and
Thummin, adorned with twelve precious stones set in gold, and bearing the
names of the tribes of Israel. The high-priest's brow was grave and
thoughtful. A white cloth was wound round his head, the ends of which
hung down to the shoulders.
"I rejoice to behold you once more, Belteshazzar," exclaimed the king to
the former of the two men. "Since the death of my father you have not
been seen at my gate."
The man thus addressed bowed humbly and answered: "The favor of the king
rejoices his servant! If it seem good unto thee, to cause the sun of thy
favor to shine on me, thine unworthy servant, so hearken unto my petition
for my nation, which thy great father caused to return unto the land of
their fathers' sepulchres. This old man at my side, Joshua, the
high-priest of our God, hath not feared the long journey to Babylon, that
he might bring his request before thy face. Let his speech be pleasing in
thine ears and his words bring forth fruit in thine heart."
"I foresee what ye desire of me," cried the king. "Am I wrong, priest, in
supposing that your petition refers to the building of the temple in your
native land?"
"Nothing can be hidden from the eyes of my lord," answered the priest,
bowing low. "Thy servants in Jerusalem desire to behold the face of their
ruler, and beseech thee by my mouth to visit the land of their fathers,
and to grant them permission to set forward the work of the temple,
concerning which thine illustrious father (the favor of our God rest upon
him), made a decree."
The king answered with a smile: "You have the craft of your nation, and
understand how to choose the right time and words for your petition. On
my birthday it is difficult for me to refuse my faithful people even one
request. I promise you, therefore, so soon as possible to visit Jerusalem
and the land of your fathers."
"By so doing thou wilt make glad the hearts of thy servants," answered
the priest; "our vines and olives will bear more fruit at thine approach,
our gates will lift up their heads to receive thee, and Israel rejoice
with shouts to meet his lord doubly blessed if as lord of the building--"
"Enough, priest, enough!" cried Cambyses. "Your first petition, I have
said it, shall not remain unfulfilled; for I have long desired to visit
the wealthy city of Tyre, the golden Sidon, and Jerusalem with its
strange superstitions; but were I to give permission for the building
now, what would remain for me to grant you in the coming year?"
"Thy servants will no more molest thee by their petitions, if thou grant
unto them this one, to finish the temple of the Lord their God," answered
the priest.
"Strange beings, these men of Palestine!" exclaimed Cambyses. "I have
heard it said that ye believe in one God alone, who can be represented by
no likeness, and is a spirit. Think ye then that this omnipresent Being
requires a house? Verily, your great spirit can be but a weak and
miserable creature, if he need a covering from the wind and rain, and a
shelter from the heat which he himself has created. If your God be like
ours, omnipresent, fall down before him and worship as we do, in every
place, and feel certain that everywhere ye will be heard of him!"
"The God of Israel hears his people in every place," exclaimed the
high-priest. "He heard us when we pined in captivity under the Pharaohs
far from our land; he heard us weeping by the rivers of Babylon. He chose
thy father to be the instrument of our deliverance, and will hear my
prayer this day and soften thine heart like wise. O mighty king, grant
unto thy servants a common place of sacrifice, whither our twelve tribes
may repair, an altar on the steps of which they can pray together, a
house in which to keep their holy feasts! For this permission we will
call down the blessing of God upon thine head and his curse upon thine
enemies."
"Grant unto my brethren the permission to build their temple!" added
Belteshazzar, who was the richest and most honorable and respected of the
Jews yet remaining in Babylon; a man whom Cyrus had treated with much
consideration, and of whom he had even taken counsel from time to time.
"Will ye then be peaceable, if I grant your petition?" asked the king.
"My father allowed you to begin the work and granted the means for its
completion. Of one mind, happy and content, ye returned to your native
land, but while pursuing your work strife and contention entered among
you. Cyrus was assailed by repeated letters, signed by the chief men of
Syria, entreating him to forbid the work, and I also have been lately
besought to do the same. Worship your God when and where ye will, but
just because I desire your welfare, I cannot consent to the prosecution
of a work which kindles discord among you."
"And is it then thy pleasure on this day to take back a favor, which thy
father made sure unto us by a written decree?" asked Belteshazzar.
"A written decree?"
"Which will surely be found even to this day laid up in the archives of
thy kingdom."
"Find this decree and show it me, and I will not only allow the building
to be continued, but will promote the same," answered the king; "for my
father's will is as sacred to me as the commands of the gods."
"Wilt thou allow search to be made in the house of the rolls at
Ecbatana?" asked Belteshazzar. "The decree will surely be found there."
"I consent, but I fear ye will find none. Tell thy nation, priest, that I
am content with the equipment of the men of war they have sent to take
the field against the Massagetae. My general Megabyzus commends their
looks and bearing. May thy people prove as valiant now as in the wars of
my father! You, Belteshazzar, I bid to my marriage feast, and charge you
to tell your fellows, Meshach and Abednego, next unto you the highest in
the city of Babylon, that I expect them this evening at my table."
"The God of my people Israel grant thee blessing and happiness," answered
Belteshazzar bowing low before the king.
"A wish which I accept!" answered the king, "for I do not despise the
power of your wonder-working great Spirit. But one word more,
Belteshazzar. Many Jews have lately been punished for reviling the gods
of the Babylonians. Warn your people! They bring down hatred on
themselves by their stiff-necked superstition, and the pride with which
they declare their own great spirit to be the only true God. Take example
by us; we are content with our own faith and leave others to enjoy theirs
in peace. Cease to look upon yourselves as better than the rest of the
world. I wish you well, for a pride founded on self-respect is pleasing
in mine eyes; but take heed lest pride degenerate into vainglory.
Farewell! rest assured of my favor."
The Jews then departed. They were disappointed, but not hopeless; for
Belteshazzar knew well that the decree, relative to the building of the
temple, must be in the archives at Ecbatana.
They were followed by a deputation from Syria, and by the Greeks of
Ionia; and then, winding up the long train, appeared a band of
wild-looking men, dressed in the skins of animals, whose features bespoke
them foreigners in Babylon. They wore girdles and shoulderbands of solid,
unwrought gold; and of the same precious metal were their bow-cases,
axes, lance-points, and the ornaments on their high fur caps. They were
preceded by a man in Persian dress, whose features proved him, however,
to be of the same race as his followers.
The king gazed at first on these envoys with wonder; then his brow
darkened, and beckoning the officer whose duty it was to present
strangers, he exclaimed "What can these men have to crave of me? If I
mistake not they belong to the Massagetae, to that people who are so soon
to tremble before my vengeance. Tell them, Gobryas, that an armed host is
standing on the Median plains ready to answer their demands with the
sword."
Gobryas answered, bowing low: "These men arrived this morning during the
sacrifice bringing huge burdens of the purest gold to purchase your
forbearance. When they heard that a great festival was being celebrated
in your honor, they urgently besought to be admitted into your presence,
that they might declare the message entrusted to them by their country."
The king's brow cleared and, after sharply scrutinizing the tall, bearded
Massageta, he said: "Let them come nearer. I am curious to know what
proposals my father's murderers are about to make me."
Gobryas made a sign, and the tallest and eldest of the Massagetae came up
close to the throne and began to speak loudly in his native tongue. He
was accompanied by the man in a Persian dress, who, as one of Cyrus'
prisoners of war, had learnt the Persian language, and now interpreted
one by one the sentences uttered by the spokesman of this wandering
tribe.
"We know," began the latter, "that thou, great king, art wroth with the
Massagetae because thy father fell in war with our tribe--a war which he
alone had provoked with a people who had done naught to offend him."
"My father was justified in punishing your nation," interrupted the king.
"Your Queen Tomyris had dared to refuse him her hand in marriage."
"Be not wroth, O King," answered the Massagetan, "when I tell thee that
our entire nation approved of that act. Even a child could see that the
great Cyrus only desired to add our queen to the number of his wives,
hoping, in his insatiable thirst for more territories, to gain our land
with her."
Cambyses was silent and the envoy went on. "Cyrus caused a bridge to be
made over our boundary river, the Araxes. We were not dismayed at this,
and Tomyris sent word that he might save himself this trouble, for that
the Massagetae were willing either to await him quietly in their own
land, leaving the passage of the river free, or to meet him in his. Cyrus
decided, by the advice of the dethroned king of Lydia, (as we learnt
afterwards, through some prisoners of war) on meeting us in our own land
and defeating us by a stratagem. With this intention he sent at first
only a small body of troops, which could be easily dispersed and
destroyed by our arrows and lances, and allowed us to seize his camp
without striking a blow. Believing we had defeated this insatiable
conqueror, we feasted on his abundant stores, and, poisoned by the sweet
unknown drink which you call wine, fell into a stupefied slumber, during
which his soldiers fell upon us, murdered the greater number of our
warriors and took many captives. Among the latter was the brave, young
Spargapises, our queen's son.
"Hearing in his captivity, that his mother was willing to conclude peace
with your nation as the price of his liberty, he asked to have his chains
taken off. The request was granted, and on obtaining the use of his hands
he seized a sword and stabbed himself, exclaiming: 'I sacrifice my life
for the freedom of my nation.'"
"No sooner did we hear the news that the young prince we loved so well
had died thus, than we assembled all the forces yet left to us from your
swords and fetters. Even old men and boys flew to arms to revenge our
noble Spargapises, and sacrifice themselves, after his example, for
Massagetaen freedom. Our armies met; ye were worsted and Cyrus fell. When
Tomyris found his body lying in a pool of human blood, she cried:
'Methinks, insatiable conqueror, thou art at last sated with blood!' The
troop, composed of the flower of your nobility, which you call the
Immortals, drove us back and carried your father's dead body forth from
our closest ranks. You led them on, fighting like a lion. I know you
well, and that wound across your manly face, which adorns it like a
purple badge of honor, was made by the sword now hanging at my side."
A movement passed through the listening crowd; they trembled for the bold
speaker's life. Cambyses, however, looked pleased, nodded approvingly to
the man and answered: "Yes, I recognize you too now; you rode a red horse
with golden trappings. You shall see that the Persians know how to honor
courage. Bow down before this man, my friends, for never did I see a
sharper sword nor a more unwearied arm than his; and such heroic courage
deserves honor from the brave, whether shown by friend or foe. As for
you, Massagetae, I would advise you to go home quickly and prepare for
war; the mere recollection of your strength and courage increases my
longing to test it once more. A brave foe, by Mithras, is far better than
a feeble friend. You shall be allowed to return home in peace; but beware
of remaining too long within my reach, lest the thought of the vengeance
I owe my father's soul should rouse my anger, and your end draw suddenly
nigh."
A bitter smile played round the bearded mouth of the warrior as he made
answer to this speech. "The Massagetae deem your father's soul too well
avenged already. The only son of our queen, his people's pride, and in no
way inferior to Cyrus, has bled for him. The shores of the Araxes have
been fertilized by the bodies of fifty thousand of my countrymen, slain
as offerings for your dead king, while only thirty thousand fell there on
your own side. We fought as bravely as you, but your armor is better able
to resist the arrows which pierce our clothing of skins. And lastly, as
the most cruel blow of all, ye slew our queen."
"Tomyris is dead?" exclaimed Cambyses interrupting him. "You mean to tell
me that the Persians have killed a woman? Answer at once, what has
happened to your queen?"
"Tomyris died ten months ago of grief for the loss of her only son, and I
have therefore a right to say that she too fell a sacrifice to the war
with Persia and to your father's spirit."
"She was a great woman," murmured Cambyses, his voice unsteady from
emotion. "Verily, I begin to think that the gods themselves have
undertaken to revenge my father's blood on your nation. Yet I tell you
that, heavy as your losses may seem, Spargapises, Tomyris and fifty
thousand Massagetae can never outweigh the spirit of one king of Persia,
least of all of a Cyrus."
"In our country," answered the envoy, "death makes all men equal. The
spirits of the king and the slave are of equal worth. Your father was a
great man, but we have undergone awful sufferings for his sake. My tale
is not yet ended. After the death of Tomyris discord broke out among the
Massagetae. Two claimants for the crown appeared; half our nation fought
for the one, half for the other, and our hosts were thinned, first by
this fearful civil war and then by the pestilence which followed in its
track. We can no longer resist your power, and therefore come with heavy
loads of pure gold as the price of peace."
"Ye submit then without striking a blow?" asked Cambyses. "Verily, I had
expected something else from such heroes; the numbers of my host, which
waits assembled on the plains of Media, will prove that. We cannot go to
battle without an enemy. I will dismiss my troops and send a satrap. Be
welcome as new subjects of my realm."
The red blood mounted into the cheeks of the Massagetan warrior on
hearing these words, and he answered in a voice trembling with
excitement: "You err, O King, if you imagine that we have lost our old
courage, or learnt to long for slavery. But we know your strength; we
know that the small remnant of our nation, which war and pestilence have
spared, cannot resist your vast and well-armed hosts. This we admit,
freely and honestly as is the manner of the Massagetae, declaring however
at the same time, that we are determined to govern ourselves as of yore,
and will never receive laws or ordinances from a Persian satrap. You are
wroth, but I can bear your angry gaze and yet repeat my declaration."
"And my answer," cried Cambyses, "is this: Ye have but one choice: either
to submit to my sceptre, become united to the kingdom of Persia under the
name of the Massagetan province, and receive a satrap as my
representative with due reverence, or to look upon yourselves as my
enemies, in which case you will be forced by arms to conform to those
conditions which I now offer you in good part. To-day you could secure a
ruler well-affected to your cause, later you will find in me only a
conqueror and avenger. Consider well before you answer."
"We have already weighed and considered all," answered the warrior, "and,
as free sons of the desert, prefer death to bondage. Hear what the
council of our old men has sent me to declare to you:--The Massageta;
have become too weak to oppose the Persians, not through their own fault,
but through the heavy visitation of our god, the sun. We know that you
have armed a vast host against us, and we are ready to buy peace and
liberty by a yearly tribute. But if you persist in compelling us to
submit by force of arms, you can only bring great damage on yourselves.
The moment your army nears the Araxes, we shall depart with our wives and
children and seek another home, for we have no fixed dwellings like
yours, but are accustomed to rove at will on our swift horses, and to
rest in tents. Our gold we shall take with us, and shall fill up,
destroy, and conceal the pits in which you could find new treasures. We
know every spot where gold is to be found, and can give it in abundance,
if you grant us peace and leave us our liberty; but, if you venture to
invade our territory, you win nothing but an empty desert and an enemy
always beyond your reach,--an enemy who may become formidable, when he
has had time to recover from the heavy losses which have thinned his
ranks. Leave us in peace and freedom and we are ready to give every year
five thousand swift horses of the desert, besides the yearly tribute of
gold; we will also come to the help of the Persian nation when threatened
by any serious danger."
The envoy ceased speaking. Cambyses did not answer at once; his eyes were
fixed on the ground in deep thought. At last he said, rising at the same
time from his throne: "We will take counsel on this matter over the wine
to-night, and to-morrow you shall hear what answer you can bring to your
people. Gobryas, see that these men are well cared for, and send the
Massagetan, who wounded me in battle, a portion of the best dishes from
my own table."
CHAPTER XV.
During these events Nitetis had been sitting alone in her house on the
hanging-gardens, absorbed in the saddest thoughts. To-day, for the first
time, she had taken part in the general sacrifice made by the king's
wives, and had tried to pray to her new gods in the open air, before the
fire-altars and amidst the sound of religious songs strange to her ears.
Most of the inhabitants of the harem saw her to-day for the first time,
and instead of raising their eyes to heaven, had fixed them on her during
the ceremony. The inquisitive, malevolent gaze of her rivals, and the
loud music resounding from the city, disquieted and distracted her mind.
Her thoughts reverted painfully to the solemn, sultry stillness of the
gigantic temples in her native land where she had worshipped the gods of
her childhood so earnestly at the side of her mother and sister; and much
as she longed, just on this day, to pray for blessings on her beloved
king, all her efforts were in vain; she could arouse no devotional
feeling. Kassandane and Atossa knelt at her side, joining heartily in the
very hymns which to Nitetis were an empty sound.
It cannot be denied, that many parts of these hymns contain true poetry;
but they become wearisome through the constant repetition and invocation
of the names of good and bad spirits. The Persian women had been taught
from childhood, to look upon these religious songs as higher and holier
than any other poetry. Their earliest prayers had been accompanied by
such hymns, and, like everything else which has come down to us from our
fathers, and which we have been told in the impressionable time of
childhood is divine and worthy of our reverence, they were still sacred
and dear to them and stirred their most devotional feelings.
But for Nitetis, who had been spoilt for such things by an intimate
acquaintance with the best Greek poets, they could have but little charm.
What she had lately been learning in Persia with difficulty had not yet
become a part of herself, and so, while Kassandane and Atossa went
through all the outward rites as things of course and perfectly natural
to them, Nitetis could only prevent herself from forgetting the
prescribed ceremonials by a great mental effort, and dreaded lest she
should expose her ignorance to the jealous, watchful gaze of her rivals.
And then, too, only a few minutes before the sacrifice, she had received
her first letter from Egypt. It lay unread on her dressing-table, and
came into her mind whenever she attempted to pray. She could not help
wondering what news it might bring her. How were her parents? and how had
Tachot borne the parting from herself, and from the prince she loved so
well?
The ceremony over, Nitetis embraced Kassandane and Atossa, and drew a
long, deep breath, as if delivered from some threatening danger. Then
ordering her litter, she was carried back to her dwelling, and hastened
eagerly to the table where her letter lay. Her principal attendant, the
young girl who on the journey had dressed her in her first Persian robes,
received her with a smile full of meaning and promise, which changed
however, into a look of astonishment, on seeing her mistress seize the
letter, without even glancing at the articles of dress and jewelery which
lay on the table.
Nitetis broke the seal quickly and was sitting down, in order to begin
the difficult work of reading her letter, when the girl came up, and with
clasped hands, exclaimed: "By Mithras, my mistress, I cannot understand
you. Either you are ill, or that ugly bit of grey stuff must contain some
magic which makes you blind to everything else. Put that roll away and
look at the splendid presents that the great king (Auramazda grant him
victory!) has sent while you were at the sacrifice. Look at this
wonderful purple robe with the white stripe and the rich silver
embroidery; and then the tiara with the royal diamonds! Do not you know
the high meaning of these gifts? Cambyses begs, (the messenger said
'begs,' not 'commands') you to wear these splendid ornaments at the
banquet to-day. How angry Phaedime will be! and how the others will look,
for they have never received such presents. Till now only Kassandane has
had a right to wear the purple and diamonds; so by sending you these
gifts, Cambyses places you on a level with his mother, and chooses you to
be his favorite wife before the whole world.' O pray allow me to dress
you in these new and beautiful things. How lovely you will look! How
angry and envious the others will feel! If I could only be there when you
enter the hall! Come, my mistress, let me take off your simple dress, and
array you, (only as a trial you know,) in the robes that as the new queen
you ought to wear."
Nitetis listened in silence to the chattering girl, and admired the gifts
with a quiet smile. She was woman enough to rejoice at the sight, for he,
whom she loved better than life itself, had sent them; and they were a
proof that she was more to the king than all his other wives;--that
Cambyses really loved her. The long wished-for letter fell unread to the
ground, the girl's wish to dress her was granted without a word, and in a
short time the splendid toilette was completed. The royal purple added to
her beauty, the high flashing tiara made her slender, perfect figure seem
taller than it really was, and when, in the metal mirror which lay on her
dressing table, she beheld herself for the first time in the glorious
likeness of a queen, a new expression dawned on her features. It seemed
as if a portion of her lord's pride were reflected there. The frivolous
waiting-woman sank involuntarily on her knees, as her eyes, full of
smiling admiration, met the radiant glance of Nitetis,--of the woman who
was beloved by the most powerful of men.
For a few moments Nitetis gazed on the girl, lying in the dust at her
feet; but soon shook her beautiful head, and blushing for shame, raised
her kindly, kissed her forehead, gave her a gold bracelet, and then,
perceiving her letter on the ground, told her she wished to be alone.
Mandane ran, rather than walked, out of the room in her eagerness to show
the splendid present she had just received to the inferior attendants and
slaves; and Nitetis, her eyes glistening and her heart beating with
excess of happiness, threw herself on to the ivory chair which stood
before her dressing-table, uttered a short prayer of thanksgiving to her
favorite Egyptian goddess, the beautiful Hathor, kissed the gold chain
which Cambyses had given her after plunging into the water for her ball,
then her letter from home, and rendered almost over-confident by her
great happiness, began to unroll it, slowly sinking back into the purple
cushions as she did so and murmuring: "How very, very happy I am! Poor
letter, I am sure your writer never thought Nitetis would leave you a
quarter of an hour on the ground unread."
In this happy mood she began to read, but her face soon grew serious and
when she had finished, the letter fell once more to the ground.
Her eyes, whose proud glance had brought the waiting-maid to her feet,
were dimmed by tears; her head, carried so proudly but a few minutes
before, now lay on the jewels which covered the table. Tears rolled down
among the pearls and diamonds, as strange a contrast as the proud tiara
and its unhappy, fainting wearer.
The letter read as follows:
"Ladice the wife of Amasis and Queen of Upper and Lower Egypt, to her
daughter Nitetis, consort of the great King of Persia.
"It has not been our fault, my beloved daughter, that you have remained
so long without news from home. The trireme by which we sent our letters
for you to AEgae was detained by Samian ships of war, or rather pirate
vessels, and towed into the harbor of Astypalaea.
"Polykrates' presumption increases with the continual success of his
undertakings, and since his victory over the Lesbians and Milesians, who
endeavored to put a stop to his depredations, not a ship is safe from the
attacks of his pirate vessels.
"Pisistratus is dead," but his sons are friendly to Polykrates. Lygdamis
is under obligations to him, and cannot hold his own in Naxos without
Samian help. He has won over the Amphiktyonic council to his side by
presenting the Apollo of Delos with the neighboring island of Rhenea. His
fifty-oared vessels, requiring to be manned by twenty-thousand men, do
immense damage to all the seafaring nations; yet not one dares to attack
him, as the fortifications of his citadel and his splendid harbor are
almost impregnable, and he himself always surrounded by a well-drilled
body-guard.
"Through the traders, who followed the fortunate Kolxus to the far west,
and these pirate ships, Samos will become the richest of islands and
Polykrates the most powerful of men, unless, as your father says, the
gods become envious of such unchanging good fortune and prepare him a
sudden and speedy downfall.
"In this fear Amasis advised Polykrates as his old friend, to put away
from him the thing he held dearest, and in such a manner that he might be
sure of never receiving it again. Polykrates adopted this advice and
threw into the sea, from the top of the round tower on his citadel, his
most valuable signet-ring, an unusually large sardonyx held by two
dolphins. This ring was the work of Theodorus, and a lyre, the symbol of
the ruler, was exquisitely engraved on the stone."
"Six days later, however, the ring was found by Polykrates' cooks in the
body of a fish. He sent us news at once of this strange occurrence, but
instead of rejoicing your father shook his grey head sadly, saying: 'he
saw now it was impossible for any one to avoid his destiny!' On the same
day he renounced the friendship of Polykrates and wrote him word, that he
should endeavor to forget him in order to avoid the grief of seeing his
friend in misfortune.
"Polykrates laughed at this message and returned the letters his pirates
had taken from our trireme, with a derisive greeting. For the future all
your letters will be sent by Syria.
"You will ask me perhaps, why I have told you this long story, which has
so much less interest for you than any other home news. I answer: to
prepare you for your father's state. Would you have recognized the
cheerful, happy, careless Amasis in that gloomy answer to his Samian
friend?
"Alas, my husband has good reason to be sad, and since you left us, my
own eyes have seldom been free from tears. My time is passed either at
the sick-bed of your sister or in comforting your father and guiding his
steps; and though much in need of sleep I am now taking advantage of
night to write these lines.
"Here I was interrupted by the nurses, calling me to your sister Tachot,
your own true friend.
"How often the dear child has called you in her feverish delirium; and
how carefully she treasures your likeness in wax, that wonderful portrait
which bears evidence not only of the height to which Greek art has risen,
but of the master hand of the great Theodorus. To-morrow it will be sent
to AEgina, to be copied in gold, as the soft wax becomes injured from
frequent contact with your sister's burning hands and lips.
"And now, my daughter, you must summon all your courage to hear what I
need all my strength of mind to tell-the sad story of the fate which the
gods have decreed for our house.
"For three days after you left us Tachot wept incessantly. Neither our
comforting words nor your father's good advice--neither offerings nor
prayers--could avail to lessen her grief or divert her mind. At last on
the fourth day she ceased to weep and would answer our questions in a low
voice, as if resigned; but spent the greater part of every day sitting
silently at her wheel. Her fingers, however, which used to be so skilful,
either broke the threads they tried to spin, or lay for hours idle in her
lap, while she was lost in dreams. Your father's jokes, at which she used
to laugh so heartily, made no impression on her, and when I endeavored to
reason with her she listened in anxious suspense.
"If I kissed her forehead and begged her to control herself, she would
spring up, blushing deeply, and throw herself into my arms, then sit down
again to her wheel and begin to pull at the threads with almost frantic
eagerness; but in half an hour her hands would be lying idle in her lap
again and her eyes dreamily fixed, either on the ground, or on some spot
in the air. If we forced her to take part in any entertainment, she would
wander among the guests totally uninterested in everything that was
passing.
"We took her with us on the great pilgrimage to Bubastis, during which
the Egyptians forget their usual gravity, and the shores of the Nile look
like a great stage where the wild games of the satyrs are being performed
by choruses, hurried on in the unrestrained wantonness of intoxication.
When she saw thus for the first time an entire people given up to the
wildest and most unfettered mirth and enjoyment, she woke up from her
silent brooding thoughts and began to weep again, as in the first days
after you went away.
"Sad and perplexed, we brought our poor child back to Sais.
"Her looks were not those of a common mortal. She grew thinner, and we
all fancied, taller; her complexion was white, and almost transparent,
with a tender bloom on her cheek, which I can only liken to a young
rose-leaf or the first faint blush of sunrise. Her eyes are still
wonderfully clear and bright. It always seems to me as if they looked
beyond the heaven and earth which we see.
"As she continued to suffer more and more from heat in the head and
hands, while her tender limbs often shivered with a slight chill, we sent
to Thebes for Thutmes, the most celebrated physician for inward
complaints.
"The experienced priest shook his head on seeing your sister and foretold
a serious illness. He forbade her to spin or to speak much. Potions of
all kinds were given her to drink, her illness was discussed and
exorcised, the stars and oracles consulted, rich presents and sacrifices
made to the gods. The priest of Hathor from the island of Philae sent us
a consecrated amulet, the priest of Osiris in Abydos a lock of hair from
the god himself set in gold, and Neithotep, the high-priest of our own
guardian goddess, set on foot a great sacrifice, which was to restore
your sister to health.
"But neither physicians nor charms were of any avail, and at last
Neithotep confessed that Tachot's stars gave but little ground for hope.
Just then, too, the sacred bull at Memphis died and the priests could
discover no heart in his entrails, which they interpreted as
prognosticating evil to our country. They have not yet succeeded in
finding a new Apis, and believe that the gods are wroth with your
father's kingdom. Indeed the oracle of Buto has declared that the
Immortals will show no favor to Egypt, until all the temples that have
been built in the black land for the worship of false gods are destroyed
and their worshippers banished.
[Egypt was called by its ancient inhabitants Cham, the black,
or black-earthed.]
"These evil omens have proved, alas, only too true. Tachot fell ill of a
dreadful fever and lay for nine days hovering between life and death; she
is still so weak that she must be carried, and can move neither hand nor
foot.
"During the journey to Bubastis, Amasis' eyes, as so often happens here,
became inflamed. Instead of sparing them, he continued to work as usual
from sunrise until mid-day, and while your sister was so ill he never
left her bed, notwithstanding all our entreaties. But I will not enter
into particulars, my child. His eyes grew worse, and on the very day
which brought us the news of your safe arrival in Babylon, Amasis became
totally blind.
"The cheerful, active man has become old, gloomy and decrepit since that
day. The death of Apis, and the unfavorable constellations and oracles
weigh on his mind; his happy temper is clouded by the unbroken night in
which he lives; and the consciousness that he cannot stir a step alone
causes indecision and uncertainty. The daring and independent ruler will
soon become a mere tool, by means of which the priests can work their
will.
"He spends hours in the temple of Neith, praying and offering sacrifices;
a number of workmen are employed there in building a tomb for his mummy,
and the same number at Memphis in levelling the temple which the Greeks
have begun building to Apollo. He speaks of his own and Tachot's
misfortunes as a just punishment from the Immortals.
"His visits to Tachot's sick-bed are not the least comfort to her, for
instead of encouraging her kindly, he endeavors to convince her that she
too deserves punishment from the gods. He spends all his remarkable
eloquence in trying to persuade her, that she must forget this world
entirely and only try to gain the favor of Osiris and the judges of the
nether world by ceaseless prayers and sacrifices. In this manner he only
tortures our poor sick child, for she has not lost her love of life.
Perhaps I have still too much of the Greek left in me for a queen of
Egypt; but really, death is so long and life so short, that I cannot help
calling even wise men foolish, when they devote the half of even this
short term to a perpetual meditation on the gloomy Hades.
"I have just been interrupted again. Our great physician, Thutmes, came
to enquire after his patient. He gives very little hope, and seems
surprised that her delicate frame has been able to resist death so long.
He said yesterday: 'She would have sunk long ago if not kept up by her
determined will, and a longing which gives her no rest. If she ceased to
care for life, she could allow death to take her, just as we dream
ourselves asleep. If, on the other hand, her wish could be gratified, she
might, (though this is hardly probable) live some years yet, but if it
remain but a short time longer unfulfilled, it will certainly wear her to
death.
"Have you any idea for whom she longs so eagerly? Our Tachot has allowed
herself to be fascinated by the beautiful Bartja, the brother of your
future husband. I do not mean to say by this that he has employed magic,
as the priest Ameneman believes, to gain her love; for a youth might be
far less handsome and agreeable than Bartja, and yet take the heart of an
innocent girl, still half a child. But her passionate feeling is so
strong, and the change in her whole being so great, that sometimes I too
am tempted to believe in the use of supernatural influence. A short time
before you left I noticed that Tachot was fond of Bartja. Her distress at
first we thought could only be for you, but when she sank into that
dreamy state, Ibykus, who was still at our court, said she must have been
seized by some strong passion.
"Once when she was sitting dreaming at her wheel, I heard him singing
softly Sappho's little love-song to her:
"I cannot, my sweet mother,
Throw shuttle any more;
My heart is full of longing,
My spirit troubled sore,
All for a love of yesterday
A boy not seen before."
[Sappho ed. Neue XXXII. Translation from Edwin Arnold's
Poets of Greece.]
"She turned pale and asked him: 'Is that your own song?'
"'No,' said he, 'Sappho wrote it fifty years ago.'
"'Fifty years ago,' echoed Tachot musingly.
"'Love is always the same,' interrupted the poet; 'women loved centuries
ago, and will love thousands of years to come, just as Sappho loved fifty
years back.'
"The sick girl smiled in assent, and from that time I often heard her
humming the little song as she sat at her wheel. But we carefully avoided
every question, that could remind her of him she loved. In the delirium
of fever, however, Bartja's name was always on her burning lips. When she
recovered consciousness we told her what she had said in her delirium;
then she opened her heart to me, and raising her eyes to heaven like a
prophetess, exclaimed solemnly: 'I know, that I shall not die till I have
seen him again.'
"A short time ago we had her carried into the temple, as she longed to
worship there again. When the service was over and we were crossing the
temple-court, we passed some children at play, and Tachot noticed a
little girl telling something very eagerly to her companions. She told
the bearers to put down the litter and call the child to her.
"'What were you saying?' she asked the little one.
"I was telling the others something about my eldest sister.'
"'May I hear it too?' said Tachot so kindly, that the little girl began
at once without fear: "Batau, who is betrothed to my sister, came back
from Thebes quite unexpectedly yesterday evening. Just as the Isis-star
was rising, he came suddenly on to our roof where Kerimama was playing at
draughts with my father; and he brought her such a beautiful golden
bridal wreath."
[Among the Egyptians the planet Venus bore the name of the goddess
Isis. Pliny II. 6. Arist De mundo II. 7. Early monuments prove
that they were acquainted with the identity of the morning and
evening star. Lepsius, Chronologie p. 94.]
"Tachot kissed the child and gave her her own costly fan. When we were at
home again she smiled archly at me and said: 'You know, mother dear, that
the words children say in the temple-courts are believed to be oracles.'
So, if the little one spoke the truth, he must come; and did not you hear
that he is to bring the bridal-wreath? O mother, I am sure, quite sure,
that I shall see him again.'
"I asked her yesterday if she had any message for you, and she begged me
to say that she sent you thousands of kisses, and messages of love, and
that when she was stronger she meant to write, as she had a great deal to
tell you. She has just brought me the little note which I enclose; it is
for you alone, and has cost her much fatigue to write.
"But now I must finish my letter, as the messenger has been waiting for
it some time.
"I wish I could give you some joyful news, but sadness and sorrow meet me
whichever way I turn. Your brother yields more and more to the priests'
tyranny, and manages the affairs of state for your poor blind father
under Neithotep's guidance.
"Amasis does not interfere, and says it matters little whether his place
be filled a few days sooner or later by his successor.
"He did not attempt to prevent Psamtik from seizing the children of
Phanes in Rhodopis' house, and actually allowed his son to enter into a
negotiation with the descendants of those two hundred thousand soldiers,
who emigrated to Ethiopia in the reign of Psamtik I. on account of the
preference shown to the Greek mercenaries. In case they declared
themselves willing to return to their native land, the Greek mercenaries
were to have been dismissed. The negotiation failed entirely, but
Psamtik's treatment of the children of Phanes has given bitter offence to
the Greeks. Aristomachus threatened to leave Egypt, taking with him ten
thousand of his best troops, and on hearing that Phanes' son had been
murdered at Psamtik's command applied for his discharge. From that time
the Spartan disappeared, no one knows whither; but the Greek troops
allowed themselves to be bribed by immense sums and are still in Egypt.
"Amasis said nothing to all this, and looked on silently from the midst
of his prayers and sacrifices, while your brother was either offending
every class of his subjects or attempting to pacify them by means beneath
the dignity of a ruler. The commanders of the Egyptian and Greek troops,
and the governors of different provinces have all alike assured me that
the present state of things is intolerable. No one knows what to expect
from this new ruler; he commands today the very thing, which he angrily
forbade the day before. Such a government must soon snap the beautiful
bond, which has hitherto united the Egyptian people to their king.
"Farewell, my child, think of your poor friend, your mother; and forgive
your parents when you hear what they have so long kept secret from you.
Pray for Tachot, and remember us to Croesus and the young Persians whom
we know. Give a special message too from Tachot to Bartja; I beg him to
think of it as the last legacy of one very near death. If you could only
send her some proof, that he has not forgotten her! Farewell, once more
farewell and be happy in your new and blooming home."
CHAPTER XVI.
Sad realities follow bright anticipations nearly as surely as a rainy day
succeeds a golden sunrise. Nitetis had been so happy in the thought of
reading the very letter, which poured such bitter drops of wormwood into
her cup of happiness.
One beautiful element in her life, the remembrance of her dear home and
the companions of her happy childhood, had been destroyed in one moment,
as if by the touch of a magician's wand.
She sat there in her royal purple, weeping, forgetful of everything but
her mother's grief, her father's misfortunes and her sister's illness.
The joyful future, full of love, joy, and happiness, which had been
beckoning her forward only a few minutes before, had vanished. Cambyses'
chosen bride forgot her waiting, longing lover, and the future queen of
Persia could think of nothing but the sorrows of Egypt's royal house.
It was long past mid-day, when the attendant Mandane came to put a last
touch to Nitetis' dress and ornaments.
"She is asleep," thought the girl. "I can let her rest another quarter of
an hour; the sacrifice this morning has tired her, and we must have her
fresh and beautiful for the evening banquet; then she will outshine the
others as the moon does the stars."
Unnoticed by her mistress she slipped out of the room, the windows of
which commanded a splendid view over the hanging-gardens, the immense
city beneath, the river, and the rich and fruitful Babylonian plain, and
went into the garden.
Without looking round she ran to a flower-bed, to pluck some roses. Her
eyes were fixed on her new bracelet, the stones of which sparkled in the
sun, and she did not notice a richly-dressed man peering in at one of the
windows of the room where Nitetis lay weeping. On being disturbed in his
watching and listening, he turned at once to the girl and greeted her in
a high treble voice.
She started, and on recognizing the eunuch Boges, answered: "It is not
polite, sir, to frighten a poor girl in this way. By Mithras, if I had
seen you before I heard you, I think I should have fainted. A woman's
voice does not take me by surprise, but to see a man here is as rare as
to find a swan in the desert."
Boges laughed good-humoredly, though he well understood her saucy
allusion to his high voice, and answered, rubbing his fat hands: "Yes, it
is very hard for a young and pretty bird like you, to have to live in
such a lonely corner, but be patient, sweetheart. Your mistress will soon
be queen, and then she will look out a handsome young husband for you.
Ah, ha! you will find it pleasanter to live here alone with him, than
with your beautiful Egyptian."
"My mistress is too beautiful for some people's fancy, and I have never
asked any one to look out a husband for me," she answered pertly. "I can
find one without your help either."
"Who could doubt it? Such a pretty face is as good a bait for a man, as a
worm for a fish."
"But I am not trying to catch a husband, and least of all one like you."
"That I can easily believe," he answered laughing. But tell me, my
treasure, why are you so hard on me? Have I done anything to vex you?
Wasn't it through me, that you obtained this good appointment, and are
not we both Medes?"
"You might just as well say that we are both human beings, and have five
fingers on each hand and a nose in the middle of our faces. Half the
people here are Medes, and if I had as many friends as I have countrymen,
I might be queen to-morrow. And as to my situation here, it was not you,
but the high-priest Oropastes who recommended me to the great queen
Kassandane. Your will is not law here."
"What are you talking about, my sweet one? don't you know, that not a
single waiting-woman can be engaged without my consent?"
"Oh, yes, I know that as well as you do, but . . ."
"But you women are an unthankful race, and don't deserve our kindness."
"Please not to forget, that you are speaking to a girl of good family."
"I know that very well, my little one. I know that your father was a
Magian and your mother a Magian's daughter; that they both died early and
you were placed under the care of the Destur Ixabates, the father of
Oropastes, and grew up with his children. I know too that when you had
received the ear-rings, Oropastes' brother Gaumata, (you need not blush,
Gaumata is a pretty name) fell in love with your rosy face, and wanted to
marry you, though he was only nineteen. Gaumata and Mandane, how well the
two names sound together! Mandane and Gaumata! If I were a poet I should
call my hero Gaumata and his lady-love Mandane."
"I insist on your ceasing to jest in this way," cried Mandane, blushing
deeply and stamping her foot.
"What, are you angry because I say the names sound well together? You
ought rather to be angry with the proud Oropastes, who sent his younger
brother to Rhagar and you to the court, that you might forget one
another."
"That is a slander on my benefactor."
"Let my tongue wither away, if I am not speaking the truth and nothing
but the truth! Oropastes separated you and his brother because he had
higher intentions for the handsome Gaumata, than a marriage with the
orphan daughter of an inferior Magian. He would have been satisfied with
Amytis or Menische for a sister-in-law, but a poor girl like you, who
owed everything to his bounty, would only have stood in the way of his
ambitious plans. Between ourselves, he would like to be appointed regent
of Persia while the king is away at the Massagetan war, and would
therefore give a great deal to connect himself by marriage in some way or
other with the Archemenidae. At his age a new wife is not to be thought
of; but his brother is young and handsome, indeed people go so far as to
say, that he is like the Prince Bartja."
"That is true," exclaimed the girl. "Only think, when we went out to meet
my mistress, and I saw Bartja for the first time from the window of the
station-house, I thought he was Gaumata. They are so like one another
that they might be twins, and they are the handsomest men in the
kingdom."
"How you are blushing, my pretty rose-bud! But the likeness between them
is not quite so great as all that. When I spoke to the high-priest's
brother this morning . . ."
"Gaumata is here?" interrupted the girl passionately. "Have you really
seen him or are you trying to draw me out and make fun of me?"
"By Mithras! my sweet one, I kissed his forehead this very morning, and
he made me tell him a great deal about his darling. Indeed his blue eyes,
his golden curls and his lovely complexion, like the bloom on a peach,
were so irresistible that I felt inclined to try and work impossibilities
for him. Spare your blushes, my little pomegranate-blossom, till I have
told you all; and then perhaps in future you will not be so hard upon
poor Boges; you will see that he has a good heart, full of kindness for
his beautiful, saucy little countrywoman."
"I do not trust you," she answered, interrupting these assurances. "I
have been warned against your smooth tongue, and I do not know what I
have done to deserve this kind interest."
"Do you know this?" he asked, showing her a white ribbon embroidered all
over with little golden flames.
"It is the last present I worked for him," exclaimed Mandane.
"I asked him for this token, because I knew you would not trust me. Who
ever heard of a prisoner loving his jailer?"
"But tell me at once, quickly--what does my old playfellow want me to do?
Look, the-western sky is beginning to glow. Evening is coming on, and I
must arrange my mistress's dress and ornaments for the banquet."
"Well, I will not keep you long," said the eunuch, becoming so serious
that Mandane was frightened. "If you do not choose to believe that I
would run into any risk out of friendship to you, then fancy that I
forward your love affair to humble the pride of Oropastes. He threatens
to supplant me in the king's favor, and I am determined, let him plot and
intrigue as he likes, that you shall marry Gaumata. To-morrow evening,
after the Tistar-star has risen, your lover shall come to see you. I will
see that all the guards are away, so that he can come without danger,
stay one hour and talk over the future with you; but remember, only one
hour. I see clearly that your mistress will be Cambyses' favorite wife,
and will then forward your marriage, for she is very fond of you, and
thinks no praise too high for your fidelity and skill. So to-morrow
evening," he continued, falling back into the jesting tone peculiar to
him, "when the Tistar-star rises, fortune will begin to shine on you. Why
do you look down? Why don't you answer? Gratitude stops your pretty
little mouth, eh? is that the reason? Well, my little bird, I hope you
won't be quite so silent, if you should ever have a chance of praising
poor Boges to your powerful mistress. And what message shall I bring to
the handsome Gaumata? May I say that you have not forgotten him and will
be delighted to see him again? You hesitate? Well, I am very sorry, but
it is getting dark and I must go. I have to inspect the women's dresses
for the birthday banquet. Ah! one thing I forgot to mention. Gaumata must
leave Babylon to-morrow. Oropastes is afraid, that he may chance to see
you, and told him to return to Rhage directly the festival was over.
What! still silent? Well then, I really cannot help you or that poor
fellow either. But I shall gain my ends quite as well without you, and
perhaps after all it is better that you should forget one another.
Good-bye."
It was a hard struggle for the girl. She felt nearly sure that Boges was
deceiving her, and a voice within warned her that it would be better to
refuse her lover this meeting. Duty and prudence gained the upper hand,
and she was just going to exclaim: "Tell him I cannot see him," when her
eye caught the ribbon she had once embroidered for her handsome
playfellow. Bright pictures from her childhood flashed through her mind,
short moments of intoxicating happiness; love, recklessness and longing
gained the day in their turn over her sense of right, her misgivings and
her prudence, and before Boges could finish his farewell, she called out,
almost in spite of herself and flying towards the house like a frightened
fawn: "I shall expect him."
Boges passed quickly through the flowery paths of the hanging-gardens. He
stopped at the parapet end cautiously opened a hidden trap-door,
admitting to a secret staircase which wound down through one of the huge
pillars supporting the hanging-gardens, and which had probably been
intended by their original designer as a means of reaching his wife's
apartments unobserved from the shores of the river. The door moved easily
on its hinges, and when Boges had shut it again and strewed a few of the
river-shells from the garden walks over it, it would have been difficult
to find, even for any one who had come with that purpose. The eunuch
rubbed his jeweled hands, smiling the while as was his custom, and
murmured: "It can't fail to succeed now; the girl is caught, her lover is
at my beck and call, the old secret flight of steps is in good order,
Nitetis has been weeping bitterly on a day of universal rejoicing, and
the blue lily opens to-morrow night. Ah, ha! my little plan can't
possibly fail now. And to-morrow, my pretty Egyptian kitten, your little
velvet paw will be fast in a trap set by the poor despised eunuch, who
was not allowed, forsooth, to give you any orders."
His eyes gleamed maliciously as he said these words and hurried from the
garden.
At the great flight of steps he met another eunuch, named Neriglissar,
who held the office of head-gardener, and lived at the hanging-gardens.
"How is the blue lily going on?" asked Boges.
"It is unfolding magnificently!" cried the gardener, in enthusiasm at the
mere mention of his cherished flower. "To-morrow, as I promised, when the
Tistar-star rises, it will be in all its beauty. My Egyptian mistress
will be delighted, for she is very fond of flowers, and may I ask you to
tell the king and the Achaemenidae, that under my care this rare plant
has at last flowered? It is to be seen in full beauty only once in every
ten years. Tell the noble Achaemenidae; this, and bring them here."
"Your wish shall be granted," said Boges smiling, "but I think you must
not reckon on the king, as I do not expect he will visit the
hanging-gardens before his marriage with the Egyptian. Some of the
Archimenidae, however, will be sure to come; they are such lovers of
horticulture that they would not like to miss this rare sight. Perhaps,
too, I may succeed in bringing Croesus. It is true that he does not
understand flowers or doat on them as the Persians do, but he makes
amends for this by his thorough appreciation of everything beautiful."
"Yes, yes, bring him too," exclaimed the gardener. "He will really be
grateful to you, for my queen of the night is the most beautiful flower,
that has ever bloomed in a royal garden. You saw the bud in the clear
waters of the reservoir surrounded by its green leaves; that bud will
open into a gigantic rose, blue as the sky. My flower . . ."
The enthusiastic gardener would have said much more in praise of his
flower, but Boges left him with a friendly nod, and went down the flight
of steps. A two-wheeled wooden carriage was waiting for him there; he
took his seat by the driver, the horses, decked out with bells and
tassels, were urged into a sharp trot and quickly brought him to the gate
of the harem-garden.
That day was a busy, stirring one in Cambyses' harem. In order that the
women might look their very best, Boges had commanded that they should
all be taken to the bath before the banquet. He therefore went at once to
that wing of the palace, which contained the baths for the women.
While he was still at some distance a confused noise of screaming,
laughing, chattering and tittering reached his ears. In the broad porch
of the large bathing-room, which had been almost overheated, more than
three hundred women were moving about in a dense cloud of steam.
[We read in Diodorus XVII. 77. that the king of Persia had as many
wives as there are days in the year. At the battle of Issus,
Alexander the Great took 329 concubines, of the last Darius,
captive.]
The half-naked forms floated over the warm pavement like a motley crowd
of phantoms. Their thin silken garments were wet through and clung to
their delicate figures, and a warm rain descended upon them from the roof
of the bath, rising up again in vapor when it reached the floor.
Groups of handsome women, ten or twenty together, lay gossiping saucily
in one part of the room; in another two king's wives were quarrelling
like naughty children. One beauty was screaming at the top of her voice
because she had received a blow from her neighbor's dainty little
slipper, while another was lying in lazy contemplation, still as death,
on the damp, warm floor. Six Armenians were standing together, singing a
saucy love-song in their native language with clear-toned voices, and a
little knot of fair-haired Persians were slandering Nitetis so fearfully,
that a by-stander would have fancied our beautiful Egyptian was some
awful monster, like those nurses used to frighten children.
Naked female slaves moved about through the crowd, carrying on their
heads well-warmed cloths to throw over their mistresses. The cries of the
eunuchs, who held the office of door-keepers, and were continually urging
the women to greater haste,--the screeching calls of those whose slaves
had not yet arrived,--the penetrating perfumes and the warm vapor
combined to produce a motley, strange and stupefying scene.
A quarter of an hour later, however, the king's wives presented a very
different spectacle.
They lay like roses steeped in dew, not asleep, but quite still and
dreaming, on soft cushions placed along the walls of an immense room. The
wet perfumes still lay on their undried and flowing hair, and nimble
female slaves were busied in carefully wiping away, with little bags made
of soft camels' hair, the slightest outward trace of the moisture which
penetrated deep into the pores of the skin.
Silken coverlets were spread over their weary, beautiful limbs, and a
troop of eunuchs took good care that the dreamy repose of the entire body
should not be disturbed by quarrelsome or petulant individuals. Their
efforts, however, were seldom so successful as to-day, when every one
knew that a disturbance of the peace would be punished by exclusion from
the banquet. They had probably been lying a full hour in this dreamy
silence, when the sound of a gong produced another transformation.
The reposing figures sprang from their cushions, a troop of female slaves
pressed into the hall, the beauties were annointed and perfumed, their
luxuriant hair ingeniously braided, plaited, and adorned with precious
stones. Costly ornaments and silken and woolen robes in all the colors of
the rainbow were brought in, shoes stiff with rich embroidery of pearls
and jewels were tied on to their tender feet, and golden girdles fastened
round their waists.
[Some kings gave their wives the revenues of entire cities as
"girdle-money" (pin-money).]
By the time Boges came in, the greater number of the women were already
fully adorned in their costly jewelry, which would have represented
probably, when taken together, the riches of a large kingdom.
He was greeted by a shrill cry of joy from many voices. Twenty of the
women joined hands and danced round their smiling keeper, singing a
simple song which had been composed in the harem in praise of his
virtues. On this day it was customary for the king to grant each of his
wives one reasonable petition. So when the ring of dancers had loosed
hands, a troop of petitioners rushed in upon Boges, kissing his hands,
stroking his cheeks, whispering in his ear all kinds of requests, and
trying by flattery to gain his intercession with the king. The woman's
tyrant smiled at it all, stopped his ears and pushed them all back with
jests and laughter, promising Amytis the Median that Esther the
Phoenician should be punished, and Esther the same of Amytis,--that
Parmys should have a handsomer set of jewels than Parisatys, and
Parisatys a more costly one than Parmys, but finding it impossible to get
rid of these importunate petitioners, he blew a little golden whistle.
Its shrill tones acted like magic on the eager crowd; the raised hands
fell in a moment, the little tripping feet stood still, the opening lips
closed and the eager tumult was turned into a dead silence.
Whoever disobeyed the sound of this little whistle, was certain of
punishment. It was as important as the words "Silence, in the king's
name!" or the reading of the riot-act. To-day it worked even more
effectually than usual. Boges' self-satisfied smile showed that he had
noticed this; he then favored the assembly with a look expressive of his
contentment with their conduct, promised in a flowery speech to exert all
his influence with the king in behalf of his dear little white doves, and
wound up by telling them to arrange themselves in two long rows.
The women obeyed and submitted to his scrutiny like soldiers on drill, or
slaves being examined by their buyer.
With the dress and ornaments of most he was satisfied, ordering, however,
to one a little more rouge, to another a little white powder to subdue a
too healthy color, here a different arrangement of the hair--there a
deeper tinge to the eyebrows, or more pains to be taken in anointing the
lips.
When this was over he left the hall and went to Phaedime, who as one of
the king's lawful wives, had a private room, separated from those
allotted to the concubines.
This former favorite,--this humbled daughter of the Achaemenidae, had
been expecting him already some time.
She was magnificently dressed, and almost overloaded with jewels. A thick
veil of gauze inwrought with gold hung from her little tiara, and
interlaced with this was the blue and white band of the Achaemenidae.
There could be no question that she was beautiful, but her figure was
already too strongly developed, a frequent result of the lazy harem life
among Eastern women. Fair golden hair, interwoven with little silver
chains and gold pieces, welled out almost too abundantly from beneath her
tiara, and was smoothed over her white temples.
She sprang forward to meet Boges, trembling with eagerness, caught a
hasty glance at herself in the looking-glass, and then, fixing her eyes
on the eunuch, asked impetuously: "Are you pleased with me? Will he
admire me?"
Boges smiled his old, eternal smile and answered: "You always please me,
my golden peacock, and the king would admire you too if he could see you
as you were a moment ago. You were really beautiful when you called out,
'Will he admire me?' for passion had turned your blue eyes black as
night, and your lip was curled with hatred so as to show two rows of
teeth white as the snow on the Demawend!"
Phaedime was flattered and forced her face once more into the admired
expression, saying: "Then take us at once to the banquet, for I know my
eyes will be darker and more brilliant, and my teeth will gleam more
brightly, when I see that Egyptian girl sitting where I ought to sit."
"She will not be allowed to sit there long."
"What! is your plan likely to succeed then? Oh, Boges, do not hide it any
longer from me--I will be as silent as the grave--I will help you--I
will--"
"No, I cannot, I dare not tell you about it, but this much I will say in
order to sweeten this bitter evening: we have dug the pit for our enemy,
and if my golden Phaedime will only do what I tell her, I hope to give
her back her old place, and not only that, but even a higher one."
"Tell me what I am to do; I am ready for anything and everything."
"That was well and bravely spoken; like a true lioness. If you obey me we
must succeed; and the harder the task, the higher the reward. Don't
dispute what I am going to say, for we have not a minute to lose. Take
off all your useless ornaments and only wear the chain the king gave you
on your marriage. Put on a dark simple dress instead of this bright one;
and when you have prostrated yourself before Kassandane, bow down humbly
before the Egyptian Princess too."
"Impossible!"
"I will not be contradicted. Take off those ornaments at once, I entreat
you. There, that is right. We cannot succeed unless you obey me. How
white your neck is! The fair Peri would look dark by your side."
"But--"
"When your turn comes to ask a favor of the king, tell him you have no
wishes, now that the sun of your life has withdrawn his light."
"Yes, that I will do."
"When your father asks after your welfare, you must weep."
"I will do that too."
"And so that all the Achaemenidae can see that you are weeping."
"That will be a fearful humiliation!"
"Not at all; only a means by which to rise the more surely. Wash the red
color from your cheeks and put on white powder. Make yourself pale--paler
still."
"Yes, I shall need that to hide my blushes. Boges, you are asking
something fearful of me, but I will obey you if you will only give me a
reason."
"Girl, bring your mistress's new dark green robe."
"I shall look like a slave."
"True grace is lovely even in rags."
"The Egyptian will completely eclipse me."
"Yes, every one must see that you have not the slightest intention of
comparing yourself with her. Then people will say: 'Would not Phaedime be
as beautiful as this proud woman, if she had taken the same pains to make
herself so?"'
"But I cannot bow down to her."
"You must."
"You only want to humble and ruin me."
"Short-sighted fool! listen to my reasons and obey. I want especially to
excite the Achaemenidae against our enemy. How it will enrage your
grandfather Intaphernes, and your father Otanes to see you in the dust
before a stranger! Their wounded pride will bring them over to our side,
and if they are too 'noble,' as they call it, to undertake anything
themselves against a woman, still they will be more likely to help than
to hinder us, if I should need their assistance. Then, when the Egyptian
is ruined, if you have done as I wish, the king will remember your sad
pale face, your humility and forgetfulness of self. The Achaemenidae, and
even the Magi, will beg him to take a queen from his own family; and
where in all Persia is there a woman who can boast of better birth than
you? Who else can wear the royal purple but my bright bird of Paradise,
my beautiful rose Phaedime? With such a prize in prospect we must no more
fear a little humiliation than a man who is learning to ride fears a fall
from his horse."
And she, princess as she was, answered: "I will obey you."
"Then we are certain of victory," said the eunuch. "There, now your eyes
are flashing darkly again as I like to see them, my queen. And so
Cambyses shall see you when the tender flesh of the Egyptian shall have
become food for dogs and the birds of the air, and when for the first
time after long months of absence, I bring him once more to the door of
your apartments. Here, Armorges! tell the rest of the women to get ready
and enter their litters. I will go on and be there to show them their
places."
..........................
The great banqueting-hall was bright as day--even brighter, from the
light of thousands of candles whose rays were reflected in the gold
plates forming the panelling of the walls. A table of interminable length
stood in the middle of the hall, overloaded with gold and silver cups,
plates, dishes, bowls, jugs, goblets, ornaments and incense-altars, and
looked like a splendid scene from fairy-land.
"The king will soon be here," called out the head-steward of the table,
of the great court-lords, to the king's cup-bearer, who was a member of
the royal family. "Are all the wine-jugs full, has the wine been tasted,
are the goblets ranged in order, and the skins sent by Polykrates, have
they been emptied?"
"Yes," answered the cup-bearer, "everything is ready, and that Chian wine
is better than any I ever tasted; indeed, in my opinion, even the Syrian
is not to be compared to it. Only taste it."
So saying he took a graceful little golden goblet from the table in one
hand, raised a wine-pitcher of the same costly metal with the other,
swung the latter high into the air and poured the wine so cleverly into
the narrow neck of the little vessel that not a drop was lost, though the
liquid formed a wide curve in its descent. He then presented the goblet
to the head-steward with the tips of his fingers, bowing gracefully as he
did so.
The latter sipped the delicious wine, testing its flavor with great
deliberation, and said, on returning the cup: "I agree with you, it is
indeed a noble wine, and tastes twice as well when presented with such
inimitable grace. Strangers are quite right in saying that there are no
cupbearers like the Persian."
"Thanks for this praise," replied the other, kissing his friend's
forehead. "Yes, I am proud of my office, and it is one which the king
only gives to his friends. Still it is a great plague to have to stay so
long in this hot, suffocating Babylon. Shall we ever be off for the
summer, to Ecbatana or Pasargada?"
"I was talking to the king about it to-day. He had intended not to leave
before the Massagetan war, and to go straight from Babylon into the
field, but to-day's embassy has changed matters; it is probable that
there may be no war, and then we shall go to Susa three days after the
king's marriage--that is, in one week from the present time."
"To Susa?" cried the cup-bearer. "It's very little cooler there than
here, and besides, the old Memnon's castle is being rebuilt."
"The satrap of Susa has just brought word that the new palace is
finished, and that nothing so brilliant has ever been seen. Directly
Cambyses heard, it he said: Then we will start for Susa three days after
our marriage. I should like to show the Egyptian Princess that we
understand the art of building as well as her own ancestors. She is
accustomed to hot weather on the Nile, and will not find our beautiful
Susa too warm.' The king seems wonderfully fond of this woman."
"He does indeed! All other women have become perfectly indifferent to
him, and he means soon to make her his queen."
"That is unjust; Phaedime, as daughter of the Achaemenidae, has an older
and better right."
"No doubt, but whatever the king wishes, must be right."
"The ruler's will is the will of God."
"Well said! A true Persian will kiss his king's hand, even when dripping
with the blood of his own child."
"Cambyses ordered my brother's execution, but I bear him no more ill-will
for it than I should the gods for depriving me of my parents. Here, you
fellows! draw the curtains back; the guests are coming. Look sharp, you
dogs, and do your duty! Farewell, Artabazos, we shall have warm work
to-night."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Death is so long and life so short
No man was allowed to ask anything of the gods for himself
Take heed lest pride degenerate into vainglory
AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS.
By Georg Ebers
Volume 6.
CHAPTER I.
The principal steward of the banquet went forward to meet the guests as
they entered, and, assisted by other noble staff-bearers (chamberlains
and masters of the ceremonies), led them to their appointed places.
When they were all seated, a flourish of trumpets announced that the king
was near. As he entered the hall every one rose, and the multitude
received him with a thundering shout of "Victory to the king!" again and
again repeated.
The way to his seat was marked by a purple Sardian carpet, only to be
trodden by himself and Kassandane. His blind mother, led by Croesus, went
first and took her seat at the head of the table, on a throne somewhat
higher than the golden chair for Cambyses, which stood by it. The king's
lawful wives sat on his left hand; Nitetis next to him, then Atossa, and
by her side the pale, plainly-dressed Phaedime; next to this last wife of
Cambyses sat Boges, the eunuch. Then came the high-priest Oropastes, some
of the principal Magi, the satraps of various provinces (among them the
Jew Belteshazzar), and a number of Persians, Medes and eunuchs, all
holding high offices under the crown.
Bartja sat at the king's right hand, and after him Croesus, Hystaspes,
Gobryas, Araspes, and others of the Achaemenidae, according to their rank
and age. Of the concubines, the greater number sat at the foot of the
table; some stood opposite to Cambyses, and enlivened the banquet by
songs and music. A number of eunuchs stood behind them, whose duty it was
to see that they did not raise their eyes towards the men.
Cambyses' first glance was bestowed on Nitetis; she sat by him in all the
splendor and dignity of a queen, but looking very, very pale in her new
purple robes.
Their eyes met, and Cambyses felt that such a look could only come from
one who loved him very dearly. But his own love told him that something
had troubled her. There was a sad seriousness about her mouth, and a
slight cloud, which only he could see, seemed to veil the usually calm,
clear and cheerful expression of her eyes. "I will ask her afterwards
what has happened," thought he, "but it will not do to let my subjects
see how much I love this girl."
He kissed his mother, sister, brother and his nearest relations on the
forehead--said a short prayer thanking the gods for their mercies and
entreating a happy new year for himself and the Persians--named the
immense sum he intended to present to his countrymen on this day, and
then called on the staff bearers to bring the petitioners before his
face, who hoped to obtain some reasonable request from the king on this
day of grace.
As every petitioner had been obliged to lay his request before the
principal staff bearer the day before, in order to ascertain whether it
was admissible, they all received satisfactory answers. The petitions of
the women had been enquired into by the eunuchs in the same manner, and
they too were now conducted before their lord and master by Boges,
Kassandane alone remaining seated.
The long procession was opened by Nitetis and Atossa, and the two
princesses were immediately followed by Phaedime and another beauty. The
latter was magnificently dressed and had been paired with Phaedime by
Boges, in order to make the almost poverty-stricken simplicity of the
fallen favorite more apparent.
Intaphernes and Otanes looked as annoyed as Boges had expected, on seeing
their grandchild and daughter so pale, and in such miserable array, in
the midst of all this splendor and magnificence.
Cambyses had had experience of Phaedime's former extravagance in matters
of dress, and, when he saw her standing before him so plainly dressed and
so pale, looked both angry and astonished. His brow darkened, and as she
bent low before him, he asked her in an angry and tyrannical tone: "What
is the meaning of this beggarly dress at my table, on the day set apart
in my honor? Have you forgotten, that in our country it is the custom
never to appear unadorned before the king? Verily, if it were not my
birthday, and if I did not owe you some consideration as the daughter of
our dearest kinsman, I should order the eunuchs to take you back to the
harem, that you might have time to think over your conduct in solitude."
These words rendered the mortified woman's task much easier. . . . She began
to weep loud and bitterly, raising her hands and eyes to her angry lord
in such a beseeching manner that his anger was changed into compassion,
and he raised her from the ground with the question: "Have you a petition
to ask of me?"
"What can I find to wish for, now that the sun of my life has withdrawn
his light?" was her faltering answer, hindered by sobs.
Cambyses shrugged his shoulders, and asked again "Is there nothing then
that you wish for? I used to be able to dry your tears with presents; ask
me for some golden comfort to-day."
"Phaedime has nothing left to wish for now. For whom can she put on
jewels when her king, her husband, withdraws the light of his
countenance?"
"Then I can do nothing for you," exclaimed Cambyses, turning away angrily
from the kneeling woman. Boges had been quite right in advising Phaedime
to paint herself with white, for underneath the pale color her cheeks
were burning with shame and anger. But, in spite of all, she controlled
her passionate feelings, made the same deep obeisance to Nitetis as to
the queen-mother, and allowed her tears to flow fast and freely in sight
of all the Achaemenidae.
Otanes and Intaphernes could scarcely suppress their indignation at
seeing their daughter and grandchild thus humbled, and many an
Achaemenidae looked on, feeling deep sympathy with the unhappy Phaedime
and a hidden grudge against the favored, beautiful stranger.
The formalities were at last at an end and the feast began. Just before
the king, in a golden basket, and gracefully bordered round with other
fruits, lay a gigantic pomegranate, as large as a child's head.
Cambyses noticed it now for the first time, examined its enormous size
and rare beauty with the eye of a connoisseur, and said: "Who grew this
wonderful pomegranate?"
"Thy servant Oropastes," answered the chief of the Magi, with a low
obeisance. "For many years I have studied the art of gardening, and have
ventured to lay this, the most beautiful fruit of my labors, at the feet
of my king."
"I owe you thanks," cried the king: "My friends, this pomegranate will
assist me in the choice of a governor at home when we go out to war, for,
by Mithras, the man who can cherish and foster a little tree so carefully
will do greater things than these. What a splendid fruit! Surely it's
like was never seen before. I thank you again, Oropastes, and as the
thanks of a king must never consist of empty words alone, I name you at
once vicegerent of my entire kingdom, in case of war. For we shall not
dream away our time much longer in this idle rest, my friends. A Persian
gets low-spirited without the joys of war."
A murmur of applause ran through the ranks of the Achaemenidae and fresh
shouts of "Victory to the king" resounded through the hall. Their anger
on account of the humiliation of a woman was quickly forgotten; thoughts
of coming battles, undying renown and conqueror's laurels to be won by
deeds of arms, and recollections of their former mighty deeds raised the
spirits of the revellers.
The king himself was more moderate than usual to-day, but he encouraged
his guests to drink, enjoying their noisy merriment and overflowing
mirth; taking, however, far more pleasure still in the fascinating beauty
of the Egyptian Princess, who sat at his side, paler than usual, and
thoroughly exhausted by the exertions of the morning and the unaccustomed
weight of the high tiara. He had never felt so happy as on this day. What
indeed could he wish for more than he already possessed? Had not the gods
given him every thing that a man could desire? and, over and above all
this, had not they flung into his lap the precious gift of love? His
usual inflexibility seemed to have changed into benevolence, and his
stern severity into good-nature, as he turned to his brother Bartja with
the words: "Come brother, have you forgotten my promise? Don't you know
that to-day you are sure of gaining the dearest wish of your heart from
me? That's right, drain the goblet, and take courage! but do not ask
anything small, for I am in the mood to give largely to-day. Ah, it is a
secret! come nearer then. I am really curious to know what the most
fortunate youth in my entire kingdom can long for so much, that he
blushes like a girl when his wish is spoken of."
Bartja, whose cheeks were really glowing from agitation, bent his head
close to his brother's ear, and whispered shortly the story of his love.
Sappho's father had helped to defend his native town Phocaea against the
hosts of Cyrus, and this fact the boy cleverly brought forward, speaking
of the girl he loved as the daughter of a Greek warrior of noble birth.
In so saying he spoke the truth, but at the same time he suppressed the
facts that this very father had acquired great riches by mercantile
undertakings.
[The Persians were forbidden by law to contract debts, because
debtors were necessarily led to say much that was untrue. Herod. I.
For this reason they held all money transactions in contempt, such
occupations being also very uncongenial to their military tastes.
They despised commerce and abandoned it to the conquered nations.]
He then told his brother how charming, cultivated and loving his Sappho
was, and was just going to call on Croesus for a confirmation of his
words, when Cambyses interrupted him by kissing his forehead and saying:
"You need say no more, brother; do what your heart bids you. I know the
power of love too, and I will help you to gain our mother's consent."
Bartja threw himself at his brother's feet, overcome with gratitude and
joy, but Cambyses raised him kindly and, looking especially at Nitetis
and Kassandane, exclaimed: "Listen, my dear ones, the stem of Cyrus is
going to blossom afresh, for our brother Bartja has resolved to put an
end to his single life, so displeasing to the gods.
[The Persians were commanded by their religion to marry, and the
unmarried were held up to ridicule. Vendid. IV. Fargard. 130.
The highest duty of man was to create and promote life, and to have
many children was therefore considered praiseworthy. Herod. I.
136.]
In a few days the young lover will leave us for your country, Nitetis,
and will bring back another jewel from the shores of the Nile to our
mountain home."
"What is the matter, sister?" cried Atossa, before her brother had
finished speaking. Nitetis had fainted, and Atossa was sprinkling her
forehead with wine as she lay in her arms.
"What was it?" asked the blind Kassandane, when Nitetis had awakened to
consciousness a few moments later.
"The joy--the happiness--Tachot," faltered Nitetis. Cambyses, as well as
his sister, had sprung to the fainting girl's help. When she had
recovered consciousness, he asked her to take some wine to revive her
completely, gave her the cup with his own hand, and then went on at the
point at which he had left off in his account: "Bartja is going to your
own country, my wife--to Naukratis on the Nile--to fetch thence the
granddaughter of a certain Rhodopis, and daughter of a noble warrior, a
native of the brave town of Phocaea, as his wife."
"What was that?" cried the blind queen-mother.
"What is the matter with you?" exclaimed Atossa again, in an anxious,
almost reproachful tone.
"Nitetis!" cried Croesus admonishingly. But the warning came too late;
the cup which her royal lover had given her slipped from her hands and
fell ringing on the floor. All eyes were fixed on the king's features in
anxious suspense. He had sprung from his seat pale as death; his lips
trembled and his fist was clenched. Nitetis looked up at her lover
imploringly, but he was afraid of meeting those wonderful, fascinating
eyes, and turned his head away, saying in a hoarse voice: "Take the women
back to their apartments, Boges. I have seen enough of them--let us begin
our drinking-bout--good-night, my mother; take care how you nourish
vipers with your heart's blood. Sleep well, Egyptian, and pray to the
gods to give you a more equal power of dissembling your feelings.
To-morrow, my friends, we will go out hunting. Here, cup-bearer, give me
some wine! fill the large goblet, but taste it well--yes, well--for
to-day I am afraid of poison; to-day for the first time. Do you hear,
Egyptian? I am afraid of poison! and every child knows--ah-ha--that all
the poison, as well as the medicine comes from Egypt."
Nitetis left the hall,--she hardly knew how,--more staggering than
walking. Boges accompanied her, telling the bearers to make haste.
When they reached the hanging-gardens he gave her up to the care of the
eunuch in attendance, and took his leave, not respectfully as usual, but
chuckling, rubbing his hands, and speaking in an intimate and
confidential tone: "Dream about the handsome Bartja and his Egyptian
lady-love, my white Nile-kitten! Haven't you any message for the
beautiful boy, whose love-story frightened you so terribly? Think a
little. Poor Boges will very gladly play the go-between; the poor
despised Boges wishes you so well--the humble Boges will be so sorry when
he sees the proud palm-tree from Sais cut down. Boges is a prophet; he
foretells you a speedy return home to Egypt, or a quiet bed in the black
earth in Babylon, and the kind Boges wishes you a peaceful sleep.
Farewell, my broken flower, my gay, bright viper, wounded by its own
sting, my pretty fir-cone, fallen from the tall pine-tree!"
"How dare you speak in this impudent manner?" said the indignant
princess.
"Thank you," answered the wretch, smiling.
"I shall complain of your conduct," threatened Nitetis.
"You are very amiable," answered Boges. "Go out of my sight," she cried.
"I will obey your kind and gentle hints;" he answered softly, as if
whispering words of love into her ear. She started back in disgust and
fear at these scornful words; she saw how full of terror they were for
her, turned her back on him and went quickly into the house, but his
voice rang after her: "Don't forget my lovely queen, think of me now and
then; for everything that happens in the next few days will be a keepsake
from the poor despised Boges."
As soon as she had disappeared he changed his tone, and commanded the
sentries in the severest and most tyrannical manner, to keep a strict
watch over the hanging-gardens. "Certain death," said he, "to whichever
of you allows any one but myself to enter these gardens. No one,
remember--no one--and least of all messengers from the queen-mother,
Atossa or any of the great people, may venture to set foot on these
steps. If Croesus or Oropastes should wish to speak to the Egyptian
Princess, refuse them decidedly. Do you understand? I repeat it, whoever
is begged or bribed into disobedience will not see the light of
to-morrow's sun. Nobody may enter these gardens without express
permission from my own mouth. I think you know me. Here, take these gold
staters, your work will be heavier now; but remember, I swear by Plithras
not to spare one of you who is careless or disobedient."
The men made a due obeisance and determined to obey; they knew that
Boges' threats were never meant in joke, and fancied something great must
be coming to pass, as the stingy eunuch never spent his staters without
good reason.
Boges was carried back to the banqueting-hall in the same litter, which
had brought Nitetis away.
The king's wives had left, but the concubines were all standing in their
appointed place, singing their monotonous songs, though quite unheard by
the uproarious men.
The drinkers had already long forgotten the fainting woman. The uproar
and confusion rose with every fresh wine-cup. They forgot the dignity of
the place where they were assembled, and the presence of their mighty
ruler.
They shouted in their drunken joy; warriors embraced one another with a
tenderness only excited by wine, here and there a novice was carried away
in the arms of a pair of sturdy attendants, while an old hand at the work
would seize a wine-jug instead of a goblet, and drain it at a draught
amid the cheers of the lookers-on.
The king sat on at the head of the table, pale as death, staring into the
wine-cup as if unconscious of what was going on around hint. But at the
sight of his brother his fist clenched.
He would neither speak to him, nor answer his questions. The longer he
sat there gazing into vacancy, the firmer became his conviction that
Nitetis had deceived him,--that she had pretended to love him while her
heart really belonged to Bartja. How shamefully they had made sport of
him! How deeply rooted must have been the faithlessness of this clever
hypocrite, if the mere news that his brother loved some one else could
not only destroy all her powers of dissimulation, but actually deprive
her of consciousness!
When Nitetis left the hall, Otanes, the father of Phaedime had called
out: "The Egyptian women seem to take great interest in the love-affairs
of their brothers-in-law. The Persian women are not so generous with
their feelings; they keep them for their husbands."
Cambyses was too proud to let it be seen that he had heard these words;
like the ostrich, he feigned deafness and blindness in order not to seem
aware of the looks and murmurs of his guests, which all went to prove
that he had been deceived.
Bartja could have had no share in her perfidy; she had loved this
handsome youth, and perhaps all the more because she had not been able to
hope for a return of her love. If he had had the slightest suspicion of
his brother, he would have killed him on the spot. Bartja was certainly
innocent of any share in the deception and in his brother's misery, but
still he was the cause of all; so the old grudge, which had only just
been allowed to slumber, woke again; and, as a relapse is always more
dangerous than the original illness, the newly-roused anger was more
violent than what he had formerly felt.
He thought and thought, but he could not devise a fitting punishment for
this false woman. Her death would not content his vengeance, she must
suffer something worse than mere death!
Should he send her back to Egypt, disgraced and shamed? Oh, no! she loved
her country, and she would be received by her parents with open arms.
Should he, after she had confessed her guilt, (for he was determined to
force a confession from her) shut her up in a solitary dungeon? or should
he deliver her over to Boges, to be the servant of his concubines? Yes!
now he had hit upon the right punishment. Thus the faithless creature
should be disciplined, and the hypocrite, who had dared to make sport of
him--the All-powerful--forced to atone for her crimes.
Then he said to himself: "Bartja must not stay here; fire and water have
more in common than we two--he always fortunate and happy, and I so
miserable. Some day or other his descendants will divide my treasures,
and wear my crown; but as yet I am king, and I will show that I am."
The thought of his proud, powerful position flashed through him like
lightning. He woke from his dreams into new life, flung his golden goblet
far into the hall, so that the wine flew round like rain, and cried: "We
have had enough of this idle talk and useless noise. Let us hold a
council of war, drunken as we are, and consider what answer we ought to
give the Massagetae. Hystaspes, you are the eldest, give us your opinion
first."
[Herod. I. 134. The Persians deliberated and resolved when they
were intoxicated, and when they were sober reconsidered their
determinations. Tacitus tells the same of the old Germans. Germ,
c. 22.]
Hystaspes, the father of Darius, was an old man. He answered: "It seems
to me, that the messengers of this wandering tribe have left us no
choice. We cannot go to war against desert wastes; but as our host is
already under arms and our swords have lain long in their scabbards, war
we must have. We only want a few good enemies, and I know no easier work
than to make them."
At these words the Persians broke into loud shouts of delight; but
Croesus only waited till the noise had ceased to say: "Hystaspes, you and
I are both old men; but you are a thorough Persian and fancy you can only
be happy in battle and bloodshed. You are now obliged to lean for support
on the staff, which used to be the badge of your rank as commander, and
yet you speak like a hot-blooded boy. I agree with you that enemies are
easy enough to find, but only fools go out to look for them. The man who
tries to make enemies is like a wretch who mutilates his own body. If the
enemies are there, let us go out to meet them like wise men who wish to
look misfortune boldly in the face; but let us never try to begin an
unjust war, hateful to the gods. We will wait until wrong has been done
us, and then go to victory or death, conscious that we have right on our
side."
The old man was interrupted by a low murmur of applause, drowned however
quickly by cries of "Hystaspes is right! let us look for an enemy!"
It was now the turn of the envoy Prexaspes to speak, and he answered
laughing: "Let us follow the advice of both these noble old men. We will
do as Croesus bids us and not go out to seek an enemy, but at the same
time we will follow Hystaspes' advice by raising our claims and
pronouncing every one our enemy, who does not cheerfully consent to
become a member of the kingdom founded by our great father Cyrus. For
instance, we will ask the Indians if they would feel proud to obey your
sceptre, Cambyses. If they answer no, it is a sign that they do not love
us, and whoever does not love us, must be our enemy."
"That won't do," cried Zopyrus. "We must have war at any price."
"I vote for Croesus," said Gobryas. "And I too," said the noble
Artabazus.
"We are for Hystaspes," shouted the warrior Araspes, the old Intaphernes,
and some more of Cyrus's old companions-in-arms.
"War we must have at any price," roared the general Megabyzus, the father
of Zopyrus, striking the table so sharply with his heavy fist, that the
golden vessels rang again, and some goblets even fell; "but not with the
Massagetac--not with a flying foe."
"There must be no war with the Massagetae," said the high-priest
Oropastes. "The gods themselves have avenged Cyrus's death upon them."
Cambyses sat for some moments, quietly and coldly watching the
unrestrained enthusiasm of his warriors, and then, rising from his seat,
thundered out the words: "Silence, and listen to your king!"
The words worked like magic on this multitude of drunken men. Even those
who were most under the influence of wine, listened to their king in a
kind of unconscious obedience. He lowered his voice and went on: "I did
not ask whether you wished for peace or war--I know that every Persian
prefers the labor of war to an inglorious idleness--but I wished to know
what answer you would give the Massagetan warriors. Do you consider that
the soul of my father--of the man to whom you owe all your greatness--has
been sufficiently avenged?"
A dull murmur in the affirmative, interrupted by some violent voices in
the negative, was the answer. The king then asked a second question:
"Shall we accept the conditions proposed by their envoys, and grant peace
to this nation, already so scourged and desolated by the gods?" To this
they all agreed eagerly.
"That is what I wished to know," continued Cambyses. "To-morrow, when we
are sober, we will follow the old custom and reconsider what has been
resolved on during our intoxication. Drink on, all of you, as long as the
night lasts. To-morrow, at the last crow of the sacred bird Parodar, I
shall expect you to meet me for the chase, at the gate of the temple of
Bel."
So saying, the king left the hall, followed by a thundering "Victory to
the king!" Boges had slipped out quietly before him. In the forecourt he
found one of the gardener's boys from the hanging-gardens.
"What do you want here?" asked Boges. "I have something for the prince
Bartja."
"For Bartja? Has he asked your master to send him some seeds or slips?"
The boy shook his sunburnt head and smiled roguishly.
"Some one else sent you then?" said Boges becoming more attentive.
"Yes, some one else."
"Ah! the Egyptian has sent a message to her brother-in-law?"
"Who told you that?"
"Nitetis spoke to me about it. Here, give me what you have; I will give
it to Bartja at once."
"I was not to give it to any one but the prince himself."
"Give it to me; it will be safer in my hands than in yours."
"I dare not."
"Obey me at once, or--"
At this moment the king came up. Boges thought a moment, and then called
in a loud voice to the whip-bearers on duty at the palace-gate, to take
the astonished boy up.
"What is the matter here?" asked Cambyses.
"This fellow," answered the eunuch, "has had the audacity to make his way
into the palace with a message from your consort Nitetis to Bartja."
At sight of the king, the boy had fallen on his knees, touching the
ground with his forehead.
Cambyses looked at him and turned deadly pale. Then, turning to the
eunuch, he asked: "What does the Egyptian Princess wish from my brother?"
"The boy declares that he has orders to give up what has been entrusted
to him to no one but Bartja." On hearing this the boy looked imploringly
up at the king, and held out a little papyrus roll.
Cambyses snatched it out of his hand, but the next moment stamped
furiously on the ground at seeing that the letter was written in Greek,
which he could not read.
He collected himself, however, and, with an awful look, asked the boy who
had given him the letter. "The Egyptian lady's waiting-woman Mandane," he
answered; "the Magian's daughter."
"For my brother Bartja?"
"She said I was to give the letter to the handsome prince, before the
banquet, with a greeting from her mistress Nitetis, and I was to tell him
. . ."
Here the king stamped so furiously, that the boy was frightened and could
only stammer: "Before the banquet the prince was walking with you, so I
could not speak to him, and now I am waiting for him here, for Mandane
promised to give me a piece of gold if I did what she told me cleverly."
"And that you have not done," thundered the king, fancying himself
shamefully deceived. "No, indeed you have not. Here, guards, seize this
fellow!"
The boy begged and prayed, but all in vain; the whip-bearers seized him
quick as thought, and Cambyses, who went off at once to his own
apartments, was soon out of reach of his whining entreaties for mercy.
Boges followed his master, rubbing his fat hands, and laughing quietly to
himself.
The king's attendants began their work of disrobing him, but he told them
angrily to leave him at once. As soon as they were gone, he called Boges
and said in a low voice: "From this time forward the hanging-gardens and
the Egyptian are under your control. Watch her carefully! If a single
human being or a message reaches her without my knowledge, your life will
be the forfeit."
"But if Kassandane or Atossa should send to her?"
"Turn the messengers away, and send word that every attempt to see or
communicate with Nitetis will be regarded by me as a personal offence."
"May I ask a favor for myself, O King?"
"The time is not well chosen for asking favors."
"I feel ill. Permit some one else to take charge of the hanging-gardens
for to-morrow only."
"No!--now leave me."
"I am in a burning fever and have lost consciousness three times during
the day--if when I am in that state any one should . . ."
But who could take your place?"
"The Lydian captain of the eunuchs, Kandaules. He is true as gold, and
inflexibly severe. One day of rest would restore me to health. Have
mercy, O King!"
"No one is so badly served as the king himself. Kandaules may take your
place to-morrow, but give hum the strictest orders, and say that the
slightest neglect will put his life in danger.--Now depart."
"Yet one word, my King: to-morrow night the rare blue lily in the
hanging-gardens will open. Hystaspes, Intaphernes, Gobyras, Croesus and
Oropastes, the greatest horticulturists at your court, would very much
like to see it. May they be allowed to visit the gardens for a few
minutes? Kandaules shall see that they enter into no communication with
the Egyptian."
"Kandaules must keep his eyes open, if he cares for his own life.--Go!"
Boges made a deep obeisance and left the king's apartment. He threw a few
gold pieces to the slaves who bore the torches before him. He was so very
happy. Every thing had succeeded beyond his expectations:--the fate of
Nitetis was as good as decided, and he held the life of Kandaules, his
hated colleague, in his own hands.
Cambyses spent the night in pacing up and down his apartment. By
cock-crow he had decided that Nitetis should be forced to confess her
guilt, and then be sent into the great harem to wait on the concubines.
Bartja, the destroyer of his happiness, should set off at once for Egypt,
and on his return become the satrap of some distant provinces. He did not
wish to incur the guilt of a brother's murder, but he knew his own temper
too well not to fear that in a moment of sudden anger, he might kill one
he hated so much, and therefore wished to remove him out of the reach of
his passion.
Two hours after the sun had risen, Cambyses was riding on his fiery
steed, far in front of a Countless train of followers armed with shields,
swords, lances, bows and lassos, in pursuit of the game which was to be
found in the immense preserves near Babylon, and was to be started from
its lair by more than a thousand dogs.
[The same immense trains of followers of course accompanied the
kings on their hunting expeditions, as on their journeys. As the
Persian nobility were very fond of hunting, their boys were taught
this sport at an early age. According to Strabo, kings themselves
boasted of having been mighty hunters in the inscriptions on their
tombs. A relief has been found in the ruins of Persepolis, on which
the king is strangling a lion with his right arm, but this is
supposed to have a historical, not a symbolical meaning. Similar
representations occur on Assyrian monuments. Izdubar strangling a
lion and fighting with a lion (relief at Khorsabad) is admirably
copied in Delitzsch's edition of G. Smith's Chaldean Genesis.
Layard discovered some representations of hunting-scenes during his
excavations; as, for instance, stags and wild boars among the reeds;
and the Greeks often mention the immense troops of followers on
horse and foot who attended the kings of Persia when they went
hunting. According to Xenophon, Cyrop. I. 2. II. 4. every hunter
was obliged to be armed with a bow and arrows, two lances, sword and
shield. In Firdusi's Book of Kings we read that the lasso was also
a favorite weapon. Hawking was well known to the Persians more than
900 years ago. Book of Kabus XVIII. p. 495. The boomerang was
used in catching birds as well by the Persians as by the ancient
Egyptians and the present savage tribes of New Holland.]
CHAPTER II.
The hunt was over. Waggons full of game, amongst which were several
enormous wild boars killed by the king's own hand, were driven home
behind the sports men. At the palace-gates the latter dispersed to their
several abodes, in order to exchange the simple Persian leather
hunting-costume for the splendid Median court-dress.
In the course of the day's sport Cambyses had (with difficulty
restraining his agitation) given his brother the seemingly kind order to
start the next day for Egypt in order to fetch Sappho and accompany her
to Persia. At the same time he assigned him the revenues of Bactra,
Rhagae and Sinope for the maintenance of his new household, and to his
young wife, all the duties levied from her native town Phocaea, as
pin-money.
Bartja thanked his generous brother with undisguised warmth, but Cambyses
remained cold as ice, uttered a few farewell words, and then, riding off
in pursuit of a wild ass, turned his back upon him.
On the way home from the chase the prince invited his bosom-friends
Croesus, Darius, Zopyrus and Gyges to drink a parting-cup with him.
Croesus promised to join them later, as he had promised to visit the blue
lily at the rising of the Tistarstar.
He had been to the hanging-gardens that morning early to visit Nitetis,
but had been refused entrance by the guards, and the blue lily seemed now
to offer him another chance of seeing and speaking to his beloved pupil.
He wished for this very much, as he could not thoroughly understand her
behavior the day before, and was uneasy at the strict watch set over her.
The young Achaemenidae sat cheerfully talking together in the twilight in
a shady bower in the royal gardens, cool fountains plashing round them.
Araspes, a Persian of high rank, who had been one of Cyrus's friends, had
joined them, and did full justice to the prince's excellent wine.
"Fortunate Bartja!" cried the old bachelor, "going out to a golden
country to fetch the woman you love; while I, miserable old fellow, am
blamed by everybody, and totter to my grave without wife or children to
weep for me and pray the gods to be merciful to my poor soul."
"Why think of such things?" cried Zopyrus, flourishing the wine-cup.
"There's no woman so perfect that her husband does not, at least once a
day, repent that he ever took a wife. Be merry, old friend, and remember
that it's all your own fault. If you thought a wife would make you happy,
why did not you do as I have done? I am only twenty-two years old and
have five stately wives and a troop of the most beautiful slaves in my
house."
Araspes smiled bitterly.
"And what hinders you from marrying now?" said Gyges. "You are a match
for many a younger man in appearance, strength, courage and perseverance.
You are one of the king's nearest relations too--I tell you, Araspes, you
might have twenty young and beautiful wives."
"Look after your own affairs," answered Araspes. "In your place, I
certainly should not have waited to marry till I was thirty."
"An oracle has forbidden my marrying."
"Folly? how can a sensible man care for what an oracle says? It is only
by dreams, that the gods announce the future to men. I should have
thought that your own father was example enough of the shameful way in
which those lying priests deceive their best friends."
"That is a matter which you do not understand, Araspes."
"And never wish to, boy, for you only believe in oracles because you
don't understand them, and in your short-sightedness call everything that
is beyond your comprehension a miracle. And you place more confidence in
anything that seems to you miraculous, than in the plain simple truth
that lies before your face. An oracle deceived your father and plunged
him into ruin, but the oracle is miraculous, and so you too, in perfect
confidence, allow it to rob you of happiness!"
"That is blasphemy, Araspes. Are the gods to be blamed because we
misunderstand their words?"
"Certainly: for if they wished to benefit us they would give us, with the
words, the necessary penetration for discovering their meaning. What good
does a beautiful speech do me, if it is in a foreign language that I do
not understand?"
"Leave off this useless discussion," said Darius, "and tell us instead,
Araspes, how it is that, though you congratulate every man on becoming a
bridegroom, you yourself have so long submitted to be blamed by the
priests, slighted at all entertainments and festivals, and abused by the
women, only because you choose to live and die a bachelor?"
Araspes looked down thoughtfully, then shook himself, took a long draught
from the wine-cup, and said, "I have my reasons, friends, but I cannot
tell them now."
"Tell them, tell them," was the answer.
"No, children, I cannot, indeed I cannot. This cup I drain to the health
of the charming Sappho, and this second to your good fortune, my
favorite, Darius."
"Thanks, Araspes!" exclaimed Bartja, joyfully raising his goblet to his
lips.
"You mean well, I know," muttered Darius, looking down gloomily.
"What's this, you son of Hystaspes?" cried the old man, looking more
narrowly at the serious face of the youth. "Dark looks like these don't
sit well on a betrothed lover, who is to drink to the health of his
dearest one. Is not Gobryas' little daughter the noblest of all the young
Persian girls after Atossa? and isn't she beautiful?"
"Artystone has every talent and quality that a daughter of the
Achaemenidae ought to possess," was Darius's answer, but his brow did not
clear as he said the words.
"Well, if you want more than that, you must be very hard to please."
Darius raised his goblet and looked down into the wine.
"The boy is in love, as sure as my name is Araspes!" exclaimed the elder
man.
"What a set of foolish fellows you are," broke in Zopyrus at this
exclamation. "One of you has remained a bachelor in defiance of all
Persian customs; another has been frightened out of marrying by an
oracle; Bartja has determined to be content with only one wife; and
Darius looks like a Destur chanting the funeral-service, because his
father has told him to make himself happy with the most beautiful and
aristocratic girl in Persia!"
"Zopyrus is right," cried Araspes. "Darius is ungrateful to fortune."
Bartja meanwhile kept his eyes fixed on the friend, who was thus blamed
by the others. He saw that their jests annoyed him, and feeling his own
great happiness doubly in that moment, pressed Darius's hand, saying: "I
am so sorry that I cannot be present at your wedding. By the time I come
back, I hope you will be reconciled to your father's choice."
"Perhaps," said Darius, "I may be able to show a second and even a third
wife by that time."
"'Anahita' grant it!" exclaimed Zopyrus. "The Achaemenidae would soon
become extinct, if every one were to follow such examples as Gyges and
Araspes have set us. And your one wife, Bartja, is really not worth
talking about. It is your duty to marry three wives at once, in order to
keep up your father's family--the race of Cyrus."
"I hate our custom of marrying many wives," answered Bartja. "Through
doing this, we make ourselves inferior to the women, for we expect them
to remain faithful to us all our lives, and we, who are bound to respect
truth and faithfulness above every thing else, swear inviolable love to
one woman to-day, and to another to-morrow."
"Nonsense!" cried Zopyrus. "I'd rather lose my tongue than tell a he to a
man, but our wives are so awfully deceitful, that one has no choice but
to pay them back in their own coin."
"The Greek women are different," said Bartja, "because they are
differently treated. Sappho told me of one, I think her name was
Penelope, who waited twenty years faithfully and lovingly for her
husband, though every one believed he was dead, and she had fifty lovers
a day at her house."
"My wives would not wait so long for me," said Zopyrus laughing. "To tell
the truth, I don't think I should be sorry to find an empty house, if I
came back after twenty years. For then I could take some new wives into
my harem, young and beautiful, instead of the unfaithful ones, who,
besides, would have grown old. But alas! every woman does not find some
one to run away with her, and our women would rather have an absent
husband than none at all."
"If your wives could hear what you are saying!" said Araspes.
"They would declare war with me at once, or, what is still worse,
conclude a peace with one another."
"How would that be worse?"
"How? it is easy to see, that you have had no experience."
"Then let us into the secrets of your married life."
"With pleasure. You can easily fancy, that five wives in one house do not
live quite so peacefully as five doves in a cage; mine at least carry on
an uninterrupted, mortal warfare. But I have accustomed myself to that,
and their sprightliness even amuses me. A year ago, however, they came to
terms with one another, and this day of peace was the most miserable in
my life."
"You are jesting."
"No, indeed, I am quite in earnest. The wretched eunuch who had to keep
watch over the five, allowed them to see an old jewel-merchant from Tyre.
Each of them chose a separate and expensive set of jewels. When I came
home Sudabe came up and begged for money to pay for these ornaments. The
things were too dear, and I refused. Every one of the five then came and
begged me separately for the money; I refused each of them point blank
and went off to court. When I came back, there were all my wives weeping
side by side, embracing one another and calling each other
fellow-sufferers. These former enemies rose up against me with the most
touching unanimity, and so overwhelmed me with revilings and threats that
I left the room. They closed their doors against me. The next morning the
lamentations of the evening before were continued. I fled once more and
went hunting with the king, and when I came back, tired, hungry and
half-frozen--for it was in spring, we were already at Ecbatana, and the
snow was lying an ell deep on the Orontes--there was no fire on the
hearth and nothing to eat. These noble creatures had entered into an
alliance in order to punish me, had put out the fire, forbidden the cooks
to do their duty and, which was worse than all--had kept the jewels! No
sooner had I ordered the slaves to make a fire and prepare food, than the
impudent jewel-dealer appeared and demanded his money. I refused again,
passed another solitary night, and in the morning sacrificed ten talents
for the sake of peace. Since that time harmony and peace among my beloved
wives seems to me as much to be feared as the evil Divs themselves, and I
see their little quarrels with the greatest pleasure."
"Poor Zopyrus!" cried Bartja.
"Why poor?" asked this five-fold husband. "I tell you I am much happier
than you are. My wives are young and charming, and when they grow old,
what is to hinder me from taking others, still handsomer, and who, by the
side of the faded beauties, will be doubly charming. Ho! slave--bring
some lamps. The sun has gone down, and the wine loses all its flavor when
the table is not brightly lighted."
At this moment the voice of Darius, who had left the arbor and gone out
into the garden, was heard calling: "Come and hear how beautifully the
nightingale is singing."
"By Mithras, you son of Hystaspes, you must be in love," interrupted
Araspes. "The flowery darts of love must have entered the heart of him,
who leaves his wine to listen to the nightingale."
"You are right there, father," cried Bartja. "Philomel, as the Greeks
call our Gulgul, is the lovers' bird among all nations, for love has
given her her beautiful song. What beauty were you dreaming of, Darius,
when you went out to listen to the nightingale?"
"I was not dreaming of any," answered he. "You know how fond I am of
watching the stars, and the Tistar-star rose so splendidly to-night, that
I left the wine to watch it. The nightingales were singing so loudly to
one another, that if I had not wished to hear them I must have stopped my
ears."
"You kept them wide open, however," said Araspes laughing. "Your
enraptured exclamation proved that."
"Enough of this," cried Darius, to whom these jokes were getting
wearisome. "I really must beg you to leave off making allusions to
matters, which I do not care to hear spoken of."
"Imprudent fellow!" whispered the older man; "now you really have
betrayed yourself. If you were not in love, you would have laughed
instead of getting angry. Still I won't go on provoking you--tell me what
you have just been reading in the stars."
At these words Darius looked up again into the starry sky and fixed his
eyes on a bright constellation hanging over the horizon. Zopyrus watched
him and called out to his friends, "Something important must be happening
up there. Darius, tell us what's going on in the heavens just now."
"Nothing good," answered the other. "Bartja, I have something to say to
you alone."
"Why to me alone? Araspes always keeps his own counsel, and from the rest
of you I never have any secrets."
"Still--"
"Speak out."
"No, I wish you would come into the garden with me."
Bartja nodded to the others, who were still sitting over their wine, laid
his hand on Darius' shoulder and went out with him into the bright
moonlight. As soon as they were alone, Darius seized both his friend's
hands, and said: "To-day is the third time that things have happened in
the heavens, which bode no good for you. Your evil star has approached
your favorable constellation so nearly, that a mere novice in astrology
could see some serious danger was at hand. Be on your guard, Bartja, and
start for Egypt to-day; the stars tell me that the danger is here on the
Euphrates, not abroad."
"Do you believe implicitly in the stars?"
"Implicitly. They never lie."
"Then it would be folly to try and avoid what they have foretold."
"Yes, no man can run away from his destiny; but that very destiny is like
a fencing-master--his favorite pupils are those who have the courage and
skill to parry his own blows. Start for Egypt to-day, Bartja."
"I cannot--I haven't taken leave of my mother and Atossa."
"Send them a farewell message, and tell Croesus to explain the reason of
your starting so quickly."
"They would call me a coward."
"It is cowardly to yield to any mortal, but to go out of the way of one's
fate is wisdom."
"You contradict yourself, Darius. What would the fencing-master say to a
runaway-pupil?"
"He would rejoice in the stratagem, by which an isolated individual tried
to escape a superior force."
"But the superior force must conquer at last.--What would be the use of
my trying to put off a danger which, you say yourself, cannot be averted?
If my tooth aches, I have it drawn at once, instead of tormenting and
making myself miserable for weeks by putting off the painful operation as
a coward or a woman would, till the last moment. I can await this coming
danger bravely, and the sooner it comes the better, for then I shall have
it behind me."
"You do not know how serious it is."
"Are you afraid for my life?"
"No."
"Then tell me, what you are afraid of."
"That Egyptian priest with whom I used to study the stars, once cast your
horoscope with me. He knew more about the heavens, than any man I ever
saw. I learnt a great deal from him, and I will not hide from you that
even then he drew my attention to dangers that threaten you now."
"And you did not tell me?"
"Why should I have made you uneasy beforehand? Now that your destiny is
drawing near, I warn you."
"Thank you,--I will be careful. In former times I should not have
listened to such a warning, but now that I love Sappho, I feel as if my
life were not so much my own to do what I like with, as it used to be."
"I understand this feeling . . ."
"You understand it? Then Araspes was right? You don't deny?"
"A mere dream without any hope of fulfilment."
"But what woman could refuse you?"
"Refuse!"
"I don't understand you. Do you mean to say that you--the boldest
sportsman, the strongest wrestler--the wisest of all the young
Persians--that you, Darius, are afraid of a woman?"
"Bartja, may I tell you more, than I would tell even to my own father?"
"Yes."
"I love the daughter of Cyrus, your sister and the king's, Atossa."
"Have I understood you rightly? you love Atossa? Be praised for this, O
ye pure Amescha cpenta! Now I shall never believe in your stars again,
for instead of the danger with which they threatened me, here comes an
unexpected happiness. Embrace me, my brother, and tell me the whole
story, that I may see whether I can help you to turn this hopeless dream,
as you call it, into a reality."
"You will remember that before our journey to Egypt, we went with the
entire court from Ecbatana to Susa. I was in command of the division of
the "Immortals" appointed to escort the carriages containing the king's
mother and sister, and his wives. In going through the narrow pass which
leads over the Orontes, the horses of your mother's carriage slipped. The
yoke to which the horses were harnessed broke from the pole, and the
heavy, four-wheeled carriage fell over the precipice without obstruction.
[There was a yoke at the end of the shaft of a Persian carriage,
which was fastened on to the backs of the horses and took the place
of our horse-collar and pole-chain.]
On seeing it disappear, we were horrified and spurred our horses to the
place as quickly as possible. We expected of course to see only fragments
of the carriages and the dead bodies of its inmates, but the gods had
taken them into their almighty protection, and there lay the carriage,
with broken wheels, in the arms of two gigantic cypresses which had taken
firm root in the fissures of the slate rocks, and whose dark tops reached
up to the edge of the carriage-road.
"As quick as thought I sprang from my horse and scrambled down one of the
cypresses. Your mother and sister stretched their arms to me, crying for
help. The danger was frightful, for the sides of the carriage had been so
shattered by the fall, that they threatened every moment to give way, in
which case those inside it must inevitably have fallen into the black,
unfathomable abyss which looked like an abode for the gloomy Divs, and
stretched his jaws wide to crush its beautiful victims.
"I stood before the shattered carriage as it hung over the precipice
ready to fall to pieces every moment, and then for the first time I met
your sister's imploring look. From that moment I loved her, but at the
time I was much too intent on saving them, to think of anything else, and
had no idea what had taken place within me. I dragged the trembling women
out of the carriage, and one minute later it rolled down the abyss
crashing into a thousand pieces. I am a strong man, but I confess that
all my strength was required to keep myself and the two women from
falling over the precipice until ropes were thrown to us from above.
Atossa hung round my neck, and Kassandane lay on my breast, supported by
my left arm; with the right I fastened the rope round my waist, we were
drawn up, and I found myself a few minutes later on the high-road--your
mother and sister were saved.
"As soon as one of the Magi had bound up the wounds cut by the rope in my
side, the king sent for me, gave me the chain I am now wearing and the
revenues of an entire satrapy, and then took me to his mother and sister.
They expressed their gratitude very warmly; Kassandane allowed me to kiss
her forehead, and gave me all the jewels she had worn at the time of the
accident, as a present for my future wife. Atossa took a ring from her
finger, put it on mine and kissed my hand in the warmth of her
emotion--you know how eager and excitable she is. Since that happy
day--the happiest in my life--I have never seen your sister, till
yesterday evening, when we sat opposite to each other at the banquet. Our
eyes met. I saw nothing but Atossa, and I think she has not forgotten the
man who saved her. Kassandane . . ."
"Oh, my mother would be delighted to have you for a son-in-law; I will
answer for that. As to the king, your father must apply to him; he is our
uncle and has a right to ask the hand of Cyrus's daughter for his son."
"But have you forgotten your father's dream? You know that Cambyses has
always looked on me with suspicion since that time."
"Oh, that has been long forgotten. My father dreamt before his death that
you had wings, and was misled by the soothsayers into the fancy that you,
though you were only eighteen then, would try to gain the crown. Cambyses
thought of this dream too; but, when you saved my mother and sister,
Croesus explained to him that this must have been its fulfilment, as no
one but Darius or a winged eagle could possibly have possessed strength
and dexterity enough to hang suspended over such an abyss."
"Yes, and I remember too that these words did not please your brother. He
chooses to be the only eagle in Persia; but Croesus does not spare his
vanity--"
"Where can Croesus be all this time?"
"In the hanging-gardens. My father and Gobryas have very likely detained
him."
Just at that moment the voice of Zopyrus was heard exclaiming, "Well, I
call that polite! Bartja invites us to a wine-party and leaves us sitting
here without a host, while he talks secrets yonder."
"We are coming, we are coming," answered Bartja. Then taking the hand of
Darius heartily, he said: "I am very glad that you love Atossa. I shall
stay here till the day after to-morrow, let the stars threaten me with
all the dangers in the world. To-morrow I will find out what Atossa
feels, and when every thing is in the right track I shall go away, and
leave my winged Darius to his own powers."
So saying Bartja went back into the arbor, and his friend began to watch
the stars again. The longer he looked the sadder and more serious became
his face, and when the Tistar-star set, he murmured, "Poor Bartja!" His
friends called him, and he was on the point of returning to them, when he
caught sight of a new star, and began to examine its position carefully.
His serious looks gave way to a triumphant smile, his tall figure seemed
to grow taller still, he pressed his hand on his heart and whispered:
"Use your pinions, winged Darius; your star will be on your side," and
then returned to his friends.
A few minutes after, Croesus came up to the arbor. The youths sprang from
their seats to welcome the old man, but when he saw Bartja's face by the
bright moonlight, he stood as if transfixed by a flash of lightning.
"What has happened, father?" asked Gyges, seizing his hand anxiously.
"Nothing, nothing," he stammered almost inaudibly, and pushing his son on
one side, whispered in Bartja's ear: "Unhappy boy, you are still here?
don't delay any longer,--fly at once! the whip-bearers are close at my
heels, and I assure you that if you don't use the greatest speed, you
will have to forfeit your double imprudence with your life."
"But Croesus, I have . . ."
"You have set at nought the law of the land and of the court, and, in
appearance at least, have done great offence to your brother's honor.
. . ."
"You are speaking . . ."
"Fly, I tell you--fly at once; for if your visit to the hanging-gardens
was ever so innocently meant, you are still in the greatest danger. You
know Cambyses' violent temper so well; how could you so wickedly disobey
his express command?"
"I don't understand."
"No excuses,--fly! don't you know that, Cambyses has long been jealous of
you, and that your visit to the Egyptian to-night . . ."
"I have never once set foot in the hanging-gardens, since Nitetis has
been here."
"Don't add a lie to your offence, I . . ."
"But I swear to you . . ."
"Do you wish to turn a thoughtless act into a crime by adding the guilt
of perjury? The whip-bearers are coming, fly!"
"I shall remain here, and abide by my oath."
"You are infatuated! It is not an hour ago since I myself, Hystaspes, and
others of the Achaemenidae saw you in the hanging-gardens . . ."
In his astonishment Bartja had, half involuntarily, allowed himself to be
led away, but when he heard this he stood still, called his friends and
said "Croesus says he met me an hour ago in the hanging-gardens, you know
that since the sun set I have not been away from you. Give your
testimony, that in this case an evil Div must have made sport of our
friend and his companions."
"I swear to you, father," cried Gyges, "that Bartja has not left this
garden for some hours."
"And we confirm the same," added Araspes, Zopyrus and Darius with one
voice.
"You want to deceive me?" said Croesus getting very angry, and looking at
each of them reproachfully: "Do you fancy that I am blind or mad? Do you
think that your witness will outweigh the words of such men as Hystaspes,
Gobryas, Artaphernes and the high priest, Oropastes? In spite of all your
false testimony, which no amount of friendship can justify, Bartja will
have to die unless he flies at once."
"May Angramainjus destroy me," said Araspes interrupting the old man, "if
Bartja was in the hanging-gardens two hours ago!" and Gyges added:
"Don't call me your son any longer, if we have given false testimony."
Darius was beginning to appeal to the eternal stars, but Bartja put an
end to this confusion of voices by saying in a decided tone: "A division
of the bodyguard is coming into the garden. I am to be arrested; I cannot
escape because I am innocent, and to fly would lay me open to suspicion.
By the soul of my father, the blind eyes of my mother, and the pure light
of the sun, Croesus, I swear that I am not lying."
"Am I to believe you, in spite of my own eyes which have never yet
deceived me? But I will, boy, for I love you. I do not and I will not
know whether you are innocent or guilty, but this I do know, you must
fly, and fly at once. You know Cambyses. My carriage is waiting at the
gate. Don't spare the horses, save yourself even if you drive them to
death. The Soldiers seem to know what they have been sent to do; there
can be no question that they delay so long only in order to give their
favorite time to escape. Fly, fly, or it is all over with you."
Darius, too, pushed his friend forward, exclaiming: "Fly, Bartja, and
remember the warning that the heavens themselves wrote in the stars for
you."
Bartja, however, stood silent, shook his handsome head, waved his friends
back, and answered: "I never ran away yet, and I mean to hold my ground
to-day. Cowardice is worse than death in my opinion, and I would rather
suffer wrong at the hands of others than disgrace myself. There are the
soldiers! Well met, Bischen. You've come to arrest me, haven't you? Wait
one moment, till I have said good-bye to my friends."
Bischen, the officer he spoke to, was one of Cyrus's old captains; he had
given Bartja his first lessons in shooting and throwing the spear, had
fought by his side in the war with the Tapuri, and loved him as if he
were his own son. He interrupted him, saying: "There is no need to take
leave of your friends, for the king, who is raging like a madman, ordered
me not only to arrest you, but every one else who might be with you."
And then he added in a low voice: "The king is beside himself with rage
and threatens to have your life. You must fly. My men will do what I tell
them blindfold; they will not pursue you; and I am so old that it would
be little loss to Persia, if my head were the price of my disobedience."
"Thanks, thanks, my friend," said Bartja, giving him his hand; "but I
cannot accept your offer, because I am innocent, and I know that though
Cambyses is hasty, he is not unjust. Come friends, I think the king will
give us a hearing to-day, late as it is."
CHAPTER III.
Two hours later Bartja and his friends were standing before the king. The
gigantic man was seated on his golden throne; he was pale and his eyes
looked sunken; two physicians stood waiting behind him with all kinds of
instruments and vessels in their hands. Cambyses had, only a few minutes
before, recovered consciousness, after lying for more than an hour in one
of those awful fits, so destructive both to mind and body, which we call
epileptic.
[The dangerous disease to which Herodotus says Cambyses had been
subject from his birth, and which was called "sacred" by some, can
scarcely be other than epilepsy. See Herod, III. 33.]
Since Nitetis' arrival he had been free from this illness; but it had
seized him to-day with fearful violence, owing to the overpowering mental
excitement he had gone through.
If he had met Bartja a few hours before, he would have killed him with
his own hand; but though the epileptic fit had not subdued his anger it
had at least so far quieted it, that he was in a condition to hear what
was to be said on both sides.
At the right hand of the throne stood Hystaspes, Darius's grey-haired
father, Gobryas, his future father-in-law, the aged Intaphernes, the
grandfather of that Phaedime whose place in the king's favor had been
given to Nitetis, Oropastes the high-priest, Croesus, and behind them
Boges, the chief of the eunuchs. At its left Bartja, whose hands were
heavily fettered, Araspes, Darius, Zopyrus and Gyges. In the background
stood some hundred officials and grandees.
After a long silence Cambyses raised his eyes, fixed a withering look on
his fettered brother, and said in a dull hollow voice: "High-priest, tell
us what awaits the man who deceives his brother, dishonors and offends
his king, and darkens his own heart by black lies."
Oropastes came forward and answered: "As soon as such a one is proved
guilty, a death full of torment awaits him in this world, and an awful
sentence on the bridge Chinvat; for he has transgressed the highest
commands, and, by committing three crimes, has forfeited the mercy of our
law, which commands that his life shall be granted to the man who has
sinned but once, even though he be only a slave."
[On the third day after death, at the rising of the bright sun, the
souls are conducted by the Divs to the bridge Chinvat, where they
are questioned as to their past lives and conduct. Vendid.
Fargard. XIX. 93. On that spot the two supernatural powers fight
for the soul.]
"Then Bartja has deserved death. Lead him away, guards, and strangle him!
Take him away! Be silent, wretch! never will I listen to that smooth,
hypocritical tongue again, or look at those treacherous eyes. They come
from the Divs and delude every one with their wanton glances. Off with
him, guards!"
Bischen, the captain, came up to obey the order, but in the same moment
Croesus threw himself at the king's feet, touched the floor with his
forehead, raised his hands and cried: "May thy days and years bring
nought but happiness and prosperity; may Auramazda pour down all the
blessings of this life upon thee, and the Amescha cpenta be the guardians
of thy throne!
[The Amescha cpenta, "holy immortal ones," maybe compared to the
archangels of the Hebrews. They surround the throne of Auramazda
and symbolize the highest virtues. Later we find their number fixed
at six.]
Do not close thine ear to the words of the aged, but remember that thy
father Cyrus appointed me to be thy counsellor. Thou art about to slay
thy brother; but I say unto thee, do not indulge anger; strive to control
it. It is the duty of kings and of the wise, not to act without due
enquiry. Beware of shedding a brother's blood; the smoke thereof will
rise to heaven and become a cloud that must darken the days of the
murderer, and at last cast down the lightnings of vengeance on his head.
But I know that thou desirest justice, not murder. Act then as those who
have to pronounce a sentence, and hear both sides before deciding. When
this has been done, if the criminal is proved guilty and confesses his
crime, the smoke of his blood will rise to heaven as a friendly shadow,
instead of a darkening cloud, and thou wilt have earned the fame of a
just judge instead of deserving the divine judgments."
Cambyses listened in silence, made a sign to Bischen to retire, and
commanded Boges to repeat his accusation.
The eunuch made an obeisance, and began: "I was ill and obliged to leave
the Egyptian and the Hanging-gardens in the care of my colleague
Kandaules, who has paid for his negligence with his life. Finding myself
better towards evening, I went up to the hanging-gardens to see if
everything was in order there, and also to look at the rare flower which
was to blossom in the night. The king, (Auramazda grant him victory!) had
commanded that the Egyptian should be more strictly watched than usual,
because she had dared to send the noble Bartja . . ."
"Be silent," interrupted the king, "and keep to the matter in hand."
"Just as the Tistar-star was rising, I came into the garden, and staid
some time there with these noble Achaemenidae, the high-priest and the
king Croesus, looking at the blue lily, which was marvellously beautiful.
I then called my colleague Kandaules and asked him, in the presence of
these noble witnesses, if everything was in order. He affirmed that this
was the case and added, that he had just come from Nitetis, that she had
wept the whole day, and neither tasted food nor drink. Feeling anxious
lest my noble mistress should become worse, I commissioned Kandaules to
fetch a physician, and was just on the point of leaving the noble
Achaemenidae, in order in person to ascertain my mistress's state of
health, when I saw in the moon-light the figure of a man. I was so ill
and weak, that I could hardly stand and had no one near to help me,
except the gardener.
"My men were on guard at the different entrances, some distance from us.
"I clapped my hands to call some of them, but, as they did not come, I
went nearer to the house myself, under the protection of these
noblemen.--The man was standing by the window of the Egyptian Princess's
apartment, and uttered a low whistle when he heard us coming up. Another
figure appeared directly--clearly recognizable in the bright
moonlight--sprang out of the sleeping-room window and came towards us
with her companion.
"I could hardly believe my eyes on discovering that the intruder was no
other than the noble Bartja. A fig-tree concealed us from the fugitives,
but we could distinctly see them, as they passed us at a distance of not
more than four steps. While I was thinking whether I should be justified
in arresting a son of Cyrus, Croesus called to Bartja, and the two
figures suddenly disappeared behind a cypress. No one but your brother
himself can possibly explain the strange way in which he disappeared. I
went at once to search the house, and found the Egyptian lying
unconscious on the couch in her sleeping-room."
Every one listened to this story in the greatest suspense. Cambyses
ground his teeth and asked in a voice of great emotion: "Can you testify
to the words of the eunuch, Hystaspes?"
"Yes."
"Why did you not lay hands on the offender?"
"We are soldiers, not policemen."
"Or rather you care for every knave more than for your king."
"We honor our king, and abhor the criminal just as we formerly loved the
innocent son of Cyrus."
"Did you recognize Bartja distinctly?"
"Yes."
"And you, Croesus, can you too give no other answer?"
"No! I fancied I saw your brother in the moonlight then, as clearly as I
see him now; but I believe we must have been deceived by some remarkable
likeness." Boges grew pale at these words; Cambyses, however, shook his
head as if the idea did not please him, and said: "Whom am I to believe
then, if the eyes of my best warriors fail them? and who would wish to be
a judge, if testimony such as yours is not to be considered valid?"
"Evidence quite as weighty as ours, will prove that we must have been in
error."
"Will any one dare to give evidence in favor of such an outrageous
criminal?" asked Cambyses, springing up and stamping his foot.
"We will," "I," "we," shouted Araspes, Darius, Gyges and Zopyrus with one
voice.
"Traitors, knaves!" cried the king. But as he caught sight of Croesus'
warning eye fixed upon him, he lowered his voice, and said: "What have
you to bring forward in favor of this fellow? Take care what you say, and
consider well what punishment awaits perjurers."
"We know that well enough," said Araspes, "and yet we are ready to swear
by Mithras, that we have not left Bartja or his garden one moment since
we came back from hunting."
"As for me," said Darius, "I, the son of Hystaspes, have especially
convincing evidence to give in favor of your brother's innocence; I
watched the rising of the Tistar-star with him; and this, according to
Boges, was the very star that shone on his flight."
Hystaspes gazed on his son in astonishment and doubt at hearing these
words, and Cambyses turned a scrutinizing eye first on the one and then
on the other party of these strange witnesses, who wished so much, and
yet found it so impossible, to believe one another, himself unable to
come to a decision.
Bartja, who till now had remained perfectly silent, looking down sadly at
his chained hands, took advantage of the silence to say, making at the
same time a deep obeisance: "May I be allowed to speak a few words, my
King?"
"Speak!"
"From our father we learnt to strive after that which was pure and good
only; so up to this time my life has been unstained. If you have ever
known me take part in an evil deed, you have a right not to believe me,
but if you find no fault in me then trust to what I say, and remember
that a son of Cyrus would rather die than tell a lie. I confess that no
judge was ever placed in such a perplexing position. The best men in your
kingdom testify against one another, friend against friend, father
against son. But I tell you that were the entire Persian nation to rise
up against you, and swear that Cambyses had committed this or that evil
deed, and you were to say, 'I did not commit it,' I, Bartja, would give
all Persia the lie and exclaim, 'Ye are all false witnesses; sooner could
the sea cast up fire than a son of Cyrus allow his mouth to deal in
lies.' No, Cambyses, you and I are so high-born that no one but yourself
can bear evidence against me; and you can only be judged out of your own
mouth."
Cambyses' looks grew a little milder on hearing these words, and his
brother went on: "So I swear to you by Mithras, and by all pure spirits,
that I am innocent. May my life become extinct and my race perish from
off the earth, if I tell you a lie, when I say that I have not once set
foot in the hanging-gardens since my return!"
Bartja's voice was so firm and his tone so full of assurance, as he
uttered this oath that Cambyses ordered his chains to be loosened, and,
after a few moments' thought, said: "I should like to believe you, for I
cannot bear to imagine you the worst and most abandoned of men. To-morrow
we will summon the astrologers, soothsayers and priests. Perhaps they may
be able to discover the truth. Can you see any light in this darkness,
Oropastes?"
"Thy servant supposes, that a Div has taken upon him the form of Bartja,
in order to ruin the king's brother and stain thine own royal soul with
the blood of thy father's son."
Cambyses and every one present nodded their assent to this proposition,
and the king was just going to offer his hand to Bartja, when a
staff-bearer came in and gave the king a dagger. A eunuch had found it
under the windows of Nitetis' sleeping-apartment.
Cambyses examined the weapon carefully. Its costly hilt was thickly set
with rubies and turquoises. As he looked he turned pale, and dashed the
dagger on the ground before Bartja with such violence, that the stones
fell out of their setting.
"This is your dagger, you wretch!" he shrieked, seized by the same
violent passion as before. "This very morning you used it to give the
last thrust to the wild boar, that I had mortally wounded. Croesus, you
ought to know it too, for my father brought it from your treasure-house
at Sardis. At last you are really convicted, you liar!--you impostor! The
Divs require no weapons, and such a dagger as this is not to be picked up
everywhere. Ah, ha! you are feeling in your girdle! You may well turn
pale; your dagger is gone!"
"Yes, it is gone. I must have lost it, and some enemy . . ."
"Seize him, Bischen, put on his fetters! Take him to prison--the traitor,
the perjurer! He shall be strangled to-morrow. Death is the penalty of
perjury. Your heads for theirs, you guards, if they escape. Not one word
more will I hear; away with you, you perjured villains! Boges, go at once
to the hanging-gardens and bring the Egyptian to me. Yet no, I won't see
that serpent again. It is very near dawn now, and at noon she shall be
flogged through the streets. Then I'll . . ."
But here he was stopped by another fit of epilepsy, and sank down on to
the marble floor in convulsions. At this fearful moment Kassandane was
led into the hall by the old general Megabyzus. The news of what had
happened had found its way to her solitary apartments, and,
notwithstanding the hour, she had risen in order to try and discover the
truth and warn her son against pronouncing a too hasty decision. She
believed firmly that Bartja and Nitetis were innocent, though she could
not explain to herself what had happened. Several times she had tried to
put herself in communication with Nitetis, but without avail. At last she
had been herself to the hanging-gardens, but the guards had actually had
the hardihood to refuse her admission.
Croesus went at once to meet her, told her what had happened, suppressing
as many painful details as possible, confirmed her in her belief of the
innocence of the accused, and then took her to the bedside of the king.
The convulsions had not lasted long this time. He lay on his golden bed
under purple silk coverlets, pale and exhausted. His blind mother seated
herself at his side, Croesus and Oropastes took their station at the foot
of the bell, and in another part of the room, four physicians discussed
the patient's condition in low whispers.
[It was natural, that medicine should be carefully studied among a
people who set such a high value upon life as did the Persians.
Pliny indeed, (XXX. I.) maintains, that the whole of Zoroaster's
religion was founded on the science of medicine, and it is true that
there are a great many medical directions to be found in the Avesta.
In the Vendidad, Farg. VII. there is a detailed list of medical
fees. "The physician shall treat a priest for a pious blessing or
spell, the master of a house for a small draught animal, etc., the
lord of a district for a team of four oxen. If the physician cures
the mistress of the house, a female ass shall be his fee, etc.,
etc." We read in the same Fargard, that the physician had to pass a
kind of examination. If he had operated thrice successfully on bad
men, on whose bodies he had been permitted to try his skill, he was
pronounced "capable for ever." If, on the other hand, three evil
Daevayacna (worshippers of the Divs) died under his hands, he was
pronounced "incapable of healing for evermore."]
Kassandane was very gentle with her son; she begged him not to yield to
passionate anger, and to remember what a sad effect every such outburst
had on his health.
"Yes, mother, you are right," answered the king, smiling bitterly; "I see
that I must get rid of everything that rouses my anger. The Egyptian must
die, and my perfidious brother shall follow his mistress."
Kassandane used all her eloquence to convince him of the innocence of the
accused, and to pacify his anger, but neither prayers, tears, nor her
motherly exhortations, could in the least alter his resolution to rid
himself of these murderers of his happiness and peace.
At last he interrupted her lamentations by saying: "I feel fearfully
exhausted; I cannot bear these sobs and lamentations any longer. Nitetis
has been proved guilty. A man was seen to leave her sleeping-apartment in
the night, and that man was not a thief, but the handsomest man in
Persia, and one to whom she had dared to send a letter yesterday
evening."
"Do you know the contents of that letter?" asked Croesus, coming up to
the bed.
"No; it was written in Greek. The faithless creature made use of
characters, which no one at this court can read."
"Will you permit me to translate the letter?" Cambyses pointed to a small
ivory box in which the ominous piece of writing lay, saying: "There it
is; read it; but do not hide or alter a single word, for to-morrow I
shall have it read over again by one of the merchants from Sinope."
Croesus' hopes revived; he seemed to breathe again as he took the paper.
But when he had read it over, his eyes filled with tears and he murmured:
"The fable of Pandora is only too true; I dare not be angry any longer
with those poets who have written severely against women. Alas, they are
all false and faithless! O Kassandane, how the Gods deceive us! they
grant us the gift of old age, only to strip us bare like trees in winter,
and show us that all our fancied gold was dross and all our pleasant and
refreshing drinks poison!"
Kassandane wept aloud and tore her costly robes; but Cambyses clenched
his fist while Croesus was reading the following words:
"Nitetis, daughter of Amasis of Egypt, to Bartja, son of the great Cyrus:
"I have something important to tell you; I can tell it to no one but
yourself. To-morrow I hope I shall meet you in your mother's apartments.
It lies in your power to comfort a sad and loving heart, and to give it
one happy moment before death. I have a great deal to tell you, and some
very sad news; I repeat that I must see you soon."
The desperate laughter, which burst from her son cut his mother to the
heart. She stooped down and was going to kiss him, but Cambyses resisted
her caresses, saying: "It is rather a doubtful honor, mother, to be one
of your favorites. Bartja did not wait to be sent for twice by that
treacherous woman, and has disgraced himself by swearing falsely. His
friends, the flower of our young men, have covered themselves with
indelible infamy for his sake; and through him, your best beloved
daughter . . . but no! Bartja had no share in the corruption of that
fiend in Peri's form. Her life was made up of hypocrisy and deceit, and
her death shall prove that I know how to punish. Now leave me, for I must
be alone."
They had scarcely left the room, when he sprang up and paced backwards
and forwards like a madman, till the first crow of the sacred bird
Parodar. When the sun had risen, he threw himself on his bed again, and
fell into a sleep that was like a swoon.
Meanwhile Bartja had written Sappho a farewell letter, and was sitting
over the wine with his fellow-prisoners and their elder friend Araspes.
"Let us be merry," said Zopyrus, "for I believe it will soon be up with
all our merriment. I would lay my life, that we are all of us dead by
to-morrow. Pity that men haven't got more than one neck; if we'd two, I
would not mind wagering a gold piece or two on the chance of our
remaining alive."
"Zopyrus is quite right," said Araspes; "we will make merry and keep our
eyes open; who knows how soon they may be closed for ever?"
"No one need be sad who goes to his death as innocently as we do," said
Gyges. "Here, cup-bearer, fill my goblet!"
"Ah! Bartja and Darius!" cried Zopyrus, seeing the two speaking in a low
voice together, "there you are at your secrets again. Come to us and pass
the wine-cup. By Mithras, I can truly say I never wished for death, but
now I quite look forward to the black Azis, because he is going to take
us all together. Zopyrus would rather die with his friends, than live
without them."
"But the great point is to try and explain what has really happened,"
said Darius.
"It's all the same to me," said Zopyrus, whether I die with or without an
explanation, so long as I know I am innocent and have not deserved the
punishment of perjury. Try and get us some golden goblets, Bischen; the
wine has no flavor out of these miserable brass mugs. Cambyses surely
would not wish us to suffer from poverty in our last hours, though he
does forbid our fathers and friends to visit us."
"It's not the metal that the cup is made of," said Bartja, "but the
wormwood of death, that gives the wine its bitter taste."
"No, really, you're quite out there," exclaimed Zopyrus. "Why I had
nearly forgotten that strangling generally causes death." As he said
this, he touched Gyges and whispered: "Be as cheerful as you can! don't
you see that it's very hard for Bartja to take leave of this world? What
were you saying, Darius?"
"That I thought Oropastes' idea the only admissible one, that a Div had
taken the likeness of Bartja and visited the Egyptian in order to ruin
us."
"Folly! I don't believe in such things."
"But don't you remember the legend of the Div, who took the beautiful
form of a minstrel and appeared before king Kawus?"
"Of course," cried Araspes. "Cyrus had this legend so often recited at
the banquets, that I know it by heart.
"Kai Kawus hearkened to the words of the disguised Div and went to
Masenderan, and was beaten there by the Divs and deprived of his
eyesight."
"But," broke in Darius, "Rustem, the great hero, came and conquered
Erscheng and the other bad spirits, freed the captives and restored sight
to the blind, by dropping the blood of the slaughtered Divs into their
eyes. And so it will be with us, my friends! We shall be set free, and
the eyes of Cambyses and of our blind and infatuated fathers will be
opened to see our innocence. Listen, Bischen; if we really should be
executed, go to the Magi, the Chaldwans, and Nebenchari the Egyptian, and
tell them they had better not study the stars any longer, for that those
very stars had proved themselves liars and deceivers to Darius."
"Yes," interrupted Araspes, "I always said that dreams were the only real
prophecies. Before Abradatas fell in the battle of Sardis, the peerless
Panthea dreamt that she saw him pierced by a Lydian arrow."
"You cruel fellow!" exclaimed Zopyrus. "Why do you remind us, that it is
much more glorious to die in battle than to have our necks wrung off"
"Quite right," answered the elder man; "I confess that I have seen many a
death, which I should prefer to our own,--indeed to life itself. Ah,
boys, there was a time when things went better than they do now."
"Tell us something about those times."
"And tell us why you never married. It won't matter to you in the next
world, if we do let out your secret."
"There's no secret; any of your own fathers could tell you what you want
to hear from me. Listen then. When I was young, I used to amuse myself
with women, but I laughed at the idea of love. It occurred, however, that
Panthea, the most beautiful of all women, fell into our hands, and Cyrus
gave her into my charge, because I had always boasted that my heart was
invulnerable. I saw her everyday, and learnt, my friends, that love is
stronger than a man's will. However, she refused all my offers, induced
Cyrus to remove me from my office near her, and to accept her husband
Abradatas as an ally. When her handsome husband went out to the war, this
high-minded, faithful woman decked him out with all her own jewels and
told him that the noble conduct of Cyrus, in treating her like a sister,
when she was his captive, could only be repaid by the most devoted
friendship and heroic courage. Abradatas agreed with her, fought for
Cyrus like a lion, and fell. Panthea killed herself by his dead body. Her
servants, on hearing of this, put an end to their own lives too at the
grave of this best of mistresses. Cyrus shed tears over this noble pair,
and had a stone set up to their memory, which you can see near Sardis. On
it are the simple words: 'To Panthea, Abradatas, and the most faithful of
servants.' You see, children, the man who had loved such a woman could
never care for another."
The young men listened in silence, and remained some time after Araspes
had finished, without uttering a word. At last Bartja raised his hands to
heaven and cried: "O thou great Auramazda! why dost thou not grant us a
glorious end like Abradatas? Why must we die a shameful death like
murderers?"
As he said this Croesus came in, fettered and led by whip-bearers. The
friends rushed to him with a storm of questions, and Bartja too went up
to embrace the man who had been so long his tutor and guide. But the old
man's cheerful face was severe and serious, and his eyes, generally so
mild, had a gloomy, almost threatening, expression. He waved the prince
coldly back, saying, in a voice which trembled with pain and reproach:
"Let my hand go, you infatuated boy! you are not worth all the love I
have hitherto felt for you. You have deceived your brother in a fourfold
manner, duped your friends, betrayed that poor child who is waiting for
you in Naukratis, and poisoned the heart of Amasis' unhappy daughter."
Bartja listened calmly till he heard the word "deceived"; then his hand
clenched, and stamping his foot, he cried: "But for your age and
infirmities, and the gratitude I owe you, old man, these slanderous words
would be your last."
Croesus beard this outbreak of just indignation unmoved, and answered:
"This foolish rage proves that you and Cambyses have the same blood in
your veins. It would become you much better to repent of your crimes, and
beg your old friend's forgiveness, instead of adding ingratitude to the
unheard-of baseness of your other deeds."
At these words Bartja's anger gave way. His clenched hands sank down
powerless at his side, and his cheeks became pale as death.
These signs of sorrow softened the old man's indignation. His love was
strong enough to embrace the guilty as well as the innocent Bartja, and
taking the young man's right hand in both his own, he looked at him as a
father would who finds his son, wounded on the battle-field, and said:
"Tell me, my poor, infatuated boy, how was it that your pure heart fell
away so quickly to the evil powers?"
Bartja shuddered. The blood came back to his face, but these words cut
him to the heart. For the first time in his life his belief in the
justice of the gods forsook him.
He called himself the victim of a cruel, inexorable fate, and felt like a
bunted animal driven to its last gasp and hearing the dogs and sportsmen
fast coming nearer. He had a sensitive, childlike nature, which did not
yet know how to meet the hard strokes of fate. His body and his physical
courage had been hardened against bodily and physical enemies; but his
teachers had never told him how to meet a hard lot in life; for Cambyses
and Bartja seemed destined only to drink out of the cup of happiness and
joy.
Zopyrus could not bear to see his friend in tears. He reproached the old
man angrily with being unjust and severe. Gyges' looks were full of
entreaty, and Araspes stationed himself between the old man and the
youth, as if to ward off the blame of the elder from cutting deeper into
the sad and grieved heart of the younger man. Darius, however, after
having watched them for some time, came up with quiet deliberation to
Croesus, and said: "You continue to distress and offend one another, and
yet the accused does not seem to know with what offence he is charged,
nor will the accuser hearken to his defence. Tell us, Croesus, by the
friendship which has subsisted between us up to this clay, what has
induced you to judge Bartja so harshly, when only a short time ago you
believed in his innocence?"
The old man told at once what Darius desired to know--that he had seen a
letter, written in Nitetis' own hand, in which she made a direct
confession of her love to Bartja and asked him to meet her alone. The
testimony of his own eyes and of the first men in the realm, nay, even
the dagger found under Nitetis' windows, had not been able to convince
him that his favorite was guilty; but this letter had gone like a burning
flash into his heart and destroyed the last remnant of his belief in the
virtue and purity of woman.
"I left the king," he concluded, "perfectly convinced that a sinful
intimacy must subsist between your friend and the Egyptian Princess,
whose heart I had believed to be a mirror for goodness and beauty alone.
Can you find fault with me for blaming him who so shamefully stained this
clear mirror, and with it his own not less spotless soul?"
"But how can I prove my innocence?" cried Bartja, wringing his hands. "If
you loved me you would believe me; if you really cared for me. . . . "
"My boy! in trying to save your life only a few minutes ago, I forfeited
my own. When I heard that Cambyses had really resolved on your death, I
hastened to him with a storm of entreaties; but these were of no avail,
and then I was presumptuous enough to reproach him bitterly in his
irritated state of mind. The weak thread of his patience broke, and in a
fearful passion he commanded the guards to behead me at once. I was
seized directly by Giv, one of the whip-bearers; but as the man is under
obligations to me, he granted me my life until this morning, and promised
to conceal the postponement of the execution. I am glad, my sons, that I
shall not outlive you, and shall die an innocent man by the side of the
guilty."
These last words roused another storm of contradiction.
Again Darius remained calm and quiet in the midst of the tumult. He
repeated once more the story of the whole evening exactly, to prove that
it was impossible Bartja could have committed the crime laid to his
charge. He then called on the accused himself to answer the charge of
disloyalty and perfidy. Bartja rejected the idea of an understanding with
Nitetis in such short, decided, and convincing words, and confirmed his
assertion with such a fearful oath, that Croesus' persuasion of his guilt
first wavered, then vanished, and when Bartja had ended, he drew a deep
breath, like a man delivered from a heavy burden, and clasped him in his
arms.
But with all their efforts they could come to no explanation of what had
really happened. In one thing, however, they were all agreed: that
Nitetis loved Bartja and had written the letter with a wrong intention.
"No one who saw her," cried Darius, "when Cambyses announced that Bartja
had chosen a wife, could doubt for a moment that she was in love with
him. When she let the goblet fall, I heard Phaedime's father say that the
Egyptian women seemed to take a great interest in the affairs of their
brothers-in-law."
While they were talking, the sun rose and shone pleasantly into the
prisoners' room.
Bartja murmured Mithras means to make our parting difficult."
"No," answered Croesus, "he only means to light us kindly on our way into
eternity."
CHAPTER IV.
The innocent originator of all this complicated misery had passed many a
wretched hour since the birthday banquet. Since those harsh words with
which Cambyses had sent her from the hall, not the smallest fragment of
news had reached her concerning either her angry lover, or his mother and
sister. Not a day had passed since her arrival in Babylon, that had not
been spent with Kassandane and Atossa; but now, on her desiring to be
carried to them, that she might explain her strange conduct, her new
guard, Kandaules, forbade her abruptly to leave the house. She had
thought that a free and full account of the contents of her letter from
home, would clear up all these misunderstandings. She fancied she saw
Cambyses holding out his hand as if to ask forgiveness for his hastiness
and foolish jealousy. And then a joyful feeling stole into her mind as
she remembered a sentence she had once heard Ibykus say: "As fever
attacks a strong man more violently than one of weaker constitution; so a
heart that loves strongly and deeply can be far more awfully tormented by
jealousy, than one which has been only superficially seized by passion."
If this great connoisseur in love were right, Cambyses must love her
passionately, or his jealousy could not have caught fire so quickly and
fearfully. Sad thoughts about her home, however, and dark forebodings of
the future would mix with this confidence in Cambyses' love, and she
could not shut them out. Mid-day came, the sun stood high and burning in
the sky, but no news came from those she loved so well; and a feverish
restlessness seized her which increased as night came on. In the twilight
Boges came to her, and told her, with bitter scorn, that her letter to
Bartja had come into the king's hands, and that the gardener's boy who
brought it had been executed. The tortured nerves of the princess could
not resist this fresh blow, and before Boges left, he carried the poor
girl senseless into her sleeping-room, the door of which he barred
carefully.
A few minutes later, two men, one old, the other young, came up through
the trap-door which Boges had examined so carefully two days before. The
old man remained outside, crouching against the palace, wall; a hand was
seen to beckon from the window: the youth obeyed the signal, swung
himself over the ledge and into the room at a bound. Then words of love
were exchanged, the names Gaumata and Mandane whispered softly, kisses
and vows given and received. At last the old man clapped his hands. The
youth obeyed, kissed and embraced Nitetis' waiting-maid once more, jumped
out of the window into the garden, hurried past the admirers of the blue
lily who were just coming up, slipped with his companion into the
trap-door which had been kept open, closed it carefully, and vanished.
Mandane hurried to the room in which her mistress generally spent the
evening. She was well acquainted with her habits and knew that every
evening, when the stars had risen, Nitetis was accustomed to go to the
window looking towards the Euphrates, and spend hours gazing into the
river and over the plain; and that at that time she never needed her
attendance. So she felt quite safe from fear of discovery in this
quarter, and knowing she was under the protection of the chief of the
eunuchs himself, could wait for her lover calmly.
But scarcely had she discovered that her mistress had fainted, when she
heard the garden filling with people, a confused sound of men's and
eunuchs' voices, and the notes of the trumpet used to summon the
sentries. At first she was frightened and fancied her lover had been
discovered, but Boges appearing and whispering: "He has escaped safely,"
she at once ordered the other attendants, whom she had banished to the
women's apartments during her rendezvous, and who now came flocking back,
to carry their mistress into her sleeping-room, and then began using all
the remedies she knew of, to restore her to consciousness. Nitetis had
scarcely opened her eyes when Boges came in, followed by two eunuchs,
whom he ordered to load her delicate arms with fetters.
Nitetis submitted; she could not utter one word, not even when Boges
called out as he was leaving the room: "Make yourself happy in your cage,
my little imprisoned bird. They've just been telling your lord that a
royal marten has been making merry in your dove-cote. Farewell, and think
of the poor tormented Boges in this tremendous heat, when you feel the
cool damp earth. Yes, my little bird, death teaches us to know our real
friends, and so I won't have you buried in a coarse linen sack, but in a
soft silk shawl. Farewell, my darling!"
The poor, heavily-afflicted girl trembled at these words, and when the
eunuch was gone, begged Mandane to tell her what it all meant. The girl,
instructed by Boges, said that Bartja had stolen secretly into the
hanging-gardens, and had been seen by several of the Achaemenidae as he
was on the point of getting in at one of the windows. The king had been
told of his brother's treachery, and people were afraid his jealousy
might have fearful consequences. The frivolous girl shed abundant tears
of penitence while she was telling the story, and Nitetis, fancying this
a proof of sincere love and sympathy, felt cheered.
When it was over, however, she looked down at her fetters in despair, and
it was long before she could think of her dreadful position quietly. Then
she read her letter from home again, wrote the words, "I am innocent,"
and told the sobbing girl to give the little note containing them to the
king's mother after her own death, together with her letter from home.
After doing this she passed a wakeful night which seemed as if it would
never end. She remembered that in her box of ointments there was a
specific for improving the complexion, which, if swallowed in a
sufficiently large quantity, would cause death. She had this poison
brought to her, and resolved calmly and deliberately, to take her own
life directly the executioner should draw near. From that moment she took
pleasure in thinking of her last hour, and said to herself: "It is true
he causes my death; but he does it out of love." Then she thought she
would write to him, and confess all her love. He should not receive the
letter until she was dead, that he might not think she had written it to
save her life. The hope that this strong, inflexible man might perhaps
shed tears over her last words of love filled her with intense pleasure.
In spite of her heavy fetters, she managed to write the following words:
"Cambyses will not receive this letter until I am dead. It is to tell him
that I love him more than the gods, the world, yes, more than my own
young life. Kassandane and Atossa must think of me kindly. They will see
from my mother's letter that I am innocent, and that it was only for my
poor sister's sake that I asked to see Bartja. Boges has told me that my
death has been resolved upon. When the executioner approaches, I shall
kill myself. I commit this crime against myself, Cambyses, to save you
from doing a disgraceful deed."
This note and her mother's she gave to the weeping Mandane, and begged
her to give both to Cambyses when she was gone. She then fell on her
knees and prayed to the gods of her fathers to forgive her for her
apostasy from them.
Mandane begged her to remember her weakness and take some rest, but she
answered: "I do not need any sleep, because, you know, I have such little
waking-time still left me."
As she went on praying and singing her old Egyptian hymns, her heart
returned more and more to the gods of her fathers, whom she had denied
after such a short struggle. In almost all the prayers with which she was
acquainted, there was a reference to the life after death. In the nether
world, the kingdom of Osiris, where the forty-two judges of the dead
pronounce sentence on the worth of the soul after it has been weighed by
the goddess of truth and Thoth, who holds the office of writer in heaven,
she could hope to meet her dear ones again, but only in case her
unjustified soul were not obliged to enter on the career of
transmigration through the bodies of different animals, and her body, to
whom the soul had been entrusted, remained in a state of preservation.
This, "if" filled her with a feverish restlessness. The doctrine that the
well-being of the soul depended on the preservation of the earthly part
of every human being left behind at death, had been impressed on her from
childhood. She believed in this error, which had built pyramids and
excavated rocks, and trembled at the thought that, according to the
Persian custom, her body would be thrown to the dogs and birds of prey,
and so given up to the powers of destruction, that her soul must be
deprived of every hope of eternal life. Then the thought came to her,
should she prove unfaithful to the gods of her fathers again, and once
more fall down before these new spirits of light, who gave the dead body
over to the elements and only judged the soul? And so she raised her
hands to the great and glorious sun, who with his golden sword-like rays
was just dispersing the mists that hung over the Euphrates, and opened
her lips to sing her newly-learnt hymns in praise of Mithras; but her
voice failed her, instead of Mithras she could only see her own great Ra,
the god she had so often worshipped in Egypt, and instead of a Magian
hymn could only sing the one with which the Egyptian priests are
accustomed to greet the rising sun.
This hymn brought comfort with it, and as she gazed on the young light,
the rays of which were not yet strong enough to dazzle her, she thought
of her childhood, and the tears gathered in her eyes. Then she looked
down over the broad plain. There was the Euphrates with his yellow waves
looking so like the Nile; the many villages, just as in her own home,
peeping out from among luxuriant cornfields and plantations of fig-trees.
To the west lay the royal hunting-park; she could see its tall cypresses
and nut-trees miles away in the distance. The dew was glistening on every
little leaf and blade of grass, and the birds sang deliciously in the
shrubberies round her dwelling. Now and then a gentle breath of wind
arose, carrying the sweet scent of the roses across to her, and playing
in the tops of the slender, graceful palms which grew in numbers on the
banks of the river and in the fields around.
She had so often admired these beautiful trees, and compared them to
dancing-girls, as she watched the wind seizing their heavy tops and
swaying the slender stems backwards and forwards. And she had often said
to herself that here must be the home of the Phoenix, that wonderful bird
from the land of palms, who, the priests said, came once in every five
hundred years to the temple of Ra in Heliopolis and burnt himself in the
sacred incense-flames, only to rise again from his own ashes more
beautiful than before, and, after three days, to fly back again to his
home in the East. While she was thinking of this bird, and wishing that
she too might rise again from the ashes of her unhappiness to a new and
still more glorious joy, a large bird with brilliant plumage rose out of
the dark cypresses, which concealed the palace of the man she loved and
who had made her so miserable, and flew towards her. It rose higher and
higher, and at last settled on a palmtree close to her window. She had
never seen such a bird before, and thought it could not possibly be a
usual one, for a little gold chain was fastened to its foot, and its tail
seemed made of sunbeams instead of feathers. It must be Benno, the bird
of Ra! She fell on her knees again and sang with deep reverence the
ancient hymn to the Phoenix, never once turning her eyes from the
brilliant bird.
The bird listened to her singing, bending his little head with its waving
plumes, wisely and inquisitively from side to side, and flew away
directly she ceased. Nitetis looked after him with a smile. It was really
only a bird of paradise that had broken the chain by which he had been
fastened to a tree in the park, but to her he was the Phoenix. A strange
certainty of deliverance filled her heart; she thought the god Ra had
sent the bird to her, and that as a happy spirit she should take that
form. So long as we are able to hope and wish, we can bear a great deal
of sorrow; if the wished-for happiness does not come, anticipation is at
least prolonged and has its own peculiar sweetness. This feeling is of
itself enough, and contains a kind of enjoyment which can take the place
of reality. Though she was so weary, yet she lay down on her couch with
fresh hopes, and fell into a dreamless sleep almost against her will,
without having touched the poison.
The rising sun generally gives comfort to sad hearts who have passed the
night in weeping, but to a guilty conscience, which longs for darkness,
his pure light is an unwelcome guest. While Nitetis slept, Mandane lay
awake, tormented by fearful remorse. How gladly she would have held back
the sun which was bringing on the day of death to this kindest of
mistresses, and have spent the rest of her own life in perpetual night,
if only her yesterday's deed could but have been undone!
The good-natured, thoughtless girl called herself a wretched murderess
unceasingly, resolved again and again to confess the whole truth and so
to save Nitetis; but love of life and fear of death gained the victory
over her weak heart every time. To confess was certain death, and she
felt as if she had been made for life; she had so many hopes for the
future, and the grave seemed so dreadful. She thought she could perhaps
have confessed the whole truth, if perpetual imprisonment had been all
she had to fear; but death! no, she could not resolve on that. And
besides, would her confession really save the already condemned Nitetis?
Had she not sent a message to Bartja herself by that unfortunate
gardener's boy? This secret correspondence had been discovered, and that
was enough of itself to ruin Nitetis, even if she, Mandane, had done
nothing in the matter. We are never so clever as when we have to find
excuses for our own sins.
At sunrise, Mandane was kneeling by her mistress's couch, weeping
bitterly and wondering that Nitetis could sleep so calmly.
Boges, the eunuch, had passed a sleepless night too, but a very happy
one. His hated colleague, Kandaules, whom he had used as a substitute for
himself, had been already executed, by the king's command, for
negligence, and on the supposition that he had accepted a bribe; Nitetis
was not only ruined, but certain to die a shameful death. The influence
of the king's mother had suffered a severe shock; and lastly, he had the
pleasure of knowing, not only that he had outwitted every one and
succeeded in all his plans, but that through his favorite Phaedime he
might hope once more to become the all-powerful favorite of former days.
That sentence of death had been pronounced on Croesus and the young
heroes, was by no means an unwelcome thought either, as they might have
been instrumental in bringing his intrigues to light.
In the grey of the morning he left the king's apartment and went to
Phaedime. The proud Persian had taken no rest. She was waiting for him
with feverish anxiety, as a rumor of all that had happened had already
reached the harem and penetrated to her apartments. She was lying on a
purple couch in her dressing-room; a thin silken chemise and yellow
slippers thickly sown with turquoises and pearls composed her entire
dress. Twenty attendants were standing round her, but the moment she
heard Boges she sent her slaves away, sprang up to meet him, and
overwhelmed him with a stream of incoherent questions, all referring to
her enemy Nitetis.
"Gently, gently, my little bird," said Boges, laying his hand on her
shoulder. "If you can't make up your mind to be as quiet as a little
mouse while I tell my story, and not to ask one question, you won't hear
a syllable of it to-day. Yes, indeed, my golden queen, I've so much to
tell that I shall not have finished till to-morrow, if you are to
interrupt me as often as you like. Ah, my little lamb, and I've still so
much to do to-day. First I must be present at an Egyptian donkey-ride;
secondly, I must witness an Egyptian execution . . . but I see I am
anticipating my story; I must begin at the beginning. I'll allow you to
cry, laugh and scream for joy as much as you will, but you're forbidden
to ask a single question until I have finished. I think really I have
deserved these caresses. There, now I am quite at my ease, and can begin.
Once upon a time there was a great king in Persia, who had many wives,
but he loved Phaedime better than the rest, and set her above all the
others. One day the thought struck him that he would ask for the hand of
the King of Egypt's daughter in marriage, and he sent a great embassy to
Sais, with his own brother to do the wooing for him--"
"What nonsense!" cried Phaedime impatiently; "I want to know what has
happened now."
"Patience, patience, my impetuous March wind. If you interrupt me again,
I shall go away and tell my story to the trees. You really need not
grudge me the pleasure of living my successes over again. While I tell
this story, I feel as happy as a sculptor when he puts down his hammer
and gazes at his finished work."
"No, no!" said Phaedime, interrupting him again. "I cannot listen now to
what I know quite well already. I am dying of impatience, and every fresh
report that the eunuchs and slave-girls bring makes it worse. I am in a
perfect fever--I cannot wait. Ask whatever else you like, only deliver me
from this awful suspense. Afterwards I will listen to you for days, if
you wish."
Boges' smile at these words was one of great satisfaction; he rubbed his
hands and answered: "When I was a child I had no greater pleasure than to
watch a fish writhing on the hook; now I have got you, my splendid golden
carp, at the end of my line, and I can't let you go until I have sated
myself on your impatience."
Phaedime sprang up from the couch which she had shared with Boges,
stamping her foot and behaving like a naughty child. This seemed to amuse
the eunuch immensely; he rubbed his hands again and again, laughed till
the tears ran down over his fat cheeks, emptied many a goblet of wine to
the health of the tortured beauty, and then went on with his tale: "It
had not escaped me that Cambyses sent his brother (who had brought
Nitetis from Egypt), out to the war with the Tapuri purely from jealousy.
That proud woman, who was to take no orders from me, seemed to care as
little for the handsome, fair-haired boy as a Jew for pork, or an
Egyptian for white beans. But still I resolved to nourish the king's
jealousy, and use it as a means of rendering this impudent creature
harmless, as she seemed likely to succeed in supplanting us both in his
favor. It was long, however, before I could hit on a feasible plan.
"At last the new-year's festival arrived and all the priests in the
kingdom assembled at Babylon. For eight days the city was full of
rejoicing, feasting and merry-making. At court it was just the same, and
so I had very little time to think of my plans. But just then, when I had
hardly any hope of succeeding, the gracious Amescha cpenta sent a youth
across my path, who seemed created by Angramainjus himself to suit my
plan. Gaumata, the brother of Oropastes, came to Babylon to be present at
the great new-year's sacrifice. I saw him first in his brother's house,
whither I had been sent on a message from the king, and his likeness to
Bartja was so wonderful, that I almost fancied I was looking at an
apparition. When I had finished my business with Oropastes the youth
accompanied me to my carriage. I showed no signs of astonishment at this
remarkable likeness, treated him however, with immense civility, and
begged him to pay me a visit. He came the very same evening. I sent for
my best wine, pressed him to drink, and experienced, not for the first
time, that the juice of the vine has one quality which outweighs all the
rest: it can turn even a silent man into a chatter-box. The youth
confessed that the great attraction which had brought him to Babylon was,
not the sacrifice, but a girl who held the office of upper attendant to
the Egyptian Princess. He said he had loved her since he was a child; but
his ambitious brother had higher views for him, and in order to get the
lovely Mandane out of his way, had procured her this situation. At last
he begged me to arrange an interview with her. I listened good-naturedly,
made a few difficulties, and at last asked him to come the next day and
see how matters were going on. He came, and I told him that it might be
possible to manage it, but only if he would promise to do what I told him
without a question. He agreed to everything, returned to Rhagae at my
wish, and did not come to Babylon again until yesterday, when he arrived
secretly at my house, where I concealed him. Meanwhile Bartja had
returned from the war. The great point now was to excite the king's
jealousy again, and ruin the Egyptian at one blow. I roused the
indignation of your relations through your public humiliation, and so
prepared the way for my plan. Events were wonderfully in my favor. You
know how Nitetis behaved at the birthday banquet, but you do not know
that that very evening she sent a gardener's boy to the palace with a
note for Bartja. The silly fellow managed to get caught and was executed
that very night, by command of the king, who was almost mad with rage;
and I took care that Nitetis should be as entirely cut off from all
communication with her friends, as if she lived in the nest of the
Simurg. You know the rest."
"But how did Gaumata escape?"
"Through a trap-door, of which nobody knows but myself, and which stood
wide open waiting for him. Everything turned out marvellously; I even
succeeded in getting hold of a dagger which Bartja had lost while
hunting, and in laying it under Nitetis' window. In order to get rid of
the prince during these occurrences, and prevent him from meeting the
king or any one else who might be important as a witness, I asked the
Greek merchant Kolxus, who was then at Babylon with a cargo of Milesian
cloth, and who is always willing to do me a favor, because I buy all the
woollen stuffs required for the harem of him, to write a Greek letter,
begging Bartja, in the name of her he loved best, to come alone to the
first station outside the Euphrates gate at the rising of the
Tistar-star. But I had a misfortune with this letter, for the messenger
managed the matter clumsily. He declares that he delivered the letter to
Bartja; but there can be no doubt that he gave it to some one else,
probably to Gaumata, and I was not a little dismayed to hear that Bartja
was sitting over the wine with his friends on that very evening. Still
what had been done could not be undone, and I knew that the witness of
men like your father, Hystaslies, Croesus and Intaphernes, would far
outweigh anything that Darius, Gyges and Araspes could say. The former
would testify against their friend, the latter for him. And so at last
everything went as I would have had it. The young gentlemen are sentenced
to death and Croesus, who as usual, presumed to speak impertinently to
the king, will have lived his last hour by this time. As to the Egyptian
Princess, the secretary in chief has just been commanded to draw up the
following order. Now listen and rejoice, my little dove! "'Nitetis, the
adulterous daughter of the King of Egypt, shall be punished for her
hideous crimes according to the extreme rigor of the law, thus: She shall
be set astride upon an ass and led through the streets of Babylon; and
all men shall see that Cambyses knows how to punish a king's daughter, as
severely as his magistrates would punish the meanest beggar.
--To Boges, chief of the eunuchs, is entrusted the execution of this
order.
By command of King Cambyses. Ariabignes, chief of the Secretaries'
"I had scarcely placed these lines in the sleeve of my robe, when the
king's mother, with her garments rent, and led by Atossa, pressed hastily
into the hall. Weeping and lamentation followed; cries, reproaches,
curses, entreaties and prayers; but the king remained firm, and I verily
believe Kassandane and Atossa would have been sent after Croesus and
Bartja into the other world, if fear of Cyrus's spirit had not prevented
the son, even in this furious rage, from laying hands on his father's
widow. Kassandane, however, did not say one word for Nitetis. She seems
as fully convinced of her guilt as you and I can be. Neither have we
anything to fear from the enamored Gaumata. I have hired three men to
give him a cool bath in the Euphrates, before he gets back to Rhagae. Ah,
ha! the fishes and worms will have a jolly time!"
Phaedime joined in Boges' laughter, bestowed on him all the flattering
names which she had caught from his own smooth tongue, and in token of
her gratitude, hung a heavy chain studded with jewels round his neck with
her own beautiful arms.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Call everything that is beyond your comprehension a miracle
Never so clever as when we have to find excuses for our own sins
So long as we are able to hope and wish
AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS.
By Georg Ebers
Volume 7.
CHAPTER V.
Before the sun had reached his mid-day height, the news of what had
happened and of what was still to happen had filled all Babylon. The
streets swarmed with people, waiting impatiently to see the strange
spectacle which the punishment of one of the king's wives, who had proved
false and faithless, promised to afford. The whip-bearers were forced to
use all their authority to keep this gaping crowd in order. Later on in
the day the news that Bartja and his friends were soon to be executed
arrived among the crowd; they were under the influence of the palm-wine,
which was liberally distributed on the king's birthday and the following
days, and could not control their excited feelings; but these now took
quite another form.
Bands of drunken men paraded the streets, crying: "Bartja, the good son
of Cyrus, is to be executed!" The women heard these words in their quiet
apartments, eluded their keepers, forgot their veils, and rushing forth
into the streets, followed the excited and indignant men with cries and
yells. Their pleasure in the thought of seeing a more fortunate sister
humbled, vanished at the painful news that their beloved prince was
condemned to death. Men, women and children raged, stormed and cursed,
exciting one another to louder and louder bursts of indignation. The
workshops were emptied, the merchants closed their warehouses, and the
school-boys and servants, who had a week's holiday on occasion of the
king's birthday, used their freedom to scream louder than any one else,
and often to groan and yell without in the least knowing why.
At last the tumult was so great that the whip-bearers were insufficient
to cope with it, and a detachment of the body-guard was sent to patrol
the streets. At the sight of their shining armor and long lances, the
crowd retired into the side streets, only, however, to reassemble in
fresh numbers when the troops were out of sight.
At the gate, called the Bel gate, which led to the great western
high-road, the throng was thicker than at any other point, for it was
said that through this gate, the one by which she had entered Babylon,
the Egyptian Princess was to be led out of the city in shame and
disgrace. For this reason a larger number of whipbearers were stationed
here, in order to make way for travellers entering the city. Very few
people indeed left the city at all on this day, for curiosity was
stronger than either business or pleasure; those, on the other hand, who
arrived from the country, took up their stations near the gate on hearing
what had drawn the crowd thither.
It was nearly mid-day, and only wanted a few hours to the time fixed for
Nitetis' disgrace, when a caravan approached the gate with great speed.
The first carriage was a so-called harmamaxa, drawn by four horses decked
out with bells and tassels; a two-wheeled cart followed, and last in the
train was a baggage-wagon drawn by mules. A fine, handsome man of about
fifty, dressed as a Persian courtier, and another, much older, in long
white robes, occupied the first carriage. The cart was filled by a number
of slaves in simple blouses, and broad-brimmed felt hats, wearing the
hair cut close to the head. An old man, dressed as a Persian servant,
rode by the side of the cart. The driver of the first carriage had great
difficulty in making way for his gaily-ornamented horses through the
crowd; he was obliged to come to a halt before the gate and call some
whip-bearers to his assistance. "Make way for us!" he cried to the
captain of the police who came up with some of his men; "the royal post
has no time to lose, and I am driving some one, who will make you repent
every minute's delay."
"Softly, my son," answered the official. "Don't you see that it's easier
to-day to get out of Babylon, than to come in? Whom are you driving?"
"A nobleman, with a passport from the king. Come, be quick and make way
for us."
"I don't know about that; your caravan does not look much like royalty."
"What have you to do with that? The pass. . . . "
"I must see it, before I let you into the city." These words were half
meant for the traveller, whom he was scrutinizing very suspiciously.
While the man in the Persian dress was feeling in his sleeve for the
passport, the whip-bearer turned to some comrades who had just come up,
and pointed out the scanty retinue of the travellers, saying: "Did you
ever see such a queer cavalcade? There's something odd about these
strangers, as sure as my name's Giv. Why, the lowest of the king's
carpet-bearers travels with four times as many people, and yet this man
has a royal pass and is dressed like one of those who sit at the royal
table."
At this moment the suspected traveller handed him a little silken roll
scented with musk, sealed with the royal seal, and containing the king's
own handwriting.
The whip-bearer took it and examined the seal. "It is all in order," he
murmured, and then began to study the characters. But no sooner had he
deciphered the first letters than he looked even more sharply than before
at the traveller, and seized the horses' bridles, crying out: "Here, men,
form a guard round the carriage! this is an impostor."
When he had convinced himself that escape was impossible, he went up to
the stranger again and said: "You are using a pass which does not belong
to you. Gyges, the son of Croesus, the man you give yourself out for, is
in prison and is to be executed to-day. You are not in the least like
him, and you will have reason to repent leaving tried to pass for him.
Get out of your carriage and follow me."
The traveller, however, instead of obeying, began to speak in broken
Persian, and begged the officer rather to take a seat by him in the
carriage, for that he had very important news to communicate. The man
hesitated a moment; but on seeing a fresh band of whip-bearers come up,
he nodded to them to stand before the impatient, chafing horses, and got
into the carriage.
The stranger looked at him with a smile and said: "Now, do I look like an
impostor?"
"No; your language proves that you are not a Persian, but yet you look
like a nobleman."
"I am a Greek, and have come hither to render Cambyses an important
service. Gyges is my friend, and lent me his passport when he was in
Egypt, in case I should ever come to Persia. I am prepared to vindicate
my conduct before the king, and have no reason for fear. On the contrary,
the news I bring gives me reason to expect much from his favor. Let me be
taken to Croesus, if this is your duty; he will be surety for me, and
will send back your men, of whom you seem to stand in great need to-day.
Distribute these gold pieces among them, and tell me without further
delay what my poor friend Gyges has done to deserve death, and what is
the reason of all this crowd and confusion."
The stranger said this in bad Persian, but there lay so much dignity and
confidence in his tone, and his gifts were on such a large scale, that
the cringing and creeping servant of despotism felt sure he must be
sitting opposite to a prince, crossed his arms reverentially, and,
excusing himself from his many pressing affairs, began to relate rapidly.
He had been on duty in the great hall during the examination of the
prisoners the night before, and could therefore tell all that had
happened with tolerable accuracy. The Greek followed his tale eagerly,
with many an incredulous shake of his handsome head, however, when the
daughter of Amasis and the son of Cyrus were spoken of as having been
disloyal and false, that sentence of death had been pronounced,
especially on Croesus, distressed him visibly, but the sadness soon
vanished from his quickly-changing features, and gave place to thought;
this in its turn was quickly followed by a joyful look, which could only
betoken that the thinker had arrived at a satisfactory result. His
dignified gravity vanished in a moment; he laughed aloud, struck his
forehead merrily, seized the hand of the astonished captain, and said:
"Should you be glad, if Bartja could be saved?"
"More than I can say."
"Very well, then I will vouch for it, that you shall receive at least two
talents, if you can procure me an interview with the king before the
first execution has taken place."
"How can you ask such a thing of me, a poor captain? . . ."
"Yes, you must, you must!"
"I cannot."
"I know well that it is very difficult, almost impossible, for a stranger
to obtain an audience of your king; but my errand brooks no delay, for I
can prove that Bartja and his friends are not guilty. Do you hear? I can
prove it. Do you think now, you can procure me admittance?"
"How is it possible?"
"Don't ask, but act. Didn't you say Darius was one of the condemned?"
"Yes."
"I have heard, that his father is a man of very high rank."
"He is the first in the kingdom, after the sons of Cyrus."
"Then take me to him at once. He will welcome me when he hears I am able
to save his son."
"Stranger, you are a wonderful being. You speak with so much confidence
that . . ."
"That you feel you may believe me. Make haste then, and call some of your
men to make way for us, and escort us to the palace."
There is nothing, except a doubt, which runs more quickly from mind to
mind, than a hope that some cherished wish may be fulfilled, especially
when this hope has been suggested to us by some one we can trust.
The officer believed this strange traveller, jumped out of the carriage,
flourishing his scourge and calling to his men: "This nobleman has come
on purpose to prove Bartja's innocence, and must be taken to the king at
once. Follow me, my friends, and make way for him!"
Just at that moment a troop of the guards appeared in sight. The captain
of the whip-bearers went up to their commander, and, seconded by the
shouts of the crowd, begged him to escort the stranger to the palace.
During this colloquy the traveller had mounted his servant's horse, and
now followed in the wake of the Persians.
The good news flew like wind through the huge city. As the riders
proceeded, the crowd fell back more willingly, and loader and fuller grew
the shouts of joy until at last their march was like a triumphal
procession.
In a few minutes they drew up before the palace; but before the brazen
gates had opened to admit them, another train came slowly into sight. At
the head rode a grey-headed old man; his robes were brown, and rent, in
token of mourning, the mane and tail of his horse had been shorn off and
the creature colored blue.--It was Hystaspes, coming to entreat mercy for
his son.
The whip-bearer, delighted at this sight, threw himself down before the
old man with a cry of joy, and with crossed arms told him what confidence
the traveller had inspired him with.
Hystaspes beckoned to the stranger; he rode up, bowed gracefully and
courteously to the old man, without dismounting, and confirmed the words
of the whip bearer. Hystaspes seemed to feel fresh confidence too after
hearing the stranger, for he begged him to follow him into the palace and
to wait outside the door of the royal apartment, while he himself,
conducted by the head chamberlain, went in to the king.
When his old kinsman entered, Cambyses was lying on his purple couch,
pale as death. A cup-bearer was kneeling on the ground at his feet,
trying to collect the broken fragments of a costly Egyptian drinking-cup
which the king had thrown down impatiently because its contents had not
pleased his taste. At some distance stood a circle of court-officials, in
whose faces it was easy to read that they were afraid of their ruler's
wrath, and preferred keeping as far from him as possible. The dazzling
light and oppressive heat of a Babylonian May day came in through the
open windows, and not a sound was to be heard in the great room, except
the whining of a large dog of the Epirote breed, which had just received
a tremendous kick from Cambyses for venturing to fawn on his master, and
was the only being that ventured to disturb the solemn stillness. Just
before Hystaspes was led in by the chamberlain, Cambyses had sprung up
from his couch. This idle repose had become unendurable, he felt
suffocated with pain and anger. The dog's howl suggested a new idea to
his poor tortured brain, thirsting for forgetfulness.
"We will go out hunting!" he shouted to the poor startled courtiers. The
master of the hounds, the equerries, and huntsmen hastened to obey his
orders. He called after them, "I shall ride the unbroken horse Reksch;
get the falcons ready, let all the dogs out and order every one to come,
who can throw a spear. We'll clear the preserves!"
He then threw himself down on his divan again, as if these words had
quite exhausted his powerful frame, and did not see that Hystaspes had
entered, for his sullen gaze was fixed on the motes playing in the
sunbeams that glanced through the window.
Hystaspes did not dare to address him; but he stationed himself in the
window so as to break the stream of motes and thus draw attention to
himself.
At first Cambyses looked angrily at him and his rent garments, and then
asked with a bitter smile; "What do you want?"
"Victory to the king! Your poor servant and uncle has come to entreat his
ruler's mercy."
"Then rise and go! You know that I have no mercy for perjurers and false
swearers. 'Tis better to have a dead son than a dishonorable one."
"But if Bartja should not be guilty, and Darius . . ."
"You dare to question the justice of my sentence?"
"That be far from me. Whatever the king does is good, and cannot be
gainsaid; but still . . ."
"Be silent! I will not hear the subject mentioned again. You are to be
pitied as a father; but have these last few hours brought me any joy? Old
man, I grieve for you, but I have as little power to rescind his
punishment as you to recall his crime."
"But if Bartja really should not be guilty--if the gods . . ."
"Do you think the gods will come to the help of perjurers and deceivers?"
"No, my King; but a fresh witness has appeared."
"A fresh witness? Verily, I would gladly give half my kingdom, to be
convinced of the innocence of men so nearly related to me."
"Victory to my lord, the eye of the realm! A Greek is waiting outside,
who seems, to judge by his figure and bearing, one of the noblest of his
race."
The king laughed bitterly: "A Greek! Ah, ha! perhaps some relation to
Bartja's faithful fair one! What can this stranger know of my family
affairs? I know these beggarly Ionians well. They are impudent enough to
meddle in everything, and think they can cheat us with their sly tricks.
How much have you had to pay for this new witness, uncle? A Greek is as
ready with a lie as a Magian with his spells, and I know they'll do
anything for gold. I'm really curious to see your witness. Call him in.
But if he wants to deceive me, he had better remember that where the head
of a son of Cyrus is about to fall, a Greek head has but very little
chance." And the king's eyes flashed with anger as he said these words.
Hystaspes, however, sent for the Greek.
Before he entered, the chamberlains fastened the usual cloth before his
mouth, and commanded him to cast himself on the ground before the king.
The Greek's bearing, as he approached, under the king's penetrating
glance, was calm and noble; he fell on his face, and, according to the
Persian custom, kissed the ground.
His agreeable and handsome appearance, and the calm and modest manner in
which he bore the king's gaze, seemed to make a favorable impression on
the latter; he did not allow him to remain long on the earth, and asked
him in a by no means unfriendly tone: "Who are you?"
"I am a Greek nobleman. My name is Phanes, and Athens is my home. I have
served ten years as commander of the Greek mercenaries in Egypt, and not
ingloriously."
"Are you the man, to whose clever generalship the Egyptians were indebted
for their victories in Cyprus?"
"I am."
"What has brought you to Persia?"
"The glory of your name, Cambyses, and the wish to devote my arms and
experience to your service."
"Nothing else? Be sincere, and remember that one single lie may cost your
life. We Persians have different ideas of truth from the Greeks."
"Lying is hateful to me too, if only, because, as a distortion and
corruption of what is noblest, it seems unsightly in my eyes."
"Then speak."
"There was certainly a third reason for my coming hither, which I should
like to tell you later. It has reference to matters of the greatest
importance, which it will require a longer time to discuss; but to-day--"
"Just to-day I should like to hear something new. Accompany me to the
chase. You come exactly at the right time, for I never had more need of
diversion than now."
"I will accompany you with pleasure, if. . ."
"No conditions to the king! Have you had much practice in hunting?"
"In the Libyan desert I have killed many a lion."
"Then come, follow me."
In the thought of the chase the king seemed to have thrown off all his
weakness and roused himself to action; he was just leaving the hall, when
Hystaspes once more threw himself at his feet, crying with up-raised
hands: "Is my son--is your brother, to die innocent? By the soul of your
father, who used to call me his truest friend, I conjure you to listen to
this noble stranger."
Cambyses stood still. The frown gathered on his brow again, his voice
sounded like a menace and his eyes flashed as he raised his hand and said
to the Greek: "Tell me what you know; but remember that in every untrue
word, you utter your own sentence of death."
Phanes heard this threat with the greatest calmness, and answered, bowing
gracefully as he spoke: "From the sun and from my lord the king, nothing
can be hid. What power has a poor mortal to conceal the truth from one so
mighty? The noble Hystaspes has said, that I am able to prove your
brother innocent. I will only say, that I wish and hope I may succeed in
accomplishing anything so great and beautiful. The gods have at least
allowed me to discover a trace which seems calculated to throw light on
the events of yesterday; but you yourself must decide whether my hopes
have been presumptuous and my suspicions too easily aroused. Remember,
however, that throughout, my wish to serve you has been sincere, and that
if I have been deceived, my error is pardonable; that nothing is
perfectly certain in this world, and every man believes that to be
infallible which seems to him the most probable."
"You speak well, and remind me of . . . curse her! there, speak and have
done with it! I hear the dogs already in the court."
"I was still in Egypt when your embassy came to fetch Nitetis. At the
house of Rhodopis, my delightful, clever and celebrated countrywoman, I
made the acquaintance of Croesus and his son; I only saw your brother and
his friends once or twice, casually; still I remembered the young
prince's handsome face so well, that some time later, when I was in the
workshop of the great sculptor Theodorus at Samos, I recognized his
features at once."
"Did you meet him at Samos?"
"No, but his features had made such a deep and faithful impression on
Theodorus' memory, that he used them to beautify the head of an Apollo,
which the Achaemenidae had ordered for the new temple of Delphi."
"Your tale begins, at least, incredibly enough. How is it possible to
copy features so exactly, when you have not got them before you?"
"I can only answer that Theodorus has really completed this master-piece,
and if you wish for a proof of his skill would gladly send you a second
likeness of . . ."
"I have no desire for it. Go on with your story."
"On my journey hither, which, thanks to your father's excellent
arrangements, I performed in an incredibly short time, changing horses
every sixteen or seventeen miles . . ."
"Who allowed you, a foreigner, to use the posthorses?"
"The pass drawn out for the son of Croesus, which came by chance into my
hands, when once, in order to save my life, he forced me to change
clothes with him."
"A Lydian can outwit a fox, and a Syrian a Lydian, but an Ionian is a
match for both," muttered the king, smiling for the first time; "Croesus
told me this story--poor Croesus!" and then the old gloomy expression
came over his face and he passed his hand across his forehead, as if
trying to smooth the lines of care away. The Athenian went on: "I met
with no hindrances on my journey till this morning at the first hour
after midnight, when I was detained by a strange occurrence."
The king began to listen more attentively, and reminded the Athenian, who
spoke Persian with difficulty, that there was no time to lose.
"We had reached the last station but one," continued he, "and hoped to be
in Babylon by sunrise. I was thinking over my past stirring life, and was
so haunted by the remembrance of evil deeds unrevenged that I could not
sleep; the old Egyptian at my side, however, slept and dreamt peacefully
enough, lulled by the monotonous tones of the harness bells, the sound of
the horses' hoofs and the murmur of the Euphrates. It was a wonderfully
still, beautiful night; the moon and stars were so brilliant, that our
road and the landscape were lighted up almost with the brightness of day.
For the last hour we had not seen a single vehicle, foot-passenger, or
horseman; we had heard that all the neighboring population had assembled
in Babylon to celebrate your birthday, gaze with wonder at the splendor
of your court, and enjoy your liberality. At last the irregular beat of
horses' hoofs, and the sound of bells struck my ear, and a few minutes
later I distinctly heard cries of distress. My resolve was taken at once;
I made my Persian servant dismount, sprang into his saddle, told the
driver of the cart in which my slaves were sitting not to spare his
mules, loosened my dagger and sword in their scabbards, and spurred my
horse towards the place from whence the cries came. They grew louder and
louder. I had not ridden a minute, when I came on a fearful scene. Three
wild-looking fellows had just pulled a youth, dressed in the white robes
of a Magian, from his horse, stunned him with heavy blows, and, just as I
reached them, were on the point of throwing him into the Euphrates, which
at that place washes the roots of the palms and fig-trees bordering the
high-road. I uttered my Greek war-cry, which has made many an enemy
tremble before now, and rushed on the murderers. Such fellows are always
cowards; the moment they saw one of their accomplices mortally wounded,
they fled. I did not pursue them, but stooped down to examine the poor
boy, who was severely wounded. How can I describe my horror at seeing, as
I believed, your brother Bartja? Yes, they were the very same features
that I had seen, first at Naukratis and then in Theodorus' workshop, they
were . . ."
"Marvellous!" interrupted Hystaspes.
"Perhaps a little too much so to be credible," added the king. "Take
care, Hellene! remember my arm reaches far. I shall have the truth of
your story put to the proof."
"I am accustomed," answered Phanes bowing low, "to follow the advice of
our wise philosopher Pythagoras, whose fame may perhaps have reached your
ears, and always, before speaking, to consider whether what I am going to
say may not cause me sorrow in the future."
"That sounds well; but, by Mithras, I knew some one who often spoke of
that great teacher, and yet in her deeds turned out to be a most faithful
disciple of Angramainjus. You know the traitress, whom we are going to
extirpate from the earth like a poisonous viper to-day."
"Will you forgive me," answered Phanes, seeing the anguish expressed in
the king's features, "if I quote another of the great master's maxims?"
"Speak."
"Blessings go as quickly as they come. Therefore bear thy lot patiently.
Murmur not, and remember that the gods never lay a heavier weight on any
man than he can bear. Hast thou a wounded heart? touch it as seldom as
thou wouldst a sore eye. There are only two remedies for
heart-sickness:--hope and patience."
Cambyses listened to this sentence, borrowed from the golden maxims of
Pythagoras, and smiled bitterly at the word "patience." Still the
Athenian's way of speaking pleased him, and he told him to go on with his
story.
Phanes made another deep obeisance, and continued: "We carried the
unconscious youth to my carriage, and brought him to the nearest station.
There he opened his eyes, looked anxiously at me, and asked who I was and
what had happened to him? The master of the station was standing by, so I
was obliged to give the name of Gyges in order not to excite his
suspicions by belying my pass, as it was only through this that I could
obtain fresh horses.
"This wounded young man seemed to know Gyges, for he shook his head and
murmured: 'You are not the man you give yourself out for.' Then he closed
his eyes again, and a violent attack of fever came on.
"We undressed, bled him and bound up his wounds. My Persian servant, who
had served as overlooker in Amasis' stables and had seen Bartja there,
assisted by the old Egyptian who accompanied me, was very helpful, and
asserted untiringly that the wounded man could be no other than your
brother. When we had cleansed the blood from his face, the master of the
station too swore that there could be no doubt of his being the younger
son of your great father Cyrus. Meanwhile my Egyptian companion had
fetched a potion from the travelling medicine-chest, without which an
Egyptian does not care to leave his native country.
[A similar travelling medicine-chest is to be seen in the Egyptian
Museum at Berlin. It is prettily and compendiously fitted up, and
must be very ancient, for the inscription on the chest, which
contained it stated that it was made in the 11th dynasty (end of the
third century B. C.) in the reign of King Mentuhotep.]
The drops worked wonders; in a few hours the fever was quieted, and at
sunrise the patient opened his eyes once more. We bowed down before him,
believing him to be your brother, and asked if he would like to be taken
to the palace in Babylon. This he refused vehemently, and asseverated
that he was not the man we took him for, but, . . ."
"Who can be so like Bartja? tell me quickly," interrupted the king, "I am
very curious to know this."
"He declared that he was the brother of your high-priest, that his name
was Gaumata, and that this would be proved by the pass which we should
find in the sleeve of his Magian's robe. The landlord found this document
and, being able to read, confirmed the statement of the sick youth; he
was, however, soon seized by a fresh attack of fever, and began to speak
incoherently."
"Could you understand him?"
"Yes, for his talk always ran on the same subject. The hanging-gardens
seemed to fill his thoughts. He must have just escaped some great danger,
and probably had had a lover's meeting there with a woman called
Mandane."
"Mandane, Mandane," said Cambyses in a low voice; "if I do not mistake,
that is the name of the highest attendant on Amasis' daughter."
These words did not escape the sharp ears of the Greek. He thought a
moment and then exclaimed with a smile; "Set the prisoners free, my King;
I will answer for it with my own head, that Bartja was not in the
hanging-gardens."
The king was surprised at this speech but not angry. The free,
unrestrained, graceful manner of this Athenian towards himself produced
the same impression, that a fresh sea-breeze makes when felt for the
first time. The nobles of his own court, even his nearest relations,
approached him bowing and cringing, but this Greek stood erect in his
presence; the Persians never ventured to address their ruler without a
thousand flowery and flattering phrases, but the Athenian was simple,
open and straightforward. Yet his words were accompanied by such a charm
of action and expression, that the king could understand them,
notwithstanding the defective Persian in which they were clothed, better
than the allegorical speeches of his own subjects. Nitetis and Phanes
were the only human beings, who had ever made him forget that he was a
king. With them he was a man speaking to his fellow-man, instead of a
despot speaking with creatures whose very existence was the plaything of
his own caprice. Such is the effect produced by real manly dignity,
superior culture and the consciousness of a right to freedom, on the mind
even of a tyrant. But there was something beside all this, that had
helped to win Cambyses' favor for the Athenian. This man's coming seemed
as if it might possibly give him back the treasure he had believed was
lost and more than lost. But how could the life of such a foreign
adventurer be accepted as surety for the sons of the highest Persians in
the realm? The proposal, however, did not make him angry. On the
contrary, he could not help smiling at the boldness of this Greek, who in
his eagerness had freed himself from the cloth which hung over his mouth
and beard, and exclaimed: "By Mithras, Greek, it really seems as if you
were to prove a messenger of good for us! I accept your offer. If the
prisoners, notwithstanding your supposition, should still prove guilty
you are bound to pass your whole life at my court and in my service, but
if, on the contrary, you are able to prove what I so ardently long for, I
will make you richer than any of your countrymen."
Phanes answered by a smile which seemed to decline this munificent offer,
and asked: "Is it permitted me to put a few questions to yourself and to
the officers of your court?"
"You are allowed to say and ask whatever you wish."
At this moment the master of the huntsmen, one of those who daily ate at
the king's table, entered, out of breath from his endeavors to hasten the
preparations, and announced that all was ready.
"They must wait," was the king's imperious answer. "I am not sure, that
we shall hunt at all to-day. Where is Bischen, the captain of police?"
Datis, the so-called "eye of the king," who held the office filled in
modern days by a minister of police, hurried from the room, returning in
a few minutes with the desired officer. These moments Phanes made use of
for putting various questions on important points to the nobles who were
present.
"What news can you bring of the prisoners?" asked the king, as the man
lay prostrate before him. "Victory to the king! They await death with
calmness, for it is sweet to die by thy will."
"Have you heard anything of their conversation?"
"Yes, my Ruler."
"Do they acknowledge their guilt, when speaking to each other?"
"Mithras alone knows the heart; but you, my prince, if you could hear
them speak, would believe in their innocence, even as I the humblest of
your servants."
The captain looked up timidly at the king, fearing lest these words
should have excited his anger; Cambyses, however, smiled kindly instead
of rebuking him. But a sudden thought darkened his brow again directly,
and in a low voice he asked: "When was Croesus executed?"
The man trembled at this question; the perspiration stood on his
forehead, and he could scarcely stammer the words: "He is . . . he has
. . . we thought. . . ."
"What did you think?" interrupted Cambyses, and a new light of hope
seemed to dawn in his mind. "Is it possible, that you did not carry out
my orders at once? Can Croesus still be alive? Speak at once, I must know
the whole truth."
The captain writhed like a worm at his lord's feet, and at last stammered
out, raising his hands imploringly towards the king: "Have mercy, have
mercy, my Lord the king! I am a poor man, and have thirty children,
fifteen of whom . . ."
"I wish to know if Croesus is living or dead."
"He is alive! He has done so much for me, and I did not think I was doing
wrong in allowing him to live a few hours longer, that he might. . . ."
"That is enough," said the king breathing freely. "This once your
disobedience shall go unpunished, and the treasurer may give you two
talents, as you have so many children.--Now go to the prisoners,--tell
Croesus to come hither, and the others to be of good courage, if they are
innocent."
"My King is the light of the world, and an ocean of mercy."
"Bartja and his friends need not remain any longer in confinement; they
can walk in the court of the palace, and you will keep guard over them.
You, Datis, go at once to the hanging-gardens and order Boges to defer
the execution of the sentence on the Egyptian Princess; and further, I
wish messengers sent to the post-station mentioned by the Athenian, and
the wounded man brought hither under safe escort."
The "king's eye" was on the point of departure, but Phanes detained
him, saying: "Does my King allow me to make one remark?"
"Speak."
"It appears to me, that the chief of the eunuchs could give the most
accurate information. During his delirium the youth often mentioned his
name in connection with that of the girl he seemed to be in love with."
"Go at once, Datis, and bring him quickly."
"The high-priest Oropastes, Gaumata's brother, ought to appear too; and
Mandane, whom I have just been assured on the most positive authority, is
the principal attendant of the Egyptian Princess."
"Fetch her, Datis."
"If Nitetis herself could . . ."
At this the king turned pale and a cold shiver ran through his limbs. How
he longed to see his darling again! But the strong man was afraid of this
woman's reproachful looks; he knew the captivating power that lay in her
eyes. So he pointed to the door, saying "Fetch Boges and Mandane; the
Egyptian Princess is to remain in the hanging-gardens, under strict
custody."
The Athenian bowed deferentially; as if he would say: "Here no one has a
right to command but the king."
Cambyses looked well pleased, seated himself again on the purple divan,
and resting his forehead on his hand, bent his eyes on the ground and
sank into deep thought. The picture of the woman he loved so dearly
refused to be banished; it came again and again, more and more vividly,
and the thought that these features could not have deceived him--that
Nitetis must be innocent--took a firmer root in his mind; he had already
begun to hope. If Bartja could be cleared, there was no error that might
not be conceivable; in that case he would go to the hanging-gardens, take
her hand and listen to her defence. When love has once taken firm hold of
a man in riper years, it runs and winds through his whole nature like one
of his veins, and can only be destroyed with his life.
The entrance of Croesus roused Cambyses from his dream; he raised the old
man kindly from the prostrate position at his feet, into which he had
thrown himself on entering, and said: "You offended me, but I will be
merciful; I have not forgotten that my father, on his dying bed, told me
to make you my friend and adviser. Take your life back as a gift from me,
and forget my anger as I wish to forget your want of reverence. This man
says he knows you; I should like to hear your opinion of his
conjectures."
Croesus turned away much affected, and after having heartily welcomed the
Athenian, asked him to relate his suppositions and the grounds on which
they were founded.
The old man grew more and more attentive as the Greek went on, and when
he had finished raised his hands to heaven, crying: "Pardon me, oh ye
eternal gods, if I have ever questioned the justice of your decrees. Is
not this marvellous, Cambyses? My son once placed himself in great danger
to save the life of this noble Athenian, whom the gods have brought
hither to repay the deed tenfold. Had Phanes been murdered in Egypt, this
hour might have seen our sons executed."
And as he said this he embraced Hystaspes; both shared one feeling; their
sons had been as dead and were now alive.
The king, Phanes, and all the Persian dignitaries watched the old men
with deep sympathy, and though the proofs of Bartja's innocence were as
yet only founded on conjecture, not one of those present doubted it one
moment longer. Wherever the belief in a man's guilt is but slight, his
defender finds willing listeners.
CHAPTER VI.
THE sharp-witted Athenian saw clearly how matters lay in this sad story;
nor did it escape him that malice had had a hand in the affair. How could
Bartja's dagger have come into the hanging-gardens except through
treachery?
While he was telling the king his suspicions, Oropastes was led into the
hall.
The king looked angrily at him and without one preliminary word, asked:
"Have you a brother?"
"Yes, my King. He and I are the only two left out of a family of six. My
parents . . ."
"Is your brother younger or older than yourself?"
"I was the eldest of the family; my brother, the youngest, was the joy of
my father's old age."
"Did you ever notice a remarkable likeness between him and one of my
relations?"
"Yes, my King. Gaumata is so like your brother Bartja, that in the school
for priests at Rhagae, where he still is, he was always called 'the
prince.'"
"Has he been at Babylon very lately?"
"He was here for the last time at the New Year's festival."
"Are you speaking the truth?"
"The sin of lying would be doubly punishable in one who wears my robes,
and holds my office."
The king's face flushed with anger at this answer and he exclaimed:
"Nevertheless you are lying; Gaumata was here yesterday evening. You may
well tremble."
"My life belongs to the king, whose are all things; nevertheless I
swear--the high-priest-by the most high God, whom I have served
faithfully for thirty years, that I know nothing of my brother's presence
in Babylon yesterday."
"Your face looks as if you were speaking the truth."
"You know that I was not absent from your side the whole of that high
holiday."
"I know it."
Again the doors opened; this time they admitted the trembling Mandane.
The high-priest cast such a look of astonishment and enquiry on her, that
the king saw she must be in some way connected with him, and therefore,
taking no notice of the trembling girl who lay at his feet, he asked: "Do
you know this woman?"
"Yes, my King. I obtained for her the situation of upper attendant to
the--may Auramazda forgive her!--King of Egypt's daughter."
"What led you,--a priest,--to do a favor to this girl?"
"Her parents died of the same pestilence, which carried off my brothers.
Her father was a priest, respected, and a friend of our family; so we
adopted the little girl, remembering the words: 'If thou withhold help
from the man who is pure in heart and from his widow and orphans, then
shall the pure, subject earth cast thee out unto the stinging-nettles, to
painful sufferings and to the most fearful regions!' Thus I became her
foster-father, and had her brought up with my youngest brother until he
was obliged to enter the school for priests."
The king exchanged a look of intelligence with Phanes, and asked: "Why
did not you keep the girl longer with you?"
"When she had received the ear-rings I, as priest, thought it more
suitable to send such a young girl away from my house, and to put her in
a position to earn her own living."
"Has she seen your brother since she has been grown up?"
"Yes, my King. Whenever Gaumata came to see me I allowed him to be with
her as with a sister; but on discovering later that the passionate love
of youth had begun to mingle with the childish friendship of former days,
I felt strengthened in my resolution to send her away."
"Now we know enough," said the king, commanding the high-priest by a nod
to retire. He then looked down on the prostrate girl, and said
imperiously: "Rise!"
Mandane rose, trembling with fear. Her fresh young face was pale as
death, and her red lips were blue from terror.
"Tell all you know about yesterday evening; but remember, a lie and your
death are one and the same."
The girl's knees trembled so violently that she could hardly stand, and
her fear entirely took away the power of speaking.
"I have not much patience," exclaimed Cambyses. Mandane started, grew
paler still, but could not speak. Then Phanes came forward and asked the
angry king to allow him to examine the girl, as he felt sure that fear
alone had closed her lips and that a kind word would open them.
Cambyses allowed this, and the Athenian's words proved true; no sooner
had he assured Mandane of the good-will of all present, laid his hand on
her head and spoken kindly to her, than the source of her tears was
unlocked, she wept freely, the spell which had seemed to chain her
tongue, vanished, and she began to tell her story, interrupted only by
low sobs. She hid nothing, confessed that Boges had given her his
sanction and assistance to the meeting with Gaumata, and ended by saying:
"I know that I have forfeited my life, and am the worst and most
ungrateful creature in the world; but none of all this would have
happened, if Oropastes had allowed his brother to marry me."
The serious audience, even the king himself, could not resist a smile at
the longing tone in which these words were spoken and the fresh burst of
sobs which succeeded them.
And this smile saved her life. But Cambyses would not have smiled, after
hearing such a story, if Mandane, with that instinct which always seems
to stand at a woman's command in the hour of her greatest danger, had not
known how to seize his weak side, and use it for her own interests, by
dwelling much longer than was necessary, on the delight which Nitetis had
manifested at the king's gifts.
"A thousand times" cried she, "did my mistress kiss the presents which
were brought from you, O King; but oftenest of all did she press her lips
to the nosegay which you plucked with your own hands for her, some days
ago. And when it began to fade, she took every flower separately, spread
out the petals with care, laid them between woollen cloths, and, with her
own hands, placed her heavy, golden ointment-box upon them, that they
might dry and so she might keep them always as a remembrance of your
kindness."
Seeing Cambyses' awful features grow a little milder at these words, the
girl took fresh courage, and at last began to put loving words into her
mistress's mouth which the latter had never uttered; professing that she
herself had heard Nitetis a hundred times murmur the word "Cambyses" in
her sleep with indescribable tenderness. She ended her confession by
sobbing and praying for mercy.
The king looked down at her with infinite contempt, though without anger,
and pushing her away with his foot said: "Out of my sight, you dog of a
woman! Blood like yours would soil the executioner's axe. Out of my
sight!"
Mandane needed no second command to depart. The words "out of my sight"
sounded like sweet music in her ears. She rushed through the courts of
the palace, and out into the streets, crying like a mad woman "I am free!
I am free!"
She, had scarcely left the hall, when Datis, the "king's eye" reappeared
with the news that the chief of the eunuchs was nowhere to be found. He
had vanished from the hanging-gardens in an unaccountable manner; but he,
Datis, had left word with his subordinates that he was to be searched for
and brought, dead or alive.
The king went off into another violent fit of passion at this news, and
threatened the officer of police, who prudently concealed the excitement
of the crowd from his lord, with a severe punishment, if Boges were not
in their hands by the next morning.
As he finished speaking, a eunuch was brought into the hall, sent by the
king's mother to ask an interview for herself with her son.
Cambyses prepared at once to comply with his mother's wish, at the same
time giving Phanes his hand to kiss, a rare honor, only shown to those
that ate at the king's table, and saying: "All the prisoners are to be
set at liberty. Go to your sons, you anxious, troubled fathers, and
assure them of my mercy and favor. I think we shall be able to find a
satrapy a-piece for them, as compensation for to-night's undeserved
imprisonment. To you, my Greek friend, I am deeply indebted. In discharge
of this debt, and as a means of retaining you at my court, I beg you to
accept one hundred talents from my treasury."
"I shall scarcely be able to use so large a sum," said Phanes, bowing
low.
"Then abuse it," said the king with a friendly smile, and calling out to
him, "We shall meet again at supper," he left the hall accompanied by his
court.
........................
In the meantime there had been sadness and mourning in the apartments of
the queen-mother. Judging from the contents of the letter to Bartja,
Kassandane had made up her mind that Nitetis was faithless, and her own
beloved son innocent. But in whom could she ever place confidence again,
now that this girl, whom she had looked upon as the very embodiment of
every womanly virtue, had proved reprobate and faithless--now that the
noblest youths in the realm had proved perjurers?
Nitetis was more than dead for her; Bartja, Croesus, Darius, Gyges,
Araspes, all so closely allied to her by relationship and friendship, as
good as dead. And yet she durst not indulge her sorrow; she had to
restrain the despairing outbursts of grief of her impetuous child.
Atossa behaved like one deprived of her senses when she heard of the
sentences of death. The self-control which she had learnt from Nitetis
gave way, and her old impetuosity burst forth again with double
vehemence.
Nitetis, her only friend,--Bartja, the brother whom she loved with her
whole heart,--Darius, whom she felt now she not only looked up to as her
deliverer, but loved with all the warmth of a first affection--Croesus to
whom she clung like a father,--she was to lose every one she loved in one
day.
She tore her dress and her hair, called Cambyses a monster, and every one
who could possibly believe in the guilt of such people, infatuated or
insane. Then her tears would burst out afresh, she would utter imploring
supplications to the gods for mercy, and a few minutes later, begin
conjuring her mother to take her to the hanging-gardens, that they might
hear Nitetis' defence of her own conduct.
Kassandane tried to soothe the violent girl, and assured her every
attempt to visit the hanging-gardens would be in vain. Then Atossa began
to rage again, until at last her mother was forced to command silence,
and as morning had already began to dawn, sent her to her sleeping-room.
The girl obeyed, but instead of going to bed, seated herself at a tall
window looking towards the hanging-gardens. Her eyes filled with tears
again, as she thought of her friend--her sister-sitting in that palace
alone, forsaken, banished, and looking forward to an ignominious death.
Suddenly her tearful, weary eyes lighted up as if from some strong
purpose, and instead of gazing into the distance, she fixed them on a
black speck which flew towards her in a straight line from Nitetis'
house, becoming larger and more distinct every moment; and finally
settling on a cypress before her window. The sorrow vanished at once from
her lovely face and with a deep sigh of relief she sprang up, exclaiming:
"Oh, there is the Homai, the bird of good fortune! Now everything will
turn out well."
It was the same bird of paradise which had brought so much comfort to
Nitetis that now gave poor Atossa fresh confidence.
She bent forward to see whether any one was in the garden; and finding
that she would be seen by no one but the old gardener, she jumped out,
trembling like a fawn, plucked a few roses and cypress twigs and took
them to the old man, who had been watching her performances with a
doubtful shake of the head.
She stroked his cheeks coaxingly, put her flowers in his brown hand, and
said: "Do you love me, Sabaces?"
"O, my mistress!" was the only answer the old man could utter, as he
pressed the hem of her robe to his lips.
"I believe you, my old friend, and I will show you how I trust my
faithful, old Sabaces. Hide these flowers carefully and go quickly to the
king's palace. Say that you had to bring fruit for the table. My poor
brother Bartja, and Darius, the son of the noble Hystaspes, are in
prison, near the guard-house of the Immortals. You must manage that these
flowers reach them, with a warm greeting from me, but mind, the message
must be given with the flowers."
"But the guards will not allow me to see the prisoners."
"Take these rings, and slip them into their hands."
"I will do my best."
"I knew you loved me, my good Sabaces. Now make haste, and come back
soon."
The old man went off as fast as he could. Atossa looked thoughtfully
after him, murmuring to herself: "Now they will both know, that I loved
them to the last. The rose means, 'I love you,' and the evergreen
cypress, 'true and steadfast.'" The old man came back in an hour;
bringing her Bartja's favorite ring, and from Darius an Indian
handkerchief dipped in blood.
Atossa ran to meet him; her eyes filled with tears as she took the
tokens, and seating herself under a spreading plane-tree, she pressed
them by turns to her lips, murmuring: "Bartja's ring means that he thinks
of me; the blood-stained handkerchief that Darius is ready to shed his
heart's blood for me."
Atossa smiled as she said this, and her tears, when she thought of her
friends and their sad fate, were quieter, if not less bitter, than
before.
A few hours later a messenger arrived from Croesus with news that the
innocence of Bartja and his friends had been proved, and that Nitetis
was, to all intents and purposes, cleared also.
Kassandane sent at once to the hanging-gardens, with a request that
Nitetis would come to her apartments. Atossa, as unbridled in her joy as
in her grief, ran to meet her friend's litter and flew from one of her
attendants to the other crying: "They are all innocent; we shall not lose
one of them--not one!"
When at last the litter appeared and her loved one, pale as death, within
it, she burst into loud sobs, threw her arms round Nitetis as she
descended, and covered her with kisses and caresses till she perceived
that her friend's strength was failing, that her knees gave way, and she
required a stronger support than Atossa's girlish strength could give.
The Egyptian girl was carried insensible into the queen-mother's
apartments. When she opened her eyes, her head-more like a marble piece
of sculpture than a living head--was resting on the blind queen's lap,
she felt Atossa's warm kisses on her forehead, and Cambyses, who had
obeyed his mother's call, was standing at her side.
She gazed on this circle, including all she loved best, with anxious,
perplexed looks, and at last, recognizing them one by one, passed her
hand across her pale fore head as if to remove a veil, smiled at each,
and closed her eyes once more. She fancied Isis had sent her a beautiful
vision, and wished to hold it fast with all the powers of her mind.
Then Atossa called her by her name, impetuously and lovingly. She opened
her eyes again, and again she saw those loving looks that she fancied had
only been sent her in a dream. Yes, that was her own Atossa--this her
motherly friend, and there stood, not the angry king, but the man she
loved. And now his lips opened too, his stern, severe eyes rested on her
so beseechingly, and he said: "O Nitetis, awake! you must not--you cannot
possibly be guilty!" She moved her head gently with a look of cheerful
denial and a happy smile stole across her features, like a breeze of
early spring over fresh young roses.
"She is innocent! by Mithras, it is impossible that she can be guilty,"
cried the king again, and forgetful of the presence of others, he sank on
his knees.
A Persian physician came up and rubbed her forehead with a sweet-scented
oil, and Nebenchari approached, muttering spells, felt her pulse, shook
his head, and administered a potion from his portable medicine-chest.
This restored her to perfect consciousness; she raised herself with
difficulty into a sitting posture, returned the loving caresses of her
two friends, and then turning to Cambyses, asked: "How could you believe
such a thing of me, my King?" There was no reproach in her tone, but deep
sadness, and Cambyses answered softly, "Forgive me."
Kassandane's blind eyes expressed her gratitude for this
self-renunciation on the part of her son, and she said: "My daughter, I
need your forgiveness too."
"But I never once doubted you," cried Atossa, proudly and joyfully
kissing her friend's lips.
"Your letter to Bartja shook my faith in your innocence," added
Kassandane.
"And yet it was all so simple and natural," answered Nitetis. "Here, my
mother, take this letter from Egypt. Croesus will translate it for you.
It will explain all. Perhaps I was imprudent. Ask your mother to tell you
what you would wish to know, my King. Pray do not scorn my poor, ill
sister. When an Egyptian girl once loves, she cannot forget. But I feel
so frightened. The end must be near. The last hours have been so very,
very terrible. That horrible man, Boges, read me the fearful sentence of
death, and it was that which forced the poison into my hand. Ah, my
heart!"
And with these words she fell back into the arms of Kassandane.
Nebenchari rushed forward, and gave her some more drops, exclaiming: "I
thought so! She has taken poison and her life cannot be saved, though
this antidote may possibly prolong it for a few days." Cambyses stood by,
pale and rigid, following the physician's slightest movements, and Atossa
bathed her friend's forehead with her tears.
"Let some milk be brought," cried Nebenchari, "and my large
medicine-chest; and let attendants be called to carry her away, for quiet
is necessary, above all things."
Atossa hastened into the adjoining room; and Cambyses said to the
physician, but without looking into his face: "Is there no hope?"
"The poison which she has taken results in certain death."
On hearing this the king pushed Nebenchari away from the sick girl,
exclaiming: "She shall live. It is my will. Here, eunuch! summon all the
physicians in Babylon--assemble the priests and Alobeds! She is not to
die; do you hear? she must live, I am the king, and I command it."
Nitetis opened her eyes as if endeavoring to obey her lord. Her face was
turned towards the window, and the bird of paradise with the gold chain
on its foot, was still there, perched on the cypress-tree. Her eyes fell
first on her lover, who had sunk down at her side and was pressing his
burning lips to her right hand. She murmured with a smile: "O, this great
happiness!" Then she saw the bird, and pointed to it with tier left hand,
crying: "Look, look, there is the Phoenix, the bird of Ra!"
After saying this she closed her eyes and was soon seized by a violent
attack of fever.
CHAPTER VII.
Prexaspes, the king's messenger, and one of the highest officials at
court, had brought Gaumata, Mandane's lover, whose likeness to Bartja was
really most wonderful, to Babylon, sick and wounded as he was. He was now
awaiting his sentence in a dungeon, while Boges, the man who had led him
into crime, was nowhere to be found, notwithstanding all the efforts of
the police. His escape had been rendered possible by the trap-door in the
hanging-gardens, and greatly assisted by the enormous crowds assembled in
the streets.
Immense treasures were found in his house. Chests of gold and jewels,
which his position had enabled him to obtain with great ease, were
restored to the royal treasury. Cambyses, however, would gladly have
given ten times as much treasure to secure possession of the traitor.
To Phaedime's despair the king ordered all the inhabitants of the harem,
except his mother, Atossa and the dying Nitetis, to be removed to Susa,
two days after the accused had been declared innocent. Several eunuchs of
rank were deposed from their offices. The entire caste was to suffer for
the sins of him who had escaped punishment.
Oropastes, who had already entered on his duties as regent of the
kingdom, and had clearly proved his non-participation in the crime of
which his brother had been proved guilty, bestowed the vacant places
exclusively on the Magi. The demonstration made by the people in favor of
Bartja did not come to the king's ears until the crowd had long
dispersed. Still, occupied as he was, almost entirely, by his anxiety for
Nitetis, he caused exact information of this illegal manifestation to be
furnished him, and ordered the ringleaders to be severely punished. He
fancied it was a proof that Bartja had been trying to gain favor with the
people, and Cambyses would perhaps have shown his displeasure by some
open act, if a better impulse had not told him that he, not Bartja, was
the brother who stood in need of forgiveness. In spite of this, however,
he could not get rid of the feeling that Bartja, had been, though
innocent, the cause of the sad events which had just happened, nor of his
wish to get him out of the way as far as might be; and he therefore gave
a ready consent to his brother's wish to start at once for Naukratis.
Bartja took a tender farewell of his mother and sister, and started two
days after his liberation. He was accompanied by Gyges, Zopyrus, and a
numerous retinue charged with splendid presents from Cambyses for Sappho.
Darius remained behind, kept back by his love for Atossa. The day too was
not far distant, when, by his father's wish, he was to marry Artystone,
the daughter of Gobryas.
Bartja parted from his friend with a heavy heart, advising him to be very
prudent with regard to Atossa. The secret had been confided to
Kassandane, and she had promised to take Darius' part with the king.
If any one might venture to raise his eyes to the daughter of Cyrus,
assuredly it was the son of Hystaspes; he was closely connected by
marriage with the royal family, belonged like Cambyses to the Pasargadae,
and his family was a younger branch of the reigning dynasty. His father
called himself the highest noble in the realm, and as such, governed the
province of Persia proper, the mother-country, to which this enormous
world-empire and its ruler owed their origin. Should the family of Cyrus
become extinct, the descendants of Hystaspes would have a well-grounded
right to the Persian throne. Darius therefore, apart from his personal
advantages, was a fitting claimant for Atossa's hand. And yet no one
dared to ask the king's consent. In the gloomy state of mind into which
he had been brought by the late events, it was likely that he might
refuse it, and such an answer would have to be regarded as irrevocable.
So Bartja was obliged to leave Persia in anxiety about the future of
these two who were very dear to him.
Croesus promised to act as mediator in this case also, and before Bartja
left, made him acquainted with Phanes.
The youth had heard such a pleasant account of the Athenian from Sappho,
that he met him with great cordiality, and soon won the fancy of the
older and more experienced man, who gave him many a useful hint, and a
letter to Theopompus, the Milesian, at Naukratis. Phanes concluded by
asking for a private interview.
Bartja returned to his friends looking grave and thoughtful; soon,
however, he forgot his cause of anxiety and joked merrily with them over
a farewell cup. Before he mounted his horse the next morning, Nebenchari
asked to be allowed an audience. He was admitted, and begged Bartja to
take the charge of a large written roll for king Amasis. It contained a
detailed account of Nitetis' sufferings, ending with these words: "Thus
the unhappy victim of your ambitious plans will end her life in a few
hours by poison, to the use of which she was driven by despair. The
arbitrary caprices of the mighty can efface all happiness from the life
of a human creature, just as we wipe a picture from the tablet with a
sponge. Your servant Nebenchari is pining in a foreign land, deprived of
home and property, and the wretched daughter of a king of Egypt dies a
miserable and lingering death by her own hand. Her body will be torn to
pieces by dogs and vultures, after the manner of the Persians. Woe unto
them who rob the innocent of happiness here and of rest beyond the
grave!"
Bartja had not been told the contents of this letter, but promised to
take it with him; he then, amid the joyful shouts of the people, set up
outside the city-gate the stones which, according to a Persian
superstition, were to secure him a prosperous journey, and left Babylon.
Nebenchari, meanwhile, prepared to return to his post by Nitetis'
dying-bed.
Just as he reached the brazen gates between the harem-gardens and the
courts of the large palace, an old man in white robes came up to him. The
sight seemed to fill Nebenchari with terror; he started as if the gaunt
old man had been a ghost. Seeing, however, a friendly and familiar smile
on the face of the other, he quickened his steps, and, holding out his
hand with a heartiness for which none of his Persian acquaintances would
have given him credit, exclaimed in Egyptian: "Can I believe my eyes? You
in Persia, old Hib? I should as soon have expected the sky to fall as to
have the pleasure of seeing you on the Euphrates. But now, in the name of
Osiris, tell me what can have induced you, you old ibis, to leave your
warm nest on the Nile and set out on such a long journey eastward."
While Nebenchari was speaking, the old man listened in a bowing posture,
with his arms hanging down by his side, and when he had finished, looked
up into his face with indescribable joy, touched his breast with
trembling fingers, and then, falling on the right knee, laying one hand
on his heart and raising the other to heaven, cried: "Thanks be unto
thee, great Isis, for protecting the wanderer and permitting him to see
his master once more in health and safety. Ah, child, how anxious I have
been! I expected to find you as wasted and thin as a convict from the
quarries; I thought you would have been grieving and unhappy, and here
you are as well, and handsome and portly as ever. If poor old Hib had
been in your place he would have been dead long ago."
"Yes, I don't doubt that, old fellow. I did not leave home of my own will
either, nor without many a heartache. These foreigners are all the
children of Seth. The good and gracious gods are only to be found in
Egypt on the shores of the sacred, blessed Nile."
"I don't know much about its being so blessed," muttered the old man.
"You frighten me, father Hib. What has happened then?"
"Happened! Things have come to a pretty pass there, and you'll hear of it
soon enough. Do you think I should have left house and grandchildren at
my age,--going on for eighty,--like any Greek or Phoenician vagabond, and
come out among these godless foreigners (the gods blast and destroy
them!), if I could possibly have staid on in Egypt?"
"But tell me what it's all about."
"Some other time, some other time. Now you must take me to your own
house, and I won't stir out of it as long as we are in this land of
Typhon."
The old man said this with so much emphasis, that Nebenchiari could not
help smiling and saying: "Have they treated you so very badly then, old
man?"
"Pestilence and Khamsin!" blustered the old man.
[The south-west wind, which does so much injury to the crops in the
Nile valley. It is known to us as the Simoom, the wind so perilous
to travellers in the desert.]
"There's not a more good-for-nothing Typhon's brood on the face of the
earth than these Persians. I only wonder they're not all red-haired and
leprous. Ah, child, two whole days I have been in this hell already, and
all that time I was obliged to live among these blasphemers. They said no
one could see you; you were never allowed to leave Nitetis' sick-bed.
Poor child! I always said this marriage with a foreigner would come to no
good, and it serves Amasis right if his children give him trouble. His
conduct to you alone deserves that."
"For shame, old man!"
"Nonsense, one must speak one's mind sometimes. I hate a king, who comes
from nobody knows where. Why, when he was a poor boy he used to steal
your father's nuts, and wrench the name-plates off the house-doors. I saw
he was a good-for-nothing fellow then. It's a shame that such people
should be allowed to. . . ."
"Gently, gently, old man. We are not all made of the same stuff, and if
there was such a little difference between you and Amasis as boys, it, is
your own fault that, now you are old men, he has outstripped you so far.
"My father and grandfather were both servants in the temple, and of
course I followed in their footsteps."
"Quite right; it is the law of caste, and by that rule, Amasis ought
never to have become anything higher than a poor army-captain at most."
"It is not every one who's got such an easy conscience as this upstart
fellow."
"There you are again! For shame, Hib! As long as I can remember, and that
is nearly half a century, every other word with you has been an abusive
one. When I was a child your ill-temper was vented on me, and now the
king has the benefit of it."
"Serves him right! All, if you only knew all! It's now seven months since
. . ."
"I can't stop to listen to you now. At the rising of the seven stars I
will send a slave to take you to my rooms. Till then you must stay in
your present lodging, for I must go to my patient."
"You must?--Very well,--then go and leave poor old Hib here to die. I
can't possibly live another hour among these creatures."
"What would you have me do then?"
"Let me live with you as long as we are in Persia."
"Have they treated you so very roughly?"
"I should think they had indeed. It is loathsome to think of. They forced
me to eat out of the same pot with them and cut my bread with the same
knife. An infamous Persian, who had lived many years in Egypt, and
travelled here with us, had given them a list of all the things and
actions, which we consider unclean. They took away my knife when I was
going to shave myself. A good-for-nothing wench kissed me on the
forehead, before I could prevent it. There, you needn't laugh; it will be
a month at least before I can get purified from all these pollutions. I
took an emetic, and when that at last began to take effect, they all
mocked and sneered at me. But that was not all. A cursed cook-boy nearly
beat a sacred kitten to death before my very eyes. Then an
ointment-mixer, who had heard that I was your servant, made that godless
Bubares ask me whether I could cure diseases of the eye too. I said yes,
because you know in sixty years it's rather hard if one can't pick up
something from one's master. Bubares was interpreter between us, and the
shameful fellow told him to say that he was very much disturbed about a
dreadful disease in his eyes. I asked what it was, and received for
answer that he could not tell one thing from another in the dark!"
"You should have told him that the best remedy for that was to light a
candle."
"Oh, I hate the rascals! Another hour among them will be the death of
me!"
"I am sure you behaved oddly enough among these foreigners," said
Nebenchiari smiling, "you must have made them laugh at you, for the
Persians are generally very polite, well-behaved people. Try them again,
only once. I shall be very glad to take you in this evening, but I can't
possibly do it before."
"It is as I thought! He's altered too, like everybody else! Osiris is
dead and Seth rules the world again."
"Farewell! When the seven stars rise, our old Ethiopian slave, Nebununf,
will wait for you here."
"Nebununf, that old rogue? I never want to see him again."
"Yes, the very same."
"Him--well it's a good thing, when people stay as they were. To be sure I
know some people who can't say so much of themselves, and who instead of
minding their own business, pretend to heal inward diseases, and when a
faithful old servant . . ."
"Hold your tongue, and wait patiently till evening." These last words
were spoken seriously, and produced the desired impression. The old man
made another obeisance, and before his master left him, said: "I came
here under the protection of Phanes, the former commander of the Greek
mercenaries. He wishes very much to speak with you."
"That is his concern. He can come to me."
"You never leave that sick girl, whose eyes are as sound as . . ."
"Hib!"
"For all I care she may have a cataract in both. May Phanes come to you
this evening?"
"I wished to be alone with you."
"So did I; but the Greek seems to be in a great hurry, and he knows
nearly everything that I have to tell you."
"Have you been gossiping then?"
"No--not exactly--but . . ."
"I always thought you were a man to be trusted."
"So I was. But this Greek knows already a great deal of what I know, and
the rest . . ."
"Well?"
"The rest he got out of me, I hardly know how myself. If I did not wear
this amulet against an evil eye, I should have been obliged . . ."
"Yes, yes, I know the Athenian--I can forgive you. I should like him to
come with you this evening. But I see the sun is already high in the
heavens. I have no time to lose. Tell me in a few words what has
happened."
"I thought this evening . . ."
"No, I must have at least a general idea of what has happened before I
see the Athenian. Be brief."
"You have been robbed!"
"Is that all?"
"Is not that enough?"
"Answer me. Is that all?"
"Yes!"
"Then farewell."
"But Nebenchari!"
The physician did not even hear this exclamation; the gates of the harem
had already closed behind him.
When the Pleiades had risen, Nebenchari was to be found seated alone in
one of the magnificent rooms assigned to his use on the eastern side of
the palace, near to Kassandane's apartments. The friendly manner in which
he had welcomed his old servant had given place to the serious expression
which his face usually wore, and which had led the cheerful Persians to
call him a morose and gloomy man.
Nebenchari was an Egyptian priest through and through; a member of that
caste which never indulged in a jest, and never for a moment forgot to be
dignified and solemn before the public; but when among their relations
and their colleagues completely threw off this self-imposed restraint,
and gave way at times even to exuberant mirth.
Though he had known Phanes in Sais, he received him with cold politeness,
and, after the first greeting was ended, told Hib to leave them alone.
"I have come to you," said the Athenian, "to speak about some very
important affairs."
"With which I am already acquainted," was the Egyptian's curt reply.
"I am inclined to doubt that," said Phanes with an incredulous smile.
"You have been driven out of Egypt, persecuted and insulted by Psamtik,
and you have come to Persia to enlist Cambyses as an instrument of
revenge against my country."
"You are mistaken. I have nothing against your country, but all the more
against Amasis and his house. In Egypt the state and the king are one, as
you very well know."
"On the contrary, my own observations have led me to think that the
priests considered themselves one with the state."
"In that case you are better informed than I, who have always looked on
the kings of Egypt as absolute. So they are; but only in proportion as
they know how to emancipate themselves from the influence of your
caste.--Amasis himself submits to the priests now."
"Strange intelligence!"
"With which, however, you have already long been made acquainted."
"Is that your opinion?"
"Certainly it is. And I know with still greater certainty that once--you
hear me--once, he succeeded in bending the will of these rulers of his to
his own."
"I very seldom hear news from home, and do not understand what you are
speaking of."
"There I believe you, for if you knew what I meant and could stand there
quietly without clenching your fist, you would be no better than a dog
who only whimpers when he's kicked and licks the hand that torments him."
The physician turned pale. "I know that Amasis has injured and insulted
me," he said, "but at the same time I must tell you that revenge is far
too sweet a morsel to be shared with a stranger."
"Well said! As to my own revenge, however, I can only compare it to a
vineyard where the grapes are so plentiful, that I am not able to gather
them all myself."
"And you have come hither to hire good laborers."
"Quite right, and I do not even yet give up the hope of securing you to
take a share in my vintage."
"You are mistaken. My work is already done. The gods themselves have
taken it in hand. Amasis has been severely enough punished for banishing
me from country, friends and pupils into this unclean land."
"You mean by his blindness perhaps?"
"Possibly."
"Then you have not heard that Petammon, one of your colleagues, has
succeeded in cutting the skin, which covered the pupil of the eye and so
restoring Amasis' sight?"
The Egyptian started and ground his teeth; recovered his presence of
mind, however, in a moment, and answered: "Then the gods have punished
the father through the children."
"In what way? Psamtik suits his father's present mood very well. It is
true that Tachot is ill, but she prays and sacrifices with her father all
the more for that; and as to Nitetis, you and I both know that her death
will not touch him very closely."
"I really do not understand you."
"Of course not, so long as you fancy that I believe your beautiful
patient to be Amasis' daughter."
The Egyptian started again, but Phanes went on without appearing to
notice his emotion: "I know more than you suppose. Nitetis is the
daughter of Hophra, Amasis' dethroned predecessor. Amasis brought her up
as his own child-first, in order to make the Egyptians believe that
Hophra had died childless; secondly, in order to deprive her of her
rights to the throne; for you know women are allowed to govern on the
Nile."
"These are mere suppositions."
"For which, however, I can bring irrefragable proofs. Among the papers
which your old servant Hib brought with him in a small box, there must be
some letters from a certain Sonnophre, a celebrated accoucheur, your own
father, which . . ."
[To judge from the pictures on the monuments and from the 1st Chap.
of Exodus, it would seem that in ancient, as in modern Egypt,
midwives were usually called in to assist at the birth of children;
but it is also certain, that in difficult cases physicians were
employed also. In the hieratic medical papyrus in Berlin, women are
often spoken of as assisting at such times. In the medical Papyrus
Ebers certain portions are devoted to diseases peculiar to women.
"There were special rooms set aside in private houses for the birth
of children, as symbolical ones were reserved in the temples. These
chambers were called meschen, and from them was derived the name
given to midwives, to meschennu.]
"If that be the case, those letters are my property, and I have not the
slightest intention of giving them up; besides which you might search
Persia from one end to the other without finding any one who could
decipher my father's writing."
"Pardon me, if I point out one or two errors into which you have fallen.
First, this box is at present in my hands, and though I am generally
accustomed to respect the rights of property, I must assure you that, in
the present instance, I shall not return the box until its contents have
served my purpose. Secondly, the gods have so ordained, that just at this
moment there is a man in Babylon who can read every kind of writing known
to the Egyptian priests. Do you perhaps happen to know the name of
Onuphis?"
For the third time the Egyptian turned pale. "Are you certain," he said,
"that this man is still among the living?"
"I spoke to him myself yesterday. He was formerly, you know, high-priest
at Heliopolis, and was initiated into all your mysteries there. My wise
countryman, Pythagoras of Samos, came to Egypt, and after submitting to
some of your ceremonies, was allowed to attend the lessons given in the
schools for priests. His remarkable talents won the love of the great
Onuphis and he taught him all the Egyptian mysteries, which Pythagoras
afterwards turned to account for the benefit of mankind. My delightful
friend Rhodopis and I are proud of having been his pupils. When the rest
of your caste heard that Onuphis had betrayed the sacred mysteries, the
ecclesiastical judges determined on his death. This was to be caused by a
poison extracted from peach-kernels. The condemned man, however, heard of
their machinations, and fled to Naukratis, where he found a safe asylum
in the house of Rhodopis, whom he had heard highly praised by Pythagoras,
and whose dwelling was rendered inviolable by the king's letter. Here he
met Antimenidas the brother of the poet Alcarus of Lesbos, who, having
been banished by Pittakus, the wise ruler of Mitylene, had gone to
Babylon, and there taken service in the army of Nebuchadnezzar, the King
of Assyria. Antimenidas gave him letters to the Chaldians. Onuphis
travelled to the Euphrates, settled there, and was obliged to seek for
some means of earning his daily bread, as he had left Egypt a poor man.
He is now supporting himself in his old age, by the assistance which his
superior knowledge enables him to render the Chaldoeans in their
astronomical observations from the tower of Bel. Onuphis is nearly
eighty, but his mind is as clear as ever, and when I saw him yesterday
and asked him to help me, his eyes brightened as he promised to do so.
Your father was one of his judges, but he bears you no malice and sends
you a greeting."
Nebenchari's eyes were fixed thoughtfully on the ground during this tale.
When Phanes had finished, he gave him a penetrating look and said: "Where
are my papers?"
They are in Onuphis' hands. He is looking among them for the document I
want."
"I expected to hear that. Be so good as to tell me what the box is like,
which Hib thought proper to bring over to Persia?"
"It is a small ebony trunk, with an exquisitely-carved lid. In the centre
is a winged beetle, and on the four corners . . ."
"That contains nothing but a few of my father's notices and memorandums,"
said Nebenchari, drawing a deep breath of relief.
"They will very likely be sufficient for my purpose. I do not know
whether you have heard, that I stand as high as possible in Cambyses'
favor."
"So much the better for you. I can assure you, however, that the paper.
which would have been most useful to you have all been left behind in
Egypt."
"They were in a large chest made of sycamore-wood and painted in colors."
"How do you know that?"
"Because--now listen well to what I am going to say, Nebenchari--because
I can tell you (I do not swear, for our great master Pythagoras forbade
oaths), that this very chest, with all it contained, was burnt in the
grove of the temple of Neith, in Sais, by order of the king."
Phanes spoke slowly, emphasizing every syllable, and the words seemed to
strike the Egyptian like so many flashes of lightning. His quiet coolness
and deliberation gave way to violent emotion; his cheeks glowed and his
eyes flashed. But only for one single minute; then the strong emotion
seemed to freeze, his burning cheeks grew pale. "You are trying to make
me hate my friends, in order to gain me as your ally," he said, coldly
and calmly. "I know you Greeks very well. You are so intriguing and
artful, that there is no lie, no fraud, too base, if it will only help to
gain your purpose."
"You judge me and my countrymen in true Egyptian fashion; that is, they
are foreigners, and therefore must be bad men. But this time your
suspicions happen to be misplaced. Send for old Hib; he will tell you
whether I am right or not."
Nebenchari's face darkened, as Hib came into the room.
"Come nearer," said he in a commanding tone to the old man.
Hib obeyed with a shrug of the shoulders.
"Tell me, have you taken a bribe from this man? Yes or no? I must know
the truth; it can influence my future for good or evil. You are an old
and faithful servant, to whom I owe a great deal, and so I will forgive
you if you were taken in by his artifices, but I must know the truth. I
conjure you to tell me by the souls of your fathers gone to Osiris!"
The old man's sallow face turned ashy pale as he heard these words. He
gulped and wheezed some time before he could find an answer, and at last,
after choking down the tears which had forced their way to his eyes,
said, in a half-angry, half-whining tone: "Didn't I say so? they've
bewitched him, they've ruined him in this wicked land. Whatever a man
would do himself, he thinks others are capable of. Aye, you may look as
angry as you like; it matters but little to me. What can it matter indeed
to an old man, who has served the same family faithfully and honestly for
sixty years, if they call him at last a rogue, a knave, a traitor, nay
even a murderer, if it should take their fancy."
And the scalding tears flowed down over the old man's cheeks, sorely
against his will.
The easily-moved Phanes clapped him on the shoulder and said, turning to
Nebenchari: "Hib is a faithful fellow. I give you leave to call me a
rascal, if he has taken one single obolus from me."
The physician did not need Phanes' assurance; he had known his old
servant too well and too long not to be able to read his simple, open
features, on which his innocence was written as clearly as in the pages
of an open book. "I did not mean to reproach you, old Hib," he said
kindly, coming up to him. "How can any one be so angry at a simple
question?"
"Perhaps you expect me to be pleased at such a shameful suspicion?"
"No, not that; but at all events now you can tell me what has happened at
our house since I left."
"A pretty story that is! Why only to think of it makes my mouth as
bitter, as if I were chewing wormwood."
"You said I had been robbed."
"Yes indeed: no one was ever so robbed before. There would have been some
comfort if the knaves had belonged to the thieves' caste, for then we
should have got the best part of our property back again, and should not
after all have been worse off than many another; but when . . ."
[The cunning son of the architect, who robbed the treasure-house of
Rhampsinitus was, according to Herodotus, (II. 120), severely
punished; but in Diod. I. 80. we see that when thieves acknowledged
themselves to the authorities to be such, they were not punished,
though a strict watch was set over them. According to Diodorus,
there was a president of the thieves' caste, from whom the stolen
goods could be reclaimed on relinquishment of a fourth part of the
same. This strange rule possibly owed its rise to the law, which
compelled every Egyptian to appear once in each year before the
authorities of his district and give an account of his means of
subsistence. Those who made false statements were punished with
death. Diod. I. 77. Thus no one who valued his life could escape
the watchful eye of the police, and the thief sacrificed the best
part of his gains in order to save his life.]
"Keep to the point, for my time is limited."
"You need not tell me that; I see old Hib can't do anything right here in
Persia. Well, be it so, you're master; you must give orders; I am only
the servant, I must obey. I won't forget it. Well, as I was saying, it
was just at the time when the great Persian embassy came over to Sais to
fetch Nitetis, and made everybody stare at them as if they were monsters
or prodigies, that this shameful thing happened. I was sitting on the
mosquito-tower just as the sun was setting, playing with my little
grandson, my Baner's eldest boy--he's a fine strapping little lad now,
wonderfully sharp and strong for his age. The rogue was just telling me
how his father, the Egyptians do that when their wives leave the children
too much alone--had hidden his mother's shoes, and I was laughing
heartily, because my Baner won't let any of the little ones live with me,
she always says I spoil them, and so I was glad she should have the trick
played her--when all of a sudden there was such a loud knocking at the
house-door, that I thought there must be a fire and let the child drop
off my lap. Down the stairs I ran, three steps at a time, as fast as my
long legs would carry me, and unbarred the door. Before I had time to ask
them what they wanted, a whole crowd of temple-servants and
policemen--there must have been at least fifteen of them--forced their
way into the house. Pichi,--you know, that impudent fellow from the
temple of Neith,--pushed me back, barred the door inside and told the
police to put me in fetters if I refused to obey him. Of course I got
angry and did not use very civil words to them--you know that's my way
when I'm put out--and what does that bit of a fellow do--by our god
Thoth, the protector of knowledge who must know all, I'm speaking the
truth--but order them to bind my hands, forbid me--me, old Hib--to speak,
and then tell me that he had been told by the high-priest to order me
five-and-twenty strokes, if I refused to do his bidding. He showed me the
high-priest's ring, and so I knew there was nothing for it but to obey
the villain, whether I would or no. And what was his modest demand? Why,
nothing less than to give him all the written papers you had left behind.
But old Hib is not quite so stupid as to let himself be caught in that
way, though some people, who ought to know better, do fancy he can be
bribed and is no better than the son of an ass. What did I do then? I
pretended to be quite crushed into submission by the sight of the
signet-ring, begged Pichi as politely as I could to unfasten my hands,
and told him I would fetch the keys. They loosened the cords, I flew up
the stairs five steps at a time, burst open the door of your
sleeping-room, pushed my little grandson, who was standing by it, into
the room and barred it within. Thanks to my long legs, the others were so
far behind that I had time to get hold of the black box which you had
told me to take so much care of, put it into the child's arms, lift him
through the window on to the balcony which runs round the house towards
the inner court, and tell him to put it at once into the pigeon-house.
Then I opened the door as if nothing had happened, told Pichi the child
had had a knife in his mouth, and that that was the reason I had run
upstairs in such a hurry, and had put him out on the balcony to punish
him. That brother of a hippopotamus was easily taken in, and then he made
me show him over the house. First they found the great sycamore-chest
which you had told me to take great care of too, then the papyrus-rolls
on your writing-table, and so by degrees every written paper in the
house. They made no distinction, but put all together into the great
chest and carried it downstairs; the little black box, however, lay safe
enough in the pigeon-house. My grandchild is the sharpest boy in all
Sais!
"When I saw them really carrying the chest downstairs, all the anger I'd
been trying so hard to keep down burst out again. I told the impudent
fellows I would accuse them before the magistrates, nay, even before the
king if necessary, and if those confounded Persians, who were having the
city shown them, had not come up just then and made everybody stare at
them, I could have roused the crowd to take my side. The same evening I
went to my son-in-law-he is employed in the temple of Neith too, you
know,--and begged him to make every effort to find out what had become of
the papers. The good fellow has never forgotten the handsome dowry you
gave my Baner when he married her, and in three days he came and told me
he had seen your beautiful chest and all the rolls it contained burnt to
ashes. I was so angry that I fell ill of the jaundice, but that did not
hinder me from sending in a written accusation to the magistrates. The
wretches,--I suppose only because they were priests too,--refused to take
any notice of me or my complaint. Then I sent in a petition to the king,
and was turned away there too with the shameful threat, that I should be
considered guilty of high treason if I mentioned the papers again. I
valued my tongue too much to take any further steps, but the ground burnt
under my feet; I could not stay in Egypt, I wanted to see you, tell you
what they had done to you, and call on you, who are more powerful than
your poor servant, to revenge yourself. And besides, I wanted to see the
black box safe in your hands, lest they should take that from me too. And
so, old man as I am, with a sad heart I left my home and my grandchildren
to go forth into this foreign Typhon's land. Ah, the little lad was too
sharp! As I was kissing him, he said: 'Stay with us, grandfather. If the
foreigners make you unclean, they won't let me kiss you any more.' Baner
sends you a hearty greeting, and my son-in-law told me to say he had
found out that Psamtik, the crown-prince, and your rival, Petammon, had
been the sole causes of this execrable deed. I could not make up my mind
to trust myself on that Typhon's sea, so I travelled with an Arabian
trading caravan as far as Tadmor,--[Palmyra]--the Phoenician palm-tree
station in the wilderness," and then on to Carchemish, on the Euphrates,
with merchants from Sidon. The roads from Sardis and from Phoenicia meet
there, and, as I was sitting very weary in the little wood before the
station, a traveller arrived with the royal post-horses, and I saw at
once that it was the former commander of the Greek mercenaries."
"And I," interrupted Phanes, "recognized just as soon in you, the longest
and most quarrelsome old fellow that had ever come across my path. Oh,
how often I've laughed to see you scolding the children, as they ran
after you in the street whenever you appeared behind your master with the
medicine-chest. The minute I saw you too I remembered a joke which the
king once made in his own way, as you were both passing by. 'The old
man,' he said, reminds me of a fierce old owl followed by a flight of
small teasing birds, and Nebenchari looks as if he had a scolding wife,
who will some day or other reward him for healing other people's eyes by
scratching out his own!'"
"Shameful!" said the old man, and burst into a flood of execrations.
Nebenchari had been listening to his servant's tale in silence and
thought. He had changed color from time to time and on hearing that the
papers which had cost him so many nights of hard work had been burnt, his
fists clenched and he shivered as if seized by biting frost. Not one of
his movements escaped the Athenian. He understood human nature; he knew
that a jest is often much harder to bear than a grave affront, and
therefore seized this opportunity to repeat the inconsiderate joke which
Amasis had, it is true, allowed himself to make in one of his merry
moods. Phanes had calculated rightly, and had the pleasure of seeing,
that as he uttered the last words Nebenchari pressed his hand on a rose
which lay on the table before him, and crushed it to pieces. The Greek
suppressed a smile of satisfaction, and did not even raise his eyes from
the ground, but continued speaking: "Well, now we must bring the
travelling adventures of good old Hib to a close. I invited him to share
my carriage. At first he refused to sit on the same cushion with such a
godless foreigner, as I am, gave in, however, at last, had a good
opportunity at the last station of showing the world how many clever
processes of manipulation he had learnt from you and your father, in his
treatment of Oropastes' wounded brother; he reached Babylon at last safe
and sound, and there, as we could not get sight of you, owing to the
melancholy poisoning of your country-woman, I succeeded in obtaining him
a lodging in the royal palace itself. The rest you knew already."
Nebenchari bowed assent and gave Hib a sign to leave the room, which the
old man obeyed, grumbling and scolding in a low tone as he departed. When
the door had closed on him, Nebenchari, the man whose calling was to
heal, drew nearer to the soldier Phanes, and said: "I am afraid we cannot
be allies after all, Greek."
"Why not?"
"Because I fear, that your revenge will prove far too mild when compared
with that which I feel bound to inflict."
"On that head there is no need for solicitude," answered the Athenian.
"May I call you my ally then?"
"Yes," answered the other; "but only on one condition."
"And that is--?"
"That you will procure me an opportunity of seeing our vengeance with my
own eyes."
"That is as much as to say you are willing to accompany Cambyses' army to
Egypt?"
"Certainly I am; and when I see my enemies pining in disgrace and misery
I will cry unto them, 'Ah ha, ye cowards, the poor despised and exiled
physician, Nebenchari, has brought this wretchedness upon you!' Oh, my
books, my books! They made up to me for my lost wife and child. Hundreds
were to have learnt from them how to deliver the blind from the dark
night in which he lives, and to preserve to the seeing the sweetest gift
of the gods, the greatest beauty of the human countenance, the receptacle
of light, the seeing eye. Now that my books are burnt I have lived in
vain; the wretches have burnt me in burning my works. O my books, my
books!" And he sobbed aloud in his agony. Phanes came up and took his
band, saying: "The Egyptians have struck you, my friend, but me they have
maltreated and abused--thieves have broken into your granaries, but my
hearth and home have been burnt to ashes by incendiaries. Do you know,
man, what I have had to suffer at their hands? In persecuting me, and
driving me out of Egypt, they only did what they had a right to do; by
their law I was a condemned man; and I could have forgiven all they did
to me personally, for I loved Amasis, as a man loves his friend. The
wretch knew that, and yet he suffered them to commit a monstrous, an
incredible act--an act that a man's brain refuses to take in. They stole
like wolves by night into a helpless woman's house--they seized my
children, a girl and boy, the pride, the joy and comfort of my homeless,
wandering life. And how think you, did they treat them? The girl they
kept in confinement, on the pretext that by so doing they should prevent
me from betraying Egypt to Cambyses. But the boy--my beautiful, gentle
boy--my only son--has been murdered by Psamtik's orders, and possibly
with the knowledge of Amasis. My heart was withered and shrunk with exile
and sorrow, but I feel that it expands--it beats more joyfully now that
there is a hope of vengeance."
Nebenchari's sullen but burning glance met the flashing eye of the
Athenian as he finished his tale; he gave him his hand and said: "We are
allies."
The Greek clasped the offered hand and answered: "Our first point now is
to make sure of the king's favor."
"I will restore Kassandane's sight."
"Is that in your power?"
"The operation which removed Amasis' blindness was my own discovery.
Petammon stole it from my burnt papers."
"Why did you not exert your skill earlier?"
"Because I am not accustomed to bestow presents on my enemies."
Phanes shuddered slightly at these words, recovered himself, however, in
a moment, and said: "And I am certain of the king's favor too. The
Massagetan envoys have gone home to-day; peace has been granted them
and. . . ."
While he was speaking the door was burst open and one of Kassandane's
eunuchs rushed into the room crying: "The Princess Nitetis is dying!
Follow me at once, there is not a moment to lose."
The physician made a parting sign to his confederate, and followed the
eunuch to the dying-bed of the royal bride.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Blessings go as quickly as they come
Hast thou a wounded heart? touch it seldom
Nothing is perfectly certain in this world
Only two remedies for heart-sickness:--hope and patience
Remember, a lie and your death are one and the same
Scarcely be able to use so large a sum--Then abuse it
Whatever a man would do himself, he thinks others are capable of
When love has once taken firm hold of a man in riper years
AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS.
By Georg Ebers
Volume 8.
CHAPTER VIII.
The sun was already trying to break a path for his rays through the thick
curtains, that closed the window of the sick-room, but Nebenchari had not
moved from the Egyptian girl's bedside. Sometimes he felt her pulse, or
spread sweet-scented ointments on her forehead or chest, and then he
would sit gazing dreamily into vacancy. Nitetis seemed to have sunk into
a deep sleep after an attack of convulsions. At the foot of her bed stood
six Persian doctors, murmuring incantations under the orders of
Nebenchari, whose superior science they acknowledged, and who was seated
at the bed's head.
Every time he felt the sick girl's pulse he shrugged his shoulders, and
the gesture was immediately imitated by his Persian colleagues. From time
to time the curtain was lifted and a lovely head appeared, whose
questioning blue eyes fixed at once on the physician, but were always
dismissed with the same melancholy shrug. It was Atossa. Twice she had
ventured into the room, stepping so lightly as hardly to touch the thick
carpet of Milesian wool, had stolen to her friend's bedside and lightly
kissed her forehead, on which the pearly dew of death was standing, but
each time a severe and reproving glance from Nebenchari had sent her back
again into the next room, where her mother Kassandane was lying, awaiting
the end.
Cambyses had left the sick-room at sunrise, on seeing that Nitetis had
fallen asleep; he flung himself on to his horse, and accompanied by
Phanes, Prexaspes, Otanes, Darius, and a number of courtiers, only just
aroused from their sleep, took a wild ride through the game-park. He knew
by experience, that he could best overcome or forget any violent mental
emotion when mounted on an unmanageable horse.
Nebenchari started on hearing the sound of horses' hoofs in the distance.
In a waking dream he had seen Cambyses enter his native land at the head
of immense hosts; he had seen its cities and temples on fire, and its
gigantic pyramids crumbling to pieces under the powerful blows of his
mighty hand. Women and children lay in the smouldering ruins, and
plaintive cries arose from the tombs in which the very mummies moved like
living beings; and all these-priests, warriors, women, and children--the
living and the dead--all had uttered his,--Nebenchari's,--name, and had
cursed him as a traitor to his country. A cold shiver struck to his
heart; it beat more convulsively than the blood in the veins of the dying
girl at his side. Again the curtain was raised; Atossa stole in once more
and laid her hand on his shoulder. He started and awoke. Nebenchari had
been sitting three days and nights with scarcely any intermission by this
sick-bed, and such dreams were the natural consequence.
Atossa slipped back to her mother. Not a sound broke the sultry air of
the sick-room, and Nebenchiari's thoughts reverted to his dream. He told
himself that he was on the point of becoming a traitor and a criminal,
the visions he had just beheld passed before him again, but this time it
was another, and a different one which gained the foremost place. The
forms of Amasis, who had laughed at and exiled him,--of Psamtik and the
priests,--who had burnt his works,--stood near him; they were heavily
fettered and besought mercy at his hands. His lips moved, but this was
not the place in which to utter the cruel words which rose to them. And
then the stern man wiped away a tear as he remembered the long nights, in
which he had sat with the reed in his hand, by the dull light of the
lamp, carefully painting every sign of the fine hieratic character in
which he committed his ideas and experience to writing. He had discovered
remedies for many diseases of the eye, spoken of in the sacred books of
Thoth and the writings of a famous old physician of Byblos as incurable,
but, knowing that he should be accused of sacrilege by his colleagues, if
he ventured on a correction or improvement of the sacred writings, he had
entitled his work, "Additional writings on the treatment of diseases of
the eye, by the great god Thoth, newly discovered by the oculist
Nebenchari."
He had resolved on bequeathing his works to the library at Thebes, that
his experience might be useful to his successors and bring forth fruit
for the whole body of sufferers. This was to be his reward for the long
nights which he had sacrificed to science--recognition after death, and
fame for the caste to which he belonged. And there stood his old rival
Petammon, by the side of the crown-prince in the grove of Neith, and
stirred the consuming fire, after having stolen his discovery of the
operation of couching. Their malicious faces were tinged by the red glow
of the flames, which rose with their spiteful laughter towards heaven, as
if demanding vengeance. A little further off he saw in his dream Amasis
receiving his father's letters from the hands of the high-priest.
Scornful and mocking words were being uttered by the king; Neithotep
looked exultant.--In these visions Nebenchari was so lost, that one of
the Persian doctors was obliged to point out to him that his patient was
awake. He nodded in reply, pointing to his own weary eyes with a smile,
felt the sick girl's pulse, and asked her in Egyptian how she had slept.
"I do not know," she answered, in a voice that was hardly audible. "It
seemed to me that I was asleep, and yet I saw and heard everything that
had happened in the room. I felt so weak that I hardly knew whether I was
awake or asleep. Has not Atossa been here several times?"
"Yes."
"And Cambyses stayed with Kassandane until sunrise; then he went out,
mounted his horse Reksch, and rode into the game-park."
"How do you know that?"
"I saw it."
Nebenchari looked anxiously into the girl's shining eyes. She went on: "A
great many dogs have been brought into the court behind this house."
"Probably the king has ordered a hunt, in order to deaden the pain which
he feels at seeing you suffer."
"Oh, no. I know better what it means. Oropastes taught me, that whenever
a Persian dies dogs' are brought in, that the Divs may enter into them."
"But you are living, my mistress, and . . ."
"Oh, I know very well that I shall die. I knew that I had not many hours
more to live, even if I had not seen how you and the other physicians
shrugged your shoulders whenever you looked at me. That poison is
deadly."
"You are speaking too much, my mistress, it will hurt you."
"Oh let me speak, Nebenchari! I must ask you to do something for me
before I die."
"I am your servant."
"No, Nebenchari, you must be my friend and priest. You are not angry with
me for having prayed to the Persian gods? Our own Hathor was always my
best friend still. Yes, I see by your face that you forgiven me. Then you
must promise not to allow my corpse to be torn in pieces by dogs and
vultures. The thought is so very dreadful. You will promise to embalm my
body and ornament it with amulets?"
"If the king allows."
"Of course he will. How could Cambyses possibly refuse my last request?"
"Then my skill is at your service."
"Thank you; but I have still something else to ask."
"You must be brief. My Persian colleagues are already making signs to me,
to enjoin silence on you."
"Can't you send them away for a moment?"
"I will try to do so."
Nebenchari then went up and spoke to the Magi for a few minutes, and they
left the room. An important incantation, at which no one but the two
concerned might be present, and the application of a new and secret
antidotal poison were the pretexts which he had used in order to get rid
of them.
When they were alone, Nitetis drew a breath of relief and said: "Give me
your priestly blessing on my long journey into the nether world, and
prepare me for my pilgrimage to Osiris."
Nebenchari knelt down by her bed and in a low voice repeated hymns,
Nitetis making devotional responses.
The physician represented Osiris, the lord of the nether world--Nitetis
the soul, justifying itself before him.
When these ceremonies were ended the sick girl breathed more freely.
Nebenchari could not but feel moved in looking at this young suicide. He
felt confident that he had saved a soul for the gods of his native land,
had cheered the last sad and painful hours of one of God's good
creatures. During these last moments, compassion and benevolence had
excluded every bitter feeling; but when he remembered that this lovely
creature owed all her misery to Amasis too, the old black cloud of
thought darkened his mind again.--Nitetis, after lying silent for some
time, turned to her new friend with a pleasant smile, and said: "I shall
find mercy with the judges of the dead now, shall not I?"
"I hope and believe so."
"Perhaps I may find Tachot before the throne of Osiris, and my
father. . . ."
"Your father and mother are waiting for you there. Now in your last hour
bless those who begot you, and curse those who have robbed you of your
parents, your crown and your life."
"I do not understand you."
"Curse those who robbed you of your parents, crown and life, girl!" cried
the physician again, rising to his full height, breathing hard as he said
the words, and gazing down on the dying girl. "Curse those wretches,
girl! that curse will do more in gaining mercy from the judges of the
dead, than thousands of good works!" And as he said this he seized her
hand and pressed it violently.
Nitetis looked up uneasily into his indignant face, and stammered in
blind obedience, 'I curse."
"Those who robbed my parents of their throne and lives!"
"Those who robbed my parents of their throne and their lives," she
repeated after him, and then crying, "Oh, my heart!" sank back exhausted
on the bed.
Nebenchari bent down, and before the royal physicians could return,
kissed her forehead gently, murmuring: "She dies my confederate. The gods
hearken to the prayers of those who die innocent. By carrying the sword
into Egypt, I shall avenge king Hophra's wrongs as well as my own."
When Nitetis opened her eyes once more, a few hours later, Kassandane was
holding her right hand, Atossa kneeling at her feet, and Croesus standing
at the head of her bed, trying, with the failing strength of old age, to
support the gigantic frame of the king, who was so completely overpowered
by his grief, that he staggered like a drunken man. The dying girl's eyes
lighted up as she looked round on this circle. She was wonderfully
beautiful. Cambyses came closer and kissed her lips; they were growing
cold in death. It was the first kiss he had ever given her, and the last.
Two large tears sprang to her eyes; their light was fast growing dim; she
murmured Cambyses' name softly, fell back in Atossa's arms, and died.
We shall not give a detailed account of the next few hours: it would be
an unpleasant task to describe how, at a signal from the principal
Persian doctor, every one, except Nebenchari and Croesus, hastily left
the room; how dogs were brought in and their sagacious heads turned
towards the corpse in order to scare the demon of death;--how, directly
after Nitetis' death, Kassandane, Atossa and their entire retinue moved
into another house in order to avoid defilement;--how fire was
extinguished throughout the dwelling, that the pure element might be
removed from the polluting spirits of death;--how spells and exorcisms
were muttered, and how every person and thing, which had approached or
been brought into contact with the dead body, was subjected to numerous
purifications with water and pungent fluids.
The same evening Cambyses was seized by one of his old epileptic attacks.
Two days later he gave Nebenchari permission to embalm Nitetis' body in
the Egyptian manner, according to her last wish. The king gave way to the
most immoderate grief; he tore the flesh of his arms, rent his clothes
and strewed ashes on his head, and on his couch. All the magnates of his
court were obliged to follow his example. The troops mounted guard with
rent banners and muffled drums. The cymbals and kettle-drums of the
"Immortals" were bound round with crape. The horses which Nitetis had
used, as well as all which were then in use by the court, were colored
blue and deprived of their tails; the entire court appeared in mourning
robes of dark brown, rent to the girdle, and the Magi were compelled to
pray three days and nights unceasingly for the soul of the dead, which
was supposed to be awaiting its sentence for eternity at the bridge
Chinvat on the third night.
Neither the king, Kassandane, nor Atossa shrank from submitting to the
necessary purifications; they repeated, as if for one of their nearest
relations, thirty prayers for the dead, while, in a house outside the
city gates Nebenchari began to embalm her body in the most costly manner,
and according to the strictest rules of his art.
[Embalming was practised in three different ways. The first cost a
talent of silver (L225.); the second 20 Minae (L60.) and the third
was very inexpensive. Herod. II. 86-88. Diod. I. 9. The brain
was first drawn out through the nose and the skull filled with
spices. The intestines were then taken out, and the body filled in
like manner with aromatic spices. When all was finished, the corpse
was left 70 days in a solution of soda, and then wrapped in bandages
of byssus spread over with gum. The microscopical examinations of
mummy-bandages made by Dr. Ure and Prof. Czermak have proved that
byssus is linen, not cotton. The manner of embalming just described
is the most expensive, and the latest chemical researches prove that
the description given of it by the Greeks was tolerably correct. L.
Penicher maintains that the bodies were first somewhat dried in
ovens, and that then resin of the cedar-tree, or asphalte, was
poured into every opening. According to Herodotus, female corpses
were embalmed by women. Herod. II. 89. The subject is treated in
great detail by Pettigrew, History of Egyptian Mummies. London.
1834. Czermak's microscopical examinations of Egyptian mummies show
how marvellously the smallest portions of the bodies were preserved,
and confirm the statements of Herodotus on many points. The
monuments also contain much information in regard to embalming, and
we now know the purpose of nearly all the amulets placed with the
dead.]
For nine days Cambyses remained in a condition, which seemed little short
of insanity. At times furious, at others dull and stupefied, he did not
even allow his relations or the high-priest to approach him. On the
morning of the tenth day he sent for the chief of the seven judges and
commanded, that as lenient a sentence as possible should be pronounced on
Gaumata. Nitetis, on her dying-bed, had begged him to spare the life of
this unhappy youth.
One hour later the sentence was submitted to the king for ratification.
It ran thus: "Victory to the king! Inasmuch as Cambyses, the eye of the
world and the sun of righteousness, hath, in his great mercy, which is as
broad as the heavens and as inexhaustible as the great deep, commanded us
to punish the crime of the son of the Magi, Gaumata, with the indulgence
of a mother instead of with the severity of a judge, we, the seven judges
of the realm, have determined to grant his forfeited life. Inasmuch,
however, as by the folly of this youth the lives of the noblest and best
in this realm have been imperilled, and it may reasonably be apprehended
that he may again abuse the marvellous likeness to Bartja, the noble son
of Cyrus, in which the gods have been pleased in their mercy to fashion
his form and face, and thereby bring prejudice upon the pure and
righteous, we have determined to disfigure him in such wise, that in the
time to come it will be a light matter to discern between this, the most
worthless subject of the realm, and him who is most worthy. We therefore,
by the royal Will and command, pronounce sentence, that both the ears of
Gaumata be cut off, for the honor of the righteous and shame of the
impure."
Cambyses confirmed this sentence at once, and it was executed the same
day.
[With reference to Gaumata's punishment, the same which Herodotus
says was inflicted on the pretended Smerdis, we would observe that
even Persians of high rank were sometimes deprived of their ears.
In the Behistan inscription (Spiegel p. 15 and 21.) the ears, tongue
and nose of the man highest in rank among the rebels, were cut off.
Similar punishments are quoted by Brisson.]
Oropastes did not dare to intercede for his brother, though this
ignominious punishment mortified his ambitious mind more than even a
sentence of death could have done. As he was afraid that his own
influence and consideration might suffer through this mutilated brother,
he ordered him to leave Babylon at once for a country-house of his own on
Mount Arakadris.
During the few days which had just passed, a shabbily-dressed and
closely-veiled woman had watched day and night at the great gate of the
palace; neither the threats of the sentries nor the coarse jests of the
palace-servants could drive her from her post. She never allowed one of
the less important officials to pass without eagerly questioning him,
first as to the state of the Egyptian Princess, and then what had become
of Gaumata. When his sentence was told her as a good joke by a chattering
lamp-lighter, she went off into the strangest excitement, and astonished
the poor man so much by kissing his robe, that he thought she must be
crazed, and gave her an alms. She refused the money, but remained at her
post, subsisting on the bread which was given her by the compassionate
distributors of food. Three days later Gaumata himself, with his head
bound up, was driven out in a closed harmamaxa. She rushed to the
carriage and ran screaming by the side of it, until the driver stopped
his mules and asked what she wanted. She threw back her veil and showed
the poor, suffering youth her pretty face covered with deep blushes.
Gaumata uttered a low cry as he recognized her, collected himself,
however, in a moment, and said: "What do you want with me, Mandane?"
The wretched girl raised her hands beseechingly to him, crying: "Oh, do
not leave me, Gaumata! Take me with you! I forgive you all the misery you
have brought on me and my poor mistress. I love you so much, I will take
care of you and nurse you as if I were the lowest servant-girl."
A short struggle passed in Gaumata's mind. He was just going to open the
carriage-door and clasp Mandane-his earliest love-in his arms, when the
sound of horses' hoofs coming nearer struck on his ear, and looking round
he saw, a carriage full of Magi, among whom were several who had been his
companions at the school for priests. He felt ashamed and afraid of being
seen by the very youths, whom he had often treated proudly and haughtily
because he was the brother of the high-priest, threw Mandane a purse of
gold, which his brother had given him at parting, and ordered the driver
to go on as fast as possible. The mules galloped off. Mandane kicked the
purse away, rushed after the carriage and clung to it firmly. One of the
wheels caught her dress and dragged her down. With the strength of
despair she sprang up, ran after the mules, overtook them on a slight
ascent which had lessened their speed, and seized the reins. The driver
used his three-lashed whip, or scourge, the creatures reared, pulled the
girl down and rushed on. Her last cry of agony pierced the wounds of the
mutilated man like a sharp lance-thrust.
.....................
On the twelfth day after Nitetis' death Cambyses went out hunting, in the
hope that the danger and excitement of the sport might divert his mind.
The magnates and men of high rank at his court received him with thunders
of applause, for which he returned cordial thanks. These few days of
grief had worked a great change in a man so unaccustomed to suffering as
Cambyses. His face was pale, his raven-black hair and beard had grown
grey, and the consciousness of victory which usually shone in his eyes
was dimmed. Had he not, only too painfully, experienced that there was a
stronger will than his own, and that, easily as he could destroy, it did
not be in his power to preserve the life of the meanest creature? Before
starting, Cambyses mustered his troop of sportsmen, and calling Gobryas,
asked why Phanes was not there.
"My King did not order . . ."
"He is my guest and companion, once for all; call him and follow us."
Gobryas bowed, dashed back to the palace, and in half an hour reappeared
among the royal retinue with Phanes.
The Athenian was warmly welcomed by many of the group, a fact which seems
strange when we remember that courtiers are of all men the most prone to
envy, and a royal favorite always the most likely object to excite their
ill will. But Phanes seemed a rare exception to this rule. He had met the
Achaemenidae in so frank and winning a manner, had excited so many hopes
by the hints he had thrown out of an expected and important war, and had
aroused so much merriment by well-told jests, such as the Persians had
never heard before, that there were very few who did not welcome his
appearance gladly, and when--in company with the king--he separated from
the rest in chase of a wild ass, they openly confessed to one another,
that they had never before seen so perfect a man. The clever way in which
he had brought the innocence of the accused to light, the finesse which
he had shown in securing the king's favor, and the ease with which he had
learnt the Persian language in so short a time, were all subjects of
admiration. Neither was there one even of the Achaemenidae themselves,
who exceeded him in beauty of face or symmetry of figure. In the chase he
proved himself a perfect horseman, and in a conflict with a bear an
exceptionally courageous and skilful sportsman. On the way home, as the
courtiers were extolling all the wonderful qualities possessed by the
king's favorite, old Araspes exclaimed, "I quite agree with you that this
Greek, who by the way has proved himself a better soldier than anything
else, is no common man, but I am sure you would not praise him half as
much, if he were not a foreigner and a novelty."
Phanes happened to be only separated from the speaker by some thick
bushes, and heard these words. When the other had finished, he went up
and said, smiling: "I understood what you said and feel obliged to you
for your kind opinion. The last sentence, however, gave me even more
pleasure than the first, because it confirmed my own idea that the
Persians are the most generous people in the world--they praise the
virtues of other nations as much, or even more, than their own."
His hearers smiled, well pleased at this flattering remark, and Phanes
went on: "How different the Jews are now, for instance! They fancy
themselves the exclusive favorites of the gods, and by so doing incur the
contempt of all wise men, and the hatred of the whole world. And then the
Egyptians! You have no idea of the perversity of that people. Why, if the
priests could have their way entirely, (and they have a great deal of
power in their hands) not a foreigner would be left alive in Egypt, nor a
single stranger allowed to enter the country. A true Egyptian would
rather starve, than eat out of the same dish with one of us. There are
more strange, astonishing and wonderful things to be seen in that country
than anywhere else in the world. And yet, to do it justice, I must say
that Egypt has been well spoken of as the richest and most highly
cultivated land under the sun. The man who possesses that kingdom need
not envy the very gods themselves. It would be mere child's play to
conquer that beautiful country. Ten years there gave me a perfect insight
into the condition of things, and I know that their entire military caste
would not be sufficient to resist one such troop as your Immortals. Well,
who knows what the future may bring! Perhaps we may all make a little
trip together to the Nile some day. In my opinion, your good swords have
been rather long idle." These well-calculated words were received with
such shouts of applause, that the king turned his horse to enquire the
cause. Phanes answered quickly that the Achaemenidae were rejoicing in
the thought that a war might possibly be near at hand.
"What war?" asked the king, with the first smile that had been seen on
his face for many days.
"We were only speaking in general of the possibility of such a thing,"
answered Phanes carelessly; then, riding up to the king's side, his voice
took an impressive tone full of feeling, and looking earnestly into his
face, he began: "It is true, my Sovereign, that I was not born in this
beautiful country as one of your subjects, nor can I boast of a long
acquaintance with the most powerful of monarchs, but yet I cannot resist
the presumptuous, perhaps criminal thought, that the gods at my birth
appointed me to be your real friend. It is not your rich gifts that have
drawn me to you. I did not need them, for I belong to the wealthier class
of my countrymen, and I have no son,--no heir,--to whom I can bequeath my
treasures. Once I had a boy--a beautiful, gentle child;--but I was not
going to speak of that,--I . . . Are you offended at my freedom of
speech, my Sovereign?"
"What is there to offend me?" answered the king, who had never been
spoken to in this manner before, and felt strongly attracted to the
original foreigner.
"Till to-day I felt that your grief was too sacred to be disturbed, but
now the time has come to rouse you from it and to make your heart glow
once more. You will have to hear what must be very painful to you."
"There is nothing more now, that can grieve me."
"What I am going to tell you will not give you pain; on the contrary, it
will rouse your anger."
"You make me curious."
"You have been shamefully deceived; you and that lovely creature, who
died such an early death a few days ago."
Cambyses' eyes flashed a demand for further information.
"Amasis, the King of Egypt, has dared to make sport of you, the lord of
the world. That gentle girl was not his daughter, though she herself
believed that she was; she . . ."
"Impossible!"
"It would seem so, and yet I am speaking the simple truth. Amasis spun a
web of lies, in which he managed to entrap, not only the whole world, but
you too, my Sovereign. Nitetis, the most lovely creature ever born of
woman, was the daughter of a king, but not of the usurper Amasis. Hophra,
the rightful king of Egypt, was the father of this pearl among women. You
may well frown, my Sovereign. It is a cruel thing to be betrayed by one's
friends and allies."
Cambyses spurred his horse, and after a silence of some moments, kept by
Phanes purposely, that his words might make a deeper impression, cried,
"Tell me more! I wish to know everything."
"Hophra had been living twenty years in easy captivity in Sais after his
dethronement, when his wife, who had borne him three children and buried
them all, felt that she was about to give birth to a fourth. Hophra, in
his joy, determined to offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving in the temple of
Pacht, the Egyptian goddess supposed to confer the blessing of children,
when, on his way thither, a former magnate of his court, named
Patarbemis, whom, in a fit of unjust anger, he had ignominiously
mutilated, fell upon him with a troop of slaves and massacred him. Amasis
had the unhappy widow brought to his palace at once, and assigned her an
apartment next to the one occupied by his own queen Ladice, who was also
expecting soon to give birth to a child. A girl was born to Hophra's
widow, but the mother died in the same hour, and two days later Ladice
bore a child also.--But I see we are in the court of the palace. If you
allow, I will have the report of the physician, by whom this imposture
was effected, read before you. Several of his notes have, by a remarkable
conjuncture of circumstances, which I will explain to you later, fallen
into my hands. A former high-priest of Heliopolis, Onuphis, is now living
in Babylon, and understands all the different styles of writing in use
among his countrymen. Nebenchari will, of course, refuse to help in
disclosing an imposture, which must inevitably lead to the ruin of his
country."
"In an hour I expect to see you here with the man you have just spoken
of. Croesus, Nebenchari, and all the Achaemenidae who were in Egypt, will
have to appear also. I must have certainty before I can act, and your
testimony alone is not sufficient, because I know from Amasis, that you
have cause to feel a grudge against his house."
At the time appointed all were assembled before the king in obedience to
his command.
Onuphis, the former high-priest, was an old man of eighty. A pair of
large, clear, intelligent, grey eyes looked out of a head so worn and
wasted, as to be more like a mere skull than the head of a living man. He
held a large papyrus-roll in his gaunt hand, and was seated in an easy
chair, as his paralyzed limbs did not allow of his standing, even in the
king's presence. His dress was snow-white, as beseemed a priest, but
there were patches and rents to be seen here and there. His figure might
perhaps once have been tall and slender, but it was now so bent and
shrunk by age, privation and suffering, as to look unnatural and
dwarfish, in comparison with the size of his head.
Nebenchari, who revered Onuphis, not only as a high-priest deeply
initiated in the most solemn mysteries, but also on account of his great
age, stood by his side and arranged his cushions. At his left stood
Phanes, and then Croesus, Darius and Prexaspes.
The king sat upon his throne. His face was dark and stern as he broke the
silence with the following words:--"This noble Greek, who, I am inclined
to believe, is my friend, has brought me strange tidings. He says that I
have been basely deceived by Amasis, that my deceased wife was not his,
but his predecessor's daughter."
A murmur of astonishment ran through the assembly. "This old man is here
to prove the imposture." Onuphis gave a sign of assent.
"Prexaspes, my first question is to you. When Nitetis was entrusted to
your care, was it expressly said that she was the daughter of Amasis?"
"Expressly. Nebenchari had, it is true, praised Tachot to the noble
Kassandane as the most beautiful of the twin sisters; but Amasis insisted
on sending Nitetis to Persia. I imagined that, by confiding his most
precious jewel to your care, he meant to put you under a special
obligation; and as it seemed to me that Nitetis surpassed her sister, not
only in beauty but in dignity of character, I ceased to sue for the hand
of Tachot. In his letter to you too, as you will remember, he spoke of
confiding to you his most beautiful, his dearest child."
"Those were his words."
"And Nitetis was, without question, the more beautiful and the nobler of
the two sisters," said Croesus in confirmation of the envoy's remark.
"But it certainly did strike me that Tachot was her royal parents'
favorite."
"Yes," said Darius, "without doubt. Once, at a revel, Amasis joked Bartja
in these words: 'Don't look too deep into Tachot's eyes, for if you were
a god, I could not allow you to take her to Persia!' Psamtik was evidently
annoyed at this remark and said to the king, 'Father, remember Phanes.'"
"Phanes!"
"Yes, my Sovereign," answered the Athenian. "Once, when he was
intoxicated, Amasis let out his secret to me, and Psamtik was warning him
not to forget himself a second time."
"Tell the story as it occurred."
"On my return from Cyprus to Sais as a conqueror, a great entertainment
was given at court. Amasis distinguished me in every way, as having won a
rich province for him, and even, to the dismay of his own countrymen,
embraced me. His affection increased with his intoxication, and at last,
as Psamtik and I were leading him to his private apartments, he stopped
at the door of his daughter's room, and said: 'The girls sleep there. If
you will put away your own wife, Athenian, I will give you Nitetis. I
should like to have you for a son-in-law. There's a secret about that
girl, Phanes; she's not my own child.' Before his drunken father could
say more, Psamtik laid his hand before his mouth, and sent me roughly
away to my lodging, where I thought the matter over and conjectured what
I now, from reliable sources, know to be the truth. I entreat you,
command this old man to translate those parts of the physician
Sonnophre's journal, which allude to this story."
Cambyses nodded his consent, and the old man began to read in a voice far
louder than any one could have supposed possible from his infirm
appearance "On the fifth day of the month Thoth, I was sent for by the
king. I had expected this, as the queen was near her confinement. With my
assistance she was easily and safely delivered of a child--a weakly girl.
As soon as the nurse had taken charge of this child, Amasis led me behind
a curtain which ran across his wife's sleeping-apartment. There lay
another infant, which I recognized as the child of Hophra's widow, who
herself had died under my hands on the third day of the same month. The
king then said, pointing to this strong child, 'This little creature has
no parents, but, as it is written in the law that we are to show mercy to
the desolate orphans, Ladice and I have determined to bring her up as our
own daughter. We do not, however, wish that this deed should be made
known, either to the world or to the child herself, and I ask you to keep
the secret and spread a report that Ladice has given birth to twins. If
you accomplish this according to our wish, you shall receive to-day five
thousand rings of gold, and the fifth part of this sum yearly, during
your life. I made my obeisance in silence, ordered every one to leave the
sick room, and, when I again called them in, announced that Ladice had
given birth to a second girl. Amasis' real child received the name of
Tachot, the spurious one was called Nitetis."
At these words Cambyses rose from his seat, and strode through the hall;
but Onuphis continued, without allowing himself to be disturbed: "Sixth
day of the month Thoth. This morning I had just lain down to rest after
the fatigues of the night, when a servant appeared with the promised gold
and a letter from the king, asking me to procure a dead child, to be
buried with great ceremony as the deceased daughter of King Hophra. After
a great deal of trouble I succeeded, an hour ago, in obtaining one from a
poor girl who had given birth to a child secretly in the house of the old
woman, who lives at the entrance to the City of the Dead. The little one
had caused her shame and sorrow enough, but she would not be persuaded to
give up the body of her darling, until I promised that it should be
embalmed and buried in the most splendid manner. We put the little corpse
into my large medicine-chest, my son Nebenchari carried it this time
instead of my servant Hib, and so it was introduced into the room where
Hophra's widow had died. The poor girl's baby will receive a magnificent
funeral. I wish I might venture to tell her, what a glorious lot awaits
her darling after death. Nebenchari has just been sent for by the king."
At the second mention of this name, Cambyses stopped in his walk, and
said: "Is our oculist Nebenchari the man whose name is mentioned in this
manuscript?"
"Nebenchari," returned Phanes, "is the son of this very Sonnophre who
changed the children."
The physician did not raise his eyes; his face was gloomy and sullen.
Cambyses took the roll of papyrus out of Onuphis' band, looked at the
characters with which it was covered, shook his head, went up to
Nebenchari and said:
"Look at these characters and tell me if it is your father's writing."
Nebenchari fell on his knees and raised his hands.
"I ask, did your father paint these signs?"
"I do not know-whether . . . Indeed . . ."
"I will know the truth. Yes or no?"
"Yes, my King; but . . ."
"Rise, and be assured of my favor. Faithfulness to his ruler is the
ornament of a subject; but do not forget that I am your king now.
Kassandane tells me, that you are going to undertake a delicate operation
to-morrow in order to restore her sight. Are you not venturing too much?"
"I can depend on my own skill, my Sovereign."
"One more question. Did you know of this fraud?"
"Yes."
"And you allowed me to remain in error?"
"I had been compelled to swear secrecy and an oath . . ."
"An oath is sacred. Gobryas, see that both these Egyptians receive a
portion from my table. Old man, you seem to require better food."
"I need nothing beyond air to breathe, a morsel of bread and a draught of
water to preserve me from dying of hunger and thirst, a clean robe, that
I may be pleasing in the eyes of the gods and in my own, and a small
chamber for myself, that I may be a hindrance to no man. I have never
been richer than to-day."
"How so?"
"I am about to give away a kingdom."
"You speak in enigmas."
"By my translation of to-day I have proved, that your deceased consort
was the child of Hophra. Now, our law allows the daughter of a king to
succeed to the throne, when there is neither son nor brother living; if
she should die childless, her husband becomes her legitimate successor.
Amasis is a usurper, but the throne of Egypt is the lawful birthright of
Hophra and his descendants. Psamtik forfeits every right to the crown the
moment that a brother, son, daughter or son-in-law of Hophra appears. I
can, therefore, salute my present sovereign as the future monarch of my
own beautiful native land."
Cambyses smiled self-complacently, and Onuphis went on: "I have read in
the stars too, that Psamtik's ruin and your own accession to the throne
of Egypt have been fore-ordained."
"We'll show that the stars were right," cried the king, "and as for you,
you liberal old fellow, I command you to ask me any wish you like."
"Give me a conveyance, and let me follow your army to Egypt. I long to
close my eyes on the Nile."
"Your wish is granted. Now, my friends, leave me, and see that all those
who usually eat at my table are present at this evening's revel. We will
hold a council of war over the luscious wine. Methinks a campaign in
Egypt will pay better than a contest with the Massagetae."
He was answered by a joyful shout of "Victory to the king!" They all then
left the hall, and Cambyses, summoning his dressers, proceeded for the
first time to exchange his mourning garments for the splendid royal
robes.
Croesus and Phanes went into the green and pleasant garden lying on the
eastern side of the royal palace, which abounded in groves of trees,
shrubberies, fountains and flower-beds. Phanes was radiant with delight;
Croesus full of care and thought.
"Have you duly reflected," said the latter, "on the burning brand that
you have just flung out into the world?"
"It is only children and fools that act without reflection," was the
answer.
"You forget those who are deluded by passion."
"I do not belong to that number."
"And yet revenge is the most fearful of all the passions."
"Only when it is practised in the heat of feeling. My revenge is as cool
as this piece of iron; but I know my duty."
"The highest duty of a good man, is to subordinate his own welfare to
that of his country."
"That I know."
"You seem to forget, however, that with Egypt you are delivering your own
country over to the Persians."
"I do not agree with you there."
"Do you believe, that when all the rest of the Mediterranean coasts
belong to Persia, she will leave your beautiful Greece untouched?"
"Certainly not, but I know my own countrymen; I believe them fully
capable of a victorious resistance to the hosts of the barbarians, and am
confident that their courage and greatness will rise with the nearness of
the danger. It will unite our divided tribes into one great nation, and
be the ruin of the tyrants."
"I cannot argue with you, for I am no longer acquainted with the state of
things in your native country, and besides, I believe you to be a wise
man--not one who would plunge a nation into ruin merely for the
gratification of his own ambition. It is a fearful thing that entire
nations should have to suffer for the guilt of one man, if that man be
one who wears a crown. And now, if my opinion is of any importance to
you, tell me what the deed was which has roused your desire of
vengeance."
"Listen then, and never try again to turn me from my purpose. You know
the heir to the Egyptian throne, and you know Rhodopis too. The former
was, for many reasons, my mortal enemy, the latter the friend of every
Greek, but mine especially. When I was obliged to leave Egypt, Psamtik
threatened me with his vengeance; your son Gyges saved my life. A few
weeks later my two children came to Naukratis, in order to follow me out
to Sigeum. Rhodopis took them kindly under her protection, but some
wretch had discovered the secret and betrayed it to the prince. The very
next night her house was surrounded and searched,--my children found and
taken captive. Amasis had meanwhile become blind, and allowed his
miserable son to do what he liked; the wretch dared to . . ."
"Kill your only son?"
"You have said it."
"And your other child?"
"The girl is still in their hands."
"They will do her an injury when they hear . . ."
"Let her die. Better go to one's grave childless, than unrevenged."
"I understand. I cannot blame you any longer. The boy's blood must be
revenged."
And so saying, the old man pressed the Athenian's right hand. The latter
dried his tears, mastered his emotion, and cried: "Let us go to the
council of war now. No one can be so thankful for Psamtik's infamous
deeds as Cambyses. That man with his hasty passions was never made to be
a prince of peace."
"And yet it seems to me the highest duty of a king is to work for the
inner welfare of his kingdom. But human beings are strange creatures;
they praise their butchers more than their benefactors. How many poems
have been written on Achilles! but did any one ever dream of writing
songs on the wise government of Pittakus?"
"More courage is required to shed blood, than to plant trees."
"But much more kindness and wisdom to heal wounds, than to make them.--I
have still one question which I should very much like to ask you, before
we go into the hall. Will Bartja be able to stay at Naukratis when Amasis
is aware of the king's intentions?"
"Certainly not. I have prepared him for this, and advised his assuming a
disguise and a false name."
"Did he agree?"
"He seemed willing to follow my advice."
"But at all events it would be well to send a messenger to put him on his
guard."
"We will ask the king's permission."
"Now we must go. I see the wagons containing the viands of the royal
household just driving away from the kitchen."
"How many people are maintained from the king's table daily?"
"About fifteen thousand."
"Then the Persians may thank the gods, that their king only takes one
meal a day."
[This immense royal household is said to have cost 400 talents, that
is (L90,000.) daily. Athenaus, Deipn. p. 607.]
CHAPTER IX.
Six weeks after these events a little troop of horsemen might have been
seen riding towards the gates of Sardis. The horses and their riders were
covered with sweat and dust. The former knew that they were drawing near
a town, where there would be stables and mangers, and exerted all their
remaining powers; but yet their pace did not seem nearly fast enough to
satisfy the impatience of two men, dressed in Persian costume, who rode
at the head of the troop.
The well-kept royal road ran through fields of good black, arable land,
planted with trees of many different kinds. It crossed the outlying spurs
of the Tmolus range of mountains. At their foot stretched rows of olive,
citron and plane-trees, plantations of mulberries and vines; at a higher
level grew firs, cypresses and nut-tree copses. Fig-trees and date-palms,
covered with fruit, stood sprinkled over the fields; and the woods and
meadows were carpeted with brightly-colored and sweetly-scented flowers.
The road led over ravines and brooks, now half dried up by the heat of
summer, and here and there the traveller came upon a well at the side of
the road, carefully enclosed, with seats for the weary, and sheltering
shrubs. Oleanders bloomed in the more damp and shady places; slender
palms waved wherever the sun was hottest. Over this rich landscape hung a
deep blue, perfectly cloudless sky, bounded on its southern horizon by
the snowy peaks of the Tmolus mountains, and on the west by the Sipylus
range of hills, which gave a bluish shimmer in the distance.
The road went down into the valley, passing through a little wood of
birches, the stems of which, up to the very tree-top, were twined with
vines covered with bunches of grapes.
The horsemen stopped at a bend in the road, for there, before them, in
the celebrated valley of the Hermus, lay the golden Sardis, formerly the
capital of the Lydian kingdom and residence of its king, Croesus.
Above the reed-thatched roofs of its numerous houses rose a black, steep
rock; the white marble buildings on its summit could be seen from a great
distance. These buildings formed the citadel, round the threefold walls
of which, many centuries before, King Meles had carried a lion in order
to render them impregnable. On its southern side the citadel-rock was not
so steep, and houses had been built upon it. Croesus' former palace lay
to the north, on the golden-sanded Pactolus. This reddish-colored river
flowed above the market-place, (which, to our admiring travellers, looked
like a barren spot in the midst of a blooming meadow), ran on in a
westerly direction, and then entered a narrow mountain valley, where it
washed the walls of the temple of Cybele.
Large gardens stretched away towards the east, and in the midst of them
lay the lake Gygaeus, covered with gay boats and snowy swans, and
sparkling like a mirror.
A short distance from the lake were a great number of artificial mounds,
three of which were especially noticeable from their size and height.
[See also Hamilton's Asia Minor, I. P. 145. Herodotus (I. 93.)
calls the tombs of the Lydian kings the largest works of human
hands, next to the Egyptian and Babylonian. These cone-shaped hills
can be seen to this day, standing near the ruins of Sardis, not far
from the lake of Gygaea. Hamilton (Asia Minor, I. p. i) counted
some sixty of them, and could not ride round the hill of Alayattes
in less than ten minutes. Prokesch saw 100 such tumuli. The
largest, tomb of Alyattes, still measures 3400 feet in
circumference, and the length of its slope is 650 feet. According
to Prokesch, gigantic Phallus columns lie on some of these graves.]
"What can those strange-looking earth-heaps mean?" said Darius, the
leader of the troop, to Prexaspes, Cambyses' envoy, who rode at his side.
"They are the graves of former Lydian kings," was the answer. "The middle
one is in memory of the princely pair Panthea and Abradatas, and the
largest, that one to the left, was erected to the father of Croesus,
Alyattes. It was raised by the tradesmen, mechanics, and girls, to their
late king, and on the five columns, which stand on its summit, you can
read how much each of these classes contributed to the work. The girls
were the most industrious. Gyges' grandfather is said to have been their
especial friend."
"Then the grandson must have degenerated very much from the old stock."
"Yes, and that seems the more remarkable, because Croesus himself in his
youth was by no means averse to women, and the Lydians generally are
devoted to such pleasures. You see the white walls of that temple yonder
in the midst of its sacred grove. That is the temple of the goddess of
Sardis, Cybele or Ma, as they call her. In that grove there is many a
sheltered spot where the young people of Sardis meet, as they say, in
honor of their goddess."
"Just as in Babylon, at the festival of Mylitta."
"There is the same custom too on the coast of Cyprus. When I landed there
on the way back from Egypt, I was met by a troop of lovely girls, who,
with songs, dances, and the clang of cymbals, conducted me to the sacred
grove of their goddess."
"Well, Zopyrus will not grumble at Bartja's illness."
"He will spend more of his time in the grove of Cybele, than at his
patient's bedside. How glad I shall be to see that jolly fellow again!"
"Yes, he'll keep you from falling into those melancholy fits that you
have been so subject to lately." "You are quite right to blame me for
those fits, and I must not yield to them, but they are not without
ground. Croesus says we only get low-spirited, when we are either too
lazy or too weak to struggle against annoyances, and I believe he is
right. But no one shall dare to accuse Darius of weakness or idleness. If
I can't rule the world, at least I will be my own master." And as he said
these words, the handsome youth drew himself up, and sat erect in his
saddle. His companion gazed in wonder at him.
"Really, you son of Hystaspes," he said, "I believe you must be meant for
something great. It was not by chance that, when you were still a mere
child, the gods sent their favorite Cyrus that dream which induced him to
order you into safe keeping."
"And yet my wings have never appeared."
"No bodily ones, certainly; but mental ones, likely enough. Young man,
young man, you're on a dangerous road."
"Have winged creatures any need to be afraid of precipices?"
"Certainly; when their strength fails them."
"But I am strong."
"Stronger creatures than you will try to break your pinions."
"Let them. I want nothing but what is right, and shall trust to my star."
"Do you know its name?"
"It ruled in the hour of my birth, and its name is Anahita."
"I think I know better. A burning ambition is the sun, whose rays guide
all your actions. Take care; I tried that way myself once; it leads to
fame or to disgrace, but very seldom to happiness. Fame to the ambitious
is like salt water to the thirsty; the more he gets, the more he wants. I
was once only a poor soldier, and am now Cambyses' ambassador. But you,
what can you have to strive for? There is no man in the kingdom greater
than yourself, after the sons of Cyrus . . . Do my eyes deceive me?
Surely those two men riding to meet us with a troop of horsemen must be
Gyges and Zopyrus. The Angare, who left the inn before us, must have told
them of our coming."
"To be sure. Look at that fellow Zopyrus, how he's waving and beckoning
with that palm-leaf."
"Here, you fellows, cut us a few twigs from those bushes-quick. We'll
answer his green palm-leaf with a purple pomegranate-branch."
In a few minutes the friends had embraced one another, and the two bands
were riding together into the populous town, through the gardens
surrounding the lake Gygaeus, the Sardians' place of recreation. It was
now near sunset, a cooler breeze was beginning to blow, and the citizens
were pouring through the gates to enjoy themselves in the open air.
Lydian and Persian warriors, the former wearing richly-ornamented
helmets, the latter tiaras in the form of a cylinder, were following
girls who were painted and wreathed. Children were being led to the lake
by their nurses, to see the swans fed. An old blind man was seated under
a plane-tree, singing sad ditties to a listening crowd and accompanying
them on the Magadis, the twenty-stringed Lydian lute. Youths were
enjoying themselves at games of ball, ninepins, and dice, and half-grown
girls screaming with fright, when the ball hit one of their group or
nearly fell into the water.
The travellers scarcely noticed this gay scene, though at another time it
would have delighted them. They were too much interested in enquiring
particulars of Bartja's illness and recovery.
At the brazen gates of the palace which had formerly belonged to Croesus,
they were met by Oroetes, the satrap of Sardis, in a magnificent
court-dress overloaded with ornaments. He was a stately man, whose small
penetrating black eyes looked sharply out from beneath a bushy mass of
eyebrow. His satrapy was one of the most important and profitable in the
entire kingdom, and his household could bear a comparison with that of
Cambyses in richness and splendor. Though he possessed fewer wives and
attendants than the king, it was no inconsiderable troop of guards,
slaves, eunuchs and gorgeously-dressed officials, which appeared at the
palace-gates to receive the travellers.
The vice-regal palace, which was still kept up with great magnificence,
had been, in the days when Croesus occupied it, the most splendid of
royal residences; after the taking of Sardis, however, the greater part
of the dethroned king's treasures and works of art had been sent to
Cyrus's treasure-house in Pasargadae. When that time of terror had
passed, the Lydians brought many a hidden treasure into the light of day
once more, and, by their industry and skill in art during the peaceful
years which they enjoyed under Cyrus and Cambyses, recovered their old
position so far, that Sardis was again looked upon as one of the
wealthiest cities of Asia Minor, and therefore, of the world.
Accustomed as Darius and Prexaspes were to royal splendor, they were
still astonished at the beauty and brilliancy of the satrap's palace. The
marble work, especially, made a great impression on them, as nothing of
the kind was to be found in Babylon, Susa or Ecbatane, where burnt brick
and cedar-wood supply the place of the polished marble.
[The palace of Persepolis did not exist at the date of our story.
It was built partly of black stone from Mount Rachmed, and partly of
white marble; it was probably begun by Darius. The palace of Susa
was built of brick, (Strabo p. 728) that of Ecbatana of wood
overlaid with plates of gold of immense value, and roofed with tiles
made of the precious metals.]
They found Bartja lying on a couch in the great hall; he looked very
pale, and stretched out his arms towards them.
The friends supped together at the satrap's table and then retired to
Bartja's private room, in order to enjoy an undisturbed conversation.
"Well, Bartja, how did you come by this dangerous illness?" was Darius'
first question after they were seated.
"I was thoroughly well, as you know," said Bartja, "when we left Babylon,
and we reached Germa, a little town on the Sangarius, without the
slightest hindrance. The ride was long and we were very tired, burnt too
by the scorching May sun, and covered with dust; the river flows by the
station, and its waves looked so clear and bright--so inviting for a
bathe--that in a minute Zopyrus and I were off our horses, undressed, and
in the water. Gyges told us we were very imprudent, but we felt confident
that we were too much inured to such things to get any harm, and very
much enjoyed our swim in the cool, green water. Gyges, perfectly calm as
usual, let us have our own way, waited till our bath was over, and then
plunged in himself.
"In two hours we were in our saddles again, pushing on as if for our very
lives, changing horses at every station, and turning night into day.
"We were near Ipsus, when I began to feel violent pains in the head and
limbs. I was ashamed to say anything about it and kept upright on my
saddle, until we had to take fresh horses at Bagis. Just as I was in the
very act of mounting, I lost my senses and strength, and fell down on the
ground in a dead faint."
"Yes, a pretty fright you gave us," interrupted Zopyrus, "by dropping
down in that fashion. It was fortunate that Gyges was there, for I lost
my wits entirely; he, of course, kept his presence of mind, and after
relieving his feelings in words not exactly flattering to us two, he
behaved like a circumspect general.--A fool of a doctor came running up
and protested that it was all over with poor Bart, for which I gave him a
good thrashing."
"Which he didn't particularly object to," said the satrap, laughing,
"seeing that you told them to lay a gold stater on every stripe."
"Yes, yes, my pugnacity costs me very dear sometimes. But to our story.
As soon as Bartja had opened his eyes, Gyges sent me off to Sardis to
fetch a good physician and an easy travelling-carriage. That ride won't
so soon be imitated. An hour before I reached the gates my third horse
knocked up under me, so I had to trust to my own legs, and began running
as fast as I could. The people must all have thought me mad. At last I
saw a man on horseback--a merchant from Kelaenze--dragged him from his
horse, jumped into the saddle, and, before the next morning dawned, I was
back again with our invalid, bringing the best physician in Sardis, and
Oroetes' most commodious travelling-carriage. We brought him to this
house at a slow footpace, and here a violent fever came on, he became
delirious, talked all the nonsense that could possibly come into a human
brain, and made us so awfully anxious, that the mere remembrance of that
time brings the big drops of perspiration to my forehead."
Bartja took his friend's hand: "I owe my life to him and Gyges," said he,
turning to Darius. "Till to-day, when they set out to meet you, they have
never left me for a minute; a mother could not have nursed her sick child
more carefully. And Oroetes, I am much obliged to you too; doubly so
because your kindness subjected you to annoyance."
"How could that be?" asked Darius.
"That Polykrates of Samos, whose name we heard so often in Egypt, has the
best physician that Greece has ever produced. While I was lying here ill,
Oroetes wrote to this Democedes, making him immense promises, if he would
only come to Sardis directly. The Sainian pirates, who infest the whole
Ionian coast, took the messenger captive and brought Oroetes' letter to
their master Polykrates. He opened it, and sent the messenger back with
the answer, that Democedes was in his pay, and that if Oroetes needed his
advice he must apply to Polykrates himself. Our generous friend submitted
for my sake, and asked the Samian to send his physician to Sardis."
"Well," said Prexaspes, "and what followed?" The proud island-prince sent
him at once. He cured me, as you see, and left us a few days ago loaded
with presents."
"Well," interrupted Zopyrus, "I can quite understand, that Polykrates
likes to keep his physician near him. I assure you, Darius, it would not
be easy to find his equal. He's as handsome as Minutscher, as clever as
Piran Wisa, as strong as Rustem, and as benevolent and helpful as the god
Soma. I wish you could have seen how well he threw those round metal
plates he calls discs. I am no weakling, but when we wrestled he soon
threw me. And then he could tell such famous stories--stories that made a
man's heart dance within him."
[This very Oroetes afterwards succeeded in enticing Polykrates to
Sardis and there crucified him. Herod. III. 120-125. Valerius
Maximus VI. 9. 5.]
"We know just such a fellow too," said Darius, smiling at his friend's
enthusiasm. "That Athenian Phanes, who came to prove our innocence."
"The physician Democedes is from Crotona, a place which must be somewhere
very near the setting sun."
"But is inhabited by Greeks, like Athens." added Oroetes. "Ah, my young
friends, you must beware of those fellows; they're as cunning, deceitful,
and selfish, as they are strong, clever, and handsome."
"Democedes is generous and sincere," cried Zopyrus.
"And Croesus himself thinks Phanes not only an able, but a virtuous man,"
added Darius.
"Sappho too has always, and only spoken well of the Athenian," said
Bartja, in confirmation of Darius's remark. "But don't let us talk any
more about these Greeks," he went on. "They give Oroetes so much trouble
by their refractory and stubborn conduct, that he is not very fond of
them."
"The gods know that," sighed the satrap. "It's more difficult to keep one
Greek town in order, than all the countries between the Euphrates and the
Tigris."
While Oroetes was speaking, Zopyrus had gone to the window. "The stars
are already high in the heavens," he said, "and Bartja is tired; so make
haste, Darius, and tell us something about home."
The son of Hystaspes agreed at once, and began by relating the events
which we have heard already. Bartja, especially, was distressed at
hearing of Nitetis' sad end, and the discovery of Amasis' fraud filled
them all with astonishment. After a short pause, Darius went on:
"When once Nitetis' descent had been fully proved, Cambyses was like a
changed man. He called a council of war, and appeared at table in the
royal robes instead of his mourning garments. You can fancy what
universal joy the idea of a war with Egypt excited. Even Croesus, who you
know is one of Amasis' well-wishers, and advises peace whenever it is
possible, had not a word to say against it. The next morning, as usual,
what had been resolved on in intoxication was reconsidered by sober
heads; after several opinions had been given, Phanes asked permission to
speak, and spoke I should think for an hour. But how well! It was as if
every word he said came direct from the gods. He has learnt our language
in a wonderfully short time, but it flowed from his lips like honey.
Sometimes he drew tears from every eye, at others excited stormy shouts
of joy, and then wild bursts of rage. His gestures were as graceful as
those of a dancing-girl, but at the same time manly and dignified. I
can't repeat his speech; my poor words, by the side of his, would sound
like the rattle of a drum after a peal of thunder. But when at last,
inspired and carried away by his eloquence, we had unanimously decided on
war, he began to speak once more on the best ways and means of
prosecuting it successfully."
Here Darius was obliged to stop, as Zopyrus had fallen on his neck in an
ecstasy of delight. Bartja, Gyges and Oroetes were not less delighted,
and they all begged him to go on with his tale.
"Our army," began Darius afresh, "ought to be at the boundaries of Egypt
by the month Farwardin, (March) as the inundation of the Nile, which
would hinder the march of our infantry, begins in Murdad (July). Phanes
is now on his way to the Arabians to secure their assistance; in hopes
that these sons of the desert may furnish our army with water and guides
through their dry and thirsty land. He will also endeavor to win the rich
island of Cyprus, which he once conquered for Amasis, over to our side.
As it was through his mediation that the kings of the island were allowed
to retain their crowns, they will be willing to listen to his advice. In
short the Athenian leaves nothing uncared for, and knows every road and
path as if he were the sun himself He showed us a picture of the world on
a plate of copper."
Oroetes nodded and said, "I have such a picture of the world too. A
Milesian named Hekataeus, who spends his life in travelling, drew it, and
gave it me in exchange for a free-pass."
[Hekataeus of Miletus maybe called "the father of geography," as
Herodotus was "the father of history." He improved the map made by
Anaximander, and his great work, "the journey round the world," was
much prized by the ancients; but unfortunately, with the exception
of some very small fragments, has now perished. Herodotus assures
us, (V. 36.) that Hekataeus was intimately acquainted with every
part of the Persian empire, and had also travelled over Egypt. he
lived at the date of our narrative, having been born at Miletus 550
B. C. He lived to see the fall of his native city in 4966 B. C.
His map has been restored by Klausen and can be seen also in Mure's
Lan. and Lit. of Ancient Greece. Vol. IV. Maps existed, however,
much earlier, the earliest known being one of the gold-mines, drawn
very cleverly by an Egyptian priest, and so well sketched as to give
a pretty clear idea of the part of the country intended. It is
preserved in the Egyptian Museum at Turin.]
"What notions these Greeks have in their heads!" exclaimed Zopyrus, who
could not explain to himself what a picture of the world could look like.
"To-morrow I will show you my copper tablet, said Oroetes, but now we
must allow Darius to go on."
"So Phanes has gone to Arabia," continued Darius, "and Prexaspes was sent
hither not only to command you, Oroetes, to raise as many forces as
possible, especially Ionians and Carians, of whom Phanes has offered to
undertake the command, but also to propose terms of alliance to
Polykrates."
"To that pirate!" asked Oroetes, and his face darkened.
"The very same," answered Prexaspes, not appearing to notice the change
in Oroetes' face. "Phanes has already received assurances from this
important naval power, which sound as if we might expect a favorable
answer to my proposal."
"The Phoenician, Syrian and Ionian ships of war would be quite sufficient
to cope with the Egyptian fleet."
"There you are right; but if Polykrates were to declare against us, we
should not be able to hold our own at sea; you say yourself that he is
all-powerful in the AEgean."
"Still I decidedly disapprove of entering into treaty with such a
robber."
"We want powerful allies, and Polykrates is very powerful at sea. It will
be time to humble him, when we have used him to help us in conquering
Egypt. For the present I entreat you to suppress all personal feeling,
and keep the success of our great plan alone in view. I am empowered to
say this in the king's name, and to show his ring in token thereof."
Oroetes made a brief obeisance before this symbol of despotism, and
asked: "What does Cambyses wish me to do?"
"He commands you to use every means in your power to secure an alliance
with the Samian; and also to send your troops to join the main army on
the plains of Babylon as soon as possible."
The satrap bowed and left the room with a look betraying irritation and
defiance.
When the echo of his footsteps had died away among the colonnades of the
inner court, Zopyrus exclaimed: "Poor fellow, it's really very hard for
him to have to meet that proud man, who has so often behaved insolently
to him, on friendly terms. Think of that story about the physician for
instance."
"You are too lenient," interrupted Darius. "I don't like this Oroetes. He
has no right to receive the king's commands in that way. Didn't you see
him bite his lips till they bled, when Prexaspes showed him the king's
ring?"
"Yes," cried the envoy, "he's a defiant, perverse man. He left the room
so quickly, only because he could not keep down his anger any longer."
"Still," said Bartja, "I hope you will keep his conduct a secret from my
brother, for he has been very good to me."
Prexaspes bowed, but Darius said: "We must keep an eye on the fellow.
Just here, so far from the king's gate and in the midst of nations
hostile to Persia, we want governors who are more ready to obey their
king than this Oroetes seems to be. Why, he seems to fancy he is King of
Lydia!"
"Do you dislike the satrap?" said Zopyrus.
"Well, I think I do," was the answer. "I always take an aversion or a
fancy to people at first sight, and very seldom find reason to change my
mind afterwards. I disliked Oroetes before I heard him speak a word, and
I remember having the same feeling towards Psamtik, though Amasis took my
fancy."
"There's no doubt that you're very different from the rest of us," said
Zopyrus laughing, "but now, to please me, let this poor Oroetes alone.
I'm glad he's gone though, because we can talk more freely about home.
How is Kassandane? and your worshipped Atossa? Croesus too, how is he?
and what are my wives about? They'll soon have a new companion. To-morrow
I intend to sue for the hand of Oroetes' pretty daughter. We've talked a
good deal of love with our eyes already. I don't know whether we spoke
Persian or Syrian, but we said the most charming things to one another."
The friends laughed, and Darius, joining in their merriment, said: "Now
you shall hear a piece of very good news. I have kept it to the last,
because it is the best I have. Now, Bartja, prick up your ears. Your
mother, the noble Kassandane, has been cured of her blindness! Yes, yes,
it is quite true.--Who cured her? Why who should it be, but that crabbed
old Nebenchari, who has become, if possible, moodier than ever. Come,
now, calm yourselves, and let me go on with my story; or it will be
morning before Bartja gets to sleep. Indeed. I think we had better
separate now: you've heard the best, and have something to dream about
What, you will not? Then, in the name of Mithras, I must go on, though it
should make my heart bleed.
"I'll begin with the king. As long as Phanes was in Babylon, he seemed to
forget his grief for Nitetis.
"The Athenian was never allowed to leave him. They were as inseparable as
Reksch and Rustem. Cambyses had no time to think of his sorrow, for
Phanes had always some new idea or other, and entertained us all, as well
as the king, marvellously. And we all liked him too; perhaps, because no
one could really envy him. Whenever he was alone, the tears came into his
eyes at the thought of his boy, and this made his great cheerfulness--a
cheerfulness which he always managed to impart to the king, Bartja,--the
more admirable. Every morning he went down to the Euphrates with Cambyses
and the rest of us, and enjoyed watching the sons of the Achaemenidae at
their exercises. When he saw them riding at full speed past the
sand-hills and shooting the pots placed on them into fragments with their
arrows, or throwing blocks of wood at one another and cleverly evading
the blows, he confessed that he could not imitate them in these
exercises, but at the same time he offered to accept a challenge from any
of us in throwing the spear and in wrestling. In his quick way he sprang
from his horse, stripped off his clothes--it was really a shame--and, to
the delight of the boys, threw their wrestling-master as if he had been a
feather.
[In the East, nudity was, even in those days, held to be
disgraceful, while the Greeks thought nothing so beautiful as the
naked human body. The Hetaira Phryne was summoned before the judges
for an offence against religion. Her defender, seeing that sentence
was about to be pronounced against his client, suddenly tore away
the garment which covered her bosom. The artifice was successful.
The judges pronounced her not guilty, being convinced that such
wondrous grace and beauty could only belong to a favorite of
Aphrodite. Athen. XIII. p. 590]
"Then he knocked over a number of bragging fellows, and would have thrown
me too if he had not been too fatigued. I assure you, I am really
stronger than he is, for I can lift greater weights, but he is as nimble
as an eel, and has wonderful tricks by which he gets hold of his
adversary. His being naked too is a great help. If it were not so
indecent, we ought always to wrestle stripped, and anoint our skins, as
the Greeks do, with the olive-oil. He beat us too in throwing the spear,
but the king, who you know is proud of being the best archer in Persia,
sent his arrow farther. Phanes was especially pleased with our rule, that
in a wrestling-match the one who is thrown must kiss the hand of his
victor. At last he showed us a new exercise:--boxing. He refused,
however, to try his skill on any one but a slave, so Cambyses sent for
the biggest and strongest man among the servants--my groom, Bessus--a
giant who can bring the hind legs of a horse together and hold them so
firmly that the creature trembles all over and cannot stir. This big
fellow, taller by a head than Phanes, shrugged his shoulders
contemptuously on hearing that he was to box with the little foreign
gentleman. He felt quite sure of victory, placed himself opposite his
adversary, and dealt him a blow heavy enough to kill an elephant. Phanes
avoided it cleverly, in the same moment hitting the giant with his naked
fist so powerfully under the eyes, that the blood streamed from his nose
and mouth, and the huge, uncouth fellow fell on the ground with a yell.
When they picked him up his face looked like a pumpkin of a greenish-blue
color. The boys shouted with delight at his discomfiture; but we admired
the dexterity of this Greek, and were especially glad to see the king in
such good spirits; we noticed this most when Phanes was singing Greek
songs and dance-melodies to him accompanied by the lute.
"Meanwhile Kassandane's blindness had been cured, and this of course
tended not a little to disperse the king's melancholy.
"In short it was a very pleasant time, and I was just going to ask for
Atossa's hand in marriage, when Phanes went off to Arabia, and everything
was changed.
"No sooner had he turned his back on the gates of Babylon than all the
evil Divs seemed to have entered into the king. He went about, a moody,
silent man, speaking to no one; and to drown his melancholy would begin
drinking, even at an early hour in the morning, quantities of the
strongest Syrian wine. By the evening he was generally so intoxicated
that he had to be carried out of the hall, and would wake up the next
morning with headache and spasms. In the day-time he would wander about
as if looking for something, and in the night they often heard him
calling Nitetis. The physicians became very anxious about his health, but
when they sent him medicine he threw it away. It was quite right of
Croesus to say, as he did once 'Ye Magi and Chaldaeans! before trying to
cure a sick man we must discover the seat of his disease. Do you know it
in this case? No? Then I will tell you what ails the king. He has an
internal complaint and a wound. The former is called ennui, and the
latter is in his heart. The Athenian is a good remedy for the first, but
for the second I know of none; such wounds either scar over of
themselves, or the patient bleeds to death inwardly.'"
"I know of a remedy for the king though," exclaimed Otanes when he heard
these words. "We must persuade him to send for the women, or at least for
my daughter Phaedime, back from Susa. Love is good for dispersing
melancholy, and makes the blood flow faster." We acknowledged that he was
right, and advised him to remind the king of his banished wives. He
ventured to make the proposal while we were at supper, but got such a
harsh rebuff for his pains, that we all pitied him. Soon after this,
Cambyses sent one morning for all the Mobeds and Chaldaeans, and
commanded them to interpret a strange dream which he had bad. In his
dream he had been standing in the midst of a dry and barren plain: barren
as a threshing-floor, it did not produce a single blade of grass.
Displeased at the desert aspect of the place, he was just going to seek
other and more fruitful regions, when Atossa appeared, and, without
seeing him, ran towards a spring which welled up through the arid soil as
if by enchantment. While he was gazing in wonder at this scene, he
noticed that wherever the foot of his sister touched the parched soil,
graceful terebinths sprang up, changing, as they grew, into cypresses
whose tops reached unto heaven. As he was going to speak to Atossa, he
awoke.
The Mobeds and Chaldaeans consulted together and interpreted the dream
thus? 'Atossa would be successful in all she undertook.'
"Cambyses seemed satisfied with this answer, but, as the next night the
vision appeared again, he threatened the wise men with death, unless they
could give him another and a different interpretation. They pondered
long, and at last answered, 'that Atossa would become a queen and the
mother of mighty princes.'
"This answer really contented the king, and he smiled strangely to
himself as he told us his dream. 'The same day Kassandane sent for me and
told me to give up all thoughts of her daughter, as I valued my life.
"'Just as I was leaving the queen's garden I saw Atossa behind a
pomegranate-bush. She beckoned. I went to her; and in that hour we forgot
danger and sorrow, but said farewell to each other for ever. Now you know
all; and now that I have given her up--now that I know it would be
madness even to think of her again--I am obliged to be very stern with
myself, lest, like the king, I should fall into deep melancholy for the
sake of a woman. And this is the end of the story, the close of which we
were all expecting, when Atossa, as I lay under sentence of death, sent
me a rose, and made me the happiest of mortals. If I had not betrayed my
secret then, when we thought our last hour was near, it would have gone
with me to my grave. But what am I talking about? I know I can trust to
your secrecy, but pray don't look at me so deplorably. I think I am still
to be envied, for I have had one hour of enjoyment that would outweigh a
century of misery. Thank you,--thank you: now let me finish my story as
quickly as I can.
"Three days after I had taken leave of Atossa I had to marry Artystone,
the daughter of Gobryas. She is beautiful, and would make any other man
happy. The day after the wedding the Angare reached Babylon with the news
of your illness. My mind was made up at once; I begged the king to let me
go to you, nurse you, and warn you of the danger which threatens your
life in Egypt--took leave of my bride, in spite of all my father-in-law's
protestations, and went off at full speed with Prexaspes, never resting
till I reached your side, my dear Bartja. Now I shall go with you and
Zopyrus to Egypt, for Gyges must accompany the ambassador to Samos, as
interpreter. This is the king's command; he has been in better spirits
the last few days; the inspection of the masses of troops coming up to
Babylon diverts him, besides which, the Chaldaeans have assured him that
the planet Adar, which belongs to their war-god Chanon, promises a great
victory to the Persian arms. When do you think you shall be able to
travel, Bartja?"
"To-morrow, if you like," was the answer. "The doctors say the sea-voyage
will do me good, and the journey by land to Smyrna is very short."
"And I can assure you," added Zopyrus, "that Sappho will cure you sooner
than all the doctors in the world."
"Then we will start in three days;" said Darius after some consideration,
"we have plenty to do before starting. Remember we are going into what
may almost be called an enemy's country. I have been thinking the matter
over, and it seems to me that Bartja must pass for a Babylonian
carpet-merchant, I for his brother, and Zopyrus for a dealer in Sardian
red."
"Couldn't we be soldiers?" asked Zopyrus. "It's such an ignominious thing
to be taken for cheating peddlers. How would it be, for instance, if we
passed ourselves off for Lydian soldiers, escaped from punishment, and
seeking service in the Egyptian army?"
"That's not a bad idea," said Bartja, "and I think too that we look more
like soldiers than traders."
"Looks and manner are no guide," said Gyges. "Those great Greek merchants
and ship-owners go about as proudly as if the world belonged to them. But
I don't find Zopyrus' proposal a bad one."
"Then so let it be," said Darius, yielding. "In that case Oroetes must
provide us with the uniform of Lydian Taxiarchs."
"You'd better take the splendid dress of the Chiliarchs at once, I
think," cried Gyges.
"Why, on such young men, that would excite suspicion directly."
"But we can't appear as common soldiers."
"No, but as Hekatontarchs."
"All right," said Zopyrus laughing. "Anything you like except a
shop-keeper.--So in three days we are off. I am glad I shall just have
time to make sure of the satrap's little daughter, and to visit the grove
of Cybele at last. Now, goodnight, Bartja; don't get up too early. What
will Sappho say, if you come to her with pale cheeks?"
CHAPTER X.
The sun of a hot midsummer-day had risen on Naukratis. The Nile had
already begun to overflow its banks, and the fields and gardens of the
Egyptians were covered with water.
The harbor was crowded with craft of all kinds. Egyptian vessels were
there, manned by Phoenician colonists from the coasts of the Delta, and
bringing fine woven goods from Malta, metals and precious stones from
Sardinia, wine and copper from Cyprus. Greek triremes laden with oil,
wine and mastic-wood; metal-work and woollen wares from Chalcis,
Phoenician and Syrian craft with gaily-colored sails, and freighted with
cargoes of purple stuffs, gems, spices, glass-work, carpets and
cedar-trees,--used in Egypt, where wood was very scarce, for building
purposes, and taking back gold, ivory, ebony, brightly-plumaged tropical
birds, precious stones and black slaves,--the treasures of Ethiopia; but
more especially the far-famed Egyptian corn, Memphian chariots, lace from
Sais, and the finer sorts of papyrus. The time when commerce was carried
on merely by barter was now, however, long past, and the merchants of
Naukratis not seldom paid for their goods in gold coin and
carefully-weighed silver.
Large warehouses stood round the harbor of this Greek colony, and
slightly-built dwelling-houses, into which the idle mariners were lured
by the sounds of music and laughter, and the glances and voices of
painted and rouged damsels. Slaves, both white and colored, rowers and
steersmen, in various costumes, were hurrying hither and thither, while
the ships' captains, either dressed in the Greek fashion or in Phoenician
garments of the most glaring colors, were shouting orders to their crews
and delivering up their cargoes to the merchants. Whenever a dispute
arose, the Egyptian police with their long staves, and the Greek warders
of the harbor were quickly at hand. The latter were appointed by the
elders of the merchant-body in this Milesian colony.
The port was getting empty now, for the hour at which the market opened
was near, and none of the free Greeks cared to be absent from the
market-place then. This time, however, not a few remained behind,
curiously watching a beautifully-built Samian ship, the Okeia, with a
long prow like a swan's neck, on the front of which a likeness of the
goddess Hera was conspicuous. It was discharging its cargo, but the
public attention was more particularly attracted by three handsome
youths, in the dress of Lydian officers, who left the ship, followed by a
number of slaves carrying chests and packages.
The handsomest of the three travellers, in whom of course our readers
recognize their three young friends, Darius, Bartja and Zopyrus, spoke to
one of the harbor police and asked for the house of Theopompus the
Milesian, to whom they were bound on a visit.
Polite and ready to do a service, like all the Greeks, the police
functionary at once led the way across the market-place,--where the
opening of business had just been announced by the sound of a bell,--to a
handsome house, the property of the Milesian, Theopompus, one of the most
important and respected men in Naukratis.
The party, however, did not succeed in crossing the market-place without
hindrance. They found it easy enough to evade the importunities of
impudent fishsellers, and the friendly invitations of butchers, bakers,
sausage and vegetable-sellers, and potters. But when they reached the
part allotted to the flower-girls, Zopyrus was so enchanted with the
scene, that he clapped his hands for joy.
[Separate portions of the market were set apart for the sale of
different goods. The part appointed for the flower-sellers, who
passed in general for no better than they should be, was called the
"myrtle-market." Aristoph. Thesmoph. 448.]
Three wonderfully-lovely girls, in white dresses of some half-transparent
material, with colored borders, were seated together on low stools,
binding roses, violets and orange-blossoms into one long wreath. Their
charming heads were wreathed with flowers too, and looked very like the
lovely rosebuds which one of them, on seeing the young men come up, held
out to their notice.
"Buy my roses, my handsome gentlemen," she said in a clear, melodious
voice, "to put in your sweethearts' hair."
Zopyrus took the flowers, and holding the girl's hand fast in his own,
answered, "I come from a far country, my lovely child, and have no
sweetheart in Naukratis yet; so let me put the roses in your own golden
hair, and this piece of gold in your white little hand."
The girl burst into a merry laugh, showed her sister the handsome
present, and answered: "By Eros, such gentlemen as you cannot want for
sweethearts. Are you brothers?"
"No."
"That's a pity, for we are sisters."
"And you thought we should make three pretty couples?"
"I may have thought it, but I did not say so."
"And your sisters?"
[This passage was suggested by the following epigram of Dionysius
"Roses are blooming on thy cheek, with roses thy basket is laden,
Which dost thou sell? The flowers? Thyself? Or both, my pretty
maiden?"]
The girls laughed, as if they were but little averse to such a
connection, and offered Bartja and Darius rosebuds too.
The young men accepted them, gave each a gold piece in return, and were
not allowed to leave these beauties until their helmets had been crowned
with laurel.
Meanwhile the news of the strangers' remarkable liberality had spread
among the many girls, who were selling ribbons, wreaths and flowers close
by. They all brought roses too and invited the strangers with looks and
words to stay with them and buy their flowers.
Zopyrus, like many a young gentleman in Naukratis, would gladly have
accepted their invitations, for most of these girls were beautiful, and
their hearts were not difficult to win; but Darius urged him to come
away, and begged Bartja to forbid the thoughtless fellow's staying any
longer. After passing the tables of the money-changers, and the stone
seats on which the citizens sat in the open air and held their
consultations, they arrived at the house of Theopompus.
The stroke given by their Greek guide with the metal knocker on the
house-door was answered at once by a slave. As the master was at the
market, the strangers were led by the steward, an old servant grown grey
in the service of Theopompus, into the Andronitis, and begged to wait
there until he returned.
They were still engaged in admiring the paintings on the walls, and the
artistic carving of the stone floor, when Theopompus, the merchant whom
we first learnt to know at the house of Rhodopis, came back from the
market, followed by a great number of slaves bearing his purchases.
[Men of high rank among the Greeks did not disdain to make purchases
at market, accompanied by their slaves, but respectable women could
not appear there. Female slaves were generally sent to buy what was
needed.]
He received the strangers with charming politeness and asked in what way
he could be of use to them, on which Bartja, having first convinced
himself that no unwished--for listeners were present, gave him the roll
he had received from Phanes at parting.
Theopompus had scarcely read its contents, when he made a low bow to the
prince, exclaiming: "By Zeus, the father of hospitality, this is the
greatest honor that could have been conferred upon my house! All I
possess is yours, and I beg you to ask your companions to accept with
kindness what I can offer. Pardon my not having recognized you at once in
your Lydian dress. It seems to me that your hair is shorter and your
beard thicker, than when you left Egypt. Am I right in imagining that you
do not wish to be recognized? It shall be exactly as you wish. He is the
best host, who allows his guests the most freedom. All, now I recognize
your friends; but they have disguised themselves and cut their curls
also. Indeed, I could almost say that you, my friend, whose name--"
"My name is Darius."
"That you, Darius, have dyed your hair black. Yes? Then you see my memory
does not deceive me. But that is nothing to boast of, for I saw you
several times at Sais, and here too, on your arrival and departure. You
ask, my prince, whether you would be generally recognized? Certainly not.
The foreign dress, the change in your hair and the coloring of your
eyebrows have altered you wonderfully. But excuse me a moment, my old
steward seems to have some important message to give."
In a few minutes Theopompus came back, exclaiming: "No, no, my honored
friends, you have certainly not taken the wisest way of entering
Naukratis incognito. You have been joking with the flower-girls and
paying them for a few roses, not like runaway Lydian Hekatontarchs, but
like the great lords you are. All Naukratis knows the pretty, frivolous
sisters, Stephanion, Chloris and Irene, whose garlands have caught many a
heart, and whose sweet glances have lured many a bright obolus out of the
pockets of our gay young men. They're very fond of visiting the
flower-girls at market-time, and agreements are entered into then for
which more than one gold piece must be paid later; but for a few roses
and good words they are not accustomed to be so liberal as you have been.
The girls have been boasting about you and your gifts, and showing your
good red gold to their stingier suitors. As rumor is a goddess who is
very apt to exaggerate and to make a crocodile out of a lizard, it
happened that news reached the Egyptian captain on guard at the market,
that some newly-arrived Lydian warriors had been scattering gold
broadcast among the flower-girls. This excited suspicion, and induced the
Toparch to send an officer here to enquire from whence you come, and what
is the object of your journey hither. I was obliged to use a little
stratagem to impose upon him, and told him, as I believe you wish, that
you were rich young men from Sardis, who had fled on account of having
incurred the satrap's ill-will. But I see the government officer coming,
and with him the secretary who is to make out passports which will enable
you to remain on the Nile unmolested. I have promised him a handsome
reward, if he can help you in getting admitted into the king's
mercenaries. He was caught and believed my story. You are so young, that
nobody would imagine you were entrusted with a secret mission."
The talkative Greek had scarcely finished speaking when the clerk, a
lean, dry-looking man, dressed in white, came in, placed himself opposite
the strangers and asked them from whence they came and what was the
object of their journey.
The youths held to their first assertion, that they were Lydian
Hekatontarchs, and begged the functionary to provide them with passes and
tell them in what way they might most easily obtain admittance into the
king's troop of auxiliaries.
The man did not hesitate long, after Theopompus had undertaken to be
their surety, and the desired documents were made out.
Bartja's pass ran thus:
"Smerdis, the son of Sandon of Sardis, about 22 years of age--figure,
tall and slender-face, well-formed:--nose, straight:--forehead, high with
a small scar in the middle:--is hereby permitted to remain in those parts
of Egypt in which the law allows foreigners to reside, as surety has been
given for him.
"In the King's name.
"Sachons, Clerk."
Darius and Zopyrus received passports similarly worded.
When the government official had left the houses, Theopompus rubbed his
hands and said: "Now if you will follow my advice on all points you can
stay in Egypt safely enough. Keep these little rolls as if they were the
apple of your eye, and never part from them. Now, however, I must beg you
to follow me to breakfast and to tell me, if agreeable to you, whether a
report which has just been making the round of the market is not, as
usual, entirely false. A trireme from Kolophon, namely, has brought the
news that your powerful brother, noble Bartja, is preparing to make war
with Amasis."
.........................
On the evening of the same day, Bartja and Sappho saw each other again.
In that first hour surprise and joy together made Sappho's happiness too
great for words. When they were once more seated in the acanthus-grove
whose blossoming branches had so often seen and sheltered their young
love, she embraced him tenderly, but for a long time they did not speak
one word. They saw neither moon nor stars moving silently above them, in
the warm summer night; they did not even hear the nightingales who were
still repeating their favorite, flute-like, Itys-call to one another; nor
did they feel the dew which fell as heavily on their fair heads as on the
flowers in the grass around them.
At last Bartja, taking both Sappho's hands in his own, looked long and
silently into her face, as if to stamp her likeness for ever on his
memory. When he spoke at last, she cast down her eyes, for he said: "In
my dreams, Sappho, you have always been the most lovely creature that
Auramazda ever created, but now I see you again, you are more lovely even
than my dreams."
And when a bright, happy glance from her had thanked him for these words,
he drew her closer to him, asking: "Did you often think of me?"
"I thought only of you."
"And did you hope to see me soon?"
"Yes; hour after hour I thought, 'now he must be coming.' Sometimes I
went into the garden in the morning and looked towards your home in the
East, and a bird flew towards me from thence and I felt a twitching in my
right eyelid; or when I was putting my box to rights and found the laurel
crown which I put by as a remembrance, because you looked so well in
it,--Melitta says such wreaths are good for keeping true love--then I
used to clap my hands with joy and think, 'to-day he must come;' and I
would run down to the Nile and wave my handkerchief to every passing
boat, for every boat I thought must be bringing you to me."
[A bird flying from the right side, and a twitching of the right eye
were considered fortunate omens. Theokrirus, III. 37]
"But you did not come, and then I went sadly home, and would sit down by
the fire on the hearth in the women's room, and sing, and gaze into the
fire till grandmother would wake me out of my dream by saying: 'Listen to
me, girl; whoever dreams by daylight is in danger of lying awake at
night, and getting up in the morning with a sad heart, a tired brain and
weary limbs. The day was not given us for sleep, and we must live in it
with open eyes, that not a single hour may be idly spent. The past
belongs to the dead; only fools count upon the future; but wise men hold
fast by the ever young present; by work they foster all the various gifts
which Zeus, Apollo, Pallas, Cypris lend; by work they raise, and perfect
and ennoble them, until their feelings, actions, words and thoughts
become harmonious like a well-tuned lute. You cannot serve the man to
whom you have given your whole heart,--to whom in your great love you
look up as so much higher than yourself--you cannot prove the
steadfastness and faithfulness of that love better, than by raising and
improving your mind to the utmost of your power. Every good and beautiful
truth that you learn is an offering to him you love best, for in giving
your whole self, you give your virtues too. But no one gains this victory
in dreams. The dew by which such blossoms are nourished is called the
sweat of man's brow.' So she would speak to me, and then I started up
ashamed and left the hearth, and either took my lyre to learn new songs,
or listened to my loving teacher's words--she is wiser than most
men--attentively and still. And so the time passed on; a rapid stream,
just like our river Nile, which flows unceasingly, and brings such
changing scenes upon its waves, sometimes a golden boat with streamers
gay,--sometimes a fearful, ravenous crocodile."
"But now we are sitting in the golden boat. Oh, if time's waves would
only cease to flow! If this one moment could but last for aye. You lovely
girl, how perfectly you speak, how well you understand and remember all
this beautiful teaching and make it even more beautiful by your way of
repeating it. Yes, Sappho, I am very proud of you. In you I have a
treasure which makes me richer than my brother, though half the world
belongs to him."
"You proud of me? you, a king's son, the best and handsomest of your
family?"
"The greatest worth that I can find in myself is, that you think me
worthy of your love."
"Tell me, ye gods, how can this little heart hold so much joy without
breaking? 'Tis like a vase that's overfilled with purest, heaviest gold?"
"Another heart will help you to bear it; and that is my own, for mine is
again supported by yours, and with that help I can laugh at every evil
that the world or night may bring."
"Oh, don't excite the envy of the gods; human happiness often vexes them.
Since you left us we have passed some very, very sad days. The two poor
children of our kind Phanes--a boy as beautiful as Eros, and a little
girl as fair and rosy as a summer morning's cloud just lit up by the
sun,--came for some happy days to stay with us. Grandmother grew quite
glad and young again while looking on these little ones, and as for me I
gave them all my heart, though really it is your's and your's alone. But
hearts, you know, are wonderfully made; they're like the sun who sends
his rays everywhere, and loses neither warmth nor light by giving much,
but gives to all their due. I loved those little ones so very much. One
evening we were sitting quite alone with Theopompus in the women's room,
when suddenly we heard aloud, wild noise. The good old Knakias, our
faithful slave, just reached the door as all the bolts gave way, and,
rushing through the entrance-hall into the peristyle, the andronitis, and
so on to us, crashing the door between, came a troop of soldiers.
Grandmother showed them the letter by which Amasis secured our house from
all attack and made it a sure refuge, but they laughed the writing to
scorn and showed us on their side a document with the crown-prince's
seal, in which we were sternly commanded to deliver up Phanes' children
at once to this rough troop of men. Theopompus reproved the soldiers for
their roughness, telling them that the children came from Corinth and had
no connection with Phanes; but the captain of the troop defied and
sneered at him, pushed my grandmother rudely away, forced his way into
her own apartment, where among her most precious treasures, at the head
of her own bed, the two children lay sleeping peacefully, dragged them
out of their little beds and took them in an open boat through the cold
night-air to the royal city. In a few days we heard the boy was dead.
They say he has been killed by Psamtik's orders; and the little girl, so
sweet and dear, is lying in a dismal dungeon, and pining for her father
and for us. Oh, dearest, isn't it a painful thing that sorrows such as
these should come to mar our perfect happiness? My eyes weep joy and
sorrow in the same moment, and my lips, which have just been laughing
with you, have now to tell you this sad story."
"I feel your pain with you, my child, but it makes my hand clench with
rage instead of filling my eyes with tears. That gentle boy whom you
loved, that little girl who now sits weeping in the dark dungeon, shall
both be revenged. Trust me; before the Nile has risen again, a powerful
army will have entered Egypt, to demand satisfaction for this murder."
"Oh, dearest, how your eyes are glowing! I never saw you look so
beautiful before. Yes, yes, the boy must be avenged, and none but you
must be his avenger."
"My gentle Sappho is becoming warlike too."
"Yes, women must feel warlike when wickedness is so triumphant; women
rejoice too when such crimes are punished. Tell me has war been declared
already?"
"Not yet; but hosts on hosts are marching to the valley of the Euphrates
to join our main army."
"My courage sinks as quickly as it rose. I tremble at the word, the mere
word, war. How many childless mothers Ares makes, how many young fair
heads must wear the widow's veil, how many pillows are wet through with
tears when Pallas takes her shield."
"But a man developes in war; his heart expands, his arm grows strong. And
none rejoice more than you when he returns a conqueror from the field.
The wife of a Persian, especially, ought to rejoice in the thought of
battle, for her husband's honor and fame are dearer to her than his
life."
"Go to the war. I shall pray for you there."
"And victory will be with the right. First we will conquer Pharaoh's
host, then release Phanes' little daughter . . ."
"And then Aristomachus, the brave old man who succeeded Phanes when he
fled. He has vanished, no one knows whither, but people say that the
crown-prince has either imprisoned him in a dismal dungeon on account of
his having uttered threats of retaliating the cruelty shown to Phanes'
children, or--what would be worse--has had him dragged off to some
distant quarry. The poor old man was exiled from his home, not for his
own fault, but by the malice of his enemies, and the very day on which we
lost sight of him an embassy arrived here from the Spartan people
recalling Aristomachus to the Eurotas with all the honors Greece could
bestow, because his sons had brought great glory to their country. A ship
wreathed with flowers was sent to fetch the honored old man, and at the
head of the deputation was his own brave, strong son, now crowned with
glory and fame."
"I know him. He's a man of iron. Once he mutilated himself cruelly to
avoid disgrace. By the Anahita star, which is setting so beautifully in
the east, he shall be revenged!"
"Oh, can it be so late? To me the time has gone by like a sweet breeze,
which kissed my forehead and passed away. Did not you hear some one call?
They will be waiting for us, and you must be at your friend's house in
the town before dawn. Good-bye, my brave hero."
"Good-bye, my dearest one. In five days we shall hear our marriage-hymn.
But you tremble as if we were going to battle instead of to our wedding."
"I'm trembling at the greatness of our joy; one always trembles in
expectation of anything unusually great."
"Hark, Rhodopis is calling again; let us go. I have asked Theopompus to
arrange everything about our wedding with her according to the usual
custom; and I shall remain in his house incognito until I can carry you
off as my own dear wife."
"And I will go with you."
The next morning, as the three friends were walking with their host in
his garden, Zopyrus exclaimed: "Wily, Bartja, I've been dreaming all
night of your Sappho. What a lucky fellow you are! Why I fancied my new
wife in Sardis was no end of a beauty until I saw Sappho, and now when I
think of her she seems like an owl. If Araspes could see Sappho he would
be obliged to confess that even Panthea had been outdone at last. Such a
creature was never made before. Auramazda is an awful spendthrift; he
might have made three beauties out of Sappho. And how charmingly it
sounded when she said 'good-night' to us in Persian."
"While I was away," said Bartja, "she has been taking a great deal of
trouble to learn Persian from the wife of a Babylonian carpet-merchant, a
native of Susa, who is living at Naukratis, in order to surprise me.
"Yes, she is a glorious girl," said Theopompus. "My late wife loved the
little one as if she had been her own child. She would have liked to have
had her as a wife for our son who manages the affairs of my house at
Miletus, but the gods have ordained otherwise! Ah, how glad she would
have been to see the wedding garland at Rhodopis' door!"
"Is it the custom here to ornament a bride's house with flowers?" said
Zopyrus.
"Certainly," answered Theopompus. "When you see a door hung with flowers
you may always know that house contains a bride; an olive-branch is a
sign that a boy has just come into the world, and a strip of woollen
cloth hanging over the gate that a girl has been born; but a vessel of
water before the door is the token of death. But business-hour at the
market is very near, my friends, and I must leave you, as I have affairs
of great importance to transact."
"I will accompany you," said Zopyrus, "I want to order some garlands for
Rhodopis' house."
"Aha," laughed the Milesian. "I see, you want to talk to the flower-girls
again. Come, it's of no use to deny. Well, if you like you can come with
me, but don't be so generous as you were yesterday, and don't forget that
if certain news of war should arrive, your disguise may prove dangerous."
The Greek then had his sandals fastened on by his slaves and started for
the market, accompanied by Zopyrus. In a few hours he returned with such
a serious expression on his usually cheerful face, that it was easy to
see something very important had happened.
"I found the whole town in great agitation," he said to the two friends
who had remained at home; "there is a report that Amasis is at the point
of death. We had all met on the place of exchange in order to settle our
business, and I was on the point of selling all my stored goods at such
high prices as to secure me a first-rate profit, with which, when the
prospect of an important war had lowered prices again, I could have
bought in fresh goods--you see it stands me in good stead to know your
royal brother's intentions so early--when suddenly the Toparch appeared
among us, and announced that Amasis was not only seriously ill, but that
the physicians had given up all hope, and he himself felt he was very
near death. We must hold ourselves in readiness for this at any moment,
and for a very serious change in the face of affairs. The death of Amasis
is the severest loss that could happen to us Greeks; he was always our
friend, and favored us whenever he could, while his son is our avowed
enemy and will do his utmost to expel us from the country. If his father
had allowed, and he himself had not felt so strongly the importance and
value of our mercenary troops, he would have turned us hateful foreigners
out long ago. Naukratis and its temples are odious to him. When Amasis is
dead our town will hail Cambyses' army with delight, for I have had
experience already, in my native town Miletus, that you are accustomed to
show respect to those who are not Persians and to protect their rights."
"Yes," said Bartja, "I will take care that all your ancient liberties
shall be confirmed by my brother and new ones granted you."
"Well, I only hope he will soon be here," exclaimed the Greek, "for we
know that Psamtik, as soon as he possibly can, will order our temples,
which are an abomination to him, to be demolished. The building of a
place of sacrifice for the Greeks at Memphis has long been put a stop
to."
"But here," said Darius, "we saw a number of splendid temples as we came
up from the harbor."
"Oh, yes, we have several.--Ah, there comes Zopyrus; the slaves are
carrying a perfect grove of garlands behind him. He's laughing so
heartily, he must have amused himself famously with the flower-girls.
Good-morning, my friend. The sad news which fills all Naukratis does not
seem to disturb you much."
"Oh, for anything I care, Amasis may go on living a hundred years yet.
But if he dies now, people will have something else to do beside looking
after us. When do you set off for Rhodopis' house, friends?"
"At dusk."
"Then please, ask her to accept these flowers from me. I never thought I
could have been so taken by an old woman before. Every word she says
sounds like music, and though she speaks so gravely and wisely it's as
pleasant to the ear as a merry joke. But I shan't go with you this time,
Bartja; I should only be in the way. Darius, what have you made up your
mind to do?"
"I don't want to lose one chance of a conversation with Rhodopis."
"Well, I don't blame you. You're all for learning and knowing everything,
and I'm for enjoying. Friends, what do you say to letting me off this
evening? You see. . . ."
"I know all about it," interrupted Bartja laughing: "You've only seen the
flower-girls by daylight as yet, and you would like to know how they look
by lamplight."
"Yes, that's it," said Zopyrus, putting on a grave face. "On that point I
am quite as eager after knowledge as Darius."
"Well, we wish you much pleasure with your three sisters."
"No, no, not all three, if you please; Stephanion, the youngest, is my
favorite."
Morning had already dawned when Bartja, Darius and Theopompus left
Rhodopis' house. Syloson, a Greek noble who had been banished from his
native land by his own brother, Polykrates the tyrant, had been spending
the evening with them, and was now returning in their company to
Naukratis, where he had been living many years.
This man, though an exile, was liberally supplied with money by his
brother, kept the most brilliant establishment in Naukratis, and was as
famous for his extravagant hospitality as for his strength and
cleverness. Syloson was a very handsome man too, and so remarkable for
the good taste and splendor of his dress, that the youth of Naukratis
prided themselves on imitating the cut and hang of his robes. Being
unmarried, he spent many of his evenings at Rhodopis' house, and had been
told the secret of her granddaughter's betrothal.
On that evening it had been settled, that in four days the marriage
should be celebrated with the greatest privacy. Bartja had formally
betrothed himself to Sappho by eating a quince with her, on the same day
on which she had offered sacrifices to Zeus, Hera, and the other deities
who protected marriage. The wedding-banquet was to be given at the house
of Theopompus, which was looked upon as the bridegroom's. The prince's
costly bridal presents had been entrusted to Rhodopis' care, and Bartja
had insisted on renouncing the paternal inheritance which belonged to his
bride and on transferring it to Rhodopis, notwithstanding her determined
resistance.
Syloson accompanied the friends to Rhodopis' house, and was just about to
leave them, when a loud noise in the streets broke the quiet stillness of
the night, and soon after, a troop of the watch passed by, taking a man
to prison. The prisoner seemed highly indignant, and the less his broken
Greek oaths and his utterances in some other totally unintelligible
language were understood by the Egyptian guards, the more violent he
became.
Directly Bartja and Darius heard the voice they ran up, and recognized
Zopyrus at once.
Syloson and Theopompus stopped the guards, and asked what their captive
had done. The officer on duty recognized them directly; indeed every
child in Naukratis knew the Milesian merchant and the brother of the
tyrant Polykrates by sight; and he answered at once, with a respectful
salutation, that the foreign youth they were leading away had been guilty
of murder.
Theopompus then took him on one side and endeavored, by liberal promises,
to obtain the freedom of the prisoner. The man, however, would concede
nothing but a permission to speak with his captive. Meanwhile his friends
begged Zopyrus to tell them at once what had happened, and heard the
following story: The thoughtless fellow had visited the flower-girls at
dusk and remained till dawn. He had scarcely closed their housedoor on
his way home, when he found himself surrounded by a number of young men,
who had probably been lying in wait for him, as he had already had a
quarrel with one of them, who called himself the betrothed lover of
Stephanion, on that very morning. The girl had told her troublesome
admirer to leave her flowers alone, and had thanked Zopyrus for
threatening to use personal violence to the intruder. When the young
Achaemenidae found himself surrounded, he drew his sword and easily
dispersed his adversaries, as they were only armed with sticks, but
chanced to wound the jealous lover, who was more violent than the rest,
so seriously, that he fell to the ground. Meanwhile the watch had come
up, and as Zopyrus' victim howled "thieves" and "murder" incessantly,
they proceeded to arrest the offender. This was not so easy. His blood
was up, and rushing on them with his drawn sword, he had already cut his
way through the first troop when a second came up. He was not to be
daunted, attacked them too, split the skull of one, wounded another in
the arm and was taking aim for a third blow, when he felt a cord round
his neck. It was drawn tighter and tighter till at last he could not
breathe and fell down insensible. By the time he came to his senses he
was bound, and notwithstanding all his appeals to his pass and the name
of Theopompus, was forced to follow his captors.
When the tale was finished the Milesian did not attempt to conceal his
strong disapprobation, and told Zopyrus that his most unseasonable love
of fighting might be followed by the saddest consequences. After saying
this, he turned to the officer and begged him to accept his own personal
security for the prisoner. The other, however, refused gravely, saying he
might forfeit his own life by doing so, as a law existed in Egypt by
which the concealer of a murder was condemned to death. He must, he
assured them, take the culprit to Sais and deliver him over to the
Nomarch for punishment. "He has murdered an Egyptian," were his last
words, "and must therefore be tried by an Egyptian supreme court. In any
other case I should be delighted to render you any service in my power."
During this conversation Zopyrus had been begging his friends not to take
any trouble about him. "By Mithras," he cried, when Bartja offered to
declare himself to the Egyptians as a means of procuring his freedom, "I
vow I'll stab myself without a second thought, if you give yourselves up
to those dogs of Egyptians. Why the whole town is talking about the war
already, and do you think that if Psamtik knew he'd got such splendid
game in his net, he would let you loose? He would keep you as hostages,
of course. No, no, my friends. Good-bye; may Auramazda send you his best
blessings! and don't quite forget the jovial Zopyrus, who lived and died
for love and war."
The captain of the band placed himself at the head of his men, gave the
order to march, and in a few minutes Zopyrus was out of sight.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Corpse to be torn in pieces by dogs and vultures
He is the best host, who allows his guests the most freedom
The past belongs to the dead; only fools count upon the future
They praise their butchers more than their benefactors
We've talked a good deal of love with our eyes already
Wise men hold fast by the ever young present
AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS.
By Georg Ebers
Volume 9.
CHAPTER XI.
According to the law of Egypt, Zopyrus had deserved death.
As soon as his friends heard this, they resolved to go to Sais and try to
rescue him by stratagem. Syloson, who had friends there and could speak
the Egyptian language well, offered to help them.
Bartja and Darius disguised themselves so completely by dyeing their hair
and eyebrows and wearing broad-brimmed felt-hats,--that they could
scarcely recognize each other. Theopompus provided them with ordinary
Greek dresses, and, an hour after Zopyrus' arrest, they met the
splendidly-got-up Syloson on the shore of the Nile, entered a boat
belonging to him and manned by his slaves, and, after a short sail,
favored by the wind, reached Sais,--which lay above the waters of the
inundation like an island,--before the burning midsummer sun had reached
its noonday height.
They disembarked at a remote part of the town and walked across the
quarter appropriated to the artisans. The workmen were busy at their
calling, notwithstanding the intense noonday heat. The baker's men were
at work in the open court of the bakehouse, kneading bread--the coarser
kind of dough with the feet, the finer with the hands. Loaves of various
shapes were being drawn out of the ovens-round and oval cakes, and rolls
in the form of sheep, snails and hearts. These were laid in baskets, and
the nimble baker's boys would put three, four, or even five such baskets
on their heads at once, and carry them off quickly and safely to the
customers living in other quarters of the city. A butcher was
slaughtering an ox before his house, the creature's legs having been
pinioned; and his men were busy sharpening their knives to cut up a wild
goat. Merry cobblers were calling out to the passers-by from their
stalls; carpenters, tailors, joiners and weavers--were all there, busy at
their various callings. The wives of the work-people were going out
marketing, leading their naked children by the hand, and some soldiers
were loitering near a man who was offering beer and wine for sale.
But our friends took very little notice of what was going on in the
streets through which they passed; they followed Syloson in silence.
At the Greek guard-house he asked them to wait for him. Syloson,
happening to know the Taxiarch who was on duty that day, went in and
asked him if he had heard anything of a man accused of murder having been
brought from Naukratis to Sais that morning.
"Of course," said the Greek. "It's not more than half an hour since he
arrived. As they found a purse full of money in his girdle, they think he
must be a Persian spy. I suppose you know that Cambyses is preparing for
war with Egypt."
"Impossible!"
"No, no, it's a fact. The prince-regent has already received information.
A caravan of Arabian merchants arrived yesterday at Pelusium, and brought
the news."
"It will prove as false as their suspicions about this poor young Lydian.
I know him well, and am very sorry for the poor fellow. He belongs to one
of the richest families in Sardis, and only ran away for fear of the
powerful satrap Oroetes, with whom he had had a quarrel. I'll tell you
the particulars when you come to see me next in Naukratis. Of course
you'll stay a few days and bring some friends. My brother has sent me
some wine which beats everything I ever tasted. It's perfect nectar, and
I confess I grudge offering it to any one who's not, like you, a perfect
judge in such matters." The Taxiarch's face brightened up at these words,
and grasping Syloson's hand, he exclaimed. "By the dog, my friend, we
shall not wait to be asked twice; we'll come soon enough and take a good
pull at your wine-skins. How would it be if you were to ask Archidice,
the three flower-sisters, and a few flute-playing-girls to supper?"
[Archidice--A celebrated Hetaira of Naukratis mentioned by Herod.
II. 135. Flute-playing girls were seldom missing at the young
Greeks' drinking-parties]
"They shall all be there. By the bye, that reminds me that the
flower-girls were the cause of that poor young Lydian's imprisonment.
Some jealous idiot attacked him before their house with a number of
comrades. The hot-brained young fellow defended himself . . . ."
"And knocked the other down?"
"Yes; and so that he'll never get up again."
"The boy must be a good boxer."
"He had a sword."
"So much the better for him."
"No, so much the worse; for his victim was an Egyptian."
"That's a bad job. I fear it can only have an unfortunate end. A
foreigner, who kills an Egyptian, is as sure of death as if he had the
rope already round his neck. However, just now he'll get a few days'
grace; the priests are all so busy praying for the dying king that they
have no time to try criminals."
"I'd give a great deal to be able to save that poor fellow. I know his
father."
"Yes, and then after all he only did his duty. A man must defend
himself."
"Do you happen to know where he is imprisoned?"
"Of course I do. The great prison is under repair, and so he has been put
for the present in the storehouse between the principal guard-house of
the Egyptian body-guard and the sacred grove of the temple of Neith. I
have only just come home from seeing them take him there."
"He is strong and has plenty of courage; do you think he could get away,
if we helped him?"
"No, it would be quite impossible; he's in a room two stories high; the
only window looks into the sacred grove, and that, you know, is
surrounded by a ten-foot wall, and guarded like the treasury. There are
double sentries at every gate. There's only one place where it is left
unguarded during the inundation season, because, just here, the water
washes the walls. These worshippers of animals are as cautious as
water-wagtails."
"Well, it's a great pity, but I suppose we must leave the poor fellow to
his fate. Good-bye, Doemones; don't forget my invitation."
The Samian left the guard-room and went back directly to the two friends,
who were waiting impatiently for him.
They listened eagerly to his tidings, and when he had finished his
description of the prison, Darius exclaimed: "I believe a little courage
will save him. He's as nimble as a cat, and as strong as a bear. I have
thought of a plan."
"Let us hear it," said Syloson, "and let me give an opinion as to its
practicability."
"We will buy some rope-ladders, some cord, and a good bow, put all these
into our boat, and row to the unguarded part of the temple-wall at dusk.
You must then help me to clamber over it. I shall take the things over
with me and give the eagle's cry. Zopyras will know at once, because,
since we were children, we have been accustomed to use it when we were
riding or hunting together. Then I shall shoot an arrow, with the cord
fastened to it, up into his window, (I never miss), tell him to fasten a
weight to it and let it down again to me. I shall then secure the
rope-ladder to the cord, Zopyrus will draw the whole affair up again, and
hang it on an iron nail,--which, by the bye, I must not forget to send up
with the ladder, for who knows whether he may have such a thing in his
cell. He will then come down on it, go quickly with me to the part of the
wall where you will be waiting with the boat, and where there must be
another rope-ladder, spring into the boat, and there he is-safe!"
"First-rate, first-rate!" cried Bartja.
"But very dangerous," added Syloson. "If we are caught in the sacred
grove, we are certain to be severely punished. The priests hold strange
nightly festivals there, at which every one but the initiated is strictly
forbidden to appear. I believe, however, that these take place on the
lake, and that is at some distance from Zopyrus' prison."
"So much the better," cried Darius; "but now to the main point. We must
send at once, and ask Theopompus to hire a fast trireme for us, and have
it put in sailing order at once. The news of Cambyses' preparations have
already reached Egypt; they take us for spies, and will be sure not to
let either Zopyrus or his deliverers escape, if they can help it. It
would be a criminal rashness to expose ourselves uselessly to danger.
Bartja, you must take this message yourself, and must marry Sappho this
very day, for, come what may, we must leave Naukratis to-morrow. Don't
contradict me, my friend, my brother! You know our plan, and you must see
that as only one can act in it, your part would be that of a mere
looker-on. As it was my own idea I am determined to carry it out myself.
We shall meet again to-morrow, for Auramazda protects the friendship of
the pure."
It was a long time before they could persuade Bartja to leave his friends
in the lurch, but their entreaties and representations at last took
effect, and he went down towards the river to take a boat for Naukratis,
Darius and Syloson going at the same time to buy the necessary implements
for their plan.
In order to reach the place where boats were to be hired, Bartja had to
pass by the temple of Neith. This was not easy, as an immense crowd was
assembled at the entrance-gates. He pushed his way as far as the obelisks
near the great gate of the temple with its winged sun-disc and fluttering
pennons, but there the temple-servants prevented him from going farther;
they were keeping the avenue of sphinxes clear for a procession. The
gigantic doors of the Pylon opened, and Bartja, who, in spite of himself,
had been pushed into the front row, saw a brilliant procession come out
of the temple. The unexpected sight of many faces he had formerly known
occupied his attention so much, that he scarcely noticed the loss of his
broad-brimmed hat, which had been knocked off in the crowd. From the
conversation of two Ionian mercenaries behind him he learnt that the
family of Amasis had been to the temple to pray for the dying king.
The procession was headed by richly-decorated priests, either wearing
long white robes or pantherskins. They were followed by men holding
office at the court, and carrying golden staves, on the ends of which
peacocks' feathers and silver lotus-flowers were fastened, and these by
Pastophori, carrying on their shoulders a golden cow, the animal sacred
to Isis. When the crowd had bowed down before this sacred symbol, the
queen appeared. She was dressed in priestly robes and wore a costly
head-dress with the winged disc and the Uraeus. In her left hand she held
a sacred golden sistrum, the tones of which were to scare away Typhon,
and in her right some lotus-flowers. The wife, daughter and sister of the
high-priest followed her, in similar but less splendid ornaments. Then
came the heir to the throne, in rich robes of state, as priest and
prince; and behind him four young priests in white carrying Tachot, (the
daughter of Amasis and Ladice and the pretended sister of Nitetis,) in an
open litter. The heat of the day, and the earnestness of her prayers, had
given the sick girl a slight color. Her blue eyes, filled with tears,
were fixed on the sistrum which her weak, emaciated hands had hardly
strength to hold.
A murmur of compassion ran through the crowd; for they loved their dying
king, and manifested openly and gladly the sympathy so usually felt for
young lives from whom a brilliant future has been snatched by disease.
Such was Amasis' young, fading daughter, who was now being carried past
them, and many an eye grew dim as the beautiful invalid came in sight.
Tachot seemed to notice this, for she raised her eyes from the sistrum
and looked kindly and gratefully at the crowd. Suddenly the color left
her face, she turned deadly pale, and the golden sistrum fell on to the
stone pavement with a clang, close to Bartja's feet. He felt that he had
been recognized and for one moment thought of hiding himself in the
crowd; but only for one moment--his chivalrous feeling gained the day, he
darted forward, picked up the sistrum, and forgetting the danger in which
he was placing himself, held it out to the princess.
Tachot looked at him earnestly before taking the golden sistrum from his
hands, and then said, in a low voice, which only he could understand:
"Are you Bartja? Tell me, in your mother's name--are you Bartja?"
"Yes, I am," was his answer, in a voice as low as her own, "your friend,
Bartja."
He could not say more, for the priests pushed him back among the crowd.
When he was in his old place, he noticed that Tachot, whose bearers had
begun to move on again, was looking round at him. The color had come back
into her cheeks, and her bright eyes were trying to meet his. He did not
avoid them; she threw him a lotus-bud-he stooped to pick it up, and then
broke his way through the crowd, for this hasty act had roused their
attention.
A quarter of an hour later, he was seated in the boat which was to take
him to Sappho and to his wedding. He was quite at ease now about Zopyrus.
In Bartja's eyes his friend was already as good as saved, and in spite of
the dangers which threatened himself, he felt strangely calm and happy,
he could hardly say why.
Meanwhile the sick princess had been carried home, had had her oppressive
ornaments taken off, and her couch carried on to one of the
palace-balconies where she liked best to pass the hot summer days,
sheltered by broad-leaved plants, and a kind of awning.
From this veranda, she could look down into the great fore-court of the
palace, which was planted with trees. To-day it was full of priests,
courtiers, generals and governors of provinces. Anxiety and suspense were
expressed in every face: Amasis' last hour was drawing very near.
Tachot could not be seen from below; but listening with feverish
eagerness, she could hear much that was said. Now that they had to dread
the loss of their king, every one, even the priests, were full of his
praises. The wisdom and circumspection of his plans and modes of
government, his unwearied industry, the moderation he had always shown,
the keenness of his wit, were, each and all, subjects of admiration. "How
Egypt has prospered under Amasis' government!" said a Nomarch. "And what
glory he gained for our arms, by the conquest of Cyprus and the war with
the Libyans!" cried one of the generals. "How magnificently he
embellished our temples, and what great honors he paid to the goddess of
Sais!" exclaimed one of the singers of Neith. "And then how gracious and
condescending he was!" murmured a courtier. "How cleverly he managed to
keep peace with the great powers!" said the secretary of state, and the
treasurer, wiping away a tear, cried: "How thoroughly he understood the
management of the revenue! Since the reign of Rameses III. the treasury
has not been so well filled as now." "Psamtik comes into a fine
inheritance," lisped the courtier, and the soldier exclaimed, "Yes, but
it's to be feared that he'll not spend it in a glorious war; he's too
much under the influence of the priests." "No, you are wrong there,"
answered the temple-singer. "For some time past, our lord and master has
seemed to disdain the advice of his most faithful servants." "The
successor of such a father will find it difficult to secure universal
approbation," said the Nomarch. "It is not every one who has the
intellect, the good fortune and the wisdom of Amasis." "The gods know
that!" murmured the warrior with a sigh.
Tachot's tears flowed fast. These words were a confirmation of what they
had been trying to hide from her: she was to lose her dear father soon.
After she had made this dreadful certainty clear to her own mind, and
discovered that it was in vain to beg her attendants to carry her to her
dying father, she left off listening to the courtiers below, and began
looking at the sistrum which Bartja himself had put into her hand, and
which she had brought on to the balcony with her, as if seeking comfort
there. And she found what she sought; for it seemed to her as if the
sound of its sacred rings bore her away into a smiling, sunny landscape.
That faintness which so often comes over people in decline, had seized
her and was sweetening her last hours with pleasant dreams.
The female slaves, who stood round to fan away the flies, said afterwards
that Tachot had never looked so lovely.
She had lain about an hour in this state, when her breathing became more
difficult, a slight cough made her breast heave, and the bright red blood
trickled down from her lips on to her white robe. She awoke, and looked
surprised and disappointed on seeing the faces round her. The sight of
her mother, however, who came on to the veranda at that moment, brought a
smile to her face, and she said, "O mother, I have had such a beautiful
dream."
"Then our visit to the temple has done my dear child good?" asked the
queen, trembling at the sight of the blood on the sick girl's lips.
"Oh, yes, mother, so much! for I saw him again." Ladice's glance at the
attendants seemed to ask "Has your poor mistress lost her senses?" Tachot
understood the look and said, evidently speaking with great difficulty:
"You think I am wandering, mother. No, indeed, I really saw and spoke to
him. He gave me my sistrum again, and said he was my friend, and then he
took my lotus-bud and vanished. Don't look so distressed and surprised,
mother. What I say is really true; it is no dream.--There, you hear,
Tentrut saw him too. He must have come to Sais for my sake, and so the
child-oracle in the temple-court did not deceive me, after all. And now I
don't feel anything more of my illness; I dreamt I was lying in a field
of blooming poppies, as red as the blood of the young lambs that are
offered in sacrifice; Bartja was sitting by my side, and Nitetis was
kneeling close to us and playing wonderful songs on a Nabla made of
ivory. And there was such a lovely sound in the air that I felt as if
Horus, the beautiful god of morning, spring, and the resurrection, was
kissing me. Yes, mother, I tell you he is coming soon, and when I am
well, then--then--ah, mother what is this? . . . I am dying!"
Ladice knelt down by her child's bed and pressed her lips in burning
kisses on the girl's eyes as they grew dim in death.
An hour later she was standing by another bedside--her dying husband's.
Severe suffering had disfigured the king's features, the cold
perspiration was standing on his forehead, and his hands grasped the
golden lions on the arms of the deep-seated invalid chair in which he was
resting, almost convulsively.
When Ladice came in he opened his eyes; they were as keen and intelligent
as if he had never lost his sight.
"Why do not you bring Tachot to me?" he asked in a dry voice.
"She is too ill, and suffers so much, that . . ."
"She is dead! Then it is well with her, for death is not punishment; it
is the end and aim of life,--the only end that we can attain without
effort, but through sufferings!--the gods alone know how great. Osiris
has taken her to himself, for she was innocent. And Nitetis is dead too.
Where is Nebenchari's letter?"
"Here is the place: 'She took her own life, and died calling down a heavy
curse on thee and thine. The poor, exiled, scorned and plundered oculist
Nebenchari in Babylon sends thee this intelligence to Egypt. It is as
true as his own hatred of thee.' Listen to these words, Psamtik, and
remember how on his dying bed thy father told thee that, for every drachm
of pleasure purchased on earth by wrong-doing, the dying bed will be
burdened by a talent's weight of remorse. Fearful misery is coming on
Egypt for Nitetis' sake. Cambyses is preparing to make war on us. He will
sweep down on Egypt like a scorching wind from the desert. Much, which I
have staked my nightly sleep and the very marrow of my existence to bring
into existence, will be annihilated. Still I have not lived in vain. For
forty years I have been the careful father and benefactor of a great
nation. Children and children's children will speak of Amasis as a great,
wise and humane king; they will read my name on the great works which I
have built in Sais and Thebes, and will praise the greatness of my power.
Neither shall I be condemned by Osiris and the forty-two judges of the
nether world; the goddess of truth, who holds the balances, will find
that my good deeds outweigh my bad."--Here the king sighed deeply and
remained silent for some time. Then, looking tenderly at his wife, he
said: "Ladice, thou hast been a faithful, virtuous wife to me. For this I
thank thee, and ask thy forgiveness for much. We have often misunderstood
one another. Indeed it was easier for me to accustom myself to the Greek
modes of thought, than for a Greek to understand our Egyptian ideas. Thou
know'st my love of Greek art,--thou know'st how I enjoyed the society of
thy friend Pythagoras, who was thoroughly initiated in all that we
believe and know, and adopted much from us. He comprehended the deep
wisdom which lies in the doctrines that I reverence most, and he took
care not to speak lightly of truths which our priests are perhaps too
careful to hide from the people; for though the many bow down before that
which they cannot understand, they would be raised and upheld by those
very truths, if explained to them. To a Greek mind our worship of animals
presents the greatest difficulty, but to my own the worship of the
Creator in his creatures seems more just and more worthy of a human
being, than the worship of his likeness in stone. The Greek deities are
moreover subject to every human infirmity; indeed I should have made my
queen very unhappy by living in the same manner as her great god Zeus."
At these words the king smiled, and then went on: "And what has given
rise to this? The Hellenic love of beauty in form, which, in the eye of a
Greek, is superior to every thing else. He cannot separate the body from
the soul, because he holds it to be the most glorious of formed things,
and indeed, believes that a beautiful spirit must necessarily inhabit a
beautiful body. Their gods, therefore, are only elevated human beings,
but we adore an unseen power working in nature and in ourselves. The
animal takes its place between ourselves and nature; its actions are
guided, not, like our own, by the letter, but by the eternal laws of
nature, which owe their origin to the Deity, while the letter is a device
of man's own mind. And then, too, where amongst ourselves do we find so
earnest a longing and endeavor to gain freedom, the highest good, as
among the animals? Where such a regular and well-balanced life from
generation to generation, without instruction or precept?"
Here the king's voice failed. He was obliged to pause for a few moments,
and then continued: "I know that my end is near; therefore enough of
these matters. My son and successor, hear my last wishes and act upon
them; they are the result of experience. But alas! how often have I seen,
that rules of life given by one man to another are useless. Every man
must earn his own experience. His own losses make him prudent, his own
learning wise. Thou, my son, art coming to the throne at a mature age;
thou hast had time and opportunity to judge between right and wrong, to
note what is beneficial and what hurtful, to see and compare many things.
I give thee, therefore, only a few wholesome counsels, and only fear that
though I offer them with my right hand, thou wilt accept them with the
left.
"First, however, I must say that, notwithstanding my blindness, my
indifference to what has been going on during the past months has been
only apparent. I left you to your own devices with a good intention.
Rhodopis told me once one of her teacher AEsop's fables: 'A traveller,
meeting a man on his road, asked him how long it would be before he
reached the nearest town.' 'Go on, go on,' cried the other. 'But I want
to know first when I shall get to the town.' 'Go on, only go on,' was the
answer. The traveller left him with angry words and abuse; but he had not
gone many steps when the man called after him: 'You will be there in an
hour. I could not answer your question until I had seen your pace.'
"I bore this fable in my mind for my son's sake, and watched in silence
at what pace he was ruling his people. Now I have discovered what I wish
to know, and this is my advice: Examine into everything your self. It is
the duty of every man, but especially of a king, to acquaint himself
intimately with all that concerns the weal or woe of his people. You, my
son, are in the habit of using the eyes and ears of other men instead of
going to the fountain-head yourself. I am sure that your advisers, the
priests, only desire what is good; but . . . Neithotep, I must beg you to
leave us alone for a few moments."
When the priest was gone the king exclaimed "They wish for what is good,
but good only for themselves. But we are not kings of priests and
aristocrats only, we are kings of a nation! Do not listen to the advice
of this proud caste alone, but read every petition yourself, and, by
appointing Nomarchs devoted to the king and beloved by the people, make
yourself acquainted with the needs and wishes of the Egyptian nation. It
is not difficult to govern well, if you are aware of the state of feeling
in your land. Choose fit men to fill the offices of state. I have taken
care that the kingdom shall be properly divided. The laws are good, and
have proved themselves so; hold fast by these laws, and trust no one who
sets himself above them; for law is invariably wiser than the individual
man, and its transgressor deserves his punishment. The people understand
this well, and are ready to sacrifice themselves for us, when they see
that we are ready to give up our own will to the law. You do not care for
the people. I know their voice is often rude and rough, but it utters
wholesome truths, and no one needs to hear truth more than a king. The
Pharaoh who chooses priests and courtiers for his advisers, will hear
plenty of flattering words, while he who tries to fulfil the wishes of
the nation will have much to suffer from those around him; but the latter
will feel peace in his own heart, and be praised in the ages to come. I
have often erred, yet the Egyptians will weep for me, as one who knew
their needs and considered their welfare like a father. A king who really
knows his duties, finds it an easy and beautiful task to win the love of
the people--an unthankful one to gain the applause of the great--almost
an impossibility to content both.
"Do not forget,--I say it again,--that kings and priests exist for the
people, and not the people for their kings and priests. Honor religion
for its own sake and as the most important means of securing the
obedience of the governed to their governors; but at the same time show
its promulgators that you look on them, not as receptacles, but as
servants, of the Deity. Hold fast, as the law commands, by what is old;
but never shut the gates of your kingdom against what is new, if better.
Bad men break at once with the old traditions; fools only care for what
is new and fresh; the narrowminded and the selfish privileged class cling
indiscriminately to all that is old, and pronounce progress to be a sin;
but the wise endeavor to retain all that has approved itself in the past,
to remove all that has become defective, and to adopt whatever is good,
from whatever source it may have sprung. Act thus, my son. The priests
will try to keep you back--the Greeks to urge you forward. Choose one
party or the other, but beware of indecision--of yielding to the one
to-day, to the other to-morrow. Between two stools a man falls to the
ground. Let the one party be your friends, the other your enemies; by
trying to please both, you will have both opposed to you. Human beings
hate the man who shows kindness to their enemies. In the last few months,
during which you have ruled independently, both parties have been
offended by your miserable indecision. The man who runs backwards and
forwards like a child, makes no progress, and is soon weary. I have till
now--till I felt that death was near--always encouraged the Greeks and
opposed the priests. In the active business of life, the clever, brave
Greeks seemed to me especially serviceable; at death, I want men who can
make me out a pass into the nether regions. The gods forgive me for not
being able to resist words that sound so like a joke, even in my last
hour! They created me and must take me as I am. I rubbed my hands for joy
when I became king; with thee, my son, coming to the throne is a graver
matter.--Now call Neithotep back; I have still something to say to you
both."
The king gave his hand to the high-priest as he entered, saving: "I leave
you, Neithotep, without ill-will, though my opinion that you have been a
better priest than a servant to your king, remains unaltered. Psamtik
will probably prove a more obedient follower than I have been, but one
thing I wish to impress earnestly on you both: Do not dismiss the Greek
mercenaries until the war with the Persians is over, and has ended we
will hope--in victory for Egypt. My former predictions are not worth
anything now; when death draws near, we get depressed, and things begin
to look a little black. Without the auxiliary troops we shall be
hopelessly lost, but with them victory is not impossible. Be clever; show
the Ionians that they are fighting on the Nile for the freedom of their
own country--that Cambyses, if victorious, will not be contented with
Egypt alone, while his defeat may bring freedom to their own enslaved
countrymen in Ionia. I know you agree with me, Neithotep, for in your
heart you mean well to Egypt.--Now read me the prayers. I feel exhausted;
my end must be very near. If I could only forget that poor Nitetis! had
she the right to curse us? May the judges of the dead-may Osiris--have
mercy on our souls! Sit down by me, Ladice; lay thy hand on my burning
forehead. And Psamtik, in presence of these witnesses, swear to honor and
respect thy step-mother, as if thou wert her own child. My poor wife!
Come and seek me soon before the throne of Osiris. A widow and childless,
what hast thou to do with this world? We brought up Nitetis as our own
daughter, and yet we are so heavily punished for her sake. But her curse
rests on us--and only on us;--not on thee, Psamtik, nor on thy children.
Bring my grandson. Was that a tear? Perhaps; well, the little things to
which one has accustomed one's self are generally the hardest to give
up."
......................
Rhodopis entertained a fresh guest that evening; Kallias, the son of
Phoenippus, the same who first appeared in our tale as the bearer of news
from the Olympic games.
The lively, cheerful Athenian had just come back from his native country,
and, as an old and tried friend, was not only received by Rhodopis, but
made acquainted with the secret of Sappho's marriage.
Knakias, her old slave, had, it is true, taken in the flag which was the
sign of reception, two days ago; but he knew that Kallias was always
welcome to his mistress, and therefore admitted him just as readily as he
refused every one else.
The Athenian had plenty to tell, and when Rhodopis was called away on
business, he took his favorite Sappho into the garden, joking and teasing
her gaily as they looked out for her lover's coming. But Bartja did not
come, and Sappho began to be so anxious that Kallias called old Melitta,
whose longing looks in the direction of Naukratis were, if possible, more
anxious even than those of her mistress, and told her to fetch a musical
instrument which he had brought with him.
It was a rather large lute, made of gold and ivory, and as he handed it
to Sappho, he said, with a smile: "The inventor of this glorious
instrument, the divine Anakreon, had it made expressly for me, at my own
wish. He calls it a Barbiton, and brings wonderful tones from its
chords--tones that must echo on even into the land of shadows. I have
told this poet, who offers his life as one great sacrifice to the Muses,
Eros and Dionysus, a great deal about you, and he made me promise to
bring you this song, which he wrote on purpose for you, as a gift from
himself.
"Now, what do you say to this song? But by Hercules, child, how pale you
are! Have the verses affected you so much, or are you frightened at this
likeness of your own longing heart? Calm yourself, girl. Who knows what
may have happened to your lover?"
"Nothing has happened,--nothing," cried a gay, manly voice, and in a few
seconds Sappho was in the arms of him she loved.
Kallias looked on quietly, smiling at the wonderful beauty of these two
young lovers.
"But now," said the prince, after Sappho had made him acquainted with
Kallias, "I must go at once to your grandmother. We dare not wait four
days for our wedding. It must be to-day! There is danger in every hour of
delay. Is Theopompus here?"
"I think he must be," said Sappho. "I know of nothing else, that could
keep my grandmother so long in the house. But tell me, what is this about
our marriage? It seems to me . . ."
"Let us go in first, love. I fancy a thunder-storm must be coming on. The
sky is so dark, and it's so intolerably sultry."
"As you like, only make haste, unless you mean me to die of impatience.
There is not the slightest reason to be afraid of a storm. Since I was a
child there has not been either lightning or thunder in Egypt at this
time of year."
"Then you will see something new to-day," said Kallias, laughing; for a
large drop of rain has just fallen on my bald head, "the Nile-swallows
were flying close to the water as I came here, and you see there is a
cloud coming over the moon already. Come in quickly, or you will get wet.
Ho, slave, see that a black lamb is offered to the gods of the lower
world."
They found Theopompus sitting in Rhodopis' own apartment, as Sappho had
supposed. He had finished telling her the story of Zopyrus' arrest, and
of the journey which Bartja and his friends had taken on his behalf.
Their anxiety on the matter was beginning to be so serious, that Bartja's
unexpected appearance was a great relief. His words flew as he repeated
the events of the last few hours, and begged Theopompus to look out at
once for a ship in sailing order, to convey himself and his friends from
Egypt.
"That suits famously," exclaimed Kallias. "My own trireme brought me from
Naukratis to-day; it is lying now, fully equipped for sea, in the port,
and is quite at your service. I have only to send orders to the steersman
to keep the crew together and everything in sailing order.--You are under
no obligations to me; on the contrary it is I who have to thank you for
the honor you will confer on me. Ho, Knakias!--tell my slave Philomelus,
he's waiting in the hall,--to take a boat to the port, and order my
steersman Nausarchus to keep the ship in readiness for starting. Give him
this seal; it empowers him to do all that is necessary."
"And my slaves?" said Bartja.
"Knakias can tell my old steward to take them to Kallias' ship," answered
Theopompus.
"And when they see this," said Bartja, giving the old servant his ring,
"they will obey without a question."
Knakias went away with many a deep obeisance, and the prince went on:
"Now, my mother, I have a great petition to ask of you."
"I guess what it is," said Rhodopis, with a smile. "You wish your
marriage to be hastened, and I see that I dare not oppose your wish."
"If I'm not mistaken," said Kallias, "we have a remarkable case here. Two
people are in great peril, and find that very peril a matter of
rejoicing."
"Perhaps you are right there," said Bartja, pressing Sappho's hand
unperceived. And then, turning to Rhodopis again, he begged her to delay
no longer in trusting her dearest treasure to his care,--a treasure whose
worth he knew so well.
Rhodopis rose, she laid her right hand on Sappho's head and her left on
Bartja's, and said: "There is a myth which tells of a blue lake in the
land of roses; its waves are sometimes calm and gentle, but at others
they rise into a stormy flood; the taste of its waters is partly sweet as
honey, partly bitter as gall. Ye will learn the meaning of this legend in
the marriage-land of roses. Ye will pass calm and stormy-sweet and bitter
hours there. So long as thou wert a child, Sappho, thy life passed on
like a cloudless spring morning, but when thou becam'st a maiden, and
hadst learnt to love, thine heart was opened to admit pain; and during
the long months of separation pain was a frequent guest there. This guest
will seek admission as long as life lasts. Bartja, it will be your duty
to keep this intruder away from Sappho, as far as it lies in your power.
I know the world. I could perceive,--even before Croesus told me of your
generous nature,--that you were worthy of my Sappho. This justified me in
allowing you to eat the quince with her; this induces me now to entrust
to you, without fear, what I have always looked upon as a sacred pledge
committed to my keeping. Look upon her too only as a loan. Nothing is
more dangerous to love, than a comfortable assurance of exclusive
possession--I have been blamed for allowing such an inexperienced child
to go forth into your distant country, where custom is so unfavorable to
women; but I know what love is;--I know that a girl who loves, knows no
home but the heart of her husband;--the woman whose heart has been
touched by Eros no misfortune but that of separation from him whom she
has chosen. And besides, I would ask you, Kallias and Theopompus, is the
position of your own wives so superior to that of the Persian women? Are
not the women of Ionia and Attica forced to pass their lives in their own
apartments, thankful if they are allowed to cross the street accompanied
by suspicious and distrustful slaves? As to the custom which prevails in
Persia of taking many wives, I have no fear either for Bartja or Sappho.
He will be more faithful to his wife than are many Greeks, for he will
find in her what you are obliged to seek, on the one hand in marriage, on
the other in the houses of the cultivated Hetaere:--in the former,
housewives and mothers, in the latter, animated and enlivening
intellectual society. Take her, my son. I give her to you as an old
warrior gives his sword, his best possession, to his stalwart son:--he
gives it gladly and with confidence. Whithersoever she may go she will
always remain a Greek, and it comforts me to think that in her new home
she will bring honor to the Greek name and friends to our nation, Child,
I thank thee for those tears. I can command my own, but fate has made me
pay an immeasurable price for the power of doing so. The gods have heard
your oath, my noble Bartja. Never forget it, but take her as your own,
your friend, your wife. Take her away as soon as your friends return; it
is not the will of the gods that the Hymenaeus should be sung at Sappho's
nuptial rites."
As she said these words she laid Sappho's hand in Bartja's, embraced her
with passionate tenderness, and breathed a light kiss on the forehead of
the young Persian. Then turning to her Greek friends, who stood by, much
affected:
"That was a quiet nuptial ceremony," she said; "no songs, no torch-light!
May their union be so much the happier. Melitta, bring the bride's
marriage-ornaments, the bracelets and necklaces which lie in the bronze
casket on my dressing-table, that our darling may give her hand to her
lord attired as beseems a future princess."
"Yes, and do not linger on the way," cried Kallias, whose old
cheerfulness had now returned. "Neither can we allow the niece of the
greatest of Hymen's poets to be married without the sound of song and
music. The young husband's house is, to be sure, too far off for our
purpose, so we will suppose that the andronitis is his dwelling.
[The Hymenaeus was the wedding-song, so called because of its
refrain "Hymen O! Hymenae' O!" The god of marriage, Hymen, took
his origin and name from the hymn, was afterwards decked out richly
with myths, and finally, according to Catullus, received a seat on
Mount Helikon with the Muses.]
[A Greek bride was beautifully adorned for her marriage, and her
bridesmaids received holiday garments. Homer, Odyss. VI. 27.
Besides which, after the bath, which both bride and bridegroom were
obliged to take, she was anointed with sweet-smelling essences.
Thucyd. II. 15. Xenoph. Symp. II. 3.]
"We will conduct the maiden thither by the centre door, and there we will
enjoy a merry wedding-feast by the family hearth. Here, slavegirls, come
and form yourselves into two choruses. Half of your number take the part
of the youths; the other half that of the maidens, and sing us Sappho's
Hymenaeus. I will be the torch-bearer; that dignity is mine by right. You
must know, Bartja, that my family has an hereditary right to carry the
torches at the Eleusinian mysteries and we are therefore called Daduchi
or torch-bearers. Ho, slave! see that the door of the andronitis is hung
with flowers, and tell your comrades to meet us with a shower of
sweetmeats as we enter. That's right, Melitta; why, how did you manage to
get those lovely violet and myrtle marriage-crowns made so quickly? The
rain is streaming through the opening above. You see, Hymen has persuaded
Zeus to help him; so that not a single marriage-rite shall be omitted.
You could not take the bath, which ancient custom prescribes for the
bride and bridegroom on the morning of their wedding-day, so you have
only to stand here a moment and take the rain of Zeus as an equivalent
for the waters of the sacred spring. Now, girls, begin your song. Let the
maidens bewail the rosy days of childhood, and the youths praise the lot
of those who marry young."
Five well-practised treble voices now began to sing the chorus of virgins
in a sad and plaintive tone.
Suddenly the song was hushed, for a flash of lightning had shone down
through the aperture beneath which Kallias had stationed the bride and
bridegroom, followed by a loud peal of thunder. "See!" cried the
Daduchus, raising his hand to heaven, "Zeus himself has taken the
nuptial-torch, and sings the Hymenaeus for his favorites."
At dawn the next morning, Sappho and Bartja left the house and went into
the garden. After the violent storm which had raged all night, the garden
was looking as fresh and cheerful in the morning light as the faces of
the newly-married pair.
Bartja's anxiety for his friends, whom he had almost forgotten in the
excitement of his marriage, had roused them so early.
The garden had been laid out on an artificial hill, which overlooked the
inundated plain. Blue and white lotus-blossoms floated on the smooth
surface of the water, and vast numbers of water-birds hovered along the
shores or over the flood. Flocks of white, herons appeared on the banks,
their plumage gleaming like glaciers on distant mountain peaks; a
solitary eagle circled upward on its broad pinions through the pure
morning air, turtle-doves nestled in the tops of the palm-trees; pelicans
and ducks fluttered screaming away, whenever a gay sail appeared. The air
had been cooled by the storm, a fresh north-wind was blowing, and,
notwithstanding the early hour, there were a number of boats sailing over
the deluged fields before the breeze. The songs of the rowers, the
plashing strokes of their oars and the cries of the birds, all
contributed to enliven the watery landscape of the Nile valley, which,
though varied in color, was somewhat monotonous.
Bartja and Sappho stood leaning on each other by the low wall which ran
round Rhodopis' garden, exchanging tender words and watching the scene
below, till at last Bartja's quick eye caught sight of a boat making
straight for the house and coming on fast by the help of the breeze and
powerful rowers.
A few minutes later the boat put in to shore and Zopyrus with his
deliverers stood before them.
Darius's plan had succeeded perfectly, thanks to the storm, which, by its
violence and the unusual time of its appearance, had scared the
Egyptians; but still there was no time to be lost, as it might reasonably
be supposed that the men of Sais would pursue their fugitive with all the
means at their command.
Sappho, therefore, had to take a short farewell of her grandmother, all
the more tender, however, for its shortness,--and then, led by Rartja and
followed by old Melitta, who was to accompany her to Persia, she went on
board Syloson's boat. After an hour's sail they reached a
beautifully-built and fast-sailing vessel, the Hygieia, which belonged to
Kallias.
He was waiting for them on board his trireme. The leave-taking between
himself and his young friends was especially affectionate. Bartja hung a
heavy and costly gold chain round the neck of the old man in token of his
gratitude, while Syloson, in remembrance of the dangers they had shared
together, threw his purple cloak over Darius' shoulders. It was a
master-specimen of Tynan dye, and had taken the latter's fancy. Darius
accepted the gift with pleasure, and said, as he took leave: "You must
never forget that I am indebted to you, my Greek friend, and as soon as
possible give me an opportunity of doing you service in return."
"You ought to come to me first, though," exclaimed Zopyrus, embracing his
deliverer. "I am perfectly ready to share my last gold piece with you; or
what is more, if it would do you a service, to sit a whole week in that
infernal hole from which you saved me. Ah! they're weighing anchor.
Farewell, you brave Greek. Remember me to the flower-sisters, especially
to the pretty, little Stephanion, and tell her her long-legged lover
won't be able to plague her again for some time to come at least. And
then, one more thing; take this purse of gold for the wife and children
of that impertinent fellow, whom I struck too hard in the heat of the
fray."
The anchors fell rattling on to the deck, the wind filled the sails, the
Trieraules--[Flute-player to a trireme]--took his flute and set the
measure of the monotonous Keleusma or rowing-song, which echoed again
from the hold of the vessel. The beak of the ship bearing the statue of
Hygieia, carved in wood, began to move. Bartja and Sappho stood at the
helm and gazed towards Naukratis, until the shores of the Nile vanished
and the green waves of the Hellenic sea splashed their foam over the deck
of the trireme.
CHAPTER XII.
Our young bride and bridegroom had not travelled farther than Ephesus,
when the news reached them that Amasis was dead. From Ephesus they went
to Babylon, and thence to Pasargadae, which Kassandane, Atossa and
Croesus had made their temporary residence. Kassandane was to accompany
the army to Egypt, and wished, now that Nebenchari had restored her
sight, to see the monument which had lately been built to her great
husband's memory after Croesus' design, before leaving for so long a
journey. She rejoiced in finding it worthy of the great Cyrus, and spent
hours every day in the beautiful gardens which had been laid out round
the mausoleum.
It consisted of a gigantic sarcophagus made of solid marble blocks, and
resting like a house on a substructure composed of six high marble steps.
The interior was fitted up like a room, and contained, beside the golden
coffin in which were preserved such few remains of Cyrus as had been
spared by the dogs, vultures, and elements, a silver bed and a table of
the same metal, on which were golden drinking-cups and numerous garments
ornamented with the rarest and most costly jewels.
The building was forty feet high. The shady paradises--[Persian
pleasure-gardens]--and colonnades by which it was surrounded had been
planned by Croesus, and in the midst of the sacred grove was a
dwelling-house for the Magi appointed to watch over the tomb.
The palace of Cyrus could be seen in the distance--a palace in which he
had appointed that the future kings of Persia should pass at least some
months of every year. It was a splendid building in the style of a
fortress, and so inaccessibly placed that it had been fixed on as the
royal treasure-house.
Here, in the fresh mountain air of a place dedicated to the memory of the
husband she had loved so much, Kassandane felt well and at peace; she was
glad too to see that Atossa was recovering the old cheerfulness, which
she had so sadly lost since the death of Nitetis and the departure of
Darius. Sappho soon became the friend of her new mother and sister, and
all three felt very loath to leave the lovely Pasargadm.
Darius and Zopyrus had remained with the army which was assembling in the
plains of the Euphrates, and Bartja too had to return thither before the
march began.
Cambyses went out to meet his family on their return; he was much
impressed with Sappho's great beauty, but she confessed to her husband
that his brother only inspired her with fear.
The king had altered very much in the last few months. His formerly pale
and almost noble features were reddened and disfigured by the quantities
of wine he was in the habit of drinking. In his dark eyes there was the
old fire still, but dimmed and polluted. His hair and beard, formerly so
luxuriant, and black as the raven's wing, hung down grey and disordered
over his face and chin, and the proud smile which used so to improve his
features had given way to an expression of contemptuous annoyance and
harsh severity.
Sometimes he laughed,--loudly, immoderately and coarsely; but this was
only when intoxicated, a condition which had long ceased to be unusual
with him.
He continued to retain an aversion to his wives; so much so that the
royal harem was to be left behind in Susa, though all his court took
their favorite wives and concubines with them on the campaign. Still no
one could complain that the king was ever guilty of injustice; indeed he
insisted more eagerly now than before on the rigid execution of the law;
and wherever he detected an abuse his punishments were cruel and
inexorable. Hearing that a judge, named Sisamnes, had been bribed to
pronounce an unjust sentence, he condemned the wretched man to be flayed,
ordered the seat of justice to be covered with his skin, appointed the
son to the father's vacant place and compelled him to occupy this fearful
seat.--[Herodot. V. 25.]--Cambyses was untiring as commander of the
forces, and superintended the drilling of the troops assembled near
Babylon with the greatest rigor and circumspection.
The hosts were to march after the festival of the New Year, which
Cambyses celebrated this time with immense expense and profusion. The
ceremony over, he betook himself to the army. Bartja was there. He came
up to his brother, beaming with joy, kissed the hem of his robe, and told
him in a tone of triumph that he hoped to become a father. The king
trembled as he heard the words, vouchsafed his brother no answer, drank
himself into unconsciousness that evening, and the next morning called
the soothsayers, Magi and Chaldaeans together, in order to submit a
question to them. "Shall I be committing a sin against the gods, if I
take my sister to wife and thus verify the promise of the dream, which ye
formerly interpreted to mean that Atossa should bear a future king to
this realm?"
The Magi consulted a short time together. Then Oropastes cast himself at
the king's feet and said, "We do not believe, O King, that this marriage
would be a sin against the gods; inasmuch as, first: it is a custom among
the Persians to marry with their own kin; and secondly, though it be not
written in the law that the pure man may marry his sister, it is written
that the king may do what seemeth good in his own eyes. That which
pleaseth thee is therefore always lawful."
Cambyses sent the Magi away with rich gifts, gave Oropastes full powers
as regent of the kingdom in his absence, and soon after told his
horrified mother that, as soon as the conquest of Egypt and the
punishment of the son of Amasis should have been achieved, he intended to
marry his sister Atossa.
At length the immense host, numbering more than 800,000 fighting men,
departed in separate divisions, and reached the Syrian desert in two
months. Here they were met by the Arabian tribes whom Phanes had
propitiated--the Amalekites and Geshurites--bringing camels and horses
laden with water for the host.
At Accho, in the land of the Canaanites, the fleets of the Syrians,
Phoenicians and Ionians belonging to Persia, and the auxiliary ships from
Cyprus and Samos, won by the efforts of Phanes, were assembled. The case
of the Samian fleet was a remarkable one. Polykrates saw in Cambyses'
proposal a favorable opportunity of getting rid of all the citizens who
were discontented with his government, manned forty triremes with eight
thousand malcontent Samians, and sent them to the Persians with the
request that not one might be allowed to return home.--[Herod. III. 44.]
As soon as Phanes heard this he warned the doomed men, who at once,
instead of sailing to join the Persian forces, returned to Samos and
attempted to overthrow Polykrates. They were defeated, however, on land,
and escaped to Sparta to ask help against the tyrant.
A full month before the time of the inundation, the Persian and Egyptian
armies were standing face to face near Pelusium on the north-east coast
of the Delta.
Phanes' arrangements had proved excellent. The Arabian tribes had kept
faith so well that the journey through the desert, which would usually
have cost thousands of lives, had been attended with very little loss,
and the time of year had been so well chosen that the Persian troops
reached Egypt by dry roads and without inconvenience.
The king met his Greek friend with every mark of distinction, and
returned a friendly nod when Phanes said: "I hear that you have been less
cheerful than usual since the death of your beautiful bride. A woman's
grief passes in stormy and violent complaint, but the sterner character
of a man cannot so soon be comforted. I know what you feel, for I have
lost my dearest too. Let us both praise the gods for granting us the best
remedy for our grief--war and revenge." Phanes accompanied the king to an
inspection of the troops and to the evening revel. It was marvellous to
see the influence he exercised over this fierce spirit, and how calm--nay
even cheerful--Cambyses became, when the Athenian was near.
The Egyptian army was by no means contemptible, even when compared with
the immense Persian hosts. Its position was covered on the right by the
walls of Pelusium, a frontier fortress designed by the Egyptian kings as
a defence against incursions from the east. The Persians were assured by
deserters that the Egyptian army numbered altogether nearly six hundred
thousand men. Beside a great number of chariots of war, thirty thousand
Karian and Ionian mercenaries, and the corps of the Mazai, two hundred
and fifty thousand Kalasirians, one hundred and sixty thousand
Hermotybians, twenty thousand horsemen, and auxiliary troops, amounting
to more than fifty thousand, were assembled under Psamtik's banner;
amongst these last the Libyan Maschawascha were remarkable for their
military deeds, and the Ethiopians for their numerical superiority.
The infantry were divided into regiments and companies, under different
standards, and variously equipped.
[In these and the descriptions immediately following, we have drawn
our information, either from the drawings made from Egyptian
monuments in Champollion, Wilkinson, Rosellini and Lepsius, or from
the monuments themselves. There is a dagger in the Berlin Museum,
the blade of which is of bronze, the hilt of ivory and the sheath of
leather. Large swords are only to be seen in the hands of the
foreign auxiliaries, but the native Egyptians are armed with small
ones, like daggers. The largest one of which we have any knowledge
is in the possession of Herr E. Brugsch at Cairo. It is more than
two feet long.]
The heavy-armed soldiers carried large shields, lances, and daggers; the
swordsmen and those who fought with battle-axes had smaller shields and
light clubs; beside these, there were slingers, but the main body of the
army was composed of archers, whose bows unbent were nearly the height of
a man. The only clothing of the horse-soldiers was the apron, and their
weapon a light club in the form of a mace or battle-axe. Those warriors,
on the contrary, who fought in chariots belonged to the highest rank of
the military caste, spent large sums on the decoration of their
two-wheeled chariots and the harness of their magnificent horses, and
went to battle in their most costly ornaments. They were armed with bows
and lances, and a charioteer stood beside each, so that their undivided
attention could be bestowed upon the battle.
The Persian foot was not much more numerous than the Egyptian, but they
had six times the number of horse-soldiers.
As soon as the armies stood face to face, Cambyses caused the great
Pelusian plain to be cleared of trees and brushwood, and had the
sand-hills removed which were to be found here and there, in order to
give his cavalry and scythe-chariots a fair field of action. Phanes'
knowledge of the country was of great use. He had drawn up a plan of
action with great military skill, and succeeded in gaining not only
Cambyses' approval, but that of the old general Megabyzus and the best
tacticians among the Achaemenidae. His local knowledge was especially
valuable on account of the marshes which intersected the Pelusian plain,
and might, unless carefully avoided, have proved fatal to the Persian
enterprise. At the close of the council of war Phanes begged to be heard
once more: "Now, at length," he said, "I am at liberty to satisfy your
curiosity in reference to the closed waggons full of animals, which I
have had transported hither. They contain five thousand cats! Yes, you
may laugh, but I tell you these creatures will be more serviceable to us
than a hundred thousand of our best soldiers. Many of you are aware that
the Egyptians have a superstition which leads them rather to die than
kill a cat, I, myself, nearly paid for such a murder once with my life.
Remembering this, I have been making a diligent search for cats during my
late journey; in Cyprus, where there are splendid specimens, in Samos and
in Crete. All I could get I ordered to be caught, and now propose that
they be distributed among those troops who will be opposed to the native
Egyptian soldiers. Every man must be told to fasten one firmly to his
shield and hold it out as he advances towards the enemy. I will wager
that there's not one real Egyptian, who would not rather fly from the
battle-field than take aim at one of these sacred animals."
This speech was met by a loud burst of laughter; on being discussed,
however, it was approved of, and ordered to be carried out at once. The
ingenious Greek was honored by receiving the king's hand to kiss, his
expenses were reimbursed by a magnificent present, and he was urged to
take a daughter of some noble Persian family in marriage.
[Themistocles too, on coming to the Persian court, received a high-
born Persian wife in marriage. Diod. XI. 57.]
The king concluded by inviting him to supper, but this the Athenian
declined, on the plea that he must review the Ionian troops, with whom he
was as yet but little acquainted, and withdrew.
At the door of his tent he found his slaves disputing with a ragged,
dirty and unshaven old man, who insisted on speaking with their master.
Fancying he must be a beggar, Phanes threw him a piece of gold; the old
man did not even stoop to pick it up, but, holding the Athenian fast by
his cloak, cried, "I am Aristomachus the Spartan!"
Cruelly as he was altered, Phanes recognized his old friend at once,
ordered his feet to be washed and his head anointed, gave him wine and
meat to revive his strength, took his rags off and laid a new chiton over
his emaciated, but still sinewy, frame.
Aristomachus received all in silence; and when the food and wine had
given him strength to speak, began the following answer to Phanes' eager
questions.
On the murder of Phanes' son by Psamtik, he had declared his intention of
leaving Egypt and inducing the troops under his command to do the same,
unless his friend's little daughter were at once set free, and a
satisfactory explanation given for the sudden disappearance of the boy.
Psamtik promised to consider the matter. Two days later, as Aristomachus
was going up the Nile by night to Memphis, he was seized by Egyptian
soldiers, bound and thrown into the dark hold of a boat, which, after a
voyage of many days and nights, cast anchor on a totally unknown shore.
The prisoners were taken out of their dungeon and led across a desert
under the burning sun, and past rocks of strange forms, until they
reached a range of mountains with a colony of huts at its base. These
huts were inhabited by human beings, who, with chains on their feet, were
driven every morning into the shaft of a mine and there compelled to hew
grains of gold out of the stony rock. Many of these miserable men had
passed forty years in this place, but most died soon, overcome by the
hard work and the fearful extremes of heat and cold to which they were
exposed on entering and leaving the mine.
[Diodorus (III. 12.) describes the compulsory work in the gold mines
with great minuteness. The convicts were either prisoners taken in
war, or people whom despotism in its blind fury found it expedient
to put out of the way. The mines lay in the plain of Koptos, not
far from the Red Sea. Traces of them have been discovered in modern
times. Interesting inscriptions of the time of Rameses the Great,
(14 centuries B. C.) referring to the gold-mines, have been found,
one at Radesich, the other at Kubnn, and have been published and
deciphered in Europe.]
"My companions," continued Aristomachus, "were either condemned murderers
to whom mercy had been granted, or men guilty of high treason whose
tongues had been cut out, and others such as myself whom the king had
reason to fear. Three months I worked among this set, submitting to the
strokes of the overseer, fainting under the fearful heat, and stiffening
under the cold dews of night. I felt as if picked out for death and only
kept alive by the hope of vengeance. It happened, however, by the mercy
of the gods, that at the feast of Pacht, our guards, as is the custom of
the Egyptians, drank so freely as to fall into a deep sleep, during which
I and a young Jew who had been deprived of his right hand for having used
false weights in trade, managed to escape unperceived; Zeus Lacedaemonius
and the great God whom this young man worshipped helped us in our need,
and, though we often heard the voices of our pursuers, they never
succeeded in capturing us. I had taken a bow from one of our guards; with
this we obtained food, and when no game was to be found we lived on
roots, fruits and birds' eggs. The sun and stars showed us our road. We
knew that the gold-mines were not far from the Red Sea and lay to the
south of Memphis. It was not long before we reached the coast; and then,
pressing onwards in a northerly direction, we fell in with some friendly
mariners, who took care of us until we were taken up by an Arabian boat.
The young Jew understood the language spoken by the crew, and in their
care we came to Eziongeber in the land of Edom. There we heard that
Cambyses was coming with an immense army against Egypt, and travelled as
far as Harma under the protection of an Amalekite caravan bringing water
to the Persian army. From thence I went on to Pelusium in the company of
some stragglers from the Asiatic army, who now and then allowed me a seat
on their horses, and here I heard that you had accepted a high command in
Cambyses' army. I have kept my vow, I have been true to my nation in
Egypt; now it is your turn to help old Aristomachus in gaining the only
thing he still cares for--revenge on his persecutors."
"And that you shall have!" cried Phanes, grasping the old man's hand.
"You shall have the command of the heavy-armed Milesian troops, and
liberty to commit what carnage you like among the ranks of our enemies.
This, however, is only paying half the debt I owe you. Praised be the
gods, who have put it in my power to make you happy by one single
sentence. Know then, Aristomachus, that, only a few days after your
disappearance, a ship arrived in the harbor of Naukratis from Sparta. It
was guided by your own noble son and expressly sent by the Ephori in your
honor--to bring the father of two Olympic victors back to his native
land."
The old man's limbs trembled visibly at these words, his eyes filled with
tears and he murmured a prayer. Then smiting his forehead, he cried in a
voice trembling with feeling: "Now it is fulfilled! now it has become a
fact! If I doubted the words of thy priestess, O Phoebus Apollo! pardon
my sin! What was the promise of the oracle?
"If once the warrior hosts from the snow-topped mountains
descending,
Come to the fields of the stream watering richly the plain,
Then shall the lingering boat to the beckoning meadows convey thee,
Which to the wandering foot peace and a home can afford.
When those warriors come, from the snow-topped mountains descending,
Then will the powerful Five grant thee what long they refused."
"The promise of the god is fulfilled. Now I may return home, and I will;
but first I raise my hands to Dice, the unchanging goddess of justice,
and implore her not to deny me the pleasure of revenge."
"The day of vengeance will dawn to-morrow," said Phanes, joining in the
old man's prayer. "Tomorrow I shall slaughter the victims for the
dead--for my son--and will take no rest until Cambyses has pierced the
heart of Egypt with the arrows which I have cut for him. Come, my friend,
let me take you to the king. One man like you can put a whole troop of
Egyptians to flight."
.......................
It was night. The Persian soldiers, their position being unfortified,
were in order of battle, ready to meet any unexpected attack. The
foot-soldiers stood leaning on their shields, the horsemen held their
horses saddled and bridled near the camp-fires. Cambyses was riding
through the ranks, encouraging his troops by words and looks. Only one
part of the army was not yet ranged in order of battle--the centre. It
was composed of the Persian body-guard, the apple-bearers, Immortals, and
the king's own relatives, who were always led into battle by the king in
person.
The Ionian Greeks too had gone to rest, at Phanes' command. He wanted to
keep his men fresh, and allowed them to sleep in their armor, while he
kept watch. Aristomachus was welcomed with shouts of joy by the Greeks,
and kindly by Cambyses, who assigned him, at the head of one half the
Greek troops, a place to the left of the centre attack, while Phanes,
with the other half, had his place at the right. The king himself was to
take the lead at the head of the ten thousand Immortals, preceded by the
blue, red and gold imperial banner and the standard of Kawe. Bartja was
to lead the regiment of mounted guards numbering a thousand men, and that
division of the cavalry which was entirely clothed in mail.
Croesus commanded a body of troops whose duty it was to guard the camp
with its immense treasures, the wives of Cambyses' nobles, and his own
mother and sister.
At last Mithras appeared and shed his light upon the earth; the spirits
of the night retired to their dens, and the Magi stirred up the sacred
fire which had been carried before the army the whole way from Babylon,
until it became a gigantic flame. They and the king united in feeding it
with costly perfumes, Cambyses offered the sacrifice, and, holding the
while a golden bowl high in the air, besought the gods to grant him
victory and glory. He then gave the password, "Auramazda, the helper and
guide," and placed himself at the head of his guards, who went into the
battle with wreaths on their tiaras. The Greeks offered their own
sacrifices, and shouted with delight on hearing that the omens were
auspicious. Their war-cry was "Hebe."
Meanwhile the Egyptian priests had begun their day also with prayer and
sacrifice, and had then placed their army in order of battle.
Psamtik, now King of Egypt, led the centre. He was mounted on a golden
chariot; the trappings of his horses were of gold and purple, and plumes
of ostrich feathers nodded on their proud heads. He wore the double crown
of Upper and Lower Egypt, and the charioteer who stood at his left hand
holding the reins and whip, was descended from one of the noblest
Egyptian families.
The Hellenic and Karian mercenaries were to fight at the left of the
centre, the horse at the extreme of each wing, and the Egyptian and
Ethiopian foot were stationed, six ranks deep, on the right and left of
the armed chariots, and Greek mercenaries.
Psamtik drove through the ranks of his army, giving encouraging and
friendly words to all the men. He drew up before the Greek division, and
addressed them thus: "Heroes of Cyprus and Libya! your deeds in arms are
well known to me, and I rejoice in the thought of sharing your glory
to-day and crowning you with fresh laurels. Ye have no need to fear, that
in the day of victory I shall curtail your liberties. Malicious tongues
have whispered that this is all ye have to expect from me; but I tell
you, that if we conquer, fresh favors will be shown to you and your
descendants; I shall call you the supporters of my throne. Ye are
fighting to-day, not for me alone, but for the freedom of your own
distant homes. It is easy to perceive that Cambyses, once lord of Egypt,
will stretch out his rapacious hand over your beautiful Hellas and its
islands. I need only remind you, that they be between Egypt and your
Asiatic brethren who are already groaning under the Persian yoke. Your
acclamations prove that ye agree with me already, but I must ask for a
still longer hearing. It is my duty to tell you who has sold, not only
Egypt, but his own country to the King of Persia, in return for immense
treasures. The man's name is Phanes! You are angry and inclined to doubt?
I swear to you, that this very Phanes has accepted Cambyses' gold and
promised not only to be his guide to Egypt, but to open the gates of your
own Greek cities to him. He knows the country and the people, and can be
bribed to every perfidy. Look at him! there he is, walking by the side of
the king. See how he bows before him! I thought I had heard once, that
the Greeks only prostrated themselves before their gods. But of course,
when a man sells his country, he ceases to be its citizen. Am I not
right? Ye scorn to call so base a creature by the name of countryman?
Yes? then I will deliver the wretch's daughter into your hands. Do what
ye will with the child of such a villain. Crown her with wreaths of
roses, fall down before her, if it please you, but do not forget that she
belongs to a man who has disgraced the name of Hellene, and has betrayed
his countrymen and country!"
As he finished speaking the men raised a wild cry of rage and took
possession of the trembling child. A soldier held her up, so that her
father--the troops not being more than a bow-shot apart--could see all
that happened. At the same moment an Egyptian, who afterwards earned
celebrity through the loudness of his voice, cried: "Look here, Athenian!
see how treachery and corruption are rewarded in this country!" A bowl of
wine stood near, provided by the king, from which the soldiers had just
been drinking themselves into intoxication. A Karian seized it, plunged
his sword into the innocent child's breast, and let the blood flow into
the bowl; filled a goblet with the awful mixture, and drained it, as if
drinking to the health of the wretched father. Phanes stood watching the
scene, as if struck into a statue of cold stone. The rest of the soldiers
then fell upon the bowl like madmen, and wild beasts could not have
lapped up the foul drink with greater eagerness.--[Herodotus tells this
fearful tale (III. ii.)]
In the same moment Psamtik triumphantly shot off his first arrow into the
Persian ranks.
The mercenaries flung the child's dead body on to the ground; drunk with
her blood, they raised their battle-song, and rushed into the strife far
ahead of their Egyptian comrades.
But now the Persian ranks began to move. Phanes, furious with pain and
rage, led on his heavy-armed troops, indignant too at the brutal
barbarity of their countrymen, and dashed into the ranks of those very
soldiers, whose love he had tried to deserve during ten years of faithful
leadership.
At noon, fortune seemed to be favoring the Egyptians; but at sunset the
Persians had the advantage, and when the full-moon rose, the Egyptians
were flying wildly from the battle-field, perishing in the marshes and in
the arm of the Nile which flowed behind their position, or being cut to
pieces by the swords of their enemies.
Twenty thousand Persians and fifty thousand Egyptians lay dead on the
blood-stained sea-sand. The wounded, drowned, and prisoners could
scarcely be numbered.
[Herod. III. 12. Ktesias, Persica 9. In ancient history the loss
of the conquered is always far greater than that of the conquerors.
To a certain extent this holds good in the present day, but the
proportion is decidedly not so unfavorable for the vanquished.]
Psamtik had been one of the last to fly. He was well mounted, and, with a
few thousand faithful followers, reached the opposite bank of the Nile
and made for Memphis, the well-fortified city of the Pyramids.
Of the Greek mercenaries very few survived, so furious had been Phanes'
revenge, and so well had he been supported by his Ionians. Ten thousand
Karians were taken captive and the murderer of his little child was
killed by Phanes' own hand.
Aristomachus too, in spite of his wooden leg, had performed miracles of
bravery; but, notwithstanding all their efforts, neither he, nor any of
his confederates in revenge, had succeeded in taking Psamtik prisoner.
When the battle was over, the Persians returned in triumph to their
tents, to be warmly welcomed by Croesus and the warriors and priests who
had remained behind, and to celebrate their victory by prayers and
sacrifices.
The next morning Cambyses assembled his generals and rewarded them with
different tokens of distinction, such as costly robes, gold chains,
rings, swords, and stars formed of precious stones. Gold and silver coins
were distributed among the common soldiers.
The principal attack of the Egyptians had been directed against the
centre of the Persian army, where Cambyses commanded in person; and with
such effect that the guards had already begun to give way. At that moment
Bartja, arriving with his troop of horsemen, had put fresh courage into
the wavering, had fought like a lion himself, and by his bravery and
promptitude decided the day in favor of the Persians.
The troops were exultant in their joy: they shouted his praises, as "the
conqueror of Pelusium" and the "best of the Achaemenidae."
Their cries reached the king's ears and made him very angry. He knew he
had been fighting at the risk of life, with real courage and the strength
of a giant, and yet the day would have been lost if this boy had not
presented him with the victory. The brother who had embittered his days
of happy love, was now to rob him of half his military glory. Cambyses
felt that he hated Bartja, and his fist clenched involuntarily as he saw
the young hero looking so happy in the consciousness of his own
well-earned success.
Phanes had been wounded and went to his tent; Aristomachus lay near him,
dying.
"The oracle has deceived me, after all," he murmured. "I shall die
without seeing my country again."
"The oracle spoke the truth," answered Phanes. "Were not the last words
of the Pythia?"
'Then shall the lingering boat to the beckoning meadows convey thee,
Which to the wandering foot peace and a home will afford?'
"Can you misunderstand their meaning? They speak of Charon's lingering
boat, which will convey you to your last home, to the one great
resting-place for all wanderers--the kingdom of Hades."
"Yes, my friend, you are right there. I am going to Hades."
"And the Five have granted you, before death, what they so long
refused,--the return to Lacedaemon. You ought to be thankful to the gods
for granting you such sons and such vengeance on your enemies. When my
wound is healed, I shall go to Greece and tell your son that his father
died a glorious death, and was carried to the grave on his shield, as
beseems a hero."
"Yes, do so, and give him my shield as a remembrance of his old father.
There is no need to exhort him to virtue."
"When Psamtik is in our power, shall I tell him what share you had in his
overthrow?"
"No; he saw me before he took to flight, and at the unexpected vision his
bow fell from his hand. This was taken by his friends as a signal for
flight, and they turned their horses from the battle."
"The gods ordain, that bad men shall be ruined by their own deeds.
Psamtik lost courage, for he must have believed that the very spirits of
the lower world were fighting against him."
"We mortals gave him quite enough to do. The Persians fought well. But
the battle would have been lost without the guards and our troops."
"Without doubt."
"I thank thee, O Zeus Lacedaemonius."
"You are praying?"
"I am praising the gods for allowing me to die at ease as to my country.
These heterogeneous masses can never be dangerous to Greece. Ho,
physician, when am I likely to die?"
The Milesian physician, who had accompanied the Greek troops to Egypt,
pointed to the arrow-head sticking fast in his breast, and said with a
sad smile, "You have only a few hours more to live. If I were to draw the
arrow from your wound, you would die at once."
The Spartan thanked him, said farewell to Phanes, sent a greeting to
Rhodopis, and then, before they could prevent him, drew the arrow from
his wound with an unflinching hand. A few moments later Aristomachus was
dead.
The same day a Persian embassy set out for Memphis on board one of the
Lesbian vessels. It was commissioned to demand from Psamtik the surrender
of his own person and of the city at discretion. Cambyses followed,
having first sent off a division of his army under Megabyzus to invest
Sais.
At Heliopolis he was met by deputations from the Greek inhabitants of
Naukratis and the Libyans, praying for peace and his protection, and
bringing a golden wreath and other rich presents. Cambyses received them
graciously and assured them of his friendship; but repulsed the
messengers from Cyrene and Barka indignantly, and flung, with his own
hand, their tribute of five hundred silver mince among his soldiers,
disdaining to accept so contemptible an offering.
In Heliopolis he also heard that, at the approach of his embassy, the
inhabitants of Memphis had flocked to the shore, bored a hole in the
bottom of the ship, torn his messengers in pieces without distinction, as
wild beasts would tear raw flesh, and dragged them into the fortress. On
hearing this he cried angrily: "I swear, by Mithras, that these murdered
men shall be paid for; ten lives for one."
Two days later and Cambyses with his army stood before the gates of
Memphis. The siege was short, as the garrison was far too small for the
city, and the citizens were discouraged by the fearful defeat at
Pelusium.
King Psamtik himself came out to Cambyses, accompanied by his principal
nobles, in rent garments, and with every token of mourning. Cambyses
received him coldly and silently, ordering him and his followers to be
guarded and removed. He treated Ladice, the widow of Amasis, who appeared
at the same time as her step-son, with consideration, and, at the
intercession of Phanes, to whom she had always shown favor, allowed her
to return to her native town of Cyrene under safe conduct. She remained
there until the fall of her nephew, Arcesilaus III. and the flight of her
sister Pheretime, when she betook herself to Anthylla, the town in Egypt
which belonged to her, and where she passed a quiet, solitary existence,
dying at a great age.
Cambyses not only scorned to revenge the imposture which had been
practised on him on a woman, but, as a Persian, had far too much respect
for a mother, and especially for the mother of a king, to injure Ladice
in any way.
While he was engaged in the siege of Sais, Psamtik passed his
imprisonment in the palace of the Pharaohs, treated in every respect as a
king, but strictly guarded.
Among those members of the upper class who had incited the people to
resistance, Neithotep, the high-priest of Neith, had taken the foremost
place. He was therefore sent to Memphis and put in close confinement,
with one hundred of his unhappy confederates. The larger number of the
Pharaoh's court, on the other hand, did homage voluntarily to Cambyses at
Sais, entitled him Ramestu, "child of the sun," and suggested that he
should cause himself to be crowned King of Upper and Lower Egypt, with
all the necessary formalities, and admitted into the priestly caste
according to ancient custom. By the advice of Croesus and Phanes,
Cambyses gave in to these proposals, though much against his own will: he
went so far, indeed, as to offer sacrifice in the temple of Neith, and
allowed the newly-created high-priest of the goddess to give him a
superficial insight into the nature of the mysteries. Some of the
courtiers he retained near himself, and promoted different administrative
functionaries to high posts; the commander of Amasis' Nile fleet
succeeded so well in gaining the king's favor, as to be appointed one of
those who ate at the royal table.
[On a statue in the Gregorian Museum in the Vatican, there is an
inscription giving an account of Cambyses' sojourn at Sais, which
agrees with the facts related in our text. He was lenient to his
conquered subjects, and, probably in order to secure his position as
the lawful Pharaoh, yielded to the wishes of the priests, was even
initiated into the mysteries and did much for the temple of Neith.
His adoption of the name Ramestu is also confirmed by this statue.
E. de Rough, Memoire sur la statuette naophore du musee Gregorian,
au Vatican. Revue Archeol. 1851.]
On leaving Sais, Cambyses placed Megabyzus in command of the city; but
scarcely had the king quitted their walls than the smothered rage of the
people broke forth; they murdered the Persian sentinels, poisoned the
wells, and set the stables of the cavalry on fire. Megabyzus at once
applied to the king, representing that such hostile acts, if not
repressed by fear, might soon be followed by open rebellion. "The two
thousand noble youths from Memphis whom you have destined to death as an
indemnification for our murdered ambassadors," said he, "ought to be
executed at once; and it would do no harm if the son of Psamtik were
added to the number, as he can some day become a rallying centre for the
rebels. I hear that the daughters of the dethroned king and of the
high-priest Neithotep have to carry water for the baths of the noble
Phanes."
The Athenian answered with a smile: "Cambyses has allowed me to employ
these aristocratic female attendants, my lord, at my own request."
"But has forbidden you to touch the life of one member of the royal
house," added Cambyses. "None but a king has the right to punish kings."
Phanes bowed. The king turned to Megabyzus and ordered him to have the
prisoners executed the very next day, as an example. He would decide the
fate of the young prince later; but at all events he was to be taken to
the place of execution with the rest. "We must show them," he concluded,
"that we know how to meet all their hostile manifestations with
sufficient rigor."
Croesus ventured to plead for the innocent boy. "Calm yourself, old
friend," said Cambyses with a smile; "the child is not dead yet, and
perhaps will be as well off with us as your own son, who fought so well
at Pelusium. I confess I should like to know, whether Psamtik bears his
fate as calmly and bravely as you did twenty-five years ago."
"That we can easily discover, by putting him on trial," said Phanes. "Let
him be brought into the palace-court to-morrow, and let the captives and
the condemned be led past him. Then we shall see whether he is a man or a
coward."
"Be it so," answered Cambyses. "I will conceal myself and watch him
unobserved. You, Phanes, will accompany me, to tell me the name and rank
of each of the captives."
The next morning Phanes accompanied the king on to a balcony which ran
round the great court of the palace--the court we have already described
as being planted with trees. The listeners were hidden by a grove of
flowering shrubs, but they could see every movement that took place, and
hear every word that was spoken beneath them. They saw Psamtik,
surrounded by a few of his former companions. He was leaning against a
palm-tree, his eyes fixed gloomily on the ground, as his daughters
entered the court. The daughter of Neithotep was with them, and some more
young girls, all dressed as slaves; they were carrying pitchers of water.
At sight of the king, they uttered such a loud cry of anguish as to wake
him from his reverie. He looked up, recognized the miserable girls, and
bowed his head lower than before; but only for a moment. Drawing himself
up quickly, he asked his eldest daughter for whom she was carrying water.
On hearing that she was forced to do the work of a slave for Phanes, he
turned deadly pale, nodded his head, and cried to the girls, "Go on."
A few minutes later the captives were led into the court, with ropes
round their necks, and bridles in their mouths.
[This statement of Herodotus (III. 14.) is confirmed by the
monuments, on which we often see representations of captives being
led along with ropes round their necks. What follows is taken
entirely from the same passage in Herodotus.]
At the head of the train was the little prince Necho. He stretched his
hands out to his father, begging him to punish the bad foreigners who
wanted to kill him. At this sight the Egyptians wept in their exceeding
great misery; but Psamtik's eyes were dry. He bowed his tearless face
nearly to the earth, and waved his child a last farewell.
After a short interval, the captives taken in Sais entered. Among them
was Neithotep, the once powerful high-priest, clothed in rags and moving
with difficulty by the help of a staff. At the entrance-gate he raised
his eyes and caught sight of his former pupil Darius. Reckless of all the
spectators around him, he went straight up to the young man, poured out
the story of his need, besought his help, and ended by begging an alms.
Darius complied at once, and by so doing, induced others of the
Achaemenidae, who were standing by, to hail the old man jokingly and
throw him little pieces of money, which he picked up laboriously and
thankfully from the ground.
At this sight Psamtik wept aloud, and smote upon his forehead, calling on
the name of his friend in a voice full of woe.
Cambyses was so astonished at this, that he came forward to the
balustrade of the veranda, and pushing the flowers aside, exclaimed:
"Explain thyself, thou strange man; the misfortunes of a beggar, not even
akin to thee, move thy compassion, but thou canst behold thy son on the
way to execution and thy daughters in hopeless misery without shedding a
tear, or uttering a lament!"
Psamtik looked up at his conqueror, and answered: "The misfortunes of my
own house, O son of Cyrus, are too great for tears; but I may be
permitted to weep over the afflictions of a friend, fallen, in his old
age, from the height of happiness and influence into the most miserable
beggary."
Cambyses' face expressed his approval, and on looking round he saw that
his was not the only eye which was filled with tears. Croesus, Bartja,
and all the Persians-nay, even Phanes himself, who had served as
interpreter to the kings-were weeping aloud.
The proud conqueror was not displeased at these signs of sympathy, and
turning to the Athenian: "I think, my Greek friend" he said, "we may
consider our wrongs as avenged. Rise, Psamtik, and endeavor to imitate
yonder noble old man, (pointing to Croesus) by accustoming yourself to
your fate. Your father's fraud has been visited on you and your family.
The crown, which I have wrested from you is the crown of which Amasis
deprived my wife, my never-to-be-forgotten Nitetis. For her sake I began
this war, and for her sake I grant you now the life of your son--she
loved him. From this time forward you can live undisturbed at our court,
eat at our table and share the privileges of our nobles. Gyges, fetch the
boy hither. He shall be brought up as you were, years ago, among the sons
of the Achaemenidae."
The Lydian was hastening to execute this delightful commission, but
Phanes stopped him before he could reach the door, and placing himself
proudly between the king and the trembling, thankful Psamtik, said: "You
would be going on a useless errand, noble Lydian. In defiance of your
command, my Sovereign, but in virtue of the full powers you once gave me,
I have ordered the grandson of Amasis to be the executioner's first
victim. You have just heard the sound of a horn; that was the sign that
the last heir to the Egyptian throne born on the shores of the Nile has
been gathered to his fathers. I am aware of the fate I have to expect,
Cambyses. I will not plead for a life whose end has been attained.
Croesus, I understand your reproachful looks. You grieve for the murdered
children. But life is such a web of wretchedness and disappointment, that
I agree with your philosopher Solon in thinking those fortunate to whom,
as in former days to Kleobis and Biton, the gods decree an early death.
[Croesus, after having shown Solon his treasures, asked him whom he
held to be the most fortunate of men, hoping to hear his own name.
The sage first named Tellus, a famous citizen of Athens, and then
the brothers Kleobis and Biton. These were two handsome youths, who
had gained the prize for wrestling, and one day, when the draught-
animals had not returned from the field, dragged their mother
themselves to the distant temple, in presence of the people. The
men of Argos praised the strength of the sons,--the women praised
the mother who possessed these sons. She, transported with delight
at her sons' deed and the people's praise, went to the statue of the
goddess and besought her to give them the best that could fall to
the lot of men. When her prayer was over and the sacrifice offered,
the youths fell asleep, and never woke again. They were dead.
Herod. I, 31. Cicero. Tuscul. I. 47.]
"If I have ever been dear to you, Cambyses--if my counsels have been of
any use, permit me as a last favor to say a few more words. Psamtik knows
the causes that rendered us foes to each other. Ye all, whose esteem is
worth so much to me, shall know them too. This man's father placed me in
his son's stead at the head of the troops which had been sent to Cyprus.
Where Psamtik had earned humiliation, I won success and glory. I also
became unintentionally acquainted with a secret, which seriously
endangered his chances of obtaining the crown; and lastly, I prevented
his carrying off a virtuous maiden from the house of her grandmother, an
aged woman, beloved and respected by all the Greeks. These are the sins
which he has never been able to forgive; these are the grounds which led
him to carry on war to the death with me directly I had quitted his
father's service. The struggle is decided now. My innocent children have
been murdered at thy command, and I have been pursued like a wild beast.
That has been thy revenge. But mine!--I have deprived thee of thy throne
and reduced thy people to bondage. Thy daughter I have called my slave,
thy son's death-warrant was pronounced by my lips, and my eyes have seen
the maiden whom thou persecutedst become the happy wife of a brave man.
Undone, sinking ever lower and lower, thou hast watched me rise to be the
richest and most powerful of my nation. In the lowest depth of thine own
misery--and this has been the most delicious morsel of my vengeance--thou
wast forced to see me--me, Phanes shedding tears that could not be kept
back, at the sight of thy misery. The man, who is allowed to draw even
one breath of life, after beholding his enemy so low, I hold to be happy
as the gods themselves I have spoken."
He ceased, and pressed his hand on his wound. Cambyses gazed at him in
astonishment, stepped forward, and was just going to touch his girdle--an
action which would have been equivalent to the signing of a death-warrant
when his eye caught sight of the chain, which he himself had hung round
the Athenian's neck as a reward for the clever way in which he had proved
the innocence of Nitetis.
[The same sign was used by the last Darius to denote that his able
Greek general Memnon, who had offended him by his plainness of
speech, was doomed to death. As he was being led away, Memnon
exclaimed, in allusion to Alexander, who was then fast drawing near:
"Thy remorse will soon prove my worth; my avenger is not far off."
Droysen, Alex. d. Grosse, Diod. XVII. 30. Curtius III. 2.]
The sudden recollection of the woman he loved, and of the countless
services rendered him by Phanes, calmed his wrath his hand dropped. One
minute the severe ruler stood gazing lingeringly at his disobedient
friend; the next, moved by a sudden impulse, he raised his right hand
again, and pointed imperiously to the gate leading from the court.
Phanes bowed in silence, kissed the king's robe, and descended slowly
into the court. Psamtik watched him, quivering with excitement, sprang
towards the veranda, but before his lips could utter the curse which his
heart had prepared, he sank powerless on to the ground.
Cambyses beckoned to his followers to make immediate preparations for a
lion-hunt in the Libyan mountains.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Between two stools a man falls to the ground
Human beings hate the man who shows kindness to their enemies
Misfortune too great for tears
Nothing is more dangerous to love, than a comfortable assurance
Ordered his feet to be washed and his head anointed
Rules of life given by one man to another are useless
AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS.
By Georg Ebers
Volume 10.
CHAPTER XIII.
The waters of the Nile had begun to rise again. Two months had passed
away since Phanes' disappearance, and much had happened.
The very day on which he left Egypt, Sappho had given birth to a girl,
and had so far regained strength since then under the care of her
grandmother, as to be able to join in an excursion up the Nile, which
Croesus had suggested should take place on the festival of the goddess
Neith. Since the departure of Phanes, Cambyses' behavior had become so
intolerable, that Bartja, with the permission of his brother, had taken
Sappho to live in the royal palace at Memphis, in order to escape any
painful collision. Rhodopis, at whose house Croesus and his son, Bartja,
Darius and Zopyrus were constant guests, had agreed to join the party.
On the morning of the festival-day they started in a gorgeously decorated
boat, from a point between thirty and forty miles below Memphis, favored
by a good north-wind and urged rapidly forward by a large number of
rowers.
A wooden roof or canopy, gilded and brightly painted, sheltered them from
the sun. Croesus sat by Rhodopis, Theopompus the Milesian lay at her
feet. Sappho was leaning against Bartja. Syloson, the brother of
Polykrates, had made himself a comfortable resting-place next to Darius,
who was looking thought fully into the water. Gyges and Zopyrus busied
themselves in making wreaths for the women, from the flowers handed them
by an Egyptian slave.
"It seems hardly possible," said Bartja, "that we can be rowing against
the stream. The boat flies like a swallow."
"This fresh north-wind brings us forward," answered Theopompus. "And then
the Egyptian boatmen understand their work splendidly."
"And row all the better just because we are sailing against the stream,"
added Croesus. "Resistance always brings out a man's best powers."
"Yes," said Rhodopis, "sometimes we even make difficulties, if the river
of life seems too smooth."
"True," answered Darius. "A noble mind can never swim with the stream. In
quiet inactivity all men are equal. We must be seen fighting, to be
rightly estimated."
"Such noble-minded champions must be very cautious, though," said
Rhodopis, "lest they become contentious, and quarrelsome. Do you see
those melons lying on the black soil yonder, like golden balls? Not one
would have come to perfection if the sower had been too lavish with his
seed. The fruit would have been choked by too luxuriant tendrils and
leaves. Man is born to struggle and to work, but in this, as in
everything else, he must know how to be moderate if his efforts are to
succeed. The art of true wisdom is to keep within limits."
"Oh, if Cambyses could only hear you!" exclaimed Croesus. "Instead of
being contented with his immense conquests, and now thinking for the
welfare of his subjects, he has all sorts of distant plans in his head.
He wishes to conquer the entire world, and yet, since Phanes left,
scarcely a day has passed in which he has not been conquered himself by
the Div of drunkenness."
"Has his mother no influence over him?" asked Rhodopis. "She is a noble
woman."
"She could not even move his resolution to marry Atossa, and was forced
to be present at the marriage feast."
"Poor Atossa!" murmured Sappho.
"She does not pass a very happy life as Queen of Persia," answered
Croesus; "and her own naturally impetuous disposition makes it all the
more difficult or her to live contentedly with this husband and mother; I
am sorry to hear it said that Cambyses neglects her sadly, and treats her
like a child. But the marriage does not seem to have astonished the
Egyptians, as brothers and sisters often marry here."
"In Persia too," said Darius, putting on an appearance of the most
perfect composure, "marriages with very near relations are thought to be
the best."
"But to return to the king," said Croesus, turning the conversation for
Darius' sake. "I can assure you, Rhodopis, that he may really be called a
noble man. His violent and hasty deeds are repented of almost as soon as
committed, and the resolution to be a just and merciful ruler has never
forsaken him. At supper, for instance, lately, before his mind was
clouded by the influence of wine, he asked us what the Persians thought
of him in comparison with his father."
"And what was the answer?" said Rhodopis. "Intaphernes got us out of the
trap cleverly enough," answered Zopyrus, laughing. "He exclaimed: 'We are
of opinion that you deserve the preference, inasmuch as you have not only
preserved intact the inheritance bequeathed you by Cyrus, but have
extended his dominion beyond the seas by your conquest of Egypt.' This
answer did not seem to please the king, however, and poor Intaphernes was
not a little horrified to hear him strike his fist on the table and cry,
'Flatterer, miserable flatterer!' He then turned to Croesus and asked his
opinion. Our wise friend answered at once: 'My opinion is that you have
not attained to the greatness of your father; for,' added he in a
pacifying tone, 'one thing is wanting to you--a son such as Cyrus
bequeathed us in yourself."
"First-rate, first-rate," cried Rhodopis clapping her hands and laughing.
"An answer that would have done honor to the ready-witted Odysseus
himself. And how did the king take your honeyed pill?"
"He was very much pleased, thanked Croesus, and called him his friend."
"And I," said Croesus taking up the conversation, "used the favorable
opportunity to dissuade him from the campaigns he has been planning
against the long lived Ethiopians, the Ammonians and the Carthaginians.
Of the first of these three nations we know scarcely anything but through
fabulous tales; by attacking them we should lose much and gain little.
The oasis of Ammon is scarcely accessible to a large army, on account of
the desert by which it is surrounded; besides which, it seems to me
sacrilegious to make war upon a god in the hope of obtaining possession
of his treasures, whether we be his worshippers or not. As to the
Carthaginians, facts have already justified my predictions. Our fleet is
manned principally by Syrians and Phoenicians, and they have, as might be
expected, refused to go to war against their brethren. Cambyses laughed
at my reasons, and ended by swearing, when he was already somewhat
intoxicated, that he could carry out difficult undertakings and subdue
powerful nations, even without the help of Bartja and Phanes."
"What could that allusion to you mean, my son?" asked Rhodopis.
"He won the battle of Pelusiam," cried Zopyrus, before his friend could
answer. "He and no one else!"
"Yes," added Croesus, "and you might have been more prudent, and have
remembered that it is a dangerous thing to excite the jealousy of a man
like Cambyses. You all of you forget that his heart is sore, and that the
slightest vexation pains him. He has lost the woman he really loved; his
dearest friend is gone; and now you want to disparage the last thing in
this world that he still cares for,--his military glory."
"Don't blame him," said Bartja, grasping the old man's hand. "My brother
has never been unjust, and is far from envying me what I must call my
good fortune, for that my attack arrived just at the right time can
hardly be reckoned as a merit on my part. You know he gave me this
splendid sabre, a hundred thorough-bred horses, and a golden hand-mill as
rewards of my bravery."
Croesus' words had caused Sappho a little anxiety at first; but this
vanished on hearing her husband speak so confidently, and by the time
Zopyrus had finished his wreath and placed it on Rhodopis' head, all her
fears were forgotten.
Gyges had prepared his for the young mother. It was made of snow-white
water-lilies, and, when she placed it among her brown curls, she looked
so wonderfully lovely in the simple ornament, that Bartja could not help
kissing her on the forehead, though so many witnesses were present. This
little episode gave a merry turn to the conversation; every one did his
best to enliven the others, refreshments of all kinds were handed round,
and even Darius lost his gravity for a time and joined in the jests that
were passing among his friends.
When the sun had set, the slaves set elegantly-carved chairs, footstools,
and little tables on the open part of the deck. Our cheerful party now
repaired thither and beheld a sight so marvellously beautiful as to be
quite beyond their expectations.
The feast of Neith, called in Egyptian "the lamp-burning," was celebrated
by a universal illumination, which began at the rising of the moon. The
shores of the Nile looked like two long lines of fire. Every temple,
house and but was ornamented with lamps according to the means of its
possessors. The porches of the country-houses and the little towers on
the larger buildings were all lighted up by brilliant flames, burning in
pans of pitch and sending up clouds of smoke, in which the flags and
pennons waved gently backwards and forwards. The palm-trees and sycamores
were silvered by the moonlight and threw strange fantastic reflections on
the red waters of the Nile-red from the fiery glow of the houses on their
shores. But strong and glowing as was the light of the illumination, its
rays had not power to reach the middle of the giant river, where the boat
was making its course, and the pleasure-party felt as if they were
sailing in dark night between two brilliant days. Now and then a
brightly-lighted boat would come swiftly across the river and seem, as it
neared the shore, to be cutting its way through a glowing stream of
molten iron.
Lotus-blossoms, white as snow, lay on the surface of the river, rising
and falling with the waves, and looking like eyes in the water. Not a
sound could be heard from either shore. The echoes were carried away by
the north-wind, and the measured stroke of the oars and monotonous song
of the rowers were the only sounds that broke the stillness of this
strange night--a night robbed of its darkness.
For a long time the friends gazed without speaking at the wonderful
sight, which seemed to glide past them. Zopyrus was the first to break
the silence by saying, as he drew a long breath: "I really envy you,
Bartja. If things were as they should be, every one of us would have his
dearest wife at his side on such a night as this."
"And who forbade you to bring one of your wives?" answered the happy
husband.
"The other five," said the youth with a sigh. "If I had allowed Oroetes'
little daughter Parysatis, my youngest favorite, to come out alone with
me to-night, this wonderful sight would have been my last; tomorrow there
would have been one pair of eyes less in the world."
Bartja took Sappho's hand and held it fast, saying, "I fancy one wife
will content me as long as I live." The young mother pressed his hand
warmly again, and said, turning to Zopyrus: "I don't quite trust you, my
friend. It seems to me that it is not the anger of your wives you fear,
so much as the commission of an offence against the customs of your
country. I have been told that my poor Bartja gets terribly scolded in
the women's apartments for not setting eunuchs to watch over me, and for
letting me share his pleasures."
"He does spoil you terribly," answered Zopyrus, "and our wives are
beginning to quote him as an example of kindness and indulgence, whenever
we try to hold the reins a little tight. Indeed there will soon be a
regular women's mutiny at the king's gate, and the Achaemenidae who
escaped the swords and arrows of the Egyptians, will fall victims to
sharp tongues and floods of salt tears."
"Oh! you most impolite Persian!" said Syloson laughing. "We must make you
more respectful to these images of Aphrodite."
"You Greeks! that's a good idea," answered the youth. "By Mithras, our
wives are quite as well off as yours. It's only the Egyptian women, that
are so wonderfully free."
"Yes, you are quite right," said Rhodopis. "The inhabitants of this
strange land have for thousands of years granted our weaker sex the same
rights, that they demand for themselves. Indeed, in many respects, they
have given us the preference. For instance, by the Egyptian law it is the
daughters, not the sons, who are commanded to foster and provide for
their aged parents, showing how well the fathers of this now humbled
people understood women's nature, and how rightly they acknowledged that
she far surpasses man in thoughtful solicitude and self-forgetful love.
Do not laugh at these worshippers of animals. I confess that I cannot
understand them, but I feel true admiration for a people in the teaching
of whose priests, even Pythagoras, that great master in the art of
knowledge, assured me lies a wisdom as mighty as the Pyramids."
"And your great master was right," exclaimed Darius. "You know that I
obtained Neithotep's freedom, and, for some weeks past, have seen him and
Onuphis very constantly, indeed they have been teaching me. And oh, how
much I have learnt already from those two old men, of which I had no idea
before! How much that is sad I can forget, when I am listening to them!
They are acquainted with the entire history of the heavens and the earth.
They know the name of every king, and the circumstances of every
important event that has occurred during the last four thousand years,
the courses of the stars, the works of their own artists and sayings of
their sages, during the same immense period of time. All this knowledge
is recorded in huge books, which have been preserved in a palace at
Thebes, called the 'place of healing for the soul.' Their laws are a
fountain of pure wisdom, and a comprehensive intellect has been shown in
the adaptation of all their state institutions to the needs of the
country. I wish we could boast of the same regularity and order at home.
The idea that lies at the root of all their knowledge is the use of
numbers, the only means by which it is possible to calculate the course
of the stars, to ascertain and determine the limits of all that exists,
and, by the application of which in the shortening and lengthening of the
strings of musical instruments, tones can be regulated.
[We agree with Iamblichus in supposing, that these Pythagorean views
were derived from the Egyptian mysteries.]
"Numbers are the only certain things; they can neither be controlled nor
perverted. Every nation has its own ideas of right and wrong; every law
can be rendered invalid by circumstances; but the results obtained from
numbers can never be overthrown. Who can dispute, for instance, that
twice two make four? Numbers determine the contents of every existing
thing; whatever is, is equal to its contents, numbers therefore are the
true being, the essence of all that is."
"In the name of Mithras, Darius, do leave off talking in that style,
unless you want to turn my brain," interrupted Zopyrus. "Why, to hear
you, one would fancy you'd been spending your life among these old
Egyptian speculators and had never had a sword in your hand. What on
earth have we to do with numbers?"
"More than you fancy," answered Rhodopis. "This theory of numbers belongs
to the mysteries of the Egyptian priests, and Pythagoras learnt it from
the very Onuphis who is now teaching you, Darius. If you will come to see
me soon, I will show you how wonderfully that great Samian brought the
laws of numbers and of the harmonies into agreement. But look, there are
the Pyramids!"
The whole party rose at these words, and stood speechless, gazing at the
grand sight which opened before them.
The Pyramids lay on the left bank of the Nile, in the silver moonshine,
massive and awful, as if bruising the earth beneath them with their
weight; the giant graves of mighty rulers. They seemed examples of man's
creative power, and at the same time warnings of the vanity and
mutability of earthly greatness. For where was Chufu now,--the king who
had cemented that mountain of stone with the sweat of his subjects? Where
was the long-lived Chafra who had despised the gods, and, defiant in the
consciousness of his own strength, was said to have closed the gates of
the temples in order to make himself and his name immortal by building a
tomb of superhuman dimensions?
[Herodotus repeats, in good faith, that the builders of the great
Pyramids were despisers of the gods. The tombs of their faithful
subjects at the foot of these huge structures prove, however, that
they owe their bad repute to the hatred of the people, who could not
forget the era of their hardest bondage, and branded the memories of
their oppressors wherever an opportunity could be found. We might
use the word "tradition" instead of "the people," for this it is
which puts the feeling and tone of mind of the multitude into the
form of history.]
Their empty sarcophagi are perhaps tokens, that the judges of the dead
found them unworthy of rest in the grave, unworthy of the resurrection,
whereas the builder of the third and most beautiful pyramid, Menkera, who
contented himself with a smaller monument, and reopened the gates of the
temples, was allowed to rest in peace in his coffin of blue basalt.
There they lay in the quiet night, these mighty pyramids, shone on by the
bright stars, guarded by the watchman of the desert--the gigantic
sphinx,--and overlooking the barren rocks of the Libyan stony mountains.
At their feet, in beautifully-ornamented tombs, slept the mummies of
their faithful subjects, and opposite the monument of the pious Menkera
stood a temple, where prayers were said by the priests for the souls of
the many dead buried in the great Memphian city of the dead. In the west,
where the sun went down behind the Libyan mountains, where the fruitful
land ended and the desert began--there the people of Memphis had buried
their dead; and as our gay party looked towards the west they felt awed
into a solemn silence.
But their boat sped on before the north-wind; they left the city of the
dead behind them and passed the enormous dikes built to protect the city
of Menes from the violence of the floods; the city of the Pharaohs came
in sight, dazzlingly bright with the myriads of flames which had been
kindled in honor of the goddess Neith, and when at last the gigantic
temple of Ptah appeared, the most ancient building of the most ancient
land, the spell broke, their tongues were loosed, and they burst out into
loud exclamations of delight.
It was illuminated by thousands of lamps; a hundred fires burnt on its
Pylons, its battlemented walls and roofs. Burning torches flared between
the rows of sphinxes which connected the various gates with the main
building, and the now empty house of the god Apis was so surrounded by
colored fires that it gleamed like a white limestone rock in a tropical
sunset. Pennons, flags and garlands waved above the brilliant picture;
music and loud songs could be heard from below.
"Glorious," cried Rhodopis in enthusiasm, "glorious! Look how the painted
walls and columns gleam in the light, and what marvellous figures the
shadows of the obelisks and sphinxes throw on the smooth yellow
pavement!"
"And how mysterious the sacred grove looks yonder!" added Croesus. "I
never saw anything so wonderful before."
"I have seen something more wonderful still," said Darius. "You will
hardly believe me when I tell you that I have witnessed a celebration of
the mysteries of Neith."
"Tell us what you saw, tell us!" was the universal outcry.
"At first Neithotep refused me admission, but when I promised to remain
hidden, and besides, to obtain the freedom of his child, he led me up to
his observatory, from which there is a very extensive view, and told me
that I should see a representation of the fates of Osiris and his wife
Isis.
"He had scarcely left, when the sacred grove became so brightly
illuminated by colored lights that I was able to see into its innermost
depths.
"A lake, smooth as glass, lay before me, surrounded by beautiful trees
and flower-beds. Golden boats were sailing on this lake and in them sat
lovely boys and girls dressed in snow-white garments, and singing sweet
songs as they passed over the water. There were no rowers to direct these
boats, and yet they moved over the ripples of the lake in a graceful
order, as if guided by some magic unseen hand. A large ship sailed in the
midst of this little fleet. Its deck glittered with precious stones. It
seemed to be steered by one beautiful boy only, and, strange to say, the
rudder he guided consisted of one white lotus-flower, the delicate leaves
of which seemed scarcely to touch the water. A very lovely woman, dressed
like a queen, lay on silken cushions in the middle of the vessel; by her
side sat a man of larger stature than that of ordinary mortals. He wore a
crown of ivy on his flowing curls, a panther-skin hung over his shoulders
and he held a crooked staff in the right hand. In the back part of the
ship was a roof made of ivy, lotus-blossoms and roses; beneath it stood a
milk-white cow with golden horns, covered with a cloth of purple. The man
was Osiris, the woman Isis, the boy at the helm their son Horus, and the
cow was the animal sacred to the immortal Isis. The little boats all
skimmed over the water, singing glad songs of joy as they passed by the
ship, and receiving in return showers of flowers and fruits, thrown down
upon the lovely singers by the god and goddess within. Suddenly I heard
the roll of thunder. It came crashing on, louder, and louder, and in the
midst of this awful sound a man in the skin of a wild boar, with hideous
features and bristling red hair, came out of the gloomiest part of the
sacred grove, plunged into the lake, followed by seventy creatures like
himself, and swam up to the ship of Osiris.
[We have taken our description of this spectacle entirely from the
Osiris-myth, as we find it in Plutarch, Isis and Orisis 13-19.
Diod. I. 22. and a thousand times repeated on the monuments. Horus
is called "the avenger of his father," &c. We copy the battle with
all its phases from an inscription at Edfu, interpreted by Naville.]
"The little boats fled with the swiftness of the wind, and the trembling
boy helmsman dropped his lotus-blossom.
"The dreadful monster then rushed on Osiris, and, with the help of his
comrades, killed him, threw the body into a coffin and the coffin into
the lake, the waters of which seemed to carry it away as if by magic.
Isis meanwhile had escaped to land in one of the small boats, and was now
running hither and thither on the shores of the lake, with streaming
hair, lamenting her dead husband and followed by the virgins who had
escaped with her. Their songs and dances, while seeking the body of
Osiris, were strangely plaintive and touching, and the girls accompanied
the dance by waving black Byssus scarfs in wonderfully graceful curves.
Neither were the youths idle; they busied themselves in making a costly
coffin for the vanished corpse of the god, accompanying their work with
dances and the sound of castanets. When this was finished they joined the
maidens in the train of the lamenting Isis and wandered on the shore with
them, singing and searching.
"Suddenly a low song rose from some invisible lips. It swelled louder and
louder and announced, that the body of the god had been transported by
the currents of the Mediterranean to Gebal in distant Phoenicia. This
singing voice thrilled to my very heart; Neithotep's son, who was my
companion, called it 'the wind of rumor.'
"When Isis heard the glad news, she threw off her mourning garments and
sang a song of triumphant rejoicing, accompanied by the voices of her
beautiful followers. Rumor had not lied; the goddess really found the
sarcophagus and the dead body of her husband on the northern shore of the
lake.
[It is natural, that Isis should find the body of her husband in the
north. The connection between Phoenicia and Egypt in this myth, as
it has been handed down to us by Plutarch, is very remarkable. We
consider the explanation of the close affinity between the Isis and
Osiris and the Adonis myths to be in the fact, that Egyptians and
Phoenicians lived together on the shores of the Delta where the
latter had planted their colonies. Plutarch's story of the finding
of Osiris' dead body is very charming. Isis and Osiris. Ed. Parth.
15.]
"They brought both to land with dances; Isis threw herself on the beloved
corpse, called on the name of Osiris and covered the mummy with kisses,
while the youths wove a wonderful tomb of lotus-flowers and ivy.
"When the coffin had been laid under this beautiful vault, Isis left the
sad place of mourning and went to look for her son. She found him at the
east end of the lake, where for a long time I had seen a beautiful youth
practising arms with a number of companions.
"While she was rejoicing over her newly-found child, a fresh peal of
thunder told that Typhon had returned. This time the monster rushed upon
the beautiful flowering grave, tore the body out of its coffin, hewed it
into fourteen pieces, and strewed them over the shores of the lake.
"When Isis came back to the grave, she found nothing but faded flowers
and an empty coffin; but at fourteen different places on the shore
fourteen beautiful colored flames were burning. She and her virgins ran
to these flames, while Horus led the youths to battle against Typhon on
the opposite shore.
"My eyes and ears hardly sufficed for all I had to see and hear. On the
one shore a fearful and interesting struggle, peals of thunder and the
braying of trumpets; on the other the sweet voices of the women, singing
the most captivating songs to the most enchanting dances, for Isis had
found a portion of her husband's body at every fire and was rejoicing.
"That was something for you, Zopyrus! I know of no words to describe the
grace of those girls' movements, or how beautiful it was to see them
first mingling in intricate confusion, then suddenly standing in
faultless, unbroken lines, falling again into the same lovely tumult and
passing once more into order, and all this with the greatest swiftness.
Bright rays of light flashed from their whirling ranks all the time, for
each dancer had a mirror fastened between her shoulders, which flashed
while she was in motion, and reflected the scene when she was still.
"Just as Isis had found the last limb but one of the murdered Osiris,
loud songs of triumph and the flourish of trumpets resounded from the
opposite shore.
"Horus had conquered Typhon, and was forcing his way into the nether
regions to free his father. The gate to this lower world opened on the
west side of the lake and was guarded by a fierce female hippopotamus.
"And now a lovely music of flutes and harps came nearer and nearer,
heavenly perfumes rose into the air, a rosy light spread over the sacred
grove, growing brighter every minute, and Osiris came up from the lower
world, led by his victorious son. Isis hastened to embrace her risen and
delivered husband, gave the beautiful Horus his lotus-flower again
instead of the sword, and scattered fruits and flowers over the earth,
while Osiris seated himself under a canopy wreathed with ivy, and
received the homage of all the spirits of the earth and of the Amenti."
[The lower world, in Egyptian Amenti, properly speaking, the West or
kingdom of death, to which the soul returns at the death of the
body, as the sun at his setting. In a hieroglyphic inscription of
the time of the Ptolemies the Amenti is called Hades.]
Darius was silent. Rhodopis began:
"We thank you for your charming account; but this strange spectacle must
have a higher meaning, and we should thank you doubly if you would
explain that to us."
"Your idea is quite right," answered Darius, "but what I know I dare not
tell. I was obliged to promise Neithotep with an oath, not to tell tales
out of school."
"Shall I tell you," asked Rhodopis, "what conclusions various hints from
Pythagoras and Onuphis have led me to draw, as to the meaning of this
drama? Isis seems to me to represent the bountiful earth; Osiris,
humidity or the Nile, which makes the earth fruitful; Horus, the young
spring; Typhon, the scorching drought. The bounteous earth, robbed of her
productive power, seeks this beloved husband with lamentations in the
cooler regions of the north, where the Nile discharges his waters. At
last Horus, the young springing power of nature, is grown up and conquers
Typhon, or the scorching drought. Osiris, as is the case with the
fruitful principle of nature, was only apparently dead, rises from the
nether regions and once more rules the blessed valley of the Nile, in
concert with his wife, the bounteous earth."
"And as the murdered god behaved properly in the lower regions," said
Zopyrus, laughing, "he is allowed, at the end of this odd story, to
receive homage from the inhabitants of Hamestegan, Duzakh and Gorothman,
or whatever they call these abodes for the Egyptian spirit-host."
"They are called Amenti," said Darius, falling into his friend's merry
mood; but you must know that the history of this divine pair represents
not only the life of nature, but also that of the human soul, which, like
the murdered Osiris, lives an eternal life, even when the body is dead."
"Thank you," said the other; "I'll try to remember that if I should
chance to die in Egypt. But really, cost what it may, I must see this
wonderful sight soon."
"Just my own wish," said Rhodopis. "Age is inquisitive."
"You will never be old," interrupted Darius. "Your conversation and your
features have remained alike beautiful, and your mind is as clear and
bright as your eyes."
"Forgive me for interrupting you," said Rhodopis, as if she had not heard
his flattering words, "but the word 'eyes' reminds me of the oculist
Nebenchari, and my memory fails me so often, that I must ask you what has
become of him, before I forget. I hear nothing now of this skilful
operator to whom the noble Kassandane owes her sight."
"He is much to be pitied," replied Darius. "Even before we reached
Pelusium he had begun to avoid society, and scorned even to speak with
his countryman Onuphis. His gaunt old servant was the only being allowed
to wait on or be with him. But after the battle his whole behavior
changed. He went to the king with a radiant countenance, and asked
permission to accompany him to Sais, and to choose two citizens of that
town to be his slaves. Cambyses thought he could not refuse anything to
the man, who had been such a benefactor to his mother, and granted him
full power to do what he wished. On arriving at Amasis' capital, he went
at once to the temple of Neith, caused the high-priest (who had moreover
placed himself at the head of the citizens hostile to Persia), to be
arrested, and with him a certain oculist named Petammon. He then informed
them that, as punishment for the burning of certain papers, they would be
condemned to serve a Persian to whom he should sell them, for the term of
their natural lives, and to perform the most menial services of slaves in
a foreign country. I was present at this scene, and I assure you I
trembled before the Egyptian as he said these words to his enemies.
Neithotep, however, listened quietly, and when Nebenchari had finished,
answered him thus: If thou, foolish son, hast betrayed thy country for
the sake of thy burnt manuscripts, the deed has been neither just nor
wise. I preserved thy valuable works with the greatest care, laid them up
in our temple, and sent a complete copy to the library at Thebes. Nothing
was burnt but the letters from Amasis to thy father, and a worthless old
chest. Psamtik and Petammon were present, and it was then and there
resolved that a new family tomb in the city of the dead should be built
for thee as a compensation for the loss of papers, which, in order to
save Egypt, we were unfortunately forced to destroy. On its walls thou
canst behold pleasing paintings of the gods to whom thou hast devoted thy
life, the most sacred chapters from the book of the dead, and many other
beautiful pictures touching thine own life and character."
"The physician turned very pale--asked first to see his books, and then
his new and beautifully-fitted-up tomb. He then gave his slaves their
freedom, (notwithstanding which they were still taken to Memphis as
prisoners of war), and went home, often passing his hand across his
forehead on the way, and with the uncertain step of one intoxicated. On
reaching his house he made a will, bequeathing all he possessed to the
grandson of his old servant Hib, and, alleging that he was ill, went to
bed. The next morning he was found dead. He had poisoned himself with the
fearful strychnos-juice."
"Miserable man" said Croesus. "The gods had blinded him, and he reaped
despair instead of revenge, as a reward for his treachery."
"I pity him," murmured Rhodopis. "But look, the rowers are taking in
their oars. We are at the end of our journey; there are your litters and
carriages waiting for you. It was a beautiful trip. Farewell, my dear
ones; come to Naukratis soon, I shall return at once with Theopompus and
Syloson. Give little Parmys a thousand kisses from me, and tell Melitta
never to take her out at noon. It is dangerous for the eyes. Good-night,
Croesus; good-night, friends, farewell my dear son."
The Persians left the vessel with many a nod and farewell word, and
Bartja, looking round once more, missed his footing and fell on the
landing-pier.
He sprang up in a moment without Zopyrus' help, who came running back,
calling out, "Take care, Bartja! It's unlucky to fall in stepping ashore.
I did the very same thing, when we left the ship that time at Naukratis."
CHAPTER XIV.
While our friends were enjoying their row on the Nile, Cambyses' envoy,
Prexaspes, had returned from a mission to the long-lived Ethiopians. He
praised their strength and stature, described the way to their country as
almost inaccessible to a large army, and had plenty of marvellous tales
to tell. How, for instance; they always chose the strongest and
handsomest man in their nation for their king, and obeyed him
unconditionally: how many of them reached the age of 120 years, and some
even passed it: how they ate nothing but boiled flesh, drank new milk and
washed in a spring the waters of which had the scent of violets, gave a
remarkable lustre to their skins, and were so light that wood could not
swim in them: how their captives wore golden fetters, because other
metals were rare and dear in their country; and lastly, how they covered
the bodies of the dead with plaster or stucco, over which a coating of
some glass-like material was poured, and kept the pillars thus formed one
year in their houses, during which time sacrifices were offered them, and
at the year's end they were placed in rows around the town.
The king of this strange people had accepted Cambyses' presents, saying,
in a scornful tone, that he new well his friendship was of no importance
to the Persians, and Prexaspes had only been sent to spy out the land. If
the prince of Asia were a just man, he would be contented with his own
immense empire and not try to subjugate a people who had done him no
wrong. "Take your king this bow," he said, "and advise him not to begin
the war with us, until the Persians are able to bend such weapons as
easily as we do. Cambyses may thank the gods, that the Ethiopians have
never taken it into their heads to conquer countries which do not belong
to them."
He then unbent his mighty bow of ebony, and gave it to Prexaspes to take
to his lord.
Cambyses laughed at the bragging African, invited his nobles to a trial
of the bow the next morning, and awarded Prexaspes for the clever way in
which he had overcome the difficulties of his journey and acquitted
himself of his mission. He then went to rest, as usual intoxicated, and
fell into a disturbed sleep, in which he dreamed that Bartja was seated
on the throne of Persia, and that the crown of his head touched the
heavens.
This was a dream, which he could interpret without the aid of soothsayer
or Chaldean. It roused his anger first, and then made him thoughtful.
He could not sleep, and such questions as the following came into his
mind: "Haven't you given your brother reason to feel revengeful? Do you
think he can forget that you imprisoned and condemned him to death, when
he was innocent? And if he should raise his hand against you, would not
all the Achaemenidae take his part? Have I ever done, or have I any
intention of ever doing anything to win the love of these venal
courtiers? Since Nitetis died and that strange Greek fled, has there been
a single human being, in whom I have the least confidence or on whose
affection I can rely?"
These thoughts and questionings excited him so fearfully, that he sprang
from his bed, crying: "Love and I have nothing to do with one another.
Other men maybe kind and good if they like; I must be stern, or I shall
fall into the hands of those who hate me--hate me because I have been
just, and have visited heavy sins with heavy chastisements. They whisper
flattering words in my ear; they curse me when my back is turned. The
gods themselves must be my enemies, or why do they rob me of everything I
love, deny me posterity and even that military glory which is my just
due? Is Bartja so much better than I, that everything which I am forced
to give up should be his in hundred-fold measure? Love, friendship, fame,
children, everything flows to him as the rivers to the sea, while my
heart is parched like the desert. But I am king still. I can show him
which is the stronger of us two, and I will, though his forehead may
touch the heavens. In Persia there can be only one great man. He or I,--I
or he. In a few days I'll send him back to Asia and make him satrap of
Bactria. There he can nurse his child and listen to his wife's songs,
while I am winning glory in Ethiopia, which it shall not be in his power
to lessen. Ho, there, dressers! bring my robes and a good morning-draught
of wine. I'll show the Persians that I'm fit to be King of Ethiopia, and
can beat them all at bending a bow. Here, give me another cup of wine.
I'd bend that bow, if it were a young cedar and its string a cable!" So
saying he drained an immense bowl of wine and went into the
palace-garden, conscious of his enormous strength and therefore sure of
success.
All his nobles were assembled waiting for him there, welcomed him with
loud acclamations, and fell on their faces to the ground before their
king.
Pillars, connected by scarlet cords, had been quickly set up between the
closely-cut hedges and straight avenues. From these cords, suspended by
gold and silver rings, yellow and dark blue hangings fluttered in the
breeze. Gilded wooden benches had been placed round in a large circle,
and nimble cup-bearers handed wine in costly vessels to the company
assembled for the shooting-match.
At a sign from the king the Achaemenidae rose from the earth.
Cambyses glanced over their ranks, and his face brightened on seeing that
Bartja was not there. Prexaspes handed him the Ethiopian bow, and pointed
out a target at some distance. Cambyses laughed at the large size of the
target, weighted the bow with his right hand, challenged his subjects to
try their fortune first, and handed the bow to the aged Hystaspes, as the
highest in rank among the Achaemenidae.
While Hystaspes first, and then all the heads of the six other highest
families in Persia, were using their utmost efforts to bend this monster
weapon in vain, the king emptied goblet after goblet of wine, his spirits
rising as he watched their vain endeavors to solve the Ethiopian's
problem. At last Darius, who was famous for his skill in archery, took
the bow. Nearly the same result. The wood was inflexible as iron and all
his efforts only availed to move it one finger's breadth. The king gave
him a friendly nod in reward for his success, and then, looking round on
his friends and relations in a manner that betokened the most perfect
assurance, he said: "Give me the bow now, Darius. I will show you, that
there is only one man in Persia who deserves the name of king;--only one
who can venture to take the field against the Ethiopians;--only one who
can bend this bow."
He grasped it tightly with his left hand, taking the string, which was as
thick as a man's finger and made from the intestines of a lion, in his
right, fetched a deep breath, bent his mighty back and pulled and pulled;
collected all his strength for greater and greater efforts, strained his
sinews till they threatened to break, and the veins in his forehead were
swollen to bursting, did not even disdain to use his feet and legs, but
all in vain. After a quarter of an hour of almost superhuman exertion,
his strength gave way, the ebony, which he had succeeded in bending even
farther than Darius, flew back and set all his further endeavors at
nought. At last, feeling himself thoroughly exhausted, he dashed the bow
on to the ground in a passion, crying: "The Ethiopian is a liar! no
mortal man has ever bent that bow. What is impossible for my arm is
possible for no other. In three days we will start for Ethiopia. I will
challenge the impostor to a single combat, and ye shall see which is the
stronger. Take up the bow, Prexaspes, and keep it carefully. The black
liar shall be strangled with his own bow-string. This wood is really
harder than iron, and I confess that the man who could bend it, would
really be my master. I should not be ashamed to call him so, for he must
be of better stuff than I."
As he finished speaking, Bartja appeared in the circle of assembled
Persians. His glorious figure was set off to advantage by his rich dress,
his features were bright with happiness and a feeling of conscious
strength. He passed through the ranks of the Achaemenidae with many a
friendly nod, which was warmly returned, and going straight to his
brother, kissed his robe, looked up frankly and cheerfully into his
gloomy eyes, and said: "I am a little late, and ask your forgiveness, my
lord and brother. Or have I really come in time? Yes, yes, I see there's
no arrow in the target yet, so I am sure you, the best archer in the
world, cannot have tried your strength yet. But you look so enquiringly
at me. Then I will confess that our child kept me. The little creature
laughed to-day for the first time, and was so charming with its mother,
that I forgot how time was passing while I watched them. You have all
full leave to laugh at my folly; I really don't know how to excuse
myself. See, the little one has pulled my star from the chain. But I
think, my brother, you will give me a new one to-day if I should hit the
bull's eye. Shall I shoot first, or will you begin, my Sovereign?"
"Give him the bow, Prexaspes," said Cambyses, not even deigning to look
at his brother.
Bartja took it and was proceeding to examine the wood and the string,
when Cambyses suddenly called out, with a mocking laugh: "By Mithras, I
believe you want to try your sweet looks on the bow, and win its favor in
that fashion, as you do the hearts of men. Give it back to Prexaspes.
It's easier to play with beautiful women and laughing children, than with
a weapon like this, which mocks the strength even of real men."
Bartja blushed with anger and annoyance at this speech, which was uttered
in the bitterest tone, picked up the giant arrow that lay before him,
placed himself opposite the target, summoned all his strength, bent the
bow, by an almost superhuman effort, and sent the arrow into the very
centre of the target, where its iron point remained, while the wooden
shaft split into a hundred shivers.
[Herodotus tells this story (III, 30.), and we are indebted to him
also for our information of the events which follow. The following
inscription, said to have been placed over the grave of Darius, and
communicated by Onesikritus, (Strabo 730.) proves that the Persians
were very proud of being reputed good archers: "I was a friend to my
friends, the best rider and archer, a first-rate hunter; I could do
everything."]
Most of the Achaemenidae burst into loud shouts of delight at this
marvellous proof of strength; but Bartja's nearest friends turned pale
and were silent; they were watching the king, who literally quivered with
rage, and Bartja, who was radiant with pride and joy.
Cambyses was a fearful sight at that moment. It seemed to him as if that
arrow, in piercing the target, had pierced his own heart, his strength,
dignity and honor. Sparks floated before his eyes, in his ears was a
sound like the breaking of a stormy sea on the shore; his cheeks glowed
and he grasped the arm of Prexaspes who was at his side. Prexaspes only
too well understood what that pressure meant, when given by a royal hand,
and murmured: "Poor Bartja!"
At last the king succeeded in recovering his presence of mind. Without
saying a word, he threw a gold chain to his brother, ordered his nobles
to follow him, and left the garden, but only to wander restlessly up and
down his apartments, and try to drown his rage in wine. Suddenly he
seemed to have formed a resolution and ordered all the courtiers, except
Prexaspes, to leave the hall. When they were alone, he called out in a
hoarse voice and with a look that proved the extent of his intoxication:
"This life is not to be borne! Rid me of my enemy, and I will call you my
friend and benefactor."
Prexaspes trembled, threw himself at the king's feet and raised his hands
imploringly; but Cambyses was too intoxicated, and too much blinded by
his hatred to understand the action. He fancied the prostration was meant
as a sign of devotion to his will, signed to him to rise, and whispered,
as if afraid of hearing his own words: "Act quickly and secretly; and, as
you value your life, let no one know of the upstart's death. Depart, and
when your work is finished, take as much as you like out of the treasury.
But keep your wits about you. The boy has a strong arm and a winning
tongue. Think of your own wife and children, if he tries to win you over
with his smooth words."
As he spoke he emptied a fresh goblet of pure wine, staggered through the
door of the room, calling out as he turned his back on Prexaspes: "Woe be
to you if that upstart, that woman's hero, that fellow who has robbed me
of my honor, is left alive."
Long after he had left the hall, Prexaspes stood fixed on the spot where
he had heard these words. The man was ambitious, but neither mean nor
bad, and he felt crushed by the awful task allotted to him. He knew that
his refusal to execute it would bring death or disgrace on himself and on
his family; but he loved Bartja, and besides, his whole nature revolted
at the thought of becoming a common, hired murderer. A fearful struggle
began in his mind, and raged long after he left the palace. On the way
home he met Croesus and Darius. He fancied they would see from his looks
that he was already on the way to a great crime, and hid himself behind
the projecting gate of a large Egyptian house. As they passed, he heard
Croesus say: "I reproached him bitterly, little as he deserves reproach
in general, for having given such an inopportune proof of his great
strength. We may really thank the gods, that Cambyses did not lay violent
hands on him in a fit of passion. He has followed my advice now and gone
with his wife to Sais. For the next few days Bartja must not come near
the king; the mere sight of him might rouse his anger again, and a
monarch can always find unprincipled servants . . ."
The rest of the sentence died away in the distance, but the words he had
heard were enough to make Prexaspes start, as if Croesus had accused him
of the shameful deed. He resolved in that moment that, come what would,
his hands should not be stained with the blood of a friend. This
resolution restored him his old erect bearing and firm gait for the time,
but when he reached the dwelling which had been assigned as his abode in
Sais his two boys ran to the door to meet him. They had stolen away from
the play-ground of the sons of the Achaemenidae, (who, as was always the
case, had accompanied the king and the army), to see their father for a
moment. He felt a strange tenderness, which he could not explain to
himself, on taking them in his arms, and kissed the beautiful boys once
more on their telling him that they must go back to their play-ground
again, or they should be punished. Within, he found his favorite wife
playing with their youngest child, a sweet little girl. Again the same
strange, inexplicable feeling of tenderness. He overcame it this time for
fear of betraying his secret to his young wife, and retired to his own
apartment early.
Night had come on.
The sorely-tried man could not sleep; he turned restlessly from side to
side. The fearful thought, that his refusal to do the king's will would
be the ruin of his wife and children, stood before his wakeful eyes in
the most vivid colors. The strength to keep his good resolution forsook
him, and even Croesus' words, which, when he first heard them had given
his nobler feelings the victory, now came in as a power on the other
side. "A monarch can always find unprincipled servants." Yes, the words
were an affront, but at the same time a reminder, that though he might
defy the king's command a hundred others would be ready to obey it. No
sooner had this thought become clear to him, than he started up, examined
a number of daggers which hung, carefully arranged, above his bed, and
laid the sharpest on the little table before him.
He then began to pace the room in deep thought, often going to the
opening which served as a window, to cool his burning forehead and see if
dawn were near.
When at last daylight appeared, he heard the sounding brass calling the
boys to early prayer. That reminded him of his sons and he examined the
dagger a second time. A troop of gaily-dressed courtiers rode by on their
way to the king. He put the dagger in his girdle; and at last, on hearing
the merry laughter of his youngest child sound from the women's
apartments, he set the tiara hastily on his head, left the house without
taking leave of his wife, and, accompanied by a number of slaves, went
down to the Nile. There he threw himself into a boat and ordered the
rowers to take him to Sais.
.........................
A few hours after the fatal shooting-match, Bartja had followed Croesus'
advice and had gone off to Sais with his young wife. They found Rhodopis
there. She had yielded to an irresistible impulse and, instead of
returning to Naukratis, had stopped at Sais. Bartja's fall on stepping
ashore had disturbed her, and she had with her own eyes seen an owl fly
from the left side close by his head. These evil omens, to a heart which
had by no means outgrown the superstitions of the age, added to a
confused succession of distressing dreams which had disturbed her
slumbers, and her usual wish to be always near Bartja and Sappho, led her
to decide quickly on waiting for her granddaughter at Sais.
Bartja and Sappho were delighted to find such a welcome guest, and after
she had dandled and played with her great grandchild, the little Parmys,
to her heart's content, they led her to the rooms which had been prepared
for her.
[Herodotus states, that beside Atossa, &c.. Darius took a daughter
of the deceased Bartja, named Parmys, to be his wife. Herod. III.
88. She is also mentioned VII. 78.]
They were the same in which the unhappy Tachot had spent the last months
of her fading existence. Rhodopis could not see all the little trifles
which showed, not only the age and sex of the former occupant, but her
tastes and disposition, without feeling very sad. On the dressing-table
were a number of little ointment-boxes and small bottles for perfumes,
cosmetics, washes and oils. Two larger boxes, one in the form of a
Nile-goose, and another on the side of which a woman playing on a lute
had been painted, had once contained the princess's costly golden
ornaments, and the metal mirror with a handle in the form of a sleeping
maiden, had once reflected her beautiful face with its pale pink flush.
Everything in the room, from the elegant little couch resting on lions'
claws, to the delicately-carved ivory combs on the toilet-table, proved
that the outward adornments of life had possessed much charm for the
former owner of these rooms. The golden sisirum and the
delicately-wrought nabla, the strings of which had long ago been broken,
testified to her taste for music, while the broken spindle in the corner,
and some unfinished nets of glass beads shewed that she had been fond of
woman's usual work.
It was a sad pleasure to Rhodopis to examine all these things, and the
picture which she drew in her own mind of Tachot after the inspection,
differed very little from the reality. At last interest and curiosity led
her to a large painted chest. She lifted the light cover and found,
first, a few dried flowers; then a ball, round which some skilful hand
had wreathed roses and leaves, once fresh and bright, now, alas, long ago
dead and withered. Beside these were a number of amulets in different
forms, one representing the goddess of truth, another containing spells
written on a strip of papyrus and concealed in a little golden case. Then
her eyes fell on some letters written in the Greek character. She read
them by the light of the lamp. They were from Nitetis in Persia to her
supposed sister, and were written in ignorance of the latter's illness.
When Rhodopis laid them down her eyes were full of tears. The dead girl's
secret lay open before her. She knew now that Tachot had loved Bartja,
that he had given her the faded flowers, and that she had wreathed the
ball with roses because he had thrown it to her. The amulets must have
been intended either to heal her sick heart, or to awaken love in his.
As she was putting the letters back in their old place, she touched some
cloths which seemed put in to fill up the bottom of the chest, and felt a
hard round substance underneath. She raised them, and discovered a bust
made of colored wax, such a wonderfully-exact portrait of Nitetis, that
an involuntary exclamation of surprise broke from her, and it was long
before she could turn her eyes away from Theodorus' marvellous work.
She went to rest and fell asleep, thinking of the sad fate of Nitetis,
the Egyptian Princess.
The next morning Rhodopis went into the garden--the same into which we
led our readers during the lifetime of Amasis-and found Bartja and Sappho
in an arbor overgrown with vines.
Sappho was seated in a light wicker-work chair. Her child lay on her lap,
stretching out its little hands and feet, sometimes to its father, who
was kneeling on the ground before them, and then to its mother whose
laughing face was bent down over her little one.
Bartja was very happy with his child. When the little creature buried its
tiny fingers in his curls and beard, he would draw his head back to feel
the strength of the little hand, would kiss its rosy feet, its little
round white shoulders and dimpled arms. Sappho enjoyed the fun, always
trying to draw the little one's attention to its father.
Sometimes, when she stooped down to kiss the rosy baby lips, her forehead
would touch his curls and he would steal the kiss meant for the little
Parmys.
Rhodopis watched them a long time unperceived, and, with tears of joy in
her eyes, prayed the gods that they might long be as happy as they now
were. At last she came into the arbor to wish them good-morning, and
bestowed much praise on old Melitta for appearing at the right moment,
parasol in hand, to take her charge out of the sunshine before it became
too bright and hot, and put her to sleep.
The old slave had been appointed head-nurse to the high-born child, and
acquitted herself in her new office with an amount of importance which
was very comical. Hiding her old limbs under rich Persian robes, she
moved about exulting in the new and delightful right to command, and kept
her inferiors in perpetual motion.
Sappho followed Melitta into the palace, first whispering in her
husband's ear with her arm round his neck: "Tell my grandmother
everything and ask whether you are right."
Before he could answer, she had stopped his mouth with a kiss, and then
hurried after the old woman who was departing with dignified steps.
The prince smiled as he watched her graceful walk and beautiful figure,
and said, turning to Rhodopis: "Does not it strike you, that she has
grown taller lately."
"It seems so," answered Rhodopis. "A woman's girlhood has its own
peculiar charm, but her true dignity comes with motherhood. It is the
feeling of having fulfilled her destiny, which raises her head and makes
us fancy she has grown taller."
"Yes," said Bartja, "I think she is happy. Yesterday our opinions
differed for the first time, and as she was leaving us just now, she
begged me, privately, to lay the question before you, which I am very
glad to do, for I honor your experience and wisdom just as much, as I
love her childlike inexperience."
Bartja then told the story of the unfortunate shooting-match, finishing
with these words: "Croesus blames my imprudence, but I know my brother; I
know that when he is angry he is capable of any act of violence, and it
is not impossible that at the moment when he felt himself defeated he
could have killed me; but I know too, that when his fierce passion has
cooled, he will forget my boastful deed, and only try to excel me by
others of the same kind. A year ago he was by far the best marksman in
Persia, and would be so still, if drink and epilepsy had not undermined
his strength. I must confess I feel as if I were becoming stronger every
day."
"Yes," interrupted Rhodopis, "pure happiness strengthens a man's arm,
just as it adds to the beauty of a woman, while intemperance and mental
distress ruin both body and mind far more surely even than old age. My
son, beware of your brother; his strong arm has become paralyzed, and his
generosity can be forfeited too. Trust my experience, that the man who is
the slave of one evil passion, is very seldom master of the rest; besides
which, no one feels humiliation so bitterly as he who is sinking--who
knows that his powers are forsaking him. I say again, beware of your
brother, and trust the voice of experience more than that of your own
heart, which, because it is generous itself, believes every one else to
be so."
"I see," said Bartja, "that you will take Sappho's side. Difficult as it
will be for her to part from you, she has still begged me to return with
her to Persia. She thinks that Cambyses may forget his anger, when I am
out of sight. I thought she was over-anxious, and besides, it would
disappoint me not to take part in the expedition against the Ethiopians."
"But I entreat you," interrupted Rhodopis, "to follow her advice. The
gods only know what pain it will give me to lose you both, and yet I
repeat a thousand times: Go back to Persia, and remember that none but
fools stake life and happiness to no purpose. As to the war with
Ethiopia, it is mere madness; instead of subduing those black inhabitants
of the south, you yourselves will be conquered by heat, thirst and all
the horrors of the desert. In saying this I refer to the campaigns in
general; as to your own share in them, I can only say that if no fame is
to be won there, you will be putting your own life and the happiness of
your family in jeopardy literally for nothing, and that if, on the other
hand, you should distinguish yourself again, it would only be giving
fresh cause of jealousy and anger to your brother. No, go to Persia, as
soon as you can."
Bartja was just beginning to make various objections to these arguments,
when he caught sight of Prexaspes coming up to them, looking very pale.
After the usual greeting, the envoy whispered to Bartja, that he should
like to speak with him alone. Rhodopis left them at once, and he began,
playing with the rings on his right hand as he spoke, in a constrained,
embarrassed way. "I come from the king. Your display of strength
irritated him yesterday, and he does not wish to see you again for some
time. His orders are, that you set out for Arabia to buy up all the
camels that are to be had.
[Camels are never represented on the Egyptian monuments, whereas
they were in great use among the Arabians and Persians, and are now
a necessity on the Nile. They must have existed in Egypt, however.
Hekekyan-Bey discovered the bones of a dromedary in a deep bore.
Representations of these creatures were probably forbid We know this
was the case with the cock, of which bird there were large numbers
in Egypt: It is remarkable, that camels were not introduced into
Barbary until after the birth of Christ.]
"As these animals can bear thirst very long, they are to be used in
conveying food and water for our army on the Ethiopian campaign. There
must be no delay. Take leave of your wife, and (I speak by the king's
command) be ready to start before dark. You will be absent at least a
month. I am to accompany you as far as Pelusium. Kassandane wishes to
have your wife and child near her during your absence. Send them to
Memphis as soon as possible; under the protection of the queen mother,
they will be in safety."
Prexaspes' short, constrained way of speaking did not strike Bartja. He
rejoiced at what seemed to him great moderation on the part of his
brother, and at receiving a commission which relieved him of all doubt on
the question of leaving Egypt, gave his friend, (as he supposed him to
be), his hand to kiss and an invitation to follow him into the palace.
In the cool of the evening, he took a short but very affectionate
farewell of Sappho and his child, who was asleep in Melitta's arms, told
his wife to set out as soon as possible on her journey to Kassandane,
called out jestingly to his mother-in-law, that at least this time she
had been mistaken in her judgment of a man's character, (meaning his
brother's), and sprang on to his horse.
As Prexaspes was mounting, Sappho whispered to him, "Take care of that
reckless fellow, and remind him of me and his child, when you see him
running into unnecessary danger."
"I shall have to leave him at Pelusium," answered the envoy, busying
himself with the bridle of his horse in order to avoid meeting her eyes.
"Then may the gods take him into their keeping!" exclaimed Sappho,
clasping her husband's hand, and bursting into tears, which she could not
keep back. Bartja looked down and saw his usually trustful wife in tears.
He felt sadder than he had ever felt before. Stooping down lovingly from
his saddle, he put his strong arm round her waist, lifted her up to him,
and as she stood supporting herself on his foot in the stirrup, pressed
her to his heart, as if for a long last farewell. He then let her safely
and gently to the ground, took his child up to him on the saddle, kissed
and fondled the little creature, and told her laughingly to make her
mother very happy while he was away, exchanged some warm words of
farewell with Rhodopis, and then, spurring his horse till the creature
reared, dashed through the gateway of the Pharaohs' palace, with
Prexaspes at his side.
When the sound of the horses' hoofs had died away in the distance, Sappho
laid her head on her grandmother's shoulder and wept uncontrollably.
Rhodopis remonstrated and blamed, but all in vain, she could not stop her
tears.
CHAPTER XV.
On the morning after the trial of the bow, Cambyses was seized by such a
violent attack of his old illness, that he was forced to keep his room
for two days and nights, ill in mind and body; at times raging like a
madman, at others weak and powerless as a little child.
On the third day he recovered consciousness and remembered the awful
charge he had laid on Prexaspes, and that it was only too possible he
might have executed it already. At this thought he trembled, as he had
never trembled in his life before. He sent at once for the envoy's eldest
son, who was one of the royal cup-bearers. The boy said his father had
left Memphis, without taking leave of his family. He then sent for
Darius, Zopyrus and Gyges, knowing how tenderly they loved Bartja, and
enquired after their friend. On hearing from them that he was at Sais, he
sent the three youths thither at once, charging them, if they met
Prexaspes on the way, to send him back to Memphis without delay. This
haste and the king's strange behavior were quite incomprehensible to the
young Achaemenidae; nevertheless they set out on their journey with all
speed, fearing that something must be wrong.
Cambyses, meanwhile, was miserably restless, inwardly cursed his habit of
drinking and tasted no wine the whole of that clay. Seeing his mother in
the palace-gardens, he avoided her; he durst not meet her eye.
The next eight days passed without any sign of Prexaspes' return; they
seemed to the king like a year. A hundred times he sent for the young
cup-bearer and asked if his father had returned; a hundred times he
received the same disappointing answer.
At sunset on the thirteenth day, Kassandane sent to beg a visit from him.
The king went at once, for now he longed to look on the face of his
mother; he fancied it might give him back his lost sleep.
After he had greeted her with a tenderness so rare from him, that it
astonished her, he asked for what reason she had desired his presence.
She answered, that Bartja's wife had arrived at Memphis under singular
circumstances and had said she wished to present a gift to Cambyses. He
gave Sappho an audience at once, and heard from her that Prexaspes had
brought her husband an order to start for Arabia, and herself a summons
to Memphis from the queen-mother. At these words the king turned very
pale, and his features were agitated with pain as he looked at his
brother's lovely young wife. She felt that something unusual was passing
in his mind, and such dreadful forebodings arose in her own, that she
could only offer him the gift in silence and with trembling hands.
"My husband sends you this," she said, pointing to the
ingeniously-wrought box, which contained the wax likeness of Nitetis.
Rhodopis had advised her to take this to the king in Bartja's name, as a
propitiatory offering.
Cambyses showed no curiosity as to the contents of the box, gave it in
charge to a eunuch, said a few words which seemed meant as thanks to his
sister-in law, and left the women's apartments without even so much as
enquiring after Atossa, whose existence he seemed to have forgotten.
He had come to his mother, believing that the visit would comfort and
calm his troubled mind, but Sappho's words had destroyed his last hope,
and with that his last possibility of rest or peace. By this time either
Prexaspes would already have committed the murder, or perhaps at that
very moment might be raising his dagger to plunge it into Bartja's heart.
How could he ever meet his mother again after Bartja's death? how could
he answer her questions or those of that lovely Sappho, whose large,
anxious, appealing eyes had touched him so strangely?
A voice within told him, that his brother's murder would be branded as a
cowardly, unnatural, and unjust deed, and he shuddered at the thought. It
seemed fearful, unbearable, to be called an assassin. He had already
caused the death of many a man without the least compunction, but that
had been done either in fair fight, or openly before the world. He was
king, and what the king did was right. Had he killed Bartja with his own
hand, his conscience would not have reproached him; but to have had him
privately put out of the way, after he had given so many proofs of
possessing first-rate manly qualities, which deserved the highest
praise--this tortured him with a feeling of rage at his own want of
principle,-a feeling of shame and remorse which he had never known
before. He began to despise himself. The consciousness of having acted,
and wished to act justly, forsook him, and he began to fancy, that every
one who had been executed by his orders, had been, like Bartja, an
innocent victim of his fierce anger. These thoughts became so
intolerable, that he began to drink once more in the hope of drowning
them. But now the wine had precisely the opposite effect, and brought
such tormenting thoughts, that, worn out as he was already by epileptic
fits and his habit of drinking, both body and mind threatened to give way
to the agitation caused by the events of the last months. Burning and
shivering by turns, he was at last forced to lie down. While the
attendants were disrobing him, he remembered his brother's present, had
the box fetched and opened, and then desired to be left alone. The
Egyptian paintings on the outside of the box reminded him of Nitetis, and
then he asked himself what she would have said to his deed. Fever had
already begun, and his mind was wandering as he took the beautiful wax
bust out of the box. He stared in horror at the dull, immovable eyes. The
likeness was so perfect, and his judgment so weakened by wine and fever,
that he fancied himself the victim of some spell, and yet could not turn
his eyes from those dear features. Suddenly the eyes seemed to move. He
was seized with terror, and, in a kind of convulsion, hurled what he
thought had become a living head against the wall. The hollow, brittle
wax broke into a thousand fragments, and Cambyses sank back on to his bed
with a groan.
From that moment the fever increased. In his delirium the banished Phanes
appeared, singing a scornful Greek song and deriding him in such infamous
words, that his fists clenched with rage. Then he saw his friend and
adviser, Croesus, threatening him in the very same words of warning,
which he had used when Bartja had been sentenced to death by his command
on account of Nitetis: "Beware of shedding a brother's blood; the smoke
thereof will rise to heaven and become a cloud, that must darken the days
of the murderer, and at last cast down the lightnings of heaven upon his
head."
And in his delirious fancy this figure of speech became a reality. A rain
of blood streamed down upon him from dark clouds; his clothes and hands
were wet with the loathsome moisture. He went down to the Nile to cleanse
himself, and suddenly saw Nitetis coming towards him. She had the same
sweet smile with which Theodorus had modelled her. Enchanted with this
lovely vision, he fell down before her and took her hand, but he had
scarcely touched it, when drops of blood appeared at the tips of her
delicate fingers, and she turned away from him with every sign of horror.
He humbly implored her to forgive him and come back; she remained
inexorable. He grew angry, and threatened her, first with his wrath, and
then with awful punishments. At last, as she only answered his threats by
a low scornful laugh, he ventured to throw his dagger at her. She
crumbled at once into a thousand pieces, like the wax statue. But the
derisive laughter echoed on, and became louder. Many voices joined in it,
each trying to outbid the other. And the voices of Bartja and Nitetis
were the loudest,--their tone the most bitter. At last he could bear
these fearful sounds no longer and stopped his ears; this was of no use,
and he buried his head, first in the glowing desert-sand and then in the
icy cold Nile-water, until his senses forsook him. On awaking, the actual
state of things seemed incomprehensible to him. He had gone to bed in the
evening, and yet he now saw, by the direction of the sun's rays which
fell on his bed, that, instead of dawning as he had expected, the day was
growing dark. There could be no mistake; he heard the chorus of priests
singing farewell to the setting Mithras.
Then he heard a number of people moving behind a curtain, which had been
hung up at the head of his bed. He tried to turn in his bed, but could
not; he was too weak. At last, finding it impossible to discover whether
he was in real life or still in a dream, he called for his dressers and
the courtiers, who were accustomed to be present when he rose. They
appeared in a moment, and with them his mother, Prexaspes, a number of
the learned among the Magi, and some Egyptians who were unknown to him.
They told him, that he had been lying in a violent fever for weeks, and
had only escaped death by the special mercy of the gods, the skill of the
physicians, and the unwearied nursing of his mother. He looked
enquiringly first at Kassandane, then at Prexaspes, lost consciousness
again, and fell into a deep sleep, from which he awoke the next morning
with renewed strength.
In four days he was strong enough to sit up and able to question
Prexaspes on the only subject, which occupied his thoughts.
In consideration of his master's weakness the envoy was beginning an
evasive reply, when a threatening movement of the king's gaunt, worn
hand, and a look which had by no means lost its old power of awing into
submission, brought him to the point at once, and in the hope of giving
the king a great pleasure and putting his mind completely at rest, he
began: "Rejoice, O King! the youth, who dared to desire the disparagement
of thy glory, is no more. This hand slew him and buried his body at
Baal-Zephon. The sand of the desert and the unfruitful waves of the Red
Sea were the only witnesses of the deed; and no creature knows thereof
beside thyself, O King, thy servant Prexaspes, and the gulls and
cormorants, that hover over his grave."
The king uttered a piercing shriek of rage, was seized by a fresh
shivering-fit, and sank back once more in raving delirium.
Long weeks passed, every day of which threatened its death. At last,
however, his strong constitution gained the day, but his mind had given
way, and remained disordered and weak up to his last hour.
When he was strong enough to leave the sick-room and to ride and shoot
once more, he abandoned himself more than ever to the pleasure of
drinking, and lost every remnant of self-control.
The delusion had fixed itself in his disordered mind, that Bartja was not
dead, but transformed into the bow of the King of Ethiopia, and that the
Feruer (soul) of his father Cyrus had commanded him to restore Bartja to
its original form, by subjugating the black nation.
This idea, which he confided to every one about him as a great secret,
pursued him day and night and gave him no rest, until he had started for
Ethiopia with an immense host. He was forced, however, to return without
having accomplished his object, after having miserably lost the greater
part of his army by heat and the scarcity of provisions. An historian,
who may almost be spoken of as contemporary, tells us that the wretched
soldiers, after having subsisted on herbs as long as they could, came to
deserts where there was no sign of vegetation, and in their despair
resorted to an expedient almost too fearful to describe. Lots were drawn
by every ten men, and he on whom the lot fell was killed and eaten by the
other nine.
[Herodotus visited Egypt some 60 years after the death of Cambyses,
454 B.C. He describes the Ethiopian campaign, III. 25.]
At last things went so far, that his subjects compelled this madman to
return, but only, with their slavish Asiatic feelings, to obey him all
the more blindly, when they found themselves once more in inhabited
regions.
On reaching Memphis with the wreck of his army, he found the Egyptians in
glorious apparel celebrating a festival. They had found a new Apis and
were rejoicing over the reappearance of their god, incarnate in the
sacred bull.
As Cambyses had heard at Thebes, that the army he had sent against the
oasis of Ammon in the Libyan desert, had perished miserably in a Khamsin,
or Simoom, and that his fleet, which was to conquer Carthage, had refused
to fight with a people of their own race, he fancied that the Memphians
must be celebrating a festival of joy at the news of his misfortunes,
sent for their principal men, and after reproaching them with their
conduct, asked why they had been gloomy and morose after his victories,
but joyous at hearing of his misfortunes. The Memphians answered by
explaining the real ground for their merry-making, and told him, that the
appearance of the sacred bull was always celebrated in Egypt with the
greatest rejoicings. Cambyses called them liars, and, as such, sentenced
them to death. He then sent for the priests; received, however, exactly
the same answer from them.
With the bitterest irony he asked to be allowed to make the acquaintance
of this new god, and commanded them to bring him. The bull Apis was
brought and the king told that he was the progeny of a virgin cow and a
moonbeam, that he must be black, with a white triangular spot on the
forehead, the likeness of an eagle on his back, and on his side the
crescent moon. There must be two kinds of hair on his tail, and on his
tongue an excrescence in the form of the sacred beetle Scarabaeus.
When Cambyses saw this deified creature he could discover nothing
remarkable in him, and was so enraged that he plunged his sword into its
side. As the blood streamed from the wound and the animal fell, he broke
out into a piercing laugh, and cried: "Ye fools! so your gods are flesh
and blood; they can be wounded. Such folly is worthy of you. But ye shall
find, that it is not so easy to make a fool of me. Ho, guards! flog these
priests soundly, and kill every one whom you find taking part in this mad
celebration." The command was obeyed and fearfully exasperated the
Egyptians.
[According to Herod. III. 29. Cambyses' sword slipped and ran into
the leg of the sacred bull. As the king died also of a wound in the
thigh, this just suits Herodotus, who always tries to put the
retribution that comes after presumptuous crime in the strongest
light; but it is very unlikely that the bull should have died of a
mere thigh wound.]
Apis died of his wound; the Memphians buried him secretly in the vaults
belonging to the sacred bulls, near the Serapeum, and, led by Psamtik,
attempted an insurrection against the Persians. This was very quickly put
down, however, and cost Psamtik his life,--a life the stains and
severities of which deserve to be forgiven, in consideration of his
unwearied, ceaseless efforts to deliver his people from a foreign yoke,
and his death in the cause of freedom.
Cambyses' madness had meanwhile taken fresh forms. After the failure of
his attempt to restore Bartja, (transformed as he fancied into a bow) to
his original shape, his irritability increased so frightfully that a
single word, or even a look, was sufficient to make him furious. Still
his true friend and counsellor, Croesus, never left him, though the king
had more than once given him over to the guards for execution. But the
guards knew their master; they took good care not to lay hands on the old
man, and felt sure of impunity, as the king would either have forgotten
his command, or repented of it by the next day, Once, however, the
miserable whip bearers paid a fearful penalty for their lenity. Cambyses,
while rejoicing that Croesus was saved, ordered his deliverers to be
executed for disobedience without mercy.
It would be repugnant to us to repeat all the tales of barbarous
cruelties, which are told of Cambyses at this insane period of his life;
but we cannot resist mentioning a few which seem to us especially
characteristic.
While sitting at table one day, already somewhat intoxicated, he asked
Prexaspes what the Persians thought of him. The envoy, who in hopes of
deadening his tormenting conscience by the performance of noble and
dangerous acts, let no opportunity pass of trying to exercise a good
influence over his sovereign, answered that they extolled him on every
point, but thought he was too much addicted to wine.
These words, though spoken half in jest, put the king into a violent
passion, and he almost shrieked: "So the Persians say, that the wine has
taken away my senses, do they? on the contrary, I'll show them that
they've lost their own." And as he spoke he bent his bow, took aim for a
moment at Prexaspes' eldest son, who, as cup-bearer, was standing at the
back of the hall waiting for and watching every look of his sovereign,
and shot him in the breast. He then gave orders that the boy's body
should be opened and examined. The arrow had pierced the centre of his
heart. This delighted the senseless tyrant, and he called out with a
laugh: "Now you see, Prexaspes, it's the Persians who have lost their
judgment, not I. Could any one have hit the mark better?"
Prexaspes stood there, pale and motionless, compelled to watch the horrid
scene, like Niobe when chained to Sipylus. His servile spirit bowed
before the ruler's power, instead of arming his right hand with the
dagger of revenge, and when the frantic king asked him the same question
a second time, he actually answered, pressing his hand on his heart: "A
god could not have hit the mark more exactly."
A few weeks after this, the king went to Sais, and there was shown the
rooms formerly occupied by his bride. This brought back all the old
painful recollections in full force, and at the same time his clouded
memory reminded him, though without any clearness of detail, that Amasis
had deceived both Nitetis and himself. He cursed the dead king and
furiously demanded to be taken to the temple of Neith, where his mummy
was laid. There he tore the embalmed body out of its sarcophagus, caused
it to be scourged, to be stabbed with pins, had the hair torn off and
maltreated it in every possible way. In conclusion, and contrary to the
ancient Persian religious law, which held the pollution of pure fire by
corpses to be a deadly sin, he caused Amasis' dead body to be burnt, and
condemned the mummy of his first wife, which lay in a sarcophagus at
Thebes, her native place, to the same fate.
On his return to Memphis, Cambyses did not shrink from personally
ill-treating his wife and sister, Atossa.
He had ordered a combat of wild beasts to take place, during which,
amongst other entertainments of the same kind, a dog was to fight with a
young lion. The lion had conquered his antagonist, when another dog, the
brother of the conquered one, broke away from his chain, attacked the
lion, and with the help of the wounded dog, vanquished him.
This scene delighted Cambyses, but Kassandane and Atossa, who had been
forced by the king's command to be present, began to weep aloud.
The tyrant was astonished, and on asking the reason for their tears,
received as answer from the impetuous Atossa, that the brave creature who
had risked its own life to save its brother, reminded her of Bartja. She
would not say by whom he had been murdered, but his murder had never been
avenged.
These words so roused the king's anger, and so goaded his conscience,
that in a fit of insane fury he struck the daring woman, and might
possibly have killed her, if his mother had not thrown herself into his
arms and exposed her own body to his mad blows.
Her voice and action checked his rage, for he had not lost reverence for
his mother; but her look of intense anger and contempt, which he clearly
saw and could not forget, begot a fresh delusion in his mind. He believed
from that moment, that the eyes of women had power to poison him; he
started and hid himself behind his companions whenever he saw a woman,
and at last commanded that all the female inhabitants of the palace at
Memphis, his mother not excepted, should be sent back to Ecbatana.
Araspes and Gyges were appointed to be their escort thither.
......................
The caravan of queens and princesses had arrived at Sais; they alighted
at the royal palace. Croesus had accompanied them thus far on their way
from Egypt.
Kassandane had altered very much during the last few years. Grief and
suffering had worn deep lines in her once beautiful face, though they had
had no power to bow her stately figure.
Atossa, on the contrary, was more beautiful than ever, notwithstanding
all she had suffered. The refractory and impetuous child, the daring
spirited girl, had developed into a dignified, animated and determined
woman. The serious side of life, and three sad years passed with her
ungovernable husband and brother, had been first-rate masters in the
school of patience, but they had not been able to alienate her heart from
her first love. Sappho's friendship had made up to her in some measure
for the loss of Darius.
The young Greek had become another creature, since the mysterious
departure of her husband. Her rosy color and her lovely smile were both
gone. But she was wonderfully beautiful, in spite of her paleness, her
downcast eyelashes and languid attitude. She looked like Ariadne waiting
for Theseus. Longing and expectation lay in every look, in the low tone
of her voice, in her measured walk. At the sound of approaching steps,
the opening of a door or the unexpected tones of a man's voice, she would
start, get up and listen, and then sink back into the old waiting,
longing attitude, disappointed but not hopeless. She began to dream
again, as she had been so fond of doing in her girlish days.
She was her old self only when playing with her child. Then the color
came back to her cheeks, her eyes sparkled, she seemed once more to live
in the present, and not only in the past or future.
Her child was everything to her. In that little one Bartja seemed to be
still alive, and she could love the child with all her heart and
strength, without taking one iota from her love to him. With this little
creature the gods had mercifully given her an aim in life and a link with
the lower world, the really precious part of which had seemed to vanish
with her vanished husband. Sometimes, as she looked into her baby's blue
eyes, so wonderfully like Bartja's, she thought: Why was not she born a
boy? He would have grown more like his father from day to day, and at
last, if such a thing indeed could ever be, a second Bartja would have
stood before me.
But such thoughts generally ended soon in her pressing the little one
closer than ever to her heart, and blaming herself for ingratitude and
folly.
One day Atossa put the same idea in words, exclaiming: "If Parmys were
only a boy! He would have grown up exactly like his father, and have been
a second Cyrus for Persia." Sappho smiled sadly at her friend, and
covered the little one with kisses, but Kassandane said: "Be thankful to
the gods, my child, for having given you a daughter. If Parmys were a
boy, he would be taken from you as soon as he had reached his sixth year,
to be brought up with the sons of the other Achaemenidae, but your
daughter will remain your own for many years."
Sappho trembled at the mere thought of parting from her child; she
pressed its little fair curly head close to her breast, and never found,
fault with her treasure again for being a girl.
Atossa's friendship was a great comfort to her poor wounded heart. With
her she could speak of Bartja as much and as often as she would, and was
always certain of a kind and sympathizing listener. Atossa had loved her
vanished brother very dearly. And even a stranger would have enjoyed
hearing Sappho tell of her past happiness. Her words rose into real
eloquence in speaking of those bright days; she seemed like an inspired
poetess. Then she would take her lyre, and with her clear, sweet,
plaintive voice sing the love-songs of the elder Sappho, in which all her
own deepest feelings were so truly expressed, and fancy herself once more
with her lover sitting under the sweet-scented acanthus in the quiet
night, and forget the sad reality of her present life. And when, with a
deep sigh, she laid aside the lyre and came back out of this
dream-kingdom, the tears were always to be seen in Kassandane's eyes,
though she did not understand the language in which Sappho had been
singing, and Atossa would bend down and kiss her forehead.
Thus three long years had passed, during which Sappho had seldom seen her
grandmother, for, as the mother of Parmys, she was by the king's command,
forbidden to leave the harem, unless permitted and accompanied either by
Kassandane or the eunuchs.
On the present occasion Croesus, who had always loved, and loved her
still, like a daughter, had sent for Rhodopis to Sais. He, as well as
Kassandane, understood her wish to take leave of this, her dearest and
most faithful friend, before setting out for Persia; besides which
Kassandane had a great wish to see one in whose praise she had heard so
much. When Sappho's tender and sad farewell was over therefore, Rhodopis
was summoned to the queen-mother.
A stranger, who saw these two women together, would have thought both
were queens; it was impossible to decide which of the two had most right
to the title.
Croesus, standing as he did in as close a relation to the one as to the
other, undertook the office of interpreter, and the ready intellect of
Rhodopis helped him to carry on an uninterrupted flow of conversation.
Rhodopis, by her own peculiar attractions, soon won the heart of
Kassandane, and the queen knew no better way of proving this than by
offering, in Persian fashion, to grant her some wish.
Rhodopis hesitated a moment; then raising her hands as if in prayer, she
cried: "Leave me my Sappho, the consolation and beauty of my old age."
Kassandane smiled sadly. "It is not in my power to grant that wish," she
answered. "The laws of Persia command, that the children of the
Achaemenidae shall be brought up at the king's gate. I dare not allow the
little Parmys, Cyrus' only grandchild, to leave me, and, much as Sappho
loves you, you know she would not part from her child. Indeed, she has
become so dear to me now, and to my daughter, that though I well
understand your wish to have her, I could never allow Sappho to leave
us."
Seeing that Rhodopis' eyes were filling with tears, Kassandane went on:
"There is, however, a good way out of our perplexity. Leave Naukratis,
and come with us to Persia. There you can spend your last years with us
and with your granddaughter, and shall be provided with a royal
maintenance."
Rhodopis shook her head, hoary but still so beautiful, and answered in a
suppressed voice: "I thank you, noble queen, for this gracious
invitation, but I feel unable to accept it. Every fibre of my heart is
rooted in Greece, and I should be tearing my life out by leaving it
forever. I am so accustomed to constant activity, perfect freedom, and a
stirring exchange of thought, that I should languish and die in the
confinement of a harem. Croesus had already prepared me for the gracious
proposal you have just made, and I have had a long and difficult battle
to fight, before I could decide on resigning my dearest blessing for my
highest good. It is not easy, but it is glorious, it is more worthy of
the Greek name--to live a good and beautiful life, than a happy one--to
follow duty rather than pleasure. My heart will follow Sappho, but my
intellect and experience belong to the Greeks; and if you should ever
hear that the people of Hellas are ruled by themselves alone, by their
own gods, their own laws, the beautiful and the good, then you will know
that the work on which Rhodopis, in league with the noblest and best of
her countrymen, has staked her life, is accomplished. Be not angry with
the Greek woman, who confesses that she would rather die free as a beggar
than live in bondage as a queen, though envied by the whole world."
Kassandane listened in amazement. She only understood part of what
Rhodopis had said, but felt that she had spoken well and nobly, and at
the conclusion gave her her hand to kiss. After a short pause, Kassandane
said: "Do what you think right, and remember, that as long as I and my
daughter live, your granddaughter will never want for true and faithful
love."
"Your noble countenance and the fame of your great virtue are warrant
enough for that." answered Rhodopis.
"And also," added the queen, "the duty which lies upon me to make good
the wrong, that has been done your Sappho."
She sighed painfully and went on: "The little Parmys shall be carefully
educated. She seems to have much natural talent, and can sing the songs
of her native country already after her mother. I shall do nothing to
check her love of music, though, in Persia the religious services are the
only occasions in which that art is studied by any but the lower
classes."
At these words Rhodopis' face glowed. "Will you permit me to speak
openly, O Queen?" she said. "Speak without fear," was Kassandane's
answer. "When you sighed so painfully just now in speaking of your dear
lost son, I thought: Perhaps that brave young hero might have been still
living, if the Persians had understood better how to educate their sons.
Bartja told me in what that education consisted. To shoot, throw the
spear, ride, hunt, speak the truth, and perhaps also to distinguish
between the healing and noxious properties of certain plants: that is
deemed a sufficient educational provision for a man's life. The Greek
boys are just as carefully kept to the practice of exercises for
hardening and bracing the body; for these exercises are the founders and
preservers of health, the physician is only its repairer and restorer.
If, however, by constant practice a Greek youth were to attain to the
strength of a bull, the truth of the Deity, and the wisdom of the most
learned Egyptian priest, we should still look down upon him were he
wanting in two things which only early example and music, combined with
these bodily exercises, can give: grace and symmetry. You smile because
you do not understand me, but I can prove to you that music, which, from
what Sappho tells me, is not without its moving power for your heart, is
as important an element in education as gymnastics, and, strange as it
may sound, has an equal share in effecting the perfection of both body
and mind. The man who devotes his attention exclusively to music will, if
he be of a violent disposition, lose his savage sternness at first; he
will become gentle and pliable as metal in the fire. But at last his
courage will disappear too; his passionate temper will have changed into
irritability, and he will be of little worth as a warrior, the calling
and character most desired in your country. If, on the other hand, he
confines himself to gymnastics only, he will, like Cambyses, excel in
manliness and strength; but his mind--here my comparison ceases--will
remain obtuse and blind, his perceptions will be confused, He will not
listen to reason, but will endeavor to carry everything by force, and,
lacking grace and proportion, his life will probably become a succession
of rude and violent deeds. On this account we conclude that music is
necessary not only for the mind, and gymnastics not only for the body,
but that both, working together, elevate and soften the mind and
strengthen the body--give manly grace, and graceful manliness."
[The fundamental ideas of this speech are drawn from
Plato's ideal "State."]
After a moment's pause Rhodopis went on: "The youth who has not received
such an education, whose roughness has never been checked even in
childhood, who has been allowed to vent his temper on every one,
receiving flattery in return and never hearing reproof; who has been
allowed to command before he has learnt to obey, and who has been brought
up in the belief that splendor, power and riches are the highest good,
can never possibly attain to the perfect manhood, which we beseech the
gods to grant our boys. And if this unfortunate being happens to have
been born with an impetuous disposition, ungovernable and eager passions,
these will be only nourished and increased by bodily exercise
unaccompanied by the softening influence of music, so that at last a
child, who possibly came into the world with good qualities, will, merely
through the defects in his education, degenerate into a destructive
animal, a sensual self-destroyer, and a mad and furious tyrant."
Rhodopis had become animated with her subject. She ceased, saw tears in
the eyes of the queen, and felt that she had gone too far and had wounded
a mother's heart,--a heart full of noble feeling. She touched her robe,
kissed its border, and said softly: "Forgive me."
Kassandane looked her forgiveness, courteously saluted Rhodopis and
prepared to leave the room. On the threshold, however, she stopped and
said: "I am not angry. Your reproaches are just; but you too must
endeavor to forgive, for I can assure you that he who has murdered the
happiness of your child and of mine, though the most powerful, is of all
mortals the most to be pitied. Farewell! Should you ever stand in need of
ought, remember Cyrus' widow, and how she wished to teach you, that the
virtues the Persians desire most in their children are magnanimity and
liberality."
After saying this she left the apartment.
On the same day Rhodopis heard that Phanes was dead. He had retired to
Crotona in the neighborhood of Pythagoras and there passed his time in
reflection, dying with the tranquillity of a philosopher.
She was deeply affected at this news and said to Croesus: "Greece has
lost one of her ablest men, but there are many, who will grow up to be
his equals. The increasing power of Persia causes me no fear; indeed, I
believe that when the barbarous lust of conquest stretches out its hand
towards us, our many-headed Greece will rise as a giant with one head of
divine power, before which mere barbaric strength must bow as surely as
body before spirit."
Three days after this, Sappho said farewell for the last time to her
grandmother, and followed the queens to Persia. Notwithstanding the
events which afterwards took place, she continued to believe that Bartja
would return, and full of love, fidelity and tender remembrance, devoted
herself entirely to the education of her child and the care of her aged
mother-in-law, Kassandane.
Little Parmys became very beautiful, and learnt to love the memory of her
vanished father next to the gods of her native land, for her mother's
tales had brought him as vividly before her as if he had been still alive
and present with them.
Atossa's subsequent good fortune and happiness did not cool her
friendship. She always called Sappho her sister. The hanging-gardens were
the latter's residence in summer, and in her conversations there with
Kassandane and Atossa one name was often mentioned--the name of her, who
had been the innocent cause of events which had decided the destinies of
great kingdoms and noble lives--the Egyptian Princess.
CHAPTER XVI.
Here we might end this tale, but that we feel bound to give our readers
some account of the last days of Cambyses. We have already described the
ruin of his mind, but his physical end remains still to be told, and also
the subsequent fate of some of the other characters in our history.
A short time after the departure of the queens, news reached Naukratis
that Oroetes, the satrap of Lydia, had, by a stratagem, allured his old
enemy, Polykrates, to Sardis and crucified him there, thus fulfilling
what Amasis had prophecied of the tyrant's mournful end. This act the
satrap had committed on his own responsibility, events having taken place
in the Median kingdom which threatened the fall of the Achaemenidaean
dynasty.
The king's long absence in a foreign country had either weakened or
entirely dissipated, the fear which the mere mention of his name had
formerly inspired in those who felt inclined to rebel. The awe that his
subjects had formerly felt for him, vanished at the tidings of his
madness, and the news that he had wantonly exposed the lives of thousands
of their countrymen to certain death in the deserts of Libya and
Ethiopia, inspired the enraged Asiatics with a hatred which, when
skilfully fed by the powerful Magi, soon roused, first the Medes and
Assyrians, and then the Persians, to defection and open insurrection.
Motives of self-interest led the ambitious high-priest, Oropastes, whom
Cambyses had appointed regent in his absence, to place himself at the
head of this movement. He flattered the people by remitting their taxes,
by large gifts and larger promises, and finding his clemency gratefully
recognized, determined on an imposture, by which he hoped to win the
crown of Persia for his own family.
He had not forgotten the marvellous likeness between his brother Gaumata
(who had been condemned to lose his ears) and Bartja, the son of Cyrus,
and on hearing that the latter, the universal favorite, as he well knew,
of the Persian nation, had disappeared, resolved to turn this to account
by passing off his brother as the vanished prince, and setting him on the
throne in place of Cambyses. The hatred felt throughout the entire
kingdom towards their insane king, and the love and attachment of the
nation to Bartja, made this stratagem so easy of accomplishment, that
when at last messengers from Oropastes arrived in all the provinces of
the empire declaring to the discontented citizens that, notwithstanding
the rumor they had heard, the younger son of Cyrus was still alive, had
revolted from his brother, ascended his father's throne and granted to
all his subjects freedom from tribute and from military service during a
period of three years, the new ruler was acknowledged throughout the
kingdom with rejoicings.
The pretended Bartja, who was fully aware of his brother's mental
superiority, had obeyed his directions in every particular, had taken up
his residence in the palace of Nisaea,--in the plains of Media, placed
the crown on his head, declared the royal harem his own, and had shown
himself once from a distance to the people, who were to recognize in him
the murdered Bartja. After that time, however, for fear of being at last
unmasked, he concealed himself in his palace, giving himself up, after
the manner of Asiatic monarchs, to every kind of indulgence, while his
brother held the sceptre with a firm hand, and conferred all the
important offices of state on his friends and family.
No sooner did Oropastes feel firm ground under his feet, than he
despatched the eunuch Ixabates to Egypt, to inform the army of the change
of rulers that had taken place and persuade them to revolt in favor of
Bartja, who he knew had been idolized by the Soldiers.
The messenger had been well chosen, fulfilled his mission with much
skill, and had already won over a considerable part of the army for the
new king, when he was taken prisoner by some Syrians, who brought him to
Memphis in hopes of reward.
On arriving in the city of the Pyramids he was brought before the king,
and promised impunity on condition of revealing the entire truth.
The messenger then confirmed the rumor, which had reached Egypt, that
Bartja had ascended the throne of Cyrus and had been recognized by the
greater part of the empire.
Cambyses started with terror at these tidings, as one who saw a dead man
rise from his grave. He was by this time fully aware that Bartja had been
murdered by Prexaspes at his own command, but in this moment he began to
suspect that the envoy had deceived him and spared his brother's life.
The thought had no sooner entered his mind than he uttered it,
reproaching Prexaspes so bitterly with treachery, as to elicit from him a
tremendous oath, that he had murdered and buried the unfortunate Bartja
with his own hand.
Oropastes' messenger was next asked whether he had seen the new king
himself. He answered that he had not, adding that the supposed brother of
Cambyses had only once appeared in public, and had then shown himself to
the people from a distance. On hearing this, Prexaspes saw through the
whole web of trickery at once, reminded the king of the unhappy
misunderstandings to which the marvellous likeness between Bartja and
Gaumata had formerly given rise, and concluded by offering to stake his
own life on the correctness of his supposition. The explanation pleased
the king, and from that moment his diseased mind was possessed by one new
idea to the exclusion of all others--the seizure and slaughter of the
Magi.
The host was ordered to prepare for marching. Aryandes,--one of the
Achaemenidae, was appointed satrap of Egypt, and the army started
homeward without delay. Driven by this new delusion, the king took no
rest by day or night, till at last his over-ridden and ill-used horse
fell with him, and he was severely wounded in the fall by his own dagger.
After lying insensible for some days, he opened his eyes and asked first
to see Araspes, then his mother, and lastly Atossa, although these three
had set out on their journey home months before. From all he said it
appeared that during the last four years, from the attack of fever until
the present accident, he had been living in a kind of sleep. He seemed
astonished and pained at hearing what had happened during these years.
But of his brother's death he was fully aware. He knew that Prexaspes had
killed him by his--the king's--orders and had told him that Bartja lay
buried on the shores of the Red Sea.--During the night which followed
this return to his senses it became clear to himself also, that his mind
had been wandering for along time. Towards morning he fell into a deep
sleep, and this so restored his strength, that on waking he called for
Croesus and required an exact relation of the events that had passed
during the last few years.
His old friend and adviser obeyed; he felt that Cambyses was still
entrusted to his care, and in the hope, faint as it was, of bringing him
back to the right way, he did not suppress one of the king's acts of
violence in his relation.
His joy was therefore great at perceiving, that his words made a deep
impression on the newly-awakened mind of the king. With tears in his
eyes, and with the ashamed look of a child, he grieved over his wrong
deeds and his madness, begged Croesus to forgive him, thanked him for
having borne so long and faithfully with him, and commissioned him to ask
Kassandane and Sappho especially for forgiveness, but also, Atossa and
all whom he had unjustly offended.
The old man wept too, but his tears were tears of joy and he repeatedly
assured Cambyses that he would recover and have ample opportunity of
making amends for the past. But to all this Cambyses shook his head
resolutely, and, pale and wan as he looked, begged Croesus to have his
couch carried on to a rising ground in the open air, and then to summon
the Achaemenidae. When these orders, in spite of the physicians, had been
obeyed, Cambyses was raised into an upright sitting position, and began,
in a voice which could be heard at a considerable distance:
"The time to reveal my great secret has arrived, O ye Persians. Deceived
by a vision, provoked and annoyed by my brother, I caused him to be
murdered in my wrath. Prexaspes wrought the evil deed by my command, but
instead of bringing me the peace I yearned for, that deed has tortured me
into madness and death. By this my confession ye will be convinced, that
my brother Bartja is really dead. The Magi have usurped the throne of the
Achaemenidae. Oropastes, whom I left in Persia as my vicegerent and his
brother Gaumata, who resembles Bartja so nearly that even Croesus,
Intaphernes and my uncle, the noble Hystaspes, were once deceived by the
likeness, have placed themselves at their head. Woe is me, that I have
murdered him who, as my nearest kinsman, should have avenged on the Magi
this affront to my honor. But I cannot recall him from the dead, and I
therefore appoint you the executors of my last will. By the Feruer of my
dead father, and in the name of all good and pure spirits, I conjure you
not to suffer the government to fall into the hands of the unfaithful
Magi. If they have obtained possession thereof by artifice, wrest it from
their hands in like manner; if by force, use force to win it back. Obey
this my last will, and the earth will yield you its fruits abundantly;
your wives, your flocks and herds shall be blessed and freedom shall be
your portion. Refuse to obey it, and ye shall suffer the corresponding
evils; yea, your end, and that of every Persian shall be even as mine."
After these words the king wept and sank back fainting, on seeing which,
the Achaemenidae rent their clothes and burst into loud lamentations. A
few hours later Cambyses died in Croesus' arms. Nitetis was his last
thought; he died with her name on his lips and tears of penitence in his
eyes. When the Persians had left the unclean corpse, Croesus knelt down
beside it and cried, raising his hand to heaven: "Great Cyrus, I have
kept my oath. I have remained this miserable man's faithful adviser even
unto his end."
The next morning the old man betook himself, accompanied by his son
Gyges, to the town of Barene, which belonged to him, and lived there many
years as a father to his subjects, revered by Darius and praised by all
his contemporaries.
........................
After Cambyses' death the heads of the seven Persian tribes held a
council, and resolved, as a first measure, on obtaining certain
information as to the person of the usurper. With this view, Otanes sent
a confidential eunuch to his daughter Phaedime, who, as they knew, had
come into the possession of the new king with the rest of Cambyses'
harem.
[The names of the seven conspiring chiefs, given by Herodotus agree
for the most part with those in the cuneiform inscriptions. The
names are: Otanes, Intaphernes, Gobryas, Megabyzus, Aspatines,
Hydarnes and Darius Hystaspis. In the inscription Otana:
Vindafrand, Gaubaruva, Ardumams, Vidarna, Bagabukhsa and Darayavus.]
Before the messenger returned, the greater part of the army had
dispersed, the soldiers seizing this favorable opportunity to return to
their homes and families, after so many years of absence. At last,
however, the long-expected messenger came back and brought for answer,
that the new king had only visited Phaedime once, but that during that
visit she had, at great personal risk, discovered that he had lost both
ears. Without this discovery, however, she could assert positively that
though there were a thousand points of similarity between the usurper and
the murdered Bartja, the former was in reality none other than Gaumata,
the brother of Oropastes. Her old friend Boges had resumed his office of
chief of the eunuchs, and had revealed to her the secrets of the Magi.
The high-priest had met the former keeper of the women begging in the
streets of Susa, and had restored him to his old office with the words:
"You have forfeited your life, but I want men of your stamp." In
conclusion. Phaedime entreated her father to use every means in his power
for the overthrow of the Magi, as they treated her with the greatest
contempt and she was the most miserable of women.
Though none of the Achaemenidae hall really for a moment believed; that
Bartja was alive and had seized on the throne, so clear an account of the
real person of the usurper was very welcome to them, and they resolved at
once to march on Nisaea with the remnant of the army and overthrow the
Magi either by craft or force.
They entered the new capital unassailed, and finding that the majority of
the people seemed content with the new government, they also pretended to
acknowledge the king as the son of Cyrus, to whom they were prepared to
do homage. The Magi, however, were not deceived; they shut themselves up
in their palace, assembled an army in the Nisaean plain, promised the
soldiers high pay, and used every effort to strengthen the belief of the
people in Gaumata's disguise. On this point no one could do them more
injury, or, if he chose, be more useful to them, than Prexaspes. He was
much looked up to by the Persians, and his assurance, that he had not
murdered Bartja, would have been sufficient to tame the fast-spreading
report of the real way in which the youth had met his death. Oropastes,
therefore, sent for Prexaspes, who, since the king's dying words, had
been avoided by all the men of his own rank and had led the life of an
outlaw, and promised him an immense sum of money, if he would ascend a
high tower and declare to the people, assembled in the court beneath,
that evil-disposed men had called him Bartja's murderer, whereas he had
seen the new king with his own eyes and had recognized in him the younger
son of his benefactor. Prexaspes made no objection to this proposal, took
a tender leave of his family while the people were being assembled,
uttered a short prayer before the sacred fire-altar and walked proudly to
the palace. On his way thither he met the chiefs of the seven tribes and
seeing that they avoided him, called out to them: "I am worthy of your
contempt, but I will try to deserve your forgiveness."
Seeing Darius look back, he hastened towards him, grasped his hand and
said: "I have loved you like a son; take care of my children when I am no
more, and use your pinions, winged Darius." Then, with the same proud
demeanor he ascended the tower.
Many thousands of the citizens of Nisaea were within reach of his voice,
as he cried aloud: "Ye all know that the kings who have, up to the
present time, loaded you with honor and glory, belonged to the house of
the Achaemenidae. Cyrus governed you like a real father, Cambyses was a
stern master, and Bartja would have guided you like a bridegroom, if I,
with this right hand which I now show you, had not slain him on the
shores of the Red Sea. By Mithras, it was with a bleeding heart that I
committed this wicked deed, but I did it as a faithful servant in
obedience to the king's command. Nevertheless, it has haunted me by day
and night; for four long years I have been pursued and tormented by the
spirits of darkness, who scare sleep from the murderer's couch. I have
now resolved to end this painful, despairing existence by a worthy deed,
and though even this may procure me no mercy at the bridge of Chinvat, in
the mouths of men, at least, I shall have redeemed my honorable name from
the stain with which I defiled it. Know then, that the man who gives
himself out for the son of Cyrus, sent me hither; he promised me rich
rewards if I would deceive you by declaring him to be Bartja, the son of
the Achaemenidae. But I scorn his promises and swear by Mithras and the
Feruers of the kings, the most solemn oaths I am acquainted with, that
the man who is now ruling you is none other than the Magian Gaumata, he
who was deprived of his ears, the brother of the king's vicegerent and
high-priest, Oropastes, whom ye all know. If it be your will to forget
all the glory ye owe to the Achaemenidae, if to this ingratitude ye
choose to add your own degradation, then acknowledge these creatures and
call them your kings; but if ye despise a lie and are ashamed to obey
worthless impostors, drive the Magi from the throne before Mithras has
left the heavens, and proclaim the noblest of the Achaemenidae, Darius,
the exalted son of Hystaspes, who promises to become a second Cyrus, as
your king. And now, in order that ye may believe my words and not suspect
that Darius sent me hither to win you over to his side, I will commit a
deed, which must destroy every doubt and prove that the truth and glory
of the Achaemenidae are clearer to me, than life itself. Blessed be ye if
ye follow my counsels, but curses rest upon you, if ye neglect to
reconquer the throne from the Magi and revenge yourselves upon
them.--Behold, I die a true and honorable man!"
With these words he ascended the highest pinnacle of the tower and cast
himself down head foremost, thus expiating the one crime of his life by
an honorable death.
The dead silence with which the people in the court below had listened to
him, was now broken by shrieks of rage and cries for vengeance. They
burst open the gates of the palace and were pressing in with cries of
"Death to the Magi," when the seven princes of the Persians appeared in
front of the raging crowd to resist their entrance.
At sight of the Achaemenidae the citizens broke into shouts of joy, and
cried more impetuously than ever, "Down with the Magi! Victory to King
Darius!"
The son of Hystaspes was then carried by the crowd to a rising ground,
from which he told the people that the Magi had been slain by the
Achaemenidae, as liars and usurpers. Fresh cries of joy arose in answer
to these words, and when at last the bleeding heads of Oropastes and
Gaumata were shown to the crowd, they rushed with horrid yells through
the streets of the city, murdering every Magian they could lay hold of.
The darkness of night alone was able to stop this awful massacre.
Four days later, Darius, the son of Hystaspes, was chosen as king by the
heads of the Achaemenidae, in consideration of his high birth and noble
character, and received by the Persian nation with enthusiasm. Darius had
killed Gaumata with his own hand, and the highpriest had received his
death-thrust from the hand of Megabyzus, the father of Zopyrus. While
Prexaspes was haranguing the people, the seven conspiring Persian
princes, Otanes, Intaphernes, Gobryas, Megabyzus, Aspatines, Hydarnes and
Darius, (as representative of his aged father Hystaspes), had entered the
palace by a carelessly-guarded gate, sought out the part of the building
occupied by the Magi, and then, assisted by their own knowledge of the
palace, and the fact that most of the guards had been sent to keep watch
over the crowd assembled to hear Prexaspes easily penetrated to the
apartments in which at that moment they were to be found. Here they were
resisted by a few eunuchs, headed by Boges, but these were overpowered
and killed to a man. Darius became furious on seeing Boges, and killed
him at once. Hearing the dying cries of these eunuchs, the Magi rushed to
the spot and prepared to defend themselves. Oropastes snatched a lance
from the fallen Boges, thrust out one of Intaphernes' eyes and wounded
Aspatines in the thigh, but was stabbed by Megabyzus. Gaumata fled into
another apartment and tried to bar the door, but was followed too soon by
Darius and Gobryas; the latter seized, threw him, and kept him down by
the weight of his own body, crying to Darius, who was afraid of making a
false stroke in the half-light, and so wounding his companion instead of
Gaumata, "Strike boldly, even if you should stab us both." Darius obeyed,
and fortunately only hit the Magian.
Thus died Oropastes, the high-priest, and his brother Gaumata, better
known under the name of the "pseudo" or "pretended Smerdis."
A few weeks after Darius' election to the throne, which the people said
had been marvellously influenced by divine miracles and the clever
cunning of a groom, he celebrated his coronation brilliantly at
Pasargadae, and with still more splendor, his marriage with his beloved
Atossa. The trials of her life had ripened her character, and she proved
a faithful, beloved and respected companion to her husband through the
whole of that active and glorious life, which, as Prexaspes had foretold,
made him worthy of the names by which he was afterwards known--Darius the
Great, and a second Cyrus.
[Atossa is constantly mentioned as the favorite wife of Darius, and
be appointed her son Xerxes to be his successor, though he had three
elder sons by the daughter of Gobryas. Herodotus (VII. 3.) speaks
with emphasis of the respect and consideration in which Atossa was
held, and Aeschylus, in his Persians, mentions her in her old age,
as the much-revered and noble matron.]
As a general he was circumspect and brave, and at the same time
understood so thoroughly how to divide his enormous realm, and to
administer its affairs, that he must be classed with the greatest
organizers of all times and countries. That his feeble successors were
able to keep this Asiatic Colossus of different countries together for
two hundred years after his death, was entirely owing to Darius. He was
liberal of his own, but sparing of his subjects' treasures, and made
truly royal gifts without demanding more than was his due. He introduced
a regular system of taxation, in place of the arbitrary exactions
practised under Cyrus and Cambyses, and never allowed himself to be led
astray in the carrying out of what seemed to him right, either by
difficulties or by the ridicule of the Achaemenidae, who nicknamed him
the "shopkeeper," on account of what seemed, to their exclusively
military tastes, his petty financial measures. It is by no means one of
his smallest merits, that he introduced one system of coinage through his
entire empire, and consequently through half the then known world.
Darius respected the religions and customs of other nations. When the
writing of Cyrus, of the existence of which Cambyses had known nothing,
was found in the archives of Ecbatana, he allowed the Jews to carry on
the building of their temple to Jehovah; he also left the Ionian cities
free to govern their own communities independently. Indeed, he would
hardly have sent his army against Greece, if the Athenians had not
insulted him.
In Egypt he had learnt much; among other things, the art of managing the
exchequer of his kingdom wisely; for this reason he held the Egyptians in
high esteem, and granted them many privileges, amongst others a canal to
connect the Nile with the Red Sea, which was greatly to the advantage of
their commerce.
[Traces of this canal can be found as early as the days of Setos I;
his son Rameses II. caused the works to be continued. Under Necho
they were recommenced, and possibly finished by Darius. In the time
of the Ptolemies, at all events, the canal was already completed.
Herod. II. 158. Diod. I. 33. The French, in undertaking to
reconstruct the Suez canal, have had much to encounter from the
unfriendly commercial policy of the English and their influence over
the internal affairs of Egypt, but the unwearied energy and great
talent of Monsr. de Lesseps and the patriotism of the French nation
have at last succeeded in bringing their great work to a successful
close. Whether it will pay is another question. See G. Ebers, Der
Kanal von Suez. Nordische Revue, October 1864. The maritime canal
connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea has also been
completed since 1869. We were among those, who attended the
brilliant inauguration ceremonies, and now willingly recall many of
the doubts expressed in our work 'Durch Gosen zum Sinai'. The
number of ships passing through the canal is constantly increasing.]
During the whole of his reign, Darius endeavored to make amends for the
severity with which Cambyses had treated the Egyptians; even in the later
years of his life he delighted to study the treasures of their wisdom,
and no one was allowed to attack either their religion or customs, as
long as he lived. The old high-priest Neithotep enjoyed the king's favor
to the last, and Darius often made use of his wise old master's
astrological knowledge.
The goodness and clemency of their new ruler was fully acknowledged by
the Egyptians; they called him a deity, as they had called their own
kings, and yet, in the last years of his reign, their desire for
independence led them to forget gratitude and to try to shake off his
gentle yoke, which was only oppressive because it had originally been
forced on them.
[The name of Darius occurs very often on the monuments as Ntariusch.
It is most frequently found in the inscriptions on the temple in the
Oasis el-Khargah, recently photographed by G. Rohlfs. The Egypto-
Persian memorial fragments, bearing inscriptions in the hieroglyphic
and cuneiform characters are very interesting. Darius' name in
Egyptian was generally "Ra, the beloved of Ammon." On a porcelain
vessel in Florence, and in some papyri in Paris and Florence he is
called by the divine titles of honor given to the Pharaohs.]
Their generous ruler and protector did not live to see the end of this
struggle.
[The first rebellion in Egypt, which broke out under Aryandes, the
satrap appointed by Cambyses, was put down by Darius in person. He
visited Egypt, and promised 100 talents (L22,500.) to any one who
would find a new Apis. Polyaen. VII. ii. 7. No second outbreak
took place until 486 B.C. about 4 years before the death of Darius.
Herod. VI i. Xerxes conquered the rebels two years after his
accession, and appointed his brother Achaemenes satrap of Egypt.]
It was reserved for Xerxes, the successor and son of Darius and Atossa,
to bring back the inhabitants of the Nile valley to a forced and
therefore insecure obedience.
Darius left a worthy monument of his greatness in the glorious palace
which he built on Mount Rachmed, the ruins of which are the wonder and
admiration of travellers to this day. Six thousand Egyptian workmen, who
had been sent to Asia by Cambyses, took part in the work and also
assisted in building a tomb for Darius and his successors, the rocky and
almost inaccessible chambers of which have defied the ravages of time,
and are now the resort of innumerable wild pigeons.
He caused the history of his deeds to be cut, (in the cuneiform character
and in the Persian, Median and Assyrian languages), on the polished side
of the rock of Bisitun or Behistan, not far from the spot where he saved
Atossa's life. The Persian part of this inscription can still be
deciphered with certainty, and contains an account of the events related
in the last few chapters, very nearly agreeing with our own and that of
Herodotus. The following sentences occur amongst others: "Thus saith
Darius the King: That which I have done, was done by the grace of
Auramazda in every way. I fought nineteen battles after the rebellion of
the kings. By the mercy of Auramazda I conquered them. I took nine kings
captive. One was a Median, Gaumata by name. He lied and said: 'I am
Bardiya (Bartja), the son of Cyrus.' He caused Persia to rebel."
Some distance lower down, he names the chiefs who helped him to dethrone
the Magi, and in another place the inscription has these words: "Thus
saith the King Darius: That which I have done was done in every way by
the grace of Auramazda. Auramazda helped me, and such other gods as there
be. Auramazda and the other gods gave me help, because I was not swift to
anger, nor a liar, nor a violent ruler, neither I nor my kinsmen. I have
shown favor unto him who helped my brethren, and I have punished severely
him who was my enemy. Thou who shalt be king after me, be not merciful
unto him who is a liar or a rebel, but punish him with a severe
punishment. Thus saith Darius the King: Thou who shalt hereafter behold
this tablet which I have written, or these pictures, destroy them not,
but so long as thou shalt live preserve them, &c."
It now only remains to be told that Zopyrus, the son of Megabyzus,
continued to the last the king's most faithful friend.
A courtier once showed the king a pomegranate, and asked him of what one
gift of fortune he would like so many repetitions, as there were seeds in
that fruit. Without a moment's hesitation Darius answered, "Of my
Zopyrus."--[Plutarch]
The following story will prove that Zopyrus, on his part, well understood
how to return his royal friend's kindness. After the death of Cambyses,
Babylon revolted from the Persian empire. Darius besieged the city nine
months in vain, and was about to raise the siege, when one day Zopyrus
appeared before him bleeding, and deprived of his ears and nose, and
explained that he had mutilated himself thus in order to cheat the
Babylonians, who knew him well, as he had formerly been on intimate terms
with their daughters. He said he wished to tell the haughty citizens,
that Darius had thus disfigured him, and that he had come to them for
help in revenging himself. He thought they would then place troops at his
disposal, with which he intended to impose upon them by making a few
successful sallies at first. His ultimate intention was to get possession
of the keys, and open the Semiramis gate to his friends.
These words, which were spoken in a joking tone, contrasted so sadly with
the mutilated features of his once handsome friend, that Darius wept, and
when at last the almost impregnable fortress was really won by Zopyrus'
stratagem, he exclaimed: "I would give a hundred Babylons, if my Zopyrus
had not thus mutilated himself."
He then appointed his friend lord of the giant city, gave him its entire
revenues, and honored him every year with the rarest presents. In later
days he used to say that, with the exception of Cyrus, who had no equal,
no man had ever performed so generous a deed as Zopyrus.
[Herod. III. 160. Among other presents Zopyrus received a gold
hand-mill weighing six talents, the most honorable and distinguished
gift a Persian monarch could bestow upon a subject. According to
Ktesias, Megabaezus received this gift from Xerxes.]
Few rulers possessed so many self-sacrificing friends as Darius, because
few understood so well how to be grateful.
When Syloson, the brother of the murdered Polykrates, came to Susa and
reminded the king of his former services, Darius received him as a
friend, placed ships and troops at his service, and helped him to recover
Samos.
The Samians made a desperate resistance, and said, when at last they were
obliged to yield: "Through Syloson we have much room in our land."
Rhodopis lived to hear of the murder of Hipparchus, the tyrant of Athens,
by Harmodius and Aristogiton, and died at last in the arms of her best
friends, Theopompus the Milesian and Kallias the Athenian, firm in her
belief of the high calling of her countrymen.
All Naukratis mourned for her, and Kallias sent a messenger to Susa, to
inform the king and Sappho of her death.
A few months later the satrap of Egypt received the following letter from
the hand of the king:
"Inasmuch as we ourselves knew and honored Rhodopis, the Greek, who
has lately died in Naukratis,--inasmuch as her granddaughter, as
widow of the lawful heir to the Persian throne, enjoys to this day
the rank and honors of a queen,--and lastly, inasmuch as I have
lately taken the great-grandchild of the same Rhodopis, Parmys, the
daughter of Bartja and Sappho, to be my third lawful wife, it seems
to me just to grant royal honors to the ancestress of two queens. I
therefore command thee to cause the ashes of Rhodopis, whom we have
always esteemed as the greatest and rarest among women, to be buried
in the greatest and rarest of all monuments, namely, in one of the
Pyramids. The costly urn, which thou wilt receive herewith, is sent
by Sappho to preserve the ashes of the deceased."
Given in the new imperial palace at Persepolis.
DARIUS, son of Hystaspes.
King.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A noble mind can never swim with the stream
Age is inquisitive
Apis the progeny of a virgin cow and a moonbeam
Be not merciful unto him who is a liar or a rebel
Canal to connect the Nile with the Red Sea
I was not swift to anger, nor a liar, nor a violent ruler
Introduced a regular system of taxation-Darius
Numbers are the only certain things
Resistance always brings out a man's best powers
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR AN EGYPTIAN PRINCESS, COMPLETE:
A kind word hath far more power than an angry one
A first impression is often a final one
A noble mind can never swim with the stream
Abuse not those who have outwitted thee
Age is inquisitive
Apis the progeny of a virgin cow and a moonbeam
Assigned sixty years as the limit of a happy life
At my age every year must be accepted as an undeserved gift
Avoid excessive joy as well as complaining grief
Be not merciful unto him who is a liar or a rebel
Between two stools a man falls to the ground
Blessings go as quickly as they come
Call everything that is beyond your comprehension a miracle
Cambyses had been spoiled from his earliest infancy
Canal to connect the Nile with the Red Sea
Cannot understand how trifles can make me so happy
Cast off all care; be mindful only of pleasure
Confess I would rather provoke a lioness than a woman
Corpse to be torn in pieces by dogs and vultures
Creed which views life as a short pilgrimage to the grave
Curiosity is a woman's vice
Death is so long and life so short
Devoid of occupation, envy easily becomes hatred
Did the ancients know anything of love
Does happiness consist then in possession
Easy to understand what we like to hear
Eros mocks all human efforts to resist or confine him
Eyes are much more eloquent than all the tongues in the world
Folly to fret over what cannot be undone
For the errors of the wise the remedy is reparation, not regret
Go down into the grave before us (Our children)
Greeks have not the same reverence for truth
Happiness has nothing to do with our outward circumstances
Hast thou a wounded heart? touch it seldom
He who kills a cat is punished (for murder)
He is the best host, who allows his guests the most freedom
He who is to govern well must begin by learning to obey
Human beings hate the man who shows kindness to their enemies
I cannot . . . Say rather: I will not
I was not swift to anger, nor a liar, nor a violent ruler
In war the fathers live to mourn for their slain sons
In our country it needs more courage to be a coward
In this immense temple man seemed a dwarf in his own eyes
In those days men wept, as well as women
Inn, was to be found about every eighteen miles
Introduced a regular system of taxation-Darius
Know how to honor beauty; and prove it by taking many wives
Lovers delighted in nature then as now
Lovers are the most unteachable of pupils
Misfortune too great for tears
Mosquito-tower with which nearly every house was provided
Multitude who, like the gnats, fly towards every thing brilliant
Natural impulse which moves all old women to favor lovers
Never so clever as when we have to find excuses for our own sins
No man was allowed to ask anything of the gods for himself
Nothing is more dangerous to love, than a comfortable assurance
Nothing is perfectly certain in this world
Numbers are the only certain things
Observe a due proportion in all things
Olympics--The first was fixed 776 B.C.
One must enjoy the time while it is here
Only two remedies for heart-sickness:--hope and patience
Ordered his feet to be washed and his head anointed
Papyrus Ebers
Pilgrimage to the grave, and death as the only true life
Pious axioms to be repeated by the physician, while compounding
Remember, a lie and your death are one and the same
Resistance always brings out a man's best powers
Robes cut as to leave the right breast uncovered
Romantic love, as we know it, a result of Christianity
Rules of life given by one man to another are useless
Scarcely be able to use so large a sum--Then abuse it
Sent for a second interpreter
Sing their libels on women (Greek Philosophers)
So long as we are able to hope and wish
Take heed lest pride degenerate into vainglory
The past belongs to the dead; only fools count upon the future
The priests are my opponents, my masters
The gods cast envious glances at the happiness of mortals
The beautiful past is all he has to live upon
They praise their butchers more than their benefactors
Those are not my real friends who tell me I am beautiful
Time is clever in the healing art
True host puts an end to the banquet
Unwise to try to make a man happy by force
War is a perversion of nature
We live for life, not for death
We've talked a good deal of love with our eyes already
Whatever a man would do himself, he thinks others are capable of
When love has once taken firm hold of a man in riper years
Whether the historical romance is ever justifiable
Wise men hold fast by the ever young present
Ye play with eternity as if it were but a passing moment
Young Greek girls pass their sad childhood in close rooms
Zeus pays no heed to lovers' oaths
THE SISTERS, Complete
By Georg Ebers
Translated from the German by Clara Bell
DEDICATION TO HERR EDUARD von HALLBERGER
Allow me, my dear friend, to dedicate these pages to you. I present them
to you at the close of a period of twenty years during which a warm and
fast friendship has subsisted between us, unbroken by any disagreement.
Four of my works have first seen the light under your care and have
wandered all over the world under the protection of your name. This, my
fifth book, I desire to make especially your own; it was partly written
in your beautiful home at Tutzing, under your hospitable roof, and I
desire to prove to you by some visible token that I know how to value
your affection and friendship and the many happy hours we have passed
together, refreshing and encouraging each other by a full and perfect
interchange of thought and sentiment.
PREFACE.
By a marvellous combination of circumstances a number of fragments of the
Royal Archives of Memphis have been preserved from destruction with the
rest, containing petitions written on papyrus in the Greek language;
these were composed by a recluse of Macedonian birth, living in the
Serapeum, in behalf of two sisters, twins, who served the god as "Pourers
out of the libations."
At a first glance these petitions seem scarcely worthy of serious
consideration; but a closer study of their contents shows us that we
possess in them documents of the greatest value in the history of
manners. They prove that the great Monastic Idea--which under the
influence of Christianity grew to be of such vast moral and historical
significance--first struck root in one of the centres of heathen
religious practices; besides affording us a quite unexpected insight into
the internal life of the temple of Serapis, whose ruined walls have, in
our own day, been recovered from the sand of the desert by the
indefatigable industry of the French Egyptologist Monsieur Mariette.
I have been so fortunate as to visit this spot and to search through
every part of it, and the petitions I speak of have been familiar to me
for years. When, however, quite recently, one of my pupils undertook to
study more particularly one of these documents--preserved in the Royal
Library at Dresden--I myself reinvestigated it also, and this study
impressed on my fancy a vivid picture of the Serapeum under Ptolemy
Philometor; the outlines became clear and firm, and acquired color, and
it is this picture which I have endeavored to set before the reader, so
far as words admit, in the following pages.
I did not indeed select for my hero the recluse, nor for my heroines the
twins who are spoken of in the petitions, but others who might have lived
at a somewhat earlier date under similar conditions; for it is proved by
the papyrus that it was not once only and by accident that twins were
engaged in serving in the temple of Serapis, but that, on the contrary,
pair after pair of sisters succeeded each other in the office of pouring
out libations.
I have not invested Klea and Irene with this function, but have simply
placed them as wards of the Serapeum and growing up within its precincts.
I selected this alternative partly because the existing sources of
knowledge give us very insufficient information as to the duties that
might have been required of the twins, partly for other reasons arising
out of the plan of my narrative.
Klea and Irene are purely imaginary personages, but on the other hand I
have endeavored, by working from tolerably ample sources, to give a
faithful picture of the historical physiognomy of the period in which
they live and move, and portraits of the two hostile brothers Ptolemy
Philometor and Euergetes II., the latter of whom bore the nickname of
Physkon: the Stout. The Eunuch Eulaeus and the Roman Publius Cornelius
Scipio Nasica, are also historical personages.
I chose the latter from among the many young patricians living at the
time, partly on account of the strong aristocratic feeling which he
displayed, particularly in his later life, and partly because his
nickname of Serapion struck me. This name I account for in my own way,
although I am aware that he owed it to his resemblance to a person of
inferior rank.
For the further enlightenment of the reader who is not familiar with this
period of Egyptian history I may suggest that Cleopatra, the wife of
Ptolemy Philometor--whom I propose to introduce to the reader--must not
be confounded with her famous namesake, the beloved of Julius Caesar and
Mark Antony. The name Cleopatra was a very favorite one among the
Lagides, and of the queens who bore it she who has become famous through
Shakespeare (and more lately through Makart) was the seventh, the sister
and wife of Ptolemy XIV. Her tragical death from the bite of a viper or
asp did not occur until 134 years later than the date of my narrative,
which I have placed 164 years B.C.
At that time Egypt had already been for 169 years subject to the rule of
a Greek (Macedonian) dynasty, which owed its name as that of the
Ptolemies or Lagides to its founder Ptolemy Soter, the son of Lagus. This
energetic man, a general under Alexander the Great, when his
sovereign--333 B.C.--had conquered the whole Nile Valley, was appointed
governor of the new Satrapy; after Alexander's death in 323 B.C., Ptolemy
mounted the throne of the Pharaohs, and he and his descendants ruled over
Egypt until after the death of the last and most famous of the
Cleopatras, when it was annexed as a province to the Roman Empire.
This is not the place for giving a history of the successive Ptolemies,
but I may remark that the assimilating faculty exercised by the Greeks
over other nations was potent in Egypt; particularly as the result of the
powerful influence of Alexandria, the capital founded by Alexander, which
developed with wonderful rapidity to be one of the most splendid centres
of Hellenic culture and of Hellenic art and science.
Long before the united rule of the hostile brothers Ptolemy Philometor
and Euergetes--whose violent end will be narrated to the reader of this
story--Greek influence was marked in every event and detail of Egyptian
life, which had remained almost unaffected by the characteristics of
former conquerors--the Hyksos, the Assyrians and the Persians; and, under
the Ptolemies, the most inhospitable and exclusive nation of early
antiquity threw open her gates to foreigners of every race.
Alexandria was a metropolis even in the modern sense; not merely an
emporium of commerce, but a focus where the intellectual and religious
treasures of various countries were concentrated and worked up, and
transmitted to all the nations that desired them. I have resisted the
temptation to lay the scene of my story there, because in Alexandria the
Egyptian element was too much overlaid by the Greek, and the too splendid
and important scenery and decorations might easily have distracted the
reader's attention from the dramatic interest of the persons acting.
At that period of the Hellenic dominion which I have described, the kings
of Egypt were free to command in all that concerned the internal affairs
of their kingdom, but the rapidly-growing power of the Roman Empire
enabled her to check the extension of their dominion, just as she chose.
Philometor himself had heartily promoted the immigration of Israelites
from Palestine, and under him the important Jewish community in
Alexandria acquired an influence almost greater than the Greek; and this
not only in the city but in the kingdom and over their royal protector,
who allowed them to build a temple to Jehovah on the shores of the Nile,
and in his own person assisted at the dogmatic discussions of the
Israelites educated in the Greek schools of the city. Euergetes II., a
highly gifted but vicious and violent man, was, on the contrary, just as
inimical to them; he persecuted them cruelly as soon as his brother's
death left him sole ruler over Egypt. His hand fell heavily even on the
members of the Great Academy--the Museum, as it was called--of
Alexandria, though he himself had been devoted to the grave labors of
science, and he compelled them to seek a new home. The exiled sons of
learning settled in various cities on the shores of the Mediterranean,
and thus contributed not a little to the diffusion of the intellectual
results of the labors in the Museum.
Aristarchus, the greatest of Philometor's learned contemporaries, has
reported for us a conversation in the king's palace at Memphis. The
verses about "the puny child of man," recited by Cleopatra in chapter X.,
are not genuinely antique; but Friedrich Ritschl--the Aristarchus of our
own days, now dead--thought very highly of them and gave them to me, some
years ago, with several variations which had been added by an anonymous
hand, then still in the land of the living. I have added to the first
verse two of these, which, as I learned at the eleventh hour, were
composed by Herr H. L. von Held, who is now dead, and of whom further
particulars may be learned from Varnhagen's 'Biographisclaen Denkmalen'.
Vol. VII. I think the reader will thank me for directing his attention to
these charming lines and to the genius displayed in the moral application
of the main idea. Verses such as these might very well have been written
by Callimachus or some other poet of the circle of the early members of
the Museum of Alexandria.
I was also obliged in this narrative to concentrate, in one limited
canvas as it were, all the features which were at once the conditions and
the characteristics of a great epoch of civilization, and to give them
form and movement by setting the history of some of the men then living
before the reader, with its complications and its denouement. All the
personages of my story grew up in my imagination from a study of the
times in which they lived, but when once I saw them clearly in outline
they soon stood before my mind in a more distinct form, like people in a
dream; I felt the poet's pleasure in creation, and as I painted them
their blood grew warm, their pulses began to beat and their spirit to
take wings and stir, each in its appropriate nature. I gave history her
due, but the historic figures retired into the background beside the
human beings as such; the representatives of an epoch became vehicles for
a Human Ideal, holding good for all time; and thus it is that I venture
to offer this transcript of a period as really a dramatic romance.
Leipzig November 13, 1879.
GEORG EBERS.
THE SISTERS.
CHAPTER I.
On the wide, desert plain of the Necropolis of Memphis stands the
extensive and stately pile of masonry which constitutes the Greek temple
of Serapis; by its side are the smaller sanctuaries of Asclepios, of
Anubis and of Astarte, and a row of long, low houses, built of unburnt
bricks, stretches away behind them as a troop of beggar children might
follow in the train of some splendidly attired king.
The more dazzlingly brilliant the smooth, yellow sandstone walls of the
temple appear in the light of the morning sun, the more squalid and mean
do the dingy houses look as they crouch in the outskirts. When the winds
blow round them and the hot sunbeams fall upon them, the dust rises from
them in clouds as from a dry path swept by the gale. Even the rooms
inside are never plastered, and as the bricks are of dried Nile-mud mixed
with chopped straw, of which the sharp little ends stick out from the
wall in every direction, the surface is as disagreeable to touch as it is
unpleasing to look at. When they were first built on the ground between
the temple itself and the wall which encloses the precincts, and which,
on the eastern side, divides the acacia-grove of Serapis in half, they
were concealed from the votaries visiting the temple by the back wall of
a colonnade on the eastern side of the great forecourt; but a portion of
this colonnade has now fallen down, and through the breach, part of these
modest structures are plainly visible with their doors and windows
opening towards the sanctuary--or, to speak more accurately, certain
rudely constructed openings for looking out of or for entering by. Where
there is a door there is no window, and where a gap in the wall serves
for a window, a door is dispensed with; none of the chambers, however, of
this long row of low one-storied buildings communicate with each other.
A narrow and well-trodden path leads through the breach in the wall; the
pebbles are thickly strewn with brown dust, and the footway leads past
quantities of blocks of stone and portions of columns destined for the
construction of a new building which seems only to have been intermitted
the night before, for mallets and levers lie on and near the various
materials. This path leads directly to the little brick houses, and ends
at a small closed wooden door so roughly joined and so ill-hung that
between it and the threshold, which is only raised a few inches above the
ground, a fine gray cat contrives to squeeze herself through by putting
down her head and rubbing through the dust. As soon as she finds herself
once more erect on her four legs she proceeds to clean and smooth her
ruffled fur, putting up her back, and glancing with gleaming eyes at the
house she has just left, behind which at this moment the sun is rising;
blinded by its bright rays she turns away and goes on with cautious and
silent tread into the court of the temple.
The hovel out of which pussy has crept is small and barely furnished; it
would be perfectly dark too, but that the holes in the roof and the rift
in the door admit light into this most squalid room. There is nothing
standing against its rough gray walls but a wooden chest, near this a few
earthen bowls stand on the ground with a wooden cup and a gracefully
wrought jug of pure and shining gold, which looks strangely out of place
among such humble accessories. Quite in the background lie two mats of
woven bast, each covered with a sheepskin. These are the beds of the two
girls who inhabit the room, one of whom is now sitting on a low stool
made of palm-branches, and she yawns as she begins to arrange her long
and shining brown hair. She is not particularly skilful and even less
patient over this not very easy task, and presently, when a fresh tangle
checks the horn comb with which she is dressing it, she tosses the comb
on to the couch. She has not pulled it through her hair with any haste
nor with much force, but she shuts her eyes so tightly and sets her white
teeth so firmly in her red dewy lip that it might be supposed that she
had hurt herself very much.
A shuffling step is now audible outside the door; she opens wide her
tawny-hazel eyes, that have a look of gazing on the world in surprise, a
smile parts her lips and her whole aspect is as completely changed as
that of a butterfly which escapes from the shade into the sunshine where
the bright beams are reflected in the metallic lustre of its wings.
A hasty hand knocks at the ill-hung door, so roughly that it trembles on
its hinges, and the instant after a wooden trencher is shoved in through
the wide chink by which the cat made her escape; on it are a thin round
cake of bread and a shallow earthen saucer containing a little olive-oil;
there is no more than might perhaps be contained in half an ordinary
egg-shell, but it looks fresh and sweet, and shines in clear, golden
purity. The girl goes to the door, pulls in the platter, and, as she
measures the allowance with a glance, exclaims half in lament and half in
reproach:
"So little! and is that for both of us?"
As she speaks her expressive features have changed again and her flashing
eyes are directed towards the door with a glance of as much dismay as
though the sun and stars had been suddenly extinguished; and yet her only
grief is the smallness of the loaf, which certainly is hardly large
enough to stay the hunger of one young creature--and two must share it;
what is a mere nothing in one man's life, to another may be of great
consequence and of terrible significance.
The reproachful complaint is heard by the messenger outside the door, for
the old woman who shoved in the trencher over the threshold answers
quickly but not crossly.
"Nothing more to-day, Irene."
"It is disgraceful," cries the girl, her eyes filling with tears, "every
day the loaf grows smaller, and if we were sparrows we should not have
enough to satisfy us. You know what is due to us and I will never cease
to complain and petition. Serapion shall draw up a fresh address for us,
and when the king knows how shamefully we are treated--"
"Aye! when he knows," interrupted the old woman. But the cry of the poor
is tossed about by many winds before it reaches the king's ear. I might
find a shorter way than that for you and your sister if fasting comes so
much amiss to you. Girls with faces like hers and yours, my little Irene,
need never come to want."
"And pray what is my face like?" asked the girl, and her pretty features
once more seemed to catch a gleam of sunshine.
"Why, so handsome that you may always venture to show it beside your
sister's; and yesterday, in the procession, the great Roman sitting by
the queen looked as often at her as at Cleopatra herself. If you had been
there too he would not have had a glance for the queen, for you are a
pretty thing, as I can tell you. And there are many girls would sooner
hear those words then have a whole loaf--besides you have a mirror I
suppose, look in that next time you are hungry."
The old woman's shuffling steps retreated again and the girl snatched up
the golden jar, opened the door a little way to let in the daylight and
looked at herself in the bright surface; but the curve of the costly vase
showed her features all distorted, and she gaily breathed on the hideous
travestie that met her eyes, so that it was all blurred out by the
moisture. Then she smilingly put down the jar, and opening the chest took
from it a small metal mirror into which she looked again and yet again,
arranging her shining hair first in one way and then in another; and she
only laid it down when she remembered a certain bunch of violets which
had attracted her attention when she first woke, and which must have been
placed in their saucer of water by her sister some time the day before.
Without pausing to consider she took up the softly scented blossoms,
dried their green stems on her dress, took up the mirror again and stuck
the flowers in her hair.
How bright her eyes were now, and how contentedly she put out her hand
for the loaf. And how fair were the visions that rose before her young
fancy as she broke off one piece after another and hastily eat them after
slightly moistening them with the fresh oil. Once, at the festival of the
New Year, she had had a glimpse into the king's tent, and there she had
seen men and women feasting as they reclined on purple cushions. Now she
dreamed of tables covered with costly vessels, was served in fancy by
boys crowned with flowers, heard the music of flutes and harps and--for
she was no more than a child and had such a vigorous young
appetite--pictured herself as selecting the daintiest and sweetest
morsels out of dishes of solid gold and eating till she was satisfied,
aye so perfectly satisfied that the very last mouthful of bread and the
very last drop of oil had disappeared.
But so soon as her hand found nothing more on the empty trencher the
bright illusion vanished, and she looked with dismay into the empty
oil-cup and at the place where just now the bread had been.
"Ah!" she sighed from the bottom of her heart; then she turned the
platter over as though it might be possible to find some more bread and
oil on the other side of it, but finally shaking her head she sat looking
thoughtfully into her lap; only for a few minutes however, for the door
opened and the slim form of her sister Klea appeared, the sister whose
meagre rations she had dreamily eaten up, and Klea had been sitting up
half the night sewing for her, and then had gone out before sunrise to
fetch water from the Well of the Sun for the morning sacrifice at the
altar of Serapis.
Klea greeted her sister with a loving glance but without speaking; she
seemed too exhausted for words and she wiped the drops from her forehead
with the linen veil that covered the back of her head as she seated
herself on the lid of the chest. Irene immediately glanced at the empty
trencher, considering whether she had best confess her guilt to the
wearied girl and beg for forgiveness, or divert the scolding she had
deserved by some jest, as she had often succeeded in doing before. This
seemed the easier course and she adopted it at once; she went up to her
sister quickly, but not quite unconcernedly, and said with mock gravity:
"Look here, Klea, don't you notice anything in me? I must look like a
crocodile that has eaten a whole hippopotamus, or one of the sacred
snakes after it has swallowed a rabbit. Only think when I had eaten my
own bread I found yours between my teeth--quite unexpectedly--but now--"
Klea, thus addressed, glanced at the empty platter and interrupted her
sister with a low-toned exclamation. "Oh! I was so hungry."
The words expressed no reproof, only utter exhaustion, and as the young
criminal looked at her sister and saw her sitting there, tired and worn
out but submitting to the injury that had been done her without a word of
complaint, her heart, easily touched, was filled with compunction and
regret. She burst into tears and threw herself on the ground before her,
clasping her knees and crying, in a voice broken with sobs:
"Oh Klea! poor, dear Klea, what have I done! but indeed I did not mean
any harm. I don't know how it happened. Whatever I feel prompted to do I
do, I can't help doing it, and it is not till it is done that I begin to
know whether it was right or wrong. You sat up and worried yourself for
me, and this is how I repay you--I am a bad girl! But you shall not go
hungry--no, you shall not."
"Never mind; never mind," said the elder, and she stroked her sister's
brown hair with a loving hand.
But as she did so she came upon the violets fastened among the shining
tresses. Her lips quivered and her weary expression changed as she
touched the flowers and glanced at the empty saucer in which she had
carefully placed them the clay before. Irene at once perceived the change
in her sister's face, and thinking only that she was surprised at her
pretty adornment, she said gaily: "Do you think the flowers becoming to
me?"
Klea's hand was already extended to take the violets out of the brown
plaits, for her sister was still kneeling before her, but at this
question her arm dropped, and she said more positively and distinctly
than she had yet spoken and in a voice, whose sonorous but musical tones
were almost masculine and certainly remarkable in a girl:
"The bunch of flowers belongs to me; but keep it till it is faded, by
mid-day, and then return it to me."
"It belongs to you?" repeated the younger girl, raising her eyes in
surprise to her sister, for to this hour what had been Klea's had been
hers also. "But I always used to take the flowers you brought home; what
is there special in these?"
"They are only violets like any other violets," replied Klea coloring
deeply. "But the queen has worn them."
"The queen!" cried her sister springing to her feet and clasping her
hands in astonishment. "She gave you the flowers? And you never told me
till now? To be sure when you came home from the procession yesterday you
only asked me how my foot was and whether my clothes were whole and then
not another mortal word did you utter. Did Cleopatra herself give you
this bunch?"
"How should she?" retorted Klea. "One of her escort threw them to me; but
drop the subject pray! Give me the water, please, my mouth is parched and
I can hardly speak for thirst."
The bright color dyed her cheeks again as she spoke, but Irene did not
observe it, for--delighted to make up for her evil doings by performing
some little service--she ran to fetch the water-jar; while Klea filled
and emptied her wooden bowl she said, gracefully lifting a small foot, to
show to her sister:
"Look, the cut is almost healed and I can wear my sandal again. Now I
shall tie it on and go and ask Serapion for some bread for you and
perhaps he will give us a few dates. Please loosen the straps for me a
little, here, round the ankle, my skin is so thin and tender that a
little thing hurts me which you would hardly feel. At mid-day I will go
with you and help fill the jars for the altar, and later in the day I can
accompany you in the procession which was postponed from yesterday. If
only the queen and the great foreigner should come again to look on at
it! That would be splendid! Now, I am going, and before you have drunk
the last bowl of water you shall have some bread, for I will coax the old
man so prettily that he can't say 'no.'"
Irene opened the door, and as the broad sunlight fell in it lighted up
tints of gold in her chestnut hair, and her sister looking after her
could almost fancy that the sunbeams had got entangled with the waving
glory round her head. The bunch of violets was the last thing she took
note of as Irene went out into the open air; then she was alone and she
shook her head gently as she said to herself: "I give up everything to
her and what I have left she takes from me. Three times have I met the
Roman, yesterday he gave me the violets, and I did want to keep those for
myself--and now--" As she spoke she clasped the bowl she still held in
her hand closely to her and her lips trembled pitifully, but only for an
instant; she drew herself up and said firmly: "But it is all as it should
be."
Then she was silent; she set down the water-jar on the chest by her side,
passed the back of her hand across her forehead as if her head were
aching, then, as she sat gazing down dreamily into her lap, her weary
head presently fell on her shoulder and she was asleep.
CHAPTER II.
The low brick building of which the sisters' room formed a part, was
called the Pastophorium, and it was occupied also by other persons
attached to the service of the temple, and by numbers of pilgrims. These
assembled here from all parts of Egypt, and were glad to pass a night
under the protection of the sanctuary.
Irene, when she quitted her sister, went past many doors--which had been
thrown open after sunrise--hastily returning the greetings of many
strange as well as familiar faces, for all glanced after her kindly as
though to see her thus early were an omen of happy augury, and she soon
reached an outbuilding adjoining the northern end of the Pastophorium;
here there was no door, but at the level of about a man's height from the
ground there were six unclosed windows opening on the road. From the
first of these the pale and much wrinkled face of an old man looked down
on the girl as she approached. She shouted up to him in cheerful accents
the greeting familiar to the Hellenes "Rejoice!" But he, without moving
his lips, gravely and significantly signed to her with his lean hand and
with a glance from his small, fixed and expressionless eyes that she
should wait, and then handed out to her a wooden trencher on which lay a
few dates and half a cake of bread.
"For the altar of the god?" asked the girl. The old man nodded assent,
and Irene went on with her small load, with the assurance of a person who
knows exactly what is required of her; but after going a few steps and
before she had reached the last of the six windows she paused, for she
plainly heard voices and steps, and presently, at the end of the
Pastophorium towards which she was proceeding and which opened into a
small grove of acacias dedicated to Serapis--which was of much greater
extent outside the enclosing wall--appeared a little group of men whose
appearance attracted her attention; but she was afraid to go on towards
the strangers, so, leaning close up to the wall of the houses, she
awaited their departure, listening the while to what they were saying.
In front of these early visitors to the temple walked a man with a long
staff in his right hand speaking to the two gentlemen who followed, with
the air of a professional guide, who is accustomed to talk as if he were
reading to his audience out of an invisible book, and whom the hearers
are unwilling to interrupt with questions, because they know that his
knowledge scarcely extends beyond exactly what he says. Of his two
remarkable-looking hearers one was wrapped in a long and splendid robe
and wore a rich display of gold chains and rings, while the other wore
nothing over his short chiton but a Roman toga thrown over his left
shoulder.
His richly attired companion was an old man with a full and beardless
face and thin grizzled hair. Irene gazed at him with admiration and
astonishment, but when she had feasted her eyes on the stuffs and
ornaments he wore, she fixed them with much greater interest and
attention on the tall and youthful figure at his side.
"Like Hui, the cook's fat poodle, beside a young lion," thought she to
herself, as she noted the bustling step of the one and the independent
and elastic gait of the other. She felt irresistibly tempted to mimic the
older man, but this audacious impulse was soon quelled for scarcely had
the guide explained to the Roman that it was here that those pious
recluses had their cells who served the god in voluntary captivity, as
being consecrated to Serapis, and that they received their food through
those windows--here he pointed upwards with his staff when suddenly a
shutter, which the cicerone of this ill-matched pair had touched with his
stick, flew open with as much force and haste as if a violent gust of
wind had caught it, and flung it back against the wall.--And no less
suddenly a man's head-of ferocious aspect and surrounded by a shock of
gray hair like a lion's mane--looked out of the window and shouted to him
who had knocked, in a deep and somewhat overloud voice.
"If my shutter had been your back, you impudent rascal, your stick would
have hit the right thing. Or if I had a cudgel between my teeth instead
of a tongue, I would exercise it on you till it was as tired as that of a
preacher who has threshed his empty straw to his congregation for three
mortal hours. Scarcely is the sun risen when we are plagued by the
parasitical and inquisitive mob. Why! they will rouse us at midnight
next, and throw stones at our rotten old shutters. The effects of my last
greeting lasted you for three weeks--to-day's I hope may act a little
longer. You, gentlemen there, listen to me. Just as the raven follows an
army to batten on the dead, so that fellow there stalks on in front of
strangers in order to empty their pockets--and you, who call yourself an
interpreter, and in learning Greek have forgotten the little Egyptian you
ever knew, mark this: When you have to guide strangers take them to see
the Sphinx, or to consult the Apis in the temple of Ptah, or lead them to
the king's beast-garden at Alexandria, or the taverns at Hanopus, but
don't bring them here, for we are neither pheasants, nor flute-playing
women, nor miraculous beasts, who take a pleasure in being stared at.
You, gentlemen, ought to choose a better guide than this chatter-mag that
keeps up its perpetual rattle when once you set it going. As to
yourselves I will tell you one thing: Inquisitive eyes are intrusive
company, and every prudent house holder guards himself against them by
keeping his door shut."
Irene shrank back and flattened herself against the pilaster which
concealed her, for the shutter closed again with a slam, the recluse
pulling it to with a rope attached to its outer edge, and he was hidden
from the gaze of the strangers; but only for an instant, for the rusty
hinges on which the shutter was hanging were not strong enough to bear
such violent treatment, and slowly giving way it was about to fall. The
blustering hermit stretched out an arm to support it and save it; but it
was heavy, and his efforts would not have succeeded had not the young man
in Roman dress given his assistance and lifted up the shutter with his
hand and shoulder, without any effort, as if it were made of willow laths
instead of strong planks.
"A little higher still," shouted the recluse to his assistant. "Let us
set the thing on its edge! so, push away, a little more. There, I have
propped up the wretched thing and there it may lie. If the bats pay me a
visit to-night I will think of you and give them your best wishes."
"You may save yourself that trouble," replied the young man with cool
dignity. "I will send you a carpenter who shall refix the shutter, and we
offer you our apologies for having been the occasion of the mischief that
has happened."
The old man did not interrupt the speaker, but, when he had stared at him
from head to foot, he said: "You are strong and you speak fairly, and I
might like you well enough if you were in other company. I don't want
your carpenter; only send me down a hammer, a wedge, and a few strong
nails. Now, you can do nothing more for me, so pack off"
"We are going at once," said the more handsomely dressed visitor in a
thin and effeminate voice. "What can a man do when the boys pelt him with
dirt from a safe hiding-place, but take himself off"
"Be off, be off," said the person thus described, with a laugh. "As far
off as Samothrace if you like, fat Eulaeus; you can scarcely have
forgotten the way there since you advised the king to escape thither with
all his treasure. But if you cannot trust yourself to find it alone, I
recommend you your interpreter and guide there to show you the road."
The Eunuch Eulaeus, the favorite councillor of King Ptolemy--called
Philometor (the lover of his mother)--turned pale at these words, cast a
sinister glance at the old man and beckoned to the young Roman; he
however was not inclined to follow, for the scolding old oddity had taken
his fancy--perhaps because he was conscious that the old man, who
generally showed no reserve in his dislikes, had a liking for him.
Besides, he found nothing to object to in his opinion of his companions,
so he turned to Eulaeus and said courteously:
"Accept my best thanks for your company so far, and do not let me detain
you any longer from your more important occupations on my account."
Eulaeus bowed and replied, "I know what my duty is. The king entrusted me
with your safe conduct; permit me therefore to wait for you under the
acacias yonder."
When Eulaeus and the guide had reached the green grove, Irene hoped to
find an opportunity to prefer her petition, but the Roman had stopped in
front of the old man's cell, and had begun a conversation with him which
she could not venture to interrupt. She set down the platter with the
bread and dates that had been entrusted to her on a projecting stone by
her side with a little sigh, crossed her arms and feet as she leaned
against the wall, and pricked up her ears to hear their talk.
"I am not a Greek," said the youth, "and you are quite mistaken in
thinking that I came to Egypt and to see you out of mere curiosity."
"But those who come only to pray in the temple," interrupted the other,
"do not--as it seems to me--choose an Eulaeus for a companion, or any
such couple as those now waiting for you under the acacias, and invoking
anything rather than blessings on your head; at any rate, for my own
part, even if I were a thief I would not go stealing in their company.
What then brought you to Serapis?"
"It is my turn now to accuse you of curiosity!"
"By all means," cried the old man, "I am an honest dealer and quite
willing to take back the coin I am ready to pay away. Have you come to
have a dream interpreted, or to sleep in the temple yonder and have a
face revealed to you?"
"Do I look so sleepy," said the Roman, "as to want to go to bed again
now, only an hour after sunrise?"
"It may be," said the recluse, "that you have not yet fairly come to the
end of yesterday, and that at the fag-end of some revelry it occurred to
you that you might visit us and sleep away your headache at Serapis."
"A good deal of what goes on outside these walls seems to come to your
ears," retorted the Roman, "and if I were to meet you in the street I
should take you for a ship's captain or a master-builder who had to
manage a number of unruly workmen. According to what I heard of you and
those like you in Athens and elsewhere, I expected to find you something
quite different."
"What did you expect?" said Serapion laughing. "I ask you notwithstanding
the risk of being again considered curious."
"And I am very willing to answer," retorted the other, "but if I were to
tell you the whole truth I should run into imminent danger of being sent
off as ignominiously as my unfortunate guide there."
"Speak on," said the old man, "I keep different garments for different
men, and the worst are not for those who treat me to that rare dish--a
little truth. But before you serve me up so bitter a meal tell me, what
is your name?"
"Shall I call the guide?" said the Roman with an ironical laugh. "He can
describe me completely, and give you the whole history of my family. But,
joking apart, my name is Publius."
"The name of at least one out of every three of your countrymen."
"I am of the Cornelia gens and of the family of the Scipios," continued
the youth in a low voice, as though he would rather avoid boasting of his
illustrious name.
"Indeed, a noble gentleman, a very grand gentleman!" said the recluse,
bowing deeply out of his window. "But I knew that beforehand, for at your
age and with such slender ankles to his long legs only a nobleman could
walk as you walk. Then Publius Cornelius--"
"Nay, call me Scipio, or rather by my first name only, Publius," the
youth begged him. "You are called Serapion, and I will tell you what you
wish to know. When I was told that in this temple there were people who
had themselves locked into their little chambers never to quit them,
taking thought about their dreams and leading a meditative life, I
thought they must be simpletons or fools or both at once."
"Just so, just so," interrupted Serapion. "But there is a fourth
alternative you did not think of. Suppose now among these men there
should be some shut up against their will, and what if I were one of
those prisoners? I have asked you a great many questions and you have not
hesitated to answer, and you may know how I got into this miserable cage
and why I stay in it. I am the son of a good family, for my father was
overseer of the granaries of this temple and was of Macedonian origin,
but my mother was an Egyptian. I was born in an evil hour, on the
twenty-seventh day of the month of Paophi, a day which it is said in the
sacred books that it is an evil day and that the child that is born in it
must be kept shut up or else it will die of a snake-bite. In consequence
of this luckless prediction many of those born on the same day as myself
were, like me, shut up at an early age in this cage. My father would very
willingly have left me at liberty, but my uncle, a caster of horoscopes
in the temple of Ptah, who was all in all in my mother's estimation, and
his friends with him, found many other evil signs about my body, read
misfortune for me in the stars, declared that the Hathors had destined me
to nothing but evil, and set upon her so persistently that at last I was
destined to the cloister--we lived here at Memphis. I owe this misery to
my dear mother and it was out of pure affection that she brought it upon
me. You look enquiringly at me--aye, boy! life will teach you too the
lesson that the worst hate that can be turned against you often entails
less harm upon you than blind tenderness which knows no reason. I learned
to read and write, and all that is usually taught to the priests' sons,
but never to accommodate myself to my lot, and I never shall.--Well, when
my beard grew I succeeded in escaping and I lived for a time in the
world. I have been even to Rome, to Carthage, and in Syria; but at last I
longed to drink Nile-water once more and I returned to Egypt. Why?
Because, fool that I was, I fancied that bread and water with captivity
tasted better in my own country than cakes and wine with freedom in the
land of the stranger.
"In my father's house I found only my mother still living, for my father
had died of grief. Before my flight she had been a tall, fine woman, when
I came home I found her faded and dying. Anxiety for me, a miserable
wretch, had consumed her, said the physician--that was the hardest thing
to bear. When at last the poor, good little woman, who could so fondly
persuade me--a wild scamp--implored me on her death-bed to return to my
retreat, I yielded, and swore to her that I would stay in my prison
patiently to the end, for I am as water is in northern countries, a child
may turn me with its little hand or else I am as hard and as cold as
crystal. My old mother died soon after I had taken this oath. I kept my
word as you see--and you have seen too how I endure my fate."
"Patiently enough," replied Publius, "I should writhe in my chains far
more rebelliously than you, and I fancy it must do you good to rage and
storm sometimes as you did just now."
"As much good as sweet wine from Chios!" exclaimed the anchorite,
smacking his lips as if he tasted the noble juice of the grape, and
stretching his matted head as far as possible out of the window. Thus it
happened that he saw Irene, and called out to her in a cheery voice:
"What are you doing there, child? You are standing as if you were waiting
to say good-morning to good fortune."
The girl hastily took up the trencher, smoothed down her hair with her
other hand, and as she approached the men, coloring slightly, Publius
feasted his eyes on her in surprise and admiration.
But Serapion's words had been heard by another person, who now emerged
from the acacia-grove and joined the young Roman, exclaiming before he
came up with them:
"Waiting for good fortune! does the old man say? And you can hear it
said, Publius, and not reply that she herself must bring good fortune
wherever she appears."
The speaker was a young Greek, dressed with extreme care, and he now
stuck the pomegranate-blossom he carried in his hand behind his ear, so
as to shake hands with his friend Publius; then he turned his fair,
saucy, almost girlish face with its finely-cut features up to the
recluse, wishing to attract his attention to himself by his next speech.
"With Plato's greeting 'to deal fairly and honestly' do I approach you!"
he cried; and then he went on more quietly: "But indeed you can hardly
need such a warning, for you belong to those who know how to conquer
true--that is the inner--freedom; for who can be freer than he who needs
nothing? And as none can be nobler than the freest of the free, accept
the tribute of my respect, and scorn not the greeting of Lysias of
Corinth, who, like Alexander, would fain exchange lots with you, the
Diogenes of Egypt, if it were vouchsafed to him always to see out the
window of your mansion--otherwise not very desirable--the charming form
of this damsel--"
"That is enough, young man," said Serapion, interrupting the Greek's flow
of words. "This young girl belongs to the temple, and any one who is
tempted to speak to her as if she were a flute-player will have to deal
with me, her protector. Yes, with me; and your friend here will bear me
witness that it may not be altogether to your advantage to have a quarrel
with such as I. Now, step back, young gentlemen, and let the girl tell me
what she needs."
When Irene stood face to face with the anchorite, and had told him
quickly and in a low voice what she had done, and that her sister Klea
was even now waiting for her return, Serapion laughed aloud, and then
said in a low tone, but gaily, as a father teases his daughter:
"She has eaten enough for two, and here she stands, on her tiptoes,
reaching up to my window, as if it were not an over-fed girl that stood
in her garments, but some airy sprite. We may laugh, but Klea, poor
thing, she must be hungry?"
Irene made no reply, but she stood taller on tiptoe than ever, put her
face up to Serapion, nodding her pretty head at him again and again, and
as she looked roguishly and yet imploringly into his eyes Serapion went
on:
"And so I am to give my breakfast to Klea, that is what you want; but
unfortunately that breakfast is a thing of the past and beyond recall;
nothing is left of it but the date-stones. But there, on the trencher in
your hand, is a nice little meal."
"That is the offering to Serapis sent by old Phibis," answered the girl.
"Hm, hm--oh! of course!" muttered the old man. "So long as it is for a
god--surely he might do without it better than a poor famishing girl."
Then he went on, gravely and emphatically, as a teacher who has made an
incautious speech before his pupils endeavors to rectify it by another of
more solemn import.
"Certainly, things given into our charge should never be touched;
besides, the gods first and man afterwards. Now if only I knew what to
do. But, by the soul of my father! Serapis himself sends us what we need.
Step close up to me, noble Scipio--or Publius, if I may so call you--and
look out towards the acacias. Do you see my favorite, your cicerone, and
the bread and roast fowls that your slave has brought him in that
leathern wallet? And now he is setting a wine-jar on the carpet he has
spread at the big feet of Eulaeus--they will be calling you to share the
meal in a minute, but I know of a pretty child who is very hungry--for a
little white cat stole away her breakfast this morning. Bring me half a
loaf and the wing of a fowl, and a few pomegranates if you like, or one
of the peaches Eulaeus is so judiciously fingering. Nay--you may bring
two of them, I have a use for both."
"Serapion!" exclaimed Irene in mild reproof and looking down at the
ground; but the Greek answered with prompt zeal, "More, much more than
that I can bring you. I hasten--"
"Stay here," interrupted Publius with decision, holding him back by the
shoulder. "Serapion's request was addressed to me, and I prefer to do my
friend's pleasure in my own person."
"Go then," cried the Greek after Publius as he hurried away. "You will
not allow me even thanks from the sweetest lips in Memphis. Only look,
Serapion, what a hurry he is in. And now poor Eulaeus has to get up; a
hippopotamus might learn from him how to do so with due awkwardness.
Well! I call that making short work of it--a Roman never asks before he
takes; he has got all he wants and Eulaeus looks after him like a cow
whose calf has been stolen from her; to be sure I myself would rather eat
peaches than see them carried away! Oh if only the people in the Forum
could see him now! Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, own grandson to the
great Africanus, serving like a slave at a feast with a dish in each
hand! Well Publius, what has Rome the all conquering brought home this
time in token of victory?"
"Sweet peaches and a roast pheasant," said Cornelius laughing, and he
handed two dishes into the anchorite's window; "there is enough left
still for the old man."
"Thanks, many thanks!" cried Serapion, beckoning to Irene, and he gave
her a golden-yellow cake of wheaten bread, half of the roast bird,
already divided by Eulaeus, and two peaches, and whispered to her: "Klea
may come for the rest herself when these men are gone. Now thank this
kind gentleman and go."
For an instant the girl stood transfixed, her face crimson with confusion
and her glistening white teeth set in her nether lip, speechless, face to
face with the young Roman and avoiding the earnest gaze of his black
eyes. Then she collected herself and said:
"You are very kind. I cannot make any pretty speeches, but I thank you
most kindly."
"And your very kind thanks," replied Publius, "add to the delights of
this delightful morning. I should very much like to possess one of the
violets out of your hair in remembrance of this day--and of you."
"Take them all," exclaimed Irene, hastily taking the bunch from her hair
and holding them out to the Roman; but before he could take them she drew
back her hand and said with an air of importance:
"The queen has had them in her hand. My sister Klea got them yesterday in
the procession."
Scipio's face grew grave at these words, and he asked with commanding
brevity and sharpness:
"Has your sister black hair and is she taller than you are, and did she
wear a golden fillet in the procession? Did she give you these flowers?
Yes--do you say? Well then, she had the bunch from me, but although she
accepted them she seems to have taken very little pleasure in them, for
what we value we do not give away--so there they may go, far enough!"
With these words he flung the flowers over the house and then he went on:
"But you, child, you shall be held guiltless of their loss. Give me your
pomegranate-flower, Lysias!"
"Certainly not," replied the Greek. "You chose to do pleasure to your
friend Serapion in your own person when you kept me from going to fetch
the peaches, and now I desire to offer this flower to the fair Irene with
my own hand."
"Take this flower," said Publius, turning his back abruptly on the girl,
while Lysias laid the blossom on the trencher in the maiden's hand; she
felt the rough manners of the young Roman as if she had been touched by a
hard hand; she bowed silently and timidly and then quickly ran home.
Publius looked thoughtfully after her till Lysias called out to him:
"What has come over me? Has saucy Eros perchance wandered by mistake into
the temple of gloomy Serapis this morning?"
"That would not be wise," interrupted the recluse, "for Cerberus, who
lies at the foot of our God, would soon pluck the fluttering wings of the
airy youngster," and as he spoke he looked significantly at the Greek.
"Aye! if he let himself be caught by the three-headed monster," laughed
Lysias. "But come away now, Publius; Eulaeus has waited long enough."
"You go to him then," answered the Roman, "I will follow soon; but first
I have a word to say to Serapion."
Since Irene's disappearance, the old man had turned his attention to the
acacia-grove where Eulaeus was still feasting. When the Roman addressed
him he said, shaking his great head with dissatisfaction:
"Your eyes of course are no worse than mine. Only look at that man
munching and moving his jaws and smacking his lips. By Serapis! you can
tell the nature of a man by watching him eat. You know I sit in my cage
unwillingly enough, but I am thankful for one thing about it, and that is
that it keeps me far from all that such a creature as Eulaeus calls
enjoyment--for such enjoyment, I tell you, degrades a man."
"Then you are more of a philosopher than you wish to seem," replied
Publius.
"I wish to seem nothing," answered the anchorite.
"For it is all the same to me what others think of me. But if a man who
has nothing to do and whose quiet is rarely disturbed, and who thinks his
own thoughts about many things is a philosopher, you may call me one if
you like. If at any time you should need advice you may come here again,
for I like you, and you might be able to do me an important service."
"Only speak," interrupted the Roman, "I should be glad from my heart to
be of any use to you."
"Not now," said Serapion softly. "But come again when you have
time--without your companions there, of course--at any rate without
Eulaeus, who of all the scoundrels I ever came across is the very worst.
It may be as well to tell you at once that what I might require of you
would concern not myself but the weal or woe of the water-bearers, the
two maidens you have seen and who much need protection."
"I came here for my parents' sake and for Klea's, and not on your
account," said Publius frankly. "There is something in her mien and in
her eyes which perhaps may repel others but which attracts me. How came
so admirable a creature in your temple?"
"When you come again," replied the recluse, "I will tell you the history
of the sisters and what they owe to Eulaeus. Now go, and understand me
when I say the girls are well guarded. This observation is for the
benefit of the Greek who is but a heedless fellow; but you, when you know
who the girls are, will help me to protect them."
"That I would do as it is, with real pleasure," replied Publius; he took
leave of the recluse and called out to Eulaeus.
"What a delightful morning it has been!"
"It would have been pleasanter for me," replied Eulaeus, "if you had not
deprived me of your company for such a long time."
"That is to say," answered the Roman, "that I have stayed away longer
than I ought."
"You behave after the fashion of your race," said the other bowing low.
"They have kept even kings waiting in their ante-chambers."
"But you do not wear a crown," said Publius evasively. "And if any one
should know how to wait it is an old courtier, who--"
"When it is at the command of his sovereign," interrupted Eulaeus, the
old courtier may submit, even when youngsters choose to treat him with
contempt."
"That hits us both," said Publius, turning to Lysias. "Now you may answer
him, I have heard and said enough."
CHAPTER III.
Irene's foot was not more susceptible to the chafing of a strap than her
spirit to a rough or an unkind word; the Roman's words and manner had
hurt her feelings.
She went towards home with a drooping head and almost crying, but before
she had reached it her eyes fell on the peaches and the roast bird she
was carrying. Her thoughts flew to her sister and how much the famishing
girl would relish so savory a meal; she smiled again, her eyes shone with
pleasure, and she went on her way with a quickened step. It never once
occurred to her that Klea would ask for the violets, or that the young
Roman could be anything more to her sister than any other stranger.
She had never had any other companion than Klea, and after work, when
other girls commonly discussed their longings and their agitations and
the pleasures and the torments of love, these two used to get home so
utterly wearied that they wanted nothing but peace and sleep. If they had
sometimes an hour for idle chat Klea ever and again would tell some story
of their old home, and Irene, who even within the solemn walls of the
temple of Serapis sought and found many innocent pleasures, would listen
to her willingly, and interrupt her with questions and with anecdotes of
small events or details which she fancied she remembered of her early
childhood, but which in fact she had first learnt from her sister, though
the force of a lively imagination had made them seem a part and parcel of
her own experience.
Klea had not observed Irene's long absence since, as we know, shortly
after her sister had set out, overpowered by hunger and fatigue she had
fallen asleep. Before her nodding head had finally sunk and her drooping
eyelids had closed, her lips now and then puckered and twitched as if
with grief; then her features grew tranquil, her lips parted softly and a
smile gently lighted up her blushing cheeks, as the breath of spring
softly thaws a frozen blossom. This sleeper was certainly not born for
loneliness and privation, but to enjoy and to keep love and happiness.
It was warm and still, very still in the sisters' little room. The buzz
of a fly was audible now and again, as it flew round the little oil-cup
Irene had left empty, and now and again the breathing of the sleeper,
coming more and more rapidly. Every trace of fatigue had vanished from
Klea's countenance, her lips parted and pouted as if for a kiss, her
cheeks glowed, and at last she raised both hands as if to defend herself
and stammered out in her dream, "No, no, certainly not--pray, do not! my
love--" Then her arm fell again by her side, and dropping on the chest on
which she was sitting, the blow woke her. She slowly opened her eyes with
a happy smile; then she raised her long silken lashes till her eyes were
open, and she gazed fixedly on vacancy as though something strange had
met her gaze. Thus she sat for some time without moving; then she started
up, pressed her hand on her brow and eyes, and shuddering as if she had
seen something horrible or were shivering with ague, she murmured in
gasps, while she clenched her teeth:
"What does this mean? How come I by such thoughts? What demons are these
that make us do and feel things in our dreams which when we are waking we
should drive far, far from our thoughts? I could hate myself, despise and
hate myself for the sake of those dreams since, wretch that I am! I let
him put his arm round me--and no bitter rage--ah! no--something quite
different, something exquisitely sweet, thrilled through my soul."
As she spoke, she clenched her fists and pressed them against her
temples; then again her arms dropped languidly into her lap, and shaking
her head she went on in an altered and softened voice:
"Still-it was only in a dream and--Oh! ye eternal gods--when we are
asleep--well! and what then? Has it come to this; to impure thoughts I am
adding self-deception! No, this dream was sent by no demon, it was only a
distorted reflection of what I felt yesterday and the day before, and
before that even, when the tall stranger looked straight into my
eyes--four times he has done so now--and then--how many hours ago, gave
me the violets. Did I even turn away my face or punish his boldness with
an angry look? Is it not sometimes possible to drive away an enemy with a
glance? I have often succeeded when a man has looked after us; but
yesterday I could not, and I was as wide awake then as I am at this
moment. What does the stranger want with me? What is it he asks with his
penetrating glance, which for days has followed me wherever I turn, and
robs me of peace even in my sleep? Why should I open my eyes--the gates
of the heart--to him? And now the poison poured in through them is
seething there; but I will tear it out, and when Irene comes home I will
tread the violets into the dust, or leave them with her; she will soon
pull them to pieces or leave them to wither miserably--for I will remain
pure-minded, even in my dreams--what have I besides in the world?"
At these words she broke off her soliloquy, for she heard Irene's voice,
a sound that must have had a favorable effect on her spirit, for she
paused, and the bitter expression her beautiful features had but just now
worn disappeared as she murmured, drawing a deep breath:
"I am not utterly bereft and wretched so long as I have her, and can hear
her voice."
Irene, on her road home, had given the modest offerings of the anchorite
Phibis into the charge of one of the temple-servants to lay before the
altar of Serapis, and now as she came into the room she hid the platter
with the Roman's donation behind her, and while still in the doorway,
called out to her sister:
"Guess now, what have I here?"
"Bread and dates from Serapion," replied Klea.
"Oh, dear no!" cried the other, holding out the plate to her sister, "the
very nicest dainties, fit for gods and kings. Only feel this peach, does
not it feel as soft as one of little Philo's cheeks? If I could always
provide such a substitute you would wish I might eat up your breakfast
every day. And now do you know who gave you all this? No, that you will
never guess! The tall Roman gave them me, the same you had the violets
from yesterday."
Klea's face turned crimson, and she said shortly and decidedly:
"How do you know that?"
"Because he told me so himself," replied Irene in a very altered tone,
for her sister's eyes were fixed upon her with an expression of stern
gravity, such as Irene had never seen in her before.
"And where are the violets?" asked Klea.
"He took them, and his friend gave me this pomegranate-flower," stammered
Irene. "He himself wanted to give it me, but the Greek--a handsome, merry
man--would not permit it, and laid the flower there on the platter. Take
it--but do not look at me like that any longer, for I cannot bear it!"
"I do not want it," said her sister, but not sharply; then, looking down,
she asked in a low voice: "Did the Roman keep the violets?"
"He kept--no, Klea--I will not tell you a lie! He flung them over the
house, and said such rough things as he did it, that I was frightened and
turned my back upon him quickly, for I felt the tears coming into my
eyes. What have you to do with the Roman? I feel so anxious, so
frightened--as I do sometimes when a storm is gathering and I am afraid
of it. And how pale your lips are! that comes of long fasting, no
doubt--eat now, as much as you can. But Klea! why do you look at me
so--and look so gloomy and terrible? I cannot bear that look, I cannot
bear it!"
Irene sobbed aloud, and her sister went up to her, stroked her soft hair
from her brow, kissed her kindly, and said:
"I am not angry with you, child, and did not mean to hurt you. If only I
could cry as you do when clouds overshadow my heart, the blue sky would
shine again with me as soon as it does with you. Now dry your eyes, go up
to the temple, and enquire at what hour we are to go to the
singing-practice, and when the procession is to set out."
Irene obeyed; she went out with downcast eyes, but once out she looked up
again brightly, for she remembered the procession, and it occurred to her
that she would then see again the Roman's gay acquaintance, and turning
back into the room she laid her pomegranate-blossom in the little bowl
out of which she had formerly taken the violets, kissed her sister as
gaily as ever, and then reflected as to whether she would wear the flower
in her hair or in her bosom. Wear it, at any rate, she must, for she must
show plainly that she knew how to value such a gift.
As soon as Klea was alone she seized the trencher with a vehement
gesture, gave the roast bird to the gray cat, who had stolen back into
the room, turning away her head, for the mere smell of the pheasant was
like an insult. Then, while the cat bore off her welcome spoils into a
corner, she clutched a peach and raised her hand to fling it away through
a gap in the roof of the room; but she did not carry out her purpose, for
it occurred to her that Irene and little Philo, the son of the
gate-keeper, might enjoy the luscious fruit; so she laid it back on the
dish and took up the bread, for she was painfully hungry.
She was on the point of breaking the golden-brown cake, but acting on a
rapid impulse she tossed it back on the trencher saying to herself: "At
any rate I will owe him nothing; but I will not throw away the gifts of
the gods as he threw away my violets, for that would be a sin. All is
over between him and me, and if he appears to-day in the procession, and
if he chooses to look at me again I will compel my eyes to avoid meeting
his--aye, that I will, and will carry it through. But, Oh eternal gods!
and thou above all, great Serapis, whom I heartily serve, there is
another thing I cannot do without your aid. Help me, oh! help me to
forget him, that my very thoughts may remain pure."
With these words she flung herself on her knees before the chest, pressed
her brow against the hard wood, and strove to pray.
Only for one thing did she entreat the gods; for strength to forget the
man who had betrayed her into losing her peace of mind.
But just as swift clouds float across the sky, distracting the labors of
the star-gazer, who is striving to observe some remote planet--as the
clatter of the street interrupts again and again some sweet song we fain
would hear, marring it with its harsh discords--so again and again the
image of the young Roman came across Klea's prayers for release from that
very thought, and at last it seemed to her that she was like a man who
strives to raise a block of stone by the exertion of his utmost strength,
and who weary at last of lifting the stone is crushed to the earth by its
weight; still she felt that, in spite of all her prayers and efforts, the
enemy she strove to keep off only came nearer, and instead of flying from
her, overmastered her soul with a grasp from which she could not escape.
Finally she gave up the unavailing struggle, cooled her burning face with
cold water, and tightened the straps of her sandals to go to the temple;
near the god himself she hoped she might in some degree recover the peace
she could not find here.
Just at the door she met Irene, who told her that the singing-practice
was put off, on account of the procession which was fixed for four hours
after noon. And as Klea went towards the temple her sister called after
her.
"Do not stay too long though, water will be wanted again directly for the
libations."
"Then will you go alone to the work?" asked Klea; "there cannot be very
much wanted, for the temple will soon be empty on account of the
procession. A few jars-full will be enough. There is a cake of bread and
a peach in there for you; I must keep the other for little Philo."
CHAPTER IV.
Klea went quickly on towards the temple, without listening to Irene's
excuses. She paid no heed to the worshippers who filled the forecourt,
praying either with heads bent low or with uplifted arms or, if they were
of Egyptian extraction, kneeling on the smooth stone pavement, for, even
as she entered, she had already begun to turn in supplication to the
divinity.
She crossed the great hall of the sanctuary, which was open only to the
initiated and to the temple-servants, of whom she was one. Here all
around her stood a crowd of slender columns, their shafts crowned with
gracefully curved flower calyxes, like stems supporting lilies, over her
head she saw in the ceiling an image of the midnight sky with the bright,
unresting and ever-restful stars; the planets and fixed stars in their
golden barks looked down on her silently. Yes! here were the twilight and
stillness befitting a personal communion with the divinity.
The pillars appeared to her fancy like a forest of giant growth, and it
seemed to her that the perfume of the incense emanated from the gorgeous
floral capitals that crowned them; it penetrated her senses, which were
rendered more acute by fasting and agitation, with a sort of
intoxication. Her eyes were raised to heaven, her arms crossed over her
bosom as she traversed this vast hall, and with trembling steps
approached a smaller and lower chamber, where in the furthest and darkest
background a curtain of heavy and costly material veiled the brazen door
of the holy of holies.
Even she was forbidden to approach this sacred place; but to-day she was
so filled with longing for the inspiring assistance of the god, that she
went on to the holy of holies in spite of the injunction she had never
yet broken, not to approach it. Filled with reverent awe she sank down
close to the door of the sacred chamber, shrinking close into the angle
formed between a projecting door-post and the wall of the great hall.
The craving desire to seek and find a power outside us as guiding the
path of our destiny is common to every nation, to every man; it is as
surely innate in every being gifted with reason--many and various as
these are--as the impulse to seek a cause when we perceive an effect, to
see when light visits the earth, or to hear when swelling waves of sound
fall on our ear. Like every other gift, no doubt that of religious
sensibility is bestowed in different degrees on different natures. In
Klea it had always been strongly developed, and a pious mother had
cultivated it by precept and example, while her father always had taught
her one thing only: namely to be true, inexorably true, to others as to
herself.
Afterwards she had been daily employed in the service of the god whom she
was accustomed to regard as the greatest and most powerful of all the
immortals, for often from a distance she had seen the curtain of the
sanctuary pushed aside, and the statue of Serapis with the Kalathos on
his head, and a figure of Cerberus at his feet, visible in the half-light
of the holy of holies; and a ray of light, flashing through the darkness
as by a miracle, would fall upon his brow and kiss his lips when his
goodness was sung by the priests in hymns of praise. At other times the
tapers by the side of the god would be lighted or extinguished
spontaneously.
Then, with the other believers, she would glorify the great lord of the
other world, who caused a new sun to succeed each that was extinguished,
and made life grow up out of death; who resuscitated the dead, lifting
them up to be equal with him, if on earth they had reverenced truth and
were found faithful by the judges of the nether world.
Truth--which her father had taught her to regard as the best possession
of life--was rewarded by Serapis above all other virtues; hearts were
weighed before him in a scale against truth, and whenever Klea tried to
picture the god in human form he wore the grave and mild features of her
father, and she fancied him speaking in the words and tones of the man to
whom she owed her being, who had been too early snatched from her, who
had endured so much for righteousness' sake, and from whose lips she had
never heard a single word that might not have beseemed the god himself.
And, as she crouched closely in the dark angle by the holy of holies, she
felt herself nearer to her father as well as to the god, and accused
herself pitilessly, in that unmaidenly longings had stirred her heart,
that she had been insincere to herself and Irene, nay in that if she
could not succeed in tearing the image of the Roman from her heart she
would be compelled either to deceive her sister or to sadden the innocent
and careless nature of the impressionable child, whom she was accustomed
to succor and cherish as a mother might. On her, even apparently light
matters weighed oppressively, while Irene could throw off even grave and
serious things, blowing them off as it were into the air, like a feather.
She was like wet clay on which even the light touch of a butterfly leaves
a mark, her sister like a mirror from which the breath that has dimmed it
instantly and entirely vanishes.
"Great God!" she murmured in her prayer, "I feel as if the Roman had
branded my very soul. Help thou me to efface the mark; help me to become
as I was before, so that I may look again in Irene's eyes without
concealment, pure and true, and that I may be able to say to myself, as I
was wont, that I had thought and acted in such a way as my father would
approve if he could know it."
She was still praying thus when the footsteps and voices of two men
approaching the holy of holies startled her from her devotions; she
suddenly became fully conscious of the fact that she was in a forbidden
spot, and would be severely punished if she were discovered.
"Lock that door," cried one of the new-comers to his companion, pointing
to the door which led from the prosekos into the pillared hall, "none,
even of the initiated, need see what you are preparing here for us--"
Klea recognized the voice of the high-priest, and thought for a moment of
stepping forward and confessing her guilt; but, though she did not
usually lack courage, she did not do this, but shrank still more closely
into her hiding-place, which was perfectly dark when the brazen door of
the room; which had no windows, was closed. She now perceived that the
curtain and door were opened which closed the inmost sanctuary, she heard
one of the men twirling the stick which was to produce fire, saw the
first gleam of light from it streaming out of the holy of holies, and
then heard the blows of a hammer and the grating sound of a file.
The quiet sanctum was turned into a forge, but noisy as were the
proceedings within, it seemed to Klea that the beating of her own heart
was even louder than the brazen clatter of the tools wielded by Krates;
he was one of the oldest of the priests of Serapis, who was chief in
charge of the sacred vessels, who was wont never to speak to any one but
the high-priest, and who was famous even among his Greek
fellow-countrymen for the skill with which he could repair broken
metal-work, make the securest locks, and work in silver and gold.
When the sisters first came into the temple five years since, Irene had
been very much afraid of this man, who was so small as almost to be a
dwarf, broad shouldered and powerfully knit, while his wrinkled face
looked like a piece of rough cork-bark, and he was subject to a painful
complaint in his feet which often prevented his walking; her fears had
not vexed but only amused the priestly smith, who whenever he met the
child, then eleven years old, would turn his lips up to his big red nose,
roll his eyes, and grunt hideously to increase the terror that came over
her.
He was not ill-natured, but he had neither wife nor child, nor brother,
nor sister, nor friend, and every human being so keenly desires that
others should have some feeling about him, that many a one would rather
be feared than remain unheeded.
After Irene had got over her dread she would often entreat the old
man--who was regarded as stern and inaccessible by all the other dwellers
in the temple--in her own engaging and coaxing way to make a face for
her, and he would do it and laugh when the little one, to his delight and
her own, was terrified at it and ran away; and just lately when Irene,
having hurt her foot, was obliged to keep her room for a few days, an
unheard of thing had occurred: he had asked Klea with the greatest
sympathy how her sister was getting on, and had given her a cake for her.
While Krates was at his work not a word passed between him and the
high-priest. At length he laid down the hammer, and said:
"I do not much like work of this kind, but this, I think, is successful
at any rate. Any temple-servant, hidden here behind the altar, can now
light or extinguish the lamps without the illusion being detected by the
sharpest. Go now and stand at the door of the great hall and speak the
word."
Klea heard the high-priest accede to this request and cry in a chanting
voice: "Thus he commands the night and it becomes day, and the
extinguished taper and lo! it flames with brightness. If indeed thou art
nigh, Oh Serapis! manifest thyself to us."
At these words a bright stream of light flashed from the holy of holies,
and again was suddenly extinguished when the high-priest sang: "Thus
showest thou thyself as light to the children of truth, but dost punish
with darkness the children of lies."
"Again?" asked Krates in a voice which conveyed a desire that the answer
might be 'No.'
"I must trouble you," replied the high-priest. "Good! the performance
went much better this time. I was always well assured of your skill; but
consider the particular importance of this affair. The two kings and the
queen will probably be present at the solemnity, certainly Philometor and
Cleopatra will, and their eyes are wide open; then the Roman who has
already assisted four times at the procession will accompany them, and if
I judge him rightly he, like many of the nobles of his nation, is one of
those who can trust themselves when it is necessary to be content with
the old gods of their fathers; and as regards the marvels we are able to
display to them, they do not take them to heart like the poor in spirit,
but measure and weigh them with a cool and unbiassed mind. People of that
stamp, who are not ashamed to worship, who do not philosophize but only
think just so much as is necessary for acting rightly, those are the
worst contemners of every supersensual manifestation."
"And the students of nature in the Museum?" asked Krates. "They believe
nothing to be real that they cannot see and observe."
"And for that very reason," replied the high-priest, "they are often
singularly easy to deceive by your skill, since, seeing an effect without
a cause, they are inclined to regard the invisible cause as something
supersensual. Now, open the door again and let us get out by the side
door; do you, this time, undertake the task of cooperating with Serapis
yourself. Consider that Philometor will not confirm the donation of the
land unless he quits the temple deeply penetrated by the greatness of our
god. Would it be possible, do you think, to have the new censer ready in
time for the birthday of King Euergetes, which is to be solemnly kept at
Memphis?"
"We will see," replied Krates, "I must first put together the lock of the
great door of the tomb of Apis, for so long as I have it in my workshop
any one can open it who sticks a nail into the hole above the bar, and
any one can shut it inside who pushes the iron bolt. Send to call me
before the performance with the lights begins; I will come in spite of my
wretched feet. As I have undertaken the thing I will carry it out, but
for no other reason, for it is my opinion that even without such means of
deception--"
"We use no deception," interrupted the high-priest, sternly rebuking his
colleague. "We only present to short-sighted mortals the creative power
of the divinity in a form perceptible and intelligible to their senses."
With these words the tall priest turned his back on the smith and quitted
the hall by a side door; Krates opened the brazen door, and as he
gathered together his tools he said to himself, but loud enough for Klea
to hear him distinctly in her hiding-place:
"It may be right for me, but deceit is deceit, whether a god deceives a
king or a child deceives a beggar."
"Deceit is deceit," repeated Klea after the smith when he had left the
hall and she had emerged from her corner.
She stood still for a moment and looked round her. For the first time she
observed the shabby colors on the walls, the damage the pillars had
sustained in the course of years, and the loose slabs in the pavement.
The sweetness of the incense sickened her, and as she passed by an old
man who threw up his arms in fervent supplication, she looked at him with
a glance of compassion.
When she had passed out beyond the pylons enclosing the temple she turned
round, shaking her head in a puzzled way as she gazed at it; for she knew
that not a stone had been changed within the last hour, and yet it looked
as strange in her eyes as some landscape with which we have become
familiar in all the beauty of spring, and see once more in winter with
its trees bare of leaves; or like the face of a woman which we thought
beautiful under the veil which hid it, and which, when the veil is
raised, we see to be wrinkled and devoid of charm.
When she had heard the smith's words, "Deceit is deceit," she felt her
heart shrink as from a stab, and could not check the tears which started
to her eyes, unused as they were to weeping; but as soon as she had
repeated the stern verdict with her own lips her tears had ceased, and
now she stood looking at the temple like a traveller who takes leave of a
dear friend; she was excited, she breathed more freely, drew herself up
taller, and then turned her back on the sanctuary of Serapis, proudly
though with a sore heart.
Close to the gate-keeper's lodge a child came tottering towards her with
his arms stretched up to her. She lifted him up, kissed him, and then
asked the mother, who also greeted her, for a piece of bread, for her
hunger was becoming intolerable. While she ate the dry morsel the child
sat on her lap, following with his large eyes the motion of her hand and
lips. The boy was about five years old, with legs so feeble that they
could scarcely support the weight of his body, but he had a particularly
sweet little face; certainly it was quite without expression, and it was
only when he saw Klea coming that tiny Philo's eyes had lighted up with
pleasure.
"Drink this milk," said the child's mother, offering the young girl an
earthen bowl. "There is not much and I could not spare it if Philo would
eat like other children, but it seems as if it hurt him to swallow. He
drinks two or three drops and eats a mouthful, and then will take no more
even if he is beaten."
"You have not been beating him again?" said Klea reproachfully, and
drawing the child closer to her. "My husband--" said the woman, pulling
at her dress in some confusion. "The child was born on a good day and in
a lucky hour, and yet he is so puny and weak and will not learn to speak,
and that provokes Pianchi."
"He will spoil everything again!" exclaimed Klea annoyed. "Where is he?"
"He was wanted in the temple."
"And is he not pleased that Philo calls him 'father,' and you 'mother,'
and me by my name, and that he learns to distinguish many things?" asked
the girl.
"Oh, yes of course," said the woman. "He says you are teaching him to
speak just as if he were a starling, and we are very much obliged to
you."
"That is not what I want," interrupted Klea. "What I wish is that you
should not punish and scold the boy, and that you should be as glad as I
am when you see his poor little dormant soul slowly waking up. If he goes
on like this, the poor little fellow will be quite sharp and intelligent.
What is my name, my little one?"
"Ke-ea," stammered the child, smiling at his friend. "And now taste this
that I have in my hand; what is it?--I see you know. It is
called--whisper in my ear. That's right, mil--mil-milk! to be sure, my
tiny, it is milk. Now open your little mouth and say it prettily after
me--once more--and again--say it twelve times quite right and I will give
you a kiss--Now you have earned a pretty kiss--will you have it here or
here? Well, and what is this? your ea-? Yes, your ear. And this?--your
nose, that is right."
The child's eyes brightened more and more under this gentle teaching, and
neither Klea nor her pupil were weary till, about an hour later, the
re-echoing sound of a brass gong called her away. As she turned to go the
little one ran after her crying; she took him in her arms and carried him
back to his mother, and then went on to her own room to dress herself and
her sister for the procession. On the way to the Pastophorium she
recalled once more her expedition to the temple and her prayer there.
"Even before the sanctuary," said she to herself, "I could not succeed in
releasing my soul from its burden--it was not till I set to work to
loosen the tongue of the poor little child. Every pure spot, it seems to
me, may be the chosen sanctuary of some divinity, and is not an infant's
soul purer than the altar where truth is mocked at?"
In their room she found Irene; she had dressed her hair carefully and
stuck the pomegranate-flower in it, and she asked Klea if she thought she
looked well.
"You look like Aphrodite herself," replied Klea kissing her forehead.
Then she arranged the folds of her sister's dress, fastened on the
ornaments, and proceeded to dress herself. While she was fastening her
sandals Irene asked her, "Why do you sigh so bitterly?" and Klea replied,
"I feel as if I had lost my parents a second time."
CHAPTER V.
The procession was over.
At the great service which had been performed before him in the Greek
Serapeum, Ptolemy Philometor had endowed the priests not with the whole
but with a considerable portion of the land concerning which they had
approached him with many petitions. After the court had once more quitted
Memphis and the procession was broken up, the sisters returned to their
room, Irene with crimson cheeks and a smile on her lips, Klea with a
gloomy and almost threatening light in her eyes.
As the two were going to their room in silence a temple-servant called to
Klea, desiring her to go with him to the high-priest, who wished to speak
to her. Klea, without speaking, gave her water-jar to Irene and was
conducted into a chamber of the temple, which was used for keeping the
sacred vessels in. There she sat down on a bench to wait. The two men who
in the morning had visited the Pastophorium had also followed in the
procession with the royal family. At the close of the solemnities Publius
had parted from his companion without taking leave, and without looking
to the right or to the left, he had hastened back to the Pastophorium and
to the cell of Serapion, the recluse.
The old man heard from afar the younger man's footstep, which fell on the
earth with a firmer and more decided tread than that of the
softly-stepping priests of Serapis, and he greeted him warmly with signs
and words.
Publius thanked him coolly and gravely, and said, dryly enough and with
incisive brevity:
"My time is limited. I propose shortly to quit Memphis, but I promised
you to hear your request, and in order to keep my word I have come to see
you; still--as I have said--only to keep my word. The water-bearers of
whom you desired to speak to me do not interest me--I care no more about
them than about the swallows flying over the house yonder."
"And yet this morning you took a long walk for Klea's sake," returned
Serapion.
"I have often taken a much longer one to shoot a hare," answered the
Roman. "We men do not pursue our game because the possession of it is any
temptation, but because we love the sport, and there are sporting natures
even among women. Instead of spears or arrows they shoot with flashing
glances, and when they think they have hit their game they turn their
back upon it. Your Klea is one of this sort, while the pretty little one
I saw this morning looks as if she were very ready to be hunted, I
however, no more wish to be the hunter of a young girl than to be her
game. I have still three days to spend in Memphis, and then I shall turn
my back forever on this stupid country."
"This morning," said Serapion, who began to suspect what the grievance
might be which had excited the discontent implied in the Roman's speech,
"This morning you appeared to be in less hurry to set out than now, so to
me you seem to be in the plight of game trying to escape; however, I know
Klea better than you do. Shooting is no sport of hers, nor will she let
herself be hunted, for she has a characteristic which you, my friend
Publius Scipio, ought to recognize and value above all others--she is
proud, very proud; aye, and so she may be, scornful as you look--as if
you would like to say 'how came a water-carrier of Serapis by her pride,
a poor creature who is ill-fed and always engaged in service, pride which
is the prescriptive right only of those, whom privilege raises above the
common herd around them?--But this girl, you may take my word for it, has
ample reason to hold her head high, not only because she is the daughter
of free and noble parents and is distinguished by rare beauty, not
because while she was still a child she undertook, with the devotion and
constancy of the best of mothers, the care of another child--her own
sister, but for a reason which, if I judge you rightly, you will
understand better than many another young man; because she must uphold
her pride in order that among the lower servants with whom unfortunately
she is forced to work, she may never forget that she is a free and noble
lady. You can set your pride aside and yet remain what you are, but if
she were to do so and to learn to feel as a servant, she would presently
become in fact what by nature she is not and by circumstances is
compelled to be. A fine horse made to carry burdens becomes a mere
cart-horse as soon as it ceases to hold up its head and lift its feet
freely. Klea is proud because she must be proud; and if you are just you
will not contemn the girl, who perhaps has cast a kindly glance at
you--since the gods have so made you that you cannot fail to please any
woman--and yet who must repel your approaches because she feels herself
above being trifled with, even by one of the Cornelia gens, and yet too
lowly to dare to hope that a man like you should ever stoop from your
height to desire her for a wife. She has vexed you, of that there can be
no doubt; how, I can only guess. If, however, it has been through her
repellent pride, that ought not to hurt you, for a woman is like a
soldier, who only puts on his armor when he is threatened by an opponent
whose weapons he fears."
The recluse had rather whispered than spoken these words, remembering
that he had neighbors; and as he ceased the drops stood on his brow, for
whenever any thing disturbed him he was accustomed to allow his powerful
voice to be heard pretty loudly, and it cost him no small effort to
moderate it for so long.
Publius had at first looked him in the face, and then had gazed at the
ground, and he had heard Serapion to the end without interrupting him;
but the color had flamed in his cheeks as in those of a schoolboy, and
yet he was an independent and resolute youth who knew how to conduct
himself in difficult straits as well as a man in the prime of life. In
all his proceedings he was wont to know very well, exactly what he
wanted, and to do without any fuss or comment whatever he thought right
and fitting.
During the anchorite's speech the question had occurred to him, what did
he in fact expect or wish of the water-bearer; but the answer was
wanting, he felt somewhat uncertain of himself, and his uncertainty and
dissatisfaction with himself increased as all that he heard struck him
more and more. He became less and less inclined to let himself be thrown
over by the young girl who for some days had, much against his will, been
constantly in his thoughts, whose image he would gladly have dismissed
from his mind, but who, after the recluse's speech, seemed more desirable
than ever. "Perhaps you are right," he replied after a short silence, and
he too lowered his voice, for a subdued tone generally provokes an
equally subdued answer. "You know the maiden better than I, and if you
describe her correctly it would be as well that I should abide by my
decision and fly from Egypt, or, at any rate, from your protegees, since
nothing lies before me but a defeat or a victory, which could bring me
nothing but repentance. Klea avoided my eye to-day as if it shed poison
like a viper's tooth, and I can have nothing more to do with her: still,
might I be informed how she came into this temple? and if I can be of any
service to her, I will-for your sake. Tell me now what you know of her
and what you wish me to do."
The recluse nodded assent and beckoned Publius to come closer to him, and
bowing down to speak into the Roman's ear, he said softly: "Are you in
favor with the queen?" Publius, having said that he was, Serapion, with
an exclamation of satisfaction, began his story.
"You learned this morning how I myself came into this cage, and that my
father was overseer of the temple granaries. While I was wandering abroad
he was deposed from his office, and would probably have died in prison,
if a worthy man had not assisted him to save his honor and his liberty.
All this does not concern you, and I may therefore keep it to myself; but
this man was the father of Klea and Irene, and the enemy by whose
instrumentality my father suffered innocently was the villain Eulaeus.
You know--or perhaps indeed you may not know--that the priests have to
pay a certain tribute for the king's maintenance; you know? To be sure,
you Romans trouble yourselves more about matters of law and
administration than the culture of the arts or the subtleties of thought.
Well, it was my father's duty to pay these customs over to Eulaeus, who
received them; but the beardless effeminate vermin, the glutton--may
every peach he ever ate or ever is to eat turn to poison!--kept back half
of what was delivered to him, and when the accountants found nothing but
empty air in the king's stores where they hoped to find corn and woven
goods, they raised an alarm, which of course came to the ears of the
powerful thief at court before it reached those of my poor father. You
called Egypt a marvellous country, or something like it; and so in truth
it is, not merely on account of the great piles there that you call
Pyramids and such like, but because things happen here which in Rome
would be as impossible as moonshine at mid-day, or a horse with his tail
at the end of his nose! Before a complaint could be laid against Eulaeus
he had accused my father of the peculation, and before the Epistates and
the assessor of the district had even looked at the indictment, their
judgment on the falsely accused man was already recorded, for Eulaeus had
simply bought their verdict just as a man buys a fish or a cabbage in the
market. In olden times the goddess of justice was represented in this
country with her eyes shut, but now she looks round on the world like a
squinting woman who winks at the king with one eye, and glances with the
other at the money in the hand of the accuser or the accused. My poor
father was of course condemned and thrown into prison, where he was
beginning to doubt the justice of the gods, when for his sake the
greatest wonder happened, ever seen in this land of wonders since first
the Greeks ruled in Alexandria. An honorable man undertook without fear
of persons the lost cause of the poor condemned wretch, and never rested
till he had restored him to honor and liberty. But imprisonment, disgrace
and indignation had consumed the strength of the ill-used man as a worm
eats into cedar wood, and he fell into a decline and died. His preserver,
Klea's father, as the reward of his courageous action fared even worse;
for here by the Nile virtues are punished in this world, as crimes are
with you. Where injustice holds sway frightful things occur, for the gods
seem to take the side of the wicked. Those who do not hope for a reward
in the next world, if they are neither fools nor philosophers--which
often comes to the same thing--try to guard themselves against any change
in this.
"Philotas, the father of the two girls, whose parents were natives of
Syracuse, was an adherent of the doctrines of Zeno--which have many
supporters among you at Rome too--and he was highly placed as an
official, for he was president of the Chrematistoi, a college of judges
which probably has no parallel out of Egypt, and which has been kept up
better than any other. It travels about from province to province
stopping in the chief towns to administer justice. When an appeal is
brought against the judgment of the court of justice belonging to any
place--over which the Epistates of the district presides--the case is
brought before the Chrematistoi, who are generally strangers alike to the
accuser and accused; by them it is tried over again, and thus the
inhabitants of the provinces are spared the journey to Alexandria
or--since the country has been divided--to Memphis, where, besides, the
supreme court is overburdened with cases.
"No former president of the Chrematistoi had ever enjoyed a higher
reputation than Philotas. Corruption no more dared approach him than a
sparrow dare go near a falcon, and he was as wise as he was just, for he
was no less deeply versed in the ancient Egyptian law than in that of the
Greeks, and many a corrupt judge reconsidered matters as soon as it
became known that he was travelling with the Chrematistoi, and passed a
just instead of an unjust sentence.
"Cleopatra, the widow of Epiphanes, while she was living and acting as
guardian of her sons Philometor and Euergetes--who now reign in Memphis
and Alexandria--held Philotas in the highest esteem and conferred on him
the rank of 'relation to the king'; but she was just dead when this
worthy man took my father's cause in hand, and procured his release from
prison.
"The scoundrel Eulaeus and his accomplice Lenaeus then stood at the
height of power, for the young king, who was not yet of age, let himself
be led by them like a child by his nurse.
"Now as my father was an honest man, no one but Eulaeus could be the
rascal, and as the Chrematistoi threatened to call him before their
tribunal the miserable creature stirred up the war in Caelo-Syria against
Antiochus Epiphanes, the king's uncle.
"You know how disgraceful for us was the course of that enterprise, how
Philometor was defeated near Pelusium, and by the advice of Eulaeus
escaped with his treasure to Samothrace, how Philometor's brother
Euergetes was set up as king in Alexandria, how Antiochus took Memphis,
and then allowed his elder nephew to continue to reign here as though he
were his vassal and ward.
"It was during this period of humiliation, that Eulaeus was able to evade
Philotas, whom he may very well have feared, as though his own conscience
walked the earth on two legs in the person of the judge, with the sword
of justice in his hand, and telling all men what a scoundrel he was.
"Memphis had opened her gates to Antiochus without offering much
resistance, and the Syrian king, who was a strange man and was fond of
mixing among the people as if he himself were a common man, applied to
Philotas, who was as familiar with Egyptian manners and customs as with
those of Greece, in order that he might conduct him into the halls of
justice and into the market-places; and he made him presents as was his
way, sometimes of mere rubbish and sometimes of princely gifts.
"Then when Philometor was freed by the Romans from the protection of the
Syrian king, and could govern in Memphis as an independent sovereign,
Eulaeus accused the father of these two girls of having betrayed Memphis
into the hands of Antiochus, and never rested till the innocent man was
deprived of his wealth, which was considerable, and sent with his wife to
forced labor in the gold mines of Ethiopia.
"When all this occurred I had already returned to my cage here; but I
heard from my brother Glaucus--who was captain of the watch in the
palace, and who learned a good many things before other people did--what
was going on out there, and I succeeded in having the daughters of
Philotas secretly brought to this temple, and preserved from sharing
their parents' fate. That is now five years ago, and now you know how it
happens, that the daughters of a man of rank carry water for the altar of
Serapis, and that I would rather an injury should be done to me than to
them, and that I would rather see Eulaeus eating some poisonous root than
fragrant peaches."
"And is Philotas still working in the mines?" asked the Roman, clenching
his teeth with rage.
"Yes, Publius," replied the anchorite. "A 'yes' that it is easy to say,
and it is just as easy too to clench one's fists in indignation--but it
is hard to imagine the torments that must be endured by a man like
Philotas; and a noble and innocent woman--as beautiful as Hera and
Aphrodite in one--when they are driven to hard and unaccustomed labor
under a burning sun by the lash of the overseer. Perhaps by this time
they have been happy enough to die under their sufferings and their
daughters are already orphans, poor children! No one here but the
high-priest knows precisely who they are, for if Eulaeus were to learn
the truth he would send them after their parents as surely as my name is
Serapion."
"Let him try it!" cried Publius, raising his right fist threateningly.
"Softly, softly, my friend," said the recluse, "and not now only, but
about everything which you under take in behalf of the sisters, for a man
like Eulaeus hears not only with his own ears but with those of thousand
others, and almost everything that occurs at court has to go through his
hands as epistolographer. You say the queen is well-disposed towards you.
That is worth a great deal, for her husband is said to be guided by her
will, and such a thing as Eulaeus cannot seem particularly estimable in
Cleopatra's eyes if princesses are like other women--and I know them
well."
"And even if he were," interrupted Publius with glowing cheeks, "I would
bring him to ruin all the same, for a man like Philotas must not perish,
and his cause henceforth is my own. Here is my hand upon it; and if I am
happy in having descended from a noble race it is above all because the
word of a son of the Cornelii is as good as the accomplished deed of any
other man."
The recluse grasped the right hand the young man gave him and nodded to
him affectionately, his eyes radiant, though moistened with joyful
emotion. Then he hastily turned his back on the young man, and soon
reappeared with a large papyrus-roll in his hand. "Take this," he said,
handing it to the Roman, "I have here set forth all that I have told you,
fully and truly with my own hand in the form of a petition. Such matters,
as I very well know, are never regularly conducted to an issue at court
unless they are set forth in writing. If the queen seems disposed to
grant you a wish give her this roll, and entreat her for a letter of
pardon. If you can effect this, all is won."
Publius took the roll, and once more gave his hand to the anchorite, who,
forgetting himself for a moment, shouted out in his loud voice:
"May the gods bless thee, and by thy means work the release of the
noblest of men from his sufferings! I had quite ceased to hope, but if
you come to our aid all is not yet wholly lost."
CHAPTER VI.
"Pardon me if I disturb you."
With these words the anchorite's final speech was interrupted by Eulaeus,
who had come in to the Pastophorium softly and unobserved, and who now
bowed respectfully to Publius.
"May I be permitted to enquire on what compact one of the noblest of the
sons of Rome is joining hands with this singular personage?"
"You are free to ask," replied Publius shortly and drily, "but every one
is not disposed to answer, and on the present occasion I am not. I will
bid you farewell, Serapion, but not for long I believe."
"Am I permitted to accompany you?" asked Eulaeus.
"You have followed me without any permission on my part."
"I did so by order of the king, and am only fulfilling his commands in
offering you my escort now."
"I shall go on, and I cannot prevent your following me."
"But I beg of you," said Eulaeus, "to consider that it would ill-become
me to walk behind you like a servant."
"I respect the wishes of my host, the king, who commanded you to follow
me," answered the Roman. "At the door of the temple however you can get
into your chariot, and I into mine; an old courtier must be ready to
carry out the orders of his superior."
"And does carry them out," answered Eulaeus with deference, but his eyes
twinkled--as the forked tongue of a serpent is rapidly put out and still
more rapidly withdrawn--with a flash first of threatening hatred, and
then another of deep suspicion cast at the roll the Roman held in his
hand.
Publius heeded not this glance, but walked quickly towards the
acacia-grove; the recluse looked after the ill-matched pair, and as he
watched the burly Eulaeus following the young man, he put both his hands
on his hips, puffed out his fat cheeks, and burst into loud laughter as
soon as the couple had vanished behind the acacias.
When once Serapion's midriff was fairly tickled it was hard to reduce it
to calm again, and he was still laughing when Klea appeared in front of
his cell some few minutes after the departure of the Roman. He was about
to receive his young friend with a cheerful greeting, but, glancing at
her face, he cried anxiously;
"You look as if you had met with a ghost; your lips are pale instead of
red, and there are dark shades round your eyes. What has happened to you,
child? Irene went with you to the procession, that I know. Have you had
bad news of your parents? You shake your head. Come, child, perhaps you
are thinking of some one more than you ought; how the color rises in your
cheeks! Certainly handsome Publius, the Roman, must have looked into your
eyes--a splendid youth is he--a fine young man--a capital good fellow--"
"Say no more on that subject," Klea exclaimed, interrupting her friend
and protector, and waving her hand in the air as if to cut off the other
half of Serapion's speech. "I can hear nothing more about him."
"Has he addressed you unbecomingly?" asked the recluse.
"Yes!" said Klea, turning crimson, and with a vehemence quite foreign to
her usual gentle demeanor, "yes, he persecutes me incessantly with
challenging looks."
"Only with looks?" said the anchorite. "But we may look even at the
glorious sun and at the lovely flowers as much as we please, and they are
not offended."
"The sun is too high and the soulless flowers too humble for a man to
hurt them," replied Klea. "But the Roman is neither higher nor lower than
I, the eye speaks as plain a language as the tongue, and what his eyes
demand of me brings the blood to my cheeks and stirs my indignation even
now when I only think of it."
"And that is why you avoid his gaze so carefully?"
"Who told you that?"
"Publius himself; and because he is wounded by your hard-heartedness he
meant to quit Egypt; but I have persuaded him to remain, for if there is
a mortal living from whom I expect any good for you and yours--"
"It is certainly not he," said Klea positively. "You are a man, and
perhaps you now think that so long as you were young and free to wander
about the world you would not have acted differently from him--it is a
man's privilege; but if you could look into my soul or feel with the
heart of a woman, you would think differently. Like the sand of the
desert which is blown over the meadows and turns all the fresh verdure to
a hideous brown-like a storm that transforms the blue mirror of the sea
into a crisped chaos of black whirl pools and foaming ferment, this man's
imperious audacity has cruelly troubled my peace of heart. Four times his
eyes pursued me in the processions; yesterday I still did not recognize
my danger, but to-day--I must tell you, for you are like a father to me,
and who else in the world can I confide in?--to-day I was able to avoid
his gaze, and yet all through long endless hours of the festival I felt
his eyes constantly seeking mine. I should have been certain I was under
no delusion, even if Publius Scipio--but what business has his name on my
lips?--even if the Roman had not boasted to you of his attacks on a
defenceless girl. And to think that you, you of all others, should have
become his ally! But you would not, no indeed you would not, if you knew
how I felt at the procession while I was looking down at the ground, and
knew that his very look desecrated me like the rain that washed all the
blossoms off the young vine-shoots last year. It was just as if he were
drawing a net round my heart--but, oh! what a net! It was as if the flax
on a distaff had been set on fire, and the flames spun out into thin
threads, and the meshes knotted of the fiery yarn. I felt every thread
and knot burning into my soul, and could not cast it off nor even defend
myself. Aye! you may look grieved and shake your head, but so it was, and
the scars hurt me still with a pain I cannot utter."
"But Klea," interrupted Serapion, "you are quite beside yourself--like
one possessed. Go to the temple and pray, or, if that is of no avail, go
to Asclepios or Anubis and have the demon cast out."
"I need none of your gods!" answered the girl in great agitation. "Oh! I
wish you had left me to my fate, and that we had shared the lot of our
parents, for what threatens us here is more frightful than having to sift
gold-dust in the scorching sun, or to crush quartz in mortars. I did not
come to you to speak about the Roman, but to tell you what the
high-priest had just disclosed to me since the procession ended."
"Well?" asked Serapion eager and almost frightened, stretching out his
neck to put his head near to the girl's, and opening his eyes so wide
that the loose skin below them almost disappeared.
"First he told me," replied Klea, "how meagrely the revenues of the
temple are supplied--"
"That is quite true," interrupted the anchorite, "for Antiochus carried
off the best part of its treasure; and the crown, which always used to
have money to spare for the sanctuaries of Egypt, now loads our estates
with heavy tribute; but you, as it seems to me, were kept scantily
enough, worse than meanly, for, as I know--since it passed through my
hands--a sum was paid to the temple for your maintenance which would have
sufficed to keep ten hungry sailors, not speak of two little pecking
birds like you, and besides that you do hard service without any pay.
Indeed it would be a more profitable speculation to steal a beggar's rags
than to rob you! Well, what did the high-priest want?"
"He says that we have been fed and protected by the priesthood for five
years, that now some danger threatens the temple on our account, and that
we must either quit the sanctuary or else make up our minds to take the
place of the twin-sisters Arsinoe and Doris who have hitherto been
employed in singing the hymns of lamentation, as Isis and Nephthys, by
the bier of the deceased god on the occasion of the festivals of the
dead, and in pouring out the libations with wailing and outcries when the
bodies were brought into the temple to be blessed. These maidens,
Asclepiodorus says, are now too old and ugly for these duties, but the
temple is bound to maintain them all their lives. The funds of the temple
are insufficient to support two more serving maidens besides them and us,
and so Arsinoe and Doris are only to pour out the libations for the
future, and we are to sing the laments, and do the wailing."
"But you are not twins!" cried Serapion. "And none but twins--so say the
ordinances--may mourn for Osiris as Isis and Neplithys."
"They will make twins of us!" said Klea with a scornful turn of her lip.
"Irene's hair is to be dyed black like mine, and the soles of her sandals
are to be made thicker to make her as tall as I am."
"They would hardly succeed in making you smaller than you are, and it is
easier to make light hair dark than dark hair light," said Serapion with
hardly suppressed rage. "And what answer did you give to these
exceedingly original proposals?"
"The only one I could very well give. I said no--but I declared myself
ready, not from fear, but because we owe much to the temple, to perform
any other service with Irene, only not this one."
"And Asclepiodorus?"
"He said nothing unkind to me, and preserved his calm and polite demeanor
when I contradicted him, though he fixed his eyes on me several times in
astonishment as if he had discovered in me something quite new and
strange. At last he went on to remind me how much trouble the temple
singing-master had taken with us, how well my low voice went with Irene's
high one, how much applause we might gain by a fine performance of the
hymns of lamentation, and how he would be willing, if we undertook the
duties of the twin-sisters, to give us a better dwelling and more
abundant food. I believe he has been trying to make us amenable by
supplying us badly with food, just as falcons are trained by hunger.
Perhaps I am doing him an injustice, but I feel only too much disposed
to-day to think the worst of him and of the other fathers. Be that as it
may; at any rate he made me no further answer when I persisted in my
refusal, but dismissed me with an injunction to present myself before him
again in three days' time, and then to inform him definitively whether I
would conform to his wishes, or if I proposed to leave the temple. I
bowed and went towards the door, and was already on the threshold when he
called me back once more, and said: 'Remember your parents and their
fate!' He spoke solemnly, almost threateningly, but he said no more and
hastily turned his back on me. What could he mean to convey by this
warning? Every day and every hour I think of my father and mother, and
keep Irene in mind of them."
The recluse at these words sat muttering thoughtfully to himself for a
few minutes with a discontented air; then he said gravely:
"Asclepiodorus meant more by his speech than you think. Every sentence
with which he dismisses a refractory subordinate is a nut of which the
shell must be cracked in order to get at the kernel. When he tells you to
remember your parents and their sad fate, such words from his lips, and
under the present circumstances, can hardly mean anything else than this:
that you should not forget how easily your father's fate might overtake
you also, if once you withdrew yourselves from the protection of the
temple. It was not for nothing that Asclepiodorus--as you yourself told
me quite lately, not more than a week ago I am sure--reminded you how
often those condemned to forced labor in the mines had their relations
sent after them. Ah! child, the words of Asclepiodorus have a sinister
meaning. The calmness and pride, with which you look at me make me fear
for you, and yet, as you know, I am not one of the timid and tremulous.
Certainly what they propose to you is repulsive enough, but submit to it;
it is to be hoped it will not be for long. Do it for my sake and for that
of poor Irene, for though you might know how to assert your dignity and
take care of yourself outside these walls in the rough and greedy world,
little Irene never could. And besides, Klea, my sweetheart, we have now
found some one, who makes your concerns his, and who is great and
powerful--but oh! what are three clays? To think of seeing you turned
out--and then that you may be driven with a dissolute herd in a filthy
boat down to the burning south, and dragged to work which kills first the
soul and then the body! No, it is not possible! You will never let this
happen to me--and to yourself and Irene; no, my darling, no, my pet, my
sweetheart, you cannot, you will not do so. Are you not my children, my
daughters, my only joy? and you, would you go away, and leave me alone in
my cage, all because you are so proud!"
The strong man's voice failed him, and heavy drops fell from his eyes one
after another down his beard, and on to Klea's arm, which he had grasped
with both hands.
The girl's eyes too were dim with a mist of warm tears when she saw her
rough friend weeping, but she remained firm and said, as she tried to
free her hand from his:
"You know very well, father Serapion, that there is much to tie me to
this temple; my sister, and you, and the door-keeper's child, little
Philo. It would be cruel, dreadful to have to leave you; but I would
rather endure that and every other grief than allow Irene to take the
place of Arsinoe or the black Doris as wailing woman. Think of that
bright child, painted and kneeling at the foot of a bier and groaning and
wailing in mock sorrow! She would become a living lie in human form, an
object of loathing to herself, and to me--who stand in the place of a
mother to her--from morning till night a martyrizing reproach! But what
do I care about myself--I would disguise myself as the goddess without
even making a wry face, and be led to the bier, and wail and groan so
that every hearer would be cut to the heart, for my soul is already
possessed by sorrow; it is like the eyes of a man, who has gone blind
from the constant flow of salt tears. Perhaps singing the hymns of
lamentation might relieve my soul, which is as full of sorrow as an
overbrimming cup; but I would rather that a cloud should for ever darken
the sun, that mists should hide every star from my eyes, and the air I
breathe be poisoned by black smoke than disguise her identity, and darken
her soul, or let her clear laugh be turned to shrieks of lamentation, and
her fresh and childlike spirit be buried in gloomy mourning. Sooner will
I go way with her and leave even you, to perish with my parents in misery
and anguish than see that happen, or suffer it for a moment."
As she spoke Serapion covered his face with his hands, and Klea, hastily
turning away from him, with a deep sigh returned to her room.
Irene was accustomed when she heard her step to hasten to meet her, but
to-day no one came to welcome her, and in their room, which was beginning
to be dark as twilight fell, she did not immediately catch sight of her
sister, for she was sitting all in a heap in a corner of the room, her
face hidden, in her hands and weeping quietly.
"What is the matter?" asked Klea, going tenderly up to the weeping child,
over whom she bent, endeavoring to raise her.
"Leave me," said Irene sobbing; she turned away from her sister with an
impatient gesture, repelling her caress like a perverse child; and then,
when Klea tried to soothe her by affectionately stroking her hair, she
sprang up passionately exclaiming through her tears:
"I could not help crying--and, from this hour, I must always have to cry.
The Corinthian Lysias spoke to me so kindly after the procession, and
you--you don't care about me at all and leave me alone all this time in
this nasty dusty hole! I declare I will not endure it any longer, and if
you try to keep me shut up, I will run away from this temple, for outside
it is all bright and pleasant, and here it is dingy and horrid!"
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A mere nothing in one man's life, to another may be great
A subdued tone generally provokes an equally subdued answer
Air of a professional guide
Before you serve me up so bitter a meal (the truth)
Blind tenderness which knows no reason
By nature she is not and by circumstances is compelled to be
Deceit is deceit
Desire to seek and find a power outside us
Inquisitive eyes are intrusive company
Many a one would rather be feared than remain unheeded
Not yet fairly come to the end of yesterday
The altar where truth is mocked at
Virtues are punished in this world
Who can be freer than he who needs nothing
Who only puts on his armor when he is threatened
THE SISTERS
By Georg Ebers
Volume 2.
CHAPTER VII.
In the very midst of the white wall with its bastions and ramparts, which
formed the fortifications of Memphis, stood the old palace of the kings,
a stately structure built of bricks, recently plastered, and with courts,
corridors, chambers and halls without number, and veranda-like
out-buildings of gayly-painted wood, and a magnificent pillared
banqueting-hall in the Greek style. It was surrounded by verdurous
gardens, and a whole host of laborers tended the flower-beds and shady
alleys, the shrubs and the trees; kept the tanks clean and fed the fish
in them; guarded the beast-garden, in which quadrupeds of every kind,
from the heavy-treading elephant to the light-footed antelope, were to be
seen, associated with birds innumerable of every country and climate.
A light white vapor rose from the splendidly fitted bath-house, loud
barkings resounded from the dog-kennels, and from the long array of open
stables came the neighing of horses with the clatter and stamp of hoofs,
and the rattle of harness and chains. A semicircular building of new
construction adjoining the old palace was the theatre, and many large
tents for the bodyguard, for ambassadors and scribes, as well as others,
serving as banqueting-halls for the various court-officials, stood both
within the garden and outside its enclosing walls. A large space leading
from the city itself to the royal citadel was given up to the soldiers,
and there, by the side of the shady court-yards, were the houses of the
police-guard and the prisons. Other soldiers were quartered in tents
close to the walls of the palace itself. The clatter of their arms and
the words of command, given in Greek, by their captain, sounded out at
this particular instant, and up into the part of the buildings occupied
by the queen; and her apartments were high up, for in summer time
Cleopatra preferred to live in airy tents, which stood among the
broad-leaved trees of the south and whole groves of flowering shrubs, on
the level roof of the palace, which was also lavishly decorated with
marble statues. There was only one way of access to this retreat, which
was fitted up with regal splendor; day and night it was fanned by
currents of soft air, and no one could penetrate uninvited to disturb the
queen's retirement, for veteran guards watched at the foot of the broad
stair that led to the roof, chosen from the Macedonian "Garde noble," and
owing as implicit obedience to Cleopatra as to the king himself. This
select corps was now, at sunset, relieving guard, and the queen could
hear the words spoken by the officers in command and the clatter of the
shields against the swords as they rattled on the pavement, for she had
come out of her tent into the open air, and stood gazing towards the
west, where the glorious hues of the sinking sun flooded the bare, yellow
limestone range of the Libyan hills, with their innumerable tombs and the
separate groups of pyramids; while the wonderful coloring gradually
tinged with rose-color the light silvery clouds that hovered in the clear
sky over the valley of Memphis, and edged them as with a rile of living
gold.
The queen stepped out of her tent, accompanied by a young Greek girl--the
fair Zoe, daughter of her master of the hunt Zenodotus, and Cleopatra's
favorite lady-in-waiting--but though she looked towards the west, she
stood unmoved by the magic of the glorious scene before her; she screened
her eyes with her hand to shade them from the blinding rays, and said:
"Where can Cornelius be staying! When we mounted our chariots before the
temple he had vanished, and as far as I can see the road in the quarters
of Sokari and Serapis I cannot discover his vehicle, nor that of Eulaeus
who was to accompany him. It is not very polite of him to go off in this
way without taking leave; nay, I could call it ungrateful, since I had
proposed to tell him on our way home all about my brother Euergetes, who
has arrived to-day with his friends. They are not yet acquainted, for
Euergetes was living in Cyrene when Publius Cornelius Scipio landed in
Alexandria. Stay! do you see a black shadow out there by the vineyard at
Kakem; That is very likely he; but no--you are right, it is only some
birds, flying in a close mass above the road. Can you see nothing more?
No!--and yet we both have sharp young eyes. I am very curious to know
whether Publius Scipio will like Euergetes. There can hardly be two
beings more unlike, and yet they have some very essential points in
common."
"They are both men," interrupted Zoe, looking at the queen as if she
expected cordial assent to this proposition.
"So they are," said Cleopatra proudly. "My brother is still so young
that, if he were not a king's son, he would hardly have outgrown the
stage of boyhood, and would be a lad among other Epheboi,--[Youths above
18 were so called]--and yet among the oldest there is hardly a man who is
his superior in strength of will and determined energy. Already, before I
married Philometor, he had clutched Alexandria and Cyrene, which by right
should belong to my husband, who is the eldest of us three, and that was
not very brotherly conduct--and indeed we had other grounds for being
angry with him; but when I saw him again for the first time after nine
months of separation I was obliged to forget them all, and welcome him as
though he had done nothing but good to me and his brother--who is my
husband, as is the custom of the families of Pharaohs and the usage of
our race. He is a young Titan, and no one would be astonished if he one
day succeeded in piling Pelion upon Ossa. I know well enough how wild he
can often be, how unbridled and recalcitrant beyond all bounds; but I can
easily pardon him, for the same bold blood flows in my own veins, and at
the root of all his excesses lies power, genuine and vigorous power. And
this innate pith and power are just the very thing we most admire in men,
for it is the one gift which the gods have dealt out to us with a less
liberal hand than to men. Life indeed generally dams its overflowing
current, but I doubt whether this will be the case with the stormy
torrent of his energy; at any rate men such as he is rush swiftly
onwards, and are strong to the end, which sooner or later is sure to
overtake them; and I infinitely prefer such a wild torrent to a shallow
brook flowing over a plain, which hurts no one, and which in order to
prolong its life loses itself in a misty bog. He, if any one, may be
forgiven for his tumultuous career; for when he pleases my brother's
great qualities charm old and young alike, and are as conspicuous and as
remarkable as his faults--nay, I will frankly say his crimes. And who in
Greece or Egypt surpasses him in grasp and elevation of mind?"
"You may well be proud of him," replied Zoe. "Not even Publius Scipio
himself can soar to the height reached by Euergetes."
"But, on the other hand, Euergetes is not gifted with the steady, calm
self-reliance of Cornelius. The man who should unite in one person the
good qualities of those two, need yield the palm, as it seems to me, not
even to a god!"
"Among us imperfect mortals he would indeed be the only perfect one,"
replied Zoe. "But the gods could not endure the existence of a perfect
man, for then they would have to undertake the undignified task of
competing with one of their own creatures."
"Here, however, comes one whom no one can accuse!" cried the young queen,
as she hastened to meet a richly dressed woman, older than herself, who
came towards her leading her son, a pale child of two years old. She bent
down to the little one, tenderly but with impetuous eagerness, and was
about to clasp him in her arms, but the fragile child, which at first had
smiled at her, was startled; he turned away from her and tried to hide
his little face in the dress of his nurse--a lady of rank-to whom he
clung with both hands. The queen threw herself on her knees before him,
took hold of his shoulder, and partly by coaxing and partly by insistence
strove to induce him to quit the sheltering gown and to turn to her; but
although the lady, his wet-nurse, seconded her with kind words of
encouragement, the terrified child began to cry, and resisted his
mother's caresses with more and more vehemence the more passionately she
tried to attract and conciliate him. At last the nurse lifted him up, and
was about to hand him to his mother, but the wilful little boy cried more
than before, and throwing his arms convulsively round his nurse's neck he
broke into loud cries.
In the midst of this rather unbecoming struggle of the mother against the
child's obstinacy, the clatter of wheels and of horses' hoofs rang
through the court-yard of the palace, and hardly had the sound reached
the queen's ears than she turned away from the screaming child, hurried
to the parapet of the roof, and called out to Zoe:
"Publius Scipio is here; it is high time that I should dress for the
banquet. Will that naughty child not listen to me at all? Take him away,
Praxinoa, and understand distinctly that I am much dissatisfied with you.
You estrange my own child from me to curry favor with the future king.
That is base, or else it proves that you have no tact, and are
incompetent for the office entrusted to you. The office of wet-nurse you
duly fulfilled, but I shall now look out for another attendant for the
boy. Do not answer me! no tears! I have had enough of that with the
child's screaming." With these words, spoken loudly and passionately, she
turned her back on Praxinoa--the wife of a distinguished Macedonian
noble, who stood as if petrified--and retired into her tent, where
branched lamps had just been placed on little tables of elegant
workmanship. Like all the other furniture in the queen's dressing-tent
these were made of gleaming ivory, standing out in fine relief from the
tent-cloth which was sky-blue woven with silver lilies and ears of corn,
and from the tiger-skins which covered all the cushions, while white
woollen carpets, bordered with a waving scroll in blue, were spread on
the ground.
The queen threw herself on a seat in front of her dressing-table, and sat
staring at herself in a mirror, as if she now saw her face and her
abundant, reddish-fair hair for the first time; then she said, half
turning to Zoe and half to her favorite Athenian waiting-maid, who stood
behind her with her other women:
"It was folly to dye my dark hair light; but now it may remain so, for
Publius Scipio, who has no suspicion of our arts, thought this color
pretty and uncommon, and never will know its origin. That Egyptian
headdress with the vulture's head which the king likes best to see me in,
the young Greek Lysias and the Roman too, call barbaric, and so every one
must call it who is not interested in the Egyptians. But to-night we are
only ourselves, so I will wear the chaplet of golden corn with sapphire
grapes. Do you think, Zoe, that with that I could wear the dress of
transparent bombyx silk that came yesterday from Cos? But no, I will not
wear that, for it is too slight a tissue, it hides nothing and I am now
too thin for it to become me. All the lines in my throat show, and my
elbows are quite sharp--altogether I am much thinner. That comes of
incessant worry, annoyance, and anxiety. How angry I was yesterday at the
council, because my husband will always give way and agree and try to be
pleasant; whenever a refusal is necessary I have to interfere, unwilling
as I am to do it, and odious as it is to me always to have to stir up
discontent, disappointment, and disaffection, to take things on myself
and to be regarded as hard and heartless in order that my husband may
preserve undiminished the doubtful glory of being the gentlest and
kindest of men and princes. My son's having a will of his own leads to
agitating scenes, but even that is better than that Philopator should
rush into everybody's arms. The first thing in bringing up a boy should
be to teach him to say 'no.' I often say 'yes' myself when I should not,
but I am a woman, and yielding becomes us better than refusal--and what
is there of greater importance to a woman than to do what becomes her
best, and to seem beautiful?
"I will decide on this pale dress, and put over it the net-work of gold
thread with sapphire knots; that will go well with the head-dress. Take
care with your comb, Thais, you are hurting me! Now--I must not chatter
any more. Zoe, give me the roll yonder; I must collect my thoughts a
little before I go down to talk among men at the banquet. When we have
just come from visiting the realm of death and of Serapis, and have been
reminded of the immortality of the soul and of our lot in the next world,
we are glad to read through what the most estimable of human thinkers has
said concerning such things. Begin here, Zoe."
Cleopatra's companion, thus addressed, signed to the unoccupied
waiting-women to withdraw, seated herself on a low cushion opposite the
queen, and began to read with an intelligent and practised intonation;
the reading went on for some time uninterrupted by any sound but the
clink of metal ornaments, the rustle of rich stuffs, the trickle of oils
or perfumes as they were dropped into the crystal bowls, the short and
whispered questions of the women who were attiring the queen, or
Cleopatra's no less low and rapid answers.
All the waiting-women not immediately occupied about the queen's
person--perhaps twenty in all, young and old-ranged themselves along the
sides of the great tent, either standing or sitting on the ground or on
cushions, and awaiting the moment when it should be their turn to perform
some service, as motionless as though spellbound by the mystical words of
a magician. They only made signs to each other with their eyes and
fingers, for they knew that the queen did not choose to be disturbed when
she was being read to, and that she never hesitated to cast aside
anything or anybody that crossed her wishes or inclinations, like a tight
shoe or a broken lutestring.
Her features were irregular and sharp, her cheekbones too strongly
developed, and the lips, behind which her teeth gleamed pearly
white-though too widely set--were too full; still, so long as she exerted
her great powers of concentration, and listened with flashing eyes, like
those of a prophetess, and parted lips to the words of Plato, her face
had worn an indescribable glow of feeling, which seemed to have come upon
her from a higher and better world, and she had looked far more beautiful
than now when she was fully dressed, and when her women crowded round
leer--Zoe having laid aside the Plato--with loud and unmeasured flattery.
Cleopatra delighted in being thus feted, and, in order to enjoy the
adulation of a throng, she would always when dressing have a great number
of women to attend her toilet; mirrors were held up to her on every side,
a fold set right, and the jewelled straps of her sandals adjusted.
One praised the abundance of her hair, another the slenderness of her
form, the slimness of her ankles, and the smallness of her tiny hands and
feet. One maiden remarked to another--but loud enough to be heard--on the
brightness of her eyes which were clearer than the sapphires on her brow,
while the Athenian waiting-woman, Thais, declared that Cleopatra had
grown fatter, for her golden belt was less easy to clasp than it had been
ten days previously.
The queen presently signed to Zoe, who threw a little silver ball into a
bowl of the same metal, elaborately wrought and decorated, and in a few
minutes the tramp of the body-guard was audible outside the door of the
tent.
Cleopatra went out, casting a rapid glance over the roof--now brightly
illuminated with cressets and torches--and the white marble statues that
gleamed out in relief against the dark clumps of shrubs; and then,
without even looking at the tent where her children were asleep, she
approached the litter, which had been brought up to the roof for her by
the young Macedonian nobles. Zoe and Thais assisted her to mount into it,
and her ladies, waiting-women, and others who had hurried out of the
other tents, formed a row on each side of the way, and hailed their
mistress with loud cries of admiration and delight as she passed by,
lifted high above them all on the shoulders of her bearers. The diamonds
in the handle of her feather-fan sparkled brightly as Cleopatra waved a
gracious adieu to her women, an adieu which did not fail to remind them
how infinitely beneath her were those she greeted. Every movement of her
hand was full of regal pride, and her eyes, unveiled and untempered, were
radiant with a young woman's pleasure in a perfect toilet, with
satisfaction in her own person, and with the anticipation of the festive
hours before her.
The litter disappeared behind the door of the broad steps that led up to
the roof, and Thais, sighing softly, said to herself, "If only for once I
could ride through the air in just such a pretty shell of colored and
shining mother-of-pearl, like a goddess! carried aloft by young men, and
hailed and admired by all around me! High up there the growing Selene
floats calmly and silently by the tiny stars, and just so did she ride
past in her purple robe with her torch-bearers and flames and lights-past
us humble creatures, and between the tents to the banquet--and to what a
banquet, and what guests! Everything up here greets her with rejoicing,
and I could almost fancy that among those still marble statues even the
stern face of Zeno had parted its lips, and spoken flattering words to
her. And yet poor little Zoe, and the fair-haired Lysippa, and the
black-haired daughter of Demetrius, and even I, poor wretch, should be
handsomer, far handsomer than she, if we could dress ourselves with fine
clothes and jewels for which kings would sell their kingdoms; if we could
play Aphrodite as she does, and ride off in a shell borne aloft on
emerald-green glass to look as if it were floating on the waves; if
dolphins set with pearls and turquoises served us for a footstool, and
white ostrich-plumes floated over our heads, like the silvery clouds that
float over Athens in the sky of a fine spring day. The transparent tissue
that she dared not put on would well become me! If only that were true
which Zoe was reading yesterday, that the souls of men were destined to
visit the earth again and again in new forms! Then perhaps mine might
some day come into the world in that of a king's child. I should not care
to be a prince, so much is expected of him, but a princess indeed! That
would be lovely!"
These and such like were Thais' dreams, while Zoe stood outside the tent
of the royal children with her cousin, the chief-attendant of prince
Philopator, carrying on an eager conversation in a low tone. The child's
nurse from time to time dried her eyes and sobbed bitterly as she said:
"My own baby, my other children, my husband and our beautiful house in
Alexandria--I left them all to suckle and rear a prince. I have
sacrificed happiness, freedom, and my nights'-sleep for the sake of the
queen and of this child, and how am I repaid for all this? As if I were a
lowborn wench instead of the daughter and wife of noble men; this woman,
half a child still, scarcely yet nineteen, dismisses me from her service
before you and all her ladies every ten days! And why? Because the
ungoverned blood of her race flows in her son's veins, and because he
does not rush into the arms of a mother who for days does not ask for him
at all, and never troubles herself about him but in some idle moment when
she has gratified every other whim. Princes distribute favor or disgrace
with justice only so long as they are children. The little one
understands very well what I am to him, and sees what Cleopatra is. If I
could find it in my heart to ill-use him in secret, this mother--who is
not fit to be a mother--would soon have her way. Hard as it would be to
me so soon to leave the poor feeble little child, who has grown as dear
to my soul as my own--aye and closer, even closer, as I may well
say--this time I will do it, even at the risk of Cleopatra's plunging us
into ruin, my husband and me, as she has done to so many who have dared
to contravene her will."
The wet-nurse wept aloud, but Zoe laid her hand on the distressed woman's
shoulder, and said soothingly: "I know you have more to submit to from
Cleopatra's humors than any of us all, but do not be overhasty. Tomorrow
she will send you a handsome present, as she so often has done after
being unkind; and though she vexes and hurts you again and again, she
will try to make up for it again and again till, when this year is over,
your attendance on the prince will be at an end, and you can go home
again to your own family. We all have to practise patience; we live like
people dwelling in a ruinous house with to-day a stone and to-morrow a
beam threatening to fall upon our heads. If we each take calmly whatever
befalls us our masters try to heal our wounds, but if we resist may the
gods have mercy on us! for Cleopatra is like a strung bow, which sets the
arrow flying as soon as a child, a mouse, a breath of air even touches
it--like an over-full cup which brims over if a leaf, another drop, a
single tear falls into it. We should, any one of us, soon be worn out by
such a life, but she needs excitement, turmoil and amusement at every
hour. She comes home late from a feast, spends barely six hours in
disturbed slumber, and has hardly rested so long as it takes a pebble to
fall to the ground from a crane's claw before we have to dress her again
for another meal. From the council-board she goes to hear some learned
discourse, from her books in the temple to sacrifice and prayer, from the
sanctuary to the workshops of artists, from pictures and statues to the
audience-chamber, from a reception of her subjects and of foreigners to
her writing-room, from answering letters to a procession and worship once
more, from the sacred services back again to her dressing-tent, and
there, while she is being attired she listens to me while I read the most
profound works--and how she listens! not a word escapes her, and her
memory retains whole sentences. Amid all this hurry and scurry her spirit
must need be like a limb that is sore from violent exertion, and that is
painfully tender to every rough touch. We are to her neither more nor
less than the wretched flies which we hit at when they trouble us, and
may the gods be merciful to those on whom this queen's hand may fall!
Euergetes cleaves with the sword all that comes in his way. Cleopatra
stabs with the dagger, and her hand wields the united power of her own
might and of her yielding husband's. Do not provoke her. Submit to what
you cannot avert; just as I never complain when, if I make a mistake in
reading, she snatches the book from my hand, or flings it at my feet. But
I, of course, have only myself to fear for, and you have your husband and
children as well."
Praxinoa bowed her head at these words in sad assent, and said:
"Thank you for those words! I always think only from my heart, and you
mostly from your head. You are right, this time again there is nothing
for me to do but to be patient; but when I have fulfilled the duties
here, which I undertook, and am at home again, I will offer a great
sacrifice to Asclepias and Hygiea, like a person recovered from a severe
illness; and one thing I know: that I would rather be a poor girl,
grinding at a mill, than change with this rich and adored queen who, in
order to enjoy her life to the utmost, carelessly and restlessly hurries
past all that our mortal lot has best to offer. Terrible, hideous to me
seems such an existence with no rest in it! and the heart of a mother
which is so much occupied with other things that she cannot win the love
of her child, which blossoms for every hired nurse, must be as waste as
the desert! Rather would I endure anything--everything--with patience
than be such a queen!"
CHAPTER VIII.
"What! No one to come to meet me?" asked the queen, as she reached the
foot of the last flight of porphyry steps that led into the ante-chamber
to the banqueting-hall, and, looking round, with an ominous glance, at
the chamberlains who had accompanied her, she clinched her small fist. "I
arrive and find no one here!"
The "No one" certainly was a figure of speech, since more than a hundred
body-guards-Macedonians in rich array of arms-and an equal number of
distinguished court-officials were standing on the marble flags of the
vast hall, which was surrounded by colonnades, while the star-spangled
night-sky was all its roof; and the court-attendants were all men of
rank, dignified by the titles of fathers, brothers, relatives, friends
and chief-friends of the king.
These all received the queen with a many-voiced "Hail!" but not one of
them seemed worthy of Cleopatra's notice. This crowd was less to her than
the air we breathe in order to live--a mere obnoxious vapor, a whirl of
dust which the traveller would gladly avoid, but which he must
nevertheless encounter in order to proceed on his way.
The queen had expected that the few guests, invited by her selection and
that of her brother Euergetes to the evening's feast, would have welcomed
her here at the steps; she thought they would have seen her--as she felt
herself--like a goddess borne aloft in her shell, and that she might have
exulted in the admiring astonishment of the Roman and of Lysias, the
Corinthian: and now the most critical instant in the part she meant to
play that evening had proved a failure, and it suggested itself to her
mind that she might be borne back to her roof-tent, and be floated down
once more when she was sure of the presence of the company. But there was
one thing she dreaded more even than pain and remorse, and that was any
appearance of the ridiculous; so she only commanded the bearers to stand
still, and while the master of the ceremonies, waiving his dignity,
hurried off to announce to her husband that she was approaching, she
signed to the nobles highest in rank to approach, that she might address
a few gracious words to them, with distant amiability. Only a few
however, for the doors of thyia wood leading into the banqueting hall
itself, presently opened, and the king with his friends came forward to
meet Cleopatra.
"How were we to expect you so early?" cried Philometor to his wife.
"Is it really still early?" asked the queen, "or have I only taken you by
surprise, because you had forgotten to expect me?"
"How unjust you are!" replied the king. "Must you now be told that, come
as early as you will, you always come too late for my desires."
"But for ours," cried Lysias, "neither too early nor too late, but at the
very right time--like returning health and happiness, or the victor's
crown."
"Health as taking the place of sickness?" asked Cleopatra, and her eyes
sparkled keenly and merrily. "I perfectly understand Lysias," said
Publius, intercepting the Greek. "Once, on the field of Mars, I was flung
from my horse, and had to lie for weeks on my couch, and I know that
there is no more delightful sensation than that of feeling our departed
strength returning as we recover. He means to say that in your presence
we must feel exceptionally well."
"Nay rather," interrupted Lysias, "our queen seems to come to us like
returning health, since so long as she was not in our midst we felt
suffering and sick for longing. Thy presence, Cleopatra, is the most
effectual remedy, and restores us to our lost health."
Cleopatra politely lowered her fan, as if in thanks, thus rapidly turning
the stick of it in her hand, so as to make the diamonds that were set in
it sparkle and flash. Then she turned to the friends, and said:
"Your words are most amiable, and your different ways of expressing your
meaning remind me of two gems set in a jewel, one of which sparkles
because it is skilfully cut, and reflects every light from its mirrorlike
facets, while the other shines by its genuine and intrinsic fire. The
genuine and the true are one, and the Egyptians have but one word for
both, and your kind speech, my Scipio--but I may surely venture to call
you Publius--your kind speech, my Publius seems to me to be truer than
that of your accomplished friend, which is better adapted to vainer ears
than mine. Pray, give me your hand."
The shell in which she was sitting was gently lowered, and, supported by
Publius and her husband, the queen alighted and entered the
banqueting-hall, accompanied by her guests.
As soon as the curtains were closed, and when Cleopatra had exchanged a
few whispered words with her husband, she turned again to the Roman, who
had just been joined by Eulaeus, and said:
"You have come from Athens, Publius, but you do not seem to have followed
very closely the courses of logic there, else how could it be that you,
who regard health as the highest good--that you, who declared that you
never felt so well as in my presence--should have quitted me so promptly
after the procession, and in spite of our appointment? May I be allowed
to ask what business--"
"Our noble friend," answered Eulaeus, bowing low, but not allowing the
queen to finish her speech, "would seem to have found some particular
charm in the bearded recluses of Serapis, and to be seeking among them
the key-stone of his studies at Athens."
"In that he is very right," said the queen. "For from them he can learn
to direct his attention to that third division of our existence,
concerning which least is taught in Athens--I mean the future--"
"That is in the hands of the gods," replied the Roman. "It will come soon
enough, and I did not discuss it with the anchorite. Eulaeus may be
informed that, on the contrary, everything I learned from that singular
man in the Serapeum bore reference to the things of the past."
"But how can it be possible," said Eulaeus, "that any one to whom
Cleopatra had offered her society should think so long of anything else
than the beautiful present?"
"You indeed have good reason," retorted Publius quickly, "to enter the
lists in behalf of the present, and never willingly to recall the past."
"It was full of anxiety and care," replied Eulaeus with perfect
self-possession. "That my sovereign lady must know from her illustrious
mother, and from her own experience; and she will also protect me from
the undeserved hatred with which certain powerful enemies seem minded to
pursue me. Permit me, your majesty, not to make my appearance at the
banquet until later. This noble gentleman kept me waiting for hours in
the Serapeum, and the proposals concerning the new building in the temple
of Isis at Philae must be drawn up and engrossed to-day, in order that
they may be brought to-morrow before your royal husband in council and
your illustrious brother Euergetes--"
"You have leave, interrupted Cleopatra."
As soon as Eulaeus had disappeared, the queen went closer up to Publius,
and said:
"You are annoyed with this man--well, he is not pleasant, but at any rate
he is useful and worthy. May I ask whether you only feel his personality
repugnant to you, or whether actual circumstances have given rise to your
aversion--nay, if I have judged rightly, to a very bitterly hostile
feeling against him?"
"Both," replied Publius. "In this unmanly man, from the very first, I
expected to find nothing good, and I now know that, if I erred at all, it
was in his favor. To-morrow I will ask you to spare me an hour when I can
communicate to your majesty something concerning him, but which is too
repulsive and sad to be suitable for telling in an evening devoted to
enjoyment. You need not be inquisitive, for they are matters that belong
to the past, and which concern neither you nor me."
The high-steward and the cup-bearer here interrupted this conversation by
calling them to table, and the royal pair were soon reclining with their
guests at the festal board.
Oriental splendor and Greek elegance were combined in the decorations of
the saloon of moderate size, in which Ptolemy Philometor was wont to
prefer to hold high-festival with a few chosen friends. Like the great
reception-hall and the men's hall-with its twenty doors and lofty
porphyry columns--in which the king's guests assembled, it was lighted
from above, since it was only at the sides that the walls--which had no
windows--and a row of graceful alabaster columns with Corinthian
acanthus-capitals supported a narrow roof; the centre of the hall was
quite uncovered. At this hour, when it was blazing with hundreds of
lights, the large opening, which by day admitted the bright sunshine, was
closed over by a gold net-work, decorated with stars and a crescent moon
of rock-crystal, and the meshes were close enough to exclude the bats and
moths which at night always fly to the light. But the illumination of the
king's banqueting-hall made it almost as light as day, consisting of
numerous lamps with many branches held up by lovely little figures of
children in bronze and marble. Every joint was plainly visible in the
mosaic of the pavement, which represented the reception of Heracles into
Olympus, the feast of the gods, and the astonishment of the amazed hero
at the splendor of the celestial banquet; and hundreds of torches were
reflected in the walls of polished yellow marble, brought from Hippo
Regius; these were inlaid by skilled artists with costly stones, such as
lapis lazuli and malachite, crystals, blood-stone, jasper, agates and
chalcedony, to represent fruit-pieces and magnificent groups of game or
of musical instruments; while the pilasters were decorated with masks of
the tragic and comic Muses, torches, thyrsi wreathed with ivy and vine,
and pan-pipes. These were wrought in silver and gold, and set with costly
marbles, and they stood out from the marble background like metal work on
a leather shield, or the rich ornamentation on a sword-sheath. The
figures of a Dionysiac procession, forming the frieze, looked down upon
the feasters--a fine relievo that had been designed and modelled for
Ptolemy Soter by the sculptor Bryaxis, and then executed in ivory and
gold.
Everything that met the eye in this hall was splendid, costly, and above
all of a genial aspect, even before Cleopatra had come to the throne; and
she--here as in her own apartments--had added the busts of the greatest
Greek philosophers and poets, from Thales of Miletus down to Strato, who
raised chance to fill the throne of God, and from Hesiod to Callimachus;
she too had placed the tragic mask side by side with the comic, for at
her table--she was wont to say--she desired to see no one who could not
enjoy grave and wise discourse more than eating, drinking, and laughter.
Instead of assisting at the banquet, as other ladies used, seated on a
chair or at the foot of her husband's couch, she reclined on a couch of
her own, behind which stood busts of Sappho the poetess, and Aspasia the
friend of Pericles.
Though she made no pretensions to be regarded as a philosopher nor even
as a poetess, she asserted her right to be considered a finished
connoisseur in the arts of poetry and music; and if she preferred
reclining to sitting how should she have done otherwise, since she was
fully aware how well it became her to extend herself in a picturesque
attitude on her cushions, and to support her head on her arm as it rested
on the back of her couch; for that arm, though not strictly speaking
beautiful, always displayed the finest specimens of Alexandrian
workmanship in gem-cutting and goldsmiths' work.
But, in fact, she selected a reclining posture particularly for the sake
of showing her feet; not a woman in Egypt or Greece had a smaller or more
finely formed foot than she. For this reason her sandals were so made
that when she stood or walked they protected only the soles of her feet,
and her slender white toes with the roseate nails and their polished
white half-moons were left uncovered.
At the banquet she put off her shoes altogether, as the men did; hiding
her feet at first however, and not displaying them till she thought the
marks left on her tender skin by the straps of the sandals had completely
disappeared.
Eulaeus was the greatest admirer of these feet; not, as he averred, on
account of their beauty, but because the play of the queen's toes showed
him exactly what was passing in her mind, when he was quite unable to
detect what was agitating her soul in the expression of her mouth and
eyes, well practised in the arts of dissimulation.
Nine couches, arranged three and three in a horseshoe, invited the guests
to repose, with their arms of ebony and cushions of dull olive-green
brocade, on which a delicate pattern of gold and silver seemed just to
have been breathed.
The queen, shrugging her shoulders, and, as it would seem, by no means
agreeably surprised at something, whispered to the chamberlain, who then
indicated to each guest the place he was to occupy. To the right of the
central group reclined the queen, and her husband took his place to the
left; the couch between the royal pair, destined for their brother
Euergetes, remained unoccupied.
On one of the three couches which formed the right-hand angle with those
of the royal family, Publius found a place next to Cleopatra; opposite to
him, and next the king, was Lysias the Corinthian. Two places next to him
remained vacant, while on the side by the Roman reclined the brave and
prudent Hierax, the friend of Ptolemy Euergetes and his most faithful
follower.
While the servants strewed the couches with rose leaves, sprinkled
perfumed waters, and placed by the couch of each guest a small table-made
of silver and of a slab of fine, reddish-brown porphyry, veined with
white-the king addressed a pleasant greeting to each guest, apologizing
for the smallness of the number.
"Eulaeus," he said, "has been forced to leave us on business, and our
royal brother is still sitting over his books with Aristarchus, who came
with him from Alexandria; but he promised certainly to come."
"The fewer we are," replied Lysias, bowing low, "the more honorable is
the distinction of belonging to so limited a number of your majesty's
most select associates."
"I certainly think we have chosen the best from among the good," said the
queen. "But even the small number of friends I had invited must have
seemed too large to my brother Euergetes, for he--who is accustomed to
command in other folks' houses as he does in his own--forbid the
chamberlain to invite our learned friends--among whom Agatharchides, my
brothers' and my own most worthy tutor, is known to you--as well as our
Jewish friends who were present yesterday at our table, and whom I had
set down on my list. I am very well satisfied however, for I like the
number of the Muses; and perhaps he desired to do you, Publius,
particular honor, since we are assembled here in the Roman fashion. It is
in your honor, and not in his, that we have no music this evening; you
said that you did not particularly like it at a banquet. Euergetes
himself plays the harp admirably. However, it is well that he is late in
coming as usual, for the day after tomorrow is his birthday, and he is to
spend it here with us and not in Alexandria; the priestly delegates
assembled in the Bruchion are to come from thence to Memphis to wish him
joy, and we must endeavor to get up some brilliant festival. You have no
love for Eulaeus, Publius, but he is extremely skilled in such matters,
and I hope he will presently return to give us his advice."
"For the morning we will have a grand procession," cried the king.
"Euergetes delights in a splendid spectacle, and I should be glad to show
him how much pleasure his visit has given us."
The king's fine features wore a most winning expression as he spoke these
words with heart-felt warmth, but his consort said thoughtfully: "Aye! if
only we were in Alexandria--but here, among all the Egyptian people--"
CHAPTER IX.
A loud laugh re-echoing from the marble walls of the state-room
interrupted the queen's speech; at first she started, but then smiled
with pleasure as she recognized her brother Euergetes, who, pushing aside
the chamberlains, approached the company with an elderly Greek, who
walked by his side.
"By all the dwellers on Olympus! By the whole rabble of gods and beasts
that live in the temples by the Nile!" cried the new-comer, again
laughing so heartily that not only his fat cheeks but his whole immensely
stout young frame swayed and shook. "By your pretty little feet,
Cleopatra, which could so easily be hidden, and yet are always to be
seen--by all your gentle virtues, Philometor, I believe you are trying to
outdo the great Philadelphus or our Syrian uncle Antiochus, and to get up
a most unique procession; and in my honor! Just so! I myself will take a
part in the wonderful affair, and my sturdy person shall represent Eros
with his quiver and bow. Some Ethiopian dame must play the part of my
mother Aphrodite; she will look the part to perfection, rising from the
white sea-foam with her black skin. And what do you think of a Pallas
with short woolly hair; of the Charities with broad, flat Ethiopian feet;
and an Egyptian, with his shaven head mirroring the sun, as Phoebus
Apollo?"
With these words the young giant of twenty years threw himself on the
vacant couch between his brother and sister, and, after bowing, not
without dignity, to the Roman, whom his brother named to him, he called
one of the young Macedonians of noble birth who served at the feast as
cup-bearers, had his cup filled once and again and yet a third time,
drinking it off quickly and without setting it down; then he said in a
loud tone, while he pushed his hands through his tossed, light brown
hair, till it stood straight up in the air from his broad temples and
high brow:
"I must make up for what you have had before I came.--Another cup-full
Diocleides."
"Wild boy!" said Cleopatra, holding up her finger at him half in jest and
half in grave warning. "How strange you look!"
"Like Silenus without the goat's hoofs," answered Euergetes. "Hand me a
mirror here, Diocleides; follow the eyes of her majesty the queen, and
you will be sure to find one. There is the thing! And in fact the picture
it shows me does not displease me. I see there a head on which besides
the two crowns of Egypt a third might well find room, and in which there
is so much brains that they might suffice to fill the skulls of four
kings to the brim. I see two vulture's eyes which are always keen of
sight even when their owner is drunk, and that are in danger of no peril
save from the flesh of these jolly cheeks, which, if they continue to
increase so fast, must presently exclude the light, as the growth of the
wood encloses a piece of money stuck into a rift in a tree-or as a
shutter, when it is pushed to, closes up a window. With these hands and
arms the fellow I see in the mirror there could, at need, choke a
hippopotamus; the chain that is to deck this neck must be twice as long
as that worn by a well-fed Egyptian priest. In this mirror I see a man,
who is moulded out of a sturdy clay, baked out of more unctuous and solid
stuff than other folks; and if the fine creature there on the bright
surface wears a transparent robe, what have you to say against it,
Cleopatra? The Ptolemaic princes must protect the import trade of
Alexandria, that fact was patent even to the great son of Lagus; and what
would become of our commerce with Cos if I did not purchase the finest
bombyx stuffs, since those who sell it make no profits out of you, the
queen--and you cover yourself, like a vestal virgin, in garments of
tapestry. Give me a wreath for my head--aye and another to that, and new
wine in the cup! To the glory of Rome and to your health, Publius
Cornelius Scipio, and to our last critical conjecture, my Aristarchus--to
subtle thinking and deep drinking!"
"To deep thinking and subtle drinking!" retorted the person thus
addressed, while he raised the cup, looked into the wine with his
twinkling eyes and lifted it slowly to his nose--a long, well-formed and
slightly aquiline nose--and to his thin lips.
"Oh! Aristarchus," exclaimed Euergetes, and he frowned. "You please me
better when you clear up the meaning of your poets and historians than
when you criticise the drinking-maxims of a king. Subtle drinking is mere
sipping, and sipping I leave to the bitterns and other birds that live
content among the reeds. Do you understand me? Among reeds, I
say--whether cut for writing, or no."
"By subtle drinking," replied the great critic with perfect indifference,
as he pushed the thin, gray hair from his high brow with his slender
hand. "By subtle drinking I mean the drinking of choice wine, and did you
ever taste anything more delicate than this juice of the vines of
Anthylla that your illustrious brother has set before us? Your
paradoxical axiom commends you at once as a powerful thinker and as the
benevolent giver of the best of drinks."
"Happily turned," exclaimed Cleopatra, clapping her hands, "you here see,
Publius, a proof of the promptness of an Alexandrian tongue."
"Yes!" said Euergetes, "if men could go forth to battle with words
instead of spears the masters of the Museum in Alexander's city, with
Aristarchus at their head, they might rout the united armies of Rome and
Carthage in a couple of hours."
"But we are not now in the battle-field but at a peaceful meal," said the
king, with suave amiability. "You did in fact overhear our secret
Euergetes, and mocked at my faithful Egyptians, in whose place I would
gladly set fair Greeks if only Alexandria still belonged to me instead of
to you.--However, a splendid procession shall not be wanting at your
birthday festival."
"And do you really still take pleasure in these eternal goose-step
performances?" asked Euergetes, stretching himself out on his couch, and
folding his hands to support the back of his head. "Sooner could I
accustom myself to the delicate drinking of Aristarchus than sit for
hours watching these empty pageants. On two conditions only can I declare
myself ready and willing to remain quiet, and patiently to dawdle through
almost half a day, like an ape in a cage: First, if it will give our
Roman friend Publius Cornelius Scipio any pleasure to witness such a
performance--though, since our uncle Antiochus pillaged our wealth, and
since we brothers shared Egypt between us, our processions are not to be
even remotely compared to the triumphs of Roman victors--or, secondly, if
I am allowed to take an active part in the affair."
"On my account, Sire," replied Publius, "no procession need be arranged,
particularly not such a one as I should here be obliged to look on at."
"Well! I still enjoy such things," said Cleopatra's husband.
"Well-arranged groups, and the populace pleased and excited are a sight I
am never tired of."
"As for me," cried Cleopatra, "I often turn hot and cold, and the tears
even spring to my eyes, when the shouting is loudest. A great mass of men
all uniting in a common emotion always has a great effect. A drop, a
grain of sand, a block of stone are insignificant objects, but millions
of them together, forming the sea, the desert or the pyramids, constitute
a sublime whole. One man alone, shouting for joy, is like a madman
escaped from an asylum, but when thousands of men rejoice together it
must have a powerful effect on the coldest heart. How is it that you,
Publius Scipio, in whom a strong will seems to me to have found a
peculiarly happy development, can remain unmoved by a scene in which the
great collective will of a people finds its utterance?"
"Is there then any expression of will, think you," said the Roman, "in
this popular rejoicing? It is just in such circumstances that each man
becomes the involuntary mimic and duplicate of his neighbor; while I love
to make my own way, and to be independent of everything but the laws and
duties laid upon me by the state to which I belong."
"And I," said Euergetes, "from my childhood have always looked on at
processions from the very best places, and so it is that fortune punishes
me now with indifference to them and to everything of the kind; while the
poor miserable devil who can never catch sight of anything more than the
nose or the tip of a hair or the broad back of those who take part in
them, always longs for fresh pageants. As you hear, I need have no
consideration for Publius Scipio in this, willing as I should be to do
so. Now what would you say, Cleopatra, if I myself took a part in my
procession--I say mine, since it is to be in my honor; that really would
be for once something new and amusing."
"More new and amusing than creditable, I think," replied Cleopatra dryly.
"And yet even that ought to please you," laughed Euergetes. "Since,
besides being your brother, I am your rival, and we would sooner see our
rivals lower themselves than rise."
"Do not try to justify yourself by such words," interrupted the king
evasively, and with a tone of regret in his soft voice. "We love you
truly; we are ready to yield you your dominion side by side with ours,
and I beg you to avoid such speeches even in jest, so that bygones may be
bygones."
"And," added Cleopatra, "not to detract from your dignity as a king and
your fame as a sage by any such fool's pranks."
"Madam teacher, do you know then what I had in my mind? I would appear as
Alcibiades, followed by a train of flute-playing women, with Aristarchus
to play the part of Socrates. I have often been told that he and I
resemble each other--in many points, say the more sincere; in every
point, say the more polite of my friends."
At these words Publius measured with his eye the frame of the royal young
libertine, enveloped in transparent robes; and recalling to himself, as
he gazed, a glorious statue of that favorite of the Athenians, which he
had seen in the Ilissus, an ironical smile passed over his lips. It was
not unobserved by Euergetes and it offended him, for there was nothing he
liked better than to be compared to the nephew of Pericles; but he
suppressed his annoyance, for Publius Cornelius Scipio was the nearest
relative of the most influential men of Rome, and, though he himself
wielded royal power, Rome exercised over him the sovereign will of a
divinity.
Cleopatra noticed what was passing in her brother's mind, and in order to
interrupt his further speech and to divert his mind to fresh thoughts,
she said cheerfully:
"Let us then give up the procession, and think of some other mode of
celebrating your birthday. You, Lysias, must be experienced in such
matters, for Publius tells me that you were the leader in all the games
of Corinth. What can we devise to entertain Euergetes and ourselves?"
The Corinthian looked for a moment into his cup, moving it slowly about
on the marble slab of the little table at his side, between an oyster
pasty and a dish of fresh asparagus; and then he said, glancing round to
win the suffrages of the company:
"At the great procession which took place under Ptolemy
Philadelphus--Agatharchides gave me the description of it, written by the
eye-witness Kallixenus, to read only yesterday--all kinds of scenes from
the lives of the gods were represented before the people. Suppose we were
to remain in this magnificent palace, and to represent ourselves the
beautiful groups which the great artists of the past have produced in
painting or sculpture; but let us choose those only that are least
known."
"Splendid," cried Cleopatra in great excitement, who can be more like
Heracles than my mighty brother there--the very son of Alcmene, as
Lysippus has conceived and represented him? Let us then represent the
life of Heracles from grand models, and in every case assign to Euergetes
the part of the hero."
"Oh! I will undertake it," said the young king, feeling the mighty
muscles of his breast and arms, "and you may give me great credit for
assuming the part, for the demi-god who strangled the snakes was lacking
in the most important point, and it was not without due consideration
that Lysippus represented him with a small head on his mighty body; but I
shall not have to say anything."
"If I play Omphale will you sit at my feet?" asked Cleopatra.
"Who would not be willing to sit at those feet?" answered Euergetes. "Let
us at once make further choice among the abundance of subjects offered to
us, but, like Lysias, I would warn you against those that are too
well-known."
"There are no doubt things commonplace to the eye as well as to the ear,"
said Cleopatra. "But what is recognized as good is commonly regarded as
most beautiful."
"Permit me," said Lysias, "to direct your attention to a piece of
sculpture in marble of the noblest workmanship, which is both old and
beautiful, and yet which may be known to few among you. It exists on the
cistern of my father's house at Corinth, and was executed many centuries
since by a great artist of the Peloponnesus. Publius was delighted with
the work, and it is in fact beautiful beyond description. It is an
exquisite representation of the marriage of Heracles and Hebe--of the
hero, raised to divinity, with sempiternal youth. Will Your Majesty allow
yourself to be led by Pallas Athene and your mother Alcmene to your
nuptials with Hebe?"
"Why not?" said Euergetes. "Only the Hebe must be beautiful. But one
thing must be considered; how are we to get the cistern from your
father's house at Corinth to this place by to-morrow or next day? Such a
group cannot be posed from memory without the original to guide us; and
though the story runs that the statue of Serapis flew from Sinope to
Alexandria, and though there are magicians still at Memphis--"
"We shall not need them," interrupted Publius, "while I was staying as a
guest in the house of my friend's parents--which is altogether more
magnificent than the old castle of King Gyges at Sardis--I had some gems
engraved after this lovely group, as a wedding-present for my sister.
They are extremely successful, and I have them with me in my tent."
"Have you a sister?" asked the queen, leaning over towards the Roman.
"You must tell me all about her."
"She is a girl like all other girls," replied Publius, looking down at
the ground, for it was most repugnant to his feelings to speak of his
sister in the presence of Euergetes.
"And you are unjust like all other brothers," said Cleopatra smiling,
"and I must hear more about her, for"--and she whispered the words and
looked meaningly at Publius--"all that concerns you must interest me."
During this dialogue the royal brothers had addressed themselves to
Lysias with questions as to the marriage of Heracles and Hebe, and all
the company were attentive to the Greek as he went on: "This fine work
does not represent the marriage properly speaking, but the moment when
the bridegroom is led to the bride. The hero, with his club on his
shoulder, and wearing the lion's skin, is led by Pallas Athene, who, in
performing this office of peace, has dropped her spear and carries her
helmet in her hand; they are accompanied by his mother Alcmene, and are
advancing towards the bride's train. This is headed by no less a
personage than Apollo himself, singing the praises of Hymenaeus to a
lute. With him walks his sister Artemis and behind them the mother of
Hebe, accompanied by Hermes, the messenger of the gods, as the envoy of
Zeus. Then follows the principal group, which is one of the most lovely
works of Greek art that I am acquainted with. Hebe comes forward to meet
her bridegroom, gently led on by Aphrodite, the queen of love. Peitho,
the goddess of persuasion, lays her hand on the bride's arm,
imperceptibly urging her forward and turning away her face; for what she
had to say has been said, and she smiles to herself, for Hebe has not
turned a deaf ear to her voice, and he who has once listened to Peitho
must do what she desires."
"And Hebe?" asked Cleopatra.
"She casts down her eyes, but lifts up the arm on which the hand of
Peitho rests with a warning movement of her fingers, in which she holds
an unopened rose, as though she would say; 'Ah! let me be--I tremble at
the man'--or ask: 'Would it not be better that I should remain as I am
and not yield to your temptations and to Aphrodite's power?' Oh! Hebe is
exquisite, and you, O Queen! must represent her!"
"I!" exclaimed Cleopatra. "But you said her eyes were cast down."
"That is from modesty and timidity, and her gait must also be bashful and
maidenly. Her long robe falls to her feet in simple folds, while Peitho
holds hers up saucily, between her forefinger and thumb, as if stealthily
dancing with triumph over her recent victory. Indeed the figure of Peitho
would become you admirably."
"I think I will represent Peitho," said the queen interrupting the
Corinthian. "Hebe is but a bud, an unopened blossom, while I am a mother,
and I flatter myself I am something of a philosopher--"
"And can with justice assure yourself," interrupted Aristarchus, "that
with every charm of youth you also possess the characters attributed to
Peitho, the goddess, who can work her spells not only on the heart but on
the intellect also. The maiden bud is as sweet to look upon as the rose,
but he who loves not merely color but perfume too--I mean refreshment,
emotion and edification of spirit--must turn to the full-blown flower; as
the rose--growers of lake Moeris twine only the buds of their favorite
flower into wreaths and bunches, but cannot use them for extracting the
oil of imperishable fragrance; for that they need the expanded blossom.
Represent Peitho, my Queen! the goddess herself might be proud of such a
representative."
"And if she were so indeed," cried Cleopatra, "how happy am I to hear
such words from the lips of Aristarchus. It is settled--I play Peitho. My
companion Zoe may take the part of Artemis, and her grave sister that of
Pallas Athene. For the mother's part we have several matrons to choose
from; the eldest daughter of Epitropes appears to me fitted for the part
of Aphrodite; she is wonderfully lovely."
"Is she stupid too?" asked Euergetes. "That is also an attribute of the
ever-smiling Cypria."
"Enough so, I think, for our purpose," laughed Cleopatra. "But where are
we to find such a Hebe as you have described, Lysias? The daughter of
Alimes the Arabarch is a charming child."
"But she is brown, as brown as this excellent wine, and too thoroughly
Egyptian," said the high-steward, who superintended the young Macedonian
cup-bearers; he bowed deeply as he spoke, and modestly drew the queen's
attention to his own daughter, a maiden of sixteen. But Cleopatra
objected, that she was much taller than herself, and that she would have
to stand by the Hebe, and lay her hand on her arm.
Other maidens were rejected on various grounds, and Euergetes had already
proposed to send off a carrier-pigeon to Alexandria to command that some
fair Greek girl should be sent by an express quadriga to Memphis--where
the dark Egyptian gods and men flourish, and are more numerous than the
fair race of Greeks--when Lysias exclaimed:
"I saw to-day the very girl we want, a Hebe that might have stepped out
from the marble group at my father's, and have been endued with life and
warmth and color by some god. Young, modest, rose and white, and just
about as tall as Your Majesty. If you will allow me, I will not tell you
who she is, till after I have been to our tent to fetch the gems with the
copies of the marble."
"You will find them in an ivory casket at the bottom of my
clothes-chest," said Publius; "here is the key."
"Make haste," cried the queen, "for we are all curious to hear where in
Memphis you discovered your modest, rose and white Hebe."
CHAPTER X.
An hour had slipped by with the royal party, since Lysias had quitted the
company; the wine-cups had been filled and emptied many times; Eulaeus
had rejoined the feasters, and the conversation had taken quite another
turn, since the whole of the company were not now equally interested in
the same subject; on the contrary, the two kings were discussing with
Aristarchus the manuscripts of former poets and of the works of the
sages, scattered throughout Greece, and the ways and means of obtaining
them or of acquiring exact transcripts of them for the library of the
Museum. Hierax was telling Eulaeus of the last Dionysiac festival, and of
the representation of the newest comedy in Alexandria, and Eulaeus
assumed the appearance--not unsuccessfully--of listening with both ears,
interrupting him several times with intelligent questions, bearing
directly on what he had said, while in fact his attention was exclusively
directed to the queen, who had taken entire possession of the Roman
Publius, telling him in a low tone of her life--which was consuming her
strength--of her unsatisfied affections, and her enthusiasm for Rome and
for manly vigor. As she spoke her cheeks glowed and her eyes sparkled,
for the more exclusively she kept the conversation in her own hands the
better she thought she was being entertained; and Publius, who was
nothing less than talkative, seldom interrupted her, only insinuating a
flattering word now and then when it seemed appropriate; for he
remembered the advice given him by the anchorite, and was desirous of
winning the good graces of Cleopatra.
In spite of his sharp ears Eulaeus could understand but little of their
whispered discourse, for King Euergetes' powerful voice sounded loud
above the rest of the conversation; but Eulaeus was able swiftly to
supply the links between the disjointed sentences, and to grasp the
general sense, at any rate, of what she was saying. The queen avoided
wine, but she had the power of intoxicating herself, so to speak, with
her own words, and now just as her brothers and Aristarchus were at the
height of their excited and eager question and answer--she raised her
cup, touched it with her lips and handed it to Publius, while at the same
time she took hold of his.
The young Roman knew well enough all the significance of this hasty
action; it was thus that in his own country a woman when in love was wont
to exchange her cup with her lover, or an apple already bitten by her
white teeth.
Publius was seized with a cold shudder--like a wanderer who carelessly
pursues his way gazing up at the moon and stars, and suddenly perceives
an abyss yawning; at his feet. Recollections of his mother and of her
warnings against the seductive wiles of the Egyptian women, and
particularly of this very woman, flashed through his mind like lightning;
she was looking at him--not royally by any means, but with anxious and
languishing gaze, and he would gladly have kept his eyes fixed on the
ground, and have left the cup untouched; but her eye held his fast as
though fettering it with ties and bonds; and to put aside the cup seemed
to the most fearless son of an unconquered nation a deed too bold to be
attempted. Besides, how could he possibly repay this highest favor with
an affront that no woman could ever forgive--least of all a Cleopatra?
Aye, many a life's happiness is tossed away and many a sin committed,
because the favor of women is a grace that does honor to every man, and
that flatters him even when it is bestowed by the unloved and unworthy.
For flattery is a key to the heart, and when the heart stands half open
the voice of the tempter is never wanting to whisper: "You will hurt her
feelings if you refuse."
These were the deliberations which passed rapidly and confusedly through
the young Roman's agitated brain, as he took the queen's cup and set his
lips to the same spot that hers had touched. Then, while he emptied the
cup in long draughts, he felt suddenly seized by a deep aversion to the
over-talkative, overdressed and capricious woman before him, who thus
forced upon him favors for which he had not sued; and suddenly there rose
before his soul the image, almost tangibly distinct, of the humble
water-bearer; he saw Klea standing before him and looking far more
queenly as, proud and repellent, she avoided his gaze, than the sovereign
by his side could ever have done, though crowned with a diadem.
Cleopatra rejoiced to mark his long slow draught, for she thought the
Roman meant to imply by it that he could not cease to esteem himself
happy in the favor she had shown him. She did not take her eyes off him,
and observed with pleasure that his color changed to red and white; nor
did she notice that Eulaeus was watching, with a twinkle in his eyes, all
that was going on between her and Publius. At last the Roman set down the
cup, and tried with some confusion to reply to her question as to how he
had liked the flavor of the wine.
"Very fine--excellent--" at last he stammered out, but he was no longer
looking at Cleopatra but at Euergetes, who just then cried out loudly:
"I have thought over that passage for hours, I have given you all my
reasons and have let you speak, Aristarchus, but I maintain my opinion,
and whoever denies it does Homer an injustice; in this place 'siu' must
be read instead of 'iu'."
Euergetes spoke so vehemently that his voice outshouted all the other
guests; Publius however snatched at his words, to escape the necessity
for feigning sentiments he could not feel; so he said, addressing himself
half to the speaker and half to Cleopatra:
"Of what use can it be to decide whether it is one or the other--'iu' or
'siu'. I find many things justifiable in other men that are foreign to my
own nature, but I never could understand how an energetic and vigorous
man, a prudent sovereign and stalwart drinker--like you, Euergetes--can
sit for hours over flimsy papyrus-rolls, and rack his brains to decide
whether this or that in Homer should be read in one way or another."
"You exercise yourself in other things," replied Euergetes. "I consider
that part of me which lies within this golden fillet as the best that I
have, and I exercise my wits on the minutest and subtlest questions just
as I would try the strength of my arms against the sturdiest athletes. I
flung five into the sand the last time I did so, and they quake now when
they see me enter the gymnasium of Timagetes. There would be no strength
in the world if there were no obstacles, and no man would know that he
was strong if he could meet with no resistance to overcome. I for my part
seek such exercises as suit my idiosyncrasy, and if they are not to your
taste I cannot help it. If you were to set these excellently dressed
crayfish before a fine horse he would disdain them, and could not
understand how foolish men could find anything palatable that tasted so
salt. Salt, in fact, is not suited to all creatures! Men born far from
the sea do not relish oysters, while I, being a gourmand, even prefer to
open them myself so that they may be perfectly fresh, and mix their
liquor with my wine."
"I do not like any very salt dish, and am glad to leave the opening of
all marine produce to my servants," answered Publius. "Thereby I save
both time and unnecessary trouble."
"Oh! I know!" cried Euergetes. "You keep Greek slaves, who must even read
and write for you. Pray is there a market where I may purchase men, who,
after a night of carousing, will bear our headache for us? By the shores
of the Tiber you love many things better than learning."
"And thereby," added Aristarchus, "deprive yourselves of the noblest and
subtlest of pleasures, for the purest enjoyment is ever that which we
earn at the cost of some pains and effort."
"But all that you earn by this kind of labor," returned Publius, "is
petty and unimportant. It puts me in mind of a man who removes a block of
stone in the sweat of his brow only to lay it on a sparrow's feather in
order that it may not be carried away by the wind."
"And what is great--and what is small?" asked Aristarchus. "Very opposite
opinions on that subject may be equally true, since it depends solely on
us and our feelings how things appear to us--whether cold or warm; lovely
or repulsive--and when Protagoras says that 'man is the measure of all
things,' that is the most acceptable of all the maxims of the Sophists;
moreover the smallest matter--as you will fully appreciate--acquires an
importance all the greater in proportion as the thing is perfect, of
which it forms a part. If you slit the ear of a cart-horse, what does it
signify? but suppose the same thing were to happen to a thoroughbred
horse, a charger that you ride on to battle!
"A wrinkle or a tooth more or less in the face of a peasant woman matters
little, or not at all, but it is quite different in a celebrated beauty.
If you scrawl all over the face with which the coarse finger of the
potter has decorated a water-jar, the injury to the wretched pot is but
small, but if you scratch, only with a needle's point, that gem with the
portraits of Ptolemy and Arsinoe, which clasps Cleopatra's robe round her
fair throat, the richest queen will grieve as though she had suffered
some serious loss.
"Now, what is there more perfect or more worthy to be treasured than the
noblest works of great thinkers and great poets.
"To preserve them from injury, to purge them from the errors which, in
the course of time, may have spotted their immaculate purity, this is our
task; and if we do indeed raise blocks of stone it is not to weight a
sparrow's feather that it may not be blown away, but to seal the door
which guards a precious possession, and to preserve a gem from injury.
"The chatter of girls at a fountain is worth nothing but to be wafted
away on the winds, and to be remembered by none; but can a son ever deem
that one single word is unimportant which his dying father has bequeathed
to him as a clue to his path in life? If you yourself were such a son,
and your ear had not perfectly caught the parting counsels of the
dying-how many talents of silver would you not pay to be able to supply
the missing words? And what are immortal works of the great poets and
thinkers but such sacred words of warning addressed, not to a single
individual, but to all that are not barbarians, however many they maybe.
They will elevate, instruct, and delight our descendants a thousand years
hence as they do us at this day, and they, if they are not degenerate and
ungrateful will be thankful to those who have devoted the best powers of
their life to completing and restoring all that our mighty forefathers
have said, as it must have originally stood before it was mutilated, and
spoiled by carelessness and folly.
"He who, like King Euergetes, puts one syllable in Homer right, in place
of a wrong one, in my opinion has done a service to succeeding
generations--aye and a great service."
"What you say," replied Publius, "sounds convincing, but it is still not
perfectly clear to me; no doubt because I learned at an early age to
prefer deeds to words. I find it more easy to reconcile my mind to your
painful and minute labors when I reflect that to you is entrusted the
restoration of the literal tenor of laws, whose full meaning might be
lost by a verbal error; or that wrong information might be laid before me
as to one single transaction in the life of a friend or of a
blood-relation, and it might lie with me to clear him of mistakes and
misinterpretation."
"And what are the works of the great singers of the deeds of the
heroes-of the writers of past history, but the lives of our fathers
related either with veracious exactness or with poetic adornments?" cried
Aristarchus. "It is to these that my king and companion in study devotes
himself with particular zeal."
"When he is neither drinking, nor raving, nor governing, nor wasting his
time in sacrificing and processions," interpolated Euergetes. "If I had
not been a king perhaps I might have been an Aristarchus; as it is I am
but half a king--since half of my kingdom belongs to you, Philometor--and
but half a student; for when am I to find perfect quiet for thinking and
writing? Everything, everything in me is by halves, for I, if the scale
were to turn in my favor"--and here he struck his chest and his forehead,
"I should be twice the man I am. I am my whole real self nowhere but at
high festivals, when the wine sparkles in the cup, and bright eyes flash
from beneath the brows of the flute-players of Alexandria or
Cyrene--sometimes too perhaps in council when the risk is great, or when
there is something vast and portentous to be done from which my brother
and you others, all of you, would shrink--nay perhaps even the Roman.
Aye! so it is--and you will learn to know it."
Euergetes had roared rather than spoken the last words; his cheeks were
flushed, his eyes rolled, while he took from his head both the garland of
flowers and the golden fillet, and once more pushed his fingers through
his hair.
His sister covered her ears with her hands, and said: "You positively
hurt me! As no one is contradicting you, and you, as a man of culture,
are not accustomed to add force to your assertions, like the Scythians,
by speaking in a loud tone, you would do well to save your metallic voice
for the further speech with which it is to be hoped you will presently
favor us. We have had to bow more than once already to the strength of
which you boast--but now, at a merry feast, we will not think of that,
but rather continue the conversation which entertained us, and which had
begun so well. This eager defence of the interests which most delight the
best of the Hellenes in Alexandria may perhaps result in infusing into
the mind of our friend Publius Scipio--and through him into that of many
young Romans--a proper esteem for a line of intellectual effort which he
could not have condemned had he not failed to understand it perfectly.
"Very often some striking poetical turn given to a subject makes it, all
at once, clear to our comprehension, even when long and learned
disquisitions have failed; and I am acquainted with such an one, written
by an anonymous author, and which may please you--and you too,
Aristarchus. It epitomizes very happily the subject of our discussion.
The lines run as follows:
"Behold, the puny Child of Man
Sits by Time's boundless sea,
And gathers in his feeble hand
Drops of Eternity.
"He overhears some broken words
Of whispered mystery
He writes them in a tiny book
And calls it 'History!'
"We owe these verses to an accomplished friend; another has amplified the
idea by adding the two that follow:
"If indeed the puny Child of Man
Had not gathered drops from that wide sea,
Those small deeds that fill his little span
Had been lost in dumb Eternity.
"Feeble is his hand, and yet it dare
Seize some drops of that perennial stream;
As they fall they catch a transient gleam--
Lo! Eternity is mirrored there!
"What are we all but puny children? And those of us who gather up the
drops surely deserve our esteem no less than those who spend their lives
on the shore of that great ocean in mere play and strife--"
"And love," threw in Eulaeus in a low voice, as he glanced towards
Publius.
"Your poet's verses are pretty and appropriate," Aristarchus now said,
"and I am very happy to find myself compared to the children who catch
the falling drops. There was a time--which came to an end, alas! with the
great Aristotle--when there were men among the Greeks, who fed the ocean
of which you speak with new tributaries; for the gods had bestowed on
them the power of opening new sources, like the magician Moses, of whom
Onias, the Jew, was lately telling us, and whose history I have read in
the sacred books of the Hebrews. He, it is true--Moses I mean--only
struck water from the rock for the use of the body, while to our
philosophers and poets we owe inexhaustible springs to refresh the mind
and soul. The time is now past which gave birth to such divine and
creative spirits; as your majesties' forefathers recognized full well
when they founded the Museum of Alexandria and the Library, of which I am
one of the guardians, and which I may boast of having completed with your
gracious assistance. When Ptolemy Soter first created the Museum in
Alexandria the works of the greatest period could receive no additions in
the form of modern writings of the highest class; but he set us--children
of man, gathering the drops--the task of collecting and of sifting them,
of eliminating errors in them--and I think we have proved ourselves equal
to this task.
"It has been said that it is no less difficult to keep a fortune than to
deserve it; and so perhaps we, who are merely 'keepers' may nevertheless
make some credit--all the more because we have been able to arrange the
wealth we found under hand, to work it profitably, to apply it well, to
elucidate it, and to make it available. When anything new is created by
one of our circle we always link it on to the old; and in many
departments we have indeed even succeeded in soaring above the ancients,
particularly in that of the experimental sciences. The sublime
intelligence of our forefathers commanded a broad horizon--our narrower
vision sees more clearly the objects that lie close to us. We have
discovered the sure path for all intellectual labor, the true scientific
method; and an observant study of things as they are, succeeds better
with us than it did with our predecessors. Hence it follows that in the
provinces of the natural sciences, in mathematics, astronomy, mechanics
and geography the sages of our college have produced works of unsurpassed
merit. Indeed the industry of my associates--"
"Is very great," cried Euergetes. "But they stir up such a dust that all
free-thought is choked, and because they value quantity above all things
in the results they obtain, they neglect to sift what is great from what
is small; and so Publius Scipio and others like him, who shrug their
shoulders over the labors of the learned, find cause enough to laugh in
their faces. Out of every four of you I should dearly like to set three
to some handicraft, and I shall do it too, one of these days--I shall do
it, and turn them and all their miserable paraphernalia out of the
Museum, and out of my capital. They may take refuge with you, Philometor,
you who marvel at everything you cannot do yourself, who are always
delighted to possess what I reject, and to make much of those whom I
condemn--and Cleopatra I dare say will play the harp, in honor of their
entering Memphis."
"I dare say!" answered the queen, laughing bitterly. "Still, it is to be
expected that your wrath may fall even on worthy men. Until then I will
practise my music, and study the treatise on harmony that you have begun
writing. You are giving us proof to-day of how far you have succeeded in
attaining unison in your own soul."
"I like you in this mood!" cried Euergetes. "I love you, sister, when you
are like this! It ill becomes the eagle's brood to coo like the dove, and
you have sharp talons though you hide them never so well under your soft
feathers. It is true that I am writing a treatise on harmony, and I am
doing it with delight; still it is one of those phenomena which, though
accessible to our perception, are imperishable, for no god even could
discover it entire and unmixed in the world of realities. Where is
harmony to be found in the struggles and rapacious strife of the life of
the Cosmos? And our human existence is but the diminished reflection of
that process of birth and decease, of evolution and annihilation, which
is going on in all that is perceptible to our senses; now gradually and
invisibly, now violently and convulsively, but never harmonyously.
"Harmony is at home only in the ideal world--harmony which is unknown
even among the gods harmony, whom I may know, and yet may never
comprehend--whom I love, and may never possess--whom I long for, and who
flies from me.
"I am as one that thirsteth, and harmony as the remote, unattainable
well--I am as one swimming in a wide sea, and she is the land which
recedes as I deem myself near to it.
"Who will tell me the name of the country where she rules as queen,
undisturbed and untroubled? And which is most in earnest in his pursuit
of the fair one: He who lies sleeping in her arms, or he who is consumed
by his passion for her?
"I am seeking what you deem that you possess.--Possess--!
"Look round you on the world and on life--look round, as I do, on this
hall of which you are so proud! It was built by a Greek; but, because the
simple melody of beautiful forms in perfect concord no longer satisfies
you, and your taste requires the eastern magnificence in which you were
born, because this flatters your vanity and reminds you, each time you
gaze upon it, that you are wealthy and powerful--you commanded your
architect to set aside simple grandeur, and to build this gaudy
monstrosity, which is no more like the banqueting-hall of a Pericles than
I or you, Cleopatra, in all our finery, are like the simply clad gods and
goddesses of Phidias. I mean not to offend you, Cleopatra, but I must say
this; I am writing now on the subject of harmony, and perhaps I shall
afterwards treat of justice, truth, virtue; although I know full well
that they are pure abstractions which occur neither in nature nor in
human life, and which in my dealings I wholly set aside; nevertheless
they seem to me worthy of investigation, like any other delusion, if by
resolving it we may arrive at conditional truth. It is because one man is
afraid of another that these restraints--justice, truth, and what else
you will--have received these high-sounding names, have been stamped as
characteristics of the gods, and placed under the protection of the
immortals; nay, our anxious care has gone so far that it has been taught
as a doctrine that it is beautiful and good to cloud our free enjoyment
of existence for the sake of these illusions. Think of Antisthenes and
his disciples, the dog-like Cynics--think of the fools shut up in the
temple of Serapis! Nothing is beautiful but what is free, and he only is
not free who is forever striving to check his inclinations--for the most
part in vain--in order to live, as feeble cowards deem virtuously, justly
and truthfully.
"One animal eats another when he has succeeded in capturing it, either in
open fight or by cunning and treachery; the climbing plant strangles the
tree, the desert-sand chokes the meadows, stars fall from heaven, and
earthquakes swallow up cities. You believe in the gods--and so do I after
my own fashion--and if they have so ordered the course of this life in
every class of existence that the strong triumph over the weak, why
should not I use my strength, why let it be fettered by those
much-belauded soporifics which our prudent ancestors concocted to cool
the hot blood of such men as I, and to paralyze our sinewy fists.
"Euergetes--the well-doer--I was named at my birth; but if men choose to
call me Kakergetes--the evil-doer--I do not mind it, since what you call
good I call narrow and petty, and what you call evil is the free and
unbridled exercise of power. I would be anything rather than lazy and
idle, for everything in nature is active and busy; and as, with
Aristippus, I hold pleasure to be the highest good, I would fain earn the
name of having enjoyed more than all other men; in the first place in my
mind, but no less in my body which I admire and cherish."
During this speech many signs of disagreement had found expression, and
Publius, who for the first time in his life heard such vicious sentiments
spoken, followed the words of the headstrong youth with consternation and
surprise. He felt himself no match for this overbearing spirit, trained
too in all the arts of argument and eloquence; but he could not leave all
he had heard uncontroverted, and so, as Euergetes paused in order to
empty his refilled cup, he began:
"If we were all to act on your principles, in a few centuries, it seems
to me, there would be no one left to subscribe to them; for the earth
would be depopulated; and the manuscripts, in which you are so careful to
substitute 'siu' for 'iu', would be used by strong-handed mothers, if any
were left, to boil the pot for their children--in this country of yours
where there is no wood to burn. Just now you were boasting of your
resemblance to Alcibiades, but that very gift which distinguished him,
and made him dear to the Athenians--I mean his beauty--is hardly possible
in connection with your doctrines, which would turn men into ravening
beasts. He who would be beautiful must before all things be able to
control himself and to be moderate--as I learnt in Rome before I ever saw
Athens, and have remembered well. A Titan may perhaps have thought and
talked as you do, but an Alcibiades--hardly!"
At these words the blood flew to Euergetes' face; but he suppressed the
keen and insulting reply that rose to his lips, and this little victory
over his wrathful impulse was made the more easy as Lysias, at this
moment, rejoined the feasters; he excused himself for his long absence,
and then laid before Cleopatra and her husband the gems belonging to
Publius.
They were warmly admired; even Euergetes was not grudging of his praise,
and each of the company admitted that he had rarely seen anything more
beautiful and graceful than the bashful Hebe with downcast eyes, and the
goddess of persuasion with her hand resting on the bride's arm.
"Yes, I will take the part of Peitho," said Cleopatra with decision.
"And I that of Heracles," cried Euergetes.
"But who is the fair one," asked King Philometor of Lysias, whom you have
in your eye, as fulfilling this incomparably lovely conception of Hebe?
While you were away I recalled to memory the aspect of every woman and
girl who frequents our festivals, but only to reject them all, one after
the other."
"The fair girl whom I mean," replied Lysias, "has never entered this or
any other palace; indeed I am almost afraid of being too bold in
suggesting to our illustrious queen so humble a child as fit to stand
beside her, though only in sport."
"I shall even have to touch her arm with my hand!" said the queen
anxiously, and she drew up her fingers as if she had to touch some
unclean thing. If you mean a flower-seller or a flute-player or something
of that kind--"
"How could I dare to suggest anything so improper?" Lysias hastily
interposed. "The girl of whom I speak may be sixteen years old; she is
innocence itself incarnate, and she looks like a bud ready to open
perhaps in the morning dew that may succeed this very night, but which as
yet is still enfolded in its cup. She is of Greek race, about as tall as
you are, Cleopatra; she has wonderful gazelle-like eyes, her little head
is covered by a mass of abundant brown hair, when she smiles she has
delicious dimples in her cheeks--and she will be sure to smile when such
a Peitho speaks to her!"
"You are rousing our curiosity," cried Philometor. "In what garden, pray,
does this blossom grow?"
"And how is it," added Cleopatra, "that my husband has not discovered it
long since, and transplanted it to our palace."
"Probably," answered Lysias, "because he who possesses Cleopatra, the
fairest rose of Egypt, regards the violets by the roadside as too
insignificant to be worth glancing at. Besides, the hedge that fences
round my bud grows in a gloomy spot; it is difficult of access and
suspiciously watched. To be brief: our Hebe is a water-bearer in the
temple of Serapis, and her name is Irene."
CHAPTER XI.
Lysias was one of those men from whose lips nothing ever sounds as if it
were meant seriously. His statement that he regarded a serving girl from
the temple of Serapis as fit to personate Hebe, was spoken as naturally
and simply as if he were telling a tale for children; but his words
produced an effect on his hearers like the sound of waters rushing into a
leaky ship.
Publius had turned perfectly white, and it was not till his friend had
uttered the name of Irene that he in some degree recovered his composure;
Philometor had struck his cup on the table, and called out in much
excitement:
"A water-bearer of Serapis to play Hebe in a gay festal performance! Do
you conceive it possible, Cleopatra?"
"Impossible--it is absolutely out of the question," replied the queen,
decidedly. Euergetes, who also had opened his eyes wide at the
Corinthian's proposition, sat for a long time gazing into his cup in
silence; while his brother and sister continued to express their surprise
and disapprobation and to speak of the respect and consideration which
even kings must pay to the priests and servants of Serapis.
At length, once more lifting his wreath and crown, he raised his curls
with both hands, and said, quite calmly and decisively;
"We must have a Hebe, and must take her where we find her. If you
hesitate to allow the girl to be fetched it shall be done by my orders.
The priests of Serapis are for the most part Greeks, and the high-priest
is a Hellene. He will not trouble himself much about a half-grown-up girl
if he can thereby oblige you or me. He knows as well as the rest of us
that one hand washes the other! The only question now is--for I would
rather avoid all woman's outcries--whether the girl will come willingly
or unwillingly if we send for her. What do you think, Lysias?"
"I believe she would sooner get out of prison to-day than to-morrow,"
replied Lysias. "Irene is a lighthearted creature, and laughs as clearly
and merrily as a child at play--and besides that they starve her in her
cage."
"Then I will have her fetched to-morrow!" said Euergetes.
"But," interrupted Cleopatra, "Asclepiodorus must obey us and not you;
and we, my husband and I--"
"You cannot spoil sport with the priests," laughed Euergetes. "If they
were Egyptians, then indeed! They are not to be taken in their nests
without getting pecked; but here, as I have said, we have to deal with
Greeks. What have you to fear from them? For aught I care you may leave
our Hebe where she is, but I was once much pleased with these
representations, and to-morrow morning, as soon as I have slept, I shall
return to Alexandria, if you do not carry them into effect, and so
deprive me, Heracles, of the bride chosen for me by the gods. I have said
what I have said, and I am not given to changing my mind. Besides, it is
time that we should show ourselves to our friends feasting here in the
next room. They are already merry, and it must be getting late."
With these words Euergetes rose from his couch, and beckoned to Hierax
and a chamberlain, who arranged the folds of his transparent robe, while
Philometor and Cleopatra whispered together, shrugging their shoulders
and shaking their heads; and Publius, pressing his hand on the
Corinthian's wrist, said in his ear: "You will not give them any help if
you value our friendship; we will leave as soon as we can do so with
propriety."
Euergetes did not like to be kept waiting. He was already going towards
the door, when Cleopatra called him back, and said pleasantly, but with
gentle reproachfulness:
"You know that we are willing to follow the Egyptian custom of carrying
out as far as possible the wishes of a friend and brother for his
birthday festival; but for that very reason it is not right in you to try
to force us into a proceeding which we refuse with difficulty, and yet
cannot carry out without exposing ourselves to the most unpleasant
consequences. We beg you to make some other demand on us, and we will
certainly grant it if it lies in our power."
The young colossus responded to his sister's appeal with a loud shout of
laughter, waved his arm with a flourish of his hand expressive of haughty
indifference; and then he exclaimed:
"The only thing I really had a fancy for out of all your possessions you
are not willing to concede, and so I must abide by my word--or I go on my
way."
Again Cleopatra and her husband exchanged a few muttered words and rapid
glances, Euergetes watching them the while; his legs straddled apart, his
huge body bent forward, and his hands resting on his hips. His attitude
expressed so much arrogance and puerile, defiant, unruly audacity, that
Cleopatra found it difficult to suppress an exclamation of disgust before
she spoke.
"We are indeed brethren," she said, "and so, for the sake of the peace
which has been restored and preserved with so much difficulty, we give
in. The best way will be to request Asclepiodorus--"
But here Euergetes interrupted the queen, clapping his hands loudly and
laughing:
"That is right, sister! only find me my Hebe! How you do it is your
affair, and is all the same to me. To-morrow evening we will have a
rehearsal, and the day after we will give a representation of which our
grandchildren shall repeat the fame. Nor shall a brilliant audience be
lacking, for my complimentary visitors with their priestly splendor and
array of arms will, it is to be hoped, arrive punctually. Come, my lords,
we will go, and see what there is good to drink or to listen to at the
table in the next room."
The doors were opened; music, loud talking, the jingle of cups, and the
noise of laughter sounded through them into the room where the princes
had been supping, and all the king's guests followed Euergetes, with the
exception of Eulaeus. Cleopatra allowed them to depart without speaking a
word; only to Publius she said: "Till we meet again!" but she detained
the Corinthian, saying:
"You, Lysias, are the cause of this provoking business. Try now to repair
the mischief by bringing the girl to us. Do not hesitate! I will guard
her, protect her with the greatest care, rely upon me."
"She is a modest maiden," replied Lysias, "and will not accompany me
willingly, I am sure. When I proposed her for the part of Hebe I
certainly supposed that a word from you, the king and queen, would
suffice to induce the head of the temple to entrust her to you for a few
hours of harmless amusement. Pardon me if I too quit you now; I have the
key of my friend's chest still in my possession, and must restore it to
him."
"Shall we have her carried off secretly?" asked Cleopatra of her husband,
when the Corinthian had followed the other guests.
"Only let us have no scandal, no violence," cried Philometor anxiously.
"The best way would be for me to write to Asclepiodorus, and beg him in a
friendly manner to entrust this girl--Ismene or Irene, or whatever the
ill-starred child's name is--for a few days to you, Cleopatra, for your
pleasure. I can offer him a prospect of an addition to the gift of land I
made today, and which fell far short of his demands."
"Let me entreat your majesty," interposed Eulaeus, who was now alone with
the royal couple, "let me entreat you not to make any great promises on
this occasion, for the moment you do so Asclepiodorus will attribute an
importance to your desire--"
"Which it is far from having, and must not seem to have," interrupted the
queen. "It is preposterous to waste so many words about a miserable
creature, a water-carrying girl, and to go through so much
disturbance--but how are we to put an end to it all? What is your advice,
Eulaeus?"
"I thank you for that enquiry, noble princess," replied Eulaeus. "My
lord, the king, in my opinion, should have the girl carried off, but not
with any violence, nor by a man--whom she would hardly follow so
immediately as is necessary--but by a woman.
"I am thinking of the old Egyptian tale of 'The Two Brothers,' which you
are acquainted with. The Pharaoh desired to possess himself of the wife
of the younger one, who lived on the Mount of Cedars, and he sent armed
men to fetch her away; but only one of them came back to him, for Batau
had slain all the others. Then a woman was sent with splendid ornaments,
such as women love, and the fair one followed her unresistingly to the
palace.
"We may spare the ambassadors, and send only the woman; your lady in
waiting, Zoe, will execute this commission admirably. Who can blame us in
any way if a girl, who loves finery, runs away from her keepers?"
"But all the world will see her as Hebe," sighed Philometor, "and
proclaim us--the sovereign protectors of the worship of Serapis--as
violators of the temple, if Asclepiodorus leads the cry. No, no, the
high-priest must first be courteously applied to. In the case of his
raising any difficulties, but not otherwise, shall Zoe make the attempt."
"So be it then," said the queen, as if it were her part to express her
confirmation of her husband's proposition.
"Let your lady accompany me," begged Eulaeus, "and prefer your request to
Asclepiodorus. While I am speaking with the high-priest, Zoe can at any
rate win over the girl, and whatever we do must be done to-morrow, or the
Roman will be beforehand with us. I know that he has cast an eye on
Irene, who is in fact most lovely. He gives her flowers, feeds his pet
bird with pheasants and peaches and other sweetmeats, lets himself be
lured into the Serapeum by his lady-love as often as possible, stays
there whole hours, and piously follows the processions, in order to
present the violets with which you graciously honored him by giving them
to his fair one--who no doubt would rather wear royal flowers than any
others--"
"Liar!" cried the queen, interrupting the courtier in such violent
excitement and such ungoverned rage, so completely beside herself, that
her husband drew back startled.
"You are a slanderer! a base calumniator! The Roman attacks you with
naked weapons, but you slink in the dark, like a scorpion, and try to
sting your enemy in the heel. Apelles, the painter, warns us--the
grandchildren of Lagus--against folks of your kidney in the picture he
painted against Antiphilus; as I look at you I am reminded of his Demon
of Calumny. The same spite and malice gleam in your eyes as in hers, and
the same fury and greed for some victim, fire your flushed face! How you
would rejoice if the youth whom Apelles has represented Calumny as
clutching by the hair, could but be Publius! and if only the lean and
hollow-eyed form of Envy, and the loathsome female figures of Cunning and
Treachery would come to your did as they have to hers! But I remember too
the steadfast and truthful glance of the boy she has flung to the ground,
his arms thrown up to heaven, appealing for protection to the goddess and
the king--and though Publius Scipio is man enough to guard himself
against open attack, I will protect him against being surprised from an
ambush! Leave this room! Go, I say, and you shall see how we punish
slanderers!"
At these words Eulaeus flung himself at the queen's feet, but she,
breathing hurriedly and with quivering nostrils, looked away over his
head as if she did not even see him, till her husband came towards her,
and said in a voice of most winning gentleness:
"Do not condemn him unheard, and raise him from his abasement. At least
give him the opportunity of softening your indignation by bringing the
water-bearer here without angering Asclepiodorus. Carry out this affair
well, Eulaeus, and you will find in me an advocate with Cleopatra."
The king pointed to the door, and Eulaeus retired, bowing deeply and
finding his way out backwards. Philometer, now alone with his wife, said
with mild reproach:
"How could you abandon yourself to such unmeasured anger? So faithful and
prudent a servant--and one of the few still living of those to whom our
mother was attached--cannot be sent away like a mere clumsy attendant.
Besides, what is the great crime he has committed? Is it a slander which
need rouse you to such fury when a cautious old man says in all innocence
of a young one--a man belonging to a world which knows nothing of the
mysterious sanctity of Serapis--that he has taken a fancy to a girl, who
is admired by all who see her, that he seeks her out, and gives her
flowers--"
"Gives her flowers?" exclaimed Cleopatra, breaking out afresh. "No, he is
accused of persecuting a maiden attached to Serapis--to Serapis I say.
But it is simply false, and you would be as angry as I am if you were
ever capable of feeling manly indignation, and if you did not want to
make use of Eulaeus for many things, some of which I know, and others
which you choose to conceal from me. Only let him fetch the girl; and
when once we have her here, and if I find that the Roman's indictment
against Eulaeus--which I will hear to-morrow morning--is well founded,
you shall see that I have manly vigor enough for both of us. Come away
now; they are waiting for us in the other room."
The queen gave a call, and chamberlains and servants hurried in; her
shell-shaped litter was brought, and in a few minutes, with her husband
by her side, she was borne into the great peristyle where the grandees of
the court, the commanders of the troops, the most prominent of the
officials of the Egyptian provinces, many artists and savants, and the
ambassadors from foreign powers, were reclining on long rows of couches,
and talking over their wine, the feast itself being ended.
The Greeks and the dark-hued Egyptians were about equally represented in
this motley assembly; but among them, and particularly among the learned
and the fighting men, there were also several Israelites and Syrians.
The royal pair were received by the company with acclamations and marks
of respect; Cleopatra smiled as sweetly as ever, and waved her fan
graciously as she descended from her litter; still she vouchsafed not the
slightest attention to any one present, for she was seeking Publius, at
first among those who were nearest to the couch prepared for her, and
then among the other Hellenes, the Egyptians, the Jews, the
ambassadors--still she found him not, and when at last she enquired for
the Roman of the chief chamberlain at her side, the official was sent for
who had charge of the foreign envoys. This was an officer of very high
rank, whose duty it was to provide for the representatives of foreign
powers, and he was now near at hand, for he had long been waiting for an
opportunity to offer to the queen a message of leave-taking from Publius
Cornelius Scipio, and to tell her from him, that he had retired to his
tent because a letter had come to him from Rome.
"Is that true?" asked the queen letting her feather fan droop, and
looking her interlocutor severely in the face.
"The trireme Proteus, coming from Brundisium, entered the harbor of
Eunostus only yesterday," he replied; "and an hour ago a mounted
messenger brought the letter. Nor was it an ordinary letter but a
despatch from the Senate--I know the form and seal."
"And Lysias, the Corinthian?"
"He accompanied the Roman."
"Has the Senate written to him too?" asked the queen annoyed, and
ironically. She turned her back on the officer without any kind of
courtesy, and turning again to the chamberlain she went on, in incisive
tones, as if she were presiding at a trial:
"King Euergetes sits there among the Egyptians near the envoys from the
temples of the Upper Country. He looks as if he were giving them a
discourse, and they hang on his lips. What is he saying, and what does
all this mean?"
"Before you came in, he was sitting with the Syrians and Jews, and
telling them what the merchants and scribes, whom he sent to the South,
have reported of the lands lying near the lakes through which the Nile is
said to flow. He thinks that new sources of wealth have revealed
themselves not far from the head of the sacred river which can hardly
flow in from the ocean, as the ancients supposed."
"And now?" asked Cleopatra. "What information is he giving to the
Egyptians?"
The chamberlain hastened towards Euergetes' couch, and soon returned to
the queen--who meanwhile had exchanged a few friendly words with Onias,
the Hebrew commander--and informed her in a low tone that the king was
interpreting a passage from the Timaeus of Plato, in which Solon
celebrates the lofty wisdom of the priests of Sais; he was speaking with
much spirit, and the Egyptians received it with loud applause.
Cleopatra's countenance darkened more and more, but she concealed it
behind her fan, signed to Philometor to approach, and whispered to him:
"Keep near Euergetes; he has a great deal too much to say to the
Egyptians. He is extremely anxious to stand well with them, and those
whom he really desires to please are completely entrapped by his
portentous amiability. He has spoiled my evening, and I shall leave you
to yourselves."
"Till to-morrow, then."
"I shall hear the Roman's complaint up on my roof-terrace; there is
always a fresh air up there. If you wish to be present I will send for
you, but first I would speak to him alone, for he has received letters
from the Senate which may contain something of importance. So, till
to-morrow."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
And what is great--and what is small
Behold, the puny Child of Man
Evolution and annihilation
Flattery is a key to the heart
Hold pleasure to be the highest good
Man is the measure of all things
Museum of Alexandria and the Library
One hand washes the other
Prefer deeds to words
What are we all but puny children?
THE SISTERS
By Georg Ebers
Volume 3.
CHAPTER XII.
While, in the vast peristyle, many a cup was still being emptied, and the
carousers were growing merrier and noisier--while Cleopatra was abusing
the maids and ladies who were undressing her for their clumsiness and
unreadiness, because every touch hurt her, and every pin taken out of her
dress pricked her--the Roman and his friend Lysias walked up and down in
their tent in violent agitation.
"Speak lower," said the Greek, "for the very griffins woven into the
tissue of these thin walls seem to me to be lying in wait, and listening.
"I certainly was not mistaken. When I came to fetch the gems I saw a
light gleaming in the doorway as I approached it; but the intruder must
have been warned, for just as I got up to the lantern in front of the
servants' tent, it disappeared, and the torch which usually burns outside
our tent had not been lighted at all; but a beam of light fell on the
road, and a man's figure slipped across in a black robe sprinkled with
gold ornaments which I saw glitter as the pale light of the lantern fell
upon them--just as a slimy, black newt glides through a pool. I have good
eyes as you know, and I will give one of them at this moment, if I am
mistaken, and if the cat that stole into our tent was not Eulaeus."
"And why did you not have him caught?" asked Publius, provoked.
"Because our tent was pitch-dark," replied Lysias, and that stout villain
is as slippery as a badger with the dogs at his heels, Owls, bats and
such vermin which seek their prey by night are all hideous to me, and
this Eulaeus, who grins like a hyaena when he laughs--"
"This Eulaeus," said Publius, interrupting his friend, "shall learn to
know me, and know too by experience that a man comes to no good, who
picks a quarrel with my father's son."
"But, in the first instance, you treated him with disdain and
discourtesy," said Lysias, "and that was not wise."
"Wise, and wise, and wise!" the Roman broke out. "He is a scoundrel. It
makes no difference to me so long as he keeps out of my way; but when, as
has been the case for several days now, he constantly sticks close to me
to spy upon me, and treats me as if he were my equal, I will show him
that he is mistaken. He has no reason to complain of my want of
frankness; he knows my opinion of him, and that I am quite inclined to
give him a thrashing. If I wanted to meet his cunning with cunning I
should get the worst of it, for he is far superior to me in intrigue. I
shall fare better with him by my own unconcealed mode of fighting, which
is new to him and puzzles him; besides it is better suited to my own
nature, and more consonant to me than any other. He is not only sly, but
is keen-witted, and he has at once connected the complaint which I have
threatened to bring against him with the manuscript which Serapion, the
recluse, gave me in his presence. There it lies--only look.
"Now, being not merely crafty, but a daring rascal too--two qualities
which generally contradict each other, for no one who is really prudent
lives in disobedience to the laws--he has secretly untied the strings
which fastened it. But, you see, he had not time enough to tie the roll
up again! He has read it all or in part, and I wish him joy of the
picture of himself he will have found painted there. The anchorite wields
a powerful pen, and paints with a firm outline and strongly marked
coloring. If he has read the roll to the end it will spare me the trouble
of explaining to him what I purpose to charge him with; if you disturbed
him too soon I shall have to be more explicit in my accusation. Be that
as it may, it is all the same to me."
"Nay, certainly not," cried Lysias, "for in the first case Eulaeus will
have time to meditate his lies, and bribe witnesses for his defence. If
any one entrusted me with such important papers--and if it had not been
you who neglected to do it--I would carefully seal or lock them up. Where
have you put the despatch from the Senate which the messenger brought you
just now?"
"That is locked up in this casket," replied Publius, moving his hand to
press it more closely over his robe, under which he had carefully hidden
it.
"May I not know what it contain?" asked the Corinthian.
"No, there is not time for that now, for we must first, and at once,
consider what can be done to repair the last mischief which you have
done. Is it not a disgraceful thing that you should betray the sweet
creature whose childlike embarrassment charmed us this morning--of whom
you yourself said, as we came home, that she reminded you of your lovely
sister--that you should betray her, I say, into the power of the wildest
of all the profligates I ever met--to this monster, whose pleasures are
the unspeakable, whose boast is vice? What has Euergetes--"
"By great Poseidon!" cried Lysias, eagerly interrupting his friend. "I
never once thought of this second Alcibiades when I mentioned her. What
can the manager of a performance do, but all in his power to secure the
applause of the audience? and, by my honor! it was for my own sake that I
wanted to bring Irene into the palace--I am mad with love for her--she
has undone me."
"Aye! like Callista, and Phryne, and the flute-player Stephanion,"
interrupted the Roman, shrugging his shoulders.
"How should it be different?" asked the Corinthian, looking at his friend
in astonishment. "Eros has many arrows in his quiver; one strikes deeply,
another less deeply; and I believe that the wound I have received to-day
will ache for many a week if I have to give up this child, who is even
more charming than the much-admired Hebe on our cistern."
"I advise you however to accustom yourself to the idea, and the sooner
the better," said Publius gravely, as he set himself with his arms
crossed, directly in front of the Greek. "What would you feel inclined to
do to me if I took a fancy to lure your pretty sister--whom Irene, I
repeat it, is said to resemble--to tempt her with base cunning from your
parents' house?"
"I protest against any such comparison," cried the Corinthian very
positively, and more genuinely exasperated than the Roman had ever seen
him.
"You are angry without cause," replied Publius calmly and gravely. "Your
sister is a charming girl, the ornament of your illustrious house, and
yet I dare compare the humble Irene--"
"With her! do you mean to say?" Lysias shouted again. "That is a poor
return for the hospitality which was shown to you by my parents and of
which you formally sang the praises. I am a good-natured fellow and will
submit to more from you than from any other man--I know not why,
myself;--but in a matter like this I do not understand a joke! My sister
is the only daughter of the noblest and richest house in Corinth and has
many suitors. She is in no respect inferior to the child of your own
parents, and I should like to know what you would say if I made so bold
as to compare the proud Lucretia with this poor little thing, who carries
water like a serving-maid."
"Do so, by all means!" interrupted Publius coolly, "I do not take your
rage amiss, for you do not know who these two sisters are, in the temple
of Serapis. Besides, they do not fill their jars for men but in the
service of a god. Here--take this roll and read it through while I answer
the despatch from Rome. Here! Spartacus, come and light a few more
lamps."
In a few minutes the two young men were sitting opposite each other at
the table which stood in the middle of their tent. Publius wrote busily,
and only looked up when his friend, who was reading the anchorite's
document, struck his hand on the table in disgust or sprang from his seat
ejaculating bitter words of indignation. Both had finished at the same
moment, and when Publius had folded and sealed his letter, and Lysias had
flung the roll on to the table, the Roman said slowly, as he looked his
friend steadily in the face: "Well?"
"Well!" repeated Lysias. I now find myself in the humiliating position of
being obliged to deem myself more stupid than you--I must own you in the
right, and beg your pardon for having thought you insolent and arrogant!
Never, no never did I hear a story so infernally scandalous as that in
that roll, and such a thing could never have occurred but among these
accursed Egyptians! Poor little Irene! And how can the dear little girl
have kept such a sunny look through it all! I could thrash myself like
any school-boy to think that I--a fool among fools--should have directed
the attention of Euergetes to this girl, and he, the most powerful and
profligate man in the whole country. What can now be done to save Irene
from him? I cannot endure the thought of seeing her abandoned to his
clutches, and I will not permit it to happen.
"Do not you think that we ought to take the water-bearers under our
charge?"
"Not only we ought but we must," said Publius decisively; "and if we did
not we should be contemptible wretches. Since the recluse took me into
his confidence I feel as if it were my, duty to watch over these girls
whose parents have been stolen from them, as if I were their
guardian--and you, my Lysias, shall help me. The elder sister is not now
very friendly towards me, but I do not esteem her the less for that; the
younger one seems less grave and reserved than Klea; I saw how she
responded to your smile when the procession broke up. Afterwards, you did
not come home immediately any more than I did, and I suspect that it was
Irene who detained you. Be frank, I earnestly beseech you, and tell me
all; for we must act in unison, and with thorough deliberation, if we
hope to succeed in spoiling Euergetes' game."
"I have not much to tell you," replied the Corinthian. "After the
procession I went to the Pastophorium--naturally it was to see Irene, and
in order not to fail in this I allowed the pilgrims to tell me what
visions the god had sent them in their dreams, and what advice had been
given them in the temple of Asclepius as to what to do for their own
complaints, and those of their cousins, male and female.
"Quite half an hour had passed so before Irene came. She carried a little
basket in which lay the gold ornaments she had worn at the festival, and
which she had to restore to the keeper of the temple-treasure. My
pomegranate-flower, which she had accepted in the morning, shone upon me
from afar, and then, when she caught sight of me and blushed all over,
casting down her eyes, then it was that it first struck me 'just like the
Hebe on our cistern.'
"She wanted to pass me, but I detained her, begging her to show me the
ornaments in her hand; I said a number of things such as girls like to
hear, and then I asked her if she were strictly watched, and whether they
gave her delicate little hands and feet--which were worthy of better
occupation than water-carrying--a great deal to do. She did not hesitate
to answer, but with all she said she rarely raised her eyes. The longer
you look at her the lovelier she is--and yet she is still a mere
child-though a child certainly who no longer loves staying at home, who
has dreams of splendor, and enjoyment, and freedom while she is kept shut
up in a dismal, dark place, and left to starve.
"The poor creatures may never quit the temple excepting for a procession,
or before sunrise. It sounded too delightful when she said that she was
always so horribly tired, and so glad to go to sleep again after she was
waked, and had to go out at once just when it is coldest, in the twilight
before sunrise. Then she has to draw water from a cistern called the Well
of the Sun."
"Do you know where that cistern lies?" asked Publius.
"Behind the acacia-grove," answered Lysias. "The guide pointed it out to
me. It is said to hold particularly sacred water, which must be poured as
a libation to the god at sunrise, unmixed with any other. The girls must
get up so early, that as soon as dawn breaks water from this cistern
shall not be lacking at the altar of Serapis. It is poured out on the
earth by the priests as a drink-offering."
Publius had listened attentively, and had not lost a word of his friend's
narrative. He now quitted him hastily, opened the tent-door, and went out
into the night, looking up to discover the hour from the stars which were
silently pursuing their everlasting courses in countless thousands, and
sparkling with extraordinary brilliancy in the deep blue sky. The moon
was already set, and the morning-star was slowly rising--every night
since the Roman had been in the land of the Pyramids he had admired its
magnificent size and brightness.
A cold breeze fanned the young man's brow, and as he drew his robe across
his breast with a shiver, he thought of the sisters, who, before long,
would have to go out in the fresh morning air. Once more he raised his
eyes from the earth to the firmament over his head, and it seemed to him
that he saw before his very eyes the proud form of Klea, enveloped in a
mantle sown over with stars. His heart throbbed high, and he felt as if
the breeze that his heaving breast inhaled in deep breaths was as fresh
and pure as the ether that floats over Elysium, and of a strange potency
withal, as if too rare to breathe. Still he fancied he saw before him the
image of Klea, but as he stretched out his hand towards the beautiful
vision it vanished--a sound of hoofs and wheels fell upon his ear.
Publius was not accustomed to abandon himself to dreaming when action was
needed, and this reminded him of the purpose for which he had come out
into the open air. Chariot after chariot came driving past as he returned
into his tent. Lysias, who during his absence had been pacing up and down
and reflecting, met him with the question:
"How long is it yet till sunrise?"
"Hardly two hours," replied the Roman. "And we must make good use of them
if we would not arrive too late."
"So I think too," said the Corinthian. "The sisters will soon be at the
Well of the Sun outside the temple walls, and I will persuade Irene to
follow me. You think I shall not be successful? Nor do I myself--but
still perhaps she will if I promise to show her something very pretty,
and if she does not suspect that she is to be parted from her sister, for
she is like a child."
"But Klea," interrupted Publius thoughtfully, "is grave and prudent; and
the light tone which you are so ready to adopt will be very little to her
taste, Consider that, and dare the attempt--no, you dare not deceive her.
Tell her the whole truth, out of Irene's hearing, with the gravity the
matter deserves, and she will not hinder her sister when she knows how
great and how imminent is the danger that threatens her."
"Good!" said the Corinthian. "I will be so solemnly earnest that the most
wrinkled and furrowed graybeard among the censors of your native city
shall seem a Dionysiac dancer compared with me. I will speak like your
Cato when he so bitterly complained that the epicures of Rome paid more
now for a barrel of fresh herrings than for a yoke of oxen. You shall be
perfectly satisfied with me!--But whither am I to conduct Irene? I might
perhaps make use of one of the king's chariots which are passing now by
dozens to carry the guests home."
"I also had thought of that," replied Publius. "Go with the chief of the
Diadoches, whose splendid house was shown to us yesterday. It is on the
way to the Serapeum, and just now at the feast you were talking with him
incessantly. When there, indemnify the driver by the gift of a gold
piece, so that he may not betray us, and do not return here but proceed
to the harbor. I will await you near the little temple of Isis with our
travelling chariot and my own horses, will receive Irene, and conduct her
to some new refuge while you drive back Fuergetes' chariot, and restore
it to the driver."
"That will not satisfy me by any means," said Lysias very gravely; "I was
ready to give up my pomegranate-flower to you yesterday for Irene, but
herself--"
"I want nothing of her," exclaimed Publius annoyed. "But you might--it
seems to me--be rather more zealous in helping me to preserve her from
the misfortune which threatens her through your own blunder. We cannot
bring her here, but I think that I have thought of a safe hiding-place
for her.
"Do you remember Apollodorus, the sculptor, to whom we were recommended
by my father, and his kind and friendly wife who set before us that
capital Chios wine? The man owes me a service, for my father commissioned
him and his assistants to execute the mosaic pavement in the new arcade
he was having built in the capitol; and subsequently, when the envy of
rival artists threatened his life, my father saved him. You yourself
heard him say that he and his were all at my disposal."
"Certainly, certainly," said Lysias. "But say, does it not strike you as
most extraordinary that artists, the very men, that is to say, who beyond
all others devote themselves to ideal aims and efforts, are particularly
ready to yield to the basest impulses; envy, detraction, and--"
"Man!" exclaimed Publius, angrily interrupting the Greek, "can you never
for ten seconds keep on the same subject, and never keep anything to
yourself that comes into your head? We have just now, as it seems to me,
more important matters to discuss than the jealousy of each other shown
by artists--and in my opinion, by learned men too. The sculptor
Apollodorus, who is thus beholden to me, has been living here for the
last six months with his wife and daughters, for he has been executing
for Philometor the busts of the philosophers, and the animal groups to
decorate the open space in front of the tomb of Apis. His sons are
managers of his large factory in Alexandria, and when he next goes there,
down the Nile in his boat, as often happens, he can take Irene with him,
and put her on board a ship.
"As to where we can have her taken to keep her safe from Euergetes, we
will talk that over afterwards with Apollodorus."
"Good, very good," agreed the Corinthian. "By Heracles! I am not
suspicious--still it does not altogether please me that you should
yourself conduct Irene to Apollodorus, for if you are seen in her company
our whole project may be shipwrecked. Send the sculptor's wife, who is
little known in Memphis, to the temple of Isis, and request her to bring
a veil and cloak to conceal the girl. Greet the gay Milesian from me too,
and tell her--no, tell her nothing--I shall see her myself afterwards at
the temple of Isis."
During the last words of this conversation, slaves had been enveloping
the two young men in their mantles. They now quitted the tent together,
wished each other success, and set out at a brisk pace; the Roman to have
his horses harnessed, and Lysias to accompany the chief of the Diadoches
in one of the king's chariots, and then to act on the plan he had agreed
upon with Publius.
CHAPTER XIII.
Chariot after chariot hurried out of the great gate of the king's palace
and into the city, now sunk in slumber. All was still in the great
banqueting-hall, and dark-hued slaves began with brooms and sponges to
clean the mosaic pavement, which was strewed with rose leaves and with
those that had fallen from the faded garlands of ivy and poplar; while
here and there the spilt wine shone with a dark gleam in the dim light of
the few lamps that had not been extinguished.
A young flute-player, overcome with sleep and wine, still sat in one
corner. The poplar wreath that had crowned his curls had slipped over his
pretty face, but even in sleep he still held his flute clasped fast in
his fingers. The servants let him sleep on, and bustled about without
noticing him; only an overseer pointed to him, and said laughing:
"His companions went home no more sober than that one. He is a pretty
boy, and pretty Chloes lover besides--she will look for him in vain this
morning."
"And to-morrow too perhaps," answered another; "for if the fat king sees
her, poor Damon will have seen the last of her."
But the fat king, as Euergetes was called by the Alexandrians, and,
following their example, by all the rest of Egypt, was not just then
thinking of Chloe, nor of any such person; he was in the bath attached to
his splendidly fitted residence. Divested of all clothing, he was
standing in the tepid fluid which completely filled a huge basin of white
marble. The clear surface of the perfumed water mirrored statues of
nymphs fleeing from the pursuit of satyrs, and reflected the shimmering
light of numbers of lamps suspended from the ceiling. At the upper end of
the bath reclined the bearded and stalwart statue of the Nile, over whom
the sixteen infant figures--representing the number of ells to which the
great Egyptian stream must rise to secure a favorable
inundation--clambered and played to the delight of their noble father
Nile and of themselves. From the vase which supported the arm of the
venerable god flowed an abundant stream of cold water, which five pretty
lads received in slender alabaster vases, and poured over the head and
the enormously prominent muscles of the breast, the back and the arms of
the young king who was taking his bath.
"More, more--again and again," cried Euergetes, as the boys began to
pause in bringing and pouring the water; and then, when they threw a
fresh stream over him, he snorted and plunged with satisfaction, and a
perfect shower of jets splashed off him as the blast of his breath
sputtered away the water that fell over his face.
At last he shouted out: "Enough!" flung himself with all his force into
the water, that spurted up as if a huge block of stone had been thrown
into it, held his head for a long time under water, and then went up the
marble steps of the bath shaking his head violently and mischievously in
his boyish insolence, so as thoroughly to wet his friends and servants
who were standing round the margin of the basin; he suffered himself to
be wrapped in snowy-white sheets of the thinnest and finest linen, to be
sprinkled with costly essences of delicate odor, and then he withdrew
into a small room hung all round with gaudy hangings.
There he flung himself on a mound of soft cushions, and said with a
deep-drawn breath: "Now I am happy; and I am as sober again as a baby
that has never tasted anything but its mother's milk. Pindar is right!
there is nothing better than water! and it slakes that raging fire which
wine lights up in our brain and blood. Did I talk much nonsense just now,
Hierax?"
The man thus addressed, the commander-in-chief of the royal troops, and
the king's particular friend, cast a hesitating glance at the bystanders;
but, Euergetes desiring him to speak without reserve, he replied:
"Wine never weakens the mind of such as you are to the point of folly,
but you were imprudent. It would be little short of a miracle if
Philometor did not remark--"
"Capital!" interrupted the king sitting up on his cushions. "You, Hierax,
and you, Komanus, remain here--you others may go. But do not go too far
off, so as to be close at hand in case I should need you. In these days
as much happens in a few hours as usually takes place in as many years."
Those who were thus dismissed withdrew, only the king's dresser, a
Macedonian of rank, paused doubtfully at the door, but Euergetes signed
to him to retire immediately, calling after him:
"I am very merry and shall not go to bed. At three hours after sunrise I
expect Aristarchus--and for work too. Put out the manuscripts that I
brought. Is the Eunuch Eulaeus waiting in the anteroom? Yes--so much the
better!
"Now we are alone, my wise friends Hierax and Komanus, and I must explain
to you that on this occasion, out of pure prudence, you seem to me to
have been anything rather than prudent. To be prudent is to have the
command of a wide circle of thought, so that what is close at hand is no
more an obstacle than what is remote. The narrow mind can command only
that which lies close under observation; the fool and visionary only that
which is far off. I will not blame you, for even the wisest has his hours
of folly, but on this occasion you have certainly overlooked that which
is at hand, in gazing at the distance, and I see you stumble in
consequence. If you had not fallen into that error you would hardly have
looked so bewildered when, just now, I exclaimed 'Capital!'
"Now, attend to me. Philometor and my sister know very well what my humor
is, and what to expect of me. If I had put on the mask of a satisfied man
they would have been surprised, and have scented mischief, but as it was
I showed myself to them exactly what I always am and even more reckless
than usual, and talked of what I wanted so openly that they may indeed
look forward to some deed of violence at my hands but hardly to a
treacherous surprise, and that tomorrow; for he who falls on his enemy in
the rear makes no noise about it.
"If I believed in your casuistry, I might think that to attack the enemy
from behind was not a particularly fine thing to do, for even I would
rather see a man's face than his rear--particularly in the case of my
brother and sister, who are both handsome to look upon. But what can a
man do? After all, the best thing to do is what wins the victory and
makes the game. Indeed, my mode of warfare has found supporters among the
wise. If you want to catch mice you must waste bacon, and if we are to
tempt men into a snare we must know what their notions and ideas are, and
begin by endeavoring to confuse them.
"A bull is least dangerous when he runs straight ahead in his fury; while
his two-legged opponent is least dangerous when he does not know what he
is about and runs feeling his way first to the right and then to the
left. Thanks to your approval--for I have deserved it, and I hope to be
able to return it, my friend Hierax. I am curious as to your report.
Shake up the cushion here under my head--and now you may begin."
"All appears admirably arranged," answered the general. "The flower of
our troops, the Diadoches and Hetairoi, two thousand-five hundred men,
are on their way hither, and by to-morrow will encamp north of Memphis.
Five hundred will find their way into the citadel, with the priests and
other visitors to congratulate you on your birthday, the other two
thousand will remain concealed in the tents. The captain of your brother
Philometor's Philobasilistes is bought over, and will stand by us; but
his price was high--Komanus was forced to offer him twenty talents before
he would bite."
"He shall have them," said the king laughing, "and he shall keep them
too, till it suits me to regard him as suspicious, and to reward him
according to his deserts by confiscating his estates. Well! proceed."
"In order to quench the rising in Thebes, the day before yesterday
Philometor sent the best of the mercenaries with the standards of
Desilaus and Arsinoe to the South. Certainly it cost not a little to
bribe the ringleaders, and to stir up the discontent to an outbreak."
"My brother will repay us for this outlay," interrupted the king, "when
we pour his treasure into our own coffers. Go on."
"We shall have most difficulty with the priests and the Jews. The former
cling to Philometor, because he is the eldest son of his father, and has
given large bounties to the temples, particularly of Apollinopolis and
Philae; the Jews are attached to him, because he favors them more than
the Greeks, and he, and his wife--your illustrious sister--trouble
themselves with their vain religious squabbles; he disputes with them
about the doctrines contained in their book, and at table too prefers
conversing with them to any one else."
"I will salt the wine and meat for them that they fatten on here," cried
Euergetes vehemently, "I forbade to-day their presence at my table, for
they have good eyes and wits as sharp as their noses. And they are most
dangerous when they are in fear, or can reckon on any gains.
"At the same time it cannot be denied that they are honest and tenacious,
and as most of them are possessed of some property they rarely make
common cause with the shrieking mob--particularly here in Alexandria.
"Envy alone can reproach them for their industry and enterprise, for the
activity of the Hellenes has improved upon the example set by them and
their Phoenician kindred.
"They thrive best in peaceful times, and since the world runs more
quietly here, under my brother and sister, than under me, they attach
themselves to them, lend my brother money, and supply my sister with cut
stones, sapphires and emeralds, selling fine stuffs and other woman's
gear for a scrap of written papyrus, which will soon be of no more value
than the feather which falls from the wing of that green screaming bird
on the perch yonder.
"It is incomprehensible to me that so keen a people cannot perceive that
there is nothing permanent but change, nothing so certain as that nothing
is certain; and that they therefore should regard their god as the one
only god, their own doctrine as absolutely and eternally true, and that
they contemn what other peoples believe.
"These darkened views make fools of them, but certainly good soldiers
too--perhaps by reason indeed of this very exalted self-consciousness and
their firm reliance on their supreme god."
"Yes, they certainly are," assented Hierax. "But they serve your brother
more willingly, and at a lower price, than us."
"I will show them," cried the king, "that their taste is a perverted and
obnoxious one. I require of the priests that they should instruct the
people to be obedient, and to bear their privations patiently; but the
Jews," and at these words his eyes rolled with an ominous glare, "the
Jews I will exterminate, when the time comes."
"That will be good for our treasury too," laughed Komanus.
"And for the temples in the country," added Euergetes, "for though I seek
to extirpate other foes I would rather win over the priests; and I must
try to win them if Philometor's kingdom falls into my hands, for the
Egyptians require that their king should be a god; and I cannot arrive at
the dignity of a real god, to whom my swarthy subjects will pray with
thorough satisfaction, and without making my life a burden to me by
continual revolts, unless I am raised to it by the suffrages of the
priests."
"And nevertheless," replied Hierax, who was the only one of Euergetes'
dependents, who dared to contradict him on important questions,
"nevertheless this very day a grave demand is to be preferred on your
account to the high-priest of Serapis. You press for the surrender of a
servant of the god, and Philometor will not neglect--"
"Will not neglect," interrupted Euergetes, "to inform the mighty
Asclepiodorus that he wants the sweet creature for me, and not for
himself. Do you know that Eros has pierced my heart, and that I burn for
the fair Irene, although these eyes have not yet been blessed with the
sight of her?
"I see you believe me, and I am speaking the exact truth, for I vow I
will possess myself of this infantine Hebe as surely as I hope to win my
brother's throne; but when I plant a tree, it is not merely to ornament
my garden but to get some use of it. You will see how I will win over
both the prettiest of little lady-loves and the high-priest who, to be
sure, is a Greek, but still a man hard to bend. My tools are all ready
outside there.
"Now, leave me, and order Eulaeus to join me here."
"You are as a divinity," said Komanus, bowing deeply, "and we but as
frail mortals. Your proceedings often seem dark and incomprehensible to
our weak intellect, but when a course, which to us seems to lead to no
good issue, turns out well, we are forced to admit with astonishment that
you always choose the best way, though often a tortuous one."
For a short time the king was alone, sitting with his black brows knit,
and gazing meditatively at the floor. But as soon as he heard the soft
foot-fall of Eulaeus, and the louder step of his guide, he once more
assumed the aspect of a careless and reckless man of the world, shouted a
jolly welcome to Eulaeus, reminded him of his, the king's, boyhood, and
of how often he, Eulaeus, had helped him to persuade his mother to grant
him some wish she had previously refused him.
"But now, old boy," continued the king, "the times are changed, and with
you now-a-days it is everything for Philometor and nothing for poor
Euergetes, who, being the younger, is just the one who most needs your
assistance."
Eulaeus bowed with a smile which conveyed that he understood perfectly
how little the king's last words were spoken in earnest, and he said:
"I purposed always to assist the weaker of you two, and that is what I
believe myself to be doing now."
"You mean my sister?"
"Our sovereign lady Cleopatra is of the sex which is often unjustly
called the weaker. Though you no doubt were pleased to speak in jest when
you asked that question, I feel bound to answer you distinctly that it
was not Cleopatra that I meant, but King Philometor."
"Philometor? Then you have no faith in his strength, you regard me as
stronger than he; and yet, at the banquet to-day, you offered me your
services, and told me that the task had devolved upon you of demanding
the surrender of the little serving-maiden of Serapis, in the king's
name, of Asclepiodorus, the high-priest. Do you call that aiding the
weaker? But perhaps you were drunk when you told me that?
"No? You were more moderate than I? Then some other change of views must
have taken place in you; and yet that would very much surprise me, since
your principles require you to aid the weaker son of my mother--"
"You are laughing at me," interrupted the courtier with gentle
reproachfulness, and yet in a tone of entreaty. "If I took your side it
was not from caprice, but simply and expressly from a desire to remain
faithful to the one aim and end of my life."
"And that is?"
"To provide for the welfare of this country in the same sense as did your
illustrious mother, whose counsellor I was."
"But you forget to mention the other--to place yourself to the best
possible advantage."
"I did not forget it, but I did not mention it, for I know how closely
measured out are the moments of a king; and besides, it seems to me as
self-evident that we think of our personal advantage as that when we buy
a horse we also buy his shadow."
"How subtle! But I no more blame you than I should a girl who stands
before her mirror to deck herself for her lover, and who takes the same
opportunity of rejoicing in her own beauty.
"However, to return to your first speech. It is for the sake of Egypt as
you think--if I understand you rightly--that you now offer me the
services you have hitherto devoted to my brother's interests?"
"As you say; in these difficult times the country needs the will and the
hand of a powerful leader."
"And such a leader you think I am?"
"Aye, a giant in strength of will, body and intellect--whose desire to
unite the two parts of Egypt in your sole possession cannot fail, if you
strike and grasp boldly, and if--"
"If?" repeated the king, looking at the speaker so keenly that his eyes
fell, and he answered softly:
"If Rome should raise no objection."
Euergetes shrugged his shoulders, and replied gravely:
"Rome indeed is like Fate, which always must give the final decision in
everything we do. I have certainly not been behindhand in enormous
sacrifices to mollify that inexorable power, and my representative,
through whose hands pass far greater sums than through those of the
paymasters of the troops, writes me word that they are not unfavorably
disposed towards me in the Senate."
"We have learned that from ours also. You have more friends by the Tiber
than Philometor, my own king, has; but our last despatch is already
several weeks old, and in the last few days things have occurred--"
"Speak!" cried Euergetes, sitting bolt upright on his cushions. "But if
you are laying a trap for me, and if you are speaking now as my brother's
tool, I will punish you--aye! and if you fled to the uttermost cave of
the Troglodytes I would have you followed up, and you should be torn in
pieces alive, as surely as I believe myself to be the true son of my
father."
"And I should deserve the punishment," replied Eulaeus humbly. Then he
went on: "If I see clearly, great events lie before us in the next few
days."
"Yes--truly," said Euergetes firmly.
"But just at present Philometor is better represented in Rome than he has
ever been. You made acquaintance with young Publius Scipio at the king's
table, and showed little zeal in endeavoring to win his good graces."
"He is one of the Cornelii," interrupted the king, "a distinguished young
man, and related to all the noblest blood of Rome; but he is not an
ambassador; he has travelled from Athens to Alexandria, in order to learn
more than he need; and he carries his head higher and speaks more freely
than becomes him before kings, because the young fellows fancy it looks
well to behave like their elders."
"He is of more importance than you imagine."
"Then I will invite him to Alexandria, and there will win him over in
three days, as surely as my name is Euergetes."
"It will then be too late, for he has to-day received, as I know for
certain, plenipotentiary powers from the Senate to act in their name in
case of need, until the envoy who is to be sent here again arrives."
"And I only now learn this for the first time!" cried the king springing
up from his couch, "my friends must be deaf, and blind and dull indeed,
if still I have any, and my servants and emissaries too! I cannot bear
this haughty ungracious fellow, but I will invite him tomorrow
morning--nay I will invite him to-day, to a festive entertainment, and
send him the four handsomest horses that I have brought with me from
Cyrene. I will--"
"It will all be in vain," said Eulaeus calmly and dispassionately. "For
he is master, in the fullest and widest meaning of the word, of the
queen's favor--nay--if I may permit myself to speak out freely--of
Cleopatra's more than warm liking, and he enjoys this sweetest of gifts
with a thankful heart. Philometor--as he always does--lets matters go as
they may, and Cleopatra and Publius--Publius and Cleopatra triumph even
publicly in their love; gaze into each other's eyes like any pair of
pastoral Arcadians, exchange cups and kiss the rim on the spot where the
lips of the other have touched it. Promise and grant what you will to
this man, he will stand by your sister; and if you should succeed in
expelling her from the throne he would boldly treat you as Popilius
Laenas did your uncle Antiochus: he would draw a circle round your
person, and say that if you dared to step beyond it Rome would march
against you."
Euergetes listened in silence, then, flinging away the draperies that
wrapped his body, he paced up and down in stormy agitation, groaning from
time to time, and roaring like a wild bull that feels itself confined
with cords and bands, and that exerts all its strength in vain to rend
them.
Finally he stood still in front of Eulaeus and asked him:
"What more do you know of the Roman?"
"He, who would not allow you to compare yourself to Alcibiades, is
endeavoring to out-do that darling of the Athenian maidens; for he is not
content with having stolen the heart of the king's wife, he is putting
out his hand to reach the fairest virgin who serves the highest of the
gods. The water-bearer whom Lysias, the Roman's friend, recommended for a
Hebe is beloved by Publius, and he hopes to enjoy her favors more easily
in your gay palace than he can in the gloomy temple of Serapis."
At these words the king struck his forehead with his hand, exclaiming:
"Oh! to be a king--a man who is a match for any ten! and to be obliged to
submit with a patient shrug like a peasant whose grain my horsemen crush
into the ground!
"He can spoil everything; mar all my plans and thwart all my desires--and
I can do nothing but clench my fist, and suffocate with rage. But this
fuming and groaning are just as unavailing as my raging and cursing by
the death-bed of my mother, who was dead all the same and never got up
again.
"If this Publius were a Greek, a Syrian, an Egyptian--nay, were he my own
brother--I tell you, Eulaeus, he should not long stand in my way; but he
is plenipotentiary from Rome, and Rome is Fate--Rome is Fate."
The king flung himself back on to his cushions with a deep sigh, and as
if crushed with despair, hiding his face in the soft pillows; but Eulaeus
crept noiselessly up to the young giant, and whispered in his ear with
solemn deliberateness:
"Rome is Fate, but even Rome can do nothing against Fate. Publius Scipio
must die because he is ruining your mother's daughter, and stands in the
way of your saving Egypt. The Senate would take a terrible revenge if he
were murdered, but what can they do if wild beasts fall on their
plenipotentiary, and tear him to pieces?"
"Grand! splendid!" cried Euergetes, springing again to his feet, and
opening his large eyes with radiant surprise and delight, as if heaven
itself had opened before them, revealing the sublime host of the gods
feasting at golden tables.
"You are a great man, Eulaeus, and I shall know how to reward you; but do
you know of such wild beasts as we require, and do they know how to
conduct themselves so that no one shall dare to harbor even the shadow of
a suspicion that the wounds torn by their teeth and claws were inflicted
by daggers, pikes or spearheads?"
"Be perfectly easy," replied Eulaeus. "These beasts of prey have already
had work to do here in Memphis, and are in the service of the king--"
"Aha! of my gentle brother!" laughed Euergetes. "And he boasts of never
having killed any one excepting in battle--and now--"
"But Philometor has a wife," interposed Eulaeus; and Euergetes went on.
"Aye, woman, woman! what is there that a man may not learn from a woman?"
Then he added in a lower tone: "When can your wild beasts do their work?"
"The sun has long since risen; before it sets I will have made my
preparations, and by about midnight, I should think, the deed may be
done. We will promise the Roman a secret meeting, lure him out to the
temple of Serapis, and on his way home through the desert--"
"Aye, then,--" cried the king, making a thrust at his own breast as
though his hand held a dagger, and he added in warning: "But your beasts
must be as powerful as lions, and as cautious-as cautious, as cats. If
you want gold apply to Komanus, or, better still, take this purse. Is it
enough? Still I must ask you; have you any personal ground of hatred
against the Roman?"
"Yes," answered Eulaeus decisively. "He guesses that I know all about him
and his doings, and he has attacked me with false accusations which may
bring me into peril this very day. If you should hear that the queen has
decided on throwing me into prison, take immediate steps for my
liberation."
"No one shall touch a hair of your head; depend upon that. I see that it
is to your interest to play my game, and I am heartily glad of it, for a
man works with all his might for no one but himself. And now for the last
thing: When will you fetch my little Hebe?"
"In an hour's time I am going to Asclepiodorus; but we must not demand
the girl till to-morrow, for today she must remain in the temple as a
decoy-bird for Publius Scipio."
"I will take patience; still I have yet another charge to give you.
Represent the matter to the high-priest in such a way that he shall think
my brother wishes to gratify one of my fancies by demanding--absolutely
demanding--the water-bearer on my behalf. Provoke the man as far as is
possible without exciting suspicion, and if I know him rightly, he will
stand upon his rights, and refuse you persistently. Then, after you, will
come Komanus from me with greetings and gifts and promises.
"To-morrow, when we have done what must be done to the Roman, you shall
fetch the girl in my brother's name either by cunning or by force; and
the day after, if the gods graciously lend me their aid in uniting the
two realms of Egypt under my own hand, I will explain to Asclepiodorus
that I have punished Philometor for his sacrilege against his temple, and
have deposed him from the throne. Serapis shall see which of us is his
friend.
"If all goes well, as I mean that it shall, I will appoint you Epitropon
of the re-united kingdom--that I swear to you by the souls of my deceased
ancestors. I will speak with you to-day at any hour you may demand it."
Eulaeus departed with a step as light as if his interview with the king
had restored him to youth.
When Hierax, Komanus, and the other officers returned to the room,
Euergetes gave orders that his four finest horses from Cyrene should be
led before noonday to his friend Publius Cornelius Scipio, in token of
his affection and respect. Then he suffered himself to be dressed, and
went to Aristarchus with whom he sat down to work at his studies.
CHAPTER XIV.
The temple of Serapis lay in restful silence, enveloped in darkness,
which so far hid its four wings from sight as to give it the aspect of a
single rock-like mass wrapped in purple mist.
Outside the temple precincts too all had been still; but just now a
clatter of hoofs and rumble of wheels was audible through the silence,
otherwise so profound that it seemed increased by every sound. Before the
vehicle which occasioned this disturbance had reached the temple, it
stopped, just outside the sacred acacia-grove, for the neighing of a
horse was now audible in that direction.
It was one of the king's horses that neighed; Lysias, the Greek, tied him
up to a tree by the road at the edge of the grove, flung his mantle over
the loins of the smoking beast; and feeling his way from tree to tree
soon found himself by the Well of the Sun where he sat down on the
margin.
Presently from the east came a keen, cold breeze, the harbinger of
sunrise; the gray gloaming began by degrees to pierce and part the tops
of the tall trees, which, in the darkness, had seemed a compact black
roof. The crowing of cocks rang out from the court-yard of the temple,
and, as the Corinthian rose with a shiver to warm himself by a rapid walk
backwards and forwards, he heard a door creak near the outer wall of the
temple, of which the outline now grew sharper and clearer every instant
in the growing light.
He now gazed with eager observation down the path which, as the day
approached, stood out with increasing clearness from the surrounding
shades, and his heart began to beat faster as he perceived a figure
approaching the well, with rapid steps. It was a human form that advanced
towards him--only one--no second figure accompanied it; but it was not a
man--no, a woman in a long robe. Still, she for whom he waited was surely
smaller than the woman, who now came near to him. Was it the elder and
not the younger sister, whom alone he was anxious to speak with, who came
to the well this morning?
He could now distinguish her light foot-fall--now she was divided from
him by a young acacia-shrub which hid her from his gaze-now she set down
two water-jars on the ground--now she briskly lifted the bucket and
filled the vessel she held in her left hand--now she looked towards the
eastern horizon, where the dim light of dawn grew broader and brighter,
and Lysias thought he recognized Irene--and now--Praised be the gods! he
was sure; before him stood the younger and not the elder sister; the very
maiden whom he sought.
Still half concealed by the acacia-shrub, and in a soft voice so as not
to alarm her, he called Irene's name, and the poor child's blood froze
with terror, for never before had she been startled by a man here, and at
this hour. She stood as if rooted to the spot, and, trembling with
fright, she pressed the cold, wet, golden jar, sacred to the god, closely
to her bosom.
Lysias repeated her name, a little louder than before, and went on, but
in a subdued voice:
"Do not be frightened, Irene; I am Lysias, the Corinthian--your friend,
whose pomegranate-blossom you wore yesterday, and who spoke to you after
the procession. Let me bid you good morning!"
At these words the girl let her hand fall by her side, still holding the
jar, and pressing her right hand to her heart, she exclaimed, drawing a
deep breath:
"How dreadfully you frightened me! I thought some wandering soul was
calling me that had not yet returned to the nether world, for it is not
till the sun rises that spirits are scared away."
"But it cannot scare men of flesh and blood whose purpose is good. I, you
may believe me, would willingly stay with you, till Helios departs again,
if you would permit me."
"I can neither permit nor forbid you anything," answered Irene. "But, how
came you here at this hour?"
"In a chariot," replied Lysias smiling.
"That is nonsense--I want to know what you came to the Well of the Sun
for at such an hour."
"I What but for you yourself? You told me yesterday that you were glad to
sleep, and so am I; still, to see you once more, I have been only to glad
to shorten my night's rest considerably."
"But, how did you know?"
"You yourself told me yesterday at what time you were allowed to leave
the temple."
"Did I tell you? Great Serapis! how light it is already. I shall be
punished if the water-jar is not standing on the altar by sunrise, and
there is Klea's too to be filled."
"I will fill it for you directly--there--that is done; and now I will
carry them both for you to the end of the grove, if you will promise me
to return soon, for I have many things to ask you."
"Go on--only go on," said the girl; "I know very little; but ask away,
though you will not find much to be made of any answers that I can give."
"Oh! yes, indeed, I shall--for instance, if I asked you to tell me all
about your parents. My friend Publius, whom you know, and I also have
heard how cruelly and unjustly they were punished, and we would gladly do
much to procure their release."
"I will come--I will be sure to come," cried Irene loudly and eagerly,
"and shall I bring Klea with me? She was called up in the middle of the
night by the gatekeeper, whose child is very ill. My sister is very fond
of it, and Philo will only take his medicine from her. The little one had
gone to sleep in her lap, and his mother came and begged me to fetch the
water for us both. Now give me the jars, for none but we may enter the
temple."
"There they are. Do not disturb your sister on my account in her care of
the poor little boy, for I might indeed have one or two things to say to
you which she need not hear, and which might give you pleasure. Now, I am
going back to the well, so farewell! But do not let me have to wait very
long for you." He spoke in a tender tone of entreaty, and the girl
answered low and rapidly as she hurried away from him:
"I will come when the sun is up."
The Corinthian looked after her till she had vanished within the temple,
and his heart was stirred--stirred as it had not been for many years. He
could not help recalling the time when he would teaze his younger sister,
then still quite a child, putting her to the test by asking her, with a
perfectly grave face, to give him her cake or her apple which he did not
really want at all. The little one had almost always put the thing he
asked for to his mouth with her tiny hands, and then he had often felt
exactly as he felt now.
Irene too was still but a child, and no less guileless than his darling
in his own home; and just as his sister had trusted him--offering him the
best she had to give--so this simple child trusted him; him, the
profligate Lysias, before whom all the modest women of Corinth cast down
their eyes, while fathers warned their growing-up sons against him;
trusted him with her virgin self--nay, as he thought, her sacred person.
"I will do thee no harm, sweet child!" he murmured to himself, as he
presently turned on his heel to return to the well. He went forward
quickly at first, but after a few steps he paused before the marvellous
and glorious picture that met his gaze. Was Memphis in flames? Had fire
fallen to burn up the shroud of mist which had veiled his way to the
temple?
The trunks of the acacia-trees stood up like the blackened pillars of a
burning city, and behind them the glow of a conflagration blazed high up
to the heavens. Beams of violet and gold slipped and sparkled between the
boughs, and danced among the thorny twigs, the white racemes of flowers,
and the tufts of leaves with their feathery leaflets; the clouds above
were fired with tints more pure and tender than those of the roses with
which Cleopatra had decked herself for the banquet.
Not like this did the sun rise in his own country! Or, was it perhaps
only that in Corinth or in Athens at break of day, as he staggered home
drunk from some feast, he had looked more at the earth than at the
heavens?
His horses began now to neigh loudly as if to greet the steeds of the
coming Sun-god. Lysias hurried to them through the grove, patted their
shining necks with soothing words, and stood looking down at the vast
city at his feet, over which hung a film of violet mist--at the solemn
Pyramids, over which the morning glow flung a gay robe of rose-color--on
the huge temple of Ptah, with the great colossi in front of its
pylons--on the Nile, mirroring the glory of the sky, and on the limestone
hills behind the villages of Babylon and Troy, about which he had, only
yesterday, heard a Jew at the king's table relating a legend current
among his countrymen to the effect that these hills had been obliged to
give up all their verdure to grace the mounts of the sacred city
Hierosolyma.
The rocky cliffs of this barren range glowed at this moment like the fire
in the heart of the great ruby which had clasped the festal robe of King
Euergetes across his bull-neck, as it reflected the shimmer of the
tapers: and Lysias saw the day-star rising behind the range with blinding
radiance, shooting forth rays like myriads of golden arrows, to rout and
destroy his foe, the darkness of night.
Eos, Helios, Phoebus Apollo--these had long been to him no more than
names, with which he associated certain phenomena, certain processes and
ideas; for he when he was not luxuriating in the bath, amusing himself in
the gymnasium, at cock or quail-fights, in the theatre or at Dionysiac
processions--was wont to exercise his wits in the schools of the
philosophers, so as to be able to shine in bandying words at
entertainments; but to-day, and face to face with this sunrise, he
believed as in the days of his childhood--he saw in his mind's eye the
god riding in his golden chariot, and curbing his foaming steeds, his
shining train floating lightly round him, bearing torches or scattering
flowers--he threw up his arms with an impulse of devotion, praying aloud:
"To-day I am happy and light of heart. To thy presence do I owe this, O!
Phoebus Apollo, for thou art light itself. Oh! let thy favors continue--"
But he here broke off in his invocation, and dropped his arms, for he
heard approaching footsteps. Smiling at his childish weakness--for such
he deemed it that he should have prayed--and yet content from his pious
impulse, he turned his back on the sun, now quite risen, and stood face
to face with Irene who called out to him:
"I was beginning to think that you had got out of patience and had gone
away, when I found you no longer by the well. That distressed me--but you
were only watching Helios rise. I see it every day, and yet it always
grieves me to see it as red as it was to-day, for our Egyptian nurse used
to tell me that when the east was very red in the morning it was because
the Sun-god had slain his enemies, and it was their blood that colored
the heavens, and the clouds and the hills."
"But you are a Greek," said Lysias, "and you must know that it is Eos
that causes these tints when she touches the horizon with her rosy
fingers before Helios appears. Now to-day you are, to me, the rosy dawn
presaging a fine day."
"Such a ruddy glow as this," said Irene, "forebodes great heat, storms,
and perhaps heavy rain, so the gatekeeper says; and he is always with the
astrologers who observe the stars and the signs in the heavens from the
towers near the temple-gates. He is poor little Philo's father. I wanted
to bring Klea with me, for she knows more about our parents than I do;
but he begged me not to call her away, for the child's throat is almost
closed up, and if it cries much the physician says it will choke, and yet
it is never quiet but when it is lying in Klea's arms. She is so
good--and she never thinks of herself; she has been ever since midnight
till now rocking that heavy child on her lap."
"We will talk with her presently," said the Corinthian. "But to-day it
was for your sake that I came; you have such merry eyes, and your little
mouth looks as if it were made for laughing, and not to sing
lamentations. How can you bear being always in that shut up dungeon with
all those solemn men in their black and white robes?"
There are some very good and kind ones among them. I am most fond of old
Krates, he looks gloomy enough at every one else; but with me only he
jokes and talks, and he often shows me such pretty and elegantly wrought
things."
"Ah! I told you just now you are like the rosy dawn before whom all
darkness must vanish."
"If only you could know how thoughtless I can be, and how often I give
trouble to Klea, who never scolds me for it, you would be far from
comparing me with a goddess. Little old Krates, too, often compares me to
all sorts of pretty things, but that always sounds so comical that I
cannot help laughing. I had much rather listen to you when you flatter
me."
"Because I am young and youth suits with youth. Your sister is older, and
so much graver than you are. Have you never had a companion of your own
age whom you could play with, and to whom you could tell everything?"
"Oh! yes when I was still very young; but since my parents fell into
trouble, and we have lived here in the temple, I have always been alone
with Klea. What do you want to know about my father?"
"That I will ask you by-and-by. Now only tell me, have you never played
at hide and seek with other girls? May you never look on at the merry
doings in the streets at the Dionysiac festivals? Have you ever ridden in
a chariot?"
"I dare say I have, long ago--but I have forgotten it. How should I have
any chance of such things here in the temple? Klea says it is no good
even to think of them. She tells me a great deal about our parents--how
my mother took care of us, and what my father used to say. Has anything
happened that may turn out favorably for him? Is it possible that the
king should have learned the truth? Make haste and ask your questions at
once, for I have already been too long out here."
The impatient steeds neighed again as she spoke, and Lysias, to whom this
chat with Irene was perfectly enchanting, but who nevertheless had not
for a moment lost sight of his object, hastily pointed to the spot where
his horses were standing, and said:
"Did you hear the neighing of those mettlesome horses? They brought me
hither, and I can guide them well; nay, at the last Isthmian games I won
the crown with my own quadriga. You said you had never ridden standing in
a chariot. How would you like to try for once how it feels? I will drive
you with pleasure up and down behind the grove for a little while."
Irene heard this proposal with sparkling eyes and cried, as she clapped
her hands:
"May I ride in a chariot with spirited horses, like the queen? Oh!
impossible! Where are your horses standing?"
In this instant she had forgotten Klea, the duty which called her back to
the temple, even her parents, and she followed the Corinthian with winged
steps, sprang into the two-wheeled chariot, and clung fast to the
breastwork, as Lysias took his place by her side, seized the reins, and
with a strong and practised hand curbed the mettle of his spirited
steeds.
She stood perfectly guileless and undoubting by his side, and wholly at
his mercy as the chariot rattled off; but, unknown to herself, beneficent
powers were shielding her with buckler and armor--her childlike
innocence, and that memory of her parents which her tempter himself had
revived in her mind, and which soon came back in vivid strength.
Breathing deep with excitement, and filled with such rapture as a bird
may feel when it first soars from its narrow nest high up into the ether
she cried out again and again:
"Oh, this is delightful! this is splendid!" and then:
"How we rush through the air as if we were swallows! Faster, Lysias,
faster! No, no--that is too fast; wait a little that I may not fall! Oh,
I am not frightened; it is too delightful to cut through the air just as
a Nile boat cuts through the stream in a storm, and to feel it on my face
and neck."
Lysias was very close to her; when, at her desire, he urged his horses to
their utmost pace, and saw her sway, he involuntarily put out his hand to
hold her by the girdle; but Irene avoided his grasp, pressing close
against the side of the chariot next her, and every time he touched her
she drew her arm close up to her body, shrinking together like the
fragile leaf of a sensitive plant when it is touched by some foreign
object.
She now begged the Corinthian to allow her to hold the reins for a little
while, and he immediately acceded to her request, giving them into her
hand, though, stepping behind her, he carefully kept the ends of them in
his own. He could now see her shining hair, the graceful oval of her
head, and her white throat eagerly bent forward; an indescribable longing
came over him to press a kiss on her head; but he forbore, for he
remembered his friend's words that he would fulfil the part of a guardian
to these girls. He too would be a protector to her, aye and more than
that, he would care for her as a father might. Still, as often as the
chariot jolted over a stone, and he touched her to support her, the
suppressed wish revived, and once when her hair was blown quite close to
his lips he did indeed kiss it--but only as a friend or a brother might.
Still, she must have felt the breath from his lips, for she turned round
hastily, and gave him back the reins; then, pressing her hand to her
brow, she said in a quite altered voice--not unmixed with a faint tone of
regret:
"This is not right--please now to turn the horses round."
Lysias, instead of obeying her, pulled at the reins to urge the horses to
a swifter pace, and before he could find a suitable answer, she had
glanced up at the sun, and pointing to the east she exclaimed:
"How late it is already! what shall I say if I have been looked for, and
they ask me where I have been so long? Why don't you turn round--nor ask
me anything about my parents?"
The last words broke from her with vehemence, and as Lysias did not
immediately reply nor make any attempt to check the pace of the horses,
she herself seized the reins exclaiming:
"Will you turn round or no?"
"No!" said the Greek with decision. "But--"
"And this is what you intended!" shrieked the girl, beside herself. "You
meant to carry me off by stratagem--but wait, only wait--"
And before Lysias could prevent her she had turned round, and was
preparing to spring from the chariot as it rushed onwards; but her
companion was quicker than she; he clutched first at her robe and then
her girdle, put his arm round her waist, and in spite of her resistance
pulled her back into the chariot.
Trembling, stamping her little feet and with tears in her eyes, she
strove to free her girdle from his grasp; he, now bringing his horses to
a stand-still, said kindly but earnestly:
"What I have done is the best that could happen to you, and I will even
turn the horses back again if you command it, but not till you have heard
me; for when I got you into the chariot by stratagem it was because I was
afraid that you would refuse to accompany me, and yet I knew that every
delay would expose you to the most hideous peril. I did not indeed take a
base advantage of your father's name, for my friend Publius Scipio, who
is very influential, intends to do everything in his power to procure his
freedom and to reunite you to him. But, Irene, that could never have
happened if I had left you where you have hitherto lived."
During this discourse the girl had looked at Lysias in bewilderment, and
she interrupted him with the exclamation:
"But I have never done any one an injury! Who can gain any benefit by
persecuting a poor creature like me:
"Your father was the most righteous of men," replied Lysias, "and
nevertheless he was carried off into torments like a criminal. It is not
only the unrighteous and the wicked that are persecuted. Have you ever
heard of King Euergetes, who, at his birth, was named the 'well-doer,'
and who has earned that of the 'evil doer' by his crimes? He has heard
that you are fair, and he is about to demand of the high-priest that he
should surrender you to him. If Asclepiodorus agrees--and what can he do
against the might of a king--you will be made the companion of
flute-playing girls and painted women, who riot with drunken men at his
wild carousals and orgies, and if your parents found you thus, better
would it be for them--"
"Is it true, all you are telling me?" asked Irene with flaming cheeks.
"Yes," answered Lysias firmly. "Listen Irene--I have a father and a dear
mother and a sister, who is like you, and I swear to you by their
heads--by those whose names never passed my lips in the presence of any
other woman I ever sued to--that I am speaking the simple truth; that I
seek nothing but only to save you; that if you desire it, as soon as I
have hidden you I will never see you again, terribly hard as that would
be to me--for I love you so dearly, so deeply--poor sweet little
Irene--as you can never imagine."
Lysias took the girl's hand, but she withdrew it hastily, and raising her
eyes, full of tears, to meet his she said clearly and firmly:
"I believe you, for no man could speak like that and betray another. But
how do you know all this? Where are you taking me? Will Klea follow me?"
"At first you shall be concealed with the family of a worthy sculptor. We
will let Klea know this very day of all that has happened to you, and
when we have obtained the release of your parents then--but--Help us,
protecting Zeus! Do you see the chariot yonder? I believe those are the
white horses of the Eunuch Eulaeus, and if he were to see us here, all
would be lost! Hold tight, we must go as fast as in a chariot race.
There, now the hill hides us, and down there, by the little temple of
Isis, the wife of your future host is already waiting for you; she is no
doubt sitting in the closed chariot near the palm-trees.
"Yes, certainly, certainly, Klea shall hear all, so that she may not be
uneasy about you! I must say farewell to you directly and then,
afterwards, sweet Irene, will you sometimes think of the unhappy Lysias;
or did Aurora, who greeted him this morning, so bright and full of happy
promise, usher in a day not of joy but of sorrow and regret?" The Greek
drew in rein as he spoke, bringing his horses to a sober pace, and looked
tenderly in Irene's eyes. She returned his gaze with heart-felt emotion,
but her gunny glance was dimmed with tears.
"Say something," entreated the Greek. "Will you not forget me? And may I
soon visit you in your new retreat?"
Irene would so gladly have said yes--and yes again, a thousand times yes;
and yet she, who was so easily carried away by every little emotion of
her heart, in this supreme moment found strength enough to snatch her
hand from that of the Greek, who had again taken it, and to answer
firmly:
"I will remember you for ever and ever, but you must not come to see me
till I am once more united to my Klea."
"But Irene, consider, if now--" cried Lysias much agitated.
"You swore to me by the heads of your nearest kin to obey my wishes,"
interrupted the girl. "Certainly I trust you, and all the more readily
because you are so good to me, but I shall not do so any more if you do
not keep your word. Look, here comes a lady to meet us who looks like a
friend. She is already waving her hand to me. Yes, I will go with her
gladly, and yet I am so anxious--so troubled, I cannot tell you--but I am
so thankful too! Think of me sometimes, Lysias, and of our journey here,
and of our talk, and of my parents: I entreat you, do for them all you
possibly can. I wish I could help crying--but I cannot!"
CHAPTER XV.
Lysias eyes had not deceived him. The chariot with white horses which he
had evaded during his flight with Irene belonged to Eulaeus. The morning
being cool--and also because Cleopatra's lady-in-waiting was with him--he
had come out in a closed chariot, in which he sat on soft cushions side
by side with the Macedonian lady, endeavoring to win her good graces by a
conversation, witty enough in its way.
"On the way there," thought he, "I will make her quite favorable to me,
and on the way back I will talk to her of my own affairs."
The drive passed quickly and pleasantly for both, and they neither of
them paid any heed to the sound of the hoofs of the horses that were
bearing away Irene.
Eulaeus dismounted behind the acacia-grove, and expressed a hope that Zoe
would not find the time very long while he was engaged with the
high-priest; perhaps indeed, he remarked, she might even make some use of
the time by making advances to the representative of Hebe.
But Irene had been long since warmly welcomed in the house of
Apollodorus, the sculptor, by the time they once more found themselves
together in the chariot; Eulaeus feigning, and Zoe in reality feeling,
extreme dissatisfaction at all that had taken place in the temple. The
high-priest had rejected Philometor's demand that he should send the
water-bearer to the palace on King Euergetes' birthday, with a
decisiveness which Eulaeus would never have given him credit for, for he
had on former occasions shown a disposition to measures of compromise;
while Zoe had not even seen the waterbearer.
"I fancy," said the queen's shrewd friend, "that I followed you somewhat
too late, and that when I entered the temple about half an hour after
you--having been detained first by Imhotep, the old physician, and then
by an assistant of Apollodorus, the sculptor, with some new busts of the
philosophers--the high-priest had already given orders that the girl
should be kept concealed; for when I asked to see her, I was conducted
first to her miserable room, which seemed more fit for peasants or goats
than for a Hebe, even for a sham one--but I found it perfectly deserted.
"Then I was shown into the temple of Serapis, where a priest was
instructing some girls in singing, and then sent hither and thither, till
at last, finding no trace whatever of the famous Irene, I came to the
dwelling-house of the gate-keeper of the temple.
"An ungainly woman opened the door, and said that Irene had been gone
from thence for some long time, but that her elder sister was there, so I
desired she might be fetched to speak with me. And what, if you please,
was the answer I received? The goddess Klea--I call her so as being
sister to a Hebe--had to nurse a sick child, and if I wanted to see her I
might go in and find her.
"The tone of the message quite conveyed that the distance from her down
to me was as great as in fact it is the other way. However, I thought it
worth the trouble to see this supercilious water-bearing girl, and I went
into a low room--it makes me sick now to remember how it smelt of
poverty--and there she sat with an idiotic child, dying on her lap.
Everything that surrounded me was so revolting and dismal that it will
haunt my dreams with terror for weeks to come and spoil all my cheerful
hours.
"I did not remain long with these wretched creatures, but I must confess
that if Irene is as like to Hebe as her elder sister is to Hera,
Euergetes has good grounds for being angry if Asclepiodorus keeps the
girl from him.
"Many a queen--and not least the one whom you and I know so
intimately-would willingly give half of her kingdom to possess such a
figure and such a mien as this serving-girl. And then her eyes, as she
looked at me when she rose with that little gasping corpse in her arms,
and asked me what I wanted with her sister!
"There was an impressive and lurid glow in those solemn eyes, which
looked as if they had been taken out of some Medusa's head to be set in
her beautiful face. And there was a sinister threat in them too which
seemed to say: 'Require nothing of her that I do not approve of, or you
will be turned into stone on the spot.' She did not answer twenty words
to my questions, and when I once more tasted the fresh air outside, which
never seemed to me so pleasant as by contrast with that horrible hole, I
had learnt no more than that no one knew--or chose to know--in what
corner the fair Irene was hidden, and that I should do well to make no
further enquiries.
"And now, what will Philometor do? What will you advise him to do?"
"What cannot be got at by soft words may sometimes be obtained by a
sufficiently large present," replied Eulaeus. "You know very well that of
all words none is less familiar to these gentry than the little word
'enough'; but who indeed is really ready to say it?
"You speak of the haughtiness and the stern repellent demeanor of our
Hebe's sister. I have seen her too, and I think that her image might be
set up in the Stoa as a happy impersonation of the severest virtue: and
yet children generally resemble their parents, and her father was the
veriest peculator and the most cunning rascal that ever came in my way,
and was sent off to the gold-mines for very sufficient reasons. And for
the sake of the daughter of a convicted criminal you have been driven
through the dust and the scorching heat, and have had to submit to her
scorn and contemptuous airs, while I am threatened with grave peril on
her account, for you know that Cleopatra's latest whim is to do honor to
the Roman, Publius Scipio; he, on the other hand, is running after our
Hebe, and, having promised her that he will obtain an unqualified pardon
for her father, he will do his utmost to throw the odium of his robbery
upon me.
"The queen is to give him audience this very day, and you cannot know how
many enemies a man makes who, like me, has for many years been one of the
leading men of a great state. The king acknowledges, and with gratitude,
all that I have done for him and for his mother; but if, at the moment
when Publius Scipio accuses me, he is more in favor with her than ever, I
am a lost man.
"You are always with the queen; do you tell her who these girls are, and
what motives the Roman has for loading me with their father's crimes; and
some opportunity must offer for doing you and your belongings some
friendly office or another."
"What a shameless crew!" exclaimed Zoe. "Depend upon it I will not be
silent, for I always do what is just. I cannot bear seeing others
suffering an injustice, and least of all that a man of your merit and
distinction should be wounded in his honor, because a haughty foreigner
takes a fancy to a pretty little face and a conceited doll of a girl."
Zoe was in the right when she found the air stifling in the gate-keeper's
house, for poor Irene, unaccustomed to such an atmosphere, could no more
endure it than the pretentious maid of honor. It cost even Klea an effort
to remain in the wretched room, which served as the dwelling-place of the
whole family; where the cooking was carried on at a smoky hearth, while,
at night, it also sheltered a goat and a few fowls; but she had endured
even severer trials than this for the sake of what she deemed right, and
she was so fond of little Philo--her anxious care in arousing by degrees
his slumbering intelligence had brought her so much soothing
satisfaction, and the child's innocent gratitude had been so tender a
reward--that she wholly forgot the repulsive surroundings as soon as she
felt that her presence and care were indispensable to the suffering
little one.
Imhotep, the most famous of the priest-physicians of the temple of
Asclepius--a man who was as learned in Greek as in Egyptian medical lore,
and who had been known by the name of "the modern Herophilus" since King
Philometor had summoned him from Alexandria to Memphis--had long since
been watchful of the gradual development of the dormant intelligence of
the gate-keeper's child, whom he saw every day in his visits to the
temple. Now, not long after Zoe had quitted the house, he came in to see
the sick child for the third time. Klea was still holding the boy on her
lap when he entered. On a wooden stool in front of her stood a brazier of
charcoal, and on it a small copper kettle the physician had brought with
him; to this a long tube was attached. The tube was in two parts, joined
together by a leather joint, also tubular, in such a way that the upper
portion could be turned in any direction. Klea from time to time applied
it to the breast of the child, and, in obedience to Imhotep's
instructions, made the little one inhale the steam that poured out of it.
"Has it had the soothing effect it ought to have?" asked the physician.
"Yes, indeed, I think so," replied Klea, "There is not so much noise in
the chest when the poor little fellow draws his breath."
The old man put his ear to the child's mouth, laid his hand on his brow,
and said:
"If the fever abates I hope for the best. This inhaling of steam is an
excellent remedy for these severe catarrhs, and a venerable one besides;
for in the oldest writings of Hermes we find it prescribed as an
application in such cases. But now he has had enough of it. Ah! this
steam--this steam! Do you know that it is stronger than horses or oxen,
or the united strength of a whole army of giants? That diligent enquirer
Hero of Alexandria discovered this lately.
"But our little invalid has had enough of it, we must not overheat him.
Now, take a linen cloth--that one will do though it is not very fine.
Fold it together, wet it nicely with cold water--there is some in that
miserable potsherd there--and now I will show you how to lay it on the
child's throat.
"You need not assure me that you understand me, Klea, for you have
hands--neat hands--and patience without end! Sixty-five years have I
lived, and have always had good health, but I could almost wish to be ill
for once, in order to be nursed by you. That poor child is well off
better than many a king's child when it is sick; for him hireling nurses,
no doubt, fetch and do all that is necessary, but one thing they cannot
give, for they have it not; I mean the loving and indefatigable patience
by which you have worked a miracle on this child's mind, and are now
working another on his body. Aye, aye, my girl; it is to you and not me
that this woman will owe her child if it is preserved to her. Do you hear
me, woman? and tell your husband so too; and if you do not reverence Klea
as a goddess, and do not lay your hands beneath her feet, may you
be--no--I will wish you no ill, for you have not too much of the good
things of life as it is!"
As he spoke the gate-keeper's wife came timidly up to the physician and
the sick child, pushed her rough and tangled hair off her forehead a
little, crossed her lean arms at full length behind her back, and,
looking down with out-stretched neck at the boy, stared in dumb amazement
at the wet cloths. Then she timidly enquired:
"Are the evil spirits driven out of the child?"
"Certainly," replied the physician. "Klea there has exorcised them, and I
have helped her; now you know."
"Then I may go out for a little while? I have to sweep the pavement of
the forecourt."
Klea nodded assent, and when the woman had disappeared the physician
said:
"How many evil demons we have to deal with, alas! and how few good ones.
Men are far more ready and willing to believe in mischievous spirits than
in kind or helpful ones; for when things go ill with them--and it is
generally their own fault when they do--it comforts them and flatters
their vanity if only they can throw the blame on the shoulders of evil
spirits; but when they are well to do, when fortune smiles on them of
course, they like to ascribe it to themselves, to their own cleverness or
their superior insight, and they laugh at those who admonish them of the
gratitude they owe to the protecting and aiding demons. I, for my part,
think more of the good than of the evil spirits, and you, my child,
without doubt are one of the very best.
"You must change the compress every quarter of an hour, and between
whiles go out into the open air, and let the fresh breezes fan your
bosom--your cheeks look pale. At mid-day go to your own little room, and
try to sleep. Nothing ought to be overdone, so you are to obey me."
Klea replied with a friendly and filial nod, and Imhotep stroked down her
hair; then he left; she remained alone in the stuffy hot room, which grew
hotter every minute, while she changed the wet cloths for the sick child,
and watched with delight the diminishing hoarseness and difficulty of his
breathing. From time to time she was overcome by a slight drowsiness, and
closed her eyes for a few minutes, but only for a short while; and this
half-awake and half-asleep condition, chequered by fleeting dreams, and
broken only by an easy and pleasing duty, this relaxation of the tension
of mind and body, had a certain charm of which, through it all, she
remained perfectly conscious. Here she was in her right place; the
physicians kind words had done her good, and her anxiety for the little
life she loved was now succeeded by a well-founded hope of its
preservation.
During the night she had already come to a definite resolution, to
explain to the high-priest that she could not undertake the office of the
twin-sisters, who wept by the bier of Osiris, and that she would rather
endeavor to earn bread by the labor of her hands for herself and
Irene--for that Irene should do any real work never entered her mind--at
Alexandria, where even the blind and the maimed could find occupation.
Even this prospect, which only yesterday had terrified her, began now to
smile upon her, for it opened to her the possibility of proving
independently the strong energy which she felt in herself.
Now and then the figure of the Roman rose before her mind's eye, and
every time that this occurred she colored to her very forehead. But
to-day she thought of this disturber of her peace differently from
yesterday; for yesterday she had felt herself overwhelmed by him with
shame, while to-day it appeared to her as though she had triumphed over
him at the procession, since she had steadily avoided his glance, and
when he had dared to approach her she had resolutely turned her back upon
him. This was well, for how could the proud foreigner expose himself
again to such humiliation.
"Away, away--for ever away!" she murmured to herself, and her eyes and
brow, which had been lighted up by a transient smile, once more assumed
the expression of repellent sternness which, the day before, had so
startled and angered the Roman. Soon however the severity of her features
relaxed, as she saw in fancy the young man's beseeching look, and
remembered the praise given him by the recluse, and as--in the middle of
this train of thought--her eyes closed again, slumber once more falling
upon her spirit for a few minutes, she saw in her dream Publius himself,
who approached her with a firm step, took her in his arms like a child,
held her wrists to stop her struggling hands, gathered her up with rough
force, and then flung her into a canoe lying at anchor by the bank of the
Nile.
She fought with all her might against this attack and seizure, screamed
aloud with fury, and woke at the sound of her own voice. Then she got up,
dried her eyes that were wet with tears, and, after laying a freshly
wetted cloth on the child's throat, she went out of doors in obedience to
the physician's advice.
The sun was already at the meridian, and its direct rays were fiercely
reflected from the slabs of yellow sandstone that paved the forecourt. On
one side only of the wide, unroofed space, one of the colonnades that
surrounded it threw a narrow shade, hardly a span wide; and she would not
go there, for under it stood several beds on which lay pilgrims who, here
in the very dwelling of the divinity, hoped to be visited with dreams
which might give them an insight into futurity.
Klea's head was uncovered, and, fearing the heat of noon, she was about
to return into the door-keeper's house, when she saw a young white-robed
scribe, employed in the special service of Asclepiodorus, who came across
the court beckoning eagerly to her. She went towards him, but before he
had reached her he shouted out an enquiry whether her sister Irene was in
the gate-keeper's lodge; the high-priest desired to speak with her, and
she was nowhere to be found. Klea told him that a grand lady from the
queen's court had already enquired for her, and that the last time she
had seen her had been before daybreak, when she was going to fill the
jars for the altar of the god at the Well of the Sun.
"The water for the first libation," answered the priest, "was placed on
the altar at the right time, but Doris and her sister had to fetch it for
the second and third. Asclepiodorus is angry--not with you, for he knows
from Imhotep that you are taking care of a sick child--but with Irene.
Try and think where she can be. Something serious must have occurred that
the high-priest wishes to communicate to her."
Klea was startled, for she remembered Irene's tears the evening before,
and her cry of longing for happiness and freedom. Could it be that the
thoughtless child had yielded to this longing, and escaped without her
knowledge, though only for a few hours, to see the city and the gay life
there?
She collected herself so as not to betray her anxiety to the messenger,
and said with downcast eyes:
"I will go and look for her."
She hurried back into the house, once more looked to the sick child,
called his mother and showed her how to prepare the compresses, urging
her to follow Imhotep's directions carefully and exactly till she should
return; she pressed one loving kiss on little Philo's forehead--feeling
as she did so that he was less hot than he had been in the morning--and
then she left, going first to her own dwelling.
There everything stood or lay exactly as she had left it during the
night, only the golden jars were wanting. This increased Klea's alarm,
but the thought that Irene should have taken the precious vessels with
her, in order to sell them and to live on the proceeds, never once
entered her mind, for her sister, she knew, though heedless and easily
persuaded, was incapable of any base action.
Where was she to seek the lost girl? Serapion, the recluse, to whom she
first addressed herself, knew nothing of her.
On the altar of Serapis, whither she next went, she found both the
vessels, and carried them back to her room.
Perhaps Irene had gone to see old Krates, and while watching his work and
chattering to him, had forgotten the flight of time--but no, the
priest-smith, whom she sought in his workshop, knew nothing of the
vanished maiden. He would willingly have helped Klea to seek for his
favorite, but the new lock for the tombs of the Apis had to be finished
by mid-day, and his swollen feet were painful.
Klea stood outside the old man's door sunk in thought, and it occurred to
her that Irene had often, in her idle hours, climbed up into the dove-cot
belonging to the temple, to look out from thence over the distant
landscape, to visit the sitting birds, to stuff food into the gaping
beaks of the young ones, or to look up at the cloud of soaring doves. The
pigeon-house, built up of clay pots and Nile-mud, stood on the top of the
storehouse, which lay adjoining the southern boundary wall of the temple.
She hastened across the sunny courts and slightly shaded alleys, and
mounted to the flat roof of the storehouse, but she found there neither
the old dove-keeper nor his two grandsons who helped him in his work, for
all three were in the anteroom to the kitchen, taking their dinner with
the temple-servants.
Klea shouted her sister's name; once, twice, ten times--but no one
answered. It was just as if the fierce heat of the sun burnt up the sound
as it left her lips. She looked into the first pigeon-house, the second,
the third, all the way to the last. The numberless little clay tenements
of the brisk little birds threw out a glow like a heated oven; but this
did not hinder her from hunting through every nook and corner. Her cheeks
were burning, drops of perspiration stood on her brow, and she had much
difficulty in freeing herself from the dust of the pigeon-houses, still
she was not discouraged.
Perhaps Irene had gone into the Anubidium, or sanctuary of Asclepius, to
enquire as to the meaning of some strange vision, for there, with the
priestly physicians, lived also a priestess who could interpret the
dreams of those who sought to be healed even better than a certain
recluse who also could exercise that science. The enquirers often had to
wait a long time outside the temple of Asclepius, and this consideration
encouraged Klea, and made her insensible to the burning southwest wind
which was now rising, and to the heat of the sun; still, as she returned
to the Pastophorium--slowly, like a warrior returning from a defeat--she
suffered severely from the heat, and her heart was wrung with anguish and
suspense.
Willingly would she have cried, and often heaved a groan that was more
like a sob, but the solace of tears to relieve her heart was still denied
to her.
Before going to tell Asclepiodorus that her search had been unsuccessful,
she felt prompted once more to talk with her friend, the anchorite; but
before she had gone far enough even to see his cell, the high-priest's
scribe once more stood in her way, and desired her to follow him to the
temple. There she had to wait in mortal impatience for more than an hour
in an ante room. At last she was conducted into a room where
Asclepiodorus was sitting with the whole chapter of the priesthood of the
temple of Serapis.
Klea entered timidly, and had to wait again some minutes in the presence
of the mighty conclave before the high-priest asked her whether she could
give any information as to the whereabouts of the fugitive, and whether
she had heard or observed anything that could guide them on her track,
since he, Asclepiodorus, knew that if Irene had run away secretly from
the temple she must be as anxious about her as he was.
Klea had much difficulty in finding words, and her knees shook as she
began to speak, but she refused the seat which was brought for her by
order of Asclepiodorus. She recounted in order all the places where she
had in vain sought her sister, and when she mentioned the sanctuary of
Asclepius, and a recollection came suddenly and vividly before her of the
figure of a lady of distinction, who had come there with a number of
slaves and waiting-maids to have a dream interpreted, Zoe's visit to
herself flashed upon her memory; her demeanor--at first so over-friendly
and then so supercilious--and her haughty enquiries for Irene.
She broke off in her narrative, and exclaimed:
"I am sure, holy father, that Irene has not fled of her own free impulse,
but some one perhaps may have lured her into quitting the temple and me;
she is still but a child with a wavering mind. Could it possibly be that
a lady of rank should have decoyed her into going with her? Such a person
came to-day to see me at the door-keeper's lodge. She was richly dressed
and wore a gold crescent in her light wavy hair, which was plaited with a
silk ribband, and she asked me urgently about my sister. Imhotep, the
physician, who often visits at the king's palace, saw her too, and told
me her name is Zoe, and that she is lady-in-waiting to Queen Cleopatra."
These words occasioned the greatest excitement throughout the conclave of
priests, and Asclepiodorus exclaimed:
"Oh! women, women! You indeed were right, Philammon; I could not and
would not believe it! Cleopatra has done many things which are forgiven
only in a queen, but that she should become the tool of her brother's
basest passions, even you, Philammon, could hardly regard as likely,
though you are always prepared to expect evil rather than good. But now,
what is to be done? How can we protect ourselves against violence and
superior force?"
Klea had appeared before the priests with cheeks crimson and glowing from
the noontide heat, but at the high-priest's last words the blood left her
face, she turned ashy-pale, and a chill shiver ran through her trembling
limbs. Her father's child--her bright, innocent Irene--basely stolen for
Euergetes, that licentious tyrant of whose wild deeds Serapion had told
her only last evening, when he painted the dangers that would threaten
her and Irene if they should quit the shelter of the sanctuary.
Alas, it was too true! They had tempted away her darling child, her
comfort and delight, lured her with splendor and ease, only to sink her
in shame! She was forced to cling to the back of the chair she had
disdained, to save herself from falling.
But this weakness overmastered her for a few minutes only; she boldly
took two hasty steps up to the table behind which the high-priest was
sitting, and, supporting herself with her right hand upon it, she
exclaimed, while her voice, usually so full and sonorous, had a hoarse
tone:
"A woman has been the instrument of making another woman unworthy of the
name of woman! and you--you, the protectors of right and virtue--you who
are called to act according to the will and mind of the gods whom you
serve--you are too weak to prevent it? If you endure this, if you do not
put a stop to this crime you are not worthy--nay, I will not be
interrupted--you, I say, are unworthy of the sacred title and of the
reverence you claim, and I will appeal--"
"Silence, girl!" cried Asclepiodorus to the terribly excited Klea. "I
would have you imprisoned with the blasphemers, if I did not well
understand the anguish which has turned your brain. We will interfere on
behalf of the abducted girl, and you must wait patiently in silence. You,
Callimachus, must at once order Ismael, the messenger, to saddle the
horses, and ride to Memphis to deliver a despatch from me to the queen;
let us all combine to compose it, and subscribe our names as soon as we
are perfectly certain that Irene has been carried off from these
precincts. Philammon, do you command that the gong be sounded which calls
together all the inhabitants of the temple; and you, my girl, quit this
hall, and join the others."
CHAPTER XVI.
Klea obeyed the high-priest's command at once, and wandered--not knowing
exactly whither--from one corridor to another of the huge pile, till she
was startled by the sound of the great brazen plate, struck with mighty
blows, which rang out to the remotest nook and corner of the precincts.
This call was for her too, and she went forthwith into the great court of
assembly, which at every moment grew fuller and fuller. The
temple-servants and the keepers of the beasts, the gate-keepers, the
litter-bearers, the water-carriers-all streamed in from their interrupted
meal, some wiping their mouths as they hurried in, or still holding in
their hands a piece of bread, a radish, or a date which they hastily
munched; the washer-men and women came in with hands still wet from
washing the white robes of the priests, and the cooks arrived with brows
still streaming from their unfinished labors. Perfumes floated round from
the unwashed hands of the pastophori, who had been busied in the
laboratories in the preparation of incense, while from the library and
writing-rooms came the curators and scribes and the officials of the
temple counting-house, their hair in disorder, and their light
working-dress stained with red or black. The troop of singers, male and
female, came in orderly array, just as they had been assembled for
practice, and with them came the faded twins to whom Klea and Irene had
been designated as successors by Asclepiodorus. Then came the pupils of
the temple-school, tumbling noisily into the court-yard in high delight
at this interruption to their lessons. The eldest of these were sent to
bring in the great canopy under which the heads of the establishment
might assemble.
Last of all appeared Asclepiodorus, who handed to a young scribe a
complete list of all the inhabitants and members of the temple, that he
might read it out. This he proceeded to do; each one answered with an
audible "Here" as his name was called, and for each one who was absent
information was immediately given as to his whereabouts.
Klea had joined the singing-women, and awaited in breathless anxiety a
long-endlessly long-time for the name of her sister to be called; for it
was not till the very smallest of the school-boys and the lowest of the
neat-herds had answered, "Here," that the scribe read out, "Klea, the
water-bearer," and nodded to her in answer as she replied "Here!"
Then his voice seemed louder than before as he read. "Irene, the
water-bearer."
No answer following on these words, a slight movement, like the bowing
wave that flies over a ripe cornfield when the morning breeze sweeps
across the ears, was evident among the assembled inhabitants of the
temple, who waited in breathless silence till Asclepiodorus stood forth,
and said in a distinct and audible voice:
"You have all met here now at my call. All have obeyed it excepting those
holy men consecrated to Serapis, whose vows forbid their breaking their
seclusion, and Irene, the water-bearer. Once more I call, 'Irene,' a
second, and a third time--and still no answer; I now appeal to you all
assembled here, great and small, men and women who serve Serapis. Can any
one of you give any information as to the whereabouts of this young girl?
Has any one seen her since, at break of day, she placed the first
libation from the Well of the Sun on the altar of the god? You are all
silent! Then no one has met her in the course of this day? Now, one
question more, and whoever can answer it stand forth and speak the words
of truth.
"By which gate did this lady of rank depart who visited the temple early
this morning?--By the eastern gate--good.
"Was she alone?--She was.
"By which gate did the epistolographer Eulaeus depart?--By the east.
"Was he alone?--He was.
"Did any one here present meet the chariot either of the lady or of
Eulaeus?"
"I did," cried a car-driver, whose daily duty it was to go to Memphis
with his oxen and cart to fetch provisions for the kitchen, and other
necessaries.
"Speak," said the high-priest.
"I saw," replied the man, "the white horses of my Lord Eulaeus hard by
the vineyard of Khakem; I know them well. They were harnessed to a closed
chariot, in which besides himself sat a lady."
"Was it Irene?" asked Asclepiodorus.
"I do not know," replied the tarter, "for I could not see who sat in the
chariot, but I heard the voice of Eulaeus, and then a woman's laugh. She
laughed so heartily that I had to screw my mouth up myself, it tickled me
so."
While Klea supposed this description to apply to Irene's merry
laugh-which she had never thought of with regret till this moment--the
high-priest exclaimed:
"You, keeper of the eastern gate, did the lady and Eulaeus enter and
leave this sanctuary together?"
"No," was the answer. "She came in half an hour later than he did, and
she quitted the temple quite alone and long after the eunuch."
"And Irene did not pass through your gate, and cannot have gone out by
it?--I ask you in the name of the god we serve!"
"She may have done so, holy father," answered the gate-keeper in much
alarm. "I have a sick child, and to look after him I went into my room
several times; but only for a few minutes at a time-still, the gate
stands open, all is quiet in Memphis now."
"You have done very wrong," said Asclepiodorus severely, "but since you
have told the truth you may go unpunished. We have learned enough. All
you gate-keepers now listen to me. Every gate of the temple must be
carefully shut, and no one--not even a pilgrim nor any dignitary from
Memphis, however high a personage he may be--is to enter or go out
without my express permission; be as alert as if you feared an attack,
and now go each of you to his duties."
The assembly dispersed; these to one side, those to another.
Klea did not perceive that many looked at her with suspicion as though
she were responsible for her sister's conduct, and others with
compassion; she did not even notice the twin-sisters, whose place she and
Irene were to have filled, and this hurt the feelings of the good elderly
maidens, who had to perform so much lamenting which they did not feel at
all, that they eagerly seized every opportunity of expressing their
feelings when, for once in a way, they were moved to sincere sorrow. But
neither these sympathizing persons nor any other of the inhabitants of
the temple, who approached Klea with the purpose of questioning or of
pitying her, dared to address her, so stern and terrible was the solemn
expression of her eyes which she kept fixed upon the ground.
At last she remained alone in the great court; her heart beat faster
unusual, and strange and weighty thoughts were stirring in her soul. One
thing was clear to her: Eulaeus--her father's ruthless foe and
destroyer--was now also working the fall of the child of the man he had
ruined, and, though she knew it not, the high-priest shared her
suspicions. She, Klea, was by no means minded to let this happen without
an effort at defence, and it even became clearer and clearer to her mind
that it was her duty to act, and without delay. In the first instance she
would ask counsel of her friend Serapion; but as she approached his cell
the gong was sounded which summoned the priests to service, and at the
same time warned her of her duty of fetching water.
Mechanically, and still thinking of nothing but Irene's deliverance, she
fulfilled the task which she was accustomed to perform every day at the
sound of this brazen clang, and went to her room to fetch the golden jars
of the god.
As she entered the empty room her cat sprang to meet her with two leaps
of joy, putting up her back, rubbing her soft head against her feet with
her fine bushy tail ringed with black stripes set up straight, as cats
are wont only when they are pleased. Klea was about to stroke the coaxing
animal, but it sprang back, stared at her shyly, and, as she could not
help thinking, angrily with its green eyes, and then shrank back into the
corner close to Irene's couch.
"She mistook me!" thought Klea. "Irene is more lovable than I even to a
beast, and Irene, Irene--" She sighed deeply at the name, and would have
sunk down on her trunk there to consider of new ways and means--all of
which however she was forced to reject as foolish and impracticable--but
on the chest lay a little shirt she had begun to make for little Philo,
and this reminded her again of the sick child and of the duty of fetching
the water.
Without further delay she took up the jars, and as she went towards the
well she remembered the last precepts that had been given her by her
father, whom she had once been permitted to visit in prison. Only a few
detached sentences of this, his last warning speech, now came into her
mind, though no word of it had escaped her memory; it ran much as
follows:
"It may seem as though I had met with an evil recompense from the gods
for my conduct in adhering to what I think just and virtuous; but it only
seems so, and so long as I succeed in living in accordance with nature,
which obeys an everlasting law, no man is justified in accusing me. My
own peace of mind especially will never desert me so long as I do not set
myself to act in opposition to the fundamental convictions of my inmost
being, but obey the doctrines of Zeno and Chrysippus. This peace every
one may preserve, aye, even you, a woman, if you constantly do what you
recognize to be right, and fulfil the duties you take upon yourself. The
very god himself is proof and witness of this doctrine, for he grants to
him who obeys him that tranquillity of spirit which must be pleasing in
his eyes, since it is the only condition of the soul in which it appears
to be neither fettered and hindered nor tossed and driven; while he, on
the contrary, who wanders from the paths of virtue and of her daughter,
stern duty, never attains peace, but feels the torment of an unsatisfied
and hostile power, which with its hard grip drags his soul now on and now
back.
"He who preserves a tranquil mind is not miserable, even in misfortune,
and thankfully learns to feel con tented in every state of life; and that
because he is filled with those elevated sentiments which are directly
related to the noblest portion of his being--those, I mean--of justice
and goodness. Act then, my child, in conformity with justice and duty,
regardless of any ulterior object, without considering whether your
action will bring you pleasure or pain, without fear of the judgment of
men or the envy of the gods, and you will win that peace of mind which
distinguishes the wise from the unwise, and may be happy even in adverse
circumstances; for the only real evil is the dominion of wickedness, that
is to say the unreason which rebels against nature, and the only true
happiness consists in the possession of virtue. He alone, however, can
call virtue his who possesses it wholly, and sins not against it in the
smallest particular; for there is no difference of degrees either in good
or in evil, and even the smallest action opposed to duty, truth or
justice, though punishable by no law, is a sin, and stands in opposition
to virtue.
"Irene," thus Philotas had concluded his injunctions, "cannot as yet
understand this doctrine, but you are grave and have sense beyond your
years. Repeat this to her daily, and when the time comes impress on your
sister--towards whom you must fill the place of a mother--impress on her
heart these precepts as your father's last will and testament."
And now, as Klea went towards the well within the temple-wall to fetch
water, she repeated to herself many of these injunctions; she felt
herself encouraged by them, and firmly resolved not to give her sister up
to the seducer without a struggle.
As soon as the vessels for libation at the altar were filled she returned
to little Philo, whose state seemed to her to give no further cause for
anxiety; after staying with him for more than an hour she left the
gate-keeper's dwelling to seek Serapion's advice, and to divulge to him
all she had been able to plan and consider in the quiet of the sick-room.
The recluse was wont to recognize her step from afar, and to be looking
out for her from his window when she went to visit him; but to-day he
heard her not, for he was stepping again and again up and down the few
paces which the small size of his tiny cell allowed him to traverse. He
could reflect best when he walked up and down, and he thought and thought
again, for he had heard all that was known in the temple regarding
Irene's disappearance; and he would, he must rescue her--but the more he
tormented his brain the more clearly he saw that every attempt to snatch
the kidnapped girl from the powerful robber must in fact be vain.
"And it must not, it shall not be!" he had cried, stamping his great
foot, a few minutes before Klea reached his cell; but as soon as he was
aware of her presence he made an effort to appear quite easy, and cried
out with the vehemence which characterized him even in less momentous
circumstances:
"We must consider, we must reflect, we must puzzle our brains, for the
gods have been napping this morning, and we must be doubly wide-awake.
Irene--our little Irene--and who would have thought it yesterday! It is a
good-for-nothing, unspeakably base knave's trick--and now, what can we do
to snatch the prey from the gluttonous monster, the savage wild beast,
before he can devour our child, our pet little one?
"Often and often I have been provoked at my own stupidity, but never,
never have I felt so stupid, such a godforsaken blockhead as I do now.
When I try to consider I feel as if that heavy shutter had been nailed
clown on my head. Have you had any ideas? I have not one which would not
disgrace the veriest ass--not a single one."
"Then you know everything?" asked Klea, "even that it is probably our
father's enemy, Eulaeus, who has treacherously decoyed the poor child to
go away with him?"
"Yes, Yes!" cried Serapion, "wherever there is some scoundrel's trick to
be played he must have a finger in the pie, as sure as there must be meal
for bread to be made. But it is a new thing to me that on this occasion
he should be Euergetes' tool. Old Philammon told me all about it. Just
now the messenger came back from Memphis, and brought a paltry scrap of
papyrus on which some wretched scribbler had written in the name of
Philometer, that nothing was known of Irene at court, and complaining
deeply that Asclepiodorus had not hesitated to play an underhand game
with the king. So they have no idea whatever of voluntarily releasing our
child."
"Then I shall proceed to do my duty," said Klea resolutely. "I shall go
to Memphis, and fetch my sister."
The anchorite stared at the girl in horror, exclaiming: "That is folly,
madness, suicide! Do you want to throw two victims into his jaws instead
of one?"
"I can protect myself, and as regards Irene, I will claim the queen's
assistance. She is a woman, and will never suffer--"
"What is there in this world that she will not suffer if it can procure
her profit or pleasure? Who knows what delightful thing Euergetes may not
have promised her in return for our little maid? No, by Serapis! no,
Cleopatra will not help you, but--and that is a good idea--there is one
who will to a certainty. We must apply to the Roman Publius Scipio, and
he will have no difficulty in succeeding."
"From him," exclaimed Klea, coloring scarlet, "I will accept neither good
nor evil; I do not know him, and I do not want to know him."
"Child, child!" interrupted the recluse with grave chiding. "Does your
pride then so far outweigh your love, your duty, and concern for Irene?
What, in the name of all the gods, has Publius done to you that you avoid
him more anxiously than if he were covered with leprosy? There is a limit
to all things, and now--aye, indeed--I must out with it come what may,
for this is not the time to pretend to be blind when I see with both eyes
what is going on--your heart is full of the Roman, and draws you to him;
but you are an honest girl, and, in order to remain so, you fly from him
because you distrust yourself, and do not know what might happen if he
were to tell you that he too has been hit by one of Eros' darts. You may
turn red and white, and look at me as if I were your enemy, and talking
contemptible nonsense. I have seen many strange things, but I never saw
any one before you who was a coward out of sheer courage, and yet of all
the women I know there is not one to whom fear is less known than my bold
and resolute Klea. The road is a hard one that you must take, but only
cover your poor little heart with a coat of mail, and venture in all
confidence to meet the Roman, who is an excellent good fellow. No doubt
it will be hard to you to crave a boon, but ought you to shrink from
those few steps over sharp stones? Our poor child is standing on the edge
of the abyss; if you do not arrive at the right time, and speak the right
words to the only person who is able to help in this matter, she will be
thrust into the foul bog and sink in it, because her brave sister was
frightened at--herself!"
Klea had cast down her eyes as the anchorite addressed her thus; she
stood for some time frowning at the ground in silence, but at last she
said, with quivering lips and as gloomily as if she were pronouncing a
sentence on herself.
"Then I will ask the Roman to assist me; but how can I get to him?"
"Ah!--now my Klea is her father's daughter once more," answered Serapion,
stretching out both his arms towards her from the little window of his
cell; and then he went on: "I can make the painful path somewhat smoother
for you. My brother Glaucus, who is commander of the civic guard in the
palace, you already know; I will give you a few words of recommendation
to him, and also, to lighten your task, a little letter to Publius
Scipio, which shall contain a short account of the matter in hand. If
Publius wishes to speak with you yourself go to him and trust him, but
still more trust yourself.
"Now go, and when you have once more filled the water-jars come back to
me, and fetch the letters. The sooner you can go the better, for it would
be well that you should leave the path through the desert behind you
before nightfall, for in the dark there are often dangerous tramps about.
You will find a friendly welcome at my sister Leukippa's; she lives in
the toll-house by the great harbor--show her this ring and she will give
you a bed, and, if the gods are merciful, one for Irene too."
"Thank you, father," said Klea, but she said no more, and then left him
with a rapid step.
Serapion looked lovingly after her; then he took two wooden tablets faced
with wax out of his chest, and, with a metal style, he wrote on one a
short letter to his brother, and on the other a longer one to the Roman,
which ran as follows:
"Serapion, the recluse of Serapis, to Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica,
the Roman.
"Serapion greets Publius Scipio, and acquaints him that Irene, the
younger sister of Klea, the water-bearer, has disappeared from this
temple, and, as Serapion suspects, by the wiles of the epistolographer
Eulaeus, whom we both know, and who seems to have acted under the orders
of King Ptolemy Euergetes. Seek to discover where Irene can be. Save her
if thou canst from her ravishers, and conduct her back to this temple or
deliver her in Memphis into the hands of my sister Leukippa, the wife of
the overseer of the harbor, named Hipparchus, who dwells in the
toll-house. May Serapis preserve thee and thine."
The recluse had just finished his letters when Klea returned to him. The
girl hid them in the folds of the bosom of her robe, said farewell to her
friend, and remained quite grave and collected, while Serapion, with
tears in his eyes, stroked her hair, gave her his parting blessing, and
finally even hung round her neck an amulet for good luck, that his mother
had worn--it was an eye in rock-crystal with a protective inscription.
Then, without any further delay, she set out towards the temple gate,
which, in obedience to the commands of the high priest, was now locked.
The gate-keeper--little Philo's father--sat close by on a stone bench,
keeping guard. In a friendly tone Klea asked him to open the gate; but
the anxious official would not immediately comply with her request, but
reminded her of Asclepiodorus' strict injunctions, and informed her that
the great Roman had demanded admission to the temple about three hours
since, but had been refused by the high-priest's special orders. He had
asked too for her, and had promised to return on the morrow.
The hot blood flew to Klea's face and eyes as she heard this news. Could
Publius no more cease to think of her than she of him? Had Serapion
guessed rightly? "The darts of Eros"--the recluse's phrase flashed
through her mind, and struck her heart as if it were itself a winged
arrow; it frightened her and yet she liked it, but only for one brief
instant, for the utmost distrust of her own weakness came over her again
directly, and she told herself with a shudder that she was on the
high-road to follow up and seek out the importunate stranger.
All the horrors of her undertaking stood vividly before her, and if she
had now retraced her steps she would not have been without an excuse to
offer to her own conscience, since the temple-gate was closed, and might
not be opened to any one, not even to her.
For a moment she felt a certain satisfaction in this flattering
reflection, but as she thought again of Irene her resolve was once more
confirmed, and going closer up to the gate-keeper she said with great
determination:
"Open the gate to me without delay; you know that I am not accustomed to
do or to desire anything wrong. I beg of you to push back the bolt at
once."
The man to whom Klea had done many kindnesses, and whom Imhotep had that
very day told that she was the good spirit of his house, and that he
ought to venerate her as a divinity--obeyed her orders, though with some
doubt and hesitation. The heavy bolt flew back, the brazen gate opened,
the water-bearer stepped out, flung a dark veil over her head, and set
out on her walk.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
If you want to catch mice you must waste bacon
Man works with all his might for no one but himself
Nothing permanent but change
Nothing so certain as that nothing is certain
Priests that they should instruct the people to be obedient
THE SISTERS
By Georg Ebers
Volume 4.
CHAPTER XVII.
A paved road, with a row of Sphinxes on each side, led from the Greek
temple of Serapis to the rock-hewn tombs of Apis, and the temples and
chapels built over them, and near them; in these the Apis bull after its
death--or "in Osiris" as the phrase went--was worshipped, while, so long
as it lived, it was taken care of and prayed to in the temple to which it
belonged, that of the god Ptah at Memphis. After death these sacred
bulls, which were distinguished by peculiar marks, had extraordinarily
costly obsequies; they were called the risen Ptah, and regarded as the
symbol of the soul of Osiris, by whose procreative power all that dies or
passes away is brought to new birth and new life--the departed soul of
man, the plant that has perished, and the heavenly bodies that have set.
Osiris-Sokari, who was worshipped as the companion of Osiris, presided
over the wanderings which had to be performed by the seemingly extinct
spirit before its resuscitation as another being in a new form; and
Egyptian priests governed in the temples of these gods, which were purely
Egyptian in style, and which had been built at a very early date over the
tomb-cave of the sacred bulls. And even the Greek ministers of Serapis,
settled at Memphis, were ready to follow the example of their rulers and
to sacrifice to Osiris-Apis, who was closely allied to Serapis--not only
in name but in his essential attributes. Serapis himself indeed was a
divinity introduced from Asia into the Nile valley by the Ptolemies, in
order to supply to their Greek and Egyptian subjects alike an object of
adoration, before whose altars they could unite in a common worship. They
devoted themselves to the worship of Apis in Osiris at the shrines, of
Greek architecture, and containing stone images of bulls, that stood
outside the Egyptian sanctuary, and they were very ready to be initiated
into the higher significance of his essence; indeed, all religious
mysteries in their Greek home bore reference to the immortality of the
soul and its fate in the other world.
Just as two neighboring cities may be joined by a bridge, so the Greek
temple of Serapis--to which the water-bearers belonged--was connected
with the Egyptian sanctuary of Osiris-Apis by the fine paved road for
processions along which Klea now rapidly proceeded. There was a shorter
way to Memphis, but she chose this one, because the mounds of sand on
each side of the road bordered by Sphinxes--which every day had to be
cleared of the desert-drift--concealed her from the sight of her
companions in the temple; besides the best and safest way into the city
was by a road leading from a crescent, decorated with busts of the
philosophers, that lay near the principal entrance to the new Apis tombs.
She looked neither at the lion-bodies with men's heads that guarded the
way, nor at the images of beasts on the wall that shut it in; nor did she
heed the dusky-hued temple-slaves of Osiris-Apis who were sweeping the
sand from the paved way with large brooms, for she thought of nothing but
Irene and the difficult task that lay before her, and she walked swiftly
onwards with her eyes fixed on the ground.
But she had taken no more than a few steps when she heard her name called
quite close to her, and looking up in alarm she found herself standing
opposite Krates, the little smith, who came close up to her, took hold of
her veil, threw it back a little before she could prevent him, and asked:
"Where are you off to, child?"
"Do not detain me," entreated Klea. "You know that Irene, whom you are
always so fond of, has been carried off; perhaps I may be able to save
her, but if you betray me, and if they follow me--"
"I will not hinder you," interrupted the old man. "Nay, if it were not
for these swollen feet I would go with you, for I can think of nothing
else but the poor dear little thing; but as it is I shall be glad enough
when I am sitting still again in my workshop; it is exactly as if a
workman of my own trade lived in each of my great toes, and was dancing
round in them with hammer and file and chisel and nails. Very likely you
may be so fortunate as to find your sister, for a crafty woman succeeds
in many things which are too difficult for a wise man. Go on, and if they
seek for you old Krates will not betray you."
He nodded kindly at Klea, and had already half turned his back on her
when he once more looked round, and called out to her:
"Wait a minute, girl--you can do me a little service. I have just fitted
a new lock to the door of the Apis-tomb down there. It answers admirably,
but the one key to it which I have made is not enough; we require four,
and you shall order them for me of the locksmith Heri, to be sent the day
after to-morrow; he lives opposite the gate of Sokari--to the left, next
the bridge over the canal--you cannot miss it. I hate repeating and
copying as much as I like inventing and making new things, and Heri can
work from a pattern just as well as I can. If it were not for my legs I
would give the man my commission myself, for he who speaks by the lips of
a go-between is often misunderstood or not understood at all."
"I will gladly save you the walk," replied Klea, while the Smith sat down
on the pedestal of one of the Sphinxes, and opening the leather wallet
which hung by his side shook out the contents. A few files, chisels, and
nails fell out into his lap; then the key, and finally a sharp, pointed
knife with which Krates had cut out the hollow in the door for the
insertion of the lock; Krates touched up the pattern-key for the smith in
Memphis with a few strokes of the file, and then, muttering thoughtfully
and shaking his head doubtfully from side to side, he exclaimed:
"You still must come with me once more to the door, for I require
accurate workmanship from other people, and so I must be severe upon my
own."
"But I want so much to reach Memphis before dark," besought Klea.
"The whole thing will not take a minute, and if you will give me your arm
I shall go twice as fast. There are the files, there is the knife."
"Give it me," Klea requested. "This blade is sharp and bright, and as
soon as I saw it I felt as if it bid me take it with me. Very likely I
may have to come through the desert alone at night."
"Aye," said the smith, "and even the weakest feels stronger when he has a
weapon. Hide the knife somewhere about you, my child, only take care not
to hurt yourself with it. Now let me take your arm, and on we will
go--but not quite so fast."
Klea led the smith to the door he indicated, and saw with admiration how
unfailingly the bolt sprang forward when one half of the door closed upon
the other, and how easily the key pushed it back again; then, after
conducting Krates back to the Sphinx near which she had met him, she went
on her way at her quickest pace, for the sun was already very low, and it
seemed scarcely possible to reach Memphis before it should set.
As she approached a tavern where soldiers and low people were accustomed
to resort, she was met by a drunken slave. She went on and past him
without any fear, for the knife in her girdle, and on which she kept her
hand, kept up her courage, and she felt as if she had thus acquired a
third hand which was more powerful and less timid than her own. A company
of soldiers had encamped in front of the tavern, and the wine of Kbakem,
which was grown close by, on the eastern declivity of the Libyan range,
had an excellent savor. The men were in capital spirits, for at noon
today--after they had been quartered here for months as guards of the
tombs of Apis and of the temples of the Necropolis--a commanding officer
of the Diadoches had arrived at Memphis, who had ordered them to break up
at once, and to withdraw into the capital before nightfall. They were not
to be relieved by other mercenaries till the next morning.
All this Klea learned from a messenger from the Egyptian temple in the
Necropolis, who recognized her, and who was going to Memphis,
commissioned by the priests of Osiris-Apis and Sokari to convey a
petition to the king, praying that fresh troops might be promptly sent to
replace those now withdrawn.
For some time she went on side by side with this messenger, but soon she
found that she could not keep up with his hurried pace, and had to fall
behind. In front of another tavern sat the officers of the troops, whose
noisy mirth she had heard as she passed the former one; they were sitting
over their wine and looking on at the dancing of two Egyptian girls, who
screeched like cackling hens over their mad leaps, and who so effectually
riveted the attention of the spectators, who were beating time for them
by clapping their hands, that Klea, accelerating her step, was able to
slip unobserved past the wild crew. All these scenes, nay everything she
met with on the high-road, scared the girl who was accustomed to the
silence and the solemn life of the temple of Serapis, and she therefore
struck into a side path that probably also led to the city which she
could already see lying before her with its pylons, its citadel and its
houses, veiled in evening mist. In a quarter of an hour at most she would
have crossed the desert, and reach the fertile meadow land, whose emerald
hue grew darker and darker every moment. The sun was already sinking to
rest behind the Libyan range, and soon after, for twilight is short in
Egypt, she was wrapped in the darkness of night. The westwind, which had
begun to blow even at noon, now rose higher, and seemed to pursue her
with its hot breath and the clouds of sand it carried with it from the
desert.
She must certainly be approaching water, for she heard the deep pipe of
the bittern in the reeds, and fancied she breathed a moister air. A few
steps more, and her foot sank in mud; and she now perceived that she was
standing on the edge of a wide ditch in which tall papyrus-plants were
growing. The side path she had struck into ended at this plantation, and
there was nothing to be done but to turn about, and to continue her walk
against the wind and with the sand blowing in her face.
The light from the drinking-booth showed her the direction she must
follow, for though the moon was up, it is true, black clouds swept across
it, covering it and the smaller lights of heaven for many minutes at a
time. Still she felt no fatigue, but the shouts of the men and the loud
cries of the women that rang out from the tavern filled her with alarm
and disgust. She made a wide circuit round the hostelry, wading through
the sand hillocks and tearing her dress on the thorns and thistles that
had boldly struck deep root in the desert, and had grown up there like
the squalid brats in the hovel of a beggar. But still, as she hurried on
by the high-road, the hideous laughter and the crowing mirth of the
dancing-girls still rang in her mind's ear.
Her blood coursed more swiftly through her veins, her head was on fire,
she saw Irene close before her, tangibly distinct--with flowing hair and
fluttering garments, whirling in a wild dance like a Moenad at a
Dionysiac festival, flying from one embrace to another and shouting and
shrieking in unbridled folly like the wretched girls she had seen on her
way. She was seized with terror for her sister--an unbounded dread such
as she had never felt before, and as the wind was now once more behind
her she let herself be driven on by it, lifting her feet in a swift run
and flying, as if pursued by the Erinnyes, without once looking round her
and wholly forgetful of the smith's commission, on towards the city along
the road planted with trees, which as she knew led to the gate of the
citadel.
CHAPTER XVIII.
In front of the gate of the king's palace sat a crowd of petitioners who
were accustomed to stay here from early dawn till late at night, until
they were called into the palace to receive the answer to the petition
they had drawn up. When Klea reached the end of her journey she was so
exhausted and bewildered that she felt the imperative necessity of
seeking rest and quiet reflection, so she seated herself among these
people, next to a woman from Upper Egypt. But hardly had she taken her
place by her with a silent greeting, when her talkative neighbor began to
relate with particular minuteness why she had come to Memphis, and how
certain unjust judges had conspired with her bad husband to trick
her--for men were always ready to join against a woman--and to deprive
her of everything which had been secured to her and her children by her
marriage-contract. For two months now, she said, she had been waiting
early and late before the sublime gate, and was consuming her last ready
cash in the city where living was so dear; but it was all one to her, and
at a pinch she would sell even her gold ornaments, for sooner or later
her cause must come before the king, and then the wicked villain and his
accomplices would be taught what was just.
Klea heard but little of this harangue; a feeling had come over her like
that of a person who is having water poured again and again on the top of
his head. Presently her neighbor observed that the new-comer was not
listening at all to her complainings; she slapped her shoulder with her
hand, and said:
"You seem to think of nothing but your own concerns; and I dare say they
are not of such a nature as that you should relate them to any one else;
so far as mine are concerned the more they are discussed, the better."
The tone in which these remarks were made was so dry, and at the same
time so sharp, that it hurt Klea, and she rose hastily to go closer to
the gate. Her neighbor threw a cross word after her; but she did not heed
it, and drawing her veil closer over her face, she went through the gate
of the palace into a vast courtyard, brightly lighted up by cressets and
torches, and crowded with foot-soldiers and mounted guards.
The sentry at the gate perhaps had not observed her, or perhaps had let
her pass unchallenged from her dignified and erect gait, and the numerous
armed men through whom she now made her way seemed to be so much occupied
with their own affairs, that no one bestowed any notice on her. In a
narrow alley, which led to a second court and was lighted by lanterns,
one of the body-guard known as Philobasilistes, a haughty young fellow in
yellow riding-boots and a shirt of mail over his red tunic, came riding
towards her on his tall horse, and noticing her he tried to squeeze her
between his charger and the wall, and put out his hand to raise her veil;
but Klea slipped aside, and put up her hands to protect herself from the
horse's head which was almost touching her.
The cavalier, enjoying her alarm, called out: "Only stand still--he is
not vicious."
"Which, you or your horse?" asked Klea, with such a solemn tone in her
deep voice that for an instant the young guardsman lost his
self-possession, and this gave her time to go farther from the horse. But
the girl's sharp retort had annoyed the conceited young fellow, and not
having time to follow her himself, he called out in a tone of
encouragement to a party of mercenaries from Cyprus, whom the frightened
girl was trying to pass:
"Look under this girl's veil, comrades, and if she is as pretty as she is
well-grown, I wish you joy of your prize." He laughed as he pressed his
knees against the flanks of his bay and trotted slowly away, while the
Cypriotes gave Klea ample time to reach the second court, which was more
brightly lighted even than the first, that they might there surround her
with insolent importunity.
The helpless and persecuted girl felt the blood run cold in her veins,
and for a few minutes she could see nothing but a bewildering confusion
of flashing eyes and weapons, of beards and hands, could hear nothing but
words and sounds, of which she understood and felt only that they were
revolting and horrible, and threatened her with death and ruin. She had
crossed her arms over her bosom, but now she raised her hands to hide her
face, for she felt a strong hand snatch away the veil that covered her
head. This insolent proceeding turned her numb horror to indignant rage,
and, fixing her sparkling eyes on her bearded opponents, she exclaimed:
"Shame upon you, who in the king's own house fall like wolves on a
defenceless woman, and in a peaceful spot snatch the veil from a young
girl's head. Your mothers would blush for you, and your sisters cry shame
on you--as I do now!"
Astonished at Klea's distinguished beauty, startled at the angry glare in
her eyes, and the deep chest-tones of her voice which trembled with
excitement, the Cypriotes drew back, while the same audacious rascal that
had pulled away her veil came closer to her, and cried:
"Who would make such a noise about a rubbishy veil! If you will be my
sweetheart I will buy you a new one, and many things besides."
At the same time he tried to throw his arm round her; but at his touch
Klea felt the blood leave her cheeks and mount to her bloodshot eyes, and
at that instant her hand, guided by some uncontrollable inward impulse,
grasped the handle of the knife which Krates had lent her; she raised it
high in the air though with an unsteady arm, exclaiming:
"Let me go or, by Serapis whom I serve, I will strike you to the heart!"
The soldier to whom this threat was addressed, was not the man to be
intimidated by a blade of cold iron in a woman's hand; with a quick
movement he seized her wrist in order to disarm her; but although Klea
was forced to drop the knife she struggled with him to free herself from
his clutch, and this contest between a man and a woman, who seemed to be
of superior rank to that indicated by her very simple dress, seemed to
most of the Cypriotes so undignified, so much out of place within the
walls of a palace, that they pulled their comrade back from Klea, while
others on the contrary came to the assistance of the bully who defended
himself stoutly. And in the midst of the fray, which was conducted with
no small noise, stood Klea with flying breath. Her antagonist, though
flung to the ground, still held her wrist with his left hand while he
defended himself against his comrades with the right, and she tried with
all her force and cunning to withdraw it; for at the very height of her
excitement and danger she felt as if a sudden gust of wind had swept her
spirit clear of all confusion, and she was again able to contemplate her
position calmly and resolutely.
If only her hand were free she might perhaps be able to take advantage of
the struggle between her foes, and to force her way out between their
ranks.
Twice, thrice, four times, she tried to wrench her hand with a sudden
jerk through the fingers that grasped it; but each time in vain.
Suddenly, from the man at her feet there broke a loud, long-drawn cry of
pain which re-echoed from the high walls of the court, and at the same
time she felt the fingers of her antagonist gradually and slowly slip
from her arm like the straps of a sandal carefully lifted by the surgeon
from a broken ankle.
"It is all over with him!" exclaimed the eldest of the Cypriotes. "A man
never calls out like that but once in his life! True enough--the dagger
is sticking here just under the ninth rib! This is mad work! That is your
doing again, Lykos, you savage wolf!"
"He bit deep into my finger in the struggle--"
"And you are for ever tearing each other to pieces for the sake of the
women," interrupted the elder, not listening to the other's excuses.
"Well, I was no better than you in my time, and nothing can alter it! You
had better be off now, for if the Epistrategist learns we have fallen to
stabbing each other again--"
The Cypriote had not ceased speaking, and his countrymen were in the very
act of raising the body of their comrade when a division of the civic
watch rushed into the court in close order and through the passage near
which the fight for the girl had arisen, thus stopping the way against
those who were about to escape, since all who wished to get out of the
court into the open street must pass through the doorway into which Klea
had been forced by the horseman. Every other exit from this second court
of the citadel led into the strictly guarded gardens and buildings of the
palace itself.
The noisy strife round Klea, and the cry of the wounded man had attracted
the watch; the Cypriotes and the maiden soon found themselves surrounded,
and they were conducted through a narrow side passage into the court-yard
of the prison. After a short enquiry the men who had been taken were
allowed to return under an escort to their own phalanx, and Klea gladly
followed the commander of the watch to a less brilliantly illuminated
part of the prison-yard, for in him she had recognized at once Serapion's
brother Glaucus, and he in her the daughter of the man who had done and
suffered so much for his father's sake; besides they had often exchanged
greetings and a few words in the temple of Serapis.
"All that is in my power," said Glaucus--a man somewhat taller but not so
broadly built as his brother--when he had read the recluse's note and
when Klea had answered a number of questions, "all that is in my power I
will gladly do for you and your sister, for I do not forget all that I
owe to your father; still I cannot but regret that you have incurred such
risk, for it is always hazardous for a pretty young girl to venture into
this palace at a late hour, and particularly just now, for the courts are
swarming not only with Philometor's fighting men but with those of his
brother, who have come here for their sovereign's birthday festival. The
people have been liberally entertained, and the soldier who has been
sacrificing to Dionysus seizes the gifts of Eros and Aphrodite wherever
he may find them. I will at once take charge of my brother's letter to
the Roman Publius Cornelius Scipio, but when you have received his answer
you will do well to let yourself be escorted to my wife or my sister, who
both live in the city, and to remain till to-morrow morning with one or
the other. Here you cannot remain a minute unmolested while I am
away--Where now--Aye! The only safe shelter I can offer you is the prison
down there; the room where they lock up the subaltern officers when they
have committed any offence is quite unoccupied, and I will conduct you
thither. It is always kept clean, and there is a bench in it too."
Klea followed her friend who, as his hasty demeanor plainly showed, had
been interrupted in important business. In a few steps they reached the
prison; she begged Glaucus to bring her the Roman's answer as quickly as
possible, declared herself quite ready to remain in the dark--since she
perceived that the light of a lamp might betray her, and she was not
afraid of the dark--and suffered herself to be locked in.
As she heard the iron bolt creak in its brass socket a shiver ran through
her, and although the room in which she found herself was neither worse
nor smaller than that in which she and her sister lived in the temple,
still it oppressed her, and she even felt as if an indescribable
something hindered her breathing as she said to herself that she was
locked in and no longer free to come and to go. A dim light penetrated
into her prison through the single barred window that opened on to the
court, and she could see a little bench of palm-branches on which she sat
down to seek the repose she so sorely needed. All sense of discomfort
gradually vanished before the new feeling of rest and refreshment, and
pleasant hopes and anticipations were just beginning to mingle themselves
with the remembrance of the horrors she had just experienced when
suddenly there was a stir and a bustle just in front of the prison--and
she could hear, outside, the clatter of harness and words of command. She
rose from her seat and saw that about twenty horsemen, whose golden
helmets and armor reflected the light of the lanterns, cleared the wide
court by driving the men before them, as the flames drive the game from a
fired hedge, and by forcing them into a second court from which again
they proceeded to expel them. At least Klea could hear them shouting 'In
the king's name' there as they had before done close to her. Presently
the horsemen returned and placed themselves, ten and ten, as guards at
each of the passages leading into the court. It was not without interest
that Klea looked on at this scene which was perfectly new to her; and
when one of the fine horses, dazzled by the light of the lanterns, turned
restive and shied, leaping and rearing and threatening his rider with a
fall--when the horseman checked and soothed it, and brought it to a
stand-still--the Macedonian warrior was transfigured in her eyes to
Publius, who no doubt could manage a horse no less well than this man.
No sooner was the court completely cleared of men by the mounted guard
than a new incident claimed Klea's attention. First she heard footsteps
in the room adjoining her prison, then bright streaks of light fell
through the cracks of the slight partition which divided her place of
retreat from the other room, then the two window-openings close to hers
were closed with heavy shutters, then seats or benches were dragged about
and various objects were laid upon a table, and finally the door of the
adjoining room was thrown open and slammed to again so violently, that
the door which closed hers and the bench near which she was standing
trembled and jarred.
At the same moment a deep sonorous voice called out with a loud and
hearty shout of laughter:
"A mirror--give me a mirror, Eulaeus. By heaven! I do not look much like
prison fare--more like a man in whose strong brain there is no lack of
deep schemes, who can throttle his antagonist with a grip of his fist,
and who is prompt to avail himself of all the spoil that comes in his
way, so that he may compress the pleasures of a whole day into every
hour, and enjoy them to the utmost! As surely as my name is Euergetes my
uncle Antiochus was right in liking to mix among the populace. The
splendid puppets who surround us kings, and cover every portion of their
own bodies in wrappings and swaddling bands, also stifle the expression
of every genuine sentiment; and it is enough to turn our brain to reflect
that, if we would not be deceived, every word that we hear--and, oh dear!
how many words we must needs hear-must be pondered in our minds. Now, the
mob on the contrary--who think themselves beautifully dressed in a
threadbare cloth hanging round their brown loins--are far better off. If
one of them says to another of his own class--a naked wretch who wears
about him everything he happens to possess--that he is a dog, he answers
with a blow of his fist in the other's face, and what can be plainer than
that! If on the other hand he tells him he is a splendid fellow, he
believes it without reservation, and has a perfect right to believe it.
"Did you see how that stunted little fellow with a snub-nose and
bandy-legs, who is as broad as he is long, showed all his teeth in a
delighted grin when I praised his steady hand? He laughs just like a
hyena, and every respectable father of a family looks on the fellow as a
god-forsaken monster; but the immortals must think him worth something to
have given him such magnificent grinders in his ugly mouth, and to have
preserved him mercifully for fifty years--for that is about the rascal's
age. If that fellow's dagger breaks he can kill his victim with those
teeth, as a fox does a duck, or smash his bones with his fist."
"But, my lord," replied Eulaeus dryly and with a certain matter-of-fact
gravity to King Euergetes--for he it was who had come with him into the
room adjoining Klea's retreat, "the dry little Egyptian with the thin
straight hair is even more trustworthy and tougher and nimbler than his
companion, and, so far, more estimable. One flings himself on his prey
with a rush like a block of stone hurled from a roof, but the other,
without being seen, strikes his poisoned fang into his flesh like an
adder hidden in the sand. The third, on whom I had set great hopes, was
beheaded the day before yesterday without my knowledge; but the pair whom
you have condescended to inspect with your own eyes are sufficient. They
must use neither dagger nor lance, but they will easily achieve their end
with slings and hooks and poisoned needles, which leave wounds that
resemble the sting of an adder. We may safely depend on these fellows."
Once more Euergetes laughed loudly, and exclaimed: What criticism!
Exactly as if these blood-hounds were tragic actors of which one could
best produce his effects by fire and pathos, and the other by the
subtlety of his conception. I call that an unprejudiced judgment. And why
should not a man be great even as a murderer? From what hangman's noose
did you drag out the neck of one, and from what headsman's block did you
rescue the other when you found them?
"It is a lucky hour in which we first see something new to us, and, by
Heracles! I never before in the whole course of my life saw such villains
as these. I do not regret having gone to see them and talked to them as
if I were their equal. Now, take this torn coat off me, and help me to
undress. Before I go to the feast I will take a hasty plunge in my bath,
for I twitch in every limb, I feel as if I had got dirty in their
company.
"There lie my clothes and my sandals; strap them on for me, and tell me
as you do it how you lured the Roman into the toils."
Klea could hear every word of this frightful conversation, and clasped
her hand over her brow with a shudder, for she found it difficult to
believe in the reality of the hideous images that it brought before her
mind. Was she awake or was she a prey to some horrid dream?
She hardly knew, and, indeed, she scarcely understood half of all she
heard till the Roman's name was mentioned. She felt as if the point of a
thin, keen knife was being driven obliquely through her brain from right
to left, as it now flashed through her mind that it was against him,
against Publius, that the wild beasts, disguised in human form, were
directed by Eulaeus, and face to face with this--the most hideous, the
most incredible of horrors--she suddenly recovered the full use of her
senses. She softly slipped close to that rift in the partition through
which the broadest beam of light fell into the room, put her ear close to
it, and drank in, with fearful attention, word for word the report made
by the eunuch to his iniquitous superior, who frequently interrupted him
with remarks, words of approval or a short laugh-drank them in, as a man
perishing in the desert drinks the loathsome waters of a salt pool.
And what she heard was indeed well fitted to deprive her of her senses,
but the more definite the facts to which the words referred that she
could overhear, the more keenly she listened, and the more resolutely she
collected her thoughts. Eulaeus had used her own name to induce the Roman
to keep an assignation at midnight in the desert close to the Apis-tombs.
He repeated the words that he had written to this effect on a tile, and
which requested Publius to come quite alone to the spot indicated, since
she dare not speak with him in the temple. Finally he was invited to
write his answer on the other side of the square of clay. As Klea heard
these words, put into her own mouth by a villain, she could have sobbed
aloud heartily with anguish, shame, and rage; but the point now was to
keep her ears wide open, for Euergetes asked his odious tool:
"And what was the Roman's answer?" Eulaeus must have handed the tile to
the king, for he laughed loudly again, and cried out:
"So he will walk into the trap--will arrive by half an hour after
midnight at the latest, and greets Klea from her sister Irene. He carries
on love-making and abduction wholesale, and buys water-bearers by the
pair, like doves in the market or sandals in a shoe maker's stall. Only
see how the simpleton writes Greek; in these few words there are two
mistakes, two regular schoolboys' blunders.
"The fellow must have had a very pleasant day of it, since he must have
been reckoning on a not unsuccessful evening--but the gods have an ugly
habit of clenching the hand with which they have long caressed their
favorites, and striking him with their fist.
"Amalthea's horn has been poured out on him today; first he snapped up,
under my very nose, my little Hebe, the Irene of Irenes, whom I hope
to-morrow to inherit from him; then he got the gift of my best Cyrenaan
horses, and at the same time the flattering assurance of my valuable
friendship; then he had audience of my fair sister--and it goes more to
the heart of a republican than you would believe when crowned heads are
graciously disposed towards him--finally the sister of his pretty
sweetheart invites him to an assignation, and she, if you and Zoe speak
the truth, is a beauty in the grand style. Now these are really too many
good things for one inhabitant of this most stingily provided world; and
in one single day too, which, once begun, is so soon ended; and justice
requires that we should lend a helping hand to destiny, and cut off the
head of this poppy that aspires to rise above its brethren; the thousands
who have less good fortune than he would otherwise have great cause to
complain of neglect."
"I am happy to see you in such good humor," said Eulaeus.
"My humor is as may be," interrupted the king. "I believe I am only
whistling a merry tune to keep up my spirits in the dark. If I were on
more familiar terms with what other men call fear I should have ample
reason to be afraid; for in the quail-fight we have gone in for I have
wagered a crown-aye, and more than that even. To-morrow only will decide
whether the game is lost or won, but I know already to-day that I would
rather see my enterprise against Philometor fail, with all my hopes of
the double crown, than our plot against the life of the Roman; for I was
a man before I was a king, and a man I should remain, if my throne, which
now indeed stands on only two legs, were to crash under my weight.
"My sovereign dignity is but a robe, though the costliest, to be sure, of
all garments. If forgiveness were any part of my nature I might easily
forgive the man who should soil or injure that--but he who comes too near
to Euergetes the man, who dares to touch this body, and the spirit it
contains, or to cross it in its desires and purposes--him I will crush
unhesitatingly to the earth, I will see him torn in pieces. Sentence is
passed on the Roman, and if your ruffians do their duty, and if the gods
accept the holocaust that I had slain before them at sunset for the
success of my project, in a couple of hours Publius Cornelius Scipio will
have bled to death.
"He is in a position to laugh at me--as a man--but I therefore--as a
man--have the right, and--as a king--have the power, to make sure that
that laugh shall be his last. If I could murder Rome as I can him how
glad should I be! for Rome alone hinders me from being the greatest of
all the great kings of our time; and yet I shall rejoice to-morrow when
they tell me Publius Cornelius Scipio has been torn by wild beasts, and
his body is so mutilated that his own mother could not recognize it more
than if a messenger were to bring me the news that Carthage had broken
the power of Rome."
Euergetes had spoken the last words in a voice that sounded like the roll
of thunder as it growls in a rapidly approaching storm, louder, deeper,
and more furious each instant. When at last he was silent Eulaeus said:
"The immortals, my lord, will not deny you this happiness. The brave
fellows whom you condescended to see and to talk to strike as certainly
as the bolt of our father Zeus, and as we have learned from the Roman's
horse-keeper where he has hidden Irene, she will no more elude your grasp
than the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt.--Now, allow me to put on your
mantle, and then to call the body-guard that they may escort you as you
return to your residence."
"One thing more," cried the king, detaining Eulaeus. "There are always
troops by the Tombs of Apis placed there to guard the sacred places; may
not they prove a hindrance to your friends?"
"I have withdrawn all the soldiers and armed guards to Memphis down to
the last man," replied Eulaeus, and quartered them within the White Wall.
Early tomorrow, before you proceed to business, they will be replaced by
a stronger division, so that they may not prove a reinforcement to your
brother's troops here if things come to fighting."
"I shall know how to reward your foresight," said Euergetes as Eulaeus
quitted the room.
Again Klea heard a door open, and the sound of many hoofs on the pavement
of the court-yard, and when she went, all trembling, up to the window,
she saw Euergetes himself, and the powerfully knit horse that was led in
for him. The tyrant twisted his hand in the mane of the restless and
pawing steed, and Klea thought that the monstrous mass could never mount
on to the horse's back without the aid of many men; but she was mistaken,
for with a mighty spring the giant flung himself high in the air and on
to the horse, and then, guiding his panting steed by the pressure of his
knees alone, he bounded out of the prison-yard surrounded by his splendid
train.
For some minutes the court-yard remained empty, then a man hurriedly
crossed it, unlocked the door of the room where Klea was, and informed
her that he was a subaltern under Glaucus, and had brought her a message
from him.
"My lord," said the veteran soldier to the girl, "bid me greet you, and
says that he found neither the Roman Publius Scipio, nor his friend the
Corinthian at home. He is prevented from coming to you himself; he has
his hands full of business, for soldiers in the service of both the kings
are quartered within the White Wall, and all sorts of squabbles break out
between them. Still, you cannot remain in this room, for it will shortly
be occupied by a party of young officers who began the fray. Glaucus
proposes for your choice that you should either allow me to conduct you
to his wife or return to the temple to which you are attached. In the
latter case a chariot shall convey you as far as the second tavern in
Khakem on the borders of the desert-for the city is full of drunken
soldiery. There you may probably find an escort if you explain to the
host who you are. But the chariot must be back again in less than an
hour, for it is one of the king's, and when the banquet is over there may
be a scarcity of chariots."
"Yes--I will go back to the place I came from," said Klea eagerly,
interrupting the messenger. "Take me at once to the chariot."
"Follow me, then," said the old man.
"But I have no veil," observed Klea, "and have only this thin robe on.
Rough soldiers snatched my wrapper from my face, and my cloak from off my
shoulders."
"I will bring you the captain's cloak which is lying here in the
orderly's room, and his travelling-hat too; that will hide your face with
its broad flap. You are so tall that you might be taken for a man, and
that is well, for a woman leaving the palace at this hour would hardly
pass unmolested. A slave shall fetch the things from your temple
to-morrow. I may inform you that my master ordered me take as much care
of you as if you were his own daughter. And he told me too--and I had
nearly forgotten it--to tell you that your sister was carried off by the
Roman, and not by that other dangerous man, you would know whom he meant.
Now wait, pray, till I return; I shall not be long gone."
In a few minutes the guard returned with a large cloak in which he
wrapped Klea, and a broad-brimmed travelling-hat which she pressed down
on her head, and he then conducted her to that quarter of the palace
where the king's stables were. She kept close to the officer, and was
soon mounted on a chariot, and then conducted by the driver--who took her
for a young Macedonian noble, who was tempted out at night by some
assignation--as far as the second tavern on the road back to the
Serapeum.
CHAPTER XIX.
While Klea had been listening to the conversation between Euergetes and
Eulaeus, Cleopatra had been sitting in her tent, and allowing herself to
be dressed with no less care than on the preceding evening, but in other
garments.
It would seem that all had not gone so smoothly as she wished during the
day, for her two tire-women had red eyes. Her lady-in-waiting, Zoe, was
reading to her, not this time from a Greek philosopher but from a Greek
translation of the Hebrew Psalms: a discussion as to their poetic merit
having arisen a few days previously at the supper-table. Onias, the
Israelite general, had asserted that these odes might be compared with
those of Alcman or of Pindar, and had quoted certain passages that had
pleased the queen. To-day she was not disposed for thought, but wanted
something strange and out of the common to distract her mind, so she
desired Zoe to open the book of the Hebrews, of which the translation was
considered by the Hellenic Jews in Alexandria as an admirable work--nay,
even as inspired by God himself; it had long been known to her through
her Israelite friends and guests.
Cleopatra had been listening for about a quarter of an hour to Zoe's
reading when the blast of a trumpet rang out on the steps which led up
her tent, announcing a visitor of the male sex. The queen glanced angrily
round, signed to her lady to stop reading, and exclaimed:
"I will not see my husband now! Go, Thais, and tell the eunuchs on the
steps, that I beg Philometor not to disturb me just now. Go on, Zoe."
Ten more psalms had been read, and a few verses repeated twice or thrice
by Cleopatra's desire, when the pretty Athenian returned with flaming
cheeks, and said in an excited tone:
"It is not your husband, the king, but your brother Euergetes, who asks
to speak with you."
"He might have chosen some other hour," replied Cleopatra, looking round
at her maid. Thais cast down her eyes, and twitched the edge of her robe
between her fingers as she addressed her mistress; but the queen, whom
nothing could escape that she chose to see, and who was not to-day in the
humor for laughing or for letting any indiscretion escape unreproved,
went on at once in an incensed and cutting tone, raising her voice to a
sharp pitch:
"I do not choose that my messengers should allow themselves to be
detained, be it by whom it may--do you hear! Leave Me this instant and go
to your room, and stay there till I want you to undress me this evening.
Andromeda--do you hear, old woman?--you can bring my brother to me, and
he will let you return quicker than Thais, I fancy. You need not leer at
yourself in the glass, you cannot do anything to alter your wrinkles. My
head-dress is already done. Give me that linen wrapper, Olympias, and
then he may come! Why, there he is already! First you ask permission,
brother, and then disdain to wait till it is given you."
"Longing and waiting," replied Euergetes, "are but an ill-assorted
couple. I wasted this evening with common soldiers and fawning
flatterers; then, in order to see a few noble countenances, I went into
the prison, after that I hastily took a bath, for the residence of your
convicts spoils one's complexion more, and in a less pleasant manner,
than this little shrine, where everything looks and smells like
Aphrodite's tiring-room; and now I have a longing to hear a few good
words before supper-time comes."
"From my lips?" asked Cleopatra.
"There are none that can speak better, whether by the Nile or the
Ilissus."
"What do you want of me?"
"I--of you?"
"Certainly, for you do not speak so prettily unless you want something."
"But I have already told you! I want to hear you say something wise,
something witty, something soul-stirring."
"We cannot call up wit as we would a maid-servant. It comes unbidden, and
the more urgently we press it to appear the more certainly it remains
away."
"That may be true of others, but not of you who, even while you declare
that you have no store of Attic salt, are seasoning your speech with it.
All yield obedience to grace and beauty, even wit and the sharp-tongued
Momus who mocks even at the gods."
"You are mistaken, for not even my own waiting-maids return in proper
time when I commission them with a message to you."
"And may we not to be allowed to sacrifice to the Charites on the way to
the temple of Aphrodite?"
"If I were indeed the goddess, those worshippers who regarded my
hand-maidens as my equals would find small acceptance with me."
"Your reproof is perfectly just, for you are justified in requiring that
all who know you should worship but one goddess, as the Jews do but one
god. But I entreat you do not again compare yourself to the brainless
Cyprian dame. You may be allowed to do so, so far as your grace is
concerned; but who ever saw an Aphrodite philosophizing and reading
serious books? I have disturbed you in grave studies no doubt; what is
the book you are rolling up, fair Zoe?"
"The sacred book of the Jews, Sire," replied Zoe; "one that I know you do
not love."
And you--who read Homer, Pindar, Sophocles, and Plato--do you like it?"
asked Euergetes.
"I find passages in it which show a profound knowledge of life, and
others of which no one can dispute the high poetic flight," replied
Cleopatra. "Much of it has no doubt a thoroughly barbarian twang, and it
is particularly in the Psalms--which we have now been reading, and which
might be ranked with the finest hymns--that I miss the number and rhythm
of the syllables, the observance of a fixed metre--in short, severity of
form. David, the royal poet, was no less possessed by the divinity when
he sang to his lyre than other poets have been, but he does not seem to
have known that delight felt by our poets in overcoming the difficulties
they have raised for themselves. The poet should slavishly obey the laws
he lays down for himself of his own free-will, and subordinate to them
every word, and yet his matter and his song should seem to float on a
free and soaring wing. Now, even the original Hebrew text of the Psalms
has no metrical laws."
"I could well dispense with them," replied Euergetes; "Plato too
disdained to measure syllables, and I know passages in his works which
are nevertheless full of the highest poetic beauty. Besides, it has been
pointed out to me that even the Hebrew poems, like the Egyptian, follow
certain rules, which however I might certainly call rhetorical rather
than poetical. The first member in a series of ideas stands in antithesis
to the next, which either re-states the former one in a new form or sets
it in a clearer light by suggesting some contrast. Thus they avail
themselves of the art of the orator--or indeed of the painter--who brings
a light color into juxtaposition with a dark one, in order to increase
its luminous effect. This method and style are indeed not amiss, and that
was the least of all the things that filled me with aversion for this
book, in which besides, there is many a proverb which may be pleasing to
kings who desire to have submissive subjects, and to fathers who would
bring up their sons in obedience to themselves and to the laws. Even
mothers must be greatly comforted by them,--who ask no more than that
their children may get through the world without being jostled or pushed,
and unmolested if possible, that they may live longer than the oaks or
ravens, and be blessed with the greatest possible number of descendants.
Aye! these ordinances are indeed precious to those who accept them, for
they save them the trouble of thinking for themselves. Besides, the great
god of the Jews is said to have dictated all that this book contains to
its writers, just as I dictate to Philippus, my hump-backed secretary,
all that I want said. They regard everyone as a blasphemer and desecrator
who thinks that anything written in that roll is erroneous, or even
merely human. Plato's doctrines are not amiss, and yet Aristotle had
criticised them severely and attempted to confute them. I myself incline
to the views of the Stagyrite, you to those of the noble Athenian, and
how many good and instructive hours we owe to our discussions over this
difference of opinion! And how amusing it is to listen when the
Platonists on the one hand and the Aristotelians on the other, among the
busy threshers of straw in the Museum at Alexandria, fall together by the
ears so vehemently that they would both enjoy flinging their metal cups
at each others' heads--if the loss of the wine, which I pay for, were not
too serious to bear. We still seek for truth; the Jews believe they
possess it entirely.
"Even those among them who most zealously study our philosophers believe
this; and yet the writers of this book know of nothing but actual
present, and their god--who will no more endure another god as his equal
than a citizen's wife will admit a second woman to her husband's
house--is said to have created the world out of nothing for no other
purpose but to be worshipped and feared by its inhabitants.
"Now, given a philosophical Jew who knows his Empedocles--and I grant
there are many such in Alexandria, extremely keen and cultivated
men--what idea can he form in his own mind of 'creation out of nothing?'
Must he not pause to think very seriously when he remembers the
fundamental axiom that 'out of nothing, nothing can come,' and that
nothing which has once existed can ever be completely annihilated? At any
rate the necessary deduction must be that the life of man ends in that
nothingness whence everything in existence has proceeded. To live and to
die according to this book is not highly profitable. I can easily
reconcile myself to the idea of annihilation, as a man who knows how to
value a dreamless sleep after a day brimful of enjoyment--as a man who if
he must cease to be Euergetes would rather spring into the open jaws of
nothingness--but as a philosopher, no, never!"
"You, it is true," replied the queen, "cannot help measuring all and
everything by the intellectual standard exclusively; for the gods, who
endowed you with gifts beyond a thousand others, struck with blindness or
deafness that organ which conveys to our minds any religious or moral
sentiment. If that could see or hear, you could no more exclude the
conviction that these writings are full of the deepest purport than I
can, nor doubt that they have a powerful hold on the mind of the reader.
"They fetter their adherents to a fixed law, but they take all bitterness
out of sorrow by teaching that a stern father sends us suffering which is
represented as being sometimes a means of education, and sometimes a
punishment for transgressing a hard and clearly defined law. Their god,
in his infallible but stern wisdom, sets those who cling to him on an
evil and stony path to prove their strength, and to let them at last
reach the glorious goal which is revealed to them from the beginning."
"How strange such words as these sound in the mouth of a Greek,"
interrupted Euergetes. "You certainly must be repeating them after the
son of the Jewish high-priest, who defends the cause of his cruel god
with so much warmth and skill."
"I should have thought," retorted Cleopatra, "that this overwhelming
figure of a god would have pleased you, of all men; for I know of no
weakness in you. Quite lately Dositheos, the Jewish centurion--a very
learned man--tried to describe to my husband the one great god to whom
his nation adheres with such obstinate fidelity, but I could not help
thinking of our beautiful and happy gods as a gay company of amorous
lords and pleasure-loving ladies, and comparing them with this stern and
powerful being who, if only he chose to do it, might swallow them all up,
as Chronos swallowed his own children."
"That," exclaimed Euergetes, "is exactly what most provokes me in this
superstition. It crushes our light-hearted pleasure in life, and whenever
I have been reading the book of the Hebrews everything has come into my
mind that I least like to think of. It is like an importunate creditor
that reminds us of our forgotten debts, and I love pleasure and hate an
importunate reminder. And you, pretty one, life blooms for you--"
"But I," interrupted Cleopatra, "I can admire all that is great; and does
it not seem a bold and grand thing even to you, that the mighty idea that
it is one single power that moves and fills the world, should be freely
and openly declared in the sacred writings of the Jews--an idea which the
Egyptians carefully wrap up and conceal, which the priests of the Nile
only venture to divulge to the most privileged of those who are initiated
into their mysteries, and which--though the Greek philosophers indeed
have fearlessly uttered it--has never been introduced by any Hellene into
the religion of the people? If you were not so averse to the Hebrew
nation, and if you, like my husband and myself, had diligently occupied
yourself with their concerns and their belief you would be juster to them
and to their scriptures, and to the great creating and preserving spirit,
their god--"
"You are confounding this jealous and most unamiable and ill-tempered
tyrant of the universe with the Absolute of Aristotle!" cried Euergetes;
"he stigmatises most of what you and I and all rational Greeks require
for the enjoyment of life as sin--sin upon sin. And yet if my easily
persuadable brother governed at Alexandria, I believe the shrewd priests
might succeed in stamping him as a worshipper of that magnified
schoolmaster, who punishes his untutored brood with fire and torment."
"I cannot deny," replied Cleopatra, "that even to me the doctrine of the
Jews has something very fearful in it, and that to adopt it seems to me
tantamount to confiscating all the pleasures of life.--But enough of such
things, which I should no more relish as a daily food than you do. Let us
rejoice in that we are Hellenes, and let us now go to the banquet. I fear
you have found a very unsatisfactory substitute for what you sought in
coming up here."
"No--no. I feel strangely excited to-day, and my work with Aristarchus
would have led to no issue. It is a pity that we should have begun to
talk of that barbarian rubbish; there are so many other subjects more
pleasing and more cheering to the mind. Do you remember how we used to
read the great tragedians and Plato together?"
"And how you would often interrupt our tutor Agatharchides in his
lectures on geography, to point out some mistake! Did you prosecute those
studies in Cyrene?"
"Of course. It really is a pity, Cleopatra, that we should no longer live
together as we did formerly. There is no one, not even Aristarchus, with
whom I find it more pleasant and profitable to converse and discuss than
with you. If only you had lived at Athens in the time of Pericles, who
knows if you might not have been his friend instead of the immortal
Aspasia. This Memphis is certainly not the right place for you; for a few
months in the year you ought to come to Alexandria, which has now risen
to be superior to Athens."
"I do not know you to-day!" exclaimed Cleopatra, gazing at her brother in
astonishment. "I have never heard you speak so kindly and brotherly since
the death of my mother. You must have some great request to make of us."
"You see how thankless a thing it is for me to let my heart speak for
once, like other people. I am like the boy in the fable when the wolf
came! I have so often behaved in an unbrotherly fashion that when I show
the aspect of a brother you think I have put on a mask. If I had had
anything special to ask of you I should have waited till to-morrow, for
in this part of the country even a blind beggar does not like to refuse
his lame comrade anything on his birthday."
"If only we knew what you wish for! Philometor and I would do it more
than gladly, although you always want something monstrous. Our
performance to-morrow will--at any rate--but--Zoe, pray be good enough to
retire with the maids; I have a few words to say to my brother alone."
As soon as the queen's ladies had withdrawn, she went on:
"It is a real grief to use, but the best part of the festival in honor of
your birthday will not be particularly successful, for the priests of
Serapis spitefully refuse us the Hebe about whom Lysias has made us so
curious. Asclepiodorus, it would seem, keeps her in concealment, and
carries his audacity so far as to tell us that someone has carried her
off from the temple. He insinuates that we have stolen her, and demands
her restitution in the name of all his associates."
"You are doing the man an injustice; our dove has followed the lure of a
dove-catcher who will not allow me to have her, and who is now billing
and cooing with her in his own nest. I am cheated, but I can scarcely be
angry with the Roman, for his claim was of older standing than mine."
"The Roman?" asked Cleopatra, rising from her seat and turning pale. "But
that is impossible. You are making common cause with Eulaeus, and want to
set me against Publius Scipio. At the banquet last night you showed
plainly enough your ill-feeling against him."
"You seem to feel more warmly towards him. But before I prove to you that
I am neither lying nor joking, may I enquire what has this man, this
many-named Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, to recommend him above any
handsome well-grown Macedonian, who is resolute in my cause, in the whole
corps of your body guard, excepting his patrician pride? He is as bitter
and ungenial as a sour apple, and all the very best that you--a subtle
thinker, a brilliant and cultivated philosopher--can find to say is no
more appreciated by his meanly cultivated intellect than the odes of
Sappho by a Nubian boatman."
"It is exactly for that," cried the queen, "that I value him; he is
different from all of us; we who--how shall I express myself--who always
think at second-hand, and always set our foot in the rut trodden by the
master of the school we adhere to; who squeeze our minds into the moulds
that others have carved out, and when we speak hesitate to step beyond
the outlines of those figures of rhetoric which we learned at school! You
have burst these bonds, but even your mighty spirit still shows traces of
them. Publius Scipio, on the contrary, thinks and sees and speaks with
perfect independence, and his upright sense guides him to the truth
without any trouble or special training. His society revives me like the
fresh air that I breathe when I come out into the open air from the
temple filled with the smoke of incense--like the milk and bread which a
peasant offered us during our late excursion to the coast, after we had
been living for a year on nothing but dainties."
"He has all the admirable characteristics of a child!" interrupted
Euergetes. "And if that is all that appears estimable to you in the Roman
your son may soon replace the great Cornelius."
"Not soon! no, not till he shall have grown older than you are, and a
man, a thorough man, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot,
for such a man is Publius! I believe--nay, I am sure--that he is
incapable of any mean action, that he could not be false in word or even
in look, nor feign a sentiment be did not feel."
"Why so vehement, sister? So much zeal is quite unnecessary on this
occasion! You know well enough that I have my easy days, and that this
excitement is not good for you; nor has the Roman deserved that you
should be quite beside yourself for his sake. The fellow dared in my
presence to look at you as Paris might at Helen before he carried her
off, and to drink out of your cup; and this morning he no doubt did not
contradict what he conveyed to you last night with his eyes--nay, perhaps
by his words. And yet, scarcely an hour before, he had been to the
Necropolis to bear his sweetheart away from the temple of the gloomy
Serapis into that of the smiling Eros."
"You shall prove this!" cried the queen in great excitement. "Publius is
my friend--"
"And I am yours!"
"You have often proved the reverse, and now again with lies and
cheating--"
"You seem," interrupted Euergetes, "to have learned from your
unphilosophical favorite to express your indignation with extraordinary
frankness; to-day however I am, as I have said, as gentle as a kitten--"
"Euergetes and gentleness!" cried Cleopatra with a forced laugh. "No, you
only step softly like a cat when she is watching a bird, and your
gentleness covers some ruthless scheme, which we shall find out soon
enough to our cost. You have been talking with Eulaeus to-day; Eulaeus,
who fears and hates Publius, and it seems to me that you have hatched
some conspiracy against him; but if you dare to cast a single stone in
his path, to touch a single hair of his head, I will show you that even a
weak woman can be terrible. Nemesis and the Erinnyes from Alecto to
Megaera, the most terrible of all the gods, are women!"
Cleopatra had hissed rather than spoken these words, with her teeth set
with rage, and had raised her small fist to threaten her brother; but
Euergetes preserved a perfect composure till she had ceased speaking.
Then he took a step closer to her, crossed his arms over his breast, and
asked her in the deepest bass of his fine deep voice:
"Are you idiotically in love with this Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica,
or do you purpose to make use of him and his kith and kin in Rome against
me?"
Transported with rage, and without blenching in the least at her
brother's piercing gaze, she hastily retorted: "Up to this moment only
the first perhaps--for what is my husband to me? But if you go on as you
have begun I shall begin to consider how I may make use of his influence
and of his liking for me, on the shores of the Tiber."
"Liking!" cried Euergetes, and he laughed so loud and violently that Zoe,
who was listening at the tent door, gave a little scream, and Cleopatra
drew back a step. "And to think that you--the most prudent of the
prudent--who can hear the dew fall and the grass grow, and smell here in
Memphis the smoke of every fire that is lighted in Alexandria or in Syria
or even in Rome--that you, my mother's daughter, should be caught over
head and ears by a broad-shouldered lout, for all the world like a clumsy
town-girl or a wench at a loom. This ignorant Adonis, who knows so well
how to make use of his own strange and resolute personality, and of the
power that stands in his background, thinks no more of the hearts he sets
in flames than I of the earthen jar out of which water is drawn when I am
thirsty. You think to make use of him by the 'Tiber; but he has
anticipated you, and learns from you all that is going on by the Nile and
everything they most want to know in the Senate.
"You do not believe me, for no one ever is ready to believe anything that
can diminish his self-esteem--and why should you believe me? I frankly
confess that I do not hesitate to lie when I hope to gain more by untruth
than by that much-belauded and divine truth, which, according to your
favorite Plato, is allied to all earthly beauty; but it is often just as
useless as beauty itself, for the useful and the beautiful exclude each
other in a thousand cases, for ten when they coincide. There, the gong is
sounding for the third time. If you care for plain proof that the Roman,
only an hour before he visited you this morning, had our little Hebe
carried off from the temple, and conveyed to the house of Apollodorus,
the sculptor, at Memphis, you have only to come to see me in my rooms
early to-morrow after the first morning sacrifice. You will at any rate
wish to come and congratulate me; bring your children with you, as I
propose making them presents. You might even question the Roman himself
at the banquet to-day, but he will hardly appear, for the sweetest gifts
of Eros are bestowed at night, and as the temple of Serapis is closed at
sunset Publius has never yet seen his Irene in the evening. May I expect
you and the children after morning sacrifice?"
Before Cleopatra had time to answer this question another trumpet-blast
was heard, and she exclaimed: "That is Philometor, come to fetch us to
the banquet. I will ere long give the Roman the opportunity of defending
himself, though--in spite of your accusations--I trust him entirely. This
morning I asked him solemnly whether it was true that he was in love with
his friend's charming Hebe, and he denied it in his firm and manly way,
and his replies were admirable and worthy of the noblest mind, when I
ventured to doubt his sincerity. He takes truth more seriously than you
do. He regards it not only as beautiful and right to be truthful, he
says, but as prudent too; for lies can only procure us a small
short-lived advantage, as transitory as the mists of night which vanish
as soon as the sun appears, while truth is like the sunlight itself,
which as often as it is dimmed by clouds reappears again and again. And,
he says, what makes a liar so particularly contemptible in his eyes is,
that to attain his end, he must be constantly declaring and repeating the
horror he has of those who are and do the very same thing as he himself.
The ruler of a state cannot always be truthful, and I often have failed
in truth; but my intercourse with Publius has aroused much that is good
in me, and which had been slumbering with closed eyes; and if this man
should prove to be the same as all the rest of you, then I will follow
your road, Euergetes, and laugh at virtue and truth, and set the busts of
Aristippus and Strato on the pedestals where those of Zeno and
Antisthenes now stand."
"You mean to have the busts of the philosophers moved again?" asked King
Philometor, who, as he entered the tent, had heard the queen's last
words. "And Aristippus is to have the place of honor? I have no
objection--though he teaches that man must subjugate matter and not
become subject to it.--["Mihi res, non me rebus subjungere."]--This
indeed is easier to say than to do, and there is no man to whom it is
more impossible than to a king who has to keep on good terms with Greeks
and Egyptians, as we have, and with Rome as well. And besides all this to
avoid quarrelling with a jealous brother, who shares our kingdom! If men
could only know how much they would have to do as kings only in reading
and writing, they would take care never to struggle for a crown! Up to
this last half hour I have been examining and deciding applications and
petitions. Have you got through yours, Euergetes? Even more had
accumulated for you than for us."
"All were settled in an hour," replied the other promptly. "My eye is
quicker than the mouth of your reader, and my decisions commonly consist
of three words while you dictate long treatises to your scribes. So I had
done when you had scarcely begun, and yet I could tell you at once, if it
were not too tedious a matter, every single case that has come before me
for months, and explain it in all its details."
"That I could not indeed," said Philometor modestly, "but I know and
admire your swift intelligence and accurate memory."
"You see I am more fit for a king than you are;" laughed Euergetes. "You
are too gentle and debonair for a throne! Hand over your government to
me. I will fill your treasury every year with gold. I beg you now, come
to Alexandria with Cleopatra for good, and share with me the palace and
the gardens in the Bruchion. I will nominate your little Philopator heir
to the throne, for I have no wish to contract a permanent tie with any
woman, as Cleopatra belongs to you. This is a bold proposal, but reflect,
Philometor, if you were to accept it, how much time it would give you for
your music, your disputations with the Jews, and all your other favorite
occupations."
"You never know how far you may go with your jest!" interrupted
Cleopatra. "Besides, you devote quite as much time to your studies in
philology and natural history as he does to music and improving
conversations with his learned friends."
"Just so," assented Philometor, "and you may be counted among the sages
of the Museum with far more reason than I."
"But the difference between us," replied Euergetes, "is that I despise
all the philosophical prattlers and rubbish-collectors in Alexandria
almost to the point of hating them, while for science I have as great a
passion as for a lover. You, on the contrary, make much of the learned
men, but trouble yourself precious little about science."
"Drop the subject, pray," begged Cleopatra. "I believe that you two have
never yet been together for half an hour without Euergetes having begun
some dispute, and Philometor having at last given in, to pacify him. Our
guests must have been waiting for us a long time. Had Publius Scipio made
his appearance?"
"He had sent to excuse himself," replied the king as he scratched the
poll of Cleopatra's parrot, parting its feathers with the tips of his
fingers. "Lysias, the Corinthian, is sitting below, and he says he does
not know where his friend can be gone."
"But we know very well," said Euergetes, casting an ironical glance at
the queen. "It is pleasant to be with Philometor and Cleopatra, but
better still with Eros and Hebe. Sister, you look pale--shall I call for
Zoe?"
Cleopatra shook her head in negation, but she dropped into a seat, and
sat stooping, with her head bowed over her knees as if she were
dreadfully tired. Euergetes turned his back on her, and spoke to his
brother of indifferent subjects, while she drew lines, some straight and
some crooked, with her fan-stick through the pile of the soft rug on the
floor, and sat gazing thoughtfully at her feet. As she sat thus her eye
was caught by her sandals, richly set with precious stones, and the
slender toes she had so often contemplated with pleasure; but now the
sight of them seemed to vex her, for in obedience to a swift impulse she
loosened the straps, pushed off her right sandal with her left foot,
kicked it from her, and said, turning to her husband:
"It is late and I do not feel well, and you may sup without me."
"By the healing Isis!" exclaimed Philometor, going up to her. "You look
suffering. Shall I send for the physicians? Is it really nothing more
than your usual headache? The gods be thanked! But that you should be
unwell just to-day! I had so much to say to you; and the chief thing of
all was that we are still a long way from completeness in our
preparations for our performance. If this luckless Hebe were not--"
"She is in good hands," interrupted Euergetes. "The Roman, Publius
Scipio, has taken her to a place of safety; perhaps in order to present
her to me to morrow morning in return for the horses from Cyrene which I
sent him to-day. How brightly your eyes sparkle, sister--with joy no
doubt at this good idea. This evening, I dare say he is rehearsing the
little one in her part that she may perform it well to-morrow. If we are
mistaken--if Publius is ungrateful and proposes keeping the dove, then
Thais, your pretty Athenian waiting-woman, may play the part of Hebe.
What do you think of that suggestion, Cleopatra?"
"That I forbid such jesting with me!" cried the queen vehemently. "No one
has any consideration for me--no one pities me, and I suffer fearfully!
Euergetes scorns me--you, Philometor, would be glad to drag me down! If
only the banquet is not interfered with, and so long as nothing spoils
your pleasure!--Whether I die or no, no one cares!"
With these words the queen burst into tears, and roughly pushed away her
husband as he endeavored to soothe her. At last she dried her eyes, and
said: "Go down-the guests are waiting."
"Immediately, my love," replied Philometor. "But one thing I must tell
you, for I know that it will arouse your sympathy. The Roman read to you
the petition for pardon for Philotas, the chief of the Chrematistes and
'relative of the king,' which contains such serious charges against
Eulaeus. I was ready with all my heart to grant your wish and to pardon
the man who is the father of these miserable water-bearers; but, before
having the decree drawn up, I had the lists of the exiles to the
gold-mines carefully looked through, and there it was discovered that
Philotas and his wife have both been dead more than half a year. Death
has settled this question, and I cannot grant to Publius the first
service he has asked of me--asked with great urgency too. I am sorry for
this, both for his sake and for that of poor Philotas, who was held in
high esteem by our mother."
"May the ravens devour them!" answered Cleopatra, pressing her forehead
against the ivory frame which surrounded the stuffed back of her seat.
"Once more I beg of you excuse me from all further speech." This time the
two kings obeyed her wishes. When Euergetes offered her his hand she said
with downcast eyes, and poking her fan-stick into the wool of the carpet:
"I will visit you early to-morrow."
"After the first sacrifice," added Euergetes. "If I know you well,
something that you will then hear will please you greatly; very greatly
indeed, I should think. Bring the children with you; that I ask of you as
a birthday request."
CHAPTER XX.
The royal chariot in which Klea was standing, wrapped in the cloak and
wearing the hat of the captain of the civic guard, went swiftly and
without stopping through the streets of Memphis. As long as she saw
houses with lighted windows on each side of the way, and met riotous
soldiers and quiet citizens going home from the taverns, or from working
late in their workshops, with lanterns in their hands or carried by their
slaves--so long her predominant feeling was one of hatred to Publius; and
mixed with this was a sentiment altogether new to her--a sentiment that
made her blood boil, and her heart now stand still and then again beat
wildly--the thought that he might be a wretched deceiver. Had he not
attempted to entrap one of them--whether her sister or herself it was all
the same--wickedly to betray her, and to get her into his power!
"With me," thought she, "he could not hope to gain his evil ends, and
when he saw that I knew how to protect myself he lured the poor
unresisting child away with him, in order to ruin her and to drag her
into shame and misery. Just like Rome herself, who seizes on one country
after another to make them her own, so is this ruthless man. No sooner
had that villain Eulaeus' letter reached him, than he thought himself
justified in believing that I too was spellbound by a glance from his
eyes, and would spread my wings to fly into his arms; and so he put out
his greedy hand to catch me too, and threw aside the splendor and
delights of a royal banquet to hurry by night out into the desert, and to
risk a hideous death--for the avenging deities still punish the
evildoer."
By this time she was shrouded in total darkness, for the moon was still
hidden by black clouds. Memphis was already behind her, and the chariot
was passing through a tall-stemmed palm-grove, where even at mid-day deep
shades intermingled with the sunlight. When, just at this spot, the
thought once more pierced her soul that the seducer was devoted to death,
she felt as though suddenly a bright glaring light had flashed up in her
and round her, and she could have broken out into a shout of joy like one
who, seeking retribution for blood, places his foot at last on the breast
of his fallen foe. She clenched her teeth tightly and grasped her girdle,
in which she had stuck the knife given her by the smith.
If the charioteer by her side had been Publius, she would have stabbed
him to the heart with the weapon with delight, and then have thrown
herself under the horses' hoofs and the brazen wheels of the chariot.
But no! Still more gladly would she have found him dying in the desert,
and before his heart had ceased to beat have shouted in his ear how much
she hated him; and then, when his breast no longer heaved a breath--then
she would have flung herself upon him, and have kissed his dimmed eyes.
Her wildest thoughts of vengeance were as inseparable from tender pity
and the warmest longings of a heart overflowing with love, as the dark
waters of a river are from the brighter flood of a stream with which it
has recently mingled. All the passionate impulses which had hitherto been
slumbering in her soul were set free, and now raised their clamorous
voices as she was whirled across the desert through the gloom of night.
The wishes roused in her breast by her hatred appealing to her on one
side and her love singing in her ear, in tempting flute-tones, on the
other, jostled and hustled one another, each displacing the other as they
crowded her mind in wild confusion. As she proceeded on her journey she
felt that she could have thrown herself like a tigress on her victim, and
yet--like an outcast woman--have flung herself at Publius' knees in
supplication for the love that was denied her. She had lost all idea of
time and distance, and started as from a wild and bewildering dream when
the chariot suddenly halted, and the driver said in his rough tones:
"Here we are, I must turn back again."
She shuddered, drew the cloak more closely round her, sprang out on to
the road, and stood there motionless till the charioteer said:
"I have not spared my horses, my noble gentleman. Won't you give me
something to get a drop of wine?" Klea's whole possessions were two
silver drachma, of which she herself owned one and the other belonged to
Irene. On the last anniversary but one of his mother's death, the king
had given at the temple a sum to be divided among all the attendants,
male and female, who served Serapis, and a piece of silver had fallen to
the share of herself and her sister. Klea had them both about her in a
little bag, which also contained a ring that her mother had given her at
parting, and the amulet belonging to Serapion. The girl took out the two
silver coins and gave them to the driver, who, after testing the liberal
gift with his fingers, cried out as he turned his horses:
"A pleasant night to you, and may Aphrodite and all the Loves be
favorable!"
"Irene's drachma!" muttered Klea to herself, as the chariot rolled away.
The sweet form of her sister rose before her mind; she recalled the hour
when the girl--still but a child--had entrusted it to her, because she
lost everything unless Klea took charge of it for her.
"Who will watch her and care for her now?" she asked herself, and she
stood thinking, trying to defend herself against the wild wishes which
again began to stir in her, and to collect her scattered thoughts. She
had involuntarily avoided the beam of light which fell across the road
from the tavern-window, and yet she could not help raising her eyes and
looking along it, and she found herself looking through the darkness
which enveloped her, straight into the faces of two men whose gaze was
directed to the very spot where she was standing. And what faces they
were that she saw! One, a fat face, framed in thick hair and a short,
thick and ragged beard, was of a dusky brown and as coarse and brutal as
the other was smooth, colorless and lean, cruel and crafty. The eyes of
the first of these ruffians were prominent, weak and bloodshot, with a
fixed glassy stare, while those of the other seemed always to be on the
watch with a restless and uneasy leer.
These were Euergetes' assassins--they must be! Spellbound with terror and
revulsion she stood quite still, fearing only that the ruffians might
hear the beating of her heart, for she felt as if it were a hammer swung
up and down in an empty space, and beating with loud echoes, now in her
bosom and now in her throat.
"The young gentleman must have gone round behind the tavern--he knows the
shortest way to the 'tombs. Let us go after him, and finish off the
business at once," said the broad-shouldered villain in a hoarse whisper
that broke down every now and then, and which seemed to Klea even more
repulsive than the monster's face.
"So that he may hear us go after him-stupid!" answered the other. "When
he has been waiting for his sweetheart about a quarter of an hour I will
call his name in a woman's voice, and at his first step towards the
desert do you break his neck with the sand-bag. We have plenty of time
yet, for it must still be a good half hour before midnight."
"So much the better," said the other. "Our wine-jar is not nearly empty
yet, and we paid the lazy landlord for it in advance, before he crept
into bed."
"You shall only drink two cups more," said the punier villain. "For this
time we have to do with a sturdy fellow, Setnam is not with us now to
lend a hand in the work, and the dead meat must show no gaping thrusts or
cuts. My teeth are not like yours when you are fasting--even cooked food
must not be too tough for them to chew it, now-a-days. If you soak
yourself in drink and fail in your blow, and I am not ready with the
poisoned stiletto the thing won't come off neatly. But why did not the
Roman let his chariot wait?"
"Aye! why did he let it go away?" asked the other staring open-mouthed in
the direction where the sound of wheels was still to be heard. His
companion mean while laid his hand to his ear, and listened. Both were
silent for a few minutes, then the thin one said:
"The chariot has stopped at the first tavern. So much the better. The
Roman has valuable cattle in his shafts, and at the inn down there, there
is a shed for horses. Here in this hole there is hardly a stall for an
ass, and nothing but sour wine and mouldy beer. I don't like the rubbish,
and save my coin for Alexandria and white Mariotic; that is strengthening
and purifies the blood. For the present I only wish we were as well off
as those horses; they will have plenty of time to recover their breath."
"Yes, plenty of time," answered the other with a broad grin, and then he
with his companion withdrew into the room to fill his cup.
Klea too could hear that the chariot which had brought her hither, had
halted at the farther tavern, but it did not occur to her that the driver
had gone in to treat himself to wine with half of Irene's drachma. The
horses should make up for the lost time, and they could easily do it, for
when did the king's banquets ever end before midnight?
As soon as Plea saw that the assassins were filling their earthen cups,
she slipped softly on tiptoe behind the tavern; the moon came out from
behind the clouds for a few minutes, she sought and found the short way
by the desert-path to the Apis-tombs, and hastened rapidly along it. She
looked straight before her, for whenever she glanced at the road-side,
and her eye was caught by some dried up shrub of the desert, silvery in
the pale moonlight, she fancied she saw behind it the face of a murderer.
The skeletons of fallen beasts standing up out of the dust, and the
bleached jawbones of camels and asses, which shone much whiter than the
desert-sand on which they lay, seemed to have come to life and motion,
and made her think of the tiger-teeth of the bearded ruffian.
The clouds of dust driven in her face by the warm west wind, which had
risen higher, increased her alarm, for they were mingled with the colder
current of the night-breeze; and again and again she felt as if spirits
were driving her onwards with their hot breath, and stroking her face
with their cold fingers. Every thing that her senses perceived was
transformed by her heated imagination into a fearful something; but more
fearful and more horrible than anything she heard, than any phantom that
met her eye in the ghastly moonlight, were her own thoughts of what was
to be done now, in the immediate future--of the fearful fate that
threatened the Roman and Irene; and she was incapable of separating one
from the other in her mind, for one influence alone possessed her, heart
and soul: dread, dread; the same boundless, nameless, deadly dread--alike
of mortal peril and irremediable shame, and of the airiest phantoms and
the merest nothings.
A large black cloud floated slowly across the moon and utter darkness hid
everything around, even the undefined forms which her imagination had
turned to images of dread. She was forced to moderate her pace, and find
her way, feeling each step; and just as to a child some hideous form that
looms before him vanishes into nothingness when he covers his eyes with
his hand, so the profound darkness which now enveloped her, suddenly
released her soul from a hundred imaginary terrors.
She stood still, drew a deep breath, collected the whole natural force of
her will, and asked herself what she could do to avert the horrid issue.
Since seeing the murderers every thought of revenge, every wish to punish
the seducer with death, had vanished from her mind; one desire alone
possessed her now--that of rescuing him, the man, from the clutches of
these ravening beasts. Walking slowly onwards she repeated to herself
every word she had heard that referred to Publius and Irene as spoken by
Euergetes, Eulaeus, the recluse, and the assassins, and recalled every
step she had taken since she left the temple; thus she brought herself
back to the consciousness that she had come out and faced danger and
endured terror, solely and exclusively for Irene's sake. The image of her
sister rose clearly before her mind in all its bright charm, undimmed by
any jealous grudge which, indeed, ever since her passion had held her in
its toils had never for the smallest fraction of a minute possessed her.
Irene had grown up under her eye, sheltered by her care, in the sunshine
of her love. To take care of her, to deny herself, and bear the severest
fatigue for her had been her pleasure; and now as she appealed to her
father--as she wont to do--as if he were present, and asked him in an
inaudible cry: "Tell me, have I not done all for her that I could do?"
and said to herself that he could not possibly answer her appeal but with
assent, her eyes filled with tears; the bitterness and discontent which
had lately filled her breast gradually disappeared, and a gentle, calm,
refreshing sense of satisfaction came over her spirit, like a cooling
breeze after a scorching day.
As she now again stood still, straining her eyes which were growing more
accustomed to the darkness, to discover one of the temples at the end of
the alley of sphinxes, suddenly and unexpectedly at her right hand a
solemn and many-voiced hymn of lamentation fell upon her ear. This was
from the priests of Osiris-Apis who were performing the sacred mysteries
of their god, at midnight, on the roof of the temple. She knew the hymn
well--a lament for the deceased Osiris which implored him with urgent
supplication to break the power of death, to rise again, to bestow new
light and new vitality on the world and on men, and to vouchsafe to all
the departed a new existence.
The pious lament had a powerful effect on her excited spirit. Her parents
too perhaps had passed through death, and were now taking part in the
conduct of the destiny of the world and of men in union with the life
giving God. Her breath came fast, she threw up her arms, and, for the
first time since in her wrath she had turned her back on the holy of
holies in the temple of Serapis, she poured forth her whole soul with
passionate fervor in a deep and silent prayer for strength to fulfil her
duty to the end,--for some sign to show her the way to save Irene from
misfortune, and Publius from death. And as she prayed she felt no longer
alone--no, it seemed to her that she stood face to face with the
invincible Power which protects the good, in whom she now again had
faith, though for Him she knew no name; as a daughter, pursued by foes,
might clasp her powerful father's knees and claim his succor.
She had not stood thus with uplifted arms for many minutes when the moon,
once more appearing, recalled her to herself and to actuality. She now
perceived close to her, at hardly a hundred paces from where she stood,
the line of sphinxes by the side of which lay the tombs of Apis near
which she was to await Publius. Her heart began to beat faster again, and
her dread of her own weakness revived. In a few minutes she must meet the
Roman, and, involuntarily putting up her hand to smooth her hair, she was
reminded that she still wore Glaucus' hat on her head and his cloak
wrapped round her shoulders. Lifting up her heart again in a brief prayer
for a calm and collected mind, she slowly arranged her dress and its
folds, and as she did so the key of the tomb-cave, which she still had
about her, fell under her hand. An idea flashed through her brain--she
caught at it, and with hurried breath followed it out, till she thought
she had now hit upon the right way to preserve from death the man who was
so rich and powerful, who had given her nothing but taken everything from
her, and to whom, nevertheless, she--the poor water-bearer whom he had
thought to trifle with--could now bestow the most precious of the gifts
of the immortals, namely, life.
Serapion had said, and she was willing to believe, that Publius was not
base, and he certainly was not one of those who could prove ungrateful to
a preserver. She longed to earn the right to demand something of him, and
that could be nothing else but that he should give up her sister and
bring Irene back to her.
When could it be that he had come to an understanding with the
inexperienced and easily wooed maiden? How ready she must have been to
clasp the hand held out to her by this man! Nothing surprised her in
Irene, the child of the present; she could comprehend too that Irene's
charm might quickly win the heart even of a grave and serious man.
And yet--in all the processions it was never Irene that he had gazed at,
but always herself, and how came it to pass that he had given a prompt
and ready assent to the false invitation to go out to meet her in the
desert at midnight? Perhaps she was still nearer to his heart than Irene,
and if gratitude drew him to her with fresh force then--aye then--he
might perhaps woo her, and forget his pride and her lowly position, and
ask her to be his wife.
She thought this out fully, but before she had reached the half circle
enclosed by the Philosophers' busts the question occurred to her mind.
And Irene?
Had she gone with him and quitted her without bidding her farewell
because the young heart was possessed with a passionate love for
Publius--who was indeed the most lovable of men? And he? Would he indeed,
out of gratitude for what she hoped to do for him, make up his mind, if
she demanded it, to make her Irene his wife--the poor but more than
lovely daughter of a noble house?
And if this were possible, if these two could be happy in love and honor,
should she Klea come between the couple to divide them? Should she
jealously snatch Irene from his arms and carry her back to the gloomy
temple which now--after she had fluttered awhile in sportive freedom in
the sunny air--would certainly seem to her doubly sinister and
unendurable? Should she be the one to plunge Irene into misery--Irene,
her child, the treasure confided to her care, whom she had sworn to
cherish?
"No, and again no," she said resolutely. "She was born for happiness, and
I for endurance, and if I dare beseech thee to grant me one thing more, O
thou infinite Divinity! it is that Thou wouldst cut out from my soul this
love which is eating into my heart as though it were rotten wood, and
keep me far from envy and jealousy when I see her happy in his arms. It
is hard--very hard to drive one's own heart out into the desert in order
that spring may blossom in that of another: but it is well so--and my
mother would commend me and my father would say I had acted after his own
heart, and in obedience to the teaching of the great men on these
pedestals. Be still, be still my aching heart--there--that is right!"
Thus reflecting she went past the busts of Zeno and Chrysippus, glancing
at their features distinct in the moonlight: and her eyes falling on the
smooth slabs of stone with which the open space was paved, her own shadow
caught her attention, black and sharply defined, and exactly resembling
that of some man travelling from one town to another in his cloak and
broad-brimmed hat.
"Just like a man!" she muttered to herself; and as, at the same moment,
she saw a figure resembling her own, and, like herself, wearing a hat,
appear near the entrance to the tombs, and fancied she recognized it as
Publius, a thought, a scheme, flashed through her excited brain, which at
first appalled her, but in the next instant filled her with the ecstasy
which an eagle may feel when he spreads his mighty wings and soars above
the dust of the earth into the pure and infinite ether. Her heart beat
high, she breathed deeply and slowly, but she advanced to meet the Roman,
drawn up to her full height like a queen, who goes forward to receive
some equal sovereign; her hat, which she had taken off, in her left hand,
and the Smith's key in her right-straight on towards the door of the
Apis-tombs.
CHAPTER XXI.
The man whom Klea had seen was in fact none other than Publius. He was
now at the end of a busy day, for after he had assured himself that Irene
had been received by the sculptor and his wife, and welcomed as if she
were their own child, he had returned to his tent to write once more a
dispatch to Rome. But this he could not accomplish, for his friend Lysias
paced restlessly up and down by him as he sat, and as often as he put the
reed to the papyrus disturbed him with enquiries about the recluse, the
sculptor, and their rescued protegee.
When, finally, the Corinthian desired to know whether he, Publius,
considered Irene's eyes to be brown or blue, he had sprung up
impatiently, and exclaimed indignantly:
"And supposing they were red or green, what would it matter to me!"
Lysias seemed pleased rather than vexed with this reply, and he was on
the point of confessing to his friend that Irene had caused in his heart
a perfect conflagration--as of a forest or a city in flames--when a
master of the horse had appeared from Euergetes, to present the four
splendid horses from Cyrene, which his master requested the noble Roman
Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica to accept in token of his friendship.
The two friends, who both were judges and lovers of horses, spent at
least an hour in admiring the fine build and easy paces of these valuable
beasts. Then came a chamberlain from the queen to invite Publius to go to
her at once.
The Roman followed the messenger after a short delay in his tent, in
order to take with him the gems representing the marriage of Hebe, for on
his way from the sculptor's to the palace it had occurred to him that he
would offer them to the queen, after he had informed her of the parentage
of the two water-carriers. Publius had keen eyes, and the queen's
weaknesses had not escaped him, but he had never suspected her of being
capable of abetting her licentious brother in forcibly possessing himself
of the innocent daughter of a noble father. He now purposed to make her a
present--as in some degree a substitute for the representation his friend
had projected, and which had come to nothing--of the picture which she
had hoped to find pleasure in reproducing.
Cleopatra received him on her roof, a favor of which few could boast; she
allowed him to sit at her feet while she reclined on her couch, and gave
him to understand, by every glance of her eyes and every word she spoke,
that his presence was a happiness to her, and filled her with passionate
delight. Publius soon contrived to lead the conversation to the subject
of the innocent parents of the water-bearers, who had been sent off to
the goldmines; but Cleopatra interrupted his speech in their favor and
asked him plainly, undisguisedly, and without any agitation, whether it
was true that he himself desired to win the youthful Hebe. And she met
his absolute denial with such persistent and repeated expressions of
disbelief, assuming at last a tone of reproach, that he grew vexed and
broke out into a positive declaration that he regarded lying as unmanly
and disgraceful, and could endure any insult rather than a doubt of his
veracity.
Such a vehement and energetic remonstrance from a man she had
distinguished was a novelty to Cleopatra, and she did not take it amiss,
for she might now believe--what she much wished to believe--that Publius
wanted to have nothing to do with the fair Hebe, that Eulaeus had
slandered her friend, and that Zoe had been in error when, after her vain
expedition to the temple--from which she had then just returned--she had
told her that the Roman was Irene's lover, and must at the earliest hour
have betrayed to the girl herself, or to the priests in the Serapeum,
what was their purpose regarding her.
In the soul of this noble youth there was nothing false--there could be
nothing false! And she, who was accustomed never to hear a word from the
men who surrounded her without asking herself with what aim it was
spoken, and how much of it was dissimulation or downright falsehood,
trusted the Roman, and was so happy in her trust that, full of gracious
gaiety, she herself invited Publius to give her the recluse's petition to
read. The Roman at once gave her the roll, saying that since it contained
so much that was sad, much as he hoped she would make herself acquainted
with it, he felt himself called upon also to give her some pleasure,
though in truth but a very small one. Thus speaking he produced the gems,
and she showed as much delight over this little work of art as if,
instead of being a rich queen and possessed of the finest engraved gems
in the world, she were some poor girl receiving her first gift of some
long-desired gold ornament.
"Exquisite, splendid!" she cried again and again. "And besides, they are
an imperishable memorial of you, dear friend, and of your visit to Egypt.
I will have them set with the most precious stones; even diamonds will
seem worthless to me compared with this gift from you. This has already
decided my sentence as to Eulaeus and his unhappy victims before I read
your petition. Still I will read that roll, and read it attentively, for
my husband regards Eulaeus as a useful--almost an indispensable-tool, and
I must give good reasons for my verdict and for the pardon. I believe in
the innocence of the unfortunate Philotas, but if he had committed a
hundred murders, after this present I would procure his freedom all the
same."
The words vexed the Roman, and they made her who had spoken them in order
to please him appear to him at that moment more in the light of a
corruptible official than of a queen. He found the time hang heavy that
he spent with Cleopatra, who, in spite of his reserve, gave him to
understand with more and more insistence how warmly she felt towards him;
but the more she talked and the more she told him, the more silent he
became, and he breathed a sigh of relief when her husband at last
appeared to fetch him and Cleopatra away to their mid-day meal.
At table Philometor promised to take up the cause of Philotas and his
wife, both of whom he had known, and whose fate had much grieved him;
still he begged his wife and the Roman not to bring Eulaeus to justice
till Euergetes should have left Memphis, for, during his brother's
presence, beset as he was with difficulties, he could not spare him; and
if he might judge of Publius by himself he cared far more to reinstate
the innocent in their rights, and to release them from their miserable
lot--a lot of which he had only learned the full horrors quite recently
from his tutor Agatharchides--than to drag a wretch before the judges
to-morrow or the day after, who was unworthy of his anger, and who at any
rate should not escape punishment.
Before the letter from Asclepiodorus--stating the mistaken hypothesis
entertained by the priests of Serapis that Irene had been carried off by
the king's order--could reach the palace, Publius had found an
opportunity of excusing himself and quitting the royal couple. Not even
Cleopatra herself could raise any objection to his distinct assurance
that he must write to Rome today on matters of importance. Philometor's
favor was easy to win, and as soon as he was alone with his wife he could
not find words enough in praise of the noble qualities of the young man,
who seemed destined in the future to be of the greatest service to him
and to his interests at Rome, and whose friendly attitude towards himself
was one more advantage that he owed--as he was happy to acknowledge--to
the irresistible talents and grace of his wife.
When Publius had quitted the palace and hurried back to his tent, he felt
like a journeyman returning from a hard day's labor, or a man acquitted
from a serious charge; like one who had lost his way, and has found the
right road again.
The heavy air in the arbors and alleys of the embowered gardens seemed to
him easier to breathe than the cool breeze that fanned Cleopatra's raised
roof. He felt the queen's presence to be at once exciting and oppressive,
and in spite of all that was flattering to himself in the advances made
to him by the powerful princess, it was no more gratifying to his taste
than an elegantly prepared dish served on gold plate, which we are forced
to partake of though poison may be hidden in it, and which when at last
we taste it is sickeningly sweet.
Publius was an honest man, and it seemed to him--as to all who resemble
him--that love which was forced upon him was like a decoration of honor
bestowed by a hand which we do not respect, and that we would rather
refuse than accept; or like praise out of all proportion to our merit,
which may indeed delight a fool, but rouses the indignation rather than
the gratitude of a wise man. It struck him too that Cleopatra intended to
make use of him, in the first place as a toy to amuse herself, and then
as a useful instrument or underling, and this so gravely incensed and
discomfited the serious and sensitive young man that he would willingly
have quitted Memphis and Egypt at once and without any leave-taking.
However, it was not quite easy for him to get away, for all his thoughts
of Cleopatra were mixed up with others of Klea, as inseparably as when we
picture to ourselves the shades of night, the tender light of the calm
moon rises too before our fancy.
Having saved Irene, his present desire was to restore her parents to
liberty; to quit Egypt without having seen Klea once more seemed to him
absolutely impossible. He endeavored once more to revive in his mind the
image of her proud tall figure; he felt he must tell her that she was
beautiful, a woman worthy of a king--that he was her friend and hated
injustice, and was ready to sacrifice much for justice's sake and for her
own in the service of her parents and herself. To-day again, before the
banquet, he purposed to go to the temple, and to entreat the recluse to
help him to an interview with his adopted daughter.
If only Klea could know beforehand what he had been doing for Irene and
their parents she must surely let him see that her haughty eyes could
look kindly on him, must offer him her hand in farewell, and then he
should clasp it in both his, and press it to his breast. Then would he
tell her in the warmest and most inspired words he could command how
happy he was to have seen her and known her, and how painful it was to
bid her farewell; perhaps she might leave her hand in his, and give him
some kind word in return. One kind word--one phrase of thanks from Klea's
firm but beautiful mouth--seemed to him of higher value than a kiss or an
embrace from the great and wealthy Queen of Egypt.
When Publius was excited he could be altogether carried away by a sudden
sweep of passion, but his imagination was neither particularly lively nor
glowing. While his horses were being harnessed, and then while he was
driving to the Serapeum, the tall form of the water-bearer was constantly
before him; again and again he pictured himself holding her hand instead
of the reins, and while he repeated to himself all he meant to say at
parting, and in fancy heard her thank him with a trembling voice for his
valuable help, and say that she would never forget him, he felt his eyes
moisten--unused as they had been to tears for many years. He could not
help recalling the day when he had taken leave of his family to go to the
wars for the first time. Then it had not been his own eyes but his
mother's that had sparkled through tears, and it struck him that Klea, if
she could be compared to any other woman, was most like to that noble
matron to whom he owed his life, and that she might stand by the side of
the daughter of the great Scipio Africanus like a youthful Minerva by the
side of Juno, the stately mother of the gods.
His disappointment was great when he found the door of the temple closed,
and was forced to return to Memphis without having seen either Klea or
the recluse.
He could try again to-morrow to accomplish what had been impossible
to-day, but his wish to see the girl he loved, rose to a torturing
longing, and as he sat once more in his tent to finish his second
despatch to Rome the thought of Klea came again to disturb his serious
work. Twenty times he started up to collect his thoughts, and as often
flung away his reed as the figure of the water-bearer interposed between
him and the writing under his hand; at last, out of patience with
himself, he struck the table in front of him with some force, set his
fists in his sides hard enough to hurt himself, and held them there for a
minute, ordering himself firmly and angrily to do his duty before he
thought of anything else.
His iron will won the victory; by the time it was growing dusk the
despatch was written. He was in the very act of stamping the wax of the
seal with the signet of his family--engraved on the sardonyx of his
ring--when one of his servants announced a black slave who desired to
speak with him. Publius ordered that he should be admitted, and the negro
handed him the tile on which Eulaeus had treacherously written Klea's
invitation to meet her at midnight near the Apis-tombs. His enemy's
crafty-looking emissary seemed to the young man as a messenger from the
gods; in a transport of haste and, without the faintest shadow of a
suspicion he wrote, "I will be there," on the luckless piece of clay.
Publius was anxious to give the letter to the Senate, which he had just
finished, with his own hand, and privately, to the messenger who had
yesterday brought him the despatch from Rome; and as he would rather have
set aside an invitation to carry off a royal treasure that same night
than have neglected to meet Klea, he could not in any case be a guest at
the king's banquet, though Cleopatra would expect to see him there in
accordance with his promise. At this juncture he was annoyed to miss his
friend Lysias, for he wished to avoid offending the queen; and the
Corinthian, who at this moment was doubtless occupied in some perfectly
useless manner, was as clever in inventing plausible excuses as he
himself was dull in such matters. He hastily wrote a few lines to the
friend who shared his tent, requesting him to inform the king that he had
been prevented by urgent business from appearing among his guests that
evening; then he threw on his cloak, put on his travelling-hat which
shaded his face, and proceeded on foot and without any servant to the
harbor, with his letter in one hand and a staff in the other.
The soldiers and civic guards which filled the courts of the palace,
taking him for a messenger, did not challenge him as he walked swiftly
and firmly on, and so, without being detained or recognized, he reached
the inn by the harbor, where he was forced to wait an hour before the
messenger came home from the gay strangers' quarter where he had gone to
amuse himself. He had a great deal to talk of with this man, who was to
set out next morning for Alexandria and Rome; but Publius hardly gave
himself the necessary time, for he meant to start for the meeting place
in the Necropolis indicated by Klea, and well-known to himself, a full
hour before midnight, although he knew that he could reach his
destination in a very much shorter time.
The sun seems to move too slowly to those who long and wait, and a planet
would be more likely to fail in punctuality than a lover when called by
love.
In order to avoid observation he did not take a chariot but a strong mule
which the host of the inn lent him with pleasure; for the Roman was so
full of happy excitement in the hope of meeting Klea that he had slipped
a gold piece into the small, lightly-closed fingers of the innkeeper's
pretty child, which lay asleep on a bench by the side of the table,
besides paying double as much for the country wine he had drunk as if it
had been fine Falernian and without asking for his reckoning. The host
looked at him in astonishment when, finally, he sprang with a grand leap
on to the back of the tall beast, without laying his hand on it; and it
seemed even to Publius himself as though he had never since boyhood felt
so fresh, so extravagantly happy as at this moment.
The road to the tombs from the harbor was a different one to that which
led thither from the king's palace, and which Klea had taken, nor did it
lead past the tavern in which she had seen the murderers. By day it was
much used by pilgrims, and the Roman could not miss it even by night, for
the mule he was riding knew it well. That he had learned, for in answer
to his question as to what the innkeeper kept the beast for he had said
that it was wanted every day to carry pilgrims arriving from Upper Egypt
to the temple of Serapis and the tombs of the sacred bulls; he could
therefore very decidedly refuse the host's offer to send a driver with
the beast. All who saw him set out supposed that he was returning to the
city and the palace.
Publius rode through the streets of the city at an easy trot, and, as the
laughter of soldiers carousing in a tavern fell upon his ear, he could
have joined heartily in their merriment. But when the silent desert lay
around him, and the stars showed him that he would be much too early at
the appointed place, he brought the mule to a slower pace, and the nearer
he came to his destination the graver he grew, and the stronger his heart
beat. It must be something important and pressing indeed that Klea
desired to tell him in such a place and at such an hour. Or was she like
a thousand other women--was he now on the way to a lover's meeting with
her, who only a few days before had responded to his glance and accepted
his violets?
This thought flashed once through his mind with importunate distinctness,
but he dismissed it as absurd and unworthy of himself. A king would be
more likely to offer to share his throne with a beggar than this girl
would be to invite him to enjoy the sweet follies of love-making with her
in a secret spot.
Of course she wanted above all things to acquire some certainty as to her
sister's fate, perhaps too to speak to him of her parents; still, she
would hardly have made up her mind to invite him if she had not learned
to trust him, and this confidence filled him with pride, and at the same
time with an eager longing to see her, which seemed to storm his heart
with more violence with every minute that passed.
While the mule sought and found its way in the deep darkness with slow
and sure steps, he gazed up at the firmament, at the play of the clouds
which now covered the moon with their black masses, and now parted,
floating off in white sheeny billows while the silver crescent of the
moon showed between them like a swan against the dark mirror of a lake.
And all the time he thought incessantly of Klea--thinking in a dreamy way
that he saw her before him, but different and taller than before, her
form growing more and more before his eyes till at last it was so tall
that her head touched the sky, the clouds seemed to be her veil, and the
moon a brilliant diadem in her abundant dark hair. Powerfully stirred by
this vision he let the bridle fall on the mule's neck, and spread open
his arms to the beautiful phantom, but as he rode forwards it ever
retired, and when presently the west wind blew the sand in his face, and
he had to cover his eyes with his hand it vanished entirely, and did not
return before he found himself at the Apis-tombs.
He had hoped to find here a soldier or a watchman to whom he could
entrust the beast, but when the midnight chant of the priests of the
temple of Osiris-Apis had died away not a sound was to be heard far or
near; all that lay around him was as still and as motionless as though
all that had ever lived there were dead. Or had some demon robbed him of
his hearing? He could hear the rush of his own swift pulses in his
ears-not the faintest sound besides.
Such silence is there nowhere but in the city of the dead and at night,
nowhere but in the desert.
He tied the mule's bridle to a stela of granite covered with
inscriptions, and went forward to the appointed place. Midnight must be
past--that he saw by the position of the moon, and he was beginning to
ask himself whether he should remain standing where he was or go on to
meet the water-bearer when he heard first a light footstep, and then saw
a tall erect figure wrapped in a long mantle advancing straight towards
him along the avenue of sphinxes. Was it a man or a woman--was it she
whom he expected? and if it were she, was there ever a woman who had come
to meet a lover at an assignation with so measured, nay so solemn, a
step? Now he recognized her face--was it the pale moonlight that made it
look so bloodless and marble-white? There was something rigid in her
features, and yet they had never--not even when she blushingly accepted
his violets--looked to him so faultlessly beautiful, so regular and so
nobly cut, so dignified, nay impressive.
For fully a minute the two stood face to face, speechless and yet quite
near to each other. Then Publius broke the silence, uttering with the
warmest feeling and yet with anxiety in his deep, pure voice, only one
single word; and the word was her name "Klea."
The music of this single word stirred the girl's heart like a message and
blessing from heaven, like the sweetest harmony of the siren's song, like
the word of acquittal from a judge's lips when the verdict is life or
death, and her lips were already parted to say 'Publius' in a tone no
less deep and heartfelt-but, with all the force of her soul, she
restrained herself, and said softly and quickly:
"You are here at a late hour, and it is well that you have come."
"You sent for me," replied the Roman.
"It was another that did that, not I," replied Klea in a slow dull tone,
as if she were lifting a heavy weight, and could hardly draw her breath.
"Now--follow me, for this is not the place to explain everything in."
With these words Klea went towards the locked door of the Apis-tombs, and
tried, as she stood in front of it, to insert into the lock the key that
Krates had given her; but the lock was still so new, and her fingers
shook so much, that she could not immediately succeed. Publius meanwhile
was standing close by her side, and as he tried to help her his fingers
touched hers.
And when he--certainly not by mistake--laid his strong and yet trembling
hand on hers, she let it stay for a moment, for she felt as if a tide of
warm mist rose up in her bosom dimming her perceptions, and paralyzing
her will and blurring her sight.
"Klea," he repeated, and he tried to take her left hand in his own; but
she, like a person suddenly aroused to consciousness after a short dream,
immediately withdrew the hand on which his was resting, put the key into
the lock, opened the door, and exclaimed in a voice of almost stern
command, "Go in first."
Publius obeyed and entered the spacious antechamber of the venerable
cave, hewn out of the rock and now dimly lighted. A curved passage of
which he could not see the end lay before him, and on both sides, to the
right and left of him, opened out the chambers in which stood the
sarcophagi of the deceased sacred bulls. Over each of the enormous stone
coffins a lamp burnt day and night, and wherever a vault stood open their
glimmer fell across the deep gloom of the cave, throwing a bright beam of
light on the dusky path that led into the heart of the rock, like a
carpet woven of rays of light.
What place was this that Klea had chosen to speak with him in.
But though her voice sounded firm, she herself was not cool and
insensible as Orcus--which this place, which was filled with the fumes of
incense and weighed upon his senses, much resembled--for he had felt her
fingers tremble under his, and when he went up to her, to help her, her
heart beat no less violently and rapidly than his own. Ah! the man who
should succeed in touching that heart of hard, but pure and precious
crystal would indeed enjoy a glorious draught of the most perfect bliss.
"This is our destination," said Klea; and then she went on in short
broken sentences. "Remain where you are. Leave me this place near the
door. Now, answer me first one question. My sister Irene has vanished
from the temple. Did you cause her to be carried off?"
"I did," replied Publius eagerly. "She desired me to greet you from her,
and to tell you how much she likes her new friends. When I shall have
told you--"
"Not now" interrupted Klea excitedly. "Turn round--there where you see
the lamp-light." Publius did as he was desired, and a slight shudder
shook even his bold heart, for the girl's sayings and doings seemed to
him not solemn merely, but mysterious like those of a prophetess. A
violent crash sounded through the silent and sacred place, and loud
echoes were tossed from side to side, ringing ominously throughout the
grotto. Publius turned anxiously round, and his eye, seeking Klea, found
her no more; then, hurrying to the door of the cave, he heard her lock it
on the outside.
The water-bearer had escaped him, had flung the heavy door to, and
imprisoned him; and this idea was to the Roman so degrading and
unendurable that, lost to every feeling but rage, wounded pride, and the
wild desire to be free, he kicked the door with all his might, and called
out angrily to Klea:
"Open this door--I command you. Let me free this moment or, by all the
gods--"
He did not finish his threat, for in the middle of the right-hand panel
of the door a small wicket was opened through which the priests were wont
to puff incense into the tomb of the sacred bulls--and twice, thrice,
finally, when he still would not be pacified, a fourth time, Klea called
out to him:
"Listen to me--listen to me, Publius." Publius ceased storming, and she
went on:
"Do not threaten me, for you will certainly repent it when you have heard
what I have to tell you. Do not interrupt me; I may tell you at once this
door is opened every day before sunrise, so your imprisonment will not
last long; and you must submit to it, for I shut you in to save your
life--yes, your life which was in danger. Do you think my anxiety was
folly? No, Publius, it is only too well founded, and if you, as a man,
are strong and bold, so am I as a woman. I never was afraid of an
imaginary nothing. Judge yourself whether I was not right to be afraid
for you.
"King Euergetes and Eulaeus have bribed two hideous monsters to murder
you. When I went to seek out Irene I overheard all, and I have seen with
my own eyes the two horrible wolves who are lurking to fall upon you, and
heard with these ears their scheme for doing it. I never wrote the note
on the tile which was signed with my name; Eulaeus did it, and you took
his bait and came out into the desert by night. In a few minutes the
ruffians will have stolen up to this place to seek their victim, but they
will not find you, Publius, for I have saved you--I, Klea, whom you first
met with smiles--whose sister you have stolen away--the same Klea that
you a minute since were ready to threaten. Now, at once, I am going into
the desert, dressed like a traveller in a coat and hat, so that in the
doubtful light of the moon I may easily be taken for you--going to give
my weary heart as a prey to the assassins' knife."
"You are mad!" cried Publius, and he flung himself with his whole weight
on the door, and kicked it with all his strength. "What you purpose is
pure madness open the door, I command you! However strong the villains
may be that Euergetes has bribed, I am man enough to defend myself."
"You are unarmed, Publius, and they have cords and daggers."
"Then open the door, and stay here with me till day dawns. It is not
noble, it is wicked to cast away your life. Open the door at once, I
entreat you, I command you!"
At any other time the words would not have failed of their effect on
Klea's reasonable nature, but the fearful storm of feeling which had
broken over her during the last few hours had borne away in its whirl all
her composure and self-command. The one idea, the one resolution, the one
desire, which wholly possessed her was to close the life that had been so
full of self-sacrifice by the greatest sacrifice of all--that of life
itself, and not only in order to secure Irene's happiness and to save the
Roman, but because it pleased her--her father's daughter--to make a noble
end; because she, the maiden, would fain show Publius what a woman might
be capable of who loved him above all others; because, at this moment,
death did not seem a misfortune; and her mind, overwrought by hours of
terrific tension, could not free itself from the fixed idea that she
would and must sacrifice herself.
She no longer thought these things--she was possessed by them; they had
the mastery, and as a madman feels forced to repeat the same words again
and again to himself, so no prayer, no argument at this moment would have
prevailed to divert her from her purpose of giving up her young life for
Publius and Irene. She contemplated this resolve with affection and pride
as justifying her in looking up to herself as to some nobler creature.
She turned a deaf ear to the Roman's entreaty, and said in a tone of
which the softness surprised him:
"Be silent Publius, and hear me further. You too are noble, and certainly
you owe me some gratitude for having saved your life."
"I owe you much, and I will pay it," cried Publius, "as long as there is
breath in this body--but open the door, I beseech you, I implore you--"
"Hear me to the end, time presses; hear me out, Publius. My sister Irene
went away with you. I need say nothing about her beauty, but how bright,
how sweet her nature is you do not know, you cannot know, but you will
find out. She, you must be told, is as poor as I am, but the child of
freeborn and noble parents. Now swear to me, swear--no, do not interrupt
me--swear by the head of your father that you will never, abandon her,
that you will never behave to her otherwise than as if she were the
daughter of your dearest friend or of your own brother."
"I swear it and I will keep my oath--by the life of the man whose head is
more sacred to me than the names of all the gods. But now I beseech you,
I command you open this door, Klea--that I may not lose you--that I may
tell you that my whole heart is yours, and yours alone--that I love you,
love you unboundedly."
"I have your oath," cried the girl in great excitement, for she could now
see a shadow moving backwards and forwards at some distance in the
desert. "You have sworn by the head of your father. Never let Irene
repent having gone with you, and love her always as you fancy now, in
this moment, that you love me, your preserver. Remember both of you the
hapless Klea who would gladly have lived for you, but who now gladly dies
for you. Do not forget me, Publius, for I have never but this once opened
my heart to love, but I have loved you Publius, with pain and torment,
and with sweet delight--as no other woman ever yet revelled in the
ecstasy of love or was consumed in its torments." She almost shouted the
last words at the Roman as if she were chanting a hymn of triumph, beside
herself, forgetting everything and as if intoxicated.
Why was he now silent, why had he nothing to answer, since she had
confessed to him the deepest secret of her breast, and allowed him to
look into the inmost sanctuary of her heart? A rush of burning words from
his lips would have driven her off at once to the desert and to death;
his silence held her back--it puzzled her and dropped like cool rain on
the soaring flames of her pride, fell on the raging turmoil of her soul
like oil on troubled water. She could not part from him thus, and her
lips parted to call him once more by his name.
While she had been making confession of her love to the Roman as if it
were her last will and testament, Publius felt like a man dying of
thirst, who has been led to a flowing well only to be forbidden to
moisten his lips with the limpid fluid. His soul was filled with
passionate rage approaching to despair, and as with rolling eyes he
glanced round his prison an iron crow-bar leaning against the wall met
his gaze; it had been used by the workmen to lift the sarcophagus of the
last deceased Apis into its right place. He seized upon this tool, as a
drowning man flings himself on a floating plank: still he heard Klea's
last words, and did not lose one of them, though the sweat poured from
his brow as he inserted the metal lever like a wedge between the two
halves of the door, just above the threshold.
All was now silent outside; perhaps the distracted girl was already
hurrying towards the assassins--and the door was fearfully heavy and
would not open nor yield. But he must force it--he flung himself on the
earth and thrust his shoulder under the lever, pushing his whole body
against the iron bar, so that it seemed to him that every joint
threatened to give way and every sinew to crack; the door rose--once more
he put forth the whole strength of his manly vigor, and now the seam in
the wood cracked, the door flew open, and Klea, seized with terror, flew
off and away--into the desert--straight towards the murderers.
Publius leaped to his feet and flung himself out of his prison; as he saw
Klea escape he flew after her with, hasty leaps, and caught her in a few
steps, for her mantle hindered her in running, and when she would not
obey his desire that she should stand still he stood in front of her and
said, not tenderly but sternly and decidedly:
"You do not go a step farther, I forbid it."
"I am going where I must go," cried the girl in great agitation. "Let me
go, at once!"
"You will stay here--here with me," snarled Publius, and taking both her
hands by the wrists he clasped them with his iron fingers as with
handcuffs. "I am the man and you are the woman, and I will teach you who
is to give orders here and who is to obey."
Anger and rage prompted these quite unpremeditated words, and as
Klea--while he spoke them with quivering lips--had attempted with the
exertion of all her strength, which was by no means contemptible, to
wrench her hands from his grasp, he forced her--angry as he still was,
but nevertheless with due regard for her womanliness--forced her by a
gentle and yet irresistible pressure on her arms to bend before him, and
compelled her slowly to sink down on both knees.
As soon as she was in this position, Publius let her free; she covered
her eyes with her aching hands and sobbed aloud, partly from anger, and
because she felt herself bitterly humiliated.
"Now, stand up," said Publius in an altered tone as he heard her weeping.
"Is it then such a hard matter to submit to the will of a man who will
not and cannot let you go, and whom you love, besides?" How gentle and
kind the words sounded! Klea, when she heard them, raised her eyes to
Publius, and as she saw him looking down on her as a supplicant her anger
melted and turned to grateful emotion--she went closer to him on her
knees, laid her head against him and said:
"I have always been obliged to rely upon myself, and to guide another
person with loving counsel, but it must be sweeter far to be led by
affection and I will always, always obey you."
"I will thank you with heart and soul henceforth from this hour!" cried
Publius, lifting her up. "You were ready to sacrifice your life for me,
and now mine belongs to you. I am yours and you are mine--I your husband,
you my wife till our life's end!"
He laid his hands on her shoulders, and turned her face round to his; she
resisted no longer, for it was sweet to her to yield her will to that of
this strong man. And how happy was she, who from her childhood had taken
it upon herself to be always strong, and self-reliant, to feel herself
the weaker, and to be permitted to trust in a stronger arm than her own.
Somewhat thus a young rose-tree might feel, which for the first time
receives the support of the prop to which it is tied by the careful
gardener.
Her eyes rested blissfully and yet anxiously on his, and his lips had
just touched hers in a first kiss when they started apart in terror, for
Klea's name was clearly shouted through the still night-air, and in the
next instant a loud scream rang out close to them followed by dull cries
of pain.
"The murderers!" shrieked Klea, and trembling for herself and for him she
clung closely to her lover's breast. In one brief moment the self-reliant
heroine--proud in her death-defying valor--had become a weak, submissive,
dependent woman.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Created the world out of nothing for no other purpose
Dreamless sleep after a day brimful of enjoyment
Man must subjugate matter and not become subject to it
No one believes anything that can diminish his self-esteem
Praise out of all proportion to our merit
Save them the trouble of thinking for themselves
She no longer thought these things--she was possessed by them
Taken it upon herself to be always strong, and self-reliant
The most terrible of all the gods, are women
The sun seems to move too slowly to those who long and wait
We seek for truth; the Jews believe they possess it entirely
Who always think at second-hand
Why so vehement, sister? So much zeal is quite unnecessary
THE SISTERS
By Georg Ebers
Volume 5.
CHAPTER XXII.
On the roof of the tower of the pylon by the gate of the Serapeum stood
an astrologer who had mounted to this, the highest part of the temple, to
observe the stars; but it seemed that he was not destined on this
occasion to fulfil his task, for swiftly driving black clouds swept again
and again across that portion of the heavens to which his observations
were principally directed. At last he impatiently laid aside his
instruments, his waxed tablet and style, and desired the gate-keeper--the
father of poor little Philo--whose duty it was to attend at night on the
astrologers on the tower, to carry down all his paraphernalia, as the
heavens were not this evening favorable to his labors.
"Favorable!" exclaimed the gate-keeper, catching up the astrologer's
words, and shrugging his shoulders so high that his head disappeared
between them.
"It is a night of horror, and some great disaster threatens us for
certain. Fifteen years have I been in my place, and I never saw such a
night but once before, and the very next day the soldiers of Antiochus,
the Syrian king, came and plundered our treasury. Aye--and to-night is
worse even than that was; when the dog-star first rose a horrible shape
with a lion's mane flew across the desert, but it was not till midnight
that the fearful uproar began, and even you shuddered when it broke out
in the Apis-cave. Frightful things must be coming on us when the sacred
bulls rise from the dead and butt and storm at the door with their horns
to break it open. Many a time have I seen the souls of the dead
fluttering and wheeling and screaming above the old mausoleums, and
rock-tombs of ancient times. Sometimes they would soar up in the air in
the form of hawks with men's heads, or like ibises with a slow lagging
flight, and sometimes sweep over the desert like gray shapeless shadows,
or glide across the sand like snakes; or they would creep out of the
tombs, howling like hungry dogs. I have often heard them barking like
jackals or laughing like hyenas when they scent carrion, but to-night is
the first time I ever heard them shrieking like furious men, and then
groaning and wailing as if they were plunged in the lake of fire and
suffering horrible torments.
"Look there--out there--something is moving again! Oh! holy father,
exorcise them with some mighty bann. Do you not see how they are growing
larger? They are twice the size of ordinary mortals." The astronomer took
an amulet in his hand, muttered a few sentences to himself, seeking at
the same time to discover the figures which had so scared the
gate-keeper.
"They are indeed tall," he said when he perceived them. "And now they are
melting into one, and growing smaller and smaller--however, perhaps they
are only men come to rob the tombs, and who happen to be particularly
tall, for these figures are not of supernatural height."
"They are twice as tall as you, and you are not short," cried the
gate-keeper, pressing his lips devoutly to the amulet the astrologer held
in his hand, "and if they are robbers why has no watchman called out to
stop them? How is it their screams and groans have not waked the
sentinels that are posted there every night? There--that was another
fearful cry! Did you ever hear such tones from any human breast? Great
Serapis, I shall die of fright! Come down with me, holy father, that I
may look after my little sick boy, for those who have seen such sights do
not escape unstricken."
The peaceful silence of the Necropolis had indeed been disturbed, but the
spirits of the departed had no share in the horrors which had been
transacted this night in the desert, among the monuments and rocktombs.
They were living men that had disturbed the calm of the sacred place,
that had conspired with darkness in cold-blooded cruelty, greater than
that of evil spirits, to achieve the destruction of a fellow-man; but
they were living men too who, in the midst of the horrors of a most
fearful night, had experienced the blossoming in their own souls of the
divinest germ which heaven implants in the bosom of its mortal children.
Thus in a day of battle amid blood and slaughter may a child be born that
shall grow up blessed and blessing, the comfort and joy of his family.
The lion-maned monster whose appearance and rapid disappearance in the
desert had first alarmed the gate-keeper, had been met by several
travellers on its way to Memphis, and each and all, horrified by its
uncanny aspect, had taken to flight or tried to hide themselves--and yet
it was no more than a man with warm pulses, an honest purpose, and a true
and loving heart. But those who met him could not see into his soul, and
his external aspect certainly bore little resemblance to that of other
men.
His feet, unused to walking, moved but clumsily, and had a heavy body to
carry, and his enormous beard and the mass of gray hair on his
head--which he turned now this way and now that--gave him an aspect that
might well scare even a bold man who should meet him unexpectedly. Two
stall-keepers who, by day, were accustomed to offer their wares for sale
near the Serapeum to the pilgrims, met him close to the city.
"Did you see that panting object?" said one to the other as they looked
after him. "If he were not shut up fast in his cell I could declare it
was Serapion, the recluse."
"Nonsense," replied the other. "He is tied faster by his oath than by
chains and fetters. It must be one of the Syrian beggars that besiege the
temple of Astarte."
"Perhaps," answered his companion with indifference. "Let us get on now,
my wife has a roast goose for supper this evening."
Serapion, it is true, was fast tied to his cell, and yet the pedler had
judged rightly, for he it was who hurried along the high-road frightening
all he met. After his long captivity walking was very painful to him;
besides, he was barefoot, and every stone in the path hurt the soles of
his feet which had grown soft; nevertheless he contrived to make a by no
means contemptible pace when in the distance he caught sight of a woman's
figure which he could fancy to be Klea. Many a man, who in his own
particular sphere of life can cut a very respectable figure, becomes a
laughing-stock for children when he is taken out of his own narrow
circle, and thrown into the turmoil of the world with all his
peculiarities clinging to him. So it was with Serapion; in the suburbs
the street-boys ran after him mocking at him, but it was not till three
smart hussys, who were resting from their dance in front of a tavern,
laughed loudly as they caught sight of him, and an insolent soldier drove
the point of his lance through his flowing mane, as if by accident, that
he became fully conscious of his wild appearance, and it struck him
forcibly that he could never in this guise find admission to the king's
palace.
With prompt determination he turned into the first barber's stall that he
saw lighted up; at his appearance the barber hastily retreated behind his
counter, but he got his hair and beard cut, and then, for the first time
for many years, he saw his own face in the mirror that the barber held
before him. He nodded, with a melancholy smile, at the face--so much
aged--that looked at him from the bright surface, paid what was asked,
and did not heed the compassionate glance which the barber and his
assistant sent after him. They both thought they had been exercising
their skill on a lunatic, for he had made no answer to all their
questions, and had said nothing but once in a deep and fearfully loud
voice:
"Chatter to other people--I am in a hurry."
In truth his spirit was in no mood for idle gossip; no, it was full of
gnawing anxiety and tender fears, and his heart bled when he reflected
that he had broken his vows, and forsworn the oath he had made to his
dying mother.
When he reached the palace-gate he begged one of the civic guard to
conduct him to his brother, and as he backed his request with a gift of
money he was led at once to the man whom he sought. Glaucus was
excessively startled to recognize Serapion, but he was so much engaged
that he could only give up a few minutes to his brother, whose
proceedings he considered as both inexplicable and criminal.
Irene, as the anchorite now learned, had been carried off from the
temple, not by Euergetes but by the Roman, and Klea had quitted the
palace only a few minutes since in a chariot and would return about
midnight and on foot from the second tavern to the temple. And the poor
child was so utterly alone, and her way lay through the desert where she
might be attacked by dissolute soldiery or tomb-robbers or jackals and
hyenas. Her walk was to begin from the second tavern, and that was the
very spot where low rioters were wont to assemble--and his darling was so
young, so fair, and so defenceless!
He was once more a prey to the same unendurable dread that had come over
him, in his cell, after Klea had left the temple and darkness had closed
in. At that moment he had felt all that a father could feel who from his
prison-window sees his beloved and defenceless child snatched away by
some beast of prey. All the perils that could threaten her in the palace
or in the city, swarming with drunken soldiers, had risen before his mind
with fearful vividness, and his powerful imagination had painted in
glaring colors all the dangers to which his favorite--the daughter of a
noble and respected man--might be exposed.
He rushed up and down his cell like a wounded tiger, he flung himself
against the walls, and then, with his body hanging far out of the window,
had looked out to see if the girl--who could not possibly have returned
yet--were not come back again. The darker it grew, the more his anguish
rose, and the more hideous were the pictures that stood before his fancy;
and when, presently, a pilgrim in the Pastophorium who had fallen into
convulsions screamed out loud, he was no longer master of himself--he
kicked open the door which, locked on the outside and rotten from age,
had been closed for years, hastily concealed about him some silver coins
he kept in his chest, and let himself down to the ground.
There he stood, between his cell and the outer wall of the temple, and
now it was that he remembered his vows, and the oath he had sworn, and
his former flight from his retreat. Then he had fled because the
pleasures and joys of life had tempted him forth--then he had sinned
indeed; but now the love, the anxious care that urged him to quit his
prison were the same as had brought him back to it. It was to keep faith
that he now broke faith, and mighty Serapis could read his heart, and his
mother was dead, and while she lived she had always been ready and
willing to forgive.
He fancied so vividly that he could see her kind old face looking at him
that he nodded at her as if indeed she stood before him.
Then, he rolled an empty barrel to the foot of the wall, and with some
difficulty mounted on it. The sweat poured down him as he climbed up the
wall built of loose unbaked bricks to the parapet, which was much more
than a man's height; then, sliding and tumbling, he found himself in the
ditch which ran round it on the outside, scrambled up its outer slope,
and set out at last on his walk to Memphis.
What he had afterwards learned in the palace concerning Klea had but
little relieved his anxiety on her account; she must have reached the
border of the desert so much sooner than he, and quick walking was so
difficult to him, and hurt the soles of his feet so cruelly! Perhaps he
might be able to procure a staff, but there was just as much bustle
outside the gate of the citadel as by day. He looked round him, feeling
the while in his wallet, which was well filled with silver, and his eye
fell on a row of asses whose drivers were crowding round the soldiers and
servants that streamed out of the great gate.
He sought out the strongest of the beasts with an experienced eye, flung
a piece of silver to the owner, mounted the ass, which panted under its
load, and promised the driver two drachmm in addition if he would take
him as quickly as possible to the second tavern on the road to the
Serapeum. Thus--he belaboring the sides of the unhappy donkey with his
sturdy bare legs, while the driver, running after him snorting and
shouting, from time to time poked him up from behind with a
stick--Serapion, now going at a short trot, and now at a brisk gallop,
reached his destination only half an hour later than Klea.
In the tavern all was dark and empty, but the recluse desired no
refreshment. Only his wish that he had a staff revived in his mind, and
he soon contrived to possess himself of one, by pulling a stake out of
the fence that surrounded the innkeeper's little garden. This was a
somewhat heavy walking-stick, but it eased the recluse's steps, for
though his hot and aching feet carried him but painfully the strength of
his arms was considerable.
The quick ride had diverted his mind, had even amused him, for he was
easily pleased, and had recalled to him his youthful travels; but now, as
he walked on alone in the desert, his thoughts reverted to Klea, and to
her only.
He looked round for her keenly and eagerly as soon as the moon came out
from behind the clouds, called her name from time to time, and thus got
as far as the avenue of sphinxes which connected the Greek and Egyptian
temples; a thumping noise fell upon his ear from the cave of the
Apis-tombs. Perhaps they were at work in there, preparing for the
approaching festival. But why were the soldiers, which were always on
guard here, absent from their posts to-night? Could it be that they had
observed Klea, and carried her off?
On the farther side of the rows of sphinxes too, which he had now
reached, there was not a man to be seen--not a watchman even though the
white limestone of the tombstones and the yellow desert-sand shone as
clear in the moonlight as if they had some internal light of their own.
At every instant he grew more and more uneasy, he climbed to the top of a
sand-hill to obtain a wider view, and loudly called Klea's name.
There--was he deceived? No--there was a figure visible near one of the
ancient tomb-shrines--a form that seemed wrapped in a long robe, and when
once more he raised his voice in a loud call it came nearer to him and to
the row of sphinxes. In great haste and as fast as he could he got down
again to the roadway, hurried across the smooth pavement, on both sides
of which the long perspective of man-headed lions kept guard, and
painfully clambered up a sand-heap on the opposite side. This was in
truth a painful effort, for the sand crumbled away again and again under
his feet, slipping down hill and carrying him with it, thus compelling
him to find a new hold with hand and foot. At last he was standing on the
outer border of the sphinx-avenue and opposite the very shrine where he
fancied he had seen her whom he sought; but during his clamber it had
become perfectly dark again, for a heavy cloud had once more veiled the
moon. He put both hands to his mouth, and shouted as loud as he could,
"Klea!"--and then again, "Klea!"
Then, close at his feet he heard a rustle in the sand, and saw a figure
moving before him as though it had risen out of the ground. This could
not be Klea, it was a man--still, perhaps, he might have seen his
darling--but before he had time to address him he felt the shock of a
heavy blow that fell with tremendous force on his back between his
shoulders. The assassin's sand-bag had missed the exact spot on the nape
of the neck, and Serapion's strongly-knit backbone would have been able
to resist even a stronger blow.
The conviction that he was attacked by robbers flashed on his
consciousness as immediately as the sense of pain, and with it the
certainty that he was a lost man if he did not defend himself stoutly.
Behind him he heard another rustle in the sand. As quickly as he could he
turned round with an exclamation of "Accursed brood of vipers!" and with
his heavy staff he fell upon the figure before him like a smith beating
cold iron, for his eye, now more accustomed to the darkness, plainly saw
it to be a man. Serapion must have hit straight, for his foe fell at his
feet with a hideous roar, rolled over and over in the sand, groaning and
panting, and then with one shrill shriek lay silent and motionless.
The recluse, in spite of the dim light, could see all the movements of
the robber he had punished so severely, and he was bending over the
fallen man anxiously and compassionately when he shuddered to feel two
clammy hands touching his feet, and immediately after two sharp pricks in
his right heel, which were so acutely painful that he screamed aloud, and
was obliged to lift up the wounded foot. At the same time, however, he
did not overlook the need to defend himself. Roaring like a wounded bull,
cursing and raging, he laid about him on all sides with his staff, but
hit nothing but the ground. Then as his blows followed each other more
slowly, and at last his wearied arms could no longer wield the heavy
stake, and he found himself compelled to sink on his knees, a hoarse
voice addressed him thus:
"You have taken my comrade's life, Roman, and a two-legged serpent has
stung you for it. In a quarter of an hour it will be all over with you,
as it is with that fellow there. Why does a fine gentleman like you go to
keep an appointment in the desert without boots or sandals, and so make
our work so easy? King Euergetes and your friend Eulaeus send you their
greetings. You owe it to them that I leave you even your ready money; I
wish I could only carry away that dead lump there!"
During this rough speech Serapion was lying on the ground in great agony;
he could only clench his fists, and groan out heavy curses with his lips
which were now getting parched. His sight was as yet undimmed, and he
could distinctly see by the light of the moon, which now shone forth from
a broad cloudless opening in the sky, that the murderer attempted to
carry away his fallen comrade, and then, after raising his head to listen
for a moment sprang off with flying steps away into the desert. But the
recluse now lost consciousness, and when some minutes later he once more
opened his eyes his head was resting softly in the lap of a young girl,
and it was the voice of his beloved Klea that asked him tenderly.
"You poor dear father! How came you here in the desert, and into the
hands of these murderers? Do you know me--your Klea? And he who is
looking for your wounds--which are not visible at all--he is the Roman
Publius Scipio. Now first tell us where the dagger hit you that I may
bind it up quickly--I am half a physician, and understand these things as
you know."
The recluse tried to turn his head towards Klea's, but the effort was in
vain, and he said in a low voice: "Prop me up against the slanting wall
of the tomb shrine yonder; and you, child, sit down opposite to me, for I
would fain look at you while I die. Gently, gently, my friend Publius,
for I feel as if all my limbs were made of Phoenician glass, and might
break at the least touch. Thank you, my young friend--you have strong
arms, and you may lift me a little higher yet. So--now I can bear it;
nay, I am well content, I am to be envied--for the moon shows me your
dear face, my child, and I see tears on your cheeks, tears for me, a
surly old man. Aye, it is good, it is very good to die thus."
"Oh, father, father!" cried Klea. "You must not speak so. You must live,
you must not die; for see, Publius here asks me to be his wife, and the
Immortals only can know how glad I am to go with him, and Irene is to
stay with us, and be my sister and his. That must make you happy,
father.--But tell us, pray tell us where the wound hurts that the
murderer gave you?"
"Children, children," murmured the anchorite, and a happy smile parted
his lips. "The gracious gods are merciful in permitting me to see
that--aye, merciful to me, and to effect that end I would have died
twenty deaths."
Klea pressed his now cold hand to her lips as he spoke and again asked,
though hardly able to control her voice for tears:
"But the wound, father--where is the wound?" "Let be, let be," replied
Serapion. "It is acrid poison, not a dagger or dart that has undone my
strength. And I can depart in peace, for I am no longer needed for
anything. You, Publius, must now take my place with this child, and will
do it better than I. Klea, the wife of Publius Scipio! I indeed have
dreamt that such a thing might come to pass, and I always knew, and have
said to myself a thousand times that I now say to you my son: This girl
here, this Klea is of a good sort, and worthy only of the noblest. I give
her to you, my son Publius, and now join your hands before me here--for I
have always been like a father to her."
"That you have indeed," sobbed Klea. "And it was no doubt for my sake, and
to protect me, that you quitted your retreat, and have met your death."
"It was fate, it was fate," stammered the old man.
"The assassins were in ambush for me," cried Publius, seizing Serapion's
hand, "the murderers who fell on you instead of me. Once more, where is
your wound?"
"My destiny fulfils itself," replied the recluse. "No locked-up cell, no
physician, no healing herb can avail against the degrees of Fate. I am
dying of a serpent's sting as it was foretold at my birth; and if I had
not gone out to seek Klea a serpent would have slipped into my cage, and
have ended my life there. Give me your hands, my children, for a deadly
chill is creeping over me, and its cold hand already touches my heart."
For a few minutes his voice failed him, and then he said softly:
"One thing I would fain ask of you. My little possessions, which were
intended for you and Irene, you will now use to bury me. I do not wish to
be burnt, as they did with my father--no, I should wish to be finely
embalmed, and my mummy to be placed with my mother's. If indeed we may
meet again after death--and I believe we shall--I would rather see her
once more than any one, for she loved me so much--and I feel now as if I
were a child again, and could throw my arms round her neck. In another
life, perhaps, I may not be the child of misfortune that I have been in
this--in another life--now it grips my heart--in another----Children
whatever joys have smiled on me in this, children, it was to you I have
owed it--Klea, to you--and there is my little Irene too----"
These were the last words of Serapion the recluse; he fell back with a
deep sigh and was dead. Klea and Publius tenderly closed his faithful
eyes.
CHAPTER XXIII.
The unwonted tumult that had broken the stillness of the night had not
been unobserved in the Greek Serapeum any more than in the Egyptian
temple adjoining the Apis-tombs; but perfect silence once more reigned in
the Necropolis, when at last the great gate of the sanctuary of
Osiris-Apis was thrown open, and a little troop of priests arranged in a
procession came out from it with a vanguard of temple servants, who had
been armed with sacrificial knives and axes.
Publius and Klea, who were keeping faithful watch by the body of their
dead friend, saw them approaching, and the Roman said:
"It would have been even less right in such a night as this to let you
proceed to one of the temples with out my escort than to have let our
poor friend remain unwatched."
"Once more I assure you," said Klea eagerly "that we should have thrown
away every chance of fulfilling Serapion's last wish as he intended, if
during our absence a jackal or a hyena had mutilated his body, and I am
happy to be able at least to prove to my friend, now he is dead, how
grateful I am for all the kindness he showed us while he lived. We ought
to be grateful even to the departed, for how still and blissful has this
hour been while guarding his body. Storm and strife brought us
together--"
"And here," interrupted Publius, "we have concluded a happy and permanent
treaty of peace for the rest of our lives."
"I accept it willingly," replied Klea, looking down, "for I am the
vanquished party."
"But you have already confessed," said Publius, "that you were never so
unhappy as when you thought you had asserted your strength against mine,
and I can tell you that you never seemed to me so great and yet so
lovable as when in the midst of your triumph, you gave up the battle for
lost. Such an hour as that, a man experiences but once in his lifetime. I
have a good memory, but if ever I should forget it, and be angry and
passionate--as is sometimes my way--remind me of this spot, or of this
our dead friend, and my hard mood will melt, and I shall remember that
you once were ready to give your life for mine. I will make it easy for
you, for in honor of this man, who sacrificed his life for yours and who
was actually murdered in my stead, I promise to add his name of Serapion
to my own, and I will confirm this vow in Rome. He has behaved to us as a
father, and it behoves me to reverence his memory as though I had been
his son. An obligation was always unendurable to me, and how I shall ever
make full restitution to you for what you have done for me this night I
do not yet know--and yet I should be ready and willing every day and
every hour to accept from you some new gift of love. 'A debtor,' says the
proverb, 'is half a prisoner,' and so I must entreat you to deal
mercifully with your conquerer."
He took her hand, stroked back the hair from her forehead, and touched it
lightly with his lips. Then he went on:
"Come with me now that we may commit the dead into the hands of these
priests."
Klea once more bent over the remains of the anchorite, she hung the
amulet he had given her for her journey round his neck, and then silently
obeyed her lover. When they came up with the little procession Publius
informed the chief priest how he had found Serapion, and requested him to
fetch away the corpse, and to cause it to be prepared for interment in
the costliest manner in the embalming house attached to their temple.
Some of the temple-servants took their places to keep watch over the
body, and after many questions addressed to Publius, and after examining
too the body of the assassin who had been slain, the priests returned to
the temple.
As soon as the two lovers were left alone again Klea seized the Roman's
hand, and said passionately: "You have spoken many tender words to me,
and I thank you for them; but I am wont always to be honest, and less
than any one could I deceive you. Whatever your love bestows upon me will
always be a free gift, since you owe me nothing at all and I owe you
infinitely much; for I know now that you have snatched my sister from the
clutches of the mightiest in the land while I, when I heard that Irene
had gone away with you, and that murder threatened your life, believed
implicitly that on the contrary you had lured the child away to become
your sweetheart, and then--then I hated you, and then--I must confess
it\--in my horrible distraction I wished you dead!"
"And you think that wish can offend me or hurt me?" said Publius. "No, my
child; it only proves to me that you love me as I could wish to be loved.
Such rage under such circumstances is but the dark shadow cast by love,
and is as inseparable from love as from any tangible body. Where it is
absent there is no such thing as real love present--only an airy vision,
a phantom, a mockery. Such an one as Klea does not love nor hate by
halves; but there are mysterious workings in your soul as in that of
every other woman. How did the wish that you could see me dead turn into
the fearful resolve to let yourself be killed in my stead?"
"I saw the murderers," answered Klea, "and I was overwhelmed with horror
of them and of their schemes, and of all that had to do with them; I
would not destroy Irene's happiness, and I loved you even more deeply
than I hated you; and then--but let us not speak of it."
"Nay-tell me all."
"Then there was a moment--"
"Well, Klea?"
"Then--in these last hours, while we have been sitting hand in hand by
the body of poor Serapion, and hardly speaking, I have felt it all over
again--then the midnight hymn of the priests fell upon my heart, and as I
lifted up my soul in prayer at their pious chant I felt as if all my
inmost heart had been frozen and hardened, and was reviving again to new
life and tenderness and warmth. I could not help thinking of all that is
good and right, and I made up my mind to sacrifice myself for you and for
Irene's happiness far more quickly and easily than I could give it up
afterwards. My father was one of the followers of Zeno--"
"And you," interrupted Publius, "thought you were acting in accordance
with the doctrine of the Stoa. I also am familiar with it, but I do not
know the man who is so virtuous and wise that he can live and act, as
that teaching prescribes, in the heat of the struggle of life, or who is
the living representative in flesh and blood of the whole code of ethics,
not sinning against one of its laws and embodying it in himself. Did you
ever hear of the peace of mind, the lofty indifference and equanimity of
the Stoic sages? You look as if the question offended you, but you did
not by any means know how to attain that magnanimity, for I have seen you
fail in it; indeed it is contrary to the very nature of woman, and--the
gods be thanked--you are not a Stoic in woman's dress, but a woman--a
true woman, as you should be. You have learned nothing from Zeno and
Chrysippus but what any peasant girl might learn from an honest father,
to be true I mean and to love virtue. Be content with that; I am more
than satisfied."
"Oh, Publius," exclaimed the girl, grasping her friend's hand. "I
understand you, and I know that you are right. A woman must be miserable
so long as she fancies herself strong, and imagines and feels that she
needs no other support than her own firm will and determination, no other
counsel than some wise doctrines which she accepts and adheres to. Before
I could call you mine, and went on my own way, proud of my own virtue, I
was--I cannot bear to think of it--but half a soul, and took it for a
whole; but now--if now fate were to snatch you from me, I should still
know where to seek the support on which I might lean in need and despair.
Not in the Stoa, not in herself can a woman find such a stay, but in
pious dependence on the help of the gods."
"I am a man," interrupted Publius, "and yet I sacrifice to them and yield
ready obedience to their decrees."
"But," cried Klea, "I saw yesterday in the temple of Serapis the meanest
things done by his ministers, and it pained me and disgusted me, and I
lost my hold on the divinity; but the extremest anguish and deepest love
have led me to find it again. I can no longer conceive of the power that
upholds the universe as without love nor of the love that makes men happy
as other than divine. Any one who has once prayed for a being they love
as I prayed for you in the desert can never again forget how to pray.
Such prayers indeed are not in vain. Even if no god can hear them there
is a strengthening virtue in such prayer itself.
"Now I will go contentedly back to our temple till you fetch me, for I
know that the discreetest, wisest, and kindest Beings will watch over our
love."
"You will not accompany me to Apollodorus and Irene?" asked Publius in
surprise.
"No," answered Klea firmly. "Rather take me back to the Serapeum. I have
not yet been released from the duties I undertook there, and it will be
more worthy of us both that Asclepiodorus should give you the daughter of
Philotas as your wife than that you should be married to a runaway
serving-maid of Serapis."
Publius considered for a moment, and then he said eagerly:
"Still I would rather you should come with me. You must be dreadfully
tired, but I could take you on my mule to Apollodorus. I care little for
what men say of me when I am sure I am doing right, and I shall know how
to protect you against Euergetes whether you wish to be readmitted to the
temple or accompany me to the sculptor. But do come--it will be hard on
me to part from you again. The victor does not lay aside the crown when
he has just won it in hard fight."
"Still I entreat you to take me back to the Serapeum," said Klea, laying
her hand in that of Publius.
"Is the way to Memphis too long, are you utterly tired out?"
"I am much wearied by agitation and terror, by anxiety and happiness,
still I could very well bear the ride; but I beg of you to take me back
to the temple."
"What--although you feel strong enough to remain with me, and in spite of
my desire to conduct you at once to Apollodorus and Irene?" asked Publius
astonished, and he withdrew his hand. "The mule is waiting out there.
Lean on my arm. Come and do as I request you."
"No, Publius, no. You are my lord and master, and I will always obey you
unresistingly. In one thing only let me have my own way, now and in the
future. As to what becomes a woman I know better than you, it is a thing
that none but a woman can decide."
Publius made no reply to these words, but he kissed her, and threw his
arm round her; and so, clasped in each other's embrace, they reached the
gate of the Serapeum, there to part for a few hours.
Klea was let into the temple, and as soon as she had learned that little
Philo was much better, she threw herself on her humble bed.
How lonely her room seemed, how intolerably empty without Irene. In
obedience to a hasty impulse she quitted her own bed, lay herself down on
her sister's, as if that brought her nearer to the absent girl, and
closed her eyes; but she was too much excited and too much exhausted to
sleep soundly. Swiftly-changing visions broke in again and again on her
sincerely devotional thoughts and her restless half-sleep, painting to
her fancy now wondrously bright images, and now most horrible ones--now
pictures of exquisite happiness, and again others of dismal melancholy.
And all the time she imagined she heard distant music and was being
rocked up and down by unseen hands.
Still the image of the Roman overpowered all the rest.
At last a refreshing sleep sealed her eyes more closely, and in her dream
she saw her lover's house in Rolne, his stately father, his noble
mother--who seemed to her to bear a likeness to her own mother--and the
figures of a number of tall and dignified senators. She felt herself much
embarrassed among all these strangers, who looked enquiringly at her, and
then kindly held out their hands to her. Even the dignified matron came
to meet her with effusion, and clasped her to her breast; but just as
Publius had opened his to her and she flew to his heart, and she fancied
she could feel his lips pressed to hers, the woman, who called her every
morning, knocked at her door and awoke her.
This time she had been happy in her dream and would willingly have slept
again; but she forced herself to rise from her bed, and before the sun
was quite risen she was standing by the Well of the Sun and, not to
neglect her duty, she filled both the jars for the altar of the god.
Tired and half-overcome by sleep, she set the golden vessels in their
place, and sat down to rest at the foot of a pillar, while a priest
poured out the water she had brought, as a drink-offering on the ground.
It was now broad daylight as she looked out into the forecourt through
the many-pillared hall of the temple; the early sunlight played round the
columns, and its slanting rays, at this hour, fell through the tall
doorway far into the great hall which usually lay in twilight gloom.
The sacred spot looked very solemn in her eyes, sublime, and as it were
reconsecrated, and obeying an irresistible impulse she leaned against a
column, and lifting up her arms, and raising her eyes, she uttered her
thankfulness to the god for his loving kindness, and found but one thing
to pray for, namely that he would preserve Publius and Irene, and all
mankind, from sorrow and anxiety and deception.
She felt as if her heart had till now been benighted and dark, and had
just disclosed some latent light--as if it had been withered and dry, and
was now blossoming in fresh verdure and brightly-colored flowers.
To act virtuously is granted even to those who, relying on themselves.
earnestly strive to lead moral, just and honest lives; but the happy
union of virtue and pure inner happiness is solemnized only in the heart
which is able to seek and find a God--be it Serapis or Jehovah.
At the door of the forecourt Klea was met by Asclepiodorus, who desired
her to follow him. The high-priest had learned that she had secretly
quitted the temple: when she was alone with him in a quiet room he asked
her gravely and severely, why she had broken the laws and left the
sanctuary without his permission. Klea told him, that terror for her
sister had driven her to Memphis, and that she there had heard that
Publics Cornelius Scipio, the Roman who had taken up her father's cause,
had saved Irene from king Euergetes, and placed her in safety, and that
then she had set out on her way home in the middle of the night.
The high-priest seemed pleased at her news, and when she proceeded to
inform him that Serapion had forsaken his cell out of anxiety for her,
and had met his death in the desert, he said:
"I knew all that, my child. May the gods forgive the recluse, and may
Serapis show him mercy in the other world in spite of his broken oath!
His destiny had to be fulfilled. You, child, were born under happier
stars than he, and it is within my power to let you go unpunished. This I
do willingly; and Klea, if my daughter Andromeda grows up, I can only
wish that she may resemble you; this is the highest praise that a father
can bestow on another man's daughter. As head of this temple I command
you to fill your jars to-day, as usual, till one who is worthy of you
comes to me, and asks you for his wife. I suspect he will not be long to
wait for."
"How do you know, father,--" asked Klea, coloring.
"I can read it in your eyes," said Asclepiodorus, and he gazed kindly
after her as, at a sign from him, she quitted the room.
As soon as he was alone he sent for his secretary and said:
"King Philometor has commanded that his brother Euergetes' birthday shall
be kept to-day in Memphis. Let all the standards be hoisted, and the
garlands of flowers which will presently arrive from Arsinoe be fastened
up on the pylons; have the animals brought in for sacrifice, and arrange
a procession for the afternoon. All the dwellers in the temple must be
carefully attired. But there is another thing; Komanus has been here, and
has promised us great things in Euergetes' name, and declares that he
intends to punish his brother Philometor for having abducted a
girl--Irene--attached to our temple. At the same time he requests me to
send Klea the water-bearer, the sister of the girl who was carried off,
to Memphis to be examined--but this may be deferred. For to-day we will
close the temple gates, solemnize the festival among ourselves, and allow
no one to enter our precincts for sacrifice and prayer till the fate of
the sisters is made certain. If the kings themselves make their
appearance, and want to bring their troops in, we will receive them
respectfully as becomes us, but we will not give up Klea, but consign her
to the holy of holies, which even Euergetes dare not enter without me;
for in giving up the girl we sacrifice our dignity, and with that
ourselves."
The secretary bowed, and then announced that two of the prophets of
Osiris-Apis desired to speak with Asclepiodorus.
Klea had met these men in the antechamber as she quitted the high-priest,
and had seen in the hand of one of them the key with which she had opened
the door of the rock-tomb. She had started, and her conscience urged her
to go at once to the priest-smith, and tell him how ill she had fulfilled
her errand.
When she entered his room Krates was sitting at his work with his feet
wrapped up, and he was rejoiced to see her, for his anxiety for her and
for Irene had disturbed his night's rest, and towards morning his alarm
had been much increased by a frightful dream.
Klea, encouraged by the friendly welcome of the old man, who was usually
so surly, confessed that she had neglected to deliver the key to the
smith in the city, that she had used it to open the Apis-tombs, and had
then forgotten to take it out of the new lock. At this confession the old
man broke out violently, he flung his file, and the iron bolt at which he
was working, on to his work-table, exclaiming:
"And this is the way you executed your commission. It is the first time I
ever trusted a woman, and this is my reward! All this will bring evil on
you and on me, and when it is found out that the sanctuary of Apis has
been desecrated through my fault and yours, they will inflict all sorts
of penance on me, and with very good reason--as for you, they will punish
you with imprisonment and starvation."
"And yet, father," Klea calmly replied, "I feel perfectly guiltless, and
perhaps in the same fearful situation you might not have acted
differently."
"You think so--you dare to believe such a thing?" stormed the old man.
"And if the key and perhaps even the lock have been stolen, and if I have
done all that beautiful and elaborate work in vain?"
"What thief would venture into the sacred tombs?" asked Klea doubtfully.
"What! are they so unapproachable?" interrupted Krates. "Why, a miserable
creature like you even dared to open them. But only wait--only wait; if
only my feet were not so painful--"
"Listen to me," said the girl, going closer up to the indignant smith.
"You are discreet, as you proved to me only yesterday; and if I were to
tell you all I went through and endured last night you would certainly
forgive me, that I know."
"If you are not altogether mistaken!" shouted the smith. "Those must be
strange things indeed which could induce me to let such neglect of duty
and such a misdemeanor pass unpunished."
And strange things they were indeed which the old man now had to hear,
for when Klea had ended her narrative of all that had occurred during the
past night, not her eyes only but those of the old smith too were wet
with tears.
"These accursed legs!" he muttered, as his eyes met the enquiring glance
of the young girl, and he wiped the salt dew from his cheeks with the
sleeve of his coat. "Aye-a swelled foot like mine is painful, child, and
a cripple such as I am is not always strong-minded. Old women grow like
men, and old men grow like women. Ah! old age--it is bad to have such
feet as mine, but what is worse is that memory fades as years advance. I
believe now that I left the key myself in the door of the Apis-tombs last
evening, and I will send at once to Asclepiodorus, so that he may beg the
Egyptians up there to forgive me--they are indebted to me for many small
jobs."
CHAPTER XXIV.
All the black masses of clouds which during the night had darkened the
blue sky and hidden the light of the moon had now completely disappeared.
The north-east wind which rose towards morning had floated them away, and
Zeus, devourer of the clouds, had swallowed them up to the very last. It
was a glorious morning, and as the sun rose in the heavens, and pierced
and burnt up with augmenting haste the pale mist that hovered over the
Nile, and the vapor that hung--a delicate transparent veil of bluish-grey
bombyx-gauze--over the eastern slopes, the cool shades of night vanished
too from the dusky nooks of the narrow town which lay, mile-wide, along
the western bank of the river. And the intensely brilliant sunlight which
now bathed the streets and houses, the palaces and temples, the gardens
and avenues, and the innumerable vessels in the harbor of Memphis, was
associated with a glow of warmth which was welcome even there in the
early morning of a winter's day.
Boats' captains and sailors--were hurrying down to the shore of the Nile
to avail themselves of the northeast breeze to travel southwards against
the current, and sails were being hoisted and anchors heaved, to an
accompaniment of loud singing. The quay was so crowded with ships that it
was difficult to understand how those that were ready could ever
disentangle themselves, and find their way through those remaining
behind; but each somehow found an outlet by which to reach the navigable
stream, and ere long the river was swarming with boats, all sailing
southwards, and giving it the appearance of an endless perspective of
camp tents set afloat.
Long strings of camels with high packs, of more lightly laden asses, and
of dark-colored slaves, were passing down the road to the harbor; these
last were singing, as yet unhurt by the burden of the day, and the
overseers' whips were still in their girdles.
Ox-carts were being laden or coming down to the landing-place with goods,
and the ship's captains were already beginning to collect round the
different great merchants--of whom the greater number were Greeks, and
only a few dressed in Egyptian costume--in order to offer their freight
for sale, or to hire out their vessels for some new expedition.
The greatest bustle and noise were at a part of the quay where, under
large tents, the custom-house officials were busily engaged, for most
vessels first cast anchor at Memphis to pay duty or Nile-toll on the
"king's table." The market close to the harbor also was a gay scene;
there dates and grain, the skins of beasts, and dried fish were piled in
great heaps, and bleating and bellowing herds of cattle were driven
together to be sold to the highest bidder.
Soldiers on foot and horseback in gaudy dresses and shining armor,
mingled with the busy crowd, like peacocks and gaudy cocks among the
fussy swarm of hens in a farm yard; lordly courtiers, in holiday dresses
of showy red, blue and yellow stuffs, were borne by slaves in litters or
standing on handsome gilt chariots; garlanded priests walked about in
long white robes, and smartly dressed girls were hurrying down to the
taverns near the harbor to play the flute or to dance.
The children that were playing about among this busy mob looked
covetously at the baskets piled high with cakes, which the bakers' boys
were carrying so cleverly on their heads. The dogs innumerable, put up
their noses as the dealers in such dainties passed near them, and many of
them set up longing howls when a citizen's wife came by with her slaves,
carrying in their baskets freshly killed fowls, and juicy meats to roast
for the festival, among heaps of vegetables and fruits.
Gardeners' boys and young girls were bearing garlands of flowers,
festoons and fragrant nosegays, some piled on large trays which they
carried two and two, some on smaller boards or hung on cross poles for
one to carry; at that part of the quay where the king's barge lay at
anchor numbers of workmen were busily employed in twining festoons of
greenery and flowers round the flag-staffs, and in hanging them with
lanterns.
Long files of the ministers of the god-representing the five phyla or
orders of the priesthood of the whole country--were marching, in holiday
attire, along the harbor-road in the direction of the palace, and the
jostling crowd respectfully made way for them to pass. The gleams of
festal splendor seemed interwoven with the laborious bustle on the quay
like scraps of gold thread in a dull work-a-day garment.
Euergetes, brother of the king, was keeping his birthday in Memphis
to-day, and all the city was to take part in the festivities.
At the first hour after sunrise victims had been sacrificed in the temple
of Ptah, the most ancient, and most vast of the sanctuaries of the
venerable capital of the Pharaohs; the sacred Apis-bull, but recently
introduced into the temple, was hung all over with golden ornaments;
early in the morning Euergetes had paid his devotions to the sacred
beast--which had eaten out of his hand, a favorable augury of success for
his plans; and the building in which the Apis lived, as well as the
stalls of his mother and of the cows kept for him, had been splendidly
decked with flowers.
The citizens of Memphis were not permitted to pursue their avocations or
ply their trades beyond the hour of noon; then the markets, the booths,
the workshops and schools were to be closed, and on the great square in
front of the temple of Ptah, where the annual fair was held, dramas both
sacred and profane, and shows of all sorts were to be seen, heard and
admired by men, women and children--provided at the expense of the two
kings.
Two men of Alexandria, one an AEolian of Lesbos, and the other a Hebrew
belonging to the Jewish community, but who was not distinguishable by
dress or accent from his Greek fellow-citizens, greeted each other on the
quay opposite the landing-place for the king's vessels, some of which
were putting out into the stream, spreading their purple sails and
dipping their prows inlaid with ivory and heavily gilt.
"In a couple of hours," said the Jew, "I shall be travelling homewards.
May I offer you a place in my boat, or do you propose remaining here to
assist at the festival and not starting till to-morrow morning? There are
all kinds of spectacles to be seen, and when it is dark a grand
illumination is to take place."
"What do I care for their barbarian rubbish?" answered the Lesbian. "Why,
the Egyptian music alone drives me to distraction. My business is
concluded. I had inspected the goods brought from Arabia and India by way
of Berenice and Coptos, and had selected those I needed before the vessel
that brought them had moored in the Mariotic harbor, and other goods will
have reached Alexandria before me. I will not stay an hour longer than is
necessary in this horrible place, which is as dismal as it is huge.
Yesterday I visited the gymnasium and the better class of
baths--wretched, I call them! It is an insult to the fish-market and the
horse-ponds of Alexandria to compare them with them."
"And the theatre!" exclaimed the Jew. "The exterior one can bear to look
at--but the acting! Yesterday they gave the 'Thals' of Menander, and I
assure you that in Alexandria the woman who dared to impersonate the
bewitching and cold-hearted Hetaira would have been driven off the
stage--they would have pelted her with rotten apples. Close by me there
sat a sturdy, brown Egyptian, a sugar-baker or something of the kind, who
held his sides with laughing, and yet, I dare swear, did not understand a
word of the comedy. But in Memphis it is the fashion to know Greek, even
among the artisans. May I hope to have you as my guest?"
"With pleasure, with pleasure!" replied the Lesbian. "I was about to look
out for a boat. Have you done your business to your satisfaction?"
"Tolerably!" answered the Jew. "I have purchased some corn from Upper
Egypt, and stored it in the granaries here. The whole of that row yonder
were to let for a mere song, and so we get off cheaply when we let the
wheat lie here instead of at Alexandria where granaries are no longer to
be had for money."
"That is very clever!" replied the Greek. "There is bustle enough here in
the harbor, but the many empty warehouses and the low rents prove how
Memphis is going down. Formerly this city was the emporium for all
vessels, but now for the most part they only run in to pay the toll and
to take in supplies for their crews. This populous place has a big
stomach, and many trades drive a considerable business here, but most of
those that fail here are still carried on in Alexandria."
"It is the sea that is lacking," interrupted the Jew; "Memphis trades
only with Egypt, and we with the whole world. The merchant who sends his
goods here only load camels, and wretched asses, and flat-bottomed
Nile-boats, while we in our harbors freight fine seagoing vessels. When
the winter-storms are past our house alone sends twenty triremes with
Egyptian wheat to Ostia and to Pontus; and your Indian and Arabian goods,
your imports from the newly opened Ethiopian provinces, take up less
room, but I should like to know how many talents your trade amounted to
in the course of the past year. Well then, farewell till we meet again on
my boat; it is called the Euphrosyne, and lies out there, exactly
opposite the two statues of the old king--who can remember these stiff
barbarian names? In three hours we start. I have a good cook on board,
who is not too particular as to the regulations regarding food by which
my countrymen in Palestine live, and you will find a few new books and
some capital wine from Byblos."
"Then we need not dread a head-wind," laughed the Lesbian. "We meet again
in three hours."
The Israelite waved his hand to his travelling companion, and proceeded
at first along the shore under the shade of an alley of sycamores with
their broad unsymmetrical heads of foliage, but presently he turned aside
into a narrow street which led from the quay to the city. He stood still
for a moment opposite the entrance of the corner house, one side of which
lay parallel to the stream while the other--exhibiting the front door,
and a small oil-shop--faced the street; his attention had been attracted
to it by a strange scene; but he had still much to attend to before
starting on his journey, and he soon hurried on again without noticing a
tall man who came towards him, wearing a travelling-hat and a cloak such
as was usually adapted only for making journeys.
The house at which the Jew had gazed so fixedly was that of Apollodorus,
the sculptor, and the man who was so strangely dressed for a walk through
the city at this hour of the day was the Roman, Publius Scipio. He seemed
to be still more attracted by what was going on in the little stall by
the sculptor's front door, than even the Israelite had been; he leaned
against the fence of the garden opposite the shop, and stood for some
time gazing and shaking his head at the strange things that were to be
seen within.
A wooden counter supported by the wall of the house-which was used by
customers to lay their money on and which generally held a few
oil-jars-projected a little way into the street like a window-board, and
on this singular couch sat a distinguished looking youth in a light blue,
sleeveless chiton, turning his back on the stall itself, which was not
much bigger than a good sized travelling-chariot. By his side lay a
"Himation"--[A long square cloak, and an indispensable part of the dress
of the Greeks.]--of fine white woolen stuff with a blue border. His legs
hung out into the street, and his brilliant color stood out in wonderful
contrast to the dark skin of a naked Egyptian boy, who crouched at his
feet with a cage full of doves.
The young Greek sitting on the window-counter had a golden fillet on his
oiled and perfumed curls, sandals of the finest leather on his feet, and
even in these humble surroundings looked elegant--but even more merry
than elegant--for the whole of his handsome face was radiant with smiles
while he tied two small rosy-grey turtle doves with ribands of
rose-colored bombyx-silk to the graceful basket in which they were
sitting, and then slipped a costly gold bracelet over the heads of the
frightened birds, and attached it to their wings with a white silk tie.
When he had finished this work he held the basket up, looked at it with a
smile of satisfaction, and he was in the very act of handing it to the
black boy when he caught sight of Publius, who went up to him from the
garden-fence.
"In the name of all the gods, Lysias," cried the Roman, without greeting
his friend, what fool's trick are you at there again! Are you turned
oil-seller, or have you taken to training pigeons?"
"I am the one, and I am doing the other," answered the Corinthian with a
laugh, for he it was to whom the Roman's speech was addressed. "How do
you like my nest of young doves? It strikes me as uncommonly pretty, and
how well the golden circlet that links their necks becomes the little
creatures!"
"Here, put out your claws, you black crocodile," he continued, turning to
his little assistant, "carry the basket carefully into the house, and
repeat what I say, 'From the love-sick Lysias to the fair Irene'--Only
look, Publius, how the little monster grins at me with his white teeth.
You shall hear that his Greek is far less faultless than his teeth. Prick
up your ears, you little ichneumon--now once more repeat what you are to
say in there--do you see where I am pointing with my finger?--to the
master or to the lady who shall take the doves from you."
With much pitiful stammering the boy repeated the Corinthian's message to
Irene, and as he stood there with his mouth wide open, Lysias, who was an
expert at "ducks and drakes" on the water, neatly tossed into it a silver
drachma. This mouthful was much to the little rascal's taste, for after
he had taken the coin out of his mouth he stood with wide-open jaws
opposite his liberal master, waiting for another throw; Lysias however
boxed him lightly on his ears, and chucked him under the chin, saying as
he snapped the boy's teeth together:
"Now carry up the birds and wait for the answer." "This offering is to
Irene, then?" said Publius. "We have not met for a long time; where were
you all day yesterday?"
"It will be far more entertaining to hear what you were about all the
night long. You are dressed as if you had come straight here from Rome.
Euergetes has already sent for you once this morning, and the queen
twice; she is over head and ears in love with you."
"Folly! Tell me now what you were doing all yesterday."
"Tell me first where you have been."
"I had to go some distance and will tell you all about it later, but not
now; and I encountered strange things on my way--aye, I must say
extraordinary things. Before sunrise I found a bed in the inn yonder, and
to my own great surprise I slept so soundly that I awoke only two hours
since."
"That is a very meagre report; but I know of old that if you do not
choose to speak no god could drag a syllable from you. As regards myself
I should do myself an injury by being silent, for my heart is like an
overloaded beast of burden and talking will relieve it. Ah! Publius, my
fate to-day is that of the helpless Tantalus, who sees juicy pears
bobbing about under his nose and tempting his hungry stomach, and yet
they never let him catch hold of them, only look-in there dwells Irene,
the pear, the peach, the pomegranate, and my thirsting heart is consumed
with longing for her. You may laugh--but to-day Paris might meet Helen
with impunity, for Eros has shot his whole store of arrows into me. You
cannot see them, but I can feel them, for not one of them has he drawn
out of the wound. And the darling little thing herself is not wholly
untouched by the winged boy's darts. She has confessed so much to me
myself. It is impossible for me to refuse her any thing, and so I was
fool enough to swear a horrible oath that I would not try to see her till
she was reunited to her tall solemn sister, of whom I am exceedingly
afraid. Yesterday I lurked outside this house just as a hungry wolf in
cold weather sneaks about a temple where lambs are being sacrificed, only
to see her, or at least to hear a word from her lips, for when she speaks
it is like the song of nightingales--but all in vain. Early this morning
I came back to the city and to this spot; and as hanging about forever
was of no use, I bought up the stock of the old oil-seller, who is asleep
there in the corner, and settled myself in his stall, for here no one can
escape me, who enters or quits Apollodorus' house--and, besides, I am
only forbidden to visit Irene; she herself allows me to send her
greetings, and no one forbids me, not even Apollodorus, to whom I spoke
an hour ago."
"And that basket of birds that your dusky errand-boy carried into the
house just now, was such a 'greeting?"
"Of course--that is the third already. First I sent her a lovely nosegay
of fresh pomegranate-blossoms, and with it a few verses I hammered out in
the course of the night; then a basket of peaches which she likes very
much, and now the doves. And there lie her answers--the dear, sweet
creature! For my nosegay I got this red riband, for the fruit this peach
with a piece bitten out. Now I am anxious to see what I shall get for my
doves. I bought that little brown scamp in the market, and I shall take
him with me to Corinth as a remembrance of Memphis, if he brings me back
something pretty this time. There, I hear the door, that is he; come here
youngster, what have you brought?" Publius stood with his arms crossed
behind his back, hearing and watching the excited speech and gestures of
his friend who seemed to him, to-day more than ever, one of those
careless darlings of the gods, whose audacious proceedings give us
pleasure because they match with their appearance and manner, and we feel
they can no more help their vagaries than a tree can help blossoming. As
soon as Lysias spied a small packet in the boy's hand he did not take it
from him but snatched up the child, who was by no means remarkably small,
by the leather belt that fastened up his loin-cloth, tossed him up as if
he were a plaything, and set him down on the table by his side,
exclaiming:
"I will teach you to fly, my little hippopotamus! Now, show me what you
have got."
He hastily took the packet from the hand of the youngster, who looked
quite disconcerted, weighed it in his hand and said, turning to Publius:
"There is something tolerably heavy in this--what can it contain?"
"I am quite inexperienced in such matters," replied the Roman.
"And I much experienced," answered Lysias. "It might be, wait-it might be
the clasp of her girdle in here. Feel, it is certainly something hard."
Publius carefully felt the packet that the Corinthian held out to him,
with his fingers, and then said with a smile:
"I can guess what you have there, and if I am right I shall be much
pleased. Irene, I believe, has returned you the gold bracelet on a little
wooden tablet."
"Nonsense!" answered Lysias. "The ornament was prettily wrought and of
some value, and every girl is fond of ornaments."
"Your Corinthian friends are, at any rate. But look what the wrapper
contains."
"Do you open it," said the Corinthian.
Publius first untied a thread, then unfolded a small piece of white
linen, and came at last to an object wrapped in a bit of flimsy, cheap
papyrus. When this last envelope was removed, the bracelet was in fact
discovered, and under it lay a small wax tablet.
Lysias was by no means pleased with this discovery, and looked
disconcerted and annoyed at the return of his gift; but he soon mastered
his vexation, and said turning to his friend, who was not in the least
maliciously triumphant, but who stood looking thoughtfully at the ground.
"Here is something on the little tablet--the sauce no doubt to the
peppered dish she has set before me."
"Still, eat it," interrupted Publius. "It may do you good for the
future."
Lysias took the tablet in his hand, and after considering it carefully on
both sides he said:
"It belongs to the sculptor, for there is his name. And there--why she
has actually spiced the sauce or, if you like it better the bitter dose,
with verses. They are written more clearly than beautifully, still they
are of the learned sort."
"Well?" asked the Roman with curiosity, as Lysias read the lines to
himself; the Greek did not look up from the writing but sighed softly,
and rubbing the side of his finely-cut nose with his finger he replied:
"Very pretty, indeed, for any one to whom they are not directly
addressed. Would you like to hear the distich?"
"Read it to me, I beg of you."
"Well then," said the Corinthian, and sighing again he read aloud;
'Sweet is the lot of the couple whom love has united;
But gold is a debt, and needs must at once be restored.'
"There, that is the dose. But doves are not human creatures, and I know
at once what my answer shall be. Give me the fibula, Publius, that clasps
that cloak in which you look like one of your own messengers. I will
write my answer on the wax."
The Roman handed to Lysias the golden circlet armed with a strong pin,
and while he stood holding his cloak together with his hands, as he was
anxious to avoid recognition by the passers-by that frequented this
street, the Corinthian wrote as follows:
"When doves are courting the lover adorns himself only;
But when a youth loves, he fain would adorn his beloved."
"Am I allowed to hear it?" asked Publius, and his friend at once read him
the lines; then he gave the tablet to the boy, with the bracelet which he
hastily wrapped up again, and desired him to take it back immediately to
the fair Irene. But the Roman detained the lad, and laying his hand on
the Greek's shoulder, he asked him: "And if the young girl accepts this
gift, and after it many more besides--since you are rich enough to make
her presents to her heart's content--what then, Lysias?"
"What then?" repeated the other with more indecision and embarrassment
than was his wont. "Then I wait for Klea's return home and--Aye! you may
laugh at me, but I have been thinking seriously of marrying this girl,
and taking her with me to Corinth. I am my father's only son, and for the
last three years he has given me no peace. He is bent on my mother's
finding me a wife or on my choosing one for myself. And if I took him the
pitch-black sister of this swarthy lout I believe he would be glad. I
never was more madly in love with any girl than with this little Irene,
as true as I am your friend; but I know why you are looking at me with a
frown like Zeus the Thunderer. You know of what consequence our family is
in Corinth, and when I think of that, then to be sure--"
"Then to be sure?" enquired the Roman in sharp, grave tone.
"Then I reflect that a water-bearer--the daughter of an outlawed man, in
our house--"
"And do you consider mine as being any less illustrious in Rome than your
own is in Corinth?" asked Publius sternly.
"On the contrary, Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica. We are important by
our wealth, you by your power and estates."
"So it is--and yet I am about to conduct Irene's sister Klea as my lawful
wife to my father's house."
"You are going to do that!" cried Lysias springing from his seat, and
flinging himself on the Roman's breast, though at this moment a party of
Egyptians were passing by in the deserted street. "Then all is well,
then--oh! what a weight is taken off my mind!--then Irene shall be my
wife as sure as I live! Oh Eros and Aphrodite and Father Zeus and Apollo!
how happy I am! I feel as if the biggest of the Pyramids yonder had
fallen off my heart. Now, you rascal, run up and carry to the fair Irene,
the betrothed of her faithful Lysias--mark what I say--carry her at once
this tablet and bracelet. But you will not say it right; I will write
here above my distich: 'From the faithful Lysias to the fair Irene his
future wife.' There--and now I think she will not send the thing back
again, good girl that she is! Listen, rascal, if she keeps it you may
swallow cakes to-day out on the Grand Square till you burst--and yet I
have only just paid five gold pieces for you. Will she keep the bracelet,
Publius--yes or no?"
"She will keep it."
A few minutes later the boy came hurrying back, and pulling the Greek
vehemently by his dress, he cried:
"Come, come with me, into the house." Lysias with a light and graceful
leap sprang right over the little fellow's head, tore open the door, and
spread out his arms as he caught sight of Irene, who, though trembling
like a hunted gazelle, flew down the narrow ladder-like stairs to meet
him, and fell on his breast laughing and crying and breathless.
In an instant their lips met, but after this first kiss she tore herself
from his arms, rushed up the stairs again, and then, from the top step,
shouted joyously:
"I could not help seeing you this once! now farewell till Klea comes,
then we meet again," and she vanished into an upper room.
Lysias turned to his friend like one intoxicated, he threw himself down
on his bench, and said:
"Now the heavens may fall, nothing can trouble me! Ye immortal gods, how
fair the world is!"
"Strange boy!" exclaimed the Roman, interrupting his friend's rapture.
"You can not stay for ever in this dingy stall."
"I will not stir from this spot till Klea comes. The boy there shall
fetch me victuals as an old sparrow feeds his young; and if necessary I
will lie here for a week, like the little sardines they preserve in oil
at Alexandria."
"I hope you will have only a few hours to wait; but I must go, for I am
planning a rare surprise for King Euergetes on his birthday, and must go
to the palace. The festival is already in full swing. Only listen how
they are shouting and calling down by the harbor; I fancy I can hear the
name of Euergetes."
"Present my compliments to the fat monster! May we meet again
soon--brother-in-law!"
CHAPTER XXV.
King Euergetes was pacing restlessly up and down the lofty room which his
brother had furnished with particular magnificence to be his
reception-room. Hardly had the sun risen on the morning of his birthday
when he had betaken himself to the temple of Ptah with a numerous
suite--before his brother Philometor could set out--in order to sacrifice
there, to win the good graces of the high-priest of the sanctuary, and to
question of the oracle of Apis. All had fallen out well, for the sacred
bull had eaten out of his hand; and yet he would have been more
glad--though it should have disdained the cake he offered it, if only
Eulaeus had brought him the news that the plot against the Roman's life
had been successful.
Gift after gift, addresses of congratulation from every district of the
country, priestly decrees drawn up in his honor and engraved on tablets
of hard stone, lay on every table or leaned against the walls of the vast
ball which the guests had just quitted. Only Hierax, the king's friend,
remained with him, supporting himself, while he waited for some sign from
his sovereign, on a high throne made of gold and ivory and richly
decorated with gems, which had been sent to the king by the Jewish
community of Alexandria.
The great commander knew his master well and knew too that it was not
prudent to address him when he looked as he did now. But Euergetes
himself was aware of the need for speech, and he began, without pausing
in his walk or looking at his dignified friend:
"Even the Philobasilistes have proved corrupt; my soldiers in the citadel
are more numerous and are better men too than those that have remained
faithful to Philometor, and there ought to be nothing more for me to do
but to stir up a brief clatter of swords on shields, to spring upon the
throne, and to have myself proclaimed king; but I will never go into the
field with the strongest division of the enemy in my rear. My brother's
head is on my sister's shoulders, and so long as I am not certain of
her--"
A chamberlain rushed into the room as the king spoke, and interrupted him
by shouting out:
"Queen Cleopatra."
A smile of triumph flashed across the features of the young giant; he
flung himself with an air of indifference on to a purple divan, and
desired that a magnificent lyre made of ivory, and presented to him by
his sister, should be brought to him; on it was carved with wonderful
skill and delicacy a representation of the first marriage, that of Cadmus
with Harmonia, at which all the gods had attended as guests.
Euergetes grasped the chords with wonderful vigor and mastery, and began
to play a wedding march, in which eager triumph alternated with tender
whisperings of love and longing.
The chamberlain, whose duty it was to introduce the queen to her
brother's presence, wished to interrupt this performance of his
sovereign's; but Cleopatra held him back, and stood listening at the door
with her children till Euergetes had brought the air to a rapid
conclusion with a petulant sweep of the strings, and a loud and
ear-piercing discord; then he flung his lute on the couch and rose with
well-feigned surprise, going forward to meet the queen as if, absorbed in
playing, he had not heard her approach.
He greeted his sister affectionately, holding out both his hands to her,
and spoke to the children--who were not afraid of him, for he knew how to
play madcap games with them like a great frolicsome boy--welcoming them
as tenderly as if he were their own father.
He could not weary of thanking Cleopatra for her thoughtful present--so
appropriate to him, who like Cadmus longed to boast of having mastered
Harmonia, and finally--she not having found a word to say--he took her by
the hand to exhibit to her the presents sent him by her husband and from
the provinces. But Cleopatra seemed to take little pleasure in all these
things, and said:
"Yes, everything is admirable, just as it has always been every year for
the last twenty years; but I did not come here to see but to listen."
Her brother was radiant with satisfaction; she on the contrary was pale
and grave, and, could only now and then compel herself to a forced smile.
"I fancied," said Euergetes, "that your desire to wish me joy was the
principal thing that had brought you here, and, indeed, my vanity
requires me to believe it. Philometor was with me quite early, and
fulfilled that duty with touching affection. When will he go into the
banqueting-hall?"
"In half an hour; and till then tell me, I entreat you, what yesterday
you--"
"The best events are those that are long in preparing," interrupted her
brother. "May I ask you to let the children, with their attendants,
retire for a few minutes into the inner rooms?"
"At once!" cried Cleopatra eagerly, and she pushed her eldest boy, who
clamorously insisted on remaining with his uncle, violently out of the
door without giving his attendant time to quiet him or take him in her
arms.
While she was endeavoring, with angry scolding and cross words, to hasten
the children's departure, Eulaeus came into the room. Euergetes, as soon
as he saw him, set every limb with rigid resolve, and drew breath so
deeply that his broad chest heaved high, and a strong respiration parted
his lips as he went forward to meet the eunuch, slowly but with an
enquiring look.
Eulaeus cast a significant glance at Hierax and Cleopatra, went quite
close up to the king, whispered a few words into his ear, and answered
his brief questions in a low voice.
"It is well," said Euergetes at last, and with a decisive gesture of his
hand he dismissed Eulaeus and his friend from the room.
Then he stood, as pale as death, his teeth set in his under-lip, and
gazing blankly at the ground.
He had his will, Publius Cornelius Scipio lived no more; his ambition
might reach without hindrance the utmost limits of his desires, and yet
he could not rejoice; he could not escape from a deep horror of himself,
and he struck his broad forehead with his clenched fists. He was face to
face with his first dastardly murder.
"And what news does Eulaeus bring?" asked Cleopatra in anxious
excitement, for she had never before seen her brother like this; but he
did not hear these words, and it was not till she had repeated them with
more insistence that he collected himself, stared at her from head to
foot with a fixed, gloomy expression, and then, letting his hand fall on
her shoulder so heavily that her knees bent under her and she gave a
little cry, asked her in a low but meaning tone:
"Are you strong enough to bear to hear great news?"
"Speak," she said in a low voice, and her eyes were fixed on his lips
while she pressed her hand on her heart. Her anxiety to hear fettered her
to him, as with a tangible tie, and he, as if he must burst it by the
force of his utterance, said with awful solemnity, in his deepest tones
and emphasizing every syllable:
"Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica is dead."
At these words Cleopatra's pale cheeks were suddenly dyed with a crimson
glow, and clenching her little hands she struck them together, and
exclaimed with flashing eyes:
"I hoped so!"
Euergetes withdrew a step from his sister, and said: "You were right. It
is not only among the race of gods that the most fearful of all are
women!"
"What have you to say?" retorted Cleopatra. "And am I to believe that a
toothache has kept the Roman away from the banquet yesterday, and again
from coming to see me to-day? Am I to repeat, after you, that he died of
it? Now, speak out, for it rejoices my heart to hear it; where and how
did the insolent hypocrite meet his end?"
"A serpent stung him," replied Euergetes, turning from his sister. "It
was in the desert, not far from the Apis-tombs."
"He had an assignation in the Necropolis at midnight--it would seem to
have begun more pleasantly than it ended?"
Euergetes nodded assent to the question, and added gravely:
"His fate overtook him--but I cannot see anything very pleasing in the
matter."
"No?" asked the queen. "And do you think that I do not know the asp that
ended that life in its prime? Do you think that I do not know, who set
the poisoned serpent on the Roman? You are the assassin, and Eulaeus and
his accomplices have helped you! Only yesterday I would have given my
heart's blood for Publius, and would rather have carried you to the grave
than him; but to-day, now that I know the game that the wretch has been
playing with me, I would even have taken on myself the bloody deed which,
as it is, stains your hands. Not even a god should treat your sister with
such contempt--should insult her as he has done--and go unpunished!
Another has already met the same fate, as you know--Eustorgos, Hipparchon
of Bithynia, who, while he seemed to be dying of love for me, was
courting Kallistrata my lady in waiting; and the wild beasts and serpents
exercised their dark arts on him too. Eulaeus' intelligence has fallen on
you, who are powerful, like a cold hand on your heart; in me, the weak
woman, it rouses unspeakable delight. I gave him the best of all a woman
has to bestow, and he dared to trample it in the dust; and had I no right
to require of him that he should pour out the best that he had, which was
his life, in the same way as he had dared to serve mine, which is my
love? I have a right to rejoice at his death. Aye! the heavy lids now
close those bright eyes which could be falser than the stern lips that
were so apt to praise truth. The faithless heart is forever still which
could scorn the love of a queen--and for what? For whom? Oh, ye pitiful
gods!"
With these words the queen sobbed aloud, hastily lifting her hands to
cover her eyes, and ran to the door by which she had entered her
brother's rooms.
But Euergetes stood in her way, and said sternly and positively:
"You are to stay here till I return. Collect yourself, for at the next
event which this momentous day will bring forth it will be my turn to
laugh while your blood shall run cold." And with a few swift steps he
left the hall.
Cleopatra buried her face in the soft cushions of the couch, and wept
without ceasing, till she was presently startled by loud cries and the
clatter of arms. Her quick wit told her what was happening. In frantic
haste she flew to the door but it was locked; no shaking, no screaming,
no thumping seemed to reach the ears of the guard whom she heard
monotonously walking up and down outside her prison.
And now the tumult and clang of arms grew louder and louder, and the
rattle of drums and blare of trumpets began to mingle with the sound. She
rushed to the window in mortal fear, and looked down into the
palace-yard; at that same instant the door of the great banqueting-hall
was flung open, and a flying crowd streamed out in distracted
confusion--then another, and a third--all troops in King Philometor's
uniform. She ran to the door of the room into which she had thrust her
children; that too was locked. In her desperation she once more sprang to
the window, shouted to the flying Macedonians to halt and make a
stand--threatening and entreating; but no one heard her, and their number
constantly increased, till at length she saw her husband standing on the
threshold of the great hall with a gaping wound on his forehead, and
defending himself bravely and stoutly with buckler and sword against the
body-guard of his own brother, who were pressing him sorely. In agonized
excitement she shouted encouraging words to him, and he seemed to hear
her, for with a strong sweep of his shield he struck his nearest
antagonist to the earth, sprang with a mighty leap into the midst of his
flying adherents, and vanished with them through the passage which led to
the palace-stables.
The queen sank fainting on her knees by the window, and, through the
gathering shades of her swoon her dulled senses still were conscious of
the trampling of horses, of a shrill trumpet-blast, and at last of a
swelling and echoing shout of triumph with cries of, "Hail: hail to the
son of the Sun--Hail to the uniter of the two kingdoms; Hail to the King
of Upper and Lower Egypt, to Euergetes the god."
But at the last words she recovered consciousness entirely and started
up. She looked down into the court again, and there saw her brother borne
along on her husband's throne-litter by dignitaries and nobles. Side by
side with the traitor's body-guard marched her own and Philometor's
Philobasilistes and Diadoches.
The magnificent train went out of the great court of the palace, and
then--as she heard the chanting of priests--she realized that she had
lost her crown, and knew whither her faithless brother was proceeding.
She ground her teeth as her fancy painted all that was now about to
happen. Euergetes was being borne to the temple of Ptah, and proclaimed
by its astonished chief-priests, as King of Upper and Lower Egypt, and
successor to Philometor. Four pigeons would be let fly in his presence to
announce to the four quarters of the heavens that a new sovereign had
mounted the throne of his fathers, and amid prayer and sacrifice a golden
sickle would be presented to him with which, according to ancient custom,
he would cut an ear of corn.
Betrayed by her brother, abandoned by her husband, parted from her
children, scorned by the man she had loved, dethroned and powerless, too
weak and too utterly crushed to dream of revenge--she spent two
interminably long hours in the keenest anguish of mind, shut up in her
prison which was overloaded with splendor and with gifts. If poison had
been within her reach, in that hour she would unhesitatingly have put an
end to her ruined life. Now she walked restlessly up and down, asking
herself what her fate would be, and now she flung herself on the couch
and gave herself up to dull despair.
There lay the lyre she had given to her brother; her eye fell on the
relievo of the marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia, and on the figure of a
woman who was offering a jewel to the bride. The bearer of the gift was
the goddess of love, and the ornament she gave--so ran the
legend--brought misfortune on those who inherited it. All the darkest
hours of her life revived in her memory, and the blackest of them all had
come upon her as the outcome of Aphrodite's gifts. She thought with a
shudder of the murdered Roman, and remembered the moment when Eulaeus had
told her that her Bithynian lover had been killed by wild beasts. She
rushed from one door to another--the victim of the avenging
Eumenides--shrieked from the window for rescue and help, and in that one
hour lived through a whole year of agonies and terrors.
At last--at last, the door of the room was opened, and Euergetes came
towards her, clad in the purple, with the crown of the two countries on
his grand head, radiant with triumph and delight.
"All hail to you, sister!" he exclaimed in a cheerful tone, and lifting
the heavy crown from his curling hair. "You ought to be proud to-day, for
your own brother has risen to high estate, and is now King of Upper and
Lower Egypt."
Cleopatra turned from him, but he followed her and tried to take her
hand. She however snatched it away, exclaiming:
"Fill up the measure of your deeds, and insult the woman whom you have
robbed and made a widow. It was with a prophecy on your lips that you
went forth just now to perpetrate your greatest crime; but it falls on
your own head, for you laugh over our misfortune--and it cannot regard
me, for my blood does not run cold; I am not overwhelmed nor hopeless,
and I shall--"
"You," interrupted Euergetes, at first with a loud voice, which presently
became as gentle as though he were revealing to her the prospect of a
future replete with enjoyment, "You shall retire to your roof-tent with
your children, and there you shall be read to as much as you like, eat as
many dainties as you can, wear as many splendid dresses as you can
desire, receive my visits and gossip with me as often as my society may
seem agreeable to you--as yours is to me now and at all times. Besides
all this you may display your sparkling wit before as many Greek and
Jewish men of letters or learning as you can command, till each and all
are dazzled to blindness. Perhaps even before that you may win back your
freedom, and with it a full treasury, a stable full of noble horses, and
a magnificent residence in the royal palace on the Bruchion in gay
Alexandria. It depends only on how soon our brother Philometor--who
fought like a lion this morning--perceives that he is more fit to be a
commander of horse, a lute-player, an attentive host of word-splitting
guests--than the ruler of a kingdom. Now, is it not worthy of note to
those who, like you and me, sister, love to investigate the phenomena of
our spiritual life, that this man--who in peace is as yielding as wax, as
week as a reed--is as tough and as keen in battle as a finely tempered
sword? We hacked bravely at each other's shields, and I owe this slash
here on my shoulder to him. If Hierax--who is in pursuit of him with his
horsemen--is lucky and catches him in time, he will no doubt give up the
crown of his own free will."
"Then he is not yet in your power, and he had time to mount a horse!"
cried Cleopatra, her eyes sparkling with satisfaction; "then all is not
yet lost for us. If Philometor can but reach Rome, and lay our case
before the Senate--"
"Then he might certainly have some prospect of help from the Republic,
for Rome does not love to see a strong king on the throne of Egypt," said
Euergetes. "But you have lost your mainstay by the Tiber, and I am about
to make all the Scipios and the whole gens Cornelia my stanch allies, for
I mean to have the deceased Roman burnt with the finest cedar-wood and
Arabian spices; sacrifices shall be slaughtered at the same time as if he
had been a reigning king, and his ashes shall be sent to Ostia and Rome
in the costliest specimen of Vasa murrina that graces my treasure-house,
and on a ship specially fitted, and escorted by the noblest of my
friends. The road to the rampart of a hostile city lies over corpses, and
I, as general and king--"
Euergetes suddenly broke off in his sentence, for a loud noise and
vehement talking were heard outside the door. Cleopatra too had not
failed to observe it, and listened with alert attention; for on such a
day and in these apartments every dialogue, every noise in the king's
antechamber might be of grave purport.
Euergetes did not deceive himself in this matter any more than his
sister, and he went towards the door holding the sacrificial sickle,
which formed part of his regalia, in his right hand. But he had not
crossed the room when Eulaeus rushed in, as pale as death, and calling
out to his sovereign:
"The murderers have betrayed us; Publius Scipio is alive, and insists on
being admitted to speak with you."
The king's armed hand fell by his side, and for a moment he gazed blankly
into vacancy, but the next instant he had recovered himself, and roared
in a voice which filled the room like rolling thunder:
"Who dares to hinder the entrance of my friend Publius Cornelius Scipio?
And are you still here, Eulaeus--you scoundrel and you villain! The first
case that I, as King of Upper and Lower Egypt, shall open for trial will
be that which this man--who is your foe and my friend--proposes to bring
against you. Welcome! most welcome on my birthday, my noble friend!"
The last words were addressed to Publius, who now entered the room with
stately dignity, and clad in the ample folds of the white toga worn by
Romans of high birth. He held a sealed roll or despatch in his right
hand, and, while he bowed respectfully to Cleopatra, he seemed entirely
to overlook the hands King Euergetes held out in welcome. After his first
greeting had been disdained by the Roman, Euergetes would not have
offered him a second if his life had depended on it. He crossed his arms
with royal dignity, and said:
"I am grieved to receive your good wishes the last of all that have been
offered me on this happy day."
"Then you must have changed your mind," replied Publius, drawing up his
slight figure, which was taller than the king's, "You have no lack of
docile instruments, and last night you were fully determined to receive
my first congratulations in the realm of shades."
"My sister," answered Euergetes, shrugging his shoulders, "was only
yesterday singing the praises of your uncultured plainness of speech; but
to-day it is your pleasure to speak in riddles like an Egyptian oracle."
"They cannot, however, be difficult to solve by you and your minions,"
replied Publius coldly, as he pointed to Eulaeus. "The serpents which you
command have powerful poisons and sharp fangs at their disposal; this
time, however, they mistook their victim, and have sent a poor recluse of
Serapis to Hades instead of one of their king's guests."
"Your enigma is harder than ever," cried the king. "My intelligence at
least is unequal to solve it, and I must request you to speak in less
dark language or else to explain your meaning."
"Later, I will," said Publius emphatically, "but these things concern
myself alone, and I stand here now commissioned by the State of Rome
which I serve. To-day Juventius Thalna will arrive here as ambassador
from the Republic, and this document from the Senate accredits me as its
representative until his arrival."
Euergetes took the sealed roll which Publius offered to him. While he
tore it open, and hastily looked through its contents, the door was again
thrown open and Hierax, the king's trusted friend, appeared on the
threshold with a flushed face and hair in disorder.
"We have him!" he cried before he came in. "He fell from his horse near
Heliopolis."
"Philometor?" screamed Cleopatra, flinging herself upon Hierax. "He fell
from his horse--you have murdered him?"
The tone in which the words were said, so full of grief and horror that
the general said compassionately:
"Calm yourself, noble lady; your husband's wound in the forehead is not
dangerous. The physicians in the great hall of the temple of the Sun
bound it up, and allowed me to bring him hither on a litter."
Without hearing Hierax to the end Cleopatra flew towards the door, but
Euergetes barred her way and gave his orders with that decision which
characterized him, and which forbade all contradiction:
"You will remain here till I myself conduct you to him. I wish to have
you both near me."
"So that you may force us by every torment to resign the throne!" cried
Cleopatra. "You are in luck to-day, and we are your prisoners."
"You are free, noble queen," said the Roman to the poor woman, who was
trembling in every limb. "And on the strength of my plenipotentiary
powers I here demand the liberty of King Philometor, in the name of the
Senate of Rome."
At these words the blood mounted to King Euergetes' face and eyes, and,
hardly master of himself, he stammered out rather than said:
"Popilius Laenas drew a circle round my uncle Antiochus, and threatened
him with the enmity of Rome if he dared to overstep it. You might excel
the example set you by your bold countryman--whose family indeed was far
less illustrious than yours--but I--I--"
"You are at liberty to oppose the will of Rome," interrupted Publius with
dry formality, "but, if you venture on it, Rome, by me, will withdraw her
friendship. I stand here in the name of the Senate, whose purpose it is
to uphold the treaty which snatched this country from the Syrians, and by
which you and your brother pledged yourselves to divide the realm of
Egypt between you. It is not in my power to alter what has happened here;
but it is incumbent on me so to act as to enable Rome to distribute to
each of you that which is your due, according to the treaty ratified by
the Republic.
"In all questions which bear upon that compact Rome alone must decide,
and it is my duty to take care that the plaintiff is not prevented from
appearing alive and free before his protectors. So, in the name of the
Senate, King Euergetes, I require you to permit King Philometor your
brother, and Queen Cleopatra your sister, to proceed hence, whithersoever
they will." Euergetes, breathing hard in impotent fury, alternately
doubling his fists, and extending his quivering fingers, stood opposite
the Roman who looked enquiringly in his face with cool composure; for a
short space both were silent. Then Euergetes, pushing his hands through
his hair, shook his head violently from side to side, and exclaimed:
"Thank the Senate from me, and say that I know what we owe to it, and
admire the wisdom which prefers to see Egypt divided rather than united
in one strong hand--Philometor is free, and you also Cleopatra."
For a moment he was again silent, then he laughed loudly, and cried to
the queen:
"As for you sister--your tender heart will of course bear you on the
wings of love to the side of your wounded husband."
Cleopatra's pale cheeks had flushed scarlet at the Roman's speech; she
vouchsafed no answer to her brother's ironical address, but advanced
proudly to the door. As she passed Publius she said with a farewell wave
of her pretty hand.
"We are much indebted to the Senate."
Publius bowed low, and she, turning away from him, quitted the room.
"You have forgotten your fan, and your children!" the king called after
her; but Cleopatra did not hear his words, for, once outside her
brother's apartment, all her forced and assumed composure flew to the
winds; she clasped her hands on her temples, and rushed down the broad
stairs of the palace as if she were pursued by fiends.
When the sound of her steps had died away, Euergetes turned to the Roman
and said:
"Now, as you have fulfilled what you deem to be your duty, I beg of you
to explain the meaning of your dark speeches just now, for they were
addressed to Euergetes the man, and not the king. If I understood you
rightly you meant to imply that your life had been attempted, and that
one of those extraordinary old men devoted to Serapis had been murdered
instead of you."
"By your orders and those of your accomplice Eulaeus," answered Publius
coolly.
"Eulaeus, come here!" thundered the king to the trembling courtier, with
a fearful and threatening glare in his eyes. "Have you hired murderers to
kill my friend--this noble guest of our royal house--because he
threatened to bring your crimes to light?"
"Mercy!" whimpered Eulaeus sinking on his knees before the king.
"He confesses his crime!" cried Euergetes; he laid his hand on the girdle
of his weeping subordinate, and commanded Hierax to hand him over without
delay to the watch, and to have him hanged before all beholders by the
great gate of the citadel. Eulaeus tried to pray for mercy and to speak,
but the powerful officer, who hated the contemptible wretch, dragged him
up, and out of the room.
"You were quite right to lay your complaint before me," said Euergetes
while Eulaeus cries and howls were still audible on the stairs. "And you
see that I know how to punish those who dare to offend a guest."
"He has only met with the portion he has deserved for years," replied
Publius. "But now that we stand face to face, man to man, I must close my
account with you too. In your service and by your orders Eulaeus set two
assassins to lie in wait for me--"
"Publius Cornelius Scipio!" cried the king, interrupting his enemy in an
ominous tone; but the Roman went on, calmly and quietly:
"I am saying nothing that I cannot support by witnesses; and I have truly
set forth, in two letters, that king Euergetes during the past night has
attempted the life of an ambassador from Rome. One of these despatches is
addressed to my father, the other to Popilius Lamas, and both are already
on their way to Rome. I have given instructions that they are to be
opened if, in the course of three months reckoned from the present date,
I have not demanded them back. You see you must needs make it convenient
to protect my life, and to carry out whatever I may require of you. If
you obey my will in everything I may demand, all that has happened this
night shall remain a secret between you and me and a third person, for
whose silence I will be answerable; this I promise you, and I never broke
my word."
"Speak," said the king flinging himself on the couch, and plucking the
feathers from the fan Cleopatra had forgotten, while Publius went on
speaking.
"First I demand a free pardon for Philotas of Syracuse, 'relative of the
king,' and president of the body of the Chrematistes, his immediate
release, with his wife, from their forced labor, and their return from
the mines."
"They both are dead," said Euergetes, "my brother can vouch for it."
"Then I require you to have it declared by special decree that Philotas
was condemned unjustly, and that he is reinstated in all the dignities he
was deprived of. I farther demand that you permit me and my friend Lysias
of Corinth, as well as Apollodorus the sculptor, to quit Egypt without
let or hindrance, and with us Klea and Irene, the daughters of Philotas,
who serve as water-bearers in the temple of Serapis.--Do you hesitate as
to your reply?"
"No," answered the king, and he tossed up his hand. "For this once I have
lost the game."
"The daughters of Philotas, Klea and Irene," continued Publius with
imperturbable coolness, "are to have the confiscated estates of their
parents restored to them."
"Then your sweetheart's beauty does not satisfy you!" interposed
Euergetes satirically.
"It amply satisfies me. My last demand is that half of this wealth shall
be assigned to the temple of Serapis, so that the god may give up his
serving-maidens willingly, and without raising any objections. The other
half shall be handed over to Dicearchus, my agent in Alexandria, because
it is my will that Klea and Irene shall not enter my own house or that of
Lysias in Corinth as wives, without the dowry that beseems their rank.
Now, within one hour, I must have both the decree and the act of
restitution in my hands, for as soon as Juventius Thalna arrives
here--and I expect him, as I told you this very day--we propose to leave
Memphis, and to take ship at Alexandria."
"A strange conjuncture!" cried Euergetes. "You deprive me alike of my
revenge and my love, and yet I see myself compelled to wish you a
pleasant journey. I must offer a sacrifice to Poseidon, to the Cyprian
goddess, and to the Dioscurides that they may vouchsafe your ship a
favorable voyage, although it will carry the man who in the future, can
do us more injury at Rome by his bitter hostility, than any other."
"I shall always take the part of which ever of you has justice on his
side."
Publius quitted the room with a proud wave of his hand, and Euergetes, as
soon as the door had closed behind the Roman, sprang from his couch,
shook his clenched fist in angry threat, and cried:
You, you obstinate fellow and your haughty patrician clan may do me
mischief enough by the Tiber; and yet perhaps I may win the game in spite
of you!
"You cross my path in the name of the Roman Senate. If Philometor waits
in the antechambers of consuls and senators we certainly may chance to
meet there, but I shall also try my luck with the people and the
tribunes.
"It is very strange! This head of mine hits upon more good ideas in an
hour than a cool fellow like that has in a year, and yet I am beaten by
him--and if I am honest I can not but confess that it was not his luck
alone, but his shrewdness that gained the victory. He may be off as soon
as he likes with his proud Hera--I can find a dozen Aphrodites in
Alexandria in her place!
"I resemble Hellas and he Rome, such as they are at present. We flutter
in the sunshine, and seize on all that satisfies our intellect or
gratifies our senses: they gaze at the earth, but walk on with a firm
step to seek power and profit. And thus they get ahead of us, and yet--I
would not change with them."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A debtor, says the proverb, is half a prisoner
Old women grow like men, and old men grow like women
They get ahead of us, and yet--I would not change with them
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE SISTERS, COMPLETE:
A subdued tone generally provokes an equally subdued answer
A mere nothing in one man's life, to another may be great
A debtor, says the proverb, is half a prisoner
Air of a professional guide
And what is great--and what is small
Before you serve me up so bitter a meal (the truth)
Behold, the puny Child of Man
Blind tenderness which knows no reason
By nature she is not and by circumstances is compelled to be
Deceit is deceit
Desire to seek and find a power outside us
Evolution and annihilation
Flattery is a key to the heart
Hold pleasure to be the highest good
If you want to catch mice you must waste bacon
Inquisitive eyes are intrusive company
Man is the measure of all things
Man works with all his might for no one but himself
Many a one would rather be feared than remain unheeded
Museum of Alexandria and the Library
Not yet fairly come to the end of yesterday
Nothing permanent but change
Nothing so certain as that nothing is certain
Old women grow like men, and old men grow like women
One hand washes the other
Prefer deeds to words
Priests that they should instruct the people to be obedient
The altar where truth is mocked at
They get ahead of us, and yet--I would not change with them
Virtues are punished in this world
What are we all but puny children?
Who can be freer than he who needs nothing
Who only puts on his armor when he is threatened
JOSHUA, Complete
By Georg Ebers
Translated from the German by Mary J. Safford
PREFACE.
Last winter I resolved to complete this book, and while giving it the
form in which it now goes forth into the world, I was constantly reminded
of the dear friend to whom I intended to dedicate it. Now I am permitted
to offer it only to the manes of Gustav Baur; for a few months ago death
snatched him from us.
Every one who was allowed to be on terms of intimacy with this man feels
his departure from earth as an unspeakably heavy loss, not only because
his sunny, cheerful nature and brilliant intellect brightened the souls
of his friends; not only because he poured generously from the
overflowing cornucopia of his rich knowledge precious gifts to those with
whom he stood in intellectual relations, but above all because of the
loving heart which beamed through his clear eyes, and enabled him to
share the joys and sorrows of others, and enter into their thoughts and
feelings.
To my life's end I shall not forget that during the last few years,
himself physically disabled and overburdened by the duties imposed by the
office of professor and counsellor of the Consistory, he so often found
his way to me, a still greater invalid. The hours he then permitted me to
spend in animated conversation with him are among those which, according
to old Horace, whom he know so thoroughly and loved so well, must be
numbered among the 'good ones'. I have done so, and whenever I gratefully
recall them, in my ear rings my friend's question:
"What of the story of the Exodus?"
After I had told him that in the midst of the desert, while following the
traces of the departing Hebrews, the idea had occurred to me of treating
their wanderings in the form of a romance, he expressed his approval in
the eager, enthusiastic manner natural to him. When I finally entered
farther into the details of the sketch outlined on the back of a camel,
he never ceased to encourage me, though he thoroughly understood my
scruples and fully appreciated the difficulties which attended the
fulfilment of my task.
So in a certain degree this book is his, and the inability to offer it to
the living man and hear his acute judgment is one of the griefs which
render it hard to reconcile oneself to the advancing years which in other
respects bring many a joy.
Himself one of the most renowned, acute and learned students and
interpreters of the Bible, he was perfectly familiar with the critical
works the last five years have brought to light in the domain of Old
Testament criticism. He had taken a firm stand against the views of the
younger school, who seek to banish the Exodus of the Jews from the
province of history and represent it as a later production of the
myth-making popular mind; a theory we both believed untenable. One of his
remarks on this subject has lingered in my memory and ran nearly as
follows:
"If the events recorded in the Second Book of Moses--which I believe are
true--really never occurred, then nowhere and at no period has a
historical event of equally momentous result taken place. For thousands
of years the story of the Exodus has lived in the minds of numberless
people as something actual, and it still retains its vitality. Therefore
it belongs to history no less certainty than the French Revolution and
its consequences."
Notwithstanding such encouragement, for a long series of years I lacked
courage to finish the story of the Exodus until last winter an unexpected
appeal from abroad induced me to resume it. After this I worked
uninterruptedly with fresh zeal and I may say renewed pleasure at the
perilous yet fascinating task until its completion.
The locality of the romance, the scenery as we say of the drama, I have
copied as faithfully as possible from the landscapes I beheld in Goshen
and on the Sinai peninsula. It will agree with the conception of many of
the readers of "Joshua."
The case will be different with those portions of the story which I have
interwoven upon the ground of ancient Egyptian records. They will
surprise the laymen; for few have probably asked themselves how the
events related in the Bible from the standpoint of the Jews affected the
Egyptians, and what political conditions existed in the realm of Pharaoh
when the Hebrews left it. I have endeavored to represent these relations
with the utmost fidelity to the testimony of the monuments. For the
description of the Hebrews, which is mentioned in the Scriptures, the
Bible itself offers the best authority. The character of the "Pharaoh of
the Exodus" I also copied from the Biblical narrative, and the portraits
of the weak King Menephtah, which have been preserved, harmonize
admirably with it. What we have learned of later times induced me to
weave into the romance the conspiracy of Siptah, the accession to the
throne of Seti II., and the person of the Syrian Aarsu who, according to
the London Papyrus Harris I., after Siptah had become king, seized the
government.
The Naville excavations have fixed the location of Pithom-Succoth beyond
question, and have also brought to light the fortified store-house of
Pithom (Succoth) mentioned in the Bible; and as the scripture says the
Hebrews rested in this place and thence moved farther on, it must be
supposed that they overpowered the garrison of the strong building and
seized the contents of the spacious granaries, which are in existence at
the present day.
In my "Egypt and the Books of Moses" which appeared in 1868, I stated
that the Biblical Etham was the same as the Egyptian Chetam, that is, the
line of fortresses which protected the isthmus of Suez from the attacks
of the nations of the East, and my statement has long since found
universal acceptance. Through it, the turning back of the Hebrews before
Etham is intelligible.
The mount where the laws were given I believe was the majestic Serbal,
not the Sinai of the monks; the reasons for which I explained fully in my
work "Through Goshen to Sinai." I have also--in the same
volume--attempted to show that the halting-place of the tribes called in
the Bible "Dophkah" was the deserted mines of the modern Wadi Maghara.
By the aid of the mental and external experiences of the characters,
whose acts have in part been freely guided by the author's imagination,
he has endeavored to bring nearer to the sympathizing reader the human
side of the mighty destiny of the nation which it was incumbent on him to
describe. If he has succeeded in doing so, without belittling the
magnificent Biblical narrative, he has accomplished his desire; if he has
failed, he must content himself with the remembrance of the pleasure and
mental exaltation he experienced during the creation of this work.
Tutzing on the Starnberger See,
September 20th, 1889.
GEORG EBERS.
JOSHUA.
CHAPTER I.
"Go down, grandfather: I will watch."
But the old man to whom the entreaty was addressed shook his shaven head.
"Yet you can get no rest here. . . .
"And the stars? And the tumult below? Who can think of rest in hours like
these? Throw my cloak around me! Rest--on such a night of horror!"
"You are shivering. And how your hand and the instrument are shaking."
"Then support my arm."
The youth dutifully obeyed the request; but in a short time he exclaimed:
"Vain, all is vain; star after star is shrouded by the murky clouds.
Alas, hear the wailing from the city. Ah, it rises from our own house
too. I am so anxious, grandfather, feel how my head burns! Come down,
perhaps they need help."
"Their fate is in the hands of the gods--my place is here.
"But there--there! Look northward across the lake. No, farther to the
west. They are coming from the city of the dead."
"Oh, grandfather! Father--there!" cried the youth, a grandson of the
astrologer of Amon-Ra, to whom he was lending his aid. They were standing
in the observatory of the temple of this god in Tanis, the Pharaoh's
capital in the north of the land of Goshen. He moved away, depriving the
old man of the support of his shoulder, as he continued: "There, there!
Is the sea sweeping over the land? Have the clouds dropped on the earth
to heave to and fro? Oh, grandfather, look yonder! May the Immortals have
pity on us! The under-world is yawning, and the giant serpent Apep has
come forth from the realm of the dead. It is moving past the temple. I
see, I hear it. The great Hebrew's menace is approaching fulfilment. Our
race will be effaced from the earth. The serpent! Its head is turned
toward the southeast. It will devour the sun when it rises in the
morning."
The old man's eyes followed the youth's finger, and he, too, perceived a
huge, dark mass, whose outlines blended with the dusky night, come
surging through the gloom; he, too, heard, with a thrill of terror, the
monster's loud roar.
Both stood straining their eyes and ears to pierce the darkness; but
instead of gazing upward the star-reader's eye was bent upon the city,
the distant sea, and the level plain. Deep silence, yet no peace reigned
above them: the high wind now piled the dark clouds into shapeless
masses, anon severed that grey veil and drove the torn fragments far
asunder. The moon was invisible to mortal eyes, but the clouds were
toying with the bright Southern stars, sometimes hiding them, sometimes
affording a free course for their beams. Sky and earth alike showed a
constant interchange of pallid light and intense darkness. Sometimes the
sheen of the heavenly bodies flashed brightly from sea and bay, the
smooth granite surfaces of the obelisks in the precincts of the temple,
and the gilded copper roof of the airy royal palace, anon sea and river,
the sails in the harbor, the sanctuaries, the streets of the city, and
the palm-grown plain which surrounded it vanished in gloom. Eye and ear
failed to retain the impression of the objects they sought to discern;
for sometimes the silence was so profound that all life, far and near,
seemed hushed and dead, then a shrill shriek of anguish pierced the
silence of the night, followed at longer or shorter intervals by the loud
roar the youthful priest had mistaken for the voice of the serpent of the
nether-world, and to which grandfather and grandson listened with
increasing suspense.
The dark shape, whose incessant motion could be clearly perceived
whenever the starlight broke through the clouds, appeared first near the
city of the dead and the strangers' quarter. Both the youth and the old
man had been seized with terror, but the latter was the first to regain
his self-control, and his keen eye, trained to watch the stars, speedily
discovered that it was not a single giant form emerging from the city of
the dead upon the plain, but a multitude of moving shapes that seemed to
be swaying hither and thither over the meadow lands. The bellowing and
bleating, too, did not proceed from one special place, but came now
nearer and now farther away. Sometimes it seemed to issue from the bowels
of the earth, and at others to float from some airy height.
Fresh horror seized upon the old man. Grasping his grandson's right hand
in his, he pointed with his left to the necropolis, exclaiming in
tremulous tones: "The dead are too great a multitude. The under-world is
overflowing, as the river does when its bed is not wide enough for the
waters from the south. How they swarm and surge and roll onward! How they
scatter and sway to and fro. They are the souls of the thousands whom
grim death has snatched away, laden with the curse of the Hebrew,
unburied, unshielded from corruption, to descend the rounds of the ladder
leading to the eternal world."
"Yes, yes, those are their wandering ghosts," shrieked the youth in
absolute faith, snatching his hand from the grey-beard's grasp and
striking his burning brow, exclaiming, almost incapable of speech in his
horror: "Ay, those are the souls of the damned. The wind has swept them
into the sea, whose waters cast them forth again upon the land, but the
sacred earth spurns them and flings them into the air. The pure ether of
Shu hurls them back to the ground and now--oh look, listen--they are
seeking the way to the wilderness."
"To the fire!" cried the old astrologer. "Purify them, ye flames; cleanse
them, water."
The youth joined his grandfather's form of exorcism, and while still
chanting together, the trap-door leading to this observatory on the top
of the highest gate of the temple was opened, and a priest of inferior
rank called: "Cease thy toil. Who cares to question the stars when the
light of life is departing from all the denizens of earth!"
The old man listened silently till the priest, in faltering accents,
added that the astrologer's wife had sent him, then he stammered:
"Hora? Has my son, too, been stricken?"
The messenger bent his head, and the two listeners wept bitterly, for the
astrologer had lost his first-born son and the youth a beloved father.
But as the lad, shivering with the chill of fever, sank ill and powerless
on the old man's breast, the latter hastily released himself from his
embrace and hurried to the trap-door. Though the priest had announced
himself to be the herald of death, a father's heart needs more than the
mere words of another ere resigning all hope of the life of his child.
Down the stone stairs, through the lofty halls and wide courts of the
temple he hurried, closely followed by the youth, though his trembling
limbs could scarcely support his fevered body. The blow that had fallen
upon his own little circle had made the old man forget the awful vision
which perchance menaced the whole universe with destruction; but his
grandson could not banish the sight and, when he had passed the
fore-court and was approaching the outermost pylons his imagination,
under the tension of anxiety and grief, made the shadows of the obelisks
appear to be dancing, while the two stone statues of King Rameses, on the
corner pillars of the lofty gate, beat time with the crook they held in
their hands.
Then the fever struck the youth to the ground. His face was distorted by
the convulsions which tossed his limbs to and fro, and the old man,
failing on his knees, strove to protect the beautiful head, covered with
clustering curls, from striking the stone flags, moaning under his breath
"Now fate has overtaken him too."
Then calming himself, he shouted again and again for help, but in vain.
At last, as he lowered his tones to seek comfort in prayer, he heard the
sound of voices in the avenue of sphinxes beyond the pylons, and fresh
hope animated his heart.
Who was coming at so late an hour?
Loud wails of grief blended with the songs of the priests, the clinking
and tinkling of the metal sistrums, shaken by the holy women in the
service of the god, and the measured tread of men praying as they marched
in the procession which was approaching the temple.
Faithful to the habits of a long life, the astrologer raised his eyes
and, after a glance at the double row of granite pillars, the colossal
statues and obelisks in the fore-court, fixed them on the starlit skies.
Even amid his grief a bitter smile hovered around his sunken lips;
to-night the gods themselves were deprived of the honors which were their
due.
For on this, the first night after the new moon in the month of
Pharmuthi, the sanctuary in bygone years was always adorned with flowers.
As soon as the darkness of this moonless night passed away, the high
festival of the spring equinox and the harvest celebration would begin.
A grand procession in honor of the great goddess Neith, of Rennut, who
bestows the blessings of the fields, and of Horus at whose sign the seeds
begin to germinate, passed, in accordance with the rules prescribed by
the Book of the Divine Birth of the Sun, through the city to the river
and harbor; but to-day the silence of death reigned throughout the
sanctuary, whose courts at this hour were usually thronged with men,
women, and children, bringing offerings to lay on the very spot where
death's finger had now touched his grandson's heart.
A flood of light streamed into the vast space, hitherto but dimly
illumined by a few lamps. Could the throng be so frenzied as to imagine
that the joyous festival might be celebrated, spite of the unspeakable
horrors of the night.
Yet, the evening before, the council of priests had resolved that, on
account of the rage of the merciless pestilence, the temple should not be
adorned nor the procession be marshalled. In the afternoon many whose
houses had been visited by the plague had remained absent, and now while
he, the astrologer, had been watching the course of the stars, the pest
had made its way into this sanctuary, else why had it been forsaken by
the watchers and the other astrologers who had entered with him at
sunset, and whose duty it was to watch through the night?
He again turned with tender solicitude to the sufferer, but instantly
started to his feet, for the gates were flung wide open and the light of
torches and lanterns streamed into the court. A swift glance at the sky
told him that it was a little after midnight, yet his fears seemed to
have been true--the priests were crowding into the temples to prepare for
the harvest festival to-morrow.
But he was wrong. When had they ever entered the sanctuary for this
purpose in orderly procession, solemnly chanting hymns? Nor was the train
composed only of servants of the deity. The population had joined them,
for the shrill lamentations of women and wild cries of despair, such as
he had never heard before in all his long life within these sacred walls,
blended in the solemn litany.
Or were his senses playing him false? Was the groaning throng of restless
spirits which his grandson had pointed out to him from the observatory,
pouring into the sanctuary of the gods?
New horror seized upon him; with arms flung upward to bid the specters
avaunt he muttered the exorcism against the wiles of evil spirits. But he
soon let his hands fall again; for among the throng he noted some of his
friends who yesterday, at least, had still walked among living men.
First, the tall form of the second prophet of the god, then the women
consecrated to the service of Amon-Ra, the singers and the holy fathers
and, when he perceived behind the singers, astrologers, and pastophori
his own brother-in-law, whose house had yesterday been spared by the
plague, he summoned fresh courage and spoke to him. But his voice was
smothered by the shouts of the advancing multitude.
The courtyard was now lighted, but each individual was so engrossed by
his own sorrows that no one noticed the old astrologer. Tearing the cloak
from his shivering limbs to make a pillow for the lad's tossing head, he
heard, while tending him with fatherly affection, fierce imprecations on
the Hebrews who had brought this woe on Pharaoh and his people, mingling
with the chants and shouts of the approaching crowd and, recurring again
and again, the name of Prince Rameses, the heir to the throne, while the
tone in which it was uttered, the formulas of lamentation associated with
it, announced the tidings that the eyes of the monarch's first-born son
were closed in death.
The astrologer gazed at his grandson's wan features with increasing
anxiety, and even while the wailing for the prince rose louder and louder
a slight touch of gratification stirred his soul at the thought of the
impartial justice Death metes out alike to the sovereign on his throne
and the beggar by the roadside. He now realized what had brought the
noisy multitude to the temple!
With as much swiftness as his aged limbs would permit, he hastened
forward to meet the mourners; but ere he reached them he saw the
gate-keeper and his wife come out of their house, carrying between them
on a mat the dead body of a boy. The husband held one end, his fragile
little wife the other, and the gigantic warder was forced to stoop low to
keep the rigid form in a horizontal position and not let it slip toward
the woman. Three children, preceded by a little girl carrying a lantern,
closed the mournful procession.
Perhaps no one would have noticed the group, had not the gate-keeper's
little wife shrieked so wildly and piteously that no one could help
hearing her lamentations. The second prophet of Amon, and then his
companions, turned toward them. The procession halted, and as some of the
priests approached the corpse the gate-keeper shouted loudly: "Away, away
from the plague! It has stricken our first-born son."
The wife meantime had snatched the lantern from her little girl's hand
and casting its light full on the dead boy's rigid face, she screamed:
"The god hath suffered it to happen. Ay, he permitted the horror to enter
beneath his own roof. Not his will, but the curse of the stranger rules
us and our lives. Look, this was our first-born son, and the plague has
also stricken two of the temple-servants. One already lies dead in our
room, and there lies Kamus, grandson of the astrologer Rameri. We heard
the old man call, and saw what was happening; but who can prop another's
house when his own is falling? Take heed while there is time; for the
gods have opened their own sanctuaries to the horror. If the whole world
crumbles into ruin, I shall neither marvel nor grieve. My lord priests, I
am only a poor lowly woman, but am I not right when I ask: Do our gods
sleep, or has some one paralyzed them, or what are they doing that they
leave us and our children in the power of the base Hebrew brood?"
"Overthrow them! Down with the foreigners! Death to the sorcerer
Mesu,--[Mesu is the Egyptian name of Moses]--hurl him into the sea." Such
were the imprecations that followed the woman's curse, as an echo follows
a shout, and the aged astrologer's brother-in-law Hornecht, captain of
the archers, whose hot blood seethed in his veins at the sight of the
dying form of his beloved nephew, waved his short sword, crying
frantically: "Let all men who have hearts follow me. Upon them! A life
for a life! Ten Hebrews for each Egyptian whom the sorcerer has slain!"
As a flock rushes into a fire when the ram leads the way, the warrior's
summons fired the throng. Women forced themselves in front of the men,
pressing after him into the gateway, and when the servants of the temple
lingered to await the verdict of the prophet of Amon, the latter drew his
stately figure to its full height, and said calmly: "Let all who wear
priestly garments remain and pray with me. The populace is heaven's
instrument to mete out vengeance. We will remain here to pray for their
success."
CHAPTER II.
Bai, the second prophet of Amon, who acted as the representative of the
aged and feeble chief-prophet and high-priest Rui, went into the holy of
holies, the throng of inferior servants of the divinity pursued their
various duties, and the frenzied mob rushed through the streets of the
city towards the distant Hebrew quarter.
As the flood, pouring into the valley, sweeps everything before it, the
people, rushing to seek vengeance, forced every one they met to join
them. No Egyptian from whom death had snatched a loved one failed to
follow the swelling torrent, which increased till hundreds became
thousands. Men, women, and children, freedmen and slaves, winged by the
ardent longing to bring death and destruction on the hated Hebrews,
darted to the remote quarter where they dwelt.
How the workman had grasped a hatchet, the housewife an axe, they
themselves scarcely knew. They were dashing forward to deal death and
ruin and had had no occasion to search for weapons--they had been close
at hand.
The first to feel the weight of their vengeance must be Nun, an aged
Hebrew, rich in herds, loved and esteemed by many an Egyptian whom he had
benefitted--but when hate and revenge speak, gratitude shrinks timidly
into the background.
His property, like the houses and hovels of his people, was in the
strangers' quarter, west of Tanis, and lay nearest to the streets
inhabited by the Egyptians themselves.
Usually at this hour herds of cattle and flocks of sheep were being
watered or driven to pasture and the great yard before his house was
filled with cattle, servants of both sexes, carts, and agricultural
implements. The owner usually overlooked the departure of the flocks and
herds, and the mob had marked him and his family for the first victims of
their fury.
The swiftest of the avengers had now reached his extensive
farm-buildings, among them Hornecht, captain of the archers,
brother-in-law of the old astrologer. House and barns were brightly
illumined by the first light of the young day. A stalwart smith kicked
violently on the stout door; but the unbolted sides yielded so easily
that he was forced to cling to the door-post to save himself from
falling. Others, Hornecht among them, pressed past him into the yard.
What did this mean?
Had some new spell been displayed to attest the power of the Hebrew
leader Mesu, who had brought such terrible plagues on the land,--and of
his God.
The yard was absolutely empty. The stalls contained a few dead cattle and
sheep, killed because they had been crippled in some way, while a lame
lamb limped off at sight of the mob. The carts and wagons, too, had
vanished. The lowing, bleating throng which the priests had imagined to
be the souls of the damned was the Hebrew host, departing by night from
their old home with all their flocks under the guidance of Moses.
The captain of the archers dropped his sword, and a spectator might have
believed that the sight was a pleasant surprise to him; but his neighbor,
a clerk from the king's treasure-house, gazed around the empty space with
the disappointed air of a man who has been defrauded.
The flood of schemes and passions, which had surged so high during the
night, ebbed under the clear light of day. Even the soldier's quickly
awakened wrath had long since subsided into composure. The populace might
have wreaked their utmost fury on the other Hebrews, but not upon Nun,
whose son, Hosea, had been his comrade in arms, one of the most
distinguished leaders in the army, and an intimate family friend. Had he
thought of him and foreseen that his father's dwelling would be first
attacked, he would never have headed the mob in their pursuit of
vengeance; nay, he bitterly repented having forgotten the deliberate
judgment which befitted his years.
While many of the throng began to plunder and destroy Nun's deserted
home, men and women came to report that not a soul was to be found in any
of the neighboring dwellings. Others told of cats cowering on the
deserted hearthstones, of slaughtered cattle and shattered furniture; but
at last the furious avengers dragged out a Hebrew with his family and a
half-witted grey-haired woman found hidden among some straw. The crone,
amid imbecile laughter, said her people had made themselves hoarse
calling her, but Meliela was too wise to walk on and on as they meant to
do; besides her feet were too tender, and she had not even a pair of
shoes.
The man, a frightfully ugly Jew, whom few of his own race would have
pitied, protested, sometimes with a humility akin to fawning, sometimes
with the insolence which was a trait of his character, that he had
nothing to do with the god of lies in whose name the seducer Moses had
led away his people to ruin; he himself, his wife, and his child had
always been on friendly terms with the Egyptians. Indeed, many knew him,
he was a money-lender and when the rest of his nation had set forth on
their pilgrimage, he had concealed himself, hoping to pursue his
dishonest calling and sustain no loss.
Some of his debtors, however, were among the infuriated populace, though
even without their presence he was a doomed man; for he was the first
person on whom the excited mob could show that they were resolved upon
revenge. Rushing upon him with savage yells, the lifeless bodies of the
luckless wretch and his family were soon strewn over the ground. Nobody
knew who had done this first bloody deed; too many had dashed forward at
once.
Not a few others who had remained in the houses and huts also fell
victims to the people's thirst for vengeance, though many had time to
escape, and while streams of blood were flowing, axes were wielded, and
walls and doors were battered down with beams and posts to efface the
abodes of the detested race from the earth.
The burning embers brought by some frantic women were extinguished and
trampled out; the more prudent warned them of the peril that would menace
their own homes and the whole city of Tanis, if the strangers' quarter
should be fired.
So the Hebrews' dwellings escaped the flames; but as the sun mounted
higher dense clouds of white dust shrouded the abodes they had forsaken,
and where, only yesterday, thousands of people had possessed happy homes
and numerous herds had quenched their thirst in fresh waters, the glowing
soil was covered with rubbish and stone, shattered beams, and broken
woodwork. Dogs and cats left behind by their owners wandered among the
ruins and were joined by women and children who lived in the beggars'
hovels on the edge of the necropolis close by, and now, holding their
hands over their mouths, searched amid the stifling dust and rubbish for
any household utensil or food which might have been left by the fugitives
and overlooked by the mob.
During the afternoon Fai, the second prophet of Amon, was carried past
the ruined quarter. He did not come to gloat over the spectacle of
destruction, it was his nearest way from the necropolis to his home. Yet
a satisfied smile hovered around his stern mouth as he noticed how
thoroughly the people had performed their work. His own purpose, it is
true, had not been fulfilled, the leader of the fugitives had escaped
their vengeance, but hate, though never sated, can yet be gratified. Even
the smallest pangs of an enemy are a satisfaction, and the priest had
just come from the grieving Pharaoh. He had not succeeded in releasing
him entirely from the bonds of the Hebrew magician, but he had loosened
them.
The resolute, ambitious man, by no means wont to hold converse with
himself, had repeated over and over again, while sitting alone in the
sanctuary reflecting on what had occurred and what yet remained to be
done, these little words, and the words were: "Bless me too!"
Pharaoh had uttered them, and the entreaty had been addressed neither to
old Rui, the chief priest, nor to himself, the only persons who could
possess the privilege of blessing the monarch, nay--but to the most
atrocious wretch that breathed, to the foreigner the Hebrew, Mesu, whom
he hated more than any other man on earth.
"Bless me too!" The pious entreaty, which wells so trustingly from the
human heart in the hour of anguish, had pierced his soul like a dagger.
It had seemed as if such a petition, uttered by the royal lips to such a
man, had broken the crozier in the hand of the whole body of Egyptian
priests, stripped the panther-skin from their shoulders, and branded with
shame the whole people whom he loved.
He knew full well that Moses was one of the wisest sages who had ever
graduated from the Egyptian schools, knew that Pharaoh was completely
under the thrall of this man who had grown up in the royal household and
been a friend of his father Rameses the Great. He had seen the monarch
pardon deeds committed by Moses which would have cost the life of any
other mortal, though he were the highest noble in the land--and what must
the Hebrew be to Pharaoh, the sun-god incarnate on the throne of the
world, when standing by the death-bed of his own son, he could yield to
the impulse to uplift his hands to him and cry "Bless me too!"
He had told himself all these things, maturely considered them, yet he
would not yield to the might of the strangers. The destruction of this
man and all his race was in his eyes the holiest, most urgent duty--to
accomplish which he would not shrink even from assailing the throne. Nay,
in his eyes Pharaoh Menephtah's shameful entreaty: "Bless me too!" had
deprived him of all the rights of sovereignty.
Moses had murdered Pharaoh's first-born son, but he and the aged
chief-priest of Amon held the weal or woe of the dead prince's soul in
their hands,--a weapon sharp and strong, for he knew the monarch's weak
and vacillating heart. If the high-priest of Amon--the only man whose
authority surpassed his own--did not thwart him by some of the
unaccountable whims of age, it would be the merest trifle to force
Pharaoh to yield; but any concession made to-day would be withdrawn
to-morrow, should the Hebrew succeed in coming between the irresolute
monarch and his Egyptian advisers. This very day the unworthy son of the
great Rameses had covered his face and trembled like a timid fawn at the
bare mention of the sorcerer's name, and to-morrow he might curse him and
pronounce a death sentence upon him. Perhaps he might be induced to do
this, and on the following one he would recall him and again sue for his
blessing.
Down with such monarchs! Let the feeble reed on the throne be hurled into
the dust! Already he had chosen a successor from among the princes of the
blood, and when the time was ripe--when Rui, the high-priest of Amon, had
passed the limits of life decreed by the gods to mortals and closed his
eyes in death, he, Bai, would occupy his place, a new life for Egypt, and
Moses and his race would commence would perish.
While the prophet was absorbed in these reflections a pair of ravens
fluttered around his head and, croaking loudly, alighted on the dusty
ruins of one of the shattered houses. He involuntarily glanced around him
and noted that they had perched on the corpse of a murdered Hebrew, lying
half concealed amid the rubbish. A smile which the priests of lower rank
who surrounded his litter knew not how to interpret, flitted over his
shrewd, defiant countenance.
CHAPTER III.
Hornecht, commander of the archers, was among the prophet's companions.
Indeed they were on terms of intimacy, for the soldier was a leader amid
the nobles who had conspired to dethrone Pharaoh.
As they approached Nun's ruined dwelling, the prophet pointed to the
wreck and said: "The former owner of this abode is the only Hebrew I
would gladly spare. He was a man of genuine worth, and his son,
Hosea. . . ."
"Will be one of us," the captain interrupted. "There are few better men
in Pharaoh's army, and," he added, lowering his voice, "I rely on him
when the decisive hour comes."
"We will discuss that before fewer witnesses," replied Bai. "But I am
greatly indebted to him. During the Libyan war--you are aware of the
fact--I fell into the hands of the enemy, and Hosea, at the head of his
little troop, rescued me from the savage hordes." Sinking his tones, he
went on in his most instructive manner, as though apologizing for the
mischief wrought: "Such is the course of earthly affairs! Where a whole
body of men merit punishment, the innocent must suffer with the guilty.
Under such circumstances the gods themselves cannot separate the
individual from the multitude; nay, even the innocent animals share the
penalty. Look at the flocks of doves fluttering around the ruins; they
are seeking their cotes in vain. And the cat with her kittens yonder. Go
and take them, Beki; it is our duty to save the sacred animals from
starving to death."
And this man, who had just been planning the destruction of so many of
his fellow-mortals, was so warmly interested in kindly caring for the
senseless beasts, that he stopped his litter and watched his servants
catch the cats.
This was less quickly accomplished than he had hoped; for one had taken
refuge in the nearest cellar, whose opening was too narrow for the men to
follow. The youngest, a slender Nubian, undertook the task; but he had
scarcely approached the hole when he started back, calling: "There is a
human being there who seems to be alive. Yes, he is raising his hand. It
is a boy or a youth, and assuredly no slave; his head is covered with
long waving locks, and--a sunbeam is shining into the cellar--I can see a
broad gold circlet on his arm."
"Perhaps it is one of Nun's kindred, who has been forgotten," said
Hornecht, and Bai eagerly added:
"It is an interposition from the gods! Their sacred animals have pointed
out the way by which I can render a service to the man to whom I am so
much indebted. Try to get in, Beki, and bring the youth out."
Meanwhile the Nubian had removed the stone whose fall had choked the
opening, and soon after he lifted toward his companions a motionless
young form which they brought into the open air and bore to a well whose
cool water speedily restored consciousness.
As he regained his senses, he rubbed his eyes, gazed around him
bewildered, as if uncertain where he was, then his head drooped as though
overwhelmed with grief and horror, revealing that the locks at the back
were matted together with black clots of dried blood.
The prophet had the deep wound, inflicted on the lad by a falling stone,
washed at the well and, after it had been bandaged, summoned him to his
own litter, which was protected from the sun.
The young Hebrew, bringing a message, had arrived at the house of his
grandfather Nun, before sunrise, after a long night walk from Pithom,
called by the Hebrews Succoth, but finding it deserted had lain down in
one of the rooms to rest a while. Roused by the shouts of the infuriated
mob, he had heard the curses on his race which rang through the whole
quarter and fled to the cellar. The roof, which had injured him in its
fall, proved his deliverance; for the clouds of dust which had concealed
everything as it came down hid him from the sight of the rioters.
The prophet looked at him intently and, though the youth was unwashed,
wan, and disfigured by the bloody bandage round his head, he saw that the
lad he had recalled to life was a handsome, well-grown boy just nearing
manhood.
His sympathy was roused, and his stern glance softened as he asked kindly
whence he came and what had brought him to Tanis; for the rescued youth's
features gave no clue to his race. He might readily have declared himself
an Egyptian, but he frankly admitted that he was a grandson of Nun. He
had just attained his eighteenth year, his name was Ephraim, like that of
his forefather, the son of Joseph, and he had come to visit his
grandfather. The words expressed steadfast self-respect and pride in his
illustrious ancestry.
He delayed a short time ere answering the question whether he brought a
message; but soon collected his thoughts and, looking the prophet
fearlessly in the face, replied:
"Whoever you may be, I have been taught to speak the truth, so I will
tell you that I have another relative in Tanis, Hosea, the son of Nun, a
chief in Pharaoh's army, for whom I have a message."
"And I will tell you," the priest replied, "that it was for the sake of
this very Hosea I tarried here and ordered my servants to bring you out
of the ruined house. I owe him a debt of gratitude, and though most of
your nation have committed deeds worthy of the harshest punishment, for
the sake of his worth you shall remain among us free and unharmed."
The boy raised his eyes to the priest with a proud, fiery glance, but ere
he could find words, Bai went on with encouraging kindness.
"I believe I can read in your face, my lad, that you have come to seek
admittance to Pharaoh's army under your uncle Hosea. Your figure is
well-suited to the trade of war, and you surely are not wanting in
courage."
A smile of flattered vanity rested on Ephraim's lips, and toying with the
broad gold bracelet on his arm, perhaps unconsciously, he replied with
eagerness:
"Ay, my lord, I have often proved my courage in the hunting field; but at
home we have plenty of sheep and cattle, which even now I call my own,
and it seems to me a more enviable lot to wander freely and rule the
shepherds than to obey the commands of others."
"Aha!" said the priest. "Perhaps Hosea may instil different and better
views. To rule--a lofty ambition for youth. The misfortune is that we who
have attained it are but servants whose burdens grow heavier with the
increasing number of those who obey us. You understand me, Hornecht, and
you, my lad, will comprehend my meaning later, when you become the
palm-tree the promise of your youth foretells. But we are losing time.
Who sent you to Hosea?"
The youth cast down his eyes irresolutely, but when the prophet broke the
silence with the query: "And what has become of the frankness you were
taught?" he responded promptly and resolutely:
"I came for the sake of a woman whom you know not."
"A woman?" the prophet repeated, casting an enquiring glance at Hornecht.
"When a bold warrior and a fair woman seek each other, the Hathors"--[The
Egyptian goddesses of love, who are frequently represented with cords in
their hands,]--are apt to appear and use the binding cords; but it does
not befit a servant of the divinity to witness such goings on, so I
forbear farther questioning. Take charge of the lad, captain, and aid him
to deliver his message to Hosea. The only doubt is whether he is in the
city."
"No," the soldier answered, "but he is expected with thousands of his men
at the armory to-day."
"Then may the Hathors, who are partial to love messengers, bring these
two together to-morrow at latest," said the priest.
But the lad indignantly retorted: "I am the bearer of no love message."
The prophet, pleased with the bold rejoinder, answered pleasantly: "I had
forgotten that I was accosting a young shepherd-prince." Then he added in
graver tones: "When you have found Hosea, greet him from me and tell him
that Bai, the second prophet of Amon sought to discharge a part of the
debt of gratitude he owed for his release from the hands of the Libyans
by extending his protection to you, his nephew. Perhaps, my brave boy,
you do not know that you have escaped as if by a miracle a double peril;
the savage populace would no more have spared your life than would the
stifling dust of the falling houses. Remember this, and tell Hosea also
from me, Bai, that I am sure when he beholds the woe wrought by the magic
arts of one of your race on the house of Pharaoh, to which he vowed
fealty, and with it on this city and the whole country, he will tear
himself with abhorrence from his kindred. They have fled like cowards,
after dealing the sorest blows, robbing of their dearest possessions
those among whom they dwelt in peace, whose protection they enjoyed, and
who for long years have given them work and ample food. All this they
have done and, if I know him aright, he will turn his back upon men who
have committed such crimes. Tell him also that this has been voluntarily
done by the Hebrew officers and men under the command of the Syrian
Aarsu. This very morning--Hosea will have heard the news from other
sources--they offered sacrifices not only to Baal and Seth, their own
gods, whom so many of you were ready to serve ere the accursed sorcerer,
Mesu, seduced you, but also to Father Amon and the sacred nine of our
eternal deities. If he will do the same, we will rise hand in hand to the
highest place, of that he may be sure--and well he merits it. The
obligation still due him I shall gratefully discharge in other ways,
which must for the present remain secret. But you may tell your uncle now
from me that I shall find means to protect Nun, his noble father, when
the vengeance of the gods and of Pharaoh falls upon the rest of your
race. Already--tell him this also--the sword is whetted, and a pitiless
judgment is impending. Bid him ask himself what fugitive shepherds can do
against the power of the army among whose ablest leaders he is numbered.
Is your father still alive, my son?"
"No, he was borne to his last resting-place long ago," replied the youth
in a faltering voice.
Was the fever of his wound attacking him? Or did the shame of belonging
to a race capable of acts so base overwhelm the young heart? Or did the
lad cling to his kindred, and was it wrath and resentment at hearing them
so bitterly reviled which made his color vary from red to pale and roused
such a tumult in his soul that he was scarcely capable of speech? No
matter! This lad was certainly no suitable bearer of the message the
prophet desired to send to his uncle, and Bai beckoned to Hornecht to
come with him under the shadow of a broad-limbed sycamore-tree.
The point was to secure Hosea's services in the army at any cost, so he
laid his hand on his friend's shoulder, saying:
"You know that it was my wife who won you and others over to our cause.
She serves us better and more eagerly than many a man, and while I
appreciate your daughter's beauty, she never tires of lauding the winning
charm of her innocence."
"And Kasana is to take part in the plot?" cried the soldier angrily.
"Not as an active worker, like my wife,--certainly not."
"She would be ill-suited to such a task," replied the other in a calmer
tone, "she is scarcely more than a child."
"Yet through her aid we might bring to our cause a man whose good-will
seems to me priceless."
"You mean Hosea?" asked the captain, his brow darkening again, but the
prophet added:
"And if I do? Is he still a real Hebrew? Can you deem it unworthy the
daughter of a distinguished warrior to bestow her band on a man who, if
our plans prosper, will be commander-in-chief of all the troops in the
land?"
"No, my lord!" cried Hornecht. "But one of my motives for rebelling
against Pharaoh and upholding Siptah is that the king's mother was a
foreigner, while our own blood courses through Siptah's veins. The mother
decides the race to which a man belongs, and Hosea's mother was a Hebrew
woman. He is my friend, I value his talents; Kasana likes him. . . ."
"Yet you desire a more distinguished son-in-law?" interrupted his
companion. "How is our arduous enterprise to prosper, if those who are to
peril their lives for its success consider the first sacrifice too great?
You say that your daughter favors Hosea?"
"Yes, she did care for him," the soldier answered; "yes, he was her
heart's desire. But I compelled her to obey me, and now that she is a
widow, am I to give her to the man whom--the gods alone know with how
much difficulty--I forced her to resign? When was such an act heard of in
Egypt?"
"Ever since the men and women who dwell by the Nile have submitted, for
the sake of a great cause, to demands opposed to their wishes," replied
the priest.
"Consider all this, and remember that Hosea's ancestress--he boasted of
it in your own presence--was an Egyptian, the daughter of a man of my own
class."
"How many generations have passed to the tomb since?"
"No matter! It brings us into closer relations with him. That must
suffice. Farewell until this evening. Meanwhile, will you extend your
hospitality to Hosea's nephew and commend him to your fair daughter's
nursing; he seems in sore need of care."
CHAPTER IV.
The house of Hornecht, like nearly every other dwelling in the city, was
the scene of the deepest mourning. The men had shaved their hair, and the
women had put dust on their foreheads. The archer's wife had died long
before, but his daughter and her women received him with waving veils and
loud lamentations; for the astrologer, his brother-in-law, had lost both
his first-born son and his grandson, and the plague had snatched its
victims from the homes of many a friend.
But the senseless youth soon demanded all the care the women could
bestow, and after bathing him and binding a healing ointment on the
dangerous wound in his head, strong wine and food were placed before him,
after which, refreshed and strengthened, he obeyed the summons of the
daughter of his host.
The dust-covered, worn-out fellow was transformed into a handsome youth.
His perfumed hair fell in long curling locks from beneath the fresh white
bandage, and gold-bordered Egyptian robes from the wardrobe of Kasana's
dead husband covered his pliant bronzed limbs. He seemed pleased with the
finery of his garments, which exhaled a subtle odor of spikenard new to
his senses; for the eyes in his handsome face sparkled brilliantly.
It was many a day since the captain's daughter, herself a woman of
unusual beauty and charm, had seen a handsomer youth. Within the year she
had married a man she did not love Kasana had returned a widow to her
father's house, which lacked a mistress, and the great wealth bequeathed
to her, at her husband's death, made it possible for her to bring into
the soldier's unpretending home the luxury and ease which to her had now
become a second nature.
Her father, a stern man prone to sudden fits of passion, now yielded
absolutely to her will. Formerly he had pitilessly enforced his own,
compelling the girl of fifteen to wed a man many years her senior. This
had been done because he perceived that Kasana had given her young heart
to Hosea, the soldier, and he deemed it beneath his dignity to receive
the Hebrew, who at that time held no prominent position in the army, as
his son-in-law. An Egyptian girl had no choice save to accept the husband
chosen by her father and Kasana submitted, though she shed so many bitter
tears that the archer rejoiced when, in obedience to his will, she had
wedded an unloved husband.
But even as a widow Kasana's heart clung to the Hebrew. When the army was
in the field her anxiety was ceaseless; day and night were spent in
restlessness and watching. When news came from the troops she asked only
about Hosea, and her father with deep annoyance attributed to her love
for the Hebrew her rejection of suitor after suitor. As a widow she had a
right to the bestowal of her own hand, and the tender, gentle-natured
woman astonished Hornecht by the resolute decision displayed, not alone
to him and lovers of her own rank, but to Prince Siptah, whose cause the
captain had espoused as his own.
To-day Kasana expressed her delight at the Hebrew's return with such
entire frankness and absence of reserve that the quick-tempered man
rushed out of the house lest he might be tempted into some thoughtless
act or word. His young guest was left to the care of his daughter and her
nurse.
How deeply the lad's sensitive nature was impressed by the airy rooms,
the open verandas supported by many pillars, the brilliant hues of the
painting, the artistic household utensils, the soft cushions, and the
sweet perfume everywhere! All these things were novel and strange to the
son of a herdsman who had always lived within the grey walls of a
spacious, but absolutely plain abode, and spent months together in canvas
tents among shepherds and flocks, nay was more accustomed to be in the
open air than under any shelter! He felt as though some wizard had borne
him into a higher and more beautiful world, where he was entirely at home
in his magnificent garb, with his perfumed curls and limbs fresh from the
bath. True, the whole earth was fair, even out in the pastures among the
flocks or round the fire in front of the tent in the cool of the evening,
when the shepherds sang, the hunters told tales of daring exploits, and
the stars sparkled brightly overhead.
But all these pleasures were preceded by weary, hateful labor; here it
was a delight merely to see and to breathe and, when the curtains parted
and the young widow, giving him a friendly greeting, made him sit down
opposite to her, sometimes questioning him and sometimes listening with
earnest sympathy to his replies, he almost imagined his senses had failed
him as they had done under the ruins of the fallen house, and he was
enjoying the sweetest of dreams. The feeling that threatened to stifle
him and frequently interrupted the flow of words was the rapture bestowed
upon him by great Aschera, the companion of Baal, of whom the Phoenician
traders who supplied the shepherds with many good things had told him
such marvels, and whom the stern Miriam forbade him ever to name at home.
His family had instilled into his young heart hatred of the Egyptians as
the oppressors of his race, but could they be so wicked, could he detest
a people among whom were creatures like this lovely, gentle woman, who
gazed into his eyes so softly, so tenderly, whose voice fell on his ear
like harmonious music, and whose glance made his blood course so swiftly
that he could scarce endure it and pressed his hand upon his heart to
quiet its wild pulsation.
Kasana sat opposite to him on a seat covered with a panther-skin, drawing
the fine wool from the distaff. He had pleased her and she had received
him kindly because he was related to the man whom she had loved from
childhood. She imagined that she could trace a resemblance between him
and Hosea, though the youth lacked the grave earnestness of the man to
whom she had yielded her young heart, she knew not why nor when, though
he had never sought her love.
A lotus blossom rested among her dark waving curls, and its stem fell in
a graceful curve on her bent neck, round which clustered a mass of soft
locks. When she lifted her eyes to his, he felt as though two springs had
opened to pour floods of bliss into his young breast, and he had already
clasped in greeting the dainty hand which held the yarn.
She now questioned him about Hosea and the woman who had sent the
message, whether she was young and fair and whether any tie of love bound
her to his uncle.
Ephraim laughed merrily. She who had sent him was so grave and earnest
that the bare thought of her being capable of any tender emotion wakened
his mirth. As to her beauty, he had never asked himself the question.
The young widow interpreted the laugh as the reply she most desired and,
much relieved, laid aside the spindle and invited Ephraim to go into the
garden.
How fragrant and full of bloom it was, how well-kept were the beds, the
paths, the arbors, and the pond.
His unpretending home adjoined a dreary yard, wholly unadorned and filled
with pens for sheep and cattle. Yet he knew that at some future day he
would be owner of great possessions, for he was the sole child and heir
of a wealthy father and his mother was the daughter of the rich Nun. The
men servants had told him this more than once, and it angered him to see
that his own home was scarcely better than Hornecht's slave-quarters, to
which Kasana had called his attention.
During their stroll through the garden Ephraim was asked to help her cull
the flowers and, when the basket he carried was filled, she invited him
to sit with her in a bower and aid her to twine the wreaths. These were
intended for the dear departed. Her uncle and a beloved cousin--who bore
some resemblance to Ephraim--had been snatched away the night before by
the plague which his people had brought upon Tanis.
From the street which adjoined the garden-wall they heard the wails of
women lamenting the dead or bearing a corpse to the tomb. Once, when the
cries of woe rose more loudly and clearly than ever, Kasana gently
reproached him for all that the people of Tanis had suffered through the
Hebrews, and asked if he could deny that the Egyptians had good reason to
hate a race which had brought such anguish upon them.
It was hard for Ephraim to find a fitting answer; he had been told that
the God of his race had punished the Egyptians to rescue his own people
from shame and bondage, and he could neither condemn nor scorn the men of
his own blood. So he kept silence that he might neither speak falsely nor
blaspheme; but Kasana allowed him no peace, and he at last replied that
aught which caused her sorrow was grief to him, but his people had no
power over life and health, and when a Hebrew was ill, he often sent for
an Egyptian physician. What had occurred was doubtless the will of the
great God of his fathers, whose power far surpassed the might of any
other deity. He himself was a Hebrew, yet she would surely believe his
assurance that he was guiltless of the plague and would gladly recall her
uncle and cousin to life, had he the power to do so. For her sake he
would undertake the most difficult enterprise.
She smiled kindly and replied:
"My poor boy! If I see any guilt in you, it is only that you are one of a
race which knows no ruth, no patience. Our beloved, hapless dead! They
must even lose the lamentations of their kindred; for the house where
they rest is plague-stricken and no one is permitted to enter."
She silently wiped her eyes and went on arranging her garlands, but tear
after tear coursed down her cheeks.
Ephraim knew not what to say, and mutely handed her the leaves and
blossoms. Whenever his hand touched hers a thrill ran through his veins.
His head and the wound began to ache, and he sometimes felt a slight
chill. He knew that the fever was increasing, as it had done once before
when he nearly lost his life in the red disease; but he was ashamed to
own it and battled bravely against his pain.
When the sun was nearing the horizon Hornecht entered the garden. He had
already seen Hosea, and though heartily glad to greet his old friend once
more, it had vexed him that the soldier's first enquiry was for his
daughter. He did not withhold this from the young widow, but his flashing
eyes betrayed the displeasure with which he delivered the Hebrew's
message. Then, turning to Ephraim, he told him that Hosea and his men
would encamp outside of the city, pitching their tents, on account of the
pestilence, between Tanis and the sea. They would soon march by. His
uncle sent Ephraim word that he must seek him in his tent.
When he noticed that the youth was aiding his daughter to weave the
garlands, he smiled, and said:
"Only this morning this young fellow declared his intention of remaining
free and a ruler all his life. Now he has taken service with you, Kasana.
You need not blush, young friend. If either your mistress or your uncle
can persuade you to join us and embrace the noblest trade--that of the
soldier--so much the better for you. Look at me! I've wielded the bow
more than forty years and still rejoice in my profession. I must obey, it
is true, but it is also my privilege to command, and the thousands who
obey me are not sheep and cattle, but brave men. Consider the matter
again. He would make a splendid leader of the archers. What say you,
Kasana?"
"Certainly," replied the young widow. And she was about to say more, but
the regular tramp of approaching troops was heard on the other side of
the garden-wall. A slight flush crimsoned Kasana's cheeks, her eyes
sparkled with a light that startled Ephraim and, regardless of her father
or her guest, she darted past the pond, across paths and flower-beds, to
a grassy bank beside the wall, whence she gazed eagerly toward the road
and the armed host which soon marched by.
Hosea, in full armor, headed his men. As he passed Hornecht's garden he
turned his grave head, and seeing Kasana lowered his battle-axe in
friendly salutation.
Ephraim had followed the captain of the archers, who pointed out the
youth's uncle, saying: "Shining armor would become you also, and when
drums are beating, pipes squeaking shrilly, and banners waving, a man
marches as lightly as if he had wings. To-day the martial music is hushed
by the terrible woe brought upon us by that Hebrew villain. True, Hosea
is one of his race yet, though I cannot forget that fact, I must admit
that he is a genuine soldier, a model for the rising generation. Tell him
what I think of him on this score. Now bid farewell to Kasana quickly and
follow the men; the little side-door in the wall is open." He turned
towards the house as he spoke, and Ephraim held out his hand to bid the
young widow farewell.
She clasped it, but hurriedly withdrew her own, exclaiming anxiously:
"How burning hot your hand is! You have a fever!"
"No, no," faltered the youth, but even while speaking he fell upon his
knees and the veil of unconsciousness descended upon the sufferer's soul,
which had been the prey of so many conflicting emotions.
Kasana was alarmed, but speedily regained her composure and began to cool
his brow and head by bathing them with water from the neighboring pond.
Yes, in his boyhood the man she loved must have resembled this youth. Her
heart throbbed more quickly and, while supporting his head in her hands,
she gently kissed him.
She supposed him to be unconscious, but the refreshing water had already
dispelled the brief swoon, and he felt the caress with a thrill of
rapture. But he kept his eyes closed, and would gladly have lain for a
life-time with his head pillowed on her breast in the hope that her lips
might once more meet his. But instead of kissing him a second time she
called loudly for aid. He raised himself, gave one wild, ardent look into
her face and, ere she could stay him, rushed like a strong man to the
garden gate, flung it open, and followed the troops. He soon overtook the
rear ranks, passed on in advance of the others, and at last reached their
leader's side and, calling his uncle by name, gave his own. Hosea, in his
joy and astonishment, held out his arms, but ere Ephraim could fall upon
his breast, he again lost consciousness, and stalwart soldiers bore the
senseless lad into the tent the quartermaster had already pitched on a
dune by the sea.
CHAPTER V.
It was midnight. A fire was blazing in front of Hosea's tent, and he sat
alone before it, gazing mournfully now into the flames and anon over the
distant country. Inside the canvas walls Ephraim was lying on his uncle's
camp-bed.
The surgeon who attended the soldiers had bandaged the youth's wounds,
given him an invigorating cordial, and commanded him to keep still; for
the violence with which the fever had attacked the lad alarmed him.
But in spite of the leech's prescription Ephraim continued restless.
Sometimes Kasana's image rose before his eyes, increasing the fever of
his over-heated blood, sometimes he recalled the counsel to become a
warrior like his uncle. The advice seemed wise--at least he tried to
persuade himself that it was--because it promised honor and fame, but in
reality he wished to follow it because it would bring her for whom his
soul yearned nearer to him.
Then his pride rose as he remembered the insults which she and her father
had heaped on those to whom by every tie of blood and affection, he
belonged. His hand clenched as he thought of the ruined home of his
grandfather, whom he had ever regarded one of the noblest of men. Nor was
his message forgotten. Miriam had repeated it again and again, and his
clear memory retained every syllable, for he had unweariedly iterated it
to himself during his solitary walk to Tanis. He was striving to do the
same thing now but, ere he could finish, his mind always reverted to
thoughts of Kasana. The leech had told Hosea to forbid the sufferer to
talk and, when the youth attempted to deliver his message, the uncle
ordered him to keep silence. Then the soldier arranged his pillow with a
mother's tenderness, gave him his medicine, and kissed him on the
forehead. At last he took his seat by the fire before the tent and only
rose to give Ephraim a drink when he saw by the stars that an hour had
passed.
The flames illumined Hosea's bronzed features, revealing the countenance
of a man who had confronted many a peril and vanquished all by steadfast
perseverance and wise consideration. His black eyes had an imperious
look, and his full, firmly-compressed lips suggested a quick temper and,
still more, the iron will of a resolute man. His broad-shouldered form
leaned against some lances thrust crosswise into the earth, and when he
passed his strong hand through his thick black locks or smoothed his dark
beard, and his eyes sparkled with ire, it was evident that his soul was
stirred by conflicting emotions and that he stood on the threshold of a
great resolve. The lion was resting, but when he starts up, let his foes
beware!
His soldiers had often compared their fearless, resolute leader, with his
luxuriant hair, to the king of beasts, and as he now shook his fist,
while the muscles of his bronzed arm swelled as though they would burst
the gold armlet that encircled them, and his eyes flashed fire, his
awe-inspiring mien did not invite approach.
Westward, the direction toward which his eyes were turned, lay the
necropolis and the ruined strangers' quarter. But a few hours ago he had
led his troops through the ruins around which the ravens were circling
and past his father's devastated home.
Silently, as duty required, he marched on. Not until he halted to seek
quarters for the soldiers did he hear from Hornecht, the captain of the
archers, what had happened during the night. He listened silently,
without the quiver of an eye-lash, or a word of questioning, until his
men had pitched their tents. He had but just gone to rest when a Hebrew
maiden, spite of the menaces of the guard, made her way in to implore
him, in the name of Eliab, one of the oldest slaves of his family, to go
with her to the old man, her grandfather. The latter, whose weakness
prevented journeying, had been left behind, and directly after the
departure of the Hebrews he and his wife had been carried on an ass to
the little but near the harbor, which generous Nun, his master, had
bestowed on the faithful slave.
The grand-daughter had been left to care for the feeble pair, and now the
old servant's heart yearned for one more sight of his lord's first-born
son whom, when a child, he had carried in his arms. He had charged the
girl to tell Hosea that Nun had promised his people that his son would
abandon the Egyptians and cleave to his own race. The tribe of Ephraim,
nay the whole Hebrew nation had hailed these tidings with the utmost joy.
Eliab would give him fuller details; she herself had been well nigh dazed
with weeping and anxiety. He would earn the richest blessings if he would
only follow her.
The soldier realized at once that he must fulfil this desire, but he was
obliged to defer his visit to the old slave until the nest morning. The
messenger, however, even in her haste, had told him many incidents she
had seen herself or heard from others.
At last she left him. He rekindled the fire and, so long as the flames
burned brightly, his gaze was bent with a gloomy, thoughtful expression
upon the west. Not till they had devoured the fuel and merely flickered
with a faint bluish light around the charred embers did he fix his eyes
on the whirling sparks. And the longer he did so, the deeper, the more
unconquerable became the conflict in his soul, whose every energy, but
yesterday, had been bent upon a single glorious goal.
The war against the Libyan rebels had detained him eighteen months from
his home, and he had seen ten crescent moons grow full since any news had
reached him of his kindred. A few weeks before he had been ordered to
return, and when to-day he approached nearer and nearer to the obelisks
towering above Tanis, the city of Rameses, his heart had pulsed with as
much joy and hopefulness as if the man of thirty were once more a boy.
Within a few short hours he should again see his beloved, noble father,
who had needed great deliberation and much persuasion from Hosea's
mother--long since dead--ere he would permit his son to follow the bent
of his inclinations and enter upon a military life in Pharaoh's army. He
had anticipated that very day surprising him with the news that he had
been promoted above men many years his seniors and of Egyptian lineage.
Instead of the slights Nun had dreaded, Hosea's gallant bearing, courage
and, as he modestly added, good-fortune had gained him promotion, yet he
had remained a Hebrew. When he felt the necessity of offering to some god
sacrifices and prayer, he had bowed before Seth, to whose temple Nun had
led him when a child, and whom in those days all the people in Goshen in
whose veins flowed Semitic blood had worshipped. But he also owed
allegiance to another god, not the God of his fathers, but the deity
revered by all the Egyptians who had been initiated. He remained unknown
to the masses, who could not have understood him; yet he was adored not
only by the adepts but by the majority of those who had obtained high
positions in civil or military life-whether they were servants of the
divinity or not--and Hosea, the initiated and the stranger, knew him
also. Everybody understood when allusion was made to "the God," the "Sum
of All," the "Creator of Himself," and the "Great One." Hymns extolled
him, inscriptions on the monuments, which all could read, spoke of him,
the one God, who manifested himself to the world, pervaded the universe,
and existed throughout creation not alone as the vital spark animates the
human organism, but as himself the sum of creation, the world with its
perpetual growth, decay, and renewal, obeying the laws he had himself
ordained. His spirit, existing in every form of nature, dwelt also in
man, and wherever a mortal gazed he could discern the rule of the "One."
Nothing could be imagined without him, therefore he was one like the God
of Israel. Nothing could be created nor happen on earth apart from him,
therefore, like Jehovah, he was omnipotent. Hosea had long regarded both
as alike in spirit, varying only in name. Whoever adored one was a
servant of the other, so the warrior could have entered his father's
presence with a clear conscience, and told him that although in the
service of the king he had remained loyal to the God of his nation.
Another thought had made his heart pulse faster and more joyously as he
saw in the distance the pylons and obelisks of Tanis; for on countless
marches through the silent wilderness and in many a lonely camp he had
beheld in imagination a virgin of his own race, whom he had known as a
singular child, stirred by marvellous thoughts, and whom, just before
leading his troops to the Libyan war, he had again met, now a dignified
maiden of stern and unapproachable beauty. She had journeyed from Succoth
to Tanis to attend his mother's funeral, and her image had been deeply
imprinted on his heart, as his--he ventured to hope--on hers. She had
since become a prophetess, who heard the voice of her God. While the
other maidens of his people were kept in strict seclusion, she was free
to come and go at will, even among men, and spite of her hate of the
Egyptians and of Hosea's rank among them, she did not deny that it was
grief to part and that she would never cease thinking of him. His future
wife must be as strong, as earnest, as himself. Miriam was both, and
quite eclipsed a younger and brighter vision which he had once conjured
before his memory with joy.
He loved children, and a lovelier girl than Kasana he had never met,
either in Egypt or in alien lands. The interest with which the fair
daughter of his companion-in-arms watched his deeds and his destiny, the
modest yet ardent devotion afterwards displayed by the much sought-after
young widow, who coldly repelled all other suitors, had been a delight to
him in times of peace. Prior to her marriage he had thought of her as the
future mistress of his home, but her wedding another, and Hornecht's
oft-repeated declaration that he would never give his child to a
foreigner, had hurt his pride and cooled his passion. Then he met Miriam
and was fired with an ardent desire to make her his wife. Still, on the
homeward march the thought of seeing Kasana again had been a pleasant
one. It was fortunate he no longer wished to wed Hornecht's daughter; it
could have led to naught save trouble. Both Hebrews and Egyptians held it
to be an abomination to eat at the same board, or use the same seats or
knives. Though he himself was treated by his comrades as one of
themselves, and had often heard Kasana's father speak kindly of his
kindred, yet "strangers" were hateful in the eyes of the captain of the
archers, and of all free Egyptians.
He had found in Miriam the noblest of women. He hoped that Kasana might
make another happy. To him she would ever be the charming child from whom
we expect nothing save the delight of her presence.
He had come to ask from her, as a tried friend ever ready for leal
service, a joyous glance. From Miriam he would ask herself, with all her
majesty and beauty, for he had borne the solitude of the camp long
enough, and now that on his return no mother's arms opened to welcome
him, he felt for the first time the desolation of a single life. He
longed to enjoy the time of peace when, after dangers and privations of
every kind, he could lay aside his weapons. It was his duty to lead a
wife home to his father's hearth and to provide against the extinction of
the noble race of which he was the sole representative. Ephraim was the
son of his sister.
Filled with the happiest thoughts, he had advanced toward Tannis and, on
reaching the goal of all his hopes and wishes, found it lying before him
like a ripening grain-field devastated by hail and swarms of locusts.
As if in derision, fate led him first to the Hebrew quarter. A heap of
dusty ruins marked the site of the house where he had spent his
childhood, and for which his heart had longed; and where his loved ones
had watched his departure, beggars were now greedily searching for
plunder among the debris.
The first man to greet him in Tanis was Kasana's father. Instead of a
friendly glance from her eyes, he had received from him tidings that
pierced his inmost heart. He had expected to bring home a wife, and the
house where she was to reign as mistress was razed to the ground. The
father, for whose blessing he longed, and who was to have been gladdened
by his advancement, had journeyed far away and must henceforward be the
foe of the sovereign to whom he owed his prosperity.
He had been proud of rising, despite his origin, to place and power. Now
he would be able, as leader of a great host, to show the prowess of which
he was capable. His inventive brain had never lacked schemes which, if
executed by his superiors, would have had good results; now he could
fulfil them according to his own will, and instead of the tool become the
guiding power.
These reflections had awakened a keen sense of exultation in his breast
and winged his steps on his homeward march and, now that he had reached
the goal, so long desired, must he turn back to join the shepherds and
builders to whom--it now seemed a sore misfortune--he belonged by the
accident of birth and ancestry, though, denial was futile, he felt as
utterly alien to the Hebrews as he was to the Libyans whom he had
confronted on the battle-field. In almost every pursuit he valued, he had
nothing in common with his people. He had believed he might truthfully
answer yes to his father's enquiry whether he had returned a Hebrew, yet
he now felt it would be only a reluctant and half-hearted assent.
He clung with his whole soul to the standards beneath which he had gone
to battle and might now himself lead to victory. Was it possible to
wrench his heart from them, renounce what his own deeds had won? Yet
Eliab's granddaughter had told him that the Hebrews expected him to leave
the army and join them. A message from his father must soon reach
him--and among the Hebrews a son never opposed a parent's command.
There was still another to whom implicit obedience was due, Pharaoh, to
whom he had solemnly vowed loyal service, sworn to follow his summons
without hesitation or demur, through fire and water, by day and night.
How often he had branded the soldier who deserted to the foe or rebelled
against the orders of his commander as a base scoundrel and villain, and
by his orders many a renegade from his standard had died a shameful death
on the gallows under his own eyes. Was he now to commit the deed for
which he had despised and killed others? His prompt decision was known
throughout the army, how quickly in the most difficult situations he
could resolve upon the right course and carry it into action; but during
this dark and lonely hour of the night he seemed to himself a mere
swaying reed, and felt as helpless as a forsaken orphan.
Wrath against himself preyed upon him, and when he thrust a spear into
the flames, scattering the embers and sending a shower of bright sparks
upward, it was rage at his own wavering will that guided his hand.
Had recent events imposed upon him the virile duty of vengeance, doubt
and hesitation would have vanished and his father's summons would have
spurred him on to action; but who had been the heaviest sufferers here?
Surely it was the Egyptians whom Moses' curse had robbed of thousands of
beloved lives, while the Hebrews had escaped their revenge by flight. His
wrath had been kindled by the destruction of the Hebrews' houses, but he
saw no sufficient cause for a bloody revenge, when he remembered the
unspeakable anguish inflicted upon Pharaoh and his subjects by the men of
his own race.
Nay; he had nothing to avenge; he seemed to himself like a man who
beholds his father and mother in mortal peril, owns that he cannot save
both, yet knows that while staking his life to rescue one he must leave
the other to perish. If he obeyed the summons of his people, he would
lose his honor, which he had kept as untarnished as his brazen helm, and
with it the highest goal of his life; if he remained loyal to Pharaoh and
his oath, he must betray his own race, have all his future days darkened
by his father's curse, and resign the brightest dream he cherished; for
Miriam was a true child of her people and he would be blest indeed if her
lofty soul could be as ardent in love as it was bitter in hate.
Stately and beautiful, but with gloomy eyes and hand upraised in warning,
her image rose before his mental vision as he sat gazing over the
smouldering fire out into the darkness. And now the pride of his manhood
rebelled, and it seemed base cowardice to cast aside, from dread of a
woman's wrath and censure, all that a warrior held most dear.
"Nay, nay," he murmured, and the scale containing duty, love, and filial
obedience suddenly kicked the beam. He was what he was--the leader of ten
thousand men in Pharaoh's army. He had vowed fealty to him--and to none
other. Let his people fly from the Egyptian yoke, if they desired. He,
Hosea, scorned flight. Bondage had sorely oppressed them, but the highest
in the land had received him as an equal and held him worthy of the
loftiest honor. To repay them with treachery and desertion was foreign to
his nature and, drawing a long breath, he sprang to his feet with the
conviction that he had chosen aright. A fair woman and the weak yearning
of a loving heart should not make him a recreant to grave duties and the
loftiest purposes of his life.
"I will stay!" cried a loud voice in his breast. "Father is wise and
kind, and when he learns the reasons for my choice he will approve them
and bless, instead of cursing me. I will write to him, and the boy Miriam
sent me shall be the messenger."
A call from the tent startled him and when, springing up, he glanced at
the stars, he found that he had forgotten his duty to the suffering lad
and hurried to his couch.
Ephraim was sitting up in his bed, watching for him, and exclaimed: "I
have been waiting a long, long time to see you. So many thoughts crowd my
brain and, above all, Miriam's message. I can get no rest until I have
delivered it--so listen now."
Hosea nodded assent and, after drinking the healing potion handed to him,
Ephraim began:
"Miriam the daughter of Amram and Jochebed greets the son of Nun the
Ephraimite. Thy name is Hosea, 'the Help,' and the Lord our God hath
chosen thee to be the helper of His people. But henceforward, by His
command, thou shalt be called Joshua,--[Jehoshua, he who helps
Jehova]--the help of Jehovah; for through Miriam's lips the God of her
fathers, who is the God of thy fathers likewise, bids thee be the sword
and buckler of thy people. In Him dwells all power, and he promises to
steel thine arm that He may smite the foe."
Ephraim had begun in a low voice, but gradually his tones grew more
resonant and the last words rang loudly and solemnly through the
stillness of the night.
Thus had Miriam uttered them, laying her hands on the lad's head and
gazing earnestly into his face with eyes deep and dark as night, and
while repeating them he had felt as though some secret power were
constraining him to shout them aloud to Hosea, just as he had heard them
from the lips of the prophetess. Then, with a sigh of relief, he turned
his face toward the canvas wall of the tent, saying quietly:
"Now I will go to sleep."
But Hosea laid his hand on his shoulder, exclaiming imperiously: "Say it
again."
The youth obeyed, but this time he repeated the words in a low, careless
tone, then saying beseechingly:
"Let me rest now," put his hand under his cheek and closed his eyes.
Hosea let him have his way, carefully applied a fresh bandage to his
burning head, extinguished the light, and flung more fuel on the
smouldering fire outside; but the alert, resolute man performed every act
as if in a dream. At last he sat down, and propping his elbows on his
knees and his head in his hands, stared alternately, now into vacancy,
and anon into the flames.
Who was this God who summoned him through Miriam's lips to be, under His
guidance, the sword and shield of His people?
He was to be known by a new name, and in the minds of the Egyptians the
name was everything "Honor to the name of Pharaoh," not "Honor to
Tharaoh" was spoken and written. And if henceforward he was to be called
Joshua, the behest involved casting aside his former self, and becoming a
new man.
The will of the God of his fathers announced to him by Miriam meant no
less a thing than the command to transform himself from the Egyptian his
life had made him, into the Hebrew he had been when a lad. He must learn
to act and feel like an Israelite! Miriam's summons called him back to
his people. The God of his race, through her, commanded him to fulfil his
father's expectations. Instead of the Egyptian troops whom he must
forsake, he was in future to lead the men of his own blood forth to
battle! This was the meaning of her bidding, and when the noble virgin
and prophetess who addressed him, asserted that God Himself spoke through
her lips, it was no idle boast, she was really obeying the will of the
Most High. And now the image of the woman whom he had ventured to love,
rose in unapproachable majesty before him. Many things which he had heard
in his childhood concerning the God of Abraham, and His promises returned
to his mind, and the scale which hitherto had been the heavier, rose
higher and higher. The resolve just matured, now seemed uncertain, and he
again confronted the terrible conflict he had believed was overpast.
How loud, how potent was the call he heard! Ringing in his ears, it
disturbed the clearness and serenity of his mind, and instead of calmly
reflecting on the matter, memories of his boyhood, which he had imagined
were buried long ago, raised their voices, and incoherent flashes of
thought darted through his brain.
Sometimes he felt impelled to turn in prayer to the God who summoned him,
but whenever he attempted to calm himself and uplift his heart and eyes
to Him, he remembered the oath he must break, the soldiers he must
abandon to lead, instead of well-disciplined, brave, obedient bands of
brothers-in-arms, a wretched rabble of cowardly slaves, and rude,
obstinate shepherds, accustomed to the heavy yoke of bondage.
The third hour after midnight had come, the guards had been relieved, and
Hosea thought he might now permit himself a few hours repose. He would
think all these things over again by daylight with his usual clear
judgment, which he strove in vain to obtain now. But when he entered the
tent and heard Ephraim's regular breathing, he fancied that the boy's
solemn message was again echoing in his ears. Startled, he was in the act
of repeating it himself, when loud voices in violent altercation among
the sentinels disturbed the stillness of the night.
The interruption was welcome, and he hurried to the outposts.
CHAPTER VI.
Hogla, the old slave's granddaughter, had come to beseech Hosea to go
with her at once to her grandfather, who had suddenly broken down, and
who feeling the approach of death could not perish without having once
more seen and blessed him.
The warrior told her to wait and, after assuring himself that Ephraim was
sleeping quietly, ordered a trusty man to watch beside his bed and went
away with Hogla.
The girl walked before him, carrying a small lantern, and as its light
fell on her face and figure, he saw how unlovely she was, for the hard
toil of slavery had bowed the poor thing's back before its time. Her
voice had the harsh accents frequently heard in the tones of women whose
strength has been pitilessly tasked; but her words were kind and tender,
and Hosea forgot her appearance when she told him that her lover had gone
with the departing tribes, yet she had remained with her grandparents
because she could not bring herself to leave the old couple alone.
Because she had no beauty no man had sought her for his wife till Assir
came, who did not care for her looks because he toiled industriously,
like herself, and expected her to add to his savings. He would gladly
have stayed with her, but his father had commanded him to go forth, so
there was no choice for them save to obey and part forever.
The words were simple and the accents harsh, yet they pierced the heart
of the man who was preparing to follow his own path in opposition to his
father's will.
As they approached the harbor and Hosea saw the embankments, and the vast
fortified storehouses built by his own people, he remembered the ragged
laborers whom he had so often beheld crouching before the Egyptian
overseers or fighting savagely among themselves. He had heard, too, that
they shrunk from no lies, no fraud to escape their toil, and how
difficult was the task of compelling them to obey and fulfil their duty.
The most repulsive forms among these luckless hordes rose distinctly
before his vision, and the thought that it might henceforward be his
destiny to command such a wretched rabble seemed to him ignominy which
the lowest of his brave officers, the leader of but fifty men, would seek
to avoid. True, Pharaoh's armies contained many a Hebrew mercenary who
had won renown for bravery and endurance; but these men were the sons of
owners of herds or people who had once been shepherds. The toiling
slaves, whose clay huts could be upset by a kick, formed the majority of
those to whom he was required to return.
Resolute in his purpose to remain loyal to the oath which bound him to
the Egyptian standard, yet moved to the very depths of his heart, he
entered the slave's little hut, and his anger rose when he saw old Eliab
sitting up, mixing some wine and water with his own hands. So he had been
summoned from his nephew's sick-bed, and robbed of his night's rest, on a
false pretence, in order that a slave, in his eyes scarcely entitled to
rank as a man, might have his way. Here he himself experienced a specimen
of the selfish craft of which the Egyptians accused his people, and which
certainly did not attract him, Hosea, to them. But the anger of the just,
keen sighted-man quickly subsided at the sight of the girl's unfeigned
joy in her grandfather's speedy recovery. Besides he soon learned from
the old man's aged wife that, shortly after Hogla's departure, she
remembered the wine they had, and as soon as he swallowed the first
draught her husband, whom she had believed had one foot in the grave,
grew better and better. Now he was mixing some more of God's gift to
strengthen himself occasionally by a sip.
Here Eliab interrupted her to say that they owed this and many more
valuable things to the goodness of Nun, Hosea's father, who had given
them, besides their little hut, wine, meal for bread, a milch cow, and
also an ass, so that he could often ride out into the fresh air. He had
likewise left them their granddaughter and some pieces of silver, so that
they could look forward without fear to the end of their days, especially
as they had behind the house a bit of ground, where Hogla meant to raise
radishes, onions, and leeks for their own table. But the best gift of all
was the written document making them and the girl free forever. Ay, Nun
was a true master and father to his people, and the blessing of Jehovah
had followed his gifts; for soon after the departure of the Hebrews, he
and his wife had been brought hither unmolested by the aid of Assir,
Hogla's lover.
"We old people shall die here," Eliab's wife added. But Assir promised
Hogla that he would come back for her when she had discharged her filial
duties to the end.
Then, turning to her granddaughter, she said encouragingly: "And we
cannot live much longer now."
Hogla raised her blue gown to wipe the tears from her eyes, exclaiming
"May it be a long, long time yet. I am young and can wait."
Hosea heard the words, and again it seemed as though the poor, forsaken,
unlovely girl was giving him a lesson.
He had listened patiently to the freed slaves' talk, but his time was
limited and he now asked whether Eliab had summoned him for any special
purpose.
"Ay," he replied; "I was obliged to send, not only to still the yearning
of my old heart, but because my lord Nun commanded me to do so."
"Thou hast attained a grand and noble manhood, and hast now become the
hope of Israel. Thy father promised the slaves and freedmen of his
household that after his death, thou wouldst be heir, lord and master.
His words were full of thy praise, and great rejoicing hailed his
statement that thou wouldst follow the departing Hebrews. And my lord
deigned to command me to tell thee, if thou should'st return ere his
messenger arrived, that Nun, thy father, expected his son. Whithersoever
thy nation may wander, thou art to follow. Toward sunrise, or at latest
by the noon-tide hour, the tribes will tarry to rest at Succoth. He will
conceal in the hollow sycamore that stands in front of Amminadab's house
a letter which will inform thee whither they will next turn their steps.
His blessing and that of our God will attend thy every step."
As Eliab uttered the last words, Hosea bowed his head as if inviting
invisible hands to be laid upon it. Then he thanked the old man and
asked, in subdued tones, whether all the Hebrews had willingly obeyed the
summons to leave house and lands.
His aged wife clasped her hands, exclaiming: "Oh no, my lord, certainly
not. What wailing and weeping filled the air before their departure! Many
refused to go, others fled, or sought some hiding-place. But all
resistance was futile. In the house of our neighbor Deuel--you know
him--his young wife had just given birth to their first son. How was she
to fare on the journey? She wept bitterly and her husband uttered fierce
curses, but it was all in vain. She was put in a cart with her babe, and
as the arrangements went on, both submitted like all the rest--even
Phineas who crept into a pigeon-house with his wife and five children,
and crooked grave-haunting Kusaja. Do you remember her? Adonai! She had
seen father, mother, husband, and three noble sons, all that the Lord had
given her to love, borne to the tomb. They lay side by side in our
burying ground, and every morning and evening she went there and, sitting
on a log of wood which she had rolled close to the gravestones, moved her
lips constantly, not in prayer--no, I have listened often when she did
not know I was near--no; she talked to the dead, as though they could
hear her in the sepulchre, and understand her words like those who walk
alive beneath the sun. She is near seventy, and for thrice seven years
she has gone by the name of grave-haunting Kusaja. It was in sooth a
foolish thing to do; yet perhaps that was why she found it all the harder
to give it up, and go she would not, but hid herself among the bushes.
When Ahieser, the overseer, dragged her out, her wailing made one's heart
sore, yet when the time for departure came, the longing to go seized upon
her also, and she found it as hard to resist as the others."
"What had happened to the poor creatures, what possessed them?" asked
Hosea, interrupting the old wife's speech; for in imagination he again
beheld the people he must lead, if he valued his father's blessing as the
most priceless boon the world could offer, and beheld them in all their
wretchedness.
The startled dame, fearing that she had offended her master's first-born
son, the great and powerful chieftain, stammered:
"What possessed them, my lord? Ah, well--I am but a poor lowly
slave-woman; yet, my lord, had you but seen it. . . . "
"Well, even then?" interrupted the warrior in harsh, impatient tones, for
this was the first time he had ever found himself compelled to act
against his desires and belief.
Eliab tried to come to the assistance of the terrified woman, saying
timidly
"Ah, my lord, no tongue can relate, no human mind can picture it. It came
from the Almighty and, if I could describe how great was its influence on
the souls of the people. . . . "
"Try," Hosea broke in, "but my time is brief. So they were compelled to
depart, and set forth reluctantly on their wanderings. Even the Egyptians
have long known that they obeyed the bidding of Moses and Aaron as the
sheep follow the shepherd. Have those who brought the terrible pestilence
on so many guiltless human beings also wrought the miracle of blinding
the minds of you and of your wife?"
The old man stretched out his hands to the soldier, and answered in a
troubled voice and a tone of the most humble entreaty:
"Oh, my lord, you are my master's first-born son, the greatest and
loftiest of your race, if it is your pleasure you can trample me into the
dust like a beetle, yet I must lift up my voice and say: 'You have heard
false tales!' You were away in foreign lands when mighty things were done
in our midst, and far from Zoan,--[The Hebrew name for Tanis]--as I hear,
when the exodus took place. Any son of our people who witnessed it would
rather his tongue should wither than mock at the marvels the Lord
permitted him to behold. Ah, if you had patience to suffer me to tell the
tale. . . ."
"Speak on!" cried Hosea, astonished at the old man's solemn fervor. Eliab
thanked him with an ardent glance, exclaiming:
"Oh, would that Aaron, or Eleasar, or my lord your father were here in my
stead, or would that Jehovah would bestow on me the might of their
eloquence! But be it as it is! True, I imagine I can again see and hear
everything as though it were happening once more before my eyes, but how
am I to describe it? How can such things be given in words? Yet, with
God's assistance, I will try."
Here he paused and Hosea, noticing that the old man's hands and lips were
trembling, gave him the cup of wine, and Eliab gratefully quaffed it to
the dregs. Then, half-closing his eyes, he began his story and his
wrinkled features grew sharper as he went on:
"My wife has already told you what occurred after the people learned the
command that had been issued. We, too, were among those who lost courage
and murmured. But last night, all who belonged to the household of
Nun--and also the shepherds, the slaves, and the poor--were summoned to a
feast, and there was abundance of roast lamb, fresh, unleavened bread,
and wine, more than usual at the harvest festival, which began that
night, and which you, my lord, have often attended in your boyhood. We
sat rejoicing, and our lord, your father, comforted us, and told us of
the God of our fathers and the wonders He had wrought for them. It was
now His will that we should go forth from this land where we had suffered
contempt and bondage. This was no sacrifice like that of Abraham when, at
the command of the Most High, he had whetted his knife to shed the blood
of his son Isaac, though it would be hard for many of us to quit a home
that had grown dear to us and forego many a familiar custom. But it will
be a great happiness for us all. For, he said, we were not to journey
forth to an unknown country, but to a beautiful region which God Himself
had set apart for us. He had promised us, instead of this place of
bondage, a new and delightful home where we should dwell free men, amid
fruitful fields and rich pastures, which would supply food to every man
and his family and make all hearts rejoice. Just as laborers must work
hard to earn high wages, we must endure a brief period of want and
suffering to gain for ourselves and for our children the beautiful new
home which the Lord had promised. God's own land it must be, for it was a
gift of the Most High.
"Having spoken thus, he blessed us all and promised that thou, too,
wouldst shake the dust from off thy feet, and join us to fight for our
cause with a strong arm as a trained soldier and a dutiful son.
"Shouts of joy rang forth and, when we assembled in the market-place and
found that all the bondmen had escaped from the overseers, many gained
fresh courage. Then Aaron stepped into our midst, stood upon the
auctioneer's bench, and told us with his own lips all that we had heard
from my master Nun at the festival. The words he uttered sounded
sometimes like pealing thunder, and anon like the sweet melody of lutes,
and every one felt that the Lord our God Himself was speaking through
him; for even the most rebellious were so deeply moved that they no
longer complained and murmured. And when he finally announced to the
throng that no erring mortal, but the Lord our God Himself would be our
leader, and described the wonders of the land whose gates He would open
unto us, and where we might live, trammelled by no bondage, as free and
happy men, owing no obedience to any ruler save the God of our fathers
and those whom we ourselves chose for our leaders, every man present felt
as though he were drunk with sweet wine, and, instead of faring forth
across a barren wilderness to an unknown goal, was on the way to a great
festal banquet, prepared by the Most High Himself. Even those who had not
heard Aaron's words were inspired with wondrous faith; men and women
behaved even more joyously and noisily than usual at the harvest
festival, for every heart was overflowing with genuine gratitude.
"The old people caught the universal spirit! Your grandfather Elishama,
bowed by the weight of his hundred years, who, as you know, has long sat
bent and silent in his corner, straightened his drooping form, and with
sparkling eyes poured forth a flood of eloquent words. The spirit of the
Lord had descended upon him and upon us all. I myself felt as though the
vigor of youth had returned to mind and body, and when I passed the
throngs who were preparing to set forth, I saw the young mother Elisheba
in her litter. Her face was as radiant as on her marriage morn, and she
was pressing her nursling to her breast, and rejoicing over his happy
fate in growing up in freedom in the Promised Land. Her spouse, Deuel,
who had poured forth such bitter imprecations, now waved his staff,
kissed his wife and child with tears of joy, and shouted with delight
like a vintager at the harvest season, when jars and wine skins are too
few to hold the blessing. Old grave-haunting Kusaja, who had been dragged
away from the sepulchre of her kindred, was sitting in a cart with other
infirm folk, waving her veil and joining in the hymn of praise Elkanah
and Abiasaph, the sons of Korah, had begun. So they went forth; we who
were left behind fell into each other's arms, uncertain whether the tears
we shed streamed from our eyes for grief or for sheer joy at seeing the
throng of our loved ones so full of hope and gladness.
"So it came to pass.
"As soon as the pitch torches borne at the head of the procession, which
seemed to me to shine more brightly than the lamps lighted by the
Egyptians on the gates of the temple of the great goddess Neith, had
vanished in the darkness, we set out, that we might not delay Assir too
long, and while passing through the streets, which resounded with the
wailing of the citizens, we softly sang the hymn of the sons of Korah,
and great joy and peace filled our hearts, for we knew that the Lord our
God would defend and guide His people."
The old man paused, but his wife and Hogla, who had listened with
sparkling eyes, leaned one on the other and, without any prompting, began
the hymn of praise of the sons of Korah, the old woman's faint voice
mingling with touching fervor with the tones of the girl, whose harsh
notes thrilled with the loftiest enthusiasm.
Hosea felt that it would be criminal to interrupt the outpouring of these
earnest hearts, but Eliab soon stopped them and gazed with evident
anxiety into the stern face of his lord's first-born son.
Had Hosea understood him?
Did this warrior, who served under Pharaoh's banner, realize how entirely
the Lord God Himself had ruled the souls of his people at their
departure.
Had the life among the Egyptians so estranged him from his people and his
God, rendered him so degenerate, that he would bid defiance to the wishes
and commands of his own father?
Was the man on whom the Hebrews' highest hopes were fixed a renegade,
forever lost to his people?
He received no verbal answer to these mute questions, but when Hosea
grasped his callous right hand in both his own and pressed it as he would
have clasped a friend's, when he bade him farewell with tearful eyes,
murmuring: "You shall hear from me!" he felt that he knew enough and,
overwhelmed with passionate delight, he pressed kiss after kiss upon the
warrior's arms and clothing.
CHAPTER VII.
Hosea returned to the camp with drooping head. The conflict in his soul
was at an end. He now knew what duty required. He must obey his father's
summons.
And the God of his race!
The old man's tale had given new life to the memories of his childhood,
and he now knew that He was not the same God as the Seth of the Asiatics
in Lower Egypt, nor the "One" and the "Sum of All" of the adepts.
The prayers he had uttered ere he fell asleep, the history of the
creation of the world, which he could never hear sufficiently often,
because it showed so clearly the gradual development of everything on
earth and in heaven until man came to possess and enjoy all, the story of
Abraham and Isaac, of Jacob, Esau, and his own ancestor, Joseph--how
gladly he had listened to these tales as they fell from the lips of the
gentle woman who had given him life, and from those of his nurse, and his
grandfather Elishama. Yet he imagined that they had faded from his memory
long ago.
But in old Eliab's hovel he could have repeated the stories word for
word, and he now knew that there was indeed one invisible, omnipotent
God, who had preferred his race above all others, and had promised to
make them a mighty people.
The truths concealed by the Egyptians under the greatest mystery were the
common property of his race. Every beggar, every slave might raise his
hands in supplication to the one invisible God who had revealed Himself
unto Abraham.
Shrewd Egyptians, who had divined His existence and shrouded His image
with monstrous shapes, born of their own thoughts and imaginations, had
drawn a thick veil over Him, hidden Him from the masses. Among the
Hebrews alone did He really live and display His power in all its mighty,
heart-stirring grandeur.
He was not nature, with whom the initiated in the temples confounded Him.
No, the God of his fathers was far above all created things and the whole
visible universe, far above man, His last, most perfect work, whom He had
formed in His own image; and every living creature was subject to His
will. The Mightiest of Kings, He ruled the universe with stern justice,
and though He withdrew Himself from the sight and understanding of man,
His image, He was nevertheless a living, thinking, moving Being, though
His span of existence was eternity, His mind omniscience, His sphere of
sovereignty infinitude.
And this God had made Himself the leader of His people! There was no
warrior who could venture to cope with His might. If the spirit of
prophecy had not deceived Miriam, and the Lord had indeed commanded Hosea
to wield His sword, how dared he resist, what higher position could earth
offer? And his people? The rabble of whom he had thought so scornfully,
what a transformation seemed to have been wrought in them by the power of
the Most High, since he had listened to old Eliab's tale! Now he longed
to be their leader, and midway to the camp he paused on a sand-hill,
whence he could see the limitless expanse of the sea shimmering under the
sheen of the twinkling stars of heaven, and for the first time in many a
long, long year, he raised his arms and eyes to the God whom he had found
once more.
He began with a little prayer his mother had taught him; then he cried
out to the Almighty as to a powerful counselor, imploring him with
fervent zeal to point out the way in which he should walk without being
disobedient to Him or to his father, or breaking the oath he had sworn to
Pharaoh and becoming a dishonored man in the eyes of those to whom he
owed so great a debt of gratitude.
"Thy chosen people praise Thee as the God of Truth, Who dost punish those
who forswear their oaths," he prayed. "How canst Thou command me to be
faithless and break the vow that I have made. Whatever I am, whatever I
may accomplish, belongs to Thee, Oh Mighty Lord, and I am ready to devote
my blood, my life to my people. But rather than render me a dishonored
and perjured man, take me away from earth and commit the work which Thou
hast chosen Thy servant to perform, to the hands of one who is bound by
no solemn oath."
So he prayed, and it seemed as if he clasped in his embrace a long-lost
friend. Then he walked on in silence through the vanishing dusk, and when
the first grey light of morning dawned, the flood of feeling ebbed, and
the clear-headed warrior regained his calmness of thought.
He had vowed to do nothing against the will of his father or his God, but
he was no less firmly resolved to be neither perjurer nor renegade. His
duty was clear and plain. He must leave Pharaoh's service, first telling
his superiors that, as a dutiful son, he must obey his father's commands,
and share his fate and that of his people.
Yet he did not conceal from himself that his request might be refused,
that he might be detained by force, nay, perchance, if he insisted on
carrying out his purpose with unshaken will, he might be menaced with
death, or if the worst should come, even delivered over to the
executioner. But if this should be his doom, if his purpose cost him his
life, he would still have done what was right, and his comrades, whose
esteem he valued, could still think of him as a brave brother-in-arms.
Nor would his father and Miriam be angry with him, nay, they would mourn
the faithful son, the upright man, who chose death rather than dishonor.
Calm and resolute, he gave the pass-word with haughty bearing to the
sentinel and entered his tent. Ephraim was still lying on his couch,
smiling as if under the thrall of pleasant dreams. Hosea threw himself on
a mat beside him to seek strength for the hard duties of the coming day.
Soon his eyes closed, too, and, after an hour's sound sleep, he woke
without being roused and called for his holiday attire, his helmet, and
the gilt coat-of-mail he wore at great festivals or in the presence of
Egypt's king.
Meantime Ephraim, too, awoke, looked with mingled curiosity and delight
at his uncle, who stood before him in all the splendor of his manhood and
glittering panoply of war, and exclaimed:
"It must be a proud feeling to wear such garments and lead thousands to
battle."
Hosea shrugged his shoulders and replied:
"Obey thy God, give no man, from the loftiest to the lowliest, a right to
regard you save with respect, and you can hold your head as high as the
proudest warrior who ever wore purple robe and golden armor."
"But you have done great deeds among the Egyptians," Ephraim continued.
"They hold you in high regard; even captain Homecht and his daughter,
Kasana."
"Do they?" asked the soldier smiling, and then bid his nephew keep quiet;
for his brow, though less fevered than the night before, was still
burning.
"Don't go into the open air until the leech has seen you," Hosea added,
"and wait here till my return."
"Shall you be absent long?" asked the lad.
Hosea paused for a moment, lost in thought then, with a kindly glance at
him answered, gravely "Whoever serves a master knows not how long he may
be detained." Then, changing his tone, he continued less earnestly.
"To-day--this morning--perchance I may finish my business speedily and
return in a few hours. If not, if I do not come back to you this evening
or early to-morrow morning, then. . . . " he laid his hand on the lad's
shoulder as he spoke "then go home at your utmost speed. When you reach
Succoth, if the people have gone before your coming, you will find in the
hollow sycamore before Amminadab's house a letter which will tell you
whither they have turned their steps. When you overtake them, give my
greetings to my father, to my grandfather Elishama, and to Miriam. Tell
them that Hosea will be mindful of the commands of his God and of his
father. In future he will call himself Joshua--Joshua, do you hear? Tell
this to Miriam first. Finally, tell them that if I remain behind and am
not suffered to follow them, as I would like to, that the Most High has
made a different disposal of His servant and has broken the sword which
He had chosen, ere He used it. Do you understand me, boy?"
Ephraim nodded, and answered:
"You mean that death alone can stay you from obeying the summons of God,
and your father's command."
"Ay, that was my meaning," replied the chief. "If they ask why I did not
slip away from Pharaoh and escape his power, say that Hosea desired to
enter on his new office as a true man, unstained by perjury or, if it is
the will of God, to die one. Now repeat the message."
Ephraim obeyed; his uncle's remarks must have sunk deep into his soul;
for he neither forgot nor altered a single word. But scarcely had he
performed the task of repetition when, with impetuous earnestness, he
grasped Hosea's hand and besought him to tell him whether he had any
cause to fear for his life.
The warrior clasped him affectionately in his arms and answered that he
hoped he had entrusted this message to him only to have it forgotten.
"Perhaps," he added, "they will strive to keep me by force, but by God's
help I shall soon be with you again, and we will ride to Succoth
together."
With these words he hurried out, unheeding the questions his nephew
called after him; for he had heard the rattle of wheels outside. Two
chariots, drawn by mettled steeds, rapidly approached the tent and
stopped directly before the entrance.
CHAPTER VIII.
The men who stepped from the chariots were old acquaintances of Hosea.
They were the head chamberlain and one of the king's chief scribes, come
to summon him to the Sublime Porte.
[Palace of the king. The name of Pharaoh means "the Sublime
Porte."]
No hesitation nor escape was possible, and Hosea, feeling more surprise
than anxiety, entered the second chariot with the chief scribe. Both
officials wore mourning robes, and instead of the white ostrich plume,
the insignia of office, black ones waved over the temples of both. The
horses and runners of the two-wheeled chariots were also decked with all
the emblems of the deepest woe. And yet the monarch's messengers seemed
cheerful rather than depressed; for the eagle they were to bear to
Pharaoh was ready to obey his behest, and they had feared that they would
find his eyrie abandoned.
Swift as the wind the long-limbed bays of royal breed bore the light
vehicles over the uneven sandy road and the smooth highway toward the
palace.
Ephraim, with the curiosity of youth, had gone out of the tent to view a
scene so novel to his eyes. The soldiers were pleased by the Pharaoh's
sending his own carriage for their commander, and the lad's vanity was
flattered to see his uncle drive away in such state. But he was not
permitted the pleasure of watching him long; dense clouds of dust soon
hid the vehicles.
The scorching desert wind which, during the Spring months, so often blows
through the valley of the Nile, had risen, and though the bright blue sky
which had been visible by night and day was still cloudless, it was
veiled by a whitish mist.
The sun, a motionless ball, glared down on the heads of men like a blind
man's eye. The burning heat it diffused seemed to have consumed its rays,
which to-day were invisible. The eye protected by the mist could gaze at
it undazzled, yet its scorching power was undiminished. The light breeze,
which usually fanned the brow in the morning, touched it now like the hot
breath of a ravening beast of prey. Loaded with the fine scorching sand
borne from the desert, it transformed the pleasure of breathing into a
painful torture. The air of an Egyptian March morning, which was wont to
be so balmy, now oppressed both man and beast, choking their lungs and
seeming to weigh upon them like a burden destroying all joy in life.
The higher the pale rayless globe mounted into the sky, the greyer became
the fog, the more densely and swiftly blew the sand-clouds from the
desert.
Ephraim was still standing in front of the tent, gazing at the spot where
Pharaoh's chariots had disappeared. His knees trembled, but he attributed
it to the wind sent by Seth-Typhon, at whose blowing even the strongest
felt an invisible burden clinging to their feet.
Hosea had gone, but he might come back in a few hours, then he, Ephraim,
would be obliged to go with him to Succoth, and the bright dreams and
hopes which yesterday had bestowed and whose magical charms were
heightened by his fevered brain, would be lost to him forever.
During the night he had firmly resolved to enter Pharaoh's army, that he
might remain near Tanis and Kasana; but though he had only half
comprehended Hosea's message, he could plainly discern that he intended
to turn his back upon Egypt and his high position and meant to take
Ephraim with him, should he make his escape. So he must renounce his
longing to see Kasana once more. But this thought was unbearable and an
inward voice whispered that, having neither father nor mother, he was
free to act according to his own will. His guardian, his dead father's
brother, in whose household he had grown up, had died not long before,
and no new guardian had been named because the lad was now past
childhood. He was destined at some future day to be one of the chiefs of
his proud tribe and until yesterday he had desired no better fate.
He had obeyed the impulse of his heart when, with the pride of a shepherd
prince, he had refused the priest's suggestion that he should become one
of Pharaoh's soldiers, but he now told himself that he had been childish
and foolish to reject a thing of which he was ignorant, nay, which had
ever been intentionally represented to him in a false and hateful light
in order to bind him more firmly to his own people.
The Egyptians had always been described as detestable enemies and
oppressors, yet how enchanting everything seemed in the house of the
first Egyptian warrior he had entered.
And Kasana!
What must she think of him, if he left Tanis without a word of greeting,
of farewell. Must it not grieve and wound him to remain in her memory a
clumsy peasant shepherd? Nay, it would be positively dishonest not to
return the costly raiment she had lent him. Gratitude was reckoned among
the Hebrews also as the first duty of noble hearts. He would be worthy of
hate his whole life long, if he did not seek her once more!
But there was need of haste. When Hosea returned, he must find him ready
for departure.
He at once began to bind his sandals on his feet, but he did it slowly,
and could not understand why the task seemed so hard to-day.
He passed through the camp unmolested. The pylons and obelisks before the
temples, which appeared to quiver in the heated air, marked the direction
he was to pursue, and he soon reached the broad road which led to the
market-place--a panting merchant whose ass was bearing skins of wine to
the troops, told him the way.
Dense clouds of dust lay on the road and whirled around him, the sun beat
fiercely down on his bare head, his wound began to ache again, the fine
sand which filled the air entered his eyes and mouth and stung his face
and bare limbs like burning needles. He was tortured by thirst and was
often compelled to stop, his feet grew so heavy. At last he reached a
well dug for travelers by a pious Egyptian, and though it was adorned
with the image of a god and Miriam had taught him that this was an
abomination from which he should turn aside, he drank again and again,
thinking he had never tasted aught so refreshing.
The fear of losing consciousness, as he had done the day before, passed
away and, though his feet were still heavy, he walked rapidly toward the
alluring goal. But soon his strength again deserted him, the sweat poured
from his brow, his wound began to throb and beat, and he felt as though
his skull was compressed by an iron circle. His keen eyes, too, failed,
for the objects he tried to see blended with the dust of the road, the
horizon reeled up and down before his eyes, and he felt as though the
hard pavement had turned to a yielding bog under his feet.
Yet he took little heed of all these things, for never before had such
bright visions filled his mind. His thoughts grew marvellously vivid, and
image after image rose before the wide eyes of his soul, not at his own
behest, but as if summoned by a secret will outside of his consciousness.
Now he fancied that he was lying at Kasana's feet, resting his head on
her lap while he gazed upward into her lovely face--anon he saw Hosea
standing before him in his glittering armor, as he had beheld him a short
time ago, only his garb was still more gorgeous and, instead of the dim
light in the tent, a ruddy glow like that of fire surrounded him. Then
the finest oxen and rams in his herds passed before him and sentences
from the messages he had learned darted through his mind; nay he
sometimes imagined that they were being shouted to him aloud. But ere he
could grasp their import, some new dazzling vision or loud rushing noise
seemed to fill his mental eye and ear.
He pressed onward, staggering like a drunken man, with drops of sweat
standing on his brow and with parched mouth. Sometimes he unconsciously
raised his hand to wipe the dust from his burning eyes, but he cared
little that he saw very indistinctly what was passing around him, for
there could be nothing more beautiful than what he beheld with his inward
vision.
True, he was often aware that he was suffering intensely, and he longed
to throw himself exhausted on the ground, but a strange sense of
happiness sustained him. At last he was seized with the delusion that his
head was swelling and growing till it attained the size of the head of
the colossus he had seen the day before in front of a temple gate, then
it rose to the height of the palm-trees by the road-side, and finally it
reached the mist shrouding the firmament, then far above it. Then it
suddenly seemed as though this head of his was as large as the whole
world, and he pressed his hands on his temples to clasp his brow; for his
neck and shoulders were too weak to support the weight of so enormous a
head and, mastered by this strange delusion, he shrieked aloud, his
shaking knees gave way, and he fell unconscious in the dust.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Hate, though never sated, can yet be gratified
Omnipotent God, who had preferred his race above all others
When hate and revenge speak, gratitude shrinks timidly
Who can prop another's house when his own is falling
JOSHUA
By Georg Ebers
Volume 2.
CHAPTER IX.
At the same hour a chamberlain was ushering Hosea into the audience
chamber.
Usually subjects summoned to the presence of the king were kept waiting
for hours, but the Hebrew's patience was not tried long. During this
period of the deepest mourning the spacious rooms of the palace, commonly
tenanted by a gay and noisy multitude, were hushed to the stillness of
death; for not only the slaves and warders, but many men and women in
close attendance on the royal couple had fled from the pestilence,
quitting the palace without leave.
Here and there a solitary priest, official, or courtier leaned against a
pillar or crouched on the floor, hiding his face in his hands, while
awaiting some order. Sentries paced to and fro with lowered weapons, lost
in melancholy thoughts. Now and then a few young priests in mourning
robes glided through the infected rooms, silently swinging silver censers
which diffused a pungent scent of resin and juniper.
A nightmare seemed to weigh upon the palace and its occupants; for in
addition to grief for their beloved prince, which saddened many a heart,
the dread of death and the desert wind paralyzed alike the energy of mind
and body.
Here in the immediate vicinity of the throne where, in former days, all
eyes had sparkled with hope, ambition, gratitude, fear, loyalty, or hate,
Hosea now encountered only drooping heads and downcast looks.
Bai, the second prophet of Amon, alone seemed untouched alike by sorrow,
anxiety, or the enervating atmosphere of the day; he greeted the warrior
in the ante-room as vigorously and cheerily as ever, and assured
him--though in the lowest whisper--that no one thought of holding him
responsible for the misdeeds of his people. But when Hosea volunteered
the acknowledgment that, at the moment of his summons to the king, he had
been in the act of going to the commander-in-chief to beg a release from
military service, the priest interrupted him to remind him of the debt of
gratitude he, Bai, owed to him as the preserver of his life. Then he
added that he would make every effort in his power to keep him in the
army and show that the Egyptians--even against Pharaoh's will, or which
he would speak farther with him privately--knew how to honor genuine
merit without distinction of person or birth.
The Hebrew had little time to repeat his resolve; the head chamberlain
interrupted them to lead Hosea into the presence of the "good god."
The sovereign awaited Hosea in the smaller audience-room adjoining the
royal apartments.
It was a stately chamber, and to-day looked more spacious than when, as
of yore, it was filled with obsequious throngs. Only a few courtiers and
priests, with some of the queen's ladies-in-waiting, all clad in deep
mourning, stood in groups near the throne. Opposite to Pharaoh, squatting
in a circle on the floor, were the king's councillors and interpreters,
each adorned with an ostrich plume.
All wore tokens of mourning, and the monotonous, piteous plaint of the
wailing women, which ever and anon rose into a loud, shrill, tremulous
shriek, echoed through the silent rooms within to this hall, announcing
that death had claimed a victim even in the royal dwelling.
The king and queen sat on a gold and ivory couch, heavily draped with
black. Instead of their usual splendid attire, both wore dark robes, and
the royal consort and mother, who mourned her first-born son, leaned
motionless, with drooping head, against her kingly husband's shoulder.
Pharaoh, too, gazed fixedly into space, as though lost in a dream. The
sceptre had slipped from his hand and lay in his lap.
The queen had been torn away from the corpse of her son, which was now
delivered to the embalmers, and it was not until she reached the entrance
of the audience-chamber that she had succeeded in checking her tears. She
had no thought of resistance; the inexorable ceremonial of court
etiquette required the queen to be present at any audience of importance.
To-day she would gladly have shunned the task, but Pharaoh had commanded
her presence, and she knew and approved the course to be pursued; for she
was full of dread of the power of the Hebrew Mesu, called by his own
people Moses, and of his God, who had brought such terrible woe on the
Egyptians. She had other children to lose, and she had known Mesu from
her childhood, and was well aware how highly the great Rameses, her
husband's father and predecessor, had prized the wisdom of this stranger
who had been reared with his own sons.
Ah, if it were only possible to conciliate this man. But Mesu had
departed with the Israelites, and she knew his iron will and had learned
that the terrible prophet was armed, not alone against Pharaoh's threats,
but also against her own fervent entreaties.
She was now expecting Hosea. He, the son of Nun, the foremost man of all
the Hebrews in Tanis, would succeed, if any one could, in carrying out
the plan which she and her royal husband deemed best for all parties,--a
plan supported also by Rui, the hoary high-priest and first prophet of
Amon, the head of the whole Egyptian priesthood, who held the offices of
chief judge, chief treasurer, and viceroy of the kingdom, and had
followed the court from Thebes to Tanis.
Ere going to the audience hall, she had been twining wreaths for her
loved dead and the lotus flowers, larkspurs, mallow and willow-leaves,
from which she was to weave them, had been brought there by her desire.
They were lying on a small table and in her lap; but she felt paralyzed,
and the hand she stretched toward them refused to obey her will.
Rui, the first prophet of Amon, an aged man long past his ninetieth
birthday, squatted on a mat at Pharaoh's left hand. A pair of bright
eyes, shaded by bushy white brows, glittered in his brown face--seamed
and wrinkled like the bark of a gnarled oaklike gay flowers amid withered
leaves, forming a strange contrast to his lean, bowed, and shrivelled
form.
The old man had long since resigned the management of business affairs to
the second prophet, Bai, but he held firmly to his honors, his seat at
Pharaoh's side, and his place in the council, where, though he said
little, his opinion was more frequently followed than that of the
eloquent, ardent second prophet, who was many years his junior.
The old man had not quitted Pharaoh's side since the plague entered the
palace, yet to-day he felt more vigorous than usual; the hot desert wind,
which weakened others, refreshed him. He was constantly shivering,
despite the panther-skin which hung over his back and shoulders, and the
heat of the day warmed his chilly old blood.
Moses, the Hebrew, had been his pupil, and never had he instructed a
nobler nature, a youth more richly endowed with all the gifts of
intellect. He had initiated the Israelite into all the highest mysteries,
anticipating the greatest results for Egypt and the priesthood, and when
the Hebrew one day slew an overseer who had mercilessly beaten one of his
race, and then fled into the desert, Rui had secretly mourned the evil
deed as if his own son had committed it and must suffer the consequences.
His intercession had secured Mesu's pardon; but when the latter returned
to Egypt and the change had occurred which other priests termed his
"apostasy," the old man had grieved even more keenly than over his
flight. Had he, Rui, been younger, he would have hated the man who had
thus robbed him of his fairest hopes; but the aged priest, who read men's
hearts like an open book and could judge the souls of his fellow-mortals
with the calm impartiality of an unclouded mind, confessed that he had
been to blame in failing to foresee his pupil's change of thought.
Education and precept had made Mesu an Egyptian priest according to his
own heart and that of the divinity; but after having once raised his hand
in the defence of his own people against those to whom he had been bound
only by human craft and human will, he was lost to the Egyptians and
became once more a true son of his race. And where this man of the strong
will and lofty soul led the way, others could not fail to follow.
Rui knew likewise full well what the renegade meant to give to his race;
he had confessed it himself to the priest-faith in the one God. Mesu had
rejected the accusation of perjury, declaring that he would never betray
the mysteries to the Hebrews, his sole desire was to lead them back to
the God whom they had worshipped ere Joseph and his family came to Egypt.
True, the "One" of the initiated resembled the God of the Hebrews in many
things, but this very fact had soothed the old sage; for experience had
taught him that the masses are not content with a single invisible God,
an idea which many, even among the more advanced of his own pupils found
difficult to comprehend. The men and women of the lower classes needed
visible symbols of every important thing whose influence they perceived
in and around them, and the Egyptian religion supplied these images. What
could an invisible creative power guiding the course of the universe be
to a love-sick girl? She sought the friendly Hathor, whose gentle hands
held the cords that bound heart to heart, the beautiful mighty
representative of her sex--to her she could trustingly pour forth all the
sorrows that burdened her bosom. What was the petty grief of a mother who
sought to snatch her darling child from death, to the mighty and
incomprehensible Deity who governed the entire universe? But the good
Isis, who herself had wept her eyes red in bitter anguish, could
understand her woe. And how often in Egypt it was the wife who determined
her husband's relations to the gods!
Rui had frequently seen Hebrew men and women praying fervently in
Egyptian temples. Even if Mesu should induce them to acknowledge his God,
the experienced sage clearly foresaw that they would speedily turn from
the invisible Spirit, who must ever remain aloof and incomprehensible,
and return by hundreds to the gods they understood.
Now Egypt was threatened with the loss of the laborers and builders she
so greatly needed, but Rui believed that they might be won back.
"When fair words will answer our purpose, put aside sword and bow," he
had replied to Bai, who demanded that the fugitives should be pursued and
slain. "We have already too many corpses in our country; what we want is
workers. Let us hold fast what we seem on the verge of losing."
These mild words were in full harmony with the mood of Pharaoh, who had
had sufficient sorrow, and would have thought it wiser to venture unarmed
into a lion's cage than to again defy the wrath of the terrible Hebrew.
So he had closed his ears to the exhortations of the second prophet,
whose steadfast, energetic will usually exercised all the greater
influence upon him on account of his own irresolution, and upheld old
Rui's suggestion that the warrior, Hosea, should be sent after his people
to deal with them in Pharaoh's name--a plan that soothed his mind and
renewed his hopes.
The second prophet, Bai, had finally assented to the plan; for it
afforded a new chance of undermining the throne he intended to overthrow.
If the Hebrews were once more settled in the land, Prince Siptah, who
regarded no punishment too severe for the race he hated, might perhaps
seize the sceptre of the cowardly king Menephtah.
But the fugitives must first be stopped, and Hosea was the right man to
do this. But in Bai's eyes no one would be more able to gain the
confidence of an unsuspicious soldier than Pharaoh and his royal consort.
The venerable high-priest Rui, though wholly unaware of the conspiracy,
shared this opinion, and thus the sovereigns had been persuaded to
interrupt the mourning for the dead and speak in person to the Hebrew.
Hosea had prostrated himself before the throne and, when he rose, the
king's weary face was bent toward him, sadly, it is true, yet graciously.
According to custom, the hair and beard of the father who had lost his
first-born son had been shaven. Formerly they had encircled his face in a
frame of glossy black, but twenty years of anxious government had made
them grey, and his figure, too, had lost its erect carriage and seemed
bent and feeble, though he had scarcely passed his fifth decade. His
regular features were still beautiful in their symmetry, and there was a
touch of pathos in their mournful gentleness, so evidently incapable of
any firm resolve, especially when a smile lent his mouth a bewitching
charm.
The languid indolence of his movements scarcely impaired the natural
dignity of his presence, yet his musical voice was wont to have a feeble,
beseeching tone. He was no born ruler; thirteen older brothers had died
ere the throne of Pharaoh had become his heritage, and up to early
manhood he had led a careless, joyous existence--as the handsomest youth
in the whole land, the darling of women, the light-hearted favorite of
fortune. Then he succeeded his father the great Rameses, but he had
scarcely grasped the sceptre ere the Libyans, with numerous allies,
rebelled against Egypt. The trained troops and their leaders, who had
fought in his predecessor's wars, gained him victory, but during the
twenty years which had now passed since Rameses' death, the soldiers had
rarely had any rest. Insurrections constantly occurred, sometimes in the
East, anon in the West and, instead of living in Thebes, where he had
spent many years of happiness, and following the bent of his inclination
by enjoying in the splendid palace the blessing of peace and the society
of the famous scholars and poets who then made that city their home, he
was compelled sometimes to lead his armies in the field, sometimes to
live in Tanis, the capital of Lower Egypt, to settle the disturbances of
the border land.
This was the desire of the venerable Rui, and the king willingly followed
his guidance. During the latter years of Rameses' reign, the temple at
Thebes, and with it the chief priest, had risen to power and wealth
greater than that possessed by royalty itself, and Menephtah's indolent
nature was better suited to be a tool than a guiding hand, so long as he
received all the external honors due to Pharaoh. These he guarded with a
determination which he never roused himself to display in matters of
graver import.
The condescending graciousness of Pharaoh's reception awakened feelings
of mingled pleasure and distrust in Hosea's mind, but he summoned courage
to frankly express his desire to be relieved from his office and the oath
he had sworn to his sovereign.
Pharaoh listened quietly. Not until Hosea confessed that he was induced
to take this step by his father's command did he beckon to the
high-priest, who began in low, almost inaudible tones:
"The son who resigns great things to remain obedient to his father will
be the most loyal of the 'good god's' servants. Go, obey the summons of
Nun. The son of the sun, the Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt, sets you
free; but through me, the slave of his master, he imposes one condition."
"What is that?" asked Hosea.
Pharaoh signed to Rui a second time and, as the monarch sank back upon
his throne, the old man, fixing his keen eyes on Hosea, replied:
"The demand which the lord of both worlds makes upon you by my lips is
easy to fulfil. You must return to be once more his servant and one of
us, as soon as your people and their leader, who have brought such
terrible woe upon this land, shall have clasped the divine hand which the
son of the sun extends to them in reconciliation, and shall have returned
to the beneficent shadow of his throne. He intends to attach them to his
person and his realm by rich tokens of his favor, as soon as they return
from the desert to which they have gone forth to sacrifice to their God.
Understand me fully! All the burdens which have oppressed the people of
your race shall be removed. The 'great god' will secure to them, by a new
law, privileges and great freedom, and whatever we promise shall be
written down and witnessed on our part and yours as a new and valid
covenant binding on our children and our children's children. When such a
compact has been made with an honest purpose on our part to keep it for
all time, and your tribes have consented to accept it, will you promise
that you will then be one of us again?"
"Accept the office of mediator, Hosea," the queen here interrupted in a
low tone, with her sorrowful eyes fixed imploringly on Hosea's face. "I
dread the fury of Mesu, and everything in our power shall be done to
regain his old friendship. Mention my name and recall the time when he
taught little Isisnefert the names of the plants she brought to him and
explained to her and her sister their beneficial or their harmful
qualities, during his visits to the queen, his second mother, in the
women's apartments. The wounds he has dealt our hearts shall be pardoned
and forgotten. Be our envoy. Hosea, do not deny us."
"Such words from royal lips are a strict mandate," replied the Hebrew.
"And yet they make the heart rejoice. I will accept the office of
mediator."
The hoary high-priest nodded approvingly, exclaiming:
"I hope a long period of blessing may arise from this brief hour. But
note this. Where potions can aid, surgery must be shunned. Where a bridge
spans the stream, beware of swimming through the whirlpool."
"Yes, by all means shun the whirlpool," Pharaoh repeated, and the queen
uttered the same words, then once more bent her eyes on the flowers in
her lap.
A council now began.
Three private scribes took seats on the floor close by Rui, in order to
catch his low tones, and the scribes and councillors in the circle before
the throne seized their writing-materials and, holding the papyrus in
their left hands, wrote with reed or brush; for nothing which was debated
and determined in Pharaoh's presence was suffered to be left unrecorded.
During the continuance of this debate no voice in the audience chamber
was raised above a whisper; the courtiers and guards stood motionless at
their posts, and the royal pair gazed mutely into vacancy as though lost
in reverie.
Neither Pharaoh nor his queen could possibly have heard the muttered
conversation between the men; yet the Egyptians, at the close of every
sentence, glanced upward at the king as if to ensure his approbation.
Hosea, to whom the custom was perfectly familiar, did the same and, like
the rest, lowered his tones. Whenever the voices of Bai or of the chief
of the scribes waxed somewhat louder, Pharaoh raised his head and
repeated the words of Rui: "Where a bridge spans the stream, beware of
swimming through the whirlpool;" for this saying precisely expressed his
own desires and those of the queen. No strife! Let us live at peace with
the Hebrews, and escape from the anger of their awful leader and his God,
without losing the thousands of industrious workers in the departed
tribes.
So the discussion went on, and when the murmuring of the debaters and the
scratching of the scribes' reeds had continued at least an hour the queen
remained in the same position; but Pharaoh began to move and lift up his
voice, fearing that the second prophet, who had detested the man whose
benedictions he had implored and whose enmity seemed so terrible, was
imposing on the mediator requirements impossible to fulfil.
Yet he said nothing save to repeat the warning about the bridge, but his
questioning look caused the chief of the scribes to soothe him with the
assurance that everything was progressing as well as possible. Hosea had
only requested that, in future, the overseers of the workmen should not
be of Libyan birth, but Hebrews themselves, chosen by the elders of their
tribes with the approval of the Egyptian government.
Pharaoh cast a glance of imploring anxiety at Bai, the second prophet,
and the other councillors; but the former shrugged his shoulders
deprecatingly and, pretending to yield his own opinion to the divine
wisdom of Pharaoh, acceded to Hosea's request.
The divinity on the throne of the world accepted, with a grateful bend of
the head, this concession from a man whose wishes had so often opposed
his own, and after the "repeater" or herald had read aloud all the
separate conditions of the agreement, Hosea was forced to make a solemn
vow to return in any case to Tanis, and report to the Sublime Porte how
his people had received the king's proposals.
But the wary chief, versed in the wiles and tricks with which the
government was but too well supplied, uttered the vow with great
reluctance, and only after he had received a written assurance that,
whatever might be the result of the negotiations, his liberty should not
be restricted in any respect, after he had proved that he had used his
utmost efforts to induce the leader of the Hebrews to accept the compact.
At last Pharaoh extended his hand for the warrior to kiss, and when the
latter had also pressed his lips to the edge of the queen's garments, Rui
signed to the head-chamberlain, who made obeisance to Pharaoh, and the
sovereign knew that the hour had come when he might retire. He did so
gladly and with a lighter heart; for he believed that he had done his
best to secure his own welfare and that of his people.
A sunny expression flitted across his handsome, worn features, and when
the queen also rose and saw his smile of satisfaction it was reflected on
her face. Pharaoh uttered a sigh of relief as he crossed the threshold of
the audience chamber and, accosting his wife, said:
"If Hosea wins his cause, we shall cross the bridge safely."
"And need not swim through the whirlpool," the queen answered in the same
tone.
"And if the chief succeeds in soothing Mesu, and induces the Hebrews to
stay in the land," Pharaoh added:
"Then you will enrol this Hosea--he looks noble and upright--among the
kindred of the king," Isisnefert interrupted.
But upon this Pharaoh drew up his languid, drooping figure, exclaiming
eagerly:
"How can I? A Hebrew! Were we to admit him among the 'friends' or
'fan-bearers' it would be the highest favor we could bestow! It is no
easy matter in such a case to choose between too great or too small a
recompense."
The farther the royal pair advanced toward the interior of the palace,
the louder rose the wailing voices of the mourning women. Tears once more
filled the eyes of the queen; but Pharaoh continued to ponder over what
office at court he could bestow on Hosea, should his mission prove
successful.
CHAPTER X.
Hosea was forced to hurry in order to overtake the tribes in time; for
the farther they proceeded, the harder it would be to induce Moses and
the leaders of the people to return and accept the treaty.
The events which had befallen him that morning seemed so strange that he
regarded them as a dispensation of the God whom he had found again; he
recollected, too, that the name "Joshua," "he who helps Jehovah," had
been received through Miriam's message. He would gladly bear it; for
though it was no easy matter to resign the name for which he had won
renown, still many of his comrades had done likewise. His new one was
attesting its truth grandly; never had God's help been more manifest to
him than this morning. He had entered Pharaoh's palace expecting to be
imprisoned or delivered over to the executioner, as soon as he insisted
upon following his people, and how speedily the bonds that held him in
the Egyptian army had been sundered. And he had been appointed to
discharge a task which seemed in his eyes so grand, so lofty, that he was
on the point of believing that the God of his fathers had summoned him to
perform it.
He loved Egypt. It was a fair country. Where could his people find a more
delightful home? It was only the circumstances under which they had lived
there which had been intolerable. Happier times were now in store. The
tribes were given the choice between returning to Goshen, or settling on
the lake land west of the Nile, with whose fertility and ample supply of
water he was well acquainted. No one would have a right to reduce them to
bondage, and whoever gave his labor to the service of the state was to
have for overseer no stern and cruel foreigner, but a man of his own
blood.
True, he knew that the Hebrews must remain under subjection to Pharaoh.
But had not Joseph, Ephraim, and his sons, Hosea's ancestors, been called
his subjects and lived content to be numbered among the Egyptians.
If the covenant was made, the elders of the tribes were to direct the
private concerns of the people. Spite of Bai's opposition, Moses had been
named regent of the new territory, while he, Hosea, himself was to
command the soldiers who would defend the frontiers, and marshal fresh
troops from the Israelite mercenaries, who had already borne themselves
valiantly in many a fray. Ere he had quitted the palace, Bai had made
various mysterious allusions, which though vague in purport, betrayed
that the priest was cherishing important plans and, as soon as the
guidance of the government passed from old Rui's hands into his, a high
position, perhaps the command of the whole army, now led by a Syrian
named Aarsu, would be conferred on him, Hosea.
But this prospect caused him more anxiety than pleasure, though great was
his satisfaction at having gained the concession that every third year
the eastern frontiers of the country should be thrown open to his people,
that they might go to the desert and there offer sacrifices to their God.
Moses had seemed to lay the utmost stress upon this privilege, and
according to the existing law, no one was permitted to cross the narrow
fortified frontier on the east without the permission of the government.
Perhaps granting this desire of the mighty leader might win him to accept
a compact so desirable for his nation.
During these negotiations Hosea had again realized his estrangement from
his people, he was not even aware--for what purpose the sacrifice in the
desert was offered. He also frankly acknowledged to Pharaoh's councillors
that he knew neither the grievances nor the requirements of the tribes, a
course he pursued to secure to the Hebrews the right of changing or
revising in any respect the offers he was to convey.
What better proposals could they or their leader desire?
The future was full of fresh hopes of happiness for his people and
himself. If the compact was made, the time had arrived for him to
establish a home of his own, and Miriam's image again appeared in all its
loftiness and beauty. The thought of gaining this splendid maiden was
fairly intoxicating, and he wondered whether he was worthy of her, and if
it would not be presumptuous to aspire to the hand of the
divinely-inspired, majestic virgin and prophetess.
He was experienced in the affairs of life and knew full well how little
reliance could be placed upon the promises of the vacillating man, who
found the sceptre too heavy for his feeble hand. But he had exercised
caution and, if the elders of the people could but be won over, the
agreement would be inscribed on metal tables, sentence by sentence, and
hung in the temple at Thebes, with the signatures of Pharaoh and the
envoys of the Hebrews, like every other binding agreement between Egypt
and a foreign nation. Such documents--he had learned this from the treaty
of peace concluded with the Cheta--assured and lengthened the brief
"eternity" of national covenants. He had certainly neglected no
precaution to secure his people from treachery and perjury. Never had he
felt more vigorous, more confident, more joyous than when he again
entered Pharaoh's chariot to take leave of his subordinates. Bai's
mysterious hints and suggestions troubled him very little; he was
accustomed to leave future anxieties to be cared for in the future. But
at the camp he encountered a grief which belonged to the present;
surprised, angry, and troubled, he learned that Ephraim had secretly left
the tent, telling no one whither he was going. A hurried investigation
drew out the information that the youth had been seen on the road to
Tanis, and Hosea hastily bade his trusty shield-bearer search the city
for the youth and, if he found him, to order him to follow his uncle to
Succoth.
After the chief had said farewell to his men, he set off, attended only
by his old groom. He was pleased to have the adone--[Corresponding to the
rank of adjutant.]--and subaltern officers who had been with him, the
stern warriors, with whom he had shared everything in war and peace, in
want and privation, show so plainly the pain of parting. Tears streamed
down the bronzed cheeks of many a man who had grown grey in warfare, as
he clasped his hand for the last time. Many a bearded lip was pressed to
the hem of his robe, to his feet, and to the sleek skin of the noble
Libyan steed which, pressing forward with arching neck only to be curbed
by its rider's strength, bore him through the ranks. For the first time
since his mother's death his own eyes grew dim, as shouts of farewell
rang warmly and loudly from the manly breasts of his soldiers.
Never before had he so deeply realized how firmly he was bound to these
men, and how he loved his noble profession.
Yet the duty he was now fulfilling was also great and glorious, and the
God who had absolved him from his oath and smoothed the way for him to
obey his father's commands as a true and upright man, would perhaps bring
him back to his comrades in arms, whose cordial farewell he still fancied
he heard long after he was out of reach of their voices.
The greatness of the work assigned to him, the enthusiasm of a man who
devotes himself with devout earnestness to the performance of a difficult
task, the rapturous joy of the lover, who with well-founded hopes of the
fulfilment of the purest and fairest desires of his heart, hastens to
meet the woman of his choice, first dawned upon him when he had left the
city behind and was dashing at a rapid trot toward the south-east across
the flat, well-watered plain with its wealth of palm-groves.
While forcing his steed to a slower pace as he passed through the streets
of the capital, and the region near the harbor, his mind was so engrossed
by his recent experiences and his anxiety concerning the runaway youth,
that he paid little attention to the throng of vessels lying at anchor,
the motley crowd of ship owners, traders, sailors, and laborers,
representatives of all the nations of Africa and Asia, who sought a
livelihood here, and the officials, soldiers, and petitioners, who had
followed Pharaoh from Thebes to the city of Rameses.
He had even failed to see two men of high rank, though one, Hornecht, the
captain of the archers, had waved his hand to him.
They had retired into the deep gateway formed by the pylons at the
entrance of the temple of Seth, to escape the clouds of dust which the
desert wind was still blowing along the road.
While Hornecht was vainly trying to arrest the horseman's attention, his
companion, Bai, the second prophet of Amon, whispered: "Let him go! He
will learn where his nephew is soon enough."
"As you desire," replied the soldier. Then he eagerly continued the story
he had just begun. "When they brought the lad in, he looked like a piece
of clay in the potter's workshop."
"No wonder," replied the priest; "he had lain long enough in the road in
the dust of Typhon. But what was your steward seeking among the
soldiers?"
"We had heard from my adon, whom I sent to the camp last evening, that
the poor youth was attacked by a severe fever, so Kasana put up some wine
and her nurse's balsam, and dispatched the old creature with them to the
camp."
"To the youth or to Hosea?" asked the prophet with a mischievous smile.
"To the sufferer," replied Hornecht positively, a frown darkening his
brow. But, restraining himself, he added as if apologizing: "Her heart is
as soft as wax, and the Hebrew youth--you saw him yesterday. . . . "
"Is a splendid lad, just fitted to win a woman's heart!" replied the
priest laughing. "Besides, whoever shows kindness to the nephew does not
harm the uncle."
"That was not in her mind," replied Hornecht bluntly. "But the invisible
God of the Hebrews is not less watchful of his children than the
Immortals whom you serve; for he led Hotepu to the youth just as he was
at the point of death. The dreamer would undoubtedly have ridden past
him; for the dust had already . . . ."
"Transformed him into a bit of potter's clay. But then?"
"Then the old man suddenly saw a glint of gold in the dusty heap."
"And the stiffest neck will stoop for that."
"Quite true. My Hotepu did so, and the broad gold circlet the lad wore
flashed in the sunlight and preserved his life a second time."
"The luckiest thing is that we have the lad in our possession."
"Yes, I was rejoiced to have him open his eyes once more. Then his
recovery grew more and more rapid; the doctor says he is like a kitten,
and all these mishaps will not cost him his life. But he is in a violent
fever, and in his delirium says all sorts of senseless things, which even
my daughter's nurse, a native of Ascalon, cannot clearly comprehend. Only
she thought she caught Kasana's name."
"So it is once more a woman who is the source of the trouble."
"Stop these jests, holy father," replied Hornecht, biting his lips. "A
modest widow, and that boy with the down still on his lips."
"At his age," replied the unabashed priest, "fullblown roses have a
stronger attraction for young beetles than do buds; and in this
instance," he added more gravely, "it is a most fortunate accident. We
have Hosea's nephew in the snare, and it will be your part not to let him
escape."
"Do you mean that we are to deprive him of his liberty?" cried the
warrior.
"Even so."
"Yet you value his uncle?"
"Certainly. But the state has a higher claim."
"This boy. . . ."
"Is a desirable hostage. Hosea's sword was an extremely useful tool to
us; but if the hand that guides it is directed by the man whose power
ever greater things we know . . . ."
"You mean the Hebrew, Mesu?"
"Then Hosea will deal us wounds as deep as those he erst inflicted on our
foes."
"Yet I have heard you say more than once that he was incapable of
perjury."
"And so I say still, he has given wonderful proof of it to-day. Merely
for the sake of being released from his oath, he thrust his head into the
crocodile's jaws. But though the son of Nun is a lion, he will find his
master in Mesu. That man is the mortal foe of the Egyptians, the bare
thought of him stirs my gall."
"The cries of the wailing women behind this door admonish us loudly
enough to hate him."
"Yet the weakling on the throne has forgotten vengeance, and is now
sending Hosea on an errand of reconciliation."
"With your sanction, I think?"
"Ay," replied the priest with a mocking smile. "We send him to build a
bridge! Oh, this bridge! A grey-beard's withered brain recommends it to
be thrown across the stream, and the idea just suits this pitiful son of
a great father, who would certainly never have shunned swimming through
the wildest whirlpool, especially when revenge was to be sought. Let
Hosea essay the bridge! If it leads him back across the stream to us, I
will offer him a right warm and cordial welcome; but as soon as this one
man stands on our shores, may its supports sink under the leaders of his
people; we, the only brave souls in Egypt, must see to that."
"So be it. Yet I fear we shall lose the chief, too, if justice overtakes
his people."
"It might almost seem so."
"You have greater wisdom than I."
"Yet here you believe me in error."
"How could I venture to . . . ."
"As a member of the military council you are entitled to your own
opinion, and I consider myself bound to show you the end of the path
along which you have hitherto followed us with blindfold eyes. So listen,
and judge accordingly when your turn comes to speak in the council. The
chief-priest Rui is old . . . ."
"And you now fill half his offices."
"Would that he might soon be relieved of the last half of his burden. Not
on my own account. I love strife, but for the welfare of our native land.
It is a deep-seated feeling of our natures to regard the utterances and
mandates of age as wisdom, so there are few among the councillors who do
not follow the old man's opinions; yet his policy limps on crutches, like
himself. All good projects are swamped under his weak, fainthearted
guidance."
"That is the very reason my vote is at your disposal," cried the warrior.
"That is why I am ready to use all my might to hurl this sleeper from the
throne and get rid of his foolish advisers."
The prophet laid his finger on his lips to warn his companion to be more
cautious, drew nearer to him, pointed to his litter, and said in a low,
hurried tone:
"I am expected at the Sublime Porte, so listen. If Hosea's mission is
successful his people will return--the guilty with the innocent--and the
latter will suffer. Among the former we can include the whole of Hosea's
tribe, who call themselves the sons of Ephraim, from old Nun down to the
youth in your dwelling."
"We may spare them; but Mesu, too, is a Hebrew, and what we do to
him. . . ."
"Will not occur in the public street, and it is child's play to sow
enmity between two men who desire to rule in the same sphere. I will make
sure that Hosea shall shut his eyes to the other's death; but Pharaoh,
whether his name is Meneptah or"--he lowered his voice--"Siptah, must
then raise him to so great a height--and he merits it--that his giddy
eyes will never discern aught we desire to conceal. There is one dish
that never palls on any man who has once tasted it."
"And what is that?"
"Power, Hornecht--mighty power! As ruler of a whole province, commander
of all the mercenaries in Aarsu's stead, he will take care not to break
with us. I know him. If I can succeed in making him believe Mesu has
wronged him--and the imperious man will afford some pretext for it--and
can bring him to the conviction that the law directs the punishment we
mete out to the sorcerer and the worst of his adherents, he will not only
assent but approve it."
"And if he fails in his mission?"
"He will return at any rate; for he would not be false to his oath. But
if Mesu, from whom we may expect anything, should detain him by force,
the boy will be of service to us; for Hosea loves him, his people value
his life, and he belongs to one of their noblest tribes. In any case
Pharaoh must threaten the lad; we will guard him, and that will unite his
uncle to us by fresh ties and lead him to join those who are angry with
the king."
"Excellent!"
"The surest way to attain our object will be by forging still another
chain. In short--now I beg you to be quiet, your temper is far too hot
for your grey hairs--in short, our Hebrew brother-in-arms, the saviour of
my life, the ablest man in the army, who is certain to win the highest
place, must be your son-in-law. Kasana's heart is his--my wife has told
me so." Hornecht frowned again, and struggled painfully to control his
anger. He perceived that he must overcome his objection to giving his
daughter to the man whose birth he scorned, much as he liked and esteemed
his character. He could not refrain from uttering an oath under his
breath, but his answer to the prophet was more calm and sensible than the
latter had anticipated. If Kasana was so possessed by demons that this
stranger infatuated her, let her have her will. But Hosea had not yet
sued for her.
"By the red god Seth, and his seventy companions," he added wrathfully,
"neither you, nor any one shall induce me to offer my daughter, who has
twenty suitors, to a man who terms himself our friend, yet finds no
leisure to greet us in our own house! To keep fast hold of the lad is
another thing, I will see to that."
CHAPTER XI.
The midnight heavens, decked with countless stars, spanned with their
cloudless azure vault the flat plains of the eastern Delta and the city
of Succoth, called by the Egyptians, from their sanctuary, the place of
the god Tum, or Pithom.
The March night was drawing toward its end, pallid mists floated over the
canal, the work of Hebrew bondmen which, as far as the eye could reach,
intersected the plain, watering the fields and pastures along its course.
Eastward and southward the sky was shrouded by dense veils of mist that
rose from the large lakes and from the narrow estuaries that ran far up
into the isthmus. The hot and dusty desert wind, which the day before had
swept over the parched grass and the tents and houses of Succoth, had
subsided at nightfall; and the cool atmosphere which in March, even in
Egypt, precedes the approach of dawn, made itself felt.
Whoever had formerly entered, between midnight and morning, the humble
frontier hamlet with its shepherd tents, wretched hovels of Nile mud, and
by no means handsome farms and dwellings, would scarcely have recognized
it now. Even the one noticeable building in the place--besides the
stately temple of the sungod Turn--the large fortified store-house,
presented at this hour an unfamiliar aspect. Its long white-washed walls,
it is true, glimmered through the gloom as distinctly as ever, but
instead of towering--as usual at this time--mute and lifeless above the
slumbering town--the most active bustle was going on within and around
it. It was intended also as a defense against the predatory hordes of the
Shasu,
[Bedouins, who dwelt as nomads in the desert adjacent to Egypt, now
regarded as part of Asia.]
who had made a circuit around the fortified works on the isthmus, and its
indestructible walls contained an Egyptian garrison, who could easily
defend it against a force greatly superior in numbers.
To-day it looked as if the sons of the desert had assailed it; but the
men and women who were bustling about below and on the broad parapet of
the gigantic building were Hebrews, not Shasu. With loud outcries and
gesticulations of delight they were seizing the thousands of measures of
wheat, barley, rye, and durra, the stores of pulse, dates, and onions
they found in the well-filled granaries, and even before sunset had begun
to empty the store-rooms and put their contents into sacks, pails, and
skins, trays, jugs, and aprons, which were let down by ropes or carried
to the ground on ladders.
The better classes took no share in this work, but among the busy throng,
spite of the lateness of the hour, were children of all ages, carrying
away in pots, jugs, and dishes-borrowed from their mothers' cooking
utensils--as much as they could.
Above, beside the unroofed openings of the storerooms, into which the
stars were shining, and also at the foot of the ladders, women held
torches or lanterns to light the others at their toil.
Pans of blazing pitch were set in front of the strong locked doors of the
real fortress, and in their light armed shepherds were pacing to and fro.
When heavy stones or kicks belabored the brazen-bound door from within,
and threats were uttered in the Egyptian tongue, the Hebrews outside did
not fail to retort in words of mockery and scorn.
On the day of the harvest festival, during the first evening watch,
runners arrived at Succoth and announced to the Israelites, whose numbers
were twenty-fold greater than those of the Egyptians, that they had
quitted Tanis in the morning and the tribes intended to leave at night;
their kindred in Succoth must be ready to go forth with them. There was
great rejoicing among the Hebrews, who like those of their blood in the
city of Rameses, had assembled in every house at a festive repast on the
night of the new moon after the vernal equinox when the harvest festival
usually began. The heads of the tribes had informed them that the day of
liberation had arrived, and the Lord would lead them into the Promised
Land.
Here, too, as in Tanis, many had been faint-hearted and rebellious, and
others had endeavored to separate their lot from the rest and remain
behind; but here, too, they were carried away by the majority. Eleasar,
the son of Aaron, and the distinguished heads of the tribe of Judah, Hur
and Naashon, had addressed the multitude, as Aaron and Nun had done in
the city of Rameses. But Miriam, the virgin, the sister of Moses, had
gone from house to house, everywhere awakening the fire of enthusiasm in
men's hearts, and telling the women that the morrow's sun would usher in
for them and their children a new day of happiness, prosperity, and
freedom.
Few had been deaf to the appeals of the prophetess; there was an air of
majesty, which compelled obedience, in the bearing of this maiden, whose
large black eyes, surmounted by heavy dark eye-brows, which met in the
middle, pierced the hearts of those on whom her gaze was bent and seemed
to threaten the rebellious with their gloomy radiance.
The members of every household went to rest after the festival with
hearts uplifted and full of hope. But what a change had passed over them
during the second day, the night that followed it, and the next morning!
It seemed as though the desert wind had buried all their courage and
confidence in the dust it swept before it. The dread of going forth to
face an unknown future had stolen into every heart, and many a man who
had waved his staff full of trust and joyful enterprise was now held, as
if with clamps and fetters, to his well-tilled garden, the home of his
ancestors, and the harvest in the fields, which had just been half
gathered.
The Egyptian garrison in the fortified store-house had not failed to
notice that the Hebrews were under some special excitement, but they
supposed it due to the harvest festival. The commander of the garrison
had learned that Moses desired to lead his people into the wilderness to
offer sacrifices to their God, and had asked for a reinforcement. But he
knew nothing more; for until the morning when the desert wind blew, no
Hebrew had disclosed the plans of his kindred. But the more sorely the
heat of the day oppressed them, the greater became the dread of the
faint-hearted of the pilgrimage through the hot, dusty, waterless desert.
The terrible day had given them a foretaste of what was impending and
when, toward noon, the dust grew thicker, the air more and more
oppressive, a Hebrew trader, from whom the Egyptian soldiers purchased
goods, stole into the store-house to ask the commander to prevent his
people from rushing to their doom.
Even among the leaders the voices of malcontents had grown loud. Asarja
and Michael, with their sons, who grudged the power of Moses and Aaron,
had even gone from one to another to try to persuade them, ere departing,
to summon the elders again and charge then to enter into fresh
negotiations with the Egyptians. While these malcontents were
successfully gathering adherents, and the traitor had sought the
commander of the Egyptian garrison, two more messengers arrived with
tidings that the fugitives would arrive in Succoth between midnight and
morning.
Breathless, speechless, dripping with perspiration, and with bleeding
lips, the elder messenger sank on the threshold of Amminadab's house, now
the home of Miriam also. Both the exhausted men were refreshed with wine
and food, ere the least wearied was fully capable of speech. Then, in a
hoarse voice, but from a heart overflowing with gratitude and ardent
enthusiasm, he reported the scenes which had occurred at the exodus, and
how the God of their fathers had filled every heart with His spirit, and
instilled new faith into the souls of the cowards.
Miriam had listened to this story with sparkling eyes; at its close she
flung her veil over her head and bade the servants of the household, who
had assembled around the messengers, to summon the whole Hebrew people
under the sycamore, whose broad summit, the growth of a thousand years,
protected a wide space of earth from the scorching sunbeams.
The desert wind was still blowing, but the glad news seemed to have
destroyed the baneful power it exerted on man, and when many hundreds of
people had flocked together under the sycamore, Miriam had given her hand
to Eleasar, the son of her brother Aaron, sprung upon the bench which
rested against the huge hollow trunk of the tree, raised her hands and
eyes toward heaven in an ecstasy, and began in a loud voice to address a
prayer to the Lord, as if she beheld him with her earthly vision.
Then she permitted the messenger to speak, and when the latter again
described the events which had occurred in the city of Rameses, and then
announced that the fugitives from Tanis would arrive in a few hours, loud
shouts of joy burst from the throng. Eleasar, the son of Aaron,
proclaimed with glowing enthusiasm what the Lord had done for his people
and had promised to them, their children, and children's children.
Each word from the lips of the inspired speaker fell upon the hearts of
the Hebrews like the fresh dew of morning on the parched grass. The
trusting hearers pressed around him and Miriam with shouts of joy, and
the drooping courage of the timorous appeared to put forth new wings.
Asarja, Michael, and their followers no longer murmured, nay, most of
them had been infected by the general enthusiasm, and when a Hebrew
mercenary stole out from the garrison of the store-house and disclosed
what had been betrayed to his commander, Eleasar, Naashon, Hur, and
others took counsel together, gathered all the shepherds around them, and
with glowing words urged them to show in this hour that they were men
indeed and did not fear, with their God's mighty aid, to fight for their
people and their liberty.
There was no lack of axes, clubs, sickles, brazen spears, heavy staves,
slings, the shepherds' weapons of defence against the wild beasts of the
desert, or bows and arrows, and as soon as a goodly number of strong men
had joined him, Hur fell upon the Egyptian overseers who were watching
the labor of several hundred Hebrew slaves. Shouting: "They are coming!
Down with the oppressors! The Lord our God is our leader!" they rushed
upon the Lybian warders, put them to rout, and released their fellows who
were digging the earth, and laying bricks. As soon as the illustrious
Naashon had pressed one of the oldest of these hapless men like a brother
to his heart, the other liberated bondsmen had flung themselves into the
shepherds' arms and thus, still shouting: "They are coming!" and "The
Lord, the God of our fathers, is our leader!" they pressed forward in an
increasing multitude. When at last the little band of shepherds had grown
to a body of several thousand men, Hur led them against the Egyptian
soldiers, whom they largely outnumbered.
The Egyptian bowmen had already discharged a shower of arrows, and stones
hurled from the slings of the powerful shepherds had dealt fatal wounds
in the front ranks of the foe, when the blast of a trumpet rang out,
summoning the garrison of the fortress behind the sloping walls and solid
door. The Hebrews seemed to the commander too superior a force to fight,
but duty required him to hold the fort until the arrival of the
reinforcements he had requested.
Hur, however, had not been satisfied with his first victory. Success had
kindled the courage of his followers, as a sharp gust of wind fans a
smouldering fire, and wherever an Egyptian showed himself on the
battlements of the store-house, the round stone from a shepherd's sling
struck heavily upon him. At Naashon's bidding ladders had been brought
and, in the twinkling of an eye, hundreds climbed up the building from
every direction and, after a short, bloodless struggle, the granaries
fell into the Hebrews' hands, though the Egyptians had succeeded in still
retaining the fort. During the passage of these events the desert wind
had subsided. Some of the liberated bondsmen, furious with rage, had
heaped straw, wood, and faggots against the gate of the courtyard into
which the Egyptians had been forced. It would have been a light task for
the assailants to destroy every one of their foes by fire; but Hur,
Naashon, and other prudent leaders had not suffered this to be done, lest
the provisions still in the store-rooms should be burned.
It had been no easy matter, in truth, to deter the younger of the
ill-treated bondsmen from this act of vengeance; but each one was a
member of some family, and when Hur's admonitions were supported by those
of the fathers and mothers, they not only allowed themselves to be
pacified, but aided the elders to distribute the contents of the
magazines among the heads of families and pack them on the beasts of
burden and into the carts which were to accompany the fugitives.
The work went forward amid the broad glare of torches, and became a new
festival; for neither Hur, Naashon, nor Eleasar could prevent the men and
women from opening the wine-jars and skins. They succeeded, however, in
preserving the lion's share of the precious booty for a time of need, and
thus averted much drunkenness, though the spirit of the grape-juice and
the pleasure in obtaining so rich a prize doubtless enhanced the grateful
excitement of the throng. When Eleasar finally went among them for the
second time to tell them of the Promised Land, men and women listened
with uplifted hearts, and joined in the hymn Miriam began to sing.
Devout enthusiasm now took possession of every heart in Succoth, as it
had done in Tanis during the hour that preceded the exodus, and when
seventy Hebrew men and women, who had concealed themselves in the temple
of Turn, heard the jubilant hymn, they came forth into the open air,
joined the others, and packed their possessions with as much glad
hopefulness and warm trust in the God of their fathers, as if they had
never shrunk from the departure.
As the stars sank lower in the heavens, the joyous excitement increased.
Men and women thronged the road to Tanis to meet their approaching
kindred. Many a father led his boy by the hand, and many a mother carried
her child in her arms; the multitude drawing near contained numerous
beloved relatives to be greeted, and the coming dawn could not fail to
bring solemn hours of which one would wish no beloved heart to be
deprived, and which would linger in the souls of the little ones till
they themselves had children and grandchildren.
No bed in tent, hovel, or house was occupied; for everywhere the final
packing was going on. The throng of workers at the granaries had
lessened; most of them were now supplied with as much food as they could
carry.
Men and women equipped for travelling lay around fires hurriedly lighted
in front of many tents and houses, and in the larger farms shepherds were
driving the cattle and slaughtering the oxen and sheep which were unable
to go with the people. The blows of axes and hammers and the creaking of
saws were heard in front of many a house; for litters to transport the
sick and feeble must be made. Carts and wains were still to be loaded,
and the heads of families had a hard task with the women; for a woman's
heart often clings more closely to things apparently worthless than to
those of the greatest value. When the weaver Rebecca was more eager to
find room in the cart for the rude cradle in which her darling had died,
than for the beautiful ebony chest inlaid with ivory an Egyptian had
pawned to her husband, who could blame her?
Light shone from all the window openings and tent doors, while from the
roofs of the largest houses the blaze of torches or lanterns greeted the
approaching Hebrews.
At the banquet served on the night of the harvest festival, no table had
lacked a roast lamb; during this hour of waiting the housewife offered
her family what she could.
The narrow streets of the humble little town were full of active life,
and never had the setting stars shone upon features so cheerful, eyes
sparkling so brightly with enthusiasm, and faces so transfigured by hope
and devout piety.
CHAPTER XII.
When morning dawned, all who had not gone down to meet the fugitives who
were to make their first long halt here, had assembled on the roof of one
of the largest houses in Succoth.
One after another fleet-footed man or boy, hurrying in advance of the
rest, had reached Succoth. Amminadab's house was the goal sought by the
majority. It consisted of two buildings, one occupied by Naashon, the
owner's son, and his family, the other, a larger dwelling, which
sheltered, besides the grey-haired owner and his wife, his son-in-law
Aaron with his wife, children, and grand-children, and Miriam. The aged
leader of his tribe, who had assigned the duties of his position to his
son Naashon, extended his hand to every messenger and listened to his
story with sparkling eyes, often dimmed by tears. He had induced his old
wife to sit in the armchair in which she was to be carried after the
people, that she might become accustomed to it, and for the same reason
he now occupied his own.
When the old dame heard the messengers boast that the fair future
promised to the people was now close at hand, her eyes often sought her
husband, and she exclaimed: "Yes, Moses!" for she held her son-in-law's
brother in high esteem, and rejoiced to see his prophecy fulfilled. The
old people were proud of Aaron, too; but all their love was lavished upon
Eleasar, their grandson, whom they beheld growing up into a second Moses.
Miriam had been for some time a new and welcome member of the household.
True, the warm-hearted old couple's liking for the grave maiden had not
increased to parental tenderness, and their daughter Elisheba, Aaron's
active wife, had no greater inclination to share the cares of the large
family with the prophetess than her son Naashon's spouse, who, moreover,
dwelt with her immediate family under her own roof. Yet the old people
owed Miriam a debt of gratitude for the care she bestowed upon their
granddaughter Milcah, the daughter of Aaron and Elisheba, whom a great
misfortune had transformed from a merry-hearted child into a melancholy
woman, whose heart seemed dead to every joy.
A few days after her marriage to a beloved husband the latter, carried
away by passion, had raised his hand against an Egyptian tax-gatherer,
who, while Pharaoh was passing through Succoth toward the east, had
attempted to drive off a herd of his finest cattle for "the kitchen of
the lord of both worlds." For this act of self-defence the hapless man
had been conveyed to the mines as a prisoner of state, and every one knew
that the convicts there perished, soul and body, from torturing labor far
beyond their strength. Through the influence of old Nun, Hosea's father,
the wife and relatives of the condemned man had been saved from sharing
his punishment, as the law prescribed. But Milcah languished under the
blow, and the only person who could rouse the pale, silent woman from
brooding over her grief was Miriam. The desolate heart clung to the
prophetess, and she accompanied her when she practised in the huts of the
poor the medical skill she had learned and took them medicines and alms.
The last messengers Amninadab and his wife received on the roof described
the hardships of the journey and the misery they had witnessed in dark
hues; but if one, more tender-hearted than the rest, broke into
lamentations over the sufferings endured by the women and children during
the prevalence of the desert wind, and recalling the worst horrors
impressed upon his memory, uttered mournful predictions for the future,
the old man spoke cheering words, telling him of the omnipotence of God,
and how custom would inure one to hardship. His wrinkled features
expressed firm confidence, while one could read in Miriam's beautiful,
yet stern countenance, little of the courageous hope, which youth is wont
to possess in a far higher degree than age.
During the arrival and departure of the messengers she did not quit the
old couple's side, leaving to her sister-in-law Elisheba and her servants
the duty of offering refreshments to the wearied men. She herself
listened intently, with panting breath, but what she heard seemed to
awaken her anxiety; for she knew that no one came to the house which
sheltered Aaron save those who were adherents of her brothers, the
leaders of the people. If such men's blitheness was already waning, what
must the outlook be to the lukewarm and refractory!
She rarely added a question of her own to those asked by the old man and,
when she did so, the messengers who heard her voice for the first time
looked at her in surprise; though musical, the tones were unusually deep.
After several messengers, in reply to her inquiries, declared that Hosea,
the son of Nun, had not come with the others, her head drooped and she
asked nothing more, till pallid Milcah, who followed her everywhere,
raised her dark eyes beseechingly and murmured the name of Reuben, her
captive husband. The prophetess kissed the poor desolate wife's forehead,
glanced at her as if she had neglected her in some way, and then
questioned the messengers with urgent eagerness concerning their news of
Reuben, who had been dragged to the mines. One only had learned from a
released prisoner that Milcah's husband was living in the copper mines of
the province of Bech, in the neighborhood of Mt. Sinai, and Miriam seized
upon these tidings to assure Milcah, with great vivacity and warmth, that
if the tribes moved eastward they would surely pass the mines and release
the Hebrews imprisoned there.
These were welcome words, and Milcah, who nestled to her comforter's
breast, would gladly have heard more; but great restlessness had seized
upon the people gazing into the distance from the roof of Amminadab's
house; a dense cloud of dust was approaching from the north, and soon
after a strange murmur arose, then a loud uproar, and finally shouts and
cries from thousands of voices, lowing, neighing, and bleating, such as
none of the listeners had ever heard,--and then on surged the many-limbed
and many-voiced multitude, the endless stream of human beings and herds,
which the astrologer's grandson on the observatory of the temple at Tanis
had mistaken for the serpent of the nether-world.
Now, too, in the light of early dawn, it might easily have been imagined
a host of bodiless spirits driven forth from the realms of the dead; for
a whitish-grey column of dust extending to the blue vault of heaven moved
before it, and the vast whole, with its many parts and voices, veiled by
the clouds of sand, had the appearance of a single form. Often, however,
a metal spear-head or a brazen kettle, smitten by a sunbeam, flashed
brightly, and individual voices, shouting loudly, fell upon the ear.
The foremost billows of the flood had now reached Amminadab's house,
before which pasture lands extended as far as the eye could reach.
Words of command rang on the air, the procession halted, dispersing as a
mountain lake overflows in spring, sending rivulets and streams hither
and thither; but the various small runlets speedily united, taking
possession of broad patches of the dewy pastures, and wherever such
portions of the torrent of human beings and animals rested, the shroud of
dust which had concealed them disappeared.
The road remained hidden by the cloud a long time, but on the meadows the
morning sunlight shone upon men, women, and children, cattle and donkeys,
sheep and goats, and soon tent after tent was pitched on the green sward
in front of the dwellings of Amminadab and Naashon, herds were surrounded
by pens, stakes and posts were driven into the hard ground, awnings were
stretched, cows were fastened to ropes, cattle and sheep were led to
water, fires were lighted, and long lines of women, balancing jars on
their heads, with their slender, beautifully curved arms, went to the
well behind the old sycamore or to the side of the neighboring canal.
This morning, as on every other working-day, a pied ox with a large hump
was turning the wheel that raised the water. It watered the land, though
the owner of the cattle intended to leave it on the morrow; but the slave
who drove it had no thought beyond the present and, as no one forbade
him, moistened as he was wont the grass for the foe into whose hands it
was to fall.
Hours elapsed ere the advancing multitude reached the camp, and Miriam
who stood describing to Amminadab, whose eyes were no longer keen enough
to discern distant objects, what was passing below, witnessed many an
incident from which she would fain have averted her gaze.
She dared not frankly tell the old man what she beheld, it would have
clouded his joyous hope.
Relying, with all the might of an inspired soul upon the God of her
fathers and his omnipotence, she had but yesterday fully shared
Amminadab's confidence; but the Lord had bestowed upon her spirit the
fatal gift of seeing things and hearing words incomprehensible to all
other human beings. Usually she distinguished them in dreams, but they
often came to her also in solitary hours, when she was deeply absorbed by
thoughts of the past or the future.
The words Ephraim had announced to Hosea in her name, as a message from
the Most High, had been uttered by unseen lips while she was thinking
under the sycamore of the exodus and the man whom she had loved from her
childhood--and when that day, between midnight and morning, she again sat
beneath the venerable tree and was overpowered by weariness, she had
believed she heard the same voice. The words had vanished from her memory
when she awoke, but she knew that their purport had been sorrowful and of
ill omen.
Spite of the vagueness of the monition, it disturbed her, and the
outcries rising from the pastures certainly were not evoked by joy that
the people had joined her brothers and the first goal of their wanderings
had been successfully gained, as the old man at her side supposed; no,
they were the furious shouts of wrathful, undisciplined men, wrangling
and fighting with fierce hostility on the meadow for a good place to
pitch their tents or the best spot at the wells or on the brink of the
canals to water their cattle.
Wrath, disappointment, despair echoed in the shouts, and when her gaze
sought the point whence they rose loudest, she saw the corpse of a woman
borne on a piece of tent-cloth by railing bondmen and a pale,
death-stricken infant held on the arm of a half naked, frantic man, its
father, who shook his disengaged hand in menace toward the spot where she
saw her brothers.
The next moment she beheld a grey-haired old man, bowed by heavy toil,
raise his fist against Moses. He would have struck him, had he not been
dragged away by others.
She could not bear to stay longer on the roof. Pale and panting for
breath, she hurried to the camp. Milcah followed, and wherever they
encountered people who lived in Succoth, they received respectful
greetings.
The new comers from Zoan,--as the Hebrews called Tanis,--Pha-kos, and
Bubastis, whom they met on the way, did not know Miriam, yet the tall
figure and stately dignity of the prophetess led them also to make way
respectfully or pause to answer her questions.
The things she learned were evil and heart-rending; for joyously as the
procession had marched forward on the first day, it dragged along sadly
and hopelessly on the second. The desert wind had robbed many of the
strong of their power of resistance and energy; others, like the
bondman's wife and nursling, had been attacked by fever on the pilgrimage
through the dust and the oppressive heat of the day, and they pointed out
to her the procession which was approaching the burial-place of the
Hebrews of Succoth. Those who were being conveyed to the bourn whence
there is no return were not only women and children, or those who had
been brought from their homes ill, that they might not be left behind,
but also men who were in robust health the day before and had broken down
under burdens too heavy for their strength, or who had recklessly exposed
themselves, while working, to the beams of the noon-day sun.
In one tent, where a young mother was shaking with the chill of a severe
attack of fever, Miriam asked the pallid Milcah to bring her medicine
chest, and the desolate wife went on her errand with joyous alacrity. On
the way she stopped many and timidly asked about her captive husband, but
could obtain no news of him. Miriam, however, heard from Nun, Hosea's
father, that Eliab, the freedman whom he had left behind, had informed
him that his son would be ready to join his people. She also learned that
the wounded Ephraim had found shelter in his uncle's tent.
Was the lad's illness serious, or what other cause detained Hosea in
Tanis? These questions filled Miriam's heart with fresh anxiety, yet with
rare energy she nevertheless lavished help and comfort wherever she went.
Old Nun's cordial greeting had cheered her, and a more vigorous, kind,
and lovable old man could not be imagined.
The mere sight of his venerable head, with its thick snow-white hair and
beard, his regular features, and eyes sparkling with the fire of youth,
was a pleasure to her, and as, in his vivacious, winning manner, he
expressed his joy at meeting her again, as he drew her to his heart and
kissed her brow, after she had told him that, in the name of the Most
High, she had called Hosea "Joshua" and summoned him back to his people
that he might command their forces, she felt as if she had found in him
some compensation for her dead father's loss, and devoted herself with
fresh vigor to the arduous duties which everywhere demanded her
attention.
And it was no trivial matter for the high-souled maiden to devote
herself, with sweet self-sacrifice, to those whose roughness and uncouth
manners wounded her. The women, it is true, gladly accepted her aid, but
the men, who had grown up under the rod of the overseer, knew neither
reserve nor consideration. Their natures were as rude as their persons
and when, as soon as they learned her name, they began to assail her with
harsh reproaches, asserting that her brother had lured them from an
endurable situation to plunge them into the most horrible position, when
she heard imprecations and blasphemy, and saw the furious wrath of the
black eyes that flashed in the brown faces framed by masses of tangled
hair and beards, her heart failed her.
But she succeeded in mastering dread and aversion, and though her heart
throbbed violently, and she expected to meet the worst, she reminded
those who were repulsive to her and from whom her woman's weakness urged
her to flee, of the God of their fathers and His promises.
She now thought she knew what the sorrowful warning voice under the
sycamore had portended, and beside the couch of the young dying mother
she raised her hands and heart to Heaven and took an oath unto the Most
High that she would exert every power of her being to battle against the
faint-hearted lack of faith and rude obstinacy, which threatened to
plunge the people into sore perils. Jehovah had promised them the fairest
future and they must not be robbed of it by the short-sightedness and
defiance of a few deluded individuals; but God himself could scarcely be
wroth with those who, content if their bodily wants were satisfied, had
unresistingly borne insults and blows like cattle. The multitude even now
did not realize that they must pass through the darkness of misery to be
worthy of the bright day that awaited them.
The medicines administered by Miriam seemed to relieve the sufferer, and
filled with fresh confidence, she left the tent to seek her brothers.
There had been little change in the state of affairs in the camp, and she
again beheld scenes from which she recoiled and which made her regret
that the sensitive Milcah was her companion.
Some rascally bondmen who had seized cattle and utensils belonging to
others had been bound to a palmtree, and the ravens that followed the
procession; and had found ample sustenance on the way, now croaked
greedily around the quickly established place of execution.
No one knew who had been judge or executioner of the sentence; but those
who took part in the swift retribution considered it well justified, and
rejoiced in the deed.
With rapid steps and averted head Miriam drew the trembling Milcah on and
gave her to the care of her uncle Naashon to lead home. The latter had
just parted from the man who with him ruled the sons of Judah as a prince
of the tribe--Hur, who at the head of the shepherds had won the first
victory against the Egyptians, and who now led to the maiden with joyful
pride a man and a boy, his son and grandson. Both had been in the service
of the Egyptians, practising the trade of goldsmith and worker in metals
for Pharaoh at Memphis. The former's skill had won him the name of Uri,
which in Egyptian means 'great', and this artificer's son Bezaleel, Hur's
grandson, though scarcely beyond boyhood, was reputed to surpass his
father in the gifts of genius.
Hur gazed with justifiable pride at son and grandson; for though both had
attained much consideration among the Egyptians they had followed their
father's messenger without demur, leaving behind them many who were dear
to their hearts, and the property gained in Memphis, to join their
wandering nation and share its uncertain destiny.
Miriam greeted the new arrivals with the utmost warmth, and the men who,
representing three generations, stood before her, presented a picture on
which the eyes of any well-disposed person could not fail to rest with
pleasure.
The grandfather was approaching his sixtieth year, and though many
threads of silver mingled with his ebon-black hair, he held himself as
erect as a youth, while his thin, sharply-cut features expressed the
unyielding determination, which explained his son's and grandson's prompt
obedience to his will.
Uri, too, was a stately man, and Bezaleel a youth who showed that he had
industriously utilized his nineteen years and already attained an
independent position. His artist eye sparkled with special brilliancy,
and after he and his father had taken leave of Miriam to greet Caleb,
their grandfather and great-grandfather, she heartily congratulated the
man who was one of her brother's most loyal friends, upon such scions of
his noble race.
Hur seized her hand and, with a warmth of emotion gushing from a grateful
heart that was by no means usual to the stern, imperious nature of this
chief of an unruly shepherd tribe, exclaimed:
"Ay, they have remained good, true, and obedient. God has guarded them
and prepared this day of happiness for me. Now it depends on you to make
it the fairest of all festivals. You must have long perceived that my
eyes have followed you and that you have been dear to my heart. To work
for our people and their welfare is my highest aim as a man, yours as a
woman, and that is a strong bond. But I desired to have a still firmer
one unite us, and since your parents are dead, and I cannot go with the
bridal dower to Amram, to buy you from him, I now bring my suit to you in
person, high-souled maiden. But ere you say yes or no, you should learn
that my son and grandson are ready to pay you the same honor as head of
our household that they render me, and your brothers willingly permitted
me to approach you as a suitor."
Miriam had listened to this offer in silent surprise. She had a high
esteem and warm regard for the man who so fervently desired her love.
Spite of his age, he stood before her in the full flush of manhood and
stately dignity, and the beseeching expression of eyes whose glance was
wont to be so imperious and steadfast stirred the inmost depths of her
soul.
She, however, was waiting with ardent longing for another, so her sole
answer was a troubled shake of the head.
But this man of mature years, a prince of his tribe, who was accustomed
to carry his plans persistently into execution, undeterred by her mute
refusal, continued even more warmly than before.
"Do not destroy in one short moment the yearning repressed with so much
difficulty for years! Do you object to my age?"
Miriam shook her head a second time, but Hur went on:
"That was the source of my anxiety, though I can still vie with many a
younger man in vigor. But, if you can overlook your lover's grey hairs,
perhaps you may be induced to weigh the words he now utters. Of the faith
and devotion of my soul I will say nothing. No man of my years woos a
woman, unless his heart's strong impulse urges him on. But there is
something else which, meseems, is of equal import. I said that I would
lead you to my house. Yonder it stands, a building firm and spacious
enough; but from to-morrow a tent will be our home, the camp our
dwelling-place, and there will be wild work enough within its bounds. No
one is secure, not even of life, least of all a woman, however strong she
may be, who has made common cause with those against whom thousands
murmur. Your parents are dead, your brothers might protect you, but
should the people lay hands on them, the same stones on which you cross
the stream would drag you down into the depths with them."
"And were I your wife, you also," replied Miriam, her thick eye-brows
contracting in a heavy frown.
"I will take the risk," Hur answered. "The destinies of all are in God's
hands, my faith is as firm as yours, and behind me stands the tribe of
Judah, who follow me and Naashon as the sheep follow the shepherds. Old
Nun and the Ephraimites are with us, and should matters come to the
worst, it would mean perishing according to God's will, or in faithful
union, power, and prosperity, awaiting old age in the Promised Land."
Miriam fearlessly gazed full into his stern eyes, laid her hand on his
arm, and answered: "Those words are worthy of the man whom I have honored
from childhood, and who has reared such sons; but I cannot be your wife."
"You cannot?"
"No, my lord, I cannot."
"A hard sentence, but it must suffice," replied the other, his head
drooping in sorrow; but Miriam exclaimed:
"Nay, Hur, you have a right to ask the cause of my refusal, and because I
honor you, I owe you the truth. Another man of our race reigns in my
heart. He met me for the first time when I was still a child. Like your
son and grandson, he has lived among the Egyptians, but the summons of
our God and of his father reached him as did the message to your sons,
and like Uri and Bezaleel, he showed himself obedient. If he still
desires to wed me, I shall become his wife, if it is the will of the God
whom I serve, and who shows me the favor of suffering me to hear his
voice. But I shall think of you with gratitude forever."
Her large eyes had been glittering through tears as she uttered the
words, and there was a tremor in the grey-haired lover's voice as he
asked in hesitating, embarrassed tones:
"And if the man for whom you are waiting--I do not ask his name--shuts
his ears to the call that has reached him, if he declines to share the
uncertain destiny of his people?"
"That will never happen!" Miriam interrupted, a chill creeping through
her veins, but Hur exclaimed:
"There is no 'never,' no 'surely,' save with God. If, spite of your firm
faith, the result should be different from your expectations, will you
resign to the Lord the wish which began to stir in your heart, when you
were still a foolish child?"
"He who has guided me until now will show me the right way."
"Well then," replied Hur, "put your trust in Him, and if the man of your
choice is worthy of you, and becomes your lord, my soul will rejoice
without envy when the Most High blesses your union. But if God wills
otherwise, and you need a strong arm for your support, I am here. The
tent and the heart of Hur will ever be open to you."
With these words he turned away; but Miriam gazed thoughtfully after him
as long as the old chief's stately figure was visible.
At last, still pondering, she moved toward her host's house, but at the
road leading to Tanis, she paused and gazed northward. The dust had
subsided, and she could see a long distance, but the one person whom it
was to lead back to her and to his people did not appear. Sighing sadly,
she moved onward with drooping head, and started violently when her
brother Moses' deep voice called to her from the old sycamore.
CHAPTER XIII.
Aaron and Eleasar, with fiery eloquence, had reminded the murmuring,
disheartened people of the power and promises of their God. Whoever had
stretched his limbs undisturbed to comfortable rest, whoever had been
strengthened by food and drink regained the confidence that had been
lost. The liberated bondmen were told of the hard labor and dishonoring
blows which they had escaped and admonished that they must recognize as
God's dispensation, among other things, that Pharaoh had not pursued
them; but the rich booty still found in the plundered storehouse had no
small share in the revival of their drooping courage, and the bondmen and
lepers--for many of the latter had accompanied them and rested outside
the camp--in short, all for whose support Pharaoh had provided, saw
themselves safe for a long time from care and privation. Yet there was no
lack of malcontents, and here and there, though no one knew who
instigated the question, loud discussion arose whether it would not be
more advisable to return to Pharaoh and rely on his favor. Whoever raised
it, did the work secretly, and was often compelled to submit to sharp,
threatening retorts.
Miriam had talked with her brothers and shared the heavy anxieties that
oppressed them. Why had the desert wind so speedily destroyed the courage
of the people during their brief pilgrimage? How impatient, how weak in
faith, how rebellious they had showed themselves at the first obstacle
they had encountered, how uncontrollable they had been in following their
fierce impulses. When summoned to prayer just before sunrise during their
journey, some had turned toward the day-star rising in the east, others
had taken out a small idol they had brought with them, and others still
had uplifted their eyes to the Nile acacia, which in some provinces of
Egypt was regarded as a sacred tree. What did they know of the God who
had commanded them to cast so much behind them and take upon themselves
such heavy burdens? Even now many were despairing, though they had
confronted no serious dangers; for Moses had intended to lead the Hebrews
in Succoth over the road to Philistia direct to the Promised Land in
Palestine, but the conduct of the people forced him to resign this plan
and form another.
To reach the great highway connecting Asia and Africa it was necessary to
cross the isthmus, which rather divided than united the two continents;
for it was most thoroughly guarded from intruders and, partly by natural,
partly by artificial obstacles, barred the path of every fugitive; a
series of deep lakes rolled their waves upon its soil, and where these
did not stay the march of the travelers strong fortifications, garrisoned
by trained Egyptian troops, rose before them.
This chain of forts was called Chetam--or in the Hebrew tongue--Etham,
and wayfarers leaving Succoth would reach the nearest and strongest of
these forts in a few hours.
When the tribes, full of enthusiasm for their God, and ready for the most
arduous enterprises, shook off their chains and, exulting in their new
liberty, rushed forward to the Promised Land Moses, and with him the
majority of the elders, had believed that, like a mountain torrent,
bursting dams and sluices, they would destroy and overthrow everything
that ventured to oppose their progress. With these enthusiastic masses,
to whom bold advance would secure the highest good, and timid hesitation
could bring nothing save death and ruin, they had expected to rush over
the Etham line as if it were a pile of faggots. But now since a short
chain of difficulties and suffering had stifled the fire of their souls,
now that wherever the eye turned, there were two calm and five
dissatisfied or anxious individuals to one upheld by joyous anticipation,
to storm the Etham line would have cost rivers of blood and moreover
jeopardized all that had been already gained.
The overpowering of the little garrison in the storehouse of Pithom had
occurred under specially favorable circumstances, which could hardly be
expected to happen again, so the original plan must be changed, and an
attempt made to take a circuit around the fortifications. Instead of
moving toward the northeast, the tribes must turn southward.
But, ere carrying this plan into execution, Moses, accompanied by a few
trusty men, desired to examine the new route and ascertain whether it
would be passable for the great wandering people.
These matters were discussed under the great sycamore in front of
Amminadab's house, and Miriam was present, a mute witness.
Women,--even those like herself,--were forced to keep silence when men
were holding counsel; yet it was hard for her to remain speechless when
it was decided to abstain from attacking the forts, even should the
trained warrior, Hosea, whom God Himself had chosen to be his sword,
return to his people.
"What avails the best leader, if there is no army to obey him?" Naashon,
Amminadab's son, had exclaimed, and the others shared his opinion.
When the council finally broke up, Moses took leave of his sister with
fraternal affection. She knew that he was in the act of plunging into
fresh dangers and--in the modest manner in which she was always wont to
accost the brother who so far surpassed all others in every gift of mind
and body,--expressed her anxiety. He looked into her eyes with friendly
reproach and raised his right hand toward heaven; but she understood his
meaning, and kissing his hand with grateful warmth, replied:
"You stand under the protection of the Most High, and I fear no longer."
Pressing his lips upon her brow, he bade her give him a tablet, wrote a
few words on it, flung it into the hollow trunk of the sycamore, and
said:
"For Hosea, no, for Joshua, the son of Nun, if he comes while I am
absent. The Lord has great deeds for him to accomplish, when he learns to
expect loftier things from the Most High than from the mighty ones of
earth."
With these words he left her; but Aaron who, as the oldest, was the head
of her tribe, lingered and told her that a man of worth sought her hand.
Miriam, with blanching face, replied:
"I know it. . . . "
He looked at her in surprise and with earnest monition, added:
"As you choose; yet it will be wise to consider this. Your heart belongs
to your God and to your people, and the man whom you wed must be ready,
like yourself, to serve both; for two must be one in marriage, and if the
highest aim of one is not also that of the other, they will remain two
till the end. The voice of the senses, which drew them together, will
soon be mute and nothing will be left to them save discord."
Having said this, he went away, and she, too, was preparing to leave the
others; for on the eve of departure she might be needed in the house
whose hospitality she enjoyed. But a new incident detained her, as though
bound with fetters, under the sycamore.
What cared she for the packing of perishable wares and providing for
bodily needs, when affairs which occupied her whole soul were under
discussion! Elisheba, Naashon's wife, any housekeeper and faithful slave
could attend to the former wants. Higher things were to be determined
here--the weal or woe of her people.
Several men of distinction in the tribes had joined the elders under the
sycamore; but Hur had already departed with Moses.
Uri, the son of the former, now appeared beneath the ancient tree. The
worker in metals, who had just come from Egypt, had talked in Memphis
with persons who were near to the king and learned that Pharaoh was ready
to remove great burdens from the Hebrews and grant them new favors, if
Moses would render the God whom he served propitious to him and induce
the people to return after they had offered sacrifices in the wilderness.
Therefore it would be advisable to send envoys to Tanis and enter into
negotiations with the Sublime Porte.
These proposals, which Uri had not yet ventured to moot to his father,
he, with good intentions, brought before the assembled elders; he hoped
that their acceptance might spare the people great suffering. But
scarcely had he concluded his clear and convincing speech, when old Nun,
Hosea's father, who had with difficulty held his feelings in check, broke
in.
The old man's face, usually so cheerful, glowed with wrath, and its fiery
hue formed a strange contrast to the thick white locks which framed it. A
few hours before he had heard Moses repel similar propositions with harsh
decision and crushing reasons; now he had heard them again brought.
forward and noted many a gesture of assent among the listeners, and saw
the whole great enterprise imperilled, the enterprise for whose success
he had himself risked and sacrificed more than any other man.
This was too much for the active old man who, with flashing eyes and hand
upraised in menace, burst forth "What do you mean? Are we to pick up the
ends of the rope the Lord our God has severed? Do you counsel us to
fasten it anew, with a looser knot, which will hold as long as the whim
of a vacillating weakling who has broken his promises to us and to Moses
a score of times? Do you wish to lead us back to the cage whence the
Almighty released us by a miracle? Are we to treat the Lord our God like
a bad debtor and prefer the spurious gold ring we are offered to the
royal treasures He promises? Oh, messenger from the Egyptians--I
would . . . ."
Here the hot-blooded grey-beard raised his clenched fist in menace but,
ere he had uttered the threat that hovered on his lips, he let his arm
fall; for Gabriel, the oldest member of the tribe of Zebulun, shouted:
"Remember your own son, who is to-day among the foes of his people."
The words struck home; yet they only dimmed the fiery old man's glad
self-reliance a moment and, amid the voices uttering disapproval of the
malicious Gabriel and the few who upheld the Zebulunite, he cried:
"And because I am perhaps in danger of losing, not only the ten thousand
acres of land I flung behind me, but a noble son, it is my right to speak
here."
His broad chest heaved with his labored breathing and his eyes, shadowed
by thick white brows, rested with a milder expression on the son of Hur,
whose face had paled at his vehement words, as he continued:
"Uri is a good and dutiful son to his father and has also been obliged to
make great sacrifices in leaving the place where his work was so much
praised and his own house in Memphis. The blessing of the Most High will
not fail him. But for the very reason that he has hitherto obeyed the
command, he must not now seek to destroy what we have commenced under the
guidance of the Most High. To you, Gabriel, I answer that my son probably
will not tarry among our foes, but obedient to my summons, will join us,
like Uri, the first-born of Hur. What still detains him is doubtless some
important matter of which Hosea will have as little cause to be ashamed
as I, his father. I know and trust him, and whoever expects aught else
will sooner or later, by my son's course of action, be proved a liar."
Here he paused to push his white hair back from his burning brow and, as
no one contradicted him, he turned to the worker in metals, and added
with cordial friendliness:
"What angered me, Uri, was certainly not your purpose. That is a good
one; but you have measured the greatness and majesty of the God of our
fathers by the standard of the false gods of the Egyptians, who die and
rise again and, as Aaron has just said, represent only minor attributes
of Him who is in all and transcends everything. To serve God, until Moses
taught me a better counsel, I deemed meant to sacrifice an ox, a lamb, or
a goose upon the altar like the Egyptians; but your eyes, as befell me
through Moses, will not be opened to Him who rules the world and has made
us His people, until, like me, you, and all of us, and probably my son
also, shall each have kindled in his own breast the sacrificial fire
which never goes out and consumes everything that does not relate to Him
in love and loyalty, faith and reverence. Through Moses, His servant, God
has promised us the greatest blessings--deliverance from bondage, the
privilege of ruling on our own land as free men in a beautiful country,
our own possession and the heritage of our children. We are going forth
to receive His gift, and whoever seeks to stop us on our way, whoever
urges us to turn and creep back into the net whose brazen meshes we have
burst, advises his people to run once more like sheep into the fire from
which they have escaped. I am not angry with you; your face shows that
you perceive how foolishly you have erred; but all ye who are here must
know that I heard only a few hours ago from Moses' own lips these words:
'Whoever counsels return and the making of covenants with the Egyptians,
I will denounce as a scorner of Jehovah our God, and the destroyer and
worst foe of his people!'"
Uri went to the old man, gave him his hand, and deeply convinced of the
justice of his reproaches, exclaimed: "No treaty, no covenant with the
Egyptians! I am grateful to you, Nun, for opening my eyes. To me, also,
the hour will doubtless come in which you, or some one who stands nearer
to Him than I, will teach me to know your God, who is also mine."
As he ceased speaking, he went away with Nun, who put his arm around his
shoulders; but Miriam had listened breathlessly to Uri's last words, and
as he expressed a desire to know the God of his people, her eyes had
sparkled with the light of enthusiasm. She felt that her soul was filled
with the greatness of the Most High and that she had the gift of speech
to make another familiar with the knowledge she herself possessed. But
this time also custom required her to keep silence. Her heart ached, and
as she again moved among the multitude and convinced herself that Hosea
had not yet come, she went home, as twilight was beginning to gather, and
joined the others on the roof.
No one there appeared to have missed her, not even poor melancholy
Milcah, and she felt unutterably lonely in this house.
If Hosea would only come, if she might have a strong breast on which to
lean, if this sense of being a stranger in her own home, this useless
life beneath the roof she was obliged to call hers, though she never felt
thoroughly at home under it, would but cease. Moses and Aaron, too, had
gone away, taking Hur's grandson with them; but no one had deemed her,
who lived and breathed solely for her people and their welfare, worthy to
learn whither their journey led or what was its purpose.
Why had the God to whom she devoted her whole life and being made her a
woman, yet given her the mind and soul of a man?
She waited, as if to test whether any of the circle of kindly-natured
people to which she belonged really loved her, for some one of the elders
or the children to accost her; but Eleasar's little ones were pressing
around their grandparents, and she had never understood how to make
herself agreeable to children. Elisheba was directing the slaves who were
putting the finishing touches to the packing; Milcah sat with her cat in
her lap, gazing into vacancy. No one heeded or spoke to her.
Bitter pain overpowered Miriam, and after she had shared the evening meal
with the others, and forced herself not to disturb by her own sorrowful
mood, the joyous excitement of the children, who looked forward to the
pilgrimage as a great pleasure, she longed to go out of doors.
Closely veiled, she passed alone through the camp and what she beheld
there was certainly ill-suited to dispel the mood that oppressed her.
There was plenty of noise, and though sometimes devout hymns, full of joy
and hope, echoed on the air, she heard far more frequently savage
quarrelling and rebellious words. When her ear caught threats or
reproaches levelled against her noble brother, she quickened her pace,
but she could not escape her anxiety concerning what would happen at the
departure after sunrise on the morrow, should the malcontents obtain
supremacy.
She knew that the people would be forced to press forward; but her dread
of Pharaoh's military power had never permitted her to be at peace--to
her it was as it were embodied in Hosea's heroic figure. If the Lord
Himself did not fight in the ranks of the wretched bondmen and shepherds
who were quarrelling and disputing around her, how were they to withstand
the well-trained and equipped hosts of the Egyptians, with their horses
and chariots?
She had heard that guards had been posted in all parts of the camp, with
orders to sound the horn or strike the cymbal at the approach of the foe,
until the men had flocked to the spot whence the warning first echoed.
She had long listened for such an alarm, yet how much more intently for
the hoof-beats of a single steed, the firm step and deep voice of the
warrior for whom she yearned. On his account she constantly returned to
the northern part of the camp which adjoined the road coming from Tanis
and where now, at Moses' bidding, the tents of most of the men capable of
bearing arms were pitched. Here she had hoped to find true confidence;
but as she listened to the talk of the armed soldiers who surrounded the
camp-fires in dense circles, she heard that Uri's proposal had reached
them also. Most of them were husbands and fathers, had left behind a
house, a bit of land, a business, or an office, and though many spoke of
the command of the Most High and the beautiful new home God had promised,
not a few were disposed to return. How gladly she would have gone among
these blinded mortals and exhorted them to obey with fresh faith and
confidence the command of the Lord and of her brother. But here, too, she
was forced to keep silence. She was permitted to listen only, and she was
most strongly attracted to the very places where she might expect to hear
rebellious words and proposals.
There was a mysterious charm in this cruel excitement and she felt as if
she were deprived of something desirable when many a fire was
extinguished, the soldiers went to sleep, and conversation ceased.
She now turned for the last time toward the road leading from Tanis; but
nothing was stirring there save the sentries pacing to and fro.
She had not yet doubted Hosea's coming; for the summons she had sent to
him in the name of the Lord had undoubtedly reached him; but now that the
stars showed her it was past midnight, the thought came vividly before
her mind of the many years he had spent among the Egyptians, and that he
might perhaps deem it unworthy of a man to obey the call of a woman, even
if she uplifted her voice in the name of the Most High. She had
experienced humiliations enough that day, why should not this be decreed
also?
CHAPTER XIV
Deeply disturbed and tortured by such thoughts, Miriam walked toward
Amminadab's house to seek repose; but just as she was in the act of
crossing the threshold, she paused and again listened for sounds coming
from the north.
Hosea must arrive from that direction.
But she heard nothing save the footsteps of a sentinel and the voice of
Hur, who was patrolling the camp with a body of armed men.
He, too, had been unable to stay in the house.
The night was mild and starry, the time seemed just suited for dreams
under the sycamore. Her bench beneath the venerable tree was empty, and
with drooping head she approached the beloved resting-place, which she
must leave forever on the morrow.
But ere she had reached the spot so close at hand, she paused with her
figure drawn up to its full height and her hand pressed upon her
throbbing bosom. This time she was not mistaken, the beat of hoofs echoed
on the air, and it came from the north.
Were Pharaoh's chariots approaching to attack the camp? Should she shout
to wake the warriors? Or could it be he whom she so longingly expected?
Yes, yes, yes! It was the tramp of a single steed, and must be a new
arrival; for there were loud voices in the tents, the dogs barked, and
shouts, questions, and answers came nearer and nearer with the rider.
It was Hosea, she felt sure. His riding alone through the night, released
from the bonds that united him to Pharaoh and his comrades in arms, was a
sign of his obedience! Love had steeled his will and quickened the pace
of his steed, and the gratitude of answering affection, the reward she
could bestow, should be withheld no longer. In her arms he should
blissfully perceive that he had resigned great possessions to obtain
something still fairer and sweeter! She felt as though the darkness
around had suddenly brightened into broad day, as her ear told her that
the approaching horseman was riding straight toward the house of her host
Amminadab. She now knew that he was obeying her summons, that he had come
to find her. Hosea was seeking her ere he went to his own father, who had
found shelter in the big empty house of his grandson, Ephraim.
He would gladly have dashed toward her at the swiftest pace of his steed,
but it would not do to ride rapidly through the camp. Ah, how long the
time seemed ere she at last saw the horseman, ere he swung himself to the
ground, and his companion flung the reins of the horse to a man who
followed him.
It was he, it was Hosea!
But his companion--she had recognized him distinctly and shrank a
little--his companion was Hur, the man who a few hours before had sought
her for his wife.
There stood her two suitors side by side in the starlight, illumined by
the glare of the pitch torches blazing beside the carts and household
utensils which had been packed for the morrow's journey.
The tall figure of the elder Hebrew towered over the sinewy form of the
warrior, and the shepherd prince bore himself no whit less erect than the
Egyptian hero. Both voices sounded earnest and manly, yet her lover's
seemed to Miriam stronger and deeper. They had now advanced so near that
she could understand their conversation.
Hur was telling the newcomer that Moses had gone on a reconnoitring
expedition, and Hosea was expressing his regret, because he had important
matters to discuss with him.
Then he must set out with the tribes the next morning, Hur replied, for
Moses intended to join them on the way.
Then he pointed to Amminadab's house, from which no ray of light gleamed
through the darkness, and asked Hosea to spend the remainder of the night
beneath his roof, as he probably would not wish yo disturb his aged
father at so late an hour.
Miriam saw her friend hesitate and gaze intently up to the women's
apartments and the roof of her host's house. Knowing what he sought, she
could no longer resist the impulse of her heart, but stepped forth from
the shadow of the sycamore and gave Hosea a cordial and tender welcome.
He, too, disdained to conceal the joy of his heart, and Hur stood beside
the reunited lovers, as they clasped each other's hands, and exchanged
greetings, at first mutely, then with warm words.
"I knew you would come!" cried the maiden, and Hosea answered with joyful
emotion.
"You might easily suppose so, oh Prophetess; for your own voice was among
those that summoned me here."
Then in a calmer tone, he added: "I hoped to find your brother also; I am
the bearer of a message of grave import to him, to us, and to the people.
I see that you, too, are ready to depart and should grieve to behold the
comfort of your aged hosts destroyed by hasty acts that may yet be
needless."
"What do you mean?" asked Hur, advancing a step nearer to the other. "I
mean," replied Hosea, "that if Moses persists in leading the tribes
eastward, much blood will flow uselessly to-morrow; for I learned at
Tanis that the garrison of Etham has been ordered to let no man pass,
still less the countless throng, whose magnitude surprised me as I rode
through the camp. I know Apu, who commands the fortifications and the
legions whom he leads. There would be a terrible, fruitless massacre of
our half-armed, untrained people, there would be--in short, I have urgent
business to discuss with Moses, urgent and immediate, to avert the
heaviest misfortune ere it is too late."
"What you fear has not escaped our notice," replied Hur, "and it is in
order to guard against this peril that Moses has set forth on a dangerous
quest."
"Whither?" asked Hosea.
"That is the secret of the leaders of the tribes."
"Of which my father is one."
"Certainly; and I have already offered to take you to him. If he assumes
the responsibility of informing you. . . ."
"Should he deem it a breach of duty, he will keep silence. Who is to
command the wandering hosts tomorrow?"
"I."
"You?" asked Hosea in astonishment, and Hur answered calmly:
"You marvel at the audacity of the shepherd who ventures to lead an army;
but the Lord of all armies, to whom we trust our cause, is our leader; I
rely solely on His guidance."
"And so do I," replied Hosea. "No one save the God through whom Miriam
summoned me to this spot, entrusted me--of that I am confident--with the
important message which brings me here. I must find Moses ere it is too
late."
"You have already heard that he will be beyond the reach of any one,
myself included, until to-morrow, perhaps the day after. Will you speak
to Aaron?"
"Is he in the camp?"
"No; but we expect his return before the departure of the people, that is
in a few hours."
"Has he the power to decide important matters in Moses' absence?"
"No, he merely announces to the people in eloquent language what his
illustrious brother commands."
The warrior bent his eyes with a disappointed expression on the ground,
and after a brief pause for reflection eagerly added, fixing his gaze on
Miriam:
"It is Moses to whom the Lord our God announces his will; but to you, his
august maiden sister, the Most High also reveals himself, to you . . ."
"Oh, Hosea!" interrupted the prophetess, extending her hands toward him
with a gesture of mingled entreaty and warning; but the chief, instead of
heeding her monition, went on:
"The Lord our God hath commanded you to summon me, His servant, back to
the people; He hath commanded you to give me the name for which I am to
exchange the one my father and mother bestowed upon me, and which I have
borne in honor for thirty years. Obedient to your summons, I have cast
aside all that could make me great among men; but on my way through
Egypt,--bearing in my heart the image of my God and of you,--braving
death, the message I now have to deliver was entrusted to me, and I
believe that it came from the Most High Himself. It is my duty to convey
it to the leaders of the people; but as I am unable to find Moses, I can
confide it to no better one than you who, though only a woman,
stand,--next to your brother--nearest to the Most High, so I implore you
to listen to me. The tidings I bring are not yet ripe for the ears of a
third person."
Hur drew his figure to a still greater height and, interrupting Hosea,
asked Miriam whether she desired to hear the son of Nun without
witnesses; she answered with a quiet "yes."
Then Hur turned haughtily and coldly to the warrior:
"I think that Miriam knows the Lord's will, as well as her brother's, and
is aware of what beseems the women of Israel. If I am not mistaken, it
was under this tree that your own father, the worthy Nun, gave to my son
Uri the sole answer which Moses must also make to every bearer of a
message akin to yours."
"Do you know it?" asked Hosea in a tone of curt reproof.
"No," replied the other, "but I suspect its purport, and look here."
While speaking he stooped with youthful agility and, raising two large
stones with his powerful arms, propped them against each other, rolled
several smaller ones to their sides, and then, with panting breath,
exclaimed:
"Let this heap be a witness between me and thee, like the stones named
Mizpah which Jacob and Laban erected. And as the latter called upon the
Lord to watch between him and the other, so do I likewise. I point to
this heap that you may remember it, when we are parted one from the
other. I lay my hand upon these stones and bear witness that I, Hur, son
of Caleb and Ephrath, put my trust in no other than the Lord, the God of
our fathers, and am ready to obey His command, which calls us forth from
the kingdom of Pharaoh into a land which He promised to us. But of thee,
Hosea, son of Nun, I ask and the Lord our God hears thee: Dost thou, too,
expect no other help save from the God of Abraham, who has made thy race
His chosen people? And wilt thou also testify whether thou wilt ever
regard the Egyptians who oppressed us, and from whose bondage the Lord
our God delivered us, as the mortal foes of thy God and of thy race?"
The warrior's bearded features quivered, and he longed to overthrow the
heap and answer the troublesome questioner with wrathful words, but
Miriam had laid her hand on the top of the pile of stones, and clasping
his right hand, exclaimed:
"He is questioning you in the presence of our God and Lord, who is your
witness."
Hosea succeeded in controlling his wrath, and pressing the maiden's hand
more closely, he answered earnestly:
"He questions, but I may not answer; 'yea' or 'nay' will be of little
service here; but I, too, call God to witness, and before this heap you,
Miriam, but you alone, shall hear what I propose and for what purpose I
have come. Look, Hur! Like you I lay my hand upon this heap and bear
witness that I, Hosea, son of Nun, put my sole trust in the Lord and God
of our fathers. He stands as a witness between me and thee, and shall
decide whether my way is His, or that of an erring mortal. I will obey
His will, which He has made known to Moses and to this noble maiden. This
I swear by an oath whose witness is the Lord our God."
Hur had listened intently and, impressed by the earnestness of the words,
now exclaimed:
"The Lord our God has heard your vow and against your oath I, in the
presence of this heap, take another: If the hour comes when, mindful of
this heap of stones, you give the testimony you have refused me, there
shall henceforward be no ill-will between us, and if it is in accordance
with the will of the Most High, I will cheerfully resign to you the
office of commander, which you, trained in many wars, would be better
suited to fill than I, who hitherto have ruled only my flocks and
shepherds. But you, Miriam, I charge to remember that this heap of stones
will also be a witness of the colloquy you are to hold with this man in
the presence of God. I remind you of the reproving words you heard
beneath this tree from the lips of his father, and call God to witness
that I would have darkened the life of my son Uri, who is the joy of my
heart, with a father's curse if he had gone among the people to induce
them to favor the message he brought; for it would have turned those of
little faith from their God. Remember this, maiden, and let me say again:
"If you seek me you will find me, and the door I opened will remain open
to you, whatever may happen!"
With these words Hur turned his back upon Miriam and the warrior.
Neither knew what had befallen them, but he who during the long ride
beset by many a peril had yearned with ardent anticipations for the hour
which was to once more unite him to the object of his love, gazed on the
ground full of bewilderment and profound anxiety, while Miriam who, at
his approach, had been ready to bestow upon him the highest, sweetest
gifts with which a loving woman rewards fidelity and love, had sunk to
the earth before the ominous pile of stones close beside the tree and
pressed her forehead against its gnarled, hollow trunk.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Brief "eternity" of national covenants
Choose between too great or too small a recompense
Regard the utterances and mandates of age as wisdom
There is no 'never,' no surely
Voice of the senses, which drew them together, will soon be mute
JOSHUA
By Georg Ebers
Volume 3.
CHAPTER XV.
For a long time nothing was heard beneath the sycamore save Miriam's low
moans and the impatient footsteps of the warrior who, while struggling
for composure, did not venture to disturb her.
He could not yet understand what had suddenly towered like a mountain
between him and the object of his love.
He had learned from Hur's words that his father and Moses rejected all
mediation, yet the promises he was bearing to the people seemed to him a
merciful gift from the Most High. None of his race yet knew it and, if
Moses was the man whom he believed him to be, the Lord must open his eyes
and show him that he had chosen him, Hosea, to lead the people through
his mediation to a fairer future; nor did he doubt that He could easily
win his father over to his side. He would even have declared a second
time, with the firmest faith, that it was the Most High who had pointed
out his path, and after reflecting upon all this he approached Miriam,
who had at last risen, with fresh confidence. His loving heart prompted
him to clasp her in his arms, but she thrust him back and her voice,
usually so pure and clear, sounded harsh and muffled as she asked why he
had lingered so long and what he intended to confide to her.
While cowering under the sycamore, she had not only struggled and prayed
for composure, but also gazed into her own soul. She loved Hosea, but she
suspected that he came with proposals similar to those of Uri, and the
wrathful words of hoary Nun rang in her ears more loudly than ever. The
fear that the man she loved was walking in mistaken paths, and the
startling act of Hur had made the towering waves of her passion subside
and her mind, now capable of calmer reflection, desired first of all to
know what had so long detained him whom she had summoned in the name of
her God, and why he came alone, without Ephraim.
The clear sky was full of stars, and these heavenly bodies, which seem to
have been appointed to look down upon the bliss of united human lovers,
now witnessed the anxious questions of a tortured girl and the impatient
answers of a fiery, bitterly disappointed man.
He began with the assurance of his love and that he had come to make her
his wife; but, though she permitted him to hold her hand in his clasp,
she entreated him to cease pleading his suit and first tell her what she
desired to know.
On his way he had received various reports concerning Ephraim through a
brother-in-arms from Tanis, so he could tell her that the lad had been
disobedient and, probably from foolish curiosity, had gone, ill and
wounded, to the city, where he had found shelter and care in the house of
a friend. But this troubled Miriam, who seemed to regard it as a reproach
to know that the orphaned, inexperienced lad, who had grown up under her
own eyes and whom she herself had sent forth among strangers, was beneath
an Egyptian roof.
But Hosea declared that he would undertake the task of bringing him back
to his people and as, nevertheless she continued to show her anxiety,
asked whether he had forfeited her confidence and love. Instead of giving
him a consoling answer, she began to put more questions, desiring to know
what had delayed his coming, and so, with a sorely troubled and wounded
heart, he was forced to make his report and, in truth, begin at the end
of his story.
While she listened, leaning against the trunk of the sycamore, he paced
to and fro, urged by longing and impatience, sometimes pausing directly
in front of her. Naught in this hour seemed to him worthy of being
clothed in words, save the hope and passion which filled his heart. Had
he been sure that hers was estranged he would have dashed away again,
after having revealed his whole soul to his father, and risked the ride
into unknown regions to seek Moses. To win Miriam and save himself from
perjury were his only desires, and momentous as had been his experiences
and expectations, during the last few days, he answered her questions
hastily, as if they concerned the most trivial things.
He began his narrative in hurried words, and the more frequently she
interrupted him, the more impatiently he bore it, the deeper grew the
lines in his forehead.
Hosea, accompanied by his attendant, had ridden southward several hours
full of gladsome courage and rich in budding hopes, when just before dusk
he saw a vast multitude moving in advance of him. At first he supposed he
had encountered the rear-guard of the migrating Hebrews, and had urged
his horse to greater speed. But, ere he overtook the wayfarers, some
peasants and carters who had abandoned their wains and beasts of burden
rushed past him with loud outcries and shouts of warning which told him
that the people moving in front were lepers. And the fugitives' warning
had been but too well founded; for the first, who turned with the
heart-rending cry: "Unclean! Unclean!" bore the signs of those attacked
by the fell disease, and from their distorted faces covered with white
dust and scurf, lustreless eyes, destitute of brows, gazed at him.
Hosea soon recognized individuals, here Egyptian priests with shaven
heads, yonder Hebrew men and women. With the stern composure of a
soldier, he questioned both and learned that they were marching from the
stone quarries opposite Memphis to their place of isolation on the
eastern shore of the Nile. Several of the Hebrews among them had heard
from their relatives that their people had left Egypt and gone to seek a
land which the Lord had promised them. Many had therefore resolved to put
their trust also in the mighty God of their fathers and follow the
wanderers; the Egyptian priests, bound to the Hebrews by the tie of a
common misfortune, had accompanied them, and fixed upon Succoth as the
goal of their journey, knowing that Moses intended to lead his people
there first. But every one who could have directed them on their way had
fled before them, so they had kept too far northward and wandered near
the fortress of Thabne. Hosea had met them a mile from this spot and
advised them to turn back, that they might not bring their misfortune
upon their fugitive brethren.
During this conversation, a body of Egyptian soldiers had marched from
the fortress toward the lepers to drive them from the road; but their
commander, who knew Hosea, used no violence, and both men persuaded the
leaders of the lepers to accept the proposal to be guided to the
peninsula of Sinai, where in the midst of the mountains, not far from the
mines, a colony of lepers had settled. They had agreed to this plan
because Hosea promised them that, if the tribes went eastward, they would
meet them and receive everyone who was healed; but if the Hebrews
remained in Egypt, nevertheless the pure air of the desert would bring
health to many a sufferer, and every one who recovered would be free to
return home.
These negotiations had consumed much time, and the first delay was
followed by many others; for as Hosea had been in such close contact with
the lepers, he was obliged to ride to Thabne, there with the commander of
the garrison, who had stood by his side, to be sprinkled with bird's
blood, put on new garments, and submit to certain ceremonies which he
himself considered necessary and which could be performed only in the
bright sunlight. His servant had been kept in the fortress because the
kind-hearted man had shaken hands with a relative whom he met among the
hapless wretches.
The cause of the delay had been both sorrowful and repulsive, and not
until after Hosea had left Thabne in the afternoon and proceeded on his
way to Succoth, did hope and joy again revive at the thought of seeing
Miriam once more and bringing to his people a message that promised so
much good.
His heart had never throbbed faster or with more joyous anticipation than
on the nocturnal ride which led him to his father and the woman he loved,
and on reaching his goal, instead of the utmost happiness, he now found
only bitter disappointment.
He had reluctantly described in brief, disconnected sentences his meeting
with the lepers, though he believed he had done his best for the welfare
of these unfortunates. All of his warrior comrades had uttered a word of
praise; but when he paused she whose approval he valued above aught else,
pointed to a portion of the camp and said sadly: "They are of our blood,
and our God is theirs. The lepers in Zoan, Pha-kos and Phibeseth followed
the others at a certain distance, and their tents are pitched outside the
camp. Those in Succoth--there are not many--will also be permitted to go
forth with us; for when the Lord promised the people the Land for which
they long, He meant lofty and lowly, poor and humble, and surely also the
hapless ones who must now remain in the hands of the foe. Would you not
have done better to separate the Hebrews from the Egyptians, and guide
those of our own blood to us?"
The warrior's manly pride rebelled and his answer sounded grave and
stern: "In war we must resolve to sacrifice hundreds in order to save
thousands. The shepherds separate the scabby sheep to protect the flock."
"True," replied Miriam eagerly; "for the shepherd is a feeble man, who
knows no remedy against contagion; but the Lord, who calls all His
people, will suffer no harm to arise from rigid obedience."
"That is a woman's mode of thought," replied Hosea; "but what pity
dictates to her must not weigh too heavily in the balance in the councils
of men. You willingly obey the voice of the heart, which is most proper,
but you should not forget what befits you and your sex."
A deep flush crimsoned Miriam's cheeks; for she felt the sting contained
in this speech with two-fold pain because it was Hosea who dealt the
thrust. How many pangs she had been compelled to endure that day on
account of her sex, and now he, too, made her feel that she was not his
peer because she was a woman. In the presence of the stones Hur had
gathered, and on which her hand now rested, he had appealed to her
verdict, as though she were one of the leaders of the people, and now he
abruptly thrust her, who felt herself inferior to no man in intellect and
talent, back into a woman's narrow sphere.
But he, too, felt his dignity wounded, and her bearing showed him that
this hour would decide whether he or she would have the mastery in their
future union. He stood proudly before her, his mien stern in its
majesty--never before had he seemed so manly, so worthy of admiration.
Yet the desire to battle for her insulted womanly dignity gained
supremacy over every other feeling, and it was she who at last broke the
brief, painful silence that had followed his last words, and with a
composure won only by the exertion of all her strength of will, she
began:
"We have both forgotten what detains us here so late at night. You wished
to confide to me what brings you to your people and to hear, not what
Miriam, the weak woman, but the confidante of the Lord decides."
"I hoped also to hear the voice of the maiden on whose love I rely," he
answered gloomily.
"You shall hear it," she replied quickly, taking her hand from the
stones. "Yet it may be that I cannot agree with the opinion of the man
whose strength and wisdom are so far superior to mine, yet you have just
shown that you cannot tolerate the opposition of a woman, not even mine."
"Miriam," he interrupted reproachfully, but she continued still more
eagerly: "I have felt it, and because it would be the greatest grief of
my life to lose your heart, you must learn to understand me, ere you call
upon me to express my opinion."
"First hear my message."
"No, no!" she answered quickly. "The reply would die upon my lips. Let me
first tell you of the woman who has a loving heart, and yet knows
something else that stands higher than love. Do you smile? You have a
right to do so, you have so long been a stranger to the secret I mean to
confide. . . ."
"Speak then!" he interrupted, in a tone which betrayed how difficult it
was for him to control his impatience.
"I thank you," she answered warmly. Then leaning against the trunk of the
ancient tree, while he sank down on the bench, gazing alternately at the
ground and into her face, she began:
"Childhood already lies behind me, and youth will soon follow. When I was
a little girl, there was not much to distinguish me from others. I played
like them and, though my mother had taught me to pray to the God of our
fathers, I was well pleased to listen to the other children's tales of
the goddess Isis. Nay, I stole into her temple, bought spices, plundered
our little garden for her, anointed her altar, and brought flowers for
offerings. I was taller and stronger than many of my companions, and was
also the daughter of Amram, so they followed me and readily did what I
suggested. When I was eight years old, we moved hither from Zoan. Ere I
again found a girl-playfellow, you came to Gamaliel, your sister's
husband, to be cured of the wound dealt by a Libyan's lance. Do you
remember that time when you, a youth, made the little girl a companion? I
brought you what you needed and prattled to you of the things I knew, but
you told me of bloody battles and victories, of flashing armor, and the
steeds and chariots of the warrior, You showed me the ring your daring
had won, and when the wound in your breast was cured, we roved over the
pastures. Isis, whom you also loved, had a temple here, and how often I
secretly slipped into the forecourt to pray for you and offer her my
holiday-cakes. I had heard so much from you of Pharaoh and his splendor,
of the Egyptians, and their wisdom, their art, and luxurious life, that
my little heart longed to live among them in the capital; besides, it had
reached my ears that my brother Moses had received great favors in
Pharaoh's palace and risen to distinction in the priesthood. I no longer
cared for our own people; they seemed to me inferior to the Egyptians in
all respects.
"Then came the parting from you and, as my little heart was devout and
expected all good gifts from the divine power, no matter what name it
bore, I prayed for Pharaoh and his army, in whose ranks you were
fighting.
"My mother sometimes spoke of the God of our fathers as a mighty
protector, to whom the people in former days owed much gratitude, and
told me many beautiful tales of Him; but she herself often offered
sacrifices in the temple of Seth, or carried clover blossoms to the
sacred bull of the sun-god. She, too, was kindly disposed toward the
Egyptians, among whom her pride and joy, our Moses, had attained such
high honors.
"So in happy intercourse with the others I reached my fifteenth year. In
the evening, when the shepherds returned home, I sat with the young
people around the fire, and was pleased when the sons of the shepherd
princes preferred me to my companions and sought my love; but I refused
them all, even the Egyptian captain who commanded the garrison of the
storehouse; for I remembered you, the companion of my youth. My best
possession would not have seemed too dear a price to pay for some magic
spell that would have brought you to us when, at the festal games, I
danced and sang to the tambourine while the loudest shouts of applause
greeted me. Whenever many were listening I thought of you--then I poured
forth like the lark the feelings that filled my heart, then my song was
inspired by you and not by the fame of the Most High, to whom it was
consecrated."
Here passion, with renewed power, seized the man, to whom the woman he
loved was confessing so many blissful memories. Suddenly starting up, he
extended his arms toward her; but she sternly repulsed him, that she
might control the yearning which threatened to overpower her also.
Yet her deep voice had gained a new, strange tone as, at first rapidly
and softly, then in louder and firmer accents, she continued:
"So I attained my eighteenth year and was no longer satisfied to dwell in
Succoth. An indescribable longing, and not for you only, had taken
possession of my soul. What had formerly afforded me pleasure now seemed
shallow, and the monotony of life here in the remote frontier city amid
shepherds and flocks, appeared dull and pitiful.
"Eleasar, Aaron's son, had taught me to read and brought me books, full
of tales which could never have happened, yet which stirred the heart.
Many also contained hymns and fervent songs such as one lover sings to
another. These made a deep impression on my soul and, whenever I was
alone in the evening, or at noon-day when the shepherds and flocks were
far away in the fields, I repeated these songs or composed new ones, most
of which were hymns in praise of the deity. Sometimes they extolled Amon
with the ram's head, sometimes cow-headed Isis, and often, too, the great
and omnipotent God who revealed Himself to Abraham, and of whom my mother
spoke more and more frequently as she advanced in years. To compose such
hymns in quiet hours, wait for visions revealing God's grandeur and
splendor, or beautiful angels and horrible demons, became my favorite
occupation. The merry child had grown a dreamy maiden, who let household
affairs go as they would. And there was no one who could have warned me,
for my mother had followed my father to the grave; and I now lived alone
with my old aunt Rachel, unhappy myself, and a source of joy to no one.
Aaron, the oldest of our family, had removed to the dwelling of his
father-in-law Amminadab: the house of Amram, his heritage, had become too
small and plain for him and he left it to me. My companions avoided me;
for my mirthfulness had departed and I patronized them with wretched
arrogance because I could compose songs and beheld more in my visions
than all the other maidens.
"Nineteen years passed and, on the evening of my birthday, which no one
remembered save Milcah, Eleasar's daughter, the Most High for the first
time sent me a messenger. He came in the guise of an angel, and bade me
set the house in order; for a guest, the person dearest to me on earth,
was on the way.
"It was early and under this very tree; but I went home and, with old
Rachel's help, set the house in order, and provided food, wine, and all
else we offer to an honored guest. Noon came, the afternoon passed away,
evening deepened into night, and morning returned, yet I still waited for
the guest. But when the sum of that day was nearing the western horizon,
the dogs began to bark loudly, and when I went to the door a powerful
man, with tangled grey hair and beard, clad in the tattered white robes
of a priest, hurried toward me. The dogs shrank back whining; but I
recognized my brother.
"Our meeting after so long a separation at first brought me more fear
than pleasure; for Moses was flying from the officers of the law because
he had slain the overseer. You know the story.
"Wrath still glowed in his flashing eyes. He seemed to me like the god
Seth in his fury, and each one of his slow words was graven upon my soul
as by a hammer and chisel. Thrice seven days and nights he remained under
my roof, and as I was alone with him and deaf Rachel, and he was
compelled to remain concealed, no one came between us, and he taught me
to know Him who is the God of our fathers.
"Trembling and despairing, I listened to his powerful words, which seemed
to fall like rocks upon my breast, when he admonished me of God's
requirements, or described the grandeur and wrath of Him whom no mind can
comprehend, and no name can describe. Ah, when he spoke of Him and of the
Egyptian gods, it seemed as if the God of my people stood before me like
a giant, whose head touched the sky, and the other gods were creeping in
the dust at his feet like whining curs.
"He taught me also that we alone were the people whom the Lord had
chosen, we and no other. Then for the first time I was filled with pride
at being a descendant of Abraham, and every Hebrew seemed a brother,
every daughter of Israel a sister. Now, too, I perceived how cruelly my
people had been enslaved and tortured. I had been blind to their
suffering, but Moses opened my eyes and sowed in my heart hate, intense
hate of their oppressors, and from this hate sprang love for the victims.
I vowed to follow my brother and await the summons of my God. And lo, he
did not tarry and Jehovah's voice spoke to me as with tongues.
"Old Rachel died. At Moses' bidding I gave up my solitary life and
accepted the invitation of Aaron and Amminadab.
"So I became a guest in their household, yet led a separate life among
them all. They did not interfere with me, and the sycamore here on their
land became my special property. Beneath its shadow God commanded me to
summon you and bestow on you the name "Help of Jehovah"--and you, no
longer Hosea, but Joshua, will obey the mandate of God and His
prophetess."
Here the warrior interrupted the maiden's words, to which he had listened
earnestly, yet with increasing disappointment:
"Ay, I have obeyed you and the Most High. But what it cost me you disdain
to ask. Your story has reached the present time, yet you have made no
mention of the days following my mother's death, during which you were
our guest in Tanis. Have you forgotten what first your eyes and then your
lips confessed? Have the day of your departure and the evening on the
sea, when you bade me hope for and remember you, quite vanished from your
memory? Did the hatred Moses implanted in your heart kill love as well as
every other feeling?"
"Love?" asked Miriam, raising her large eyes mournfully to his. "Oh no.
How could I forget that time, the happiest of my life! Yet from the day
Moses returned from the wilderness by God's command to release the people
from bondage--three months after my separation from you--I have taken no
note of years and months, days and nights."
"Then you have forgotten those also?" Hosea asked harshly.
"Not so," Miriam answered, gazing beseechingly into his face. "The love
that grew up in the child and did not wither in the maiden's heart,
cannot be killed; but whoever consecrates one's life to the Lord. . . . "
Here she suddenly paused, raised her hands and eyes rapturously, as if
borne out of herself, and cried imploringly: "Thou art near me,
Omnipotent One, and seest my heart! Thou knowest why Miriam took no note
of days and years, and asked nothing save to be Thy instrument until her
people, who are, also, this man's people, received what Thou didst
promise."
During this appeal, which rose from the inmost depths of the maiden's
heart, the light wind which precedes the coming of dawn had risen, and
the foliage in the thick crown of the sycamore above Miriam's head
rustled; but Hosea fairly devoured with his eyes the tall majestic
figure, half illumined, half veiled by the faint glimmering light. What
he heard and saw seemed like a miracle. The lofty future she anticipated
for her people, and which must be realized ere she would permit herself
to yield to the desire of her own heart, he believed that he was hearing
to them as a messenger of the Lord. As if rapt by the noble enthusiasm of
her soul, he rushed toward her, seized her hand, and cried in glad
emotion: "Then the hour has come which will again permit you to
distinguish months from days and listen to the wishes of your own soul.
For to I, Joshua, no longer Hosea, but Joshua, come as the envoy of the
Lord, and my message promises to the people whom I will learn to love as
you do, new prosperity, and thus fulfils the promise of a new and better
home, bestowed by the Most High."
Miriam's eyes sparkled brightly and, overwhelmed with grateful joy, she
exclaimed:
"Thou hast come to lead us into the land which Jehovah promised to His
people? Oh Lord, how measureless is thy goodness! He, he comes as Thy
messenger."
"He comes, he is here!" Joshua enthusiastically replied, and she did not
resist when he clasped her to his breast and, thrilling with joy, she
returned his kiss.
CHAPTER XVI.
Fear of her own weakness soon made Miriam release herself from her
lover's embrace, but she listened with eager happiness, seeking some new
sign from the Most High in Joshua's brief account of everything he had
felt and experienced since her summons.
He first described the terrible conflict he endured, then how he regained
entire faith and, obedient to the God of his people and his father's
summons, went to the palace expecting imprisonment or death, to obtain
release from his oath.
He told her how graciously the sorrowing royal pair had received him, and
how he had at last taken upon himself the office of urging the leaders of
his nation to guide them into the wilderness for a short time only, and
then take them home to Egypt, where a new and beautiful region on the
western bank of the river should be allotted to them. There no foreign
overseer should henceforward oppress the workmen, but the affairs of the
Hebrews should be directed by their own elders, and a man chosen by
themselves appointed their head.
Lastly he said that he, Joshua, would be placed in command of the Hebrew
forces and, as regent, mediate and settle disputes between them and the
Egyptians whenever it seemed necessary.
United to her, a happy husband, he would care in the new land for even
the lowliest of his race. On the ride hither he had felt as men do after
a bloody battle, when the blast of trumpets proclaim victory. He had
indeed a right to regard himself as the envoy of the Most High.
Here, however, he interrupted himself; for Miriam, who at first had
listened with open ears and sparkling eyes, now showed a more and more
anxious and troubled mien. When he at last spoke of making the people
happy as her husband, she withdrew her hand, gazed timidly at his manly
features, glowing with joyful excitement, and then as if striving to
maintain her calmness, fixed her eyes upon the ground.
Without suspecting what was passing in her mind, Hosea drew nearer. He
supposed that her tongue was paralyzed by maidenly shame at the first
token of favor she had bestowed upon a man. But when at his last words,
designating himself as the true messenger of God, she shook her head
disapprovingly, he burst forth again, almost incapable of self-control in
his sore disappointment:
"So you believe that the Lord has protected me by a miracle from the
wrath of the mightiest sovereign, and permitted me to obtain from his
powerful hand favors for my people, such as the stronger never grant to
the weaker, simply to trifle with the joyous confidence of a man whom he
Himself summoned to serve Him."
Miriam, struggling to force back her tears, answered in a hollow tone:
"The stronger to the weaker! If that is your opinion, you compel me to
ask, in the words of your own father: 'Who is the more powerful, the Lord
our God or the weakling on the throne, whose first-born son withered like
grass at a sign from the Most High. Oh, Hosea! Hosea!'"
"Joshua!" he interrupted fiercely. "Do you grudge me even the name your
God bestowed? I relied upon His help when I entered the palace of the
mighty king. I sought under God's guidance rescue and salvation for the
people, and I found them. But you, you . . . ."
"Your father and Moses, nay, all the believing heads of the tribes, see
no salvation for us among the Egyptians," she answered, panting for
breath. "What they promise the Hebrews will be their ruin. The grass
sowed by us withers where their feet touch it! And you, whose honest
heart they deceive, are the whistler whom the bird-catcher uses to decoy
his feathered victims into the snare. They put the hammer into your hand
to rivet more firmly than before the chains which, with God's aid, we
have sundered. Before my mind's eye I perceive . . . ."
"Too much!" replied the warrior, grinding his teeth with rage. "Hate dims
your clear intellect. If the bird-catcher really--what was your
comparison--if the bird-catcher really made me his whistler, deceived and
misled me, he might learn from you, ay, from you! Encouraged by you, I
relied upon your love and faith. From you I hoped all things--and where
is this love? As you spared me nothing that could cause me pain, I will,
pitiless to myself, confess the whole truth to you. It was not alone
because the God of my fathers called me, but because His summons reached
me through you and my father that I came. You yearn for a land in the far
uncertain distance, which the Lord has promised you; but I opened to the
people the door of a new and sure home. Not for their sakes--what
hitherto have they been to me?--but first of all to live there in
happiness with you whom I loved, and my old father. Yet you, whose cold
heart knows naught of love, with my kiss still on your lips, disdain what
I offer, from hatred of the hand to which I owe it. Your life, your
conflicts have made you masculine. What other women would trample the
highest blessings under foot?"
Miriam could bear no more and, sobbing aloud, covered her convulsed face
with her hands.
At the grey light of dawn the sleepers in the camp began to stir, and men
and maid servants came out of the dwellings of Amminadab and Naashon. All
whom the morning had roused were moving toward the wells and watering
places, but she did not see them.
How her heart had expanded and rejoiced when her lover exclaimed that he
had come to lead them to the land which the Lord had promised to his
people. Gladly had she rested on his breast to enjoy one brief moment of
the greatest bliss; but how quickly had bitter disappointment expelled
joy! While the morning breeze had stirred the crown of the sycamore and
Joshua had told her what Pharaoh would grant to the Hebrews, the rustling
among the branches had seemed to her like the voice of God's wrath and
she fancied she again heard the angry words of hoary-headed Nun. The
latter's reproaches had dismayed Uri like the flash of lightning, the
roll of thunder, yet how did Joshua's proposition differ from Uri's?
The people--she had heard it also from the lips of Moses--were lost if,
faithless to their God, they yielded to the temptations of Pharaoh. To
wed a man who came to destroy all for which she, her brothers, and his
own father lived and labored, was base treachery. Yet she loved Joshua
and, instead of harshly repulsing him, she would have again nestled ah,
how gladly, to the heart which she knew loved her so ardently.
But the leaves in the top of the tree continued to rustle and it seemed
as if they reminded her of Aaron's warning, so she forced herself to
remain firm.
The whispering above came from God, who had chosen her for His
prophetess, and when Joshua, in passionate excitement, owned that the
longing for her was his principal motive for toiling for the people, who
were as unknown to him as they were dear to her, her heart suddenly
seemed to stop beating and, in her mortal agony, she could not help
sobbing aloud.
Unheeding Joshua, or the stir in the camp, she again flung herself down
with uplifted arms under the sycamore, gazing upward with dilated,
tearful eyes, as if expecting a new revelation. But the morning breeze
continued to rustle in the summit of the tree, and suddenly everything
seemed as bright as sunshine, not only within but around her, as always
happened when she, the prophetess, was to behold a vision. And in this
light she saw a figure whose face startled her, not Joshua, but another
to whom her heart did not incline. Yet there he stood before the eyes of
her soul in all his stately height, surrounded by radiance, and with a
solemn gesture he laid his hand on the stones he had piled up.
With quickened breath, she gazed upward to the face, yet she would gladly
have closed her eyes and lost her hearing, that she might neither see it
nor catch the voices from the tree. But suddenly the figure vanished, the
voices died away, and she appeared to behold in a bright, fiery glow, the
first man her virgin lips had kissed, as with uplifted sword, leading the
shepherds of her people, he dashed toward an invisible foe.
Swiftly as the going and coming of a flash of lightning, the vision
appeared and vanished, yet ere it had wholly disappeared she knew its
meaning.
The man whom she called "Joshua" and who seemed fitted in every respect
to be the shield and leader of his people, must not be turned aside by
love from the lofty duty to which the Most High had summoned him. None of
the people must learn the message he brought, lest it should tempt them
to turn aside from the dangerous path they had entered.
Her course was as plain as the vision which had just vanished. And, as if
the Most High desired to show her that she had rightly understood its
meaning, Hur's voice was heard near the sycamore--ere she had risen to
prepare her lover for the sorrow to which she must condemn herself and
him--commanding the multitude flocking from all directions to prepare for
the departure.
The way to save him from himself lay before her; but Joshua had not yet
ventured to disturb her devotions.
He had been wounded and angered to the inmost depths of his soul by her
denial. But as he gazed down at her and saw her tall figure shaken by a
sudden chill, and her eyes and hands raised heavenward as though,
spell-bound, he had felt that something grand and sacred dwelt within her
breast which it would be sacrilege to disturb; nay, he had been unable to
resist the feeling that it would be presumptuous to seek to wed a woman
united to the Lord by so close a tie. It must be bliss indeed to call
this exalted creature his own, yet it would be hard to see her place
another, even though it were the Almighty Himself, so far above her lover
and husband.
Men and cattle had already passed close by the sycamore and just as he
was in the act of calling Miriam and pointing to the approaching throng,
she rose, turned toward him, and forced from her troubled breast the
words:
"I have communed with the Lord, Joshua, and now know His will. Do you
remember the words by which God called you?"
He bent his head in assent; but she went on:
"Well then, you must also know what the Most High confided to your
father, to Moses, and to me. He desires to lead us out of the land of
Egypt, to a distant country where neither Pharaoh nor his viceroy shall
rule over us, and He alone shall be our king. That is His will, and if He
requires you to serve Him, you must follow us and, in case of war,
command the men of our people."
Joshua struck his broad breast, exclaiming in violent agitation: "An oath
binds me to return to Tanis to inform Pharaoh how the leaders of the
people received the message with which I was sent forth. Though my heart
should break, I cannot perjure myself."
"And mine shall break," gasped Miriam, "ere I will be disloyal to the
Lord our God. We have both chosen, so let what once united us be sundered
before these stones."
He rushed frantically toward her to seize her hand; but with an imperious
gesture she waved him back, turned away, and went toward the multitude
which, with sheep and cattle, were pressing around the wells.
Old and young respectfully made way for her as, with haughty bearing, she
approached Hur, who was giving orders to the shepherds; but he came
forward to meet her and, after hearing the promise she whispered, he laid
his hand upon her head and said with solemn earnestness:
"Then may the Lord bless our alliance."
Hand in hand with the grey-haired man to whom she had given herself,
Miriam approached Joshua. Nothing betrayed the deep emotion of her soul,
save the rapid rise and fall of her bosom, for though her cheeks were
pale, her eyes were tearless and her bearing was as erect as ever.
She left to Hur to explain to the lover whom she had forever resigned
what she had granted him, and when Joshua heard it, he started back as
though a gulf yawned at his feet.
His lips were bloodless as he stared at the unequally matched pair. A
jeering laugh seemed the only fitting answer to such a surprise, but
Miriam's grave face helped him to repress it and conceal the tumult of
his soul by trivial words.
But he felt that he could not long succeed in maintaining a successful
display of indifference, so he took leave of Miriam. He must greet his
father, he said hastily, and induce him to summon the elders.
Ere he finished several shepherds hurried up, disputing wrathfully and
appealed to Hur to decide what place in the procession belonged to each
tribe. He followed them, and as soon as Miriam found herself alone with
Joshua, she said softly, yet earnestly, with beseeching eyes:
"A hasty deed was needful to sever the tie that bound us, but a loftier
hope unites us. As I sacrificed what was dearest to my heart to remain
faithful to my God and people, do you, too, renounce everything to which
your soul clings. Obey the Most High, who called you Joshua! This hour
transformed the sweetest joy to bitter grief; may it be the salvation of
our people! Remain a son of the race which gave you your father and
mother! Be what the Lord called you to become, a leader of your race! If
you insist on fulfilling your oath to Pharaoh, and tell the elders the
promises with which you came, you will win them over, I know. Few will
resist you, but of those few the first will surely be your own father. I
can hear him raise his voice loudly and angrily against his own dear son;
but if you close your ears even to his warning, the people will follow
your summons instead of God's, and you will rule the Hebrews as a mighty
man. But when the time comes that the Egyptian casts his promises to the
winds, when you see your people in still worse bondage than before and
behold them turn from the God of their fathers to again worship
animal-headed idols, your father's curse will overtake you, the wrath of
the Most High will strike the blinded man, and despair will be the lot of
him who led to ruin the weak masses for whose shield the Most High chose
him. So I, a feeble woman, yet the servant of the Most High and the
maiden who was dearer to you than life, cry in tones of warning: Fear
your father's curse and the punishment of the Lord! Beware of tempting
the people."
Here she was interrupted by a female slave, who summoned her to her
house--and she added in low, hurried accents: "Only this one thing more.
If you do not desire to be weaker than the woman whose opposition roused
your wrath, sacrifice your own wishes for the welfare of yonder
thousands, who are of the same blood! With your hand on these stones you
must swear . . . ."
But here her voice failed. Her hands groped vainly for some support, and
with a loud cry she sank on her knees beside Hur's token.
Joshua's strong arms saved her from falling prostrate, and several women
who hurried up at his shout soon recalled the fainting maiden to life.
Her eyes wandered restlessly from one to another, and not until her
glance rested on Joshua's anxious face did she become conscious where she
was and what she had done. Then she hurriedly drank the water a
shepherd's wife handed to her, wiped the tears from her eyes, sighed
painfully, and with a faint smile whispered to Joshua: "I am but a weak
woman after all."
Then she walked toward the house, but after the first few steps turned,
beckoned to the warrior, and said softly:
"You see how they are forming into ranks. They will soon begin to move.
Is your resolution still unshaken? There is still time to call the
elders."
He shook his head, and as he met her tearful, grateful glance, answered
gently:
"I shall remember these stones and this hour, wife of Hur. Greet my
father for me and tell him that I love him. Repeat to him also the name
by which his son, according to the command of the Most High, will
henceforth be called, that its promise of Jehovah's aid may give him
confidence when he hears whither I am going to keep the oath I have
sworn."
With these words he waved his hand to Miriam and turned toward the camp,
where his horse had been fed and watered; but she called after him: "Only
one last word: Moses left a message for you in the hollow trunk of the
tree."
Joshua turned back to the sycamore and read what the man of God had
written for him. "Be strong and steadfast" were the brief contents, and
raising his head he joyfully exclaimed: "Those words are balm to my soul.
We meet here for the last time, wife of Hur, and, if I go to my death, be
sure that I shall know how to die strong and steadfast; but show my old
father what kindness you can."
He swung himself upon his horse and while trotting toward Tanis, faithful
to his oath, his soul was free from fear, though he did not conceal from
himself that he was going to meet great perils. His fairest hopes were
destroyed, yet deep grief struggled with glad exaltation. A new and lofty
emotion, which pervaded his whole being, had waked within him and was but
slightly dimmed, though he had experienced a sorrow bitter enough to
darken the light of any other man's existence. Naught could surpass the
noble objects to which he intended to devote his blood and life--his God
and his people. He perceived with amazement this new feeling which had
power to thrust far into the background every other emotion of his
breast--even love.
True, his head often drooped sorrowfully when he thought of his old
father; but he had done right in repressing the eager yearning to clasp
him to his heart. The old man would scarcely have understood his motives,
and it was better for both to part without seeing each other rather than
in open strife.
Often it seemed as though his experiences had been but a dream, and while
he felt bewildered by the excitements of the last few hours, his strong
frame was little wearied by the fatigues he had undergone.
At a well-known hostelry on the road, where he met many soldiers and
among them several military commanders with whom he was well acquainted,
he at last allowed his horse and himself a little rest and food; and as
he rode on refreshed active life asserted its claims; for as far as the
gate of the city of Rameses he passed bands of soldiers, and learned that
they were ordered to join the cohorts he had himself brought from Libya.
At last he rode into the capital and as he passed the temple of Amon he
heard loud lamentations, though he had learned on the way that the plague
had ceased. What many a sign told him was confirmed at last by some
passing guards--the first prophet and high-priest of Amon, the
grey-haired Rui, had died in the ninety-eighth year of his life. Bai, the
second prophet, who had so warmly protested his friendship and gratitude
to Hosea, had now become Rui's successor and was high-priest and judge,
keeper of the seals and treasurer, in short, the most powerful man in the
realm.
CHAPTER XVII.
"Help of Jehovah!" murmured a state-prisoner, laden with heavy chains,
five days later, smiling bitterly as, with forty companions in
misfortune, he was led through the gate of victory in Tanis toward the
east.
The mines in the Sinai peninsula, where more convict labor was needed,
were the goal of these unfortunate men.
The prisoner's smile lingered a short time, then drawing up his muscular
frame, his bearded lips murmured: "Strong and steadfast!" and as if he
desired to transmit the support he had himself found he whispered to the
youth marching at his side: "Courage, Ephraim, courage! Don't gaze down
at the dust, but upward, whatever may come."
"Silence in the ranks!" shouted one of the armed Libyan guards, who
accompanied the convicts, to the older prisoner, raising his whip with a
significant gesture. The man thus threatened was Joshua, and his
companion in suffering Ephraim, who had been sentenced to share his fate.
What this was every child in Egypt knew, for "May I be sent to the
mines!" was one of the most terrible oaths of the common people, and no
prisoner's lot was half so hard as that of the convicted state-criminals.
A series of the most terrible humiliations and tortures awaited them. The
vigor of the robust was broken by unmitigated toil; the exhausted were
forced to execute tasks so far beyond their strength that they soon found
the eternal rest for which their tortured souls longed. To be sent to the
mines meant to be doomed to a slow, torturing death; yet life is so dear
to men that it was considered a milder punishment to be dragged to forced
labor in the mines than to be delivered up to the executioner.
Joshua's encouraging words had little effect upon Ephraim; but when, a
few minutes later, a chariot shaded by an umbrella, passed the prisoners,
a chariot in which a slender woman of aristocratic bearing stood beside a
matron behind the driver, he turned with a hasty movement and gazed after
the equipage with sparkling eyes till it vanished in the dust of the
road.
The younger woman had been closely veiled, but Ephraim thought he
recognized her for whose sake he had gone to his ruin, and whose lightest
sign he would still have obeyed.
And he was right; the lady in the chariot was Kasana, the daughter of
Hornecht, captain of the archers, and the matron was her nurse.
At a little temple by the road-side, where, in the midst of a grove of
Nile acacias, a well was maintained for travellers, she bade the matron
wait for her and, springing lightly from the chariot which had left the
prisoners some distance behind, she began to pace up and down with
drooping head in the shadow of the trees, until the whirling clouds of
dust announced the approach of the convicts.
Taking from her robe the gold rings she had ready for this purpose, she
went to the man who was riding at its head on an ass and who led the
mournful procession. While she was talking with him and pointing to
Joshua, the guard cast a sly glance at the rings which had been slipped
into his hand, and seeing a welcome yellow glitter when his modesty had
expected only silver, his features instantly assumed an expression of
obliging good-will.
True, his face darkened at Kasana's request, but another promise from the
young widow brightened it again, and he now turned eagerly to his
subordinates, exclaiming: "To the well with the moles, men! Let them
drink. They must be fresh and healthy under the ground!"
Then riding up to the prisoners, he shouted to Joshua:
"You once commanded many soldiers, and look more stiff-necked now than
beseems you and me. Watch the others, guards, I have a word or two to say
to this man alone."
He clapped his hands as if he were driving hens out of a garden, and
while the prisoners took pails and with the guards, enjoyed the
refreshing drink, their leader drew Joshua and Ephraim away from the
road--they could not be separated on account of the chain which bound
their ancles together.
The little temple soon hid them from the eyes of the others, and the
warder sat down on a step some distance off, first showing the two
Hebrews, with a gesture whose meaning was easily understood, the heavy
spear he carried in his hand and the hounds which lay at his feet.
He kept his eyes open, too, during the conversation that followed. They
could say whatever they chose; he knew the duties of his office and
though, for the sake of good money he could wink at a farewell, for
twenty years, though there had been many attempts to escape, not one of
his moles--a name he was fond of giving to the future miners--had
succeeded in eluding his watchfulness.
Yonder fair lady doubtless loved the stately man who, he had been told,
was formerly a chief in the army. But he had already numbered among his
"moles," personages even more distinguished, and if the veiled woman
managed to slip files or gold into the prisoner's hands, he would not
object, for that very evening the persons of both would be thoroughly
searched, even the youth's black locks, which would not have remained
unshorn, had not everything been in confusion prior to the departure of
the convicts, which took place just before the march of Pharaoh's army.
The watcher could not hear the whispered words exchanged between the
degraded chief and the lady, but her humble manner and bearing led him to
suppose that it was she who had brought the proud warrior to his ruin.
Ah, these women! And the fettered youth! The looks he fixed upon the
slender figure were ardent enough to scorch her veil. But patience!
Mighty Father Amon! His moles were going to a school where people learned
modesty!
Now the lady had removed her veil. She was a beautiful woman! It must be
hard to part from such a sweetheart. And now she was weeping.
The rude warder's heart grew as soft as his office permitted; but he
would fain have raised his scourge against the older prisoner; for was it
not a shame to have such a sweetheart and stand there like a stone?
At first the wretch did not even hold out his hand to the woman who
evidently loved him, while he, the watcher, would gladly have witnessed
both a kiss and an embrace.
Or was this beauty the prisoner's wife who had betrayed him? No, no! How
kindly he was now gazing at her. That was the manner of a father speaking
to his child; but his mole was probably too young to have such a
daughter. A mystery! But he felt no anxiety concerning its solution;
during the march he had the power to make the most reserved convict an
open book.
Yet not only the rude gaoler, but anyone would have marvelled what had
brought this beautiful, aristocratic woman, in the grey light of dawn,
out on the highway to meet the hapless man loaded with chains.
In sooth, nothing would have induced Kasana to take this step save the
torturing dread of being scorned and execrated as a base traitress by the
man whom she loved. A terrible destiny awaited him, and her vivid
imagination had shown her Joshua in the mines, languishing, disheartened,
drooping, dying, always with a curse upon her on his lips.
On the evening of, the day Ephraim bad been brought to the house,
shivering with the chill caused by burning fever, and half stifled with
the dust of the road, her father lead told her that in the youthful
Hebrew they possessed a hostage to compel Hosea to return to Tanis and
submit to the wishes of the prophet Bai, with whom she knew her father
was leagued in a secret conspiracy. He also confided to her that not only
great distinction and high offices, but a marriage with herself had been
arrranged to bind Hosea to the Egyptians and to a cause from which the
chief of the archers expected the greatest blessings for himself, his
house, and his whole country.
These tidings had filled her heart with joyous hope of a long desired
happiness, and she confessed it to the prisoner with drooping head amid
floods of tears, by the little wayside temple; for he was now forever
lost to her, and though he did not return the love she had lavished on
him from his childhood, he must not hate and condemn her without having
heard her story.
Joshua listened willingly and assured her that nothing would lighten his
heart more than to have her clear herself from the charge of having
consigned him and the youth at his side to their most terrible fate.
Kasana sobbed aloud and was forced to struggle hard for composure ere she
succeeded in telling her tale with some degree of calmness.
Shortly after Hosea's departure the chief-priest died and, on the same
day Bai, the second prophet, became his successor. Many changes now took
place, and the most powerful man in the kingdom filled Pharaoh with
hatred of the Hebrews and their leader, Mesu, whom he and the queen had
hitherto protected and feared. He had even persuaded the monarch to
pursue the fugitives, and an army had been instantly summoned to compel
their return. Kasana had feared that Hosea could not be induced to fight
against the men of his own blood, and that he must feel incensed at being
sent to make treaties which the Egyptians began to violate even before
they knew whether their offers had been accepted.
When he returned--as he knew only too well--Pharaoh had had him watched
like a prisoner and would not suffer him to leave his presence until he
had sworn to again lead his troops and be a faithful servant to the king.
Bai, the new chief priest, however, had not forgotten that Hosea had
saved his life and showed himself well disposed and grateful to him; she
knew also that he hoped to involve him in a secret enterprise, with which
her father, too, was associated. It was Bai who had prevailed upon
Pharaoh, if Hosea would renew his oath of fealty, to absolve him from
fighting against his own race, put him in command of the foreign
mercenaries and raise him to the rank of a "friend of the king." All
these events, of course, were familiar to him; for the new chief priest
had himself set before him the tempting dishes which, with such strong,
manly defiance, he had thrust aside.
Her father had also sided with him, and for the first time ceased to
reproach him with his origin.
But, on the third day after Hosea's return, Hornecht had gone to talk
with him and since then everything had changed for the worse. He must be
best aware what had caused the man of whom she, his daughter, must think
no evil, to be changed from a friend to a mortal foe.
She had looked enquiringly at him as she spoke, and he did not refuse to
answer--Hornecht had told him that he would be a welcome son-in-law.
"And you?" asked Kasana, gazing anxiously into his face.
"I," replied the prisoner, "was forced to say that though you had been
dear and precious to me from your childhood, many causes forbade me to
unite a woman's fate to mine."
Kasana's eyes flashed, and she exclaimed:
"Because you love another, a woman of your own people, the one who sent
Ephraim to you!"
But Joshua shook his head and answered pleasantly:
"You are wrong, Kasana! She of whom you speak is the wife of another."
"Then," cried the young widow with fresh animation, gazing at him with
loving entreaty, "why were you compelled to rebuff my father so harshly?"
"That was far from my intention, dear child," he replied warmly, laying
his hand on her head. "I thought of you with all the tenderness of which
my nature is capable. If I could not fulfil his wish, it was because
grave necessity forbids me to yearn for the peaceful happiness by my own
hearth-stone for which others strive. Had they given me my liberty, my
life would have been one of restlessness and conflict."
"Yet how many bear sword and shield," replied Kasana, "and still, on
their return, rejoice in the love of their wives and the dear ones
sheltered beneath their roof."
"True, true," he answered gravely; "but special duties, unknown to the
Egyptians, summon me. I am a son of my people."
"And you intend to serve them?" asked Kasana. "Oh, I understand you.
Yet. . . . why then did you return to Tanis? Why did you put yourself into
Pharaoh's power?"
"Because a sacred oath compelled me, poor child," he answered kindly.
"An oath," she cried, "which places death and imprisonment between you
and those whom you love and still desire to serve. Oh, would that you had
never returned to this abode of injustice, treachery, and ingratitude! To
how many hearts this vow will bring grief and tears! But what do you men
care for the suffering you inflict on others? You have spoiled all the
pleasure of life for my hapless self, and among your own people dwells a
noble father whose only son you are. How often I have seen the dear old
man, the stately figure with sparkling eyes and snow-white hair. So would
you look when you, too, had reached a ripe old age, as I said to myself,
when I met him at the harbor, or in the fore-court of the palace,
directing the shepherds who were driving the cattle and fleecy sheep to
the tax-receiver's table. And now his son's obstinacy must embitter every
day of his old age."
"Now," replied Joshua, "he has a son who is going, laden with chains, to
endure a life of misery, but who can hold his head higher than those who
betrayed him. They, and Pharaoh at their head, have forgotten that he has
shed his heart's blood for them on many a battlefield, and kept faith
with the king at every peril. Menephtah, his vice-roy and chief, whose
life I saved, and many who formerly called me friend, have abandoned and
hurled me and this guiltless boy into wretchedness, but those who have
done this, woman, who have committed this crime, may they all. . . ."
"Do not curse them!" interrupted Kasana with glowing cheeks.
But Joshua, unheeding her entreaty, exclaimed "Should I be a man, if I
forgot vengeance?"
The young widow clung anxiously to his arm, gasping in beseeching
accents:
"How could you forgive him? Only you must not curse him; for my father
became your foe through love for me. You know his hot blood, which so
easily carries him to extremes, despite his years. He concealed from me
what he regarded as an insult; for he saw many woo me, and I am his
greatest treasure. Pharaoh can pardon rebels more easily than my father
can forgive the man who disdained his jewel. He behaved like one
possessed when he returned. Every word he uttered was an invective. He
could not endure to stay at home and raged just as furiously elsewhere.
But no doubt he would have calmed himself at last, as he so often did
before, had not some one who desired to pour oil on the flames met him in
the fore-court of the palace. I learned all this from Bai's wife; for
she, too, repents what she did to injure you; her husband used every
effort to save you. She, who is as brave as any man, was ready to aid him
and open the door of your prison; for she has not forgotten that you
saved her husband's life in Libya. Ephraim's chains were to fall with
yours, and everything was ready to aid your flight."
"I know it," Hosea interrupted gloomily, "and I will thank the God of my
fathers if those were wrong from whom I heard that you are to blame,
Kasana, for having our dungeon door locked more firmly."
"Should I be here, if that were so!" cried the beautiful, grieving woman
with impassioned eagerness. True, resentment did stir within me as it
does in every woman whose lover scorns her; but the misfortune that
befell you speedily transformed resentment into compassion, and fanned
the old flames anew. So surely as I hope for a mild judgment before the
tribunal of the dead, I am innocent and have not ceased to hope for your
liberation. Not until yesterday evening, when all was too late, did I
learn that Bai's proposal had been futile. The chief priest can do much,
but he will not oppose the man who made himself my father's ally."
"You mean Prince Siptah, Pharaoh's nephew!" cried Joshua in excited
tones. "They intimated to me the scheme they were weaving in his
interest; they wished to put me in the place of the Syrian Aarsu, the
commander of the mercenaries, if I would consent to let them have their
way with my people and desert those of my own blood. But I would rather
die twenty deaths than sully myself with such treachery. Aarsu is better
suited to carry out their dark plans, but he will finally betray them
all. So far as I am concerned, the prince has good reason to hate me."
Kasana laid her hand upon his lips, pointed anxiously to Ephraim and the
guide, and said gently:
"Spare my father! The prince--what roused his enmity. . . . "
"The profligate seeks to lure you into his snare and has learned that you
favor me," the warrior broke in. She bent her head with a gesture of
assent, and added blushing:
"That is why Aarsu, whom he has won over to his cause, watches you so
strictly."
"And the Syrian will keep his eyes sufficiently wide open," cried Joshua.
"Now let us talk no more of this. I believe you and thank you warmly for
following us hapless mortals. How fondly I used to think, while serving
in the field, of the pretty child, whom I saw blooming into maidenhood."
"And you will think of her still with neither wrath nor rancor?"
"Gladly, most gladly."
The young widow, with passionate emotion, seized the prisoner's hand to
raise it to her lips, but he withdrew it; and, gazing at him with tears
in her eyes, she said mournfully:
"You deny me the favor a benefactor does not refuse even to a beggar."
Then, suddenly drawing herself up to her full height, she exclaimed so
loudly that the warder started and glanced at the sun: "But I tell you
the time will come when you will sue for the favor of kissing this hand
in gratitude. For when the messenger arrives bringing to you and to this
youth the liberty for which you have longed, it will be Kasana to whom
you owe it."
Rapt by the fervor of the wish that animated her, her beautiful face
glowed with a crimson flush. Joshua seized her right hand, exclaiming:
"Ah, if you could attain what your loyal soul desires! How could I
dissuade you from mitigating the great misfortune which overtook this
youth in your house? Yet, as an honest man, I must tell you that I shall
never return to the service of the Egyptians; for, come what may, I shall
in future cleave, body and soul, to those you persecute and despise, and
to whom belonged the mother who bore me."
Kasana's graceful head drooped; but directly after she raised it again,
saying:
"No other man is so noble, so truthful, that I have known from my
childhood. If I can find no one among my own nation whom I can honor, I
will remember you, whose every thought is true and lofty, whose nature is
faultless. Put if poor Kasana succeeds in liberating you, do not scorn
her, if you find her worse than when you left her, for however she may
humiliate herself, whatever shame may come upon her . . . ."
"What do you intend?" Hosea anxiously interrupted; but she had no time to
answer; for the captain of the guard had risen and, clapping his hands,
shouted: "Forward, you moles!" and "Step briskly."
The warrior's stout heart was overwhelmed with tender sadness and,
obeying a hasty impulse, he kissed the beautiful unhappy woman on the
brow and hair, whispering:
"Leave me in my misery, if our freedom will cost your humiliation. We
shall probably never meet again; for, whatever may happen, my life will
henceforth be nothing but battle and sacrifice. Darkness will shroud us
in deeper and deeper gloom, but however black the night may be, one star
will still shine for this boy and for me--the remembrance of you, my
faithful, beloved child."
He pointed to Ephraim as he spoke and the youth, as if out of his senses,
pressed his lips on the hand and arm of the sobbing woman.
"Forward!" shouted the leader again, and with a grateful smile helped the
generous lady into the chariot, marvelling at the happy, radiant gaze
with which her tearful eyes followed the convicts.
The horses started, fresh shouts arose, blows from the whips fell on bare
shoulders, now and then a cry of pain rang on the morning air, and the
train of prisoners again moved eastward. The chain on the ancles of the
companions in suffering stirred the dust, which shrouded the little band
like the grief, hate, and fear darkening the soul of each.
CHAPTER XVIII.
A long hour's walk beyond the little temple where the prisoners had
rested the road, leading to Succoth and the western arm of the Red Sea,
branched off from the one that ran in a southeasterly direction past the
fortifications on the isthmus to the mines.
Shortly after the departure of the prisoners, the army which had been
gathered to pursue the Hebrews left the city of Rameses, and as the
convicts had rested some time at the well, the troops almost overtook
them. They had not proceeded far when several runners came hurrying up to
clear the road for the advancing army. They ordered the prisoners to move
aside and defer their march until the swifter baggage train, bearing
Pharaoh's tents and travelling equipments, whose chariot wheels could
already be heard, had passed them.
The prisoners' guards were glad to stop, they were in no hurry. The day
was hot, and if they reached their destination later, it would be the
fault of the army.
The interruption was welcome to Joshua, too; for his young companion had
been gazing into vacancy as if bewildered, and either made no answer to
his questions or gave such incoherent ones that the older man grew
anxious; he knew how many of those sentenced to forced labor went mad or
fell into melancholy. Now a portion of the army would pass them, and the
spectacle was new to Ephraim and promised to put an end to his dull
brooding.
A sand-hill overgrown with tamarisk bushes rose beside the road, and
thither the leader guided the party of convicts. He was a stern man, but
not a cruel one, so he permitted his "moles" to lie down on the sand, for
the troops would doubtless be a long time in passing. As soon as the
convicts had thrown themselves on the ground the rattle of wheels, the
neighing of fiery steeds, shouts of command, and sometimes the
disagreeable braying of an ass were heard.
When the first chariots appeared Ephraim asked if Pharaoh was coming; but
Joshua, smiling, informed him that when the king accompanied the troops
to the field, the camp equipage followed directly behind the vanguard,
for Pharaoh and his dignitaries wished to find the tents pitched and the
tables laid, when the day's march was over and the soldiers and officers
expected a night's repose.
Joshua had not finished speaking when a number of empty carts and unladen
asses appeared. They were to carry the contributions of bread and meal,
animals and poultry, wine and beer, levied on every village the sovereign
passed on the march, and which had been delivered to the tax-gatherers
the day before.
Soon after a division of chariot warriors followed. Every pair of horses
drew a small, two-wheeled chariot, cased in bronze, and in each stood a
warrior and the driver of the team. Huge quivers were fastened to the
front of the chariots, and the soldiers leaned on their lances or on
gigantic bows. Shirts covered with brazen scales, or padded coats of mail
with gay overmantle, a helmet, and the front of the chariot protected the
warrior from the missiles of the foe. This troop, which Joshua said was
the van, went by at a slow trot and was followed by a great number of
carts and wagons, drawn by horses, mules, or oxen, as well as whole
troops of heavily-laden asses.
The uncle now pointed out to his nephew the long masts, poles, and heavy
rolls of costly stuffs intended for the royal tent, and borne by numerous
beasts of burden, as well as the asses and carts with the kitchen
utensils and field forges. Among the baggage heaped on the asses, which
were followed by nimble drivers, rode the physicians, tailors,
salve-makers, cooks, weavers of garlands, attendants, and slaves
belonging to the camp. Their departure had been so recent that they were
still fresh and inclined to jest, and whoever caught sight of the
convicts, flung them, in the Egyptian fashion, a caustic quip which many
sought to palliate by the gift of alms. Others, who said nothing, also
sent by the ass-drivers fruit and trifling gifts; for those who were free
to-day might share the fate of these hapless men to-morrow. The captain
permitted it, and when a passing slave, whom Joshua had sold for
thieving, shouted the name of Hosea, pointing to him with a malicious
gesture, the rough but kind-hearted officer offered his insulted prisoner
a sip of wine from his own flask.
Ephraim, who had walked from Succoth to Tanis with a staff in his hand,
and a small bundle containing bread, dried lamb, radishes, and dates,
expressed his amazement at the countless people and things a single man
needed for his comfort, and then relapsed into his former melancholy
until his uncle roused him with farther explanations.
As soon as the baggage train had passed, the commander of the band of
prisoners wished to set off, but the "openers of the way," who preceded
the archers, forbade him, because it was not seemly for convicts to
mingle with soldiers. So they remained on their hillock and continued to
watch the troops.
The archers were followed by heavily-armed troops, bearing shields
covered with strong hide so large that they extended from the feet to
above the middle of the tallest men, and Hosea now told the youth that in
the evening they set them side by side, thus surrounding the royal tent
like a fence. Besides this weapon of defence they carried a lance, a
short dagger-like sword, or a battle-sickle, and as these thousands were
succeeded by a body of men armed with slings Ephraim for the first time
spoke without being questioned and said that the slings the shepherds had
taught him to make were far better than those of the soldiers and,
encouraged by his uncle, he described in language so eager that the
prisoners lying by his side listened, how he had succeeded in slaying not
only jackals, wolves, and panthers, but even vultures, with stones hurled
from a sling. Meanwhile he interrupted himself to ask the meaning of the
standards and the names of the separate divisions.
Many thousands had already passed, when another troop of warriors in
chariots appeared, and the chief warder of the prisoners exclaimed:
"The good god! The lord of two worlds! May life, happiness, and health be
his!" With these words he fell upon his knees in the attitude of worship,
while the convicts prostrated themselves to kiss the earth and be ready
to obey the captain's bidding and join at the right moment in the cry:
"Life, happiness, and health!"
But they had a long time to wait ere the expected sovereign appeared;
for, after the warriors in the chariots had passed, the body-guard
followed, foot-soldiers of foreign birth with singular ornaments on their
helmets and huge swords, and then numerous images of the gods, a large
band of priests and wearers of plumes. They were followed by more
body-guards, and then Pharaoh appeared with his attendants. At their head
rode the chief priest Bai in a gilded battle-chariot drawn by magnificent
bay stallions. He who had formerly led troops in the field, had assumed
the command of this pursuing expedition ordered by the gods and, though
clad in priestly robes, he also wore the helmet and battle-axe of a
general. At last, directly behind his equipage, came Pharaoh himself; but
he did not go to battle like his warlike predecessors in a war-chariot,
but preferred to be carried on a throne. A magnificent canopy protected
him above, and large, thick, round ostrich feather fans, carried by his
fan-bearers, sheltered him on both sides from the scorching rays of the
sun.
After Menephtah had left the city and the gate of victory behind him, and
the exulting acclamations of the multitude had ceased to amuse him, he
had gone to sleep and the shading fans would have concealed his face and
figure from the prisoners, had not their shouts been loud enough to rouse
him and induce him to turn his head toward them. The gracious wave of his
right hand showed that he had expected to see different people from
convicts and, ere the shouts of the hapless men had died away, his eyes
again closed.
Ephraim's silent brooding had now yielded to the deepest interest, and as
the empty golden war-chariot of the king, before which pranced the most
superb steeds he had ever seen, rolled by, he burst into loud
exclamations of admiration.
These noble animals, on whose intelligent heads large bunches of feathers
nodded, and whose rich harness glittered with gold and gems, were indeed
a splendid sight. The large gold quivers set with emeralds, fastened on
the sides of the chariot, were filled with arrows.
The feeble man to whose weak hand the guidance of a great nation was
entrusted, the weakling who shrunk from every exertion, regained his lost
energy whenever hunting was in prospect; he considered this campaign a
chase on the grandest scale and as it seemed royal pastime to discharge
his arrows at the human beings he had so lately feared, instead of at
game, he had obeyed the chief priest's summons and joined the expedition.
It had been undertaken by the mandate of the great god Amon, so he had
little to dread from Mesu's terrible power.
When he captured him he would make him atone for having caused Pharaoh
and his queen to tremble before him and shed so many tears on his
account.
While Joshua was still telling the youth from which Phoenician city the
golden chariots came, he suddenly felt Ephraim's right hand clutch his
wrist, and heard him exclaim: "She! She! Look yonder! It is she!" The
youth had flushed crimson, and he was not mistaken; the beautiful Kasana
was passing amid Pharaoh's train in the same chariot in which she had
pursued the convicts, and with her came a considerable number of ladies
who had joined what the commander of the foot-soldiers, a brave old
warrior, who had served under the great Rameses, termed "a pleasure
party."
On campaigns through the desert and into Syria, Libya, or Ethiopia the
sovereign was accompanied only by a chosen band of concubines in
curtained chariots, guarded by eunuchs; but this time, though the queen
had remained at home, the wife of the chief priest Bai and other
aristocratic ladies had set the example of joining the troops, and it was
doubtless tempting enough to many to enjoy the excitements of war without
peril.
Kasana had surprised her friend by her appearance an hour before; only
yesterday the young widow could not be persuaded to accompany the troops.
Obeying an inspiration, without consulting her father, so unprepared that
she lacked the necessary traveling equipments, she had joined the
expedition, and it seemed as if a man whom she had hitherto avoided,
though he was no less a personage than Siptah, the king's nephew, had
become a magnet to her.
When she passed the prisoners, the prince was standing in the chariot
beside the young beauty in her nurse's place, explaining in jesting tones
the significance of the flowers in a bouquet, which Kasana declared could
not possibly have been intended for her, because an hour and a quarter
before she had not thought of going with the army.
But Siptah protested that the Hathors had revealed at sunrise the
happiness in store for him, and that the choice of each single blossom
proved his assertion.
Several young courtiers who were walking in front of their chariots,
surrounded them and joined in the laughter and merry conversation, in
which the vivacious wife of the chief priest shared, having left her
large travelling-chariot to be carried in a litter.
None of these things escaped Joshua's notice and, as he saw Kasana, who a
short time before had thought of the prince with aversion, now saucily
tap his hand with her fan, his brow darkened and he asked himself whether
the young widow was not carelessly trifling with his misery.
But the prisoners' chief warder had now noticed the locks on Siptah's
temples, which marked him as a prince of the royal household and his loud
"Hail! Hall!" in which the other guards and the captives joined, was
heard by Kasana and her companions. They looked toward the
tamarisk-bushes, whence the cry proceeded, and Joshua saw the young widow
turn pale and then point with a hasty gesture to the convicts. She must
undoubtedly have given Siptah some command, for the latter at first
shrugged his shoulders disapprovingly then, after a somewhat lengthy
discussion, half grave, half jesting, he sprang from the chariot and
beckoned to the chief gaoler.
"Have these men," he called from the road so loudly that Kasana could not
fail to hear, "seen the face of the good god, the lord of both worlds?"
And when he received a reluctant answer, he went on arrogantly:
"No matter! At least they beheld mine and that of the fairest of women,
and if they hope for favor on that account they are right. You know who I
am. Let the chains that bind them together be removed." Then, beckoning
to the man, he whispered:
"But keep your eyes open all the wider; I have no liking for the fellow
beside the bush, the ex-chief Hosea. After returning home, report to me
and bring news of this man. The quieter he has become, the deeper my hand
will sink in my purse. Do you understand?"
The warder bowed, thinking: "I'll take care, my prince, and also see that
no one attempts to take the life of any of my moles. The greater the rank
of these gentlemen, the more bloody and strange are their requests! How
many have come to me with similar ones. He releases the poor wretches'
feet, and wants me to burden my soul with a shameful murder. Siptah has
tried the wrong man! Here, Heter, bring the bag of tools and open the
moles' chains."
While the files were grating on the sand-hill by the road and the
prisoners were being released from the fetters on their ancles,--though
for the sake of security each man's arms were bound together,--Pharaoh's
host marched by.
Kasana had commanded Prince Siptah to release from their iron burden the
unfortunates who were being dragged to a life of misery, openly
confessing that she could not bear to see a chief who had so often been a
guest of her house so cruelly humiliated. Bai's wife had supported her
wish, and the prince was obliged to yield.
Joshua knew to whom he and Ephraim owed this favor, and received it with
grateful joy.
Walking had been made easier for him, but his mind was more and more
sorely oppressed with anxious cares.
The army passing yonder would have been enough to destroy down to the
last man a force ten times greater than the number of his people. His
people, and with them his father and Miriam,--who had caused him such
keen suffering, yet to whom he was indebted for having found the way
which, even in prison, he had recognized as the only right one--seemed to
him marked out for a bloody doom; for, however powerful might be the God
whose greatness the prophetess had praised in such glowing words, and to
whom he himself had learned to look up with devout admiration,--untrained
and unarmed bands of shepherds must surely and hopelessly succumb to the
assault of this army. This certainty, strengthened by each advancing
division, pierced his very soul. Never before had he felt such burning
anguish, which was terribly sharpened when he beheld the familiar faces
of his own troops, which he had so lately commanded, pass before him
under the leadership of another. This time they were taking the field to
hew down men of his own blood. This was pain indeed, and Ephraim's
conduct gave him cause for fresh anxiety; since Kasana's appearance and
interference in behalf of him and his companions in suffering, the youth
had again lapsed into silence and gazed with wandering eyes at the army
or into vacancy.
Now he, too, was freed from the chain, and Joshua asked in a whisper if
he did not long to return to his people to help them resist so powerful a
force, but Ephraim merely answered:
"When confronted with those hosts, they can do nothing but yield. What
did we lack before the exodus? You were a Hebrew, and yet became a mighty
chief among the Egyptians ere you obeyed Miriam's summons. In your place,
I would have pursued a different course."
"What would you have done?" asked Joshua sternly.
"What?" replied the youth, the fire of his young soul blazing. "What?
Only this, I would have remained where there is honor and fame and
everything beautiful. You might have been the greatest of the great, the
happiest of the happy--this I have learned, but you made a different
choice."
"Because duty commanded it," Joshua answered gravely, "because I will no
longer serve any one save the people among whom I was born."
"The people?" exclaimed Ephraim, contemptuously. "I know them, and you
met them at Succoth. The poor are miserable wretches who cringe under the
lash; the rich value their cattle above all else and, if they are the
heads of the tribes, quarrel with one another. No one knows aught of what
pleases the eye and the heart. They call me one of the richest of the
race and yet I shudder when I think of the house I inherited, one of the
best and largest. One who has seen more beautiful ones ceases to long for
such an abode."
The vein on Joshua's brow swelled, and he wrathfully rebuked the youth
for denying his own blood, and being a traitor to his people.
The guard commanded silence, for Joshua had raised his reproving voice
louder, and this order seemed welcome to the defiant youth. When, during
their march, his uncle looked sternly into his face or asked whether he
had thought of his words, he turned angrily away, and remained mute and
sullen until the first star had risen, the night camp had been made under
the open sky, and the scanty prison rations had been served.
Joshua dug with his hands a resting place in the sand, and with care and
skill helped the youth to prepare a similar one.
Ephraim silently accepted this help; but as they lay side by side, and
the uncle began to speak to his nephew of the God of his people on whose
aid they must rely, if they were not to fall victims to despair in the
mines, the youth interrupted him, exclaiming in low tones, but with
fierce resolution:
"They will not take me to the mines alive! I would rather die, while
making my escape, than pine away in such wretchedness."
Joshua whispered words of warning, and again reminded him of his duties
to his people. But Ephraim begged to be let alone; yet soon after he
touched his uncle and asked softly:
"What are they planning with Prince Siptah?"
"I don't know; nothing good, that is certain."
"And where is Aarsu, the Syrian, your foe, who commands the Asiatic
mercenaries, and who was to watch us with such fierce zeal? I did not see
him with the others."
"He remained in Tanis with his troops."
"To guard the palace?"
"Undoubtedly."
"Then he commands many soldiers, and Pharaoh has confidence in him?"
"The utmost, though he ill deserves it."
"And he is a Syrian, and therefore of our blood."
"And more closely allied to us than to the Egyptians, at least so far as
language and appearance are concerned."
"I should have taken him for a man of our race, yet he is, as you were,
one of the leaders in the army."
"Other Syrians and Libyans command large troops of mercenaries, and the
herald Ben Mazana, one of the highest dignitaries of the court--the
Egyptians call him Rameses in the sanctuary of Ra--has a Hebrew father."
"And neither he nor the others are scorned on account of their birth?"
"This is not quite so. But why do you ask these questions?"
"I could not sleep."
"And so such thoughts came to you. But you have some definite idea in
your mind and, if my inference is correct, it would cause me pain. You
wished to enter Pharaoh's service!"
Both were silent a long time, then Ephraim spoke again and, though he
addressed Joshua, it seemed as if he were talking to himself:
"They will destroy our people; bondage and shame await those who survive.
My house is now left to ruin, not a head of my splendid herds of cattle
remains, and the gold and silver I inherited, of which there was said to
be a goodly store, they are carrying with them, for your father has
charge of my wealth, and it will soon fall as booty into the hands of the
Egyptians. Shall I, if I obtain my liberty, return to my people and make
bricks? Shall I bow my back and suffer blows and abuse?"
Joshua eagerly whispered:
"You must appeal to the God of your fathers, that he may protect and
defend His people. Yet, if the Most High has willed the destruction of
our race, be a man and learn to hate with all the might of your young
soul those who trample your people under their feet. Fly to the Syrians,
offer them your strong young arm, and take no rest till you have avenged
yourself on those who have shed the blood of your people and load you,
though innocent, with chains."
Again silence reigned for some time, nothing was heard from Ephraim's
rude couch save a dull, low moan from his oppressed breast; but at last
he answered softly:
"The chains no longer weigh upon us, and how could I hate her who
released us from them?"
"Remain grateful to Kasana," was the whispered reply, "but hate her
nation."
Hosea heard the youth toss restlessly, and again sigh heavily and moan.
It was past midnight, the waxing moon rode high in the heavens, and the
sleepless man did not cease to listen for sounds from the youth; but the
latter remained silent, though slumber had evidently fled from him also;
for a noise as if he were grinding his teeth came from his place of rest.
Or had mice wandered to this barren place, where hard brown blades of
grass grew between the crusts of salt and the bare spots, and were
gnawing the prisoners' hard bread?
Such gnawing and grinding disturb the sleep of one who longs for slumber;
but Joshua desired to keep awake to continue to open the eyes of the
blinded youth, yet he waited in vain for any sign of life from his
nephew.
At last he was about to lay his hand on the lad's shoulder, but paused as
by the moonlight he saw Ephraim raise one arm though, before he lay down,
both hands were tied more firmly than before.
Joshua now knew that it was the youth's sharp teeth gnawing the rope
which had caused the noise that had just surprised him, and he
immediately stood up and looked first upward and then around him.
Holding his breath, the older man watched every movement, and his heart
began to throb anxiously. Ephraim meant to fly, and the first step toward
escape had already succeeded! Would that the others might prosper too!
But he feared that the liberated youth might enter the wrong path. He was
the only son of his beloved sister, a fatherless and motherless lad, so
he had never enjoyed the uninterrupted succession of precepts and lessons
which only a mother can give and a defiant young spirit will accept from
her alone. The hands of strangers had bound the sapling to a stake and it
had shot straight upward, but a mother's love would have ennobled it with
carefully chosen grafts. He had grown up beside another hearth than his
parents', yet the latter is the only true home for youth. What marvel if
he felt himself a stranger among his people.
Amid such thoughts a great sense of compassion stole over Joshua and,
with it, the consciousness that he was deeply accountable for this youth
who, for his sake, while on the way to bring him a message, had fallen
into such sore misfortune. But much as he longed to warn him once more
against treason and perjury, he refrained, fearing to imperil his
success. Any noise might attract the attention of the guards, and he took
as keen an interest in the attempt at liberation, as if Ephraim had made
it at his suggestion.
So instead of annoying the youth with fruitless warnings, he kept watch
for him; life had taught him that good advice is more frequently unheeded
than followed, and only personal experiences possess resistless power of
instruction.
The chief's practiced eye soon showed him the way by which Ephraim, if
fortune favored him, could escape.
He called softly, and directly after his nephew whispered:
"I'll loose your ropes, if you will hold up your hands to me. Mine are
free!"
Joshua's tense features brightened.
The defiant lad was a noble fellow, after all, and risked his own chance
in behalf of one who, if he escaped with him, threatened to bar the way
in which, in youthful blindness, he hoped to find happiness.
CHAPTER XIX.
Joshua gazed intently around him. The sky was still bright, but if the
north wind continued to blow, the clouds which seemed to be rising from
the sea must soon cover it.
The air had grown sultry, but the guards kept awake and regularly
relieved one another. It was difficult to elude their attention; yet
close by Ephraim's couch, which his uncle, for greater comfort, had
helped him make on the side of a gently sloping hill, a narrow ravine ran
down to the valley. White veins of gypsum and glittering mica sparkled in
the moonlight along its bare edges. If the agile youth could reach this
cleft unseen, and crawl through as far as the pool of saltwater,
overgrown with tall grass and tangled desert shrubs, at which it ended,
he might, aided by the clouds, succeed.
After arriving at this conviction Joshua considered, as deliberately as
if the matter concerned directing one of his soldiers on his way, whether
he himself, in case he regained the use of his hands, could succeed in
following Ephraim without endangering his project. And he was forced to
answer this question in the negative; for the guard who sometimes sat,
sometimes paced to and fro on a higher part of the crest of the hill a
few paces away, could but too easily perceive, by the moonlight, the
youth's efforts to loose the firmly-knotted bonds. The cloud approaching
the moon might perhaps darken it, ere the work was completed. Thus
Ephraim might, on his account, incur the peril of losing the one
fortunate moment which promised escape. Would it not be the basest of
crimes, merely for the sake of the uncertain chance of flight, to bar the
path to liberty of the youth whose natural protector he was? So he
whispered to Ephraim:
"I cannot go with you. Creep through the chasm at your right to the
salt-pool. I will watch the guards. As soon as the cloud passes over the
moon and I clear my throat, start off. If you escape, join our people.
Greet my old father, assure him of my love and fidelity, and tell him
where I am being taken. Listen to his advice and Miriam's; theirs is the
best counsel. The cloud is approaching the moon,--not another word now!"
As Ephraim still continued to urge him in a whisper to hold up his
pinioned arms, he ordered him to keep silence and, as soon as the moon
was obscured and the guard, who was pacing to and fro above their heads
began a conversation with the man who came to relieve him, Joshua cleared
his throat and, holding his breath, listened with a throbbing heart for
some sound in the direction of the chasm.
He first heard a faint scraping and, by the light of the fire which the
guards kept on the hill-top as a protection against wild beasts, he saw
Ephraim's empty couch.
He uttered a sigh of relief; for the youth must have entered the ravine.
But though he strained his ears to follow the crawling or sliding of the
fugitive he heard nothing save the footsteps and voices of the warders.
Yet he caught only the sound, not the meaning of their words, so intently
did he fix his powers of hearing upon the course taken by the fugitive.
How nimbly and cautiously the agile fellow must move! He was still in the
chasm, yet meanwhile the moon struggled victoriously with the clouds and
suddenly her silver disk pierced the heavy black curtain that concealed
her from the gaze of men, and her light was reflected like a slender,
glittering pillar from the motionless pool of salt-water, enabling the
watching Joshua to see what was passing below; but he perceived nothing
that resembled a human form.
Had the fugitive encountered any obstacle in the chasm? Did some
precipice or abyss hold him in its gloomy depths? Had--and at the thought
he fancied that his heart had stopped beating--Had some gulf swallowed
the lad when he was groping his way through the night?
How he longed for some noise, even the faintest, from the ravine! The
silence was terrible. But now! Oh, would that it had continued! Now the
sound of falling stones and the crash of earth sliding after echoed
loudly through the still night air. Again the moonlight burst through the
cloud-curtain, and Joshua perceived near the pool a living creature which
resembled an animal more than a human being, for it seemed to be crawling
on four feet. Now the water sent up a shower of glittering spray. The
figure below had leaped into the pool. Then the clouds again swallowed
the lamp of night, and darkness covered everything.
With a sigh of relief Joshua told himself that he had seen the flying
Ephraim and that, come what might, the escaping youth had gained a
considerable start of his pursuers.
But the latter neither remained inert nor allowed themselves to be
deceived; for though, to mislead them, he had shouted loudly: "A jackal!"
they uttered a long, shrill whistle, which roused their sleeping
comrades. A few seconds later the chief warder stood before him with a
burning torch, threw its light on his face, and sighed with relief when
he saw him. Not in vain had he bound him with double ropes; for he would
have been called to a severe reckoning at home had this particular man
escaped.
But while he was feeling the ropes on the prisoner's arms, the glare of
the burning torch, which lighted him, fell on the fugitive's rude,
deserted couch. There, as if in mockery, lay the gnawed rope. Taking it
up, he flung it at Joshua's feet, blew his whistle again and again, and
shouted: "Escaped! The Hebrew! Young Curly-head!"
Paying no farther heed to Joshua, he began the pursuit. Hoarse with fury,
he issued order after order, each one sensible and eagerly obeyed.
While some of the guards dragged the prisoners together, counted them,
and tied them with ropes, their commander, with the others and his dogs,
set off on the track of the fugitive.
Joshua saw him make the intelligent animals smell Ephraim's gnawed bonds
and resting-place, and beheld them instantly rush to the ravine. Gasping
for breath, he also noted that they remained in it quite a long time, and
at last--the moon meanwhile scattered the clouds more and more--darted
out of the ravine, and dashed to the water. He felt that it was fortunate
Ephraim had waded through instead of passing round it; for at its edge
the dogs lost the scent, and minute after minute elapsed while the
commander of the guards walked along the shore with the eager animals,
which fairly thrust their noses into the fugitive's steps, in order to
again get on the right trail. Their loud, joyous barking at last
announced that they had found it. Yet, even if they persisted in
following the runaway, the captive warrior no longer feared the worst,
for Ephraim had gained a long advance of his pursuers. Still, his heart
beat loudly enough and time seemed to stand still until the chief-warder
returned exhausted and unsuccessful.
The older man, it is true, could never have overtaken the swift-footed
youth, but the youngest and most active guards had been sent after the
fugitive. This statement the captain of the guards himself made with an
angry jeer.
The kindly-natured man seemed completely transformed,--for he felt what
had occurred as a disgrace which could scarcely be overcome, nay, a
positive misfortune.
The prisoner who had tried to deceive him by the shout of 'jackal!' was
doubtless the fugitive's accomplice. Prince Siptah, too, who had
interfered with the duties of his office, he loudly cursed. But nothing
of the sort should happen again; and he would make the whole band feel
what had fallen to his lot through Ephraim. Therefore he ordered the
prisoners to be again loaded with chains, the ex-chief fastened to a
coughing old man, and all made to stand in rank and file before the fire
till morning dawned.
Joshua gave no answer to the questions his new companion-in-chains
addressed to him; he was waiting with an anxious heart for the return of
the pursuers. At times he strove to collect his thoughts to pray, and
commended to the God who had promised His aid, his own destiny and that
of the fugitive boy. True, he was often rudely interrupted by the captain
of the guards, who vented his rage upon him.
Yet the man who had once commanded thousands of soldiers quietly
submitted to everything, forcing himself to accept it like the
unavoidable discomfort of hail or rain; nay, it cost him an effort to
conceal his joyful emotion when, toward sunrise, the young warders sent
in pursuit returned with tangled hair, panting for breath, and bringing
nothing save one of the dogs with a broken skull.
The only thing left for the captain of the guards to do was to report
what had occurred at the first fortress on the Etham border, which the
prisoners were obliged in any case to pass, and toward this they were now
driven.
Since Ephraim's flight a new and more cruel spirit had taken possession
of the warders. While yesterday they had permitted the unfortunate men to
move forward at an easy pace, they now forced them to the utmost possible
speed. Besides, the atmosphere was sultry, and the scorching sun
struggled with the thunderclouds gathering in heavy masses at the north.
Joshua's frame, inured to fatigues of every kind, resisted the tortures
of this hurried march; but his weaker companion, who had grown grey in a
scribe's duties, often gave way and at last lay prostrate beside him.
The captain was obliged to have the hapless man placed on an ass and
chain another prisoner to Joshua. He was his former yoke-mate's brother,
an inspector of the king's stables, a stalwart Egyptian, condemned to the
mines solely on account of the unfortunate circumstance of being the
nearest blood relative of a state criminal.
It was easier to walk with this vigorous companion, and Joshua listened
with deep sympathy and tried to comfort him when, in a low voice, he made
him the confidant of his yearning, and lamented the heaviness of heart
with which he had left wife and child in want and suffering. Two sons had
died of the pestilence, and it sorely oppressed his soul that he had been
unable to provide for their burial--now his darlings would be lost to him
in the other world also and forever.
At the second halt the troubled father became franker still. An ardent
thirst for vengeance filled his soul, and he attributed the same feeling
to his stern-eyed companion, whom he saw had plunged into misfortune from
a high station in life. The ex-inspector of the stables had a
sister-in-law, who was one of Pharaoh's concubines, and through her and
his wife, her sister, he had learned that a conspiracy was brewing
against the king in the House of the Separated.--[Harem]. He even knew
whom the women desired to place in Menephtah's place.
As Joshua looked at him, half questioning, half doubting, his companion
whispered. "Siptah, the king's nephew, and his noble mother, are at the
head of the plot. When I am once more free, I will remember you, for my
sister-in-law certainly will not forget me." Then he asked what was
taking his companion to the mines, and Joshua frankly told his name. But
when the Egyptian learned that he was fettered to a Hebrew, he tore
wildly at his chain and cursed his fate. His rage, however, soon subsided
in the presence of the strange composure with which his companion in
misfortune bore the rudest insults, and Joshua was glad to have the other
beset him less frequently with complaints and questions.
He now walked on for hours undisturbed, free to yield to his longing to
collect his thoughts, analyze the new and lofty emotions which had ruled
his soul during the past few days, and accommodate himself to his novel
and terrible position.
This quiet reflection and self-examination relieved him and, during the
following night, he was invigorated by a deep, refreshing sleep.
When he awoke the setting stars were still in the sky and reminded him of
the sycamore in Succoth, and the momentous morning when his lost love had
won him for his God and his people. The glittering firmament arched over
his head, and he had never so distinctly felt the presence of the Most
High. He believed in His limitless power and, for the first time, felt a
dawning hope that the Mighty Lord who had created heaven and earth would
find ways and means to save His chosen people from the thousands of the
Egyptian hosts.
After fervently imploring God to extend His protecting hand over the
feeble bands who, obedient to His command, had left so much behind them
and marched so confidently through an unknown and distant land, and
commended to His special charge the aged father whom he himself could not
defend, a wonderful sense of peace filled his soul.
The shouts of the guards, the rattling of the chain, his wretched
companions in misfortune, nay, all that surrounded him, could not fail to
recall the fate awaiting him. He was to grow grey in slavish toil within
a close, hot pit, whose atmosphere choked the lungs, deprived of the
bliss of breathing the fresh air and beholding the sunlight; loaded with
chains, beaten and insulted, starving and thirsting, spending days and
nights in a monotony destructive alike to soul and body,--yet not for one
moment did he lose the confident belief that this horrible lot might
befall any one rather than himself, and something must interpose to save
him.
On the march farther eastward, which began with the first grey dawn of
morning, he called this resolute confidence folly, yet strove to retain
it and succeeded.
The road led through the desert, and at the end of a few hours' rapid
march they reached the first fort, called the Fortress of Seti. Long
before, they had seen it through the clear desert air, apparently within
a bowshot.
Unrelieved by the green foliage of bush or palmtree, it rose from the
bare, stony, sandy soil, with its wooden palisades, its rampart, its
escarped walls, and its lookout, with broad, flat roof, swarming with
armed warriors. The latter had heard from Pithom that the Hebrews were
preparing to break through the chain of fortresses on the isthmus and had
at first mistaken the approaching band of prisoners for the vanguard of
the wandering Israelites.
From the summits of the strong projections, which jutted like galleries
from every direction along the entire height of the escarped walls to
prevent the planting of scaling-ladders, soldiers looked through the
embrasures at the advancing convicts; yet the archers had replaced their
arrows in the quivers, for the watchmen in the towers perceived how few
were the numbers of the approaching troop, and a messenger had already
delivered to the commander of the garrison an order from his superior
authorizing him to permit the passage of the prisoners.
The gate of the palisade was now opened, and the captain of the guards
allowed the prisoners to lie down on the glowing pavement within.
No one could escape hence, even if the guards withdrew; for the high
fence was almost insurmountable, and from the battlements on the top of
the jutting walls darts could easily reach a fugitive.
The ex-chief did not fail to note that everything was ready, as if in the
midst of war, for defence against a foe. Every man was at his post, and
beside the huge brazen disk on the tower stood sentinels, each holding in
his hand a heavy club to deal a blow at the approach of the expected
enemy; for though as far as the eye could reach, neither tree nor house
was visible, the sound of the metal plate would be heard at the next
fortress in the Etham line, and warn or summon its garrison.
To be stationed in the solitude of this wilderness was not a punishment,
but a misfortune; and the commander of the army therefore provided that
the same troops should never remain long in the desert.
Joshua himself, in former days, had been in command of the most southerly
of these fortresses, called the Migdol of the South; for each one of the
fortifications bore the name of Migdol, which in the Semitic tongue means
the tower of a fortress.
His people were evidently expected here; and it was not to be supposed
that Moses had led the tribes back to Egypt. So they must have remained
in Succoth or have turned southward. But in that direction rolled the
waters of the Bitter Lakes and the Red Sea, and how could the Hebrew
hosts pass through the deep waters?
Hosea's heart throbbed anxiously at this thought, and all his fears were
to find speedy confirmation; for he heard the commander of the fortress
tell the captain of the prisoners' guards, that the Hebrews had
approached the line of fortifications several days before, but soon
after, without assaulting the garrison, had turned southward. Since then
they seemed to have been wandering in the desert between Pithom and the
Red Sea.
All this had been instantly reported at Tanis, but the king was forced to
delay the departure of the army for several days until the week of
general mourning for the heir to the throne had expired. The fugitives
might have turned this to account, but news had come by a carrier dove
that the blinded multitude had encamped at Pihahiroth, not far from the
Red Sea. So it would be easy for the army to drive them into the water
like a herd of cattle; there was no escape for them in any other
direction.
The captain listened to these tidings with satisfaction; then he
whispered a few words to the commander of the fortress and pointed with
his finger to Joshua, who had long recognized him as a brother-in-arms
who had commanded a hundred men in his own cohorts and to whom he had
done many a kindness. He was reluctant to reveal his identity in this
wretched plight to his former subordinate, who was also his debtor; but
the commander flushed as he saw him, shrugged his shoulders as though he
desired to express to Joshua regret for his fate and the impossibility of
doing anything for him, and then exclaimed so loudly that he could not
fail to hear:
"The regulations forbid any conversation with prisoners of state, but I
knew this man in better days, and will send you some wine which I beg you
to share with him."
As he walked with the other to the gate, and the latter remarked that
Hosea deserved such favor less than the meanest of the band, because he
had connived at the escape of the fugitive of whom he had just spoken,
the commander ran his hand through his hair, and answered:
"I would gladly have shown him some kindness, though he is much indebted
to me; but if that is the case, we will omit the wine; you have rested
long enough at any rate."
The captain angrily gave the order for departure, and drove the hapless
band deeper into the desert toward the mines.
This time Joshua walked with drooping head. Every fibre of his being
rebelled against the misfortune of being dragged through the wilderness
at this decisive hour, far from his people and the father whom he knew to
be in such imminent danger. Under his guidance the wanderers might
perchance have found some means of escape. His fist clenched when he
thought of the fettered limbs which forbade him to utilize the plans his
brain devised for the welfare of his people; yet he would not lose
courage, and whenever he said to himself that the Hebrews were lost and
must succumb in this struggle, he heard the new name God Himself had
bestowed upon him ring in his ears and at the same moment the flames of
hate and vengeance on all Egyptians, which had been fanned anew by the
fortress commander's base conduct, blazed up still more brightly. His
whole nature was in the most violent tumult and as the captain noted his
flushed cheeks and the gloomy light in his eyes he thought that this
strong man, too, had been seized by the fever to which so many convicts
fell victims on the march.
When, at the approach of darkness, the wretched band sought a night's
rest in the midst of the wilderness, a terrible conflict of emotions was
seething in Joshua's soul, and the scene around him fitly harmonized with
his mood; for black clouds had again risen in the north from the sea and,
before the thunder and lightning burst forth and the rain poured in
torrents, howling, whistling winds swept masses of scorching sand upon
the recumbent prisoners.
After these dense clouds had been their coverlet, pools and ponds were
their beds. The guards had bound them together hand and foot and,
dripping and shivering, held the ends of the ropes in their hands; for
the night was as black as the embers of their fire which the rain had
extinguished, and who could have pursued a fugitive through such darkness
and tempest.
But Joshua had no thought of secret flight. While the Egyptians were
trembling and moaning, when they fancied they heard the wrathful voice of
Seth, and the blinding sheets of fire flamed from the clouds, he only
felt the approach of the angry God, whose fury he shared, whose hatred
was also his own. He felt himself a witness of His all-destroying
omnipotence, and his breast swelled more proudly as he told himself that
he was summoned to wield the sword in the service of this Mightiest of
the Mighty.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A school where people learned modesty
But what do you men care for the suffering you inflict on others
Childhood already lies behind me, and youth will soon follow
Good advice is more frequently unheeded than followed
Precepts and lessons which only a mother can give
Should I be a man, if I forgot vengeance?
To the mines meant to be doomed to a slow, torturing death
What had formerly afforded me pleasure now seemed shallow
JOSHUA
By Georg Ebers
Volume 4.
CHAPTER XX.
The storm which had risen as night closed in swept over the isthmus. The
waves in its lakes dashed high, and the Red Sea, which thrust a bay
shaped like the horn of a snail into it from the south, was lashed to the
wildest fury.
Farther northward, where Pharaoh's army, protected by the Migdol of the
South, the strongest fort of the Etham line, had encamped a short time
before, the sand lashed by the storm whirled through the air and, in the
quarter occupied by the king and his great officials, hammers were
constantly busy driving the tent-pins deeper into the earth; for the
brocades, cloths, and linen materials which formed the portable houses of
Pharaoh and his court, struck by the gale, threatened to break from the
poles by which they were supported.
Black clouds hung in the north, but the moon and stars were often
visible, and flashes of distant lightning frequently brightened the
horizon. Even now the moisture of heaven seemed to avoid this rainless
region and in all directions fires were burning, which the soldiers
surrounded in double rows, like a living shield, to keep the storm from
scattering the fuel.
The sentries had a hard duty; for the atmosphere was sultry, in spite of
the north wind, which still blew violently, driving fresh clouds of sand
into their faces.
Only two sentinels were pacing watchfully to and fro at the most northern
gate of the camp, but they were enough; for, on account of the storm, no
one had appeared for a long time to demand entrance or egress. At last,
three hours after sunset, a slender figure, scarcely beyond boyhood,
approached the guards with a firm step and, showing a messenger's pass,
asked the way to Prince Siptah's tent.
He seemed to have had a toilsome journey; for his thick black locks were
tangled and his feet were covered with dust and dried clay. Yet he
excited no suspicion; for his bearing was that of a self-reliant freeman,
his messenger's pass was perfectly correct, and the letter he produced
was really directed to Prince Siptah; a scribe of the corn storehouses,
who was sitting at the nearest fire with other officials and subordinate
officers, examined it.
As the youth's appearance pleased most of those present, and he came from
Tanis and perhaps brought news, a seat at the fire and a share in the
meal were offered; but he was in haste.
Declining the invitation with thanks, he answered the questions curtly
and hurriedly and begged the resting soldiers for a guide. One was placed
at his disposal without delay. But he was soon to learn that it would not
be an easy matter to reach a member of the royal family; for the tents of
Pharaoh, his relatives, and dignitaries stood in a special spot in the
heart of the camp, hedged in by the shields of the heavily-armed troops.
When he entered he was challenged again and again, and his messenger's
pass and the prince's letter were frequently inspected. The guide, too,
was sent back, and his place was filled by an aristocratic lord, called I
the 'eye and ear of the king,' who busied himself with the seal of the
letter. But the messenger resolutely demanded it, and as soon as it was
again in his hand, and two tents standing side by side rocking in the
tempest had been pointed out to him, one as Prince Siptah's, the other as
the shelter of Masana, the daughter of Hornecht, for whom he asked, he
turned to the chamberlain who came out of the former one, showed him the
letter, and asked to be taken to the prince; but the former offered to
deliver the letter to his master--whose steward he was--and Ephraim--for
he was the messenger--agreed, if he would obtain him immediate admission
to the young widow.
The steward seemed to lay much stress upon getting possession of the
letter and, after scanning Ephraim from top to toe, he asked if Kasana
knew him, and when the other assented, adding that he brought her a
verbal message, the Egyptian said smiling:
"Well then; but we must protect our carpets from such feet, and you seem
weary and in need of refreshment. Follow me."
With these words he took him to a small tent, before which an old slave
and one scarcely beyond childhood were sitting by the fire, finishing
their late meal with a bunch of garlic.
They started up as they saw their master; but he ordered the old man to
wash the messenger's feet, and bade the younger ask the prince's cook in
his name for meat, bread, and wine. Then he led Ephraim to his tent,
which was lighted by a lantern, and asked how he, who from his appearance
was neither a slave nor a person of mean degree, had come into such a
pitiable plight. The messenger replied that on his way he had bandaged
the wounds of a severely injured man with the upper part of his apron,
and the chamberlain instantly went to his baggage and gave him a piece of
finely plaited linen.
Ephraim's reply, which was really very near the truth, had cost him so
little thought and sounded so sincere, that it won credence, and the
steward's kindness seemed to him so worthy of gratitude that he made no
objection when the courtier, without injuring the seal, pressed the roll
of papyrus with a skilful hand, separating the layers and peering into
the openings to decipher the contents. While thus engaged, the corpulent
courtier's round eyes sparkled brightly and it seemed to the youth as if
the countenance of the man, whose comfortable plumpness and smooth
rotundity at first appeared like a mirror of the utmost kindness of
heart, now had the semblance of a cat's.
As soon as the steward had completed his task, he begged the youth to
refresh himself in all comfort, and did not return until Ephraim had
bathed, wrapped a fresh linen upper-garment around his hips, perfumed and
anointed his hair, and, glancing into the mirror, was in the act of
slipping a broad gold circlet upon his arm.
He had hesitated some time ere doing this; for he was aware that he would
encounter great perils; but this circlet was his one costly possession
and, during his captivity, it had been very difficult for him to hide it
under his apron. It might be of much service to him but, if he put it on,
it would attract attention and increase the danger of being recognized.
Yet the reflection he beheld in the mirror, vanity, and the desire to
appear well in Kasana's eyes, conquered caution and prudent
consideration, and the broad costly ornament soon glittered on his arm.
The steward stood in astonishment before the handsome, aristocratic
youth, so haughty in his bearing, who had taken the place of the
unassuming messenger. The question whether he was a relative of Kasana
sprang to his lips, and receiving an answer in the negative, he asked to
what family he belonged.
Ephraim bent his eyes on the ground for some time in embarrassment, and
then requested the Egyptian to spare him an answer until he had talked
with Hornecht's daughter.
The other, shaking his head, looked at him again, but pressed him no
farther; for what he had read in the letter was a secret which might
bring death to whoever was privy to it, and the aristocratic young
messenger was doubtless the son of a dignitary who belonged to the circle
of the fellow-conspirators of Prince Siptah, his master.
A chill ran through the courtier's strong, corpulent body, and he gazed
with mingled sympathy and dread at the blooming human flower associated
thus early in plans fraught with danger.
His master had hitherto only hinted at the secret, and it would still be
possible for him to keep his own fate separate from his. Should he do so,
an old age free from care lay before him; but, if he joined the prince
and his plan succeeded, how high he might rise! Terribly momentous was
the choice confronting him, the father of many children, and beads of
perspiration stood on his brow as, incapable of any coherent thought, he
led Ephraim to Kasana's tent, and then hastened to his master.
Silence reigned within the light structure, which was composed of poles
and gay heavy stuffs, tenanted by the beautiful widow.
With a throbbing heart Ephraim approached the entrance, and when he at
last summoned courage and drew aside the curtain fastened firmly to the
earth, which the wind puffed out like a sail, he beheld a dark room, from
which a similar one opened on the right and left. The one on the left was
as dark as the central one; but a flickering light stole through numerous
chinks of the one on the right. The tent was one of those with a flat
roof, divided into three apartments, which he had often seen, and the
woman who irresistibly attracted him was doubtless in the lighted one.
To avoid exposing himself to fresh suspicion, he must conquer his timid
delay, and he had already stooped and loosed the loop which fastened the
curtain to the hook in the floor, when the door of the lighted room
opened and a woman's figure entered the dark central chamber.
Was it she?
Should he venture to speak to her? Yes, it must be done.
Panting for breath and clenching his hands, he summoned up his courage as
if he were about to steal unbidden into the most sacred sanctuary of a
temple. Then he pushed the curtain aside, and the woman whom he had just
noticed greeted him with a low cry.
But he speedily regained his composure, for a ray of light had fallen on
her face, revealing that the person who stood before him was not Kasana,
but her nurse, who had accompanied her to the prisoners and then to the
camp. She, too, recognized him and stared at him as though he had risen
from the grave.
They were old acquaintances; for when he was first brought to the
archer's house she had prepared his bath and moistened his wound with
balsam, and during his second stay beneath the same roof, she had joined
her mistress in nursing him. They had chatted away many an hour together,
and he knew that she was kindly disposed toward him; for when midway
between waking and sleeping, in his burning fever, her hand had stroked
him with maternal tenderness, and afterwards she had never wearied of
questioning him about his people and at last had acknowledged that she
was descended from the Syrians, who were allied to the Hebrews. Nay, even
his language was not wholly strange to her; for she had been a woman of
twenty when dragged to Egypt with other prisoners of Rameses the Great.
Ephraim, she was fond of saying, reminded her of her own son when he was
still younger.
The youth had no ill to fear from her, so grasping her hand, he whispered
that he had escaped from his guards and come to ask counsel from her
mistress and herself.
The word "escaped" was sufficient to satisfy the old woman; for her idea
of ghosts was that they put others to flight, but did not fly themselves.
Relieved, she stroked the youth's curls and, ere his whispered
explanation was ended, turned her back upon him and hurried into the
lighted room to tell her mistress whom she had found outside.
A few minutes after Ephraim was standing before the woman who had become
the guiding star of his life. With glowing cheeks he gazed into the
beautiful face, still flushed by weeping, and though it gave his heart a
pang when, before vouchsafing him a greeting, she enquired whether Hosea
had accompanied him, he forgot the foolish pain when he saw her gaze
warmly at him. Yet when the nurse asked whether she did not think he
looked well and vigorous, and withal more manly in appearance, it seemed
as though he had really grown taller, and his heart beat faster and
faster.
Kasana desired to learn the minutest details of his uncle's experiences;
but after he had done her bidding and finally yielded to the wish to
speak of his own fate, she interrupted him to consult the nurse
concerning the means of saving him from unbidden looks and fresh
dangers--and the right expedient was soon found.
First, with Ephraim's help, the old woman closed the main entrance of the
tent as firmly as possible, and then pointed to the dark room into which
he must speedily and softly retire as soon as she beckoned to him.
Meanwhile Kasana had poured some wine into a goblet, and when he came
back with the nurse she made him sit down on the giraffe skin at her feet
and asked how he had succeeded in evading the guards, and what he
expected from the future. She would tell him in advance that her father
had remained in Tanis, so he need not fear recognition and betrayal.
Her pleasure in this meeting was evident to both eyes and ears; nay, when
Ephraim commenced his story by saying that Prince Siptah's command to
remove the prisoners' chains, for which they were indebted solely to her,
had rendered his escape possible, she clapped her hands like a child.
Then her face clouded and, with a deep sigh, she added that ere his
arrival her heart had almost broken with grief and tears; but Hosea
should learn what a woman would sacrifice for the most ardent desire of
her heart.
She repaid with grateful words Ephraim's assurance that, before his
flight, he had offered to release his uncle from his bonds and, when she
learned that Joshua had refused to accept his nephew's aid, lest it might
endanger the success of the plan he had cleverly devised for him, she
cried out to her nurse, with tearful eyes, that Hosea alone would have
been capable of such a deed.
To the remainder of the fugitive's tale she listened intently, often
interrupting him with sympathizing questions.
The torturing days and nights of the past, which had reached such a happy
termination, seemed now like a blissful dream, a bewildering fairy-tale,
and the goblet she constantly replenished was not needed to lend fire to
his narrative.
Never before had he been so eloquent as while describing how, in the
ravine, he had stepped on some loose stones and rolled head foremost down
into the chasm with them. On reaching the bottom he had believed that all
was lost; for soon after extricating himself from the rubbish that had
buried him, in order to hurry to the pool, he had heard the whistle of
the guards.
Yet he had been a good runner from his childhood, had learned in his
native pastures to guide himself by the light of the stars, so without
glancing to the right or to the left, he had hastened southward as fast
as his feet would carry him. Often in the darkness he had fallen over
stones or tripped in the hollows of the desert sand, but only to rise
again quickly and dash onward, onward toward the south, where he knew he
should find her, Kasana, her for whose sake he recklessly flung to the
winds what wiser-heads had counselled, her for whom he was ready to
sacrifice liberty and life.
Whence he derived the courage to confess this, he knew not, and neither
the blow from her fan, nor the warning exclamation of the nurse: "Just
look at the boy!" sobered him. Nay, his sparkling eyes sought hers still
mote frequently as he continued his story.
One of the hounds which attacked him he had flung against a rock, and the
other he pelted with stones till it fled howling into a thicket. He had
seen no other pursuers, either that night, or during the whole of the
next day. At last he again reached a travelled road and found country
people who told him which way Pharaoh's army had marched. At noon,
overwhelmed by fatigue, he had fallen asleep under the shade of a
sycamore, and when he awoke the sun was near its setting. He was very
hungry, so he took a few turnips from a neighboring field. But their
owner suddenly sprang from a ditch near by, and he barely escaped his
pursuit.
He had wandered along during a part of the night, and then rested beside
a well on the roadside, for he knew that wild beasts shun such frequented
places.
After sunrise he continued his march, following the road taken by the
army. Everywhere he found traces of it, and when, shortly before noon,
exhausted and faint from hunger, he reached a village in the cornlands
watered by the Seti-canal, he debated whether to sell his gold armlet,
obtain more strengthening food, and receive some silver and copper in
change. But he was afraid of being taken for a thief and again
imprisoned, for his apron had been tattered by the thorns, and his
sandals had long since dropped from his feet. He had believed that even
the hardest hearts could not fail to pity his misery so, hard as it was
for him, he had knocked at a peasant's door and begged. But the man gave
him nothing save the jeering counsel that a strong young fellow like him
ought to use his arms and leave begging to the old and weak. A second
peasant had even threatened to beat him; but as he walked on with
drooping bead, a young woman whom he had noticed in front of the
barbarian's house followed him, thrust some bread and dates into his
hand, and whispered hastily that heavy taxes had been levied on the
village when Pharaoh marched through, or she would have given him
something better.
This unexpected donation, which he had eaten at the next well, had not
tasted exactly like a festal banquet, but he did not tell Kasana that it
had been embittered by the doubt whether to fulfil Joshua's commission
and return to his people or yield to the longing that drew him to her.
He moved forward irresolutely, but fate seemed to have undertaken to
point out his way; for after walking a short half hour, the latter
portion of the time through barren land, he had found by the wayside a
youth of about his own age who, moaning with pain, held his foot clasped
between both hands. Pity led him to go to him and, to his astonishment,
he recognized the runner and messenger of Kasana's father, with whom he
had often talked.
"Apu, our nimble Nubian runner?" cried the young widow, and Ephraim
assented and then added that the messenger had been despatched to convey
a letter to Prince Siptah as quickly as possible, and the swift-footed
lad, who was wont to outstrip his master's noble steeds, had shot over
the road like an arrow and would have reached his destination in two
hours more, had he not stepped on the sharp edge of a bottle that had
been shattered by a wagon-wheel--and made a deep and terrible wound.
"And you helped him?" asked Kasana.
"How could I do otherwise?" replied Ephraim. "He had already lost a great
deal of blood and was pale as death. So I carried him to the nearest
ditch, washed the gaping wound, and anointed it with his balsam."
"I put the little box in his pouch myself a year ago," said the nurse who
was easily moved, wiping her eyes. Ephraim confirmed the statement, for
Apu had gratefully told him of it. Then he went on.
"I tore my upper garment into strips and bandaged the wound as well as I
could. Meanwhile he constantly urged haste, held out the pass and letter
his master had given him and, knowing nothing of the misfortune which had
befallen me, charged me to deliver the roll to the prince in his place.
Oh, how willingly I undertook the task and, soon after the second hour
had passed, I reached the camp. The letter is in the prince's hands, and
here am I--and I can see that you are glad! But no one was ever so happy
as I to sit here at your feet, and look up to you, so grateful as I am
that you have listened to me so kindly, and if they load me with chains
again I will bear it calmly, if you will but care for me. Ah, my
misfortune has been so great! I have neither father nor mother, no one
who loves me. You, you alone are dear, and you will not repulse me, will
you?"
He had fairly shouted the last words, as if beside himself, and carried
away by the might of passion and rendered incapable by the terrible
experiences of the past few hours of controlling the emotions that
assailed him, the youth, still scarcely beyond childhood, who saw himself
torn away from and bereft of all that had usually sustained and supported
him, sobbed aloud, and like a frightened birdling seeking protection
under its mother's wings, hid his head, amid floods of tears, in Kasana's
lap.
Warm compassion seized upon the tender-hearted young widow, and her own
eyes grew dim. She laid her hands kindly upon his head, and feeling the
tremor that shook the frame of the weeping lad, she raised his head with
both hands, kissed his brow and cheeks, looked smilingly into his eyes
with tears in her own, and exclaimed:
"You poor, foolish fellow! Why should I not care for you, why should I
repel you? Your uncle is the most beloved of men to me, and you are like
his son. For your sakes I have already accepted what I should otherwise
have thrust far, far from me! But now I must go on, and must not care
what others may think or say of me, if only I can accomplish the one
thing for which I am risking person, life, all that I once prized! Wait,
you poor, impulsive fellow!"--and here she again kissed him on the
cheeks--"I shall succeed in smoothing the path for you also. That is
enough now!"
This command sounded graver, and was intended to curb the increasing
impetuosity of the ardent youth. But she suddenly started up, exclaiming
with anxious haste: "Go, go, at once!"
The footsteps of men approaching the tent, and a warning word from the
nurse had brought this stern order to the young widow's lips, and
Ephraim's quick ear made him understand her anxiety and urged him to join
the old nurse in the dark room. There he perceived that a few moments'
delay would have betrayed him; for the curtain of the tent was drawn
aside and a man passed through the central space straight to the lighted
apartment, where Kasana--the youth heard it distinctly--welcomed the new
guest only too cordially, as though his late arrival surprised her.
Meanwhile the nurse had seized her own cloak, flung it over the
fugitive's bare shoulders, and whispered:
"Be near the tent just before sunrise, but do not enter it until I call
you, if you value your life. You have neither mother nor father, and my
child Kasana ah, what a dear, loving heart she has!--she is the best of
all good women; but whether she is fit to be the guide of an
inexperienced young blusterer, whose heart is blazing like dry straw with
love for her, is another question. I considered many things, while
listening to your story, and on account of my liking for you I will tell
you this. You have an uncle who--my child is right there--is the best of
men, and I know mankind. Whatever he advised, do; for it will surely
benefit you. Obey him! If his bidding leads you far away from here and
Kasana, so much the better for you. We are walking in dangerous paths,
and had it not been done for Hosea's sake, I would have tried to hold her
back with all my might. But for him--I am an old woman; but I would go
through fire myself for that man. I am more grieved than I can tell, both
for the pure, sweet child and for yourself, whom my own son was once so
much like, so I repeat: Obey your uncle, boy! Do that, or you will go to
ruin, and that would be a pity!"
With these words, without waiting for an answer, she drew the curtain of
the tent aside, and waited until Ephraim had slipped through. Then,
wiping her eyes, she entered, as if by chance, the lighted chamber; but
Kasana and her late guest had matters to discuss that brooked no
witnesses, and her "dear child" only permitted her to light her little
lamp at the three-armed candelabra, and then sent her to rest.
She promptly obeyed and, in the dark room, where her couch stood beside
that of her mistress, she sank down, hid her face in her hands, and wept.
She felt as though the world was upside down. She no longer understood
her darling Kasana; for she was sacrificing purity and honor for the sake
of a man whom--she knew it--her soul abhorred.
CHAPTER XXI.
Ephriam cowered in the shadow of the tent, from which he had slipped, and
pressed his ear close to the wall. He had cautiously ripped a small
opening in a seam of the cloth, so he could see and hear what was passing
in the lighted room of the woman he loved. The storm kept every one
within the tents whom duty did not summon into the open air, and Ephraim
had less reason to fear discovery on account of the deep shadow that
rested on the spot where he lay. The nurse's cloak covered him and,
though shiver after shiver shook his young limbs, it was due to the
bitter anguish that pierced his soul.
The man on whose breast he saw Kasana lay her head was a prince, a person
of high rank and great power, and the capricious beauty did not always
repel the bold man, when his lips sought those for whose kiss Ephraim so
ardently longed.
She owed him nothing, it is true, yet her heart belonged to his uncle,
whom she had preferred to all others. She had declared herself ready to
endure the most terrible things for his liberation; and now his own eyes
told him that she was false and faithless, that she granted to another
what belonged to one alone. She had bestowed caresses on him, too, but
these were only the crumbs that fell from Hosea's table, a robbery--he
confessed it with a blush--he had perpetrated on his uncle, yet he felt
offended, insulted, deceived, and consumed to his inmost soul with fierce
jealousy on behalf of his uncle, whom he honored, nay, loved, though he
had opposed his wishes.
And Hosea? Why, he too, like himself, this princely suitor, and all other
men, must love her, spite of his strange conduct at the well by the
roadside--it was impossible for him to do otherwise--and now, safe from
the poor prisoner's resentment, she was basely, treacherously enjoying
another's tender caresses.
Siptah, he had heard at their last meeting, was his uncle's foe, and it
was to him that she betrayed the man she loved!
The chink in the tent was ready to show him everything that occurred
within, but he often closed his eyes that he might not behold it. Often,
it is true, the hateful scene held him in thrall by a mysterious spell
and he would fain have torn the walls of the tent asunder, struck the
detested Egyptian to the ground, and shouted into the faithless woman's
face the name of Hosea, coupled with the harshest reproaches.
The fervent passion which had taken possession of him was suddenly
transformed to hate and scorn. He had believed himself to be the happiest
of mortals, and he had suddenly become the most miserable; no one, he
believed, had ever experienced such a fall from the loftiest heights to
the lowest depths.
The nurse had been right. Naught save misery and despair could come to
him from so faithless a woman.
Once he started up to fly, but he again heard the bewitching tones of her
musical laugh, and mysterious powers detained him, forcing him to listen.
At first the seething blood had throbbed so violently in his ears that he
felt unable to follow the dialogue in the lighted tent. But, by degrees,
he grasped the purport of whole sentences, and now he understood all that
they said, not a word of their further conversation escaped him, and it
was absorbing enough, though it revealed a gulf from which he shrank
shuddering.
Kasana refused the bold suitor many favors for which he pleaded, but this
only impelled him to beseech her more fervently to give herself to him,
and the prize he offered in return was the highest gift of earth, the
place by his side as queen on the throne of Egypt, to which he aspired.
He said this distinctly, but what followed was harder to understand; for
the passionate suitor was in great haste and often interrupted his hasty
sentences to assure Kasana, to whose hands in this hour he was committing
his life and liberty, of his changeless love, or to soothe her when the
boldness of his advances awakened fear and aversion. But he soon began to
speak of the letter whose bearer Ephraim had been and, after reading it
aloud and explaining it, the youth realized with a slight shudder that he
had become an accomplice in the most criminal of all plots, and for a
moment the longing stole over him to betray the traitors and deliver them
into the hand of the mighty sovereign whose destruction they were
plotting. But he repelled the thought and merely sunned himself in the
pleasurable consciousness--the first during this cruel hour-of holding
Kasana and her royal lover in his hand as one holds a beetle by a string.
This had a favorable effect on him and restored the confidence and
courage he had lost. The baser the things he continued to hear, the more
clearly he learned to appreciate the value of the goodness and truth
which he had lost. His uncle's words, too, came back to his memory.
"Give no man, from the loftiest to the lowliest, a right to regard you
save with respect, and you can hold your head as high as the proudest
warrior who ever wore purple robe and golden armor."
On the couch in Kasana's house, while shaking with fever, he had
constantly repeated this sentence; but in the misery of captivity, and on
his flight it had again vanished from his memory. In the courtier's tent
when, after he had bathed and perfumed himself, the old slave held a
mirror before him, he had given it a passing thought; but now it mastered
his whole soul. And strange to say, the worthless traitor within wore a
purple coat and golden mail, and looked like a military hero, but he
could not hold his head erect, for the work he sought to accomplish could
only succeed in the secrecy that shuns the light, and was like the labor
of the hideous mole which undermines the ground in the darkness.
His tool was the repulsive cloven-footed trio, falsehood, fraud, and
faithlessness, and she whom he had chosen for his help-mate was the
woman--it shamed him to his inmost soul-for whom he had been in the act
of sacrificing all that was honorable, precious, and dear to him.
The worst infamies which he had been taught to shun were the rounds of
the ladder on which this evil man intended to mount.
The roll the youth had brought to the camp contained two letters. The
first was from the conspirators in Tanis, the second from Siptah's
mother.
The former desired his speedy return and told him that the Syrian Aarsu,
the commander of the foreign mercenaries, who guarded the palace, as well
as the women's house, was ready to do him homage. If the high-priest of
Amon, who was at once chief-judge, viceroy and keeper of the seal,
proclaimed him king, he was sovereign and could enter the palace which
stood open to him and ascend the throne without resistance. If Pharaoh
returned, the body-guards would take him prisoner and remove him as
Siptah, who liked no halfway measures, had secretly directed, while the
chief-priest insisted upon keeping him in mild imprisonment.
Nothing was to be feared save the premature return from Thebes of Seti,
the second son of Menephtah; for the former, after his older brother's
death, had become heir to the throne, and carrier doves had brought news
yesterday that he was now on his way. Therefore Siptah and the powerful
priest who was to proclaim him king were urged to the utmost haste.
The necessary measures had been adopted in case of possible resistance
from the army; for as soon as the Hebrews had been destroyed, the larger
portion of the troops, without any suspicion of the impending
dethronement of their commander-in-chief, would be sent to their former
stations. The body-guards were devoted to Siptah, and the others who
entered the capital, should worst come to worst, could be easily
overpowered by Aarsu and his mercenaries.
"There is nothing farther for me to do," said the prince, "stretching
himself comfortably, like a man who has successfully accomplished a
toilsome task," except to rush back to Tanis in a few hours with Bai,
have myself crowned and proclaimed king in the temple of Amon, and
finally received in the palace as Pharaoh. The rest will take care of
itself. Seti, whom they call the heir to the throne, is just such another
weakling as his father, and must submit to a fixed fact, or if necessary,
be forced to do so. The captain of the body-guards will see that
Menephtah does not again enter the palace in the city of Rameses.
The second letter which was addressed to the Pharaoh, had been written by
the mother of the prince in order to recall her son and the chief-priest
Bai to the capital as quickly as possible, without exposing the former to
the reproach of cowardice for having quitted the army so shortly before
the battle. Though she had never been better, she protested with
hypocritical complaints and entreaties, that the hours of her life were
numbered, and besought the king to send her son and the chief-priest Bai
to her without delay, that she might be permitted to bless her only child
before her death.
She was conscious of many a sin, and no one, save the high-priest,
possessed the power of winning the favor of the gods for her, a dying
woman. Without his intercession she would perish in despair.
This letter, too, the base robber of a crown read aloud, called it a
clever bit of feminine strategy, and rubbed his hands gleefully.
Treason, murder, hypocrisy, fraud, shameful abuse of the most sacred
feelings, nay all that was evil must serve Siptah to steal the throne,
and though Kasana had wrung her hands and shed tears when she heard that
he meant to remove Pharaoh from his path, she grew calmer after the
prince had represented that her own father had approved of his
arrangements for the deliverance of Egypt from the hand of the king, her
destroyer.
The letter from the prince's mother to Pharaoh, the mother who urged her
own son to the most atrocious crimes, was the last thing Ephraim heard;
for it roused in the young Hebrew, who was wont to consider nothing purer
and more sacred than the bonds which united parents and children, such
fierce indignation, that he raised his fist threateningly and, springing
up, opened his lips in muttered invective.
He did not hear that Kasana made the prince swear that, if he attained
the sovereign power, he would grant her first request. It should cost him
neither money nor lands, and only give her the right to exercise mercy
where her heart demanded it; for things were in store which must
challenge the wrath of the gods and he must leave her to soothe it.
Ephraim could not endure to see or hear more of these abominable things.
For the first time he felt how great a danger he ran of being dragged
into this marsh and becoming a lost, evil man; but never, he thought,
would he have been so corrupt, so worthless, as this prince. His uncle's
words again returned to his mind, and he now raised his head proudly and
arched his chest as if to assure himself of his own unbroken vigor,
saying meanwhile, with a long breath, that he was of too much worth to
ruin himself for the sake of a wicked woman, even though, like Kasana,
she was the fairest and most bewitching under the sun.
Away, away from the neighborhood of this net, which threatened to
entangle him in murder and every deed of infamy.
Resolved to seek his people, he turned toward the gate of the camp, but
after a few hasty steps paused, and a glance at the sky showed him that
it was the second hour past midnight. Every surrounding object was buried
in silence save that from the neighboring Dens of the royal steeds, came
the sound of the rattle of a chain, or of the stamp of a stallion's hoof.
If he risked escaping from the camp now, he could not fail to be seen and
stopped. Prudence commanded him to curb his impatience and, as he glanced
around, his eyes rested on the chamberlain's tent from which the old
slave had just emerged to look for his master, who was still waiting in
the prince's tent for his lord's return.
The old man had treated Ephraim kindly, and now asked him with
good-natured urgency to come in and rest; for the youth needed sleep.
And Ephraim accepted the well-meant invitation. He felt for the first
time how weary his feet were, and he had scarcely stretched himself upon
the mat which the old slave--it was his own--spread on the floor of the
tent for him, ere the feeling came over him that his limbs were relaxing;
and yet he had expected to find here time and rest for calm deliberation.
He began, too, to think of the future and his uncle's commission.
That he must join his people without delay was decided. If they escaped
Pharaoh's army, the others could do what they pleased, his duty was to
summon his shepherds, servants, and the youths of his own age, and with
them hurry to the mines to break Joshua's chains and bring him back to
his old father and the people who needed him. He already saw himself with
a sling in his girdle and a battle-axe in his hand, rushing on in advance
of the others, when sleep overpowered him and bound the sorely wearied
youth so firmly and sweetly that even dreams remained aloof from his
couch and when morning came the old slave was obliged to shake him to
rouse him.
The camp was already pervaded with bustling life. Tents were struck,
asses and ox-carts laden, steeds curried and newly-shod, chariots washed,
weapons and harnesses cleaned, breakfast was distributed and eaten.
At intervals the blare of trumpets was heard in one direction, loudly
shouted commands in another, and from the eastern portion of the camp
echoed the chanting of the priests, who devoutly greeted the new-born
sun-god.
A gilded chariot, followed by a similar one, drove up to the costly
purple tent beside Kasana's, which active servants were beginning to take
down.
Prince Siptah and the chief-priest Bai had received Pharaoh's permission
to set off for Tanis, to fulfil the wish of a "dying woman."
Soon after Ephraim took leave of the old slave and bade him give Kasana's
nurse the cloak and tell her that the messenger had followed her advice
and his uncle's.
Then he set off on his walk.
He escaped unchallenged from the Egyptian camp and, as he entered the
wilderness, he heard the shout with which he called his shepherds in the
pastures. The cry, resounding far over the plain, startled a sparrow-hawk
which was gazing into the distance from a rock and, as the bird soared
upward, the youth fancied that if he stretched out his arms, wings must
unfold strong enough to bear him also through the air. Never had he felt
so light and active, so strong and free, nay had the priest at this hour
asked him the question whether he would accept the office of a captain of
thousands in the Egyptian army, he would undoubtedly have answered, as he
did before the ruined house of Nun, that his sole desire was to remain a
shepherd and rule his flocks and servants.
He was an orphan, but he had a nation, and where his people were was his
home.
Like a wanderer, who, after a long journey, sees his home in the
distance, he quickened his pace.
He had reached Tanis on the night of the new moon and the round silver
shield which was paling in the morning light was the same which had then
risen before his eyes. Yet it seemed as though years lay between his
farewell of Miriam and the present hour, and the experiences of a life
had been compressed into these few days.
He had left his tribe a boy; he returned a man; yet, thanks to this one
terrible night, he had remained unchanged, he could look those whom he
loved and reverenced fearlessly in the face.
Nay, more!
He would show the man whom he most esteemed that he, too, Ephraim, could
hold his head high. He would repay Joshua for what he had done, when he
remained in chains and captivity that he, his nephew, might go forth as
free as a bird.
After hurrying onward an hour, he reached a ruined watch-tower, climbed
to its summit, and saw, at a short distance beyond the mount of
Baal-zephon, which had long towered majestically on the horizon, the
glittering northern point of the Red Sea.
The storm, it is true, had subsided, but he perceived by the surging of
its emerald surface that the sea was by no means calm, and single black
clouds in the sky, elsewhere perfectly clear, seemed to indicate an
approaching tempest.
He gazed around him asking himself what the leader of the people probably
intended, if--as the prince had told Kasana--they had encamped between
Pihahiroth--whose huts and tents rose before him on the narrow gulf the
northwestern arm of the Red Sea thrust into the land--and the mount of
Baal-zephon.
Had Siptah lied in this too?
No. This time the malicious traitor had departed from his usual custom;
for between the sea and the village, where the wind was blowing slender
columns of smoke asunder, his falcon-eye discovered many light spots
resembling a distant flock of sheep, and among and beside them a singular
movement to and fro upon the sands.
It was the camp of his people.
How short seemed the distance that separated him from them!
Yet the nearer it was, the greater became his anxiety lest the great
multitude, with the women and children, herds and tents, could not escape
the vast army which must overtake them in a few hours.
His heart shrank as he gazed around him; for neither to the east, where a
deeper estuary was surging, nor southward, where the Red Sea tossed its
angry waves, nor even toward the north, whence Pharaoh's army was
marching, was escape possible. To the west lay the wilderness of Aean,
and if the wanderers escaped in that direction, and were pressed farther,
they would again enter Egyptian soil and the exodus would be utterly
defeated.
So there was nothing left save to risk a battle, and at the thought a
chill ran through the youth's veins; for he knew how badly armed,
untrained, savage, unmanageable, and cowardly were the men of his race,
and had witnessed the march of the powerful, well-equipped Egyptian army,
with its numerous foot-soldiers and superb war-chariots.
To him now, as to his uncle a short time before, his people seemed doomed
to certain destruction, unless succored by the God of his fathers. In
former years, and just before his departure, Miriam, with sparkling eyes
and enthusiastic words, had praised the power and majesty of this
omnipotent Lord, who preferred his people above all other nations; but
the lofty words of the prophetess had filled his childish heart with a
slight fear of the unapproachable greatness and terrible wrath of this
God.
It had been easier for him to uplift his soul to the sun-god, when his
teacher, a kind and merry-hearted Egyptian priest, led him to the temple
of Pithom. In later years he had felt no necessity of appealing to any
god; for he lacked nothing, and while other boys obeyed their parents'
commands, the shepherds, who well knew that the flocks they tended
belonged to him, called him their young master, and first in jest, then
in earnest, paid him all the honor due a ruler, which prematurely
increased his self-importance and made him an obstinate fellow.
He whom stalwart, strong men obeyed, was sufficient unto himself, and
felt that others needed him and, as nothing was more difficult for him
than to ask a favor, great or small, from any one, he rebelled against
praying to a God so far off and high above him.
But now, when his heart was oppressed by the terrible destiny that
threatened his people, he was overwhelmed by the feeling that only the
Greatest and Mightiest could deliver them from this terrible, unspeakable
peril, as if no one could withstand this powerful army, save He whose
might could destroy heaven and earth.
What were they that the Most High, whom Miriam and Hosea described as so
pre-eminently great, should care for them? Yet his people numbered many
thousands, and God had not disdained to make them His, and promise great
things for them in the future. Now they were on the verge of destruction,
and he, Ephraim, who came from the camp of the enemy, was perhaps the
sole person who saw the full extent of the danger.
Suddenly he was filled with the conviction that it was incumbent upon
him, above all others, to tell the God of his fathers,--who perhaps in
caring for earth and heaven, sun and stars, had forgotten the fate of His
people--of the terrible danger impending, and beseech Him to save them.
He was still standing on the top of the ruined tower, and raised his arms
and face toward heaven.
In the north he saw the black clouds which he had noticed in the blue sky
swiftly massing and rolling hither and thither. The wind, which had
subsided after sunrise, was increasing in strength and power, and rapidly
becoming a storm. It swept across the isthmus in gusts, which followed
one another more and more swiftly, driving before them dense clouds of
yellow sand.
He must lift up his voice loudly, that the God to whom he prayed might
hear him in His lofty heaven, so, with all the strength of his young
lungs, he shouted into the storm:
"Adonai, Adonai! Thou, whom they call Jehovah, mighty God of my fathers,
hear me, Ephraim, a young inexperienced lad, of whom, in his
insignificance, Thou hast probably never thought. I ask nothing for
myself. But the people, whom Thou dost call Thine, are in sore peril.
They have left durable houses and good pastures because Thou didst
promise them a better and more beautiful land, and they trusted in Thee
and Thy promises. But now the army of Pharaoh is approaching, so great a
host that our people will never be able to resist it. Thou must believe
this, Eli, my Lord. I have seen it and been in its midst. So surely as I
stand here, I know that it is too mighty for Thy people. Pharaoh's power
will crush them as the hoofs of the cattle trample the grain on the
threshing-floor. And my people, who are also Thine, are encamped in a
spot where Pharaoh's warriors can cut them down from all directions, so
that there is no way for them to fly, not one. I saw it distinctly from
this very spot. Hear me now, Adonai. But canst Thou hear my words, oh
Lord, in such a tempest? Surely Thou canst; for they call Thee omnipotent
and, if Thou dost hear me and dost understand the meaning of my words,
Thou wilt see with Thy mighty eyes, if such is Thy will, that I speak the
truth. Then Thou wilt surely remember the vow Thou didst make to the
people through Thy servant Moses.
"Among the Egyptians, I have witnessed treachery and murder and shameful
wiles; their deeds have filled me, who am myself but a sinful,
inexperienced youth, with horror and indignation. How couldst Thou, from
whom all good is said to proceed, and whom Miriam calls truth itself, act
like those abominable men and break faith with those who trusted in Thee?
I know, Thou great and mighty One, that this is far from Thee, nay,
perhaps it is a sin even to cherish such a thought. Hear me, Adonai! Look
northward at the troops of the Egyptians, who will surely soon leave
their camp and march forward, and southward to the peril of Thy people,
for whom escape is no longer possible, and Thou wilt rescue them by Thy
omnipotence and great wisdom; for Thou hast promised them a new country,
and if they are destroyed, how can they reach it?"
With these words he finished his prayer, which, though boyish and
incoherent, gushed from the inmost depths of his heart. Then he sprang
with long leaps from the ruined tower to the barren plain at his feet,
and ran southward as fleetly as if he were escaping from captivity a
second time. He felt how the wind rushing from the north-east urged him
forward, and told himself that it would also hasten the march of
Pharaoh's soldiers. Perhaps the leaders of his people did not yet know
how vast was the military power that threatened them, and undervalued the
danger in which their position placed them. But he saw it, and could give
them every information. Haste was necessary, and he felt as though he had
gained wings in this race with the storm.
The village of Pihahiroth was soon gained, and while dashing by it
without pausing, he noticed that its huts and tents were deserted by men
and cattle. Perhaps its inhabitants had fled with their property to a
place of safety before the advancing Egyptian troops or the hosts of his
own people.
The farther he went, the more cloudy became the sky,--which here so
rarely failed to show a sunny vault of blue at noonday,--the more
fiercely howled the tempest. His thick locks fluttered wildly around his
burning head, he panted for breath, yet flew on, on, while his sandals
seemed to him to scarcely touch the ground.
The nearer he came to the sea, the louder grew the howling and whistling
of the storm, the more furious the roar of the waves dashing against the
rocks of Baal-zephon. Now--a short hour after he had left the tower--he
reached the first tents of the camp, and the familiar cry: "Unclean!" as
well as the mourning-robes of those whose scaly, disfigured faces looked
forth from the ruins of the tents which the storm had overthrown,
informed him that he had reached the lepers, whom Moses had commanded to
remain outside the camp.
Yet so great was his haste that, instead of making a circuit around their
quarter, he dashed straight through it at his utmost speed. Nor did he
pause even when a lofty palm, uprooted by the tempest, fell to the ground
so close beside him that the fan-shaped leaves in its crown brushed his
face.
At last he gained the tents and pinfolds of his people, not a few of
which had also been overthrown, and asked the first acquaintances he met
for Nun, the father of his dead mother and of Joshua.
He had gone down to the shore with Moses and other elders of the people.
Ephraim followed him there, and the damp, salt sea-air refreshed him and
cooled his brow.
Yet he could not instantly get speech with him, so he collected his
thoughts, and recovered his breath, while watching the men whom he sought
talking eagerly with some gaily-clad Phoenician sailors. A youth like
Ephraim might not venture to interrupt the grey-haired heads of the
people in the discussion, which evidently referred to the sea; for the
Hebrews constantly pointed to the end of the bay, and the Phoenicians
sometimes thither, sometimes to the mountain and the sky, sometimes to
the north, the center of the still increasing tempest.
A projecting wall sheltered the old men from the hurricane, yet they
found it difficult to stand erect, even while supported by their staves
and clinging to the stones of the masonry.
At last the conversation ended and while the youth saw the gigantic
figure of Moses go with slow, yet firm steps among the leaders of the
Hebrews down to the shore of the sea, Nun, supported by one of his
shepherds, was working his way with difficulty, but as rapidly as
possible toward the camp. He wore a mourning-robe, and while the others
looked joyous and hopeful when they parted, his handsome face, framed by
its snow-white beard and hair, had the expression of one whose mind and
body were burdened by grief.
Not until Ephraim called him did he raise his drooping leonine head, and
when he saw him he started back in surprise and terror, and clung more
firmly to the strong arm of the shepherd who supported him.
Tidings of the cruel fate of his son and grandson had reached him through
the freed slaves he had left in Tanis; and the old man had torn his
garments, strewed ashes on his head, donned mourning robes, and grieved
bitterly for his beloved, noble, only son and promising grandson.
Now Ephraim was standing before him; and after Nun had laid his hand on
his shoulders, and kissed him again and again, he asked if his son was
still alive and remembered him and his people.
As soon as the youth had joyfully assured him that such was the case, Nun
threw his arms around the boy's shoulders, that henceforth his own blood,
instead of a stranger, should protect him from the violence of the storm.
He had grave and urgent duties to fulfil, from which nothing might
withhold him. Yet as the fiery youth shouted into his ear, through the
roar of the hurricane, on their way through the camp, that he would
summon his shepherds and the companions of his own age to release Hosea,
who now called himself Joshua, old Nun's impetuous spirit awoke and,
clasping Ephraim closer to his heart, he cried out that though an old man
he was not yet too aged to swing an axe and go with Ephraim's youthful
band to liberate his son. His eyes sparkled through his tears, and waving
his free arm aloft, he cried:
"The God of my fathers, on whom I learned to rely, watches over His
faithful people. Do you see the sand, sea-weed, and shells yonder at the
end of the estuary? An hour ago the place was covered with water, and
roaring waves were dashing their white spray upward. That is the way,
boy, which promises escape; if the wind holds, the water--so the
experienced Phoenicians assure us--will recede still farther toward the
sea. Their god of the north wind, they say, is favorable to us, and their
boys are already lighting a fire to him on the summit of Baal-zephon
yonder, but we know that it is Another, Who is opening to us a path to
the desert. We were in evil case, my boy!"
"Yes, grandfather!" cried the youth. "You were trapped like lions in the
snare, and the Egyptian host--it passed me from the first man to the
last--is mighty and unconquerable. I hurried as fast as my feet could
carry me to tell you how many heavily-armed troops, bowmen, steeds, and
chariots. . . . "
"We know, we know," the old man interrupted, "but here we are."
He pointed to an overturned tent which his servants were trying to prop,
and beside which an aged Hebrew, his father Elishama, wrapped in cloth,
sat in the chair in which he was carried by bearers.
Nun hastily shouted a few words and led Ephraim toward him. But while the
youth was embracing his great-grandfather, who hugged and caressed him,
Nun, with youthful vivacity, was issuing orders to the shepherds and
servants:
"Let the tent fall, men! The storm has begun the work for you! Wrap the
covering round the poles, load the carts and beasts of burden. Move
briskly, You, Gaddi, Shamma, and Jacob, join the others! The hour for
departure has come! Everybody must hasten to harness the animals, put
them in the wagons, and prepare all things as fast as possible. The
Almighty shows us the way, and every one must hasten, in His name and by
the command of Moses. Keep strictly to the old order. We head the
procession, then come the other tribes, lastly the strangers and leprous
men and women. Rejoice, oh, ye people; for our God is working a great
miracle and making the sea dry land for us, His chosen people. Let
everyone thank Him while working, and pray from the depths of the heart
that He will continue to protect us. Let all who do not desire to be
slain by the sword and crushed by the weight of Pharaoh's chariots put
forth their best strength and forget rest! That will await us as soon as
we have escaped the present peril. Down with the tent-cover yonder; I'll
roll it up myself. Lay hold, boy! Look across at the children of
Manasseh, they are already packing and loading. That's right, Ephraim,
you know how to use your hands!
"What more have we to do! My head, my forgetful old head! So much has
come upon me at once! You have nimble feet, Raphu;--I undertook to warn
the strangers to prepare for a speedy departure. Run quickly and hurry
them, that they may not linger too far behind the people. Time is
precious! Lord, Lord, my God, extend Thy protecting hand over Thy people,
and roll the waves still farther back with the tempest, Thy mighty
breath! Let every one pray silently while working, the Omnipresent One,
Who sees the heart, will hear it. That load is too heavy for you,
Ephraim, you are lifting beyond your strength. No. The youth has mastered
it. Follow his example, men, and ye of Succoth, rejoice in your master's
strength."
The last words were addressed to Ephraim's shepherds, men and maid
servants, most of whom shouted a greeting to him in the midst of their
work, kissed his arm or hand, and rejoiced at his return. They were
engaged in packing and wrapping their goods, and in gathering,
harnessing, and loading the animals, which could only be kept together by
blows and shouts.
The people from Succoth wished to vie with their young master, those from
Tanis with their lord's grandson, and the other owners of flocks and
lesser men of the tribe of Ephraim, whose tents surrounded that of their
chief Nun, did the same, in order not to be surpassed by others; yet
several hours elapsed ere all the tents, household utensils, and
provisions for man and beast were again in their places on the animals
and in the carts, and the aged, feeble and sick had been laid on litters
or in wagons.
Sometimes the gale bore from the distance to the spot where the
Ephraimites were busily working the sound of Moses' deep voice or the
higher tones of Aaron. But neither they nor the men of the tribe of Judah
heeded the monition; for the latter were ruled by Hur and Naashon, and
beside the former stood his newly-wedded wife Miriam. It was different
with the other tribes and the strangers, to the obstinacy and cowardice
of whose chiefs was due the present critical position of the people.
CHAPTER XXII.
To break through the center of the Etham line of fortifications and march
toward the north-east along the nearest road leading to Palestine had
proved impossible; but Moses' second plan of leading the people around
the Migdol of the South had also been baffled; for spies had reported
that the garrison of the latter had been greatly strengthened. Then the
multitude had pressed around the man of God, declaring that they would
rather return home with their families and appeal to Pharaoh's mercy than
to let themselves, their wives, and their families be slaughtered.
Several days had been spent in detaining them; but when other messengers
brought tidings that Pharaoh was approaching with a powerful army the
time seemed to have come when the wanderers, in the utmost peril, might
be forced to break through the forts, and Moses exerted the full might of
his commanding personality, Aaron the whole power of his seductive
eloquence, while old Nun and Hur essayed to kindle the others with their
own bold spirit.
But the terrible news had robbed the majority of the last vestige of self
reliance and trust in God, and they had already resolved to assure
Pharaoh of their repentance when the messengers whom, without their
leader's knowledge, they had sent forth, returned, announcing that the
approaching army had been commanded to spare no Hebrew, and to show by
the sharp edge of the sword, even to those who sued for mercy, how
Pharaoh punished the men by whose shameful sorcery misery and woe had
come upon so many Egyptians.
Then, too late, they became aware that to return would ensure more speedy
destruction than to boldly press forward. But when the men capable of
bearing arms followed Hur and Nun to the Migdol of the South, they turned
to fly at the defiant blare of the Egyptian war trumpets. When they came
back to the camp with weary limbs, depressed and disheartened, new and
exaggerated reports of Pharaoh's military force had reached the people,
and now terror and despair had taken possession of the bolder men. Every
admonition was vain, every threat derided, and the rebellious people had
forced their leaders to go with them till, after a short march, they
reached the Red Sea, whose deep green waves had forced them to pause in
their southward flight.
So they had encamped between Pihahiroth and Baal-zephon, and here the
leaders again succeeded in turning the attention of the despairing people
to the God of their fathers.
In the presence of sure destruction, from which no human power could save
them, they had again learned to raise their eyes to Heaven; but Moses'
soul had once more been thrilled with anxiety and compassion for the
poor, sorely afflicted bands who had followed his summons. During the
night preceding, he had climbed one of the lower peaks of Baal-zephon
and, amid the raging of the tempest and the roar of the hissing surges,
sought the Lord his God, and felt his presence near him. He, too, had not
wearied of pleading the need of his people and adjuring him to save them.
At the same hour Miriam, the wife of Hur, had gone to the sea-shore
where, under a solitary palmtree, she addressed the same petition to her
God, whose trusted servant she still felt herself. Here she besought Him
to remember the women and children who, trusting in Him, had wandered
forth into distant lands. She had also knelt to pray for the friend of
her youth, languishing in terrible captivity; but had only cried in low,
timid accents: "Oh, Lord, do not forget the hapless Hosea, whom at Thy
bidding I called Joshua, though he showed himself less obedient to Thy
will than Moses, my brother, and Hur, my husband. Remember also the
youthful Ephraim, the grandson of Nun, Thy faithful servant."
Then she returned to the tent of the chief, her husband, while many a
lowly man and poor anxious woman, before their rude tents or on their
thin, tear-drenched mats, uplifted their terrified souls to the God of
their fathers and besought His care for those who were dearest to their
hearts.
So, in this night of utmost need, the camp had become a temple in which
high and low, the heads of families and the housewives, masters and
slaves, nay, even the afflicted lepers sought and found their God.
At last the morning came on which Ephraim had shouted his childish prayer
amid the roaring of the storm, and the waters of the sea had begun to
recede.
When the Hebrews beheld with their own eyes the miracle that the Most
High was working for His chosen people, even the discouraged and
despairing became believing and hopeful.
Not only the Ephraimites, but the other tribes, the foreigners, and
lepers felt the influence of the newly-awakened joyous confidence, which
urged each individual to put forth all his powers to prepare for the
journey and, for the first time, the multitude gathered and formed into
ranks without strife, bickering, deeds of violence, curses, and tears.
After sunset Moses, holding his staff uplifted, and Aaron, singing and
praying, entered at the head of the procession the end of the bay.
The storm, which continued to rage with the same violence, had swept the
water out of it and blew the flame and smoke of the torches carried by
the tribes toward the south-west.
The chief leaders, on whom all eyes rested with trusting eagerness, were
followed by old Nun and the Ephraimites. The bottom of the sea on which
they trod was firm, moist sand, on which even the herds could walk as if
it were a smooth road, sloping gently toward the sea.
Ephraim, in whom the elders now saw the future chief, had been entrusted,
at his grandfather's suggestion, with the duty of seeing that the
procession did not stop and, for this purpose, had been given a leader's
staff; for the fishermen whose huts stood at the foot of Baal-zephon,
like the Phoenicians, believed that when the moon reached her zenith the
sea would return to its old bed, and therefore all delay was to be
avoided.
The youth enjoyed the storm, and when his locks fluttered and he battled
victoriously against the gale in rushing hither and thither, as his
office required, it seemed to him a foretaste of the venture he had in
view.
So the procession moved on through the darkness which had speedily
followed the dusk of evening. The acrid odor of the sea-weed and fishes
which had been left stranded pleased the boy,--who felt that he had
matured into manhood,--better than the sweet fragrance of spikenard in
Kasana's tent. Once the memory of it flashed through his brain, but with
that exception there was not a moment during these hours which gave him
time to think of her.
He had his hands full of work; sometimes a heap of sea-weed flung on the
path by a wave must be removed; sometimes a ram, the leader of a flock,
refused to step on the wet sand and must be dragged forward by the horns,
or cattle and beasts of burden must be driven through a pool of water
from which they shrank.
Often, too, he was obliged to brace his shoulder against a heavily-laden
cart, whose wheels had sunk too deeply into the soft sand; and when, even
during this strange, momentous march, two bands of shepherds began to
dispute about precedence close to the Egyptian shore, he quickly settled
the dispute by making them draw lots to decide which party should go
first.
Two little girls who, crying bitterly, refused to wade through a pool of
water, while their mother was busy with the infant in her arms, he
carried with prompt decision through the shallow puddle, and the cart
with a broken wheel he had moved aside by the light of the torches and
commanded some stalwart bondmen, who were carrying only small bundles, to
load themselves with the sacks and bales, nay, even the fragments of the
vehicle. He uttered a word of cheer to weeping women and children and,
when the light of a torch fell upon the face of a companion of his own
age, whose aid he hoped to obtain for the release of Joshua, he briefly
told him that there was a bold adventure in prospect which he meant to
dare in concert with him.
The torch-bearers who usually headed the procession this time were
obliged to close its ranks, for the storm raging from the northeast would
have blown the smoke into the people's faces. They stood on the Egyptian
shore, and already the whole train had passed them except the lepers who,
following the strangers, were the last of the whole multitude.
These "strangers" were a motley crew, comprising Asiatics of Semitic
blood, who had escaped from the bondage or severe punishments which the
Egyptian law imposed, traders who expected to find among the wanderers
purchasers of their wares, or Shasu shepherds, whose return was
prohibited by the officials on the frontier. Ephraim had much trouble
with them, for they refused to leave the firm land until the lepers had
been forced to keep farther away from them; yet the youth, with the aid
of the elders of the tribe of Benjamin, who preceded them, brought them
also to obedience by threatening them with the prediction of the
Phoenicians and the fishermen that the moon, when it had passed its
zenith, would draw the sea back to its old bed.
Finally he persuaded the leader of the lepers, who had once been an
Egyptian priest, to keep at least half the distance demanded.
Meanwhile the tempest had continued to blow with increased violence, and
its howling and whistling, blended with the roar of the dashing waves and
the menacing thunder of the surf, drowned the elders' shouts of command,
the terrified shrieks of the children, the lowing and bleating of the
trembling herds, and the whining of the dogs. Ephraim's voice could be
heard only by those nearest and, moreover, many of the torches were
extinguished, while others were kept burning with the utmost difficulty.
Seeking to recover his wind and get a little rest, he walked slowly for a
time over the damp sand behind the last lepers, when he heard some one
call his name and, turning, he saw one of his former playmates, who was
returning from a reconnoitring expedition and who, with the sweat pouring
from his brow and panting breath, shouted into the ear of the youth, in
whose hand he saw the staff of a leader, that Pharaoh's chariots were
approaching at the head of his army. He had left them at Pihahiroth and,
if they did not stop there to give the other troops time to join them,
they might overtake the fugitives at any moment. With these words he
darted past the lepers to join the leaders; but Ephraim stopped in the
middle of the road, pressing his hand upon his brow, while a new burden
of care weighed heavily upon his soul.
He knew that the approaching army would crush the men, women, and
children whose touching fear and helplessness he had just beheld, as a
man's foot tramples on an ant-bill, and again every instinct of his being
urged him to pray, while from his oppressed heart the imploring cry rose
through the darkness:
"Eli, Eli, great God most high! Thou knowest--for I have told Thee, and
Thine all-seeing eye must perceive it, spite of the darkness of this
night--the strait of Thy people, whom Thou hast promised to lead into a
new country. Remember Thy vow, Jehovah! Be merciful unto us, Thou great
and mighty one! Our foe is approaching with resistless power! Stay him!
Save us! Protect the poor women and children! Save us, be merciful to
us!"
During this prayer he had raised his eyes heavenward and saw on the
summit of Baal-zephon the red blaze of a fire. It had been lighted by the
Phoenicians to make the Baal of the north-wind favorable to the men of
kindred race and hostile to the hated Egyptians. This was a kindly deed;
but he put his trust in another God and, as his eye glanced over the
vault of heaven and noted the grey and black storm-clouds scurrying,
gathering, parting, and then rushing in new directions, he perceived
between two dispersing masses of clouds the silvery light of the full
moon, which had now attained her zenith.
Fresh anxiety assailed him; for he remembered the prediction of men
skilled in the changes of winds and waves. If the sea should now return
to its ancient bed, his people would be lost; for there was no escape,
even toward the north, where deep pools of water were standing amid the
mire and cliffs. Should the waves flow back within the next hour, the
seed of Abraham would be effaced from the earth, as writing inscribed on
wax disappears from the tablet under the pressure of a warm hand.
Yet was not this people thus marked for destruction, the nation which the
Lord had chosen for His own? Could He deliver it into the hand of those
who were also His own foes?
No, no, a thousand times no!
And the moon, which was to cause this destruction, had but a short time
before been the ally of his flight and favored him. Only let him keep up
his hope and faith and not lose confidence.
Nothing, nothing was lost as yet.
Come what might, the whole nation need not perish, and his own tribe,
which marched at the head of the procession, certainly would not; for
many must have reached the opposite shore, nay, perhaps more than he
supposed; for the bay was not wide, and even the lepers, the last of the
train, had already advanced some distance across the wet sand.
Ephraim now remained alone behind them all to listen to the approach of
the hostile chariots. He laid his ear to the ground on the shore of the
bay, and he could trust to the sharpness of his hearing; how often, in
this attitude, he had caught the distant tramp of stray cattle or, while
hunting, the approach of a herd of antelopes or gazelles.
As the last, he was in the greatest danger; but what cared he for that?
How gladly he would have sacrificed his young life to save the others.
Since he had held in his hand the leader's staff, it seemed to him as if
he had assumed the duty of watching over his people, so he listened and
listened till he could hear a slight trembling of the ground and finally
a low rumble. That was the foe, that must be Pharaoh's chariots, and how
swiftly the proud steeds whirled them forward.
Springing up as if a lash had struck him, he dashed on to urge the others
to hasten.
How oppressively sultry the air had grown, spite of the raging storm
which extinguished so many torches! The moon was concealed by clouds, but
the flickering fire on the summit of the lofty height of Baal-zephon
blazed brighter and brighter. The sparks that rose from the midst of the
flames glittered as they swept westward; for the wind now came more from
the east.
Scarcely had he noticed this, when he hurried back to the boys bearing
pans of pitch who closed the procession, to command them in the utmost
haste to fill the copper vessels afresh and see that the smoke rose in
dense, heavy clouds; for, he said to himself, the storm will drive the
smoke into the faces of the stallions who draw the chariots and frighten
or stop them.
No means seemed to him too insignificant, every moment that could be
gained was precious; and as soon as he had convinced himself that the
smoke-clouds were pouring densely from the vessels and making it
difficult to breathe the air of the path over which the people had
passed, he hurried forward, shouting to the elders whom he overtook that
Pharaoh's chariots were close at hand and the march must be hastened. At
once pedestrians, bearers, drivers, and shepherds exerted all their
strength to advance faster; and though the wind, which blew more and more
from the east, impeded their progress, all struggled stoutly against it,
and dread of their approaching pursuers doubled their strength.
The youth seemed to the heads of the tribes, who nodded approval wherever
he appeared, like a shepherd dog guarding and urging the flock; and when
he had slipped through the moving bands and battled his way forward
against the storm, the east wind bore to his ears as if in reward a
strange shout; for the nearer he came to its source, the louder it rang,
and the more surely he perceived that it was a cry of joy and exultation,
the first that had burst from a Hebrew's breast for many a long day.
It refreshed Ephraim like a cool drink after long thirsting, and he could
not refrain from shouting aloud and crying joyously to the others:
"Saved, saved!" Two tribes had already reached the eastern shore of the
bay and were raising the glad shouts which, with the fires blazing in
huge pans on the shore, kindled the courage of the approaching fugitives
and braced their failing strength. Ephraim saw by their light the
majestic figure of Moses on a hill by the sea, extending his staff over
the waters, and the spectacle impressed him, like all the other
fugitives, from the highest to the lowest, more deeply than aught else
and strongly increased the courage of his heart. This man was indeed the
trusted servant of the Most High, and so long as he held his staff
uplifted, the waves seemed spell-bound, and through him God forbade their
return.
He, Ephraim, need no longer appeal to the Omnipotent One--that was the
appointed task of this great and exalted personage; but he must continue
to fulfil his little duty of watching the progress of individuals.
Back against the stream of fugitives to the lepers and torch-bearers he
hastened, shouting to each division, "Saved! Saved! They have gained the
goal. Moses' staff is staying the waves. Many have already reached the
shore. Thank the Lord! Forward, that you, too, may join in the rejoicing!
Fix your eyes on the two red beacons! The rescued ones lighted them! The
servant of the Lord is standing between them with uplifted staff."
Then, kneeling on the wet sand, he again pressed his ear to the ground,
and now heard distinctly, close at hand, the rattle of wheels and the
swift beat of horses' hoofs.
But while still listening, the noise gradually ceased, and he heard
nothing save the howling of the furious storm and the threatening dash of
the surging waves, or a single cry borne by the east wind.
The chariots had reached the dry portion of the bay and lingered some
time ere they continued their way along this dangerous path; but suddenly
the Egyptian war-cry rang out, and the rattle of wheels was again heard.
They advanced more slowly than before but faster than the people could
walk.
For the Egyptians also the road remained dry; but if his people only kept
a short distance in advance he need feel no anxiety; during the night the
rescued tribes could disperse among the mountains and hide in places
where no chariots nor horses could follow. Moses knew this region where
he had lived so long as a fugitive; it was only necessary to inform him
of the close vicinity of the foe. So he trusted one of his play-fellows
of the tribe of Benjamin with the message, and the latter had not far to
go to reach the shore. He himself remained behind to watch the
approaching army; for already, without stooping or listening, spite of
the storm raging around him, he heard the rattle of wheels and the
neighing of the horses. But the lepers, whose ears also caught the sound,
wailed and lamented, feeling themselves in imagination flung to the
ground, crushed by the chariots, or crowded into a watery grave, for the
pathway had grown narrower and the sea seemed to be trying in earnest to
regain the land it had lost.
The men and cattle could no longer advance in ranks as wide as before,
and while the files of the hurrying bodies narrowed they lengthened, and
precious time was lost. Those on the right were already wading through
the rising water in haste and terror; for already the commands of the
Egyptian leaders were heard in the distance.
But the enemy was evidently delayed, and Ephraim easily perceived the
cause of their diminished speed; for the road constantly grew softer and
the narrow wheels of the chariots cut deeply into it and perhaps sank to
the axles.
Protected by the darkness, he glided forward toward the pursuers, as far
as he could, and heard here a curse, yonder a fierce command to ply the
lash more vigorously; at last he distinctly heard one leader exclaim to
the man next him:
"Accursed folly! If they had only let us start before noon, and not
waited until the omen had been consulted and Anna had been installed with
all due solemnity in Bai's place, it would have been easy work, and we
should have caught them like a flock of quail! The chief-priest was wont
to bear himself stoutly in the field, and now he gives up the command
because a dying woman touches his heart."
"Siptah's mother!" said another soothingly. "Yet, after all, twenty
princesses ought not to have turned him from his duty to us. Had he
remained, there would have been no need of scourging our steeds to death,
and that at an hour when every sensible leader lets his men gather round
the camp-fires to eat their suppers and play draughts. Look to the
horses, Heter! We are fast in the sand again!"
A loud out-cry rose behind the first chariot, and Ephraim heard another
voice shout:
"Forward, if it costs the horses their lives!"
"If return were possible," said the commander of the chariot-soldiers, a
relative of the king, "I would go back now. But as matters are, one would
tumble over the other. So forward, whatever it may cost. We are close on
their heels. Halt! Halt! That accursed stinging smoke! Wait, you dogs! As
soon as the pathway widens, we'll run you down with scant ceremony, and
may the gods deprive me of a day of life for each one I spare! Another
torch out! One can't see one's hand before one's face! At a time like
this a beggar's crutch would be better than a leader's staff"
"And an executioner's noose round the neck rather than a gold chain!"
said another with a fierce oath.
"If the moon would only appear again! Because the astrologers predicted
that it would shine in full splendor from evening till morning, I myself
advised the late departure, turning night into day. If it were only
lighter! . . . ."
But this sentence remained unfinished, for a gust of wind, bursting like
a wild beast from the south-eastern ravine of Mount Baal-zephon, rushed
upon the fugitives, and a high wave drenched Ephraim from head to foot.
Gasping for breath, he flung back his hair and wiped his eyes; but loud
cries of terror rang from the lips of the Egyptians behind him; for the
same wave that struck the youth had hurled the foremost chariots into the
sea.
Ephraim began to fear for his people and, while running forward to join
them again, a brilliant flash of lightning illumined the bay, Mount
Baal-zephon, and every surrounding object. The thunder was somewhat long
in following, but the storm soon came nearer, and at last the lightning
no longer flashed through the darkness in zigzag lines, but in shapeless
sheets of flame, and ere they faded the deafening crash of the thunder
pealed forth, reverberating in wild uproar amid the hard, rocky
precipices of the rugged mountain, and dying away in deep, muttering
echoes along the end of the bay and the shore.
Whenever the clouds, menacing destruction, discharged their lightnings,
sea and land, human beings and animals, far and near, were illumined by
the brilliant glare, while the waters and the sky above were tinged with
a sulphurous yellow hue through which the vivid lightning shone and
flamed as through a wall of yellow glass.
Ephraim now thought he perceived that the blackest thunder-clouds came
from the south and not from the north, but the glare of the lightning
showed behind him a span of frightened horses rushing into the sea, one
chariot shattered against another, and farther on several jammed firmly
together to the destruction of their occupants, while they barred the
progress of others.
Yet the foe still advanced, and the space which separated pursued and
pursuers did not increase. But the confusion among the latter had become
so great that the warriors' cries of terror and their leaders' shouts of
encouragement and menace were distinctly heard whenever the fierce
crashing of the thunder died away.
Yet, black as were the clouds on the southern horizon, fiercely as the
tempest raged, the gloomy sky still withheld its floods and the fugitives
were wet, not with the water from the clouds but by the waves of the sea,
whose surges constantly dashed higher and more and more frequently washed
the dry bed of the bay.
Narrower and narrower grew the pathway, and with it the end of the
procession.
Meanwhile the flames blazing in the pitch pans continued to show the
terrified fugitives the goal of escape and remind them of Moses and the
staff God had given him. Every step brought them nearer to it. Now a loud
shout of joy announced that the tribe of Benjamin had also reached the
shore; but they had at last been obliged to wade, and were drenched by
the foaming surf. It had cost unspeakable effort to save the oxen from
the surging waves, get the loaded carts forward, and keep the cattle
together; but now man and beast stood safe on shore. Only the strangers
and the lepers were still to be rescued. The latter possessed no herds of
their own, but the former had many and both sheep and cattle were so
terrified by the storm that they struggled against passing through the
water, now a foot deep over the road. Ephraim hurried to the shore,
called on the shepherds to follow him and, under his direction, they
helped drive the herds forward.
The attempt was successful and, amid the thunder and lightning, greeted
with loud cheers, the last man and the last head of cattle reached the
land.
The lepers were obliged to wade through water rising to their knees and
at last to their waists and, ere they had gained the shore, the sluices
of heaven opened and the rain poured in torrents. Yet they, too, arrived
at the goal and though many a mother who had carried her child a long
time in her arms or on her shoulder, fell upon her knees exhausted on the
land, and many a hapless sufferer who, aided by a stronger companion in
misery, had dragged the carts through the yielding sand or wading in the
water carried a litter, felt his disfigured head burn with fever, they,
too, escaped destruction.
They were to wait beyond the palm-trees, whose green foliage appeared on
the hilly ground at the edge of some springs near the shore; the others
were to be led farther into the country to begin, at a given signal, the
journey toward the southeast into the mountains, through whose
inhospitable stony fastnesses a regular army and the war-chariots could
advance only with the utmost difficulty.
Hur had assembled his shepherds and they stood armed with lances, slings,
and short swords, ready to attack the enemy who ventured to step on
shore. Horses and men were to be cut down and a high wall was to be made
of the fragments of the chariots to bar the way of the pursuing
Egyptians.
The pans of burning pitch on the shore were shielded and fed so
industriously that neither the pouring rain nor the wind extinguished
them. They were to light the shepherds who had undertaken to attack the
chariot-soldiers, and were commanded by old Nun, Hur, and Ephraim.
But they waited in vain for the pursuers, and when the youth, first of
all, perceived by the light of the torches that the way by which the
rescued fugitives had come was now a wide sea, and the smoke was blown
toward the north instead of toward the southwest--it was at the time of
the first morning watch--his heart, surcharged with joy and gratitude,
sent forth the jubilant shout: "Look at the pans. The wind has shifted!
It is driving the sea northward. Pharaoh's army has been swallowed by the
waves!"
The group of rescued Hebrews remained silent for a short time; but
suddenly Nun's loud voice exclaimed:
"He has seen aright, children! What are we mortals! Lord, Lord! Stern and
terrible art Thou in judgment upon Thy foes!"
Here loud cries interrupted him; for at the springs where Moses leaned
exhausted against a palm-tree, and Aaron was resting with many others,
the people had also perceived what Ephraim had noticed--and from lip to
lip ran the glad, terrible, incredible, yet true tidings, which each
passing moment more surely confirmed.
Many an eye was raised toward the sky, across which the black clouds were
rushing farther and farther northward.
The rain was ceasing; instead of the lightning and thunder only a few
pale flashes were seen over the isthmus and the distant sea at the north,
while in the south the sky was brightening.
At last the setting moon emerged from the grey clouds, and her peaceful
light silvered the heights of Baal-zephon and the shore of the bay, whose
bottom was once more covered with tossing waves.
The raging, howling storm had passed into the low sighing of the morning
breeze, and the sea, which had dashed against the rocks like a roaring
wild-beast, now lay quivering with broken strength at the stone base of
the mountain.
For a short time the sea still spread a dark pall over the many Egyptian
corpses, but the paling moon, ere her setting, splendidly embellished the
briny resting-place of a king and his nobles; for her rays illumined and
bordered their coverlet, the sea, with a rich array of sparkling diamonds
in a silver setting.
While the east was brightening and the sky had clothed itself in the
glowing hues of dawn, the camp had been pitched; but little time remained
for a hasty meal for, shortly after sunrise, the gong had summoned the
people and, as soon as they gathered near the springs, Miriam swung her
timbrel, shaking the bells and striking the calf-skin till it resounded
again. As she moved lightly forward, the women and maidens followed her
in the rhythmic step of the dance; but she sang:
"I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse
and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.
"The Lord is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation: he is
my God, and I will prepare him an habitation; my father's God, and I will
exalt him.
"The Lord is a man of war: the Lord is his name. Pharaoh's chariots and
his host hath he cast into the sea: his chosen captains also are drowned
in the Red Sea.
"The depths have covered them: they sank into the bottom as a stone.
"Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious in power: thy right hand, O
Lord, hath dashed in pieces the enemy.
"And in the greatness of thine excellency thou hast overthrown them that
rose up against thee: thou sentest forth thy wrath, which consumed them
as stubble.
"And with the blast of thy nostrils the waters were gathered together,
the floods stood upright as an heap, and the depths were congealed in the
heart of the sea.
"The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil;
my lust shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, my hand shall
destroy them.
"Thou didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered them: they sank as lead
in the mighty waters.
"Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like thee,
glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders?
"Thou stretchedst out thy right hand, the earth swallowed them.
"Thou, in thy mercy hast led forth the people which thou hast redeemed:
thou hast guided them in thy strength unto thy holy habitation."
Men and women joined in the song, when she repeated the words:
"I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse
and his rider hath he thrown into the sea."
This song and this hour of rejoicing were never forgotten by the Hebrews,
and each heart was filled with the glory of God and the glad and grateful
anticipation of better, happier days.
CHAPTER XXIII.
The hymn of praise had died away, but though the storm had long since
raged itself into calmness, the morning sky, which had been beautiful in
the rosy flush of dawn, was again veiled by grey mists, and a strong wind
still blew from the southwest, lashing the sea and shaking and swaying
the tops of the palm-trees beside the springs.
The rescued people had paid due honor to the Most High, even the most
indifferent and rebellious had joined in Miriam's song of praise; yet,
when the ranks of the dancers approached the sea, many left the
procession to hurry to the shore, which presented many attractions.
Hundreds had now gathered on the strand, where the waves, like generous
robbers, washed ashore the booty they had seized during the night.
Even the women did not allow the wind to keep them back; for the two
strongest impulses of the human heart, avarice and the longing for
vengeance, drew them to the beach.
Some new object of desire appeared every moment; here lay the corpse of a
warrior, yonder his shattered chariot. If the latter had belonged to a
man of rank, its gold or silver ornaments were torn off, while the short
sword or battle-axe was drawn from the girdle of the lifeless owner, and
men and women of low degree, male and female slaves belonging to the
Hebrews and foreigners, robbed the corpses of the clasps and circlets of
the precious metal, or twisted the rings from the swollen fingers of the
drowned.
The ravens which had followed the wandering tribes and vanished during
the storm, again appeared and, croaking, struggled against the wind to
maintain their places above the prey whose scent had attracted them.
But the dregs of the fugitive hordes were still more greedy than they,
and wherever the sea washed a costly ornament ashore, there were fierce
outcries and angry quarrelling. The leaders kept aloof; the people, they
thought, had a right to this booty, and whenever one of them undertook to
control their rude greed, he received no obedience.
The pass to which the Egyptians had brought them within the last few
hours had been so terrible, that even the better natures among the
Hebrews did not think of curbing the thirst for vengeance. Even
grey-bearded men of dignified bearing, and wives and mothers whose looks
augured gentle hearts thrust back the few hapless foes who had succeeded
in reaching the land on the ruins of the war-chariots or baggage-wagons.
With shepherds' crooks and travelling staves, knives and axes, stones and
insults they forced their hands from the floating wood, and the few who
nevertheless reached the land were flung by the furious mob into the sea
which had taken pity on them in vain.
Their wrath was so great, and vengeance so sacred a duty, that no one
thought of the respect, the pity, the consideration, which are
misfortune's due, and not a word was uttered to appeal to generosity or
compassion or even to remind the people of the profit which might be
derived from holding the rescued soldiers as prisoners of war.
"Death to our mortal foes! Destruction to them! Down with them! Feed the
fishes with them! You drove us into the sea with our children, now try
the salt waves yourselves!"
Such were the shouts that rose everywhere, and which no one opposed, not
even Miriam and Ephraim, who had also gone down to the shore to witness
the scene it presented.
The maiden had become the wife of Hur, but her new condition had made
little change in her nature and conduct. The fate of her people and the
intercourse with God, whose prophetess she felt herself to be, were still
her highest aims. Now that all for which she had hoped and prayed was
fulfilled; now that at the first great triumph of her efforts she had
expressed the feelings of the faithful in her song, she felt as if she
were the leader of the grateful multitude at whose head she had marched
singing and as if she had attained the goal of her life.
Ephraim had reminded her of Hosea and, while talking with him about the
prisoner, she moved on as proudly as a queen, answering the greetings of
the throng with majestic dignity. Her eyes sparkled with joy, and her
features wore an expression of compassion only at brief intervals, when
the youth spoke of the greatest sufferings which he had borne with his
uncle. She doubtless still remembered the man she had loved, but he was
no longer necessary to the lofty goal of her aspirations.
Ephraim had just spoken of the beautiful Egyptian, who had loved Hosea
and at whose intercession the prisoner's chains had been removed, when
loud outcries were heard at a part of the strand where many of the people
had gathered. Shouts of joy mingled with yells of fury; and awakened the
conjecture that the sea had washed some specially valuable prize ashore.
Curiosity drew both to the spot, and as Miriam's stately bearing made the
throng move respectfully aside, they soon saw the mournful contents of a
large travelling-chariot, which had lost its wheels. The linen canopy
which had protected it was torn away, and on the floor lay two elderly
Egyptian women; a third, who was much younger, leaned against the back of
the vehicle thus strangely transformed into a boat. Her companions lay
dead in the water which had covered its floor, and several Hebrew women
were in the act of tearing the costly gold ornaments from the neck and
arms of one of the corpses. Some chance had preserved this young woman's
life, and she was now giving her rich jewels to the Israelites. Her pale
lips and slender, half-frozen hands trembled as she did so, and in low,
musical tones she promised the robbers to yield them all she possessed
and pay a large ransom, if they would spare her. She was so young, and
she had shown kindness to a Hebrew surely they might listen to her.
It was a touching entreaty, but so often interrupted by threats and
curses that only a few could hear it. Just as Ephraim and Miriam reached
the shore she shrieked aloud--a rude hand had torn the gold serpent from
her ear.
The cry pierced the youth's heart like a dagger-thrust and his cheeks
paled, for he recognized Kasana. The bodies beside her were those of her
nurse and the wife of the chief priest Bai.
Scarcely able to control himself, Ephraim thrust aside the men who
separated him from the object of the moment's assault, sprang on the
sand-hill at whose foot the chariot had rested, and shouted with glowing
cheeks in wild excitement:
"Back! Woe to any one who touches her!"
But a Hebrew woman, the wife of a brickmaker whose child had died in
terrible convulsions during the passage through the sea, had already
snatched the dagger from her girdle, and with the jeering cry "This for
my little Ruth, you jade!" dealt her a blow in the back. Then she raised
the tiny blood-stained weapon for a second stroke; but ere she could give
her enemy another thrust, Ephraim flung himself between her and her
victim and wrenched the dagger from her grasp. Then planting himself
before the wounded girl, he swung the blade aloft exclaiming in loud,
threatening tones:
"Whoever touches her, you robbers and murderers, shall mingle his blood
with this woman's." Then he flung himself beside Kasana's bleeding form,
and finding that she had lost consciousness, raised her in his arms and
carried her to Miriam.
The astonished plunderers speechlessly made way for a few minutes, but
ere he reached the prophetess shouts of: "Vengeance! Vengeance!" were
heard in all directions. "We found the woman: the booty belongs to us
alone!--How dares the insolent Ephraimite call us robbers and
murderers?--Wherever Egyptian blood can be spilled, it must flow!--At
him!--Snatch the girl from him!"
The youth paid no heed to these outbursts of wrath until he had laid
Kasana's head in the lap of Miriam, who had seated herself on the nearest
sand-hill, and as the angry throng, the women in front of the men,
pressed upon him, he again waved his dagger, crying: "Back--I command
you. Let all of the blood of Ephraim and Judah rally around me and
Miriam, the wife of their chief! That's right, brothers, and woe betide
any hand that touches her. Do you shriek for vengeance? Has it not been
yours through yonder monster who murdered the poor defenceless one? Do
you want your victim's jewels? Well, well; they belong to you, and I will
give you mine to boot, if you will leave the wife of Hur to care for this
dying girl!"
With these words he bent over Kasana, took off the clasps and rings she
still wore, and gave them to the greedy hands outstretched to seize them.
Lastly he stripped the broad gold circlet from his arm, and holding it
aloft exclaimed:
"Here is the promised payment. If you will depart quietly and leave this
woman to Miriam, I will give you the gold, and you can divide it among
you. If you thirst for more blood, come on; but I will keep the armlet."
These words did not fail to produce their effect. The furious women
looked at the heavy broad gold armlet, then at the handsome youth, and
the men of Judah and Ephraim who had gathered around him, and finally
glanced enquiringly into one another's faces. At last the wife of a
foreign trader cried:
"Let him give us the gold, and we'll leave the handsome young chief his
bleeding sweetheart."
To this decision the others agreed, and though the brickmaker's
infuriated wife, who thought as the avenger of her child she had done an
act pleasing in the sight of God, and was upbraided for it as a
murderess, reviled the youth with frantic gestures, she was dragged away
by the crowd to the shore where they hoped to find more booty.
During this threatening transaction, Miriam had fearlessly examined
Kasana's wound and bound it up with skilful hands, The dagger which
Prince Siptah had jestingly given the beautiful lady of his love, that
she might not go to war defenceless, had inflicted a deep wound under the
shoulder, and the blood had flowed so abundantly that the feeble spark of
life threatened to die out at any moment.
But she still lived, and in this condition was borne to the tent of Nun,
which was the nearest within reach.
The old chief had just been supplying weapons to the shepherds and youths
whom Ephraim had summoned to go to the relief of the imprisoned Hosea,
and had promised to join them, when the mournful procession approached.
As Kasana loved the handsome old man, the latter had for many years kept
a place in his heart for Captain Homecht's pretty daughter.
She had never met him without gladdening him by a greeting which he
always returned with kind words, such as: "The Lord bless you, child!"
or: "It is a delightful hour when an old man meets so fair a creature."
Many years before--she had then worn the curls of childhood--he had even
sent her a lamb, whose snowy fleece was specially silky, after having
bartered the corn from her father's lands for cattle of his most famous
breed--and what his son had told him of Kasana had been well fitted to
increase his regard for her.
He beheld in the archer's daughter the most charming young girl in Tanis
and, had she been the child of Hebrew parents, he would have rejoiced to
wed her to his son.
To find his darling in such a state caused the old man grief so profound
that bright tears ran down upon his snowy beard and his voice trembled
as, while greeting her, he saw the blood-stained bandage on her shoulder.
After she had been laid on his couch, and Nun had placed his own chest of
medicines at the disposal of the skilful prophetess, Miriam asked the men
to leave her alone with the suffering Egyptian, and when she again called
them into the tent she had revived the strength of the severely-wounded
girl with cordials, and bandaged the hurt more carefully than had been
possible before.
Kasana, cleansed from the blood-stains and with her hair neatly arranged,
lay beneath the fresh linen coverings like a sleeping child just on the
verge of maidenhood.
She was still breathing, but the color had not returned to cheeks or
lips, and she did not open her eyes until she had drunk the cordial
Miriam mixed for her a second time.
The old man and his grandson stood at the foot of her couch, and each
would fain have asked the other why he could not restrain his tears
whenever he looked at this stranger's face.
The certainty that Kasana was wicked and faithless, which had so
unexpectedly forced itself upon Ephraim, had suddenly turned his heart
from her and startled him back into the right path which he had
abandoned. Yet what he had heard in her tent had remained a profound
secret, and as he told his grandfather and Miriam that she had
compassionately interceded for the prisoners, and both had desired to
hear more of her, he had felt like a father who had witnessed the crime
of a beloved son, and no word of the abominable things he had heard had
escaped his lips.
Now he rejoiced that he had kept silence; for whatever he might have seen
and heard, this fair creature certainly was capable of no base deed.
To the old man she had never ceased to be the lovely child whom he had
known, the apple of his eye and the joy of his heart. So he gazed with
tender anxiety at the features convulsed by pain and, when she at last
opened her eyes, smiled at her with paternal affection. Her glance showed
that she instantly recognized both him and Ephraim, but weakness baffled
her attempt to nod to them. Yet her expressive face revealed surprise and
joy, and when Miriam had given her the cordial a third time and bathed
her brow with a powerful essence, her large eyes wandered from face to
face and, noticing the troubled looks of the men, she managed to whisper:
"The wound aches--and death--must I die?" One looked enquiringly at
another, and the men would gladly have concealed the terrible truth; but
she went on:
"Oh, let me know. Ah, I pray you, tell me the truth!"
Miriam, who was kneeling beside her, found courage to answer:
"Yes, you poor young creature, the wound is deep, but whatever my skill
can accomplish shall be done to preserve your life as long as possible."
The words sounded kind and full of compassion, yet the deep voice of the
prophetess seemed to hurt Kasana; for her lips quivered painfully while
Miriam was speaking, and when she ceased, her eyes closed and one large
tear after another ran down her cheeks. Deep, anxious silence reigned
around her until she again raised her lashes and, fixing her eyes wearily
on Miriam, asked softly, as if perplexed by some strange spectacle:
"You are a woman, and yet practise the art of the leech."
"My God has commanded me to care for the suffering ones of our people,"
replied the other.
The dying girl's eyes began to glitter with a restless light, and she
gasped in louder tones, nay with a firmness that surprised the others:
"You are Miriam, the woman who sent for Hosea." And when the other
answered promptly and proudly: "It is as you say!" Kasana continued:
"And you possess striking, imperious beauty, and much influence. He
obeyed your summons, and you--you consented to wed another?"
Again the prophetess answered, this time with gloomy earnestness: "It is
as you say."
The dying girl closed her eyes once more, and a strange proud smile
hovered around her lips. But it soon vanished and a great and painful
restlessness seized upon her. The fingers of her little hands, her lips,
nay, even her eyelids moved perpetually, and her smooth, narrow forehead
contracted as if some great thought occupied her mind.
At last the ideas that troubled her found utterance and, as if roused
from her repose, she exclaimed in terrified accents:
"You are Ephraim, who seemed like his son, and the old man is Nun, his
dear father. There you stand and will live on. . . . But I--I . . . Oh,
it is so hard to leave the light. . . . Anubis will lead me before the
judgment seat of Osiris. My heart will be weighed, and then. . . ."
Here she shuddered and opened and closed her trembling hands; but she
soon regained her composure and began to speak again. Miriam, however,
sternly forbade this, because it would hasten her death.
Then the sufferer, summoning all her strength, exclaimed hastily, as
loudly as her voice would permit, after measuring the prophetess' tall
figure with a long glance: "You wish to prevent me from doing my
duty--you?"
There had been a slight touch of mockery in the question; but Kasana
doubtless felt that it was necessary to spare her strength; for she
continued far more quietly, as though talking to herself:
"I cannot die so, I cannot! How it happened; why I sacrificed all,
all. . . . I must atone for it; I will not complain, if he only learns how
it came to pass. Oh, Nun, dear old Nun, who gave me the lamb when I was a
little thing--I loved it so dearly--and you, Ephraim, my dear boy, I will
tell you everything."
Here a painful fit of coughing interrupted her; but as soon as she
recovered her breath, she turned to Miriam, and called in a tone which so
plainly expressed bitter dislike, that it would have surprised any one
who knew her kindly nature:
"But you, yonder,--you tall woman with the deep voice who are a
physician, you lured him from Tanis, from his soldiers and from me. He,
he obeyed your summons. And you . . . you became another's wife;
probably after his arrival . . . yes! For when Ephraim summoned him, he
called you a maiden . . . I don't know whether this caused him, Hosea,
pain. . . . But there is one thing I do know, and that is that I want to
confess something and must do so, ere it is too late. . . . And no one must
hear it save those who love him, and I--do you hear--I love him, love him
better than aught else on earth! But you? You have a husband, and a God
whose commands you eagerly obey--you say so yourself. What can Hosea be
to you? So I beseech you to leave us. I have met few who repelled me, but
you--your voice, your eyes--they pierce me to the heart--and if you were
near I could not speak as I must. . . . and oh, talking hurts me so! But
before you go--you are a leech--let me know this one thing--I have many
messages to leave for him ere I die. . . . Will it kill me to talk?"
Again the prophetess found no other words in answer except the brief: "It
is as you say," and this time they sounded harsh and ominous.
While wavering between the duty which, as a physician, she owed the
sufferer and the impulse not to refuse the request of a dying woman, she
read in old Nun's eyes an entreaty to obey Kasana's wish, and with
drooping head left the tent. But the bitter words of the hapless girl
pursued her and spoiled the day which had begun so gloriously and also
many a later hour; nay, to her life's end she could not understand why,
in the presence of this poor, dying woman, she had been overpowered by
the feeling that she was her inferior and must take a secondary place.
As soon as Kasana was left alone with Nun and Ephraim, and the latter had
flung himself on his knees beside her couch, while the old man kissed her
brow, and bowed his white head to listen to her low words, she began:
"I feel better now. That tall woman . . . those gloomy brows that meet in
the middle . . . those nightblack eyes . . . they glow with so fierce a fire,
yet are so cold. . . . That woman . . . did Hosea love her, father? Tell me; I
am not asking from idle curiosity!"
"He honored her," replied the old man in a troubled tone, "as did our
whole nation; for she has a lofty spirit, and our God suffers her to hear
His voice; but you, my darling, have been dear to him from childhood, I
know."
A slight tremor shook the dying girl. She closed her eyes for a short
time and a sunny smile hovered around her lips.
She lay in this attitude so long that Nun feared death had claimed her
and, holding the medicine in his hand, listened to hear her breathing.
Kasana did not seem to notice it; but when she finally opened her eyes,
she held out her hand for the cordial, drank it, and then began again:
"It seemed just as if I had seen him, Hosea. He wore the panoply of war
just as he did the first time he took me into his arms. I was a little
thing and felt afraid of him, he looked so grave, and my nurse had told
me that he had slain a great many of our foes. Yet I was glad when he
came and grieved when he went away. So the years passed, and love grew
with my growth. My young heart was so full of him, so full. . . . Even when
they forced me to wed another, and after I had become a widow."
The last words had been scarcely audible, and she rested some time ere
she continued:
"Hosea knows all this, except how anxious I was when he was in the field,
and how I longed for him ere he returned. At last, at last he came home,
and how I rejoiced! But he, Hosea . . . ? That woman--Ephraim told me
so--that tall, arrogant woman summoned him to Pithom. But he returned,
and then. . . . Oh, Nun, your son. . . . that was the hardest thing
. . . ! He refused my hand, which my father offered. . . . And how that
hurt me. . . ! I can say no more . . . ! Give me the drink!"
Her cheeks had flushed crimson during these painful confessions, and when
the experienced old man perceived how rapidly the excitement under which
she was laboring hastened the approach of death, he begged her to keep
silence; but she insisted upon profiting by the time still allowed her,
and though the sharp pain with which a short cough tortured her forced
her to press her hand upon her breast, she continued:
"Then hate came; but it did not last long--and never did I love him more
ardently than when I drove after the poor convict--you remember, my boy.
Then began the horrible, wicked, evil time . . . of which I must tell him
that he may not despise me, if he hears about it. I never had a mother,
and there was no one to warn me. . . . Where shall I begin? Prince
Siptah--you know him, father--that wicked man will soon rule over my
country. My father is in a conspiracy with him . . . merciful gods, I can
say no more!"
Terror and despair convulsed her features as she uttered these words; but
Ephraim interrupted her and, with tearful eyes and faltering voice,
confessed that he knew all. Then he repeated what he had heard while
listening outside of her tent, and her glance confirmed the tale.
When he finally spoke of the wife of the viceroy and chief-priest Bai,
whose body had been borne to the shore with her, Kasana interrupted him
with the low exclamation:
"She planned it all. Her husband was to be the greatest man in the
country and rule even Pharaoh; for Siptah is not the son of a king."
"And," the old man interrupted, to quiet her and help her tell what she
desired to say, "as Bai raised, he can overthrow him. He will become,
even more certainly than the dethroned monarch, the tool of the man who
made him king. But I know Aarsu the Syrian, and if I see aright, the time
will come when he will himself strive, in distracted Egypt, rent by
internal disturbances, for the power which, through his mercenaries, he
aided others to grasp. But child, what induced you to follow the army and
this shameful profligate?"
The dying girl's eyes sparkled, for the question brought her directly to
what she desired to tell, and she answered as loudly and quickly as her
weakness permitted:
"I did it for your son's sake, for love of him, to liberate Hosea. The
evening before I had steadily and firmly refused the wife of Bai. But
when I saw your son at the well and he, Hosea. . . . Oh, at last he was so
affectionate and kissed me so kindly . . . and then--then. . . . My poor
heart! I saw him, the best of men, perishing amid contumely and disease.
"And when he passed with chains one thought darted through my mind. . . ."
"You determined, you dear, foolish, misguided child," cried the old man,
"to win the heart of the future king in order, through him, to release my
son, your friend?"
The dying girl again smiled assent and softly exclaimed:
"Yes, yes, I did it for that, for that alone. And the prince was so
abhorrent to me. And the shame, the disgrace--oh, how terrible it was!"
"And you incurred it for my son's sake," the old man interrupted, raising
her hand, wet with his tears, to his lips; but she fixed her eyes on
Ephraim, sobbing softly:
"I thought of him too. He is so young, and it is so horrible in the
mines."
She shuddered again as she spoke; but the youth covered her burning hand
with kisses, while she gazed affectionately at him and the old man,
adding in faltering accents:
"Oh, all is well now, and if the gods grant him freedom. . . ."
Here Ephraim interrupted her to exclaim in fiery tones:
"We are going to the mines this very day. I and my comrades, and my
grandfather with us, will put his guards to flight."
"And he shall hear from my lips," Nun added, "how faithfully Kasana loved
him, and that his life will be too short to thank her for such a
sacrifice."
His voice failed him--but every trace of suffering had vanished from the
countenance of the dying girl, and for a long time she gazed heavenward
silently with a happy look. By degrees, however, her smooth brow
contracted in an anxious frown, and she gasped in low tones:
"Well, all is well . . . only one thing . . . my body . . . unembalmed
. . . without the sacred amulets. . . ."
But the old man answered:
"As soon as you have closed your eyes, I will give it, carefully wrapped,
to the Phoenician captain now tarrying here, that he may deliver it to
your father."
Kasana tried to turn her head toward him to thank him with a loving
glance, but she suddenly pressed both hands on her breast, crimson blood
welled from her lips, her cheeks varied from livid white to fiery scarlet
and, after a brief, painful convulsion, she sank back. Death laid his
hand on the loving heart, and her features gained the expression of a
child whose mother has forgiven its fault and clasped it to her heart ere
it fell asleep.
The old man, weeping, closed the dead girl's eyes. Ephraim, deeply moved,
kissed the closed lids, and after a short silence Nun said:
"I do not like to enquire about our fate beyond the grave, which Moses
himself does not know; but whoever has lived so that his or her memory is
tenderly cherished in the souls of loved ones, has, I think, done the
utmost possible to secure a future existence. We will remember this dead
girl in our most sacred hours. Let us do for her corpse what we promised,
and then set forth to show the man for whom Kasana sacrificed what she
most valued that we do not love him less than this Egyptian woman."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
I do not like to enquire about our fate beyond the grave
Then hate came; but it did not last long
JOSHUA
By Georg Ebers
Volume 5.
CHAPTER XXIV.
The prisoners of state who were being transported to the mines made slow
progress. Even the experienced captain of the guards had never had a more
toilsome trip or one more full of annoyances, obstacles, and mishaps.
One of his moles, Ephraim, had escaped; he had lost his faithful hounds,
and after his troop had been terrified and drenched by a storm such as
scarcely occurred in these desert regions once in five years, a second
had burst the next evening--the one which brought destruction on
Pharaoh's army--and this had been still more violent and lasting.
The storm had delayed the march and, after the last cloud-burst, several
convicts and guards had been attacked by fever owing to their wet
night-quarters in the open air. The Egyptian asses, too, who were unused
to rain, had suffered and some of the best had been left on the road.
Finally they had been obliged to bury two dead prisoners, and place three
who were dangerously ill on the remaining asses; and the other prisoners
were laden with the stores hitherto carried by the beasts of burden. This
was the first time such a thing had happened during the leader's service
of five and twenty years, and he expected severe reproofs.
All these things exerted a baneful influence on the disposition of the
man, who was usually reputed one of the kindest-hearted of his companions
in office; and Joshua, the accomplice of the bold lad whose flight was
associated with the other vexations, suffered most sorely from his
ill-humor.
Perhaps the irritated man would have dealt more gently with him, had he
complained like the man behind him, or burst into fierce oaths like his
yoke-mate, who made threatening allusions to the future when his
sister-in-law would be in high favor with Pharaoh and know how to repay
those who ill-treated her dear relative.
But Hosea had resolved to bear whatever the rude fellow and his mates
chose to inflict with the same equanimity that he endured the scorching
sun which, ever since he had served in the army, had tortured him during
many a march through the desert, and his steadfast, manly character
helped him keep this determination.
If the captain of the gang loaded him with extra heavy burdens, he
summoned all the strength of his muscles and tottered forward without a
word of complaint until his knees trembled under him; then the captain
would rush to him, throw several packages from his shoulders, and exclaim
that he understood his spite; he was only trying to be left on the road,
to get him into fresh difficulties; but he would not allow himself to be
robbed of the lives of the men who were needed in the mines.
Once the captain inflicted a wound that bled severely; but he instantly
made every effort to cure it, gave him wine to restore his strength, and
delayed the march half a day to permit him to rest.
He had not forgotten Prince Siptah's promise of a rich reward to any one
who brought him tidings of Hosea's death, but this was the very reason
that induced the honest-hearted man to watch carefully over his
prisoner's life; for the consciousness of having violated his duty for
the sake of reaping any advantage would have robbed him of all pleasure
in food and drink, as well as of the sound sleep which were his greatest
blessings.
So though the Hebrew prisoner was tortured, it was never beyond the
limits of the endurable, and he had the pleasure of rendering, by his own
great strength, many a service to his weaker companions.
He had commended his fate to the God who had summoned him to His service;
but he was well aware that he must not rest content with mere pious
confidence, and therefore thought by day and night of escape. But the
chain that bound him to his companions in suffering was too firmly
forged, and was so carefully examined and hammered every morning and
evening, that the attempt to escape would only have plunged him into
greater misery.
The prisoners had at first marched through a hilly region, then climbed
upward, with a long mountain chain in view, and finally reached a desert
country from which truncated sandstone cones rose singly from the rocky
ground.
On the fifth evening they encamped near a large mountain which Nature
seemed to have piled up from flat layers of stone and, as the sun of the
sixth day rose, they turned into a side valley leading to the mines in
the province of Bech.
During the first few days they had been overtaken by a messenger from the
king's silver-house; but on the other hand they had met several little
bands bearing to Egypt malachite, turquoise, and copper, as well as the
green glass made at the mines.
Among those whom they met at the entrance of the cross-valley into which
they turned on the last morning was a married couple on their way
homeward, after having received a pardon from the king. The captain of
the guards pointed them out to encourage his exhausted moles, but the
spectacle produced the opposite effect; for the tangled locks of the man,
who had scarcely passed his thirtieth year, were grey, his tall figure
was bowed and emaciated, and his naked back was covered with scars and
bleeding wales; the wife, who had shared his misery, was blind. She sat
cowering on an ass, in the dull torpor of insanity, and though the
passing of the convicts made a startling interruption to the silence of
the wilderness, and her hearing had remained keen, she paid no heed, but
continued to stare indifferently into vacancy.
The sight of the hapless pair placed Hosea's own terrible future before
him as if in a mirror, and for the first time he groaned aloud and
covered his face with his hands.
The captain of the guards perceived this and, touched by the horror of
the man whose resolution had hitherto seemed peerless, called to him:
"They don't all come home like that, no indeed!"
"Because they are even worse off," he thought. "But the poor wights
needn't know it beforehand. The next time I come this way I'll ask for
Hosea; I shall want to know what has become of this bull of a man. The
strongest and the most resolute succumb the most quickly."
Then, like a driver urging an unharnessed team forward, he swung the lash
over the prisoners, but without touching them, and pointing to a column
of smoke which rose behind a cliff at the right of the road, he
exclaimed:
"There are the smelting furnaces! We shall reach our destination at noon.
There will be no lack of fire to cook lentils, and doubtless you may have
a bit of mutton, too; for we celebrate to-day the birth of the good god,
the son of the sun; may life, health, and prosperity be his!"
For the next half-hour their road led between lofty cliffs through the
dry bed of a river, down which, after the last rains, a deep mountain
torrent had poured to the valley; but now only a few pools still
remained.
After the melancholy procession had passed around a steep mountain whose
summit was crowned with a small Egyptian temple of Hathor and a number of
monuments, it approached a bend in the valley which led to the ravine
where the mines were located.
Flags, hoisted in honor of Pharaoh's birth-day, were waving from tall
masts before the gates of the little temple on the mountain; and when
loud shouts, uproar, and clashing greeted the travellers in the valley of
the mines, which was wont to be so silent, the captain of the guards
thought that the prisoners' greatest festival was being celebrated in an
unusually noisy way and communicated this conjecture to the other guards
who had paused to listen.
Then the party pressed forward without delay, but no one raised his head;
the noon-day sun blazed so fiercely, and the dazzling walls of the ravine
sent forth a reflected glow as fierce as if they were striving to surpass
the heat of the neighboring smelting furnaces.
Spite of the nearness of the goal the prisoners tottered forward as if
asleep, only one held his breath in the intensity of suspense.
As the battle-charger in the plough arches his neck, and expands his
nostrils, while his eyes flash fire, so Joshua's bowed figure, spite of
the sack that burdened his shoulders, straightened itself, and his
sparkling eyes were turned toward the spot whence came the sounds the
captain of the guards had mistaken for the loud tumult of festal mirth.
He, Joshua, knew better. Never could he mistake the roar echoing there;
it was the war-cry of Egyptian soldiers, the blast of the trumpet
summoning the warriors, the clank of weapons, and the battle-shouts of
hostile hordes.
Ready for prompt action, he bent toward his yokemate, and whispered
imperiously:
"The hour of deliverance is at hand. Take heed, and obey me blindly."
Strong excitement overpowered his companion also, and Hosea had scarcely
glanced into the side-valley ere he bade him hold himself in readiness.
The first look into the ravine had showed him, on the summit of a cliff,
a venerable face framed in snowy locks--his father's. He would have
recognized him among thousands and at a far greater distance! But from
the beloved grey head he turned a swift glance at the guide, who had
stopped in speechless horror, and supposing that a mutiny had broken out
among the prisoners, with swift presence of mind shouted hoarsely to the
other guards:
"Keep behind the convicts and cut down every one who attempts to escape!"
But scarcely had his subordinates hurried to the end of the train, ere
Joshua whispered to his companion:
"At him!"
As he spoke the Hebrew, who, with his yoke-mate, headed the procession,
attacked the astonished leader, and ere he was aware of it, Joshua seized
his right arm, the other his left.
The strong man, whose powers were doubled by his rage, struggled
furiously to escape, but Joshua and his companion held him in an iron
grasp.
A single rapid glance had showed the chief the path he must take to join
his people True, it led past a small band of Egyptian bow-men, who were
discharging their arrows at the Hebrews on the opposite cliff, but the
enemy would not venture to fire at him and his companion; for the
powerful figure of the captain of the guards, clearly recognizable by his
dress and weapons, shielded them both.
"Lift the chain with your right hand," whispered Joshua, "I will hold our
living buckler. We must ascend the cliff crab-fashion."
His companion obeyed, and as they advanced within bow-shot of the
enemy--moving sometimes backward, sometimes sideways--they held the
Egyptian before them and with the ringing shout: "The son of Nun is
returning to his father and to his people!" Joshua step by step drew
nearer to the Hebrew combatants.
Not one of the Egyptians who knew the captain of the prisoners' guard had
ventured to send an arrow at the escaping prisoners. While the fettered
pair were ascending the cliff backward, Joshua heard his name shouted in
joyous accents, and directly after Ephraim, with a band of youthful
warriors, came rushing down the height toward him.
To his astonishment Joshua saw the huge shield, sword, or battle-axe of
an Egyptian heavily-armed soldier in the hands of each of these sons of
his people, but the shepherd's sling and the bag of round stones also
hung from many girdles.
Ephraim led his companions and, before greeting his uncle, formed them
into two ranks like a double wall between Joshua and the hostile bow-men.
Then he gave himself up to the delight of meeting, and a second glad
greeting soon followed; for old Nun, protected by the tall Egyptian
shields which the sea had washed ashore, had been guided to the
projecting rock in whose shelter strong hands were filing the fetters
from Joshua and his companion, while Ephraim, with several others, bound
the captain.
The unfortunate man had given up all attempt at resistance and submitted
to everything as if utterly crushed. He only asked permission to wipe his
eyes ere his arms were bound behind his back; for tear after tear was
falling on the grey beard of the warder who, outwitted and overpowered,
no longer felt capable of discharging the duties of his office.
Nun clasped to his heart with passionate fervor the rescued son whom he
had already mourned as lost. Then, releasing him, he stepped back and
never wearied of feasting his eyes on him and hearing him repeat that,
faithful to his God, he had consecrated himself to the service of his
people.
But it was for a brief period only that they gave themselves up to the
bliss of this happy meeting; the battle asserted its rights, and its
direction fell, as a matter of course, to Joshua.
He had learned with grateful joy, yet not wholly untinged with
melancholy, of the fate which had overtaken the brave army among whose
leaders he had long proudly numbered himself, and also heard that another
body of armed shepherds, under the command of Hur, Miriam's husband, had
attacked the turquoise mines of Dophkah, which situated a little farther
toward the south, could be reached in a few hours. If they conquered,
they were to join the young followers of Ephraim before sunset.
The latter was burning with eagerness to rush upon the Egyptians, but the
more prudent Joshua, who had scanned the foe, though he did not doubt
that they must succumb to the fiery shepherds, who were far superior to
them in numbers, was anxious to shed as little blood as possible in this
conflict, which was waged on his account, so he bade Ephraim cut a palm
from the nearest tree, ordered a shield to be handed to him and then,
waving the branch as an omen of peace, yet cautiously protecting himself,
advanced alone to meet the foe.
The main body were drawn up in front of the mines and, familiar with the
signal which requested negotiations, asked their commander for an
interview.
The latter was ready to grant it, but first desired to know the contents
of a letter which had just been handed to him and must contain evil
tidings. This was evident from the messenger's looks and the few words
which, though broken, were pregnant with meaning, that he had whispered
to his countryman.
While some of Pharaoh's warriors offered refreshments to the exhausted,
dust-covered runner, and listened with every token of horror to the
tidings he hoarsely gasped, the commander of the troops read the letter.
His features darkened and, when he had finished, he clenched the papyrus
fiercely; for it had announced tidings no less momentous than the
destruction of the army, the death of Pharaoh Menephtah, and the
coronation of his oldest surviving son as Seti II., after the attempt of
Prince Siptah to seize the throne had been frustrated. The latter had
fled to the marshy region of the Delta, and Aarsu, the Syrian, after
abandoning him and supporting the new king, had been raised to the chief
command of all the mercenaries. Bai, the high-priest and chief-judge, had
been deprived of his rank and banished by Seti II. Siptah's confederates
had been taken to the Ethiopian gold mines instead of to the copper
mines. It was also stated that many women belonging to the House of the
Separated had been strangled; and Siptah's mother had undoubtedly met the
same fate. Every soldier who could be spared from the mines was to set
off at once for Tanis, where veterans were needed for the new legions.
This news exerted a powerful influence; for after Joshua had told the
commander that he was aware of the destruction of the Egyptian army and
expected reinforcements which had been sent to capture Dophkah to arrive
within a few hours, the Egyptian changed his imperious tone and
endeavored merely to obtain favorable conditions for retreat. He was but
too well aware of the weakness of the garrison of the turquoise mines and
knew that he could expect no aid from home. Besides, the mediator
inspired him with confidence; therefore, after many evasions and threats,
he expressed himself satisfied with the assurance that the garrison,
accompanied by the beasts of burden and necessary provisions, should be
allowed to depart unharmed. This, however, was not to be done until after
they had laid down their arms and showed the Hebrews all the galleries
where the prisoners were at work.
The young Hebrews, who twice outnumbered the Egyptians, at once set about
disarming them; and many an old warrior's eyes grew dim, many a man broke
his lance or snapped his arrows amid execrations and curses, while some
grey-beards who had formerly served under Joshua and recognized him,
raised their clenched fists and upbraided him as a traitor.
The dregs of the army were sent for this duty in the wilderness and most
of the men bore in their faces the impress of corruption and brutality.
Those in authority on the Nile knew how to choose soldiers whose duty it
was to exercise pitiless severity against the defenceless.
At last the mines were opened and Joshua himself seized a lamp and
pressed forward into the hot galleries where the naked prisoners of
state, loaded with fetters, were hewing the copper ore from the walls.
Already he could hear in the distance the picks, whose heads were shaped
like a swallow's tail, bite the hard rock. Then he distinguished the
piteous wails of tortured men and women; for cruel overseers had followed
them into the mine and were urging the slow to greater haste.
To-day, Pharaoh's birthday, they had been driven to the temple of Hathor
on the summit of the neighboring height, to pray for the king who had
plunged them into the deepest misery, and they would have been released
from labor until the next morning, had not the unexpected attack induced
the commander to force them back into the mines. Therefore to-day the
women, who were usually obliged merely to crush and sift the ores needed
to make glass and dyes, were compelled to labor in the galleries.
When the convicts heard Joshua's shouts and footsteps, which echoed from
the bare cliffs, they were afraid that some fresh misfortune was
impending, and wailing and lamentations arose in all directions. But the
deliverer soon reached the first convicts, and the glad tidings that he
had come to save them from their misery speedily extended to the inmost
depths of the mines.
Wild exultation filled the galleries which were wont to witness only
sorrowful moans and burning tears; yet loud cries for help, piteous
wailings, groans, and the death-rattle reached Joshua's ear; for a
hot-blooded man had rushed upon the overseer most hated and felled him
with his pick-axe. His example quickly inflamed the others' thirst for
vengeance and, ere it could be prevented, the same fate overtook the
other officials. But they had defended themselves and the corpse of many
a prisoner strewed the ground beside their tormentors.
Obeying Joshua's call, the liberated multitude at last emerged into the
light of day. Savage and fierce were the outcries which blended in
sinister discord with the rattling of the chains they dragged after them.
Even the most fearless among the Hebrews shrank in horror as they beheld
the throng of hapless sufferers in the full radiance of the sunlight; for
the dazzled, reddened eyes of the unfortunate sufferers,--many of whom
had formerly enjoyed in their own homes or at the king's court every
earthly blessing; who had been tender mothers and fathers, rejoiced in
doing good, and shared all the blessings of the civilization of a richly
gifted people,--these dazzled eyes which at first glittered through tears
caused by the swift transition from the darkness of the mines to the
glare of the noon-day sun, soon sparkled as fiercely and greedily as
those of starving owls.
At first, overwhelmed by the singular change in their destiny, they
struggled for composure and did not resist the Hebrews, who, at Joshua's
signal, began to file the fetters from their ankles; but when they
perceived the disarmed soldiers and overseers who, guarded by Ephraim and
his companions, were ranged at the base of a cliff, a strange excitement
overpowered them. Amid shrieks and yells which no name can designate, no
words describe, they broke from those who were trying to remove their
fetters and, though no glance or word had been exchanged between them,
obeyed the same terrible impulse, and unheeding the chains that burdened
them, rushed upon the defenceless Egyptians. Before the Hebrews could
prevent it, each threw himself upon the one who had inflicted the worst
suffering upon him; and here might be seen an emaciated man clutching the
throat of his stronger foe, yonder a band of nude women horribly
disfigured by want and neglect, rush upon the man who had most rudely
insulted, beaten, and abused them, and with teeth and nails wreak upon
him their long repressed fury.
It seemed as though the flood-tide of hate had burst its dam and,
unfettered, was demanding its victims.
There was a horrible scene of attack and defence, a ferocious, bloody
conflict on foot and amid the red sand of the desert, shrieks, yells, and
howls pierced the ear; nay, it was difficult to distinguish individuals
in this motley confusion of men and women, animated on the one side by
the wildest passion, a yearning for vengeance amounting to
blood-thirstiness, and on the other by the dread of death and the
necessity for self-defence.
Only a few of the prisoners had succeeded in controlling themselves; but
they, too, shouted irritating words to their fellows, reviled the
Egyptians in violent excitement, and shook their clenched fists at the
disarmed foe.
The fury with which the liberated serfs rushed upon their tormentors was
as unprecedented as the cruelties they had suffered.
But Joshua had deprived the Egyptians of their weapons, and they were
therefore under his protection.
So he commanded his men to separate the combatants, if possible without
bloodshed; but the task was no easy one, and many new and horrible deeds
were committed. At last, however, it was accomplished, and they now
perceived how terribly rage had increased the strength of the exhausted
and feeble sufferers; for though no weapons had been used in the conflict
a number of corpses strewed the spot, and most of the guards were
bleeding from terrible wounds.
After quiet had been restored, Joshua asked the wounded commander for the
list of prisoners, but he pointed to the clerk of the mines, whom none of
the convicts had assailed. He had been their physician and treated them
kindly-an elderly man, he had himself undergone sore trials and, knowing
the pain of suffering, was ready to alleviate the pangs of others.
He willingly read aloud the names of the prisoners, among which were
several Hebrew ones, and after each individual had responded, many
declared themselves ready to join the wandering tribes.
When the disarmed soldiers and guards at last set out on their way home,
the captain of the band that had escorted Joshua and his companions left
the other Egyptians, and with drooping head and embarrassed mien
approached old Nun and his son, and begged permission to go with them;
for he could expect no favor at home and there was no God in Egypt so
mighty as theirs. It had not escaped his notice that Hosea, who had once
been a chief in the Egyptian service, had raised his hands in the sorest
straits to this God, and never had he witnessed the same degree of
resolution that he possessed. Now he also knew that this same mighty God
had buried Pharaoh's powerful army in the sea to save His people. Such a
God was acceptable to his heart, and he desired nothing better than to
remain henceforward with those who served Him.
Joshua willingly allowed him to join the Hebrews. Then it appeared that
there were fifteen of the latter among the liberated prisoners and, to
Ephraim's special delight, Reuben, the husband of poor melancholy Milcah,
who clung so closely to Miriam. His reserved, laconic disposition had
stood him in good stead, and the arduous forced labor seemed to have
inflicted little injury on his robust frame.
The exultation of victory, the joy of success, had taken full possession
of Ephraim and his youthful band; but when the sun set and there was
still no sign of Hur and his band, Nun and his followers were seized with
anxiety.
Ephraim had already proposed to go with some of his companions in quest
of tidings, when a messenger announced that Hur's men had lost courage at
the sight of the well-fortified Egyptian citadel. Their leader, it is
true, had urged them to the assault, but his band had shrunk from the
peril and, unless Nun and his men brought aid, they would return with
their mission unfulfilled.
It was therefore resolved to go to the assistance of the timorous. With
joyous confidence they marched forward and, during the journey through
the cool night, Ephraim and Nun described to Joshua how they had found
Kasana and how she had died. What she had desired to communicate to the
man she loved was now made known to him, and the warrior listened with
deep emotion and remained silent and thoughtful until they reached
Dophkah, the valley of the turquoise mines, from whose center rose the
fortress which contained the prisoners.
Hur and his men had remained concealed in a side-valley, and after Joshua
had divided the Hebrew force into several bodies and assigned to each a
certain task, he gave at dawn the signal for the assault.
After a brief struggle the little garrison was overpowered and the
fortress taken. The disarmed Egyptians, like their companions at the
copper mines, were sent home. The prisoners were released and the lepers,
whose quarters were in a side-valley beyond the mines--among them were
those who at Joshua's bidding had been brought here--were allowed to
follow the conquerors at a certain distance.
What Hur, Miriam's husband, could not accomplish, Joshua had done, and
ere the young soldiers departed with Ephraim, old Nun assembled them to
offer thanks to the Lord. The men under Hur's command also joined in the
prayer and wherever Joshua appeared Ephraim's companions greeted him with
cheers.
"Hail to our chief!" often rang on the air, as they marched forward:
"Hail to him whom the Most High Himself has chosen for His sword! We will
gladly follow him; for through him God leads us to victory."
Hur's men also joined in these shouts, and he did not forbid them; nay,
after the storming of the fortress, he had thanked Joshua and expressed
his pleasure in his liberation.
At the departure, the younger man had stepped back to let the older one
precede him; but Hur had entreated grey-haired Nun, who was greatly his
senior, to take the head of the procession, though after the deliverance
of the people on the shore of the Red Sea he had himself been appointed
by Moses and the elders to the chief command of the Hebrew soldiers.
The road led first through a level mountain valley, then it crossed the
pass known as the "Sword-point ", which was the only means of
communication between the mines and the Red Sea.
The rocky landscape was wild and desolate, and the path to be climbed
steep. Joshua's old father, who had grown up on the flat plains of Goshen
and was unaccustomed to climbing mountains, was borne amid the joyous
acclamations of the others, in the arms of his son and grandson, to the
summit of the pass; but Miriam's husband who, at the head of his men,
followed the division of Ephraim's companions, heard the shouts of the
youths yet moved with drooping head and eyes bent on the ground.
At the summit they were to rest and wait for the people who were to be
led through the wilderness of Sin to Dophkah.
The victors gazed from the top of the pass in search of the travellers;
but as yet no sign of them appeared. But when they looked back along the
mountain path whence they had come a different spectacle presented
itself, a scene so grand, so marvellous, that it attracted every eye as
though by a magic spell; for at their feet lay a circular valley,
surrounded by lofty cliffs, mountain ridges, peaks, and summits, which
here white as chalk, yonder raven-black, here grey and brown, yonder red
and green, appeared to grow upward from the sand toward the azure sky of
the wilderness, steeped in dazzling light, and unshadowed by the tiniest
cloudlet.
All that the eye beheld was naked and bare, silent and lifeless. On the
slopes of the many-colored rocks, which surrounded the sandy valley, grew
no blade of grass nor smallest plant. Neither bird, worm, nor beetle
stirred in these silent tracts, hostile to all life. Here the eye
discerned no cultivation,--nothing that recalled human existence. God
seemed to have created for Himself alone these vast tracts which were of
service to no living creature. Whoever penetrated into this wilderness
entered a spot which the Most High had perchance chosen for a place of
rest and retreat, like the silent, inaccessible Holy of Holies of the
temple.
The young men had gazed mutely at the wonderful scene at their feet. Now
they prepared to encamp and showed themselves diligent in serving old
Nun, whom they sincerely loved. Resting among them under a hastily
erected canopy he related, with sparkling eyes, the deeds his son had
performed.
Meanwhile Joshua and Hur were still standing at the top of the pass, the
former gazing silently down into the dreary, rocky valley, which
overarched by the blue dome of the sky, surrounded by the mountain
pillars and columns from God's own workshop, opened before him as the
mightiest of temples.
The old man had long gazed gloomily at the ground, but he suddenly
interrupted the silence and said:
"In Succoth I erected a heap of stones and called upon the Lord to be a
witness between us. But in this spot, amid this silence, it seems to me
that without memorial or sign we are sure of His presence." Here he drew
his figure to a greater height and continued: "And I now raise mine eyes
to Thee, Adonai, and address my humble words to Thee, Jehovah, Thou God
of Abraham and of our fathers, that Thou mayst a second time be a witness
between me and this man whom Thou Thyself didst summon to Thy service,
that he might be Thy sword."
He had uttered these words with eyes and hands uplifted, then turning to
the other, he said with solemn earnestness:
"So I ask thee Hosea, son of Nun, dost thou remember the vow which thou
and I made before the stones in Succoth?"
"I do," was the reply. "And in sore disaster and great peril I perceived
what the Most High desired of me, and am resolved to devote to Him all
the strength of body and soul with which He has endowed me, to Him alone,
and to His people, who are also mine. Henceforward I will be called
Joshua . . . nor will I seek service with the Egyptians or any foreign
king; for the Lord our God through the lips of thy wife bestowed this
name upon me."
Then Hur, with solemn earnestness, broke in: "That is what I expected to
hear and as, in this place also, the Most High is a witness between me
and thee and hears this conversation, let the vow I made in His presence
be here fulfilled. The heads of the tribes and Moses, the servant of the
Lord, appointed me to the command of the fighting-men of our people. But
now thou dost call thyself Joshua, and hast vowed to serve no other than
the Lord our God. I am well aware thou canst accomplish far greater
things as commander of an army than I, who have grown grey in driving
herds, or than any other Hebrew, by whatever name he is known, so I will
fulfil the vow sworn at Succoth. I will ask Moses, the servant of the
Lord, and the elders to confide to thee the office of commander. In their
hands will I place the decision and, because I feel that the Most High
beholds my heart, let me confess that I have thought of thee with secret
rancor. Yet, for the welfare of the people, I will forget what lies
between us and offer thee my hand."
With these words he held out his hand to Joshua and the latter, grasping
it, replied with generous candor:
"Thy words are manly and mine shall be also. For the sake of the people
and the cause we both serve, I will accept thy offer. Yet since thou hast
summoned the Most High as a witness and He hears me, I, too, will not
withhold one iota of the truth. The Lord Himself has summoned me to the
office of commander of the fighting-men which thou dost desire to commit
to me. It was done through Miriam, thy wife, and is my due. Yet I
recognize thy willingness to yield thy dignity to me as a praiseworthy
deed, since I know how hard it is for a man to resign power, especially
in favor of a younger one whom he does not love. Thou hast done this, and
I am grateful. I, too, have thought of thee with secret rancor; for
through thee I lost another possession harder for a man to renounce than
office: the love of woman."
The hot blood mounted into Hur's cheeks, as he exclaimed:
"Miriam! I did not force her into marriage; nay I did not even purchase
her, according to the custom of our fathers, with the bridal dowry--she
became my wife of her own free will."
"I know it," replied Joshua quietly, "yet there was one man who had
yearned to make her his longer and more ardently than thou, and the fire
of jealousy burned fiercely in his heart. But have no anxiety; for wert
thou now to give her a letter of divorce and lead her to me that I might
open my arms and tent to receive her, I would exclaim:
"Why hast thou done this thing to thyself and to me? For a short time ago
I learned what woman's love is, and that I was mistaken when I believed
Miriam shared the ardor of my heart. Besides, during the march with
fetters on my feet, in the heaviest misfortune, I vowed to devote all the
strength and energy of soul and body to the welfare of our people. Nor
shall the love of woman turn me from the great duty I have taken upon
myself. As for thy wife, I shall treat her as a stranger unless, as a
prophetess, she summons me to announce a new message from the Lord."
With these words he held out his hand to his companion and, as Hur
grasped it, loud voices were heard from the fighting-men, for messengers
were climbing the mountain, who, shouting and beckoning, pointed to the
vast cloud of dust that preceded the march of the tribes.
CHAPTER XXV.
The Hebrews came nearer and nearer, and many of the young combatants
hastened to meet them. These were not the joyous bands, who had joined
triumphantly in Miriam's song of praise, no, they tottered toward the
mountain slowly, with drooping heads. They were obliged to scale the pass
from the steeper side, and how the bearers sighed; how piteously the
women and children wailed, how fiercely the drivers swore as they urged
the beasts of burden up the narrow, rugged path; how hoarsely sounded the
voices of the half fainting men as they braced their shoulders against
the carts to aid the beasts of burden.
These thousands who, but a few short days before, had so gratefully felt
the saving mercy of the Lord, seemed to Joshua, who stood watching their
approach, like a defeated army.
But the path they had followed from their last encampment, the harbor by
the Red Sea, was rugged, arid, and to them, who had grown up among the
fruitful plains of Lower Egypt, toilsome and full of terror.
It had led through the midst of the bare rocky landscape, and their eyes,
accustomed to distant horizons and luxuriant green foliage, met narrow
boundaries and a barren wilderness.
Since passing through the Gate of Baba, they had beheld on their way
through the valley of the same name and their subsequent pilgrimage
through the wilderness of Sin, nothing save valleys with steep precipices
on either side. A lofty mountain of the hue of death had towered, black
and terrible, above the reddish-brown slopes, which seemed to the
wanderers like the work of human hands, for the strata of stones rose at
regular intervals. One might have supposed that the giant builders whose
hands had toiled here in the service of the Sculptor of the world had
been summoned away ere they had completed the task, which in this
wilderness had no searching eye to fear and seemed destined for the
service of no living creature. Grey and brown granite cliffs and ridges
rose on both sides of the path, and in the sand which covered it lay
heaps of small bits of red porphyry and coal-black stones that seemed as
if they had been broken by the blows of a hammer and resembled the dross
from which metal had been melted. Greenish masses of rock, most peculiar
in form, surrounded the narrow, cliff circled mountain valleys, which
opened into one another. The ascending path pierced them; and often the
Hebrews, as they entered, feared that the lofty cliffs in the distance
would compel them to return. Then murmurs and lamentations arose, but the
mode of egress soon appeared and led to another rock-valley.
On departing from the harbor at the Red Sea they had often found thorny
gum acacias and an aromatic desert plant, which the animals relished; but
the farther they entered the rocky wilderness, the more scorching and
arid the sand became, and at last the eye sought in vain for herbs and
trees.
At Elim fresh springs and shade-giving palms were found, and at the Red
Sea there were well-filled cisterns; but here at the camp in the
wilderness of Sin nothing had been discovered to quench the thirst, and
at noon it seemed as though an army of spiteful demons had banished every
inch of shade cast by the cliffs; for every part of the valleys and
ravines blazed and glowed, and nowhere was there the slightest protection
from the scorching sun.
The last water brought with them had been distributed among the human
beings and animals, and when the procession started in the morning not a
drop could be found to quench their increasing thirst.
Then the old doubting rancor and rebelliousness took possession of the
multitude. Curses directed against Moses and the elders, who had led them
from the comfort of well-watered Egypt to this misery, never ceased; but
when they climbed the pass of the "Swordpoint" their parched throats had
become too dry for oaths and invectives.
Messengers from old Nun, Ephraim, and Hur had already informed the
approaching throngs that the young men had gained a victory and liberated
Joshua and the other captives; but their discouragement had become so
great that even this good news made little change, and only a flitting
smile on the bearded lips of the men, or a sudden flash of the old light
in the dark eyes of the women appeared.
Miriam, accompanied by melancholy Milcah, had remained with her
companions instead of, as usual, calling upon the women to thank the Most
High.
Reuben, the husband of her sorrowful ward whom fear of disappointment
still deterred from yielding to his newly-awakened hopes, was a quiet,
reticent man, so the first messenger did not know whether he was among
the liberated prisoners. But great excitement overpowered Milcah and,
when Miriam bade her be patient, she hurried from one playmate to another
assailing them with urgent questions. When even the last could give her
no information concerning the husband she had loved and lost, she burst
into loud sobs and fled back to the prophetess. But she received little
consolation, for the woman who was expecting to greet her own husband as
a conqueror and see the rescued friend of her childhood, was
absent-minded and troubled, as if some heavy burden oppressed her soul.
Moses had left the tribes as soon as he learned that the attack upon the
mines had succeeded and Joshua was rescued; for it had been reported that
the warlike Amalekites, who dwelt in the oasis at the foot of Mt. Sinai,
were preparing to resist the Hebrews' passage through their well-watered
tract in the wilderness with its wealth of palms. Accompanied by a few
picked men he set off across the mountains in quest of tidings, expecting
to join his people between Alush and Rephidim in the valley before the
oasis.
Abidan, the head of the tribe of Benjamin, with Hur and Nun, the princes
of Judah and Ephraim after their return from the mines--were to represent
him and his companions.
As the people approached the steep pass Hur, with more of the rescued
prisoners, came to meet them, and hurrying in advance of all the rest was
young Reuben, Milcah's lost husband. She had recognized him in the
distance as he rushed down the mountain and, spite of Miriam's protest,
darted into the midst of the tribe of Simeon which marched in front of
hers.
The sight of their meeting cheered many a troubled spirit and when at
last, clinging closely to each other, they hurried to Miriam and the
latter beheld the face of her charge, it seemed as though a miracle had
been wrought; for the pale lily had become in the hue of her cheeks a
blooming rose. Her lips, too, which she had but rarely and timidly opened
for a question or an answer, were in constant motion; for how much she
desired to know, how many questions she had to ask the silent husband who
had endured such terrible suffering.
They were a handsome, happy pair, and it seemed to them as if, instead of
passing naked rocks over barren desert paths, they were journeying
through a vernal landscape where springs were gushing and birds carolling
their songs.
Miriam, who had done everything in her power to sustain the grieving
wife, was also cheered by the sight of her happiness. But every trace of
joyous sympathy soon vanished from her features; for while Reuben and
Milcah, as if borne on wings, seemed scarcely to touch the soil of the
wilderness, she moved forward with drooping head, oppressed by the
thought that it was her own fault that no like happiness could bloom for
her in this hour.
She told herself that she had made a sore sacrifice, worthy of the
highest reward and pleasing in the sight of God, when she refused to obey
the voice of her heart, yet she could not banish from her memory the
dying Egyptian who had denied her right to be numbered among those who
loved Hosea, the woman who for his sake had met so early a death.
She, Miriam, lived, yet she had killed the most fervent desire of her
soul; duty forbade her thinking with ardent longing of him who lingered
up yonder, devoted to the cause of his people and the God of his fathers,
a free, noble man, perhaps the future leader of the warriors of her race,
and if Moses so appointed, next to him the first and greatest of all the
Hebrews, but lost, forever lost to her.
Had she on that fateful night obeyed the yearning of her woman's heart
and not the demands of the vocation which placed her far above all other
women, he would long since have clasped her in his arms, as quiet Reuben
embraced his poor, feeble Milcah, now so joyous as she walked stoutly at
his side.
What thoughts were these?
She must drive them back to the inmost recesses of her heart, seek to
crush them; for it was a sin for her to long so ardently to meet another.
She wished for her husband's presence, as a saviour from herself and the
forbidden desires of this terrible hour.
Hur, the prince of the tribe of Judah, was her husband, not the former
Egyptian, the liberated captive. What had she to ask from the Ephraimite,
whom she had forever refused?
Why should it hurt her that the liberated prisoner did not seek her; why
did she secretly cherish the foolish hope that momentous duties detained
him?
She scarcely saw or heard what was passing around her, and Milcah's
grateful greeting to her husband first informed her that Hur was
approaching.
He had waved his hand to her while still afar, but he came alone, without
Hosea or Joshua, she cared not what the rescued man called himself; and
it angered her to feel that this hurt her, nay, pierced her to the heart.
Yet she esteemed her elderly husband and it was not difficult for her to
give him a cordial welcome.
He answered her greeting joyously and tenderly; but when she pointed to
the re-united pair and extolled him as victor and deliverer of Reuben and
so many hapless men, he frankly owned that he had no right to this
praise, it was the due of "Joshua," whom she herself had summoned in the
name of the Most High to command the warriors of the people.
Miriam turned pale and, in spite of the steepness of the road, pressed
her husband with questions. When she heard that Joshua was resting on the
heights with his father and the young men and refreshing themselves with
wine, and that Hur had promised to resign voluntarily, if Moses desired
to entrust the command to him, her heavy eye-brows contracted in a gloomy
frown beneath her broad forehead and, with curt severity, she exclaimed:
"You are my lord, and it is not seemly for me to oppose you, not even if
you forget your own wife so far that you give place to the man who once
ventured to raise his eyes to her."
"He no longer cares for you," Hur eagerly interrupted; "nay, were I to
give you a letter of divorce, he would no longer desire to possess you."
"Would he not?" asked Miriam with a forced smile. "Do you owe this
information to him?"
"He has devoted himself, body and soul, to the welfare of the people and
renounces the love of woman," replied Hur. But his wife exclaimed:
"Renunciation is easy, where desire would bring nothing save fresh
rejection and shame. Not to him who, in the hour of the utmost peril,
sought aid from the Egyptians is the honor of the chief command of the
warriors due, but rather to you, who led the tribes to the first victory
at the store-house in Succoth and to whom the Lord Himself, through Moses
His servant, confided the command."
Hur looked anxiously at the woman for whom a late, fervent love had fired
his heart, and seeing her glowing cheeks and hurried breathing, knew not
whether to attribute these symptoms to the steep ascent or to the
passionate ambition of her aspiring soul, which she now transferred to
him, her husband.
That she held him in so much higher esteem than the younger hero, whose
return he had dreaded, pleased him, but he had grown grey in the strict
fulfilment of duty, and would not deviate from what he considered right.
His mere hints had been commands to the wife of his youth whom he had
borne to the grave a few years before, and as yet he had encountered no
opposition from Miriam. That Joshua was best fitted to command the
fighting-men of the people was unquestionable, so he answered, with
panting breath, for the ascent taxed his strength also:
"Your good opinion is an honor and a pleasure to me; but even should
Moses and the elders confer the chief command upon me, remember the heap
of stones at Succoth and my vow. I have ever been mindful of and shall
keep it."
Miriam looked angrily aside, and said nothing more till they had reached
the summit of the pass.
The victorious youths were greeting their approaching kindred with loud
shouts.
The joy of meeting, the provisions captured, and the drink which, though
sparingly distributed, was divided among the greatest sufferers, raised
the drooping courage of the exhausted wayfarers; and the thirsting
Hebrews shortened the rest at the summit of the pass in order to reach
Dophkah more quickly. They had heard from Joshua that they would find
there not only ruined cisterns, but also a hidden spring whose existence
had been revealed to him by the ex-captain of the prisoners' guards.
The way led down the mountain. "Haste" was the watchword of the fainting
Hebrews on their way to a well; and thus, soon after sunset, they reached
the valley of the turquoise mines, where they encamped around the hill
crowned by the ruined fortress and burned store-houses of Dophkah.
The spring in an acacia grove dedicated to the goddess Hathor was
speedily found, and fire after fire was quickly lighted. The wavering
hearts which, in the desert of Sin, had been on the verge of despair were
again filled with the anticipation of life, hope, and grateful faith. The
beautiful acacias, it is true, had been felled to afford easier access to
the spring whose refreshing waters had effected this wonderful change.
At the summit of the pass Joshua and Miriam had met again, but found time
only for a hasty greeting. In the camp they were brought into closer
relations.
Joshua had appeared among the people with his father. The heir of the
princely old man who was held in such high esteem received joyous
greetings from all sides, and his counsel to form a vanguard of the
youthful warriors, a rear-guard of the older ones, and send out chosen
bands of the former on reconnoitering expeditions was readily adopted.
He had a right to say that he was familiar with everything pertaining to
the guidance and defence of a large army. God Himself had entrusted him
with the chief command, and Moses, by sending him the monition to be
strong and steadfast, had confirmed the office. Hur, too, who now
possessed it, was willing to transfer it to him, and this man's promise
was inviolable, though he had omitted to repeat it in the presence of the
elders. Joshua was treated as if he held the chief command, and he
himself felt his own authority supreme.
After the assembly dispersed, Hur had invited him, spite of the late
hour, to go to his tent and the warrior accompanied him, for he desired
to talk with Miriam. He would show her, in her husband's presence, that
he had found the path which she had so zealously pointed out to him.
In the presence of another's wife the tender emotions of a Hebrew were
silent. Hur's consort must be made aware that he, Joshua, no longer
cherished any love for her. Even in his solitary hours, he had wholly
ceased to think of her.
He confessed that she was a noble, a majestic woman, but the very memory
of this grandeur now sent a chill through his veins.
Her actions, too, appeared in a new light. Nay, when at the summit of the
pass she had greeted him with a cold smile, he felt convinced that they
were utterly estranged from one another, and this feeling grew stronger
and stronger beside the blazing fire in the stately tent of the chief,
where they met a second time.
The rescued Reuben and his wife Milcah had deserted Miriam long before
and, during her lonely waiting, many thoughts had passed through her mind
which she meant to impress upon the man to whom she had granted so much
that its memory now weighed on her heart like a crime.
We are most ready to be angry with those to whom we have been unjust, and
this woman regarded the gift of her love as something so great, so
precious, that it behooved even the man whom she had rejected never to
cease to remember it with gratitude. But Joshua had boasted that he no
longer desired, even were she offered to him, the woman whom he had once
so fervently loved and clasped in his embrace. Nay, he had confirmed this
assertion by leisurely waiting, without seeking her.
At last he came, and in company with her husband, who was ready to cede
his place to him.
But she was present, ready to watch with open eyes for the welfare of the
too generous Hur.
The elderly man, to whose fate she had linked her own, and whose faithful
devotion touched her, should be defrauded by no rival of the position
which was his due, and which he must retain, if only because she rebelled
against being the wife of a man who could no longer claim next to her
brothers the highest rank in the tribes.
Never before had the much-courted woman, who had full faith in her gift
of prophesy, felt so bitter, sore, and irritated. She did not admit it
even to herself, yet it seemed as if the hatred of the Egyptians with
which Moses had inspired her, and which was now futile, had found a new
purpose and was directed against the only man whom she had ever loved.
But a true woman can always show kindness to everyone whom she does not
scorn, so though she blushed deeply at the sight of the man whose kiss
she had returned, she received him cordially, and with sympathetic
questions.
Meanwhile, however, she addressed him by his former name Hosea, and when
he perceived it was intentional, he asked if she had forgotten that it
was she herself who, as the confidante of the Most High, had commanded
him henceforward to call himself "Joshua."
Her features grew sharper with anxiety as she replied that her memory was
good but he reminded her of a time which she would prefer to forget. He
had himself forfeited the name the Lord had given him by preferring the
favor of the Egyptians to the help which God had promised. Faithful to
the old custom, she would continue to call him "Hosea."
The honest-hearted soldier had not expected such hostility, but he
maintained a tolerable degree of composure and answered quietly that he
would rarely afford her an opportunity to address him by this or any
other name. Those who were his friends readily adopted that of Joshua.
Miriam replied that she, too, would be ready to do so if her husband
approved and he himself insisted upon it; for the name was only a
garment. Of course offices and honors were another matter.
When Joshua then declared that he still believed God Himself had summoned
him, through the lips of His prophetess, to command the Hebrew soldiers
and that he would admit the right of no one save Moses to deprive him of
his claim to this office, Hur assented and held out his hand to him.
Then Miriam dropped the restraint she had hitherto imposed on herself
and, with defiant eagerness, continued:
"There I am of a different opinion. You did not obey the summons of the
Most High. Can you deny this? And when the Omnipresent One found you at
the feet of Pharaoh, instead of at the head of His people, He deprived
you of the office with which He had entrusted you. He, the mightiest of
generals, summoned the tempest and the waves, and they swallowed up the
foe. So perished those who were your friends till their heavy fetters
made you realize their true disposition toward you and your race. But I,
meanwhile, was extolling the mercy of the Most High, and the people
joined in my hymn of praise. On that very day the Lord summoned another
to command the fighting-men in your stead, and that other, as you know,
is my husband. If Hur has never learned the art of war, God will surely
guide his arm, and it is He and none other who bestows victory.
"My husband--hear it again--is the sole commander of the hosts and if, in
the abundance of his generosity, he has forgotten it, he will retain his
office when he remembers whose hand chose him, and when I, his wife,
raise my voice and recall it to his memory."
Joshua turned to go, in order to end the painful discussion, but Hur
detained him, protesting that he was deeply incensed by his wife's
unseemly interference in the affairs of men, and that he insisted on his
promise. "A woman's disapproving words were blown away by the wind. It
would be Moses' duty to declare whom Jehovah had chosen to be commander."
While making this reply Hur had gazed at his wife with stern dignity, as
if admonishing discretion, and the look seemed to have effected its
purpose; for Miriam had alternately flushed and paled as she listened;
nay, she even detained the guest by beckoning him with a trembling hand
to approach, as though she desired to soothe him.
"Let me say one thing more," she began, drawing a long breath, "that you
may not misunderstand my meaning. I call everyone our friend who devotes
himself to the cause of the people, and how self-sacrificingly you intend
to do this, Hur has informed me. It was your confidence in Pharaoh's
favor that parted us--therefore I know how to prize your firm and
decisive breach with the Egyptians, but I did not correctly estimate the
full grandeur of this deed until I learned that not only long custom, but
other bonds, united you to the foe."
"What is the meaning of these words?" replied Joshua, convinced that she
had just fitted to the bowstring another shaft intended to wound him. But
Miriam, unheeding the question, calmly continued with a defiant keenness
of glance that contradicted her measured speech:
"After the Lord's guidance had delivered us from the enemy, the Red Sea
washed ashore the most beautiful woman we have seen for a long time. I
bandaged the wound a Hebrew woman dealt her and she acknowledged that her
heart was filled with love for you, and that on her dying bed she
regarded you as the idol of her soul."
Joshua, thoroughly incensed, exclaimed: "If this is the whole truth, wife
of Hur, my father has given me a false report; for according to what I
heard from him, the hapless woman made her last confession only in the
presence of those who love me; not in yours. And she was right to shun
you--you would never have understood her."
Here he saw a smile of superiority hover around Miriam's lips; but he
repelled it, as he went on:
"Ah, your intellect is tenfold keener than poor Kasana's ever was. But
your heart, which was open to the Most High, had no room for love. It
will grow old and cease to beat without having learned the feeling. And,
spite of your flashing eyes, I will tell you you are more than a woman,
you are a prophetess. I cannot boast of gifts so lofty. I am merely a
plain man, who understands the art of fighting better than that of
foretelling the future. Yet I can see what is to come. You will foster
the hatred of me that glows in your breast, and will also implant it in
your husband's heart and zealously strive to fan it there. And I know
why. The fiery ambition which consumes you will not suffer you to be the
wife of a man who is second to any other. You refuse to call me by the
name I owe to you. But if hatred and arrogance do not stifle in your
breast the one feeling that still unites us--love for our people, the day
will come when you will voluntarily approach and, unasked, by the free
impulse of your heart, call me 'Joshua.'"
With these words he took leave of Miriam and her husband by a short wave
of the hand, and vanished in the darkness of the night.
Hur gazed gloomily after him in silence until the footsteps of the
belated guest had died away in the sleeping camp; then the ill-repressed
wrath of the grave man, who had hitherto regarded his young wife with
tender admiration, knew no bounds.
With two long strides he stood directly before her as she gazed with a
troubled look into the fire, her face even paler than his own. His voice
had lost its metallic harmony, and sounded shrill and sharp as he
exclaimed:
"I had the courage to woo a maiden who supposed herself to be nearer to
God than other women, and now that she has become my wife she makes me
atone for such presumption."
"Atone?" escaped Miriam's livid lips, and a defiant glance blazed at him
from her black eyes. But, undismayed, he continued, grasping her hand
with so firm a pressure that it hurt her:
"Aye, you make me atone for it!--Shame on me, if I permit this
disgraceful hour to be followed by similar ones."
Miriam strove to wrest her hand from his clasp, but he would not release
it, and went on:
"I sought you, that you might be the pride of my house. I expected to sow
honor, and I reap disgrace; for what could be more humiliating to a man
than to have a wife who rules him, who presumes to wound with hostile
words the heart of the friend who is protected by the laws of
hospitality? A woman of different mould, a simple-hearted, upright wife,
who looked at her husband's past life, instead of planning how to
increase his greatness, that she might share it with him, need not have
had me shout into her ears that Hur has garnered honors and dignities
enough, during his long existence, to be able to spare a portion of them
without any loss of esteem. It is not the man who holds the chief
command, but the one who shows the most self-sacrificing love for the
people that is greatest in the eyes of Jehovah. You desire a high place,
you seek to be honored by the multitude as one who is summoned by the
Lord. I shall not forbid it, so long as you do not forget what the duty
of a wife commands. You owe me love also; for you vowed to give it on
your marriage day; but the human heart can bestow only what it possesses,
and Hosea is right when he says that love, which is warm itself and warms
others, is a feeling alien to your cold nature."
With these words he turned his back upon her and went to the dark portion
of the tent, while Miriam remained standing by the fire, whose flickering
light illumined her beautiful, pallid face.
With clenched teeth and hands pressed on her heaving bosom, she stood
gazing at the spot where he had disappeared.
Her grey-haired husband had confronted her in the full consciousness of
his dignity, a noble man worthy of reverence, a true, princely chief of
his tribe, and infinitely her superior. His every word had pierced her
bosom like the thrust of a lance. The power of truth had given each its
full emphasis and held up to Miriam a mirror that showed her an image
from which she shrank.
Now she longed to rush after him and beg him to restore the love with
which he had hitherto surrounded her--and which the lonely woman had
gratefully felt.
She knew that she could reciprocate his costly gift; for how ardently she
longed to have one kind, forgiving word from his lips.
Her soul seemed withered, parched, torpid, like a corn-field on which a
poisonous mildew has fallen; yet it had once been green and blooming.
She thought of the tilled fields in Goshen which, after having borne an
abundant harvest, remained arid and bare till the moisture of the river
came to soften the soil and quicken the seed which it had received. So it
had been with her soul, only she had flung the ripening grain into the
fire and, with blasphemous hand, erected a dam between the fructifying
moisture and the dry earth.
But there was still time!
She knew that he erred in one respect; she knew she was like all other
women, capable of yearning with ardent passion for the man she loved. It
depended solely on herself to make him feel this in her arms.
Now, it is true, he was justified in thinking her harsh and unfeeling,
for where love had once blossomed in her soul, a spring of bitterness now
gushed forth poisoning all it touched.
Was this the vengeance of the heart whose ardent wishes she had
heroically slain?
God had disdained her sorest sacrifice; this it was impossible to doubt;
for His majesty was no longer revealed to her in visions that exalted the
heart, and she was scarcely entitled to call herself His prophetess. This
sacrifice had led her, the truth-loving woman, into falsehood and plunged
her who, in the consciousness of seeking the right path lived at peace
with herself, into torturing unrest. Since that great and difficult deed
she, who had once been full of hope, had obtained nothing for which she
longed. She, who recognized no woman as her superior, had been obliged to
yield in shame her place to a poor dying Egyptian. She had been kindly
disposed toward all who were of her blood, and were devoted to the sacred
cause of her people, and now her hostile bitterness had wounded one of
the best and noblest. The poorest bondman's wife rejoiced to bind more
and more closely the husband who had once loved her--she had wickedly
estranged hers.
Seeking protection she had approached his hearthstone shivering, but she
had found it warmer than she had hoped, and his generosity and love fell
upon her wounded soul like balm. True, he could not restore what she had
lost, but he could give a welcome compensation.
Ah, he no longer believed her capable of a tender emotion, yet she needed
love in order to live, and no sacrifice seemed to her too hard to regain
his. But pride was also a condition of her very existence, and whenever
she prepared to humbly open her heart to her husband, the fear of
humiliating herself overpowered her, and she stood as though spell-bound
till the blazing wood at her feet fell into smoking embers and darkness
surrounded her.
Then a strange anxiety stole over her.
Two bats, which had come from the mines and circled round the fire darted
past her like ghosts. Everything urged her back to the tent, to her
husband, and with hasty resolution she entered the spacious room lighted
by a lamp. But it was empty, and the female slave who received her said
that Hur would spend the time until the departure of the people with his
son and grandson.
A keen pang pierced her heart, and she lay down to rest with a sense of
helplessness and shame which she had not felt since her childhood.
A few hours after the camp was astir and when her husband, in the grey
dawn of morning, entered the tent with a curt greeting, pride again
raised its head and her reply sounded cold and formal.
He did not come alone; his son Uri was with him.
But he looked graver than was his wont; for the men of Judah had
assembled early and adjured him not to give up the chief command to any
man who belonged to another tribe.
This had been unexpected. He had referred them to Moses' decision, and
his desire that it might be adverse to him was intensified, as his young
wife's self-reliant glance stirred fresh wrath in his soul.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Early the following morning the people resumed their march with fresh
vigor and renewed courage; but the little spring which, by digging, had
at last been forced to flow was completely exhausted.
However, its refusal to bestow a supply of water to take with them was of
no consequence; they expected to find another well at Alush.
The sun had risen in radiant majesty in a cloudless sky. The light showed
its awakening power on the hearts of men, and the rocks and the yellow
sand of the road sparkled like the blue vault above. The pure, light,
spicy air of the desert, cooled by the freshness of the night, expanded
the breasts of the wayfarers, and walking became a pleasure.
The men showed greater confidence, and the eyes of the women sparkled
more brightly than they had done for a long time; for the Lord had again
showed the people that He remembered them in their need; and fathers and
mothers gazed proudly at the sons who had conquered the foe. Most of the
tribes had greeted in the band of prisoners some one who had long been
given up as lost, and it was a welcome duty to make amends for the
injuries the terrible forced labor had inflicted. There was special
rejoicing, not only among the Ephraimites, but everywhere, over the
return of Joshua, as all, save the men of the tribe of Judah, now called
him, remembering the cheering promise the name conveyed.
The youths who under his command had put the Egyptians to rout, told
their relatives what manner of man the son of Nun was, how he thought of
everything and assigned to each one the place for which he was best
suited. His eye kindled the battle spirit in every one on whom it fell,
and the foe retreated at his mere war-cry.
Those who spoke of old Nun and his grandson also did so with sparkling
eyes. The tribe of Ephraim, whose lofty pretensions had been a source of
much vexation, was willingly allowed precedence on this march, and only
the men of Judah were heard to grumble. Doubtless there was reason for
dissatisfaction; for Hur, the prince of their tribe, and his young wife
walked as if oppressed by a heavy burden; whoever asked them anything
would have been wiser to have chosen another hour.
So long as the sun's rays were oblique, there was still a little shade at
the edge of the sandstone rocks which bordered the road on both sides or
towered aloft in the center; and as the sons of Korah began a song of
praise, young and old joined in, and most gladly and gratefully of all
Milcah, now no longer pale, and Reuben, her happy, liberated husband.
The children picked up golden-yellow bitter apples, which having fallen
from the withered vines, lay by the wayside as if they had dropped from
the sky, and brought them to their parents. But they were bitter as gall
and a morose old man of the tribe of Zebulun, who nevertheless kept their
firm shells to hold ointment, said:
"These are a symbol of to-day. It looks pleasant now; but when the sun
mounts higher and we find no water, we shall taste the bitterness."
His prediction was verified only too soon; for as the road which, after
leaving the sandstone region, began to lead upward through a rocky
landscape which resembled walls of red brick and grey stone, grew
steeper, the sun rose higher and higher and the heat of the day hourly
increased.
Never had the sun sent sharper arrows upon the travellers, and pitiless
was their fall upon bare heads and shoulders.
Here an old man, yonder a younger one, sank prostrate under its scorching
blaze or, supported by his friends, staggered on raving with his hand
pressed to his brow like a drunken man. The blistered skin peeled from
the hands and faces of men and women, and there was not one whose palate
and tongue were not parched by the heat, or whose vigorous strength and
newly-awakened courage it did not impair.
The cattle moved forward with drooping heads and dragging feet or rolled
on the ground till the shepherds' lash compelled them to summon their
failing powers.
At noon the people were permitted to rest, but there was not a hand's
breadth of shade where they sought repose. Whoever lay down in the
noonday heat found fresh tortures instead of relief. The sufferers
themselves urged a fresh start for the spring at Alush.
Hitherto each day, after the sun had begun its course toward the west
through the cloudless sky of the desert, the heat had diminished, and ere
the approach of twilight a fresher breeze had fanned the brow; but to-day
the rocks retained the glow of noonday for many hours, until a light cool
breeze blew from sea at the west. At the same time the vanguard which, by
Joshua's orders, preceded the travellers, halted, and the whole train
stopped.
Men, women, and children fixed their eyes and waved hands, staves, and
crutches toward the same spot, where the gaze was spell-bound by a
wondrous spectacle never beheld before.
A cry of astonishment and admiration echoed from the parched weary lips,
which had long since ceased to utter question or answer; and it soon rang
from rank to rank, from tribe to tribe, to the very lepers at the end of
the procession and the rear-guard which followed it. One touched another,
and whispered a name familiar to every one, that of the sacred mountain
where the Lord had promised Moses to "bring them unto a good land and a
large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey."
No one had told the weary travellers, yet all knew that for the first
time they beheld Horeb and the peak of Sinai, the most sacred summit of
this granite range.
Though a mountain, it was also the throne of the omnipotent God of their
fathers.
The holy mountain itself seemed at this hour to be on fire like the bush
whence He had spoken to His chosen servant. Its summit, divided into
seven peaks, towered majestically aloft in the distance, dominating the
heights and valleys far and near, glowing before the people like a giant
ruby, irradiated by the light of a conflagration which was consuming the
world.
No eye had ever beheld a similar spectacle. Then the sun sank lower and
lower, till it set in the sea concealed behind the mountains. The glowing
ruby was transformed into a dark amethyst, and at last assumed the deep
hue of a violet; but the eyes of the people continued to dwell on the
sacred scenes as though spell-bound. Nay, when the day-star had
completely disappeared, and its reflection gilded a long cloud with
shining edges, their eyes dilated still more, for a man of the tribe of
Benjamin, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the spectacle, beheld in it the
floating gold-bordered mantle of Jehovah, and the neighbors to whom he
showed it, believed him, and shared his pious excitement.
This inspiring sight had made the Hebrews for a short time forget thirst
and weariness. But the highest exaltation was soon to be transformed into
the deepest discouragement; for when night closed in and Alush was
reached after a short march it appeared that the desert tribe which dwelt
there, ere striking their tents the day before, had filled the brackish
spring with pebbles and rubbish.
Everything fit to drink which had been brought with them had been
consumed at Dophkah, and the exhausted spring at the mines had afforded
no water to fill the skins. Thirst not only parched their palates but
began to fever their bowels. Their dry throats refused to receive the
solid food of which there was no lack. Scenes that could not fail to
rouse both ruth and anger were seen and heard on all sides.
Here men and women raved and swore, wailed and moaned, yonder they gave
themselves up to dull despair. Others, whose crying children shrieked for
water, had gone to the choked spring and were quarrelling around a little
spot on the ground, whence they hoped to collect a few drops of the
precious fluid in a shallow dish. The cattle, too, lowed so mournfully
and beseechingly that it pierced the shepherds' hearts like a reproach.
Few took the trouble to pitch a tent. The night was so warm, and the
sooner they pressed forward the better, for Moses had promised to join
them a few leagues hence. He alone could aid, it was his duty to protect
man and beast from perishing.
If the God who had promised them such splendid gifts left them to die in
the wilderness with their cattle, the man to whose guidance they had
committed themselves was a cheat; and the God whose might and mercy he
never ceased extolling was more false and powerless than the idols with
heads of human beings and animals, to whom they had prayed in Egypt.
Threats, too, were loudly uttered amid curses and blasphemies. Wherever
Aaron, who had returned to the people, appeared and addressed them,
clenched fists were stretched toward him.
Miriam, too, by her husband's bidding, was compelled to desist from
comforting the women with soothing words, after a mother whose infant was
expiring at her dry breast, picked up a stone and others followed her
example.
Old Nun and his son found more attentive hearers. Both agreed that Joshua
must fight, no matter in what position Moses placed him; but Hur himself
led him to the warriors, who joyously greeted him.
Both the old man and the younger one understood how to infuse confidence.
They told them of the well-watered oasis of the Amalekites, which was not
far distant, and pointed to the weapons in their hands, with which the
Lord Himself had furnished them. Joshua assured them that they greatly
outnumbered the warriors of the desert tribe. If the young men bore
themselves as bravely as they had done at the copper mines and at
Dophkah, with God's aid the victory would be theirs.
After midnight Joshua, having taken counsel with the elders, ordered the
trumpets which summoned the fighting-men to be sounded. Under the bright
starry sky he reviewed them, divided them into bands, gave to each a
fitting leader, and impressed upon them the importance of the orders they
were to obey.
They had assembled torpidly, half dead with thirst, but the new
occupation to which their sturdy commander urged them, the hope of
victory, and the great value of the prize: a piece of land at the foot of
the sacred mountain, rich in springs and palm-trees, wonderfully
strengthened their lost energy.
Ephraim was among them animating others by his tireless vigor. But when
the ex-chief of the Egyptians--whom the Lord had already convinced that
He considered him worthy of the aid his name promised--adjured them to
rely on God's omnipotence, his words produced a very different effect
from those uttered by Aaron whose monitions they had heard daily since
their departure.
When Joshua had spoken, many youthful lips, though parched with thirst,
shouted enthusiastically:
"Hail to the chief! You are our captain; we will obey no other."
But he now explained gravely and resolutely that the obedience he exacted
from them he intended to practise rigidly himself. He would willingly
take the last place in the ranks, if such was the command of Moses.
The stars were still shining brightly in a cloudless sky when the sound
of the horns warned the people to set out on their march. Meanwhile the
vanguard had been sent forward to inform Moses of the condition of the
tribes, and after the review was over, Ephraim followed them.
During the march Joshua kept the warriors together as closely as though
an attack might be expected; profiting meanwhile by every moment to give
the men and their captains instructions for the coming battle, to inspect
them, and range their ranks in closer order. Thus he kept them and their
attention on the alert till the stars paled.
Opposition or complaint was rare among the warriors, but the murmurs,
curses, and threats grew all the louder among those who bore no weapons.
Even before the grey dawn of morning the thirsting men, whose knees
trembled with weakness, and who beheld close before their eyes the
suffering of their wives and children, shouted more and more frequently:
"On to Moses! We'll stone him when we find him!"
Many, with loud imprecations and flashing eyes, picked up bits of rock
along the road, and the fury of the multitude at last expressed itself so
fiercely and passionately that Hur took counsel with the well-disposed
among the elders, and then hurried forward with the fighting-men of Judah
to protect Moses, in case of extremity, from the rebels by force of arms.
Joshua was commissioned to detain the bands of rioters who, amid threats
and curses, were striving to force their way past the warriors.
When the sun at last rose with dazzling splendor, the march had become a
pitiful creeping and tottering onward. Even the soldiers moved as though
they were paralysed. Only when the rebels tried to press onward, they did
their duty and forced them back with swords and lances.
On both sides of the valley through which the Hebrews were passing
towered lofty cliffs of grey granite, which glittered and flashed
marvellously when the slanting sunbeams struck the bits of quartz thickly
imbedded in the primeval rock.
At noon the heat could not fail to be scorching again between the bare
precipices which in many places jutted very near one another; but the
coolness of the morning still lingered. The cattle at least found some
refreshment; for many a bush of the juicy, fragrant betharan--[Cantolina
fragrantissima]--afforded them food, and the shepherd-lads lifted their
short frocks, filled the aprons thus made with them and, spite of their
own exhaustion, held them up to the hungry mouths of the animals.
They had passed an hour in this way, when a loud shout of joy suddenly
rang out, passing from the vanguard through rank after rank till it
reached the last roan in the rear.
No one had heard in words to what event it was due, yet every one knew
that it meant nothing else than the discovery of fresh water.
Ephraim now returned to confirm the glad tidings, and what an effect it
produced upon the discouraged hearts!
They straightened their bent figures and struggled onward with redoubled
speed, as if they had already drained the water jar in long draughts. The
bands of fighting-men put no farther obstacles in their way, and joyously
greeted those who crowded past them.
But the swiftly flowing throng was soon dammed; for the spot which
afforded refreshment detained the front ranks, which blocked the whole
procession as thoroughly as a wall or moat.
The multitude became a mighty mob that filled the valley. At last men and
women, with joyous faces, appeared bearing full jars and pails in their
hands and on their heads, beckoning gaily to their friends, shouting
words of cheer, and trying to force their way through the crowd to their
relatives; but many had the precious liquid torn from them by force ere
they reached their destination.
Joshua and his band had forced their way to the vicinity of the spring,
to maintain order among the greedy drawers of water. But they were
obliged to have patience for a time, for the strong men of the tribe of
Judah, with whom Hur had led the way in advance of all the rest, were
still swinging their axes and straining at the levers hastily prepared
from the trunks of the thorny acacias to move huge blocks out of the way
and widen the passage to the flow of water that was gushing from several
clefts in the rock.
At first the spring had lost itself in a heap of moss-covered granite
blocks and afterwards in the earth; but now the overflow and trickling
away of the precious fluid had been stopped and a reservoir formed whence
the cattle also could drink.
Whoever had already succeeded in filling a jar had obtained the water
from the overflow which had escaped through the quickly-made dam. Now the
men appointed to guard the camp were keeping every one back to give the
water in the large new reservoir into which it flowed in surprising
abundance, time to grow clear.
In the presence of the gift of God for which they had so passionately
shouted, it was easy to be patient. They had discovered the treasure and
only needed to preserve it. No word of discontent, murmuring, or reviling
was heard; nay, many looked with shame and humiliation at the new gift of
the Most High.
Loud, gladsome shouts and words echoed from the distance; but the man of
God, who knew better than any one else, the valleys and rocks, pastures
and springs of the Horeb region and had again obtained so great a
blessing for the people, had retired into a neighboring ravine; he was
seeking refuge from the thanks and greetings which rose with increasing
enthusiasm from ever widening circles, and above all peace and calmness
for his own deeply agitated soul.
Soon fervent hymns of praise to the Lord sounded from the midst of the
refreshed, reinvigorated bands overflowing with ardent gratitude, who had
never encamped richer in hope and joyous confidence.
Songs, merry laughter, jests, and glad shouts accompanied the pitching of
every tent, and the camp sprung up as quickly as if it had been conjured
from the earth by some magic spell.
The eyes of the young men sparkled with eagerness for the fray, and many
a head of cattle was slaughtered to make the meal a festal banquet.
Mothers who had done their duty in the camp, leading their children by
the hand went to the spring and showed them the spot where Moses' staff
had pointed out to his people the water gushing from the clefts in the
granite. Many men also stood with hands and eyes uplifted around the
place where Jehovah had shown Himself so merciful to His people; among
them many a rebel who had stooped for the bit of rock with which he meant
to stone the trusted servant of God. No one doubted that a new and great
miracle had been performed.
Old people enjoined the young never to forget this day and this drink,
and a grandmother sprinkled her grandchildren's brows at the edge of the
spring with water to secure for them divine protection throughout their
future lives.
Hope, gratitude, and warm confidence reigned wherever the gaze was
turned, even fear of the warlike sons of Amalek had vanished; for what
evil could befall those who trusted to the favor of such an Omnipotent
Defender.
One tent alone, the stateliest of all, that of the prince of the tribe of
Judah, did not share the joy of the others.
Miriam sat alone among her women, after having silently served the meal
to the men who were overflowing with grateful enthusiasm; she had learned
from Reuben, Milcah's husband, that Moses had given to Joshua in the
presence of all the elders, the office of commander-in-chief. Hur, her
husband, she had heard farther, had joyfully yielded the guidance of the
warriors to the son of Nun.
This time the prophetess had held aloof from the people's hymns of
praise. When Milcah and her women had urged her to accompany them to the
spring, she had commanded the petitioners to go alone. She was expecting
her husband and wished to greet him alone; she must show him that she
desired his forgiveness. But he did not return home; for after the
council of the elders had separated, he helped the new commander to
marshal the soldiers and did so as an assistant, subordinate to Hosea,
who owed to her his summons and the name of Joshua.
Her servants, who had returned, were now drawing threads from the
distaff: but this humble toil was distasteful to her, and while she let
her hands rest and gazed idly into vacancy, the hours dragged slowly
along, while she felt her resolution of meekly approaching her husband
become weaker and weaker. She longed to pray for strength to bow before
the man who was her lord and master; but the prophetess, who was
accustomed to fervent pleading, could not find inspiration. Whenever she
succeeded in collecting her thoughts and uplifting her heart, she was
disturbed. Each fresh report that reached her from the camp increased her
displeasure. When evening at last closed in, a messenger arrived and told
her not to prepare the supper which, however, had long stood ready. Hur,
his son, and grandson had accepted the invitation of Nun and Joshua.
It was a hard task for her to restrain her tears. But had she permitted
them to flow uncontrolled, they would have been those of wrath and
insulted womanly dignity, not of grief and longing.
During the hours of the evening watch soldiers marched past, and from
troop after troop cheers for Joshua reached her.
Even when the words "strong and steadfast!" were heard, they recalled the
man who had once been dear to her, and whom now--she freely admitted
it--she hated. The men of his own tribe only had honored her husband with
a cheer. Was this fitting gratitude for the generosity with which he had
divested himself, for the sake of the younger man, of a dignity that
belonged to him alone? To see her husband thus slighted pierced her to
the heart and caused her more pain than Hur's leaving her, his
newly-wedded wife, to solitude.
The supper before the tent of the Ephraimites lasted a long time. Miriam
sent her women to rest before midnight, and lay down to await Hur's
return and to confess to him all that had wounded and angered her,
everything for which she longed.
She thought it would be an easy matter to keep awake while suffering such
mental anguish. But the great fatigues and excitements of the last few
days asserted their rights, and in the midst of a prayer for humility and
her husband's love sleep overpowered her. At last, at the time of the
first morning watch, just as day was dawning, the sound of trumpets
announcing peril close at hand, startled her from sleep.
She rose hurriedly and glancing at her husband's couch found it empty.
But it had been used, and on the sandy soil--for mats had been spread
only in the living room of the tent--she saw close beside her own bed the
prints of Hur's footsteps.
So he had stood close by it and perhaps, while she was sleeping, gazed
yearningly into her face.
Ay, this had really happened; her old female slave told her so unasked.
After she had roused Hur, she had seen him hold the light cautiously so
that it illumined Miriam's face and then stoop over her a long time as if
to kiss her.
This was good news, and so rejoiced the solitary woman that she forgot
the formality which was peculiar to her and pressed her lips to the
wrinkled brow of the crooked little crone who had served her parents.
Then she had her hair arranged, donned the light-blue festal robe Hur had
given her, and hurried out to bid him farewell.
Meanwhile the troops had formed in battle array.
The tents were being struck and for a long time Miriam vainly sought her
husband. At last she found him; but he was engaged in earnest
conversation with Joshua, and when she saw the latter a chill ran through
the prophetess' blood, and she could not bring herself to approach the
men.
CHAPTER XXVII.
A severe struggle was impending; for as the spies reported, the
Amalekites had been joined by other desert tribes. Nevertheless the
Hebrew troops were twice their number. But how greatly inferior in
warlike skill were Joshua's bands to the foes habituated to battle and
attack.
The enemy was advancing from the south, from the oasis at the foot of the
sacred mountain, which was the ancient home of their race, their
supporter, the fair object of their love, their all, well worthy that
they should shed their last drop of blood in her defence.
Joshua, now recognized by Moses and the whole Hebrew people as the
commander of the fighting-men, led his new-formed troops to the widest
portion of the valley, which permitted him to derive more advantage from
the superior number of his force.
He ordered the camp to be broken up and again pitched in a narrower spot
on the plain of Rephidim at the northern end of the battle-field, where
it would be easier to defend the tents. The command of this camp and the
soldiers left for its protection he confided to his cautious father.
He had wished to leave Moses and the older princes of the tribes within
the precincts of the well-guarded camp, but the great leader of the
people had anticipated him and, with Hur and Aaron, had climbed a granite
cliff from whose lofty summit the battle could be witnessed. So the
combatants saw Moses and his two companions on the peak dominating the
valley, and knew that the trusted servant of the Most High would not
cease to commend their cause to Him and pray for their success and
deliverance.
But every private soldier in the army, every woman and old man in the
camp knew how to find the God of their fathers in this hour of peril, and
the war-cry Joshua had chosen: "Jehovah our standard!" bound the hearts
of the warriors to the Ruler of Battles, and reminded the most despairing
and untrained Hebrew that he could take no step and deal no blow which
the Lord did not guide.
The trumpets and horns of the Hebrews sounded louder and louder; for the
Amalekites were pressing into the plain which was to be the scene of the
battle.
It was a strange place of conflict, which the experienced soldier would
never have selected voluntarily; for it was enclosed on both sides by
lofty, steep, grey granite cliffs. If the enemy conquered, the camp would
be lost, and the aids the art of war afforded must be used within the
smallest conceivable space.
To make a circuit round the foe or attack him unexpectedly in the flank
seemed impossible; but the rocks themselves were made to serve Joshua;
for he had commanded his skilful slingers and trained archers to climb
the precipices to a moderate height and wait for the signal when they
were to mingle in the battle.
At the first glance Joshua perceived that he had not overestimated the
foe; for those who began the fray were bearded men with bronzed, keen,
manly features, whose black eyes blazed with the zest of battle and
fierce hatred of the enemy.
Like their grey-haired, scarred leader, all were slenderly formed and
lithe of limb. They swung, like trained warriors, the brazen
sickle-shaped sword, the curved shield of heavy wood, or the lance decked
below its point with a bunch of camel's hair. The war-cry rang loud,
fierce, and defiant, from the steadfast breasts of these sons of the
desert, who must either conquer or lose their dearest possession.
The first assault was met by Joshua at the head of men, whom he had armed
with the heavy shields and lances of the Egyptians; incited by their
brave leader they resisted a long time--while the narrow entrance to the
battle field prevented the savage foe from using his full strength.
But when the foe on foot retreated, and a band of warriors mounted on
swift dromedaries dashed upon the Hebrews many were terrified by the
strange aspect of the huge unwieldy beasts, known to them only by report.
With loud outcries they flung down their shields and fled. Wherever a gap
appeared in the ranks the rider of a dromedary urged it in, striking
downward with his long keen weapon at the foe. The shepherds, unused to
such assaults, thought only of securing their own safety, and many turned
to fly; for sudden terror seized them as they beheld the flaming eyes or
heard the shrill, fierce shriek of one of the infuriated Amalekite women,
who had entered the battle to fire the courage of their husbands and
terrify the foe. Clinging with the left hand to leather thongs that hung
from the saddles, they allowed themselves to be dragged along by the
hump-backed beasts wherever they were guided. Hatred seemed to have
steeled the weak women's hearts against the fear of death, pity, and
feminine dread; and the furious yells of these Megaerae destroyed the
courage of many of the braver Hebrews.
But scarcely did Joshua see his men yield than, profiting by the
disaster, he commanded them to retreat still farther and give the foe
admittance to the valley; for he told himself that he could turn the
superior number of his forces to better account as soon as it was
possible to press the enemy in front and on both sides at the same time,
and allow the slingers and bowmen to take part in the fray.
Ephraim and his bravest comrades, who surrounded him as messengers, were
now despatched to the northern end of the valley to inform the captains
of the troops stationed there of Joshua's intention and command them to
advance.
The swift-footed shepherd lads darted off as nimbly as gazelles, and it
was soon evident that the commander had adopted the right course for, as
soon as the Amalekites reached the center of the valley, they were
attacked on all sides, and many who boldly rushed forward fell on the
sand while still waving sword or lance, struck by the round stones or
keen arrows discharged by the slingers and archers stationed on the
cliffs.
Meanwhile Moses, with Aaron and Hur, remained on the cliff overlooking
the battle-field.
Thence the former watched the conflict in which, grown grey in the arts
of peace, he shared only with his heart and soul.
No movement, no uplifted or lowered sword of friend or foe escaped his
watchful gaze; but when the attack began and the commander, with wise
purpose, left the way to the heart of his army open to the enemy, Hur
exclaimed to the grey-haired man of God:
"The lofty intellect of my wife and your sister perceived the right
course. The son of Nun is unworthy of the summons of the Most High. What
strategy! Our force is superior, yet the foe is pressing unimpeded into
the midst of the army. Our troops are dividing as the waters of the Red
Sea parted at God's command, and apparently by their leader's order."
"To swallow up the Amalekites as the waves of the sea engulfed the
Egyptians," was Moses' answer. Then, stretching his arms toward heaven,
he cried: "Look down, Jehovah, upon Thy people who are in fresh need.
Steel the arm and sharpen the eyes of him whom Thou didst choose for Thy
sword! Lend him the help Thou didst promise, when Thou didst name him
Joshua! And if it is no longer Thy will that he who shows himself strong
and steadfast, as beseems Thy captain, should lead our forces to the
battle, place Thyself, with the hosts of Heaven, at the head of Thy
people, that they may crush their foes."
Thus the man of God prayed with arms uplifted, never ceasing to beseech
and appeal to God, whose lofty will guided his own, and soon Aaron
whispered that their foes were sore beset and the Hebrews' courage was
showing itself in magnificent guise.
Joshua was now here, now there, and the ranks of the enemy were already
thinning, while the numbers of the Hebrews seemed increasing.
Hur confirmed these words, adding that the tireless zeal and heroic scorn
of death displayed by the son of Nun could not be denied. He had just
felled one of the fiercest Amalekites with his battle-axe.
Then Moses uttered a sigh of relief, let his arms fall, and eagerly
watched the farther progress of the battle, which was surging, raging and
roaring beneath him.
Meanwhile the sun had reached its zenith and shone with scorching fire
upon the combatants. The grey granite walls of the valley exhaled fiercer
and fiercer heat and drops of perspiration had long been pouring from the
burning brows of the three men on the cliff. How the noon-tide heat must
burden those who were fighting and struggling below; how the bleeding
wounds of those who had fallen in the dust must burn!
Moses felt all this as if he were himself compelled to endure it; for his
immovably steadfast soul was rich in compassion, and he had taken into
his heart, as a father does his child, the people of his own blood for
whom he lived and labored, prayed and planned.
The wounds of the Hebrews pained him, yet his heart throbbed with joyous
pride, when he beheld how those whose cowardly submission had so
powerfully stirred his wrath a short time before, had learned to act on
the defensive and offensive; and saw one youthful band after another
shouting: "Jehovah our standard!" rush upon the enemy.
In Joshua's proud, heroic figure he beheld the descendants of his people
as he had imagined and desired them, and now he no longer doubted that
the Lord Himself had summoned the son of Nun to the chief command. His
eye had rarely beamed as brightly as in this hour.
But what was that?
A cry of alarm escaped the lips of Aaron, and Hur rose and gazed
northward in anxious suspense for thence, where the tents of the people
stood, fresh war-cries rose, blended with loud, piteous shrieks which
seemed to be uttered, not only by men, but by women and children.
The camp had been attacked.
Long before the commencement of the battle a band of Amalekites had
separated from the others and made their way to it through a path in the
mountains with which they were familiar.
Hur thought of his young wife, while before Aaron's mind rose Elisheba,
his faithful spouse, his children and grandchildren; and both, with
imploring eyes, mutely entreated Moses to dismiss them to hasten to aid
their dear ones; but the stern leader refused and detained them.
Then, drawing his figure to its full height, Moses again raised his hands
and eyes to Heaven, appealing to the Most High with fervent warmth, and
never ceasing in his prayers, which became more and more ardent as time
passed on, for the vantage gained by the soldiers seemed lost. Each new
glance at the battle-field, everything his companions told him, while his
soul, dwelling with the Lord, had rendered him blind to the scene at his
feet, increased the burden of his anxieties.
Joshua, at the head of a strong detachment, had retreated from the
battle, accompanied by Bezaleel, Hur's grandson, Aholiab, his most
beloved comrade, the youthful Ephraim, and Reuben, Milcah's husband.
Hur's eyes had followed them, while his heart was full of blessings; for
they had evidently quitted the battle to save the camp. With straining
ears he listened to the sounds from the north, as if suspecting how
nearly he was affected by the broken cries and moans borne by the wind
from the tents.
Old Nun had defended himself against the Amalekite troop that assailed
the camp, and fought valiantly; but when he perceived that the men whom
Joshua had placed under his command could no longer hold out against the
attack of the enemy, he sent to ask for aid; Joshua instantly entrusted
the farther guidance of the battle to the second head of the tribe of
Judah, Naashon, and Uri the son of Hur, who had distinguished himself by
courage and discretion and hastened, with other picked men, to his
father's relief.
He had not lost a moment, yet the conflict was decided when he appeared
on the scene of action; for when he approached the camp the Amalekites
had already broken through his father's troops, cut it off from them, and
rushed in.
Joshua first saved the brave old man from the foe; then the next thing
was to drive the sons of the desert from the tents and, in so doing,
there was a fierce hand to hand struggle of man against man, and as he
himself could be in only one place he was forced to leave the young men
to shift for themselves.
Here, too, he raised the war-cry: "Jehovah our standard!" and rushed upon
the tent of Hur,--which the enemy had seized first and where the battle
raged most fiercely.
Many, corpses already strewed the ground at its entrance, and furious
Amalekites were still struggling with a band of Hebrews; but wild shrieks
of terror rang from within its walls.
Joshua dashed across the threshold as if his feet were winged and beheld
a scene which filled even the fearless man with horror; for at the left
of the spacious floor Hebrews and Amalekites rolled fighting on the
blood-stained mats, while at the right he saw Miriam and several of her
women whose hands had been bound by the foe.
The men had desired to bear them away as a costly prize; but an Amalekite
woman, frantic with rage and jealousy and thirsting for revenge, wished
to devote the foreign women to a fiery death; fanning the embers upon the
hearth she had brought them, with the help of the veil torn from Miriam's
head, to a bright blaze.
A terrible uproar filled the spacious enclosure, when Joshua sprang into
the tent.
Here furious men were fighting, yonder the female servants of the
prophetess were shrieking loudly or, as they saw the approaching warrior,
screaming for help and rescue.
Their mistress, deadly pale, knelt before the hostile chief whose wife
had threatened her with death by fire. She gazed at her preserver as if
she beheld a ghost that had just risen from the earth and what now
happened remained imprinted on Miriam's memory as a series of bloody,
horrible, disconnected, yet superb visions.
In the first place the Amalekite chieftain who had bound her was a
strangely heroic figure.
The bronzed warrior, with his bold hooked nose, black beard, and fiery
eyes, looked like an eagle of his own mountains. But another was soon to
cope with him, and that other the man who had been dear to her heart.
She had often compared him to a lion, but never had he seemed more akin
to the king of the wilderness.
Both were mighty and terrible men. No one could have predicted which
would be the victor and which the vanquished; but she was permitted to
watch their conflict, and already the hot-blooded son of the desert had
raised his war-cry and rushed upon the more prudent Hebrew.
Every child knows that life cannot continue if the heart ceases to throb
for a minute; yet Miriam felt that her own stood still as if benumbed and
turned to stone, when the lion was in danger of succumbing to the eagle,
and when the latter's glittering knife flashed, and she saw the blood
gushing from the other's shoulder.
But the frozen heart had now begun to beat again, nay it pulsed faster
than ever; for suddenly the leonine warrior, toward whom she had just
felt such bitter hatred, had again become, as if by a miracle, the friend
of her youth. With blast of trumpets and clash of cymbals love had again
set forth to enter, with triumphant joy, the soul which had of late been
so desolate, so impoverished. All that separated her from him was
suddenly forgotten and buried, and never was a more fervent appeal
addressed to the Most High than during the brief prayer for him which
rose from her heart at that moment. And the swiftness with which the
petition was granted equalled its ardor; for the eagle had fallen and
lowered its pinions beneath the superior might of the lion.
Then darkness veiled Miriam's eyes and she felt as if in a dream Ephraim
sever the ropes around her wrists.
Soon after she regained her full consciousness, and now beheld at her
feet the bleeding form of the conquered chieftain; while on the other
side of the tent the floor was strewed with dead and wounded men, Hebrews
and Amalekites, among them many of her husband's slaves. But beside the
fallen men stood erect, and exulting in victory, the stalwart warriors of
her people, among them the venerable form of Nun, and Joshua, whose
father was binding up his wounds.
To do this she felt was her duty and hers only, and a deep sense of
shame, a burning grief took possession of her as she remembered how she
had sinned against this man.
She knew not how she who had caused him such deep suffering could atone
for it, how she could repay what she owed him.
Her whole heart was overflowing with longing for one kind word from his
mouth, and she approached him on her knees across the blood-stained
floor; but the lips of the prophetess, usually so eloquent, seemed
paralyzed and could not find the right language till at last from her
burdened breast the cry escaped in loud imploring accents:
"Joshua, oh, Joshua! I have sinned heavily against you and will atone for
it all my life; but do not disdain my gratitude! Do not cast it from you
and, if you can, forgive me."
She had been unable to say more; then--never would she forget it--burning
tears had gushed from her eyes and he had raised her from the floor with
irresistible strength, yet as gently as a mother touches her fallen
child, and from his lips mild, gentle words, full of forgiveness, echoed
in her ears. The very touch of his right hand had assured her that he was
no longer angry.
She still felt the pressure of his hand, and heard his assurance that
from no lips would he more gladly hear the name of Joshua than from hers.
With the war-cry "Jehovah our standard!" he at last turned his back upon
her; for a long time its clear tones and the enthusiastic shouts of his
soldiers echoed in her ears.
Finally everything around her had lapsed into silence and she only knew
that never had she shed such bitter, burning tears as in this hour. And
she made two solemn vows in the presence of the God who had summoned her
to be His prophetess. Meanwhile both the men whom they concerned were
surrounded by the tumult of battle.
One had again led his troops from the rescued camp against the foe; the
other was watching with the leader of the people the surging to and fro
of the ever-increasing fury of the conflict.
Joshua found his people in sore stress. Here they were yielding, yonder
they were still feebly resisting the onslaught of the sons of the desert;
but Hur gazed with increasing and redoubled anxiety at the progress of
the battle; for in the camp he beheld wife and grandson, and below his
son, in mortal peril.
His paternal heart ached as he saw Uri retreat, then as he pressed
forward again and repelled the foe by a well-directed assault, it
throbbed joyously, and he would gladly have shouted words of praise.
But whose ear would have been sharp enough to distinguish the voice of a
single man amid the clash of arms and war-cries, the shrieks of women,
the wails of the wounded, the discordant grunting of the camels, the
blasts of horns and trumpets mingling below?
Now the foremost band of the Amalekites had forced itself like a wedge
into the rear ranks of the Hebrews.
If the former succeeded in opening a way for those behind and joined the
division which was attacking the camp, the battle was lost, and the
destruction of the people sealed; for a body of Amalekites who had not
mingled in the fray were still stationed at the southern entrance of the
valley, apparently for the purpose of defending the oasis against the foe
in case of need.
A fresh surprise followed.
The sons of the desert had fought their way forward so far that the
missiles of the slingers and bowmen could scarcely reach them. If these
men were not to be idle, it was needful that they should be summoned to
the battle-field.
Hur had long since shouted to Uri to remember them and use their aid
again; but now the figure of a youth suddenly appeared approaching from
the direction of the camp as nimbly as a mountain goat, by climbing and
leaping from one rock to another.
As soon as he reached the first ones he spoke to them, and made signs to
the next, who passed the message on, and at last they all climbed down
into the valley, scaled the western cliff to the height of several men,
and suddenly vanished as though the rock had swallowed them.
The youth whom the slingers and archers had followed was Ephraim.
A black shadow on the cliff where he had disappeared with the others must
be the opening of a ravine, through which they were doubtless to be
guided to the men who had followed Joshua to the succor of the camp.
Such was the belief, not only of Hur but of Aaron, and the former again
began to doubt Joshua's fitness for the Lord's call; for what benefited
those in the tents weakened the army whose command devolved upon his son
Uri and his associate in office Naashon. The battle around the camp had
already lasted for hours and Moses had not ceased to pray with hands
uplifted toward heaven, when the Amalekites succeeded in gaining a
considerable vantage.
Then the leader of the Hebrews summoned his strength for a new and more
earnest appeal to the Most High; but the exhausted man's knees tottered
and his wearied arms fell. But his soul had retained its energy, his
heart the desire not to cease pleading to the Ruler of Battles.
Moses was unwilling to remain inactive during this conflict and his
weapon was prayer.
Like a child who will not cease urging its mother until she grants what
it unselfishly beseeches for its brothers and sisters, he clung imploring
to the Omnipotent One, who had hitherto proved Himself a father to him
and to his people and wonderfully preserved them from the greatest
perils.
But his physical strength was exhausted, so he summoned his companions
who pushed forward a rock on which he seated himself, in order to assail
the heart of the Most High with fresh prayers.
There he sat and though his wearied limbs refused their service, his soul
was obedient and rose with all its fire to the Ruler of the destinies of
men.
But his arms grew more and more paralysed, and at last fell as if
weighted with lead; for years it had become a necessity to him to stretch
them heavenward when he appealed with all his fervor to God on high.
This his companions knew, and they fancied they perceived that whenever
the great leader's hands fell the sons of Amalek gained a fresh
advantage.
Therefore they eagerly supported his arms, one at the right side, the
other at the left, and though the mighty man could no longer lift his
voice in intelligible words, though his giant frame reeled to and fro,
and though more than once it seemed to him as if the stone which
supported him, the valley and the whole earth rocked, still his hands and
eyes remained uplifted. Not a moment did he cease to call upon the Most
High till suddenly loud shouts of victory, which echoed clearly from the
rocky sides of the valley, rose from the direction of the camp.
Joshua had again appeared on the battle-field and, at the head of his
warriors, rushed with resistless energy upon the foe.
The battle now assumed a new aspect.
The result was still uncertain, and Moses could not cease uplifting his
heart and arms to heaven, but at last, at last this long final struggle
came to an end. The ranks of the Amalekites wavered and finally,
scattered and disheartened, dashed toward the southern entrance of the
valley whence they had come.
There also cries were heard and from a thousand lips rang the glad shout:
"Jehovah our standard! Victory!" and again "Victory!"
Then the man of God removed his arms from the supporting shoulders of his
companions, swung them aloft freely and with renewed and wonderfully
invigorated strength shouted:
"I thank Thee, my God and my Lord! Jehovah our standard! The people are
saved!"
Then darkness veiled the eyes of the exhausted man. But a little later he
again opened them and saw Ephraim, with the slingers and bowmen, attack
the body of Amalekites at the southern entrance of the valley, while
Joshua drove the main army of the sons of the desert toward their
retreating comrades.
Joshua had heard through some captives of a ravine which enabled good
climbers to reach a defile which led to the southern end of the
battle-field; and Ephraim, obedient to his command, had gone with the
slingers and bowmen along this difficult path to assail in the rear the
last band of foemen who were still capable of offering resistance.
Pressed, harassed from two sides, and disheartened, the sons of Amalek
gave up the conflict and now the Hebrews beheld how these sons of the
desert, who had grown up in this mountain region, understood how to use
their feet; for at a sign from their leader they spurred the dromedaries
and flew away like leaves blown by the wind. Rough mountain heights which
seemed inaccessible to human beings they scaled on their hands and feet
like nimble lizards; many others escaped through the ravine which the
captured slaves had betrayed to Joshua.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
The larger portion of the Amalekites had perished or lay wounded on the
battle-field. Joshua knew that the other desert tribes, according to
their custom, would abandon their defeated companions and return to their
own homes.
Yet it seemed probable that despair would give the routed warriors
courage not to let their oasis fall into the hands of the Hebrews without
striking a blow.
But Joshua's warriors were too much exhausted for it to be possible to
lead them onward at once.
He himself was bleeding from several slight wounds, and the exertions of
the last few days were making themselves felt even on his hardened frame.
Besides the sun, which when the battle began had just risen, was already
sinking to rest and should it prove necessary to force an entrance into
the oasis it was not advisable to fight in darkness.
What he and still more his brave warriors needed was rest until the grey
dawn of early morning.
He saw around him only glad faces, radiant with proud self-reliance, and
as he commanded the troops to disband, in order to celebrate the victory
in the camp with their relatives, each body that filed slowly and wearily
past him burst into cheers as fresh and resonant as though they had
forgotten the exhaustion which so short a time before had bowed every
head and burdened every foot.
"Hail to Joshua! Hail to the victor!" still echoed from the cliffs after
the last band had disappeared from his gaze. But far more distinctly the
words with which Moses had thanked him rang in his soul. They were:
"Thou bast proved thyself a true sword of the Most High, strong and
steadfast. So long as the Lord is thy help and Jehovah is our standard,
we need fear no foes."
He fancied he still felt on his brow and hair the kiss of the mighty man
of God who had clasped him to his breast in the presence of all the
people, and it was no small thing to master the excitement which the
close of this momentous day awakened in him.
A strong desire to regain perfect self-possession ere he again mingled in
the jubilant throng and met his father, who shared every lofty emotion
that stirred his own soul, detained him on the battle-field.
It was a scene where dread and horror reigned; for all save himself who
lingered there were held by death or severe wounds.
The ravens which had followed the wanderers hovered above the corpses and
already ventured to swoop nearer to the richly-spread banquet. The scent
of blood had lured the beasts of prey from the mountains and dens in the
rocks and their roaring and greedy growling were heard in all directions.
As darkness followed dusk lights began to flit over the blood-soaked
ground. These were to aid the slaves and those who missed a relative to
distinguish friend from foe, the wounded from the dead; and many a groan
from the breast of some sorely-wounded man mingled with the croaking of
the sable birds, and the howls of the hungry jackals and hyenas, foxes
and panthers.
But Joshua was familiar with the horrors of the battle-field and did not
heed them.
Leaning against a rock, he saw the same stars rise which had shone upon
him before the tent in the camp at Tanis, when in the sorest conflict
with himself he confronted the most difficult decision of his life.
A month had passed since then, yet that brief span of time had witnessed
an unprecedented transformation of his whole inner and outward life.
What had seemed to him grand, lofty, and worthy of the exertion of all
his strength on that night when he sat before the tent where lay the
delirious Ephraim, to-day lay far behind him as idle and worthless.
He no longer cared for the honors, dignities and riches which the will of
the whimsical, weak king of a foreign people could bestow upon him. What
to him was the well-ordered and disciplined army, among whose leaders be
had numbered himself with such joyous pride?
He could scarcely realize that there had been a time when he aspired to
nothing higher than to command more and still more thousands of
Egyptians, when his heart had swelled at the bestowal of a new title or
glittering badge of honor by those whom he held most unworthy of his
esteem.
From the Egyptians he had expected everything, from his own people
nothing.
That very night before his tent the great mass of the men of his own
blood had been repulsive to him as pitiful slaves languishing in
dishonorable, servile toil. Even the better classes he had arrogantly
patronized; for they were but shepherds and as such contemptible to the
Egyptians, whose opinions he shared.
His own father was also the owner of herds and, though he held him in
high esteem, it was in spite of his position and only because his whole
character commanded reverence; because the superb old man's fiery vigor
won love from every one, and above all from him, his grateful son.
He had never ceased to gladly acknowledge his kinship to him, but in
other respects he had striven to so bear himself among his
brothers-in-arms that they should forget his origin and regard him in
everything as one of themselves. His ancestress Asenath, the wife of
Joseph, had been an Egyptian and he had boasted of the fact.
And now,--to-day?
He would have made any one feel the weight of his wrath who reproached
him with being an Egyptian; and what at the last new moon he would only
too willingly have cast aside and concealed, as though it were a
disgrace, made him on the night of the next new moon whose stars were
just beginning to shine, raise his head with joyous pride.
What a lofty emotion it was to feel himself with just complacency the man
he really was!
His life and deeds as an Egyptian chief now seemed like a perpetual lie,
a constant desertion of his ideal.
His truthful nature exulted in the consciousness that the base denial and
concealment of his birth was at an end.
With joyous gratitude he felt that he was one of the people whom the Most
High preferred to all others, that he belonged to a community, whose
humblest members, nay even the children, could raise their hands in
prayer to the God whom the loftiest minds among the Egyptians surrounded
with the barriers of secrecy, because they considered their people too
feeble and dull of intellect to stand before His mighty grandeur and
comprehend it.
And this one sole God, before whom all the whole motley world of Egyptian
divinities sank into insignificance, had chosen him, the son of Nun, from
among the thousands of his race to be the champion and defender of His
chosen people and bestowed on him a name that assured him of His aid.
No man, he thought, had ever had a loftier aim than, obedient to his God
and under His protection, to devote his blood and life to the service of
his own people. His black eyes sparkled more brightly and joyously as he
thought of it. His heart seemed too small to contain all the love with
which he wished to make amends to his brothers for his sins against them
in former years.
True, he had lost to another a grand and noble woman whom he had hoped to
make his own; but this did not in the least sadden the joyous enthusiasm
of his soul; for he had long ceased to desire her as his wife, high as
her image still stood in his mind. He now thought of her with quiet
gratitude only; for he willingly admitted that his new life had begun on
the decisive night when Miriam set him the example of sacrificing
everything, even the dearest object of love, to God and the people.
Miriam's sins against him were effaced from his memory; for he was wont
to forget what he had forgiven. Now he felt only the grandeur of what he
owed her. Like a magnificent tree, towering skyward on the frontier of
two hostile countries, she stood between his past and his present life.
Though love was buried, he and Miriam could never cease to walk hand in
hand over the same road toward the same destination.
As he again surveyed the events of the past, he could truly say that
under his leadership pitiful bondmen had speedily become brave warriors
In the field they had been willing and obedient and, after the victory,
behaved with manliness. And they could not fail to improve with each
fresh success. To-day it seemed to him not only desirable, but quite
possible, to win in battle at their head a land which they could love and
where, in freedom and prosperity, they could become the able men he
desired to make them.
Amid the horrors of the battle-field in the moonless night joy as bright
as day entered his heart and with the low exclamation: "God and my
people!" and a grateful glance upward to the starry firmament he left the
corpse-strewn valley of death like a conqueror walking over palms and
flowers scattered by a grateful people on the path of victory.
CONCLUSION.
There was an active stir in the camp.
Fires surrounded by groups of happy human beings were burning in front of
the tents, and many a beast was slain, here as a thank-offering, yonder
for the festal supper.
Wherever Joshua appeared glad cheers greeted him; but he did not find his
father, for the latter had accepted an invitation from Hur, so it was
before the prince of Judah's tent that the son embraced the old man, who
was radiant with grateful joy.
Ere Joshua sat down Hur beckoned him aside, ordered a slave who had just
killed a calf to divide it into two pieces and pointing to it, said:
"You have accomplished great deeds for the people and for me, son of Nun,
and my life is too short for the gratitude which is your due from my wife
and myself. If you can forget the bitter words which clouded our peace at
Dophkah--and you say you have done so--let us in future keep together
like brothers and stand by each other in joy and grief, in need and
peril. The chief command henceforth belongs to you alone, Joshua, and to
no other, and this is a source of joy to the whole people, above all to
my wife and to me. So if you share my wish to form a brotherhood, walk
with me, according to the custom of our fathers, between the halves of
this slaughtered animal."
Joshua willingly accepted this invitation, and Miriam was the first to
join in the loud acclamations of approval commenced by the grey-haired
Nun. She did so with eager zeal; for it was she who had inspired her
husband, before whom she had humbled herself, and whose love she now once
more possessed, with the idea of inviting Joshua to the alliance both had
now concluded.
This had not been difficult for her; for the two vows she had made after
the son of Nun, whom she now gladly called "Joshua," had saved her from
the hand of the foe were already approaching fulfilment, and she felt
that she had resolved upon them in a happy hour.
The new and pleasant sensation of being a woman, like any other woman,
lent her whole nature a gentleness hitherto foreign to it, and this
retained the love of the husband whose full value she had learned to know
during the sad time in which he had shut his heart against her.
In the self-same hour which made Hur and Joshua brothers, a pair of
faithful lovers who had been sundered by sacred duties were once more
united; for while the friends were still feasting before the tent of Hur,
three of the people asked permission to speak to Nun, their master. These
were the old freedwoman, who had remained in Tanis, her granddaughter
Hogla and Assir, the latter's betrothed husband, from whom the girl had
parted to nurse her grandparents.
Hoary Eliab had soon died, and the grandmother and Hogla--the former on
the old man's ass--had followed the Hebrews amid unspeakable
difficulties.
Nun welcomed the faithful couple with joy and gave Hogla to Assir for his
wife.
So this blood-stained day had brought blessings to many, yet it was to
end with a shrill discord.
While the fires in the camp were burning, loud voices were heard, and
during the whole journey not an evening had passed without strife and
sanguinary quarrels.
Wounds and fatal blows had often been given when an offended man revenged
himself on his enemy, or a dishonest one seized the property of others or
denied the obligations he had sworn to fulfil.
In such cases it had been difficult to restore peace and call the
criminals to account; for the refractory refused to recognize any one as
judge. Whoever felt himself injured banded with others, and strove to
obtain justice by force.
On that festal evening Hur and his guests at first failed to notice the
uproar to which every one was accustomed. But when close at hand, amid
the fiercest yells, a bright glare of light arose, the chiefs began to
fear for the safety of the camp, and rising to put an end to the
disturbance, they became witnesses of a scene which filled some with
wrath and horror, and the others with grief.
The rapture of victory had intoxicated the multitude.
They longed to express their gratitude to the deity, and in vivid
remembrance of the cruel worship of their home, a band of Phoenicians
among the strangers had kindled a huge fire to their Moloch and were in
the act of hurling into the flames several Amalekite captives as the most
welcome sacrifice to their god.
Close beside it the Israelites had erected on a tall wooden pillar a clay
image of the Egyptian god Seth, which one of his Hebrew worshippers had
brought with him to protect himself and his family.
Directly after their return to the camp Aaron had assembled the people to
sing hymns of praise and offer prayers of thanksgiving; but to many the
necessity of beholding, in the old-fashioned way, an image of the god to
whom they were to uplift their souls, had been so strong that the mere
sight of the clay idol had sufficed to bring them to their knees, and
turn them from the true God.
At the sight of the servants of Moloch, who were already binding the
human victims to hurl them into the flames, Joshua was seized with wrath
and, when the deluded men resisted, he ordered the trumpets to be sounded
and with his young men who blindly obeyed him and were by no means
friendly to the strangers, drove them back, without bloodshed, to their
quarters in the camp.
The impressive warnings of old Nun, Hur, and Naashon diverted the Hebrews
from the crime which ingratitude made doubly culpable. Yet many of the
latter found it hard to control themselves when the fiery old man
shattered the idol which was dear to them, and had it not been for the
love cherished for him, his son, and his grandson, and the respect due
his snow-white hair, many a hand would doubtless have been raised against
him.
Moses had retired to a solitary place, as was his wont after every great
danger from which the mercy of the Most High brought deliverance, and
tears filled Miriam's eyes as she thought of the grief which the tidings
of such apostasy and ingratitude would cause her noble brother.
A gloomy shadow had also darkened Joshua's joyous confidence. He lay
sleepless on the mat in his father's tent, reviewing the past.
His warrior-soul was elevated by the thought that a single, omnipotent,
never-erring Power guided the universe and the lives of men and exacted
implicit obedience from the whole creation. Every glance at nature and
life showed him that everything depended upon One infinitely great and
powerful Being, at whose sign all creatures rose, moved, or sank to rest.
To him, the chief of a little army, his God was the highest and most
far-sighted of rulers, the only One, who was always certain of victory.
What a crime it was to offend such a Lord and repay His benefits with
apostasy!
Yet the people had committed before his eyes this heinous sin and, as he
recalled to mind the events which had compelled him to interpose, the
question arose how they were to be protected from the wrath of the Most
High, how the eyes of the dull multitude could be opened to His wonderful
grandeur, which expanded the heart and the soul.
But he found no answer, saw no expedient, when he reflected upon the
lawlessness and rebellion in the camp, which threatened to be fatal to
his people.
He had succeeded in making his soldiers obedient. As soon as the trumpets
summoned them, and he himself in full armor appeared at the head of his
men, they yielded their own obstinate wills to his. Was there then
nothing that could keep them, during peaceful daily life, within the
bounds which in Egypt secured the existence of the meanest and weakest
human beings and protected them from the attacks of those who were bolder
and stronger?
Amid such reflections he remained awake until early morning; when the
stars set, he started up, ordered the trumpets to be sounded, and as on
the preceding days, the new-made troops assembled without opposition and
in full force.
He was soon marching at their head through the narrow, rocky valley, and
after moving silently an hour through the gloom the warriors enjoyed the
refreshing coolness which precedes the young day.
Then the grey light of early dawn glimmered in the east, the sky began to
brighten, and in the glowing splendor of the blushing morning rose
solemnly in giant majesty the form of the sacred mountain.
Close at hand and distinctly visible it towered before the Hebrews with
its brown masses of rock, cliffs, and chasms, while above the seven peaks
of its summit hovered a pair of eagles on whose broad pinions the young
day cast a shimmering golden glow.
A thrill of pious awe made the whole band halt as they had before Alush,
and every man, from the first rank to the last, in mute devotion raised
his hands to pray.
Then they moved on with hearts uplifted, and one shouted joyously to
another as some pretty dark birds flew twittering toward them, a sign of
the neighborhood of fresh water.
They had scarcely marched half an hour longer when they beheld the
bluish-green foliage of tamarisk bushes and the towering palm-trees; at
last, the most welcome of all sounds in the wilderness fell on their
listening ears--the ripple of flowing water.
This cheered their hearts, and the majestic spectacle of Mount Sinai,
whose heaven-touching summit was now concealed by a veil of blue mist,
filled with devout amazement the souls of the men who had grown up on the
flat plains of Goshen.
[The mountain known at the present day as Serbal, not the Sinai of
the monks which in our opinion was first declared in the reign of
Justinian to be the mount whence the laws were given. The detailed
reasons for our opinion that Serbal is the Sinai of the Scriptures,
which Lepsius expressed before its and others share with us may be
found in our works: "Durch Gosen zum Sinai, aus dem Wanderbuch and
der Bibliothek." 2 Aufl. Leipzig. 1882. Wilh. Engelmann.]
They pressed cautiously forward; for the remainder of the defeated
Amalekites might be lying in ambush. But no foe was seen or heard, and
the Hebrews found some tokens of the thirst for vengeance of the sons of
the wilderness in their ruined houses, the superb palm-trees felled, and
little gardens destroyed. It was necessary now to remove from the road
the slender trunks with their huge leafy crowns, that they might not
impede the progress of the people; and, when this work was done, Joshua
ascended through a ravine which led to the brook in the valley, up to the
first terrace of the mountain, that he might gaze around him far and near
for a view of the enemy.
The steep pathway led past masses of red granite, intersected by veins of
greenish diorite, until he reached a level plateau high above the oasis,
where, beside a clear spring, green bushes and delicate mountain flowers
adorned the barren wilderness.
Here he intended to rest and, as he gazed around him, he perceived in the
shadow of an overhanging cliff a man's tall figure.
It was Moses.
The flight of his thoughts had rapt him so far away from the present and
his surroundings, that he did not perceive Joshua's approach, and the
latter was restrained by respectful awe from approaching the man of God.
He waited patiently till the latter raised his bearded face and greeted
him with friendly dignity.
Then they gazed together at the oasis and the desolate stony valleys of
the mountain region at their feet. The emerald waters of a small portion
of the Red Sea, which washed the western slope of the mountain, also
glittered beneath them.
Meanwhile they talked of the people and the greatness and omnipotence of
the God who had so wonderfully guided them, and as they looked northward,
they beheld the endlessly long stream of Hebrews, which, following the
curves of the rocky valley, was surging slowly toward the oasis.
Then Joshua opened his heart to the man of God and told him the questions
he had asked himself during the past sleepless night, and to which he had
found no answer. The latter listened quietly, and in deep, faltering
tones answered in broken sentences:
"The lawlessness in the camp--ay, it is ruining the people! But the Lord
placed the power to destroy it in our hands. Woe betide him who resists.
They must feel this power, which is as sublime as yonder mountain, as
immovable as its solid rock."
Then Moses' wrathful words ceased.
After both had gazed silently into vacancy a long time, Joshua broke the
silence by asking:
"And what is the name of this power?"
Loudly and firmly from the bearded lips of the man of God rang the words;
"THE LAW!"
He pointed with his staff to the summit of the mountain.
Then, waving his hand to his companion, he left him. Joshua completed his
search for the foe and saw on the yellow sands of the valley dark figures
moving to and fro.
They were the remnants of the defeated Amalekite bands seeking new
abodes.
He watched them a short time and, after convincing himself that they were
quitting the oasis, he thoughtfully returned to the valley.
"The law!" he repeated again and again.
Ay, that was what the wandering tribes lacked. It was doubtless reserved
for its severity to transform the hordes which had escaped bondage into a
people worthy of the God who preferred them above the other nations of
the earth.
Here the chief's reflections were interrupted; for human voices, the
lowing and bleating of herds, the barking of dogs, and the heavy blows of
hammers rose to his ears from the oasis.
They were pitching the tents, a work of peace, for which no one needed
him.
Lying down in the shadow of a thick tamarisk bush, above which a tall
palm towered proudly, he stretched his limbs comfortably to rest in the
assurance that the people were now provided for, in war by his good
sword, in peace by the Law. This was much, it renewed his hopes; yet, no,
no--it was not all, could not be the final goal. The longer he reflected,
the more profoundly he felt that this was not enough to satisfy him
concerning those below, whom he cherished in his heart as if they were
brothers and sisters. His broad brow again clouded, and roused from his
repose by fresh doubts, he gently shook his head.
No, again no! The Law could not afford to those who were so dear to him
everything that he desired for them. Something else was needed to make
their future as dignified and beautiful as he had beheld it before his
mind's eye on his journey to the mines.
But what was it, what name did this other need bear?
He began to rack his brain to discover it, and while, with closed lids,
he permitted his thoughts to rove to the other nations whom he had known
in war and peace, in order to seek among them the one thing his own
people lacked, sleep overpowered him and a dream showed him Miriam and a
lovely girl, who looked like Kasana as she had so often rushed to meet
him when a sweet, innocent child, followed by the white lamb which Nun
had given to his favorite many years before.
Both figures offered him a gift and asked him to choose one or the other.
Miriam's hand held a heavy gold tablet, at whose top was written in
flaming letters: "The Law!" and which she offered with stern severity.
The child extended one of the beautifully-curved palm-leaves which he had
often waved as a messenger of peace.
The sight of the tablet filled him with pious awe, the palm-branch waved
a friendly greeting and he quickly grasped it. But scarcely was it in his
hand ere the figure of the prophetess melted into the air like mist,
which the morning breeze blows away. In painful astonishment he now gazed
at the spot where she had stood, and surprised and troubled by his
strange choice, though he felt that he had made the right one, he asked
the child what her gift imported to him and to the people.
She waved her hand to him, pointed into the distance, and uttered three
words whose gentle musical sound sank deep into his heart. Yet hard as he
strove to catch their purport, he did not succeed, and when he asked the
child to explain them the sound of his own voice roused him and he
returned to the camp, disappointed and thoughtful.
Afterwards he often tried to remember these words, but always in vain.
All his great powers, both mental and physical, he continued to devote to
the people; but his nephew Ephraim, as a powerful prince of his tribe,
who well deserved the high honors he enjoyed in after years,
founded a home of his own, where old Nun watched the growth of
great-grand-children, who promised a long perpetuation of his noble race.
Everyone is familiar with Joshua's later life, so rich in action, and how
he won in battle a new home for his people.
There in the Promised Land many centuries later was born, in Bethlehem,
another Jehoshua who bestowed on all mankind what the son of Nun had
vainly sought for the Hebrew nation.
The three words uttered by the child's lips which the chief had been
unable to comprehend were:
"Love, Mercy, Redemption!"
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Asenath, the wife of Joseph, had been an Egyptian
Most ready to be angry with those to whom we have been unjust
Pleasant sensation of being a woman, like any other woman
Woman's disapproving words were blown away by the wind
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE JOSHUA:
A school where people learned modesty
Asenath, the wife of Joseph, had been an Egyptian
Brief "eternity" of national covenants
But what do you men care for the suffering you inflict on others
Childhood already lies behind me, and youth will soon follow
Choose between too great or too small a recompense
Good advice is more frequently unheeded than followed
Hate, though never sated, can yet be gratified
I do not like to enquire about our fate beyond the grave
Most ready to be angry with those to whom we have been unjust
Omnipotent God, who had preferred his race above all others
Pleasant sensation of being a woman, like any other woman
Precepts and lessons which only a mother can give
Regard the utterances and mandates of age as wisdom
Should I be a man, if I forgot vengeance?
Then hate came; but it did not last long
There is no 'never,' no surely
To the mines meant to be doomed to a slow, torturing death
Voice of the senses, which drew them together, will soon be mute
What had formerly afforded me pleasure now seemed shallow
When hate and revenge speak, gratitude shrinks timidly
Who can prop another's house when his own is falling
Woman's disapproving words were blown away by the wind
CLEOPATRA
By Georg Ebers
Translated from the German by Mary J. Safford
PREFACE.
If the author should be told that the sentimental love of our day was
unknown to the pagan world, he would not cite last the two lovers, Antony
and Cleopatra, and the will of the powerful Roman general, in which he
expressed the desire, wherever he might die, to be buried beside the
woman whom he loved to his latest hour. His wish was fulfilled, and the
love-life of these two distinguished mortals, which belongs to history,
has more than once afforded to art and poesy a welcome subject.
In regard to Cleopatra, especially, life was surrounded with an
atmosphere of romance bordering on the fabulous. Even her bitterest foes
admire her beauty and rare gifts of intellect. Her character, on the
contrary, presents one of the most difficult problems of psychology. The
servility of Roman poets and authors, who were unwilling frankly to
acknowledge the light emanating so brilliantly from the foe of the state
and the Imperator, solved it to her disadvantage. Everything that bore
the name of Egyptian was hateful or suspicious to the Roman, and it was
hard to forgive this woman, born on the banks of the Nile, for having
seen Julius Caesar at her feet and compelled Mark Antony to do her
bidding. Other historians, Plutarch at their head, explained the enigma
more justly, and in many respects in her favour.
It was a delightful task to the author to scan more closely the
personality of the hapless Queen, and from the wealth of existing
information shape for himself a creature in whom he could believe. Years
elapsed ere he succeeded; but now that he views the completed picture, he
thinks that many persons might be disposed to object to the brightness of
his colours. Yet it would not be difficult for the writer to justify
every shade which he has used. If, during his creative work, he learned
to love his heroine, it was because, the more distinctly he conjured
before his mind the image of this wonderful woman, the more keenly he
felt and the more distinctly he perceived how fully she merited not only
sympathy and admiration, but, in spite of all her sins and weaknesses,
the self-sacrificing affection which she inspired in so many hearts.
It was an author of no less importance than Horace who called Cleopatra
"non humilis mulier"--a woman capable of no baseness. But the phrase
gains its greatest importance from the fact that it adorns the hymn which
the poet dedicated to Octavianus and his victory over Antony and
Cleopatra. It was a bold act, in such an ode, to praise the victor's foe.
Yet he did it, and his words, which are equivalent to a deed, are among
this greatly misjudged woman's fairest claims to renown.
Unfortunately it proved less potent than the opinion of Dio, who often
distorted what Plutarch related, but probably followed most closely the
farce or the popular tales which, in Rome, did not venture to show the
Egyptian in a favourable light.
The Greek Plutarch, who lived much nearer the period of our heroine than
Dio, estimated her more justly than most of the Roman historians. His
grandfather had heard many tales of both Cleopatra and Antony from his
countryman Philotas, who, during the brilliant days when they revelled in
Alexandria, had lived there as a student. Of all the writers who describe
the Queen, Plutarch is the most trustworthy, but even his narrative must
be used with caution. We have closely followed the clear and
comprehensive description given by Plutarch of the last days of our
heroine. It bears the impress of truth, and to deviate widely from it
would be arbitrary.
Unluckily, Egyptian records contain nothing which could have much weight
in estimating the character of Cleopatra, though we have likenesses
representing the Queen alone, or with her son Caesarion. Very recently
(in 1892) the fragment of a colossal double statue was found in
Alexandria, which can scarcely be intended for any persons except
Cleopatra and Antony hand in hand. The upper part of the female figure is
in a state of tolerable preservation, and shows a young and attractive
face. The male figure was doubtless sacrificed to Octavianus's command to
destroy Antony's statues. We are indebted to Herr Dr. Walther, in
Alexandria, for an excellent photograph of this remarkable piece of
sculpture. Comparatively few other works of plastic art, in which we here
include coins, that could render us familiar with our heroine's
appearance, have been preserved.
Though the author must especially desire to render his creation a work of
art, it is also requisite to strive for fidelity. As the heroine's
portrait must reveal her true character, so the life represented here
must correspond in every line with the civilization of the period
described. For this purpose we placed Cleopatra in the centre of a larger
group of people, whom she influences, and who enable her personality to
be displayed in the various relations of life.
Should the author succeed in making the picture of the remarkable woman,
who was so differently judged, as "lifelike" and vivid as it stamped
itself upon his own imagination, he might remember with pleasure the
hours which he devoted to this book.
GEORG EBERS
TUTZING ON THE STARNBERGER SEE, October 5, 1893.
CLEOPATRA.
CHAPTER I.
Gorgias, the architect, had learned to bear the scorching sunbeams of the
Egyptian noonday. Though not yet thirty, he had directed--first as his
late father's assistant and afterwards as his successor--the construction
of the huge buildings erected by Cleopatra in Alexandria.
Now he was overwhelmed with commissions; yet he had come hither ere the
hours of work were over, merely to oblige a youth who had barely passed
the confines of boyhood.
True, the person for whom he made this sacrifice was Caesarion, the son
whom Cleopatra had given to Julius Caesar. Antony had honoured him with
the proud title of "King of kings"; yet he was permitted neither to rule
nor even to issue orders, for his mother kept him aloof from affairs of
state, and he himself had no desire to hold the sceptre.
Gorgias had granted his wish the more readily, because it was apparent
that he wanted to speak to him in private, though he had not the least
idea what Caesarion desired to confide, and, under any circumstances, he
could give him only a brief interview. The fleet, at whose head the Queen
had set sail, with Mark Antony, for Greece, must have already met
Octavianus's galleys, and doubtless a battle wherein the destiny of the
world was decided had also been fought upon the land, Gorgias believed
that the victory would fall to Antony and the Queen, and wished the noble
pair success with his whole heart. He was even obliged to act as if the
battle had been already determined in their favour, for the architectural
preparations for the reception of the conquerors were entrusted to his
charge, and that very day must witness the decision of the location of
the colossal statues which represented Antony hand in hand with his royal
love.
The epitrop Mardion, a eunuch, who as Regent, represented Cleopatra; and
Zeno, the Keeper of the Seal, who rarely opposed him, wished to have the
piece of sculpture erected in a different place from the one he favoured.
The principal objection to the choice made by the powerful head of the
government was that it had fallen on land owned by a private individual.
This might lead to difficulties, and Gorgias opposed it. As an artist,
too, he did not approve Mardion's plan; for though, on Didymus's land,
the statues would have faced the sea, which the Regent and the Keeper of
the Seal regarded as very important, no fitting background could have
been obtained.
At any rate, the architect could now avail himself of Caesarion's
invitation to overlook from the appointed place of meeting--the lofty
steps of the Temple of Isis--the Bruchium, and seek the best site for the
twin statues. He was anxious to select the most suitable one; the master
who had created this work of art had been his friend, and had closed his
eyes in death shortly after its completion.
The sanctuary whence Gorgias commenced his survey was in one of the
fairest portions of the Bruchium, the Alexandrian quarter, where stood
the royal palace with its extensive annexes, the finest temples--except
the Serapeum, situated in another part of the city-and the largest
theatres; the Forum invited the council of Macedonian citizens to its
assemblies, and the Museum afforded a resort for the scholars.
The little square closed in the east by the Temple of Isis was called the
"Corner of the Muses," on account of the two marble statues of women
before the entrance of the house, which, with its large garden facing the
square northward and extending along the sea, belonged to Didymus, an old
and highly respected scholar and member of the Museum.
The day had been hot, and the shade of the Temple of Isis was very
welcome to the architect.
This sanctuary rested upon a lofty foundation, and a long flight of steps
led to the cella. The spot afforded Gorgias a wide prospect.
Most of the buildings within his vision belonged to the time of Alexander
and his successors in the house of the Ptolemies, but some, and by no
means the least stately, were the work of Gorgias himself or of his
father. The artist's heart swelled with enthusiastic delight at the sight
of this portion of his native city.
He had been in Rome, and visited many other places numbered among the
world's fairest and most populous cities; but not one contained so many
superb works of art crowded together in so small a space.
"If one of the immortals themselves," he murmured, "should strive to
erect for the inhabitants of Olympus a quarter meet for their grandeur
and beauty, it could scarcely be much more superb or better fitted to
satisfy the artistic needs which we possess as their gift, and it would
surely be placed on the shore of such a sea."
While speaking, he shaded his keen eyes with his hand. The architect, who
usually devoted his whole attention to the single object that claimed his
notice, now permitted himself the pleasure of enjoying the entire picture
in whose finishing touches he had himself borne a part; and, as his
practised eye perceived in every temple and colonnade the studied and
finished harmony of form, and the admirable grouping of the various
buildings and statues, he said to himself, with a sigh of satisfaction,
that his own art was the noblest and building the highest of royal
pleasures. No doubt this belief was shared by the princes who, three
centuries before, had endeavoured to obtain an environment for their
palaces which should correspond with their vast power and overflowing
wealth, and at the same time give tangible expression to their reverence
for the gods and their delight in art and beauty. No royal race in the
universe could boast of a more magnificent abode. These thoughts passed
through Gorgias's mind as the deep azure hue of sea and sky blended with
the sunlight to bring into the strongest relief all that the skill and
brains of man, aided by exhaustless resources, had here created.
Waiting, usually a hard task for the busy architect, became a pleasure in
this spot; for the rays streaming lavishly in all directions from the
diadem of the sovereign sun flooded with dazzling radiance the thousands
of white marble statues on the temples and colonnades, and were reflected
from the surfaces of the polished granite of the obelisks and the equally
smooth walls of the white, yellow, and green marble, the syenite, and the
brown, speckled porphyry of sanctuaries and palaces. They seemed to be
striving to melt the bright mosaic pictures which covered every foot Of
the ground, where no highway intersected and no tree shaded it, and
flashed back again from the glimmering metal or the smooth glaze in the
gay tiles on the roofs of the temples and houses. Here they glittered on
the metal ornaments, yonder they seemed to be trying to rival the
brilliancy of the gilded domes, to lend to the superb green of the
tarnished bronze surfaces the sparkling lustre of the emerald, or to
transform the blue and red lines of the white marble temples into
lapis-lazuli and coral and their gilded decorations into topaz. The
pictures in the mosaic pavement of the squares, and on the inner walls of
the colonnades, were doubly effective against the light masses of marble
surrounding them, which in their turn were indebted to the pictures for
affording the eye an attractive variety instead of dazzling monotony.
Here the light of the weltering sun enhanced the brilliancy of colour in
the flags and streamers which fluttered beside the obelisks and Egyptian
pylons, over the triumphal arches and the gates of the temples and
palaces. Yet even the exquisite purplish blue of the banner waving above
the palace on the peninsula of Lochias, now occupied by Cleopatra's
children, was surpassed by the hue of the sea, whose deep azure near the
shore merged far away into bands of lighter and darker blue, blending
with dull or whitish green.
Gorgias was accustomed to grasp fully whatever he permitted to influence
him, and though still loyal to his custom of associating with his art
every remarkable work of the gods or man, he had not forgotten in his
enjoyment of the familiar scene the purpose of his presence in this spot.
No, the garden of Didymus was not the proper place for his friend's last
work.
While gazing at the lofty plane, sycamore, and mimosa trees which
surrounded the old scholar's home, the quiet square below him suddenly
became astir with noisy life, for all classes of the populace were
gathering in front of the sequestered house, as if some unusual spectacle
attracted them.
What could they want of the secluded philosopher?
Gorgias gazed earnestly at them, but soon turned away again; a gay voice
from below called his name.
A singular procession had approached the temple--a small body of armed
men, led by a short, stout fellow, whose big head, covered with bushy
curls, was crowned with a laurel wreath. He was talking eagerly to a
younger man, but had paused with the others in front of the sanctuary to
greet the architect. The latter shouted a few pleasant words in reply.
The laurel-crowned figure made a movement as if he intended to join him,
but his companion checked him, and, after a short parley, the older man
gave the younger one his hand, flung his heavy head back, and strutted
onward like a peacock, followed by his whole train.
The other looked after him, shrugging his shoulders; then called to
Gorgias, asking what boon he desired from the goddess.
"Your presence," replied the architect blithely.
"Then Isis will show herself gracious to you," was the answer, and the
next instant the two young men cordially grasped each other's hands.
Both were equally tall and well formed; the features bore witness to
their Greek origin; nay, they might have been taken for brothers, had not
the architect's whole appearance seemed sturdie and plainer than that of
his companion, whom he called "Dion" and friend. As the latter heaped
merry sarcasms upon the figure wearing the laurel wreath who had just
left him, Anaxenor, the famous zither-player, on whom Antony had bestowed
the revenues of four cities and permission to keep body-guard, and
Gorgias's deeper voice sometime assented, sometimes opposed with sensible
objections, the difference between these two men of the same age and race
became clearly apparent.
Both showed a degree of self-reliance unusual, at their age; but the
architect's was the assurance which a man gains by toil and his own
merit, Dion's that which is bestowed by large possession and a high
position in society. Those who were ignorant that the weight of Dion's
carefully prepared speech had more than once turned the scale in the city
councils would probably have been disposed to take him for one of the
careless worldlings who had no lack of representatives among the gilded
youth of Alexandria; while the architect's whole exterior, from his keen
eye to the stouter leather of his sandals, revealed earnest purpose and
unassuming ability.
Their friendship had commenced when Gorgias built a new palace for Dion.
During long business association people become well acquainted, even
though their conversations relate solely to direction and execution. But
in this case, he who gave the orders had been only the inspirer and
adviser, the architect the warm-hearted friend, eager to do his utmost to
realize what hovered before the other's mind as the highest attainable
excellence. So the two young men became first dear, and finally almost
indispensable to each other. As the architect discovered in the wealthy
man of the world many qualities whose existence he had not suspected, the
latter was agreeably surprised to find in the artist, associated with his
solidity of character, a jovial companion, who--this first made him
really beloved by his friend--had no lack of weaknesses.
When the palace was completed to Dion's satisfaction and became one of
the most lauded ornaments of the city, the young men's friendship assumed
a new form, and it would have been difficult to say which received the
most benefit.
Dion had just been stopped by the zither-player to ask for confirmation
of the tidings that the united forces of Antony and Cleopatra had gained
a great victory on sea and land.
In the eating-house at Kanopus, where he had breakfasted, everyone was
full of the joyful news, and rivers of wine had been drunk to the health
of the victors and the destruction of the malicious foe. "In these days,"
cried Dion, "not only weak-brained fellows, like the zither-player,
believe me omniscient, but many sensible men also. And why? Because,
forsooth, I am the nephew of Zeno, the Keeper of the Seal, who is on the
brink of despair because he himself knows nothing, not even the veriest
trifle."
"Yet he stands nearest to the Regent," observed Gorgias, "and must learn,
if any one does, how the fleet fares."
"You too!" sighed his friend. "Had I been standing so far above the
ground as you, the architect--by the dog, I should not have failed to
note the quarter whence the wind blew! It has been southerly a whole
fortnight, and keeps back the galleys coming from the north. The Regent
knows nothing, absolutely nothing, and my uncle, of course, no more. But
if they do learn anything they will be shrewd enough not to enrich me
with it."
"True, there are other rumours afloat," said the architect thoughtfully.
"If I were in Mardion's place--"
"Thank the Olympians that you are not," laughed his companion. "He has as
many cares as a fish has scales. And one, the greatest. That pert young
Antyllus was over-ready with his tongue yesterday at Barine's. Poor
fellow! He'll have to answer for it to his tutor at home."
"You mean the remark about the Queen's accompanying the fleet?"
"St!" said Dion, putting his finger on his lips, for many men and women
were now ascending the temple steps. Several carried flowers and cakes,
and the features of most expressed joyful emotion. The news of the
victory had reached their ears, and they wanted to offer sacrifices to
the goddess whom Cleopatra, "the new Isis," preferred to all others.
The first court-yard of the sanctuary was astir with life. They could
hear the ringing of the sistrum bells and the murmuring chant of the
priests. The quiet fore-court of the little temple of the goddess, which
here, in the Greek quarter of palaces, had as few visitors as the great
Temple of Isis in the Rhakotis was overcrowded, had now become the worst
possible rendezvous for men who stood so near the rulers of the
government. The remark made about the Queen the evening before by
Antyllus, Antony's nineteen-year-old son, at the house of Barine, a
beautiful young woman who attracted all the prominent men in Alexandria,
was the more imprudent because it coincided with the opinion of all the
wisest heads. The reckless youth enthusiastically reverenced his father,
but Cleopatra, the object of Antony's love, and--in the Egyptians'
eyes--his wife, was not Antyllus's mother. He was the son of Fulvia, his
father's first wife, and feeling himself a Roman, would have preferred a
thousand times to live on the banks of the Tiber. Besides, it was
certain--Antony's stanchest friends made no attempt to conceal the
fact--that the Queen's presence with the army exerted a disturbing
influence, and could not fail to curb the daring courage of the brave
general. Antyllus, with the reckless frankness inherited from his father,
had expressed this view in the presence of all Barine's guests, and in a
form which would be only too quickly spread throughout Alexandria, whose
inhabitants relished such speeches.
These remarks would be slow in reaching the plain people who were
attracted to the temple by the news of the victory, yet many doubtless
knew Caesarion, whom the architect was awaiting here. It would be wiser
to meet the prince at the foot of the steps. Both men, therefore, went
down to the square, though the crowds seeking the temple and thronging
the space before Didymus's house made it more and more difficult to pace
to and fro.
They were anxious to learn whether the rumour that Didymus's garden was
to be taken for the twin statues had already spread abroad, and their
first questions revealed that this was the case. It was even stated that
the old sage's house was to be torn down, and within a few hours. This
was vehemently contradicted; but a tall, scrawny man seemed to have
undertaken to defend the ruler's violence.
The friends knew him well. It was the Syrian Philostratus, a clever
extempore speaker and agitator of the people, who placed his clever
tongue at the disposal of the highest bidder.
"The rascal is probably now in my uncle's employ," said Dion. "The idea
of putting the piece of sculpture there originated with him, and it is
difficult to turn him from such plans. There is some secret object to be
gained here. That is why they have brought Philostratus. I wonder
if the conspiracy is connected in any way with Barine, whose
husband--unfortunately for her--he was before he cast her off."
"Cast her off!" exclaimed Gorgias wrathfully. "How that sounds! True, he
did it, but to persuade him the poor woman sacrificed half the fortune
her father had earned by his brush. You know as well as I that life with
that scoundrel would be unbearable."
"Very true," replied Dion quietly. "But as all Alexandria melted into
admiration after her singing of the 'yalemos' at the Adonis festival, she
no longer needed her contemptible consort."
"How can you take pleasure, whenever it is possible, in casting such
slurs upon a woman, whom but yesterday you called blameless, charming,
peerless?"
"That the light she sheds may not dazzle your eyes. I know how sensitive
they are."
"Then spare, instead of irritating them. Besides, your suggestion gives
food for thought Barine is the granddaughter of the man whose garden they
want, and the advocate would probably be glad to injure both. But I'll
spoil his game. It is my business to choose the site for the statues."
"Yours?" replied Dion. "Unless some on who is more powerful opposes you.
I would try to win my uncle, but there are others superior to him. The
Queen has gone, it is true; but Iras, whose commands do not die away in
empty air, told me this morning that she had her own ideas about the
erection of the statue."
"Then you bring Philostratus here!" cried the architect.
"I?" asked the other in amazement.
"Ay, you," asserted Gorgias. "Did not you say that Iras, with whom you
played when a boy is now becoming troublesome by watching your every
step? And then--you visit Barine constantly and she so evidently prefers
you, that the fact might easily reach the ears of Iras."
"As Argus has a hundred, jealousy has a thousand eyes," interrupted Dion,
"yet I seek nothing from Barine, save two pleasant hours when the day is
drawing towards its close. No matter; Iras, I suppose, heard that I was
favoured by this much-admired woman. Iras herself has some little regard
for me, so she bought Philostratus. She is willing to pay something for
the sake of injuring the woman who stands between us, or the old man who
has the good or evil fortune of being her rival's grandfather. No, no;
that would be too base! And believe me, if Iras desired to ruin Barine,
she need not make so long a circuit. Besides, she is not really a wicked
woman. Or is she? All I know is that where any advantage is to be gained
for the Queen, she does not shrink even from doubtful means, and also
that the hours speed swiftly for any one in her society. Yes, Iras,
Iras--I like to utter the name. Yet I do not love her, and she--loves
only herself, and--a thing few can say--another still more. What is the
world, what am I to her, compared with the Queen, the idol of her heart?
Since Cleopatra's departure, Iras seems like the forsaken Ariadne, or a
young roe which has strayed from its mother. But stop; she may have a
hand in the game: the Queen trusted her as if she were her sister, her
daughter. No one knows what she and Charmian are to her. They are called
waiting-women, but are their sovereign's dearest friends. When, on the
departure of the fleet, Cleopatra was compelled to leave Iras here--she
was ill with a fever--she gave her the charge of her children, even those
whose beards were beginning to grow, the 'King of kings' Caesarion, whose
tutor punishes him for every act of disobedience; and the unruly lad
Antyllus, who has forced his way the last few evenings into our friend's
house."
"Antony, his own father, introduced him to her."
"Very true, and Antyllus took Caesarion there. This vexed Iras, like
everything which may disturb the Queen. Barine is troublesome on account
of Cleopatra, whom she wishes to spare every, annoyance, and perhaps she
dislikes her a little for my sake. Now she wants to inflict on the old
man, Barine's grandfather, whom she loves, some injury which the spoiled,
imprudent woman will scarcely accept quietly, and which will rouse her to
commit some folly that can be used against her. Iras will hardly seek her
life, but she may have in mind exile or something of that kind. She knows
people as well as I know her, my neighbour and playmate, whom many a time
I was obliged to lift down from some tree into which the child had
climbed as nimbly as a kitten."
"I myself suggested this conjecture, yet I cannot credit her with such
unworthy intrigues," cried Gorgias.
"Credit her?" repeated Dion, shrugging his shoulders. "I only transport
myself in imagination to the court and to the soul of the woman who helps
make rain and sunshine there. You have columns rounded and beams hewed
that they may afterwards support the roof to which in due time you wish
to direct attention. She and all who have a voice in the management of
court affairs look first at the roof and then seek anything to raise and
support it, though it should be corpses, ruined lives, and broken hearts.
The point is that the roof shall stand until the architect, the Queen,
sees and approves it. As to the rest--But there is the carriage--It
doubtless brings--You were--"
He paused, laid his hand on his friend's arm, and whispered hastily:
"Iras is undoubtedly at the bottom of this, and it is not Antyllus, but
yonder dreaming lad, for whom she is moving. When she spoke of the
statues just now, she asked in the same breath where I had seen him on
the evening of the day before yesterday, and that was the very time he
called on Barine. The plot was made by her, and Iras is doing all the
work. The mouse is not caught while the trap is closed, and she is just
raising her little hand to open it."
"If only she does not use some man's hand," replied the architect
wrathfully, and then turned towards the carriage and the elderly man who
had just left it, and was now approaching the two friends.
CHAPTER II.
When Caesarion's companion reached Dion and Gorgias, the former modestly
made a movement to retire. But Archibius was acquainted with both, and
begged him to remain. There was an air of precision and clearness in the
voice and quiet movements of this big, broad-shouldered man, with his
robust frame and well-developed limbs. Though only a few years beyond
forty, not merely his grey hair but the calm, impressive dignity of his
whole manner indicated a more advanced age.
"The young King yonder," he began in a deep, musical voice, motioning
towards the equipage, "wished to speak to you here in person, Gorgias,
but by my advice he refrained from mingling with the crowd. I have
brought him hither in a closed carriage. If the plan suits you, enter it
and talk with him while I keep watch here. Strange things seem to be
occurring, and yonder--or am I mistaken? Has the monster dragged along
there any connection with the twin statues of the Queen and her friend?
Was it you who selected that place for them?"
"No," replied the architect. "The order was issued over my head and
against my will."
"I thought so," replied the other. "This is the very matter of which
Caesarion wishes to speak. If you can prevent the erection of the statues
on Didymus's land, so much the better. I will do everything in my power
to aid you, but in the Queen's absence that is little."
"Then what can be said of my influence?" asked the architect. "Who, in
these days, knows whether the sky will be blue or grey to-morrow? I can
guarantee one thing only: I will do my best to prevent this injury of an
estimable citizen, interference with the laws of our city, and violation
of good taste."
"Say so to the young King, but express yourself cautiously," replied
Archibius as the architect turned towards the carriage.
As soon as Dion and the older man were alone, the latter inquired the
cause of the increasing uproar, and as, like every well-disposed
Alexandrian, he esteemed Archibius, and knew that he was intimately
acquainted with the owner of the imperilled garden, and therefore with
his granddaughter Barine, he confided his anxiety to him without reserve.
"Iras is your niece, it is true," he said in his open-hearted manner,
"but I know that you understand her character. It suits her now to fling
a golden apple into the path of a person whom she dislikes and believes
incautious, that she may pick it up and thus afford her an opportunity to
bring a charge of theft."
Noting the inquiring glance Archibius fixed upon him as he made this
comparison, he changed his tone and continued more earnestly: "Zeus is
great, but destiny is superior even to him. Zeus can accomplish much, but
when Iras and your sister Charmian, who unfortunately is now with the
Queen, wish to effect anything, he, like the Regent Mardion, must give
way. The more lovable Cleopatra is, the more surely every one prizes a
position near her person above aught else, especially such trifles as law
and justice."
"These are harsh words," responded Archibius, and seem the more bitter in
proportion to the germ of truth which they contain. Our court shares the
fate of every other in the East, and those to whom Rome formerly set the
example of holding law and justice sacred--"
"Can now go there," interrupted Dion, "to learn how rudely both are
trampled under foot. The sovereigns here and there may smile at one
another like the augurs. They are like brothers--"
"But with the difference," Archibius broke in, "that the head of our
public affairs is the very embodiment of affability and grace; while in
Rome, on the contrary, harsh severity and bloody arrogance, or even
repulsive servility, guide the reins."
Here Archibius interrupted himself to point to the shouting throng
advancing towards them. "You are right," Dion answered. "Let us defer
this discussion till we can pursue it in the house of the charming
Barine. But I rarely meet you there, though by blood you are so nearly
allied to her father. I am her friend--at my age that might easily mean
her lover. But in our case the comparison would not suit. Yet perhaps you
will believe me, for you have the right to call yourself the friend of
the most bewitching of women."
A sorrowful smile flitted over the grave, set features of the older man,
who, raising his hand as if in protest, answered carelessly: "I grew up
with Cleopatra, but a private citizen loves a queen only as a divinity. I
believe in your friendship for Barine, though I deem it dangerous."
"If you mean that it might injure the lovely woman," replied Dion,
raising his head more proudly as if to intimate that he required no
warning, even from him, "perhaps you are right. Only I beg you not to
misunderstand me. I am not vain enough to suppose that I could win her
heart, but unfortunately there are many who cannot forgive the power of
attraction which she exerts over me as well as upon all. So many men
gladly visit Barine's house that there are an equal number of women who
would rejoice to close it. Among them, of course, is Iras. She dislikes
my friend; nay, I fear that what you witness yonder is the apple she
flung in order, if not to ruin, at least to drive her from the city, ere
the Queen--may the gods grant her victory!--ere Cleopatra returns. You
know your niece Iras. Like your sister Charmian, she will shrink from
nothing to remove an annoyance from her mistress's pathway, and it will
hardly please Cleopatra when she learns that the two youths whose welfare
lies nearest her heart--Antyllus and Caesarion--seek Barine's house, no
matter how stainless the latter's reputation may be."
"I have just heard of it," replied Archibius, "and I, too, am anxious.
Antony's son has inherited much of his father's insatiable love of
pleasure. But Caesarion! He has not yet ventured out of the dreamland
which surrounds him into actual life. What others scarcely perceive deals
him a serious blow. I fear Eros is sharpening arrows for him which will
pierce deep into his heart. While talking with me he seemed strangely
changed. His dreamy eyes glittered like a drunkard's when he spoke of
Barine. I fear, I fear--"
"Impossible!" cried Dion, in surprise, nay, almost terror. "If that is
the case, Iras is not wholly wrong, and we must deal with the matter
differently. But it is of the first importance to conceal the fact that
Caesarion has any interest in the affairs of the old house-owner. To seek
to maintain the old man's right to his own property is a matter of
course, and I will undertake to do this and try to get yonder orator home
Just see how the braggart is swinging his arms in Iras's service! As for
Barine, it will be well to induce her to leave of her own free will a
city where it will be made unpleasant for her. Try to persuade her to
pursue this course. If I went to her with such a suggestion, I, who
yesterday--No, no! Besides, she might hear that Iras and I--She would
imagine all sorts of absurdities. You know what jealousy means. To you,
whom she esteems, she would surely listen, and she need not go far from
the city. If the heart of this enthusiastic boy--who might some day
desire to be 'King of kings' not only in name--should really be fired
with love for Barine, what serious misfortune might follow! We must
secure her from him. She could not go to my country house among the
papyrus plantations at Sebennys. It would afford too much license for
evil tongues. But you--your villa at Kanopus is too near--but, if I am
not mistaken, you have--"
"My estate in the lake region is remote enough, and will be at her
disposal," interrupted the other. "The house is always kept ready for my
reception. I will do my best to persuade her, for your advice is prudent.
She must be withdrawn from the boy's eyes."
"I shall learn the result of your mission tomorrow," cried Dion
eagerly--"nay, this evening. If she consents, I will tell Iras, as if by
accident, that Barine has gone to Upper Egypt to drink new milk, or
something of that kind. Iras is a shrewd woman, and will be glad if she
can keep aloof from such trifles during the time which will decide the
fate of Cleopatra and of the world."
"My thoughts, too, are always with the army," said Archibius. "How
trivial everything else seems compared with the result which will be
determined in the next few days! But life is made up of trifles. They are
food, drink, maintenance. Should the Queen return triumphant, and find
Caesarion in wrong paths--"
"We must close them against him," exclaimed Dion.
"That the boy may not follow Barine?" asked Archibius, shaking his head.
"I think we need feel no anxiety on that score. He will doubtless eagerly
desire to do so, but with him there is a wide gulf between the wish and
its fulfilment. Antyllus is differently constituted. He would be quite
capable of ordering a horse to be saddled, or the sails of a boat to be
spread in order to pursue her--beyond the Cataract if necessary. So we
must maintain the utmost secrecy concerning the place to which Barine
voluntarily exiles herself."
"But she is not yet on her way," replied Dion with a faint sigh. "She is
bound to this city by many ties."
"I know it," answered Archibius, confirming his companion's fear. The
latter, pointing to the equipage, said in a rapid, earnest tone: "Gorgias
is beckoning. But, before we part, let me beseech you to do everything to
persuade Barine to leave here. She is in serious danger. Conceal nothing
from her, and say that her friends will not leave her too long in
solitude."
Archibius, with a significant glance, shook his finger at the young man
in playful menace, and then went up to the carriage.
Caesarion's clear-cut but pallid face, whose every feature resembled that
of his father, the great Caesar, bent towards them from the opening above
the door, as he greeted both with a formal bend of the head and a
patronizing glance. His eyes had sparkled with boyish glee when he first
caught sight of the friend from whom he had been separated several weeks,
but to the stranger he wished to assume the bearing which beseemed a
king. He desired to make him feel his superior position, for he was
ill-disposed towards him. He had seen him favoured by the woman whom he
imagined he loved, and whose possession he had been promised by the
secret science of the Egyptians, whose power to unveil the mysteries of
the future he firmly believed. Antyllus, Antony's son, had taken him to
Barine, and she had received him with the consideration due his rank.
Spite of her bright graciousness, boyish timidity had hitherto prevented
any word of love to the young beauty whom he saw surrounded by so many
distinguished men of mature years. Yet his beaming, expressive eyes must
have revealed his feelings to her. Doubtless his glances had not been
unobserved, for only a few hours before an Egyptian woman had stopped him
at the temple of his father, Caesar, to which, according to the fixed
rules governing the routine of his life, he went daily at a certain hour
to pray, to offer sacrifices, to anoint the stone of the altar, or to
crown the statue of the departed emperor.
Caesarion had instantly recognized her as the female slave whom he had
seen in Barine's atrium, and ordered his train to fall back.
Fortunately his tutor, Rhodon, had not fulfilled his duty of accompanying
him. So the youth had ventured to follow the slave woman, and in the
shadow of the mimosas, in the little grove beside the temple, he found
Barine's litter. His heart throbbed violently as, full of anxious
expectation, he obeyed her signal to draw nearer. Still, she had granted
him nothing save the favour of gratifying one of her wishes. But his
heart had swelled almost to bursting when, resting her beautiful white
arm on the door of her litter, she had told him that unjust men were
striving to rob her grandfather Didymus of his garden, and she expected
him, who bore the title of the "King of kings" to do his best to prevent
such a crime.
It had been difficult for him to grasp her meaning while she was
speaking. There was a roaring sound in his ears as if, instead of being
in the silent temple grove, he was standing on a stormy day upon the
surf-beaten promontory of Lochias. He had not ventured to raise his eyes
and look into her face. Not until she closed with the question whether
she might hope for his assistance did her gaze constrain him to glance
up. Ah, what had he not fancied he read in her imploring blue eyes! how
unspeakably beautiful she had appeared!
He had stood before her as if bereft of his senses. His sole knowledge
was that he had promised, with his hand on his heart, to do everything in
his power to prevent what threatened to cause her pain. Then her little
hand, with its sparkling rings, was again stretched towards him, and he
had resolved to kiss it; but while he glanced around at his train, she
had already waved him a farewell, and the litter was borne away.
He stood motionless, like the figure of a man on one of his mother's
ancient vases, staring in bewilderment after the flying figure of
Happiness, whom he might easily have caught by her floating locks. How he
raged over the miserable indecision which had defrauded him of so much
joy! Yet nothing was really lost. If he succeeded in fulfilling her
wishes, she could not fail to be grateful; and then--
He pondered over the person to whom he should apply--Mardion, the Regent,
or the Keeper of the Seal? No, they had planned the erection of the group
of sculpture in the philosopher's garden. To Iras, his mother's
confidante? Nay, last of all to her. The cunning woman would have
perceived his purpose and betrayed it to the Regent. Ah, if Charmian, his
mother's other attendant, had been present! but she was with the fleet,
which perhaps was even now engaged in battle with the enemy.
At this recollection his eyes again sought the ground--he had not been
permitted to take the place in the army to which his birth entitled him,
while his mother and Charmian--But he did not pursue this painful current
of thought; for a serious reproach had forced itself upon him and sent
the blood to his cheeks. He wished to be considered a man, and yet, in
these fateful days, which would determine the destiny of his mother, his
native city, Egypt, and that Rome which he, the only son of Caesar, was
taught to consider his heritage, he was visiting a beautiful woman,
thinking of her, and of her alone. His days and half the nights were
passed in forming plans for securing her love, forgetful of what should
have occupied his whole heart.
Only yesterday Iras had sharply admonished him that, in times like these,
it was the duty of every friend of Cleopatra, and every foe of her foes,
to be with the army at least in mind.
He had remembered this, but, instead of heeding the warning, the thought
of her had merely recalled her uncle, Archibius, who possessed great
influence, not merely on account of his wealth but because every one also
knew his high standing in the regard of the Queen. Besides, the clever,
kindly man had always been friendly to him from childhood, and like a
revelation came the idea of applying to him, and to the architect
Gorgias, who had a voice in the matter, and by whom he had been strongly
attracted during the period while he was rebuilding the wing assigned to
the prince in the palace at Lochias.
So one of the attendants was instantly despatched with the little tablet
which invited Gorgias to the interview at the Temple of Isis.
Then, in the afternoon, Caesarion went secretly in a boat to the little
palace of Archibius, situated on the seashore at Kanopus, and now as the
latter, with his friend, stood beside the carriage door, he explained to
them that he was going with the architect to old Didymus to assure him of
his assistance.
This was unadvisable in every respect, but it required all the weight of
the older man's reasons to induce the prince to yield. The consequences
which might ensue, should the populace discover that he was taking sides
against the Regent, would be incalculable. But submission and withdrawal
were especially difficult to the young "King of kings." He longed to pose
as a man in Dion's presence, and as this could not be, he strove to
maintain the semblance of independence by yielding his resolve only on
the plea of not desiring to injure the aged scholar and his
granddaughter. Finally, he again entreated the architect to secure
Didymus in the possession of his property. When at last he drove away
with Archibius, twilight was already gathering, torches were lighted in
front of the temple and the little mausoleum adjoining the cella, and
pitch-pans were blazing in the square.
CHAPTER III.
"The lad is in an evil plight," said Gorgias, shaking his head
thoughtfully as the equipage rolled over the stone pavement of the Street
of the King.
"And over yonder, added Dion," "the prospect is equally unpleasing.
Philostratus is setting the people crazy. But the hired mischief-maker
will soon wish he had been less ready to seize Iras's gold coins."
"And to think," cried the architect, "that Barine was this scoundrel's
wife! How could it--"
"She was but a child when they married her," interrupted Dion. "Who
consults a girl of fifteen in the choice of a husband? And
Philostratus--he was my classmate at Rhodus--at that time had the fairest
prospects. His brother Alexas, Antony's favourite, could easily advance
him. Barine's father was dead, her mother was accustomed to follow
Didymus's counsel, and the clever fellow had managed to strew dust in the
old man's eyes. Long and lank as he is, he is not bad-looking even now.
"When he appeared as an orator he pleased his hearers. This turned his
head, and a spendthrift's blood runs in his veins. To bring his fair
young bride to a stately mansion, he undertook the bad cause of the
thievish tax-collector Pyrrhus, and cleared him."
"He bought a dozen false witnesses."
"There were sixteen. Afterwards they became as numerous as the open
mouths you see shouting yonder. It is time to silence them. Go to the old
man's house and soothe him--Barine also, if she is there. If you find
messengers from the Regent, raise objections to the unprecedented decree.
You know the portions of the law which can be turned to Didymus's
advantage."
"Since the reign of Euergetes II, registered landed property has been
unassailable, and his was recorded."
"So much the better. Tell the officials also, confidentially, that you
know of objections just discovered which may perhaps change the Regent's
views."
"And, above all, I shall insist upon my right to choose the place for the
twin statues. The Queen herself directed the others to heed my opinion."
"That will cast the heaviest weight into the scale. We shall meet later.
You will prefer to keep away from Barine to-night. If you see her, tell
her that Archibius said he would visit her later--for an object I will
explain afterwards. I shall probably go to Iras to bring her to reason.
It will be better not to mention Caesarion's wish."
"Certainly--and you will give nothing to yonder brawler."
"On the contrary. I feel very generous. If Peitho will aid me, the
insatiate fellow will get more than may be agreeable to him."
Then grasping the architect's hand, Dion forced his way through the
throng surrounding the high platform on wheels, upon which the closely
covered piece of sculpture had been rolled up. The gate of the scholar's
house stood open, for an officer in the Regent's service had really
entered a short time before, but the Scythian guards sent by the exegetus
Demetrius, one of Barine's friends, were keeping back the throng of
curious spectators.
Their commander knew Gorgias, and he was soon standing in the impluvium
of the scholar's house, an oblong, rootless space, with a fountain in the
centre, whose spray moistened the circular bed of flowers around it. The
old slave had just lighted some three-branched lamps which burned on tall
stands. The officers sent by the Regent to inform Didymus that his garden
would be converted into a public square had just arrived.
When Gorgias entered, these magistrates, their clerks, and the witnesses
accompanying them--a group of twenty men, at whose head was Apollonius, a
distinguished officer of the royal treasury--were in the house. The slave
who admitted the architect informed him of it.
In the atrium a young girl, doubtless a member of the household, stopped
him. He was not mistaken in supposing that she was Helena, Didymus's
younger granddaughter, of whom Barine had spoken. True, she resembled her
sister neither in face nor figure, for while the young matron's hair was
fair and waving, the young girl's thick black tresses were wound around
her head in a smooth braid. Very unlike Barine's voice, too, were the
deep, earnest tones trembling with emotion, in which she confronted him
with the brief question, concealing a faint reproach, "Another demand?"
After first ascertaining that he was really speaking to Helena, his
friend's sister, he hastily told her his name, adding that, on the
contrary, he had come to protect her grandfather from a serious
misfortune.
When his glance first rested upon her in the dimly lighted room, the
impression she made upon him was by no means favourable. The pure brow,
which seemed to him too high for a woman's face, wore an indignant frown;
and though her mouth was beautiful in form, its outlines were often
marred by a passionate tremor that lent the exquisitely chiselled
features a harsh, nay, bitter expression. But she had scarcely heard the
motive of his presence ere, pressing her hand upon her bosom with a sigh
of relief, she eagerly exclaimed:
"Oh, do what you can to avert this terrible deed! No one knows how the
old man loves this house. And my grandmother! They will die if it is
taken from them."
Her large eyes rested upon him with a warm, imploring light; and the
stern, almost repellent voice thrilled with love for her relatives. He
must lend his aid here, and how gladly he would do so! He assured her of
this; and Helena, who had heard him mentioned as a man of ability, saw in
him a helper in need, and begged him, with touching fervour, to show her
grandfather, when he came before the officers, that all was not lost.
The astonished architect asked if Didymus did not know what was
impending, and Helena hastily replied:
"He is working in the summer-house by the sea. Apollonius is a
kind-hearted man, and will wait until I have prepared my grandfather. I
must go to him. He has already sent Philotas--his pupil, who finds and
unrolls his books--a dozen times to inquire the cause of the tumult
outside; but I replied that the crowds were flocking to the harbour on
account of the Queen. There is often a mob shouting madly; but nothing
disturbs my grandfather when he is absorbed in his work; and his pupil--a
young student from Amphissa--loves him and does what I bid him. My
grandmother, too, knows nothing yet. She is deaf, and the female slaves
dare not tell her. After her recent attack of giddiness, the doctor said
that any sudden shock might injure her. If only I can find the right
words, that my grandfather may not be too sorely hurt!"
"Shall I accompany you?" asked Gorgias kindly.
"No," she answered hurriedly. "He needs time ere he will trust strangers.
Only, if Apollonius discloses the terrible truth, and his grief threatens
to overpower him, comfort him, and show him that we still have friends
who are ready to protect us from such disaster."
She waved her hand in token of gratitude, and hurried through the little
side gate into the garden. Gorgias looked after her with sparkling eyes,
and drew a long breath. How good this girl must be, how wisely she cared
for her relatives! How energetically the young creature behaved! He had
seen his new acquaintance only in the dim light, but she must be
beautiful. Her eyes, lips, and hair certainly were. How his heart
throbbed as he asked himself the question whether this young girl, who
was endowed with every gift which constituted the true worth of
womanhood, was not preferable to her more attractive sister Barine!--when
the thought darted through his mind that he had cause to be grateful to
the beard which covered his chin and cheeks, for he felt that he, a
sedate, mature man, must have blushed. And he knew why. Only half an hour
before he had felt and admitted to Dion that he considered Barine the
most desirable of women, and now another's image cast a deep shadow over
hers and filled his heart with new, perhaps stronger emotions.
He had had similar experiences only too often, and his friends, Dion at
their head, had perceived his weakness and spoiled many an hour for him
by their biting jests. The series of tall and short, fair and dark
beauties who had fired his fancy was indeed of considerable length, and
every one on whom he had bestowed his quickly kindled affections had
seemed to him the one woman he must make his own, if he would be a happy
man. But ere he had reached the point of offering his hand, the question
had arisen in his mind whether he might not love another still more
ardently. So he had begun to persuade himself that his heart yearned for
no individual, but the whole sex--at least the portion which was young
and could feel love--and therefore he would scarcely be wise to bind
himself to any one. True, he knew that he was capable of fidelity, for he
clung to his friends with changeless loyalty, and was ready to make any
sacrifice in their behalf. With women, however, he dealt differently. Was
Helena's image, which now floated before him so bewitchingly, destined to
fade as swiftly? The contrary would have been remarkable. Yet he firmly
believed that this time Eros meant honestly by him. The laughing loves
who twined their rose garlands around him and Helena's predecessors had
nothing to do with this grave maiden.
These reflections darted through his brain with the speed of lightning,
and still stirred his heart when he was ushered into the impluvium, where
the magistrates were impatiently awaiting the owner of the house. With
the lucidity peculiar to him, he explained his reasons for hoping that
their errand would be vain, and Apollonius replied that no one would
rejoice more than he himself if the Regent should authorize him, on the
morrow, to countermand his mission. He would gladly wait there longer to
afford the old man's granddaughter an opportunity to soften the tidings
of the impending misfortune.
The kind-hearted man's patience, however, was not tested too long; for
when Helena entered the summer-house Didymus had already been informed of
the disaster which threatened him and his family. The philosopher
Euphranor, an elderly member of the Museum, had reached him through the
garden gate, and, spite of Philotas's warning sign, told him what was
occurring. But Didymus knew the old philosopher, who, a recluse from the
world like himself, was devoting the remainder of his life and strength
to the pursuit of science. So he only shook his head incredulously,
pushed back the thin locks of grey hair which hung down on his cheeks
over the barest part of his skull, and exclaimed reproachfully, though as
if the matter under discussion was of the most trivial importance: "What
have you been hearing? We'll see about it!"
He had risen as he spoke, and too abruptly surprised by the news to
remember the sandals on the mat and the upper robe which lay on a chest
of drawers at the end of the room, he was in the act of quitting it, when
his friend, who had silently watched his movements, stopped him, and
Helena entered.
The grey-haired sage turned to her, and, vexed by his friend's doubts,
begged her to convince her grandfather that even matters which do not
please us may nevertheless be of some importance. She did so as
considerately as possible, thinking meanwhile of the architect and his
hopes.
Didymus, with his eyes bent on the ground, shook his grey head again and
again. Then, suddenly raising it, he rushed to the door, and without
heeding the upper garment which Helena still held in her hand, tore it
open, shouting, "But things must and shall be changed!"
Euphranor and his granddaughter followed. Though his head was bowed, he
crossed the little garden with a swift, firm tread, and, without noticing
the questions and warnings of his companions, walked at once to the
impluvium. The bright light dazzled his weakened eyes, and his habit of
gazing into vacancy or on the ground compelled him to glance from side to
side for some time, ere he could accustom himself to it. Apollonius
approached, greeted him respectfully, and assured him that he deeply
regretted having interrupted him in the work for which the whole world
was waiting, but he had come on important business.
"I know, I know," the old scholar answered with a smile of superiority.
"What is all this ado about?"
As he spoke he looked around the group of spectators, among whom he knew
no one except Apollonius, who had charge of the museum accounts, and the
architect, for whom he had composed the inscription on the Odeum, which
he had recently built. But when his eyes met only unfamiliar faces, the
confidence which hitherto had sustained him began to waver, though still
convinced that a demand such as the philosopher suggested could not
possibly be made upon him, he continued: "It is stated that there is a
plan for turning my garden into a public square. And for what purpose? To
erect a piece of sculpture. But there can be nothing serious in the
rumour, for my property is recorded in the land register, and the law--"
"Pardon me," Apollonius broke in, "if I interrupt you. We know the
ordinance to which you refer, but this case is an exceptional one. The
Regent desires to take nothing from you. On the contrary, he offers, in
the name of the Queen, any compensation you yourself may fix for the
piece of land which is to be honoured by the statues of the highest
personages in the country--Cleopatra and Antony, hand in hand. The piece
of sculpture has already been brought here. A work by the admirable
artist Lysander, who passed too early to the nether world, certainly will
not disfigure your house. The little summer-house by the sea must be
removed to-morrow, it is true; you know that our gracious Queen may
return any day-victorious if the immortals are just. This piece of
sculpture, which is created in her honour, to afford her pleasure, must
greet her on her arrival, so the Regent send me to-day to communicate his
wish, which, as he represents the Queen--"
"Yet," interrupted the architect, who had again warmly assured the old
man's granddaughter of his aid, "yet your friends will endeavour to
persuade the Regent to find another place for the statues."
"They are at liberty to do so," said the officer. "What will happen later
the future will show. My office merely requires me to induce the worthy
owner of this house and garden to submit to-day to the Queen's command,
which the Regent and my own heart bid me clothe in the form of a
request."
During this conversation the old man had at first listened silently to
the magistrate's words, gazing intently into his face. So it was true.
The demand to yield up his garden, and even the little house, for fifty
years the scene of his study and creative work, for the sake of a statue,
would be made. Since this had become a certainty, he had stood with his
eyes fixed upon the ground. Grief had paralyzed his tongue, and Helena,
who felt this, for the aged head seemed as if it were bending under a
heavy burden, had drawn close to his side.
The shouts and howls of the throng outside echoed through the open roof
of the impluvium, but the old man did not seem to hear them, and did not
even notice his granddaughter. Yet, no sooner did he feel her touch than
he hurriedly shrank away, flung back his drooping head, and gazed around
the circle of intruders.
The dull, questioning eyes of the old commentator and writer of many
books now blazed with the hot fire of youthful passion and, like a
wrestler who seeks the right grip, he measured Apollonius and his
companions with wrathful glances. The fragile recluse seemed transformed
into a warrior ready for battle. His lips and the nostrils of his
delicate nose quivered, and when Apollonius began to say that it would be
wise to remove the contents of the summer-house that day, as it would be
torn down early the next morning, Didymus raised his arms, exclaiming:
"That will not be done. Not a single roll shall be removed! They will
find me at work as usual early to-morrow morning, and if it is still your
wish to rob me of my property you must use violence to attain your
purpose."
"Calm yourself," replied Apollonius. "Every one beneath the moon must
submit to a higher power; the gods bow to destiny, we mortals to the
sovereign. You are a sage; I, merely mindful of the behests of duty,
administer my office. But I know life, and if I may offer my counsel, you
will accept what cannot be averted, and I will wager ten to one that you
will have the best of it; that the Queen will place in your hands
means--"
"Sufficient to build a palace on the site of the little house of which I
was robbed," Didymus interrupted bitterly. Then rage burst forth afresh
"What do I care for your money? I want my rights, my good, guaranteed
rights. I insist upon them, and whoever assails the ground which my
grandfather and father bequeathed to me--"
He hesitated, for the throng outside had burst into a loud shout of joy;
and when it died away, and the old man began once more defiantly to claim
his rights, he was interrupted by a woman's clear tones, addressing him
with the Greek greeting, "Rejoice!"--a voice so gay and musical that it
seemed to dispel the depression which rested like a grey fog on the whole
company.
While Didymus was listening to the excited populace, and the new-comer
was gazing at the old man whose rigid obstinacy could scarcely be
conquered by kindness, the younger men were looking at the beautiful
woman who joined them. Her haste had flushed her cheeks, and from beneath
the turquoise-blue kerchief that covered her fair locks a bewitching face
smiled at her sister, the architect, and her grandfather.
Apollonius and many of his companions felt as if happiness in person had
entered this imperilled house, and many an eye brightened when the
infuriated old man exclaimed in an altered tone, "You here, Barine?" and
she, without heeding the presence of the others, kissed his cheek with
tender affection.
Helena, Gorgias, and the old philosopher Euphranor, had approached her,
and when the latter asked with loving reproach, "Why, Barine, how did you
get through the howling mob?" she answered gaily: "That a learned member
of the Museum may receive me with the query whether I am here, though
from childhood a kind or--what do you think, grandfather?--a malign fate
has preserved me from being overlooked, and some one else reprovingly
asks how I passed through the shouting mob, as if it were a crime to wade
into the water to hold out a helping hand to those we love best when it
is up to their chins! But, oh! dear, this howling is too hideous!"
While speaking, she pressed her little hands on the part of the kerchief
which concealed her ears, and said no more until the noise subsided,
although she declared that she was in a hurry, and had only come to learn
how matters were. Meanwhile it seemed as if she was so full of quick,
pulsing life, that it was impossible to leave even a moment unused, if it
were merely to bestow or answer a friendly glance.
The architect and her sister were obliged to return hurried answers to
hasty questions; and as soon as she ascertained what had brought the
strangers there she thanked Apollonius, and said that old friends would
do their best to spare her grandfather such a sorrow.
In reply to repeated inquiries from the two old men in regard to her
arrival there, she answered: "Nobody will believe it, because in this
hurry I could not keep my mouth shut; but I acted like a mute fish and
reached the water." Then, drawing her grandfather aside, she whispered to
him that, when she left her boat at the harbour, Archibius had seen her
from his carriage, and instantly stopped it to inform her of his intended
visit that evening. He was coming to discuss an important matter.
Therefore she must receive the worthy man, whom she sincerely liked, so
she could not stay. Then turning to the others still with her kerchief on
her head ready for departure--she asked what the people meant by their
outcries. The architect replied that Philostratus had endeavoured to make
the crowd believe that the only appropriate site for the statues of which
she had heard was her grandfather's garden, and he thought he knew in
whose behalf the fellow was acting.
"Certainly not in the Regent's," said Apollonius, in a tone of sincere
conviction; but Barine, over whose sunny brow a shadow had flitted when
Gorgias uttered the orator's name, assented with a slight bend of the
head, and then whispered hurriedly, yet earnestly, that she would answer
for the old man's allowing himself to be persuaded, if he had only time
to collect his thoughts.
The next morning, when the market was crowded, the officer might commence
his negotiations afresh, if the Regent insisted on his plan. Meanwhile
she would do her best to persuade her grandfather to yield, though he was
not exactly one of the class who are easily guided. Apollonius might
remind the Regent that it would be advisable at this time to avoid a
public scandal, to remember Didymus's age, and the validity of his claim.
While Apollonius was talking with his companions, Barine beckoned to the
architect, and hastily took leave of the others, protesting that she was
in no danger, since she would slip away again like a fish, only this time
she would use her tongue, and hoped by its means to win to the support of
Didymus's just cause a man who would already have ended all the trouble
had the Queen only been in Alexandria.
Until now the eyes and ears of the whole company had been fixed upon
Barine. No one had desired anything better than to gaze at and listen to
her.
Not until she had quitted the room with Gorgias did the officials discuss
the matter together, and soon after Apollonius went away with his
companions, to hold another conference with the Regent about this
unpleasant business. This time the architect had followed the young
beauty with very mingled feelings. Only an hour before he would have
rejoiced to be permitted to accompany and protect Barine; now he would
have gladly remained with her sister, who had returned his farewell
greeting so gratefully and yet with such maidenly modesty. But even the
most vacillating man cannot change one fancy for another as he would
replace a black piece on the draughtboard with a white one, and he still
found it delightful to be so near Barine. Only the thought that Helena
might believe that he stood on very intimate terms with her sister had
darted with a disquieting influence through his brain when the latter
invited him to accompany her.
In the garden Barine begged him, before they went to the landing-place
where the boat was moored, to help her ascend the narrow flight of steps
leading to the flat roof of the gatekeeper's little house.
Here they could watch unseen the tumult in the square below, for it was
surrounded by dense laurel bushes. Bright flames were blazing in the
pitch-pans before the two temples at the side of the Corner of the Muses,
and their light was increased by the torches held in the hands of
Scythians. Yet no individuals could be distinguished in the throng. The
marble walls of the temples shimmered, the statues at Didymus's gate, and
the hermae along the street of the King which passed the threatened house
and connected the north of the Corner of the Muses with the sea-shore,
loomed from the darkness in the brilliancy of the reflected light, but
the smoke of the torches darkened the sky and dimmed the starlight.
The only persons distinctly visible were Dion, who had stationed himself
on the lofty framework of the platform on which the muffled statues had
been drawn hither, and the attorney Philostratus, who stood on the
pedestal of one of the dolphins which surrounded the fountain between the
Temple of Isis and the street. The space, a dozen paces wide, which
divided them, permitted the antagonists to understand each other, and the
attention of the whole throng was fixed upon the wranglers.
These verbal battles were one of the greatest pleasures of the
Alexandrians, and they greeted every clever turn of speech with shouts of
applause, every word which displeased them with groans, hisses, and
cat-calls.
Barine could see and hear what was passing below. She had pushed aside
the foliage of the laurel bushes which concealed her, and, with her hand
raised to her ear, stood listening to the two disputants. When the
scoundrel whom she had called husband, and for whom her contempt had
become too deep for hate, sneeringly assailed her family as having been
fed from generation to generation from the corn-bin of the Museum, she
bit her lips. But they soon curled, as if what she heard aroused her
disgust, for the speaker now turned to Dion and accused him of preventing
the kindly disposed Regent from increasing the renown of the great Queen
and affording her noble heart a pleasure.
"My tongue," he cried, "is the tool which supports me. Why am I using it
here till it is weary and almost paralyzed? In honour of Cleopatra, our
illustrious Queen, and her generous friend, to whom we all owe a debt of
gratitude. Let all who love her and the divine Antony, the new Herakles
and Dionysus--both will soon make their entry among us crowned with the
laurels of victory--join the Regent and every well-disposed person in
seizing yonder bit of land so meanly withheld by base avarice and a
sentiment--a sentiment, do you hear?--which I do not name more plainly,
simply because wickedness is repulsive to me, and I do not stand here as
an accuser. Whoever upholds the word-monger who spouts forth books as the
dolphin at my side does water, may do so. I shall not envy him. But first
look at Didymus's ally and panegyrist. There he stands opposite to me. It
would have been better for him had the dolphin at his feet taught him
silence. Then he might have remained in the obscurity which befits him.
"But whether willing or not, I must drag him forth, and I will show you
Dion, fellow-citizens, though I would far rather have you see things
which arouse less ire. The dim light prevents your distinguishing the
colour of his robe, but I know it, for I saw it in the glare of day. It
is hyacinthine purple. You know what that costs. It would support the
wives and children of many among you for ten long years. 'How heavy must
be the purse which can expose such a treasure to sun and rain!' is the
thought of every one who sees him strutting about as proudly as a
peacock. And his purse is loaded with many talents. Only it is a pity
that, day after day, most of you must give your children a little less
bread and deprive yourselves of many a draught of wine to deck him out so
bravely. His father, Eumenes, was a tax-collector, and what the leech
extorted from you and your children, the son now uses to drive, clad in
hyacinthine purple, a four-horse chariot, which splashes the mire from
the street into your faces as it rolls onward. By the dog! the gentleman
does not weigh so very much, yet he needs four horses to drag him. And,
fellow-citizens, do you know why? I'll tell you. He's afraid of sticking
fast everywhere, even in his speech."
Here Philostratus lowered his voice, for the phrase "sticking fast" had
drawn a laugh from some of his hearers; but Dion, whose father had really
amassed, in the high position of a receiver of taxes, the handsome
fortune which his son possessed, did not delay his reply.
"Yes, yes," he retorted scornfully, "yonder Syrian babbler hit the mark
this time. He stands before me, and who does not easily stick fast when
marsh and mire are so near? As for the hyacinthine purple cloak, I wear
it because I like it. His crocus-yellow one is less to my taste, though
he certainly looks fine enough in it in the sunlight. It shines like a
buttercup in the grass. You know the plant. When it fades--and I ask
whether you think Philostratus looks like a bud--when it fades, it leaves
a hollow spiral ball which a child's breath could blow away. Suppose in
future we should call the round buttercup seed-vessels 'Philostratus
heads'? You like the suggestion? I am glad, fellow-citizens, and I thank
you. It proves your good taste. Then we will stick to the comparison.
Every head contains a tongue, and Philostratus says that his is the tool
which supports him."
"Hear the money-bag, the despiser of the people!" interrupted
Philostratus furiously. "The honest toil by which a citizen earns a
livelihood is a disgrace in his eyes."
"Honest toil, my good friend," replied Dion, "is scarcely in question
here. I spoke only of your tongue.--You understand me, fellow-citizens.
Or, if any of you are not yet acquainted with this worthy man, I will
show him to you, for I know him well. He is my foe, yet I can sincerely
recommend him to many of you. If any one has a very bad, shamefully
corrupt cause to bring before the courts, I most earnestly counsel him to
apply to the buttercup man perched on yonder fountain. He will thank me
for it. Believe me, Didymus's cause is just, precisely because this
advocate so eagerly assails it. I told you just now the matter under
discussion. Which of you who owns a garden can say in future, 'It is
mine,' if, during the absence of the Queen, it is allowable to take it
away to be used for any other purpose? But this is what threatens
Didymus. If this is to be the custom here, let every one beware of sowing
a radish or planting a bush or a tree, for should the wife of some great
noble desire to dry her linen there, he may be deprived of it ere the
former can ripen or the latter give shade."
Loud applause followed this sentence, but Philostratus shouted in a voice
that echoed far and wide: "Hear me, fellow-citizens; do not allow your
selves to be deceived! No one is to be robbed here. The project is to
purchase, at a high price, the spot which the city needs for her
adornment, and to honour and please the Queen. Are the Regent and the
citizens to lose this opportunity of expressing the gratitude of years,
and the rejoicing over the greatest of victories, of which we shall soon
hear, because an evil-disposed person--the word must be uttered--a foe to
his country, opposes it?"
"Now the mire is coming too near me," Dion angrily responded, "and I
might really stick fast, as I was warned; for I do not envy the ready
presence of mind of any person whose tongue would not falter when the
basest slander scattered its venom over him. You all know,
fellow-citizens, through how many generations the Didymus family has
lived to the honour of this city, doing praiseworthy work in yonder
house. You know that the good old man who dwells there was one of the
teachers of the royal children."
"And yet," cried Philostratus, "only the day before yesterday he walked
arm in arm in the Paneum garden with Arius, the tutor of Octavianus, our
own and our Queen's most hated foe. In my presence, and before I know not
how many others, Didymus distinguished this Arius as his most beloved
pupil."
"To give you that title," retorted Dion, "would certainly fill any
teacher with shame and anger, no matter how far you had surpassed him in
wisdom and knowledge. Nay, had you been committed to the care of the
herring dealers, instead of the rhetoricians, every honest man among them
would disown you, for they sell only good wares for good money, while you
give the poorest in exchange for glittering gold. This time you trample
under foot the fair name of an honourable man. But I will not suffer it;
and you hear, fellow-citizens, I now challenge this Syrian to prove that
Didymus ever betrayed his native land, or I will brand him in your
presence a base slanderer, an infamous, venal destroyer of character!"
"An insult from such lips is easily borne," replied Philostratus in a
tone of scornful superiority; but there was a pause ere he again turned
to the listening throng, and with all the warmth he could throw into his
voice continued: "What do I desire, then, fellow-citizens? What is the
sole object of my words? I stand here with clean hands, impelled solely
by the impulse of my heart, to plead for the Queen. In order to secure
the only suitable site for the statues to be erected to Cleopatra's
honour and fame, I enter into judgment with her foes, expose myself to
the insult with which boastful insolence is permitted to vent its wrath
upon me. But I am not dismayed, though, in pursuing this course, I am
acting against the law of Nature; for the infamous man against whom I
raise my voice was my teacher, too, and ere he turned from the path of
right and virtue--under influences which I will not mention here--he
numbered me also, in the presence of many witnesses, among his best
pupils. I was certainly one of the most grateful--I chose his
granddaughter--the truth must be spoken--for my wife. The possession--"
"Possession!" interrupted Dion in a loud, excited tone. "The corpse cast
ashore by the waves might as well boast possession of the sea!"
The dim torchlight was sufficient to reveal Philostratus's pallor to the
bystanders. For a moment the orator seemed to lose his self-control, but
he quickly recovered himself, and shouted: "Fellow-citizens, dear
friends! I was about to make you witnesses of the misery which a woman,
whose wickedness is even greater than her beauty, brought upon an
inexperienced--"
But he went no further; for his hearers--many of whom knew the brilliant,
generous Dion, and Barine, the fair singer at the last Adonis
festival--gave the orator tokens of their indignation, which were all the
more pitiless because of the pleasure they felt in seeing an expert
vanquished by an untrained foe. The wordy war would not have ended so
quickly, however, had not restlessness and alarm taken possession of the
crowd. The shout, "Back! disperse!" ran through the multitude, and
directly after the trampling of hoofs and the commands of the leader of a
troop of Libyan cavalry were heard. The matter at stake was not
sufficiently important to induce the populace to offer an armed force
resistance which might have entailed serious danger. Besides, the
blustering war of tongues had reached a merry close, and loud laughter
blended with the shouts of fear and warning; for the surging throng had
swept with unexpected speed towards the fountain and plunged Philostratus
into the basin. Whether this was due to the wrath of some enemy, or to
mere accident, could not be learned; the vain efforts of the luckless man
to crawl out of the water up the smooth marble were so comical, and his
gestures, after helping hands had dragged him dripping upon the pavement
of the square, were so irresistibly funny, that more laughing than angry
voices were heard, especially when some one cried, "His hands were soiled
by blackening Didymus, so the washing will do him good." "Some wise
physicians flung him into the water," retorted an other; "he needed the
cold application after the blows Dion dealt him."
The Regent, who had sent the troop of horsemen to drive the crowd away
from Didymus's house, might well be pleased that the violent measure
encountered so little resistance.
The throng quickly scattered, and was speedily attracted by something new
at the Theatre of Dionysus--the zither-player Anaxenor had just announced
from its steps that Cleopatra and Antony had won the most brilliant
victory, and had sung to the accompaniment of his lute a hymn which had
deeply stirred all hearts. He had composed it long before, and seized the
first opportunity--the report had reached his ears while breakfasting in
Kanopus--to try its effect.
As soon as the square began to empty, Barine left her post of
observation. It was long since her heart had throbbed so violently. Not
one of the many suitors for her favour had been so dear to her as Dion;
but she now felt that she loved him.
What he had just done for her and her grandfather was worthy of the
deepest gratitude; it proved that he did not come to her house, like most
of her guests, merely to while away the evening hours.
It had been no small matter for the young aristocrat, in the presence of
the whole multitude, to enter into a debate with the infamous
Philostratus, and how well he had succeeded in silencing the dreaded
orator! Besides, Dion had even taken her part against his own powerful
uncle, and perhaps by his deed drawn upon himself the hostility of his
enemy's brother, Alexas, Antony's powerful favourite. Barine might assure
herself that he, who was the peer of any Macedonian noble in the city,
would have done this for no one else.
She felt as if the act had ransomed her.
When, after an unhappy marriage and many desolate days, she had regained
her former bright cheerfulness and saw her house become the centre of the
intellectual life of the city, she had striven until now to extend the
same welcome to all her guests. She had perceived that she ought not to
give any one the power over her which is possessed by the man who knows
that he is beloved, and even to Dion she had granted little more than to
the others. But now she saw plainly that she would resign the pleasure of
being a universally admired woman, whose modest home attracted the most
distinguished men in the city, for the far greater happiness which would
be hers as Dion's beloved wife.
With him, cherished by his love, she believed that she could find far
greater joy in solitude than in the gay course of her present life.
She knew now what she must do if Dion sought her, and the architect, for
the first time, found her a silent companion. He had willingly
accompanied her back to her grandfather's house, where he had again met
her sister Helena, while she had quitted it disappointed, because her
brave defender had not returned there.
After the interruption of the debate Dion had been in a very cheerful
mood. The pleasant sensation of having championed a good cause, and the
delightful consciousness of success were not new to him, but he had
rarely felt so uplifted as now. He most ardently longed for his next
meeting with Barine, and imagined how he would describe what had happened
and claim her gratitude for his friendly service. The scene had risen
clearly before his mind, but scarcely had the radiant vision of the
future faded when the unusually bright expression of his manly face was
clouded by a grave and troubled one.
The darkness of the night, illumined only by the flare of the pitch-pans,
had surrounded him, yet it had seemed as if he were standing with Barine
in the full light of noon in the blossoming garden of his own palace,
and, after asking a reward for his sturdy championship, she had clung to
him with deep emotion, and he had passionately kissed her tearful face.
The face had quickly vanished, yet it had been as distinct as the most
vivid picture in a dream. Was Barine more to him than he supposed? Had he
not been drawn to her, during the past few months, by the mere charm of
her pliant intellect and her bright beauty? Had a new, strong passion
awakened within him? Was he in danger of seeing the will which urged him
to preserve his freedom conquered? Had he cause to fear that some day,
constrained by a mysterious, invincible power, in defiance of the
opposition of calm reason, he might perhaps bind himself for life to this
Barine, the woman who had once been the wife of a Philostratus, and who
bestowed her smiles on all who found admittance to her house seeking a
feast for the eye, a banquet for the ear, a pleasant entertainment?
Though her honor was as stainless as the breast of a swan--and he had no
reason to doubt it--she would still be classed with Aspasia and other
women whose guests sought more than songs and agreeable conversations.
The gifts with which the gods had so lavishly endowed her had already
been shared with too many to permit him, the last scion of a noble
Macedonian house, to think of leading her, as mistress, to the palace
whose erection he had so carefully and successfully planned with Gorgias.
Surely it lacked nothing save the gracious rule of a mistress.
But if she should consent to become his without the blessing of Hymen?
No.
He could not thus dishonor the granddaughter of Didymus, the man who had
been his father's revered teacher, a woman whom he had always rejoiced
that, spite of the gay freedom with which she received so many admirers,
he could still esteem. He would not do so, though his friends would have
greeted such scruples with a smile of superiority. Who revered the
sacredness of marriage in a city whose queen was openly living for the
second time with the husband of another? Dion himself had formed many a
brief connection, but for that very reason he could not place a woman
like Barine on the same footing with those whose love he had perhaps owed
solely to his wealth. He had never lacked courage and resolution, but he
felt that this time he would have to resist a power with which he had
never coped.
That accursed face! Again and again it rose before his mental vision,
smiling and beckoning so sweetly that the day must come when the yearning
to realize the dream would conquer all opposition. If he remained near
her he would inevitably do what he might afterwards regret, and therefore
he would fain have offered a sacrifice to Peitho to induce her to enhance
Archibius's powers of persuasion and induce Barine to leave Alexandria.
It would be hard for him to part from her, yet much would be gained if
she went into the country. Between the present and the distant period of
a second meeting lay respite from peril, and perhaps the possibility of
victory. Dion did not recognize himself. He seemed as unstable as a
swaying reed, because he had conquered his wish to re-enter old Didymus's
house and encourage him, and passed on to his own home. But he would
probably have found Barine still with her grandfather, and he would not
meet her, though every fibre of his being longed for her face, her voice,
and a word of gratitude from her beloved lips. Instead of joy, he was
filled with the sense of dissatisfaction which overpowers a man standing
at a crossing in the roads, who sees before him three goals, yet can be
fully content with neither.
The Street of the King, along which he suffered himself to be carried by
the excited throng, ran between the sea and the Theatre of Dionysus. The
thought darted through his mind that his friend the architect desired to
erect the luckless statues of the royal lovers in front of this stately
building. He would divert his thoughts by examining the site which
Gorgias had chosen.
The zither-player finished his hymn just as Dion approached the theatre,
and the crowd began to disperse. Every one was full of the joyful tidings
of victory, and one shouted to another what Anaxenor, the favourite of
the great Antony, who must surely know, had just recited in thrilling
verse. Many a joyous Io and loud Evoe to Cleopatra, the new Isis, and
Antony, the new Dionysus, resounded through the air, while bearded and
smooth, delicate Greek and thick Egyptian lips joined in the shout, "To
the Sebasteum!" This was the royal palace, which faced the government
building containing the Regent's residence. The populace desired to have
the delightful news confirmed, and to express, by a public demonstration,
the grateful joy which filled every heart.
Dion, too, was eager to obtain certainty, and, though usually averse to
mingling with the populace during such noisy outbursts of feeling, he was
preparing to follow the crowd thronging towards the Sebasteum, when the
shouts of runners clearing a passage for a closed litter fell upon his
ear.
It was occupied by Iras, the Queen's trusted attendant. If any one could
give accurate information, it was she; yet it would hardly be possible to
gain an opportunity of conversing with her in this throng. But Iras must
have had a different opinion; she had seen Dion, and now called him to
her side. There were hoarse tones in her voice, usually so clear and
musical, which betrayed the emotion raging in her breast as she assailed
the young Macedonian noble with a flood of questions. Without giving him
the usual greeting, she hastily desired to know what was exciting the
people, who had brought the tidings of victory, and whither the multitude
was flocking?
Dion had found it difficult not to be forced from the litter while
answering. Iris perceived this, and as they were just passing the
Maeander, the labyrinth, which was closed after sunset, she ordered her
bearers to carry the litter to the entrance, made herself known to the
watchman, ordered the outer court to be opened, the litter to be placed
there, and the bearers and runners to wait outside for her summons, which
would soon be given.
This unusual haste and excitement filled Dion with just solicitude. She
refused his invitation to alight and walk up and down, declaring that
life offered so many labyrinths that one need not seek them. He, too,
seemed to be following paths which were scarcely straight ones. "Why,"
she concluded, thrusting her head far out of the opening in the litter,
"are you rendering it so difficult for the Regent and your own uncle to
execute their plans, making common cause with the populace, like a paid
agitator?"
"Like Philostratus, you mean, on whom I bestowed a few blows in addition
to the golden guerdon received from your hand?"
"Ay, like him, for aught I care. Probably it was you, too, who had him
flung into the water, after you had vented your wrath on him? You managed
your cause well. What we do for love's sake is usually successful. No
matter, if only his brother Alexas does not rouse Antony against you. For
my part, I merely desire to know why and for whom all this was done."
"For whom save the good old man who was my father's preceptor, and his
just claim?" replied Dion frankly. "Moreover--for no site more unsuitable
could be found than his garden-in behalf of good taste."
Iras laughed a shrill, short laugh, and her narrow, regularly formed
face, which might have been called beautiful, had not the bridge of the
straight delicate nose been too long and the chin too small, darkened
slightly, as she exclaimed, "That is frank at least."
"You ought to be accustomed to that from me," replied Dion calmly. "In
this case, however, the expert, Gorgias, fully shares my opinion."
"I heard that too. You are both the most constant visitors of--what is
the woman's name?--the bewitching Barine."
"Barine?" repeated Dion, as if the mention of the name surprised him.
"You take care, my friend, that our conversation does honour to its
scene, the labyrinth. I speak of works of the sculptor's art, and you
pretend that I am referring to what is most certainly a very successful
living work from the creative hands of the gods. I was very far from
thinking of the granddaughter of the old scholar for whom I interceded."
"Ay," she scornfully retorted, "young gentlemen in your position, and
with your habits of life, always think of their fathers estimable
teachers rather than of the women who, ever since Pandora opened her box,
have brought all sorts of misfortunes into the world. But," she added,
pushing back her dark locks from her high forehead, "I don't understand
myself, how, with the mountain of care that now burdens my soul, I can
waste even a single word upon such trifles. I care as little for the aged
scholar as I do for his legion of commentaries and books, though they are
not wholly unfamiliar to me. For any concern of mine he might have as
many grandchildren as there are evil tongues in Alexandria, were it not
that just at this time it is of the utmost importance to remove
everything which might cast a shadow on the Queen's pathway. I have just
come from the palace of the royal children at Lochias, and what I learned
there. But that--I will not, I cannot believe it. It fairly stifles me!"
"Have you received bad news from the fleet?" questioned Dion, with
sincere anxiety; but she only bent her head in assent, laying her fan of
ostrich-plumes on her lips to enjoin silence, at the same time shivering
so violently that he perceived it, even in the dusk. It was evident that
speech was difficult, as she added in a muffled tone: "It must be kept
secret--Rhodian sailors--thank the gods, it is still very doubtful--it
cannot, must not be true--and yet-the prattle of that zither-player,
which has filled the multitude with joyous anticipation, is
abominable--the great ones of the earth are often most sorely injured by
those who owe them the most gratitude. I know you can be silent, Dion.
You could as a boy, if anything was to be hidden from our parents. Would
you still be ready to plunge into the water for me, as in those days?
Scarcely. Yet you may be trusted, and, even in this labyrinth, I will do
so. My heart is heavy. But not one word to any person. I need no
confidant and could maintain silence even towards you, but I am anxious
that you should understand me, you who have just taken such a stand.
Before I entered my litter at Lochias, the boy returned, and I talked
with him."
"Young Caesarion loves Barine," replied Dion with grave earnestness.
"Then this horrible folly is known?" asked Iras excitedly. "A passion far
deeper than I should ever have expected this dreamer to feel has taken
possession of him. And if the Queen should now return--perhaps less
successful than we desire--if she looks to those from whom she still
expects pleasure, satisfaction, lofty deeds, and learns what has befallen
the boy--for what does not that sun-bright intellect learn and perceive?
He is dear to her, dearer than any of you imagine. How it will increase
her anxiety, perhaps her suffering! With what good reason she will be
angered against those whom duty and love should have commanded to guard
the boy!"
"And therefore," added Dion, "the stone of offence must be removed. Your
first step to secure this object was the attack on Didymus."
He had judged correctly and perceived that, in her assault upon the old
scholar, she had at first intended to play into the hands of the rulers,
work against the old philosopher and his relatives, among whose number
was Barine; for the Egyptian law permitted the relatives of those who
were convicted of any crime against the sovereign or the government to be
banished with the criminal. This attack upon an innocent person was
disgraceful, yet every word Iras uttered made Dion feel, every feature of
her face betrayed, that it was not merely base jealousy, but a nobler
emotion, that caused her to assail the guiltless sage--love for her
mistress, the desire which dominated her whole being to guard Cleopatra
from grief and trouble in these trying times. He knew Iras's iron will
and the want of consideration with which she had learned to pursue her
purpose at the court. His first object was to protect Barine from the
danger which threatened her; but he also wished to relieve the anxiety of
Iras, the daughter of Krates, his father's neighbour, with whom he had
played in boyhood and for whom he had never ceased to feel a tender
interest.
His remark surprised her. She saw that her plot was detected by the man
whose esteem she most valued, and a loving woman is glad to recognize the
superiority of her lover. Besides, from her earliest childhood--and she
was only two years younger than Dion--she had belonged to circles where
no quality was more highly prized than mental pliancy and keenness. Her
dark eyes, which at first had glittered distrustfully and questioningly
and afterwards glowed with a gloomy light, now gained a new expression.
Her gaze sought her friend's with a tender, pleading look as, admitting
his charge, she began: "Yes! Dion, the philosopher's granddaughter must
not stay here. Or do you see any other way to protect the unhappy boy
from incalculable misfortune? You know me well enough to be aware that,
like you, I am reluctant to infringe another's rights, that except in
case of necessity I am not cruel. I value your esteem. No one is more
truthful, and yesterday you averred that Eros had no part in your visits
to the much-admired young woman, that you joined her guests merely
because the society you found at her house afforded a pleasant stimulus
to the mind. I have ceased to believe in many things, but not in you and
your words, and if hearing that you had taken sides with the grandfather,
I fancied that you were secretly seeking the thanks and gratitude of the
granddaughter, why--surely the atrocious maxim that Zeus does not hear
the vows of lovers comes from you men--why, suspicion again reared its
head. Now you seem to share my opinion--"
"Like you," Dion interrupted, "I believe that Barine ought to be
withdrawn from the boy's pursuit, which cannot be more unpleasant to you
than to her. As Caesarion neither can nor ought to leave Alexandria while
affairs are so threatening, nothing is left except to remove the young
woman--but, of course, in all kindness."
"In a golden chariot, garlanded with roses, if you so desire," cried Iras
eagerly.
"That might attract attention," answered Dion, smiling and raising his
hand as if to enjoin moderation. "Your mode of action does not please me,
even now that I know its purpose, but I will gladly aid you to attain
your object. Your crooked paths also lead to the goal, and perhaps one is
less likely to stumble in them; but straight ways suit me better, and I
think I have already found the right one. A friend will invite Barine to
an estate far away from here, perhaps in the lake regions."
"You?" cried Iras, her narrow eyebrows suddenly contracting.
"Do you imagine that she would go with me?" he asked, in a faintly
reproachful tone. "No. Fortunately, we have older friends, and at their
head is one who happens to be your uncle and at the same time is wax in
the hands of the Queen."
"Archibius?" exclaimed Iras. "Ah! if he could persuade her to do so!"
"He will try. He, too, is anxious about the lad. While we are talking
here, he is inviting Barine to his estate. The country air will benefit
her."
"May she bloom there like a young shepherdess!"
"You are right to wish her the best fortune; for if the Queen does not
return victorious, the irritability of our Alexandrians will be doubled.
When you laid hands on Didymus's garden, you were so busily engaged in
building the triumphal arch that you forgot--"
"Who would have doubted the successful issue of this war?" cried Iras.
"And they will, they will conquer. The Rhodian said that the fleet was
scattered. The disaster happened on the Acharnanian coast. How positive
it sounded! But he had it only at second and third hand. And what are
mere rumours? The source of the false tidings is discovered later.
Besides, even if the naval battle were really lost, the powerful army,
which is far superior to Octavianus's forces, still remains. Which of the
enemy's generals could cope with Antony on the land? How he will fight
when all is at stake-fame, honour, sovereignty, hate, and love! Away with
this fear, based on mere rumour! After Dyrrachium Caesar's cause was
deemed lost, and how soon Pharsalus made him master of the world! Is it
worthy of a sensible person to suffer courage to be depressed by a
sailor's gossip? And yet--yet! It began while I was ill. And then the
swallows on the Antonias, the admiral's ship. We have already spoken of
it. Mardiou and your uncle Zeno saw with their own eyes the strange
swallows drive away those which had built their nest on the helm of the
Antonias, and kill the young ones with their cruel beaks. An evil omen!
"I cannot forget it. And my dream, while I lay ill with fever far away
from my mistress! But I have already lingered here too long. No, Dion,
no. I am grateful for the rest here--I can now feel at ease about
Caesarion. Place the monument where you choose. The people shall see and
hear that we respect their opposition, that we are just and friendly.
Help me to turn this matter to the advantage of the Queen, and if
Archibius succeeds in getting Barine away and keeping her in the country,
then--if I had aught that seemed to you desirable it should be yours. But
what does the petted Dion care for his fading playfellow?"
"Fading?" he repeated in a tone of indignant reproach. "Say rather the
fully developed flower has learned from her royal friend the secret of
eternal youth."
With a swift impulse of gratitude Iras bent her face towards him in the
dusk, extending the slender white hand--next to Cleopatra's famed as the
most beautiful at court--for him to kiss, but when he merely pressed his
lips lightly on it with no shadow of tenderness, she hastily withdrew it,
exclaiming as if overwhelmed by sudden repentance: "This idle, hollow
dalliance at such a time, with such a burden of anxiety oppressing the
heart! It is un worthy, shameful! If Barine goes with Archibius, her time
will scarcely hang heavy on his estates. I think I know some one who will
speedily follow to bear her company.--Here, Sasis! the bearers! To the
Tower of Nilus, before the Gate of the Sun!"
Dion gazed after her litter a short time, then passed his hand through
his waving brown hair, walked swiftly to the shore and, without pausing
long to choose, sprang into one of the boats which were rented for
pleasure voyages. Ordering the sailors who were preparing to accompany
him to remain on shore, he stretched the sail with a practised hand, and
ran out towards the mouth of the harbour. He needed some strong
excitement, and wished to go himself in search of news.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Contempt had become too deep for hate
Jealousy has a thousand eyes
Zeus does not hear the vows of lovers
CLEOPATRA
By Georg Ebers
Volume 2.
CHAPTER IV.
The house facing the garden of the Paneum, where Barine lived, was the
property of her mother, who had inherited it from her parents. The artist
Leonax, the young beauty's father, son of the old philosopher Didymus,
had died long before.
After Barine's unhappy marriage with Philostratus was dissolved, she had
returned to her mother, who managed the affairs of the household. She
too, belonged to a family of scholars and had a brother who had won high
repute as a philosopher, and had directed the studies of the young
Octavianus. This had occurred long before the commencement of the
hostility which separated the heirs of Caesar and Mark Antony. But even
after the latter had deserted Octavia, the sister of Octavianus, to
return to Cleopatra, the object of his love, and there was an open breach
between the two rivals for the sovereignty of the world, Antony had been
friendly to Arius and borne him no grudge for his close relations to his
rival. The generous Roman had even given his enemy's former tutor a fine
house, to show him that he was glad to have him in Alexandria and near
his person.
The widow Berenike, Barine's mother, was warmly attached to her only
brother, who often joined her daughter's guests. She was a quiet, modest
woman whose happiest days had been passed in superintending the education
of her children, Barine, the fiery Hippias, and the quiet Helena, who for
several years had lived with her grandparents and, with faithful
devotion, assumed the duty of caring for them. She had been more easily
guided than the two older children; for the boy's aspiring spirit had
often drawn him beyond his mother's control, and the beautiful, vivacious
girl had early possessed charms so unusual that she could not remain
unnoticed.
Hippias had studied oratory, first in Alexandria and later in Athens and
Rhodes. Three years before, his uncle Arius had sent him with excellent
letters of introduction to Rome to become acquainted with the life of the
capital and try whether, in spite of his origin, his brilliant gifts of
eloquence would forward his fortunes there.
Two miserable years with an infamous, unloved husband had changed the
wild spirits of Barine's childhood into the sunny cheerfulness now one of
her special charms. Her mother was conscious of having desired only her
best good in uniting the girl of sixteen to Philostratus, whom the
grandfather Didymus then considered a very promising young man, and whose
advancement, in addition to his own talents, his brother Alexas, Antony's
favourite, promised to aid. She had believed that this step would afford
the gay, beautiful girl the best protection from the perils of the
corrupt capital; but the worthless husband had caused both mother and
daughter much care and sorrow, while his brother Alexas, who constantly
pursued his young sister-in-law with insulting attentions, was the source
of almost equal trouble. Berenike often gazed in silent astonishment at
the child, who, spite of such sore grief and humiliation, had preserved
the innocent light-heartedness which made her seem as if life had offered
her only thornless roses.
Her father, Leonax, had been one of the most distinguished artists of the
day, and Barine had inherited from him the elastic artist temperament
which speedily rebounds from the heaviest pressure. To him also she owed
the rare gift of song, which had been carefully cultivated and had
already secured her the first position in the woman's chorus at the
festival of the great goddesses of the city. Every one was full of her
praises, and after she had sung the Yalemos in the palace over the waxen
image of the favourite of the gods, slain by the boar, her name was
eagerly applauded. To have heard her was esteemed a privilege, for she
sang only in her own house or at religious ceremonials "for the honour of
the gods."
The Queen, too, had heard her, and, after the Adonis festival, her uncle
Arius had presented her to Antony, who expressed his admiration with all
the fervour of his frank nature, and afterwards came to her house a
second time, accompanied by his son Antyllus. Doubtless he would have
called on her frequently and tested upon her heart his peculiar power
over women, had he not been compelled to leave the city on the day after
his last visit.
Berenike had reproved her brother for bringing the Queen's lover to
Barine, for her anxiety was increased by the repeated visits of Antony's
son, and still more aroused by that of Caesarion, who was presented by
Antyllus.
These youths were not numbered among the guests whose presence she
welcomed and whose conversation afforded her pleasure. It was flattering
that they should honour her simple home by their visits, but she knew
that Caesarion came without his tutor's knowledge, and perceived, by the
expression of his eyes, what drew him to her daughter. Besides, Berenike,
in rearing the two children, who had been the source of so much anxiety
had lost the joyous confidence which had characterized her own youth.
Whenever life presented any new phase, she saw the dark side first. If a
burning candle stood before her, the shadow of the candlestick caught her
eye before the light. Her whole mental existence became a chain of fears,
but the kind-hearted woman loved her children too tenderly to permit them
to see it. Only it was a relief to her heart when some of her evil
forebodings were realized, to say that she had foreseen it all.
No trace of this was legible in her face, a countenance still pretty and
pleasing in its unruffled placidity. She talked very little, but what she
did say was sensible, and proved how attentively she understood how to
listen. So she was welcome among Barine's guests. Even the most
distinguished received something from her, because he felt that the quiet
woman understood him.
Before Barine had returned that evening, something had occurred which
made her mother doubly regret the accident to her brother Arius the day
before. On his way home from his sister's he had been run over by a
chariot darting recklessly along the Street of the King, and was carried,
severely injured, to his home, where he now lay helpless and fevered. Nor
did it lessen his sufferings to hear his two sons threaten to take
vengeance on the reckless fellow who had wrought their father this
mischief, for he had reason to believe Antyllus the perpetrator of the
deed, and a collision between the youths and the son of Antony could only
result in fresh disaster to him and his, especially as the young Roman
seemed to have inherited little of his father's magnanimous generosity.
Yet Arius could not be vexed with his sons for stigmatizing, in the
harshest terms, the conduct of the man who had gone on without heeding
the accident. He had cautioned his sister against the utterly unbridled
youth whose father he had himself brought to her house. With what good
reason he had raised his voice in warning was now evident. At sunset that
very day several guests had arrived as usual, followed by Antyllus, a
youth of nineteen. When the door-keeper refused to admit him, he had
rudely demanded to see Barine, thrust aside the prudent old porter, who
endeavoured to detain him, and, in spite of his protestations, forced his
way into his dead master's work-room, where the ladies usually received
their visitors. Not until he found it empty would he retire, and then he
first fastened a bouquet of flowers he had brought to a statue of Eros in
burnt clay, which stood there. Both the porter and Barine's waiting-maid
declared that he was drunk; they saw it when he staggered away with the
companions who had waited for him in the garden outside.
This unseemly and insulting conduct filled Berenike with the deepest
indignation. It must not remain unpunished, and, while waiting for her
daughter, she imagined what evil consequences might ensue if Antyllus
were forbidden the house and accused to his tutor, and how unbearable, on
the other hand, he might become if they omitted to do so.
She was full of sad presentiments, and as, with such good reason, she
feared the worst, she cherished a faint hope that her daughter might
perhaps bring home some pleasant tidings; for she had had the experience
that events which had filled her with the utmost anxiety sometimes
resulted in good fortune.
At last Barine appeared, and it was indeed long since she had clasped her
mother in her arms with such joyous cheerfulness.
The widow's troubled heart grew lighter. Her daughter must have met with
something unusually gratifying, she looked so happy, although she had
surely heard what had happened here; for her cloak was laid aside and her
hair newly arranged, so she must have been to her chamber, where she was
dressed by her loquacious Cyprian slave, who certainly could not keep to
herself anything that was worth mentioning. The nimble maid had shown her
skill that day.
"Any stranger would take her for nineteen," thought her mother. "How
becoming the white robe and blue-bordered peplum are to her; how softly
the azure bombyx ribbon is wound around the thick waves of her hair! Who
would believe that no curling-irons had touched the little golden locks
that rest so gracefully on her brow, that no paint-brush had any share in
producing the rose and white hues on her cheek, or the alabaster glimmer
of her arms? Such beauty easily becomes a Danae dower; but it is a
magnificent gift of the gods! Yet why did she put on the bracelet which
Antony gave her after his last visit? Scarcely on my account. She can
hardly expect Dion at so late an hour. Even while I am rejoicing in the
sight of her beauty, some new misfortune may be impending."
So ran the current of her thoughts while her daughter was gaily
describing what she had witnessed at her grandfather's. Meanwhile she had
nestled comfortably among the cushions of a lounge; and when she
mentioned Antyllus's unseemly conduct, she spoke of it, with a
carelessness that startled Berenike, as a vexatious piece of rudeness
which must not occur again.
"But who is to prevent it?" asked the mother anxiously.
"Who, save ourselves?" replied Barine. "He will not be admitted."
"And if he forced his way in?"
Barine's big blue eyes flashed angrily, and there was no lack of decision
in her voice as she exclaimed, "Let him try it!"
"But what power have we to restrain the son of Antony?" asked Berenike.
"I do not know."
"I do," replied her daughter. "I will be brief, for a visitor is coming."
"So late?" asked the mother anxiously.
"Archibius wishes to discuss an important matter with us."
The lines on the brow of the older woman smoothed, but it contracted
again as she exclaimed inquiringly: "Important business at so unusual an
hour! Ah, I have expected nothing good since early morning! On my way to
my brother's a raven flew up before me and fluttered towards the left
into the garden."
"But I," replied Barine, after receiving, in reply to her inquiry, a
favourable report concerning her uncle's health-"I met seven--there were
neither more nor less; for seven is the best of numbers--seven snow-white
doves, which all flew swiftly towards the right. The fairest of all came
first, bearing in its beak a little basket which contained the power that
will keep Antony's son away from us. Don't look at me in such amazement,
you dear receptacle of every terror."
"But, child, you said that Archibius was coming so late to discuss an
important matter," rejoined the mother.
"He must be here soon."
"Then cease this talking in riddles; I do not guess them quickly."
"You will solve this one," returned Barine; "but we really have no time
to lose. So-my beautiful dove was a good, wise thought, and what it
carried in its basket you shall hear presently. You see, mother, many
will blame us, though here and there some one may pity; but this state of
things must not continue. I feel it more and more plainly with each
passing day; and several years must yet elapse ere this scruple becomes
wholly needless. I am too young to welcome as a guest every one whom this
or that man presents to me. True, our reception-hall was my father's
work-room and you, my own estimable, blameless mother, are the hostess
here; but though superior to me in every respect, you are so modest that
you shield yourself behind your daughter until the guests think of you
only when you are absent. So those who seek us both merely say, 'I am
going to visit Barine'--and there are too many who say this--I can no
longer choose, and this thought--"
"Child! child!" interrupted her mother joyfully, "what god met you as you
went out this morning?"
"Surely you know," she answered gaily; "it was seven doves, and, when I
took the little basket from the bill of the first and prettiest one, it
told me a story. Do you want to hear it?"
"Yes, yes; but be quick, or we shall be interrupted."
Then Barine leaned farther back among the cushions, lowered her long
lashes, and began: "Once upon a time there was a woman who had a garden
in the most aristocratic quarter of the city--here near the Paneum, if
you please. In the autumn, when the fruit was ripening, she left the gate
open, though all her neighbours did the opposite. To keep away unbidden
lovers of her nice figs and dates, she fastened on the gate a tablet
bearing the inscription: 'All may enter and enjoy the sight of the
garden; but the dogs will bite any one who breaks a flower, treads upon
the grass, or steals the fruit.'
"The woman had nothing but a lap-dog, and that did not always obey her.
But the tablet fulfilled its purpose; for at first none came except her
neighbours in the aristocratic quarter. They read the threat, and
probably without it would have respected the property of the woman who so
kindly opened the door to them. Thus matters went on for a time, until
first a beggar came, and then a Phoenician sailor, and a thievish
Egyptian from the Rhakotis--neither of whom could read. So the tablet
told them nothing; and as, moreover, they distinguished less carefully
between mine and thine, one trampled the turf and another snatched from
the boughs a flower or fruit. More and more of the rabble came, and you
can imagine what followed. No one punished them for the crime, for they
did not fear the barking of the lap-dog, and this gave even those who
could read, courage not to heed the warning. So the woman's pretty garden
soon lost its peculiar charm; and the fruit, too, was stolen. When the
rain at last washed the inscription from the tablet, and saucy boys
scrawled on it, there was no harm done; for the garden no longer offered
any attractions, and no one who looked into it cared to enter. Then the
owner closed her gate like the neighbours, and the next year she again
enjoyed the green grass and the bright hues of the flowers. She ate her
fruit herself, and the lap-dog no longer disturbed her by its barking."
"That is," said her mother, "if everybody was as courteous and as well
bred as Gorgias, Lysias, and the others, we would gladly continue to
receive them. But since there are rude fellows like Antyllus--"
"You have understood the story correctly," Barine interrupted. "We are
certainly at liberty to invite to our house those who have learned to
read our inscription. To-morrow visitors will be informed that we can no
longer receive them as before."
"Antyllus's conduct affords an excellent pretext," her mother added.
"Every fair-minded person must understand--"
"Certainly," said Barine, "and if you, shrewdest of women, will do your
part--
"Then for the first time we can act as we please in our own home. Believe
me, child--if you only do not--"
"No ifs!--not this time!" cried the young beauty, raising her hand
beseechingly. "It gives me such delight to think of the new life, and if
matters come to pass as I hope and wish--then--do not you also believe,
mother, that the gods owe me reparation?"
"For what?" asked the deep voice of Archibius, who had entered
unannounced, and was now first noticed by the widow and her daughter.
Barine hastily rose and held out both hands to her old friend,
exclaiming, "Since they bring you to us, they are already beginning the
payment."
CHAPTER V.
An artist, especially a great artist, finds it easy to give his house an
attractive appearance. He desires comfort in it, and only the beautiful
is comfortable to him. Whatever would disturb harmony offends his eye,
and to secure the noblest ornament of his house he need not invite any
stranger to cross its threshold. The Muse, the best of assistants, joins
him unbidden.
Leonax, Barine's father, had been thus aided to transform the interior of
his house into a very charming residence. He had painted on the walls of
his own work-room incidents in the life of Alexander the Great, the
founder of his native city, and on the frieze a procession of dancing
Cupids.
Here Barine now received her guests, and the renown of these paintings
was not one of the smallest inducements which had led Antony to visit the
young beauty and to take his son, in whom he wished to awaken at least a
fleeting pleasure in art. He also knew how to prize her beauty and her
singing, but the ardent passion which had taken possession of him in his
mature years was for Cleopatra alone. He whose easily won heart and
susceptible fancy had urged him from one commonplace love to another had
been bound by the Queen with chains of indestructible and supernatural
power. By her side a Barine seemed to him merely a work of art endowed
with life and a voice that charmed the ear. Yet he owed her some pleasant
hours, and he could not help bestowing gifts upon any one to whom he was
indebted for anything pleasant. He liked to be considered the most
generous spendthrift on earth, and the polished bracelet set with a gem,
on which was carved Apollo playing on his lyre, surrounded by the
listening Muses, looked very simple, but was really an ornament of
priceless value, for the artist who made it was deemed the best
stone-cutter in Alexandria in the time of Philadelphus, and each one of
the tiny figures sculptured on the bit of onyx scarcely three fingers
wide was a carefully executed masterpiece of the most exquisite beauty.
Antony had chosen it because he deemed it a fitting gift for the woman
whose song had pleased him. He had not thought of asking its value;
indeed, only a connoisseur would have perceived it; and as the circlet
was not showy and well became her beautiful arm, Barine liked to wear it.
Had not the war taken him away, Antony's second visit would certainly not
have been his last. Besides the singing which enthralled him, the
conversation had been gay and brilliant, and in addition to Leonax's
paintings, he had seen other beautiful works of art which the former had
obtained by exchanging with many distinguished companions.
Nor was there any lack of plastic creations in the spacious apartment, to
which the flashing of the water poured by a powerful man from the
goatskin bottle on his shoulder into a shell lent a special charm.
The master who had carved this stooping Nubian had also created the
much-discussed statues of the royal lovers. The clay Eros, who with bent
knee was aiming at a victim visible to himself alone, was also his work.
Antony, when paying his second visit, had laughingly laid the garland he
wore before "the greatest of human conquerors," while a short time ago
his son Antyllus had rudely thrust his bouquet of flowers into the
opening of the curved right arm which was drawing the string. In doing so
the statue had been injured. Now the flowers lay unheeded upon the little
altar at the end of the large room, lighted only by a single lamp; for
the ladies had left it with their guest. They were in Barine's favourite
apartment, a small room, where there were several pictures by her dead
father.
Antyllus's bouquet, and the damage to the clay statue of Eros, had played
a prominent part in the conversation between the three, and rendered
Archibius's task easier.
Berenike had greeted the guest with a complaint of the young Roman's
recklessness and unseemly conduct, to which Barine added the declaration
that they had now sacrificed enough to Zeus Xenios, the god of
hospitality. She meant to devote her future life to the modest household
gods and to Apollo, to whom she owed the gift of song.
Archibius had listened silently in great surprise until she had finished
her explanation and declared that henceforth she intended to live alone
with her mother, instead of having her father's workshop filled with
guests.
The young beauty's vivid imagination transported her to this new and
quieter life. But, spite of the clear and glowing hues in which she
described her anticipations, her grey-haired listener could not have
believed in them fully. A subtle smile sometimes flitted over his grave,
somewhat melancholy face--that of a man who has ceased to wrestle in the
arena of life, and after severe conflict now preferred to stand among the
spectators and watch others win or lose the prize of victory. Doubtless
the wounds which he had received still ached, yet his sorrowful
experiences did not prevent his being an attentive observer. The
expression of his clear eyes showed that he mentally shared whatever
aroused his sympathy. Whoever understood how to listen thus, and,
moreover--the prominence of the brow above the nose showed it--was also a
trained thinker, could not fail to be a good counsellor, and as such he
was regarded by many, and first of all by the Queen.
The wise deliberation, which was one of his characteristic traits, showed
itself on this occasion; for though he had come to persuade Barine try a
country residence, he refrained from doing until she had exhausted the
story of her own affairs and inquired the important cause of his visit.
In the principal matter his request was granted ere he made it. So he
could begin with the query whether the mother and daughter did not think
that the transition to the new mode of life could be effected more easily
if they were absent from the city a short time. It would awaken comment
they should close their house against guests on the morrow, and as the
true reason could not be given, many would be offended. If, on the
contrary, they could resolve to quit the capital for a few weeks, many,
it is true, would lament their decision, but what was alloted to all
alike could be resented by no one.
Berenike eagerly assented, but Barine grew thoughtful. Then Archibius
begged her to speak frankly, and after she had asked where they could he
proposed his country estate.
His keen grey eyes had perceived that something, bound her so firmly to
the city that in the case of a true woman like Barine it must be an
affair of the heart. He had evidently judged correctly, for, at his
prediction that there would be no lack of visits from her dearest
friends, she raised her head, her blue eyes sparkled brightly, and when
Archibius paused she to her mother, exclaiming gaily "We will go!"
Again the vivid imagination daughter conjured the future before her in
distinct outlines. She alone knew whom she meant when she spoke of the
visitor she expected at Irenia, Archibius's estate. The name meant "The
place of peace," and it pleased her.
Archibius listened smilingly; but when she began to assign him also a
part in driving the little Sardinian horses and pursuing the birds, he
interrupted her with the statement that whether he could speedily allow
himself a pleasure which he should so keenly enjoy--that of breathing the
country air with such charming guests--would depend upon the fate of
another. Thank the gods, he had been able to come here with a lighter
heart, because, just before his departure, he had heard of a splendid
victory gained by the Queen. The ladies would perhaps permit him to
remain a little longer, as he was expecting confirmation of the news.
It was evident that he awaited it in great suspense, and that his heart
was by no means free from anxiety.
Berenike shared it, and her pleasant face, which had hitherto reflected
her delight at her daughter's sensible resolution, was now clouded with
care as Archibius began: "The object of my presence here? You are making
it very easy for me to attain it. If I deemed it honest, I could now
conceal the fact that I had sought you to induce you to leave the city. I
see no peril from the boyish insolence of the son of Antony. The point in
question, child, is merely to put yourself out of the reach of
Caesarion."
"If you could place me in the moon, it would please me best, as far as he
is concerned," replied Barine eagerly. "That is just what induced me to
change our mode of life, since my door cannot be closed against the boy
who, though still under a tutor, uses his rank as a key to open it. And
just think of being compelled to address that dreamer, with eyes pleading
for help, by the title of 'king'!"
"Yet what mighty impulse might not be slumbering in the breast of a son
of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra?" said Archibius. "And passion--I know, my
child, that it is no fault of yours--has now awakened within him.
Whatever the result may be, it must fill his mother's heart with anxiety.
That is why it is needful to hasten your departure, and to keep your
destination a secret. He will attempt no violence; but--he is the child
of his parents--and some unexpected act may be anticipated from him."
"You startle me!" cried Barine. "You transform the cooing dove which
entered my house into a dangerous griffin."
"As such you may regard him," said the other, warningly. "You will be a
welcome guest, Barine, but I invited you, whom I have loved from your
earliest childhood, the daughter of my dearest friend, not merely to do
you a service at Irenia, but to save from grief or even annoyance the
person to whom--who is not aware of it--I owe everything."
The words conveyed to both ladies the knowledge that, though they were
dear to Archibius, he would sacrifice them, and with them, perhaps, all
the rest of the world, for the peace and happiness of the Queen.
Barine had expected nothing else. She knew that Cleopatra had made the
philosopher's son a wealthy man and the owner of extensive estates; but
she also felt that the source of his loyal devotion to the Queen, over
whom he watched like a tender father, was due to other causes. Cleopatra
prized him also. Had he been ambitious, he could have stood at the helm
of the ship of state, as Epitrop long ago, but--the whole city knew
it--he had more than once refused to accept a permanent office, because
he believed that he could serve his mistress better as an unassuming,
unnoticed counsellor. Berenike had told Barine that the relations between
Cleopatra and Archibius dated back to their childhood, but she had
learned no particulars. Various rumours were afloat which, in the course
of time, had been richly adorned and interwoven with anecdotes, and
Barine naturally lent the most ready credence to those which asserted
that the princess, in her earliest youth, had cherished a childish love
for the philosopher's son. Now her friend's conduct led her to believe
it.
When Archibius paused, the young beauty assured him that she understood
him; and as the alabaster hanging lamp and a three-branched light cast a
brilliant glow upon the portrait which her father had painted of the
nineteen-year-old Queen, and afterwards copied for his own household, she
pointed to it, and, pursuing the current of her own thoughts, asked the
question:
"Was she not marvellously beautiful at that time?"
"As your father's work represents her," was the reply. "Leonax painted
the portrait of Octavia, on the opposite side, the same year, and perhaps
the artist deemed the Roman the fairer woman." He pointed as he spoke to
a likeness of Octavianus's sister, whom Barine's father had painted as
the young wife of Marcellus, her first husband.
"Oh, no!" said Berenike. "I still remember perfectly how Leonax returned
in those days. What woman might not have been jealous of his enthusiasm
for the Roman Hera? At that time I had not seen the portrait, and when I
asked whether he thought Octavia more beautiful than the Queen, for whom
Eros had inflamed his heart, as in the case of most of the beautiful
women he painted, he exclaimed--you know his impetuous manner--'Octavia
stands foremost in the ranks of those who are called "beautiful" or "less
beautiful"; the other, Cleopatra, stands alone, and can be compared with
no one.'"
Archibius bent his head in assent, then said firmly, "But, as a child,
when I first saw her, she would have been the fairest even in the dance
of the young gods of love."
"How old was she then?" asked Barine, eagerly.
"Eight years," he answered. "How far in the past it is, yet I have not
forgotten a single hour!" Barine now earnestly entreated him to tell them
the story of those days, but Archibius gazed thoughtfully at the floor
for some time ere he raised his head and answered: "Perhaps it will be
well if you learn more of the woman for whose sake I ask a sacrifice at
your hands. Arius is your brother and uncle. He stands near to
Octavianus, for he was his intellectual guide, and I know that he reveres
the Roman's sister, Octavia, as a goddess. Antony is now struggling with
Octavianus for the sovereignty of the world. Octavia succumbed in the
conflict against the woman of whom you desire to hear. It is not my place
to judge her, but I may instruct and warn. Roman nations burn incense to
Octavia, and, when Cleopatra's name is uttered, they veil their faces
indignantly. Here in Alexandria many imitate them. Whoever upholds
shining purity may hope to win a share of the radiance emanating from it.
They call Octavia the lawful wife, and Cleopatra the criminal who robbed
her of her husband's heart."
"Not I!" exclaimed Barine eagerly. "How often I have heard my uncle say
that Antony and Cleopatra were fired with the most ardent love for each
other! Never did the arrows of Eros pierce two hearts more deeply. Then
it became necessary to save the state from civil war and bloodshed.
Antony consented to form an alliance with his rival, and, as security for
the sincerity of the reconciliation, he gave his hand in marriage to
Octavia, whose first husband, Marcellus, had just died--his hand, I say,
only his hand, for his heart was captive to the Queen of Egypt. And if
Antony was faithless to the wife to whom statecraft had bound him, he
kept his pledge to the other, who had an earlier, better title. If
Cleopatra did not give up the man to whom she had sworn fidelity forever,
she was right--a thousand times right! In my eyes--no matter how often my
mother rebukes me--Cleopatra, in the eyes of the immortals, is and always
will be Antony's real wife; the other, though on her marriage day no
custom, no word, no stroke of the stylus, no gesture was omitted, is the
intruder in a bond of love which rejoices the gods, however it may anger
mortals, and--forgive me, mother--virtuous matrons."
Berenike had listened with blushing cheeks to her vivacious daughter; now
with timid earnestness she interrupted: "I know that those are the views
of the new times; that Antony in the eyes of the Egyptians, and probably
also according to their customs, is the rightful husband of the Queen. I
know, too, that you are both against me. Yet Cleopatra is in reality a
Greek, and therefore--eternal gods!--I can sincerely pity her; but the
marriage has been solemnized, and I cannot blame Octavia. She rears and
cherishes, as if they were her own, the children of her faithless husband
and Fulvia, his first wife, who have no claim upon her. It is more than
human to take the stones from the path of the man who became her foe, as
she does. No woman In Alexandria can pray more fervently than I that
Cleopatra and her friend may conquer Octavianus. His cold nature, highly
as my brother esteems him, is repellent to me. But when I gaze at
Octavia's beautiful, chaste, queenly, noble countenance, the mirror of
true womanly purity--"
"You can rejoice," Archibius added, completing the sentence, and laying
his right hand soothingly on the arm of the excited woman, "only it would
be advisable at this time to put the portrait elsewhere, and rest
satisfied with confiding your opinion of Octavia to your brother and a
friend as reliable as myself. If we conquer, such things may pass; if
not--The messenger tarries long--"
Here Barine again entreated him to use the time. She had only once had
the happiness of being noticed by the Queen--just after her song at the
Adonis festival. Then Cleopatra had advanced to thank her. She said only
a few kind words, but in a voice which seemed to penetrate the inmost
depths of her heart and bind her with invisible threads. Meanwhile
Barine's eyes met those of her sovereign, and at first they roused an
ardent desire to press her lips even on the hem of her robe, but
afterwards she felt as if a venomous serpent had crawled out of the most
beautiful flower.
Here Archibius interrupted her with the remark that he remembered
perfectly how, after the song, Antony had addressed her at the same time
as the Queen, and Cleopatra lacked no feminine weakness.
"Jealousy?" asked Barine, in astonishment. "I was not presumptuous enough
to admit it. I secretly feared that Alexas, the brother of Philostratus,
had prejudiced her. He is as ill-disposed towards me as the man who was
my husband. But everything connected with those two is so base and
shameful that I will not allow it to cloud this pleasant hour. Yet the
fear that Alexas might have slandered me to the Queen is not groundless.
"He is as shrewd as his brother, and through Antony, into whose favour he
ingratiated himself, is always in communication with Cleopatra. He went
to the war with him."
"I learned that too late, and am utterly powerless against Antony,"
replied Archibius.
"But was it not natural that I should fear he had prejudiced the Queen?"
asked Barine. "At any rate, I imagined that I detected a hostile
expression in her eyes, and it repelled me, though at first I had been so
strongly attracted towards her."
"And had not that other stepped between you, you could not have turned
from her again!" said Archibius. "The first time I saw her I was but a
mere boy, and she--as I have already said--a child eight years old."
Barine nodded gratefully to Archibius, brought the distaff to her mother,
poured water into the wine in the mixing vessel, and after at first
leaning comfortably back among the cushions, she soon bent forward in a
listening attitude, with her elbow propped on her knee, and her chin
supported by her hand. Berenike drew the flax from the distaff, at first
slowly, then faster and faster.
"You know my country-house in the Kanopus," the guest began. "It was
originally a small summer palace belonging to the royal family, and
underwent little change after we moved into it. Even the garden is
unaltered. It was full of shady old trees. Olympus, the leech, had chosen
this place, that my father might complete within its walls the work of
education entrusted to him. You shall hear the story. At that time
Alexandria was in a state of turmoil, for Rome had not recognized the
King, and ruled over us like Fate, though it had not acknowledged the
will by which the miserable Alexander bequeathed Egypt to him like a
field or a slave.
"The King of Egypt, who called himself 'the new Dionysus,' was a weak
man, whose birth did not give him the full right to the sovereignty. You
know that the people called him the 'fluteplayer.' He really had no
greater pleasure than to hear music and listen to his own performances.
He played by no means badly on more than one instrument, and, moreover,
as a reveller did honour to the other name. Whoever kept sober at the
festival of Dionysus, whose incarnate second self he regarded himself,
incurred his deepest displeasure.
"The flute-player's wife, Queen Tryphoena, and her oldest daughter--she
bore your name, Berenike--ruined his life. Compared with them, the King
was worthy and virtuous. What had become of the heroes and the
high-minded princes of the house of Ptolemy? Every passion and crime had
found a home in their palaces!
"The flute-player, Cleopatra's father, was by no means the worst. He was
a slave to his own caprices; no one had taught him to bridle his
passions. Where it served his purpose, even death was summoned to his
aid; but this was a custom of the last sovereigns of his race. In one
respect he was certainly superior to most of them--he still possessed a
capacity to feel a loathing for the height of crime, to believe in virtue
and loftiness of soul, and the possibility of implanting them in youthful
hearts. When a boy, he had been under the influence of an excellent
teacher, whose precepts had lingered in his memory and led him to
determine to withdraw his favourite children--two girls--from their
mother's sway, at least as far as possible.
"I learned afterwards that it had been his desire to confide the
princesses wholly to my parents' care. But an invincible power opposed
this. Though Greeks might be permitted to instruct the royal children in
knowledge, the Egyptians would not yield the right to their religious
education. The leech Olympus--you know the good old man--had insisted
that the delicate Cleopatra must spend the coldest winter months in Upper
Egypt, where the sky was never clouded, and the summer near the sea in a
shady garden. The little palace at Kanopus was devoted to this purpose.
"When we moved there it was entirely unoccupied, but the princesses were
soon to be brought to us. During the winter Olympus preferred the island
of Philae, on the Nubian frontier, because the famous Temple of Isis was
there, and its priests willingly undertook to watch over the children.
"The Queen would not listen to any of these plans. Leaving Alexandria and
spending the winter on a lonely island in the tropics was an utterly
incomprehensible idea. So she let the King have his way, and no doubt was
glad to be relieved from the care of the children; for, even after her
royal husband's exile from the city, she never visited her daughters.
True, death allowed her only a short time to do so.
"Her oldest daughter, Berenike, who became her successor, followed her
example, and troubled herself very little about her sisters. I heard
after wards that she was very glad to know that they were in charge of
persons who filled their minds with other thoughts than the desire to
rule. Her brothers were reared at Lochias by our countryman Theodotus,
under the eyes of their guardian, Pothinus.
"Our family life was of course wholly transformed by the reception of the
royal children. In the first place, we moved from our house in the Museum
Square into the little palace at Kanopus, and the big, shady garden
delighted us. I remember, as though it were but yesterday, the morning--I
was then a boy of fifteen--when my father told us that two of the King's
daughters would soon become members of the household. There were three of
us children--Charmian, who went to the war with the Queen, because Iras,
our niece, was ill; I myself; and Straton, who died long ago. We were
urged to treat the princesses with the utmost courtesy and consideration,
and we perceived that their reception really demanded respect; for the
palace, which we had found empty and desolate, was refurnished from roof
to foundation.
"The day before they were expected horses, chariots, and litters came,
while boats and a splendid state galley, fully manned, arrived by sea.
Then a train of male and female slaves appeared, among them two fat
eunuchs.
"I can still see the angry look with which my father surveyed all these
people. He drove at once to the city, and on his return his clear eyes
were as untroubled as ever. A court official accompanied him, and only
that portion of the useless amount of luggage and number of persons that
my father desired remained.
"The princesses were to come the next morning--it was at the end of
February--flowers were blooming in the grass and on the bushes, while the
foliage of the trees glittered with the fresh green which the rising sap
gives to the young leaves. I was sitting on a strong bough of a
sycamore-tree, which grew opposite to the house, watching for them. Their
arrival was delayed and, as I gazed meanwhile over the garden, I thought
it must surely please them, for not a palace in the city had one so
beautiful.
"At last the litters appeared; they had neither runners nor attendants,
as my father had requested, and when the princesses alighted--both at the
same moment--I knew not which way to turn my eyes first, for the creature
that fluttered like a dragon-fly rather than stepped from the first
litter, was not a girl like other mortals--she seemed like a wish, a
hope. When the dainty, beautiful creature turned her head hither and
thither, and at last gazed questioningly, as if beseeching help, into the
faces of my father and mother, who stood at the gate to receive her, it
seemed to me that such must have been the aspect of Psyche when she stood
pleading for mercy at the throne of Zeus.
"But it was worth while to look at the other also. Was that Cleopatra?
She might have been the elder, for she was as tall as her sister, but how
utterly unlike! From the waving hair to every movement of the hands and
body the former--it was Cleopatra--had seemed to me as if she were
flying. Everything about the second figure, on the contrary, was solid,
nay, even seemed to offer positive resistance. She sprang from the litter
and alighted on the ground with both feet at once, clung firmly to the
door, and haughtily flung back her head, crowned with a wealth of dark
locks. Her complexion was pink and white, and her blue eyes sparkled
brightly enough; but the expression with which she gazed at my parents
was defiant rather than questioning, and as she glanced around her red
lips curled scornfully as though she deemed her surroundings despicable
and unworthy of her royal birth.
"This irritated me against the seven-year-old child, yet I said to myself
that, though it was very beautiful here--thanks to my father's
care--perhaps it appeared plain and simple when compared with the marble,
gold, and purple of the royal palace whence she came. Her features, too,
were regular and beautiful, and she would have attracted attention by her
loveliness among a multitude. When I soon heard her issue imperious
commands and defiantly insist upon the fulfilment of every wish, I
thought, in my boyish ignorance, that Arsinoe must be the elder; for she
was better suited to wield a sceptre than her sister. I said so to my
brother and Charmian; but we all soon saw which really possessed queenly
majesty; for Arsinoe, if her will were crossed, wept, screamed, and raged
like a lunatic, or, if that proved useless, begged and teased; while if
Cleopatra wanted anything she obtained it in a different way. Even at
that time she knew what weapons would give her victory and, while using
them, she still remained the child of a king.
"No artisan's daughter could have been further removed from airs of
majestic pathos than this embodiment of the most charming childlike
grace; but if anything for which her passionate nature ardently longed
was positively refused, she understood how to attain it by the melody of
her voice, the spell of her eyes, and in extreme cases by a silent tear.
When to such tears were added uplifted hands and a few sweet words, such
as, 'It would make me happy,' or, 'Don't you see how it hurts me?'
resistance was impossible; and in after-years also her silent tears and
the marvellous music of her voice won her a victory in the decisive
questions of life.
"We children were soon playmates and friends, for my parents did not wish
the princesses to begin their studies until after they felt at home with
us. This pleased Arsinoe, although she could already read and write; but
Cleopatra more than once asked to hear something from my father's store
of wisdom, of which she had been told.
"The King and her former teacher had cherished the highest expectations
from the brilliant intellect of this remarkable child, and Olympus once
laid his hand on my curls and bade me take care that the princess did not
outstrip the philosopher's son. I had always occupied one of the foremost
places, and laughingly escaped, assuring him that there was no danger.
"But I soon learned that this warning was not groundless. You will think
that the old fool's heart has played him a trick, and in the magic garden
of childish memories the gifted young girl was transformed into a
goddess. That she certainly was not; for the immortals are free from the
faults and weaknesses of humanity."
"And what robbed Cleopatra of the renown of resembling the gods?" asked
Barine eagerly.
A subtle smile, not wholly free from reproach, accompanied Archibius's
reply: "Had I spoken of her virtues, you would hardly have thought of
asking further details. But why should I try to conceal what she has
displayed to the world openly enough throughout her whole life? Falsehood
and hypocrisy were as unfamiliar to her as fishing is to the sons of the
desert. The fundamental principles which have dominated this rare
creature's life and character to the present day are two ceaseless
desires: first, to surpass every one, even in the most difficult
achievements; and, secondly, to love and to be loved in return. From them
emanated what raised her above all other women. Ambition and love will
also sustain her like two mighty wings on the proud height to which they
have borne her, so long as they dwell harmoniously in her fiery soul.
Hitherto a rare favour of destiny has permitted this, and may the
Olympians grant that thus it may ever be!"
Here Archibius paused, wiped the perspiration from his brow, asked if the
messenger had arrived, and ordered him to be admitted as soon as he
appeared. Then he went on as calmly as before:
"The princesses were members of our household, and in the course of time
they seemed like sisters. During the first winter the King allowed them
to spend only the most inclement months at Philae, for he was unwilling
to live without them. True, he saw them rarely enough; weeks often
elapsed without a visit; but, on the other hand, he often came day after
day to our garden, clad in plain garments, and borne in an unpretending
litter, for these visits were kept secret from every one save the leech
Olympus.
"I often saw the tall, strong man, with red, bloated face, playing with
his children like a mechanic who had just returned from work. But he
usually remained only a short time, seeming to be satisfied with having
seen them again. Perhaps he merely wished to assure himself that they
were comfortable with us. At any rate, no one was permitted to go near
the group of plane-trees where he talked with them.
"But it is easy to hide amid the dense foliage of these trees, so my
knowledge that he questioned them is not solely hearsay.
"Cleopatra was happy with us from the beginning; Arsinoe needed a longer
time; but the King valued only the opinion of his older child, his
darling, on whom he feasted his eyes and ears like a lover. He often
shook his heavy head at the sight of her, and when she gave him one of
her apt replies, he laughed so loudly that the sound of his deep,
resonant voice was heard as far as the house.
"Once I saw tear after tear course down his flushed cheeks, and yet his
visit was shorter than usual. The closed 'harmamaxa' in which he came
bore him from our house directly to the vessel which was to convey him to
Cyprus and Rome. The Alexandrians, headed by the Queen, had forced him to
leave the city and the country.
"He was indeed unworthy of the crown, but he loved his little daughter
like a true father. Still, it was terrible, monstrous for him to invoke
curses upon the mother and sister of the children, in their presence, and
in the same breath command them to hate and execrate them, but to love
and never forget him.
"I was then seventeen and Cleopatra ten years old. I, who loved my
parents better than my life, felt an icy chill run through my veins and
then a touch upon my heart like balsam, as I heard little Arsinoe, after
her father had gone, whisper to her sister, 'We will hate them--may the
gods destroy them!' and when Cleopatra answered with tearful eyes, 'Let
us rather be better than they, very good indeed, Arsinoe, that the
immortals may love us and bring our father back.'
"'Because then he will make you Queen,' replied Arsinoe sneeringly, still
trembling with angry excitement.
"Cleopatra gazed at her with a troubled look.
"Her tense features showed that she was weighing the meaning of the
words, and I can still see her as she suddenly drew up her small figure,
and said proudly, 'Yes, I will be Queen!'
"Then her manner changed, and in the sweetest tones of her soft voice,
she said beseechingly, 'You won't say such naughty things again, will
you?'
"This was at the time that my father's instruction began to take
possession of her mind. The prediction of Olympus was fulfilled. True, I
attended the school of oratory, but when my father set the royal maiden a
lesson, I was permitted to repeat mine on the same subject, and
frequently I could not help admitting that Cleopatra had succeeded better
than I.
"Soon there were difficult problems to master, for the intellect of this
wonderful child demanded stronger food, and she was introduced into
philosophy. My father himself belonged to the school of Epicurus, and
succeeded far beyond his expectations in rousing Cleopatra's interest in
his master's teachings. She had been made acquainted with the other great
philosophers also, but always returned to Epicurus, and induced the rest
of us to live with her as a true disciple of the noble Samian.
"Your father and brother have doubtless made you familiar with the
precepts of the Stoa; yet you have certainly heard that Epicurus spent
the latter part of his life with his friends and pupils in quiet
meditation and instructive conversation in his garden at Athens. We,
too--according to Cleopatra's wish--were to live thus and call ourselves
'disciples of Epicurus.'
"With the exception of Arsinoe, who preferred gayer pastimes, into which
she drew my brother Straton--at that time a giant in strength--we all
liked the plan. I was chosen master, but I perceived that Cleopatra
desired the position, so she took my place.
"During our next leisure afternoon we paced up and down the garden, and
the conversation about the chief good was so eager, Cleopatra directed it
with so much skill, and decided doubtful questions so happily, that we
reluctantly obeyed the brazen gong which summoned us to the house, and
spent the whole evening in anticipating the next afternoon.
"The following morning my father saw several country people assembled
before the secluded garden; but he did not have time to inquire what they
wanted; for Timagenes, who shared the instruction in history--you know he
was afterwards taken to Rome as a prisoner of war--rushed up to him,
holding out a tablet which bore the inscription Epicurus had written on
the gate of his garden: 'Stranger, here you will be happy; here is the
chief good, pleasure.'
"Cleopatra had written this notice in large letters on the top of a small
table before sunrise, and a slave had secretly fastened it on the gate
for her.
"This prank might have easily proved fatal to our beautiful
companionship, but it had been done merely to make our game exactly like
the model.
"My father did not forbid our continuing this pastime, but strictly
prohibited our calling ourselves 'Epicureans' outside of the garden, for
this noble name had since gained among the people a significance wholly
alien. Epicurus says that true pleasure is to be found only in peace of
mind and absence of pain."
"But every one," interrupted Barine, "believes that people like the
wealthy Isidorus, whose object in life is to take every pleasure which
his wealth can procure, are the real Epicureans. My mother would not have
confided me long to a teacher by whose associates 'pleasure' was deemed
the chief good."
"The daughter of a philosopher," replied Archibius, gently shaking his
head, "ought to understand what pleasure means in the sense of Epicurus,
and no doubt you do. True, those who are further removed from these
things cannot know that the master forbids yearning for individual
pleasure. Have you an idea of his teachings? No definite one? Then permit
me a few words of explanation. It happens only too often that Epicurus is
confounded with Aristippus, who places sensual pleasure above
intellectual enjoyment, as he holds that bodily pain is harder to endure
than mental anguish. Epicurus, on the contrary, considers intellectual
pleasure to be the higher one; for sensual enjoyment, which he believes
free to every one, can be experienced only in the present, while
intellectual delight extends to both the past and the future. To the
Epicureans the goal of life, as has already been mentioned, is to attain
the chief blessings, peace of mind, and freedom from pain. He is to
practise virtue only because it brings him pleasure; for who could remain
virtuous without being wise, noble, and just?--and whoever is all these
cannot have his peace of mind disturbed, and must be really happy in the
exact meaning of the master. I perceived long since the peril lurking in
this system of instruction, which takes no account of moral excellence;
but at that time it seemed to me also the chief good.
"How all this charmed the mind of the thoughtful child, still untouched
by passion! It was difficult to supply her wonderfully vigorous intellect
with sufficient sustenance, and she really felt that to enrich it was the
highest pleasure. And to her, who could scarcely endure to have a rude
hand touch her, though a small grief or trivial disappointment could not
be averted, the freedom from pain which the master had named as the first
condition for the existence of every pleasure, and termed the chief good,
seemed indeed the first condition of a happy life.
"Yet this child, whom my father once compared to a thinking flower, bore
without complaint her sad destiny--her father's banishment, her mother's
death, her sister Berenike's profligacy. Even to me, in whom she found a
second brother and fully trusted, she spoke of these sorrowful things
only in guarded allusions. I know that she understood what was passing
fully and perfectly, and how deeply she felt it; but pain placed itself
between her and the 'chief good,' and she mastered it. And when she sat
at work, with what tenacious power the delicate creature struggled until
she had conquered the hardest task and outstripped Charmian and even me!
"In those days I understood why, among the gods, a maiden rules over
learning, and why she is armed with the weapons of war. You have heard
how many languages Cleopatra speaks. A remark of Timagenes had fallen
into her soul like a seed. 'With every language you learn,' he had said,
'you will gain a nation.' But there were many peoples in her father's
kingdom, and when she was Queen they must all love her. True, she began
with the tongue of the conquerors, not the conquered. So it happened that
we first learned Lucretius, who reproduces in verse the doctrines of
Epicurus. My father was our teacher, and the second year she read
Lucretius as if it were a Greek book. She had only half known Egyptian;
now she speedily acquired it. During our stay at Philae she found a
troglodyte who was induced to teach her his language. There were Jews
enough here in Alexandria to instruct her in theirs, and she also learned
its kindred tongue, Arabic.
"When, many years later, she visited Antony at Tarsus, the warriors
imagined that some piece of Egyptian magic was at work, for she addressed
each commander in his own tongue, and talked with him as if she were a
native of the same country.
"It was the same with everything. She outstripped us in every branch of
study. To her burning ambition it would have been unbearable to lag
behind.
"The Roman Lucretius became her favourite poet, although she was no more
friendly to his nation than I, but the self-conscious power of the foe
pleased her, and once I heard her exclaim 'Ah! if the Egyptians were
Romans, I would give up our garden for Berenike's throne.'
"Lucretius constantly led her back to Epicurus, and awakened a severe
conflict in her unresting mind. You probably know that he teaches that
life in itself is not so great a blessing that it must be deemed a
misfortune not to live. It is only spoiled by having death appear to us
as the greatest of misfortunes. Only the soul which ceases to regard
death as a misfortune finds peace. Whoever knows that thought and feeling
end with life will not fear death; for, no matter how many dear and
precious things the dead have left here below, their yearning for them
has ceased with life. He declares that providing for the body is the
greatest folly, while the Egyptian religion, in which Anubis strove to
strengthen her faith, maintained precisely the opposite.
"To a certain degree he succeeded, for his personality exerted a powerful
influence over her; and besides, she naturally took great pleasure in
mystical, supernatural things, as my brother Straton did in physical
strength, and you, Barine, enjoy the gift of song. You know Anubis by
sight. What Alexandrian has not seen this remarkable man? and whoever has
once met his eyes does not easily forget him. He does indeed rule over
mysterious powers, and he used them in his intercourse with the young
princess. It is his work if she cleaves to the religious belief of her
people, if she who is a Hellene to the last drop of blood loves Egypt,
and is ready to make any sacrifice for her independence and grandeur. She
is called 'the new Isis,' but Isis presides over the magic arts of the
Egyptians, and Anubis initiated Cleopatra into this secret science, and
even persuaded her to enter the observatory and the laboratory--
"But all these things had their origin in our garden of Epicurus, and my
father did not venture to forbid it; for the King had sent a message from
Rome to say that he was glad to have Cleopatra find pleasure in her own
people and their secret knowledge.
"The flute-player, during his stay on the Tiber, had given his gold to
the right men or bound them as creditors to his interest. After Pompey,
Caesar, and Crassus had concluded their alliance, they consented at Lucca
to the restoration of the Ptolemy. Millions upon millions would not have
seemed to him too large a price for this object. Pompey would rather have
gone to Egypt himself, but the jealousy of the others would not permit
it. Gabinius, the Governor of Syria, received the commission.
"But the occupants of the Egyptian throne were not disposed to resign it
without a struggle. You know that meanwhile Queen Berenike, Cleopatra's
sister, had been twice married. She had her miserable first husband
strangled--a more manly spouse had been chosen by the Alexandrians for
her second consort. He bravely defended his rights, and lost his life on
the field of battle.
"The senate learned speedily enough that Gabinius had brought the Ptolemy
back to his country; the news reached us more slowly. We watched for
every rumour with the same passionate anxiety as now.
"At that time Cleopatra was fourteen, and had developed magnificently.
Yonder portrait shows the perfect flower, but the bud possessed, if
possible, even more exquisite charm. How clear and earnest was the gaze
of her bright eyes! When she was gay they could shine like stars, and
then her little red mouth had an indescribably mischievous expression,
and in each cheek came one of the tiny dimples which still delight every
one. Her nose was more delicate than it is now, and the slight curve
which appears in the portrait, and which is far too prominent in the
coins, was not visible. Her hair did not grow dark until later in life.
My sister Charmian had no greater pleasure than to arrange its wavy
abundance. It was like silk, she often said, and she was right. I know
this, for when at the festival of Isis, Cleopatra, holding the sistrum,
followed the image of the goddess, she was obliged to wear it unconfined.
On her return home she often shook her head merrily, and her hair fell
about her like a cataract, veiling her face and figure. Then, as now, she
was not above middle height, but her form possessed the most exquisite
symmetry, only it was still more delicate and pliant.
"She had understood how to win all hearts. Yet, though she seemed to
esteem our father higher, trust me more fully, look up to Anubis with
greater reverence, and prefer to argue with the keen-witted Timagenes,
she still appeared to hold all who surrounded her in equal favour, while
Arsinoe left me in the lurch if Straton were present, and whenever the
handsome Melnodor, one of my father's pupils, came to us, she fairly
devoured him with her glowing eyes.
"As soon as it was rumoured that the Romans were bringing the King back,
Queen Berenike came to us to take the young girls to the city. When
Cleopatra entreated her to leave her in our parents' care and not
interrupt her studies, a scornful smile flitted over Berenike's face, and
turning to her husband Archelaus, she said scornfully, 'I think books
will prove to be the smallest danger.'
"Pothinus, the guardian of the two princesses' brothers, had formerly
permitted them at times to visit their sisters. Now they were no longer
allowed to leave Lochias, but neither Cleopatra nor Arsinoe made many
inquiries about them. The little boys always retreated from their
caresses, and the Egyptian locks on their temples, which marked the age
of childhood, and the Egyptian garments which Pothinus made them wear,
lent them an unfamiliar aspect.
"When it was reported that the Romans were advancing from Gaza, both
girls were overpowered by passionate excitement. Arsinoe's glittered in
every glance; Cleopatra understood how to conceal hers, but her colour
often varied, and her face, which was not pink and white like her
sister's, but--how shall I express it?"
"I know what you mean," Barine interrupted. "When I saw her, nothing
seemed to me more charming than that pallid hue through which the crimson
of her cheeks shines like the flame through yonder alabaster lamp, the
tint of the peach through the down. I have seen it often in
convalescents. Aphrodite breathes this hue on the faces and figures of
her favourites only, as the god of time imparts the green tinge to the
bronze. Nothing is more beautiful than when such women blush."
"Your sight is keen," replied Archibius, smiling. "It seemed indeed as if
not Eos, but her faint reflection in the western horizon, was tinting the
sky, when joy or shame sent the colour to her cheeks, But when wrath took
possession of her--and ere the King's return this often happened--she
could look as if she were lifeless, like a marble statue, with lips as
colourless as those of a corpse.
"My father said that the blood of Physkon and other degenerate ancestors,
who had not learned to control their passions, was asserting itself in
her also. But I must continue my story, or the messenger will interrupt
me too soon.
"Gabinius was bringing back the King. But from the time of his approach
with the Roman army and the auxiliary troops of the Ethnarch of Judea,
nothing more was learned of him or of Antipater, who commanded the forces
of Hyrkanus; every one talked constantly of the Roman general Antony. He
had led the troops successfully through the deserts between Syria and the
Egyptian Delta without losing a single man on the dangerous road by the
Sirbonian Sea and Barathra, where many an army had met destruction. Not
to Antipater, but to him, had the Jewish garrison of Pelusium surrendered
their city without striking a blow. He had conquered in two battles; and
the second, where, as you know, Berenike's husband fell after a brave
resistance, had decided the destiny of the country.
"From the time his name was first mentioned, neither of the girls could
hear enough about him. It was said that he was the most aristocratic of
aristocratic Romans, the most reckless of the daring, the wildest of the
riotous, and the handsomest of the handsome.
"The waiting-maid from Mantua, with whom Cleopatra practised speaking the
Roman language, had often seen him, and had heard of him still more
frequently--for his mode of life was the theme of gossip among all
classes of Roman men and women. His house was said to have descended in a
direct line from Hercules, and his figure and magnificent black beard
recalled his ancestor. You know him, and know that the things reported of
him are those which a young girl cannot hear with indifference, and at
that time he was nearly five lustra younger than he is to-day.
"How eagerly Arsinoe listened when his name was uttered! How Cleopatra
flushed and paled when Timagenes condemned him as an unprincipled
libertine! True, Antony was opening her father's path to his home.
"The flute-player had not forgotten his daughters. He had remained aloof
from the battle, but as soon as the victory was decided, he pressed on
into the city.
"The road led past our garden.
"The King had barely time to send a runner to his daughters, fifteen
minutes before his arrival, to say that he desired to greet them. They
were hurriedly attired in festal garments, and both presented an
appearance that might well gladden a father's heart.
"Cleopatra was not yet as tall as Arsinoe, but, though only fourteen, she
looked like a full-grown maiden, while her sister's face and figure
showed that in years she was still a child. But she was no longer one in
heart. Bouquets for the returning sovereign had been arranged as well as
haste permitted. Each one of the girls held one in her hand when the
train approached.
"My parents accompanied them to the garden gate. I could see what was
passing, but could hear distinctly only the voices of the men.
"The King alighted from the travelling chariot, which was drawn by eight
white Median steeds. The chamberlain who attended him was obliged to
support him. His face, reddened by his potations, fairly beamed as he
greeted his daughters. His joyful surprise at the sight of both, but
especially of Cleopatra, was evident. True, he kissed and embraced
Arsinoe, but after that he had eyes and ears solely for Cleopatra.
"Yet his younger daughter was very beautiful. Away from her sister, she
would have commanded the utmost admiration; but Cleopatra was like the
sun, beside which every other heavenly body pales. Yet, no; she should
not be compared to the sun. It was part of the fascination she exerted
that every one felt compelled to gaze at her, to discover the source of
the charm which emanated from her whole person.
"Antony, too, was enthralled by the spell as soon as he heard the first
words from her lips. He had dashed up to the King's chariot, and seeing
the two daughters by their father's side, he greeted them with a hasty
salute. When, in reply to the question whether he might hope for her
gratitude for bringing her father back to her so quickly, she said that
as a daughter she sincerely rejoiced, but as an Egyptian the task would
be harder, he gazed more keenly at her.
"I did not know her answer until later; but ere the last sound of her
voice had died away, I saw the Roman spring from his charger and fling
the bridle to Ammonius--the chamberlain who had assisted the King from
the chariot--as if he were his groom. The woman-hunter had met with rare
game in his pursuit of the fairest, and while he continued his
conversation with Cleopatra her father sometimes joined in, and his deep
laughter was often heard.
"No one would have recognized the earnest disciple of Epicurus. We had
often heard apt replies and original thoughts from Cleopatra's lips, but
she had rarely answered Timagenes's jests with another. Now she
found--one could see it by watching the speakers--a witty answer to many
of Antony's remarks. It seemed as if, for the first time, she had met
some one for whom she deemed it worth while to bring into the field every
gift of her deep and quick intelligence. Yet she did not lose for a
moment her womanly dignity; her eyes did not sparkle one whit more
brightly than during an animated conversation with me or our father.
"It was very different with Arsinoe. When Antony flung himself from his
horse, she had moved nearer to her sister, but, as the Roman continued to
overlook her, her face crimsoned, she bit her scarlet lips. Her whole
attitude betrayed the agitation that mastered her, and I, who knew her,
saw by the expression of her eyes and her quivering nostrils that she was
on the point of bursting into tears. Though Cleopatra stood so much
nearer to my heart, I felt sorry for her, and longed to touch the arm of
the haughty Roman, who indeed looked like the god of war, and whisper to
him to take some little notice of the poor child, who was also a daughter
of the King.
"But a still harder blow was destined to fall upon Arsinoe; for when the
King, who had been holding both bouquets, warned Antony that it was time
to depart, he took one, and I heard him say in his deep, loud tones,
'Whoever calls such flowers his daughters does not need so many others.'
Then he gave Cleopatra the blossoms and, laying his hand upon his heart,
expressed the hope of seeing her in Alexandria, and swung himself upon
the charger which the chamberlain, pale with fury, was still holding by
the bridle.
"The flute-player was delighted with his oldest daughter, and told my
father he would have the young princess conveyed to the city on the day
after the morrow. The next day he had things to do of which he desired
her to have no knowledge. Our father, in token of his gratitude, should
retain for himself and his heirs the summer palace and the garden. He
would see that the change of owner was entered in the land register. This
was really done that very day. It was, indeed, his first act save
one--the execution of his daughter Berenike.
"This ruler, who would have seemed to any one who beheld his meeting with
his children a warm-hearted man and a tender father, at that time would
have put half Alexandria to the sword, had not Antony interposed. He
forbade the bloodshed, and honoured Berenike's dead husband by a stately
funeral.
"As the steed bore him away, he turned back towards Cleopatra; he could
not have saluted Arsinoe, for she had rushed into the garden, and her
swollen face betrayed that she had shed burning tears.
"From that hour she bitterly hated Cleopatra.
"On the day appointed, the King brought the princesses to the city with
regal splendour. The Alexandrians joyously greeted the royal sisters, as,
seated on a golden throne, over which waved ostrich-feathers, they were
borne in state down the Street of the King, surrounded by dignitaries,
army commanders, the body-guard, and the senate of the city. Cleopatra
received the adulation of the populace with gracious majesty, as if she
were already Queen. Whoever had seen her as, with floods of tears, she
bade us all farewell, assuring us of her gratitude and faithful
remembrance, the sisterly affection she showed me--I had just been
elected commander of the Ephebi--" Here Archibius was interrupted by a
slave, who announced the arrival of the messenger, and, rising hurriedly,
he went to Leonax's workshop, to which the man had been conducted, that
he might speak to him alone.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Shadow of the candlestick caught her eye before the light
Soul which ceases to regard death as a misfortune finds peace
CLEOPATRA
By Georg Ebers
Volume 3.
CHAPTER VI.
The men sent by Archibius to obtain news had brought back no definite
information; but a short time before, a royal runner had handed him a
tablet from Iras, requesting him to visit her the next day. Disquieting,
but fortunately as yet unverified tidings had arrived. The Regent was
doing everything in his power to ascertain the truth; but he (Archibius)
was aware of the distrust of the government, and everything connected
with it, felt by the sailors and all the seafaring folk at the harbour.
An independent person like himself could often learn more than the chief
of the harbour police, with all his ships and men.
The little tablet was accompanied by a second, which, in the Regent's
name, authorized the bearer to have the harbour chains raised anywhere,
to go out into the open sea and return without interference.
The messenger, the overseer of Archibius's galley slaves, was an
experienced man. He undertook to have the "Epicurus"--a swift vessel,
which Cleopatra had given to her friend--ready for a voyage to the open
sea within two hours. The carriage should be sent for his master, that no
time might be lost.
When Archibius had returned to the ladies and asked whether it would be
an abuse of their hospitality, if--it was now nearly midnight--he should
still delay his departure for a time, they expressed sincere pleasure,
and begged him to continue his narrative.
"I must hasten," he hurriedly began, after eating the lunch which
Berenike had ordered while he was talking with the messenger, "but the
events of the next few years are hardly worth mentioning. Besides, my
time was wholly occupied by my studies in the museum.
"As for Cleopatra and Arsinoe, they stood like queens at the head of all
the magnificence of the court. The day on which they left our house was
the last of their childhood.
"Who would venture to determine whether her father's restoration, or the
meeting with Antony, had wrought the great change which took place at
that time in Cleopatra?
"Just before she left us, my mother had lamented that she must give her
to a father like the flute-player, instead of to a worthy mother; for the
best could not help regarding herself happy in the possession of such a
daughter. Afterwards her character and conduct were better suited to
delight men than to please a mother. The yearning for peace of mind
seemed over. Only the noisy festivals, the singing and music, of which
there was never any cessation in the palace of the royal virtuoso, seemed
to weary her and at such times she appeared at our house and spent
several days beneath its roof. Arsinoe never accompanied her; her heart
was sometimes won by a golden-haired officer in the ranks of the German
horsemen whom Gabinius had left among the garrison of Alexandria,
sometimes by a Macedonian noble among the youths who, at that time,
performed the service of guarding the palace.
"Cleopatra lived apart from her, and Arsinoe openly showed her hostility
from the time that she entreated her to put an end to the scandal caused
by her love affairs.
"Cleopatra held aloof from such things.
"Though she had devoted much time to the magic arts of the Egyptians, her
clear intellect had rendered her so familiar with the philosophy of the
Hellenes that it was a pleasure to hear her converse or argue in the
museum-as she often did-with the leaders of the various schools. Her
self-confidence had become very strong. Though, while with us, she said
that she longed to return to the days of the peaceful Garden of Epicurus,
she devoted herself eagerly enough to the events occurring in the world
and to statecraft. She was familiar with everything in Rome, the desires
and struggles of the contending parties, as well as the characters of the
men who were directing affairs, their qualities, views, and aims.
"She followed Antony's career with the interest of love, for she had
bestowed on him the first affection of her young heart. She had expected
the greatest achievements, but his subsequent course seemed to belie
these lofty hopes. A tinge of scorn coloured her remarks concerning him
at that time, but here also her heart had its share.
"Pompey, to whom her father owed his restoration to the throne, she
considered a lucky man, rather than a great and wise one. Of Julius
Caesar, on the contrary, long before she met him, she spoke with ardent
enthusiasm, though she knew that he would gladly have made Egypt a Roman
province. The greatest deed which she expected from the energetic Julius
was that he would abolish the republic, which she hated, and soar upward
to tyrannize over the arrogant rulers of the world--only she would fain
have seen Antony in his place. How often in those days she used magic art
to assure herself of his future! Her father was interested in these
things, especially as, through them, and the power of the mighty Isis, he
expected to obtain relief from his many and severe sufferings.
"Cleopatra's brothers were still mere boys, completely dependent upon
their guardian, Pothinus, to whom the King left the care of the
government, and their tutor, Theodotus, a clever but unprincipled
rhetorician. These two men and Achillas, the commander of the troops,
would gladly have aided Dionysus, the King's oldest male heir, to obtain
the control of the state, in order afterwards to rule him, but the
flute-player baffled their plans. You know that in his last will he made
Cleopatra, his favourite child, his successor, but her brother Dionysus
was to share the throne as her husband. This caused much scandal in Rome,
though it was an old custom of the house of Ptolemy, and suited the
Egyptians.
"The flute-player died. Cleopatra became Queen, and at the same time the
wife of a husband ten years old, for whom she did not even possess the
natural gift of sisterly tenderness. But with the obstinate child who had
been told by his counsellors that the right to rule should be his alone,
she also married the former governors of the country.
"Then began a period of sore suffering. Her life was a perpetual battle
against notorious intrigues, the worst of which owed their origin to her
sister. Arsinoe had surrounded herself with a court of her own, managed
by the eunuch Ganymedes, an experienced commander, and at the same time a
shrewd adviser, wholly devoted to her interest. He understood how to
bring her into close relations with Pothinus and other rulers of the
state, and thus at last united all who possessed any power in the royal
palace in an endeavour to thrust Cleopatra from the throne. Pothinus,
Theodotus, and Achillas hated her because she saw their failings and made
them feel the superiority of her intellect. Their combined efforts might
have succeeded in overthrowing her before, had not the Alexandrians,
headed by the Ephebi, over whom I still had some influence, stood by her
so steadfastly. Whoever could still be classed as a youth glowed with
enthusiasm for her, and most of the Macedonian nobles in the body-guard
would have gone to death for her sake, though she had forced them to gaze
hopelessly up to her as if she were some unapproachable goddess.
"When her father died she was seventeen, but she knew how to resist
oppressors and foes as if she were a man. My sister, Charmian, whom she
had appointed to a place in her service, loyally aided her. At that time
she was a beautiful and lovable girl, but the spell exerted by the Queen
fettered her like chains and bonds. She voluntarily resigned the love of
a noble man--he afterwards became your husband, Berenike--in order not to
leave her royal friend at a time when she so urgently needed her. Since
then my sister has shut her heart against love. It belonged to Cleopatra.
She lives, thinks, cares for her alone. She is fond of you, Barine,
because your father was so dear to her. Iras, whose name is so often
associated with hers, is the daughter of my oldest sister, who was
already married when the King entrusted the princesses to our father's
care. She is thirteen years younger than Cleopatra, but her mistress
holds the first place in her heart also. Her father, the wealthy Krates,
made every effort to keep her from entering the service of the Queen, but
in vain. A single conversation with this marvellous woman had bound her
forever.
"But I must be brief. You have doubtless heard how completely Cleopatra
bewitched Pompey's son during his visit to Alexandria. She had not been
so gracious to any man since her meeting with Antony, and it was not from
affection, but to maintain the independence of her beloved native land.
At that time the father of Gnejus was the man who possessed the most
power, and statecraft commanded her to win him through his son. The young
Roman also took his leave 'full of her,' as the Egyptians say. This
pleased her, but the visit greatly aided her foes. There was no slander
which was not disseminated against her. The commanders of the body-guard,
whom she had always treated as a haughty Queen, had seen her associate
with Pompey's son in the theatre as if he were a friend of equal rank;
and on many other occasions the Alexandrians saw her repay his courtesies
in the same coin. But in those days hatred of Rome surged high. The
regents, leagued with Arsinoe, spread the rumour that Cleopatra would
deliver Egypt up to Pompey, if the senate would secure to her the sole
sovereignty of the new province, and leave her free to rid herself of her
royal brother and husband.
"She was compelled to fly, and went first to the Syrian frontier, to gain
friends for her cause among the Asiatic princes. My brother Straton--you
remember the noble youth who won the prize for wrestling at Olympia,
Berenike--and I were commissioned to carry the treasure to her. We
doubtless exposed ourselves to great peril, but we did so gladly, and
left Alexandria with a few camels, an ox-cart, and some trusted slaves.
We were to go to Gaza, where Cleopatra was already beginning to collect
an army, and had disguised ourselves as Nabataean merchants. The
languages which I had learned, in order not to be distanced by Cleopatra,
were now of great service.
"Those were stirring times. The names of Caesar and Pompey were in every
mouth. After the defeat at Dyrrachium the cause of Julius seemed lost,
but the Pharsalian battle again placed him uppermost, unless the East
rose in behalf of Pompey. Both seemed to be favourites of Fortune. The
question now was to which the goddess would prove most faithful.
"My sister Charmian was with the Queen, but through one of Arsinoe's
maids, who was devoted to her, we had learned from the palace that
Pompey's fate was decided. He had come a fugitive from the defeat of
Pharsalus, and begged the King of Egypt--that is, the men who were acting
in his name--for a hospitable reception. Pothinus and his associates had
rarely confronted a greater embarrassment. The troops and ships of the
victorious Caesar were close at hand; many of Gabinius' men were serving
in the Egyptian army. To receive the vanquished Pompey kindly was to make
the victorious Caesar a foe. I was to witness the terrible solution of
this dilemma. The infamous words of Theodotus, 'Dead dogs no longer
bite,' had turned the scale.
"My brother and I reached Mount Casius with our precious freight, and
pitched our tents to await a messenger, when a large body of armed men
approached from the city. At first we feared that we were pursued; but a
spy reported that the King himself was among the soldiery, and at the
same time a large Roman galley drew near the coast. It must be Pompey's.
So they had changed their views, and the King was coming in person to
receive their guest. The troops encamped on the flat shore on which stood
the Temple of the Casian Amon.
"The September sun shone brightly, and was reflected from the weapons.
From the high bank of the dry bed of the river, where we had pitched our
tent, we saw something scarlet move to and fro. It was the King's mantle.
The waves, stirred by the autumn breeze, rippled lightly, blue as
cornflowers, over the yellow sand of the dunes; but the King stood still,
shading his eyes with his hand as he gazed at the galley. Meanwhile,
Achillas, the commander of the troops, and Septimius, the tribune, who
belonged to the Roman garrison in Alexandria, and who, I knew, had served
under Pompey and owed him many favours, had entered a boat and put off to
the vessel, which could not come nearer the land on account of the
shallow water.
"The conference now began, and Achillas's offer of hospitality must have
been very warm and well calculated to inspire confidence, for a tall
lady--it was Cornelia, the wife of the Imperator--waved her hand to him
in token of gratitude."
Here the speaker paused, drew a long breath, and, pressing his hand to
his brow, continued "What follows--alas, that it was my fate to witness
the dreadful scene! How often a garbled account has been given, and yet
the whole was so terribly simple!
"Fortune makes her favourites confiding. Pompey was also. Though more
than fifty years old--he lacked two years of sixty--he sprang into the
boat quickly enough, with merely a little assistance from a freedman. A
sailor--he was a negro--shoved the skiff off from the side of the huge
ship as violently as if the pole he used for the purpose was a spear, and
the galley his foe. The boat, urged by his companions' oars, had already
moved forward, and he stumbled, the brown cap falling from his woolly
head in the act.
"It seems as if I could still see him. Ere I clearly realized that this
was an evil omen, the boat stopped.
"The water was shallow. I saw Achillas point to the shore. It could be
reached by a single bound. Pompey looked towards the King. The freedman
put his hand under his arm to help him rise. Septimius also stood up. I
thought he intended to assist him. But no! What did this mean? Something
flashed by the Imperator's silver-grey hair as if a spark had fallen from
the sky. Would Pompey defend himself, or why did he raise his hand? It
was to draw around him the toga, with which he silently covered his face.
The tribune's arm was again raised high into the air, and then--what
confusion! Here, there, yonder, hands suddenly appeared aloft, bright
flashes darted through the clear air. Achillas, the general, dealt blows
with his dagger as if he were skilled in murder. The Imperator's stalwart
figure sank forward. The freedman supported him.
"Then shouts arose, here a cry of fury, yonder a wail of grief, and,
rising above all, a woman's shriek of anguish. It came from the lips of
Cornelia, the murdered man's wife. Shouts of applause from the King's
camp followed, then the blast of a trumpet; the Egyptians drew back from
the shore. The scarlet cloak again appeared. Septimius, bearing in his
hand a bleeding head, went towards it and held the ghastly trophy aloft.
"The royal boy gazed into the dull eyes of the victim, who had guided the
destinies of many a battlefield, of Rome, of two quarters of the globe.
The sight was probably too terrible for the child upon the throne, for he
averted his head. The ship moved away from the land, the Egyptians formed
into ranks and marched off. Achillas cleansed his blood-stained hands in
the sea-water. The freedman beside him washed his master's headless
trunk. The general shrugged his shoulders as the faithful fellow heaped
reproaches on him."
Here Archibius paused, drawing a long breath. Then he continued more
calmly:
"Achillas did not lead the troops back to Alexandria, but eastward,
towards Pelusium, as I learned later.
"My brother and I stood on the rocky edge of the ravine. It was long ere
either spoke. A cloud of dust concealed the King and his body-guard, the
sails of the galley disappeared. Twilight closed in, and Straton pointed
westward towards Alexandria. Then the sun set. Red! red! It seemed as if
a torrent of blood was pouring over the city.
"Night followed. A scanty fire was glimmering on the strand. Where had
the wood been gathered in this desert? How had it been kindled? A
wrecked, mouldering boat had lain close beside the scene of the murder.
The freedman and his companions had broken it up and fed the flames with
withered boughs, the torn garments of the murdered man, and dry sea-weed.
A blaze soon rose, and a body was carefully placed upon the wretched
funeral pyre. It was the corpse of the great Pompey. One of the
Imperator's veterans aided the faithful servant."
Here Archibius sank back again among the cushions, adding in explanation:
"Cordus, the man's name was Servius Cordus. He fared well later. The
Queen provided for him. The others? Fate overtook them all soon enough.
Theodotus was condemned by Brutus to a torturing death. Amid his loud
shrieks of agony one of Pompey's veterans shouted, 'Dead dogs no longer
bite, but they howl when dying!'
"It was worthy of Caesar that he averted his face in horror from the head
of his enemy, which Theodotus sent to him. Pothinus, too, vainly awaited
the reward of his infamous deed.
"Julius Caesar had cast anchor before Alexandria shortly after the King's
return. Not until after his arrival in Egypt did he learn how Pompey had
been received there. You know that he remained nine months. How often I
have heard it said that Cleopatra understood how to chain him here! This
is both true and false. He was obliged to stay half a year; the following
three months he did indeed give to the woman whom he loved. Ay, the heart
of the man of fifty-four had again opened to a great passion. Like all
wounds, those inflicted by the arrows of Eros heal more slowly when youth
lies behind the stricken one. It was not only the eyes and the senses
which attracted a couple so widely separated by years, but far more the
mental characteristics of both. Two winged intellects had met. The genius
of one had recognized that of the other. The highest type of manhood had
met perfect womanhood. They could not fail to attract each other. I
expected it; for Cleopatra had long watched breathlessly the flight of
this eagle who soared so far above the others, and she was strong enough
to keep at his side.
"We succeeded in joining Cleopatra, and heard that, spite of the
hostility of our citizens, Caesar had occupied the palace of the
Ptolemies and was engaged in restoring order.
"We knew in what way Pothinus, Achillas, and Arsinoe would seek to
influence him. Cleopatra had good reason to fear that her foes might
deliver Egypt unconditionally to Rome, if Caesar should leave the reins
of government in their hands and shut her out. She had cause to dread
this, but she also had the courage to act in person in her own behalf.
"The point now was to bring her into the city, the palace-nay, into
direct communication with the dictator. Children tell the tale of the
strong man who bore Cleopatra in a sack through the palace portals. It
was not a sack which concealed her, but a Syrian carpet. The strong man
was my brother Straton. I went first, to secure a free passage.
"Julius Caesar and she saw and found each other. Fate merely drew the
conclusion which must result from such premises. Never have I seen
Cleopatra happier, more exalted in mind and heart, yet she was menaced on
all sides by serious perils. It required all the military genius of
Caesar to conquer the fierce hostility which he encountered here. It was
this, not the thrall of Cleopatra, I repeat, which first bound him to
Egypt. What would have prevented him--as he did later--from taking the
object of his love to Rome, had it been possible at that time? But this
was not the case. The Alexandrians provided for that.
"He had recognized the flute-player's will, nay, had granted more to the
royal house than could have been given to the former. Cleopatra and her
brother-husband, Dionysus, were to share the government, and he also
bestowed on Arsinoe and her youngest brother the island of Cyprus, which
had been wrested from their uncle Ptolemy by the republic. Rome was, of
course, to remain the guardian of the brothers and sisters.
"This arrangement was unendurable to Pothinus and the former rulers of
the state. Cleopatra as Queen, and Rome--that is Caesar, the dictator,
her friend, as guardian--meant their removal from power, their
destruction, and they resisted violently.
"The Egyptians and even the Alexandrians supported them. The young King
hated nothing more than the yoke of the unloved sister, who was so
greatly his superior. Caesar had come with a force by no means equal to
theirs, and it might be possible to draw the mighty general into a snare.
They fought with all the power at their command, with such passionate
eagerness, that the dictator had never been nearer succumbing to peril.
But Cleopatra certainly did not paralyze his strength and cautious
deliberation. No! He had never been greater; never proved the power of
his genius so magnificently. And against what superior power, what hatred
he contended! I myself saw the young King, when he heard that Cleopatra
had succeeded in entering the palace and meeting Caesar, rush into the
street, fairly crazed by rage, tear the diadem from his head, hurl it on
the pavement, and shriek to the passers-by that he was betrayed, until
Caesar's soldiers forced him back into the palace, and dispersed the mob.
"Arsinoe had received more than she could venture to expect; but she was
again most deeply angered. After Caesar's entry into the palace, she had
received him as Queen, and hoped everything from his favour. Then her
hated sister had come and, as so often happened, she was forgotten for
Cleopatra's sake.
"This was too much, and with the eunuch Ganymedes, her confidant, and--as
I have already said--an able warrior, she left the palace and joined the
dictator's foes.
"There were severe battles on land and sea; in the streets of the city,
for the drinkable water excavated by the foe; and against the
conflagration which destroyed part of the Bruchium and the library of the
museum. Yet, half dead with thirst, barely escaped from drowning,
threatened on all sides by fierce hatred, he stood firm, and remained
victor also in the open field, after the young King had placed himself at
the head of the Egyptians and collected an army.
"You know that the boy was drowned in the flight.
"In battle and mortal peril, amid blood and the clank of arms, Caesar and
Cleopatra spent half a year ere they were permitted to pluck the fruit of
their common labour. The dictator now made her Queen of Egypt, and gave
her, as co-regent, her youngest brother, a boy not half her own age. To
Arsinoe he granted the life she had forfeited, but sent her to Italy.
"Peace followed the victory. Now, it is true, grave duties must have
summoned the statesman back to Rome, but he tarried three full months
longer.
"Whoever knows the life of the ambitious Julius, and is aware what this
delay might have cost him, may well strike his brow with his hand, and
ask, 'Is it true and possible that he used this precious time to take a
trip with the woman he loved up the Nile, to the island of Isis, which is
so dear to the Queen, to the extreme southern frontier of the country?'
Yet it was so, and I myself went in the second ship, and not only saw
them together, but more than once shared their banquets and their
conversation. It was giving and taking, forcing down and elevating, a
succession of discords, not unpleasant to hear, because experience taught
that they would finally terminate in the most beautiful harmony. It was a
festal day for all the senses."
"I imagine the whole Nile journey," interrupted Barine, "to be like the
fairy voyage, when the purple silk sails of Cleopatra's galley bore
Antony along the Cydnus."
"No, no," replied Archibius, "she first learned from Antony the art of
filling this earthly existence with fleeting pleasures. Caesar demanded
more. Her intellect offered him the highest enjoyment."
Here he hesitated.
"True, the skill with which, to please Antony, she daily offered him for
years fresh charms for every sense, was not a matter of accident."
"And this," cried Barine, "this was undertaken by the woman who had
recognized the chief good in peace of mind!"
"Ay," replied Archibius thoughtfully, "yet this was the inevitable
result. Pleasure had been the young girl's object in life. Ere passion
awoke in her soul, peace of mind was the chief good she knew. When the
hour arrived that this proved unattainable, the firmly rooted yearning
for happiness still remained the purpose of her existence. My father
would have been wiser to take her to the Stoa and impress it upon her
that, if life must have a goal, it should be only to live in accordance
with the sensibly arranged course of the world, and in harmony with one's
own nature. He should have taught her to derive happiness from virtue. He
should have stamped goodness upon the soul of the future Queen as the
fundamental law of her being. He omitted to do this, because in his
secluded life he had succeeded in finding the happiness which the master
promises to his disciples. From Athens to Cyrene, from Epicurus to
Aristippus, is but a short step, and Cleopatra took it when she forgot
that the master was far from recognizing the chief good in the enjoyment
of individual pleasure. The happiness of Epicurus was not inferior to
that of Zeus, if he had only barley bread and water to appease his hunger
and thirst.
"Yet she still considered herself a follower of Epicurus, and later, when
Antony had gone to the Parthian war, and she was a long time alone, she
once more began to strive for freedom from pain and peace of mind, but
the state, her children, the marriage of Antony--who had long been her
lover--to Octavia, the yearning of her own heart, Anubis, magic, and the
Egyptian teachings of the life after death, above all, the burning
ambition, the unresting desire to be loved, where she herself loved, to
be first among the foremost--"
Here he was interrupted by the messenger, who informed him that the ship
was ready.
CHAPTER VII.
Archibius had buried himself so deeply in the past that it was several
minutes ere he could bring himself back to the present. When he did so,
he hastily discussed with the two ladies the date of their departure.
It was hard for Berenike to leave her injured brother, and Barine longed
to see Dion once more before the journey. Both were reluctant to quit
Alexandria ere decisive news had arrived from the army and the fleet. So
they requested a few days' delay; but Archibius cut them short, requiring
them, with a resolution which transformed the amiable friend into a stern
master, to be ready for the journey the next day at sunset. His Nile boat
would await them at the Agathodaemon harbour on Lake Mareotis, and his
travelling chariot would convey them thither, with as much luggage and as
many female slaves as they desired to take with them. Then softening his
tone, he briefly reminded the ladies of the great annoyances to which a
longer stay would expose them, excused his rigour on the plea of haste,
pressed the hands of the mother and daughter, and retired without heeding
Barine, who called after him, yet could desire nothing save to plead for
a longer delay. The carriage bore him swiftly to the great harbour.
The waxing moon was mirrored like a silver column, now wavering and
tremulous, now rent by the waves tossing under a strong southeast wind,
and illumined the warm autumn night. The sea outside was evidently
running high. This was apparent by the motion of the vessels lying at
anchor in the angle which the shore in front of the superb Temple of
Poseidon formed with the Choma. This was a tongue of land stretched like
a finger into the sea, on whose point stood a little palace which
Cleopatra, incited by a chance remark of Antony, had had built there to
surprise him.
Another, of white marble, glimmered in the moonlight from the island of
Antirrhodus; and farther still a blazing fire illumined the darkness. Its
flames flared from the top of the famous lighthouse on the island of
Pharos at the entrance of the harbour, and, swayed to and fro by the
wind, steeped the horizon and the outer edge of the dark water in the
harbour with moving masses of light which irradiated the gloomy distance,
sometimes faintly, anon more brilliantly.
Spite of the late hour, the harbour was full of bustle, though the wind
often blew the men's cloaks over their heads, and the women were obliged
to gather their garments closely around them. True, at this hour commerce
had ceased; but many had gone to the port in search of news, or even to
greet before others the first ship returning from the victorious fleet;
for that Antony had defeated Octavianus in a great battle was deemed
certain.
Guards were watching the harbour, and a band of Syrian horsemen had just
passed from the barracks in the southern part of the Lochias to the
Temple of Poseidon.
Here the galleys lay at anchor, not in the harbour of Eunostus, which was
separated from the other by the broad, bridge-like dam of the
Heptastadium, that united the city and the island of Pharos. Near it were
the royal palaces and the arsenal, and any tidings must first reach this
spot. The other harbour was devoted to commerce, but, in order to prevent
the spread of false reports, newly arrived ships were forbidden to enter.
True, even at the great harbour, news could scarcely be expected, for a
chain stretching from the end of the Pharos to a cliff directly opposite
in the Alveus Steganus, closed the narrow opening. But it could be raised
if a state galley arrived with an important message, and this was
expected by the throng on the shore.
Doubtless many came from banquets, cookshops, taverns, or the nocturnal
meeting-places of the sects that practised the magic arts, yet the weight
of anxious expectation seemed to check the joyous activity, and wherever
Archibius glanced he beheld eager, troubled faces. The wind forced many
to bow their heads, and, wherever they turned their eyes, flags and
clouds of dust were fluttering in the air, increasing the confusion.
As the galley put off from the shore, and the flutes summoned the oarsmen
to their toil, its owner felt so disheartened that he did not even
venture to hope that he was going in quest of good tidings.
Long-vanished days had, as it were, been called from the grave, and many
a scene from the past rose before him as he lay among the cushions on the
poop, gazing at the sky, across which dark, swiftly sailing clouds
sometimes veiled the stars and again revealed them.
"How much we can conceal by words without being guilty of falsehood!" he
murmured, while recalling what he had told the women.
Ay, he had been Cleopatra's confidant in his early youth, but how he had
loved her, how, even as a boy, he had been subject to her, body and soul!
He had allowed her to see it, displayed, confessed it; and she had
accepted it as her rightful due. She had repelled with angry pride his
only attempt to clasp her, in his overflowing affection, in his arms; but
to show his love for her is a crime for which the loftiest woman pardons
the humblest suitor, and a few hours later Cleopatra had met him with the
old affectionate familiarity.
Again he recalled the torments which he had endured when compelled to
witness how completely she yielded to the passion which drew her to
Antony. At that time the Roman had merely swept through her life like a
swiftly passing meteor, but many things betrayed that she did not forget
him; and while Archibius had seen without pain her love for the great
Caesar bud and grow, the torturing feeling of jealousy again stirred in
his heart, though youth was past, when at Tarsus, on the river Cydnus,
she renewed the bond which still united her to Antony.
Now his hair had grown grey, and though nothing had clouded his
friendship for the Queen, though he had always been ready to serve her,
this foolish feeling had not been banished, and again and again mastered
his whole being. He by no means undervalued Antony's attractions; but he
saw his foibles no less clearly. All in all, whenever he thought of this
pair, he felt like the lover of art who entrusts the finest gem in his
collection to a rich man who knows not how to prize its real value, and
puts it in the wrong place.
Yet he wished the Roman the most brilliant victory; for his defeat would
have been Cleopatra's also, and would she endure the consequences of such
a disaster?
The galley was approaching the flickering circle of light at the foot of
the Pharos, and Archibius was just producing the token which was to
secure the lifting of the chain, when his name echoed through the
stillness of the night.
It was Dion hailing him from a boat tossing near the mouth of the harbour
on the waves surging in from the turbulent sea. He had recognized
Archibius's swift galley from the bust of Epicurus which was illumined by
the light of the lantern in the prow. Cleopatra had had it placed upon
the ship which, by her orders, had been built for her friend.
Dion now desired to join him, and was soon standing on the deck at his
side. He had landed on the island of Pharos, and entered a sailors'
tavern to learn what was passing. But no one could give him any definite
information, for the wind was blowing from the land and allowed large
vessels to approach the Egyptian coast only by the aid of oars. Shortly
before the breeze had veered from south to southeast, and an experienced
Rhodian would "never again lift cup of wine to his lips" if it did not
blow from the north to-morrow or the day after. Then ships bearing news
might reach Alexandria by the dozen--that is, the greybeard added with a
defiant glance at the daintily clad city gentleman--if they were allowed
to pass the Pharos or go through the Poseidon basin into the Eunostus. He
had fancied that he saw sails on the horizon at sunset, but the swiftest
galley became a hedgehog when the wind blew against its prow, and even
checked the oars.
Others, too, had fancied that they had seen sails, and Dion would gladly
have gone out to sea to investigate, but he was entirely alone in a frail
hired boat, and this would not have been permitted to pass beyond the
harbour. The expectation that every road would be open to Archibius had
not deceived him, and the harbour chain was drawn aside for the Epicurus.
With swelling sails, urged by the strong wind blowing from the southeast,
its keel cut the rolling waves.
Soon a faint, tremulous light appeared in the north. It must be a ship;
and though the helmsman in the tavern at Pharos, who looked as though he
had not always steered peaceful trading-vessels, had spoken of some which
did not let the ships they caught pass unscathed, the men on the
well-equipped, stately Epicurus did not fear pirates, especially as
morning was close at hand, and it had just shot by two clumsy men-of-war
which had been sent out by the Regent.
The strong wind filled every sail, rowing would have been useless labour,
and the light in front seemed to be coming nearer.
A wan glimmer was already beginning to brighten the distant east when the
Epicurus approached the vessel with the light, but it seemed to wish to
avoid the Alexandrian, and turned suddenly towards the northeast.
Archibius and Dion now discussed whether it would be worth while to
pursue the fugitive. It was a small ship, which, as the dark masses of
clouds became bordered with golden edges, grew more distinct and appeared
to be a Cilician pirate of the smallest size.
As to its crew, the tried sailors on the Epicurus, a much larger vessel,
which lacked no means of defence, showed no signs of alarm, the helmsman
especially, who had served in the fleet of Sextus Pompey, and had sprung
upon the deck of many a pirate ship.
Archibius deemed it foolish to commence a conflict unnecessarily. But
Dion was in the mood to brave every peril.
If life and death were at stake, so much the better!
He had informed his friend of Iras's fears.
The fleet must be in a critical situation, and if the little Cilician had
had nothing to conceal she would not have shunned the Epicurus.
It was worth while to learn what had induced her to turn back just before
reaching the harbour. The warlike helmsman also desired to give chase,
and Archibius yielded, for the uncertainty was becoming more and more
unbearable. Dion's soul was deeply burdened too. He could not banish
Barine's image; and since Archibius had told him that he had found her
resolved to shut her house against guests, and how willingly she had
accepted his invitation to the country, again and again he pondered over
the question what should prevent his marrying the quiet daughter of a
distinguished artist, whom he loved?
Archibius had remarked that Barine would be glad to greet her most
intimate friends--among whom he was included--in her quiet country.
Dion did not doubt this, but he was equally sure that the greeting would
bind him to her and rub him of his liberty, perhaps forever. But would
the Alexandrian possess the lofty gift of freedom, if the Romans ruled
his city as they governed Carthage or Corinth? If Cleopatra were
defeated, and Egypt became a Roman province, a share in the business of
the council, which was still addressed as "Macedonian men," and which was
dear to Dion, could offer nothing but humiliation, and no longer afford
satisfaction.
If a pirate's spear put an end to bondage under the Roman yoke and to
this unworthy yearning and wavering, so much the better!
On this autumn morning, under this grey sky, from which sank a damp,
light fog, with these hopes and fears in his heart, he beheld in both the
present and future naught save shadows.
The Epicurus overtook and captured the fugitive. The slight resistance
the vessel might have offered was relinquished when Archibius's helmsman
shouted that the Epicurus did not belong to the royal navy, and had come
in search of news.
The Cilician took in his oars; Archibius and Dion entered the vessel and
questioned the commander.
He was an old, weather-beaten seaman, who would give no information until
after he had learned what his pursuers really desired.
At first he protested that he had witnessed on the Peloponnesian coast a
great victory gained by the Egyptian galleys over those commanded by
Octavianus; but the queries of the two friends involved him in
contradictions, and he then pretended to know nothing, and to have spoken
of a victory merely to please the Alexandrian gentlemen.
Dion, accompanied by a few men from the crew of the Epicurus, searched
the ship, and found in the little cabin a man bound and gagged, guarded
by one of the pirates.
It was a sailor from the Pontus, who spoke only his native language.
Nothing intelligible could be obtained from him; but there were important
suggestions in a letter, found in a chest in the cabin, among clothing,
jewels, and other stolen articles.
The letter-Dion could scarcely believe his own eyes-was addressed to his
friend, the architect Gorgias. The pirate, being ignorant of writing, had
not opened it, but Dion tore the wax from the cord without delay.
Aristocrates, the Greek rhetorician, who had accompanied Antony to the
war, had written from Taenarum, in the south of the Peloponnesus,
requesting the architect, in the general's name, to set the little palace
at the end of the Choma in order, and surround it on the land side with a
high wall.
No door would be necessary. Communication with the dwelling could be had
by water. He must do his utmost to complete the work speedily.
The friends gazed at each other in astonishment, as they read this
commission.
What could induce Antony to give so strange an order? How did it fall
into the hands of the pirates?
This must be understood.
When Archibius, whose gentle nature, so well adapted to inspire
confidence, quickly won friends, burst into passionate excitement, the
unexpected transition rarely failed to produce its effect, especially as
his tall, strong figure and marked features made a still more threatening
impression.
Even the captain gazed at him with fear, when the Alexandrian threatened
to recall all his promises of consideration and mercy if the pirate
withheld even the smallest trifle connected with this letter. The man
speedily perceived that it would be useless to make false statements; for
the captive from Pontus, though unable to speak Greek, understood the
language, and either confirmed every remark of the other with vehement
gestures, or branded it in the same manner as false.
Thus it was discovered that the pirate craft, in company with a much
larger vessel, owned by a companion, had lurked behind the promontory of
Crete for a prize. They had neither seen nor heard aught concerning the
two fleets, when a dainty galley, "the finest and fleetest that ever
sailed in the sea"--it was probably the "Swallow," Antony's
despatch-boat-had run into the snare. To capture her was an easy task.
The pirates had divided their booty, but the lion's share of goods and
men had fallen to the larger ship.
A pouch containing letters and money had been taken from a gentleman of
aristocratic appearance--probably Antony's messenger--who had received a
severe wound, died, and had been flung into the sea. The former had been
used to light the fire, and only the one addressed to the architect
remained.
The captured sailors had said that the fleet of Octavianus had defeated
Cleopatra's, and the Queen had fled, but that the land forces were still
untouched, and might yet decide the conflict in Antony's favour. The
pirate protested that he did not know the position of the army--it might
be at Taenarum, whence the captured ship came. It was a sin and a shame,
but his own crew had set it on fire, and it sank before his eyes.
This report seemed to be true, yet the Acharnanian coast, where the
battle was said to have been fought, was so far from the southern point
of the Peloponnesus, whence Antony's letter came, that it must have been
written during the flight. One thing appeared to be certain--the fleet
had been vanquished and dispersed on the 2d or 3d of September.
Where would the Queen go now? What had become of the magnificent galleys
which had accompanied her to the battle?
Even the contrary winds would not have detained them so long, for they
were abundantly supplied with rowers.
Had Octavianus taken possession of them? Were they burned or sunk?
But in that case how had Antony reached Taenarum?
The pirate could give no answer to these questions, which stirred both
heart and brain. Why should he conceal what had reached his ears?
At last Archibius ordered the property stolen from Antony's ship, and the
liberated sailor to be brought on board the Epicurus, but the pirate was
obliged to swear not to remain in the waters between Crete and
Alexandria. Then he was suffered to pursue his way unmolested.
This adventure had occupied many hours, and the return against the wind
was slow; for, during the chase the Epicurus had been carried by the
strong breeze far out to sea. Yet, when still several miles from the
mouth of the harbour at the Pharos, it was evident that the Rhodian
helmsman in the island tavern had predicted truly; for the weather
changed with unusual speed, and the wind now blew from the north. The sea
fairly swarmed with ships, some belonging to the royal fleet, some to
curious Alexandrians, who had sailed out to take a survey. Archibius and
Dion had spent a sleepless night and day. The heavy air, pervaded by a
fine mist, had grown cool. After refreshing themselves by a repast, they
paced up and down the deck of the Epicurus.
Few words were exchanged, and they wrapped their cloaks closer around
them. Both had quaffed large draughts of the fiery wine with which the
Epicurus was well supplied, but it would not warm them. Even the fire,
blazing brightly in the richly furnished cabin, could scarcely do so.
Archibius's thoughts lingered with his beloved Queen, and his vivid power
of imagination conjured before his mind everything which could distress
her. No possible chance, not even the most terrible, was forgotten, and
when he saw her sinking in the ship, stretching her beautiful arms
imploringly towards him, to whom she had so long turned in every perilous
position, when he beheld her a captive in the presence of the hostile,
cold-hearted Octavianus, the blood seemed to freeze in his veins. At last
he dropped his felt mantle and, groaning aloud, struck his brow with his
clenched hand. He had fancied her walking with gold chains on her slender
wrists before the victor's four-horse chariot, and heard the exulting
shouts of the Roman populace.
That would have been the most terrible of all. To pursue this train of
thought was beyond the endurance of the faithful friend, and Dion turned
in surprise as he heard him sob and saw the tears which bedewed his face.
His own heart was heavy enough, but he knew his companion's warm devotion
to the Queen; so, passing his arm around his shoulder, he entreated him
to maintain that peace of soul and mind which he had so often admired. In
the most critical situations he had seen him stand high above them, as
yonder man who fed the flames on the summit of the Pharos stood above the
wild surges of the sea. If he would reflect over what had happened as
dispassionately as usual, he could not fail to see that Antony must be
free and in a position to guide his own future, since he directed the
palace in the Choma to be put in order. He did not understand about the
wall, but perhaps he was bringing home some distinguished captive whom he
wished to debar from all communication with the city. It might prove that
everything was far better than they feared, and they would yet smile at
these grievous anxieties. His heart, too, was heavy, for he wished the
Queen the best fortune, not only for her own sake, but because with her
and her successful resistance to the greed of Rome was connected the
liberty of Alexandria.
"My love and anxiety, like yours," he concluded, "have ever been given to
her, the sovereign of this country. The world will be desolate, life will
no longer be worth living, if the iron foot of Rome crushes our
independence and freedom." The words had sounded cordial and sincere, and
Archibius followed Dion's counsel. Calm thought convinced him that
nothing had yet happened which compelled belief in the worst result; and,
as one who needs consolation often finds relief in comforting another,
Archibius cheered his own heart by representing to his younger friend
that, even if Octavianus were the victor and should deprive Egypt of her
independence, he would scarcely venture to take from the citizens of
Alexandria the free control of their own affairs. Then he explained to
Dion that, as a young, resolute, independent man, he might render himself
doubly useful if it were necessary to guard the endangered liberty of the
city, and told him how many beautiful things life still held in store.
His voice expressed anxious tenderness for his young friend. No one had
spoken thus to Dion since his father's death.
The Epicurus would soon reach the mouth of the harbour, and after landing
he must again leave Archibius.
The decisive hour which often unites earnest men more firmly than many
previous years had come to both. They had opened their hearts to each
other. Dion had withheld only the one thing which, at the first sight of
the houses in the city, filled his soul with fresh uneasiness.
It was long since he had sought counsel from others. Many who had asked
his, had left him with thanks, to do exactly the opposite of what he had
advised, though it would have been to their advantage. More than once he,
too, had done the same, but now a powerful impulse urged him to confide
in Archibius. He knew Barine, and wished her the greatest happiness.
Perhaps it would be wise to let another person, who was kindly disposed,
consider what his own heart so eagerly demanded and prudence forbade.
Hastily forming his resolution, he again turned to his friend, saying:
"You have shown yourself a father to me. Imagine that I am indeed your
son, and, as such wished to confess that a woman had become dear to my
heart, and to ask whether you would be glad to greet her as a daughter."
Here Archibius interrupted him with the exclamation: "A ray of light amid
all this gloom? Grasp what you have too long neglected as soon as
possible! It befits a good citizen to marry. The Greek does not attain
full manhood till he becomes husband and father. If I have remained
unwedded, there was a special reason for it, and how often I have envied
the cobbler whom I saw standing before his shop in the evening, holding
his child in his arms, or the pilot, to whom large and small hands were
stretched in greeting when he returned home! When I enter my dwelling
only my dogs rejoice. But you, whose beautiful palace stands empty, to
whose proud family it is due that you should provide for its
continuance--"
"That is just what brings me into a state of indecision, which is usually
foreign to my nature," interrupted Dion. "You know me and my position in
the world, and you have also known from her earliest childhood the woman
to whom I allude."
"Iras?" asked his companion, hesitatingly. His sister, Charmian, had told
him of the love felt by the Queen's younger waiting-woman.
But Dion eagerly denied this, adding I am speaking of Barine, the
daughter of your dead friend Leonax. "I love her, yet my pride is
sensitive, and I know that it will extend to my future wife. The
contemptuous glances which others might cast at her I should scorn, for I
know her worth. Surely you remember my mother: she was a very different
woman. Her house, her child, the slaves, her loom, were everything to
her. She rigidly exacted from other women the chaste reserve which was a
marked trait in her own character. Yet she was gentle, and loved me, her
only son, beyond aught else. I think she would have opened her arms to
Barine, had she believed that she was necessary to my happiness. But
would the young beauty, accustomed to gay intercourse with distinguished
men, have been able to submit to her demands? When I consider that she
cannot help taking into her married life the habit of being surrounded
and courted; when I think that the imprudence of a woman accustomed to
perfect freedom might set idle tongues in motion, and cast a shadow upon
the radiant purity of my name; when I even--" and he raised his clenched
right hand. But Archibius answered soothingly:
"That anxiety is groundless if Barine warmly and joyfully gives you her
whole heart. It is a sunny, lovable, true woman's heart, and therefore
capable of a great love. If she bestows it on you--and I believe she
will--go and offer sacrifices in your gratitude; for the immortals
desired your happiness when they guided your choice to her and not to
Iras, my own sister's child. If you were really my son, I would now
exclaim, 'You could not bring me a dearer daughter, if--I repeat it--if
you are sure of her love.'"
Dion gazed into vacancy a short time, and then cried firmly: "I am!"
CHAPTER VIII.
The Epicurus anchored before the Temple of Poseidon. The crew had been
ordered to keep silence, though they knew nothing, except that a letter
from Antony, commanding the erection of a wall, had been found on board
the pirate. This might be regarded as a good omen, for people do not
think of building unless they anticipate a time of peace.
The light rain had ceased, but the wind blew more strongly from the
north, and the air had grown cool. A dense throng still covered the quay
from the southern end of the Heptastadium to the promontory of Lochias.
The strongest pressure was between the peninsula of the Choma and the
Sebasteum; for this afforded a view of the sea, and the first tidings
must reach the residence of the Regent, which was connected with the
palace.
A hundred contradictory rumours had been in circulation that morning; and
when, at the third hour in the afternoon, the Epicurus arrived, it was
surrounded by a dense multitude eager to hear what news the ship had
brought from without.
Other vessels shared the same fate, but none could give reliable tidings.
Two swift galleys from the royal fleet reported meeting a Samian trireme,
which had given news of a great victory gained by Antony on the land and
Cleopatra on the sea, and, as men are most ready to believe what they
desire, throngs of exulting men and women moved to and fro along the
shore, strengthening by their confidence many a timorous spirit. Prudent
people, who had regarded the long delay of the first ships of the fleet
with anxiety, had opened their ears to the tales of evil, and looked
forward to the future with uneasiness. But they avoided giving expression
to their fears, for the overseer of an establishment for gold embroidery,
who had ventured to warn the people against premature rejoicing, had
limped home badly beaten, and two other pessimists who had been flung in
the sea had just been dragged out dripping wet.
Nor could the multitude be blamed for this confidence; for at the
Serapeum, the theatre of Dionysus, the lofty pylons of the Sebasteum, the
main door of the museum, in front of the entrance of the palace in the
Bruchium, and before the fortress-like palaces in the Lochias, triumphal
arches had been erected, adorned with gods of victory and trophies
hastily constructed of plaster, inscriptions of congratulations and
thanks to the deities, garlands of foliage and flowers. The wreathing of
the Egyptian pylons and obelisks, the principal temple, and the favourite
statues in the city had been commenced during the night. The last touches
were now being given to the work.
Gorgias, like his friend Dion, had not closed his eyes since the night
before; for he had had charge of all the decorations of the Bruchium,
where one superb building adjoined another.
Sleep had also fled from the couches of the occupants of the Sebasteum,
the royal palace where Iras lived during the absence of the Queen, and
the practorium, facing its southern front, which contained the official
residence of the Regent.
When Archibius was conducted to the Queen's waiting-woman, her appearance
fairly startled him. She had been his guest in Kanopus only the day
before yesterday, and how great was the alteration within this brief
time! Her oval face seemed to have lengthened, the features to have grown
sharper; and this woman of seven-and-twenty years, who had hitherto
retained all the charms of youth, appeared suddenly to have aged a
decade. There was a feverish excitement in her manner, as, holding out
her hand to her uncle, in greeting, she exclaimed hastily, "You, too,
bring no good tidings?"
"Nor any evil ones," he answered quietly. "But, child, I do not like your
appearance--the dark circles under your keen eyes. You have had news
which rouses your anxiety?"
"Worse than that," she answered in a low tone.
"Well?"
"Read!" gasped Iras, her lips and nostrils quivering as she handed
Archibius a small tablet. With a gesture of haste very unusual in him, he
snatched it from her hand and, as his eyes ran over the words traced upon
it, every vestige of colour vanished from his cheeks and lips.
They were written by Cleopatra's own hand, and contained the following
lines:
"The naval battle was lost--and by my fault. The land forces might still
save us, but not under his command. He is with me, uninjured, but
apparently exhausted; like a different being, bereft of courage, listless
as if utterly crushed. I foresee the beginning of the end. As soon as
this reaches you, arrange to have some unpretending litters ready for us
every evening at sunset. Make the people believe that we have conquered
until trustworthy intelligence arrives concerning the fate of Canidius
and the army. When you kiss the children in my name, be very tender with
them. Who knows how soon they may be orphaned? They already have an
unhappy mother; may they be spared the memory of a cowardly one! Trust no
one except those whom I left in authority, and Archibius, not even
Caesarion or Antyllus. Provide for having every one whose aid may be
valuable to me within reach when I come. I cannot close with the familiar
'Rejoice'--the 'Fresh Courage' placed on many a tombstone seems more
appropriate. You who did not envy me in my happiness will help me to bear
misfortune. Epicurus, who believes that the gods merely watch the destiny
of men inactively from their blissful heights, is right. Were it
otherwise, how could the love and loyalty which cleave to the hapless,
defeated woman, be repaid with anguish of heart and tears? Yet continue
to love her."
Archibius, pale and silent, let the tablet fall. It was long ere he
gasped hoarsely: "I foresaw it; yet now that it is here--" His voice
failed, and violent, tearless sobs shook his powerful frame.
Sinking on a couch he buried his face amid the cushions.
Iras gazed at the strong man and shook her head. She, too, loved the
Queen; the news had brought tears to her eyes also; but even while she
wept, a host of plans coping with this disaster had darted through her
restless brain. A few minutes after the arrival of the message of
misfortune she had consulted with the members of Cleopatra's council, and
adopted measures for sustaining the people's belief in the naval victory.
What was she, the delicate, by no means courageous girl, compared to this
man of iron strength who, she was well aware, had braved the greatest
perils in the service of the Queen? Yet there he lay with his face hidden
in the pillows as if utterly overwhelmed.
Did a woman's soul rebound more quickly after being crushed beneath the
burdens of the heaviest suffering, or was hers of a special character,
and her slender body the casket of a hero's nature?
She had reason to believe so when she recalled how the Regent and the
Keeper of the Seal had received the terrible news. They had rushed
frantically up and down the vast hall as if desperate; but Mardion the
eunuch had little manhood, and Zeno was a characterless old author who
had won the Queen's esteem, and the high office which he occupied solely
by the vivid power of imagination, that enabled him constantly to devise
new exhibitions, amusements, and entertainments, and present them with
magical splendour.
But Archibius, the brave, circumspect counsellor and helper?
His shoulders again quivered as if they had received a blow, and Iras
suddenly remembered what she had long known, but never fully
realized--that yonder grey-haired man loved Cleopatra, loved her as she
herself loved Dion; and she wondered whether she would have been strong
enough to maintain her composure if she had learned that a cruel fate
threatened to rob him of life, liberty, and honour.
Hour after hour she had vainly awaited the young Alexandrian, yet he had
witnessed her anxiety the day before. Had she offended him? Was he
detained by the spell of Didymus's granddaughter?
It seemed a great wrong that, amid the unspeakably terrible misfortune
which had overtaken her mistress, she could not refrain from thinking
continually of Dion. Even as his image filled her heart, Cleopatra's
ruled her uncle's mind and soul, and she said to herself that it was not
alone among women that love paid no heed to years, or whether the locks
were brown or tinged with grey.
But Archibius now raised himself, left the couch, passed his hand across
his brow, and in the deep, calm tones natural to his voice, began with a
sorrowful smile: "A man stricken by an arrow leaves the fray to have his
wound bandaged. The surgeon has now finished his task. I ought to have
spared you this pitiable spectacle, child. But I am again ready for the
battle. Cleopatra's account of Antony's condition renders a piece of news
which we have just received somewhat more intelligible."
"We?" replied Iras. "Who was your companion?"
"Dion," answered Archibius; but when he was about to describe the
incidents of the preceding night, she interrupted him with the question
whether Barine had consented to leave the city. He assented with a curt
"Yes," but Iras assumed the manner of having expected nothing different,
and requested him to continue his story.
Archibius now related everything which they had experienced, and their
discovery in the pirate ship. Dion was even now on the way to carry
Antony's order to his friend Gorgias.
"Any slave might have attended to that matter equally well," Iras
remarked in an irritated tone. "I should think he would have more reason
to expect trustworthy tidings here. But that's the way with men!"
Here she hesitated but, meeting an inquiring glance from her uncle, she
went on eagerly; "Nothing, I believe, binds them more firmly to one
another than mutual pleasure. But that must now be over. They will seek
other amusements, whether with Heliodora or Thais I care not. If the
woman had only gone before! When she caught young Caesarion--"
"Stay, child," her uncle interrupted reprovingly. "I know how much she
would rejoice if Antyllus had never brought the boy to her house."
"Now--because the poor deluded lad's infatuation alarms her."
"No, from his first visit. Immature boys do not suit the distinguished
men whom she receives."
"If the door is always kept open, thieves will enter the house."
"She received only old acquaintances, and the friends whom they
presented. Her house was closed to all others. So there was no trouble
with thieves. But who in Alexandria could venture to refuse admittance to
a son of the Queen?"
"There is a wide difference between quiet admittance and fanning a
passion to madness. Wherever a fire is burning, there has certainly been
a spark to kindle it. You men do not detect such women's work. A glance,
a pressure of the hand, even the light touch of a garment, and the flame
blazes, where such inflammable material lies ready."
"We lament the violence of the conflagration. You are not well disposed
towards Barine."
"I care no more for her than this couch here cares for the statue of
Mercury in the street!" exclaimed Iras, with repellent arrogance. "There
could be no two things in the world more utterly alien than we. Between
the woman whose door stands open, and me, there is nothing in common save
our sex."
"And," replied Archibius reprovingly, "many a beautiful gift which the
gods bestowed upon her as well as upon you. As for the open door, it was
closed yesterday. The thieves of whom you spoke spoiled her pleasure in
granting hospitality. Antyllus forced himself with noisy impetuosity into
her house. This made her dread still more unprecedented conduct in the
future. In a few hours she will be on the way to Irenia. I am glad for
Caesarion's sake, and still more for his mother's, whom we have wronged
by forgetting so long for another."
"To think that we should be forced to do so!" cried Iras excitedly--"
now, at this hour, when every drop of blood, every thought of this poor
brain should belong to the Queen! Yet it could not be avoided. Cleopatra
is returning to us with a heart bleeding from a hundred wounds, and it is
terrible to think that a new arrow must strike her as soon as she steps
upon her native soil. You know how she loves the boy, who is the living
image of the great man with whom she shared the highest joys of love.
When she learns that he, the son of Caesar, has given his young heart to
the cast-off wife of a street orator, a woman whose home attracted men as
ripe dates lure birds, it will be--I know--like rubbing salt into her
fresh wounds. Alas! and the one sorrow will not be all. Antony, her
husband, also found the way to Barine. He sought her more than once. You
cannot know it as I do; but Charmian will tell you how sensitive she has
become since the flower of her youthful charms--you don't perceive it--is
losing one leaf after another. Jealousy will torture her, and--I know her
well--perhaps no one will ever render the siren a greater service than I
did when I compelled her to leave the city."
The eyes of Archibius's clever niece had glittered with such hostile
feeling as she spoke that he thought with just anxiety of his dead
friend's daughter. What did not yet threaten Barine as serious danger
Iras had the power to transform into grave peril.
Dion had begged him to maintain strict secrecy; but even had he been
permitted to speak, he would not have done so now. From his knowledge of
Iras's character she might be expected, if she learned that some one had
come between her and the friend of her youth, to shrink from no means of
spoiling her game. He remembered the noble Macedonian maiden whom the
Queen had begun to favour, and who was hunted to death by Iras's hostile
intrigues. Few were more clever, and--if she once loved--more loyal and
devoted, more yielding, pliant, and in happy hours more bewitching, yet
even in childhood she had preferred a winding path to a straight one. It
seemed as if her shrewdness scorned to attain the end desired by the
simple method lying close at hand. How willingly his mother and his
younger sister Charmian had cared for the slaves and nursed them when
they were ill; nay, Charmian had gained in her Nubian maid Aniukis a
friend who would have gone to death for her sake! Cleopatra, too, when a
child, had found sincere delight in taking a bouquet to his parents' sick
old housekeeper and sitting by her bedside to shorten the time for her
with merry talk. She had gone to her unasked, while Iras had often been
punished because she had made the lives of numerous slaves in her
parents' household still harder by unreasonable harshness. This trait in
her character had roused her uncle's anxiety and, in after-years, her
treatment of her inferiors had been such that he could not number her
among the excellent of her sex. Therefore he was the more joyfully
surprised by the loyal, unselfish love with which she devoted herself to
the service of the Queen. Cleopatra had gratified Charmian's wish to have
her niece for an assistant; and Iras, who had never been a loving
daughter to her own faithful mother, had served her royal mistress with
the utmost tenderness.
Archibius valued this loyalty highly, but he knew what awaited any one
who became the object of her hatred, and the fear that it would involve
Barine in urgent peril was added to his still greater anxiety for
Cleopatra.
When about to depart, burdened by the sorrowful conviction that he was
powerless against his niece's malevolent purpose, he was detained by the
representation that every fresh piece of intelligence would first reach
the Sebasteum and her. Some question might easily arise which his calm,
prudent mind could decide far better than hers, whose troubled condition
resembled a shallow pool disturbed by stones flung into the waves.
The apartments of his sister Charmian, which were connected with his by a
corridor, were empty, and Iras begged him to remain there a short time.
The anxiety and dread that oppressed her heart would kill her. To know
that he was near would be the greatest comfort.
When Archibius hesitated because he deemed it his duty to urge Caesarion,
over whom he possessed some influence, to give up his foolish wishes for
his mother's sake, Iras assured him that he would not find the youth. He
had gone hunting with Antyllus and some other friends. She had approved
the plan, because it removed him from the city and Barine's dangerous
house.
"As the Queen does not wish him to know the terrible news yet," she
concluded, "his presence would only have caused us embarrassment. So
stay, and when it grows dark go with us to the Lochias. I think it will
please the sorrowing woman, when she lands, to see your familiar face,
which will remind her of happier days. Do me the favour to stay." She
held out both hands beseechingly as she spoke, and Archibius consented.
A repast was served, and he shared it with his niece; but Iras did not
touch the carefully chosen viands, and Archibius barely tasted them.
Then, without waiting for dessert, he rose to go to his sister's
apartments. But Iras urged him to rest on the divan in the adjoining
room, and he yielded. Yet, spite of the softness of the pillows and his
great need of sleep, he could not find it; anxiety kept him awake, and
through the curtain which divided the room in which Iras remained from
the one he occupied he sometimes heard her light footsteps pacing
restlessly to and fro, sometimes the coming and going of messengers in
quest of news.
All his former life passed before his mind. Cleopatra had been his sun,
and now black clouds were rising which would dim its light, perchance
forever. He, the disciple of Epicurus, who had not followed the doctrines
of other masters until later in life, held the same view of the gods as
his first master. To him also they had seemed immortal beings sufficient
unto themselves, dwelling free from anxiety in blissful peace, to whom
mortals must look upward on account of their supreme grandeur, but who
neither troubled themselves about the guidance of the world, which was
fixed by eternal laws, nor the fate of individuals. Had he been convinced
of the contrary, he would have sacrificed everything he possessed in
order, by lavish offerings, to propitiate the immortals in behalf of her
to whom he had devoted his life and every faculty of his being.
Like Iras, he, too, could find no rest upon his couch, and when she heard
his step she called to him and asked why he did not recover the sleep
which he had lost. No one knew the demands the next night might make upon
him.
"You will find me awake," he answered quietly.
Then he went to the window which, above the pylons that rose before the
main front of the Sebasteum, afforded a view of the Bruchium and the sea.
The harbour was now swarming with vessels of every size, garlanded with
flowers and adorned with gay flags and streamers. The report of the
successful issue of the first naval battle was believed, and many desired
to greet the victorious fleet and hail their sovereign as she entered the
harbour.
Many people, equipages, and litters had also gathered on the shore,
between the lofty pylons and the huge door of the Sebasteum. They were
representatives of the aristocracy of the city; for the majority were
attended by richly attired slaves. Many wore costly garlands, and
numerous chariots and litters were adorned with gold or silver ornaments,
gems, and glittering paste. The stir and movement in front of the palace
were ceaseless, and Iras, who was now standing beside her uncle, waved
her hand towards it, saying: "The wind of rumour! Yesterday only one or
two came; to-day every one who belongs to the 'Inimitable Livers' flocks
hither in person to get news. The victory was proclaimed in the
market-place, at the theatre, the gymnasium, and the camp. Every one who
wears garlands or weapons heard of a battle won. Yesterday, among all the
thousands, there was scarcely a single doubter; but to-day-how does it
happen? Even among those who as 'Inimitables' have shared all the
pleasures, entertainments, and festivities of our noble pair, faith
wavers; for if they were firmly convinced of the brilliant victory which
was announced loudly enough, they would not come themselves to watch, to
spy, to listen. Just look down! There is the litter of Diogenes--yonder
that of Ammonius. The chariot beyond belongs to Melampous. The slaves in
the red bombyx garments serve Hermias. They all belong to the society
of--'Inimitables,' and shared our banquets. That very Apollonius who, for
the last half hour, has been trying to question the palace servants, day
before yesterday ordered fifty oxen to be slaughtered to Ares, Nike, and
the great Isis, as the Queen's goddess, and when I met him in the temple
he exclaimed that this was the greatest piece of extravagance he had ever
committed; for even without the cattle Cleopatra and Antony would be sure
of victory. But now the wind of rumour has swept away his beautiful
confidence also. They are not permitted to see me. The doorkeepers say
that I am in the country. The necessity of showing every one a face
radiant with the joy of victory would kill me. There comes Apollonius.
How his fat face beams! He believes in the victory, and after sunset none
of yonder throng will appear here; he is already giving orders to his
slaves. He will invite all his friends to a banquet, and won't spare his
costly wines. Capital! At least no one from that company can disturb us.
Dion is his cousin, and will be present also. We shall see what these
pleasure-lovers will do when they are forced to confront, the terrible
reality."
"I think," replied Archibius, "they will afford the world a remarkable
spectacle; friends won in prosperity who remain constant in adversity."
"Do you?" asked Iras, with sparkling eyes. "If that proves true, how I
would praise and value men--the majority of whom without their wealth
would be poorer than beggars. But look at yonder figure in the white robe
beside the left obelisk--is it not Dion? The crowd is bearing him away--I
think it was he."
But she had been deceived; the man whom she fancied she had seen, because
her heart so ardently yearned for him, was not near the Sebasteum, and
his thoughts were still farther away.
At first he had intended to give the architect the letter which was
addressed to him. He would be sure to find him at the triumphal arch
which was being erected on the shore of the Bruchium. But on reaching the
former place he learned that Gorgias had gone to remove the statues of
Cleopatra and Antony from the house of Didymus, and erect them in front
of the Theatre of Dionysus. The Regent, Mardion, had ordered it. Gorgias
was already superintending the erection of the foundation.
The huge hewn stones which he required for this purpose had been taken
from the Temple of Nemesis, which he was supervising. Whatever number of
government slaves he needed were at his disposal, so Gorgias's foreman
reported, proudly adding that before the sun went down, the architect
would have shown the Alexandrians the marvel of removing the twin statues
from one place to another in a single day, and yet establishing them as
firmly as the Colossus which had been in Thebes a thousand years.
Dion found the piece of sculpture in front of Didymus's garden, ready for
removal, but the slaves who had placed before the platform the rollers on
which it was to be moved had already been kept waiting a long time by the
architect.
This was his third visit to the old philosopher's house. First, he had
been obliged to inform him and his family that their property was no
longer in danger; then he had come to tell them at what hour he would
remove the statues, which still attracted many curious spectators; and,
finally, he had again appeared, to announce that they were to be taken
away at once. His foreman or a slave could probably have done this, but
Helena--Didymus's granddaughter, Barine's sister--drew him again and
again to the old man's home. He would gladly have come still more
frequently, for at every meeting he had discovered fresh charms in the
beautiful, quiet, thoughtful maiden, who cared so tenderly for her aged
grandparents. He believed that he loved her, and she seemed glad to
welcome him. But this did not entitle him to seek her hand, though his
large, empty house so greatly needed a mistress. His heart had glowed
with love for too many. He wished first to test whether this new fancy
would prove more lasting. If he succeeded in remaining faithful even a
few days, he would, as it were, reward himself for it, and appear before
Didymus as a suitor.
He excused his frequent visits to himself on the pretext of the necessity
of becoming acquainted with his future wife, and Helena made the task
easier for him. The usual reserve of her manner lessened more and more;
nay, the great confidence with which he at first inspired her was
increased by his active assistance. When he entered just now, she had
even held out her hand to him, and inquired about the progress of his
work.
He was overwhelmed with business, but so great was his pleasure in
talking with her that he lingered longer than he would have deemed right
under any other circumstances, and regarded it as an unpleasant
interruption when Barine--for whom his heart had throbbed so warmly only
yesterday--entered the tablinum.
The young beauty was by no means content with a brief greeting; but drew
Helena entirely away from him. Never had he seen her embrace and kiss her
sister so passionately as while hurriedly telling her that she had come
to bid farewell to the loved ones in her grandparents' house.
Berenike had arrived with her, but went first to the old couple.
While Barine was telling Helena and Gorgias, also, why all this plan had
been formed so hastily, Gorgias was silently comparing the two sisters.
He found it natural that he had once believed that he loved Barine; but
she would not have been a fitting mistress of his house. Life at her side
would have been a chain of jealous emotions and anxieties, and her
stimulating remarks and searching questions, which demanded absolute
attention, would not have permitted him, after his return home, wearied
by arduous toil, to find the rest for which he longed. His eye wandered
from her to her sister, as if testing the space between two newly erected
pillars; and Barine, who had noticed his strange manner, suddenly laughed
merrily, and asked whether they might know what building was occupying
his thoughts, while a good friend was telling him that the pleasant hours
in her house were over.
Gorgias started, and the apology he stammered showed so plainly how
inattentively he had listened, that Barine would have had good reason to
feel offended. But one glance at her sister and another at him enabled
her speedily to guess the truth. She was pleased; for she esteemed
Gorgias, and had secretly feared that she might be forced to grieve him
by a refusal, but he seemed as if created for her sister. Her arrival had
probably interrupted them so, turning to Helena, she exclaimed: "I must
see my mother and our grandparents. Meanwhile entertain our friend here.
We know each other well. He is one of the few men who can be trusted.
That is my honest opinion, Gorgias, and I say it to you also, Helena."
With these words she nodded to both, and Gorgias was again alone with the
maiden whom he loved.
It was difficult to begin the conversation anew, and when, spite of many
efforts, it would not flow freely, the shout of the overseer, which
reached his ear through the opening of the roof, urging the men to work,
was like a deliverance. Promising to return again soon, as eagerly as if
he had been requested to do so, he took his leave and opened the door
leading into the adjoining room. But on the threshold he started back,
and Helena, who had followed him, did the same, for there stood his
friend Dion, and Barine's beautiful head lay on his breast, while his
hand rested as if in benediction on her fair hair. And--no, Gorgias was
not mistaken-the slender frame of the lovely woman, whose exuberant
vivacity had so often borne him and others away with it, trembled as if
shaken by deep and painful emotion.
When Dion perceived his friend, and Barine raised her head, turning her
face towards him, it was indeed wet with tears, but their source could
not be sorrow; for her blue eyes were sparkling with a happy light.
Yet Gorgias found something in her features which he was unable to
express in words--the reflection of the ardent gratitude that had taken
possession of her soul and filled it absolutely. While seeking the
architect, Dion had met Barine, who was on her way to her grandparents,
and what he had dreaded the day before happened. The first glance from
her eyes which met his forced the decisive question from his lips.
In brief, earnest words he confessed his love for her, and his desire to
make her his own, as the pride and ornament of his house.
Then, in the intensity of her bliss, her eyes overflowed and, under the
spell of a great miracle wrought in her behalf, she found no words to
answer; but Dion had approached, clasped her right hand in both of his,
and frankly acknowledged how, with the image of his strict mother before
his eyes, he had wavered and hesitated until love had overmastered him.
Now, full of the warmest confidence, he asked whether she would consent
to rule as mistress of his home, the honour and ornament of his ancient
name? He knew that her heart was his, but he must hear one thing more
from her lips--
Here she had interrupted him with the cry, "This one thing--that your
wife, in joy and in sorrow, will live for you and you alone? The whole
world can vanish for her, now that you have raised her to your side and
she is yours."
After this assurance, which sounded like an oath, Dion felt as if a heavy
burden had fallen from his heart, and clasping her in his arms with
passionate tenderness, he repeated, "In joy and in sorrow!"
Thus Gorgias and Helena had surprised them, and the architect felt for
the first time that there is no distinction between our own happiness and
that of those whom we love.
His friend Helena seemed to have the same feeling, when she saw what this
day had given her sister; and the philosopher's house, so lately shadowed
by anxiety, and many a fear, would soon ring with voices uttering joyous
congratulations. The architect no longer felt that he had a place in this
circle, which was now pervaded by a great common joy, and after Dion made
a brief explanation, Gorgias's voice was soon heard outside loudly
issuing orders to the workmen.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
From Epicurus to Aristippus, is but a short step
Preferred a winding path to a straight one
CLEOPATRA
By Georg Ebers
Volume 4.
CHAPTER IX.
Gorgias went to his work without delay. When the twin statues were only
waiting to be erected in front of the Theatre of Dionysus, Dion sought
him. Some impulse urged him to talk to his old friend before leaving the
city with his betrothed bride. Since they parted the latter had
accomplished the impossible; for the building of the wall on the Choma,
ordered by Antony, was commenced, the restoration of the little palace at
the point, and many other things connected with the decoration of the
triumphal arches, were arranged. His able and alert foreman found it
difficult to follow him as he dictated order after order in his
writing-tablet.
The conversation with his friend was not a long one, for Dion had
promised Barine and her mother to accompany them to the country.
Notwithstanding the betrothal, they were to start that very day; for
Caesarion had called upon Barine twice that morning. She had not received
him, but the unfortunate youth's conduct induced her to hasten the
preparations for her departure.
To avoid attracting attention, they were to use Archibius's large
travelling chariot and Nile boat, although Dion's were no less
comfortable.
The marriage was to take place in the "abode of peace." The young
Alexandrian's own ship, which was to convey the newly wedded pair to
Alexandria, bore the name of Peitho, the goddess of persuasion, for Dion
liked to be reminded of his oratorical powers in the council.
Henceforward it would be called the Barine, and was to receive many an
embellishment.
Dion confided to his friend what he had learned in relation to the fate
of the Queen and the fleet, and, notwithstanding the urgency of the
claims upon Gorgias's time, he lingered to discuss the future destiny of
the city and her threatened liberty; for these things lay nearest to his
heart.
"Fortunately," cried Dion, "I followed my inclination; now it seems to me
that duty commands every true man to make his own house a nursery for the
cultivation of the sentiments which he inherited from his forefathers and
which must not die, so long as there are Macedonian citizens in
Alexandria. We must submit if the superior might of Rome renders Egypt a
province of the republic, but we can preserve to our city and her council
the lion's share of their freedom. Whatever may be the development of
affairs, we are and shall remain the source whence Rome draws the largest
share of the knowledge which enriches her brain."
"And the art which adorns her rude life," replied Gorgias. "If she is
free to crush us without pity, she will fare, I think, like the maiden
who raises her foot to trample on a beautiful, rare flower, and then
withdraws it because it would be a crime to destroy so exquisite a work
of the Creator."
"And what does the flower owe to your maiden," cried Dion, "or our city
to Rome? Let us meet her claims with dignified resolution, then I think
we shall not have the worst evils to fear."
"Let us hope so. But, my friend, keep your eyes open for other than Roman
foes. Now that it will become known that you do not love her, beware of
Iras. There is something about her which reminds me of the jackal.
Jealousy!--I believe she would be capable of the worst--"
"Yet," Dion interrupted, "Charmian will soften whatever injury Iras plans
to do me, and, though I cannot rely much upon my uncle, Archibius is
above both and favours us and our marriage."
Gorgias uttered a sigh of relief, and exclaimed, "Then on to happiness!"
"And you must also begin to provide for yours," replied Dion warmly.
"Forbid your heart to continue this wandering, nomad life. The tent which
the wind blows down is not fit for the architect's permanent residence.
Build yourself a fine house, which will defy storms, as you built my
palace. I shall not grudge it, and have already said, the times demand
it."
"I will remember the advice," replied Gorgias. "But six eyes are again
bent upon me for direction. There are so many important things to be done
while we waste the hours in building triumphal arches for the
defeated--trophies for an overthrow. But your uncle has just issued
orders to complete the work in the most magnificent style. The ways of
destiny and the great are dark; may the brightest sunshine illumine
yours! A prosperous journey! We shall hear, of course, when you celebrate
the wedding, and if I can I shall join you in the Hymenaeus. Lucky fellow
that you are! Now I'm summoned from over yonder! May Castor and Pollux,
and all the gods favourable to travel, Aphrodite, and all the Loves
attend your trip to Irenia, and protect you in the realm of Eros and
Hymen!"
With these words the warm-hearted man clasped his friend to his breast
for the first time. Dion cordially responded, and at last shook his hard
right hand with the exclamation:
"Farewell, then, till we meet in Irenia on the wedding day, you dear,
faithful fellow."
Then he entered the chariot which stood waiting, and Gorgias gazed after
him thoughtfully. The hyacinthine purple cloak which Dion wore that day
had not vanished from his sight when a loud crashing, rattling, and
roaring arose behind him. A hastily erected scaffold, which was to
support the pulleys for raising the statues, had collapsed. The damage
could be easily repaired, but the accident aroused a troubled feeling in
the architect's mind. He was a child of his time, a period when duty
commanded the prudent man to heed omens. Experience also taught him that
when such a thing happened in his work something unpleasant was apt to
occur within the circle of his friends. The veil of the future concealed
what might be in store for the beloved couple; but he resolved to keep
his eyes open on Dion's behalf and to request Archibius to do the same.
The pressure of work, however, soon silenced the sense of uneasiness. The
damage was speedily repaired, and later Gorgias, sometimes with one,
sometimes with another tablet or roll of MS. in his hand, issued the most
varied orders.
Gradually the light of this dismal day faded. Ere the night, which
threatened to bring rain and storm, closed in, he again rode on his mule
to the Bruchium to overlook the progress of the work in the various
buildings and give additional directions, for the labour was to be
continued during the night.
The north wind was now blowing so violently from the sea that it was
difficult to keep the torches and lamps lighted. The gale drove the drops
of rain into his face, and a glance northward showed him masses of black
clouds beyond the harbour and the lighthouse. This indicated a bad night,
and again the boding sense of coming misfortune stole over him. Yet he
set to work swiftly and prudently, helping with his own hands when
occasion required.
Night closed in. Not a star was visible in the sky, and the air, chilled
by the north wind, grew so cold that Gorgias at last permitted his body
slave to wrap his cloak around him. While drawing the hood over his head,
he gazed at a procession of litters and men moving towards Lochias.
Perhaps the Queen's children were returning home from some expedition.
But probably they were rather private citizens on their way to some
festival celebrating the victory; for every one now believed in a great
battle and a successful issue of the war. This was proved by the shouts
and cheers of the people, who, spite of the storm, were still moving to
and fro near the harbour.
The last of the torch-bearers had just passed Gorgias, and he had told
himself that a train of litters belonging to the royal family would not
move through the darkness so faintly lighted, when a single man, bearing
in his hand a lantern, whose flickering rays shone on his wrinkled face,
approached rapidly from the opposite direction. It was old Phryx,
Didymus's house slave, with whom the architect had become acquainted,
while the aged scholar was composing the inscription for the Odeum which
Gorgias had erected. The aged servant had brought him many alterations of
his master's first sketch, and Gorgias had reminded him of it the
previous day.
The workmen by whom the statues had been raised to the pedestal, amid the
bright glare of torches, to the accompaniment of a regular chant, had
just dropped the ropes, windlasses, and levers, when the architect
recognized the slave.
What did the old man want at so late an hour on this dark night? The fall
of the scaffold again returned to his mind.
Was the slave seeking for a member of the family? Did Helena need
assistance? He stopped the gray-haired man, who answered his question
with a heavy sigh, followed by the maxim, "Misfortunes come in pairs,
like oxen." Then he continued: "Yesterday there was great anxiety. Today,
when there was so much rejoicing on account of Barine, I thought
directly, 'Sorrow follows joy, and the second misfortune won't be spared
us.' And so it proved."
Gorgias anxiously begged him to relate what had happened, and the old
man, drawing nearer, whispered that the pupil and assistant of
Didymus--young Philotas of Amphissa, a student, and, moreover, a
courteous young man of excellent family--had gone to a banquet to which
Antyllus, the son of Antony, had invited several of his classmates. This
had already happened several times, and he, Phryx, had warned him, for,
when the lowly associate with the lofty, the lowly rarely escape kicks
and blows. The young fellow, who usually had behaved no worse than the
other Ephebi, had always returned from such festivities with a flushed
face and unsteady steps, but to-night he had not even reached his room in
the upper story. He had darted into the house as though pursued by the
watch, and, while trying to rush up the stairs--it was really only a
ladder-he had made a misstep and fell. He, Phryx, did not believe that he
was hurt, for none of his limbs ached, even when they were pulled and
stretched, and Dionysus kindly protected drunkards; but some demon must
have taken possession of him, for he howled and groaned continually, and
would answer no questions. True, he was aware, from the festivals of
Dionysus, that the young man was one of those who, when intoxicated, weep
and lament; but this time something unusual must have occurred, for in
the first place his handsome face was coloured black and looked hideous,
since his tears had washed away the soot in many places, and then he
talked nothing but a confused jargon. It was a pity.
When an attempt was made, with the help of the garden slave, to carry him
to his room, he dealt blows and kicks like a lunatic. Didymus now also
believed that he was possessed by demons, as often happens to those who,
in falling, strike their heads against the ground, and thus wake the
demons in the earth. Well, yes, they might be demons, but only those of
wine. The student was just "crazy drunk," as people say. But the old
gentleman was very fond of his pupil, and had ordered him, Pliryx, to go
to Olympus, who, ever since he could remember, had been the family
physician.
"The Queen's leech?" asked Gorgias, disapprovingly, and when the slave
assented, the architect exclaimed in a positive tone: "It is not right to
force the old man out of doors in such a north wind. Age is not specially
considerate to age. Now that the statues stand yonder, I can leave my
post for half an hour and will go with you. I don't think a leech is
needed to drive out these demons."
"True, my lord, true!" cried the slave, "but Olympus is our friend. He
visits few patients, but he will come to our house in any weather. He has
litters, chariots, and splendid mules. The Queen gives him whatever is
best and most comfortable. He is skilful, and perhaps can render speedy
help. People must use what they have."
"Only where it is necessary," replied the architect. "There are my two
mules; follow me on the second. If I don't drive out the demons, you will
have plenty of time to trot after Olympus."
This proposal pleased the old slave, and a short time after Gorgias
entered the venerable philosopher's tablinum.
Helena welcomed him like an intimate friend. Whenever he appeared she
thought the peril was half over. Didymus, too, greeted him warmly, and
conducted him to the little room where the youth possessed by demons lay
on a divan.
He was still groaning and whimpering. Tears were streaming down his
cheeks, and, whenever any member of the household approached, he pushed
him away.
When Gorgias held his hands and sternly ordered him to confess what wrong
he had done, he sobbed out that he was the most ungrateful wretch on
earth. His baseness would ruin his kind parents, himself, and all his
friends.
Then he accused himself of having caused the destruction of Didymus's
granddaughter. He would not have gone to Antyllus again had not his
recent generosity bound him to him, but now he must atone-ay, atone.
Then, as if completely crushed, he continued to mumble the word, "atone!"
and for a time nothing more could be won from him.
Didymus, however, had the key to the last sentence. A few weeks before,
Philotas and several other pupils of the rhetorician whose lectures in
the museum he attended had been invited to breakfast with Antyllus. When
the young student loudly admired the beautiful gold and silver beakers in
which the wine was served, the reckless host cried: "They are yours; take
them with you." When the guests departed the cup-bearer asked Philotas,
who had been far from taking the gift seriously, to receive his property.
Antyllus had intended to bestow the goblets; but he advised the youth to
let him pay their value in money, for among them were several ancient
pieces of most artistic workmanship, which Antony, the extravagant young
fellow's father, might perhaps be unwilling to lose.
Thereupon several rolls of gold solidi were paid to the astonished
student--and they had been of little real benefit, since they had made it
possible for him to keep pace with his wealthy and aristocratic
classmates and share many of their extravagances. Yet he had not ceased
to fulfil his duty to Didymus.
Though he sometimes turned night into day, he gave no serious cause for
reproof. Small youthful errors were willingly pardoned; for he was a
good-looking, merry young fellow, who knew how to make himself agreeable
to the entire household, even to the women.
What had befallen the poor youth that day? Didymus was filled with
compassion for him, and, though he gladly welcomed Gorgias, he gave him
to understand that the leech's absence vexed him.
But, during a long bachelor career in Alexandria, a city ever gracious to
the gifts of Bacchus, Gorgias had become familiar with attacks like those
of Philotas and their treatment, and after several jars of water had been
brought and he had been left alone a short time with the sufferer, the
philosopher secretly rejoiced that he had not summoned the grey-haired
leech into the stormy night for Gorgias led forth his pupil with dripping
hair, it is true, but in a state of rapid convalescence.
The youth's handsome face was freed from soot, but his eyes were bent in
confusion on the ground, and he sometimes pressed his hand upon his
aching brow. It needed all the old philosopher's skill in persuasion to
induce him to speak, and Philotas, before he began, begged Helena to
leave the room.
He intended to adhere strictly to the truth, though he feared that the
reckless deed into which he had suffered himself to be drawn might have a
fatal effect upon his future life.
Besides, he hoped to obtain wise counsel from the architect, to whom he
owed his speedy recovery, and whose grave, kindly manner inspired him
with confidence; and, moreover, he was so greatly indebted to Didymus
that duty required him to make a frank confession--yet he dared not
acknowledge one of the principal motives of his foolish act.
The plot into which he had been led was directed against Barine, whom he
had long imagined he loved with all the fervour of his twenty years. But,
just before he went to the fatal banquet, he had heard that the young
beauty was betrothed to Dion. This had wounded him deeply; for in many a
quiet hour it had seemed possible to win her for himself and lead her as
his wife to his home in Amphissa. He was very little younger than she,
and if his parents once saw her, they could not fail to approve his
choice. And the people in Amphissa! They would have gazed at Barine as if
she were a goddess.
And now this fine gentleman had come to crush his fairest hopes. No word
of love had ever been exchanged between him and Barine, but how kindly
she had always looked at him, how willingly she had accepted trivial
services! Now she was lost. At first this had merely saddened him, but
after he had drunk the wine, and Antyllus, Antony's son, in the
presence of the revellers, over whom Caesarion presided as
"symposiarch"--[Director of a banquet.]--had accused Barine of capturing
hearts by magic spells, he had arrived at the conviction that he, too,
had been shamefully allured and betrayed.
He had served for a toy, he said to himself, unless she had really loved
him and merely preferred Dion on account of his wealth. In any case, he
felt justified in cherishing resentment against Barine, and with the
number of goblets which he drained his jealous rage increased.
When urged to join in the escapade which now burdened his conscience he
consented with a burning brain in order to punish her for the wrong
which, in his heated imagination, she had done him.
All this he withheld from the older men and merely briefly described the
splendid banquet which Caesarion, pallid and listless as ever, had
directed, and Antyllus especially had enlivened with the most reckless
mirth.
The "King of kings" and Antony's son had escaped from their tutors on the
pretext of a hunting excursion, and the chief huntsman had not grudged
them the pleasure--only they were obliged to promise him that they would
be ready to set out for the desert early the next morning.
When, after the banquet, the mixing-vessels were brought out and the
beakers were filled more rapidly, Antyllus whispered several times to
Caesarion and then turned the conversation upon Barine, the fairest of
the fair, destined by the immortals for the greatest and highest of
mankind. This was the "King of kings," Caesarion, and he also claimed the
favour of the gods for himself. But everybody knew that Aphrodite deemed
herself greater than the highest of kings, and therefore Barine ventured
to close her doors upon their august symposiarch in a manner which could
not fail to be unendurable, not only to him but to all the youth of
Alexandria. Whoever boasted of being one of the Ephebi might well clench
his fist with indignation, when he heard that the insolent beauty kept
young men at a distance because she considered only the older ones worthy
of her notice. This must not be! The Ephebi of Alexandria must make her
feel the power of youth. This was the more urgently demanded, because
Caesarion would thereby be led to the goal of his wishes.
Barine was going into the country that very evening. Insulted Eros
himself was smoothing their way. He commanded them to attack the arrogant
fair one's carriage and lead her to him who sought her in the name of
youth, in order to show her that the hearts of the Ephebi, whom she
disdainfully rejected, glowed more ardently than those of the older men
on whom she bestowed her favours.
Here Gorgias interrupted the speaker with a loud cry of indignation, but
old Didymus's eyes seemed to be fairly starting from their sockets as he
hoarsely shouted an impatient:
"Go on!"
And Philotas, now completely sobered, described with increasing animation
the wonderful change that had taken place in the quiet Caesarion, as if
some magic spell had been at work; for scarcely had the revellers greeted
Antyllus's words with shouts of joy, declaring themselves ready to avenge
insulted youth upon Barine, than the "King of kings" suddenly sprang from
the cushions on which he had listlessly reclined, and with flashing eyes
shouted that whoever called himself his friend must aid him in the
attack.
Here he was urged to still greater haste by another impatient "Go on!"
from his master, and hurriedly continued his story, describing how they
had blackened their faces and armed themselves with Antyllus's swords and
lances. As the sun was setting they went in a covered boat through the
Agathodamon Canal to Lake Mareotis. Everything must have been arranged in
advance; for they landed precisely at the right hour.
As, during the trip, they had kept up their courage by swallowing the
most fiery wine, Philotas had staggered on shore with difficulty and then
been dragged forward by the others. After this he knew nothing more,
except that he had rushed with the rest upon a large harmamaxa,--[A
closed Asiatic travelling-carriage with four wheels]--and in so doing
fell. When he rose from the earth all was over.
As if in a dream he saw Scythians and other guardians of the peace seize
Antyllus, while Caesarion was struggling on the ground with another man.
If he was not mistaken it was Dion, Barine's betrothed husband.
These communications were interrupted by many exclamations of impatience
and wrath; but now Didymus, fairly frantic with alarm, cried:
"And the child--Barine?"
But when Philotas's sole reply to this question was a silent shake of the
head, indignation conquered the old philosopher, and clutching his
pupil's chiton with both hands, he shook him violently, exclaiming
furiously:
"You don't know, scoundrel? Instead of defending her who should be dear
to you as a child of this household, you joined the rascally scorners of
morality and law as the accomplice of this waylayer in purple!"
Here the architect soothed the enraged old man with expostulations, and
the assertion that everything must now yield to the necessity of
searching for Barine and Dion. He did not know which way to turn, in the
amount of labour pressing upon him, but he would have a hasty talk with
the foreman and then try to find his friend.
"And I," cried the old man, "must go at once to the unfortunate child.-My
cloak, Phryx, my sandals!"
In spite of Gorgias's counsel to remember his age and the inclement
weather, he cried angrily:
"I am going, I say! If the tempest hurls me to the earth, and the bolts
of Zeus strike me, so be it. One misfortune more or less matters little
in a life which has been a chain of heavy blows of Fate. I buried three
sons in the prime of manhood, and two have been slain in battle. Barine,
the joy of my heart, I myself, fool that I was, bound to the scoundrel
who blasted her joyous existence; and now that I believed she would be
protected from trouble and misconstruction by the side of a worthy
husband, these infamous rascals, whose birth protects them from
vengeance, have wounded, perhaps killed her betrothed lover. They trample
in the dust her fair name and my white hair!--Phryx, my hat and staff."
The storm had long been raging around the house, which stood close by the
sea, and the sailcloth awning which was stretched over the impluvium
noisily rattled the metal rings that confined it. Now so violent a gust
swept from room to room that two of the flames in the three-branched lamp
went out. The door of the house had been opened, and drenched with rain,
a hood drawn over his black head, Barine's Nubian doorkeeper crossed the
threshold.
He presented a pitiable spectacle and at first could find no answer to
the greetings and questions of the men, who had been joined by Helena,
her grandmother leaning on her arm; his rapid walk against the fury of
the storm had fairly taken away his breath.
He had little, however, to tell. Barine merely sent a message to her
relatives that, no matter what tales rumour might bring, she and her
mother were unhurt. Dion had received a wound in the shoulder, but it was
not serious. Her grandparents need have no anxiety; the attack had
completely failed.
Doris, who was deaf, had listened vainly, holding her hand to her ear, to
catch this report; and Didymus now told his granddaughter as much as he
deemed it advisable for her to know, that she might communicate it to her
grandmother, who understood the movements of her lips.
The old man was rejoiced to learn that his granddaughter had escaped so
great a peril uninjured, yet he was still burdened by sore anxiety. The
architect, too, feared the worst, but by dint of assuring him that he
would return at once with full details when he had ascertained the fate
of Dion and his betrothed bride, he finally persuaded the old man to give
up the night walk through the tempest.
Philotas, with tears in his eyes, begged them to accept his services as
messenger or for any other purpose; but Didymus ordered him to go to bed.
An opportunity would be found to enable him to atone for the offence so
recklessly committed.
The scholar's peaceful home was deprived of its nocturnal repose, and
when Gorgias had gone and Didymus had refused Helena's request to have
the aged porter take her to her sister, the old man remained alone with
his wife in the tablinum.
She had been told nothing except that thieves had attacked her
granddaughter, Barine, and slightly wounded her lover; but her own heart
and the manner of the husband, at whose side she had grown grey, showed
that many things were being concealed. She longed to know the story more
fully, but it was difficult for Didymus to talk a long time in a loud
tone, so she silenced her desire to learn the whole truth. But, in order
to await the architect's report, they did not go to rest.
Didymus had sunk into an armchair, and Doris sat near at her spindle, but
without drawing any threads from her distaff. When she heard her husband
sigh and saw him bury his face in his hands, she limped nearer to him,
difficult as it was for her to move, and stroked his head, now nearly
bald, with her hand. Then she uttered soothing words, and, as the
anxious, troubled expression did not yet pass from his wrinkled face, she
reminded him in faltering yet tender tones how often they had thought
they must despair, and yet everything had resulted well.
"Ah! husband," she added, "I know full well that the clouds hanging over
us are very black, and I cannot even see them clearly, because you show
them at such a distance. Yet I feel that they threaten us with sore
tribulation. But, after all, what harm can they do us, if we only keep
close together, we two old people and the children of the children whom
Hades rent from us? We need only to grow old to perceive that life has a
head with many faces. The ugly one of to-day can last no longer than you
can keep that deeply furrowed brow. But you need not coerce yourself for
my sake, husband. Let it be so. I need merely close my eyes to see how
smooth and beautiful it was in youth, and how pleasant it will look when
better days say, 'Here we are!'"
Didymus, with a mournful smile, kissed her grey hair and shouted into her
left ear, which was a little less deaf than the other:
"How young you are still, wife!"
CHAPTER X.
The tempest swept howling from the north across the island of Pharos, and
the shallows of Diabathra in the great harbour of Alexandria. The water,
usually so placid, rose in high waves, and the beacon on the lighthouse
of Sastratus sent the rent abundance of its flames with hostile
impetuosity towards the city. The fires in the pitch-pans and the torches
on the shore sometimes seemed on the point of being extinguished, at
others burst with a doubly brilliant blaze through the smoke which
obscured them.
The royal harbour, a fine basin which surrounded in the form of a
semicircle the southern part of the Lochias and a portion of the northern
shore of the Bruchium, was brightly illuminated every night; but this
evening there seemed to be an unusual movement among the lights on its
western shore, the private anchorage of the royal fleet.
Was it the storm that stirred them? No. How could the wind have set one
torch in the place of another, and moved lights or lanterns in a
direction opposite to its violent course? Only a few persons, however,
perceived this; for, though joyous anticipation or anxious fears urged
many thither, who would venture upon the quay on such a tempestuous
night? Besides, no one would have found admittance to the royal port,
which was closed on all sides. Even the mole which, towards the west,
served as the string to the bow of land surrounding it, had but a single
opening and--as every one knew--that was closed by a chain in the same
way as the main entrance to the harbour between the Pharos and Alveus
Steganus.
About two hours before midnight, spite of the increasing fury of the
tempest, the singular movement of the lights diminished, but rarely had
the hearts of those for whom they burned throbbed so anxiously. These
were the dignitaries and court officials who stood nearest to
Cleopatra--about twenty men and a single woman, Iras. Mardion and she had
summoned them because the Queen's letter permitted those to whom she had
given authority to offer her a quiet reception. After a long consultation
they had not invited the commanders of the little Roman garrison left
behind. It was doubtful whether those whom they expected would return
that night, and the Roman soldiers who were loyal to Antony had gone with
him to the war.
The hall in the centre of the private roadstead of the royal harbour,
where they had assembled, was furnished with regal magnificence; for it
was a favourite resort of the Queen. The spacious apartment lacked no
requisite of comfort, and most of those who were waiting used the
well-cushioned couches, while others, harassed by mental anxiety, paced
to and fro.
As the room had remained unused for months, bats had made nests there,
and now that it was lighted, dazzled by the glare of the lamps and
candles, they darted to and fro above the heads of the assembly. Iras had
ordered the commander of the Mellakes, or youths, a body-guard composed
of the sons of aristocratic Macedonian families, to expel the troublesome
creatures, and it diverted the thoughts of these devoted soldiers of the
Queen to strike at them with their swords.
Others preferred to watch this futile battle rather than give themselves
up to the anxiety which filled their minds. The Regent was gazing mutely
at the ground; Iras, pale and absent-minded, was listening to Zeno's
statements; and Archibius had gone out of doors, and, unheeding the
storm, was looking across the tossing waves of the harbour for the
expected ships.
In a wooden shed, whose roof was supported by gaily painted pillars,
through which the wind whistled, the servants, from the porters to the
litter-bearers, had gathered in groups under the flickering light of the
lanterns. The Greeks sat on wooden stools, the Egyptians upon mats on the
floor. The largest circle contained the parties who attended to the
Queen's luggage and the upper servants, among whom were several maids.
They had been told that the Queen was expected that night, because it was
possible that the strong north wind would bear her ship home with
unexpected speed after the victory. But they were better informed:
palaces have chinks in doors and curtains, and are pervaded by a very
peculiar echo which bears even a whisper distinctly from ear to ear.
The body-slave of the commander-in-chief Seleukus was the principal
spokesman. His master had reached Alexandria but a few hours ago from the
frontier fortress of Pelusium, which he commanded. A mysterious order
from Lucilius, Antony's most faithful friend, brought from Taenarum by a
swift galley, had summoned him hither.
The freedman Beryllus, a loquacious Sicilian, who, as an actor, had seen
better days ere pirates robbed him of his liberty, had heard many new
things, and his hearers listened eagerly; for ships coming from the
north, which touched at Pelusium, had confirmed and completed the evil
tidings that had penetrated the Sebasteum.
According to his story, he was as well informed as if he had been an
eye-witness of the naval battle; for he had been present during his
master's conversation with many ship-captains and messengers from Greece.
He even assumed the air of a loyal, strictly silent servant, who would
only venture to confirm and deny what the Alexandrians had already
learned. Yet his knowledge consisted merely of a confused medley of false
and true occurrences. While the Egyptian fleet had been defeated at
Actium, and Antony, flying with Cleopatra, had gone first to Taenarum at
the end of the Peloponnesian coast, he asserted that the army and fleet
had met on the Peloponnesian coast and Octavianus was pursuing Antony,
who had turned towards Athens, while Cleopatra was on her way to
Alexandria.
His "trustworthy intelligence" had been patched together from a few words
caught from Seleukus at table, or while receiving and dismissing
messengers. In other matters his information was more accurate.
While for several days the harbour of Alexandria had been closed, vessels
were permitted to enter Pelusium, and all captains of newly arrived ships
and caravans were compelled to report to Beryllus's master, the
commandant of the important frontier fortress.
He had quitted Pelusium the night before. The strong wind had driven the
trireme before it so swiftly that it was difficult for even the sea gulls
to follow. It was easy for the listeners to believe this; for the storm
outside howled louder and louder, whistling through the open hall where
the servants had gathered. Most of the lamps and torches had been blown
out, the pitch-pans only sent forth still blacker clouds of smoke, lit by
red and yellow flames, and the closed lanterns alone continued to diffuse
a flickering light. So the wide space, dim with smoke, was illumined only
by a dull, varying glimmer.
One of the porters had furnished wine to shorten the hours of waiting;
but it could only be drunk in secret, so there were no goblets. The jars
wandered from mouth to mouth, and every sip was welcome, for the wind
blew keenly, and besides, the smoke irritated their throats.
The freedman, Beryllus, was often interrupted by paroxysms of coughing,
especially from the women, while relating the evil omens which were told
to his master in Pelusium. Each was well authenticated and surpassed its
predecessor in significance.
Here one of Iras's maids interrupted him to tell the story of the
swallows on the "Antonius," Cleopatra's admiral galley. He could scarcely
report from Pelusium an omen of darker presage.
But Beryllus gazed at her with a pitying smile, which so roused the
expectations of the others that the overseer of the litter and baggage
porters, who were talking loudly together, hoarsely shouted, "Silence!"
Soon no sound was heard in the open space save the shrill whistling of
the wind, a word of command to the harbour-guards, and the freedman's
voice, which he lowered to increase the charm of the mysterious events he
was describing.
He began with the most fulsome praise of Cleopatra and Antony, reminding
his hearers that the Imperator was a descendant of Herakles. The
Alexandrians especially were aware that their Queen and Antony claimed
and desired to be called "The new Isis" and "The new Dionysus." But every
one who beheld the Roman must admit that in face and figure he resembled
a god far more than a man.
The Imperator had appeared as Dionysus, especially to the Athenians. In
the proscenium of the theatre in that city was a huge bas-relief of the
Battle of the Giants, the famous work of an ancient sculptor--he,
Beryllus, had seen it--and from amid the numerous figures in this piece
of sculpture the tempest had torn but a single one--which? Dionysus, the
god as whose mortal image Antony had once caroused in a vine-clad arbour
in the presence of the Athenians. The storm to-night was at the utmost
like the breath of a child, compared with the hurricane which could wrest
from the hard marble the form of Dionysus. But Nature gathers all her
forces when she desires to announce to short-sighted mortals the approach
of events which are to shake the world.
The last words were quoted from his master who had studied in Athens.
They had escaped from his burdened soul when he heard of another portent,
of which a ship from Ostia had brought tidings. The flourishing city
Pisaura--
Here, however, he was interrupted, for several of those present had
learned, weeks before, that this place had sunk in the sea, but merely
pitied the unfortunate inhabitants.
Beryllus quietly permitted them to free themselves from the suspicion
that people in Alexandria had had tidings of so remarkable an event later
than those in Pelusium, and at first answered their query what this had
to do with the war merely by a shrug of the shoulders; but when the
overseer of the porters also put the question, he went on "The omen made
a specially deep impression upon our minds, for we know what Pisaura is,
or rather how it came into existence. The hapless city which dark Hades
ingulfed really belonged to Antony, for in the days of its prosperity he
was its founder."
He measured the group with a defiant glance, and there was no lack of
evidences of horror; nay, one of the maid-servants shrieked aloud, for
the storm had just snatched a torch from the iron rings in the wall and
hurled it on the floor close beside the listener.
Suspense seemed to have reached its height. Yet it was evident that
Beryllus had not yet drawn his last arrow from the quiver.
The maid-servant, whose scream had startled the others, had regained her
composure and seemed eager to hear some other new and terrible omen, for,
with a beseeching glance, she begged the freedman not to withhold the
knew.
He pointed to the drops of perspiration which, spite of the wind sweeping
through the hall, covered her brow: "You must use your handkerchief.
Merely listening to my tale will dampen your skin. Stone statues are made
of harder material, but a soul dwells within them too. Their natures may
be harsher or more gentle; they bring us woe or heal heavy sorrows,
according to their mood. Every one learns this who raises his hands to
them in prayer. One of these statues stands in Alba. It represents Mark
Antony, in whose honour it was erected by the city. And it foresaw what
menaced the man whose stone double it is. Ay, open your ears! About four
days ago a ship's captain came to my master and in my presence this man
reported--he grew as pale as ashes while he spoke--what he himself had
witnessed. Drops of perspiration had oozed from the statue of Antony in
Alba. Horror seized all the citizens; men and women came to wipe the brow
and cheeks of the statue, but the drops of perspiration did not cease to
drip, and this continued several days and nights. The stone image had
felt what was impending over the living Mark Antony. It was a horrible
spectacle, the man said."
Here the speaker paused, and the group of listeners started, for the
clang of a gong was heard outside, and the next instant all were on their
feet hastening to their posts.
The officials in the magnificent hall had also risen. Here the silence
had been interrupted only by low whispers. The colour had faded from most
of the grave, anxious faces, and their timid glances shunned one another.
Archibius had first perceived, by the flames of the Pharos, the red
glimmer which announced the approach of the royal galley. It had not been
expected so early, but was already passing the islands into the great
harbour. It was probably the Antonius, the ship on which the old swallows
had pecked the young ones to death.
Though the waves were running high, even in the sheltered harbour, they
scarcely rocked the massive vessel. An experienced pilot must have
steered it past the shallows and cliffs on the eastern side of the
roadstead, for instead of passing around the island of Antirrhodus as
usual, it kept between the island and the Lochias, steering straight
towards the entrance into the little royal harbour. The pitch-pans on
both sides had been filled with fresh resin and tow to light the way. The
watchers on the shore could now see its outlines distinctly.
It was the Antonius, and yet it was not.
Zeno, the Keeper of the Seal, who was standing beside Iras, wrapped his
cloak closer around his shivering limbs, pointed to it, and whispered,
"Like a woman who leaves her parents' house in the rich array of a bride,
and returns to it an impoverished widow."
Iras drew herself up, and with cutting harshness replied, "Like the sun
veiled by mists, but which will soon shine forth again more radiantly
than ever."
"Spoken from the depths of my soul," said the old courtier eagerly, "so
far as the Queen is concerned. Of course, I did not allude to her
Majesty, but to the ship. You were ill when it left the harbour,
garlanded with flowers and adorned with purple sails. And now! Even this
flickering light shows the wounds and rents. I am the last person whom
you need tell that our sun Cleopatra will soon regain its old radiance,
but at present it is very chilly and cold here by the water's edge in
this stormy air; and when I think of our first moment of meeting--
"Would it were over!" murmured Iras, wrapping herself closer in her
cloak. Then she drew back shivering, for the rattle of the heavy chain,
which was drawn aside from the opening of the harbour, echoed with an
uncanny sound through the silence of the night. A mountain seemed to
weigh upon the watchers' breasts, for the wooden monster which now
entered the little harbour moved forward as slowly and silently as a
spectral ship. It seemed as if life were extinct on the huge galley
usually swarming with a numerous crew; as if a vessel were about to cast
anchor whose sailors had fallen victims to the plague. Nothing was heard
save an occasional word of command, and the signal whistles of the
fluteplayer who directed the rowers. A few lanterns burned with a
wavering light on the vast length of her decks. The brilliant
illumination which usually shone through the darkness would have
attracted the attention of the Alexandrians.
Now it was close to the landing. The group on shore watched every inch of
its majestic progress with breathless suspense, but when the first rope
was flung to the slaves on shore several men in Greek robes pressed
forward hurriedly among the courtiers.
They had come with a message, whose importance would permit no delay, to
the Regent Mardion, who stood between Zeno and Iras, gazing gloomily at
the ground with a frowning brow. He was pondering over the words in which
to address the Queen, and within a few minutes the ship would have made
her landing, and Cleopatra might cross the bridge. To disturb him at that
moment was an undertaking few who knew the irritable, uncertain temper of
the eunuch would care to risk. But the tall Macedonian, who for a short
time attracted the eyes of most of the spectators from the galley,
ventured to do so. It was the captain of the nightwatch, the aristocratic
commander of the police force of the city.
"Only a word, my lord," he whispered to the Regent, "though the time may
be inopportune."
"As inopportune as possible," replied the eunuch with repellent
harshness.
"We will say as inopportune as the degree of haste necessary for its
decision. The King Caesarion, with Antyllus and several companions,
attacked a woman. Blackened faces. A fight. Caesarion and the woman's
companion--an aristocrat, member of the Council--slightly wounded.
Lictors interfered just in time. The young gentlemen were arrested. At
first they refused to give their names--"
"Caesarion slightly, really only slightly wounded?" asked the eunuch with
eager haste.
"Really and positively. Olympus was summoned at once. A knock on the
head. The man who was attacked flung him on the pavement in the
struggle."
"Dion, the son of Eumenes, is the man," interrupted Iras, whose quick ear
had caught the officer's report. "The woman is Barine, the daughter of
the artist Leonax."
"Then you know already?" asked the Macedonian in surprise.
"So it seems," answered Mardion, gazing into the girl's face with a
significant glance. Then, turning to her rather than to the Macedonian,
he added, "I think we will have the young rascals set free and brought to
Lochias with as little publicity as possible."
"To the palace?" asked the Macedonian.
"Of course," replied Iras firmly. "Each to his own apartments, where they
must remain until further orders."
"Everything else must be deferred until after the reception," added the
eunuch, and the Macedonian, with a slight, haughty nod, drew back.
"Another misfortune," sighed the eunuch.
"A boyish prank," Iras answered quickly, "but even a still greater
misfortune is less than nothing so long as we are not conscious of it.
This unpleasant occurrence must be concealed for the present from the
Queen. Up to this time it is a vexation, nothing more--and it can and
must remain so; for we have it in our power to uproot the poisonous tree
whence it emanates."
"You look as if no one could better perform the task," the Regent
interrupted, with a side glance at the galley, "so you shall have the
commission. It is the last one I shall give, during the Queen's absence,
in her name."
"I shall not fail," she answered firmly.
When Iras again looked towards the landing-place she saw Archibius
standing alone, with his eyes fixed upon the ground. Impulse prompted her
to tell her uncle what had happened; but at the first step she paused,
and her thin lips uttered a firm "No."
Her friend had become a stone in her path. If necessary, she would find
means to thrust him also aside, spite of his sister Charmian and the old
tie which united him to Cleopatra. He had grown weak, Charmian had always
been so.
She would have had time enough now to consider what step to take first,
had not her heart ached so sorely.
After the huge galley lay moored, several minutes elapsed ere two
pastophori of the goddess Isis, who guarded the goblet of Nektanebus,
taken from the temple treasures and borne along in a painted chest,
stepped upon the bridge, followed by Cleopatra's first chamberlain, who
in a low tone announced the approach of the Queen and commanded the
waiting groups to make way. A double line of torch-bearers had been
stationed from the landing to the gate leading into the Bruchium, and the
other on the north, which was the entrance to the palaces on the Lochias,
since it was not known where Cleopatra would desire to go. The
chamberlain, however, said that she would spend the night at Lochias,
where the children lived, and ordered all the flickering, smoking
torches, save a few, to be extinguished.
Mardion, the Keeper of the Seal, Archibius, and Iras were standing by the
bridge a little in advance of the others, when voices were heard on the
ship, and the Queen appeared, preceded by several lantern-bearers and
followed by a numerous train of court officials, pages, maids, and female
slaves. Cleopatra's little hand rested on Charmian's arm, as, with a
haughty carriage of the head, she moved towards the shore. A thick veil
covered her face, and a large, dark cloak concealed her figure. How
elastic her step was still! how proud yet graceful was the gesture with
which she waved a greeting to Mardion and Zeno.
Extending her hand to raise Iras, who had sunk prostrate before her, she
kissed her on the forehead, whispering, "The children?"
"All is well with them," replied the girl.
Then the returning sovereign greeted the others with a gracious gesture,
but vouchsafed a word to no one until the eunuch stepped before her to
deliver his address of welcome. She motioned him aside with a curt
"Later"; and when Zeno held open the door of the litter, she said in a
stifled tone: "I will walk. After the rocking of the galley in this
tempest, I feel reluctant to enter the litter. There are many things to
be considered to-day. An idea came to me on the way home. Summon the
captain of the harbour and his chief counsellors, the heads of the war
office, the superintendent of the fortifications on land and water,
especially the Aristarch and Gorgias--I want to see them. Time presses.
They must be here in two hours-no, in an hour and a half. I wish to
examine all their plans and charts of the eastern frontier, especially
the river channels and canals in the Delta."
Then she turned to Archibius, who had approached the litter, laid her
hand upon his arm, and though her veil prevented him from seeing her
sparkling eyes, he felt them shining deep into his heart, as the voice
whose melody had often enthralled his soul cried, "We will take it as a
favourable omen that it is again you who lead me to this palace in a time
of trouble."
His overflowing heart found expression in the warm reply, "Whenever it
may be, forever and ever this arm and this life are yours!" And the Queen
answered in a tone of earnest belief, "I know it."
Then, with her hand still resting on his arm, she moved forward; but when
he began to ask whether she really had cause to speak of a time of
trouble, she cut him short with the entreaty "Not now. Let us say
nothing. It is worse than bad--as evil as possible. Yet no. Few are
permitted, in an hour of trouble, to lean on the arm of a faithful
friend."
The words were accompanied with a light pressure of her little hand, and
it seemed as if his old heart was growing young.
He dared not speak, for her wish was law; but while moving silently at
her side, first along the shore, then through the gate, and finally over
the marble flagstones which led to the palace portal, it seemed as if he
beheld, instead of the veiled head of the hapless Queen, the soft,
light-brown locks which floated around the face of a happy child. Before
his mental vision rose the little mistress of the garden of Epicurus. He
saw the sparkle of her large blue eyes, which never ceased to question,
yet appeared to contain the mystery of the world. He fancied he heard
once more the silvery cadence of her voice and the bewitching magic of
her pure, childlike laughter, and it was hard to remember what she had
become.
Snatched away from the present, yet conscious that Fate had granted him a
great boon in this sorrowful hour, he moved on at her side and led her
through the main entrance, the spacious inner court-yard of the palace.
At the rear was the great door opening into the Queen's apartments,
before which Mardion, Iras, and their companions had already stationed
themselves. At the left was a smaller one leading into the wing occupied
by the children.
Archibius was about to conduct Cleopatra across the lighted court-yard,
but she motioned towards the children's rooms, and he understood her.
At the threshold her hand fell from his arm, and when he bowed as if to
retire, she said kindly: "There is Charmian. You both deserve to
accompany me to the spot where childhood is dreaming and peace of mind
and painlessness have their abode. But respect for the Queen has
prevented the brother and sister from greeting each other after so long a
separation. Do so now! Then, follow me."
While speaking, she hastened with the swift step of youth into the atrium
and up the staircase which led to the sleeping-rooms of the princes and
princesses.
Archibius and Charmian obeyed her bidding; the brother clasped his sister
affectionately in his arms, and in hurried tones, with tears streaming
from her eyes, she informed him that to her all seemed lost.
Antony had behaved in a manner for which no words of condemnation or
regret were adequate. Probably he would follow Cleopatra; the fleet, and
perhaps the army also, were destroyed. Her fate lay in the hands of
Octavianus.
Then she preceded him towards the staircase, where Iras was standing with
a tall Syrian, who bore a striking resemblance to Philostratus, Barine's
former husband. It was his brother Alexas, the trusted favourite of Mark
Antony. His place should now have been with him, and Archibius asked his
sister with a hasty look how this man chanced to be in the Queen's train.
"His skill in reading the stars," was the reply. "His flattering tongue.
He is a parasite of the worst kind, but he tells her many things, he
diverts her, and she tolerates him near her person."
As soon as Iras saw the direction in which Cleopatra had turned, she had
hastened after her to accompany her to the children. The Syrian Alexas
had stopped her to express his joy in meeting her again. Even before the
outbreak of the war he had devoted himself zealously to her, and he now
plainly showed that during the long period of separation his feelings had
by no means cooled. Like his brother, he had a head too small for his
body, but his well-formed features were animated by a pair of eyes
sparkling with a keen, covetous expression.
Iras, too, seemed glad to welcome the favourite, but ere the brother and
sister reached the staircase she left him to embrace Charmian, her aunt
and companion, with the affection of a daughter.
They found the Queen in the anteroom of the children's apartments.
Euphronion, their tutor, had awaited her there, and hurriedly gave, in
the most rapturous terms, his report of them and the wonderful gifts
which became more and more apparent in each, now as a heritage from their
mother, now from their father.
Cleopatra had interrupted the torrent of his enthusiastic speech with
many a question, meanwhile endeavouring to loose the veil wound about her
head; but the little hands, unaccustomed to the task, failed. Iras
noticed it from the stairs and, hastening up the last steps, skilfully
released her from the long web of lace.
The Queen acknowledged the service by a gracious nod, but when the chief
eunuch opened the door leading into the children's rooms, she called
joyously to the brother and sister, "Come!" The tutor, who was obliged to
leave the charge of his pupils' sleeping apartments to the eunuchs and
nurses, drew back, but Iras felt it a bitter affront to be excluded from
this visit. Her cheeks flushed and paled; her thin lips were more firmly
compressed, and she gazed intently at the basket of fruit in the mosaic
floor at her feet as if she were counting the cherries that filled it.
But she suddenly pushed the little curls back from her forehead, darted
swiftly down the stairs, and called to Alexas just as he was about to
leave the atrium.
The Syrian hastened towards her, extolling the good fortune that made his
sun rise for him a second time that night, but she cut him short with the
words; "Cease this foolish love-making. It would be far better for us
both to become allies in serious, bitter earnest. I am ready."
"So am I!" cried the Syrian rapturously, pressing his hand upon his
heart.
Meanwhile Cleopatra had entered the chamber where the children lay
sleeping. Deep silence pervaded the lofty hall hung with bright-hued
carpets, and softly lighted by three lamps with rose-colored globes. An
arch, supported by pillars of Libyan marble, divided the wide space. In
the first, near a window closely muffled with draperies, stood two ivory
beds, surmounted with crowns of gold and silver set with pearls and
turquoises. Around the edge, carved by the hands of a great artist, ran a
line of happy children dancing to the songs of birds in blossoming
bushes.
The couches were separated by a heavy curtain which the eunuchs had
raised at the approach of the Queen. Cleopatra could now see them all at
a single glance, and the picture was indeed one of exquisite charm; for
on these beautiful couches slept the twins, the ten-year-old children of
Cleopatra and Antony--Antonius Helios and Cleopatra Selene. The girl was
pink and white, fair and wonderfully lovely; the boy no less beautiful,
but with ebon-black hair, like his father. Both curly heads were turned
towards the side, and rested on a dimpled hand pressed upon the silken
pillow.
Upon a third bed, beyond the arch, was Alexander, the youngest prince, a
lovely boy of six, the Queen's darling.
After gazing a long while at the twins, and pressing a light kiss upon
cheeks flushed with slumber, she turned to the youngest child and sank
beside his couch as if forced to bend the knee before some apparition
which Heaven had vouchsafed to her. Tears streamed from her eyes as,
drawing the child carefully towards her, she kissed his mouth, eyes, and
cheeks, and then laid him gently back upon the pillows. The boy, however,
did not instantly relapse into slumber, but threw his little plump arms
around his mother's neck, murmuring incomprehensible words. She joyously
submitted to his caresses, till sleep again overpowered him, and his
little hands fell back upon the bed.
She lingered a short time longer, with her brow resting on the ivory of
the couch, praying for this child and his brother and sister. When she
rose again her cheeks were wet with tears, and she pressed her hand upon
her breast. Then, beckoning to Charmian and Archibius, she motioned
towards Alexander and the twins, saying, as she saw tears glittering in
the eyes of both: "I know you have lost this happiness for my sake. For
each one of these children a great empire would not be too high a price;
for them all----What does earth contain that I would not bestow? Yet what
can I still call my own?"
Her smiling face clouded as she asked the question. The vision of the
lost battle again rose before her mind. Her own power was lost,
forfeited, and with it the independence of the native land which she
loved. Rome was already stretching out her hand to add it to the others
as a new province. But this should not be! Her twin children yonder,
sleeping beneath crowns, must wear them! And the boy slumbering on the
pillows? How many kingdoms Antony had bestowed! What remained for her to
give?
Again she bent to the child. A beautiful dream must have hovered over
him, for he was smiling in his sleep. A flood of maternal love welled up
in her agitated heart, and, as she saw the companions of her childhood
also gazing tenderly at the little steeper, she remembered the days of
her own youth, and the quiet happiness which she had enjoyed in her
garden of Epicurus.
Power and splendour had begun for her beyond its confines, but the
greater the heights of worldly grandeur she attained, the more distant,
the more irrecoverable became the consciousness of the happiness which
she had once gratefully enjoyed, and for which she had never ceased to
long. And as she now gazed once more at the peaceful, smiling face,
whence all pain and anxiety seemed worlds away, and all the love which
her heart contained appeared to be pouring towards him, the question
arose in her mind whether this boy, for whom she possessed no crown,
might not be the only happy mortal of them all-happy in the sense of the
master. Deeply moved by this thought, she turned to Archibius and
Charmian, exclaiming in a subdued tone, in order not to rouse the
sleeper: "Whatever destiny may await us, I commend this child to your
special love and care. If Fate denies him the lustre of the crown and the
elation of power, teach him to enjoy that other happiness, which--how
long ago it is!--your father unfolded to his mother."
Archibius kissed her robe, and Charmian her hands; but Cleopatra, drawing
a long breath, said: "The mother has already taken too much time from the
Queen. I have ordered the news of my arrival to be kept from Caesarion.
This was well. The most important matters will be settled before our
meeting. Everything relating to me and to the state must be decided
within an hour. But, first, I am something more than mother and Queen.
The woman also asserts her claim. I will find time for you, my friend,
to-morrow!-To my chamber first, Charmian. But you need rest still more
than I. Go with your brother. Send Iras to me. She will be glad to use
her skilful fingers again in her mistress's service."
CHAPTER XI.
The Queen had left her bath. Iras had arranged the still abundant waves
of her hair, now dark-brown in hue, and robed her magnificently to
receive the dignitaries whom, spite of the late hour of the night, she
expected.
How wonderfully she had retained her beauty! It seemed as if Time had not
ventured to touch this masterpiece of feminine loveliness; yet the
Greek's keen eye detected here and there some token of the vanishing
spell of youth. She loved her mistress, yet her inmost soul rejoiced
whenever she detected in her the same changes which began to appear in
herself, the woman of seven-and-twenty, so many years her sovereign's
junior. She would gladly have given Cleopatra everything at her command,
yet she felt as if she must praise Nature for an act of justice, when she
perceived that even her royal favourite was not wholly relieved from the
law which applied to all.
"Cease your flattery," said Cleopatra, smiling mournfully. "They say that
the works of the Pharaohs here on the Nile flout Time. The inexorable
destroyer is less willing to permit this from the Queen of Egypt. These
are grey hairs, and they came from this head, however eagerly you may
deny it. Whose save my own are these lines around the corners of the eyes
and on the brow? What say you to the tooth which my lips do not hide so
kindly as you assert? It was injured the night before the luckless
battle. My dear, faithful, skilful Olympus, the prince of leeches, is the
only one who can conceal such things. But it would not do to take the old
man to the war, and Glaucus is far less adroit. How I missed Olympus
during those fatal hours! I seemed a monster even to myself, and
he--Antony's eye is only too keen for such matters. What is the love of
men? A blackened tooth may prove its destruction. An aspect obnoxious to
the gaze will pour water on the fiercest fire. What hours I experienced,
Iras! Many a glance from him seemed an insult, and, besides, my heart was
filled with torturing anxiety.
"Something had evidently come between us! I felt it. The trouble began
soon after he left Alexandria. It gnawed my soul like a worm, and now
that I am here again I must see clearly. He will follow me in a few days,
I know. Pinarius Scarpus, with his untouched legions, is in Paraetonium,
whither he went. At Taenarum he resolved to retire from the world which
he, on whom it had bestowed so much that is great, hates because he has
given it cause for many a shake of the head. But the old spirit woke
again, and if Fortune, usually so faithful, still aids him, a large force
will soon join the new African army. The Asiatic princes--But the ruler
of the state must be silent. I entered this room to give the woman her
just rights, and the woman shall have them. He will soon be here. He
cannot live without me. It is not alone the beaker of Nektanebus which
draws him after me!"
"When the greatest of the great, Julius Caesar, sued for your love in
Alexandria, and Antony on the Cydnus, you did not possess the goblet,"
observed Iras. "It is two years since Anubis permitted you to borrow the
masterpiece from the temple treasures, and within a few days you will be
obliged to restore it. That a mysterious spell emanates from the cup is
certain, but one still more powerful dwells in the magic of your own
nature."
"Would that it might assert itself to-day!" cried the Queen. "At any rate
the power of the beaker impelled Antony to do many things. I am not vain
enough to believe that it was love, that it was solely the spell of my
own personality which drew him to me in that disastrous hour. That
battle, that incomprehensible, disgraceful battle! You were ill, and
could not see our fleet when it set sail; but even experienced spectators
said that handsomer, larger vessels were never beheld. I was right in
insisting that the decision of the conflict should be left to them. I was
entitled to call them mine. Had we conquered, what a proud delight it
would have been to say, 'The weapons which you gave to the man you loved
gained him the sovereignty of the world!' Besides, the stars had assured
me that good fortune would attend us on the sea. They had given the same
message to Anubis here and to Alexas upon Antony's galley. I also trusted
the spell of the goblet, which had already compelled Antony to do many
things he opposed. So I succeeded in having the decision of the conflict
left to the fleet, but the prediction was false, false, false!--how
utterly, was to be proved only too soon.
"If I had only been told in time what I learned later! After the defeat
people were more loquacious. That one remark of a veteran commander of
the foot-soldiers would probably have sufficed to open my eyes. He had
asked Mark Antony why he fixed his hopes on miserable wood, exclaiming,
'Let the Phoenician's and Egyptians war on the water, but leave us the
land where we are accustomed, with our feet firmly set upon the earth, to
fight, conquer, or die!' This alone, I am sure, would have changed my
resolve in a happy hour. But it was kept from me.
"The conflict began. Our troops had lost patience. The left wing of the
fleet advanced. At first I watched the battle eagerly, with a throbbing
heart. How proudly the huge galleys moved forward! Everything was going
admirably. Antony had made an address, assuring the warriors that, even
without soldiers, our ships would destroy the foe by their mere height
and size. What orator can so carry his hearers with him! I, too, was
still fearless. Who cherishes anxiety when confidently expecting victory?
When he went on board his own ship, after bidding me farewell far less
cordially than usual, I became more troubled. I thought it was evident
that his love was waning. What had I become since we left Alexandria, and
Olympus no longer attended me! Matters could not continue in this way. I
would leave the direction of the war to him, and vanish from his eyes.
After he had looked into the beaker of Nektanebus, he yielded to my will,
but often with indignation. The unconcealed, ineffaceable lines, and the
years, the cruel years!"
"What thoughts are these?" cried Iras. "Let me take oath, my sovereign
mistress, that as you stand before me--"
"Thanks to this toilet-table and the new compounds of Olympus in these
boxes! At that time, I tell you, I was fairly startled at the sight of my
own face. Trouble does not enhance beauty, and what condemnation the
Romans had heaped on the woman who meddled with war, the craft of man! I
had answers for them, but I would not endure it longer. I had previously
determined to hold aloof from the battle on land; but even at the
commencement of the conflict, spite of its favourable promise, I longed
to leave Antony and return to the children. They do not heed the colour
of their mother's hair, nor her wrinkles; and he, when he had looked for
and called me in vain, would feel for the first time what he possessed in
me, would miss me, and with the longing the old love would awaken with
fresh ardour. As soon as the fleet had gained the victory I would have
the prow of my galley turned southward and, without a farewell,
exclaiming only, 'We will meet in Alexandria!' set sail for Egypt.
"I summoned Alexas, who had remained with me, and ordered him to give me
a signal as soon as the battle was decided in our favour. I remained on
deck. Then I saw the ships of the foe describing a wide circle. The
nauarch told me that Agrippa was trying to surround us. This roused a
feeling of discomfort. I began to repent having meddled with men's work.
"Antony looked across at me from his galley. I waved my hand to point out
the peril, but instead of eagerly and lovingly answering the greeting, as
of yore, he turned his back, and in a short time after the wildest uproar
arose around me. One ship became entangled with another, planks and poles
shattered with a loud crash. Shouts, the cries and moans of the
combatants and the wounded, mingled with the thunder of the stones hurled
by the catapults, and the sharp notes of the signals which sounded like
calls for help. Two soldiers, stricken by arrows, fell beside me. It was
horrible! Yet my courage remained steadfast, even when a squadron--it was
commanded by Aruntius--pressed upon the fleet. I saw another line of
galleys steering directly towards us, and a Roman vessel assailed by one
of mine--I had named her the Selene--turn on her side and sink. This
pleased me and seemed like the first presage of victory. I again ordered
Alexas to have the ship's prow turned as soon as the result of the battle
was decided. Ere I had ceased speaking, Jason, the steward--you know
him--appeared with refreshments. I took the beaker, but, ere I could
raise it to my lips, he fell to the deck with a cloven skull, mingling
his blood with the spilled juice of the grape. My blood seemed fairly to
freeze in my veins, and Alexas, trembling and deadly pale, asked, 'Do you
command us to quit the battle?'
"Every fibre of my being urged me to give the order, but I controlled
myself, and asked the nauarch, who was standing on the bridge before me,
'Are we gaining the advantage?' The reply was a positive 'Yes.' I thought
the fitting time had come, and called to him to steer the galley
southward. But the man did not seem to understand. Meanwhile the noise of
the conflict had grown louder and louder. So, in spite of Charmian, who
besought me not to interfere in the battle, I sent Alexas to the
commander on the bridge, and while he talked with the grey-bearded
seaman, who wrathfully answered I know not what, I glanced at the nearest
ship--I no longer knew whether it was friend or foe--and as I saw the
rows of restless oars moving in countless numbers to and fro, it seemed
as if every ship had become a huge spider, and the long wooden handles of
the oars were its legs and feet. Each of these monsters appeared to be
seeking to snare me in a horrible net, and when the nauarch came to
beseech me to wait, I imperiously commanded him to obey my orders.
"The luckless man bowed, and performed his Queen's behest. The giant was
turned, and forced a passage through the maze.
"I breathed more freely.
"What had threatened me like the legs of huge spiders became oars once
more. Alexas led me under a roof, where no missiles could reach me. My
desire was fulfilled. I had escaped Antony's eyes, and we were going
towards Alexandria and my children. When I at last looked around I saw
that my other ships were following. I had not given this order, and was
terribly startled. When I sought Alexas, he had vanished. The centurion
whom I sent to order the nauarch to give the signal to the other ships to
return to the battle, reported that the captain's dead body has just been
borne away, but that the command should be given. How this was done I do
not know, but it produced no effect, and no one noticed the anxious
waving of my handkerchief.
"We had left Antony's galley--he was standing on the bridge--far behind.
"I had waved my hand as we passed close by, and he hurried down to bend
far over the bulwark and shout to me. I can still see his hands raised to
his bearded lips. I did not understand what he said, and only pointed
southward and in spirit wished him victory and that this separation might
tend to the welfare of our love. But he shook his head, pressed his hand
despairingly to his brow, and waved his arms as though to give me a sign,
but the Antonias swept far ahead of his ship and steered straight towards
the south.
"I breathed more freely, in the pleasant consciousness of escaping a
two-fold danger. Had I remained long before Antony's eyes, looking as I
did then, it might--
"Wretched blunder of a wretched woman, I say now. But at that time I
could not suspect what a terrible doom I had brought down in that hour
upon ourselves, my children, perhaps the whole world; so I remained under
the thrall of these petty fears and thoughts until wounded men were
carried past me. The sight distressed me; you know how sensitive I am,
and with what difficulty I endure and witness suffering.
"Charmian led me to the cabin. There I first realized what I had done. I
had hoped to aid in crushing the hated foe, and now perhaps it was I who
had built for him the bridge to victory, to sovereignty, to our
destruction. Pursued by such thoughts, as if by the Furies, I paced
restlessly to and fro.
"Suddenly I heard a loud noise on deck. A crashing blow seemed to shake
the huge ship. We were pursued! A Roman galley had boarded mine! This was
my thought as I grasped the dagger Antony had given me.
"But Charmian came back with tidings which seemed scarcely less terrible
than the baseless fear. I had angrily commanded her to leave me because
she had urged me to revoke the command to turn back. Now, deadly pale,
she announced that Mark Antony had left his galley, followed me in a
little five-oared boat, and come on board our ship.
"My blood froze in my veins.
"He had come, I imagined, to force me to return to the battle and,
drawing a long breath, my defiant pride urged me to show him that I was
the Queen and would obey only my own will, while my heart impelled me to
sink at his feet and beseech him, without heeding me, to issue any order
which promised to secure a victory.
"But he did not come.
"I sent Charmian up again. Antony had been unable to continue the
conflict when parted from me. Now he sat in front of the cabin with his
head resting on his hands, staring at the planks of the deck like one
distraught. He, he--Antony! The bravest horseman, the terror of the foe,
let his arms fall like a shepherd-boy whose sheep are stolen by the
wolves. Mark Antony, the hero who had braved a thousand dangers, had
flung down his sword. Why, why? Because a woman had yielded to idle
fears, obeyed the yearning of a mother's heart, and fled? Of all human
weaknesses, not one had been more alien than cowardice to the man whose
recklessness had led him to many an unprecedented venture. And now? No, a
thousand times no! Fire and water would unite sooner than Mark Antony and
cowardice! He had been under the coercive power of a demon; a mysterious
spell had forced him--"
"The mightiest power, love," interrupted Iras with enthusiastic
warmth--"a love as great and overmastering as ever subjugated the soul of
man."
"Ay, love," repeated Cleopatra, in a hollow tone. Then her lips curled
with a faint tinge of derision, and her voice expressed the very
bitterness of doubt, as she continued: "Had it been merely the love which
makes two mortals one, transfers the heart of one to the other, it might
perchance have borne my timorous soul into the hero's breast! But no.
Violent tempests had raged before the battle. It had not been possible
always to appear before him in the guise in which we would fain be seen
by those whom we love.
"Even now, when your skilful hands have served me--there is the
mirror--the image it reflects--seems to me like a carefully preserved
wreck--"
"O my royal mistress," cried Iras, raising her hands beseechingly, "must
I again declare that neither the grey hairs which are again brown, nor
the few lines which Olympus will soon render invisible, nor whatever else
perhaps disturbs you in the image you behold reflected, impairs your
beauty? Unclouded and secure of victory, the spell of your godlike
nature--"
"Cease, cease!" interrupted Cleopatra. "I know what I know. No mortal can
escape the great eternal laws of Nature. As surely as birth commences
life, everything that exists moves onward to destruction and decay."
"Yet the gods," Iras persisted, "give to their works different degrees of
existence. The waterlily blooms but a single day, yet how full of vigour
is the sycamore in the garden of the Paneum, which has flourished a
thousand years! Not a petal in the blossoms of your youth has faded, and
is it conceivable that there is even the slightest diminution in the love
of him who cast away all that man holds dearest because he could not
endure to part, even for days or weeks, from the woman whom he
worshipped?"
"Would that he had done so!" cried Cleopatra mournfully. "But are you so
sure that it was love which made him follow me? I am of a different
opinion. True love does not paralyze, but doubles the high qualities of
man. I learned this when Caesar was prisoned by a greatly superior force
within this very palace, his ships burned, his supply of water cut off.
In him also, in Antony, I was permitted to witness this magnificent
spectacle twenty--what do I say?-a hundred times, so long as he loved me
with all the ardour of his fiery soul. But what happened at Actium? That
shameful flight of the cooing dove after his mate, at which generations
yet unborn will point in mockery! He who does not see more deeply will
attribute to the foolish madness of love this wretched forgetfulness of
duty, honour, fame, the present and the future; but I, Iras--and this is
the thought which whitens one hair after another, which will speedily
destroy the remnant of your mistress's former beauty by the exhaustion of
sleepless nights--I know better. It was not love which drew Antony after
me, not love that trampled in the dust the radiant image of reckless
courage, not love that constrained the demigod to follow the pitiful
track of a fugitive woman."
Here her voice fell, and seizing the girl's wrist with a painful
pressure, she drew her closer to her side and whispered:
"The goblet of Nektanebus is connected with it. Ay, tremble! The powers
that emanate from the glittering wonder are as terrible as they are
unnatural. The magic spell exerted by the beaker has transformed the
heroic son of Herakles, the more than mortal, into the whimpering coward,
the crushed, broken nonentity I found upon the galley's deck. You are
silent? Your nimble tongue finds no reply. How could you have forgotten
that you aided me to win the wager which forced Antony to gaze into the
beaker before I filled it for him? How grateful I was to Anubis when he
finally consented to trust to my care this marvel of the temple
treasures, when the first trial succeeded, and Antony, at my bidding,
placed the magnificent wreath which he wore upon the bald brow of that
crabbed old follower of Aristoteles, Diomedes, whom he detested in his
inmost soul! It was scarcely a year ago, and you know how rarely at first
I used the power of the terrible vessel. The man whom I loved obeyed my
slightest glance, without its aid. But later--before the battle--I felt
how gladly he would have sent me, who might ruin all, back to Egypt.
Besides, I felt--I have already said so--that something had come between
us. Yet, often as he was on the point of sacrificing me to the
importunate Romans, I need only bid him gaze into the beaker, and exclaim
'You will not send me hence. We belong together. Whither one goes, the
other will follow!' and he besought me not to leave him. The very morning
before the battle I gave him the drinking cup, urging him, whatever might
happen, never, never to leave me. And he obeyed this time also, though
the person to whom a magic spell bound him was a fleeing woman. It is
terrible. And yet, have I a right to execrate the thrall of the beaker?
Scarcely! For without the Magian's glittering vessel--a secret voice in
my soul has whispered the warning a thousand times during the sleepless
nights--he would have taken another on the galley. And I believe I know
this other--I mean the woman whose singing enthralled my heart too at the
Adonis festival just before our departure. I noticed the look with which
his eyes sought hers. Now I know that it was not merely my old deceitful
foe, jealousy, which warned me against her. Alexas, the most faithful of
his friends, also confirmed what I merely feared--ah! and he told me
other things which the stars had revealed to him. Besides, he knows the
siren, for she was the wife of his own brother. To protect his honour, he
cast off the coquettish Circe."
"Barine!" fell in resolute tones from the lips of Iras.
"So you know her?" asked Cleopatra, eagerly. The girl raised her clasped
hands beseechingly to the Queen, exclaiming:
"I know this woman only too well, and how my heart rages against her! O
my mistress, that I, too, should aid in darkening this hour! Yet it must
be said. That Antony visited the singer, and even took his son there more
than once, is known throughout the city. Yet that is not the worst. A
Barine entering into rivalry with you! It would be too ridiculous. But
what bounds can be set to the insatiate greed of these women? No rank, no
age is sacred. It was dull in the absence of the court and the army.
There were no men who seemed worth the trouble of catching, so she cast
her net for boys, and the one most closely snared was the King
Caesarion."
"Caesarion!" exclaimed Cleopatra, her pale cheeks flushing. "And his
tutor Rhodon? My strict commands?"
"Antyllus secretly presented him to her," replied Iras. "But I kept my
eyes open. The boy clung to the singer with insensate passion. The only
expedient was to remove her from the city. Archibius aided me."
"Then I shall be spared sending her away."
"Nay, that must still be done; for, on the journey to the country
Caesarion, with several comrades, attacked her."
"And the reckless deed was successful?"
"No, my royal mistress. I wish it had been. A love-sick fool who
accompanied her drew his sword in her defence, raised his hand against
the son of Caesar, and wounded him. Calm yourself, I beseech you, I
conjure you--the wound is slight. The boy's mad passion makes me far more
anxious."
The Queen's pouting scarlet lips closed so firmly that her mouth lost the
winning charm which was peculiar to it, and she answered in a firm,
resolute tone: "It is the mother's place to protect the son against the
temptress. Alexas is right. Her star stands in the path of mine. A woman
like this casts a deep shadow on her Queen's course. I will defend
myself. It is she who has placed herself between us; she has won Antony.
But no! Why should I blind myself? Time and the charms he steals from
women are far more powerful than twenty such little temptresses. Then,
there are the circumstances which prevented my concealing the defects
that wounded the eyes of this most spoiled of all spoiled mortals. All
these things aided the singer. I feel it. In her pursuit of men she had
at her command all the means which aid us women to conceal what is
unlovely and enhance what is beautiful in a lover's eyes, while I was at
a disadvantage, lacking your aid and the long-tested skill of Olympus.
The divinity on the ship, amid the raging of the storm, was forced more
than once to appear before the worshipper ungarlanded, without ornament
for the head, or incense."
"But though she used all the combined arts of Aphrodite and Isis, she
could not vie with you, my royal mistress!" cried Iras. "How little is
required to delude the senses of one scarcely more than a child!"
"Poor boy!" sighed the Queen, gently. "Had he not been wounded, and were
it not so hard to resign what we love, I should rejoice that he, too,
understands how to plan and act. Perhaps--O Iras, would that it might be
so!--now that the gate is burst open, the brain and energy of the great
Caesar will enter his living image. As the Egyptians call Horus 'the
avenger of his father,' perhaps he may become his mother's defender and
avenger. If Caesar's spirit wakes within him, he will wrest from the
dissembler Octavianus the heritage of which the nephew robbed the son.
You swear that the wound is but a slight one?"
"The physicians have said so."
"Well, then we will hope so. Let him enter the conflict of life. We will
afford him ample opportunity to test his powers. No foolish passion shall
prevent the convalescent youth from following his father upward along the
pathway of fame. But send for the woman who ensnared him, the audacious
charmer whose aspirations mount to those I hold dearest. We will see how
she appears beside me!"
"These are grievous times," said Iras, who saw in amazement the Queen's
eyes sparkle with the confident light of victory. "Grant your foot its
right. Let it crush her! Monsters enough, on whom you cannot set your
foot, throng your path. Hence to Hades, in these days of conflict, with
all who can be quickly removed!"
"Murder?" asked Cleopatra, her noble brow contracting in a frown.
"If it must be, ay," replied Iras, sharply. "If possible, banishment to
an island, an oasis. If necessity requires, to the mines with the siren!"
"If necessity requires?" repeated the Queen. "I think that means, if it
proves that she has deserved the harshest punishment."
"She has brought it upon herself by every hour of my sovereign's life
clouded through her wiles. In the mines the desire to set snares for
husbands and sons soon vanishes."
"And people languish in the most terrible torture till death ends their
suffering," added Cleopatra, in a tone of grave reproof. "No, girl, this
victory is too easy. I will not send even my foe to death without a
hearing, especially at this time, which teaches me what it is to await
the verdict of one who is more powerful. This woman who, as it were,
summons me to battle, shall have her wish. I am curious to see the singer
again, and to learn the means by which she has succeeded in chaining to
her triumphal car so many captives, from boys up to the most exacting
men."
"What do you intend, my royal mistress?" cried Iras in horror.
"I intend," said Cleopatra imperiously, "to see the daughter of Leonax,
the granddaughter of Didymus, two men whom I hold in high esteem, ere I
decide her destiny. I wish to behold, test, and judge my rival, heart and
mind, ere I condemn her. I will engage in the conflict to which she
challenged the loving wife and mother! But--this is my right--I will
compel her to show herself to me as Antony so often saw me during the
past few weeks, unaided and unimproved by the arts which we both have at
command."
Then, without paying any further heed to her attendant, she went to a
window, and, after a swift glance at the sky, added quietly: "The first
hour after midnight is drawing to a close. The council will begin
immediately. The matter to be under discussion is a venture which might
save much from the wreck. The council will last two hours, perchance only
one. The singer can wait. Where does she live?"
"In the house which belonged to her father, the artist Leonax, in the
garden of the Paneum," replied Iras hoarsely. "But, O my Queen, if ever
my opinion had the slightest weight with you--"
"I desire no counsel now, but demand the fulfilment of my orders!" cried
Cleopatra resolutely. "As soon as those whom I expect are here--"
The Queen was interrupted by a chamberlain, who announced the arrival of
the men whom she had summoned, and Cleopatra bade him tell them that she
was on her way to the council chamber. Then she turned again to Iras and
in rapid words commanded her to go at once in a closed carriage,
accompanied by a reliable person, to Barine's house. She must be brought
to the palace without the least delay--Iras would understand--even if it
should be necessary to rouse her from her sleep. "I wish to see her as if
a storm had forced her suddenly upon the deck of a ship," she said in
conclusion.
Then snatching a small tablet from the dressing-table, she scrawled upon
the wax with a rapid hand: "Cleopatra, the Queen, desires to see Barine,
the daughter of Leonax, without delay. She must obey any command of Iras,
Cleopatra's messenger, and her companion."
Then, closing the diptychon, she handed it to her attendant, asking:
"Whom will you take?"
She answered without hesitation, "Alexas."
"Very well," answered Cleopatra. "Do not allow her a moment for
preparations, whatever they may be. But do not forget--I command
you--that she is a woman."
With these words she turned to follow the chamberlain, but Iras hurried
after her to adjust the diadem upon her head and arrange some of the
folds of her robe.
Cleopatra submitted, saying kindly, "Something else, I see, is weighing
on your heart."
"O my mistress!" cried the girl. "After these tempests of the soul, these
harassing months, you are turning night into day and assuming fresh
labours and anxieties. If the leech Olympus--"
"It must be," interrupted Cleopatra kindly. "The last two weeks seemed
like a single long and gloomy night, during which I sometimes left my
couch for a few hours. One who seeks to drag what is dearest from the
river does not consider whether the cold bath is agreeable. If we
succumb, it does not matter whether we are well or ill; if, on the
contrary, we succeed in gathering another army and saving Egypt, let it
cost health and life. The minutes I intend to grant to the woman will be
thrown into the bargain. Whatever may come, I shall be ready to meet my
fate. I am at one of life's great turning points. At such a time we
fulfil our obligations and demands, both great and small."
A few minutes later Cleopatra entered the throne-room and saluted the men
whom she had roused from their slumber in order to lay before them a bold
plan which, in the lowest depths of misfortune, her yearning to offer
fresh resistance to the victorious foe had caused her vigorous, restless
mind to evoke.
When, many years before, the boy with whom, according to her father's
will, she shared the throne, and his guardian Pothinus, had compelled her
to fly from Alexandria, she had found in the eastern frontier of the
Delta, on the isthmus which united Egypt to Asia, the remains of the
canal which the energetic Pharaohs of former times had constructed to
connect the Mediterranean with the Red Sea.
Even at that period she had deemed this ruinous work worthy of notice,
had questioned the AEnites who dwelt there about the remains, and even
visited some of them herself during the leisure hours of waiting.
From this survey it had seemed possible, by a great expenditure of
labour, to again render navigable the canal which the Pharaohs had used
to reach both seas in the same galleys, and by which, less than five
hundred years before, Darius, the founder of the Persian Empire, had
brought his fleet to his support.
With the tireless desire for knowledge characteristic of her, Cleopatra
had sought information concerning all these matters, and in quiet hours
had more than once pondered over plans for again uniting the Grecian and
Arabian seas.
Clearly, plainly, fully, with more thorough knowledge of many details
than even the superintendent of the water works, she explained her design
to the assembled professionals. If it proved practicable, the rescued
ships of the fleet, with others lying in the roadstead of Alexandria,
could be conveyed across the isthmus into the Red Sea, and thus saved to
Egypt and withdrawn from the foe. Supported by this force, many things
might be attempted, resistance might be considerably prolonged, and the
time thus gained used in gathering fresh aid and allies.
If the opportunity to make an attack arrived, a powerful fleet would be
at her disposal, for which smaller ships also should now be built at
Klysma, on the basis of the experience gained at Actium. The men who had
been robbed of their night's rest listened in amazement to the melodious
words of this woman who, in the deepest disaster, had devised a plan of
escape so daring in its grandeur, and understood how to explain it better
than any one of their number could have done. They followed every
sentence with the keenest attention, and Cleopatra's language grew more
impassioned, gained greater power and depth, the more plainly she
perceived the unfeigned, enthusiastic admiration paid her by her
listeners.
Even the oldest and most experienced men did not consider the surprising
proposal utterly impossible and impracticable. Some, among them Gorgias,
who during the restoration of the Serapeum had helped his father on the
eastern frontier of the Delta, and thus became familiar with the
neighbourhood of Heroonopolis, feared the difficulties which an elevation
of the earth in the centre of the isthmus would place in the way of the
enterprise. Yet, why should an undertaking which was successful in the
days of Sesostris appear unattainable?
The shortness of the time at their disposal was a still greater source of
anxiety, and to this was added the information that one hundred and
twenty thousand workmen had perished during the restoration of the canal
which Pharaoh Necho nearly completed. The water way was not finished at
that period, because an oracle had asserted that it would benefit only
the foreigners, the Phoenicians.
All these points were duly considered, but could not shake the opinion
that, under specially favourable conditions, the Queen's plan would be
practicable; though, to execute it, obstacles mountain-high were to be
conquered. All the labourers in the fields, who had not been pressed into
the army, must be summoned to the work.
Not an hour's delay was permitted. Where there was no water to bear the
ships, an attempt must be made to convey them across the land. There was
no lack of means. The mechanics who had understood how to move the
obelisks and colossi from the cataract to Alexandria, could here again
find opportunity to test their brains and former skill.
Never had Cleopatra's kindling spirit roused more eager, nay, more
passionate sympathy, in any counsellors gathered around her than during
this nocturnal meeting, and when at last she paused, the loud
acclamations of excited men greeted her. The Queen's return, and the
tidings of the lost battle which she had communicated, were to be kept
secret.
Gorgias had been appointed one of the directors of the enterprise, and
the intellect, voice, and winning charm of Cleopatra had so enraptured
him that he already fancied he saw the commencement of a new love which
would be fatal to his regard for Helena.
It was foolish to raise his wishes so high, but he told himself that he
had never beheld a woman more to be desired. Yet he cherished a very warm
memory of the philosopher's grand-daughter, and lamented that he would
scarcely find it possible to bid her farewell.
Zeno, the Keeper of the Seal, Dion's uncle, had questioned him about his
nephew in a very mysterious manner as soon as he entered the council
chamber, and received the reply that the wound in the shoulder, which
Caesarion had dealt with a short Roman sword, though severe, was--so the
physicians assured them-not fatal.
This seemed to satisfy Zeno, and ere Gorgias could urge him to extend a
protecting hand over his nephew, he excused himself and, with a message
to the wounded man, turned his back upon him.
The courtier had not yet learned what view the Queen would take of this
unfortunate affair, and besides, he was overloaded with business. The new
enterprise required the issue of a large number of documents conferring
authority, which all passed through his hands.
Cleopatra addressed a few kind, encouraging words to each one of the
experts who had been entrusted with the execution of her plan. Gorgias,
too, was permitted to kiss her robe, which stirred his blood afresh. He
would fain have flung himself at the feet of this marvellous woman and,
with his services, place his life at her disposal. And Cleopatra noticed
the enthusiastic ardour of his glance.
He, too, had been mentioned in the list of Barine's admirers. There must
be something unusual about this woman! But could she have fired a body of
grave men in behalf of a great, almost impossible deed, roused them to
such enthusiastic admiration as she, the vanquished, menaced Queen?
Certainly not.
She felt in the right mood to confront Barine as judge and rival.
In the midst of the deepest misery she had spent one happy hour. She had
again felt, with joyous pride, that her intellect, fresh and unclouded,
would be capable of outstripping the best powers, and in truth she needed
no magic goblet to win hearts.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Aspect obnoxious to the gaze will pour water on the fire
Everything that exists moves onward to destruction and decay
Trouble does not enhance beauty
CLEOPATRA
By Georg Ebers
Volume 5.
CHAPTER XII.
Barine had been an hour in the palace. The magnificently furnished room
to which she was conducted was directly above the council chamber, and
sometimes, in the silence of the night, the voice of the Queen or the
loud cheers of men were distinctly heard.
Barine listened without making the slightest effort to catch the meaning
of the words which reached her ears. She longed only for something to
divert her thoughts from the deep and bitter emotion which filled her
soul. Ay, she was roused to fury, and yet she felt how completely this
passionate resentment contradicted her whole nature.
True, the shameless conduct of Philostratus during their married life had
often stirred the inmost depths of her placid, kindly spirit, and after
wards his brother Alexas had come to drive her, by his disgraceful
proposals, to the verge of despair; rage was added to the passionate
agitation of her soul, and for this she had cause to rejoice--but for
this mighty resentment during the time of struggle she might have,
perhaps, succumbed from sheer weariness and the yearning desire to rest.
At last, at last, she and her friends, by means of great sacrifices, had
succeeded in releasing her from these tortures. Philostratus's consent to
liberate her was purchased. Alexas's persecution had ceased long before;
he had first been sent away as envoy by his patron Antony, and afterwards
been compelled to accompany him to the war.
How she had enjoyed the peaceful days in her mother's house! How quickly
the bright cheerfulness which she had supposed lost had returned to her
soul!--and to-day Fate had blessed her with the greatest happiness life
had ever offered. True, she had had only a few brief hours in which to
enjoy it, for the attack of the unbridled boys and the wound inflicted
upon her lover had cast a heavy shadow on her bliss.
Her mother had again proved to be in the right when she so confidently
predicted a second misfortune which would follow the first only too soon.
Barine had been torn at midnight from her peaceful home and her wounded
lover's bedside. This was done by the Queen's command, and, full of angry
excitement, she said to herself that the men were right who cursed
tyranny because it transformed free human beings into characterless
chattels.
There could be nothing good awaiting her; that was proved by the
messengers whom Cleopatra had sent to summon her at this unprecedented
hour. They were her worst enemies: Iras, who desired to wed her
lover--Dion had told her so after the assault--and Alexas, whose suit she
had rejected in a way which a man never forgives.
She had already learned Iras's feelings. The slender figure with the
narrow head, long, delicate nose, small chin, and pointed fingers, seemed
to her like a long, sharp thorn. This strange comparison had entered her
head as Iras stood rigidly erect, reading aloud in a shrill, high voice
the Queen's command. Everything about this hard, cold face appeared as
sharp as a sting, and ready to destroy her.
Her removal from her mother's house to the royal palace had been swift
and simple.
After the attack--of which she saw little, because, overpowered by fear
and horror, she closed her eyes--she had driven home with her lover,
where the leech had bandaged his injuries, and Berenike had quickly and
carefully transformed her own sleeping chamber into a sick-room.
Barine, after changing her dress, did not leave Dion's side. She had
attired herself carefully, for she knew his delight in outward adornment.
When she returned from her grandparents, before sunset, she was alone
with him, and he, kissing her arm, had murmured that wherever the Greek
tongue was spoken there was not one more beautiful. The gem was worthy of
its loveliness. So she had opened her baggage to take out the circlet
which Antony had given, and it again enclasped her arm when she entered
the sick-room.
Because Dion had told her that he deemed her fairest in the simple white
robe she had worn a few days before, when there were no guests save
himself and Gorgias, and she had sung until after midnight his favourite
songs as though all were intended for him alone, her choice had fallen
upon this garment. And she rejoiced that she had worn it--the wounded
man's eyes rested upon her so joyously when she sat down opposite to him.
The physician had forbidden him to talk, and urged him to sleep if
possible. So Barine only held his hand in silence, whispering, whenever
he opened his eyes, a tender word of love and encouragement.
She had remained with him for hours, leaving her place at his side merely
to give him his medicine, or, with her mother's aid, place poultices on
his wounds.
When his manly face was distorted by suffering, she shared his pain; but
during most of the time a calm, pleasant sense of happiness pervaded her
mind. She felt safe and sheltered in the possession of the man whom she
loved, though fully aware of the perils which threatened him, and,
perhaps, her also. But the assurance of his love completely filled her
heart and cast every care entirely into the shade. Many men had seemed
estimable and agreeable, a few even desirable husbands, but Dion was the
first to awaken love in her ardent but by no means passionate soul. She
regarded the experiences of the past few days as a beautiful miracle. How
she had yearned and pined until the most fervent desire of her heart was
fulfilled! Now Dion had offered her his love, and nothing could rob her
of it.
Gorgias and the sons of her uncle Arius had disturbed her a short time.
After they had gone with a good report, Berenike had entreated her
daughter to lie down and let her take her place. But Barine would not
leave her lover's couch, and had just loosed her hair to brush it again
and fasten the thick, fair braids around her head, when, two hours after
midnight, some one knocked loudly on the window shutters. Berenike was in
the act of removing the poultice, so Barine herself went into the atrium
to wake the doorkeeper.
But the old man was not asleep, and had anticipated her. She recognized,
with a low cry of terror, the first person who entered the lighted
vestibule--Alexas. Iras followed, her head closely muffled, for the storm
was still howling through the streets. Last of all a lantern-bearer
crossed the threshold.
The Syrian saluted the startled young beauty with a formal bow, but Iras,
without a greeting or even a single word of preparation, delivered the
Queen's command, and then read aloud, by the light of the lantern, what
Cleopatra had scrawled upon the wax tablet.
When Barine, pallid and scarcely able to control her emotion, requested
the messengers who had arrived at so late an hour to enter, in order to
give her time to prepare for the night drive and take leave of her
mother, Iras vouchsafed no reply, but, as if she had the right to rule
the house, merely ordered the doorkeeper to bring his mistress's cloak
without delay.
While the old man, with trembling knees, moved away, Iras asked if the
wounded Dion was in the dwelling; and Barine, her self-control restored
by the question, answered, with repellent pride, that the Queen's orders
did not command her to submit to an examination in her own house.
Iras shrugged her shoulders and said, sneeringly, to Alexas:
"In truth, I asked too much. One who attracts so many men of all ages can
scarcely be expected to know the abode of each individual."
"The heart has a faithful memory," replied the Syrian in a tone of
correction, but Iras echoed, contemptuously, "The heart!"
Then all were silent until, instead of the doorkeeper, Berenike herself
came hurrying in, bringing the cloak. With pallid face and bloodless lips
she wrapped it around her daughter's shoulders, whispering, amid floods
of tears, almost inaudible words of love and encouragement, which Iras
interrupted by requesting Barine to follow her to the carriage.
The mother and daughter embraced and kissed each other, then the closed
equipage bore the persecuted woman through the storm and darkness to
Lochias.
Not a word was exchanged between Barine and the Queen's messengers until
they reached the room where the former was to await Cleopatra; but here
Iras again endeavoured to induce her to speak. At the first question,
however, Barine answered that she had no information to give.
The room was as bright as if it were noonday, though the lights flickered
constantly, for the wind found its way through the thin shutters closing
the windows on both sides of the corner room, and a strong, cold draught
swept in. Barine wrapped her cloak more closely around her; the storm
which howled about the sea-washed palace harmonized with the vehement
agitation of her soul. Whether she had looked within or without, there
was nothing which could have soothed her save the assurance of being
loved--an assurance that held fear at bay. Now, indignation prevented
dread from overpowering her, yet calm consideration could not fail to
show her that danger threatened on every hand. The very manner in which
Iras and Alexas whispered together, without heeding her presence, boded
peril, for courtiers show such contempt only to those whom they know are
threatened with the indifference or resentment of the sovereign. Barine,
during her married life with a man devoid of all delicacy of feeling, and
with a disposition as evil as his tongue was ready, had learned to endure
many things which were hard to bear; yet when, after a remark from Iras
evidently concerning her, she heard Alexas laugh, she was compelled to
exert the utmost self-restraint to avoid telling her enemy how utterly
she despised the cowardly cruelty of her conduct. But she succeeded in
keeping silent. Still, the painful constraint she imposed on herself must
find vent in some way, and, as the tortured anguish of her soul reached
its height, large tears rolled down her cheeks.
These, too, were noticed by her enemy and made the target of her wit; but
this time the sarcasm failed to produce its effect upon the Syrian, for,
instead of laughing, he grew grave, and whispered something which seemed
to Barine a reproof or a warning. Iras's reply was merely a contemptuous
shrug of the shoulders.
Barine had noticed long before that her mother, in her fear and
bewilderment, had brought her own cloak instead of her daughter's, and
this circumstance also did not seem to her foe too trivial for a sneer.
But the childish insolence that seemed to have taken possession of one
who usually by no means lacked dignity, was merely the mask beneath which
she concealed her own suffering. A grave motive was the source of the
mirth by which she affected to be moved at the sight of her enemy's
cloak. The grey, ill-fitting garment disfigured Barine, and she desired
that the Queen should feel confident of surpassing her rival even in
outward charms. No one, not even Cleopatra, could dispense with a
protecting wrap in this cold draught, and nothing suited her better than
the purple mantle in whose delicate woollen fabric black and gold dragons
and griffins were embroidered. Iras had taken care that it lay ready.
Barine could not fail to appear like a beggar in comparison, though
Alexas said that her blue kerchief was marvellously becoming.
He was a base-minded voluptuary, who, aided by rich gifts of mind and
wide knowledge, had shunned no means of ingratiating himself with Antony,
the most lavish of patrons. The repulse which this man, accustomed to
success, had received from Barine had been hard to forget, yet he did not
resign the hope of winning her. Never had she seemed more desirable than
in her touching weakness. Even base natures are averse to witnessing the
torture of the defenceless, and when Iras had aimed another poisoned
shaft at her, he ventured, at the risk of vexing his ally, to say, under
his breath:
"Condemned criminals are usually granted, before their end, a favourite
dish. I have no cause to wish Barine anything good; but I would not
grudge that. You, on the contrary, seem to delight in pouring wormwood on
her last mouthful."
"Certainly," she answered, her eyes sparkling brightly. "Malice is the
purest of pleasures; at least to me, when exercised on this woman."
The Syrian, with a strange smile, held out his hand, saying: "Keep your
good-will towards me, Iras."
"Because," she retorted with a sneer, "evil may follow my enmity. I think
so, too. I am not especially sensitive concerning myself, but whoever
dares"--here she raised her voice--"to harm one whom I--Just listen to
the cheers! How she carries all hearts with her! Though Fate had made her
a beggar, she would still be peerless among women. She is like the sun.
The clouds which intrude upon her pathway of radiance are consumed and
disappear."
While uttering the last sentence she had turned towards Barine, whose ear
the sharp voice again pierced like a thorn, as she commanded her to
prepare for the examination.
Almost at the same moment the door, caught by the wind, closed with a
loud bang. The "introducer"--[Marshal of the court.]--had opened it, and,
after a hasty glance, exclaimed:
"The audience will not be given in this meeting place for all the winds
of heaven! Her Majesty desires to receive her late visitor in the Hall of
Shells."
With these words he bowed courteously to Barine, and ushered her and her
two companions through several corridors and apartments into a
well-heated anteroom.
Here even the windows were thoroughly protected from the storm. Several
body-guards and pages belonging to the corps of the "royal boys" stood
waiting to receive them.
"This is comfortable." said Alexas, turning to Iras. "Was the winter we
have just experienced intended to fill us with twofold gratitude for the
delights of the mild spring in this blessed room?"
"Perhaps so," she answered sullenly, and then added in a low tone: "Here
at Lochias the seasons do not follow their usual course. They change
according to the pleasure of the supreme will. Instead of four, the
Egyptians, as you know, have but three; in the palaces on the Nile they
are countless. What is the meaning of this sudden entry of summer? Winter
would have pleased me better."
The Queen--Iras knew not why--had changed her arrangements for Barine's
reception. This vexed her, and her features assumed a gloomy, threatening
expression as the young beauty, casting aside her cloak and kerchief,
stood awaiting Cleopatra in a white robe of fine material and perfect
fit. The thick, fair braids, wound simply around her shapely head, gave
her an appearance of almost childish youth, and the sight made Iras feel
as if she, and Cleopatra also, were outwitted.
In the dimly lighted atrium of the house near the Paneum garden, she had
noticed only that Barine wore something white. Had it been merely a night
robe, so much the better. But she might have appeared in her present garb
at the festival of Isis. The most careful deliberation could have
selected nothing more suitable or becoming. And did this vain woman go to
rest with costly gold ornaments? Else how did the circlet chance to be on
her arm? Each of Cleopatra's charms seemed to Iras, who knew them all,
like a valuable possession of her own. To see even the least of them
surpassed by another vexed her; and to behold in yonder woman a form
which she could not deny was no less beautiful, enraged, nay, pierced her
to the heart.
Since she had known that because of Barine she could hope for nothing
more from the man to whose love she believed she possessed a claim dating
from their childhood, she had hated the young beauty. And now to the many
things which contributed to increase her hostile mood, was added the
disagreeable consciousness that during the last few hours she had treated
her contemptibly. Had she only seen earlier what her foe's cloak
concealed, she would have found means to give her a different appearance.
But she must remain as she was; for Chairman had already entered. Other
hours, however, would follow, and if the next did not decide the fate of
the woman whom she hated, future ones should.
For this purpose she did not need the aid of Charmian, her uncle
Archibius's sister, who had hitherto been a beloved associate and
maternal friend. But what had happened? Iras fancied that her pleasant
features wore a repellent expression which she had never seen before. Was
this also the singer's fault? And what was the cause?
The older woman's manner decided the question whether she should still
bestow upon her returned relative the love of a grateful niece. No, she
would no longer put any restraint upon herself. Charmian should feel that
she (Iras) considered any favour shown to her foe an insult. To work
against her secretly was not in her nature. She had courage to show an
enemy her aversion, and she did not fear Charmian enough to pursue a
different course. She knew that the artist Leonax, Barine's father, had
been Charmian's lover; but this did not justify her favouring the woman
who had robbed her niece of the heart of the man whom she--as Charmian
knew--had loved from childhood.
Charmian had just had a long conversation with her brother, and had also
learned in the palace that Barine had been summoned to the Queen's
presence in the middle of the night; so, firmly persuaded that evil was
intended to the young woman who had already passed through so many
agitating scenes of joy and sorrow, she entered the waiting-room, and her
pleasant though no longer youthful face, framed in smooth, grey hair, was
greeted by Barine as the shipwrecked mariner hails the sight of land.
All the emotions which had darkened and embittered her soul were soothed.
She hastened towards her friend's sister, as a frightened child seeks its
mother, and Charmian perceived what was stirring in her heart.
It would not do, under existing circumstances, to kiss her in the palace,
but she drew Leonax's daughter towards her to show Iras that she was
ready to extend a protecting hand over the persecuted woman. But Barine
gazed at her with pleading glances, beseeching aid, whispering amid her
tears: "Help me, Charmian. She has tortured, insulted, humiliated me with
looks and words--so cruelly, so spitefully! Help me; I can bear no more."
Charmian shook her kind head and urged her in a whisper to calm herself.
She had robbed Iras of her lover; she should remember that. Cost what it
might, she must not shed another tear. The Queen was gracious. She,
Charmian, would aid her. Everything would depend on showing herself to
Cleopatra as she was, not as slander represented her. She must answer her
as she would Archibius or herself.
The kindly woman, as she spoke, stroked her brow and eyes with maternal
tenderness, and Barine felt as if goodness itself had quelled the tempest
in her soul. She gazed around her as though roused from a troubled dream,
and now for the first time perceived the richly adorned room in which she
stood, the admiring glances of the boys in the Macedonian corps of pages,
and the bright fire blazing cheerily on the hearth. The howling of the
storm increased the pleasant sense of being under a firm roof, and Iras,
who had whispered to the "introducer" at the door, no longer seemed like
a sharp thorn or a spiteful demon, but a woman by no means destitute of
charm, who repulsed her, but on whom she had inflicted the keenest pang a
woman's heart can suffer. Then she again thought of her wounded lover at
home, and remembered that, whatever might happen, his heart did not
belong to Iras, but to her alone. Lastly, she recalled Archibius's
description of Cleopatra's childhood, and this remembrance was followed
by the conviction that the omnipotent sovereign would be neither cruel
nor unjust, and that it would depend upon herself to win her favour.
Charmian, too, was the Queen's confidante; and if the manner of Iras and
Alexas had alarmed her, Charmian's might well inspire confidence.
All these thoughts darted through her brain with the speed of lightning.
Only a brief time for consideration remained; for, even as she bowed her
head on the bosom of her friend, the "introducer" entered the room,
crying, "Her illustrious Majesty will expect those whom she summoned in a
few minutes!"
Soon after a chamberlain appeared, waving a fan of ostrich feathers and,
preceded by the court official, they passed through several brilliantly
lighted, richly furnished rooms.
Barine again breathed freely and moved with head erect; and when the
wide, lofty folding doors of ebony, against whose deep black surface the
inlaid figures of Tritons, mermaids, shells, fish, and sea monsters were
sharply relieved, she beheld a glittering, magnificent scene, for the
hall which Cleopatra had chosen for her reception was completely covered
with various marine forms, from the shells to coral and starfish.
A wide, lofty structure, composed of masses of stalactites and unhewn
blocks of stone, formed a deep grotto at the end of the hall, whence
peered the gigantic head of a monster whose open jaws formed the
fireplace of the chimney. Logs of fragrant Arabian wood were blazing
brightly on the hearth, and the dragon's ruby glass eyes diffused a red
light through the apartment which, blended with the rays of the white and
pink lamps in the shape of lotus flowers fastened among gold and silver
tendrils and groups of sedges on the walls and ceiling, filling the
spacious apartment with the soft light whose roseate hue was specially
becoming to Cleopatra's waxen complexion.
Several stewards and cup-bearers, the master of the hunt, chamberlains,
female attendants, eunuchs, and other court officials were awaiting the
Queen, and pages who belonged to the Macedonian cadet corps of royal boys
stood sleepily, with drooping heads, around the small throne of gold,
coral, and amber which, placed opposite to the chimney, awaited the
sovereign.
Barine had already seen this magnificent hall, and others still more
beautiful in the Sebasteum, and the splendour therefore neither excited
nor abashed her; only she would fain have avoided the numerous train of
courtiers. Could it be Cleopatra's intention to question her before the
eyes of all these men, women, and boys?
She no longer felt afraid, but her heart still throbbed quickly. It had
beat in the same way in her girlhood, when she was asked to sing in the
presence of strangers.
At last she heard doors open, and an invisible hand parted the heavy
curtains at her right. She expected to see the Regent, the Keeper of the
Seal, and the whole brilliantly adorned train of attendants who always
surrounded the Queen on formal occasions, enter the magnificent hall.
Else why had it been selected as the scene of this nocturnal trial?
But what was this?
While she was still recalling the display at the Adonis festival, the
curtains began to close again. The courtiers around the throne
straightened their bowed figures, the pages forgot their fatigue, and all
joined in the Greek salutation of welcome, and the "Life! happiness!
health!" with which the Egyptians greeted their sovereign.
The woman of middle height who now appeared before the curtain, and who,
as she crossed the wide hall alone and unattended, seemed to Barine even
smaller than when surrounded by the gay throng at the Adonis festival,
must be the Queen. Ay, it was she!
Iras was already standing by her side, and Charmian was approaching with
the "introducer." The women rendered her various little services thus
Iras took from her shoulders the purple mantle, with its embroidery of
black and gold dragons. What an exquisite masterpiece of the loom it must
be!
All the dangers against which she must defend herself flashed swiftly
through Barine's mind; yet, for an instant, she felt the foolish feminine
desire to see and handle the costly mantle.
But Iras had already laid it on the arm of one of the waiting maids, and
Cleopatra now glanced around her, and with a youthful, elastic step
approached the throne.
Once more the feeling of timidity which she had had in her girlhood
overpowered Barine, but with it came the memory of the garden of
Epicurus, and Archibius's assurance that she, too, would have left the
Queen with her heart overflowing with warm enthusiasm had not a
disturbing influence interposed between them.
Yet, had this disturbing influence really existed? No. It was created
solely by Cleopatra's jealous imagination. If she would only permit her
to speak freely now, she should hear that Antony cared as little for her
as she, Barine, for the boy Caesarion. What prevented her from confessing
that her heart was another's? Iras had no one to blame save herself if
she spoke the truth pitilessly in her presence.
Cleopatra now turned to the "introducer," waving her hand towards the
throne and those who surrounded it.
Ay, she was indeed beautiful. How bright and clear was the light of her
large eyes, in spite of the harassing days through which she had passed
and the present night of watching!
Cleopatra's heart was still elated by the reception of her bold idea of
escape, and she approached Barine with gentler feelings and intentions.
She had chosen a pleasanter room for the interview than the one Iras had
selected. She desired a special environment to suit each mood, and as
soon as she saw the group of courtiers who surrounded the throne she
ordered their dismissal.
The "introducer," to carry out the usual ceremonial, had commanded their
presence in the audience chamber, but their attendance had given the
meeting a form which was now distasteful to the Queen. She wished to
question, not to condemn.
At so happy an hour it was a necessity of her nature to be gracious.
Perhaps she had been unduly anxious concerning this singer. It even
seemed probable; for a man who loved her like Antony could scarcely yearn
for the favour of another woman. This view had been freshly confirmed by
a brief conversation with the chief Inspector of Sacrifices, an estimable
old man, who, after hearing how Antony had hurried in pursuit of her at
Actium, raised his eyes and hands as if transported with rapture,
exclaiming: "Unhappy Queen! Yet happiest of women! No one was ever so
ardently beloved; and when the tale is told of the noble Trojan who
endured such sore sufferings for a woman's sake, future generations will
laud the woman whose resistless spell constrained the greatest man of his
day, the hero of heroes, to cast aside victory, fame, and the hope of the
world's sovereignty, as mere worthless rubbish."
Posterity, whose verdict she dreaded--this wise old reader of the future
was right--must extol her as the most fervently beloved, the most
desirable of women.
And Mark Antony? Even had the magic power of Nektanebus's goblet forced
him to follow her and to leave the battle, there still remained his will,
a copy of which--received from Rome--Zeno, the Keeper of the Seal, had
showed to her at the close of the council. "Wherever he might die," so
ran the words, "he desired to be buried by the side of Cleopatra."
Octavianus had wrested it from the Vestal Virgins, to whose care it had
been entrusted, in order to fill the hearts of Roman citizens and matrons
with indignation against his foe. The plot had succeeded, but the
document had reminded Cleopatra that her heart had given this man the
first of its flowers, that love for him had been the sunshine of her
life. So, with head erect, she had crossed the threshold where she was to
meet the woman who had ventured to sow tares in her garden. She intended
to devote only a short time to the interview, which she anticipated with
the satisfaction of the strong who are confident of victory.
As she approached the throne, her train left the hall; the only persons
who remained were Charmian, Iras, Zeno, the Keeper of the Seal, and the
"introducer."
Cleopatra cast a rapid glance at the throne, to which an obsequious
gesture of the courtier's hand invited her; but she remained standing,
gazing keenly at Barine.
Was it the coloured rays from the ruby eyes of the dragon in the
fireplace which shed the roseate glow on Cleopatra's cheeks? It certainly
enhanced the beauty of a face now only too frequently pallid and
colourless, when rouge did not lend its aid; but Barine understood
Archibius's ardent admiration for this rare woman, when Cleopatra, with a
faint smile, requested her to approach.
Nothing more winning could be imagined than the frank kindness, wholly
untinged by condescending pride, of this powerful sovereign.
The less Barine had expected such a reception the more deeply it moved
her; nay, her eyes grew dim with grateful emotion, which lent them so
beautiful a lustre, she looked so lovely in her glad surprise, that
Cleopatra thought the months which had elapsed since her first meeting
with the singer had enhanced her charms. And how young she was! The Queen
swiftly computed the years which Barine must have lived as the wife of
Philostratus, and afterwards as the attractive mistress of a hospitable
house, and found it difficult to reconcile the appearance of this
blooming young creature with the result of the calculation.
She was surprised, too, to note the aristocratic bearing whose possession
no one could deny the artist's daughter. This was apparent even in her
dress, yet Iras had roused her in the middle of the night, and certainly
had given her no time for personal adornment.
She had expected lack of refinement and boldness, in the woman who was
said to have attracted so many men, but even the most bitter prejudice
could have detected no trace of it. On the contrary, the embarrassment
which she could not yet wholly subdue lent her an air of girlish
timidity. All in all, Barine was a charming creature, who bewitched men
by her vivacity, her grace, and her exquisite voice, not by coquetry and
pertness. That she possessed unusual mental endowments Cleopatra did not
believe. Barine had only one advantage over her--youth.
Time had not yet robbed the former of a single charm, while from the
Queen he had wrested many; their number was known only to herself and her
confidantes, but at this hour she did not miss them.
Barine, with a low, modest bow, advanced towards the Queen, who commenced
the conversation by graciously apologizing for the late hour at which she
had summoned her. "But," she added, "you belong to the ranks of the
nightingales, who during the night most readily and exquisitely reveal to
us what stirs their hearts--"
Barine gazed silently at the floor a moment, and when she raised her eyes
her voice was faint and timid. "I sing, it is true, your Majesty, but I
have nothing else in common with the birds. The wings which, when a
child, bore me wherever I desired, have lost their strength. They do not
wholly refuse their service, but they now require favourable hours to
move."
"I should not have expected that in the time of your youth, your most
beautiful possession," replied the Queen. "Yet it is well. I too--how
long ago it seems!--was a child, and my imagination outstripped even the
flight of the eagle. It could dare the risk unpunished. Now----Whoever
has reached mature life is wise to let these wings remain idle. The
mortal who ventures to use them may easily approach too near the sun,
and, like Icarus, the wax will melt from his pinions. Let me tell you
this: To the child the gift of imagination is nourishing bread. In later
years we need it only as salt, as spice, as stimulating wine. Doubtless
it points out many paths, and shows us their end; but, of a hundred
rambles to which it summons him, scarcely one pleases the mature man. No
troublesome parasite is more persistently and sharply rebuffed. Who can
blame the ill-treated friend if it is less ready to serve us as the years
go on? The wise man will keep his ears ever open, but rarely lend it his
active hand. To banish it from life is to deprive the plant of blossoms,
the rose of its fragrance, the sky of its stars."
"I have often said the same things to myself, though in a less clear and
beautiful form, when life has been darkened," replied Barine, with a
faint blush; for she felt that these words were doubtless intended to
warn her against cherishing too aspiring wishes. "But, your Majesty, here
also the gods place you, the great Queen, far above us. We should often
find existence bare indeed but for the fancy which endows us with
imaginary possessions. You have the power to secure a thousand things
which to us common mortals only the gift of imagination pictures as
attainable."
"You believe that happiness is like wealth, and that the happiest person
is the one who receives the largest number of the gifts of fortune,"
answered the Queen. "The contrary, I think, can be easily proved. The
maxim that the more we have the less we need desire, is also false,
though in this world there are only a certain number of desirable things.
He who already possesses one of ten solidi which are to be divided, ought
really to desire only nine, and therefore would be poorer by a wish than
another who has none. True, it cannot be denied that the gods have
burdened or endowed me with a greater number of perishable gifts than you
and many others. You seem to set a high value upon them. Doubtless there
may be one or another which you could appropriate only by the aid of the
imagination. May I ask which seems to you the most desirable?"
"Spare me the choice, I beseech you," replied Barine in an embarrassed
tone. "I need nothing from your treasures, and, as for the other
possessions I lack many things; but it is uncertain how the noblest and
highest gifts in the possession of the marvellously endowed favourite of
the gods would suit the small, commonplace ones I call mine, and I know
not--"
"A sensible doubt!" interrupted the Queen. "The lame man, who desired a
horse, obtained one, and on his first ride broke his neck. The only
blessing--the highest of all--which surely bestows happiness can neither
be given away nor transferred from one to another. He who has gained it
may be robbed of it the next moment."
The last sentence had fallen from the Queen's lips slowly and
thoughtfully, but Barine, remembering Archibius's tale, said modestly,
"You are thinking of the chief good mentioned by Epicurus--perfect peace
of mind."
Cleopatra's eyes sparkled with a brighter light as she asked eagerly, "Do
you, the granddaughter of a philosopher, know the system of the master?"
"Very superficially, your Majesty. My intellect is far inferior to yours.
It is difficult for me thoroughly to comprehend all the details of any
system of philosophy."
"Yet you have attempted it?"
"Others endeavoured to introduce me into the doctrines of the Stoics. I
have forgotten most of what I learned; only one thing lingered in my
memory, and I know why--because it pleased me."
"And that?"
"Was the wise law of living according to the dictates of our own natures.
The command to shun everything contradictory to the simple fundamental
traits of our own characters pleased me, and wherever I saw affectation,
artificiality, and mannerism I was repelled, while from my grandfather's
teaching I drew the principle that I could do nothing better than to
remain, so far as life would permit, what I had been as a child ere I had
heard the first word of philosophy, or felt the constraint which society
and its forms impose."
"So the system of the Stoics leads to this end also!" cried the Queen
gaily, and, turning to the companion of her own studies, she added: "Did
you hear, Charmian? If we had only succeeded in perceiving the wisdom and
calm, purposeful order of existence which the Stoics, amid so much that
is perverse, unhealthy, and provocative of contradiction, nevertheless
set above everything else! How can I, in order to live wisely, imitate
Nature, when in her being and action I encounter so much that is
contradictory to my human reason, which is a part of the divine?"
Here she hesitated, and the expression of her face suddenly changed.
She had advanced close to Barine and, while standing directly in front of
her, her eyes had rested on the gem which adorned her arm above the
elbow.
Was it this which agitated Cleopatra so violently that her voice lost its
bewitching melody, as she went on in a harsh, angry tone?--"So that is
the source of all this misfortune. Even as a child I detested that sort
of arbitrary judgment which passes under the mask of stern morality.
There is an example! Do you hear the howling of the storm? In human
nature, as well as in the material world, there are tempests and
volcanoes which bring destruction, and, if the original character of any
individual is full of such devastating forces, like the neighbourhood of
Vesuvius or Etna, the goal to which his impulses would lead him is
clearly visible. Ay, the Stoic is not allowed to destroy the harmony and
order of things in existence, any more than to disturb those which are
established by the state. But to follow our natural impulses wherever
they lead us is so perilous a venture, that whoever has the power to fix
a limit to it betimes is in duty bound to do so. This power is mine, and
I will use it!"
Then, with iron severity, she asked: "As it seems to be one of the
demands of your nature, woman, to allure and kindle the hearts of all who
bear the name of man, even though they have not yet donned the garb of
the Ephebi, so, too, you seem to appear to delight in idle ornaments.
Or," and as she spoke she touched Barine's shoulder"--or why should you
wear, during the hours of slumber, that circlet on your arm?"
Barine had watched with increasing anxiety the marked change in the
manner and language of the Queen. She now beheld a repetition of what she
had experienced at the Adonis festival, but this time she knew what had
roused Cleopatra's jealousy. She, Barine, wore on her arm a gift from
Antony. With pallid face she strove to find a fitting answer, but ere she
could do so Iras advanced to the side of the incensed Queen, saying:
"That circlet is the counterpart of the one your august husband bestowed
upon you. The singer's must also be a gift from Mark Antony. Like every
one else in the world, she deems the noble Imperator the greatest man of
his day. Who can blame her for prizing it so highly that she does not
remove it even while she sleeps?"
Again Barine felt as if a thorn had pierced her; but though the
resentment which she had previously experienced once more surged hotly
within her heart, she forced herself to maintain seemly external
composure, and struggled for some word in answer; but she found none
suitable, and remained silent.
She had told the truth. From early youth she had followed the impulses of
her own nature without heeding the opinion of mortals, as the teachings
of the Stoics directed, and she had been allowed to do so because this
nature was pure, truthful, alive to the beautiful, and, moreover, free
from those unbridled, volcanic impulses to which the Queen alluded. The
cheerful patience of her soul had found ample satisfaction in the
cultivation of her art, and in social intercourse with men who permitted
her to share their own intellectual life. Today she had learned that the
first great passion of her heart had met with a response. Now she was
bound to her lover, and knew herself to be pure and guiltless, far better
entitled to demand respect from sterner judges of morality than the woman
who condemned her, or the spiteful Iras, who had not ceased to offer her
love to Dion.
The sorrowful feeling of being misunderstood and unjustly condemned,
mingled with fear of the terrible fate to which she might be sentenced by
the omnipotent sovereign, whose clear intellect was clouded by jealousy
and the resentment of a mother's wounded heart, paralyzed her tongue.
Besides, she was confused by the angry emotion which the sight of Iras
awakened. Twice, thrice she strove to utter a few words of explanation,
defence, but her voice refused to obey her will.
When Charmian at last approached to encourage her, it was too late; the
indignant Queen had turned away, exclaiming to Iras: "let her be taken
back to Lochias. Her guilt is proved; but it does not become the injured
person, the accuser, to award the punishment. This must be left to the
judges before whom we will bring her."
Then Barine once more recovered the power of speech. How dared Cleopatra
assert that she was convicted of a crime, without hearing her defence?
As surely as she felt her own innocence she must succeed in proving it,
and with this consciousness she cried out to the Queen in a tone of
touching entreaty: "O your Majesty, do not leave me without hearing me!
As truly as I believe in your justice, I can ask you to listen to me once
more. Do not give me up to the woman who hates me because the man whom
she--"
Here Cleopatra interrupted her. Royal dignity forbade her to hear one
woman's jealous accusation of another, but, with the subtle discernment
with which women penetrate one another's moods, she heard in Barine's
piteous appeal a sincere conviction that she was too severely condemned.
Doubtless she also had reason to believe in Iras's hate, and Cleopatra
knew how mercilessly she pursued those who had incurred her displeasure.
She had rejected and still shuddered at her advice to remove the singer
from her path; for an inner voice warned her not to burden her soul now
with a fresh crime, which would disturb its peace. Besides, she had at
first been much attracted by this charming, winning creature; but the
irritating thought that Antony had bestowed the same gift upon the
sovereign and the artist's daughter still so incensed her, that it taxed
to the utmost her graciousness and self-control as, without addressing
any special person, she exclaimed, glancing back into the hall: "This
examination will be followed by another. When the time comes, the accused
must appear before the judges; therefore she must remain at Lochias and
in custody. It is my will that no harm befalls her. You are her friend,
Charmian. I will place her in your charge. Only"--here she raised her
voice--"on pain of my anger, do not allow her by any possibility to leave
the palace, even for a moment, or to hold intercourse with any person
save yourself."
With these words she passed out of the hall and went into her own
apartments. She had turned the night into day, not only to despatch
speedily matters which seemed to her to permit of no delay, but even more
because, since the battle of Actium, she dreaded the restless hours upon
her lonely couch. They seemed endless; and though before she had
remembered with pleasure the unprecedented display and magnificence with
which she had surrounded her love-life with Antony, she now in these
hours reproached herself for having foolishly squandered the wealth of
her people. The present appeared unbearable, and from the future a host
of black cares pressed upon her.
The following days were overcrowded with business details.
Half of her nights were spent in the observatory. She had not asked again
for Barine. On the fifth night she permitted Alexas to conduct her once
more to the little observatory which had been erected for her father at
Lochias, and Antony's favourite knew how to prove that a star which had
long threatened her planet was that of the woman whom she seemed to have
forgotten as completely as she had ignored his former warning against
this very foe.
The Queen denied this, but Alexas eagerly continued: "The night after
your return home your kindness was again displayed in its inexhaustible
and--to us less noble souls--incomprehensible wealth. Deeply agitated, we
watched during the memorable examination the touching spectacle of the
greatest heart making itself the standard by which to measure what is
petty and ignoble. But ere the second trial takes place the wanderers
above, who know the future, bid me warn you once more; for that woman's
every look was calculated, every word had its fixed purpose, every tone
of her voice was intended to produce a certain effect. Whatever she said
or may yet say had no other design than to deceive my royal mistress. As
yet there have been no definite questions and answers. But you will have
her examined, and then----What may she not make of the story of Mark
Antony, Barine, and the two armlets? Perhaps it will be a masterpiece."
"Do you know its real history?" asked Cleopatra, clasping her fingers
more closely around the pencil in her hand.
"If I did," replied Alexas, smiling significantly, "the receiver of
stolen goods should not betray the thief."
"Not even if the person who has been robbed--the Queen--commands you to
give up the dishonestly acquired possession?"
"Unfortunately, even then I should be forced to withhold obedience; for
consider, my royal mistress, there are but two great luminaries around
which my dark life revolves. Shall I betray the moon, when I am sure of
gaining nothing thereby save to dim the warm light of the sun?"
"That means that your revelations would wound me, the sun?"
"Unless your lofty soul is too great to be reached by shadows which
surround less noble women with an atmosphere of indescribable torture."
"Do you intend to render your words more attractive by the veil with
which you shroud them? It is transparent, and dims the vision very
little. My soul, you think, should be free from jealousy and the other
weaknesses of my sex. There you are mistaken. I am a woman, and wish to
remain one. As Terence's Chremes says he is a human being, and nothing
human is unknown to him, I do not hesitate to confess all feminine
frailties. Anubis told me of a queen in ancient times who would not
permit the inscriptions to record 'she,' but 'he came,' or 'he, the
ruler, conquered.' Fool! Whatever concerns me, my womanhood is not less
lofty than the crown. I was a woman ere I became Queen. The people
prostrate themselves before my empty litters; but when, in my youth, I
wandered in disguise with Antony through the city streets and visited
some scene of merrymaking, while the men gazed admiringly at me, and we
heard voices behind us murmur, 'A handsome couple!' I returned home full
of joy and pride. But there was something greater still for the woman to
learn, when the heart in the breast of the Queen forgot throne and
sceptre and, in the hours consecrated to Eros, tasted joys known to
womanhood alone. How can you men, who only command and desire, understand
the happiness of sacrifice? I am a woman; my birth does not exalt me
above any feeling of my sex; and what I now ask is not as Queen but as
woman."
"If that is the case," Alexas answered with his hand upon his heart, "you
impose silence upon me; for were I to confess to the woman Cleopatra what
agitates my soul, I should be guilty of a double crime--I would violate a
promise and betray the friend who confided his noble wife to my
protection."
"Now the darkness is becoming too dense for me," replied Cleopatra,
raising her head with repellent pride. "Or, if I choose to raise the
veil, I must point out to you the barriers--
"Which surround the Queen," replied the Syrian with an obsequious bow.
"There you behold the fact. It is an impossibility to separate the woman
from the princess. So far as I am concerned, I do not wish to anger the
former against the presumptuous adorer, and I desire to yield to the
latter the obedience which is her due. Therefore I entreat you to forget
the armlet and its many painful associations, and pass to the
consideration of other matters. Perhaps the fair Barine will voluntarily
confess everything, and even add how she managed to ensnare the amiable
son of the greatest of men, and the most admirable of mothers, the young
King Caesarion."
Cleopatra's eyes flashed more brightly, and she angrily exclaimed: "I
found the boy just now as though he were possessed by demons. He was
ready to tear the bandage from his wound, if he were refused the woman
whom he loved. A magic potion was the first thought, and his tutor of
course attributes everything to magic arts. Charmian, on the contrary,
declares that his visits annoyed and even alarmed Barine. Nothing except
a rigid investigation can throw light upon this subject. We will await
the Imperator's return. Do you think that he will again seek the singer?
You are his most trusted confidant. If you desire his best good, and care
for my favour, drop your hesitation and answer this question."
The Syrian assumed the manner of a man who had reached a decision, and
answered firmly: "Certainly he will, unless you prevent him. The simplest
way would be--"
"Well?"
"To inform him, as soon as he lands, that she is no longer to be found. I
should be especially happy to receive this commission from my royal sun."
"And do you think it would dim the light of your moon a little, were he
to seek her here in vain?"
"As surely as that the contrary would be the case if he were always as
gratefully aware of the peerless brilliancy of his sun as it deserves.
Helios suffers no other orb to appear so long as he adorns the heavens.
His lustre quenches all the rest. Let my sun so decree, and Barine's
little star will vanish."
"Enough! I know your aim now. But a human life is no small thing, and
this woman, too, is the child of a mother. We must consider, earnestly
consider, whether our purpose cannot be gained without proceeding to
extremes. This must be done with zeal and a kindly intention--But I--Now,
when the fate of this country, my own, and the children's is hanging in
the balance, when I have not fifteen minutes at my command, and there is
no end of writing and consulting, I can waste no time on such matters."
"The reflective mind must be permitted to use its mighty wings
unimpeded," cried the Syrian eagerly. "Leave the settlement of minor
matters to trustworthy friends."
Here they were interrupted by the "introducer," who announced the eunuch
Mardion. He had come on business which, spite of the late hour, permitted
no delay.
Alexas accompanied the Queen to the tablinum, where they found the
eunuch. A slave attended him, carrying a pouch filled with letters which
had just been brought by two messengers from Syria. Among them were some
which must be answered without delay. The Keeper of the Seal and the
Exegetus were also waiting. Their late visit was due to the necessity of
holding a conference in relation to the measures to be adopted to calm
the excited citizens. All the galleys which had escaped from the battle
had entered the harbour the day before, wreathed with garlands as if a
great victory had been won. Loud acclamations greeted them, yet tidings
of the defeat at Actium spread with the swiftness of the wind. Crowds
were now gathering, threatening demonstrations had been made in front of
the Sebasteum, and on the square of the Serapeum the troops had been
compelled to interfere, and blood had flowed.
There lay the letters. Zeno remarked that more papers conferring
authority were required for the work on the canal, and the Exegetus
earnestly besought definite instruction.
"It is much--much," murmured Cleopatra. Then, drawing herself up to her
full height, she exclaimed, "Well, then, to work!"
But Alexas did not permit her to do this at once. Humbly advancing as she
took her seat at the large writing-table, he whispered: "And with all
this, must my royal mistress devote time and thought to the destroyer of
her peace. To disturb your Majesty with this trifle is a crime; yet it
must be committed, for should the affair remain unheeded longer, the
trickling rivulet may become a mountain torrent--"
Here Cleopatra, whose glance had just rested upon a fateful letter from
King Herod, turned her face half towards her husband's favourite,
exclaiming curtly, with glowing cheeks, "Presently."
Then she glanced rapidly over the letter, pushed it excitedly aside, and
dismissed the waiting Syrian with the impatient words: "Attend to the
trial and the rest. No injustice, but no untimely mildness. I will look
into this unpleasant matter myself before the Imperator returns."
"And the authority?" asked the Syrian, with another low bow.
"You have it. If you need a written one, apply to Zeno. We will discuss
the affair further at some less busy hour."
The Syrian retired; but Cleopatra turned to the eunuch and, flushed with
emotion, cried, pointing to the King of Judea's letter: "Did you ever
witness baser ingratitude? The rats think the ship is sinking, and it is
time to leave it. If we succeed in keeping above water, they will return
in swarms; and this must, must, must be done, for the sake of this
beloved country and her independence. Then the children, the children!
All our powers must now be taxed, every expedient must be remembered and
used. We will hammer each feeble hope until it becomes the strong steel
of certainty. We will transform night into day. The canal will save the
fleet. Mark Antony will find in Africa Pinarius Scarpus with untouched
loyal legions. The gladiators are faithful to us. We can easily make them
ours, and my brain is seething with other plans. But first we will attend
to the Alexandrians. No violence!"
This exclamation was followed by order after order, and the promise that,
if necessary, she would show herself to the people.
The Exegetus was filled with admiration as he received the clear,
sagacious directions. After he had retired with his companions, the Queen
again turned to the Regent, saying: "We did wisely to make the people
happy at first with tidings of victory. The unexpected news of terrible
disaster might have led them to some unprecedented deed of madness.
Disappointment is a more common pain, for which less powerful remedies
will suffice. Besides, many things could be arranged ere they knew that I
was here. How much we have accomplished already, Mardion! But I have not
even granted myself the joy of seeing my children. I was forced to defer
the pleasure of the companionship of my oldest friends, even Archibius.
When he comes again he will be admitted. I have given the order. He knows
Rome thoroughly. I must hear his opinion of pending negotiations."
She shivered as she spoke, and pressing her hand upon her brow,
exclaimed: "Octavianus victor, Cleopatra vanquished! I, who was
everything to Caesar, beseeching mercy from his heir. I, a petitioner to
Octavia's brother! Yet, no, no! There are still a hundred chances of
avoiding the horrible doom. But whoever wishes to compel the field to
bear fruits must dig sturdily, draw the buckets from the well, plough,
and sow the seed. To work, then, to work! When Antony returns he must
find all things ready. The first success will restore his lost energy. I
glanced through yonder letter while talking with the Exegetus; now I will
dictate the answer."
So she sat reading, writing, and dictating, listening, answering, and
giving orders, until the east brightened with the approach of dawn, the
morning star grew pale, and the Regent, utterly exhausted, entreated her
to consider her own health and his years, and permit him a few hours'
rest.
Then she, too, allowed herself to be led into her darkened chamber, and
this time a friendly, dreamless slumber closed her weary eyes and held
her captive until roused by the loud shouts of the multitude, who had
heard of the Queen's return and flocked to Lochias.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Without heeding the opinion of mortals
CLEOPATRA
By Georg Ebers
Volume 6.
CHAPTER XIII.
During these hours of rest Iras and Charmian had watched in turn beside
Cleopatra. When she rose, the younger attendant rendered her the
necessary services. She was to devote herself to her mistress until the
evening; for her companion, who now stood in her way, was not to return
earlier. Before Charmian left, she had seen that her apartments--in which
Barine, since the Queen had placed her in her charge, had been a welcome
guest--were carefully watched. The commander of the Macedonian guard, who
years before had vainly sought her favour, and finally had become the
most loyal of her friends, had promised to keep them closely.
Yet Iras knew how to profit by her mistress's sleep and the absence of
her aunt. She had learned that she would be shut out of her apartments,
and therefore from Barine also. Ere any step could be taken against the
prisoner, she must first arrange the necessary preliminaries with Alexas.
The failure of her expectation of seeing her rival trampled in the dust
had transformed her jealous resentment into hatred, and though she was
her niece, she even transferred a portion of it to Charmian, who had
placed herself between her and her victim.
She had sent for the Syrian, but he, too, had gone to rest at a late hour
and kept her waiting a long time. The reception which the impatient girl
bestowed was therefore by no means cordial, but her manner soon grew more
friendly.
First Alexas boasted of having induced the Queen to commit Barine's fate
to him. If he should try her at noon and find her guilty, there was
nothing to prevent him from compelling her to drink the poisoned cup or
having her strangled before evening. But the matter would be dangerous,
because the singer's friends were numerous and by no means powerless.
Yet, in the depths of her heart, Cleopatra desired nothing more ardently
than to rid herself of her dangerous rival. But he knew the great ones of
the earth. If he acted energetically and brought matters to a speedy
close, the Queen, to avoid evil gossip, would burden him with her own
act. Antony's mood could not be predicted, and the Syrian's weal or woe
depended on his favour. Besides, the execution of the singer at the last
Adonis festival might have a dangerous effect upon the people of
Alexandria. They were already greatly excited, and his brother, who knew
them, said that some were overwhelmed with sorrow, and others ready, in
their fury, to rise in a bloody rebellion. Everything was to be feared
from this rabble, but Philostratus understood how to persuade them to
many things, and Alexas had just secured his aid.
Alexas had really succeeded in the work of reconciliation. During the
orator's married life with Barine she had forbidden her brother-in-law
the house, and her husband had quarrelled with the brother who sought his
wife. But after the latter had risen to a high place in Antony's favour,
and been loaded with gold by his lavish hand, Philostratus had again
approached him to claim his share of the new wealth. And the source from
which Alexas drew flowed so abundantly that his favourite did not find it
difficult to give. Both men were as unprincipled as they were lavish, and
experience taught them that base natures always have at their disposal a
plank with which to bridge chasms. If it is of gold, it will be crossed
the more speedily. Such was the case here, and of late it had become
specially firm; for each needed the other's aid.
Alexas loved Barine, while Philostratus no longer cared for her. On the
other hand, he hated Dion with so ardent a thirst for revenge that, to
obtain it, he would have resigned even the hope of fresh gains. The
humiliation inflicted upon him by the arrogant Macedonian noble, and the
derision which through his efforts had been heaped upon him, haunted him
like importunate pursuers; and he felt that he could only rid himself of
them with the source of his disgrace. Without his brother's aid, he would
have been content to assail Dion with his slandering tongue; with his
powerful assistance he could inflict a heavier injury upon him, perhaps
even rob him of liberty and life. They had just made an agreement by
which Philostratus pledged himself to reconcile the populace to any
punishment that might be inflicted upon Barine, and Alexas promised to
help his brother take a bloody vengeance upon Dion the Macedonian.
Barine's death could be of no service to Alexas. The sight of her beauty
had fired his heart a second time, and he was resolved to make her his
own. In the dungeon, perhaps by torture, she should be forced to grasp
his helping hand. All this would permit no delay. Everything must be done
before the return of Antony, who was daily expected. Alexas's lavish
patron had made him so rich that he could bear to lose his favour for the
sake of this object. Even without it, he could maintain a household with
royal magnificence in some city of his Syrian home.
On receiving the favourite's assurance that he would remove Barine from
Charmian's protection on the morrow, Iras became more gracious. She could
make no serious objection to his statement that the new trial might not,
it is true, end in a sentence of death, but the verdict would probably be
transportation to the mines, or something of the sort.
Then Alexas cautiously tested Iras's feelings towards his brother's
mortal foe. They were hostile; yet when the favourite intimated that he,
too, ought to be given up to justice, she showed so much hesitation, that
Alexas stopped abruptly and turned the conversation upon Barine. Here she
promised assistance with her former eager zeal, and it was settled that
the arrest should be made the following morning during the hours of
Charmian's attendance upon the Queen.
Iras had valuable counsel to offer. She was familiar with one of the
prisons, whose doors she had opened to many a hapless mortal whose
disappearance, in her opinion, might be of service to the Queen. She had
deemed it a duty, aided by the Keeper of the Seal, to anticipate her
mistress in cases where her kind heart would have found it difficult to
pronounce a severe sentence, and Cleopatra had permitted it, though
without commendation or praise. What happened within its walls--thanks to
the silence of the warder--never passed beyond the portals. If Barine
cursed her life there, she would still fare better than she, Iras, who
during the past few nights had been on the brink of despair whenever she
thought of the man who had disdained her love and abandoned her for
another.
As the Syrian held out his hand to take leave, she asked bluntly
"And Dion?"
"He cannot be set free," was the reply, "for he loves Barine; nay, the
fool was on the eve of leading her home to his beautiful palace as its
mistress."
"Is that true, really true?" asked Iras, whose cheeks and lips lost every
tinge of colour, though she succeeded in maintaining her composure.
"He confessed it yesterday in a letter to his uncle, the Keeper of the
Seal, in which he entreated him to do his utmost for his chosen bride,
whom he would never resign. But Zeno has no liking for this niece. Do you
wish to see the letter?"
"Then, of course, he cannot be set at liberty," replied Iras, and there
was additional shrillness in her voice. "He will do everything in his
power for the woman he loves, and that is much--far more than you, who
are half a stranger here, suspect. The Macedonian families stand by each
other. He is a member of the council. The bands of the Ephebi will
support him to a man. And the populace?--He lately spoiled the game of
your brother, who was acting for me, in a way. He was finally dragged out
of the basin of the fountain, dripping with water and overwhelmed with
shame."
"For that very reason his mouth must be closed."
Iras nodded assent, but after a short pause she exclaimed angrily: "I
will help you to silence him, but not forever. Do you hear? Theodotus's
saying about the dead dogs which do not bite brought no blessing to any
one who followed it. There are other ways of getting rid of this man."
"A bird sang that you were not unfriendly to him."
"A bird? Then it was probably an owl, which cannot see in the daylight.
His worst enemy, your brother, would probably sacrifice himself for his
welfare sooner than I."
"Then I shall begin to feel sympathy for this Dion."
"I saw recently that your compassion surpassed mine. Death is not the
hardest punishment."
"Is that the cause of this gracious respite?"
"Perhaps so. But there are other matters to be considered here. First,
the condition of the times. Everything is tottering, even the royal
power, which a short time ago was a wall which concealed many things and
afforded shelter from every assault. Then Dion himself. I have already
numbered those who will support him. Since the defeat at Actium, the
Queen can no longer exclaim to that many-headed monster, the people, 'You
must,' but 'I entreat.' The others--"
"The first considerations are enough; but may I be permitted to know what
my wise friend has awarded to the hapless wight from whom she withdrew
her favour?"
"First, imprisonment here at Lochias. He has stained his hands with the
blood of Caesarion, the King of kings. That is high treason, even in the
eyes of the people. Try to obtain the order for the arrest this very
day."
"Whenever I can disturb the Queen with such matters."
"Not for nay sake, but to save her from injury. Away with everything
which can cloud her intellect in these decisive days! First, away with
Barine, who spoiled her return home; and then let us take care of the man
who would be capable, for this woman's sake, of causing an insurrection
in Alexandria. The great cares associated with the state and the throne
are hers; for the minor ones of the toilet and the heart I will provide."
Here she was interrupted by one of Cleopatra's waiting-maids. The Queen
had awakened, and Iras hastened to her post.
As she passed Charmian's apartments and saw two handsome soldiers,
belonging to the Macedonian body-guard, pacing to and fro on duty before
them, her face darkened. It was against her alone that Charmian was
protecting Barine. She had been harshly reproved by the older woman on
account of the artist's daughter, who had been the source of so many
incidents which had caused her pain, and Iras regretted that she had ever
confided to her aunt her love for Dion. But, no matter what might happen,
the upas-tree whence emanated all these tortures, anxieties, and
vexations, must be rooted out--stricken from the ranks of the living.
Ere she entered the Queen's anteroom she had mentally pronounced sentence
of death on her enemy. Her inventive brain was now busy in devising means
to induce the Syrian to undertake its execution. If this stone of offence
was removed it would again be possible to live in harmony with Charmian.
Dion would be free, and then, much as he had wounded her, she would
defend him from the hatred of Philostratus and his brother.
She entered the Queen's presence with a lighter heart. The death of a
condemned person had long since ceased to move her deeply. While
rendering the first services to her mistress, who had been much refreshed
by her sleep, her face grew brighter and brighter; for Cleopatra
voluntarily told her that she was glad to have her attendance, and not be
constantly annoyed by the same disagreeable matter, which must soon be
settled.
In fact, Charmian, conscious that no one else at court would have
ventured to do so, had never grown weary, spite of many a rebuff, of
pleading Barine's cause until, the day before, Cleopatra, in a sudden fit
of anger, had commanded her not to mention the mischief-maker again.
When Charmian soon after requested permission to let Iras take her place
the following day, the Queen already regretted the harsh reproof she had
given her friend, and, while cordially granting the desired leave, begged
her to attribute her angry impatience to the cares which burdened her.
"And when you show me your kind, faithful face again," she concluded,
"you will have remembered that a true friend withholds from an unhappy
woman whom she loves whatever will shadow more deeply her already clouded
life. This Barine's very name sounds like a jeer at the composure I
maintain with so much difficulty. I do not wish to hear it again."
The words were uttered in a tone so affectionate and winning, that
Charmian's vexation melted like ice in the sun. Yet she left the Queen's
presence anxious and troubled; for ere she quitted the room Cleopatra
remarked that she had committed the singer's affairs to Alexas. She was
now doubly eager to obtain a day's freedom, for she knew the unprincipled
favourite's feelings towards the young beauty, and longed to discuss with
Archibius the best means of guarding her from the worst perils.
When at a late hour she went to rest, she was served by the Nubian maid,
who had accompanied her to the court from her parents' home. She came
from the Cataract, where she had been bought when the family of Alypius
accompanied the child Cleopatra to the island of Philae. Anukis was given
to Charmian, who at the time was just entering womanhood, as the first
servant who was her sole property, and she had proved so clever, skilful,
apt to learn, and faithful, that her mistress took her, as her personal
attendant, to the palace.
Charmian's warm, unselfish love for the Queen was equalled by Anukis's
devotion to the mistress who had long since made her free, and had become
so strongly attached to her that the Nubian's interests were little less
regarded than her own. Her sound, keen judgment and natural wit had
gained a certain renown in the palace, and as Cleopatra often
condescended to rouse her to an apt answer, Antony had done so, too; and
since the slight crook in the back, which she had from childhood, had
grown into a hump, he gave her the name of Aisopion--the female AEsop.
All the Queen's attendants now used it, and though others of lower rank
did the same, she permitted it, though her ready wit would have supplied
her tongue with a retort sharp enough to respond to any word which
displeased her.
But she knew the life and fables of AEsop, who had also once been a
slave, and deemed it an honour to be compared with him.
When Charmian had left Cleopatra and sought her chamber, she found Barine
sound asleep, but Anukis was awaiting her, and her mistress told her with
what deep anxiety for Barine she had quitted the presence of the Queen.
She knew that the Nubian was fond of the young matron, whom in her
childhood she had carried in her arms, and whose father, Leonax, had
often jested with her. The maid had watched her career with much
interest, and while Barine had been her mistress's guest her efforts to
amuse and soothe her were unceasing.
She had gone every morning to Berenike to ask tidings of Dion's health,
and always brought favourable news. Anukis knew Philostratus and his
brother, too, and as she liked Antony, who jested with her so kindly, she
grieved to see an unprincipled fellow like Alexas his chief confidant.
She knew the plots with which the Syrian had persecuted Barine, and when
Charmian told her that the Queen had committed the young beauty's fate to
this man's keeping her dark face grew fairly livid; but she forced
herself to conceal the terror which the news inspired. Her mistress was
also aware what this choice meant to Barine. But Anukis would have
thought it wrong to disturb Charmian's sleep by revealing her own
distress. It was fortunate that she was going early the next morning to
seek the aid of Archibius, whom Anukis believed to be the wisest of men;
but this by no means soothed her. She knew the fable of the lion and the
mouse, which had been told in her home long before the time of the author
for whom she was nicknamed, and already more than once she had been in a
position to render far greater and more powerful persons an important
service. To soothe Charmian to sleep and turn her thoughts in another
direction, she told her about Dion, whom she had found much better that
day, how tenderly he seemed to love Barine, and how touchingly patient
and worthy of her father the daughter of Leonax had been.
After her mistress had fallen asleep she went to the hall where, spite of
the late hour, she expected to meet some of the servants--sure of being
greeted as a welcome guest. When, a short time later, Alexas's body-slave
appeared, she filled his wire cup, sat down by his side, and tried with
all the powers at her command to win his confidence. And so well did the
elderly Nubian succeed that Marsyas, a handsome young Ligurian, after she
had gone, declared that Aisopion's jokes and stories were enough to bring
the dead to life, and it was as pleasant to talk seriously with the
brown-skinned monster as to dally with a fair-haired sweetheart.
After Charmian had left the palace the following morning, Anukis again
sought Marsyas and learned from him for what purpose and at what hour
Iras had summoned Alexas. His master was continually whispering with the
languishing Macedonian.
When Anukis returned, Barine seemed troubled because she brought no
tidings from her mother and Dion; but the Nubian entreated her to have
patience, and gave her some books and a spindle, that she might have
occupation in her solitude. She, Anukis, must go to the kitchen, because
she had heard yesterday that the cook had bought some mushrooms, which
might be poisonous; she knew the fungi and wanted to see them.
Then, passing into Charmian's chamber, she glided through the corridor
which connected the apartments of Cleopatra's confidential attendants,
and slipped into Iras's room. When Alexas entered she was concealed
behind one of the hangings which covered the walls of the reception-room.
After the Syrian had retired and Iras had been called away, Anukis
returned to Barine and said that the mushrooms had really been poisonous,
and of the deadliest species. They had been cooked, and she must go out
to seek an antidote. Since a precious human life might be at stake,
Barine would not wish to keep her.
"Go," said the latter, kindly. "But if you are the old obliging Aisopion,
you won't object to going a little farther."
"And inquiring at the house near the Paneum garden," added Anukis. "That
was already settled. Longing is also a poison for a loving heart, and its
antidote is good news."
With these laughing words she left her favourite; but as soon as she was
out of doors her black brow became lined with earnest thought, and she
stood pondering a long time. At last she went to the Bruchium to hire a
donkey to ride to Kanopus, where she hoped to find Archibius. It was
difficult to reach the nearest stand; for a great crowd had assembled on
the quay between the Lochias and the Corner of the Muses, and groups of
the common people, sailors, and slaves were constantly flocking hither.
But she at last forced her way to the spot and, while the driver was
helping her to mount the animal she had chosen, she asked what had
attracted the throng, and he answered:
"They are tearing down the house of the old Museum fungus, Didymus."
"How can that be?" cried the startled woman. "The good old man!"
"Good?" repeated the driver, scornfully. "He's a traitor, who has caused
all the trouble. Philostratus, the brother of the great Alexas, a friend
of Mark Antony, told us so. He wanted to prove it, so it must be true.
Hear the shouts, and how the stones are flying! Yes, yes. His
granddaughter and her lover set an ambush for the King Caesarion. They
would have killed him, but the watch interfered, and now he lies wounded
on his couch. If mighty Isis does not lend her aid, the young prince's
life will soon be over."
Then, turning to the donkey, he dealt him two severe blows on the right
and left haunches, shouting: "Hi, Grey! It does one good to hear that
royal backs have room for the cudgel too."
Meanwhile, the Nubian was hesitating whether she should not first turn
the donkey to the right and seek Didymus; but Barine was threatened by
greater peril, and her life was of more value than the welfare of the
aged pair. This decided the question, and she rode forward.
The donkey and his driver did their best, but they came too late; for in
the little palace at Kanopus, Anukis learned from the porter that
Archibius had gone to the city with his old friend Timagenes, the
historian, who lived in Rome, and seemed to have come to Alexandria as an
envoy.
Charmian, too, had been here, but also failed to find the master of the
house, and followed him. Evil tidings-which, owing to the loss of time
involved, might prove fatal. If the donkey had only been swifter! True,
Archibius's stable was full of fine animals, but who was she that she
should presume to use them? Yet she had gained something which rendered
her the equal of many who were born free and occupied a higher
station--the reputation for trustworthiness and wisdom; and relying upon
this, she told the faithful old steward, as far as possible, what was at
stake, and soon after he himself took her, both mounted on swift mules,
to the city and the Paneum garden.
He chose the nearest road thither through the Gate of the Sun and the
Kanopic Way. Usually at this hour it was crowded with people, but to-day
few persons were astir. All the idlers had thronged to the Bruchium and
the harbour to see the returning ships of the vanquished fleet, hear
something new, witness the demonstrations of joy, the sacrifices and
processions, and--if Fortune favoured--meet the Queen and relieve their
overflowing hearts by acclamations.
When the carriage turned towards the left and approached the Paneum,
progress for the first time became difficult. A dense crowd had gathered
around the hill on whose summit the sanctuary of Pan dominated the
spacious garden. Anukis's eye perceived the tall figure of Philostratus.
Was the mischief-maker everywhere? This time he seemed to encounter
opposition, for loud shouts interrupted his words. Just as the carriage
passed he pointed to the row of houses in which the widow of Leonax
lived, but violent resistance followed the gesture.
Anukis perceived what restrained the crowd; for, as the equipage
approached its destination, a body of armed youths stopped it. Their
finely-formed limbs, steeled by the training of the Palaestra, and the
raven, chestnut, and golden locks floating around their well-shaped
heads, were indeed beautiful. They were a band of the Ephebi, formerly
commanded by Archibius, and to whose leadership more recently Dion had
been elected. The youths had heard what had occurred--that imprisonment,
perhaps even worse disaster, threatened him. At any other time it would
scarcely have been possible to oppose the decree of the Government and
guard their imperilled friend, but in these dark days the rulers must
deal with them. Though they were loyal to the Queen, and had resolved,
spite of her defeat, to support her cause, as soon as she needed them,
they would not suffer Dion to be punished for a crime which, in their
eyes, was an honour. Their determination to protect him grew more eager
with every vexatious delay on the part of the city council to deal with a
matter which concerned one of their own body. They had not yet decided
whether to demand a full pardon or only a mild sentence for the man who
had wounded the "King of kings," the son of the sovereign. Moreover, the
quiet Caesarion, still subject to his tutor, had not understood how to
win the favour of the Ephebi. The weakling never appeared in the
Palaestra, which even the great Mark Antony did not disdain to visit. The
latter had more than once given the youths assembled there proofs of his
giant strength, and his son Antyllus also frequently shared their
exercises. Dion had merely dealt Caesarion with his clenched fist one of
the blows which every one must encounter in the arena.
Philotas of Amphissa, the pupil of Didymus, had been the first to inform
them of the attack and, with fiery zeal, had used his utmost power to
atone for the wrong done to his master's granddaughter. His appeal had
roused the most eager sympathy. The Ephebi believed themselves strong
enough to defend their friend against any one and, if the worst should
come, they knew they would be sustained by the council, the Exegetus, the
captain of the guard--a brave Macedonian, who had once been an ornament
of their own band--and the numerous clients of Dion and his family. There
was not a single weakling among them. They had already found an
opportunity to prove this; for, though they had arrived too late to
protect Didymus's property from injury, they had checked the fury of the
mob whose passions Philostratus had aroused, and forced back the crowd
whom the Syrian led to Barine's dwelling to devote it to the same fate.
Another equipage was already standing before the door of Berenike's
house--one of the carriages which were always at the disposal of the
Queen's officials--when Anukis left Archibius's vehicle. Had some of
Alexas's myrmidons arrived, or was he himself on the way to examine Dion,
or even arrest him? The driver, like all the palace servants, knew
Anukis, and she learned from him that he had brought Gorgias, the
architect.
Anukis had never met the latter, though, during the rebuilding of
Caesarion's apartments, she had often seen him, and heard much of him;
among other things, that Dion's beautiful palace was his work. He was a
friend of the wounded man, so she need not fear him.
When she entered the atrium she heard that Berenike had gone out to drive
with Archibius and his Roman friend. The leech had forbidden his patient
to see many visitors. No one had been admitted except Gorgias and one of
Dion's freedmen.
But time pressed; people of the same rank and disposition understand one
another; the old porter and the Nubian were both loyal to their
employers, and, moreover, were natives of the same country; so it
required only a few words to persuade the door-keeper to conduct her
without delay to the bedside of the wounded man.
The freedman, a tall, weather-beaten greybeard, simply clad, who looked
like a pilot, was waiting outside the sick-room. He had not yet been
admitted to Dion's presence, but this did not appear to vex him, for he
stood leaning quietly against the wall beside the door, gazing at the
broad-brimmed sailor's hat which he was slowly turning in his hands.
Scarcely had Dion heard Anukis's name, when an eager "Let her come in"
reached her ears through the half-open door.
The Nubian waited to be summoned, but her dark face must have showed
distinctly that something important and urgent had brought her here, for
the wounded man added to his first words of greeting the expression of a
fear that she had no good news.
Her reply was an eager nod of assent, accompanied by a doubtful glance at
Gorgias; and Dion now curtly told the architect the name of the newcomer,
and assured her that his friend might hear everything, even the greatest
secret.
Anukis uttered a sigh of relief and then, in a tone of the most earnest
warning, poured forth the story of the impending danger. She would not be
satisfied when he spoke of the Ephebi, who were ready to defend him, and
the council, which would make the cause of one of its members its own,
but entreated him to seek some safe place of refuge, no matter where; for
powers against whom no resistance would avail were stretching their hands
towards him. Even this statement, however, proved useless, for Dion was
convinced that the influence of his uncle, the Keeper of the Seal, would
guard him from any serious danger. Then Anukis resolved to confess what
she had overheard; but she told the story without mentioning Barine, and
the peril threatening her also. Finally, with all the warmth of a really
anxious heart, she entreated him to heed her warning.
Even while she was still speaking, the friends exchanged significant
glances; but scarcely had the last words fallen from her lips when the
giant figure of the freedman passed through the door, which had remained
open.
"You here, Pyrrhus?" cried the wounded man kindly.
"Yes, master, it is I," replied the stalwart fellow, twirling his sailor
hat still faster. "Listening isn't exactly my trade, and I don't usually
enter your presence uninvited; but I couldn't help hearing what came
through the door, and the croaking of the old raven drew me in."
"I wish you had heard more cheerful things," replied Dion; "but the
brown-skinned bird of ill omen usually sings pleasant songs, and they all
come from a faithful heart. But when my silent Pyrrhus opens his mouth so
far, something important must surely follow, and you can speak freely in
her presence."
The sailor cleared his throat, gripped his coarse felt hat in his sinewy
hands, and said, in such a tremulous, embarrassed tone that his heavy
chin quivered and his voice sometimes faltered: "If the woman is to be
trusted, you must leave here, master, and seek some safe hiding-place. I
came to offer one. On my way I heard your name. It was said that you had
wounded the Queen's son, and it might cost you your life. Then I thought:
'No, no, not that, so long as Pyrrhus lives, who taught his young master
Dion to use the oars and to set his first sail--Pyrrhus and his family.'
Why repeat what we both know well enough? From my first boat and the land
on our island to the liberty you bestowed upon us, we owe everything to
your father and to you, and a blessing has rested upon your gift and our
labour, and what is mine is yours. No more words are needed. You know our
cliff beyond the Alveus Steganus, north of the great harbour--the Isle of
Serpents. It is quickly gained by any one who knows the course through
the water, but is as inaccessible to others as the moon and stars. People
are afraid of the mere name, though we rid the island of the vermin long
ago. My boys Dionysus, Dionichus, and Dionikus--they all have 'Dion' in
their name--are waiting in the fish market, and when it grows dusk--"
Here the wounded man interrupted the speaker by holding out his hand and
thanking him warmly for his fidelity and kindness, though he refused the
well-meant invitation. He admitted that he knew no safer hiding-place
than the cliff surrounded by fluttering sea-gulls, where Pyrrhus lived
with his family and earned abundant support by fishing and serving as
pilot. But anxiety concerning his future wife prevented his leaving the
city.
The freedman however gave him no rest. He represented how quickly the
harbour could be reached from his island, that fish were brought thence
from it daily, and he would therefore always have news of what was
passing. His sons were like him, and never used any unnecessary words;
talking did not suit them. The women of the household rarely left the
island. So long as it sheltered their beloved guest, they should not set
foot away from it. If occasion should require, the master could be in
Alexandria again quickly enough to put anything right.
This suggestion pleased the architect, who joined in the conversation to
urge the freedman's request. But Dion, for Barine's sake, obstinately
refused, until Anukis, who had long been anxious to go in pursuit of
Archibius, thought it time to give her opinion.
"Go with the man, my lord!" she cried. "I know what I know. I will tell
our Barine of your faithful resolution; but how can she show her
gratitude for it if you are a dead man?"
This question and the information which followed it turned the scale;
and, as soon as Dion had consented to accompany the freedman, the Nubian
prepared to continue her errands, but the wounded man detained her to
give many messages for Barine, and then she was stopped by the architect,
who thought he had found in her the right assistant for numerous plans he
had in his mind.
He had returned early that morning from Heroonpolis, where, with other
members of his profession, he had inspected the newly constructed
waterway. The result of the first investigation had been unfavourable to
the verge of discouragement; and, in behalf of the others, he had gone to
the Queen to persuade her to give up the enterprise which, though so full
of promise, was impracticable in the short time at their disposal.
He had travelled all night, and was received as soon as Cleopatra rose
from her couch. He had driven from the Lochias in the carriage placed at
his disposal because he had business at the arsenal and various points
where building was going on, in order to inspect the wall erected for
Antony on the Choma, and the Temple of Isis at the Corner of the Muses,
to which Cleopatra desired to add a new building. But scarcely had he
quitted the Bruchium when he was detained by the crowd assailing the
house of Didymus with beams and rams, and at the same time keeping off
the Ephebi who had attacked them.
He had forced his way through the raging mob to aid the old couple and
their granddaughter. The slave Phryx had been busily preparing the boats
which lay moored in the harbour of the seawashed estate, but Gorgias had
found it difficult to persuade the grey-haired philosopher to go with him
and his family to the shore. He was ready to face the enraged rioters
and--though it should cost his life--cry out that they were shamefully
deceived and were staining themselves with a disgraceful crime. Not until
the architect represented that it was unworthy of a Didymus to expose to
bestial violence a life on which helpless women and the whole world--to
whom his writings were guide-posts to the realms of truth--possessed a
claim, could he be induced to yield. Nevertheless, the sage and his
relatives almost fell into the hands of the furious rabble, for Didymus
would not depart until he had saved this, that, and the other precious
book, till the number reached twenty or thirty. Besides, his old deaf
wife, who usually submitted quietly when her defective hearing prevented
her comprehension of many things, insisted upon knowing what was
occurring. She ordered everybody who came near her to explain what had
happened, thus detaining her granddaughter Helena, who was trying to save
the most valuable articles in the dwelling. So the departure was delayed,
and only the brave defence of young Philotas, Didymus's assistant, and
some of the Ephebi, who joined him, enabled them to escape unharmed.
The Scythian guards, which at last put a stop to the frantic rage of the
deluded populace, arrived too late to prevent the destruction of the
house, but they saved Philotas and the other youths from the fists and
stones of the rabble. When the boats had gone farther out into the
harbour the question of finding a home for the philosopher and his family
was discussed. Berenike's house was also threatened, and the rules of the
museum prevented the reception of women. Five servants had accompanied
the family, and none of Didymus's learned friends had room for so many
guests. When the old man and Helena began to enumerate the lodgings of
which they could think, Gorgias interposed with an entreaty that they
would come to his house.
He had inherited the dwelling from his father. It was very large and
spacious, almost empty, and they could reach it speedily, as it stood on
the seashore, north of the Forum. The fugitives would be entirely at
liberty there, since he had work on hand which would permit him to spend
no time under his own roof except at night. He soon overcame the trivial
objections made by the philosopher and, fifteen minutes after they had
left the Corner of the Muses, he was permitted to open the door of his
house to his guests, and he did so with genuine pleasure. The old
housekeeper and the grey-haired steward, who had been in his father's
service, looked surprised, but worked zealously after Gorgias had
confided the visitors to their charge. The pressure of business forbade
his fulfilling the duties of host in his own person.
Didymus and his family had reason to be grateful; and when the old sage
found in the large library which the architect placed at his disposal
many excellent books and among them some of his own, he ceased his
restless pacing to and fro and forced himself to settle down. Then he
remembered that, by the advice of a friend, he had placed his property in
the keeping of a reliable banker and, though life still seemed dark grey,
it no longer looked as black as before.
Gorgias briefly related all this to the Nubian, and Dion added that she
would find Archibius with his Roman friend at the house of Berenike's
brother, the philosopher Arius. Like himself, the latter was suffering
from an injury inflicted by a reckless trick of Antyllus. Barine's mother
was there also, so Anukis could inform them of the fate of Didymus and
his brother, and tell them that he, Dion, intended to leave her house and
the city an hour after sunset.
"But," interrupted Gorgias, "no one, not even your hostess Berenike and
her brother, must know your destination.--You look as if you could keep a
secret, woman."
"Though she owes her nickname Aisopion to her nimble tongue," replied
Dion.
"But this tongue is like the little silver fish with scarlet spots in the
palace garden," said Anukis. "They dart to and fro nimbly enough; but as
soon as danger threatens they keep as quiet in the water as though they
were nailed fast. And--by mighty Isis!--we have no lack of peril in these
trying times. Would you like to see the lady Berenike and the others
before your departure?"
"Berenike, yes; but the sons of Arius--they are fine fellows--would be
wise to keep aloof from this house to-day."
"Yes indeed!" the architect chimed in. "It will be prudent for their
father, too, to seek some hiding-place. He is too closely connected with
Octavianus. It may indeed happen that the Queen will desire to make use
of him. In that case he may be able to aid Barine, who is his sister's
child. Timagenes, too, who comes from Rome as a mediator, may have some
influence."
"The same thoughts entered my poor brain also," said Anukis. "I am now
going to show the gentlemen the danger which threatens her, and if I
succeed--Yet what could a serving-woman of my appearance accomplish?
Still--my house is nearer to the brink of the stream than the dwelling of
most others, and if I fling in a loaf, perhaps the current will bear it
to the majestic sea."
"Wise Aisopion!" cried Dion; but the worthy maid-servant shrugged her
crooked shoulders, saying: "We needn't be free-born to find pleasure in
what is right; and if being wise means using one's brains to think, with
the intention of promoting right and justice, you can always call me so.
Then you will start after sundown?"
With these words she was about to leave the room, but the architect, who
had watched her every movement, had formed a plan and begged her to
follow him.
When they reached the next room he asked for a faithful account of Barine
and the dangers threatening her. After consulting her as if she were an
equal, he held out his hand in farewell, saying: "If it is possible to
bring her to the Temple of Isis unseen, these clouds may scatter. I shall
be in the sanctuary of the goddess from the first hour after sunset. I
have some measurements to take there. When you say you know that the
immortals will have pity on the innocent woman whom they have led to the
verge of the abyss, perhaps you may be right. It seems as if matters here
were combining in a way which would be apt to rob the story-teller of his
listener's faith."
After Aisopion had gone, Gorgias returned to Dion's room and asked the
freedman to be ready with his boat at a place on the shore which he
carefully described.
The friends were again alone. Gorgias had his hands full of work, but he
could not help expressing his surprise at the calm bearing which Dion
maintained. "You behave as if you were going to an oyster supper at
Kanopus," he said, shaking his head as though perplexed by some
incomprehensible problem.
"What else would you have me do?" asked the Macedonian. "The vivid
imagination of you artists shows you the future according to your own
varying moods. If you hope, you transform a pleasant garden into the
Elysian fields; if you fear anything you behold in a burning roof the
conflagration of a world. We, from whose cradle the Muse was absent, who
use only sober reason to provide for the welfare of the household and the
state, as well as for our own, see facts as they are and treat them like
figures in a sum. I know that Barine is in danger. That might drive me
frantic; but beyond her I see Archibius and Charmian spreading their
protecting wings over her head; I perceive the fear of my faction,
including the museum, of the council of which I am a member, of my
clients and the conditions of the times, which precludes arousing the
wrath of the citizens. The product which results from the correct
addition of all these known quantities--"
"Will be correct," interrupted his friend, "so long as the most
incalculable of all factors, passion, does not blend with them--the
passion of a woman--and the Queen belongs to the sex which is certainly
more powerful in that domain."
"Granted! But as soon as Mark Antony returns it will be proved that her
jealousy was needless."
"We will hope so. It is only the misled, deceived, abused Cleopatra whom
I fear; for she herself is matchless in divine goodness. The charm by
which she ensnares hearts is indescribable, and the iron power of her
intellect! I tell you, Dion--"
"Friend, friend," was the laughing interruption. "How high your wishes
soar! For three years I have kept an account of the conflagrations in
your heart. I believe we had reached seventeen; but this last one is
equal to two."
"Folly!" cried Gorgias in an irritated tone: "May not a man admire what
is magnificent, wonderful, unique? She is all these things! Just now--how
long ago is it?--she appeared before me in a radiance of beauty--"
"Which should have made you shade both eyes. Yet you have been speaking
so warmly of your young guest, her loving caution, her gentle calmness in
the midst of peril--"
"Do you suppose I wish to recall a single syllable?" the architect
indignantly broke in. "Helena has no peer among the maidens of
Alexandria--but the other--Cleopatra--is elevated in her divine majesty
above all ordinary mortals. You might spare me and yourself that scornful
curl of the lip. Had she gazed into your face with those tearful,
sorrowful eyes, as she did into mine, and spoken of her misery, you would
have gone through fire and water, hand in hand with me, for her sake. I
am not a man who is easily moved, and since my father's death the only
tears I have seen have been shed by others; but when she talked of the
mausoleum I was to build for her because Fate, she knew not how soon,
might force her to seek refuge in the arms of death, my calmness
vanished. Then, when she cumbered me among the friends on whom she could
rely and held out her hand--a matchless hand--oh! laugh if you choose--I
felt I know not how, and kneeling at her feet I kissed it; it was wet
with my tears. I am not ashamed of this emotion, and my lips seem
consecrated since they touched the little white hand which spoke a
language of its own and stands before my eyes wherever I gaze."
Pushing back his thick locks from his brow as he spoke, he shook his head
as though dissatisfied with himself and, in an altered tone, hurriedly
continued: "But this is a time ill-suited for such ebullitions of
feeling. I mentioned the mausoleum, whose erection the Queen desires. She
will see the first hasty sketch to-morrow. It is already before my mind's
eye. She wished to have it adjoin the Temple of Isis, her goddess--I
proposed the great sanctuary in the Rhakotis quarter, but she
objected--she wished to have it close to the palace at Lochias. She had
thought of the temple at the Corner of the Muses, but the house occupied
by Didymus stood in the way of a larger structure. If this were removed
it would be possible to carry the street through the old man's garden,
perhaps even to the sea-shore, and we should have had space for a
gigantic edifice and still left room for a fine garden. But we had
learned how the philosopher loved his family estate. The Queen is
unwilling to use violence towards the old man. She is just, and perhaps
other reasons, of which I am ignorant, influence her. So I promised to
look for another site, though I saw how much she desired to have her tomb
connected with the sanctuary of her favourite goddess Then--I have
already told the clever brown witch--then the immortals, Divinity, Fate,
or whatever we call the power which guides the world and our lives
according to eternal laws and its own mysterious, omnipotent will,
permitted a rascally deed, from which I think may come deliverance for
you and a source of pleasure to the Queen in these days of trial."
"Man, man! Where will this new passion lead you? The horses are stamping
impatiently outside; duty summons the most faithful of men, and he stands
like a prophet, indulging in mysterious sayings!"
"Whose meaning and purport, spite of your calm calculations of existing
circumstances, will soon seem no less wonderful to you than to me, whose
unruly artist nature, according to your opinion, is playing me a trick,"
retorted the architect. "Now listen to this explanation: Didymus's house
will be occupied at once by my workmen, but I shall examine the lower
rooms of the Temple of Isis. I have with me a document requiring
obedience to my orders. Cleopatra herself laid the plans before me, even
the secret portion showing the course of the subterranean chambers. It
will cast some light upon my mysterious sayings if I bear you away from
the enemy through one of the secret corridors. They were right in
concealing from you by how slender a thread, spite of the power of your
example in mathematics, the sword hangs above your head. Now that I see a
possibility of removing it, I can show it to you. Tomorrow you would have
fallen, without hope of rescue, into the hands of cruel foes and been
shamefully abandoned by your own weak uncle, had not the most implacable
of all your enemies permitted himself the infamous pleasure of laying
hands on an old man's house, and the Queen, in consequence of an
agitating message, had the idea suggested of building her own mausoleum.
The corridor"--here he lowered his voice--"of which I spoke leads to the
sea at a spot close beside Didymus's garden, and through it I will guide
you, and, if possible, Barine also, to the shore. This could be
accomplished in the usual way only by the greatest risk. If we use the
passage we can reach a dark place on the strand unseen, and unless some
special misfortune pursues us our flight will be unnoticed. The litters
and your tottering gait would betray everything if we were to enter the
boat anywhere else in the great harbour."
"And we, sensible folk, refuse to believe in miracles!" cried Dion,
holding out his wan hand to the architect. "How shall I thank you, you
dear, clever, most loyal of friends to your male friends, though your
heart is so faithless to fair ones? Add that malicious speech to the
former ones, for which I now crave your pardon. What you intend to
accomplish for Barine and me gives you a right to do and say to me
whatever ill you choose all the rest of my life. Anxiety for her would
surely have bound me to this house and the city when the time came to
make the escape, for without her my life would now be valueless. But when
I think that she might follow me to Pyrrhus's cliff--"
"Don't flatter yourself with this hope," pleaded Gorgias. "Serious
obstacles may interpose. I am to have another talk with the Nubian later.
With no offence to others, I believe her advice will be the best. She
knows how matters stand with the lofty, and yet herself belongs to the
lowly. Besides, through Charmian the way to the Queen lies open, and
nothing which happens at court escapes her notice. She showed me that we
must consider Barine's delivery to Alexas a piece of good fortune. How
easily jealousy might have led to a fatal crime one whose wish promptly
becomes action, unless she curbs the undue zeal of her living tools!
Those on whom Fate inflicts so many blows rarely are in haste to spare
others. Would the anxieties which weigh upon her like mountains interpose
between the Queen and the jealous rancour which is too petty for her
great soul?"
"What is great or petty to the heart of a loving woman?" asked Dion. "In
any case you will do what you can to remove Barine from the power of the
enraged princess--I know."
Gorgias pressed his friend's hand closely, then, yielding to a sudden
impulse, kissed him on the forehead and hurried to the door.
On the threshold a faint moan from the wounded man stopped him. Would he
be strong enough to follow the long passage leading to the sea?
Dion protested that he confidently expected to do so, but his deeply
flushed face betrayed that the fever which had once been conquered had
returned.
Gorgias's eyes sought the floor in deep thought. Many sick persons were
borne to the temple in the hope of cure; so Dion's appearance would cause
no special surprise. On the other hand, to have strangers carry him
through the passage seemed perilous. He himself was strong, but even the
strongest person would have found it impossible to support the heavy
burden of a grown man to the sea, for the gallery was low and of
considerable length. Still, if necessary, he would try. With the
comforting exclamation, "If your strength does not suffice, another way
will be found," he took his leave, gave Barine's maid and the wounded
man's body-slave the necessary directions, commanded the door-keeper to
admit no one save the physician, and stepped into the open air.
A little band of Ephebi were pacing to and fro before the house. Others
had flung themselves down in an open space surrounded by shrubbery in the
Paneum garden, and were drinking the choice wine which Dion's cellarer,
by his orders, had brought and was pouring out for the crowd.
It was an animated scene, for the clients of the sufferer, who, after
expressing their sympathy, had been dismissed by the porter, and
bedizened girls had joined the youths. There was no lack of jests and
laughter, and when some pretty young mother or female slave passed by
leading children, with whom the garden was a favourite playground, many a
merry word was exchanged.
Gorgias waved his hands gaily to the youths, pleased with the
cheerfulness with which the brave fellows transformed duty into a
festival, and many raised their wine-cups, shouting a joyous "Io" and
"Evoe," to drink the health of the famous artist who not long ago had
been one of themselves.
The others were led by a slender youth, the student Philotas, from
Amphissa, Didymus's assistant, whom the architect, a few days before, had
helped to liberate from the demons of wine. Even while Gorgias was
beckoning to him from the two-wheeled chariot, the thought entered his
mind that yonder handsome youth, who had so deeply wronged Barine and
Dion, would be the very person to help carry his friend through the
low-roofed passage to the sea. If Philotas was the person Gorgias
believed him to be, he would deem it a special favour to make amends for
his crime to those whom he had injured, and he was not mistaken; for,
after the youth had taken a solemn oath not to betray the secret to any
one, the architect asked him to aid in Dion's rescue. Philotas,
overflowing with joyful gratitude, protested his willingness to do so,
and promised to wait at the appointed spot in the Temple of Isis at the
time mentioned.
CHAPTER XIV.
While Gorgias was examining the subterranean chambers in the Temple of
Isis, Charmian returned to Lochias earlier than she herself had expected.
She had met her brother, whom she did not find at Kanopus, at Berenike's,
and after greeting Dion on his couch of pain, she told Archibius of her
anxiety. She confided to him alone that the Queen had committed Barine's
fate to Alexas, for the news might easily have led the mother of the
endangered woman to some desperate venture; but even Archibius's
composure, so difficult to disturb, was not proof against it. He would
have sought the Queen's presence at once--if necessary, forced his way to
it; but the historian Timagenes, who had just come from Rome, was
expecting him, and he had not returned to his birthplace as a private
citizen, but commissioned by Octavianus to act as mediator in putting an
end to the struggle which had really been decided in his favour at the
battle of Actium. The choice of this mediator was a happy one; for he had
taught Cleopatra in her childhood, and was the self-same quick-witted man
who had so often roused her to argument. His share in a popular
insurrection against the Roman rule had led to his being carried as a
slave to the Tiber. There he soon purchased his freedom, and attained
such distinction that Octavianus entrusted this important mission to the
man who was so well known in Alexandria. Archibius was to meet him at the
house of Arius, who was still suffering from the wounds inflicted by the
chariot-wheels of Antyllus, and Berenike had accompanied Timagenes to her
brother.
Charmian did not venture to go there; a visit to Octavianus's former
teacher would have been misinterpreted, and it was repugnant to her own
delicacy of feeling to hold intercourse at this time with the foe and
conqueror of her royal mistress. She therefore let her brother drive with
Berenike to the injured man's; but before his departure Archibius had
promised, if the worst came, to dare everything to open the eyes of the
Queen, who had forbidden her, Charmian, to speak in behalf of Barine and
thwart the plans of Alexas.
From the Paneum garden she was carried to the Kanopic Way and the Jewish
quarter, where she had many important purchases to make for Cleopatra. It
was long after noon when the litter was again borne to Lochias.
On the way she had severely felt her own powerlessness. Without having
accomplished anything herself, she was forced to wait for the success of
others; and she had scarcely crossed the threshold of the palace ere
fresh cares were added to those which already burdened her soul.
She understood how to read the faces of courtiers, and the door-keeper's
had taught her that since her departure something momentous had occurred.
She disliked to question the slaves and lower officials, so she
refrained, though the interior of the palace was crowded with guards,
officials of every grade, attendants, and slaves. Many who saw her gazed
at her with the timidity inspired by those over whom some disaster is im
pending. Others, whose relations were more intimate, pressed forward to
enjoy the mournful satisfaction of being the first messengers of evil
tidings. But she passed swiftly on, keeping them back with grave words
and gestures, until, before the door of the great anteroom thronged with
Greek and Egyptian petitioners, she met Zeno, the Keeper of the Seal.
Charmian stopped him and inquired what had happened.
"Since when?" asked the old courtier. "Every moment has brought some
fresh tidings and all are mournful. What terrible times, Charmian, what
disasters!"
"No messenger had arrived when I left the Lochias," replied Charmian.
"Now it seems as though the old monster of a palace, accustomed to so
many horrors, is holding its breath in dread. Tell me the main thing, at
least, before I meet the Queen."
The main thing? Pestilence or famine--which shall we call the worse?"
"Quick, Zeno! I am expected."
"I, too, am in haste, and really there is nothing to relate over which
the tongue would care to dwell. Candidus arrived first. Came himself
straight from Actium. The fellow is bold enough."
"Is the army defeated also?"
"Defeated, dispersed, deserted to the foe--King Herod with his legions in
the van."
Charmian covered her face with her hands and groaned aloud, but Zeno
continued:
"You were with her in the flight. When Mark Antony left you, he sailed
with the ships which joined him for Paraetonium. A large body of troops
on which the Queen and Mardion had fixed their hopes was encamped there.
Reinforcements could easily be gained and we should once more have a fine
army at our disposal."
"Pinarius Scarpus, a cautious soldier, was in command; and I, too,
believed--"
"The more you trusted him, the greater would be your error. The shameless
rascal--he owes everything to Antony--had received tidings of Actium ere
the ships arrived, and had already made overtures to Octavianus when the
Imperator came. The veterans who opposed the treachery were hewn down by
the wretch's orders, but the brave garrison of the city could not be won
over to the monstrous crime. It is due to these men that Mark Antony
still lives and did not come to a miserable end at the hands of his own
troops. The twice-defeated general--a courier brought the news--will
arrive to-night. Strangely enough, he will not come to Lochias, but to
the little palace on the Choma."
"Poor, poor Queen!" cried Charmian; "how did she bear all this?"
"In the presence of the defeated Candidus and Antony's messenger like a
heroine. But afterwards----Her raving did not last long; but the mute,
despairing silence! Ere she had fully recovered her self-command she sent
us all away, and I have not seen her since. But all the thoughts and
feelings which dwell here"--he pointed to his brow and breast--"have left
their abode and linger with her. I totter from place to place like a
soulless body. O Charmian! what has befallen us? Where are the days when
care and trouble lay buried with the other dead--the days and nights when
my brain united with that of the Queen to transform this desolate earth
into the beautiful Elysian Fields, every-day life to a festival,
festivals to the very air of Olympus? What unprecedented scenes of
splendour had I not devised for the celebration of the victory, the
triumph--nay, even the entry into Rome! Whole chests are filled with the
sketches, programmes, drawings, and verses. All who handle brush and
chisel, compose and execute music, would have lent their aid, and--you
may believe me-the result would have been something which future
generations would have discussed, lauded, and extolled in song. And
now--now?"
"Now we will double our efforts to save what is yet to be rescued!"
"Rescued?" repeated the courtier in a hollow tone. "The Queen, too, still
clings to this fine word. When I saw her at work yesterday, it seemed as
if I beheld her drawing water with the bottomless vessel of the Danaides.
True, today, when I left her, her arms had fallen--and in this attitude
she now stands before me with her tearful eyes. And besides, I can't get
my nephew Dion out of my mind. Cares--nothing but cares concerning him!
And my intentions towards him were so kind! My will gives him my entire
fortune; but now he actually wants to marry the singer, the daughter of
the artist Leonax. You have taken her under your protection, but surely
your own niece, Iras, is dearer to you, so you will approve of my
destroying the will if Dion insists upon his own way. He shall not have a
solidus of my property if he does not give up the woman who is a thorn in
the Queen's flesh. And his choice does not suit our ancient race. Iras,
on the contrary, was Dion's playfellow, and I have long destined her for
his wife. No better match, nor one more acceptable to the Queen, could be
found for him. He cared for her until the singer bewitched him. Bring
them together, and they shall be like my own children. If the fool
resists his uncle, whose sole desire is to benefit him, I will withdraw
my aid. Whatever intrigues his foes may weave, I shall fold my arms and
not interfere. I stand in the place of his father, my dead brother, and
demand obedience. The Queen is my universe, and her favour is of more
value than twenty refractory nephews."
"You will retain her Majesty's favour, even if you intercede for your
brother's son."
"And Iras? When she finds herself deceived--and she will soon discover
it--she will not rest--"
"Until she has brought ruin upon him," interrupted Charmian, in a tone of
sorrow rather than reproach as though she already beheld the impending
disaster. "But Iras has no greater influence with the Queen than I, and
if you and I unite to protect the brave young fellow, who is of your own
blood--"
"Then, of course--no doubt, on account of your longer period of service,
you have more influence with her Majesty than Iras--however--such matters
must be considered--and I have already said--my mind leaves its abode to
follow the Queen like her shadow. It heeds only what concerns her. Let
everything else go as it will. The fleet the same as destroyed, Candidus
defeated, Herod a deserter, treason on treason--the African legions lost!
What in the name of the god who tried to roll back the wheel dashing down
the mountain-side!--And yet! Let us offer sacrifices, my friend, and hope
for better days!"
Zeno retired as he spoke, but Charmian moved forward with a drooping head
to find Barine and her faithful Anukis, and weep her fill ere she went to
perform the duty of consoling and sustaining her beloved mistress. Yet
she herself so sorely needed comfort. Wherever she turned her eyes she
beheld disaster, peril, treachery, and base intrigues. She felt as if she
had lived long enough, and that her day was over. Hitherto her gentle
nature, her intellect, which yearned to expand, gather new riches, and
exchange what it had gained with others, had possessed much to offer to
the Queen. She had not only been Cleopatra's confidante, but necessary to
her to discuss questions far in advance of the demands of the times,
which occupied her restless mind. Now the Queen's attention was wholly
absorbed by events--hard, cruel facts--which she must resist or turn to
her own advantage. Her life had become a conflict, and Charmian felt that
she was by no means combative. The hard, supple, keenly polished
intellect of Iras now asserted its value, and the elderly woman told
herself that she was in danger of being held in less regard than her
younger companion. To resign her office would have given her peace of
mind, but she repelled the thought. For the very reason that these days
were so full of misery and perhaps drawing nearer to the end, she must
remain, first for the sake of the Queen, but also to watch over Barine.
Now she longed to go to Cleopatra. Her mere presence, she knew, would do
her sore heart good. The silvery laugh of a child reached her ears
through the open gate of the garden which she was rapidly approaching.
Little six-year-old Alexander ran towards her with open arms, hugged her
closely, pressed his curly head against her, and gazed into her face with
his large clear eyes.
Charmian's heart swelled; and as she raised the child in her arms and
kissed him, she thought of the sad fate impending, and the composure
maintained with so much difficulty gave way; tears streamed from her eyes
and, sobbing violently, she pressed the boy closer to her breast.
The prince, accustomed to bright faces and tender caresses, broke away
from her in terror to run back to his brother and sisters. But he had a
kind little heart, and, knowing that no one weeps and sobs unless in
pain, Alexander pitied Charmian, whom he loved, and hurried to her again.
What he meant to show her had pleased his mother, too, and dried the
tears in her eyes. So he took Charmian by the hand and drew her along,
saying that he wanted her to see the prettiest thing. She willingly
allowed herself to be led over the paths, strewn with red sand, of the
little garden which Antony had had laid out for his children in the
magnificent style which pleased his love of splendour, and filled with
rare and beautiful things.
There was a pond with tiny gold and silver fish, where the rare lotus
flowers with pink blossoms arose from amid their smooth green leaves, and
another where dwarf ducks of every colour, which seemed as if they had
been created for children, swam to and fro. A bit of the sea which washed
its shore had been enclosed by a gilded latticework, and on its surface
floated a number of snow-white swans and black ones with scarlet bills.
Native and Indian flowers of every hue adorned the beds, and the narrow
paths were shaded by arbours made of gold wire, over which ran climbing
vines filled with bright blossoms.
A grotto of stalactites behind the dense foliage of an Indian tree
offered a resting-place, and beside it was a little house where the
children could stay. The interior lacked none of the requisites of
living, not even the cooking utensils in the kitchen, and the family
portraits in the tablinum, delicately painted by an artist on small ivory
slabs. Everything was made to suit the size of children, but of the most
costly material and careful workmanship.
Behind the house was a little stable where four tiny horses with spotted
skins, the rarest and prettiest creatures imaginable--a gift from the
King of Media--were stamping the ground.
In another place was an enclosure containing gazelles, ostriches, young
giraffes, and other grass-eating animals. Bright-plumaged birds and
monkeys filled the tops of the trees, gay balls rose and fell on the jets
of the fountains, and child genii and images of the gods in bronze and
marble peered from the foliage. This whole enchanted world was comprised
within a narrow space, and, with its radiance of colour and wealth of
form, its perfume, songs, and warbling, exerted a bewildering influence
upon the excited imaginations of grown people as well as children.
Little Alexander, without even casting a glance at all this, drew
Charmian forward. He did not pause until he reached the shore of the
lotus pond; then, putting his fingers on his lips, he said: "There, now,
I'll show you. Look here!"
Rising cautiously upon tip-toe as he spoke, he pointed to the hollow in
the trunk of a tree. A pair of finches had built their nest in it, and
five young ones with big yellow beaks stretched their ugly little heads
hungrily upward.
"That's so pretty!" cried the prince. "And you must see the old ones come
to feed them." The beautiful boy's sweet face fairly beamed with delight,
and Charmian kissed him tenderly. Yet, even as she did so, she thought of
the young swallows hacked to death in his mother's galley, and a chill
ran through her veins.
Just at that moment voices were heard calling Alexander from a neglected
spot behind the dainty little house built for the children, and the boy
exclaimed peevishly:
"There, now, I showed you the little nest, so I forgot. Agatha fell
asleep and Smerdis went away, so we were alone. Then they sent me to
Horus, the gate-keeper, to get some of his spelt bread. He never says no
to anything, and it does taste so good. We're peasants, and have been
using the axe and the hoe, so we want something to eat. Have you seen our
house? We built it ourselves. Selene, Helios, Jotape, my future wife, and
I--yes, I! They let me help, and we finished it alone, all alone!
Everything is here. We shall build the shed for the cow to-morrow. The
others mustn't see it, but I may show it to you."
While speaking, he drew her forward again, and Charmian obediently
followed. The twins and little Jotape, who had been chosen for the future
bride of the six-year-old Prince Alexandera pretty, delicate, fair-haired
child of his own age, the daughter of the Median king, who had been
betrothed to the boy after the Parthian war, and now remained as a
hostage at Cleopatra's court--welcomed her with joyous shouts. With the
exception of the little Median princess, Charmian had witnessed their
birth, and they all loved her dearly.
The little royal labourers showed their work with proud delight, and it
really was well done.
They had toiled at it for weeks, paying no heed to the garden and all its
costly rarities. They pointed with special pride to the two planks which
Helios, aided by Alexander, had fished out of the sea after the last
storm, when they were left alone, and to the lock on the door which they
had secretly managed to wrench from an old gate. Selene herself had woven
the curtain in front of the door. Now they were going to build a hearth
too.
Charmian praised their skill, while they--all talking merrily
together--told her how they had conquered the greatest difficulties.
Their bright eyes sparkled with pleasure while describing the work of
their own hands, and they were so absorbed in eager delight that they did
not notice the approach of a man until startled by his words: "Enough of
this idle sport now, your Highnesses. Too much time has already been
wasted on it."
Then, turning to the Queen, who had accompanied him, he continued in a
tone of apology: "This amusement might seem somewhat hazardous, yet there
is much to be said in its favour. Besides, it appeared to afford the
royal children so much pleasure that I permitted it for a short time. But
if your Majesty commands:
"Let them have their pleasure," the Queen interrupted kindly; and as soon
as the children saw their mother they rushed forward, crowded around her
with fearless love, thanked her, and eagerly assured her that nothing in
the whole garden was half so dear to them as their little house. They
meant to build a stable too.
"That might be too much," said the tutor Euphronion, a grey-haired man
with a shrewd, kindly face. "We must remember how many things are yet to
be learned, that we may reach the goal fixed for your Majesty's birthday
and pass the examination."
But all the children now joined in the entreaty to be allowed to build
the stable too, and it was granted.
When the tutor at last began to lead them away, the royal mother stopped
them, asking "Suppose, instead of this garden, I should give you a bit of
bare land, such as the peasants till, where, after your lessons, you
might dig and build as much as you please?"
Loud shouts of joy from the children answered the question; but the
little Median girl, Jotape, said hesitatingly:
"Could I take my doll too--only the oldest, Atossa? She has lost one arm,
yet I love her the best."
"Deprive us of anything you choose!" cried Helios, drawing little
Alexander towards him, to show that they, the men, were of the same mind,
"only give us some ground and let us build."
"We will consider whether it can be done," replied Cleopatra. "Perhaps,
Euphronion, you would be the right person--But we will discuss the matter
at a more quiet hour."
The tutor withdrew and the children, who followed, looked back, waving
their hands and calling to their mother for a long time.
When they had disappeared behind the shrubbery in the garden Charmian
exclaimed, "However dark the sky may be, so long as you possess these
little ones you can never lack sunshine."
"If," replied Cleopatra, gazing pensively at the ground, "with a thought
of them another did not blend which makes the gloom become deeper still.
You know the tidings this terrible day has brought?"
"All," replied Charmian, sighing heavily.
"Then you know the abyss on whose verge we are walking; and to see
them--them also dragged into the yawning gulf by their unhappy
mother--Oh, Charmian, Charmian!"
She sobbed aloud, threw her arms around the neck of her friend and
playfellow, and laid her head upon her bosom like a child seeking
consolation. Cleopatra wept for several minutes, and when she again
raised her tear-stained face she said softly:
"That did me good! O, Charmian! no one needs love as I do. On your warm
heart my own has already grown calmer."
"Use it, nestle there whenever you need it, to the end," cried Charmian,
deeply moved.
"To the end," repeated Cleopatra, wiping her eyes. "It began to-day, I
think. I have just spent an hour alone. I meant to commit a crime, and
you know how impatiently passion sweeps me along. But what misfortunes
have assailed me! The army destroyed; the desertion of Herod and
Pinarius; Antony's generous, trusting heart torn by base treachery, his
soul darkened; the reconstruction of the canal, the last hope--Gorgias
brought the news--the same as destroyed. Just then little Alexander came
to show me his bird's nest. Everything else in the garden seemed to him
worthless by comparison. This awakened new thoughts, and now here is the
little house which the children have built with their own hands. All
these things forced me by some mysterious power to look back along the
course of my life to the distant days in your father's house--I--These
children! Upon what different foundations our lives have been built! I
made them begin at the point I had gained when youth lay behind me. My
childhood commenced among the disorders of the government, clouded by my
father's exile and my mother's death, on the brink of ruin. That of the
twins--they are ten years old--will soon be over--and now, after enjoying
pleasures not one of which was bestowed on me, they must endure the same
sorrow. But did not we have better ones? What they daily possessed we
only dreamed of in our simple garden. How often I let you share the
radiant visions which my soul revealed to me! You willingly accompanied
me into the splendid fairy world of my dreams. All that my imagination
conjured up during the years of quiet and repose accompanied me into my
after-life. Again and again I have beheld them, rich and powerful, upon
the throne. The means of rendering the vision a varity were at hand; and
when I met the man whose own life resembled the realization of a dream, I
recalled those childish fancies and made them facts. The marvels with
which I adorned my lover's existence were childish dreams to which I gave
tangible form. This garden is an image of the life to which I intended to
rise; in reality, fell. We collected within the limits of this bit of
earth everything which can delight the senses; not a single one is
omitted in this narrow space, whose crowded maze of pleasures fairly
impede freedom of movement. Yet in your home, and guided by your wise
father, I had learned to be content with so little, and commenced the
struggle to attain peace. That painless peace--our chief good--whence
came it? Through me it was lost to you both But the children--I made them
begin their lives in an arena of every disturbing influence; and now I
see how their own healthy natures yearn to escape from the dazzling
wealth of colour, the stupefying fragrance, the bewildering songs and
twittering. They long to return to the untilled earth, where the life of
struggling mortals began.
"The boy casts away the baubles, to test his own creative powers. The
girl follows his example, and clings fast only to the doll in which she
sees the living child, in order to do justice to the maternal instinct,
the token of her sex. But what they so eagerly desire is right, and shall
be granted. When I was ten years old, like the twins, my life and efforts
were already directed towards one fixed goal. They are still blindly
following the objects set before them. Let them return to the place
whence their mother started, where she received everything good which is
still hers. They shall go to the garden of Epicurus, no matter whether it
is the old one in Kanopus or elsewhere. All that their mother beheld in
vivid dreams, which she often strove with wanton extravagance to realize,
has surrounded them from their birth and early satiated them. When they
enter life, they will scorn what merely stirs and dazzles the senses, and
cling to the aspiration for painless peace of mind, if a wise guide
directs them and protects them from the dangers which the teachings of
Epicurus contain for youth. I have found this guide, and you, too, will
trust him--I mean your brother Archibius."
"Archibius?" asked Charmian in surprise. "Yes, he who grew up in the
garden of Epicurus, and in life and philosophy found the support which
has preserved his peace of mind during all the conflicts of existence--he
who loves the mother, and to whom the children are also dear--he to whom
the boys and girls cling with affectionate confidence. I wish to place
the children under his protection and, if he will consent to grant this
desire of the most hapless of women, I shall look forward calmly to the
end. It is approaching! I feel, I know it! Gorgias is already at work
upon the plan for my tomb."
"O my Queen!" cried Charmian sorrowfully. Whatever may happen, your
illustrious life cannot be in danger! The generous heart of Mark Antony
does not throb in Octavianus's breast, but he is not cruel, and for the
very reason that cool calculation curbs ambition he will spare you. He
knows that you are the idol of the city, the whole country; and if he
really succeeds in adding fresh victories to this first conquest, if the
immortals permit your throne and--may they avert it!--your sacred person,
too, to fall into his power--"
"Then," cried Cleopatra, her clear eyes flashing, "then he shall learn
which of us two is the greater--then I shall know how to maintain the
right to despise him, though blind Fate should make the whole power of
the world subject to him who robbed my son and Caesar's of his heritage!"
Her eyes had blazed with anger as she uttered the words; then, letting
her little clenched hand fall, she went on in an altered tone:
"Months may pass before he is strong enough to risk the attack, and the
immortals themselves approved the erection of the monument. The only
obstacle in the way, the house of the old philosopher Didymus, was
destroyed. A messenger from Gorgias brought the news. It is to be the
second monument in Alexandria worthy of notice. The other contains the
body of the great Alexander, to whom the city owes its origin and name.
He who subjected half the world to his power and the genius of the
Greeks, was younger than I when he died. Whence do I, by whose miserable
weakness the battle of Actium was lost, derive the right to walk longer
beneath the sun? Perhaps Mark Antony will arrive in a few hours."
"And will you meet the disheartened hero in this mood?" interrupted
Charmian.
"He does not wish to be received," answered Cleopatra bitterly. "He even
refused to let me greet him, and I understand the denial. But what must
have overwhelmed this joyous nature, so friendly to all mankind, that he
longs for solitude and avoids meeting those who are nearest and dearest?
Iras is now at the Choma--whither he wishes to retire--to see that
everything is in order. She will also provide a supply of the flowers he
loves. It is hard, cruelly hard, not to welcome him as usual. Oh,
Charmian, what joy it was when, with open arms and overflowing heart, he
swung his mighty figure ashore like a youth, while his handsome, heroic
face beamed with ardent love for me! And then--you do not forget it
either--when he raised his deep voice to shout the first greeting, why,
it seemed as if the very fish in the water must join in, and the
palm-trees on the shore wave their feathery tops in joyous sympathy. And
here! The dreams of my childhood, which I made reality for him, received
us, and our existence, wreathed with love and roses, became a fairy tale.
Since the day he rode towards us at Kanopus and offered me the first
bouquet, with his sunny glance wooing my love, his image has stood before
my soul as the embodiment of the virile strength which conquers
everything, and the bright, undimmed joy which renders the whole world
happy. And now--now? Do you remember the dull dreamer whom we left ere he
set forth for Paraetonium? But no, no, a thousand times no, he must not
remain so! Not with bowed head, but erect as in the days of happiness,
must he cross the threshold of Hades, hand in hand with her whom he
loved. And he does love me still. Else would he have followed me hither,
though no magic goblet drew him after me? And I? The heart which, in the
breast of the child, gave him its first young love, is still his, and
will be forever. Might I not go to the harbour and await him there? Look
me in the face, Charmian, and answer me as fearlessly as a mirror: did
Olympus really succeed in effacing the wrinkles?"
"They were scarcely visible before," was the reply, "and even the keenest
eye could no longer discover them. I have brought the pomade, too, and
the prescription Olympus gave me for--"
"Hush, hush!" interrupted Cleopatra softly. "There are many living
creatures in this garden, and they say that even the birds are good
listeners."
A roguish smile deepened the dimples in her cheeks as she spoke, and
delight in her bewitching grace forced from Charmian's lips the
exclamation:
"If Mark Antony could only see you now!"
"Flatterer!" replied the Queen with a grateful smile. But Charmian felt
that the time had now come to plead once more for Barine, and she began
eagerly:
"No, I certainly do not flatter. No one in Alexandria, no matter what
name she bears, could venture to vie even remotely with your charms. So
cease the persecution of the unfortunate woman whom you confided to my
care. It is an insult to Cleopatra--"
But here an indignant "Again!" interrupted her.
Cleopatra's face, which during the conversation had mirrored every
emotion of a woman's soul, from the deepest sorrow to the most
mischievous mirth, assumed an expression of repellent harshness, and,
with the curt remark, "You are forgetting what I had good reason to
forbid--I must go to my work," she turned her back upon the companion of
her youth.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
See facts as they are and treat them like figures in a sum
CLEOPATRA
By Georg Ebers
Volume 7.
CHAPTER XV.
Charmain went towards her own apartments. How often she had had a similar
experience! In the midst of the warmest admiration for this rare woman's
depth of feeling, masculine strength of intellect, tireless industry,
watchful care for her native land, steadfast loyalty, and maternal
devotion, she had been sobered in the most pitiable way.
She had been forced to see Cleopatra, for the sake of realizing a
childish dream, and impressing her lover, squander vast sums, which
diminished the prosperity of her subjects; place great and important
matters below the vain, punctilious care of her own person; forget, in
petty jealousy, the justice and kindness which were marked traits in her
character; and, though the most kindly and womanly of sovereigns, suffer
herself to be urged by angry excitement to inflict outrage on a subject
whose acts had awakened her displeasure. The lofty ambition which had
inspired her noblest and most praiseworthy deeds had more than once been
the source of acts which she herself regretted. When a child, she could
not endure to be surpassed in difficult tasks, and still deemed it a
necessity to be first and peerless. Hence the unfortunate circumstance
that Antony had given Barine the counterpart of an armlet which she
herself wore as a gift from her lover, was perhaps the principal cause of
her bitter resentment against the hapless woman.
Charmian had seen Cleopatra forgive freely and generously many a wrong,
nay, many an affront, inflicted upon her; but to see herself placed by
her husband on the same plane as a Barine, even in the most trivial
matter, might easily seem to her an unbearable insult; and the mishap
which had befallen Caesarion, in consequence of his foolish passion for
the young beauty, gave her a right to punish her rival.
Deeply anxious concerning the fate of the woman in her care--greatly
agitated, moreover, and exhausted physically and mentally--Charmian
sought her own apartments.
Here she hoped to find solace in Barine's cheerful and equable nature;
here the helpful hands of her dark-skinned maid and confidante awaited
her.
The sun was low in the western horizon when she entered the anteroom. The
members of the body-guard who were on duty told her that nothing unusual
had occurred, and with a sigh of relief she passed into the sitting-room.
But the Ethiopian, who usually came to meet her with words of welcome,
took her veil and wraps, and removed her shoes, was absent. Today no one
greeted her. Not until she entered the second room, which she had
assigned to her guest, did she find Barine, who was weeping bitterly.
During Charmian's absence the latter had received a letter from Alexas,
in which he informed her that he was ordered by the Queen to subject her
to an examination the next morning. Her cause looked dark but, if she did
not render his duty harder by the harshness which had formerly caused him
much pain, he would do his utmost to protect her from imprisonment,
forced labour in the mines, or even worse misfortunes. The imprudent game
which she had played with King Caesarion had unfortunately roused the
people against her. The depth of their indignation was shown by the fury
with which they had assailed the house of her grandfather, Didymus.
Nothing could save Dion, who had audaciously attacked the illustrious son
of their beloved Queen, from the rage of the populace. He, Alexas, knew
that in this Dion she would lose a friend and protector, but he would be
disposed to take his place if her conduct did not render it impossible
for him to unite mercy with justice.
This shameful letter, which promised Barine clemency in return for her
favour without unmasking him in his character of judge, explained to
Charmian the agitation in which she found her friend's daughter.
It was doubtless a little relief to Barine to express her loathing and
abhorrence of Alexas as eagerly as her gentle nature would permit, but
fear, grief, and indignation continued to struggle for the mastery in her
oppressed soul.
It would have been expected that the keen-witted woman would have eagerly
inquired what Charmian had accomplished with the Queen and Archibius, and
what new events had happened to affect Cleopatra, the state, and the
city; but she questioned her with far deeper interest concerning the
welfare of her lover, desiring information in regard to many things of
which her friend could give no tidings. In her brief visit to Dion's
couch she had not learned how he bore his own misfortunes and Barine's,
what view he took of the future, or what he expected from the woman he
loved.
Charmian's ignorance and silence in regard to these very matters
increased the anxiety of the endangered woman, who saw not only her own
life, but those dearest to her, seriously threatened. So she entreated
her hostess to relieve her from the uncertainty which was harder to
endure than the most terrible reality; but the latter either could not or
would not give her any further details of Cleopatra's intentions, or the
fate and present abode of her grandparents and Helena. This increased her
anxiety, for if Alexas's information was correct, her family must be
homeless. When Charmian at last admitted that she had seen Dion only a
few minutes, the tortured Barine's power of quiet endurance gave way.
She, whose nature was so hopeful that, when the glow of the sunset faded,
she already anticipated with delight the rosy dawn of the next day, now
beheld in Cleopatra's hand the reed which was to sign the death-sentence
of Dion and herself. Her mental vision conjured up her relatives wounded
by the falling house or bleeding under the stones hurled by the raging
populace. She heard Alexas command the executioner to subject her to the
rack, and fancied that Anukis had not returned because she had failed to
find Dion. The Queen's soldiers had probably carried him to prison,
loaded with chains, if Philostratus had not already instigated the mob to
drag him through the streets.
With feverish impetuosity, which alarmed Charmian the more because it was
so unlike her old friend's daughter, Barine described all the spectres
with which her imagination--agitated by terror, longing, love, and
loathing--terrified her; but the former exerted all the power of
eloquence she possessed, by turns reproving her and loading her with
caresses, in order to soothe her and rouse her from her despair. But
nothing availed. At last she succeeded in persuading the unhappy woman to
go with her to the window, which afforded a most beautiful view.
Westward, beyond the Heptastadium, the sun was sinking below the forests
of masts in the harbour of the Eunostus; and Charmian, who had learned
from her intercourse with the royal children how to soothe a troubled
young heart, to divert Barine's thoughts, directed her attention to the
crimson glow in the western sky, and told her how her father, the artist,
had showed her the superb brilliancy which colours gained at this hour of
the day, even when the west was less radiant than now. But Barine, who
usually could never gaze her fill at such a spectacle, did not thank her,
for this sunset reminded her of another which she had lately watched at
Dion's side, and she again broke into convulsive sobs.
Charmian, not knowing what to do, passed her arm around her. Just at that
moment the door was hurriedly thrown open, and Anukis, the Nubian,
entered.
Her mistress knew that something unusual must have happened to detain her
so long from her post at Barine's side, and her appearance showed that
she had been attending to important matters which had severely taxed her
strength. Her shining dark skin looked ashen grey, her high forehead,
surrounded by tangled woolly locks, was dripping with perspiration, and
her thick lips were pale. Although she must have undergone great fatigue,
she did not seem in need of rest; for, after greeting the ladies,
apologizing for her long absence, and telling Barine that this time Dion
had seemed to her half on the way to recovery, a rapid side glance at her
mistress conveyed an entreaty that she would follow her into the next
room.
But the language of the Nubian's eyes had not escaped the suspicious
watchfulness of the anxious Barine and, overwhelmed with fresh terror,
she begged that she might hear all.
Charmian ordered her maid to speak openly; but Anukis, ere she began,
assured them that she had received the news she brought from a most
trustworthy source--only it would make a heavy demand upon the resolution
and courage of Barine, whom she had hoped to find in a very different
mood. There was no time to lose. She was expected at the appointed place
an hour after sunset.
Here Charmian interrupted the maid with the exclamation "Impossible!" and
reminded her of the guards which Alexas, aided by Iras, who was
thoroughly familiar with the palace, had stationed the day before in the
anteroom, at all the doors--nay, even beneath the windows.
The Nubian replied that everything had been considered; but, to gain
time, she must beg Barine to let her colour her skin and curl her hair
while she was talking.
The surprise visible in the young beauty's face caused her to exclaim:
"Only act with entire confidence. You shall learn everything directly.
There is so much to tell! On the way here I had planned how to relate the
whole story in regular order, but it can't be done now. No, no! Whoever
wants to save a flock of sheep from a burning shed must lead out the
bell-wether first--the main thing, I mean--so I will begin with that,
though it really comes last. The explanation of how all this--"
Here, like a cry of joy, Barine's exclamation interrupted her:
"I am to fly, and Dion knows it and will follow me! I see it in your
face."
In fact, every feature of the dusky maid-servant's ugly face betrayed
that pleasant thoughts were agitating her mind. Her black eyes flashed
with fearless daring, and a smile beautified her big mouth and thick lips
as she replied:
"A loving heart like yours understands the art of prophecy better than
the chief priest of the great Serapis. Yes, my young mistress, he of whom
you speak must disappear from this wicked city where so much evil
threatens you both. He will certainly escape and, if the immortals aid us
and we are wise and brave, you also. Whence the help comes can be told
later. Now, the first thing is to transform you--don't be reluctant--into
the ugliest woman in the world--black Anukis. You must escape from the
palace in this disguise.--Now you know the whole plan, and while I get
what is necessary from my chest of clothes, I beg you, mistress, to
consider how we are to obtain the black stains for that ivory skin and
golden hair."
With these words she left the room, but Barine flung herself into her
friend's arms, exclaiming, amid tears and laughter: "Though I should be
forced to remain forever as black and crooked as faithful Aisopion, if he
did not withdraw his love, though I were obliged to go through fire and
water--I would O Charmian! what changes so quickly as joy and sorrow? I
would fain show some kindness to every one in the world, even to your
Queen, who has brought all these troubles upon me."
The new-born hope had transformed the despairing woman into a happy one,
and Charmian perceived it with grateful joy, secretly wishing that
Cleopatra had listened to her appeal.
While examining the hair-dyes used by the Queen she saw, lurking in the
background of what was still unexplained, and therefore confused her
mind, fresh and serious perils. Barine, on the contrary, gazed across
them to the anticipated meeting with her lover, and was full of the
gayest expectation until the maid-servant's return.
The work of disfigurement began without delay. Anukis moved her lips as
busily as her hands, and described in regular order all that had befallen
her during the eventful day.
Barine listened with rising excitement, and her joy increased as she
beheld the path which had been smoothed for her by the care and wisdom of
her friends. Charmian, on the contrary, became graver and more quiet the
more distinctly she perceived the danger her favourite must encounter.
Yet she could not help admitting that it would be a sin against Barine's
safety, perhaps her very life, to withhold her from this well-considered
plan of escape.
That it must be tried was certain; but as the moment which was to
endanger the woman she loved drew nearer, and she could not help saying
to herself that she was aiding an enterprise in opposition to the express
command of the Queen and helping to execute a plan which threatened to
rouse the indignation, perhaps the fury, of Cleopatra, a feeling of
sorrow overpowered her. She feared nothing for herself. Not for a single
instant did she think of the unpleasant consequences which Barine's
escape might draw upon her. The burden on her soul was due only to the
consciousness of having, for the first time, opposed the will of the
sovereign, to fulfil whose desires and to promote whose aims had been the
beloved duty of her life. Doubtless the thought crossed her mind that, by
aiding Barine's escape, she was guarding Cleopatra from future
repentance; probably she felt sure that it was her duty to help rescue
this beautiful young life, whose bloom had been so cruelly assailed by
tempest and hoar-frost, and which now had a prospect of the purest
happiness; yet, though in itself commendable, the deed brought her into
sharp conflict with the loftiest aims and aspirations of her life. And
how much nearer than the other was the woman--she shrank from the
word--whom she was about to betray, how much greater was Cleopatra's
claim to her love and gratitude! Could she have any other emotion than
thankfulness if the plan of escape succeeded? Yet she was reluctant to
perform the task of making Barine's beautiful, symmetrical figure
resemble the hunch-backed Nubian's, or to dip her fingers into the pomade
intended for Cleopatra; and it grieved her to mar the beauty of Barine's
luxuriant tresses by cutting off part of her thick fair braids.
True, these things could not be avoided, if the flight was to succeed,
and the further Anukis advanced in her story, the fewer became her
mistress's objections to the plan.
The conversation between Iras and Alexas, which had been overheard by the
maid, already made it appear necessary to withdraw Barine and her lover
from the power of such foes. The faithful man whom Anukis had found with
Dion, whose name she did not mention and of whose home she said only that
no safer hiding-place could be found, even by the mole which burrowed in
the earth, really seemed to have been sent with Gorgias to Dion's couch
by Fate itself. The control of the subterranean chambers in the Temple of
Isis which had been bestowed on the architect, also appeared like a
miracle.
Upon a small tablet, which the wise Aisopion had intentionally delayed
handing to her mistress until now, were the lines: "Archibius greets his
sister Charmian. If I know your heart, it will be as hard for you as for
me to share this plot, yet it must be done for the sake of her father, to
save the life and happiness of his child. So it must fall to your lot to
bring Barine to the Temple of Isis at the Corner of the Muses. She will
find her lover there and, if possible, be wedded to him. As the sanctuary
is so near, you need leave the palace only a short time. Do not tell
Barine what we have planned. The disappointment would be too great if it
should prove impracticable."
This letter and the arrangement it proposed transformed the serious
scruples which shadowed Charmian's good-will into a joyous, nay,
enthusiastic desire to render assistance. Barine's marriage to the man
who possessed her heart was close at hand, and she was the daughter of
Leonax, who had once been dear to her. Fear and doubt vanished as if
scattered to the four winds, and when Aisopion's work of transformation
was completed and Barine stood before her as the high-shouldered,
dark-visaged, wrinkled maid, she could not help admitting that it would
be easy to escape from the palace in that disguise.
She now told Barine that she intended to accompany her herself; and
though the former's stained face forced her to refrain from kissing her
friend, she plainly expressed to her and the faithful freedwoman the
overflowing gratitude which filled her heart.
Anukis was left alone. After carefully removing all the traces of her
occupation, as habit dictated, she raised her arms in prayer, beseeching
the gods of her native land to protect the beautiful woman to whom she
had loaned her own misshapen form, which had now been of genuine service,
and who had gone forth to meet so many dangers, but also a happiness
whose very hope had been denied to her.
Charmian had told her maid that if the Queen should inquire for her
before Iras returned from the Choma to say that she had been obliged to
leave the palace, and to supply her place. During their absence, when
Charmian had been attacked by sickness, Cleopatra had often entrusted the
care of her toilet to Aisopion, and had praised her skill.
The Queen's confidential attendant was followed as usual when she went
out by a dark-skinned maid. Lanterns and lamps had already been lighted
in the corridors of the spacious palace, and the court-yards were ablaze
with torches and pitch-pans; but, brilliantly as they burned in many
places, and numerous as were the guards, officers, eunuchs, clerks,
soldiers, cooks, attendants, slaves, door-keepers, and messengers whom
they passed, not one gave them more than a careless glance.
So they reached the last court-yard, and then came a moment when the
hearts of both women seemed to stop beating--for the man whom they had
most cause to dread, Alexas the Syrian, approached.
And he did not pass the fugitives, but stopped Charmian, and courteously,
even obsequiously, informed her that he wished to get rid of the
troublesome affair of her favourite, which had been assigned to him
against his will, and therefore had determined to bring Barine to trial
early the following morning.
The Syrian's body-servant attended his master, and while the former was
talking with Charmian the latter turned to the supposed Nubian, tapped
her lightly on the shoulder, and whispered: "Come this evening, as you
did yesterday. You haven't finished the story of Prince Setnau."
The fugitive felt as if she had grown dumb and could never more regain
the power of speech. Yet she managed to nod, and directly after the
favourite bowed a farewell to Charmian. The Ligurian was obliged to
follow his master, while Charmian and Barine passed through the gateway
between the last pylons into the open air.
Here the sea-breeze seemed to waft her a joyous greeting from the realm
of liberty and happiness, and the timid woman, amid all the perils which
surrounded her, regained sufficient presence of mind to tell her friend
what Alexas's slave had whispered--that Aisopion might remind him of it
the same evening, and thus strengthen his belief that the Nubian had
accompanied the Queen's confidante.
The way to the Temple of Isis was short. The stars showed that they would
reach their destination in time; but a second delay unexpectedly
occurred. From the steps leading to the cella of the sanctuary a
procession, whose length seemed endless, came towards them. At the head
of the train marched eight pastophori, bearing the image of Isis. Then
came the basket-bearers of the goddess with several other priestesses,
followed by the reader with an open book-roll. Behind him appeared the
quaternary number of prophets, whose head, the chief priest, moved with
stately dignity beneath a canopy. The rest of the priestly train bore in
their hands manuscripts, sacred vessels, standards, and wreaths. The
priestesses--some of whom, with garlands on their flowing hair, were
already shaking the sistrum of Isis--mingled with the line of priests,
their high voices blending with the deep notes of the men. Neokori, or
temple servants, and a large number of worshippers of Isis, closed the
procession, all wearing wreaths and carrying flowers. Torch and lantern
bearers lighted the way, and the perfume of the incense rising from the
little pan of charcoal in the hand of a bronze arm, which the pastophori
waved to and fro, surrounded and floated after the procession.
The two women waiting for the train to pass saw it turn towards Lochias,
and the conversation of the bystanders informed them that its object was
to convey to "the new Isis," the Queen, the greeting of the goddess, and
assure the sovereign of the divinity's remembrance of her in the hour of
peril.
Cleopatra could not help accepting this friendly homage, and it was
incumbent upon her to receive it wearing on her head the crown of Upper
and Lower Egypt, and robed in all the ecclesiastical vestments which only
her two most trusted attendants knew how to put on with the attention to
details that custom required. This had never been entrusted to maids of
inferior position like the Nubian; so Cleopatra would miss Charmian.
The thought filled her with fresh uneasiness and, when the steps were at
last free, she asked herself anxiously how all this would end.
It seemed as if the fugitive and her companion had exposed themselves to
this great peril in vain; for some of the temple servants were forcing
back those who wished to enter the sanctuary, shouting that it would be
closed until the return of the procession. Barine gazed timidly into
Charmian's face; but, ere she could express her opinion, the tall figure
of a man appeared on the temple steps. It was Archibius, who with grave
composure bade them follow him, and silently led them around the
sanctuary to a side door, through which, a short time before, a litter
had passed, accompanied by several attendants.
Ascending a flight of steps within the long building, they reached the
dimly lighted cella.
As in the Temple of Osiris at Abydos seven corridors, here three led to
the same number of apartments, the holy place of the sanctuary. The
central one was dedicated to Isis, that on the left to her husband
Osiris, and that on the right to Horus, the son of the great goddess.
Before it, scarcely visible in the dim light, stood the altars, loaded
with sacrifices by Archibius.
Beside that of Horus was the litter which had been borne into the temple
before the arrival of the women. From it, supported by two friends,
descended a slender young man.
A hollow sound echoed through the pillared hall. The iron door at the
main entrance of the temple had been closed. The shrill rattle that
followed proceeded from the metal bolts which an old servant of the
sanctuary had shot into the sockets.
Barine started, but neither inquired the cause of the noise nor perceived
the wealth of objects here presented to the senses; for the man who,
leaning on another's arm, approached the altar, was Dion, the lover who
had perilled his life for her sake. Her eyes rested intently on his
figure, her whole heart yearned towards him and, unable to control
herself,--she called his name aloud.
Charmian gazed anxiously around the group, but soon uttered a sigh of
relief; for the tall man whose arm supported Dion was Gorgias, the worthy
architect, his best friend, and the other, still taller and stronger, her
own brother Archibius. Yonder figure, emerging from the disguise of
wraps, was Berenike, Barine's mother. All trustworthy confidants! The
only person whom she did not know was the handsome young man standing at
her brother's side.
Barine, whose arm she still held, had struggled to escape to rush to her
mother and lover; but Archibius had approached, and in a whisper warned
her to be patient and to refrain from any greeting or question,
"supposing," he added, "that you are willing to be married at this altar
to Dion, the son of Eumenes."
Charmian felt Barine's arm tremble in hers at this suggestion, but the
young beauty obeyed her friend's directions. She did not know what had
befallen her, or whether, in the excess of happiness which overwhelmed
her, to shout aloud in her exultant joy, or melt into silent tears of
gratitude and emotion.
No one spoke. Archibius took a roll of manuscript from Dion's hand,
presented himself before the assembled company as the bride's kyrios, or
guardian, and asked Barine whether she so recognized him. Then he
returned to Dion the marriage contract, whose contents he knew and
approved, and informed those present that, in the marriage about to be
solemnized, they must consider him the paranymphos, or best man, and
Berenike as the bridesmaid, and they instantly lighted a torch at the
fires burning on one of the altars. Archibius, as kyrios, joined the
lovers' hands in the Egyptian--Barine's mother, as bridesmaid, in the
Greek-manner, and Dion gave his bride a plain iron ring. It was the same
one which his father had bestowed at his own wedding, and he whispered:
"My mother valued it; now it is your turn to honour the ancient
treasure."
After stating that the necessary sacrifices had been offered to Isis and
Serapis, Zeus, Hera, and Artemis, and that the marriage between Dion, son
of Eumenes, and Barine, daughter of Leonax, was concluded, Archibius
shook hands with both.
Haste seemed necessary, for he permitted Berenike and his sister only
time for a brief embrace, and Gorgias to clasp her hand and Dion's. Then
he beckoned, and the newly made bride's mother followed him in tears,
Charmian bewildered and almost stupefied. She did not fully realize the
meaning of the event she had just witnessed until an old neokori had
guided her and the others into the open air.
Barine felt as if every moment might rouse her from a blissful dream, and
yet she gladly told herself that she was awake, for the man walking
before her, leaning on the arm of a friend, was Dion. True, she saw, even
in the faint light of the dim temple corridor, that he was suffering.
Walking appeared to be so difficult that she rejoiced when, yielding to
Gorgias's entreaties, he entered the litter.
But where were the bearers?
She was soon to learn; for, even while she looked for them, the architect
and the youth, in whom she had long since recognized Philotas, her
grandfather's assistant, seized the poles.
"Follow us," said Gorgias, under his breath, and she obeyed, keeping
close behind the litter, which was borne first down a broad and then a
narrow staircase, and finally along a passage. Here a door stopped the
fugitives; but the architect opened it and helped his friend out of the
litter, which before proceeding farther he placed in a room filled with
various articles discovered during his investigation of the subterranean
temple chambers.
Hitherto not a word had been spoken. Now Gorgias called to Barine: "This
passage is low--you must stoop. Cover your head, and don't be afraid if
you meet bats. They have long been undisturbed. We might have taken you
from the temple to the sea, and waited there, but it would probably have
attracted attention and been dangerous. Courage, young wife of Dion! The
corridor is long, and walking through it is difficult; but compared with
the road to the mines, it is as smooth and easy as the Street of the
King. If you think of your destination, the bats will seem like the
swallows which announce the approach of spring."
Barine nodded gratefully to him; but she kissed the hand of Dion, who was
moving forward painfully, leaning on the arm of his friend. The light of
the torch carried by Gorgias's faithful foreman, who led the way, had
fallen on her blackened arm, and when the little party advanced she kept
behind the others. She thought it might be unpleasant for her lover to
see her thus disfigured, and spared him, though she would gladly have
remained nearer. As soon as the passage grew lower, the wounded man's
friends took him in their arms, and their task was a hard one, for they
were not only obliged to move onward bending low under the heavy burden,
but also to beat off the bats which, frightened by the foreman's torch,
flew up in hosts.
Barine's hair was covered, it is true, but at any other time the hideous
creatures, which often brushed against her head and arms, would have
filled her with horror and loathing. Now she scarcely heeded them; her
eyes were fixed on the recumbent figure in the bearers' arms, the man to
whom she belonged, body and soul, and whose patient suffering pierced her
inmost heart. His head rested on the breast of Gorgias, who walked
directly in front of her; the architect's stooping posture concealed his
face, but his feet were visible and, whenever they twitched, she fancied
he was in pain. Then she longed to press forward to his side, wipe the
perspiration from his brow in the hot, low corridor, and whisper words of
love and encouragement.
This she was sometimes permitted to do when the friends put down their
heavy burden. True, they allowed themselves only brief intervals of rest,
but they were long enough to show her how the sufferer's strength was
failing. When they at last reached their destination, Philotas was forced
to exert all his strength to support the exhausted man, while Gorgias
cautiously opened the door. It led to a flight of sea-washed steps close
to the garden of Didymus, which as a child she had often used with her
brother to float a little boat upon the water.
The architect opened the door only a short distance; he was expected, for
Barine soon heard him whisper, and suddenly the door was flung wide. A
tall man raised Dion and bore him into the open air. While she was still
gazing after him, a second figure of equal size approached her and,
hastily begging her permission, lifted her in his arms like a child, and
as she inhaled the cool night air and felt the water through which her
bearer waded splash up and wet her feet, her eyes sought her new-made
husband--but in vain; the night was very dark, and the lights on the
shore did not reach this spot so far below the walls of the quay.
Barine was frightened; but a few minutes after the outlines of a large
fishing boat loomed through the darkness, dimly illumined by the harbour
lights, and the next instant the giant who carried her placed her on the
deck, and a deep voice whispered: "All's well. I'll bring some wine at
once."
Then Barine saw her husband lying motionless on a couch which had been
prepared for him in the prow of the boat. Bending over him, she perceived
that he had fainted, and while rubbing his forehead with the wine,
raising his head on her lap, cheering him, and afterwards by the light of
a small lantern carefully renewing the bandage on his shoulder, she did
not notice that the vessel was moving through the water until the boatman
set the triangular sail.
She had not been told where the boat was bearing her, and she did not
ask. Any spot that she could share with Dion was welcome. The more lonely
the place, the more she could be to him. How her heart swelled with
gratitude and love! When she bent over him, kissed his forehead, and felt
how feverishly it burned, she thought, "I will nurse you back to health,"
and raised her eyes and soul to her favourite god, to whom she owed the
gift of song, and who understood everything beautiful and pure, to thank
Phoebus Apollo and beseech him to pour his rays the next morning on a
convalescent man. While she was still engaged in prayer the boat touched
the shore. Again strong arms bore her and Dion to the land, and when her
foot touched the solid earth, her rescuer, the freedman Pyrrhus, broke
the silence, saying: "Welcome, wife of Dion, to our island! True, you
must be satisfied to take us as we are. But if you are as content with us
as we are glad to serve you and your lord, who is ours also, the hour of
leave-taking will be far distant."
Then, leading the way to the house, he showed her as her future
apartments two large whitewashed rooms, whose sole ornament was their
exquisite neatness. On the threshold stood Pyrrhus's grey-haired wife, a
young woman, and a girl scarcely beyond childhood; but the older one
modestly welcomed Barine, and also begged her to accept their
hospitality. Recovery was rapid in the pure air of the Serpent Isle. She
herself, and--she pointed to the others--her oldest son's wife, and her
own daughter, Dione, would be ready to render her any service.
CHAPTER XVI.
Brothers and sisters are rarely talkative when they are together. As
Charmian went to Lochias with Archibius, it was difficult for her to find
words, the events of the past few hours had agitated her so deeply.
Archibius, too, could not succeed in turning his thoughts in any other
direction, though important and far more momentous things claimed his
attention.
They walked on silently side by side. In reply to his sister's inquiry
where the newly wedded pair were to be concealed, he had answered that,
spite of her trustworthiness, this must remain a secret. To her second
query, how had it been possible to use the interior of the Temple of Isis
without interruption, he also made a guarded reply.
In fact, it was the control of the subterranean corridors of the
sanctuary which had suggested to Gorgias the idea of carrying Dion
through them to Pyrrhus's fishing-boat. To accomplish this it was only
necessary to have the Temple of Isis, which usually remained open day and
night, left to the fugitive's friends for a short time; and this was
successfully managed.
The historian Timagenes, who had come from Rome as ambassador and claimed
the hospitality of his former pupil Archibius, had been empowered to
offer Cleopatra recognition of her own and her children's right to the
throne, and a full pardon, if she would deliver Mark Antony into the
hands of Octavianus, or have him put to death.
The Alexandrian Timagenes considered this demand both just and desirable,
because it promised to deliver his native city from the man whose
despotic arrogance menaced its freedom, and whose lavish generosity and
boundless love of splendour diminished its wealth. To Rome, as whose
representative the historian appeared, this man's mere existence meant
constant turmoil and civil war. At the restoration of the flute-player by
Gabinius and Mark Antony, Timagenes had been carried into slavery. Later,
when, after his freedom had been purchased by the son of Sulla, he
succeeded in attaining great influence in Rome, he still remained hostile
to Mark Antony, and it had been a welcome charge to work against him in
Alexandria. He hoped to find an ally in Archibius, whose loyal devotion
to the Queen he knew. Arius, Barine's uncle and Octavianus's former
tutor, would also aid him. The most powerful support of his mission,
however, could be rendered by the venerable chief priest, the head of the
whole Egyptian hierarchy. He had shown the latter that Antony, in any
case, was a lost man, and Egypt was in the act of dropping like a ripe
fruit into the lap of Octavianus. It would soon be in his power to give
the country whatever degree of liberty and independence he might choose.
The Caesar had the sole disposal of the Queen's fate also, and whoever
desired to see her remain on the throne must strive to gain the good-will
of Octavianus.
The wise Anubis had considered all these things, but he owed to Timagenes
the hint that Arius was the man whom Octavianus most trusted. So the
august prelate secretly entered into communication with Barine's uncle.
But the dignity of his high office, and the feebleness of extreme age,
forbade Anubis to seek the man who was suspected of friendship for the
Romans. He had therefore sent his trusted secretary, the young Serapion,
to make a compact as his representative with the friend of Octavianus,
whose severe injuries prevented his leaving the house to go to the chief
priest.
During Timagenes's negotiations with the secretary and Arius, Archibius
came to entreat Barine's uncle to do everything in his power to save his
niece; and, as all the Queen's friends were anxious to prevent an act
which, in these times of excitement, could not fail, on account of its
connection with Dion, a member of the Council, to rouse a large number of
the citizens against her, Serapion, as soon as he was made aware of the
matter, eagerly protested his readiness to do his best to save the
imperilled lovers. He cared nothing for Barine or Dion as individuals,
but he doubtless would have been ready to make a still greater sacrifice
to win the influential Archibius, and especially Arius, who would have
great power through Octavianus, the rising sun.
The men had just begun to discuss plans for saving Barine, when the
Nubian appeared and told Archibius what had been arranged beside Dion's
sick-bed by the freedman and Gorgias. The escape of the fugitives
depended solely upon their reaching the boat unseen, and the surest way
to accomplish this was to use the subterranean passage which the
architect had again opened.
Archibius, to whom the representative of the chief priest had offered his
aid, now took the others into his confidence, and Arius proposed that
Barine should marry Dion in the Temple of Isis, and the couple should
afterwards be guided through the secret passage to the boat. This
proposal was approved, and Serapion promised to reserve the sanctuary for
the wedding of the fugitives for a short time after the departure of the
procession, which was to take place at sunset. In return for this service
another might perhaps soon be requested from the friend of Octavianus,
who greeted his promise with grateful warmth.
"The priesthood," said Serapion, "takes sides with all who are unjustly
persecuted, and in this case bestows aid the more willingly on account of
its great anxiety to guard the Queen from an act which would be difficult
to approve." As for the fugitives, so far as he could see, only two
possibilities were open to them: Cleopatra would cleave to Mark Antony
and go--would that the immortals might avert it!--to ruin, or she would
sacrifice him and save her throne and life. In both cases the endangered
lovers could soon return uninjured--the Queen had a merciful heart, and
never retained anger long if no guilt existed.
The details of the plan were then settled by Archibius, Anukis, and
Berenike, who was with the family of Arius, and the decision was
communicated to the architect. Archibius had maintained the same silence
concerning the destination of the fugitives towards the men composing the
council and Barine's mother as to his sister. With regard to the mission
of Timagenes and the political questions which occupied his mind, he gave
Charmian only the degree of information necessary to explain the plan she
so lovingly promoted; but she had no desire to know more. On the way home
her mind was wholly absorbed by the fear that Cleopatra had missed her
services and discovered Barine's flight. True, she mentioned the Queen's
desire to place her children in Archibius's charge, but she could not
give him full particulars until she reached her own apartments.
Her absence had not been noticed. The Regent Mardion had received the
procession in the Queen's name, for Cleopatra had driven into the city,
no one knew where.
Charmian entered her apartments with a lighter heart. Anukis opened the
door to them. She had remained undisturbed, and it was a pleasure to
Archibius to give the faithful, clever freedwoman an account of the
matter with his own lips. He could have bestowed no richer reward upon
the modest servant, who listened to his words as if they were a
revelation. When she disclaimed the thanks with which he concluded,
protesting that she was the person under obligation, the expression was
sincere. Her keen intellect instantly recognized the aristocrat's manner
of addressing an equal or an inferior; and he who, in her eyes, was the
first of men, had described the course of events as though she had stood
on the same level. The Queen herself might have been satisfied with the
report.
When she left Charmian's rooms to join the other servants, she told
herself that she was an especially favoured mortal; and when a young cook
teased her about her head being sunk between her shoulders, she answered,
laughing--"My shoulders have grown so high because I shrug them so often
at the fools who jeer at me and yet are not half so happy and grateful."
Charmian, sorely wearied, had flung herself into an arm-chair, and
Archibius took his place opposite to her. They were happy in each other's
society, even when silent; but to-day the hearts of both were so full
that they fared like those who are so worn out by fatigue that they
cannot sleep. How much they had to tell each other!--yet it was long ere
Charmian broke the silence and returned to the subject of the Queen's
wish, describing to her brother Cleopatra's visit to the house which the
children had built, how kind and cordial she had been; yet, a few minutes
later, incensed by the mere mention of Barine's name, she had dismissed
her so ungraciously.
"I do not know what you intend," she said in conclusion, "but,
notwithstanding my love for her, I must perhaps decide in favour of what
is most difficult, for--when she learns that it was I who withdrew the
daughter of Leonax from her and the base Alexas--what treatment can I
expect, especially as Iras no longer gives me the same affection, and
shows that she has forgotten my love and care? This will increase, and
the worst of the matter is, that if the Queen begins to favour her, I
cannot justly reproach her, for Iras is keener-witted, and has a more
active brain. Statecraft was always odious to me. Iras, on the contrary,
is delighted with the opportunity to speak on subjects connected with the
government of the country, and especially the ceaseless, momentous game
with Rome and the men who guide her destiny."
"That game is lost," Archibius broke in with so much earnestness that
Charmian started, repeating in a low, timid tone:
"Lost?"
"Forever," said Archibius, "unless--
"The Olympians be praised--that there is still a doubt."
"Unless Cleopatra can decide to commit an act which will force her to be
faithless to herself, and destroy her noble image through all future
generations."
"How?"
"Whenever you learn it, will be too soon."
"And suppose she should do it, Archibius? You are her most trusted
confidant. She will place in your charge what she loves more than she
does herself."
"More? You mean, I suppose, the children?"
"The children! Yes, a hundred times yes. She loves them better than aught
else on earth. For them, believe me, she would be ready to go to her
death."
"Let us hope so."
"And you--were she to commit the horrible deed--I can only suspect what
it is. But should she descend from the height which she has hitherto
occupied--would you still be ready--"
"With me," he interrupted quietly, "what she does or does not do matters
nothing. She is unhappy and will be plunged deeper and deeper into
misery. I know this, and it constrains me to exert my utmost powers in
her service. I am hers as the hermit consecrated to Serapis belongs to
the god. His every thought must be devoted to him. To the deity who
created him he dedicates body and soul until the death to which he dooms
him. The bonds which unite me to this woman--you know their origin--are
not less indestructible. Whatever she desires whose fulfilment will not
force me to despise myself is granted in advance."
"She will never require such things from the friend of her childhood,"
cried Charmian. Then, approaching him with both arms extended joyfully,
she exclaimed: "Thus you ought to speak and feel, and therein is the
answer to the question which has agitated my soul since yesterday.
Barine's flight, the favour and disfavour of Cleopatra, Iras, my poor
head, which abhors politics, while at this time the Queen needs
keen-sighted confidants--"
"By no means," her brother interrupted. "It is for men alone to give
counsel in these matters. Accursed be women's gossip over their toilet
tables. It has already scattered to the four winds many a well-considered
plan of the wisest heads, and an Iras could never be more fatal to
statecraft than just at the present moment, had not Fate already uttered
the final verdict."
"Then hence with these scruples," cried Charmian eagerly; "my doubts are
at an end! As usual, you point out the right path. I had thought of
returning to the country estate we call Irenia--the abode of peace--or to
our beloved little palace at Kanopus, to spend the years which may still
be allotted to me, and return to everything that made my childhood
beautiful. The philosophers, the flowers in the garden, the poets--even
the new Roman ones, of whose works Timagenes sent us such charming
specimens--would enliven the solitude. The child, the daughter of the man
whose love I renounced, and afterwards perhaps her sons and daughters,
would fill the place of my own. As they would have been dear to Leonax,
I, too, would have loved them! This is the guise in which the future has
appeared to me in many a quiet hour. But shall Charmian--who, when her
heart throbbed still more warmly and life lay fair before her, laid her
first love upon the altar of sacrifice for her royal playfellow--abandon
Cleopatra in misfortune from mere selfish scruples? No, no!--Like you, I
too belong--come what may--to the Queen."
She gazed into her brother's face, sure of his approval but, waving his
uplifted hand, he answered gravely: "No, Charmian! What I, a man, can
assume, might be fatal to you, a woman. The present is not sweet enough
for me to embitter it with wormwood from the future. And yet you must
cast one glance into its gloomy domain, in order to understand me. You
can be silent, and what you now learn will be a secret between us. Only
one thing"--here he lowered the loud tones of his deep voice--"only one
thing can save her: the murder of Antony, or an act of shameless
treachery which would deliver him into Octavianus's power. This is the
proposal Timagenes brought."
"This?" she asked in a hollow tone, her grey head drooping.
"This," he repeated firmly. "And if she succumbs to the temptation, she
will be faithless to the love which has coursed through her whole life as
the Nile flows through the land of her ancestors. Then, Charmian, stay,
stay under any circumstances, cling to her more firmly than ever, for
then, then, my sister, she will be more wretched--ten, a hundred fold
more wretched than if Octavianus deprives her of everything, perhaps even
life itself."
"Nor will I leave her, come what may. I will remain at her side until the
end," cried Charmian eagerly. But Archibius, without noticing the
enthusiastic ardor, so unusual to his sister's quiet nature, calmly
continued: "She won your heart also, and it seems impossible for you to
desert her. Many have shared our feelings; and it is no disgrace to any
one. Misfortune is a weapon which cleaves base natures like a sword, yet
like a hammer welds noble ones more closely. To you, therefore, it now
seems doubly difficult to leave her, but you need love. The right to live
and guard yourself from the most pitiable retrogression is your due, as
much as that of the rare woman on the throne. So long as you are sure of
her love, remain with her, and show your devotion in every situation
until the end. But the motives which were drawing you away to books,
flowers, and children, weigh heavily in the balance, and if you lack the
anchor of her favour and love, I shall see you perish miserably. The
frost emanating from Cleopatra, if her heart grew cold to you, the
pin-pricks with which Iras would assail you, were you defenceless, would
kill you. This must not be, sister; we will guard against it Do not
interrupt me. The counsel I advise you to follow has been duly weighed.
If you see that the Queen still loves you as in former days, cling to
her; but should you learn the contrary, bid her farewell to-morrow. My
Irenia is yours--"
"But she does love me, and even should she no longer--"
"The test is at hand. We will leave the decision to her. You shall
confess that you were the culprit who aided Barine to escape her power to
punish."
"Archibius!"
"If you did not, a series of falsehoods must ensue. Try whether the petty
qualities in her nature, which urged her to commit the fate of Leonax's
daughter to unworthy hands, are more powerful than the nobler ones. Try
whether she is worthy of the self-sacrificing fidelity which you have
given her all your life. If she remains the same as before, spite of this
admission--"
Here he was interrupted by Anukis, who asked if her mistress would see
Iras at this late hour. "Admit her," replied Archibius, after hastily
exchanging glances with his sister, whose face had paled at his demand.
He perceived it and, as the servant withdrew, he clasped her hand, saying
with earnest affection: "I gave you my opinion, but at our age we must
take counsel with ourselves, and you will find the right path."
"I have already found it," she answered softly with downcast eyes. "This
visitor brought a speedy decision. I must not feel ashamed in Iras's
presence."
She had scarcely finished speaking when the Queen's younger confidante
entered. She was excited and, after casting a searching glance around the
familiar room, she asked, after a curt greeting:
"No one knows where the Queen has gone. Mardion received the procession
in her place. Did she take you into her confidence?"
Charmian answered in the negative, and inquired whether Antony had
arrived, and how she had found him.
"In a pitiable state," was the reply. "I hastened hither to prevent the
Queen from visiting him, if possible. She would have received a rebuff.
It is horrible."
"The disappointment of Paraetonium is added to the other burdens,"
observed Archibius.
"A feather compared with the rest," cried Iras indignantly. "What a
spectacle! A shrivelled soul, never too large, in the body of a powerful
giant. Disaster crushes the courage of the descendant of Herakles. The
weakling will drag the Queen's splendid courage with him into the dust."
"We will do our best to prevent it," replied Archibius firmly. "The
immortals have placed you and Charmian at her side to sustain her, if her
own strength fails. The time to test your powers has arrived."
"I know my duty," replied Iras austerely.
"Prove it!" said Archibius earnestly. "You think you have cause for anger
against Charmian."
"Whoever treats my foes so tenderly can doubtless dispense with my
affection. Where is your ward?"
"That you shall learn later," replied Charmian advancing. "But when you
do know, you will have still better reason to doubt my love; yet it was
only to save one dear to me from misery, certainly not to grieve you,
that I stepped between you and Barine. And now let me say--had you
wounded me to the quick, and everything dear to the Greek heart called to
me for vengeance--I should impose upon myself whatever constraint might
be necessary to deny the impulse, because this breast contains a love
stronger, more powerful, than the fiercest hate. And this love we both
share. Hate me, strive to wound and injure one at whose side you have
hitherto stood like a daughter, but beware of robbing me of the strength
and freedom which I need, to be and to offer to my royal mistress all the
assistance in my power. I have just been consulting my brother about
leaving Cleopatra's service."
"Now?" Iras broke in vehemently. "No, no! Not that! It must not be! She
cannot spare you now."
"More easily, perhaps, than you," replied Charmian; "yet in many things
my services might be hard to replace."
"Nothing under the sun could do it," cried Iras eagerly. "If, in these
days of trouble, she should lose you too--"
"Still darker ones are approaching," interrupted Archibius positively.
"Perhaps you will learn all to-morrow. Whether Charmian yields to her
desire for rest, or continues in the service of the Queen, depends on
you. If you wish her to remain you must not render it too hard for her to
do so. We three, my child, are perhaps the only persons at this court to
whom the Queen's happiness is more than their own, and therefore we
should permit no incident, whatever name it may bear, to cloud our
harmony."
Iras threw back her head with angry pride, exclaiming passionately: "Was
it I who injured you? I do not know in what respect. But you and
Charmian--though you have so long been aware that this heart was closed
against every love save one--stepped between me and the man for whom I
have yearned since childhood, and built the bridge which united Dion and
Barine. I held the woman I hated in my grasp, and thanked the immortals
for the boon; but you two--it is not difficult to guess the secret you
are still trying to keep from me--you aided her to escape. You have
robbed me of my revenge; you have again placed the singer in the path
where she must find the man to whom I have a better and older claim, and
who perhaps may still be considering which of us two will be the better
mistress of his house, if Alexas and his worthy brother do not arrange
matters so that we must both content ourselves with thinking tenderly of
a dead man. That is why I believe that I am no longer indebted to you,
that Charmian has more than repaid herself for all the kindness she has
ever showed me."
With these words she hurried to the door, but paused on the threshold,
exclaiming: "This is the state of affairs; yet I am ready to serve the
Queen hand in hand with you as before; for you two--as I have said--are
necessary to her. In other respects--I shall follow my own path."
CHAPTER XVII.
Cleopatra had sought the venerable Anubis, who now, as the priest of
Alexander, at the age of eighty, ruled the whole hierarchy of the
country. It was difficult for him to leave his arm-chair, but he had been
carried to the observatory to examine the adverse result of the
observation made by the Queen herself. The position of the stars,
however, had been so unfavourable that the more deeply Cleopatra entered
into these matters, the less easy he found it to urge the mitigating
influences of distant planets, which he had at first pointed out.
In his reception-hall, however, the chief priest had assured her that the
independence of Egypt and the safety of her own person lay in her hands;
only--the planets showed this--a terrible sacrifice was required--a
sacrifice of which his dignity, his eighty years, and his love for her
alike forbade him to speak. Cleopatra was accustomed to hear these
mysterious sayings from his lips, and interpreted them in her own way.
Many motives had induced her to seek the venerable prelate at this late
hour. In difficult situations he had often aided her with good counsel;
but this time she was not led to him by the magic cup of Nektanebus,
which the eight pastophori who accompanied it had that day restored to
the temple, for since the battle of Actium the superb vessel had been a
source of constant anxiety to her.
Cleopatra had now asked the teacher of her childhood the direct question
whether the cup--a wide, shallow vessel, with a flat, polished bottom
could really have induced Antony to leave the battle and follow her ere
the victory was decided. She had used it just before the conflict between
the galleys, and this circumstance led Anubis to answer positively in the
affirmative.
Long ago the marvellous chalice had been exhibited to her among the
temple treasures, and she was told that every one who induced another
person to be reflected from its shining surface obtained the mastery over
his will. Her wish to possess it, however, was not gratified, and she did
not ask for it again until the limitless devotion and ardent love of
Antony had seemed less fervent than of yore. From that time she had never
ceased to urge her aged friend to place the wondrous cup in her keeping.
At first he had absolutely refused, predicting that its use would bring
misfortune upon her; but when her request was followed by an imperative
command, and the goblet was entrusted to her, Anubis himself believed
that this one vessel did possess the magic power attributed to it. He
deemed that the drinking-cup afforded the strongest proof of the magic
art, far transcending human ability, of the great goddess by whose aid
King Nektanebus--who, according to tradition, was the father of Alexander
the Great--was said to have made the vessel in the Isis island of Philoe.
Anubis had intended to remind Cleopatra of his refusal, and show her the
great danger incurred by mortals who strove to use powers beyond their
sphere. It had been his purpose to bid her remember Phaeton, who had
almost kindled a conflagration in the world, when he attempted, in the
chariot of his father, Phoebus Apollo, to guide the horses of the sun.
But this was unnecessary, for he had scarcely assented to the question
ere, with passionate vehemence, she ordered him to destroy before her
eyes the cup which had brought so much misfortune.
The priest feigned that her desire harmonized with a resolution which he
had himself formed. In fact, before her arrival, he had feared that the
goblet might be used in some fatal manner if Octavianus should take
possession of the city and country, and the wonder-working vessel should
fall into his hands. Nektanebus had made the cup for Egypt. To wrest it
from the foreign ruler was acting in the spirit of the last king in whose
veins had flowed the blood of the Pharaohs, and who had toiled with
enthusiastic devotion for the independence and liberty of his people. To
destroy this man's marvellous work rather than deliver it to the Roman
conqueror seemed to the chief priest, after the Queen's command, a sacred
duty, and as such he represented it to be when he commanded the smelting
furnace to be fired and the cup transformed into a shapeless mass before
the eyes of Cleopatra.
While the metal was melting he eagerly told the Queen how easily she
could dispense with the vessel which owed its magic power to the mighty
Isis.
The spell of woman's charms was also a gift of the goddess. It would
suffice to render Antony's heart soft and yielding as the fire melted the
gold. Perhaps the Imperator had forfeited, with the Queen's respect, her
love--the most priceless of blessings. He, Anubis, would regard this as a
great boon of the Deity; "for," he concluded, "Mark Antony is the cliff
which will shatter every effort to secure to my royal mistress
undiminished the heritage which has come to her and her children from
their ancestors, and preserve the independence and prosperity of this
beloved land. This cup was a costly treasure. The throne and prosperity
of Egypt are worthy of greater sacrifices. But I know that there is none
harder for a woman to make than her love."
The meaning of the old man's words Cleopatra learned the following
morning, when she granted the first interview to Timagenes, Octavianus's
envoy.
The keen-witted, brilliant man, who had been one of her best teachers and
with whom, when a pupil, she had had many an argument, was kindly
received, and fulfilled his commission with consummate skill.
The Queen listened attentively to his representations, showed him that
her own intellect had not lost in flexibility, though it had gained
power; and when she dismissed him, with rich gifts and gracious words,
she knew that she could preserve the independence of her beloved native
land and retain the throne for herself and her children if she would
surrender Antony to the conqueror or to him, as "the person acting,"
or--these were Timagenes's own words--"remove him forever from the play
whose end she had the power to render either brilliant or fateful."
When she was again alone her heart throbbed so passionately and her soul
was in such a tumult of agitation that she felt unable to attend the
appointed meeting of the Council of the crown. She deferred the session
until the following day, and resolved to go out upon the sea, to
endeavour to regain her composure.
Antony had refused to see her. This wounded her. The thought of the
goblet and its evil influences had by no means passed from her memory
with the destruction of the vessel caused by one of those outbursts of
passion to which, in these days of disaster, she yielded more frequently
than usual. On the contrary, she felt the necessity of being alone, to
collect her thoughts and strive to dispel the clouds from her troubled
soul.
The beaker had been one of the treasures of Isis, and the memory of it
recalled hours during which, in former days, she had often found
composure in the temple of the goddess. She wished to seek the sanctuary
unnoticed and, accompanied only by Iras and the chief Introducer, went,
closely veiled, to the neighbouring temple at the Corner of the Muses.
But she failed to find the object of her pilgrimage. The throng which
filled it to pray and offer sacrifices, and the fear of being recognized,
destroyed her calmness.
She was in the act of retiring, when Gorgias, the architect, followed by
an assistant carrying surveying instruments, advanced towards her. She
instantly called him to her side, and he informed her how wonderfully
Fate itself seemed to favour her plan of building. The mob had destroyed
the house of the old philosopher Didymus, and the grey-haired sage, to
whom he had offered the shelter of his home, was now ready to transfer
the property inherited from his ancestors, if her Majesty would assure
him and his family of her protection.
Then she asked to see the architect's plan for joining the museum to the
sanctuary, and became absorbed in the first sketch, to which he had
devoted part of the night and morning. He showed it, and with eager
urgency Cleopatra commanded him to begin the building as soon as possible
and pursue the work night and day. What usually required months must be
completed in weeks.
Iras and the "Introducer," clad in plain garments, had waited for her in
the temple court and, joined by the architect, accompanied her to the
unpretending litter standing at one of the side gates but, instead of
entering it, she ordered Gorgias to attend her to the garden.
The inspection proved that the architect was right and, even if the
mausoleum occupied a portion of it, and the street which separated it
from the Temple of Isis were continued along the shore of the sea, the
remainder would still be twice as large as the one belonging to the
palace at Lochias.
Cleopatra's thorough examination showed Gorgias that she had some
definite purpose in view. Her inquiry whether it would be possible to
connect it with the promontory of Lochias indicated what she had in mind,
and the architect answered in the affirmative. It was only necessary to
tear down some small buildings belonging to the Crown and a little temple
of Berenike at the southern part of the royal harbour. The arm of the
Agathodaemon Canal which entered here had been bridged long ago.
The new scene which would result from this change had been conjured
before the Queen's mental vision with marvellous celerity, and she
described it in brief, vivid language to the architect. The garden should
remain, but must be enlarged from the Lochias to the bridge. Thence a
covered colonnade would lead to the palace. After Gorgias had assured her
that all this could easily be arranged, she gazed thoughtfully at the
ground for a time, and then gave orders that the work should be commenced
at once, and requested him to spare neither means nor men.
Gorgias foresaw a period of feverish toil, but it did not daunt him. With
such a master builder he was ready to roof the whole city. Besides, the
commission delighted him because it proved that the woman whose mausoleum
was to rise from the earth so swiftly still thought of enhancing the
pleasures of existence; for, though she wished the garden to remain
unchanged, she desired to see the colonnade and the remainder of the work
constructed of costly materials and in beautiful forms. When she bade him
farewell, Gorgias kissed her robe with ardent enthusiasm.
What a woman! True, she had not even raised her veil, and was attired in
plain dark clothing, but every gesture revealed the most perfect grace.
The arm and hand with which she pointed now here, now there, again seemed
to him fairly instinct with life; and he, who deemed perfection of form
of so much value, found it difficult to avert his eyes from her
marvellous symmetry. And her whole figure! What lines, what genuine
aristocratic elegance, and warm, throbbing life!
That morning when Helena, now an inmate of his own home, greeted him, he
had essayed to compare her, mentally, with Cleopatra, but speedily
desisted. The man to whom Hebe proffers nectar does not ask for even the
best wine of Byblus. A feeling of grateful, cheerful satisfaction,
difficult to describe, stole over him when the reserved, quiet Helena
addressed him so warmly and cordially; but the image of Cleopatra
constantly thrust itself between them, and it was difficult for him to
understand himself. He had loved many women in succession, and now his
heart throbbed for two at once, and the Queen was the brighter of the two
stars whose light entranced him. Therefore his honest soul would have
considered it a crime to woo Helena now.
Cleopatra knew what an ardent admirer she had won in the able architect,
and the knowledge pleased her. She had used no goblet to gain him.
Doubtless he would begin to build the mausoleum the next morning. The
vault must have space for several coffins. Antony had more than once
expressed the desire to be buried beside her, wherever he might die, and
this had occurred ere she possessed the beaker. She must in any case
grant him the same favour, no matter in what place or by whose hand he
met death, and the bedimmed light of his existence was but too evidently
nearing extinction. If she spared him, Octavianus would strike him from
the ranks of the living, and she----Again she was overpowered by the
terrible, feverish restlessness which had induced her to command the
destruction of the goblet, and had brought her to the temple. She could
not return in this mood to meet her councillors, receive visitors, greet
her children. This was the birthday of the twins; Charmian had reminded
her of it and undertaken to provide the gifts. How could she have found
time and thought for such affairs? She had returned from the chief priest
late in the evening, yet had asked for a minute description of the
condition in which they found Mark Antony. The report made by Iras
harmonized with the state in which she had herself seen him during and
after the battle. Ay, his brooding gloom seemed to have deepened.
Charmian had helped her dress in the morning, and had been on the point
of making her difficult confession, and owning that she had aided Barine
to escape the punishment of her royal mistress; but ere she could begin,
Timagenes was announced, for Cleopatra had not risen from her couch until
a late hour.
The object for which the Queen had sought the temple had not been gained;
but the consultation with Gorgias had diverted her mind, and the emotions
which the thought of her last resting-place had evoked now drowned
everything else, as the roar of the surf dominates the twittering of the
swallows on the rocky shore.
Ay, she needed calmness! She must weigh and ponder over many things in
absolute quietude, and this she could not obtain at Lochias. Then her
glance rested upon the little sanctuary of Berenike, which she had
ordered removed to make room for a garden near at hand, where the
children could indulge their love of creative work. It was empty. She
need fear no interruption there. The interior contained only a single,
quiet, pleasant chamber, with the image of Berenike. The "Introducer"
commanded the guard to admit no other visitors, and soon the little white
marble, circular room with its vaulted roof received the Queen. She sank
down on one of the bronze benches opposite to the statue. All was still;
in this cool silence her mind, trained to thought, could find that for
which it longed--clearness of vision, a plain understanding of her own
feelings and position in the presence of the impending decision.
At first her thoughts wandered to and fro like a dove ere it chooses the
direction of its flight; but after the question why she was having a tomb
built so hurriedly, when she would be permitted to live, her mind found
the right track. Among the Scythian guards, the Mauritanians, and
Blemmyes in the army there were plenty of savage fellows whom a word from
her lips and a handful of gold would have set upon the vanquished Antony,
as the huntsman's "Seize him!" urges the hounds. A hint, and among the
wretched magicians and Magians in the Rhakotis, the Egyptian quarter of
the city, twenty men would have assassinated him by poison or wily
snares; one command to the Macedonians in the guard of the Mellakes or
youths, and he would be a captive that very day, and to-morrow, if she so
ordered, on the way to Asia, whither Octavianus, as Timagenes told her,
had gone.
What prevented her from grasping the gold, giving the hint, issuing the
command?
Doubtless she thought of the magic goblet, now melted, which had
constrained him to cast aside honour, fame, and power, as worthless
rubbish, in order to obey her behest not to leave her; but though this
remembrance burdened her soul, it had no decisive influence. It was no
one thing which prisoned her hand and lips, but every fibre of her being,
every pulsation of her heart, every glance back into the past to the
confines of childhood.
Yet she listened to other thoughts also. They reminded her of her
children, the elation of power, love for the land of her ancestors, and
the peril which menaced it without her, the bliss of seeing the light,
and the darkness, the silence, the dull rigidity of death, the
destruction of the body and the mind cherished and developed with so much
care and toil, the horrible torture which might be associated with the
transition from life to death--the act of dying. And what lay before her
in the existence which lasted an eternity? When she no longer breathed
beneath the sun, even if the death hour was deferred, and she found that
not Epicurus, who believed that with death all things ended, had been
right, but the ancient teachings of the Egyptians, what would await her
in that world beyond the grave if she purchased a few more years of life
by the murder or betrayal of her lover, her husband?
Yet perhaps the punishments inflicted upon the condemned were but
bugbears invented by the priesthood, which guarded the regulation of the
state in order to curb the unruly conduct of the populace and terrify the
turbulent transgressors of the law. And, whispered the daring Greek
spirit, in the abode of the condemned, not in the Garden of Aalu, the
Elysian Fields of the Egyptians, she would meet her father and mother and
all her wicked ancestors down to Euergetes I., who was succeeded by the
infamous Philopater. Thus the thought of the other world became an
antecedent so uncertain as to permit no definite inference, and might
therefore be left out of the account. How would--this must be the form of
the question--the years purchased by the murder or betrayal of one whom
she loved shape themselves for her?
During the night the image of the murdered man would drive sleep from her
couch, and the Furies, the Dirx, as the Roman Antony called them, who
pursue murderers with the serpent scourge, were no idle creations of
poetic fancy, but fully symbolized the restlessness of the criminal,
driven to and fro by the pangs of conscience. The chief good, the
painless happiness of the Epicureans, was forever lost to those burdened
by such guilt.
And during the hours of the day and evening? Ay, then she would be free
to heap pleasure on pleasure. But for whom were the festivals to be
celebrated; with whom could she share them? For many a long year no
banquet, no entertainment had given her enjoyment without Mark Antony.
For whom did she adorn herself or strive to stay the vanishing charm? And
how soon would anguish of soul utterly destroy the spell, which was
slowly, slowly, yet steadily diminishing, and, when the mirror revealed
wrinkles which the skill of no Olympus could efface, when she----No, she
was not created to grow old! Did the few years of life which must contain
so much misery really possess a value great enough to surrender the right
of being called by present and future generations the bewitching
Cleopatra, the most irresistible of women?
And the children?
Yes, it would have been delightful to see them grow up and occupy the
throne, but serious, decisive doubts soon blended even with an idea so
rich in joy.
How glorious to greet Caesarion as sovereign of the world in Octavianus's
place! But how could the dreamer, whose first love affair had caused the
total sacrifice of dignity and violation of the law, and who now seemed
to have once more relapsed into the old state of torpor, attain the
position?
The other children inspired fair hopes, and how beautiful it appeared to
the mother's heart to see Antonius Helios as King of Egypt; Cleopatra
Selene with her first child in her arms; and little Alexander a noble
statesman and hero, rich in virtue and talents! Yet, what would they,
Antony's children, whose education she hoped Archibius would direct, feel
for the mother who had been their father's murderess?
She shuddered at the thought, remembering the hours when her childish
heart had shed tears of blood over the infamous mother whom her father
had execrated. And Queen Tryphoena, whom history recorded as a monster,
had not killed her husband, but merely thrust him from the throne.
Arsinoe's execrations of her mother and sister came back to her memory,
and the thought that the rosy lips of the twins and her darling Alexander
could ever open to curse her,--the idea that the children would ever
raise their beloved hands to point at her, the wicked murderess of their
father, with horror and scorn--No, no, and again no! She would not
purchase a few more years of valueless life at the cost of this
humiliation and shame.
Purchase of whom?
Of that Octavianus who had robbed her son of the heritage of his father,
Caesar, and whose mention in the will was like an imputation on her
fidelity--the cold-hearted, calculating upstart, whose nature from their
first meeting in Rome had repelled, rebuffed, chilled her; of the man by
whose cajolery and power her husband--for in her own eyes and those of
the Egyptians Antony held this position--had been induced to wed his
sister, Octavia, and thereby stamp her, Cleopatra, as merely his love,
cast a doubt upon the legitimate birth of her children; of the false
friend of the trusting Antony who, before the battle of Actium, had most
deeply humiliated and insulted both!
On the contrary, her royal pride rebelled against obeying the command of
such a man to commit the most atrocious deed; and from childhood this
pride had been as much a part of her nature as her breath and the
pulsation of her heart. And yet, for her children's sake, she might
perhaps have incurred this disgrace, had it not been at the same time the
grave of the best and noblest things which she desired to implant in the
young souls of the twins and Alexander.
While thinking of the children's curses she had risen from her seat. Why
should she reflect and consider longer? She had found the clear
perception she sought. Let Gorgias hasten the building of the tomb.
Should Fate demand her life, she would not resist if she were permitted
to preserve it only at the cost of murder or base treachery. Her lover's
was already forfeited. At his side she had enjoyed a radiant, glowing,
peerless bliss, of which the world still talked with envious amazement.
At his side, when all was over, she would rest in the grave, and compel
the world to remember with respectful sympathy the royal lovers, Antony
and Cleopatra. Her children should be able to think of her with
untroubled hearts, and not even the shadow of a bitter feeling, a warning
thought, should deter them from adorning their parents' grave with
flowers, weeping at its foot, invoking and offering sacrifices to their
spirits.
Then she glanced at the statue of Berenike, who had also once worn on her
brow the double crown of Egypt. She, too, had early died a violent death;
she, too, had known how to love. The vow to sacrifice her beautiful hair
to Aphrodite if her husband returned uninjured from the Syrian war had
rendered her name illustrious. "Berenike's Hair" was still to be seen as
a constellation in the night heavens.
Though this woman had sinned often and heavily, one act of loyal love had
made her an honoured, worshipped princess. She--Cleopatra would do
something still greater. The sacrifice which she intended to impose upon
herself would weigh far more heavily in the balance than a handful of
beautiful tresses, and would comprise sovereignty and life.
With head erect and a sense of proud self-reliance she gazed at the noble
marble countenance of the Cyrenian queen. Ere entering the sanctuary she
had imagined that she knew how the criminals whom she had sentenced to
death must feel. Now that she herself had done with life, she felt as if
she were relieved from a heavy burden, and yet her heart ached,
and--especially when she thought of her children--she was overwhelmed
with the emotion which is the most painful of all forms of
compassion--pity for herself.
CHAPTER XVIII.
When Cleopatra left the temple, Iras marvelled at the change in her
appearance. The severe tension which had given her beautiful face a shade
of harshness had yielded to an expression of gentle sadness that enhanced
its charm, yet her features quickly brightened as her attendant pointed
to the procession which was just entering the forecourt of the palace.
In Alexandria and throughout Egypt birthdays were celebrated as far as
possible. Therefore, to do honour to the twins, the children of the city
had been sent to offer their congratulations, and at the same time to
assure their royal mother of the love and devotion of the citizens.
The return to the palace occupied only a few minutes, and as Cleopatra,
hastily donning festal garments, gazed down at the bands of children, it
seemed as if Fate by this fair spectacle had given her a sign of approval
of her design.
She was soon standing hand in hand with the twins upon the balcony before
which the procession had halted. Hundreds of boys and girls of the same
age as the prince and princess had flocked thither, the former bearing
bouquets, the latter small baskets filled with lilies and roses. Every
head was crowned with a wreath, and many of the girls wore garlands of
flowers. A chorus of youths and maidens sang a festal hymn, beseeching
the gods to grant the royal mother and children every happiness; the
leader of the chorus of girls made a short address in the name of the
city, and during this speech the children formed in ranks, the tallest in
the rear, the smallest in the front, and the others between according to
their height. The scene resembled a living garden, in which rosy faces
were the beautiful flowers.
Cleopatra thanked the citizens for the charming greeting sent to her by
those whom they held dearest, and assured them that she returned their
love. Her eyes grew dim with tears as she went with her three children to
the throng who offered their congratulations, and an unusually pretty
little girl whom she kissed threw her arms around her as tenderly as if
she were her own mother. And how beautiful was the scene when the girls
strewed the contents of their little baskets on the ground before her,
and the boys, with many a ringing shout and loving wish, offered the
bouquets to her and the twins!
Charmian had not forgotten to provide the gifts; and when the
chamberlains and waiting-women led the children into a large hall to
offer them refreshments, the Queen's eyes sparkled so brightly that the
companion of her childhood ventured to make her difficult confession.
And, as so often happens, the event we most dread shows, when it actually
occurs, a friendly or indifferent aspect; this was the case now. Nothing
in life is either great or small--the one may be transformed to the
other, according to the things with which it is compared. The tallest man
becomes a dwarf beside a rocky giant of the mountain chain, the smallest
is a Titan to the swarming ants in the forest. The beggar seizes as a
treasure what the rich man scornfully casts aside. That which the day
before yesterday seemed to Cleopatra unendurable, roused her keenest
anxiety, robbed her of part of her night's repose, and induced her to
adopt strenuous measures, now appeared trivial and scarcely worthy of
consideration.
Yesterday and to-day had brought events and called up questions which
forced Barine's disappearance into the realm of unimportant matters.
Charmian's confession was preceded by the statement that she longed for
rest yet, nevertheless, was ready to remain with her royal friend, in
every situation, until she no longer desired her services and sent her
away. But she feared that this moment had come.
Cleopatra interrupted her with the assurance that she was speaking of
something utterly impossible; and when Charmian disclosed Barine's
escape, and admitted that it was she who had aided the flight of the
innocent and sorely threatened granddaughter of Didymus, the Queen
started up angrily and frowned, but it was only for a moment. Then, with
a smile, she shook her finger at her friend, embraced her, and gravely
but kindly assured her that, of all vices, ingratitude was most alien to
her nature. The companion of her childhood had bestowed so many proofs of
faithfulness, love, self-sacrifice, and laborious service in her behalf
that they could not be long outweighed by a single act of wilful
disobedience. An abundant supply would still remain, by virtue of which
she might continue to sin without fearing that Cleopatra would ever part
from her Charmian.
The latter again perceived that nothing on earth could be hostile or
sharp enough to sever the bond which united her to this woman. When her
lips overflowed with the gratitude which filled her heart, Cleopatra
admitted that it seemed as if, in aiding Barine's escape, she had
rendered her a service. The caution with which Charmian had concealed
Barine's refuge had not escaped her notice, and she did not ask to learn
it. It was enough for her that the dangerous beauty was out of
Caesarion's reach. As for Antony, a wall now separated him from the
world, and consequently from the woman who, spite of Alexas's
accusations, had probably never stood closer to his heart.
Charmian now eagerly strove to show the Queen what had induced the Syrian
to pursue Barine so vindictively. It was evident--and scarcely needed
proof--that Mark Antony's whole acquaintanceship with the old scholar's
granddaughter had been far from leading to any tender relation. But
Cleopatra gave only partial attention. The man whom she had loved with
every pulsation of her heart already seemed to her only a dear memory.
She did not forget the happiness enjoyed with and through him, or the
wrong she had done by the use of the magic goblet; yet with the wall on
the Choma, which divided him from her and the rest of the world, and her
command to have the mausoleum built, she imagined that the season of love
was over. Any new additions to this chapter of the life of her heart were
but the close. Even the jealousy which had clouded the happiness of her
love like a fleeting, rapidly changing shadow, she believed she had now
renounced forever.
While Charmian protested that no one save Dion had ever been heard with
favour by Barine, and related many incidents of her former life,
Cleopatra's thoughts were with Antony. Like the image of the beloved
dead, the towering figure of the Roman hero rose before her mind, but she
recalled him only as he was prior to the battle of Actium. She desired
and expected nothing more from the broken-spirited man, whose condition
was perhaps her own fault. But she had resolved to atone for her guilt,
and would do so at the cost of throne and life. This settled the account.
Whatever her remaining span of existence might add or subtract, was part
of the bargain.
The entrance of Alexas interrupted her. With fiery passion he expressed
his regret that he had been defrauded by base intrigues of the right
bestowed upon him to pass sentence upon a guilty woman. This was the more
difficult to bear because he was deprived of the possibility of providing
for the pursuit of the fugitive. Antony had honoured him with the
commission to win Herod back to his cause. He was to leave Alexandria
that very night. As nothing could be expected in this matter from the
misanthropic Imperator, he hoped that the Queen would avenge such an
offence to her dignity, and adopt severe measures towards the singer and
her last lover, Dion, who with sacrilegious hands had wounded the son of
Caesar.
But Cleopatra, with royal dignity, kept him within the limits of his
position, commanded him not to mention the affair to her again, and then,
with a sorrowful smile, wished him success with Herod, in whose return to
the lost cause of Antony, however, much as she prized the skill of the
mediator, she did not believe.
When he had retired, she exclaimed to Charmian: "Was I blind? This man is
a traitor! We shall discover it. Wherever Dion has taken his young wife,
let her be carefully concealed, not from me, but from this Syrian. It is
easier to defend one's self against the lion than the scorpion. You, my
friend, will see that Archibius seeks me this very day. I must talk with
him, and--you no longer have any thought of a parting? Another will come
soon enough, which will forever forbid these lips from kissing your dear
face."
As she spoke, she again clasped the companion of her childhood in her
arms, and when Iras entered to request an audience for Lucilius, Antony's
most faithful friend, Cleopatra, who had noticed the younger woman's
envious glance at the embrace, said: "Was I mistaken in fancying that you
imagined yourself slighted for Charmian, who is an older friend? That
would be wrong; for I love and need you both. You are her niece, and
indebted to her for much kindness from your earliest childhood. So, even
though you will lose the joy of revenge upon a hated enemy, forget what
has happened, as I did, and maintain your former affectionate
companionship. I will reward you for it with the only thing that the
daughter of the wealthy Krates cannot purchase, yet which she probably
rates at no low value--the love of her royal friend."
With these words she clasped Iras also in a close embrace, and when the
latter left the room to summon Lucilius, she thought: "No woman has ever
won so much love; perhaps that is why she possesses so great a treasure
of it, and can afford such unspeakable happiness by its bestowal. Or is
she so much beloved because she entered the world full of its wealth, and
dispenses it as the sun diffuses light? Surely that must be the case. I
have reason to believe it, for whom did I ever love save the Queen? No
one, not even myself, and I know no one in whose love for me I can
believe. But why did Dion, whom I loved so fervently, disdain me? Fool!
Why did Mark Antony prefer Cleopatra to Octavia, who was not less fair,
whose heart was his, and whose hand held the sovereignty of half the
world?"
Passing on as she spoke, she soon returned, ushering the Roman Lucilius
into the presence of the Queen. A gallant deed had bound this man to
Antony. After the battle of Philippi, when the army of the republicans
fled, Brutus had been on the point of being seized by the enemy's
horsemen; but Lucilius, at the risk of being cut down, had personated
him, and thereby, though but for a short time, rescued him. This had
seemed to Antony unusual and noble and, in his generous manner, he had
not only forgiven him, but bestowed his favour upon him. Lucilius was
grateful, and gave him the same fidelity he had showed to Brutus. At
Actium he had risked Antony's favour to prevent his deserting Cleopatra
after the battle, and then accompanied him in his flight. Now he was
bearing him company in his seclusion on the Choma.
The grey-haired man who, but a short time before, had retained all the
vigour of youth, approached the Queen with bowed head and saddened heart.
His face, so regular in its contours, had undergone a marked change
within the past few weeks. The cheeks were sunken, the features had grown
sharper, and there was a sorrowful expression in the eyes, which, when
informing Cleopatra of his friend's condition, glittered with tears.
Before the hapless battle he was one of Cleopatra's most enthusiastic
admirers; but since he had been forced to see his friend and benefactor
risk fame, happiness, and honour to follow the Queen, he had cherished a
feeling of bitter resentment towards her. He would certainly have spared
himself this mission, had he not been sure that she who had brought her
lover to ruin was the only person who could rouse him from spiritless
languor to fresh energy and interest in life.
From motives of friendship, urged by no one, he came unbidden to the
woman whom he had formerly so sincerely admired, to entreat her to cheer
the unfortunate man, rouse him, and remind him of his duty. He had little
news to impart; for on the voyage she had herself witnessed long enough
the pitiable condition of her husband. Now Antony was beginning to be
content in it, and this was what most sorely troubled the faithful
friend.
The Imperator had called the little palace which he occupied on the Choma
his Timonium, because he compared himself with the famous Athenian
misanthrope who, after fortune abandoned him, had also been betrayed by
many of his former friends. Even at Taenarum he had thought of returning
to the Choma, and by means of a wall, which would separate it from the
mainland, rendering it as inaccessible as--according to rumour--the grave
of Timon at Halae near Athens. Gorgias had erected it, and whoever wished
to visit the hermit was forced to go by sea and request admittance, which
was granted to few.
Cleopatra listened to Lucilius with sympathy, and then asked whether
there was no way of cheering or comforting the wretched man.
"No, your Majesty," he replied. "His favourite occupation is to recall
what he once possessed, but only to show the uselessness of these
memories. 'What joys has life not offered me?' he asks, and then adds:
'But they were repeated again and again, and after being enjoyed for the
tenth time they became monotonous and lost their charm. Then they caused
satiety to the verge of loathing.' Only necessary things, such as bread
and water, he says, possess real value; but he desires neither, because
he has even less taste for them than for the dainties which spoil a man's
morrow. Yesterday in a specially gloomy hour, he spoke of gold. This was
perhaps most worthy of desire. The mere sight of it awakened pleasant
hopes, because it might afford so many gratifications. Then he laughed
bitterly, exclaiming that those joys were the very ones which produced
the most disagreeable satiety. Even gold was not worth the trouble of
stretching out one's hand.
"He is fond of enlarging upon such fancies, and finds images to make his
meaning clear.
"'In the snow upon the highest mountain-peak the feet grow cold,' he
said. 'In the mire they are warm, but the dark mud is ugly and clings to
them.'
"Then I remarked that between the morass and the mountain-snows lie sunny
valleys where life would be pleasant; but he flew into a rage, vehemently
protesting that he would never be content with the pitiable middle course
of Horace. Then he exclaimed: 'Ay, I am vanquished. Octavianus and his
Agrippa are the conquerors; but if a rock mutilates or an elephant's
clumsy foot crushes me, I am nevertheless of a higher quality than
either.'"
"There spoke the old Mark Antony!" cried Cleopatra; but again Lucilius's
loyal heart throbbed with resentment against the woman who had fostered
the recklessness which had brought his powerful friend to ruin, and he
continued:
"But he often sees himself in a different light. 'No writer could invent
a more unworthy life than mine,' he exclaimed recently. 'A farce ending
in a tragedy.'"
Lucilius might have added still harsher sayings, but the sorrowful
expression in the tearful eyes of the afflicted Queen silenced them upon
his lips.
Yet Cleopatra's name blended with most of the words uttered by the
broken-spirited man. Sometimes it was associated with the most furious
reproaches, but more frequently with expressions of boundless delight and
wild outbursts of fervent longing, and this was what inspired Lucilius
with the hope that the Queen's influence would be effectual with his
friend. Therefore he repeated some especially ardent words, to which
Cleopatra listened with grateful joy.
Yet, when Lucilius paused, she remarked that doubtless the misanthropist
had spoken of her, and probably of Octavia also, in quite a different
way. She was prepared for the worst, for she was one of the rocks against
which his greatness had been shattered.
This reminded Lucilius of the comment Antony had made upon the three
women whom he had wedded, and he answered reluctantly: "Fulvia, the wife
of his youth--I knew the bold, hot-blooded woman, the former wife of
Clodius--he called the tempest which swelled his sails."
"Yes, Yes!" cried Cleopatra. 'So she did. He owes her much; but I, too,
am indebted to the dead Fulvia. She taught him to recognize and yield to
woman's power."
"Not always to his advantage," retorted Lucilius, whose resentment was
revived by the last sentence and, without heeding the faint flush on the
Queen's cheek, he added: "Of Octavia he said that she was the straight
path which leads to happiness, and those who are content to walk in it
are acceptable to gods and men."
"Then why did he not suffer it to content him?" cried Cleopatra
wrathfully.
"Fulvia's school," replied the Roman, "was probably the last where he
would learn the moderation which--as you know--is so alien to his nature.
His opinion of the quiet valleys and middle course you have just heard."
"But I, what have I been to him?" urged the Queen.
Lucilius bent his gaze for a short time on the floor, then answered
hesitatingly:
"You asked to hear, and the Queen's command must be obeyed. He compared
your Majesty to a delicious banquet given to celebrate a victory, at
which the guests, crowned with garlands, revel before the battle--"
"Which is lost," said the Queen hurriedly, in a muffled voice. "The
comparison is apt. Now, after the defeat, it would be absurd to prepare
another feast. The tragedy is closing, so the play (doubtless he said so)
which preceded it would be but a wearisome repetition if performed a
second time. One thing, it is true, seems desirable--a closing act of
reconciliation. If you think it is in my power to recall my husband to
active life, rely upon me. The banquet of which he spoke occupied long
years. The dessert will consume little time, but I am ready to serve it.
When I asked permission to visit him he refused. What plan of meeting
have you arranged?"
"That I will leave to your feminine delicacy of feeling," replied
Lucilius. "Yet I have come with a request whose fulfilment will perhaps
contain the answer. Eros, Mark Antony's faithful body-slave, humbly
petitions your Majesty to grant him a few minutes' audience. You know the
worthy fellow. He would die for you and his master, and he--I once heard
from your lips the remark of King Antiochus, that no man was great to his
body-slave--thus Eros sees his master's weaknesses and lofty qualities
from a nearer point of view than we, and he is shrewd. Antony gave him
his freedom long ago, and if your Majesty does not object to receiving a
man so low in station--"
"Let him come," replied Cleopatra. "Your demand upon me is just.
Unhappily, I am but too well aware of the atonement due your friend.
Before you came, I was engaged in making preparations for the fulfilment
of one of his warmest wishes."
With these words she dismissed the Roman. Her feelings as she watched his
departure were of very mingled character. The yearning for the happiness
of which she had been so long deprived had again awaked, while the unkind
words which he had applied to her still rankled in her heart. But the
door had scarcely closed behind Lucilius when the usher announced a
deputation of the members of the museum.
The learned gentlemen came to complain of the wrong which had been done
to their colleague, Didymus, and also to express their loyalty during
these trying times. Cleopatra assured them of her favour, and said that
she had already offered ample compensation to the old philosopher. In a
certain sense she was one of themselves. They all knew that, from early
youth, she had honoured and shared their labours. In proof of this, she
would present to the library of the museum the two hundred thousand
volumes from Pergamus, one of the most valuable gifts Mark Antony had
ever bestowed upon her, and which she had hitherto regarded merely as a
loan. This she hoped would repay Didymus for the injury which, to her
deep regret, had been inflicted upon him, and at least partially repair
the loss sustained by the former library of the museum during the
conflagration in the Bruchium.
The sages, eagerly assuring her of their gratitude and devotion, retired.
Most of them were personally known to Cleopatra who, to their mutual
pleasure and advantage, had measured her intellectual powers with the
most brilliant minds of their body.
The sun had already set, when a procession of the priests of Serapis, the
chief god of the city, whose coming had been announced the day before,
appeared at Lochias. Accompanied by torch and lantern bearers, it moved
forward with slow and solemn majesty. In harmony with the nature of
Serapis, there were many reminders of death.
The meaning of every image, every standard, every shrine, every
peculiarity of the music and singing, was familiar to the Queen. Even the
changing colours of the lights referred to the course of growth and decay
in the universe and in human life, and the magnificent close of the chant
of homage which represented the reception of the royal soul into the
essence of the deity, the apotheosis of the sovereign, was well suited to
stir the heart; for a sea of light unexpectedly flooded the whole
procession and, while its glow irradiated the huge pile of the palace,
the sea with its forest of ships and masts, and the shore with its
temples, pylons, obelisks, and superb buildings, all the choruses,
accompanied by the music of sackbuts, cymbals, and lutes, blended in a
mighty hymn, whose waves of sound rose to the star-strewn sky and reached
the open sea beyond the Pharos.
Many a symbolical image suggested death and the resurrection, defeat and
a victory following it by the aid of great Serapis; and when the torches
retired, vanishing in the darkness, with the last, notes of the chanting
of the priests, Cleopatra, raised her head, feeling as if the vow she had
made during the gloomy singing of the aged men and the extinguishing of
the torches had received the approval of the deity brought by her
forefathers to Alexandria and enthroned there to unite in his own person
the nature of the Greek and the Egyptian gods.
Her tomb was to be built and, if destiny was fulfilled, to receive her
lover and herself. She had perceived from Antony's bitter words, as well
as the looks and tones of Lucilius, that he, as well as the man to whom
her heart still clung with indissoluble bonds, held her responsible for
Actium and the fall of his greatness.
The world, she knew, would imitate them, but it should learn that if love
had robbed the greatest man of his day of fame and sovereignty, that love
had been worthy of the highest price.
The belief which had just been symbolically represented to her--that it
was allotted to the vanishing light to rise again in new and radiant
splendour--she would maintain for the present, though the best success
could scarcely lead to anything more than merely fanning the glimmering
spark and deferring its extinction.
For herself there was no longer any great victory to win which would be
worth the conflict. Yet the weapons must not rest until the end. Antony
must not perish, growling, like a second Timon, or a wild beast caught in
a snare. She would rekindle, though but for the last blaze, the fire of
his hero-nature, which blind love for her and the magic spell that had
enabled her to bind his will had covered for a time with ashes.
While listening to the resurrection hymn of the priests of Serapis, she
had asked herself if it might not be possible to give Antony, when he had
been roused to fresh energy, the son of Caesar as a companion in arms.
True, she had found the boy in a mood far different from the one for
which she had hoped. If he had once been carried on to a bold deed, it
seemed to have exhausted his energy; for he remained absorbed in the most
pitiable love-sickness. Yet he had not recovered from his illness. When
he was better he would surely wake to active interest in the events which
threatened to exert so great an influence on his own existence and, like
the humblest slave, lament the defeat of Actium. Hitherto he had listened
to the tidings of battle which had reached his ears with an indifference
that seemed intelligible and pardonable only when attributed to his
wound.
His tutor Rhodon had just requested a leave of absence, remarking that
Caesarion would not lack companions, since he was expecting Antyllus and
other youths of his own age. A flood of light streamed from the windows
of the reception hall of the "King of kings." There was still time to
seek him and make him understand what was at stake. Ah! if she could but
succeed in awaking his father's spirit! If that culpable attack should
prove the harbinger of future deeds of manly daring!
No interview with him as yet had encouraged this expectation, but a
mother's heart easily sees, even in disappointment, a step which leads to
a new hope. When Charmian entered to announce Antony's body-slave, she
sent word to him to wait, and requested her friend to accompany her to
her son.
As they approached the apartments occupied by Caesarion, Antyllus's loud
voice reached them through the open door, whose curtain was only half
drawn. The first word which the Queen distinguished was her own name; so,
motioning to her companion, she stood still. Barine was again the subject
of conversation.
Antony's son was relating what Alexas had told him. Cleopatra, the Syrian
had asserted, intended to send the young beauty to the mines or into
exile, and severely punish Dion; but both had made their escape. The
Ephebi had behaved treacherously by taking sides with their foe. But this
was because they were not yet invested with their robes. He hoped to
induce his father to do this as soon as he shook off his pitiable
misanthropy. And he must also be persuaded to direct the pursuit of the
fugitives. "This will not be difficult," he cried insolently, "for the
old man appreciates beauty, and has himself cast an eye on the singer. If
they capture her, I'll guarantee nothing, you 'King of kings!' for, spite
of his grey beard, he can cut us all out with the women, and Barine--as
we have heard--doesn't think a man of much importance until his locks
begin to grow thin. I gave Derketaeus orders to send all his men in
pursuit. He's as cunning as a fox, and the police are compelled to obey
him."
"If I were not forced to lie here like a dead donkey, I would soon find
her," sighed Caesarion. "Night or day, she is never out of my mind. I
have already spent everything I possessed in the search. Yesterday I sent
for the steward Seleukus. What is the use of being my mother's son, and
the fat little fellow isn't specially scrupulous! He will do nothing, yet
there must be gold enough. The Queen has sunk millions in the sand on the
Syrian frontier of the Delta. There is to be a square hole or something
of the sort dug there to hide the fleet. I only half understand the
absurd plan. The money might have paid hundreds of spies. So talents are
thrown away, and the strong-box is locked against the son. But I'll find
one that will open to me. I must have her, though I risk the crown. It
always sounds like a jeer when they call me the King of kings. I am not
fit for sovereignty. Besides, the throne will be seized ere I really
ascend it. We are conquered, and if we succeed in concluding a peace,
which will secure us life and a little more, we must be content. For my
part, I shall be satisfied with a country estate on the water, a
sufficient supply of money and, above all, Barine. What do I care for
Egypt? As Caesar's son I ought to have ruled Rome; but the immortals knew
what they were doing when they prompted my father to disinherit me. To
govern the world one must have less need of sleep. Really--you know it--I
always feel tired, even when I am well. People must let me alone! Your
father, too, Antyllus, is laying down his arms and letting things go as
they will."
"Ah, so he is!" cried Antony's son indignantly. "But just wait! The
sleeping lion will wake again, and, when he uses his teeth and paws--"
"My mother will run away, and your father will follow her," replied
Caesarion with a melancholy smile, wholly untinged by scorn. "All is
lost. But conquered kings and queens are permitted to live. Caesar's son
will not be exhibited to the Quirites in the triumphal procession. Rhodon
says that there would be an insurrection if I appeared in the Forum. If I
go there again, it certainly will not be in Octavianus's train. I am not
suited for that kind of ignominy. It would stifle me and, ere I would
grant any man the pleasure of dragging the son of Caesar behind him to
increase his own renown, I would put an end--ten, nay, a hundred times
over, in the good old Roman fashion, to my life, which is by no means
especially attractive. What is sweeter than sound sleep, and who will
disturb and rouse me when Death has lowered his torch before me? But now
I think I shall be spared this extreme. Whatever else they may inflict
upon me will scarcely exceed my powers of endurance. If any one has
learned contentment it is I. The King of kings and Co-Regent of the Great
Queen has been trained persistently, and with excellent success, to be
content. What should I be, and what am I? Yet I do not complain, and wish
to accuse no one. We need not summon Octavianus, and when he is here let
him take what he will if he only spares the lives of my mother, the
twins, and little Alexander, whom I love, and bestows on me the
estate--the main thing is that it must be full of fishponds--of which I
spoke. The private citizen Caesarion, who devotes his time to fishing and
the books he likes to read, will gladly be allowed to choose a wife to
suit his own taste. The more humble her origin, the more easily I shall
win the consent of the Roman guardian."
"Do you know, Caesarion," interrupted Antony's unruly son, leaning back
on the cushions and stretching his feet farther in front of him, "if you
were not the King of kings I should be inclined to call you a base,
mean-natured fellow! One who has the good fortune to be the son of Julius
Caesar ought not to forget it so disgracefully. My gall overflows at your
whimpering. By the dog! It was one of my most senseless pranks to take
you to the singer. I should think there would be other things to occupy
the mind of the King of kings. Besides, Barine cares no more for you than
the last fish you caught. She showed that plainly enough. I say once
more, if Derketaeus's men succeed in capturing the beauty who has robbed
you of your senses, she won't go with you to your miserable estate to
cook the fish you catch, for if we have her again, and my father holds
out his hand to her, all your labour will be in vain. He saw the fair
enchantress only twice, and had no time to become better acquainted, but
she captured his fancy and, if I remind him of her, who knows what will
happen?"
Here Cleopatra beckoned to her companion and returned to her apartments
with drooping head. On reaching them, she broke the silence, saying:
"Listening, Charmian, is unworthy of a Queen; but if all listeners heard
things so painful, one need no longer guard keyholes and chinks of doors.
I must recover my calmness ere I receive Eros. One thing more. Is
Barine's hiding-place secure?"
"I don't know--Archibius says so."
"Very well. They are searching for her zealously enough, as you heard,
and she must not be found. I am glad that she did not set a snare for the
boy. How a jealous heart leads us astray! Were she here, I would grant
her anything to make amends for my unjust suspicion of her and Antony.
And to think that Alexas--but for your interposition he would have
succeeded--meant to send her to the mines! It is a terrible warning to be
on my guard. Against whom? First of all, my own weakness. This is a day
of recognition. A noble aim, but on the way the feet bleed, and the
heart--ah! Charmian, the poor, weak, disappointed heart!"
She sighed heavily, and supported her head on the arm resting upon the
table at her side. The polished, exquisitely grained surface of thya-wood
was worth a large estate; the gems in the rings and bracelets which
glittered on her hand and arm would have purchased a principality. This
thought entered her mind and, overpowered by a feeling of angry disgust,
she would fain have cast all the costly rubbish into the sea or the
destroying flames.
She would gladly have been a beggar, content with the barley bread of
Epicurus, she said to herself, if in return she could but have inspired
her son even with the views of the reckless blusterer Antyllus. Her worst
fears had not pictured Caesarion so weak, so insignificant. She could no
longer rest upon her cushions; and while, with drooping head, she gazed
backward over the past, the accusing voice in her own breast cried out
that she was reaping what she had sowed. She had repressed, curbed the
boy's awakening will to secure his obedience; understood how to prevent
any exercise of his ability or efforts in wider circles.
True, it had been done on many a pretext. Why should not her son taste
the quiet happiness which she had enjoyed in the garden of Epicurus? And
was not the requirement that whoever is to command must first learn to
obey, based upon old experiences?
But this was a day of reckoning and insight, and for the first time she
found courage to confess that her own burning ambition had marked out the
course of Caesarion's education. She had not repressed his talents from
cool calculation, but it had been pleasant to her to see him grow up free
from aspirations. She had granted the dreamer repose without arousing
him. How often she had rejoiced over the certainty that this son, on whom
Antony, after his victory over the Parthians, had bestowed the title of
Co-Regent, would never rebel against his mother's guardianship! The
welfare of the state had doubtless been better secured in her trained
hands than in those of an inexperienced boy. And the proud consciousness
of power! Her heart swelled. So long as she lived she would remain Queen.
To transfer the sovereignty to another, whatever name he might bear, had
seemed to her impossible. Now she knew how little her son yearned for
lofty things. Her heart contracted. The saying "You reap what you sowed"
gave her no peace, and wherever she turned in her past life she perceived
the fruit of the seeds which she had buried in the ground. The field was
sinking under the burden of the ears of misfortune. The harvest was ripe
for the reaper; but, ere he raised the sickle, the owner's claim must be
preserved. Gorgias must hasten the building of the tomb; the end could
not be long deferred. How to shape this worthily, if the victor left her
no other choice, had just been pointed out by the son of whom she was
ashamed. His father's noble blood forbade him to bear the deepest
ignominy with the patience his mother had inculcated.
It had grown late ere she admitted Antony's body-slave, but for her the
business of the night was just commencing. After he had gone she would be
engaged for hours with the commanders of the army, the fleet, the
fortifications. The soliciting of allies, too, must be carried on by
means of letters containing the most stirring appeals to the heart.
Eros, Antony's body-slave, appeared. His kind eyes filled with tears at
the sight of the Queen. Grief had not lessened the roundness of his
handsome face, but the expression of mischievous, often insolent, gaiety
had given place to a sorrowful droop of the lips, and his fair hair had
begun to turn grey.
Lucilius's information that Cleopatra had consented to make advances to
Antony had seemed like the rising of the sun after a long period of
darkness. In his eyes, not only his master, but everything else, must
yield to the power of the Queen. He had heard Antony at Tarsus inveigh
against "the Egyptian serpent," protesting that he would make her pay so
dearly for her questionable conduct towards himself and the cause of
Caesar that the treasure-houses on the Nile should be like an empty
wine-skin; yet, a few hours after, body and soul had been in her toils.
So it had continued till the battle of Actium. Now there was nothing more
to lose; but what might not Cleopatra bestow upon his master? He thought
of the delightful years during which his face had grown so round, and
every day fresh pleasures and spectacles, such as the world would never
again witness, had satiated eye and ear, palate and nostril,--nay, even
curiosity. If they could be repeated, even in a simpler form, so much the
better. His main--nay, almost his sole-desire was to release his lord
from this wretched solitude, this horrible misanthropy, so ill suited to
his nature.
Cleopatra had kept him waiting two hours, but he would willingly have
loitered in the anteroom thrice as long if she only determined to follow
his counsel. It was worth considering, and Eros did not hesitate to give
it. No one could foresee how Antony would greet Cleopatra herself, so he
proposed that she should send Charmian--not alone, but with her clever
hunch-backed maid, to whom the Imperator himself had given the name
"Aisopion." He liked Charmian, and could never see the dusky maid without
jesting with her. If his master could once be induced to show a cheerful
face to others besides himself, Eros, and perceived how much better it
was to laugh than to lapse into sullen reverie and anger, much would be
gained, and Charmian would do the rest, if she brought a loving message
from her royal mistress.
Hitherto Cleopatra had not interrupted him; but when she expressed the
opinion that a slave's nimble tongue would have little power to change
the deep despondency of a man overwhelmed by the most terrible disaster,
Eros waved his short, broad hand, saying:
"I trust your Majesty will pardon the frankness of a man so humble in
degree, but those in high station often permit us to see what they hide
from one another. Only the loftiest and the lowliest, the gods and the
slaves, behold the great without disguise. May my ears be cropped if the
Imperator's melancholy and misanthropy are so intense! All this is a
disguise which pleases him. You know how, in better days, he enjoyed
appearing as Dionysus, and with what wanton gaiety he played the part of
the god. Now he is hiding his real, cheerful face behind the mask of
unsocial melancholy, because he thinks the former does not suit this time
of misfortune. True, he often says things which make your skin creep, and
frequently broods mournfully over his own thoughts. But this never lasts
long when we are alone. If I come in with a very funny story, and he
doesn't silence me at once, you can rely on his surpassing it with a
still more comical one. A short time ago I reminded him of the fishing
party when your Majesty had a diver fasten a salted herring on his hook.
You ought to have heard him laugh, and exclaim what happy days those
were. The lady Charmian need only remind him of them, and Aisopion spice
the allusion with a jest. I'll give my nose--true, it's only a small one,
but everybody values that feature most--if they don't persuade him to
leave that horrible crow's nest in the middle of the sea. They must
remind him of the twins and little Alexander; for when he permits me to
talk about them his brow smooths most speedily. He still speaks very
often to Lucilius and his other friends of his great plans of forming a
powerful empire in the East, with Alexandria as its principal city. His
warrior blood is not yet calm. A short time ago I was even ordered to
sharpen the curved Persian scimitar he likes to wield. One could not know
what service it might be, he said. Then he swung his mighty arm. By the
dog! The grey-haired giant still has the strength of three youths. When
he is once more with you, among warriors and battle chargers, all will be
well."
"Let us hope so." replied Cleopatra kindly, and promised to follow his
advice.
When Iras, who had taken Charmian's place, accompanied the Queen to her
chamber after several hours of toil, she found her silent and sad. Lost
in thought, she accepted her attendant's aid, breaking her silence only
after she had gone to her couch. "This has been a hard day, Iras," she
said; "it brought nothing save the confirmation of an old saying, perhaps
the most ancient in the world: 'Every one wilt reap only what he sows.
The plant which grows from the seed you place in the earth may be
crushed, but no power in the world will compel the seed to develop
differently or produce fruit unlike what Nature has assigned to it.' My
seed was evil. This now appears in the time of harvest. But we will yet
bring a handful of good wheat to the storehouses. We will provide for
that while there is time. I will talk with Gorgias early to-morrow
morning. While we were building, you showed good taste and often
suggested new ideas. When Gorgias brings the plans for the mausoleum you
shall examine them with me. You have a right to do so, for, if I am not
mistaken, few will visit the finished structure more frequently than my
Iras."
The girl started up and, raising her hand as if taking a vow, exclaimed:
"Your tomb will vainly wait my visit; your end will be mine also."
"May the gods preserve your youth from it!" replied the Queen in a tone
of grave remonstrance. "We still live and will do battle."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Epicurus, who believed that with death all things ended
No, she was not created to grow old
Nothing in life is either great or small
Priests: in order to curb the unruly conduct of the populace
She would not purchase a few more years of valueless life
To govern the world one must have less need of sleep
What changes so quickly as joy and sorrow
CLEOPATRA
By Georg Ebers
Volume 8.
CHAPTER XIX.
Night brought little sleep to Cleopatra. Memory followed memory, plan was
added to plan. The resolve made the day before was the right one. To-day
she would begin its execution. Whatever might happen, she was prepared
for every contingency.
Ere she went to her work she granted a second audience to the Roman
envoy. Timagenes exerted all his powers of eloquence, skill in
persuasion, wit, and ingenuity. He again promised to Cleopatra life and
liberty, and to her children the throne; but when he insisted upon the
surrender or death of Mark Antony as the first condition of any further
negotiations, Cleopatra remained steadfast, and the ambassador set forth
on his way home without any pledge.
After he had gone, the Queen and Iras looked over the plans for the tomb
brought by Gorgias, but the intense agitation of her soul distracted
Cleopatra's attention, and she begged him to come again at a later hour.
When she was alone, she took out the letters which Caesar and Antony had
written to her. How acute, subtle, and tender were those of the former;
how ardent, impassioned, yet sincere were those of the mighty and fiery
orator, whose eloquence swept the listening multitudes with him, yet whom
her little hand had drawn wherever she desired!
Her heart throbbed faster when she thought of the meeting with Antony,
now close at hand; for Charmian had gone with the Nubian to invite him to
join her again. They had started several hours ago, and she awaited their
return with increasing impatience. She had summoned him for their last
mutual battle. That he would come she did not doubt. But could she
succeed in rekindling his courage? Two persons so closely allied should
sink and perish, still firmly united, in the final battle, if victory was
denied.
Archibius was now announced.
It soothed her merely to gaze into the faithful countenance, which
recalled so many of her happiest memories.
She opened her whole soul to him without reserve, and he drew himself up
to his full height, as if restored to youth; while when she told him that
she would never sully herself by treachery to her lover and husband, and
had resolved to die worthy of her name, the expression of his eyes
revealed that she had chosen the right path.
Ere she had made the request that he should undertake the education and
guidance of the children, he voluntarily proposed to devote his best
powers to them. The plan of uniting Didymus's garden with the Lochias and
giving it to the little ones also met with his approval. His sister had
already told him that Cleopatra had determined to build her tomb. He
hoped, he added, that its doors would not open to her for many years.
She shook her head sorrowfully, exclaiming "Would that I could read every
face as I do yours! My friend Archibius wishes me a long life, if any one
does; but he is as wise as he is faithful, and therefore will consider
that earthly life is by no means a boon in every case. Besides, he says
to himself: 'Events are impending over this Queen and woman, my friend,
which will perhaps render it advisable to make use of the great privilege
which the immortals bestow on human beings when it becomes desirable for
them to leave the stage of life. So let her build her tomb.' Have I read
the old familiar book aright?"
"On the whole, yes," he answered gravely. "But it is inscribed upon its
pages that a great princess and faithful mother can be permitted to set
forth on the last journey, whence there is no return, only when--"
"When," she interrupted, "a shameful end threatens to fall upon the fair
beginning and brilliant middle period, as a swarm of locusts darkens the
air and devours and devastates the fields. I know it, and will act
accordingly."
"And," added Archibius, "this end also (faithful to your nature) you will
shape regally.--On my way here I met my sister near the Choma. You sent
her to your husband. He will grasp the proffered hand. Now that it is
necessary to stake everything or surrender, the grandson of Herakles will
again display his former heroic power. Perhaps, stimulated and encouraged
by the example of the woman he loves, he will even force hostile Fate to
show him fresh favour."
"Destiny will pursue its course," interrupted Cleopatra firmly. "But
Antony must help me to heap fresh obstacles in the pathway, and when he
wishes to use his giant strength, what masses of rock his mighty arm can
hurl!"
"And if your lofty spirit smooths the path for him, then, my royal
mistress--"
"Even then the close of the tragedy will be death, and every scene a
disappointment. Was not the plan of bringing the fleet across the isthmus
bold and full of promise? Even the professional engineers greeted it with
applause, and yet it proved impracticable. Destiny dug its grave. And the
terrible omens before and after Actium, and the stars--the stars!
Everything points to speedy destruction, everything! Every hour brings
news of the desertion of some prince or general. As if from a
watch-tower, I now overlook what is growing from the seed I sowed.
Sterile ears or poisonous vegetation, wherever I turn my eyes. And yet!
You, who know my life from its beginning, tell me--must I veil my head in
shame when the question is asked, what powers of intellect, what talents
industry, and desire for good Cleopatra displayed?"
"No, my royal mistress, a thousand times no!"
"Yet the fruit of every tree I planted degenerated and decayed. Caesarion
is withering in the flower of his youth--by whose fault I know only too
well. You will now take charge of the education of the other children. So
it is for you to consider what brought me where I now stand, and how to
guard their life-bark from wandering and shipwreck."
"Let me train them to be human beings," replied Archibius gravely, "and
preserve them from the desire to enter the lists with the gods. From the
simple Cleopatra in the garden of Epicurus, who was a delight to the good
and wise, you became the new Isis, to whom the multitude raised hearts,
eyes, and hands, dazzled and blinded. We will transfer the twins, Helios
and Selene, the sun and the moon, from heaven to earth; they must become
mortals--Greeks. I will not transplant them to the garden of Epicurus,
but to another, where the air is more bracing. The inscription on its
portals shall not be, 'Here pleasure is the chief good,' but 'This is an
arena for character.' He who leaves this garden shall not owe to it the
yearning for happiness and comfort, but an immovably steadfast moral
discipline. Your children, like yourself, were born in the East, which
loves what is monstrous, superhuman, exaggerated. If you entrust them to
me, they must learn to govern themselves. At the helm stands moral
earnestness, which, however, does not exclude the joyous cheerfulness
natural to our people; the sails will be trimmed by moderation, the
noblest quality of the Greek nation."
"I understand," Cleopatra interrupted, with drooping head. "Interwoven
with the means of securing the children's welfare, you set before the
mother's eyes the qualities she has lacked. I know that long ago you
abandoned the teachings of Epicurus and the Stoa, and with an earnest aim
before your eyes sought your own paths. The tempest of life swept me far
away from the quiet garden where we sought the purest delight. Now I have
learned to know the perils which threaten those who see the chief good in
happiness. It stands too high for mortals, for in the changeful stir of
life it remains unattainable, and yet it is too low an aim for their
struggles, for there are worthier objects. Yet one saying of Epicurus we
both believed, and it has always stood us in good stead: 'Wisdom can
obtain no more precious contribution to the happiness of mortal life than
the possession of friendship.'"
She held out her hand as she spoke, and while, deeply agitated, he raised
it to his lips, she went on: "You know I am on the eve of the last
desperate battle--if the gods will--shoulder to shoulder with Antony.
Therefore I shall not be permitted to watch your work of education; yet I
will aid it. When the children question you about their mother, you will
be obliged to restrain yourself from saying: 'Instead of striving for the
painless peace of mind, the noble pleasure of Epicurus, which once seemed
to her the highest good, she constantly pursued fleeting amusements. The
Oriental recklessly squandered her once noble gifts of intellect and the
wealth of her people, yielded to the hasty impulses of her passionate
nature.' But you shall also say to them: 'Your mother's heart was full of
ardent love, she scorned what was base, strove for the highest goal, and
when she fell, preferred death to treachery and disgrace.'"
Here she paused, for she thought she heard footsteps approaching, and
then exclaimed anxiously: "I am waiting--expecting. Perhaps Antony cannot
escape from the paralyzing grasp of despair. To fight the last battle
without him, and yet under the gaze of his wrathful, gloomy eyes, once so
full of sunshine, would be the greatest sorrow of my life. Archibius, I
may confess this to you, the friend who saw love for this man develop in
the breast of the child--But what does this mean? An uproar! Have the
people rebelled? Yesterday the representatives of the priesthood, the
members of the museum, and the leaders of the army assured me of their
changeless fidelity and love. Dion belonged to the Macedonian men of the
Council; yet I have already declared, in accordance with the truth, that
I never intended to persecute him on Caesarion's account. I do not even
know--and do not desire to know the refuge of the lately wedded pair. Or
has the new tax levied, the command to seize the treasures of the temple,
driven them to extremities? What am I to do? We need gold to bid the foe
defiance, to preserve the independence of the throne, the country, and
the people. Or have tidings from Rome? It is becoming serious--and the
noise is growing louder."
"Let me see what they want," Archibius anxiously interrupted, hastening
to the door; but just at that moment the Introducer opened it, crying,
"Mark Antony is approaching the Lochias, attended by half Alexandria!"
"The noble Imperator is returning!" fell from the bearded lips of the
commander of the guard, ere the courtier's words had died away; and even
while he spoke Iras pressed past him, shrieking as if half frantic: "He
is coming! He is here! I knew he would come! How they are shouting and
cheering! Out with you, men! If you are willing, my royal mistress, we
will greet him from the balcony of Berenike. If we only had--"
"The twins--little Alexander!" interrupted Cleopatra, with blanched face
and faltering voice. "Put on their festal garments."
"Quick--the children, Zoe!" cried Iras, completing the order and clapping
her hands. Then she turned to the Queen with the entreaty: "Be calm, my
royal mistress, be calm, I beseech you. We have ample time. Here is the
vulture crown of Isis, and here the other. Antony's slave, Eros, has just
come in, panting for breath. The Imperator, he says, will appear as the
new Dionysus. It would certainly please his master--though he had not
commissioned him to request it--if you greeted him as the new Isis.--Help
me, Hathor. Nephoris, tell the usher to see that the fan-bearers and the
other attendants, women and men, are in their places.--Here are the pearl
and diamond necklaces for your throat and bosom. Take care of the robe.
The transparent bombyx is as delicate as a cobweb, and if you tear it No,
you must not refuse. We all know how it pleases him to see his goddess in
divine majesty and beauty." Cleopatra, with glowing cheeks and throbbing
heart, made no further objection to donning the superb festal robe,
strewn with glimmering pearls and glittering gems. It would have been
more in harmony with her feelings to meet the returning Antony in the
plain, dark garb which, since her arrival at home, she had exchanged for
a richer one only on festal occasions; but Antony was coming as the new
Dionysus, and Eros knew what would please his master.
Eight nimble hands, which were often aided by Iras's skilful fingers,
toiled busily, and soon the latter could hold up the mirror before
Cleopatra, exclaiming from the very depths of her heart, "Like the
foam-born Aphrodite and the golden Hathor!"
Then Iras, who, in adorning her beloved mistress, had forgotten love,
hate, and envy, and amid her eager haste barely found time for a brief,
fervent prayer for a happy issue of this meeting, threw the broad
folding-doors as wide as if she were about to reveal to the worshippers
in the temple the image of the god in the innermost sanctuary.
A long, echoing shout of surprise and delight greeted the Queen, for the
courtiers, hastily summoned, were already awaiting her without, from the
grey-haired epistolograph to the youngest page. Regally attired women in
her service raised the floating train of her cloak; others, in sacerdotal
robes, were testing the ease of movement of the rings on the sistrum
rods, men and boys were forming into lines according to the rank of each
individual, and the chief fan-bearer gave the signal for departure. After
a short walk through several halls and corridors, the train reached the
first court-yard of the palace, and there ascended the few steps leading
to the broad platform at the entrance-gate which overlooked the whole
Bruchium and the Street of the King, down which the expected hero would
approach.
The distant uproar of the multitude had sounded threatening, but now,
amid the deafening din, they could distinguish every shout of welcome,
every joyous greeting, every expression of delight, surprise, applause,
admiration, and homage, known to the Greek and Egyptian tongues.
Only the centre and end of the procession were visible. The head had
reached the Corner of the Muses, where, concealed by the old trees in the
garden, it moved on between the Temple of Isis and the land owned by
Didymus. The end still extended to the Choma, whence it had started.
All Alexandria seemed to have joined it.
Men large and small, of high and low degree, old and young, the lame and
the crippled, mingled with the throng, sweeping onward among horses and
carriages, carts and beasts of burden, like a mountain torrent dashing
wildly down to the valley. Here a loud shriek rang from an overturned
litter, whose bearers had fallen. Yonder a child thrown to the ground
screamed shrilly, there a dog trodden under the feet of the crowd howled
piteously. So clear and resonant were the shouts of joy that they rose
high above the flutes and tambourines, the cymbals and lutes of the
musicians, who followed the man approaching in the robes of a god.
The head of the procession now passed beyond the Corner of the Muses and
came within view of the platform.
There could be no doubt to whom this ovation was given, for the returning
hero was in the van, high above all the other figures. From the golden
throne borne on the shoulders of twelve black slaves he waved his long
thyrsus in greeting to the exulting multitude. Before the bacchanalian
train which accompanied him, and behind the musicians who followed, moved
two elephants bearing between them, as a light burden, some
unrecognizable object covered with a purple cloth. Now the column had
passed between the pylons through the lofty gateway which separated the
palace from the Street of the King, and stopped opposite to the platform.
While officials, Scythians, and body-guards of all shades of complexion,
on foot and on horseback, kept back the throng by force where friendly
warning did not avail, Cleopatra saw her lover descend from the throne
and give a signal to the Indian slave who guided the elephants. The cloth
was flung aside, revealing to the astonished eyes of the spectators a
bouquet of flowers such as no Alexandrian had ever beheld. It consisted
entirely of blossoming rose-bushes. The red flowers formed a circle in
the centre, surrounded by a broad light garland of white ones. The whole
gigantic work rested like an egg in its cup in a holder of palm fronds
which, as it were, framed it in graceful curving outlines. More than a
thousand blossoms were united in this peerless bouquet, and the singular
gigantic gift was characteristic of its giver.
He advanced on foot to the platform, his figure towering above the brown,
light-hued, and black freedmen and slaves who followed as, on the
monuments of the Pharaohs, the image of the sovereign dominates those of
the subjects and foes.
He could look down upon the tallest men, and the width of his shoulders
was as remarkable as his colossal height. A long, gold-broidered purple
mantle, floating to his ancles, increased his apparent stature. Powerful
arms, with the swelling muscles of an athlete, were extended from his
sleeveless robe towards the beloved Queen.
The well-formed head, thick dark hair, and magnificent beard corresponded
with the powerful figure. Formerly these locks had adorned the head of
the youth with the blue-black hue of the raven's plumage; now the threads
of grey scattered abundantly through them were concealed by the aid of
dye. A thick wreath of vine leaves rested on the Imperator's brow, and
leafy vine branches, to which clung several dark bunches of grapes, fell
over his broad shoulders and down his back, which was covered like a
cloak, not by a leopard-skin, but that of a royal Indian tiger of great
size--he had slain it himself in the arena. The head and paws of the
animal were gold, the eyes two magnificent sparkling sapphires. The clasp
of the chain, by which the skin was suspended, as well as that of the
gold belt which circled the Imperator's body above the hips, was covered
with rubies and emeralds. The wide armlets above his elbows, the
ornaments on his broad breast, nay, even his red morocco boots, glittered
and flashed with gems.
Radiant magnificent as his former fortunes seemed the attire of this
mighty fallen hero, who but yesterday had shrunk timidly and sadly from
the eyes of his fellow-men. His features, too, were large, noble, and
beautiful in outline; but, though his pale cheeks were adorned with the
borrowed crimson of youth, half a century of the maddest pursuit of
pleasure and the torturing excitement of the last few weeks had left
traces only too visible; for the skin hung in loose bags beneath the
large eyes; wrinkles furrowed his brow and radiated in slanting lines
from the corners of his eyes across his temples.
Yet not one of those whom this bedizened man of fifty was approaching
thought of seeing in him an aged, bedecked dandy; it was an instinct of
his nature to surround himself with pomp and splendour and, moreover, his
whole appearance was so instinct with power that scorn and mockery shrank
abashed before it.
How frank, gracious, and kindly was this man's face, how sincere the
heart-felt emotion which sparkled in his eyes, still glowing with the
fire of youth, at the sight of the woman from whom he had been so long
parted! Every feature beamed with the most ardent tenderness for the
royal wife whom he was approaching, and the expression on the lips of the
giant varied so swiftly from humble, sorrowful anguish of mind to
gratitude and delight, that even the hearts of his foes were touched. But
when, pressing his hand on his broad breast, he advanced towards the
Queen, bending so low that it seemed as if he would fain kiss her feet,
when in fact the colossal figure did sink kneeling before her, and the
powerful arms were outstretched with fervent devotion like a child
beseeching help, the woman who had loved him throughout her whole life
with all the ardour of her passionate soul was overpowered by the feeling
that everything which stood between them, all their mutual offences, had
vanished. He saw the sunny smile that brightened her beloved,
ever-beautiful face, and then--then his own name reached his ears from
the lips to which he owed the greatest bliss love had ever offered. At
last, as if intoxicated by the tones of her voice, which seemed to him
more musical than the songs of the Muses; half smiling at the jest which,
even in the most serious earnest, he could not abandon; half moved to the
depths of his soul by the power of his newly awakening happiness after
such sore sorrow, he pointed to the gigantic bouquet, which three slaves
had lifted down from the elephant and were bearing to the Queen.
Cleopatra, too, was overwhelmed with emotion.
This floral gift imitated, on an immense scale, the little bouquet which
the famous young general had taken from her father's hand before the gate
of the garden of Epicurus to present to her as his first gift. That had
also been composed of red roses, surrounded by white ones. Instead of
palm fronds, it had been encircled only by fern leaves. This was one of
the beautiful offerings which Antony's gracious nature so well understood
how to choose. The bouquet was a symbol of the unprecedented generosity
natural to this large-minded man. No magic goblet had compelled him to
approach her thus and with such homage. Nothing had constrained him, save
his overflowing heart, his constant, fadeless love.
As if restored to youth, transported by some magic spell to the happy
days of early girlhood, she forgot her royal dignity and the hundreds of
eyes which rested upon him as if spell-bound; and, obedient to an
irresistible impulse of the heart, she sank upon the broad, heaving
breast of the kneeling hero. Laughing joyously in the clear, silvery
tones which are usually heard only in youth, he clasped her in his strong
arms, raised her slender figure in its floating royal mantle from the
ground, kissed her lips and eyes, held her aloft in the soaring attitude
of the Goddess of Victory, as if to display his happiness to the eyes of
all, and at last placed her carefully on her feet again like some
treasured jewel.
Then, turning to the children, who were waiting at their mother's side,
he lifted first little Alexander, then the twins, to kiss them; and,
while holding Helios and Selene in his arms, as if the joy of seeing them
again had banished their weight, the shouts which had arisen when the
Queen sank on his breast again burst forth.
The ancient walls of the Lochias palace had never heard such
acclamations. They passed from lip to lip, from hundreds to hundreds and,
though those more distant did not know the cause, they joined in the
shouts. Along the whole vast stretch from the Lochias to the Choma the
cheers rang out like a single, heart-stirring, inseparable cry, echoing
across the harbour, the ships lying at anchor, the towering masts, to the
cliff amid the sea where Barine was nursing her new-made husband.
CHAPTER XX.
The property of the freedman Pyrrhus was a flat rock in the northern part
of the harbour, scarcely larger than the garden of Didymus at the Corner
of the Muses, a desolate spot where neither tree nor blade of grass grew.
It was called the Serpent Island, though the inhabitants had long since
rid it of these dangerous guests, which lived in great numbers in the
neighbouring cliffs. Not even the poorest crops would grow in soil so
hostile to life, and those who chose it for a home were compelled to
bring even the drinking-water from the continent.
This desert, around which hovered gulls, sea-swallows, and sea-eagles,
had been for several weeks the abode of the fugitives, Dion and Barine.
They still occupied the two rooms which had been assigned to them on
their arrival. During the day the sun beat fiercely down upon the yellow
chalky rock. There was no shade save in the house and at the foot of a
towering cliff in the southern part of the island, the fishermen's
watch-tower.
There were no works of human hands save a little Temple of Poseidon, an
altar of Isis, the large house owned by Pyrrhus, solidly constructed by
Alexandrian masons, and a smaller one for the freedman's married sons and
their families. A long wooden frame, on which nets were strung to dry,
rose on the shore. Near it, towards the north, in the open sea, was the
anchorage of the larger sea-going ships and the various skiffs and boats
of the fisher folk. Dionikos, Pyrrhus's youngest son, who was still
unmarried, built new boats and repaired the old ones.
His two strong, taciturn brothers, with their wives and children, his
father Pyrrhus, his wife and their youngest child, a daughter, Dione, a
few dogs, cats, and chickens, composed the population of the Serpent
Island.
Such were the surroundings of the newly wedded pair, who had been reared
in the capital. At first many things were strange to them, but they
accommodated themselves to circumstances with a good grace, and both had
admitted to each other, long before, that life had never been so equable
and peaceful.
During the first week Dion's wound and fever still harassed him, but the
prediction of Pyrrhus that the pure, fresh sea-air would benefit the
sufferer had been fulfilled, and the monotonous days had passed swiftly
enough to the young bride in caring for the invalid.
The wife of Pyrrhus--"mother," as they all called her--had proved to be a
skilful nurse, and her daughters-in-law and young Dione were faithful and
nimble assistants. During the time of anxiety and nursing, Barine had
formed a warm friendship for them. If the taciturn men avoided using a
single unnecessary word, the women were all the more ready to gossip; and
it was a pleasure to talk to pretty Dione, who had grown up on the island
and was eager to hear about the outside world.
Dion had long since left his couch and the house, and each day looked
happier, more content with himself and his surroundings. At first his
feverish visions had shown him his dead mother, pointing anxiously at his
new-made wife, as if to warn him against her. During his convalescence he
remembered them and they conjured up the doubt whether Barine could
endure the solitude of this desolate cliff, whether she would not lose
the bright serenity of soul whose charm constantly increased. Would it be
any marvel if she should pine with longing in this solitude, and even
suffer physically from their severe privations?
The perception that love now supplied the place of all which she had lost
pleased him, but he forbade himself to expect that this condition of
affairs could be lasting. Nothing save exaggerated self-conceit would
induce the hope. But he must have undervalued his own power of
attraction--or Barine's love--for with each passing week the cheerful
serenity of her disposition gained fresh steadfastness and charm. He,
too, had the same experience; it was long since he had felt so vigorous,
untrammelled, and free from care. His sole regret was the impossibility
of sharing the political life of the city at this critical period; and at
times he felt some little anxiety concerning the fate and management of
his property, though, even if his estates were confiscated, he would
still retain a competence which he had left in the hands of a trustworthy
money-changer. Barine shared everything that concerned him, even these
moods, and this led him to tell her about the affairs of the city and the
state, in which she had formerly taken little interest, his property in
Alexandria and the provinces. With what glad appreciation she listened,
when she went out with him from the northern anchorage on the open sea,
or sat during long winter evenings making nets, an art which she had
learned from Dione!
Her lute had been sent to her from the city, and what pleasure her
singing afforded her husband and herself; how joyously their hosts, old
and young, listened to the melody!
A few book-rolls had also come, and Dion enjoyed discussing their
contents with Barine. He himself read very little, for he was rarely
indoors during the day. The fourth week after his arrival he was able to
aid, with arms whose muscles had been steeled in the pakestra, the men in
their fishing, and Dionikos in his boat-building.
The close, constant, uninterrupted companionship of the married pair
revealed to each unexpected treasures in the other, which, perhaps, might
have remained forever concealed in city life. Here each was everything to
the other, and this undisturbed mutual life soon inspired that blissful
consciousness of inseparable union which usually appears only after
years, as the fairest fruit of a marriage founded on love.
Doubtless there were hours when Barine longed to see her mother and
others who were dear to her, but the letters which arrived from time to
time prevented this yearning from becoming a source of actual pain.
Prudence required them to restrict their intercourse with the city. But,
whenever Pyrrhus went to market, letters reached the island delivered at
the fish auction in the harbour by Anukis, Charmian's Nubian maid, to the
old freedman, who had become her close friend.
So the time came when Dion could say without self-deception that Barine
was content in this solitude, and that his love and companionship
supplied the place of the exciting, changeful life of the capital. Though
letters came from her mother, sister, or Charmian, her grandfather,
Gorgias, or Archibius, not one transformed the wish to leave her desolate
hiding-place into actual homesickness, but each brought fresh subjects
for conversation, and among them many which, by arousing the interest of
both, united them more firmly.
The second month of their flight a letter arrived from Archibius, in
which he informed them that they might soon form plans for their return,
for Alexas, the Syrian, had proved a malicious traitor. He had not
performed the commission entrusted to him of winning Herod to Antony's
cause, but treacherously deserted his patron and remained with the King
of the Jews. When, with unprecedented shamelessness, he sought Octavianus
to sell the secrets of his Egyptian benefactor, he was arrested and
executed in his own home, Laodicea.
Now, their friend continued, Cleopatra's eyes as well as her husband's
were opened to the true character of Barine's most virulent accuser. The
influence of Philostratus, too, was of course destroyed by his brother's
infamous deed. Yet they must wait a little longer; for Caesarion had
joined the Ephebi, and Antyllus had been invested with the toga virilis.
They could now undertake many things independently, and Caesarion often
made remarks which showed that he would not cease to lay plots for
Barine.
Dion feared nothing from the royal boy on his own account, but for his
wife's sake he dared not disregard his friend's warning. This was hard;
for though he still felt happy on the island, he longed to install the
woman he loved in his own house, and every impulse of his nature urged
him to be present at the meetings of the Council in these fateful times.
Therefore he was more than ready to risk returning to the city, but
Barine entreated him so earnestly not to exchange the secure happiness
they enjoyed here for a greater one, behind which might lurk the heaviest
misfortune, that he yielded. Another letter from Charmian soon proved the
absolute necessity of continuing to exercise caution.
Even from the island they could perceive that everything known as festal
pleasure was rife in Alexandria, and bore along in its mad revelry the
court and the citizens. When the wind blew from the south, it brought
single notes of inspiring music or indistinct sounds of the wildest
popular rejoicing.
The fisherman's daughter, Dione, often called them to the strand to
admire the galleys adorned with fabulous splendour, garlanded with
flowers, and echoing with the music of lutes and the melody of songs.
Sails of purple embroidered silk bore the vessels over the smooth tide.
Once the watchers even distinguished, upon a barge richly adorned with
gilded carving, young female slaves who, with floating hair and
transparent sea-green robes, handled, in the guise of Nereids, light
sandal-wood oars with golden blades. Often the breeze bore to the island
the perfumes which surrounded the galleys, and on calm nights the
magnificent ships, surrounded by the magical illumination of many-hued
lamps, swept across the mirror-like surface of the waves, Among the
voyagers were gods, goddesses, and heroes who, standing or reclining in
beautiful groups, represented scenes from the myths and history. On the
deck of the Queen's superb vessel guests crowned with wreaths lay on
purple couches, under garlands of flowers, eating choice viands and
draining golden wine-cups.
On other nights the illumination of the shore of the Bruchium rendered it
as bright as day. The huge dome of the Serapeum on the Rhakotis, covered
with lamps, towered above the flat roofs of the city like the starry
firmament of a smaller world which had descended to earth. Every temple
and palace was transformed into a giant candelabrum, and the rows of
lamps on the quay stretched like tendrils of light from the dazzlingly
illuminated marble Temple of Poseidon to the palace at Lochias, steeped
in radiance.
When Pyrrhus or one of his sons returned from market they described the
festivals and shows, banquets, races, and endless pleasure excursions
arranged by the court, which made the citizens fairly hold their breath.
It was a prosperous time for the fishermen; the Queen's cooks took all
their wares and paid a liberal price.
January had come, when another letter arrived from Charmian. Dion and
Barine had watched in vain for any unusual events on Cleopatra's birth
day, but on Antony's, a few days later, there was plenty of music and
shouting, and in the evening an unusually magnificent illumination.
Two days after, this letter was delivered to Pyrrhus by his dusky friend
Anukis.
Her inquiry whether he thought it prudent to convey visitors to his
guests was answered in the negative, for since Octavianus had been in
Asia, the harbour swarmed with the boats of spies, and a single act of
imprudence might bring ruin.
Charmian's letter, too, was even better calculated to curb Dion's
increasing desire to return home than the fisherman's warning.
True, the beginning contained good news of Barine's relatives, and then
informed Dion that his uncle, the Keeper of the Seal, was fairly
revelling in bliss. His inventive gifts were taxed more than ever. Every
day brought a festival, every night magnificent banquets. One spectacle,
excursion, or hunting party followed another. In the theatres, the Odeum,
the Hippodrome, no more brilliant performances, races, naval battles,
gladiatorial struggles, and combats between beasts had been given, even
before Actium. Dion himself had formerly attended the entertainments of
those who belonged to the court circle, the society of "Inimitable
Livers." It had been revived again, but Antony called them the "Comrades
of Death." This was significant. Every one knows that the end is drawing
near, and imitates the Pharaoh to whom the oracle promised six years of
life, and who convicted it of falsehood and made them twelve by carousing
during the night also.
The Queen's meeting with her husband, which she had previously reported,
had been magnificent. "At that time," she wrote, "we hoped that a more
noble life would begin, and Mark Antony, awakened and elevated by his
rekindled love, would regain his former heroic power; but we were
mistaken; Cleopatra, it is true, toiled unceasingly, but her lover with
his enormous bunch of roses gave the signal for the maddest revelry which
the imagination of the wildest devotee of pleasure could conceive. The
performances of the Inimitable Livers were far surpassed by those of the
"Comrades of Death."
"Antony is at their head, and he, whose giant frame resists even the most
unprecedented demands, succeeds in stupefying himself and forgetting the
impending ruin. When he comes to us after a night of revelry his eyes
sparkle as brightly, his deep voice has as clear a ring, as at the
beginning of the banquet. The Queen is his goddess; and who could remain
unmoved when the giant bows obediently to the nod of his delicate
sovereign, and devises and offers the most unprecedented things to win a
smile from her lips? The changeful, impetuous wooing of youth lies far
behind him, but his homage, which the Ephebi of today would perhaps term
antiquated, has always seemed to me as if a mountain were bending before
a star. The stranger who sees her in his company believes her a happy
woman. Amid the fabulous radiance of the festal array, when all who
surround her admire, worship, and strew flowers in her path, one might
believe that the old sunny days had returned; but when we are alone, how
rarely I see her smile! Then she plans for the tomb which, under
Gorgias's direction, is rapidly rising, and considers with him the best
method of rendering it an inaccessible place of retreat.
"She decided everything, down to the carving on the stone sarcophagi. In
addition, there are to be rooms and chambers in the lower story for the
reception of her treasures. Beneath them she has had corridors made for
the pitch and straw which, if the worst should come, are to be lighted.
She will then give to the flames the gold and silver, gems and jewels,
ebony and ivory, the costly spices--in short, all her valuables. The
pearls alone are worth many kingdoms. Who can blame her if she prefers to
destroy them rather than leave them for the foe"
"The garden in which you grew up, Barine, is now the scene of the happy,
busy life led by Alexander and the twins. There, under my brother's
guidance, they frolic, build, and dig. Cleopatra goes to it whenever she
longs for repose after the pursuit of pleasures which have lost their
zest.
"When, the day before yesterday, Antony, crowned with ivy as the new
Dionysus, drove up the Street of the King in the golden chariot drawn by
tamed lions, to bring her, the new Isis, from the Lochias in a lotus
flower made of silver and white paste, drawn by four snow-white steeds,
she pointed to the glittering train and said: 'Between the quiet of the
philosopher's garden, where I began my life and still feel most at ease,
and the grave, where nothing disturbs my last repose, stretches the
Street of the King, with this deafening tumult, this empty splendour. It
is mine.'
"O child, it was very different in former days! She loved Mark Antony
with passionate ardour. He was the first man in the world, and yet he
bowed before the supremacy of her will. The longing of the awakening
heart, the burning ambition which already kindled the soul of the child,
had alike found satisfaction, and the world beheld how the mortal woman,
Cleopatra, for her lover and herself, could steep this meagre life with
the joys of the immortals. He was grateful for them, and the most
generous of men laid at the feet of the 'Great Queen of the East' the
might of Rome and the kings of two quarters of the globe.
"These years were spent by both in one long revel. His marriage with
Octavia brought the first awakening. It was hard and painful. He had not
deserted Cleopatra for a woman's sake, but on account of his endangered
power and sovereignty. But the unloved Octavia constrained him to look up
to her with respectful admiration--nay, she became dear to him.
"A fierce battle for him and his heart arose between the two. It was
fought with very different weapons, and Cleopatra conquered. The revel,
the dream began again. Then came Actium, the disenchantment, the
awakening, the fall, the flight from the world. Our object was not to let
him relapse into intoxication, to rouse the hero's strength and courage
from their slumber, render him for love's sake a fellow-combatant in the
common cause.
"But he had become accustomed to see in her the giver of ecstasy. The
only thing that he still desired was to drain the cup of pleasure in her
society till all was over. She sees this, grieves over it, and leaves no
means of rousing him to fresh energy untried; yet how rarely he rallies
his powers to earnest labour!
"While she is fortifying the mouths of the Nile and the frontiers of the
country, building ship after ship, arming and negotiating, she can not
resist him when he summons her to new pleasures.
"Though so many of the traits which rendered him great and noble have
vanished, she can not give up the old love and clings steadfastly to him
because, because--I know not why. A woman's loving heart does not
question motives and laws. Besides, he is the father of her children and,
in playing with them, he regains the old joyousness of mood so
enthralling to the heart.
"Since Archibius has taken charge of them, they can dispense with
Euphronion, their tutor. The clever man knows Rome, Octavianus, and those
who surround him, so he was chosen as an envoy. His object was to induce
the conqueror to transfer the sovereignty of Egypt to the boys Antonius
Helios, and Alexander, but Caesar vouchsafed no answer to the mediator in
Antony's affairs--nay, did not even grant him an audience.
"To Cleopatra Octavianus promised friendly treatment, and the fulfilment
of her wish concerning the boys if--and now came the repetition of the
old demand--she would put Antony out of the world or deliver him into his
hands.
"This demand, which contains base treachery, was impossible for her noble
soul. Since she had resolved to build the tomb, granting it became
impossible, yet Octavianus made every effort to tempt her to the base
deed. True, the death of this one man would have spared much bloodshed.
The Caesar knows how to choose his tools. He sent here as negotiator a
clever young man, who possessed great charms of mind and person. No plan
to prejudice the Queen against her husband and persuade her to commit the
treachery was left untried. He went so far as to assure Cleopatra that in
former years she had won the Caesar's heart, and that he still loved her.
She accepted these assurances at their true value and remained steadfast.
"Antony at first paid no heed to the intriguer. But when he learned what
means he employed, and especially how he made use of the surrender of one
of Caesar's murderers, which he himself had long regretted, to brand him
as an ungrateful traitor, he would not have been Mark Antony if he had
accepted it quietly. He was completely his old self when he ordered the
smooth fellow--who, however, had come as the ambassador of the mighty
victor--to be scourged, sent him back to Rome, and wrote a letter to
Octavianus, in which he complained of the man's arrogance and
presumption, adding--spite of my heavy heart I can not help smiling when
I think of it--that misfortune had rendered him unusually irritable; yet
if his action perhaps displeased Caesar, he might treat his freedman
Hipparchus, who was in his power, as he had served Thyrsus!
"You see that his gay arrogance has not deserted him. Trouble slips away
from him as rain is shaken from the coarse military cloak which he wore
in the Parthian war, and therefore it cannot exert its purifying power.
"When we consider that, a few years ago, this man, as it were, doubled
himself when peril was most threatening, his conduct now, on the eve of
the decisive struggle, is intelligible only to those who know him as we
do. If he fights, he will no longer do so to save himself, or even to
conquer, but to die an honourable death. If he still enjoys the pleasures
offered, he believes that he can thus mitigate for himself the burden of
defeat, and diminish the grandeur of the conqueror's victory. In the eyes
of the world, at least, a man who can still revel like Antony is only
half vanquished. Yet the lofty tone of his mind was lowered. The
surrender of the murderer of Caesar--his name was Turullius--proves it.
"And this, Barine--tell your husband so--this is what fills me with
anxiety and compels me to entreat you not to think of returning home yet.
"Antony is now the jovial companion of his son, and permits Antyllus to
share all his own pleasures. Of course, he heard of Caesarion's passion,
and is disposed to help the poor fellow. He has often said that nothing
would better serve to rouse the dreamer from torpor than your charming
vivacity. As the earth could scarcely have swallowed you up, you would be
found; he, too, should be glad to hear you sing again. I know that search
will be made for you.
"How imperiously this state of affairs requires you to exercise caution
needs no explanation. On the other hand, you may find comfort in the
tidings that Cleopatra intends to send Caesarion with his tutor Rhodon to
Ethiopia, by way of the island of Philae. Archibius heard through
Timagenes that Octavianus considers the son of Caesar, whose face so
wonderfully resembles his father's, a dangerous person, and this opinion
is the boy's death-warrant. Antyllus, too, is going on a journey. His
destination is Asia, where he is to seek to propitiate Octavianus and
make him new offers. As you know, he was betrothed to his daughter Julia.
The Queen ceased long ago to believe in the possibility of victory, yet,
spite of all the demands of the "Comrades of Death" and her own cares,
she toils unweariedly in preparing for the defence of the country. She is
doubtless the only member of that society who thinks seriously of the
approaching end.
"Now that the tomb is rising, she ponders constantly upon death. She, who
was taught by Epicurus to strive for freedom from pain and is so
sensitive to the slightest bodily suffering, is still seeking a path
which, with the least agony, will lead to the eternal rest for which she
longs. Iras and the younger pupils of Olympus are aiding her. The old man
furnishes all sorts of poisons, which she tries upon various
animals--nay, recently even on criminals sentenced to death. All these
experiments seem to prove that the bite of the uraeus serpent, whose
image on the Egyptian crown symbolizes the sovereign's instant power over
life and death, stills the heart most swiftly and with the least
suffering.
"How terrible these things are! What pain it causes to see the being one
loves most, the mother of the fairest children, so cruelly heighten the
anguish of parting, choose death, as it were, for a constant companion,
amid the whirl of the gayest amusements! She daily looks all his terrors
in the face, yet with proud contempt turns her back upon the bridge which
might perhaps enable her for a time to escape the monster. This is grand,
worthy of her, and never have I loved her more tenderly.
"You, too, must think of her kindly. She deserves it. A noble heart which
sees itself forced to pity a foe, easily forgives; and was she ever your
enemy?
"I have written a long, long letter to solace your seclusion from the
world and relieve my own heart. Have patience a little while longer. The
time is not far distant when Fate itself will release you from exile. How
often your relatives, Archibius and Gorgias, whom I now see frequently in
the presence of the Queen, long to visit you!--but they, too, believe
that it might prove a source of danger."
The warnings in this letter were confirmed by another from Archibius, and
soon after they heard that Caesarion had really sailed up the Nile for
Ethiopia with his tutor Rhodon, and Antyllus had been sent to Asia to
visit Octavianus. The latter had received him, it is true; but sent him
home without making any pledges.
These tidings were not brought by letter, but by Gorgias himself, whose
visit surprised them one evening late in March.
Rarely had a guest received a more joyous welcome. When he entered the
bare room, Barine was making a net and telling the fisherman's daughter
Dione the story of the wanderings of Ulysses. Dion, too, listened
attentively, now and then correcting or explaining her descriptions,
while carving a head of Poseidon for the prow of a newly built boat.
As Gorgias unexpectedly crossed the threshold, the dim light of the lamp
fed by kiki-oil seemed transformed into sunshine. How brightly their eyes
sparkled, how joyous were their exclamations of welcome and surprise!
Then came questions, answers, news! Gorgias was obliged to share the
family supper, which had only waited the return of the father who had
brought the guest.
The fresh oysters, langustae, and other dishes served tasted more
delicious to the denizen of the city than the most delicious banquets of
the "Comrades of Death" to which he was now frequently invited by the
Queen.
All that Pyrrhus said voluntarily and told his sons in reply to their
questions was so sensible and related to matters which, because they were
new to Gorgias, seemed so fascinating that, when Dion's good wine was
served, he declared that if Pyrrhus would receive him he, too, would
search for pursuers and be banished here.
When the three again sat alone before the plain clay mixing vessel it
seemed to the lonely young couple as if the best part of the city life
which they had left behind had found its way to them, and what did they
not have to say to one another! Dion and Barine talked of their hermit
life, Gorgias of the Queen and the tomb, which was at the same time a
treasure chamber. The slanting walls were built as firmly as if they were
intended to last for centuries and defy a violent assault. The centre of
the lower story was formed by a lofty hall of vast dimensions, in whose
midst were the large marble sarcophagi. Men were working busily upon the
figures in relief intended for the decoration of the sides and lids. This
hall, whose low arched ceiling was supported by three pairs of heavy
columns, was furnished like a reception-room. The couches, candelabra,
and altars were already being made. Charmian had kept the fugitives well
informed. In the subterranean chambers at the side of the hall, and in
the second story, which could not be commenced until the ceiling was
completed, store-rooms were to be made, and below and beside them were
passages for ventilation and the storage of combustible materials.
Gorgias regretted that he could not show his friend the hall, which was
perhaps the handsomest and most costly he had ever created. The noblest
material-brown porphyry, emerald-green serpentine, and the dark varieties
of marble-had been used, and the mosaic and brass doors, which were
nearing completion, were masterpieces of Alexandrian art. To have all
this destroyed was a terrible thought, but even more unbearable was that
of its object--to receive the body of the Queen.
Again rapturous admiration of this greatest and noblest of women led
Gorgias to enthusiastic rhapsodies, until Dion exercised his office of
soberer, and Barine asked tidings of her mother, her grandparents, and
her sister. There was nothing but good news to be told. True, the
architect had to wage a daily battle with the old philosopher, who termed
it an abuse of hospitality to remain so long at his friend's with his
whole family; but thus far Gorgias had won the victory, even against
Berenike, who wished to take her father and his household to her own
home.
Cleopatra had purchased the house and garden of Didymus at thrice their
value, the architect added. He was now a wealthy man, and had
commissioned him to build a new mansion. The land facing the sea and near
the museum had been found, but the handsome residence would not be
completed until summer. The dry Egyptian air would have permitted him to
roof it sooner, but there were many of Helena's wishes--most of them very
sensible ones--to be executed.
Barine and Dion glanced significantly at each other; but the architect,
perceiving it, exclaimed: "Your mute language is intelligible enough, and
I confess that for five months Helena has seemed to me the most
attractive of maidens. I see, too, that she has some regard for me. But
as soon as I stand before her--the Queen, I mean--and hear her voice, it
seems as if a tempest swept away every thought of Helena, and it is not
in my nature to deceive any one. How can I woo a girl whom I so deeply
honour--your sister, Barine--when the image of another rules my soul?"
Dion reminded him of his own words that the Queen was loved only as a
goddess and, without waiting for his reply, turned the conversation to
other topics.
It was three hours after midnight when Pyrrhus warned Gorgias that it was
time for departure. When the fisherman's fleetest boat was at last
bearing him back to the city he wondered whether girls who, before
marriage, lived like Helena in undisturbed seclusion, would really be
better wives and more content with every lot than the much-courted
Barine, whom Dion had led from the gayest whirl of life in the capital to
the most desolate solitude.
This delightful evening was followed by a day of excitement and grave
anxiety. It had been necessary to conceal the young couple from the
collector's officials, who took from Pyrrhus part of his last year's
savings, and the large new boat which he used to go out on the open sea.
The preparations for war required large sums; all vessels suitable for
the purpose were seized for the fleet, and all residents of the city and
country shared the same fate as Pyrrhus.
Even the temple treasures were confiscated, and yet no one could help
saying to himself that the vast sums which, through these pitiless
extortions, flowed into the treasury, were used for the pleasures of the
court as well as for the equipment of the fleet and the army.
Yet so great was the people's love for the Queen, so high their regard
for the independence of Egypt, so bitter their hate of Rome, that there
was no rebellion.
How earnestly Cleopatra, amid all the extravagant revels, from which she
could not too frequently absent herself, toiled to advance the military
preparations, could be seen even by the exiles from their cliff; for work
in two dock-yards was continued day and night, and the harbour was filled
with vessels. Ships of war were continually moving to and fro, and from
the Serpent Island they witnessed constantly, often by starlight, the
drilling of the oarsmen and of whole squadrons upon the open sea.
Sometimes a magnificent state galley appeared, on whose deck was Antony,
who inspected the hastily equipped fleet to make the newly recruited
sailors one of those kindling speeches in which he was a master hard to
surpass. Two sons of Pyrrhus were now numbered in the crews of the
recently built war ships. They had been impressed into the service in
April, and though Dion had placed a large sum at their father's disposal
to secure their release, the attempt was unsuccessful.
So there had been sorrow and tears in the contented little colony of
human beings on the lonely cliff, and when Dionysus and Dionichos had a
day's leave of absence to visit their relatives, they complained of the
cruel haste with which the young men were drilled and wearied to
exhaustion, and spoke of the sons of citizens and peasants who had been
dragged from their villages, their parents, and their business to be
trained for seamen. There was great indignation among them, and they
listened only too readily to the agitators who whispered how much better
they would have fared on the galleys of Octavianus.
Pyrrhus entreated his sons not to join any attempt at mutiny; the women,
on the contrary, would have approved anything which promised to release
the youths from their severe service, and their bright cheerfulness was
transformed into anxious depression. Barine, too, was no longer the same.
She had lost her joyous activity, her eyes were often wet with tears, and
she moved with drooping head as if some heavy care oppressed her.
Was it the heat of April, with its desert winds, which had brought the
transformation? Had longing for the changeful, exciting life of former
days at last overpowered her? Was solitude becoming unendurable? Was her
husband's love no longer sufficient to replace the many pleasures she had
sacrificed?--No! It could not be that; never had she gazed with more
devoted tenderness into Dion's face than when entirely alone with him in
shady nooks. She who in such hours looked the very embodiment of
happiness and contentment, certainly was neither ill nor sorrowful.
Dion, on the contrary, held his head high early and late, and appeared as
proud and self-conscious as though life was showing him its fairest face.
Yet he had heard that his estates had been sequestrated, and that he owed
it solely to the influence of Archibius and his uncle, that his property,
like that of so many others, had not been added to the royal treasures.
But what disaster could he not have speedily vanquished in these days?
A great joy--the greatest which the immortals can bestow upon human
beings--was dawning for him and his young wife, and in May the women on
the island shared her blissful hope.
Pyrrhus brought from the city an altar and a marble statue of Ilythyia,
the Goddess of Birth, called by the Romans Lucina, which his friend
Anukis had given him, in Charmian's name, for the young wife. She had
again spoken of the serpents which lived in such numbers in the
neighbouring islands, and her question whether it would be difficult to
capture one alive was answered by the freedman in the negative.
The image of the goddess and the altar were erected beside the other
sanctuaries, and how often the stone was anointed by Barine and the women
of the fisherman's family!
Dion vowed to the goddess a beautiful temple on the cliff and in the city
if she would be gracious to his beloved young wife.
When, in June, the noonday sun blazed most fiercely, the fisherman
brought to the cliff Helena, Barine's sister, and Chloris, Dion's nurse,
who had been a faithful assistant of his mother, and afterwards managed
the female slaves of the household.
How joyously and gratefully Barine held out her arms to her sister! Her
mother had been prevented from coming only by the warning that her
disappearance would surely attract the attention of the spies. And the
latter were very alert; for Mark Antony had not yet given up the pursuit
of the singer, nor had the attorney Philostratus recalled the
proclamation offering two talents for the capture of Dion, and both the
latter's palace and Berenike's house were constantly watched.
It seemed more difficult for the quiet Helena to accommodate herself to
this solitude than for her gayer-natured sister. Plainly as she showed
her love for Barine, she often lapsed into reverie, and every evening she
went to the southern side of the cliff and gazed towards the city, where
her grandparents doubtless sorely missed her, spite of the careful
attention bestowed upon them in Gorgias's house.
Eight days had passed since her arrival, and life in this wilderness
seemed more distasteful than on the first and the second; the longing for
her grandparents, too, appeared to increase; for that day she had gone to
the shore, even under the burning rays of the noonday sun, to gaze
towards the city.
How dearly she loved the old people!
But Dion's conjecture that the tears sparkling in Helena's eyes when she
entered their room at dusk were connected with another resident of the
capital, spite of his wife's indignant denial, appeared to be correct;
for, a short time after, clear voices were heard in front of the-house,
and when a deep, hearty laugh rang out, Dion started up, exclaiming,
"Gorgias never laughs in that way, except when he has had some unusual
piece of good fortune!"
He hurried out as he spoke, and gazed around; but, notwithstanding the
bright moonlight, he could see nothing except Father Pyrrhus on his way
back to the anchorage.
But Dion's ears were keen, and he fancied he heard subdued voices on the
other side of the dwelling. He followed the sound without delay and, when
he turned the corner of the building, stopped short in astonishment,
exclaiming as a low cry rose close before him:
"Good-evening, Gorgias! I'll see you later. I won't interrupt you."
A few rapid steps took him back to Barine, and as he whispered, "I saw
Helena out in the moonlight, soothing her longing for her grandparents in
Gorgias's arms," she clapped her hands and said, smiling:
"That's the way one loses good manners in this solitude. To disturb the
first meeting of a pair of lovers! But Gorgias treated us in the same way
in Alexandria, so he is now paid in his own coin."
The architect soon entered the room, with Helena leaning on his arm. Hour
by hour he had missed her more and more painfully, and on the eighth day
found it impossible to endure life's burden longer without her. He now
protested that he could approach her mother and grandparents as a suitor
with a clear conscience; for on the third day after Helena's departure
the relation between him and the Queen had changed. In Cleopatra's
presence the image of the granddaughter of Didymus became even more vivid
than that of the peerless sovereign had formerly been in Helena's.
Outside of the pages of poetry he had never experienced longing like that
which had tortured him during the past few days.
CHAPTER XXI.
This time the architect could spend only a few hours on the Serpent
Island, for affairs in the city were beginning to wear a very serious
aspect, and the building of the monument was pushed forward even during
the night. The interior of the first story was nearly completed and the
rough portion of the second was progressing. The mosaic workers, who were
making the floor of the great hall, had surpassed themselves. It was
impossible to wait longer for the sculptures which were to adorn the
walls. At present slabs of polished black marble were to occupy the
places intended for bronze reliefs; the utmost haste was necessary.
Octavianus had already reached Pelusium; even if Seleukus, the commander
of the garrison, held the strong fortress a long time, a part of the
hostile army might appear before Alexandria the following week.
A considerable force, however, was ready to meet him. The fleet seemed
equal to that of the enemy; the horsemen whom Antony had led before the
Queen would delight the eye of any one versed in military affairs; and
the Imperator hoped much from the veterans who had served under him in
former times, learned to know his generosity and open hand in the hour of
prosperity, and probably had scarcely forgotten the eventful days when he
had cheerfully and gaily shared their perils and privations.
Helena remained on the cliff, and her longing for the old couple had
materially diminished. Her hands moved nimbly, and her cheerful glance
showed that the lonely life on the island was beginning to unfold its
charms to her.
The young husband, however, had grown very uneasy. He concealed it before
the women, but old Pyrrhus often had much difficulty in preventing his
making a trip to the city which might imperil, on the eve of the final
decision, the result of their long endurance and privation. Dion had
often wished to set sail with his wife for a great city in Syria or
Greece, but fresh and mighty obstacles had deterred him. A special danger
lay in the fact that every large vessel was thoroughly searched before it
left the harbour, and it was impossible to escape from it without passing
through the narrow straits east of the Pharos or the opening in the
Heptastadium, both of which were easily guarded. The calm moderation that
usually distinguished the young counsellor had been transformed into
feverish restlessness, and the heart of his faithful old monitor had also
lost its poise; for an encounter between the fleet in which his sons
served and that of Octavianus was speedily expected.
One day he returned from the city greatly excited. Pelusium was said to
have fallen.
When he ascended the cliff he found everything quiet. No one, not even
Dione, came to meet him.
What had happened here?
Had the fugitives been discovered and dragged with his family to the city
to be thrown into prison, perhaps sent to the stone quarries?
Deadly pale, but erect and composed, he walked towards the house. He owed
to Dion and his father the greatest blessing in life, liberty, and the
foundation of everything else he possessed. But if his fears were
verified, if he was bereft of friends and property, even as a lonely
beggar he might continue to enjoy his freedom. If, for the sake of those
to whom he owed his best possession, he must surrender the rest, it was
his duty to bear fate patiently.
It was still light.
Even when he had approached very near the house he heard no sound save
the joyous barking of his wolf-hound, Argus, which leaped upon him.
He now laid his hand upon the lock of the door--but it was flung open
from the inside.
Dion had seen him coming and, enraptured by the new happiness with which
this day had blessed him, he flung himself impetuously on the breast of
his faithful friend, exclaiming: "A boy, a splendid boy! We will call him
Pyrrhus."
Bright tears of joy streamed down the freedman's face and fell on his
grey beard; and when his wife came towards him with her finger on her
lips, he whispered in a tremulous voice: "When I brought them here you
were afraid that the city people would drag us into ruin, but
nevertheless you received them as they deserved to be, and--he's going to
name him Pyrrhus--and now!--What has a poor fellow like me done to have
such great and beautiful blessings fall to my lot?"
"And I--I?" sobbed his wife. "And the child, the darling little
creature!"
This day of sunny happiness was followed by others of quiet joy, of the
purest pleasure, yet mingled with the deepest anxiety. They also brought
many an hour in which Helena found an opportunity to show her prudence,
while old Chloris and the fisherman's wife aided her by their experience.
Every one, down to the greybeard whose name the little one bore, declared
that there had never been a lovelier young mother than Barine or a
handsomer child than the infant Pyrrhus; but Dion could no longer endure
to remain on the cliff.
A thousand things which he had hitherto deemed insignificant and allowed
to pass unheeded now seemed important and imperatively in need of his
personal attention. He was a father, and any negligence might be harmful
to his son.
With his bronzed complexion and long hair and beard he required little
aid to disguise him from his friends. In the garments shabby by long use,
and with his delicate hands calloused by work in the dock-yard, any one
would have taken him for a real fisherman.
Perhaps it was foolish, but the desire to show himself in the character
of a father to Barine's mother and grandparents and to Gorgias seemed
worth risking a slight danger; so, without informing Barine, who was now
able to walk about her room, he set out for the city after sunset on the
last day of July.
He knew that Octavianus was encamped in the Hippodrome east of
Alexandria. The white mounds which had risen there had been recognized as
tents, even from the Serpent Island. Pyrrhus had returned in the
afternoon with tidings that Antony's mounted troops had defeated those of
Octavianus. This time the news of victory could be trusted, for the
palace at Lochias was illuminated for a festival and when Dion landed
there was a great bustle on the quay. One shouted to another that all
would be well. Mark Antony was his old self again. He had fought like a
hero.
Many who yesterday had cursed him, to-day mingled their voices in the
shouts of "Evoe!" which rang out for the new Dionysus, who had again
proved his claim to godship.
The late visitor found the grandparents alone in the house of Gorgias.
They had been informed of Barine's new happiness long before. Now they
rejoiced with Dion, and wanted to send at once for their host and future
son-in-law, who was in the city attending a meeting of the Ephebi,
although he had ceased some time ago to be a member of their company. But
Dion wished to greet him among the youths who had invited the architect
to give them his aid in deciding the question of the course they were to
pursue in the impending battle.
Yet he did not leave the old couple immediately; he was expecting two
visitors--Barine's mother and Charmian's Nubian maid who, since the birth
of little Pyrrhus, had come to the philosopher's every evening. The
former's errand was to ask whether any news of the mother and child had
been received during the day; the latter, to get the letters which she
delivered the next morning at the fish-market to her friend Pyrrhus or
his sons.
Anukis was the first to appear. She relieved her sympathizing heart by a
brief expression of congratulations; but, gladly as she would have
listened to the most minute details concerning the beloved young mother
from the lips of Dion himself, she repressed her own wishes for her
mistress's sake, and returned to Charmian as quickly as possible to
inform her of the arrival of the unexpected guest.
Berenike bore her new dignity of grandmother with grateful joy, yet
to-night she came oppressed by a grave anxiety, which was not solely due
to her power of imagining gloomy events. Her brother Arius and his sons
were concealed in the house of a friend, for they seemed threatened by a
serious peril. Hitherto Antony had generously borne the philosopher no
ill-will on the score of his intimate relations with Octavianus; but now
that Octavianus was encamped outside the city, the house of the man who,
during the latter's years of education, had been his mentor and
counsellor, and later a greatly valued friend, was watched, by Mardion's
orders, by the Scythian guard. He and his family were forbidden to enter
the city, and his escape to his friend had been effected under cover of
the darkness and with great danger.
The anxious woman feared the worst for her brother if Mark Antony should
conquer, and yet, with her whole heart, she wished the Queen to gain the
victory. She, who always feared the worst, saw in imagination the
fortunes of war change--and there was reason for the belief. The bold
general who had gained so many victories, and whom the defeat of Actium
had only humbled, was said to have regained his former elasticity. He had
dashed forward at the head of his men with the heroic courage of former
days--nay, with reckless impetuosity. Rumour reported that, with the huge
sword he wielded, he had dealt from his powerful charger blows as
terrible as those inflicted five-and-twenty years before when, not far
from the same spot, he struck Archelaus on the head. The statement that,
in his golden armour, with the gold helmet framing his bearded face, he
resembled his ancestor Herakles, was confirmed by Charmian, who had been
borne quickly hither by a pair of the Queen's swift horses. Cleopatra
might need her soon, yet she had left the Lochias to question the father
about many things concerning the young mother and her boy, who was
already dear to her as the first grandson of the man whose suit, it is
true, she had rejected, but to whom she owed the delicious consciousness
of having loved and been loved in the springtime of life.
Dion found her changed. The trying months which she had described in her
letters to Barine had completely blanched her grey hair, her cheeks were
sunken, and a deep line between her mouth and nose gave her pleasant face
a sorrowful expression. Besides, she seemed to have been weeping and, in
fact, heart-rending events had just occurred.
She had stolen away from Lochias in the midst of a revel.
Antony's victory was being celebrated. He himself presided at the
banquet. Again his head and breast were wreathed with a wealth of fresh
leaves and superb flowers. At his side reclined Cleopatra, robed in
light-blue garments adorned with lotus-flowers which, like the little
coronet on her head, glittered with sapphires and pearls. Charmian said
she had rarely looked more beautiful. But she did not add that the Queen
had been obliged to have rouge applied to her pale, bloodless cheeks.
It was touching to see Antony after his return from the battle, still in
his suit of mail, clasp her in his arms as joyously as if he had won her
back, a prize of victory, and with his vanished heroic power regained her
and their mutual love. Her eyes, too, had been radiant with joy and, in
the elation of her heart, she had given the horseman who, for a deed of
special daring, was presented to her, a helmet and coat of mail of solid
gold.
Yet, even before the revel began, she had been forced to acknowledge to
herself that the commencement of the end was approaching; for, a few
hours after she had so generously rewarded the man, he had deserted to
the foe. Then Antony had challenged Octavianus to a duel, and received
the unfeeling reply that he would find many roads to death open.
This was the language of the cold-hearted foe, secure of superior power.
How sadly, too, she had been disappointed in the hope--that the veterans
who had served under Antony would desert their new commander at the first
summons and flock to his standard!--for all her husband's efforts in this
direction, spite of the bewitching power of his eloquence, failed, while
every hour brought tidings of the treacherous desertion from his army of
individual warriors and whole maniples. His foe deemed his cause so weak
that he did not even resist Mark Antony's attempts to win the soldiers by
promises.
From all these signs Cleopatra now saw plainly, in her lover's victory,
only the last flicker of a dying fire; but so long as it burned he should
see her follow its light.
Therefore she had entered the festal hall with the victor of the day. She
had witnessed a strange festival. It began with tears and reminded
Cleopatra of the saying that she herself resembled a banquet served to
celebrate a victory before the battle was won. The cup-bearers had
scarcely advanced to the guests with their golden vessels when Antony
turned to them, exclaiming: "Pour generously, men; perhaps to-morrow you
will serve another master!"
Then, unlike his usual self, he grew thoughtful and murmured under his
breath, "And I shall probably be lying outside a corpse, a miserable
nothing."
Loud sobs from the cup-bearers and servants followed these words; but he
addressed them calmly, assuring them that he would not take them into a
battle from which he expected an honourable death rather than rescue and
victory.
At this Cleopatra's tears flowed also. If this reckless man of pleasure,
this notorious spendthrift and disturber of the public peace, with his
insatiate desires, had inspired bitter hostility, few had gained the warm
love of so many hearts. One glance at his heroic figure; one memory of
the days when even his foes conceded that he was never greater than in
the presence of the most imminent peril, never more capable of awakening
in others the hope of brighter times than amid the sorest privations; one
tone of the orator's deep, resonant voice, which so often came from the
heart and therefore gained hearts with such resistless power; the
recollection of numberless instances of the bright cheerfulness of his
nature and his boundless generosity sufficiently explained the
lamentations which burst forth at that banquet, the tears which
flowed--tears of genuine feeling. They were also shed for the beautiful
Queen who, unmindful of the spectators, rested her noble brow, with its
coronal of pearls, upon his mighty shoulder.
But the grief did not last long, for Mark Antony, shouted: "Hence with
melancholy! We do not need the larva!
[At the banquets of the Egyptians a small figure in the shape of a
mummy was passed around to remind the guests that they, too, would
soon be in the same condition, and have no more time to enjoy life
and its pleasures. The Romans imitated this custom by sending the
larva, a statuette in the form of a skeleton, to make the round of
the revellers. The Greek love of beauty converted this ugly
scarecrow into a winged genius.]
We know, without its aid, that pleasure will soon be over!--Xuthus, a
joyous festal song!--And you, Metrodor, lead the dancers! The first
beaker to the fairest, the best, the wisest, the most cherished, the most
fervently beloved of women!" As he spoke he waved his goblet aloft, the
flute-player, Xuthus, beckoned to the chorus, and the dancer Metrodor, in
the guise of a butterfly, led forth a bevy of beautiful girls, who, in
the cloud of ample robes of transparent coloured bombyx which floated
around them, executed the most graceful figures and now hovered like
mists, now flitted to and fro as if borne on wings, affording the most
charming variety to the delighted spectators.
The "Comrades of Death" had again become companions in pleasure; and when
Charmian, who did not lose sight of her mistress, noticed the sorrowful
quiver of her lips and glided out of the circle of guests, the faithful
Nubian had approached to inform her of Dion's arrival.
Then--but this she concealed from her friends--she hastened to her own
apartments to prepare to go out, and when Iras opened the door to enter
her rooms she went to speak to her about the night attendance upon the
Queen. But her niece had not perceived her; shaken by convulsive sobs,
she had pressed her face among the cushions of a couch, and there
suffered the fierce anguish which had stirred the inmost depths of her
being to rave itself out with the full vehemence of her passionate
nature. Charmian called her name and, weeping herself, ripened her arms
to her, and for the first time since her return from Actium her sister's
daughter again sank upon her breast, and they held each other in a close
embrace until Charmian's exclamation, "With her, for her unto death!" was
answered by Iras's "To the tomb!"
This was a word which, in many an hour of the silent night, had stirred
the soul of the woman who had been the youthful playmate of the Queen
who, with bleeding heart, sat below among the revellers at the noisy
banquet and forced her to ask the question: "Is not your fate bound to
hers? What can life offer you without her?"
Now, this word was spoken by other lips, and, like an echo of Iras's
exclamation, came the answer: "Unto death, like you, if she precedes us
to the other world. Whatever may follow dying, nowhere shall she lack
Charmian's hand and heart."
"Nor the love and service of Iras," was the answering assurance.
So they had parted, and the agitation of this fateful moment was still
visible in the features of the woman who had formerly sacrificed to her
royal playfellow her love, and now offered her life.
When, ere leaving Gorgias's house, she bade her friend farewell, she
pressed Dion's hand with affectionate warmth and, as he accompanied her
to the carriage, she informed him that, before the first encounter of the
troops, Archibius had taken the royal children to his estate of Irenia,
where they were at present.
"Rarely has it been my fate to experience a more sorrowful hour than when
I beheld the Queen, her heart torn with anguish, bid them fare well. What
fate is impending over the dear ones, who are so worthy of the greatest
happiness? To see the twins and little Alexander recognized and saved
from death and insult, and your boy in Barine's arms, is the last wish
which I still cherish."
On returning to Lochias, Charmian had a long time to wait ere the Queen
retired. She dreaded the mood in which she would leave the banquet. For
months past Cleopatra had returned from the revels of the "Comrades of
Death" saddened to tears, or in a blaze of indignation. How must this
last banquet, which began so mournfully and continued with such reckless
mirth, affect her?
At last, the second hour after midnight, Cleopatra appeared.
Charmian believed that she must be the sport of some delusion, for the
Queen's eyes which, when she had left her, were full of tears, now
sparkled with the radiant light of joy and, as her friend took the crown
from her head, she exclaimed:
"Why did you depart from the banquet so early? Perhaps it was the last,
but I remember no festival more brilliant. It was like the springtime of
my love. Mark Antony would have touched the heart of a stone statue by
that blending of manly daring and humble devotion which no woman can
resist. As in former days, hours shrivelled into moments. We were again
young, once more united. We were together here at Lochias to-night, and
yet in distant years and other places. The notes of the singers, the
melodies of the musicians, the figures executed by the dancers, were lost
upon us. We soared back, hand in hand, to a magic world, and the fairy
drama in the realms of the blessed, which passed before us in dazzling
splendour and blissful joy, was the dream which I loved best when a
child, and at the same time the happiest portion of the life of the Queen
of Egypt.
"It began before the gate of the garden of Epicurus, and continued on the
river Cydnus. I again beheld myself on the golden barge, garlanded with
wreaths of flowers, reclining on the purple couch with roses strewn
around me and beneath my jewelled sandals. A gentle breeze swelled the
silken sails; my female companions raised their clear voices in song to
the accompaniment of lutes; the perfumes floating around us were borne by
the wind to the shore, conveying the tidings that the bliss believed by
mortals to be reserved for the gods alone was drawing near. And even as
his heart and his enraptured senses yielded to my sway, his mind, as he
himself confessed, was under the thrall of mine. We both felt happy,
united by ties which nothing, not even misfortune, could sever. He, the
ruler of the world, was conquered, and delighted to obey the behests of
the victor, because he felt that she before whom he bowed was his own
obedient slave. And no magic goblet effected all this. I breathed more
freely, as if relieved from the oppressive delusion--the fire had
consumed it also--which had burdened my soul until a few hours ago. No
magic spell, only the gifts of mind and soul which the vanquished victor,
the woman Cleopatra, owed to the favour of the immortals, had compelled
his lofty manhood to yield.
"From the Cydnus he brought me hither to the blissful days which we were
permitted to pass in my city of Alexandria. A thousand sunny hours,
musical, echoing surges which long since dashed down the stream of Time,
he recalled to life, and I--I did the same, and our memories blended into
one. What never-to-be-forgotten moments we experienced when, with
reckless mirth, we mingled unrecognized among the joyous throng! What
Olympic delight elated our hearts when the plaudits of thousands greeted
us! What joys satiated our minds and senses in our own apartments! What
pure, unalloyed nectar of the soul was bestowed upon us by our
children--bliss which we shared with and imparted to each other until
neither knew which was the giver and which the receiver! Everything sad
and painful seemed to be effaced from the book of memory; and the child's
dream, the fairy-tale woven by the power of imagination, stood before my
soul as a reality--the same reality, I repeat, which I call my past life.
"And, Charmian, if death comes to-morrow, should I say that he appeared
too early--summoned me ere he permitted life to bestow all its best gifts
upon me? No, no, and again no! Whoever, in the last hour of existence,
can say that the fairest dreams of childhood were surpassed by a long
portion of actual life, may consider himself happy, even in the deepest
need and on the verge of the grave.
"The aspiration to be first and highest among the women of her own time,
which had already thrilled the young girl's heart, was fulfilled. The
ardent longing for love which, even at that period, pervaded my whole
being, was satisfied when I became a loving wife, mother, and Queen, and
friendship, through the favour of Destiny, also bestowed upon me its
greatest blessings by the hands of Archibius, Charmian, and Iras.
"Now I care not what may happen. This evening taught me that life had
fulfilled its pledges. But others, too, must be enabled to remember the
most brilliant of queens, who was also the most fervently beloved of
women. For this I will provide: the mausoleum which Gorgias is erecting
for me will stand like an indestructible wall between the Cleopatra who
to-day still proudly wears the crown and her approaching humiliation and
disgrace.
"Now I will go to sleep. If my awakening brings defeat, sorrow, and
death, I have no reason to accuse my fate. It denied me one thing only
the painless peace which the child and the young girl recognized as the
chief good; yet Cleopatra will possess that also. The domain of death,
which, as the Egyptians say, loves silence, is opening its doors to me.
The most absolute peace begins upon its threshold--who knows where it
ends? The vision of the intellect does not extend far enough to discover
the boundary where, at the end of eternity--which in truth is endless--it
is replaced by something else."
While speaking, the Queen had motioned to her friend to accompany her
into her chamber, from which a door led into the children's room. An
irresistible impulse constrained her to open it and gaze into the dark,
empty apartment.
She felt an icy chill run through her veins. Taking a light from the hand
of one of the maids who attended her, she went to little Alexander's
couch. Like the others, it was empty, deserted. Her head sank on her
breast, the courageous calmness with which she had surveyed her whole
past life failed and, like the luxuriant riot in the sky of the most
brilliant hues, ere the glow of sunset suddenly yields to darkness,
Cleopatra's soul, after the lofty elation of the last few hours,
underwent a sudden transition and, overwhelmed by deep, sorrowful
depression, she threw herself down before the twins' bed, where she lay
weeping softly until Charmian, as day began to dawn, urged her to retire
to rest. Cleopatra slowly rose, dried her eyes, and said: "My past life
seemed to me just now like a magnificent garden, but how many serpents
suddenly stretched out their flat heads with glittering eyes and forked
tongues! Who tore away the flowers beneath which they lay concealed? I
think, Charmian, it was a mysterious power which here, in the children's
apartment, rules so strongly the most trivial as well as the strongest
emotions, it was--when did I last hear that ominous word?--it was
conscience. Here, in this abode of innocence and purity, whatever
resembles a spot stands forth distinctly before the eyes. Here, O
Charmian!--if the children were but here! If I could only--yet, no, no!
It is fortunate, very fortunate that they have gone. I must be strong;
and their sweet grace would rob me of my energy. But the light grows
brighter and brighter. Dress me for the day. It would be easier for me to
sleep in a falling house than with such a tumult in my heart."
While she was being attired in the dark robes she had ordered, loud
shouts arose from the royal harbour below, blended with the blasts of the
tuba and other signals directing the movements of the fleet and the army,
a large body of troops having been marched during the night to the
neighbouring hills overlooking the sea.
The notes sounded bold and warlike. The well-armed galleys presented a
stately appearance. How often Cleopatra had seen unexpected events occur,
apparent impossibilities become possible! Had not the victory of
Octavianus at Actium been a miracle? What if Fate, like a capricious
ruler, now changed from frowns to smiles? What if Antony proved himself
the hero of yesterday, the general he had been in days of yore?
She had refused to see him again before the battle, that she might not
divert his thoughts from the great task approaching. But now, as she
beheld him, clad in glittering armour like the god of war himself, ride
before the troops on his fiery Barbary charger, greeting them with the
gay salutation whose warmth sprung from the heart and which had so often
kindled the warriors to glowing enthusiasm, she was forced to do violence
to her own feelings to avoid calling him and saying that her thoughts
would follow his course. But she refrained, and when his purple cloak
vanished from her sight her head drooped again. How different in former
days were the cheers of the troops when he showed himself to them! This
lukewarm response to his gay, glad greeting was no omen of victory.
CHAPTER XXII.
Dion, too, witnessed the departure of the troops. Gorgias, whom he had
found among the Ephebi, accompanied him and, like the Queen, they saw, in
the cautious manner with which the army greeted the general, a bad omen
for the result of the battle. The architect had presented Dion to the
youths as the ghost of a dead man, who, as soon as he was asked whence he
came or whither he was going, would be compelled to vanish in the form of
a fly. He could venture to do this; he knew the Ephebi--there was no
traitor in their ranks.
Dion, the former head of the society, had been welcomed like a beloved
brother risen from the dead, and he had the gratification, after so long
a time, of turning the scale as speaker in a debate. True, he had
encountered very little opposition, for the resolve to hold aloof from
the battle against the Romans had been urged upon the Ephebi by the Queen
herself through Antyllus, who, however, had already left the meeting when
Dion joined it. It had seemed to Cleopatra a crime to claim the blood of
the noblest sons of the city for a cause which she herself deemed lost.
She knew the parents of many, and feared that Octavianus would inflict a
terrible punishment upon them if, not being enrolled in the army, they
fell into his power with arms in their hands.
The stars were already setting when the Ephebi accompanied their friend,
singing in chorus the Hymenaeus, which they had been unable to chant on
his wedding day. The melody of lutes accompanied the voices, and this
nocturnal music was the source of the rumour that the god Dionysus, to
whom Mark Antony felt specially akin, and in whose form he had so often
appeared to the people, had abandoned him amid songs and music.
The youths left Dion in front of the Temple of Isis. Gorgias alone
remained with him. The architect led his friend to the Queen's mausoleum
near the sanctuary, where men were toiling busily by torchlight. Alight
scaffolding still surrounded it, but the lofty first story, containing
the real tomb, was completed, and Dion admired the art with which the
exterior of the edifice suggested its purpose. Huge blocks of dark-grey
granite formed the walls. The broad front-solemn, almost gloomy in
aspect-rose, sloping slightly, above the massive lofty door, surmounted
by a moulding bearing the winged disk of the sun. On either side were
niches containing statues of Antony and Cleopatra cast in dark bronze,
and above the cornice were brazen figures of Love and Death, Fame and
Silence, ennobling the Egyptian forms with exquisite works of Hellenic
art.
The massive door, adorned with brass figures in relief, would have
resisted a battering-ram. On the side of the steps leading to it lay
Sphinxes of dark-green diorite. Everything connected with this building,
dedicated to death, was grave and massive, suggesting by its
indestructibility the idea of eternity.
The second story was not yet finished; masons and stone-cutters were
engaged in covering the strong walls with dark serpentine and black
marble. The huge windlass stood ready to raise a masterpiece of
Alexandrian art. This was intended for the pediment, and represented
Venus Victrix with helmet, shield, and lance, leading a band of winged
gods of love, little archers at whose head Eros himself was discharging
arrows, and victoriously fighting against the three-headed Cerberus,
death, already bleeding from many wounds.
There was no time to see the interior of the building, for Pyrrhus
expected his guest to join him at the harbour at sunrise, and the eastern
sky was already brightening with the approach of dawn.
As the friends reached the landing-place the brass dome of the Serapeum,
which towered above everything, was glittering with dazzling splendour.
The pennons and masts of the fleet which was about to set sail from the
harbour seemed steeped in a sea of golden light. Tremulous reflections of
the brazen and gilded figures on the prows of the vessels were mirrored
in the undulating surface of the sea, and the long shadows of the banks
of oars united galley after galley on the surface of the water like the
meshes of a net.
Here the friends parted, and Dion walked down the quay alone to meet the
freedman, who must have found it difficult to guide his boat out of this
labyrinth of vessels. The inspection of the mausoleum had detained the
young father too long and, though disguised beyond recognition, he
reproached himself for having recklessly incurred a danger whose
consequences--he felt this to-day for the first time--would not injure
himself alone. The whole fleet was awaiting the signal for departure. The
vessels which did not belong to it had been obliged to moor in front of
the Temple of Poseidon, and all were strictly forbidden to leave the
anchorage.
Pyrrhus's fishing-boat was in the midst, and return to the Serpent Island
was impossible at present.
How vexatious! Barine was ignorant of his trip to the city, and to be
compelled to leave her alone while a naval battle was in progress
directly before her eyes distressed him as much as it could not fail to
alarm her.
In fact, the young mother had waited from early dawn with increasing
anxiety for her husband. As the sun rose higher, and the strokes of the
oars propelling two hundred galleys, the shrill whistle of the flutes
marking the time, the deep voices of the captains shouting orders, and
the blasts of the trumpets filling the air, were heard far and near
around the island, she became so overwhelmed with uneasiness that she
insisted upon going to the shore, though hitherto she had not been
permitted to take the air except under the awning stretched for the
purpose on the shady side of the house.
In vain the women urged her not to let her fears gain the mastery and to
have patience. But she would have resisted even force in order to look
for him who, with her child, now comprised her world.
When, leaning on Helena's arm, she reached the shore, no boat was in
sight. The sea was covered with ships of war, floating fortresses, moving
onward like dragons with a thousand legs whose feet were the countless
rowers arranged in three or five sets. Each of the larger galleys was
surrounded by smaller ones, from most of which darted dazzling flashes of
light, for they were crowded with armed men, and from the prows of the
strong boarding vessels the sunbeams glittered on the large shining metal
points whose office was to pierce the wooden sides of the foe. The gilded
statues in the prows of the large galleys shone and sparkled in the broad
radiance of the day-star, and flashes of light also came from the low
hills on the shore. Here Mark Antony's soldiers were stationed, and the
sunbeams reflected from the helmets, coats of mail, and lance-heads of
the infantry, and the armour of the horsemen quivered with dazzling
brilliancy in the hot air of the first day of an Egyptian August.
Amid this blazing, flashing, and sparkling in the morning air, so steeped
in warmth and radiance, the sounds of warlike preparations from the land
and fleet constantly grew louder. Barine, exhausted, had just sunk into a
chair which Dione, the fisherman's daughter, had placed in the shade of
the highest rock on the northwestern shore of the flat island, when a
crashing blast of the tuba suddenly echoed from all the galleys in the
Egyptian fleet, and the whole array of vessels filed past the Pharos at
the opening of the harbour into the open sea.
There the narrow ranks of the wooden giants separated and moved onward in
broader lines. This was done quietly and in the same faultless order as a
few days before, when a similar manoeuvre had been executed under the
eyes of Mark Antony.
The longing for combat seemed to urge them steadily forward.
The hostile fleet, lying motionless, awaited the attack. But the Egyptian
assailants had advanced majestically only a few ships lengths towards the
Roman foe when another signal rent the air. The women whose ears caught
the waves of sound said afterwards that it seemed like a cry of agony--it
had given the signal for a deed of unequalled treachery. The slaves,
criminals, and the basest of the mercenaries on the rowers' benches in
the hold had doubtless long listened intently for it, and, when it
finally came, the men on the upper benches raised their long oars and
held them aloft, which stopped the work of those below, and every galley
paused, pointing at the next with the wooden oars outstretched like
fingers, as if seized with horror. The celerity and faultless order with
which the raising of the oars was executed and vessel after vessel
brought to a stand would have been a credit to an honourable captain, but
the manoeuvre introduced one of the basest acts ever recorded in history;
and the women, who had witnessed many a naumachza and understood its
meaning, exclaimed as if with a single voice: "Treachery! They are going
over to the enemy!"
Mark Antony's fleet, created for him by Cleopatra, surrendered, down to
the last galley, to Caesar's heir, the victor of Actium; and the man to
whom the sailors had vowed allegiance, who had drilled them, and only
yesterday had urged them to offer a gallant resistance, saw from one of
the downs on the shore the strong weapons on which he had based the
fairest hopes, not shattered, but delivered into the hands of the enemy!
The surrender of the fleet to the foe--he knew it--sealed his
destruction; and the women on the shore of the Serpent Island, who were
so closely connected with those on whom this misfortune fell, suspected
the same thing. The hearts of both were stirred, and their eyes grew dim
with tears of indignation and sorrow. They were Alexandrians, and did not
desire to be ruled by Rome. Cleopatra, daughter of the Macedonian house
of the Ptolemies, had the sole right to govern the city of her ancestors,
founded by the great Macedonian. The sorrow they had themselves endured
through her sank into insignificance beside the tremendous blow of Fate
which in this hour reached the Queen.
The Roman and Egyptian fleet returned to the harbour as one vast squadron
under the same commander, and anchored in the roadstead of the city,
which was now its precious booty.
Barine had seen enough, and returned to the house with drooping head. Her
heart was heavy, and her anxiety for the man she loved hourly increased.
It seemed as if the very day-star shrank from illuminating so infamous a
deed with friendly light; for the dazzling, searching sun of the first of
August veiled its radiant face with a greyish-white mist, and the
desecrated sea wrinkled its brow, changed its pure azure robe to
yellowish grey and blackish green, while the white foam hissed on the
crests of the angry waves.
As twilight began to approach, the anxiety of the deserted wife became
unendurable. Not only Helena's wise words of caution, but the sight of
her child, failed to exert their usual influence; and Barine had already
summoned the son of Pyrrhus to persuade him to take her in his boat to
the city, when Dione saw a boat approaching the Serpent Island from the
direction of the sea.
A short time after, Dion sprang on shore and kissed from his young wife's
lips the reproaches with which she greeted him.
He had heard of the treachery of the fleet while entering a hired boat
with the freedman in the harbour of Eunostus, Pyrrhus's having been
detained with the other craft before the Temple of Poseidon.
The experienced pilot had been obliged to steer the boat in a wider curve
against the wind through the open sea, and was delayed a long time by a
number of the war vessels of the fleet.
Danger and separation were now passed, and they rejoiced in the happiness
of meeting, yet could not feel genuine joy. Their souls were oppressed by
anxiety concerning the fate of the Queen and their native city.
As night closed in the dogs barked violently, and they heard loud voices
on the shore. Dion, with a presentiment that misfortune was threatening
himself and his dear ones, obeyed the summons.
No star illumined the darkness. Only the wavering light of a lantern on
the strand and another on the nearest island illumined the immediate
vicinity, while southward the lights in the city shone as brightly as
ever.
Pyrrhus and his youngest son were just pushing a boat into the water to
release from the sands another which had run aground in a shallow near
the neighbouring island.
Dion sprang in with them, and soon recognized in the hail the voice of
the architect Gorgias.
The young father shouted a joyous greeting to his friend, but there was
no reply.
Soon after, Pyrrhus landed his belated guest on the shore. He had
escaped--as the fisherman explained--a great danger; for had he gone to
the other island, which swarmed with venomous serpents, he might easily
have fallen a victim to the bite of one of the reptiles.
Gorgias grasped Dion's hand but, in reply to his gay invitation to
accompany him to the house at once, he begged him to listen to his story
before joining the ladies.
Dion was startled. He knew his friend. When his deep voice had such a
tone of gloomy discouragement, and his head drooped so mournfully, some
terrible event had befallen him.
His foreboding had been correct. The first tidings pierced his own soul
deeply.
He was not surprised to learn that the Romans ruled Alexandria; but a
small band of the conquerors, who had been ordered to conduct themselves
as if they were in a friendly country, had forced their way into the
architect's large house to occupy the quarters assigned to them. The deaf
grandmother of Helena and Barine, who had but half comprehended what
threatened the citizens, terrified by the noisy entrance of the soldiers,
had had another attack of apoplexy, and closed her eyes in death before
Gorgias set out for the island.
But it was not only this sad event, which must grieve the hearts of the
two sisters, that had brought the architect in a stranger's boat to the
Serpent Island at so late an hour. His soul was so agitated by the
horrible incidents of the day that he needed to seek consolation among
those from whom he was sure to find sympathy.
Nor was it wholly the terrible things Fate had compelled him to witness
which induced him to venture out upon the sea so recklessly, but still
more the desire to bring to the fugitives the happy news that they might
return with safety to their native city.
Deeply agitated--nay, confused and overpowered by all he had seen and
experienced--the architect, usually so clear and, with all his mental
vivacity, so circumspect, began his story. A remonstrance from Dion
induced him to collect his thoughts and describe events in the order in
which they had befallen him.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Fairest dreams of childhood were surpassed
Golden chariot drawn by tamed lions
Life had fulfilled its pledges
Until neither knew which was the giver and which the receiver
CLEOPATRA
By Georg Ebers
Volume 9.
CHAPTER XXIII.
After accompanying Dion to the harbour, the architect had gone to the
Forum to converse with the men he met there, and learn what they feared
and expected in regard to the future fate of the city.
All news reached this meeting-place first, and he found a large number of
Macedonian citizens who, like himself, wished to discuss passing events
in these decisive hours.
The scene was very animated, for the most contradictory messages were
constantly arriving from the fleet and the army.
At first they were very favourable; then came the news of the treason,
and soon after of the desertion of the cavalry and foot soldiers.
A distinguished citizen had seen Mark Antony, accompanied by several
friends, dashing down the quay. The goal of their flight was the little
palace on the Choma.
Grave men, whose opinion met with little opposition, thought that it was
the duty of the Imperator--now that Fate had decided against him, and
nothing remained save a life sullied by disgrace--to put himself to death
with his own hand, like Brutus and so many other noble Romans. Tidings
soon came that he had attempted to do what the best citizens expected.
Gorgias could not endure to remain longer in the Forum, but hastened to
the Choma, though it was difficult to force his way to the wall, where a
breach had been made. He had found the portion of the shore from which
the promontory ran densely crowded with people--from whom he learned that
Antony was no longer in the palace--and the sea filled with boats.
A corpse was just being borne out of the little palace on the Street of
the King and, among those who followed, Gorgias recognized one of
Antony's slaves. The man's eyes were red with weeping. He readily obeyed
the architect's sign and, sobbing bitterly, told him that the hapless
general, after his army had betrayed him, fled hither. When he heard in
the palace that Cleopatra had preceded him to Hades, he ordered his
body-slave Eros to put an end to his life also. The worthy man drew back,
pierced his own breast with his sword, and sank dying at his master's
feet; but Antony, exclaiming that Eros's example had taught him his duty,
thrust the short sword into his breast with his own hand. Yet deep and
severe as was the wound, it did not destroy the tremendous vitality of
the gigantic Roman. With touching entreaties he implored the bystanders
to kill him, but no one could bring himself to commit the deed. Meanwhile
Cleopatra's name, coupled with the wish to follow her, was constantly on
the lips of the Imperator.
At last Diomedes, the Queen's private secretary, appeared, to bring him,
by her orders, to the mausoleum where she had taken refuge.
Antony, as if animated with fresh vigour, assented, and while being
carried thither gave orders that Eros should have a worthy burial. Even
though dying, it would have been impossible for the most generous of
masters to permit any kindness rendered to pass unrequited.
The slave again wept aloud as he uttered the words, but Gorgias hastened
at once to the tomb. The nearest way, the Street of the King, had become
so crowded with people who had been forced back by Roman soldiers,
between the Theatre of Dionysus and the Corner of the Muses, that he had
been compelled to reach the building through a side street.
The quay was already unrecognizable, and even in the other streets the
populace showed a foreign aspect. Instead of peaceful citizens, Roman
soldiers in full armour were met everywhere. Instead of Greek, Egyptian,
and Syrian faces, fair and dark visages of alien appearance were seen.
The city seemed transformed into a camp. Here he met a cohort of
fair-haired Germans; yonder another with locks of red whose home he did
not know; and again a vexil of Numidian or Pannonian horsemen.
At the Temple of the Dioscuri he was stopped. A Hispanian maniple had
just seized Antony's son Antyllus and, after a hasty court-martial,
killed him. His tutor, Theodotus, had betrayed him to the Romans, but the
infamous fellow was being led with bound hands after the corpse of the
hapless youth, because he was caught in the act of hiding in his girdle a
costly jewel which he had taken from his neck. Before his departure for
the island Gorgias heard that the scoundrel had been sentenced to
crucifixion.
At last he succeeded in forcing a passage to the tomb, which he found
surrounded on all sides by Roman lictors and the Scythian guards of the
city, who, however, permitted him, as the architect, to pass.
The numerous obstacles by which he had been delayed spared him from
becoming an eye-witness of the most terrible scenes of the tragedy which
had just ended; but he received a minute description from the Queen's
private secretary, a well-disposed Macedonian, who had accompanied the
wounded Antony, and with whom Gorgias had become intimately acquainted
during the building of the mausoleum.
Cleopatra had fled to the tomb as soon as the fortune of war turned in
favour of Octavianus. No one was permitted to accompany her except
Charmian and Iras, who had helped her close the heavy brazen door of the
massive building. The false report of her death, which had induced Antony
to put an end to his life, had perhaps arisen from the fact that the
Queen was literally in the tomb.
When, borne in the arms of his faithful servants, he reached the
mausoleum, mortally wounded, the Queen and her attendants vainly
endeavoured to open the heavy brazen portal. But Cleopatra ardently
longed to see her dying lover. She wished to have him near to render the
last services, assure him once more of her devotion, close his eyes, and,
if it was so ordered, die with him.
So she and her attendants had searched the place, and when Iras spoke of
the windlass which stood on the scaffold to raise the heavy brass plate
bearing the bas-relief of Love conquering Death, the Queen and her
friends hastened up the stairs, the bearer below fastened the wounded man
to the rope, and Cleopatra herself stood at the windlass to raise him,
aided by her faithful companions.
Diomedes averred that he had never beheld a more piteous spectacle than
the gigantic man hovering between heaven and earth in the agonies of
death and, while suffering the most terrible torture, extending his arms
longingly towards the woman he loved. Though scarcely able to speak, he
tenderly called her name, but she made no reply; like Iras and Charmian,
she was exerting her whole strength at the windlass in the most
passionate effort to raise him. The rope running over the pulley cut her
tender hands; her beautiful face was terribly distorted; but she did not
pause until they had succeeded in lifting the burden of the dying man
higher and higher till he reached the floor of the scaffolding. The
frantic exertion by which the three women had succeeded in accomplishing
an act far beyond their strength, though it was doubled by the power of
the most earnest will and ardent longing, would nevertheless have failed
in attaining its object had not Diomedes, at the last moment, come to
their assistance. He was a strong man, and by his aid the dying Roman was
seized, drawn upon the scaffolding, and carried down the staircase to the
tomb in the first story.
When the wounded general had been laid on one of the couches with which
the great hall was already furnished, the private secretary retired, but
remained on the staircase, an unnoticed spectator, in order to be at hand
in case the Queen again needed his assistance. Flushed from the terrible
exertion which she had just made, with tangled, dishevelled locks,
gasping and moaning, Cleopatra, as if out of her senses, tore open her
robe, beat her breast, and lacerated it with her nails. Then, pressing
her own beautiful face on her lover's wound to stanch the flowing blood,
she lavished upon him all the endearing names which she had bestowed on
their love.
His terrible suffering made her forget her own and the sad fate
impending. Tears of pity fell like the refreshing drops of a shower upon
the still unwithered blossoms of their love, and brought those which,
during the preceding night, had revived anew, to their last magnificent
unfolding.
Boundless, limitless as her former passion for this man, was now the
grief with which his agonizing death filled her heart.
All that Mark Antony had been to her in the heyday of life, all their
mutual experiences, all that each had received from the other, had
returned to her memory in clear and vivid hues during the banquet which
had closed a few hours ago. Now these scenes, condensed into a narrow
compass, again passed before her mental vision, but only to reveal more
distinctly the depth of misery of this hour. At last anguish forced even
the clearest memories into oblivion: she saw nothing save the tortures of
her lover; her brain, still active, revealed solely the gulf at her feet,
and the tomb which yawned not only for Antony, but for herself.
Unable to think of the happiness enjoyed in the past or to hope for it in
the future, she gave herself up to uncontrolled despair, and no woman of
the people could have yielded more absolutely to the consuming grief
which rent her heart, or expressed it in wilder, more frantic language,
than did this great Queen, this woman who as a child had been so
sensitive to the slightest suffering, and whose after-life had certainly
not taught her to bear sorrow with patience. After Charmian, at the dying
man's request, had given him some wine, he found strength to speak
coherently, instead of moaning and sighing.
He tenderly urged Cleopatra to secure her own safety, if it could be done
without dishonour, and mentioned Proculejus as the man most worthy of her
confidence among the friends of Octavianus. Then he entreated her not to
mourn for him, but to consider him happy; for he had enjoyed the richest
favours of Fortune. He owed his brightest hours to her love; but he had
also been the first and most powerful man on earth. Now he was dying in
the arms of Love, honourable as a Roman who succumbed to Romans.
In this conviction he died after a short struggle.
Cleopatra had watched his last breath, closed his eyes, and then thrown
herself tearlessly on her lover's body. At last she fainted, and lay
unconscious with her head upon his marble breast.
The private secretary had witnessed all this, and then returned with
tearful eyes to the second story. There he met Gorgias, who had climbed
the scaffolding, and told him what he had seen and heard from the stairs.
But his story was scarcely ended when a carriage stopped at the Corner of
the Muses and an aristocratic Roman alighted. This was the very
Proculejus whom the dying Antony had recommended to the woman he loved as
worthy of her confidence.
"In fact," Gorgias continued, "he seemed in form and features one of the
noblest of his haughty race. He came commissioned by Octavianus, and is
said to be warmly devoted to the Caesar, and a well-disposed man. We have
also heard him mentioned as a poet and a brother-in-law of Maecenas. A
wealthy aristocrat, he is a generous patron of literature, and also holds
art and science in high esteem. Timagenes lauds his culture and noble
nature. Perhaps the historian was right; but where the object in question
is the state and its advantage, what we here regard as worthy of a free
man appears to be considered of little moment at the court of Octavianus.
The lord to whom he gives his services intrusted him with a difficult
task, and Proculejus doubtless considered it his duty to make every
effort to perform it--and yet----If I see aright, a day will come when he
will curse this, and the obedience with which he, a free man, aided
Caesar But listen.
"Erect and haughty in his splendid suit of armour, he knocked at the door
of the tomb. Cleopatra had regained consciousness and asked--she must
have known him in Rome--what he desired.
"He had come, he answered courteously, by the command of Octavianus, to
negotiate with her, and the Queen expressed her willingness to listen,
but refused to admit him into the mausoleum.
"So they talked with each other through the door. With dignified
composure, she asked to have the sons whom she had given to Antony--not
Caasarion--acknowledged as Kings of Egypt.
"Proculejus instantly promised to convey her wishes to Caesar, and gave
hopes of their fulfilment.
"While she was speaking of the children and their claims--she did not
mention her own future--the Roman questioned her about Mark Antony's
death, and then described the destruction of the dead man's army and
other matters of trivial importance. Proculejus did not look like a
babbler, but I felt a suspicion that he was intentionally trying to hold
the attention of the Queen. This proved to be his design; he had been
merely waiting for Cornelius Gallus, the commander of the fleet, of whom
you have heard. He, too, ranks among the chief men in Rome, and yet he
made himself the accomplice of Proculejus.
"The latter retired as soon as he had presented the new-comer to the
hapless woman.
"I remained at my post and now heard Gallus assure Cleopatra of his
master's sympathy. With the most bombastic exaggeration he described how
bitterly Octavianus mourned in Mark Antony the friend, the
brother-in-law, the co-ruler and sharer in so many important enterprises.
He had shed burning tears over the tidings of his death. Never had more
sincere ones coursed down any man's cheeks.
"Gallus, too, seemed to me to be intentionally prolonging the
conversation.
"Then, while I was listening intently to understand Cleopatra's brief
replies, my foreman, who, when the workmen were driven away by the
Romans, had concealed himself between two blocks of granite, came to me
and said that Proculejus had just climbed a ladder to the scaffold in the
rear of the monument. Two servants followed, and they had all stolen down
into the hall.
"I hastily started up. I had been lying on the floor with my head
outstretched to listen.
"Cost what it might, the Queen must be warned. Treachery was certainly at
work here.
"But I came too late.
"O Dion! If I had only been informed a few minutes before, perhaps
something still more terrible might have happened, but the Queen would
have been spared what now threatens her. What can she expect from the
conqueror who, in order to seize her alive, condescends to outwit a
noble, defenceless woman, who has succumbed to superior power?
"Death would have released the unhappy Queen from sore trouble and
horrible shame. And she had already raised the dagger against her life.
Before my eyes she flung aloft her beautiful arm with the flashing steel,
which glittered in the light of the candles in the many-branched
candelabra beside the sarcophagi. But I will try to remain calm! You
shall hear what happened in regular order. My thoughts grow confused as
the terrible scene recurs to my memory. To describe it as I saw it, I
should need to be a poet, an artist in words; for what passed before me
happened on a stage--you know, it was a tomb. The walls were of dark
stone-dark, too, were the pillars and ceiling--all dark and glittering;
most portions were smoothly polished stone, shining like a mirror. Near
the sarcophagi, and around the candelabra as far as the vicinity of the
door, where the rascally trick was played, the light was brilliant as in
a festal hall. Every blood-stain on the hand, every scratch, every wound
which the desperate woman had torn with her own nails on her bosom, which
gleamed snow-white from her black robes, was distinctly visible. Farther
away, on the right and left, the light was dim, and near the side walls
the darkness was as intense as in a real tomb. On the smooth porphyry
columns, the glittering black marble and serpentine--here, there, and
everywhere--flickered the wavering reflection of the candlelight. The
draught kept it continually in motion, and it wavered to and fro in the
hall, like the restless souls of the damned. Wherever the eye turned it
met darkness. The end of the hall seemed black--black as the anteroom of
Hades--yet through it pierced a brilliant moving bar; sunbeams which
streamed from the stairway into the tomb and amid which danced tiny
motes. How the scene impressed the eye! The home of gloomy Hecate! And
the Queen and her impending fate. A picture flooded with light, standing
forth in radiant relief against the darkness of the heavy, majestic forms
surrounding it in a wide circle. This tomb in this light would be a
palace meet for the gloomy rule of the king of the troop of demons
conjured up by the power of a magician--if they have a ruler. But where
am I wandering? 'The artist!' I hear you exclaim again, 'the artist!
Instead of rushing forward and interposing, he stands studying the light
and its effects in the royal tomb.' Yes, yes; I had come too late, too
late--far too late! On the stairs leading to the lower story of the
building I saw it, but I was not to blame for the delay--not in the
least!
"At first I had been unable to see the men--or even a shadow; but I
beheld plainly in the brightest glare of the light the body of Mark
Antony on the couch and, in the dusk farther towards the right, Iras and
Charmian trying to raise a trapdoor. It was the one which closed the
passage leading to the combustible materials stored in the cellar. A sign
from the Queen had commanded them to fire it. The first steps of the
staircase, down which I was hastening, were already behind me--then--then
Proculejus, with two men, suddenly dashed from the intense darkness on
the other side. Scarcely able to control myself, I sprang down the
remaining steps, and while Iras's shrill cry, 'Poor Cleopatra, they will
capture you!' still rang in my ears, I saw the betrayed Queen turn from
the door through which, resolved on death, she was saying something to
Gallus, perceive Proculejus close behind her, thrust her hand into her
girdle, and with the speed of lightning--you have already heard so--throw
up her arm with the little dagger to bury the sharp blade in her breast.
What a picture! In the full radiance of the brilliant light, she
resembled a statue of triumphant victory or of noble pride in great deeds
accomplished; and then, then, only an instant later, what an outrage was
inflicted!
"Like a robber, an assassin, Proculejus rushed upon her, seized her arm,
and wrested the weapon from her grasp. His tall figure concealed her from
me. But when, struggling to escape from the ruffian's clutch, she again
turned her face towards the hall, what a transformation had occurred! Her
eyes--you know how large they are--were twice their usual size, and
blazed with scorn, fury, and hatred for the traitor. The cheering light
had become a consuming fire. So I imagine the vengeance, the curse which
calls down ruin upon the head of a foe. And Proculejus, the great lord,
the poet whose noble nature is praised by the authors on the banks of the
Tiber, held the defenceless woman, the worthy daughter of a brilliant
line of kings, in a firm grasp, as if it required the exertion of all his
strength to master this delicate embodiment of charming womanhood. True,
the proud blood of the outwitted lioness urged her to resist this
profanation, and Proculejus--an enviable honour--made her feel the
superior strength of his arm. I am no prophet, but Dion, I repeat, this
shameful struggle and the glances which flashed upon him will be
remembered to his dying hour. Had they been darted at me, I should have
cursed my life.
"They blanched even the Roman's cheeks. He was lividly pale as he
completed what he deemed his duty. His own aristocratic hands were
degraded to the menial task of searching the garments of a woman, the
Queen, for forbidden wares, poisons or weapons. He was aided by one of
Caesar's freedmen, Epaphroditus, who is said to stand so high in the
favour of Octavianus.
"The scoundrel also searched Iras and Charmian, yet all the time both
Romans constantly spoke in cajoling terms of Caesar's favour; and his
desire to grant Cleopatra everything which was due a Queen.
"At last she was taken back to Lochias, but I felt like a madman; for the
image of the unfortunate woman pursued me like my shadow. It was no
longer a vision of the bewitching sovereign nay, it resembled the
incarnation of despair, tearless anguish, wrath demanding vengeance. I
will not describe it; but those eyes, those flashing, threatening eyes,
and the tangled hair on which Antony's blood had flowed-terrible,
horrible! My heart grew chill, as if I had seen upon Athene's shield the
head of the Medusa with its serpent locks.
"It had been impossible for me to warn her in time, or even to seize the
traitor's arm--I have already said so--and yet, yet her shining image
gazed reproachfully at me for my cowardly delay. Her glance still haunts
me, robbing me of calmness and peace. Not until I gaze into Helena's
pure, calm eyes will that terrible vision of the face, flooded by light
in the midst of the tomb, cease to haunt me."
His friend laid his hand on his arm, spoke soothingly to him, and
reminded him of the blessings which this terrible day--he had said so
himself--had brought.
Dion was right to give this warning; for Gorgias's bearing and the very
tone of his voice changed as he eagerly declared that the frightful
events had been followed by more than happy ones for the city, his
friend, and Barine.
Then, with a sigh of relief, he continued: "I pursued my way home like a
drunken man. Every attempt to approach the Queen or her attendants was
baffled, but I learned from Charmian's clever Nubian that Cleopatra had
been permitted, in Caesar's name, to choose the palace she desired to
occupy, and had selected the one at Lochias.
"I did not make much progress towards my house; the crowd in front of the
great gymnasium stopped me. Octavianus had gone into the city, and the
people, I heard, had greeted him with acclamations and flung themselves
on their knees before him. Our stiff-necked Alexandrians in the dust
before the victor! It enraged me, but my resentment was diminished.
"The members of the gymnasium all knew me. They made way and, ere I was
aware of it, I had passed through the door. Tall Phryxus had drawn my arm
through his. He appears and vanishes at will, is as alert as he is rich,
sees and hears everything, and manages to secure the best places. This
time he had again succeeded; for when he released me we were standing
opposite to a newly erected tribune.
"They were waiting for Octavianus, who was still in the hypostyle of
Euergetes receiving the homage of the epitrop, the members of the
Council, the gymnasiarch, and I know not how many others.
"Phryxus said that on Caesar's entry he had held out his hand to his
former tutor, bade him accompany him, and commanded that his sons should
be presented. The philosopher had been distinguished above every one
else, and this will benefit you and yours; for he is Berenike's brother,
and therefore your wife's uncle. What he desires is sure to be granted.
You will hear at once how studiously the Caesar distinguishes him. I do
not grudge it to the man; he interceded boldly for Barine; he is lauded
as an able scholar, and he does not lack courage. In spite of Actium and
the only disgraceful deed with which, to my knowledge, Mark Antony could
be reproached--I mean the surader of Turullius--Arius remained here,
though the Imperator might have held the friend of Julius Caesar's nephew
as a hostage as easily as he gave up the Emperor's assassin.
"Since Octavianus encamped before the city, your uncle has been in
serious danger, and his sons shared his peril. Surely you must know the
handsome, vigorous young Ephebi.
"We were not obliged to wait long in the gymnasium ere the Caesar
appeared on the platform; and now--if your hand clenches, it is only what
I expect--now all fell on their knees. Our turbulent, rebellious rabble
raised their hands like pleading beggars, and grave, dignified men
followed their example. Whoever saw me and Phryxus will remember us among
the kneeling lickspittles; for had we remained standing we should
certainly have been dragged down. So we followed the example of the
others."
"And Octavianus?" asked Dion eagerly.
"A man of regal bearing and youthful aspect; beardless face of the finest
chiselling, a profile as beautiful as if created for the coin-maker; all
the lines sharp and yet pleasing; every inch an aristocrat; but the very
mirror of a cold nature, incapable of any lofty aspiration, any warm
emotion, any tenderness of feeling. All in all, a handsome, haughty,
calculating man, whose friendship would hardly benefit the heart, but
from whose enmity may the immortals guard all we love!
"Again he led Arius by the hand. The philosopher's sons followed the
pair. When he stood on the stage, looking down upon the thousands
kneeling before him, not a muscle of his noble face--it is certainly
that--betrayed the slightest emotion. He gazed at us like a farmer
surveying his flocks and, after a long silence, said curtly in excellent
Greek that he absolved the Alexandrians from all guilt towards him:
first--he counted as if he were summoning individual veterans to reward
them--from respect for the illustrious founder of our city, Alexander,
the conqueror of the world; secondly, because the greatness and beauty of
Alexandria filled him with admiration; and, thirdly--he turned to Arius
as he spoke--to give pleasure to his admirable and beloved friend.
"Then shouts of joy burst forth.
"Every one, from the humblest to the greatest, had had a heavy burden
removed from his mind, and the throng had scarcely left the gymnasium
when they were again laughing saucily enough, and there was no lack of
biting and innocent jests.
"The fat carpenter, Memnon--who furnished the wood-work for your
palace--exclaimed close beside me that formerly a dolphin had saved Arius
from the pirates; now Arius was saving marine Alexandria from the
robbers. So the sport went on. Philostratus, Barine's first husband,
offered the best butt for jests. The agitator had good reason to fear the
worst; and now, clad in black mourning robes, ran after Arius, whom but a
few months ago he persecuted with the most vindictive hatred, continually
repeating this shallow bit of verse:
"'If he is a wise man, let the wise aid the wise.'
"Reaching home was not easy. The street was swarming with Roman soldiers.
They fared well enough; for in the joy of their hearts many a prosperous
citizen who saw his property saved invited individual warriors, or even a
whole maniple, to the taverns or cook-shops, and the stock of wine in
Alexandrian cellars will be considerably diminished to-night.
"Many, as I have already said, had been quartered in the houses, with
orders to spare the property of the citizens; and it was in this way that
the misfortune with which I commenced my narrative befell the
grandmother. She died before my departure.
"All the gates of the city will now stand open to you, and the niece of
Arius and her husband will be received with ovations. I don't grudge
Barine the good fortune; for the way in which your noble wife, who had
cast her spell over me too, flung aside what is always dear to the
admired city beauty and found on the loneliest of islands a new world in
love, is worthy of all admiration and praise. For yourself, I dread new
happiness and honours; if they are added to those which Fate bestowed
upon you in such a wife and your son Pyrrhus, the gods would not be
themselves if they did not pursue you with their envy. I have less reason
to fear them."
"Ungrateful fellow!" interrupted his friend. "There will be numerous
mortals to grudge you Helena. As for me, I have already felt many a
slight foreboding; but we have already paid by no means a small tribute
to the divine ones. The lamp is still burning in the sitting-room. Inform
the sisters of their grandmother's death, and tell them the pleasant
tidings you have brought us, but reserve until the morning a description
of the terrible scenes you witnessed. We will not spoil their sleep. Mark
my words! Helena's silent grief and her joy at our escape will lighten
your heart."
And so it proved. True, Gorgias lived over again in his dreams the
frightful spectacle witnessed the day before; but when the sun of the 2d
day of August rose in full radiance over Alexandria and, early in the
morning, boat after boat reached the Serpent Island, landing first
Berenike and her nephews, the sons of the honoured philosopher Arius,
then clients, officials, and friends of Dion, and former favourite guests
of Barine, to greet the young pair and escort them from the refuge which
had so long sheltered them back to the city and their midst, new and
pleasant impressions robbed the gloomy picture of a large portion of its
terrors.
"Tall Phryxus" had rapidly spread the news of the place where Dion and
Barine had vanished, and that they had long been happily wedded. Many
deemed it well worth a short voyage to see the actors in so strange an
adventure and be the first to greet them. Besides, those who knew Barine
and her husband were curious to learn how two persons accustomed to the
life of a great capital had endured for months such complete solitude.
Many feared or expected to see them emaciated and careworn, haggard or
sunk in melancholy, and hence there were a number of astonished faces
among those whose boats the freedman Pyrrhus guided as pilot through the
shallows which protected his island.
The return of this rare couple to their home would have afforded an
excellent opportunity for gay festivities. Sincerely as the majority of
the populace mourned the fate of the Queen, and gravely as the more
thoughtful feared for Alexandria's freedom under Roman rule, all rejoiced
over the lenient treatment of the city. Their lives and property were
safe, and the celebration of festivals had become a life habit with all
classes. But the news of the death of Didymus's wife and the illness of
the old man, who could not bear up under the loss of his faithful
companion, gave Dion a right to refuse any gay welcome at his home.
Barine's sorrow was his also, and Didymus died a few days after his wife,
with whom he had lived in the bonds of love for more than half a
century--people said, "of a broken heart."
So Dion and his young wife entered his beautiful palace with no noisy
festivities. Instead of the jubilant hymenaeus, the voice of his own
child greeted him on the threshold.
The mourning garments in which Barine welcomed him in the women's
apartment reminded him of the envy of the gods which his friend had
feared for him. But he often fancied that his mother's statue in the
tablinum looked specially happy when the young mistress of the house
entered it.
Barine, too, felt that her happiness as wife and mother in her
magnificent home would have been overwhelming had not a wise destiny
imposed upon her, just at this time, grief for those whom she loved.
Dion instantly devoted himself again to the affairs of the city and his
own business. He and the woman he loved, who had first become really his
own during a time of sore privation, had run into the harbour and gazed
quietly at the storms of life. The anchor of love, which moored their
ship to the solid earth, had been tested in the solitude of the Serpent
Island.
CHAPTER XXIV.
The fisherman and his family had watched the departure of their beloved
guests with sorrowful hearts, and the women had shed many tears, although
the sons of Pyrrhus had been dismissed from the fleet and were again
helping their father at home, as in former times.
Besides, Dion had made the faithful freedman a prosperous man, and given
his daughter, Dione, a marriage dowry. She was soon to become the wife of
the captain of the Epicurus, Archibius's swift galley, whose acquaintance
she had made when the vessel, on several occasions, brought Charmian's
Nubian maid to the island. Anukis's object in making these visits was not
only to see her friend, but to induce him to catch one of the poisonous
serpents in the neighbouring island and keep it ready for the Queen.
Since Cleopatra had ascertained that no poison caused a less painful
death than the fangs of the asp, she had resolved that the bite of one of
these reptiles should release her from the burden of life. The clever
Ethiopian had thought of inducing her friend Pyrrhus to procure the
adder, but it had required all Aisopion's skill in persuasion, and the
touching manner in which she understood how to describe the Queen's
terrible situation and severe suffering, to conquer the reluctance of the
upright man. At last she succeeded in persuading him to measure a queen
by a different standard from a woman of the people, and inducing him to
arrange the manner and time of conveying the serpent into the
well-guarded palace. A signal was to inform him when the decisive hour
arrived. After that he was to be ready with the asp in the fish-market
every day. Probably his service would soon be claimed; for Octavianus's
delay was scarcely an indication of a favourable decision of Cleopatra's
fate.
True, she was permitted to live in royal state at Lochias, and had even
been allowed to have the children, the twins, and little Alexander sent
back to her with the promise that life and liberty would be granted them;
but Caesarion--whose treacherous tutor Rhodon lured him from the journey
southward back to Alexandria by all sorts of representations, among them
the return of Barine--was held prisoner in his father's temple, where he
had sought refuge. This news, and the fact that Octavianus had condemned
to death the youth who bore so striking a resemblance to Caesar, had not
remained concealed from the unhappy mother. She was also informed of the
words in which the philosopher Arius had encouraged Caesar's desire to
rid himself of the son of his famous uncle. They referred to the Homeric
saying concerning the disadvantage of having many rulers.
Everything which Cleopatra desired to know concerning events in the city
reached her ears; for she was allowed much liberty-only she was closely
watched day and night, and all the servants and officials to whom she
granted an audience were carefully searched to keep from her all means of
self-destruction.
True, it was very evident that she had closed her account with life. Her
attempt to take no food and die of starvation must have been noticed.
Threats directed against the children, through whom she could be most
easily influenced, finally induced her to eat again. Octavianus was
informed of all these things, and his conduct proved his anxiety to keep
her from suicide.
Several Asiatic princes vied with each other in the desire to honour Mark
Antony by a magnificent funeral, but Octavianus had allowed Cleopatra to
provide the most superb obsequies. In the time of her deepest anguish it
afforded her comfort and satisfaction to arrange everything herself, and
even perform some offices with her own hands. The funeral had been as
gorgeous as the dead man's love of splendour could have desired.
Iras and Charmian were often unable to understand how the Queen--who,
since Antony's death, had suffered not only from the wounds she had
inflicted upon herself in her despair, but also after her baffled attempt
at starvation from a slow fever--had succeeded in resisting the severe
exertions and mental agitation to which she had been subjected by
Antony's funeral.
The return of Archibius with the children, however, had visibly
reanimated her flagging energy. She often went to Didymus's garden, which
was now connected with the palace at Lochias, to watch their work and
share whatever interested their young hearts.
But the gayest of mothers, who had understood how to enter so thoroughly
into her children's pursuits, had now become a sorrowful, grave monitor.
Though the lessons she urged upon them were often beautiful and wise,
they were little suited to the ages of Archibius's pupils, for they
usually referred to death and to questions of philosophy not easily
understood by children.
She herself felt that she no longer struck the right key; but whenever
she tried to change it and jest with them as usual, she could endure the
forced gaiety only a short time; a painful revulsion, frequently
accompanied by tears, followed, and she was obliged to leave her
darlings.
The life her foe granted her seemed like an intrusive gift, an oppressive
debt, which we desire to pay a troublesome creditor as soon as possible.
She seemed calmer and apparently content only when permitted to talk with
the companions of her youth concerning bygone days, or with them and Iras
of death, and how it would be possible to put an end to an unwelcome
existence.
After such conversations Iras and Charmian left her with bleeding hearts.
They had long since resolved to share the fate of their royal mistress,
whatever it might be. Their common suffering was the bond which again
united them in affection. Iras had provided poisoned pins which had
speedily destroyed the animals upon which they had been tried. Cleopatra
knew of their existence, but she herself preferred the painless death
bestowed by the serpent's bite, and it was long since her friends had
seen the eyes of their beloved sovereign sparkle so brightly as when
Charmian told her that away had been found to obtain the uraeus serpent
as soon as it was needed. Put it was not yet imperative to adopt the last
expedient. Octavianus wished to be considered lenient, and perhaps might
still be prevailed upon to grant the Queen and her children a future meet
for their royal birth.
Cleopatra's reply was an incredulous smile, yet a faint hope which saved
her from despair began to bud in her soul.
Dolabella, an aristocratic Roman, a scion of the noble Cornelius family,
was in the Caesar's train, and had been presented to the Egyptian Queen.
In former years his father was a friend of Cleopatra; nay, she had placed
him under obligations by sending him, after the murder of Julius Caesar,
the military force at her command to be used against Cassius. True, her
legions, by messengers from Dolabella himself, were despatched in another
direction; but Cleopatra had not withdrawn her favour from Dolabella's
father on that account. The latter had known her in Rome before the death
of Caesar, and had enthusiastically described the charms of the
bewitching Egyptian sovereign. Though the youth found her only a mourning
widow, ill in body and mind, he was so strongly attracted and deeply
moved by her beauty, her brilliant intellect, her grace of bearing, her
misfortunes and sufferings, that he devoted many hours to her, and would
have considered it a happiness to render her greater services than
circumstances permitted. He often accompanied her to the children, whose
hearts had been completely won by his frank, cheerful nature; and so it
happened that he soon became one of the most welcome guests at Lochias.
He confided without reserve every feeling that stirred his soul to the
warm-hearted woman who was so many years his senior, and through him she
learned many things connected with Octavianus and his surroundings.
Without permitting himself to be used as a tool, he became an advocate
for the unfortunate woman whom he so deeply esteemed.
In intercourse with her he made every effort to inspire confidence in
Octavianus, who favoured him, enjoyed his society, and in whose
magnanimity the youth firmly believed.
He anticipated the best results from an interview between the Queen and
the Caesar; for he deemed it impossible that the successful conqueror
could part untouched, and with no desire to mitigate her sad fate, from
the woman who, in earlier years, had so fascinated his father, and whom
he himself, though she might almost have been his mother, deemed peerless
in her bewitching and gracious charm.
Cleopatra, on the contrary, shrank from meeting the man who had brought
so much misfortune upon Mark Antony and herself, and inflicted upon her
insults which were only too well calculated to make her doubt his
clemency and truth. On the other hand, she could not deny Dolabella's
assertion that it would be far less easy for Octavianus to refuse her in
person the wishes she cherished for her children's future than through
mediators. Proculejus had learned that Antony had named him to the Queen
as the person most worthy of her confidence, and more keenly felt the
wrong which, as the tool and obedient friend of Octavianus, he had
inflicted upon the hapless woman. The memory of his unworthy deed, which
history would chronicle, had robbed the sensitive man, the author and
patron of budding Roman poetry, of many an hour's sleep, and therefore he
also now laboured zealously to oblige the Queen and mitigate her hard
fate. He, like the freedman Epaphroditus, who by Caesar's orders watched
carefully to prevent any attempt upon her life, seemed to base great
hopes on such an interview, and endeavoured to persuade her to request an
audience from the Caesar.
Archibius said that, even in the worst case, it could not render the
present state of affairs darker. Experience, he said to Charmian, proved
that no man of any feeling could wholly resist the charm of her nature,
and to him at least she had never seemed more winning than now. Who could
have gazed unmoved into the beautiful face, so eloquent in its silent
suffering, whose soul would not have been deeply touched by the sorrowful
tones of her sweet voice? Besides, her sable mourning robes were so well
suited to the slight tinge of melancholy which pervaded her whole aspect.
When the fever flushed her cheeks, Archibius, spite of the ravages which
grief, anxiety, and fear had made upon her charms, thought that he had
never seen her look more beautiful. He knew her thoroughly, and was aware
that her desire to follow the man she loved into the realm of death was
sincere; nay, that it dominated her whole being. She clung to life only
to die as soon as possible. The decision which, after her resolve to
build the monument, she had recognized in the temple of Berenike as the
right one, had become the rule of conduct of her life. Every thought,
every conversation, led her back to the past. The future seemed to exist
no longer. If Archibius succeeded in directing her thoughts to
approaching days she occupied herself wholly with her children's fate.
For herself she expected nothing, felt absolved from every duty except
the one of protecting herself and her name from dishonour and
humiliation.
The fact that Octavianus, when he doomed Caesarion to death, permitted
the other children to return to her with the assurance that no harm
should befall them, proved that he made a distinction between them and
his uncle's son, and had no fears that they threatened his own safety.
She might expect important results in their favour from an interview with
Octavianus, so she at last authorized Proculejus to request an audience.
The Imperator's answer came the very same day. It was his place to seek
her--so ran the Caesar's message. This meeting must decide her fate.
Cleopatra was aware of this, and begged Charmian to remember the asp.
Her attendants had been forbidden to leave Lochias, but Epaphroditus
permitted them to receive visitors. The Nubian's merry, amusing talk had
made friends for her among the Roman guards, who allowed her to pass in
and out unmolested. On her return, of course, she was searched with the
utmost care, like every one who entered Lochias.
The decisive hour was close at hand. Charmian knew what she must do in
any event, but there was still one desire for whose fulfilment she
longed. She wished to greet Barine and see her boy.
To spare Iras, she had hitherto refrained from sending for Dion's wife.
The sight of the mother and child might have reopened wounds still
unhealed, and she would not inflict this sorrow upon her niece, who for a
long time had once more been loyally devoted to her.
Octavianus did not hasten to fulfil his assurance. But, at the end of a
week, Proculejus brought the news that he could promise a visit from the
Caesar that afternoon. The Queen was deeply agitated, and desired before
the interview to pay a visit to her tomb. Iras offered to accompany her,
and as Cleopatra intended to remain an hour or longer, Charmian thought
it a favourable opportunity to see Barine and her boy.
Dion's wife had been informed of her friend's wish, and Anukis, who was
to take her to Lochias, did not wait long for the mother and child.
Didymus's garden--now the property of the royal children--was the scene
of the meeting. In the shade of the familiar trees the young mother sank
upon the breast of her faithful friend, and Charmian could not gaze her
fill at the boy, or weary of tracing in his features a resemblance to his
grandfather Leonax.
How much these two women, to whom Fate had allotted lives so widely
different, found to tell each other! The older felt transported to the
past, the younger seemed to have naught save a present rich in blessing
and a future green with hope. She had good news to tell of her sister
also. Helena had long been the happy wife of Gorgias who, however, spite
of the love with which he surrounded the young mistress of his house,
numbered among his most blissful hours those which were devoted to
overseeing the progress of the work on the mausoleum, where he met
Cleopatra.
Time flew swiftly to the two women, and it was a painful surprise when
one of the eunuchs on guard announced that the Queen had returned. Again
Charmian embraced her lover's grandson, blessed him and the young mother,
sent messages of remembrance to Dion, begged Barine to think of her
affectionately when she had passed from earth and, if her heart prompted
her to the act, to anoint or adorn with a ribbon or flower the tombstone
of the woman who had no friend to render her such a service.
Deeply moved by the firmness with which Charmian witnessed the approach
of death, Barine listened in silence, but suddenly started as the sharp
tones of a well-known voice called her friend's name and, as she turned,
Iras stood before her. Pallid and emaciated, she looked in her long,
floating black robes the very incarnation of misery.
The sight pierced the heart of the happy wife and mother. She felt as if
much of the joy which Iras lacked had fallen to her own lot, and all the
grief and woe she had ever endured had been transferred to her foe. She
would fain have approached humbly and said something very kind and
friendly; but when she saw the tall, haggard woman gazing at her child,
and noticed the disagreeable expression which had formerly induced her to
compare her to a sharp thorn, a terrible dread of this woman's evil eye
which might harm her boy seized the mother's heart and, overwhelmed by an
impulse beyond control, she covered his face with her own veil.
Iras saw it, and after Barine had answered her question, "Dion's child?"
in the affirmative, with a glance beseeching forbearance, the girl drew
up her slender figure, saying with arrogant coldness "What do I care for
the child? We have more important matters on our hearts."
Then she turned to Charmian to inform her, in the tone of an official
announcement, that during the approaching interview the Queen desired her
attendance also.
Octavianus had appointed sunset for the interview, and it still lacked
several hours of the time. The suffering Queen felt wearied by her visit
to the mausoleum, where she had implored the spirit of Antony, if he had
any power over the conqueror's heart, to induce him to release her from
this torturing uncertainty and promise the children a happy fate.
To Dolabella, who had accompanied her from the tomb to the palace, she
said that she expected only one thing from this meeting, and then won
from him a promise which strengthened her courage and seemed the most
precious boon which could be granted at this time.
She had expressed the fear that Octavianus would still leave her in
doubt. The youth spoke vehemently in Caesar's defence, and closed with
the exclamation, "If he should still keep you in suspense, he would be
not only cool and circumspect--"
"Then," Cleopatra interrupted, "be nobler, be less cruel, and release
your father's friend from these tortures. If he does not reveal to me
what awaits me and you learn it, then--you will not say no, you cannot
refuse me--then you, yes, you will inform me?"
Promptly and firmly came the reply: "What have I been able to do for you
until now? But I will release you from this torture, if possible." Then
he hastily turned his back, that he might not be compelled to see the
eunuchs stationed at the palace gate search the garments of the royal
captive.
His promise sustained the failing courage of the wearied, anxious Queen,
and she reclined upon the cushions of a lounge to recover from the
exhausting expedition; but she had scarcely closed her eyes when the
pavement of the court-yard rang under the hoofs of the four horses which
bore the Caesar to Lochias. Cleopatra had not expected the visit so
early.
She had just been consulting with her attendants about the best mode of
receiving him. At first she had been disposed to do so on the throne,
clad in her royal attire, but she afterwards thought that she was too ill
and weak to bear the heavy ornaments. Besides, the man and successful
conqueror would show himself more indulgent and gracious to the suffering
woman than to the princess.
There was much to palliate the course which she had pursued in former
days, and she had carefully planned the defence by which she hoped to
influence his calm but not unjust nature. Many things in her favour were
contained in the letters from Caesar and Antony which, after her
husband's death, she had read again and again during so many wakeful
nights, and they had just been brought to her.
Both Archibius and the Roman Proculejus had counselled her not to receive
him entirely alone. The latter did not express his opinion in words, but
he knew that Octavianus was more readily induced to noble and lenient
deeds when there was no lack of witnesses to report them to the world. It
was advisable to provide spectators for the most consummate actor of his
day.
Therefore the Queen had retained Iras, Charmian, and some of the
officials nearest to her person, among them the steward Seleukus, who
could give information if any question arose concerning the delivery of
the treasure.
She had also intended, after she had somewhat recovered from the visit to
the tomb, to be robed in fresh garments. This was prevented by the
Caesar's unexpected arrival. Now, even had time permitted, she would have
been unable to have her hair arranged, she felt so weak and yet so
feverishly excited.
The blood coursed hotly through her veins and flushed her cheeks. When
told that the Caesar was close at hand, she had only time to raise
herself a little higher on her cushions, push back her hair, and let
Iras, with a few hasty touches, adjust the folds of her mourning robes.
Had she attempted to advance to meet him, her limbs would have failed to
support her.
When the Caesar at last entered, she could greet him only by a wave of
her hand; but Octavianus, who had uttered the usual salutations from the
threshold, quickly broke the painful silence, saying with a courteous
bow:
"You summoned me--I came. Every one is subject to beauty--even the
victor."
Cleopatra's head drooped in shame as she answered distinctly, yet in a
tone of modest denial: "I only asked the favour of an audience. I did not
summon. I thank you for granting the request. If it is dangerous for man
to bow to woman's charms, no peril threatens you here. Beauty cannot
withstand tortures such as those which have been imposed on me--barely
can life remain. But you prevented my casting it from me. If you are
just, you will grant to the woman whom you would not permit to die an
existence whose burden will not exceed her power to endure."
The Caesar again bowed silently and answered courteously:
"I intend to make it worthy of you."
"Then," cried Cleopatra impetuously, "release me from this torturing
uncertainty. You are not one of the men who never look beyond to-day and
to-morrow."
"You are thinking," said Octavianus harshly, "of one who perhaps would
still be among us, if with wiser caution--"
Cleopatra's eyes, which hitherto had met the victor's cold gaze with
modest entreaty, flashed angrily, and a majestic: "Let the past rest!"
interrupted him.
But she soon mastered the indignation which had stirred her passionate
blood, and in a totally different tone, not wholly free from gentle
persuasion, she continued:
"The provident intellect of the man whose nod the universe obeys grasps
the future as well as the present. Must not he, therefore, have decided
the children's fate ere he consented to see their mother? The only
obstacle in your path, the son of your great uncle--"
"His doom was a necessity," interrupted the conqueror in a tone of
sincere regret. "As I mourned Antony, I grieve for the unfortunate boy."
"If that is true," replied Cleopatra eagerly, "it does honour to the
kindness of your heart. When Proculejus wrested the dagger from my grasp
he blamed me because I attributed to the most clement of conquerors
harshness and implacability."
"Two qualities," the Caesar protested, "which are wholly alien to my
nature."
"And which--even if you possessed them--you neither could nor ought to
use," cried Cleopatra, "if you really mean the beautiful words you so
often utter that, as the nephew and heir of the great Julius Caesar, you
intend to walk in his footsteps. Caesarion--there is his bust--was the
image in every feature of his father, your illustrious model. To me, the
hapless woman now awaiting my sentence from his nephew's lips, the gods
granted, as the most precious of all gifts, the love of your divine
uncle. And what love! The world knew not what I was to his great heart,
but my wish to defend myself from misconception bids me show it to you,
his heir. From you I expect my sentence. You are the judge. These letters
are my strongest defence. I rely upon them to show myself to you as I was
and am, not as envy and slander describe me.--The little ivory casket,
Iras! It contains the precious proofs of Caesar's love, his letters to
me."
She raised the lid with trembling hands and, as these mementoes carried
her back to the past, she continued in lower tones:
"Among all my treasures this simple little coffer has been for half a
lifetime my most valued jewel. He gave it to me. It was in the midst of
the fierce contest here at the Bruchium."
Then, while unfolding the first roll, she directed Octavianus's attention
to it and the remainder of the contents of the little casket, exclaiming:
"Silent pages, yet how eloquent! Each one a peerless picture, the
powerful thinker, the man of action, who permits his restless intellect
to repose, and suffers his heart to overflow with the love of youth! Were
I vain, Octavianus, I might call each one of these letters a trophy of
victory, an Olympic garland. The woman to whom Julius Caesar owned his
subjugation might well hold her head higher than the unhappy, vanquished
Queen who, save the permission to die--"
"Do not part with the letters," said Octavianus kindly. "Who can doubt
that they are a precious treasure--"
"The most precious and at the same time the advocate of the accused,"
replied Cleopatra eagerly; "on them--as you have already heard--rests my
vindication. I will commence with their contents. How terrible it is to
make what is sacred to us and intended only to elevate our own hearts
serve a purpose, to do what has always been repugnant to us! But I need
an advocate and, Octavianus, these letters will restore to the wretched,
suffering beggar the dignity and majesty of the Queen. The world knows
but two powers to which Julius Caesar bowed--the thrall of the pitiable
woman on this couch, and of all-conquering death. An unpleasant
fellowship--but I do not shrink from it; for death robbed him of life,
and from my hand--I ask only a brief moment. How gladly I would spare
myself my own praises, and you the necessity of listening to them! Yes,
here it is: 'Through you, you irresistible woman,' he writes, 'I learned
for the first time, after youth was over, how beautiful life can be.'"
Cleopatra, as she spoke, handed Caesar the letter. But while she was
still searching hastily for another he returned the first, saying:
"I understand only too well your reluctance to allow such confidential
effusions to play the part of defender. I can imagine their purport, and
they shall influence me as if I had read them all. However eloquent they
may be, they are needless witnesses. Is any written testimony required in
behalf of charms whose magic is still potent?"
A bewitching smile, which seemed like a confirmation of the haughty young
conqueror's flattering words, flitted over Cleopatra's face. Octavianus
noticed it. This woman indeed possessed enthralling charms, and he felt
the slight flush that suffused his cheeks.
This unhappy captive, this suffering supplicant, could still draw into
her net any man who did not possess the cool watchfulness which panoplied
his soul. Was it the marvellous melody of her voice, the changeful lustre
of her tearful eyes, the aristocratic grace of the noble figure, the
exquisite symmetry of the hands and feet, the weakness of the prostrate
sufferer, strangely blended with truly royal majesty, or the thought that
love for her had found earth's greatest and loftiest men with
indissoluble fetters, which lent this fragile woman, who had long since
passed the boundaries of youth, so powerful a spell of attraction?
At any rate, however certain of himself he might be, he must guard his
feelings. He understood how to bridle passion far better than the uncle
who was so greatly his superior.
Yet it was of the utmost importance to keep her alive, and therefore to
maintain her belief in his admiration. He wished to show the world and
the Great Queen of the East, who had just boasted of conquering, like
death, even the most mighty, its own supremacy as man and victor. But he
must also be gentle, in order not to endanger the object for which he
wanted her. She must accompany him to Rome. She and her children promised
to render his triumph the most brilliant and memorable one which any
conqueror had ever displayed to the senate and the people. In a light
tone which, however, revealed the emotion of his soul, he answered: "My
illustrious uncle was known as a friend of fair women. His stern life was
crowned with flowers by many hands, and he acknowledged these favours
verbally and perhaps--as he did to you in all these letters--with the
reed. His genius was greater, at any rate more many-sided and mobile,
than mine. He succeeded, too, in pursuing different objects at the same
time with equal devotion. I am wholly absorbed in the cares of state, of
government, and war. I feel grateful when I can permit our poets to adorn
my leisure for a brief space. Overburdened with toil, I have no time to
yield myself captive, as my uncle did in these very rooms, to the most
charming of women. If I could follow my own will, you would be the first
from whom I would seek the gifts of Eros. But it may not be! We Romans
learn to curb even the most ardent wishes when duty and morality command.
There is no city in the world where half so many gods are worshipped as
here; and what strange deities are numbered among them! It needs a
special effort of the intellect to understand them. But the simple duties
of the domestic hearth!--they are too prosaic for you Alexandrians, who
imbibe philosophy with your mothers' milk. What marvel, if I looked for
them in vain? True, they would find little satisfaction--our household
gods I mean--here, where the rigid demands of Hymen are mute before the
ardent pleadings of Eros. Marriage is scarcely reckoned among the sacred
things of life. But this opinion seems to displease you."
"Because it is false," cried Cleopatra, repressing with difficulty a
fresh outburst of indignation. "Yet, if I see aright, your reproach is
aimed only at the bond which united me to the man who was called your
sister's husband. But I will I would gladly remain silent, but you force
me to speak, and I will do so, though your own friend, Proculejus, is
signing to me to be cautious. I--I, Cleopatra, was the wife of Mark
Antony according to the customs of this country, when you wedded him to
the widow of Marcellus, who had scarcely closed his eyes. Not she, but I,
was the deserted wife--I to whom his heart belonged until the hour of his
death, not the unloved consort wedded--" Here her voice fell. She had
yielded to the passionate impulse which urged her to express her feelings
in the matter, and now continued in a tone of gentle explanation: "I know
that you proposed this alliance solely for the peace and welfare of
Rome--"
"To guard both, and to spare the blood of tens of thousands," Octavianus
added with proud decision. "Your clear brain perceived the true state of
affairs. If, spite of the grave importance of these motives, you--But
what voices would not that of the heart silence with you women! The man,
the Roman, succeeded in closing his ears to its siren song. Were it
otherwise, I would never have chosen for my sister a husband by whom I
knew her happiness would be so ill-guarded--I would, as I have already
said, be unable to master my own admiration of the loveliest of women.
But I ought scarcely to boast of that. I fear that a heart like yours
opens less quickly to the modest Octavianus than to a Julius Caesar or
the brilliant Mark Antony. Yet I may be permitted to confess that perhaps
I might have avoided conducting this unhappy war against my friend to the
end under my own guidance, and appearing myself in Egypt, had I not been
urged by the longing to see once more the woman who had dazzled my boyish
eyes. Now, in my mature manhood, I desired to comprehend those marvellous
gifts of mind, that matchless sagacity--"
"Sagacity!" interrupted the Queen, shrugging her shoulders mournfully.
"You possess a far greater share of what is commonly called by that name.
My fate proves it. The pliant intellect which the gods bestowed on me
would ill sustain the test in this hour of anguish. But if you really
care to learn what mental power Cleopatra once possessed, relieve me of
this terrible burden of uncertainty, and grant me a position in life
which will permit my paralyzed soul to move freely once more."
"It depends solely on yourself," Octavian eagerly responded, "to make
your future life, not only free from care, but beautiful."
"On me?" asked Cleopatra in astonishment. Our weal and woe are in your
hands alone. I am modest and ask nothing save to know what you intend for
our future, what you mean by the lot which you term beautiful."
"Nothing less," replied the Caesar quietly, "than what seems to lie
nearest to your own heart--a life of that freedom of soul to which you
aspire."
The breath of the agitated Queen began come more quickly and, no longer
able to contr the impatience which overpowered her, she exclaimed, "With
the assurance of your favour on your lips, you refuse to discuss the
question which interests, me beyond any other--for which, if any you must
have been prepared when you came here--"
"Reproaches?" asked Octavianus with we feigned surprise. "Would it not
rather be my place to complain? It is precisely because I am thoroughly
sincere in the friendly disposition which you read aright from my words,
that some of your measures cannot fail to wound me. Your treasures were
to be committed to the flames. It would be unfair to expect tokens of
friendship from the vanquished; but can you deny that even the bitterest
hatred could scarcely succeed in devising anything more hostile?"
"Let the past rest! Who would not seek in war to diminish the enemy's
booty?" pleaded the Queen in a soothing tone. But as Octavianus delayed
his answer, she continued more eagerly: "It is said that the ibex in the
mountains, when in mortal peril, rushes upon the hunter and hurls him
with it down the precipice. The same impulse is natural to human beings,
and praiseworthy, I think, in both. Forget the past, as I will try to do,
I repeat with uplifted hands. Say that you will permit the sons whom I
gave to Antony to ascend the Egyptian throne, not under their mother's
guardianship, but that of Rome, and grant me freedom wherever I may live,
and I will gladly transfer to you, down to the veriest trifles, all the
property and treasures I possess."
She clenched her little hand impatiently under the folds of her robe as
she spoke; but Octavianus lowered his eyes, saying carelessly: "In war
the victor disposes of the property of the vanquished; but my heart
restrains me from applying the universal law to you, who are so far above
ordinary mortals. Your wealth is said to be vast, though the foolish war
which Antony, with your aid, so greatly prolonged, devoured vast sums. In
this country squandered gold seems like the grass which, when mowed,
springs up anew."
"You speak," replied Cleopatra, more and more deeply incensed, with proud
composure, "of the treasures which my ancestors, the powerful monarchs of
a wealthy country, amassed during three hundred years for their noble
race and for the adornment of the women of their line. Parsimony did not
accord with the generosity and lofty nature of an Antony, yet avarice
itself would not deem the portion still remaining insignificant. Every
article is registered."
While speaking, she took a manuscript from the hand of Seleukus and
passed it to Octavianus who, with a slight bend of the head, received it
in silence. But he had scarcely begun to read it when the steward, a
little corpulent man with twinkling eyes half buried in his fat cheeks,
raised his short forefinger, pointed insolently at the Queen, and
asserted that she was trying to conceal some things, and had ordered him
not to place them on the list. Every tinge of colour faded from the lips
and cheeks of the agitated and passionate woman; tortured by feverish
impatience and no longer able to control her emotions, she raised herself
and, with her own dainty hand, struck the accuser--whom she had lifted
from poverty and obscurity to his present high position--again and again
in the face, till Octavianus, with a smile of superiority, begged her,
much as the man deserved his punishment, to desist.
The unfortunate woman, thus thrown off her guard, flung herself back on
her couch and, panting for breath, with tears streaming from her eyes,
sobbed aloud, declaring that in the presence of such unendurable insult,
such contemptible baseness, she fairly loathed herself. Then pressing her
clenched hands upon her temples, she exclaimed "Before the eyes of the
foe my royal dignity, which I have maintained all my life, falls from me
like a borrowed mantle. Yet what am I? What shall I be to-morrow, what
later? But who beneath the sun who has warm blood in his veins can
preserve his composure when juicy grapes are held before his thirsting
lips to be withdrawn, as from Tantalus, ere he can taste them? You came
hither with the assurance of your favour; but the flattering words of
promise which you bestowed upon the unhappy woman were probably only the
drops of poppy-juice given to soothe the ravings of fever. Was the favour
which you permitted me to see and anticipate for the future merely
intended to delude a miserable--"
But she went no further; Octavianus, with dignified bearing and loud,
clear tones, interrupted "Whoever believes the heir of Caesar capable of
shamefully deceiving a noble woman, a queen, the object of his
illustrious uncle's love, insults and wounds him; but the just anger
which overmastered you may serve as your apology. Ay," he added in a
totally different tone, "I might even have cause to be grateful for this
indignation, and to wish for another opportunity to witness the outbreak
of passion though in its unbridled fierceness--the royal lioness is
scarcely aware of her own beauty when the tempest of wrath sweeps her
away. What must she be when it is love that constrains the flame of her
glowing soul to burst into a blaze?"
"Her glowing soul!" Cleopatra eagerly repeated, and the desire awoke to
subjugate this man who had so confidently boasted of his power of
resistance. Though he might be stronger than many others, he certainly
was not invincible. And aware of her still unbroken sway over the hearts
of men, her eyes sparkled with the alluring radiance of love, and a
bewitching smile brightened her face.
The young Imperator's heart began to chafe under the curb and to beat
more quickly, his cheeks flushed and paled by turns. How she gazed at
him! What if she loved the nephew as she had once loved the uncle who,
through her, had learned what bliss life can offer? Ay, it must be
happiness to kiss those lips, to be clasped in those exquisite arms, to
hear one's own name tenderly spoken by those musical tones. Even the
magnificent marble statue of Ariadne, which he had seen in Athens, had
not displayed to his gaze lines more beautiful than those of the woman
reclining on yonder pillows. Who could venture to speak in her presence
of vanished charms? Ah, no! The spell which had conquered Julius Caesar
was as vivid, as potent as ever. He himself felt its power; he was young,
and after such unremitting exertions he too yearned to quaff the nectar
of the noblest joys, to steep body and soul in peerless bliss.
So, with a hasty movement, he took one step towards her couch, resolved
to grasp her hands and raise them to his lips. His ardent gaze answered
hers; but surprised by the power which, though so heavily burdened with
physical and mental suffering, she still possessed over the strongest and
coldest of men, she perceived what was passing in his soul, and a smile
of triumph, blended with the most bitter contempt, hovered around her
beautiful lips. Should she dupe him into granting her wishes by feigning
love for the first time? Should she yield to the man who had insulted
her, in order to induce him to accord the children their rights? Should
she, to gratify her lover's foe, relinquish the sacred grief which was
drawing her after him, give posterity and her children the right to call
her, instead of the most loyal of the loyal, a dishonoured woman, who
sold herself for power?
To all these questions came a prompt denial. The single stride which
Octavianus had made towards her, his eyes aflame with love, gave her the
right to feel that she had vanquished the victor, and the proud delight
of triumph was too plainly reflected in her mobile features to escape the
penetrating, distrustful gaze of the subjugated Caesar.
But he had scarcely perceived what threatened him, and remembered her
words concerning his famous uncle's surrender only to her and to death,
when he succeeded in conquering his quickly kindled senses. Blushing at
his own weakness, he averted his eyes from the Queen, and when he met
those of Proculejus and the other witnesses of the scene, he realized the
abyss on whose verge he stood. He had half succumbed to the danger of
losing, by a moment's weakness, the fruit of great sacrifices and severe
exertions.
His expressive eyes, which had just rested rapturously upon a beautiful
woman, now scanned the spectators with the stern glance of a monarch and,
apparently wishing to moderate an excess of flattering recognition which
might be misinterpreted, he said in an almost pedagogical tone:
"Yet we would rather see the noble lioness in the majestic repose which
best suits all sovereigns. It is difficult for a calm, deliberate nature
like mine to understand an ardent, quickly kindling heart."
Cleopatra had watched this sudden transition with more surprise than
disappointment. Octavianus had half surrendered to her, but recovered his
self-command in time, and a man of his temperament does not readily
succumb twice to a danger which he barely escaped. And this was well! He
should learn that he had misunderstood the glance which fired his heart;
so she answered distantly, with majestic dignity:
"Misery such as mine quenches all ardour. And love? Woman's heart is ever
open to it, save where it has lost the desire for power and pleasure. You
are young and happy, therefore your soul still yearns for love--I know
that--though not for mine. To me, on the contrary, one suitor only is
welcome, he with the lowered torch, whom you keep aloof from me. With him
alone is to be found the boon for which this soul has longed from
childhood--painless peace! You smile. My past gives you the right to do
so. I will not lessen it. Each individual lives his or her own life. Few
understand the changes of their own existence, far less those of a
stranger's. The world has witnessed how Peace fled from my path, or I
from hers, and yet I see the possibility of finding the way. I am safe
from the only things which would debar me from those joys--humiliation
and disgrace." Here she hesitated; then, as if in explanation, continued
in the sweetest tones at her command: "Your generosity, I think, will
guard from these two foes the woman whom just now--I did not fail to see
it--you considered worthy of a more than gracious glance. I shall
treasure it among memories which will never fade. But now, illustrious
Imperator! tell me, what is your decision concerning me and the children?
What may we hope from your favour?"
"That Octavianus will be more and more warmly animated by the desire to
accord you and yours a worthy destiny, the more firmly you expect that he
will attest his generosity."
"And if I fulfil this desire and expect from you everything that is great
and noble--the condition is not difficult--what proofs of your
graciousness will then await us?"
"Paint them with all the fervour of that vivid power of imagination which
interpreted even my glance in your favour, and devised the marvels by
which you rendered the greatest and most brilliant man in Rome the
happiest of mortals. But--by Zeus!--it is the fourth hour after noonday!"
A glance from the window had caused the exclamation. Then, pressing his
hand upon his heart, he continued in a tone of the most sincere regret
"How gladly I would prolong this fascinating conversation, but important
matters which, unfortunately, cannot be deferred, summon me--"
"And your answer?" cried Cleopatra, panting for breath and gazing at him
with eyes full of expectation.
"Must I repeat it?" he asked with impatient haste. "Very well, then. In
return for implicit confidence on your part, favour, forgiveness,
cordiality, every consideration which you can justly desire. Your heart
is so rich in warmth of feeling, grant me but a small share of it and ask
tangible gifts in return. They are already bestowed." Then greeting her
like a friend who is reluctant to say farewell, he hastily left the
apartment.
"Gone--gone!" cried Iras as the door closed behind him. "An eel that
slips from the hand which strives to hold him."
"Northern ice," added Cleopatra gloomily as Charmian aided her to find a
more comfortable position. "As smooth as it is cold; there is nothing
more to hope."
"Yes, my royal mistress, yes," Iras eagerly protested. "Dolabella is
waiting for him in the Philadelphus court-yard. From him--you have his
promise--we shall learn what Octavianus has in store for you."
In truth, the Caesar did find the youth at the first gate of the palace,
inspecting his superb Cyrenean horses.
"Magnificent animals!" cried Octavianus; "a gift from the city! Will you
drive with me?--A remarkable, a very remarkable woman!"
"Isn't she?" asked Dolabella eagerly.
"Undoubtedly," replied the Caesar. "But though she might almost be your
mother, an uncommonly dangerous one for youths of your age. What a
melting voice, what versatility, what fervour! And yet such regal grace
in every movement! But I wish to stifle, not to fan, the spark which
perhaps has already fallen into your heart. And the play, the farce which
she just enacted before me in the midst of most serious matters!"
He uttered a low, short laugh; but Dolabella exclaimed expectantly: "You
rarely laugh, but this conversation--apparently--excites your mirth. So
the result was satisfactory?"
"Let us hope so. I was as gracious to her as possible."
"That is delightful. May I know in what manner your kindness and wisdom
have shaped her future? Or, rather, what did you promise the vanquished
Queen?"
"My favour, if she will trust me."
"Proculejus and I will continue to strengthen her confidence. And if we
succeed--?"
"Then, as I have said, she will have my favour--a generous abundance of
favour."
"But her future destiny? What fate will you bestow on her and her
children?"
"Whatever the degree of her confidence deserves."
Here he hesitated, for he met Dolabella's earnest, troubled gaze, which
was blended with a shade of reproach.
Octavianus desired to retain the enthusiastic admiration of the youth,
who perhaps was destined to lofty achievements, so he continued in a
confidential tone: "To you, my young friend, I can venture to speak more
frankly. I will gladly grant the most aspiring wishes of this fascinating
and, I repeat, very remarkable woman, but first I need her for my
triumph. The Romans would have cause to reproach me if I deprived them of
the sight of this Queen, this peerless woman, in many respects the first
of her time. We shall soon set out for Syria. The Queen and her children
I shall send in three days to Rome. If, in the triumphal procession
there, she creates the sensation I anticipate from a spectacle so worthy
of admiration, she shall learn how I reward those who oblige me."
Dolabella had listened in silence. When the Caesar entered the carriage,
he requested permission to remain behind.
Octavianus drove alone eastward to the camp where, in the vicinity of the
Hippodrome, men were surveying the ground on which the suburb of
Nikopolis--city of victory--was to be built to commemorate for future
generations the victory of the first Emperor over Antony and Cleopatra.
It grew, but never attained any great importance.
The noble Cornelius gazed indignantly after his sovereign's fiery steeds;
then, drawing up his stately figure to its full height, he entered the
palace with a firm step. The act might cost him his life, but he would do
what he believed to be his duty to the noble woman who had honoured him
with her friendship. This rare sovereign was too good to feast the eyes
of the rabble.
A few minutes later Cleopatra knew her impending ignominy.
CHAPTER XXV.
The next morning the Queen had many whispered conversations with
Charmian, and the latter with Anukis. The day before, Archibius's
gardener had brought to his master's sister some unusually fine figs,
which grew in the old garden of Epicurus. This fruit was also mentioned,
and Anukis went to Kanopus, and thence, in the steward's carriage, with a
basket of the very best ones to the fish-market. There she had a great
deal to say to Pyrrhus, and the freedman went to his boat with the figs.
Shortly after the Nubian's return the Queen came back to the palace from
the mausoleum. Her features bore an impress of resolution usually alien
to them; nay, the firmly compressed lips gave them an expression of
actual sternness. She knew what duty required, and regarded her
approaching end as an inevitable necessity. Death seemed to her like a
journey which she must take in order to escape the most terrible
disgrace. Besides, life after the death of Antony was no longer the same;
it had been only a tiresome delay and waiting for the children's sake.
The visit to the tomb had been intended, as it were, to announce her
coming to her husband. She had remained a long time in the silent hall,
where she had garlanded the coffin with flowers, kissed it, talked to the
dead man as if he were still alive, and told him that the day had come
when what he had mentioned in his will as the warmest desire of his
heart--to rest beside her in the same tomb--would be fulfilled. Among the
thousand forms of suffering which had assailed her, nothing had seemed so
hard to bear as to be deprived of his society and love.
Then she had gone into the garden, embraced and kissed the children, and
entreated them to remember her tenderly. Her purpose had not been
concealed from Archibius, but Charmian had told him the menace of the
future, and he approved her decision. By the exertion of all his innate
strength of will, he succeeded in concealing the grief which rent his
faithful heart. She must die. The thought of seeing her adorn the
triumphal procession of Octavianus was unbearable to him also. Her thanks
and entreaties to be an affectionate guardian to the children were
received with an external calmness which afterwards seemed to him utterly
incomprehensible.
When she spoke of her approaching meeting with her lover, he asked
whether she had entirely abandoned the teachings of Epicurus, who
believed that death absolutely ended existence.
Cleopatra eagerly assented, saying: "Absence of pain has ceased to appear
to me the chief earthly blessing, since I have known that love does not
bring pleasure only, since I have learned that pain is the inseparable
companion of love. I will not give it up, nor will I part from my lover.
Whoever experiences what fate has allotted to me has learned to know
other gods than those whom the master described as dwelling happily in
undisturbed repose. Rather eternal torture in another world, united to
the man I love, than painless, joyless mere existence in a desolate,
incomprehensible, unknown region! You will be the last to teach the
children to yearn for freedom from pain--"
"Because, like you," cried Archibius, "I have learned how great a
blessing is love, and that love is pain."
As he spoke he bent over her hand to kiss it, but she took his temples
between her hands and, bending hastily, pressed her lips on his broad
brow.
Then his self-control vanished, and, sobbing aloud, he hurried back to
the children.
Cleopatra gazed after him with a sorrowful smile, and leaning on
Charmian's arm, she entered the palace.
There she was bathed and, robed in costly mourning garments, reclined
among her cushions to take breakfast, which was usually served at this
hour. Iras and Charmian shared it.
When dessert was carried in, the Nubian brought a basket filled with
delicious figs. A peasant, she told Epaphroditus, who was watching the
meal, had given them to her because they were so remarkably fine. Some
had already been snatched by the guards.
The Queen and her companions ate a little of the fruit, and Proculejus,
who had come to greet Cleopatra, was also persuaded to taste one of the
finest figs.
At the end of the meal Cleopatra wished to rest. The Roman gentlemen and
the guards retired. At last the women were alone, and gazed at each other
silently.
Charmian timidly lifted the upper layer of the fruit, but the Queen said
mournfully:
"The wife of Antony dragged through the streets of Rome behind the
victor's chariot, a spectacle for the populace and envious matrons!"
Then, starting up, she exclaimed: "What a thought! Was it too great for
Octavianus, or too petty? He who so loudly boasts his knowledge of
mankind expects this impossibility from the woman who revealed her inmost
soul to him as fully as he concealed his from her. We will show him how
small is his comprehension of human nature, and teach him modesty."
A contemptuous smile flitted over her beautiful lips as, with rapid
movements, she flung handful after handful of figs on the table, till she
saw some thing stirring under the fruit, and with a sigh of relief
exclaimed under her breath:
"There it is!" as with hasty resolution she held out her arm towards the
asp, which hissed at her.
While gazing intently at the movements of the viper, which seemed afraid
to fulfil the dread office, she said to her attendants:
"I thank you-thank you for everything. Be calm. You know, Iras, it will
cause no pain. They say it is like falling asleep." Then she shuddered
slightly, adding: "Death is a solemn thing; yet it must be. Why does the
serpent delay? There, there; I will keep firm. Ambition and love were the
moving forces of my life. Men shall praise my memory.--I follow you, Mark
Antony!" Charmian bent over the left arm of her royal mistress, which
hung loosely at her side, and, weeping aloud, covered it with kisses,
while Cleopatra, watching the motions of the asp still more closely,
added:
"The peace of our garden of Epicurus will begin to-day. Whether it will
be painless, who can tell? Yet--there I agree with Archibius--life's
greatest joy--love--is blended with pain, as yonder branch of exquisite
roses from Dolabella, the last gift of friendship, has its sharp thorns.
I think you have both experienced this. The twins and my little
darling--When they think of their mother and her end, will not the
children--"
Here she uttered a low cry. The asp had struck its fangs into the upper
part of her arm like an icy flash of lightning, and a few instants later
Cleopatra sank back upon her pillows lifeless.
Iras, pale but calm, pointed to her, saying "Like a sleeping child.
Bewitching even in death. Fate itself was constrained to do her will and
fulfil the last desire of the great Queen, the victorious woman, whom no
heart resisted. Its decree shatters the presumptuous plan of Octavianus.
The victor will show himself to the Romans without thee, thou dear one."
Sobbing violently, she bent over the inanimate form, closed the eyes, and
kissed the lips and brow. The weeping Charmian did the same.
Then the footsteps of men were heard in the anteroom, and Iras, who was
the first to notice them, cried eagerly:
"The moment is approaching! I am glad it is close at hand. Does it not
seem to you also as if the very sun in the heavens was darkened?"
Charmian nodded assent, and whispered, "The poison?"
"Here!" replied Iras calmly, holding out a plain pin. "One little prick,
and the deed will be done. Look! But no. You once inflicted the deepest
suffering upon me. You know--Dion, the playmate of my childhood--It is
forgiven. But now--you will do me a kindness. You will spare my using the
pin myself. Will you not? I will repay you. If you wish, my hand shall
render you the same service."
Charmian clasped her niece to her heart, kissed her, pricked her arm
lightly, and gave her the other pin, saying:
"Now it is your turn. Our hearts were filled with love for one who
understood how to bestow it as none other ever did, and our love was
returned. What matters all else that we sacrificed? Those on whom the sun
shines need no other light. Love is pain," she said in dying, "but this
pain--especially that of renunciation for love's sake--bears with it a
joy, an exquisite joy, which renders death easy. To me it seems as if it
were merely following the Queen to--Oh, that hurt!" Iras's pin had
pricked her.
The poison did its work quickly. Iras was seized with giddiness, and
could scarcely stand. Charmian had just sunk on her knees, when some one
knocked loudly at the closed door, and the voices of Epaphroditus and
Proculejus imperiously demanded admittance.
When no answer followed, the lock was hastily burst open.
Charmian was found lying pale and distorted at the feet of her royal
mistress; but Iras, tottering and half stupefied by the poison, was
adjusting the diadem, which had slipped from its place. To keep from her
beloved Queen everything that could detract from her beauty had been her
last care.
Enraged, fairly frantic with wrath, the Romans rushed towards the women.
Epaphroditus had seen Iras still occupied in arranging Cleopatra's
ornaments. Now he endeavoured to raise her companion, saying
reproachfully, "Charmian, was this well done?" Summoning her last
strength, she answered in a faltering voice, "Perfectly well, and worthy
a descendant of Egyptian kings." Her eyes closed, but Proculejus, the
author, who had gazed long with deep emotion into the beautiful proud
face of the Queen whom he had so greatly wronged, said: "No other woman
on earth was ever so admired by the greatest, so loved by the loftiest.
Her fame echoed from nation to nation throughout the world. It will
continue to resound from generation to generation; but however loudly men
may extol the bewitching charm, the fervour of the love which survived
death, her intellect, her knowledge, the heroic courage with which she
preferred the tomb to ignominy--the praise of these two must not be
forgotten. Their fidelity deserves it. By their marvellous end they
unconsciously erected the most beautiful monument to their mistress; for
what genuine goodness and lovableness must have been possessed by the
woman who, after the greatest reverses, made it seem more desirable to
those nearest to her person to die than to live without her!"
[The Roman's exclamation and the answer of the loyal dying Charmian
are taken literally from Plutarch's narrative.]
The news of the death of their beloved, admired sovereign transformed
Alexandria into a house of mourning. Obsequies of unprecedented
magnificence and solemnity, at which many tears of sincere grief flowed,
honoured her memory. One of Octavianus's most brilliant plans was
frustrated by her death, and he had raved furiously when he read the
letter in which Cleopatra, with her own hand, informed him of her
intention to die. But he owed it to his reputation for generosity to
grant her a funeral worthy of her rank. To the dead, who had ceased to be
dangerous, he was ready to show an excess of magnanimity.
The treatment which he accorded to Cleopatra's children also won the
world's admiration. His sister Octavia received them into her own house
and intrusted their education to Archibius.
When the order to destroy the statues of Antony and Cleopatra was issued,
Octavianus gave his contemporaries another proof of his disposition to be
lenient, for he ordered that the numerous statues of the Queen in
Alexandria and Egypt should be preserved. True, he had been influenced by
the large sum of two thousand talents paid by an Alexandrian to secure
this act of generosity. Archibius was the name of the rare friend who had
impoverished himself to render this service to the memory of the beloved
dead.
In later times the statues of the unfortunate Queen adorned the places
where they had been erected.
The sarcophagi of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, by whose side rested Iras
and Charmian, were constantly heaped with flowers and offerings to the
dead. The women of Alexandria, especially, went to the tomb of their
beloved Queen as if it were a pilgrimage; but in after-days faithful
mourners also came from a distance to visit it, among them the children
of the famous lovers whom death here united--Cleopatra Selene, now the
wife of the learned Numidian Prince Juba, Helios Antony, and Alexander,
who had reached manhood. Their friend and teacher, Archibius, accompanied
them. He taught them to hold their mother's memory dear, and had so
reared them that, in their maturity, he could lead them with head erect
to the sarcophagus of the friend who had confided them to his charge.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Pain is the inseparable companion of love
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE COMPLETE CLEOPATRA:
Aspect obnoxious to the gaze will pour water on the fire
Contempt had become too deep for hate
Epicurus, who believed that with death all things ended
Everything that exists moves onward to destruction and decay
Fairest dreams of childhood were surpassed
From Epicurus to Aristippus, is but a short step
Golden chariot drawn by tamed lions
Jealousy has a thousand eyes
Life had fulfilled its pledges
No, she was not created to grow old
Nothing in life is either great or small
Pain is the inseparable companion of love
Preferred a winding path to a straight one
Priests: in order to curb the unruly conduct of the populace
See facts as they are and treat them like figures in a sum
Shadow of the candlestick caught her eye before the light
She would not purchase a few more years of valueless life
Soul which ceases to regard death as a misfortune finds peace
To govern the world one must have less need of sleep
Trouble does not enhance beauty
Until neither knew which was the giver and which the receiver
What changes so quickly as joy and sorrow
Without heeding the opinion of mortals
Zeus does not hear the vows of lovers
THE EMPEROR, Complete
By Georg Ebers
Volume 1.
Translated by Clara Bell
PREFACE.
It is now fourteen years since I planned the story related in these
volumes, the outcome of a series of lectures which I had occasion to
deliver on the period of the Roman dominion in Egypt. But the pleasures
of inventive composition were forced to give way to scientific labors,
and when I was once more at leisure to try my wings with increase of
power I felt more strongly urged to other flights. Thus it came to pass
that I did I not take the time of Hadrian for the background of a tale
till after I had dealt with the still later period of the early monastic
move in "Homo Sum." Since finishing that romance my old wish to depict,
in the form of a story, the most important epoch of the history of that
venerable nation to which I have devoted nearly a quarter century of my
life, has found its fulfilment. I have endeavored to give a picture of
the splendor of the Pharaonic times in "Uarda," of the subjection of
Egypt to the new Empire of the Persians in "An Egyptian Princess," of the
Hellenic period under the Lagides in "The Sisters," of the Roman dominion
and the early growth of Christianity in "The Emperor," and of the
anchorite spirit--in the deserts and rocks of the Sinaitic Peninsula--in
"Homo Sum." Thus the present work is the last of which the scene will be
laid in Egypt. This series of romances will not only have introduced the
reader to a knowledge of the history of manners and culture in Egypt, but
will have facilitated his comprehension of certain dominant ideas which
stirred the mind of the Ancients. How far I may have succeeded in
rendering the color of the times I have described and in producing
pictures that realize the truth, I myself cannot venture to judge; for
since even present facts are differently reflected in different minds,
this must be still more emphatically the case with things long since past
and half-forgotten. Again and again, when historical investigation has
refused to afford me the means of resuscitating some remotely ancient
scene, I have been obliged to take counsel of imagination and remember
the saying that 'the Poet must be a retrospective Seer,' and could allow
my fancy to spread her wings, while I remained her lord and knew the
limits up to which I might permit her to soar. I considered it my lawful
privilege to paint much that was pure invention, but nothing that was not
possible at the period I was representing. A due regard for such
possibility has always set the bounds to fancy's flight; wherever
existing authorities have allowed me to be exact and faithful I have
always been so, and the most distinguished of my fellow-professors in
Germany, England, France and Holland, have more than once borne witness
to this. But, as I need hardly point out, poetical and historical truth
are not the same thing; for historical truth must remain, as far as
possible, unbiassed by the subjective feeling of the writer, while
poetical truth can only find expression through the medium of the
artist's fancy.
As in my last two romances, so in "The Emperor," I have added no notes: I
do this in the pleasant conviction of having won the confidence of my
readers by my historical and other labors. Nothing has encouraged me to
fresh imaginative works so much as the fact that through these romances
the branch of learning that I profess has enlisted many disciples whose
names are now mentioned with respect among Egyptologists. Every one who
is familiar with the history of Hadrian's time will easily discern by
trifling traits from what author or from which inscription or monument
the minor details have been derived, and I do not care to interrupt the
course of the narrative and so spoil the pleasure of the larger class of
readers. It would be a happiness to me to believe that this tale deserves
to be called a real work of art, and, as such, its first function should
be to charm and elevate the mind. Those who at the same time enrich their
knowledge by its study ought not to detect the fact that they are
learning.
Those who are learned in the history of Alexandria under the Romans may
wonder that I should have made no mention of the Therapeutai on Lake
Mareotis. I had originally meant to devote a chapter to them, but Luca's
recent investigations led me to decide on leaving it unwritten. I have
given years of study to the early youth of Christianity, particularly in
Egypt, and it affords me particular satisfaction to help others to
realize how, in Hadrian's time, the pure teaching of the Saviour, as yet
little sullied by the contributions of human minds, conquered--and could
not fail to conquer--the hearts of men. Side by side with the triumphant
Faith I have set that noble blossom of Greek life and culture--Art which
in later ages, Christianity absorbed in order to dress herself in her
beautiful forms. The statues and bust of Antinous which remain to us of
that epoch, show that the drooping tree was still destined to put forth
new leaves under Hadrian's rule.
The romantic traits which I have attributed to the character of my hero,
who travelled throughout the world, climbing mountains to rejoice in the
splendor of he rising sun, are authentic. One of the most difficult tasks
I have ever set myself was to construct from the abundant but essentially
contradictory accounts of Hadian a human figure in which I could myself
at all believe; still, how gladly I set to work to do so! There was much
to be considered in working out this narrative, but the story itself has
flowed straight from the heart of the writer; I can only hope it may find
its way to that of the reader.
LEIPZIG, November, 1880.
GEORG EBERS.
THE EMPEROR.
CHAPTER I.
The morning twilight had dawned into day, and the sun had risen on the
first of December of the year of our Lord 129, but was still veiled by
milk-white mists which rose from the sea, and it was cold.
Kasius, a mountain of moderate elevation, stands on a tongue of land that
projects from the coast between the south of Palestine and Egypt. It is
washed on the north by the sea which, on this day, is not gleaming, as is
its wont, in translucent ultramarine; its more distant depths slowly
surge in blue-black waves, while those nearer to shore are of quite a
different hue, and meet their sisters that lie nearer to the horizon in a
dull greenish-grey, as dusty plains join darker lava beds. The
northeasterly wind, which had risen as the sun rose, now blew more
keenly, wreaths of white foam rode on the crests of the waves, though
these did not beat wildly and stormily on the mountain-foot, but rolled
heavily to the shore in humped ridges, endlessly long, as if they were of
molten lead. Still the clear bright spray splashed up when the gulls
dipped their pinions in the water as they floated above it, hither and
thither, restless and uttering shrill little cries, as though driven by
terror.
Three men were walking slowly along the causeway which led from the top
of the hill down into the valley, but it was only the eldest, who walked
in front of the other two, who gave any heed to the sky, the sea, the
gulls, and the barren plain that lay silent at his feet. He stopped, and
as soon as he did so, the others followed his example. The landscape
below him seemed to rivet his gaze, and it justified the disapproval with
which he gently shook his head, which was somewhat sunk into his beard. A
narrow strip of desert stretched westward before him as far as the eye
could reach, dividing two levels of water. Along this natural dyke a
caravan was passing, and the elastic feet of the camels fell noiselessly
on the road they trod. The leader, wrapped in his white mantle, seemed
asleep, and the camel-drivers to be dreaming; the dull-colored eagles by
the road-side did not stir at their approach. To the right of the stretch
of flat coast along which the road ran from Syria to Egypt, lay the
gloomy sea, overhung by grey clouds; to the left lay the desert, a
strange and mysterious feature in the landscape, of which the eye could
not see the end, either to the east or to the west, and which looked here
like a stretch of snow, there like standing water, and again like a
thicket of rushes.
The eldest of our travellers gazed constantly towards heaven or into the
distance; the second, a slave who carried rugs and cloaks on his broad
shoulders, never took his eyes off his master; and the third, a young,
free-man, looked wearily and dreamily down the road.
A broad path, leading to a stately temple, crossed that which led from
the summit of the mountain to the coast, and the bearded pedestrian
turned up it; but he followed it only for a few steps, then he turned his
head with a dissatisfied air, muttered a few unintelligible words into
his beard, turned round and hastily retraced his steps to the narrow way,
down which he went towards the valley. His young companion followed him
without raising his head or interrupting his reverie, as if he were his
shadow, but the slave lifted his cropped fair head and a stolen smile
crossed his lips as on the left hand side of the Kasius road he caught
sight of a black kid, and close beside it an old woman who, at the
approach of the three men covered her wrinkled face in alarm with her
dark blue veil.
"That is the reason then!" said the slave to himself with a nod, and
blowing a kiss into the air to a black-haired girl who crouched at the
old woman's feet. But she, for whom the greeting was intended, did not
observe this mute courtship, for her eyes followed the travellers, and
especially the young man, as if spellbound. As soon as the three were far
enough off not to hear her, the girl asked with a shiver, as if some
desert-spectre had passed by-and in a low voice "Grandmother, who was
that?"
The old woman raised her veil, laid her hand on her grandchild's mouth,
and whispered:
"It was he."
"The Emperor?"
The old woman answered with a significant nod, but the girl squeezed
herself up, against her grandmother, with vehement curiosity stretching
out her dusky head to see better, and asked softly: "The young one?"
"Silly child! the one in front with a grey beard."
"He? Oh, I wish the young one was the Emperor!"
It was in fact Hadrian, the Roman Emperor, who walked on in silence
before his escort, and it seemed as though his advent had given life to
the desert, for as he approached the reed-swamp, the kites flew up in the
air, and from behind a sand-hill on the edge of the broader road which
Hadrian had avoided, came two men in priestly robes. They both belonged
to the temple of Baal of Kariotis, a small structure of solid stone,
which faced the sea, and which the Emperor had yesterday visited.
"Do you think he has lost his way?" said one to the other, in the
Phoenician tongue.
"Hardly," was the answer. "Master said that he could always find a road
again by which he had once gone, even in the dark."
"And yet he is gazing more at the clouds than at the road."
"Still, he promised us yesterday."
"He promised nothing for certain," interrupted the other.
"Indeed he did; at parting he called out--and I heard him distinctly:
'Perhaps I shall return and consult your oracle.'"
"Perhaps."
"I think he said 'probably.'"
"Who knows whether some sign he has seen up in the sky may not have
turned him back; he is going to the camp by the sea."
"But the banquet is standing ready for him in our great hall."
"He will find what he needs down there. Come, it is a wretched morning,
and I am being frozen."
"Wait a little longer-look there."
"What?"
"He does not even wear a hat to cover his grey hair."
"He has never yet been seen to travel with anything on his head."
"And his grey cloak is not very imperial looking."
"He always wears the purple at a banquet."
"Do you know who his walk and appearance remind me of?"
"Who?"
"Of our late high-priest, Abibaal; he used to walk in that ponderous,
meditative way, and wear a beard like the Emperor's."
"Yes, yes--and had the same piercing grey eye."
"He too used often to gaze up at the sky. They have both the same broad
forehead, too; but Abibaal's nose was more aquiline, and his hair curled
less closely."
"And our governor's mouth was grave and dignified, while Hadrian's lips
twitch and curl at all he says and hears, as if he were laughing at it
all."
"Look, he is speaking now to his favorite--Antonius I think they call the
pretty boy."
"Antinous, not Antonius. He picked him up in Bithynia, they say."
"He is a beautiful youth."
"Incomparably beautiful! What a figure and what a face! Still, I cannot
wish that he were my son."
"The Emperor's favorite!"
"For that very reason. Why, he looks already as if he had tried every
pleasure, and could never know any farther enjoyment."
............................
On a little level close to the sea-shore, and sheltered by crumbling
cliffs from the east wind, stood a number of tents. Between them fires
were burning, round which were gathered groups of Roman soldiers and
imperial servants. Half-naked boys, the children of the fishermen and
camel-drivers who dwelt in this wilderness, were running busily hither
and thither, feeding the flames with dry stems of sea-grass and dead
desert-shrubs; but though the blaze flew high, the smoke did not rise;
but driven here and there by the squalls of wind, swirled about close to
the ground in little clouds, like a flock of scattered sheep. It seemed
as though it feared to rise in the grey, damp, uninviting atmosphere. The
largest of the tents, in front of which Roman sentinels paced up and
down, two and two, on guard, was wide open on the side towards the sea.
The slaves who came out of the broad door-way with trays on their cropped
heads-loaded with gold and silver vessels, plates, wine-jars, goblets,
and the remains of a meal had to hold them tightly with both hands that
they might not be blown over.
The inside of the tent was absolutely unadorned. The Emperor lay on a
couch near the right wall, which was blown in and bulged by the wind; his
bloodless lips were tightly set, his arms crossed over his breast, and
his eyes half closed. But he was not asleep, for he often opened his
mouth and smacked his lips, as if tasting the flavor of some viand. From
time to time he raised his eyelids--long, finely wrinkled, and
blue-veined--turning his eyes up to heaven or rolling them to one side
and then downwards towards the middle of the tent. There, on the skin of
a huge bear trimmed with blue cloth, lay Hadrian's favorite Antinous. His
beautiful head rested on that of the beast, which had been slain by his
sovereign, and its skull and skin skilfully preserved, his right leg,
supported on his left knee, he flourished freely in the air, and his
hands were caressing the Emperor's bloodhound, which had laid its
sage-looking head on the boy's broad, bare breast, and now and then tried
to lick his soft lips to show its affection. But this the youth would not
allow; he playfully held the beast's muzzle close with his hands or
wrapped its head in the end of his mantle, which had slipped back from
his shoulders.
The dog seemed to enjoy the game, but once when Antinous had drawn the
cloak more tightly round its head and it strove in vain to be free from
the cloth that impeded its breathing, it set up a loud howl, and this
doleful cry made the Emperor change his attitude and cast a glance of
displeasure at the boy lying on the bear-skin, but only a glance, not a
word of blame. And soon the expression, even of his eyes, changed, and he
fixed them on the lads's figure with a gaze of loving contemplation, as
though it were some noble work of art that he could never tire of
admiring. And truly the Immortals had moulded this child of man to such a
type; every muscle of that throat, that chest, those arms and legs was a
marvel of softness and of power; no human countenance could be more
regularly chiselled. Antinous observing that his master's attention had
been attracted to his play with the dog, let the animal go and turned his
large, but not very brilliant, eyes on the Emperor.
"What are you doing here?" asked Hadrian kindly.
"Nothing," said the boy.
"No one can do nothing. Even if we fancy we have succeeded in doing
nothing we still continue to think that we are unoccupied, and to think
is a good deal."
"But I cannot even think."
Every one can think; besides you were not doing nothing, for you were
playing."
"Yes, with the dog." With these words Antinous stretched out his legs on
the ground, pushed away the dog, and raised his curly head on both hands.
"Are you tired?" asked the Emperor.
"Yes."
"We both kept watch for an equal portion of the night, and I, who am so
much older, feel quite wide awake."
"It was only yesterday that you were saying that old soldiers were the
best for night-watches."
The Emperor nodded, and then said:
"At your age while we are awake we live three times as fast as at mine,
and so we need to sleep twice as long. You have every right to be tired.
To be sure it was not till three hours after midnight that we climbed the
mountain, and how often a supper party is not over before that."
"It was very cold and uncomfortable up there."
"Not till after the sun had risen."
"Ah! before that you did not notice it, for till then you were busy
thinking of the stars."
"And you only of yourself--very true."
"I was thinking of your health too when that cold wind rose before Helios
appeared."
"I was obliged to await his rising."
"And can you discern future events by the way and manner of the rising of
the sun?"
Hadrian looked in surprise at the speaker, shook his head in negation,
looked up at the top of the tent, and after a long pause said, in abrupt
sentences, with frequent interruptions:
"Day is the present merely, and the future is evolved out of darkness;
the corn grows from the clods of the field; the rain falls from the
darkest clouds; a new generation is born of the mother's womb; the limbs
recover their vigor in sleep. And what is begotten of the darkness of
death--who can tell?"
When, after saying this, the Emperor had remained for some time silent,
the youth asked him:
"But if the sunrise teaches you nothing concerning the future why should
you so often break your night's rest and climb the mountain to see it?"
"Why? Why?" repeated Hadrian, slowly and meditatively, stroking his
grizzled beard; then he went on as if speaking to himself:
"That is a question which reason fails to answer, before which my lips
find no words; and, if I had them at my command, who among the rabble
would understand me? Such questions can best be answered by means of
parables. Those who take part in life are actors, and the world is their
stage. He who wants to look tall on it wears the cothurnus, and is not a
mountain the highest vantage ground that a man can find for the sole of
his foot? Kasius there is but a hill, but I have stood on greater giants
than he, and seen the clouds rise below me, like Jupiter on Olympus."
"But you need climb no mountains to feel yourself a god," cried Antinous;
"the godlike is your title--you command and the world must obey. With a
mountain beneath his feet a man is nearer to heaven no doubt than he is
on the plain."
"Well?"
"I dare not say what came into my mind."
"Speak out."
"I knew a little girl who when I took her on my shoulder would stretch
out her arms and exclaim, 'I am so tall!' She fancied that she was taller
than I then, and yet was only little Panthea."
"But in her own conception of herself, it was she who was tall, and that
decides the issue, for to each of us a thing is only that which it seems
to us. It is true they call me godlike, but I feel every day, and a
hundred times a day, the limitations of the power and nature of man, and
I cannot get beyond them. On the top of a mountain I cease to feel them;
there I feel as if I were great, for nothing is higher than my head, far
or near. And when, as I stand there, the night vanishes before my eyes,
when the splendor of the young sun brings the world into new life for me,
by restoring to my consciousness all that just before had been engulfed
in gloom, then a deeper breath swells my breast, and my lungs fill with
the purer and lighter air of the heights. Up there, alone and in silence,
no hint can reach me of the turmoil below, and I feel myself one with the
great aspect of nature spread before me. The surges of the sea come and
go, the tree-tops in the forest bow and rise, fog and mist roll away and
part asunder hither and thither, and up there I feel myself so merged
with the creation that surrounds me that often it even seems as though it
were my own breath that gives it life. Like the storks and the swallows,
I yearn for the distant land, and where should the human eye be more
likely to be permitted, at least in fancy, to discern the remote goal
than from the summit of a mountain?
"The limitless distance which the spirit craves for seems there to assume
a form tangible to the senses, and the eye detects its border line. My
whole being feels not merely elevated, but expanded, and that vague
longing which comes over me as soon as I mix once more in the turmoil of
life, and when the cares of state demand my strength, vanishes. But you
cannot understand it, boy. These are things which no other mortal can
share with me."
"And it is only to me that you do not scorn to reveal them!" cried
Antinous, who had turned round to face the Emperor, and who with wide
eyes had not lost one word.
"You?" said Hadrian, and a smile, not absolutely free from mockery,
parted his lips. "From you I should no more have a secret than from the
Cupid by Praxiteles, in my study at Rome."
The blood mounted to the lad's cheeks and dyed them flaming crimson. The
Emperor observed this and said kindly:
"You are more to me than the statue, for the marble cannot blush. In the
time of the Athenians Beauty governed life, but in you I can see that the
gods are pleased to give it a bodily existence, even in our own days, and
to look at you reconciles me to the discords of existence. It does me
good. But how should I expect to find that you understand me; your brow
was never made to be furrowed by thought; or did you really understand
one word of all I said?"
Antinous propped himself on his left arm, and lifting his right hand, he
said emphatically:
"Yes."
"And which," asked Hadrian.
"I know what longing is."
"For what?"
"For many things."
"Tell me one."
"Some enjoyment that is not followed by depression. I do not know of
one."
"That is a desire you share with all the youth of Rome, only they are apt
to postpone the reaction. Well, and what next?"
"I cannot tell you."
"What prevents your speaking openly to me?"
"You, yourself did."
"I?"
"Yes, you; for you forbid me to speak of my home, my mother, and my
people."
The Emperor's brow darkened, and he answered sternly:
"I am your father and your whole soul should be given to me."
"It is all yours," answered the youth, falling back on to the bear-skin,
and drawing the pallima closely over his shoulders, for a gust blew
coldly in at the side of the tent, through which Phlegon, the Emperor's
private secretary, now entered and approached his master. He was followed
by a slave with several sealed rolls under his arms.
"Will it be agreeable to you, Caesar, to consider the despatches and
letters that have just arrived?" asked the official, whose
carefully-arranged hair had been tossed by the sea-breeze.
"Yes, and then we can make a note of what I was able to observe in the
heavens last night. Have you the tablets ready?"
"I left them in the tent set up especially for the work, Caesar."
"The storm has become very violent."
"It seems to blow from the north and east both at once, and the sea is
very rough. The Empress will have a bad voyage."
"When did she set out?"
"The anchor was weighed towards midnight. The vessel which is to fetch
her to Alexandria is a fine ship, but rolls from side to side in a very
unpleasant manner."
Hadrian laughed loudly and sharply at this, and said:
"That will turn her heart and her stomach upside down. I wish I were
there to see--but no, by all the gods, no! for she will certainly forget
to paint this morning; and who will construct that edifice of hair if all
her ladies share her fate. We will stay here to-day, for if I meet her
soon after she has reached Alexandria she will be undiluted gall and
vinegar."
With these words Hadrian rose from his couch, and waving his hand to
Antinous, went out of the tent with his secretary.
A third person standing at the back of the tent had heard the Emperor's
conversation with his favorite; this was Mastor, a Sarmatian of the race
of the Taryges. He was a slave, and no more worthy of heed than the dog
which had followed Hadrian, or than the pillows on which the Emperor had
been reclining. The man, who was handsome and well grown, stood for some
time twisting the ends of his long red moustache, and stroking his round,
closely-cropped head with his bands; then he drew the open chiton
together over his broad breast, which seemed to gleam from the remarkable
whiteness of the skin. He never took his eyes off Antinous, who had
turned over, and covering his face with his hands had buried them in the
bear's hairy mane.
Mastor had something he wanted to say to him, but he dared not address
him for the young favorite's demeanor could not be reckoned on. Often he
was ready to listen to him and talk with him as a friend, but often, too,
he repulsed him more sharply than the haughtiest upstart would repel the
meanest of his servants. At last the slave took courage and called the
lad by his name, for it seemed less hard to submit to a scolding than to
smother the utterance of a strong, warm feeling, unimportant as it might
be, which was formed in words in his mind. Antinous raised his head a
little on his hands and asked:
"What is it?"
"I only wanted to tell you," replied the Sarmatian, "that I know who the
little girl was that you so often took upon your shoulders. It was your
little sister, was it not, of whom you were speaking to me lately?"
The lad nodded assent, and then once more buried his head in his hands,
and his shoulders heaved so violently that it would seem that he was
weeping.--Mastor remained silent for a few minutes, then he went up to
Antinous and said:
"You know I have a son and a little daughter at home, and I am always
glad to hear about little girls. We are alone and if it will relieve your
heart."
"Let me alone, I have told you a dozen times already about my mother and
little Parthea," replied Antinous, trying to look composed.
"Then do so confidently for the thirteenth," said the slave. "In the camp
and in the kitchen I can talk about my people as much as I like. But
you--tell me, what do you call the little dog that Panthea made a scarlet
cloak for?"
"We called it Kallista," cried Antinous wiping his eyes with the back of
his hand. "My father would not allow it but we persuaded my mother. I was
her favorite, and when I put my arms round her and looked at her
imploringly she always said 'yes' to anything I asked her."
A bright light shone in the boy's weary eyes; he had remembered a whole
wealth of joys which left no depression behind them.
CHAPTER II.
One of the palaces built in Alexandria by the Ptolemaic kings stood on
the peninsula called Lochias which stretched out into the blue sea like a
finger pointing northwards; it formed the eastern boundary of the great
harbor. Here there was never any lack of vessels but to-day they were
particularly numerous, and the quay-road paved with smooth blocks of
stone, which led from the palatial quarter of the town--the Bruchiom as
it was called--which was bathed by the sea, to the spit of land was so
crowded with curious citizens on foot and in vehicles, that all
conveyances were obliged to stop in their progress before they had
reached the private harbor reserved for the Emperor's vessels.
But there was something out of the common to be seen at the
landing-place, for there lying under the shelter of the high mole were
the splendid triremes, galleys, long boats and barges which had brought
Hadrian's wife and the suite of the imperial couple to Alexandria. A very
large vessel with a particularly high cabin on the after deck and having
the head of a she-wolf on the lofty and boldly-carved prow excited the
utmost attention. It was carved entirely in cedar wood, richly decorated
with bronze and ivory, and named the Sabina. A young Alexandrian pointed
to the name written in gold letters on the stern, nudging his companion
and saying with a laugh:
"Sabina has a wolf's head then!"
"A peacock's would suit her better. Did you see her on her way to the
Caesareum?" replied the other.
"Alas! I did," said the first speaker, but he said no more perceiving,
close behind him, a Roman lictor who bore over his left shoulder his
fasces, a bundle of elmrods skilfully tied together, and who, with a wand
in his right-hand and the assistance of his comrades, was endeavoring to
part the crowd and make room for the chariot of his master, Titianus, the
imperial prefect, which came slowly in the rear. This high official had
overheard the citizens' heedless words, and turning to the man who stood
beside him, while with a light fling he threw the end of his toga into
fresh folds, he said:
"An extraordinary people! I cannot feel annoyed with them, and yet I
would rather walk from here to Canopus on the edge of a knife than on
that of an Alexandrian's tongue."
"Did you hear what the stout man was saying about Verus?"
"The lictor wanted to take him up, but nothing is to be done with them by
violence. If they had to pay only a sesterce for every venomous word, I
tell you Pontius, the city would be impoverished and our treasury would
soon be fuller than that of Gyges at Sardis."
"Let them keep their money," cried the other, the chief architect of the
city, a man of about thirty years of age with highly-arched brows and
eager piercing eyes; and grasping the roll he held in his hand with a
strong grip, he continued:
"They know how to work, and sweat is bitter. While they are busy they
help each other, in idleness they bite each other, like unbroken horses
harnessed to the same pole. The wolf is a fine brute, but if you break
out his teeth he becomes a mangy hound."
"You speak after my own heart," cried the prefect. "But here we are,
eternal gods! I never imagined anything so bad as this. From a distance
it always looked handsome enough!"
Titianus and the architect descended from the chariot, the former desired
a lictor to call the steward of the palace, and then he and his companion
inspected first the door which led into it. It looked fine enough with
its double columns which supported a lofty pediment, but, all the same,
it did not present a particularly pleasing aspect, for the stucco had, in
several places, fallen from the walls, the capitals of the marble columns
were lamentably injured and the tall doors, overlaid with metal, hung
askew on their hinges. Pontius inspected every portion of the door-way
with a keen eye and then, with the prefect, went into the first court of
the palace, in which, in the time of the Ptolemies, the tents had stood
for ambassadors, secretaries, and the officers in waiting on the king.
There they met with an unexpected hindrance, for across the paved
court-yard, where the grass grew in tufts, and tall thistles were in
bloom, a number of ropes were stretched aslant from the little house in
which dwelt the gate-keeper; and on these ropes were hung newly-washed
garments of every size and shape.
"A pretty residence for an Emperor," sighed Titianus, shrugging his
shoulders, but stopping the lictor, who had raised his fasces to cut the
ropes.
"It is not so bad as it looks," said the architect positively.
"Gate-keeper! hi, gate-keeper! Where is the lazy fellow hiding himself?"
While he called out and the lictor hurried forward into the interior of
the palace, Pontius went towards the gate-keeper's lodge, and having made
his way in a stooping attitude through the damp clothes, there he stood
still. Ever since he had come in at the gate annoyance and vexation had
been stamped on his countenance, but now his large mouth spread into a
smile, and he called to the prefect in an undertone:
"Titianus, just take the trouble to come here."
The elderly dignitary, whose tall figure exceeded that of the architect
in height by a full head, did not find it quite so easy to pass under the
ropes with his head bent down; but he did it with good humor, and while
carefully avoiding pulling down the wet linen, he called out:
"I am beginning to feel some respect for children's shirts; one can at
any rate get through them without breaking one's spine. Oh! this is
delicious--quite delicious!"
This exclamation was caused by the sight which the architect had invited
the prefect to come and enjoy, and which was certainly droll enough. The
front of the gate-keeper's house was quite grown over with ivy which
framed the door and window in its long runners. Amidst the greenery hung
numbers of cages with starlings, blackbirds, and smaller singing-birds.
The wide door of the little house stood open, giving a view into a
tolerably spacious and gaily-painted room. In the background stood a clay
model of an Apollo of admirable workmanship; above, and near this, the
wall was hung with lutes and lyres of various size and form.
In the middle of the room, and near the open door, was a table, on which
stood a large wicker cage containing several nests of young goldfinches,
and with green food twined among the osiers. There were, too, a large
wine-jar and an ivory goblet decorated with fine carving. Close to the
drinking-vessels, on the stone top of the table, rested the arm of an
elderly woman who had fallen asleep in the arm-chair in which she sat.
Notwithstanding the faint grey moustache that marked her upper-lip and
the pronounced ruddiness of her fore head and cheeks, she looked pleasant
and kind. She must have been dreaming of something that pleased her, for
the expression of her lips and of her eyes-one being half open and the
other closely shut-gave her a look of contentment. In her lap slept a
large grey cat, and by its side--as though discord never could enter this
bright little abode which exhaled no savor of poverty, but, on the
contrary, a peculiar and fragrant scent--lay a small shaggy dog, whose
snowy whiteness of coat could only be due to the most constant care. Two
other dogs, like this one, lay stretched on the floor at the old lady's
feet, and seemed no less soundly asleep.
As the prefect came up, the architect pointed to this study of
still-life, and said in a whisper:
"If we had a painter here it would make a lovely little picture."
"Incomparable," answered Titianus, "only the vivid scarlet on the dame's
cheeks seems to me suspicious, considering the ample proportions of the
wine-jar at her elbow."
"But did you ever see a calmer, kindlier, or more contented countenance?"
"Baucis must have slept like that when Philemon allowed himself leave of
absence for once! or did that devoted spouse always remain at home?"
"Apparently he did. Now, peace is at an end." The approach of the two
friends had waked one of the little dogs. He gave tongue, and his
companion immediately jumped up and barked as if for a wager. The old
woman's pet sprang out of her lap, but neither his mistress nor the cat
let themselves be disturbed by the noise, and slept on.
"A watcher among a thousand!" said the architect, laughing.
"And this phalanx of dogs which guard the palace of a Caesar," added
Titianus, "might be vanquished with a blow. Take heed, the worthy matron
is about to wake."
The dame had in fact been disturbed by the barking. She sat up a little,
lifted her hands, and then, half singing, half muttering a few words, she
sank back again in her chair.
"This is delicious!" cried the prefect.
"Begone dull care" she sang in her sleep.
"How may this rare specimen of humanity look when she is awake?"
"I should be sorry to drive the old lady out of her nest!" said the
architect unrolling his scroll.
"You shall touch nothing in the little house," cried the prefect eagerly.
"I know Hadrian; he delights in such queer things and queer people, and I
will wager he will make friends with the old woman in his own way. Here
at last comes the steward of this palace."
The prefect was not mistaken; the hasty step he had heard was that of the
official they awaited. At some little distance they could already hear
the man, panting as he hurried up, and as he came, before Titianus could
prevent him, he had snatched down the cords that were stretched across
the court and flung all the washing on the ground. As soon as the curtain
had thus dropped which had divided him from the Emperor's representative
and his companion, he bowed to the former as low as the rotund dimensions
of his person would allow; but his hasty arrival, the effort of strength
he had made, and his astonishment at the appearance of the most powerful
personage in the Nile Province in the building entrusted to his care, so
utterly took away his breath--of which he at all times was but
"scant"--that he was unable even to stammer out a suitable greeting.
Titianus gave him a little time, and then, after expressing his regret at
the sad plight of the washing, now strewn upon the ground, and mentioning
to the steward the name and position of his friend Pontius, he briefly
explained to him that the Emperor wished to take up his abode in the
palace now in his charge; that he--Titianus--was cognizant of the bad
condition in which it then was, and had come to take council with him and
the architect as to what could be done in the course of a few days to
make the dilapidated residence habitable for Hadrian, and to repair, at
any rate, the more conspicuous damage. He then desired the steward to
lead him through the rooms.
"Directly--at once," answered the Greek, who had attained his present
ponderous dimensions through many years of rest: "I will hasten to fetch
the keys." And as he went, puffing and panting, he re-arranged with his
short, fat fingers the still abundant hair on the right side of his head.
Pontius looked after him.
"Call him back, Titianus," said he. "We disturbed him in the midst of
curling his hair; only one side was done when the lictor called him away,
and I will wager my own head that he will have the other side frizzled
before he comes back. I know your true Greek!"
"Well, let him," answered Titianus. "If you have taken his measure
rightly he will not be able to give his attention without reserve to our
questions till the other half of his hair is curled. I know, too, how to
deal with a Hellene."
"Better than I, I perceive," said the architect in a tone of conviction.
"A statesman is used to deal with men as we do with lifeless materials.
Did you see the fat fellow turn pale when you said that it would be but a
few days before the Emperor would make his entry here? Things must look
well in the old house there. Every hour is precious, and we have lingered
here too long."
The prefect nodded agreement and followed the architect into the inner
court of the palace. How grand and well-proportioned was the plan of this
immense building through which the steward Keraunus, who returned with
his fine curls complete all round, now led the Romans. It stood on an
artificial hill in the midst of the peninsula of Lochias, and from many a
window and many a balcony there were lovely prospects of the streets and
open squares, the houses, palaces and public buildings of the metropolis,
and of the harbor, swarming with ships. The outlook from Lochias was
rich, gay and varied to the south and west, but east and north from the
platform of the palace of the Ptolemies, the gaze fell on the
never-wearying prospect of the eternal sea, limited only by the vault of
heaven. When Hadrian had sent a special messenger from Mount Kasius to
desire his prefect Titianus to have this particular building prepared for
his reception, he knew full well what advantages its position offered; it
was the part of his officials to restore order in the interior of the
palace, which had remained uninhabited from the time of Cleopatra's
downfall. He gave them for the purpose eight, or perhaps nine,
days--little more than a week. And in what a condition did Titianus and
Pontius find this now dilapidated and plundered scene of former
magnificence--the sweat pouring from their foreheads with their exertions
as they inspected and sketched, questioned and made notes of it all.
The pillars and steps in the interior were tolerably well preserved, but
the rain had poured in through the open roofs of the banqueting and
reception-lulls, the fine mosaic pavements had started here and there,
and in other places a perfect little meadow had grown in the midst of a
hall, or an arcade; for Octavianus Augustus, Tiberius, Vespasian, Titus
and a whole series of prefects, had already carefully removed the finest
of the mosaics from the famous palace of the Ptolemies, and carried them
to Rome or to the provinces, to decorate their town houses or country
villas. In the same way the best of the statues were gone, with which a
few centuries previously the art-loving Lagides had decorated this
residence--besides which they had another, still larger, on the Bruchiom.
In the midst of a vast marbled hall stood an elegantly-wrought fountain,
connected with the fine aqueduct of the city. A draught of air rushed
through this hall, and in stormy weather switched the water all over the
floor, now robbed of its mosaics, and covered, wherever the foot could
tread, with a thin, dark green, damp and slippery coating of mossy plants
and slime. It was here that Keraunus leaned breathless against the wall,
and, wiping his brow, panted rather than said: "At last, this is the
end!"
The words sounded as if he meant his own end and not that of their
excursion through the palace, and it seemed like a mockery of the man
himself when Pontius unhesitatingly replied with decision:
"Good, then we can begin our re-examination here, at once."
Keraunus did not contradict him, but, as he remembered the number of
stairs to be climbed over again, he looked as if sentence of death had
been passed upon him.
"Is it necessary that I should remain with you during the rest of your
labors, which must be principally directed to details?" asked the prefect
of the architect.
"No," answered Pontius, "provided you will take the trouble to look at
once at my plan, so as to inform yourself on the whole of what I propose,
and to give me full powers to dispose of men and means in each case as it
arises."
"That is granted," said Titianus. "I know that Pontius will not demand a
man or a sesterce more or less than is needed for the purpose."
The architect bowed in silence and Titianus went on.
"But above all things, do you think you can accomplish your task in eight
days and nine nights?"
"Possibly, at a pinch; and if I could only have four days more at my
disposal, most probably."
"Then all that is needed is to delay Hadrian's arrival by four days and
nights."
"Send some interesting people--say the astronomer Ptolemaeus, and
Favorinus, the sophist, who await him here--to meet him at Pelusium. They
will find some way of detaining him there."
"Not a bad idea! We will see. But who can reckon on the Empress's moods?
At any rate, consider that you have only eight days to dispose of."
"Good."
"Where do you hope to be able to lodge Hadrian?"
"Well, a very small portion of the old building is, strictly speaking,
fit to use."
"Of that, I regret to say, I have fully convinced myself," said the
prefect emphatically, and turning to the steward, he went on in a tone
less of stern reproof than of regret.
"It seems to me, Keraunus, that it would have been your duty to inform me
earlier of the ruinous condition of the building."
"I have already lodged a complaint," replied the man, "but I was told in
answer to my report that there were no means to apply to the purpose."
"I know nothing of these things," cried Titianus.
"When did you forward your petition to the prefect's office?"
"Under your predecessor, Haterius Nepos."
"Indeed," said the prefect with a drawl.
"So long ago. Then, in your place, I should have repeated my application
every year, without any reference to the appointment of a new prefect.
However, we have now no time for talking. During the Emperor's residence
here, I shall very likely send one of my subordinates to assist you!"
Titianus turned his back on the steward, and asked the architect:
"Well, my good Pontius, what part of the palace have you your eye upon?"
"The inner halls and rooms are in the best repair."
"But they are the last that can be thought of," cried Titianus. "The
Emperor is satisfied with everything in camp, but where fresh air and a
distant prospect are to be had, he must have them."
"Then let us choose the western suite; hold the plan my worthy friend."
The steward slid as he was desired, the architect took his pencil and
made a vigorous line in the air above the left side of the sketch,
saying:
"This is the west front of the palace which you see from the harbor. From
the south you first come into the lofty peristyle, which may be used as
an antechamber; it is surrounded with rooms for the slaves and
body-guard. The next smaller sitting-rooms by the side of the main
corridor we may assign to the officers and scribes, in this spacious
hypaethral hall--the one with the Muses--Hadrian may give audience and
the guests may assemble there whom he may admit to eat at his table in
this broad peristyle. The smaller and well-preserved rooms, along this
long passage leading to the steward's house, will do for the pages,
secretaries and other attendants on Caesar's person, and this long
saloon, lined with fine porphyry and green marble, and adorned with the
beautiful frieze in bronze will, I fancy, please Hadrian as a study and
private sitting-room."
"Admirable!" cried Titianus, "I should like to show your plan to the
Empress."
"In that case, instead of eight days I must have as many weeks," said
Pontius coolly.
"That is true," answered the prefect laughing. "But tell me, Keraunus,
how comes it that the doors are wanting to all the best rooms?"
"They were of fine thyra wood, and they were wanted in Rome."
"I must have seen one or another of them there," muttered the prefect.
"Your cabinet-workers will have a busy time, Pontius."
"Nay, the hanging-makers may be glad; wherever we can we will close the
door-ways with heavy curtains."
"And what will you do with this damp abode of fogs, which, if I mistake
not, must adjoin the dining-hall?"
"We will turn it into a garden filled with ornamental foliage."
"That is quite admissable--and the broken statues?"
"We will get rid of the worst."
The Apollo and the nine Muses stand in the room you intend for an
audience-hall--do they not?"
"Yes."
"They are in fairly good condition, I think."
"Urania is wanting entirely," said the steward, who was still holding the
plan out in front of him.
"And what became of her?" asked Titianus, not without excitement.
"Your predecessor, the prefect Haterius Nepos, took a particular fancy to
it and carried it with him to Rome."
"Why Urania of all others?" cried Titianus angrily. She, above all, ought
not to be missing from the hall of audience of Caesar the pontiff of
heaven! What is to be done?"
"It will be difficult to find an Urania ready-made as tall as her
sisters, and we have no time to search one out, a new one must be made."
"In eight days?"
"And eight nights."
"But my good friend, only to get the marble--"
"Who thinks of marble? Papias will make us one of straw, rags and
gypsum--I know his magic hand--and in order that the others may not be
too unlike their new-born sister they shall be whitewashed."
"Capital--but why choose Papias when we have Harmodius?"
"Harmodius takes art in earnest, and we should have the Emperor here
before he had completed his sketches. Papias works with thirty assistants
at anything that is ordered of him, so long as it brings him money. His
last things certainly amaze me, particularly the Hygyeia for Dositheus
the Jew, and the bust of Plutarch put up in the Caesareum. they are full
of grace and power. But who can distinguish what is his work and what
that of his scholars? Enough, he knows how things should be done; and if
a good sum is to be got by it he will hew you out a whole sea-fight in
marble in five days."
"Then give Papias the commission but the hapless mutilated pavements-what
will you do with them?"
"Gypsum and paint must mend them," said Pontius, "and where that will not
do, we must lay carpets on the floor in the Eastern fashion. Merciful
night! how dark it is growing; give me the plan Keraunus and provide us
with torches and lamps for to-day, and the next following ones must have
twenty-four hours apiece, full measure. I must ask you for half a dozen
trustworthy slaves Titianus; I shall want them for messengers. What are
you standing there for man? Lights, I said. You have had half a lifetime
to rest in, and when Caesar is gone you will have as many more years for
the same laudable purpose--"
As he spoke the steward had silently gone off, but the architect did not
spare him the end of the sentence; he shouted after him:
"Unless by that time you are smothered in your own fat. Is it Nile-mud or
blood that runs in that huge mortal's veins?"
"I am sure I do not care," said the prefect, "so long as the glorious
fire that flows in yours only holds out till the work is done. Do not
allow yourself to be overworked at first, nor require the impossible of
your strength, for Rome and the world still expect great things of you. I
can now write in perfect security to the Emperor that all will be ready
for him in Lochias, and as a farewell speech, I can only say, it is folly
to be discouraged if only Pontius is at hand to support and assist me."
CHAPTER III.
The prefect ordered the lictors, who were awaiting him with his chariot,
to hasten to his house, and to conduct to Pontius several most worthy
slaves, familiar with Alexandria--some of whom he named--and at the same
time to send the architect a good couch with pillows and coverlets, and
to despatch a good meal and fine wine to the old palace at Lochias. Then
he mounted his chariot and drove through the Bruchiom along the shore to
the great edifice known as the Caesareum. He got on but slowly, for the
nearer he approached his destination the denser was the crowd of
inquisitive citizens, who stood closely packed round the vast
circumference of the building. Quite from a distance the prefect could
see a bright light; it rose to heaven from the large pans of pitch which
were placed on the towers on each side of the tall gate of the Caesareum
which faced the sea. To the right and left of this gate stood a tall
obelisk, and on each of these, men were lighting lamps which had been
attached to the sides and placed on the top, on the previous day.
"In honor of Sabina," said the prefect to himself. "All that this Pontius
does is thoroughly done, and there is no more complete sinecure than the
supervision of his arrangements."
Fully persuaded of this he did not think it necessary to go up to the
illuminated door-way which led into the temple erected by Octavian in
honor of Julius Caesar; on the contrary, he directed the charioteer to
stop at a door built in the Egyptian style, which faced the garden of the
palace of the Ptolemies, and which led to the imperial residence that had
been built by the Alexandrians for Tiberius, and had been greatly
extended and beautified under the later Caesars. A sacred grove divided
it from the temple of Caesar, with which it communicated by a covered
colonnade. Before this door there were several chariots and horses, and a
whole host of slaves, black and white, were in attendance with their
masters' litters. Here lictors kept back the sight-seeking crowd,
officers were lounging against the pillars, and the Roman guard were just
assembling with a clatter of arms, to the sound of a trumpet within the
door, to await their dismissal.
Everything gave way respectfully before the chariot of the prefect, and
as Titianus walked through the illuminated arcades of the Caesareum,
passing by the masterpieces of statuary placed there, and the rows of
pictures--and reached the halls in which the library of the palace was
kept, he could not help thinking of all the care and trouble which with
the assistance of Pontius, he had for months devoted to rendering this
palace which had not been used since Titus had set out for Judaea, fit
quarters for Hadrian's reception. The Empress now lived in the rooms
intended for her husband, and decorated with the choicest works of art,
and Titianus reflected with regret that, after Sabina had once become
aware of their presence there, it would be quite impossible to transfer
them to Lochias. At the door of the splendid room which he had intended
for Hadrian he was met by Sabina's chamberlain who undertook to conduct
him at once into the presence of his mistress.
The roof of the hall in which the prefect found the Empress, in summer
was open to the sky; but at this season was suitably covered in by a
movable copper roof, partly to keep off the rain of the Alexandrian
winter, and partly too because, even in the warmer season Sabina was wont
to complain of cold; but beneath it a wide opening allowed the air free
entrance and exit. As Titianus entered the room a comfortable warmth and
subtle perfume met his senses; the warmth was produced by stoves of a
peculiar form standing in the middle of the room; one of these
represented Vulcan's forge. Brightly glowing charcoal lay in front of the
bellows which were worked by an automaton, at short regular intervals,
while the god and his assistants modelled in brass, stood round the
genial fire with tongs and hammers. The other stove was a large silver
bird's-nest, in which likewise charcoal was burning. Above the glowing
fuel a phoenix, also in brass, and in the likeness of an eagle, seemed
striving to soar heavenwards. Besides these a number of lamps lighted the
saloon, which in truth looked too large for the number of people
assembled in it, and which was lavishly furnished with gracefully-formed
seats, couches, and tables, vases of flowers and statues.
The prefect and Pontius had intended a quite different room to serve for
smaller assemblies, and had fitted it up suitably for the purpose, but
the Empress had preferred the great hall to the smaller room. The
venerable and nobly-born statesman was filled with vexation, nay, with an
embarrassment that made him feel estranged, when he had to glance round
the room to find the persons in it, collected, as they were, into small
knots. He could hear nothing but hushed voices; here an unintelligible
murmur and there a suppressed laugh, but from no one a frank speech or
full utterance. For a moment he felt as if he had found admittance to the
abode of whispering calumny, and yet he knew why here no one dared to
speak out or above a murmur. Loud voices hurt the Empress, and a clear
voice was a misery to her, and yet few men possessed so loud and
penetrating a chest voice as her husband, who was not wont to lay
restraint upon himself for any human being, not even for his wife.
Sabina sat on a large divan, more like a couch than a chair; her feet
were buried in the shaggy fell of a buffalo, and her knees and ankles
wrapped round with down-cushions covered with silk. Her head she held
very upright, and it was difficult to imagine how her slender throat
could support it, loaded as it was with strings of pearls and precious
stones which were braided in the tall structure of her reddish-gold hair,
that was arranged in long cylindrical curls pinned closely side by side.
The Empress's thin face looked particularly small under the mass of
natural and artificial adornment which towered above her brow. Beautiful
she could never have been, even in her youth, but her features were
regular, and the prefect confessed to himself as he looked at Sabina's
face, marked as it was with minute wrinkles and touched up with red and
white, that the sculptor who a few years previously had been commissioned
to represent her as 'Venus Victrix' might very well have given the
goddess a certain amount of resemblance to the imperial model. If only
her eyes, which were absolutely bereft of lashes, had not been quite so
small and keen--in spite of the dark lines painted round them--and if
only the sinews in her throat had not stood out quite so conspicuously
from the flesh which formerly had covered them!
With a deep bow Titianus took the Empress's right hand, covered with
rings; but she withdrew it quickly from that of her husband's friend and
relative, as if she feared that the carefully-cherished limb--useless as
it was for any practical purpose, a mere toy among hands--might suffer
some injury, and wrapped it and her arm in her upper-robe. But she
returned the prefect's friendly greeting with all the warmth at her
command. Though formerly at Rome she had been accustomed to see Titianus
every day at her house, this was their first meeting in Alexandria; for
the previous day, exhausted by the sufferings of her sea-voyage, she had
been carried in a closed litter to the Caesareum, and this morning she
had declined to receive his visit, as her whole time was given up to her
physicians, bathing-women, and coiffeurs.
"How can you survive in this country?" she said in a low but harsh voice,
which always made the hearer feel that it was that of a dull, fractious,
childless woman. "At noon the sun burns you up, and in the evening it is
so cold--so intolerably cold!' As she spoke she drew her robe closer
round her, but Titianus, pointing to the stoves in the middle of the
hall, said:
"I hoped we had succeeded in cutting the bowstrings of the Egyptian
winter, and it is but a feeble weapon."
"Still young, still imaginative, still a poet!" said the Empress wearily.
"I saw your wife a couple of hours since. Africa seems to suit her less
well; I was shocked to see Julia, the handsome matron, so altered. She
does not look well."
"Years are the foe of beauty."
"Frequently they are, but true beauty often resists their attacks."
"You are yourself the living proof of your assertion."
"That is as much as to say that I am growing old."
"Nay--only that you know the secret of remaining beautiful."
"You are a poet!" murmured the Empress with a twitch of her thin
under-lip.
"Affairs of state do not favor the Muses."
"But I call any man a poet who sees things more beautiful than they are,
or who gives them finer names than they deserve--a poet, a dreamer, a
flatterer--for it comes to that."
"Ah! modesty can always find words to repel even well-merited
admiration."
"Why this foolish bandying of words?" sighed Sabina, flinging herself
back in her chair. "You have been to school under the hair-splitting
logicians in the Museum here, and I have not. Over there sits Favorinus,
the sophist; I dare say he is proving to Ptolemaeus that the stars are
mere specks of blood in our eyes, which we choose to believe are in the
sky. Florus, the historian, is taking note of this weighty discussion;
Pancrates, the poet, is celebrating the great thoughts of the
philosopher. As to what part the philologist there can find to take in
this important event you know better than I. What is the man's name?"
"Apollonius."
"Hadrian has nick-named him 'the obscure.' The more difficult it is to
understand the discourses of these gentlemen the more highly are they
esteemed."
"One must dive to obtain what lies at the bottom of the water--all that
floats on the surface is borne by the waves, a plaything for children.
Apollonius is a very learned man."
"Then my husband ought to leave him among his disciples and his books. It
was his wish that I should invite these people to my table. Florus and
Pancrates I like--not the others."
"I can easily relieve you of the company of Favorinus and Ptolemaeus;
send them to meet the Emperor."
"To what end?"
"To entertain him."
"He has his plaything with him," said Sabina, and her thin lips curled
with an expression of bitter contempt.
"His artistic eye delights in the beauty of Antinous, which is
celebrated, but which it has not yet been my privilege to see."
"And you are very anxious to see this marvel?"
"I cannot deny it."
"And yet you want to postpone your meeting with Caesar?" said Sabina, and
a keen glance of inquiry and distrust twinkled in her little eyes.
"Why do you want to delay my husband's arrival?"
"Need I tell you," said Titianus eagerly, "how greatly I shall rejoice to
see once more my sovereign, the companion of my youth, the greatest and
wisest of men, after a separation of four years? What would I not give if
he were here already! And yet I would rather that he should arrive in
fourteen days than in eight."
"What reason can you have?"
"A mounted messenger brought me a letter to-day in which the Emperor
tells me that he proposes to inhabit the old palace at Lochias, and not
the Caesareum."
At these words Sabina's forehead clouded, her gaze, dark and blank, was
fixed on her lap, and biting her under-lip, she muttered:
"Because I am here."
Titianus made as though he had not heard these words, and continued in an
easy tone:
"There he has a wide outlook into the distance, which is what he has
loved from his youth up. But the old building is much dilapidated, and
though I have already begun to exert all the forces at my command, with
the assistance of our admirable architect, Pontius, to restore a portion
of it at any rate, and make it a habitable and not too uncomfortable
residence, the time is too short to do anything thoroughly worthy--"
"I wish to see my husband here, and the sooner the better," interrupted
the Empress with decision. Then she turned towards the row of pillars
which stood by the right-hand wall of the hall, and which were at some
distance from her couch, calling out "Verus." But her voice was so weak
that it did not reach the person addressed, so turning to the prefect,
she said: "I beg of you to call Verus to me, the praetor Lucius Aurelius
Verus." Titianus immediately obeyed.
As he entered the hall he had already exchanged friendly greetings with
the man to whom the Empress wished to speak. He now did not succeed in
attracting his attention till he stood close at his elbow, for he formed
the centre of a small group of men and women who were hanging on his
words. What he was saying in a subdued voice must have been
extraordinarily diverting, for it could be seen that his hearers were
making the greatest efforts to keep their suppressed laughter from
breaking out into a shout that would shake the very hall, a noise the
Empress detested. When the prefect came up to Verus, a young girl, whose
pretty head was crowned by a perfect thicket of little ringlets, was just
laying her hand on his arm and saying:
"Nay-that is too much; if you go on like this, for the future whenever
you speak I shall stop my ears with my hands, as sure as my name is
Balbilla."
"And as sure as you are descended from King Antiochus," added Verus
bowing.
"Always the same," laughed the prefect, nodding to the audacious jester.
"Sabina wants to speak to you."
"Directly, directly," said Verus. "My story is a true one, and you all
ought to be grateful to me for having released you from that tedious
philologer who has now button-holed my witty friend Favorinus. I like
your Alexandria, Titianus; still it is not a great capital like Rome. The
people have not yet learned not to be astonished; they are perpetually in
amazement. When I go out driving--"
"Your runners ought to fly before you with roses in their hair and wings
on their shoulders like Cupids."
"In honor of the Alexandrian ladies?"
"As if the Roman ladies in Rome, and the fair Greeks at Athens,"
interrupted Balbilla.
"The praetor's runners go faster than Parthian horses," cried the
Empress's chamberlain. "He has named them after the winds."
"As they deserve," added Verus "Come, Titianus." He laid his hand in a
confidential manner on the arm of the prefect, to whom he was related;
and as they went towards Sabina he whispered in his ear:
"I can keep her waiting as if I were the Emperor."
Favorinus who had been engaged in talk with Ptolemaeus, the astronomer,
Apollonius, and the philosopher and poet Pancrates in another part of the
hall, looked after the two men and said:
"A handsome couple. One the personification of imperial and dignified
Rome; the other with his Hermes-like figure."
"The other"--interrupted the philologist with stern displeasure, "the
other is the very incarnation of the haughtiness, the luxury pushed to
insanity, and the infamous depravity of the metropolis. That dissipated
ladies-man."
"I will not defend his character," said Favorinus in his pleasant voice,
and with an elegance in his pronunciation of Greek which delighted even
the grammarian. "His ways and doings are disgraceful; still you must
allow that his manners are tinged with the charm of Hellenic beauty, that
the Charites kissed him at his birth, and though, by the stern laws of
virtue we must condemn him, he deserves to be crowned with praise and
garlands from the point of view of the feeling for beauty."
"Oh! for the artist who wants a model he is a choice morsel."
"The Athenian judges acquitted Phryne because she was beautiful."
"They did wrong."
"Hardly in the eyes of the gods, whose fairest works must deserve our
respect."
"Still poison may be kept in the most beautiful vessels."
"And yet body and soul always to a certain extent correspond."
"And can you dare to call the handsome Verus the admirable Verus?"
"No, but the reckless Lucius Aurelius Verus is at the same time the
gayest and pleasantest of all the Romans, free alike from spite or
carefulness, he troubles himself with no doctrines of virtue, and as when
a thing pleases him, he desires to possess it, he endeavors to give
pleasure to every one else."
"He has wasted his pains so far as I am concerned."
"I do as he wishes."
The last words both of the philologer and the sophist were spoken
somewhat louder than was usual in the presence of the Empress. Sabina,
who had just told the praetor which residence her husband had decided on
inhabiting, drew up her shoulders and pinched her lips as if in pain,
while Verus turned a face of indignation--a face which was manly in spite
of all the delicacy and regularity of the features--on the two speakers,
and his fine bright eyes caught the hostile glance of Apollonius.
An intimation of aversion to his person was one of the things which to
him were past endurance; he hastily passed his hand through his
blue-black hair, which was only slightly grizzled at the temples and
flowed uncurled, but in soft waving locks round his head, and said, not
heeding Sabina's question as to his opinion of her husband's latest
instructions:
"He is a repulsive fellow, that wrangling logician; he has an evil eye
that threatens mischief to us all, and his trumpet voice cannot hurt you
more than it does me. Must we endure him at table with us every day?"
"So Hadrian desires."
"Then I shall start for Rome," said Verus decidedly. "My wife wants to be
back with her children, and as praetor, it is more fitting that I should
stay by the Tiber than by the Nile."
The words were spoken as lightly as though they were nothing more than a
proposition to go to supper, but they seemed to agitate the Empress
deeply, for her head, which had seemed almost a fixture during her
conversation with Titianus, now shook so violently that the pearls and
jewels rattled in the erection of curls. There she sat for some seconds
staring into her lap.
Verus stooped to pick up a gem that had fallen from her hair, and as he
did so she said hastily:
"You are right. Apollonius is intolerable. Let us send him to meet my
husband."
"Then I will remain," answered Verus, as pleased as a wilful boy who has
got his own way.
"Fickle as the wind," murmured Sabina, threatening him with her finger.
"Show me the stone--it is one of the largest and finest; you may keep
it."
When an hour later, Verus quitted the hall with the prefect, Titianus
said:
"You have done me a service cousin, without knowing it. Now can you
contrive that Ptolemaeus and Favorinus shall go with Apollonius to meet
the Emperor at Pelusium?"
"Nothing easier" was the answer.
And the same evening the prefect's steward conveyed to Pontius the
information that he might count on having probably fourteen days for his
work, instead of eight or nine only.
CHAPTER IV.
In the Caesareum, where the Empress dwelt, the lights were extinguished
one after another; but in the palace of Lochias they grew more numerous
and brighter. In festal illuminations of the harbor pitch cressets on the
roof, and long rows of lamps that accumulated architectonic features of
the noble structure, were always kindled; but inside it, no blaze so
brilliant had ever lighted it within the memory of man. The harbor
watchmen at first gazed anxiously up at Lochias, for they feared that a
fire must have broken out in the old palace; they were soon reassured
however, by one of the prefect's lictors, who brought them a command to
keep open the harbor gates that night, and every night till the Emperor
should have arrived, to all who might wish to proceed from Lochias to the
city, or from the city to the peninsula, under the orders of Pontius the
architect. And till long past midnight not a quarter of an hour passed in
which the people whom the architect had summoned to his aid were not
knocking at the harbor gates, which, though not locked were all guarded.
The little house belonging to the gate-keeper was also brightly lighted
up; the birds and cats belonging to the old woman whom the prefect and
his companions had found slumbering by her wine-jar, were now fast
asleep, but the little dogs still flew loudly yelping into the yard each
time a new-comer entered by the open gate.
"Come, Aglaia, what will folks think of you? Thalia, my beauty, behave
like a good dog; come here, Euphrosyne, and don't be so silly!" cried the
old lady in a voice which was both pleasant and peremptory, as she
stood-wide awake now-behind her table, folding together the dried
clothes. The little barking beasts who were thus endowed with the names
of the three Graces did not trouble themselves much about her
affectionate admonitions; to their sorrow, for it happened more than once
to each of them, when they had got under the feet of some new-comer, to
creep, whining and howling, into the house again to seek consolation from
their mistress, who would pick up the sufferer and soothe it with kisses
and coaxing.
The old lady was no longer alone, for in the background, on a long and
narrow couch which stood in front of the statue of Apollo, lay a tall,
lean man, wearing a red chiton. A little lamp hanging from the ceiling
threw a dull light on him and on the lute he was playing. To the faint
sound of the instrument, which was rather a large one, and which he had
propped on the pillow by his side, he was singing, or rather murmuring a
long ditty. Twice, thrice, four times he repeated it in the same way. Now
and again he suddenly let his voice sound more loudly--and though his
hair was quite grey his voice was not unpleasing--and sang a few phrases
full of expression and with artistic delivery; and then, when the dogs
barked too vehemently, he would spring up, and with his lute in his
left-hand and a long pliable rattan in his right, he would rush into the
court-yard, shout the names of the dogs, and raise his cane as if he
would kill them; but he always took care not to hit them, only to beat on
the pavement near them. When, returning from such an excursion, he
stretched himself again on his couch, the old woman, pointing to the
hanging-lamp which the impatient creature often knocked with his head,
would call out, "Euphorion, mind the oil."
And he each time answered with the same threatening gesture and the same
glare in his black eyes:
"The little brutes!"
The singer had been diligently practising his musical exercises for about
an hour, when the dogs rushed into the court-yard, not barking this time,
but yelping loudly with joy. The old woman laid aside the washing and
listened, but the tall man said:
"As many birds come flying before the Emperor as gulls before a storm. If
only they would leave us in peace--"
"Hark, that is Pollux; I know by the dogs," said the woman, hastening as
fast as she could over the threshold and out to meet him. But the
expected visitor was already at the door. He picked up the three
four-footed Graces who leaped round him, one after the other by the skin
of the neck, and gave each a tap on its nose. Then, seeing the old woman,
he took her head between his hands, and kissed her forehead, saying,
"Good-evening, little Mother," and shook hands with the singer, adding,
"How are you, great, big Father?"
"You are as big as I am," replied the man thus addressed, and he drew the
younger man towards him, and laid one of his broad hands on his own grey
head and the other on that of his first-born, with its wealth of brown
hair.
"As if we were cast in the same mould," cried the youth; and in fact he
was very like his father--like, no doubt, as a noble hunter is like a
worn-out hack--as marble is like limestone--as a cedar is like a
fir-tree. Both were remarkably tall, had thick hair, dark eyes, and
strongly aquiline noses, exactly of the same shape; but the cheerful
brightness which irradiated the countenance of the youth had certainly
not been inherited from the lute-player, but from the little woman who
looked up into his face and patted his arm.
But whence did he derive the powerful, but indescribable something which
gave nobility to his head, and of which it was impossible to say whether
it lay in his eye, or in the lofty brow, arched so differently to that of
either parent?
"I knew you would come," cried his mother. "This afternoon I dreamed it,
and I can prove that I expected you, for there, on the brazier, stands
the stewed cabbage and sausage waiting for you."
"I cannot stay now," replied Pollux. "Really, I cannot, though your kind
looks would persuade me, and the sausage winks at me out of the
cabbage-pan. My master, Papias, is gone on ahead, and in the palace there
we are to work wonders in less time than it generally takes to consider
which end the work should be begun at."
"Then I will carry the cabbage into the palace for you," said Doris,
standing on tip-toe to hold a sausage to the lips of her tall son. Pollux
bit off a large mouthful and said, as he munched it:
"Excellent! I only wish that the thing I am to construct up there may
turn out as good a statue as this savory cylinder--now fast
disappearing--was a superior and admirable sausage."
"Have another?" said Doris.
"No mother; and you must not bring the cabbage either. Up to midnight not
a minute must be lost, and if I then leave off for a little while you
must by that time be dreaming of all sorts of pleasant things."
"I will carry you the cabbage then," said his father, "for I shall not be
in bed so early at any rate. The hymn to Sabina, composed by Mesomedes,
is to be performed with the chorus, as soon as the Empress visits the
theatre, and I am to lead the upper part of the old men, who grow young
again at the sight of her. The rehearsal is fixed for to-morrow, and I
know nothing about it yet. Old music, note for note, is ready and safe in
my throat, but new things--new things!"
"It is according to circumstances," said Pollux, laughing.
"If only they would perform your father's Satyr-play, or his Theseus!"
cried Doris.
"Only wait a little, I will recommend him to Caesar as soon as he is
proud to call me his friend, as the Phidias of the age. Then, when he
asks me 'Who is the happy man who begot you?' I will answer: It is
Euphorion, the divine poet and singer; and my mother, too, is a worthy
matron, the gate-keeper of your palace, Doris, the enchantress, who turns
dingy clothes into snow-white linen."
These last words the young artist sang in a fine and powerful voice to a
mode invented by his father.
"If only you had been a singer!" exclaimed Euphorion.
"Then I should have enjoyed the prospect," retorted Pollux, "of spending
the evening of my life as your successor in this little abode."
"And now for wretched pay, you plant the laurels with which Papias crowns
himself!" answered the old man shrugging his shoulders.
"His hour is coming, too," cried Doris, "his merit will be recognized; I
saw him in my dreams, with a great garland on his curly head!"
"Patience, father-patience," said the young man, grasping his father's
hand. "I am young and strong, and do all I can. Here, behind this
forehead, good ideas are seething; what I have succeeded in carrying out
by myself, has at any rate brought credit and fame to others, although it
is all far from resembling the ideal of beauty that here--here--I seem to
see far away and behind a cloud; still I feel that if, in a moment of
kindness, Fortune will but shed a few fresh drops of dew on it all I
shall, at any rate, turn out something better than the mere ill-paid
right-hand of Papias, who, without me does not know what he ought to do,
or how to do it."
"Only keep your eyes open and work hard," cried Doris.
"It is of no use without luck," muttered the singer, shrugging his
shoulders.
The young artist bid his parents good-night, and was about to leave, but
his mother detained him to show him the young goldfinches, hatched only
the day before. Pollux obeyed her wish, not merely to please her, but
because he liked to watch the gay little bird that sat warming and
sheltering her nestlings. Close to the cage stood the huge wine-jar and
his mother's cup, decorated by his own hand. His eye fell on these, and
he pushed them aside in silence. Then, taking courage, he said, laughing:
"The Emperor will often pass by here, mother; give up celebrating your
Dionysiac festival. How would it do if you filled the jar with one-fourth
wine and three-fourths water? It does not taste badly."
"Spoiling good gifts," replied his mother.
"One-fourth wine-to please me," Pollux entreated, taking his mother by
the shoulders and kissing her forehead.
"To please you, you great boy!" said Doris, as her eyes filled with
tears. "Why for you, if I must, I would drink nothing but wretched water.
Euphorion you may finish what is left in the jar presently."
.........................
Pontius had already begun his labors, at first with aid only of his
assistants who had followed him on foot. Measuring, estimating, sending
short notes and writing figures, names and suggestions on the plan, and
on his folding wax-tablets, he was not idle for an instant, though
frequently interrupted by the appointed superintendents of the workshops
and manufactures in Lochias, whose co-operation he required. They only
came at this late hour because they were called upon by the prefect's
orders.
Papias, the sculptor, introduced himself among the latest, though Pontius
had written to him with his own hand that he had to communicate to him a
very remunerative and particularly pressing commission for the Emperor,
which might, perhaps, be taken in hand that very night. The matter in
question was a statue of Urania, which must be completed in eight days by
the same method which Papias had introduced at the last festival of
Adonis, and to the scale which he, Pontius, indicated, in the palace of
Lochias itself. With regard to several works of restoration which had to
be carried out with equal rapidity, and as to the price to be paid, they
could agree at the same time and place.
The sculptor was a man of foresight and did not appear on the scene alone
but with his best assistant, Pollux, the son of the worthy couple at the
gate, and several slaves who dragged after him sundry trunks and carts
loaded with tools, boards, clay, gypsum and other raw materials of his
art. On the road to Lochias he had informed the young sculptor of the
business in hand, and had told him in a condescending tone that he would
be permitted to try his skill in reconstructing the Urania. At the gate
he had permitted Pollux to greet his parents, and had gone alone into the
palace to open his bargain with the architect without the presence of
witnesses.
The young artist perfectly understood his master. He knew that he would
be expected to carry out the statue of Urania, while his task-master,
after making some trifling alterations in the completed work, would
declare that it was his own. Pollux had for two years been obliged, more
than once, to put up with similar treatment; and now, as usual, he
submitted to this dishonest manoeuvre because, under his master there was
plenty to do, and the delight of work was to him the greatest he could
have.
Papias, to whom he had gone early as an apprentice and to whom he owed
the knowledge he possessed, was no miser, still Pollux needed money, not
for himself alone but because he had taken on himself the charge of a
widowed sister and her children as if they were his own family. He was
always glad to take some comfort into the narrow home of his parents, who
were poor, and to maintain his younger brother Teuker--who had devoted
himself to the same art--during the years of his apprenticeship. Again
and again he had thought of telling his master that he should start on
his own footing and earn laurels for himself, but what then would become
of those who relied on his help, if he gave up his regular earnings and
if he got no commissions when there were so many unknown beginners eager
for them? Of what avail were all his ability and the most honest
good-will if no opportunity offered for his executing his work in noble
materials? With his own means he certainly was in no position to do so.
While he was talking to his parents Papias had opened his transactions
with the architect. Pontius explained to the sculptor what was required
and Papias listened attentively; he never interrupted the speaker, but
only stroked his face from time to time, as if to make it smoother than
it was already, though it was shaved with peculiar care and formed and
colored like a warm mask; meanwhile draping the front of his rich blue
toga, which he wore in the fashion of a Roman senator, into fresh folds.
But when Pontius showed him, at the end of the rooms destined for the
Emperor, the last of the statues to be restored, and which needed a new
grin, Papias said decisively:
"It cannot be done."
"That is a rash verdict," replied the architect. "Do you not know the
proverb, which, being such a good one, is said to have been first uttered
by more than one sage: 'That it shows more ill-judgment to pronounce a
thing impossible than to boast that we can achieve a task however much it
may seem to transcend our powers.'"
Papias smiled and looked down at his gold-embroidered shoes as he said:
"It is more difficult to us sculptors to imagine ourselves waging Titanic
warfare against the impossible, than it is to you who work with enormous
masses. I do not yet see the means which would give me courage to begin
the attack."
"I will tell you," replied Pontius quickly and decidedly. "On your side
good-will, plenty of assistants and night-watchers; on ours, the Caesar's
approval and plenty of gold."
After this the transaction came to a prompt and favorable issue, and the
architect could but express his entire approbation, in most cases, of the
sculptor's judicious and well-considered suggestions.
"Now I must go home," concluded Papias. "My assistants will proceed at
once with the necessary preparations. The work must be carried on behind
screens, so that no one may disturb us or hinder us with remarks."
Half an hour later a scaffolding was already erected in the middle of the
hall where the Urania was to stand.
It was concealed from; public gaze by thick linen stretched on tall
wooden frames, and behind these screens Pollux was busied in framing a
small model in wax, while his master had returned home to make
arrangements for the labors of the following day.
It wanted only an hour of midnight, and still the supper sent to the
palace for the architect by the prefect remained untouched. Pontius was
hungry enough, but before attacking the meal that a slave had set out on
a marble table--the roast meat which looked so inviting, the orange-red
crayfish, the golden-brown pasty and the many-hued fruits--he conceived
it his duty to inspect the rooms to be restored. It was needful to see
whether the slaves who had been set, in the first place to clean out all
the rooms, were being intelligently directed by the men set over them,
whether they were doing their duty and had all that they required; they
had got some hours to work, then they were to rest and to begin again at
sunrise, reinforced by other laborers both slave and free.
More and better lighting was universally demanded, and when, in the hall
of the Muses, the men who were cleaning the pavement and scraping the
columns loudly clamored for torches and lamps, a young man's head peered
over the screen which shut in the place reserved for the restoration of
the Urania, and a lamentable voice cried out:
"My Muse, with her celestial sphere, is the guardian of star-gazers and
is happiest in the dark--but not till she is finished. To form her we
must have light and more light--and when it is lighter here the voice of
the people down there, which does not sound very delightful up in this
hollow space, will diminish somewhat also. Give light, then, O, men!
Light for my goddess, and for your scrubbers and scourers."
Pontius looked up smiling at Pollux, who had uttered this appeal, and
answered:
Your cry of distress is fully justified, my friend. But do you really
believe in the power of light to diminish noise?"
"At any rate," replied Pollux, "where it is absent, that is to say in the
dark, every noise seems redoubled."
"That is true, but there are other reasons for that," answered the
architect. "To-morrow in an interval of work we will discuss these
matters. Now I will go to provide you with lamps and lights."
"Urania, the protectress of the fine arts, will be beholden to you,"
cried Pollux as the architect went away.
Pontius meanwhile sought his chief foreman to ask him whether he had
delivered his orders to Keraunus, the palace-steward, to come to him, and
to put the cressets and lamps commonly used for the external
illuminations, at the service of his workmen.
"Three times," was the answer "have I been myself to the man, but each
time he puffed himself out like a frog and answered me not a word, but
only sent me into a little room with his daughter--whom you must see, for
she is charming--and a miserable black slave, and there I found these few
wretched lamps that are now burning."
"Did you order him to come to me?"
"Three hours ago, and again a second time, when you were talking with
Papias."
The architect turned his back upon the foreman in angry haste, unrolled
the plan of the palace, quickly found upon it the abode of the
recalcitrant steward, seized a small red-clay lamp that was standing near
him, and being quite accustomed to guide himself by a plan, went straight
through the rooms, which were not a few, and by a long corridor from the
hall of the Muses, to the lodging of the negligent official. An unclosed
door led him into a dark ante-chamber followed by another room, and
finally into a large, well-furnished apartment. All these door-ways, into
what seemed to be at once the dining and sitting-room of the steward,
were bereft of doors, and could only be closed by stuff curtains, just
now drawn wide open. Pontius could therefore look in, unhindered and
unperceived, at the table on which a three-branched bronze lamp was
standing between a dish and some plates. The stout man was sitting with
his rubicund moon-face towards the architect, who, indignant as he was,
would have gone straight up to him with swift decision, if, before
entering the second room, a low but pitiful sob had not fallen on his
ear.
The sob proceeded from a slight young girl who came forward from a door
beyond the sitting-room, and who now placed a platter with a loaf on the
table by the steward.
"Come, do not cry, Selene," said the steward, breaking the bread slowly
and with an evident desire to soothe his child.
"How can I help crying," said the girl. "But tomorrow morning let me buy
a piece of meat for you; the physician forbade you to eat bread."
"Man must be filled," replied the fat man, "and meat is dear. I have nine
mouths to fill, not counting the slaves. And where am I to get the money
to fill us all with meat?"
"We need none, but for you it is necessary."
"It is of no use, child. The butcher will not trust us any more, the
other creditors press us, and at the end of the month we shall have just
ten drachmae left us."
The girl turned pale, and asked in anxiety:
"But, father, it was only to-day that you showed me the three gold pieces
which you said had been given you as a present out of the money
distributed on the arrival of the Empress."
The steward absently rolled a piece of bread-crumb between his fingers
and said:
"I spent that on this fibula with an incised onyx--and as cheap as dirt,
I can tell you. If Caesar comes he must see who and what I am; and if I
die any one will give you twice as much for it as I paid. I tell you the
Empress's money was well laid out on the thing." Selene made no answer,
but she sighed deeply, and her eye glanced at a quantity of useless
things which her father had acquired and brought home because they were
cheap, while she and her seven sisters wanted the most necessary things.
"Father," the girl began again after a short silence, "I ought not to go
on about it, but even if it vexes you, I must--the architect, who is
settling all the work out there, has sent for you twice already."
"Be silent!" shouted the fat man, striking his hand on the table. "Who is
this Pontius, and who am I!"
"You are of a noble Macedonian family, related perhaps even to the
Ptolemies; you have your seat in the Council of the Citizens--but do,
this time, be condescending and kind. The man has his hands full, he is
tired out."
"Nor have I been able to sit still the whole day, and what is fitting, is
fitting. I am Keraunus the son of Ptolemy, whose father came into Egypt
with Alexander the Great, and helped to found this city, and every one
knows it. Our possessions were diminished; but it is for that very reason
that I insist on our illustrious blood being recognized. Pontius sends to
command the presence of Keraunus! If it were not infuriating it would be
laughable--for who is this man, who? I have told you his father was a
freedman of the former prefect Claudius Balbillus, and by the favor of
the Roman his father rose and grew rich. He is the descendant of slaves,
and you expect that I shall be his obedient humble servant, whenever he
chooses to call me?"
But father, my dear father, it is not the son of Ptolemy, but the
palace-steward that he desires shall go to hire."
"Mere chop-logic!--you have nothing to say, not a step do I take to go to
him."
The girl clasped her hands over her face, and sobbed loudly and
pitifully. Keraunus started up and cried out, beside himself.
"By great Serapis. I can bear this no longer. What are you whimpering
about?"
The girl plucked up courage and going up to the indignant man she said,
though more than once interrupted by tears.
"You must go father--indeed you must. I spoke to the foreman, and he told
me coolly and decidedly that the architect was placed here in Caesar's
name, and that if you do not obey him you will at once be superseded in
your office. And if that were to happen, if that--O father, father, only
think of blind Helios and poor Berenice! Arsinoe and I could earn our
bread, but the little ones--the little ones."
With these words the girl fell on her knees lifting her hands in entreaty
to her obstinate parent. The blood had mounted to the man's face and
eyes, and pressing his hand to his purple forehead he sank back in his
chair as if stricken with apoplexy. His daughter sprang up and offered
him the cup full of wine and water which was standing on the table; but
Keraunus pushed it aside with his hands, and panted out, while he
struggled for breath:
"Supersede me--in my place--turn me out of this palace! Why there, in
that ebony trunk, lies the rescript of Euergetes which confers the
stewardship of this residence on my ancestor Philip, and as a hereditary
dignity in his family. Now Philip's wife had the honor of being the
king's mistress--or, as some say, his daughter. There lies the document,
drawn up in red and black ink on yellow papyrus and ratified with the
seal and signature of Euergetes the Second. All the princes of the
Lagides have confirmed it, all the Roman prefects have respected it, and
now--now."
"But father" said the girl interrupting her father, and wringing her
hands in despair, "you still hold the place and if you will only give
in."
"Give in, give in," shrieked the corpulent steward shaking his fat hands
above his blood-shot face. "I will give in--I will not bring you all to
misery--for my children's sake I will allow myself to be ill-treated and
down-trodden, I will go--I will go directly. Like the pelican I will feed
my children with my heart's blood. But you ought to know what it costs
me, to humiliate myself thus; it is intolerable to me, and my heart is
breaking--for the architect, the architect has trampled upon me as if I
were his servant; he wished--I heard him with these ears--he shrieked
after me a villainous hope that I might be smothered in my own fat--and
the physician has told me I may die of apoplexy! Leave me, leave me. I
know those Romans are capable of anything. Well--here I am; fetch me my
saffron-colored pallium, that I wear in the council, fetch me my gold
fillet for my head. I will deck myself like a beast for sacrifice, and I
will show him--"
Not a word of this harangue had escaped the ears of the architect who had
been at first indignant and then moved to laughter, and withal it had
touched his heart. A sluggish and torpid character was repugnant to his
vigorous nature, and the deliberate and indifferent demeanor of the stout
steward, on an occasion which had prompted him and all concerned to act
as quickly and energetically as possible, had brought words to his lips
which he now wished that he had never spoken. It is true that the
steward's false pride had roused his indignation, and who can listen
calmly to any comment on a stain on his birth? But the appeal of this
miserable father's daughter had gone to his heart. He pitied the fatuous
simpleton whom, with a turn of his hand, he could reduce to beggary, and
who had evidently been far more deeply hurt by his words than Pontius had
been by what he had overheard, and so he followed the kindly impulse of a
noble nature to spare the unfortunate.
He rapped loudly with his knuckles on the inside of the door-post of the
ante-room, coughed loudly, and then said, bowing deeply to the steward on
the threshold of the sitting-room:
"Noble Keraunus--I have come, as beseems me, to pay you my respects.
Excuse the lateness of the hour, but you can scarcely imagine how busy I
have been since we parted."
Keraunus had at first started at the late visitor, then he stared at him
in consternation. He now went towards him, stretched out both hands as if
suddenly relieved of a nightmare, and a bright expression of such warm
and sincere satisfaction overspread his countenance that Pontius wondered
how he could have failed to observe what a well-cut face this fat
original had.
"Take a seat at our humble table," said Keraunus. "Go Selene and call the
slaves. Perhaps there is yet a pheasant in the house, a roast fowl or
something of the kind--but the hour, it is true, is late."
"I am deeply obliged to you," replied the architect, smiling. "My supper
is waiting for me in the hall of the Muses, and I must return to my
work-people. I should be grateful to you if you would accompany me. We
must consult together as to the lighting of the rooms, and such matters
are best discussed over a succulent roast and a flask of wine."
"I am quite at your service," said Keraunus with a bow.
"I will go on ahead," said the architect, "but first will you have the
goodness to give all that you have in the way of cressets, lights and
lamps to the slaves, who, in a few minutes, shall await your orders at
your door."
When Pontius had departed, Selene exclaimed with a deep sigh
"Oh! what a fright I have had! I will go now and find the lamps. How
terribly it might have ended."
"It is well that he should have come," murmured Keraunus. "Considering
his birth and origin, the architect is certainly a well-bred man."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Facts are differently reflected in different minds
Have not yet learned not to be astonished
Ill-judgment to pronounce a thing impossible
Years are the foe of beauty
THE EMPEROR
By Georg Ebers
Volume 2.
CHAPTER V.
Pontius had gone to the steward's room, with a frowning brow, but it was
with a smile on his strongly-marked lips, and a brisk step that he
returned to his work-people. The foreman came to meet him with looks of
enquiry as he said. "The steward was a little offended and with reason;
but now we are capital friends and he will do what he can in the matter
of lighting."
In the hall of the Muses he paused outside the screen, behind which
Pollux was working, and called out:
"Friend sculptor, listen to me, it is high time to have supper."
"It is, indeed," replied Pollux, "else it will be breakfast."
"Then lay aside your tools for a quarter of an hour and help me and the
palace-steward to demolish the food that has been sent me."
"You will need no second assistant if Keraunus is there. Food melts
before him like ice before the sun."
"Then come and save him from an overloaded stomach."
"Impossible, for I am just now dealing most unmercifully with a bowl full
of cabbage and sausages. My mother had cooked that food of the gods and
my father has brought it in to his first-born son."
"Cabbage and sausages!" repeated the architect, and its tone betrayed
that his hungry stomach would fain have made closer acquaintance with the
savory mess.
"Come in here," continued Pollux, "and be my guest. The cabbage has
experienced the process which is impending over this palace--it has been
warmed up."
"Warmed-up cabbage is better than freshly-cooked, but the fire over which
we must try to make this palace enjoyable again, burns too hotly and must
be too vigorously stirred. The best things have been all taken out, and
cannot be replaced."
"Like the sausages, I have fished out of my cabbages," laughed the
sculptor. "After all I cannot invite you to be my guest, for it would be
a compliment to this dish if I were now to call it cabbage with sausages.
I have worked it like a mine, and now that the vein of sausages is nearly
exhausted, little remains but the native soil in which two or three
miserable fragments remain as memorials of past wealth. But my mother
shall cook you a mess of it before long, and she prepares it with
incomparable skill."
"A good idea, but you are my guest."
"I am replete."
"Then come and spice our meal with your good company."
"Excuse me, sir; leave me rather here behind my screen. In the first
place, I am in a happy vein, and on the right track; I feel that
something good will come of this night's work."
"And tomorrow--"
"Hear me out."
"Well."
"You would be doing your other guest an ill-service by inviting me."
"Do you know the steward then?"
"From my earliest youth, I am the son of the gatekeeper of the palace."
"Oh, ho! then you came from that pretty little lodge with the ivy and the
birds, and the jolly old lady."
"She is my mother--and the first time the butcher kills she will concoct
for you and me a dish of sausages and cabbage without an equal."
"A very pleasing prospect."
"Here comes a hippopotamus--on closer inspection Keraunus, the steward."
"Are you his enemy?"
"I, no; but he is mine--yes," replied Pollux. "It is a foolish story.
When we sup together don't ask me about it if you care to have a jolly
companion And do not tell Keraunus that I am here, it will lead to no
good."
"As you wish, and here are our lamps too."
"Enough to light the nether world," exclaimed Pollux, and waving his hand
to the architect in farewell he vanished behind the screens to devote
himself entirely to his model.
It was long past midnight, and the slaves who had set to work with much
zeal had finished their labors in the hall of the Muses. They were now
allowed to rest for some hours on straw that had been spread for them in
another wing of the building. The architect himself wished to take
advantage of this time to refresh himself by a short sleep, for the
exertions of the morrow, but between this intention and its fulfilment an
obstacle was interposed, the preposterous dimensions namely of his guest.
He had invited the steward on purpose to give him his fill of meat, and
Keraunus had shown himself amenable to encouragement in this respect. But
after the last dish bad been removed the steward thought that good
manners demanded that he should honor his entertainer by his illustrious
presence, and at the same time the prefect's good wine loosened the
tongue of the man, who was not usually communicative.
First he spoke of the manifold infirmities which tormented him and
endangered his life, and when Pontius, to divert his talk into other
channels, was so imprudent as to allude to the Council of Citizens,
Keraunus gave full play to his eloquence, and, while he emptied cup after
cup of wine, tried to lay down the reasons which had made him and his
friends decide on staking everything in order to deprive the members of
the extensive community of Jews in the city of their rights as citizens,
and to expel them, if possible, from Alexandria. So warm was his zeal
that he totally forgot the presence of the architect, and his humble
origin, and declared to be indispensable, that even the descendants of
freed-slaves should be disenfranchised.
Pontius saw in the steward's inflamed eyes and cheeks that it was the
wine which spoke within him, and he made no answer; and determined that
the rest he needed should not be thus abridged, he rose from table and
briefly excusing himself he retired to the room in which the couch had
been prepared for him. After he had undressed he desired his slave to see
what Keraunus was about, and soon received the reassuring information
that the steward was fast asleep and snoring.
"Only listen," said the slave, to confirm his report. "You can hear him
grunting and snuffing as far as this. I pushed a cushion under his head,
for otherwise, so full as he is, the stout gentleman might come to some
harm."
Love is a plant which springs up for many who have never sown it, and
grows into a spreading tree for many who have neither fostered nor tended
it. How little had Keraunus ever done to win the heart of his daughter,
how much on the contrary which could not fail to overshadow and trouble
her young life. And yet Selene, whose youth--for she was but
nineteen--needed repose and to whom the evening with the reprieve of
sleep brought more pleasure than the morning with its load of cares and
labor, sat by the three-branched lamp and watched, and tormented herself
more and more as it grew later and later, at her father's long absence.
About a week before the strong man had suddenly lost consciousness; only,
it is true, for a few minutes, and the physician had told her that though
he appeared to be in superabundant health, the attack indicated that he
must follow his prescriptions strictly and avoid all kinds of excess. A
single indiscretion, he had declared, might swiftly and suddenly cut the
thread of his existence. After her father had gone out in obedience to
the architect's invitation, Selene had brought out her youngest brothers'
and sisters' garments, in order to mend them. Her sister Arsinoe, who was
her junior by two years, and whose fingers were as nimble as her own,
might indeed have helped her, but she had gone to bed early and was
sleeping by the children who could not be left untended at night. Her
female slave, who had been in her grandmother's service, ought to have
assisted her; but the old half-blind negress saw even worse by lamp-light
than by daylight, and after a few stitches could do no more. Selene sent
her to bed and sat down alone to her work.
For the first hour she sewed away without looking up, considering,
meanwhile, how she could best contrive to support the family till the end
of the month on the few drachmae she could dispose of. As it got later
she grew wearier and wearier, but still she sat at the work, though her
pretty head often sank upon her breast. She must await her father's
return, for a potion prepared by the physician stood waiting for him, and
she feared he would forget it if she did not remind him.
By the end of the second hour sleep overcame her, and she felt as if the
chair she was sitting on was giving way under her, and as if it was
sinking at first slowly and then quicker and quicker, into a deep abyss
that opened beneath her. Looking up for help in her dream, she could see
nothing but her father's face, which looked aside with indifference. As
her dream went on she called him and called him again, but for a long
time he did not seem to hear her. At last he looked down at her and when
he perceived her he smiled, but instead of helping her he picked up
stones and clods from the edge of the gulf and threw them on her hands
with which she had clutched the brambles and roots that grew out of the
rift of the rocks. She entreated him to cease, implored him, shrieked to
him to spare her, but not a muscle moved in the face above her; it seemed
set in a vacant smile, and even his heart was dead too, for he ruthlessly
flung down now a pebble, now a clod, one after the other, till her hands
were losing their last feeble hold and she was on the point of falling
into the fatal gulf below. Her own cry of terror aroused her, but during
the brief process of returning from her dream to actuality, she saw
through swiftly parting mists--only for an instant, and yet quite
plainly--the tall grass of a meadow, spangled with ox-eye daisies, white
and gold, with violet-hued blue bells and scarlet poppies, among which
she was lying--as in a soft green bed, while near the sward lay a
sparkling blue lake and behind it rose beautiful swelling hills, with red
cliffs, and green groves, and meadows bright in the clear sunshine. A
clear sky, across which a soft breeze gently blew light silvery flakes of
cloud, bent over the lovely but fleeting picture, which she could not
compare with anything she had ever seen near her own home.
She had only slept for a short time, but when, once more thoroughly
awake, she rubbed her eyes, she thought her dream must have lasted for
hours.
One flame of the three-branched lamp had flickered into extinction and
the wick of another was beginning to waste. She hastily put it out with a
pair of tongs that hung by a chain, and then after pouring fresh oil into
the lamp that was still burning she carried the light into her father's
sleeping room.
He had not yet returned. She was seized with a mortal terror. Had the
architect's wine bereft him of his senses? Had he on his way back to his
rooms been seized with a fresh attack of giddiness? In spirit she saw the
heavy man incapable of raising himself, dying perhaps where he had
fallen.
No choice remained to her; she must go at once to the hall of the Muses
and see what had happened to her father, pick him up, give him help
or--if he still were feasting--endeavor to tempt him back by any excuse
she could find. Everything was at stake; her father's life and with it
maintenance and shelter for eight helpless creatures.
The December night was stormy, a keen and bitter wind blew through the
ill-closed opening in the roof of the room as Selene, before she began
her expedition, tied a handkerchief over her head and threw over her
shoulders a white mantle which had been worn by her dead mother. In the
long corridor which lay between her father's rooms and the front portion
of the palace, she had to screen the flickering light of the little lamp
with her left hand, carrying it in her right; the flame blown about by
the draught and her own figure were mirrored here and there in the
polished surface of the dark marble. The thick sandals she had tied on to
her feet roused loud echoes in the empty rooms as they fell on the stone
pavements, and terror possessed Selene's anxious soul. Her fingers
trembled as they held the lamp and her heart beat audibly as, with bated
breath, she went through the cupolaed hall in which Ptolemy Euergetes
'the fat' was said, some years ago, to have murdered his own son, and in
which even a deep breath roused an echo.
But even in this room she did not forget to look to the right and left
for her father. She breathed a sigh of relief when she perceived a streak
of light which shone through the gaping rift of a cracked side-door of
the hall of the Muses and fell in a broken reflection on the floor and
the wall of the last room through which she had to pass. She now entered
the large hall which was dimly lighted by the lamps behind the sculptor's
screen, and by several tapers, now burnt down low. These were standing on
a table knocked together out of blocks of wood and planks at the extreme
end of the hall, and behind this her father was sound asleep.
The deep notes brought out of the sleeper's broad chest, were echoed in a
very uncanny way from the bare walls of the vast empty room, and she was
frightened by them and still more by the long black shadows of the
pillars, that lay, like barriers, across her path. She stood listening in
the middle of the hall and soon recognized in the alarming tones a sound
that was only too familiar. Without a moment's hesitation she started to
run, and hastened to the sleeper, shook him, pushed him, called him,
sprinkled his forehead with water, and appealed to him by the tenderest
names with which her sister Arsinoe was wont to coax him. When, in spite
of all this, he neither spoke nor stirred, she flung the full light of
the lamp on his face. Then she thought she perceived that a bluish tinge
had overspread his bloated features, and she broke into the deep,
agonized, weeping which, a few hours previously had touched the
architect's heart.
There was a sudden stir behind the screens which enclosed the sculptor
and the work in progress. Pollux had been working for a long time with
zeal and pleasure, but at last the steward's snoring had begun to disturb
him. The body of the Muse had already taken a definite form and he could
begin to work out the head with the earliest dawn of day. He now dropped
his arms wearily, for as soon as he ceased to create with his whole heart
and mind he felt tired, and saw plainly that without a model he could do
nothing satisfactory with the drapery of his Urania. So he pulled his
stool up to a great chest full of gypsum to get a little repose by
leaning against it.
But sleep avoided the artist who was too much excited by his rapid
night's work, and as soon as Selene opened the door he sat upright and
peeped through an opening between the frames of his place of retirement.
When he saw the tall draped figure in whose hand a lamp was trembling,
when he watched her cross the spacious hall, and then suddenly stand
still, he was not a little startled, but this did not hinder him from
noting every step of the nocturnal spectre with far more curiosity than
alarm. Then, when Selene looked round her, and the lamp illuminated her
face, be recognized the steward's daughter, and immediately knew what she
must be seeking.
Her vain attempts to rouse the sleeper, though somewhat pathetic, had in
them at the same time something irresistibly ludicrous, and Pollux felt
sorely tempted to laugh. But as soon as Selene began to weep so bitterly
he hastily pushed apart two of the laths of the screen, went up and
called her name, at first softly not to frighten her, and then more
loudly. When she turned her head he begged her warmly not to be alarmed
far he was no ghost, only a very humble and ordinary mortal, in fact-as
she might see--nothing more, alas! than the son of Euphorian, the
gate-keeper, good for nothing as yet, but treading the path to something
better.
"You, Pollux?" asked the girl with surprise.
"The very man. But you--can I help you?"
"My poor father," sobbed Selene. "He does not stir, he is immovable--and
his face--oh! merciful gods."
"A man who snores is not dead," said the sculptor. "But the doctor told
him--"
"He is not even ill! Pontius only gave him stronger wine to drink than he
is used to. Let him be; he is sleeping with the pillow under his neck, as
comfortably as a child. When he began just now to trumpet a little too
loud I whistled as loud as a plover, for that often silences a snorer;
but I could more easily have made those stone Muses dance than have
roused him."
"If only we could get him to bed."
"Well, if you have four horses at hand."
"You are as bad as you ever were!"
"A little less so, Selene, only you must become accustomed again to my
way of speaking. This time I only mean that we two together are not
strong enough to carry him away."
"But what can I do, then? The doctor said--"
"Never mind the doctor. The complaint your father is suffering from is
one I know well. It will be gone to-morrow, perhaps by sundown, and the
only pain it will leave behind, he will feel under his wig. Only leave
him to sleep."
"But it is so cold here."
"Take my cloak and cover him with that."
"Then you will be frozen."
"I am used to it. How long has Keraunus had dealings with the doctor?"
Selene related the accident that had befallen her father and how
justified were her fears. The sculptor listened to her in silence and
then said in a quite altered tone:
"I am truly sorry to hear it. Let us put some cold water on his forehead,
and until the slaves come back again I will change the wet cloth every
quarter of an hour. Here is a jar and a handkerchief--good, they might
have been left on purpose. Perhaps, too, it will wake him, and if not the
people shall carry him to his own rooms."
"Disgraceful, disgraceful!" sighed the girl.
"Not at all; the high-priest of Serapis even is sometimes unwell. Only
let me see to it."
"It will excite him afresh if he sees you. He is so angry with you--so
very angry."
"Omnipotent Zeus, what harm have I done you, fat father! The gods forgive
the sins of the wise, and a man will not forgive the fault committed by a
stupid lad in a moment of imprudence."
"You mocked at him."
"I set a clay head that was like him on the shoulders of the fat Silenus
near the gate, that had lost its own head. It was my first piece of
independent work."
"But you did it to vex my father."
"Certainly not, Selene; I was delighted with the joke and nothing more."
"But you knew how touchy he is."
"And does a wild boy of fifteen ever reflect on the consequences of his
audacity? If he had but given me a thrashing his annoyance would have
discharged itself like thunder and lightning, and the air would have been
clear again. But, as it was, he cut the face off the work with a knife,
and deliberately trod the pieces under foot as they lay on the ground. He
gave me one single blow--with his thumb--which I still feel, it is true,
and then he treated me and my parents with such scorn, so coldly and
hardly, with such bitter contempt--"
"He never is really violent, but wrath seems to eat him inwardly, and I
have rarely seen him so angry as he was that time."
"But if he had only settled the account with me on the spot! but my
father was by, and hot words fell like rain, and my mother added her
share, and from that time there has been utter hostility between our
little house and you up here. What hurt me most was that you and your
sister were forbidden to come to see us and to play with me."
"That has spoilt many pleasant hours for me, too."
"It was nice when we used to dress up in my father's theatrical finery
and cloaks."
"And when you made us dolls out of clay.".
"Or when we performed the Olympian games."
"I was always the teacher when we played at school with our little
brothers and sisters."
"Arsinoe gave you most trouble."
"Oh! and what fun when we went fishing!"
"And when we brought home the fishes and mother gave us meal and raisins
to cook them."
"Do you remember the festival of Adonis, and how I stopped the runaway
horse of that Numidian officer?"
"The horse had knocked over Arsinoe, and when we got home mother gave you
an almond-cake."
"And your ungrateful sister bit a great piece out of it and left me only
a tiny morsel. Is Arsinoe as pretty as she promised to become? It is two
years since I last saw her; at our place we never have time to leave work
till it is dark. For eight months I had to work for the master at
Ptolemais, and often saw the old folks but once in the month."
"We go out very little, too, and we are not allowed to go into your
parents' house. My sister--"
"Is she pretty?"
"Yes, I think she is. Whenever she can get hold of a piece of ribbon she
plaits it in her hair, and the men in the street turn round to look at
her. She is sixteen now."
"Sixteen! What, little Arsinoe! Why, how long then is it since your
mother died?"
"Four years and eight months."
"You remember the date very exactly; such a mother is not easily
forgotten, indeed. She was a good woman and a kinder I never met. I know,
too, that she tried to mollify your father's feeling, but she could not
succeed, and then she need must die!"
"Yes," said Selene gloomily. "How could the gods decree it! They are
often more cruel than the hardest hearted man."
"Your poor little brothers and sisters!"
The girl bowed her head sadly and Pollux stood for some time with his
eyes fixed on the ground. Then he raised his head and exclaimed:
"I have something for you that will please you."
"Nothing ever pleases me now she is dead."
"Yes, yes indeed," replied the young sculptor eagerly. "I could not
forget the good soul, and once in my idle moments I modelled her bust
from memory. To-morrow I will bring it to you."
"Oh!" cried Selene, and her large heavy eyes brightened with a sunny
gleam.
"Now, is not it true, you are pleased?"
"Yes indeed, very much. But when my father learns that it is you who have
given me the portrait--"
"Is he capable of destroying it?"
"If he does not destroy it, he will not suffer it in the house as soon as
he knows that you made it." Pollux took the handkerchief from the
steward's head, moistened it afresh, and exclaimed as he rearranged it on
the forehead of the sleeping man:
"I have an idea. All that matters is that my bust should serve to remind
you often of your mother; the bust need not stand in your rooms. The
busts of the women of the house of Ptolemy stand on the rotunda, which
you can see from your balcony, and which you can pass whenever you
please; some of them are badly mutilated and must be got rid of. I will
undertake to restore the Berenice and put your mother's head on her
shoulders. Then you have only to go out and look at her. Will that do?"
"Yes, Pollux; you are a good man."
"So I told you just now. I am beginning to improve. But time--time! if I
am to undertake to repair Berenice I must begin by saving the minutes."
"Go back to your work now; I know how to apply a wet compress only too
well."
With these words Selene threw back her mantle over her shoulders so as to
leave her hands free for use, and stood with her slender figure, her pale
face, and the fine broadly-flowing folds of rich stuff, like a statue in
the eyes of the young sculptor.
"Stop--stay so--just so," cried Pollux to the astonished girl, so loudly
and eagerly that she was startled.
"Your cloak hangs with a wonderfully-free flow from your shoulders--in
the name of all the gods do not touch it. If only I might model from it I
should in a few minutes gain a whole day for our Berenice. I will wet the
handkerchief at intervals in the pauses." Without waiting for Selene's
answer the sculptor hastened into his nook and returned first with one of
the lamps he worked by in each hand, and some small tools in his mouth,
and then fetched his wax model which he placed on the outer side of the
table, behind which the steward was sleeping. The tapers were put out,
the lamps pushed aside, and raised or lowered, and when at last a
tolerably suitable light was procured Pollux threw himself on a stool,
straddled his legs, craned his head forward as far as his neck would
allow, looking, with his hooked nose, like a vulture that strives to
descry his distant prey-cast his eyes down, raised them again to take in
something fresh, and after a long gaze looked down again while his
fingers and nails moved over the surface of the wax-figure, sinking into
the plastic material, applying new pieces to apparently complete
portions, removing others with a decided nip and rounding them off with
bewildering rapidity to use them for a fresh purpose.
He seemed to be seized with cramp in his hands, but still under his
knotted brow his eye shone earnest, resolute and calm, and yet full of
profound and speechless inspiration. Selene had said not a word that
permitted his using her as a model; but, as if his enthusiasm was
infectious, she remained motionless, and when, as he worked, his gaze met
hers she could detect the stern earnestness which at this moment
possessed her eager companion.
Neither of them opened their lips for some time. At last he stood back
from his work, stooping low to look first at Selene and then at his
statuette with keen examination from head to foot; and then, drawing a
deep breath, and rubbing the wax over with his finger, he said:
"There, that is how it must go! Now I will wet your father's handkerchief
and then we can go on again. If you are tired you can rest."
She availed herself but little of this permission and presently he began
work again. As he proceeded carefully to replace some folds of her
drapery which had fallen out of place, she moved her foot as if to draw
back, but he begged her earnestly to stand still and she obeyed his
request.
Pollux now used his fingers and modelling tools more calmly; his gaze was
less wistful and he began to talk again.
"You are very pale," he said. "To be sure the lamp-light and a sleepless
night have something to do with it."
"I look just the same by daylight, but I am not ill."
"I thought Arsinoe would have been like your mother, but now I see many
features of her face in yours again. The oval of their form is the same
and, in both, the line of the nose runs almost straight to the forehead;
you have her eyes and the same bend of the brow, but your mouth is
smaller and more sharply cut, and she could hardly have made such a heavy
knot of her hair. I fancy, too, that yours is lighter than hers."
"As a girl she must have had still more hair, and perhaps she may have
been as fair as I was--I am brown now."
"Another thing you inherit from her is that your hair, without being
curly, lies upon your head in such soft waves."
"It is easy to keep in order."
"Are not you taller than she was?"
"I fancy so, but as she was stouter she looked shorter. Will you soon
have done?"
"You are getting tired of standing?"
"Not very."
"Then have a little more patience. Your face reminds me more and more of
our early years; I should be glad to see Arsinoe once more. I feel at
this moment as if time had moved backwards a good piece. Have you the
same feeling?"
Selene shook her head.
"You are not happy?"
"No."
"I know full well that you have very heavy duties to perform for your
age."
"Things go as they may."
"Nay, nay. I know you do not let things go haphazard. You take care of
your brothers and sisters like a mother."
"Like a mother!" repeated Selene, and she smiled a bitter negative.
"Of course a mother's love is a thing by itself, but your father and the
little ones have every reason to be satisfied with yours."
"The little ones are perhaps, and Helios who is blind, but Arsinoe does
what she can."
"You certainly are not content, I can hear it in your voice, and you used
formerly to be as merry and happy as your sister, though perhaps not so
saucy."
"Formerly--"
"How sadly that sounds! And yet you are handsome, you are young, and life
lies before you."
"But what a life!"
"Well, what?" asked the sculptor, and taking his hands from his work he
looked ardently at the fair pale girl before him and cried out fervently:
"A life which might be full of happiness and satisfied affection."
The girl shook her head in negation and answered coldly:
"'Love is joy,' says the Christian woman who superintends us at work in
the papyrus factory, and since my mother died I have had no love. I
enjoyed all my share of happiness once for all in my childhood, now I am
content if only we are spared the worst misfortunes. Otherwise I take
what each day brings, because I can not do otherwise. My heart is empty,
and if I ever feel anything keenly, it is dread. I have long since ceased
to expect any thing good of the future."
"Girl!" exclaimed Pollux. "Why, what has been happening to you? I do not
understand half of what you are saying. How came you in the papyrus
factory?"
"Do not betray me," begged Selene. "If my father were to hear of it."
"He is asleep, and what you confide to me no one will ever hear of
again."
"Why should I conceal it? I go every day with Arsinoe for two hours to
the manufactory, and we work there to earn a little money."
"Behind your father's back?"
"Yes, he would rather that we should starve than allow it. Every day I
feel the same loathing for the deceit; but we could not get on without
it, for Arsinoe thinks of nothing but herself, plays draughts with my
father, curls his hair, plays with the children as if they were dolls,
but it is my part to take care of them."
"And you, you say, have no share of love. Happily no one believes you,
and I least of all. Only lately my mother was telling me about you, and I
thought you were a girl who might turn out just such a wife as a woman
ought to be."
"And now?"
"Now, I know it for certain."
"You may be mistaken."
"No, no! your name is Selene, and you are as gentle as the kindly
moonlight; names, even, have their significance."
"And my blind brother who has never even seen the light is called
Helios!" answered the girl.
Pollux had spoken with much warmth, but Selene's last words startled him
and checked the effervescence of his feelings. Finding he did not answer
her bitter exclamation, she said, at first coolly, but with increasing
warmth:
"You are beginning to believe me, and you are right, for what I do for
the children is not done out of love, or out of kindness, or because I
set their welfare above my own. I have inherited my father's pride, and
it would be odious to me if my brothers and sisters went about in rags,
and people thought we were as poor and helpless as we really are. What is
most horrible to me is sickness in the house, for that increases the
anxiety I always feel and swallows up my last coin; the children must not
perish for want of it. I do not want to make myself out worse than I am;
it grieves me too to see them drooping. But nothing that I do brings me
happiness--at most it moderates my fears. You ask what I am afraid
of?--of everything, everything that can happen to me, for I have no
reason to look forward to anything good. When there is a knock, it may be
a creditor; when people look at Arsinoe in the street, I seem to see
dishonor lurking round her; when my father acts against the advice of the
physician I feel as if we were standing already roofless in the open
street. What is there that I can do with a happy mind? I certainly am not
idle, still I envy the woman who can sit with her hands in her lap and be
waited on by slaves, and if a golden treasure fell into my possession, I
would never stir a finger again, and would sleep every day till the sun
was high and make slaves look after my father and the children. My life
is sheer misery. If ever we see better days I shall be astonished, and
before I have got over my astonishment it will all be over."
The sculptor felt a cold chill, and his heart which had opened wide to
his old playfellow shrank again within him. Before he could find the
right words of encouragement which he sought, they heard in the hall,
where the workmen and slaves were sleeping, the blast of a trumpet
intended to awake them. Selene started, drew her mantle more closely
round her, begged Pollux to take care of her father, and to hide the
wine-jar which was standing near him from the work-people and then,
forgetting her lamp, she went hastily toward the door by which she had
entered. Pollux hurried after her to light the way and while he
accompanied her as far as the door of her rooms, by his warm and urgent
words which appealed wonderfully to her heart, he extracted from her a
promise to stand once more in her mantle as his model.
A quarter of an hour later the steward was safe in bed and still sleeping
soundly, while Pollux, who had stretched himself on a mattress behind his
screen, could not for a long time cease to think of the pale girl with
her benumbed soul. At last sleep overcame him too, and a sweet dream
showed him pretty little Arsinoe, who but for him must infallibly have
been killed by the Numidian's restive horse, taking away her sister
Selene's almond-cake and giving it to him. The pale girl submitted
quietly to the robbery and only smiled coldly and silently to herself.
CHAPTER VI.
Alexandria was in the greatest excitement.
The Emperor's visit now immediately impending had tempted the busy hive
of citizens away from the common round of life in which, day after
day,--swarming, hurrying, pushing each other on, or running each other
down--they raced for bread and for the means of filling their hours of
leisure with pleasures and amusements. The unceasing wheel of industry
to-day had pause in the factories, workshops, storehouses and courts of
justice, for all sorts and conditions of men were inspired by the same
desire to celebrate Hadrian's visit with unheard-of splendor. All that
the citizens could command of inventive skill, of wealth, and of beauty
was called forth to be displayed in the games and processions which were
to fill up a number of days. The richest of the heathen citizens had
undertaken the management of the pieces to be performed in the Theatre,
of the mock fight on the lake, and of the sanguinary games in the
Amphitheatre; and so great was the number of opulent persons that many
more were prepared to pay for smaller projects, for which there was no
opening. Nevertheless the arrangements for certain portions of the
procession, in which even the less wealthy were to take a share, the
erection of the building in the Hippodrome, the decorations in the
streets, and the preparations for entertaining the Roman visitors
absorbed sums so large that they seemed extravagant even to the prefect
Titianus, who was accustomed to see his fellow-officials in Rome squander
millions.
As the Emperor's viceroy it behoved him to give his assent to all that
was planned to feast his sovereign's eye and ear. On the whole, he left
the citizens of the great town free to act as they would; but he had,
more than once, to exert a decided opposition to their overdoing the
thing; for though the Emperor might be able to endure a vast amount of
pleasure, what the Alexandrians originally proposed to provide for him to
see and hear would have exhausted the most indefatigable human energy.
That which gave the greatest trouble, not merely to him, but also to the
masters of the revels chosen by the municipality, were the never-dormant
hostility between the heathen and the Jewish sections of the inhabitants,
and the processions, since no division chose to come last, nor would any
number be satisfied to be only the third or the fourth.
It was from a meeting, where his determined intervention had at last
brought all these preliminaries to a decision beyond appeal, that
Titianus proceeded to the Caesareum to pay the Empress the visit which
she expected of him daily. He was glad to have come to some conclusion,
at any rate provisionally, with regard to these matters, for six days had
slipped away since the works had been begun in the palace of Lochias, and
Hadrian's arrival was nearing rapidly.
He found Sabina, as usual, on her divan, but on this occasion the Empress
was sitting upright on her cushions. She seemed quite to have got over
the fatigues of the sea-voyage, and in token that she felt better she had
applied more red to her cheeks and lips than three days ago, and because
she was to receive a visit from the sculptors, Papias and Aristeas, she
had had her hair arranged as it was worn in the statue of Venus Victrix,
with whose attributes she had, five years previously--though not, it is
true, without some resistance--been represented in marble. When a copy of
this statue had been erected in Alexandria, an evil tongue had made a
speech which was often repeated among the citizens.
"This Aphrodite is triumphant to be sure, for all who see her make haste
to fly; she should be called Cypris the scatterer."
Titianus was still under the excitement of the embittered squabbles and
unpleasing exhibitions of character at which he had just been present
when he entered the presence of the Empress, whom he found in a small
room with no one but the chamberlain and a few ladies-in-waiting. To the
prefect's respectful inquiries after her health, she shrugged her
shoulders and replied:
"How should I be? If I said well it would not be true; if I said ill, I
should be surrounded with pitiful faces, which are not pleasant to look
at. After all we must endure life. Still, the innumerable doors in these
rooms will be the death of me if I am compelled to remain here long."
Titianus glanced at the two doors of the room in which the Empress was
sitting, and began to express his regrets at their bad condition, which
had escaped his notice; but Sabina interrupted him, saying:
"You men never do observe what hurts us women. Our Verus is the only man
who can feel and understand--who can divine it, as I might say. There are
five and thirty doors in my rooms! I had them counted-five and thirty! If
they were not old and made of valuable wood I should really believe they
had been made as a practical joke on me."
"Some of them might be supplemented with curtains."
"Oh! never mind--a few miseries, more or less in any life do not matter.
Are the Alexandrians ready at last with their preparations?"
"I am sure I hope so," said the prefect with a sigh. They are bent on
giving all that is their best; but in the endeavor to outvie each other
every one is at war with his neighbor, and I still feel the effects of
the odious wrangling which I have had to listen to for hours, and that I
have been obliged to check again and again with threats of 'I shall be
down upon you.'"
"Indeed," said the Empress with a pinched smile, as if she had heard some
thing that pleased her.
"Tell me something about your meeting. I am bored to death, for Verus,
Balbilla and the others have asked for leave of absence that they may go
to inspect the work doing at Lochias; I am accustomed to find that people
would rather be any where than with me. Can I wonder then that my
presence is not enough to enable a friend of my husband's to forget a
little annoyance--the impression left by some slight misunderstanding?
But my fugitives are a long time away; there must be a great deal that is
beautiful to be seen at Lochias."
The prefect suppressed his annoyance and did not express his anxiety lest
the architect and his assistants should be disturbed, but began in the
tone of the messenger in a tragedy:
"The first quarrel was fought over the order of the procession."
"Sit a little farther off," said Sabina pressing her jewelled right-hand
on her ear, as if she were suffering a pain in it. The prefect colored
slightly, but he obeyed the desire of Caesar's wife and went on with his
story, pitching his voice in a somewhat lower key than before:
"Well, it was about the procession, that the first breach of the peace
arose."
"I have heard that once already," replied the lady, yawning. "I like
processions."
"But," said the prefect, a man in the beginning of the sixties--and he
spoke with some irritation, "here as in Rome and every where else, where
they are not controlled by the absolute will of a single individual,
processions are the children of strife, and they bring forth strife, even
when they are planned in honor of a festival of Peace."
"It seems to annoy you that they should be organized in honor of
Hadrian?"
"You are in jest; it is precisely because I care particularly that they
should be carried out with all possible splendor, that I am troubling
myself about them in person, even as to details; and to my great
satisfaction I have been able even to subdue the most obstinate; still it
was scarcely my duty--"
"I fancied that you not only served the state but were my husband's
friend."
"I am proud to call myself so."
"Aye--Hadrian has many, very many friends since he has worn the purple.
Have you got over your ill temper Titianus? You must have become very
touchy. Poor Julia has an irritable husband!"
"She is less to be pitied than you think," said Titianus with dignity,
"for my official duties so entirely claim my time that she is not often
likely to know what disturbs me. If I have forgotten to dissimulate my
vexation before you, I beg you to pardon me, and to attribute it to my
zeal in securing a worthy reception for Hadrian."
"As if I had scolded you! But to return to your wife--as I understand she
shares the fate I endure. We poor women have nothing to expect from our
husbands, but the stale leavings that remain after business has absorbed
the rest! But your story--go on with your story."
"The worst moments I had at all were given me by the bad feeling of the
Jews towards the other citizens."
"I hate all these infamous sects--Jews, Christians or whatever they are
called! Do they dare to grudge their money for the reception of Caesar?"
"On the contrary Alabarchos, their wealthy chief, has offered to defray
all the cost of the Naumachia and his co-religionist Artemion."
"Well, take their money, take their money."
"The Greek citizens feel that they are rich enough to pay all the
expenses, which will amount to many millions of sesterces, and they wish
to exclude the Jews, if possible, from all the processions and games."
"They are perfectly right."
"But allow me to ask you whether it is just to prohibit half the
population of Alexandria doing honor to their Emperor!"
"Oh! Hadrian will, with pleasure, dispense with the honor. Our conquering
heroes have thought it redounded to their glory to be called Africanus,
Germanicus and Dacianus, but Titus refused to be called Judaicus when he
had destroyed Jerusalem."
"That was because he dreaded the remembrance of the rivers of blood which
had to be shed in order to break the fearfully obstinate resistance of
that nation. The besieged had to be conquered limb by limb, and finger by
finger, before they would make up their minds to yield."
"Again you are speaking half poetically, or have these people elected you
as their advocate?"
"I know them and make every effort to secure them justice, just as much
as any other citizen of this country which I govern in the name of the
Empire and of Caesar. They pay taxes as well as the rest of the
Alexandrians; nay more, for there are many wealthy men among them who are
honorably prominent in trade, in professions, learning and art, and I
therefore mete to them the same measure as to the other inhabitants of
this city. Their superstition offends me no more than that of the
Egyptians."
"But it really is above all measure. At Aelia Capitolina which Hadrian
had decorated with several buildings, they refused to sacrifice to the
statues of Zeus and Hera. That is to say they scorn to do homage to me
and my husband!"
"They are forbidden to worship any other divinity than their own God.
Aelia rose up on the very soil where their ruined Jerusalem had stood,
and the statues of which you speak stand in their holy places."
"What has that to do with us?"
"You know that even Caius--[Caligula]--could not reduce them by placing
his statue in the Holy of Holies of their temple; and Petronius, the
governor, had to confess that to subdue them meant to exterminate them."
"Then let them meet with the fate they deserve, let them be
exterminated!" cried Sabina.
"Exterminated?" asked the prefect. "In Alexandria they constitute nearly
half of the citizens, that is to say several hundred thousand of obedient
subjects, exterminated!"
"So many?" asked the Empress in alarm. "But that is frightful. Omnipotent
Jove! supposing that mass were to revolt against us! No one ever told me
of this danger. In Cyrenaica, and at Salamis in Cyprus, they killed their
fellow-citizens by thousands."
"They had been provoked to extremities and they were superior to their
oppressors in force."
"And in their own land one revolt after another is organized."
"By reason of the sacrifices of which we were speaking."
"Tinnius Rufus is at present the legate in Palestine. He has a horribly
shrill voice--but he looks like a man who will stand no trifling, and
will know how to quell the venomous brood."
"Possibly" replied Titianus. "But I fear that he will never attain his
end by mere severity; and if he should he will have depopulated his
province."
"There are already too many men in the empire."
"But never enough good and useful citizens."
"Outrageous contemners of the gods and useless citizens!"
"Here in Alexandria, where many have accommodated themselves to Greek
habits of life and thought, and where all have adopted the Greek tongue,
they are undoubtedly good citizens, and wholly devoted to Caesar."
"Do they take part in the rejoicings?"
"Yes, as far as the Greek citizens will allow them."
"And the arrangement of the water-fight?"
"That will not be given over to them, but Artemion will be permitted to
supply the wild beasts for the games in the Amphitheatre."
"And he was not avaricious about it?"
"So far from it that you will be astonished. The man must know the secret
of Midas, of turning stones into gold."
"And are there many like him among your Jews?"
"A good number."
"Then I wish that they would attempt a revolt, for if this led to the
destruction of the rich ones, their gold, at any rate, would remain."
"Meanwhile I will try and keep them alive, as being good rate-payers."
"And does Hadrian share your wish?"
"Without doubt."
"Your successor may perhaps bring him to another mind."
"He always acts according to his own judgment, and for the present I am
in office," answered Titianus haughtily.
"And may the God of the Jews long preserve you in it!" retorted Sabina
scornfully.
CHAPTER VII.
Before Titianus could open his lips to reply, the principal door of the
room was opened cautiously but widely, and the praetor Lucius Aurelius
Verus, his wife Domitia Lucilla, the young Balbilla and, last of all,
Annaeus Florus, the historian, entered. All four were in the best
spirits, and immediately after the preliminary greetings, were eager to
report what they had seen at Lochias; but Sabina waved silence with her
hand, and breathed out:
"No, no; not at present. I feel quite exhausted. This long waiting, and
then--my smelling-bottle, Verus. Leukippe, bring me a cup of water with
some fruit-syrup--but not so sweet as usual."
The Greek slave-girl hastened to execute this command, and the Empress,
as she waved an elegant bottle carved in onyx, under her nostrils, went
on:
"It is a little eternity--is it not, Titianus, that we have been
discussing state affairs? You all know how frank I am and that I cannot
be silent when I meet with perverse opinions. While you have been away I
have had much to hear and to say; it would have exhausted the strength of
the strongest. I only wonder you don't find me more worn out, for what
can be more excruciating for a woman, that to be obliged to enter the
lists for manly decisiveness against a man who is defending a perfectly
antagonistic view? Give me water, Leukippe."
While the Empress drank the syrup with tiny sips twitching her thin lips
over it, Verus went up to the prefect and asked him in an under tone:
"You were a long while alone with Sabina, cousin?"
"Yes," replied Titianus, and he set his teeth as he spoke and clenched his
fist so hard that the praetor could not misunderstand, and replied in a
low voice:
"She is much to be pitied, and particularly just now she has hours--"
"What sort of hours?" asked Sabina taking the cup from her lips.
"These," replied Verus quickly, "in which I am not obliged to occupy
myself in the senate or with the affairs of state. To whom do I owe them
but to you?"
With these words he approached the mature beauty, and taking the goblet
out of her hand with affectionate subservience, as a son might wait on
his honored and suffering mother, he gave it to the Greek slave. The
Empress bowed her thanks again and again to the praetor with much
affability, and then said, with a slight infusion of cheerfulness in her
tones:
"Well--and what is there to be seen at Lochias?"
"Wonderful things," answered Balbilla readily and clasping her little
hands.
"A swarm of bees, a colony of ants, have taken possession of the palace.
Hands black, white and brown--more than we could count, are busy there
and of all the hundreds of workmen which are astir there, not one got in
the way of another, for one little man orders and manages them all, just
as the prescient wisdom of the gods guides the stars through the
'gracious and merciful night' so that they may never push or run against
each other."
"I must put in a word on behalf of Pontius the architect," interposed
Verus. "He is a man of at least average height."
"Let us admit it to satisfy your sense of justice," returned Balbilla.
"Let us admit it--a man of average height, with a papyrus-roll in his
right-hand and a stylus in the left, controls them. Now, does my way of
stating it please you better?"
"It can never displease me," answered the praetor. "Let Balbilla go on
with her story," commanded the Empress.
"What we saw was chaos," continued the girl, "still in the confusion we
could divine the elements of an orderly creation in the future; nay, it
was even visible to the eye."
"And not unfrequently stumbled over with the foot," laughed the praetor.
"If it had been dark, and if the laborers had been worms, we must have
trodden half of them to death--they swarmed so all over the pavement."
"What were they doing?"
"Every thing," answered Balbilla quickly. "Some were polishing damaged
pieces, others were laying new bits of mosaic in the empty places from
which it had formerly been removed, and skilled artists were painting
colored figures on smooth surfaces of plaster. Every pillar and every
statue was built round with a scaffolding reaching to the ceiling on
which men were climbing and crowding each other just as the sailors climb
into the enemy's ships in the Naumachia."
The girl's pretty cheeks had flushed with her eager reminiscence of what
she had seen, and, as she spoke, moving her hands with expressive
gestures, the tall structure of curls which crowned her small head shook
from side to side.
"Your description begins to be quite poetical," said the Empress,
interrupting her young companion. "Perhaps the Muse may even inspire you
with verse."
"All the Pierides," said the praetor, "are represented at Lochias. We saw
eight of them, but the ninth, that patroness of the arts, who protects
the stargazer, the lofty Urania, has at present, in place of a
head--allow me to leave it to you to guess divine Sabina?"
"Well--what?"
"A wisp of straw."
"Alas," sighed the Empress. "What do you say, Florus? Are there not among
your learned and verse spinning associates certain men who resemble this
Urania?"
"At any rate," replied Florus, "we are more prudent than the goddess, for
we conceal the contents of our heads in the hard nut of the skull, and
under a more or less abundant thatch of hair. Urania displays her straw
openly."
"That almost sounds," said Balbilla laughing and pointing to her abundant
locks, "as if I especially needed to conceal what is covered by my hair."
"Even the Lesbian swan was called the fair-haired," replied Florus.
"And you are our Sappho," said the praetor's wife, drawing the girl's arm
to her bosom.
"Really! and will you not write in verse all that you have seen to-day?"
asked the Empress.
Balbilla looked down on the ground a minute and then said brightly: "It
might inspire me, everything strange that I meet with prompts me to write
verse."
"But follow the counsel of Apollonius the philologer," advised Florus.
"You are the Sappho of our day, and therefore you should write in the
ancient Aeolian dialect and not Attic Greek." Verus laughed, and the
Empress, who never was strongly moved to laughter, gave a short sharp
giggle, but Balbilla said eagerly:
"Do you think that I could not acquire it and do so? To-morrow morning I
will begin to practise myself in the old Aeolian forms."
"Let it alone," said Domitia Lucilla; "your simplest songs are always the
prettiest."
"No one shall laugh at me!" declared Balbilla pertinaciously. "In a few
weeks I will know how to use the Aeolian dialect, for I can do anything I
am determined to do--anything, anything."
"What a stubborn little head we have under our curls!" exclaimed the
Empress, raising a graciously threatening finger.
"And what powers of apprehension," added Florus.
"Her master in language and metre told me his best pupil was a woman of
noble family and a poetess besides--Balbilla in short."
The girl colored at the words, and said with pleased excitement:
"Are you flattering me or did Hephaestion really say that?"
"Woe is me!" cried the praetor, "for Hephaestion was my master too, and I
am one of the masculine scholars beaten by Balbilla. But it is no news to
me, for the Alexandrian himself told me the same thing as Florus."
"You follow Ovid and she Sappho," said Florus; "you write in Latin and
she in Greek. Do you still always carry Ovid's love-poems about with
you?"
"Always," replied Verus, "as Alexander did his Homer."
"And out of respect for his master your husband endeavors, by the grace
of Venus, to live like him," added Sabina, addressing herself to Domitia
Lucilla.
The tall and handsome Roman lady only shrugged her shoulders slightly in
answer to this not very kindly-meant speech; but Verus said, while he
picked up Sabina's silken coverlet, and carefully spread it over her
knees:
"My happiest fortune consists in this: that Venus Victrix favors me. But
we are not yet at the end of our story; our Lesbian swan met at Lochias
with another rare bird, an artist in statuary."
"How long have the sculptors been reckoned among birds?" asked Sabina.
"At the utmost can they be compared to woodpeckers."
"When they work in wood," laughed Verus. "Our artist, however, is an
assistant of Papias, and handles noble materials in the grand style. On
this occasion, however, he is building a statue out of a very queer
mixture of materials."
"Verus may very well call our new acquaintance a bird," interrupted
Balbilla, "for as we approached the screen behind which he is working he
was whistling a tune with his lips, so pure and cheery, and loud, that it
rang through the empty hall above all the noise of the workmen. A
nightingale does not pipe more sweetly. We stood still to listen till the
merry fellow, who had no idea that we were by, was silent again; and then
hearing the architect's voice, he called to him over the screen. 'Now we
must clap Urania's head on; I saw it clearly in my mind and would have
had it finished with a score of touches, but Papias said he had one in
the workshop. I am curious to see what sort of a sugarplum face, turned
out by the dozen, he will stick on my torso--which will please me, at any
rate, for a couple of days. Find me a good model for the bust of the
Sappho I am to restore. A thousand gadflies are buzzing in my brain--I am
so tremendously excited! What I am planning now will come to something!'"
Balbilla, as she spoke the last words, tried to mimic a man's deep voice,
and seeing the Empress smile she went on eagerly.
"It all came out so fresh, from a heart full to bursting of happy
vigorous creative joy, that it quite fired me, and we all went up to the
screen and begged the sculptor to let us see his work."
"And you found?" asked Sabina.
"He positively refused to let us into his retreat," replied the praetor;
"but Balbilla coaxed the permission out of him, and the tall young fellow
seems to have really learnt something. The fall of the drapery that
covers the Muse's figure is perfectly thought out with reference to
possibility--rich, broadly handled, and at the same time of surprising
delicacy. Urania has drawn her mantle closely round her, as if to protect
herself from the keen night-air while gazing at the stars. When he has
finished his Muse, he is to repair some mutilated busts of women; he was
fixing the head of a finished Berenice to-day, and I proposed to him to
take Balbilla as the model for his Sappho."
"A good idea" said the Empress. "If the bust is successful I will take
him with me to Rome."
"I will sit to him with pleasure," said the girl. "The bright young
fellow took my fancy."
"And Balbilla his," added the praetor's wife; he gazed at her as a
marvel, and she promised him that, with your permission, she would place
her face at his disposal for three hours to-morrow."
"He begins with the head," interposed Verus. "What a happy man is an
artist such as he! He may turn about her head, or lay her peplum in folds
without reproof or repulse, and to-day when we had to get past bogs of
plaster, and lakes of wet paint, she scarcely picked up the hem of her
dress, and never once allowed me--who would so willingly have supported
her--to lift her over the worst places."
Balbilla reddened and said angrily:
"Really Verus, in good earnest, I will not allow you to speak to me in
that way, so now you know it once for all; I have so little liking for
what is not clean that I find it quite easy to avoid it without
assistance."
"You are too severe," interrupted the Empress with a hideous smile. "Do
not you think Domitia Lucilla, that she ought to allow your husband to be
of service to her?"
"If the Empress thinks it right and fitting," replied the lady raising
her shoulders, and with an expressive movement of her hands. Sabina quite
took her meaning, and suppressing another yawn she said angrily:
"In these days we must be indulgent toward a husband who has chosen
Ovid's amatory poems as his faithful companion. What is the matter
Titianus?"
While Balbilla had been relating her meeting with the sculptor Pollux, a
chamberlain had brought in to the prefect an important letter, admitting
of no delay. The state official had withdrawn to the farther side of the
room with it, had broken the strong seal and had just finished reading
it, when the Empress asked her question.
Nothing of what went on around her escaped Sabina's little eyes, and she
had observed that while the governor was considering the document
addressed to him he had moved uneasily. It must contain something of
importance.
"An urgent letter," replied Titianus, "calls me home. I must take my
leave, and I hope ere long to be able to communicate to you something
agreeable."
"What does that letter contain?"
"Important news from the provinces," said Titianus.
"May I inquire what?"
"I grieve to say that I must answer in the negative. The Emperor
expressly desired that this matter should be kept secret. Its settlement
demands the promptest haste, and I am therefore unfortunately obliged to
quit you immediately."
Sabina returned the prefect's parting salutations with icy coldness and
immediately desired to be conducted to her private rooms to dress herself
for supper.
Balbilla escorted her, and Florus betook himself to the "Olympian table,"
the famous eating-house kept by Lycortas, of whom he had been told
wonders by the epicures at Rome.
When Verus was alone with his wife he went up in a friendly manner and
said:
"May I drive you home again?"
Domitia Lucilla had thrown herself on a couch, and covered her face with
her hands, and she made no reply. "May I?" repeated the praetor. As his
wife persisted in her silence, he went nearer to her, laid his hand on
her slender fingers that concealed her face, and said:
"I believe you are angry with me!" She pushed away his hand, with a
slight movement, and said: "Leave me."
"Yes, unfortunately I must leave you. Business takes me into the city and
I will--"
"You will let the young Alexandrians, with whom you revelled through the
night, introduce you to new fair ones--I know it."
"There are in fact women here of incredible charm," replied Verus quite
coolly. White, brown, copper-colored, black--and all delightful in their
way. I could never be tired of admiring them."
"And your wife?" asked Lucilla, facing him, sternly. "My wife? yes, my
fairest. Wife is a solemn title of honor and has nothing to do with the
joys of life. How could I mention your name in the same hour with those
of the poor children who help me to beguile an idle hour."
Domitia Lucilla was used to such phrases, and yet on this occasion they
gave her a pang. But she concealed it, and crossing her arms she said
resolutely and with dignity:
"Go your way--through life with your Ovid, and your gods of love, but do
not attempt to crush innocence under the wheels of your chariot."
"Balbilla do you mean," asked the praetor with a loud laugh. "She knows
how to take care of herself and has too much spirit to let herself get
entangled in erotics. The little son of Venus has nothing to say to two
people who are such good friends as she and I are."
"May I believe you?"
"My word for it, I ask nothing of her but a kind word," cried he, frankly
offering his hand to his wife. Lucilla only touched it lightly with her
fingers and said:
"Send me back to Rome. I have an unutterable longing to see my children,
particularly the boys."
"It cannot be," said Verus. "Not at present; but in a few weeks, I hope."
"Why not sooner?"
"Do not ask me."
"A mother may surely wish to know why she is separated from her baby in
the cradle."
"That cradle is at present in your mother's house, and she is taking care
of our little ones. Have patience, a little longer for that which I am
striving after, for you, and for me, and not last, for our son, is so
great, so stupendously great and difficult that it might well outweigh
years of longing."
Verus spoke the last words in a low tone, but with a dignity which
characterized him only in decisive moments, but his wife, even before he
had done speaking, clasped his right-hand in both of hers and said in a
low frightened voice:
"You aim at the purple?" He nodded assent.
"That is what it means then!"
"What?"
"Sabina and you--"
"Not on that account only; she is hard and sharp to others, but to me she
has shown nothing but kindness, ever since I was a boy."
"She hates me."
"Patience, Lucilla; patience! The day is coming when the daughter of
Nigrinus, the wife of Caesar, and the former Empress--but I will not
finish. I am, as you know, warmly attached to Sabina, and sincerely wish
the Emperor a long life."
"And he will adopt."
"Hush!--he is thinking of it, and his wife wishes It."
"Is it likely to happen soon?"
"Who can tell at this moment what Caesar may decide on in the very next
hour. But probably his decision may be made on the thirtieth of
December."
"Your birthday."
"He asked what day it was, and he is certainly casting my horoscope, for
the night when my mother bore me--"
"The stars then are to seal our fate?"
"Not they alone. Hadrian must also be inclined to read them in my favor."
"How can I be of use to you?"
"Show yourself what you really are in your intercourse with the Emperor"
"I thank you for those words--and I beg you do not provoke me any more.
If it might yet be something more than a mere post of honor to be the
wife of Verus, I would not ask for the new dignity of becoming wife to
Caesar."
"I will not go into the town to-day; I will stay with you. Now are you
happy?"
"Yes, yes," cried she, and she raised her arm to throw it round her
husband's neck, but he held her aside and whispered:
"That will do. The idyllic is out of place in the race for the purple."
CHAPTER VIII.
Titianus had ordered his charioteer to drive at once to Lochias. The road
led past the prefect's palace, his residence on the Bruchiom, and he
paused there; for the letter which lay hidden in the folds of his toga,
contained news, which, within a few hours, might put him under the
necessity of not returning home till the following morning. Without
allowing himself to be detained by the officials, subalterns, or lictors,
who were awaiting his return to make communications, or to receive his
orders, he went straight through the ante-room and the large public rooms
for men, to find his wife in the women's apartments which looked upon the
garden. He met her at the door of her room, for she had heard his step
approaching and came out to receive him.
"I was not mistaken," said the matron with sincere pleasure. "How
pleasant that you have been released so early to-day. I did not expect
you till supper was over."
"I have come only to go again," replied Titianus, entering his wife's
room. "Have some bread brought to me and a cup of mixed wine;
why--really! here stands all I want ready as if I had ordered it. You are
right, I was with Sabina a shorter time than usual; but she exerted
herself in that short time to utter as many sour words as if we had been
talking for half a day. And in five minutes I must quit you again, till
when?--the gods alone know when I shall return. It is hard even to speak
the words, but all our trouble and care, and all poor Pontius' zeal and
pains-taking labor are in vain."
As he spoke the prefect threw himself on a couch; his wife handed him the
refreshment he had asked for, and said, as she passed her hand over his
grey hair:
"Poor man! Has Hadrian then determined after all to inhabit the
Caesareum?"
"No. Leave us, Syra--you shall see directly. Please read me Caesar's
letter once more. Here it is." Julia unfolded the papyrus, which was of
elegant quality, and began:
"Hadrian to his friend Titianus, the Governor of Egypt. The deepest
secrecy--Hadrian greets Titianus, as he has so often done for years at
the beginning of disagreeable business letters, and only with half his
heart. But to-morrow he hopes to greet the dear friend of his youth, his
prudent vicegerent, not merely with his whole soul, but with hand and
tongue. And now to be more explicit, as follows: I come to-morrow
morning, the fifteenth of December, towards evening, to Alexandria, with
none but Antinous, the slave Mastor, and my private secretary, Phlegon.
We land at Lochias, in the little harbor, and you will know my ship by a
large silver star at the prow. If night should fall before I arrive
there, three red lanterns at the end of the mast shall inform you of the
friend that is approaching. I have sent home the learned and witty men
whom you sent to meet me, in order to detain me, and gain time for the
restoration of the old nest in which I had a fancy to roost with
Minerva's birds--which have not, I hope, all been driven out of it--in
order that Sabina and her following may not lack entertainment, nor the
famous gentlemen themselves be unnecessarily disturbed in their labors. I
need them not. If perchance it was not you who sent them, I ask your
pardon. An error in this matter would certainly involve some humiliation,
for it is easier to explain what has happened than to foresee what is to
come. Or is the reverse the truth? I will indemnify the learned men for
their useless journey by disputing this question with them and their
associates in the Museum. The rapid movement to which the philologer was
prompted on my account will prolong his existence; he bristles with
learning at the tip of every hair, and he sits still more than is good
for him.
"We shall arrive in modest disguise and will sleep at Lochias; you know
that I have rested more than once on the bare earth, and, if need be, can
sleep as well on a mat as on a couch. My pillow follows at my heels--my
big dog, which you know; and some little room, where I can meditate
undisturbed on my designs for next year, can no doubt be found.
"I entreat you to keep my secret strictly. To none--man nor woman--and I
beseech you as urgently as friend or Caesar ever besought a favor--let
the least suspicion of my arrival be known. Nor must the smallest
preparation betray whom it is you receive. I cannot command so dear a
friend as Titianus, but I appeal to his heart to carry out my wishes.
"I rejoice to see you again; what delight I shall find in the whirl of
confusion that I hope to find at Lochias. You shall take me to see the
artists, who are, no doubt, swarming in the old castle, as the architect
Claudius Venator from Rome, who is to assist Pontius with his advice. But
this Pontius, who carried out such fine works for Herodes Atticus, the
rich Sophist, met me at his house, and will certainly recognize me. Tell
him, therefore, what I propose doing. He is a serious and trustworthy
man, not a chatterbox or scatter-brained simpleton who loses his head.
Thus you may take him into the secret, but not till my vessel is in
sight. May all be well with you."
"Well, what do you say to that?" asked Titianus, taking the letter from
his wife's hand. "Is it not more than vexatious--our work was going on so
splendidly."
"But," said Julia thoughtfully and with a meaning smile. "Perhaps it
might not have been finished in time. As matters now stand it need not be
complete, and Hadrian will see the good intention all the same. I am glad
about the letter, for it takes a great responsibility off your otherwise
overloaded shoulders."
"You always see the right side," cried the prefect. "It is well that I
came home, for I can await Caesar with a much lighter heart. Let me lock
up the letter, and then farewell. This parting is for some hours from
you, and from all peace for many days."
Titianus gave her his hand. She held it firmly and said:
"Before you go I must confess to you that I am very proud."
"You have every right to be."
"But you have not said a word to me about keeping silence."
"Because you have kept other tests--still, to be sure, you are a woman,
and a very handsome one besides."
"An old grandmother, with grey hair!"
"And still more upright and more charming than a thousand of the most
admired younger beauties."
"You are trying to convert my pride into vanity, in my old age."
"No, no! I was only looking at you with an examining eye, as our talk led
me to do, and I remembered that Sabina had lamented that handsome Julia
was not looking well. But where is there another woman of your age with
such a carriage, such unwrinkled features, so clear a brow, such deep
kind eyes, such beautifully-polished arms--"
"Be quiet," exclaimed his wife. "You make me blush."
"And may I not be proud that a grandmother, who is a Roman, as my wife
is, can find it so easy to blush? You are quite different from other
women."
"Because you are different from other men."
"You are a flatterer; since all our children have left us, it is as if we
were newly married again."
"Ah! the apple of discord is removed."
"It is always over what he loves best that man is most prompt to be
jealous. But now, once more, farewell."
Titianus kissed his wife's forehead and hurried towards the door; Julia
called him back and said:
"One thing at any rate we can do for Caesar. I send food every day down
to the architect at Lochias, and to-day there shall be three times the
quantity."
"Good; do so."
"Farewell, then."
"And we shall meet again, when it shall please the gods and the Emperor."
........................
When the prefect reached the appointed spot, no vessel with a silver star
was to be seen.
The sun went down and no ship with three red lanterns was visible.
The harbor-master, into whose house Titianus went, was told that he
expected a great architect from Rome, who was to assist Pontius with his
counsel in the works at Lochias, and he thought it quite intelligible
that the governor should do a strange artist the honor of coming to meet
him; for the whole city was well aware of the incredible haste and the
lavish outlay of means that were being given to the restoration of the
ancient palace of the Ptolemies as a residence for the Emperor.
While he was waiting, Titianus remembered the young sculptor Pollux,
whose acquaintance he had made, and his mother in the pretty little
gate-house. Well disposed towards them as he felt, he sent at once to old
Doris, desiring her not to retire to rest early that evening, since he,
the prefect, would be going late to Lochias.
"Tell her, too, as from yourself and not from me," Titianus instructed
the messenger, "that I may very likely look in upon her. She may light up
her little room and keep it in order."
No one at Lochias had the slightest suspicion of the honor which awaited
the old palace.
After Verus had quitted it with his wife and Balbilla, and when he had
again been at work for about an hour the sculptor Pollux came out of his
nook, stretching himself, and called out to Pontius, who was standing on
a scaffold:
"I must either rest or begin upon something new. One cures me of fatigue
as much as the other. Do you find it so?"
"Yes, just as you do," replied the architect, as he continued to direct
the work of the slave-masons, who were fixing a new Corinthian capital in
the place of an old one which had been broken.
"Do not disturb yourself," Pollux cried up to him. "I only request you to
tell my master Papias when he comes here with Gabinius, the dealer in
antiquities, that he will find me at the rotunda that you inspected with
me yesterday. I am going to put the head on to the Berenice; my
apprentice must long since have completed his preparations; but the
rascal came into the world with two left-hands, and as he squints with
one eye everything that is straight looks crooked to him, and--according
to the law of optics--the oblique looks straight. At any rate, he drove
the peg which is to support the new head askew into the neck, and as no
historian has recorded that Berenice ever had her neck on one side, like
the old color-grinder there, I must see to its being straight myself. In
about half an hour, as I calculate, the worthy Queen will no longer be
one of the headless women."
"Where did you get the new head?" asked Pontius. "From the secret
archives of my memory," replied Pollux. "Have you seen it?"
"Yes."
"And do you like it?"
"Very much."
"Then it is worthy to live," sang the sculptor, and, as he quitted the
hall, he waved his left-hand to the architect, and with his right-hand
stuck a pink, which he had picked in the morning, behind his ear.
At the rotunda his pupil had done his business better than his master
could have expected, but Pollux was by no means satisfied with his own
arrangements. His work, like several others standing on the same side of
the platform, turned its back on the steward's balcony, and the only
reason why he had parted with the portrait of Selene's mother, of which
he was so fond, was that his playfellow might gaze at the face whenever
she chose. He found, however, to his satisfaction, that the busts were
held in their places on their tall pedestals only by their own weight,
and he then resolved to alter the historical order of the portrait-heads
by changing their places, and to let the famous Cleopatra turn her back
upon the palace, so that his favorite bust might look towards it.
In order to carry out this purpose then and there, he called some slaves
up to help him in the alteration. This gave rise, more than once, to a
warning cry, and the loud talking and ordering on this spot, for so many
years left solitary and silent, attracted an inquirer, who, soon after
the apprentice had begun his work, had shown herself on the balcony, but
who had soon retreated after casting a glance at the dirty lad, splashed
from head to foot with plaster. This time, however, she remained to
watch, following every movement of Pollux as he directed the slaves;
though, all the time and whatever he was doing, he turned his back upon
her.
At last the portrait-head had found its right position, shrouded still in
a cloth to preserve it from the marks of workmen's hands. With a deep
breath the artist turned full on the steward's house, and immediately a
clear merry voice called out:
"What, tall Pollux! It really is tall Pollux; how glad I am!"
With these words the girl on the balcony loudly clapped her hands; and as
the sculptor hailed her in return, and shouted:
"And you are little Arsinoe, eternal gods! What the little thing has come
to!" She stood on tip-toe to seem taller, nodded at him pleasantly, and
laughed out: "I have not done growing yet; but as for you, you look quite
dignified with the beard on your chin, and your eagle's nose. Selene did
not tell me till to-day that you were living down there with the others."
The artist's eyes were fixed on the girl, as if spellbound. There are
poetic natures in which the imagination immediately transmutes every new
thing that strikes the eyes or the intelligence, into a romance, or
rapidly embodies it in verse; and Pollux, like many of his calling, could
never set his eyes on a fine human form and face, without instantly
associating them with his art.
"A Galatea--a Galatea without an equal!" thought he, as he stood with his
eyes fixed on Arsinoe's face and figure. "Just as if she had this instant
risen from the sea--that form is just as fresh, and joyous, and healthy;
and her little curls wave back from her brow as if they were still
floating on the water; and now as she stoops, how full and supple in
every movement. It is like a daughter of Nereus following the line of the
as the waves as they rise into crests and dip again into watery valleys.
She is like Selene and her mother in the shape of her head and the Greek
cut of her face, but the elder sister is like the statue of Prometheus
before it had a soul, and Arsinoe is like the Master's work after the
celestial fire coursed through her veins."
The artist had felt and thought all this out in a few seconds, but the
girl found her speechless admirer's silence too long, and exclaimed
impatiently:
"You have not yet offered me any proper greeting. What are you doing down
there?"
"Look here," he replied, lifting the cloth from the portrait, which was a
striking likeness.
Arsinoe leaned far over the parapet of the balcony, shaded her eyes with
her hand and was silent for more than a minute. Then she suddenly cried
out loudly and exclaiming:
"Mother--it is my mother!" She flew into the room behind her.
"Now she will call her father and destroy all poor Selene's comfort,"
thought Pollux, as he pushed the heavy marble bust on which his gypsum
head was fixed, into its right place.
"Well, let him come. We are the masters here now, and Keraunus dare not
touch the Emperor's property." He crossed his arms and stood gazing at
the bust, muttering to himself:
"Patchwork--miserable patchwork. We are cobbling up a robe for the
Emperor out of mere rags; we are upholsterers and not artists. If it
were only for Hadrian, and not for Diotima and her children, not another
finger would I stir in the place."
The path from the steward's residence led through some passages and up a
few steps to the rotunda, on which the sculptor was standing, but in
little more than a minute from Arsinoe's disappearance from the balcony
she was by his side. With a heightened color she pushed the sculptor away
from his work and put herself in the place where he had been standing, to
be able to gaze at her leisure at the beloved features. Then she
exclaimed again:
"It is mother--mother!" and the bright tears ran over her cheeks, without
restraint from the presence of the artist, or the laborers and slaves
whom she had flown past on her way, and who stared at her with as much
alarm as if she were possessed.
Pollux did not disturb her. His heart was softened as he watched the
tears running down the cheeks of this light-hearted child, and he could
not help reflecting that goodness was indeed well rewarded when it could
win such tender and enduring love as was cherished for the poor dead
mother on the pedestal before him.
After looking for some time at the sculptor's work Arsinoe grew calmer,
and turning to Pollux she asked:
"Did you make it?"
"Yes," he replied, looking down.
"And entirely from memory?"
"To be sure."
"Do you know what?"
"Well."
"This shows that the Sibyl at the festival of Adonis was right when she
sang in the Jalemus that the gods did half the work of the artist."
"Arsinoe!" cried Pollux, for her words made him feel as if a hot spring
were seething in his heart, and he gratefully seized her hand; but she
drew it away, for her sister Selene had come out on the balcony and was
calling her.
It was for his elder playfellow and not for Arsinoe that Pollux had set
his work in this place, but, just now, her gaze fell like a disturbing
chill on his excited mood.
"There stands your mother's portrait," he called up to the balcony in an
explanatory tone, pointing to the bust.
"I see it," she replied coldly. "I will look at it presently more
closely. Come up Arsinoe, father wants to speak to you."
Again Pollux stood alone.
As Selene withdrew into the room, she gently shook her pale head, and
said to herself:
"'It was to be for me,' Pollux said; something for me, for once--and even
this pleasure is spoilt."
CHAPTER IX.
The palace-steward, to whom Selene had called up his younger daughter,
had just returned from the meeting of the citizens; and his old black
slave, who always accompanied him when he went out, took the
saffron-colored pallium from his shoulders, and from his head the golden
circlet, with which he loved to crown his curled hair when he quitted the
house. Keraunus still looked heated, his eyes seemed more prominent than
usual and large drops of sweat stood upon his brow, when his daughter
entered the room where he was. He absently responded to Arsinoe's
affectionate greeting with a few unmeaning words, and before making the
important communication he had to disclose to his daughters, he walked up
and down before them for some time, puffing out his fat cheeks and
crossing his arms. Selene was alarmed, and Arsinoe had long been out of
patience, when at last he began:
"Have you heard of the festivals which are to be held in Caesar's honor?"
Selene nodded and her sister exclaimed:
"Of course we have! Have you secured places for us on the seats kept for
the town council?"
"Do not interrupt me," the steward crossly ordered his daughter. "There
is no question of staring at them. All the citizens are required to allow
their daughters to take part in the grand things that are to be carried
out, and we all were asked how many girls we had."
"And how are we to take part in the show?" cried Arsinoe, joyfully
clapping her hands.
"I wanted to withdraw before the summons was proclaimed, but Tryphon, the
shipwright, who has a workshop down by the King's Harbor, held me back
and called out to the assembly that his sons said that I had two pretty
young daughters. Pray how did he know that?"
With these words the steward lifted his grey brows and his face grew red
to the roots of his hair. Selene shrugged her shoulders, but Arsinoe
said:
"Tryphon's shipyard lies just below and we often pass it; but we do not
know him or his sons. Have you ever seen them Selene? At any rate it is
polite of him to speak of us as pretty."
"Nobody need trouble themselves about your appearance unless they want to
ask my permission to marry you," replied the steward with a growl.
"And what did you say to Tryphon?" asked Selene.
"I did as I was obliged. Your father is steward of a palace which at
present belongs to Rome and the Emperor; hence I must receive Hadrian as
a guest in this, the dwelling of my fathers, and therefore I, less than
any other citizen--cannot withhold my share in the honors which the city
council has decreed shall be paid to him."
"Then we really may," said Arsinoe, and she went up to her father to give
him a coaxing pat. But Keraunus was not in the humor to accept caresses;
he pushed her aside with an angry: "Leave me alone," and then went on:
"If Hadrian were to ask me 'Where are your daughters on the occasion of
the festival?' and if I had to reply, 'They were not among the daughters
of the noble citizens,' it would be an insult to Caesar, to whom in fact
I feel very well disposed. All this I had to consider, and I gave your
names and promised to send you to the great Theatre to the assembly of
young girls. There you will be met by the noblest matrons and maidens of
the city, and the first painters and sculptors will decide to what part
of the performance your air and appearance are best fitted."
"But, father," cried Selene, "we cannot show ourselves in such an
assembly in our common garments, and where are we to find the money to
buy new ones?"
"We can quite well show ourselves by any other girls, in clean, white
woollen dresses, prettily smartened with fresh ribbons," declared
Arsinoe, interposing between her father and her sister.
"It is not that which troubles me," replied the steward; "it is the
costumes, the costumes! It is only the daughters of the poorer citizens
who will be paid by the council, and it would be a disgrace to be
numbered among the poor--you understand me, children."
"I will not take part in the procession," said Selene resolutely, but
Arsinoe interrupted her.
"It is inconvenient and horrible to be poor, but it certainly is no
disgrace! The most powerful Romans of ancient times, regarded it as
honorable to die poor. Our Macedonian descent remains to us even if the
state should pay for our costumes."
"Silence," cried the steward. "This is not the first time that I have
detected this low vein of feeling in you. Even the noble may submit to
the misfortunes entailed by poverty, but the advantages it brings with it
he can never enjoy unless he resigns himself to being so no longer."
It had cost the steward much trouble to give due expression to this idea,
which he did not recollect to have heard from another, which seemed new
to him, and which nevertheless fully represented what he felt; and he
slowly sank, with all the signs of exhaustion, into a couch which formed
a divan round a side recess in the spacious sitting-room.
In this room Cleopatra might have held with Antony those banquets of
which the unequalled elegance and refinement had been enhanced by every
grace of art and wit. On the very spot where Keraunus now reclined the
dining-couch of the famous lovers had probably stood; for, though the
whole hall had a carefully-laid pavement, in this recess there was a
mosaic of stones of various colors of such beauty and delicacy of finish
that Keraunus had always forbidden his children to step upon it. This, it
is true, was less out of regard for the fine work of art than because his
father had always prohibited his doing so, and his father again before
him. The picture represented the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, and the
divan only covered the outer border of the picture, which was decorated
with graceful little Cupids.
Keraunus desired his daughter to fetch him a cup of wine, but she mixed
the juice of the grape with a judicious measure of water. After he had
half drunk the diluted contents of the goblet, with many faces of
disgust, he said:
"Would you like to know what each of your dresses will cost if it is to
be in no respect inferior to those of the others?"
"Well," said Arsinoe anxiously.
"About seven hundred drachmae;--[$115 in 1880]--Philinus, the tailor, who
is working for the theatre, tells me it will be impossible to do anything
well for less."
"And you are really thinking of such insane extravagance," cried Selene.
"We have no money, and I should like to know the man who would lend us
any more."
The steward's younger daughter looked doubtfully at the tips of her
fingers and was silent, but her eyes swimming in tears betrayed what she
felt. Keraunus was rejoiced at the silent consent which Arsinoe seemed to
accord to his desire to let her take part in the display at whatever
cost. He forgot that he had just reproached her for her low sentiments,
and said:
"The little one always feels what is right. As for you, Selene, I beg you
to reflect seriously that I am your father, and that I forbid you to use
this admonishing tone to me; you have accustomed yourself to it with the
children and to them you may continue to use it. Fourteen hundred
drachmae certainly, at the first thought of it, seems a very large sum,
but if the material and the trimming required are bought with judgment,
after the festival we may very likely sell it back to the man with
profit."
"With profit!" cried Selene bitterly, "not half is to be got for old
things-not a quarter! And even if you turn me out of the house--I will
not help to drag us into deeper wretchedness; I will take no part in the
performances."
The steward did not redden this time, he was not even violent; on the
contrary, he simply raised his head and compared his daughters as they
stood--not without an infusion of satisfaction. He was accustomed to love
his daughters in his own way, Selene as the useful one, and Arsinoe as
the beauty; and as on this occasion all he cared for was to satisfy his
vanity, and as this end could be attained through his younger daughter
alone, he said:
"Stay with the children then, for all I care. We will excuse you on the
score of weak health, and certainly, child, you do look extremely pale. I
would far rather find the means for the little one only."
Two sweet dimples again began to show in Arsinoe's cheeks, but Selene's
lips were as white as her bloodless cheeks as she exclaimed:
"But, father--father! neither the baker nor the butcher has had a coin
paid him for the last two months, and you will squander seven hundred
drachmae!"
"Squander!" cried Keraunus indignantly, but still in a tone of disgust
rather than anger. "I have already forbidden you to speak to me in that
way. The richest of our noble youths will take part in the games; Arsinoe
is handsome and perhaps one of them may choose her for his wife. And do
you call it squandering, when a father does his utmost to find a suitable
husband for his daughter. After all, what do you know of what I may
possess?"
"We have nothing, so I cannot know of it," cried the girl beside herself.
"Indeed!" drawled Keraunus with an embarrassed smile. "And is that
nothing which lies in the cup board there, and stands on the cornice
shelf? For your sakes I will part with these--the onyx fibula, the rings,
the golden chaplet, and the girdle of course."
"They are of mere silver-gilt!" Selene interrupted, ruthlessly. "All my
grandfather's real gold you parted with when my mother died."
"She had to be cremated and buried as was due to our rank," answered
Keraunus; "but I will not think now of those melancholy days."
"Nay, do think of them, father."
"Silence! All that belongs to my own adornment of course I cannot do
without, for I must be prepared to meet Caesar in a dress befitting my
rank; but the little bronze Eros there must be worth something,
Plutarch's ivory cup, which is beautifully carved, and above all, that
picture; its former possessor was convinced that it had been painted by
Apelles himself herein Alexandria. You shall know at once what these
little things are worth, for, as the gods vouchsafed, on my way home I
met, here in the palace, Gabinius of Nicaea, the dealer in such objects.
He promised me that when he had done his business with the architect he
would come to me to inspect my treasures, and to pay money down for
anything that might suit him. If my Apelles pleases him, he will give ten
talents for that alone, and if he buys it for only the half or even the
tenth of that sum, I will make you enjoy yourself for once, Selene."
"We will see," said the pale girl, shrugging her shoulders, and her
sister exclaimed:
"Show him the sword too, that you always declared belonged to Caesar, and
if he gives you a good sum for it you will buy me a gold bracelet."
"And Selene shall have one, too. But I have the very slenderest hopes of
the sword, for a connoisseur would hardly pronounce it genuine. But I
have other things, many others. Hark! that is Gabinius, no doubt. Quick,
Selene, throw the chiton round me again. My chaplet, Arsinoe. A
well-to-do man always gets a higher price than a poor one. I have ordered
the slave to await him in the ante-room; it is always done in the best
houses."
The curiosity dealer was a small, lean man, who, by prudence and good
luck, had raised himself to be one of the most esteemed of his class and
a rich man. Having matured his knowledge by industry, and experience, he
knew better than any man how to distinguish what was good from what was
indifferent or bad, what was genuine from what was spurious. No one had a
keener eye; but he was abrupt in his dealings with those from whom he had
nothing to gain. In circumstances where there was profit in view, he
could, to be sure, be polite even to subservience and show inexhaustible
patience. He commanded himself so far as to listen with an air of
conviction to the steward as he told him in a condescending tone that he
was tired of his little possessions, that he could just as well keep them
as part with them; he merely wanted to show them to him as a connoisseur
and would only part with them if a good round sum were offered for what
was in fact idle capital. One piece after another passed through the
dealer's slender fingers, or was placed before him that he might
contemplate it; but the man spoke not, and only shook his head as he
examined every fresh object. And when Keraunus told him whence this or
that specimen of his treasures had been obtained, he only
murmured--"Indeed" or "Really."
"Do you think so?" After the last piece of property had passed through
his hands, the steward asked:
"Well, what do you think of them?"
The beginning of the sentence was spoken confidently, the end almost in
fear, for the dealer only smiled and shook his head again before he said:
"There are some genuine little things among them, but nothing worth
speaking of. I advise you to keep them, because you have an affection for
them, while I could get very little by them."
Keraunus avoided looking towards Selene, whose large eyes, full of dread,
had been fixed on the dealer's lips; but Arsinoe, who had followed his
movements with no less attention, was less easily discouraged, and
pointing to her father's Apelles, she said: And that picture, is that
worth nothing?"
"It grieves me that I cannot tell so fair a damsel that it is inestimably
valuable," said the dealer, stroking his gray whiskers. "But we have here
only a very feeble copy. The original is in the Villa belonging to
Phinius on the Lake of Larius, and which he calls Cothurnus. I have no
use whatever for this piece."
"And this carved cup?" asked Keraunus. "It came from among the
possessions of Plutarch, as I can prove, and it is said to have been the
gift of the Emperor Trajan."
"It is the prettiest thing in your collection," replied Gabinius; "but it
is amply paid for with four hundred drachmae."
"And this cylinder from Cyprus, with the elegant incised work?" The
steward was about to take up the polished crystal, but his hand was
trembling with agitation and pushed instead of lifting it from the table.
It rolled away on the floor and across the smooth mosaic picture as far
as the couches. Keraunus was about to stoop to pick it up, but his
daughters both held him back, and Selene cried out:
"Father, you must not; the physician strictly forbade it."
While the steward pushed the girls away grumbling, the dealer had gone
down on his knees to pick up the cylinder, but it seemed to cost the
slightly-built man much less effort to stoop than to get up again, for
some minutes had elapsed before he once more stood on his feet, in front
of Keraunus. His countenance had put on an expression of eager attention,
and he once more took up the painting attributed to Apelles, sat down
with it on the couch, and appeared wholly absorbed in the contemplation
of the picture, which hid his face from the bystanders.
But his eye was not resting on the work before him, but on the
marriage-scene at his feet, in which he detected each moment some fresh
and unique beauty. As the dealer sat there for some minutes with the
little picture on his knee, the steward's face brightened, Selene drew a
deep breath, and Arsinoe went up to her father to cling to his arm and
whisper in his ear:
"Do not let him have the Apelles cheap--remember my bracelet."
Gabinius now rose, glanced at the various objects lying on the table and
said in a much shorter and more business-like tone than before:
"For all these things I can give you--wait a minute--twenty-seventy-four
hundred--four hundred and fifty--I can give you six hundred and fifty
drachmae, not a sesterce more!"
"You are joking," cried Keraunus.
"Not a sesterce more," answered the other coldly. "I do not want to make
anything, but you as a business man will understand that I do not wish to
buy with a certain prospect of loss. As regards the Apelles--"
"Well?"
"It may be of some value to me, but only under certain conditions. The
case is quite different as regards buying pictures. Your two young
damsels know of course that my line of business leads me to admire and
value all that is beautiful, but still I must request you to leave me
alone with your father for a little while. I want to speak with him about
this curious painting." Keraunus signed to his daughters, who immediately
left the room. Before the door was closed upon them the dealer called
after them:
"It is already growing dark, might I ask you to send me as bright a light
as possible by one of your slaves."
"What about the picture?" asked Keraunus.
"Till the light is brought let us talk of something else," said Gabinius.
"Then take a seat on the couch," said Keraunus. "You will be doing me a
pleasure and perhaps yourself as well."
As soon as the two men were seated on the divan, Gabinius began:
"Those little things which we have collected with particular liking, we
do not readily part with--that I know by long experience. Many a man who
has come into some property after he has sold all his little antiquities
has offered me ten times the price I have paid him to get them back
again, generally in vain, unfortunately. Now, what is true of others is
true of you, and if you had not been in immediate need of money you would
hardly have offered me these things."
"I must entreat you," began the steward, but the dealer interrupted him,
saying:
"Even the richest are sometimes in want of ready money; no one knows that
better than I, for I--I must confess--have large means at my command.
Just at present it would be particularly easy for me to free you from all
embarrassment."
"There stands my Apelles," exclaimed the steward. "It is yours if you
make a bid that suits me."
"The light--here comes the light!" exclaimed Gabinius, taking from the
slave's hand the three-branched lamp which Selene had hastily supplied
with a fresh wick, and he placed it, while he murmured to Keraunus, "By
your leave," down on the centre of the mosaic. The steward looked at the
man on his left hand, with puzzled inquiry, but Gabinius heeded him not
but went down on his knees again, felt the mosaic over with his hand, and
devoured the picture of the marriage of Peleus with his eyes.
"Have you lost anything?" asked Keraunus.
"No-nothing whatever. There in the corner--now I am satisfied. Shall I
place the lamp there, on the table? So--and now to return to business."
"I beg to do so, but I may as well begin by telling you that in my case
it is a question not of drachmae but of Attic talents."--[ The Attic
talent was worth about L200, or $1000 dollars in the 1880 exchange rate.]
"That is a matter of course, and I will offer you five; that is to say a
sum for which you could buy a handsome roomy house."
Once more the blood mounted to the steward's head; for a few minutes he
could not utter a word, for his heart thumped violently; but presently be
so far controlled himself as to be able to answer. This time at any rate,
he was determined to seize Fortune by the forelock and not to be taken
advantage of, so he said:
"Five talents will not do; bid higher."
"Then let us say six."
"If you say double that we are agreed."
"I cannot put it beyond ten talents; why, for that sum you might build a
small palace."
"I stand out for twelve."
"Well, be it so, but not a sesterce more."
"I cannot bear to part with my splendid work of art," sighed Keraunus.
"But I will take your offer, and give you my Apelles."
"It is not that picture I am dealing for," replied Gabinius. "It is of
trifling value, and you may continue to enjoy the possession of it. It is
another work of art in this room that I wish to have, and which has
hitherto seemed to you scarcely worth notice. I have discovered it, and
one of my rich customers has asked me to find him just such a thing."
"I do not know what it is."
"Does everything in this room belong to you?"
"Whom else should it belong to?"
"Then you may dispose of it as you please?"
"Undoubtedly."
"Very well, then--the twelve Attic talents which I offer you are to be
paid for the picture that is under our feet."
"The mosaic! that? It belongs to the palace."
"It belongs to your residence, and that, I heard you say yourself, has
been inhabited for more than a century by your forefathers. I know the
law; it pronounces that everything which has remained in undisputed
possession in one family, for a hundred years, becomes their property."
"This mosaic belongs to the palace."
"I assert the contrary. It is an integral portion of your family
dwelling, and you may freely dispose of it."
"It belongs to the palace."
"No, and again no; you are the owner. Tomorrow morning early you shall
receive twelve Attic talents in gold, and, with the help of my son, later
in the day I will take up the picture, pack it, and when it grows dark,
carry it away. Procure a carpet to cover the empty place for the present.
As to the secrecy of the transaction--I must of course insist on it as
strongly--and more so--than yourself."
"The mosaic belongs to the palace," cried the steward, this time in a
louder voice, "Do you hear? it belongs to the palace, and whoever dares
touch it, I will break his bones."
As he spoke Keraunus stood up, his huge chest panting, his cheeks and
forehead dyed purple, and his fist, which he held in the dealer's face,
was trembling. Gabinius drew back startled, and said:
"Then you will not have the twelve talents!"
"I will--I will!" gasped Keraunus, "I will show you how I beat those who
take me for a rogue. Out of my sight, villain, and let me hear not
another word about the picture, and the robbery in the dark, or I will
send the prefect's lictors after you and have you thrown into irons, you
rascally thief!"
Gabinius hurried to the door, but he there turned round once more to the
groaning and gasping colossus, and cried out, as he stood on the
threshold:
"Keep your rubbish! we shall have more to say to each other yet."
When Selene and Arsinoe returned to the sitting-room they found their
father breathing hard and sitting on the couch, with his head drooping
forward. Much alarmed, they went close up to him, but he exclaimed quite
coherently:
"Water--a drink of water!--the thief!--the scoundrel!"
Though hardly pressed, it had not cost him a struggle or a pang to refuse
what would have placed him and his children in a position of ease; and
yet he would not have hesitated to borrow it, aye, or twice the sum, from
rich or poor, though he knew full certainly that he would never be in a
position to restore it. Nor was he even proud of what he had done; it
seemed to him quite natural in a Macedonian noble. It was to him
altogether out of the pale of possibility that he should entertain the
dealer's proposition for an instant.
But where was he to get the money for Arsinoe's outfit? how could he keep
the promise given at the meeting?
He lay meditating on the divan for an hour; then he took a wax tablet out
of a chest and began to write a letter on it to the prefect. He intended
to offer the precious mosaic picture which had been discovered in his
abode, to Titianus for the Emperor, but he did not bring his composition
to an end, for he became involved in high-flown phrases. At last he
doubted whether it would do at all, flung the unfinished letter back into
the chest, and disposed himself to sleep.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A well-to-do man always gets a higher price than a poor one
I must either rest or begin upon something new
THE EMPEROR
By Georg Ebers
Volume 3.
CHAPTER X.
While anxiety and trouble were brooding over the steward's dwelling,
while dismay and disappointment were clouding the souls of its
inhabitants, the hall of the Muses was merry with feasting and laughter.
Julia, the prefect's wife, had supplied the architect at Lochias with a
carefully-prepared meal,--sufficient to fill six hungry maws, and
Pontius' slave--who had received it on its arrival and had unpacked it
dish after dish, and set them out on the humblest possible table had then
hastened to fetch his master to inspect all these marvels of the cook's
art. The architect shook his head as he contemplated the superabundant
blessing, and muttered to himself:
"Titianus must take me for a crocodile, or rather for two crocodiles,"
and he went to the sculptor's little tabernacle, where Papias the master
was also, to invite the two men to share his supper.
Besides them he asked two painters, and the chief mosaic worker of the
city, who all day long had been busied in restoring the old and faded
pictures on the ceilings and pavements, and under the influence of good
wine and cheerful chat they soon emptied the dishes and bowls and
trenchers. A man who for several hours has been using his hands or his
mind, or both together, waxes hungry, and all the artists whom Pontius
had brought together at Lochias had now been working for several days
almost to the verge of exhaustion. Each had done his best, in the first
place, no doubt, to give satisfaction to Pontius, whom all esteemed, and
to himself; but also in the hope of giving proof of his powers to the
Emperor and of showing him how things could be done in Alexandria. When
the dishes had been removed and the replete feasters had washed and dried
their hands, they filled their cups out of a jar of mixed wine, of which
the dimensions answered worthily to the meal they had eaten. One of the
painters then proposed that they should hold a regular drinking-bout, and
elect Papias, who was as well known as a good table orator as he was as
an artist, to be the leader of the feast. However, the master declared
that he could not accept the honor, for that it was due to the worthiest
of their company; to the man namely, who, only a few days since, had
entered this empty palace and like a second Deucalion had raised up
illustrious artists, such as he then saw around him in great numbers, and
skilled workmen by hundreds, not out of plastic stone but out of nothing.
And then--while declaring that he understood the use of the hammer and
chisel better than that of the tongue, and that he had never studied the
art of making speeches--he expressed his wish that Pontius would lead the
revel, in the most approved form.
But he was not allowed to get to the end of this evidence of his skill,
for Euphorion the door-keeper of the palace, Euphorion the father of
Pollux, ran hastily into the hall of the Muses with a letter in his hand
which he gave to the architect.
"To be read without an instant's delay," he added, bowing with theatrical
dignity to the assembled artists. "One of the prefect's lictors brought
this letter, which, if my wishes be granted, brings nothing that is
unwelcome. Hold your noise you little blackguards or I will be the death
of you."
These words, which so far as the tone was concerned, formed a somewhat
inharmonious termination to a speech intended for the ears of great
artists, were addressed to his wife's four-footed Graces who had followed
him against his wish, and were leaping round the table barking for the
slender remains of the consumed food.
Pontius was fond of animals and had made friends with the old woman's
pets, so, as he opened the prefect's letter, he said:
"I invite the three little guests to the remains of our feast. Give them
anything that is fit for them, Euphorion, and whatever seems to you most
suitable to your own stomach you may put into it."
While the architect first rapidly glanced through the letter and then
read it carefully, the singer had collected a variety of good morsels for
his wife's favorites on a plate, and finally carried the last remaining
pasty, with the dish on which it reposed, to the vicinity of his own
hooked nose.
"For men or for dogs?" he asked his son, as he pointed to it with a rigid
finger.
"For the gods!" replied Pollux. "Take it to mother; she will like to eat
ambrosia for once."
"A jolly evening to you!" cried the singer, bowing to the artists who
were emptying their cups, and he quitted the hall with his pasty and his
dogs. Before he had fairly left the hall with his long strides, Papias,
whose speech had been interrupted, once more raised his wine-cup and
began again:
"Our Deucalion, our more than Deucalion--"
"Pardon me," interrupted Pontius. "If I once more stop your discourse
which began so promisingly; this letter contains important news and our
revels must be over for the night. We must postpone our symposium and
your drinking-speech."
"It was not a drinking-speech, for if ever there was a moderate man--"
Papias began. But Pontius stopped him again, saying:
"Titianus writes me word that he proposes coming to Lochias this evening.
He may arrive at any moment; and not alone, but with my fellow-artist,
Claudius Venator from Rome, who is to assist me with his advice."
"I never even heard his name," said Papias, who was wont to trouble
himself as little about the persons as about the works of other artists.
"I wonder at that," said Pontius, closing the double tablets which
announced the Emperor's advent.
"Can he do anything?" asked Pollux.
"More than any one of us," replied Pontius. "He is a mighty man."
"That is splendid!" exclaimed Pollux. "I like to see great men. When one
looks me in the eye I always feel as if some of his superabundance
overflowed into me, and irresistibly I draw myself up and think how fine
it would be if one day I might reach as high as that man's chin."
"Beware of morbid ambition," said Papias to his pupil in a warning voice.
"It is not the man who stands on tiptoe, but he who does his duty
diligently, that can attain anything great."
"He honestly does his," said the architect rising, and he laid his hand
on the young sculptor's shoulder. "We all do; to-morrow by sunrise each
must be at his post again. For my colleague's sake it will be well that
you should all be there in good time."
The artists rose, expressing their thanks and regrets. "You will not
escape the continuation of this evening's entertainment," cried one of
the painters, and Papias, as he parted from Pontius, said:
"When we next meet I will show you what I understand by a
drinking-speech. It will do perhaps for your Roman guest. I am curious to
hear what he will say about our Urania. Pollux has done his share of the
work very well, and I have already devoted an hour's work to it, which
has improved it. The more humble our material, the better I shall be
pleased if the work satisfies Caesar; he himself has tried his hand at
sculpture."
"If only Hadrian could hear that!" cried one of the painters. "He likes
to think himself a great artist--one of the foremost of our time. It is
said that he caused the life of the great architect, Apollodorus--who
carried out such noble works for Trajan--to be extinguished--and why?
because formerly that illustrious man had treated the imperial bungler as
a mere dabbler, and would not accept his plan for the temple of Venus at
Rome."
"Mere talk!" answered Pontius to this accusation. "Apollodorus died in
prison, but his incarceration had little enough to do with the Emperor's
productions--excuse me, gentlemen, I must once more look through the
sketches and plans."
The architect went away, but Pollux continued the conversation that had
been begun by saying:
"Only I cannot understand how a man who practises so many arts at once as
Hadrian does, and at the same time looks after the state and its
government, who is a passionate huntsman and who dabbles in every kind of
miscellaneous learning, contrives, when he wants to practise one
particular form of art, to recall all his five senses into the nest from
which he has let them fly, here, there, and everywhere. The inside of his
head must be like that salad-bowl--which we have reduced to emptiness--in
which Papias discovered three sorts of fish, brown and white meat,
oysters and five other substances."
"And who can deny," added Papias, "that if talent is the father, and meat
the mother of all productiveness, practice must be the artist's teacher!
Since Hadrian took to sculpture and painting it has become the universal
fashion here to practise these arts, and among the wealthier youth who
come to my workroom, many have very good abilities; but not one of them
brings anything to any good issue, because so much of their time is taken
up by the gymnasium, the bath, the quail-fights, the suppers, and I know
not what besides, so that they do nothing by way of practice."
"True," said a painter. "Without the restraint and worry of
apprenticeship no one can ever rise to happy and independent
creativeness; and in the schools of rhetoric or in hunting or fighting no
one can study drawing. It is not till a pupil has learned to sit steady
and worry himself over his work for six hours on end that I begin to
believe he will ever do any good work. Have you any of you seen the
Emperor's work?"
"I have," answered a mosaic worker. "Many years ago Hadrian sent a
picture to me that he had painted; I was to make a mosaic from it. It was
a fruit piece. Melons, gourds, apples, and green leaves. The drawing was
but so-so, and the color impossibly vivid, still the composition was
pleasing from its solidity and richness. And after all, when one sees it,
one cannot but feel that such superfluity is better than meagreness and
feebleness. The larger fruits, especially under the exuberant sappy
foliage, were so huge that they might have been grown in the garden of
luxury itself, still the whole had a look of reality. I mitigated the
colors somewhat in my transcript; you may still see a copy of the picture
at my house, it hangs in the studio where my men draw. Nealkes, the rich
hanging-maker, has had a tapestry woven from it which Pontius proposes to
use as a hanging for a wall of the work-room, but I have made a fine
frame on purpose for it."
"Say rather for its designer."
"Or yet rather," added the most loquacious of the painters, "for the
visit he may possibly pay your workshops."
"I only wish the Emperor may come to ours too! I should like to sell him
my picture of Alexander saluted by the priests in the temple of Jupiter
Ammon."
"I hope that when you agree about the price you will remember we are
partners," said his fellow-artist smugly.
"I will follow your example strictly," replied the other.
"Then you will certainly not be a loser," cried Papias, "for Eustorgius
is fully aware of the worth of his works. And if Hadrian is to order
works from every master whose art he dabbles in, he will require a fleet
on purpose to carry his purchases to Rome."
"It is said," continued Eustorgius, laughing, "that he is a painter among
poets, a sculptor among painters, an astronomer among musicians, and a
sophist among artists--that is to say, that he pursues every art and
science with some success as his secondary occupation."
As he spoke the last words Pontius returned to the table where the
artists were standing round the winejar; he had heard the painter's last
remark and interrupted him by saying:
"But my friend you forget that he is a monarch among monarchs--and not
merely among those of today--in the fullest meaning of the word. Each of
us separately can produce something better and more perfect in his own
line; but how great is the man who by earnestness and skill can even
apprehend everything that the mind has ever been able to conceive of, or
the creative spirit of the artist to embody! I know him, and I know that
he loves a really thorough master, and tries to encourage him with
princely liberality. But his ears are everywhere, and he promptly becomes
the implacable enemy of those who provoke his resentment. So bridle your
restive Alexandrian tongues, and let me tell you that my colleague from
Rome is in the closest intimacy with Hadrian. He is of the same age,
resembles him greatly, and repeats to him everything that he hears said
about him. So cease talking about Caesar and pass no severer judgments on
dilettanti in the purple than on your wealthy pupils, who paint and
chisel for the mere love of it, and for whom you find it so easy to lisp
out 'charming,' or 'wonderfully pretty,' or 'remarkably nice.' Take my
warning in good part, you know I mean it well."
He spoke the last words with a cordial, manly feeling, of which his voice
was peculiarly capable, and which was always certain to secure him the
confidence even of the recalcitrant.
The artists exchanged greetings and hand-shakings and left the hall; a
slave carried away the wine-jar and wiped the table, on which Pontius
proceeded to lay out his sketches and plans. But he was not alone, for
Pollux was soon at his side, and with a comical expression of pathos and
laying his finger on his nose, he said:
"I have come out of my cage to say something more to you."
"Well?"
"The hour is approaching when I may hope to repay the beneficent deeds,
which, at various times, you have done to my interior. My mother will
to-morrow morning, set before you that dish of cabbage. It could not be
done sooner, because the only perfect sausage-maker, the very king of his
trade, prepares these savory cylinders only once a week. A few hours ago
he completed the making of the sausages, and to-morrow morning my mother
will warm up for our breakfasts the noble mess, which she is preparing
for us this evening--for, as I have told you, it is in its warmed-up
state that it is the ideal of its kind. What will follow by way of sweets
we shall owe again to my mother's art; but the cheering and invigorating
element--I mean the wine that I drives dull care away, we owe to my
sister."
"I will come," said Pontius, "if my guest leaves me an hour free, and I
shall enjoy the excellent dish. But what does a gay bird like you know of
dull care?"
"The words fit into the metre," replied Pollux. "I inherit from my
father--who, when he is not gate-keeping, sings and recites--a
troublesome tendency whenever anything incites me to drift into rhythm."
"But to-day you have been more silent than usual, and yet you seemed to
me to be extraordinarily content. Not your face only, but your whole
length--a good measure--from the sole of your foot to the crown of your
head was like a brimming cask of satisfaction."
"Well, there is much that is lovely in this world!" cried Pollux,
stretching himself comfortably and lifting his arms with his hands
clasped far above his head towards heaven.
"Has anything specially pleasant happened to you?"
"There is no need for that! Here I live in excellent company, the work
progresses, and--well, why should I deny it? There was something
specially to mark to-day; I met an old acquaintance again."
"An old one?"
"I have already known her sixteen years; but when I first saw her she was
in swaddling clothes."
"Then this venerable damsel friend is more than sixteen, perhaps
seventeen! Is Eros the friend of the happy, or does happiness only follow
in his train?" As the architect thoughtfully said these words to himself,
Pollux listened attentively to a noise outside, and said:
"Who can be passing out there at this hour? Do you not hear the bark of a
big dog mingle with the snapping of the three Graces?"
"It is Titianus conducting the architect from Rome," replied Pontius
excitedly.
"I will go to meet him. But one thing more my friend, you too have an
Alexandrian tongue. Beware of laughing at the Emperor's artistic efforts
in the presence of this Roman. I repeat it: the man who is now coming is
superior to us all, and there is nothing more repellant to me than when a
small man assumes a strutting air of importance because he fancies he has
discovered in some great man a weak spot where his own little body
happens to be sound. The artist I am expecting is a grand man, but the
Emperor Hadrian is a grander. Now retire behind your screens, and
tomorrow morning I will be your guest."
CHAPTER XI.
Pontius threw his pallium over the chiton he commonly wore at his work
and went forward to meet the sovereign of the world, whose arrival had
been announced to him in the prefect's letter. He was perfectly calm, and
if his heart beat a little faster than usual, it was only because he was
pleased once more to meet the wonderful man whose personality had made a
deep impression on him before.
In the happy consciousness of having done all that lay in his power and
of deserving no blame, he went through the ante-chambers and chief
entrance of the palace into the fore-court, where a crowd of slaves were
busied by torch-light in laying new marble slabs. Neither these workmen
nor their overseers had paid any heed to the barking of the dogs and the
loud talking which had for some little time been audible in the vicinity
of the gate-keeper's lodge; for a special rate of payment had been
promised to the laborers and their foremen if they should have finished a
set piece of the new pavement by a certain hour, to the satisfaction of
the architect. No one who heard the deep man's-voice ring through the
court from the doorway guessed to whom it belonged.
The Emperor had been delayed by adverse winds and had not run into the
harbor till a little before midnight.
Titianus, who was watching for him, he greeted as an old friend with
heartfelt warmth, and with him and Antinous he stepped into the prefect's
chariot, while Phlegon the secretary, Hermogenes his physician, and
Mastor with the luggage, among which were their campbeds, were to follow
in another vehicle. The harbor watchmen hastened to array themselves
indignantly to oppose the chariot, as it rolled noisily along the street,
and the huge dog that destroyed the peace of the night with its baying;
but as soon as they recognized Titianus they respectfully made way. The
gate-keeper and his wife, obedient to the prefect's warning, had remained
up, and as soon as the singer heard the chariot approaching which bore
the Emperor, he hastened to open the palace-gates. The broken-up pavement
and the swarms of men engaged in repairing it, obliged Titianus and his
companions to quit the chariot here and to pass close to the little
gate-house. Hadrian, whose observation nothing ever escaped which came in
his way and seemed worth noticing, stood still before Euphorion's door
and looked into the comfortable little room, with its decoration of
flowers and birds and the statue of Apollo; while dame Doris in her
newest garments, stood on the threshold to watch for the prefect. And
Titianus greeted her warmly, for he was wont whenever he came to Lochias
to exchange a few merry or wise words with her. The little dogs had
already crept into their basket, but as soon as they caught sight of a
strange dog they rushed past their mistress into the open air, and dame
Doris found herself obliged, while she returned the kindly greeting of
her patron, to shout at Euphrosyne, Thalia and Aglaia more than once by
their pretty names.
"Splendid, splendid!" cried Hadrian, pointing into the little house. "An
idyl, a perfect idyl. Who would have expected to find such a smiling nook
of peace in the most restless and busy town in the empire."
"I and Pontius were equally surprised at this little nest, and we
therefore left it untouched," said the prefect.
"Intelligent people understand each other, and I owe you thanks for
preserving this little home," answered the Emperor. "What an omen, what a
favorable, in every way favorable augury, it offers me. The Graces
receive me here into these old walls, Aglaia, Thalia and Euphrosyne!"
"Good luck to you, Master," old Doris called out to the prefect.
"We come late," said Hadrian.
"That does not matter," said the old woman. "Here at Lochias for the last
week we have quite forgotten to distinguish day from night, and a
blessing can never come too late."
"I have brought with me to-day an illustrious guest," said Titianus. "The
great Roman architect Claudius Venator. He only disembarked a few minutes
since."
"Then a draught of wine will do him good. We have in the house some good
white Mareotic from my daughter's garden by the lake. If your friend will
do us humble folks so much honor, I beg he will step into our room; it is
clean, is it not sir? and the cup I will give him to drink it out of
would not disgrace the Emperor himself. Who knows what you will find up
in the midst of all the muddle yonder?"
"I will accept your invitation with pleasure," answered Hadrian. "I can
see by your face that you have a pleasure in entertaining us, and any one
might envy you your little house."
"When the climbing-rose and the honey-suckle are out it is much
prettier," said Doris, as she filled the cup. "Here is some water for
mixing."
The Emperor took the cup carved by Pollux, looked at it with admiration,
and before putting it to his lips said:
"A masterpiece, dame; what would Caesar find to drink out of here where
the gate-keeper uses such a treasure? Who executed this admirable work,
pray?"
"My son carved it for me in his spare time."
"He is a highly-skilled sculptor," Titianus explained.
When the Emperor had half emptied the cup with much satisfaction he set
it on the table, and said:
"A very noble drink! I thank you, mother."
"And I you, for styling me mother: there is no better title a woman can
have who has brought up good children; and I have three who need never be
ashamed to be seen."
"I wish you all luck with them, good little mother," replied the Emperor.
"We shall meet again, for I am going to spend some days at Lochias."
"Now, in all this bustle?" asked Doris.
"This great architect," said Titianus, in explanation, "is to advise and
help our Pontius."
"He needs no help!" cried the old woman. "He is a man of the best stamp.
His foresight and energy, my son says, are incomparable. I have seen him
giving his orders myself, and I know a man when I see him!"
"And what particularly pleased you in him?" asked Hadrian, who was much
amused with the shrewd old woman's freedom.
"He never for a moment loses his temper in all the hurry, never speaks a
word too much or too little; he can be stern when it is necessary, but he
is kind to his inferiors. What his merits are as an artist I am not
capable of judging, but I am quite certain that he is a just and able
man."
"I know him myself," replied Caesar, "and you describe him rightly; but
he seemed to me sterner than he has shown himself to you."
"Being a man he must be able to be severe; but he is so only when it is.
necessary, and how kind he can be he shows himself every day. A man grows
to the mould of his own mind when he is a great deal alone; and this I
have noticed, that a man who is repellant and sharp to those beneath him
is not in himself anything really great; for it shows that he considers
it necessary to guard against the danger of being looked upon as of no
more consequence than the poorer folks he deals with. Now, a man of real
worth knows that it can be seen in his bearing, even when he treats one
of us as an equal. Pontius does so, and Titianus, and you who are his
friend, no less. It is a good thing that you should have come--but, as I
said before, the architect up there can do very well without you."
"You do not seem to rate my capacity very highly, and I regret it, for
you have lived with your eyes open and have learned to judge men keenly."
Doris looked shrewdly at the Emperor with her kindly glance, as if taking
his mental measure, and then answered confidently:
"You--you are a great man too--it is quite possible that you might see
things that would escape Pontius. There are a few choice souls whom the
Muses particularly love and you are one of them."
"What leads you to suppose so?"
"I see it in your gaze--in your brow."
"You have the gift of divination, then?"
"No, I am not one of that sort; but I am the mother of two sons on whom
also the Immortals have bestowed the special gift, which I cannot exactly
describe. It was in them I first saw it, and wherever I have met with it
since in other men and artists--they have been the elect of their circle.
And you too--I could swear to it, that you are foremost of the men among
whom you live."
"Do not swear lightly," laughed the Emperor. "We will meet and talk
together again little mother, and when I depart I will ask you again
whether you have not been deceived in me. Come now, Telemachus, the
dame's birds seem to delight you very much."
These words were addressed to Antinous, who had been going from cage to
cage contemplating the feathered pets, all sleeping snugly, with much
curiosity and pleasure.
"Is that your son?" asked Doris.
"No, dame, he is only my pupil; but I feel as if he were my son."
"He is a beautiful lad!"
"Why, the old lady still looks after the young men!"
"We do not give that up till we are a hundred or till the Parcae cut the
thread of life."
"What a confession!"
"Let me finish my speech.--We never cease to take pleasure in seeing a
handsome young fellow, but so long as we are young we ask ourselves what
he may have in store for us, and as we grow old we are perfectly
satisfied to be able to show him kindness. Listen young master. You will
always find me here if you want anything in which I can serve you. I am
like a snail and very rarely leave my shell."
"Till our next meeting," cried Hadrian, and he and his companions went
out into the court.
There the difficulty was to find a footing on the disjointed pavement.
Titianus went on in front of the Emperor and Antinous, and so but few
words of friendly pleasure could be exchanged by the monarch and his
vicegerent on the occasion of their meeting again. Hadrian stepped
cautiously forward, his face wearing meanwhile a satisfied smile. The
verdict passed by the simple shrewd woman of the people had given him far
greater pleasure than the turgid verse in which Mesomedes and his
compeers were wont to sing his praises, or the flattering speeches with
which he was loaded by the sophists and rhetoricians.
The old woman had taken him for no more than an artist; she could not
know who he was, and yet she had recognized--or had Titianus been
indiscreet? Did she know or suspect whom she was talking to? Hadrian's
deeply suspicious nature was more and more roused; he began to fancy that
the gate-keeper's wife had learnt her speech by heart, and that her
welcome had been preconcerted; he suddenly paused and desired the prefect
to wait for him, and Antinous to remain behind with the clog. He turned
round, retraced his steps to the gatehouse and slipped close up to it in
a very unprincely way. He stood still by the door of the little house
which was still open, and listened to the conversation between Doris and
her husband.
"A fine tall man," said Euphorion, "he is a little like the Emperor."
"Not a bit," replied Doris. "Only think of the full-length statue of
Hadrian in the garden of the Paneum; it has a dissatisfied satirical
expression, and the architect has a grave brow, it is true, but pure
friendly kindness lights up his features. It is only the beard that
reminds you of the one when you look at the other. Hadrian might be very
glad if he were like the prefect's guest."
"Yes, he is handsomer--how shall I say it--more like the gods than that
cold marble figure," Euphorion declared. "A grand noble, he is no doubt,
but still an artist too; I wonder whether he could be induced by Pontius
or Papias or Aristeas or one of the great painters to take the part of
Calchas the soothsayer in our group at the festival? He would perform it
in quite another way than that dry stick Philemon the ivory carver. Hand
me my lute; I have already forgotten again the beginning of the last
verse. Oh! my wretched memory! Thank you."
Euphorion loudly struck the strings and sang in a voice that was still
tolerably sweet and very well trained:
"'Sabina hail! Oh Sabina!--Hail; victorious hail to the conquering
goddess Sabina!' If only Pollux were here he would remind me of the right
words. 'Hail; victorious hail, to the thousand-fold Sabina!'--That is
nonsense. 'Hail, hail! divine hail to thee O all-conquering Sabina.' No
it was not that either. If a crocodile would only swallow this Sabina I
would give him that hot cake in yonder dish with pleasure, for his
pudding. But stay--I have it. 'Hail, a thousand-fold hail to the
conquering goddess Sabina!'"
Hadrian had heard all he wanted; while Euphorion went on repeating his
line a score or more of times to impress it on his recalcitrant memory.
Caesar turned his back on the gate-house, and while he and his companions
picked their way not without difficulty through the workmen who squatted
here and there and everywhere on the ground, he clapped Titianus more
than once on his shoulder, and after he had been received and welcomed by
Pontius, he exclaimed:
"I bless my decision to come here now! I have had a good evening, a quite
delightful evening."
The Emperor had not felt so cheerful and free from care for years as on
this occasion, and when in spite of the late hour he found the workmen
still busy everywhere, and saw all that had already been restored in the
old palace and what was being done for its renovation, the restless man
could not resist expressing his satisfaction, and exclaimed to Antinous:
"Here we may see that even in our sordid times miracles may be wrought by
good-will, industry, and skill. Explain to me my good Pontius how you
were able to construct that enormous scaffold."
CHAPTER XII.
More pleasant hours were to follow on the amusing arrival of the Emperor
at his half-finished residence at Lochias that night. Pontius proposed to
him to inspect several well-preserved rooms, which had in the first
instance been reserved for the gentlemen of his suite; and one of these
with an open outlook on the harbor, the town, and the island of
Antirrhodus he suggested should be provisionally furnished for the
Emperor's reception. Thanks to the architect's foresight, to Mastor's
practised hand, and to the numbers of men employed in the palace who were
accustomed to all kinds of service--provision was soon made for the
night, for Hadrian and his companions. The comfortable couch which the
prefect had sent to Lochias for Pontius was carried into the Emperor's
sleeping-room, and the camp-beds for Antinous and the suite were soon set
up in the other rooms. Tables, pillows, and various household vessels
which had already been sent in from the manufactories of Alexandria, and
which stood packed in bales and cases in the large central court of the
palace were soon taken out, and so far as they were applicable for use
were carried into the hastily-arranged rooms. Even before Hadrian, under
the prefect's guidance, had reached the last room in which restorations
were being carried out, Pontius was ready with his arrangements, and
could assure the Emperor that to-night he would find a good bed and very
tolerable quarters, and that by to-morrow he should have a really
elegantly-furnished room.
"Charming, quite delightful," cried the Emperor, as he entered his room.
"One might fancy you had some industrious demons at your command. Pour
some water over my hands, Mastor, and then to supper! I am as hungry as a
beggar's clog."
"I think we shall find all you need," replied Titianus, while Hadrian
washed his hands and his bearded face.
"Have you eaten all that I sent down to Lochias to-day, my dear Pontius?"
"Alas! we have," sighed Pontius.
"But I gave orders that a supper for five should be sent."
"It sufficed for six hungry artists," answered the architect, "if only I
could have guessed for whom the food was intended! And now what is to be
done? There are wine and bread still in the hall of the Muses, meanwhile"
"That must satisfy us," said the Emperor, as he wiped his face. "In the
Dacian war, in Numidia, and often when out hunting, I have been glad if
only one or the other was to be obtained."
Antinous, who was very hungry and tired, made a melancholy face at these
words of his master, and Hadrian perceiving it, added with a smile:
"But youth needs something more to live upon than bread and wine. You
pointed out to me just now the residence of the palace-steward. Might we
not find there a morsel of meat or cheese, or something of the kind?"
"Hardly," replied Pontius. "For the man stuffs his fat stomach and his
eight children with bread and porridge. But an attempt will at any rate
be worth making."
"Then send to him; but conduct us at once to the hall where the Muses
have preserved some bread and wine for me and these good fellows, though
they do not always provide them for their disciples."
Pontius at once conducted the Emperor into the hall. On the way thither,
Hadrian asked:
"Is the steward so miserably paid that he is forced to content himself
with such meagre fare?"
"He has a residence rent free, and two hundred drachmae a month."
"That is not so very little. What is the man's name, and of what kith and
kin is he?"
"He is called Keraunus, and is of ancient Macedonian descent. His
ancestors from time immemorial have held the office he now fills, and he
even supposes himself to be related to the extinct royal dynasty through
the mistress of some one of the Lagides. Keraunus sits in the town
council and never stirs out in the streets without his slave, who is one
of the sort which the merchants in the slave market throw into the
bargain with the buyer. He is as fat as a stuffed pig, dresses like a
senator, loves antiquities and curiosities, for which he will let himself
be cheated of his last coin, and bears his poverty with more of pride
than of dignity; and still he is an honorable man, and can be made
useful, if he is taken on the right side."
"Altogether a queer fellow. And you say he is fat, is he jolly?"
"As far from it as possible."
"Ah, people who are fat and cross are my aversion. What is this by way of
an erection?"
"Behind that screen works Papias' best scholar. His name is Pollux, and
he is the son of the couple who keep the gate-house. You will be pleased
with him."
"Call him here," said the Emperor.
But before the architect could comply with his desire the sculptor's head
had appeared above the screen. The young man had heard the approaching
voices and steps; he greeted the prefect respectfully from his elevated
position, and after satisfying his curiosity was about to spring down
from the stool on which he had climbed when Pontius called to him that
Claudius Venator, the architect from Rome, wished to make his
acquaintance.
"That is very kind in him, and still more kind in you," Pollux answered
from above, "since it is only from you that he can know that I exist
beneath the moon, and use the hammer and chisel. Allow me to descend from
my four-legged cothurnus, for at present you are forced to look up to me,
and from all I have heard of your talents from Pontius, nothing can be
more absolutely the reverse of what it ought to be."
"Nay, stop where you are," answered Hadrian. "We, as fellow-artists, may
waive ceremony.--What are you doing in there?"
"I will push the screen back in a moment and show you our Urania. It is
very good for an artist to hear the opinion of a man who thoroughly
understands the thing."
"Presently, friend-presently; first let me enjoy a scrap of bread, for
the severity of my hunger might very possibly influence my judgment."
As he was speaking the architect offered the Emperor a salver with bread,
salt, and a cup of wine, which his own slave had carried to him. When
Pollux observed this modest meal, he called out:
"That is prisoners' fare, Pontius; have we nothing better in the house
than that?"
"Possibly you yourself assisted in demolishing the dainty dishes I had
sent down for the architect," cried Titianus, pretending to threaten him.
"You are defacing a fair memory," sighed the sculptor, with mock
melancholy. "But, by Hercules, I did my fair share of the work of
destruction. If only now--but stay! I have an idea worthy of Aristotle
himself! that breakfast, to which I invited you to-morrow morning, most
noble Pontius, is all ready at my mother's, and can be warmed up in a few
minutes. Do not be alarmed, worthy sir, but the dish in question is
cabbage with sausages--a mess which, like the soul of an Egyptian,
possesses at the instant of resurrection, nobler qualities than when it
first sees the light."
"Excellent," cried Hadrian. "Cabbage and sausages!" He wiped his full
lips with his hand, smiling with gratification, and he broke into a
hearty laugh of amusement as he heard a loud "Ah!" of satisfaction from
Antinous, who drew nearer to the canvas screen. "There is another whose
mouth waters and whose imagination revels in a happy future," said the
Emperor to the prefect, pointing to his favorite.
But he had misinterpreted the lad's exclamation, for it was the mere name
of the dish--which his mother had often set on the table of his humble
home in Bithynia--which reminded him of his native country and his
childhood, and transplanted him in thought back into their midst. It was
a swift leap at his heart, and not merely the pleasant watering of his
gums, that had forced the "Ah" to his lips. Still, he was glad to see his
native dish again, and would not have exchanged it against the richest
banquet. Pollux had meanwhile come out of his nook, and said:
"In a quarter of an hour I shall set before you the breakfast which has
been turned into a supper. Mitigate your worst hunger with some bread and
salt, and then my mother's cabbage-stew will not only satisfy you, but
will be enjoyed with calm appreciation."
"Greet dame Doris from me," Hadrian called after the sculptor; and when
Pollux had quitted the hall he turned to Titianus and Pontius and said:
"What a splendid young fellow. I am curious to see what he can do as an
artist."
"Then follow me," replied Pontius, leading the way.
"What do you say to this Urania? Papias made the head of the Muse, but
the figure and the drapery Pollux formed with his own hand in a few
days."
The imperial artist stood in front of the statue, with his arms crossed,
and remained there for some time in silence. Then he nodded his bearded
head approvingly, and said gravely:
"A well-considered work, and carried out with remarkable freedom; this
mantle drawn over the bosom would not disgrace a Phidias. All is broad,
characteristic and true. Did the young artist work from the model here at
Lochias?"
"I have seen no model, and I believe that he evolved the whole figure out
of his head," replied Pontius.
"Impossible, perfectly impossible," cried the Emperor, in the tone of a
man who knows well what he is talking about. "Such lines, such forms not
Praxiteles himself could have invented. He must have seen them, have
formed them as he stood face to face with the living copy. We will ask
him. What is to be made out of that newly-set-up mass of clay?"
"Possibly the bust of some princess of the house of the Lagides.
To-morrow you shall see a head of Berenice by our young friend, which
seems to me to be one of the best things ever done in Alexandria."
"And is the lad a proficient in magic?" asked Hadrian. "It seems to me
simply impossible that he should have completed this statue and a woman's
bust in these few days."
Pontius explained to the Emperor that Pollux had mounted the head on a
bust already to hand, and as he answered his questions without reserve,
he revealed to him what stupendous exertions of the arts had been called
into requisition to give the dilapidated palace a suitable and, in its
kind, even brilliant appearance. He frankly confessed that here he was
working only for effect, and talked to Hadrian exactly as he would have
discussed the same subject with any other fellow-artist.
While the Emperor and the architect were thus eagerly conversing, and the
prefect was hearing from Phlegon, the secretary, all the experience of
their journey, Pollux reappeared in the hall of the Muses accompanied by
his father. The singer carried before him a steaming mess, fresh cakes of
bread, and the pasty which a few hours previously he had carried home to
his wife from the architect's table. Pollux held to his breast a
tolerably large two-handled jar full of Mareotic wine, which he had
hastily wreathed with branches of ivy.
A few minutes later the Emperor was reclining on a mattress that had been
laid for him, and was making his way valiantly through the savory mess.
He was in the happiest humor; he called Antinous and his secretary,
heaped abundant portions with his own hand on their plates, which he bade
them hold out to him, declaring as he did so that it was to prevent their
fishing the best of the sausages out of the cabbage for themselves. He
also spoke highly of the Mareotic wine. When they came to opening the
pasty the expression of his face changed; he frowned and asked the
prefect in a suspicious tone, severely and sternly:
"How came these people by such a pasty as this?"
"Where did you get it from?" asked the prefect of the singer.
"From the banquet which the architect gave to the artists here," answered
Euphorion. "The bones were given to the Graces and this dish, which had
not been touched, to me and my wife. She devoted it with pleasure to
Pontius' guest."
Titianus laughed and exclaimed:
"This then accounts for the total disappearance of the handsome supper
which we sent down to the architect. This pasty-allow me to look at
it--this pasty was prepared by a recipe obtained from Verus. He invited
us to breakfast yesterday and instructed my cook how to prepare it."
"No Platonist ever propagated his master's doctrines with greater zeal
than Verus does the merits of this dish," said the Emperor, who had
recovered his good humor as soon as he perceived that no artful
preparation for his arrival was to be suspected in this matter. "What
follies that spoilt child of fortune can commit! Does he still insist on
cooking with his own hands?"
"No, not quite that," replied the prefect. "But he had a couch placed for
him in the kitchen on which he stretched himself at full length and told
my cook exactly how to prepare the pasty, of which you are--I should say,
of which the Emperor is particularly fond. It consists of pheasant, ham,
cow's udder and a baked crust."
"I am quite of Hadrian's opinion," laughed the Emperor; doing all justice
to the excellent pie. "You entertain me splendidly my friend, and I am
very much your debtor. What did you say your name is young man?"
"Pollux."
"Your Urania, Pollux, is a fine piece of work, and Pontius says you
executed the drapery without a model. I said, and I repeat, that it is
simply impossible."
"You judge rightly, a young girl stood for it."
The Emperor glanced at the architect, as much as to say, I knew it!
Pontius asked in astonishment:
"When? I have never seen a female form within these walls."
"Recently."
"But I have never quitted Lochias for a minute. I have never gone to rest
before midnight, and have been on my legs again long before sunrise."
"But still there were several hours between your going to sleep, and
waking up again," replied Pollux. "Ah, youth--youth!" exclaimed the
Emperor, and a satirical smile played upon his lips.
"Part Damon and Phyllis by iron doors, and they will find their way to
each other through the key-hole."
Euphorion looked seriously at his son, the architect shook his head and
refrained from further questions, but Hadrian rose from his couch,
dismissed Antinous and his secretary to bed, requested Titianus to go
home and to give his wife his kindly greetings, and then desired Pollux
to conduct him within this screen, since he himself was not tired and was
accustomed to do with only a few hours sleep.
The young sculptor was strongly attracted by this commanding personage.
It had not escaped him that the gray-bearded stranger greatly resembled
the Emperor; but Pontius had prepared him for the likeness, and in fact
there was much in the eyes and mouth of the Roman architect that he had
never traced in any portrait of Hadrian 'Imperator.' And as they stood
before his scarcely-finished statue his respect increased for the new
visitor to Lochias; for, with earnest frankness, he pointed out to him
certain faults, and while praising the merits of the rapidly-executed
figure he explained in a few brief and pithy phrases his own conception
of the ideal Urania. Then shortly but clearly, he stated his views as to
how the plastic artist must deal with the problems of his art.
The young man's heart beat faster, and more than once he turned hot and
cold by turns as he heard things uttered by the bearded lips of this
imposing man, in a rich voice and in lucid phrases, which he had often
divined or vaguely felt, but for which, while learning, observing, and
working, he had never sought expression in words. And how kindly the
great master took up his timid observations, how convincingly he answered
them. Such a man as this he had never met, never had he bowed with such
full consent before the superiority and sovereign power of another mind.
The second hour after midnight had begun, when Hadrian, standing before
the rough-cast clay bust, asked Pollux:
"What is this to be?"
"A portrait of a girl."
"Probably of the complaisant model who ventures into Lochias at night?"
"No; a lady of rank will sit to me."
"An Alexandrian?"
"Oh, no. A beauty in the train of the Empress."
"What is her name? I know all the Roman ladies."
"Balbilla."
"Balbilla? There are many of that name. What is she like, the lady you
mean?" asked Hadrian, with a cunning glance of amusement.
"That is easier to ask than to answer," replied the artist, who, seeing
his gray-bearded companion smile, recovered his gay vivacity, "But
stay--you have seen a peacock spread its tail--now only imagine that
every eye in the train of Hera's bird was a graceful round curl, and that
in the middle of the circle there was a charming, intelligent girl's
face, with a merry little nose, and a rather too high forehead, and you
will have the portrait of the young damsel who has graciously permitted
me to model from her person."
Hadrian laughed heartily, threw off his cloak, and exclaimed:
"Stand aside--I know your maiden--and if I mean a different one you shall
tell me."
While he was still speaking he had plunged his powerful hands into the
yielding clay, and kneading and pinching like a practised modeller,
wiping off and pressing on, he formed a woman's face with a towering
structure of curls, which resembled Balbilla, but which reproduced every
conspicuous peculiarity with such whimsical exaggeration that Pollux
could not contain his delight. When at last Hadrian stepped back from the
happy caricature and called upon him to say whether that were not indeed
the Roman lady, Pollux exclaimed:
"It is as surely she, as you are not merely a great architect, but an
admirable sculptor. The thing is coarse, but unmistakably
characteristic."
The Emperor himself seemed to enjoy his artistic joke hugely, for he
looked at it, and laughed again and again. Pontius, however, seemed to
view it differently; he had listened with eager sympathy to the
conversation between Hadrian and the sculptor, and had watched the former
as he began his work; but as it went on he turned away, for he hated that
distortion of fine forms, which he often found that the Egyptians took a
special delight in. It was positively painful to him to see a graceful,
highly-gifted and defenceless creature, to whom, too, he felt himself
bound by ties of gratitude, mocked at in this way by such a man as
Hadrian. He had only to-day met Balbilla for the first time, but he had
heard from Titianus that she was staying at the Caesareum with the
Empress, and the prefect had also told him that she was the granddaughter
of that same governor, Claudius Balbillus, who had granted freedom to his
own grandfather, a learned Greek slave.
He had met her with grateful sympathy and devotion; her bright and lively
nature had delighted him, and at each thoughtless word she uttered he
would have liked to give her some warning sign, as though she were near
to him through some tie of blood, or some old established friendship that
might warrant his right to do so. The defiant, half gallant way in which
Verus, the dissipated lady-killer, had spoken to her had enraged him and
filled him with anxiety, and long after the illustrious visitors had left
Lochias he had thought of her again and again, and had resolved, if it
were possible, to keep a watchful eye on the descendant of the benefactor
of his family. He felt it as a sacred duty to shelter and protect her,
seeming to him as she did, an airy, pretty, defenceless song-bird.
The Emperor's caricature had the same effect on his feelings as though
some one had insulted and scorned, before his eyes, something that ought
to be regarded as sacred. And there stood the monarch, a man no longer
young, gazing at his performance and never weary of the amusement it
afforded him. It pained Pontius keenly, for like all noble natures, he
could not bear to discover anything mean or vulgar in a man to whom he
had always looked up as to a strong exceptional character. As an artist
Hadrian ought not to have vilified beauty, as a man he ought not to have
insulted unprotected innocence.
In the soul of the architect, who had hitherto been one of the Emperor's
warmest admirers, a slight aversion began to dawn, and he was glad, when,
at last, Hadrian decided to withdraw to rest.
The Emperor found in his room every requisite he was accustomed to use,
and while his slave undressed him, lighted his night-lamp and adjusted
his pillows, he said:
"This is the best evening I have enjoyed for years. Is Antinous
comfortably in bed?"
"As much so as in Rome."
"And the big dog?"
"I will lay his rug in the passage at your door."
"Has he had any food?"
"Bones, bread and water."
"I hope you have had something to eat this evening."
"I was not hungry, and there was plenty of bread and wine."
"To-morrow we shall be better supplied. Now, good-night. Weigh your words
for fear you should betray me. A few days here undisturbed would be
delightful!"
With these words the Emperor turned over on his couch and was soon
asleep.
Mastor, too, lay down to rest after he had spread a rug for the dog in
the corridor outside the Emperor's sleeping-room. His head rested on a
curved shield of stout cowhide under which lay his short sword; the bed
was but a hard one, but Mastor had for years been used to rest on nothing
better, and still had enjoyed the dreamless slumbers of a child; but
to-night sleep avoided him, and from time to time he pressed his hand on
his wearily open eyes to wipe away the salt dew which rose to them again
and again. For a long time he had restrained these tears bravely enough,
for the Emperor liked to see none but cheerful faces among his servants;
nay, he had once said that it was in consequence of his bright eyes that
he had entrusted to him the care of his person. Poor, cheerful Mastor! He
was nothing but a slave, still he had a heart which lay open to joy and
suffering, to pleasure and trouble, to hatred and to love.
In his childhood his native village had fallen into the hands of the foes
of his race. He and his brother had been carried away as slaves, first
into Asia Minor, and then as they were both particularly pretty
fair-haired boys, to Rome. There they had been bought for the Emperor;
Mastor had been chosen to wait on Hadrian's person, his brother had been
put to work in the gardens. Nothing was lacking to either except his
liberty; nothing tormented them but their longing for their native home,
and even this altogether faded away after he had married the pretty
little daughter of a superintendent of the gardens, a slave like himself.
She was a lively little woman with sparkling eyes, whom no one could pass
by without noticing.
The slave's duties left him but little time to enjoy the society of his
pretty partner and of the two children she bore him, but the
consciousness of possessing them made him happy when he followed his
master to the chase, or in the journeys through the empire. Now, for
seven months he had heard nothing of his family; but a short letter had
reached him at Pelusium, which had been sent with the despatches for the
Emperor from Ostia to Egypt. He could not read, and in consequence of the
Emperor's rapid travelling, it was not till he reached Lochias, that he
was put in possession of its contents.
Before going to rest Antinous had read him the letter, which had been
written for his brother by a public scribe, and its contents were enough
to wreck the heart even of a slave. His pretty little wife had fled from
her home and from the Emperor's service to follow a Greek ship's captain
across the world; his eldest child, a boy, the darling of his heart, was
dead; and his fair-haired tender little Tullia, with her pearly teeth,
her round little arms, and her pretty tiny fingers that had often tried
to pull his close-cropped hair, and had fondly stroked and patted it, had
been carried off to the miserable refuge, under whose squalid roof the
children of deceased slaves were reared. Only two hours since, and in
fancy he had possessed a home, and a group of human beings, whom he could
love. Now, this was all over and with however hard a hand the deepest
woes might fall on him, he might not sob or groan aloud, or even roll
from side to side as again and again he was violently prompted to do, for
his lord slept lightly and the least noise might wake him. At sunrise he
must appear before the Emperor as cheerful as usual, and yet he felt as
if he must himself perish miserably as his happiness had done. His heart
was bursting with anguish, still he neither groaned nor stirred.
CHAPTER XIII.
The night had been almost as sleepless to Keraunus' daughter Selene as it
had been to the hapless slave. Her father's vain wish to let Arsinoe take
a part with the daughters of the wealthier citizens had filled the girl's
heart with fresh terrors. It was the final blow which would demolish the
structure of their social existence, standing as it did on quaking
ground, and which must fling her family and herself into disgrace and
want. When their last treasure of any value was sold, and the creditors
could no longer be put off, particularly during the Emperor's presence in
the city, when they should try to sell up all her father's little
property, or to carry him off to a debtor's prison, was it not then as
good as certain that some one else would be appointed to fill his place,
and that she and the other children would fall into misery? And there lay
Arsinoe by her side, and slept with as calm and deep a breath as blind
Helios and the other little ones.
Before going to bed she had tried with all the fervency and eloquence of
which she was mistress, to persuade, entreat, and implore the heedless
girl to refuse as positively as she herself had refused to take any part
in the processions; but Arsinoe had at first repulsed her crossly, and
finally had defiantly declared that means might yet very likely be found,
and that what her father permitted, Selene had no right to interfere in,
still less to forbid. And when afterwards she saw Arsinoe sleeping so
calmly by her side, she felt as if she would like to shake her; but she
was so accustomed to bear all the troubles of the family alone, and to be
unkindly repelled by her sister whenever she attempted to admonish her,
that she forbore.
Arsinoe had a good and tender heart, but she was young, pretty, and vain.
With affectionate persuasion she might be won over to anything, but
Selene, when ever she remonstrated with her, made her feel her
superiority over herself, acquired from her care of the family and her
maternal character. Thus, not a day passed without some quarrelling and
tears between these two sisters who were so dissimilar, and yet, both so
well disposed. Arsinoe was always the first to offer her hand for a
reconciliation, but Selene would rarely have a kinder answer ready to her
affectionate advances than, "Let be," or "Oh yes, I know!" and their
outward intercourse bore an aspect of coolness, which was easily worked
up to an outbreak of hostile speeches. Hundreds of times they would go to
bed without wishing each other 'good-night,' and still more often would
they avoid any morning greeting when they first met in the day.
Arsinoe liked talking, but in Selene's presence she was taciturn; there
were few things in which Selene took pleasure, while her sister delighted
in every thing which can charm youth. It was the steward's eldest
daughter who attended to the daily needs of the children, their food and
clothes; it was the second who superintended their games, and their
dolls. The eldest watched and taught them with anxious care, detecting in
every little fault the germ of some evil tendency in the future, while
the other enticed them into follies, it is true, but opened their minds
to joyous impressions, and attained more by kisses and kind words than
Selene could by fault-finding. The children would call Selene when they
wanted her, but would fly to Arsinoe as soon as they saw her. Their
hearts were hers, and Selene felt this bitterly; it seemed to her to be
unjust, for she saw clearly that her sister could reap, from mere
frivolous play in her idle hours, a sweeter reward than she could earn by
the anxiety, trouble and exhausting toil, in which she often spent her
nights.
But children are not unjust in this way. It is true that they keep an
account in their heart and not in their head. Those who give them the
warmth of affection they pay back most honestly.
On this particular night it was not, it is certain, with very sisterly
feelings that Selene looked at the sleeping Arsinoe, and the words on the
girl's lips as she had dropped asleep, had sounded very unkind; but,
nevertheless, they felt warmly towards each other, and any one who should
have attempted to say a word against the one in the presence of the other
would soon have found out how close a bond held together these two
hearts, dissimilar as they were. But no girl of nineteen can pass a night
altogether without sleeping, however sadly she may turn and turn over and
over again in her bed. So slumber overmastered Selene every now and then
for a quarter of an hour, and each time she dreamed of her sister.
Once she saw Arsinoe dressed out like a queen, followed by beggar
children and pelted with bad words--then she saw her on the rotunda below
the balcony romping with Pollux, and in their bold sport they broke her
mother's bust. At last she dreamed that she herself was playing--as in
the days of her childhood--in the gate-keeper's garden with the sculptor.
They were making cakes of sand together, and Arsinoe jumped on the cakes
as soon as they were made, and trod them all into dust.
The pretty pale girl had for a long time ceased to know the refreshing,
dreamless, sound sleep of youth, for the sweetest slumbers are more apt
to seek out those who by day have some rest, than those who are worn out
by fatigue, and evening after evening Selene was one of these. Every
night she had dreams, but tonight they were almost exclusively sad in
character, and so terrifying that she woke herself repeatedly with her
own groaning, or disturbed Arsinoe's peaceful sleep by loud cries.
These cries did not disturb her father, he--to-night, as every night--had
begun to snore soon after he had gone to rest, never to cease till it was
time to rise again.
Selene was always busy in the house before any one, even before the
slaves; and the approach of day this time seemed to the sleepless girl a
real release. When she rose it was still perfectly dark, but she knew
that the rising of the December sun could not be long to wait for.
Without paying any heed to the sleepers, or making any special effort to
tread noiselessly, or to do what she had to do without disturbing them,
she lighted her little lamp, at the night-lamp, washed herself, arranged
her hair, and then knocked at the doors of the old slaves.
As soon as they had yawned out "directly," or a sleepy "very well," she
went into her father's room and took his jug to fetch him fresh water in
it. The best well in the palace was on a small terrace on the west side;
it was supplied by the city aqueducts, and was constructed of five marble
monsters, bearing up on twisted fishtails a huge shell, in which sat a
bearded river-god. Their horse-shaped heads poured water into a vast
basin, which, in the lapse of centuries, had grown full of a green and
filmy vegetation.
In order to reach this fountain, Selene had to go along the corridor
where lay the rooms occupied by the Emperor and his followers. She only
knew that an architect from Rome had taken up his quarters at Lochias,
for, some time after midnight, she had been to get out meat and salt for
him, but in what rooms the strangers had been lodged no one had told her.
But this morning as she followed the path she was accustomed to tread day
by day at the same hour, she felt an anxious shiver. She felt as if
everything were not quite the same as usual, and just as she had set her
foot on the cop step of the flight leading to the corridor, she raised
her lamp to discover whence came the sound she thought she could hear,
she perceived in the gloom a fearful something which as she approached
it resembled a dog, and which was larger--much larger--than a dog should
be.
Her blood ran cold with terror; for a few moments she stood as if
spellbound, and was only conscious that the growling and snarling that
she heard meant mischief and threatening to herself. At last she found
strength to turn to fly, but at the same instant a loud and furious bark
echoed behind her and she heard the monster's quick leaps as he flew
after her along the stone pavement.
She felt a violent shock, the pitcher flew out of her hand and was
shattered into a thousand fragments, and she sank to the ground under the
weight of a warm, rough, heavy mass. Her loud cries of alarm resounded
from the hard bare walls, and roused the sleepers and brought them to her
side.
"See what it is," cried Hadrian to his slave, who had immediately sprung
up and seized his shield and sword.
"The dog has attacked a woman who wanted to come this way," replied
Mastor.
"Hold him off, but do not beat him," the Emperor shouted after him.
"Argus has only done his duty." The slave hastened down the passage as
fast as possible, loudly calling the dog by his name. But another had
been beforehand and had dragged him off his victim, and this was
Antinous, whose room was close to the scene of action, and who, as soon
as he had heard the dog's bark and Selene's scream, had hurried to hold
back the brute which was really dangerous when on guard and in the dark.
When Mastor appeared the lad had just succeeded in dragging the dog away
from Selene, who was lying on the stairs leading to the corridor. Before
Antinous could reach her Argus was standing over her gnashing his teeth
and growling. Argus, who was quickly quieted by his friends' tone of
kindly admonition, stood aside silent and with his head down while
Antinous knelt by the senseless girl on whom the pale light of early dawn
fell through--wide window. The boy looked with alarm on her pale face,
lifted her helpless arm, and sought on her light-colored dress for any
trace of blood that might have been drawn, but in vain. After he had
assured himself that she still breathed, and that her lips moved, he
called to Mastor:
"Argus seems only to have pulled her down, not to have wounded her; she
has lost consciousness however. Go quickly into my room and bring me the
blue phial out of my medicine-case and a cup of water."
The slave whistled to the hound and obeyed the order as quickly as
possible.
Meanwhile Antinous remained on his knees by the senseless girl, and
ventured to raise her head with its long soft weight of hair. How
beautiful were those marble-white, and nobly-cut features! How touching
did the silent accent of pain that lay on her lips seem to him, and how
happy was the spoilt darling of the Emperor, who was loved by all who saw
him, to be able to be tender and helpful, unasked!
"Wake up, oh! wake up!" he cried to Selene--and when still she did not
move, he repeated more urgently and tenderly, "Pray, pray wake up."
But she did not hear him, and remained motionless even when, with a
slight blush, he drew over her shoulder her peplum, which the dog had
torn away. Now Mastor returned with the water and the blue phial, and
gave them to the Bithynian. While Antinous laid the girl's head in his
lap, the slave was hurrying away, saying: "Caesar called me."
The lad moistened Selene's forehead with the reviving fluid, made her
inhale the strong essence which the phial contained, and cried again loud
and earnestly, "Wake, wake."--And presently her lips parted, showing her
small, white teeth, and then she slowly raised the lids which had veiled
her eyes. With a deep sigh of relief he set the cup and the phial on the
ground so as to support her when she slowly began to raise herself; but,
scarcely had he turned his face towards her, when she sprang up suddenly
and violently, and flinging both her arms round his neck, cried out:
"Save me, Pollux, save me! The monster is devouring me." Antinous much
startled, seized the girl's arms to release himself from their embrace,
but, she had already freed him and sunk back on to the ground. The next
moment she was shivering violently as if from an attack of fever; again
she threw up her hands, pressed them to her temples, and gazed with
terror and bewilderment into the face that bent above her.
"What is it? Who are you?" she asked, in a low voice.
He rose quickly, and while he supported her as she attempted to rise and
stand upon her feet, he said:
"The gods be praised that you are still alive. Our big hound threw you
down-and he has terrible teeth." Selene was now standing up, and face to
face with the boy at whose last words she shuddered again.
"Do, you feel any pain?" asked Antinous, anxiously.
"Yes," she said, dully.
"Did he bite you?"
"I think not--pick up that pin, it has fallen out of my dress."
The Bithynian obeyed her behest, and while the girl re-fastened her
peplum over her shoulders she asked him again:
"Who are you? How came the dog in our palace?"
"He belongs--he belongs to us. We arrived late last night, and Pontius
put us--"
"Then you are with the architect from Rome?"
"Yes, but who are you?"
"Selene is my name, I am the daughter of the palace-steward."
"And who is Pollux, whom you were calling to help you when you recovered
your senses?"
"What does that matter to you?"
Antinous colored, and answered in confusion:
"I was startled when you suddenly roused up, with his name so loudly on
your lips, when I brought you back to life with water and this essence."
"Well, I was roused--and now I can walk again. People who bring furious
dogs into a strange place, should know how to take better care of them.
Tie the dog up safely, for the children--my little brothers and
sisters--come this way when they want to go out. Thank you for your
help--and my pitcher?"
As she spoke she looked down on the remains of the pretty jar, which was
one her mother had particularly valued. When she saw the fragments lying
on the ground, she gave a deep sob, but she shed no tears. Then she
exclaimed angrily: "It is infamous!"
With these words she turned her back on Antinous and returned to her
father's room, using her left foot, however, with caution, for it was
very painful.
The young Bithynian gazed in silence at Selene's tall, slight form, he
felt prompted to follow her, to say to her how very sorry he was for the
mischance that had befallen her, and that the hound belonged not to him
but to another man; but he dared not. Long after she had disappeared from
sight he stood on the same spot. At last he collected his senses, and
slowly went back to his room, where he sat on his couch with his eyes
fixed dreamily on the ground, till the Emperor's call roused him from his
reverie.
Selene had hardly vouchsafed Antinous a glance. She was in pain not
merely in her left foot, but also in the back of her head where she found
there was a deep cut; but her thick hair had staunched the blood that
flowed from the wound. She felt very tired, and the loss of her pretty
jug, which must also be replaced by another, vexed her far more than the
beauty of the favorite had charmed her.
She slowly and wearily entered the sitting-room, where her father was by
this time waiting for her and his water. He was accustomed to have it
regularly at the same hour, and as Selene was absent longer than usual,
he could think of no better way of filling up the time than by grumbling
and scolding to himself; when, at last, his daughter appeared on the
threshold, he at once perceived that she had no jug, and said crossly:
"And am I to have no water to-day?"
Selene shook her head, sank into a seat, and began to cry softly.
"What is the matter?" asked her father.
"The pitcher is broken," she said sadly.
"You should take better care of such expensive things," scolded her
father. "You are always complaining of want of money, and at the same
time you break half our belongings."
"I was thrown down," answered Selene, drying her eyes.
"Thrown down! by whom?" asked the steward, slowly rising.
"By the architect's big dog--the architect who came last night from Rome,
and to whom we gave that meat and salt in the middle of the night. He
slept here, at Lochias."
"And he set his clog on my child!" shouted Keraunus, with an angry glare.
"The hound was alone in the passage when I went there."
"Did it bite you?"
"No, but it pulled me down, and stood over me, and gnashed its teeth--oh!
it was horrible."
"The cursed, vagabond scoundrel!" growled the steward, "I will teach him
how to behave in a strange house!"
"Let him be," said Selene, as she saw her father about to don the saffron
cloak.
"What is done cannot be undone, and if quarrels and dissentions come of
it, it will make you ill."
"Vagabonds! impudent rascals! who fill my palace with quarrelsome curs,"
muttered Keraunus without listening to his daughter, and as he settled
the folds of his pallium he growled "Arsinoe! why is it that girl never
hears me."
When she appeared he desired her to heat the irons to curl his hair.
"They are ready by the fire," answered Arsinoe. "Come into the kitchen
with me."
Keraunus followed her, and had his locks curled and scented, while his
younger children stood round him waiting for the porridge which Selene
usually prepared for them at this hour.
Keraunus responded to their morning greetings with nods as friendly as
Arsinoe's tongs, which held his head tightly by the hair, would allow. It
was only the blind Helios, a pretty boy of six, that he drew to his side
and gave a kiss on his cheek. He loved this child, who, though deprived
of the noblest of the senses, was always merry and contented, with
peculiar tenderness. Once he even laughed aloud when the child clung to
his sister, as she brandished the tongs, and said:
"Father, do you know why I am sorry I cannot see?"
"Well?" said his father.
"Because I should so like to see you for once with the beautiful curls
which Arsinoe makes with the irons." But the steward's mirth was checked
when his daughter, pausing in her labors, said half in jest, but half in
earnest:
"Have you thought any more about the Emperor's arrival, father? I smarten
and dress you so fine every day--but to-day you ought to think of
dressing me."
"We will see about it," said Keraunus evasively. "Do you know," said
Arsinoe, after a short pause, as she twisted the last lock in the
freshly-heated tongs, "I thought it all over last night again. If we
cannot succeed any way in scraping together the money for my dress, we
can still--"
"Well?"
"Even Selene can say nothing against it."
"Against what?"
"But, you will be angry!"
"Speak out."
"You pay taxes like the rest of the citizens."
"What has that to do with it?"
"Well then, we are justified in expecting something from the city."
"What for?"
"To pay for my dress for the festival which is got up for the Emperor,
not by an individual, but by the citizens as a body. We could not accept
alone, but it is folly to refuse what a rich municipality offers. That is
neither more nor less than making them a present."
"You be silent," cried Keraunus, really furious, and trying in vain to
remember the argument with which, only yesterday, he had refused the same
suggestion. "Be silent, and wait till I begin to talk about such
matters."
Arsinoe flung the tongs on the hearth with so much annoyance that they
fell on the stone with a loud clatter; but her father quitted the kitchen
and returned to the sitting-room. There he found Selene lying on a couch,
and the old slave-woman, who had tied a wet handkerchief round the girl's
head, pressing another to her bare left foot.
"Wounded!" cried Keraunus, and his eyes rolled slowly from right to left
and from left to right.
"Look at the swelling!" cried the old woman in broken Greek, raising
Selene's snow-white foot in her black hands for her father to see.
"Thousands of fine ladies have hands that are not so small. Poor, poor
little foot," and as she spoke the old woman pressed it to her lips.
Selene pushed her aside, and said, turning to her father:
"The cut on my head is nothing to speak of, but the muscles and veins
here at the ancle are swelled and my leg hurts me rather when I tread.
When the dog threw me down I must have hit it against the stone step."
"It is outrageous!" cried Keraunus, the blood again mounting to his head,
"only wait and I will show them what I think of their goings on."
"No, no," entreated Selene, "only beg them politely to shut up the dog,
or to chain it, so that it may not hurt the children."
Her voice trembled with anxiety as she spoke the words, for the dread,
which, she knew not why, had so long been tormenting her lest her father
should lose his place, seemed to affect her more than ever to-day.
"What! civil words after what has now happened?" cried Keraunus
indignantly, and as if something quite unheard of had been suggested to
him.
"Nay, nay, say what you mean," shrieked the old woman. "If such a thing
had occurred to your father he would have fallen on the strange builder
with a good thrashing."
"And his son Keraunus will not let him off," declared the steward,
quitting the room without heeding Selene's entreaty not to let himself be
provoked.
In the ante-chamber he found his old slave whom he ordered to take a
stick and go before him to announce him to Pontius' guest, the architect,
who was lodging in the rooms in the wing near the fountain. This was the
elegant thing to do, and by this means the black slave would meet the big
dog before his master who held him and all dogs in the utmost abhorrence.
As he approached his destination he found himself quite in the humor to
speak his mind to the stranger who had come here with a ferocious hound
to tear the members of his family.
CHAPTER XIV.
Hadrian had slept most comfortably; only a few hours it is true, but they
had sufficed to refresh his spirit. He was now in his sitting-room and
had gone to the window, which took up more than half the extent of the
long west wall of the room, and opened on the sea. The wide opening,
which extended downwards to within a few spans of the floor, was finished
at either side by a tall pillar of fine reddish-brown porphyry, flecked
with white, and crowned with gilt Corinthian capitals.
Against one of these the Emperor was leaning stroking the blood-hound,
whose prompt and vigorous watchfulness had pleased him greatly. What did
he care for the terrors the dog might have caused a mere girl?
By the other pillar stood Antinous; he had placed his right foot on the
low window-sill, and with his chin resting on his hand and his elbow on
his knee, his figure was well within the room.
"This, Pontius, is really a first-rate man," said Hadrian, pointing to a
tapestry hanging across the narrow end of the room. "This hanging was
copied from a fruit-piece that I painted some time since, and had
executed here in mosaic. Yesterday this room was not even intended for my
use, thus the hanging must have been put up between our arrival and this
morning. And how many other beautiful things I see around me! The whole
place looks habitable, and the eye finds an abundance of objects on which
it can rest with pleasure."
"Have you examined that magnificent cushion?" asked Antinous; "and the
bronze figures, there in the corner, look to me far from bad."
"They are admirable works," said Hadrian. "Still, I would do without them
with pleasure rather than miss this window. Which is the bluer, the sky
or the sea? And what a delicious spring breeze fans us here, in the
middle of December. Which are the more delightful to contemplate, the
innumerable ships in the harbor, which communicate between this flowery
land and other countries, and bless it with wealth, or the buildings
which attract the eye in whichever direction it turns. It is difficult to
know whether most to admire their stately dimensions or the beauty of
their forms."
"And what is that long, huge dyke, which connects the island with the
mainland? Only look! There is a huge trireme passing under one of the
wide arches, on which it is supported--and there comes another."
"That is the great viaduct, called by the Alexandrians the Heptastadion,
because it is said to be seven stadia in length; and in the upper portion
it carries a stone water-course--as an elder tree has in it a vein of
pith-which supplies water to the island of Pharos."
"What a pity it is," said Antinous, "that we cannot overlook from here
the whole of the structure with the men and the vehicles that swarm upon
it like busy ants. That little island and the narrow tongue of land that
runs out into the harbor with the tall slender building at the end of it,
half hide it."
"But they serve to vary the picture," replied the Emperor. "Cleopatra
often dwelt in the little castle on the island with its harbor, and in
that tall tower on the northern side of the peninsula, round which, just
now, the blue waves are playing, while the gulls and pigeons fly happily
over it--there Antony retreated after the fight of Actium."
"To forget his disgrace!" exclaimed Antinous.
"He named it his Timonareum, because he hoped there to remain unmolested
by other human beings, like the wise misanthrope of Athens. How would it
be if I called Lochias my Timonareum?"
"No man need try to hide fame and greatness."
"Who told you that it was shame that led Antony to hide himself in that
place?" asked the imperial sophist; "he proved often enough, at the head
of his cavalry, that he was a brave soldier; and though at Actium, when
all was still going well, he let his ship be turned, it was out of no
fear of swords and spears, but because Fate compelled him to subjugate
his strong will to the wishes of a woman with whose destiny his was
linked."
"Then do you excuse his conduct?"
"I only seek to account for it, and never, for a moment, could allow
myself to believe that shame ever prompted a single act in Antony. I--do
you suppose I could ever blush? Nay, we cease to feel shame when we have
lived to feel such profound contempt for the world."
"But why then should Marc Antony have shut himself up, in yonder
sea-washed prison?"
"Because, to every true man, who has dissipated whole years of his life
with women, jesters and flatterers, a moment comes of satiety and
loathing. In such an hour he feels that of all the men under the lights
of heaven, he, himself, is the only one with whom it is worth his while
to commune. After Actium, this was what Antony felt, and he quitted the
society of men in order to find himself for once in good company."
"It is that, no doubt, which drives you now and again into solitude."
"No doubt-but you are always allowed to follow me."
"Then you regard me as better than others," exclaimed Antinous joyfully.
"As more beautiful at any rate," replied Hadrian kindly. "Ask me some
more questions."
But Antinous needed a few minutes pause before he could comply with this
desire. At last he recollected himself and proceeded to inquire why most
of the vessels were moored in the harbor beyond the Heptastadion, known
as Eunostus. The entrance there was less dangerous than that between the
Pharos and the point of Lochias which led into the eastern
landing-places. And then Hadrian could give him information as to every
building in the city about which his companion evinced any curiosity. But
when the Emperor had pointed out the Soma, under which rested the remains
of Alexander the Great, he became thoughtful, and said, as if to himself:
"The Great--We may well envy the young Macedonian; not the mere name of
Great, for many of small worth have had it bestowed on them, but because
he really earned it!"
There was not a question put by the handsome Bithynian that Hadrian could
not answer; Antinous followed all his explanations with growing
astonishment, exclaiming at last:
"How perfectly well you know this place--and yet you never were here
before."
"It is one of the greatest pleasures of travelling," replied Hadrian,
"that on our journeys we come to know many things in their actuality of
which we have formed an idea from books and narratives. This requires us
to compare the reality with the pictures in our own minds, seen with the
inward eye, before we saw the reality. It is to me a far smaller pleasure
to be surprised by something new and unexpected than to make myself more
closely acquainted with something I know already sufficiently to deem it
worthy to be known better. Do you understand what I mean?"
"To be sure I do. We hear of a thing, and when we afterwards see it we
ask ourselves whether we have conceived of it rightly. But I always
picture people or places which I hear much praised, as much more
beautiful than I ever find the reality."
"The balance of difference, which is to the disadvantage of reality,"
answered Hadrian, "stands not so much to its discredit, as to the credit
of the eager and beautifying power of your youthful imagination. I--I--"
and the Emperor stroked his beard and gazed out into the distance. "I
learn by experience that the older I grow, the more often I find it
possible so to imagine men, places, and things that I have not seen as
that when I meet them in real life for the first time, I feel justified
in fancying that I have known them long since, visited them, and beheld
them with my bodily eyes. Here, for instance, I feel as if I saw nothing
new, but only gazed once more at what has long been familiar. But that is
no wonder, for I know my Strabo, and have heard and read a hundred
accounts of this city. Still there are many things which are quite
strange to me, and yet as they come before me make me feel as if I had
seen or known them long ago."
"I have felt something like that," said Antinous. "Can our souls have
ever lived in other bodies, and sometimes recall the impressions made in
that former existence?
"Favorinus once told me that some great philosopher, Plato, I think,
asserts that before we are born our souls are wafted about in the
firmament that they may contemplate the earth on which they are destined
subsequently to dwell. Favorinus says too--"
"Favorinus!" cried Hadrian, evasively. "That graceful elocutionist has
plenty of skill in giving new and captivating forms to the thoughts of
the great philosophers; but he has not been able to surprise the secret
of his own soul--besides, he talks too much, and he cannot dispense with
the excitement of life."
"Still you have recognized the phenomenon, but you disapprove of
Favorinus' explanation of it?"
"Yes, for I have met men and things as old acquaintances which never saw
the light till long after I was born. Possibly my own interpretation may
not adapt itself to the consciousness of all--but in myself, I know for
certain, there dwells a mysterious something which stirs and works in me
independently of myself, which enters into me, and takes its departure at
its will. Call it as you will, my Daimon, or even my Genius--the name
matters not. Nor will this 'something' always come at my bidding, while
it often possesses me when I least expect it. In those moments when it
stirs within me, I am master of much which is peculiar to the experience
and potentiality of that hour. What is known to that Daimon always
appears to me the very same when I actually meet it. Thus Alexandria is
not unknown to me, because my Genius has seen it in his flights. It has
learnt and done much, both in me and for me; a hundred times, face to
face with my own finished works I have asked myself: 'Is it possible that
you--Hadrian--your mother's son-can have achieved this? What then is the
mysterious power that aided you to do it?' Now I also recognize it, and
can see it work in others. The man in whom it dwells soon excels his
fellows, and it is most manifest in artists. Or is it that mere common
men become great artists simply because the Genius selects them as his
temple to dwell in? Do you follow me, boy?"
"Not altogether," replied Antinous, and his large eyes which had sparkled
brightly so long as he gazed with the Emperor on the city, were now cast
down and fixed wearily on the ground. "Do not be angry with me, my Lord,
but I shall never understand such things as these, for there is no man
with whom your Genius, as you term it, has less concern than with me.
Thoughts of my own have I none, and it is difficult to me to follow the
thoughts of others; indeed I should like to know how I am ever to do
anything right. When I want to work, to work something out, no Daimon
helps my soul; no--it feels quite helpless, and drifts into dreaminess.
And if I ever do complete anything, I am obliged to own to myself that I
certainly might have been able to do it better."
"Self-knowledge," laughed Hadrian, "is the climax of wisdom. A man has
done something if he has only added a 'thing of beauty' to the joys of a
friend's imagination; what others do by hard work you do by mere
existence. Be quiet, Argus!" For, while he was speaking, the hound had
risen, and had gone snarling to the door. In spite of his master's orders
he broke into a loud bark when he heard a steady knock at the door.
Hadrian looked round in bewilderment, and asked: "Where is Mastor?"
Antinous shouted the slave's name into the Emperor's bedroom, which was
next to the living-room, but in vain. "He generally is always at hand,
and as brisk as a lark, but to-day he looked as if in a dream, and while
he was dressing me he first let my shoe fall out of his hand and then my
brooch."
"I read him yesterday a letter from Rome. His young wife has gone away
with a ship's captain."
"We may wish him joy of being free again."
"It does not seem to afford him any satisfaction."
"Oh! a handsome lad like my body-slave can find as many substitutes as he
likes."
"But he has not done so. For the present he is still smarting under his
loss."
"How wise! There, some one is knocking again. Just see who ventures--but
to be sure any one has a right to knock, for at Lochias I am not the
Emperor, but a simple private gentleman. Lie down Argus, are you crazy,
old fellow? Why the dog maintains my dignity better than I do, and he
does not seem altogether to like the architect's part I am playing."
Antinous had already raised his hand to lift the handle, when the door
was gently opened from outside, and the steward's slave stood on the
threshold. The old negro presented a lamentable spectacle. The Emperor's
dignified and awe-compelling figure, and his favorite's rich garments
made him feel embarrassed, and the hound's threatening growl filled him
with such terror that he huddled his lean negro-legs together, and, as
far as its length would allow, tried to cover them for protection with
his threadbare tunic.
Hadrian gazed in astonishment at this image of fear, and then asked:
"Well! what do you want, fellow?"
The slave attempted to advance a step or two, but at a loud command from
Hadrian he stood still, and as he looked down at his flat feet, he
ruefully scratched his short-cropped grey hair, some of which had fallen
off and left a bald patch.
"Well," repeated Hadrian, in a tone which was anything rather than
encouraging, as he relaxed his hold on the hound's collar in a somewhat
suspicious manner. The slave's bent knees began to quake, and holding out
his broad palm to the grey-bearded gentleman, who seemed to him
hardly less alarming than the dog, he began to stammer out in
fearfully-mutilated Greek the speech which his master had repeated to him
several times, and which set forth that he had come "into the presence of
the architect, Claudius Venator, of Rome, to announce the visit of his
master, a member of the town-council, a Macedonian, and a Roman citizen,
Keraunus, the son of Ptolemy, steward of the once royal but now imperial
palace at Lochias."
Hadrian unrelentingly allowed the poor wretch to finish his speech,
rubbing his hands with amusement, while the sweat of anguish stood on the
old slave's face, and to prolong the delightful joke, he took good care
not to help the miserable old man when his unaccustomed tongue came to
some insuperable difficulty. When, at length, the negro had finished the
pompous announcement, Hadrian said, kindly:
"Tell your master he may come in."
Scarcely had the slave left the room, when the sovereign, turning to his
favorite, exclaimed:
"This is a delicious joke! What will the Jupiter be like, when the eagle
is such a bird as this!"
Keraunus was not long to wait for. While pacing up and down the passage
outside the Emperor's room, his bad humor had risen considerably, for he
took it as a slight on the part of the architect, that he should allow
him--whose birth and dignities he would have learnt from his slave--to
wait several minutes, each of which seemed to him a quarter of an hour.
His expectation too, that the Roman would come to conduct him in person
into his apartment was by no means fulfilled, for the slave's message was
briefly--"He may come in."
"Did he say may? Did he not say 'please to come in, or have the goodness
to come in?'" asked the steward.
"He may come in--was what he said," replied the slave.
Keraunus grunted out, "Well!" set his gold circlet straight on his head
which he held very upright, crossed his arms over his broad chest with a
sigh, and ordered the black man:
"Open the door."
The steward crossed the threshold with much dignity: then, not to commit
any breach of courtesy, he bowed low, and was about to begin to utter his
reprimand in cutting terms, when a glance at the Emperor and at the
splendid decoration which the room had undergone since the day previous,
not to mention the very unpleasant growling of the big dog, prompted him
to strike a milder string. His slave had followed him and had sought a
safe corner near the door, between the wall of the room and a couch, but
he himself, conquering his alarm at the dog, went forward some distance
into the room. The Emperor had seated himself on the window-sill; he
pressed his foot lightly on the head of the dog, and gazed at Keraunus as
at some remarkable curiosity. His eye thus met that of the steward and
made him clearly understand that he had to do with a greater personage
than he had expected. There was something imposing in the person of the
man who sat before him; for this very reason, however, his pride stood on
tiptoe, and he asked in a tone of swaggering dignity, though not so
sharply and abruptly as he had intended.
"Am I standing before the new visitor to Lochias, the architect Claudius
Venator of Rome?"
"You are--standing--" replied the Emperor, with a roguish side glance at
Antinous.
"You have met with a friendly reception to this palace. Like my fathers,
who have enjoyed the stewardship of it for centuries, I know how to
exercise the sacred duties of hospitality."
"I am surprised to hear of the high antiquity of your family and bow to
your pious sentiments," answered Hadrian, in the same tone as the
steward. "What farther may I learn from you?"
"I did not come here to relate history," said Keraunus, whose gall rose
as he thought he detected a mocking smile on the stranger's lips. "I did
not come here to tell stories, but to complain that you, as a
warmly-welcomed guest, show so little anxiety to protect your host from
injury."
"How is that?" asked Hadrian, rising from his seat and signing to
Antinous to hold back the hound, which manifested a peculiar aversion to
the steward. It no doubt detected that he had come to show no special
friendliness to his owner.
"Is that dangerous dog, gnashing its teeth there, your property?" asked
Keraunus.
"Yes."
This morning it threw down my daughter and smashed a costly pitcher,
which she is fond of carrying to fetch water in the dawn."
"I heard of that misadventure," said Hadrian, "and I would give much if I
could undo it. The vessel shall be amply made good to you."
"I beg you not to add insult to the injury, we have suffered by your
fault. A father whose daughter has been knocked down and hurt--"
"Then, Argus actually bit her?" cried Antinous, horrified.
"No," Keraunus replied. "But as she fell her head and foot have been
injured, and she is suffering much pain."
"That is very sad," said Hadrian, "and as I am not ignorant of the
healing art, I will gladly try to help the poor girl."
"I pay a professional leech, who attends me and mine," replied the
steward, in a repellant tone, "and I came hither to request--or, to be
frank with you--to require--"
"What?"
"First, that my pardon shall be asked."
"That, the artist, Claudius Venator, is always ready to do when any one
has suffered damage by his fault. What has happened--I repeat it--grieves
me sincerely, and I beg you tell the maiden to whom the accident
happened, that her pain is mine. What more do you desire?"
The steward's features had calmed down at these last words, and he
answered with less excitement than before:
"I must request you to chain up your dog, or to shut it up, or in some
way to keep it from mischief."
"That is pretty strong!" cried the Emperor.
"It is only a reasonable demand, and I must stand by it," replied
Keraunus decidedly. "Neither I--nor my children's lives are safe, so long
as this wild beast is prowling about at pleasure."
Hadrian had, ere now, erected monuments to deceased favorites, both dogs
and horses, and his faithful Argus was no less dear to him, than other
four-footed companions have been to other childless men; hence the queer
fat man's demand seemed to him so audacious and monstrous, that he
indignantly exclaimed:
"Folly!--the dog shall be watched, but nothing farther."
"You will chain him up," replied Keraunus, with an angry, glare, "or
someone will be found who will make him harmless forever."
"That will be an evil attempt for the cowardly murderer!" cried Hadrian.
"Eh! Argus, what do you think?"
At these words the dog drew himself up, and would have sprung at the
steward's throat if his master and Antinous had not held him back.
Keraunus felt that the dog had threatened him, but at this instant he
would have let himself be torn by him without wincing, so completely was
he overmastered by the fury born of his injured pride.
"And am I--I too, to be hunted down by a dog, in this house?" he cried
defiantly, setting his left fist on his hip. "Every thing has its limits,
and so has my patience with a guest who, in spite of his ripe age forgets
due consideration. I will inform the prefect Titianus of your proceedings
here, and when the Emperor arrives he shall know--"
"What?" laughed Hadrian.
"The way you behave to me."
"Till then the dog shall stay where it is, and really under due
restraint. But I can tell you man, that Hadrian is as much a friend of
dogs as I am--and fonder of me than even of dogs."
"We will see," growled Keraunus, "I or the dog!"
"I am afraid it will be the dog then."
"And Rome will see a fresh revolt," cried Keraunus, rolling his eyes.
"You took Egypt from the Ptolemies."
"And with very good reason--besides that is a stale old story."
"Justice is never stale, like a bad debt."
"At any rate it perishes with persons it concerns; there have been no
Lagides left here--how many years?"
"So you believe, because it suits your ends to believe it," replied the
steward. "In the man who stands before you flows the blood of the
Macedonian rulers of this country. My eldest son bears the name of
Ptolemaeus Helios--that borne by the last of the Lagides, who perished as
you pretend."
"Dear, good, blind Helios!" interrupted the black slave; for he was
accustomed to avail himself of the hapless child's name as a protection,
when Keraunus was in a doubtful humor.
"Then the last descendant of the Ptolemies is blind!" laughed the
Emperor. "Rome may ignore his claims. But I will inform the Emperor how
dangerous a pretender this roof yet harbors."
"Denounce me, accuse me, calumniate me!" cried the steward,
contemptuously. "But I will not let myself be trodden on.
Patience--patience! you will live to know me yet."
"And you, the blood-hound," replied Hadrian, "if you do not this instant
quit the room with your mouthing crow--"
Keraunus signed to his slave and without greeting his foe in any way,
turned his back upon him. He paused for a moment at the door of the room
and cried out to Hadrian:
"Rely upon this, I shall complain to the Council and write to Caesar how
you presume to behave to a Macedonian citizen."
As soon as the steward had quitted the room, Hadrian freed the dog, which
flew raging at the door which was closed between him and the object of
his aversion. Hadrian ordered him to be quiet, and then turning to his
companion, he exclaimed:
"A perfect monster of a man! to the last degree ridiculous, and at the
same time repulsive. How his rage seethed in him, and yet could not break
out fairly and thoroughly. I am always on my guard with such obstinate
fools. Pay attention to my Argus, and remember, we are in Egypt, the land
of poison, as Homer long since said. Mastor must keep his eyes open--Here
he is at last."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Have lived to feel such profound contempt for the world
In order to find himself for once in good company--(Solitude)
Never speaks a word too much or too little
They keep an account in their heart and not in their head
THE EMPEROR
By Georg Ebers
Volume 4.
CHAPTER XV.
After the Emperor's body-slave had started up to go to the aid of Selene,
who was attacked by his sovereign's dog, something had happened to him
which he could not forget; he had received an impression which he could
not wipe out, and words and tones had stirred his mind and soul which
incessantly echoed in them, so that it was in a preoccupied and
half-dreamy way that he had done his master those little services which
he was accustomed to perform every morning, briskly and with complete
attention.
Summer and winter Mastor was accustomed to leave his master's bedroom
before sunrise to prepare everything that Hadrian could need when he rose
from his slumbers. There was the gold plating to clean on the narrow
greaves and the leather straps which belonged to his master's military
boots, his clothes to air and to perfume with the slight, hardly
perceptible scent that he liked, but the preparations for Hadrian's bath
were what took up most of his time. At Lochias there were not as yet--as
there were in the imperial palace at Rome--properly-filled baths; still
his servant knew that here, as there, his master would use a due
abundance of water. He had been told that if he required anything for his
master he was to apply to Pontius. Him he found, without seeking him,
outside the room meant for Hadrian's sitting-room, to which, while the
Emperor still slept, he was endeavoring, with the help of his assistants,
to give a comfortable and pleasing aspect. The architect referred the
slave to the workmen who were busy laying the pavement in the forecourt
of the palace; these men would carry in for him as much water as ever he
could need. The body-servant's position relieved him of such humble
duties, still, when on the chase, when travelling, or as need arose, he
was accustomed to perform them unasked, and very willingly.
The sun had not yet risen when he went out into the court, a number of
slaves were lying on their mats asleep, others had camped round a fire
and were waiting for their early broth, which was being stirred with
wooden sticks by an old man and a boy. Mastor would not disturb either
group; he went up to a party of workmen, who seemed to be talking
together, and yet remained attentive to the speech of an old man who was
evidently telling them a story.
The poor fellow's heart was heavy and his mind was little bent on tales
and amusements. All life was embittered. The services required of him
usually seemed to him of paramount importance, beyond everything else;
but to-day it was different. He had an obscure feeling as though fate
herself had released him from all his duties, as if misfortune had cut
the bonds which bound him to his service to the Emperor, and had made him
an isolated and lonely being. It even came into his head whether he
should not take in his hand all the gold pieces given him sometimes by
Hadrian, or which the wealthy folks who wished to be the foremost of
those introduced into the Emperor's presence, after waiting in the
antechamber, had flung to him or slipped into his hand--make his escape
and carouse away all that he possessed in the taverns of the great city,
in wine and the gay company of women. It was all the same to him what
might happen to him.
If he were caught he would probably be flogged to death; but he had had
kicks and blows in plenty before he had got into the Emperor's service,
nay; when he was brought to Rome he had once even been hunted with dogs.
If he lost his life, after all what would it matter? He would have done
with it then, once for all, and the future offered him no prospect but
perpetual fatigue in the service of a restless master, anxiety and
contempt. He was a thoroughly good-hearted being who could not bear to
hurt any one, and who found it equally hard to disturb a fellow-man in
his pleasures or amusement. He felt particularly disinclined to do so
just now, for a wounded soul is keenly alive to the moods and feelings of
others; so, as he approached the group of workmen, from among whom he
proposed to choose his water-carrier, he determined that he would not
interrupt the story-teller, on whose lips the gaze of his audience was
riveted with interest.
The glare of the blaze under the soup-kettle fell full on the speaker's
face. He was an old laborer, but his long hair proclaimed him a freeman.
His abundant white beard induced Mastor to suppose that he must be a Jew
or a Phoenician, but there was nothing remarkable in the old man, who was
dressed in a poor and scanty tunic, excepting his peculiarly brilliant
eyes, which were immovably fixed on the heavens, and the oblique position
in which he held his head, supporting it on the left side with his raised
hands.
"And now," said the speaker, dropping his arms, "let us go back to our
labors, my brethren. 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,' it
is written. It is often hard to us old men to heave stones and bend our
stiff backs for so long together, but we are nearer than you younger ones
to the happy future. Life is not easy to all of us, but it is we who
labor and are heavy laden--we above all others--that the Lord has bidden
to be his guests, and not last among us the slaves."
"Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will refresh
you," interrupted one of the younger men repeating the words of Christ.
"Yea, thus saith the Saviour," said the old man approvingly, "and he
surely then was thinking of us. I said just now our load is not light,
but how much heavier was the burden he took upon him of his own free will
to release us from woe. Every one must work, nay even Caesar himself, but
he who could dwell in the glory of his Father let himself be mocked and
scorned and spit in the face, let the crown of thorns be pressed on his
suffering head, bore his heavy cross, sinking under its weight, and
endured a death of torment, and all for our sakes, without a murmur. But
he suffered not in vain, for God accepted the sacrifice of his Son, and
did his will and said, 'All that believe on Him should not perish, but
have everlasting life.' And though a new and weary day is now beginning,
and though it should be followed by a thousand wearier still, though
death is the end of life--still we believe in our Redeemer, we have God's
word bidding us out of sorrows and sufferings into his Heaven, promising
us for a brief time of misery in this world, endless ages of joy.--Now go
to work. Our sturdy friend Krates will work for you dear Knakias until
your finger is healed. When the bread is distributed remember, each of
you, the children of our poor deceased brother Philammon. You, poor
Gibbus, will find your labors bitter to-day. This man's master, my dear
brethren, sold both his daughters yesterday to a dealer from Smyrna; but
if you never see them again in Egypt, or in any other country, my friend,
you will meet them in the home of your Heavenly Father--of that you may
rest assured. Our life on earth is but a pilgrimage, and Heaven is the
goal, and the Guide who teaches us never to miss the way, is our Saviour.
Weariness and toil, sorrow and suffering are easy to bear, to him who
knows that when the solemn hour is near, the King of Kings shall throw
open his dwelling-place, and invite him to enter as a favored guest to
inhabit there, where all we have loved have found joy and rest."
"Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will refresh
you," said a man's loud voice again from the circle that sat round the
old man. The old man stood up, signed to a boy who distributed the bread
in equal shares to the workmen, and took up a jar with handles, out of
which he filled a large wooden cup with wine.
Not a word of this discourse had escaped Mastor, and the often repeated
verse, "Come unto me all ye that labor," dwelt in his mind like the
invitation of a hospitable friend bidding him to happy days of freedom
and enjoyment. A distant gleam shone through the weight of his troubles,
seeming to promise the dawn of a new day, and he reverently went up to
the old man, in the first place to ask him if he was the overseer of the
workmen who stood round him.
"I am," replied the old man, and as soon as he learnt what Mastor
required as a commission from the controlling architect, he pointed out
some young slaves who quickly brought the water that he needed.
Pontius met the Emperor's servant and his water-carriers and remarked,
loudly enough for Mastor to understand him, to Pollux who was with him:
"The architect's servant is getting Christians to wait upon his master
to-day. They are regular and sober workmen who do their duty silently and
well."
While Mastor was giving his master towels, and helping to dry and dress
him, he was far less attentive than usual, for he could not get the words
he had heard from the overseer's lips out of his mind. He had not
understood them all, but he had fully comprehended that there was a kind
and loving God who had suffered in his own person the utmost torments,
who was especially gracious to the poor, the miserable, and the bondsman,
and who promised to refresh them and comfort them, and to re-unite them
to those who had once been dear to them. "Come unto me," sounded again
and again in his ears, and struck so warmly to his heart that he could
not help thinking first of his mother, who, so many a time, when he was a
child, had called to him only to clasp him in her arms as he ran towards
her, and to press him to her heart. Just so had he often called his poor
little dead son, and the feeling that there could be any one who might
still call to him--the forsaken lonely man--with loving words to release
him from his griefs, to reunite him to his mother, his father, and all
the dear ones left behind in his lost and distant home, took half the
bitterness from his pain.
He was accustomed to listen to all that was said in the Emperor's
presence, and year by year he had learnt to understand more of what he
heard. He had often heard the Christians discussed, and usually as
deluded but dangerous fools. Many of his fellow-slaves, too, he had heard
called Christian idiots, but still not unfrequently very reasonable men,
and sometimes even Hadrian himself, had taken the part of the Christians.
This was the first time that Mastor had heard from their own lips what
they believed and hoped, and now, while fulfilling his duties he could
hardly bear the delay before he could once more seek out the old
pavement-worker, to enquire of him, and to have the hopes confirmed which
his words had aroused in his soul.
No sooner had Hadrian and Antinous gone into the living-room than Mastor
had hastened off across the court to find the Christians. There he tried
to open a conversation with the overseer concerning his faith, but the
old man answered that there was a season for everything; just now he
could not interrupt the work, but that he might come again after sundown,
and that he then would tell him of Him who had promised to refresh the
sorrow-laden.
Mastor thought no more of making his escape. When he appeared again in
his master's presence there was such a sunny light in his blue eyes that
Hadrian left the angry words he had prepared for him unspoken, and cried
to Antinous, laughing and pointing to the slave:
"I really believe the rascal has consoled himself already, and found a
new mate. Let us, too, follow the precept of Horace, so far as we may,
and enjoy the present day. The poet may let the future go as it will, but
I cannot, for, unfortunately, I am the Emperor."
"And Rome may thank the gods that you are," replied Antinous.
"What happy phrases the boy hits upon sometimes," said Hadrian with a
laugh, and he stroked the lad's brown curls. "Now till noon I must work
with Phlegon and Titianus, whom I am expecting, and then perhaps we may
find something to laugh at. Ask the tall sculptor there behind the
screens, at what hour Balbilla is to sit to him for her bust. We must
also inspect the architect's work, and that of the Alexandrian artists by
daylight; that, their zeal has well deserved."
Hadrian retired to the room where his private secretary had ready for him
the despatches and papers for Rome and the provinces, which the Emperor
was required to read and to sign. Antinous remained alone in the
sitting-room, and for an hour he continued to gaze at the ships which
came to anchor in the harbor, or sailed out of the roads, and amused
himself with watching the swift boats which swarmed round the larger
vessels, like wasps round ripe fruit. He listened to the songs of the
sailors, and the music of the flute-players, to the measured beat of the
oars, which came up from the triremes in the private harbor of the
Emperor as they went out to sea. Even the pure blue of the sky and the
warmth of the delicious morning were a pleasure to him, and he asked
himself whether the smell of tar, which pervaded the seaport, were
agreeable or not.
Presently as the sun mounted in the sky, its bright sphere dazzled him;
he left the window with a yawn, stretched himself on a couch, and stared
absently up at the ceiling of the room without thinking of the subject
which the faded picture on it was intended to represent.
Idleness had long since grown to be the occupation of his life; but
accustomed to it as he was, he was sometimes conscious of its dark
attendant shadow ennui--as of a disagreeable and intrusive interruption
to the enjoyment of life. Generally in such lonely hours of idle reverie
his thoughts reverted to his belongings in Bithynia, of whom he never
dared to speak before the Emperor, or perhaps of the hunting excursions
he had made with Hadrian, of the slaughtered game, of the fish he--an
experienced angler--had caught, or such like. What the future might bring
him troubled him not, for to the love of creativeness, to ambition--to
all, in short, that bore any resemblance to a passionate excitement his
soul had, so far, remained a stranger. The admiration which was
universally excited by his beauty gave him no pleasure, and many a time
he felt as though it was not worth while to stir a limb or draw a breath.
Almost everything he saw was indifferent to him excepting a kind word
from the lips of the Emperor, whom he regarded as great above all other
men, whom he feared as Destiny incarnate, and to whom he felt himself
bound as intimately as the flower to the tree, the blossom that must die
when the stem is broken, on which it flaunts as an ornament and a grace.
But, to-day, as he flung himself on the divan his visions took a new
direction. He could not help thinking of the pale girl whom he had saved
from the jaws of the blood-hound--of the white cold hand which for an
instant had clung to his neck--of the cold words with which she had
afterwards repelled him.
Antinous began to long violently to see Selene. That same Antinous, to
whom in all the cities he had visited with the Emperor, and in Rome
particularly, the noble fair ones had sent branches of flowers and tender
letters, and who nevertheless, since the day when he left his home, had
never felt for any woman or girl half so tender a sentiment, as for the
hunter the Emperor had given him, or for the big dog. This girl stood
before his memory like breathing marble. Perchance the man might be
doomed to death who should rest on her cold breast, but such a death must
be full of ecstasy, and it seemed to him that it would be far more
blissful to die with the blood frozen in his veins, than of the too rapid
throbbing of his heart.
"Selene," he murmured, now and again, with soft hesitation; a strange
unrest foreign to his calm nature seemed to propagate itself through all
his limbs, and he who commonly would be stretched on a couch for hours
without stirring, lost in dreams, now sprang up and paced the room,
sighing deeply, and with long strides.
It was a passionate longing for Selene that drove him up and down, and
his wish to see her again crystallized into resolve, and prompted him to
contrive the ways and means of meeting her once more before the Emperor's
return.
Simply to invade her father's lodging without farther ceremony, seemed to
him out of the question, and yet he was certain of finding her there,
since her injured foot would of course keep her at home. Should he once
more go to the steward with a request for bread and salt? But he dared
not ask anything of Keraunus in Hadrian's name after the scene which had
so recently taken place. Should he go there to carry her a new pitcher in
the place of the broken one? But that would only freshly enrage the
arrogant official.
Should he--should he--should he not? But no, it was quite
impossible--still, that no doubt--that was the right idea. In his
medicine-chest there were a few extracts which had been given to him by
the Emperor; he would offer her one of these to dilute with water and
apply to her bruised foot. And this act of sympathy could not displease
even his master, who liked to prove his healing art on the sick or
suffering. He at once called Mastor, and desired him to take charge of
the hound which had followed his steps as he paced the room, then he went
into his sleeping-room, took out a phial of a most costly essence, which
Hadrian had given him on his last birthday, and which had formerly
belonged to Trajan's wife, Kotina, and then proceeded to the steward's
rooms. On the steps where he had found Selene, he found the black slave
with some children. The old man had sat down them and got no farther for
fear of the Roman's dog. Antinous went up to him and begged him to guide
him to his master's quarters, and the negro immediately showed him the
way, opened the door of the antechamber, and pointing to the living-room
said:
"There--but Keraunus is absent."
Without troubling himself any further about Antinous the slave went back
to the children, but the Bithyman stood irresolute, with his flask in his
hand, for besides Selene's voice he heard that of another girl and the
deeper tones of a man. He was still hesitating when Arsinoe's loud
exclamation of "Who's there?" obliged him to advance.
In the sitting-room Selene was standing dressed in a long light-colored
robe with a veil over her head, as if prepared to go out, but Arsinoe was
perched on the edge of a table, in such a way as that the tips of her
toes only touched the ground, and on the table lay a quantity of
old-fashioned things. Before her stood a Phoenician, of middle age,
holding in his hand a finely-carved cup; apparently he was in treaty for
it with the young girl.
Keraunus had been again to-day to a dealer in curiosities, but he had not
found him at home, so he had left word at his shop that Hiram might call
upon him in his rooms at Lochias, where he could show him several
valuable rarities. The Phoenician had arrived before the return of the
steward himself, who had been detained at a meeting of the town council,
and Arsinoe was displaying her father's treasures, whose beauties she was
extolling with much eloquence. Hiram unfortunately offered a no higher
price than Gabinius, whom the steward had sent off so indignantly the
previous evening.
Selene had been convinced from the first of the bootlessness of the
attempt, and was now anxious to bring the transaction to a speedy
conclusion, as the hour was approaching when she and Arsinoe had to go to
the papyrus factory. To her sister's refusal to accompany her, and to the
old slave-woman's entreaty that she would rest her foot, at any rate for
to-day, she had responded only with a resolute, "I am going."
The appearance of the youth on the scene occasioned the girls some
embarrassment. Selene recognized him at once, Arsinoe thought him
handsome but awkward, while the curiosity-dealer gazed at him in perfect
admiration, and was the first to offer him a greeting. Antinous returned
it, bowed to the sisters, and then said turning to Selene:
"We heard that your head was cut, and your foot hurt, and as we were
guilty of your mishap, we venture to offer you this phial which contains
a good remedy for such injuries."
"Thank you," replied the girl. "But I feel already so well that I shall
try to go out."
"That you certainly ought not to do," said Antinous, beseechingly.
"I must," replied Selene, gravely.
"Then, at any rate, take the phial to use for a lotion when you return.
Ten drops in such a cup as that, full of water."
"I can try it when I come in."
"Do so, and you will see how healing it is. You are not vexed with us any
longer?"
"No."
"I am glad of that!" cried the boy, fixing his large dreamy eyes on
Selene with silent passion. This gaze displeased her, and she said more
coldly than before to the Bithyman.
"To whom shall I give the phial when I have used the stuff in it?"
"Keep it, pray keep it," begged Antinous. "It is pretty, and will be
twice as precious in my eyes when it belongs to you."
"It is pretty-but I do not wish for presents."
"Then destroy it when you have done with it. You have not forgiven us our
dog's bad behavior, and we are sincerely sorry that our dog--"
"I am not vexed with you. Arsinoe pour the medicine into a saucer."
The steward's younger daughter immediately obeyed, and noticing as she
did so, how pretty the phial was, sparkling with various colors, she said
frankly enough:
"If my sister will not have it, give it to me. How can you make such a
pother about nothing, Selene?"
"Take it," said Antinous, looking anxiously at the ground, for it had now
just occurred to him how highly the Emperor had valued this little
bottle, and that he might possibly ask him some time what had become of
it. Selene shrugged her shoulders, and drawing her veil round her head,
she exclaimed, with a glance of annoyance at her sister:
"It is high time!"
"I am not going to-day," replied Arsinoe, defiantly, "and it is folly for
you to walk a quarter of a mile with your swollen foot."
"It would be wiser to take some care of it," observed the dealer,
politely, and Antinous anxiously added:
"If you increase your own suffering you will add to our self-reproach."
"I must go," Selene repeated resolutely, "and you with me, sister."
It was not out of mere wilfulness that she spoke, it was bitter
necessity, that forced her to utter the words. To-day, at any rate, she
must not miss going to the papyrus factory, for the week's wages for her
work and Arsinoe's were to be paid. Besides, the next day, and for four
days after, the workshops and counting-house would be closed, for the
Emperor had announced to the wealthy proprietor his intention of visiting
them, and in his honor various dilapidations in the old rooms were to be
repaired, and various decorations added to the bare-looking building.
Hence, to remain away from the works to-day meant, not merely the loss of
a week's pay, but the sacrifice of twelve days, since it had been
announced to the work-people, that as a token of rejoicing, and in honor
of the imperial visit, full pay would be given for the unemployed days;
and Selene needed money to maintain the family, and must therefore
persist in her intention.
When she saw that Arsinoe showed no sign of accompanying her, she once
more asked with stern determination:
"Are you coming?--Yes, or no."
"No," cried Arsinoe, defiantly, and sitting farther on the table.
"Then I am to go alone?"
"You are to stay here."
Selene went close up to her sister and looked at her enquiringly and
reproachfully; but Arsinoe adhered to her refusal. She pouted like a
sulky child, and slapping the hand on which she was leaning three times
on the table, she repeated, "No--no--no."
Selene called to the old slave-woman, and desired her to remain in the
sitting-room till her father should return, greeted the dealer politely,
and Antinous with a careless nod, and then left the room. The lad had
followed her, and they both met the children. Selene pulled their dresses
straight, and strictly enjoined them not to go near the corridor on
account of the strange dog. Antinous stroked the blind boy's pretty curly
head, and then, as Selene was about to descend the stairs, he asked her:
"May I help you?"
"Yes," said the girl, for at the very first step an acute pain in the
ancle checked her, and she put out her arm to the young man that he might
support her elbow on his hand. But her answer would assuredly have been
"no," if she had had the smallest feeling of liking for the Emperor's
favorite; but she bore the image of another in her heart, and did not
even perceive that Antinous was beautiful. The Bithynian's heart, on the
other hand, had never beaten so violently as during the brief moments
when he was permitted to hold Selene's arm. He felt intoxicated, while he
was alive to the fact that during the descent of the few steps she was
suffering great pain.
"Stay at home, and spare yourself!" he begged her once more in a
trembling voice.
"You worry me!" she said, in a tone of vexation. "I must go, and it is
not far."
"May I accompany you?"
She laughed aloud and answered somewhat scornfully:
"Certainly not. Only conduct me through the corridor that the dog may not
attack me again, then go where you will--but not with me."
He obeyed when at the end of the passage where it opened into a large
hall, he bid her farewell, and she thanked him with a few friendly words.
There were two ways out from her father's rooms into the road, one led
through the rotunda where the Ptolemaic Queens were placed, and across
several terraces up and down steps through the forecourt; the other, on a
level all the way, through the rooms and halls of the palace. She was
forced to choose the latter, for it would have been impossible for her
with her aching foot to clamber up a number of steps without help and
down them again, but she came to this conclusion much against her will,
for she knew what numbers of men were engaged in the works of
restoration; and to get through them safely it struck her that she might
ask her old playfellow to escort her through the crowd of workmen and
rough slaves as far as his parent's gatehouse. But she did not easily
decide on this course, for, since the afternoon when Pollux had shown her
mother's bust to Arsinoe before showing it to her, she had felt a grudge
towards the sculptor, who so lately before had touched and opened her
weary and loveless soul; and this sore feeling had not diminished, but
had rather increased with time. At every hour of the day, and whatever
she was occupied in, she could not help repeating to herself, that she
had every reason to be vexed with him.
She had stood to him a second time as a model for his work, had spoken to
him many times, and when last they parted had promised to allow him this
very evening to study once more the folds of her mantle. With what
pleasure she had looked forward to each meeting with Pollux, how truly
lovable she had thought him on every fresh occasion; how frankly he too,
expressed his pleasure as often as they met! They had talked of all sorts
of things, even of love, and how eager he had been when he told her that
the only thing she needed to make her happy was a good husband who would
succor and comfort her as she deserved, and as he spoke he had looked at
his own strong hands while she had turned red, and had thought to herself
that if he liked it she would willingly make the experiment of enjoying
life heartily by his side.
It seemed to her as though they belonged to each other, as if she had
been born for him alone, and he for her. Why then yesterday had he shown
Arsinoe her mother's bust before her?
Well, now she would ask him plainly whether he had placed it on the
rotunda for her or for her sister, and let him see she was not pleased.
She must tell him, too, that she could not stand as his model that
evening; if only on account of her foot that would be impossible.
With increasing pain and effort she crossed the threshold of the hall of
the Muses, and went up to the screen behind which her friend was
concealed. He was not alone, for she heard voices within--and it was not
a man but a woman who was with him; she could hear her clear laugh at
some distance. When she came close up to the screen to call Pollux, the
woman, who was certainly sitting to him as a model, spoke louder than
before, and called out merrily:
"But this is delicious! I am to let you fulfil the office of my maid,
what audacity these artists have!"
"Say yes," begged the artist, in the gay and cordial tone which more than
once had helped to ensnare Selene's heart. "You are beautiful, Balbilla,
but if you would allow me, you might be far handsomer than you are even."
And again there was a merry laugh behind the screen. The pleasant voice
must have hurt poor Selene acutely for she drew up her shoulders, and her
fair features were stamped with an expression of keen suffering, and she
pressed both hands over her heart as she went on past the screen and her
handsome flirting playfellow, limping across the courtyard and into the
road.
What tortured the poor child so cruelly? The poverty of her house, and
her bodily pain, which increased at every step, or her numbed and sore
heart, betrayed of her newly-blossoming, last, and fairest hope?
CHAPTER XVI.
Usually when Selene went out walking, many people looked at her with
admiration, but to-day a couple of street-boys composed her escort. They
ran after her calling out impudently, 'dot, and go one,' and tried
ruthlessly to snatch at the loosely-tied sandal on her injured foot,
which tapped the pavement at every step. While Selene was thus making her
way with cruel pain, satisfaction and happiness had visited Arsinoe; for
hardly had Selene and Antinous quitted her father's apartments, when
Hiram begged her to show him the little bottle which the handsome youth
had just given her. The dealer turned it over and over in the sunlight,
tested its ring, tried to scratch it with the stone in his ring, and then
muttered, "Vasa Murrhma."
The words did not escape the girl's sharp ears, and she had heard her
father say that the costliest of all the ornamental vessels with which
the wealthy Romans were wont to decorate their reception-rooms, were
those called Vasa Murrhina; so she explained to him at once, that she
knew what high prices were paid for such vases, and that she had no mind
to sell it cheaply. He began to bid, she laughingly demanded ten times
the price, and after a long battle between the dealer and the owner,
fought now half in jest, and now in grave earnest, the Phoenician said:
"Two thousand drachmae; not a sesterce more." That is not enough by a
long way, but then it is yours."
"I would hardly have given half to a less fair customer."
"And I only let you have it because you are such a polite man."
"I will send you the money before sundown."
At these words the girl, who had been radiant with surprise and delight,
and who would have liked to throw her arms round the bald-headed
merchant's neck, or round that of her old slave, who was even less
attractive, or for that matter, would have embraced the world--the
triumphant girl became thoughtful; her father would certainly come home
ere long, and she could not conceal from herself that he would disapprove
of the whole proceeding, and would probably send the phial back to the
young man, and the money to the dealer. She herself would never have
asked the stranger for the bottle if she had had the slightest suspicion
of its value; but now it certainly belonged to her, and if she had given
it back again she would have given no one any pleasure; on the contrary,
she would have offended the stranger, and probably have lost the greatest
pleasure that she had ever enjoyed.
What was to be done now? She was still perched on the table; she had
taken her left foot in her right hand, and sitting in this quaint
position, she looked down on the ground as gravely as if she were trying
to find an idea, or a way out of the difficulty, in the pattern on the
floor.
The dealer for a moment amused himself in studying her bewilderment,
which he thought charming--only wishing that his son, a young painter,
were standing in his place. At last he broke the silence however, saying:
"Your father, perhaps, will not agree to our bargain; and yet it is for
him you want the money?"
"Who says so?"
"Would he have offered me his own treasures if he had not wanted money?"
"It is only--I can--only--" stammered Arsinoe, who was unaccustomed to
falsehood--I would merely not confess to him--"
"I myself saw how innocently you came by the phial," said the dealer,
"and Keraunus never need know anything about such a trifle. Fancy
yourself, that you have broken it, and that the pieces are lying at the
bottom of the sea. Which of all these things does your father value
least?"
"This old sword of Antony," answered the child, her face brightening once
more. "He says it is much too long, and too slender to be what it
pretends to be. For my part I do not believe that it is a sword at all,
but a roasting-spit."
"I shall apply it to that very purpose to-morrow morning in my kitchen,"
said the dealer, "but I offer you two thousand drachmae for it, and will
take it with me and send you the amount in a few hours. Will that do?"
Arsinoe dropped her foot, glided from the table, and instead of
answering, clapped her hands with glee.
"Only tell him," continued Hiram, "that I am able just now to pay so much
for this kind of thing, because Caesar is certain to look about him for
the things that belonged to Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, Octavianus,
Augustus, and other great Romans who have lived in Egypt. The old woman
there may bring the spit after me. My slave is waiting outside, and can
hide it under his chiton as far as my kitchen door, for if he carried it
openly the connoisseurs passing by might covet the priceless treasure,
and we must protect ourselves from the evil eye."
The dealer laughed, took the little bottle into his own keeping, gave the
sword to the old woman, and then took a friendly leave of the young girl.
As soon as Arsinoe was alone, she flew into the bedroom to put on her
sandals, threw her veil over her head, and hastened to the papyrus
manufactory. Selene must know of the unexpected good fortune that had
befallen her, and all of them, and then she would have the poor girl
carried home in a litter, for there were always plenty for hire on the
quay.
Things did not always go smoothly--very often very unsmoothly and
stormily between the sisters, but still anything of importance that
happened to Arsinoe, whether it were good or evil, she must at once tell
Selene.
Ye gods! what happiness! She could take her place among the daughters of
the great citizens in the processions, no less richly apparelled than
they, and still there would remain a nice little sum for her father and
sister; and the work in the factory, the nasty dirty work, which she
hated and loathed, would be at an end, it was to be hoped, for ever.
The old slave was still sitting on the steps with the children; Arsinoe
tossed them up one after the other, and whispered in each child's ear:
"Cakes this evening!" and she kissed the blind child's eyes, and said:
"You may come with me, dear little man. I will find a litter for Selene
and put you in, and you will be carried home like a little prince."
The little blind boy threw his arms up with delight, exclaiming: "Through
the air, and without falling." While she was still holding him in her
arms, her father came up the steps that led from the rotunda to the
passage, his face streaming with heat and excitement; and after wiping
his brow and panting to regain his breath, he said:
"Hiram, the curiosity-dealer, met me just outside, with the sword that
belonged to Antony; and you sold it to him for two thousand drachmae! you
little fool!"
"But, father, you would have given the old spit for a pasty and a draught
of wine," laughed Arsinoe.
"I?" cried Keraunus. "I would have had three times the sum for that
venerable relic, for which Caesar will give its weight in silver;
however, sold is sold. And yet-and yet, the thought that I no longer
possess the sword of Antony, will give me many sleepless nights."
"If this evening we set you down to a good dish of meat, sleep will soon
follow," answered Arsinoe, and she took the handkerchief out of her
father's hand, and coaxingly wiped his temples, going on vivaciously: "We
are quite rich folks, father, and will show the other citizens' daughters
what we can do."
"Now you shall both take part in the festival," said Keraunus, decidedly.
"Caesar shall see that I shun no sacrifice in his honor, and if he
notices you, and I bring my complaint against that insolent architect
before him--"
"You must let that pass," begged Arsinoe, "if only poor Selene's foot is
well by that time."
"Where is she?"
"Gone out."
"Then her foot cannot be so very bad. She will soon come in, it is to be
hoped."
"Probably--I mean to fetch her with a litter."
"A litter?" said Keraunus, in surprise.
"The two thousand drachmae have turned the girl's head."
"Only on account of her foot. It was hurting her so much when she went
out."
"Then why did she not stay at home? As usual she has wasted an hour to
save a sesterce, and you, neither of you have any time to spare."
"I will go after her at once."
"No--no, you at any rate, must remain here, for in two hours the matrons
and maidens are to meet at the theatre."
"In two hours! but mighty Serapis, what are we to put on?"
"It is your business to see to that," replied Keraunus, "I myself will
have the litter you spoke of, and be carried down to Tryphon, the
ship-builder. Is there any money left in Selene's box?"
Arsinoe went into her sleeping-room, and said, as she returned:
"This is all--six pieces of two drachmae."
"Four will be enough for me," replied the steward, but after a moment's
reflection he took the whole half-dozen.
"What do you want with the ship-builder?" asked Arsinoe.
"In the Council," replied Keraunus, "I was worried again about you girls.
I said one of my daughters was ill, and the other must attend upon her;
but this would not do, and I was asked to send the one who was well. Then
I explained that you had no mother, that we lived a retired life for each
other, and that I could not bear the idea of sending my daughter alone,
and without any protectress to the meeting. So then Tryphon said that it
would give his wife pleasure to take you to the theatre with her own
daughter. This I half accepted, but I declared at once that you would not
go, if your elder sister were not better. I could not give any positive
consent--you know why."
"Oh, blessings on Antony and his noble spit!" cried Arsinoe. "Now
everything is settled, and you can tell the ship-builder we shall go. Our
white dresses are still quite good, but a few ells of new light blue
ribbon for my hair, and of red for Selene's, you must buy on the way, at
Abibaal, the Phoenician's."
"Very good."
"I will see at once to both the dresses--but, to be sure, when are we to
be ready?"
"In two hours."
"Then, do you know what, dear old father?"
"Well?"
"Our old woman is half blind, and does everything wrong. Do let me go
down to dame Doris at the gate-house, and ask her to help me. She is so
clever and kind, and no one irons so well as she does."
"Silence!" cried the steward, angrily, interrupting his daughter. "Those
people shall never again cross my threshold."
"But look at my hair; only look at the state it is in," cried Arsinoe,
excitedly, and thrusting her fingers into her thick tresses which she
pulled into disorder. "To do that up again, plait it with new ribbons,
iron our dresses, and sew on the brooches--why the Empress' ladies-maid
could not do all that in two hours."
"Doris shall never cross this threshold," repeated Keraunus, for all his
answer.
"Then tell the tailor Hippias to send me an assistant; but that will cost
money."
"We have it, and can pay," replied Keraunus, proudly, and in order not to
forget his commissions he muttered to himself while he went to get a
litter:
"Hippias the tailor, blue ribbon, red ribbon, and Tryphon the
ship-builder."
The tailor's nimble apprentice helped Arsinoe to arrange her dress and
Selene's, and was never weary of praising the sheen and silkiness of
Arsinoe's hair, while she twisted it with ribbons, built it up and
twisted it at the back so gracefully with a comb, that it fell in a thick
mass of artfully-curled locks down her neck and back. When Keraunus came
back, he gazed with justifiable pride at his beautiful child; he was
immensely pleased, and even chuckled softly to himself as he laid out the
gold pieces which were brought to him by the curiosity-dealer's servant,
and set them in a row and counted them. While he was thus occupied,
Arsinoe went up to him and asked laughing: "Hiram has not cheated me
then?" Keraunus desired her not to disturb him, and added:
"Think of that sword, the weapon of the great Antony, perhaps the very
one with which he pierced his own breast.--Where can Selene be?"
An hour, an hour and a half had slipped by, and when the fourth half-hour
was well begun, and still his eldest daughter did not return, the steward
announced that they must set out, for that it would not do to keep the
ship-builder's wife waiting. It was a sincere grief to Arsinoe to be
obliged to go without Selene. She had made her sister's dress look as
nice as her own, and had laid it carefully on the divan near the mosaic
pavement. She had taken a great deal of trouble. Never before had she
been out in the streets alone, and it seemed impossible to enjoy anything
without the companionship and supervision of her absent sister. But her
father's assertion, that Selene would have a place gladly found for her,
even later, among the maidens, reassured the girl who was overflowing
with joyful expectation.
Finally she perfumed herself a little with the fragrant extract which
Keraunus was accustomed to use before going to the council, and begged
her father to order the old slave-woman to go and buy the promised cakes
for the little ones during her absence. The children had all gathered
round her, admiring her with loud ohs! and ahs! as if she were some
wondrous incarnation, not to be too nearly approached, and on no account
to be touched. The elaborate dressing of her hair would not allow of her
stooping over them as usual. She could only stroke little Helios' curls,
saying: "Tomorrow you shall have a ride in the air, and perhaps Selene
will tell you a pretty story by-and-bye."
Her heart beat faster than usual as she stepped into the litter, which
was waiting for her just in front of the gate-house. Old Doris looked at
her from a distance with pleasure, and while Keraunus stepped out into
the street to call a litter for himself, the old woman hastily cut the
two finest roses from her bush, and pressing her fingers to her lips with
a sly smile, put them into the girl's hand.
Arsinoe felt as if it were in a dream that she went to the ship-builder's
house, and from thence to the theatre, and on her way she fully
understood, for the first time, that alarm and delight may find room side
by side in a girl's mind, and that one by no means hinders the existence
of the other.
Fear and expectation so completely overmastered her, that she neither saw
nor heard what was going on around her; only once she noticed a young man
with a garland on his head, who, as he passed her, arm in arm with
another, called out to her gaily: "Long live beauty!"
From that moment she kept her eyes fixed on her lap and on the roses dame
Doris had given her. The flowers reminded her of the kind old woman's
son, and she wondered whether tall Pollux had perhaps seen her in her
finery. That, she would have liked very much; and after all, it was not
at all impossible, for, of course, since Pollux had been working at
Lochias he must often have gone to his parents. Perhaps even he had
himself picked the roses for her, but had not dared to give them to her
as her father was so near.
CHAPTER XVII.
But the young sculptor had not been at the gatehouse when Arsinoe went
by. He had thought of her often enough since meeting her again by the
bust of her mother; but on this particular afternoon his time and
thoughts were fully claimed by another fair damsel. Balbilla had arrived
at Lochias about noon, accompanied, as was fitting, by the worthy
Claudia, the not wealthy widow of a senator, who for many years had
filled the place of lady-in-attendance and protecting companion to the
rich fatherless and motherless girl. At Rome, she conducted Balbilla's
household affairs with as much sense and skill as satisfaction in the
task. Still she was not perfectly content with her lot, for her ward's
love of travelling, often compelled her to leave the metropolis, and in
her estimation, there was no place but Rome where life was worth living.
A visit to Baiae for bathing, or in the winter months a flight to the
Ligurian coast, to escape the cold of January and February--these she
could endure; for she was certain there to find, if not Rome, at any rate
Romans; but Balbilla's wish to venture in a tossing ship, to visit the
torrid shores of Africa, which she pictured to herself as a burning oven,
she had opposed to the utmost. At last, however, she was obliged to put a
good face on the matter, for the Empress herself expressed so decidedly
her wish to take Balbilla with her to the Nile, that any resistance would
have been unduteous. Still; in her secret heart, she could not but
confess to herself that her high-spirited and wilful foster-child--for so
she loved to call Balbilla--would undoubtedly have carried out her
purpose without the Empress' intervention.
Balbilla had come to the palace, as the reader knows, to sit for her
bust.
When Selene was passing by the screen which concealed her playfellow and
his work from her gaze, the worthy matron had fallen gently asleep on a
couch, and the sculptor was exerting all his zeal to convince the noble
damsel that the size to which her hair was dressed was an exaggeration,
and that the super-incumbence of such a mass must disfigure the effect of
the delicate features of her face. He implored her to remember in how
simple a style the great Athenian masters, at the best period of the
plastic arts, had taught their beautiful models to dress their hair, and
requested her to do her own hair in that manner next day, and to come to
him before she allowed her maid to put a single lock through the
curling-tongs; for to-day, as he said, the pretty little ringlets would
fly back into shape, like the spring of a fibula when the pin was bent
back. Balbilla contradicted him with gay vivacity, protested against his
desire to play the part of lady's maid, and defended her style of
hair-dressing on the score of fashion.
"But the fashion is ugly, monstrous, a pain to one's eyes!" cried Pollux.
"Some vain Roman lady must have invented it, not to make herself
beautiful, but to be conspicuous."
"I hate the idea of being conspicuous by my appearance," answered
Balbilla. "It is precisely by following the fashion, however conspicuous
it may be, that we are less remarkable than when we carefully dress far
more simply and plainly--in short, differently to what it prescribes.
Which do you regard as the vainer, the fashionably-dressed young
gentleman on the Canopic way, or the cynical philosopher with his unkempt
hair, his carefully-ragged cloak over his shoulders, and a heavy cudgel
in his dirty hands?"
"The latter, certainly," replied Pollux. "Still he is sinning against the
laws of beauty which I desire to win you over to, and which will survive
every whim of fashion, as certainly as Homer's Iliad will survive the
ballad of a street-singer, who celebrates the last murder that excited
the mob of this town.--Am I the first artist who has attempted to
represent your face?"
"No," said Balbilla, with a laugh. "Five Roman artists have already
experimented on my head."
"And did any one of their busts satisfy you?"
"Not one seemed to me better than utterly bad."
"And your pretty face is to be handed down to posterity in five-fold
deformity?"
"Ah! no--I had them all destroyed."
"That was very good of them!" cried Pollux, eagerly. Then turning with a
very simple gesture to the bust before him he said: "Hapless clay, if the
lovely lady whom thou art destined to resemble will not sacrifice the
chaos of her curls, thy fate will undoubtedly be that of thy
predecessors."
The sleeping matron was roused by this speech. "You were speaking," she
said, "of the broken busts of Balbilla?"
"Yes," replied the poetess.
"And perhaps this one may follow them," sighed Claudia. "Do you know what
lies before you in that case?"
"No, what?"
"This young lady knows something of your art."
"I learnt to knead clay a little of Aristaeus," interrupted Balbilla.
"Aha! because Caesar set the fashion, and in Rome it would have been
conspicuous not to dabble in sculpture."
"Perhaps."
"And she tried to improve in every bust all that particularly displeased
her," continued Claudia.
"I only began the work for the slaves to finish," Balbilla threw in,
interrupting her companion. "Indeed, my people became quite expert in the
work of destruction."
"Then my work may, at any rate, hope for a short agony and speedy death,"
sighed Pollux. "And it is true--all that lives comes into the world with
its end already preordained."
"Would an early demise of your work pain you much?" asked Balbilla.
"Yes, if I thought it successful; not if I felt it to be a failure."
"Any one who keeps a bad bust," said Balbilla, "must feel fearful lest an
undeservedly bad reputation is handed down to future generations."
"Certainly! but how then can you find courage to expose yourself for the
sixth time to a form of calumny that it is difficult to counteract?"
"Because I can have anything destroyed that I choose," laughed the spoilt
girl. "Otherwise sitting still is not much to my taste."
"That is very true," sighed Claudia. "But from you I expect something
strikingly good."
"Thank you," said Pollux, "and I will take the utmost pains to complete
something that may correspond to my own expectations of what a marble
portrait ought to be, that deserves to be preserved to posterity."
"And those expectations require--?"
Pollux considered for a moment, and then he replied:
"I have not always the right words at my command, for all that I feel as
an artist. A plastic presentiment, to satisfy its creator, must fulfil
two conditions; first it must record for posterity in forms of eternal
resemblance all that lay in the nature of the person it represents;
secondly, it must also show to posterity what the art of the time when it
was executed, was capable of."
"That is a matter of course--but you are forgetting your own share."
"My own fame you mean?"
"Certainly."
"I work for Papias and serve my art, and that is enough; meanwhile Fame
does not trouble herself about me, nor do I trouble myself about her."
"Still, you will put your name on my bust?"
"Why not?"
"You are as prudent as Cicero."
"Cicero?"
"Perhaps you would hardly know old Tullius' wise remark that the
philosophers who wrote of the vanity of writers put their names to their
books all the same."
"Oh! I have no contempt for laurels, but I will not run after a thing
which could have no value for me, unless it came unsought, and because it
was my due."
"Well and good; but your first condition could only be fulfilled in its
widest sense if you could succeed in making yourself acquainted with my
thoughts and feelings, with the whole of my inmost mind."
"I see you and talk to you," replied Pollux. Claudia laughed aloud, and
said:
"If instead of two sittings of two hours you were to talk to her for
twice as many years you would always find something new in her. Not a
week passes in which Rome does not find in her something to talk about.
That restless brain is never quiet, but her heart is as good as gold, and
always and everywhere the same."
"And did you suppose that that was new to me?" asked Pollux. "I can see
the restless spirit of my model in her brow and in her mouth, and her
nature is revealed in her eyes."
"And in my snub-nose?" asked Balbilla.
"It bears witness to your wonderful and whimsical notions, which astonish
Rome so much."
"Perhaps you are one more that works for the hammer of the slaves,"
laughed Balbilla.
"And even if it were so," said Pollux, "I should always retain the memory
of this delightful hour." Pontius the architect here interrupted the
sculptor, begging Balbilla to excuse him for disturbing the sitting;
Pollux must immediately attend to some business of importance, but in ten
minutes he would return to his work. No sooner were the two ladies alone,
than Balbilla rose and looked inquisitively round and about the
sculptor's enclosed work-room; but her companion said:
"A very polite young man, this Pollux, but rather too much at his ease,
and too enthusiastic."
"An artist," replied Balbilla, and she proceeded to turn over every
picture and tablet with the sculptor's studies in drawing, raised the
cloth from the wax model of the Urania, tried the clang of the lute which
hung against one of the canvas walls, was here, there, and everywhere,
and at last stood still in front of a large clay model, placed in a
corner of the studio, and closely wrapped in cloths.
"What may that be?" asked Claudia.
"No doubt a half-finished new model."
Balbilla felt the object in front of her with the tips of her fingers,
and said: "It seems to me to be a head. Something remarkable at any rate.
In these close covered dishes we sometimes find the best meat. Let its
unveil this shrouded portrait."
"Who knows what it may be?" said Claudia, as she loosened a twist in the
cloths which enveloped the bust. There are often very remarkable things
to be seen in such workshops.
"Hey, what, it is only a woman's head! I can feel it," cried Balbilla.
"But you can never tell," the older lady went on, untying a knot. "These
artists are such unfettered, unaccountable beings."
"Do you lift the top, I will pull here," and a moment later the young
Roman stood face to face with the caricature which Hadrian had moulded on
the previous evening, in all its grimacing ugliness. She recognized
herself in it at once, and at the first moment, laughed loudly, but the
longer she looked at the disfigured likeness, the more vexed, annoyed and
angry she became. She knew her own face, feature for feature, all that
was pretty in it, and all that was plain, but this likeness ignored
everything in her face that was not unpleasing, and this it emphasized
ruthlessly, and exaggerated with a refinement of spitefulness. The head
was hideous, horrible, and yet it was hers. As she studied it in profile,
she remembered what Pollux had declared he could read in her features,
and deep indignation rose up in her soul.
Her great inexhaustible riches, which allowed her the reckless
gratification of every whim, and secured consideration, even for her
follies, had not availed to preserve her from many disappointments which
other girls, in more modest circumstances, would have been spared. Her
kind heart and open hand had often been abused, even by artists, and it
was self-evident to her, that the man who could make this caricature, who
had so enjoyed exaggerating all that was unlovely in her face, had wished
to exercise his art on her features, not for her own sake, but for that
of the high price she might be inclined to pay for a flattering likeness.
She had found much to please her in the young sculptor's fresh and happy
artist nature, in his frank demeanor and his honest way of speech. She
felt convinced that Pollux, more readily than anybody else, would
understand what it was that lent a charm to her face, which was in no way
strictly beautiful, a charm which could not be disputed in spite of the
coarse caricature which stood before her.
She felt herself the richer by a painful experience, indignant, and
offended. Accustomed as she was to give prompt utterance even to her
displeasure, she exclaimed hotly, and with tears in her eyes:
"It is shameful, it is base. Give me my wraps Claudia. I will not stay an
instant longer to be the butt of this man's coarse and spiteful jesting."
"It is unworthy," cried the matron, "so to insult a person of your
position. It is to be hoped our litters are waiting outside."
Pontius had overheard Balbilla's last words. He had come into the
work-place without Pollux, who was still speaking to the prefect, and he
said gravely as he approached Balbilla:
"You have every reason to be angry, noble lady. This thing is an insult
in clay, malicious, and at the same time coarse in every detail; but it
was not Pollux who did it, and it is not right to condemn without a
trial."
"You take your friend's part!" exclaimed Balbilla. "I would not tell a
lie for my own brother."
"You know how to give your words the aspect of an honorable meaning in
serious matters, as he does in jest."
"You are angry and unaccustomed to bridle your tongue," replied the
architect. "Pollux, I repeat it, did not perpetrate the caricature, but a
sculptor from Rome."
"Which of them? I know them all."
"I may not name him."
"There--you see.--Come away Claudia."
"Stay," said Pontius, decisively. "If you were any one but yourself, I
would let you go at once in your anger, and with the double charge on
your conscience of doing an injustice to two well-meaning men. But as you
are the granddaughter of Claudius Balbillus, I feel it to be due to
myself to say, that if Pollux had really made this monstrous bust he
would not be in this palace now, for I should have turned him out and
thrown the horrid object after him. You look surprised--you do not know
who I am that can address you so."
"Yes, yes," cried Balbilla, much mollified, for she felt assured that the
man who stood before her, as unflinching as if he were cast in bronze,
and with an earnest frown, was speaking the truth, and that he must have
some right to speak to her with such unwonted decision. "Yes indeed, you
are the principal architect of the city; Titianus, from whom we have
heard of you, has told us great things of you; but how am I to account
for your special interest in me?"
"It is my duty to serve you--if necessary, even with my life."
"You," said Balbilla, puzzled. "But I never saw you till yesterday."
"And yet you may freely dispose of all that I have and am, for my
grandfather was your grandfather's slave."
"I did not know"--said Balbilla, with increasing confusion.
"Is it possible that your noble grandfather's instructor, the venerable
Sophinus, is altogether forgotten. Sophinus, whom your grandfather freed,
and who continued to teach your father also."
"Certainly not--of course not," cried Balbilla. "He must have been a
splendid man, and very learned besides."
"He was my father's father," said Pontius.
"Then you belong to our family," exclaimed Balbilla, offering him a
friendly hand.
"I thank you for those words," answered Pontius. "Now, once more, Pollux
had nothing to do with that image."
"Take my cloak, Claudia," said the girl. "I will sit again to the young
man."
"Not to-day--it would spoil his work," replied Pontius. "I beg of you to
go, and let the annoyance you so vehemently expressed die out some where
else. The young sculptor must not know that you have seen this
caricature, it would occasion him much embarrassment. But if you can
return to-morrow in a calmer and more happy humor, with your lively
spirit tuned to a softer key, then Pollux will be able to make a likeness
which may satisfy the granddaughter of Claudius Balbillus."
"And, let us hope, the grandson of his learned teacher also," answered
Balbilla, with a kindly farewell greeting, as she went with her companion
towards the door of the hall of the Muses, where her slaves were waiting.
Pontius escorted her so far in silence, then he returned to the
work-place, and safely wrapped the caricature up again in its cloths.
As he went out into the hall again, Pollux hurried up to meet him,
exclaiming:
"The Roman architect wants to speak to you, he is a grand man!"
"Balbilla was called away, and bid me greet you," replied Pontius. "Take
that thing away for fear she should see it. It is coarse and hideous."
A few moments later he stood in the presence of the Emperor, who
expressed the wish to play the part of listener while Balbilla was
sitting. When the architect, after begging him not to let Pollux know of
the incident, told him of what had occurred in the screened-off studio,
and how angry the young Roman lady had been at the caricature, which was
certainly very offensive, Hadrian rubbed his hands and laughed aloud with
delight. Pontius ground his teeth, and then said very earnestly:
"Balbilla seems to me a merry-hearted girl, but of a noble nature. I see
no reason to laugh at her." Hadrian looked keenly into the daring
architect's eyes, laid his hand on his shoulder, and replied with a
certain threatening accent in his deep voice:
"It would be an evil moment for you, or for any one, who should do so in
my presence. But age may venture to play with edged tools, which children
may not even touch."
CHAPTER XVIII.
Selene entered the gate-way in the endlessly-long walk of sun-dried
bricks which enclosed the wide space where stood the court-yards,
water-tanks and huts, belonging to the great papyrus manufactory of
Plutarch, where she and her sister were accustomed to work. She could
generally reach it in a quarter of an hour, but to-day it had taken more
than four times as long and she herself did not know how she had managed
to hold herself up, and to walk-limp-stumble along, in spite of the acute
pain she was suffering. She would willingly have clung to every
passer-by, have held on to every slow passing vehicle, to every beast of
burden that overtook her--but man and beast mercilessly went on their
way, without paying any heed to her. She got many a push from those who
were hurrying by and who scarcely turned round to look at her, when from
time to time she stopped to sink for a moment on to the nearest
door-step, or some low cornice or bale of goods; to dry her eyes, or
press her hand to her foot, which was now swollen to a great size,
hoping, as she did so, to be able to forget, under the sense of a new
form of pain, the other unceasing and unendurable torment, at least for a
few minutes.
The street boys who had run after her, and laughed at her, ceased
pursuing her when they found that she constantly stopped to rest. A woman
with a child in her arms once asked her, as she stopped to rest a minute
on a threshold, whether she wanted anything, but walked on when Selene
shook her head and made no other answer.
Once she thought she must give up altogether, when suddenly the street
was filled with jeering boys and inquisitive men and women--for Verus,
the superb Verus, came by in his chariot, and what a chariot! The
Alexandrian populace were accustomed to see much that was strange in the
busy streets of their crowded city; but this vehicle attracted every eye,
and excited astonishment, admiration and mirth, wherever it appeared, and
not unfrequently the bitterest ridicule. The handsome Roman stood in the
middle of his gilt chariot, and himself drove the four white horses,
harnessed abreast; on his head he wore a wreath, and across his breast,
from one shoulder, a garland of roses. On the foot-board of the quadriga
sat two children, dressed as Cupids; their little legs dangled in the
air, and they each held, attached by a long gilt wire, a white dove which
fluttered in front of Verus.
The dense and hurrying crowd, crushed Selene remorselessly against the
wall; instead of looking at the wonderful sight she covered her face with
her hands to hide the distortion of pain in her features; still she just
saw the splendid chariot, the gold harness on the horses, and the figure
of the insolent owner glide past her, as if in a dream that was blurred
by pain, and the sight infused into her soul, that was already harassed
by pain and anxiety, a feeling of bitter aversion, and the envious
thought that the mere trappings of the horses of this extravagant
prodigal would suffice to keep her and her family above misery for a
whole year.
By the time the chariot had turned the next corner, and the crowd had
followed it, she had almost fallen to the ground. She could not take
another step, and looked round for a litter, but, while generally there
was no lack of them, in this spot, to-day there was not one to be seen.
The factory was only a few hundred steps farther, but in her fancy they
seemed like so many stadia. Presently some of the workmen and women from
the factory came by, laughing and showing each other their wages, so the
payment must be now going on. A glance at the sun showed her how long she
had already been on her way, and remind her of the purpose of her walk.
With the exertion of all her strength, she dragged herself a few steps
farther; then, just as her courage was again beginning to fail, a little
girl came running towards her who was accustomed to wait upon the workers
at the table where Selene and Arsinoe were employed, and who held in her
hand a pitcher. She called the dusky little Egyptian, and said:
"Hathor, pray come back to the factory with me. I cannot walk any
farther, my foot is so dreadfully painful; but if I lean a little on your
shoulder, I shall get on better."
"I cannot," said the child. "If I make haste home I shall have some
dates," and she ran on.
Selene looked after her, and an inward voice, against which she had had
to rebel before to-day, asked her why she of all people must be a
sufferer for others, when they thought only of themselves, and with a
heavy sigh, she made a fresh attempt to proceed on her way.
When she had gone a few steps, neither seeing not hearing anything that
passed her, a girl came up to her, and asked her timidly, but kindly,
what was the matter. It was a leaf-joiner who sat opposite to her at the
works, a poor, deformed creature, who, nevertheless, plied her nimble
fingers contentedly and silently, and who at first had taught Selene and
Arsinoe many useful tricks of working. The girl offered her crooked
shoulder unasked as a support to Selene, and measured her step; to those
of the sufferer with as much nicety as if she felt everything that Selene
herself did; thus, without speaking, they reached the door of the
factory; there, in the first court-yard the little hunchback made Selene
sit down on one of the bundles of papyrus-stems which lay all about the
place, by the side of the tanks in which the plants were dipped to
freshen them, and arranged in order, built up into high heaps, according
to the localities whence they were brought. After a short rest, they went
on through the hall in which the triangular green stems were sorted,
according to the quality of the white pith they contained. The next
rooms, in which men stripped the green sheath from the pith, and the long
galleries where the more skilled hands split the pith with sharp knives
into long moist strips about a finger wide, and of different degrees of
fineness, seemed to Selene to grow longer the farther she went, and to be
absolutely interminable.
Generally the pith-splitters sat here in long rows, each at his own
little table, on each side of a gangway left for the slaves, who carried
the prepared material to the drying-house; but, to-day, most of them had
left their places and stood chatting together and packing up their wooden
clips, knives, and sharpening-stones. Half way down this room Selene's
hand fell from her companion's shoulder, she turned giddy, and said in a
low tone:
"I can go no farther--"
The little hunchback held her up as well as she could, and though she
herself was far from strong, she succeeded in dragging, rather than
carrying, Selene to an empty couch and in laying her upon it. A few
workmen gathered around the senseless girl, and brought some water, then
when she opened her eyes again, and they found that she belonged to the
rooms where the prepared papyrus-leaves were gummed together, some of
them offered to carry her thither, and before Selene could consent they
had taken up the bench and lifted it with its light burden. Her damaged
foot hung down, and gave the poor girl such pain that she cried out, and
tried to raise the injured limb and hold her ankle in her band; her
comrade helped by taking the poor little foot in her own hand, and
supporting it with tender and cautious care.
As she thus went by, carried, as it were, in triumph by the men, and
borne high in the air, everyone turned to look at her, and the suffering
girl felt this rather as if she were some criminal being carried through
the streets to exhibit her disgrace to the citizens. But when she found
herself in the large rooms where, in one place men, and in another the
most skilled of the women and girls were employed in laying the narrow
strips of papyrus crosswise over each other, and gumming them together,
she had recovered strength enough to pull her veil over her face which
she held down. Arsinoe, and she herself, in order to remain unrecognized
had always been accustomed to walk through these rooms closely veiled,
and not to lay their wraps aside till they reached the little room where
they sat with about twenty other women to glue the sheets together.
Every one looked at her with curious enquiry. Her foot certainly hurt
her, the cut in her head was burning, and she felt altogether intensely
miserable; still there was room and to spare in her soul for the false
pride that she inherited from her father, and for the humiliating
consciousness that she was regarded by these people as one of themselves.
In the room in which she worked, none but free women were employed, but
more than a thousand slaves worked in the factory and she would as soon
have eaten with beasts without plate or spoon, as have shared a meal with
them. At one time, when every thing in their house seemed going to ruin,
it was her own father who had suggested the papyrus factory to her
attention, by telling her, with indignation, that the daughter of an
impoverished citizen had degraded herself and her whole class by devoting
herself to working in the papyrus factory to earn money. She was pretty
well paid, to be sure, and in answer to Selene's enquiry, he had stated
the amount she earned and mentioned the name of the rich manufacturer to
whom she had sold her social standing for gold.
Soon after this Selene had gone alone to the factory, had discussed all
that was necessary with the manager, and had then begun, with Arsinoe, to
work regularly in the factory where they now for two years had spent some
hours of every day in gumming the papyrus-leaves together.
How many a time at the beginning of a new week, or when under the
influence of a special fit of aversion to her work, had Arsinoe refused
to go with her ever again to the factory; how much persuasive eloquence
had she expended, how many new ribbons had she bought, how often had she
consented to allow her to go to some spectacle, which consumed half a
week's wages, to induce Arsinoe to persist in her work, or to avert the
fulfilment of her threat to tell her father, whither her daily walk--as
she called it--tended.
When Selene, who had been carried as far as the door of her own
work-room, was sitting once more in her usual place in front of the long
table on which she worked, and where hundreds of prepared papyrus strips
were to be joined together, she felt scarcely able to raise the veil from
her face. She drew the uppermost sheets towards her, dipped the brush in
the gum-jar, and began to touch the margin of the leaf with it--but in
the very act, her strength forsook her, the brush fell from her fingers,
she dropped her hands on the table and her face in her hands, and began
to cry softly.
While she sat thus, her tears slowly flowing, her shoulders heaving, and
her whole body shaken with shuddering sobs, a woman who sat opposite to
her, beckoned to the deformed girl, and after whispering to her a few
words grasped her hand firmly and warmly and looked straight into her
eyes with her own, which though lustreless were clear and steady; then
the little hunchback silently took Arsinoe's vacant place by Selene, and
pushed the smaller half of the papyrus leaves over to the woman, and both
set diligently to work on the gumming.
They had been thus occupied for some time when Selene at last raised her
head and was about to take up her brush again. She looked round for it
and perceived her companion, whom she had not even thanked for her
helpfulness, busily at work in Arsinoe's seat. She looked at her neighbor
with eyes still full of tears, and as the girl, who was wholly absorbed
in her task, did not notice her gaze, Selene said in a tone of surprise
rather than kindliness.
"This is my sister's place; you may sit here to-day, but when the factory
opens again she must sit by me again."
"I know, I know," said the workwoman shyly. "I am only finishing your
sheets because I have no more of my own to do, and I can see how badly
your foot is hurting you."
The whole transaction was so strange and novel to Selene that she did not
even understand her neighbor's meaning, and she only said, with a shrug:
"You may earn all you can, for aught I can do; I cannot do anything
to-day."
Her deformed companion colored and looked up doubtfully at her opposite
neighbor, who at once laid aside her brush and said, turning to Selene:
"That is not what Mary means, my child. She is doing one-half of your
day's task and I am doing the other, so that your suffering foot may not
deprive you of your day's pay."
"Do I look so very poor then?" exclaimed Keraunus' daughter, and a faint
crimson tinged her pale cheeks.
"By no means, my child," replied the woman. "You and your sister are
evidently of good family--but pray let us have the pleasure of being of
some help to you.
"I do not know--" Selene stammered.
"If you saw that it hurt me to stoop when the wind blows the strips of
papyrus on to the floor, would you not willingly pick them up for me?"
continued the woman. "What we are doing for you is neither less nor yet
much more than that. In a few minutes we shall have finished and then we
can follow the others, for every one else has left. I am the overseer of
the room, as you know, and must in any case remain here till the last
work-woman has gone."
Selene felt full well that she ought to be grateful for the kindness
shown her by these two women, and yet she had a sense of having a deed of
almsgiving forced upon her acceptance, and she answered quickly, still
with the blood mounting to her cheeks. "I am very grateful for your good
intentions, of course, very grateful; but here each one must work for
herself, and it would ill-become me to allow you to give me the money you
have earned."
The girl spoke these words with a decisiveness which was not free from
arrogance, but this did not disturb the woman's gentle equanimity--"widow
Hannah," as she was called by the workwoman--and fixing the calm gaze of
her large eyes on Selene, she answered kindly:
"We have been very happy to work for you, dear daughter, and a divine
Sage has said that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Do you
understand all that that means? In our case it is as much as to say that
it makes kind-hearted folks much happier to do others a pleasure than to
receive good gifts. You said just now that you were grateful; do you want
now to spoil our pleasure?"
"I do not quite understand--" answered Selene. "No?" interrupted widow
Hannah. "Then only try for once to do some one a pleasure with sincere
and heartfelt love, and you will see how much good it does one, how it
opens the heart and turns every trouble to a pleasure. Is it not true
Mary, we shall he sincerely obliged to Selene if only she will not spoil
the pleasure we have had in working for her?"
"I have been so glad to do it," said the deformed girl, "and there--now I
have finished."
"And I too," said the widow, pressing the last leaf on to its fellow with
a cloth, and then adding her pile of finished sheets to Mary's.
"Thank you very much," murmured Selene, with downcast eyes, and rising
from her seat, but she tried to support herself on her lame foot and this
caused her such pain, that with a low cry, she sank back on the stool.
The widow hastened to her side, knelt clown by her, took the injured foot
with tender care in her delicate and slender hands, examined it
attentively, felt it gently, and then exclaimed with horror:
"Good Lord! and did you walk through the streets with a foot in this
state?" and looking up at Selene she said affectionately. "Poor child,
poor child! it must have hurt you! Why the swelling has risen above your
sandal-straps. It is frightful! and yet--do you live far from this?"
"I can get home in half an hour."
"Impossible! First let me see on my tablets how much the paymaster owes
you that I may go and fetch it, and then we will soon see what can be
done with you. Meanwhile you sit still daughter dear, and you Mary rest
her foot on a stool and undo the straps very gently from her ankle. Do
not be afraid my child, she has soft, careful hands." As she spoke she
rose and kissed Selene on her forehead and eyes, and Selene clung to her
and could only say with swimming eyes, and a voice trembling with
feeling:
"Dame Hannah, dear widow Hannah."
As the warm sunshine of an October clay reminds the traveller of the
summer that is over, so the widow's words and ways brought back to Selene
the long lost love and care of her good mother; and something soothing
mingled in the bitterness of the pain she was suffering. She looked
gratefully at the kind woman and obediently sat still; it was such a
comfort once more to obey an order, and to obey willingly--to feel
herself a child again and to be grateful for loving care.
Hannah went away, and Mary knelt down in front of Selene to loosen and
remove the straps which were half buried in the swelled muscles. She did
it with the greatest caution, but her fingers had hardly touched her,
when Selene shrank back with a groan, and before she could undo the
sandal, the patient had fainted away. Mary fetched some water and bathed
her brow, and the burning wound in her head, and by the time Selene had
once more opened her eyes, dame Hannah had returned. When the widow
stroked her thick soft hair, Selene looked up with a smile and asked:
"Have I been to sleep?"
"You shut your eyes my child," replied the widow. "Here are your wages
and your sister's, for twelve days; do not move, I will put it in your
little bag. Mary has not succeeded in loosening your sandal, but the
physician who is paid to attend on the factory people will be here
directly, and will order what is proper for your poor foot. The manager
is having a litter fetched for you.--Where do you live?"
"We?" cried Selene, alarmed. "No, no, I must go home."
"But my child you cannot walk farther than the court-yard even if we both
help you."
"Then let me get a litter out in the street. My father--no one must
know--I cannot."
Hannah signed to Mary to leave them, and when she had shut the door on
the deformed girl, she brought a stool, sat down opposite to Selene, laid
a hand on the knee that was not hurt, and said:
"Now, dear girl, we are alone. I am no chatterbox, and will certainly not
betray your confidence. Tell me quietly who you belong to. Tell me--you
believe that I mean well by you?"
"Yes," replied Selene, looking the widow full in the face--a
regularly-cut face, set in abundant smooth brown hair, and with the stamp
of genuine and heart-felt goodness. "Yes--you remind me of my mother."
"Well, I might be your mother."
"I am nineteen years old already."
"Already," replied Hannah, with a smile. "Why my life has been twice as
long as yours. I had a child, too, a boy; and he was taken from me when
he was quite little. He would be a year older than you now, my child--is
your mother still alive?"
"No," said Selene, with her old dry manner, that had become a habit. "The
gods have taken her from us. She would have been, like you, not quite
forty now, and she was as pretty and as kind as you are. When she died
she left seven children besides me, all little, and one of them blind. I
am the eldest, and do what I can for them, that they may not be starved."
"God will help you in the loving task."
"The gods!" exclaimed Selene, bitterly. "They let them grow up, the rest
I have to see to--oh! my foot, my foot!"
"Yes, we will think of that before anything else. Your father is alive?"
"Yes."
"And he is not to know that you work here?"
Selene shook her head.
"He is in moderate circumstances, but of good family?"
"Yes."
"Here, I think, is the doctor. Well? May I know your father's name? I
must if I am to get you safe home."
"I am the daughter of Keraunus, the steward of the palace, and we have
rooms there, at Lochias," Selene answered, with rapid decision, but in a
low whisper, so that the physician, who just then opened the room door,
might not hear her. "No one, and least of all, my father, must know that
I work here."
The widow made a sign to her to be easy, greeted the grey-haired leech
who came in with his assistant; and then, while the old man examined the
injured limb, and cut the straps with a sharp pair of scissors, she
bathed the girl's face and cut head with a wet handkerchief, supported
the poor child in her arms, and, when the pain seemed too much for her,
kissed her pale cheeks.
Many sighs from the bottom of her heart, and many shrill little cries
betrayed how intense was the pain Selene was enduring. When at length,
her delicate and graceful foot-distorted just now by the extensive
swelling,--was freed from the bands and straps, and the ankle had been
felt and pressed in every direction by the leech, he exclaimed, turning
to the assistant who stood ready to lend a helping hand:
"Look here, Hippolytus, the girl came along the streets with her ankle in
this state. If any one else had told me of such a thing, I should have
desired him to keep his lies to himself. The fibula is broken at the
joint, and with this injured limb the child has walked farther than I
could trust myself at all--without my litter. By Sirius! child, if you
are not crippled for life it will be a miracle."
Selene had listened with closed eyes, and exhausted almost to
unconsciousness; but at his last words she slightly shrugged her
shoulders with a faint smile of scorn on her lips.
"You think nothing of being lame!" said the old man, who let no gesture
of his patient escape him. "That, of course, is your affair, but it is
mine to see that you do not become a cripple in my hands. The opportunity
for working a miracle is not given to one of us every day, and happily
for me, you yourself bring a powerful coadjutor to help me. I do not mean
a lover or anything of that kind, though you are much too pretty, but
your lovely, vigorous, healthy youth. The hole in your head is hotter
than it need be--keep it properly cool with fresh water. Where do you
live, child?"
"Almost half an hour from here," said Hannah, answering for Selene.
"She cannot be taken so far as that, even in a litter, at present," said
the old man.
"I must go home!" cried Selene, resolutely, and trying to sit up.
"Nonsense," exclaimed the physician. "I must forbid your moving at all.
Be still, and be patient and obedient, or your foolish joke will come to
a bad end; fever has already set in, and it will increase by the evening.
It has nothing much to do with the leg, but all the more with the
inflamed scalp-wound. Do you think," he added, turning to the widow,
"that perhaps a bed could be made here on which she might lie, and remain
here till the factory reopens?"
"I would rather die," shrieked Selene, trying to draw away her foot from
the leech.
"Be still--be still, my dear child," said the good woman, soothingly. "I
know where I can take you. My house is in a garden belonging to Paulina,
the widow of Pudeus, near this and close to the sea; it is not above a
thousand paces off, and there you will have a soft couch and tender care.
A good litter is waiting, and I should think--"
"Even that is a good distance," said the old man. "However, she cannot
possibly be better cared for than by you, dame Hannah. Let us try it
then, and I will accompany you to lash those accursed bearers' skins if
they do not keep in step."
Selene made no attempt to resist these orders, and willingly drank a
potion which the old man gave her; but she cried to herself as she was
lifted into the litter and her foot was carefully propped on pillows. In
the street, which they soon reached through a side door, she again almost
lost consciousness, and half awake but half as in a dream, she heard the
leech's voice as he cautioned the bearers to walk carefully, and saw the
people, and vehicles, and horsemen pass her on their way. Then she saw
that she was being carried through a large garden, and at last she dimly
perceived that she was being laid on a bed. From that moment every thing
was merged in a dream, though the frequent convulsions of pain that
passed over her features and now and then a rapid movement of her hand to
the cut in her head, showed that she was not altogether oblivious to the
reality of her sufferings.
Dame Hannah sat by the bed, and carried out the physician's instructions
with exactness; he himself did not leave his patient till he was
perfectly satisfied with her bed and her position. Mary stayed with the
widow helping her to wet handkerchiefs and to make bandages out of old
linen.
When Selene began to breathe more calmly Hannah beckoned her assistant to
come close to her and asked in a low voice.
"Can you stay here till early to-morrow, we must take it in turns to
watch her, most likely for several nights--how hot this wound on her head
is!"
"Yes, I can stay, only I must tell my mother that she may not be
frightened."
"Quite right, and then you may undertake another commission for I cannot
leave the poor child just now."
"Her people will be anxious about her."
"That is just where you must go; but no one besides us two must know who
she is. Ask for Selene's sister and tell her what has happened; if you
see her father tell him that I am taking care of his daughter, and that
the physician strictly forbids her moving or being moved. But he must not
know that Selene is one of us workers, so do not say a word about the
factory before him. If you find neither Arsinoe nor her father at home,
tell any one that opens the door to you that I have taken the sick child
in, and did it gladly. But about the workshop, do your hear, not a word.
One thing more, the poor girl would never have come down to the factory
in spite of such pain, unless her family had been very much in need of
her wages; so just give these drachmae to some one and say, as is
perfectly true, that we found them about her person."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Enjoy the present day
Idleness had long since grown to be the occupation of his life
It was such a comfort once more to obey an order
Philosophers who wrote of the vanity of writers
THE EMPEROR
By Georg Ebers
Volume 5.
CHAPTER XIX.
Plutarch was one of the richest citizens of Alexandria, and the owner of
the papyrus manufactory where Selene and Arsinoe worked; and he had of
his own free will offered to provide for the "suitable" entertainment of
the wives and daughters of his fellow-citizens, who were, this very day,
to assemble in one of the smaller theatres of the city. Every one that
knew him, knew too that "suitable" with him meant as much as to say
imperial splendor.
The ship-builder's daughter had prepared Arsinoe for grand doings, but by
the time she had reached the entrance only of the theatre her
expectations were exceeded, for as soon as she gave her father's name and
her own, a boy, who looked out from an arbor of flowers gave her a
magnificent bunch of flowers, and another, who sat perched on a dolphin,
handed her, as a ticket of admission, a finely-cut ornament of ivory
mounted in gold, with a pin, by which the invited owner was intended to
fix it like a brooch in her peplum; and at each entrance to the theatre,
the ladies, as they came in, had a similar present made them.
The passage leading to the auditorium was full of perfume, and Arsinoe,
who had already visited this theatre two or three times, hardly
recognized it, it was so gaily decorated with colored scarfs. And who had
ever seen ladies and young girls filling the best places instead of men,
as was the case to-day? Indeed the citizens' daughters were in general
not permitted to see a theatrical performance at all, unless on very
special and exceptional occasions. She looked up with a smile at the
empty topmost rows of the cheapest seats of the semicircular auditorium,
as one looks at an old playfellow one had outgrown by a head, for it was
there--when she had occasionally been permitted to dip into their scanty
common purse--that she had almost fainted many a time, with pleasure,
fear, or sympathy, though the draught so high up and under the open
heaven which was the only roof, was incessantly blowing; and in summer
the discomforts were even greater from the awning which shaded the
amphitheatre on the sunny side. The wide breadths of canvas were managed
by means of stout ropes, and when these were pulled through the rings
they rode in, they made a screech which compelled the bearer to stop his
ears; and often it was necessary to duck his head not to be hit by the
heavy ropes or by the awning itself. But Arsinoe only remembered these
things to-day as a butterfly sporting in the sun may remember the hideous
pupa-case that it has burst and left behind it.
Radiant with happy excitement, she was led to her seat with her young
companion, the black-haired daughter of the shipwright. She perceived
indeed that numerous eyes turned upon her, but that only added to her
pleasure, for she knew that she could well bear looking at, and there
could be no greater pleasure, as she thought, than to give pleasure to a
multitude.
To-day at any rate! For those who were looking at her were the chief
citizens of Alexandria; they stood on the stage, and among them stood
kind tall Pollux, waving his hand to her. She could not keep her feet
quiet, but she did contrive to keep her arms still by crossing them in
front of her, so that they might not betray how excited she was.
This distribution of parts had already begun, for, by waiting for Selene,
she had come in almost half an hour too late. As soon as she saw that the
eyes that had been attracted to herself as she entered the theatre had
turned to other objects she herself looked round her. She was sitting on
a bench at the lowest and narrowest end of one of the wedge-shaped
sections of seats, which grew wider at the upper end, and which were
divided from each other by gangways for those who came and went, thus
forming the semicircular area of the auditorium.
Here she was surrounded only by young girls and women who were to have a
part or place in the performances. The places for these interested
persons were divided from the stage by a space for the orchestra, whence
the stage was easily reached by steps up which the chorus were wont to
mount to it.
Behind Arsinoe, in the larger circular rows, sat the parents and husbands
of the performers, among whom Keraunus, in his saffron robe, had taken a
place, besides a considerable number of sight-loving matrons and older
citizens who had accepted Plutarch's invitation.
Among the young women and girls Arsinoe saw several whose beauty struck
her, but she admired them ungrudgingly, and it never came into her head
to compare herself with them, for she knew very accurately that she was
pretty, and that even here she had nothing to conceal, and this was
enough for her.
The many-voiced hum which incessantly buzzed in her ears, and the perfume
which rose from the attar in the orchestra had something intoxicating in
them. Her gaze round the assembled multitude could not disturb any one,
and her companion had found some friends with whom she was chattering and
laughing. Other ladies and young girls sat staring silently in front of
them, or studying the appearance of the rest of the audience, male and
female; while others again concentrated their whole attention on the
stage. Arsinoe soon followed this example, nor was this solely on account
of Pollux who, by the prefect's orders, had been enlisted among the
artists to whom the arrangement of the display was entrusted, in spite of
the objections of his master Papias. More than once before had she seen
the afternoon sun shine as brightly into the theatre as it did to-day,
and the blue sky overarching it without a cloud, but with what different
feelings did she now direct her gaze to the raised level behind the
orchestra. The background, it is true, was the same as usual, the
pillared front of a palace built entirely of colored marbles, and
ornamented with gold; but on this occasion fresh garlands of fragrant
flowers hung gracefully between the pilasters and across from column to
column. Several artists, the first of the city, with tablets and styla in
their hands were moving about among fifty girls and ladies, and Plutarch
himself, and the gentlemen with him, composed, as it were a grand chorus
which sometimes divided, and sometimes stood all together.
On the right side of the stage were three purple-covered couches. On one
of them sat Titianus, the prefect, who, like the artists, used his
pencil; with him was his wife Julia. On another reclined Verus, at full
length, and as usual, crowned with roses; the third was for Plutarch, but
was unoccupied. The praetor did not hesitate to interrupt any speaker, as
though he were the host of the entertainment, and many of his remarks
were followed by loud applause, or approving laughter.
The face and figure of the wealthy Plutarch, which could never be
forgotten, were not altogether strange to Arsinoe, for, a few days
previously he had shown himself for the first time in many years in his
papyrus factory, with an architect to settle with him how the courts and
rooms could best be cleaned and decorated for the reception of the
Emperor; and on this occasion he had gone into the room where she worked
and had pinched her cheek with a few roguish and flattering words.
There he was, walking across the stage. He was an old man, said to be
about seventy years of age, his legs were half-paralyzed, and they
nevertheless moved with a series of incessant and rapid but unvoluntary
jerks under his heavy bowed body, and he was supported on either hand by
a tall young fellow. His nobly-formed head, must have been in his youth,
of extraordinary beauty. Now his head was covered by a wig of long brown
hair, his eyebrows and lashes were darkly dyed, his cheeks daubed with
red and white paint, which gave his countenance a fixed expression, as if
he had been stricken in the very act of smiling. On his curls he wore a
wreath of rare flowers in long racemes. An abundance of red and white
roses stuck out from the front folds of his ample toga, and were held in
their place by gold brooches, sparkling with precious stones of large
size. The hems of his mantle were all edged with rose-buds, and each was
fastened in with an emerald that shone like some bright insect. The young
men who supported him seemed like a portion of himself; he took no more
heed of them than if they had been crutches, and they needed not command
to tell them where he wished to go, where to stand still, and where to
rest.
At a distance his face was like that of a youth, but seen close it looked
like a painted plaster mask, with regular features and large movable
eyes.
Favorinus, the sophist, had said of him that one might cry over his
handsome locomotive corpse, if one were not obliged to laugh at it, and
it was said that he had himself declared that he would force his
faithless youth to remain with him. The Alexandrians called him the
Adonis with six legs, on account of the lads who supported him, and
without whom no one ever saw him and who always accompanied him when he
went out. The first time he heard this nickname he remarked: "They had
better have called me sixhanded;" and in fact he had a thoroughly good
heart, he was liberal and benevolent, took fatherly care of his
work-people, treated his slaves well, enriched those whom he set free,
and from time to time distributed large sums among the people in money
and in grain.
Arsinoe looked compassionately on the poor old man who could not buy back
his youth with all his money and all his art.
In the supercilious man who at once came up to Plutarch she recognized
the art-dealer Gabinius to whom her father had shown the door, on account
of the mosaic picture in their sitting-room, but their conversation was
interrupted, for the distribution of the women's part for the group of
Alexander's entry into Babylon, was now about to take place; about fifty
girls and young women were sent away from the stage and went down into
the orchestra. The Exegetes, the highest official in the town, now came
forward and took a new list out of the hand of Papias the sculptor. After
rapidly casting an eye on this, he handed it to a herald who followed
him, who proclaimed to all the assembly:
"In the name of the most noble Exegetes I request your attention, all you
ladies here assembled, the wives and daughters of Macedonians and of
Roman citizens. We now come to a distribution of the characters in our
representation of the life and history of the great Macedonian, of the
'Marriage of Alexander and Roxana,' and I hereby request those among you
to come upon the stage whom our artists have selected to take part in
this scene in the procession." After this exordium he shouted in a deep
and resonant voice a long list of names, and while this was going on
every other sound was hushed in the wide amphitheatre.
Even on the stage all was still; only Verus whispered a few remarks to
Titianus, and the curiosity-dealer spoke into Plutarch's ear, long
sentences with the stringent emphasis which was peculiar to him; and the
old man answered sometimes with an assenting nod, and sometimes with a
deprecatory motion of his hands.
Arsinoe listened with suspended breath to the herald's proclamation; she
started and colored all over, with her eyes fixed on the bunch of flowers
in her hand, when she heard from the stage loudly uttered and plain to be
heard by all present:
"Arsinoe, the second daughter of Keraunus, the Macedonian and a Roman
citizen."
The ship-builder's daughter had already been called before her, and had
immediately left her seat, but Arsinoe waited modestly till some older
ladies rose. She then joined them and went among the last members of the
little procession which went down to the orchestra and from thence up the
steps for the chorus, on to the stage.
There the ladies and young girls were placed in two ranks, and looked at
with amiable consideration by the artists. Arsinoe was not long in
perceiving that these gentlemen looked at her longer and more often than
at the others; and then, after the masters of the festival had gone aside
in groups to discuss the matter they looked at her constantly and were
talking, she felt sure, about her. Nor did it escape her that she had
become the centre of many glances from the lookers-on who were sitting in
the theatre, and it occurred to her that on several sides people were
pointing at her with their fingers. She did not know which way she should
look and began to feel bashful; still she was pleased at being remarked
by so many people, and as she stood looking at the ground out of sheer
embarrassment to hide the delight she felt, Verus, who had gone up to the
group of artists, called out, putting his hand on the prefect's arm.
"Charming-charming! a Roxana that might have sprung straight out of the
picture."
Arsinoe heard these words, and guessing that they referred to her she
became more confused than ever, while her awkward smile gradually changed
to an expression of joyful but anxious expectation of a delight which was
almost painful in its magnitude.
Now one of the artists pronounced her name, and as she ventured to raise
her eyes to see if it were not Pollux who had spoken, she observed the
wealthy Plutarch who, with his two living crutches and Gabinius, the lean
curiosity-dealer, was inspecting the ranks of her companions. Presently
he had come quite close to her, and as he was helped towards her with
tottering steps, he dug the dealer in the ribs and said, kissing the back
of his hand, and winking his great eyes: "I know--I know! It is not
easily forgotten. Ivory and red coral!"
Arsinoe started, the blood left her cheeks, and all satisfaction fled
from her heart when the old man came to a stand-still in front of her,
and said kindly:
"Ah! ah! a bud out of the papyrus factory among all these proud roses and
lilies. Ah! ah! out of my work-rooms to join my assembly! Never
mind-never mind, beauty is everywhere welcome. I do not ask how you got
here. I am only glad that you are here."
Arsinoe covered part of her face with her hand, but he tapped her white
arm three times with his middle finger, and then tottered on laughing to
himself. The dealer had caught Plutarch's words, and asked him, when they
had gone a few steps from Arsinoe, with eager indignation:
"Did I hear you rightly? a work-woman in your factory, and here among our
daughters?"
"So it is--two busy hands among so many idle ones," said the old man,
gaily.
"Then she must have forced her way in, and must be turned out."
"Certainly she shall not--Why, she is charming."
"It is revolting! here, in this assembly!"
"Revolting?" interrupted Plutarch. "Oh dear, no! we must not be too
particular. And how are we to obtain mere children from you
antiquity-mongers?" Then he added pleasantly:
"This lovely creature must I should think, delight your fine sense of
beauty; or are you afraid that she may seem better suited to the part of
Roxana than your own charming daughter? Only listen to the men up there!
Let us see what is going on."
These words referred to a loud discussion which had arisen close by the
couches of the prefect and Verus, the praetor. They, and with them most
of the painters and sculptors present, were of opinion that Arsinoe would
be a wonderfully effective Roxana; they maintained that her face and
figure answered perfectly to those of the Bactrian princes as they were
represented by Action, whose picture was, to a certain extent, to serve
as the basis of the living group. Only Papias and two of his
fellow-artists, declared against this choice, and eagerly asserted that
among all the damsels present one, and one alone, was worthy to appear
before the Emperor as Alexander's bride, and that one was Praxilla, the
daughter of Gabinius. All three were in close business relations with the
father of the young girl, who was tall, and slim, and certainly very
lovely, and they wanted to do a pleasure to the rich and knowing
purchaser. Their zeal even assumed a tone of vehemence, when the dealer,
following in the wake of Plutarch, joined the group of disputants, and
they were certain of being heard by him.
"And who is this girl yonder?" asked Papias, pointing to Arsinoe, as the
two came up. "Nothing can be said against her beauty, but she is dressed
less than simply, and wears no kind of ornament worth speaking of--it is
a thousand to one against her parents being in a position to provide her
with such a rich dress, and such costly jewels as Roxana certainly ought
to display when about to be married to Alexander. The Asiatic princess
must appear in silk, gold and precious stones. Now my friend here will be
able so to dress his Praxilla that the splendor of her attire might have
astonished the great Macedonian himself, but who is the father of that
pretty child who is satisfied with the blue ribbon in her hair, her two
roses, and her little white frock?"
"Your reflections are just, Papias," interrupted the dealer, with dry
incisiveness. "The girl you are speaking of is quite out of the question.
I do not say so for my daughter's sake, but because everything in bad
taste is odious to me; it is hardly conceivable how such a young thing
could have had the audacity to force herself in here. A pretty face, to
be sure, opens locks and bars. She is--do not be too much startled--she
is nothing more than a work-girl in the papyrus factory of our excellent
host, Plutarch."
"That is not the truth," Pollux interrupted, indignantly, as he heard
this assertion.
"Moderate your tongue, young man," replied the dealer. "I can call you to
witness, noble Plutarch."
"Let her be whom she may," answered the old man, with annoyance. "She is
very one of my workwomen, but even if she had come straight here from the
gumming-table with such a face and such a figure, she is perfectly in
place here and everywhere. That is my opinion."
"Bravo! my fine friend!" cried Verus, nodding to the old man. "Caesar
will be far better pleased with such a paragon of charmers as that sweet
creature, than with all your old writs of citizenship and heavy purses."
"That is true," the prefect said, confirming this statement. "And I dare
swear she is a free maiden, and not a slave. But you stood up for her
friend Pollux--what do you know about her?"
"That she is the daughter of Keraunus, the palace-steward, and that I
have known her from her childhood," answered the youthful artist
emphatically. "He is a Roman citizen, and of an old Macedonian house as
well."
"Perhaps even of royal descent," added Titianus, laughing.
"I know the man," answered the dealer hastily. "He is an impecunious
insolent old fool."
"I should think," interrupted Verus with lofty composure, but rather as
being bored, than as reproving the irritated speaker, "it seems to me
that this is hardly the place to conduct a discussion as to the nature
and disposition of the fathers of all those ladies and young girls."
"But he is poor," cried the dealer angrily. "A few days since he offered
to sell me his few miserable curiosities, but really I could not--"
"We are sorry for your sake if the transaction was unsuccessful," Verus
again interposed, this time with excessive politeness. "Now, first let us
decide on the persons and afterwards on the costumes. The father of the
girl is a Roman citizen then?"
"A member of the council, and in his way a man of position," replied
Titianus.
"And I," added his wife Julia, "have taken a great fancy to the sweet
little maid, and if the principal part is given to her, and her noble
father is without adequate means, as you assert my friend, I will
undertake to provide for her costume. Caesar will be charmed with such a
Roxana."
The dealer's clients were silent, he himself was trembling with
disappointment and vexation, and his fury rose to the utmost when
Plutarch, whom till then he thought he had won over to his daughter's
side, tried to bow his bent old body before dame Julia, and said with a
graceful gesture of regret:
"My old eyes have deceived me again on this occasion. The little girl is
very like one of my workwomen; very like--but I see now that there is a
certain something which the other lacks. I have done her an injustice and
remain her debtor. Permit, me, noble lady to add the ornaments to the
dress you provide for our Roxana. I may be lucky enough to find something
pretty for her. A sweet child! I shall go at once and beg her forgiveness
and tell her what we propose. May I do so noble Julia? Have I your
permission gentlemen?"
In a very few minutes it was known all over the stage, and soon after all
through the amphitheatre, that Arsinoe, the daughter of Keraunus, had
been selected to represent the character of Roxana.
"But who was Keraunus?"
"How was it that the children of the most illustrious and wealthy
citizens had been overlooked in assigning this most prominent part?"
"This was just what might be expected when every thing was left to those
reckless artists!"
"And where was a poor little girl like that to find the talents which it
would cost to procure the costume of an Asiatic princess, Alexander's
bride?"
"Plutarch, and the prefect's wife had undertaken that."
"A mere beggar."
"How well the family jewels would have suited our daughters!"
"Do we want to show Caesar nothing but a few silly pretty faces?--and not
something of our wealth and taste?"
"Supposing Hadrian asks who this Roxana is, and had to be told that a
collection had to be made to get her a proper costume."
"Such things never could happen anywhere but in Alexandria."
"Every one wants to know whether she worked in Plutarch's factory. They
say it is not true--but the painted old villain still loves a pretty
face. He smuggled her in, you may be sure; where there is smoke there is
fire, and it is beyond a doubt that she gets money from the old man."
"What for?"
"Ah! you had better enquire of a priest of Aphrodite. It is nothing to
laugh at, it is scandalous, audacious!"
Thus and on this wise ran the comments with which the announcement of
Arsinoe's preferment to the part of Roxana was received, and hatred and
bitter animosity had grown up in the souls of the dealer and his
daughter. Praxilla was selected as a companion to Alexander's bride, and
she yielded without objecting, but on her way homewards she nodded assent
when her father said:
"Let things go on now as they may, but a few hours before the performance
begins, I will send them word that you are ill."
The selection of Arsinoe had however, on the other hand, given pleasure
as well as pain. Up in the middle places in the amphitheatre sat
Keraunus, his legs far apart, his face glowing, panting and choking with
sheer delight, and too haughty to draw in his feet even when the brother
of the archidikastes tried to squeeze by his bulky person which filled
two seats at once. Arsinoe, whose sharp ears had not failed to catch the
dealer's remonstrances, and the words in which brave Pollux had taken her
part, had, at first, felt dying of shame and terror, but now she felt as
though she could fly on the wings of her delight. She had never been so
happy in her life, and when she got out with her father, in the first
dark street she threw her arms round his neck, kissed both his cheeks,
and then told him how kind the lady Julia, the prefect's wife had been to
her, and that she had undertaken, with the warmest friendliness, to have
her costly dress made for her.
Keraunus had no objection to offer, and, strange to say, he did not
consider it beneath his dignity to allow Arsinoe to be supplied with
jewels by the wealthy manufacturer.
"People have seen," he said, pathetically, "that we need not shrink from
doing as much as other citizens do, but to dress a Roxana as befits a
bride would cost millions, and I am very willing to confess to my friends
that I have not millions. Where the costume comes from is all the same,
be that as it may you will still stand the first of all the maidens in
the city, and I am pleased with you for that, my child. To-morrow will be
the last meeting, and then perhaps Selene too, may have a prominent part
given to her. Happily we are able to dress her as befits. When will the
prefect's wife fetch you?"
"To-morrow about noon."
"Then early to-morrow buy a nice new dress."
"Will there not be enough for a new bracelet too?" asked Arsinoe,
coaxingly. "This one of mine is too narrow and trumpery."
"You shall have one, for you have deserved it," replied Keraunus, with
dignity. "But you must have patience till the day after to-morrow;
to-morrow the goldsmiths will be closed on account of the festival."
Arsinoe had never seen her father so cheerful and talkative as he was
to-day, and yet the walk from the theatre to Lochias was not a very short
one, and it was long past the early hour at which he was accustomed to
retire to bed.
By the time the father and daughter reached the palace it was already
tolerably late, for, after Arsinoe had quitted the stage, suitable
representatives of parts had been selected for three other scenes from
the life of Alexander, by the light of torches, lamps and tapers; and
before the assemblage broke up, Plutarch's guests were entertained with
wine, fruit, syrups, sweet cakes, oyster pasties, and other delicacies.
The steward had fallen with good will on the noble drink and excellent
food, and when he was replete, he was wont to be in a better humor, and
after a modicum of wine, in a more cheerful mood than usual. Just now he
was content and kind, for although he had done all that lay in his power,
the entertainment had not lasted long enough, for him to arrive at a
state of intoxication which could make him surly, or to overload his
digestion. Towards the end of their walk, he turned thoughtful and said:
"To-morrow the council does not sit on account of the festival, and that
is well; all the world will congratulate me, question me, and notice me,
and the gilding on my circlet is quite shabby; and in some places the
silver shines through. Your outfit will now cost nothing, and it is quite
necessary that before the next meeting I should go to a goldsmith and
exchange that wretched thing for one of real gold. A man should show what
he is."
He spoke the words pompously, and Arsinoe eagerly acquiesced, and only
begged him, as they went in at the open door, to leave enough for
Selene's costume; he laughed quietly to himself, and said:
"We need no longer be so very cautious. I should like to know who the
Alexander will be who will be the first to ask for my Roxana as his wife.
Rich old Plutarch's only son already has a seat in the council, and has
not yet taken a wife. He is no longer very young, but he is a fine man
still."
The radiant father's dream of the future was interrupted by Doris, who
came out of the gate-house and called him by his name. Keraunus stood
still. When the old woman went on:
"I must speak with you."
He answered, repellently: "But I shall not listen to you--neither now nor
at any time."
"It was certainly not for my pleasure," retorted Doris, "that I called to
you; I have only to tell you that you will not find your daughter Selene
at home."
"What do you say?" cried Keraunus.
"I say that the poor girl with her damaged foot could at last walk no
farther, and that she had to be carried into a strange house where she is
being taken care of."
"Selene!" cried Arsinoe, falling from all her clouds of happiness,
startled and grieved--"do you know where she is?"
Before Doris could reply, Keraunus stormed out:
"It is all the fault of the Roman architect and his raging beast of a
dog. Very good! very good! now Caesar will certainly help me to my
rights. He will give a lesson to those who throw Roxana's sister into a
sick-bed, and hinder her from taking any part in the processions. Very
good! very good indeed!"
"It is sad enough to cry over!" said the gatekeeper's wife, indignantly.
"Is this the thanks she gets for all her care of her little brothers and
sisters! Only to think that a father can speak so, when his best child is
lying with a broken leg, helpless among strangers!"
"With a broken leg," whimpered Arsinoe.
"Broken!" repeated Keraunus slowly, and now sincerely anxious. "Where can
I find her?"
"At dame Hannah's little house at the bottom of the garden belonging to
the widow of Pudeus."
"Why did they not bring her here?"
"Because the physician forbade it. She is in a fever, but she is well
cared for. Hannah is one of the Christians. I cannot bear the people, but
they know how to nurse the sick better than any one."
"With Christians! my child is with Christians!" shrieked Keraunus, beside
himself. "At once Arsinoe, at once come with me; Selene shall not stay a
moment longer among that accursed rabble. Eternal gods! besides all our
other troubles this disgrace too!"
"Nay, it is not so bad as that," said Doris soothingly. "There are very
estimable folks even among the Christians. At any rate they are certainly
honorable, for the poor hunch-backed creature who first brought the bad
news gave me this little bag of money which dame Hannah had found in
Selene's pocket."
Keraunus took his daughter's hard-won wages as contemptuously as though
he was quite accustomed to gold, and thought nothing of more wretched
silver; but Arsinoe began to cry at the sight of the drachmae, for she
knew it was for the sake of that money that Selene had left her home, and
could divine what frightful pain she must have suffered on the way.
"Honorable this, and honorable that!" cried Keraunus, as he tied up his
money-bag. "I know well enough how shameless are the goings on in
assemblies of that stamp; kissing and hugging slaves! quite the right
sort of thing for my daughter! Come Arsinoe, let us find a litter at
once!"
"No, no!" exclaimed Doris eagerly. "For the present you must leave her in
peace. I should be glad to conceal it from you as a father--but the
physician declared it might cost her her life if she were not left just
now in perfect quiet. No one goes to any kind of assembly with a burning
wound in the head, a high fever and a broken leg.--Poor dear child!"
Keraunus stood silent in grave consternation, while Arsinoe exclaimed
through her tears:
"But I must go to her, I must see her Doris."
"That I cannot blame you for, my pretty one," said the old woman. I have
already been to the house of the Christians, but they would not let me in
to see the patient. With you it is rather different as you are her
sister."
"Come father," begged Arsinoe, "first let us see to the children, and
then you shall come with me to see Selene. Oh! why did I not go with her.
Oh! if she should die."
CHAPTER XX.
Keraunus and his daughter reached their rooms less quickly than usual,
for the steward dreaded a fresh attack from the blood-hound, which,
to-night however, was sharing Antinous' room. They found the old
slavewoman up, and in great excitement, for she loved Selene, she was
frightened at her absence, and in the children's sleeping-room all was
not as it should be.
Arsinoe went without delay to see the little ones, but the black woman
remained with her master, and told him with many tears, while he
exchanged his saffron-colored pallium for an old cloak, that the joy of
her heart, little blind Helios had been ill, and could not sleep, even
after she had given him some of the drops which Keraunus himself was
accustomed to take.
"Idiotic animal!" exclaimed Keraunus, "to give my medicine to the child,"
and he kicked off his new shoes to replace them with shabbier ones. "If
you were younger I would have you flogged."
"But you did say the drops were good," stammered the old woman.
"For me," shouted the steward, and without fastening his shoe-straps
round his ankles, so that they flapped and pattered on the ground, he
hurried off into the children's room. There sat his darling blind child,
his 'neir' as he liked to call him, with his pretty, fair, curly head
resting on Arsinoe's breast. The child recognized his step, and began his
little lament:
"Selene was away, and I was frightened, and I feel so sick, so sick."
The steward laid his hand on the child's forehead, and feeling how hot it
was he began to walk restlessly up and down by the little bed.
"That is just how it always happens," he said. "When one misfortune comes
another always follows. Look at him Arsinoe. Do you remember how the
fever took poor Berenice? Sickness, uneasiness, and a burning
head.--Have you any pain in your head my boy?"
"No," answered Helios, "but I feel so sick."
The steward opened the child's little shirt to see if he had any spots on
his breast, but Arsinoe said, as she bent over him:
"It is nothing much, he has only overloaded his stomach. The stupid old
woman gives him every thing he asks for, and she let him have half of the
currant cake, which we sent her to fetch before we went out."
"But his head is burning," repeated Keraunus.
"He will be quite well again by to-morrow morning," replied Arsinoe. "Our
poor Selene needs us far snore than he does. Come father. The old woman
can stay with him."
"I want Selene to come," whimpered the child. "Pray, pray, do not leave
me alone again."
"Your old father will stay with you my pet," said Keraunus tenderly, for
it cut him to the soul to see this child suffer. "You none of you know
what this boy is to us all."
"He will soon go to sleep," Arsinoe asserted. "Do let us go, or it will
be too late."
"And leave the old woman to commit some other stupid blunder?" cried
Keraunus. "It is my duty to stay with the poor little boy. You can go to
your sister and take the old woman with you."
"Very good, and to-morrow early I will come back."
"To-morrow morning?" said Keraunus surprised. "No, no, that will not do.
Doris said just now that Selene will be well nursed by the Christians.
Only see how she is, give her my love, and then come back."
"But father--"
"Besides you must remember that the prefect's wife expects you to-morrow
at noon to choose the stuff for your dress, and you must not look as if
you had been sitting up all night."
"I will rest a little while in the morning."
"In the morning? And how about curling my hair? And your new frock? And
poor little Helios?--No child, you are only just to see Selene and then
come back again. Early in the morning too the holiday will have begun,
and you know what goes on then; the old woman would be of no use to you
in the throng. Go and see how Selene is, you are not to stay."
"I will see--"
"Not a word about seeing--you come home again. I desire it; in two hours
you are to be in bed."
Arsinoe shrugged her shoulders, and two minutes after she was standing
with the old slave-woman in front of the gate-house.
A broad beam of light still fell through the half-open door of the bowery
little room, so Euphorion and Doris had not retired to rest and could at
once open the palace-gate for her. The Graces set up a bark as Arsinoe
crossed the threshold of her old friends' house, but they did not leave
their cushion for they soon recognized her.
It was several years since Arsinoe, in obedience to her father's strict
prohibition had set foot in the snug the house, and her heart was deeply
touched as she saw again all the surroundings she had loved as a child,
and had not forgotten as she grew into girlhood. There were the birds,
the little dogs, and the lutes on the wall near the Apollo. On worthy
dame Doris' table there had always been something to eat, and there, now,
good a lovely, golden-brown cake, by the side of the wine-jar. How often
as a child had she sneaked in to beg a sweet morsel, how often to see
whether tall Pollux were not there, Pollux, whose bold devices and
original suggestions, gave his work and his play alike, the stamp of
genius, and lent them a peculiar charm. And there sat her saucy
playfellow in person, his legs stretched at full length in front of him,
and talking, eagerly. Arsinoe heard him relating the end of the history
of her being chosen for Roxana, and caught her own name, graced with such
epithets as brought the blushes to her cheeks, and gave her double
pleasure because he could not guess that she could overhear them. From a
boy he had grown to a man, and a fine man, and a great artist--but he was
still the old kind and audacious Pollux.
The sudden leap with which he sprang from his seat to welcome her, the
frank laughter with which he several times interrupted her speech, the
childlike loving way in which he held his arm round his little mother
while he greeted her, and asked why she was going out so late, the
winning, touching tone of his voice as he expressed his regret at
Selene's mishaps--all went home to Arsinoe as a thing known and loved, of
which she had long been deprived, and she clung to the two strong hands
he held out to her. If at that moment he had taken her up, and clasped
her to his heart before the very eyes of Eupliorion and his mother she
really would have been incapable of resisting him.
It was with a heavy heart that Arsinoe had gone into dame Doris, but in
the gate-keeper's house there reigned an atmosphere in which care and
anxiety could not breathe, and the light-hearted girl's vision of her
sister as tormented with pain and threatened with danger was changed in a
wonderfully short time to that of a sufferer comfortably in bed, with
only a severely-injured foot. In the place of consuming anxiety she felt
only hearty sympathy, and this sounded in her voice as she begged the
singer Euphorion to open the gate for her, because she wanted to go out
with her slave-woman to ascertain how Selene was.
Doris soothed her, repeating her assurance that the patient would be
nursed with the utmost care in dame Hannah's hands; still, she thought
her wish to see her sister very justifiable, and eagerly seconded Pollux
when he entreated Arsinoe to accept his escort; for the festival would be
beginning soon after midnight, the streets would be full of rough and
impudent people, and a bunch of feathers would be about as much use
against the drunken slaves as her black scarecrow, who had been falling
into decrepitude even before she had done the stupidest deed of her life
and roused the steward's anger against herself.
So they went along the dark streets which grew full of people the farther
they went, side by side in silence. Presently Pollux said:
"Put your arm through mine; you ought to feel that I am protecting you,
and I--I should like to feel at every step that I have found you once
more, and am allowed to be near you--so sweet a creature."
The words did not sound impertinent, on the contrary, they sounded very
much in earnest, and the sculptor's deep voice trembled with emotion as
he spoke them with deep tenderness. They knocked at the door of the
girl's heart with the urgent hand of love; she unhesitatingly put her
hand through his arm and answered softly:
"You will take care of me now."
"Yes," said he, and he took her little hand, which rested on his right
arm, in his left hand. She did not draw it away, and after they had gone
on thus for a few paces he sighed and said:
"Do you know how I feel?"
"Well!"
"Nay, I myself cannot put it into words. Rather as if I had triumphed in
the Olympian games, or as if Caesar had invested me with the purple!--But
who cares for the wealth or the purple! You are hanging on my arm, and I
have hold of your hand; compared with this, all is as nought. If it were
not for the people about I--I do not know what I could do."
She looked up at him with happy content, but he lifted her hand to his
lips and pressed it to them long and fervently. Then he let it go again
and said, with a sigh that came up from the bottom of his heart:
"Oh Arsinoe, my sweet Arsinoe, how I love you!"
As the words came softly yet hotly from his lips the girl clasped his arm
closely to her bosom, leaned her head on his shoulder, looked up at him
with a wide-eyed, tender gaze, and said softly:
"Oh Pollux, I am so happy, the world is so good!"
"Nay, I could hate it!" cried the sculptor. "To hear this--and to have an
old mother wide awake at home, and to be obliged to walk steadily on in a
street crowded with men--it is unendurable! I shall not hold out much
longer--sweetest of girls--here it is quiet and dark."
Yes, in a little nook made by two contiguous houses, and into which
Pollux drew Arsinoe, it was pitch dark, as he hastily pressed his first
kiss on her innocent lips; but in their hearts it was light-radiant
sunshine.
She had thrown her arms round his neck and would willingly have clung to
him till day should end; but they heard the approach of a noisy
procession of slaves. These unfortunate creatures began soon after
midnight singing and shouting so as to avail themselves to the extremist
limit of the holiday, which released them for a short time from their
tasks and duties; Pollux knew well how unbounded the license of their
pleasures could be, and as he walked on with Arsinoe he enjoined her to
keep with him as close as possible to the houses.
"How jolly they are!" he said pointing to the merry-makers. "Their
masters will wait on themselves a little to-day, and the best day in the
year is just beginning for them, but for us the best day in all our
lives."
"Yes, yes," cried Arsinoe, and she clasped his strong arm with both her
hands.
Then they both laughed merrily, for Pollux had noticed that the old
slave-woman had gone on past them with her head sunk on her breast, and
was following another pair.
"I will call her," Arsinoe said.
"No, no, let her be," said the artist. "The couple in front certainly
require her protection more than we do."
"But how could she possibly mistake that little man for you?" laughed
Arsinoe.
"I wish I were a little smaller," replied Pollux with a sigh. "Only
picture to yourself the vast amount of burning love and tormenting
longing that can be contained in so large a body as mine!" She slapped
him on the arm, and to punish her he hastily pressed his lips on her
forehead.
"Don't--think of the people," she said reprovingly, but he gaily
answered:
"It is not a misfortune to be envied."
Here the streets came to an end, and they found themselves in front of
the garden belonging to Pudeus' widow; Pollux knew it, for Paulina who
owned it was the sister of Pontius, the architect, who himself owned a
magnificent house in the city. But could it be possible? Had invisible
hands brought them here already? The gate of the enclosure was locked.
Pollux roused a porter, told him what he wanted, and was conducted by him
with Arsinoe to apart of the grounds where a bright light shone out from
dame Hannah's little abode, for he had had instructions to admit the sick
girl's friends even during the night.
A crescent moon lighted the paths, which were strewed with shells; the
shrubs and trees in the garden threw sharply-defined shadows on their
gleaming whiteness, the sea sparkled brightly, and as soon as the porter
had left the happy young pair together, and they found themselves in a
shadowy alley, Pollux said, opening his arms to the girl:
"Now--one more kiss, just for a remembrance, while I wait."
"Not now," begged Arsinoe.
"I am no longer happy since we came in here. I cannot help thinking of
poor Selene."
"I have not a word to say against that," replied Pollux submissively.
"Then when waiting is over may I have my reward?"
"No, no, now, at once," cried Arsinoe throwing herself on his breast, and
then she hurried towards the house.
He followed her, and when she paused in front of a brightly-lighted
window on the ground floor, he stopped also. They both looked in on a
lofty and spacious room, kept in the most perfect order and cleanliness;
it had one door only opening on the roofless forecourt of the house; the
walls of the room were plainly painted of a light green color, and the
only ornament it contained was one piece of carved work over the door.
On the farther side stood the bed on which Selene was lying; a few paces
from it sat the deformed girl asleep, while dame Hannah softly went up to
the patient with a wet compress in her hand which she carefully laid on
her head.
Pollux touched Arsinoe and whispered to her:
"Your sister lies there in her sleep like an Ariadne deserted by
Dionysus. How wretched she will feel when she comes to herself."
"She looks to me less pale than usual."
"Look now, how she bends her arm, and what a lovely attitude as she puts
her hand to her head!"
"Go--" said Arsinoe. "You ought not to be spying here."
"Directly, directly--but if you were lying there no power should stir me
from the spot. How carefully Hannah lifts the wet wrapper from her poor
broken ankle. You could not touch your eye more gently than the good
woman handles Selene's foot."
"Go back, she is looking straight this way."
"What a wonderful face! It would do for a Penelope, but there is
something singular in her eyes. Now if I had to make another star-gazing
Urania, or a Sappho full of the deity, and with eyes fixed on the heavens
in poetic rapture, that is what I would put into her! She is no longer
young, but how pure her face is! It is like a sky when the wind has swept
it clear of clouds."
"Seriously you must go now," said Arsinoe drawing away her hand, which he
had again taken. Pollux saw that his praise of another woman's beauty
annoyed her, and he said soothingly:
"Be easy child. You have not your match here in Alexandria, no, nor so
far as Greek is spoken. A perfectly clear sky is certainly not the most
beautiful to my taste. Pure light, and pure blue, give no satisfaction to
the artist, it is only behind a few moving clouds, lighted up by changing
gleams of gold and silver, that the firmament has any true charm, and
though your face too is like heaven to me it does not lack sweet
movement, never twice alike. Now this matron--"
"Only look," interrupted Arsinoe, "how tenderly dame Hannah bends over
Selene, and now she is gently kissing her brow. No mother could tend her
own daughter more lovingly. I have known her for a long time; she is
good, very good; it is hardly credible for she is a Christian."
"The cross up there over the door," said Pollux "is the token by which
these extraordinary people recognize each other."
"And what is signified by the dove and fish and anchor round it?" asked
Arsinoe.
"They are emblems of the mysteries of the Christians," replied Pollux. "I
do not understand them; the things are wretchedly painted; the adherents
of the crucified God contemn all art, and particularly my branch of it,
for they hate all images of the gods."
"And yet among such blasphemers we find such good men; I will go in at
once; Hannah is wetting another handkerchief."
"And how unwearied and kind she looks as she does it; still there is
something strange, deserted, and graceless in this large bare room. I
should not like to live there."
"Have you noticed the faint scent of lavender that comes through the
window?"
"Long since--there your sister is moving and has opened her eyes--now she
has shut them again."
"Go back into the garden and wait till I come," Arsinoe commanded him
decidedly. "I will only see how Selene is going on; I will not stop long
for my father wishes me to return soon, and no one can nurse her better
than Hannah!"
The girl drew her hand out of her lover's and knocked at the door of the
little house; it was opened and the widow herself led Arsinoe to the
bedside of her sister. Pollux at first sat a while on a bench in the
garden, but soon sprang up and paced with long steps the path he had
previously trodden with Arsinoe. A stone table across the path, brought
him to a stand-still, and he took a fancy for leaping it. The third time
he came up to it he sprang over it with a long jump. But no sooner had he
done the frolicsome deed than he paused, shook his head at himself and
muttered to himself: "Like a boy!"--He felt indeed like a happy child.
But as he waited he became calmer and graver. He acknowledged to himself,
with sincere thankfulness, that he had now found the ideal woman, of whom
he had dreamed in his hours of best inspiration, and that she was his,
wholly and alone. And after all, what was he? A poor rascal who had many
mouths to fill, and was no more than two fingers of his master's hand.
This must be altered. He would not reduce his sister's comforts in any
way but he must break with Papias, and stand henceforth on his own feet.
His courage mounted fast, and when at last, Arsinoe returned from her
sister, he had resolved that he must first finish Balbilla's bust with
all diligence in his own workshop, and that then he would model his
beloved; these two female heads he could not fail in. Caesar must see
them, they must be exhibited, and already in his mind's eye, he saw
himself refusing order after order, and accepting only the most splendid
where all were good.
Arsinoe went home comforted. Selene's sufferings were certainly less than
she had pictured them; she did not wish to be nursed by any one besides
dame Hannah. She might perhaps have a little fever, but any one who was
capable of discussing every little question of house-keeping, and all
that related to the children could not be--as Arsinoe thought while she
walked back through the garden, leaning on the artist's arm--really and
properly ill.
"It must revive and delight her to have Roxana for a sister!" cried
Pollux; but his pretty companion shook her head and said: "She is always
so odd; what most delights me is averse to her."
"Well Selene is of course the moon, and you are the sun."
"And what are you?" asked Arsinoe.
"I am tall Pollux, and to-night I feel as if I might some day be great
Pollux."
"If you succeed I shall grow with you."
"That will be your right, since it is only through you that I can ever
succeed in that which I propose to do.
"And how should a simple little thing, such as I am, be able to help an
artist?"
"By living, and by loving him," cried the sculptor, lifting her up in his
arms before she could prevent him.
Outside the garden-gate the old slave-woman was sitting asleep. She had
learnt from the porter that her young mistress had been admitted with her
companion, but she herself had been forbidden to enter the grounds. A
curbstone had served her for a seat, and as she waited her eyes had
closed, in spite of the increasing noise in the street. Arsinoe did not
waken her, but asked Pollux, with a roguish laugh:
"We shall find our way alone, shall we not?"
"If Eros does not lead us astray," answered the artist. And so, as they
went on their way, they jested and exchanged little tender speeches.
The nearer they got to Lochias and to the main lines of traffic which
intersected at right angles the Canopic way--the widest and longest road
in the city--the fuller was the stream of people that flowed onwards in
the direction in which they were going; but this circumstance favored
them, for those who wish to be unobserved, when they cannot be absolutely
alone, have only to mix with the crowd. As they were borne towards the
focus and centre of the festive doings, they clung closely together, she
to him, and he to her, so that they might not be torn apart by any of the
rushing and tumultuous processions of excited Thracian women who,
faithful to their native usages, came storming by with a young bull, on
this particular night of the year, that following the shortest day. They
had hardly gone a hundred paces beyond the Moon-street when they heard
proceeding from it a wild roving song of tipsy jollity, and loud above it
the sound of drums and pipes, cymbals and noisy shouting, and at the same
time in the King's street, a road which crossed the Bruchiom and opened
on Lochias, a merry troup came towards them.
At their head, among other acquaintances, came Teuker, the gem-cutter,
the younger brother of Pollux. Crowned with ivy, and flourishing a
thyrsus he came dancing on, and behind him, leaping and shouting, a train
of men and women, all excited to the verge of folly, singing, hollooing,
and dancing.
Garlands of vine, ivy and asphodel fluttered from a hundred heads;
poplar, lotus, and laurel wreaths overhung their heated brows;
panther-skins, deer and goatskins hung from their bare shoulders and
waved in the wind as their bearers hurried onwards. This procession had
been first formed by some artists and rich youths returning with some
women from a banquet, with a band of music; every one who met this festal
party had joined it or had been forced to enlist with it. Respectable
citizens and their wives, laborers, maid-servants, slaves, soldiers and
sailors, officers, women flute-players, artisans, ship-captains, the
whole chorus of a theatre invited by a friend of art, excited women who
dragged with them a goat that was to be slaughtered to Dionysus--none had
been able to resist the temptation to join the procession. It turned down
the Moon-street, keeping to the middle of the road which was planted with
elms, and had on each side of it a raised foot-way, which at this time of
night no one used. How clear was the sound of the double-pipes, how
bravely the girls hit the calf-skin of the tambourines with their soft
fists, how saucily the wind tossed and tangled the dishevelled hair of
the riotous women and played with the smoke of the torches which were
wielded in the air by audacious youths, disguised as Pan or as Satyrs,
and shouting as they went.
Here a girl, holding her tambourine high in the air, rattled the little
bells on its hoop, as she flew along, as violently as though she wanted
to shake the hollow metal balls out of their frame, and send them
whistling through the air on their own account-there, side by side with
his comrades, who were excited almost to madness, a handsome lad came
skipping along in elaborately graceful leaps, but carrying over his arm,
with comic care, a long bull's-tail that he had tied on, and blowing
alternately up and down the short scale from the shortest to the longest
of the reeds composing his panpipes. Through the noisy crowd as they
rushed by, sounded, now and again, a loud roar, that might as easily have
been caused by pain as joy; but it was each time hastily drowned in mad
laughter, extravagant singing and jubilant music.
Old and young, great and small, all in short that came near this rabble
train, were carried off with irresistible force to follow it with shouts
of triumph. Even Pollux and Arsinoe had for some time ceased to walk
soberly side by side, but moved their feet, laughingly in time to the
merry measure.
"How nice it sounds," cried the artist. "I could dance and be merry too
Arsinoe, dance and make merry with you like a madman!"
Before she could find time to say 'yes' or 'no,' he shouted a loud "To,
To, Dionysus," and flung her up in the air. She too was caught by the
spirit of the thing, and waving her hand above her head she joined in his
shout of triumph, and let him drag her along to a corner of the
Moon-street where a seller of garlands offered her wares for sale. There
she let him wreathe her with ivy, she stuck a laurel wreath on his head,
twisted a streamer of ivy round his neck and breast, and laughed loudly
as she flung a large silver coin into the flower-woman's lap and clung
tightly to his arm. It was all done in swift haste without reflection, as
if in a fit of intoxication, and with trembling hands.
The procession was drawing to an end. Six women and girls in wreaths
closed it, walking arm in arm with loud singing. Pollux drew his
sweetheart behind this jovial crew, threw his arm around Arsinoe once
more, while she put hers round him, and then both of them stepped out in
a brisk dance-step flinging their arms left free, throwing back their
heads, shouting and singing loudly, and forgetting all that surrounded
them; they felt as though they were bound to each other by a glory of
sunbeams, while some god lifted them above the earth and bore them up
through a realm of delight and joy beyond the myriad stars and through
the translucent ether; thus they let themselves be led away through the
Moon-street into the Canopic way and so back to the sea, and as far as
the temple of Dionysus.
There they paused breathless and it suddenly struck them that he was
Pollux and she Arsinoe, and that she must get back again to her father
and the children.
"Come home," she said softly, and as she spoke she dropped her arm and
began to gather up her loosened hair.
"Yes, yes," he said as if in a dream. He released her, struck his hand
against his brow, and turning to the open cella of the temple he said:
"Long have I known that thou art mighty O Dionysus, and that thou O
Aphrodite art lovely, and that thou art sweet O Eros! but how inestimable
your gifts, that I have learnt to-day for the first time."
"We were indeed full of the deity," said Arsinoe. "But here comes another
procession and I must go home."
"Then let us go by the Little Harbor," answered Pollux.
"Yes--I must pick the leaves out of my hair and no one will see us
there."
"I will help you--"
"No, you are not to touch me," said Arsinoe decidedly. She grasped her
abundant soft and shiny hair, and cleared it of the leaves that had got
entangled in it, as tiny beetles do in a double flower. Finally she hid
her hair under her veil, which had slipped off her head long since, but,
almost by a miracle, had caught and remained hanging on the brooch of her
peplum. Pollux stood looking at her, and overmastered by the passion that
possessed him, he exclaimed:
"Eternal gods! how I love you! Till now my soul has been like a careless
child, to-day it is grown to heroic stature.--Wait--only wait, it will
soon learn to use its weapons."
"And I will help it in the fight," she said happily, as she put her hand
through his arm again, and they hurried back to the old palace, dancing
rather than walking.
The late December sun was already giving warning of his approaching
rising by cold yellowish-grey streaks in the sky as Pollux and his
companion entered the gate, which had long since been opened for the
workmen. In the hall of the Muses they took a first farewell, in the
passage leading to the steward's room, a second--sad and yet most happy;
but this was but a short one for the gleam of a lamp made them start
apart, and Arsinoe instantly fled.
The disturber was Antinous who was waiting here for the Emperor who was
still gazing at the stars from the watch-tower Pontius had erected for
him. As she vanished he turned to Pollux and said gaily:
"I need your forgiveness for I have disturbed you in an interview with
your sweetheart."
"She will be my wife," said the sculptor proudly.
"So much the better!" replied the favorite, and he drew a deep breath, as
though the artist's words had relieved his mind of a burden.
"Ah! so much the better. Can you tell me where to find the fair Arsinoe's
sister?"
"To be sure," replied the artist, and he felt pleased that the young
Bithynian should cling to his arm. Within the next hour, Pollux, from
whose lips there flowed a stream of eager and enthusiastic words, like
water from a spring, had completely won the heart of the Emperor's
favorite.
The girl found both her father and Helios, who no longer looked like a
sick patient--fast asleep. The old slave-woman came in a few minutes
after her, and when at last, after unbinding her hair, Arsinoe threw
herself on her bed she fell asleep instantly, and in her dreams found
herself once more by the side of her Pollux, while they both were flying
to the sound of drums, flutes, and cymbals high above the dusty ways of
earth, like leaves swept on by the wind.
CHAPTER XXI.
The steward awoke soon after sunrise. He had slept no less soundly, it is
true, in his arm-chair than in his bed, but he did not feel refreshed,
and his limbs ached.
In the living-room everything was in the same disorder as on the previous
evening, and this annoyed him, for he was accustomed to find his room in
order when he entered it in the morning. On the table, surrounded by
flies, stood the remains of the children's supper, and among the bread
crusts and plates lay his own ornaments and his daughter's! Wherever he
turned he saw articles of dress and other things out of their place. The
old slave-woman came in yawning, her woolly grey hair hung in disorder
about her face, and her eyes seemed fixed, her feet carried her
unsteadily here and there.
"You are drunk," cried Keraunus; nor was he mistaken, for when the old
woman had waked up, sitting by the house of Pudeus, and had learned from
the gate keeper that Arsinoe had quitted the garden, she had gone into a
tavern with other slave-women. When her master seized her arm and shook
her, she exclaimed with a stupid grin on her wet lips:
"It is the feast-day. Every one is free, to-day is the feast."
"Roman nonsense!" interrupted the steward. "Is my breakfast ready?"
While the old woman stood muttering some inaudible words, the slave came
into the room and said:
"To-day is a general holiday, may I go out too?"
"Oh that would suit me admirably!" cried the steward.
"This monster drunk, Selene sick, and you running about the streets."
"But no one stops at home to-day," replied the slave timidly.
"Be off then!" cried Keraunus. "Walk about from now till midnight! Do as
you please, only do not expect me to keep you any longer. You are still
fit to turn the hand-mill, and I dare say I can find a fool to give me a
few drachmae for you."
"No, no, do not sell me," groaned the old man, raising his hands in
entreaty; Keraunus however would not hear him, but went on angrily:
"A dog at least remains faithful to his master, but you slaves eat him
out of house and home, and when he most needs you, you want to run about
the streets."
"But I will stay," howled the old man.
"Nay, do as you please. You have long been like a lame horse which makes
its rider a butt for the laughter of children. When, you go out with me
everyone looks round as if I had a stain on my pallium. And then the
mangy dog wants to keep holiday, and stick himself up among the
citizens!"
"I will stay here, only do not sell me!" whimpered the miserable old man,
and he tried to take his master's hand; but the steward shoved him off,
and desired him to go into the kitchen and light a fire, and throw some
water on the old woman's head to sober her. The slave pushed his
companion out of the room, while Keraunus went into his daughter's
bedroom to rouse her.
There was no light in Arsinoe's room but that which could creep in
through a narrow opening just below the ceiling; the slanting rays fell
directly on the bed up to which Keraunus went. There lay his daughter n
sound sleep; her pretty head rested on her uplifted right arm, her
unbound brown hair flowed like a stream over her soft round shoulders and
over the edge of the little bed. He had never seen the child look so
pretty, and the sight of her really touched his heart, for Arsinoe
reminded him of his lost wife, and it was not vain pride merely, but a
movement of true paternal love, which involuntarily transformed his
earnest wish that the gods night leave him this child and let her be
happy, into an unspoken but fervent prayer.
He was not accustomed to waking his daughter who was always up and busy
before he was, and he could hardly bear to disturb his darling's sweet
sleep; but it had to be done, so he called Arsinoe by her name, shook her
arm and said, as at last she sat up and looked at him enquiringly:
"It is I, get up, remember what has to be done today."
"Yes--yes," she said yawning, "but it is so early yet!"
"Early," said Keraunus, smiling. "My stomach says the contrary. The sun
is already high, and I have not yet had my porridge."
"Make the old woman cook it."
"No, no, my child--you must get up. Have you forgotten whom you are to
represent? And my hair is to be curled, and the prefect's wife, and then
your dress."
"Very well--go; I do not care the least bit about Roxana and all the
dressing-up."
"Because you are not yet quite awake," laughed the steward. "How did this
ivy-leaf get into your hair?" Arsinoe colored, put her hand to the spot
indicated by her father, and said reluctantly:
"Out of some bough or another, but now go that I may get up."
"In a minute--tell me how did you find Selene?"
"Not so very bad--but I will tell you all about that afterwards. Now I
want to be alone."
When, half an hour later, Arsinoe brought her father his porridge he
gazed at the child in astonishment. Some extraordinary change seemed to
have come over his daughter. Something shone in her eyes that he had
never observed before, and that gave her childlike features an importance
and significance that almost startled him. While she was making the
porridge, Keraunus, with the slave's help, had taken the children up and
dressed them; now they were all sitting at breakfast; Helios among them
fresh and blooming. Now, while Arsinoe told her father all about Selene,
and the nursing she was having at dame Hannah's hands, Keraunus kept his
eyes fixed on her, and when she noticed this and asked impatiently what
there was peculiar in her appearance to-day, he shook his head and
answered:
"What strange things are girls! A great honor has been done you. You are
to represent the bride of Alexander, and pride and delight have changed
you wonder fully in a single night--but I think to your disadvantage."
"Folly," said Arsinoe reddening, and stretching herself with fatigue she
threw herself back on a couch. She did not feel weary exactly, for the
lassitude she felt in every limb had a peculiar pleasure in it. She felt
as if she had come out of a hot bath, and since her father had roused her
she seemed to hear, again and again, the sound of the inspiriting music
which she had followed arm in arm with Pollux. Now and again she smiled,
now and again she gazed straight before her, and at the same time she
said to herself that if at this very moment her lover were to ask her,
she would not lack strength to fling herself at once, with him, once more
into the mad whirl. Yes--she felt perfectly fresh! only her eyes burned a
little; and if Keraunus fancied he saw anything new in his daughter it
must be the glowing light which now lurked in them along with the playful
sparkle he had always seen there.
When breakfast was over the slave took the children out, and Arsinoe had
begun to curl her father's hair, when Keraunus put on his most dignified
attitude and said ponderously.
"My child."
The girl dropped the heated tongs and calmly asked. "Well"--fully
prepared to hear one of the wonderful propositions which Selene was wont
to oppose.
"Listen to me attentively."
Now, what Keraunus was about to say had only occurred to him an hour
since when he had spoiled his slave's desire to go out; but as he said it
he pressed his hand to his forehead assuming the expression of a
meditative philosopher.
"For a long time I have been considering a very important matter. Now I
have come to a decision and I will confide it to you. We must buy a new
manslave."
"But father!" cried Arsinoe, "think what it will cost you. If we have
another man to feed--"
"There is no question of that," replied Keraunus. "I will exchange the
old one for a younger one that I need not be ashamed to be seen with.
Yesterday I told you that henceforth we shall attract greater attention
than hitherto, and really if we appear with that black scarecrow at our
heels in the streets or elsewhere--"
"Certainly we cannot make much show Sebek," interrupted Arsinoe, "but we
can leave him at home for the future."
"Child, child!" exclaimed Keraunus reproachfully, "will you never
remember who and what we are. How would it beseem us to appear in the
streets without a slave?"
The girl shrugged her shoulders, and put it to her father that Sebek was
an old piece of family property, that the little ones were fond of him
because he cared for them like a nurse, that a new slave would cost a
great deal and would only be driven by force to many services which the
old one was always ready and willing to fulfil.
But Arsinoe preached to deaf ears. Selene was not there; secure from her
reproaches and as anxious as a spoiled boy for the thing that was denied
him, Keraunus adhered to his determination to exchange the faithful old
fellow for a new and more showy slave. Not for a moment did he think of
the miserable fate that threatened the decrepit creature, who had grown
old in his house, if he were to sell him; but he still had a feeling that
it was not quite right to spend the last money that had chanced to come
into the house, on a thing that really and truly was not in any way
necessary. The more justifiable Arsinoe's doubts seemed to be and the
more loudly did an inward voice warn him not to offer this fresh
sacrifice to his vain-gloriousness, the more firmly and desperately did
he defend his wish to do so; and as he fought for the thing he desired,
it acquired in his eyes a semblance of necessity and a number of reasons
suggested themselves which made it appear both justifiable and easy of
attainment.
There was money in hand; after Arsinoe's being chosen for the part of
Roxana he might expect to be able to borrow more; it was his duty to
appear with due dignity that he might not scare off the illustrious
son-in-law of whom he dreamed, and in the extremity of need he could
still fall back on his collection of rarities. The only thing was to find
the right purchaser; for, if the sword of Antony had brought him so much,
what would not some amateur give him for the other, far more valuable,
objects.
Arsinoe turned red and white as her father referred again and again to
the bargain she had made; but she dared not confess the truth, and she
rued her falsehood all the more bitterly the more clearly she saw with
her own sound sense, that the Honor which had fallen upon her yesterday,
threatened to develop all her father's weaknesses in an absolutely fatal
manner.
To-day she would have been amply satisfied with pleasing Pollux, and she
would, without a regret have transferred to another her part with all the
applause and admiration it would procure her, and which, only yesterday,
had seemed to her so inestimably precious. This she said; but Keraunus
would not take the assertion in earnest, laughed in her face, went off
into mysterious allusions to the wealth which could not fail to come into
the house and--since an obscure consciousness told him that it would be
becoming him to prove that it was not solely personal vanity and
self-esteem that influenced all his proceedings--he explained that he had
made up his mind to a great sacrifice and would be content on the coming
occasion to wear his gilt fillet and not buy a pure gold one. By this act
of self-denial he fancied he had acquired a full right to devote a very
pretty little sum to the acquisition of a fine-looking slave. Arsinoe's
entreaties were unheeded, and when she began to cry with grief at the
prospect of losing her old house-mate he forbid her crossly to shed a
tear for such a cause, for it was very childish, and he would not be
pleased to conduct her with red eyes to meet the prefect's wife.
During the course of this argument his hair had got itself duly curled,
and he now desired Arsinoe to arrange her own hair nicely and then to
accompany him.
They would buy a new dress and peplum, go to see Selene, and then be
carried to the prefect's.
Only yesterday he had thought it too bold a step to use a litter, and
to-day he was already considering the propriety of hiring a chariot.
No sooner was he alone than a new idea occurred to him. The insolent
architect should be taught that he was not the man to be insulted and
injured with impunity. So he cut a clean strip of papyrus off a letter
that lay in his chest, and wrote upon it the following words:
"Keraunus, the Macedonian, to Claudius Venator, the architect, of Rome:"
"My eldest daughter, Selene, is by your fault, so severely hurt that she
is in great danger, is kept to her bed and suffers frightful pain. My
other children are no longer safe in their father's house, and I
therefore require you, once more, to chain up your dog. If you refuse to
accede to this reasonable demand I will lay the matter before Caesar. I
can tell you that circumstances have occurred which will determine
Hadrian to punish any insolent person who may choose to neglect the
respect due to me and to my daughters."
When Keraunus had closed this letter with his seal he called the slave
and said coldly:
"Take this to the Roman architect, and then fetch two litters; make
haste, and while we are out take good care of the children. To-morrow or
next day you will be sold. To whom? That must depend on how you behave
during the last hours that you belong to us." The negro gave a loud cry
of grief that came from the depth of his heart, and flung himself on the
ground at the steward's feet. His cry did indeed pierce his master's
soul--but Keraunus had made up his mind not to let himself be moved nor
to yield. But the negro clung more closely to his knees, and when the
children, attracted to the spot by their poor old friend's lamentation,
cried loudly in unison, and little Helios began to pat and stroke the
little remains of the negro's woolly hair, the vain man felt uneasy about
the heart, and to protect himself against his own weakness he cried out
loudly and violently:
"Now, away with you, and do as you are ordered or I will find the whip."
With these words he tore himself loose from the miserable--old man who
left the room with his head hanging down, and who soon was standing at
the door of the Emperor's rooms with the letter in his hand. Hadrian's
appearance and manner had filled him with terror and respect, and he
dared not knock at the door. After he had waited for some time, still
with tears in his eyes, Mastor came into the passage with the remains of
his master's breakfast. The negro called to him and held out the
steward's letter, stammering out lamentably:
"From Keraunus, for you master."
"Lay it here on the tray," said the Sarmatian. "But what has happened to
you, my old friend? you are wailing most pitifully and look miserable.
Have you been beaten?"
The negro shook his head and answered, whimpering: "Keraunus is going to
sell me."
"There are better masters than he."
"But Sebek is old, Sebek is weak--he can no longer lift and pull, and
with hard work he will certainly die."
"Has life been so easy and comfortable then at the steward's?"
"Very little wine, very little meat, very much hunger," said the old man.
"Then you must be glad to leave him."
"No, no," groaned Sebek.
"You foolish old owl," said Mastor. "Why do you care then for that grumpy
niggard?"
The negro did not answer for some time, then his lean breast heaved and
fell, and, as if the dam were broken through that had choked his
utterance, he burst out with a mixture of loud sobs:
"The children, the little ones, our little ones. They are so sweet; and
our little blind Helios stroked my hair because I was to go away,
here--just here he stroked it"--and he put his hand on a perfectly bald
place--"and now Sebek must go and never see them all again, just as if
they were all dead."
And the words rolled out and with difficulty, as if carried on in the
flood of his tears. They went to Mastor's heart, rousing the memory of
his own lost children and a strong desire to comfort his unhappy comrade.
"Poor fellow!" he said, compassionately. "Aye, the children! they are so
small, and the door into one's heart is so narrow--and they dance in at
it a thousand times better and more easily than grown-up folks. I, too,
have lost dear children, and they were my own, too. I can teach any one
what is meant by sorrow--but I know too now where comfort is to be
found." With these words Mastor held the tray he was carrying on his hip
with his right hand, while he put the left on the negro's shoulder and
whispered to him:
"Have you ever heard of the Christians?"
Sebek nodded eagerly as if Mastor were speaking of a matter of which he
had heard great things and expected much, and Mastor went on in a low
voice "Come early to-morrow before sunrise to the pavement-workers in the
'court, and there you will hear of One who comforts the weary and
heavy-laden."
The Emperor's servant once more took his tray in both hands and hurried
away, but a faint gleam of hope had lighted up in the old slave's eyes.
He expected no happiness, but perhaps there might be some way of bearing
the sorrows of life more easily.
Mastor as soon he had given his tray to the kitchen slaves--who were now
busy again in the palace at Lochias--returned to his lord and gave him
the steward's letter. It was an ill-chosen hour for Keraunus, for the
Emperor was in a gloomy mood. He had sat up till morning, had rested
scarcely three hours, and now, with knitted brows, was comparing the
results of his night's observation of the starry sky with certain
astronomical tables which lay spread out before him. Over this work he
frequently shook his head which was covered with crisp waves of hair;
nay--he once flung the pencil, with which he was working his
calculations, down on the table, leaned back in his seat and covered his
eyes with both hands. Then again he began to write fresh numbers, but his
new results seemed to be no more satisfactory than the former one.
The steward's letter had been for a long time lying before him when at
last it again caught his attention as he put out his hand for another
document. Needing some change of ideas he tore it open, read it and flung
it from him with annoyance. At any other time he would have expressed
some sympathy with the suffering girl, have laughed at the ridiculous
man, and have thought out some trick to tease or to terrify; but just now
the steward's threats made him angry and increased his dislike for him.
Tired of the silence around him he called to Antinous, who sat gazing
dreamily down on the harbor; the youth immediately approached his master.
Hadrian looked at him and said, shaking his head:
"Why you too look as if some danger were threatening you. Is the sky
altogether overcast?"
"No my lord, it is blue over the sea, but towards the south the black
clouds are gathering."
"Towards the south?" said Hadrian thoughtfully. "Any thing serious can
hardly threaten us from that quarter.--But it comes, it is near, it is
upon us before we suspect it."
"You sat up too long, and that has put you out of tune."
"Out of tune?" muttered Hadrian to himself. "And what is tune? That
subtle harmony or discord is a condition which masters all the emotions
of the soul at once; and not without reason--to-day my heart is paralyzed
with anxiety."
"Then you have seen evil signs in the heavens?"
"Direful signs!"
"You wise men believe in the stars," replied Antinous. "No doubt you are
right, but my weak head cannot understand what their regular courses have
to do with my inconstant wanderings."
"Grow gray," replied the Emperor, "learn to comprehend the universe with
your intellect, and not till then speak of these things for not till then
will you discern that every atom of things created, and the greatest as
well as the least, is in the closest bonds with every other; that all
work together, and each depends on all. All that is or ever will be in
nature, all that we men feel, think or do, all is dependent on eternal
and immutable causes; and these causes have each their Daimon who
interposes between us and the divinity and is symbolized in golden
characters on the vault of heaven. The letters are the stars, whose
orbits are as unchanging and everlasting as are the first causes of all
that exists or happens."
"And are you quite sure that you never read wrongly in this great
record?" asked Antinous.
"Even I may err," replied Hadrian. "But this time I have not deceived
myself. A heavy misfortune threatens me. It is a strange, terrible and
extraordinary coincidence!"
"What?"
"From that accursed Antioch--whence nothing good has ever come to me--I
have received the saying of an oracle which foretells that, that--why
should I hide it from you--in the middle of the year now about to begin
some dreadful misfortune shall fall upon me, as lightning strikes the
traveller to the earth; and tonight--look here. Here is the house of
Death, here are the planets--but what do you know of such things? Last
night--the night in which once before such terrors were wrought, the
stars confirmed the fatal oracle with as much naked plainness, as much
unmistakable certainty as if they had tongues to shout the evil forecast
in my ear. It is hard to walk on with such a goal in prospect. What may
not the new year bring in its course?"
Hadrian sighed deeply, but Antinous went close up to him, fell on his
knees before him and asked in a tone of childlike humility:
"May I, a poor foolish lad, teach a great and wise man how to enrich his
life with six happy months?" The Emperor smiled, as though he knew what
was coming, but his favorite felt encouraged to proceed.
"Leave the future to the future," he said. "What must come will come, for
the gods themselves have no power against Fate. When evil is approaching
it casts its black shadow before it; you fix your gaze on it and let it
darken the light of day. I saunter dreamily on my way and never see
misfortune till it runs up against me and falls upon me unawares--"
"And so you are spared many a gloomy day," interrupted Hadrian.
"That is just what I would have said."
"And your advice is excellent, for you and for every other loiterer
through the gay fair-time of an idle life," replied the Emperor, "but the
man whose task it is to bear millions in safety and over abysses, must
watch the signs around him, look out far and near, and never dare close
his eyes, even when such terrors loom as it was my fate to see during the
past night."
As he spoke, Phlegon, the Emperor's private secretary, came in with
letters just received from Rome, and approached his master. He bowed low,
and taking up Hadrian's last words he said:
"The stars disquiet you, Caesar?"
"Well, they warn me to be on my guard," replied Hadrian.
"Let us hope that they be," cried the Greek, with cheerful vivacity.
"Cicero was not altogether wrong when he doubted the arts of Astrology."
"He was a mere talker!" said the Emperor, with a frown.
"But," asked Phlegon, "would it not be fair that if the horoscopes cast
for Cneius or Caius, let us say, were alike, to expect that Cneius or
Caius must have the same temperament and the same destiny through life if
they had happened to be born in the same hour?"
"Always the old commonplaces, the old silly objections!" interrupted
Hadrian, vexed to the verge of rage. "Speak when you are spoken to, and
do not trouble yourself about things you do not understand and which do
not concern you. Is there anything of importance among these papers?"
Antinous gazed at his sovereign in astonishment; why should Phlegon's
objections make him so furious when he had answered his so kindly?
Hadrian paid no farther heed to him, but read the despatches one after
another, hastily but attentively, wrote brief notes on the margins,
signed a decree with a firm hand, and, when his work was finished desired
the Greek to leave him. Hardly was he alone with Antinous when the loud
cries and jovial shouting of a large multitude came to their ears through
the open window.
"What does this mean?" he asked Mastor, and as soon as he had been
informed that the workmen and slaves had just been let out to give
themselves up to the pleasures of their holiday, he muttered to himself:
"These creatures can riot, shout, dress themselves with garlands, forget
themselves in a debauch--and I, I whom all envy--I spoil my brief span of
life with vain labors, let myself be tormented with consuming cares--I--"
here he broke off and cried in quite an altered tone:
"Ha! ha! Antinous, you are wiser than I. Let us leave the future to the
future. The feast-day is ours too; let us take advantage of this day of
freedom. We too will throw ourselves into the holiday whirlpool
disguised, I as a satyr, and you as a young faun or something of the
kind; we will drain cups, wander round the city and enjoy all that is
enjoyable."
"Oh!" exclaimed Antinous, joyfully clapping his hands.
"Evoe Bacche!" cried Hadrian, tossing up his cup that stood on his table.
"You are free till this evening, Mastor, and you my boy, go and talk to
Pollux, the sculptor. He shall be our guide and he will provide us with
wreaths and some mad disguise. I must see drunken men, I must laugh with
the jolliest before I am Caesar again. Make haste, my friend, or new
cares will come to spoil my holiday mood."
CHAPTER XXII.
Antinous and Mastor at once quitted the Emperor's room; in the corridor
the lad beckoned the slave to him and said in a low voice:
"You can hold your tongue I know, will you do me a favor?"
"Three sooner than one," replied the Sarmatian.
"You are free to-day--are you going into the city?"
"I think so."
"You are not known here, but that does not matter. Take these gold pieces
and in the flower-market buy with one of them the most beautiful bunch of
flowers you can find, with another you may make merry, and out of the
remainder spend a drachma in hiring an ass. The driver will conduct you
to the garden of Pudeus' widow where stands the house of dame Hannah; you
remember the name?"
"Dame Hannah and the widow of Pudeus."
"And at the little house, not the big one, leave the flowers for the sick
Selene."
"The daughter of the fat steward, who was attacked by our big dog?" asked
Mastor, curiously.
"She or another," said Antinous, impatiently, "and when they ask you who
sent the flowers, say 'the friend at Lochias,' nothing more. You
understand."
The slave nodded and said to himself: "What! you too-oh! these women."
Antinous signed to him to be silent, impressed on him in a few hasty
words that he was to be discreet and to pick out the very choicest
flowers, and then betook himself into the hall of the Muses to seek
Pollux. From him he had learnt where to find the suffering Selene, of
whom he could not help thinking incessantly and wherever he might be. He
did not find the sculptor in his screened-off nook; prompted by a wish to
speak to his mother, Pollux had gone down to the gatehouse where he was
now standing before her and frankly narrating, with many eager gestures
of his long arms, all that had occurred on the previous night. His story
flowed on like a song of triumph, and when he described how the holiday
procession had carried away Arsinoe and himself, the old woman jumped up
from her chair and clapping her fat little hands, she exclaimed:
"Ah! that is pleasure, that is happiness! I remember flying along with
your father in just the same way thirty years ago."
"And since thirty years," Pollux interposed. "I can still remember very
well how at one of the great Dionysiac festivals, fired by the power of
the god, you rushed through the streets with a deer-skin over your
shoulders."
"That was delightful--lovely!" cried Doris with sparkling eyes. "But
thirty years since it was all different, very different. I have told you
before now how I went with our maid-servant into the Canopic way to the
house of my aunt Archidike to look on at the great procession. I had not
far to go for we lived near the Theatre, my father was stage-manager and
yours was one of the chief singers in the chorus. We hurried along, but
all sorts of people stopped us, and drunken men wanted to joke with me."
"Ah, you were as sweet as a rose-bud then," her son interrupted.
"As a rose-bud, yes, but not like your lovely rose," said the old woman.
"At any rate I looked nice enough for the men in disguise--fauns and
satyrs and were the cynic hypocrites in their ragged cloaks, to think it
worth while to look at me and to take a rap on the knuckles when they
tried to put an arm round me or to steal a kiss, I did not care for the
handsomest of them, for Euphorion had done for me with his fiery
glances--not with words for I was very strictly kept and he had never
been able to get a chance to speak to me. At the corner of the Canopic
way and the Market street we could get no farther, for the crowd had
blocked the way and were howling and storming as they stared at a party
of Klodones and other Maenads, who in their sacred fury were tearing a
goat to pieces with their teeth. I shuddered at the spectacle, but I must
need stare with the rest and shout and halloo as they did. My maid, who I
held on to tightly, was seized with the frenzy and dragged me into the
middle of the circle close up to the bleeding sacrifice. Two of the
possessed women sprang upon us, and I felt one clasping me tightly and
trying to throw me down. It was a horrible moment but I defended myself
bravely and had succeeded in keeping on my feet when your father sprang
forward, set me free and led me away. What happened after I could not
tell you now; it was one of those wild happy dreams in which you must
hold your heart with both hands for fear it should crack with joy, or fly
out and away up to the sky and in the very eye of the sun. Late in the
evening I got home and a week after I was Euphorion's wife."
"We have exactly followed your example," said Pollux, "and if Arsinoe
grows to be like my dear old woman I shall be quite satisfied."
"Happy and contented," replied Doris. "Keep you health, snap your fingers
at care and sorrow, do your duty on work-days and drink till you are
jolly in honor of the god on holidays, and then all will be well. Those
who do all they are able and enjoy as much as they can get, make good use
of their lives and need feel no remorse in their last hours. What is past
is done for, and when Atropos cuts our thread some one else will stand in
our place and joys will begin all over again. May the gods bless you!"
"You are right," said Pollux embracing his mother, and two together can
turn the work out of hand more lightly and enjoy the pleasures of
existence better than each alone--can they not?"
"I am sure of it; and you have chosen the right mate," cried the old
woman. "You are a sculptor and used to simple things; you need no riches,
only a sweet face which may every day rejoice your heart, and that you
have found."
"There is nowhere a sweeter or a lovelier," said Pollux.
"No, that there is not," continued Doris. "First I cast my eyes on
Selene. She need not be ashamed to show herself either, and she is a
pattern for girls; but then as Arsinoe grew older, whenever she passed
this way I thought to myself: 'that girl is growing up for my boy,' and
now that you have won her I feel as if I were once more as young as your
sweetheart herself. My old heart beats as happily as if the little Loves
were touching it with their wings and rosy fingers. If my feet had not
grown so heavy with constantly standing over the hearth and at
washing--really and truly I could take Euphorion by the arm and dance
through the streets with him to-day."
"Where is father?"
"Out singing."
"In the morning! where?"
"There is some sect that are celebrating their mysteries. They pay well
and he had to sing dismal hymns for them behind a curtain; the wildest
stuff, in which he does not follow a word, and that I do not understand a
half of."
"It is a pity for I wanted to speak to him."
"He will not be back till late."
"There is plenty of time."
"So much the better, otherwise I might have told him what you had to
say."
"Your advice is as good as his. I think of giving up working under Papias
and standing on my own feet."
"You are quite right; the Roman architect told me yesterday that a great
future was open to you."
"There are only my poor sister and the children to be considered. If,
during the first few months I should find myself falling short--"
"We will manage to pull through. It is high time that you yourself should
reap from what you sow."
"So it seems to me, for my own sake and Arsinoe's; if only Keraunus--"
"Aye--there will be a battle to fight with him."
"A hard one, a hard one," sighed Pollux.
"The thought of the old man troubles my happiness."
"Folly!" cried Doris. "Avoid all useless anxiety. It is almost as
injurious as remorse gnawing at your heart. Take a workshop of your own,
do some great work in a joyful spirit, something to astonish the world,
and I will wager anything that the old fool of a steward will only be
vexed to think that he destroyed the first work of the celebrated Pollux,
instead of treasuring it in his cabinet of curiosities. Just imagine that
no such person exists in the world and enjoy your happiness."
"I will stick to that."
"One thing more my lad: take good care of Arsinoe. She is young and
inexperienced and you must not persuade her to do anything you would
advise her not to do if she were betrothed to your brother instead of to
yourself."
Doris had not done speaking when Antinous came into the gate-house and
delivered the commands of the architect Claudius Venator, to escort him
through the city. Pollux hesitated with his answer, for he had still much
to do in the palace, and he hoped to see Arsinoe again in the course of
the day. After such a morning what could noon and evening be to him
without her? Dame Doris noticed his indecision and cried:
"Yes, go; the festival is for pleasure, besides, the architect can
perhaps advise you on many points, and recommend you to his friends."
"Your mother is right," said Antinous. "Claudius Venator can be very
touchy, but he can also be grateful, and I wish you sincerely well--"
"Good then, I will come," Pollux interposed while the Bithynian was still
speaking, for he felt himself strongly attracted by Hadrian's imposing
personality and considered that under the circumstances, it might be very
desirable to revel with him for a while.
"I will come, but first I must let Pontius know that I am going to fly
from the heat of the fray for a few hours to-day."
"Leave that to Venator," replied the favorite, "and you must find some
amusing disguise and procure masks for him and for me and, if you like,
for yourself too. He wants to join the revel as a satyr and I in some
other disguise."
"Good," replied the sculptor. "I will go at once and order what is
requisite. A quantity of dresses for the Dionysiac processions are lying
in our workshop and in half an hour I will be back with the things."
"But pray make haste," Antinous begged him. "My master cannot bear to be
kept waiting, and besides--one thing--"
At these words Antinous had grown embarrassed and had gone quite close up
to the artist. He laid his hand on his shoulder and said in a low voice
but impressively:
"Venator stands very near to Caesar. Beware of saying anything before him
that is not in Hadrian's favor."
"Is your master Caesar's spy?" asked Pollux, looking suspiciously at
Antinous. "Pontius has already, given me a similar warning, and if that
is the case--"
"No, no," interrupted the lad hastily.
"Anything but that; but the two have no secrets from each other and
Venator talks a good deal--cannot hold his tongue--"
"I thank you and will be on my guard."
"Aye do so--I mean it honestly." The Bithynian held out his hand to the
artist with an expression of warm regard on his handsome features and
with an indescribably graceful gesture. Pollux took it heartily, but dame
Doris, whose old eyes had been fixed as if spellbound on Antinous, seized
her son's arm and quite excited by the sight of his beauty cried out:
"Oh! what a splendid creature! moulded by the gods! sacred to the gods!
Pollux, boy! you might almost think one of the immortals had come down to
earth."
"Look at my old woman!" exclaimed Pollux laughing, "but in truth friend,
she has good reasons for her ecstasies, I could follow her example."
"Hold him fast, hold him fast!" cried Doris. "If he only will let you
take his likeness you can show the world a thing worth seeing."
"Will you?" interrupted Pollux turning to Hadrian's favorite.
"I have never yet been able to keep still for any artist," said Antinous.
"But I will do any thing you wish to please you. It only vexes me that
you too should join in the chorus with the rest of the world. Farewell
for the present, I must go back to my master."
As soon as the youth had left the house Doris exclaimed:
"Whether a work of art is good for any thing or not I can only guess at,
but as to what is beautiful that I know as well as any other woman in
Alexandria. If that boy will stand as your model you will produce
something that will delight men and turn the heads of the women, and you
will be sought after even in a workshop of your own. Eternal gods! such
beauty as that is sublime. Why are there no means of preserving such a
face and such a form from old age and wrinkles?"
"I know the means, mother," said Pollux, as he went to the door. "It is
called Art: to her it is given to bestow eternal youth on this mortal
Adonis."
The old woman glanced at her son with pardonable pride, and confirmed his
words by an assenting nod. While she fed her birds, with many coaxing
words, and made one which was a special favorite pick crumbs from her
lips, the young sculptor was hurrying through the streets with long
steps.
He was greeted as he went with many a cross word, and many exclamations
rose from the crowd he left behind him, for he pushed his way by the
weight of his tall person and his powerful arms, and saw and heard, as he
went, little enough of what was going around him. He thought of Arsinoe,
and between whiles of Antinous and of the attitude in which he best might
represent him--whether as hero or god.
In the flower-market, near the Gymnasium, he was for a moment roused from
his reverie by a picture which struck him as being unusual and which
riveted his gaze, as did every thing exceptional that came under his
eyes. On a very small dark-colored donkey sat a tall, well-dressed slave,
who held in his right hand a nosegay of extraordinary size and beauty. By
his side walked a smartly dressed-up man with a splendid wreath, and a
comic mask over his face followed by two garden-gods of gigantic stature,
and four graceful boys. In the slave, Pollux at once recognized the
servant of Claudius Venator, and he fancied he must have seen the masked
gentlemen too before now, but he could not remember where, and did not
trouble himself to retrace him in his mind. At any rate, the rider of the
donkey had just heard something he did not like, for he was looking
anxiously at his bunch of flowers.
After Pollux had hurried past this strange party his thoughts reverted to
other, and to him far nearer and dearer subjects. But Mastor's anxious
looks were not without a cause, for the gentleman who was talking to him
was no less a person than Verus, the praetor, who was called by the
Alexandrians the sham Eros. He had seen the Emperor's body-slave a
hundred times about his person; he therefore recognized him at once, and
his presence here in Alexandria led him directly to the simple and
correct inference that his master too must be in the city. The praetor's
curiosity was roused, and he at once proceeded to ply the poor fellow
with bewildering cross-questions. When the donkey-rider shortly and
sharply refused to answer, Verus thought it well to reveal himself to
him, and the slave lost his confident demeanor when he recognized the
grand gentleman, the Emperor's particular friend.
He lost himself in contradictory statements, and although he did not
directly admit it, he left his interrogator in the certainty that Hadrian
was in Alexandria.
It was perfectly evident that the beautiful nosegay, which had attracted
the praetor's attention to Mastor could not belong to himself. What could
be its destination? Verus recommenced his questioning, but the Sarmatian
would betray nothing, till Verus tapped him lightly first on one cheek
and then on the other, and said gaily:
"Mastor, my worthy friend Mastor, listen to me. I will make you certain
proposals, and you shall nod your head, towards that of the estimable
beast with two pairs of legs on which you are mounted, as soon as one of
them takes your fancy."
"Let me go on my way," the slave implored, with growing anxiety.
"Go, by all means, but I go with you," retorted Verus, "until I have hit
on the thing that suits you. A great many plans dwell in my head, as you
will see. First I must ask you, shall I go to your master and tell him
that you have betrayed his presence in Alexandria?"
"Sir, you will never do that!" cried Mastor.
"To proceed then. Shall I and my following hang on to your skirts and
stay with you till nightfall, when you and your steed must return home?
You decline--with thanks! and very wisely, for the execution of this
project would be equally unpleasant to you and to me, and would probably
get you punished. Whisper to me then, softly, in my ear, where your
master is lodging, and from whom and to whom you are carrying those
flowers; as soon as you have agreed to that proposal I will let you go on
alone, and will show you that I care no more for my gold pieces here, in
Alexandria, than I do in Italy."
"Not gold--certainly I will not take gold!" cried Mastor.
"You are an honest fellow," replied Verus in an altered tone, "and you
know of me that I treat my servants well and would rather be kind to
folks than hard upon them. So satisfy my curiosity without any fear, and
I will promise you in return, that not a soul, your master least of all,
shall ever know from me what you tell me." Mastor hesitated a little, but
as he could not but own to himself that he would be obliged at last to
yield to the stronger will of this imperious man, and as moreover he knew
that the haughty and extravagant praetor was in fact one of the kindest
of masters, he sighed deeply and whispered:
"You will not be the ruin of a poor wretch like me, that I know, so I
will tell you, we are living at Lochias."
"There," exclaimed Verus clapping his hands. "And now as to the flowers?"
"Mere trifling."
"Is Hadrian then in a merry mood?"
"Till to-day he was very gay--but since last night--"
"Well?"
"You know yourself what he is when he has seen lead signs in the sky."
"Bad signs," said Verus gravely.
"And yet he sends flowers?"
"Not he, can you not guess?"
"Antinous?"
Mastor nodded assent.
"Only think," laughed Verus. "Then he too is beginning to think it better
worth while to admire than to be admired. And who is the fair one who has
succeeded in waking up his slumbering heart?"
"Nay--I promised him not to chatter."
"And I promise you the same. My powers of reserve are far greater than my
curiosity even."
"Be content, I beseech you with what you already know."
"But to know half is less endurable than to know nothing."
"Nay--I cannot tell you."
"Then am I to begin with fresh suggestions, and all over again?"
"Oh! my lord. I beg you, entreat you--"
"Out with the word, and I go on my way, but if you persist in refusing--"
"Really and truly it only concerns a white-faced girl whom you would not
even look at."
"A girl-indeed!"
"Our big dog threw the poor thing down."
"In the street?"
"No, at Lochias. Her father is Keraunus the palace-steward."
"And her name is Arsinoe?" asked Verus with undisguised concern, for he
had a pleasant recollection of the beautiful child who had been selected
to fill the part of Roxana.
"No, her name is Selene, Arsinoe indeed is her younger sister."
"Then you bring these flowers from Lochias?"
"She went out, and she could not get back home again, she is now lying in
the house of a stranger."
"Where?"
"That must be quite indifferent to you--"
"By no means, quite the contrary. I beg you to tell me the whole truth."
"Eternal gods! what can you care about the poor sick creature?"
"Nothing whatever; but I must know whither you are riding."
"Down by the sea. I do not know the house, but the donkey driver--"
"Is it far from here?"
"About half an hour yet," said the lad.
"A good way then," replied Verus. "And Hadrian is particularly anxious to
remain unknown."
"Certainly."
"And you his body-servant, who are known to numbers of others here from
Rome, like myself, you propose to ride half a mile through the streets
where every creature that can stand or walk is swarming, with a large
nosegay in your hand which attracts every body's attention. Oh Mastor
that is not wise!"
The slave started, and seeing at once that Verus was right, he asked in
alarm:
"What then can I do?"
"Get off your donkey," said the praetor. "Disguise yourself and make merry
to your heart's content with these gold pieces."
"And the flowers?"
"I will see to that."
"You will? I may trust you; and never betray to Antinous what you
compelled me to do?"
"Positively not."
"There--there are the flowers, but I cannot take the gold."
"Then I shall fling it among the crowd. Buy yourself a garland, a mask
and some wine, as much as you can carry. Where is the girl to be found?"
"At dame Hannah's. She lives in a little house in a garden belonging to
the widow of Pudeus. And whoever gives it to her is to say that it is
sent by the friend at Lochias."
"Good. Now go, and take care that no one recognizes you. Your secret is
mine, and the friend at Lochias shall be duly mentioned."
Mastor disappeared in the crowd. Verus put the nosegay into the hands of
one of the garden-gods that followed in his train, sprang laughing on to
the ass, and desired the driver to show him the way. At the corner of the
next street, he met two litters, carried with difficulty through the
crowd by their bearers. In the first sat Keraunus, whose saffron-colored
cloak was conspicuous from afar, as fat as Silenus the companion of
Dionysus, but looking very sullen. In the second sat Arsinoe, looking
gaily about her, and so fresh and pretty that the Roman's easily-stirred
pulses beat more rapidly.
Without reflecting, he took the flowers from the hand of the
garden-god--the flowers intended for Selene--laid them on the girl's
litter, and said:
"Alexander greets Roxana, the fairest of the fair." Arsinoe colored, and
Verus, after watching her for some time as she was carried onwards,
desired one of his boys to follow her litter, and to join him again in
the flower-market, where he would wait, to inform him whither she had
gone.
The messenger hurried off, and Verus, turning his ass's head soon reached
a semicircular pillared hall on the shady side of a large open space,
under which the better sort of gardeners and flower dealers of the city
exposed their gay and fragrant wares to be sold by pretty girls. To-day
every stall had been particularly well supplied, but the demand for
wreaths and flowers had steadily increased from an early hour, and
although Verus had all that he could find of fresh flowers arranged and
tied together, still the nosegay, though much larger, was not half so
beautiful as that intended for Selene, and for which he substituted it.
Now this annoyed the Roman. His sense of justice prompted him to make
good the loss he had inflicted on the sick girl. Gay ribbons were wound
round the stalks of the flowers, and the long ends floated in the air, so
Verus took a brooch from his dress and stuck it into the bow which
ornamented the stem of the nosegay; then he was satisfied, and as he
looked at the stone set in a gold border--an onyx on which was engraved
Eros sharpening his arrows--he pictured to himself the pleasure, the
delight of the girl that the handsome Bithynian loved, as she received
the beautiful gift.
His slaves, natives of Britain, who were dressed as garden-gods, were
charged with the commission to proceed to dame Hannah's under the
guidance of the donkey-driver to deliver the nosegay to Selene from 'the
friend at Lochias,' and then to wait for him outside the house of
Titianus, the prefect; for thither, as he had ascertained from his
swift-footed messenger, had Keraunus and his daughter been carried.
Verus needed a longer time than the boy, to make his way through the
crowd. At the door of the prefect's residence he laid aside his mask, and
in an anteroom where the steward was sitting on a couch waiting for his
daughter, he arranged his hair and the folds of his toga, and was then
conducted to the lady Julia with whom he hoped, once more, to see the
charming Arsinoe.
But in the reception-room, instead of Arsinoe he found his own wife and
the poetess Balbilla and her companion. He greeted the ladies gaily,
amiably and gracefully, as usual, and then, as he looked enquiringly
round the large room without concealing his disappointment, Balbilla came
up to him and asked him in a low voice:
"Can you be honest, Verus?"
"When circumstances allow it, yes."
"And will they allow it here?"
"I should suppose so."
"Then answer me truly. Did you come here for Julia's sake, or did you
come--"
"Well?"
"Or did you expect to find the fair Roxana with the prefect's wife?"
"Roxana?" asked Verus, with a cunning smile. "Roxana! Why she was the
wife of Alexander the Great, and is long since dead, but I care only for
the living, and when I left the merry tumult in the streets it was simply
and solely--"
"You excite my curiosity."
"Because my prophetic heart promised me, fairest Balbilla, that I should
find you here."
"And that you call honest!" cried the poetess, hitting the praetor a blow
with the stick of the ostrich-feather fan she held in her hand. "Only
listen, Lucilla, your husband declares he came here for my sake." The
praetor looked reproachfully at the speaker, but she whispered:
"Due punishment for a dishonest man." Then, raising her voice, she said:
"Do you know, Lucilla, that if I remain unmarried, your husband is not
wholly innocent in the matter."
"Alas! yes, I was born too late for you," interrupted Verus, who knew
very well what the poetess was about to say.
"Nay--no misunderstanding!" cried Balbilla. "For how can a woman venture
upon wedlock when she cannot but fear the possibility of getting such a
husband as Verus."
"And what man," retorted the praetor, "would ever be so bold as to court
Balbilla, could he hear how cruelly she judges an innocent admirer of
beauty?"
"A husband ought not to admire beauty--only the one beauty who is his
wife."
"Ah Vestal maiden," laughed Verus. "I am meanwhile punishing you by
withholding from you a great secret which interests us all. No, no, I am
not going to tell--but I beg you my lady wife to take her to task, and
teach her to exercise some indulgence so that her future husband may not
have too hard a time of it."
"No woman can learn to be indulgent," replied Lucilla. "Still we practise
indulgence when we have no alternative, and the criminal requires us to
make allowance for him in this thing or the other."
Verus made his wife a bow and pressed his lips on her arm, then he asked.
"And where is dame Julia?"
"She is saving the sheep from the wolf," replied Balbilla.
"Which means--?"
"That as soon as you were announced she carried off little Roxana to a
place of safety."
"No, no," interrupted Lucilla. "The tailor was waiting in an inner room
to arrange the charming child's costume. Only look at the lovely nosegay
she brought to Julia. And do you deny my right to share your secret?"
"How could I?" replied Verus.
"He is very much in need of your making allowances!" laughed Balbilla,
while the praetor went up to, his wife and told her in a whisper what he
had learnt from Mastor. Lucilla clasped her hands in astonishment, and
Verus cried to the poetess:
"Now you see what a satisfaction your cruel tongue has deprived you of?"
"How can you be so revengeful most estimable Verus," said the lady
coaxingly. "I am dying of curiosity."
"Live but a few days longer fair Balbilla, for my sake," replied the
Roman, "and the cause of your early death will be removed."
"Only wait, I will be revenged!" cried the girl threatening him with her
finger, but Lucilla led her away saying:
"Come now, it is time we should give Julia the benefit of our advice."
"Do so," said Verus. "Otherwise I am afraid my visit to-day would seem
opportune to no one.--Greet Julia from me."
As he went away he cast a glance at the nosegay which Arsinoe had given
away as soon as she had received it from him, and he sighed: "As we grow
old we have to learn wisdom."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Avoid all useless anxiety
To know half is less endurable than to know nothing
Who do all they are able and enjoy as much as they can get
THE EMPEROR
By Georg Ebers
Volume 6.
[Note: The original print edition chapter numbers start over at this
point with numeral I. D.W.]
CHAPTER I.
Dame Hannah had watched by Selene till sunrise and indefatigably cooled
both her injured foot and the wound in her head. The old physician was
not dissatisfied with the condition of his patient, but ordered the widow
to lie down for a time and to leave the care of her for a few hours to
her young friend. When Mary was alone with the sick girl and had laid the
fresh cold handkerchief in its place, Selene turned her face towards her
and said:
"Then you were at Lochias yesterday. Tell me how you found them all
there. Who guided you to our lodgings and did you see my little brother
and sisters?"
"You are not yet quite free of fever, and I do not know how much I ought
to talk to you--but I would with all my heart."
The words were spoken kindly and there was a deep loving light in the
eyes of the deformed girl as she said them. Selene excited not merely her
sympathy and pity, but her admiration too, for she was so beautiful, so
totally different from herself, and in every little service she rendered
her, she felt like some despised beggar whom a prince might have
permitted to wait upon him. Her hump had never seemed to her so bent, nor
her brown skin so ugly at any other time as it did to-day, when side by
side with this symmetrical and delicate girlish form, rounded to such
tender contours.
But Mary felt not the smallest movement of envy. She only felt happy to
help Selene, to serve her, to be allowed to gaze at her although she was
a heathen. During the night too, she had prayed fervently that the Lord
might graciously draw to himself this lovely, gentle creature, that He
might permit her to recover, and fill her soul with the same love for the
Saviour that gave joy to her own. More than once she had longed to kiss
her, but she dared not, for it seemed to her as though the sick girl were
made of finer stuff than she herself.
Selene felt tired, very tired, and as the pain diminished, a comfortable
sense stole over her of peace and respite in the silent and loving
homeliness of her surroundings; a feeling that was new and very soothing,
though it was interrupted, now and again, by her anxiety for those at
home. Dame Hannah's presence did her good, for she fancied she recognized
in her voice something that had been peculiar to her mother's, when she
had played with her and pressed her with special affection to her heart.
In the papyrus factory, at the gumming-table, the sight of the little
hunchback had disgusted Selene, but here she observed what good eyes she
had, and how kind a voice, and the care with which Mary lifted the
compress from her foot--as softly, as if in her own hands she felt the
pain that Selene was suffering--and then laid another on the broken
ankle, aroused her gratitude. Her sister Arsinoe was a vain and thorough
Alexandrian girl, and she had nicknamed the poor thing after the ugliest
of the Hellenes who had besieged Troy. "Dame Thersites," and Selene
herself had often repeated it. Now she forgot the insulting name
altogether, and met the objections of her nurse by saying:
"The fever cannot be much now; if you tell me something I shall not think
so constantly of this atrocious pain. I am longing to be at home. Did you
see the children?"
"No, Selene. I went no farther than the entrance of your dwelling, and
the kind gate-keeper's wife told me at once that I should find neither
your father nor your sister, and that your slave-woman was gone out to
buy cakes for the children."
"To buy them!" exclaimed Selene in astonishment. "The old woman told me
too that the way to your apartments led through several rooms in which
slaves were at work, and that her son, who happened to be with her,
should accompany me, and so he did, but the door was locked, and he told
me I might entrust his mother with my commission. I did so, for she
looked as if she were both judicious and kind."
"That she is."
"And she is very fond of you, for when I told her of your sufferings the
bright tears rolled down her cheeks, and she praised you as warmly, and
was as much troubled as if you had been her own daughter."
"You said nothing about our working in the factory?" asked Selene
anxiously.
"Certainly not, you had desired me not to mention it. I was to say
everything that was kind to you from the old lady."
For several minutes the two girls were silent, then Selene asked:
"Did the gate-keeper's son who accompanied you also hear of the disaster
that had befallen me?
"Yes, on the way to your rooms he was full of fun and jokes, but when I
told him that you had gone out with your damaged foot and now could not
get home again, and were being treated by the leech, he was very angry
and used blasphemous language."
"Can you remember what he said?"
"Not perfectly, but one thing I still recollect. He accused his gods of
having created a beautiful work only to spoil it, nay he abused them"
Mary looked down as she spoke, as if she were repeating something ill to
tell, but Selene colored slightly with pleasure, and exclaimed eagerly,
as if to outdo the sculptor in abuse:
"He is quite right, the powers above act in such a way--"
"That is not right," said the deformed girl reprovingly.
"What?" asked the patient. "Here you live quietly to yourselves in
perfect peace and love. Many a word that I heard dame Hannah say has
stuck in my mind, and I can see for myself that you act as kindly as you
speak. The gods no doubt are good to you!"
"God is for each and all."
"What!" exclaimed Selene with flashing eyes. "For those whose every
pleasure they destroy? For the home of eight children whom they rob of
their mother? For the poor whom they daily threaten to deprive of their
bread-winner?"
"For them too, there is a merciful God," interrupted dame Hannah who had
just come into the room. "I will lead you to the loving Father in Heaven
who cares for us all as if we were His children; but not now--you must
rest and neither talk nor hear of anything that can excite your fevered
blood. Now I will rearrange the pillow under your head. Mary will wet a
fresh compress and then you must try to sleep."
"I cannot," replied Selene, while Hannah shook her pillows and arranged
them carefully. "Tell me about your God who loves us."
"By-and-bye, dear child. Seek Him and you will find Him, for of all His
children He loves them best who suffer."
"Those who suffer?" asked Selene, in surprise. "What has a God in his
Olympian joys to do with those who suffer?"
"Be quiet, child," interrupted Hannah, patting the sick girl with a
soothing hand, "you soon will learn how God takes care of you and that
Another loves you."
"Another," muttered Selene, and her cheeks turned crimson.
She thought at once of Pollux, and asked herself why the story of her
sufferings should have moved him so deeply if he were not in love with
her. Then she began to seek some colorable ground for what she had heard
as she went past the screen behind which he had been working. He had
never told her plainly that he loved her. Why should he, an artist and a
bright, high spirited young fellow, not be allowed to jest with a pretty
girl, even if his heart belonged to another. No, she was not indifferent
to him: that she had felt that night when she had stood as his model, and
now--as she thought--I could guess, nay, feel sure of, from Mary's story.
The longer she thought of him, the more she began to long to see him whom
she had loved so dearly even as a child. Her heart had never yet beat for
any other man, but since she had met Pollux again in the hall of the
Muses, his image had filled her whole soul, and what she now felt must be
love--could be nothing else. Half awake, but half asleep, she pictured
him to herself, entering this quiet room, sitting down by the head of her
couch, and looking with his kind eyes into hers. Ah! and how could she
help it--she sat up and opened her arms to him.
"Be still, my child, he still," said Hannah. "It is not good for you to
move about so much."
Selene opened her eyes, but only to close them again and to dream for
some time longer till she was startled from her rest by loud voices in
the garden. Hannah left the room, and her voice presently mingled with
those of the other persons outside, and when she returned her cheeks were
flushed and she could not find fitting words in which to tell her patient
what she had to say.
"A very big man, in the most outrageous dress," she said at last, "wanted
to be let in; when the gatekeeper refused, he forced his way in. He asked
for you."
"For me," said Selene, blushing.
"Yes, my child, he brought a large and beautiful nosegay of flowers, and
said 'your friend at Lochias sends you his greeting.'"
"My friend at Lochias?" murmured thoughtfully Selene to herself. Then her
eyes sparkled with gladness, and she asked quickly:
You said the man who brought the flowers was very tall."
"He was."
"Oh please, dame Hannah, let me see the flowers?" cried Selene, trying to
raise herself.
"Have you a lover, child?" asked the widow.
"A lover?--no, but there is a young man with whom we always used to play
when we were quite little--an artist, a kind, good man--and the nosegay
must be from him."
Hannah looked with sympathy at the girl, and signing to Mary she said:
"The nosegay is a very large one. You may see it, but it must not remain
in the room; the smell of so many flowers might do you harm."
Mary rose from her seat at the head of the bed, and whispered to the sick
girl:
"Is that the tall gate-keeper's son?" Selene nodded, smiling, and as the
women went away she changed her position from lying on one side,
stretched herself out on her back, pressed her hand to her heart, and
looked upwards with a deep sigh. There was a singing in her ears, and
flashes of colored light seemed to dance before her closed eyes. She drew
her breath with difficulty, but still it seemed as though the air she
drew in was full of the perfume of flowers.
Hannah and Mary carried in the enormous bunch of flowers. Selene's eyes
shone more brightly, and she clasped her hands in admiration. Then she
made them show her the lovely, richly-tinted and fragrant gift, first on
one side and then on the other, buried her face in the flowers, and
secretly kissed the delicate petals of a lovely, half-opened rose-bud.
She felt as if intoxicated, and the bright tears flowed in slow
succession down her cheeks. Mary was the first to detect the brooch stuck
into the ribbons that tied the stems of the flowers. She unfastened it
and showed it to Selene, who hastily took it out of her hand. Blushing
deeper and deeper, she fixed her eyes on the intaglio carved on the stone
of the love god sharpening his arrows. She felt her pain no more pain,
she felt quite well, and at the same time glad, proud, too happy. Dame
Hannah noted her excitement with much anxiety; she nodded to Mary and
said:
"Now my daughter, this must do; we will place the flowers outside the
window so that you may see them."
"Already," said Selene, in a regretful tone, and she broke off a few
violets and roses from the crowded mass. When she was alone again, she
laid the flowers down and once more tenderly contemplated the figures on
the handsome gem. It had no doubt been engraved by Teuker, the brother of
Pollux. How fine the carving was, how significant the choice of the
subject represented! Only the heavy gold setting disturbed the poor
child, who for so many years had had to stint and contrive with her
money. She said to herself that it was wrong of the young fellow, who,
besides being poor, had to support his sister, to rush into such an
outlay for her. But his gift gave her none the less pleasure, out of her
own possessions nothing would have seemed too precious to give him. She
would teach him to be saving by-and-bye.
The women presently returned after they had with much trouble set up the
nosegay outside the window, and they renewed the wet handkerchief without
speaking. She did not in the least want to talk, she was listening with
so much pleasure to the fair promises which her fancy was making, and
wherever she turned her eyes they fell on something she could love, The
flowers on her bed, the brooch in her hand, the nosegay outside the
window, and never dreaming that another--not the man she loved--could
have sent it to her, another for whom she cared even less than for the
Christians who walked up and down in Paulina's garden, under her window.
There she lay, full of sweet contentment and secure of a love that had
never been hers--of possessing the heart of a man who never once thought
of her, but who, only a few hours since, had rushed off with her sister,
intoxicated with joy and delight. Poor Selene!
And her next dreams were of untroubled happiness, but the minutes flew
after each other, each bringing her nearer to waking--and what a waking!
Her father had not come, as he had intended, to see her before going to
the prefect's house with Arsinoe. His desire to conduct his daughter to
Julia in a dress worthy of her prospects had detained him a long time,
and even then he had not succeeded in his object. All the weavers, and
the shops were closed, for every workman, whether slave or free, was
taking part in the festivities, and when the hour fixed by the prefect
drew near, his daughter was still sitting in her litter, in her simple
white dress and her modest peplum, bound with blue ribbon, which looked
even more insignificant by day than in the evening.
The nosegay which had been given to Arsinoe by Verus gave her much
pleasure, for a girl is always pleased with beautiful flowers--nay, they
have something in common. As she and her father approached the prefect's
house Arsinoe grew frightened, and her father could not conceal his
vexation at being obliged to take her to the lady Julia in so modest a
garb. Nor was his gloomy humor at all enlivened when he was left to wait
in the anteroom while Julia and the wife of Verus, aided by Balbilla
chose for his daughter the finest colored and costliest stuffs of the
softest wool, silk, and delicate bombyx tissue. This sort of occupation
has this peculiarity, that the longer time it takes the more assistance
is needed, and the steward had to submit to wait fully two hours in the
prefect's anteroom, which gradually grew fuller and fuller of clients and
visitors. At last Arsinoe came back all glowing and full of the beautiful
things that were to be prepared for her.
Her father rose slowly from his easy seat, and as she hastened towards
him the door opened, and through it came Plutarch, freshly wreathed,
freshly decked with flowers which were fastened to the breast-folds of
his gallium, and lifted into the room by his two human crutches. Every
one rose as he came in, and when Keraunus saw that the chief lawyer of
the city, a man of ancient family, bowed before him, he did likewise.
Plutarch's eyesight was stronger than his legs were, and where a pretty
woman was to be seen, it was always very keen. He perceived Arsinoe as
soon as he had crossed the threshold and waved both hands towards her, as
if she were an old and favorite acquaintance.
The sweet child had quite bewitched him; in his younger days he would
have given anything and everything to win her favor; now he was satisfied
to make his favor pleasing to her; he touched her playfully two or three
times on the arm and said gaily:
"Well pretty Roxana, has dame Julia done well with the dresses?"
"Oh! they have chosen such pretty, such really lovely things!" exclaimed
the girl."
"Have they?" said Plutarch, to conceal by speech the fact that he was
meditating on some subject; "Have they? and why should they not?"
Arsinoe's washed dress had caught the old man's eye, and remembering that
Gabinius the curiosity-dealer had that very morning been to him to
enquire whether Arsinoe were not in fact one of his work-girls, and to
repeat his statement that her father was a beggarly toady, full of
haughty airs, whose curiosities, of which he contemptuously mentioned a
few, were worth nothing, Plutarch was hastily asking himself how he could
best defend his pretty protege against the envious tongues of her rivals;
for many spiteful speeches of theirs had already come to his ears.
"Whatever the noble Julia undertakes is always admirably done," he said
aloud, and he added in a whisper: "The day after to-morrow when the
goldsmiths have opened their workshops again, I will see what I can find
for you. I am falling in a heap, hold me up higher Antaeus and Atlas.
So.--Yes, my child you look even better from up here than from a lower
level. Is the stout man standing behind you your father?"
"Yes."
"Have you no mother?"
"She is dead."
"Oh!" said Plutarch in a tone of regret. Then turning to the steward he
said:
"Accept my congratulations on having such a daughter Keraunus. I hear too
that you have to supply a mother's place to her."
"Alas sir! she is very like my poor wife, since her death I live a
joyless life."
"But I hear that you take pleasure in collecting rare and beautiful
objects. This is a taste we have in common. Are you inclined to part with
the cup that belonged to my namesake Plutarch? It must be a fine piece of
work from what Gabinius tells me."
"That it is," replied the steward proudly. "It was a gift to the
philosopher from Trajan; beautifully carved in ivory. I cannot bear to
part with such a gem but," and as he spoke he lowered his voice. "I am
under obligations to you, you have taken charge of my daughter's outfit
and to offer you some return I will--"
"That is quite out of the question," interrupted Plutarch, who knew men,
and who saw from the steward's pompous pretentiousness that the dealer
had done him no injustice in describing him as overbearing. "You are
doing me an honor by allowing me to contribute what I can towards
decorating our Roxana. I beg you to send me the cup, and whatever price
you put upon it, I, of course, shall pay, that is quite understood."
Keraunus had a brief internal conflict with himself. If he had not so
sorely needed money, if he had not so keenly desired to see a young and
comely slave walking behind him, he would have adhered to his purpose of
presenting the cup to Plutarch; as it was he cleared his throat, looked
at the ground, and said with an embarrassed manner and without a trace of
his former confidence:
"I remain your debtor, and it seems you do not wish this business to be
mixed up with other matters. Well then, I had two thousand drachmae for a
sword that belonged to Antony."
"Then certainly," interrupted Plutarch, "the cup, the gift of Trajan,
must be worth double, particularly to me who am related to the
illustrious owner. May I offer you four thousand drachmae for your
precious possession?"
"I am anxious to oblige you, and so I say yes," replied the steward with
much dignity, and he squeezed Arsinoe's little finger, for she was
standing close to him. Her hand had for some time been touching his in
token of warning that he should adhere to his first intention of making
the cup a present to Plutarch.
As the pair, so unlike each other, quitted the anteroom, Plutarch looked
after them with a meaning smile and thought to himself: "That is well
done. How little pleasure I generally have from my riches! How often when
I see a sturdy porter I would willingly change places with him! But
to-day I am glad to have as much money as I could wish. Sweet child! She
must have a new dress of course for the sake of appearance, but really
her beauty did not suffer from the washed-out rag of a dress. And she
belongs to me, for I have seen her at the factory among the workwomen, of
that I am certain."
Keraunus had gone out with his daughter and once outside the prefect's
house, he could not help chuckling aloud, while he patted his daughter on
the shoulder, and whispered to her:
"I told you so child! we shall be rich yet, we shall rise in life again
and need not be behind the other citizens in any thing."
"Yes, father, but it is just because you believe that, that you ought to
have given the cup to the old man."
"No," replied Keraunus, "business is business, but by and bye I will
repay him tenfold for all he does for you now, by giving him my painting
by Apelles. And Julia shall have the pair of sandal-straps set with
cut-gems that came off a sandal of Cleopatra's."
Arsinoe looked down, for she knew what these treasures were worth, and
said:
"We can consider all that later."
Then she and her father got into the litters that had been waiting for
them, and without which Keraunus thought he could no longer exist, and
they were carried to the garden of Pudeus' widow.
Their visit came to interrupt Selene's blissful dreams. Keraunus behaved
with icy coldness to dame Hannah, for it afforded him a certain
satisfaction to make a display of contempt for every thing Christian.
When he expressed his regret that Selene should have been obliged to
remain in her house, the widow replied:
"She is better here than in the street, at any rate." And when Keraunus
went on to say that he would take nothing as a gift and would pay her for
her care of his daughter, Hannah answered:
"We are happy to do all we can for your child, and Another will reward
us."
"That I certainly forbid," exclaimed the steward wrathfully.
"We do not understand each other," said the Christian pleasantly. "I do
not allude to any mortal being, and the reward we work for is not gold
and possessions, but the happy consciousness of having mitigated the
sufferings of a fellow-creature."
Keraunus shrugged his shoulders, and after desiring Selene to ask the
physician when she might be taken home, he went away.
"I will not leave you here an instant longer than is necessary," he said
as urgently as though she were in some infected house; he kissed her
forehead, bowed to Hannah as loftily as though he had just bestowed an
alms upon her, and departed, without listening to Selene's assurances
that she was extremely happy and comfortable with the widow.
The ground had long burnt under his feet, and the money in his pocket, he
was now possessed of ample means to acquire a good new slave, perhaps, if
he threw old Sebek into the bargain, they might even suffice to procure
him a handsome Greek, who might teach the children to read and write. He
could direct his first attention to the external appearance of the new
member of his household, if he were a scholar as well, he would feel
justified in the high price he expected to be obliged to pay for him.
As Keraunus approached the slave-market he said, not without some
conscious emotion at his own paternal devotion:
"All for the credit of the house, all, and only, for the children."
Arsinoe carried out her intention of staying with Selene; her father was
to fetch her on his way home. After he was gone, Hannah and Mary left the
two sisters together, for they supposed that they must wish to discuss a
variety of things without the presence of strangers.
As soon as the girls were alone Arsinoe began: "Your cheeks are rosy,
Selene, and you look cheerful--ah! and I, I am so happy--so happy!"
"Because you are to fill the part of Roxana?"
"That is very nice too, and who would have thought only yesterday morning
that we should be so rich today. We hardly know what to do with all the
money."
"We?"
"Yes, for father has sold two objects out of his collection for six
thousand drachmae."
"Oh!" cried Selene clasping her hands, "then we can pay our most pressing
debts."
"To be sure, but that is not nearly all."
"No?"
"Where shall I begin? Ah! Selene, my heart is so full. I am tired, and
yet I could dance and sing and shout all day and all the night through
till to-morrow. When I think how happy I am, my head turns, and I feel as
if I must use all my self-control to keep myself from turning giddy. You
do not know yet how you feel when the arrow of Eros has pierced you. Ah!
I love Pollux so much, and he loves me too."
At these words all the color fled from Selene's cheeks, and her pale lips
brought out the words:
"Pollux? The son of Euphorion, Pollux the sculptor?"
"Yes, our dear, kind, tall Pollux!" cried Arsinoe. "Now prick up your
ears, and you shall hear how it all came to pass. Last night on our way
to see you he confessed how much he loved me, and now you must advise me
how to win over my father to our side, and very soon too. By-and-bye he
will of course say yes, for Pollux can do anything he wants, and some day
he will be a great man, as great as Papias, and Aristaeus, and Kealkes
all put together. His youthful trick with that silly caricature--but how
pale you are, Selene!"
"It is nothing--nothing at all--a pain--go on," said Selene.
"Dame Hannah begged me not to let you talk much."
"Only tell me everything; I will be quiet."
"Well, you have seen the lovely head of mother that he made," Arsinoe
went on. "Standing by that we saw each other and talked for the first
time after long years, and I felt directly that there was not a dearer
man than he in the whole world, wide as it is. And he fell in love too
with a stupid little thing like me. Yesterday evening he came here with
me; and then as I went home, taking his arm in the dark through the
streets, then--Oh, Selene, it was splendid, delightful! You cannot
imagine!--Does your foot hurt you very much, poor dear? Your eyes are
full of tears."
"Go on, tell me all, go on."
And Arsinoe did as she was desired, sparing the poor girl nothing that
could widen and deepen the wound in her soul. Full of rapturous memories
she described the place in the streets where Pollux had first kissed her.
The shrubs in the garden where she had flung herself into his arms, her
blissful walk in the moonlight, and all the crowd assembled for the
festival, and finally how, possessed by the god, they had together joined
the procession, and danced through the streets. She described, with tears
in her eyes, how painful their parting had been, and laughed again, as
she told how an ivy leaf in her hair had nearly betrayed everything to
her father. So she talked and talked, and there was something that
intoxicated her in her own words.
How they were affecting Selene she did not observe. How could she know
that it was her narrative and no other suffering which made her sister's
lips quiver so sorrowfully? Then, when she went on to speak of the
splendid garments which Julia was having made for her, the suffering girl
listened with only half an ear, but her attention revived when she heard
how much old Plutarch had offered for the ivory cup, and that her father
proposed to exchange their old slave for a more active one.
"Our good black mouse-catching old stork looks shabby enough it is true,"
said Arsinoe, "still I am very sorry he should go away. If you had been
at home, perhaps father would have waited to consider."
Selene laughed drily, and her lips curled scornfully as she said:
"That is the way! go on! two days before you are turned out of house and
home you ride in a chariot and pair!"
"You always see the worst side," said Arsinoe with annoyance. "I tell you
it will all turn out far better and nicer and more happily than we
expect. As soon as we are a little richer we will buy back the old man,
and keep him and feed him till he dies."
Selene shrugged her shoulders, and her sister jumped up from her seat
with her eyes full of tears. She had been so happy in telling how happy
she was that she firmly believed that her story must bring brightness
into the gloom of the sick girl's soul, like sunshine after a dark night;
and Selene had nothing to give her but scornful words and looks. If a
friend refuses to share in joys it is hardly less wounding than if he
were to abandon us in trouble.
"How you always contrive to embitter my happiness!" cried Arsinoe. "I
know very well that nothing that I can do can ever be right in your eyes;
still, we are sisters, and you need not set your teeth and grudge your
words, and shrug your shoulders when I tell you of things which, even a
stranger, if I were to confide them to her, would rejoice over with me.
You are so cold and heartless! I dare say you will betray me to my
father--"
But Arsinoe did not finish her sentence, for Selene looked up at her with
a mixture of suffering and alarm, and said:
"I cannot be glad--I am in too much pain." As she spoke the tears ran
down her cheeks and as soon as Arsinoe saw them she felt a return of pity
for the sick girl, bent over and kissed her cheeks once, twice, thrice;
but Selene pushed her aside and murmured piteously:
"Leave me--pray leave me; go away, I can bear it no longer." She turned
her face to the wall, sobbing aloud. Arsinoe attempted once more to show
her some marks of affection, but her sister pushed her away still more
decidedly, crying out loudly, as if in desperation: "I shall die if you
do not leave me alone."
And the happier girl, whose best offerings were thus disdained by her
only female friend, went weeping away to await her father's return
outside the door of the widow's house.
When Hannah went to lay fresh handkerchiefs on Selene's wounds she saw
that she had been crying, but she did not enquire into the reason of her
tears. Towards evening the widow explained to her patient that she must
leave her alone for half an hour, for that she and Mary were going out to
pray to their God with their brethren and sisters, and they would pray
for her also.
"Leave me, only leave me," said Selene, "as it is, so it is--there are no
gods."
"Gods?" replied Hannah. "No. But there is one good and loving Father in
Heaven, and you soon shall learn to know him."
"I know him, well!" muttered the sick girl with keen irony.
No sooner was she alone than she sat up in bed, and flung the flowers,
which had been lying on it, far from her across the room, twisted the pin
of the brooch till it was broken, and did not stir a finger to save the
gold setting and engraved stone when they fell between the bed and wall
of the room. Then she lay staring at the ceiling, and did not stir again.
It was now quite dark. The lilies and honeysuckle in the great nosegay
outside the window began to smell more strongly, and their perfume forced
itself inexorably on her senses, rendered painfully acute by fever. She
perceived it at every breath she drew, and not for a minute would it let
her forget her wrecked happiness, and the wretchedness of her heart, till
the heavy sweetness of the flowers became more unendurable than the most
pungent odor, and she drew the coverlet over her head to escape this new
torment; but she soon cast it off again, for she thought she should be
suffocated under it. An intolerable restlessness took possession of her,
while the pain in her injured foot throbbed madly, the cut in her head
seemed to burn, and her temples beat with an agonizing headache that
contracted the muscles of her eyes. Every nerve in her body, every
thought of her brain was a separate torture, and at the same time she
felt herself without a stay, without protection, and wholly abandoned to
some cruel influence, which tossed and tore her soul as the storm tosses
the crowns of the palm-trees.
Without tears, incapable of lying still and yet punished for the
slightest movement by some fresh pain, racked in every joint, not strong
enough in her bewilderment to carry through a single connected thought,
and yet firmly convinced that the perfume she was forced to inhale at
every breath was poisoning her--destroying her--driving her mad--she
lifted her damaged foot out of bed, dragged the other after it, and sat
up on her couch regardless of the pain she felt, and the warnings of the
physician. Her long hair fell dishevelled over her face, her arms, and
her hands, in which she held her aching head; and in this new attitude
the excitement of her brain and heart took fresh development.
She sat gazing at the floor with a freezing gaze, and bitter enmity
towards her sister, hatred towards Pollux, contempt for her father's
miserable weakness, and her own utter blindness, rang wild changes in her
soul. Outside all lay in peaceful calm, and from the house in which
Paulina lived the evening breeze now and again bore the pure tones of a
pious hymn upon her ear. Selene never heeded it, but as the same air
wafted the scent of the flowers in her face even stronger than before,
she clutched her hair in her fingers and pulled it so violently that she
actually groaned with the pain she gave herself.
The question as to whether her hair was less abundant and beautiful than
her sister's suddenly occurred to her, and like a flash in the darkness
the wish shot through her soul that she could fling Arsinoe to the ground
by the hair, with the hand which was now hurting herself.
That perfume! that horrible perfume!
She could bear it no longer. She stood up on her uninjured foot, and with
very short steps she dragged herself half crying to the window, and flung
the nosegay with the great jar of burnt clay down on to the ground. The
vessel was broken.--It had cost poor Hannah many hardly-saved pieces not
long since. Selene stood on one foot, leaning, to recover herself,
against the right-hand post of the window-opening, and there she could
hear more distinctly than from her couch, the voice of the waves as they
broke on the stone quay just behind dame Hannah's little house. The child
of the Lochias was familiar with their tones, but the clashing and
gurgling of the cool, moist element against the stones had never affected
her before as they did now. Her fevered blood was on fire, her foot was
burning, her head was hot, and hatred seemed to consume her soul as in a
slow fire; she felt as if every wave that broke upon the seawall was
calling out to her: "I am cool, I am moist, I can extinguish the flame
that is consuming you. I can refresh and revive you."
What had the world to offer her but new torment and new misery? But the
sea--the blue dark sea was wide, and cold, and deep, and its waves
promised her in insidious tones to relieve her at once of the rage of her
fever, and of the burden of her life. Selene did not pause, did not
reflect; she remembered neither the children whom she had so long cared
for as a mother, nor her father, whose comfort and support she was--vague
voices in her brain seemed to be whispering to her that the world was
evil and cruel, and the abode of all the torment and care that gnawed at
her heart. She felt as if she bad been plunged to the temples in a pool
of fire, and, like some poor wretch whose garments have been caught by
the flames, she had an instinct to fly to the water, at the bottom of
which she might hope to find the fulfilment of her utmost longing, sweet
cold death, in which all is forgotten.
Groaning and tottering she pushed her way through the door into the
garden and hobbled down to the sea, grasping her temples in her hands.
CHAPTER II.
The Alexandrians were a stiff-necked generation. Only some phenomenal
sight far transcending their every-day experience could avail to make
them turn their heads to stare at it, but just now there was something to
look at, at every moment and in every street of the city. To-day too each
one thought only of himself and of his own pleasure. Some particularly
pretty, tall, or well-dressed figure would give rise to a smile or an
exclamation of approval, but before one sight had been thoroughly enjoyed
the inquisitive eye was seeking a fresh one.
Thus it happened that no one paid any special attention to Hadrian and
his companions who allowed themselves to be unresistingly carried along
the streets by the current of the crowd; and yet each one of them was, in
his way, a remarkable object. Hadrian was dressed as Silenus, Pollux as a
faun. Both wore masks and the disguise of the younger man was as well
suited to his pliant and vigorous figure as that of the elder to his
powerful stately person. Antinous followed his master, dressed as Eros.
He wore a crimson mantle and was crowned with roses, while the silver
quiver on his shoulder and the bow in his hand clearly symbolized the god
he was intended to represent. He too wore a mask, but his figure
attracted many gazers, and many a greeting of "Long live the god of love"
or "Be gracious to me oh! son of Aphrodite" was spoken as he passed.
Pollux had obtained all the things requisite for these disguises from the
store of drapery belonging to his master. Papias had been out, but the
young man did not deem it necessary to ask his consent, for he and the
other assistants had often used the things for similar purposes with his
full permission. Only as he took the quiver intended for Antinous, Pollux
hesitated a little for it was of solid silver and had been given to his
master by the wife of a wealthy cone-dealer, whom he had represented in
marble as Artemis equipped for the chase.
"The Roman's handsome companion," thought the young artist as he placed
the costly object in with the others in a basket, which a squinting
apprentice was to carry behind him--"The Roman's handsome companion must
be made a splendid Eros--and before sunrise the useless thing will be
hanging on its hook again."
Indeed Pollux had not much time to admire the splendid appearance of the
god of love he had so richly adorned, for the Roman architect was
possessed by such thirst for knowledge and such inexhaustible curiosity
as to the minutest details that even Pollux who was born in Alexandria,
and had grown up there with his eyes very wide open, was often unable to
answer his indefatigable questioning.
The grey-bearded master wanted to see every thing and to be informed on
every subject. Not content with making acquaintance with the main streets
and squares the public sites and buildings, he peeped into the handsomest
of the private houses and asked the names, rank and fortunes of the
owners. The decided way in which he told Pollux the way he wished to be
conducted proved to the artist that he was thoroughly familiar with the
plan of the city. And when the sagacious and enlightened man expressed
his approval, nay his admiration of the broad clean streets of the town,
the handsome open places, and particularly handsome buildings which
abounded on all sides, the young Alexandrian who was proud of his city
was delighted.
First Hadrian made him lead him along the seashore by the Bruchiom to the
temple of Poseidon, where he performed some devotions, then he looked
into the garden of the palace and the courts of the adjoining museum. The
Caesareum with its Egyptian gateway excited his admiration no less than
the theatre, surrounded with pillared arcades in stories, and decorated
with numerous statues. From thence deviating to the left they once more
approached the sea to visit the great Emporium, to see the forest of
masts of Eunostus, and the finely-constructed quays. They left the
viaduct known as the Heptastadion to their right and the harbor of
Kibotus, swarming with small merchant craft, did not detain them long.
Here they turned backs on the sea following a street which led inland
through the quarter called Khakotis inhabited only by native Egyptians,
and here the Roman found much to see that was noteworthy. First he and
his companions met a procession of the priests who serve the gods of the
Nile valley, carrying reliquaries and sacred vessels, with images of the
gods and sacred animals, and tending towards the Serapeum which towered
high above the streets in the vicinity. Hadrian did not visit the temple,
but he inspected the chariots which carried people along an inclined road
which led up the hill on which was the sanctuary, and watched devotees on
foot who mounted by an endless flight of steps constructed on purpose;
these grew wider towards the top, terminating in a platform where four
mighty pillars bore up a boldly-curved cupola. Nothing looked down upon
the temple-building which with its halls, galleries and rooms rose behind
this huge canopy.
The priests with their white robes, the meagre, half-naked Egyptians with
their pleated aprons and headcloths, the images of beasts and the
wonderfully-painted houses in this quarter of the city, particularly
attracted Hadrian's attention and made him ask many questions, not all of
which could Pollux answer.
Their walk which now took them farther and farther from the sea extended
to the extreme south of the town and the shores of lake Mareotis. Nile
boats and vessels of every form and size lay at anchor in this deep and
sheltered inland sea; here the sculptor pointed out to Hadrian the canal
through which goods were conveyed to the marine fleet which had been
brought down the river to Alexandria. And he pointed out to the Roman the
handsome country-houses and well-tended vineyards on the shores of the
lake.
"The bodies in this city ought to thrive," said Hadrian meditatively.
"For here are two stomachs and two mouths by which they absorb
nourishment; the sea, I mean, and this lake."
"And the harbors in each," added Pollux.
"Just so; but now it is time we should turn about," replied Hadrian, and
the party soon took a road leading eastward; they walked without pause
through the quiet streets inhabited by the Christians, and finally
through the Jews' quarter. In the heart of this quarter many houses were
shut up, and there were no signs to be seen of the gay doings which
crowded on the sense and fancy in the heathen part of the town, for the
stricter among the Hebrews held sternly aloof, from the holiday
festivities in which most of their nation and creed who dwelt among the
Greeks, took part.
For a third time Hadrian and his companions crossed the Canopic way which
formed the main artery of the city and divided it into the northern and
southern halves, for he wished to look down from the hill of the Paneum
on the combined effect as a whole of all that he had seen in detail. The
carefully-kept gardens which surrounded this elevation swarmed with men,
and the spiral path which led to the top was crowded with women and
children, who came here to see the most splendid spectacle of the whole
day, which closed with performances in all the theatres in the town.
Before the Emperor and his escort could reach the Paneum itself the crowd
suddenly packed more closely and began exclaiming among themselves, "Here
they come!" "They are early to-day!" "Here they are!"
Lictors with their fasces over their shoulders were clearing the broad
roadway, which led from the prefect's on the Bruchiom to the Paneum, with
their staves and paying no heed to the mocking and witty speeches
addressed to them by the mob wherever they appeared. One woman, as she
was driven back by a Roman guardian of the peace, cried scornfully, "Give
me your rods for my children and do not use them on unoffending
citizens."
"There is an axe hidden among the faggots," added an Egyptian
letter-writer in a warning voice.
"Bring it here," cried a butcher. "I can use it to slaughter my beasts."
The Romans as they heard these bandied words felt the blood mounting to
their faces, but the prefect, who knew his Alexandrians well, had
counselled them to be deaf; to see everything but to hear nothing. Now
there appeared a cohort of the Twelfth Legion, who were quartered in
garrison in Egypt, in their richest arms and holiday uniforms. Behind
them came two files of particularly tall lictors wearing wreaths, and
they were followed by several hundred wild beasts, leopards and panthers,
giraffes, gazelles, antelopes, and deer, all led by dark-colored
Egyptians. Then came a richly-dressed and much be-wreathed Dionysian
chorus with the sound of tambourines and lyres, double flutes and
triangles, and finally, drawn by ten elephants and twenty white horses, a
large ship, resting on wheels and gilt from stem to stern, representing
the vessel in which the Tyrrhenian pirates were said to have carried off
the young Dionysus when they had seen the black-haired hero on the shore
in his purple garments. But the miscreants--so the myth went on to
say--were not allowed long to rejoice in their violence, for hardly had
the ship reached the open sea when the fetters dropped from the god,
vines entwined the sails in sudden luxuriance, tendrils encumbered the
oars and rudder, heavy grapes clustered round the ropes, and ivy clung to
the mast and shrouded the seats and sides of the vessel. Dionysus is
equally powerful on sea and on land; in the pirates' ship he assumed the
form of a lion, and the pirates, filled with terror, flung themselves
into the sea, and in the form of dolphins followed their lost bark.
All this Titianus had caused to be represented just as the Homeric hymns
described it, out of slight materials, but richly and elegantly
decorated, in order to provide a feast for the eyes of the Alexandrians,
with the intention of riding in it himself, with his wife and the most
illustrious of the Romans who formed the Empress' suite, to enjoy all the
Holiday doings in the chief streets of the city. Young and old, great and
small, men and women, Greeks, Romans, Jews, Egyptians, foreigners dark
and fair, with smooth hair or crisp wool, crowded with equal eagerness to
the edge of the roadway to see the gorgeous boat.
Hadrian, far more anxious to see the show than his younger but less
excitable favorite, pushed into the front rank, and as Antinous was
trying to follow him, a Greek boy, whom he had shoved aside, snatched his
mask from his face, threw himself on the ground, and slipped nimbly off
with his booty. When Hadrian looked round for the Bithyman, the ship-in
which the prefect was standing between the images of the Emperor and
Empress, while Julia, Balbilla, and her companion, and other Roman lords
and ladies were sitting in it--had come quite near to them. His sharp eye
had recognized them all, and fearing that the lad's uncovered face would
betray them he cried out:
"Turn round and get into the crowd again." The favorite immediately
obeyed, and only too glad to escape from the crowd, which was a thing he
detested, he sat down on a bench close to the Paneum, and looked dreamily
at the ground while he thought of Selene and the nosegay he had sent her,
neither seeing nor hearing anything of what was going on around him.
When the gaudy ship left the gardens of the Paneum and turned into the
Canopic way, the crowd pursued it in a dense mass, hallooing and
shouting. Like a torrent suddenly swelled by a storm it rushed on,
surging and growing at each moment, and carrying with it even those who
tried to resist its force. Thus even Hadrian and Pollux were forced to
follow in its wake, and it was not till they found themselves in the
broad Canopic way that they were able to come to a stand-still. The broad
roadway of this famous street was bordered on each side by a long vista
of colonnade, and it extended from one end of the city to the other.
There were hundreds of the Corinthian columns which supported the roof
that covered the footway, and near to one of these the Emperor and Pollux
succeeded at last in effecting a halt and taking breath.
Hadrian's first thought was for his favorite, and being averse to
venturing himself once more to mix with the crowd, he begged the sculptor
to go and seek him and conduct him safely.
"Will you wait for me here?" asked Pollux.
"I have known a pleasanter halting place," sighed the Emperor.
"So have I," answered the artist. "But that tall door there, wreathed
round with boughs of poplar and ivy, leads into a cook-shop where the
gods themselves might be content to find themselves."
"Then I will wait there."
"But I warn you to eat as much as you can, for the Olympian table' as
kept by Lykortas, the Corinthian, is the dearest eating-house in the
whole city. None but the richest are his guests."
"Very good," laughed Hadrian. "Only find my assistant a new mask and
bring him back to me. It will not ruin me quite, even if I pay for a
supper for all three of us, and on a holiday one expects to spend
something."
"I hope you may not live to repent," retorted Pollux. "But a long fellow
like me is a good trencherman, and can do his part with the wine-jar."
"Only show me what you can do," cried Hadrian after him as Pollux hurried
off. "I owe you a supper at any rate, for that cabbage stew of your
mother's."
While Pollux went to seek the Bithyman in the vicinity of the Paneum, the
Emperor entered the eating house, which the skill of the cook had made
the most frequented and fashionable in Alexandria. The place in which
most of the customers of the house dined, consisted of a large open hall,
surrounded by arcades which were roofed in on three of its sides and
closed by a wall on its fourth; in these arcades stood couches, on which
the guests reclined singly, or in couples, or in larger groups, and
ordered the dishes and liquors which the serving slaves, pretty boys with
curling hair and hand some dresses, placed before them on low tables.
Here all was noise and bustle; at one table an epicure devoted himself
silently to the enjoyment of some carefully-prepared delicacy, at another
a large circle of men seemed to be talking more eagerly than they either
eat or drank, and from several of the smaller rooms behind the wall at
the back of the hall came sounds of music and song, and the bold laughter
of men and women.
The Emperor asked for a private room, but they were all occupied, and he
was requested to wait a little while, for that one of the adjoining.
rooms would very soon be vacant. He had taken off his mask, and though he
was not particularly afraid of being recognized in his disguise he chose
a couch that was screened by a broad pillar in one of the arcades at the
inner side of the court, and which, now that evening was beginning to
fall was already in obscurity. There he ordered, first some wine and then
some oysters to begin, with; while he was eating these he called one of
the superintendents and discussed with him the details of the supper he
wished presently to be served to himself and his two guests. During this
conversation the bustling host came to make his bow to his new customer,
and seeing that he had to do with a man fully conversant with all the
pleasures of the table, he remained to attend on him, and entered with
special zeal into Hadrian's various requirements.
There was, too, plenty to be seen in the court, which roused the
curiosity of the most inquisitive and enquiring man of his time. In the
large space enclosed by the arcades, and under the eyes of the guests, on
gridirons and hearths, over spits and in ovens the various dishes were
prepared which were served up by the slaves. The cooks prepared their
savory messes on large, clean tables, and the scene of their labors,
which, though enclosed by cords was open to public gaze was surrounded by
a small market, where however only the choicest of wares were displayed.
Here in tempting array was every variety of vegetable reared on Greek or
Egyptian soil; here speckless fruits of every size and hue were set out,
and there ready baked, shining, golden-brown pasties were displayed.
Those containing meat, fish or the mussels of Canopus were prepared in
Alexandria itself, but others containing fruit or the leaves of flowers
were brought from Arsinoe on the shores of Lake Moeris, for in that
neighborhood the cultivation of fruit and horticulture generally were
pursued with the greatest success. Meat of all sorts lay or hung in
suitable places; there were juicy hams from Cyrene, Italian sausages and
uncooked joints of various slaughtered beasts. By them lay or hung game
and poultry in select abundance, and a large part of the court was taken
up by a tank in which the choicest of the scaly tribes of the Nile, and
of the lakes of Northern Egypt, were swimming about as well as the
Muraena and other fish of Italian breed. Alexandrian crabs and the
mussels, oysters, and cray-fish of Canopus and Klysma were kept alive in
buckets or jars. The smoked meats of Mendes and the neighborhood of Lake
Moeris hung on metal pegs, and in a covered but well-aired room,
sheltered from the sun lay freshly-imported fish from the Mediterranean
and Red Sea. Every guest at the 'Olympian table' was allowed here to
select the meat, fruit, asparagus, fish, or pasty which he desired to
have cooked for him. The host, Lykortas, pointed out to Hadrian an old
gentleman who was busy in the court that was so prettily decorated with
still-life, engaged in choosing the raw materials of a banquet he wished
to give some friends in the evening of this very day.
"It is all very nice and extremely good," said Hadrian, "but the gnats
and flies which are attracted by all those good things are unendurable,
and the strong smell of food spoils my appetite."
"It is better in the side-rooms," said the host. "In the one kept for you
the company is now preparing to depart. In behind here the sophists
Demetrius and Pancrates are entertaining a few great men from Rome,
rhetoricians or philosophers or something of the kind. Now they are
bringing in the fine lamps and they have been sitting and talking at that
table ever since breakfast. There come the guests out of the side room.
Will you take it?"
"Yes," said Hadrian. "And when a tall young man comes to ask for the
architect Claudius Venato, from Rome, bring him in to me."
"An architect then, and not a sophist or a rhetorician," said mine host,
looking keenly at the Emperor.
"Silenus,--a philosopher!"
"Oh the two vociferous friends there go about even on other days naked
and with ragged cloaks thrown over their lean shoulders. To-day they are
feeding at the expense of rich Josephus."
"Josephus! he must be a Jew and yet he is making a large hole in the
ham."
"There would be more swine in Cyrene if there were no Jews; they are
Greeks like ourselves, and eat everything that is good."
Hadrian went into the vacant room, lay down on a couch that stood by the
wall, and urged the slaves who were busied in removing the dishes and
vessels used by his predecessors, and which were swarming with flies. As
soon as he was alone he listened to the conversation which was being
carried on between Favorinus, Florus, and their Greek guests. He knew the
two first very well, and not a word of what they were saying escaped his
keen ear.
Favorinus was praising the Alexandrians in a loud voice, but in flowing
and elegantly-accented Greek. He was a native of Arelas--[Arles]--in
Gaul, but no Hellene of them all could pour forth a purer flow of the
language of Demosthenes than he. The self-reliant, keen, and vivacious
natives of the African metropolis were far more to his taste than the
Athenians; these dwelt only in, and for, the past; the Alexandrians
rejoiced in the present. Here an independent spirit still survived, while
on the shores of the Ilissus there were none but servile souls who made a
merchandise of learning, as the Alexandrians did of the products of
Africa and the treasures of India. Once when he had fallen into disgrace
with Hadrian, the Athenians had thrown down his statue, and the favor or
disfavor of the powerful weighed with him more than intellectual
greatness, valuable labors, and true merit.
Florus agreed with Favorinus on the whole, and declared that Rome must be
freed from the intellectual influence of Athens; but Favorinus did not
admit this; he opined that it was very difficult for any one who had left
youth behind him, to learn anything new, thus referring, with light
irony, to the famous work in which Florus had attempted to divide the
history of Rome into four periods, corresponding to the ages of man, but
had left out old age, and had treated only of childhood, youth, and
manhood. Favorinus reproached him with overestimating the versatility of
the Roman genius, like his friend Fronto, and underrating the Hellenic
intellect.
Florus answered the Gaulish orator in a deep voice, and with such a grand
flow of words, that the listening Emperor would have enjoyed expressing
his approbation, and could not help considering the question as to how
many cups of wine his usually placid fellow-countryman might have taken
since breakfast to be so excited. When Floras tried to prove that under
Hadrian's rule Rome had risen to the highest stage of its manhood, his
friend, Demetrius, of Alexandria, interrupted him, and begged him to tell
him something about the Emperor's person. Florus willingly acceded to
this request, and sketched a brilliant picture of the administrative
talent, the learning, and the capability of the Emperor.
"There is only one thing," he cried eagerly, "that I cannot approve of;
he is too little at Rome, which is now the core and centre of the world.
He must need see every thing for himself, and he is always wandering
restlessly through the provinces. I should not care to change with him!"
"You have expressed the same ideas in verse," said Favorinus.
"Oh! a jest at supper-time. So long as I am in Alexandria and waiting on
Caesar I can make myself very comfortable every day at the 'Olympian
table' of this admirable cook."
"But how runs your poem?" asked Pancrates.
"I have forgotten it, and it deserved no better fate," replied Florus.
"But I," laughed the Gaul, "I remember the beginning. The first lines, I
think, ran thus:
"'Let others envy Caesar's lot;
To wander through Britannia's dales
And be snowed up in Scythian vales
Is Caesar's taste--I'd rather not?'"
As he heard these words Hadrian struck his fist into the palm of his left
hand, and while the feasters were hazarding guesses as to why he was so
long in coming to Alexandria, he took out the folding tablet he was in
the habit of carrying in his money-bag, and hastily wrote the following
lines on the wax face of it:
'Let others envy Florus' lot;
To wander through the shops for drink,
Or, into foolish dreaming sink
In a cook-shop, where sticky flies
Buzz round him till he shuts his eyes
Is Florus' taste--I'd rather not?'
[From verses by Hadrian and Florus, preserved in Spartianus.]
Hardly had he ended the lines, muttering them to himself with much relish
as he wrote, when the waiter showed in Pollux. The sculptor had failed to
find Antinous, and suggested that the young man had probably gone home;
he also begged that he might not be detained long at supper, for he had
met his master Papias, who had been extremely annoyed by his long
absence. Hadrian was no longer satisfied with the artist's society, for
the conversation in the next room was to him far more attractive than
that of the worthy young fellow. He himself was anxious to quit the meal
soon, for he felt restless and uneasy. Antinous could no doubt easily
find his way to Lochias, but recollections of the evil omens he had
observed in the heavens last night flitted across his soul like bats
through a festal hall, marring the pleasure on which he again tried to
concentrate it, in order to enjoy his hours of liberty.
Even Pollux was not so light-hearted as before. His long walk had made
him hungry, and he addressed himself so vigorously to the excellent
dishes which rapidly followed each other by his entertainer's orders, and
emptied the cup with such unfailing diligence, that the Emperor was
astonished: but the more he had to think about, the less did he talk.
Pollux, to be sure, had had his answer ready for his master, and without
considering how easy it would have been to part from him in kindness, he
had shortly and roundly quitted his service. Now indeed he stood on his
own feet, and he was longing to tell Arsinoe and his parents of what he
had done.
During the course of the meal his mother's advice recurred to his mind:
to do his best to win the favor and good will of the architect whose
guest he was; but he set it aside, for he was accustomed to owe all he
gained to his own exertions, and though he still keenly felt in Hadrian
the superiority of a powerful mind, their expedition through the city had
not brought him any nearer to the Roman. Some insurmountable barrier
stood fixed between himself and this restless, inquisitive man, who
required so many answers that no one else had time to ask a question, and
who when he was silent looked so absorbed and unapproachable that no one
would have ventured to disturb him. The bold young artist had, however,
tried now and again to break through the fence, but each time, he had at
once been seized with a feeling, of which he could not rid himself, that
he had done something awkward and unbecoming. He felt in his intercourse
with the architect as a noble dog might feel that sported with a lion,
and such sport could come to no good. Thus, for various reasons, host and
guest were well content when the last dish was removed. Before Pollux
left the room the Emperor gave him the tablets with the verses and begged
him, with a meaning smile, to desire the gate-keeper at the Caesareum to
give them to Annaeus Florus the Roman. He once more urgently charged the
sculptor to look about for his young friend and, if he should find him at
Lochias, to tell him that he, Claudius Venator, would return home ere
long. Then the artist went his way.
Hadrian still sat a long time listening to the talk close by; but after
waiting for above an hour to hear some fresh mention made of himself, he
paid his reckoning and went out into the Canopic way, now brilliantly
lighted. There he mingled with the revellers, and walked slowly onward,
seeking suspiciously and anxiously for his vanished favorite.
CHAPTER III.
Antinous, searching for his master, had wandered about in the crowd.
Whenever he saw any figures of exceptional stature he followed them, but
each time only to discover that he had entered on a false track. Long and
persistent effort was not in his nature, so as soon as he began to get
tired, he gave up the search and sat down again on a stone bench in the
garden of the Paneum.
Two cynic philosophers, with unkempt hair, tangled beards, and ragged
cloaks flung over their shivering bodies, sat down by him and fell into
loud and contemptuous abuse of the deference shown, 'in these days,' to
external things and vulgar joys, and of the wretched sensualists who
regarded pleasure and splendor, rather than virtue, as the aim and end of
existence. In order to be heard by the by-standers they spoke in loud
tones, and the elder of the two, flourished his knotted stick as
viciously, as though he had to defend himself against an attack. Antinous
felt much disgusted by the hideous appearance, the coarse manners, and
shrill voices of these persons, and when he rose--as the cynics' diatribe
seemed especially directed against him--they scoffed at him as he went,
mocking at his costume and his oiled and perfumed hair. The Bithynian
made no reply to this abuse. It was odious to him, but he thought it
might perhaps have amused Caesar.
He wandered on without thinking; the street in which he presently found
himself must no doubt lead to the sea, and if he could once find himself
on the shore he could not fail to make his way to Lochias. By the time it
was growing dark he was once more standing outside the little gate-house,
and there he learnt from Doris that the Roman and her son had not yet
returned.
What was he to do alone in the vast empty palace? Were not the very
slaves free to-day? Why should not he too for once enjoy life
independently and in his own way? Full of the pleasant sense of being his
own master and at liberty to walk in a road of his own choosing, he went
onwards, and when he presently passed by the stall of a flower-seller, he
began once more to think eagerly of Selene and the nosegay, which must
long since have reached her hands.
He had heard from Pollux in the morning that the steward's daughter was
being tended by Christians in a little house not far from the sea-shore;
indeed the sculptor himself had been quite excited as he told Antinous
that he himself had peeped into the lighted room and had seen her. 'A
glorious creature' he had called her, and had said that she had never
looked more beautiful than in a recumbent attitude on her bed.
Antinous recalled all this and determined to venture on an attempt to see
again the maiden whose image filled his heart and brain.
It was now dark and the same light which had allowed of the sculptor's
seeing Selene's features might this evening reveal them to him also. Full
of passion and excitement, he got into the first litter he met with. The
swarthy bearers were far too slow for his longing, and more than once he
flung to them as much money as they were wont to earn in a week, to urge
them to a brisker pace. At last he reached his destination; but seeing
that several men and women robed in white, were going into the garden, he
desired the bearers to carry him farther. Close to a dark narrow lane
which bounded the widow's garden-plot on the east and led directly to the
sea, he desired them to stop, got out of the litter and bid the slaves
wait for him. At the garden door he still found two men dressed in white,
and one of the cynic philosophers who had sat by him on the bench near
the Paneum. He paced impatiently up and clown, waiting till these people
should have disappeared, and thus passing again and again under the light
of the torches that were stuck up by the gate.
The dry cynic's prominent eyes were everywhere at once, and as soon as he
perceived the peripatetic Bithynian he flung up his arm, exclaiming, as
he pointed to him with a long, lean, stiff forefinger--half to the
Christians with whom he had been talking and half to the lad himself:
"What does he want. That fop! that over-dressed minion! I know the
fellow; with his smooth face and the silver quiver on his shoulder he
believes he is Eros in person. Be off with you, you house-rat. The women
and girls in here know how to protect themselves against the sort who
parade the streets in rose-colored draperies. Take yourself off, or you
will make acquaintance with the noble Paulina's slaves and clogs. Hi!
gate-keeper, here! keep an eye on this fellow."
Antinous made no answer, but slowly went back to his litter.
"To-morrow perhaps, if I cannot manage it tonight," he thought to himself
as he went; and he never thought of any other means of attaining his end,
much as he longed for it. A hindrance that came in his way ceased to be a
hindrance as soon as he had left it behind him, and after this reflection
he acted on this occasion as on many former ones. The litter was no
longer standing where he had left it; the bearers had carried it into the
lane leading to the sea, for the only little abode which stood on the
eastern side of it belonged to a fisherman whose wife sold thin potations
of Pelusium beer.
Antinous went down the green alley overarched with boughs of fig, to call
the negroes who were sitting in the dull light of a smoky oil-lamp. Here
it was dark, but at the end of the alley the sea shone and sparkled in
the moonlight; the splashing of the waves tempted him onwards and he
loitered clown to the stone-bound shore. There he spied a boat dancing on
the water between two piles and it came into his head that it might be
possible to see the house where Selene was sleeping, from the sea.
He undid the rope which secured the boat without any difficulty; he
seated himself in it, laid aside the quiver and bow, pushed off with one
of the oars that lay at the bottom of the boat and pulled with steady
strokes towards the long path of light where the moon touched the crest
of each dancing wavelet with unresting tremulous flecks of silver.
There lay the widow's garden. In that small white house must the fair
pale Selene be sleeping, but though he rowed hither and thither,
backwards and forwards, he could not succeed in discovering the window of
which Pollux had spoken. Might it not be possible to find a spot where he
could disembark and then make his way into the garden? He could see two
little boats, but they lay in a narrow walled canal and this was closed
by an iron railing. Beyond, was a, terrace projecting into the sea, and
surrounded by an elegant balustrade of little columns, but it rose
straight out of the sea on smooth high walls. But there--what was that
gleaming under the two palm-trees which, springing from the same root,
had grown together tall and slender--was not that a flight of marble
steps leading down to the sea?
Antinous dipped his right oar in the waves with a practised hand to alter
the head of the boat and was in the act of pulling his hand up to make
his stroke against the pressure of the waves--but he did not complete the
movement, nay he counteracted the stroke by a dexterous reverse action; a
strange vision arrested his attention. On the terrace, which lay full in
the bright moonlight, there appeared a white-robed figure with long
floating hair.
How strangely it moved! It went now to one side and now to the other,
then again it stood still and clasped its head in its hands. Antinous
shuddered, he could not help thinking of the Daimons of which Hadrian so
often spoke. They were said to be of half-divine and half-human nature,
and sometimes appeared in the guise of mortals.
Or was Selene dead and was the white figure her wandering shade? Antinous
clutched the handles of the oars, now merely floating on the water, and
bending forward gazed fixedly and with bated breath at the mysterious
being which had now reached the balustrade of the terrace, now--he saw
quite plainly--covered its face with both hands, leaned far over the
parapet, and now as a star falls through the sky on a clear night, as a
fruit drops from the tree in autumn, the white form of the girl dropped
from the terrace. A loud cry of anguish broke the silence of the night
which veiled the world, and almost at the same instant the water splashed
and gurgled up, and the moonbeams, cold and bright as ever, were mirrored
in the thousand drops that flew up from its surface.
Was this Antinous, the indolent dreamer, who so promptly plunged his oars
in the water, pulled a powerful stroke, and then, when in a few seconds
after her fall, the form of the drowning girl came to the surface again
quite close to the boat, flung aside the oar that was in his way? Leaning
far over the edge of the boat he seized the floating garment of the
drowning creature--it was a woman, no Daimon nor shade--and drew her
towards him. He succeeded in raising her high out of the waves, but when
he tried to pull her fairly out of her watery bed, the weight, all on one
side of the boat, was too great; it turned over and Antinous was in the
sea.
The Bithyman was a good swimmer. Before the white form could sink a
second time he had caught at it once more with his right hand and taking
care that her head should not again touch the surface of the water, he
swam with his left arm and legs towards the spot where he remembered he
had seen the flight of steps. As soon as his feet felt the ground he
lifted the girl in both arms and a groan of relief broke from his lips as
he saw the marble steps close below him. He went up them without
hesitation, and then, with a swift elastic step, carried his dripping and
senseless burden to the terrace where he had observed that there were
benches. The wide floor of the sea-terrace, paved with smooth flags of
marble, was brightly lighted by the broad moonshine, and the whiteness of
the stone reflected and seemed to increase the light. There stood the
benches which Antinous had seen from afar.
He laid his burden on the first he came to, and a thrill of thankful joy
warmed his shivering body when the rescued woman uttered a low cry of
pain which told him that he had not toiled in vain. He gently slipped his
arm between the hard elbow of the marble seat and her head, to give it a
somewhat softer resting-place. Her abundant hair fell in clammy tresses,
covering her face like a thick but fine veil; he parted it to the right
and left and then--then he sank on his knees by her side as if a sudden
bolt had fallen from the blue sky above them; for the features were hers,
Selene's, and the pale girl before whom he was kneeling was she herself,
the woman he loved.
Almost beside himself and trembling in every limb, he drew her closer to
him and put his ear against her mouth to listen whether he had not
deceived himself, whether she had not indeed fallen a victim to the waves
or whether some warm breath were passing the portals of her lips.
Yes she breathed! she was alive! Full of thankful ecstasy he pressed his
cheek to hers. Oh! how cold she was, icy, cold as death!
The torch of life was flickering, but he would not--could not--must not
let it die out: and with all the care, rapidity and decision of the most
capable man, he once more raised her, lifted her in both arms as if she
were a child, and carried her straight to the house whose white walls he
could see gleaming among the shrubs behind the terrace. The little lamp
was still burning in dame Hannah's room, which Selene had so lately
quitted; in front of the window through which the dim light came to
mingle with the moonbeams, lay the flowers whose perfume had so troubled
the suffering girl, and with them Hannah's clay jar, all still strewn on
the ground.
Was this nosegay his gift? Very likely.
But the lamp-lighted room into which he now looked could be none other
than the sick-room, which he recognized from the sculptor's account. The
housedoor was open and even that of the room in which he had seen the bed
was unfastened; he pushed it open with his foot, entered the room, and
laid Selene on the vacant couch.
There she lay as if dead; and as he looked at her immovable features,
hallowed to solemnity by sorrow and suffering, his heart was touched with
an ineffable solicitude, sympathy and pity; and, as a brother might bend
over a sleeping sister, he bent over Selene and kissed her forehead. She
moved, opened her eyes, gazed into his face--but her glance was so full
of horror, so vague, glassy and bewildered, that he drew back with a
shudder, and with hands uplifted could only stammer out: "Oh! Selene,
Selene! do you not know me?" and as he spoke he looked anxiously in the
face of the rescued girl; but she seemed not to hear him and nothing
moved but her eyes which slowly followed his every movement.
"Selene!" he cried again, and seizing her inanimate hand which hung down,
he pressed it passionately to his lips.
Then she gave a loud cry, a violent shiver shook her in every limb, she
turned aside with sighs and groans, and at the same instant the door was
opened, the little deformed girl entered the room and gave a shrill
scream of terror as she saw Antinous standing by the side of her friend.
The lad himself started and, like a thief who has been caught in the act,
he fled out into the night, through the garden, and as far as the gate
which led into the street without being stopped by any one. Here the
gate-keeper met him, but he threw him aside with a powerful fling, and
while the old man--who had grown gray in his office--caught hold of his
wet chiton he tore the door open and ran on, dragging his pursuer with
him for some paces. Then he flew down the street with long steps as if he
were racing in the Gymnasium, and soon he felt that his pursuer, in whose
hand he had left a piece of his garment, had given up the chase.
The gate-keeper's outcry had mingled with the pious hymns of the
assembled Christians in Paulina's villa, and some of them had hurried out
to help capture the disturber of the peace. But the young Bithynian was
swifter than they and might consider himself perfectly safe when once he
had succeeded in mixing with a festal procession. Half-willingly and
half-perforce, he followed the drunken throng which was making its way
from the heart of the city towards the lake, where, on a lonely spot on
the shore to the east of Nikropolis, they were to celebrate certain
nocturnal mysteries. The goal of the singing, shouting, howling mob with
whom Antinous was carried along, was between Alexandria and Canopus and
far enough from Lochias; thus it fell out that it was long past midnight
when Hadrian's favorite, dirty, out of breath, and his clothes torn, at
last appeared in the presence of his master.
CHAPTER IV.
Hadrian had expected Antinous many hours since, and the impatience and
vexation which had been long seething in him were reflected plainly
enough in his sternly-bent brow and the threatening fire of his eye.
"Where have you been?" he imperiously asked.
"I could not find you, so I took a boat and went out on the lake."
"That is false."
Antinous did not answer, but merely shrugged his shoulders.
"Alone?" asked the Emperor more gently. "Alone."
"And for what purpose?"
"I was gazing at the stars."
"You!"
"And may I not, for once, tread in your footsteps?"
"Why not indeed? The lights of heaven shine for the foolish as well as
for the wise. Even asses must be born under a good or an evil star. One
donkey serves a hungry grammarian and feeds on used-up papyrus, while
another enters the service of Caesar and is fattened up, and finds time
to go star-gazing at night. What a state you are in."
"The boat upset and I fell into the water." Hadrian was startled, and
observing his favorite's tangled hair in which the night wind had dried
the salt water, and his torn chiton, he anxiously exclaimed:
"Go this instant and let Mastor dry you and anoint you. He too came back
with a bruised hand and red eyes. Everything is upside clown this
accursed evening. You look like a slave that has been hunted by clogs.
Drink a few cups of wine and then lie down."
"I obey your orders, great Caesar."
"So formal? The donkey simile vexed you."
"You used always to have a kind word for me."
"Yes, yes, and I shall have them again, I shall have them again. Only not
to-night--go to bed."
Antinous left him, but the Emperor paced his room, up and down with long
steps, his arms crossed over his breast and his eyes fixed on the ground.
His superstitious soul had been deeply disturbed by a series of evil
signs which he had not only seen the previous night in the sky, but had
also met on his way to Lochias, and which seemed to be beginning to be
fulfilled already.
He had left the eating house in an evil humor, the bad omens made him
anxious, and though on his arrival at home he had done one or two things
which he already regretted, this had certainly not been due to any
adverse Daimons but to the brooding gloom of his clouded mind. Eternal
circumstances, it is true, had led to his being witness to an attack made
by the mob on the house of a wealthy Israelite, and it was attributable
to a vexatious accident that at this juncture, he should have met Verus,
who had observed and recognized him. Yes, the Spirits of evil were abroad
this day, but his subsequent experiences and deeds upon reaching Lochias,
would certainly not have taken place on any more fortunate day, or, to be
more exact, if he had been in a calmer frame of mind; he himself alone
was in fault, he alone, and no spiteful accident, nor malicious and
tricky Daimon. Hadrian, to be sure, attributed to these sprites all that
he had done, and so considered it irremediable; an excellent way, no
doubt, of exonerating oneself from a burdensome duty, or from repairing
some injustice, but conscience is a register in which a mysterious hand
inexorably enters every one of our deeds, and in which all that we do is
ruthlessly called by its true name. We often succeed, it is true, in
effacing the record for a longer or a shorter period, but often, again,
the letters on the page shine with an uncanny light, and force the inward
eye to see them and to heed them.
On this particular night Hadrian felt himself compelled to read the
catalogue of his actions and among them he found many a sanguinary crime,
many a petty action unworthy of a far meaner soul than he; still the
record commemorated many duties strictly fulfilled, much honest work, an
unceasing struggle towards high aims, and an unwearied effort to feel his
way intellectually, to the most remote and exalted limits possible to the
human mind and comprehension.
In this hour Hadrian thought of none but his evil deeds, and vowed to the
gods--whom he mocked at with his philosophical friends, and to whom he
nevertheless addressed himself whenever he felt the insufficiency of his
own strength and means--to build a temple here, to offer a sacrifice
there, in order to expiate old crimes and divert their malice. He felt
like a great man must who is threatened with the disfavor of his
superiors, and who hopes to propitiate them with gifts. The haughty Roman
quailed at the thought of unknown dangers, but he was far from feeling
the wholesome pangs of repentance.
Hardly an hour since he had forgotten himself and had disgracefully
abused his power over a weaker creature, and now he was vexed at having
behaved so and not otherwise; but it never entered his head to humiliate
his pride or, by offering some compensation to the offended party,
tacitly to confess the injustice he had committed. Often he deeply felt
his human weakness, but he was quite capable of believing in the
sacredness of his imperial person, and this he always found most easy
when he had trodden under foot some one who had been rash enough to
insult him, or not to acknowledge his superiority. And was it not on the
contemners of the gods that their heaviest punishments fell?
To-day the terrestrial Jupiter had again crushed into the earth with his
thunderbolts, an overbold mortal, and this time the son of the worthy
gate-keeper was his victim. The sculptor certainly had been so unlucky as
to touch Hadrian in his most sensitive spot, but a cordially benevolent
feeling is not easily converted into a relentless opposition if we are
not ourselves--as was the case with the Emperor--accustomed to jump from
one mood to the other, are not conscious--as he was--of having it in our
power directly to express our good-will or our aversion in action.
The sculptor's capacities had commanded the Emperor's esteem, his fresh
and independent nature had at first suited and attracted him, but even
during the walk together through the streets, the young man's
uncompromising manner of treating him as an equal had become unpleasing
to him. In his workshop he saw in Pollux only the artist, and delighted
in his original and dashing powers; but out of it, and among men of a
commoner stamp, from whom he was accustomed to meet with deference, the
young man's speech and demeanor seemed unbecoming, bold, and hard to be
endured. In the eating-house the huge eater and drinker, who laughingly
pressed him to do his part, so as not to make a present to the landlord,
had filled Hadrian with repulsion. And after this, when Hadrian had
returned to Lochias, out of humor and rendered apprehensive by evil
omens, and even then had not found his favorite, he impatiently paced up
and down the hall of the Muses and would not deign to offer a greeting to
the sculptor, who was noisily occupied behind his screens.
Pollux had passed quite as bad an evening as the Emperor. When, in his
desire to see Arsinoe once more, he penetrated to the door of the
steward's apartment, Keraunus had stopped his way, and sent him about his
business with insulting words. In the hall of the Muses he had met his
master, and had had a quarrel with him, for Papias, to whom he repeated
his notice to quit, had grown angry, and had desired him then and there
to sort out his own tools, and to return those that belonged to him, his
master, and for the future to keep himself as far as possible from
Papias' house, and from the works in progress at Locluas. On this, hard
words had passed on both sides, and when Papias had left the palace and
Pollux went to seek Pontius the architect, in order to discuss his future
plans with him, he learnt that he too had quitted Lochias a short time
before, and would not return till the following morning.
After brief reflection he determined to obey the orders of Papias and to
pack his own tools together. Without paying any heed to Hadrian's
presence he began to toss some of the hammers, chisels, and wooden
modelling tools into one box, and others into another, doing it as
recklessly as though he were minded to punish the unconscious tools as
adverse creatures who had turned against him.
At last his eye fell on Hadrian's bust of Balbilla. The hideous
caricature at which he had laughed only yesterday, made him angry now,
and after gazing at it thoughtfully for a few minutes his blood boiled up
furiously, he hastily pulled a lath out of the partition and struck at
the monstrosity with such fury that the dry clay flew in pieces, and the
fragments were strewed far and wide about the workshop. The wild noise
behind the sculptor's screen made the Emperor pause in his walk to see
what the artist was doing; he looked on at the work of destruction,
unobserved by Pollux, and as he looked the blood mounted to his head; he
knit his brows in anger, a blue vein in his forehead swelled and stood
out, and ominous lines appeared above his brow. The great master of
state-craft could more easily have borne to hear himself condemned as a
ruler than to see his work of art despised. A man who is sure of having
done some thing great can smile at blame, but he, who is not confident in
himself has reason to dread it, and is easily drawn into hating the
critic who utters it. Hadrian was trembling with fury, he doubled his
first as he lifted it in Pollux's face, and going close up to him asked
in a threatening tone:
"What do you mean by that?"
The sculptor glanced round at the Emperor and answered, raising his stick
for another blow:
"I am demolishing this caricature for it enrages me."
"Come here," shouted Hadrian, and clutching the girdle which confined the
artist's chiton, in his strong sinewy hand, he dragged the startled
sculptor in front of his Urania wrenched the lath out of his hand, struck
the bust of the scarcely-finished statue off the body, exclaiming as he
did so, in a voice that mimicked Pollux:
"I am demolishing this bungler's work for it enrages me!"
The artist's arms fell by his side; astonished and infuriated he stared
at the destroyer of his handiwork, and cried out:
"Madman! this is enough. One blow more and you will feel the weight of my
fists."
Hadrian laughed aloud, a cold hard laugh, flung the lath at Pollux's feet
and said:
"Judgment against judgment--it is only fair."
"Fair?" shrieked Pollux, beside himself.
"Your wretched rubbish, which my squinting apprentice could have done as
well as you, and this figure born in a moment of inspiration! Shame upon
you! Once more, if you touch the Urania again I warn you, you shall
learn--"
"Well, what?"
"That in Alexandria grey hairs are only respected so long as they deserve
it."
Hadrian folded his arms, stepped quite close up to Pollux, and said:
"Gently, fellow, if you value your life."
Pollux stepped back before the imposing personage that stood before him,
and, as it were scales, fell from his eyes. The marble statue of the
Emperor in the Caesareum represented the sovereign in this same attitude.
The architect, Claudius Venator, was none other than Hadrian.
The young artist turned pale and said with bowed head, and in low voice
as he turned to go:
"Right is always on the side of the strongest. Let me go. I am nothing
but a poor artist--you are some thing very different. I know you now; you
are Caesar."
"I am Caesar," snarled Hadrian, "and if you think more of yourself as an
artist than of me, I will show you which of us two is the sparrow, and
which the eagle."
"You have the power to destroy, and I only desire--"
"The only person here who has a right to desire is myself," cried the
Emperor, "and I desire that you shall never enter this palace again, nor
ever come within sight of me so long as I remain here. What to do with
your kith and kin I will consider. Not another word! Away with you, I
say, and thank the gods that I judge the misdeed of a miserable boy more
mercifully than you dared to do in judging the work of a greater man than
yourself, though you knew that he had done it in an idle hour with a few
hasty touches. Be off, fellow; my slaves will finish destroying your
image there, for it deserves no better fate, and because--what was it you
said just now? I remember--and because it enrages me."
A bitter laugh rang after the lad as he quitted the hall. At the
entrance, which was perfectly dark, he found his master, Papias, who had
not missed a word of what had passed between him and the Emperor. As
Pollux went into his mother's house he cried out:
"Oh mother, mother, what a morning, and what an evening. Happiness is
only the threshold to misery."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Happiness is only the threshold to misery
When a friend refuses to share in joys
THE EMPEROR
By Georg Ebers
Volume 7.
CHAPTER V.
While Pollux and his mother, who was much grieved, waited for Euphorion's
return, and while Papias was ingratiating himself with the Emperor by
pretending still to believe that Hadrian was nothing more than Claudius
Venator, the architect, Aurelius Verus, nicknamed by the Alexandrians,
"the sham Eros" had lived through strange experiences.
In the afternoon he had visited the Empress, in the hope of persuading
her to look on at the gay doings of the people, even if incognito; but
Sabina was out of spirits, declared herself unwell, and was quite sure
that the noise of the rabble would be the death of her. Having, as she
said, so vivacious a reporter as Verus, she might spare herself from
exposing her own person to the dust and smell of the town, and the uproar
of men. As soon as Lucilla begged her husband to remember his rank and
not to mingle with the excited multitude, at any rate after dark, the
Empress strictly enjoined him to see with his own eyes everything that
could be worth notice in the festival, and more particularly to give
attention to everything that was peculiar to Alexandria and not to be
seen in Rome.
After sunset Verus had first gone to visit the veterans of the Twelfth
Legion who had been in the field with him against the Numidians, and to
whom he gave a dinner at an eating-house, as being his old
fellow-soldiers. For above an hour he sat drinking with the brave old
fellows; then, quitting them, he went to look at the Canopic way by
night, as it was but a few paces thither from the scene of his
hospitality. It was brilliantly lighted with tapers, torches, and lamps,
and the large houses behind the colonnades were gaudy with rich hangings;
only the handsomest and stateliest of them all had no kind of decoration.
This was the abode of the Jew Apollodorus.
In former years the finest hangings had decorated his windows, which had
been as gay with flowers and lamps as those of the other Israelites who
dwelt in the Canopic way, and who were wont to keep the festival in
common with their heathen fellow-citizens as jovially as though they were
no less zealous to do homage to Dionysus. Apollodorus had his own reasons
for keeping aloof on this occasion from all that was connected with the
holiday doings of the heathen. Without dreaming that his withdrawal could
involve him in any danger, he was quietly sitting in his house, which was
so splendidly furnished as to seem fitted for some princely Greek rather
than for a Hebrew. This was especially the case with the men's
living-room, in which Apollodorus sat, for the pictures on the walls and
pavement of this beautiful hall--of which the roof, which was half open,
was supported on columns of the finest porphyry--represented the loves of
Eros and Psyche; while between the pillars stood busts of the greatest
heathen philosophers, and in the background a fine statue of Plato was
conspicuous. Among all the Greeks and Romans there was the portrait of
only one Jew, and this was that of Philo, whose intellectual and delicate
features greatly resembled those of the most illustrious of his Greek
companions.
In this splendid room, lighted by silver lamps, there was no lack of easy
couches, and on one of these Apollodorus was reclining; a fine-looking
man of fifty, with his mild but shrewd eyes fixed on a tall and aged
fellow-Israelite who was pacing up and down in front of him and talking
eagerly; the old man's hands too were never still, now he used them in
eager gesture, and again stroked his long white beard. On an easy seat
opposite to the master of the house sat a lean young man with pale and
very regular finely-cut features, black hair and a black beard; he sat
with his dark glowing eyes fixed on the ground, tracing lines and circles
on the pavement with the stick he held in his hand, while the excited old
man, his uncle, urgently addressed Apollodorus in a vehement but fluent
torrent of words. Apollodorus, however, shook his head from time to time
at his speech and frequently met him with a brief contradiction.
It was easy to see that what he was listening to touched him painfully,
and that the two diametrically different men were fighting a battle which
could never lead to any satisfactory issue. For, though they both used
the Greek tongue and confessed the same religion, all they felt and
thought was grounded on views, as widely dissimilar as though the two men
had been born in different spheres. When two opponents of such different
calibre meet, there is a great clatter of arms but no bloody wounds are
dealt and neither rout nor victory can result.
It was on account of this old man and his nephew that Apollodorus had
forborne to-day to decorate his house, for the Rabbi Gamaliel, who had
arrived only the day before from Palestine, and had been welcomed by his
Alexandrian relatives, condemned every form of communion with the
gentiles, and would undoubtedly have quitted the residence of his host if
he had ventured to adorn it in honor of the feast-day of the false gods.
Gamaliel's nephew, Rabbi Ben Jochai, enjoyed a reputation little inferior
to that of his father, Ben Akiba. The elder was the greatest sage and
expounder of the law--the son the most illustrious astronomer and the
most skilled interpreter of the mystical significance of the position of
the heavenly bodies, among the Hebrews.
It redounded greatly to the honor of Apollodorus that he should be
privileged to shelter under his roof the sage Gamaliel and the famous son
of so great a father, and in his hours of leisure he loved to occupy
himself with learned subjects, so he had done his utmost to make their
stay in his house in every way agreeable to them. He had bought, on
purpose for them, a kitchen slave, himself a strict Jew and familiar with
the requirements of the Levitical law as to food, who during their stay
was to preside over the mysteries of the hearth, instead of the Greek
cook who usually served him, so that none but clean meat should be
prepared according to the Jewish ritual. He had forbidden his grown-up
sons to invite any of their Greek friends into the house during the visit
of the illustrious couple or to discuss the festival; they were also
enjoined to avoid using the names of the gods of the heathen in their
conversation--but he himself was the first to sin against this
prohibition.
He, like all the Hebrews of good position in Alexandria, had acquired
Greek culture, felt and thought in Greek modes, and had remained a Jew
only in name; for though they still believed in the one God of their
fathers instead of in a crowd of Olympian deities, the One whom they
worshipped was no longer the almighty and jealous God of their nation,
but the all-pervading plasmic and life-giving Spirit with whom the Greeks
had become familiar through Plato.
Every hour that they had spent in each other's company had widened the
gulf between Apollodorus and Gamaliel, and the relations of the
Alexandrian to the sage had become almost intolerable, when he learnt
that the old man--who was related to himself--had come to Egypt with his
nephew, in order to demand the daughter of Apollodorus in marriage. But
the fair Ismene was not in the least disposed to listen to this grave and
bigoted suitor. The home of her people was to her a barbarous land, the
young astronomer filled her with alarm, and besides all this her heart
was already engaged; she had given it to the son of Alabarchos, who was
the Superior of all the Israelites in Egypt, and this young man possessed
the finest horse in the whole city, with which he had won several races
in the Hippodrome, and he also had distinguished her above all the
maidens. To him, if to any one, would she give her hand, and she had
explained herself to this effect to her father when he informed her of
Ben Jochai's suit, and Apollodorus, who had lost his wife several years
before, had neither the wish nor the power to put any pressure on his
pretty darling.
To be sure the temporizing nature of the man rendered it very difficult
to him to give a decided no to his venerable old friend; but it had to be
done sooner or later, and the present evening seemed to him an
appropriate moment for this unpleasant task.
He was alone with his guests. His daughter had gone to the house of a
friend to look on at the gay doings in the street, his three sons were
out, all the slaves had leave to enjoy their holiday till midnight;
nothing was likely to disturb them, and so, after many warm expressions
of his deep respect, he found courage to confess to them that he could
not support Ben Jochai's pretensions. His child, he said, clung too
fondly to Alexandria to wish to quit it, and his learned young friend
would be but ill suited with a wife who was accustomed to freer manners
and habits, and could hardly feel herself at ease in a home where the
laws of her fathers were strictly observed, and in which therefore no
kind of freedom of life would be tolerated.
Gamaliel let the Alexandrian speak to the end, but then, as his nephew
was beginning to argue against their host's hesitancy, the old man
abruptly interrupted him. Drawing up his figure, which was a little bent,
to its full height, and passing his hand among the blue veins and fine
wrinkles that marked his high forehead, he began:
Our house was decimated in our wars against the Romans, and among the
daughters of our race Ben Akiba found not one in Palestine who seemed to
him worthy to marry his son. But the report of the good fortune of the
Alexandrian branch of our family had reached Judea, and Ben Akiba thought
that he would do like our father Abraham, and he sent me, his Eliezer,
into a strange land to win the daughter of a kinsman to wife for his
Isaac. Now, who and what the young man is, and the esteem in which he and
his father are held by men--"
"I know well," interrupted Apollodorus, "and my house has never been so
highly honored as in your visit."
"And notwithstanding," continued the Rabbi, "we must return home as we
came; and indeed this will not only suit you best, but us too, and my
brother, whose ambassador I am, for after what I have learnt from you
within this last hour we must in any case withdraw our suit. Do not
interrupt me! Your Ismene scorns to veil her face, and no doubt it is a
very pretty one to look upon--you have trained her mind like that of a
man, and so she seeks to go her own way. That may be all very well for a
Greek woman, but in the house of Ben Akiba the woman must obey her
husband's will, as the ship obeys the helm, and have no will of her own;
her husband's will always coincides with what the law commands, which you
yourself learnt to obey."
"We recognize its excellence," replied Apolloderus, but even if all the
laws which Moses received on Sinai were binding on all mortals alike, the
various ordinances which were wisely laid down for the regulation of the
social life of our fathers, are not universally applicable for the
children of our day. And least of all can we observe them here, where,
though true to our ancient faith, we live as Greeks among Greeks."
"That I perceive," retorted Gamaliel, "for even the language--that
clothing of our thoughts--the language of our fathers and of the
scriptures, you have abandoned for another, sacrificed to another."
"You and your nephew also speak Greek."
"We do it here, because the heathen, because you and yours, no longer
understand the tongue of Moses and the prophets."
"But wherever the Great Alexander bore his arms Greek is spoken; and does
not the Greek version of the scriptures, translated by the seventy
interpreters under the direct guidance of our God, exactly reproduce the
Hebrew text?"
"And would you exchange the stone engraved by Bryasis that you wear on
your finger, and showed me yesterday with so much pride, for a wax
impression of the gem?"
"The language of Plato is not an inferior thing; it is as noble as the
costliest sapphire."
"But ours came to us from the lips of the Most High. What would you think
of a child that, disdaining the tongue Of its father listened only to
that of its neighbors and made use of an interpreter to be able to
understand its parents' commands?"
"You are speaking of parents who have long since left their native land.
The ancestor need not be indignant with his descendants when they use the
language of their new home, so long as they continue to act in accordance
with his spirit."
"We must live not merely in accordance with the spirit, but by the words
of the Most High, for not a syllable proceeds from His lips in vain. The
more exalted the spirit of a discourse is, the more important is every
word and syllable. One single letter often changes the meaning of whole
sentences.--What a noise the people outside are making! The wild tumult
penetrates even into this room which is so far from the street, and your
sons take delight in the disorders of the heathen! You do not even
withhold them by force from adding to the number of those mad devotees of
pleasure!"
"I was young once myself, and I think it no sin to share in the universal
rejoicing."
"Say rather the disgraceful idolatry of the worshippers of Dionysus. It
is in name alone that you and your children belong to the elect people of
God, in your hearts you are heathens!"
"No, Father," exclaimed Apollodorus eagerly. "The reverse is the case. In
our hearts we are Jews but we wear the garments of Greeks."
"Why your name is Apollodorus--the gift of Apollo."
"A name chosen only to distinguish me from others. Who would ever enquire
into the meaning of a name if it sounds well."
"You, everybody who is not devoid of sense," cried the Rabbi. "You think
to yourself 'need Zenodotus or Hermogenes, some Greek you meet at the
bath or else where, know at once that the wealthy personage, with whom he
discussed the latest interpretation of the Hellenic myths, is a Jew?' And
how charming is the man who asks you whether you are not an Athenian, for
your Greek has such a pure Attic accent! And what we ourselves like, we
favor in our children, so we choose names for them too which flatter our
own vanity."
"By Heracles!"
A faint mocking smile crossed Gamaliel's lips and interrupting the
Alexandrian he said:
"Is there any particularly worthy man among our Alexandrian
fellow-believers whose name is Heracles?"
"No one" cried the Alexandrian "ever thinks of the son of Alcmene when he
asseverates--it only means 'really,--truly--'"
"To be sure you are not fastidiously accurate in the choice of your words
and names, and where there is so much to be seen and enjoyed as
there is here one's thoughts are not always connected. That is
intelligible--quite, peculiarly intelligible! And in this city folks are
so polite that they are fain to wrap truth in some graceful disguise. May
I, a barbarian from Judea, be allowed to set it before you, bare of
clothing, naked and unadorned."
"Speak, I beg you, speak."
"You are Jews; but you had rather not be Jews, and you endure your origin
as an inevitable evil. It is only when you feel the mighty hand of the
Most High that you recognize it and claim your right to be one of His
chosen people. In the smooth current of daily life you proudly number
yourselves with his enemies. Do not interrupt me, and answer honestly
what I shall ask you. In what hour of your life did you feel yourself
that you owed the deepest gratitude to the God of your fathers?"
"Why should I deny it?--In the hour when my lost wife presented me with
my first-born son."
"And you called him?"
"You know his name is Benjamin."
"Like the favorite son of our forefather Jacob, for in the hour when you
thus named him you were honestly yourself, you felt thankful that it had
been vouchsafed to you to add another link to the chain of your race--you
were a Jew--you were confident in our God--in your own God. The birth of
your second son touched your soul less deeply and you gave him the name
of Theophilus, and when your third male child was born you had altogether
ceased to remember the God of your fathers, for he is named after one of
the heathen gods, Hephaestion. To put it shortly: You are Jews when the
Lord is most gracious to you, or threatens to try you most severely but
you are heathen whenever your way does not lead you over the high hills
or through the dark abysses of life. I cannot change your hearts--but the
wife of my brother's son, the daughter of Ben Akiba, must be a daughter
of our people, morning, noon, and night. I seek a Rebecca for my daughter
and not an Ismene."
"I did not ask you here," retorted Apollodorus. "But if you quit us
to-morrow, you as will be followed by our reverent regard. Think no worse
of us because we adapt ourselves, more, perhaps, than is fitting, to the
ways and ideas of the people among whom we have grown up, and in whose
midst we have been prosperous, and whose interests are ours. We know how
high our faith is beyond theirs. In our hearts we still are Jews; but are
we not bound to try to open and to cultivate and to elevate our spirits,
which God certainly made of stuff no coarser than that of other nations,
whenever and wherever we may? And in what school may our minds be trained
better or on sounder principles than in ours--I mean that of the Greek
sages? The knowledge of the Most High--"
"That knowledge," cried the old man, gesticulating vehemently with his
arms. "The knowledge of God Most High and all that the most refined
philosophy can prove, all the sublimest and purest of the thinkers of
whom you speak can only apprehend by the gravest meditation and
heart-searching--all this I say has been bestowed as a free gift of God
on every child of our people. The treasures which your sages painfully
seek out we already possess in our scriptures, our law and our moral
ordinances. We are the chosen people, the first-born of the Lord, and
when Messiah shall rise up in our midst--"
"Then," interrupted Apollodorus, "that shall be fulfilled which, like
Philo, I hope for, we shall be the priests and prophets for all nations.
Then we shall in truth be a race of priests whose vocation it shall be to
call down the blessing of the Most High on all mankind."
"For us--for us alone shall the messenger of God appear, to make us the
kings, and not the slaves of the nations."
Apollodorus looked with surprise into the face of the excited old man,
and asked with an incredulous smile: "The crucified Nazarene was a false
Messiah; but when will the true Messiah appear?"
"When will He appear?" cried the Rabbi. "When? Can I tell when? Only one
thing I do know; the serpent is already sharpening its fangs to sting the
heel of Him who shall tread upon it. Have you heard the name of Bar
Kochba?"
"Uncle," said Ben Jochai, interrupting the old Rabbi's speech, and rising
from his seat: "Say nothing you might regret."
"Nay, nay," answered Gamaliel earnestly. "Our friends here prefer the
human above the divine, but they are not traitors." Then turning again to
Apollodorus he continued:
"The oppressors in Israel have set up idols in our holy places, and
strive again to force the people to bow down to them; but rather shall
our back be broken than we will bend the knee or submit!"
"You are meditating another revolt?" asked the Alexandrian anxiously.
"Answer me--have you heard the name of Bar Kochba?"
"Yes, as that of the foolhardy leader of an armed troup."
"He is a hero--perhaps the Redeemer."
"And it was for him that you charged me to load my next corn vessel to
Joppa with swords, shields and lance-heads?"
"And are none but the Romans to be permitted to use iron?"
"Nay--but I should hesitate to supply a friend with arms if he proposed
to use them against an irresistible antagonist, who will inevitably
annihilate him!"
"The Lord of Hosts is stronger than a thousand legions!"
"Be cautious uncle," said Ben Jochai again in a warning voice.
Gamaliel turned wrathfully upon his nephew, but before he could retort on
the young man's protest, he started in alarm, for a wild howling and the
resounding clatter of violent blows on the brazen door of the house rang
through the hall and shook its walls of marble.
"They are attacking my house," shouted Apollodorus.
"This is the gratitude of those for whom you have broken faith with the
God of your fathers," said the old man gloomily. Then throwing up his
hands and eyes he cried aloud: "Hear me Adonai! My years are many and I
am ripe for the grave; but spare these, have mercy upon them."
Ben Jochai followed his uncle's example and raised his arms in
supplication, while his black eyes sparkled with a lowering glow in his
pale face.
But their prayers were brief, for the tumult came nearer and nearer;
Apollodorus wrung his hands, and struck his fist against his forehead;
his movements were violent--spasmodic. Terror had entirely robbed him of
the elegant, measured demeanor which he had acquired among his Greek
fellow-citizens, and mingling heathen oaths and adjurations with appeals
to the God of his fathers, he flew first one way and then another. He
searched for the key of the subterranean rooms of the house, but he could
not find it, for it was in the charge of his steward, who, with all the
other servants, was taking his pleasure in the streets, or over a
brimming cup in some tavern.
Now the newly-purchased kitchen-slave--the Jew to whom the keeping of the
Dionysian feast was an abomination--rushed into the room shrieking out,
as he plucked at his hair and beard:
"The Philistines are upon us! save us Rabbi, great Rabbi! Cry for us to
the Lord, oh! man of God! They are coming with staves and spears and they
will tread us down as grass and burn us in this house like the locusts
cast into the oven."
In deadly terror he threw himself at Gamaliel's feet and clasped them in
his hands, but Apollodorus exclaimed: "Follow me, follow me up on to the
roof."
"No, no," howled the slave, "Amalek is making ready the firebrand to
fling among our tents. The heathen leap and rage, the flames they are
flinging will consume us. Rabbi, Rabbi, call upon the Hosts of the Lord!
God of the just! The gate has given way. Lord! Lord! Lord!"
The terrified wretch's teeth chattered and he covered his eyes with his
hands, groaning and howling.
Ben Jochai had remained perfectly calm, but he was quivering with rage.
His prayer was ended, and turning to Gamaliel he said in deep tones:
"I knew that this would happen, I warned you. Our evil star rose when we
set forth on our wanderings.
"Now we must abide patiently what the Lord hath determined. He will be
our Avenger."
"Vengeance is His!" echoed the old man, and he covered his head with his
white mantle.
"In the sleeping-room--follow me! we can hide under the beds!" shrieked
Apollodorus; he kicked away the slave who was embracing the Rabbi's feet,
and seized the old man by the shoulder to drag him away with him. But it
was too late, for the door of the antechamber had burst open and they
could hear the clatter of weapons. "Lost, lost, all is lost!" cried
Apollodorus.
"Adonai! help us Adonai!" murmured the old man and he clung more closely
to his nephew, who overtopped him by a head and who held him clasped in
his right arm as if to protect him.
The danger which threatened Apollodorus and his guests was indeed
imminent, and it had been provoked solely by the indignation of the
excited mob at seeing the wealthy Israelite's house unadorned for the
feast.
A thousand times had it occurred that a single word had proved sufficient
to inflame the hot blood of the Alexandrians to prompt them to break the
laws and seize the sword. Bloody frays between the heathen inhabitants
and the Jews, who were equally numerous in the city, were quite the order
of the day, and one party was as often to blame as the other for
disturbing the peace and having recourse to the sword. Since the
Israelites had risen in several provinces--particularly in Cyrenaica and
Cyprus--and had fallen with cruel fury on their fellow-inhabitants who
were their oppressors, the suspicion and aversion of the Alexandrians of
other beliefs had grown more intense than in former times. Besides this,
the prosperous circumstances of many Jews, and the enormous riches of a
few, had filled the less wealthy heathen with envy and roused the wish to
snatch the possessions of those who, it cannot be denied, had not
unfrequently treated their gods with open contumely.
It happened that just within a few days the disputes regarding the
festival that was to be held in honor of the Imperial visit had added
bitterness to the old grudge, and thus it came to pass that Apollodorus'
unlighted house in the Canopic way had excited the populace to attack
this palatial residence. And here again one single speech had sufficed to
excite their fury.
In the first instance Melampus, the tanner, a drunken swaggerer, who had
failed in business, had marched up the street at the head of a tipsy
crew, and pointing with his thyrsus to the dark, undecorated house, had
shouted:
"Look at that dismal barrack! All that the Jew used to spend on
decorating the street, he is saving up now in his money chest!" The words
were like a spark among tinder and others followed.
"The niggard is robbing our father Dionysus," cried a second citizen, and
a third, flourishing his torch on high, croaked out:
"Let us get at the drachmae he grudges the god; we can find a use for
them." Graukus, the sausage maker, snatched from his neighbor's hand the
bunch of tow soaked in pitch, and bellowed out, "I advise that we should
burn the house over their heads!"
"Stay, stay," cried a cobbler who worked for Apollodorus' slaves, as he
placed himself in the butcher's way. "Perhaps they are mourning for some
one in there. The Jew has always decorated his house on former
occasions."
"Not they," replied a flute-player in a loud hoarse voice. "We met the
old miser's son on the Bruchiom with some riotous comrades and
misconducted hussies, with his purple mantle fluttering far behind him."
"Let us see which is reddest, the Tyrian stuff or the blaze we shall make
if we set the old wretch's house on fire," shouted a hungry-looking
tailor, looking round to see the effects of his wit.
"Ay! let us try!" rose from one man, and then, from a number of others:
"Let us get into the house!"
"The mean churl shall remember this day!"
"Fetch him out!"
"Drag him into the street!"
Such shouts as these rose here and there from the crowd, which grew
denser every instant as it was increased by fresh tributaries attracted
by the riot.
"Drag him out!" again shrieked an Egyptian slavedriver, and a woman
shrieked an echo of his words. She snatched the deer-skin from her
shoulders, flourished it round and round in the air above her tangled
black hair, and bellowed furiously:
"Tear him in pieces!"
"In pieces, with your teeth!" roared a drunken Maenad who, like most of
the mob that had collected, knew nothing whatever of the popular grudge
against Apollodorus and his house.
But words had already begun to be followed by deeds. Feet, fists, and
cudgels stamped, drubbed, and thumped against the firmly-bolted brazen
door of the darkened house, and a ship's boy of fourteen sprang on the
shoulders of a tall black slave and tried to climb the roof of the
colonnade, and to fling the torch which the sausage-maker handed up to
him into the open forecourt of the imperilled house.
CHAPTER VI.
The clatter of arms which Apollodorus and his guests had heard proceeded
not from the Jew's besiegers, but from some Roman soldiers who brought
safety to the besieged.
It was Verus, who as he was returning from the supper he had given his
veterans, with an officer of the Twelfth Legion and his British slaves,
had crossed the Canopic way and had been impeded in his progress by the
increasing crowd which stood before Apollodorus' house. The praetor had
met the Jew at the prefect's house, and knew him for one of the richest
and shrewdest men in Alexandria. This attack on his property roused his
ire; still he would certainly not have remained an idle spectator even if
the house in danger, instead of belonging to a man of mark, had been that
of one of the poorest and meanest, even among the Christians. Any lawless
act, any breach of constituted order was odious and intolerable to the
Roman; he would not have been the man he was if he had looked on
passively at an attack by the mob, in times of peace, on the life and
property of a quiet and estimable citizen. This licentious man of
pleasure, devoted to every enervating enjoyment, in battle, or whenever
the need arose, was as prudent as he was brave.
He now first ascertained what purpose the excited crowd had in view, and
at once considered the ways and means of frustrating their project. They
had already begun to batter the Jew's door, and already several lads were
standing on the roof of the arcades with burning torches in their hands.
Whatever he did must be done on the instant, and happily Verus had the
gift of thinking and acting promptly. In a few decisive words he begged
his companion, Lucius Albinus, to hurry back to his old soldiers and
bring them to the rescue; then he desired his slaves to force a way for
him with their powerful arms up to the door of the house. This feat was
accomplished in no time, but how great was his astonishment when he found
the Emperor standing there.
Hadrian stood in the midst of the crowd, and at the instant when Verus
appeared on the scene had wrenched the torch out of the hand of the
infuriated tailor. At the same time, in a thundering voice, he commanded
the Alexandrians--who were not accustomed to the imperial tone--to desist
from their mad project. Whistling, grunting, and words of scorn
overpowered the mandate of the sovereign, and when Verus and his slaves
had reached the spot where he stood, a few drunken Egyptians had gone up
to him and were about to lay hands on the unwelcome counsellor. The
praetor stood in their way. He first whispered to Hadrian that Jupiter
ought to be ruling the world, and might well leave it to smaller folks to
rescue a houseful of Jews; and that in a few seconds the soldiers would
arrive. Then he shouted to him in a loud voice:
"Away from this Sophist! Your place is in the Museum, or in the temple of
Serapis with your books, and not among the misguided and ignorant. Am I
right Macedonian citizens, or am I wrong?" A murmur of assent was heard
which became a roar of laughter when Verus, after Hadrian had got away,
went on:
"He has a beard like Caesar, and so he behaves as if he wore the purple!
You did well to let him escape, his wife and children are waiting for him
over their porridge."
Verus had often been implicated in wild adventure among the populace and
knew how to deal with them; if he now could only detain them till the
advent of the soldiers he might consider the game as won. Hadrian could
be a hero when it suited him; but here where no laurels were to be won,
he left to Verus the task of quieting the crowd.
As soon as he was fairly gone Verus desired his slaves to lift him on
their shoulders; his handsome good-natured face looked down upon the
crowd from high above them. He was immediately recognized, and many
voices called out:
"The crazy Roman! the praetor! the sham Eros!"
"I am he, Macedonian citizens, yes, I am he," answered Verus in a clear
voice. "And I will tell you a story."
"Listen, Listen."
"No let us get into the Jew's house."
"Presently--listen a minute to what the sham Eros says."
"I will knock your teeth down your throat boy, if you don't hold your
tongue."
All the crowd were shouting in wild confusion.
Curiosity, on the one hand, to hear the noble gentleman's speech, and the
somewhat superficial fury of the mob contended together for a few
minutes; at last curiosity seemed to be gaining the day, the tumult
subsided, and the praetor began:
"Once upon a time there was a child who had given to him ten little sheep
made of cotton, little foolish toys such as the old women sell in the
market place."
"Get into the Jew's house, we don't want to hear children's stories--"
"Be quiet there!"
"Hush now listen; from the sheep he will go on to the wolves."
"Not wolves--it will be a she-wolf!" some one shouted in the throng.
"Do not mention the horrid things!" laughed Verus but listen to
me.--Well, the child set his little sheep up in a row each one close to
the next. He was a weaver's son. Are there any weavers here? You? and
you--ah, and you out there. If I were not my father's son I should like
to be the son of an Alexandrian weaver. You need not laugh!--Well, about
the sheep. All the little things were beautifully white but one which had
nasty black spots, and the little boy could not bear that one. He went to
the hearth, pulled out a burning stick and wanted to burn the little ugly
sheep so as only to have pretty white ones. The lambkin caught fire and
just as the flame had begun to burn the wooden skeleton of the toy a
draught from the window blew the flame towards the other little sheep and
in a minute they were all burned to ashes. Then thought the little boy,
'If only I had let the ugly sheep alone! What can I play with now?' and
he began to cry. But this was not all, for while the little rascal was
drying his eyes, the flame spread and burnt up the loom, the wool, the
flax, the woven pieces, the whole house--the town in which he was born,
and even, I believe, the boy himself!--Now worthy friends and Macedonian
citizens, reflect a moment. Any man among you who is possessed of any
property may read the moral of my fable."
"Put out the torches!" cried the wife of a charcoal dealer.
"He is right; for by reason of the Jew, we are putting the whole town in
danger!" cried the cobbler.
"The mad fools have already thrown in some brands!"
"If you fellows up there fling any more I will break your ankles for
you," shouted a flax-dealer.
"Don't try any burning," the tailor commanded, "force open the door and
have out the Jew." These words raised a storm of applause and the mob
pressed forward to the Jew's abode. No one listened to Verus any more,
and he slipped down from his slave's shoulders, placed himself in front
of the door and called out:
"In the name of Caesar and the law I command you to leave this house
unharmed."
The Roman's warning was evidently quite in earnest, and the false Eros
looked as if at this moment it would be ill-advised to try jesting with
him. But in the universal uproar only a few had heard his words, and the
hot-blooded tailor was so rash as to lay his hand on the praetor's girdle
in order to drag him away from the door with the help of his comrades.
But he paid dearly for his temerity for the praetor's fist fell so
heavily on his forehead that he dropped as if struck by lightning. One of
the Britons knocked down the sausage-maker and a hideous hand to hand
fight would have been the upshot if help had not come to the hardly-beset
Romans from two quarters at once. The veterans supported by a number of
lictors were the first to appear, and soon after them came Benjamin, the
Jew's eldest son, who was passing down the great thoroughfare with his
boon-companions and saw the danger that was threatening his father's
house.
The soldiers parted the throng as the wind chases the clouds, and the
young Israelite pressed forward with his heavy thyrsus fought and pushed
his way so valiantly and resolutely through the panic-stricken mob, that
he reached the door of his father's house but a few moments later than
the soldiers. The lictors battered at the door and as no one opened it,
they forced it with the help of the soldiers in order to set a guard in
the beleaguered house, and protect it against the raging mob.
Verus and the officer entered the Jew's dwelling with the armed men, and
behind them came Benjamin and his friends--young Greeks with whom he was
in the habit of consorting daily, in the bath or the gymnasium.
Apollodorus and his guests expressed their gratitude to Verus, and when
the old Jewish house-keeper, who had seen and heard from a hiding-place
under the roof all that had taken place outside her master's house, came
into the men's hall and gave a full report of the uproar from beginning
to end, the praetor was overwhelmed with thanks; and the old woman
embroidered her narrative with the most glowing colors. While this was
going on Apollodorus' pretty daughter, Ismene, came in, and after falling
on her father's neck and weeping with agitation the house keeper took her
hand and led her to Verus, saying:
"This noble lord--may the blessing of the Most High be on him--staked his
life to save us. This beautiful robe he let be rent for our sakes, and
every daughter of Israel should fervently kiss this torn chiton, which in
the eyes of God is more precious than the richest robe--as I do."
And the old woman pressed the praetor's dress to her lips, and tried to
make Ismene do the same; but the praetor would not permit this.
"How can I allow my garment," he exclaimed, laughing, "to enjoy a favor
of which I should deem myself worthy--to be touched by such lips."
"Kiss him, kiss him!" cried the old woman, and the praetor took the head
of the blushing girl in his hands, and pressing his lips to her forehead
with a by no means paternal air, he said gaily:
"Now I am richly rewarded for all I have been so happy as to do for you,
Apollodorus."
"And we," exclaimed Gamaliel. "We--myself and my brother's first-born
son-leave it in the hands of God Most High to reward you for what you
have done for us."
"Who are you?" asked Verus, who was filled with admiration for the
prophet-like aspect of the venerable old man and the pale intellectual
head of his nephew.
Apollodorus took upon himself to explain to him how far the Rabbi
transcended all his fellow Hebrews in knowledge of the law and the
interpretation of the Kabbala, the oral and mystical traditions of their
people, and how that Simeon Ben Jochai was superior to all the
astrologers of his time. He spoke of the young man's much admired work on
the subject called Sohar, nor did he omit to mention that Gamaliel's
nephew was able to foretell the positions of the stars even on future
nights.
Verus listened to Apollodorus with increasing attention, and fixed a keen
gaze on the young man, who interrupted his host's eager encomium with
many modest deprecations. The praetor had recollected the near approach
of his birthday, and also that the position of stars in the night
preceding it, would certainly be observed by Hadrian. What the Emperor
might learn from them would seal his fate for life. Was that momentous
night destined to bring him nearer to the highest goal of his ambition or
to debar him from it?
When Apollodorus ceased speaking, Verus offered Simeon Ben Jochai his
hand, saying:
"I am rejoiced to have met a man of your learning and distinction. What
would I not give to possess your knowledge for a few hours!"
"My knowledge is yours," replied the astrologer. "Command my services, my
labors, my time--ask me as many questions as you will. We are so deeply
indebted to you--"
"You have no reason to regard me as your creditor," interrupted the
praetor, "you do not even owe me thanks. I only made your acquaintance
after I had rescued you, and I opposed the mob, not for the sake of any
particular man, but for that of law and order."
"You were benevolent enough to protect us," cried Ben Jochai, "so do not
be so stern as to disdain our gratitude."
"It does me honor, my learned friend; by all the gods it does me honor,"
replied Verus. "And in fact it is possible, it might very will be--Will
you do me the favor to come with me to that bust of Hipparchus? By the
aid of that science which owes so much to him you may be able to render
me an important service."
When the two men were standing apart from the others, in front of the
white marble portrait of the great astronomer, Verus asked:
"Do you know by what method Caesar is wont to presage the fates of men
from the stars?"
"Perfectly."
"From whom?"
"From Aquila, my father's disciple."
"Can you calculate what he will learn from the stars in the night
preceding the thirtieth of December, as to the destinies of a man who was
born in that night, and whose horoscope I possess?"
"I can only answer a conditional yes to that question."
"What should prevent your answering positively?"
"Unforeseen appearances in the heavens."
Are such signs common?"
"No, they are rare, on the contrary."
"But perhaps my fortune is not a common one-and I beg of you to calculate
on Hadrian's method what the heavens will predict on that night for the
man whose horoscope my slave shall deliver to you early to-morrow
morning."
"I will do so with pleasure."
"When can you have finished this work?"
"In four days at latest, perhaps even sooner."
"Capital! But one thing more. Do you regard me as a man, I mean, as a
true man?"
"If you were not, would you have given me such reason to be grateful to
you?"
"Well then, conceal nothing from me, not even the worst horrors, things
that might poison another man's life, and crush his spirit. Whatever you
read in the celestial record, small or great, good or evil. I require you
to tell me all."
"I will conceal nothing, absolutely nothing."
The praetor offered Ben Jochai his right hand, and warmly pressed the
Jew's slender, well-shaped fingers. Before he went away he settled with
him how he should inform him when he had finished his labors.
The Alexandrian with his guests and children accompanied the praetor to
the door. Only Ben Jamin was absent; he was sitting with his companions
in his father's dining-room, and rewarding them for the assistance they
had given him with right good wine. Gamaliel heard them shouting and
singing, and pointing to the room he shrugged his shoulders, saying, as
he turned to his host:
"They are returning thanks to the God of our fathers in the Alexandrian
fashion."
And peace was broken no more in the Jew's house but by the firm tramp of
lictors and soldiers who kept watch over it, under arms.
In a side street the praetor met the tailor he had knocked down, the
sausage-maker, and other ringleaders of the attack on the Israelite's
house. They were being led away prisoners before the night magistrates.
Verus would have set them at liberty with all his heart, but he knew that
the Emperor would enquire next morning what had been done to the rioters,
and so he forbore. At any other time he would certainly have sent them
home unpunished, but just now he was dominated by a wish that was more
dominant than his good nature or his facile impulses.
CHAPTER VII.
When he reached the Caesareum the high-chamberlain was waiting to conduct
him to Sabina who desired to speak with him notwithstanding the lateness
of the hour, and when Verus entered the presence of his patroness, he
found her in the greatest excitement. She was not reclining as usual on
her pillows but was pacing her room with strides of very unfeminine
length.
"It is well that you have come!" she exclaimed to the praetor. "Lentulus
insists that he has seen Mastor the slave, and Balbilla declares--but it
is impossible!"
"You think that Caesar is here?" asked Verus.
"Did they tell you so too?"
"No. I do not linger to talk when you require my presence and there is
something important to be told just now then--but you must not be
alarmed."
"No useless speeches!"
"Just now I met, in his own person--"
"Who?"
"Hadrian."
"You are not mistaken, you are sure you saw him?"
"With these eyes."
"Abominable, unworthy, disgraceful!" cried Sabina, so loudly and
violently that she was startled at the shrill tones of her own voice. Her
tall thin figure quivered with excitement, and to any one else she would
have appeared in the highest degree graceless, unwomanly, and repulsive:
but Verus had been accustomed from his childhood to see her with kinder
eyes than other men, and it grieved him.
There are women who remind us of fading flowers, extinguished lights or
vanishing shades, and they are not the least attractive of their sex: but
the large-boned, stiff and meagre Sabina had none of the yielding and
tender grace of these gentle creatures. Her feeble health, which was very
evident, became her particularly ill when, as at this moment, the harsh
acrimony of her embittered soul came to light with hideous plainness.
She was deeply indignant at the affront her husband had put upon her. Not
content with having a separate house established for her he kept aloof in
Alexandria without informing her of his arrival. Her hands trembled with
rage, and stammering rather than speaking she desired the praetor to
order a composing draught for her. When Verus returned she was lying on
her cushions, with her face turned to the wall, and said lamentably:
"I am freezing; spread that coverlet over me. I am a miserable, ill-used
creature."
"You are sensitive and take things too hardly," the praetor ventured to
remonstrate.
She started up angrily, cut off his speech, and put him through as keen a
cross-examination as if he were an accused person and she his judge. Ere
long she had learnt that Verus also had encountered Mastor, that her
husband was residing at Lochias, that he had taken part in the festival
in disguise, and had exposed himself to grave danger outside the house of
Apollodorus. She also made him tell her how the Israelite had been
rescued, and whom her friend had met in his house, and she blamed Verus
with bitter words for the heedless and foolhardy recklessness with which
he had risked his life for a miserable Jew, forgetting the high destinies
that lay before him. The praetor had not interrupted her, but now bowing
over her, he kissed her hand and said:
"Your kind heart foresees for me things that I dare not hope for.
Something is glimmering on the horizon of my fortune. Is it the dying
glow of my failing fortunes, is it the pale dawn of a coming and more
glorious day? Who can tell? I await with patience whatever may be
impending--an early day must decide."
"That will bring certainty, and put an end to this suspense," murmured
Sabina.
"Now rest and try to sleep," said Verus with a tender fervency, that was
peculiar to his tones. "It is past midnight and the physician has often
forbidden you to sit up late. Farewell, dream sweetly, and always be the
same to me as a man, that you were to me in my childhood and youth."
Sabina withdrew the hand he had taken, saying:
"But you must not leave me. I want you. I cannot exist without your
presence."
"Till to-morrow--always--forever I will stay with you whenever you need
me."
The Empress gave him her hand again, and sighed softly as he again bowed
over it, and pressed it long to his lips.
"You are my friend, Verus, truly my friend; yes, I am sure of it," she
said at last, breaking the silence.
"Oh Sabina, my Mother!" he answered tenderly. "You spoiled me with
kindness even when I was a boy, and what can I do to thank you for all
this?"
"Be always the same to me that you are to-day. Will you always--for all
time be the same, whatever your fortunes may be?"
"In joy and in adversity always the same; always your friend, always
ready to give my life for you."
"In spite of my husband, always, even when you think you no longer need
my favor!"
"Always, for without you I should be nothing--utterly miserable."
The Empress heaved a deep sigh and sat bolt upright on her couch. She had
formed a great resolve, and she said slowly, emphasizing every word:
"If nothing utterly unforeseen occurs in the heavens on your birth-night,
you shall be our son, and so Hadrian's successor and heir. I swear it."
There was something solemn in her voice, and her small eyes were wide
open.
"Sabina, Mother, guardian spirit of my life!" cried Verus, and he fell on
his knees by her couch. She looked in his handsome face with deep
emotion, laid her hands on his temples, and pressed her lips on his dark
curls.
A moist brilliancy sparkled in those eyes, unapt to tears, and in a soft
and appealing tone that no one had ever before heard in her voice she
said:
"Even at the summit of fortune, after your adoption, even in the purple
all will be the same between us two. Will it? Tell me, will it?"
"Always, always!" cried Verus. "And if our hopes are fulfilled--"
"Then, then," interrupted Sabina and she shivered as she spoke. "Then,
still you will be to me the same that you are now; but to be sure, to be
sure--the temples of the gods would be empty if mortals had nothing left
to wish for."
"Ah! no. Then they would bring thank-offerings to the divinity," cried
Verus, and he looked up at the Empress; but she turned away from his
smiling glance and exclaimed in a tone of reproof and alarm:
"No playing with words, no empty speeches or rash jesting! in the name of
all the gods, not at this time! For this hour, this night is among its
fellows what a hallowed temple is among other buildings--what the fervent
sun is among the other lights of heaven. You know not how I feel, nay, I
hardly know myself. Not now, not now, one lightly-spoken word!"
Verus gazed at Sabina with growing astonishment. She had always been
kinder to him than to any one else in the world and he felt bound to her
by all the ties of gratitude and the sweet memories of childhood. Even as
a boy, out of all his playfellows he was the only one who, far from
fearing her had clung to her. But to-night! who had ever seen Sabina in
such a mood? Was this the harsh bitter woman whose heart seemed filled
with gall, whose tongue cut like a dagger every one against whom she used
it? Was this Sabina who no doubt was kindly disposed towards him but who
loved no one else, not even herself? Did he see rightly, or was he under
some delusion? Tears, genuine, honest, unaffected tears filled her eyes
as she went on:
"Here I he, a poor sickly woman, sensitive in body and in soul as if I
were covered with wounds. Every movement, and even the gaze and the voice
of most of my fellow-creatures is a pain to me. I am old, much older than
you think and so wretched, so wretched, none of you can imagine how
wretched. I was never happy as a child, never as a girl, and as a
wife--merciful gods!--every kind word that Hadrian has ever vouchsafed me
I have paid for with a thousand humiliations."
"He always treats you with the utmost esteem," interrupted Verus.
"Before you, before the world! But what do I care for esteem! I may
demand the respect, the adoration of millions and it will be mine. Love,
love, a little unselfish love is what I ask--and if only I were sure, if
only I dared to hope that you give me such love, I would thank you with
all that I have, then this hour would be hallowed to me above all
others."
"How can you doubt me Mother? My dearly beloved Mother!"
"That is comfort, that is happiness!" answered Sabina. "Your voice is
never too loud for me, and I believe you, I dare trust you. This hour
makes you my son, makes me your mother."
Tender emotion, the emotion that softens the heart, thrilled through
Sabina's dried-up nature and sparkled in her eyes. She felt like a young
wife of whom a child is born, and the voice of her heart sings to her in
soothing tones: "It lives, it is mine, I am the providence of a living
soul, I am a mother."
She gazed blissfully into Verus' eyes and exclaimed, "Give me your hand
my son, help me up, for I will be here no longer. What good spirits I
feel in! Yes, this is the joy that is allotted to other women before
their hair is grey! But child--dear and only child--you must love me
really as a mother. I am too old for tender trifling, and yet I could not
bear it if you gave me nothing but a child's reverence. No, no, you must
be my friend whose heart warns him of my wishes, who can laugh with me
to-day, and weep with me to-morrow--and who shows that he is happier when
his eye meets mine. You are now my son; and soon you shall have the name
of son; that is happiness enough for one evening. Not another word--this
hour is like the finished masterpiece of some great painter; every touch
that could be added might spoil it. You may kiss my forehead, I will kiss
yours; now I will go to rest, and to-morrow when I wake I shall say to
myself that I possess something worth living for--a child, a son."
When the Empress was alone she raised her hand in prayer but she could
find no words of thanksgiving. One hour of pure happiness she had indeed
enjoyed, but how many days, months, years of joylessness and suffering
lay behind her! Gratitude knocked at the door of her heart but it was
instantly met by bitter defiance; what was one hour of happiness in the
balance against a ruined lifetime?
Foolish woman! she had never sown the seeds of love, and now she blamed
the gods for niggardliness and cruelty in denying her a harvest of love.
And now, on what soil had the seed of maternal tenderness fallen?
Verus it is true had left her content and full of hope--Sabina's altered
demeanor, it is true, had touched his heart--he purposed to cling to her
faithfully even after his formal adoption; but the light in his eye was
not that of a proud and happy son, on the contrary it sparkled like that
of a warrior who hopes to gain the victory.
Notwithstanding the late hour, his wife had not yet gone to bed. She had
heard that he had been summoned to the Empress on his return home, and
awaited him not without anxiety, for she was not accustomed to anything
pleasant from Sabina. Her husband's hasty step echoed loudly from the
stone walls of the sleeping palace. She heard it at some distance, and
went to the door of her room to meet him. Radiant, excited, and with
flushed cheeks, he held out both his hands to her. She looked so fair in
her white night-wrapper of fine white material, and his heart was so full
that he clasped her in his arms as fondly as when she was his bride; and
she loved him even now no less than she had done then, and felt for the
hundredth time with grateful joy that the faithless scapegrace had once
more returned to her unchangeable and faithful heart, like a sailor who,
after wandering through many lands seeks his native port.
"Lucilla," he cried, disengaging her arms from round his neck. "Oh,
Lucilla! what an evening this has been! I always judged Sabina
differently from you, and have felt with gratitude that she really cared
for me. Now all is clear between her and me! She called me her son. I
called her mother. I owe it to her, and the purple--the purple is ours!
You are the wife of Verus Caesar; you are certain of it if no signs and
omens come to frighten Hadrian."
In a few eager words, which betrayed not merely the triumph of a lucky
gambler, but also true emotion and gratitude, he related all that had
passed in Sabina's room. His frank and confident contentment silenced her
doubts, her dread of the stupendous fate which, beckoning her, yet
threatening her, drew visibly nearer and nearer. In her mind's eye she
saw the husband she loved, she saw her son, seated on the throne of the
Caesars, and she herself crowned with the radiant diadem of the woman
whom she hated with all the force of her soul. Her husband's kindly
feeling towards the Empress and the faithful allegiance which had tied
him to her from his boyhood did not disquiet her; but a wife allows the
husband of her choice every happiness, every gift excepting only the love
of another woman, and will forgive her hatred and abuse rather than such
love.
Lucilla was greatly excited, and a thought, that for years had been
locked in the inmost shrine of her heart, to-day proved too strong for
her powers of reticence. Hadrian was supposed to have murdered her
father, but no one could positively assert it, though either he or
another man had certainly slain the noble Nigrinus. At this moment the
old suspicion stirred her soul with revived force, and lifting her right
hand, as if in attestation, she exclaimed:
"Oh, Fate, Fate! that my husband should be heir of the man who murdered
my father!"
"Lucilla," interrupted Verus, "it is unjust even to think of such
horrors, and to speak of them is madness. Do not utter it a second time,
least of all to-day. What may have occurred formerly must not spoil the
present and the future which belong to us and to our children."
"Nigrinus was the grandfather of those children," cried the Roman mother
with flashing eyes.
"That is to say that you harbor in your soul the wish to avenge your
father's death on Caesar."
"I am the daughter of the butchered man."
"But you do not know the murderer, and the purple must outweigh the life
of one man, for it is often bought with many thousand lives. And then,
Lucilla, as you know, I love happy faces, and Revenge has a sinister
brow. Let us be happy, oh wife of Caesar! Tomorrow I shall have much to
tell you, now I must go to a splendid banquet which the son of Plutarch
is giving in my honor. I cannot stay with you--truly I cannot, I have
been expected long since. And when we are in Rome never let me find you
telling the children those old dismal stories--I will not have it."
As Verus, preceded by his slaves bearing torches, made his way through
the garden of the Caesareum he saw a light in the rooms of Balbilla, the
poetess, and he called up merrily:
"Good-night, fair Muse!"
"Good-night, sham Eros!" she retorted.
"You are decking yourself in borrowed feathers, Poetess," replied he,
laughing. "It is not you but the ill-mannered Alexandrians who invented
that name!"
"Oh! and other and better ones," cried she. "What I have heard and seen
to-day passes all belief!"
"And you will celebrate it in your poems?"
"Only some of it, and that in a satire which I propose to aim at you."
"I tremble!"
"With delight, it is to be hoped; my poem will embalm your memory for
posterity."
"That is true, and the more spiteful your verses, the more certainly will
future generations believe that Verus was the Phaon of Balbilla's Sappho,
and that love scorned filled the fair singer with bitterness."
"I thank you for the caution. To-day at any rate you are safe from my
verse, for I am tired to death."
"Did you venture into the streets?"
"It was quite safe, for I had a trustworthy escort."
"May I be allowed to ask who?"
"Why not? It was Pontius the architect who was with me."
"He knows the town well."
"And in his care I would trust myself to descend, like Orpheus, into
Hades."
"Happy Pontius!"
"Most happy Verus!"
"What am I to understand by those words, charming Balbilla?"
"The poor architect is able to please by being a good guide, while to you
belongs the whole heart of Lucilla, your sweet wife."
"And she has the whole of mine so far as it is not full of Balbilla.
Good-night, saucy Muse; sleep well."
"Sleep ill, you incorrigible tormentor!" cried the girl, drawing the
curtain across her window.
CHAPTER VIII.
The sleepless wretch on whom some trouble has fallen, so long as night
surrounds him, sees his future life as a boundless sea in which he is
sailing round and round like a shipwrecked man, but when the darkness
yields, the new and helpful day shows him a boat for escape close at
hand, and friendly shores in the distance.
The unfortunate Pollux also awoke towards morning with sighs many and
deep; for it seemed to him that last evening he had ruined his whole
future prospects. The workshop of his former master was henceforth closed
to him, and he no longer possessed even all the tools requisite for the
exercise of his art.
Only yesterday he had hoped with happy confidence to establish himself on
a footing of his own, to-day this seemed impossible, for the most
indispensable means were lacking to him. As he felt his little money-bag,
which he was wont to place under his pillow, he could not forbear smiling
in spite of all his troubles, for his fingers sank into the flaccid
leather, and found only two coins, one of which he knew alas! was of
copper, and the dried merry-thought bone of a fowl, which he had saved to
give to his little nieces.
Where was he to find the money he was accustomed to give his sister on
the first day of every month? Papias was on friendly terms with all the
sculptors of the city, and it was only to be expected that he would warn
them against him, and do his best to make it difficult to him to find a
new place as assistant. His old master had also been witness of Hadrian's
anger against him, and was quite the man to take every advantage of what
he had overheard. It is never a recommendation for any one that he is an
object of dislike to the powerful, and least of all does it help him with
those who look for the favor and gifts of the great men of the world.
When Hadrian should think proper to throw off his disguise, it might
easily occur to him to let Pollux feel the effects of his power. Would it
not be wise in him to quit Alexandria and seek work or daily bread in
some other Greek city?
But for Arsinoe's sake he could not turn his back on his native place. He
loved her with all the passion of his artist's soul, and his youthful
courage would certainly not have been so quickly and utterly crushed if
he could have deluded himself as to the fact that his hopes of possessing
her had been driven into the remote background by the events of the
preceding evening. How could he dare to drag her into his uncertain and
compromised position? And what reception could he hope for from her
father if he should now attempt to demand her for his wife. As these
thoughts overpowered his mind he suddenly felt as if his eyes were
smarting with sand that had blown into them, and he could not help
springing out of bed; he paced his little room with long steps, and he
held his forehead pressed against the wall.
The dawn of a new day appeared as a welcome comfort, and by the time he
had eaten the morning porridge which his mother set before him--and her
eyes were red with weeping--the idea struck him that he would go to
Pontius, the architect. That was the lifeboat he espied.
Doris shared her son's breakfast but, contrary to her usual custom, she
spoke very little, only she frequently passed her hand over her son's
curly hair. Euphorion strode up and down the room, rummaging his brain
for ideas for an ode in which he might address the Emperor and implore
forgiveness for his son. Soon after breakfast Pollux went up to the
rotunda where the Queens' busts stood, hoping to see Arsinoe again, and a
loud snatch of song soon brought her out on to the balcony. They
exchanged greetings, and Pollux signed to her to come down to him. She
would have obeyed him more than gladly, but her father had also heard the
sculptor's voice and drove her back into the room. Still the mere sight
of his beloved fair one had done the artist good. Hardly had he got back
to his father's little house when Antinous came sauntering in--he
represented in the artist's mind the hospitable shores on which he might
gaze. Hope revived his soul, and Hope is the sun before which despair
flies as the shades of night flee at the rising of the day-star.
His artistic faculties were once more roused into play, and found a field
for their freest exercise when Antinous told him that he was at his
disposal till mid-day, since his master--or rather Caesar as he was now
permitted to name him--was engaged in business. The prefect Titianus had
come to him with a whole heap of papers, to work with him and his private
secretary. Pollux at once led the favorite into a side room of the little
house, with a northern aspect; here on a table lay the wax and the
smaller implements which belonged to himself and which he had brought
home last evening. His heart ached, and his nerves were in a painful
state of tension as he began his work. All sorts of anxious thoughts
disturbed his spirit, and yet he knew that if he put his whole soul into
it he could do something good. Now, if ever, he must put forth his best
powers, and he dreaded failure as an utter catastrophe, for on the face
of the whole earth there was no second model to compare with this that
stood before him.
But he did not take long to collect himself for the Bithynian's beauty
filled him with profound feeling and it was with a sort of pious
exaltation that he grasped the plastic material and moulded it into a
form resembling his sitter. For a whole hour not a word passed between
them, but Pollux often sighed deeply and now then a groan of painful
anxiety escaped him.
Antinous broke the silence to ask Pollux about Selene. His heart was full
of her, and there was no other man who knew her, and whom he could
venture to entrust with his secret. Indeed it was only to speak to her
that he had come to the artist so early. While Pollux modelled and
scraped Antinous told him of all that had happened the previous night. He
lamented having lost the silver quiver when he was upset into the water
and regretted that the rose-colored chiton should afterwards have
suffered a reduction in length at the hands of his pursuer. An
exclamation of surprise, a word of sympathy, a short pause in the
movement of his hand and tool, were all the demonstration on the artist's
part, to which the story of Selene's adventure and the loss of his
master's costly property gave rise; his whole attention was absorbed in
his occupation. The farther his work progressed the higher rose his
admiration for his model. He felt as if intoxicated with noble wine as he
worked to reproduce this incarnation of the ideal of umblemished youthful
and manly beauty. The passion of artistic procreation fired his blood,
and threw every thing else--even the history of Selene's fall into the
sea, and her subsequent rescue--into the region of commonplace. Still he
had not been inattentive, and what he heard must have had some effect in
his mind; for long after Antinous had ended his narrative, he said in a
low voice and as if speaking to the bust, which was already assuming
definite form:
"It is a wonderful thing!" and again a little later; "There was always
something grand in that unhappy creature."
He had worked without interruption for nearly four hours, when standing
back from the table, he looked anxiously, first at his work and then at
Antinous, and then asked him:
"How will that do?"
The Bithynian gave eager expression to his approbation, and Pollux had,
in fact, done wonders in the short time. The wax began to display in a
much reduced scale the whole figure of the beautiful youth and in the
very same attitude which the young Dionysus carried off by the pirates,
had assumed the day before. The incomparable modelling of the favorite's
limbs and form was soft but not effeminate; and, as Pollux had said to
himself the day before, no artist in his happiest mood, could conceive
the Nysaean god as different from this.
While the sculptor in order to assure himself of the accuracy of his work
was measuring his model's limbs with wooden compasses and lengths of
tape, the sound of chariot-wheels was heard at the gate of the palace,
and soon after the yelping of the Graces. Doris called to the dogs to be
quiet and another high-pitched woman's voice mingled with hers. Antinous
listened and what he heard seemed to be somewhat out of the common for he
suddenly quitted the position in which the sculptor had placed him only a
few minutes before, ran to the window and called to Pollux in a subdued
voice:
"It is true! I am not mistaken! There is Hadrian's wife Sabina talking
out there to your mother."
He had heard rightly; the Empress had come to Lochias to seek out her
husband. She had got out of the chariot at the gate of the old palace for
the paving of the court-yard would not be completed before that evening.
Dogs, of which her husband was so fond, she detested; the shrewd beasts
returned her aversion, so dame Doris found it more difficult than usual
to succeed in reducing her disobedient pets to silence when they flew
viciously at the stranger. Sabina terrified, vehemently desired the old
woman to release her from their persecution, while the chamberlain who
had come with her and on whom she was leaning kicked out at the
irrepressible little wretches and so increased their spite. At last the
Graces withdrew into the house. Dame Doris drew a deep breath and turned
to the Empress.
She did not suspect who the stranger was for she had never seen Sabina
and had formed quite a different idea of her.
"Pardon me good lady," she said in her frank confiding manner. "The
little rascals mean no harm and never bite even a beggar, but they never
could endure old women. Whom do you seek here mother?"
"That you shall soon know," replied Sabina sharply, "what a state of
things, Lentulus, your architect Pontius' work has brought about. And
what must the inside be like if this but is left standing to disgrace the
entrance of the palace! It must go with its inhabitants. Desire that
woman to conduct us to the Roman lord who dwells here."
The chamberlain obeyed and Doris began to suspect who was standing before
her, and she said as she smoothed down her dress and bowed low:
"What great honor befalls us illustrious lady; perhaps you are even the
Emperor's wife? If that be the case--"
Sabina made an impatient sign to the chamberlain who interrupted the old
woman exclaiming:
"Be silent and show us the way."
Doris was not feeling particularly strong that day, and her eyes already
red with weeping about her son again filled with tears. No one had ever
spoken so to her before, and yet, for her son's sake she would not repay
sharp words in the same coin, though she had plenty at her command.
She tottered on in front of Sabina, and conducted her to the hall of the
Muses. There Pontius relieved her of the duty, and the respect he paid to
the stranger made her sure that in fact she was none other than the
Empress in person.
"An odious woman!" said Sabina, as she went on pointing to Doris, whom
her words could not escape. This was too much for the old woman; past all
self-control she flung herself on to a seat that was standing by, covered
her face with her hands and began crying bitterly. She felt as if the
very ground were snatched from under her feet.
Her son was in disgrace with Caesar, and she and her house were
threatened by the most powerful woman in the world. She pictured herself
as already turned into the streets with Euphorion and her dogs, and asked
herself what was to become of them all when they had lost their place and
the roof that covered them. Her husband's memory grew daily weaker, soon
his voice even might fail; and how greatly had her own strength failed
during the last few years, how small were the savings that were hidden in
their chest. The bright, genial old woman felt quite broken down. What
hurt her was, not merely the pressing need that threatened her, but the
disgrace too which would fall upon her, the dislike she had incurred--she
who had been liked by every one from her youth up--and the painful
feeling of having been treated with scorn and contempt in the presence of
others by the powerful lady whose favor she had hoped to win.
At Sabina's advent all good spirits had fled from Lochias, so at least
Doris felt, but she was not one of those who succumb helplessly to a
hostile force. For a few minutes she abandoned herself to her sorrows and
sobbed like a child. Now she dried her eyes, and her eased heart felt the
beneficial relief of tears; by degrees she could compose herself and
think calmly.
"After all," said she to herself, "none but Caesar can command here, and
it is said that he gets on but badly with his spiteful wife, and cares
very little what she wishes. Hadrian let Pollux feel his power, but he
has always been friendly to me. My dogs and birds amused him, and did he
not even do me the honor to relish a dish out of my kitchen? No, no, if
only I can succeed in speaking with him alone all may yet be well," and
thus thinking she rose from her seat.
As she was about to quit the anteroom the art dealer, Gabinius, of
Nicaea, came in, to whom Keraunus had refused to sell the mosaic in the
palace, and whose daughter had been deprived by Arsinoe of the part of
Roxana. Pontius had desired him to come to the palace and he had made his
appearance at once, for, since the evening before, a rumor had been
afloat that the Emperor was staying in Alexandria, and was inhabiting the
palace at Loehias. Whence it was derived, or on what facts it was
supported no one could say; but there it was, passing from mouth to mouth
in every circle and acquiring certainty every hour. Of all that grows on
earth nothing grows so quickly as Rumor, and yet it is a miserable
foundling that never knows its own parents.
The dealer pushed on into the palace with a glance of astonishment at the
old woman, while Doris debated whether see should seek Hadrian then and
there, or return to her little gate-House, and wait till he should at
some time be going out of the palace and passing by her dwelling. Before
she could come to any decision Pontius appeared on the scene; he had
always been very kind to her, and she therefore ventured to address him
and tell him what had occurred between her son and the Emperor. This was
no novelty to the architect; he advised her to have patience till Hadrian
should have cooled, and he promised her that later he would do every
thing in his power for Pollux, whom he loved and esteemed. On this very
day he was obliged by Caesar's command to start on a journey and for a
long absence; his destination was Pelusium, where he was to erect a
monument to the great Pompey on the spot where he had been murdered.
Hadrian, as he passed the old ruined monument on his way from Mount
Kasius to Egypt, had determined to replace it by a new one, and had
entrusted the work to Pontius whose labors at Lochias were now nearly
ended. All that might yet be lacking to the fitting of the restored
palace Hadrian himself wished to select and procure and in this
occupation so agreeable to his tastes, Gabinius, the curiosity-dealer,
was to lend him a helping hand.
While Doris was still speaking with Pontius, Hadrian and his wife came
towards the anteroom. Hardly had the architect recognized the tones of
Sabina's voice, than he hastily said in a low voice:
"Till by-and-bye this must do, dame. Stand aside; Caesar and the Empress
are coming."
And he hastened away. Doris slipped into the doorway of a side room,
which was closed only by a heavy curtain, for at that moment she would as
soon have met a raging wild beast as the haughty lady from whom she had
nothing to expect but insult and unkindness. Hadrian's interview with his
wife had lasted barely a quarter of an hour, and it must have been
anything rather than amiable, for his face was scarlet, while Sabina's
lips were perfectly white, and her painted cheeks twitched with a
restless movement. Doris was too much excited and terrified to listen to
the royal couple, still she overheard these words uttered by the Emperor
in a tone of the utmost decision.
"In small matters and where it is fitting I let you have your way; more
important things I shall this time, as always, decide by my own
judgment--my own exclusively."
These words were fraught with the fate of the gatehouse and its
inhabitants, for the removal of the "hideous hut" at the entrance of the
palace was one of the "small matters" of which Hadrian spoke. Sabina had
required this concession, since it could not be pleasant to any one
visiting Lochias to be received on the threshold by an old Megaera of
evil omen, and to be fallen upon by infuriated dogs. But Doris so little
divined the import of Hadrian's words that she rejoiced at them, for they
told her how little he was disposed to yield to his wife in important
things, and how could she suspect that her fate and that of her house
should not be included among important matters, nay the most important?
Sabina had quitted the anteroom leaning on her chamberlain and Hadrian
was standing there alone with his slave Mastor. The old woman would not
be likely to have another such favorable opportunity of supplicating the
all-powerful man who stood before her, without the hindrance of
witnesses, to exercise his magnaminity and clemency towards her son. His
back turned to her; if she could have seen the threatening scowl with
which he stood gazing on the ground she would surely have remembered the
architect's warning and have postponed her address till a future day.
How often do we spoil our best chances by following an urgent instinct to
arrive at certainty as early as possible, and by not being strong enough
to postpone opening our business till a favorable moment offers.
Uncertainty in the present often seems less endurable than adverse fate
in the future.
Doris stepped out of the side door. Mastor, who knew his master well, and
whose friendly impulse was to spare the old woman any humiliation, made
eager signs to warn her to withdraw and not to disturb Hadrian at that
moment; but she was so wholly possessed by her anxiety and wishes that
she did not observe them. As the Emperor turned to leave the room she
gathered courage, stood in the doorway through which he must pass, and
tried to fall on her knees before him. This was a difficult effort to her
old joints and Doris was forced to clutch at the door-post in order not
to lose her balance.
Hadrian at once recognized the suppliant, but to-day he found no kind
word for her, and the glance he cast down at her was anything rather than
gracious. How had he ever been able to find amusement even in this woeful
old body? Alas! poor Doris was quite a different creature in her little
house, among her flowers, dogs and birds to what she seemed here in the
spacious hall of a magnificent palace. This wide and gorgeous frame but
ill-suited so modest a figure. Thousands of good people who in the midst
of their everyday surroundings command our esteem and attract our regard
give rise to very different feelings when they are taken out of the
circle to which they belong.
Doris had never worn so unpleasing an aspect to Hadrian as at this
instant, in this decisive moment of her life. She had followed the
Empress straight from the kitchen-hearth just as she was after passing a
sleepless night and full of her many anxieties, she had scarcely set her
grey hair in order, and her kind bright eyes, usually the best feature of
her face, were red with many tears. The neat brisk little mother looked
to-day anything rather than smart and bright; in the Emperor's eyes she
was in no way distinguished from any other old woman, and he regarded all
old women as of evil omen, if he met them as he went out of any place he
was in.
"Oh, Caesar, Great Caesar!" cried Doris throwing up her hands which still
bore many traces of her labors over the hearth. "My son, my unfortunate
Pollux!"
"Out of my way!" said Hadrian sternly.
"He is an artist, a good artist, who already excels many a master, and if
the gods--"
"Out of the way, I told you. I do not want to hear anything about the
insolent fellow," said Hadrian angrily.
"But Great Caesar, he is my son, and a mother, as you know--"
"Mastor," interrupted the monarch, "carry away this old woman and make
way for me."
"Oh! my lord, my lord!" wailed the agonized woman while the slave pulled
her up, not without difficulty. "Oh! my lord, how can you find it in your
heart to be so cruel? And am I no longer old Doris whom you have even
joked with, and whose food you have eaten?"
These words recalled to the Emperor's fancy the moment of his arrival at
Lochias; he felt that he was somewhat in the old woman's debt, and being
wont to pay with royal liberality he broke in with:
"You shall be paid for your excellent dish a sum with which you can
purchase a new house, for the future your maintenance too shall be
provided for, but in three hours you must have quitted Lochias."
The Emperor spoke rapidly as though desirous of bringing a disagreeable
business to a prompt termination, and he stalked past Doris who was now
standing on her feet and leaning as if stunned against the doorpost.
Indeed if Hadrian had not left her there and had he been in the mood to
hear her farther, she was not now in a fit state to answer him another
word.
The Emperor received the honors due to Zeus and his fiat had ruined the
happiness of a contented home as completely as the thunderbolt wielded by
the Father of the gods could have done.
But this time Doris had no tears. The frightful shock that had fallen in
her soul was perceptible also to her body; her knees shook, and being
quite incapable just then of going home at once, she sunk upon a seat and
stared hopelessly before her while she reflected what next, and what more
would come upon her.
Meanwhile the Emperor was standing in a room just behind the antechamber
that had only been finished a few hours since. He began to regret his
hardness upon the old woman--for had she not, without knowing who he was,
been most friendly to him and to his favorite. "Where is Antinous?" he
asked Mastor.
"He went out to the gate-house."
"What is he doing there?"
"I believe he meant--there, perhaps he--"
"The truth, fellow!"
"He is with Pollux the sculptor."
"Has he been there long?"
"I do not exactly know."
"How long, I ask you?"
"He went after you had shut yourself in with Titianus."
"Three hours--three whole hours has he been with that braggart, whom I
ordered off the premises!" Hadrian's eye sparkled wrathfully as he spoke.
His annoyance at the absence of his favorite, whose society he permitted
no one to enjoy but himself, and least of all Pollux, smothered every
kind feeling in his mind, and in a tone of anger bordering on fury he
commanded Mastor to go and fetch Antinous, and then to have the
gate-house utterly cleared out.
"Take a dozen slaves to help you," he cried. "For aught I care the people
may carry all their rubbish into a new house, but I will never set eyes
again on that howling old woman, nor her imbecile husband. As for the
sculptor I will make him feel that Caesar has a heavy foot and can
unexpectedly crush a snake that creeps across his path."
Mastor went sadly away and Hadrian returned to his work-room, and there
called out to his secretary Phlegon:
"Write that a new gate-keeper is to be found for this palace. Euphorion,
the old one, is to have his pay continued to him, and half a talent is to
be paid to him at the prefect's office. Good--Let the man have at once
whatever is necessary; in an hour neither he nor his are to be found in
Lochias. Henceforth no one is to mention them to me again, nor to bring
me any petition from them. Their whole race may join the rest of the
dead."
Phlegon bowed and said:
"Gabinius, the curiosity-dealer, waits outside."
"He comes at an appropriate moment," cried the Emperor. "After all these
vexations it will do me good to hear about beautiful things."
CHAPTER IX.
Aye, truly! Sabina's advent had chased all good spirits from the palace
at Lochias.
The Emperor's commands had come upon the peaceful little house as a
whirlwind comes on a heap of leaves. The inhabitants were not even
allowed time fully to realize their misfortune, for instead of bewailing
themselves all they could do was to act with circumspection. The tables,
seats, cushions, beds and lutes, the baskets, plants, and bird-cages, the
kitchen utensils and the trunks with their clothes were all piled in
confusion in the courtyard, and Doris was employing the slaves appointed
by Mastor in the task of emptying the house, as briskly and carefully as
though it was nothing more than a move from one house to another. A ray
of the sunny brightness of her nature once more sparkled in her eyes
since she had been able to say to herself that all that happened to her
and hers was one of the things inevitable, and that it was more to the
purpose to think of the future than of the past. The old woman was quite
herself again over the work, and as she looked at Euphorion, who sat
quite crushed on his couch with his eyes fixed on the ground, she cried
out to him:
"After bad times, come good ones! only let us keep from making ourselves
miserable. We have done nothing wrong, and so long as we do not think
ourselves wretched, we are not so. Only, hold up your head!
"Up, old man, up! Go at once to Diotima and tell her that we beg her to
give us hospitality for a few days, and house-room for our chattels."
"And if Caesar does not keep his word?" asked Euphorion gloomily. "What
sort of a life shall we live then?"
"A bad one-a dog's life; and for that very reason it is wiser to enjoy
now what we still possess. A cup of wine, Pollux, for me and your father.
But there must be no water in it to-day."
"I cannot drink," sighed Euphorion.
"Then I will drink your share and my own too." Nay-nay, mother,"
remonstrated Pollux.
"Well put some water in, lad, just a little water, only do not make such
a pitiful face. Is that the way a young fellow should look who has his
art, and plenty of strength in his hands, and the sweetest of sweethearts
in his heart?"
"It is certainly not for myself, mother," retorted the sculptor, "that I
am anxious. But how am I ever to get into the palace again to see
Arsinoe, and how am I to deal with that ferocious old Keraunus?"
"Leave that question for time to answer," replied Doris.
"Time may give a good answer, but it may also give a bad one."
"And the best she only gives to those who wait for her in the antechamber
of Patience."
"A bad place for me, and for those like me," sighed Pollux.
"You have only to sit still and go on knocking at the doors," replied
Doris, "and before you can look round you Time will call out, 'come in.'
Now show the men how they are to treat the statue of Apollo, and be my
own happy, bright boy once more."
Pollux did as she desired, thinking as he went: "She speaks wisely--she
is not leaving Arsinoe behind. If only I had been able to arrange with
Antinous at least, where I should find him again; but at Caesar's orders
the young fellow was like one stunned, and he tottered as he went, as if
he were going to execution."
Dame Doris had not been betrayed by her happy confidence, for Phlegon the
secretary came to inform her of the Emperor's purpose to give her husband
half a talent, and to continue to pay him in the future his little
salary.
"You see," cried the old woman, "the sun of better days is already
rising. Half a talent! Why poverty has nothing to do with such rich folks
as we are! What do you think--would it not be right to pour out half a
cup of wine to the gods, and allow ourselves the other half?"
Doris was as gay as if she were going to a wedding, and her cheerfulness
communicated itself to her son, who saw himself relieved of part of the
anxiety that weighed upon him with regard to his parents and sister. His
drooping courage, and spirit for life, only needed a few drops of kindly
dew to revive it, and he once more began to think of his art. Before
anything else he would try to complete his successfully-sketched bust of
Antinous.
While he was gone back into the house to preserve his work from injury
and was giving the slaves, whom he had desired to follow him,
instructions as to how it should be carried so as not to damage it, his
master Papias came into the palace-court. He had come to put the last
touches to the works he had begun, and proposed to make a fresh attempt
to win the favor of the man whom he now knew to be the Emperor. Papias
was somewhat uneasy for he was alarmed at the thought that Pollux might
now betray how small a share his master had in his last works--which had
brought him higher praise than all he had done previously. It might even
have been wise on his part to pocket his pride and to induce his former
scholar, by lavish promises, to return to his workshop; but the evening
before he had been betrayed into speaking before the Emperor with so much
indignation at the young artist's evil disposition, of his delight at
being rid of him, that, on Hadrian's account, he must give up that idea.
Nothing was now to be done, but to procure the removal of Pollux from
Alexandria, or to render him in some way incapable of damaging him, and
this he might perhaps be able to do by the instrumentality of the
wrathful Emperor.
It even came into his mind to hire some Egyptian rascal to have him
assassinated; but he was a citizen of peaceful habits, to whom a breach
of the law was an abomination and he cast the thought from him as too
horrible and base. He was not over-nice in his choice of means, he knew
men, was very capable of finding his way up the backstairs, and did not
hesitate when need arose to calumniate others boldly, and thus he had
before now won the day in many a battle against his fellow-artists of
distinction. His hope of succeeding in the tripping of a scholar of no
great repute, and of rendering him harmless so long as the Emperor should
remain in Alexandria, was certainly not an over-bold one. He hated the
gate-keeper's son far less than he feared him, and he did not conceal
from himself that if his attack on Pollux should fail and the young
fellow should succeed in proving independently of what he was capable he
could do nothing to prevent his loudly proclaiming all that he had done
in these last years for his master.
His attention was caught by the slaves in Euphorion's little house, who
were carrying the household chattels of the evicted family into the
street. He had soon learnt what was going forward, and highly pleased at
the ill-will manifested by Hadrian towards the parents of his foe, he
stood looking on, and after brief reflection desired a negro to call
Pollux to speak to him.
The master and scholar exchanged greetings with a show of haughty
coolness and Papias said:
"You forgot to bring back the things which yesterday, without asking my
leave, you took out of my wardrobe. I must have them back to-day."
"I did not take them for myself, but for the grand lord in there, and his
companion. If any thing is missing apply to him. It grieves me that I
should have taken your silver quiver among them, for the Roman's
companion has lost it. As soon as I have done here, I will take home all
of your things that I can recover, and bring away my own. A good many
things belonging to me are still lying in your workshop."
"Good," replied Papias. "I will expect you an hour before sunset, and
then we will settle every thing," and without any farewell he turned his
back on his pupil and went into the palace.
Pollux had told him that some of the properties, which he had taken
without asking permission, had been lost-among them an object of
considerable value--and this perhaps would give him a hold over him by
which to prevent his injuring him. He remained in the palace scarcely
half an hour and then, while Pollux was still engaged in escorting his
mother and their household goods to his sister's house, he went to visit
the night magistrate, who presided over the safety of Alexandria. Papias
was on intimate terms with this important official, for he had
constructed for him a sarcophagus for his deceased wife, an altar with
panels in relief for his men's apartment, and other works, at moderate
prices, and he could count on his readiness to serve him. When he quitted
him he carried in his hand an order of arrest against his assistant
Pollux, who had attacked his property and abstracted a quiver of massive
silver. The magistrate had also promised him to send two of his guards
who would carry the offender off to prison.
Papias went home with a much lighter heart. His pupil, after he had
accomplished the easy transfer of his parents, had returned to the
palace, and there, to his delight, came across Mastor, who soon fetched
him the garments and masks that he had lent the day before to Hadrian and
Antinous. The Sarmatian at the same time told him, with tears in his
eyes, a sad, very sad story, which stirred the young sculptor's soul
deeply, and which would have prompted him to penetrate into the palace at
once, and at any risk, if he had not seen the necessity of being with
Papias at the appointed hour, which was drawing near, to answer for the
valuable property that was missing. Thinking of nothing, wishing nothing
so much as to be back as promptly as possible at Lochias, where he was
much needed, and where his heart longed to be, he took the bundle out of
the slave's hand and hurried away. Papias had sent all his assistants and
even his slaves off the premises; he received the breathless Pollux quite
alone, and took from him, with icy calmness, the things which had been
borrowed from his property-room, asking for them one by one.
"I have already told you," cried Pollux, "that it is not I, but the
illustrious Roman--you know as well as I do, who he is--who is answerable
for the silver quiver and the torn chiton." And he began to tell him how
Antinous had commanded him, in the name of his master, to find masks and
disguises for them both. But Papias cut off his speech at the very
beginning, and vehemently demanded the restoration of his quiver and bow,
of which Pollux could not work out the value in two years. The young man
whose heart and thoughts were at Lochias and who, at any cost, did not
want to be detained longer than was necessary, begged his master, with
all possible politeness, to let him go now, and to settle the matter with
him to-morrow after he had discussed it with the Roman, from whom he
might certainly demand any compensation he chose. But when Papias
interrupted him again and again, and obstinately insisted on the
immediate restoration of his property, the artist whose blood was easily
heated, grew angry and replied to the attacks and questions of the older
man with vehement response.
One angry word led to another, and at last Papias hinted of persons who
took possession of other person's silver goods, and when Pollux retorted
that he knew of some who could put forward the works of others as their
own, the master struck his fist upon the table, and going towards the
door he cried out, as soon as he was at a safe distance from the furious
lad's powerful fists:
"Thief! I will show you how fellows like you are dealt with in
Alexandria."
Pollux turned white with rage, and rushed upon Papias, who fled, and
before Pollux could reach him he had taken refuge behind the two guards
sent by the magistrate, and who were waiting in the antechamber.
"Seize the thief!" he cried. "Hold the villain who stole my silver quiver
and now raises his hand against his master. Bind him, fetter him, carry
him off to prison."
Pollux did not know what had come upon him; he stood like a bear that has
been surrounded by hunters; doubtful but at bay. Should he fling himself
upon his pursuers and fell them to the earth? should he passively await
impending fate?
He knew every stone in his master's house; the anteroom in which he
stood, and indeed the whole building was on the ground floor. In the
minute while the guards were approaching and his master was giving the
order to the lictor, his eye fell on a window which looked out upon the
street, and possessed only by the single thought of defending his liberty
and returning quickly to Arsinoe he leaped out of the opening which
promised safety and into the street below.
"Thief--stop thief!" he heard as he flew on with long strides; and like
the pelting of rain driven by all the four winds came from all sides the
senseless, odious, horrible cry: "Stop thief!--stop thief!" it seemed to
deprive him of his senses.
But the passionate cry of his heart: "To Lochias, to Arsinoe! keep free,
save your liberty if only to be of use at Lochias!" drowned the shouts of
his pursuers and urged him through the streets that led to the old
palace,
On he went faster and farther, each step a leap; the briny breeze from
the sea already fanned his glowing cheeks and the narrow empty street
yonder he well knew led to the quay by the King's harbor, where he could
hide from his pursuers among the tall piles of wood. He was just turning
the corner into the alley when an Egyptian ox-driver threw his goad
between his legs; he stumbled, fell to the ground, and instantly felt
that a dog which had rushed upon him was tearing the chiton he wore,
while he was seized by a number of men. An hour later and he found
himself in prison, bitten, beaten, and bound among a crew of malefactors
and real thieves.
Night had fallen. His parents were waiting for him and he came not; and
in Lochias which he had not been able to reach there were misery and
trouble enough, and the only person in the world who could carry comfort
to Arsinoe in her despair was absent and nowhere to be found.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Dried merry-thought bone of a fowl
More to the purpose to think of the future than of the past
So long as we do not think ourselves wretched, we are not so
Temples would be empty if mortals had nothing left to wish for
THE EMPEROR
By Georg Ebers
Volume 8.
CHAPTER X.
The story told by Mastor which had so greatly agitated Pollux and had
prompted him to his mad flight was the history of events which had taken
place in the steward's rooms during the hours when the young artist was
helping his parents to transfer their household belongings into his
sister's tiny dwelling. Keraunus was certainly not one of the most
cheerful of men, but on the morning when Sabina came to the palace and
the gate-keeper was driven from his home, he had worn the aspect of a
thoroughly-contented man.
Since visiting Selene the day before he had given himself no farther
concern about her. She was not dangerously ill and was exceptionally well
taken care of, and the children did not seem to miss her. Indeed, he
himself did not want her back to-day. He avoided confessing this to
himself it is true, still he felt lighter and freer in the absence of his
grave monitor than he had been for a long time. It would be delightful,
he thought, to go on living in this careless manner, alone with Arsinoe
and the children, and now and again he rubbed his hands and grinned
complacently. When the old slave-woman brought a large dish full of cakes
which he had desired her to buy, and set it down by the side of the
children's porridge, he chuckled so heartily that his fat person shook
and swayed; and he had very good reason to be happy in his way, for
Plutarch quite early in the morning, had sent a heavy purse of gold
pieces for his ivory cup, and a magnificent bunch of roses to Arsinoe; he
might give his children a treat, buy himself a solid gold fillet, and
dress Arsinoe as finely as though she were the prefect's favorite
daughter.
His vanity was gratified in every particular.
And what a splendid fellow was the slave who now--with a superbly
reverential bow-presented him with a roast chicken and who was to walk
behind him in the afternoon to the council-chamber. The tall Thessalian
who marched after the Archidikastes to the Hall of justice, carrying his
papers, was hardly grander than his "body-servant." He had bought him
yesterday at quite a low price. The well-grown Samian was scarcely thirty
years old; he could read and write and was in a position therefore to
instruct the children in these arts; nay, he could even play the lute.
His past, to be sure, was not a spotless record, and it was for that
reason that he had been sold so cheaply. He had stolen things on several
occasions; but the brands and scars which he bore upon his person were
hidden by his new chiton and Keraunus felt in himself the power to cure
him of his evil propensities.
After desiring Arsinoe to let nothing he about of any value, for their
new house-mate seemed not to be perfectly honest, he answered his
daughter's scruples by saying:
"It would be better, no doubt, that he should be as honest as the old
skeleton I gave in exchange for him, but I reflect that even if my
body-servant should make away with some of the few drachmae we carry
about with us, I need not repent of having bought him, since I got him
for many thousand drachmae less than he is worth, on account of his
thefts, while a teacher for the children would have cost more than he can
steal from us at the worst. I will lock up the gold in the chest with my
documents. It is strong and could only be opened with a crow-bar. Besides
the fellow will have left off stealing at any rate at first, for his late
master was none of the mildest and had cured him of his pilfering I
should think, once for all. It is lucky that in selling such rascals we
should be compelled to state what their faults are; if the seller fails
to do so compensation maybe claimed from him by the next owner for what
he may lose. Lykophron certainly concealed nothing, and setting aside his
thieving propensities the Samian is said to be in every respect a capital
fellow."
"But father," replied Arsinoe, her anxiety once more urging her to speak,
"it is a bad thing to have a dishonest man in the house."
"You know nothing about it child!" answered Keraunus. "To us to live and
to be honest are the same thing, but a slave!--King Antiochus is said to
have declared that the man who wishes to be well served must employ none
but rascals."
When Arsinoe had been tempted out on to the balcony by her lover's snatch
of song and had been driven in again by her father, the steward had not
reproved her in any way unkindly, but had stroked her cheeks and said
with a smile: "I rather fancy that lad of the gatekeeper's--whom I once
turned out of doors has had his eye on you since you were chosen for
Roxana. Poor wretch! But we have very different suitors in view for you
my little girl. How would it be, think you, if rich Plutarch had sent you
those roses, not on his own behalf but as a greeting on the part of his
son? I know that he is very desirous of marrying him but the fastidious
man has never yet thought any Alexandrian girl good enough for him."
"I do not know him, and he does not think of a poor thing like me," said
Arsinoe.
"Do you think not?" asked Keraunus smiling. "We are of as good family,
nay of a better than Plutarch, and the fairest is a match for the
wealthiest. What would you say child to a long flowing purple robe and a
chariot with white horses, and runners in front?"
At breakfast Keraunus drank two cups of strong wine, in which he allowed
Arsinoe to mix only a few drops of water. While his daughter was curling
his hair a swallow flew into the room; this was a good omen and raised
the steward's spirits. Dressed in his best and with a well-filled purse,
he was on the point of starting for the council-chamber with his new
slave when Sophilus the tailor and his girl-assistant were shown into the
living-room. The man begged to be allowed to try the dress, ordered for
Roxana by the prefect's wife, on the steward's daughter. Keraunus
received him with much condescension and allowed him to bring in the
slave who followed him with a large parcel of dresses,--and Arsinoe, who
was with the children, was called.
Arsinoe was embarrassed and anxious and would far rather have yielded her
part to another; still, she was curious about the new dresses. The tailor
begged her to allow her maid to dress her; his assistant would help her
because the dresses which were only slightly stitched together for trying
on, were cut, not in the Greek but in the Oriental fashion.
"Your waiting woman," he added turning to Arsinoe, "will be able to learn
to-day the way to dress you on the great occasion."
"My daughter's maid," said Keraunus, winking slily at Arsinoe, "is not in
the house."
"Oh, I require no help," cried the tailor's girl. "I am handy too at
dressing hair, and I am most glad to help such a fair Roxana."
"And it is a real pleasure to work for her," added Sophilus. "Other young
ladies are beautified by what they wear, but your daughter adds beauty to
all she wears."
"You are most polite," said Keraunus, as Arsinoe and her handmaid left
the room.
"We learn a great deal by our intercourse with people of rank," replied
the tailor. "The illustrious ladies who honor me with their custom like
not only to see but to hear what is pleasing. Unfortunately there are
among them some whom the gods have graced with but few charms, and they,
strangely enough, crave the most flattering speeches. But the poor always
value it more than the rich when benevolence is shown them."
"Well said," cried Keraunus. "I myself am but indifferently well off for
a man of family, and am glad to live within my moderate means--so that my
daughter--"
"The lady Julia has chosen the costliest stuffs for her; as is
fitting--as the occasion demands," said the tailor. "Quite right, at the
same time--"
"Well, my lord?"
"The grand occasion will be over and my daughter, now that she is grown
up, ought to be seen at home and in the street in suitable and handsome,
though not costly, clothes.
"I said just now, true beauty needs no gaudy raiment."
"Would you be disposed now, to work for me at a moderate price?"
"With pleasure; nay, I shall be indebted to her, for all the world will
admire Roxana and inquire who may be her tailor."
"You are a very reasonable and right-minded man. What now would you
charge for a dress for her?"
"That we can discuss later."
"No, no, I beg you sincerely--"
"First let me consider what you want. Simple dresses are more difficult,
far more difficult to make, and yet become a handsome woman better than
rich and gaudy robes. But can any man make a woman understand it? I could
tell you a tale of their folly! Why many a woman who rides by in her
chariot wears dresses and gems to conceal not merely her own limbs, but
the poverty-stricken condition of her house."
Thus, and in this wise did Keraunus and the tailor converse, while the
assistant plaited up Arsinoe's hair with strings of false pearls that she
had brought with tier, and fitted and pinned on her the costly white and
blue silk robes of an Asiatic princess. At first Arsinoe was very still
and timid. She no longer cared to dress for any one but Pollux; but the
garments prepared for her were wonderfully pretty--and how well the
fitter knew how to give effect to her natural advantages. While the
neat-handed woman worked busily and carefully many merry jests passed
between them--many sincere and hearty words of admiration--and before
long Arsinoe had become quite excited and took pleased interest in the
needle-woman's labors.
Every bough that is freshly decked by spring seems to feel gladness, and
the simple child who was to-day so splendidly dressed was captivated by
pleasure in her own beauty, and its costly adornment which delighted her
beyond measure. Arsinoe now clapped her hands with delight, now had the
mirror handed to her, and now, with all the frankness of a child,
expressed her satisfaction not only with the costly clothes she wore, but
with her own surprisingly grand appearance in them.
The dress-maker was enchanted with her, proud and delighted, and could
not resist the impulse to give a kiss to the charming girl's white,
beautifully round throat.
"If only Pollux could see me so!" thought Arsinoe. "After the performance
perhaps I might show myself in my dress to Selene, and then she would
forgive my taking part in the show. It is really a pleasure to look so
nice!"
The children all stood round her while she was being dressed, and shouted
with admiration each time some new detail of the princess's attire was
added. Helios begged to be allowed to feel her dress, and after
satisfying herself that his little hands were clean she stroked them over
the glistening white silk.
She had now advanced so far that her father and the tailor could be
called in. She felt remarkably content and happy. Drawn up to her
tallest, like a real king's daughter, and yet with a heart beating as
anxiously as that of any girl would who is on the point of displaying her
beauty--hitherto protected and hidden in her parents' home--to the
thousand eyes of the gaping multitude, she went towards the sitting-room;
but she drew back her hand she had put forth to raise the latch, for she
heard the voices of several men who must just now have joined her father.
"Wait a little while, there are visitors," she cried to the seamstress
who had followed her, and she put her ear to the door to listen. At first
she could not make out anything that was going on, but the end of the
strange conversation that was being carried on within was so hideously
intelligible that she could never forget it so long as she lived.
Her father had ordered two new dresses for her, beating down the price
with the promise of prompt payment, when Mastor came into the steward's
room and informed Keraunus that his master and Gabinius, the
curiosity-dealer from Nicaea, wished to speak with him.
"Your master," said Keraunus haughtily, "may come in; I think that he
regrets the injury he has done me; but Gabinius shall never cross this
threshold again, for he is a scoundrel."
"It would be as well that you should desire that man to leave you for the
present," said the slave, pointing to the tailor.
"Whoever comes to visit me," said the steward loftily, "must be satisfied
to meet any one whom I permit to enter my house."
"Nay, nay," said the slave urgently, "my master is a greater man than you
think. Beg this man to leave the room."
"I know, I know very well," said Keraunus with a smile. "Your master is
an acquaintance of Caesar's. But we shall see, after the performance that
is about to take place, which of us two Caesar will decide for. This
tailor has business here and will stay at my pleasure. Sit in the corner
there, my friend."
"A tailor!" cried Mastor, horrified. "I tell you he must go."
"He must!" asked Keraunus wrathfully. "A slave dares to give orders in my
house? We will see."
"I am going," interrupted the artisan who understood the case. "No
unpleasantness shall arise here on my account, I will return in a quarter
of an hour."
"You will stay," commanded Keraunus. "This insolent Roman seems to think
that Lochias belongs to him; but I will show him who is master here."
But Mastor paid no heed to these words spoken in a high pitch; he took
the tailor's hand and led him out, whispering to him:
"Come with me if you wish to escape an evil hour."
The two men went off and Keraunus did not detain the artisan, for it
occurred to his mind that his presence did him small credit. He purposed
to show himself in all his dignity to the overbearing architect, but he
also remembered that it was not advisable to provoke unnecessarily the
mysterious bearded stranger, with the big clog. Much excited, and not
altogether free from anxiety, he paced up and down his room. To give
himself courage he hastily filled a cup from the wine-jar that stood on
the breakfast table, emptied it, refilled it and drank it off a second
time without adding any water, and then stood with his arms folded and a
strong color in his face awaiting his enemy's visit.
The Emperor walked in with Gabinius. Keraunus expected some greeting, but
Hadrian spoke not a word, cast a glance at him of the utmost contempt and
passed by him without taking any more notice of him than if he had been a
pillar or a piece of furniture. The blood mounted to the steward's head
and heated his eyes and for fully a minute he strove in vain to find
words to give utterance to his rage. Gabinius paid no more heed to
Keraunus than the Roman had done. He walked on ahead and paused in front
of the mosaic for which he had offered so high a price, and over which a
few days since he had been so sharply dealt with by the steward.
"I would beg you," he said, "to look at this masterpiece."
The Emperor looked at the ground, but hardly had he begun to study the
picture, of which he quite understood and appreciated the beauty, when
just behind him he heard in a hoarse voice these words uttered with
difficulty:
"In Alexandria--it is the custom, to greet--to say something--to the
people you visit." Hadrian half turned his head towards the speaker and
said indifferently but with strong and insulting contempt:
"In Rome too it is the custom to greet honest people." Then looking down
again at the mosaic he said, "Exquisite, exquisite an inestimable and
precious work." At Hadrian's words Keraunus' eyes almost started out of
his head. His face was crimson and his lips pale; he went close up to him
and as soon as he had found breath to speak he said:
"What have you--what are your words intended to convey?"
Hadrian turned suddenly and full upon the steward; in his eyes sparkled
that annihilating fire which few could endure to gaze on and his deep
voice rolled sullenly through the room as he said to the miserable man:
"My words are intended to convey that you have been an unfaithful
steward, that I know what you would rather I should not know, that I have
learned how you deal with the property entrusted to you, that you--"
"That I?"--cried the steward trembling with rage and stepping close up to
the Emperor.
"That you," shouted Hadrian in his face, "tried to sell this picture to
this man; in short that you are a simpleton and a scoundrel into the
bargain."
"I--I," gasped Keraunus slapping his hand on his fat chest. "I--a--a--but
you shall repent of these words."
Hadrian laughed coldly and scornfully, but Keraunus sprang on Gabinius
with a wonderful agility for his size, clutched him by the collar of his
chiton and shook the feeble little man as if he were a sapling, shrieking
meanwhile:
"I will choke you with your own lies--serpent, mean viper!"
"Madman!" cried Hadrian "leave hold of the Ligurian or by Sirius you
shall repent it."
"Repent it?" gasped the steward. "It will be your turn to repent when
Caesar comes. Then will come a day of reckoning with false witnesses,
shameless calumniators who disturb peaceful households, while credulous
idiots--"
"Man, man," interrupted Hadrian, not loudly but sternly and ominously,
"you know not to whom you speak."
"Oh I know you--I know you only too well. But I--I--shall I tell you who
I am?"
"You--you are a blockhead," replied the monarch shrugging his shoulders
contemptuously. Then he added calmly, with dignity--almost with
indifference:
"I am Caesar."
At these words the steward's hand dropped from the chiton of the
half-throttled dealer. Speechless and with a glassy stare he gazed in
Hadrian's face for a few seconds. Then he suddenly started, staggered
backwards, uttered a loud choking, gurgling, nameless cry, and fell back
on the floor like a mass of rock shaken from its foundations by an
earthquake. The room shook again with his fall.
Hadrian was startled and when he saw him lying motionless at his feet he
bent over him--less from pity than from a wish to see what was the matter
with him; for he had also dabbled in medicine. Just as he was lifting the
fallen man's hand to feel his pulse Arsinoe rushed into the room. She had
heard the last words of the antagonists with breathless anxiety and her
father's fall and now threw herself on her knees by the side of the
unhappy man, just opposite to Hadrian, and as his distorted and
grey-white face told her what had occurred she broke out in a passionate
cry of anguish. Her brothers and sisters followed at her heels, and when
they saw their favorite sister bewailing herself they followed her
example without knowing at first what Arsinoe was crying for, but soon
with terror and horror at their father lying there stiff and disfigured.
The Emperor, who had never had either son or daughter of his own, found
nothing so intolerable as the presence of crying children. However he
endured the wailing and whimpering that surrounded him till he had
ascertained the condition of the man lying on the ground before him.
"He is dead," he said in a few minutes. "Cover his face, Master."
Arsinoe and the children broke out afresh, and Hadrian glanced down at
them with annoyance. When his eye fell on Arsinoe, whose costly robe,
merely pinned and slightly stitched together had come undone with the
vehemence of her movements and were hanging as flapping rags in tumbled
disorder, he was disgusted with the gaudy fluttering trumpery which
contrasted so painfully with the grief of the wearer, and turning his
back on the fair girl he quitted the chamber of misery.
Gabinius followed him with a hideous smirk. He had directed the Emperor's
attention to the mosaic pavement in the steward's room, and had
shamelessly accused Keraunus of having offered to sell him a work that
belonged to the palace, contrasting his conduct with his own rectitude.
Now the calumniated man was dead, and the truth could never come to
light; this was necessarily a satisfaction to the miserable man, but he
derived even greater pleasure from the reflection that Arsinoe could not
now fill the part of Roxana, and that consequently there was once more a
possibility that it might devolve on his daughter.
Hadrian walked on in front of him, silent and thoughtful. Gabinius
followed him into his writing-room, and there said with fulsome
smoothness:
"Ah, great Caesar, thus do the gods punish with a heavy hand the crimes
of the guilty."
Hadrian did not interrupt him, but he looked him keenly and enquiringly
in the face, and then said, gravely, but coolly:
"It seems to me, man, that I should do well to break off my connection
with you, and to give some other dealer the commissions which I proposed
to entrust to you."
"Caesar!" stammered Gabinius, "I really do not know--"
"But I do know," interrupted the Emperor. "You have attempted to mislead
me, and throw your own guilt on the shoulders of another."
"I--great Caesar? I have attempted--" began the Ligurian, while his
pinched features turned an ashy grey. "You accused the steward of a
dishonorable trick," replied Hadrian. "But I know men well, and I know
that no thief ever yet died of being called a scoundrel. It is only
undeserved disgrace that can cost a man's life."
"Keraunus was full-blooded, and the shock when he learnt that you were
Caesar--"
"That shock accelerated the end no doubt," interrupted the monarch, "but
the mosaic in the steward's room is worth a million of sesterces, and now
I have seen enough to be quite sure that you are not the man to save your
money when a work like that mosaic is offered you for sale--be the
circumstances what they may. If I see the case rightly, it was Keraunus
who refused your demand that he should resign to you the treasure in his
charge. Certainly, that was the case exactly! Now, leave me. I wish to be
alone."
Gabinius retired with many bows, walking backwards to the door, and then
turned his back on the palace of Lochias muttering many impotent curses
as he went.
The steward's new 'body-servant,' the old black woman, Mastor, the tailor
and his slave, helped Arsinoe to carry her father's lifeless body and lay
it on a couch, and the slave closed his eyes. He was dead--so each told
the despairing girl, but she would not, could not believe it. As soon as
she was alone with the old negress and the dead, she lifted up his heavy,
clumsy arm, and as soon as she let go her hold it fell by his side like
lead. She lifted the cloth from the dead man's face, but she flung it
over him again at once, for death had drawn his features. Then she kissed
his cold hand and brought the children in and made them do the same, and
said sobbing:
"We have no father now; we shall never, never see him again."
The little blind boy felt the dead body with his hands, and asked his
sister:
"Will he not wake again to-morrow morning and make you curl his hair, and
take me up on his knee?"
"Never, never; he is gone, gone for ever."
As she spoke Mastor entered the room, sent by his master. Yesterday had
he not heard from the overseer of the pavement-workers the comforting
tidings that after our grief and suffering here on earth there would be
another, beautiful, blissful and eternal life? He went kindly up to
Arsinoe and said:
"No, no, my children; when we are dead we become beautiful angels with
colored wings, and all who have loved each other here on earth will meet
again in the presence of the good God."
Arsinoe looked at the slave with disapproval.
"What is the use," she asked, "of cheating the children with silly tales?
Their father is gone, quite gone, but we will never, never forget him."
"Are there any angels with red wings?" asked the youngest little girl.
"Oh! I want to be an angel!" cried Helios, clapping his hands. "And can
the angels see?"
"Yes, dear little man," replied Mastor, "and their eyes are wonderfully
bright, and all they look upon is beautiful."
"Tell them no more Christian nonsense," begged Arsinoe. "Ah! children,
when we shall have burned our father's body there will be nothing left of
him but a few grey ashes."
But the slave took the little blind boy on his knees and whispered to
him:
"Only believe what I tell you--you will see him again in Heaven."
Then he set him down again, gave Arsinoe a little bag of gold pieces in
Caesar's name, and begged her--for so his master desired--to find a new
abode and, after the deceased was burned on the morrow, to quit Lochias
with the children. When Mastor was gone Arsinoe opened the chest, in
which lay her father's papyri and the money that Plutarch had paid for
the ivory cup, put in the heavy purse sent by the Emperor, comforting
herself while her tears flowed, with the reflection that she and the
children were provided at any rate against immediate want.
But where was she to go with the little ones? Where could she hope to
find a refuge at once? What was to become of them when all they now
possessed was spent. The gods be thanked! she was not forlorn; she still
had friends. She could find protection and love with Pollux and look to
dame Doris for motherly counsel.
She quickly dried her eyes and changed the remains of her splendor for
the dark dress in which she was accustomed to work at the papyrus
factory; then, as soon as she had taken the pearls out of her hair, she
went down to the little gate-house.
She was only a few steps from the door--but why did not the Graces come
springing out to meet her? Why did she see no birds, no flowers in the
window? Was she deceived, was she dreaming or was she tricked by some
evil spirit? The door of the dear home-like little dwelling was wide open
and the sitting-room was absolutely empty, not a chattel was left behind,
forgotten--not a leaf from a plant was lying on the ground; for dame
Doris, in her tidy fashion, had swept out the few rooms where she had
grown grey in peace and contentment as carefully as though she were to
come into them again to-morrow.
What had happened here? Where were her friends gone? A great terror came
over her, all the misery of desolation fell upon her, and as she sank
upon the stone bench outside the gate-house to wait for the inhabitants
who must presently return, the tears again flowed from her eyes and fell
in heavy drops on her hands as they lay in her lap.
She was still sitting there, thinking with a throbbing heart of Pollux
and of the happy morning of this now dying day, when a troup of Moorish
slaves came towards the deserted house. The head mason who led them
desired her to rise from the bench, and in answer to her questions, told
her that the little building was to be pulled down, and that the couple
who had inhabited it were evicted from their post, turned out of doors
and had gone elsewhere with all their belongings. But where Doris and her
son had taken themselves no one knew. Arsinoe as she heard these tidings
felt like a sailor whose vessel has grounded on a rocky shore, and who
realizes with horror that every plank and beam be neath him quivers and
gapes. As usual, when she felt too weak to help herself unaided, her
first thought was of Selene, and she decided to hasten off to her and to
ask her what she could do, what was to become of her and the children.
It was already growing dark. With a swift step, and drying her eyes from
time to time on her peplum as she went, she returned to her own room to
fetch a veil, without which she dared not venture so late into the
streets. On the steps--where the dog had thrown down Selene--she met a
man hurrying past her; in the dim light she fancied he bore some
resemblance to the slave that her father had bought the day before; but
she paid no particular heed, for her mind was full of so many other
things. In the kitchen sat the old negress in front of a lamp and the
children squatted round her; by the hearth sat the baker and the butcher,
to whom her father owed considerable sums and who had come to claim their
dues, for ill news has swifter wings than good tidings, and they had
already heard of the steward's death. Arsinoe took the lamp, begged the
men to wait, went into the sitting-room, passing, not without a shudder,
the body of the man who a few hours since had stroked her cheeks and
looked lovingly into her eyes.
How glad she felt to be able to pay her dead father's debts and save the
honor of his name! She confidently drew the key out of her pocket and
went up to the chest. What was this? She knew, quite positively, that she
had locked it before going out and yet it was now standing wide open; the
lid, thrown back, hung askew by one hinge; the other was broken. A dread,
a hideous suspicion, froze her blood; the lamp trembled in her hand as
she leaned over the chest which ought to have contained every thing she
possessed. There lay the old documents, carefully rolled together, side
by side, but the two bags with Plutarch's money and the Emperor's, had
vanished. She took out one roll after another; then she tossed them all
out on to the floor till the bottom of the chest was bare--but the gold
was really gone, nowhere to be found.
The new slave had forced open the lid of the chest and stolen the whole
possessions of the orphans of the man who, to gratify his own vanity, had
brought him into the house.
Arsinoe screamed aloud, called in her creditors, explained to them all
that had occurred and implored them to pursue the thief; and when they
only listened to her with an incredulous shrug, she swore that she was
speaking the truth, and promised that whether the slave were caught or
not she would pay them with the price of her own and her father's
personal ornaments. She knew the name of the dealer of whom her father
had bought the slave and told it to the unsatisfied dealers, who at last
left her to follow up the thief as promptly as possible.
Once more Arsinoe was alone. Tearless, but shivering and scarcely
mistress of herself from misery and agitation, she took out her veil,
flung it over her head, and hurried through the court and along the
streets to her sister.
Verily, since Sabina's visit to the palace all good spirits had deserted
it.
CHAPTER XI.
In a perfectly dark spot by the wall of the widow's garden, stood the
cynic philosopher who had met Antinous with so little courtesy, defending
himself eagerly, but in low tones against the rebukes of another man,
who, dressed, like himself in a ragged cloak and bearing a beggar's
wallet, appeared to be one of the same kidney.
"Do not deny," said the latter, "that you cling much to the Christians."
"But hear me out," urged the other.
"I need hear nothing, for I have seen you for the tenth time sneaking in
to one of their meetings."
"And do I deny it? Do I not honestly confess that I seek truth wherever I
may, where I see even a gleam of hope of finding it?"
"Like the Egyptian who wanted to catch the miraculous fish, and at last
flung his hook into the sand."
"The man acted very wisely."
"What now!"
"A marvel is not to be found just where everything else is. In hunting
for truth you must not be afraid of a bog."
"And the Christian doctrine seems to be very much such a muddy thicket."
"Call it so for aught I care."
"Then beware lest you find yourself sticking in the morass."
"I will take care of myself."
"You said just now that there were decent folks among them."
"A few no doubt. But the others! eternal gods! mere slaves, beggars,
ruined handicraftstmen, common people, untaught and unphilosophical
brains, and women, for the most part."
"Avoid them then."
"You ought to be the last to give me that advice."
"What do you mean?"
The other went close up to him and asked him in a whisper:
"Why, where do you suppose I get the money with which I pay for our food
and lodging?"
"So long as you do not steal it, it is all the same to me."
"If I had no more, you would ask the question fast enough."
"Certainly not, we strive after virtue and ought to do everything to
render ourselves independent of nature and her cravings. But to be sure
she often asserts her rights--to return then: where do you get the
money?"
"Why, it burns in the purses of the people in there. It is their duty to
give to the poor, and to tell the truth, their pleasure also; and so week
by week they give me a few drachmae for my suffering brother."
"Bah! you are the only son of your father, and he is dead."
"'All men are brethren' say the Christians, consequently I may call you
mine without lying."
"Join them then for aught I care," laughed the other. "How would it be if
I followed you among the Christians? Perhaps they would give me weekly
money too, for my suffering brother, and then we could have double
meals."
The cynics laughed loudly and parted; one went back into the city, the
other into the garden belonging to the Christian widow.
Arsinoe had entered here before the dishonest philosopher and had gone
straight to Hannah's house without being detained by the gate-keeper. As
she got nearer to her destination, she tried more and more earnestly to
devise some way in which she might inform her sister of all the dreadful
things that had happened, and which she must learn sooner or later,
without giving her too great a shock. Her dread was not much less than
her grief. As she reflected on the last few days and on all that had
occurred, it almost seemed as though she herself had been the cause of
the misfortunes of her family.
On the way to see Selene she could shed no tears, but she could not help
softly moaning to herself now and then. A woman, who for some distance
had kept pace with her, thought she must be suffering some severe bodily
pain, and when the girl passed her, she looked after her with sincere
compassion, the wailing of the desolate young creature had sounded so
piteous.
True, midway, Arsinoe had suddenly stopped and had thought that instead
of going to Selene for advice, she would turn round and seek Pollux and
ask him to help her. The thought of her lover forced its way through all
her sorrow and anxiety, through the reproaches she heaped upon herself
and the vague plans floating in the air which her brain--unaccustomed to
any serious thought, vainly tried to sketch for the future. He was kind,
and would certainly be ready to help her; but maidenly modesty held her
back from seeking him at so late an hour; besides, how could she discover
him or his parents?
The place where her sister was she was now familiar with, and no one
could judge of their position better or give sounder counsel than prudent
Selene. So she had not turned round, but had hurried on to reach her
destination as soon as possible; and now she was standing before the
little house in the garden. Before opening the door she once more
considered in what way she could prepare Selene and tell her terrible
news, and, as all that happened stood vividly before her mind's eye, she
began to weep once more.
In front of her, and following her, men and veiled women, singly or in
couples or in larger groups, passed into Paulina's garden. They came from
workshops and writing-rooms, from humble houses in narrow lanes, and from
the handsomest and largest in the main street. Each and all, from the
wealthy merchant down to the slave who could not call the coarse tunic or
scanty apron that he wore, his own, walked gravely and with a certain
dignified reserve. All who met within that gate greeted each other as
friends; the master gave a brotherly kiss to the servant, the slave to
his owner; for the congregation to which they all belonged was as one
body, animated and dwelt in by Christ, so that each member was esteemed
as equal to the others however different their gifts of body or mind
might be, or the worldly possessions with which they were endowed. Before
God and his Saviour the rich ship-owner or the grey-haired sage stood no
higher than the defenceless widow and the ignorant slave crippled with
blows. Still, the members of the community submitted to those more
implicitly than to these, for the special talents which graced certain
superior Christians were gifts of grace from the Lord, readily
acknowledged as such and, so far as they concerned the inner man, deemed
worthy of honor.
On Sunday, the day of the Resurrection of the Lord, all Christians,
without exception, visited their place of assembly for divine worship.
To-day, being the middle of the week, all who could or chose came to the
love-feast at Paulina's suburban house. She herself dwelt in the city and
she had placed the banqueting hall of her villa, which would hold more
than a hundred souls, at the disposal of her fellow Christians in that
quarter of the town. The regular service was held in the morning, but
after the day's labor was ended the Christians met at one table to have
an evening meal in common, or--on other occasions to partake of the
sacramental supper. After sunset the elders, deacons, and
deaconesses--most of whom, so long as it was light, had secular work to
attend to--met to take counsel together.
Paulina, the widow of Pudeus and sister of Pontius the architect, was a
woman of considerable property and at the same time a prudent steward,
who did not consider herself justified in seriously impairing her son's
inheritance. This son was residing at Smyrna as a partner in an uncle's
business, and always avoided Alexandria, as he did not like his mother's
intercourse with the Christians. Paulina took the most anxious care not
to make any inroads on the capital intended for him, and never allowed
her hospitality to her fellow-believers to cost her any more than it did
the other wealthy members of the circle that met at her house. There the
rich brought more than they needed for themselves and the poor were
always welcome; not feeling themselves oppressed by the benevolence they
profited by, for they were often told that their entertainer was not a
mortal, but the Saviour, who invited each one who followed him faithfully
to be his guest.
The hour was approaching which would summon dame Hannah to join the
assembly of her fellow Christians. She could not fail to appear, for she
was one of the deaconesses entrusted with the distribution of alms and
the care of the sick. She noiselessly made her preparations for going,
carefully setting the lamp behind the water-pitcher so that it should not
dazzle Selene, and she desired Mary to be exact in administering the
medicine to her patient. She knew that the girl had yesterday attempted
to make away with herself, and guessed the cause; but she asked no
questions and disturbed the poor child, who slept a good deal or lay
dreaming with open eyes, as little as possible. The old physician
wondered at her sound constitution, for since her plunge into the water
the fever had left her and even the injured foot was not much the worse.
Hannah might now hope the best for Selene if no unforeseen contingency
checked her recovery. To prevent this the unfortunate girl was never to
be left alone, and Mary had gladly agreed with her friend to fill her
place whenever she was obliged to leave the house.
The meeting of the elders and guardians had already begun when Hannah
took her tablets in her hand, on which was noted the distribution she had
made of the money entrusted to her during the last week. She greeted the
sick girl and Mary with a kindly look and whispered to the deformed girl:
"I will think of thee in my prayers thou faithful soul. There is some
food in the little cupboard--not much, for we must be sparing, the last
medicine was so dear."
In the little anteroom a lamp was burning which Mary had lighted as it
began to grow dark, and the widow paused for a moment, considering
whether she should not extinguish it to save the oil. She had taken up
the tongs that hung by it, and was about to put it out, when she heard a
gentle tap at the house-door. Before she could enquire who it was that
asked admission at so late an hour, the door was opened and Arsinoe
entered the little hall. Her eyes were still full of tears and she had
great difficulty in finding words to return Hannah's greeting.
"Why what ails you my child?" asked the Christian anxiously when by the
dim light, she saw how tearful and sad the girl looked. Arsinoe was long
before she could answer. At last she collected herself sufficiently to
sob out amid her tears:
"Oh dame Hannah! It is all over with us--my father, our poor father--"
The widow guessed at the blow that bad fallen on the sisters and full of
anxiety on Selene's account she interrupted the weeping child saying:
"Hush, hush my child-Selene must not hear you. Come out with me and then
you can tell me all." Once outside the door Hannah put her arm round
Arsinoe drew her towards her, kissed her forehead, and said:
"Now speak and tell me every thing; think that I am your mother or your
sister. Poor Selene is still too weak to advise or help you. Take
courage. What happened to your poor father?"
"Struck by apoplexy, dead--dead!" wept the girl. "Poor, dear little
orphan," said the widow in a husky voice and she clasped Arsinoe closely
in her arms. For some time she allowed the girl to weep silently on her
bosom; then she spoke:
"Give me your hand my daughter and tell me how it has all happened so
suddenly. Your father was quite well yesterday and now? Yes my girl life
is a grave matter, you have to learn it while you are still young. I know
you have six little brothers and sisters and perhaps you may soon lack
even the necessaries of life. But that is no disgrace; I am certainly
even poorer than you and yet, by God's help, I hope to be able to advise
you and perhaps even to assist you. Every thing that I can possibly do
shall be done, but first I must know how matters stand with you and what
you need."
There was so much kindness and consolation in the Christian's tones, so
much to revive hope that Arsinoe willingly complied with her demand and
began her story.
At first, to be sure, her pride shunned confessing how poor, how
absolutely destitute they were; but Hannah's questions soon brought the
truth to light; and when Arsinoe perceived that the widow understood the
misfortunes of their house in their fullest extent, and that it would be
unavailing to conceal how matters stood with her and the children, she
yielded to the growing impulse to relieve her soul by pouring out her
griefs and described frankly and without reserve the whole position of
the family, to the good woman who listened with attention and sympathy.
The widow asked about each child separately, and ended by enquiring who,
in Arsinoe's absence, was left in charge of the little ones; and when she
heard that the old slave-woman to whose care the children were entrusted,
was infirm and half-blind, she shook her head thoughtfully.
"Here help is needed and at once," she said decidedly. "You must go back
to the little ones presently. Your sister must not at present hear of
your father's death; when your future lot is to some extent secure we
will tell her by degrees all that has occurred. Now come with me, it is
by the Lord's guidance that you came here at the right moment."
Hannah conducted Arsinoe to Paulina's villa, first into a small room at
the side of the entrance hall, where the deaconesses took off their veils
and their warm wraps in winter evenings. There the girl could be alone,
and safe from inquisitive questionings which could not fail to be painful
to her. Hannah desired her to await her return, and then joined her
colleagues.
In order to do so she had to pass through the room where the elders and
deacons were sitting in council. The bishop, who presided over the
assembly, sat on a raised seat at the head of an oblong table, and on his
right hand and his left sat a number of elderly men, some of whom seemed
to be of Jewish or Egyptian extraction but most of them were Greeks. In
these the lofty intellectual brow was conspicuous, in those a bright,
ecstatic expression particularly in the eyes. Hannah went past the
assembly with a reverential greeting into the adjoining room in which the
deaconesses sat waiting, for women were not admitted to join or hear the
deliberations of the elders. The bishop, a fine old man with a full white
beard; raised his kindly eyes as the door closed upon Hannah, fixed them
for a few moments on the tips of his fingers that he had raised and then
addressed the presbyter who had presented for baptism several candidates
who had been grounded during the past year in the Christian faith and
doctrine, as follows:
"Most of the catechumens you have presented to me cling faithfully no
doubt to the Redeemer. They believe in Him and love Him. But have they
attained to that sanctification, that new birth in Christ, which alone
can justify us in admitting them through baptism among the lambs of our
Good Shepherd? Let us beware of the tainted sheep which may infect the
whole flock. Verily, in these latter years there has been no lack of
them, and they have been received among us and have brought the name of
Christian into evil repute. Shall I give you an example? There was an
Egyptian in Rhakotis; few seemed to strive so fervently as he for the
remission of his sins. He could fast for many days, and yet no sooner was
he baptized than he broke into a goldsmith's shop. He was condemned to
death, and before his end he sent for me and confessed to me that in
former years he had soiled his soul with many robberies and murders. He
had hoped to win forgiveness of his sins by the act of baptism, the mere
washing in water, not by repentance and a new birth to a pure and holy
life; and he had gone on boldly in new sin because he confidently hoped
that he might again count on the unwearying mercy of the Saviour. Others
again, who had been brought up in the practice of the ablutions which
have to be performed by those who are initiated into the deeper secrets
of the heathen mysteries, regarded baptism as an act of purification, a
mystical process of happy augury, or at the best a figurative
purification of the soul, and crowded to receive it. Here, in Alexandria,
the number of these deluded ones is especially great; for where could any
superstition find a more favorable soil than in this seat of
philosophical half-culture, or over-culture; of the worship of Serapis,
of astrology, of societies of Mystics, of visionaries and exorcisers, and
of incredulity--the twin-sister of credulity. Be cautious then to hold
back from baptism all those who regard it as a preserving charm or an act
of good omen--remembering that the same water which, sprinkled on
sanctified hearts, leads them to holy living, brings death to the unclean
soul. It is your turn to speak, Irenaeus."
"I only have to say," began the young Christian thus designated, "that I
have recently met among the catechumens with some who have attached
themselves to us from the basest motives. I mean the idlers who are glad
to receive our alms. Have you noticed here a cynic philosopher whose
starving brother we maintain? Our deacon Clemens has just ascertained
that he is the only son of his father--"
"We will investigate this matter more closely when we discuss the
distribution of alms," replied the bishop. "Here we have petitions from
several women who desire to have their children baptized; this question
we cannot decide here; it must be referred to the next Synod. So far as I
am concerned, I should be inclined not to reject the prayer of the
mothers. Wherein does the utmost aim of the Christian life consist? It
seems to me in being perfectly conformable to the example of the Saviour.
And was not he a Man among men, a Youth among the young, a Child among
children? Did not His existence lend sanctity to every age, and
especially childhood? He commanded that little children should be brought
to Him, and He promised them the Kingdom of Heaven. Wherefore then should
we exclude them and deny them baptism?"
"I cannot share your views," replied a presbyter with a high forehead and
sunken eyes. "We ought no doubt to follow the Saviour, but those who
tread in His steps should do so of their own free choice, out of love for
Him, and after He has sanctified their souls. What is the sense of a new
birth in a life that has scarcely begun.
"Your discourse," replied the bishop, "only confirms my opinion that this
question is one for a higher assembly. We will now close our discussion
of that point, and go on to the care of the poor. Call in the women, my
good Justinius."
The deaconesses came into the room and took seats at the lower end of the
table, Paulina, the widow of Pudeus, taking her place opposite the bishop
in the middle of the other women. She had learnt from Selene's kind nurse
in what pressing difficulties the children of the deceased steward now
found themselves, and that Hannah had promised to assist them.
The deacons first gave their reports of what their works had been among
the poor; after them the women were allowed to speak. Paulina, a tall,
slight woman with black hair faintly streaked with gray, drew from her
dress, which was perfectly plain, but made of particularly soft, fine
white woollen stuff--a tablet that she placed before her, and slowly
raising her eyes and looking at the assembly she said:
"Dame Hannah has a melancholy story to tell you, for which I crave your
sympathy. Will you be so good as to allow her to speak?"
Paulina seemed to feel that she was the hostess to her brethren. She
looked ill and suffering; a line of pain had settled about her lips, and
there were always dark shades under her eyes; still, there was something
firm and decisive in her voice, and her glance was anything rather than
soft and winning. After her commanding tones Hannah's tale sounded as
soft as a song. She described the different natures of the two sisters as
lovingly as though they were her own daughters, each in her own way
seemed to her so worthy of compassion, and she spoke with pathetic lament
of the unprotected, helpless orphans abandoned to misery, and among them
a pretty little blind boy. And she ended her speech by saying:
"The steward's second daughter--she is sixteen and so beautiful that she
must be exposed to every temptation--has now the whole charge of the
nourishment and care of her six young brothers and sisters. Ought we to
withhold from them a protecting hand? No, so surely as we love the
Saviour we ought not. You agree with me? Well then, do not let us delay
our help. The second daughter of the deceased Keraunus is here, in this
house; to-morrow early the children must all quit the palace, and now,
while I am speaking, are at home alone and but ill tended."
The Christian woman's good words fell on kindly soil, and the presbyters
and deacons determined to recommend the congregation who should assemble
at the love-feast to give their assistance to the steward's children.
The elders had still much to discuss, so Hannah and Paulina were charged
with the task of appealing to the hearts of the well-to-do members of the
congregation to provide for the orphans. The poor widow first conducted
her wealthy friend and hostess to the little room where Arsinoe was
waiting with growing impatience. She looked paler than usual but, in
spite of her tear-reddened eyes which she kept fixed on the ground, she
was so lovely, so touchingly lovely, that the mere sight of her moved
Paulina's heart. She had once had two children, an only daughter besides
her son. The girl bad died in the spring-time of her maidenhood, and
Paulina thought of her at every hour of her life. It was for her sake
that she had been baptized and devoted her existence to a series of
painful sacrifices. She strove with all her might to be a good
Christian--for surely she, the self-denying woman who had taken up the
cross of her own free will, the suffering creature who loved stillness
and who had made her country-house, which she visited daily, a scene of
unrest, could not fail to win Heaven, and there she hoped to meet her
innocent child.
Arsinoe reminded her of her Helena, who certainly had been far less fair
than the steward's lovely daughter, but whose image had assumed new and
glorified forms in the mother's faithful heart. Since her son had left
home for a foreign country she had often asked herself whether she might
not find some young creature to take into her home, to attach to herself,
to bring up as a Christian, and to bring as an offering to her Saviour's
feet.
Her daughter had died a heathen, and nothing troubled Paulina so deeply
as that her soul was lost, and that her own struggling and striving for
grace could not lead her to the goal beyond the grave. No sacrifice
seemed too great to purchase her child's beatitude, and now, standing
before Arsinoe and looking at her with deep emotion and admiration, she
was seized with an idea which swiftly ripened to resolve. She would win
this sweet soul for the Redeemer, and implore Him with ceaseless prayers
to save her hapless child as a reward for the work of grace in Arsinoe's
soul; and she felt as if she had signed the compact with the Redeemer,
when, fully determined on this course, she went up to the girl and asked
her:
"You are quite forlorn, quite without relations?" Arsinoe bowed her head
in assent, and Paulina went on:
"And do you bear your loss with resignation?"
"What is resignation?" asked the girl modestly. Hannah laid her hand on
the widow's arm and whispered:
"She is a heathen."
"I know it," said Paulina shortly, and then went on kindly but
positively:
"You and yours have lost both parents and a home by your father's death.
You shall find a new home in my house, with me; I ask nothing of you in
return but your love."
Arsinoe looked at the haughty lady in astonishment. She could not yet
feel any impulse of affection towards her, and she did not as yet
understand that what was required of her was the one gift which the best
will, the most loving heart in the world, could not offer at a command.
Paulina did not wait for her reply, but signed to Hannah to follow her to
join the congregation now assembled at the evening meal.
A quarter of an hour later the two women returned. The steward's orphans
were provided for. Two or three Christian families were ready and willing
to take in some of them, and many a kindly house-mother had begged to
have the blind child; but in vain, for Hannah had claimed the right to
bring up the hapless little boy in her own house, at any rate for the
present. She knew how Selene clung to him, and hoped by his presence to
be able to work powerfully on the crushed and chilled heart of the poor
girl.
Arsinoe did not contravene the arrangements of the two women. She thanked
them, indeed, for she felt that she once more stood on firm ground, but
she also was immediately aware that it would be strewn with sharp stones.
The thought of parting from her little brothers and sisters was terrible
and cruel, and never left her mind for an instant, while, accompanied by
Hannah in person, she made her way back to Lochias.
The next morning her kind friend appeared again and led her and the
little troup to Paulina's town-house. The steward's creditors divided his
little possessions; nothing but the chest of papyri followed the girl to
her new home. The hour in which the fondly-linked circle of children was
riven asunder, when one child was taken here and another there, was the
bitterest which Arsinoe had ever experienced or ever could experience
through all the after years of her life.
CHAPTER XII.
A lovely garden adjoined the Caesareum, the palace in which Sabina was
residing. Balbilla was fond of lingering there, and as the morning of the
twenty-ninth of December was particularly brilliant--the sky and its
infinite mirror the sea, gleaming in indescribably deep blue, while the
fragrance of a flowering shrub was wafted in at her window like an
invitation to quit the house she had sought a certain bench which, though
placed in a sunny spot, was slightly shaded by an acacia. This seat was
screened from the more public paths by bushes; the promenaders who did
not seek Balbilla could not observe her here, but she could command a
view, through a gap in the foliage, of the path, which was strewn with
small shells.
To-day, however, the young poetess was far from feeling any curiosity;
instead of gazing at the shrubbery enlivened by birds, at the clear
atmosphere or the sparkling sea, her eyes were fixed on a yellow roll of
papyrus and she was impressing very dry details on her retentive memory.
She had determined to keep her word to learn to speak, write, and compose
verses in the Aeolian dialect of the Greek tongue. She had chosen for her
teacher Apollonius, the great grammarian, who was apt to call his
scholars "the dullards;" and the work which was the present object of her
studies was derived from the famous library of the Serapeum, which far
exceeded in completeness that of the Museum since the siege of Julius
Caesar in the Bruchiom, when the great Museum library was burnt.
Any one observing Balbilla at her occupation could hardly have believed
that she was studying. There was no fixed effort in her eyes or on her
brow; still, she read line for line, not skipping a single word; only she
did it not like a man who climbs a mountain with sweat on his brow, but
like a lounger who walks in the main street of some great city, and is
charmed at every new and strange thing that meets his eye. Each time she
came upon some form of structure in the book she was reading that had
been hitherto unknown to her, she was so delighted that she clapped her
hands and laughed out softly. Her learned master had never before met
with so cheerful a student, and it annoyed him, for to him science was a
serious matter while she seemed to make a joke of it, as she did of every
thing, and so desecrated it in his eyes. After she had been sitting an
hour on the bench, studying in her own way, she rolled up the book and
stood up to refresh herself a little. Feeling sure that no one could see
her, she stretched herself in all her limbs and then stepped up to the
gap in the shrubbery in order to see who a man in boots might be who was
pacing up and down in the broad path beyond.
It was the praetor--and yet it was not! Verus, under this aspect at any
rate, she had never seen till now. Where was the smile that was wont to
twinkle in his merry eye like the sparkle of a diamond and to play
saucily about his lips--where the unwrinkled serenity of his brow and the
defiantly audacious demeanor of his whole handsome person? He was slowly
striding up and down with a gloomy fire in his eye, a deeply-lined brow,
and his head sunk on his breast: and yet it was not bowed with sorrow. If
so, could he have snapped his fingers in the air as he did just as he
passed in front of Balbilla, as much as to say: "Come what may! to-day I
live and laugh the future in the face!"
But this vestige of his old reckless audacity did not last longer than
the time it took to part his fingers again, and the next time Verus
passed Balbilla he looked, if possible, more gloomy than before.
Something very unpleasant must have arisen to spoil the good humor of her
friend's husband; and the poetess was sincerely sorry; for, though she
herself had daily to suffer under the praetor's impertinence, she always
forgave it for the sake of the graceful form in which he knew how to
clothe his incivilities.
Balbilla longed to see Verus content once more, and she therefore came
forth from her hiding place. As soon as he saw her he altered the
expression of his features and cried out as brightly as ever:
"Welcome, fairest of the fair!"
She made believe not to recognize him, but, as she passed him and bowed
her curly head, she said gravely and in deep tones:
"Good day to you, Timon."
"Timon?" he asked, taking her hand.
"Ah! is it you, Verus?" she answered, as though surprised. "I thought the
Athenian misanthrope had quitted Hades and come to take the air in this
garden."
"You thought rightly," replied the praetor. "But when Orpheus sings the
trees dance, the Muse can turn dull, motionless stones into a Bacchante,
and when Balbilla appears Timon is at once transformed into the happy
Verus."
"The miracle does not astonish me," laughed the girl. "But is it
permitted to ask what dark spirit so effectually produced the contrary
result, and made a Timon of the fair Lucilla's happy husband?"
"I ought rather to beware of letting you see the monster, or our joyous
muse Balbilla might easily become the sinister Hecate. But the malicious
sprite is close at hand, for he is hidden in this little roll."
"A document from Caesar?"
"Oh! no, only a letter from a Jew."
"Possibly the father of some fair daughter!"
"Wrongly guessed--as wrong as possible!"
"You excite my curiosity."
"Mine has already been satisfied by this roll. Horace is wise when he
says that man should never trouble himself about the future."
"An oracle!"
"Something of the kind."
"And can that darken this lovely morning to you? Did you ever see me
melancholy? Yet my future is threatened by a prophecy--such a hideous
prophecy."
"The fate of men is different to the destiny of women."
"Would you like to hear what was prophesied of me?"
"What a question!"
"Listen then; the saying I will repeat to you came to me from no less an
oracle than the Delphic Pythia:
"'That which thou boldest most precious and dear
Shall be torn from thy keeping,
And from the heights of Olympus,
Down shalt thou fall in the dust.'"
"Is that all?"
"Nay--two consolatory lines follow."
"And they are--?"
"Still the contemplative eye
Discerns under mutable sand drifts
Stable foundations of stone,
Marble and natural rock."
"And you are inclined to complain of this oracle?"
"Is it so pleasant to have to wade through dust? We have enough of that
intolerable nuisance here in Egypt--or am I to be delighted at the
prospect of hurting my feet on hard stones?"
"And what do the interpreters say?"
"Only silly nonsense."
"You have never found the right one; but I--I see the meaning of the
oracle."
"You?"
"Ay, I! The stern Balbilla will at last descend from the lofty Olympus of
her high-anti-mightiness and no longer disdain that immutable
foundation-rock, the adoration of her faithful Verus."
"That foundation--that rock!" laughed the girl. "I should think it as
well advised to try to walk on the surface of the sea out there as on
that rock!"
"Only try."
"It is not necessary; Lucilla has made the experiment for me. Your
interpretation is wrong; Caesar gave me a far better one."
"What was that?"
"That I should give up writing poetry and devote myself to strict
scientific studies. He advised me to try astronomy."
"Astronomy," repeated Verus, growing graver. Farewell, fair one; I must
go to Caesar!"
"We were with him yesterday at Lochias. How everything is changed there!
The pretty little gate house is gone, there is nothing more to be seen of
all the cheerful bustle of builders and artists, and what were gay
workshops are turned into dull, commonplace halls. The screens in the
hall of the Muses had to go a week ago, and with them the young
scatter-brain who set himself against my curls with so much energy that I
was on the point of sacrificing them--"
"Without them you would no longer be Balbilla," cried Verus eagerly. "The
artist condemns all that is not permanently beautiful, but we are glad to
see any thing that is graceful, and can find pleasure in it with the
other children of the time. The sculptor may dress his goddesses after
the fashion of graver days and the laws of his art, but mortal women--if
he is wise--after the fashion of the day. However, I am heartily sorry
for that clever, genial young fellow. He has offended Caesar and was
turned out of the palace, and now he is nowhere to be found."
"Oh!" cried Balbilla, full of regret, "poor man--and such a fine fellow!
And my bust? we must seek him out. If the opportunity offers I will
entreat Caesar--"
"Hadrian will hear nothing about him. Pollux has offended him deeply."
"From whom do you know that?"
"From Antinous."
"We saw him, too, only yesterday," cried Balbilla, eagerly.
"If ever a man was permitted to wear the form of a god among mortals, it
is he."
"Romantic creature!"
"I know no one who could look upon him with indifference. He is a
beautiful dreamer, and the trace of suffering which we observed yesterday
in his countenance is probably nothing more than the outward expression
of that obscure regret, felt by all that is perfect, for the joy of
development and conscious ripening into an incarnation of the ideal in
its own kind, of which he is an instance in himself."
The poetess spoke the last words in a rapt tone, as if the form of a god
was then and there before her eyes. Verus had listened to her with a
smile, but now he interrupted her, and, holding up a warning finger, he
said:
"Poetess, philosopher, and sweetest maiden, beware of descending from
your Olympus for the sake of this boy! When imagination and dreaminess
meet half-way they make a pair which float in the clouds and never even
suspect the existence of that firmer ground of which your oracle speaks."
"Nonsense," said Balbilla crossly. "Before we can fall in love with a
statue, Prometheus must animate it with a soul and fire from heaven."
"But often," retorted the praetor, "Eros proves to be a substitute for
that unhappy friend of the gods."
"The true or the sham Eros," asked Balbilla testily.
"Certainly not the sham Eros," replied Verus. "On this occasion he merely
plays the part of a kindly monitor, taking the place of Pontius, the
architect, of whom your worthy matron-companion is so much afraid. During
the tumult of the Dionysiac festival you are reported to have carried on
as grave a discussion as any two gray-bearded philosophers walking in the
Stoa among attentive students."
"With intelligent men, no doubt, we talk with intelligence!"
"Aye, and with stupid ones gayly. How much reason have I to be thankful
that I am one of the stupid ones. Farewell, till we meet again, fair
Balbilla," and the praetor hurried off.
Outside the Caesareum he got into his chariot and set out for Lochias.
The charioteer held the reins, while he himself gazed at the roll in his
hand which contained the result of the calculations of the astrologer,
Rabbi Simeon Ben Jochai; and this was certainly likely enough to disturb
the cheerfulness of the most reckless of men.
When, during the night which preceded the praetor's birthday, the Emperor
should study the heavens with special reference to the position of the
stars at his birth, he would find that, as far as till the end of the
second hour after midnight all the favorable planets promised Verus a
happy lot, success and distinction. But, with the commencement of the
third hour--so said Ben Jochai--misfortune and death would take
possession of his house of destiny; in the fourth hour his star would
vanish, and anything further that might declare itself in the sky during
that night would have nothing more to do with him, or his destiny. The
Emperor's star would triumph over his. Verus could make out but little of
the signs and calculations in the tables annexed by the Jew, but that
little confirmed what was told in the written statement.
The praetor's horses carried him swiftly along while he reflected on what
remained for him to do under these unfavorable circumstances, in order
not to be forced to give up entirely the highest goal of his ambition. If
the Rabbi's observations were accurate--and of this Verus did not for a
moment doubt--all his hopes of adoption were at an end in spite of
Sabina's support. How should Hadrian choose for his son and successor a
man who was destined to die before him? How could he, Verus, expect that
Caesar should ally his fortunate star with the fatal star of another
doomed to die?
These reflections did nothing to help him, and yet he could not escape
from them, till suddenly his charioteer pulled up the horses abruptly by
the side of the footway to make room for a delegation of Egyptian priests
who were going in procession to Lochias. The powerful hand with which his
servant had promptly controlled the fiery spirit of the animals excited
his approbation, and seemed to inspire him to put a clog boldly on the
wheels of speeding fate. When they were no longer detained by the
Egyptian delegates he desired the charioteer to drive slowly, for he
wished to gain time for consideration.
"Until the third hour after midnight," said he to himself, "all is to go
well; it is not till the fourth hour that signs are to appear in the sky
which are of evil augury for me. Of course the sheep will play round the
dead lion, and the ass will even spurn him with his hoof so long as he is
merely sick. In the short space of time between the third and fourth
hours all the signs of evil are crowded together. They must be visible;
but"--and this "but" brought sudden illumination to the praetor's mind,
"why should Caesar see them?"
The anxious aspirant's heart beat faster, his brain worked more actively,
and he desired the driver to make a short circuit, for he wanted to gain
yet more time for the ideas that were germinating in his mind to grow and
ripen.
Verus was no schemer; he walked in at the front door with a free and
careless step, and scorned to climb the backstairs. Only for the greatest
object and aim of his life was he prepared to sacrifice his inclinations,
his comfort and his pride, and to make unhesitating use of every means at
hand. For the sake of that he had already done many things which he
regretted, and the man who steals one sheep out of the flock is followed
by others without intending it. The first degrading action that a man
commits is sure to be followed by a second and a third. What Verus was
now projecting he regarded as being a simple act of self-defence; and
after all, it consisted merely in detaining Hadrian for an hour,
interrupting him in an idle occupation--the observation of the stars.
There were two men who might be helpful to him in this matter--Antinous
and the slave Mastor. He first thought of Mastor; but the Sarmatian was
faithfully devoted to his master and could not be bribed. And
besides!--No! it really was too far beneath him to make common cause with
a slave. But he could count even less on support from Antinous. Sabina
hated her husband's favorite, and for her sake Verus had never met the
young Bithynian on particularly friendly terms. He fancied, too, that he
had observed that the quiet, dreamy lad kept out of his way. It was only
by intimidation, probably, that the favorite could be induced to do him a
service.
At any rate, the first thing to be done was to visit Lochias and there to
keep a lookout with his eyes wide open. If the Emperor were in a happy
frame of mind he might, perhaps, be induced to appear during the latter
part of the night at the banquet which Verus was giving on the eve of his
birthday, and at which all that was beautiful to the eye and ear was to
be seen and heard; or a thousand favoring and helpful accidents might
occur--and at any rate the Rabbi's forecast furnished him good fortune
for the next few years.
As he dismounted from his chariot in the newly-paved forecourt and was
conducted to the Emperor's anteroom he looked as bright and free from
care as if the future lay before him sunny and cloudless.
Hadrian now occupied the restored palace, not as an architect from Rome
but as sovereign of the world; he had shown himself to the Alexandrians
and had been received with rejoicings and an unheard-of display in his
honor. The satisfaction caused by the imperial visit was everywhere
conspicuous and often found expression in exaggerated terms; indeed the
council had passed a resolution to the effect that the month of December,
being that in which the city had had the honor of welcoming the
'Imperator,' should henceforth be called:
"Hadrianus." The Emperor had to receive one deputation after another and
to hold audience after audience, and on the following morning the
dramatic representations were to begin, the processions and games which
promised to last through many days, or--as Hadrian himself expressed
it--to rob him of at least a hundred good hours. Notwithstanding, the
monarch found time to settle all the affairs of the state, and at night
to question the stars as to the fate which awaited him and his dominions
during all the seasons of the new year now so close at hand.
The aspect of the palace at Lochias was entirely changed. In the place of
the gay little gate-house stood a large tent of gorgeous purple stuff, in
which the Emperor's body-guard was quartered, and opposite to it another
was pitched for lictors and messengers. The stables were full of horses.
Hadrian's own horse, Borysthenes, which had had too long a rest, pawed
and stamped impatiently in a separate stall, and close at hand the
Emperor's retrievers, boar-hounds and harriers were housed in
hastily-contrived yards and kennels.
In the wide space of the first court soldiers were encamped, and close
under the walls squatted men and women--Egyptians, Greeks and
Hebrews--who desired to offer petitions to the sovereign. Chariots drove
in and out, litters came and went, chamberlains and other officials
hurried hither and thither. The anterooms were crowded with men of the
upper classes of the citizens who hoped to be granted audience by the
Emperor at the proper hour. Slaves, who offered refreshments to those who
waited or stood idly looking on, were to be seen in every room, and
official persons, with rolls of manuscript under their arms, bustled into
the inner rooms or out of the palace to carry into effect the orders of
their superior.
The hall of the Muses had been turned into a grand banqueting-hall.
Papias, who was now on his way to Italy by the Emperor's command, had
restored the damaged shoulder of the Urania. Couches and divans stood
between the statues, and under a canopy at the upper end of the vast room
stood a throne on which Hadrian sat when he held audience. On these
occasions he always appeared in the purple, but in his writing-room,
which he had not changed for another, he laid aside the imperial mantle
and was no more splendid in his garb than the architect Claudius Venator
had been.
In the rooms that had belonged to the deceased Keraunus now dwelt an
Egyptian without wife or children--a stern and prudent man who had done
good service as house-steward to the prefect Titianus, and the
living-room of the evicted family now looked dreary and uninhabited. The
mosaic pavement which had indirectly caused the death of Keraunus, was
now on its way to Rome, and the new steward had not thought it worth
while to fill up the empty, dusty, broken-up place which had been left in
the floor of his room by the removal of the work of art, nor even to
cover it over with mats. Not a single cheerful note was audible in the
abandoned dwelling but the twitter of the birds which still came morning
and evening to perch on the balcony, for Arsinoe and the children had
never neglected to strew the parapet with crumbs for them at the end of
each meal.
All that was gracious, all that was attractive in the old palace had
vanished at Sabina's visit, and even Hadrian himself was a different man
to what he had been a few days previously. The dignity with which he
appeared in public was truly imperial and unapproachable, and even when
he sat with his intimates in his favorite room he was grave, gloomy and
taciturn. The oracle, the stars, and other signs announced some terrible
catastrophe for the coming year with a certainty that he could not evade;
and the few careless days that he had been permitted to enjoy at Lochias
had ended with unsatisfactory occurrences.
His wife, whose bitter nature struck him in all its repellent harshness
here in Alexandria--where everything assumed sharper outlines and more
accentuated movement than in Rome--had demanded of him boldly that he
should no longer defer the adoption of the praetor.
He was anxious and unsatisfied; the infinite void in his heart yawned
before him whenever he looked into his soul, and at every glance at the
future of his external life a long course of petty trifles started up
before him which could not fail to stand in the way of his unwearying
impulse to work. Even the vegetative existence of his handsome favorite
Antinous, untroubled as it was by the sorrows or the joys of life, had
undergone a change. The youth was often moody, restless and sad. Some
foreign influences seemed to have affected him, for he was no longer
content to hang about his person like a shadow; no, he yearned for
liberty, had stolen into the city several times, seeking there the
pleasures of his age which formerly he had avoided.
Nay, a change had even come over his cheerful and willing slave Mastor.
Only his hound remained always the same in unaltered fidelity.
And he himself? He was the same to-day as ten years since: different
every day and at every hour of the day.
CHAPTER XIII.
When Verus entered the palace Hadrian had returned thither but a few
minutes previously from the city. The praetor was conducted through the
reception-rooms to the private apartments, and here he had not long to
wait, for Hadrian wished to speak with him immediately. He found the
sovereign so thoroughly out of tune that he could not think of inviting
him to his banquet. The Emperor restlessly paced the room while Verus
answered his questions as to the latest proceedings of the Senate in
Rome, but he several times interrupted his walk and gazed into the
adjoining room.
Just as the praetor had concluded his report Argus set up a howl of
delight and Antinous came into the room. Verus at once withdrew into the
window and pretended to be absorbed in looking out on the harbor.
"Where have you been?" asked the Emperor, disregarding the praetor's
presence.
"Into the city a little way," was the Bithynian's answer.
"But you know I cannot bear to miss you when I come home."
"I thought you would have been longer absent."
"For the future arrange so that I may be able to find you at whatever
time I may seek you. Tell me, you do not like to see me vexed and
worried?"
"No, my lord," said the lad and he raised a supplicating hand and looked
beseechingly at his master.
"Then let it pass. But now for something else; how did this little phial
come into the hands of the dealer Hiram?" As he spoke the Emperor took
from his table the little bottle of Vasa Murrhina which the lad had given
to Arsinoe and which she had sold to the Phoenician, and held it up
before the favorite's eyes. Antinous turned pale, and stammered in great
confusion. "It is incomprehensible--I cannot in the least recollect--"
"Then I will assist your memory," said the Emperor decidedly. "The
Phoenician appears to me to be an honester man than that rogue Gabinius.
In his collection, which I have just been to see, I found this gem, that
Plotina--do you hear me, boy--that Trajan's wife Plotina, my heart's
friend, never to be forgotten, gave me years ago. It was one of my
dearest possessions and yet I thought it not too precious to give to you
on your last birthday."
"Oh, my lord, my dear lord!" cried Antinous in a low tone and again
lifting his eyes and hands in entreaty.
"Now, I ask you," continued Hadrian, gravely, and without allowing
himself to yield to the lad's beseeching looks, "how could this object
have passed into the possession of one of the daughters of the wretched
palace-steward Keraunus from whom Hiram confessed that he had bought it?"
Antinous vainly strove for utterance; Hadrian however came to his aid by
asking him more angrily than before:
"Did the girl steal it from you? Out with the truth!"
"No, no," replied the Bithynian quickly and decidedly. "Certainly not. I
remember--wait a minute--yes, that was it.--You know it contained
excellent balsam, and when the big dog threw down Selene--the steward's
daughter is called Selene--threw her down the steps so that she lay hurt
on the stones I fetched the phial and gave her the balsam."
"With the bottle that held it?" asked the Emperor looking at Antinous.
"Yes, my lord--I had no other."
"And she kept it and sold it at once."
"You know, of course, her father--"
"A gang of thieves!" snarled Hadrian.
"Do you know what has become of the girl?"
"Yes my lord," said Antinous trembling with alarm. "I will have her taken
by the lictors," asserted the infuriated sovereign.
"No," said the lad positively. "No, you positively must not do that."
"No--? we shall see!"
"No, positively not, for at the same time you must know that Keraunus'
daughter Selene--"
"Well?"
"She flung herself into the water in despair; yes, into the water, at
night--into the sea."
"Oh!" said Hadrian more gently, "that certainly alters the case. The
lictors would find it difficult to apprehend a shade and the girl has
suffered the worst punishment of all.--But you? what shall I say to your
perfidy? You knew the value of the gem. You knew how highly I valued it,
and could part with it to such hands?"
"It contained the salve," stammered the boy. "How could I think--?"
The Emperor interrupted the boy, striking his forehead with his hand as
he spoke:
"Aye, think--we have known unfortunately too long that thinking is not
your strong point. This little bottle has cost me a pretty sum; still, as
it once belonged to you I give it back to you again; I only require you
to take better care of it this time. I shall ask for it again before
long! But in the name of all the gods, boy, what is the matter? Am I so
alarming that a simple question from me is enough to drive all the blood
out of your cheeks? Really and truly, if I had not had the thing from
Plotina I should have left it in the Phoenician's hands and not have made
all this coil about it."
Antinous went quickly up to the Emperor to kiss his hand, but Hadrian
pressed his lips to his brow with fatherly affection.
"Simpleton," he said, "if you want me to be pleased with you, you must be
again just what you were before we came to Alexandria. Leave it to others
to do things to vex me. You are created by the gods to delight me."
During Hadrian's last words a chamberlain had entered the room to inform
the Emperor that the deputation of the Egyptian priesthood had arrived to
do homage to him. He immediately assumed the purple mantle and proceeded
to the hall of the Muses where, surrounded by his court, he received the
high-priests and spiritual fathers of the different temples of the Nile
Valley, to be hailed by them as the Son of Sun-god, and to assure them
and the religion they cherished his gracious countenance. He vouchsafed
his consent to their prayer that he would add sanctity and happiness to
the temples of the immortals which they served by gracing them with his
presence, but set aside for the moment the question as to which town
might be permitted to have the care of the recently-discovered Apis.
This audience took up several hours. Verus shirked the duty of attending
it with Titianus and the other dignitaries of the court, and remained
sitting motionless by the window; it was not till Hadrian was gone from
the room that he came forward into it again. He was quite alone, for
Antinous had left the room with the Emperor. The praetor's remaining
behind had not escaped the lad's notice, but he sought to avoid him, for
the domineering, mocking spirit of Verus repelled him. Besides this the
terror which he had gone through, as well as the consciousness that he
had been guilty of a lie and had daringly deceived his kind master, had
upset a soul hitherto untainted by any subterfuge and had thrown him off
his balance. He longed to be alone, for it would have been keenly painful
to him at this moment to discuss indifferent subjects, or to be forced to
affect an easy demeanor. He sat in his little room, before a table, with
his face buried in his hands that rested on it.
Verus did not immediately follow him, for he understood what was passing
in his mind and knew that here he could not escape him. In a few minutes
all was still alike in the large room and in the small one. Then the
praetor heard the door between the smaller room and the corridor hastily
opened and immediately the Bithynian's exclamation:
"At last, Mastor--have you seen Selene?"
With two long, noiseless steps Verus went close to the door leading into
the adjoining room, and listened for the slave's answer, though a less
sharp ear than that of the praetor might have heard every syllable.
"How should I have seen her?" asked the Sarmatian sharply. "She is still
suffering and in bed. I gave your flowers to the deformed girl who takes
care of her; but I will not do it again, you may rely upon it, not if you
coax even more fondly than you did yesterday and promise me all Caesar's
treasure into the bargain! And what can you want with that wretched,
pale-faced, innocent creature? I am but a poor slave, but I can tell you
this--"
Here the Sarmatian broke off abruptly, and Verus rightly guessed that
Antinous had remembered his presence in the Emperor's room and had signed
to the slave to be silent.
But the listener had learnt enough. The favorite had told his master a
lie, and the suicide of the steward's daughter was a pure romance. Who
would have believed that the silent, dreamy lad had so much presence of
mind, and such cunning powers of invention? The praetor's handsome face
was radiant with satisfaction as he made these reflections, for now he
had the Bithynian under his thumb, and now he knew how to accomplish all
he wished. Antinous himself had indicated the right course when he had
hastened to the Emperor with a gush of tenderness, in which the warmth
was certainly not affected, to kiss his hand.
The favorite loved his master, and Verus could ground his demands on this
love without exposing himself, or having to dread the Emperor's avenging
hand in case of betrayal. He knocked at the door of the adjoining room
with a firm hand, and then went confidently and composedly up to the
Bithyman, told him that he had an important matter to discuss with him,
begged him to return with him into the Emperor's room and then said, as
soon as they were alone together:
"I am so unfortunate as not to be able to number you among my particular
friends; but one strong sentiment we have in common. We both love
Caesar."
"I love him, certainly," replied the lad.
"Well then, you must have it at heart to spare him all great sorrow, and
to prevent grave apprehensions from paralyzing the pinions of his free
and noble soul."
"No doubt."
"I knew I should find a colleague in you. See this roll. It contains the
calculations and diagrams of the greatest astrologer of our time, and
from these it is to be discovered that this night, from the end of the
second hour of the morning till the beginning of the fourth, the stars
will announce fearful disasters to our Sovereign. Do you understand?"
"Alas! perfectly."
"After that the indications of evil disappear. Now if we could only
succeed in preventing Hadrian observing the heavens merely during the
third hour after midnight we should preserve him from trouble and
anxiety, which will torment and spoil his life. Who knows whether the
stars may not be? But even if they tell the truth, misfortune, when it
does come, always comes much too soon. Do you agree with me?"
"Your suggestion sounds a very sensible one--still I think--"
"It is both sensible and wise," said the praetor, shortly and decidedly,
interrupting the boy. "And it must be your part to hinder Hadrian from
marking the course of the stars from the end of the second to the
beginning of the fourth hour after midnight."
"My part?" cried Antinous, startled.
"Yours--for you are the only person who can accomplish it."
"I?" repeated the Bithynian, greatly perturbed. "I--disturb Caesar in his
observations!"
"It is your duty."
"But he never allows any one to disturb him at his studies, and if I were
to attempt it he would be very angry and send me off in no time. No, no,
what you ask is impossible."
"It is not only possible but imperatively necessary."
"That it certainly cannot be," replied Antinous, clasping his forehead in
his hand. "Only listen! Hadrian has known for several days past that some
great misfortune threatens him. I heard it from his own lips. If you know
him at all you must know that he gazes at the stars not merely to rejoice
in future happiness, but also to fortify himself against the disasters
which threaten him or the state. What would crush a weaker man only
serves to arm his bold spirit. He can bear all that may befall, and it
would be a crime to deceive him."
"To cloud his heart and mind would be a greater," retorted Verus. "Devise
some means of taking him away from his star-gazing for only an hour."
"I dare not, and even if I wished it, it could not be done. Do you
suppose he follows me whenever I call?"
"But you know him; invent something which will be sure to make him come
down from his watchtower."
"I cannot invent or think of any thing."
"Nothing?" asked Verus, going close tip to the Bithynian. "You just now
gave striking proof to the contrary."
Antinous turned pale and the praetor went on:
"When you wanted to rescue the fair Selene from the lictors your swift
invention threw her into the sea!"
"She did throw herself in, as truly as that the gods--"
"Stay, stay," cried the praetor. "No perjury, at least! Selene is living,
you send her flowers, and if I should think proper to conduct Hadrian to
the house of Paulina--"
"Oh!" cried Antinous lamentably enough, and grasping the Roman's hand.
"You will not--you can not. Oh Verus! you will not do that."
"Simpleton," laughed the praetor, slapping the alarmed youth lightly on
the shoulder. "What good could it do me to ruin you? I have only one
thing at heart just now, and that is to save Caesar from care and
anxiety. Keep him occupied only during the third hour after midnight and
you may count on my friendship; but if out of fear or ill-will you refuse
me your assistance you do not deserve your sovereign's favor and then you
will compel me--"
"No more, no more!" cried Antinous interrupting his tormentor in despair.
"Then you promise me to carry out my wish?"
"Yes, by Hercules! Yes, what you require shall be done. But eternal gods!
how am I to get Caesar--"
"That, my young friend, I leave with perfect confidence to you and your
shrewdness."
"I am not shrewd--I can devise nothing," groaned the lad.
"What you could do out of terror of your master you can do still better
for love of him," retorted the praetor. "The problem is an easy one; and
if after all you should not succeed I shall feel it no less than my duty
to explain to Hadrian how well Antinous can take care of his own
interests and how badly of his master's peace of mind. Till to-morrow, my
handsome friend--and if for the future you have flowers to send, my
slaves are quite at your service."
With these words the praetor left the room, but Antinous stood like one
crushed, pressing his brow against the cold porphyry pillar by the
window. What Verus required of him did not seem to have any harm in it,
and yet it was not right. It was treason to his noble master, whom he
loved with tender devotion as a father, a wise, kind friend, and
preceptor, and whom he reverenced and feared as though he were a god. To
plot to hide impending trouble from him, as if he were not a man but a
feeble weakling, was absurd and contemptible, and must introduce an error
of unknown importance and extent into his sovereign's far-seeing
predeterminations. Many other reasons against the praetor's demands
crowded on him, and as each occurred to his mind he cursed his tardy
spirit which never let him see or think the right thing till it was too
late. His first deceit had already involved him in a second.
He hated himself; he hit his forehead with his fists and sobbed aloud
bitterly again and again, though he shed no tears. Still, in the midst of
his self-accusation, the flattering voice made itself heard in his soul:
"It is only to preserve your master from sorrow, and it is nothing wrong
that you are asked to do." And each time that his inward ear heard these
words he began to puzzle his brain to discover in what way it might be
possible for him to tempt the Emperor, at the hour named, down from his
watch-tower in the palace. But he could hit on no practicable plan.
"It cannot be done, no--it cannot be done!" he muttered to himself and
then he asked himself if it were not even his duty to defy the praetor
and to confess to Hadrian that he had deceived him in the morning. If
only it had not been for the little bottle! Could he ever confess that he
had heedlessly parted with this gift of all others from his master? No,
it was too hard, it might cost him his sovereign's affection for ever.
And if he contented himself with a half-truth and confessed, merely to
anticipate the praetor's accusation, that Selene was still living, then
he would involve the daughters of the hapless Keraunus in persecution and
disgrace Selene whom he loved with all the devotion of a first passion,
which was enhanced and increased by the hindrances that had come in its
way. It was impossible to confess his guilt-quite impossible. The longer
he thought, tormenting himself to find some way out of it all, the more
confused he became, and the more impotent his efforts at resistance. The
praetor had entangled him with thongs and meshes, and at every struggle
to escape they only seemed knotted more closely round him.
His head began to ache sadly; and what an endless time Caesar was absent!
He dreaded his return, and yet he longed for it. When at last Hadrian
came in and signed to Master to relieve him of his imperial robes,
Antinous slipped behind him, and silently and carefully fulfilled the
slave's office. He felt uneasy and worried, and yet he forced himself to
appear in good spirits during supper when he had to sit opposite the
Emperor.
When, shortly before midnight, Hadrian rose from the table to go up to
the watch-tower on the northern side of the palace, Antinous begged to be
allowed to carry his instruments for him, and the Emperor, stroking his
hair, said kindly:
"You are my dear and faithful companion. Youth has a right to go astray
now and then so long as it does not entirely forget the path in which it
ought to tread."
Antinous was deeply touched by these words, and he secretly pressed to
his lips a fold of the Emperor's toga as he walked in front. It was as
though he wanted to make amends in advance for the crime he had not yet
committed.
Wrapped in his cloak he kept the Emperor silent company during his
studies, till the close of the first hour after midnight. The sharp,
north wind which blew through the darkness did his aching head good, and
still he racked his wits for some pretext to attract Hadrian from his
labors, but in vain. His tormented brain was like a dried-up well; bucket
after bucket did he send down, but not one brought up the refreshing
draught he needed. Nothing--nothing could he think of that could conduce
to his end. Once he plucked up courage and said imploringly as he went
close up to the Emperor: "Go down earlier to-night my lord; you really do
not allow yourself enough rest and will injure your health."
Hadrian let him speak, and answered kindly:
"I sleep in the morning. If you are tired, go to bed now."
But Antinous remained, gazing, like his master, at the stars. He knew
very few of the brilliant bodies by their names, but some of them were
very dear to him, particularly the Pleiades which his father had pointed
out to him and which reminded him of his home. There he had been so quiet
and happy, and how wildly his anxious heart was throbbing now!
"Go to bed, the second hour is beginning," said Hadrian.
"Already!" said the boy; and as he reflected how soon that must be done
which Verus had required of him, and then looked up again at the heavens,
it seemed to him as though all the stars in the blue vault over his head
had glided from their places and were dancing in wild and whirling
confusion between the sky and the sea. He closed his eyes in his
bewilderment; then, bidding his master good-night he lighted a torch and
by its flaring and doubtful light descended from the tower.
Pontius had erected this slight structure expressly for Hadrian's nightly
observations. It was built of timber and Nile-mud and stood up as a tall
turret on the secure foundation of an ancient watch-tower built of hewn
stone, which, standing among the low buildings that served as storehouses
for the palace, commanded a free outlook over all the quarters of the
sky. Hadrian, who liked to be alone and undisturbed when observing the
heavens, had preferred this erection--even after he had made himself
known to the Alexandrians--to the great observatory of the Serapeum, from
which a still broader horizon was visible.
After Antinous had got out of the smaller and newer tower into the larger
and older one he sat down on one of the lowest steps to collect his
thoughts and to quiet his loudly-beating heart. His vain cogitations
began all over again. Time slipped on-between the present moment and the
deed to be done there were but a certain number of minutes. He told
himself so, and his weary brain stirred more actively, suggesting to him
to feign illness and bring the Emperor to his bedside. But Hadrian was
physician enough to see that he was well, and even if he should allow
himself to be deceived, he, Antinous, was a deceiver. This thought filled
him with horror of himself and with dread for the future, and yet it was
the only plan that gave any hope of success. And even when he sprang to
his feet and walked hastily up and down among the out-houses he could hit
upon no other scheme. And how fast the minutes flew! The third hour after
midnight must be quite close at hand, and he had scarcely left himself
time to rush back into the palace, throw himself on his couch, and call
Mastor. Quite bewildered with agitation and tottering like a drunken man
he hastened back into the old tower where he had left his torch leaning
against the wall and looked up the stone stairs; it suddenly flashed
through his mind that he might go up again to fling himself down them.
What did he care for his miserable life.
His fall, his cry, would bring the Emperor down from his observatory and
he knew that he would not leave his bleeding favorite uncared for and
untended he could count upon that. And if then Hadrian watched by his bed
it would be that, perhaps, of a dying man, but not of a deceiver. Fully
determined on extreme measures, he tightened the girdle which held his
chiton above his hips and once more went out into the night to judge by
the stars what hour it was. He saw the slender sickle of the waning
moon-the same moon which at the full had been mirrored in the sea when he
had gone into the water to save Selene. The image of the pale girl rose
before him, tangibly distinct. He felt as if he held her once more in his
arms--saw her once more lying on her bed-could once more press his lips
to her cold brow. Then the vision vanished; instead he was possessed by a
wild desire to see her, and he said to himself that he could not die
without having seen her once more.
He looked about him in indecision. Before him lay one of the largest of
the storehouses that surrounded the tower. With his torch in one hand he
went in at the open door. In the large shed lay the chests and cases, the
hemp, linseed, straw and matting that had been used in packing the
vessels and works of art with which the palace had been newly furnished.
This he knew; and now, looking up at the stars once more and seeing that
the second hour after midnight had almost run to an end, a fearful
thought flashed through his mind, and without daring to consider, he
flung the torch into the open shed, crammed to the roof with inflammable
materials, and stood motionless, with his arms crossed, to watch through
the door of the shed the rapidly spreading flame, the soaring smoke, the
struggle and mingling of the noiseless wreaths of black vapor from the
various combustibles with the ruddy light, the victory of the fire and
the leaping flames as they flew upward.
The roof, thatched with palm-leaves and reeds, had begun to crackle when
Antinous rushed into the tower only a few paces off crying: "Fire--fire!"
and up the stairs which led to the observatory of the imperial stargazer.
THE EMPEROR
By Georg Ebers
Volume 9.
CHAPTER XIV.
The entertainment which Verus was giving on the eve of his birthday
seemed to be far from drawing to an end, even at the beginning of the
third hour of the morning. Besides the illustrious and learned Romans who
had accompanied the Emperor to Alexandria, the most famous and
distinguished Alexandrians had also been invited by the praetor. The
splendid banquet had long been ended, but jar after jar of mixed wine was
still being filled and emptied. Verus himself had been unanimously chosen
as the king and leader of the feast. Crowned with a rich garland, he
reclined on a couch strewn with rose-leaves, an invention of his own, and
formed of four cushions piled one on another. A curtain of transparent
gauze screened him from flies and gnats, and a tightly-woven mat of
lilies and other flowers covered his feet and exhaled sweet odors for him
and for the pretty singer who sat by his side.
Pretty boys dressed as little cupids watched every sign of the 'sham
Eros.'
How indolently he lay on the deep, soft cushions! And yet his eyes were
every where, and though he had not failed to give due consideration to
the preparations for his feast, he devoted all the powers of his mind to
the present management of it. As at the entertainments which Hadrian was
accustomed to give in Rome, first of all short selections from new essays
or poems were recited by their authors, then a gay comedy was performed;
then Glycera, the most famous singer in the city, had sung a dithyramb to
her harp, in a voice as sweet as a bell, and Alexander, a skilled
performer on the trigonon, had executed a piece. Finally a troop of
female dancers had rushed into the room and swayed and balanced
themselves to the music of the double-flute and tambourine.
Each fresh amusement had been more loudly applauded than the last. With
every jar of wine a new torrent of merriment went up through the opening
in the roof, by which the scent of the flowers and of the perfume burnt
on beautiful little altars found an exit into the open air. The wine
offered in libations to the gods already lay in broad pools upon the hard
pavement of the hall, the music and singing were drowned in shouts the
feast had become an orgy.
Verus was inciting the more quiet or slothful of his guests to a freer
enjoyment and encouraging the noisiest in their extravagant recklessness
to still more unbridled license. At the same time he bowed to each one
who drank to his health, entertained the singer who sat by his side,
flung a sparkling jest into one and another silent group, and proved to
the learned men who reclined on their couches near to his that whenever
it was possible he took an interest in their discussions. Alexandria, the
focus of all the learning of the East and the West, had seen other
festivals than this riotous banquet. Indeed, even here a vein of grave
and wise discourse flavored the meal of the circle that belonged to the
Museum; but the senseless revelry of Rome had found its way into the
houses of the rich, and even the noblest achievements of the human mind
had been made, unawares, subservient to mere enjoyment. A man was a
philosopher only that he might be prompt to discuss and always ready to
take his share in the talk; and at a banquet a well-told anecdote was
more heartily welcome than some profound idea that gave rise to a
reflection or provoked a subtle discussion.
What a noise, what a clatter was storming in the hall by the second hour
after midnight! How the lungs of the feasters were choked with
overpowering perfumes! What repulsive exhibitions met the eye! How
shamelessly was all decency trodden under foot! The poisonous breath of
unchecked license had blasted the noble moderation of the vapor of wine
which floated round this chaos of riotous topers slowly rose the pale
image of Satiety watching for victims on the morrow.
The circle of couches on which lay Florus, Favorinus and their
Alexandrian friends stood like an island in the midst of the surging sea
of the orgy. Even here the cup had been bravely passed round, and Florus
was beginning to speak somewhat indistinctly, but conversation had
hitherto had the upper hand.
Two days before, the Emperor had visited the Museum and had carried on
learned discussions with the most prominent of the sages and professors
there, in the presence of their assembled disciples. At last a formal
disputation had arisen, and the dialectic keenness and precision with
which Hadrian, in the purest Attic Greek, had succeeded in driving his
opponents into a corner had excited the greatest admiration. The
Sovereign had quitted the famous institution with a promise to reopen the
contest at an early date. The philosophers, Pancrates and Dionysius and
Apollonius, who took no wine at all, were giving a detailed account of
the different phases of this remarkable disputation and praising the
admirable memory and the ready tongue of the great monarch.
"And you did not even see him at his best," exclaimed Favorinus, the
Gaul, the sophist and rhetorician. "He has received an unfavorable oracle
and the stars seem to confirm the prophecy. This puts him out of tune.
Between ourselves let me tell you I know a few who are his superiors in
dialectic, but in his happiest moments he is irresistible-irresistible.
Since we made up our quarrel he is like a brother to me. I will defend
him against all comers, for, as I say, Hadrian is my brother."
The Gaul had poured out this speech in a defiant tone and with flashing
eyes. He grew pale in his cups, touchy, boastful and very talkative.
"No doubt you are right," replied Apollonius, "but it seemed to us that
he was bitter in discussion. His eyes are gloomy rather than gay."
"He is my brother," repeated Favorinus, "and as for his eyes, I have seen
them flash--by Hercules! like the radiant sun, or merry twinkling stars!
And his mouth! I know him well! He is my brother, and I will wager that
while he condescended--it is too comical--condescended to dispute with
you--with you, there was a sly smile at each corner of his
mouth--so--look now--like this he smiled."
"I repeat, he seemed to us gloomy rather than gay," retorted Apollonius,
with annoyance; and Pancrates added:
"If he does really know how to jest he certainly did not prove it to us."
"Not out of ill-will," laughed the Gaul, "you do not know him, but I--I
am his friend and may follow wherever--he goes. Now only wait and I will
tell you a few stories about him. If I chose I could describe his whole
soul to you as if it lay there on the surface of the wine in my cup. Once
in Rome he went to inspect the newly-decorated baths of Agrippa, and in
the undressing-room he saw an old man, a veteran who had fought with him
somewhere or other. My memory is greatly admired, but his is in no
respect inferior. Scaurus was the old man's name--yes--yes, Scaurus. He
did not observe Caesar at first, for after his bath his wounds were
burning and he was rubbing his back against the rough stone of a pillar.
Hadrian however called to him: 'Why are you scratching yourself, my
friend?' and Scaurus, not at once recognizing Caesar's voice, answered
without turning round: 'Because I have no slave to do it for me.' You
should have heard Caesar laugh! Liberal as he is sometimes--I say
sometimes--he gave Scaurus a handsome sum of money and two sturdy slaves.
The story soon got abroad, and when Caesar, who--as you believe--cannot
jest, a short time after again visited the bath, two old soldiers at once
placed themselves in his way, scrubbed their backs against the wall like
Scaurus, and called out to him 'Great Caesar, we have no slaves.'--'Then
scratch each other,' cried he, and left the soldiers to rub themselves."
"Capital!" laughed Dionysius. "Now one more true story," interrupted the
loquacious Gaul. "Once upon a time a man with white hair begged of him.
The wretch was a low fellow, a parasite who wandered round from one man's
table to another, feeding himself out of other folks' wallets and dishes.
Caesar knew his man and warned him off. Then the creature had his hair
dyed that he might not be recognized, and tried his luck a second time
with the Emperor. But Hadrian has good eyes; he pointed to the door,
saying, with the gravest face: 'I have just lately refused to give your
father anything.' And a hundred such jokes pass from mouth to mouth in
Rome, and if you like I can give you a dozen of the best."
"Tell us, go on, out with your stories. They are all old friends!"
stammered Florus. "But while Favorinus chatters we can drink."
The Gaul cast a contemptuous glance at the Roman, and answered promptly:
"My stories are too good for a drunken man."
Florus paused to think of an answer, but before he could find one, the
praetor's body-slave rushed into the hall crying out: "The palace at
Lochias is on fire."
Verus kicked the mat of lilies off his feet on to the floor, tore down
the net that screened him in, and shouted to the breathless runner.
"My chariot-quick, my chariot! To our next merry meeting another evening
my friends, with many thanks for the honor you have done me. I must be
off to Lochias."
Verus flew out of the hall, without throwing on his cloak and hot as he
was, into the cold night, and at the same time most of his guests had
started up to hurry into the open air, to see the fire and to hear the
latest news; but only very few went to the scene of the conflagration to
help the citizens to extinguish it, and many heavily intoxicated drinkers
remained lying on the couches.
As Favorinus and the Alexandrians raised themselves on their pillows
Florus cried:
"No god shall make me stir from this place, not if the whole house is
burnt down and Alexandria and Rome, and for aught I care every nest and
nook on the face of the earth. It may all burn together. The Roman Empire
can never be greater or more splendid than under Caesar! It may burn down
like a heap of straw, it is all the same to me--I shall lie here and
drink."
The turmoil and confusion on the scene of the interrupted feast seemed
inextricable, while Verus hurried off to Sabina to inform her of what had
occurred. But Balbilla had been the first to discover the fire and quite
at the beginning, for after sitting industriously at her studies, and
before going to bed, she had looked out toward the sea. She had instantly
run out, cried "Fire!" and was now seeking for a chamberlain to awake
Sabina.
The whole of Lochias flared and shone in a purple and golden glow. It
formed the nucleus of a wide spreading radiance of tender red of which
the extent and intensity alternately grew and diminished. Verus met the
poetess at the door that led from the garden into the Empress'
apartments. He omitted on this occasion to offer his customary greeting,
but hastily asked her:
"Has Sabina been told?"
"I think not yet."
"Then have her called. Greet her from me--I must go to Lochias"
"We will follow you."
"No, stay here; you will be in the way there."
"I do not take much room and I shall go. What a magnificent spectacle."
"Eternal gods! the flames are breaking out too below the palace, by the
King's harbor. Where can the chariots be?"
"Take me with you."
"No you must wake the Empress."
"And Lucilla?"
"You women must stay where you are."
"For my part I certainly will not. Caesar will be in no danger?"
"Hardly--the old stones cannot burn."
"Only look! how splendid! the sky is one crimson tent. I entreat you,
Verus, let me go with you."
"No, no, pretty one. Men are wanted down there."
"How unkind you are."
"At last! here are the chariots! You women stay here; do you understand
me?"
"I will not take any orders; I shall go to Lochias."
"To see Antinous in the flames! such a sight is not to be seen every day,
to be sure!" cried Verus, ironically, as he sprang into his chariot, and
took the reins into his own hand.
Balbilla stamped with rage.
She went to Sabina's rooms fully resolved to go to the scene of the fire.
The Empress would not let herself be seen by any one, not even by
Balbilla, till she was completely dressed. A waiting-woman told Balbilla
that Sabina would get up certainly, but that for the sake of her health
she could not venture out in the night-air.
The poetess then sought Lucilla and begged her to accompany her to
Lochias; she was perfectly willing and ready, but when she heard that her
husband had wished that the women should remain at the Caesareum she
declared that she owed him obedience and tried to keep back her friend.
But the perverse curly-haired girl was fully determined, precisely
because Verus had forbidden her--and forbidden her with mocking words, to
carry out her purpose. After a short altercation with Lucilla she left
her, sought her companion Claudia, told her what she intended doing,
dismissed that lady's remonstrance with a very positive command, gave
orders herself to the house-steward to have horses put to a chariot and
reached the imperilled palace an hour and a half after Verus.
An endless, many-headed crowd of people besieged the narrow end of
Lochias on the landward side and the harbor wharves below, where some
stores and shipyards were in flames. Boats innumerable were crowded round
the little peninsula. An attempt was being made, with much shouting, and
by the combined exertions of an immense number of men, to get the larger
ships afloat which lay at anchor close to the quay of the King's harbor
and to place them in security. Every thing far and wide was lighted up as
brightly as by day, but with a ruddier and more restless light. The
north-east breeze fanned the fire, aggravating the labors of the men who
were endeavoring to extinguish it and snatching flakes of flame off every
burning mass. Each blazing storehouse was a gigantic torch throwing a
broad glare into the darkness of the night. The white marble of the
tallest beacon tower in the world, on the island of Pharos, reflected a
rosy hue, but its far gleaming light shone pale and colorless. The dark
hulls of the larger ships and the flotilla of boats in the background
were afloat in a fiery sea, and the still water under the shore mirrored
the illumination in which the whole of Lochias was wrapped.
Balbilla could not tire of admiring this varying scene, in which the most
gorgeous hues vied with each other and the intensest light contrasted
with the deepest shadows. And she had ample time to dwell on the
marvellous picture before her eyes, for her chariot could only proceed
slowly, and at a point where the street led up from the King's harbor to
the palace, lictors stood in her way and declared positively that any
farther advance was out of the question. The horses, much scared by the
glare of the fire and the crowd that pressed round them, could hardly be
controlled, first rearing and then kicking at the front board of the
chariot. The charioteer declared he could no longer be answerable. The
people who had hurried to the rescue now began to abuse the women, who
ought to have staid at home at the loom rather than come stopping the way
for useful citizens.
"There is time enough to go out driving by daylight!" cried one man; and
another: "If a spark falls in those curls another conflagration will
break out."
The position of the ladies was becoming every instant more unendurable
and Balbilla desired the charioteer to turn round; but in the swarming
mass of men that filled the street this was easier said than done. One of
the horses broke the strap which fastened the yoke that rested on his
withers to the pole, started aside and forced back the crowd which now
began to scold and scream loudly. Balbilla wanted to spring out of the
chariot, but Claudia clung tightly to her and conjured her not to leave
her in the lurch in the midst of the danger. The spoilt patrician's
daughter was not timid, but on this occasion she would have given much
not to have followed Verus. At first she thought, "A delightful
adventure! still, it will not be perfect till it is over." But presently
her bold experiment lost every trace of charm, and repentance that she
had ever undertaken it filled her mind. She was far nearer weeping than
laughing already, when a man's deep voice said behind her, in tones of
commanding decision:
"Make way there for the pumps; push aside whatever stops the way."
These terrible words reduced Claudia to sinking on to her knees, but
Balbilla's quelled courage found fresh wings as she heard them, for she
had recognized the voice of Pontius. Now he was close behind the chariot,
high on a horse. He then was the man on horseback whom she had seen
dashing from the sea-shore up to the higher storehouses that were
burning, down to the lake, and hither and thither.
She turned full upon him and called him by his name. He recognized her,
tried to pull up his horse as it was dashing forward, and smilingly shook
his head at her, as much as to say: "She is a giddy creature and deserves
a good scolding; but who could be angry with her?" And then he gave his
orders to his subordinates just as if she had been a mere chattel, a bale
of goods or something of the kind, and not an heiress of distinction.
"Take out the horses," he cried to the municipal guards; "we can use them
for carrying water."--"Help the ladies out of the chariot."--"Take them
between you Nonnus and Lucanus."--"Now, stow the chariot in there among
the bushes."--"Make way there in front, make way for our pumps." And each
of these orders was obeyed as promptly as if it was the word of command
given by a general to his well-drilled soldiers.
After the pumps had been fairly started Pontius rode close up to Balbilla
and said:
"Caesar is safe and sound. You no doubt wished to see the progress of the
fire from a spot near it, and in fact the colors down there are
magnificent. I have not time to escort you back to the Caesareum; but
follow me. You will be safe in the harbor-guard's stone house, and from
the roof you can command a view of Lochias and the whole peninsula. You
will have a rare feast for the eye, noble Balbilla; but I beg you not to
forget at the same time how many days of honest labor, what rich
possessions, how many treasures earned by bitter hardship are being
destroyed at this moment. What may delight you will cost bitter tears to
many others, and so let us both hope that this splendid spectacle may now
have reached its climax, and soon may come to an end."
"I hope so--I hope it with all my heart!" cried the girl.
"I was sure you would. As soon as possible I will come to look after you.
You Nonnus and Lucanus, conduct these noble ladies to the harbor-guard's
house.
"Tell him they are intimate friends of the Empress. Only keep the pumps
going! Till we meet again Balbilla!" and with these words the architect
gave his horse the bridle and made his way through the crowd.
A quarter of an hour later Balbilla was standing on the roof of the
little stone guard-house. Claudia was utterly exhausted and incapable of
speech. She sat in the dark little parlor below on a rough-hewn wooden
bench. But the young Roman now gazed at the fire with different eyes than
before. Pontius had made her feel a foe to the flames which only a short
time before had filled her with delight as they soared up to the sky,
wild and fierce. They still flared up violently, as though they had to
climb above the roof; but soon they seemed to be quelled and exhausted,
to find it more and more difficult to rise above the black smoke which
welled up from the burning mass. Balbilla had looked out for the
architect and had soon discovered him, for the man on horseback towered
above the crowd. He halted now by one and now by another burning
storehouse. Once she lost sight of him for a whole hour, for he had gone
to Lochias. Then again he reappeared, and wherever he stayed for a while,
the raging element abated its fury.
Without her having perceived it, the wind had changed and the air had
become still and much warmer. This circumstance favored the efforts of
the citizens trying to extinguish the fire, but Balbilla ascribed it to
the foresight of her clever friend when the flames subsided in souse
places and in others were altogether extinguished. Once she saw that he
had a building completely torn down which divided a burning granary from
some other storehouses that had been spared, and she understood the
object of this order; it cut off the progress of the flames. Another time
she saw him high on the top of a rise in the ground. Close before him in
a sheet of flame was a magazine in which were kept tow and casks of resin
and pitch. He turned his face full towards it and gave his orders, now on
this side, now on that. His figure and that of his horse, which reared
uneasily beneath him, were flooded in a crimson glow--a splendid picture!
She trembled for him, she gazed in admiration at this calm, resolute,
energetic man, and when a blazing beam fell close in front of him and
after his frightened horse had danced round and round with him, he forced
it to submit to his guidance, the praetor's insinuation recurred to her
mind, that she clung to her determination to go to Lochias because she
hoped to enjoy the spectacle of Antinous in the flames. Here, before her,
was a nobler display, and yet her lively imagination which often,
sometimes indeed against her will, gave shape to her formless
thoughts--called up the image of the beautiful youth surrounded by the
glowing glory which still painted the horizon.
Hour after hour slipped by; the efforts of the thousands who endeavored
to extinguish the blaze were crowned by increasing success; one burning
mass after another was quenched, if not extinguished, and instead of
flames smoke, mingled with sparks, rose from Lochias blacker and
blacker-and still Pontius came not to look after her. She could not see
any stars for the sky was overcast with clouds, but the beginning of a
new day could not be far distant. She was shivering with cold, and her
friend's long absence began to annoy her. When, presently, it began to
rain in large drops, she went down the ladder that led from the roof and
sat down by the fire in the little room where her companion had gone fast
asleep.
She had been sitting quite half an hour and gazing dreamily into the
warming glow, when she heard the sound of hoofs and Pontius appeared. His
face was begrimed, and his voice hoarse with shouting commands for hours.
As soon as she saw him Balbilla forgot her vexation, greeted him warmly,
and told him how she had watched his every movement; but the eager girl,
so readily fired to enthusiasm, could only with the greatest difficulty
bring out a few words to express the admiration that his mode of
proceeding had so deeply excited in her mind.
She heard him say that his mouth was quite parched and his throat was
longing for a draught of some drink, and she--who usually had every pin
she needed handed to her by a slave, and on whom fate had bestowed no
living creature whom she could find a pleasure in serving--she, with her
own hand dipped a cup of water out of the large clay jar that stood in a
corner of the room and offered it to him with a request that he would
drink it. He eagerly swallowed the refreshing fluid, and when the little
cup was empty Balbilla took it from his hand, refilled it, and gave it
him again.
Claudia, who woke up when the architect came in, looked on at her
foster-child's unheard-of proceedings with astonishment, shaking her
head. When Pontius had drained the third cupful that Balbilla fetched for
him he exclaimed, drawing a deep breath:
"That was a drink--I never tasted a better in the whole course of my
life."
"Muddy water out of a nasty earthen pitcher!" answered the girl.
"And it tasted better than wine from Byblos out of a golden goblet."
"You had honestly earned the refreshment, and thirst gives flavor to the
humblest liquor."
"You forget the hand that gave it me," replied the architect warmly.
Balbilla colored and looked at the floor in confusion, but presently
raised her face and said, as gayly and carelessly as ever:
"So that you have been deliciously refreshed; and now that is done you
will go home and the poor thirsty soul will once more become the great
architect. But before that happens, pray inform us what god it was that
brought you hither from Pelusium in the very nick of time when the fire
broke out, and how matters look now in the palace at Lochias?"
"My time is short," replied Pontius, and he then rapidly told her that,
after he had finished his work at Pelusium, he had returned to Alexandria
with the imperial post. As he got out of the chariot at the post-house he
observed the reflection of fire over the sea and was immediately after
told by a slave that it was the palace that was burning. There were
horses in plenty at the post-house; he had chosen a strong one and had
got to the spot before the crowd had collected. How the fire had
originated, so far remained undiscovered. "Caesar," he said, "was in the
act of observing the heavens when a flame broke out in a store-shed close
to the tower. Antinous was the first to detect it, cried 'Fire,' and
warned his master. I found Hadrian in the greatest agitation; he charged
me to superintend the work of rescuing all that could be saved. At
Lochias. Verus helped me greatly and indeed with so much boldness and
judgment that I owe very much to him. Caesar himself kept his favorite
within the palace, for the poor fellow burned both his hands."
"Oh!" cried Balbilla with eager regret. "How did that happen?"
"When Hadrian and Antinous first came down from the tower they brought
with them as many of the instruments and manuscripts as they could carry.
When they were at the bottom Caesar observed that a tablet with important
calculations had been left lying up above and expressed his regret.
Meanwhile the fire had already caught the slightly-built turret and it
seemed impossible to get into it again. But the dreamy Bithynian can wake
out of his slumbers it would seem, and while Caesar was anxiously
watching the burning bundles of flax which the wind kept blowing across
to the harbor the rash boy rushed into the burning building, flung the
tablet down from the top of the tower and then hurried down the stairs.
His bold action would indeed have cost the poor fellow his life if the
slave Mastor; who meanwhile had hurried to the spot, had not dragged him
down the stone stair of the old tower on which the new one stood and
carried him into the open air. He was half suffocated at the top of them
and had dropped down senseless."
"But he is alive, the splendid boy, the image of the gods! and he is out
of danger?" cried Balbilla, with much anxiety.
"He is quite well; only his hands, as I said, are somewhat burnt, and his
hair is singed, but that will grow again."
"His soft, lovely curls!" cried Balbilla. "Let us go home, Claudia. The
gardener shall cut a magnificent bunch of roses, and we will send it to
Antinous to please him."
"Flowers to a man who does not care about them?" asked Pontius, gravely.
"With what else can women reward men's virtues or do honor to their
beauty?" asked Balbilla.
"Our own conscience is the reward of our honest actions, or the laurel
wreath from the hand of some famous man."
"And beauty?"
"That of women claims and wins admiration, love too perhaps and
flowers-that of men may rejoice the eye, but to do it Honor is a task
granted to no mortal woman."
"To whom, then, if I may ask the question?"
"To Art, which makes it immortal."
"But the roses may bring some comfort and pleasure to the suffering
youth."
"Then send them-but to the sick boy, and not to the handsome man,"
retorted Pontius.
Balbilla was silent, and she and her companion followed the architect to
the harbor. There he parted from them, putting them into a boat which
took them back to the Caesareum through one of the arch-gates under the
Heptastadium.
As they were rowed along the younger Roman lady said to the elder:
"Pontius has quite spoilt my fun about the roses. The sick boy is the
handsome Antinous all the same, and if anybody could think--well, I shall
do just as I please; still it will be best not to cut the nosegay."
CHAPTER XV.
The town was out of danger; the fire was extinct. Pontius had taken no
rest till noonday. Three horses had he tired out and replaced by fresh
ones, but his sinewy frame and healthy courage had till now defied every
strain. As soon as he could consider his task at an end he went off to
his own house, and he needed rest; but in the hall of his residence he
already found a number of persons waiting, and who were likely to stand
between him and the enjoyment of it.
A man who lives in the midst of important undertakings cannot, with
impunity, leave his work to take care of itself for several days. All the
claims upon him become pent up, and when he returns home they deluge him
like water when the sluice-gates are suddenly opened behind which it has
been dammed up.
At least twenty persons, who had heard of the architect's return, were
waiting for him in his outer hall, and crowded upon him as soon as he
appeared. Among them he saw several who had come on important business,
but he felt that he had reached the farthest limit of his strength, and
he was determined to secure a little rest at any cost. The grave man's
natural consideration, usually so conspicuous, could not hold out against
the demands made on his endurance, and he angrily and peevishly pointed
to his begrimed face as he made his way through the people waiting for
him.
"To-morrow, to-morrow," he cried; "nay, if necessary, to-day, after
sunset. But now I need rest. Rest! Rest! Why, you yourselves can see the
state I am in."
All--even the master-masons and purveyors who had come on urgent affairs,
drew back; only one elderly man, his sister Paulina's house-steward,
caught hold of his chiton, stained as it was with smoke and scorched in
many places, and said quickly and in a low tone:
"My mistress greets you; she has things to speak of to you which will
bear no delay; I am not to leave you till you have promised to go to see
her to-day. Our chariot waits for you at the garden-door."
"Send it home," said Pontius, not even civilly; "Paulina must wait a few
hours."
"But my orders are to take you with me at once."
"But in this state--so--I cannot go with you," cried the architect with
vehemence. "Have you no sort of consideration? And yet--who can
tell--well, tell her I will be with her in two hours."
When Pontius had fairly escaped the throng he took a bath; then he had
some food brought to him, but even while he ate and drank, he was not
unoccupied, for he read the letters which awaited him, and examined some
drawings which his assistants had prepared during his absence.
"Give yourself an hour's respite," said the old housekeeper, who had been
his nurse and who loved him as her own son.
"I must go to my sister," he answered with a shrug. "We know her of old,"
said the old woman. "For nothing, and less than nothing, she has sent for
you be fore now; and you absolutely need rest. There--are your cushions
right--so? And let me ask you, has the humblest stone-carrier so hard a
life as you have? Even at meals you never have an hour of peace and
comfort. Your poor head is never quiet; the nights are turned into day;
something to do, always something to do. If one only knew who it is all
for?"
"Aye--who for, indeed?" sighed Pontius, pushing his arm under his head,
between it and the pillow. "But, you see, little mother, work must follow
rest as surely as day follows night or summer follows winter. The man who
has something he loves in the House--a wife and merry children, it may
be, for aught I care--who sweeten his hours of rest and make them the
best of all the day, he, I say is wise when he tries to prolong them; but
his case is not mine--"
"But why is it not yours, my son Pontius?"
"Let me finish my speech. I, as you know full well, do not care for
gossip in the bath nor for reclining long over a banquet. In the pauses
of my work I am alone, with myself and with you, my very worthy Leukippe.
So the hours of rest are not for me the fairest scenes, but empty waits
between the acts of the drama of life; and no reasonable man can find
fault with me for trying to abridge them by useful occupation."
"And what is the upshot of this sensible talk? Simply this: you must get
married."
Pontius sighed, but Leukippe added eagerly:
"You have not far to look! The most respectable fathers and mothers are
running after you and would bring their prettiest daughters into your
door."
"A daughter whom I do not know, and who might perhaps spoil the pauses
between the acts, which at present I can at any rate turn to some
account."
"They say," the old woman went on, "that marriage is a cast of the dice.
One throws a high number, another a low one; one wins a wife who is a
match for the busy bee, another gets a tiresome gnat. No doubt there is
some truth in it; but I have grown grey with my eyes open and I have
often seen it happen, that how the marriage turned out depended on the
husband. A man like you makes a bee out of a gnat--a bee that brings
honey to the hive. Of course a man must choose carefully."
"How, pray?"
"First see the parents and then the child. A girl who has grown up
surrounded by good habits, in the house of a sensible father and a
virtuous mother--"
"And where in this city am I to find such a miracle? Nay, nay, Leukippe,
for the present all shall be left to my old woman. We both do our duty,
we are satisfied with each other and--"
"And time is flying," said the housekeeper, interrupting her master in
his speech. "You are nearly thirty-five years of age, and the girls--"
"Let them be! let them be! They will find other men! Now send Cyrus with
my shoes and cloak, and have my litter got ready, for Paulina has been
kept waiting long enough."
The way from the architect's house to his sister's was long, and on his
way he found ample time for reflection on various matters besides
Leukippe's advice to marry. Still, it was a woman's face and form that
possessed him heart and soul; at first, however, he did not feel inclined
to feast his fancy on Balbilla's image, lovely as it appeared to him; on
the contrary, with self-inflicted severity he sought everything in her
which could be thought to be opposed to the highest standard of feminine
perfections. Nor did he find it difficult to detect many defects and
deficiencies in the Roman damsel; still he was forced to admit that they
were quite inseparable from her character, and that she would no longer
be what she was, if she were wholly free from them. Each of her little
weaknesses presently began to appear as an additional charm to the stern
man who had himself been brought up in the doctrine of the Stoics.
He had learnt by experience that sorrow must cast its shadow over the
existence of every human being; but still, the man to whom it should be
vouchsafed to walk through life hand-in-hand with this radiant child of
fortune could, as it seemed to him, have nothing to look forward to but
pure sunshine. During his journey to Pelusium and his stay there he had
often thought of her, and each time that her image had appeared to his
inward eye he had felt as though daylight had shone in his soul. To have
met her he regarded as the greatest joy of his life, but he dared not
aspire to claim her as his own.
He did not undervalue himself and knew that he might well be proud of the
position he had won by his own industry and talents; and still she was
the grandchild of the man who had had the right to sell his grandfather
for mere coin, and was so high-born, rich and distinguished that he would
have thought it hardly more audacious to ask the Emperor what he would
take for the purple than to woo her. But to shelter her, to warn her, to
allow his soul to be refreshed by the sight of her and by her talk--this
he felt was permissible, this happiness no one could deprive him of. And
this she would grant him--she esteemed him and would give him the right
to protect her, this he felt, with thankfulness and joy. He would, then
and there, have gone through the exertions of the last few hours all over
again if he could have been certain that he should once more be refreshed
with the draught of water from her hand. Only to think of her and of her
sweetness seemed greater happiness than the possession of any other
woman.
As he got out of his litter at the door of his sister's town-house he
shook his head, smiling at himself; for he confessed to himself that the
whole of the long distance he had hardly thought of anything but
Balbilla.
Paulina's house had but few windows opening upon the street and these
belonged to the strangers' rooms, and yet his arrival had been observed.
A window at the side of the house, all grown round with creepers, framed
in a sweet girlish head which looked down from it inquisitively on the
bustle in the street. Pontius did not notice it, but Arsinoe--for it was
her pretty face that looked out--at once recognized the architect whom
she had seen at Lochias and of whom Pollux had spoken as his friend and
patron.
She had now, for a week, been living with the rich widow; she wanted for
nothing, and yet her soul longed with all its might to be out in the
city, and to inquire for Pollux and his parents, of whom she had heard
nothing since the day of her father's death. Her lover was no doubt
seeking her with anxiety and sorrow; but how was he to find her?
Three days after her arrival she had discovered the little window from
which she had a view of the street. There was plenty to be seen, for it
led to the Hippodrome and was never empty of foot-passengers and chariots
that were proceeding thither or to Necropolis. No doubt it was a pleasure
to her to watch the fine horses and garlanded youths and men who passed
by Paulina's house; but it was not merely to amuse herself that she went
to the bowery little opening; no, she hoped, on the contrary, that she
might once see her Pollux, his father, his mother, his bother Teuker or
some one else they knew pass by her new home. Then she might perhaps
succeed in calling them, in asking what had become of her friends, and in
begging them to let her lover know where to seek her.
Her adoptive mother had twice found her at the window and had forbidden
her, not unkindly but very positively, to look out into the street.
Arsinoe had followed her unresistingly into the interior of the house,
but as soon as she knew that Paulina was out or engaged, she slipped back
to the window again and looked out for him, who must at every hour of the
day be thinking of her. And she was not happy amid her new and wealthy
surroundings. At first she had found it very pleasant to stretch her
limbs on Paulina's soft cushions, not to stir a finger to help herself,
to eat the best of food and to have neither to attend to the children nor
to labor in the horrible papyrus-factory; but by the third day she pined
for liberty--and still more for the children, for Selene and Pollux. Once
she went out driving with Paulina in a covered carriage for the first
time in her life. As the horses started she had enjoyed the rapid
movement and had leaned out at one side to see the houses and men flying
past her; but Paulina had regarded this as not correct--as she did so
many other things that she herself thought right and permissible--had
desired her to draw in her head, and had told her that a well-conducted
girl must sit with her eyes in her lap when out driving.
Paulina was kind, never was irritable, had her dressed and waited upon
like her own daughter, kissed her in the morning and when she bid her
good-night; and yet Arsinoe had never once thought of Paulina's demand
that she should love her. The proud woman, who was so cool in all the
friendly relations of life, and who, as she felt was always watching her,
was to her only a stranger who had her in her power. The fairest
sentiments of her soul she must always keep locked up from her.
Once, when Paulina, with tears in her eyes had spoken to her of her lost
daughter, Arsinoe had been softened and following the impulse of her
heart, had confided to her that she loved Pollux the sculptor and hoped
to be his wife.
"You love a maker of images!" Paulina had exclaimed, with as much horror
as if she had seen a toad; then she had paced uneasily up and down and
had added with her usual calm decision:
"No, no, my child! you will forget all this as soon as possible; I know
of a nobler Bridegroom for you; when once you have learned to know Him
you will never long for any other. Have you seen one single image in this
house?"
"No," replied Arsinoe, "but so far as regards Pollux--"
"Listen to me" said the widow, "have I not told you of our loving Father
in Heaven? Have I not told you that the gods of the heathen are unreal
beings which the vain imaginings of fools have endowed with all the
weaknesses and crimes of humanity? Can you not understand how silly it is
to pray to stones? What power can reside in these frail figures of brass
or marble?
"Idols we call them. He who carves them, serves them and offers sacrifice
to them; aye and a great sacrifice, for he devotes his best powers, to
their service. Do you understand me?"
"No--Art is certainly a lofty thing, and Pollux is a good man, full of
the divinity as he works."
"Wait a while, only wait--you will soon learn to understand," Paulina had
answered, drawing Arsinoe towards her, and had added, at first speaking
gently but then more sternly: "Now go to bed and pray to your gracious
Father in Heaven that he may enlighten your heart. You must forget the
carved image-maker, and I forbid you ever to speak in my presence again
of such a man."
Arsinoe had grown up a heathen, she clung with affection to the gods of
her fathers and hoped for happier days after the first bitterness of the
loss of her father and the separation from her brothers and sisters was
past. She was little disposed to sacrifice her young love and all her
earthly happiness for spiritual advantages of which she scarcely
comprehended the value. Her father had always spoken of the Christians
with hatred and contempt. She now saw that they could be kind and
helpful, and the doctrine that there was a loving God in Heaven who cared
for all men as his children appealed to her soul; but that we ought to
forgive our enemies, to remember our sins, and to repent of them, and to
regard all the pleasure and amusement which the gay city of Alexandria
could offer as base and worthless--this was absurd and foolish.
And what great sins had she committed? Could a loving God require of her
that she should mar all her best days because as a child she had pilfered
a cake or broken a pitcher; or, as she grew older had sometimes been
obstinate or disobedient? Surely not. And then was an artist, a kind
faithful soul like her tall Pollux, to be odious in the eyes of God the
Father of all, because he was able to make such wonderful things as that
head of her mother, for instance? If this really was so she would rather,
a thousand times rather, lift her hands in prayer to the smiling
Aphrodite, roguish Eros, beautiful Apollo, and all the nine Muses who
protected her Pollux, than to Him.
An obscure aversion rose up in her soul against the stern woman who could
not understand her, and of whose teaching and admonitions she scarcely
took in half; and she rejected many a word of the widow's which might
otherwise easily have found room in her heart, only because it was spoken
by the cold-mannered woman who at every hour seemed to try to lay some
fresh restraint upon her.
Paulina had never yet taken her with her to of the Christian assemblies
in her suburban villa; wished first to prepare her and to open her soul
to salvation. In this task no teacher of the congregation should assist
her. She, and she alone, should win to the Redeemer the soul of this fair
creature that had walked so resolutely in the ways of the heathen; this
was required of her as the condition of the covenant that she felt she
had made with Him, it was with the price of this labor that she hoped to
purchase her own child's eternal happiness. Day after day she had Arsinoe
into her own room, that was decked with flowers and with Christian
symbols, and devoted several hours to her instruction. But her disciple
proved less impressionable and less attentive every day; while Paulina
was speaking Arsinoe was thinking of Pollux, of the children, of the
festival prepared for the Emperor or of the beautiful dress she was to
have worn as Roxana. She wondered what young girl would fill her place,
and how she could ever hope to see her lover again. And it was the same
during Paulina's prayers as during her instruction, prayers that often
lasted more than hour, and which she had to attend, on her knees on
Wednesday and Friday, and with hands uplifted on all the other days of
the week.
When her adoptive mother had discovered how often she looked out into the
street she thought she had found out the reason of her pupil's distracted
attention and only waited the return of her brother, the architect, in
order to have the window blocked up.
As Pontius entered the lofty hall of his sister's house, Arsinoe came to
meet him. Her cheeks were flushed, she had hurried to fly down as fast as
possible from her window to the ground floor, in order to speak to the
architect before he went into the inner rooms or had talked with his
sister, and she looked lovelier than ever. Pontius gazed at her with
delight. He knew that he had seen this sweet face before, but he could
not at once remember where; for a face we have met with only incidentally
is not easily recognized when we find it again where we do not expect it.
Arsinoe did not give him time to speak to her, for she went straight up
to him, greeted him, and asked timidly:
"You do not remember who I am?"
"Yes, yes," said the architect, "and yet--for the moment--"
"I am the daughter of Keraunus, the palace-steward at Lochias, but you
know of course"
"To be sure, to be sure! Arsinoe is your name; I was asking to-day after
your father and heard to my great regret--"
"He is dead."
"Poor child! How everything has changed in the old palace since I went
away. The gate-house is swept away, there is a new steward and there-but,
tell me how came you here?"
"My father left us nothing and Christians took its in. There were eight
of us."
"And my sister shelters you all?"
"No, no; one has been taken into one house and others into others. We
shall never be together again." And as she spoke the tears ran down
Arsinoe's cheeks; but she promptly recovered herself, and before Pontius
could express his sympathy she went on:
"I want to ask of you a favor; let me speak before any one disturbs us."
"Speak, my child."
"You know Pollux--the sculptor Pollux?"
"Certainly."
And you were always kindly disposed toward him?"
"He is a good man and an excellent artist."
"Aye that he is, and besides all that--may I tell you something and will
you stand by me?"
"Gladly, so far as lies in my power."
Arsinoe looked down at the ground in charming and blushing confusion and
said in a low tone:
"We love each other--I am to be his wife."
"Accept my best wishes."
"Ah, if only we had got as far as that! But since my father's death we
have not seen each other. I do not know where he and his parents are, and
how are they ever to find me here?"
"Write to him."
"I cannot write well, and even if I could my messenger--"
"Has my sister had any search made for him?"
"No--oh, no. I may not even let his name pass my lips. She wants to give
me to some one else; she says that making statues is hateful to the God
of the Christians."
"Does she? And you want me to seek your lover?"
"Yes, yes, my dear lord! and if you find him tell him I shall be alone
to-morrow early, and again towards evening, every day indeed, for then
your sister goes to serve her God in her country house."
"So you want to make me a lover's go-between. You could not find a more
inexperienced one."
"Ah! noble Pontius, if you have a heart--"
"Let me speak to the end, child! I will seek your lover, and if I find
him he shall know where you are, but I cannot and will not invite him to
an assignation here behind my sister's back. He shall come openly to
Paulina and prefer his suit. If she refuses her consent I will try to
take the matter in hand with Paulina. Are you satisfied with this?"
"I must need be. And tell me, you will let me know when you have found
out where he and his parents have gone?"
"That I promise you. And now tell the one thing. Are you happy in this
house?"
Arsinoe looked down in some embarrassment, then she hastily shook her
head in vehement negation and hurried away. Pontius looked after her with
compassion and sympathy.
"Poor, pretty little creature!" he murmured to himself, and went on to
his sister's room.
The house-steward had announced his visit, and Paulina met him on the
threshold. In his sister's sitting-room the architect found Eumenes, the
bishop, a dignified old man with clear, kind eyes.
"Your name is in everybody's mouth to-day," said Paulina, after the usual
greetings. They say you did wonders last night."
"I got home very tired," said Pontius, "but as you so pressingly desired
to speak to me, I shortened my hours of rest."
"How sorry I am!" exclaimed the widow.
The bishop perceived that the brother and sister had business to discuss
together, and asked whether he were not interrupting it.
"On the contrary," cried Paulina. "The subject under discussion is my
newly-adopted daughter who, unhappily, has her head full of silly and
useless things. She tells me she has seen you at Lochias, Pontius."
"Yes, I know the pretty child."
"Yes, she is lovely to look upon," said the widow. "But her heart and
mind have been left wholly untrained, and in her the doctrine falls upon
stony ground, for she avails herself of every unoccupied moment to stare
at the horsemen and chariots that pass on the way to the Hippodrome. By
this inquisitive gaping she fills her head with a thousand useless and
distracting fancies; I am not always at home, and so it will be best to
have the pernicious window walled up."
"And did you send for me only to have that done?" cried Pontius, much
annoyed. "Your house-slaves, I should think, might have been equal to
that without my assistance."
"Perhaps, but then the wall would have to be freshly whitewashed--I know
how obliging you always are." Thank you very much. To-morrow I will send
you two regular workmen."
"Nay, to-day, at once if possible."
"Are you in such pressing haste to spoil the poor child's amusement? And
besides I cannot but think that it is not to stare at the horsemen and
chariots that she looks out, but to see her worthy lover."
"So much the worse. I was telling you, Eumenes, that a sculptor wants to
marry her."
"She is a heathen," replied the bishop.
"But on the road to salvation," answered Paulina. "But we will speak of
that presently. There is still something else to discuss, Pontius. The
hall of my country villa must be enlarged."
"Then send me the plans."
"They are in the book-room of my late husband." The architect left his
sister to go into the library, which he knew well.
As soon as the bishop was left alone with Paulina, he shook his head and
said:
"If I judge rightly, my dear sister, you are going the wrong way to work
in leading this child intrusted to your care. Not all are called, and
rebellious hearts must be led along the path of salvation with a gentle
hand, not dragged and driven. Why do you cut off this girl, who still
stands with both feet in the world, from all that can give her pleasure?
Allow the young creature to enjoy every permitted pleasure which can add
to the joys of life in youth. Do not hurt Arsinoe needlessly, do not let
her feel the hand that guides her. First teach her to love you from her
heart, and when she knows nothing dearer than you, a request from you
will be worth more than bolts or walled-up windows."
"At first I wished nothing more than that she should love me,"
interrupted Paulina.
"But have you proved her? Do you see in her the spark which may be fanned
to a flame? Have you detected in her the germ which may possibly grow to
a strong desire for salvation and to devotion to the Redeemer?"
"That germ exists in every heart-these are your own words."
"But in many of the heathen it is deeply buried in sand and stories; and
do you feel yourself equal to clearing them away without injury to the
seed or to the soil in which it lies?"
"I do, and I will win Arsinoe to Jesus Christ," said Paulina firmly.
Pontius interrupted the conversation; he remained with his sister some
time longer discussing with her and with Eumenes the new building to be
done at her country house; then he and the bishop left at the same time
and Pontius proceeded to the scene of the fire by the harbor and in the
old palace.
CHAPTER XVI.
Pontius did not find the Emperor at Lochias, for Hadrian had moved at
mid-day to the Caesareum. The strong smell of burning in every room in
the palace had sickened him and he had begun to regard the restored
building as a doomed scene of disaster. The architect was waited for with
much anxiety, for the rooms originally furnished for the Emperor in the
Caesareum had been despoiled and disarranged to decorate the rooms at
Lochias, and Pontius was wanted to superintend their immediate
rehabilitation. A chariot was waiting for him and there was no lack of
slaves, so he began this fresh task at once and devoted himself to it
till late at night. It was in vain this time that his anteroom was filled
with people waiting for his return.
Hadrian had retired to some rooms which formed part of his wife's
apartments. He was in a grave mood, and when the prefect Titianus was
announced he kept him waiting till, with his own hand, he had laid a
fresh dressing on his favorite's burns.
"Go now, my lord," begged the Bithynian, when the Emperor had finished
his task with all the skill of a surgeon: "Titianus has been walking up
and down in there for the last quarter of an hour."
"And so he may," said the monarch. "And if the whole world is shrieking
for me it must wait till these faithful hands have had their due. Yes, my
boy! we will wander on through life together, inseparable comrades.
Others indeed do the same, and each one who goes through life side by
side with a companion sharing all he enjoys or suffers, comes to think at
last that he knows him as he knows himself; still the inmost core of his
friend's nature remains concealed from him. Then, some day Fate lets a
storm come raging down upon their; the last veil is torn, under the
wanderer's eyes, from the very heart of his companion, and at last he
really sees him as he is, like a kernel stripped of its shell, a bare and
naked body. Last night such a blast swept over us and let me see the
heart of my Antinous, as plainly as this hand I hold before my eyes. Yes,
yes, yes! for the man who will risk his young and happy existence for a
thing his friend holds precious would sacrifice ten lives if he had them,
for his friend's person. Never, my friend, shall that night be forgotten.
It gives you the right to do much that might pain me, and has graven your
name on my heart, the foremost among those to whom I am indebted for any
benefit.--They are but few."
Hadrian held out his hand to Antinous as he spoke. The boy, who had kept
his eyes fixed on the ground in much confusion, raised it to his lips and
pressed it against them in violent agitation. Then he raised his large
eyes to the Emperor's and said:
"You must not speak to me so kindly, for I do not deserve such goodness.
What is my life after all? I would let it go, as a child leaves go of a
beetle it has caught, to spare you one single anxious day."
"I know it," answered Hadrian firmly, and he went to the prefect in the
adjoining room.
Titianus had come in obedience to Hadrian's orders; the matter to be
settled was what indemnification was to be paid to the city and to the
individual owners of the storehouses that had been destroyed, for Hadrian
had caused a decree to be proclaimed that no one should suffer any loss
through a misfortune sent by the gods and which had originated in his
residence. The prefect had already instituted the necessary inquiries and
the private secretaries, Phlegon, Heliodorus and Celer, were now charged
with the duty of addressing documents to the injured parties in which
they were invited, in the name of Caesar, to declare the truth as to the
amount of the loss they had suffered. Titianus also brought the
information that the Greeks and Jews had determined to express their
thankfulness for Caesar's preservation by great thank-offerings.
"And the Christians," asked Hadrian.
"They abominate the sacrifice of animals, but they will unite in a common
act of thanksgiving."
"Their gratitude will not cost them much," said Hadrian.
"Their bishop, Eumenes, brought me a sum of money for which a hundred
oxen might be bought, to distribute among the poor. He said the God of
the Christians is a spirit and requires none but spiritual sacrifices;
that the best offering a man can bring him is a prayer prompted by the
spirit and proceeding from a loving heart."
"That sounds very well for us," said Hadrian. "But it will not do for the
people. Philosophical doctrines do not tend to piety; the populace need
visible gods and tangible sacrifices. Are the Christians here good
citizens and devoted to the welfare of the state?"
"We need no courts of justice for them."
"Then take their money and distribute it among the needy; but I must
forbid their meeting for a general thanksgiving; they may raise their
hands to their great spirit in my behalf, in private. Their doctrine must
not be brought into publicity; it is not devoid of a delusive charm and
it is indispensable to the safety of the state that the mob should remain
faithful to the old gods and sacrifices."
"As you command, Caesar."
"You know the account given of the Christians by Pliny and Trajan?"
"And Trajan's answer."
"Well then let us leave them to follow their own devices in private after
their own fashion; only they must not commit any breach of the laws of
the state nor force themselves into publicity. As soon as they show any
disposition to refuse to the old gods the respect that is due to them, or
to raise a finger against them, severity must be exercised and every
excess must be punished by death."
During this conversation Verus had entered the room; he was following the
Emperor everywhere to-day for he hoped to hear him say a word as to his
observation of the heavens, and yet he did not dare to ask him what he
had discovered from them.
When he saw that Hadrian was occupied he made a chamberlain conduct him
to Antinous. The favorite turned pale as he saw the praetor, still he
retained enough presence of mind to wish him all happiness on his
birthday. It did not escape Verus that his presence had startled the lad;
he therefore plied him at first with indifferent questions, introduced
pleasing anecdotes into his conversation and then, when he had gained his
purpose, he added carelessly:
"I must thank you in the name of the state and of every friend of
Caesar's. You carried out your undertaking well to the end, though by
somewhat overpowering means."
"I entreat you say no more," interrupted Antinous eagerly, and looking
anxiously at the door of the next room.
"Oh! I would have sacrificed all Alexandria to preserve Caesar's mind
from gloom and care. Besides we have both paid dearly for our good
intentions and for those wretched sheds."
"Pray talk of something else."
"You sit there with your hands bound up and your hair singed, and I feel
very unwell."
"Hadrian said you had helped valiantly in the rescue."
"I was sorry for the poor rats whose gathered store of provisions the
flames were so rapidly devouring, and all hot as I was from my supper, I
flung myself in among the men who were extinguishing the fire. My first
reward was a bath of cold, icy-cold sea-water, which was poured over my
head out of a full skin. All doctrines of ethics are in disgrace with me,
and I have long considered all the dramatic poets, in whose pieces virtue
is rewarded and crime punished, as a pack of fools; for my pleasantest
hours are all due to my worst deeds; and sheer annoyance and misery, to
my best. No hyena can laugh more hoarsely that I now speak; some portion
of me inside here, seems to have been turned into a hedgehog whose spines
prick and hurt me, and all this because I allowed myself to be led away
into doing things which the moralists laud as virtuous."
"You cough, and you do not look well. He down awhile."
"On my birthday? No, my young friend. And now let me just ask you before
I go: Can you tell me what Hadrian read in the stars?"
"No."
"Not even if I put my Perseus at your orders for every thing you may
require of him? The man knows Alexandria and is as dumb as a fish."
"Not even then, for what I do not know I cannot tell. We are both of us
ill, and I tell you once more you will be wise to take care of yourself."
Verus left the room, and Antinous watched him go with much relief.
The praetor's visit had filled him with disquietude, and had added to the
dislike he felt for him. He knew that he had been used to base ends by
Verus, for Hadrian had told him so much as that he had gone up to the
observatory not to question the stars for himself but to cast the
praetor's horoscope, and that he had informed Verus of his intention.
There was no excuse, no forgiveness possible for the deed he had done; to
please that dissolute coxcomb, that mocking hypocrite, he had become a
traitor to his master and an incendiary, and must endure to be
overwhelmed with praises and thanks by the greatest and most keen-sighted
of men. He hated, he abhorred himself, and asked himself why the fire
which had blazed around him had been satisfied only to inflict slight
injuries on his hands and hair. When Hadrian returned to him he asked his
permission to go to bed. The Emperor gladly granted it, ordered Mastor to
watch by his side, and then agreed to his wife's request that he would
visit her.
Sabina had not been to the scene of the fire, but she had sent a
messenger every hour to inquire as to the progress of the conflagration
and the well-being of her husband. When he had first arrived at the
Caesareum she had met and welcomed him and then had retired to her own
apartments.
It wanted only two hours of midnight when Hadrian entered her room; he
found her reclining on a couch without the jewels she usually wore in the
daytime but dressed as for a banquet.
"You wished to speak with me?" said the Emperor. "Yes, and this day--so
full of remarkable events as it has been--has also a remarkable close
since I have not wished in vain."
"You so rarely give me the opportunity of gratifying a wish."
"And do you complain of that?"
"I might--for instead of wishing you are wont to demand."
"Let us cease this strife of idle words."
"Willingly. With what object did you send for me?"
"Verus is to-day keeping his birthday."
"And you would like to know what the stars promise him?"
"Rather how the signs in the heavens have disposed you towards him."
"I had but little time to consider what I saw. But at any rate the stars
promise him a brilliant future."
A gleam of joy shone in Sabina's eyes, but she forced herself to keep
calm and asked, indifferently:
"You admit that, and yet you can come to no decision?"
"Then you want to hear the decisive word spoken at once, to-day?"
"You know that without my answering you."
"Well, then, his star outshines mine and compels me to be on my guard
against him."
"How mean! You are afraid of the praetor?"
"No, but of his fortune which is bound up with you?"
"When he is our son his greatness will be ours."
"By no means, since if I make him what you wish him to be, he will
certainly try to make our greatness his. Destiny--"
"You said it favored him; but unfortunately I must dispute the
statement."
"You? Do you try too, to read the stars?"
"No, I leave that to men. Have you heard of Ammonius, the astrologer?"
"Yes. A very learned man who observes from the tower of the Serapeum, and
who, like many of his fellows in this city has made use of his art to
accumulate a large fortune."
"No less a man than the astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus referred me to
him."
"The best of recommendation."
"Well, then, I commissioned Ammonius to cast the horoscope for Verus
during the past night and he brought it to me with an explanatory key.
Here it is."
The Emperor hastily seized the tablet which Sabina held out to him, and
as he attentively examined the forecasts, arranged in order according to
the hours, he said:
"Quite right. That of course did not escape me! Well done, exactly the
same as my own observations--but here--stay--here comes the third hour,
at the beginning of which I was interrupted. Eternal gods! what have we
here?"
The Emperor held the wax tablet prepared by Aminonius at arm's length
from his eyes and never parted his lips again till he had come to the end
of the last hour of the night. Then he dropped the hand that held the
horoscope, saying with a shudder:
"A hideous destiny. Horace was right in saying the highest towers fall
with the greatest crash."
"The tower of which you speak," said Sabina, "is that darling of fortune
of whom you are afraid. Vouchsafe then to Verus a brief space of
happiness before the horrible end you foresee for him."
While she spoke Hadrian sat with his eyes thoughtfully fixed on the
ground, and then, standing in front of his wife, he replied:
"If no sinister catastrophe falls upon this man, the stars and the fate
of men have no more to do with one another than the sea with the heart of
the desert, than the throb of men's pulses with the pebbles in the brook.
If Ammonius has erred ten times over still more than ten signs remain on
this tablet, hostile and fatal to the praetor. I grieve for Verus--but
the state suffers with the sovereign's misfortunes.--This man can never
be my successor."
"No?" asked Sabina rising from her couch. "No? Not when you have seen
that your own star outlives his? Not though a glance at this tablet shows
you that when he is nothing but ashes the world will still continue long
to obey your nod?"
"Compose yourself and give me time.--Yes, I still say not even so."
"Not even so," repeated Sabina sullenly. Then, collecting herself, she
asked in a tone of vehement entreaty:
"Not even so--not even if I lift my hands to you in supplication and cry
in your face that you and Fate have grudged me the blessing, the
happiness, the crown and aim of a woman's life, and I must and I will
attain it; I must and I will once, if only for a short time, hear myself
called by some dear lips by the name which gives the veriest beggar-woman
with her infant in her arms preeminence above the Empress who has never
stood by a child's cradle. I must and I will, before I die, be a mother,
be called mother and be able to say, 'my child, my son--our son.'" And as
she spoke she sobbed aloud and covered her face with her hands.
The Emperor drew back a step from his wife. A miracle had been wrought
before his eyes. Sabina--in whose eyes no tear had ever been seen--Sabina
was weeping, Sabina had a heart like other women. Greatly astonished and
deeply moved he saw her turn from him, utterly shaken by the agitation of
her feelings, and sink on her knees by the side of the couch she had
quitted to hide her face in the cushions. He stood motionless by her
side, but presently going nearer to her:
"Stand up, Sabina," he said. "Your desire is a just one. You shall have
the son for whom your soul longs."
The Empress rose and a grateful look in her eyes, swimming in tears, met
his glance. Sabina could smile too, she could look sweet! It had taken a
lifetime, it had needed such a moment as this to reveal it to Hadrian.
He silently drew a seat towards her and sat down by her side; for some
time he sat with her hand clasped in his, in silence. Then he let it go
and said kindly:
"And will Verus fulfil all you expect of a son?" She nodded assent.
"What makes you so confident of that?" asked the Emperor. "He is a Roman
and not lacking in brilliant and estimable gifts. A man who shows such
mettle alike in the field and in the council-chamber and yet can play the
part of Eros with such success will also know how to wear the purple
without disgracing it. But he has his mother's light blood, and his heart
flutters hither and thither."
"Let him be as he is. We understand each other and he is the only man on
whose disposition I can build, on whose fidelity I can count as securely
as if he were my favorite son."
"And on what facts is this confidence based?"
"You will understand me, for you are not blind to the signs which Fate
vouchsafes to us. Have you time to listen to a short story?"
"The night is yet young."
"Then I will tell you. Forgive me if I begin with things that seem dead
and gone; but they are not, for they live and work in me to this hour. I
know that you yourself did not choose me for your wife. Plotina chose me
for you--she loved you, whether your regard for her was for the beautiful
woman or for the wife of Caesar to whom everything belonged that you had
to look for--how should I know?"
"It was Plotina, the woman, that I honored and loved--"
"In choosing me she chose you a wife who was tall and so fitted to wear
the purple, but who was never beautiful. She knew me well and she knew
that I was less apt than any other woman to win hearts; in my parents'
house no child ever enjoyed so slender a share of the gifts of love, and
none can know better than you that my husband did not spoil me with
tenderness."
"I could repent of it at this moment."
"It would be too late now. But I will not be bitter--no, indeed I will
not. And yet if you are to understand me I must own that so long as I was
young I longed bitterly for the love which no one offered me."
"And you yourself have never loved?"
"No--but it pained me that I could not. In Plotina's apartments I often
saw the children of her relations, and many a time I tried to attract
them to me, but while they would play confidently with other women they
seemed to shun me. Soon I even grew cross to them--only our Verus, the
little son of Celonius Commodus, would give me frank answers when I spoke
to him, and would bring me his broken toys that I might mend their
injuries. And so I got to love the child."
"He was a wonderfully sweet, attractive boy."
"He was indeed. One day we women were all sitting together in Caesar's
garden. Verus came running out with a particularly fine apple that Trajan
himself had given him. The rosy-cheeked fruit was admired by every one.
Then Plotina, in fun took the apple out of the boy's hand and asked him
if he would not give his apple to her. He looked at her with wide-open
puzzled eyes, shook his curly head, ran up to me and gave me--yes, me,
and no one else--the fruit, throwing his arms round my neck and saying,
'Sabina you shall have it.'"
"The judgment of Paris."
"Nay, do not jest now. This action of an unselfish child gave me courage
to endure the troubles of life. I knew now that there was one creature
that loved me, and that one repaid all that I felt for him, all that I
was never weary of doing for him with affectionate liking. He is the only
being, of whom I know, that will weep when I die. Give him the right to
call me his mother and make him our son."
"He is our son," said Hadrian, with dignified gravity, and held out his
hand to Sabina. She tried to lift it to her lips but he drew it away and
went on:
"Inform him that we accept him as our son. His wife is the daughter of
Nigrinus--who had to go, as I desired to stay and stand firm. You do not
love Lucilla, but we must both admire her for I do not know another woman
in Rome whose virtue a man might vouch for. Besides, I owe her a father,
and am glad to have such a daughter; thus we shall be blessed with
children. Whether I shall appoint Verus my successor and proclaim to the
world who shall be its future ruler I cannot now decide; for that I need
a calmer hour. Till to-morrow, Sabina. This day began with a misfortune;
may the deed with which we have combined to end it prosper and bring us
happiness."
CHAPTER XVII.
There are often fine warm days in February, but those who fancy the
spring has come find themselves deceived. The bitter, hard Sabina could
at times let soft and tender emotions get the mastery over her, but as
soon as the longing of her languishing soul for maternal happiness was
gratified, she closed her heart again and extinguished the fire that had
warmed it. Every one who approached her, even her husband, felt himself
chilled and repelled again by her manner.
Verus was ill. The first symptoms of a liver complaint which his
physicians had warned him might ensue, if he, an European, persisted in
his dissipated life at Alexandria as if it were Rome, now began to
occasion him many uneasy hours, and this, the first physical pain that
fate had ever inflicted on him, he bore with the utmost impatience. Even
the great news which Sabina brought him, realizing his boldest
aspirations, had no power to reconcile him to the new sensation of being
ill. He learnt, at the same time, that Hadrian's alarm at the
transcendent brightness of his star had nearly cost him his adoption, and
as he firmly believed that he had brought on his sufferings by his
efforts to extinguish the fire that Antinous had kindled, he bitterly
rued his treacherous interference with the Emperor's calculations. Men
are always ready to cast any burden, and especially that of a fault they
have committed, on to the shoulders of another; and so the suffering
praetor cursed Antinous and the learning of Simeon Ben Jochai, because,
if it had not been for them the mischievous folly which had spoilt his
pleasure in life would never have been committed.
Hadrian had requested the Alexandrians to postpone the theatrical
displays and processions that they had prepared for him, as his
observations as to the course of destiny during the coming year were not
yet complete. Every evening he ascended the lofty observatory of the
Serapeum and gazed from thence at the stars. His labors ended on the
tenth of January; on the eleventh the festivities began. They lasted
through many days, and by the desire of the praetor the pretty daughter
of Apollodorus the Jew was chosen to represent Roxana. Everything that
the Alexandrians had prepared to do honor to their sovereign was
magnificent and costly. So many ships had never before been engaged in
any Naumachia as were destroyed here in the sham sea-fight, no greater
number of wild beasts had ever been seen together on any occasion even in
the Roman Circus; and how bloody were the fights of the gladiators, in
which black and white combatants afforded a varied excitement for both
heart and senses. In the processions, the different elements which were
supplied by the great central metropolis of Egyptian, Greek and Oriental
culture afforded such a variety of food for the eye that, in spite of
their interminable length, the effect was less fatiguing than the Romans
had feared. The performances of the tragedies and comedies were equally
rich in startling effects; conflagrations and floods were introduced and
gave the Alexandrian actors the opportunity of displaying their talents
with such brilliant success that Hadrian and his companions were forced
to acknowledge that even in Rome and Athens they had never witnessed any
representations equally perfect.
A piece by the Jewish author Ezekiel who, under the Ptolemies, wrote
dramas in the Greek language of which the subject was taken from the
history of his own people, particularly claimed the Emperor's attention.
Titianus during all this festive season was unluckily suffering from an
attack of old-standing breathlessness, and he also had his hands full; at
the same time he did his best in helping Pontius in seeking out the
sculptor Pollux. Both men did their utmost, but though they soon were
able to find Euphorion and dame Doris, every trace of their son had
vanished. Papias, the former employer of the man who had disappeared, was
no longer in the city, having been sent by Hadrian to Italy to execute
centaurs and other figures to decorate his villa at Tibur. His wife who
remained at home, declared that she knew nothing of Pollux but that he
had abruptly quitted her husband's service. The unfortunate man's
fellow-workmen could give no news of him whatever, for not one of them
had been present when he was seized; Papias had had foresight enough to
have the man he dreaded placed in security without the presence of any
witnesses. Neither the prefect nor the architect thought of seeking the
worthy fellow in prison, and even if they had done so they would hardly
have found him, for Pollux was not kept in durance in Alexandria itself.
The prisons of the city had overflowed after the night of the holiday and
he had been transferred to Canopus and there detained and brought up for
trial.
Pollux had unhesitatingly owned to having taken the silver quiver and to
having been very angry at his master's accusation. Thus he produced from
the first an unfavorable impression on the judge, who esteemed Papias as
a wealthy man, universally respected. The accused had hardly been allowed
to speak at all and judgment was immediately pronounced against him, on
the strength of his master's accusation and his own admissions. It would
have been sheer waste of time to listen to the romances with which this
audacious rascal--who forgot all the respect he owed to his teacher and
benefactor--wanted to cram the judges. Two years of reflection, the
protectors of the law deemed, might suffice to teach this dangerous
fellow to respect the property of others and to keep him from outbreaks
against those to whom he owed gratitude and reverence.
Pollux, safe in the prison at Canopus, cursed his destiny and indulged in
vain hopes of the assistance of his friends. These were at last weary of
the vain search and only asked about him occasionally. He at first was so
insubordinate under restraint that he was put under close ward from which
he was not released until, instead of raging with fury he dreamed away
his days in sullen brooding. The gaoler knew men well, and he thought he
could safely predict that at the end of his two years' imprisonment this
young thief would quit his cell a harmless imbecile.
Titianus, Pontius, Balbilla and even Antinous had all attempted to speak
of him to the Emperor, but each was sharply repulsed and taught that
Hadrian was little inclined to pardon a wound to his artist's vanity. But
the sovereign also proved that he had a good memory for benefits he had
received, for once, when a dish was set before him consisting of cabbage
and small sausages he smiled, and taking out his purse filled with gold
pieces, he ordered a chamberlain to take it in his name to Doris, the
wife of the evicted gate-keeper. The old couple now resided in a little
house of their own in the neighborhood of their widowed daughter Diotima.
Hunger and external misery came not nigh them, still they had experienced
a great change. Poor Doris' eyes were now red and bloodshot, for they
were accustomed to many tears, which were seldom far off and overflowed
whenever a word, an object, a thought reminded her of Pollux, her
darling, her pride and her hope; and there were few half-hours in the day
when she did not think of him.
Soon after the steward's death she had sought out Selene, but dame Hannah
could not and would not conduct her to see the sick girl, for she learnt
from Mary that she was the mother of her patient's faithless lover; and
on a second visit Selene was so shy, so timid and so strange in her
demeanor, that the old woman was forced to conclude that her visit was an
unpleasant intrusion.
And from Arsinoe, whose residence she discovered from the deaconess, she
met with even a worse reception. She had herself announced as the mother
of Pollux the sculptor and was abruptly refused admission, with the
information that Arsinoe was not to be spoken with by her and that her
visits were, once for all, prohibited. After the architect Pontius had
been to seek her out and had encouraged her to make another attempt to
see and speak to Arsinoe, who clung faithfully to Pollux, Paulina herself
had received her and sent her away with such repellent words that she
went home to her husband deeply insulted and distressed to tears. Nor had
she resisted Euphorion's decision when he prohibited her ever again
crossing the Christian's threshold.
The Emperor's donation had been most welcome and timely to the poor old
couple, for Euphorion had completely lost the softness of his voice as
well as his memory through the agitations and troubles of the last few
months; he had been dismissed from the chorus of the theatre and could
only find employment and very small pay of a few drachmae, in the
mysteries of certain petty sectarians or in singing at weddings or in
hymns of lamentation. At the same time the old folks had to maintain
their daughter whom Pollux could no longer provide for, and the birds,
the Graces and the cat all must eat. That it would be possible to get rid
of them was an idea which never occurred to either Euphorion or Doris.
By day the old folks had ceased to laugh; but at night they still had
many cheerful hours, for then Hope would beguile them with bright
pictures of the future, and tell them all sorts of possible and
impossible romances which filled their souls with fresh courage. How
often they would see Pollux returning from the distant city whither he
had probably fled-from Rome, or even from Athens--crowned with laurels
and rich in treasure. The Emperor, who still so kindly remembered them,
could not always be angry with him; perhaps he might some day send a
messenger to seek Pollux and to make up to him by large commissions for
all he had made him suffer. That her darling was alive she was sure; in
that she could not be mistaken, often as Euphorion tried to persuade her
that he must be dead. The singer could tell many tales of luckless men
who had been murdered and never seen or heard of again; but she was not
to be convinced, she persisted in hope, and lived wholly in the purpose
of sending her younger son, Teuker, on his travels to seek his lost
brother as soon as his apprenticeship was over, which would be in a few
months.
Antinous, whose burnt hands had soon got well under the Emperor's care,
and who had never felt a liking and friendship for any other young man
but Pollux, lamented the artist's disappearance and wished much to seek
out dame Doris; but he found it harder than ever to leave his master, and
was so eager always to be at hand that Hadrian often laughingly
reproached him with making his slaves' duties too light.
When at last he really was master of an hour to himself he postponed his
intention of seeing his friend's parents; for with him there was always a
wide world between the purpose and the deed which he never could
overleap, if not urged by some strong impulse; and his most pressing
instincts prompted him, when the Emperor was disputing in the Museum or
receiving instructions from the chiefs of the different religious
communities as to the doctrines they severally professed, to visit the
suburban villa where, when February had already begun, Selene was still
living. He had often succeeded in stealing into Paulina's garden, but he
could not at first realize his hope of being observed by Selene of
obtaining speech with her. Whenever he went near Hannah's little house,
Mary, the deformed girl, would come in his way, tell him how her friend
was, and beg or desire him to go away. She was always with the sick girl,
for now her mother was nursed by her sister, and dame Hannah had obtained
permission for her to work at home in gumming the papyrus-strips
together.
The widow herself was obliged to be at her post in the factory, for her
duties as overseer made her presence indispensable in the work-room.
Thus it came to pass that it was always by Mary and never by Hannah that
Antinous was received and dismissed. A certain understanding had arisen
between the beautiful youth and the deformed girl. When Antinous appeared
and she called out to him: "What, again already!" he would grasp her hand
and implore her only once to grant his wish; but she was always firm,
only she never sent him away sternly but with smiles and friendly
admonitions. When he brought rare and lovely flowers in his pallium and
entreated her to give them to Selene in the name of her friend at
Lochias, she would take them and promise to place them in her room; but
she always said it would do neither him nor her any good at all that
Selene should know from whom they came. After such repulses he well knew
how to flatter and coax her with appealing words, but he had never dared
to defy her or to gain his end by force. When the flowers were placed in
the room Mary looked at them much oftener than Selene did, and when
Antinous had been long absent the deformed girl longed to see him again,
and would pace restlessly up and down between the garden gate and her
friend's little house. She, like him, dreamed of an angel, and the angel
of whom she dreamed was exactly like himself. In all her prayers she
included the name of the handsome heathen and a soft tenderness in which
a gentle pity was often infused, a grief for his unredeemed soul, was
inseparable from all her thoughts of him.
Hannah was informed by her of each of the young man's visits, and as
often as Mary mentioned Antinous the deaconess seemed anxious and desired
her to threaten to call the gate-keeper to him. The widow knew full well
who her patient's indefatigable admirer was, for she had once heard him
speaking to Mastor, and she had asked the slave, who availed himself of
every spare moment to attend the services of the Christians, who the lad
was. All Alexandria, nay all the Empire, knew the name of the most
beautiful youth of his time, the spoilt favorite of Caesar. Even Hannah
had heard of him and knew that poets sang his praises and heathen women
were eager to obtain a glance from his eyes. She knew how devoid of all
morality were the lives of the nobles at Rome, and Antinous appeared to
her as a splendid falcon that wheels above a dove to swoop down upon it
at a favorable moment and to tear it in its beak and talons. Hannah also
knew that Selene was acquainted with Antinous, that it was he who had
formerly rescued her from the big dog and afterward saved her from the
water; but that Selene, who was now recovering, did not know who her
preserver had been on this second occasion was clear from all that she
said.
Towards the end of February Antinous had come on three days in
succession, and Hannah now took the step of begging the bishop, Eumenes,
to give the gate keeper strict injunctions to look out for the young man
and to forbid his entering the garden, even with force if it should prove
necessary.
But "love laughs at locksmiths" and finds its way through locked doors,
and Antinous succeeded all the same in finding his way into Paulina's
garden. On one of these occasions he was so happy to surprise Selene, as,
supported on a stick and accompanied by a fair-haired boy and dame Hannah
herself, she hobbled up and down.
Antinous had learnt to regard everything crippled or defective with
aversion, as a monstrous failure of nature's plastic harmony, but to pity
it tenderly; but now he felt quite differently. Mary with her humpback
had at first horrified him; now he was always glad to see her though she
always crossed his wishes; and poor lame Selene, who had been mocked at
by the street boys as she limped along, seemed to him more adorable than
ever. How lovely were her face and form, how peculiar her way of
walking--she did not limp--no, she swayed along the garden. Thus, as he
said to himself afterwards, the Nereids are borne along on the undulating
waves. Love is easily satisfied, nor is this strange, for it raises all
that comes within its embrace to a loftier level of existence. In the
light of love weakness is a virtue and want an additional charm.
But the Bithynian's visits were not the widow's only cares; though she
bore the others, it is true, not anxiously but with pleasure. Her
household had increased by two living souls, and her income was very
small. That her patient might not want, she had to work with her own
hands while she superintended the girls in the factory, and to carry home
with her in the evening papyrus-leaves, not only for Mary, but for
herself too, and to glue them together during the long hours of the
night. As soon as Selene's condition improved, she too helped willingly
and diligently, but for many weeks the convalescent had to give up every
kind of employment.
Mary often looked at Hannah in silent trouble, for she looked very pale.
After she had, on one occasion fallen in a fainting fit, the deformed
girl had gathered courage and had represented to her that though she
ought indeed to put out at interest the talent intrusted to her by the
Lord, she ought not to spend it recklessly. She was giving herself no
rest, working day and night; visiting the poor and sick in her hours of
recreation just as she used, and if she did not give herself more rest
would soon need nursing instead of nursing others.
"At any rate," urged Mary, "give yourself a little indispensable sleep at
night."
"We must live," replied Hannah, "and I dare not borrow, for I may never
be able to repay."
"Then beg Paulina to remit your house-rent; she will do so gladly."
"No," said Hannah, decidedly. "The rent of this little house goes to
benefit my poor people, and you know how badly they want it. What we give
we lend to the Lord, and he taxes no man above his ability."
Selene was now well, but the physician had said that no human skill could
ever cure her of her lameness. She had become Hannah's daughter, and
blind Helios the son of the house.
Arsinoe was only allowed to see her sister rarely and always accompanied
by her protectress, and she and Selene never were able to have any
unchecked and open conversation. The steward's eldest daughter was now
contented and cheerful, while the younger was not only saddened by the
disappearance of her lover, but also, from being unhappy in her new home,
she had become fractious and easily moved to shed tears. All was well
with the younger orphans; they were often taken to see Selene, and spoke
with affection of their new parents.
As she got well her help diminished the strain on her two friends, and in
the beginning of March a call came to the widow which, if she followed
it, must give their simple existence a new aspect.
In Upper Egypt certain Christian fraternities had been established, and
one of these had addressed a prayer to the great mother-community at
Alexandria, that it would send to them a presbyter, a deacon and a
deaconess capable of organizing and guiding the believers and catechumens
in the province of Hermopolis where they were already numbered by
thousands. The life of the community and the care of the poor, and sick
in the outlying districts required organization by experienced hands, and
Hannah had been asked whether she could make up her mind to leave the
metropolis and carry on the work of benevolence at Besa in an extended
sphere.
She would there have a pleasant house, a palm-garden, and gifts from the
congregation which would secure not merely her own maintenance, but that
of her adopted children.
Hannah was bound to Alexandria by many ties; in the first place she clung
to the poor and sick, many of whom had grown very dear to her, and how
many girls who had gone astray had she rescued from evil in the factory
alone! She begged for a short time for reflection, and this was granted
to her. By the fifteenth of March she was to decide, but by the fifth she
had already made up her mind, for while Hannah was in the papyrus-factory
Antinous had succeeded in getting into Paulina's garden shortly before
sunset and in stealing close up to Hannah's house. Mary again observed
him as he approached and signed to him to go, in her usual pleasant way;
but the Bithynian was more excited than usual; he seized her hand and
clasped her with urgent warmth as he implored her to be merciful. She
endeavored at once to free herself, but he would not let her go, but
cried in coaxing tones:
"I must see her and speak to her to-day, dear, good Mary, only this
once!" And before she could prevent it he had kissed her forehead and had
flown into the house to Selene. The little hunchback did not know what
had happened to her; confused and almost paralyzed by conflicting
feelings she stood shame-faced, gazing at the ground. She felt that
something quite extraordinary had happened to her, but this wonderful
something radiated a dazzling splendor, and since this had risen for her,
for poor Mary, a feeling of pride quite new to her mingled with the shame
and indignation that filled her soul. She needed a few minutes to collect
herself and to recover a sense of her duty, and those few minutes were
made good use of by Antinous.
He flew with long steps into the room in which, on that
never-to-be-forgotten night, he had laid Selene on the couch, and even at
the threshold he called her by her name. She started and laid aside the
book out of which she was reading to her blind brother. He called a
second time, beseechingly. Selene recognized him and asked calmly:
"Do you want me, or dame Hannah?"
"You, you!" he cried passionately. "Oh Selene, I pulled you out of the
water, and since that night I have never ceased to think of you and I
must die for love of you. Have your thoughts never, never met mine on the
way to you? Are you still and always as cold, as passive as you were then
when you belonged half to life and half to death? For months have I
prowled round this house as the shade of a dead man haunts the spot where
he had left all that was dear to him on earth, and I have never been able
to tell you what I feel for you?" As he spoke the lad fell on the ground
before her and tried to clasp her knees; but she said reproachfully:
"What does all this mean? Stand up and compose yourself."
"Oh! let me, let me--" he besought her. "Do not be so cold and so hard;
have pity on me and do not reject me!"
"Stand up," repeated the girl. "I will certainly not reproach you--I owe
you thanks on the contrary."
"Not thanks, but love--a little love is all I ask."
"I try to love all men," replied the girl, "and so I love you because you
have shown me very much kindness."
"Selene, Selene!" he exclaimed in joyful triumph. He threw himself again
at her feet and passionately seized her right hand; but hardly had he
taken it in his own when Mary, scarlet with agitation, rushed into the
room. In a husky voice, full of hatred and fury, she commanded him to
leave the house at once, and when he attempted again to besiege her ear
with entreaties she cried out:
"If you do not obey I will call the men in to help us, who are out there
attending to the flowers. I ask you, will you obey or will you not?"
"Why are you so cruel, Mary?" asked the blind boy. "This man is good and
kind and tells Selene he loves her."
Antinous pointed to the child with an imploring gesture but Mary was
already by the window and was raising her hand to her mouth to make her
call heard.
"Don't, don't," cried Antinous. "I am going at once."
And he went slowly and silently towards the door, still gazing at Selene
with passionate ardor; then he quitted the room groaning with shame and
disappointment, though still with a look of radiant pride as though he
had achieved some great deed. In the garden he was met by Hannah, who
immediately hastened with accelerated steps to her own house where she
found Mary sobbing violently and dissolved in tears.
The widow was soon informed of all that had occurred in her absence, and
an hour later she had announced to the bishop that she would accept the
call to Besa and was ready to start for Upper Egypt.
"With your foster-children?" asked Eumenes.
"Yes. It was indeed Selene's most earnest wish to be baptized by you, but
as a year of probation is required--"
"I will perform the rite to-morrow morning."
"To-morrow, Father?"
"Yes, Sister, in all confidence. She buried the old man in the waves of
the sea, and before we were her teachers she had gone through the school
and discipline of life. While she was yet a heathen she had taken up her
cross and proved herself as faithful as though she were a child of the
Lord. All that was lacking to her--Faith, Love and Hope--she has found
under your roof. I thank thee for this soul thou hast found Sister, in
the name of the Lord."
"Not I, not I," said the widow. "Her heart was frozen, but it is not I
but the innocent faith of the blind child that has melted it."
"She owes her salvation to him and to you," replied the bishop, "and they
both shall be baptized together. We will give the lovely boy the name of
the fairest of the disciples, and call him John. Selene for the future,
if she herself likes it, shall be known as Martha."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
If one only knew who it is all for
Love laughs at locksmiths
Wide world between the purpose and the deed
THE EMPEROR
By Georg Ebers
Volume 10.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Selene and Helios were baptized, and two days after dame Hannah with her
adopted children and Mary, escorted by the presbyter Hilarion and a
deacon, embarked in the harbor of Mareotis on board a Nile-boat which was
to convey them to their new home, the town of Besa in Upper Egypt. The
deformed girl had hesitated as to her answer to the widow's question
whether she would accompany her. Her old mother dwelt in Alexandria, and
then--but it was this "then" which helped her abruptly to cut short all
reflection and to pronounce a decided "yes," for it referred to Antinous.
For a few minutes it had seemed unendurable to think that she should
never see him again, for she could not help often thinking of the
beautiful youth, and her whole heart ought to belong solely to the One
who had with His blood purchased peace for her on earth and bliss in the
world to come.
The day after being baptized, Selene had gone to Paulina's town-house,
and there, with many tears had taken leave of Arsinoe. All the affection
which bound the sisters together found expression at this moment of
parting. Selene had heard from Paulina that Pollux was dead, and she no
longer grudged her rival sister that she grieved for him more
passionately than herself, though at first her peace of mind had more
than once been disturbed by memories of her old playfellow.
She felt it hard to leave Alexandria, where most of her brothers and
sisters were left behind, and yet she rejoiced to think of a distant
home, for she was no longer the same creature that she had been a few
months since, and she longed for a remote scene of a new and sanctified
life.
Eumenes and Hannah were in the right. It was not the widow but the little
blind boy who had won her to Christianity. The child's influence had
proceeded in a strange course. In the first instance the promises of the
slave Master that Helios should some day meet his father again in a
shining realm among beautiful angels had a powerful effect on the blind
child's tender heart and vivid imagination. In Hannah's house his hopes
had received fresh nurture, and Mary and the widow told him much about
their kind and loving God and His Son who loved children and had invited
them to come to Him. When Selene began to recover and he was permitted to
talk to her he poured out to her all his delight at what he had heard
from the women. At first, to be sure, his sister took no pleasure in
these fanciful fables and tried to shake his belief and lead back his
heart to the old gods. But while she tried to guide the child, by degrees
she felt compelled to follow in his path; at first with wavering steps,
but dame Hannah helped her by her example and with many words of good
counsel. She only taught her doctrine when the girl asked her questions
and begged for information. All that here surrounded Selene breathed of
love and peace, and the child felt this, spoke of it, forced her to
acknowledge it, and, in his own person, was the first object on which to
exercise a wish hitherto unknown to her, to be herself loving and
lovable. The boy's firm faith, which was not to be shaken by any
reasoning or by any of the myths which she knew, touched her deeply and
led to her asking Hannah what was the real bearing of one and another of
his statements. It had always seemed a comfort to her that the miseries
of our earthly life would come to an end with death; but Helios left her
without a reply when he said in a sad voice:
"Do you feel no longing, then, to see our father and mother again?"
To see her mother again! This thought gave her an interest in the next
world, and dame Hannah fanned the spark of hope in her soul into flame.
Selene had seen and suffered much misery, and was accustomed to call the
gods cruel. Helios told her that God and the Saviour were good and kind,
and loved human beings as their children.
"Is it not good and kind," asked he, "of our Heavenly Father to lead us
to dame Hannah?"
"Yes, but we have all been torn apart," said Selene. "Never mind," said
the child confidently, "we shall all meet in Heaven."
As she got well Selene asked after each of the children and Hannah
described all the families into which they had been received. The widow
did not look as if she spoke falsely, and the little ones, when they came
to see her, confirmed her report, and yet Selene could hardly believe in
the accuracy of the pictures drawn of their lives in the houses of the
Christians.
The mother of a Christian family--says a great Christian teacher--should
be the pride of her children, the wife the pride of her husband, husband
and children the pride of the wife, and God the pride and glory of every
member of the household. Love and faith in fact the bond, contentment and
virtuous living the law of the family; and it was in just such a pure and
beneficent atmosphere, as Selene herself and Helios felt the blessing of
in Hannah's house, that each and all of her brothers and sisters were
growing up. Her upright sense gave an honest answer when she asked
herself what would have become of them all if her father had remained
alive and had been dispossessed of his office? They must all have
perished in misery and degradation.
And now?--Perhaps in truth the Divine Being had dealt in kindness with
the children.
Love, love, and again love, was breathed from all she saw and heard, and
yet--was it not love that had caused her greatest sorrows. Wherefore had
it been her lot to endure so much through the same sentiment which
beautified life to others? Had any one ever had more to suffer than she?
Aye indeed! A vivacious, eager youth had duped her and had promised
happiness to her sister instead of to her; it had been hard to bear--and
yet, the Saviour of whom Hellos had told her, had been far more severely
tried. Mankind, for whom He--the Son of God--had come down upon earth, to
save from misery and guilt, had rewarded His loving kindness by hanging
Him on the cross. In Him she could see a companion in suffering and she
asked the widow to tell her all about Him. Selene had made many
sacrifices to her family--she could never forget her walk to the
papyrus-factory--but He had let them mock Him and had shed His blood for
His own. And who was she?--and who was He? The Son of God. His image
became dear to her; she was never weary of hearing about His life and
fate, His words and deeds; and without her observing it the day came when
her soul was free to receive the teaching of Christ with fervent longing.
With faith she acquired that consciousness of guilt which had previously
been unknown to her. She had been busy and industrious out of pride and
fear, but never from love; she had selfishly tried to fling from her the
sacred gift of life without ever thinking what would become of those whom
it was her duty to care for. She had cursed her lovely sister who needed
her protection and care, and even Pollux, her childhood's playfellow; and
a thousand times had she imprecated the ruler of human destinies. All
this she now keenly felt with all the earnestness natural to her, but she
was soothed by the tidings that there was One who had redeemed the world,
and taken on Himself the sins of every repentant sinner.
After Selene had once expressed to the widow her desire to be a
Christian, Hannah brought the bishop to see her. He himself undertook to
instruct the girl and he found in her a disciple anxious and craving for
knowledge. Just like those dried-up and dull-colored plants which, when
they are plunged in water, open out and revive, so did her heart,
untimely withered and dry; and she longed to be perfectly recovered that
she, like Hannah, might tend the sick and exercise that love which Christ
demands of His followers. That which most particularly appealed to her in
her new faith was that it did not promise joys to the rich who could make
great sacrifices, but to the miserable sinner who with a contrite heart
yearned for forgiveness, to the poor and abject, towards whom she felt as
though they belonged to the same family as herself. And her valiant
spirit could not be satisfied with intentions but longed to act upon
them. In Besa she could set to work with Hannah, and this prospect
lightened her grief in quitting Alexandria.
A favoring wind bore the voyagers southward safe to their destination.
Two days after their departure Antinous once more stole into Paulina's
garden. He went up to the widow's little house looking in vain for the
deformed girl; the road was open; her absence could but be pleasing to
him, and yet it disquieted him. His heart beat wildly, for
to-day--perhaps he might find Selene alone. He opened the door without
knocking, but he dared not cross the threshold, for in the anteroom stood
a strange man, placing boards against the wall. The carpenter, a
Christian to whom Paulina had given this little house for his family to
live in, asked Antinous what he wanted.
"Is dame Hannah at home?" stammered the Bithynian.
"She no longer lives here."
"And her adopted daughter, Selene?"
"She is gone with her into Upper Egypt. Have you any message for her?"
"No," said the lad, quite confounded.
"When did they go?"
"The day before yesterday."
"And they are not coming back."
"For the next few years, certainly not. Later may be, if it is the Lord's
pleasure."
Antinous left the garden by the public gate, unmolested. He was very
pale, and he felt like a wanderer in the desert who finds the spring
choked where he had hoped to find a refreshing draught.
Next day, at the first moment he could dispose of, Antinous again knocked
at the carpenter's door to inquire in what town of Upper Egypt the
travellers proposed to settle and the artisan told him frankly, "In
Besa."
Antinous had always been a dreamer, but Hadrian had never seen him so
listless, so vaguely brooding as in these days. When he tried to rouse
him and spur him to greater energy his favorite would look at him
beseechingly, and though he made every effort to be of use to him and to
show him a cheerful countenance it was always with but brief success.
Even on the hunting excursions into the Libyan desert which the Emperor
frequently made, Antinous remained apathetic and indifferent to the
pleasures of the sport to which he had formerly devoted himself with
enjoyment and skill.
The Emperor had remained in Alexandria longer than in any other place,
and was weary of festivities and banquets, of the wordy war with the
philosophers of the Museum, of conversing with the ecstatic mystics, the
soothsayers; astrologers and empirics with whom the place swarmed. And
the short audiences which he accorded to the heads of the different
religious communities, and the inspection of the factories and workshops
of this centre of industry, began to annoy him. One day he announced his
intention of visiting the southern provinces of the Nile valley.
The high-priests of the native Egyptian faith had craved this favor of
him, and he was prompted, not only by his love of information and passion
for travelling, but also by considerations of state-craft, to gratify
this desire of a hierarchy which was extremely influential in those rich
and important provinces. The prospect of seeing with his own eyes those
marvels of Pharaonic times which attracted so many travellers, was also
an incitement, and his good spirits rose as soon as he observed what a
reviving effect his determination to visit southern Egypt had upon
Antinous.
His favorite had for the last few weeks expressed not the smallest
pleasure at any single thing. The homage paid him no less by the
Alexandrian than by the Roman ladies of rank sickened him. At banquets he
sat a silent guest whose neighborhood could not add to anybody's
pleasure, and even the most brilliant and exciting exhibitions in the
Circus and the best contests and races in the Hippodrome had hardly
sufficed to attract his gaze. Formerly he had been an eager and attentive
spectator of the plays of Menander and of his imitators, Alexis,
Apollodorus and Posidippus; but now when they were performed he stared
into vacancy and thought of Selene. The prospect of going to the place
where she was living excited him powerfully and revived his drooping
courage for life. He could hope once more, and to the man who sees light
shining in the future the present is no longer dark.
Hadrian rejoiced in this change in the lad and hastened the preparations
for their departure; still, some months passed before he could begin his
journey.
In the first place he had to provide for newly colonizing Libya, which
had been depopulated by a revolt of the Jews. Then he had to come to a
determination as to certain new post-roads which were to connect the
different parts of the empire more nearly, and finally he had to await
the formal assent of the Roman Senate to some new resolutions concerning
the hereditary reversion of conferred free-citizenship. This assent was,
no doubt a matter of course, but the Emperor never issued an edict
without it, and he was very desirous that his decree should come into
operation as soon as possible.
In the course of his visits to the Museum the sovereign had informed
himself as to the position of the several members of that institution,
and he was occupied in making certain regulations which should relieve
them of the more sordid cares of life; the condition of the aged teachers
and educators of the young had also attracted his observation, and he had
endeavored to improve it.
When Sabina represented to him what a large outlay these new measures
would entail, he replied:
"We do not allow the veterans to perish who placed their lives, and limbs
at the service of the state. Why then should those who serve it with
their intellect be burdened with petty cares? Which should we rank the
higher, power and poverty or mental wealth? The harder I--as the
sovereign--find it to answer the question the more positively do I feel
it to be my duty to mete out the same measure to all veterans alike,
whether officials, warriors or instructors."
The Alexandrians themselves detained him too by a succession of new acts
of homage. They raised him to the rank of a divinity, dedicated a temple
to him, and instituted a series of new festivals in his honor; partly no
doubt to win his partiality for their city and to express their pride and
satisfaction in his long stay there, but also because the pleasure-loving
community was glad to seize this opportunity as a favorable one for
gratifying their own inclinations and revelling in mere unusual
enjoyment. Thus the Imperial visit swallowed up millions, and Hadrian,
who enquired into every detail and contrived to obtain information as to
the sums expended by the city, blamed the recklessness of his lavish
entertainers. He wrote afterwards to his brother-in-law, Servianus, his
fullest recognition of both the wealth and the industry of Alexandrians,
saying, with terms of praise, that among them not one was idle. One made
glass, another papyrus, another linen; and each of these restless
mortals, said he, is busied in some handiwork. Even the lame, the blind
and the maimed here sought and found employment. Nevertheless he calls
the Alexandrians a contumacious and good-for-nothing community, with
sharp and evil tongues that had spared neither Verus nor Antinous. Jews,
Christians, and the votaries of Serapis, he adds in the same letter,
serve but one God instead of the divinities of Olympus, and when he
asserts of the Christians that they even worshipped Serapis he means to
say that they were persuaded of the doctrine of the survival of the soul
after death. The dispute as to which temple should be assigned as the
residence of the newly-found Apis gave Hadrian much to do. From time
immemorial this sacred bull had been kept in the temple of Ptah at
Memphis, but this venerable city of the Pyramids had been outstripped by
Alexandria, and the temple of Serapis outvied that at Memphis in the
province of Sokari, tenfold in size and in magnificence. The Egyptians of
Alexandria, who dwelt in the quarter called Rhakotis, close to the
Serapeum, desired to have the incarnation of the god in the form of a
bull, in their midst; but the Memphites would not abandon their old
prescriptive rights, and the Emperor had found it far from easy to guide
the contest, which proved a very exciting one to all parties, to a
satisfactory issue. Memphis had its Apis, and the Serapeum was
indemnified by certain endowments which had formerly been granted to the
temple at Memphis.
At last, in June, the Emperor could set out. He wished to traverse the
province on foot and on horseback, and Sabina was to follow by boat as
soon as the inundation should begin.
The Empress would gladly have returned to Rome or to Tibur, for Verus had
been obliged to quit Egypt by the orders of the physician as soon as the
summer heat had set in. He departed with his wife, as the son of the
Imperial couple, but no word on Hadrian's part had justified him in
hoping confidently to be nominated as his successor to the sovereignty.
The handsome rake's unlimited dissipations were severely checked by his
sufferings, but not altogether prevented, and on his return to Rome he
continued to indulge in all the pleasures of life. Hadrian's hesitation
and reluctance often disquieted him, for that imperial Sphinx had, only
too frequently, given the most unexpected solutions to his
mystifications. But the fatal end with which he had been threatened
caused him small anxiety; nay, Ben Jochai's prediction rather prompted
him to enjoy to the utmost every hour of health and ease that Fate might
still allow him.
CHAPTER XIX.
Balbilla and her companion, Publius Balbinus and other illustrious
Romans, Favorinus the sophist, and a numerous suite of chamberlains and
servants, were to accompany the Empress by water, while Hadrian set forth
on his land journey with a small escort to which he added a splendid
array of huntsmen. Before he reached Memphis, in crossing the Libyan
desert, through which his road lay, he had killed a few lions and many
other beasts of prey, and here he had once more found Antinous the best
of sporting companions. Cool headed in danger, indefatigable on foot,
content and serviceable in all circumstances, the young fellow seemed to
Hadrian to be a comrade created by the gods themselves for his special
delectation. When Hadrian was in the humor to brood and be silent the
whole day long, he never disturbed him by a word; but in these moods the
Emperor found his favorite's society indispensable, for the mere
consciousness of his presence soothed him.
Antinous too, was happy on these occasions, for he felt that he was of
some use to his venerated master and could thus alleviate the burden
which had never ceased to weigh on his own soul ever since the crime he
had committed. Besides, he preferred dreaming to talking, and the
exercise in the open air preserved him from listless lassitude.
In Memphis Hadrian was detained a whole month, for there he was expected
to visit the Egyptian temples with Sabina, who had arrived before him,
and to submit to many ceremonials invested with the regalia of the
Pharaohs. Sabina often felt as if she must faint when, crowned with the
ponderous vulture-headed fillet of the Queens of Egypt, weighed down with
long robes and golden ornaments, she was conducted with her husband, in
procession, through all the rooms, over the roof and finally into the
holiest place of some vast sanctuary. What senseless ceremonials they had
to go through in the course of these long circuits, and how many
sacrifices had they to attend! When she returned from these visitations
she was utterly exhausted, and indeed, it was no small exertion to
undergo so many fumigations with incense and so many aspersions, to
listen to so many litanies and hymns, to parade through such endless
halls and while being elevated to the rank of celestial beings, to be
crowned with so many crowns in turn and decorated with all kinds of
fillets and symbolic adornments.
Her husband set her a good example, however; through all the ceremonials
he displayed the whole grave majesty of his nature, and among the
Egyptians behaved as one of themselves. He even took pleasure in the
mystical lore of the priests, with whom he often held long conversations.
As at Memphis, so in all the principal temples of the great cities to the
southward, the Imperial pair accepted the homage of the hierarchy and the
honors due to divinity. Wherever Hadrian granted money for the extension
of a temple, he was required to perform the ceremony of laying a stone
with his own hand. But he always found time to hunt in the desert, to
manage the affairs of state, and to visit the most interesting monuments
of past times, and at Memphis especially, the city of the dead, with the
Pyramids, the great Sphinx, the Serapeum and the tombs of the Apis.
Before quitting the city he and his companions consulted the oracle of
the sacred bull. The fairest future was promised to Balbilla; the bull to
whom she had to offer a cake, with her face averted, had approved of her
gift and had touched her hand with his moist muzzle. Hadrian was left in
ignorance as to the sentence of the priests of Apis, for it was given to
him in a sealed roll with an explanation of the signs it contained; but
he was solemnly adjured not to open them before at least half a year had
elapsed.
It was only in the cities that Hadrian met his wife, for he pursued his
journey by land and she hers by water. The boats almost invariably
reached their destination sooner than the land-travellers, and when they
at last arrived, there was always a grand festival to welcome them, in
which however Sabina but rarely took part. Balbilla proved herself all
the more eager to make their arrival pleasant by some kindly surprise.
She sincerely reverenced Hadrian, and his favorite's beauty had an
irresistible charm for her artist's soul. It was a delight to her only to
look at him; his absence troubled her, and when he returned she was
always the first to greet him. And yet the bright girl troubled herself
about him neither more nor less than the other ladies in Sabina's train;
only Balbilla asked nothing of him but the pleasure of looking at him and
rejoicing in his beauty.
If he had dared to mistake her admiration for love and to have offered
her his, the poetess would have indignantly brought him to his bearings;
and yet she gave unqualified expression to her admiration of the
Bithynian's splendid person, and indeed with rather remarkable
demonstrativeness.
When the travellers made their appearance again after a prolonged absence
Antinous would find in the room in the ship where he was to live flowers,
and choice fruits sent by her, and verses in which she had sung his
praises. He put it all aside with the rest and only esteemed the donor
the less; but the poetess knew nothing of these sentiments in her
beautiful idol, and indeed troubled herself very little about his
feelings. She had hitherto found no difficulty in keeping within the
limits of what was becoming. But lately there had been moments in which
she had owned to herself that she might be carried away into overstepping
these limits. But what did she care for the opinion of those around her,
or about the inner life of the Bithyman, whose external perfection of
form was all that pleased her. She did not shrink from the possibility of
arousing hopes in him which she never could nor intended to fulfil, for
the idea did not once enter her mind; still she felt dissatisfied with
herself, for there was one person who might disapprove of her
proceedings, one who had indeed in plain words reprehended her fancy for
doing honor to the handsome boy with offerings of flowers, and the
opinion of that one person weighed with her more than that of all the
rest of the men and women she knew, put together.
This one was Pontius the architect; and yet, strangely enough, it was
precisely her remembrance of him that urged her on from one folly to
another. She had often seen the architect in Alexandria, and when they
parted she had allowed him to promise to follow her and the Empress, and
to escort them at any rate for a part of their voyage up the Nile. But he
came not, nor had he sent any report of himself, though he was alive and
well, and every express that overtook them brought documents for Caesar
in his handwriting.
So he, on whose faithful devotion she had built as on a rock, was no less
self-seeking and fickle than other men. She thought of him every day and
every hour; and as soon as a vessel from the north cast anchor within
sight, she watched the voyagers as they disembarked to detect him among
them. She longed for Pontius as a traveller who has lost his way sighs
for a sight of the guide who has deserted him; and yet she was angry with
him, for he had betrayed by a thousand tokens that he esteemed and cared
for her, that she had a certain power over his strong will--and now he
had broken his word and did not come.
And she? She had not been unmoved by his devotion, and had been gentler
to this grandson of her father's freed slave than to the best-born man of
her own rank. And in spite of it all Pontius could spoil all the pleasure
of her journey and stay in Alexandria instead of following in her wake.
He could easily have intrusted his building to other architects--the
great metropolis was swarming with them! Well, if he did not trouble
himself about her she certainly need care even less about him. Perhaps at
last, at the end of their travels he might yet come, and then he should
see how much she cared for his admonitions.
But she sighed impatiently for the hour when she might read him all the
verses she had addressed to Antinous, and ask him how he liked them. It
gave her a childish pleasure to add to the number of these little poems,
to finish them elaborately, and display in them all her knowledge and
ability. She gave the preference to artificial and massive metres; some
of the verses were in Latin, others in the Attic, and others again in the
Aeolian dialects of Greek, for she had now learnt to use this, and all to
punish Pontius--to vex Pontius--and at the same time to appear in his
eyes as brilliant as she could. She belauded Antinous, but she wrote for
Pontius, and for every flower she gave the lad she had sent a thought to
the architect, though with a curl on her lips of scornful defiance.
But a young girl cannot be always praising the beauty of a youth in new
and varied forms with complete impunity, and thus there were hours when
Balbilla was inclined to believe that she really loved Antinous. Then she
would call herself his Sappho, and he seemed destined to be her Phaon.
During his long absences with the Emperor she would long to see him--nay,
even with tears; but, as soon as he was by her side again, and she could
look at his inanimate beauty and into his weary eyes, when she heard the
torpid "Yes" or "No" with which he replied to her questions, the spell
was entirely broken and she honestly confessed to herself that she would
as soon see him before her hewn in marble as clothed in flesh and blood.
In such moments as these her memory of the architect was particularly
fresh, and once, when their ship was sailing through a mass of lotos
leaves, above which one splendid full-blown flower raised its head, her
apt imagination, which rapidly seized on everything noteworthy and gave
it poetic form, entwined the incident in a set of verses, in which she
designated Antinous as the lotos-flower which fulfils its destiny simply
by being beautiful, and comparing Pontius to the ship which, well
constructed and well guided, invited the traveller to new voyages in
distant lands.
The Nile voyage came to an end at Thebes of the hundred gates, and here
nothing that could attract the Roman travellers remained unvisited. The
tombs of the Pharaohs extending into the very heart of the rocky hills,
and the grand temples that stood to the west of the city of the dead,
shorn though they were of their ancient glory, filled the Emperor with
admiration. The Imperial travellers and their companions listened to the
famous colossus of Memnon, of which the upper portion had been overthrown
by an earthquake, and three times in the dawn they heard it sound.
Balbilla described the incident in several long poems which Sabina caused
to be engraved on the stone of the colossus. The poetess imagined herself
as hearing the voice of Memnon singing to his mother Eos while her tears,
the fresh morning dew, fell upon the image of her son, fallen before the
walls of Troy. These verses she composed in the Aeolian dialect, named
herself as their writer and informed the readers--among whom she included
Pontius--that she was descended from a house no less noble than that of
King Antiochus.
The gigantic structures on each bank of the Nile fully equalled Hadrian's
expectations, though they had suffered so much injury from earthquakes
and sieges, and the impoverished priesthood of Thebes were no longer in a
position to provide for their preservation even, much less for their
restoration. Balbilla accompanied Caesar on a visit to the sanctuary of
Ammon, on the eastern shore of the Nile. In the great hall, the most vast
and lofty pillared hall in the world, her impressionable soul felt a
peculiar exaltation, and as the Emperor observed how, with a heightened
color she now gazed upward, and then again, leaning against a towering
column, looked at the scene around her, he asked her what she felt,
standing in this really worthy abode of the gods.
"One thing--above all things one thing!" cried the girl. "That
architecture is the sublimest of the arts! This temple is to me like some
grand epode, and the poet who composed it conceived it not in feeble
words but formed it out of almost immovable masses. Thousands of parts
are here combined to form a whole, and each is welded with the rest into
beautiful harmony and helps to give expression to the stupendous idea
which existed in the brain of the builder of this hall. What other art is
gifted with the power of creating a work so imperishable and so far
transcending all ordinary standards?"
"A poetess crowning the architect with laurels!" exclaimed the Emperor.
"But is not the poet's realm the infinite, and can the architect ever get
beyond the finite and the limited?"
"Then is the nature of the divinity a measurable unit?" asked Balbilla.
"No, it is not; and yet this hall gives one the impression that the very
divinity might find space in it to dwell in."
"Because it owes it existence to a master-mind, which while it conceived
it stood on the boundary line of eternity. But do you think this temple
will outlast the poems of Homer?"
"No; but the memory of it will no more fade away that of the wrath of
Achilles or the wanderings of the experienced Odysseus."
"It is a pity that our friend Pontius cannot hear you," said Hadrian. "He
has completed the plans for a work which is destined to outlive me and
him and all of us.
"I mean my own tomb. Besides that I intend him to erect gates, courts and
halls in the Egyptian style at Tibur, which may remind us of our travels
in this wonderful country. I expect him to-morrow."
"To-morrow!" exclaimed Balbilla, and her face fired with a scarlet flush
to her very brow.
CHAPTER XX.
Shortly after starting from Thebes--on the second day of
November--Hadrian came to a great decision. Verus should be acknowledged
not merely as his son but also as his successor.
Sabina's urgency would not alone have sufficed to put a term to his
hesitancy, especially as it had lately been farther increased by a wish
that was all his own. His wife's heart had pined for a child, but he too
had longed for a son, and he had found one in Antinous. His favorite was
a boy he had picked up by chance, the son of humble though free parents,
but it lay in the Emperor's power to make him great, to confer on him the
highest posts of honor in the Empire, and at last to recognize him
publicly as his heir. Antinous, if any one, had deserved this at his
hands, and on no other man could he so ungrudgingly bestow everything
that he possessed.
These ideas and hopes had now filled his mind for many months, but the
nature and the mood of the young Bithyman had been more and more adverse
to them.
Hadrian had striven more earnestly than his predecessors to raise the
fallen dignity of the Senate, and still he could count securely on its
consent to any measure. The leading official authorities of the Republic
had been recognized and allowed the full exercise of their powers. To be
sure, be they whom they might, they all had to obey the Emperor, still
they were always there; and even with a weak ruler at its head the Empire
might continue to subsist within the limits established by Hadrian, and
restricted with wise moderation. Nevertheless, only a few months
previously he would not have ventured to think of the adoption of his
favorite. Now he hoped to find himself somewhat nearer to the fulfilment
of his wishes. It is true Antinous was still a dreamer; but in their
wanderings and hunting excursions through Egypt he had proved himself
gallant and prompt, intelligent, and, after their departure from Thebes,
even bold and lively at times. Antinous, under this aspect, he himself
might take in hand, and even name him as his successor in due time, when
he had risen from one post of honor to another. For the present this plan
must remain unrevealed.
When he publicly adopted Verus any idea of a possible new selection of a
son was excluded, and he might unhesitatingly venture to appoint Sabina's
darling his successor, for the most famous of the Roman physicians had
written to Hadrian, by his desire, saying that the praetor's undermined
strength could not be restored, and that, at the best, he could only have
a limited number of years to live. Well, then, Verus might die slowly and
contentedly in the midst of the most splendid anticipations, and when he
should have closed his eyes it would be time enough to set the
dreamer--by that time matured to vigorous manhood--in the vacant place.
On the return journey from Thebes to Alexandria Hadrian met his wife at
Abydos, and revealed to her his intention of proclaiming the son of her
choice as his successor. Sabina thanked him with an exclamation of "At
last!" which expressed partly her satisfaction, but partly too her
annoyance at her husband's long delay. Hadrian gave her his permission to
return to Rome from Alexandria, and on the very same day messages were
despatched with letters both to the Senate and to the prefects of Egypt.
The despatch intended for Titianus charged him to proclaim publicly the
adoption of the praetor, to arrange at the same time for a grand
festival, and on that occasion to grant to the people, in Caesar's name,
all the boons and favors which by the traditional law of Egypt the
Sovereign was expected to bestow at the birth of an heir to the throne.
The whole suite of the Imperial pair celebrated Hadrian's decision by
splendid banquets, but the Emperor did not himself take part in them, but
crossed to the other bank of the Nile and went to Antaeopolis in the
desert, meaning to penetrate from thence into the gorges of the Arabian
desert and to chase wild beasts. No one was to accompany him but
Antinous, Mastor, and a few huntsmen and some dogs.
He meant to rejoin the ships at Besa. He had postponed his visit to this
place till the return journey, because he had travelled up by the western
shore of the Nile, and the passage across the river would have taken up
too much time.
The travellers' tents were pitched one sultry evening in November,
between the Nile and the limestone range, in which was arrayed a long row
of tombs of the period of the Pharaohs. Hadrian had gone to visit these,
for the remarkable pictures on the walls delighted him, but Antinous
remained behind, for he had already looked at similar works oftener than
he cared for, in Upper Egypt. He found these pictures monotonous and
unlovely, and he had not the patience to investigate their meaning as his
master did. He had been a hundred times into the ancient rock-tombs, only
not to leave Hadrian and not for his own amusement; but to-day--he could
hardly bear himself for impatience and excitement, for he knew that a
ride, a walk, of a few hours, would carry him to Besa and to Selene. The
Emperor would remain absent three or four hours at any rate, and if he
made up his mind to it he could have sought out the girl for whom his
heart was longing before his return, and still be back again before his
master.
But before acting he must reflect. There was the Emperor climbing the
hill-side where he could see him, and messengers were expected and he had
been charged to receive them. It they should bring bad news, his master
must on no account be alone. Ten times did he go up to his good hunter to
leap upon his back; once he even took down the horse's head-gear to put
on his bridle, but in the very act of slipping the complicated bit
between the teeth of his steed his resolution gave way. During all this
delay and hesitation the minutes slipped away, and at last it was so late
that Hadrian might return and it was folly to think of carrying his plan
into execution. The expected express arrived with several letters, but
the Emperor did not come back. It grew dark, and heavy rain-drops fell
from the overcast sky, and still Antinous was alone. His anxious longing
was mingled with regret for the lost opportunity of seeing Selene and
alarm at the Emperor's prolonged absence.
In spite of the rain, which began to fill more violently, he went out
into the open air, of which the sweltering oppressiveness had helped to
fetter his feeble volition, and called to the dogs, with whose help he
proposed seeking the Emperor; but just then he heard the bark of Argus,
and soon after Hadrian and Mastor stepped out of the darkness into the
brightness which shone out from the tent, where lights were burning.
The Emperor gave his favorite but a brief greeting and silently submitted
while Antinous dried his hair and brought him some refreshments, and
Mastor bathed his feet and dressed him in fresh garments. As he reclined
with the Bithyman, before the supper which was standing ready, he said:
"A strange evening! how hot and oppressive the atmosphere is. We must be
on the lookout, something serious is brewing."
"What happened to you, my Lord?"
"Many things. At the door of the very first tomb that I was about to
enter I found an old black woman who stretched out her hands against us
to keep us out and shrieked out words that sounded horrible."
"Did you understand her?"
"No--who can learn Egyptian."
"Then you do not know what she said?"
"I was to find out--she cried out 'Dead!' and again 'Dead!' and in the
tomb which she was watching there were I know not how many persons
attacked by the plague."
"You saw them?"
"Yes, I had only heard of this disease till then. It is frightful, and
quite answers to the descriptions I had read of it."
"But Caesar!" cried Antinous reproachfully and in alarm.
"When we turned our backs on the tombs," continued Hadrian, paying no
heed to the lad's exclamation, "we were met by an elderly man dressed in
white and a strange-looking maiden. She was lame but of remarkable
beauty."
"And she was going to the sick?"
"Yes, she had brought medicine and food to them."
"But she did not go in among them?" asked Antinous eagerly.
"She did, in spite of my warnings. In her companion I recognized an old
acquaintance."
'An old one?"
"At any rate older than myself. We had met in Athens when we still were
young. At that time he was one of the school of Plato and the most
zealous, nay, perhaps the most gifted of us all."
"How came such a man among the plague-stricken people of Besa? Is he
become a physician?"
"No. But at Athens he sought fervently and eagerly for the truth, and now
he asserts that he has found it."
"Here, among the Egyptians?"
"In Alexandria among the Christians."
"And the lame girl who accompanied the philosopher--does she too believe
in the crucified God?"
"Yes. She is a sick-nurse or something of the kind. Indeed there is
something grand in the ecstatic craze of these people."
"Is it true that they worship an ass and a dove?"
"Nonsense!"
"I did not want to believe it; and at any rate they are kind, and succor
all who suffer, even strangers who do not belong to their sect."
"How do you know?"
"One hears a great deal about them in Alexandria."
"Alas! alas!--I never persecute an imaginary foe, as such I reckon the
creeds and ideas of other men; still, I cannot but ask myself whether it
can add to the prosperity of the state when citizens cease to struggle
against the pressure and necessity of life and console themselves for
them instead, by the hope of visionary happiness in another world which
perhaps only exists in the fancy of those who believe in it."
"I should wish that life might end with death," said Antinous
thoughtfully; "and yet--"
"Well?"
"If I were sure that in that other world I should find those I long to
see again, then I might long for a future life."
"And would you really like, throughout all eternity, to push and struggle
in the crowd of old acquaintances which death does not diminish but
rather multiplies?"
"Nay, not that--but I should like to be permitted to live for ever with a
few chosen friends."
"And should I be one of them?"
"Yes--indeed," cried Antinous warmly and pressing his lips to Hadrian's
hand.
"I was sure of it--but even with the promise of never being obliged to
part with you my darling, I would never sacrifice the only privilege
which man enjoys above the immortals."
"What privilege can you mean?"
"The right of withdrawing from the ranks of the living as soon as
annihilation seems more endurable than existence and I choose to call
death to release me."
"The gods, it is true, cannot die."
"And the Christians only to link a new life on to death."
"But a fairer and a happier than this on earth." They say it is a life of
bliss. But the mother of this everlasting life is the ineradicable love
of existence in even the most wretched of our race, and hope is its
father. They believe in a complete freedom from suffering in that other
world because He whom they call their Redeemer, the crucified Christ, has
saved them from all sufferings by His death."
"And can a man take upon him the sufferings of others, think you, like a
garment or a burden?"
"They say so, and my friend from Athens is quite convinced. In books of
magic there are many formulas by which misfortunes may be transferred not
merely from men to beasts, but from one human being to another. Very
remarkable experiments have even been carried out with slaves, and to
this day I have to struggle in several, provinces to suppress human
sacrifices by which the gods are to be reconciled or propitiated. Only
think of the innocent Iphigenia who was dragged to the altar; did not the
gulf in the Forum close when Curtius had leaped into it? When Fate shoots
a fatal arrow at you and I receive it in my breast, perhaps she is
content with the chance victim and does not enquire as to whom she has
hit."
"The gods would be exorbitant indeed if they were not content with your
blood for mine!"
"Life is life, and that of the young is of better worth than that of the
old. Many joys will yet bloom for you."
"And you are indispensable to the whole world."
"After me another will come. Are you ambitious, boy?"
"No, my Lord."
"What then can be the meaning of this: that every one wishes me joy of my
son Verus excepting you. Do you not like my choice?"
Antinous colored and looked at the ground, and Hadrian went on:
"Say honestly what you feel."
"The praetor is ill."
"He can have but a few years to live, and when he is dead--"
"He may recover--"
"When he is dead, I must look out for another son. What do you think now?
Who is the being that every man, from a slave to a consul, would soonest
hear call him 'Father?"'
"Some one he tenderly loved."
"True--and particularly when that one clung to him with unchangeable
fidelity. I am a man like any other, and you, my good fellow, are always
nearest to my heart, and I shall bless the day when I may authorize you,
before all the world, to call me 'Father.' Do not interrupt me. If you
resolutely concentrate your will and show as keen a sense for ruling men
as you do for the chase, if you try to sharpen your wits and take in what
I teach you, it may some day happen that Antinous instead of Verus--"
"Nay, not that, only not that!" cried the lad, turning very pale and
raising his hands beseechingly.
"The greatness with which Destiny surprises us seems terrible so long as
it is new to us," said Hadrian. "But the seaman is soon accustomed to the
storms, and we come to wear the purple as you do your chiton."
"Oh, Caesar, I entreat you," said Antinous, anxiously, "put aside these
ideas; I am not fit for great things."
"The smallest saplings grow to be palms."
"But I am only a wretched little herb that thrives awhile in your shadow.
Proud Rome--"
"Rome is my handmaid. She has been forced before now to be ruled by men
of inferior stamp, and I should show her how the handsomest of her sons
can wear the purple. The world may look for such a choice from a
sovereign whom it has long known to be an artist, that is a high-priest
of the Beautiful. And if not, I will teach it to form its taste on mine."
"You are pleased to mock me, Caesar," cried the Bithynian. "You certainly
cannot be in earnest, and if it is true that you love me--"
"What now, boy?"
"You will let me live unknown for you, care for you; you will ask nothing
of me but reverence and love and fidelity."
"I have long had them, and I now would fain repay my Antinous for all
these treasures."
"Only let me stay with you, and if necessary let me die for you."
"I believe, boy, you would be ready to make the sacrifice we were
speaking of for me!"
"At any moment without winking an eyelash."
"I thank you for those words. It has turned out a pleasant evening, and
what a bad one I looked forward to--"
"Because the woman by the tomb startled you?"
"'Dead,' is a grim word. It is true that 'death'--being dead--can
frighten no wise man; but the step out of light into darkness is fearful.
I cannot get the figure of the old hag and her shrill cry out of my mind.
Then the Christian came up, and his discourse was strange and disturbing
to my soul. Before it grew dark he and the limping girl went homewards; I
stood looking after them and my eyes were dazzled by the sun which was
sinking over the Libyan range. The horizon was clear, but behind the
day-star there were clouds. In the west, the Egyptians say, lies the
realm of death. I could not help thinking of this; and the oracle, the
misfortunes that the stars threatened me with in the course of this year,
the cry of the old woman--all these crowded into my mind together. But
then, as I observed how the sun struggled with the clouds and approached
nearer and nearer to the hill-tops on the farther side of the river, I
said to myself: If it sets in full radiance you may look confidently to
the future; if it is swallowed up by clouds before it sinks to rest, then
destiny will fulfil itself; then you must shorten sail and wait for the
storm."
"And what happened?"
"The fiery globe burnt in glowing crimson, surrounded by a million rays.
Each seemed separate from the rest and shone with glory of its own; it
was as though the sinking disc had been the centre of bow-shots
innumerable and golden arrow-shafts radiated to the sky in every
direction. The scene was magnificent and my heart beat high with happy
excitement, when suddenly and swiftly a dark cloud fell, as though
exasperated by the wounds it had received from those fiery darts; a
second followed, and a third, and sinister Daimons flung a dark and
fleecy curtain over the glorious head of Helios, as the executioner
throws a coarse black cloth over the head of the condemned, when he sets
his knee against him to strangle him."
At this narrative Antinous covered his face with both hands, and murmured
in terror:
"Frightful, frightful! What can be hanging over us? Only listen, how it
thunders, and the rain thrashes the tent."
"The clouds are pouring out torrents; see the water is coming in already.
The slaves must dig gutters for it to run off. Drive the pegs tighter you
fellows out there or the whirlwind will tear down the slight structure."
"And how sultry the air is!"
"The hot wind seems to warm even the flood of rain. Here it is still dry;
mix me a cup of wine, Antinous. Have any letters come?"
"Yes, my Lord."
"Give them to me, Mastor."
The slave, who was busily engaged in damming up with earth and stones,
the trickling stream of rain-water that was soaking into the tent, sprang
up, hastily dried his hands, took a sack out of the chest in which the
Emperor's despatches were kept and gave it to his master. Hadrian opened
the leather bag, took out a roll, hastily broke it open, and then, after
rapidly glancing at the contents, exclaimed:
"What is this? I have opened the record of the oracle of Apis. How did it
come among to-day's letters?"
Antinous went up to Hadrian, looked at the sack, and said:
"Mastor has made a mistake. These are the documents from Memphis. I will
bring you the right despatch-bag."
"Stay!" said Hadrian, eagerly seizing his favorite's hand. "Is this a
mere trick of chance or a decree of Fate? Why should this particular sack
have come into my hands to-day of all others? Why, out of twenty
documents it contains, should I have taken out this very one? Look
here.--I will explain these signs to you. Here stand three pairs of arms
bearing shields and spears, close by the name of the Egyptian month that
corresponds to our November. These are the three signs of misfortune. The
lutes up there are of happier omen. The masts here indicate the usual
state of affairs. Three of these hieroglyphics always occur together.
Three lutes indicate much good fortune, two lutes and one mast good
fortune and moderate prosperity, one pair of arms and two lutes
misfortune, followed by happiness, and so forth. Here, in November, begin
the arms with weapons, and here they stand in threes and threes, and
portend nothing but unqualified misfortune, never mitigated by a single
lute. Do you see, boy? Have you understood the meaning of these signs?"
"Perfectly well; but do you interpret them rightly? The fighting arms may
perhaps lead to victory."
"No. The Egyptians use them to indicate conflict, and to them conflict
and unrest are identical with what we call evil and disaster."
"That is strange!"
"Nay, it is well conceived; for they say that everything was originally
created good by the gods, but that the different portions of the great
All changed their nature by restless and inharmonious mingling. This
explanation was given me by the priest of Apis, and here--here by the
month of November are the three fighting arias--a hideous token. If one
of the flashes which light up this tent so incessantly, like a living
stream of light were to strike you, or me, and all of us--I should not
wonder. Terrible--terrible things hang over us! It requires some courage
under such omens as these, to keep an untroubled gaze and not to quail."
"Only use your own arms against the fighting arms of the Egyptian gods;
they are powerful," said Antinous; but Hadrian let his head sink on his
breast, and said, in a tone of discouragement:
"The gods themselves must succumb to Destiny."
The thunder continued to roar. More than once the storm snapped the
tent-ropes, and the slaves were obliged to hold on to the Emperor's
fragile shelter with their hands; the chambers of the clouds poured
mighty torrents out upon the desert range which for years had not known a
drop of rain, and every rift and runlet was filled with a stream or a
torrent.
Neither Hadrian nor Antinous closed their eyes that fearful night. The
Emperor had as yet opened only one of the rolls that were in the day's
letter-bag; it contained the information that Titianus the prefect was
cruelly troubled by his old difficulty of breathing, with a petition from
that worthy official to be allowed to retire from the service of the
state and to withdraw to his own estate. It was no small matter for
Hadrian to dispense for the future with this faithful coadjutor, to lose
the man on whom he had had his eye to tranquillize Judaea--where a fresh
revolt had raised its head, and to reduce it again to subjection without
bloodshed. To crush and depopulate the rebellious province was within the
power of other men, but to conquer and govern it with kindness belonged
only to the wise and gentle Titianus. The Emperor had no heart to open a
second letter that night. He lay in silence on his couch till morning
began to grow gray, thinking over every evil hour of his life--the
murders of Nigrinus, of Tatianus and of the senators, by which he had
secured the sovereignty--and again he vowed to the gods immense
sacrifices if only they would protect him from impending disaster.
When he rose next morning Antinous was startled at his aspect, for
Hadrian's face and lips were perfectly bloodless. After he had read the
remainder of his letters he started, not on foot but on horseback, with
Antinous and Mastor for Besa, there to await the rest of the escort.
CHAPTER XXI.
The unchained elements had raged that night with equal fury over the Nile
city of Besa. The citizens of this ancient town had done all they could
to give the Imperial traveller a worthy reception. The chief streets had
been decked with ropes of flowers strung from mast to mast and from house
to house, and by the harbor, close to the river shore, statues of Hadrian
and his wife had been erected. But the storm tore down the masts and the
garlands, and the lashed waters of the Nile had beaten with irresistible
fury on the bank; had carried away piece after piece of the fertile
shore, flung its waves, like liquid wedges into the rifts of the parched
land; and excavated the high bank by the landing-quay.
After midnight the storm was still raging with unheard-of fury; it swept
the palm thatch from many of the houses, and beat the stream with such
violence that it was like a surging sea. The full unbroken force of the
flood beat again and again on the promontory on which stood the statues
of the Imperial couple. Shortly before the first dawn of light the little
tongue of land, which was protected by no river wall, could no longer
resist the furious attack of the waters; huge clods of soil slipped and
fell with a loud noise into the river and were followed by a large mass
of the cliff, with a roar as of thunder the plateau behind sank, and the
statue of the Emperor which stood upon it began to totter and lean slowly
to its fall. When day broke it was lying with the pedestal still above
ground, but the head was buried in the earth.
At break of day the citizens left their houses to inquire of the
fishermen and boatmen what had occurred in the harbor during the night.
As soon as the storm had abated, hundreds, nay thousands, of men, women
and children thronged the landing-place round the fallen statue--they saw
the land-slip and knew that the current had torn the land from the bank
and caused the mischief. Was it that Hapi, the Nile-god, was angry with
the Emperor? At any rate the disaster that had befallen the image of the
sovereign boded evil, that was clear.
The Toparch, the chief municipal authority, at once set to work to
reinstate the statue which was itself uninjured, for Hadrian might arrive
in a few hours. Numerous men, both free and slaves, crowded to undertake
the work, and before long the statue of Hadrian, executed in the Egyptian
style, once more stood upright and gazing with a fixed countenance
towards the harbor. Sabina's was also put back by the side of her
husband's and the Toparch went home satisfied. With him most of the
starers and laborers left the quay, but their place was taken by other
curious folks who had missed the statue from its place, where the land
had fallen, and now expressed their opinions as to the mode and manner of
its fall.
"The wind can never have overturned this heavy mass of limestone," said a
ropemaker: "And see how far it stands from the broken ground."
"They say it fell on the top of land-slip," answered a baker.
"That is how it was," said a sailor.
"Nonsense!" cried the ropemaker. "If the statue had stood on the ground
now carried away, it must have fallen at once into the water and have
sunk to the bottom--any child can see that other powers have been at work
here."
"Very likely," said a temple-servant who devoted himself to the
interpretation of signs: "The gods may have overset the proud image to
give a warning token to Hadrian."
"The immortals do not mix in the affairs of men in our day," said the
sailor; "but in such a fearful night as this peaceful citizens remain
within doors and so leave a fair field for Caesar's foes."
"We are all faithful subjects," said the baker indignantly.
"You are a pack of rebellious rabble," retorted a Roman soldier, who like
the whole cohort quartered in the province of Hermopolis, had formerly
served in Judaea under the cruel Tinnius Rufus. "Among you worshippers of
beasts squabbles never cease, and as to the Christians, who have made
their nests out there on the other side of the valley, say the worst you
can of them and still you would be flattering them."
"Brave Fuscus is quite right!" cried a beggar. The wretches have brought
the plague into our houses; wherever the disease shows itself there are
Christian men and women to be seen. They came to my brother's house; they
sat all night by his sick children and of course both died."
"If only my old governor Tinnius Rufus were here," growled the soldier,
"they would none of them be any better off than their own crucified god."
"Well, I certainly have nothing in common with them," replied the baker.
"But what is true must continue true. They are quiet, kind folks and
punctual in payment, who do no harm and show kindness to many poor
creatures."
"Kindness?" cried the beggar, who had received alms himself from the
deacon of the church at Besa, but had also been exhorted to work. "All
the five priests of Sekket of the grotto of Artemis have been led away by
them and have basely abandoned the sanctuary of the goddess. And is it
good and kind that they should have poisoned my brother's children with
their potions?"
"Why should they not have killed the children?" asked the soldier. "I
heard of the same things in Syria; and as to this statue, I will never
wear my sword again--"
"Hark! listen to the bold Fuscus," cried the crowd. "He has seen much."
"I will never wear my sword again if they did not knock over the statue
in the dark."
"No, no," cried the sailor positively. "It fell with the land that was
washed away; I saw it lying there myself."
"And are you a Christian, too?" asked the soldier, "or do you suppose
that I was in jest when I swore by my sword? I have served in Bithynia,
in Syria, and in Judaea. I know these villains, good people. There were
hundreds of Christians to be seen there who would throw away life like a
worn-out shoe because they did not choose to sacrifice to the statues of
Caesar and the gods."
"There, you hear!" cried the beggar. "And did you see a single man of
them among the citizens who set to work to restore the statue to its
place?"
"There were none of them there," said the sailor, who was beginning to
share the soldier's views.
"The Christians threw down the Emperor's statue," the beggar shouted to
the crowd. "It is proved, and they shall suffer for it. Every man who is
a friend of the divine Hadrian come with me now and have them out of
their houses."
"No uproar!" interrupted the soldier to the furious man. "There is the
tribune, he will hear you."
The Roman officer, who now came past with a troop of soldiers to receive
the Emperor outside the city, was greeted by the crowd with loud
shouting. He commanded silence and made the soldier tell him what had so
violently excited the people.
"Very possibly," said the tribune, a sinewy and stern-looking man, who,
like Fuscus, had served under Tinnius Rufus, and had risen from a sutler
to be an officer, "Very possibly--but where are your proofs?"
"Most of the citizens helped in reerecting the statue, but the Christians
held aloof from the work," cried the beggar. "There was not one to be
seen. Ask the sailor, my lord; he was by and he can bear witness to it."
"That certainly is more than suspicious. This matter must be strictly
inquired into. Pay heed, you people."
"Here comes a Christian girl!" cried the sailor.
"Lame Martha; I know her well," interrupted the beggar. "She goes into
all the plague-stricken houses and poisons the people. She stayed three
days and three nights at my brother's turning the children's pillows till
they were carried out. Wherever she goes death follows."
Selene, now known as Martha, paid no heed to the crowd, but with her
blind brother Helios, now called John, went calmly on her way which led
from the raised bank down to the landing-quay. There she wished to hire a
boat to take her across the stream, for in a village on the island over
against the town dwelt some sick Christians to whom she was carrying
medicines and whom she was intending to watch. For months past her whole
life had been devoted to the suffering. She had carried help even into
heathen homes, and shrunk from neither fever nor plague. Her cheeks had
gained no color, but her eyes shone with a gentler and purer light which
glorified the severe beauty of her features. As the girl approached the
captain he fixed his eyes on her, and called out:
"Hey! pale-face--are you a Christian?"
"Yes, my lord," replied Selene, and she went on quietly and indifferently
with her brother.
The Roman looked after her, and as she passed by Hadrian's statue, and,
as she did so, dropped her head rather lower than before, he roughly
ordered her to stop and to tell him why she had averted her face from the
statue of Caesar.
"Hadrian is our ruler as well as yours," answered the young girl. "I am
in haste for there are sick people on the island."
"You will bring them no good!" cried the beggar. "Who knows what is
hidden there in the basket?"
"Silence!" interrupted the tribune. "They say, girl that your
fellow-believers overthrew the statue of Caesar in the night."
"How should that be? We honor Caesar no less than you do."
"I will believe you, and you shall prove it. There stands the statue of
the divine Caesar. Come with me and worship it." Selene looked with
horror in the face of the stern man, and could not find a word of reply.
"Well!" asked the captain, "will you come? Yes or no?"
Selene struggled for self-possession, and when the soldier held out his
hand to her she said with a trembling voice:
"We honor the Emperor but we pray to no statue--only to our Father in
Heaven."
"There you have it!" laughed the beggar.
"Once more I ask you," cried the tribune. "Will you worship this statue,
or do you refuse to do so?"
A fearful struggle possessed Selene's soul. If she resisted the Roman her
life was in danger, and the fury of the populace would be aroused against
her fellow-believers--if, on the other hand, she obeyed him, she would be
blaspheming God, breaking her faith to the Saviour who loved her, sinning
against the truth and her own conscience. A fearful dread fell upon her,
and deprived her of the power to lift her soul in prayer. She could not,
she dared not, do what was required of her, and yet the overweening love
of life which exists in every mortal led her feet to the base of the idol
and there stayed her steps.
"Lift up your hands and worship the divine Caesar," cried the tribune,
who with the rest of the lookers-on had watched her movements with keen
excitement.
Trembling, she set her basket on the ground and tried to withdraw her
hand from her brother's; but the blind boy held it fast. He fully
understood what was required of his sister, he knew full well, from the
history of many martyrs that had been told him, what fate awaited her and
him if they resisted the Roman's demand; but he felt no fear and
whispered to her:
"We will not obey his desires Martha; we will not pray to idols, we will
cling faithfully to the Redeemer. Turn me away from the image, and I will
say 'Our Father.'"
With a loud voice and his lustreless eyes upraised to Heaven, the boy
said the Lord's prayer. Selene had first set his face towards the river,
and then she herself turned her back on the statue; then, lifting her
hands, she followed the child's example.
Helios clung to her closely, her loudly uttered prayer was one with his,
and neither of them saw or heard anything more of what befell them.
The blind boy had a vision of a distant but glorious light, the maiden of
a blissful life made beautiful by love, as she was flung to the ground in
front of the statue of Hadrian, and the excited mob rushed upon her and
her faithful little brother. The military tribune tried in vain to hold
back the populace, and by the time the soldiers had succeeded in driving
the excited mob away from their victims, both the young hearts, in the
midst of the triumph of their faith, in the midst of their hopes of an
eternal and blissful life, had ceased to beat for ever.
The occurrence disturbed the captain and made him very uneasy. This girl,
this beautiful boy, who lay before him pale corpses, had been worthy of a
better fate, and he might be made to answer for them; for the law forbade
that any Christian should be punished for his faith without a judge's
sentence. He therefore commanded that the dead should be carried at once
to the house to which they belonged, and threatened every one, who should
that day set foot in the Christian quarter, with the severest punishment.
The beggar went off, shrieking and shouting, to his brother's house to
tell the mistress that lame Martha, who had nursed her daughter to death,
was slain; but he gained an evil reward, for the poor woman bewailed
Selene as if she had been her own child, and cursed him and her
murderers.
Before sundown Hadrian arrived at Besa, where he found magnificent tents
pitched to receive him and his escort. The disaster that had befallen his
statue was kept a secret from him, but he felt anxious and ill. He wished
to be perfectly alone, and desired Antinous to go to see the city before
it should be dark. The Bithynian joyfully embraced this permission as a
gift of the gods; he hurried through the decorated high streets, and made
a boy guide him from thence into the Christian quarter. Here the streets
were like a city of the dead; not a door was open, not a man to be seen.
Antinous paid the lad, sent him away, and with a beating heart went from
one house to another. Each looked neat and clean, and was surrounded by
trees and shrubs, but though the smoke curled up from several of the
roofs every house seemed to have been deserted. At last he heard the
sound of voices. Guided by these he went through a lane to an open place
where hundreds of people, men, women and children, were assembled in
front of a small building which stood in the midst of a palm grove.
He asked where dame Hannah lived, and an old man silently pointed to the
little house on which the attention of the Christians seemed to be
concentrated. The lad's heart throbbed wildly and yet he felt anxious and
embarrassed, and he asked himself whether he had not better turn back and
return next morning when he might hope to find Selene alone.
But no! Perhaps he might even now be allowed to see her.
He modestly made his way through the throng, which had set up a song in
which he could not determine whether it was intended to express feelings
of sadness or of triumph. Now he was standing at the gate of the garden
and saw Mary the deformed girl. She was kneeling by a covered bier and
weeping bitterly. Was dame Hannah dead? No, she was alive, for at this
moment she came out of her house, leaning on an old man, pale, calm and
tearless. Both came forward, the old man uttered a short prayer and then
stooping down, lifted the sheet which covered the dead.
Antinous pushed a step forward but instantly drew two steps back--then
covering his eyes with his hand he stood as if rooted to the spot.
There was no vehement lamentation. The old man began a discourse. All
around were sounds of suppressed weeping, singing and praying but
Antinous saw and heard nothing. He had dropped his hand and never took
his eyes off the white face of the dead till Hannah once more covered it
with the sheet. Even then he did not stir.
It was not till six young girls lifted Selene's modest bier and four
matrons took up that of little Helios on their shoulders and the whole
assembly moved away after them, that he too turned and followed the
mourning procession. He looked on from a distance while the larger and
the smaller coffins were carried into a rocktomb, while the entrance was
carefully closed, and the procession dispersed some here and some there.
At last he found himself alone and in front of the door of the vault. The
sun went down, and darkness spread rapidly over hill and vale. When no
one was to be seen who could observe him, he threw up his arms, clasped
the pillar at the entrance of the tomb, pressed his lips against the
rough wooden door and struck his forehead against it while his whole body
trembled with the tearless anguish of his spirit.
For some minutes he stood so and did not hear a light step which came up
behind him. It was Mary, who had come once more to pray by the grave of
her beloved friend. She at once recognized the youth and softly called
him by his name.
"Mary," he answered, clasping her hand eagerly. "How did she die?"
"Slain," she said, sadly. "She would not worship Caesar's image."
Antinous shuddered at the words, and asked, "And why would she not?"
"Because she was faithful to our belief, and so hoped for the mercy of
the Saviour. Now she is a blessed angel."
"Are you sure of that?"
"As sure as I live in hope of meeting the martyr who rests here, again in
Heaven!"
"Mary."
"Leave go of my hand!"
"Will you do me a service, Mary?"
"Willingly, Antinous--but pray do not touch me."
"Take this money and buy the loveliest wreath that is to be had here.
Hang it on this tomb, and say as you do so--call out--, From Antinous to
Selene.'"
The deformed girl took the money he gave her and said:
"She often prayed for you."
"To her God?"
"To our Redeemer, that he might give you also joy. She died for Christ
Jesus; now she is with him, and he will grant her prayers."
Antinous was silent for a while, then he said:
"Once more give me your hand, Mary, and now farewell. Will you sometimes
think of me, and pray for me too, to your Redeemer?"
"Yes, yes, and you will not quite forget me, the poor cripple?"
"Certainly not, you good, kind girl! Perhaps we may some day meet again."
With these words Antinous hurried down the hill and through the town to
the Nile.
The moon had risen and was mirrored in the rough water. Just so had its
image played upon the waves when Antinous had rescued Selene from the
sea. The lad knew that Hadrian would be expecting him, still he did not
seek his tent. A violent emotion had overpowered him; he restlessly paced
up and down the river-bank rapidly reviewing in his memory the more
prominent incidents of his past life. He seemed to hear again every word
of the dialogue that had taken place yesterday between Hadrian and
himself. Before his inward eye he saw once more his humble home in
Bithynia, his mother, his brothers and sisters whom he should never see
again. Once more he lived through the dreadful hour when he had deceived
his beloved master and had been an incendiary. An overmastering dread
fell upon him as he thought of Hadrian's wish to put him in the place of
the man whom the prudent sovereign had chosen as his successor--a choice
that was perhaps the direct outcome of his own crime. He, Antinous, who
to-day could not think of the morrow, who always kept out of the way of
the discourse of grave men because he found it so hard to follow their
meaning, he who knew nothing but how to obey, he who was never happy but
alone with his master and his dreaming, far from the bustle of the
world--he, to be burdened with the purple, with anxiety, with a
mountain-load of responsibility!
No, no; the idea was unheard-of--impossible! And yet Hadrian never gave
up a wish he had once expressed in words. The future loomed before his
soul like some overpowering foe. Suffering, unrest, and misfortune stared
him in the face, turn which way he would.
What was the hideous fatality that threatened his sovereign? It was
approaching, it must come if no one--aye, if no one should be found to
stand between him and the impending blow, and to receive in his own
breast--in his own heart, bared to receive the wound--the spear hurled by
the vengeful god. And he--he, and he alone was the one who might do this.
The thought flashed into his mind like a sudden blaze of light; and if he
should find the courage to devote himself to death for his dear master
all his sins against him would be expiated; then--then--oh, how lovely a
thought!--then might he not find entrance into the gates of that realm of
bliss which Selene's prayers had opened to him? There he would see his
mother again and his father, and by and bye his brothers and sisters--but
now, at once in a few minutes Her whom he loved and who had trodden the
ways of death before him.
An exquisite sense of hope such as he had never felt before flooded his
soul. There lay the Nile--here was a boat. He gave it a strong push into
the stream and with a powerful leap, as when hunting he had often sprung
from rock to rock, he jumped into the boat. He had just seized an oar
when Mastor, who had been desired by the Emperor to seek him, recognized
him in the moonlight and desired him to return with him to the tents.
But Antinous did not obey. As he pushed out into the stream he called
out:
"Greet my Lord from me--greet him lovingly, a thousand times, and tell
him Antinous loved him more than his life. Fate demands a victim. The
world cannot dispense with Hadrian, but Antinous is a mere nonentity,
whom none will miss but Caesar, and for him Antinous flings himself into
the jaws of death."
"Stay-stop! hapless boy, come back!" shouted the slave, and leaping into
a boat he followed that of the Bithynian, which, impelled by strong and
steady strokes, flew away into the current.
Mastor rowed with all his might, but he could not gain upon the boat he
was pursuing. Thus in a wild race both reached the middle of the stream.
There, the slave saw Antinous fling away his oar, and an instant later he
heard Antinous call loudly on the name of Selene, and then, in helpless
inactivity, he saw the lad glide into the waters, and the Nile swallowed
in its flood the noblest and fairest of victims.
CHAPTER XXII
A night and a day had slipped away since the death of the Bithynian.
Ships and boats from every part of the province had collected before Besa
to seek for the body of the drowned youth, the shores swarmed with men,
and cressets and torches had dimmed the moonlight on river and shore all
through the night; but they had not yet succeeded in finding the body of
the beautiful youth.
Hadrian had heard in what way Antinous had perished. He had required
Mastor to repeat to him more than once the last words of his faithful
companion and neither to add nor to omit a single syllable. Hadrian's
accurate memory cherished them all and now he had sat till dawn and from
dawn till the sun had reached the meridian, repeating them again and
again to him self. He sat gloomily brooding and would neither eat nor
drink. The misfortune which had threatened him had fallen--and what a
grief was this! If indeed Fate would accept the anguish he now felt in
the place of all other suffering it might have had in store for him he
might look forward to years free from care, but he felt as though he
would rather have spent the remainder of his existence in sorrow and
misery with his Antinous by his side than enjoy, without him, all that
men call happiness, peace and prosperity.
Sabina and her escort had arrived-a host of men; but he had strictly
ordered that no one, not even his wife, was to be admitted to his
presence. The comfort of tears was denied him, but his grief gripped him
at the heart, clouded his brain and made hint so irritably sensitive that
an unfamiliar voice, though even at a distance, disturbed him and made
him angry.
The party who had arrived by water were not allowed to occupy the tents
which had been pitched for them not far from his, because he desired to
be alone, quite alone, with his anguish of spirit. Mastor, whom he had
hitherto regarded rather a useful chattel than as a human creature, now
grew nearer to him--had he not been the one witness of his darling's
strange disappearance. Towards the close of this, the most miserable
night he had ever known, the slave asked him whether he should not fetch
the physician from the ships, he looked so pale; but Hadrian forbade it.
"If I could only cry like a woman," he said, "or like other fathers whose
sons are snatched away by death, that would be the best remedy. You poor
souls will have a bad time now, for the sun of my life has lost its light
and the trees by the way-side have lost their verdure."
When he was alone once more he sat staring into vacancy and muttered to
himself:
"All mankind should mourn with me for if I had been asked yesterday how
perfect a beauty might be bestowed on one of their race I could have
pointed proudly to you, my faithful boy and have said, 'Beauty like that
of the gods.' Now the crown is cut off from the trunk of the palm and the
maimed thing can only be ashamed of its deformity; and if all humanity
were but one man it would look like one who has had his right eye torn
out. I will not look on the monsters, lean and fat, that they may not
spoil my taste for the true type! Oh faithful, lovable, beautiful boy!
What a blind, mad fool have you been! And yet I cannot blame your
madness. You have pierced my soul with the deepest thrust of all and yet
I cannot even be angry with you. Superhuman! godlike was your faithful
devotion. Aye, indeed, it was!" As he thus spoke he rose from his seat
and went on resolutely and decidedly:
"Here I stretch out this my right hand-hear me, ye Immortals! Every city
in the Empire shall raise an altar to Antinous, and the friend of whom
you have robbed me I will make your equal and companion. Receive him
tenderly, oh, ye undying rulers of the world! Which among you can boast
of beauty greater than his? and which of you ever displayed so much
goodness and faithfulness as your new associate?"
This vow seemed to have given Hadrian some comfort. For above half an
hour he paced his tent with a firmer tread, then he desired that
Heliodorus his secretary might be called.
The Greek wrote what his sovereign dictated. This was nothing less than
that henceforth the world should worship a new divinity in the person of
Antinous.
At noonday a messenger in breathless haste came to say that the body of
the Bithynian had been found. Thousands flocked to see the corpse, and
among them Balbilla, who had behaved like a distracted creature when she
heard to what an end her idol had come. She had rushed up and down the
river-bank, among the citizens and fishermen, dressed in black mourning
robes and with her hair flying about her. The Egyptians had compared her
to the mourning Isis seeking the body of her beloved husband, Osiris. She
was beside herself with grief, and her companion implored her in vain to
calm herself and remember her rank and her dignity as a woman. But
Balbilla pushed her vehemently aside, and when the news was brought that
Nile had yielded up his prey she rushed on foot to see the body, with the
rest of the crowd.
Her name was in every mouth, everyone knew that she was the Empress'
friend, and so she was willingly and promptly obeyed when she commanded
the bearers who carried the bier on which the recovered body lay to set
it down and to lift up the sheet which shrouded it. Pale and trembling,
she went up to it and gazed down at the drowned man; but only for a
moment could she endure the sight. She turned away with a shudder, and
desired the bearers to go on. When the funeral procession had disappeared
and she could no longer hear the shrill wailing of the Egyptian women,
and no longer see them streaking their breast, head, and hair with damp
earth and flinging up their arms wildly in the air, she turned to her
companion and said calmly: "Now, Claudia, let us go home."
In the evening at supper she appeared dressed in black, like Sabina and
all the rest of the suite, but she was calm and ready with an answer to
every observation.
Pontius had travelled with them from Thebes to Besa, and she had spared
him nothing that could punish him for his long absence, and had
mercilessly compelled him to listen to all her verses on Antinous.
He meanwhile had been perfectly cool about it, and had criticised her
poems exactly as if they had referred not to a man of flesh and blood but
to some statue or god. This epigram he would praise, the next he would
disparage, a third condemn. Her confession that she had been in the habit
of complimenting Antinous with flowers and fruit he heard with a shrug of
the shoulders, saying pleasantly: "Give him as many presents as you will;
I know that you expect no gifts from your divinity in return for your
sacrifices."
His words had surprised and delighted her. Pontius always understood her,
and did not deserve that she should wound him. So she let him gaze into
her soul, and told him how much she loved Antinous so long as he was
absent. Then she laughed and confessed that she was perfectly indifferent
to him as soon as they were together.
When, after the Bithynian's death, she lost all self-control he simply
let her alone, and begged Claudia to do the same.
The same day that the body was found it was burnt on a pile of precious
wood. Hadrian had refused to see it when he learnt that the death by
drowning had terribly distorted the lad's features.
A few hours after the ashes of the Bithynian had been collected and
brought in a golden vase to Hadrian, the Nile fleet was once more under
sail, this time with the Emperor on board one of the boats, to proceed
without farther halt to Alexandria.
Hadrian remained alone with only his slave and his secretary on the boat
that conveyed him; but he several times sent to Pontius to desire him to
come from the ship on which he was and visit him on his. He liked to hear
the architect's deep voice, and discussed with him the plans which
Pontius had sketched for his mausoleum in Rome and the monument to his
lost favorite which he proposed to have erected from designs of his own
in the large city which he intended should stand on the site of the
little town of Besa, and which he had already named Antinoe. But these
discussions only took up a limited number of hours, and then the
architect was at liberty to return to Sabina's boat, on which Balbilla
also lived.
A few days after they had quitted Besa he was sitting alone with the
poetess on the deck of the Nile boat which, borne by the current and
propelled by a hundred oars, was rapidly and steadily nearing its
destination. Ever since the death of the hapless favorite Pontius had
avoided mentioning him to her. She had now become as observant and as
talkative as before, and in her eyes there even shone at times a ray of
the old sunny gayety of her nature. The architect thought he comprehended
the characteristic change in her sentiments, and would not allude to the
cause of the violent but transient fever under which she had suffered.
"What did you discuss with Caesar to-day?" asked Balbilla of her friend.
Pontius looked down at the ground and considered whether he could venture
to utter the name of Antinous before the poetess. Balbilla observed his
hesitation and said:
"Speak on; I can hear anything. That folly is past and over."
"Caesar is at work at the plans for a new town to be built and called
Antinoe, and a sketch for a monument to his ill-fated favorite," said
Pontius. "He will not accept any help, but I have to teach him to
discriminate what is possible from what is impossible."
"Ah! he is always gazing at the stars and you look steadily at the road
on which you are walking."
"An architect can make no use of anything that is unsteady or that has no
firm foundation."
"That is a hard saying, Pontius. It is true that during the last few
weeks I have behaved like a fool."
"I only wish that every tottering structure could recover its balance as
quickly and as certainly as you! Antinous was a demigod for beauty, and a
good faithful fellow besides."
"Do not speak of him any more," exclaimed Balbilla shuddering. "He looked
dreadful. Can you forgive me for my conduct?"
"I never was angry with you."
"But I lost your esteem."
"No, Balbilla. Beauty, which is dear to us all, and which the Muse has
kissed, attracted your easily moved poet's soul and it fluttered off at
random. Let it fly! My friend's true womanly nature was never carried
away by it. She stands on a rock, that I am sure of."
"How good and kind in you to say so--too good, too kind! for I am a
feeble creature, turned by every breeze that blows, a vain little fool
who does not know one hour what she may do the next, a spoilt child that
likes best to do the thing it ought to leave undone, a weak girl who
finds a pleasure in doing battle with men. For all in all--"
"For all in all a darling of the gods who to-day can climb the rocks with
a firm step and to-morrow lies dreaming in the sunshine among
flowers--for all in all a nature that has no equal and which lacks
nothing, nothing whatever that constitutes a true woman excepting--"
"I know what I lack," cried Balbilla. "A strong man on whom I can depend,
whose warnings I can respect. You, you are that man; you and none other,
for as soon as I feel you by my side I find it difficult to do what I
know to be wrong. Here I am, Pontius! Will you have me with all my moods,
with all my faults and weaknesses?"
"Balbilla!" cried the architect, beside himself with heartfelt agitation
and surprise, and he pressed her hand long and fervently to-his lips.
"You will? You will take me? You will never leave me, you will warn,
support me and protect me?"
"Till my last day, till death, as my child, as the apple of my eye,
as--dare I say it and believe it?--as my love, my second self, my wife."
"Oh! Pontius, Pontius," she exclaimed, grasping his broad, right hand in
both her own. "This hour restores to the orphaned Balbilla, father and
mother and gives her besides the husband that she loves."
"Mine, mine!" cried the architect. "Immortal gods! During half a lifetime
I have never found time, in the midst of labor and fatigue, to indulge in
the joys of love and now you give me with interest and compound interest
the treasure you have so long withheld."
"How can you, a reasonable man, so over-estimate the value of your
possession? But you shall find some good in it. Life can no longer be
conceived of as worth having without the possessor."
"And to me it has so long seemed empty and cold without you, you strange,
unique, incomparable creature."
"But why did you not come sooner, and so give me no time to behave like a
fool?"
"Because, because," said Pontius, gravely, "such a flight towards the sun
seemed to me too bold; because I remember that my father's father--"
"He was the noblest man that the ancestor of my house attracted to its
greatness."
"He was--consider it duly at this moment--he was your grandfather's
slave."
"I know it, but I also know, that there is not a man on earth who is
worthier of freedom than you are, or whom I could ask as humbly as I ask
you: Take me, poor, foolish Balbilla, to be your wife, guide me and make
of me whatever you can, for your own honor and mine."
The brief Nile voyage brought days and hours of the highest happiness to
Balbilla and her lover. Before the fleet sailed into the Mareotic harbor
of Alexandria, Pontius revealed his happy secret to the Emperor. Hadrian
smiled for the first time since the death of his favorite, and desired
the architect to bring Balbilla to him.
"I was wrong in my interpretation of the Pythian oracle," said he, as he
laid the poetess's hand in that of Pontius. "Would you like to know how
it runs Pontius--do not prompt me, my child. Anything that I have read
through once or twice I never forget. Pythia said:
'That which thou boldest most precious and dear shall be torn from
thy keeping,
And from the heights of Olympus, down shalt thou fall in the dust;
Still the contemplative eye discerns under mutable sand-drifts
Stable foundations of stone, marble and natural rock.'
"You have chosen well girl. The oracle guaranteed you a safe road to
tread through life. As to the dust of which it speaks, it exists no doubt
in a certain sense, but this hand wields the broom that will sweep it
away. Solemnize your marriage in Alexandria as soon as you will, but then
come to Rome, that is the only condition I impose. A thing I always have
at heart is the introduction of new and worthy members into the class of
Knights, for it is in that way alone that its fallen dignity can be
restored. This ring, my Pontius, gives you the rank of eques, and such a
man as you are, the husband of Balbilla and the friend of Caesar may no
doubt by-and-bye find a seat in the Senate. What this generation can
produce in stone and marble, my mausoleum shall bear witness to. Have you
altered the plan of the bridge?"
CHAPTER XXIII.
In Alexandria the news of the nomination of the "sham Eros" to be the
Emperor's successor was hailed with joy, and the citizens availed
themselves gladly of his fresh and favorable opportunity to hold one
festival after another. Titianus took care to provide for the due
performance of the usual acts of grace, and among others he threw open
the prison-gates of Canopus, and the sculptor Pollux was set at liberty.
The hapless artist had grown pale, it is true, in durance vile, but
neither leaner nor enfeebled in body; on the other hand all the vigor of
his intellect, all his bright courage for life and his happy creative
instinct, seemed altogether crushed out of him. His face, as in his dirty
and ragged chiton, he journeyed from Canopus to Alexandria, revealed
neither eager thankfulness for the unexpected boon of liberty, nor
happiness at the prospect of seeing again his own people and Arsinoe.
In the town he went, unintelligently dreaming as he walked, from one
street to another, but he was familiar with every stone of the way, and
his feet found their way to his sister's house. How happy was Diotima,
how her children rejoiced, how impatient was each one to conduct him to
the old folks! How high in the air the Graces frisked and leaped in front
of the new little home to welcome the returned absentee! And Doris, poor
Doris, almost fainted with joyful surprise and her husband had to support
her in his arms when her long vanished son, whom she had never given up
for lost, however, suddenly stood before her and said: "Here am I." How
fondly she kissed and caressed her dear, cruel, restored fugitive. The
singer too loudly expressed his joy alike in verse and in prose, and
fetched his best theatrical dress out of the chest to put it on his son
in the place of his ragged chiton.
A mighty torrent of curses and execrations flowed from the old man's lips
as Pollux told his story. The sculptor found it difficult to bring it to
an end, for his father interrupted him at every word, and all the while
he was talking his mother forced him to eat and drink incessantly, even
when he could no more. After he had assured her that he was long since
replete, she pushed two more pots on to the fire, for he must have been
half-starved in prison, and what he did not want now he would find room
for two hours hence. Euphorion himself conducted Pollux to the bath in
the evening, and as they went home together he never for an instant left
his side; the sense of being near him did him good and was like some
comfortable physical sensation.
The singer was not usually inquisitive, but on this occasion he never
ceased asking questions till Doris led her son to the bed she had freshly
made for him. After the artist had gone to rest, the old woman once more
slipped into his room, kissed his forehead, and said:
"To-day you have still been thinking too much of that hideous prison--but
to-morrow my boy, to-morrow you will be the same as before, will you
not?"
"Only leave me alone mother; I shall soon be better," he replied. "This
bed is as good as a sleeping-draught; the plank in the prison was quite a
different thing."
"You have never asked once for your Arsinoe," said Doris.
"What can she matter to me? Only let me sleep." But the next morning
Pollux was just the same as he had been the previous evening, and as the
days went on his condition remained unchanged. His head drooped on his
breast, he never spoke but when he was spoken to, and when Doris or
Euphorion tried to talk to him of the future, he would ask: "Am I a
burden to you?" or begged them not to worry him.
Still, he was gentle and kind, took his sister's children in his arms,
played with the Graces, whistled to the birds, went in and out, and
played a valiant part at every meal. Now and again he would ask after
Arsinoe. Once he allowed himself to be guided to the house where she
lived, but he would not knock at Paulina's door and seemed overawed by
the grandeur of the house. After he had been brooding and dreaming for a
week, so idle, listless, and absent that his mother's heart was filled
with anxious fears every time she looked at him, his brother Teuker hit
upon a happy idea.
The young gem-cutter was not usually a frequent visitor to his parents'
house, but since the return of the hapless Pollux he called there almost
daily. His apprenticeship was over and he seemed on the high-road to
become a great master in his art; nevertheless he esteemed his brother's
gifts as far beyond his own and had tried to devise some means of
reawakening the dormant energies of the luckless man's brain.
"It was at this table," said Teuker to his mother, "that Pollux used to
sit. This evening I will bring in a lump of clay and a good piece of
modelling wax. Just put it all on the table and lay his tools by the side
of it; perhaps when he sees them he will take a fancy again to work. If
he can only make up his mind to model even a doll for the children he
will soon get into the vein again, and he will go on from small things to
great."
Teuker brought the materials, Doris set them out with the modelling
tools, and next morning watched her son's proceedings with an anxious
heart. He got up late, as he had always done since his return home, and
sat a long time over the bowl of porridge which his mother had prepared
for his breakfast. Then he sauntered across to his table, stood in front
of it awhile, broke off a piece of clay and kneaded and moulded it in his
fingers into balls and cylinders, looked at one of them more closely and
then, flinging it on the ground, he said, as he leaned across the table
supporting himself on both hands to put his face near his mother's:
"You want me to work again; but it is of no use--I could do no good with
it."
The old woman's eyes filled with tears, but she did not answer him. In
the evening Pollux begged her to put away the tools.
When he was gone to bed she did so, and while she was moving about with a
light in the dark, lumber-room in which she had kept them with other
disused things, her eye fell on the unfinished wax model which had been
the last work of her ill-starred son. A new idea struck her. She called
Euphorion, made him throw the clay into the court-yard and place the
model on the table by the side of the wax. Then she put out the very same
tools as he had been using on the fateful day of their expulsion from
Lochias, close to the cleverly-sketched portrait, and begged her husband
to go out with her quite early next morning and to remain absent till
mid-day.
"You will see," she said, "when he is standing face to face with his last
work and there is no one by to disturb him or look at him, he will find
the ends of the threads that have been cut and perhaps be able to gather
them up again and go on with the work where it was interrupted."
The mother's heart had hit upon the right idea. When Pollux had eaten his
breakfast he went to his table exactly as he had done the clay before;
but the sight of the work in hand had quite a different effect to the
mere raw clay and wax. His eyes sparkled; he walked round the table with
an attentive gaze examining his work as keenly and as eagerly as if it
were some fine thing he saw for the first time. Memory revived in his
mind. He laughed aloud, clasped his hands and said to himself, "Capital!
Something may be made of that!"
His dull weariness slipped off him, as it were; a confident smile parted
his lips and he seized the wax with a firm hand. But he did not begin to
work at once; he only tried whether his fingers had not lost their
cunning, and whether the yielding material was obedient to his will. The
wax was no less docile to his touch than in former days, as he pinched or
pulled it. Perhaps then the tormenting thought that blighted his life,
the dread that in the prison he had ceased to be an artist, and had lost
all his faculty was nothing more than a mad delusion! He must at any rate
try how he could get on at the work.
No one was by to observe him--he might dare the attempt at once. The
sweat of anguish stood in large beads on his brow as he finally
concentrated his volition, shook back the hair from his face and took up
a lump of the wax in both hands. There stood the portrait of Antinous
with the head only half-finished. Now--could he succeed in modelling that
lovely head free-hand and from memory?
His breath came fast, and his hands trembled as he set to work; but soon
his hand was as steady as ever, his eye was calm and keen again, and the
work progressed. The fine features of the young Bithynian were distinct
to his mind's eye, and when, about four hours after, his mother looked in
at the window to see what Pollux was doing, whether her little stratagem
had succeeded, she cried out with surprise, for the favorite's bust, a
likeness in every feature, stood on a plinth side by side with the
original sketch. Before she could cross the threshold her son had run to
meet her, lifted her in his arms, and kissing her forehead and lips he
exclaimed, radiant with delight:
"Mother, I still can work. Mother, mother, I am not lost!"
In the afternoon his brother came in and saw what he had been doing, and
now--and not till now--could Teuker honestly be glad to have found his
brother again.
While the two artists were sitting together, and the gem-cutter was
suggesting to the sculptor, who had complained of the bad light in his
parent's house, that he should carry the statue to his master's
workshop--which was much lighter--to complete it, Euphorion had quietly
gone to some remote corner of his provision-shed and brought to light an
amphora full of noble Chian wine which had been given to him by a rich
merchant, for whose wedding he had performed the part of Hymenaeus with a
chorus of youths. For twenty years had he still preserved this jar of
wine for some specially happy occasion. This jar and his best lute were
the only objects which Euphorion had carried with his own hand from
Lochias to his daughter's house and then again to his own new abode. With
an air of dignified pride the singer set the old amphora before his sons,
but Doris laid hands upon it at once and said:
"I am glad to bestow the good gift upon you, and would willingly drink a
cup of it with you; but a prudent general does not celebrate his triumph
before he has won the battle. As soon as the statue of the beautiful lad
is completed, I myself, will wreathe this venerable jar with ivy, and beg
you spare it to us, my dear old man--but not before."
"Mother is right," said Pollux. "And if the amphora is really destined
for me, if you will allow it, my father shall not remove the pitch wig
from its venerable head, till Arsinoe is mine once more!"
"That is well my boy," cried Doris, "and then I will crown, not merely
the jar but all of us too, with nothing but sweet roses."
The next day Pollux, with his unfinished statue, removed to the workshop
of his brother's master. The worthy man cleared the best place for the
young sculptor, for he thought highly of him and wished to make good, as
far as lay in his power, the injustice the poor fellow had suffered from
the treachery of Papias. Now, from sunrise till evening fell, Pollux was
constant to his work. He gave himself up to the resuscitated pleasure and
power of creation with real passion. Instead of using wax he had recourse
to clay, and formed a tall figure which represented Antinous as the
youthful Bacchus, as the god might have appeared to the pirates. A mantle
fell in light folds from his left shoulder to his ankles, leaving the
broad breast and right aria entirely free; vine-leaves and grapes
wreathed his flowing locks, and a pine-cone, flame-shaped, crowned his
brow. The left arm was raised in a graceful curve, and his fingers
lightly grasped a thyrsus which rested on the ground and stood taller
than the god's head; by the side of this magnificent figure stood a
mighty wine-jar, half hidden by the drapery.
For a whole week Pollux had devoted himself to this task during all the
hours of daylight with unflagging zeal and diligence. Before night fell
he was accustomed to leave his work and walk up and down in front of
Paulina's house, but for the present he refrained from knocking at the
door and asking after the girl he loved. He had heard from his mother how
anxiously she was guarded from him and his; still Paulina's severity
would certainly not have hindered the artist from making the attempt to
possess himself of his dearest treasure. What held him back from even
approaching Arsinoe, was the vow he had made to himself never to tempt
her to quit her new and sheltered home till he had acquired a firm
certainty of being once for all an artist, a true artist, who might hope
to do something great, and who might dare to link the fate of the woman
he loved, with his own.
When, on the eighth morning of his labors, he was taking a few minutes
rest, his brother's master came past the rapidly advancing work, and
after contemplating it for some time exclaimed:
"Splendid, splendid! Our time has produced nothing to compare with it!"
An hour later Pollux was standing at the door of Paulina's town-house,
and let the knocker fall heavily on the door. The steward opened to him
and asked him what he wanted. He asked to speak with dame Paulina, but
she was not at home. Then he asked after Arsinoe, the daughter of
Keraunus, who had found a home with the rich widow. The servant shook his
head.
"My mistress is having her searched for," he said. "She disappeared
yesterday evening. The ungrateful creature! She has tried to run away
several times before now."
The artist laughed, slapped the steward on the back, and said:
"I will soon find her!" and he sprang away down the street, and back to
his parents.
Arsinoe had received much kindness in Paulina's house, but she had also
gone through many bad hours. For months she had been obliged to believe
that her lover was dead. Pontius had told her that Pollux had entirely
vanished and her benefactress persisted in al ways speaking of him as of
one dead. The poor child had shed many tears for him, and when the
longing to talk of him with some one who had known him had taken
possession of her she had entreated Paulina to allow her to go to see his
mother or to let Doris visit her. But the widow had desired her to give
up all thought of the idol-maker and his belongings, speaking with
contempt of the gate-keeper's worthy wife. Just at that time Selene also
left the city, and now Arsinoe's longing for her old friends grew to a
passionate craving to see them again.
One day she yielded to the promptings of her heart and slipped out into
the street to seek Doris; but the door-keeper, who had been charged by
Paulina never to allow her to go outside the door without his mistress's
express permission, noticed her and brought her back to her
protectress--not this time only, but, on several subsequent occasions
when she attempted to escape.
It was not merely her longing to talk about Pollux which made her new
home unendurable to Arsinoe, but many other reasons besides. She felt
like a prisoner; and in fact she was one, for after each attempt at
flight her freedom of movement was still farther impeded. It is true that
she had soon ceased to submit patiently to all that was required of her
and even had often opposed her adoptive mother with vehement words, tears
and execrations, but these unpleasant scenes, which always ended by a
declaration on Paulina's part that she forgave the girl, had always
resulted in a long break in her drives and in a variety of small
annoyances. Arsinoe was beginning to hate her benefactress and everything
that surrounded her, and the hours of catechising and of prayer, which
she could not escape, were a positive martyrdom. Ere long the doctrine to
which Paulina sought to win her was confounded in her mind with that
which it was intended to drive out, and she defiantly shut her heart
against it.
Bishop Eumenes, who had been elected in the spring Patriarch of the
Christians of Alexandria, visited her oftener than usual during the
summer when Paulina lived in her suburban villa. Paulina, it is true, had
fancied she could do without his help, and that she could and must carry
her task through to the end by herself; but the worthy old man had felt
sympathetically drawn to the poor ill-guided child, and sought to soothe
and calm her mind and show her the goal, towards which Paulina desired to
lead her, in all its beauty. After such discourses Arsinoe would be
softened and felt inclined to believe in God and to love Christ, but no
sooner had her protectress called her again into the school-room and put
the very same things before her in her own way than the girl's
heartstrings drew close again; and when she was desired to pray she
raised her hands, indeed, but out of sheer defiance, she prayed in spirit
to the Greek gods.
Frequently Paulina received visits from heathen acquaintances in rich
dresses and the sight of them always reminded Arsinoe of former days. How
poor she had been then! and yet she had always had a blue or a red ribbon
to plait in her hair and trim the edge of her peplum. Now she might wear
none but white dresses and the least scrap of colored ornament to dress
her hair or smarten her robe was strictly forbidden. Such vain trifles,
Paulina would say, were very well for the heathen, but the Lord looked
not at the body but at the heart.
Ah! and the poor little heart of the hapless child could not offer a very
pleasing sight to the Father in Heaven, for hatred and disgust, sadness,
impatience, and blasphemy seethed in it from morning till night. This
young nature was surely formed for love and contentment, and both had
left her weeping. Still Arsinoe never ceased to yearn for them.
When November had begun and another attempt to run away during their move
back to the town-house had failed, Paulina tried to punish her by never
speaking a word to her for a fortnight, and forbidding even the
slave-women to speak to her. In these two weeks the talkative girl was
reduced almost to desperation, and she even thought of throwing herself
off the roof down into the court-yard. But she clung too dearly to life
to carry this horrible project into execution. On the first of December
Paulina once more spoke to her, forgave her ingratitude, as usual in a
long, kind speech, and told her how many hours she had spent in praying
for her enlightenment and improvement.
Paulina spoke the truth, and yet but half the truth, for she had never
felt a real love for Arsinoe, and had now for a long time watched her
come and go with actual dislike; but she required her conversion in order
that the warmest wish of her heart might find fulfilment. It was for the
happiness of her daughter, and not for the sake of her recalcitrant
companion, that she prayed for her enlightenment and never ceased in her
efforts to open the callous heart of her adopted child to the true faith.
In the afternoon preceding that morning when Pollux had at last knocked
at the Christian widow's door, the sun shone with particular brilliancy,
and Paulina had allowed the girl to go out with her. They spent some
little time with a Christian family who dwelt on the shore of Lake
Mareotis, and so it fell out that they did not return home till late in
the evening. Arsinoe had long learnt, while she sat apparently gazing at
the ground, to keep her eyes out of the carriage and to see everything
that was going on around her; and as the chariot turned into their own
street she spied in the distance a tall man who looked like her long-wept
Pollux. She fixed her eyes upon him, and had some difficulty in keeping
herself from calling out aloud, for he it was who walked slowly down the
street. She could not be mistaken, for the torches of two slaves who were
walking in front of a litter had broadly lighted up his face and figure.
He was not lost--he was living, and seeking her. She could have shouted
aloud for joy, but she did not stir till Paulina's chariot was standing
still in front of her house. The door-keeper bustled out as usual to help
his mistress to step out of the high-slung vehicle. Thus Paulina for an
instant turned her back, and in that moment Arsinoe sprang out of the
opposite side of the chariot, and was flying down towards the street
where she had seen her lover. Before Paulina could discover that she was
gone the runaway found herself in the midst of the throng which, when the
day's work was over, poured out from the workshops and factories on their
way home.
Paulina's slaves, who were sent out at once to seek the fugitive, had to
return home this time empty-handed; but Arsinoe, on her part, had not
succeeded in finding him she sought. For an hour she looked round and
about her in vain; then she perceived that her search must be
unsuccessful, and wondered how she might find her way to his parents'
house. Rather than return to her benefactress she would have joined the
roofless crew who passed the night on the hard marble pavement of the
forecourts of the temple.
At first she rejoiced in the sense of recovered liberty, but when none of
the passers-by could tell her where Euphorion, the singer, lived, and
some young men followed her and addressed her with impudent speeches,
terror made her turn aside into a street which led to the Bruchiom; her
persecutors had not even then ceased to follow her, when a litter,
escorted by lictors and several torch-bearers, was carried past. It was
Julia, the kind wife of the prefect, who sat in it; Arsinoe recognized
her at once, followed her, and reached the door of her residence at the
same moment as she herself. As the matron got out of her litter she
observed the girl who placed herself modestly, but with hands uplifted in
entreaty, at the side of her path. Julia greeted the pretty creature in
whom she had once taken a motherly interest with affectionate sympathy,
beckoned Arsinoe to her, smiled as she listened to her request for a
night's shelter, and led her with much satisfaction to her husband.
Titianus was ill; still he was glad once more to see the ill-fated
palace-steward's pretty daughter; he listened to her story of her flight
with many signs of disapprobation, but kindly withal, and expressed the
warmest satisfaction at hearing that the sculptor Pollux was still in the
land of the living.
The grand and lordly bed in one of the strangers' rooms in the prefect's
house had held many a more illustrious guest, but never one whose sleep
was brightened by happier dreams than the poor orphaned "little
fugitive," who, no longer ago than yesterday, had cried herself to sleep.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Arsinoe was up betimes on the following morning; much embarrassed by all
the splendor that surrounded her, she walked up and down her room
thinking of Pollux. Then she stopped to take pleasure in her own image
displayed in a large mirror which stood on a dressing-table, and between
whiles she compared the couch, on which she lay clown again at full
length, with those in Paulina's house. Once more she felt herself a
prisoner, but this time she liked her prison, and presently, when she
heard slaves passing by her room, she flew to the door to listen, for it
was just possible that Titianus might have sent to fetch Pollux, and
would allow him to come to see her. At last a slave-woman came in,
brought her some breakfast, and desired her from Julia to go into the
garden and look at the flowers and aviaries till she should be sent for.
Early that morning the news had reached the prefect that Antinous had
sought his death in the Nile, and it had shocked him greatly, less on
account of the hapless youth than for Hadrian's sake. When he had given
the proper officials orders to announce the melancholy news and to desire
the citizens to give some public expression of their sympathy with the
Emperor's sorrow, he gave audience to the Patriarch Eumenes.
This venerable man, ever since the transactions which he had
conducted--with reference to the thanksgiving of the Christians for the
safety of the Emperor after the fire, had been one of the most esteemed
friends of Titianus and Julia. The prefect discussed with the Patriarch
the inauspicious effects that the death of the young fellow might be
expected to have on the Emperor, and as a result, on the government,
although the favorite had had no qualities of mind to distinguish him.
"Whenever Hadrian," continued Titianus, "would give his unresting brain
an hour's relaxation, and release himself from disappointment and
vexation and the severe toil and anxiety of which his life is overfull,
he would go out hunting with the bold youth or would have the handsome,
good-hearted boy into his own room. The sight of the Bithynian's beauty
delighted his eye, and how well Antinous knew how to listen to
him--silent, modest and attentive! Hadrian loved him as a son, and the
poor fellow clung to his master in return with more than a son's
fidelity; his death itself proved it. Caesar himself said to me once; 'In
the midst of the turmoil of waking life, when I see Antinous a feeling
comes over me as if a beautiful dream stood incorporate before my eyes.'
"Caesar's grief at losing him must indeed be great," said the Patriarch.
"And the loss will add to the gloom of his grave and brooding nature,
render his restless scheming and wandering still more capricious, and
increase his suspiciousness and irritability."
"And the circumstances under which Antinous perished," added Eumenes,
"will afford new ground for his attachment to superstitions."
"That is to be feared. We have not happy days before us; the revolt in
Judaea, too, will again cost thousands of lives."
"If only it had been granted to you to assume the government of that
province."
"But you know, my worthy friend, the condition I am in. On my bad days I
am incapable of commanding a thought or opening my lips. When my
breathlessness increases I feel as if I were being suffocated. I have
placed many decades of my life at the disposal of the state, and I now
feel justified in devoting the diminished strength which is left me to
other things. I and my wife think of retiring to my property by lake
Larius, and there to try whether we may succeed, she and I, in becoming
worthy of the salvation and capable of apprehending the truth that you
have offered us. You are there Julia? As the determination to retire from
the world has matured in us, we have, both of us, remembered more than
once the words of the Jewish sage, which you lately told us of. When the
angel of God drove the first man out of Paradise, he said: 'Henceforth
your heart must be your Paradise.' We are turning our backs on the
pleasure of a city life--"
"And we do so without regret," said Julia, interrupting her husband, "for
we bear in our minds the germ of a more indestructible, purer, and more
lasting happiness."
"Amen!" said the Patriarch. "Where two such as you dwell together there
the Lord is third in the bond." "Give us your disciple Marcianus to be
our travelling-companion," said Titianus.
"Willingly," said Eumenes. "Shall he come to visit you when I leave you?"
"Not immediately," replied Julia. "I have this morning an important and
at the same time pleasant business to attend to. You know Paulina, the
widow of Pudeus. She took into her keeping a pretty young creature--"
"And Arsinoe has run away from her."
"We took her in here," said Titianus. "Her protectress seems to have
failed in attracting her to her, or in working favorably on her nature."
"Yes," said the Patriarch. "There was but one key to her full, bright
heart--Love--but Paulina tried to force it open with coercion and
persistent driving. It remained closed--nay, the lock is spoiled.--But,
if I may ask, how came the girl into your house?"
"That I can tell you later, we did not make her acquaintance for the
first time yesterday."
"And I am going to fetch her lover to her," cried the prefect's wife.
"Paulina will claim her of you," said the Patriarch. "She is having her
sought for everywhere; but the child will never thrive under her
guidance."
"Did the widow formally adopt Arsinoe?" asked Titianus.
"No; she proposed doing so as soon as her young pupil--"
"Intentions count for nothing in law, and I can protect our pretty little
guest against her claim."
"I will fetch her," said Julia. "The time must certainly have seemed very
long to her already. Will you come with me, Eumenes?"
"With pleasure," replied the old man, "Arsinoe and I are excellent
friends; a conciliatory word from me will do her good, and my blessing
cannot harm even a heathen. Farewell, Titianus, my deacons are expecting
me."
When Julia returned to the sitting-room with her protegee, the child's
eyes were wet with tears, for the kind words of the venerable old man had
gone to her heart and she knew and acknowledged that she had experienced
good as well as evil from Paulina.
The matron found her husband no longer alone. Wealthy old Plutarch with
his two supporters was with him, and in black garments, which were
decorated with none but white flowers, instead of many colored garments;
he presented a singular appearance. The old man was discoursing eagerly
to the prefect; but as soon as he saw Arsinoe he broke off his harangue,
clapped his hands and was quite excited with the pleasure of seeing once
more the fair Roxana for whom he had once visited in vain all the
gold-workers' shops in the city.
"But I am tired," cried Plutarch, with quite youthful vivacity, "I am
quite tired of keeping the ornaments for you. There are quite enough
other useless things in my house. They belong to you, not to me, and this
very day I will send them to the noble Julia, that she may give them to
you. Give me your hand, dear child; you have grown paler but more
womanly. What do you think, Titianus, she would still do for Roxana; only
your wife must find a dress for her again. All in white, and no ribband
in your hair!--like a Christian."
"I know some one who will find out the way to fitly crown these soft
tresses," replied Julia. "Arsinoe is the bride of Pollux, the sculptor."
"Pollux!" exclaimed Plutarch, in extreme excitement. "Move me forward,
Antaeus and Atlas, the sculptor Pollux is her lover? A great, a splendid
artist! The very same, noble Titianus, of whom I just now speaking to
you."
"You know him?" asked the prefect's wife.
"No, but I have just left the work-shop of Periander, the gem-cutter, and
there I saw the model of a statue of Antinous that is unique, marvellous,
incomparable! The Bithynian as Dionysus! The work would do no discredit
to a Phidias, to a Lysippus. Pollux was out of the way, but I laid my
hand at once on his work; the young master must execute it immediately in
marble. Hadrian will be enchanted with this portrait of his beautiful and
devoted favorite. You must admire it, every connoisseur must! I will pay
for it, the only question is whether I or the city should present it to
Caesar. This matter your husband must decide."
Arsinoe was radiant with joy at these words, but she stepped modestly
into the background as an official came in and handed Titianus a dispatch
that had just arrived.
The prefect read it; then turning to his friend and his wife, he said:
"Hadrian ascribes to Antinous the honors of a god."
"Fortunate Pollux!" exclaimed Plutarch. "He has executed the first statue
of the new divinity. I will present it to the city, and they shall place
it in the temple to Antinous of which we must lay the first stone before
Caesar is back here again. Farewell, my noble friends! Greet your
bridegroom from me, my child. His work belongs to me. Pollux will be the
first among his fellow-artists, and it has been my privilege to discover
this new star--the eighth artist whose merit I have detected while he was
still unknown. Your future brother-in-law too, Teuker, will turn out
well. I am having a stone cut by him with a portrait of Antinous. Once
more farewell; I must go to the Council. We shall have to discuss the
subject of a temple to the new divinity. Move on you two!"
An hour after Plutarch had quitted the prefect's house Julia's chariot
was standing at the entrance of a lane, much too narrow to admit a
vehicle with horses, and which ended in a little plot on which stood
Euphorion's humble house. Julia's outrunners easily found out the
residence of the sculptor's parents, led the matron and Arsinoe to the
spot, and showed them the door they should knock at.
"What a color you have, my little girl!" said Julia. "Well, I will not
intrude on your meeting, but I should like to deliver you with my own
hand into those of your future mother. Go to that little house, Arctus,
and beg dame Doris to step out here. Only say that some one wishes to
speak with her, but do not mention my name."
Arsinoe's heart beat so violently that she was incapable of saying a word
of thanks to her kind protectress. "Step behind this palm-tree," said the
lady. Arsinoe obeyed; but she felt as though it was some outside
volition, and not her own, that guided her to her hiding-place. She heard
nothing of the first words spoken by the Roman lady and Doris. She only
saw the dear old face of her Pollux's mother, and in spite of her
reddened eyes and the wrinkles which trouble had furrowed in her face,
she could not tire of looking at it. It reminded her of the happiest days
of her childhood, and she longed to rush forward and throw her arms round
the neck of the kindly, good-hearted woman. Then she heard Julia say: "I
have brought her to you. She is just as sweet and as maidenly and lovely
as she was the first time we saw her in the theatre."
"Where is she? Where is she?" asked Doris in a trembling voice.
Julia pointed to the palm, and was about to call Arsinoe, but the girl
could no longer restrain her longing to fall on the neck of some one dear
to her, for Pollux had come out of the door to see who had asked for his
mother, and to see him and to fly to his breast with a cry of joy had
been one and the same act to Arsinoe.
Julia gazed at the couple with moistened eyes, and when, after many kind
words for old and young alike, she took leave of the happy group, she
said:
"I will provide for your outfit my child, and this time I think you will
wear it, not merely for one transient hour but through a long and happy
life."
Joyful singing sounded out that evening from Euphorion's little home.
Doris and her husband, and Pollux and Arsinoe, Diotima and Teuker, decked
with garlands, reclined round the amphora which was wreathed with roses,
drinking to pleasure and joy, to art and love, and to all the gifts of
the present. The sweet bride's long hair was once more plaited with
handsome blue ribbons.
Three weeks after these events Hadrian was again in Alexandria. He kept
aloof from all the festivals instituted in honor of the new god Antinous,
and smiled incredulously when he was told that a new star had appeared in
the sky, and that an oracle had declared it to be the soul of his lost
favorite.
When Plutarch conducted the Emperor and his friends to see the Bacchus
Antinous, which Pollux had completed in the clay, Hadrian was deeply
struck and wished to know the name of the master who had executed this
noble work of art. Not one of his companion's had the courage to speak
the name of Pollux in his presence; only Pontius ventured to come forward
for his young friend. He related to Hadrian the hapless artist's history
and begged him to forgive him. The Emperor nodded his approval, and said:
"For the sake of this lost one he shall be forgiven."
Pollux was brought into his presence, and Hadrian, holding out his hand
said as he pressed the sculptor's:
"The Immortals have bereft me of his love and faithfulness, but your art
has preserved his beauty for me and for the world--"
Every city in the Empire vied in building temples and erecting statues to
the new god, and Pollux, Arsinoe's happy husband, was commissioned to
execute statues and busts of Antinous for a hundred towns; but he refused
most of the orders, and would send out no work as his own that he had not
executed himself on a new conception. His master, Papias, returned to
Alexandria, but he was received there by his fellow-artists with such
insulting contempt, that in an evil hour he destroyed himself. Teuker
lived to be the most famous gem-engraver of his time.
Soon after Selene's martyrdom dame Hannah quitted Besa; the office of
Superior of the Deaconesses at Alexandria was intrusted to her, and she
exercised it with much blessing till an advanced age. Mary, the deformed
girl, remained behind in the Nile-port, which under Hadrian was extended
into the magnificent city of Antmoe. There were there two graves from
which she could not bear to part.
Four years after Arsinoe's marriage with Pollux, Hadrian called the young
sculptor to Rome; he was there to execute the statue of the Emperor in a
quadriga. This work was intended to crown and finish his mausoleum
constructed by Pontius, and Pollux carried it out in so admirable a
manner, that when it was ended, Hadrian said to him with a smile:
"Now you have earned the right to pronounce sentence of death on the
works of other masters." Euphorion's son lived in honor and prosperity to
see his children, the children of his faithful wife Arsinoe--who was
greatly admired by the Tiber-grow up to be worthy citizens. They remained
heathen; but the Christian love which Eumenes had taught Paulina's
foster-daughter was never forgotten, and she kept a kindly place for it
in her heart and in her household. A few months before the young couple
left Alexandria, Doris had peacefully gone to her last rest, and her
husband died soon after her; the want of his faithful companion was the
complaint he succumbed to.
On the shores of the Tiber, Pontius was still the sculptor's friend.
Balbilla and her husband gave their corrupt fellow-citizens the example
of a worthy, faithful marriage on the old Roman pattern. The poetess's
bust had been completed by Pollux in Alexandria, and with all its tresses
and little curls, it found favor in Balbilla's eyes.
Verus was to have enjoyed the title of Caesar even during Hadrian's
lifetime, but after a long illness he died the first. Lucilla nursed him
with unfailing devotion and enjoyed the longed-for monopoly of his
attentions through a period of much suffering. It was on their son that
in later years the purple devolved.
The predictions of the prefect Titianus were fulfilled, for the Emperor's
faults increased with years and the meaner side of his mind and nature
came into sharper relief. Titianus and his wife led a retired life by
lake Larius, far from the world, and both were baptized before they died.
They never pined for the turmoil of a pleasure-seeking world or its
dazzling show, for they had learnt to cherish in their own hearts all
that is fairest in life.
It was the slave Mastor who brought to Titianus the news of the
sovereign's death. Hadrian had given him his freedom before he died and
had left him a handsome legacy.
The prefect gave him a piece of land to farm and continued in friendly
relations with his Christian neighbor and his pretty daughter, who grew
up among her father's co-religionists.
When Titianus had told his wife the melancholy news he added solemnly:
"A great sovereign is dead. The pettinesses which disfigured the man
Hadrian will be forgotten by posterity, for the ruler Hadrian was one of
those men whom Fate sets in the places they belong to, and who, true to
their duty, struggle indefatigably to the end. With wise moderation he
was so far master of himself as to bridle his ambition and to defy the
blame and prejudice of all the Romans. The hardest, and perhaps the
wisest, resolution of his life was to abandon the provinces which it
would have exhausted the power of the Empire to retain. He travelled over
every portion of his dominion within the limits he himself had set to it,
shrinking from neither frost nor heat, and he tried to be as thoroughly
acquainted with every portion of it as if the Empire were a small estate
he had inherited. His duties as a sovereign forced him to travel, and his
love of travel lightened the duty. He was possessed by a real passion to
understand and learn everything. Even the Incomprehensible set no limits
to his thirst for knowledge, but ever striving to see farther and to dig
deeper than is possible to the mind of man, he wasted a great part of his
mighty powers in trying to snatch aside the curtain which hides the
destinies of the future. No one ever worked at so many secondary
occupations as he, and yet no former Emperor ever kept his eye so
unerringly fixed on the main task of his life, the consolidation and
maintenance of the strength of the state and the improvement and
prosperity of its citizens."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE EMPEROR, COMPLETE:
A well-to-do man always gets a higher price than a poor one
Avoid all useless anxiety
Dried merry-thought bone of a fowl
Enjoy the present day
Facts are differently reflected in different minds
Happiness is only the threshold to misery
Have not yet learned not to be astonished
Have lived to feel such profound contempt for the world
I must either rest or begin upon something new
Idleness had long since grown to be the occupation of his life
If one only knew who it is all for
Ill-judgment to pronounce a thing impossible
In order to find himself for once in good company--(Solitude)
It was such a comfort once more to obey an order
Love laughs at locksmiths
More to the purpose to think of the future than of the past
Never speaks a word too much or too little
Philosophers who wrote of the vanity of writers
So long as we do not think ourselves wretched, we are not so
Temples would be empty if mortals had nothing left to wish for
They keep an account in their heart and not in their head
To know half is less endurable than to know nothing
When a friend refuses to share in joys
Who do all they are able and enjoy as much as they can get
Wide world between the purpose and the deed
Years are the foe of beauty
HOMO SUM, Complete
By Georg Ebers
Volume 1.
Translated by Clara Bell
PREFACE.
In the course of my labors preparatory to writing a history of the
Sinaitic peninsula, the study of the first centuries of Christianity for
a long time claimed my attention; and in the mass of martyrology, of
ascetic writings, and of histories of saints and monks, which it was
necessary to work through and sift for my strictly limited object, I came
upon a narrative (in Cotelerius Ecclesiae Grecae Monumenta) which seemed
to me peculiar and touching notwithstanding its improbability. Sinai and
the oasis of Pharan which lies at its foot were the scene of action.
When, in my journey through Arabia Petraea, I saw the caves of the
anchorites of Sinai with my own eyes and trod their soil with my own
feet, that story recurred to my mind and did not cease to haunt me while
I travelled on farther in the desert.
A soul's problem of the most exceptional type seemed to me to be offered
by the simple course of this little history.
An anchorite, falsely accused instead of another, takes his punishment of
expulsion on himself without exculpating himself, and his innocence
becomes known only through the confession of the real culprit.
There was a peculiar fascination in imagining what the emotions of a soul
might be which could lead to such apathy, to such an annihilation of all
sensibility; and while the very deeds and thoughts of the strange
cave-dweller grew more and more vivid in my mind the figure of Paulus
took form, as it were as an example, and soon a crowd of ideas gathered
round it, growing at last to a distinct entity, which excited and urged
me on till I ventured to give it artistic expression in the form of a
narrative. I was prompted to elaborate this subject--which had long been
shaping itself to perfect conception in my mind as ripe material for a
romance--by my readings in Coptic monkish annals, to which I was led by
Abel's Coptic studies; and I afterwards received a further stimulus from
the small but weighty essay by H. Weingarten on the origin of
monasticism, in which I still study the early centuries of Christianity,
especially in Egypt.
This is not the place in which to indicate the points on which I feel
myself obliged to differ from Weingarten. My acute fellow-laborer at
Breslau clears away much which does not deserve to remain, but in many
parts of his book he seems to me to sweep with too hard a broom.
Easy as it would have been to lay the date of my story in the beginning
of the fortieth year of the fourth century instead of the thirtieth, I
have forborne from doing so because I feel able to prove with certainty
that at the time which I have chosen there were not only heathen recluses
in the temples of Serapis but also Christian anchorites; I fully agree
with him that the beginnings of organized Christian monasticism can in no
case be dated earlier than the year 350.
The Paulus of my story must not be confounded with the "first hermit,"
Paulus of Thebes, whom Weingarten has with good reason struck out of the
category of historical personages. He, with all the figures in this
narrative is a purely fictitious person, the vehicle for an idea, neither
more nor less. I selected no particular model for my hero, and I claim
for him no attribute but that of his having been possible at the period;
least of all did I think of Saint Anthony, who is now deprived even of
his distinguished biographer Athanasius, and who is represented as a man
of very sound judgment but of so scant an education that he was master
only of Egyptian.
The dogmatic controversies which were already kindled at the time of my
story I have, on careful consideration, avoided mentioning. The dwellers
on Sinai and in the oasis took an eager part in them at a later date.
That Mount Sinai to which I desire to transport the reader must not be
confounded with the mountain which lies at a long day's journey to the
south of it. It is this that has borne the name, at any rate since the
time of Justinian; the celebrated convent of the Transfiguration lies at
its foot, and it has been commonly accepted as the Sinai of Scripture. In
the description of my journey through Arabia Petraea I have endeavored to
bring fresh proof of the view, first introduced by Lepsius, that the
giant-mountain, now called Serbal, must be regarded as the mount on which
the law was given--and was indeed so regarded before the time of
Justinian--and not the Sinai of the monks.
As regards the stone house of the Senator Petrus, with its windows
opening on the street--contrary to eastern custom--I may remark, in
anticipation of well founded doubts, that to this day wonderfully
well-preserved fire-proof walls stand in the oasis of Pharan, the remains
of a pretty large number of similar buildings.
But these and such external details hold a quite secondary place in this
study of a soul. While in my earlier romances the scholar was compelled
to make concessions to the poet and the poet to the scholar, in this one
I have not attempted to instruct, nor sought to clothe the outcome of my
studies in forms of flesh and blood; I have aimed at absolutely nothing
but to give artistic expression to the vivid realization of an idea that
had deeply stirred my soul. The simple figures whose inmost being I have
endeavored to reveal to the reader fill the canvas of a picture where, in
the dark background, rolls the flowing ocean of the world's history.
The Latin title was suggested to me by an often used motto which exactly
agrees with the fundamental view to which I have been led by my
meditations on the mind and being of man; even of those men who deem that
they have climbed the very highest steps of that stair which leads into
the Heavens.
In the Heautontimorumenos of Terence, Chremes answers his neighbor
Menedemus (Act I, SC. I, v. 25) "Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto,"
which Donner translates literally:
"I am human, nothing that is human can I regard as alien to me."
But Cicero and Seneca already used this line as a proverb, and in a sense
which far transcends that which it would seem to convey in context with
the passage whence it is taken; and as I coincide with them, I have
transferred it to the title-page of this book with this meaning:
"I am a man; and I feel that I am above all else a man."
Leipzig, November 11, 1877.
GEORG EBERS.
HOMO SUM.
CHAPTER I.
Rocks-naked, hard, red-brown rocks all round; not a bush, not a blade,
not a clinging moss such as elsewhere nature has lightly flung on the
rocky surface of the heights, as if a breath of her creative life had
softly touched the barren stone. Nothing but smooth granite, and above it
a sky as bare of cloud as the rocks are of shrubs and herbs.
And yet in every cave of the mountain wall there moves a human life; two
small grey birds too float softly in the pure, light air of the desert
that glows in the noonday sun, and then they vanish behind a range of
cliffs, which shuts in the deep gorge as though it were a wall built by
man.
There it is pleasant enough, for a spring bedews the stony soil and
there, as wherever any moisture touches the desert, aromatic plants
thrive, and umbrageous bushes grow. When Osiris embraced the goddess of
the desert--so runs the Egyptian myth--he left his green wreath on her
couch.
But at the time and in the sphere where our history moves the old legends
are no longer known or are ignored. We must carry the reader back to the
beginning of the thirtieth year of the fourth century after the birth of
the Saviour, and away to the mountains of Sinai on whose sacred ground
solitary anchorites have for some few years been dwelling--men weary of
the world, and vowed to penitence, but as yet without connection or rule
among themselves.
Near the spring in the little ravine of which we have spoken grows a
many-branched feathery palm, but it does not shelter it from the piercing
rays of the sun of those latitudes; it seems only to protect the roots of
the tree itself; still the feathered boughs are strong enough to support
a small thread-bare blue cloth, which projects like a penthouse,
screening the face of a girl who lies dreaming, stretched at full-length
on the glowing stones, while a few yellowish mountain-goats spring from
stone to stone in search of pasture as gaily as though they found the
midday heat pleasant and exhilarating. From time to time the girl seizes
the herdsman's crook that lies beside her, and calls the goats with a
hissing cry that is audible at a considerable distance. A young kid comes
dancing up to her. Few beasts can give expression to their feelings of
delight; but young goats can.
The girl puts out her bare slim foot, and playfully pushes back the
little kid who attacks her in fun, pushes it again and again each time it
skips forward, and in so doing the shepherdess bends her toes as
gracefully as if she wished some looker-on to admire their slender form.
Once more the kid springs forward, and this time with its bead down. Its
brow touches the sole of her foot, but as it rubs its little hooked nose
tenderly against the girl's foot, she pushes it back so violently that
the little beast starts away, and ceases its game with loud bleating.
It was just as if the girl had been waiting for the right moment to hit
the kid sharply; for the kick was a hard one-almost a cruel one. The blue
cloth hid the face of the maiden, but her eyes must surely have sparkled
brightly when she so roughly stopped the game. For a minute she remained
motionless; but the cloth, which had fallen low over her face, waved
gently to and fro, moved by her fluttering breath. She was listening with
eager attention, with passionate expectation; her convulsively clenched
toes betrayed her.
Then a noise became audible; it came from the direction of the rough
stair of unhewn blocks, which led from the steep wall of the ravine down
to the spring. A shudder of terror passed through the tender, and not yet
fully developed limbs of the shepherdess; still she did not move; the
grey birds which were now sitting on a thorn-bush near her flew up, but
they had merely heard a noise, and could not distinguish who it was that
it announced.
The shepherdess's ear was sharper than theirs. She heard that a man was
approaching, and well knew that one only trod with such a step. She put
out her hand for a stone that lay near her, and flung it into the spring
so that the waters immediately became troubled; then she turned on her
side, and lay as if asleep with her head on her arm. The heavy steps
became more and more distinctly audible.
A tall youth was descending the rocky stair; by his dress he was seen to
be one of the anchorites of Sinai, for he wore nothing but a shirt-shaped
garment of coarse linen, which he seemed to have outgrown, and raw
leather sandals, which were tied on to his feet with fibrous palm-bast.
No slave could be more poorly clothed by his owner and yet no one would
have taken him for a bondman, for he walked erect and self-possessed. He
could not be more than twenty years of age; that was evident in the young
soft hair on his upper lip, chin, and cheeks; but in his large blue eyes
there shone no light of youth, only discontent, and his lips were firmly
closed as if in defiance.
He now stood still, and pushed back from his forehead the superabundant
and unkempt brown hair that flowed round his head like a lion's mane;
then he approached the well, and as he stooped to draw the water in the
large dried gourd-shell which he held, he observed first that the spring
was muddy, and then perceived the goats, and at last their sleeping
mistress.
He impatiently set down the vessel and called the girl loudly, but she
did not move till he touched her somewhat roughly with his foot. Then she
sprang up as if stung by an asp, and two eyes as black as night flashed
at him out of her dark young face; the delicate nostrils of her aquiline
nose quivered, and her white teeth gleamed as she cried:
"Am I a dog that you wake me in this fashion?" He colored, pointed
sullenly to the well and said sharply: "Your cattle have troubled the
water again; I shall have to wait here till it is clear and I can draw
some."
"The day is long," answered the shepherdess, and while she rose she
pushed, as if by chance, another stone into the water.
Her triumphant, flashing glance as she looked down into the troubled
spring did not escape the young man, and he exclaimed angrily:
"He is right! You are a venomous snake--a demon of hell."
She raised herself and made a face at him, as if she wished to show him
that she really was some horrible fiend; the unusual sharpness of her
mobile and youthful features gave her a particular facility for doing so.
And she fully attained her end, for he drew back with a look of horror,
stretched out his arms to repel her, and exclaimed as he saw her
uncontrollable laughter,
"Back, demon, back! In the name of the Lord! I ask thee, who art thou?"
"I am Miriam--who else should I be?" she answered haughtily.
He had expected a different reply, her vivacity annoyed him, and he said
angrily, "Whatever your name is you are a fiend, and I will ask Paulus to
forbid you to water your beasts at our well."
"You might run to your nurse, and complain of me to her if you had one,"
she answered, pouting her lips contemptuously at him.
He colored; she went on boldly, and with eager play of gesture.
"You ought to be a man, for you are strong and big, but you let yourself
be kept like a child or a miserable girl; your only business is to hunt
for roots and berries, and fetch water in that wretched thing there. I
have learned to do that ever since I was as big as that!" and she
indicated a contemptibly little measure, with the outstretched pointed
fingers of her two hands, which were not less expressively mobile than
her features. "Phoh! you are stronger and taller than all the Amalekite
lads down there, but you never try to measure yourself with them in
shooting with a bow and arrows or in throwing a spear!"
"If I only dared as much as I wish!" he interrupted, and flaming scarlet
mounted to his face, "I would be a match for ten of those lean rascals."
"I believe you," replied the girl, and her eager glance measured the
youth's broad breast and muscular arms with an expression of pride. "I
believe you, but why do you not dare? Are you the slave of that man up
there?"
"He is my father and besides--"
"What besides?" she cried, waving her hand as if to wave away a bat. "If
no bird ever flew away from the nest there would be a pretty swarm in it.
Look at my kids there--as long as they need their mother they run about
after her, but as soon as they can find their food alone they seek it
wherever they can find it, and I can tell you the yearlings there have
quite forgotten whether they sucked the yellow dam or the brown one. And
what great things does your father do for you?"
"Silence!" interrupted the youth with excited indignation. "The evil one
speaks through thee. Get thee from me, for I dare not hear that which I
dare not utter."
"Dare, dare, dare!" she sneered. "What do you dare then? not even to
listen!"
"At any rate not to what you have to say, you goblin!" he exclaimed
vehemently. "Your voice is hateful to me, and if I meet you again by the
well I will drive you away with stones."
While he spoke thus she stared speechless at him, the blood had left her
lips, and she clenched her small hands. He was about to pass her to fetch
some water, but she stepped into his path, and held him spell-bound with
the fixed gaze of her eyes. A cold chill ran through him when she asked
him with trembling lips and a smothered voice, "What harm have I done
you?"
"Leave me!" said he, and he raised his hand to push her away from the
water.
"You shall not touch me," she cried beside herself. "What harm have I
done you?"
"You know nothing of God," he answered, "and he who is not of God is of
the Devil."
"You do not say that of yourself," answered she, and her voice recovered
its tone of light mockery. "What they let you believe pulls the wires of
your tongue just as a hand pulls the strings of a puppet. Who told you
that I was of the Devil?"
"Why should I conceal it from you?" he answered proudly. "Our pious
Paulus, warned me against you and I will thank him for it. 'The evil
one,' he says, 'looks out of your eyes,' and he is right, a thousand
times right. When you look at me I feel as if I could tread every thing
that is holy under foot; only last night again I dreamed I was whirling
in a dance with you--"
At these words all gravity and spite vanished from Miriam's eyes; she
clapped her hands and cried, "If it had only been the fact and not a
dream! Only do not be frightened again, you fool! Do you know then what
it is when the pipes sound, and the lutes tinkle, and our feet fly round
in circles as if they had wings?"
"The wings of Satan," Hermas interrupted sternly. "You are a demon, a
hardened heathen."
"So says our pious Paulus," laughed the girl.
"So say I too," cried the young man. "Who ever saw you in the assemblies
of the just? Do you pray? Do you ever praise the Lord and our Saviour?"
"And what should I praise them for?" asked Miriam. "Because I am regarded
as a foul fiend by the most pious among you perhaps?"
"But it is because you are a sinner that Heaven denies you its blessing."
"No--no, a thousand times no!" cried Miriam. "No god has ever troubled
himself about me. And if I am not good, why should I be when nothing but
evil ever has fallen to my share? Do you know who I am and how I became
so? I was wicked, perhaps, when both my parents were slain in their
pilgrimage hither? Why, I was then no more than six years old, and what
is a child of that age? But still I very well remember that there were
many camels grazing near our house, and horses too that belonged to us,
and that on a hand that often caressed me--it was my mother's hand--a
large jewel shone. I had a black slave too that obeyed me; when she and I
did not agree I used to hang on to her grey woolly hair and beat her. Who
knows what may have become of her? I did not love her, but if I had her
now, how kind I would be to her. And now for twelve years I myself have
eaten the bread of servitude, and have kept Senator Petrus's goats, and
if I ventured to show myself at a festival among the free maidens, they
would turn me out and pull the wreath out of my hair. And am I to be
thankful? What for, I wonder? And pious? What god has taken any care of
me? Call me an evil demon--call me so! But if Petrus and your Paulus
there say that He who is up above us and who let me grow up to such a lot
is good, they tell a lie. God is cruel, and it is just like Him to put it
into your heart to throw stones and scare me away from your well."
With these words she burst out into bitter sobs, and her features worked
with various and passionate distortion.
Hermas felt compassion for the weeping Miriam. He had met her a hundred
times and she had shown herself now haughty, now discontented, now
exacting and now wrathful, but never before soft or sad. To-day, for the
first time, she had opened her heart to him; the tears which disfigured
her countenance gave her character a value which it had never before had
in his eyes, and when he saw her weak and unhappy he felt ashamed of his
hardness. He went up to her kindly and said: "You need not cry; come to
the well again always, I will not prevent you."
His deep voice sounded soft and kind as he spoke, but she sobbed more
passionately than before, almost convulsively, and she tried to speak but
she could not. Trembling in every slender limb, shaken with grief, and
overwhelmed with sorrow, the slight shepherdess stood before him, and he
felt as if he must help her. His passionate pity cut him to the heart and
fettered his by no means ready tongue.
As he could find no word of comfort, he took the water-gourd in his left
hand and laid his right, in which he had hitherto held it, gently on her
shoulder. She started, but she let him do it; he felt her warm breath; he
would have drawn back, but he felt as if he could not; he hardly knew
whether she was crying or laughing while she let his hand rest on her
black waving hair.
She did not move. At last she raised her head, her eyes flashed into his,
and at the same instant he felt two slender arms clasped round his neck.
He felt as if a sea were roaring in his ears, and fire blazing in his
eyes. A nameless anguish seized him; he tore himself violently free, and
with a loud cry as if all the spirits of hell were after him he fled up
the steps that led from the well, and heeded not that his water-jar was
shattered into a thousand pieces against the rocky wall.
She stood looking after him as if spell-bound. Then she struck her
slender hand against her forehead, threw herself down by the spring again
and stared into space; there she lay motionless, only her mouth continued
to twitch.
When the shadow of the palm-tree grew longer she sprang up, called her
goats, and looked up, listening, to the rock-steps by which he had
vanished; the twilight is short in the neighborhood of the tropics, and
she knew that she would be overtaken by the darkness on the stony and
fissured road down the valley if she lingered any longer. She feared the
terrors of the night, the spirits and demons, and a thousand vague
dangers whose nature she could not have explained even to herself; and
yet she did not stir from the spot nor cease listening and waiting for
his return till the sun had disappeared behind the sacred mountain, and
the glow in the west had paled.
All around was as still as death, she could hear herself breathe, and as
the evening chill fell she shuddered with cold.
She now heard a loud noise above her head. A flock of wild mountain
goats, accustomed to come at this hour to quench their thirst at the
spring, came nearer and nearer, but drew back as they detected the
presence of a human being. Only the leader of the herd remained standing
on the brink of the ravine, and she knew that he was only awaiting her
departure to lead the others down to drink. Following a kindly impulse,
she was on the point of leaving to make way for the animals, when she
suddenly recollected Hermas's threat to drive her from the well, and she
angrily picked up a stone and flung it at the buck, which started and
hastily fled. The whole herd followed him. Miriam listened to them as
they scampered away, and then, with her head sunk, she led her flock
home, feeling her way in the darkness with her bare feet.
CHAPTER II.
High above the ravine where the spring was lay a level plateau of
moderate extent, and behind it rose a fissured cliff of bare, red-brown
porphyry. A vein of diorite of iron-hardness lay at its foot like a green
ribbon, and below this there opened a small round cavern, hollowed and
arched by the cunning hand of nature. In former times wild beasts,
panthers or wolves, had made it their home; it now served as a dwelling
for young Hermas and his father.
Many similar caves were to be found in the holy Fountain, and other
anchorites had taken possession of the larger ones among them.
That of Stephanus was exceptionally high and deep, and yet the space was
but small which divided the two beds of dried mountain herbs where, on
one, slept the father, and on the other, the son.
It was long past midnight, but neither the younger nor the elder
cave-dweller seemed to be sleeping. Hermas groaned aloud and threw
himself vehemently from one side to the other without any consideration
for the old man who, tormented with pain and weakness, sorely needed
sleep. Stephanus meanwhile denied himself the relief of turning over or
of sighing, when he thought he perceived that his more vigorous son had
found rest.
"What could have robbed him of his rest, the boy who usually slept so
soundly, and was so hard to waken?"
"Whence comes it," thought Stephanus, "that the young and strong sleep so
soundly and so much, and the old, who need rest, and even the sick, sleep
so lightly and so little. Is it that wakefulness may prolong the little
term of life, of which they dread the end? How is it that man clings so
fondly to this miserable existence, and would fain slink away, and hide
himself when the angel calls and the golden gates open before him! We are
like Saul, the Hebrew, who hid himself when they came to him with the
crown! My wound burns painfully; if only I had a drink of water. If the
poor child were not so sound asleep I might ask him for the jar."
Stephanus listened to his son and would not wake him, when he heard his
heavy and regular breathing. He curled himself up shivering under the
sheep-skin which covered only half his body, for the icy night wind now
blew through the opening of the cave, which by day was as hot as an oven.
Some long minutes wore away; at last he thought he perceived that Hermas
had raised himself. Yes, the sleeper must have wakened, for he began to
speak, and to call on the name of God.
The old man turned to his son and began softly, "Do you hear me, my boy?"
"I cannot sleep," answered the youth.
"Then give me something to drink," asked Stephanus, "my wound burns
intolerably."
Hermas rose at once, and reached the water-jar to the sufferer.
"Thanks, thanks, my child," said the old man, feeling for the neck of the
jar. But he could not find it, and exclaimed with surprise: "How damp and
cold it is--this is clay, and our jar was a gourd."
"I have broken it," interrupted Hermas, "and Paulus lent me his."
"Well, well," said Stephanus anxious for drink; he gave the jar back to
his son, and waited till he had stretched himself again on his couch.
Then he asked anxiously: "You were out a long time this evening, the
gourd is broken, and you groaned in your sleep. Whom did you meet?"
"A demon of hell," answered Hermas. "And now the fiend pursues me into
our cave, and torments me in a variety of shapes."
"Drive it out then and pray," said the old man gravely. "Unclean spirits
flee at the name of God."
"I have called upon Him," sighed Hermas, "but in vain; I see women with
ruddy lips and flowing Hair, and white marble figures with rounded limbs
and flashing eyes beckon to me again and again."
"Then take the scourge," ordered the father, "and so win peace."
Hermas once more obediently rose, and went out into the air with the
scourge; the narrow limits of the cave did not admit of his swinging it
with all the strength of his arms.
Very soon Stephanus heard the whistle of the leathern thongs through the
stillness of the night, their hard blows on the springy muscles of the
man and his son's painful groaning.
At each blow the old man shrank as if it had fallen on himself. At last
he cried as loud as he was able "Enough--that is enough."
Hermas came back into the cave, his father called him to his couch, and
desired him to join with him in prayer.
After the 'Amen' he stroked the lad's abundant hair and said, "Since you
went to Alexandria, you have been quite another being. I would I had
withstood bishop Agapitus, and forbidden you the journey. Soon, I know,
my Saviour will call me to himself, and no one will keep you here; then
the tempter will come to you, and all the splendors of the great city,
which after all only shine like rotten wood, like shining snakes and
poisonous purple-berries--"
"I do not care for them," interrupted Hermas, "the noisy place bewildered
and frightened me. Never, never will I tread the spot again."
"So you have always said," replied Stephanus, "and yet the journey quite
altered you. How often before that I used to think when I heard you laugh
that the sound must surely please our Father in Heaven. And now? You used
to be like a singing bird, and now you go about silent, you look sour and
morose, and evil thoughts trouble your sleep."
"That is my loss," answered Hermas. "Pray let go of my hand; the night
will soon be past, and you have the whole live-long day to lecture me
in." Stephanus sighed, and Hermas returned to his couch.
Sleep avoided them both, and each knew that the other was awake, and
would willingly have spoken to him, but dissatisfaction and defiance
closed the son's lips, and the father was silent because he could not
find exactly the heart-searching words that he was seeking.
At last it was morning, a twilight glimmer struck through the opening of
the cave, and it grew lighter and lighter in the gloomy vault; the boy
awoke and rose yawning. When he saw his father lying with his eyes open,
he asked indifferently, "Shall I stay here or go to morning worship?"
"Let us pray here together," begged the father. "Who knows how long it
may yet be granted to us to do so? I am not far from the day that no
evening ever closes. Kneel down here, and let me kiss the image of the
Crucified."
Hermas did as his father desired him, and as they were ending their song
of praise, a third voice joined in the 'Amen.'
"Paulus!" cried the old man. "The Lord be praised! pray look to my wound
then. The arrow head seeks to work some way out, and it burns fearfully."
"The new comer, an anchorite, who for all clothing wore a shirt-shaped
coat of brown undressed linen, and a sheep-skin, examined the wound
carefully, and laid some herbs on it, murmuring meanwhile some pious
texts.
"That is much easier," sighed the old man. "The Lord has mercy on me for
your goodness' sake."
"My goodness? I am a vessel of wrath," replied Paulus, with a deep, rich;
sonorous voice, and his peculiarly kind blue eyes were raised to heaven
as if to attest how greatly men were deceived in him. Then he pushed the
bushy grizzled hair, which hung in disorder over his neck and face, out
of his eyes, and said cheerfully: "No man is more than man, and many men
are less. In the ark there were many beasts, but only one Noah."
"You are the Noah of our little ark," replied Stephanus.
"Then this great lout here is the elephant," laughed Paulus.
"You are no smaller than he," replied Stephanus.
"It is a pity this stone roof is so low, else we might have measured
ourselves," said Paulus. "Aye! if Hermas and I were as pious and pure as
we are tall and strong, we should both have the key of paradise in our
pockets. You were scourging yourself this night, boy; I heard the blows.
It is well; if the sinful flesh revolts, thus we may subdue it."
"He groaned heavily and could not sleep," said Stephanus.
"Aye, did he indeed!" cried Paulus to the youth, and held his powerful
arms out towards him with clenched fists; but the threatening voice was
loud rather than terrible, and wild as the exceptionally big man looked
in his sheepskin, there was such irresistible kindliness in his gaze and
in his voice, that no one could have believed that his wrath was in
earnest.
"Fiends of hell had met him," said Stephanus in excuse for his son, "and
I should not have closed an eye even without his groaning; it is the
fifth night."
"But in the sixth," said Paulus, "sleep is absolutely necessary. Put on
your sheep-skin, Hermas; you must go down to the oasis to the Senator
Petrus, and fetch a good sleeping-draught for our sick man from him or
from Dame Dorothea, the deaconess. Just look! the youngster has really
thought of his father's breakfast--one's own stomach is a good reminder.
Only put the bread and the water down here by the couch; while you are
gone I will fetch some fresh--now, come with me."
"Wait a minute, wait," cried Stephanus. "Bring a new jar with you from
the town, my son. You lent us yours yesterday, Paulus, and I must--"
"I should soon have forgotten it," interrupted the other. "I have to
thank the careless fellow, for I have now for the first time discovered
the right way to drink, as long as one is well and able. I would not have
the jar back for a measure of gold; water has no relish unless you drink
it out of the hollow of your hand! The shard is yours. I should be
warring against my own welfare, if I required it back. God be praised!
the craftiest thief can now rob me of nothing save my sheepskin."
Stephanus would have thanked him, but he took Hermas by the hand, and led
him out into the open air. For some time the two men walked in silence
over the clefts and boulders up the mountain side. When they had reached
a plateau, which lay on the road that led from the sea over the mountain
into the oasis, he turned to the youth, and said:
"If we always considered all the results of our actions there would be no
sins committed."
Hermas looked at him enquiringly, and Paulus went on, "If it had occurred
to you to think how sorely your poor father needed sleep, you would have
lain still this night."
"I could not," said the youth sullenly. "And you know very well that I
scourged myself hard enough."
"That was quite right, for you deserved a flogging for a misconducted
boy."
Hermas looked defiantly at his reproving friend, the flaming color
mounted to his cheek: for he remembered the shepherdess's words that he
might go and complain to his nurse, and he cried out angrily:
"I will not let any one speak to me so; I am no longer a child."
"Not even your father's?" asked Paulus, and he looked at the boy with
such an astonished and enquiring air, that Hermas turned away his eyes in
confusion.
"It is not right at any rate to trouble the last remnant of life of that
very man who longs to live for your sake only."
"I should have been very willing to be still, for I love my father as
well as any one else."
"You do not beat him," replied Paulus, "you carry him bread and water,
and do not drink up the wine yourself, which the Bishop sends him home
from the Lord's supper; that is something certainly, but not enough by a
long way."
"I am no saint!"
"Nor I neither," exclaimed Paulus, "I am full of sin and weakness. But I
know what the love is which was taught us by the Saviour, and that you
too may know. He suffered on the cross for you, and for me, and for all
the poor and vile. Love is at once the easiest and the most difficult of
attainments. It requires sacrifice. And you? How long is it now since you
last showed your father a cheerful countenance?"
"I cannot be a hypocrite."
"Nor need you, but you must love. Certainly it is not by what his hand
does but by what his heart cheerfully offers, and by what he forces
himself to give up that a man proves his love."
"And is it no sacrifice that I waste all my youth here?" asked the boy.
Paulus stepped back from him a little way, shook his matted head, and
said, "Is that it? You are thinking of Alexandria! Ay! no doubt life runs
away much quicker there than on our solitary mountain. You do not fancy
the tawny shepherd girl, but perhaps some pretty pink and white Greek
maiden down there has looked into your eyes?"
"Let me alone about the women," answered Hermas, with genuine annoyance.
"There are other things to look at there."
The youth's eyes sparkled as he spoke, and Paulus asked, not without
interest, "Indeed?"
"You know Alexandria better than I," answered Hermas evasively. "You were
born there, and they say you had been a rich young man."
"Do they say so?" said Paulus. "Perhaps they are right; but you must know
that I am glad that nothing any longer belongs to me of all the vanities
that I possessed, and I thank my Saviour that I can now turn my back on
the turmoil of men. What was it that seemed to you so particularly
tempting in all that whirl?"
Hermas hesitated. He feared to speak, and yet something urged and drove
him to say out all that was stirring his soul. If any one of all those
grave men who despised the world and among whom he had grown up, could
ever understand him, he knew well that it would be Paulus; Paulus whose
rough beard he had pulled when he was little, on whose shoulders he had
often sat, and who had proved to him a thousand times how truly he loved
him. It is true the Alexandrian was the severest of them all, but he was
harsh only to himself. Hermas must once for all unburden his heart, and
with sudden decision he asked the anchorite:
"Did you often visit the baths?"
"Often? I only wonder that I did not melt away and fall to pieces in the
warm water like a wheaten loaf."
"Why do you laugh at that which makes men beautiful?" cried Hermas
hastily. "Why may Christians even visit the baths in Alexandria, while we
up here, you and my father and all anchorites, only use water to quench
our thirst? You compel me to live like one of you, and I do not like
being a dirty beast."
"None can see us but the Most High," answered Paulus, "and for him we
cleanse and beautify our souls."
"But the Lord gave us our body too," interrupted Hermas. "It is written
that man is the image of God. And we! I appeared to myself as repulsive
as a hideous ape when at the great baths by the Gate of the Sun I saw the
youths and men with beautifully arranged and scented hair and smooth
limbs that shone with cleanliness and purification. And as they went
past, and I looked at my mangy sheepfell, and thought of my wild mane and
my arms and feet, which are no worse formed or weaker than theirs were, I
turned hot and cold, and I felt as if some bitter drink were choking me.
I should have liked to howl out with shame and envy and vexation. I will
not be like a monster!"
Hermas ground his teeth as he spoke the last words, and Paulus looked
uneasily at him as he went on: "My body is God's as much as my soul is,
and what is allowed to the Christians in the city--"
"That we nevertheless may not do," Paulus interrupted gravely. "He who
has once devoted himself to Heaven must detach himself wholly from the
charm of life, and break one tie after another that binds him to the
dust. I too once upon a time have anointed this body, and smoothed this
rough hair, and rejoiced sincerely over my mirror; but I say to you,
Hermas--and, by my dear Saviour, I say it only because I feel it, deep in
my heart I feel it--to pray is better than to bathe, and I, a poor
wretch, have been favored with hours in which my spirit has struggled
free, and has been permitted to share as an honored guest in the festal
joys of Heaven!"
While he spoke, his wide open eyes had turned towards Heaven and had
acquired a wondrous brightness. For a short time the two stood opposite
each other silent and motionless; at last the anchorite pushed the hair
from off his brow, which was now for the first time visible. It was
well-formed, though somewhat narrow, and its clear fairness formed a
sharp contrast to his sunburnt face.
"Boy," he said with a deep breath, "you know not what joys you would
sacrifice for the sake of worthless things. Long ere the Lord, calls the
pious man to Heaven, the pious has brought Heaven down to earth in
himself."
Hermas well understood what the anchorite meant, for his father often for
hours at a time gazed up into Heaven in prayer, neither seeing nor
hearing what was going on around him, and was wont to relate to his son,
when he awoke from his ecstatic vision, that he had seen the Lord or
heard the angel-choir.
He himself had never succeeded in bringing himself into such a state,
although Stephanus had often compelled him to remain on his knees praying
with him for many interminable hours. It often happened that the old
man's feeble flame of life had threatened to become altogether extinct
after these deeply soul-stirring exercises, and Hermas would gladly have
forbidden him giving himself up to such hurtful emotions, for he loved
his father; but they were looked upon as special manifestations of grace,
and how should a son dare to express his aversion to such peculiarly
sacred acts? But to Paulus and in his present mood he found courage to
speak out.
"I have sure hope of Paradise," he said, "but it will be first opened to
us after death. The Christian should be patient; why can you not wait for
Heaven till the Saviour calls you, instead of desiring to enjoy its
pleasures here on earth? This first and that after! Why Should God have
bestowed on us the gifts of the flesh if not that we may use them? Beauty
and strength are not empty trifles, and none but a fool gives noble gifts
to another, only in order to throw them away."
Paulus gazed in astonishment at the youth, who up to this moment had
always unresistingly obeyed his father and him, and he shook his head as
he answered,
"So think the children of this world who stand far from the Most High. In
the image of God are we made no doubt, but what child would kiss the
image of his father, when the father offers him his own living lips?"
Paulus had meant to say 'mother' instead of 'father,' but he remembered
in time that Hermas had early lost the happiness of caressing a mother,
and he had hastily amended the phrase. He was one of those to whom it is
so painful to hurt another, that they never touch a wounded soul unless
to heal it, divining the seat of even the most hidden pain.
He was accustomed to speak but little, but now he went on eagerly:
"By so much as God is far above our miserable selves, by so much is the
contemplation of Him worthier of the Christian than that of his own
person. Oh! who is indeed so happy as to have wholly lost that self and
to be perfectly absorbed in God! But it pursues us, and when the soul
fondly thinks itself already blended in union with the Most High it cries
out 'Here am I!' and drags our nobler part down again into the dust. It
is bad enough that we must hinder the flight of the soul, and are forced
to nourish and strengthen the perishable part of our being with bread and
water and slothful sleep to the injury of the immortal part, however much
we may fast and watch. And shall we indulge the flesh, to the detriment
of the spirit, by granting it any of its demands that can easily be
denied? Only he who despises and sacrifices his wretched self can, when
he has lost his baser self by the Redeemer's grace, find himself again in
God."
Hermas had listened patiently to the anchorite, but he now shook his
head, and said: "I cannot under stand either you or my father. So long as
I walk on this earth, I am I and no other. After death, no doubt, but not
till then, will a new and eternal life begin"
"Not so," cried Paulus hastily, interrupting him. "That other and higher
life of which you speak, does not begin only after death for him who
while still living does not cease from dying, from mortifying the flesh,
and from subduing its lusts, from casting from him the world and his
baser self, and from seeking the Lord. It has been vouchsafed to many
even in the midst of life to be born again to a higher existence. Look at
me, the basest of the base. I am not two but one, and yet am I in the
sight of the Lord as certainly another man than I was before grace found
me, as this young shoot, which has grown from the roots of an overthrown
palmtree is another tree than the rotten trunk. I was a heathen and
enjoyed every pleasure of the earth to the utmost; then I became a
Christian; the grace of the Lord fell upon me, and I was born again, and
became a child again; but this time--the Redeemer be praised!--the child
of the Lord. In the midst of life I died, I rose again, I found the joys
of Heaven. I had been Menander, and like unto Saul, I became Paulus. All
that Menander loved--baths, feasts, theatres, horses and chariots, games
in the arena, anointed limbs, roses and garlands, purple-garments, wine
and the love of women--lie behind me like some foul bog out of which a
traveller has struggled with difficulty. Not a vein of the old man
survives in the new, and a new life has begun for me, mid-way to the
grave; nor for me only, but for all pious men. For you too the hour will
sound, in which you will die to--"
"If only I, like you, had been a Menander," cried Hermas, sharply
interrupting the speaker: "How is it possible to cast away that which I
never possessed? In order to die one first must live. This wretched life
seems to me contemptible, and I am weary of running after you like a calf
after a cow. I am free-born, and of noble race, my father himself has
told me so, and I am certainly no feebler in body than the citizens' sons
in the town with whom I went from the baths to the wrestling-school."
"Did you go to the Palaestra?" asked Paulus in surprise.
"To the wrestling-school of Timagetus," cried Hermas, coloring. "From
outside the gate I watched the games of the youths as they wrestled, and
threw heavy disks at a mark. My eyes almost sprang out of my head at the
sight, and I could have cried out aloud with envy and vexation, at having
to stand there in my ragged sheep-skin excluded from all competition. If
Pachomius had not just then come up, by the Lord I must have sprung into
the arena, and have challenged the strongest of them all to wrestle with
me, and I could have thrown the disk much farther than the scented puppy
who won the victory and was crowned."
"You may thank, Pachomius," said Paulus laughing, "for having hindered
you, for you would have earned nothing in the arena but mockery and
disgrace. You are strong enough, certainly, but the art of the discobolus
must be learned like any other. Hercules himself would be beaten at that
game without practice, and if he did not know the right way to handle the
disk."
"It would not have been the first time I had thrown one," cried the boy.
"See, what I can do!" With these words he stooped and raised one of the
flat stones, which lay piled up to secure the pathway; extending his arm
with all his strength, he flung the granite disk over the precipice away
into the abyss.
"There, you see," cried Paulus, who had watched the throw carefully and
not without some anxious excitement. "However strong your arm may be, any
novice could throw farther than you if only he knew the art of holding
the discus. It is not so--not so; it must cut through the air like a
knife with its sharp edge. Look how you hold your hand, you throw like a
woman! The wrist straight, and now your left foot behind, and your knee
bent! see, how clumsy you are! Here, give me the stone. You take the
discus so, then you bend your body, and press down your knees like the
arc of a bow, so that every sinew in your body helps to speed the shot
when you let go. Aye--that is better, but it is not quite right yet.
First heave the discus with your arm stretched out, then fix your eye on
the mark; now swing it out high behind you--stop! once more! your arm
must be more strongly strained before you throw. That might pass, but you
ought to be able to hit the palm-tree yonder. Give me your discus, and
that stone. There; the unequal corners hinder its flight--now pay
attention!" Paulus spoke with growing eagerness, and now he grasped the
flat stone, as he might have done many years since when no youth in
Alexandria had been his match in throwing the discus.
He bent his knees, stretched out his body, gave play to his wrist,
extended his arm to the utmost and hurled the stone into space, while the
clenched toes of his right foot deeply dinted the soil.
But it fell to the ground before reaching which Paulus had indicated as
the mark.
"Wait!" cried Hermas. "Let me try now to hit the tree."
His stone whistled through the air, but it did not even reach the mound,
into which the palm-tree had struck root.
Paulus shook his head disapprovingly, and in his, turn seized a flat
stone; and now an eager contest began. At every throw Hermas' stone flew
farther, for he copied his teacher's action and grasp with increasing
skill, while the older man's arm began to tire. At last Hermas for the
second time hit the palm-tree, while Paulus had failed to reach even the
mound with his last fling.
The pleasure of the contest took stronger possession of the anchorite; he
flung his raiment from him, and seizing another stone he cried out--as
though he were standing once more in the wrestling school among his old
companions; all shining with their anointment.
"By the silver-bowed Apollo, and the arrow-speeding Artemis, I will hit
the palm-tree."
The missile sang through the air, his body sprang back, and he stretched
out his left arm to save his tottering balance; there was a crash, the
tree quivered under the blow, and Hermas shouted joyfully: "Wonderful!
wonderful! that was indeed a throw. The old Menander is not dead!
Farewell--to-morrow we will try again."
With these words Hermas quitted the anchorite, and hastened with wide
leaps down the hill in the oasis. Paulus started at the words like a
sleep-walker who is suddenly wakened by hearing his name called. He
looked about him in bewilderment, as if he had to find his way in some
strange world. Drops of sweat stood on his brow, and with sudden shame he
snatched up his garments that were lying on the ground, and covered his
naked limbs.
For some time he stood gazing after Hermas, then he clasped his brow in
deep anguish and large tears ran down upon his beard.
"What have I said?" he muttered to himself; "That every vein of the old
man in me was extirpated? Fool! vain madman that I am. They named me
Paulus, and I am in truth Saul, aye, and worse than Saul!"
With these words he threw himself on his knees, pressing his forehead
against the hard rock, and began to pray. He felt as if he had been flung
from a height on to spears and lances, as if his heart and soul were
bleeding, and while he remained there, dissolved in grief and prayer,
accusing and condemning himself, he felt not the burning of the sun as it
mounted in the sky, heeded not the flight of time, nor heard the approach
of a party of pilgrims, who, under the guidance of bishop Agapitus, were
visiting the Holy Places. The palmers saw him at prayer, heard his sobs,
and, marvelling at his piety, at a sign from their pastor they knelt down
behind him.
When Paulus at last arose, he perceived with surprise and alarm the
witnesses of his devotions, and approached Agapitus to kiss his robe. But
the bishop said: "Not so; he that is most pious is the greatest among us.
My friends, let us bow down before this saintly man!"
The pilgrims obeyed his command. Paulus hid his face in his hands and
sobbed out: "Wretch, wretch that I am!"
And the pilgrims lauded his humility, and followed their leader who left
the spot.
CHAPTER III.
Hermas had hastened onwards without delay. He had already reached the
last bend of the path he had followed down the ravine, and he saw at his
feet the long narrow valley and the gleaming waters of the stream, which
here fertilized the soil of the desert. He looked down on lofty palms and
tamarisk shrubs innumerable, among which rose the houses of the
inhabitants, surrounded by their little gardens and small
carefully-irrigated fields; already he could hear the crowing of a cock
and the hospitable barking of a dog, sounds which came to him like a
welcome from the midst of that life for which he yearned, accustomed as
he was to be surrounded day and night by the deep and lonely stillness of
the rocky heights.
He stayed his steps, and his eyes followed the thin columns of smoke,
which floated tremulously up in the clear light of the ever mounting sun
from the numerous hearths that lay below him.
"They are cooking breakfast now," thought he, "the wives for their
husbands, the mothers for their children, and there, where that dark
smoke rises, very likely a splendid feast is being prepared for guests;
but I am nowhere at home, and no one will invite me in." The contest with
Paulus had excited and cheered him, but the sight of the city filled his
young heart with renewed bitterness, and his lips trembled as he looked
down on his sheepskin and his unwashed limbs. With hasty resolve he
turned his back on the oasis and hurried up the mountain. By the side of
the brooklet that he knew of he threw off his coarse garment, let the
cool water flow over his body, washed himself carefully and with much
enjoyment, stroked clown his thick hair with his fingers, and then
hurried down again into the valley.
The gorge through which he had descended debouched by a hillock that rose
from the valley-plain; a small newly-built church leaned against its
eastern declivity, and it was fortified on all sides by walls and dikes,
behind which the citizens found shelter when they were threatened by the
Saracen robbers of the oasis. This hill passed for a particularly sacred
spot. Moses was supposed to have prayed on its summit during the battle
with the Amalekites while his arms were held up by Aaron and Hur.
But there were other notable spots in the neighborhood of the oasis.
There farther to the north was the rock whence Moses had struck the
water; there higher up, and more to the south-east, was the hill, where
the Lord had spoken to the law-giver face to face, and where he had seen
the burning bush; there again was the spring where he had met the
daughters of Jethro, Zippora and Ledja, so called in the legend. Pious
pilgrims came to these holy places in great numbers, and among them many
natives of the peninsula, particularly Nabateans, who had previously
visited the holy mountain in order to sacrifice on its summit to their
gods, the sun, moon, and planets. At the outlet, towards the north, stood
a castle, which ever since the Syrian Prefect, Cornelius Palma, had
subdued Arabia Petraea in the time of Trajan, had been held by a Roman
garrison for the protection of the blooming city of the desert against
the incursions of the marauding Saracens and Blemmyes.
But the citizens of Pharan themselves had taken measures for the security
of their property. On the topmost cliffs of the jagged crown of the giant
mountain--the most favorable spots for a look-out far and wide--they
placed sentinels, who day and night scanned the distance, so as to give a
warning-signal in case of approaching clanger. Each house resembled a
citadel, for it was built of strong masonry, and the younger men were all
well exercised bowmen. The more distinguished families dwelt near the
church-hill, and there too stood the houses of the Bishop Agapitus, and
of the city councillors of Pharan.
Among these the Senator Petrus enjoyed the greatest respect, partly by
reason of his solid abilities, and of his possessions in quarries,
garden-ground, date palms, and cattle; partly in consequence of the rare
qualities of his wife, the deaconess Dorothea, the granddaughter of the
long-deceased and venerable Bishop Chaeremon, who had fled hither with
his wife during the persecution of the Christians under Decius, and who
had converted many of the Pharanites to the knowledge of the Redeemer.
The house of Petrus was of strong and well-joined stone, and the palm
garden adjoining was carefully tended. Twenty slaves, many camels, and
even two horses belonged to him, and the centurion in command of the
Imperial garrison, the Gaul Phoebicius, and his wife Sirona, lived as
lodgers under his roof; not quite to the satisfaction of the councillor,
for the centurion was no Christian, but a worshipper of Mithras, in whose
mysteries the wild Gaul had risen to the grade of a 'Lion,' whence his
people, and with them the Pharanites in general, were wont to speak of
him as "the Lion."
His predecessor had been an officer of much lower rank but a believing
Christian, whom Petrus had himself requested to live in his house, and
when, about a year since, the Lion Phoebicius had taken the place of the
pious Pankratius, the senator could not refuse him the quarters, which
had become a right.
Hermas went shyly and timidly towards the court of Petrus' house, and his
embarrassment increased when he found himself in the hall of the stately
stone-house, which he had entered without let or hindrance, and did not
know which way to turn. There was no one there to direct him, and he
dared not go up the stairs which led to the upper story, although it
seemed that Petrus must be there. Yes, there was no doubt, for he heard
talking overhead and clearly distinguished the senator's deep voice.
Hermas advanced, and set his foot on the first step of the stairs; but he
had scarcely begun to go up with some decision, and feeling ashamed of
his bashfulness, when he heard a door fly open just above him, and from
it there poured a flood of fresh laughing children's voices, like a pent
up stream when the miller opens the sluice gate.
He glanced upwards in surprise, but there was no time for consideration,
for the shouting troop of released little ones had already reached the
stairs. In front of all hastened a beautiful young woman with golden
hair; she was laughing gaily, and held a gaudily-dressed doll high above
her head. She came backwards towards the steps, turning her fair face
beaming with fun and delight towards the children, who, full of their
longing, half demanding, half begging, half laughing, half crying,
shouted in confusion, "Let us be, Sirona," "Do not take it away again,
Sirona," "Do stay here, Sirona," again and again, "Sirona--Sirona."
A lovely six year old maiden stretched up as far as she could to reach
the round white arm that held the play-thing; with her left hand, which
was free, she gaily pushed away three smaller children, who tried to
cling to her knees and exclaimed, still stepping backwards, "No, no; you
shall not have it till it has a new gown; it shall be as long and as gay
as the Emperors's robe. Let me go, Caecilia, or you will fall down as
naughty Nikon did the other day."
By this time she had reached the steps; she turned suddenly, and with
outstretched arms she stopped the way of the narrow stair on which Hermas
was standing, gazing open-mouthed at the merry scene above his head. Just
as Sirona was preparing to run down, she perceived him and started; but
when she saw that the anchorite from pure embarrassment could find no
words in which to answer her question as to what he wanted, she laughed
heartily again and called out: "Come up, we shall not hurt you--shall we
children?"
Meanwhile Hermas had found courage enough to give utterance to his wish
to speak with the senator, and the young woman, who looked with
complacency on his strong and youthful frame, offered to conduct him to
him.
Petrus had been talking to his grown up elder sons; they were tall men,
but their father was even taller than they, and of unusual breadth of
shoulder.
While the young men were speaking, he stroked his short grey beard and
looked down at the ground in sombre gravity, as it might have seemed to
the careless observer; but any one who looked closer might quickly
perceive that not seldom a pleased smile, though not less often a
somewhat bitter one, played upon the lips of the prudent and judicious
man. He was one of those who can play with their children like a young
mother, take the sorrows of another as much to heart as if they were
their own, and yet who look so gloomy, and allow themselves to make such
sharp speeches, that only those who are on terms of perfect confidence
with them, cease to misunderstand them and fear them. There was something
fretting the soul of this man, who nevertheless possessed all that could
contribute to human happiness. His was a thankful nature, and yet he was
conscious that he might have been destined to something greater than fate
had permitted him to achieve or to be. He had remained a stone-cutter,
but his sons had both completed their education in good schools in
Alexandria. The elder, Antonius, who already had a house of his own and a
wife and children, was an architect and artist-mechanic; the younger,
Polykarp, was a gifted young sculptor. The noble church of the oasis-city
had been built under the direction of the elder; Polykarp, who had only
come home a month since, was preparing to establish and carry on works of
great extent in his father's quarries, for he had received a commission
to decorate the new court of the Sebasteion or Caesareum, as it was
called--a grand pile in Alexandria--with twenty granite lions. More than
thirty artists had competed with him for this work, but the prize was
unanimously adjudged to his models by qualified judges. The architect
whose function it was to construct the colonnades and pavement of the
court was his friend, and had agreed to procure the blocks of granite,
the flags and the columns which he required from Petrus' quarries, and
not, as had formerly been the custom, from those of Syene by the first
Cataract.
Antonius and Polykarp were now standing with their father before a large
table, explaining to him a plan which they had worked out together and
traced on the thin wax surface of a wooden tablet. The young architect's
proposal was to bridge over a deep but narrow gorge, which the beasts of
burden were obliged to avoid by making a wide circuit, and so to make a
new way from the quarries to the sea, which should be shorter by a third
than the old one. The cost of this structure would soon be recouped by
the saving in labor, and with perfect certainty, if only the
transport-ships were laden at Clysma with a profitable return freight of
Alexandrian manufactures, instead of returning empty as they had hitherto
done. Petrus, who could shine as a speaker in the council-meetings, in
private life spoke but little. At each of his son's new projects he
raised his eyes to the speaker's face, as if to see whether the young man
had not lost his wits, while his mouth, only half hidden by his grey
beard, smiled approvingly.
When Antonius began to unfold his plan for remedying the inconvenience of
the ravine that impeded the way, the senator muttered, "Only get feathers
to grow on the slaves, and turn the black ones into ravens and the white
ones into gulls, and then they might fly across. What do not people learn
in the metropolis!"
When he heard the word 'bridge' he stared at the young artist. "The only
question," said he, "is whether Heaven will lend us a rainbow." But when
Polykarp proposed to get some cedar trunks from Syria through his friend
in Alexandria, and when his elder son explained his drawings of the arch
with which he promised to span the gorge and make it strong and safe, he
followed their words with attention; at the same time he knit his
eyebrows as gloomily and looked as stern as if he were listening to some
narrative of crime. Still, he let them speak on to the end, and though at
first he only muttered that it was mere "fancy-work" or "Aye, indeed, if
I were the emperor;" he afterwards asked clear and precise questions, to
which he received positive and well considered answers. Antonius proved
by figures that the profit on the delivery of material for the Caesareum
only would cover more than three quarters of the outlay. Then Polykarp
began to speak and declared that the granite of the Holy Mountain was
finer in color and in larger blocks than that from Syene.
"We work cheaper here than at the Cataract," interrupted Antonius. "And
the transport of the blocks will not come too dear when we have the
bridge and command the road to the sea, and avail ourselves of the canal
of Trajan, which joins the Nile to the Red Sea, and which in a few months
will again be navigable."
"And if my lions are a success," added Polykarp, "and if Zenodotus is
satisfied with our stone and our work, it may easily happen that we
outstrip Syene in competition, and that some of the enormous orders that
now flow from Constantine's new residence to the quarries at Syene, may
find their way to us."
"Polykarp is not over sanguine," continued Antonius, "for the emperor is
beautifying and adding to Byzantium with eager haste. Whoever erects a
new house has a yearly allowance of corn, and in order to attract folks
of our stamp--of whom he cannot get enough--he promises entire exemption
from taxation to all sculptors, architects, and even to skilled laborers.
If we finish the blocks and pillars here exactly to the designs, they
will take up no superfluous room in the ships, and no one will be able to
deliver them so cheaply as we."
"No, nor so good," cried Polykarp, "for you yourself are an artist,
father, and understand stone-work as well as any man. I never saw a finer
or more equally colored granite than the block you picked out for my
first lion. I am finishing it here on the spot, and I fancy it will make
a show. Certainly it will be difficult to take a foremost place among the
noble works of the most splendid period of art, which already fill the
Caesareum, but I will do my best."
"The Lions will be admirable," cried Antonius with a glance of pride at
his brother. "Nothing like them has been done by any one these ten years,
and I know the Alexandrians. If the master's work is praised that is made
out of granite from the Holy Mountain, all the world will have granite
from thence and from no where else. It all depends on whether the
transport of the stone to the sea can be made less difficult and costly."
"Let us try it then," said Petrus, who during his son's talk had walked
up and down before them in silence. "Let us try the building of the
bridge in the name of the Lord. We will work out the road if the
municipality will declare themselves ready to bear half the cost; not
otherwise, and I tell you frankly, you have both grown most able men."
The younger son grasped his father's hand and pressed it with warm
affection to his lips. Petrus hastily stroked his brown locks, then he
offered his strong right hand to his eldest-born and said: "We must
increase the number of our slaves. Call your mother, Polykarp." The youth
obeyed with cheerful alacrity, and when Dame Dorothea--who was sitting at
the loom with her daughter Marthana and some of her female slaves--saw
him rush into the women's room with a glowing face, she rose with
youthful briskness in spite of her stout and dignified figure, and called
out to her son:
"He has approved of your plans?"
"Bridge and all, mother, everything," cried the young man. "Finer granite
for my lions, than my father has picked out for me is nowhere to be
found, and how glad I am for Antonius! only we must have patience about
the roadway. He wants to speak to you at once."
Dorothea signed to her son to moderate his ecstasy, for he had seized her
hand, and was pulling her away with him, but the tears that stood in her
kind eyes testified how deeply she sympathized in her favorite's
excitement.
"Patience, patience, I am coming directly," cried she, drawing away her
hand in order to arrange her dress and her grey hair, which was abundant
and carefully dressed, and formed a meet setting for her still pleasing
and unwrinkled face.
"I knew it would be so; when you have a reasonable thing to propose to
your father, he will always listen to you and agree with you without my
intervention; women should not mix themselves up with men's work. Youth
draws a strong bow and often shoots beyond the mark. It would be a pretty
thing if out of foolish affection for you I were to try to play the siren
that should ensnare the steersman of the house--your father--with
flattering words. You laugh at the grey-haired siren? But love overlooks
the ravages of years and has a good memory for all that was once
pleasing. Besides, men have not always wax in their ears when they should
have. Come now to your father."
Dorothea went out past Polykarp and her daughter. The former held his
sister back by the hand and asked--"Was not Sirona with you?"
The sculptor tried to appear quite indifferent, but he blushed as he
spoke; Marthana observed this and replied not without a roguish glance:
"She did show us her pretty face; but important business called her
away."
"Sirona?" asked Polykarp incredulously.
"Certainly, why not!" answered Marthana laughing. "She had to sew a new
gown for the children's doll."
"Why do you mock at her kindness?" said Polykarp reproachfully.
"How sensitive you are!" said Marthana softly. "Sirona is as kind and
sweet as an angel; but you had better look at her rather less, for she is
not one of us, and repulsive as the choleric centurion is to me--"
She said no more, for Dame Dorothea, having reached the door of the
sitting-room, looked around for her children.
Petrus received his wife with no less gravity than was usual with him,
but there was an arch sparkle in his half closed eyes as he asked: "You
scarcely know what is going on, I suppose?"
"You are madmen, who would fain take Heaven by storm," she answered
gaily.
"If the undertaking fails," said Petrus, pointing to his sons, "those
young ones will feel the loss longer than we shall."
"But it will succeed," cried Dorothea. "An old commander and young
soldiers can win any battle." She held out her small plump hand with
frank briskness to her husband, he clasped it cheerily and said: "I think
I can carry the project for the road through the Senate. To build our
bridge we must also procure helping hands, and for that we need your aid,
Dorothea. Our slaves will not suffice."
"Wait," cried the lady eagerly; she went to the window and called,
"Jethro, Jethro!"
The person thus addressed, the old house-steward, appeared, and Dorothea
began to discuss with him as to which of the inhabitants of the oasis
might be disposed to let them have some able-bodied men, and whether it
might not be possible to employ one or another of the house-slaves at the
building.
All that she said was judicious and precise, and showed that she herself
superintended her household in every detail, and was accustomed to
command with complete freedom.
"That tall Anubis then is really indispensable in the stable?" she asked
in conclusion. The steward, who up to this moment had spoken shortly and
intelligently, hesitated to answer; at the same time he looked up at
Petrus, who, sunk in the contemplation of the plan, had his back to him;
his glance, and a deprecating movement, expressed very clearly that he
had something to tell, but feared to speak in the presence of his master.
Dame Dorothea was quick of comprehension, and she quite understood
Jethro's meaning; it was for that very reason that she said with more of
surprise than displeasure: "What does the man mean with his winks? What I
may hear, Petrus may hear too."
The senator turned, and looked at the steward from head to foot with so
dark a glance, that he drew back, and began to speak quickly. But he was
interrupted by the children's clamors on the stairs and by Sirona, who
brought Hermas to the senator, and said laughing: "I found this great
fellow on the stairs, he was seeking you."
Petrus looked at the youth, not very kindly, and asked: "Who are you?
what is your business?" Hermas struggled in vain for speech; the presence
of so many human beings, of whom three were women, filled him with the
utmost confusion. His fingers twisted the woolly curls on his sheep-skin,
and his lips moved but gave no sound; at last he succeeded in stammering
out, "I am the son of old Stephanus, who was wounded in the last raid of
the Saracens. My father has hardly slept these five nights, and now
Paulus has sent me to you--the pious Paulus of Alexandria--but you
know--and so I--"
"I see, I see," said Petrus with encouraging kindness. "You want some
medicine for the old man. See Dorothea, what a fine young fellow he is
grown, this is the little man that the Antiochian took with him up the
mountain."
Hermas colored, and drew himself up; then he observed with great
satisfaction that he was taller than the senator's sons, who were of
about the same age as he, and for whom he had a stronger feeling, allied
to aversion and fear, than even for their stern father. Polykarp measured
him with a glance, and said aloud to Sirona, with whom he had exchanged a
greeting, are off whom he had never once taken his eyes since she had
come in: If we could get twenty slaves with such shoulders as those, we
should get on well. There is work to be done here, you big fellow--"
"My name is not 'fellow,' but Hermas," said the anchorite, and the veins
of his forehead began to swell Polykarp felt that his father's visitor
was something more than his poor clothing would seem to indicate and that
he had hurt his feelings. He had certainly seen some old anchorites, who
led a contemplative and penitential life up on the sacred mountain, but
it had never occurred to him that a strong youth could be long to the
brotherhood of hermits. So he said to him kindly: "Hermas--is that your
name? We all use our hands here and labor is no disgrace; what is your
handicraft?"
This question roused the young anchorite to the highest excitement, and
Dame Dorothea, who perceives what was passing in his mind, said with
quick decision: "He nurses his sick father. That is what you do, my son
is it not? Petrus will not refuse you his help."
"Certainly not," the senator added, "I will accompany you by-and-bye to
see him. You must know my children, that this youth's father was a great
Lord, who gave up rich possessions in order to forget the world, where he
had gone through bitter experiences, and to serve God in his own way,
which we ought to respect though it is not our own. Sit down there, my
son. First we must finish some important business, and then I will go
with you."
"We live high up on the mountain," stammered Hermas.
"Then the air will be all the purer," replied the senator. "But
stay--perhaps the old man is alone no? The good Paulus, you say, is with
him? Then he is in good hands, and you may wait."
For a moment Petrus stood considering, then he beckoned to his sons, and
said, "Antonius, go at once and see about some slaves--you, Polykarp,
find some strong beasts of burden. You are generally rather easy with
your money, and in this case it is worth while to buy the dearest. The
sooner you return well supplied the better. Action must not halt behind
decision, but follow it quickly and sharply, as the sound follows the
blow. You, Marthana, mix some of the brown fever-potion, and prepare some
bandages; you have the key."
"I will help her," cried Sirona, who was glad to prove herself useful,
and who was sincerely sorry for the sick old hermit; besides, Hermas
seemed to her like a discovery of her own, for whom she involuntarily
felt more consideration since she had learned that he was the son of a
man of rank.
While the young women were busy at the medicine-cupboard, Antonius and
Polykarp left the room.
The latter had already crossed the threshold, when he turned once more,
and cast a long look at Sirona. Then, with a hasty movement, he went on,
closed the door, and with a heavy sigh descended the stairs.
As soon as his sons were gone, Petrus turned to the steward again.
"What is wrong with the slave Anubis?" he asked.
"He is--wounded, hurt," answered Jethro, "and for the next few days will
be useless. The goat-girl Miriam--the wild cat--cut his forehead with her
reaping hook."
"Why did I not hear of this sooner?" cried Dorothea reprovingly. "What
have you done to the girl?"
"We have shut her up in the hay loft," answered Jethro, "and there she is
raging and storming."
The mistress shook her head disapprovingly. "The girl will not be
improved by that treatment," she said. "Go and bring her to me."
As soon as the intendant had left the room, she exclaimed, turning to her
husband, "One may well be perplexed about these poor creatures, when one
sees how they behave to each other. I have seen it a thousand times! No
judgment is so hard as that dealt by a slave to slaves!"
Jethro and a woman now led Miriam into the room. The girl's hands were
bound with thick cords, and dry grass clung to her dress and rough black
hair. A dark fire glowed in her eyes, and the muscles of her face moved
incessantly, as if she had St. Vitus' dance. When Dorothea looked at her
she drew herself up defiantly, and looked around the room, as if to
estimate the strength of her enemies.
She then perceived Hermas; the blood left her lips, with a violent effort
she tore her slender hands out of the loops that confined them, covering
her face with them, and fled to the door. But Jethro put himself in her
way, and seized her shoulder with a strong grasp. Miriam shrieked aloud,
and the senator's daughter, who had set down the medicines she had had in
her hand, and had watched the girl's movements with much sympathy,
hastened towards her. She pushed away the old man's hand, and said, "Do
not be frightened, Miriam. Whatever you may have done, my father can
forgive you."
Her voice had a tone of sisterly affection, and the shepherdess followed
Marthana unresistingly to the table, on which the plans for the bridge
were lying, and stood there by her side.
For a minute all were silent; at last Dame Dorothea went up to Miriam,
and asked, "What did they do to you, my poor child, that you could so
forget yourself?"
Miriam could not understand what was happening to her; she had been
prepared for scoldings and blows, nay for bonds and imprisonment, and now
these gentle words and kind looks! Her defiant spirit was quelled, her
eyes met the friendly eyes of her mistress, and she said in a low voice:
"he had followed me for such a long time, and wanted to ask you for me as
his wife; but I cannot bear him--I hate him as I do all your slaves." At
these words her eyes sparkled wildly again, and with her old fire she
went on, "I wish I had only hit him with a stick instead of a sickle; but
I took what first came to hand to defend myself. When a man touches me--I
cannot bear it, it is horrible, dreadful! Yesterday I came home later
than usual with the beasts, and by the time I had milked the goats, and
was going to bed, every one in the house was asleep. Then Anubis met me,
and began chattering about love; I repelled him, but he seized me, and
held me with his hand here on my head and wanted to kiss me; then my
blood rose, I caught hold of my reaping hook, that hung by my side, and
it was not till I saw him roaring on the ground, that I saw I had done
wrong. How it happened I really cannot tell--something seemed to rise up
in me--something--I don't know what to call it. It drives me on as the
wind drives the leaves that lie on the road, and I cannot help it. The
best thing you can do is to let me die, for then you would be safe once
for all from my wickedness, and all would be over and done with."
"How can you speak so?" interrupted Marthana. "You are wild and
ungovernable, but not wicked."
"Only ask him!" cried the girl, pointing with flashing eyes to Hermas,
who, on his part, looked down a the floor in confusion. The senator
exchanged a hasty glance with his wife, they were accustomed to under
stand each other without speech, and Dorothea said: "He who feels that he
is not what he ought to be is already on the high-road to amendment. We
let you keep the goats because you were always running after the flocks,
and never can rest in the house. You are up on the mountain before
morning-prayer, and never come home till after supper is over, and no one
takes any thought for the better part of you. Half of your guilt recoils
upon us, and we have no right to punish you. You need not be so
astonished; every one some times does wrong. Petrus and I are human
beings like you, neither more nor less; but we are Christians, and it is
our duty to look after the souls which God has entrusted to our care, be
they our children or our slaves. You must go no more up the mountain, but
shall stay with us in the house. I shall willingly forgive your hasty
deed if Petrus does not think it necessary to punish you."
The senator gravely shook his head in sign of agreement, and Dorothea
turned to enquire of Jethro: "Is Anubis badly wounded and does he need
any care?'
"He is lying in a fever and wanders in his talk," was the answer. "Old
Praxinoa is cooling his wound with water."
"Then Miriam can take her place and try to remedy the mischief which she
was the cause of," said Dorothea. "Half of your guilt will be atoned for,
girl, if Anubis recovers under your care. I will come presently with
Marthana, and show you how to make a bandage." The shepherdess cast down
her eyes, and passively allowed herself to be conducted to the wounded
man.
Meanwhile Marthana had prepared the brown mixture. Petrus had his staff
and felt-hat brought to him, gave Hermas the medicine and desired him to
follow him.
Sirona looked after the couple as they went. "What a pity for such a fine
lad!" she exclaimed. "A purple coat would suit him better than that
wretched sheepskin."
The mistress shrugged her shoulders, and signing to her daughter said:
"Come to work, Marthana, the sun is already high. How the days fly! the
older one grows the quicker the hours hurry away."
"I must be very young then," said the centurion's wife, "for in this
wilderness time seems to me to creep along frightfully slow. One day is
the same as another, and I often feel as if life were standing perfectly
still, and my heart pulses with it. What should I be without your house
and the children?--always the same mountain, the same palm-trees, the
same faces!--"
"But the mountain is glorious, the trees are beautiful!" answered
Dorothea. "And if we love the people with whom we are in daily
intercourse, even here we may be contented and happy. At least we
ourselves are, so far as the difficulties of life allow. I have often
told you, what you want is work."
"Work! but for whom?" asked Sirona. "If indeed I had children like you!
Even in Rome I was not happy, far from it; and yet there was plenty to do
and to think about. Here a procession, there a theatre; but here! And for
whom should I dress even? My jewels grow dull in my chest, and the moths
eat my best clothes. I am making doll's clothes now of my colored cloak
for your little ones. If some demon were to transform me into a hedge-hog
or a grey owl, it would be all the same to me."
"Do not be so sinful," said Dorothea gravely, but looking with kindly
admiration at the golden hair and lovely sweet face of the young woman.
"It ought to be a pleasure to you to dress yourself for your husband."
"For him?" said Sirona. "He never looks at me, or if he does it is only
to abuse me. The only wonder to me is that I can still be merry at all;
nor am I, except in your house, and not there even but when I forget him
altogether."
"I will not hear such things said--not another word," interrupted
Dorothea severely. "Take the linen and cooling lotion, Marthana, we will
go and bind up Anubis' wound."
CHAPTER IV.
Petrus went up the mountain side with Hermas. The old man followed the
youth, who showed him the way, and as he raised his eyes from time to
time, he glanced with admiration at his guide's broad shoulders and
elastic limbs. The road grew broader when it reached a little mountain
plateau, and from thence the two men walked on side by side, but for some
time without speaking till the senator asked: "How long now has your
father lived up on the mountain?"
"Many years," answered Hermas. "But I do not know how many--and it is all
one. No one enquires about time up here among us."
The senator stood still a moment and measured his companion with a
glance.
"You have been with your father ever since he came?" he asked.
"He never lets me out of his sight;" replied Hermas. "I have been only
twice into the oasis, even to go to the church."
"Then you have been to no school?"
"To what school should I go! My father has taught me to read the Gospels
and I could write, but I have nearly forgotten how. Of what use would it
be to me? We live like praying beasts."
Deep bitterness sounded in the last words, and Petrus could see into the
troubled spirit of his companion, overflowing as it was with weary
disgust, and he perceived how the active powers of youth revolted in
aversion against the slothful waste of life, to which he was condemned.
He was grieved for the boy, and he was not one of those who pass by those
in peril without helping them. Then he thought of his own sons, who had
grown up in the exercise and fulfilment of serious duties, and he owned
to himself that the fine young fellow by his side was in no way their
inferior, and needed nothing but to be guided aright. He thoughtfully
looked first at the youth and then on the ground, and muttered
unintelligible words into his grey beard as they walked on. Suddenly he
drew himself up and nodded decisively; he would make an attempt to save
Hermas, and faithful to his own nature, action trod on the heels of
resolve. Where the little level ended the road divided, one path
continued to lead upwards, the other deviated to the valley and ended at
the quarries. Petrus was for taking the latter, but Hermas cried out,
"That is not the way to our cave; you must follow me."
"Follow thou me!" replied the senator, and the words were spoken with a
tone and expression, that left no doubt in the youth's mind as to their
double meaning. "The day is yet before us, and we will see what my
laborers are doing. Do you know the spot where they quarry the stone?"
"How should I not know it?" said Hermas, passing the senator to lead the
way. "I know every path from our mountain to the oasis, and to the sea. A
panther had its lair in the ravine behind your quarries."
"So we have learnt," said Petrus. "The thievish beasts have slaughtered
two young camels, and the people can neither catch them in their toils
nor run them down with dogs."
"They will leave you in peace now," said the boy laughing. "I brought
down the male from the rock up there with an arrow, and I found the
mother in a hollow with her young ones. I had a harder job with her; my
knife is so bad, and the copper blade bent with the blow; I had to
strangle the gaudy devil with my hands, and she tore my shoulder and bit
my arm. Look! there are the scars. But thank God, my wounds heal quicker
than my father's. Paulus says, I am like an, earth-worm; when it is cut
in two the two halves say good-bye to each other, and crawl off sound and
gay, one way, and the other another way. The young panthers were so funny
and helpless, I would not kill them, but I did them up in my sheepskin,
and brought them to my father. He laughed at the little beggars, and then
a Nabataean took them to be sold at Clysma to a merchant from Rome. There
and at Byzantium, there is a demand for all kinds of living beasts of
prey. I got some money for them, and for the skins of the old ones, and
kept it to pay for my journey, when I went with the others to Alexandria
to ask the blessing of the new Patriarch."
"You went to the metropolis?" asked Petrus. "You saw the great
structures, that secure the coast from the inroads of the sea, the tall
Pharos with the far-shining fire, the strong bridges, the churches, the
palaces and temples with their obelisks, pillars, and beautiful paved
courts? Did it never enter your mind to think that it would be a proud
thing to construct such buildings?"
Hermas shook his head. "Certainly I would rather live in an airy house
with colonnades than in our dingy cavern, but building would never be in
my way. What a long time it takes to put one stone on another! I am not
patient, and when I leave my father I will do something that shall win me
fame. But there are the quarries--" Petrus did not let his companion
finish his sentence, but interrupted him with all the warmth of youth,
exclaiming: "And do you mean to say that fame cannot be won by the arts
of building? Look there at the blocks and flags, here at the pillars of
hard stone. These are all to be sent to Aila, and there my son Antonius,
the elder of the two that you saw just now, is going to build a House of
God, with strong walls and pillars, much larger and handsomer than our
church in the oasis, and that is his work too. He is not much older than
you are, and already he is famous among the people far and wide. Out of
those red blocks down there my younger son Polykarp will hew noble lions,
which are destined to decorate the finest building in the capital itself.
When you and I, and all that are now living, shall have been long since
forgotten, still it will be said these are the work of the Master
Polykarp, the son of Petrus, the Pharanite. What he can do is certainly a
thing peculiar to himself, no one who is not one of the chosen and gifted
ones can say, 'I will learn to do that.' But you have a sound
understanding, strong hands and open eyes, and who can tell what else
there is hidden in you. If you could begin to learn soon, it would not
yet be too late to make a worthy master of you, but of course he who
would rise so high must not be afraid of work. Is your mind set upon
fame? That is quite right, and I am very glad of it; but you must know
that he who would gather that rare fruit must water it, as a noble
heathen once said, with the sweat of his brow. Without trouble and labor
and struggles there can be no victory, and men rarely earn fame without
fighting for victory."
The old man's vehemence was contagious; the lad's spirit was roused, and
he exclaimed warmly: "What do you say? that I am afraid of struggles and
trouble? I am ready to stake everything, even my life, only to win fame.
But to measure stone, to batter defenceless blocks with a mallet and
chisel, or to join the squares with accurate pains--that does not tempt
me. I should like to win the wreath in the Palaestra by flinging the
strongest to the ground, or surpass all others as a warrior in battle; my
father was a soldier too, and he may talk as much as he will of 'peace,'
and nothing but 'peace,' all the same in his dreams he speaks of bloody
strife and burning wounds. If you only cure him I will stay no longer on
this lonely mountain, even if I must steal away in secret. For what did
God give me these arms, if not to use them?"
Petrus made no answer to these words, which came is a stormy flood from
Hermas' lips, but he stroked his grey beard, and thought to himself, "The
young of the eagle does not catch flies. I shall never win over this
soldier's son to our peaceful handicraft, but he shall not remain on the
mountain among these queer sluggards, for there he is being ruined, and
yet he is not of a common sort."
When he had given a few orders to the overseer of his workmen, he
followed the young man to see his suffering father.
It was now some hours since Hermas and Paulus had left the wounded
anchorite, and he still lay alone in his cave. The sun, as it rose higher
and higher, blazed down upon the rocks, which began to radiate their
heat, and the hermit's dwelling was suffocatingly hot. The pain of the
poor man's wound increased, his fever was greater, and he was very
thirsty. There stood the jug, which Paulus had given him, but it was long
since empty, and neither Paulus nor Hermas had come back. He listened
anxiously to the sounds in the distance, and fancied at first that he
heard the Alexandrian's footstep, and then that he heard loud words and
suppressed groans coming from his cave. Stephanus tried to call out, but
he himself could hardly hear the feeble sound, which, with his wounded
breast and parched mouth, he succeeded in uttering. Then he fain would
have prayed, but fearful mental anguish disturbed his devotion. All the
horrors of desertion came upon him, and he who had lived a life
overflowing with action and enjoyment, with disenchantment and satiety,
who now in solitude carried on an incessant spiritual struggle for the
highest goal--this man felt himself as disconsolate and lonely as a
bewildered child that has lost its mother.
He lay on his bed of pain softly crying, and when he observed by the
shadow of the rock that the sun had passed its noonday height,
indignation and bitter feeling were added to pain, thirst and weariness.
He doubled his fists and muttered words which sounded like soldier's
oaths, and with them the name now of Paulus, now of his son. At last
anguish gained the upperhand of his anger, and it seemed to him, as
though he were living over again the most miserable hour of his life, an
hour now long since past and gone.
He thought he was returning from a noisy banquet in the palace of the
Caesars. His slaves had taken the garlands of roses and poplar leaves
from his brow and breast, and robed him in his night-dress; now, with a
silver lamp in his hand, he was approaching his bedroom, and he smiled,
for his young wife was awaiting him, the mother of his Hermas. She was
fair and he loved her well, and he had brought home witty sayings to
repeat to her from the table of the emperor. He, if any one, had a right
to smile. Now he was in the ante-room, in which two slave-women were
accustomed to keep watch; he found only one, and she was sleeping and
breathing deeply; he still smiled as he threw the light upon her
face--how stupid she looked with her mouth open! An alabaster lamp shed a
dim light in the bed-room, softly and still smiling he went up to
Glycera's ivory couch, and held up his lamp, and stared at the empty and
undisturbed bed--and the smile faded from his lips. The smile of that
evening came back to him no more through all the long years, for Glycera
had betrayed him, and left him--him and her child. All this had happened
twenty years since, and to-day all that he had then felt had returned to
him, and he saw his wife's empty couch with his "mind's eye," as plainly
as he had then seen it, and he felt as lonely and as miserable as in that
night. But now a shadow appeared before the opening of the cave, and he
breathed a deep sigh as he felt himself released from the hideous vision,
for he had recognized Paulus, who came up and knelt down beside him.
"Water, water!" Stephanus implored in a low voice, and Paulus, who was
cut to the heart by the moaning of the old man, which he had not heard
till he entered the cave, seized the pitcher. He looked into it, and,
finding it quite dry, he rushed down to the spring as if he were running
for a wager, filled it to the brim and brought it to the lips of the sick
man, who gulped the grateful drink down with deep draughts, and at last
exclaimed with a sigh of relief; "That is better; why were you so long
away? I was so thirsty!" Paulus who had fallen again on his knees by the
old man, pressed his brow against the couch, and made no reply. Stephanus
gazed in astonishment at his companion, but perceiving that he was
weeping passionately he asked no further questions. Perfect stillness
reigned in the cave for about an hour; at last Paulus raised his face,
and said, "Forgive me Stephanus. I forgot your necessity in prayer and
scourging, in order to recover the peace of mind I had trifled away--no
heathen would have done such a thing!" The sick man stroked his friend's
arm affectionately; but Paulus murmured, "Egoism, miserable egoism guides
and governs us. Which of us ever thinks of the needs of others? And
we--we who profess to walk in the way of the Lamb!"
He sighed deeply, and leaned his head on the sick man's breast, who
lovingly stroked his rough hair, and it was thus that the senator found
him, when he entered the cave with Hermas.
The idle way of life of the anchorites was wholly repulsive to his views
of the task for men and for Christians, but he succored those whom he
could, and made no enquiries about the condition of the sufferer. The
pathetic union in which he found the two men touched his heart, and,
turning to Paulus, he said kindly: "I can leave you in perfect comfort,
for you seem to me to have a faithful nurse."
The Alexandrian reddened; he shook his head, and replied: "I? I thought
of no one but myself, and left him to suffer and thirst in neglect, but
now I will not quit him--no, indeed, I will not, and by God's help and
yours, he shall recover."
Petrus gave him a friendly nod, for he did not believe in the anchorite's
self-accusation, though he did in his good-will; and before he left the
cave, he desired Hermas to come to him early on the following day to give
him news of his father's state. He wished not only to cure Stephanus, but
to continue his relations with the youth, who had excited his interest in
the highest degree, and he had resolved to help him to escape from the
inactive life which was weighing upon him.
Paulus declined to share the simple supper that the father and son were
eating, but expressed his intention of remaining with the sick man. He
desired Hermas to pass the night in his dwelling, as the scanty limits of
the cave left but narrow room for the lad.
A new life had this day dawned upon the young man; all the grievances and
desires which had filled his soul ever since his journey to Alexandria,
crowding together in dull confusion, had taken form and color, and he
knew now that he could not remain an anchorite, but must try his over
abundant strength in real life.
"My father," thought he, "was a warrior, and lived in a palace, before he
retired into our dingy cave; Paulus was Menander, and to this day has not
forgotten how to throw the discus; I am young, strong, and free-born as
they were, and Petrus says, I might have been a fine man. I will not hew
and chisel stones like his sons, but Caesar needs soldiers, and among all
the Amalekites, nay among the Romans in the oasis, I saw none with whom I
might not match myself."
While thus he thought he stretched his limbs, and struck his hands on his
broad breast, and when he was asleep, he dreamed of the wrestling school,
and of a purple robe that Paulus held out to him, of a wreath of poplar
leaves that rested on his scented curls, and of the beautiful woman who
had met him on the stairs of the senator's house.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Action trod on the heels of resolve
Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto
I am human, nothing that is human can I regard as alien to me
Love is at once the easiest and the most difficult
Love overlooks the ravages of years and has a good memory
No judgment is so hard as that dealt by a slave to slaves
No man is more than man, and many men are less
Sky as bare of cloud as the rocks are of shrubs and herbs
Sleep avoided them both, and each knew that the other was awake
The older one grows the quicker the hours hurry away
To pray is better than to bathe
Wakefulness may prolong the little term of life
HOMO SUM
By Georg Ebers
Volume 2.
CHAPTER V.
Thanks to the senator's potion Stephanus soon fell asleep. Paulus sat
near him and did not stir; he held his breath, and painfully suppressed
even an impulse to cough, so as not to disturb the sick man's light
slumbers.
An hour after midnight the old man awoke, and after he had lain
meditating for some time with his eyes open, he said thoughtfully: "You
called yourself and us all egotistic, and I certainly am so. I have often
said so to myself; not for the first time to day, but for weeks past,
since Hermas came back from Alexandria, and seems to have forgotten how
to laugh. He is not happy, and when I ask myself what is to become of him
when I am dead, and if he turns from the Lord and seeks the pleasures of
the world, my heart sickens. I meant it for the best when I brought him
with me up to the Holy Mountain, but that was not the only motive--it
seemed to me too hard to part altogether from the child. My God! the
young of brutes are secure of their mother's faithful love, and his never
asked for him when she fled from my house with her seducer. I thought he
should at least not lose his father, and that if he grew up far away from
the world he would be spared all the sorrow that it had so profusely
heaped upon me, I would have brought him up fit for Heaven, and yet
through a life devoid of suffering. And now--and now? If he is miserable
it will be through me, and added to all my other troubles comes this
grief."
"You have sought out the way for him," interrupted Paulus, "and the rest
will be sure to come; he loves you and will certainly not leave you so
long as you are suffering."
"Certainly not?" asked the sick man sadly. "And what weapons has he to
fight through life with?"
"You gave him the Saviour for a guide; that is enough," said Paulus
soothingly. "There is no smooth road from earth to Heaven, and none can
win salvation for another."
Stephanus was silent for a long time, then he said: "It is not even
allowed to a father to earn the wretched experience of life for his son,
or to a teacher for his pupil. We may point out the goal, but the way
thither is by a different road for each of us."
"And we may thank God for that," cried Paulus. "For Hermas has been
started on the road which you and I had first to find for ourselves."
"You and I," repeated the sick man thoughtfully. "Yes, each of us has
sought his own way, but has enquired only which was his own way, and has
never concerned himself about that of the other. Self! self!--How many
years we have dwelt close together, and I have never felt impelled to ask
you what you could recall to mind about your youth, and how you were led
to grace. I learnt by accident that you were an Alexandrian, and had been
a heathen, and had suffered much for the faith, and with that I was
satisfied. Indeed you do not seem very ready to speak of those long past
days. Our neighbor should be as dear to us as our self, and who is nearer
to me than you? Aye, self and selfishness! There are many gulfs on the
road towards God."
"I have not much to tell," said Paulus. "But a man never forgets what he
once has been. We may cast the old man from us, and believe we have
shaken ourselves free, when lo! it is there again and greets us as an old
acquaintance. If a frog only once comes down from his tree he hops back
into the pond again."
"It is true, memory can never die!" cried the sick man. "I can not sleep
any more; tell me about your early life and how you became a Christian.
When two men have journeyed by the same road, and the moment of parting
is at hand, they are fain to ask each other's name and where they came
from."
Paulus gazed for some time into space, and then he began: "The companions
of my youth called me Menander, the son of Herophilus. Besides that, I
know for certain very little of my youth, for as I have already told you,
I have long since ceased to allow myself to think of the world. He who
abandons a thing, but clings to the idea of the thing, continues--"
"That sounds like Plato," said Stephanus with a smile.
"All that heathen farrago comes back to me today," cried Paulus. "I used
to know it well, and I have often thought that his face must have
resembled that of the Saviour."
"But only as a beautiful song might resemble the voice of an angel," said
Stephanus somewhat drily. "He who plunges into the depths of philosophic
systems--"
"That never was quite my case," said Paulus. "I did indeed go through the
whole educational course; Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic and Music--"
"And Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy," added Stephanus.
"Those were left to the learned many years since," continued Paulus, "and
I was never very eager for learning. In the school of Rhetoric I remained
far behind my fellows, and if Plato was dear to me I owe it to Paedonomus
of Athens, a worthy man whom my father engaged to teach us."
"They say he had been a great merchant," interrupted Stephanus. "Can it
be that you were the son of that rich Herophilus, whose business in
Antioch was conducted by the worthy Jew Urbib?"
"Yes indeed," replied Paulus, looking down at the ground in some
confusion. "Our mode of life was almost royal, and the multitude of our
slaves quite sinful. When I look back on all the vain trifles that my
father had to care for, I feel quite giddy. Twenty sea-going ships in the
harbor of Eunostus, and eighty Nile-boats on Lake Mareotis belonged to
him. His profits on the manufacture of papyrus might have maintained a
cityfull of poor. But we needed our revenues for other things. Our
Cyraenian horses stood in marble stalls, and the great hall, in which my
father's friends were wont to meet, was like a temple. But you see how
the world takes possession of us, when we begin to think about it! Rather
let us leave the past in peace. You want me to tell you more of myself?
Well; my childhood passed like that of a thousand other rich citizens'
sons, only my mother, indeed, was exceptionally beautiful and sweet, and
of angelic goodness."
"Every child thinks his own mother the best of mothers," murmured the
sick man.
"Mine certainly was the best to me," cried Paulus. "And yet she was a
heathen. When my father hurt me with severe words of blame, she always
had a kind word and loving glance for me. There was little enough,
indeed, to praise in me. Learning was utterly distasteful to me, and even
if I had done better at school, it would hardy have counted for much to
my credit, for my brother Apollonius, who was about a year younger than
I, learned all the most difficult things as if they were mere child's
play, and in dialectic exercises there soon was no rhetorician in
Alexandria who could compete with him. No system was unknown to him, and
though no one ever knew of his troubling himself particularly to study,
he nevertheless was master of many departments of learning. There were
but two things in which I could beat him--in music, and in all athletic
exercises; while he was studying and disputing I was winning garlands in
the palaestra. But at that time the best master of rhetoric and argument
was the best man, and my father, who himself could shine in the senate as
an ardent and elegant orator, looked upon me as a half idiotic
ne'er-do-weel, until one clay a learned client of our house presented him
with a pebble on which was carved an epigram to this effect: 'He who
would see the noblest gifts of the Greek race, should visit the house of
Herophilus, for there he might admire strength and vigor of body in
Menander, and the same qualities of mind in Apollonius.' These lines,
which were written in the form of a lute, passed from mouth to mouth, and
gratified my father's ambition; from that time he had words of praise for
me when my quadriga won the race in the Hippodrome, or when I came home
crowned from the wrestling-ring, or the singing match. My whole life was
spent in the baths and the palaestra, or in gay feasting."
"I know it all," exclaimed Stephanus interrupting him, "and the memory of
it all often disturbs me. Did you find it easy to banish these images
from your mind?"
"At first I had a hard fight," sighed Paulus. "But for some time now,
since I have passed my fortieth year, the temptations of the world
torment me less often. Only I must keep out of the way of the carriers
who bring fish from the fishing towns on the sea, and from Raithu to the
oasis."
Stephanus looked enquiringly at the speaker, and Paulus went on: "Yes, it
is very strange. I may see men or women--the sea yonder or the mountain
here, without ever thinking of Alexandria, but only of sacred things; but
when the savor of fish rises up to my nostrils I see the market and fish
stalls and the oysters--"
"Those of Kanopus are famous," interrupted Steplianus, "they make little
pasties there--" Paulus passed the back of his hand over his bearded lips,
exclaiming, "At the shop of the fat cook--Philemon--in the street of
Herakleotis." But he broke off, and cried with an impulse of shame, "It
were better that I should cease telling of my past life. The day does not
dawn yet, and you must try to sleep."
"I cannot sleep," sighed Stephanus; "if you love me go on with your
story."
"But do not interrupt me again then," said Paulus, and he went on: "With
all this gay life I was not happy--by no means. When I was alone
sometimes, and no longer sitting in the crowd of merry boon-companions
and complaisant wenches, emptying the wine cup and crowned with poplar, I
often felt as if I were walking on the brink of a dark abyss as if every
thing in myself and around me were utterly hollow and empty. I could
stand gazing for hours at the sea, and as the waves rose only to sink
again and vanish, I often reflected that I was like them, and that the
future of my frivolous present must be a mere empty nothing. Our gods
were of little account with us. My mother sacrificed now in one temple,
and now in another, according to the needs of the moment; my father took
part in the high festivals, but he laughed at the belief of the
multitude, and my brother talked of the 'Primaeval Unity,' and dealt with
all sorts of demons, and magic formulas. He accepted the doctrine of
Iamblichus, Ablavius, and the other Neoplatonic philosophers, which to my
poor understanding seemed either superhumanly profound or else debasingly
foolish; nevertheless my memory retains many of his sayings, which I have
learned to understand here in my loneliness. It is vain to seek reason
outside ourselves; the highest to which we can attain is for reason to
behold itself in us! As often as the world sinks into nothingness in my
soul, and I live in God only, and have Him, and comprehend Him, and feel
Him only--then that doctrine recurs to me. How all these fools sought and
listened everywhere for the truth which was being proclaimed in their
very ears! There were Christians everywhere about me, and at that time
they had no need to conceal themselves, but I had nothing to do with
them. Twice only did they cross my path; once I was not a little annoyed
when, on the Hippodrome, a Christian's horses which had been blessed by a
Nazarite, beat mine; and on another occasion it seemed strange to me when
I myself received the blessing of an old Christian dock-laborer, having
pulled his son out of the water.
"Years went on; my parents died. My mother's last glance was directed at
me, for I had always been her favorite child. They said too that I was
like her, I and my sister Arsinoe, who, soon after my father's death,
married the Prefect Pompey. At the division of the property I gave up to
my brother the manufactories and the management of the business, nay even
the house in the city, though, as the elder brother, I had a right to it,
and I took in exchange the land near the Kanopic gate, and filled the
stables there with splendid horses, and the lofts with not less noble
wine. This I needed, because I gave up the days to baths and contests in
the arena, and the nights to feasting, sometimes at my own house,
sometimes at a friend's, and sometimes in the taverns of Kanopus, where
the fairest Greek girls seasoned the feasts with singing and dancing.
"What have these details of the vainest worldly pleasure to do with my
conversion, you will ask. But listen a while. When Saul went forth to
seek his father's asses he found a crown.
"One day we had gone out in our gilded boats, and the Lesbian girl
Archidike had made ready a feast for us in her house, a feast such as
could scarcely be offered even in Rome.
"Since the taking of our city by Diocletian, after the insurrection of
Achilleus, the Imperial troops who came to Alexandria behaved insolently
enough. Between some of my friends, and certain of the young officers of
Roman patrician families, there had been a good deal of rough banter for
some months past, as to their horses, women--I know not what; and it
happened that we met these very gentry at the house of Archidike.
"Sharp speeches were made, which the soldiers replied to after their
fashion, and at last they came to insulting words, and as the wine heated
us and them, to loud threats.
"The Romans left the house of entertainment before we did. Crowned with
garlands, singing, and utterly careless, we followed soon after them, and
had almost reached the quay, when a noisy troop rushed out of a side
street, and fell upon us with naked weapons. The moon was high in the
heavens, and I could recognize some of our adversaries. I threw myself on
a tall tribune, throttled him, and, as he fell, I fell with him in the
dust. I am but dimly conscious of what followed, for sword-strokes were
showered upon me, and all grew black before my eyes. I only know what I
thought then, face to face with death."
"Well--?" asked Stephanus.
"I thought," said Paulus reddening, "of my fighting-quails at Alexandria,
and whether they had had any water. Then my dull heavy unconsciousness
increased; for weeks I lay in that state, for I was hacked like
sausage-meat; I had twelve wounds, not counting the slighter ones, and
any one else would have died of any one of them. You have often wondered
at my scars."
"And whom did the Lord choose then to be the means of your salvation?"
"When I recovered my senses," continued Paulus, "I was lying in a large,
clean room behind a curtain of light material; I could not raise myself,
but just as if I had been sleeping so many minutes instead of days, I
thought again directly of my quails. In their last fight my best cock had
severely handled handsome Nikander's, and yet he wanted to dispute the
stakes with me, but I would assert my rights! At least the quails should
fight again, and if Nikander should refuse I would force him to fight me
with his fists in the Palaestra, and give him a blue reminder of his debt
on the eye. My hands were still weak, and yet I clenched them as I
thought of the vexatious affair. 'I will punish him,' I muttered to
myself.
"Then I heard the door of the room open, and I saw three men respectfully
approaching a fourth. He greeted them with dignity, but yet with
friendliness, and rolled up a scroll which he had been reading, I would
have called out, but I could not open my parched lips, and yet I saw and
heard all that was going on around me in the room.
"It all seemed strange enough to me then; even the man's mode of greeting
was unusual. I soon perceived that he who sat in the chair was a judge,
and that the others had come as complainants; they were all three old and
poor, but some good men had left them the use and interest of a piece of
land. During seed-time one of them, a fine old man with long white hair,
had been ill, and he had not been able to help in the harvest either;
'and now they want to withhold his portion of the corn,' thought I; but
it was quite otherwise. The two men who were in health had taken a third
part of the produce to the house of the sick man, and he obstinately
refused to accept the corn because he had helped neither to sow nor to
reap it, and he demanded of the judge that he should signify to the other
two that he had no right to receive goods which he had not earned.
"The judge had so far kept silence. But he now raised his sagacious and
kindly face and asked the old man, 'Did you pray for your companions and
for the increase of their labors?'
"'I did,' replied the other.
"'Then by your intercession you helped them,' the judge decided, 'and the
third part of the produce is yours and you must keep it.'
"The old man bowed, the three men shook hands, and in a few minutes the
judge was alone in the room again.
"I did not know what had come over me; the complaint of the men and the
decision of the judge seemed to me senseless, and yet both the one and
the other touched my heart. I went to sleep again, and when I awoke
refreshed the next morning the judge came up to me and gave me medicine,
not only for my body but also for my soul, which certainly was not less
in need of it than my poor wounded limbs."
"Who was the judge?" asked Stephanus.
"Eusebius, the Presbyter of Kanopus. Some Christians had found me half
dead on the road, and had carried me into his house, for the widow
Theodora, his sister, was the deaconess of the town. The two had nursed
me as if I were their dearest brother. It was not till I grew stronger
that they showed me the cross and the crown of thorns of Him who for my
sake also had taken upon Him such far more cruel suffering than mine, and
they taught me to love His wounds, and to bear my own with submission. In
the dry wood of despair soon budded green shoots of hope, and instead of
annihilation at the end of this life they showed me Heaven and all its
joys.
"I became a new man, and before me there lay in the future an eternal and
blessed existence; after this life I now learned to look forward to
eternity. The gates of Heaven were wide open before me, and I was
baptized at Kanopus.
"In Alexandria they had mourned for me as dead, and my sister Arsinoe, as
heiress to my property, had already moved into my country-house with her
husband, the prefect. I willingly left her there, and now lived again in
the city, in order to support the brethren, as the persecutions had begun
again.
"This was easy for me, as through my brother-in-law I could visit all the
prisons; at last I was obliged to confess the faith, and I suffered much
on the rack and in the porphyry quarries; but every pain was dear to me,
for it seemed to bring me nearer to the goal of my longings, and if I
find ought to complain of up here on the Holy Mountain, it is only that
the Lord deems me unworthy to suffer harder things, when his beloved and
only Son took such bitter torments on himself for me and for every
wretched sinner."
"Ah! saintly man!" murmured Stephanus, devoutly kissing Paulus'
sheep-skin; but Paulus pulled it from him, exclaiming hastily:
"Cease, pray cease--he who approaches me with honors now in this life
throws a rock in my way to the life of the blessed. Now I will go to the
spring and fetch you some fresh water."
When Paulus returned with the water-jar he found Hermas, who had come to
wish his father good-morning before he went down to the oasis to fetch
some new medicine from the senator.
CHAPTER VI.
Sirona was sitting at the open window of her bedroom, having her hair
arranged by a black woman that her husband had bought in Rome. She
sighed, while the slave lightly touched the shining tresses here and
there with perfumed oil which she had poured into the palm of her hand;
then she firmly grasped the long thick waving mass of golden hair and was
parting it to make a plait, when Sirona stopped her, saying, "Give me the
mirror."
For some minutes she looked with a melancholy gaze at the image in the
polished metal, then she sighed again; she picked up the little greyhound
that lay at her feet, and placing it in her lap, showed the animal its
image in the mirror.
"There, poor Iambe," she said, "if we two, inside these four walls, want
to see anything like a pleasing sight we must look at ourselves."
Then she went on, turning to the slave. "How the poor little beast
trembles! I believe it longs to be back again at Arelas, and is afraid we
shall linger too long under this burning sky. Give me my sandals."
The black woman reached her mistress two little slippers with gilt
ornaments on the slight straps, but Sirona flung her hair off her face
with the back of her hand, exclaiming, "The old ones, not these. Wooden
shoes even would do here."
And with these words she pointed to the court-yard under the window,
which was in fact as ill contrived, as though gilt sandals had never yet
trodden it. It was surrounded by buildings; on one side was a wall with a
gateway, and on the others buildings which formed a sharply bent
horseshoe.
Opposite the wing in which Sirona and her husband had found a home stood
the much higher house of Petrus, and both had attached to them, in the
background of the court-yard, sheds constructed of rough reddish brown
stones, and covered with a thatch of palm-branches; in these the
agricultural implements were stored, and the senator's slaves lived. In
front lay a heap of black charcoal, which was made on the spot by burning
the wood of the thorny sajala species of acacia; and there too lay a
goodly row of well smoothed mill-stones, which were shaped in the quarry,
and exported to Egypt. At this early hour the whole unlovely domain lay
in deep shadow, and was crowded with fowls and pigeons. Sirona's window
alone was touched by the morning sun. If she could have known what a
charm the golden light shed over her figure, on her rose and white face,
and her shining hair, she would have welcomed the day-star, instead of
complaining that it had too early waked her from sleep--her best comfort
in her solitude.
Besides a few adjoining rooms she was mistress of a larger room, the
dwelling room, which look out upon the street.
She shaded her eyes with her hand, exclaiming, "Oh! the wearisome sun. It
looks at us the first thing in the morning through the window; as if the
day were not long enough. The beds must be put in the front room; I
insist upon it."
The slave shook her head, and stammered an answer, "Phoebicius will not
have it so."
Sirona's eyes flashed angrily, and her voice, which was particularly
sweet, trembled slightly as she asked, "What is wrong with him again?"
"He says," replied the slave, "that the senator's son, Polykarp, goes
oftener past your window than altogether pleases him, and it seems to
him, that you occupy yourself more than is necessary with his little
brothers and sisters, and the other children up there."
"Is he still in there?" asked Sirona with glowing cheeks, and she pointed
threateningly to the dwelling-room.
"The master is out," stuttered the old woman. "He went out before
sunrise. You are not to wait for breakfast, he will not return till
late."
The Gaulish lady made no answer, but her head fell, and the deepest
melancholy overspread her features. The greyhound seemed to feel for the
troubles of his mistress, for he fawned upon her, as if to kiss her. The
solitary woman pressed the little creature, which had come with her from
her home, closely to her bosom; for an unwonted sense of wretchedness
weighed upon her heart, and she felt as lonely, friendless, and
abandoned, as if she were driving alone--alone--over a wide and shoreless
sea. She shuddered, as if she were cold--for she thought of her husband,
the man who here in the desert should have been all in all to her, but
whose presence filled her with aversion, whose indifference had ceased to
wound her, and whose tenderness she feared far more than his wild
irritability--she had never loved him.
She had grown up free from care among a number of brothers and sisters.
Her father had been the chief accountant of the decurions' college in his
native town, and he had lived opposite the circus, where, being of a
stern temper, he had never permitted his daughters to look on at the
games; but he could not prevent their seeing the crowd streaming into the
amphitheatre, or hearing their shouts of delight, and their eager cries
of approbation.
Sirona thus grew up in the presence of other people's pleasure, and in a
constantly revived and never satisfied longing to share it; she had,
indeed, no time for unnecessary occupations, for her mother died before
she was fully grown up, and she was compelled to take charge of the eight
younger children. This she did in all fidelity, but in her hours of
leisure she loved to listen to the stories told her by the wives of
officials, who had seen, and could praise, the splendors of Rome the
golden.
She knew that she was fair, for she need only go outside the house to
hear it said; but though she longed to see the capital, it was not for
the sake of being admired, but because there was there so much that was
splendid to see and to admire. So, when the Centurion Phoebicius, the
commandant of the garrison of her native town, was transferred to Rome,
and when he desired to take the seventeen-years-old girl with him to the
imperial city, as his wife--she was more than forty years younger than
he--she followed him full of hope and eager anticipation.
Not long after their marriage she started for Rome by sea from Massilia,
accompanied by an old relative; and he went by land at the head of his
cohorts.
She reached their destination long before her husband, and without
waiting for him, but constantly in the society of her old duenna, she
gave herself up with the freedom and eagerness of her fresh youth to the
delights of seeing and admiring.
It did not escape her, while she did so, that she attracted all eyes
wherever she went, and however much this flattered and pleased her at
first, it spoilt many of her pleasures, when the Romans, young and old,
began to follow and court her. At last Phoebicius arrived, and when he
found his house crowded with his wife's admirers he behaved to Sirona as
though she had long since betrayed his honor.
Nevertheless he dragged her from pleasure to pleasure, and from one
spectacle to another, for it gratified him to show himself in public with
his beautiful young wife. She certainly was not free from frivolity, but
she had learnt early from her strict father, as being the guide of her
younger sisters, to distinguish clearly right from wrong, and the pure
from the unclean; and she soon discovered that the joys of the capital,
which had seemed at first to be gay flowers with bright colors, and
redolent with intoxicating perfume, bloomed on the surface of a foul bog.
She at first had contemplated all that was beautiful, pleasant, and
characteristic with delight; but her husband took pleasure only in things
which revolted her as being common and abominable. He watched her every
glance, and yet he pointed nothing out to her, but what was hurtful to
the feelings of a pure woman. Pleasure became her torment, for the
sweetest wine is repulsive when it has been tasted by impure lips. After
every feast and spectacle he loaded her with outrageous reproaches, and
when at last, weary of such treatment, she refused to quit the house, he
obliged her nevertheless to accompany him as often as the Legate
Quintillus desired it. The legate was his superior-officer, and he sent
her every day some present or flowers.
Up to this time she had borne with him, and had tried to excuse him, and
to think herself answerable for much of what she endured. But at
last--about ten months after her marriage--something occurred between her
and Phoebicius--something which stood like a wall of brass between him
and her; and as this something had led to his banishment to the remote
oasis, and to his degradation to the rank of captain of a miserable
maniple, instead of his obtaining his hoped for promotion, he began to
torment her systematically while she tried to protect herself by icy
coldness, so that at last it came to this, that the husband, for whom she
felt nothing but contempt, had no more influence on her life, than some
physical pain which a sick man is doomed to endure all through his
existence.
In his presence she was silent, defiant, and repellent, but as soon as he
quitted her, her innate, warm-hearted kindliness and child-like merriment
woke up to new life, and their fairest blossoms opened out in the
senator's house among the little troop who amply repaid her love with
theirs.
Phoebicius belonged to the worshippers of Mithras, and he often fasted in
his honor to the point of exhaustion, while on the other hand he
frequently drank with his boon companions, at the feasts of the god, till
he was in a state of insensibility.
Here even, in Mount Sinai, he had prepared a grotto for the feast of
Mithras, had gathered together a few companions in his faith, and when it
happened that he remained out all day and all night, and came home paler
even than usual, she well knew where he had been. Just now she vividly
pictured to herself the person of this man with his eyes, that now were
dull with sleep and now glowed with rage, and she asked herself whether
it were indeed possible that of her own free will she had chosen to
become his wife. Her bosom heaved with quicker breathing as she
remembered the ignominy he had subjected her to in Rome, and she clenched
her small hands. At this instant the little dog sprang from her lap and
flew barking to the window-sill; she was easily startled, and she drew on
her morning-gown, which had slipped from her white shoulders; then she
fastened the straps of her sandals, and went to look down into the
court-yard.
A smile played upon her lips as she perceived young Hermas, who had
already been for some time leaning motionless against the wall of the
house opposite, and devouring with his gaze the figure of the beautiful
young woman. She had a facile and volatile nature. Like the eye which
retains no impression of the disabling darkness so soon as the rays of
light have fallen on it, no gloom of suffering touched her so deeply that
the lightest breath of a new pleasure could not blow her troubles to the
winds. Many rivers are quite different in color at their source and at
their mouth, and so it was often with her tears; she began to weep for
sorrow, and then found it difficult to dry her eyes for sheer overflow of
mirth. It would have been so easy for Phoebicius to make her lot a fair
one! for she had a most susceptible heart, and was grateful for the
smallest proofs of love, but between him and her every bond was broken.
The form and face of Hermas took her fancy; she thought he looked of
noble birth in spite of his poor clothing, and when she observed that his
checks were glowing, and that the hand in which he held the medicine
phial trembled, she understood that he was watching her, and that the
sight of her had stirred his youthful blood. A woman--still more a woman
who is pleased to please--forgives any sin that is committed for her
beauty's sake, and Sirona's voice had a friendly ring in it as she bid
Hermas good-morning and asked him how his father was, and whether the
senator's medicine had been of service. The youth's answers were short
and confused, but his looks betrayed that he would fain have said quite
other things than those which his indocile tongue allowed him to
reiterate timidly.
"Dame Dorothea was telling me last evening," she said kindly, "that
Petrus had every hope of your father's recovery, but that he is still
very weak. Perhaps some good wine would be of service to him--not to-day,
but to-morrow or the day after. Only come to me if you need it; we have
some old Falerman in the loft, and white Mareotis wine, which is
particularly good and wholesome."
Hermas thanked her, and as she still urged him to apply to her in all
confidence, he took courage and succeeded in stammering rather than
saying,--"You are as good as you are beautiful."
The words were hardly spoken when the topmost stone of an elaborately
constructed pile near the slaves' house fell down with a loud clatter.
Sirona started and drew back from the window, the grey-hound set up a
loud barking, and Hermas struck his forehead with his hand as if he were
roused from a dream.
In a few instants he had knocked at the senator's door; hardly had he
entered the house when Miriam's slight form passed across behind the pile
of stones, and vanished swiftly and silently into the slaves' quarters.
These were by this time deserted by their inhabitants, who were busy in
the field, the house, or the quarries; they consisted of a few
ill-lighted rooms with bare, unfinished walls.
The shepherdess went into the smallest, where, on a bed of palm-sticks,
lay the slave that she had wounded, and who turned over as with a hasty
hand she promptly laid a fresh, but ill-folded bandage, all askew on the
deep wound in his bend. As soon as this task was fulfilled she left the
room again, placed herself behind the half open door which led into the
court-yard, and, pressing, her brow against the stone door-post, looked
first at the senator's house, and then at Sirona's window, while her
breath came faster and faster.
A new and violent emotion was stirring her young soul; not many minutes
since she had squatted peacefully on the ground by the side of the
wounded man, with her head resting on her hand, and thinking of her goats
on the mountain. Then she had heard a slight sound in the court, which
any one else would not have noticed; but she not only perceived it, but
knew with perfect certainty with whom it originated. She could never fail
to recognize Hermas' foot-step, and it had an irresistible effect upon
her. She raised her head quickly from her hand, and her elbow from the
knee on which it was resting, sprang to her feet, and went out into the
yard. She was hidden by the mill-stones, but she could see Hermas lost in
admiration. She followed the direction of his eyes and saw the same image
which had fascinated his gaze--Sirona's lovely form, flooded with
sunlight. She looked as if formed out of snow, and roses, and gold, like
the angel at the sepulchre in the new picture in the church. Yes, just
like the angel, and the thought flew through her mind how brown and black
she was herself, and that he had called her a she-devil. A sense of deep
pain came over her, she felt as though paralyzed in body and soul; but
soon she shook off the spell, and her heart began to beat violently; she
had to bite her lip hard with her white teeth to keep herself from crying
out with rage and anguish.
How she wished that she could swing herself up to the window on which
Hermas' gaze was fixed, and clutch Sirona's golden hair and tear her down
to the ground, and suck the very blood from her red lips like a vampire,
till she lay at her feet as pale as the corpse of a man dead of thirst in
the desert. Then she saw the light mantle slip from Sirona's shoulders,
and observed Hermas start and press his hand to his heart.
Then another impulse seized her. It was to call to her and warn her of
his presence; for even women who hate each other hold out the hand of
fellowship in the spirit, when the sanctity of woman's modesty is
threatened with danger. She blushed for Sirona, and had actually opened
her lips to call, when the greyhound barked and the dialogue began. Not a
word escaped her sharp ears, and when he told Sirona that she was as good
as she was beautiful she felt seized with giddiness; then the topmost
stone, by which she had tried to steady herself, lost its balance, its
fall interrupted their conversation, and Miriam returned to the sick man.
Now she was standing at the door, waiting for Hermas. Long, long did she
wait; at last he appeared with Dorothea, and she could see that he
glanced up again at Sirona; but a spiteful smile passed over her lips,
for the window was empty and the fair form that he had hoped to see again
had vanished.
Sirona was now sitting at her loom in the front room, whither she had
been tempted by the sound of approaching hoofs. Polykarp had ridden by on
his father's fine horse, had greeted her as he passed, and had dropped a
rose on the roadway. Half an hour later the old black slave came to
Sirona, who was throwing the shuttle through the warp with a skilful
hand.
"Mistress," cried the negress with a hideous grin; the lonely woman
paused in her work, and as she looked up enquiringly the old woman gave
her a rose. Sirona took the flower, blew away the road-side dust that had
clung to it, rearranged the tumbled delicate petals with her finger-tips,
and said, while she seemed to give the best part of her attention to this
occupation, "For the future let roses be when you find them. You know
Phoebicius, and if any one sees it, it will be talked about."
The black woman turned away, shrugging her shoulders; but Sirona thought,
"Polykarp is a handsome and charming man, and has finer and more
expressive eyes than any other here, if he were not always talking of his
plans, and drawings, and figures, and mere stupid grave things that I do
not care for!"
CHAPTER VII.
The next day, after the sun had passed the meridian and it was beginning
to grow cool, Hermas and Paulus yielded to Stephanus' wish, as he began
to feel stronger, and carried him out into the air. The anchorites sat
near each other on a low block of stone, which Hermas had made into a
soft couch for his father by heaping up a high pile of fresh herbs. They
looked after the youth, who had taken his bow and arrows, as he went up
the mountain to hunt a wild goat; for Petrus had prescribed a
strengthening diet for the sick man. Not a word was spoken by either of
them till the hunter had disappeared. Then Stephanus said, "How much he
has altered since I have been ill. It is not so very long since I last
saw him by the broad light of day, and he seems meantime to have grown
from a boy into a man. How self-possessed his gait is."
Paulus, looking down at the ground, muttered some words of assent. He
remembered the discus-throwing and thought to himself, "The Palaestra
certainly sticks in his mind, and he has been bathing too; and yesterday,
when he came up from the oasis, he strode in like a young athlete."
That friendship only is indeed genuine when two friends, without speaking
a word to each other, can nevertheless find happiness in being together.
Stephanus and Paulus were silent, and yet a tacit intercourse subsisted
between them as they sat gazing towards the west, where the sun was near
its setting.
Far below them gleamed the narrow, dark blue-green streak of the Red Sea,
bounded by the bare mountains of the coast, which shone in a shimmer of
golden light. Close beside them rose the toothed crown of the great
mountain which, so soon as the day-star had sunk behind it, appeared
edged with a riband of glowing rubies. The flaming glow flooded the
western horizon, filmy veils of mist floated across the hilly coast-line,
the silver clouds against the pure sky changed their hue to the tender
blush of a newly opened rose, and the undulating shore floated in the
translucent violet of the amethyst. There not a breath of air was
stirring, not a sound broke the solemn stillness of the evening. Not till
the sea was taking a darker and still darker hue, till the glow on the
mountain peaks and in the west had begun to die away, and the night to
spread its shades over the heights and hollows, did Stephanus unclasp his
folded hands and softly speak his companion's name. Paulus started and
said, speaking like a man who is aroused from a dream and who is suddenly
conscious of having heard some one speak, "You are right; it is growing
dark and cool and you must go back into the cave."
Stephanus offered no opposition and let himself be led back to his bed;
while Paulus was spreading the sheepskin over the sick man he sighed
deeply.
"What disturbs your soul?" asked the older man. "It is--it was--what good
can it do me!" cried Paulus in strong excitement. "There we sat,
witnesses of the most glorious marvels of the Most High, and I, in
shameless idolatry, seemed to see before me the chariot of Helios with
its glorious winged-horses, snorting fire as they went, and Helios
himself in the guise of Hermas, with gleaming golden hair, and the
dancing Hours, and the golden gates of the night. Accursed rabble of
demons!--"
At this point the anchorite was interrupted, for Hermas entered the cave,
and laying a young steinbock, that he had killed, before the two men,
exclaimed, "fine fellow, and he cost me no more than one arrow. I will
light a fire at once and roast the best pieces. There are plenty of bucks
still on our mountain, and I know where to find them."
In about an hour, father and son were eating the pieces of meat, which
had been cooked on a spit. Paulus declined to sup with them, for after he
had scourged himself in despair and remorse for the throwing of the
discus, he had vowed a strict fast.
"And now," cried Hermas, when his father declared himself satisfied,
after seeming to relish greatly the strong meat from which he had so long
abstained, "and now the best is to come! In this flask I have some
strengthening wine, and when it is empty it will be filled afresh."
Stephanus took the wooden beaker that his son offered him, drank a
little, and then said, while he smacked his tongue to relish the
after-taste of the noble juice, "That is something choice!--Syrian wine!
only taste it, Paulus."
Paulus took the beaker in his hand, inhaled the fragrance of the golden
fluid, and then murmured, but without putting it to his lips, "That is
not Syrian; it is Egyptian, I know it well. I should take it to be
Mareotic."
"So Sirona called it," cried Hermas, "and you know it by the mere smell!
She said it was particularly good for the sick."
"That it is," Paulus agreed; but Stephanus asked in surprise, "Sirona?
who is she?"
The cave was but dimly lighted by the fire that had been made at the
opening, so that the two anchorites could not perceive that Hermas
reddened all over as he replied, "Sirona? The Gaulish woman Sirona? Do
you not know her? She is the wife of the centurion down in the oasis."
"How do you come to know her?" asked his father.
"She lives in Petrus' house," replied the lad, "and as she had heard of
your wound--"
"Take her my thanks when you go there to-morrow morning," said Stephanus.
To her and to her husband too. Is he a Gaul?"
"I believe so--nay, certainly," answered Hermas, "they call him the lion,
and he is no doubt a Gaul?"
When the lad had left the cave the old man laid himself down to rest, and
Paulus kept watch by him on his son's bed. But Stephanus could not sleep,
and when his friend approached him to give him some medicine, he said,
"The wife of a Gaul has done me a kindness, and yet the wine would have
pleased me better if it had not come from a Gaul."
Paulus looked at him enquiringly, and though total darkness reigned in
the cave, Stephanus felt his gaze and said, "I owe no man a grudge and I
love my neighbor. Great injuries have been done me, but I have for
given--from the bottom of my heart forgiven. Only one man lives to whom I
wish evil, and he is a Gaul."
"Forgive him too," said Paulus, "and do not let evil thoughts disturb
your sleep."
"I am not tired," said the sick man, "and if you had gone through such
things as I have, it would trouble your rest at night too."
"I know, I know," said Paulus soothingly. "It was a Gaul that persuaded
your wretched wife into quitting your house and her child."
"And I loved, oh! how I loved Glycera!" groaned the old man. "She lived
like a princess and I fulfilled her every wish before it was uttered. She
herself has said a hundred times that I was too kind and too yielding,
and that there was nothing left for her to wish. Then the Gaul came to
our house, a man as acrid as sour wine, but with a fluent tongue and
sparkling eyes. How he entangled Glycera I know not, nor do I want to
know; he shall atone for it in hell. For the poor lost woman I pray day
and night. A spell was on her, and she left her heart behind in my house,
for her child was there and she loved Hermas so fondly; indeed she was
deeply devoted to me. Think what the spell must be that can annihilate a
mother's love! Wretch, hapless wretch that I am! Did you ever love a
woman, Paulus?"
"You ought to be asleep," said Paulus in a warning tone. "Who ever lived
nearly half a century without feeling love! Now I will not speak another
word, and you must take this drink that Petrus has sent for you." The
senator's medicine was potent, for the sick man fell asleep and did not
wake till broad day lighted up the cave.
Paulus was still sitting on his bed, and after they had prayed together,
he gave him the jar which Hermas had filled with fresh water before going
down to the oasis.
"I feel quite strong," said the old man. "The medicine is good; I have
slept well and dreamed sweetly; but you look pale and as if you had not
slept."
"I," said Paulus, "I lay down there on the bed. Now let me go out in the
air for a moment." With these words he went out of the cave.
As soon as he was out of sight of Stephanus he drew a deep breath,
stretched his limbs, and rubbed his burning eyes; he felt as if there was
sand gathered under their lids, for he had forbidden them to close for
three days and nights. At the same time he was consumed by a violent
thirst, for neither food nor drink had touched his lips for the same
length of time. His hands were beginning to tremble, but the weakness and
pain that he experienced filled him with silent joy, and he would
willingly have retired into his cave and have indulged, not for the first
time, in the ecstatic pain of hanging on the cross, and bleeding from
five wounds, in imitation of the Saviour.
But Stephanus was calling him, and without hesitation he returned to him
and replied to his questions; indeed it was easier to him to speak than
to listen, for in his ears there was a roaring, moaning, singing, and
piping, and he felt as if drunk with strong wine.
"If only Hermas does not forget to thank the Gaul!" exclaimed Stephanus.
"Thank--aye, we should always be thankful!" replied his companion,
closing his eyes.
"I dreamed of Glycera," the old man began again. You said yesterday that
love had stirred your heart too, and yet you never were married. You are
silent? Answer me something."
"I--who called me?" murmured Paulus, staring at the questioner with a
fixed gaze.
Stephanus was startled to see that his companion trembled in every limb,
he raised himself and held out to him the flask with Sirona's wine, which
the other, incapable of controlling himself, snatched eagerly from his
hand, and emptied with frantic thirst. The fiery liquor revived his
failing strength, brought the color to his cheeks, and lent a strange
lustre to his eyes. "How much good that has done me!" he cried with a
deep sigh and pressing his hands on his breast.
Stephanus was perfectly reassured and repeated his question, but he
almost repented of his curiosity, for his friend's voice had an utterly
strange ring in it, as he answered:
"No, I was never married--never, but I have loved for all that, and I
will tell you the story from beginning to end; but you must not interrupt
me, no not once. I am in a strange mood--perhaps it is the wine. I had
not drunk any for so long; I had fasted since--since but it does not
matter. Be silent, quite silent, and let me tell my story."
Paulus sat down on Hermas' bed; he threw himself far back, leaned the
back of his head against the rocky wall of the cavern, through whose
doorway the daylight poured, and began thus, while he gazed fixedly into
vacancy, "What she was like?--who can, describe her? She was tall and
large like Hera, and yet not proud, and her noble Greek face was lovely
rather than handsome.
"She could no longer have been very young, but she had eyes like those of
a gentle child. I never knew her other than very pale; her narrow
forehead shone like ivory under her soft brown hair; her beautiful hands
were as white as her forehead-hands that moved as if they themselves were
living and inspired creatures with a soul and language of their own. When
she folded them devoutly together it seemed as if they were putting up a
mute prayer. She was pliant in form as a young palm-tree when it bends,
and withal she had a noble dignity, even on the occasion when I first saw
her.
"It was a hideous spot, the revolting prison-hall of Rhyakotis. She wore
only a threadbare robe that had once been costly, and a foul old woman
followed her about--as a greedy rat might pursue an imprisoned dove--and
loaded her with abusive language. She answered not a word, but large
heavy tears flowed slowly over her pale cheeks and down on to her hands,
which she kept crossed on her bosom. Grief and anguish spoke from her
eyes, but no vehement passion deformed the regularity of her features.
She knew how to endure even ignominy with grace, and what words the
raging old woman poured out upon her!
"I had long since been baptized, and all the prisons were open to me, the
rich Menander, the brother-in-law of the prefect--those prisons in which
under Maximin so many Christians were destined to be turned from the true
faith.
"But she did not belong to us. Her eye met mine, and I signed my forehead
with the cross, but she did not respond to the sacred sign. The guards
led away the old woman, and she drew back into a dark corner, sat down,
and covered her face with her hands. A wondrous sympathy for the hapless
woman had taken possession of my soul; I felt as if she belonged to me,
and I to her, and I believed in her, even when the turnkey had told me in
coarse language that she had lived with a Roman at the old woman's, and
had defrauded her of a large sum of money. The next day I went again to
the prison, for her sake and my own; there I found her again in the same
corner that she had shrunk into the day before; by her stood her prison
fare untouched, a jar of water and a piece of bread.
"As I went up to her, I saw how she broke a small bit off the thin cake
for herself, and then called a little Christian boy who had come into the
prison with his mother, and gave him the remainder. The child thanked her
prettily, and she drew him to her, and kissed him with passionate
tenderness, though he was sickly and ugly.
"'No one who can love children so well is wholly lost,' said I to myself,
and I offered to help her as far as lay in my power.
"She looked at me not without distrust, and said that nothing had
happened to her, but what she deserved, and she would bear it. Before I
could enquire of her any further, we were interrupted by the Christian
prisoners, who crowded around the worthy Ammonius, who was exhorting and
comforting them with edifying discourse. She listened attentively to the
old man, and on the following day I found her in conversation with the
mother of the boy to whom she had given her bread.
"One morning, I had gone there with some fruit to offer as a treat to the
prisoners, and particularly to her. She took an apple, and said, rising
as she spoke, 'I would now ask another favor of you. You are a Christian,
send me a priest, that he may baptize me, if he does not think me
unworthy, for I am burdened with sins so heavily as no other woman can
be.' Her large, sweet, childlike eyes filled again with big silent tears,
and I spoke to her from my heart, and showed her as well as I could the
grace of the Redeemer. Shortly after, Ammonius secretly baptized her, and
she begged to be given the name of Magdalen, and so it was, and after
that she took me wholly into her confidence.
"She had left her husband and her child for the sake of a diabolical
seducer, whom she had followed to Alexandria, and who there had abandoned
her. Alone and friendless, in want and guilt, she remained behind with a
hard-hearted and covetous hostess, who had brought her before the judge,
and so into prison. What an abyss of the deepest anguish of soul I could
discover in this woman, who was worthy of a better lot! What is highest
and best in a woman? Her love, her mother's heart, her honor; and
Magdalen had squandered and ruined all these by her own guilt. The blow
of overwhelming fate may be easily borne, but woe to him, whose life is
ruined by his own sin! She was a sinner, she felt it with anguish of
repentance, and she steadily refused my offers to purchase her freedom.
"She was greedy of punishment, as a man in a fever is greedy of the
bitter potion, which cools his blood. And, by the crucified Lord! I have
found more noble humanity among sinners, than in many just men in
priestly garb. Through the presence of Magdalen, the prison recovered its
sanctity in my eyes. Before this I had frequently quitted it full of deep
contempt, for among the imprisoned Christians, there were too often lazy
vagabond's, who had loudly confessed the Saviour only to be fed by the
gifts of the brethren; there I had seen accursed criminals, who hoped by
a martyr's death to win back the redemption that they had forfeited;
there I had heard the woeful cries of the faint-hearted, who feared death
as much as they feared treason to the most High. There were things to be
seen there that might harrow the soul, but also examples of the sublimest
greatness. Men have I seen there, aye, and women, who went to their death
in calm and silent bliss, and whose end was, indeed, noble--more noble
than that of the much-lauded Codrus or Decius Mus.
"Among all the prisoners there was neither man nor woman who was more
calmly self-possessed, more devoutly resigned, than Magdalen. The words,
'There is more joy in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over
ninety and nine that need no repentance,' strengthened her greatly, and
she repented--yea and verily, she did. And for my part, God is my witness
that not an impulse as from man to woman drew me to her, and yet I could
not leave her, and I passed the day by her side, and at night she haunted
my soul, and it would have seemed to me fairer than all in life besides
to have been allowed to die with her.
"It was at the time of the fourth decree of persecution, a few months
before the promulgation of the first edict of toleration.
"He that sacrifices, it is said, shall go unpunished, and he that
refuses, shall by some means or other be brought to it, but those who
continue stiff-necked shall suffer death. For a long time much
consideration had been shown to the prisoners, but now they were alarmed
by having the edict read to them anew. Many hid themselves groaning and
lamenting, others prayed aloud, and most awaited what might happen with
pale lips and painful breathing.
"Magdalen remained perfectly calm. The names of the Christian prisoners
were called out, and the imperial soldiers led them all together to one
spot. Neither my name nor hers was called, for I did not belong to the
prisoners, and she had not been apprehended for the faith's sake. The
officer was rolling up his list, when Magdalen rose and stepped modestly
forward, saying with quiet dignity, 'I too am a Christian.'
"If there be an angel who wears the form and features of man, his face
must resemble hers, as she looked in that hour. The Roman, a worthy man,
looked at her with a benevolent, but searching gaze. I do not find your
name here,' he said aloud, shaking his head and pointing to the roll; and
he added in a lower voice, 'Nor do I intend to find it.'
"She went closer up to him, and said out loud, Grant me my place among
the believers, and write down, that Magdalen, the Christian, refuses to
sacrifice.'
"My soul was deeply moved, and with joyful eagerness I cried out, 'Put
down my name too, and write, that Menander, the son of Herophilus, also
refuses.' The Roman did his duty.
"Time has not blotted out from my memory a single moment of that day.
There stood the altar, and near it the heathen priest on one side, and on
the other the emperor's officer. We were taken up two by two; Magdalen
and I were the last. One word now--one little word--would give us life
and freedom, another the rack and death. Out of thirty of us only four
had found courage to refuse to sacrifice, but the feeble hearted broke
out into lamentations, and beat their foreheads, and prayed that the Lord
might strengthen the courage of the others. An unutterably pure and lofty
joy filled my soul, and I felt, as if we were out of the body floating on
ambient clouds. Softly and calmly we refused to sacrifice, thanked the
imperial official, who warned us kindly, and in the same hour and place
we fell into the hands of the torturers. She gazed only up to heaven, and
I only at her, but in the midst of the most frightful torments I saw
before me the Saviour beckoning to me, surrounded by angels that soared
on soft airs, whose presence filled my eyes with the purest light, and my
ears with heavenly music. She bore the utmost torture without flinching,
only once she called out the name of her son Hermas; then I turned to
look at her, and saw her gazing up to Heaven with wide open eyes and
trembling lips-living, but already with the Lord--on the rack, and yet in
bliss. My stronger body clung to the earth; she found deliverance at the
first blow of the torturer.
"I myself closed her eyes, the sweetest eyes in which Heaven was ever
mirrored, I drew a ring from her dear, white, blood-stained hand, and
here under the rough sheepskin I have it yet; and I pray, I pray, I
pray--oh! my heart! My God if it might be--if this is the end--!"
Paulus put his hand to his head, and sank exhausted on the bed, in a deep
swoon. The sick man had followed his story with breathless interest. Some
time since he had risen from his bed, and, unobserved by his companion,
had sunk on his knees; he now dragged himself, all hot and trembling, to
the side of the senseless man, tore the sheep's fell from his breast, and
with hasty movement sought the ring; he found it, and fixing on it
passionate eyes, as though he would melt it with their fire, he pressed
it again and again to his lips, to his heart, to his lips again; buried
his face in his hands and wept bitterly.
It was not till Hermas returned from the oasis that Stephanus thought of
his exhausted and fainting friend, and with his son's assistance restored
him to conscious ness. Paulus did not refuse to take some food and drink,
and in the cool of the evening, when he was refreshed and invigorated, he
sat again by the side of Stephanus, and understood from the old man that
Magdalen was certainly his wife.
"Now I know," said Paulus, pointing to Hermas, "how it is that from the
first I felt such a love for the lad there."
The old man softly pressed his hand, for he felt himself tied to his
friend by a new and tender bond, and it was with silent ecstasy that he
received the assurance that the wife he had always loved, the mother of
his child, had died a Christian and a martyr, and had found before him
the road to Heaven.
The old man slept as peacefully as a child the following night, and when,
next morning, messengers came from Raithu to propose to Paulus that he
should leave the Holy Mountain, and go with them to become their elder
and ruler, Stephanus said, "Follow this high call with all confidence,
for you deserve it. I really no longer have need of you, for I shall get
well now without any further nursing."
But Paulus, far more disturbed than rejoiced, begged of the messengers a
delay of seven days for reflection, and after wandering restlessly from
one holy spot to another, at last went down into the oasis, there to pray
in the church.
CHAPTER VIII.
It was a delicious refreshing evening; the full moon rose calmly in the
dark blue vault of the night-sky, and poured a flood of light down on the
cool earth. But its rays did not give a strong enough light to pierce the
misty veil that hung over the giant mass of the Holy Mountain; the city
of the oasis on the contrary was fully illuminated; the broad roadway of
the high-street looked to the wanderer who descended from the height
above like a shining path of white marble, and the freshly plastered
walls of the new church gleamed as white as in the light of day. The
shadows of the houses and palm-trees lay like dark strips of carpet
across the road, which was nearly empty in spite of the evening coolness,
which usually tempted the citizens out into the air.
The voices of men and women sounded out through the open windows of the
church; then the door opened and the Pharanite Christians, who had been
partaking of the Supper--the bread and the cup passed from hand to
hand--came out into the moonlight. The elders and deacons, the readers
and singers, the acolytes and the assembled priesthood of the place
followed the Bishop Agapitus, and the laymen came behind Obedianus, the
head-man of the oasis, and the Senator Petrus; with Petrus came his wife,
his grown up children and numerous slaves.
The church was empty when the door-keeper, who was extinguishing the
lights, observed a man in a dark corner of an antechamber through which a
spring of water softly plashed and trickled, and which was intended for
penitents. The man was prostrate on the ground and absorbed in prayer,
and he did not raise himself till the porter called him, and threw the
light of his little lamp full in his face.
He began to address him with hard words, but when he recognized in the
belated worshipper the anchorite Paulus of Alexandria he changed his key,
and said, in a soft and almost submissive tone of entreaty, "You have
surely prayed enough, pious man. The congregation have left the church,
and I must close it on account of our beautiful new vessels and the
heathen robbers. I know that the brethren of Raithu have chosen you to be
their elder, and that his high honor was announced to you by their
messengers, for they came to see our church too and greatly admired it.
Are you going at once to settle with them or shall you keep the
high-feast with us?"
"That you shall hear to-morrow," answered Paulus, who had risen from his
knees, and was leaning against a pillar of the narrow, bare, penitential
chamber. "In this house dwells One of whom I would fain take counsel, and
I beg of you to leave me here alone. If you will, you can lock the door,
and fetch me out later, before you go to rest for the night."
"That cannot be," said the man considering, "for my wife is ill, and my
house is a long way from here at the end of the town by the little gate,
and I must take the key this very evening to the Senator Petrus, because
his son, the architect Antonius, wants to begin the building of the new
altar the first thing to-morrow morning. The workmen are to be here by
sunrise, and if--"
"Show me the key," interrupted Paulus. "To what untold blessing may this
little instrument close or open the issues! Do you know, man, that I
think there is a way for us both out of the difficulty! You go to your
sick wife, and I will take the key to the senator as soon as I have
finished my devotions."
The door-keeper considered for a few minutes, and then acceded to the
request of the future presbyter of Raithu, while at the same time he
begged him not to linger too late.
As he went by the senator's house he smelt the savor of roast meat; he
was a poor man and thought to himself, "They fast in there just when it
pleases them, but as for us, we fast when it pleases us least."
The good smell, which provoked this lament, rose from a roast sheep,
which was being prepared as a feast-supper for the senator and the
assembled members of his household; even the slaves shared in the late
evening meal.
Petrus and Dame Dorothea sat in the Greek fashion, side by side in a half
reclining position on a simple couch, and before them stood a table which
no one shared with them, but close to which was the seat for the grown up
children of the house. The slaves squatted on the ground nearer to the
door, and crowded into two circles, each surrounding a steaming dish, out
of which they helped themselves to the brown stew of lentils with the
palm of the hand. A round, grey-looking cake of bread lay near each, and
was not to be broken till the steward Jethro had cut and apportioned the
sheep. The juicy pieces of the back and thighs of the animal were offered
to Petrus and his family to choose from, but the carver laid a slice for
each slave on his cake--a larger for the men and a smaller for the women.
Many looked with envy on the more succulent piece that had fallen to a
neighbor's share, but not even those that had fared worst dared to
complain, for a slave was allowed to speak only when his master addressed
him, and Petrus forbid even his children to discuss their food whether to
praise it or to find fault.
In the midst of the underlings sat Miriam; she never ate much, and all
meat was repulsive to her, so she pushed the cut from the ribs that was
given to her over to an old garden-woman, who sat opposite, and who had
often given her a fruit or a little honey, for Miriam loved sweet things.
Petrus spoke not a word to-day to his slaves, and very little even to his
family; Dorothea marked the deep lines between his grave eyes, not
without anxiety, and noted how he pinched his lips, when, forgetful of
the food before him, he sat lost in meditation.
The meal was ended, but still he did not move, nor did he observe the
enquiring glances which were turned on him by many eyes; no one dared to
rise before the master gave the signal.
Miriam followed all his movements with more impatience than any of the
others who were present; she rocked restlessly backwards and forwards,
crumbled the bread that she had left with her slender fingers, and her
breath now came fast and faster, and now seemed to stop entirely. She had
heard the court-yard gate open, and had recognized Hermas' step.
"He wants to speak to the master, in a moment he will come in, and find
me among these--" thought she, and she involuntarily stroked her hand
over her rough hair to smooth it, and threw a glance at the other slaves,
in which hatred and contempt were equally marked.
But Hermas came not. Not for an instant did she think that her ear had
deceived her--was he waiting now at the door for the conclusion of the
meal? Was his late visit intended for the Gaulish lady, to whom she had
seen him go yesterday again with the wine jar?
Sirona's husband, Phoebicius, as Miriam well knew, was upon the mountain,
and offering sacrifice by moonlight to Mithras with his fellow heathen in
a cave which she had long known. She had seen the Gaul quit the court
during the time of evening-prayer with a few soldiers, two of whom
carried after him a huge coffer, out of which rose the handle of a mighty
cauldron, and a skin full of water, and various vessels. She knew that
these men would pass the whole night in the grotto of Mithras, and there
greet "the young god"--the rising sun--with strange ceremonies; for the
inquisitive shepherdess had more than once listened, when she had led her
goats up the mountain before the break of day, and her ear had detected
that the worshippers of Mithras were performing their nocturnal
solemnities. Now it flashed across her mind, that Sirona was alone, and
that the late visit of Hermas probably concerned her, and not the
senator.
She started, there was quite a pain in her heart, and, as usual, when any
violent emotion agitated her mind, she involuntarily sprang to her feet
prompted by the force of her passion, and had almost reached the door,
when the senator's voice brought her to a pause, and recalled her to the
consciousness of the impropriety of her behavior.
The sick man still lay with his inflamed wound and fever down in the
court, and she knew that she should escape blame if in answer to her
master's stern questioning she said that the patient needed her, but she
had never told a lie, and her pride forbade her even now to speak an
untruth. The other slaves stared with astonishment, as she replied, "I
wanted to get out; the supper is so long."
Petrus glanced at the window, and perceiving how high the moon stood, he
shook his head as if in wonder at his own conduct, then without blaming
her he offered a thanksgiving, gave the slaves the signal to leave the
room, and after receiving a kiss of "good-night" from each of his
children--from among whom Polykarp, the sculptor, alone was missing--he
withdrew to his own room. But he did not remain alone there for long: so
soon as Dorothea had discussed the requirements of the house for the next
day with Marthana and the steward, and had been through the sleeping-room
of her younger children, casting a loving glance on the peaceful
sleepers, arranging here a coverlet, and there a pillow--she entered her
husband's room and called his name.
Petrus stood still and looked round, and his grave eyes were full of
grateful tenderness as they met those of his wife. Dorothea knew the soft
and loving heart within the stern exterior, and nodded to him with
sympathetic understanding: but before she could speak, he said, "Come in,
come nearer to me; there is a heavy matter in hand, and you cannot escape
your share of the burden."
"Give me my share!" cried she eagerly. "The slim girl of former years has
grown a broad-shouldered old woman, so that it may be easier to her to
help her lord to bear the many burdens of life. But I am seriously
anxious--even before we went to church something unsatisfactory had
happened to you, and not merely in the council-meeting. There must be
something not right with one of the children."
"What eyes you have!" exclaimed Petrus.
"Dim, grey eyes," said Dorothea, "and not even particularly keen. But
when anything concerns you and the children I could see it in the dark.
You are dissatisfied with Polykarp; yesterday, before he set out for
Raithu, you looked at him so--so--what shall I say? I can quite imagine
what it is all about, but I believe you are giving yourself groundless
anxiety. He is young, and so lovely a woman as Sirona--"
Up to this point Petrus had listened to his wife in silence. Now he
clasped his hands, and interrupted her, "Things certainly are not going
on quite right--but I ought to be used to it. What I meant to have
confided to you in a quiet hour, you tell me as if you knew all about
it!"
"And why not?" asked Dorothea. "When you graft a scion on to a tree, and
they have grown well together, the grafted branch feels the bite of the
saw that divides the stock, or the blessing of the spring that feeds the
roots, just as if the pain or the boon were its own. And you are the tree
and I am the graft, and the magic power of marriage has made us one. Your
pulses are my pulses, your thoughts have become mine, and so I always
know before you tell me what it is that stirs your soul."
Dorothea's kind eyes moistened as she spoke, and Petrus warmly clasped
her hands in his as he said, "And if the gnarled old trunk bears from
time to time some sweet fruit, he may thank the graft for it. I cannot
believe that the anchorites up yonder are peculiarly pleasing to the Lord
because they live in solitude. Man comes to his perfect humanity only
through his wife and child, and he who has them not, can never learn the
most glorious heights and the darkest depths of life and feeling. If a
man may stake his whole existence and powers for anything, surely it is
for his own house."
"And you have honestly done so for ours!" cried Dorothea.
"For ours," repeated Petrus, giving the words the strongest accent of his
deep voice. Two are stronger than one, and it is long since we ceased to
say 'I' in discussing any question concerning the house or the children;
and both have been touched by to-day's events."
"The senate will not support you in constructing the road?"
"No, the bishop gave the casting-vote. I need not tell you how we stand
towards each other, and I will not blame him; for he is a just man, but
in many things we can never meet half-way. You know that he was in his
youth a soldier, and his very piety is rough--I might almost say warlike.
If we had yielded to his views, and if our head man Obedianus had not
supported me, we should not have had a single picture in the church, and
it would have looked like a barn rather than a house of prayer. We never
have understood each other, and since I opposed his wish of making
Polykarp a priest, and sent the boy to learn of the sculptor
Thalassius--for even as a child he drew better than many masters in these
wretched days that produce no great artists--since then, I say, he speaks
of me as if I were a heathen--"
"And yet he esteems you highly, that I know," interrupted Dame Dorothea.
"I fully return his good opinion," replied Petrus, "and it is no ordinary
matter that estranges. He thinks that he only holds the true faith, and
ought to fight for it; he calls all artistic work a heathen abomination;
he never felt the purifying influence of the beautiful, and regards all
pictures and statues as tending to idolatry. Still he allows himself to
admire Polykarp's figures of angels and the Good Shepherd, but the lions
put the old warrior in a rage. 'Accursed idols and works of the devil,'
are what he calls them."
"But there were lions even in the temple of Solomon," cried Dorothea.
"I urged that, and also that in the schools of the catechists, and in the
educational history of animals which we possess and teach from, the
Saviour himself is compared to a lion, and that Mark, the evangelist, who
brought the doctrine of the gospel to Alexandria, is represented with a
lion. But he withstood me more and more violently, saying that Polykarp's
works were to adorn no sacred place, but the Caesareum, and that to him
is nothing but a heathen edifice, and the noble works of the Greeks that
are preserved there he calls revolting images by which Satan ensnares the
souls of Christian men. The other senators can understand his hard words,
but they cannot follow mine; and so they vote with him, and my motion to
construct the roadway was thrown over, because it did not become a
Christian assembly to promote idolatry, and to smooth a way for the
devil."
"I can see that you must have answered them sharply!"
"Indeed I believe so," answered Petrus, looking down. "Many painful
things were no doubt said, and it was I that suffered for them. Agapitus,
who was looking at the deacons' reports, was especially dissatisfied with
the account that I laid before them; they blamed us severely because you
gave away as much bread to heathen households as to Christians. It is no
doubt true, but--"
"But," cried Dorothea eagerly, "hunger is just as painful to the
unbaptized, and their Christian neighbors do not help them, and yet they
too are our flesh and blood. I should ill fulfil my office if I were to
let them starve, because the highest comfort is lacking to them."
"And yet," said Petrus, "the council decided that, for the future, you
must apply at the most a fourth part of the grain allotted to their use.
You need not fear for them; for the future some of our own produce may go
to them out of what we have hitherto sold. You need not withdraw even a
loaf from any one of your proteges, but certainly may now be laid by the
plans for the road. Indeed there is no hurry for its completion, for
Polykarp will now hardly be able to go on with his lions here among us.
Poor fellow! with what delight he formed the clay models, and how
wonderfully he succeeded in reproducing the air and aspect of the
majestic beasts. It is as if he were inspired by the spirit of the old
Athenian masters. We must now consider whether in Alexandria--"
"Rather let us endeavor," interrupted Dorothea, "to induce him at once to
put aside his models, and to execute other more pious works. Agapitus has
keen eyes, and the heathen work is only too dear to the lad's heart."
The senator's brow grew dark at the last words, and he said, not without
some excitement, "Everything that the heathen do is not to be condemned.
Polykarp must be kept busy, constantly and earnestly occupied, for he has
set his eyes where they should not be set. Sirona is the wife of another,
and even in sport no man should try to win his neighbor's wife. Do you
think, the Gaulish woman is capable of forgetting her duty?"
Dorothea hesitated, and after some reflection answered, "She is a
beautiful and vain child--a perfect child; I mean in nature, and not in
years, although she certainly might be the grandchild of her strange
husband, for whom she feels neither love nor respect, nor, indeed,
anything but utter aversion. I know not what, but something frightful
must have come between them even in Rome, and I have given up all
attempts to guide her heart back to him. In everything else she is soft
and yielding, and often, when she is playing with the children, I cannot
imagine where she finds her reckless gaiety. I wish she were a Christian,
for she is very dear to me, why should I deny it? It is impossible to be
sad when she is by, and she is devoted to me, and dreads my blame, and is
always striving to win my approbation. Certainly she tries to please
every one, even the children; but, so far as I can see, not more Polykarp
than any one else, although he is such a fine young man. No, certainly
not."
"And yet the boy gazes at her," said Petrus, "and Phoebicius has noticed
it; he met me yesterday when I came home, and, in his sour, polite
manner, requested me to advise my son, when he wished to offer a rose,
not to throw it into his window, as he was not fond of flowers, and
preferred to gather them himself for his wife."
The senator's wife turned pale, and then exclaimed shortly and
positively, "We do not need a lodger, and much as I should miss his wife,
the best plan will be for you to request him to find another dwelling."
"Say no more, wife," Petrus said, sternly, and interrupting her with a
wave of his hand. "Shall we make Sirona pay, for it because our son has
committed a folly for her sake? You yourself said, that her intercourse
with the children, and her respect for you, preserve her from evil, and
now shall we show her the door? By no means. The Gauls may remain in my
house so long as nothing occurs that compels me to send them out of it.
My father was a Greek, but through my mother I have Amalekite blood in my
veins, and I should dishonor myself, if I drove from my threshold any,
with whom I had once broken bread under my roof. Polykarp shall be
warned, and shall learn what he owes to us, to himself, and to the laws
of God. I know how to value his noble gifts, and I am his friend, but I
am also his master, and I will find means of preventing my son from
introducing the light conduct of the capital beneath his father's roof."
The last words were spoken with weight and decision, like the blows of a
hammer, and stern resolve sparkled in the senator's eyes. Nevertheless,
his wife went fearlessly up to him, and said, laying her hand on his arm,
"It is, indeed, well that a man can keep his eyes set on what is just,
when we women should follow the hasty impulse of our heart. Even in
wrestling, men only fight with lawful and recognized means, while
fighting women use their teeth and nails. You men understand better how
to prevent injustice than we do, and that you have once more proved to
me, but, in carrying justice out, you are not our superiors. The Gauls
may remain in our house, and do you take Polykarp severely to task, but
in the first instance as his friend. Or would it not be better if you
left it to me? He was so happy in thinking of the competition of his
lions, and in having to work for the great building in the capital, and
now it is all over. I wish you had already broken that to him; but love
stories are women's affairs, and you know how good the boy is to me. A
mother's word sometimes has more effect than a father's blow, and it is
in life as it is in war; the light forces of archers go first into the
field, and the heavily armed division stays in the background to support
them; then, if the enemy will not yield, it comes forward and decides the
battle. First let me speak to the lad. It may be that he threw the rose
into Sirona's window only in sport, for she plays with his brothers and
sisters as if she herself were one of them. I will question him; for if
it is so, it would be neither just nor prudent to blame him. Some caution
is needed even in giving a warning; for many a one, who would never have
thought of stealing, has become a thief through false suspicion. A young
heart that is beginning to love, is like a wild boy who always would
rather take the road he is warned to avoid, and when I was a girl, I
myself first discovered how much I liked you, when the Senator Aman's
wife--who wanted you for her own daughter--advised me to be on my guard
with you. A man who has made such good use of his time, among all the
temptations of the Greek Sodom, as Polykarp, and who has won such high
praise from all his teachers and masters, cannot have been much injured
by the light manners of the Alexandrians. It is in a man's early years
that he takes the bent which he follows throughout his later life, and
that he had done before he left our house. Nay--even if I did not know
what a good fellow Polykarp is--I need only look at you to say, 'A child
that was brought up by this father, could never turn out a bad man.'"
Petrus sadly shrugged his shoulders, as though he regarded his wife's
flattering words as mere idle folly, and yet he smiled, as he asked,
"Whose school of rhetoric did you go to? So be it then; speak to the lad
when he returns from Raithu. How high the moon is already; come to
rest--Antonius is to place the altar in the early dawn, and I wish to be
present."
CHAPTER IX.
Miriam's ears had not betrayed her. While she was detained at supper,
Hermas had opened the courtyard-gate; he came to bring the senator a
noble young buck, that he had killed a few hours before, as a
thank-offering for the medicine to which his father owed his recovery. It
would no doubt have been soon enough the next morning, but he could find
no rest up on the mountain, and did not--and indeed did not care
to--conceal from himself the fact, that the wish to give expression to
his gratitude attracted him down into the oasis far less than the hope of
seeing Sirona, and of hearing a word from her lips.
Since their first meeting he had seen her several times, and had even
been into her house, when she had given him the wine for his father, and
when he had taken back the empty flask. Once, as she was filling the
bottle which he held, out of the large jar, her white fingers had touched
his, and her enquiry whether he were afraid of her, or if not, why his
hands which looked so strong should tremble so violently, dwelt still in
his mind. The nearer he approached Petrus's house the more vehemently his
heart beat; he stood still in front of the gate-way, to take breath, and
to collect himself a little, for he felt that, agitated as he was, he
would find it difficult to utter any coherent words.
At last he laid his hand on the latch and entered the yard. The
watch-dogs already knew him, and only barked once as he stepped over the
threshold.
He brought a gift in his hand, and he wanted to take nothing away, and
yet he appeared to himself just like a thief as he looked round, first at
the main building lighted up by the moon, and then at the Gaul's
dwelling-house, which, veiled in darkness, stood up as a vague
silhouette, and threw a broad dark shadow on the granite flags of the
pavement, which was trodden to shining smoothness. There was not a soul
to be seen, and the reek of the roast sheep told him that Petrus and his
household were assembled at supper.
"I might come inopportunely on the feasters," said he to himself, as he
threw the buck over from his left to his right shoulder, and looked up at
Sirona's window, which he knew only too well.
It was not lighted up, but a whiter and paler something appeared within
its dark stone frame, and this something, attracted his gaze with an
irresistible spell; it moved, and Sirona's greyhound set up a sharp
barking.
It was she--it must be she! Her form rose before his fancy in all its
brilliant beauty, and the idea flashed through his mind that she must be
alone, for he had met her husband and the old slave woman among the
worshippers of Mithras on their way to the mountain. The pious youth, who
so lately had punished his flesh with the scourge to banish seductive
dream-figures, had in these few days become quite another man. He would
not leave the mountain, for his father's sake, but he was quite
determined no longer to avoid the way of the world; nay, rather to seek
it. He had abandoned the care of his father to the kindly Paulus, and had
wandered about among the rocks; there he had practised throwing the
discus, he had hunted the wild goats and beasts of prey, and from time to
time--but always with some timidity--he had gone down into the oasis to
wander round the senator's house, and catch a glimpse of Sirona.
Now that he knew that she was alone, he was irresistibly drawn to her.
What he desired of her, he himself could not have said; and nothing was
clear to his mind beyond the wish to touch her fingers once more.
Whether this were a sin or not, was all the same to him; the most
harmless play was called a sin, and every thought of the world for which
he longed, and he was fully resolved to take the sin upon himself, if
only he might attain his end. Sin after all was nothing but a phantom
terror with which they frighten children, and the worthy Petrus had
assured him that he might be a man capable of great deeds. With a feeling
that he was venturing on an unheard of act he went towards Sirona's
window, and she at once recognized him as he stood in the moonlight.
"Hermas!" he heard her say softly. He was seized with such violent terror
that he stood as if spellbound, the goat slipped from his shoulders, and
he felt as if his heart had ceased to beat. And again the sweet woman's
voice called, "Hermas, is it you? What brings you to us at such a late
hour?"
He stammered an incoherent answer, and "I do not understand; come a
little nearer." Involuntarily he stepped forward into the shadow of the
house and close up to her window. She wore a white robe with wide, open
sleeves, and her arms shone in the dim light as white as her garment. The
greyhound barked again; she quieted it, and then asked Hermas how his
father was, and whether he needed some more wine. He replied that she was
very kind, angelically kind, but that the sick man was recovering fast,
and that she had already given him far too much. Neither of them said
anything that might not have been heard by everybody, and yet they
whispered as if they were speaking of some forbidden thing.
"Wait a moment," said Sirona, and she disappeared within the room, she
soon reappeared, and said solid and sadly, "I would ask you to come into
the house but Phoebicius has locked the door. I am quite alone, hold the
flask so that I may fill it through the open window."
With these words she leaned over with the large jar--she was strong, but
the wine-jar seemed to her heavier than on other occasions, and she said
with a sigh, "The amphora is too heavy for me."
He reached up to help her; again his fingers met hers, and again he felt
the ecstatic thrill which had haunted his memory day and night ever since
he first had felt it. At this instant there was a sudden noise in the
house opposite; the slaves were coming out from supper. Sirona knew what
was happening; she started and cried out, pointing to the senator's door,
"For all the gods' sake! they are coming out, and if they see you here I
am lost!"
Hermas looked hastily round the court, and listened to the increasing
noise in the other house, then, perceiving that there was no possible
escape from the senator's people, who were close upon him, he cried out
to Sirona in a commanding tone, "Stand back," and flung himself up
through the window into the Gaul's apartment. At the same moment the door
opposite opened, and the slaves streamed out into the yard.
In front of them all was Miriam, who looked all round the wide
space-expectant; seeking something, and disappointed. He was not there,
and yet she had heard him come in; and the gate had not opened and closed
a second time, of that she was perfectly certain. Some of the slaves went
to the stables, others went outside the gate into the street to enjoy the
coolness of the evening; they sat in groups on the ground, looking up at
the stars, chattering or singing. Only the shepherdess remained in the
court-yard seeking him on all sides, as if she were hunting for some lost
trinket. She searched even behind the millstones, and in the dark sheds
in which the stone-workers' tools were kept.
Then she stood still a moment and clenched her hands; with a few light
bounds she sprang into the shadow of the Gaul's house. Just in front of
Sirona's window lay the steinbock; she hastily touched it with her
slender naked toes, but quickly withdrew her foot with a shudder, for it
had touched the beast's fresh wound, wet with its blood. She rapidly drew
the conclusion that: he had killed it, and had thrown it down here, and
that he could not be far off. Now she knew where he was in hiding-and she
tried to laugh, for the pain she felt seemed too acute and burning for
tears to allay or cool it. But she did not wholly lose her power of
reflection. "They are in the dark," thought she, "and they would see me,
if I crept under the window to listen; and yet I must know what they are
doing there together."
She hastily turned her back on Sirona's house, slipped into the clear
moonlight, and after standing there for a few minutes, went into the
slaves' quarters. An instant after, she slipped out behind the
millstones, and crept as cleverly and as silently as a snake along the
ground under the darkened base of the centurion's house, and lay close
under Sirona's window.
Her loudly beating heart made it difficult for even her sharp ears to
hear, but though she could not gather all that he said, she distinguished
the sound of his voice; he was no longer in Sirona's room, but in the
room that looked out on the street.
Now she could venture to raise herself, and to look in at the open
window; the door of communication between the two rooms was closed, but a
streak of light showed her that in the farther room, which was the
sitting-room, a lamp was burning.
She had already put up her hand in order to hoist herself up into the
dark room, when a gay laugh from Sirona fell upon her ear. The image of
her enemy rose up before her mind, brilliant and flooded with light as on
that morning, when Hermas had stood just opposite, bewildered by her
fascination. And now--now--he was actually lying at her feet, and saying
sweet flattering words to her, and he would speak to her of love, and
stretch out his arm to clasp her--but she had laughed.
Now she laughed again. Why was all so still again?
Had she offered her rosy lips for a kiss? No doubt, no doubt. And Hermas
did not wrench himself from her white arms, as he had torn himself from
hers that noon by the spring-torn himself away never to return.
Cold drops stood on her brow, she buried her hands in her thick, black
hair, and a loud cry escaped her--a cry like that of a tortured animal. A
few minutes more and she had slipped through the stable and the gate by
which they drove the cattle in; and no longer mistress of herself, was
flying up the mountain to the grotto of Mithras to warn Phoebicius.
The anchorite Gelasius saw from afar the figure of the girl flying up the
mountain in the moonlight, and her shadow flitting from stone to stone,
and he threw himself on the ground, and signed a cross on his brow, for
he thought he saw a goblin-form, one of the myriad gods of the
heathen--an Oread pursued by a Satyr. Sirona had heard the girl's shriek.
"What was that?" she asked the youth, who stood before her in the
full-dress uniform of a Roman officer, as handsome as the young god of
war, though awkward and unsoldierly in his movements.
"An owl screamed--" replied Hermas. "My father must at last tell me from
what house we are descended, and I will go to Byzantium, the new Rome,
and say to the emperor, 'Here am I, and I will fight for you among your
warriors.'"
"I like you so!" exclaimed Sirona.
"If that is the truth," cried Hermas, "prove it to me! Let me once press
my lips to your shining gold hair. You are beautiful, as sweet as a
flower--as gay and bright as a bird, and yet as hard as our mountain
rock. If you do not grant me one kiss, I shall long till I am sick and
weak before I can get away from here, and prove my strength in battle."
"And if I yield," laughed Sirona, "you will be wanting another and
another kiss, and at last not get away at all. No, no, my friend--I am
the wiser of us two. Now go into the dark room, I will look out and see
whether the people are gone in again, and whether you can get off unseen
from the street window, for you have been here much too long already. Do
you hear? I command you."
Hermas obeyed with a sigh; Sirona opened the shutter and looked out. The
slaves were coming back into the court, and she called out a friendly
word or two, which were answered with equal friendliness, for the Gaulish
lady, who never overlooked even the humblest, was dear to them all. She
took in the night-air with deep-drawn breaths, and looked up contentedly
at the moon, for she was well content with herself.
When Hermas had swung himself up into her room, she had started back in
alarm; he had seized her hand and pressed his burning lips to her arm,
and she let him do it, for she was overcome with strange bewilderment.
Then she heard Dame Dorothea calling out, "Directly, directly, I will
only say good night first to the children." These simple words, uttered
in Dorothea's voice, had a magical effect on the warm-hearted
woman--badly used and suspected as she was, and yet so well formed for
happiness, love and peace. When her husband had locked her in, taking
even her slave with him, at first she had raved, wept, meditated revenge
and flight, and at last, quite broken down, had seated herself by the
window in silent thought of her beautiful home, her brothers and sisters,
and the dark olive groves of Arelas.
Then Hermas appeared. It had not escaped her that the young anchorite
passionately admired her, and she was not displeased, for she liked him,
and the confusion with which he had been overcome at the sight of her
flattered her and seemed to her doubly precious because she knew that the
hermit in his sheepskin, on whom she had bestowed a gift of wine, was in
fact a young man of distinguished rank. And how truly to be pitied was
the poor boy, who had had his youth spoilt by a stern father. A woman
easily bestows some tender feeling on the man that she pities; perhaps
because she is grateful to him for the pleasure of feeling herself the
stronger, and because through him and his suffering she finds
gratification for the noblest happiness of a woman's heart--that of
giving tender and helpful care; women's hands are softer than ours. In
men's hearts love is commonly extinguished when pity begins, while
admiration acts like sunshine on the budding plant of a woman's
inclination, and pity is the glory which radiates from her heart.
Neither admiration nor pity, however, would have been needed to induce
Sirona to call Hermas to her window; she felt so unhappy and lonely, that
any one must have seemed welcome from whom she might look for a friendly
and encouraging word to revive her deeply wounded self-respect. And there
came the young anchorite, who forgot himself and everything else in her
presence, whose looks, whose movement, whose very silence even seemed to
do homage to her. And then his bold spring into her room, and his eager
wooing--"This is love," said she to herself. Her cheeks glowed, and when
Hermas clasped her hand, and pressed her arm to his lips, she could not
repulse him, till Dorothea's voice reminded her of the worthy lady and of
the children, and through them of her own far-off sisters.
The thought of these pure beings flowed over her troubled spirit like a
purifying stream, and the question passed through her mind, "What should
I be without these good folks over there, and is this great love-sick
boy, who stood before Polykarp just lately looking like a school-boy, is
he so worthy that I should for his sake give up the right of looking them
boldly in the face?" And she pushed Hermas roughly away, just as he was
venturing for the first time to apply his lips to her perfumed gold hair,
and desired him to be less forward, and to release her hand.
She spoke in a low voice, but with such decision, that the lad, who was
accustomed to the habit of obedience, unresistingly allowed her to push
him into the sitting-room. There was a lamp burning on the table, and on
a bench by the wall of the room, which was lined with colored stucco, lay
the helmet, the centurion's staff, and the other portions of the armor
which Phoebicius had taken off before setting out for the feast of
Mithras, in order to assume the vestments of one of the initiated of the
grade of "Lion."
The lamp-light revealed Sirona's figure, and as she stood before him in
all her beauty with glowing cheeks, the lad's heart began to beat high,
and with increased boldness he opened his arms, and endeavored to draw
her to him; but Sirona avoided him and went behind the table, and,
leaning her hands on its polished surface while it protected her like a
shield, she lectured him in wise and almost motherly words against his
rash, intemperate, and unbecoming behavior.
Any one who was learned in the heart of woman might have smiled at such
words from such lips and in such an hour; but Hermas blushed and cast
down his eyes, and knew not what to answer. A great change had come over
the Gaulish lady; she felt a great pride in her virtue, and in the
victory she had won over herself, and while she sunned herself in the
splendor of her own merits, she wished that Hermas too should feel and
recognize them. She began to expatiate on all that she had to forego and
to endure in the oasis, and she discoursed of virtue and the duties of a
wife, and of the wickedness and audacity of men.
Hermas, she said, was no better than the rest, and because she had shown
herself somewhat kind to him, he fancied already that he had a claim on
her liking; but he was greatly mistaken, and if only the courtyard had
been empty, she would long ago have shown him the door.
The young hermit was soon only half listening to all she said, for his
attention had been riveted by the armor which lay before him, and which
gave a new direction to his excited feelings. He involuntarily put out
his hand towards the gleaming helmet, and interrupted the pretty preacher
with the question, "May I try it on?"
Sirona laughed out loud and exclaimed, much amused and altogether
diverted from her train of thought, "To be sure. You ought to be a
soldier. How well it suits you! Take off your nasty sheepskin, and let us
see how the anchorite looks as a centurion."
Hermas needed no second telling; he decked himself in the Gaul's armor
with Sirona's help. We human beings must indeed be in a deplorable
plight; otherwise how is it that from our earliest years we find such
delight in disguising ourselves; that is to say, in sacrificing our own
identity to the tastes of another whose aspect we borrow. The child
shares this inexplicable pleasure with the sage, and the stern man who
should condemn it would not therefore be the wiser, for he who wholly
abjures folly is a fool all the more certainly the less he fancies
himself one. Even dressing others has a peculiar charm, especially for
women; it is often a question which has the greater pleasure, the maid
who dresses her mistress or the lady who wears the costly garment.
Sirona was devoted to every sort of masquerading. If it had been needful
to seek a reason why the senator's children and grandchildren were so
fond of her, by no means last or least would have been the fact that she
would willingly and cheerfully allow herself to be tricked out in colored
kerchiefs, ribands, and flowers, and on her part could contrive the most
fantastic costumes for them. So soon as she saw Hermas with the helmet
on, the fancy seized her to carry through the travesty he had begun. She
eagerly and in perfect innocence pulled the coat of armor straight,
helped him to buckle the breastplate and to fasten on the sword, and as
she performed the task, at which Hermas proved himself unskilful enough,
her gay and pleasant laugh rang out again and again. When he sought to
seize her hand, as he not seldom did, she hit him sharply on the fingers,
and scolded him.
Hermas' embarrassment thawed before this pleasant sport, and soon he
began to tell her how hateful the lonely life on the mountain was to him.
He told her that Petrus himself had advised him to try his strength out
in the world, and he confided to her that if his father got well, he
meant to be a soldier, and do great deeds. She quite agreed with him,
praised and encouraged him, then she criticised his slovenly deportment,
showed him with comical gravity how a warrior ought to stand and walk,
called herself his drill-master, and was delighted at the zeal with which
he strove to imitate her.
In such play the hours passed quickly. Hermas was proud of himself in his
soldierly garb, and was happy in her presence and in the hope of future
triumphs; and Sirona was gay, as she had usually been only when playing
with the children, so that even Miriam's wild cry, which the youth
explained to be the scream of an owl, only for a moment reminded her of
the danger in which she was placing herself. Petrus' slaves had long gone
to rest before she began to weary of amusing herself with Hermas, and
desired him to lay aside her husband's equipment, and to leave her.
Hermas obeyed while she warily opened the shutters, and turning to him,
said, "You cannot venture through the court-yard; you must go through
this window into the open street. But there is some one coming down the
road; let him pass first, it will not be long to wait, for he is walking
quickly."
She carefully drew the shutters to, and laughed to see how clumsily
Hermas set to work to unbuckle the greaves; but the gay laugh died upon
her lips when the gate flew open, the greyhound and the senator's
watch-dogs barked loudly, and she recognized her husband's voice as he
ordered the dogs to be quiet.
"Fly-fly-for the gods' sake!" she cried in a trembling voice. With that
ready presence of mind with which destiny arms the weakest woman in great
and sudden danger, she extinguished the lamp, flung open the shutter, and
pushed Hermas to the window. The boy did not stay to bid her farewell,
but swung himself with a strong leap down into the road, and, followed by
the barking of the dogs, which roused all the neighboring households, he
flew up the street to the little church.
He had not got more than half-way when he saw a man coming towards him;
he sprang into the shadow of a house, but the belated walker accelerated
his steps, and came straight up to him. He set off running again, but the
other pursued him, and kept close at his heels till he had passed all the
houses and began to go up the mountain-path. Hermas felt that he was
outstripping his pursuer, and was making ready for a spring over a block
of stone that encumbered the path, when he heard his name called behind
him, and he stood still, for he recognized the voice of the man from whom
he was flying as that of his good friend Paulus.
"You indeed" said the Alexandrian, panting for breath. "Yes, you are
swifter than I. Years hang lead on our heels, but do you know what it is
that lends them the swiftest wings? You have just learned it! It is a bad
conscience; and pretty things will be told about you; the dogs have
barked it all out loud enough to the night."
"And so they may!" replied Hermas defiantly, and trying in vain to free
himself from the strong grasp of the anchorite who held him firmly. "I
have done nothing wrong."
"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife!" interrupted Paulus in a tone
of stern severity. "You have been with the centurion's pretty wife, and
were taken by surprise. Where is your sheepskin?"
Hermas started, felt on his shoulder, and exclaimed, striking his fist
against his forehead, "Merciful Heaven!--I have left it there! The raging
Gaul will find it."
"He did not actually see you there?" asked Paulus eagerly.
"No, certainly not," groaned Hermas, "but the skin--"
"Well, well," muttered Paulus. "Your sin is none the less, but something
may be done in that case. Only think if it came to your father's ears; it
might cost him his life."
"And that poor Sirona!" sighed Hermas.
"Leave me to settle that," exclaimed Paulus. I will make everything
straight with her. There, take sheepskin. You will not? Well, to be sure,
the man who does not fear to commit adultery would make nothing of
becoming his father's murderer.--There, that is the way! fasten it
together over your shoulders; you will need it, for you must quit this
spot, and not for to-day and to-morrow only. You wanted to go out into
the world, and now you will have the opportunity of showing whether you
really are capable of walking on your own feet. First go to Raithu and
greet the pious Nikon in my name, and tell him that I remain here on the
mountain, for after long praying in the church I have found myself
unworthy of the office of elder which they offered me. Then get yourself
carried by some ship's captain across the Red Sea, and wander up and down
the Egyptian coast. The hordes of the Blemmyes have lately shown
themselves there; keep your eye on them, and when the wild bands are
plotting some fresh outbreak you can warn the watch on the
mountain-peaks; how to cross the sea and so outstrip them, it will be
your business to find out. Do you feel bold enough and capable of
accomplishing this task? Yes? So I expected! Now may the Lord guide you.
I will take care of your father, and his blessing and your mother's will
rest upon you if you sincerely repent, and if you now do your duty."
"You shall learn that I am a man," cried Hermas with sparkling eyes. "My
bow and arrows are lying in your cave, I will fetch them and then--aye!
you shall see whether you sent the right man on the errand. Greet my
father, and once more give me your hand."
Paulus grasped the boy's right hand, drew him to him, and kissed his
forehead with fatherly tenderness. Then he said, "In my cave, under the
green stone, you will find six gold-pieces; take three of them with you
on your journey. You will probably need them at any rate to pay your
passage. Now be off, and get to Raithu in good time."
Hermas hurried up the mountain, his head full of the important task that
had been laid upon him; dazzling visions of the great deeds he was to
accomplish eclipsed the image of the fair Sirona, and he was so
accustomed to believe in the superior insight and kindness of Paulus that
he feared no longer for Sirona now that his friend had made her affair
his own.
The Alexandrian looked after him, and breathed a short prayer for him;
then he went down again into the valley.
It was long past midnight, and the moon was sinking; it grew cooler and
cooler, and since he had given his sheepskin to Hermas he had nothing on,
but his thread-bare coat. Nevertheless he went slowly onwards, stopping
every now and then, moving his arms, and speaking incoherent words in a
low tone to himself.
He thought of Hermas and Sirona, of his own youth, and of how in
Alexandria he himself had tapped at the shutters of the dark-haired Aso,
and the fair Simaitha.
"A child--a mere boy," he murmured. "Who would have thought it? The
Gaulish woman no doubt may be handsome, and as for him, it is a fact,
that as he threw the discus I was myself surprised at his noble figure.
And his eyes--aye, he has Magdalen's eyes! If the Gaul had found him with
his wife, and had run his sword through his heart, he would have gone
unpunished by the earthly judge--however, his father is spared this
sorrow. In this desert the old man thought that his darling could not be
touched by the world and its pleasures. And now? These brambles I once
thought lay dried up on the earth, and could never get up to the top of
the palm-tree where the dates ripen, but a bird flew by, and picked up
the berries, and carried them into its nest at the highest point of the
tree.
"Who can point out the road that another will take, and say to-day,
'To-morrow I shall find him thus and not otherwise.'
"We fools flee into the desert in order to forget the world, and the
world pursues us and clings to our skirts. Where are the shears that are
keen enough to cut the shadow from beneath our feet? What is the prayer
that can effectually release us--born of the flesh--from the burden of
the flesh? My Redeemer, Thou Only One, who knowest it, teach it to me,
the basest of the base."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
He who wholly abjures folly is a fool
Some caution is needed even in giving a warning
Who can point out the road that another will take
HOMO SUM
By Georg Ebers
Volume 3.
CHAPTER X.
Within a few minutes after Hermas had flung himself out of window into
the roadway, Phoebicius walked into his sleeping-room. Sirona had had
time to throw herself on to her couch; she was terribly frightened, and
had turned her face to the wall. Did he actually know that some one had
been with her? And who could have betrayed her, and have called him home?
Or could he have come home by accident sooner than usual?
It was dark in the room, and he could not see her face, and yet she kept
her eyes shut as if asleep, for every fraction of a minute in which she
could still escape seeing him in his fury seemed a reprieve; and yet her
heart beat so violently that it seemed to her that he must hear it, when
he approached the bed with a soft step that was peculiar to him. She
heard him walk up and down, and at last go into the kitchen that adjoined
the sleeping-room. In a few moments she perceived through her half-closed
eyes, that he, had brought in a light; he had lighted a lamp at the
hearth, and now searched both the rooms.
As yet he had not spoken to her, nor opened his lips to utter a word.
Now he was in the sitting-room, and now--involuntarily she drew herself
into a heap, and pulled the coverlet over her head--now he laughed aloud,
so loud and scornfully, that she felt her hands and feet turn cold, and a
rushing crimson mist floated before her eyes. Then the light came back
into the bed-room, and came nearer and nearer. She felt her head pushed
by his hard hand, and with a feeble scream she flung off the coverlet and
sat up.
Still he did not speak a word, but what she saw was quite enough to
smother the last spark of her courage and hope, for her husband's eyes
showed only the whites, his sallow features were ashy-pale, and on his
brow the branded mark of Mithras stood out more clearly than ever. In his
right hand he held the lamp, in his left Hermas' sheepskin.
As his haggard eye met hers he held the anchorite's matted garment so
close to her face, that it touched her. Then he threw it violently on the
floor, and asked in a low, husky voice, "What is that?"
She was silent. He went up to the little table near her bed; on it stood
her night-draught in a pretty colored glass, that Polykarp had brought
her from Alexandria as a token, and with the back of his hand he swept it
from the table, so that it fell on the dais, and flew with a crash into a
thousand fragments. She screamed, the greyhound sprang up and barked at
the Gaul. He seized the little beast's collar, and flung it so violently
across the room, that it uttered a pitiful cry of pain. The dog had
belonged to Sirona since she was quite a girl, it had come with her to
Rome, and from thence to the oasis; it clung to her with affection, and
she to it, for Iambe liked no one to caress and stroke her so much as her
mistress. She was so much alone, and the greyhound was always with her,
and not only entertained her by such tricks as any other dog might have
learned, but was to her a beloved, dumb, but by no means deaf, companion
from her early home, who would prick its ears when she spoke the name of
her dear little sisters in distant Arelas, from whom she had not heard
for years; or it would look sadly in her face, and kiss her white hands,
when longing forced tears into her eyes.
In her solitary, idle, childless existence Iambe was much, very much, to
her, and now as she saw her faithful companion and friend creep
ill-treated and whining up to her bed--as the supple animal tried in vain
to spring up and take refuge in her lap, and held out to his mistress his
trembling, perhaps broken, little paw, fear vanished from the miserable
young woman's heart--she sprang from her couch, took the little dog in
her arms, and exclaimed with a glance, which flashed with anything rather
than fear or repentance: "You do not touch the poor little beast again,
if you take my advice."
"I will drown it to-morrow morning," replied Phoebicius with perfect
indifference, but with an evil smile on his flaccid lips. "So many
two-legged lovers make themselves free to my house, that I do not see why
I should share your affections with a quadruped into the bargain. How
came this sheepskin here?" Sirona vouchsafed no answer to this last
question, but she exclaimed in great excitement, "By God--by your God--by
the mighty Rock, and by all the gods! if you do the little beast a harm,
it will be the last day I stop in your house."
"Hear her!" said the centurion, "and where do you propose to travel to?
The desert is wide and there is room and to spare to starve in it, and
for your bones to bleach there. How grieved your lovers would be--for
their sakes I will take care before drowning the dog to lock in its
mistress."
"Only try to touch me," screamed Sirona beside herself, and springing to
the window. "If you lay a finger on me, I will call for help, and
Dorothea and her husband will protect me against you."
"Hardly," answered Phoebicius drily. "It would suit you no doubt to find
yourself under the same roof as that great boy who brings you colored
glass, and throws roses into your window, and perhaps has strewed the
road with them by which he found his way to you to-day. But there are
nevertheless laws which protect the Roman citizen from criminals and
impudent seducers. You were always a great deal too much in the house
over there, and you have exchanged your games with the little screaming
beggars for one with the grownup child, the rose-thrower-the fop, who,
for your sake, and not to be recognized, covers up his purple coat with a
sheepskin! Do you think, you can teach me anything about lovesick
night-wanderers and women?
"I see through it all! Not one step do you set henceforth across Petrus'
threshold. There is the open window--scream--scream as loud as you will,
and let all the people know of your disgrace. I have the greatest mind to
carry this sheepskin to the judge, the first thing in the morning. I
shall go now, and set the room behind the kitchen in order for you; there
is no window there through which men in sheepskin can get in to my house.
You shall live there till you are tamed, and kiss my feet, and confess
what has been going on here to-night. I shall learn nothing from the
senator's slaves, that I very well know; for you have turned all their
heads too--they grin with delight when they see you. All friends are made
welcome by you, even when they wear nothing but sheepskin. But they may
do what they please--I have the right keeper for you in my own hand. I am
going at once--you may scream if you like, but I should myself prefer
that you should keep quiet. As to the dog, we have not yet heard the last
of the matter; for the present I will keep him here. If you are quiet and
come to your senses, he may live for aught I care; but if you are
refractory, a rope and a stone can soon be found, and the stream runs
close below. You know I never jest--least of all just now."
Sirona's whole frame was in the most violent agitation. Her breath came
quickly, her limbs trembled, but she could not find words to answer him.
Phoebicius saw what was passing in her mind, and he went on, "You may
snort proudly now; but an hour will come when you will crawl up to me
like your lame dog, and pray for mercy. I have another idea--you will
want a couch in the dark room, and it must be soft, or I shall be blamed;
I will spread out the sheepskin for you. You see I know how to value your
adorer's offerings."
The Gaul laughed loud, seized the hermit's garment, and went with the
lamp into the dark room behind the kitchen, in which vessels and utensils
of various sorts were kept. These he set on one side to turn it into a
sleeping-room for his wife, of whose guilt he was fully convinced.
Who the man was for whose sake she had dishonored him, he knew not, for
Miriam had said nothing more than, "Go home, your wife is laughing with
her lover."
While her husband was still threatening and storming, Sirona had said to
herself, that she would rather die than live any longer with this man.
That she herself was not free from fault never occurred to her mind. He
who is punished more severely than he deserves, easily overlooks his own
fault in his feeling of the judge's injustice.
Phoebicius was right; neither Petrus nor Dorothea had it in their power
to protect her against him, a Roman citizen. If she could not contrive to
help her self she was a prisoner, and without air, light, and freedom she
could not live. During his last speech her resolution had been quickly
matured, and hardly had he turned his back and crossed the threshold,
than she hurried up to her bed, wrapped the trembling greyhound in the
coverlet, took it in her arms like a child, and ran into the sitting-room
with her light burden; the shutters were still open of the window through
which Hermas had fled into the open. With the help of a stool she took
the same way, let herself slip down from the sill into the street, and
hastened on without aim or goal--inspired only by the wish to escape
durance in the dark room, and to burst every bond that tied her to her
hated mate--up the church-hill and along the road which lead over the
mountain to the sea.
Phoebicius gave her a long start, for after having arranged her prison he
remained some time in the little room behind the kitchen, not in order to
give her time, collect his thoughts or to reflect on his future action,
but simply because he felt utterly exhausted.
The centurion was nearly sixty years of age, and his frame, originally a
powerful one, was now broken by every sort of dissipation, and could no
longer resist the effects of the strain and excitement of this night.
The lean, wiry, and very active man did not usually fall into these fits
of total enervation excepting in the daytime, for after sundown a
wonderful change would come over the gray-headed veteran, who
nevertheless still displayed much youthful energy in the exercise of his
official duties. At night his drooping eyelids, that almost veiled his
eyes, opened more wildly, his flaccid hanging under-lip closed firmly,
his long neck and narrow elongated head were held erect, and when, at a
later hour, he went out to drinking-bouts or to the service in honor of
Mithras, he might often still be taken for a fine, indomitable young man.
But when he was drunk he was no longer gay, but wild, braggart, and
noisy. It frequently happened that before he left the carouse, while he
was still in the midst of his boon-companions, the syncope would come
upon him which had so often alarmed Sirona, and from which he could never
feel perfectly safe even when he was on duty at the head of his soldiers.
The vehement big man in such moments offered a terrible image of helpless
impotence; the paleness of death would overspread his features, his back
was as if it were broken, and he lost his control over every limb. His
eyes only continued to move, and now and then a shudder shook his frame.
His people said that when he was in this condition, the centurion's
ghastly demon had entered into him, and he himself believed in this evil
spirit, and dreaded it; nay, he had attempted to be released through
heathen spells, and even through Christian exorcisms. Now he sat in the
dark room on the sheepfell, which in scorn of his wife he had spread on a
hard wooden bench. His hands and feet turned cold, his eyes glowed, and
the power to move even a finger had wholly deserted him; only his lips
twitched, and his inward eye, looking back on the past with
preternaturally sharpened vision, saw, far away and beyond, the last
frightful hour.
"If," thought he, "after my mad run down to the oasis, which few younger
men could have vied with, I had given the reins to my fury instead of
restraining it, the demon would not have mastered me so easily. How that
devil Miriam's eyes flashed as she told me that a man was betraying me.
She certainly must have seen the wearer of the sheepskin, but I lost
sight of her before I reached the oasis; I fancy she turned and went up
the mountain. What indeed might not Sirona have done to her? That woman
snares all hearts with her eyes as a bird-catcher snares birds with his
flute. How the fine gentlemen ran after her in Rome! Did she dishonor me
there, I wonder? She dismissed the Legate Quintillus, who was so anxious
to please me--I may thank that fool of a woman that he became my
enemy--but he was older even than I, and she likes young men best. She is
like all the rest of them, and I of all men might have known it. It is
the way of the world: to-day one gives a blow and to-morrow takes one."
A sad smile passed over his lips, then his features settled into a stern
gravity, for various unwelcome images rose clearly before his mind, and
would not be got rid of.
His conscience stood in inverse relation to the vigor of his body. When
he was well, his too darkly stained past life troubled him little; but
when he was unmanned by weakness, he was incapable of fighting the
ghastly demon that forced upon his memory in painful vividness those very
deeds which he would most willingly have forgotten. In such hours he must
need remember his friend, his benefactor, and superior officer, the
Tribune Servianus, whose fair young wife he had tempted with a thousand
arts to forsake her husband and child, and fly with him into the wide
world; and at this moment a bewildering illusion made him fancy that he
was the Tribune Servianus, and yet at the same time himself. Every hour
of pain, and the whole bitter anguish that his betrayed benefactor had
suffered through his act when he had seduced Glycera, he himself now
seemed to realize, and at the same time the enemy that had betrayed him,
Servianus, was none other than himself, Phoebicius, the Gaul. He tried to
protect himself and meditated revenge against the seducer, and still he
could not altogether lose the sense of his own identity.
This whirl of mad imagining, which he vainly endeavored to make clear to
himself, threatened to distract his reason, and he groaned aloud; the
sound of his own voice brought him back to actuality.
He was Phoebicius again and not another, that he knew now, and yet he
could not completely bring himself to comprehend the situation. The image
of the lovely Glycera, who had followed him to Alexandria, and whom he
had there abandoned, when he had squandered his last piece of money and
her last costly jewels in the Greek city, no longer appeared to him
alone, but always side by side with his wife Sirona.
Glycera had been a melancholy sweetheart, who had wept much, and laughed
little after running away from her husband; he fancied he could hear her
speaking soft words of reproach, while Sirona defied him with loud
threats, and dared to nod and signal to the senator's son Polykarp.
The weary dreamer angrily shook himself, collected his thoughts, doubled
his fist, and lifted it angrily; this movement was the first sign of
returning physical energy; he stretched his limbs like a man awaking from
sleep, rubbed his eyes, pressed his hands to his temples; by degrees full
consciousness returned to him, and with it the recollection of all that
had occurred in the last hour or two.
He hastily left the dark room, refreshed himself in the kitchen with a
gulp of wine, and went up to the open window to gaze at the stars.
It was long past midnight; he was reminded of his companions now
sacrificing on the mountain, and addressed a long prayer "to the crown,"
"the invincible sun-god," "the great light," "the god begotten of the
rock," and to many other names of Mithras; for since he had belonged to
the mystics of this divinity, he had become a zealous devotee, and could
fast too with extraordinary constancy. He had already passed through
several of the eighty trials, to which a man had to subject himself
before he could attain to the highest grades of the initiated, and the
weakness which had just now overpowered him, had attacked him for the
first time, after he had for a whole week lain for hours in the snow,
besides fasting severely, in order to attain the grade of "lion."
Sirona's rigorous mind was revolted by all these practices, and the
decision with which she had always refused to take any part in them, had
widened the breach which, without that, parted her from her husband.
Phoebicius was, in his fashion, very much in earnest with all these
things; for they alone saved him in some measure from himself, from dark
memories, and from the fear of meeting the reward of his evil deeds in a
future life, while Sirona found her best comfort in the remembrance of
her early life, and so gathered courage to endure the miserable present
cheerfully, and to hold fast to hope for better times.
Phoebicius ended his prayer to-day--a prayer for strength to break his
wife's strong spirit, for a successful issue to his revenge on her
seducer--ended it without haste, and with careful observance of all the
prescribed forms. Then he took two strong ropes from the wall, pulled
himself up, straight and proud, as if he were about to exhort his
soldiers to courage before a battle, cleared his throat like an orator in
the Forum before he begins his discourse, and entered the bedroom with a
dignified demeanor. Not the smallest suspicion of the possibility of her
escape troubled his sense of security, when, not finding Sirona in the
sleeping-room, he went into the sitting-room to carry out the meditated
punishment. Here again--no one.
He paused in astonishment; but the thought that she could have fled
appeared to him so insane, that he immediately and decisively dismissed
it. No doubt she feared his wrath, and was hidden under her bed or behind
the curtain which covered his clothes. "The dog," thought he, "is still
cowering by her--" and he began to make a noise, half whistling and half
hissing, which Iambe could not bear, and which always provoked her to
bark angrily--but in vain. All was still in the vacant room, still as
death. He was now seriously anxious; at first deliberately, and then with
rapid haste, he threw the light under every vessel, into every corner,
behind every cloth, and rummaged in places that not even a child--nay
hardly a frightened bird could have availed itself of for concealment. At
last his right hand fairly dropped the ropes, and his left, in which he
held the lamp, began to tremble. He found the shutters of the
sleeping-room open; where Sirona had been sitting on the seat looking at
the moon, before Hermas had come upon the scene. "Then she is not here!"
he muttered, and setting the lamp on the little table, from which he had
just now flung Polykarp's glass, he tore open the door, and hurried into
the courtyard. That she could have swung herself out into the road, and
have set out in the night for the open desert, had not yet entered into
his mind. He shook the door that closed in the homestead, and found it
locked; the watch-dogs roused themselves, and gave tongue, when
Phoebicius turned to Petrus' house, and began to knock at the door with
the brazen knocker, at first softly and then with growing anger; he
considered it as certain that his wife had sought and found protection
under the senator's roof. He could have shouted with rage and anguish,
and yet he hardly thought of his wife and the danger of losing her, but
only of Polykarp and the disgrace he had wrought upon him, and the
reparation he would exact from him, and his parents, who had dared to
tamper with his household rights--his, the imperial centurion's.
What was Sirona to him? In the flush of an hour of excitement he had
linked her destiny to his.
At Arelas, about two years since, one of his comrades had joined their
circle of boon-companions, and had related that he had been the witness
of a remarkable scene. A number of young fellows had surrounded a boy and
had unmercifully beaten him--he himself knew not wherefore. The little
one had defended himself bravely, but was at last overcome by numbers.
"Then suddenly," continued the soldier, "the door of a house near the
circus opened, and a young girl with long golden hair flew out, and drove
the boys to flight, and released the victim, her brother, from his
tormentors. She looked like a lioness," cried the narrator, "Sirona she
is called, and of all the pretty girls of Arelas, she is beyond a doubt
the prettiest." This opinion was confirmed on all sides, and Phoebicius,
who at that time had just been admitted to the grade of "lion" among the
worshippers of Mithras, and liked very well to hear himself called "the
lion," exclaimed, "I have long been seeking a lioness, and here it seems
to me that I have found one. Phoebicius and Sirona--the two names sound
very finely together."
On the following day he asked Sirona of her father for his wife, and as
he had to set out for Rome in a few days the wedding was promptly
celebrated. She had never before quitted Arelas, and knew not what she
was giving up, when she took leave of her father's house perhaps for
ever. In Rome Phoebicius and his young wife met again; there many admired
the beautiful woman, and made every effort to obtain her favor, but to
him she was only a lightly won, and therefore a lightly valued,
possession; nay, ere long no more than a burden, ornamental no doubt but
troublesome to guard. When presently his handsome wife attracted the
notice of the legate, he endeavored to gain profit and advancement
through her, but Sirona had rebuffed Quintillus with such insulting
disrespect, that his superior officer became the centurion's enemy, and
contrived to procure his removal to the oasis, which was tantamount to
banishment.
From that time he had regarded her too as his enemy, and firmly believed
that she designedly showed herself most friendly to those who seemed most
obnoxious to him, and among these he reckoned Polykarp.
Once more the knocker sounded on the senator's door; it opened, and
Petrus himself stood before the raging Gaul, a lamp in his hand.
CHAPTER XI.
The unfortunate Paulus sat on a stone bench in front of the senator's
door, and shivered; for, as dawn approached, the night-air grew cooler,
and he was accustomed to the warmth of the sheepskin, which he had now
given to Hermas. In his hand he held the key of the church, which he had
promised the door-keeper to deliver to Petrus; but all was so still in
the senator's house, that he shrank from rousing the sleepers.
"What a strange night this has been!" he muttered to himself, as he drew
his short and tattered tunic closer together. "Even if it were warmer,
and if, instead of this threadbare rag, I had a sack of feathers to wrap
myself in, still I should feel a cold shiver if the spirits of hell that
wander about here were to meet me again. Now I have actually seen one
with my own eyes. Demons in women's form rush up the mountain out of the
oasis to tempt and torture us in our sleep. What could it have been that
the goblin in a white robe and with flowing hair held in its arms? Very
likely the stone with which the incubus loads our breast when he torments
us. The other one seemed to fly, but I did not see its wings. That
side-building must be where the Gaul lives with his ungodly wife, who has
ensnared my poor Hermas. I wonder whether she is really so beautiful! But
what can a youth who has grown up among rocks and caves know of the
charms of women. He would, of course, think the first who looked kindly
at him the most enchanting of her sex. Besides she is fair, and therefore
a rare bird among the sunburnt bipeds of the desert. The centurion surely
cannot have found the sheepskin or all would not be so still here; once
since I have been here an ass has brayed, once a camel has groaned, and
now already the first cock is crowing; but not a sound have I heard from
human lips, not even a snore from the stout senator or his buxom wife
Dorothea, and it would be strange indeed if they did not both snore."
He rose, went up to the window of Phoebicius dwelling, and listened at
the half open shutters, but all was still.
An hour ago Miriam had been listening under Sirona's room; after
betraying her to Phoebicius she had followed him at a distance, and had
slipped back into the court-yard through the stables; she felt that she
must learn what was happening within, and what fate had befallen Hermas
and Sirona at the hands of the infuriated Gaul. She was prepared for
anything, and the thought that the centurion might have killed them both
with the sword filled her with bitter-sweet satisfaction. Then, seeing
the light through the crack between the partly open wooden shutters, she
softly pushed them farther apart, and, resting her bare feet against the
wall, she raised herself to look in.
She saw Sirona sitting up upon her couch, and opposite to her the Gaul
with pale distorted features; at his feet lay the sheepskin; in his right
hand he held the lamp, and its light fell on the paved floor in front of
the bed, and was reflected in a large dark red pool.
"That is blood," thought she, and she shuddered and closed her eyes.
When she reopened them she saw Sirona's face with crimson cheeks, turned
towards her husband; she was unhurt--but Hermas?
"'That is his blood!" she thought with anguish, and a voice seemed to
scream in her very heart, "I, his murderess, have shed it."
Her hands lost their hold of the shutters, her feet touched the pavement
of the yard, and, driven by her bitter anguish of soul, she fled out by
the way she had come--out into the open and up to the mountain. She felt
that rather would she defy the prowling panthers, the night-chill, hunger
and thirst, than appear again before Dame Dorothea, the senator, and
Marthana, with this guilt on her soul; and the flying Miriam was one of
the goblin forms that had terrified Paulus.
The patient anchorite sat down again on the stone seat. "The frost is
really cruel," thought he, "and a very good thing is such a woolly
sheepskin; but the Saviour endured far other sufferings than these, and
for what did I quit the world but to imitate Him, and to endure to the
end here that I may win the joys of the other world. There, where angels
soar, man will need no wretched ram's fell, and this time certainly
selfishness has been far from me, for I really and truly suffer for
another--I am freezing for Hermas, and to spare the old man pain. I would
it were even colder! Nay, I will never, absolutely never again lay a
sheepskin over my shoulders."
Paulus nodded his head as if to signify assent to his own resolve; but
presently he looked graver, for again it seemed to him that he was
walking in a wrong path.
"Aye! Man achieves a handful of good, and forthwith his heart swells with
a camel-load of pride. What though my teeth are chattering, I am none the
less a most miserable creature. How it tickled my vanity, in spite of all
my meditations and scruples, when they came from Raithu and offered me
the office of elder; I felt more triumphant the first time I won with the
quadriga, but I was scarcely more puffed up with pride then, than I was
yesterday. How many who think to follow the Lord strive only to be
exalted as He is; they keep well out of the way of His abasement. Thou, O
Thou Most High, art my witness that I earnestly seek it, but so soon as
the thorns tear my flesh the drops of blood turn to roses, and if I put
them aside, others come and still fling garlands in my way. I verily
believe that it is as hard here on earth to find pain without pleasure,
as pleasure without pain."
While thus he meditated his teeth chattered with cold, but suddenly his
reflections were interrupted, for the dogs set up a loud barking.
Phoebicius was knocking at the senator's door.
Paulus rose at once, and approached the gate-way. He could hear every
word that was spoken in the court-yard; the deep voice was the senator's,
the high sharp tones must be the centurion's.
Phoebicius was demanding his wife back from Petrus, as she had hidden in
his house, while Petrus positively declared that Sirona had not crossed
his threshold since the morning of the previous day.
In spite of the vehement and indignant tones in which his lodger spoke,
the senator remained perfectly calm, and presently went away to ask his
wife whether she by chance, while he was asleep, had opened the house to
the missing woman. Paulus heard the soldier's steps as he paced up and
down the court-yard, but they soon ceased, for Dame Dorothea appeared at
the door with her husband, and on her part emphatically declared that she
knew nothing of Sirona.
"Your son Polykarp then," interrupted Phoebicius, "will be better
informed of her whereabouts."
"My son has been since yesterday at Raithu on business," said Petrus
resolutely but evasively; "we expect him home to-day only."
"It would seem that he has been quick, and has returned much sooner,"
retorted Phoebicius. "Our preparations for sacrificing on the mountain
were no secret, and the absence of the master of the house is the
opportunity for thieves to break in--above all, for lovers who throw
roses into their ladies' windows. You Christians boast that you regard
the marriage tie as sacred, but it seems to me that you apply the rule
only to your fellow-believers. Your sons may make free to take their
pleasure among the wives of the heathen; it only remains to be proved
whether the heathen husbands will be trifled with or not. So far as I am
concerned, I am inclined for anything rather than jesting. I would have
you to understand that I will never let Caesar's uniform, which I wear,
be stained by disgrace, and that I am minded to search your house, and if
I find my undutiful wife and your son within its walls, I will carry them
and you before the judge, and sue for my rights."
"You will seek in vain," replied Petrus, commanding himself with
difficulty. "My word is yea or nay, and I repeat once more no, we harbor
neither her nor him. As for Dorothea and myself--neither of us is
inclined to interfere in your concerns, but neither will we permit
another--be he whom he may--to interfere in ours. This threshold shall
never be crossed by any but those to whom I grant permission, or by the
emperor's judge, to whom I must yield. You, I forbid to enter. Sirona is
not here, and you would do better to seek her elsewhere than to fritter
away your time here."
"I do not require your advice!" cried the centurion wrathfully.
"And I," retorted Petrus, "do not feel myself called upon to arrange your
matrimonial difficulties. Besides you can get back Sirona without our
help, for it is always more difficult to keep a wife safe in the house,
than to fetch her back when she has run away."
"You shall learn whom you have to deal with!" threatened the centurion,
and he threw a glance round at the slaves, who had collected in the
court, and who had been joined by the senator's eldest son. "I shall call
my people together at once, and if you have the seducer among you we will
intercept his escape."
"Only wait an hour," said Dorothea, now taking up the word, while she
gently touched her husband's hand, for his self-control was almost
exhausted, "I and you will see Polykarp ride home on his father's horse.
Is it only from the roses that my son threw into your wife's window, that
you suppose him to be her seducer--she plays so kindly with all his
brothers and sisters--or are there other reasons, which move you to
insult and hurt us with so heavy an accusation?"
Often when wrathful men threaten to meet with an explosion, like black
thunder-clouds, a word from the mouth of a sensible woman gives them
pause, and restrains them like a breath of soft wind.
Phoebicius had no mind to listen to any speech from Polykarp's mother,
but her question suggested to him for the first time a rapid retrospect
of all that had occurred, and he could not conceal from himself that his
suspicions rested on weak grounds. And at the same time he now said to
himself, that if indeed Sirona had fled into the desert instead of to the
senator's house he was wasting time, and letting the start, which she had
already gained, increase in a fatal degree.
But few seconds were needed for these reflections, and as he was
accustomed when need arose to control himself, he said:
"We must see--some means must be found--" and then without any greeting
to his host, he slowly returned to his own house. But he had not reached
the door, when he heard hoofs on the road, and Petrus called after him,
"Grant us a few minutes longer, for here comes Polykarp, and he can
justify himself to you in his own person."
The centurion paused, the senator signed to old Jethro to open the gate;
a man was heard to spring from his saddle, but it was an Amalekite--and
not Polykarp--who came into the court.
"What news do you bring?" asked the senator, turning half to the
messenger and half to the centurion. "My lord Polykarp, your son,"
replied the Amalekite--a dark brown man of ripe years with supple limbs,
and a sharp tongue--"sends his greetings to you and to the mistress, and
would have you to know that before mid-day he will arrive at home with
eight workmen, whom he has engaged in Raithu. Dame Dorothea must be good
enough to make ready for them all and to prepare a meal."
"When did you part from my son?" inquired Petrus.
"Two hours before sundown."
Petrus heaved a sigh of relief, for he had not till now been perfectly
convinced of his son's innocence; but, far from triumphing or making
Phoebicius feel the injustice he had done him, he said kindly--for he
felt some sympathy with the Gaul in his misfortune:
"I wish the messenger could also give some news of your wife's retreat;
she found it hard to accommodate herself to the dull life here in the
oasis, perhaps she has only disappeared in order to seek a town which may
offer more variety to such a beautiful young creature than this quiet
spot in the desert."
Phoebicius waved his hand with a negative movement, implying that he knew
better, and said, "I will show you what your nice night-bird left in my
nest. It may be that you can tell me to whom it belongs."
Just as he hastily stepped across the court-yard to his own dwelling
Paulus entered by the now open gate; he greeted the senator and his
family, and offered Petrus the key of the church.
The sun meanwhile had risen, and the Alexandrian blushed to show himself
in Dame Dorothea's presence in his short and ragged under-garment, which
was quite inefficient to cover the still athletic mould of his limbs.
Petrus had heard nothing but good of Paulus, and yet he measured him now
with no friendly eye, for all that wore the aspect of extravagance
repelled his temperate and methodical nature. Paulus was made conscious
of what was passing in the senator's mind when, without vouchsafing a
single word, he took the key from his hand. It was not a matter of
indifference to him, that this man should think ill of him, and he said,
with some embarrassment:
"We do not usually go among people without a sheepskin, but I have lost
mine."
Hardly had he uttered the words, when Phoebicius came back with Hermas'
sheepskin in his hand, and cried out to Petrus:
"This I found on my return home, in our sleeping-room."
"And when have you ever seen Polykarp in such a mantle?" asked Dorothea.
"When the gods visit the daughters of men," replied the centurion, "they
have always made choice of strange disguises. Why should not a perfumed
Alexandrian gentleman transform himself for once into one of those rough
fools on the mountain? However, even old Homer sometimes nodded--and I
confess that I was in error with regard to your son. I meant no offence,
senator! You have lived here longer than I; who can have made me a
present of this skin, which still seems to be pretty new--horns and all."
Petrus examined and felt the skin, "This is an anchorite's garment," he
said; "the penitents on the mountain are all accustomed to wear such."
"It is one of those rascals then that has found his way into my house!"
exclaimed the centurion. "I bear Caesar's commission, and I am to
exterminate ill vagabonds that trouble the dwellers in the oasis, or
travellers in the desert. Thus run the orders which I brought with me
from Rome. I will drive the low fellows together like deer for hunting,
for they are all rogues and villains, and I shall know how to torture
them until I find the right one."
"The emperor will ill-requite you for that," replied Petrus. "They are
pious Christians, and you know that Constantine himself--"
"Constantine!" exclaimed the centurion scornfully. "Perhaps he will let
himself be baptized, for water can hurt no one, and he cannot, like the
great Diocletian, exterminate the masses who run after the crucified
miracle-monger, without depopulating the country. Look at these coins;
here is the image of Caesar, and what is this on the other side? Is this
your Nazarene, or is it the old god, the immortal and invincible sun? And
is that man one of your creed, who in Constantinople adores Tyche and the
Dioscuri Castor and Pollux? The water he is baptized with to-day he will
wipe away to-morrow, and the old gods will be his defenders, if in more
peaceful times he maintains them against your superstitions."
"But it will be a good while till then," said Perrus coolly. "For the
present, at least, Constantine is the protector of the Christians. I
advise you to put your affair into the hands of Bishop Agapitus."
"That he may serve me up a dish of your doctrine, which is bad even for
women," said the centurion laughing; "and that I may kiss my enemies'
feet? They are a vile rabble up there, I repeat it, and they shall be
treated as such till I have found my man. I shall begin the hunt this
very day."
"And this very day you may end it, for the sheepskin is mine."
It was Paulus who spoke these words in a loud and decided tone; all eyes
were at once turned on him and on the centurion.
Petrus and the slaves had frequently seen the anchorite, but never
without a sheepskin similar to that which Phoebicius held in his hand.
The anchorite's self-accusation must have appeared incredible, and indeed
scarcely possible, to all who knew Paulus and Sirona; and nevertheless no
one, not even the senator, doubted it for an instant. Dame Dorothea only
shook her head incredulously, and though she could find no explanation
for the occurrence, she still could not but say to herself, that this man
did not look like a lover, and that Sirona would hardly have forgotten
her duty for his sake. She could not indeed bring herself to believe in
Sirona's guilt at all, for she was heartily well disposed towards her;
besides--though it, no doubt, was not right--her motherly vanity inclined
her to believe that if the handsome young woman had indeed sinned, she
would have preferred her fine tall Polykarp--whose roses and flaming
glances she blamed in all sincerity--to this shaggy, wild-looking
graybeard.
Quite otherwise thought the centurion. He was quite ready to believe in
the anchorite's confession, for the more unworthy the man for whom Sirona
had broken faith, the greater seemed her guilt, and the more unpardonable
her levity; and to his man's vanity it seemed to him easier--particularly
in the presence of such witnesses as Petrus and Dorothea--to bear the
fact that his wife should have sought variety and pleasure at any cost,
even at that of devoting herself to a ragged beggar, than that she should
have given her affections to a younger, handsomer, and worthier man than
himself. He had sinned much against her, but all that lay like feathers
on his side of the scales, while that which she had done weighed down
hers like a load of lead. He began to feel like a man who, in wading
through a bog, has gained firm ground with one foot, and all these
feelings gave him energy to walk up to the anchorite with a self-control,
of which he was not generally master, excepting when on duty at the head
of his soldiers.
He approached the Alexandrian with an assumption of dignity and a
demeanor which testified to his formerly having taken part in the
representations of tragedies in the theatres of great cities. Paulus, on
his part, did not retreat by a single step, but looked at him with a
smile that alarmed Petrus and the rest of the bystanders. The law put the
anchorite absolutely into the power of the outraged husband, but
Phoebicius did not seem disposed to avail himself of his rights, and
nothing but contempt and loathing were perceptible in his tone, as he
said:
"A man who takes hold of a mangy dog in order to punish him, only dirties
his hand. The woman who betrayed me for your sake, and you--you dirty
beggar--are worthy of each other. I could crush you like a fly that can
be destroyed by a blow of my hand if I chose, but my sword is Caesar's,
and shall never be soiled by such foul blood as yours; however, the beast
shall not have cast off his skin for nothing, it is thick, and so you
have only spared me the trouble of tearing it off you before giving you
your due. You shall find no lack of blows. Confess where your sweetheart
has fled to and they shall be few, but if you are slow to answer they
will be many. Lend me that thing there, fellow!"
With these words he took a whip of hippopotamus hide out of a
camel-driver's band, went close up to the Alexandrian, and asked: "Where
is Sirona?"
"Nay, you may beat me," said Paulus. "However hard your whip may fall on
me, it cannot be heavy enough for my sins; but as to where your wife is
hiding, that I really cannot tell you--not even if you were to tear my
limbs with pincers instead of stroking me with that wretched thing."
There was something so genuinely honest in Paulus' voice and tone, that
the centurion was inclined to believe him; but it was not his way to let
a threatened punishment fail of execution, and this strange beggar should
learn by experience that when his hand intended to hit hard, it was far
from "stroking." And Paulus did experience it, without uttering a cry,
and without stirring from the spot where he stood.
When at last Phoebicius dropped his weary arm and breathlessly repeated
his question, the ill-used man replied, "I told you before I do not know,
and therefore I cannot reveal it."
Up to this moment Petrus, though he had felt strongly impelled to rush to
the rescue of his severely handled fellow-believer, had nevertheless
allowed the injured husband to have his way, for he seemed disposed to
act with unusual mildness, and the Alexandrian to be worthy of all
punishment; but at this point Dorothea's request would not have been
needed to prompt him to interfere.
He went up to the centurion, and said to him in an undertone, "You have
given the evil-doer his due, and if you desire that he should undergo a
severer punishment than you can inflict, carry the matter--I say once
more--before the bishop. You will gain nothing more here. Take my word
for it, I know the man and his fellow-men; he actually knows nothing of
where your wife is hiding, and you are only wasting the time and strength
which you would do better to save, in order to search for Sirona. I fancy
she will have tried to reach the sea, and to get to Egypt or possibly to
Alexandria; and there--you know what the Greek city is--she will fall
into utter ruin."
"And so," laughed the Gaul, "find what she seeks--variety, and every kind
of pleasure. For a young thing like that, who loves amusement, there is
no pleasant occupation but vice. But I will spoil her game; you are
right, it is not well to give her too long a start. If she has found the
road to the sea, she may already--Hey, here Talib!" He beckoned to
Polykarp's Amalekite messenger. "You have just come from Raithu; did you
meet a flying woman on the way, with yellow hair and a white face?"
The Amalekite, a free man with sharp eyes, who was highly esteemed in the
senator's house, and even by Phoebicius himself, as a trustworthy and
steady man, had expected this question, and eagerly replied:
"At two stadia beyond el Heswe I met a large caravan from Petra, which
rested yesterday in the oasis here; a woman, such as you describe, was
running with it. When I heard what had happened here I wanted to speak,
but who listens to a cricket while it thunders?"
"Had she a lame greyhound with her?" asked Phoebicius, full of
expectation.
"She carried something in her arms," answered the Amalekite. "In the
moonlight I took it for a baby. My brother, who was escorting the
caravan, told me the lady was no doubt running away, for she had paid the
charge for the escort not in ready money, but with a gold signet-ring."
The Gaul remembered a certain gold ring with a finely carved onyx, which
long years ago he had taken from Glycera's finger, for she had another
one like it, and which he had given to Sirona on the day of their
marriage.
"It is strange!" thought he, "what we give to women to bind them to us
they use as weapons to turn against us, be it to please some other man,
or to smooth the path by which they escape from us. It was with a
bracelet of Glycera's that I paid the captain of the ship that brought us
to Alexandria; but the soft-hearted fool, whose dove flew after me, and I
are men of a different stamp; I will follow my flown bird, and catch it
again." He spoke the last words aloud, and then desired one of the
senator's slaves to give his mule a good feed and drink, for his own
groom, and the superior decurion who during his absence must take his
place, were also worshippers of Mithras, and had not yet returned from
the mountain.
Phoebicius did not doubt that the woman who had joined the caravan--which
he himself had seen yesterday--was his fugitive wife, and he knew that
his delay might have reduced his earnest wish to overtake her and punish
her to the remotest probability; but he was a Roman soldier, and would
rather have laid violent hands on himself than have left his post without
a deputy. When at last his fellow-worshippers came from their sacrifice
and worship of the rising sun, his preparations for his long journey were
completed.
Phoebicius carefully impressed on the decurion all he had to do during
his absence, and how he was to conduct himself; then he delivered the key
of his house into Petrus' keeping as well as the black slave-woman, who
wept loudly and passionately over the flight of her mistress; he
requested the senator to bring the anchorite's misdeed to the knowledge
of the bishop, and then, guided by the Amalekite Talib, who rode before
him on his dromedary, he trotted hastily away in pursuit of the caravan,
so as to reach the sea, if possible, before its embarkation.
As the hoofs of the mule sounded fainter and fainter in the distance,
Paulus also quitted the senator's courtyard; Dorothea pointed after him
as he walked towards the mountain. "In truth, husband," said she, "this
has been a strange morning; everything that has occurred looks as clear
as day, and yet I cannot understand it all. My heart aches when I think
what may happen to the wretched Sirona if her enraged husband overtakes
her. It seems to me that there are two sorts of marriage; one was
instituted by the most loving of the angels, nay, by the All-merciful
Himself, but the other it is not to be thought of! How can those two live
together for the future? And that under our roof! Their closed house
looks to me as though ruined and burnt-out, and we have already seen the
nettles spring up which grow everywhere among the ruins of human
dwellings."
CHAPTER XII.
The path of every star is fixed and limited, every plant bears flowers
and fruit which in form and color exactly resemble their kind, and in all
the fundamental characteristics of their qualities and dispositions, of
their instinctive bent and external impulse, all animals of the same
species resemble each other; thus, the hunter who knows the red-deer in
his father's forest, may know in every forest on earth how the stag will
behave in any given case. The better a genus is fitted for variability in
the conformation of its individuals, the higher is the rank it is
entitled to hold in the graduated series of creatures capable of
development; and it is precisely that wonderful many-sidedness of his
inner life, and of its outward manifestation, which assigns to man his
superiority over all other animated beings.
Some few of our qualities and activities can be fitly symbolized in
allegorical fashion by animals; thus, courage finds an emblem in the
lion, gentleness in the dove, but the perfect human form has satisfied a
thousand generations, and will satisfy a thousand more, when we desire to
reduce the divinity to a sensible image, for, in truth, our heart is as
surely capable of comprehending "God in us,"--that is in our feelings--as
our intellect is capable of comprehending His outward manifestation in
the universe.
Every characteristic of every finite being is to be found again in man,
and no characteristic that we can attribute to the Most High is foreign
to our own soul, which, in like manner, is infinite and immeasurable, for
it can extend its investigating feelers to the very utmost boundary of
space and time. Hence, the roads which are open to the soul, are
numberless as those of the divinity. Often they seem strange, but the
initiated very well know that these roads are in accordance to fixed
laws, and that even the most exceptional emotions of the soul may be
traced back to causes which were capable of giving rise to them and to no
others.
Blows hurt, disgrace is a burden, and unjust punishment embitters the
heart, but Paulus' soul had sought and found a way to which these simple
propositions did not apply.
He had been ill-used and contemned, and, though perfectly innocent, ere
he left the oasis he was condemned to the severest penance. As soon as
the bishop had heard from Petrus of all that had happened in his house,
he had sent for Paulus, and as he could answer nothing to the accusation,
he had expelled him from his flock--to which the anchorites
belonged--forbidden him to visit the church on week-days, and declared
that this his sentence should be publicly proclaimed before the assembled
congregation of the believers.
And how did this affect Paulus as he climbed the mountain, lonely and
proscribed?
A fisherman from the little seaport of Pharan, who met him half-way and
exchanged a greeting with him, thought to himself as he looked after him,
"The great graybeard looks as happy as if he had found a treasure." Then
he walked on into the valley with his scaly wares, reminded, as he went,
of his son's expression of face when his wife bore him his first little
one.
Near the watch-tower at the edge of the defile, a party of anchorites
were piling some stones together. They had already heard of the bishop's
sentence on Paulus, the sinner, and they gave him no greeting. He
observed it and was silent, but when they could no longer see him he
laughed to himself and muttered, while he rubbed a weal that the
centurion's whip had left upon his back, "If they think that a Gaul's
cudgel has a pleasant flavor they are mistaken, however I would not
exchange it for a skin of Anthyllan wine; and if they could only know
that at least one of the stripes which torments me is due to each one of
themselves, they would be surprised! But away with pride! How they spat
on Thee, Jesus my Lord, and who am I, and how mildly have they dealt with
me, when I for once have taken on my back another's stripes. Not a drop
of blood was drawn! I wish the old man had hit harder!"
He walked cheerfully forward, and his mind recurred to the centurion's
speech that he could if he list, "tread him down like a worm," and he
laughed again softly, for he was quite aware that he was ten times as
strong as Phoebicius, and formerly he had overthrown the braggart
Arkesilaos of Kyrene and his cousin, the tall Xenophanes, both at once in
the sand of the Palaestra. Then he thought of Hermas, of his sweet dead
mother, and of his father, and--which was the most comforting thought of
all--of how he had spared the old man this bitter sorrow.
On his path there grew a little plant with a reddish blossom. In years he
had never looked at a flower or, at any rate, had never wished to possess
one; to-day he stooped down over the blossom that graced the rock,
meaning to pluck it. But he did not carry out his intention, for before
he had laid his hand upon it, he reflected:
"To whom could I offer it? And perhaps the flowers themselves rejoice in
the light, and in the silent life that is in their roots. How tightly it
clings to the rock. Farther away from the road flowers of even greater
beauty blow, seen by no mortal eye; they deck themselves in beauty for no
one but for their Creator, and because they rejoice in themselves. I too
will withdraw from the highways of mankind; let them accuse me! So long
as I live at peace with myself and my God I ask nothing of any one. He
that abases himself--aye, he that abases himself!--My hour too shall
come, and above and beyond this life I shall see them all once more;
Petrus and Dorothea, Agapitus and the brethren who now refuse to receive
me, and then, when my Saviour himself beckons me to Him, they will see me
as I am, and hasten to me and greet me with double kindness."
He looked up, proud and rejoicing as he thought thus, and painted to
himself the joys of Paradise, to which this day he had earned an assured
claim. He never took longer and swifter steps than when his mind was
occupied with such meditations, and when he reached Stephanus' cave he
thought the way from the oasis to the heights had been shorter than
usual.
He found the sick man in great anxiety, for he had waited until now for
his son in vain, and feared that Hermas had met with some accident--or
had abandoned him, and fled out into the world. Paulus soothed him with
gentle words, and told him of the errand on which he had sent the lad to
the farther coast of the sea.
We are never better disposed to be satisfied with even bad news than when
we have expected it to be much worse; so Stephanus listened to his
friend's explanation quite calmly, and with signs of approval. He could
no longer conceal from himself that Hermas was not ripe for the life of
an anchorite, and since he had learned that his unhappy wife--whom he had
so long given up for lost--had died a Christian, he found that he could
reconcile his thoughts to relinquishing the boy to the world. He had
devoted himself and his son to a life of penance, hoping and striving
that so Glycera's soul might be snatched from damnation, and now he knew
that she herself had earned her title to Heaven.
"When will he come home again?" he asked Paulus.
"In five or six days," was the answer. "Ali, the fisherman--out of whose
foot I took a thorn some time since--informed me secretly, as I was going
to church yesterday, that the Blemmyes are gathering behind the
sulphur-mountains; when they have withdrawn, it will be high time to send
Hermas to Alexandria. My brother is still alive, and for my sake he will
receive him as a blood-relation, for he too has been baptized."
"He may attend the school of catechumens in the metropolis, and if he--if
he--"
"That we shall see," interrupted Paulus. "For the present it comes to
this, we must let him go from hence, and leave him to seek out his own
way. You fancy that there may be in heaven a place of glory for such as
have never been overcome, and you would fain have seen Hermas among them.
It reminds me of the physician of Corinth, who boasted that he was
cleverer than any of his colleagues, for that not one of his patients had
ever died. And the man was right, for neither man nor beast had ever
trusted to his healing arts. Let Hermas try his young strength, and even
if he be no priest, but a valiant warrior like his forefathers, even so
he may honestly serve God. But it will be a long time before all this
comes to pass. So long as he is away I will attend on you--you still have
some water in your jar?"
"It has twice been filled for me," said the old man. "The brown
shepherdess, who so often waters her goats at our spring, came to me the
first thing in the morning and again about two hours ago; she asked after
Hermas, and then offered of her own accord to fetch water for me so long
as he was away. She is as timid as a bird, and flew off as soon as she
had set down the jug."
"She belongs to Petrus and cannot leave her goats for long," said Paulus.
"Now I will go and find you some herbs for a relish; there will be no
more wine in the first place. Look me in the face--for how great a sinner
now do you take me? Think the very worst of me, and yet perhaps you will
hear worse said of me. But here come two men. Stay! one is Hilarion, one
of the bishop's acolytes, and the other is Pachomius the Memphite, who
lately came to the mountain. They are coming up here, and the Egyptian is
carrying a small jar. I would it might hold some more wine to keep up
your strength."
The two friends had not long to remain in ignorance of their visitor's
purpose. So soon as they reached Stephanus' cave, both turned their backs
on Paulus with conspicuously marked intention; nay the acolyte signed his
brow with the cross, as if he thought it necessary to protect himself
against evil influences.
The Alexandrian understood; he drew back and was silent, while Hilarion
explained to the sick man that Paulus was guilty of grave sins, and that,
until he had done full penance, he must remain excluded as a rotten sheep
from the bishop's flock, as well as interdicted from waiting on a pious
Christian.
"We know from Petrus," the speaker went on, "that your son, father, has
been sent across the sea, and as you still need waiting on, Agapitus
sends you by me his blessing and this strengthening wine; this youth too
will stay by you, and provide you with all necessaries until Hermas comes
home."
With these words he gave the wine-jar to the old man, who looked in
astonishment from him to Paulus, who felt indeed cut to the heart when
the bishop's messenger turned to him for an instant, and with the cry,
"Get thee out from among us!" disappeared. How many kindly ties, how many
services willingly rendered and affectionately accepted were swept away
by these words--but Paulus obeyed at once. He went up to his sick friend,
their eyes met and each could see that the eyes of the other were dimmed
with tears.
"Paulus!" cried the old man, stretching out both his hands to his
departing friend, whom he felt he could forgive whatever his guilt; but
the Alexandrian did not take them, but turned away, and, without looking
back, hastily went up the mountain to a pathless spot, and then on
towards the valley--onwards and still onwards, till he was brought to a
pause by the steep declivity of the hollow way which led southwards from
the mountains into the oasis.
The sun stood high and it was burning hot. Streaming with sweat and
panting for breath he leaned against the glowing porphyry wall behind
him, hid his face in his hands and strove to collect himself, to think,
to pray--for a long time in vain; for instead of joy in the suffering
which he had taken upon himself, the grief of isolation weighed upon his
heart, and the lamentable cry of the old man had left a warning echo in
his soul, and roused doubts of the righteousness of a deed, by which even
the best and purest had been deceived, and led into injustice towards
him. His heart was breaking with anguish and grief, but when at last he
returned to the consciousness of his sufferings physical and mental, he
began to recover his courage, and even smiled as he murmured to himself:
"It is well, it is well--the more I suffer the more surely shall I find
grace. And besides, if the old man had seen Hermas go through what I have
experienced it would undoubtedly have killed him. Certainly I wish it
could have been done without--without--aye, it is even so--without
deceit; even when I was a heathen I was truthful and held a lie, whether
in myself or in another, in as deep horror as father Abraham held murder,
and yet when the Lord required him, he led his son Isaac to the
slaughter. And Moses when he beat the overseer--and Elias, and Deborah,
and Judith. I have taken upon myself no less than they, but my lie will
surely be forgiven me, if it is not reckoned against them that they shed
blood."
These and such reflections restored Paulus to equanimity and to
satisfaction with his conduct, and he began to consider, whether he
should return to his old cave and the neighborhood of Stephanus, or seek
for a new abode. He decided on the latter course; but first he must find
fresh water and some sort of nourishment; for his mouth and tongue were
quite parched.
Lower down in the valley sprang a brooklet of which he knew, and hard by
it grew various herbs and roots, with which he had often allayed his
hunger. He followed the declivity to its base, then turning to the left,
he crossed a small table land, which was easily accessible from the
gorge, but which on the side of the oasis formed a perpendicular cliff
many fathoms deep. Between it and the main mass of the mountain rose
numerous single peaks, like a camp of granite tents, or a wildly tossing
sea suddenly turned to stone; behind these blocks ran the streamlet,
which he found after a short search.
Perfectly refreshed, and with renewed resolve to bear the worst with
patience, he returned to the plateau, and from the edge of the precipice
he gazed down into the desert gorge that stretched away far below his
feet, and in whose deepest and remotest hollow the palmgroves and
tamarisk-thickets of the oasis showed as a sharply defined mass of green,
like a luxuriant wreath flung upon a bier. The whitewashed roofs of the
little town of Pharan shone brightly among the branches and clumps of
verdure, and above them all rose the new church, which he was now
forbidden to enter. For a moment the thought was keenly painful that he
was excluded from the devotions of the community, from the Lord's supper
and from congregational prayer, but then he asked, was not every block of
stone on the mountain an altar--was not the blue sky above a thousand
times wider, and more splendid than the mightiest dome raised by the hand
of man, not even excepting the vaulted roof of the Serapeum at
Alexandria, and he remembered the "Amen" of the stones, that had rung out
after the preaching of the blind man. By this time he had quite recovered
himself, and he went towards the cliff in order to find a cavern that he
knew of, and that was empty--for its gray-headed inhabitant had died some
weeks since. "Verily," thought he, "it seems to me that I am by no means
weighed down by the burden of my disgrace, but, on the contrary, lifted
up. Here at least I need not cast down my eyes, for I am alone with my
God, and in his presence I feel I need not be ashamed."
Thus meditating, he pressed on through a narrow space, which divided two
huge masses of porphyry, but suddenly he stood still, for he heard the
barking of a dog in his immediate neighborhood, and a few minutes after a
greyhound rushed towards him--now indignantly flying at him, and now
timidly retreating--while it carefully held up one leg, which was wrapped
in a many-colored bandage.
Paulus recollected the enquiry which Phoebicius lead addressed to the
Amalekite as to a greyhound, and he immediately guessed that the Gaul's
runaway wife must be not far off. His heart beat more quickly, and
although he did not immediately know how he should meet the disloyal
wife, he felt himself impelled to go to seek her. Without delay he
followed the way by which the dog had come, and soon caught sight of a
light garment, which vanished behind the nearest rock, and then behind a
farther, and yet a farther one.
At last he came up with the fleeing woman. She was standing at the very
edge of a precipice, that rose high and sheer above the abyss--a strange
and fearful sight; her long golden hair had got tangled, and waved over
her bosom and shoulders, half plaited, half undone. Only one foot was
firm on the ground; the other-with its thin sandal all torn by the sharp
stones--was stretched out over the abyss, ready for the next fatal step.
At the next instant she might disappear over the cliff, for though with
her right hand she held on to a point of rock, Paulus could see that the
boulder had no connection with the rock on which she stood, and rocked
too and fro.
She hung over the edge of the chasm like a sleepwalker, or a possessed
creature pursued by demons, and at the same time her eyes glistened with
such wild madness, and she drew her breath with such feverish rapidity
that Paulus, who had come close up to her, involuntarily drew back. He
saw that her lips moved, and though he could not understand what she
said, he felt that her voiceless utterance was to warn him back.
What should he do? If he hurried forward to save her by a hasty grip, and
if this manoeuvre failed, she would fling herself irredeemably into the
abyss: if he left her to herself, the stone to which she clung would get
looser and looser, and as soon as it fell she would certainly fall too.
He had once heard it said, that sleep-walkers always threw themselves
down when they heard their names spoken; this statement now recurred to
his mind, and he forbore from calling out to her.
Once more the unhappy woman waved him off; his very heart stopped
beating, for her movements were wild and vehement, and he could see that
the stone which she was holding on by shifted its place. He understood
nothing of all the words which she tried to say--for her voice, which
only yesterday had been so sweet, to-day was inaudibly hoarse--except the
one name "Phoebicius," and he felt no doubt that she clung to the stone
over the abyss, so that, like the mountain-goat when it sees itself
surprised by the hunter, she might fling herself into the depth below
rather than be taken by her pursuer. Paulus saw in her neither her guilt
nor her beauty, but only a child of man trembling on the brink of a
fearful danger whom he must save from death at any cost; and the thought
that he was at any rate not a spy sent in pursuit of her by her husband,
suggested to him the first words which he found courage to address to the
desperate woman. They were simple words enough, but they were spoken in a
tone which fully expressed the childlike amiability of his warm heart,
and the Alexandrian, who had been brought up in the most approved school
of the city of orators, involuntarily uttered his words in the admirably
rich and soft chest voice, which he so well knew how to use.
"Be thankful," said he, "poor dear woman--I have found you in a fortunate
hour. I am Paulus, Hermas' best friend, and I would willingly serve you
in your sore need. No danger is now threatening you, for Phoebicius is
seeking you on a wrong road; you may trust me. Look at me! I do not look
as if I could betray a poor erring woman. But you are standing on a spot,
where I would rather see my enemy than you; lay your hand confidently in
mine--it is no longer white and slender, but it is strong and
honest--grant me this request and you will never rue it! See, place your
foot here, and take care how you leave go of the rock there. You know not
how suspiciously it shook its head over your strange confidence in it.
Take care! there--your support has rolled over into the abyss! how it
crashes and splits. It has reached the bottom, smashed into a thousand
pieces, and I am thankful that you preferred to follow me rather than
that false support." While Paulus was speaking he had gone up to Sirona,
as a girl whose bird has escaped from its cage, and who creeps up to it
with timid care in the hope of recapturing it; he offered her his hand,
and as soon as he felt hers in his grasp, he had carefully rescued her
from her fearful position, and had led her down to a secure footing on
the plateau. So long as she followed him unresistingly he led her on
towards the mountain--without aim or fixed destination--but away, away
from the abyss.
She paused by a square block of diorite, and Paulus, who had not failed
to observe how heavy her steps were, desired her to sit down; he pushed
up a flag of stone, which he propped with smaller ones, so that Sirona
might not lack a support for her weary back. When he had accomplished
this, Sirona leaned back against the stone, and something of dawning
satisfaction was audible in the soft sigh, which was the first sound that
had escaped her tightly closed lips since her rescue. Paulus smiled at
her encouragingly, and said, "Now rest a little, I see what you want; one
cannot defy the heat of the sun for a whole day with impunity."
Sirona nodded, pointed to her mouth, and implored wearily and very softly
for "water, a little water." Paulus struck his hand against his
forehead, and cried eagerly, "Directly--I will bring you a fresh draught.
In a few minutes I will be back again."
Sirona looked after him as he hastened away. Her gaze became more and
more staring and glazed, and she felt as if the rock, on which she was
sitting, were changing into the ship which had brought her from Massilia
to Ostia. Every heaving motion of the vessel, which had made her so giddy
as it danced over the shifting waves, she now distinctly felt again, and
at last it seemed as if a whirlpool had seized the ship, and was whirling
it round faster and faster in a circle. She closed her eyes, felt vaguely
and in vain in the air for some holdfast, her head fell powerless on one
side, and before her cheek sank upon her shoulder she uttered one feeble
cry of distress, for she felt as if all her limbs were dropping from her
body, as leaves in autumn fall from the boughs, and she fell back
unconscious on the stony couch which Paulus had constructed for her.
It was the first swoon that Sirona, with her sound physical and mental
powers, had ever experienced; but the strongest of her sex would have
been overcome by the excitement, the efforts, the privations, and the
sufferings which had that day befallen the unfortunate fair one.
At first she had fled without any plan out into the night and up the
mountain; the moon lighted her on her way, and for fully an hour she
continued her upward road without any rest. Then she heard the voices of
travellers who were coming towards her, and she left the beaten road and
tried to get away from them, for she feared that her greyhound, which she
still carried' on her arm, would betray her by barking, or if they heard
it whining, and saw it limp. At last she had sunk down on a stone, and
had reflected on all the events of the last few hours, and on what she
had to do next. She could look back dreamily on the past, and build
castles in the air in a blue-skyed future-this was easy enough; but she
did not find it easy to reflect with due deliberation, and to think in
earnest. Only one thing was perfectly clear to her: she would rather
starve and die of thirst, and shame, and misery-nay, she would rather be
the instrument of her own death, than return to her husband. She knew
that she must in the first instance expect ill-usage, scorn, and
imprisonment in a dark room at the Gaul's hands; but all that seemed to
her far more endurable than the tenderness with which he from time to
time approached her. When she thought of that, she shuddered and clenched
her white teeth, and doubled her fists so tightly that her nails cut the
flesh. But what was she to do? If Hermas were to meet her? And yet what
help could she look for from him, for what was he but a mere lad, and the
thought of linking her life to his, if only for a day, appeared to her
foolish and ridiculous.
Certainly she felt no inclination to repent or to blame herself; still it
had been a great folly on her part to call him into the house for the
sake of amusing herself with him.
Then she recollected the severe punishment she had once suffered,
because, when she was still quite little, and without meaning any harm,
she had taken her father's water-clock to pieces, and had spoiled it.
She felt that she was very superior to Hermas, and her position was now
too grave a one for her to feel inclined to play any more. She thought
indeed of Petrus and Dorothea, but she could only reach them by going
back to the oasis, and then she feared to be discovered by Phoebicius.
If Polykarp now could only meet her on his way back from Raithu; but the
road she had just quitted did not lead from thence, but to the gate-way
that lay more to the southwards.
The senator's son loved her--of that she was sure, for no one else had
ever looked into her eyes with such deep delight, or such tender
affection; and he was no inexperienced boy, but a right earnest man,
whose busy and useful life now appeared to her in a quite different light
to that in which she had seen it formerly. How willingly now would she
have allowed herself to be supported and guided by Polykarp! But how
could she reach him? No--even from him there was nothing to be expected;
she must rely upon her own strength, and she decided that so soon as the
morning should blush, and the sun begin to mount in the cloudless sky,
she would keep herself concealed during the day, among the mountains, and
then as evening came on, she would go down to the sea, and endeavor to
get on board a vessel to Klysma and thence reach Alexandria. She wore a
ring with a finely cut onyx on her finger, elegant ear-rings in her ears,
and on her left arm a bracelet. These jewels were of virgin gold, and
besides these she had with her a few silver coins and one large gold
piece, that her father had given her as token out of his small store,
when she had quitted him for Rome, and that she had hitherto preserved as
carefully as if it were a talisman.
She pressed the token, which was sewn into a little bag, to her lips, and
thought of her paternal home, and her brothers and sisters.
Meanwhile the sun mounted higher and higher: she wandered from rock to
rock in search of a shady spot and a spring of water, but none was to be
found, and she was tormented with violent thirst and aching hunger. By
mid-day the strips of shade too had vanished, where she had found shelter
from the rays of the sun, which now beat down unmercifully on her un
protected head. Her forehead and neck began to tingle violently, and she
fled before the burning beams like a soldier before the shafts of his
pursuer. Behind the rocks which hemmed in the plateau on which Paulus met
her, at last, when she was quite exhausted, she found a shady
resting-place. The greyhound lay panting in her lap, and held up its
broken paw, which she had carefully bound up in the morning when she had
first sat down to rest, with a strip of stuff that she had torn with the
help of her teeth from her under-garment. She now bound it up afresh, and
nursed the little creature, caressing it like an infant. The dog was as
wretched and suffering as herself, and besides it was the only being
that, in spite of her helplessness, she could cherish and be dear to. But
ere long she lost the power even to speak caressing words or to stir a
hand to stroke the dog. It slipped off her lap and limped away, while she
sat staring blankly before her, and at last forgot her sufferings in an
uneasy slumber, till she was roused by Iambe's barking and the
Alexandrian's footstep. Almost half-dead, her mouth parched and brain on
fire, while her thoughts whirled in confusion, she believed that
Phoebicius had found her track, and was come to seize her. She had
already noted the deep precipice to the edge of which she now fled, fully
resolved to fling herself over into the depths below, rather than to
surrender herself prisoner.
Paulus had rescued her from the fall, but now--as he came up to her with
two pieces of stone which were slightly hollowed, so that he had been
able to bring some fresh water in them, and which he held level with
great difficulty, walking with the greatest care--he thought that
inexorable death had only too soon returned to claim the victim he had
snatched from him, for Sirona's head hung down upon her breast, her face
was sunk towards her lap, and at the back of her head, where her abundant
hair parted into two flowing tresses, Paulus observed on the snowy neck
of the insensible woman a red spot which the sun must have burnt there.
His whole soul was full of compassion for the young, fair, and unhappy
creature, and, while he took hold of her chin, which had sunk on her
bosom, lifted her white face, and moistened her forehead and lips with
water, he softly prayed for her salvation.
The shallow cavity of the stones only offered room for a very small
quantity of the refreshing moisture, and so he was obliged to return
several times to the spring. While he was away the dog remained by his
mistress, and would now lick her hand, now put his sharp little nose
close up to her mouth, and examine her with an anxious expression, as if
to ascertain her state of health.
When Paulus had gone the first time to fetch some water for Sirona he had
found the dog by the side of the spring, and he could not help thinking,
"The unreasoning brute has found the water without a guide while his
mistress is dying of thirst. Which is the wiser--the man or the brute?"
The little dog on his part strove to merit the anchorite's good feelings
towards him, for, though at first he had barked at him, he now was very
friendly to him, and looked him in the face from time to time as though
to ask, "Do you think she will recover?"
Paulus was fond of animals, and understood the little dog's language.
When Sirona's lips began to move and to recover their rosy color, he
stroked Iambe's smooth sharp head, and said, as he held a leaf that he
had curled up to hold some water to Sirona's lips, "Look, little fellow,
how she begins to enjoy it! A little more of this, and again a little
more. She smacks her lips as if I were giving her sweet Falernian. I will
go and fill the stone again; you stop here with her, I shall be back
again directly, but before I return she will have opened her eyes; you
are pleasanter to look upon than a shaggy old graybeard, and she will be
better pleased to see you than me when she awakes." Paulus' prognosis was
justified, for when he returned to Sirona with a fresh supply of water
she was sitting upright; she rubbed her open eyes, stretched her limbs,
clasped the greyhound in both arms, and burst into a violent flood of
tears.
The Alexandrian stood aside motionless, so as not to disturb her,
thinking to himself:
"These tears will wash away a large part of her suffering from her soul."
When at last she was calmer, and began to dry her eyes, he went up to
her, offered her the stone cup of water, and spoke to her kindly. She
drank with eager satisfaction, and ate the last bit of bread that he
could find in the pocket of his garment, soaking it in the water. She
thanked him with the childlike sweetness that was peculiar to her, and
then tried to rise, and willingly allowed him to support her. She was
still very weary, and her head ached, but she could stand and walk.
As soon as Paulus had satisfied himself that she had no symptoms Of
fever, he said, "Now, for to-day, you want nothing more but a warm mess
of food, and a bed sheltered from the night-chill; I will provide both.
You sit down here; the rocks are already throwing long shadows, and
before the sun disappears behind the mountain I will return. While I am
away, your four-footed companion here will while away the time."
He hastened down to the spring with quick steps; close to it was the
abandoned cave which he had counted on inhabiting instead of his former
dwelling. He found it after a short search, and in it, to his great joy,
a well preserved bed of dried plants, which he soon shook up and relaid,
a hearth, and wood proper for producing fire by friction, a water-jar,
and in a cellar-like hole, whose opening was covered with stones and so
concealed from any but a practised eye, there were some cakes of hard
bread, and several pots. In one of these were some good dates, in another
gleamed some white meal, a third was half full of sesame-oil, and a
fourth held some salt.
"How lucky it is," muttered the anchorite, as he quitted the cave, "that
the old anchorite was such a glutton."
By the time he returned to Sirona, the sun was going down.
There was something in the nature and demeanor of Paulus, which made all
distrust of him impossible, and Sirona was ready to follow him, but she
felt so weak that she could scarcely support herself on her feet.
"I feel," she said, "as if I were a little child, and must begin again to
learn to walk."
"Then let me be your nurse. I knew a Spartan dame once, who had a beard
almost as rough as mine. Lean confidently on me, and before we go down
the slope, we will go up and down the level here two or three times." She
took his arm, and he led her slowly up and down.
It vividly recalled a picture of the days of his youth, and he remembered
a day when his sister, who was recovering from a severe attack of fever,
was first allowed to go out into the open air. She had gone out, clinging
to his arm into the peristyle of his father's house; as he walked
backward and forwards with poor, weary, abandoned Sirona, his neglected
figure seemed by degrees to assume the noble aspect of a high-born Greek;
and instead of the rough, rocky soil, he felt as if he were treading the
beautiful mosaic pavement of his father's court. Paulus was Menander
again, and if there was little in the presence of the recluse, which
could recall his identity with the old man he had trodden down, the
despised anchorite felt, while the expelled and sinful woman leaned on
his arm, the same proud sense of succoring a woman, as when he was the
most distinguished youth of a metropolis, and when he had led forward the
master's much courted daughter in the midst of a shouting troop of
slaves.
Sirona had to remind Paulus that night was coming on, and was startled,
when the hermit removed her hand from his arm with ungentle haste, and
called to her to follow him with a roughness that was quite new to him.
She obeyed, and wherever it was necessary to climb over the rocks, he
supported and lifted her, but he only spoke when she addressed him.
When they had reached their destination, he showed her the bed, and
begged her to keep awake, till he should have prepared a dish of warm
food for her, and he shortly brought her a simple supper, and wished her
a good night's rest, after she had taken it.
Sirona shared the bread and the salted meal-porridge with her dog, and
then lay down on the couch, where she sank at once into a deep, dreamless
sleep, while Paulus passed the night sitting by the hearth.
He strove to banish sleep by constant prayer, but fatigue frequently
overcame him, and he could not help thinking of the Gaulish lady, and of
the many things, which if only he were still the rich Menander, he would
procure in Alexandria for her and for her comfort. Not one prayer could
he bring to its due conclusion, for either his eyes closed before he came
to the "Amen," or else worldly images crowded round him, and forced him
to begin his devotions again from the beginning, when he had succeeded in
recollecting himself. In this half-somnolent state he obtained not one
moment of inward collectedness, of quiet reflection; not even when he
gazed up at the starry heavens, or looked down on the oasis, veiled in
night, where many others like himself were deserted by sleep. Which of
the citizens could it be that was watching by that light which he saw
glimmering down there in unwonted brightness?--till he himself,
overpowered by fatigue, fell asleep.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Overlooks his own fault in his feeling of the judge's injustice
HOMO SUM
By Georg Ebers
Volume 4.
CHAPTER XIII.
The light in the town, which had attracted Paulus, was in Petrus' house,
and burnt in Polykarp's room, which formed the whole of a small
upper-story, which the senator had constructed for his son over the
northern portion of the spacious flat roof of the main building. The
young man had arrived about noon with the slaves he had just procured,
had learned all that had happened in his absence, and had silently
withdrawn into his own room after supper was ended. Here he still
lingered over his work.
A bed, a table on and under which lay a multitude of wax-tablets,
papyrus-rolls, metal-points, and writing-reeds, with a small bench, on
which stood a water-jar and basin, composed the furniture of this room;
on its whitewashed walls hung several admirable carvings in relief, and
figures of men and animals stood near them in long rows. In one corner,
near a stone water-jar, lay a large, damp, shining mass of clay.
Three lamps fastened to stands abundantly lighted this work-room, but
chiefly a figure standing on a high trestle, which Polykarp's fingers
were industriously moulding.
Phoebicius had called the young sculptor a fop, and not altogether
unjustly, for he loved to be well dressed and was choice as to the cut
and color of his simple garments, and he rarely neglected to arrange his
abundant hair with care, and to anoint it well; and yet it was almost
indifferent to him, whether his appearance pleased other people or no,
but he knew nothing nobler than the human form, and an instinct, which he
did not attempt to check, impelled him to keep his own person as nice as
he liked to see that of his neighbor.
Now at this hour of the night, he wore only a shirt of white woollen
stuff, with a deep red border. His locks, usually so well-kept, seemed to
stand out from his head separately, and instead of smoothing and
confining them, he added to their wild disorder, for, as he worked, he
frequently passed his hand through them with a hasty movement. A bat,
attracted by the bright light, flew in at the open window--which was
screened only at the bottom by a dark curtain--and fluttered round the
ceiling; but he did not observe it, for his work absorbed his whole soul
and mind. In this eager and passionate occupation, in which every nerve
and vein in his being seemed to bear a part, no cry for help would have
struck his ear--even a flame breaking out close to him would not have
caught his eye. His cheeks glowed, a fine dew of glistening sweat covered
his brow, and his very gaze seemed to become more and more firmly riveted
to the sculpture as it took form under his hand. Now and again he stepped
back from it, and leaned backwards from his hips, raising his hands to
the level of his temples, as if to narrow the field of vision; then he
went up to the model, and clutched the plastic mass of clay, as though it
were the flesh of his enemy.
He was now at work on the flowing hair of the figure before him, which
had already taken the outline of a female head, and he flung the bits of
clay, which he removed from the back of it, to the ground, as violently
as though he were casting them at an antagonist at his feet. Again his
finger-tips and modelling-tool were busy with the mouth, nose, cheeks,
and eyes, and his own eyes took a softer expression, which gradually grew
to be a gaze of ecstatic delight, as the features he was moulding began
to agree more and more with the image, which at this time excluded every
other from his imagination.
At last, with glowing cheeks, he had finished rounding the soft form of
the shoulders, and drew back once more to contemplate the effect of the
completed work; a cold shiver seized him, and he felt himself impelled to
lift it up, and dash it to the ground with all his force. But he soon
mastered this stormy excitement, he pushed his hand through his hair
again and again, and posted himself, with a melancholy smile and with
folded hands, in front of his creation; sunk deeper and deeper in his
contemplation of it, he did not observe that the door behind him was
opened, although the flame of his lamps flickered in the draught, and
that his mother had entered the work-room, and by no means endeavored to
approach him unheard, or to surprise him. In her anxiety for her darling,
who had gone through so many bitter experiences during the past day, she
had not been able to sleep. Polykarp's room lay above her bedroom, and
when his steps over head betrayed that, though it was now near morning,
he had not yet gone to rest, she had risen from her bed without waking
Petrus, who seemed to be sleeping. She obeyed her motherly impulse to
encourage Polykarp with some loving words, and climbing up the narrow
stair that led to the roof, she went into his room. Surprised,
irresolute, and speechless she stood for some time behind the young man,
and looked at the strongly illuminated and beautiful features of the
newly-formed bust, which was only too like its well-known prototype. At
last she laid her hand on her son's shoulder, and spoke his name.
Polykarp stepped back, and looked at his mother in bewilderment, like a
man roused from sleep; but she interrupted the stammering speech with
which he tried to greet her, by saying, gravely and not without severity,
as she pointed to the statue, "What does this mean?"
"What should it mean, mother?" answered Polykarp in a low tone, and
shaking his head sadly. "Ask me no more at present, for if you gave me no
rest, and even if I tried to explain to you how to-day--this very day--I
have felt impelled and driven to make this woman's image, still you could
not understand me--no, nor any one else."
"God forbid that I should ever understand it!" cried Dorothea. "'Thou
shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife,' was the commandment of the Lord on
this mountain. And you? You think I could not understand you? Who should
understand you then, if not your mother? This I certainly do not
comprehend, that a son of Petrus and of mine should have thrown all the
teaching and the example of his parents so utterly to the wind. But what
you are aiming at with this statue, it seems to me is not hard to guess.
As the forbidden-fruit hangs too high for you, you degrade your art, and
make to yourself an image that resembles her according to your taste.
Simply and plainly it comes to this; as you can no longer see the Gaul's
wife in her own person, and yet cannot exist without the sweet presence
of the fair one, you make a portrait of clay to make love to, and you
will carry on idolatry before it, as once the Jews did before the golden
calf and the brazen serpent."
Polykarp submitted to his mother's angry blame in silence, but in painful
emotion. Dorothea had never before spoken to him thus, and to hear such
words from the very lips which were used to address him with such
heart-felt tenderness, gave him unspeakable pain. Hitherto she had always
been inclined to make excuses for his weaknesses and little faults, nay,
the zeal with which she had observed and pointed out his merits and
performances before strangers as well as before their own family, had
often seemed to him embarrassing. And now? She had indeed reason to blame
him, for Sirona was the wife of another, she had never even noticed his
admiration, and now, they all said, had committed a crime for the sake of
a stranger. It must seem both a mad and a sinful thing in the eyes of men
that he of all others should sacrifice the best he had--his Art--and how
little could Dorothea, who usually endeavored to understand him,
comprehend the overpowering impulse which had driven him to his task.
He loved and honored his mother with his whole heart, and feeling that
she was doing herself an injustice by her false and low estimate of his
proceedings, he interrupted her eager discourse, raising his hands
imploringly to her.
"No, mother, no!" he exclaimed. "As truly as God is my helper, it is not
so. It is true that I have moulded this head, but not to keep it, and
commit the sin of worshipping it, but rather to free myself from the
image that stands before my mind's eye by day and by night, in the city
and in the desert, whose beauty distracts my mind when I think, and my
devotions when I try to pray. To whom is it given to read the soul of
man? And is not Sirona's form and face the loveliest image of the Most
High? So to represent it, that the whole charm that her presence
exercises over me might also be felt by every beholder, is a task that I
have set myself ever since her arrival in our house. I had to go back to
the capital, and the work I longed to achieve took a clearer form; at
every hour I discovered something to change and to improve in the pose of
the head, the glance of the eye or the expression of the mouth. But still
I lacked courage to put the work in hand, for it seemed too audacious to
attempt to give reality to the glorious image in my soul, by the aid of
gray clay and pale cold marble; to reproduce it so that the perfect work
should delight the eye of sense, no less than the image enshrined in my
breast delights my inward eye. At the same time I was not idle, I gained
the prize for the model of the lions, and if I have succeeded with the
Good Shepherd blessing the flock, which is for the sarcophagus of Comes,
and if the master could praise the expression of devoted tenderness in
the look of the Redeemer, I know--nay, do not interrupt me, mother, for
what I felt was a pure emotion and no sin--I know that it was because I
was myself so full of love, that I was enabled to inspire the very stone
with love. At last I had no peace, and even without my father's orders I
must have returned home; then I saw her again, and found her even more
lovely than the image which reigned in my soul. I heard her voice, and
her silvery bell-like laughter--and then--and then--. You know very well
what I learned yesterday. The unworthy wife of an unworthy husband, the
woman Sirona, is gone from me for ever, and I was striving to drive her
image from my soul, to annihilate it and dissipate it--but in vain! and
by degrees a wonderful stress of creative power came upon me. I hastily
placed the lamps, took the clay in my hand, and feature by feature I
brought forth with bitter joy the image that is deeply graven in my
heart, believing that thus I might be released from the spell. There is
the fruit which was ripened in my heart, but there, where it so long has
dwelt, I feel a dismal void, and if the husk which so long tenderly
enfolded this image were to wither and fall asunder, I should not wonder
at it.--To that thing there clings the best part of my life."
"Enough!" exclaimed Dorothea, interrupting her son who stood before her
in great agitation and with trembling lips. "God forbid that that mask
there should destroy your life and soul. I suffer nothing impure within
my house, and you should not in your heart. That which is evil can never
more be fair, and however lovely the face there may look to you, it looks
quite as repulsive to me when I reflect that it probably smiled still
more fascinatingly on some strolling beggar. If the Gaul brings her back
I will turn her out of my house, and I will destroy her image with my own
hands if you do not break it in pieces on the spot."
Dorothea's eyes were swimming in tears as she spoke these words. She had
felt with pride and emotion during her son's speech how noble and
high-minded he was, and the idea that this rare and precious treasure
should be spoilt or perhaps altogether ruined for the sake of a lost
woman, drove her to desperation, and filled her motherly heart with
indignation.
Firmly resolved to carry out her threat she stepped towards the figure,
but Polykarp placed himself in her way, raising his arm imploringly to
defend it, and saying, "Not to-day--not yet, mother! I will cover it up,
and will not look at it again till to-morrow, but once--only once--I must
see it again by sunlight."
"So that to-morrow the old madness may revive in you!" cried Dorothea.
"Move out of my way or take the hammer yourself."
"You order it, and you are my mother," said Polykarp.
He slowly went up to the chest in which his tools and instruments lay,
and bitter tears ran down his cheeks, as he took his heaviest hammer in
his hand.
When the sky has shown for many days in summer-blue, and then suddenly
the clouds gather for a storm, when the first silent but fearful flash
with it noisy but harmless associate the thunder-clap has terrified the
world, a second and third thunder-bolt immediately follow. Since the
stormy night of yesterday had broken in on the peaceful, industrious, and
monotonous life by the senator's hearth, many things had happened that
had filled him and his wife with fresh anxiety.
In other houses it was nothing remarkable that a slave should run away,
but in the senator's it was more than twenty years since such a thing had
occurred, and yesterday the goat-herd Miriam had disappeared. This was
vexatious, but the silent sorrow of his son Polykarp was a greater
anxiety to Petrus. It did not please him that the youth, who was usually
so vehement, should submit unresistingly and almost indifferently to the
Bishop Agapitus, who prohibited his completing his lions. His son's sad
gaze, his crushed and broken aspect were still in his mind when at last
he went to rest for the night; it was already late, but sleep avoided him
even as it had avoided Dorothea. While the mother was thinking of her
son's sinful love and the bleeding wound in his young and betrayed heart,
the father grieved for Polykarp's baffled hopes of exercising his art on
a great work and recalled the saddest, bitterest day of his own youth;
for he too had served his apprenticeship under a sculptor in Alexandria,
had looked up to the works of the heathen as noble models, and striven to
form himself upon them. He had already been permitted by his master to
execute designs of his own, and out of the abundance of subjects which
offered themselves, he had chosen to model an Ariadne, waiting and
longing for the return of Thescus, as a symbolic image of his own soul
awaiting its salvation. How this work had filled his mind! how delightful
had the hours of labor seemed to him!--when, suddenly, his stern father
had come to the city, had seen his work before it was quite finished, and
instead of praising it had scorned it; had abused it as a heathen idol,
and had commanded Petrus to return home with him immediately, and to
remain there, for that his son should be a pious Christian, and a good
stone-mason withal--not half a heathen, and a maker of false gods.
Petrus had much loved his art, but he offered no resistance to his
father's orders; he followed him back to the oasis, there to superintend
the work of the slaves who hewed the stone, to measure granite-blocks for
sarcophagi and pillars, and to direct the cutting of them. His father was
a man of steel, and he himself a lad of iron, and when he saw himself
compelled to yield to his father and to leave his master's workshop, to
abandon his cherished and unfinished work and to become an artizan and
mail of business, he swore never again to take a piece of clay in his
hand, or to wield a chisel. And he kept his word even after his fathers
death; but his creative instincts and love of art continued to live and
work in him, and were transmitted to his two sons.
Antonius was a highly gifted artist, and if Polykarp's master was not
mistaken, and if he himself were not misled by fatherly affection, his
second son was on the high road to the very first rank in art--to a
position reached only by elect spirits.
Petrus knew the models for the Good Shepherd and for the lions, and
declared to himself that these last were unsurpassable in truth, power,
and majesty. How eagerly must the young artist long to execute them in
hard stone, and to see them placed in the honored, though indeed pagan,
spot, which was intended for them. And now the bishop forbade him the
work, and the poor fellow might well be feeling just as he himself had
felt thirty years ago, when he had been commanded to abandon the immature
first-fruits of his labor.
Was the bishop indeed right? This and many other questions agitated the
sleepless father, and as soon as he heard that his wife had risen from
her bed to go to her son, whose footsteps he too could hear overhead, he
got up and followed her.
He found the door of the work-room open, and, himself unseen and unheard,
he was witness to his wife's vehement speech, and to the lad's
justification, while Polykarp's work stood in the full light of the
lamps, exactly in front of him.
His gaze was spell-bound to the mass of clay; he looked and looked, and
was not weary of looking, and his soul swelled with the same awe-struck
sense of devout admiration that it had experienced, when for the first
time, in his early youth, he saw with his own eyes the works of the great
old Athenian masters in the Caesareum.
And this head was his son's work!
He stood there greatly overcome, his hands clasped together, holding his
breath till his mouth was dry, and swallowing his tears to keep them from
falling. At the same time he listened with anxious attention, so as not
to lose one word of Polykarp's.
"Aye, thus and thus only are great works of art begotten," said he to
himself, "and if the Lord had bestowed on me such gifts as on this lad,
no father, nay, no god, should have compelled me to leave my Ariadne
unfinished. The attitude of the body was not bad I should say--but the
head, the face--Aye, the man who can mould such a likeness as that has
his hand and eye guided by the holy spirits of art. He who has done that
head will be praised in the latter days together with the great Athenian
masters--and he-yes, he, merciful Heaven! he is my own beloved son!"
A blessed sense of rejoicing, such as he had not felt since his early
youth, filled his heart, and Dorothea's ardor seemed to him half pitiful
and half amusing.
It was not till his duteous son took the hammer in his hand, that he
stepped between his wife and the bust, saying kindly:
"There will be time enough to-morrow to destroy the work. Forget the
model, my son, now that you have taken advantage of it so successfully. I
know of a better mistress for you--Art--to whom belongs everything of
beauty that the Most High has created--In Art in all its breadth and
fulness, not fettered and narrowed by any Agapitus."
Polykarp flung himself into his father's arms, and the stern man, hardly
master of his emotions, kissed the boy's forehead, his eyes, and his
cheeks.
CHAPTER XIV.
At noon of the following day the senator went to the women's room, and
while he was still on the threshold, he asked his wife--who was busy at
the loom:
"Where is Polykarp? I did not find him with Antonius, who is working at
the placing of the altar, and I thought I might find him here."
"After going to the church," said Dorothea, "he went up the mountain. Go
down to the workshops, Marthana, and see if your brother has come back."
Her daughter obeyed quickly and gladly, for her brother was to her the
dearest, and seemed to her to be the best, of men. As soon as the pair
were alone together Petrus said, while he held out his hand to his wife
with genial affection, "Well, mother--shake hands." Dorothea paused for
an instant, looking him in the face, as if to ask him, "Does your pride
at last allow you to cease doing me an injustice?" It was a reproach, but
in truth not a severe one, or her lips would hardly have trembled so
tenderly, as she said.
"You cannot be angry with me any longer, and it is well that all should
once more be as it ought."
All certainly had not been "as it ought," for since the husband and wife
had met in Polykarp's work-room, they had behaved to each other as if
they were strangers. In their bedroom, on the way to church, and at
breakfast, they had spoken to each no more than was absolutely necessary,
or than was requisite in order to conceal their difference from the
servants and children. Up to this time, an understanding had always
subsisted between them that had never taken form in words, and yet that
had scarcely in a single case been infringed, that neither should ever
praise one of their children for anything that the other thought
blameworthy, and vice versa.
But in this night, her husband had followed up her severest condemnation
by passionately embracing the wrong-doer. Never had she been so stern in
any circumstances, while on the other hand her husband, so long as she
could remember, had never been so softhearted and tender to his son, and
yet she had controlled herself so far, as not to contradict Petrus in
Polykarp's presence, and to leave the work-room in silence with her
husband.
"When we are once alone together in the bedroom," thought she, "I will
represent to him his error as I ought, and he will have to answer for
himself."
But she did not carry out this purpose, for she felt that something must
be passing in her husband's mind that she did not understand; otherwise
how could his grave eyes shine so mildly and kindly, and his stern lips
smile so affectionately after all that had occurred when he, lamp in
hand, had mounted the narrow stair.
He had often told her that she could read his soul like an open book, but
she did not conceal from herself that there were certain sides of that
complex structure whose meaning she was incapable of comprehending. And
strange to say, she ever and again came upon these incomprehensible
phases of his soul, when the images of the gods, and the idolatrous
temples of the heathen, or when their sons' enterprises and work were the
matters in hand. And yet Petrus was the son of a pious Christian; but his
grandfather had been a Greek heathen, and hence perhaps a certain
something wrought in his blood which tormented her, because she could not
reconcile it with Agapitus' doctrine, but which she nevertheless dared
not attempt to oppose because her taciturn husband never spoke out with
so much cheerfulness and frankness as when he might talk of these things
with his sons and their friends, who often accompanied them to the oasis.
Certainly, it could be nothing sinful that at this particular moment
seemed to light up her husband's face, and restore his youth.
"They just are men," said she to herself, "and in many things they have
the advantage of us women. The old man looks as he did on his
wedding-day! Polykarp is the very image of him, as every one says, and
now, looking at the father, and recalling to my mind how the boy looked
when he told me how he could not refrain from making Sirona's portrait, I
must say that I never saw such a likeness in the whole course of my
life."
He bid her a friendly good night, and extinguished the lamp. She would
willingly have said a loving word to him, for his contented expression
touched and comforted her, but that would just then have been too much
after what she had gone through in her son's workroom. In former years it
had happened pretty often that, when one of them had caused
dissatisfaction to the other, and there had been some quarrel between
them, they had gone to rest unreconciled, but the older they grew the
more rarely did this occur, and it was now a long time since any shadow
had fallen on the perfect serenity of their married life.
Three years ago, on the occasion of the marriage of their eldest son,
they had been standing together, looking up at the starry sky, when
Petrus had come close up to her, and had said, "How calmly and peacefully
the wanderers up there follow their roads without jostling or touching
one another! As I walked home alone from the quarries by their friendly
light, I thought of many things. Perhaps there was once a time when the
stars rushed wildly about in confusion, crossing each other's path, while
many a star flew in pieces at the impact. Then the Lord created man, and
love came into the world and filled the heavens and the earth, and he
commanded the stars to be our light by night; then each began to respect
the path of the other, and the stars more rarely came into collision till
even the smallest and swiftest kept to its own path and its own period,
and the shining host above grew to be as harmonious as it is numberless.
Love and a common purpose worked this marvel, for he who loves another,
will do him no injury, and he who is bound to perfect a work with the
help of another, will not hinder nor delay him. We two have long since
found the right road, and if at any time one of us is inclined to cross
the path of the other, we are held back by love and by our common duty,
namely to shed a pure light on the path of our children."
Dorothea had never forgotten these words, and they came into her mind now
again when Petrus held out his hand to her so warmly; as she laid hers in
it, she said:
"For the sake of dear peace, well and good--but one thing I cannot leave
unsaid. Soft-hearted weakness is not usually your defect, but you will
utterly spoil Polykarp."
"Leave him, let us leave him as he is," cried Petrus, kissing his wife's
brow. "It is strange how we have exchanged parts! Yesterday you were
exhorting me to mildness towards the lad, and to-day--"
"To-day I am severer than you," interrupted Dorothea. "Who, indeed, could
guess that an old graybeard would derogate from the duties of his office
as father and as judge for the sake of a woman's smiling face in clay--as
Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage?"
"And to whom would it occur," asked Petrus, taking up his wife's tone,
"that so tender a mother as you would condemn her favorite son, because
he labored to earn peace for his soul by a deed--by a work for which his
master might envy him?"
"I have indeed observed," interrupted Dorothea, that Sirona's image has
bewitched you, and you speak as if the boy had achieved some great
miracle. I do not know much about modelling and sculpture, and I will not
contradict you, but if the fair-haired creature's face were less pretty,
and if Polykarp had not executed any thing remarkable, would it have made
the smallest difference in what he has done and felt wrong? Certainly
not. But that is just like men, they care only for success."
"And with perfect justice," answered Petrus, "if the success is attained,
not in mere child's play, but by a severe struggle. 'To him, that hath,
shall more be given,' says the scripture, and he who has a soul more
richly graced than others have--he who is helped by good spirits--he
shall be forgiven many things that even a mild judge would be unwilling
to pardon in a man of poor gifts, who torments and exerts himself and yet
brings nothing to perfection. Be kind to the boy again. Do you know what
prospect lies before you through him? You yourself in your life have done
much good, and spoken much wisdom, and I, and the children, and the
people in this place, will never forget it all. But I can promise you the
gratitude of the best and noblest who now live or who will live in
centuries to come--for that you are the mother of Polykarp!"
"And people say," cried Dorothea, "that every mother has four eyes for
her children's merits. If that is true, then fathers no doubt have ten,
and you as many as Argus, of whom the heathen legend speaks--But there
comes Polykarp."
Petrus went forward to meet his son, and gave him his hand, but in quite
a different manner to what he had formerly shown; at least it seemed to
Dorothea that her husband received the youth, no longer as his father and
master, but as a friend greets a friend who is his equal in privileges
and judgment. When Polykarp turned to greet her also she colored all
over, for the thought flashed through her mind that her son, when he
thought of the past night, must regard her as unjust or foolish; but she
soon recovered her own calm equanimity, for Polykarp was the same as
ever, and she read in his eyes that he felt towards her the same as
yesterday and as ever.
"Love," thought she, "is not extinguished by injustice, as fire is by
water. It blazes up brighter or less bright, no doubt, according to the
way the wind blows, but it cannot be wholly smothered--least of all by
death."
Polykarp had been up the mountain, and Dorothea was quite satisfied when
he related what had led him thither. He had long since planned the
execution of a statue of Moses, and when his father had left him, he
could not get the tall and dignified figure of the old man out of his
mind. He felt that he had found the right model for his work. He must, he
would forget--and he knew, that he could only succeed if he found a task
which might promise to give some new occupation to his bereaved soul.
Still, he had seen the form of the mighty man of God which he proposed to
model, only in vague outline before his mind's eye, and he had been
prompted to go to a spot whither many pilgrims resorted, and which was
known as the Place of Communion, because it was there that the Lord had
spoken to Moses. There Polykarp had spent some time, for there, if
anywhere--there, where the Law-giver himself had stood, must he find
right inspiration.
"And you have accomplished your end?" asked his father.
Polykarp shook his head.
"If you go often enough to the sacred spot, it will come to you," said
Dorothea. "The beginning is always the chief difficulty; only begin at
once to model your father's head."
"I have already begun it," replied Polykarp, "but I am still tired from
last night."
"You look pale, and have dark lines under your eyes," said Dorothea
anxiously. "Go up stairs and he down to rest. I will follow you and bring
you a beaker of old wine."
"That will not hurt him," said Petrus, thinking as he spoke--"A draught
of Lethe would serve him even better."
When, an hour later, the senator sought his son in his work-room, he
found him sleeping, and the wine stood untouched on the table. Petrus
softly laid his hand on his son's forehead and found it cool and free
from fever. Then he went quietly up to the portrait of Sirona, raised the
cloth with which it was covered, and stood before it a long time sunk in
thought. At last he drew back, covered it up again, and examined the
models which stood on a shelf fastened to the wall.
A small female figure particularly fixed his attention, and he was taking
it admiringly in his band when Polykarp awoke.
"That is the image of the goddess of fate--that is a Tyche," said Petrus.
"Do not be angry with me, father," entreated Polykarp. "You know, the
figure of a Tyche is to stand in the hand of the statue of the Caesar
that is intended for the new city of Constantine, and so I have tried to
represent the goddess. The drapery and pose of the arms, I think, have
succeeded, but I failed in the head." Petrus, who had listened to him
with attention, glanced involuntarily at the head of Sirona, and Polykarp
followed his eyes surprised and almost startled.
The father and son had understood each other, and Polykarp said, "I had
already thought of that."
Then he sighed bitterly, and said to himself, "Yes and verily, she is the
goddess of my fate." But he dared not utter this aloud.
But Petrus had heard him sigh, and said, "Let that pass. This head smiles
with sweet fascination, and the countenance of the goddess that rules the
actions even of the immortals, should be stern and grave."
Polykarp could contain himself no longer.
"Yes, father," he exclaimed. "Fate is terrible--and yet I will represent
the goddess with a smiling mouth, for that which is most terrible in her
is, that she rules not by stern laws, but smiles while she makes us her
sport."
CHAPTER XV.
It was a splendid morning; not a cloud dimmed the sky which spread high
above desert, mountain, and oasis, like an arched tent of uniform
deep-blue silk. How delicious it is to breathe the pure, light, aromatic
air on the heights, before the rays of the sun acquire their mid-day
power, and the shadows of the heated porphyry cliffs, growing shorter and
shorter, at last wholly disappear!
With what delight did Sirona inhale this pure atmosphere, when after a
long night--the fourth that she had passed in the anchorite's dismal
cave-she stepped out into the air. Paulus sat by the hearth, and was so
busily engaged with some carving, that he did not observe her approach.
"Kind good man!" thought Sirona, as she perceived a steaming pot on the
fire, and the palm-branches which the Alexandrian had fastened up by the
entrance to the cave, to screen her from the mounting sun. She knew the
way without a guide to the spring from which Paulus had brought her water
at their first meeting, and she now slipped away, and went down to it
with a pretty little pitcher of burnt clay in her hand. Paulus did indeed
see her, but he made as though he neither, saw nor heard, for he knew she
was going there to wash herself, and to dress and smarten herself as well
as might be--for was she not a woman! When she returned, she looked not
less fresh and charming than on that morning when she had been seen and
watched by Hermas. True, her heart was sore, true, she was perplexed and
miserable, but sleep and rest had long since effaced from her healthy,
youthful, and elastic frame all traces left by that fearful day of
flight; and fate, which often means best by us when it shows us a hostile
face, had sent her a minor anxiety to divert her from her graver cares.
Her greyhound was very ill, and it seemed that in the ill-treatment it
had experienced, not only its leg had been broken, but that it had
suffered some internal injury. The brisk, lively little creature fell
down powerless when ever it tried to stand, and when she took it up to
nurse it comfortably in her lap, it whined pitifully, and looked up at
her sorrowfully, and as if complaining to her. It would take neither food
nor drink; its cool little nose was hot; and when she left the cave,
Iambe lay panting on the fine woollen coverlet which Paulus had spread
upon the bed, unable even to look after her.
Before taking the dog the water she had fetched in the graceful
jar--which was another gift from her hospitable friend--she went up to
Paulus and greeted him kindly. He looked up from his work, thanked her,
and a few minutes later, when she came out of the cave again, asked her,
"How is the poor little creature?"
Sirona shrugged her shoulders, and said sadly, "She has drunk nothing,
and does not even know me, and pants as rapidly as last evening--if I
were to lose the poor little beast!--"
She could say no more for emotion, but Paulus shook his head.
"It is sinful," he said, "to grieve so for a beast devoid of reason."
"Iambe is not devoid of reason," replied Sirona. "And even if she were,
what have I left if she dies? She grew up in my father's house, where all
loved me; I had her first when she was only a few days old, and I brought
her up on milk on a little bit of sponge. Many a time, when I heard the
little thing whining for food, have I got out of bed at night with bare
feet; and so she came to cling to me like a child, and could not do
without me. No one can know how another feels about such things. My
father used to tell us of a spider that beautified the life of a
prisoner, and what is a dirty dumb creature like that to my clever,
graceful little dog! I have lost my home, and here every one believes the
worst of me, although I have done no one any harm, and no one, no one
loves me but Iambe."
"But I know of one who loves every one with a divine and equal love,"
interrupted Paulus.
"I do not care for such a one," answered Sirona. "Iambe follows no one
but me; what good can a love do me that I must share with all the world!
But you mean the crucified God of the Christians? He is good and pitiful,
so says Dame Dorothea; but he is dead--I cannot see him, nor hear him,
and, certainly, I cannot long for one who only shows me grace. I want one
to whom I can count for something, and to whose life and happiness I am
indispensable."
A scarcely perceptible shudder thrilled through the Alexandrian as she
spoke these words, and he thought, as he glanced at her face and figure
with a mingled expression of regret and admiration, "Satan, before he
fell, was the fairest among the pure spirits, and he still has power over
this woman. She is still far from being ripe for salvation, and yet she
has a gentle heart, and even if she has erred, she is not lost."
Sirona's eyes had met his, and she said with a sigh, "You look at me so
compassionately--if only Iambe were well, and if I succeeded in reaching
Alexandria, my destiny would perhaps take a turn for the better."
Paulus had risen while she spoke, and had taken the pot from the hearth;
he now offered it to his guest, saying:
"For the present we will trust to this broth to compensate to you for the
delights of the capital; I am glad that you relish it. But tell me now,
have you seriously considered what danger may threaten a beautiful,
young, and unprotected woman in the wicked city of the Greeks? Would it
not be better that you should submit to the consequences of your guilt,
and return to Phoebicius, to whom unfortunately you belong?"
Sirona, at these words, had set down the vessel out of which she was
eating, and rising in passionate haste, she exclaimed:
"That shall never, never be!--And when I was sitting up there half-dead,
and took your step for that of Phoebicius, the gods showed me a way to
escape from him, and from you or anyone who would drag me back to him.
When I fled to the edge of the abyss, I was raving and crazed, but what I
then would have done in my madness, I would do now in cold blood--as
surely as I hope to see my own people in Arelas once more! What was I
once, and to what have I come through Phoebicius! Life was to me a sunny
garden with golden trellises and shady trees and waters as bright as
crystal, with rosy flowers and singing birds; and he, he has darkened its
light, and fouled its springs, and broken down its flowers. All now seems
dumb and colorless, and if the abyss is my grave, no one will miss me nor
mourn for me."
"Poor woman!" said Paulus. "Your husband then showed you very little
love."
"Love," laughed Sirona, "Phoebicius and love! Only yesterday I told you,
how cruelly he used to torture me after his feasts, when he was drunk or
when he recovered from one of his swoons. But one thing he did to me, one
thing which broke the last thread of a tie between us. No one yet has
ever heard a word of it from me; not even Dorothea, who often blamed me
when I let slip a hard word against my husband. It was well for her to
talk--if I had found a husband like Petrus I might perhaps have been like
Dorothea. It is a marvel, which I myself do not understand, that I did
not grow wicked with such a man, a man who--why should I conceal it--who,
when we were at Rome, because he was in debt, and because he hoped to get
promotion through his legate Quintillus, sold me--me--to him. He himself
brought the old man--who had often followed me about--into his house, but
our hostess, a good woman, had overheard the matter, and betrayed it all
to me. It is so base, so vile--it seems to blacken my soul only to think
of it! The legate got little enough in return for his sesterces, but
Phoebicius did not restore his wages of sin, and his rage against me knew
no bounds when he was transferred to the oasis at the instigation of his
betrayed chief. Now you know all, and never advise me again to return to
that man to whom my misfortune has bound me.
"Only listen how the poor little beast in there is whining. It wants to
come to me, and has not the strength to move."
Paulus looked after her sympathetically as she disappeared under the
opening in the rock, and he awaited her return with folded arms. He could
not see into the cave, for the space in which the bed stood was closed at
the end by the narrow passage which formed the entrance, and which joined
it at an angle as the handle of a scythe joins the blade. She remained a
long time, and he could hear now and then a tender word with which she
tried to comfort the suffering creature. Suddenly he was startled by a
loud and bitter cry from Sirona; no doubt, the poor woman's affectionate
little companion was dead, and in the dim twilight of the cave she had
seen its dulled eye, and felt the stiffness of death overspreading and
paralyzing its slender limbs. He dared not go into the cavern, but he
felt his eyes fill with tears, and he would willingly have spoken some
word of consolation to her.
At last she came out, her eyes red with weeping. Paulus had guessed
rightly for she held the body of little Iambe in her arms.
"How sorry I am," said Paulus, "the poor little creature was so pretty."
Sirona nodded, sat down, and unfastened the prettily embroidered band
from the dog's neck, saying half to herself, and half to Paulus, "My
little Agnes worked this collar. I myself had taught her to sew, and this
was the first piece of work that was all her own." She held the collar up
to the anchorite. "This clasp is of real silver," she went on, "and my
father himself gave it to me. He was fond of the poor little dog too. Now
it will never leap and spring again, poor thing."
She looked sadly down at the dead dog. Then she collected herself, and
said hurriedly, "Now I will go away from here. Nothing--nothing keeps me
any longer in this wilderness, for the senator's house, where I have
spent many happy hours, and where everyone was fond of me, is closed
against me, and must ever be so long as he lives there. If you have not
been kind to me only to do me harm in the end, let me go today, and help
me to reach Alexandria."
"Not to-day, in any case not to-day," replied Paulus. "First I must find
out when a vessel sails for Klysma or for Berenike, and then I have many
other things to see to for you. You owe me an answer to my question, as
to what you expect to do and to find in Alexandria. Poor child--the
younger and the fairer you are--"
"I know all you would say to me," interrupted Sirona. "Wherever I have
been, I have attracted the eyes of men, and when I have read in their
looks that I pleased them, it has greatly pleased me--why should I deny
it? Many a one has spoken fair words to me or given me flowers, and sent
old women to my house to win me for them, but even if one has happened to
please me better than another, still I have never found it hard to send
them home again as was fitting."
"Till Hermas laid his love at your feet," said Paulus. "He is a bold
lad--"
"A pretty, inexperienced boy," said Sirona, "neither more nor less. It
was a heedless thing, no doubt, to admit him to my rooms, but no vestal
need be ashamed to own to such favor as I showed him. I am innocent, and
I will remain so that I may stand in my father's presence without a blush
when I have earned money enough in the capital for the long journey."
Paulus looked in her face astonished and almost horrified.
Then he had in fact taken on himself guilt which did not exist, and
perhaps the senator would have been slower to condemn Sirona, if it had
not been for his falsely acknowledging it. He stood before her, feeling
like a child that would fain put together some object of artistic
workmanship, and who has broken it to pieces for want of skill. At the
same time he could not doubt a word that she said, for the voice within
him had long since plainly told him that this woman was no common
criminal.
For some time he was at a loss for words; at last he said timidly:
"What do you purpose doing in Alexandria?"
"Polykarp says, that all good work finds a purchaser there," she
answered. "And I can weave particularly well, and embroider with
gold-thread. Perhaps I may find shelter under some roof where there are
children, and I would willingly attend to them during the day. In my free
time and at night I could work at my frame, and when I have scraped
enough together I shall soon find a ship that will carry me to Gaul, to
my own people. Do you not see that I cannot go back to Phoebicius, and
can you help me?"
"Most willingly, and better perhaps than you fancy," said Paulus. "I
cannot explain this to you just now; but you need not request me, but may
rather feel that you have a good right to demand of me that I should
rescue you."
She looked at him in surprised enquiry, and he continued:
"First let me carry away the little dog, and bury it down there. I will
put a stone over the grave, that you may know where it lies. It must be
so, the body cannot be here any longer. Take the thing, which lies there.
I had tried before to cut it out for you, for you complained yesterday
that your hair was all in a tangle because you had not a comb, so I tried
to carve you one out of bone. There were none at the shop in the oasis,
and I am myself only a wild creature of the wilderness, a sorry, foolish
animal, and do not use one.
"Was that a stone that fell? Aye, certainly, I hear a man's step; go
quickly into the cave and do not stir till I call you."
Sirona withdrew into her rock-dwelling, and Paulus took the body of the
dog in his arms to conceal it from the man who was approaching. He looked
round, undecided, and seeking a hiding-place for it, but two sharp eyes
had already detected him and his small burden from the height above him;
before he had found a suitable place, stones were rolling and crashing
down from the cliff to the right of the cavern, and at the same time a
man came springing down with rash boldness from rock to rock, and without
heeding the warning voice of the anchorite, flung himself down the slope,
straight in front of him, exclaiming, while he struggled for breath and
his face was hot with hatred and excitement:
"That--I know it well-that is Sirona's greyhound--where is its mistress?
Tell me this instant, where is Sirona--I must and will know."
Paulus had frequently seen, from the penitent's room in the church, the
senator and his family in their places near the altar, and he was much
astonished to recognize in the daring leaper, who rushed upon him like a
mad man with dishevelled hair and fiery eyes, Polykarp, Petrus' second
son.
The anchorite found it difficult to preserve his calm, and composed
demeanor, for since he had been aware that he had accused Sirona falsely
of a heavy sin, while at the same time he had equally falsely confessed
himself the partner of her misdeed, he felt an anxiety that amounted to
anguish, and a leaden oppression checked the rapidity of his thoughts. He
at first stammered out a few unintelligible words, but his opponent was
in fearful earnest with his question; he seized the collar of the
anchorite's coarse garment with terrible violence, and cried in a husky
voice, "Where did you find the dog? Where is--?"
But suddenly he left go his hold of the Alexandrian, looked at him from
head to foot, and said softly and slowly:
"Can it be possible? Are you Paulus, the Alexandrian?"
The anchorite nodded assent. Polykarp laughed loud and bitterly, pressed
his hand to his forehead, and exclaimed in a tone of the deepest disgust
and contempt:
"And is it so, indeed! and such a repulsive ape too! But I will not
believe that she even held out a hand to you, for the mere sight of you
makes me dirty." Paulus felt his heart beating like a hammer within his
breast; and there was a singing and roaring in his ears. When once more
Polykarp threatened him with his fist he involuntarily took the posture
of an athlete in a wrestling match, he stretched out his arms to try to
get a good hold of his adversary, and said in a hollow, deep tone of
angry warning, "Stand back, or something will happen to you that will not
be good for your bones."
The speaker was indeed Paulus--and yet--not Paulus; it was Menander, the
pride of the Palaestra, who had never let pass a word of his comrades
that did not altogether please him. And yet yesterday in the oasis he had
quietly submitted to far worse insults than Polykarp had offered him, and
had accepted them with contented cheerfulness. Whence then to-day this
wild sensitiveness and eager desire to fight?
When, two days since, he had gone to his old cave to fetch the last of
his hidden gold pieces, he had wished to greet old Stephanus, but the
Egyptian attendant had scared him off like an evil spirit with angry
curses, and had thrown stones after him. In the oasis he had attempted to
enter the church in spite of the bishop's prohibition, there to put up a
prayer; for he thought that the antechamber, where the spring was and in
which penitents were wont to tarry, would certainly not be closed even to
him; but the acolytes had driven him away with abusive words, and the
door-keeper, who a short time since had trusted him with the key, spit in
his face, and yet he had not found it difficult to turn his back on his
persecutors without anger or complaint.
At the counter of the dealer of whom he had bought the woollen coverlet,
the little jug, and many other things for Sirona, a priest had passed by,
had pointed to his money, and had said, "Satan takes care of his own."
Paulus had answered him nothing, had returned to his charge with an
uplifted and grateful heart, and had heartily rejoiced once more in the
exalted and encouraging consciousness that he was enduring disgrace and
suffering for another in humble imitation of Christ. What was it then
that made him so acutely sensitive with regard to Polykarp, and once more
snapped those threads, which long years of self-denial had twined into
fetters for his impatient spirit? Was it that to the man, who mortified
his flesh in order to free his soul from its bonds it seemed a lighter
matter to be contemned as a sinner, hated of God, than to let his person
and his manly dignity be treated with contempt? Was he thinking of the
fair listener in the cave, who was a witness to his humiliation? Had his
wrath blazed up because he saw in Polykarp, not so much an exasperated
fellow-believer, as merely a man who with bold scorn had put himself in
the path of another man?
The lad and the gray-bearded athlete stood face to face like mortal
enemies ready for the fight, and Polykarp did not waver, although he,
like most Christian youths, had been forbidden to take part in the
wrestling-games in the Palaestra, and though he knew that he had to deal
with a strong and practised antagonist.
He himself was indeed no weakling, and his stormy indignation added to
his desire to measure himself against the hated seducer.
"Come on--come on!" he cried; his eyes flashing, and leaning forward with
his neck out-stretched and ready on his part for the struggle. "Grip
hold! you were a gladiator, or something of the kind, before you put on
that filthy dress that you might break into houses at night, and go
unpunished. Make this sacred spot an arena, and if you succeed in making
an end of me I will thank you, for what made life worth having to me, you
have already ruined whether or no. Only come on. Or perhaps you think it
easier to ruin the life of a woman than to measure your strength against
her defender? Clutch hold, I say, clutch hold, or--"
"Or you will fall upon me," said Paulus, whose arms had dropped by his
side during the youth's address. He spoke in a quite altered tone of
indifference. "Throw yourself upon me, and do with me what you will; I
will not prevent you. Here I shall stand, and I will not fight, for you
have so far hit the truth--this holy place is not an arena. But the
Gaulish lady belongs neither to you nor to me, and who gives you a
claim--?"
"Who gives me a right over her?" interrupted Polykarp, stepping close up
to his questioner with sparkling eyes. "He who permits the worshipper to
speak of his God. Sirona is mine, as the sun and moon and stars are mine,
because they shed a beautiful light on my murky path. My life is
mine--and she was the life of my life, and therefore I say boldly, and
would say, if there were twenty such as Phoebicius here, she belongs to
me. And because I regarded her as my own, and so regard her still, I hate
you and fling my scorn in your teeth--you are like a hungry sheep that
has got into the gardener's flower-bed, and stolen from the stem the
wonderful, lovely flower that he has nurtured with care, and that only
blooms once in a hundred years--like a cat that has sneaked into some
marble hall, and that to satisfy its greed has strangled some rare and
splendid bird that a traveller has brought from a distant land. But you!
you hypocritical robber, who disregard your own body with beastly pride,
and sacrifice it to low brutality--what should you know of the magic
charm of beauty--that daughter of heaven, that can touch even thoughtless
children, and before which the gods themselves do homage! I have a right
to Sirona; for hide her where you will--or even if the centurion were to
find her, and to fetter her to himself with chains and rivets of
brass--still that which makes her the noblest work of the Most High--the
image of her beauty--lives in no one, in no one as it lives in me. This
hand has never even touched your victim--and yet God has given Sirona to
no man as he has given her wholly to me, for to no man can she be what
she is to me, and no man can love her as I do! She has the nature of an
angel, and the heart of a child; she is without spot, and as pure as the
diamond, or the swan's breast, or the morning-dew in the bosom of a rose.
And though she had let you into her house a thousand times, and though my
father even, and my own mother, and every one, every one pointed at her
and condemned her, I would never cease to believe in her purity. It is
you who have brought her to shame; it is you--"
"I kept silence while all condemned her," said Paulus with warmth, "for I
believed that she was guilty, just as you believe that I am, just as
every one that is bound by no ties of love is more ready to believe evil
than good, Now I know, aye, know for certain, that we did the poor woman
an injustice. If the splendor of the lovely dream, that you call Sirona,
has been clouded by my fault--"
"Clouded? And by you?" laughed Polykarp. "Can the toad that plunges into
the sea, cloud its shining blue, can the black bat that flits across the
night, cloud the pure light of the full-moon?"
An emotion of rage again shot through the anchorite's heart, but he was
by this time on his guard against himself, and he only said bitterly, and
with hardly-won composure:
"And how was it then with the flower, and with the bird, that were
destroyed by beasts without understanding? I fancy you meant no absent
third person by that beast, and yet now you declare that it is not within
my power even to throw a shadow over your day-star! You see you
contradict yourself in your anger, and the son of a wise man, who himself
has not long since left the school of rhetoric, should try to avoid that.
You might regard me with less hostility, for I will not offend you; nay,
I will repay your evil words with good--perhaps the very best indeed that
you ever heard in your life. Sirona is a worthy and innocent woman, and
at the time when Phoebicius came out to seek her, I had never even set
eyes upon her nor had my ears ever heard a word pass her lips."
At these words Polykarp's threatening manner changed, and feeling at once
incapable of understanding the matter, and anxious to believe, he eagerly
exclaimed:
"But yet the sheepskin was yours, and you let yourself be thrashed by
Phoebicius without defending yourself."
"So filthy an ape," said Paulus, imitating Polykarp's voice, "needs many
blows, and that day I could not venture to defend myself
because--because--But that is no concern of yours. You must subdue your
curiosity for a few days longer, and then it may easily happen that the
man whose very aspect makes you feel dirty--the bat, the toad--"
"Let that pass now," cried Polykarp. "Perhaps the excitement which the
sight of you stirred up in my bruised and wounded heart, led me to use
unseemly language. Now, indeed, I see that your matted hair sits round a
well featured countenance. Forgive my violent and unjust attack. I was
beside myself, and I opened my whole soul to you, and now that you know
how it is with me, once more I ask you, where is Sirona?"
Polykarp looked Paulus in the face with anxious and urgent entreaty,
pointing to the dog as much as to say, "You must know, for here is the
evidence."
The Alexandrian hesitated to answer; he glanced by chance at the entrance
of the cave, and seeing the gleam of Sirona's white robe behind the
palm-branches, he said to himself that if Polykarp lingered much longer,
he could not fail to discover her--a consummation to be avoided.
There were many reasons which might have made him resolve to stand in the
way of a meeting between the lady and the young man, but not one of them
occurred to him, and though he did not even dream that a feeling akin to
jealousy had begun to influence him, still he was conscious that it was
his lively repugnance to seeing the two sink into each other's arms
before his very eyes, that prompted him to turn shortly round, to take up
the body of the little dog, and to say to the enquirer:
"It is true, I do know where she is hiding, and when the time comes you
shall know it too. Now I must bury the animal, and if you will you can
help me."
Without waiting for any objection on Polykarp's part, he hurried from
stone to stone up to the plateau on the precipitous edge of which he had
first seen Sirona. The younger man followed him breathlessly, and only
joined him when he had already begun to dig out the earth with his hands
at the foot of a cliff. Polykarp was now standing close to the anchorite,
and repeated his question with vehement eagerness, but Paulus did not
look up from his work, and only said, digging faster and faster:
"Come to this place again to-morrow, and then it may perhaps be possible
that I should tell you."
"You think to put me off with that," cried the lad. "Then you are
mistaken in me, and if you cheat me with your honest-sounding words, I
will--"
But he did not end his threat, for a clear longing cry distinctly broke
the silence of the deserted mountain: "Polykarp--Polykarp." It sounded
nearer and nearer, and the words had a magic effect on him for whose ear
they were intended.
With his head erect and trembling in every limb, the young man listened
eagerly. Then he cried out, "It is her voice! I am coming, Sirona, I am
coming." And without paying any heed to the anchorite, he was on the
point of hurrying off to meet her. But Paulus placed himself close in
front of him, and said sternly: "You stay here."
"Out of my way," shouted Polykarp beside himself. "She is calling to me
out of the hole where you are keeping her--you slanderer--you cowardly
liar! Out of the way I say! You will not? Then defend yourself, you
hideous toad, or I will tread you down, if my foot does not fear to be
soiled with your poison."
Up to this moment Paulus had stood before the young man with out-spread
arms, motionless, but immovable as an oak-tree; now Polykarp first hit
him. This blow shattered the anchorite's patience, and, no longer master
of himself, he exclaimed, "You shall answer to me for this!" and before a
third and fourth call had come from Sirona's lips, he had grasped the
artist's slender body, and with a mighty swing he flung him backwards
over his own broad and powerful shoulders on to the stony ground.
After this mad act he stood over his victim with out-stretched legs,
folded arms, and rolling eyes, as if rooted to the earth. He waited till
Polykarp had picked himself up, and, without looking round, but pressing
his hands to the back of his head, had tottered away like a drunken man.
Paulus looked after him till he disappeared over the cliff at the edge of
the level ground; but he did not see how Polykarp fell senseless to the
ground with a stifled cry, not far from the very spring whence his enemy
had fetched the water to refresh Sirona's parched lips.
CHAPTER XVI.
"She will attract the attention of Damianus or Salathiel or one of the
others up there," thought Paulus as he heard Sirona's call once more,
and, following her voice, he went hastily and excitedly down the
mountainside.
"We shall have peace for to-day at any rate from that audacious fellow,"
muttered he to himself, "and perhaps to-morrow too, for his blue bruises
will be a greeting from me. But how difficult it is to forget what we
have once known! The grip, with which I flung him, I learned--how long
ago?--from the chief-gymnast at Delphi. My marrow is not yet quite dried
up, and that I will prove to the boy with these fists, if he comes back
with three or four of the same mettle."
But Paulus had not long to indulge in such wild thoughts, for on the way
to the cave he met Sirona. "Where is Polykarp?" she called out from afar.
"I have sent him home," he answered. "And he obeyed you?" she asked
again.
"I gave him striking reasons for doing so," he replied quickly.
"But he will return?"
"He has learned enough up here for to-day. We have now to think of your
journey to Alexandria."
"But it seems to me," replied Sirona, blushing, "that I am safely hidden
in your cave, and just now you yourself said--"
"I warned you against the dangers of the expedition," interrupted Paulus.
"But since that it has occurred to me that I know of a shelter, and of a
safe protector for you. There, we are at home again. Now go into the
cave, for very probably some one may have heard you calling, and if other
anchorites were to discover you here, they would compel me to take you
back to your husband."
"I will go directly," sighed Sirona, "but first explain to me--for I
heard all that you said to each other--" and she colored, "how it
happened that Phoebicius took Hermas' sheepskin for yours, and why you
let him beat you without giving any explanation."
"Because my back is even broader than that great fellow's," replied the
Alexandrian quickly. "I will tell you all about it in some quiet hour,
perhaps on our journey to Klysma. Now go into the cave, or you may spoil
everything. I know too what you lack most since you heard the fair words
of the senator's son."
"Well--what?" asked Sirona.
"A mirror!" laughed Paulus.
"How much you are mistaken!" said Sirona; and she thought to herself,
"The woman that Polykarp looks at as he does at me, does not need a
mirror."
An old Jewish merchant lived in the fishing-town on the western declivity
of the mountain; he shipped the charcoal for Egypt, which was made in the
valleys of the peninsula by burning the sajal acacia, and he had formerly
supplied fuel for the drying-room of the papyrus-factory of Paulus'
father. He now had a business connection with his brother, and Paulus
himself had had dealings with him. He was prudent and wealthy, and
whenever he met the anchorite, he blamed him for his flight from the
world, and implored him to put his hospitality to the test, and to
command his resources and means as if they were his own.
This man was now to find a boat, and to provide the means of flight for
Sirona. The longer Paulus thought it over, the more indispensable it
seemed to him that he should himself accompany the Gaulish lady to
Alexandria, and in his own person find her a safe shelter. He knew that
he was free to dispose of his brother's enormous fortune-half of which in
fact was his--as though it were all his own, and he began to rejoice in
his possessions for the first time for many years. Soon he was occupied
in thinking of the furnishing of the house, which he intended to assign
to the fair Sirona. At first he thought of a simple citizen's dwelling,
but by degrees he began to picture the house intended for her as fitted
with shining gold, white and colored marble, many-colored Syrian carpets,
nay even with vain works of the heathen, with statues, and a luxurious
bath. In increasing unrest he wandered from rock to rock, and many times
as he went up and down he paused in front of the cave where Sirona was.
Once he saw her light robe, and its conspicuous gleam led him to the
reflection, that it would be imprudent to conduct her to the humble
fishing-village in that dress. If he meant to conceal her traces from the
search of Phoebicius and Polykarp, he must first provide her with a
simple dress, and a veil that should hide her shining hair and fair face,
which even in the capital could find no match.
The Amalekite, from whom he had twice bought some goat's-milk for her,
lived in a but which Paulus could easily reach. He still possessed a few
drachmas, and with these he could purchase what he needed from the wife
and daughter of the goatherd. Although the sky was now covered with mist
and a hot sweltering south-wind had risen, he prepared to start at once.
The sun was no longer visible though its scorching heat could be felt,
but Paulus paid no heed to this sign of an approaching storm.
Hastily, and with so little attention that he confused one object with
another in the little store-cellar, he laid some bread, a knife, and some
dates in front of the entrance to the cave, called out to his guest that
he should soon return, and hurried at a rapid pace up the mountain.
Sirona answered him with a gentle word of farewell, and did not even look
round after him, for she was glad to be alone, and so soon as the sound
of his step had died away she gave herself up once more to the
overwhelming torrent of new and deep feelings which had flooded her soul
ever since she had heard Polykarp's ardent hymn of love.
Paulus, in the last few hours, was Menander again, but the lonely woman
in the cavern--the cause of this transformation--the wife of Phoebicius,
had undergone an even greater change than he. She was still Sirona, and
yet not Sirona.
When the anchorite had commanded her to retire into the cave she had
obeyed him willingly, nay, she would have withdrawn even without his
desire, and have sought for solitude; for she felt that something mighty,
hitherto unknown to her, and incomprehensible even to herself, was
passing in her soul, and that a nameless but potent something had grown
up in her heart, had struggled free, and had found life and motion; a
something that was strange, and yet precious to her, frightening, and yet
sweet, a pain, and yet unspeakably delightful. An emotion such as she had
never before known had mastered her, and she felt, since hearing
Polykarp's speech, as if a new and purer blood was flowing rapidly
through her veins. Every nerve quivered like the leaves of the poplars in
her former home when the wind blows down to meet the Rhone, and she found
it difficult to follow what Paulus said, and still more so to find the
right answer to his questions.
As soon as she was alone she sat down on her bed, rested her elbows on
her knees, and her head in her hand, and the growing and surging flood of
her passion broke out in an abundant stream of warm tears.
She had never wept so before; no anguish, no bitterness was infused into
the sweet refreshing dew of those tears. Fair flowers of never dreamed of
splendor and beauty blossomed in the heart of the weeping woman, and when
at length her tears ceased, there was a great silence, but also a great
glory within her and around her. She was like a man who has grown up in
an under-ground-room, where no light of day can ever shine, and who at
last is allowed to look at the blue heavens, at the splendor of the sun,
at the myriad flowers and leaves in the green woods, and on the meadows.
She was wretched, and yet a happy woman.
"That is love!" were the words that her heart sang in triumph, and as her
memory looked back on the admirers who had approached her in Arelas when
she was still little more than a child, and afterwards in Rome, with
tender words and looks, they all appeared like phantom forms carrying
feeble tapers, whose light paled pitifully, for Polykarp had now come on
the scene, bearing the very sun itself in his hands.
"They--and he," she murmured to herself, and she beheld as it were a
balance, and on one of the scales lay the homage which in her vain fancy
she had so coveted. It was of no more weight than chaff, and its whole
mass was like a heap of straw, which flew up as soon as Polykarp laid his
love--a hundredweight of pure gold, in the other scale.
"And if all the nations and kings of the earth brought their treasures
together," thought she, "and laid them at my feet, they could not make me
as rich as he has made me, and if all the stars were fused into one, the
vast globe of light which they would form could not shine so brightly as
the joy that fills my soul. Come now what may, I will never complain
after that hour of delight."
Then she thought over each of her former meetings with Polykarp, and
remembered that he had never spoken to her of love. What must it not have
cost him to control himself thus; and a great triumphant joy filled her
heart at the thought that she was pure, and not unworthy of him, and an
unutterable sense of gratitude rose up in her soul. The love she bore
this man seemed to take wings, and it spread itself over the common life
and aspect of the world, and rose to a spirit of devotion. With a deep
sigh she raised her eyes and hands to heaven, and in her longing to prove
her love to every living being, nay to every created thing, her spirit
sought the mighty and beneficent Power to whom she owed such exalted
happiness.
In her youth her father had kept her very strictly, but still he had
allowed her to go through the streets of the town with her young
companions, wreathed with flowers, and all dressed in their best, in the
procession of maidens at the feast of Venus of Arelas, to whom all the
women of her native town were wont to turn with prayers and sacrifices
when their hearts were touched by love.
Now she tried to pray to Venus, but again and again the wanton jests of
the men who were used to accompany the maidens came into her mind, and
memories of how she herself had eagerly listened for the only too
frequent cries of admiration, and had enticed the silent with a glance,
or thanked the more clamorous with a smile. To-day certainly she had no
mind for such sport, and she recollected the stern words which had fallen
from Dorothea's lips on the worship of Venus, when she had once told her
how well the natives of Arelas knew how to keep their feasts.
And Polykarp, whose heart was nevertheless so full of love, he no doubt
thought like his mother, and she pictured him as she had frequently seen
him following his parents by the side of his sister Marthana--often hand
in hand with her--as they went to church. The senator's son had always
had a kindly glance for her, excepting when he was one of this procession
to the temple of the God of whom they said that He was love itself, and
whose votaries indeed were not poor in love; for in Petrus' house, if
anywhere, all hearts were united by a tender affection. It then occurred
to her that Paulus had just now advised her to turn to the crucified God
of the Christians, who was full of an equal and divine love to all men.
To him Polykarp also prayed--was praying perhaps this very hour; and if
she now did the same her prayers would ascend together with his, and so
she might be in some sort one with that beloved friend, from whom
everything else conspired to part her.
She knelt down and folded her hands, as she had so often seen Christians
do, and she reflected on the torments that the poor Man, who hung with
pierced hands on the cross, had so meekly endured, though He suffered
innocently; she felt the deepest pity for Him, and softly said to
herself, as she raised her eyes to the low roof of her cave-dwelling:
"Thou poor good Son of God, Thou knowest what it is when all men condemn
us unjustly, and surely, Thou canst understand when I say to Thee how
sore my poor heart is! And they say too, that of all hearts Thine is the
most loving, and so thou wilt know how it is that, in spite of all my
misery, it still seems to me that I am a happy woman. The very breath of
a God must be rapture, and that Thou too must have learned when they
tortured and mocked Thee, for Thou halt suffered out of love. They say,
that Thou wast wholly pure and perfectly sinless. Now I--I have committed
many follies, but not a sin--a real sin--no, indeed, I have not; and Thou
must know it, for Thou art a God, and knowest the past, and canst read
hearts. And, indeed, I also would fain remain innocent, and yet how can
that be when I cannot help being devoted to Polykarp, and yet I am
another man's wife. But am I indeed the true and lawful wife of that
horrible wretch who sold me to another? He is as far from my heart--as
far as if I had never seen him with these eyes. And yet--believe me--I
wish him no ill, and I will be quite content, if only I need never go
back to him.
"When I was a child, I was afraid of frogs; my brothers and sisters knew
it, and once my brother Licinius laid a large one, that he had caught, on
my bare neck. I started, and shuddered, and screamed out loud, for it was
so hideously cold and damp--I cannot express it. And that is exactly how
I have always felt since those days in Rome whenever Phoebicius touched
me, and yet I dared not scream when he did.
"But Polykarp! oh! would that he were here, and might only grasp my hand.
He said I was his own, and yet I have never encouraged him. But now! if a
danger threatened him or a sorrow, and if by any means I could save him
from it, indeed--indeed--though I never could bear pain well, and am
afraid of death, I would let them nail me to a cross for him, as Thou
wast crucified for us all.
"But then he must know that I had died for him, and if he looked into my
dying eyes with his strange, deep gaze, I would tell him that it is to
him that I owe a love so great that it is a thing altogether different
and higher than any love I have ever before seen. And a feeling that is
so far above all measure of what ordinary mortals experience, it seems to
me, must be divine. Can such love be wrong? I know not; but Thou knowest,
and Thou, whom they name the Good Shepherd, lead Thou us--each apart from
the other, if it be best so for him--but yet, if it be possible, unite us
once more, if it be only for one single hour. If only he could know that
I am not wicked, and that poor Sirona would willingly belong to him, and
to no other, then I would be ready to die. O Thou good, kind Shepherd,
take me too into Thy flock, and guide me."
Thus prayed Sirona, and before her fancy there floated the image of a
lovely and loving youthful form; she had seen the original in the model
for Polykarp's noble work, and she had not forgotten the exquisite
details of the face. It seemed to her as well known and familiar as if
she had known--what in fact she could not even guess--that she herself
had had some share in the success of the work.
The love which unites two hearts is like the ocean of Homer which
encircles both halves of the earth. It flows and rolls on. Where shall we
seek its source--here or there--who can tell?
It was Dame Dorothea who in her motherly pride had led the Gaulish lady
into her son's workshop. Sirona thought of her and her husband and her
house, where over the door a motto was carved in the stone which she had
seen every morning from her sleeping-room. She could not read Greek, but
Polykarp's sister, Marthana, had more than once told her what it meant.
"Commit thy way to the Lord, and put thy trust in Him," ran the
inscription, and she repeated it to herself again and again, and then
drew fancy-pictures of the future in smiling day-dreams, which by degrees
assumed sharper outlines and brighter colors.
She saw herself united to Polykarp, and as the daughter of Petrus and
Dorothea, at home in the senator's house; she had a right now to the
children who loved her, and who were so dear to her; she helped the
deaconess in all her labors, and won praise, and looks of approval. She
had learned to use her hands in her father's house and now she could show
what she could do; Polykarp even gazed at her with surprise and
admiration, and said that she was as clever as she was beautiful, and
promised to become a second Dorothea. She went with him into his
workshop, and there arranged all the things that lay about in confusion,
and dusted it, while he followed her every movement with his gaze, and at
last stood before her, his arms wide--wide open to clasp her.
She started, and pressed her hands over her eyes, and flung herself
loving and beloved on his breast, and would have thrown her arms round
his neck, while her hot tears flowed--but the sweet vision was suddenly
shattered, for a swift flash of light pierced the gloom of the cavern,
and immediately after she heard the heavy roll of the thunder-clap,
dulled by the rocky walls of her dwelling.
Completely recalled to actuality she listened for a moment, and then
stepped to the entrance of the cave. It was already dusk, and heavy
rain-drops were falling from the dark clouds which seemed to shroud the
mountain peaks in a vast veil of black crape. Paulus was nowhere to be
seen, but there stood the food he had prepared for her. She had eaten
nothing since her breakfast, and she now tried to drink the milk, but it
had curdled and was not fit to use; a small bit of bread and a few dates
quite satisfied her.
As the lightning and thunder began to follow each other more and more
quickly, and the darkness fast grew deeper, a great fear fell upon her;
she pushed the food on one side, and looked up to the mountain where the
peaks were now wholly veiled in night, now seemed afloat in a sea of
flame, and more distinctly visible than by daylight. Again and again a
forked flash like a saw-blade of fire cut through the black curtain of
cloud with terrific swiftness, again and again the thunder sounded like a
blast of trumpets through the silent wilderness, and multiplied itself,
clattering, growling, roaring, and echoing from rock to rock. Light and
sound at last seemed to be hurled from Heaven together, and the very rock
in which her cave was formed quaked.
Crushed and trembling she drew back into the inmost depth of her rocky
chamber, starting at each flash that illumined the darkness.
At length they occurred at longer intervals, the thunder lost its
appalling fury, and as the wind drove the storm farther and farther to
the southwards, at last it wholly died away.
CHAPTER XVII.
It was quite dark in Sirona's cavern, fearfully dark, and the blacker
grew the night which shrouded her, the more her terror increased. From
time to time she shut her eyes as tightly as she could, for she fancied
she could see a crimson glare, and she longed for light in that hour as a
drowning man longs for the shore. Dark forebodings of every kind
oppressed her soul.
What if Paulus had abandoned her, and had left her to her fate? Or if
Polykarp should have been searching for her on the mountain in this
storm, and in the darkness should have fallen into some abyss, or have
been struck by the lightning? Suppose the mass of rock that overhung the
entrance to the cave should have been loosened in the storm, and should
fall, and bar her exit to the open air? Then she would be buried alive,
and she must perish alone, without seeing him whom she loved once more,
or telling him that she had not been unworthy of his trust in her.
Cruelly tormented by such thoughts as these, she dragged herself up and
felt her way out into the air and wind, for she could no longer hold out
in the gloomy solitude and fearful darkness. She had hardly reached the
mouth of the cave, when she heard steps approaching her lurking place,
and again she shrank back. Who was it that could venture in this
pitch-dark night to climb from rock to rock? Was it Paulus returning? Was
it he--was it Polykarp seeking her? She felt intoxicated; she pressed her
hands to her heart, and longed to cry out, but she dared not, and her
tongue refused its office. She listened with the tension of terror to the
sound of the steps which came straight towards her nearer and nearer,
then the wanderer perceived the faint gleam of her white dress, and
called out to her. It was Paulus.
She drew a deep breath of relief when she recognized his voice, and
answered his call.
"In such weather as this," said the anchorite, "it is better to be within
than without, it seems to me, for it is not particularly pleasant out
here, so far as I have found."
"But it has been frightful here inside the cave too," Sirona answered, "I
have been so dreadfully frightened, I was so lonely in the horrible
darkness. If only I had had my little dog with me, it would at least have
been a living being."
"I have made haste as well as I could," interrupted Paulus. "The paths
are not so smooth here as the Kanopic road in Alexandria, and as I have
not three necks like Cerberus, who lies at the feet of Serapis, it would
have been wiser of me to return to you a little more leisurely. The
storm-bird has swallowed up all the stars as if they were flies, and the
poor old mountain is so grieved at it, that streams of tears are
everywhere flowing over his stony cheeks. It is wet even here. Now go
back into the cave, and let me lay this that I have got here for you in
my arms, in the dry passage. I bring you good news; to-morrow evening,
when it is growing dusk, we start. I have found out a vessel which will
convey us to Klysma, and from thence I myself will conduct you to
Alexandria. In the sheepskin here you will find the dress and veil of an
Amalekite woman, and if your traces are to be kept hidden from
Phoebicius, you must accommodate yourself to this disguise; for if the
people down there were to see you as I saw you to-day, they would think
that Aphrodite herself had risen from the sea, and the report of the
fair-haired beauty that had appeared among them would soon spread even to
the oasis."
"But it seems to me that I am well hidden here," replied Sirona. "I am
afraid of a sea-voyage, and even if we succeeded in reaching Alexandria
without impediment, still I do not know--"
"It shall be my business to provide for you there." Paulus interrupted
with a decision that was almost boastful, and that somewhat disturbed
Sirona. "You know the fable of the ass in the lion's skin, but there are
lions who wear the skin of an ass on their shoulders--or of a sheep, it
comes to the same thing. Yesterday you were speaking of the splendid
palaces of the citizens, and lauding the happiness of their owners. You
shall dwell in one of those marble houses, and rule it as its mistress,
and it shall be my care to procure you slaves, and litter-bearers, and a
carriage with four mules. Do not doubt my word, for I am promising
nothing that I cannot perform. The rain is ceasing, and I will try to
light a fire. You want nothing more to eat? Well then, I will wish you
good-night. The rest will all do to-morrow."
Sirona had listened in astonishment to the anchorite's promises.
How often had she envied those who possessed all that her strange
protector now promised her--and now it had not the smallest charm for
her; and, fully determined in any case not to follow Paulus, whom she
began to distrust, she replied, as she coldly returned his greeting,
"There are many hours yet before tomorrow evening in which we can discuss
everything."
While Paulus was with great difficulty rekindling the fire, she was once
more alone, and again she began to be alarmed in the dark cavern.
She called the Alexandrian. "The darkness terrifies me so," she said.
"You still had some oil in the jug this morning; perhaps you may be able
to contrive a little lamp for me; it is so fearful to stay here in the
dark."
Paulus at once took a shard, tore a strip from his tattered coat, twisted
it together, and laid it for a wick in the greasy fluid, lighted it at
the slowly reviving fire, and putting this more than simple light in
Sirona's hand, he said, "It will serve its purpose; in Alexandria I will
see that you have lamps which give more light, and which are made by a
better artist."
Sirona placed the lamp in a hollow in the rocky wall at the head of her
bed, and then lay down to rest. Light scares away wild beasts and fear
too from the resting-place of man, and it kept terrifying thoughts far
away from the Gaulish woman.
She contemplated her situation clearly and calmly, and quite decided that
she would neither quit the cave, nor entrust herself to the anchorite,
till she had once more seen and spoken to Polykarp. He no doubt knew
where to seek her, and certainly, she thought, he would by this time have
returned, if the storm and the starless night had not rendered it an
impossibility to come up the mountain from the oasis.
"To-morrow I shall see him again, and then I will open my heart to him,
and he shall read my soul like a book, and on every page, and in every
line he will find his own name. And I will tell him too that I have
prayed to his 'Good Shepherd,' and how much good it has done me, and that
I will be a Christian like his sister Marthana and his mother. Dorothea
will be glad indeed when she hears it, and she at any rate cannot have
thought that I was wicked, for she always loved me, and the children--the
children--"
The bright crowd of merry faces came smiling in upon her fancy, and her
thoughts passed insensibly into dreams; kindly sleep touched her heart
with its gentle hand, and its breath swept every shadow of trouble from
her soul. She slept, smiling and untroubled as a child whose eyes some
guardian angel softly kisses, while her strange protector now turned the
flickering wood on the damp hearth and with a reddening face blew up the
dying charcoal-fire, and again walked restlessly up and down, and paused
each time he passed the entrance to the cave, to throw a longing glance
at the light which shone out from Sirona's sleeping-room.
Since the moment when he had flung Polykarp to the ground, Paulus had not
succeeded in recovering his self-command; not for a moment had he
regretted the deed, for the reflection had never occurred to him, that a
fall on the stony soil of the Sacred Mountain, which was as hard as iron,
must hurt more than a fall on the' sand of the arena.
"The impudent fellow," thought he, "richly deserved what he got. Who gave
him a better right over Sirona than he, Paulus himself, had--he who had
saved her life, and had taken it upon himself to protect her?" Her great
beauty had charmed him from the first moment of their meeting, but no
impure thought stirred his heart as he gazed at her with delight, and
listened with emotion to her childlike talk. It was the hot torrent of
Polykarp's words that had first thrown the spark into his soul, which
jealousy and the dread of having to abandon Sirona to another, had soon
fanned into a consuming flame. He would not give up this woman, he would
continue to care for her every need, she should owe everything to him,
and to him only. And so, without reserve, he devoted himself body and
soul to the preparations for her flight. The hot breath of the storm, the
thunder and lightning, torrents of rain, and blackness of night could not
delay him, while he leaped from rock to rock, feeling his way-soaked
through, weary and in peril; he thought only of her, and of how he could
most safely carry her to Alexandria, and then surround her with all that
could charm a woman's taste. Nothing--nothing did he desire for himself,
and all that he dreamed of and planned turned only and exclusively on the
pleasure which he might afford her. When he had prepared and lighted the
lamp for her he saw her again, and was startled at the beauty of the face
that the trembling flame revealed. He could observe her a few seconds
only, and then she had vanished, and he must remain alone in the darkness
and the rain. He walked restlessly up and down, and an agonizing longing
once more to see her face lighted up by the pale flame, and the white arm
that she had held out to take the lamp, grew more and more strong in him
and accelerated the pulses of his throbbing heart. As often as he passed
the cave, and observed the glimmer of light that came from her room, he
felt prompted and urged to slip in, and to gaze on her once more. He
never once thought of prayer and scourging, his old means of grace, he
sought rather for a reason that might serve him as an excuse if he went
in, and it struck him that it was cold, and that a sheepskin was lying in
the cavern. He would fetch it, in spite of his vow never to wear a
sheepskin again; and supposing he were thus enabled to see her, what
next?
When he had Stepped across the threshold, an inward voice warned him to
return, and told him that he must be treading the path of
unrighteousness, for that he was stealing in on tiptoe like a thief; but
the excuse was ready at once. "That is for fear of waking her, if she is
asleep."
And now all further reflection was silenced for he had already reached
the spot where, at the end of the rocky passage, the cave widened into
her sleeping-room; there she lay on her hard couch, sunk in slumber and
enchantingly fair.
A deep gloom reigned around, and the feeble light of the little lamp
lighted up only a small portion of the dismal chamber but the head,
throat, and arms that it illuminated seemed to shine with a light of
their own that enhanced and consecrated the light of the feeble flame.
Paulus fell breathless on his knees, and fixed his eyes with growing
eagerness on the graceful form of the sleeper.
Sirona was dreaming; her head, veiled in her golden hair, rested on a
high pillow of herbs, and her delicately rosy face was turned up to the
vault of the cave; her half-closed lips moved gently, and now she moved
her bent arm and her white hand, on which the light of the lamp fell, and
which rested half on her forehead and half on her shining hair.
"Is she saying anything?" asked Paulus of himself, and he pressed his
brow against a projection of the rock as tightly as if he would stem the
rapid rush of his blood that it might not overwhelm his bewildered brain.
Again she moved her lips. Had she indeed spoken? Had she perhaps called
him?
That could not be, for she still slept; but he wished to believe it--and
he would believe it, and he stole nearer to her and nearer, and bent over
her, and listened--while his own strength failed him even to draw a
breath--listened to the soft regular breathing that heaved her bosom. No
longer master of himself he touched her white arm with his bearded lips
and she drew it back in her sleep, then his gaze fell on her parted lips
and the pearly teeth that shone between them, and a mad longing to kiss
them came irresistibly over him. He bent trembling over her, and was on
the point of gratifying his impulse when, as if startled by a sudden
apparition, he drew back, and raised his eyes from the rosy lips to the
hand that rested on the sleeper's brow.
The lamplight played on a golden ring on Sirona's finger, and shone
brightly on an onyx on which was engraved an image of Tyche, the tutelary
goddess of Antioch, with a sphere upon her head, and bearing Amalthea's
horn in her hand.
A new and strange emotion took possession of the anchorite at the sight
of this stone. With trembling hands he felt in the breast of his torn
garment, and presently drew forth a small iron crucifix and the ring that
he had taken from the cold hand of Hermas' mother. In the golden circlet
was set an onyx, on which precisely the same device was visible as that
on Sirona's hand. The string with its precious jewel fell from his grasp,
he clutched his matted hair with both hands, groaned deeply, and repeated
again and again, as though to crave forgiveness, the name of "Magdalen."
Then he called Sirona in a loud voice, and as she awoke excessively
startled, he asked her in urgent tones: "Who gave you that ring?"
"It was a present from Phoebicius," replied she. "He said he had had it
given to him many years since in Antioch, and that it had been engraved
by a great artist. But I do not want it any more, and if you like to have
it you may."
"Throw it away!" exclaimed Paulus, "it will bring you nothing but
misfortune." Then he collected himself, went out into the air with his
head sunk on his breast, and there, throwing himself down on the wet
stones by the hearth, he cried out:
"Magdalen! dearest and purest! You, when you ceased to be Glycera, became
a saintly martyr, and found the road to heaven; I too had my day of
Damascus--of revelation and conversion--and I dared to call myself by the
name of Paulus--and now--now?"
Plunged in despair he beat his forehead, groaning out, "All, all in
vain!"
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Can such love be wrong?
HOMO SUM
By Georg Ebers
Volume 5.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Common natures can only be lightly touched by the immeasurable depth of
anguish that is experienced by a soul that despairs of itself; but the
more heavily the blow of such suffering falls, the more surely does it
work with purifying power on him who has to taste of that cup.
Paulus thought no more of the fair, sleeping woman; tortured by acute
remorse he lay on the hard stones, feeling that he had striven in vain.
When he had taken Hermas' sin and punishment and disgrace upon himself,
it had seemed to him that he was treading in the very footsteps of the
Saviour. And now?--He felt like one who, while running for a prize,
stumbles over a stone and grovels in the sand when he is already close to
the goal.
"God sees the will and not the deed," he muttered to himself. "What I did
wrong with regard to Sirona--or what I did not do--that matters not. When
I leaned over her, I had fallen utterly and entirely into the power of
the evil one, and was an ally of the deadliest enemy of Him to whom I had
dedicated my life and soul. Of what avail was my flight from the world,
and my useless sojourn in the desert? He who always keeps out of the way
of the battle can easily boast of being unconquered to the end-but is he
therefore a hero? The palm belongs to him who in the midst of the
struggles and affairs of the world clings to the heavenward road, and
never lets himself be diverted from it; but as for me who walk here
alone, a woman and a boy cross my path, and one threatens and the other
beckons to me, and I forget my aim and stumble into the bog of iniquity.
And so I cannot find--no, here I cannot find what I strive after. But how
then--how? Enlighten me, O Lord, and reveal to me what I must do."
Thus thinking he rose, knelt down, and prayed fervently; when at last he
came to the 'Amen,' his head was burning, and his tongue parched.
The clouds had parted, though they still hung in black masses in the
west; from time to time gleams of lightning shone luridly on the horizon
and lighted up the jagged peak of mountain with a flare; the moon had
risen, but its waning disk was frequently obscured by dark driving masses
of cloud; blinding flashes, tender light, and utter darkness were
alternating with bewildering rapidity, when Paulus at last collected
himself, and went down to the spring to drink, and to cool his brow in
the fresh water. Striding from stone to stone he told himself, that ere
he could begin a new life, he must do penance--some heavy penance; but
what was it to be? He was standing at the very margin of the brook,
hemmed in by cliffs, and was bending down to it, but before he had
moistened his lips he drew back: just because he was so thirsty he
resolved to deny himself drink. Hastily, almost vehemently, he turned his
back on the spring, and after this little victory over himself, his
storm-tossed heart seemed a little calmer. Far, far from hence and from
the wilderness and from the Sacred Mountain he felt impelled to fly, and
he would gladly have fled then and there to a distance. Whither should he
flee? It was all the same, for he was in search of suffering, and
suffering, like weeds, grows on every road. And from whom? This question
repeated itself again and again as if he had shouted it in the very home
of echo, and the answer was not hard to find: "It is from yourself that
you would flee. It is your own inmost self that is your enemy; bury
yourself in what desert you will, it will pursue you, and it would be
easier for you to cut off your shadow than to leave that behind?"
His whole consciousness was absorbed by this sense of impotency, and now,
after the stormy excitement of the last few hours, the deepest depression
took possession of his mind. Exhausted, unstrung, full of loathing of
himself and life, he sank down on a stone, and thought over the
occurrences of the last few days with perfect impartiality.
"Of all the fools that ever I met," thought he, "I have gone farthest in
folly, and have thereby led things into a state of confusion which I
myself could not make straight again, even if I were a sage--which I
certainly never shall be any more than a tortoise or a phoenix. I once
heard tell of a hermit who, because it is written that we ought to bury
the dead, and because he had no corpse, slew a traveller that he might
fulfil the commandment: I have acted in exactly the same way, for, in
order to spare another man suffering and to bear the sins of another, I
have plunged an innocent woman into misery, and made myself indeed a
sinner. As soon as it is light I will go down to the oasis and confess to
Petrus and Dorothea what I have done. They will punish me, and I will
honestly help them, so that nothing of the penance that they may lay upon
me may be remitted. The less mercy I show to myself, the more will the
Eternal judge show to me."
He rose, considered the position of the stars, and when he perceived that
morning was not far off, he prepared to return to Sirona, who was no
longer any more to him than an unhappy woman to whom he owed reparation
for much evil, when a loud cry of distress in the immediate vicinity fell
on his ear.
He mechanically stooped to pick up a stone for a weapon, and listened. He
knew every rock in the neighborhood of the spring, and when the strange
groan again made itself heard, he knew that it came from a spot which he
knew well and where he had often rested, because a large flat stone
supported by a stout pillar of granite, stood up far above the
surrounding rocks, and afforded protection from the sun, even at noonday,
when not a hand's breath of shade was to be found elsewhere.
Perhaps some wounded beast had crept under the rock for shelter from the
rain. Paulus went cautiously forward. The groaning sounded louder and
more distinct than before, and beyond a doubt it was the voice of a human
being.
The anchorite hastily threw away the stone, fell upon his knees, and soon
found on the dry spot of ground under the stone, and in the farthermost
nook of the retreat, a motionless human form.
"It is most likely a herdsman that has been struck by lightning," thought
he, as he felt with his hands the curly head of the sufferer, and the
strong arms that now bung down powerless. As he raised the injured man,
who still uttered low moans, and supported his head on his broad breast,
the sweet perfume of fine ointment was wafted to him from his hair, and a
fearful suspicion dawned upon his mind.
"Polykarp!" he cried, while he clasped his hands more tightly round the
body of the sufferer who, thus called upon, moved and muttered a few
unintelligible words; in a low tone, but still much too clearly for
Paulus, for he now knew for certain that he had guessed rightly. With a
loud cry of horror he grasped the youth's powerless form, raised him in
his arms, and carried him like a child to the margin of the spring where
he laid his noble burden down in the moist grass; Polykarp started and
opened his eyes.
Morning was already dawning, the light clouds on the eastern horizon were
already edged with rosy fringes, and the coming day began to lift the
dark veil from the forms and hues of creation.
The young man recognized the anchorite, who with trembling hands was
washing the wound at the back of his head, and his eye assumed an angry
glare as he called up all his remaining strength and pushed his attendant
from him. Paulus did not withdraw, he accepted the blow from his victim
as a gift or a greeting, thinking, "Aye, and I only wish you had a dagger
in your hand; I would not resist you."
The artist's wound was frightfully wide and deep, but the blood had
flowed among his thick curls, and had clotted over the lacerated veins
like a thick dressing. The water with which Paulus now washed his head
reopened them, and renewed the bleeding, and after the one powerful
effort with which Polykarp pushed away his enemy, he fell back senseless
in his arms The wan morning-light added to the pallor of the bloodless
countenance that lay with glazed eyes in the anchorite's lap.
"He is dying!" murmured Paulus in deadly anguish and with choking breath,
while he looked across the valley and up to the heights, seeking help.
The mountain rose in front of him, its majestic mass glowing in the rosy
dawn, while light translucent vapor floated round the peak where the Lord
had written His laws for His chosen people, and for all peoples, on
tables of stone; it seemed to Paulus that he saw the giant form of Moses
far, far up on its sublimest height and that from his lips in brazen
tones the strictest of all the commandments was thundered down upon him
with awful wrath, "Thou shalt not kill!"
Paulus clasped his hands before his face in silent despair, while his
victim still lay in his lap. He had closed his eyes, for he dared not
look on the youth's pale countenance, and still less dared he look up at
the mountain; but the brazen voice from the height did not cease, and
sounded louder and louder; half beside himself with excitement, in his
inward ear he heard it still, "Thou shalt not kill!" and then again,
"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife!" a third time, "Thou shalt not
commit adultery!" and at last a fourth, "Thou shalt have none other gods
but me!"
He that sins against one of those laws is damned; and he--he had broken
them all, broken them while striving to tread the thorny path to a life
of blessedness.
Suddenly and wildly he threw his arms up to heaven, and sighing deeply,
gazed up at the sacred hill.
What was that? On the topmost peak of Sinai whence the Pharanite
sentinels were accustomed to watch the distance, a handkerchief was
waving as a signal that the enemy were approaching.
He could not be mistaken, and as in the face of approaching danger he
collected himself and recovered his powers of thought and deliberation,
his ear distinctly caught the mighty floods of stirring sound that came
over the mountain, from the brazen cymbals struck by the watchmen to warn
the inhabitants of the oasis, and the anchorites.
Was Hermas returned? Had the Blemmyes outstripped him? From what quarter
were the marauding hosts coming on? Could he venture to remain here near
his victim, or was it his duty to use his powerful arms in defence of his
helpless companions? In agonized doubt he looked down at the youth's
pallid features, and deep, sorrowful compassion filled his mind.
How promising was this young tree of humanity that his rough fist had
broken off! and these brown curls had only yesterday been stroked by a
mother's hand. His eyes filled with tears, and he bent as tenderly as a
father might over the pale face, and pressed a gentle kiss on the
bloodless lips of the senseless youth. A thrill of joy shot through him,
for Polykarp's lips were indeed not cold, he moved his hand, and now--the
Lord be praised! he actually opened his eyes.
"And I am not a murderer!" A thousand voices seem to sing with joy in his
heart, and then he thought to himself, "First I will carry him down to
his parents in the oasis, and then go up to the brethren."
But the brazen signals rang out with renewed power, and the stillness of
the holy wilderness was broken here by the clatter of men's voices, there
by a blast of trumpets, and there again by stifled cries. It was as if a
charm had given life to the rocks and lent their voices; as if noise and
clamor were rushing like wild torrents down every gorge and cleft of the
mountainside.
"It is too late," sighed the anchorite. "If I only could--if I only
knew--"
"Hallo! hallo! holy Paulus!" a shrill woman's voice which seemed to come
from high up in the air rang out joyful and triumphant, interrupting the
irresolute man's meditations, "Hermas is alive! Hermas is here again!
Only look up at the heights. There flies the standard, for he has warned
the sentinels. The Blemmyes are coming on, and he sent me to seek you.
You must come to the strong tower on the western side of the ravine. Make
haste! come at once! Do you hear? He told me to tell you. But the man in
your lap--it is--yes, it is--"
"It is your master's son Polykarp," Paulus called back to her. "He is
hurt unto death; hurry down to the oasis, and tell the senator, tell Dame
Dorothea--"
"I have something else to do now," interrupted the shepherdess. "Hermas
has sent me to warn Gelasius, Psoes, and Dulas, and if I went down into
the oasis they would lock me up, and not let me come up the mountain
again. What has happened to the poor fellow? But it is all the same:
there is something else for you to do besides grieving over a hole in
Polykarp's head. Go up to the tower, I tell you, and let him lie--or
carry him up with you into your new den, and hand him over to your
sweetheart to nurse."
"Demon!" exclaimed Paulus, taking up a stone.
"Let him he!" repeated Miriam. "I will betray her hiding-place to
Phoebicius, if you do not do as Dermas orders you. Now I am off to call
the others, and we shall meet again at the tower. And you had better not
linger too long with your fair companion--pious Paulus--saintly Paulus!"
And laughing loudly, she sprang away from rock to rock as if borne up by
the air.
The Alexandrian looked wrathfully after her; but her advice did not seem
to be bad, he lifted the wounded man on his shoulders, and hastily
carried him up towards his cave; but before he could reach it he heard
steps, and a loud agonized scream, and in a few seconds Sirona was by his
side, crying in passionate grief, "It is he, it is he-and oh, to see him
thus!--But he must live, for if he were dead your God of Love would be
inexorable, pitiless, hard, cruel--it would be--"
She could say no more, for tears choked her voice, and Paulus, without
listening to her lamentation, passed quickly on in front of her, entered
the cave and laid the unconscious man down on the couch, saying gravely
but kindly, as Sirona threw herself on her knees and pressed the young
man's powerless hand to her lips, "If indeed you truly love him, cease
crying and lamenting. He yesterday got a severe wound on his head; I have
washed it, now do you bind it up with care, and keep it constantly cool
with fresh water. You know your way to the spring; when he recovers his
senses rub his feet, and give him some bread and a few drops of the wine
which you will find in the little cellar hard by; there is some oil there
too, which you will need for a light.
"I must go up to the brethren, and if I do not return to-morrow, give the
poor lad over to his mother to nurse. Only tell her this, that I, Paulus,
gave him this wound in a moment of rage, and to forgive me if she can,
she and Petrus. And you too forgive me that in which I have sinned
against you, and if I should fall in the battle which awaits us, pray
that the Lord may not be too hard upon me in the day of judgment, for my
sins are great and many."
At this moment the sound of the trumpets sounded even into the deepest
recess of the cave. Sirona started. "That is the Roman tuba," she
exclaimed. "I know the sound--Phoebicius is coming this way."
"He is doing his duty," replied Paulus. "And still, one thing more. I saw
last night a ring on your hand--an onyx."
"There it lies," said Sirona; and she pointed to the farthest corner of
the cave, where it lay on the dusty soil.
"Let it remain there," Paulus begged of her; he bent over the senseless
man once more to kiss his forehead, raised his hand towards Sirona in
sign of blessing, and rushed out into the open air.
CHAPTER XIX.
Two paths led over the mountain from the oasis to the sea; both followed
deep and stony gorges, one of which was named the "short cut," because
the traveller reached his destination more quickly by that road than by
following the better road in the other ravine, which was practicable for
beasts of burden. Half-way up the height the "short cut" opened out on a
little plateau, whose western side was shut in by a high mass of rock
with steep and precipitous flanks. At the top of this rock stood a tower
built of rough blocks, in which the anchorites were wont to take refuge
when they were threatened with a descent of their foes.
The position of this castle--as the penitents proudly styled their
tower--was well-chosen, for from its summit they commanded not only the
"short cut" to the oasis, but also the narrow shell-strewn strip of
desert which divided the western declivity of the Holy Mountain from the
shore, the blue-green waters of the sea, and the distant chain of hills
on the African coast.
Whatever approached the tower, whether from afar or from the
neighborhood, was at once espied by them, and the side of the rock which
was turned to the roadway was so precipitous and smooth that it remained
inaccessible even to the natives of the desert, who, with their naked
feet and sinewy arms, could climb points which even the wild goat and the
jackal made a circuit to avoid. It was more accessible from the other
side, and in order to secure that, a very strong wall had been built,
which enclosed the level on which the castle stood in the form of a
horseshoe, of which the ends abutted on the declivity of the short road.
This structure was so roughly and inartistically heaped together that it
looked as if formed by nature rather than by the hand of man. The rough
and unfinished appearance of this wall-like heap of stones was heightened
by the quantity of large and small pieces of granite which were piled on
the top of it, and which had been collected by the anchorites, in case of
an incursion, to roll and hurl down on the invading robbers. A cistern
had been dug out of the rocky soil of the plateau which the wall
enclosed, and care was taken to keep it constantly filled with water.
Such precautions were absolutely necessary, for the anchorites were
threatened with dangers from two sides. First from the Ishmaelite hordes
of Saracens who fell upon them from the east, and secondly from the
Blemmyes, the wild inhabitants of the desert country which borders the
fertile lands of Egypt and Nubia, and particularly of the barren
highlands that part the Red Sea from the Nile valley; they crossed the
sea in light skiffs, and then poured over the mountain like a swarm of
locusts.
The little stores and savings which the defenceless hermits treasured in
their caves had tempted the Blemmyes again and again, in spite of the
Roman garrison in Pharan, which usually made its appearance on the scene
of their incursion long after they had disappeared with their scanty
booty. Not many months since, the raid had been effected in which old
Stephanus had been wounded by an arrow, and there was every reason to
hope that the wild marauders would not return very soon, for Phoebicius,
the commander of the Roman maniple in the oasis, was swift and vigorous
in his office, and though he had not succeeded in protecting the
anchorites from all damage, he had followed up the Blemmyes, who fled at
his approach, and cut them off from rejoining their boats. A battle took
place between the barbarians and the Romans, not far from the coast on
the desert tract dividing the hills from the sea, which resulted in the
total annihilation of the wild tribes and gave ground to hope that such a
lesson might serve as a warning to the sons of the desert. But if
hitherto the more easily quelled promptings of covetousness had led them
to cross the sea, they were now animated by the most sacred of all
duties, by the law which required them to avenge the blood of their
fathers and brothers, and they dared to plan a fresh incursion in which
they should put forth all their resources. They were at the same time
obliged to exercise the greatest caution, and collected their forces of
young men in the valleys that lay hidden in the long range of
coast-hills.
The passage of the narrow arm of the sea that parted them from Arabia
Petraea, was to be effected in the first dark night; the sun, this
evening, had set behind heavy storm-clouds that had discharged themselves
in violent rain and had obscured the light of the waning moon. So they
drew their boats and rafts down to the sea, and, unobserved by the
sentinels on the mountain who had taken shelter from the storm under
their little penthouses, they would have reached the opposite shore, the
mountain, and perhaps even the oasis, if some one had not warned the
anchorites--and that some one was Hermas.
Obedient to the commands of Paulus, the lad had appropriated three of his
friend's gold pieces, had provided himself with a bow and arrows and some
bread, and then, after muttering a farewell to his father who was asleep
in his cave, he set out for Raithu. Happy in the sense of his strength
and manhood, proud of the task which had been set him and which he deemed
worthy of a future soldier, and cheerfully ready to fulfil it even at the
cost of his life, he hastened forward in the bright moonlight. He quitted
the path at the spot where, to render the ascent possible even to the
vigorous desert-travellers, it took a zigzag line, and clambered from
rock to rock, up and down in a direct line; when he came to a level spot
he flew on as if pursuers were at his heels. After sunrise he refreshed
himself with a morsel of food, and then hurried on again, not heeding the
heat of noon, nor that of the soft sand in which his foot sank as he
followed the line of the sea-coast.
Thus passionately hurrying onwards he thought neither of Sirona nor of
his past life--only of the hills on the farther shore and of the
Blemmyes--how he should best surprise them, and, when he had learnt their
plans, how he might recross the sea and return to his own people. At
last, as he got more and more weary, as the heat of the sun grew more
oppressive, and as the blood rushed more painfully to his heart and began
to throb more rapidly in his temples, he lost all power of thought, and
that which dwelt in his mind was no more than a dumb longing to reach his
destination as soon as possible.
It was the third afternoon when he saw from afar the palms of Raithu, and
hurried on with revived strength. Before the sun had set he had informed
the anchorite, to whom Paulus had directed him, that the Alexandrian
declined their call, and was minded to remain on the Holy Mountain.
Then Hermas proceeded to the little harbor, to bargain with the fishermen
of the place for the boat which he needed While he was talking with an
old Amalekite boatman, who, with his black-eyed sons, was arranging his
nets, two riders came at a quick pace towards the bay in which a large
merchant-ship lay at anchor, surrounded by little barks. The fisherman
pointed to it.
"It is waiting for the caravan from Petra," he said. "There, on the
dromedary, is the emperor's great warrior who commands the Romans in
Pharan."
Hermas saw Phoebicius for the first time, and as he rode up towards him
and the fisherman he started; if he had followed his first impulse, he
would have turned and have taken to flight, but his clear eyes had met
the dull and searching glance of the centurion, and, blushing at his own
weakness, he stood still with his arms crossed, and proudly and defiantly
awaited the Gaul who with his companion came straight up to him.
Talib had previously seen the youth by his father's side; he recognized
him and asked how long he had been there, and if he had come direct from
the mountain. Hermas answered him as was becoming, and understood at once
that it was not he that the centurion was seeking.
Perfectly reassured and not without curiosity he looked at the new-comer,
and a smile curled his lips as he observed that the lean old man,
exhausted by his long and hurried ride, could scarcely hold himself on
his beast, and at the same time it struck him that this pitiable old man
was the husband of the blooming and youthful Sirona. Far from feeling any
remorse for his intrusion into this man's house, he yielded entirely to
the audacious humor with which his aspect filled him, and when Phoebicius
himself asked him as to whether he had not met on his way with a
fair-haired woman and a limping greyhound, he replied, repressing his
laughter with difficulty:
"Aye, indeed! I did see such a woman and her dog, but I do not think it
was lame."
"Where did you see her?" asked Phoebicius hastily. Hermas colored, for he
was obliged to tell an untruth, and it might be that he would do Sirona
an injury by giving false information. He therefore ventured to give no
decided answer, but enquired, "Has the woman committed some crime that
you are pursuing her?"
"A great one!" replied Talib, "she is my lord's wife, and--"
What she has done wrong concerns me alone,' said Phoebicius, sharply
interrupting his companion. "I hope this fellow saw better than you who
took the crying woman with a child, from Aila, for Sirona. What is your
name, boy?"
"Hermas," answered the lad. "And who are you, pray?"
The Gaul's lips were parted for an angry reply, but he suppressed it and
said, "I am the emperor's centurion, and I ask you, what did the woman
look like whom you saw, and where did you meet her?"
The soldier's fierce looks, and his captain's words showed Hermas that
the fugitive woman had nothing good to expect if she were caught, and as
he was not in the least inclined to assist her pursuers he hastily
replied, giving the reins to his audacity, "I at any rate did not meet
the person whom you seek; the woman I saw is certainly not this man's
wife, for she might very well be his granddaughter. She had gold hair,
and a rosy face, and the greyhound that followed her was called Iambe."
"Where did you meet her?" shrieked the centurion.
"In the fishing-village at the foot of the mountain," replied Hermas.
"She got into a boat, and away it went!"
"Towards the north?" asked the Gaul.
"I think so," replied Hermas, "but I do not know, for I was in a hurry,
and could not look after her."
"Then we will try to take her in Klysma," cried Phoebicius to the
Amalekite. "If only there were horses in this accursed desert!"
"It is four days' journey," said Talib considering. "And beyond Elim
there is no water before the Wells of Moses. Certainly if we could get
good dromedaries--"
"And if," interrupted Hermas, "it were not better that you, my lord
centurion, should not go so far from the oasis. For over there they say
that the Blemmyes are gathering, and I myself am going across as a spy so
soon as it is dark."
Phoebicius looked down gloomily considering the matter. The news had
reached him too that the sons of the desert were preparing for a new
incursion, and he cried to Talib angrily but decidedly, as he turned his
back upon Hermas, "You must ride alone to Klysma, and try to capture her.
I cannot and will not neglect my duty for the sake of the wretched
woman."
Hermas looked after him as he went away, and laughed out loud when he saw
him disappear into his inn. He hired a boat from the old man for his
passage across the sea for one of the gold pieces given him by Paulus,
and lying down on the nets he refreshed him self by a deep sleep of some
hours' duration. When the moon rose he was roused in obedience to his
orders, and helped the boy who accompanied him, and who understood the
management of the sails and rudder, to push the boat, which was laid up
on the sand, down into the sea. Soon he was flying over the smooth and
glistening waters before a light wind, and he felt as fresh and strong in
spirit as a young eagle that has just left the nest, and spreads its
mighty wings for the first time. He could have shouted in his new and
delicious sense of freedom, and the boy at the stern shook his head in
astonishment when he saw Hermas wield the oars he had entrusted to him,
unskilfully it is true, but with mighty strokes.
"The wind is in our favor," he called out to the anchorite as he hauled
round the sail with the rope in his hand, "we shall get on without your
working so hard. You may save your strength."
"There is plenty of it, and I need not be stingy of it," answered Hermas,
and he bent forward for another powerful stroke.
About half-way he took a rest, and admired the reflection of the moon in
the bright mirror of the water, and he could not but think of Petrus'
court-yard that had shone in the same silvery light when he had climbed
up to Sirona's window. The image of the fair, whitearmed woman recurred
to his mind, and a melancholy longing began to creep over him.
He sighed softly, again and yet again; but as his breast heaved for the
third bitter sigh, he remembered the object of his journey and his broken
fetters, and with eager arrogance he struck the oar flat on to the water
so that it spurted high up, and sprinkled the boat and him with a shower
of wet and twinkling diamond drops. He began to work the oars again,
reflecting as he did so, that he had something better to do than to think
of a woman. Indeed, he found it easy to forget Sirona completely, for in
the next few days he went through every excitement of a warrior's life.
Scarcely two hours after his start from Raithu he was standing on the
soil of another continent, and, after finding a hiding-place for his
boat, he slipped off among the hills to watch the movements of the
Blemmyes. The very first day he went up to the valley in which they were
gathering; on the second, after being many times seen and pursued, he
succeeded in seizing a warrior who had been sent out to reconnoitre, and
in carrying him off with him; he bound him, and by heavy threats learned
many things from him.
The number of their collected enemies was great, but Hermas had hopes of
outstripping them, for his prisoner revealed to him the spot where their
boats, drawn up on shore, lay hidden under sand and stones.
As soon as it was dusk, the anchorite in his boat went towards the place
of embarkation, and when the Blemmyes, in the darkness of midnight, drew
their first bark into the water, Hermas sailed off ahead of the enemy,
landed in much danger below the western declivity of the mountain, and
hastened up towards Sinai to warn the Pharanite watchmen on the beacon.
He gained the top of the difficult peak before sunrise, roused the lazy
sentinels who had left their posts, and before they were able to mount
guard, to hoist the flags or to begin to sound the brazen cymbals, he had
hurried on down the valley to his father's cave.
Since his disappearance Miriam had incessantly hovered round Stephanus'
dwelling, and had fetched fresh water for the old man every morning, noon
and evening, even after a new nurse, who was clumsier and more peevish,
had taken Paulus' place. She lived on roots, and on the bread the sick
man gave her, and at night she lay down to sleep in a deep dry cleft of
the rock that she had long known well. She quitted her hard bed before
daybreak to refill the old man's pitcher, and to chatter to him about
Hermas.
She was a willing servant to Stephanus because as often as she went to
him, she could hear his son's name from his lips, and he rejoiced at her
coming because she always gave him the opportunity of talking of Hermas.
For many weeks the sick man had been so accustomed to let himself be
waited on that he accepted the shepherdess's good offices as a matter of
course, and she never attempted to account to herself for her readiness
to serve him. Stephanus would have suffered in dispensing with her, and
to her, her visits to the well and her conversations with the old man had
become a need, nay a necessity, for she still was ignorant whether Hermas
was yet alive, or whether Phoebicius had killed him in consequence of her
betrayal. Perhaps all that Stephanus told her of his son's journey of
investigation was an invention of Paulus to spare the sick man, and
accustom him gradually to the loss of his child; and yet she was only too
willing to believe that Hermas still lived, and she quitted the
neighborhood of the cave as late as possible, and filled the sick man's
water-jar before the sun was up, only because she said to herself that
the fugitive on his return would seek no one else so soon as his father.
She had not one really quiet moment, for if a falling stone, an
approaching footstep, or the cry of a beast broke the stillness of the
desert she at once hid herself, and listened with a beating heart; much
less from fear of Petrus her master, from whom she had run away, than in
the expectation of hearing the step of the man whom she had betrayed into
the hand of his enemy, and for whom she nevertheless painfully longed day
and night.
As often as she lingered by the spring she wetted her stubborn hair to
smooth it, and washed her face with as much zeal as if she thought she
should succeed in washing the dark hue out of her skin. And all this she
did for him, that on his return she might charm him as much as the white
woman in the oasis, whom she hated as fiercely as she loved him
passionately.
During the heavy storm of last night a torrent from the mountain-height
had shed itself into her retreat and had driven her out of it. Wet
through, shelterless, tormented by remorse, fear and longing, she had
clambered from stone to stone, and sought refuge and peace under first
one rock and then another; thus she had been attracted by the glimmer of
light that shone out of the new dwelling of the pious Paulus; she had
seen and recognized the Alexandrian, but he had not observed her as he
cowered on the ground near his hearth deeply sunk in thought.
She knew now where the excommunicated man dwelt after whom Stephanus
often asked, and she had gathered from the old man's lamentations and
dark hints, that Paulus too had been ensnared and brought to ruin by her
enemy.
As the morning-star began to pale Miriam went up to Stephanus' cave; her
heart was full of tears, and yet she was unable to pour out her need and
suffering in a soothing flood of weeping; she was wholly possessed with a
wild desire to sink down on the earth there and die, and to be released
by death from her relentless, driving torment. But it was still too early
to disturb the old man--and yet--she must hear a human voice, one
word--even if it were a hard word--from the lips of a human being; for
the bewildering feeling of distraction which confused her mind, and the
misery of abandonment that crushed her heart, were all too cruelly
painful to be borne.
She was standing by the entrance to the cave when, high above her head,
she heard the falling of stones and the cry of a human voice. She started
and listened with out-stretched neck and strung sinews, motionless. Then
she broke suddenly into a loud and piercing shout of joy, and flinging up
her arms she flew up the mountain towards a traveller who came swiftly
down to meet her.
"Hermas! Hermas!" she shouted, and all the sunny delight of her heart was
reflected in her cry so clearly and purely that the sympathetic chords in
the young man's soul echoed the sound, and he hailed her with joyful
welcome.
He had never before greeted her thus, and the tone of his voice revived
her poor crushed heart like a restorative draught offered by a tender
hand to the lips of the dying. Exquisite delight, and a glow of gratitude
such as she had never before felt flooded her soul, and as he was so good
to her she longed to show him that she had something to offer in return
for the gift of friendship which he offered her. So the first thing she
said to him was, "I have staid constantly near your father, and have
brought him water early and late, as much as he needed."
She blushed as she thus for the first time praised herself to him, but
Hermas exclaimed, "That is a good girl! and I will not forget it. You are
a wild, silly thing, but I believe that you are to be relied on by those
to whom you feel kindly."
"Only try me," cried Miriam holding out her hand to him. He took it, and
as they went on together he said:
"Do you hear the brass? I have warned the watchmen up there; the Blemmyes
are coming. Is Paulus with my father?"
"No, but I know where he is."
"Then you must call him," said the young man. "Him first and then
Gelasius, and Psoes, and Dulas, and any more of the penitents that you
can find. They must all go to the castle by the ravine. Now I will go to
my father; you hurry on and show that you are to be trusted." As he spoke
he put his arm round her waist, but she slipped shyly away, and calling
out, "I will take them all the message," she hurried off.
In front of the cave where she had hoped to meet with Paulus she found
Sirona; she did not stop with her, but contented herself with laughing
wildly and calling out words of abuse.
Guided by the idea that she should find the Alexandrian at the nearest
well, she went on and called him, then hurrying on from cave to cave she
delivered her message in Hermas' name, happy to serve him.
CHAPTER XX.
They were all collected behind the rough wall on the edge of the
ravine-the strange men who had turned their back on life with all its
joys and pails, its duties and its delights, on the community and family
to which they belonged, and had fled to the desert, there to strive for a
prize above and beyond this life, when they had of their own free-will
renounced all other effort. In the voiceless desert, far from the
enticing echoes of the world, it might be easy to kill every sensual
impulse, to throw off the fetters of the world, and so bring that
humanity, which was bound to the dust through sin and the flesh, nearer
to the pure and incorporate being of the Divinity.
All these men were Christians, and, like the Saviour who had freely taken
torments upon Himself to become the Redeemer, they too sought through the
purifying power of suffering to free themselves from the dross of their
impure human nature, and by severe penance to contribute their share of
atonement for their own guilt, and for that of all their race. No fear of
persecution had driven them into the desert--nothing but the hope of
gaining the hardest of victories.
All the anchorites who had been summoned to the tower were Egyptians and
Syrians, and among the former particularly there were many who, being
already inured to abstinence and penance in the service of the old gods
in their own country, now as Christians had selected as the scene of
their pious exercises the very spot where the Lord must have revealed
Himself to his elect.
At a later date not merely Sinai itself but the whole tract of Arabia
Petraea--through which, as it was said, the Jews at their exodus under
Moses had wandered--was peopled with ascetics of like mind, who gave to
their settlements the names of the resting-places of the chosen people,
as mentioned in the Scriptures; but as yet there was no connection
between the individual penitents, no order ruled their lives; they might
still be counted by tens, though ere long they numbered hundreds and
thousands.
The threat of danger had brought all these contemners of the world and of
life in stormy haste to the shelter of the tower, in spite of their
readiness to die. Only old Kosmas, who had withdrawn to the desert with
his wife--she had found a grave there--had remained in his cave, and had
declared to Gelasius, who shared his cave and who had urged him to
flight, that he was content in whatever place or whatever hour the Lord
should call him, and that it was in God's hands to decide whether old age
or an arrow-shot should open to him the gates of heaven.
It was quite otherwise with the rest of the anchorites, who rushed
through the narrow door of the watchtower and into its inner room till it
was filled to overflowing, and Paulus, who in the presence of danger had
fully recovered his equanimity, was obliged to refuse admission to a
new-comer in order to preserve the closely packed and trembling crowd
from injury.
No murrain passes from beast to beast, no mildew from fruit to fruit with
such rapidity as fear spreads from man to man. Those who had been driven
by the sharpest lashings of terror had run the fastest, and reached the
castle first. They had received those who followed them with lamentation
and outcries, and it was a pitiable sight to see how the terrified crowd,
in the midst of their loud declarations of resignation to God's guidance
and their pious prayers, wrung their hands, and at the same time how
painfully anxious each one was to hide the little property he had saved
first from the disapproval of his companions, and then from the
covetousness of the approaching enemy.
With Paulus came Sergius and Jeremias to whom, on the way, he had spoken
words of encouragement. All three did their utmost to revive the
confidence of the terrified men, and when the Alexandrian reminded them
how zealously each of them only a few weeks since had helped to roll the
blocks and stones from the wall, and down the precipice, so as to crush
and slay the advancing enemy the feeling was strong in many of them that,
as he had already proved himself worthy in defence, it was due to him now
to make him their leader.
The number of the men who rushed out of the tower was increasing, and
when Hermas appeared with his father on his back and followed by Miriam,
and when Paulus exhorted his companions to be edified by this pathetic
picture of filial love, curiosity tempted even the last loiterers in the
tower out into the open space.
The Alexandrian sprang over the wall, went up to Stephanus, lifted him
from the shoulders of the panting youth and, taking him on his own,
carried him towards the tower; but the old warrior refused to enter the
place of refuge, and begged his friend to lay him down by the wall.
Paulus obeyed his wish and then went with Hermas to the top of the tower
to spy the distance from thence.
As soon as he had quitted him, Stephanus turned to the anchorites who
stood near him, saying, "These stones are loose, and though my strength
is indeed small still it is great enough to send one of them over with a
push. If it comes to a battle my old soldier's eyes, dim as they are now,
may with the help of yours see many things that may be useful to you
young ones. Above all things, if the game is to be a hot one for the
robbers, one must command here whom the others will obey."
"It shall be you, father," interrupted Salathiel the Syrian. "You have
served in Caesar's army, and you proved your courage and knowledge of war
in the last raid. You shall command us."
Stephanus sadly shook his head and replied, "My voice is become too weak
and low since this wound in my breast and my long illness. Not even those
who stand nearest to me would understand me in the noise of battle. Let
Paulus be your captain, for he is strong, cautious and brave."
Many of the anchorites had long looked upon the Alexandrian as their best
stay; for many years he had enjoyed the respect of all and on a thousand
occasions had given proof of his strength and presence of mind, but at
this proposal they looked at each other in surprise, doubt and
disapproval.
Stephanus saw what was passing in their minds.
"It is true he has erred gravely," he said. "And before God he is the
least of the least among us; but in animal strength and indomitable
courage he is superior to you all. Which of you would be willing to take
his place, if you reject his guidance."
"Orion the Saite," cried one of the anchorites, "is tall and strong. If
he would--"
But Orion eagerly excused himself from assuming the dangerous office, and
when Andreas and Joseph also refused with no less decision the leadership
that was offered them, Stephanus said:
"You see there is no choice left us but to be, the Alexandrian to command
us here so long as the robbers threaten us, and no longer. There he
comes--shall I ask him?"
A murmur of consent, though by no means of satisfaction, answered the old
man, and Paulus, quite carried away by his eagerness to stake his life
and blood for the protection of the weak, and fevered with a soldier's
ardor, accepted Stephanus' commission as a matter of course, and set to
work like a general to organize the helpless wearers of sheepskin.
Some he sent to the top of the tower to keep watch, others he charged
with the transport of the stones; to a third party he entrusted the duty
of hurling pieces of rock and blocks of stone down into the abyss in the
moment of danger; he requested the weaker brethren to assemble themselves
together, to pray for the others and to sing hymns of praise, and he
concerted signs and passwords with all; he was now here, now there, and
his energy and confidence infused themselves even into the faint-hearted.
In the midst of these arrangements Hermas took leave of him and of his
father, for he heard the Roman war-trumpets and the drums of the young
manhood of Pharan, as they marched through the short cut to meet the
enemy. He knew where the main strength of the Blemmyes lay and
communicated this knowledge to the Centurion Phoebicius and the captain
of the Pharanites. The Gaul put a few short questions to Hermas, whom he
recognized immediately, for since he had met him at the harbor of Raithu
he could not forget his eyes, which reminded him of those of Glycera; and
after receiving his hasty and decided answers he issued rapid and prudent
orders.
A third of the Pharanites were to march forward against the enemy,
drumming and trumpeting, and then retreat as far as the watch-tower as
the enemy approached over the plain. If the Blemmyes allowed themselves
to be tempted thither, a second third of the warriors of the oasis, that
could easily be in ambush in a cross-valley, were to fall on their left
flank, while Phoebicius and his maniple--hidden behind the rock on which
the castle stood--would suddenly rush out and so decide the battle. The
last third of the Pharanites had orders to destroy the ships of the
invaders under the command of Hermas, who knew the spot where they had
landed.
In the worst case the centurion and his men could retreat into the
castle, and there defend themselves till the warriors of the nearest
seaports--whither messengers were already on their way--should come to
the rescue.
The Gaul's orders were immediately obeyed, and Hermas walked at the head
of the division entrusted to him, as proud and as self-possessed as any
of Caesar's veterans leading his legion into the field. He carried a bow
and arrows at his back, and in his hand a battleaxe that he had bought at
Raithu.
Miriam attempted to follow the troops he was leading, but he observed
her, and called out, "Go up to the fort, child, to my father." And the
shepherdess obeyed without hesitation.
The anchorites had all crowded to the edge of the precipice, they looked
at the division of the forces, and signed and shouted down. They had
hoped that some part of the fighting men would be joined to them for
their defence, but, as they soon learned, they had hoped in vain.
Stephanus, whose feeble sight could not reach so far as the plain at the
foot of the declivity, made Paulus report to him all that was going on
there, and with the keen insight of a soldier he comprehended the
centurion's plan. The troop led by Hermas passed by below the tower, and
the youth waved and shouted a greeting up to his father. Stephanus, whose
hearing remained sharper than his sight, recognized his son's voice and
took leave of him with tender and loving words in as loud a voice as he
could command. Paulus collected all the overflow of the old man's heart
in one sentence, and called out his blessings through his two hands as a
speaking-trumpet, after his friend's son as he departed to battle. Hermas
understood; but deeply as he was touched by this farewell he answered
only by dumb signs. A father can find a hundred words of blessing sooner
than a son can find one of thanks.
As the youth disappeared behind the rocks, Paulus said, "He marches on
like an experienced soldier, and the others follow him as sheep follow a
ram. But hark!--Certainly--the foremost division of the Pharanites and
the enemy have met. The outcry comes nearer and nearer."
"Then all will be well," cried Stephanus excitedly. "If they only take
the bait and let themselves be drawn on to the plateau I think they are
lost. From here we can watch the whole progress of the battle, and if our
side are driven back it may easily happen that they will throw themselves
into the castle. Now not a pebble must be thrown in vain, for if our
tower becomes the central point of the struggle the defenders will need
stones to fling."
These words were heard by several of the anchorites, and as now the
war-cries and the noise of the fight came nearer and nearer, and one and
another repeated to each other that their place of refuge would, become
the centre of the combat, the frightened penitents quitted the posts
assigned to them by Paulus, ran hither and thither in spite of the
Alexandrian's severe prohibition, and most of them at last joined the
company of the old and feeble, whose psalms grew more and more lamentable
as danger pressed closer upon them.
Loudest of all was the wailing of the Saite Orion who cried with uplifted
bands, "What wilt Thou of us miserable creatures, O Lord? When Moses left
Thy chosen people on this very spot for only forty days, they at once
fell away from Thee; and we, we without any leader have spent all our
life in Thy service, and have given up all that can rejoice the heart,
and have taken every kind of suffering upon us to please Thee! and now
these hideous heathen are surging round us again, and will kill us. Is
this the reward of victory for our striving and our long wrestling?"
The rest joined in the lamentation of the Saite, but Paulus stepped into
their midst, blamed them for their cowardice, and with warm and urgent
speech implored them to return to their posts so that the wall might be
guarded at least on the eastern and more accessible side, and that the
castle might not fall an easy prey into the hands of an enemy from whom
no quarter was to be expected. Some of the anchorites were already
proceeding to obey the Alexandrian's injunction, when a fearful cry, the
war-cry of the Blemmyes who were in pursuit of the Pharanites, rose from
the foot of their rock of refuge.
They crowded together again in terror; Salathiel the Syrian, had ventured
to the edge of the abyss, and had looked over old Stephanus' shoulder
down into the hollow, and when he rushed back to his companions, crying
in terror, "Our men are flying!"
Gelasius shrieked aloud, beat his breast, and tore his rough black hair,
crying out:
"O Lord God, what wilt Thou of us? Is it vain then to strive after
righteousness and virtue that Thou givest us over unto death, and dost
not fight for us? If we are overcome by the heathen, ungodliness and
brute force will boast themselves as though they had won the victory over
righteousness and truth!"
Paulus had turned from the lamenting hermits, perplexed and beside
himself, and stood with Stephanus watching the fight.
The Blemmyes had come in great numbers, and their attack, before which
the Pharanites were to have retired as a feint, fell with such force upon
the foremost division that they and their comrades, who had rushed to
their aid on the plateau, were unable to resist it, and were driven back
as far as the spot where the ravine narrowed.
"Things are not as they should be," said Stephanus. "And the cowardly
band, like a drove of cattle," cried Paulus in a fury, "leave the walls
unprotected, and blaspheme God instead of watching or fighting."
The anchorites noticed his gestures, which were indeed those of a
desperate man, and Sergius exclaimed: "Are we then wholly abandoned? Why
does not the thorn-bush light its fires, and destroy the evil-doers with
its flames? Why is the thunder silent, and where are the lightnings that
played round the peak of Sinai?
"Why does not darkness fall upon us to affright the heathen? Why does not
the earth open her mouth to swallow them up like the company of Korah?"
"The Might of God," cried Dulas, "tarries too long. The Lord must set our
piety in a doubtful light, for He treats us as though we were unworthy of
all care."
"And that you are!" exclaimed Paulus, who had heard the last words, and
who was dragging rather than leading the feeble Stephanus to the
unguarded eastern wall. "That you are, for instead of resisting His
enemies you blaspheme God, and disgrace yourself by your miserable
cowardice. Look at this sick old man who is prepared to defend you, and
obey my orders without a murmur, or, by the holy martyrs, I will drag you
to your posts by your hair and ears, and will--"
But he ceased speaking, for his threats were interrupted by a powerful
voice which called his name from the foot of the wall.
"That is Agapitus," exclaimed Stephanus. "Lead me to the wall, and set me
down there."
Before Paulus could accede to his friend's wish the tall form of the
bishop was standing by his side. Agapitus the Cappadocian had in his
youth been a warrior; he had hardly passed the limits of middle age, and
was a vigilant captain of his congregation. When all the youth of Pharan
had gone forth to meet the Blemmyes, he had no peace in the oasis, and,
after enjoining on the presbyters and deacons that they should pray in
the church for the fighting men with the women and the men who remained
behind, he himself, accompanied by a guide and two acolytes, had gone up
the mountain to witness the battle.
To the other priests and his wife who sought to detain him, he had
answered, "Where the flock is there should the shepherd be!"
Unseen and unheard he had gained the castle-wall and had been a witness
to Paulus' vehement speech. He now stood opposite the Alexandrian with
rolling eyes, and threateningly lifted his powerful hand as he called out
to him:
"And dare an outcast speak thus to his brethren? Will the champion of
Satan give orders to the soldiers of the Lord? It would indeed be a joy
to you if by your strong arm you could win back the good name that your
soul, crippled by sin and guilt, has flung away. Come on, my friends! the
Lord is with us and will help us."
Paulus had let the bishop's words pass over him in silence, and raised
his hands like the other anchorites when Agapitus stepped into their
midst, and uttered a short and urgent prayer.
After the "Amen" the bishop pointed out, like a general, to each man,
even to the feeble and aged, his place by the wall or behind the stones
for throwing, and then cried out with a clear ringing voice that sounded
above all other noise, "Show to-day that you are indeed soldiers of the
Most High."
Not one rebelled, and when man by man each had placed himself at his
post, he went to the precipice and looked attentively down at the fight
that was raging below.
The Pharanites were now opposing the attack of the Blemmyes with success,
for Phoebicius, rushing forward with his men from their ambush, had
fallen upon the compact mass of the sons of the desert in flank and,
spreading death and ruin, had divided them into two bodies. The
well-trained and well-armed Romans seemed to have an easy task with their
naked opponents, who, in a hand to hand fight, could not avail themselves
of either their arrows or their spears. But the Blemmyes had learned to
use their strength in frequent battles with the imperial troops, and so
soon as they perceived that they were no match for their enemies in
pitched battle, their leaders set up a strange shrill cry, their ranks
dissolved, and they dispersed in all directions, like a heap of feathers
strewn by a gust of wind.
Agapitus took the hasty disappearance of the enemy for wild flight, he
sighed deeply and thankfully and turned to go down to the field of
battle, and to speak consolation to his wounded fellow-Christians.
But in the castle itself he found opportunity for exercising his pious
office, for before him stood the shepherdess whom he had already observed
on his arrival and she said with much embarrassment, but clearly and
quickly, "Old Stephanus there, my lord bishop--Hermas' father for whom I
carry water-bids me ask you to come to him; for his wound has reopened
and he thinks his end is near."
Agapitus immediately obeyed this call; he went with hasty steps towards
the sick man, whose wound Paulus and Orion had already bound up, and
greeted him with a familiarity that he was far from showing to the other
penitents. He had long known the former name and the fate of Stephanus,
and it was by his advice that Hermas had been obliged to join the
deputation sent to Alexandria, for Agapitus was of opinion that no one
ought to flee from the battle of life without having first taken some
part in it.
Stephanus put out his hand to the bishop who sat down beside him, signed
to the bystanders to leave them alone, and listened attentively to the
feeble words of the sufferer. When he had ceased speaking, Agapitus said:
"I praise the Lord with you for having permitted your lost wife to find
the ways that lead to Him, and your son will be--as you were once--a
valiant man of war. Your earthly house is set in order, but are you
prepared for the other, the everlasting mansion?"
"For eighteen years I have done penance, and prayed, and borne great
sufferings," answered the sick man. "The world lies far behind me, and I
hope I am walking in the path that leads to heaven."
"So do I hope for you and for your soul," said the bishop. "That which it
is hardest to endure has fallen to your lot in this world, but have you
striven to forgive those who did you the bitterest wrong, and can you
pray, 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive them that sin against us?' Do
you remember the words, 'If ye forgive men their trespasses your heavenly
father will also forgive you?'"
"Not only have I pardoned Glycera," answered Stephanus, "but I have taken
her again into my heart of hearts; but the man who basely seduced her,
the wretch, who although I had done him a thousand benefits, betrayed me,
robbed me and dishonored me, I wish him--"
"Forgive him," cried Agapitus, "as you would be forgiven."
"I have striven these eighteen years to bless my enemy," replied
Stephanus, "and I will still continue to strive--"
Up to this moment the bishop had devoted his whole attention to the sick
anchorite, but he was now called on all sides at once, and Gelasius, who
was standing by the declivity with some other anchorites, called out to
him, "Father--save us--the heathen there are climbing up the rocks."
Agapitus signed a blessing over Stephanus and then turned away from him,
saying earnestly once more, "Forgive, and heaven is open to you."
Many wounded and dead lay on the plain, and the Pharanites were
retreating into the ravine, for the Blemmyes had not indeed fled, but had
only dispersed themselves, and then had climbed up the rocks which hemmed
in the level ground and shot their arrows at their enemies from thence.
"Where are the Romans?" Agapitus eagerly enquired of Orion.
"They are withdrawing into the gorge through which the road leads up
here," answered the Saite. "But look! only look at these heathen! The
Lord be merciful to us! they are climbing up the cliffs like woodpeckers
up a tree."
"The stones, fly to the stones!" cried Agapitus with flashing eyes to the
anchorites that stood by. "What is going on behind the wall there? Do you
hear? Yes that is the Roman tuba. Courage, brethren! the emperor's
soldiers are guarding the weakest side of the castle. But look here at
the naked figures in the cleft. Bring the blocks here; set your shoulders
stoutly to it, Orion! one more push, Salathiel! There it goes, it crashes
down if only it does not stick in the rift! No! thank God, it has bounded
off-that was a leap! Well done--there were six enemies of the Lord
destroyed at once."
"I see three more yonder," cried Orion. "Come here, Damianus, and help
me."
The man he called rushed forward with several others, and the first
success raised the courage of the anchorites so rapidly and wonderfully
that the bishop soon found it difficult to restrain their zeal, and to
persuade them to be sparing with the precious missiles.
While, under the direction of Agapitus stone after stone was hurled
clattering over the steep precipice down upon the Blemmyes, Paulus sat by
the sick man, looking at the ground.
"You are not helping them?" asked Stephanus. "Agapitus is right," replied
the Alexandrian. "I have much to expiate, and fighting brings enjoyment.
How great enjoyment I can understand by the torture it is to me to sit
still. The bishop blessed you affectionately."
"I am near the goal," sighed Stephanus, "and he promises me the joys of
heaven if I only forgive him who stole my wife from me. He is
forgiven-yes, all is forgiven him, and may everything that he undertakes
turn to good; yea, and nothing turn to evil--only feel how my heart
throbs, it is rallying its strength once more before it utterly ceases to
beat. When it is all over repeat to Hermas everything that I have told
you, and bless him a thousand, thousand times in my name and his
mother's; but never, never tell him that in an hour of weakness she ran
away with that villain--that man, that miserable man I mean--whom I
forgive. Give Hermas this ring, and with it the letter that you will find
under the dry herbs on the couch in my cave; they will secure him a
reception from his uncle, who will also procure him a place in the army,
for my brother is in high favor with Caesar. Only listen how Agapitus
urges on our men; they are fighting bravely there; that is the Roman
tuba. Attend to me--the maniple will occupy the castle and shoot down on
the heathen from hence; when they come carry me into the tower. I am weak
and would fain collect my thoughts, and pray once more that I may find
strength to forgive the man not with my lips only."
"Down there see--there come the Romans," cried Paulus interrupting him.
"Here, up here!" he called down to the men, "The steps are more to the
left."
"Here we are," answered a sharp voice. "You stay there, you people, on
that projection of rock, and keep your eye on the castle. If any danger
threatens call me with the trumpet. I will climb up, and from the top of
the tower there I can see where the dogs come from."
During this speech Stephanus had looked down and listened; when a few
minutes later the Gaul reached the wall and called out to the men inside,
"Is there no one there who will give me a hand?" he turned to Paulus,
saying, "Lift me up and support me--quick!"
With an agility that astonished the Alexandrian, Stephanus stood upon his
feet, leaned over the wall towards the centurion--who had climbed as far
as the outer foot of it, looked him in the face with eager attention,
shuddered violently, and repressing his feelings with the utmost effort
offered him his lean hand to help him.
"Servianus!" cried the centurion, who was greatly shocked by such a
meeting and in such a place, and who, struggling painfully for composure,
stared first at the old man and then at Paulus.
Not one of the three succeeded in uttering a word; but Stephanus' eyes
were fixed on the Gaul's features, and the longer he looked at him the
hollower grew his cheeks and the paler his lips; at the same time he
still held out his hand to the other, perhaps in token of forgiveness.
So passed a long minute. Then Phoebicius recollected that he had climbed
the wall in the emperor's service, and stamping with impatience at
himself he took the old man's hand in a hasty grasp. But scarcely had
Stephanus felt the touch of the Gaul's fingers when he started as struck
by lightning, and flung himself with a hoarse cry on his enemy who was
hanging on the edge of the wall.
Paulus gazed in horror at the frightful scene, and cried aloud with
fervent unction, "Let him go--forgive that heaven may forgive you."
"Heaven! what is heaven, what is forgiveness!" screamed the old man. "He
shall be damned." Before the Alexandrian could hinder him, the loose
stone over which the enemies were wrestling in breathless combat gave
way, and both were hurled into the abyss with the falling rock.
Paulus groaned from the lowest depth of his breast and murmured while the
tears ran down his cheeks, "He too has fought the fight, and he too has
striven in vain."
CHAPTER XXI.
The fight was ended; the sun as it went to its rest behind the Holy
Mountain had lighted many corpses of Blemmyes, and now the stars shone
down on the oasis from the clear sky.
Hymns of praise sounded out of the church, and near it, under the hill
against which it was built, torches were blazing and threw their ruddy
light on a row of biers, on which under green palm-branches lay the
heroes who had fallen in the battle against the Blemmyes. Now the hymn
ceased, the gates of the house of God opened and Agapitus led his
followers towards the dead. The congregation gathered in a half-circle
round their peaceful brethren, and heard the blessing that their pastor
pronounced over the noble victims who had shed their blood in fighting
the heathen. When it was ended those who in life had been their nearest
and dearest went up to the dead, and many tears fell into the sand from
the eye of a mother or a wife, many a sigh went up to heaven from a
father's breast. Next to the bier, on which old Stephanus was resting,
stood another and a smaller one, and between the two Hermas knelt and
wept. He raised his face, for a deep and kindly voice spoke his name.
"Petrus," said the lad, clasping the hand that the senator held out to
him, "I felt forced and driven out into the world, and away from my
father--and now he is gone for ever how gladly I would have been kept by
him."
"He died a noble death, in battle for those he loved," said the senator
consolingly,
"Paulus was near him when he fell," replied Hermas. "My father fell from
the wall while defending the tower; but look here this girl--poor
child--who used to keep your goats, died like a heroine. Poor, wild
Miriam, how kind I would be to you if only you were alive now!"
Hermas as he spoke stroked the arm of the shepherdess, pressed a kiss on
her small, cold hand, and softly folded it with the other across her
bosom.
"How did the girl get into the battle with the men?" asked Petrus. "But
you can tell me that in my own house. Come and be our guest as long as it
pleases you, and until you go forth into the world; thanks are due to you
from us all."
Hermas blushed and modestly declined the praises which were showered on
him on all sides as the savior of the oasis. When the wailing women
appeared he knelt once more at the head of his father's bier, cast a last
loving look at Miriam's peaceful face, and then followed his host.
The man and boy crossed the court together. Hermas involuntarily glanced
up at the window where more than once he had seen Sirona, and said, as he
pointed to the centurion's house, "He too fell."
Petrus nodded and opened the door of his house. In the hall, which was
lighted up, Dorothea came hastily to meet him, asking, "No news yet of
Polykarp?"
Her husband shook his head, and she added, "How indeed is it possible? He
will write at the soonest from Klysma or perhaps even from Alexandria."
"That is just what I think," replied Petrus, looking down to the ground.
Then he turned to Hermas and introduced him to his wife.
Dorothea received the young man with warm sympathy; she had heard that
his father had fallen in the fight, and how nobly he too had
distinguished himself. Supper was ready, and Hermas was invited to share
it. The mistress gave her daughter a sign to make preparations for their
guest, but Petrus detained Marthana, and said, "Hermas may fill Antonius'
place; he has still something to do with some of the workmen. Where are
Jethro and the house-slaves?"
"They have already eaten," said Dorothea.
The husband and wife looked at each other, and Petrus said with a
melancholy smile, "I believe they are up on the mountain."
Dorothea wiped a tear from her eye as she replied, "They will meet
Antonius there. If only they could find Polykarp! And yet I honestly
say--not merely to comfort you--it is most probable that he has not met
with any accident in the mountain gorges, but has gone to Alexandria to
escape the memories that follow him here at every step--Was not that the
gate?"
She rose quickly and looked into the court, while Petrus, who had
followed her, did the same, saying with a deep sigh, as he turned to
Marthana--who, while she offered meat and bread to Hermas was watching
her parents--"It was only the slave Anubis."
For some time a painful silence reigned round the large table, to-day so
sparely furnished with guests.
At last Petrus turned to his guest and said, "You were to tell me how the
shepherdess Miriam lost her life in the struggle. She had run away from
our house--"
"Up the mountain," added Hermas. "She supplied my poor father with water
like a daughter."
"You see, mother," interrupted Marthana, "she was not bad-hearted--I
always said so."
"This morning," continued Hermas, nodding in sad assent to the maiden,
"she followed my father to the castle, and immediately after his fall,
Paulus told me, she rushed away from it, but only to seek me and to bring
me the sad news. We had known each other a long time, for years she had
watered her goats at our well, and while I was still quite a boy and she
a little girl, she would listen for hours when I played on my willow pipe
the songs which Paulus had taught me. As long as I played she was
perfectly quiet, and when I ceased she wanted to hear more and still
more, until I had too much of it and went away. Then she would grow
angry, and if I would not do her will she would scold me with bad words.
But she always came again, and as I had no other companion and she was
the only creature who cared to listen to me, I was very well-content that
she should prefer our well to all the others. Then we grew order and I
began to be afraid of her, for she would talk in such a godless way--and
she even died a heathen. Paulus, who once overheard us, warned me against
her, and as I had long thrown away the pipe and hunted beasts with my bow
and arrow whenever my father would let me, I was with her for shorter
intervals when I went to the well to draw water, and we became more and
more strangers; indeed, I could be quite hard to her. Only once after I
came back from the capital something happened--but that I need not tell
you. The poor child was so unhappy at being a slave and no doubt had
first seen the light in a free-house.
"She was fond of me, more than a sister is of a brother--and when my
father was dead she felt that I ought not to learn the news from any one
but herself. She had seen which way I had gone with the Pharanites and
followed me up, and she soon found me, for she had the eyes of a gazelle
and the ears of a startled bird. It was not this time difficult to find
me, for when she sought me we were fighting with the Blemmyes in the
green hollow that leads from the mountain to the sea. They roared with
fury like wild beasts, for before we could get to the sea the fishermen
in the little town below had discovered their boats, which they had
hidden under sand and stones, and had carried them off to their harbor.
The boy from Raithu who accompanied me, had by my orders kept them in
sight, and had led the fishermen to the hiding-place. The watchmen whom
they had left with the boats had fled, and had reached their companions
who were fighting round the castle; and at least two hundred of them had
been sent back to the shore to recover possession of the boats and to
punish the fishermen. This troop met us in the green valley, and there we
fell to fighting.
"The Blemmyes outnumbered us; they soon surrounded us before and behind,
on the right side and on the left, for they jumped and climbed from rock
to rock like mountain goats and then shot down their reed-arrows from
above. Three or four touched me, and one pierced my hair and remained
hanging in it with the feather at the end of the shaft.
"How the battle went elsewhere I cannot tell you, for the blood mounted
to my head, and I was only conscious that I myself snorted and shouted
like a madman and wrestled with the heathen now here and now there, and
more than once lifted my axe to cleave a skull. At the same time I saw a
part of our men turn to fly, and I called them back with furious words;
then they turned round and followed me again.
"Once, in the midst of the struggle, I saw Miriam too, clinging pale and
trembling to a rock and looking on at the fight. I shouted to her to
leave the spot, and go back to my father, but she stood still and shook
her head with a gesture--a gesture so full of pity and anguish--I shall
never forget it. With hands and eyes she signed to me that my father was
dead, and I understood; at least I understood that some dreadful
misfortune had happened. I had no time for reflection, for before I could
gain any certain information by word of mouth, a captain of the heathen
had seized me, and we came to a life and death struggle before Miriam's
very eyes. My opponent was strong, but I showed the girl--who had often
taunted me for being a weakling because I obeyed my father in
everything--that I need yield to no one. I could not have borne to be
vanquished before her and I flung the heathen to the ground and slew him
with my axe. I was only vaguely conscious of her presence, for during my
severe struggle I could see nothing but my adversary. But suddenly I
heard a loud scream, and Miriam sank bleeding close before me. While I
was kneeling over his comrade one of the Blemmyes had crept up to me, and
had flung his lance at me from a few paces off. But Miriam--Miriam--"
"She saved you at the cost of her own life," said Petrus completing the
lad's sentence, for at the recollection of the occurrence his voice had
failed and his eyes overflowed with tears.
Hermas nodded assent, and then added softly: "She threw up her arms and
called my name as the spear struck her. The eldest son of Obedianus
punished the heathen that had done it, and I supported her as she fell
dying and took her curly head on my knees and spoke her name; she opened
her eyes once more, and spoke mine softly and with indescribable
tenderness. I had never thought that wild Miriam could speak so sweetly,
I was overcome with terrible grief, and kissed her eyes and her lips. She
looked at me once more with a long, wide-open, blissful gaze, and then
she was dead."
"She was a heathen," said Dorothea, drying her eyes, "but for such a
death the Lord will forgive her much."
"I loved her dearly," said Marthana, "and will lay my sweetest flowers on
her grave. May I cut some sprays from your blooming myrtle for a wreath?"
"To-morrow, to-morrow, my child," replied Dorothea. "Now go to rest; it
is already very late."
"Only let me stay till Antonius and Jethro come back," begged the girl.
"I would willingly help you to find your son," said Hermas, "and if you
wish I will go to Raithu and Klysma, and enquire among the fishermen. Had
the centurion--" and as he spoke the young soldier looked down in some
embarrassment, "had the centurion found his fugitive wife of whom he was
in pursuit with Talib, the Amalekite, before he died?"
"Sirona has not yet reappeared," replied Petrus, and perhaps--but just
now you mentioned the name of Paulus, who was so dear to you and your
father. Do you know that it was he who so shamelessly ruined the domestic
peace of the centurion?"
"Paulus!" cried Hermas. "How can you believe it?"
"Phoebicius found his sheepskin in his wife's room," replied Petrus
gravely. "And the impudent Alexandrian recognized it as his own before us
all and allowed the Gaul to punish him. He committed the disgraceful deed
the very evening that you were sent off to gain intelligence."
"And Phoebicius flogged him?" cried Hermas beside himself. "And the poor
fellow bore this disgrace and your blame, and all--all for my sake. Now I
understand what he meant! I met him after the battle and he told me that
my father was dead. When he parted from me, he said he was of all sinners
the greatest, and that I should hear it said down in the oasis. But I
know better; he is great-hearted and good, and I will not bear that he
should be disgraced and slandered for my sake." Hermas had sprung up with
these words, and as he met the astonished gaze of his hosts, he tried to
collect himself, and said:
"Paulus never even saw Sirona, and I repeat it, if there is a man who may
boast of being good and pure and quite without sin, it is he. For me, and
to save me from punishment and my father from sorrow, he owned a sin that
he never committed. Such a deed is just like him--the brave--faithful
friend! But such shameful suspicion and disgrace shall not weigh upon him
a moment longer!"
"You are speaking to an older man," said Petrus angrily interrupting the
youth's vehement speech. "Your friend acknowledged with his own lips--"
"Then he told a lie out of pure goodness," Hermas insisted. "The
sheepskin that the Gaul found was mine. I had gone to Sirona, while her
husband was sacrificing to Mithras, to fetch some wine for my father, and
she allowed me to try on the centurion's armor; when he unexpectedly
returned I leaped out into the street and forgot that luckless sheepskin.
Paulus met me as I fled, and said he would set it all right, and sent me
away--to take my place and save my father a great trouble. Look at me as
severely as you will, Dorothea, but it was only in thoughtless folly that
I slipped into the Gaul's house that evening, and by the memory of my
father--of whom heaven has this day bereft me--I swear that Sirona only
amused herself with me as with a boy, a child, and even refused to let me
kiss her beautiful golden hair. As surely as I hope to become a warrior,
and as surely as my father's spirit hears what I say, the guilt that
Paulus took upon himself was never committed at all, and when you
condemned Sirona you did an injustice, for she never broke her faith to
her husband for me, nor still less for Paulus."
Petrus and Dorothea exchanged a meaning glance, and Dorothea said:
"Why have we to learn all this from the lips of a stranger? It sounds
very extraordinary, and yet how simple! Aye, husband, it would have
become us better to guess something of this than to doubt Sirona. From
the first it certainly seemed to me impossible that that handsome woman,
for whom quite different people had troubled themselves should err for
this queer beggar--"
"What cruel injustice has fallen on the poor man!" cried Petrus. "If he
had boasted of some noble deed, we should indeed have been less ready to
give him credence."
"We are suffering heavy punishment," sighed Dorothea, "and my heart is
bleeding. Why did you not come to us, Hermas, if you wanted wine? How
much suffering would have been spared if you had!"
The lad looked down, and was silent; but soon he recollected himself, and
said eagerly:
"Let me go and seek the hapless Paulus; I return you thanks for your
kindness but I cannot bear to stay here any longer. I must go back to the
mountain."
The senator and his wife did not detain him, and when the court-yard gate
had closed upon him a great stillness reigned in Petrus' sitting-room.
Dorothea leaned far back in her seat and sat looking in her lap while the
tears rolled over her cheeks; Marthana held her hand and stroked it, and
the senator stepped to the window and sighed deeply as he looked down
into the dark court. Sorrow lay on all their hearts like a heavy leaden
burden. All was still in the spacious room, only now and then a loud,
long-drawn cry of the wailing women rang through the quiet night and
reached them through the open window; it was a heavy hour, rich in vain,
but silent self-accusation, in anxiety, and short prayers; poor in hope
or consolation.
Presently Petrus heaved a deep sigh, and Dorothea rose to go up to him
and to say to him some sincere word of affection; but just then the dogs
in the yard barked, and the agonized father said softly--in deep
dejection, and prepared for the worst:
"Most likely it is they."
The deaconess pressed his hand in hers, but drew back when a light tap
was heard at the court-yard gate. "It is not Jethro and Antonius." said
Petrus, "they have a key."
Marthana had gone up to him, and she clung to him as he leaned far out of
the window and called to whoever it was that had tapped:
"Who is that knocking?"
The dogs barked so loud that neither the senator nor the women were able
to hear the answer which seemed to be returned.
"Listen to Argus," said Dorothea, "he never howls like that, but when you
come home or one of us, or when he is pleased."
Petrus laid his finger on his lips and sounded a clear, shrill whistle,
and as the dogs, obedient to this signal, were silent, he once more
called out, "Whoever you may be, say plainly who you are, that I may open
the gate."
They were kept waiting some few minutes for the answer, and the senator
was on the point of repeating his enquiry, when a gentle voice timidly
came from the gate to the window, saying, "It is I, Petrus, the fugitive
Sirona." Hardly had the words tremulously pierced the silence, when
Marthana broke from her father, whose hand was resting on her shoulder,
and flew out of the door, down the steps and out to the gate.
"Sirona; poor, dear Sirona," cried the girl as she pushed back the bolt;
as soon as she had opened the door and Sirona had entered the court, she
threw herself on her neck, and kissed and stroked her as if she were her
long lost sister found again; then, without allowing her to speak, she
seized her hand and drew her--in spite of the slight resistance she
offered--with many affectionate exclamations up the steps and into the
sitting-room. Petrus and Dorothea met her on the threshold, and the
latter pressed her to her heart, kissed her forehead and said, "Poor
woman; we know now that we have done you an injustice, and will try to
make it good." The senator too went up to her, took her hand and added
his greetings to those of his wife, for he knew not whether she had as
yet heard of her husband's end.
Sirona could not find a word in reply. She had expected to be expelled as
a castaway when she came down the mountain, losing her way in the
darkness. Her sandals were cut by the sharp rocks, and hung in strips to
her bleeding feet, her beautiful hair was tumbled by the night-wind, and
her white robe looked like a ragged beggar's garment, for she had torn it
to make bandages for Polykarp's wound.
Some hours had already passed since she had left her patient--her heart
full of dread for him and of anxiety as to the hard reception she might
meet with from his parents.
How her hand shook with fear of Petrus and Dorothea as she raised the
brazen knocker of the senator's door, and now--a father, a mother, a
sister opened their arms to her, and an affectionate home smiled upon
her. Her heart and soul overflowed with boundless emotion and unlimited
thankfulness, and weeping loudly, she pressed her clasped hands to her
breast.
But she spared only a few moments for the enjoyment of these feelings of
delight, for there was no happiness for her without Polykarp, and it was
for his sake that she had undertaken this perilous night-journey.
Marthana had tenderly approached her, but she gently put her aside,
saying, "Not just now, dear girl. I have already wasted an hour, for I
lost my way in the ravines. Get ready Petrus to come back to the mountain
with me at once, for--but do not be startled Dorothea, Paulus says that
the worst danger is over, and if Polykarp--"
"For God's sake, do you know where he is?" cried Dorothea, and her cheeks
crimsoned while Petrus turned pale, and, interrupting her, asked in
breathless anxiety, "Where is Polykarp, and what has happened to him?"
"Prepare yourself to hear bad news," said Sirona, looking at the pair
with mournful anxiety as if to crave their pardon for the evil tidings
she was obliged to bring. "Polykarp had a fall on a sharp stone and so
wounded his head. Paulus brought him to me this morning before he set out
against the Blemmyes, that I might nurse him. I have incessantly cooled
his wound, and towards mid-day he opened his eyes and knew me again, and
said you would be anxious about him. After sundown he went to sleep, but
he is not wholly free from fever, and as soon as Paulus came in I set out
to quiet your anxiety and to entreat you to give me a cooling potion,
that I may return to him with it at once." The deepest sorrow sounded in
Sirona's accents as she told her story, and tears had started to her eyes
as she related to the parents what had befallen their son. Petrus and
Dorothea listened as to a singer, who, dressed indeed in robes of
mourning, nevertheless sings a lay of return and hope to a harp wreathed
with flowers.
"Quick, quick, Marthana," cried Dorothea eagerly and with sparkling eyes,
before Sirona had ended. "Quick, the basket with the bandages. I will mix
the fever-draught myself." Petrus went up to the Gaulish woman.
"It is really no worse than you represent?" he asked in a low voice. "He
is alive? and Paulus--"
"Paulus says," interrupted Sirona, "that with good nursing the sick man
will be well in a few weeks."
"And you can lead me to him?"
"Oh, alas! alas!" Sirona cried, striking her hand against her forehead.
"I shall never succeed in finding my way back, for I noticed no
way-marks! But stay--Before us a penitent from Memphis, who has been dead
a few weeks--"
"Old Serapion?" asked Petrus.
"That was his name," exclaimed Sirona. "Do you know his cave?"
"How should I?" replied Petrus. "But perhaps Agapitus--"
"The spring where I got the water to cool Polykarp's wound, Paulus calls
the partridge's-spring."
"The partridge's-spring," repeated the senator, "I know that." With a
deep sigh he took his staff, and called to Dorothea, "Do you prepare the
draught, the bandages, torches, and your good litter, while I knock at
our neighbor Magadon's door, and ask him to lend us slaves."
"Let me go with you," said Marthana. "No, no; you stay here with your
mother."
"And do you think that I can wait here?" asked Dorothea. "I am going with
you."
"There is much here for you to do," replied Petrus evasively, "and we
must climb the hill quickly."
"I should certainly delay you," sighed the mother, "but take the girl
with you; she has a light and lucky hand."
"If you think it best," said the senator, and he left the room.
While the mother and daughter prepared everything for the
night-expedition, and came and went, they found time to put many
questions and say many affectionate words to Sirona. Marthana, even
without interrupting her work, set food and drink for the weary woman on
the table by which she had sunk on a seat; but she hardly moistened her
lips.
When the young girl showed her the basket that she had filled with
medicine and linen bandages, with wine and pure water, Sirona said, "Now
lend me a pair of your strongest sandals, for mine are all torn, and I
cannot follow the men without shoes, for the stones are sharp, and cut
into the flesh."
Marthana now perceived for the first time the blood on her friend's feet,
she quickly took the lamp from the table and placed it on the pavement,
exclaiming, as she knelt down in front of Sirona and took her slender
white feet in her hand to look at the wounds on the soles, "Good heavens!
here are three deep cuts!"
In a moment she had a basin at hand, and was carefully bathing the wounds
in Sirona's feet; while she was wrapping the injured foot in strips of
linen Dorothea came up to them.
"I would," she said, "that Polykarp were only here now, this roll would
suffice to bind you both." A faint flush overspread Sirona's cheeks, but
Dorothea was suddenly conscious of what she had said, and Marthana gently
pressed her friend's hand.
When the bandage was securely fixed, Sirona attempted to walk, but she
succeeded so badly that Petrus, who now came back with his friend Magadon
and his sons, and several slaves, found it necessary to strictly forbid
her to accompany them. He felt sure of finding his son without her, for
one of Magadon's people had often carried bread and oil to old Serapion
and knew his cave.
Before the senator and his daughter left the room he whispered a few
words to his wife, and together they went up to Sirona.
"Do you know," he asked, "what has happened to your husband?"
Sirona nodded. "I heard it from Paulus," she answered. "Now I am quite
alone in the world."
"Not so," replied Petrus. "You will find shelter and love under our roof
as if it were your father's, so long as it suits you to stay with us. You
need not thank us--we are deeply in your debt. Farewell till we meet
again wife. I would Polykarp were safe here, and that you had seen his
wound. Come, Marthana, the minutes are precious."
When Dorothea and Sirona were alone, the deaconess said, "Now I will go
and make up a bed for you, for you must be very tired."
"No, no!" begged Sirona. "I will wait and watch with you, for I certainly
could not sleep till I know how it is with him." She spoke so warmly and
eagerly that the deaconess gratefully offered her hand to her young
friend. Then she said, "I will leave you alone for a few minutes, for my
heart is so full of anxiety that I must needs go and pray for help for
him, and for courage and strength for myself."
"Take me with you," entreated Sirona in a low tone. "In my need I opened
my heart to your good and loving God, and I will never more pray to any
other. The mere thought of Him strengthened and comforted me, and now, if
ever, in this hour I need His merciful support."
"My child, my daughter!" cried the deaconess, deeply moved; she bent over
Sirona, kissed her forehead and her lips, and led her by the hand into
her quiet sleeping-room.
"This is the place where I most love to pray," she said, "although there
is here no image and no altar. My God is everywhere present and in every
place I can find Him."
The two women knelt down side by side, and both besought the same God for
the same mercies--not for themselves, but for another; and both in their
sorrow could give thanks--Sirona, because in Dorothea she had found a
mother, and Dorothea, because in Sirona she had found a dear and loving
daughter.
CHAPTER XXII.
Paulus was sitting in front of the cave that had sheltered Polykarp and
Sirona, and he watched the torches whose light lessened as the bearers
went farther and farther towards the valley. They lighted the way for the
wounded sculptor, who was being borne home to the oasis, lying in his
mother's easy litter, and accompanied by his father and his sister.
"Yet an hour," thought the anchorite, "and the mother will have her son
again, yet a week and Polykarp will rise from his bed, yet a year and he
will remember nothing of yesterday but a scar--and perhaps a kiss that he
pressed on the Gaulish woman's rosy lips. I shall find it harder to
forget. The ladder which for so many years I had labored to construct, on
which I thought to scale heaven, and which looked to me so lofty and so
safe, there it lies broken to pieces, and the hand that struck it down
was my own weakness. It would almost seem as if this weakness of mine had
more power than what we call moral strength for that which it took the
one years to build up, was wrecked by the other in a' moment. In weakness
only am I a giant."
Paulus shivered at these words, for he was cold. Early in that morning
when he had taken upon himself Hermas' guilt he had abjured wearing his
sheepskin; now his body, accustomed to the warm wrap, suffered severely,
and his blood coursed with fevered haste through his veins since the
efforts, night-watches, and excitement of the last few days. He drew his
little coat close around him with a shiver and muttered, "I feel like a
sheep that has been shorn in midwinter, and my head burns as if I were a
baker and had to draw the bread out of the oven; a child might knock me
down, and my eyes are heavy. I have not even the energy to collect my
thoughts for a prayer, of which I am in such sore need. My goal is
undoubtedly the right one, but so soon as I seem to be nearing it, my
weakness snatches it from me, as the wind swept back the fruit-laden
boughs which Tantalus, parched with thirst, tried to grasp. I fled from
the world to this mountain, and the world has pursued me and has flung
its snares round my feet. I must seek a lonelier waste in which I may be
alone--quite alone with my God and myself. There, perhaps I may find the
way I seek, if indeed the fact that the creature that I call 'I,' in
which the whole world with all its agitations in little finds room--and
which will accompany me even there--does not once again frustrate all my
labor. He who takes his Self with him into the desert, is not alone."
Paulus sighed deeply and then pursued his reflections: "How puffed up
with pride I was after I had tasted the Gaul's rods in place of Hermas,
and then I was like a drunken man who falls down stairs step by step. And
poor Stephanus too had a fall when he was so near the goal! He failed in
strength to forgive, and the senator who has just now left me, and whose
innocent son I had so badly hurt, when we parted forgivingly gave me his
hand. I could see that he did forgive me with all his heart, and this
Petrus stands in the midst of life, and is busy early and late with mere
worldly affairs."
For a time he looked thoughtfully before him, and then he went on in his
soliloquy, "What was the story that old Serapion used to tell? In the
Thebaid there dwelt a penitent who thought he led a perfectly saintly
life and far transcended all his companions in stern virtue. Once he
dreamed that there was in Alexandria a man even more perfect than
himself; Phabis was his name, and he was a shoemaker, dwelling in the
White road near the harbor of Kibotos. The anchorite at once went to the
capital and found the shoemaker, and when he asked him, 'How do you serve
the Lord? How do you conduct your life?' Phabis looked at him in
astonishment. 'I? well, my Saviour! I work early and late, and provide
for my family, and pray morning and evening in few words for the whole
city.' Petrus, it seems to me, is such an one as Phabis; but many roads
lead to God, and we--and I--"
Again a cold shiver interrupted his meditation, and as morning approached
the cold was so keen that he endeavored to light a fire. While he was
painfully blowing the charcoal Hermas came up to him.
He had learned from Polykarp's escort where Paulus was to be found, and
as he stood opposite his friend he grasped his hand, stroked his rough
hair and thanked him with deep and tender emotion for the great sacrifice
he had made for him when he had taken upon himself the dishonoring
punishment of his fault.
Paulus declined all pity or thanks, and spoke to Hermas of his father and
of his future, until it was light, and the young man prepared to go down
to the oasis to pay the last honors to the dead. To his entreaty that he
would accompany him, Paulus only answered:
"No--no; not now, not now; for if I were to mix with men now I should fly
asunder like a rotten wineskin full of fermenting wine; a swarm of bees
is buzzing in my head, and an ant-hill is growing in my bosom. Go now and
leave me alone."
After the funeral ceremony Hermas took an affectionate leave of Agapitus,
Petrus, and Dorothea, and then returned to the Alexandrian, with whom he
went to the cave where he had so long lived with his dead father.
There Paulus delivered to him his father's letter to his uncle, and spoke
to him more lovingly than he had ever done before. At night they both lay
down on their beds, but neither of them found rest or sleep.
From time to time Paulus murmured in a low voice, but in tones of keen
anguish, "In vain--all in vain--" and again, "I seek, I seek--but who can
show me the way?"
They both rose before daybreak; Hermas went once more down to the well,
knelt down near it, and felt as though he were bidding farewell to his
father and Miriam.
Memories of every kind rose up in his soul, and so mighty is the
glorifying power of love that the miserable, brown-skinned shepherdess
Miriam seemed to him a thousand-fold more beautiful than that splendid
woman who filled the soul of a great artist with delight.
Shortly after sunrise Paulus conducted him to the fishing-port, and to
the Israelite friend who managed the business of his father's house; he
caused him to be bountifully supplied with gold and accompanied him to
the ship laden with charcoal, that was to convey hire to Klysma.
The parting was very painful to him, and when Hermas saw his eyes full of
tears and felt his hands tremble, he said, "Do not be troubled about me,
Paulus; we shall meet again, and I will never forget you and my father."
"And your mother," added the anchorite. "I shall miss you sorely, but
trouble is the very thing I look for. He who succeeds in making the
sorrows of the whole world his own--he whose soul is touched by a sorrow
at every breath he draws--he indeed must long for the call of the
Redeemer."
Hermas fell weeping on his neck and started to feel how burning the
anchorite's lips were as he pressed them to his forehead.
At last the sailors drew in the ropes; Paulus turned once more to the
youth. "You are going your own way now," he said. "Do not forget the Holy
Mountain, and hear this: Of all sins three are most deadly: To serve
false gods, to covet your neighbor's wife, and to raise your hands to
kill; keep yourself from them. And of all virtues two are the least
conspicuous, and at the same time the greatest: Truthfulness and
humility; practise these. Of all consolations these two are the best: The
consciousness of wishing the right however much we may err and stumble
through human weakness, and prayer."
Once more he embraced the departing youth, then he went across the sand
of the shore back to the mountain without looking round.
Hermas looked after him for a long time greatly distressed, for his
strong friend tottered like a drunken man, and often pressed his hand to
his head which was no doubt as burning as his lips.
The young warrior never again saw the Holy Mountain or Paulus, but after
he himself had won fame and distinction in the army he met again with
Petrus' son, Polykarp, whom the emperor had sent for to Byzantium with
great honor, and in whose house the Gaulish woman Sirona presided as a
true and loving wife and mother.
After his parting from Hermas, Paulus disappeared. The other anchorites
long sought him in vain, as well as bishop Agapitus, who had learned from
Petrus that the Alexandrian had been punished and expelled in innocence,
and who desired to offer him pardon and consolation in his own person. At
last, ten days after, Orion the Saite found him in a remote cave. The
angel of death had called him only a few hours before while in the act of
prayer, for he was scarcely cold. He was kneeling with his forehead
against the rocky wall and his emaciated hands were closely clasped over
Magdalena's ring. When his companions had laid him on his bier his noble,
gentle features wore a pure and transfiguring smile.
The news of his death flew with wonderful rapidity through the oasis and
the fishing-town, and far and wide to the caves of the anchorites, and
even to the huts of the Amalekite shepherds. The procession that followed
him to his last resting-place stretched to an invisible distance; in
front of all walked Agapitus with the elders and deacons, and behind them
Petrus with his wife and family, to which Sirona now belonged. Polykarp,
who was now recovering, laid a palm-branch in token of reconcilement on
his grave, which was visited as a sacred spot by the many whose needs he
had alleviated in secret, and before long by all the penitents from far
and wide.
Petrus erected a monument over his grave, on which Polykarp incised the
words which Paulus' trembling fingers had traced just before his death
with a piece of charcoal on the wall of his cave:
"Pray for me, a miserable man--for I was a man."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
He out of the battle can easily boast of being unconquered
Pray for me, a miserable man--for I was a man
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE 'HOMO SUM':
Action trod on the heels of resolve
Can such love be wrong?
He who wholly abjures folly is a fool
He out of the battle can easily boast of being unconquered
Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto
I am human, nothing that is human can I regard as alien to me
Love is at once the easiest and the most difficult
Love overlooks the ravages of years and has a good memory
No judgment is so hard as that dealt by a slave to slaves
No man is more than man, and many men are less
Overlooks his own fault in his feeling of the judge's injustice
Pray for me, a miserable man--for I was a man
Sky as bare of cloud as the rocks are of shrubs and herbs
Sleep avoided them both, and each knew that the other was awake
Some caution is needed even in giving a warning
The older one grows the quicker the hours hurry away
To pray is better than to bathe
Wakefulness may prolong the little term of life
Who can point out the road that another will take
SERAPIS, Complete
By Georg Ebers
Volume 1.
Translated from the German by Clara Bell
SERAPIS.
CHAPTER I.
The busy turmoil of the town had been hushed for some hours; the moon and
stars were keeping silent watch over Alexandria, and many of the
inhabitants were already in the land of dreams. It was deliciously
fresh--a truly gracious night; but, though peace reigned in the streets
and alleys, even now there was in this pause for rest a lack of the
soothing calm which refreshes and renews the spirit of man. For some few
weeks there had been an oppressive and fevered tension in the repose of
night. Every house and shop was closed as securely as though it were
done, not only to secure slumber against intrusion, but to protect life
and property from the spoiler; and instead of tones of jollity and mirth
the sleeping city echoed the heavy steps and ringing arms of soldiers.
Now and again, when the Roman word of command or the excited cry of some
sleepless monk broke the silence, shops and doors were cautiously opened
and an anxious face peered out, while belated wanderers shrunk into
gateways or under the black shadow of a wall as the watch came past. A
mysterious burden weighed on the Heart of the busy city and clicked its
pulses, as a nightmare oppresses the dreamer.
On this night of the year of our Lord 391, in a narrow street leading
from the commercial harbor known as Kibotus, an old man was slinking
along close to the houses. His clothes were plain but decent, and he
walked with his head bent forward looking anxiously on all sides; when
the patrol came by he shrank into the shadow; though he was no thief he
had his reasons for keeping out of the way of the soldiery, for the
inhabitants, whether natives or strangers, were forbidden to appear in
the streets after the harbor was closed for the night.
He stopped in front of a large house, whose long, windowless wall
extended from one side street to the next, and pausing before the great
gate, he read an inscription on which the light fell from a lamp above:
The House of the Holy Martyr. His widow here offers shelter to all who
need it. He that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord."
"At how much per cent I wonder?" mattered the old man and a satirical
smile curled his bearuless lips. A heavy thud with the knocker rang
through the silent street, and after a few short questions from within
and equally curt replies from without, a small door was opened in the
great gate. The stranger was on the point of crossing the vestibule when
a human creature crept up to him on all fours, and clutched his ancle
with a strong hand, exclaiming in a hoarse voice: "As soon as the door is
shut--an entrance fee; for the poor, you know."
The old man flung a copper piece to the gatekeeper who tried it, and
then, holding on to the rope by which he was tied to a post like a
watch-dog, he whined out "Not a drop to wet a Christian's lips?"
"It has not rained for some time," retorted the stranger, who proceeded
to open a second door which led into a vast court-yard open to the blue
vault of heaven. A few torches stuck against the pillars and a small fire
on the pavement added thin smoky, flickering light to the clear glory of
the stars, and the whole quadrangle was full of a heavy, reeking
atmosphere, compounded of smoke and the steam of hot food.
Even in the street the wanderer had heard the dull buzz and roar which
now met his ear as a loud medley of noises and voices, rising from
hundreds of men who were encamped in the wide space before him--in groups
or singly, sleeping and snoring, or quarrelling, eating, talking and
singing as they squatted on the ground which was strewn with straw.
The inn was full, and more than half of the humble guests were monks who,
during the last two days, had flowed into the city from every Cenoby,
Laura and hermitage in the desert, and from most of the monasteries in
the surrounding district--the 'Nitriote Nome'. Some of them had laid
their heads close together for confidential whispering, others squabbled
loudly, and a large group in the northern angle of the court had raised a
psalm which mingled strangely with the "three," "four," "seven," of the
men who were playing 'mora', and the cry of the cook inviting purchasers
to his stall spread with meat, bread, and onions.
At the end of the court furthest from the gateway there was a covered
way, on to which a row of doors opened leading to the rooms devoted to
families of women and children, each apartment being divided into two by
a curtain across the middle. The stranger made his way into one of these
rooms, where he was warmly welcomed by a young man, who was occupied in
cutting a Kopais reed into a mouth-piece for a double flute, and by a
tall matronly woman.
The new-comer's name was Karnis and he was the head of a family of
wandering singers who had arrived in Alexandria only the day before from
Rome. His surroundings were poor and mean, for their ship had been
attacked off the African coast by a band of pirates, and though they had
saved their lives they had lost everything they possessed. The young
owner of the vessel, to whom he owed his safety, had procured him
admission to this Xenodochium,--[a refuge or inn]--kept by his mother the
Widow Mary; Karnis had, however, found it far from comfortable, and had
gone forth at noon to seek other quarters.
"All in vain!" said he, as he wiped the heat drops from his forehead. "I
have hunted Medius half the city through and found him at last at the
house of Posidonius the Magian, whose assistant he is. There was singing
behind a curtain--wretched rubbish; but there were some old airs too with
an accompaniment on the flutes, in the style of Olympus, and really not
so bad.
"Then spirits appeared. By Sirius a queer business altogether! Medius is
in the midst of it all. I arranged the chorus and sang with them a
little. All I got for it was a little dirty silver--there! But as for a
lodging--free quarters!--there are none to be found here for anything
above an owl; and then there is the edict--that cursed edict!"
During this speech the younger man had exchanged meaning glances with his
mother. He now interrupted Karnis, saying in a tone of encouragement:
"Never mind, father; we have something good in view."
"You have?" said the old man with an incredulous shrug, while his wife
served him with a small roast chicken, on a stool which did duty for a
table.
"Yes father, we!" the lad went on, laying aside his knife. "You know we
vowed an offering to Dionysus for our escape, since he himself once fell
into the hands of pirates, so we went at once to his temple. Mother knew
the way; and as we--she, I mean, and Dada and myself. . ."
"Heh! what is this?" interrupted Karnis, now for the first time noticing
the dish before him. "A fowl--when we are so miserably poor? A whole
fowl, and cooked with oil?" He spoke angrily, but his wife, laying her
hand on his shoulder, said soothingly:
"We shall soon earn it again. Never a sesterce was won by fretting. Enjoy
to-day's gifts and the gods will provide for to-morrow."
"Indeed?" asked Karnis in an altered key. "To be sure when a roast fowl
flies into one's mouth instead of a pigeon. . . . But you are right as
usual, Herse, as usual, only--here am I battening like a senator while
you--I lay a wager you have drunk nothing but milk all day and eaten
nothing but bread and radishes. I thought so? Then the chicken must
pretend to be a pheasant and you, wife, will eat this leg. The girls are
gone to bed? Why here is some wine too! Fill up your cup, boy. A libation
to the God! Glory to Dionysus!" The two men poured the libation on the
floor and drank; then the father thrust his knife into the breast of the
bird and began his meal with a will, while Orpheus, the son, went on with
his story:
"Well, the temple of Dionysus was not to be found, for Bishop Theophilus
has had it destroyed; so to what divinity could we offer our wreath and
cake? Here in Egypt there is none but the great Mother Isis. Her
sanctuary is on the shore of Lake Mareotis and mother found it at once.
There she fell into conversation with a priestess who, as soon as she
learnt that my mother belonged to a family of musicians--though Dame
Herse was cautious in announcing this fact--and hoped to find employment
in Alexandria, led her away to a young lady who was closely veiled. This
lady," Orpheus went on--he not only played the flute but took the higher
parts for a man's voice and could also strike the lyre--"desired us to go
to her later at her own house, where she would speak with us. She drove
off in a fine carriage and we, of course followed her orders; Agne was
with us too. A splendid house! I never saw anything handsomer in Rome or
Antioch. We were kindly received, and with the lady there were another
very old lady and a tall grave man, a priest I should fancy or a
philosopher, or something of that kind."
"Not some Christian trap?" asked Karnis suspiciously. "You do not know
this place, and since the edict. . ."
"Never fear, father! There were images of the gods in the halls and
corridors, and in the room where we were received by Gorgo, the beautiful
daughter of Porphyrius, there was an altar before an image of Isis, quite
freshly anointed.--This Porphyrius is a very rich merchant; we learnt
that afterwards, and many other things. The philosopher asked us at once
whether we were aware that Theodosius had lately promulgated a new edict
forbidding young maidens to appear in public as singers or
flute-players."
"And did Agne hear that?" said the old man in a low voice as he pointed
to the curtain.
"No, she and Dada were in the garden on to which the room opened, and
mother explained at once that though Agne was a Christian she was a very
good girl, and that so long as she remained in our service she was bound
to sing with us whenever she was required. The philosopher exclaimed at
once: 'The very thing!' and they whispered together, and called the girls
and desired them to show what they could do."
"And how did they perform?" asked the old man, who was growing excited.
"Dada warbled like a lark, and Agne--well you know how it always is. Her
voice sounded lovely but it was just as usual. You can guess how much
there is in her and how deep her feeling is but she never quite brings it
out. What has she to complain of with us? And yet whatever she sings has
that mournful, painful ring which even you can do nothing to alter.
However, she pleased them better than Dada did, for I noticed that Gorgo
and the gentleman glanced at each other and at her, and whispered a word
now and then which certainly referred to Ague. When they had sung two
songs the young lady came towards us and praised both the girls, and
asked whether we would undertake to learn something quite new. I told her
that my father was a great musician who could master the most difficult
things at the first hearing."
"The most difficult! Hm . . . that depends," said the old man. "Did she show
it you?"
"No; it is something in the style of Linus and she sang it to us."
"The daughter of the rich Porphyrius sang for your entertainment? Yours?"
said Karnis laughing. "By Sirius! The world is turning upside down. Now
that girls are forbidden to perform to the gentlefolks, art is being
cultivated by the upper classes; it cannot be killed outright. For the
future the listeners will be paid to keep quiet and the singers pay for
the right of torturing their ears--our ears, our luckless ears will be
victimized."
Orpheus smiled and shook his head; then, again dropping his knife, he
went on eagerly:
"But if you could only hear her! You would give your last copper piece to
hear her again."
"Indeed!" muttered his father. "Well, there are very good teachers here.
Something by Linus did you say she sang?"
"Something of that kind; a lament for the dead of very great power:
'Return, oh! return my beloved, came back--come home!' that was the
burthen of it. And there was a passage which said: 'Oh that each tear had
a voice and could join with me in calling thee!" And how she sang it,
father! I do not think I ever in my life heard anything like it. Ask
mother. Even Dada's eyes were full of tears."
"Yes, it was beautiful," the mother agreed. "I could not help wishing
that you were there."
Karnis rose and paced the little room, waving his arms and muttering:
"Ah! so that is how it is! A friend of the Muses. We saved the large
lute--that is well. My chlamys has an ugly hole in it--if the girls were
not asleep . . . but the first thing to-morrow Ague. . . . Tell me, is
she handsome, tall?"
Herse had been watching her excitable husband with much satisfaction and
now answered his question: "Not a Hera--not a Muse--decidedly not. Hardly
above the middle height, slightly made, but not small, black eyes, long
lashes, dark straight eyebrows. I could hardly, like Orpheus, call her
beautiful. . ."
"Oh yes, mother.--Beautiful is a great word, and one my father has taught
me to use but rarely; but she--if she is not beautiful who is?--when she
raised her large dark eyes and threw back her head to bring out her
lament; tone after tone seemed to come from the bottom of her heart and
rise to the furthest height of heaven. Ah, if Agne could learn to sing
like that! 'Throw your whole soul into your singing.'--You have told her
that again and again. Now, Gorgo can and does. And she stood there as
steady and as highly strung as a bow, every note came out with the ring
of an arrow and went straight to the heart, as clear and pure as
possible."
"Be silent!" cried the old man covering his ears with his hands. "I shall
not close an eye till daylight, and then . . . Orpheus, take that
silver--take it all, I have no more--go early to market and buy
flowers--laurel branches, ivy, violets and roses. But no lotuses though
the market here is full of them; they are showy, boastful things with no
scent, I cannot bear them. We will go crowned to the Temple of the
Muses."
"Buy away, buy all you want!" said Herse laughing, as she showed her
husband some bright gold pieces. "We got that to-day, and if all is
well. . . . " Here she paused, pointed to the curtain, and went on again
in a lower tone: "It all depends of course, on Agne's playing us no
trick."
"How so? Why? She is a good girl and I will. . ."
"No, no," said Herse holding him back. "She does not know yet what the
business is. The lady wants her. . ."
"Well?"
"To sing in the Temple of Isis."
Karnis colored. He was suddenly called from a lovely dream back to the
squalid reality. "In the Temple of Isis," he said gloomily. "Agne? In the
face of all the people? And she knows nothing about it?"
"Nothing, father."
"No? Well then, if that is the case . . . Agne, the Christian, in the
Temple of Isis--here, here, where Bishop Theophilus is destroying all our
sanctuaries and the monks outdo their master. Ah, children, children, how
pretty and round and bright a soap-bubble is, and how soon it bursts. Do
you know at all what it is that you are planning? If the black flies
smell it out and it becomes known, by the great Apollo! we should have
fared better at the hands of the pirates. And yet, and yet.--Do you know
at all how the girl . . . ?"
"She wept at the lady's singing," interrupted Herse eagerly, "and, silent
as she generally is, on her way home she said: 'To sing like that! She is
a happy girl!'"
Karnis looked up with renewed confidence.
"Ah!" he exclaimed, "that is my Agne. Yes, yes, she truly loves her
divine art. She can sing, she will sing! We will venture it, if you, I,
all of us die for it!
"Herse, Orpheus, what have we to lose? Our gods, too, shall have their
martyrs. It is a poor life that has no excitement. Our art--why, all I
have ever had has been devoted to it. I make no boast of having
sacrificed everything, and if gold and lands were again to be mine I
would become a beggar once more for the sake of art: We have always held
the divine Muse sacred, but who can keep up a brave heart when he sees
her persecuted! She may only be worshipped in darkness in these days, and
the Queen of Gods and men shuns the light like a moth, a bat, an owl. If
we must die let it be with and for Her! Once more let pure and perfect
song rejoice this old heart, and if afterwards . . . My children, we have
no place in this dim, colorless world. While the Arts lived there was
Spring on the earth. Now they are condemned to death and it is Winter.
The leaves fall from all the trees, and we piping birds need groves to
sing in. How often already has Death laid his hand on our shoulder, every
breath we draw is a boon of mercy--the extra length given in by the
weaver, the hour of grace granted by the hangman to his victim! Our lives
are no longer our own, a borrowed purse with damaged copper coins. The
hard-hearted creditor has already bent his knuckles, and when he knocks
the time is up. Once more let us have one hour of pure and perfect
enjoyment, and then we will pay up capital and interest when we must."
"It cannot and will not be yet," said Herse resolutely, but she wiped her
eyes with her band. "If Agne sings even, so long as she does it without
coercion and of her own free-will no Bishop can punish us."
"He cannot, he dare not!" cried the old man. There are still laws and
judges."
"And Gorgo's family is influential as well as rich. Porphyrius has power
to protect us, and you do not yet know what a fancy he has taken to us.
Ask mother."
"It is like a story," Herse put in. "Before we left, the old lady--she
must be eighty or more--took me aside and asked me where we were lodging.
I told her at the Widow Mary's and when she heard it she struck her
crutch on the floor. 'Do you like the place?' she asked. I told her not
at all, and said we could not possibly stop here."
"Quite right!" cried Karnis. "The monks in the court-yard will kill us as
dead as rats if they hear us learning heathen hymns."
"That is what I told her; but the old lady did not allow me to finish;
she drew me close to her and whispered, 'only do as my granddaughter
wishes and you shall be safely housed and take this for the present'--and
she put her hand into the purse at her girdle, gave the gold into my
hand, and added loud enough for the others to hear: 'Fifty gold pieces
out of my own pocket if Gorgo tells me that she is satisfied with your
performance.'"
"Fifty gold pieces!" cried Karnis clasping his hands. "That brightens up
the dull grey of existence. Fifty, then, are certain. If we sing six
times that makes a talent--[estimated in 1880 at $1100]--and that will
buy back our old vineyard at Leontium. I will repair the old Odeum--they
have made a cowhouse of it--and when we sing there the monks may come and
listen! You laugh? But you are simpletons--I should like to see who will
forbid my singing on my own land and in my own country. A talent of gold!
"It is quite enough to pay on account, and I will not agree to any
bargain that will not give me the field-slaves and cattle. Castles in the
air, do you say? But just listen to me: We are sure you see of a hundred
gold pieces at least. . ." He had raised his voice in his eagerness and
while he spoke the curtains had been softly opened, and the dull glimmer
of the lamp which stood in front of Orpheus fell on a head which was
charming in spite of its disorder. A quantity of loose fair hair curled
in papers stuck up all over the round head and fell over the forehead,
the eyes were tired and still half shut, but the little mouth was wide
awake and laughing with the frank amusement of light-hearted youth.
Karnis, without noticing the listener, had gone on with his visionary
hopes of regaining his estates by his next earnings, but at this point
the young girl, holding the curtain in her right hand, stretched out her
plump left arm and begged in a humble whine:
"Good father Karnis, give me a little of your wealth; five poor little
drachmae!"
The old man started; but he instantly recovered himself and answered
good-naturedly enough:
"Go back to bed, you little hussy. You ought to be asleep instead of
listening there!"
"Asleep?" said the girl. "While you are shouting like an orator against
the wind! Five drachmae, father. I stick to that. A new ribband for me
will cost one, and the same for Agne, two. Two I will spend on wine for
us all, and that makes the five."
"That makes four--you are a great arithmetician to be sure!"
"Four?" said Dada, as much amazed as though the moon had fallen. "If only
I had a counting-frame. No, father, five I tell you--it is five."
"No, child, four; and you shall have four," replied her father. "Plutus
is at the door and to-morrow morning you shall both have garlands."
"Yes, of violets, ivy and roses," added Dame Herse. "Is Agne asleep?"
"As sound as the dead. She always sleeps soundly unless she lies wide
awake all the night through. But we were both so tired--and I am still.
It is a comfort to yawn. Do you see how I am sitting?"
"On the clothes-chest?" said Herse.
"Yes, and the curtain is not a strong back to the seat. Fortunately if I
fall asleep I shall drop forwards, not backwards."
"But there is a bed for each of you," said the mother, and giving the
girl a gentle push she followed her into the sleeping-alcove. In a few
minutes she came out again.
"That is just like Dada!" she exclaimed. "Little Papias had rolled off
the chest on which he was sleeping, so the good girl had put him into her
bed and was sitting on the chest herself, tired as she was."
"She would do anything for that boy," said Karnis. "But it is past
midnight. Come, Orpheus, let us make the bed!"
Three long hen-coops which stood piled against the wall were laid on the
ground and covered with mats; on these the tired men stretched their
limbs, but they could not sleep.
The little lamp was extinguished, and for an hour all was still in the
dark room. Then, suddenly, there was a loud commotion; some elastic
object flew against the wall with a loud flap, and Karnis, starting up,
called out: "Get out--monster!"
"What is it?" cried Herse who had also been startled, and the old man
replied angrily:
"Some daemon, some dog of a daemon is attacking me and giving me no
peace. Wait, you villain--there, perhaps that will settle you," and he
flung his second sandal. Then, without heeding the rustling fall of some
object that he had hit by accident, he gasped out:
"The impudent fiend will not let me be. It knows that we need Agne's
voice, and it keeps whispering, first in one ear and then in the other,
that I should threaten to sell her little brother if she refuses; but
I--I--strike a light, Orpheus!--She is a good girl and rather than do
such a thing. . ."
"The daemon has been close to me too," said the son as he blew on the
spark he had struck.
"And to me too," added Herse nervously. "It is only natural. There are no
images of the gods in this Christian hovel. Away, hateful serpent! We are
honest folks and will not agree to any vile baseness. Here is my amulet,
Karnis; if the daemon comes again you must turn it round--you know how."
CHAPTER II.
Early next morning the singers set out for the house of Porphyrius. The
party was not complete, however, for Dada had been forced to remain at
home. The shoes that the old man had flung to scare away the daemon had
caught in the girl's dress which she had just washed, and had dragged it
down on to the earth; she had found it in the morning full of holes burnt
by the ashes into the damp material. Dada had no other presentable
garment, so, in spite of her indignant refusal and many tears, she had to
remain indoors with Papias. Agne's anxious offers to stay in her place
with the little boy and to lend Dada her dress, both Karnis and his wife
had positively refused; and Dada had lent her aid--at first silently
though willingly and then with her usual merriment--in twining garlands
for the others and in dressing Agne's smooth black plaits with a wreath
of ivy and violets.
The men were already washed, anointed and crowned with poplar and laurel
when a steward arrived from Porphyrius to bid them follow him to his
master's house. But a small sacrifice was necessary, for the messenger
desired them to lay aside their wreaths, which would excite ill-feeling
among the monks, and certainly be snatched off by the Christian mob.
Karnis when he started was greatly disappointed, and as much depressed as
he had been triumphant and hopeful a short time before.
The monks, who had gathered outside the Xenodochium, glanced with
scowling suspicion at the party, who could not recover the good spirits
with which they had begun the day till they were fairly out of the
narrow, gloomy alleys, reeking with tar and salt fish, that adjoined the
harbor, and where they had to push their way through a dense throng. The
steward led the van with Herse, talking freely in reply to her enquiries.
His master, he said, was one of the great merchants of the city, whose
wife had died twenty years since in giving birth to Gorgo. His two sons
were at present absent on their travels. The old lady who had been so
liberal in her treatment of the singers was Damia, the mother of
Porphyrius. She had a fine fortune of her own, and notwithstanding her
great age was still respected as the soul of business in the household,
and as a woman deeply versed in the mysterious sciences. Mary, the pious
Christian, who had founded the "House of the Holy Martyr," was the widow
of Apelles, the brother of Porphyrius, but she had ceased all intercourse
with her husband's family. This was but natural, as she was at the head
of the Christian women of Alexandria, while the household of
Porphyrius--though the master himself had been baptized--was as
thoroughly heathen as any in Alexandria.
Karnis heard nothing of all this, for he came last of the party. Orpheus
and Agne followed next to Herse and the steward, and after them came two
slaves, carrying the lutes and pipes. Agne walked with downcast eyes, as
if she desired to avoid seeing all that surrounded her, though when
Orpheus addressed her she shyly glanced up at him and answered briefly
and timidly. They presently came out of an obscure alley by the canal
connecting Kibotus with Lake Mareotis where the Nile-boats lay at anchor.
Karnis drew a deeper breath, for here the air was clear and balmy; a
light northerly breeze brought the refreshing fragrance of the sea, and
the slender palm-trees that bordered the canal threw long shadows
mingling with the massive shade of the sycamores. The road was astir with
busy groups, birds sang in the trees, and the old musician drank in the
exciting and aromatic atmosphere of the Egyptian Spring with keen
enjoyment.
As they reached the middle of the steep bridge across the canal he
involuntarily stood still, riveted by the view of the southwest. In his
excitement he threw up his arms, his eyes glistened with moisture and
with the enthusiasm of youth, and, as was always the case when his
emotions were stirred by some glorious work of God or man, an image rose
to his mind, all unbidden--the image of his eldest son, now dead, but in
life his closest and most sympathetic comrade. He felt as though his hand
could grasp the shoulder of that son, too early snatched away, whose
gifts had far transcended those of the surviving Orpheus--as though he
too could gaze with him on the grand scene that lay before him.
On a platform of rocks and mighty masonry rose a structure of wonderful
magnificence and beauty, so brilliantly illuminated by the morning sun
that its noble proportions and gorgeous colors showed in dazzling
splendor and relief. Over the gilt dome bent the cloudless blue of the
African sky, and the polished hemisphere shone, as radiant as the sun
whose beams it reflected. Sloping planes for vehicles, and flights of
steps for pedestrians led up to the gates. The lower part of this
wonderful edifice--the great Temple of Serapis--was built to stand
forever, and the pillars of the vestibule supported a roof more fitted to
the majesty of the gods than to the insignificance of mortals; priests
and worshippers moved here like children among the trunks of some
gigantic forest. Round the cornice, in hundreds of niches, and on every
projection, all the gods of Olympus and all the heroes and sages of
Greece seemed to have met in conclave, and stood gazing down on the world
in gleaming brass or tinted marble. Every portion of the building blazed
with gold and vivid coloring; the painter's hand had added life to the
marble groups in high relief that filled the pediments and the smaller
figures in the long row of metopes. All the population of a town might
have found refuge in the vast edifice and its effect on the mind was like
that of a harmonious symphony of adoration sung by a chorus of giants.
"All hail! Great Serapis! I greet thee in joyful humility, thankful that
Thou hast granted to my old eyes to see Thy glorious and eternal temple
once again!" murmured Karnis in devout contemplation. Then, appealing to
his wife and son, he pointed in silence to the building. Presently,
however, as he watched Orpheus gazing in speechless delight at its
magnificent proportions he could not forbear.
"This," he began with fervid enthusiasm, "is the stronghold of Serapis
the King of the Gods! A work for all time. Its youth has lasted five
hundred years, its future will extend to all eternity.--Aye, so it is;
and so long as it endures in all its glory the old gods cannot be
deposed!"
"No one will ever dare to touch a stone of it," said the steward. "Every
child in Alexandria knows that the world will crumble into dust and ashes
if a finger is laid on that Temple, and the man who ventures to touch the
sacred image. . ."
"The god can protect himself!" interrupted the singer. "But you--you
Christian hypocrites who pretend to hate life and love death--if you
really long so vehemently for the end of all things, you have only to
fall upon this glorious structure.--Do that, do that--only do that!"
The old man shook his fist at the invisible foe and Herse echoed his
words:
"Aye, aye, only do that!" Then she added more calmly: "Well, if
everything comes to an end at once the enemies of the gods will die with
us; and there can be nothing terrible in perishing at the same time with
everything that is beautiful or dear to us."
"Nevertheless," said the steward, "the Bishop has put out his hand to
touch the sanctuary. But our noble Olympius would not suffer the
sacrilegious host to approach, and they had to retire with broken heads.
Serapis will not be mocked; he will stand though all else perish.
'Eternity,' the priest tells us, 'is to him but as an instant, and while
millions of generations bloom and fade, he is still and forever the
same!'"
"Hail, all hail to the great god!" cried Orpheus with hands outstretched
towards the temple.
"Yea, hail! for everlasting glory shall be his!" repeated his father.
"Great is Serapis, and his house and his image shall last. . ."
"Till the next full moon!" said a passer-by in a tone of sinister
mockery, shaking his fist in the face, as it were, of the god. Orpheus
turned quickly to punish the prophet of evil; but he had disappeared in
the crowd and the tide of men had borne him onwards. "Till the next full
moon!" murmured Agne, who had shuddered at her companion's rapturous
ejaculations, and she glanced uneasily at Orpheus; but by the time Herse
addressed her a minute or two later she had controlled the expression of
her features, and the matron's heart was gladdened by her bright smile.
Nay, many a young Alexandrian, passing the group on foot or in a
carriage, looked at her a second time, for that smile lent a mysterious
charm to her pale, calm face. Nor had it faded away when they had crossed
the bridge and were nearing the shores of the lake, for an idea once
conceived lingered long in Agne's mind; and as she walked on in the
bright glory of the morning's sun her mind's eye was fixed on a nocturnal
scene--on the full moon, high in the sky--on the overthrow of the great
idol and a glittering army among the marble ruins of the Serapeum.
Apostles and martyrs soared around, the Saviour sat enthroned in glory
and triumph, while angels, cradled on the clouds that were his footstool,
were singing beatific hymns which sounded clearly in her ear above the
many-voiced tumult of the quays. The vision did not vanish till she was
desired to get into the boat.
Herse was a native of Alexandria and Karnis had passed some of the best
years of his life there; but to Orpheus and Agne all was new, and even
the girl, when once she had escaped from the crowd and noise which
oppressed her, took an interest in the scene and asked a question now and
then. The younger man had not eyes enough to see all that claimed his
attention and admiration.
There were the great sluice-gates at the entrance to the canal that
joined the lake to the sea--there, in a separate dock, lay the splendid
imperial Nile-boats which served to keep up communication between the
garrison of Alexandria and the military stations on the river--there,
again, were the gaudy barges intended for the use of the 'comes', the
prefect and other high officials--and there merchant-vessels of every
size lay at anchor in countless number. Long trains of many-colored sails
swept over the rippling lake like flights of birds across a cornfield,
and every inch of the shore was covered with stores or buildings. Far
away to the south long trellices of vine covered the slopes, broken by
the silvery glaucous tones of the olive-groves, and by clumps of towering
palms whose crowns mingled to form a lofty canopy. White walls,
gaudily-painted temples and private villas gleamed among the green, and
the slanting rays of the low sun, shining on the drops that fell from the
never-resting wheels and buckets that irrigated the land, turned them
into showers of diamonds. These water-works, of the most ingenious
construction, many of them invented and contrived by scientific
engineers, were the weapons with which man had conquered the desert that
originally surrounded this lake, forcing it into green fertility and
productiveness of grain and fruit. Nay, the desert had, for many
centuries, here ceased to exist. Dionysus the generous, and the kindly
garden-gods had blest the toil of men, and yet, now, in many a plot--in
all which belonged to Christian owners--their altars lay scattered and
overthrown.
During the last thirty years much indeed was changed, and nothing to the
satisfaction of old Karnis; Herse, too, shook her head, and when the
rowers had pulled them about half-way across, she pointed to a broad
vacant spot on the bank where a new building was just rising above the
soil, and said sadly to her husband:
"Would you know that place again? Where is our dear old temple gone? The
temple of Dionysus." Karnis started up so hastily that he almost upset
the boat, and their conductor was obliged to insist on his keeping quiet;
he obeyed but badly, however, for his arms were never still as he broke
out:
"And do you suppose that because we are in Egypt I can keep my living
body as still as one of your dead mummies? Let others keep still if they
can! I say it is shameful, disgraceful; a dove's gall might rise at it!
That splendid building, the pride of the city and the delight of men's
eyes, destroyed--swept away like dust from the road! Do you see? Do you
see, I say? Broken columns, marble capitals, here, there and everywhere
at the bottom of the lake--here a head and there a torso! Great and noble
masters formed those statues by the aid of the gods, and they--they,
small and ignoble as they are, have destroyed them by the aid of evil
daemons. They have annihilated and drowned works that were worthy to live
forever! And why? Shall I tell you? Because they shun the Beautiful as an
owl shuns light. Aye, they do! There is nothing they hate or dread so
much as beauty; wherever they find it, they deface and destroy it, even
if it is the work of the Divinity. I accuse them before the
Immortals--for where is the grove even, not the work of man but the
special work of Heaven itself? Where is our grove, with its cool grottos,
its primaeval trees, its shady nooks, and all the peace and enjoyment of
which it was as full as a ripe grape is full of sweet juice?"
"It was cut down and rooted up," replied the steward. "The emperor gave
the sanctuary over to Bishop Theophilus and he set to work at once to
destroy it. The temple was pulled down, the sacred vessels went into the
melting-pot, and the images were mutilated and insulted before they were
thrown into the lime-kiln. The place they are building now is to be a
Christian church. Oh! to think of the airy, beautiful colonnades that
once stood there, and then of the dingy barn that is to take their
place!"
"Why do the gods endure it? Has Zeus lost his thunderbolts?" cried
Orpheus clenching his hands, and paying no heed to Agne who sat pale and
sternly silent during this conversation.
"Nay, he only sleeps, to wake with awful power," said the old man. "See
those blocks of marble and ruins under the waves. Swift work is
destruction! And men lost their wits and looked on at the crime, flinging
the delight of the gods into the water and the kiln. They were wise, very
wise; fishes and flames are dumb and cannot cry to heaven. One barbarian,
in one hour can destroy what it has taken the sublimest souls years,
centuries, to create. They glory in destruction and ruin and they can no
more build up again such a temple as stood there than they can restore
trees that have taken six hundred years to grow. There--out there, Herse,
in the hollow where those black fellows are stirring mortar--they have
given them shirts too, because they are ashamed of the beauty of men's
bodies--that is where the grotto was where we found your poor father."
"The grotto?" repeated his wife, looking at the spot through her tears,
and thinking of the day when, as a girl, she had hurried to the feast of
Dionysus and sought her father in the temple. He had been famous as a
gem-cutter. In obedience to the time-honored tradition in Alexandria,
after intoxicating himself with new wine in honor of the god, he had
rushed out into the street to join the procession. The next morning he
had not returned; the afternoon passed and evening came and still he did
not appear, so his daughter had gone in search of him. Karnis was at that
time a young student and, as her father's lodger, had rented the best
room in the house. He had met her going on her errand and had been very
ready to help her in the search; before long they had found the old man
in the ivy-grown grotto in the grove of Dionysus--motionless and cold, as
if struck by lightning. The bystanders believed that the god had snatched
him away in his intoxicated legion.
In this hour of sorrow Karnis had proved himself her friend, and a few
months after Herse had become his wife and gone with him to Tauromenium
in Sicily.
All this rose before her mind, and even Karnis sat gazing dumbly at the
waves; for every spot where some decisive change has occurred in our
lives has power to revive the past when we see it again after a long
absence. Thus they all sat in silence till Orpheus, touching his father,
pointed out the temple of Isis where he had met the fair Gorgo on the
previous day. The old man turned to look at the sanctuary which, as yet,
remained intact.
"A barbarous structure!" he said bitterly. "The art of the Egyptians has
long been numbered with the dead and the tiger hungers only for the
living!"
"Nay, it is not such a bad piece of work," replied the steward, "but it
is out of their reach; for the ground on which it stands belongs to my
old mistress, and the law protects private property.--You must at your
leisure inspect the ship-yard here; it is perhaps the most extensive in
the world. The timber that is piled there--cedar of Lebanon, oak from
Pontus and heavy iron-wood from Ethiopia--is worth hundreds of talents."
"And does all that belong to your master?"
"No; the owner is the grandson of a freedman, formerly in his family. Now
they are very rich and highly respected, and Master Clemens sits in the
Senate. There he is--that man in a white robe."
"A Christian, I should imagine," observed the singer.
"Very true;" replied the steward. "But what is good remains good, and he
is a worthy and excellent man notwithstanding. He keeps a tight hand over
the ship-yard here and over the others too by the harbor of Eunostus.
Only Clemens can never let other people have their own opinions; in that
he is just like the rest of them. Every slave he buys must become a
Christian and his sons are the same; even Constantine, though he is an
officer in the imperial army and as smart and clever a soldier as
lives.--As far as we are concerned we leave every man to his own beliefs.
Porphyrius makes no secret of his views and all the vessels we use in the
corn-trade are built by Christians.--But here we are."
The boat stopped at a broad flight of marble steps which led from the
lake into the garden of Porphyrius' house. Karnis as he walked through
the grounds felt himself at greater ease, for here the old gods were at
home; their statues gleamed among the dark clumps of evergreens, and were
mirrored in the clear tanks, while delicious perfumes were wafted from
the garlanded shrines and freshly anointed altars, to greet the
newcomers.
CHAPTER III.
The family of musicians were kindly received, but they were not
immediately called upon to perform, for as soon as Damia heard that the
pretty fair-haired child who had pleased her so much the day before had
been obliged to remain at home, she had one of her granddaughter's
dresses brought out, and requested Herse to go back to fetch her. Some
slaves were to accompany Herse and transfer all her little property on
board a Nile-boat belonging to Porphyrius, which was lying at anchor just
off the ship-yard. In this large barge there were several cabins which
had often accommodated guests, and which would now serve very well as a
residence for Karnis and his party. Indeed, it was particularly well
suited for a family of musicians, for they could practise there
undisturbed, and Gorgo could at any time pay them a visit.
Herse went back to the Xenodochium with a lighter heart; her son also
returned to the city to replace a number of necessaries that had been
lost on board ship, and Karnis, rejoicing to be out of the monk-haunted
asylum had remained in the men's room in the house of his new patron,
enjoying the good things which abounded there. He felt as though he was
here once more at home after years of exile. Here dwelt the spirit of his
fathers; here he found men who enjoyed life after his own fashion, who
could share his enthusiasms and his hatreds. He drank noble liquor out of
an elegantly carved onyx cup, all that he heard soothed his ears, and all
that he said met with entire sympathy. The future prospects of his
family, till now so uncertain, were hardly inferior to those which his
vivid imagination had painted the night before. And even if Fortune
should again desert him, the hours of present enjoyment should be written
down to the profit side of life, and remain a permanent gain at any rate
in memory.
The venerable Damia, her son Porphyrius, and the fair Gorgo were in fact
a trio such as are rarely met with. The master of the house, more
cautious than the women, was inclined to think that his mother and
daughter had been somewhat overhasty and imprudent in their advances and
he had at first received Karnis with considerable reserve; but after a
short interview he had convinced himself that the musician was a man of
unusual culture and superior stamp. The old lady had, from the first,
been predisposed in his favor, for she had read in the stars last night
that the day was to bring her a fortunate meeting. Her wish was law, and
Karnis could not help smiling when she addressed her son, whose hair had
long been grey and who looked fully competent to manage his own
household, as "my child," not hesitating to scold and reprove him. Her
cathedra was a high arm-chair which she never quitted but to be carried
to her observatory on the roof of the house, where she kept her
astrological tablets and manuscripts. The only weakness about her was in
her feet; but strong, and willing arms were always at her disposal to
carry her about--to table, into her sleeping-room, and during the daytime
out to sunny spots in the garden. She was never so happy as when Helios
warmed her back with his rays, for her old blood needed it after the long
night-watches that she still would keep in her observatory. Even during
the hottest noon she would sit in the sun, with a large green umbrella to
shade her keen eyes, and those who desired to speak with her might find
shade as best they could. As she stood, much bent, but propped on her
ivory crutches, eagerly following every word of a conversation, she
looked as though she were prepared at any moment to spring into the
middle of it and interrupt the speaker. She always said exactly what she
meant without reserve or ruth; and throughout her long life, as the
mistress of great wealth, she had always been allowed to have her own
way. She asserted her rights even over her son, though he was the centre
of a web whose threads reached to the furthest circumference of the known
world. The peasants who tilled the earth by the Upper and Lower Nile, the
shepherds who kept their flocks in the Arabian desert, in Syria, or on
the Silphium meads of Cyrenaica, the wood-cutters of Lebanon and Pontus,
the mountaineers of Hispania and Sardinia, the brokers, merchants, and
skippers of every port on the Mediterranean, were bound by these threads
to the villa on the shore of Mareotis, and felt the tie when the master
there--docile as a boy to his mother's will--tightened or released his
hold.
His possessions, even in his youth, had been so vast that their increment
could bring no added enjoyment to him or his family, and yet their
increase had become his life's task. He strove for a higher sum to figure
on the annual balance sheet, as eagerly as an athlete strives for a
prize; and his mother not only inspected the account, but watched every
important undertaking with keen interest. When her son and his colleagues
doubted over some decision it was she who gave the casting vote; but
though her advice in most cases proved sound and profitable, she herself
ascribed this less to her own acumen and knowledge of the world than to
the hints she obtained from the stars and from magical calculations. Her
son did not follow her in these speculations, but he rarely disputed the
conclusions that she drew from her astrological studies. While she was
turning night into day he was glad to entertain a few learned friends,
for all the hours of leisure that he could snatch from his pursuit of
fortune, he devoted to philosophy, and the most distinguished thinkers of
Alexandria were happy to be received at the hospitable table of so rich a
patron. He was charmed to be called "Callias,"
[The noble Athenian family of Callias was famed for its wealth and
splendor.]
and the heathen teachers at the schools of the Museum and Serapeum
regarded him as a faithful ally. It was known that he had been baptized,
but he never liked to hear the fact mentioned. He won all hearts by his
perfect modesty, but even more perhaps by a certain air of suffering and
melancholy which protected the wealthy merchant against the envy of
detractors.
In the course of her conversation with Karnis the old lady enquired
particularly as to the antecedent history of Agne, for if there had been
a stain on her character, or if she were by birth a slave, Gorgo could
not of course be seen with her in public, and in that case Karnis would
have to teach the lament of Isis to some freeborn singer. Karnis in reply
could only shrug his shoulders, and beg the ladies and Porphyrius to
judge for themselves when he should have related the young girl's story.
Three years since, he said, he had been staying at Antioch at the time of
a violent outbreak against the levying of certain taxes. There had been
much bloodshed, and he and his family had got out of the city as quickly
as they could. It was growing dusk when they turned into a wayside inn,
where they found Agne and her little brother captives to a soldier.
During the night the girl had crept up to the little boy's bed, and to
comfort and lull him had begun to sing him a simple song. The singer's
voice was so pure and pathetic that it had touched both him and his wife
and they had at once purchased the girl and her brother for a small sum.
He had simply paid what the soldier asked, not regarding the children in
the light of slaves; nor had he had any description of them written out,
though it was, no doubt, in his power to treat them as slaves and to sell
them again, since the sale had taken place before witnesses who might
still be found. He had afterwards learnt from the girl that her parents
were Christians and had settled in Antioch only a few years previously;
but she had no friends nor relatives there. Her father, being a
tax-collector in the service of the Emperor, had moved about a great
deal, but she remembered his having spoken of Augusta Treviroruin in
Belgica prima, as his native place.--[Now Trier or Treves, on the
Moselle.]
Agne had witnessed the attack on her father's house by the angry mob who
had killed her parents, their two slaves, and her elder brother. Her
father must certainly have been an official of some rank, and probably,
as it would seem, a Roman citizen, in which case--as Porphyrius
agreed--both the young girl and her little brother could legally claim
their freedom. The insurgents who had dragged the two children out into
the street had been driven off by the troops, and it was from them that
Karnis had rescued them. "And I have never regretted it," added the old
musician, "for Agne is a sweet, gentle soul. Of her voice I need say
nothing, since you yourselves heard it yesterday."
"And were quite delighted with it!" cried Gorgo. "If flowers could sing
it would be like that!"
"Well, well," said Karnis. "She has a lovely voice--but she wants wings.
Something--what, I know not, keeps the violet rooted to the soil."
"Christian scruples," said the merchant, and Damia added:
"Let Eros touch her--that will loosen her tongue."
"Eros, always Eros!" repeated Gorgo shrugging her shoulders. "Nay, love
means suffering--those who love drag a chain with them. To do the best of
which he is capable man needs only to be free, true, and in health."
"That is a great deal, fair mistress," replied Karnis eagerly. "With
these three gifts the best work is done. But as to Agne--what can be
further from freedom than a girl bound to service? her body, to be sure
is healthy, but her spirit suffers; she can get no peace for dread of the
Christian's terrors: Sin, Repentance, and Hell. . . ."
"Oh, we know how their life is ruined!" interrupted the old lady. "Was it
Agne who introduced you to Mary's Asylum?"
"No, noble lady."
"But how then--that prudent saint generally selects her guests, and those
that are not baptized . . ."
"She certainly sheltered heathens on this occasion."
"I am much surprised. Tell me how it happened."
"We were at Rome," began Karnis, "and my patron there persuaded Marcus,
Mary's son, to take us on board his ship at Ostia. We dropped anchor at
Cyrene, where the young master wanted to pick up his brother and bring
him also to Alexandria."
"Then is Demetrius here?" asked Porphyrius.
"Yes, sir. He came on board at Cyrene. Hardly had we got fairly to sea
again when we saw two pirate ships. Our trireme was at once turned round,
but in our hurry to regain the harbor we stuck fast on a sand bank; the
boats were at once put out to save the passengers and Cynegius, the
consul. . ."
"Cynegius--on his way here!" exclaimed Porphyrius, much excited.
"He landed yesterday with us in the harbor of Eunostus. The secretaries
and officers of his suite filled one boat and Marcus and his brother were
getting into the other with their men. We, and others of the free
passengers, should have been left behind if Dada . . ."
"That pretty little blonde?" asked Damia.
"The very same. Marcus had taken a great fancy to her prattle and her
songs during the voyage--no nightingale can sing more clearly--and when
she begged and prayed him he gave way at once, and said: he would take
her in his boat. But the brave child declared that she would jump into
the sea before she would leave without us."
"Well done!" cried the old lady, and Porphyrius added:
"That speaks well for her and for you."
"So after all Marcus found room for us in the boat--for all of us, and we
got safely to land. A few days after we all came on in a troop-ship:
Cynegius, the two brothers and the rest, all safe and sound; and, as we
had lost everything we possessed, Marcus gave us a certificate which
procured our admission into his mother's Xenodochium. And then the gods
brought me and mine under the notice of your noble daughter."
"Then Cynegius is here, positively here?" asked Porphyrius once more.
Karnis assured him that he was, and the merchant, turning to his mother,
went on:
"And Olympius has not yet come home. It is always the same thing; he is
as rash as a boy. If they should take him! The roads are swarming with
monks. There is something astir. Bring out the chariot, Syrus, at once;
and tell Atlas to be ready to accompany me. Cynegius here!--Ha, ha! I
thank the gods!"
The last exclamation was addressed to a man who at this instant came into
the room, muffled up to the eyes. He threw off the hood of his cloak and
the wrapper that went round his throat, concealing his long white beard,
and as he did so he exclaimed with a gasp for breath:
"Here I am once more!--Cynegius is here and matters look serious my
friend."
"You have been to the Museum?"
"Without any obstruction. I found them all assembled. Brave lads. They
are all for us and the gods. There are plenty of weapons. The Jews--[At
that time about two-fifths of the whole population.]--are not stirring,
Onias thinks he may vouch for that; and we must surely be a match for the
monks and the imperial cohorts."
"If the gods only stand by us to-day and tomorrow," replied Porphyrius
doubtfully.
"For ever, if only the country people do their duty!" cried the other.
"But who is this stranger?"
"The chief of the singers who were here yesterday," replied Gorgo.
"Karnis, the son of Hiero of Tauromenium," said the musician, bowing to
the stranger, whose stately figure and handsome, thoughtful head struck
him with admiration.
"Karnis of Tauromenium!" exclaimed the newcomer with glad surprise. "By
Hercules! a strange meeting. Your hand, your hand, old man. How many
years is it since we last emptied a wine-jar together at the house of old
Hippias? Seven lustres have turned our hair grey, but we still can stand
upright. Well, Karnis son of Hiero--and who am I?"
"Olympius--the great Olympius!" cried Karnis, eagerly grasping the
offered hand. "May all the gods bless this happy day!"
"All the gods?" repeated the philosopher. "Is that what you say? Then you
have not crawled under the yoke of the cross?"
"The world can rejoice only under the auspices of the gods!" cried Karnis
excitedly.
"And it shall rejoice still, we will save it from gloom!" added the other
with a flash of vehemence.
"The times are fateful. We must fight; and no longer over trifles; we
cannot now break each other's heads over a quibble, or believe that the
whole world hangs on the question whether the instant of death is the
last minute of this life or the first of the next. No--what now remains
to be decided is whether the old gods shall be victorious, whether we
shall continue to live free and happy under the rule of the Immortals, or
whether we shall bow under the dismal doctrine of the carpenter's
crucified son; we must fight for the highest hopes and aims of humanity."
"I know," interrupted Karnis, "you have already done battle valiantly for
great Serapis. They wanted to lay hands on his sanctuary but you and your
disciples put them to rout. The rest got off scot-free . . ."
"But they have taught me the value of my head," said Olympius laughing.
"Evagrius prices it at three talents. Why, you might buy a house with the
money and a modest man could live upon the interest. This worthy man
keeps me concealed here. We must talk over a few things, Porphyrius; and
you, Gorgo, do not forget the solemn festival of Isis. Now that Cynegius
is here it must be made as splendid as possible, and he must tell the
Emperor, who has sent him, what temper we Alexandrians are in. But where
is the dark maiden I saw yesterday?"
"In the garden," replied Gorgo.
"She is to sing at the foot of the bier!" cried Olympius. "That must not
be altered."
"If I can persuade her--she is a Christian," said Karnis doubtfully.
"She must," said the philosopher positively. "It will be a bad lookout
indeed for the logic and rhetoric of Alexandria if an old professor and
disputant cannot succeed in turning a young girl's resolutions upside
down. Leave that to me. I shall find time for a chat with you by and bye,
friend Karnis. How in the world does it happen that you, who so often
have helped us with your father's coin, have come down to be the chief of
a band of travelling musicians? You will have much to tell me, my good
friend; but even such important matters must give way to those that are
more pressing. One word with you, Porphyrius."
Agne had been all this time awaiting Herse's return in the colonnade that
ran along the garden-front of the house. She was glad to be alone, and it
was very comfortable to rest on the soft cushions under the gilt-coffered
ceiling of the arcade. At each end stood large shrubs covered with
bunches of violet-blue flowers and the spreading branches cast a pleasant
shade on the couch where she sat; the beautiful flowers, which were
strange to her, were delightfully fragrant, and from time to time she
helped herself to the refreshments which Gorgo herself had brought out to
her. All she saw, heard, and felt, was soothing to her mind; never had
she seen or tasted juicier peaches, richer bunches of grapes, fresher
almonds or more tempting cakes; on the shrubs in the garden and on the
grass-plots between the paths there was not a dead leaf, not a dry stem,
not the tiniest weed. The buds were swelling on the tall trees, shrubs
without end were covered with blossoms--white, blue, yellow, and
red--while, among the smooth, shining leaves of the orange and lemon
trees, gleamed the swelling fruit. On a round tank close at hand some
black swans were noiselessly tracing evanescent circles and uttering
their strange lament. The song of birds mingled with the plash of
fountains, and even the marble statues, for all that they were dumb,
seemed to be enjoying the sweet morning air and the stir and voice of
nature.
Yes, she could be happy here; as she peeled a peach and slowly swallowed
the soft fragrant mouthfuls, she laughed to remember the hard
ship's-biscuit, of the two previous days' fare. And it was Gorgo's
privilege to revel in these good things day after day, year after year.
It was like living in Eden, in the perpetual spring of man's first
blissful home on earth. There could be no suffering here; who could cry
here, who could be sorrowful, who could die? . . . Here a new train of
thought forced itself upon her. She was still so young, and yet she was
as familiar with the idea of death as she was with life; for whenever she
had happened to tell any minister of her creed that she was an orphan and
a slave, and deeply sad and sorrowful, the joys of eternity in Paradise
had always been described to her for her consolation, and it was in hopes
of Heaven that her visionary nature found such a modicum of comfort as
might suffice to keep the young artist-soul from despair. And now it
struck her that it must be hard, very hard to die, in the midst of all
this splendor. Living here must be a foretaste of the joys of
Paradise--and in the next world, among the angels of Heaven, in the
presence of the Saviour--would it not be a thousand times more beautiful
even than this? She shuddered, for, sojourning here, she was no longer to
be counted as one of the poor and humble sufferers to whom Christ had
promised the Kingdom of Heaven--here she was one of the rich, who had
nothing to hope for after death.
She pushed the peaches away with a feeling of oppression, and closed her
eyes that she might no longer see all these perishable splendors and
sinful works of the heathen, which pandered only to the senses. She
longed to remain miserable and poor on earth, that she might rejoin her
parents and dwell with them eternally.
To her it was not a belief but a certainty that her father and mother
were dwelling in Heaven, and she had often felt moved to pray that she
might die and be reunited to them; but she must not die yet, for her
little brother still needed her care. The kind souls whom she served let
him lack for nothing, it is true, that could conduce to his bodily
welfare; still, she could not appear before her parents without the
little one in her hand, and he would be lost eternally if his soul fell
into the power of the enemies of her faith. Her heart ached when she
reflected that Karnis, who was certainly not one of the reprobate and
whom she affectionately revered as a master in the art she loved--that
Herse, and the light-hearted Dada, and Orpheus even, must all be doomed
to perish eternally; and to save Orpheus she would willingly have
forfeited half the joys of Paradise. She saw that he was no less an
idolater than his parents; and yet, day by day, she prayed that his soul
might be saved, and she never ceased to hope for a miracle--that he too
might see a vision, like Paul, and confess the Saviour. She was so happy
when she was with him, and never happier than when it was her fortune to
sing with him, or to his admirable accompaniment on the lute. When she
could succeed in forgetting herself completely, and in giving utterance
by her lovely voice to all that was highest and best in her soul, he,
whose ear was no less sensitive and appreciative than his father's, would
frankly express his approval, and in these moments life was indeed fair
and precious.
Music was the bond between her and Orpheus, and when her soul was stirred
she could feel and express herself in music. Song was the language of her
heart, and she had learnt by experience that it was a language which even
the heathen could both use and understand. The Eternal Father himself
must find joy in such a voice as Gorgo's. She was a heathen, and yet she
had thrown into her song all that Agne herself could feel when she lifted
up her heart in passionate prayer. The Christian--so she had often been
taught--must have no part with the idolaters; but it was God himself who
had cast her on the hands of Karnis, and the Church commanded that
servants should obey their masters. Singing seemed to her to be a
language in itself, bestowed by God on all living creatures, even on the
birds, wherein to speak to Him; so she allowed herself to look forward
with pleasure to an opportunity of mingling her own voice with that of
the heathen lady.
CHAPTER IV.
Not long after Porphyrius and the philosopher had retired to a private
room Herse returned with Dada. Gorgo's blue spangled dress, which Damia
had sent her, suited the girl to perfection; but she was quite out of
breath, and her hair was in disorder. Herse, too, looked agitated, her
face was red and she dragged little Papias, whose hand she held, rather
roughly at her heels.
Dada was evidently abashed; less by reason of the splendor that
surrounded her than because her foster-mother had strictly enjoined her
to be very quiet and mannerly in the presence of their patrons. She felt
shy and strange as she made her low courtesy to the old lady; but Damia
seemed to be pleased with the timid grace of her demeanor, for she
offered her her hand--an honor she usually conferred only on her
intimates, bid her stoop, and gave her a kiss, saying kindly: "You are a
good brave girl. Fidelity to your friends is pleasing in the sight of the
gods, and finds its reward even among men."
Dada, obeying a happy impulse, threw herself on her knees before the old
woman, kissed her hands, and then, sitting on her heels, nestled at her
feet.
Gorgo, however, noticing Herse's agitation, asked what had happened to
them. Some monks, Herse explained, had followed them on the road hither,
had snatched Dada's lyre from the slave who was carrying it and pulled
the wreath out of her hair. Damia was furious as she heard it, and
trembled with rage as she railed at the wild hordes who disgraced and
desecrated Alexandria, the sacred home of the Muses; then she began to
speak once more of the young captain, Mary's son, to whom the troupe of
singers owed their lives.
"Marcus," said she, "is said to be a paragon of chastity. He races in the
hippodrome with all the gallants of the town and yet--if it is true it is
a miracle--he shuns women as though he were a priest already. His mother
is very anxious that he should become one; but he, by the grace of
Aphrodite, is the son of my handsome Appelles, who, if he had gazed into
those blue eyes all the way from Rome to Alexandria, would have
surrendered at mercy; but then he would also have conquered them--as
surely as I hope to live till autumn. You need not blush so, child. After
all, Marcus is a man like other men. Keep your eyes open, Dame Herse!"
"Never fear!" cried Herse. "And I have need to keep them open I am sorry
to say. The young captain, who on board ship was so bashful and retiring,
as soon as he was on land altered his time. While we were away this
morning he crept into his own mother's inn like a ferret, opened the door
of our room with the keys of which he has the command--it is
shameful!--and proposed to the girl to fly, to leave us--she is the
daughter of a dear sister of mine--and go with him; who but he knows
where!"
Damia struck the floor with her crutch and, interrupting the indignant
matron with a spiteful laugh, exclaimed:
"Ha, ha! The saintly Mary's most saintly son! Such wonders do not happen
every day! Here, Dada--here; take this ring, it has been worn by a woman
who once was young and who has had many lovers. Close--come close, my
sweet child."
Dada looked up at the old lady with puzzled eyes; Damia bent her head
close to the girl's, and whispered, softly but vehemently in her ear:
"Only turn that milksop's head, make him so madly and desperately in love
with you that he does not know which way to turn for delicious torment.
You can do it I know, and if you do--well, I make no promises; but on the
day when all Alexandria is talking of that woman's son as wandering out,
night after night, to watch under the window of the fair Dada, the
heathen singer--when he drives you out in the face of day and in his own
chariot, down the Canopic Way and past his mother's door--then child,
ask, claim whatever you will, and old Damia will not refuse it."
Then raising her head she added to the others:
"In the afternoon, my friends, you can take possession of your new
quarters. Go with them, Dada. By-and-bye we will find you a pretty room
in the tower. Come and see me very often, sweet one, and tell me all your
prettiest tales. When I am not too busy I shall always be glad to see
you, for you and I have a secret you know."
The girl stood up, looking uneasily at the old woman; Damia nodded
knowingly, as much as to say that they quite understood each other and
again offered her hand to Dada; but Dada could not kiss it; she turned
and followed the others more gravely than usual.
Gorgo guessed what the old lady would be at with Dada; as soon as the
party of singers had taken leave she went up to her grandmother and said
reproachfully:
"That little fair thing will find no difficulty in making a fool of
Marcus; for my part I hardly know him, but why should he pay for his
mother's sins against you? How can he help. . ."
"He cannot help it," interrupted Damia with decisive abruptness. "He can
do nothing to save his mother, any more than you can help being a child
of twenty and bound to hold your tongue till your opinion is asked."
...........................
The family of musicians had all met on board the barge which was lying at
anchor in the lake, off the ship-yard. Orpheus had just been an
eye-witness of the disturbance which prevailed throughout the city, and
the wild howls and cries that were audible in the distance confirmed his
report; but the waters of the lake were an unruffled mirror of blue, the
slaves in the ship-yard were at work as usual, and the cooing
turtle-doves flew from palm to palm.
No signs of troubled times were to be seen in the floating home of the
wanderers. The steward had provided for everything. There were rooms and
beds to spare in the vessel; the large deck-cabin was a comfortable
sitting-room, and from the little galley at the prow came a savory smell
of cooking and a cheerful clang of pots and pans.
"This is living!" exclaimed Karnis, stretching himself comfortably on a
divan. "This abode seems made on purpose for our noble selves! Sit down,
mother, make yourself at home. Here we are people of consequence, and if
it were only to make things pleasant for the slaves we must behave as
though we had never known people who take their meals squatted round an
earthen bowl, and clawing out the broken meat. Enjoy the gifts of the
present--who knows how long this golden hour may last! Ah, wife, it
reminds us of former times! It would be very pleasant to be like this,
side by side, and help ourselves from a table all our own to dainty
dishes which we had not assisted in cooking. For you, old woman, have
done everything with your own hands for so long, that you deserve to have
some one to wait on you for once."
A little table was placed by each divan and covered with appetizing food;
the steward mixed some fine wine of the country with fresh, clear water,
Orpheus offered the libation, and Karnis spiced the meal with jests and
tales of his youth, of which he had been reminded by his meeting with his
old friend and comrade Olympius.
Dada interrupted him frequently, laughing more loudly and recklessly than
usual; she was in a fever of excitement and Herse did not fail to remark
it. The good woman was somewhat uneasy. The very fact that her husband
always gave himself up heart and soul to the influences of the
hour--though she was glad that he should enjoy this good fortune to the
utmost--made her look beyond the present into the future. She had seen
with her own eyes the tumult that was rife in Alexandria, and felt that
they had arrived at an inauspicious moment. If it should come to a
struggle between the Christians and the Heathen, Karnis, finding that his
old friend Olympius was the head of his party, would infallibly seize the
sword, and if, then, the victory remained with the Christians no mercy
would be shown to those who had fought for the old gods. Gorgo's wish
that Agne should sing in the temple of Isis was another source of
anxiety; for if it came to that they might, only too probably, be accused
of perverting a Christian to heathen worship, and be condemned to a
severe penalty. All this had worn a very different aspect yesterday when
she had thought of Alexandria as the gay home of her youth; but now she
saw what a change had taken place in these thirty years. The Church had
risen on the ruins of the Temple, and monks had forced the sacrificing
priests into the background.
Karnis and his troupe were musicians of no ordinary stamp; still the law
concerning singing-girls might place him in peril, especially now
that--to make matters worse--a young Christian was paying court to his
pretty niece. What catastrophes might not be called down on his hapless
head if so influential a woman as Marcus' mother Mary should come to know
of her son's backsliding! Herse had long perceived how attractive that
little simpleton was to all men--old and young--and when one of the
lovers, of whom she had no lack, happened to take her fancy she was apt
to forget herself and play a too audacious game; but as soon as she found
she had gone too far and somewhat committed herself she would draw back
and meet him, if she could not avoid him, with repellent and even
unmannerly coldness. Again and again had Herse scolded and warned her,
but Dada always answered her reproofs by saying that she could not make
herself different from what she was, and Herse had never been able to
remain stern and severe in the face of the foolish excuses that Dada put
forward so convincingly.
To-day the good woman could not quite make up her mind whether it would
be wiser to warn Dada against Marcus and desire her to repel any advances
he might attempt to make, or to let bygones be bygones. She knew full
well how a trifling incident gains importance when undue emphasis is laid
on it; she therefore had merely asked the girl what secret she could have
with old Damia and had accepted some evasive subterfuge in reply, while,
at the same time, she guessed the truth and was quite determined not to
remit her watchfulness. For a time, at any rate, she thought she would
let matters go their own way, and never mention the young fellow's name;
but her husband spoilt this plan, for with the eager jollity of a man
very much at his ease after a good dinner he called upon Dada to tell
their the whole history of the young Christian's invasion in the morning.
Dada at first was reticent, but the old man's communicative humor proved
infectious and she presently told her story:
"I was sitting alone with the poor little boy, like--well I do not know
what like--you must find a comparison for yourselves. I was comforting
myself with the reflection that the key was on the inside and the door
locked, for I was getting frightened as the monks began to sing in the
yard below, one part going off to the left, as it were, and the other
part to the right. Did you ever see two drunken men walking arm in arm,
and lurching first to one side and then to the other? You may laugh, but
by the nine Muses it was just like that. Then Papias grew tired and cross
and kept asking where Agne was, till at last he began to cry. When I
asked him what he was crying for, he said he had forgotten, I really am
patient--you must all allow that--I did not do anything to him, but, just
to give him something to play with, I took out the key, for there was
nothing else at hand that he could not break, and gave it to him and told
him to play a tune on it. This delighted him, and he really did it quite
prettily. Then I looked over my burnt dress and was horrified to see how
large the holes were, and it struck me that I might turn it, because when
you turn a thing the spots, you know, do not show."
"You have invented that this very minute," cried Orpheus laughing. "We
know you. If you can only turn the laugh against yourself. . ."
"No, really," cried Dada, "the idea flew through my head like a bird
through a room; but I remembered at once that a hole burnt through shows
on both sides, so I threw the dress aside as past mending and sat down on
the low stool to peep through the wicket by the door out at the yard; the
singing had stopped and the silence frightened me almost as much. Papias
had stopped his piping too, and was sitting in the corner where Orpheus
sat to write his letter to Tauromenium."
"I know," said Orpheus, "the inkstand was there, that the steward of the
inn had lent us the day before."
"Just so; and when mother came in, there he was, dipping his finger in
the ink, and painting his white dress--you can study the pattern at your
leisure.--But no not interrupt me.--Well, I was looking into the
court-yard; it was quite empty; all the monks were gone. Suddenly a tall
young man in a white dress with a beautiful sky-blue border appeared
through the great gate. The gate-keeper crawled after him very humbly as
far as his rope would allow and even the steward spoke to him with both
hands pressed to his breast as if he had a faithful heart on the right
side as well as the one on the left. This young man--it was our kind
friend Marcus, of course--crossed the court, taking a zigzag at first, as
a snipe flies, and then came towards our door. The steward and the
gate-keeper had both vanished.--Do you remember the young Goths whom
their father took to bathe in the Tiber last winter, when it was so cold?
And how they first stood on the brink and dipped their toes in, and then
ran away and when they came back again just wetted their heads and
chests? But they had to jump in at last when their father shouted some
barbaric words to them--I can see them now. Well, Marcus was exactly like
those boys; but at last he suddenly walked straight up to our door and
knocked."
"He remembered your pretty face no doubt," laughed Karnis.
"May be. However, I did not stir. I kept as still as a mouse, sitting on
my stool and watching him through the key-hole, till presently he called
out: 'Is no one there?' Then I forgot and answered: 'They are all out!'
Of course I had betrayed myself--but it is impossible to think of
everything at once. Oh! yes--you may laugh. And he smiled too--he is a
very handsome fellow--and desired me most pressingly to open the door as
he had something of the greatest importance to say to me. I said he could
talk very well through the gap at the top; that Pyramus and Thisbe had
even kissed through a chink in a wall. But he would not see the joke; he
got graver and more earnest, and insisted, saying that our fate, his and
mine, hung on that hour, and that not a soul must overhear what he had to
say. The top of the door was too high to whisper through, so there was
nothing for it but to ask Papias for the key; however, he did not know
where he had put it. I afterwards thought of asking him what he had done
with his flute and he fetched it then at once.--In short, the key was
nowhere to be found. I told Marcus this and he wrung his hands with
vexation; but in a few minutes the inn-steward, who must have been hiding
to listen behind a pillar, suddenly appeared as if he had dropped from
the skies, took a key out of his girdle, threw the door wide open, and
vanished as if the earth had swallowed him.
"There we stood, Marcus and I, face to face. He was quite agitated; I
really believe the poor fellow was trembling, and I did not feel very
confident; however, I asked him what it was that he wanted. Then he
recovered himself a little: 'I wished,'--he began; so I went on: 'Thou
wishedst,'--and it might have gone on to the end: 'he wished, we
wished'---and so forth, like the children at school at Rome, when we were
learning Greek; but, Papias came to the rescue, for he ran up to Marcus
and asked him to toss him up high, as he used to do on board ship. Marcus
did as he was asked, and then he suddenly broke out into such a torrent
of words that I was quite terrified. First he said so many fine things
that I quite expected a declaration of love, and was trying to make up my
mind whether I would laugh him out of it or throw myself into his
arms--for he really is a dear, good, handsome fellow--and if you would
like to know the truth I should have been very willing to oblige him--to
a certain extent. But he asked me nothing, and from talking of me--listen
to this Father Karnis--and saying that the great Father in Heaven had
granted me every good gift, he went on to speak of you as a wicked,
perverse and reprobate old heathen."
"I will teach him!" exclaimed Karnis shaking his fist.
"Nay, but listen," Dada went on. "He praised you and mother for a great
many things; but do you know what he says is wrong? He says you will
imperil my psyche--my soul, my immortal soul. As if I had ever heard of
any Psyche but the Psyche whom Eros loved!"
"That is quite another thing," said Karnis very seriously. "In many
songs, you know, I have tried to make you uplift your soul to a higher
flight. You have learnt to sing, and there is no better school for a
woman's soul than music and singing. If that conceited simpleton--why, he
is young enough to be my grandson--if he talks any such nonsense to you
again you may tell him from me . . ."
"You will tell him nothing," cried Herse, "for we can have nothing
whatever to do with the Christian. You are my own sister's child and I
desire and order you--do you hear--to keep out of his way, if he ever
tries to come near you again . . ."
"Who is likely to find us here?" said Dada. "Besides, he has no such
ideas and motives as you suppose. It is what he calls my soul that he
cares for and not myself; and he wanted to take me away, not to his own
house, but to some man who would be the physician of my soul, he said. I
am generally ready enough to laugh, but what he said was so impressive
and solemn, and so wonderfully earnest and startling that I could not
jest over it. At last I was more angry at his daring to speak to me in
such a way than any of you ever thought I could be, and that drove him
half mad. You came in, mother, just as the gentleman had fallen on his
knees to implore me to leave you."
"And I gave him my mind on the subject," retorted Herse with grim
satisfaction. "I let him know what I thought of him. He may talk about
the soul--what he is after is the girl. I know these Christians and I
know what the upshot will be. He will take advantage of the edict to gain
his ends, and then you will be separated from us and shut up in a
reformatory or a refuge or a cloister or whatever they call their dismal
prisons, and will learn more about your soul than you will care to know.
It will be all over then with singing, and laughter, and amusement. Now
you know the truth, and if you are wise you will keep out of his way till
we leave Alexandria; and that will be as soon as possible, if you listen
to reason, Karnis."
She spoke with such earnest conviction that Dada remained silent with
downcast eyes, and Karnis sat up to think the matter over.
However, there was no time now for further reflection; the steward came
in and desired that he, with his son and Agne should go at once to Gorgo
to practise the lament of Isis.
This command did not include Herse and Dada, who remained on the barge.
Herse having plenty to occupy her in the lower rooms, Dada went on deck
and watched the others on their way to the house; then she sat looking at
the shipwrights at their work and tossed fruit and sweetmeats, the
remains of their dessert, for the children to catch who were playing on
the shore. Meanwhile she thought over Marcus' startling speech, Damia's
injunctions and Herse's warnings.
At first it seemed to her that Herse might be right, but by degrees she
fell back into her old conviction that the young Christian could mean no
harm by her; and she felt as sure that he would find her out wherever she
might hide herself, as that it was her pretty and much-admired little
person that he sought to win, and not her soul--for what could such an
airy nothing as a soul profit a lover? How rapturously he had described
her charms, how candidly he had owned that her image was always before
him even in his dreams, that he could not and would not give her up--nay,
that he was ready to lay down his life to save her soul. Only a man in
love could speak like this and a man so desperately in love can achieve
whatever he will. On her way from the Xenodochium to the house of
Porphyrius she had passed him in his chariot, and had admired the
splendid horses which he turned and guided with perfect skill and grace.
He was scarcely three years older than herself; he was eighteen--but in
spite of his youth and simplicity he was not unmanly; and there was
something in him--something that compelled her to be constantly thinking
of him and asking herself what that something was. Old Damia's
instructions troubled her; they took much of the charm from her dream of
being loved by Marcus, clasped in his arms, and driven through the city
in his chariot.
It was impossible--yes, quite impossible, she was sure--that they should
have parted forever; as she sat, thinking still of him and glancing from
time to time at the toiling carpenters, a boat pulled up at the landing
close to the barge out of which jumped an officer of the imperial guard.
Such a handsome man! with such a noble, powerful, sunburnt face, a
lightly waving black beard, and hair that fell from under his gold
helmet! The short-sword at his side showed him to be a tribune or prefect
of cavalry, and what gallant deeds must not this brilliant and glittering
young warrior have performed to have risen to such high rank while still
so young! He stood on the shore, looking all round, his eyes met hers and
she felt herself color; he seemed surprised to see her there and greeted
her respectfully with a military salute; then he went on towards the
unfinished hulk of a large ship whose bare curved ribs one or two foremen
were busily measuring with tape and rule.
An elderly man of dignified aspect was standing close by, who, as Dada
had already discovered, was the head of the ship-yard, and the warrior
hastened towards him. She heard him say: "Father," and in the next
instant she saw the old man open his arms and the officer rush to embrace
him.
Dada never took her eyes off the couple who walked on, arm in arm and
talking eagerly, till they disappeared into a large house on the further
side of the dockyard.
"What a handsome man!" Dada repeated to herself, but while she waited to
see him return she gazed across the lake by which Marcus might find his
way to her. And as she lingered, idly dreaming, she involuntarily
compared the two men. There were fine soldiers in plenty in Rome, and the
ship-builder's son was in no particular superior to a hundred others; but
such a man as Marcus she had never before seen--there could hardly be
such another in the world. The young guard was one fine tree among a
grove of fine trees; but Marcus had something peculiar to himself, that
distinguished him from the crowd, and which made him exceptionally
attractive and lovable. His image at length so completely filled her mind
that she forgot the handsome officer, and the shipmaster and every one
else.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Christian hypocrites who pretend to hate life and love death
He may talk about the soul--what he is after is the girl
Love means suffering--those who love drag a chain with them
To her it was not a belief but a certainty
Trifling incident gains importance when undue emphasis is laid
SERAPIS
By Georg Ebers
Volume 2.
CHAPTER V.
Karnis and his two companions were a long time away. Dada had almost
forgotten her wish to see the young soldier once more, and after playing
with little Papias for some time, as she might have played with a dog,
she began to feel dull and to think the quiet of the boat intolerable.
The sun was sinking when the absentees returned, but she at once reminded
Karnis that he had promised to take her for a walk and show her
Alexandria. Herse, however, forbid her going on such an expedition till
the following day. Dada, who was more irritable and fractious than usual,
burst into tears, flung the distaff that her foster-mother put into her
hand over the side of the ship, and declared between her sobs that she
was not a slave, that she would run away and find happiness wherever it
offered. In short she was so insubordinate that Herse lost patience and
scolded her severely. The girl sprang up, flung on a handkerchief and in
a moment would have crossed the plank to the shore; Karnis, however, held
her back.
"Why, child," he said, "do you not see how tired I am?" The appeal had
its effect; Dada recovered her reason and tried to look up brightly, but
her eyes were still tearful and heavy and she could only creep away into
a corner and cry in silence. The old man's heart was very soft towards
the girl; he would have been glad only to speak a few kind words to her
and smoothe down her hair; however, he made an effort, and whispering a
few words to his wife said he was ready, if Dada wished it, to take her
as far as the Canopic way and the Bruchium.
Dada laughed with delight, wiped away her tears, flung her arms round the
musician's neck and kissed his brown cheeks, exclaiming:
"You are the best of them all! Make haste, and Agne shall come too; she
must see something of the city."
But Agne preferred to remain on board, so Karnis and Dada set out
together. Orpheus followed them closely for, though the troops had
succeeded in quelling the uproar, the city was still in a state of
ferment. Closely veiled, and without any kind of adornment--on this Herse
had positively insisted--the girl, clinging to the old man's arm, made
her way through the streets, asking questions about everything she saw;
and her spirits rose, and she was so full of droll suggestions that
Karnis soon forgot his fatigue and gave himself up to the enjoyment of
showing her the old scenes that he knew and the new beauties and
improvements.
In the Canopic way Dada was fairly beside herself with delight. Houses
like palaces stood arrayed on each side. Close to the buildings ran a
covered arcade, and down the centre of the roadway there was a broad
footpath shaded by sycamores. This fine avenue swarmed with pedestrians,
while on each side chariots, drawn by magnificent horses, hurried past,
and riders galloped up and down; at every step there was something new
and interesting to be seen.
Rome, even, could not boast of a handsomer street, and Dada expressed her
delight with frank eagerness; but Karnis did not echo her praises; he was
indignant at finding that the Christians had removed a fine statue of the
venerable Nile-god surrounded by the playful forms of his infant
children, which had formerly graced the fountain in the middle of the
avenue, and had also overthrown or mutilated the statues of Hermes that
had stood by the roadside. Orpheus sympathized in his wrath which reached
its climax when, on looking for two statues, of Demeter and of Pallas
Athene, of which Karnis had spoken to his son as decorating the gateway
of one of the finest houses in the city, they beheld instead, mounted on
the plinths, two coarsely-wrought images of the Lamb with its Cross.
"Like two rats that have been caught under a stone!" cried the old man.
"And what is most shameful is that I would wager that they have destroyed
the statues which were the pride of the town and thrown them on a rubbish
heap. In my day this house belonged to a rich man named Philippus. But
stop--was not he the father of our hospitable protector . . ."
"The steward spoke of Porphyrius as the son of Philippus," Orpheus said.
"And Philippus was a corn merchant, too," added Karnis. "Demeter was
figurative of a blessing on the harvest, for it was from that the house
derived its wealth, and Pallas Athene was patroness of the learning that
was encouraged by its owners. When I was a student here every wealthy man
belonged to some school of philosophy. The money-bag did not count for
everything. Heathen or Jew, whether engaged in business or enjoying the
revenues of an inherited fortune, a man was expected to be able to talk
of something besides the price of merchandise and the coming and sailing
of vessels."
During this conversation Dada had withdrawn her hand from the old man's
arm to raise her veil, for two men had gone up to the gate between the
images that had roused Karnis to wrath, and one of them, who at this
instant knocked at the door, was Mary's son.
"Father, see, there he is!" cried Dada, as the door was opened, speaking
louder than was at all necessary to enable her companion to hear her; the
musician at once recognized Marcus, and turning to his son he said:
"Now we may be quite sure! Porphyrius and this young Christian's father
were brothers. Philippus must have left his house to his eldest son who
is the one that is dead, and it now belongs no doubt to Mary, his widow.
I must admit, child, that you choose your adorers from respectable
families!"
"I should think so," said the girl laughing. "And that is why he is so
proud. My fine gentleman has not even a glance to cast at us. Bang! the
door is shut. Come along, uncle!"
The young man in question entered the hall of his father's house with his
companion and paused there to say in a tone of pressing entreaty: "Only
come and speak with my mother; you really must not leave like this."
"How else?" said the other roughly. "You stick to your way, I will go
mine. You can find a better steward for the estate--I go to-morrow. May
the earth open and swallow me up if I stay one hour longer than is
absolutely necessary in this demented place. And after all Mary is your
mother and not mine."
"But she was your father's wife," retorted Marcus.
"Certainly, or you would not be my brother. But she--I have amply repaid
any kindness she ever did me by ten years of service. We do not
understand each other and we never shall."
"Yes, yes, you will indeed. I have been in church and prayed--nay, do not
laugh--I prayed to the Lord that he would make it all work right and
He--well, you have been baptized and made one of His flock."
"To my misfortune! You drive me frantic with your meek and mild ways,"
cried the other passionately. "My own feet are strong enough for me to
stand on and my hand, though it is horny, can carry out what my brain
thinks right."
"No, no, Demetrius, no. You see, you believe in the old gods. . ."
"Certainly," said the other with increasing irritation. "You are merely
talking to the winds, and my time is precious. I must pack up my small
possessions, and for your sake I will say a few words of farewell when I
take the account-books to your mother. I have land enough belonging to
myself alone, at Arsinoe; I know my own business and am tired of letting
a woman meddle and mar it. Good-bye for the present, youngster. Tell your
mother I am coming; I shall be with her in just an hour."
"Demetrius!" cried the lad trying once more to detain his brother; but
Demetrius freed himself with a powerful wrench and hurried across the
court-yard--gay with flowers and with a fountain in the middle--into
which the apartments of the family opened, his own among the number.
Marcus looked after him sadly; they differed too widely in thought and
feeling ever to understand each other completely, and when they stood
side by side no one would have imagined that they were the sons of one
father, for even in appearance they were strongly dissimilar. Marcus was
slight and delicate, Demetrius, on the contrary, broad-shouldered and
large-boned.
After this parting from his half-brother Marcus betook himself to the
women's rooms where Mary, after superintending the spinning and other
work of the slave-girls, in the rooms at the back, was wont to sit during
the evening. He found his mother in eager conversation with a Christian
priest of advanced age, an imposing personage of gentle and dignified
aspect. The widow, though past forty, might still pass for a handsome
woman: it was from her that her son had inherited his tall, thin figure
with narrow shoulders and a slight stoop, his finely-cut features, white
skin and soft, flowing, raven-black hair. Their resemblance was rendered
all the more striking by the fact that each wore a simple, narrow circlet
of gold-round the head; nay it would have seemed some unusual trick of
Nature's but that their eyes were quite unlike. Hers were black, and
their gaze was shrewd and sharp and sometimes sternly hard; while the
dreamy lustre of her son's, which were blue, lent his face an almost
feminine softness.
She must have been discussing some grave questions with the old man, for,
as the young man entered the room, she colored slightly and her long,
taper fingers impatiently tapped the back of the couch on which she was
lounging.
Marcus kissed first the priest's hand and then his mother's, and, after
enquiring with filial anxiety after her health, informed her that
Demetrius would presently be coming to take leave of her.
"How condescending?" she said coldly. "You know reverend Father what it
is that I require of him and that he refuses. His peasants--always his
peasants! Now can you tell me why they, who must feel the influence and
power of their masters so much more directly than the lower class in
towns, they, whose weal or woe so obviously depends on the will of the
Most High, are so obstinately set against the Gospel of Salvation?"
"They cling to what they are used to," replied the old man. "The seed
they sow bore fruit under the old gods; and as they cannot see nor handle
our Heavenly Father as they can their idols, and at the same time have
nothing better to hope for than a tenth or a twentieth of the grain. . ."
"Yes, mine and thine--the miserable profit of this world!" sighed the
widow. "Oh! Demetrius can defend the idolatry of his favorites warmly
enough, never fear. If you can spare the time, good Father, stay and help
me to convince him."
"I have already stayed too long," replied the priest, "for the Bishop has
commanded my presence. I should like to speak to you, my dear Marcus;
to-morrow morning, early, will you come to me? The Lord be with you,
beloved!"
He rose, and as he gave Mary his hand she detained him a moment signing
to her son to leave them, and said in a low tone:
"Marcus must not suspect that I know of the error into which he has been
led; speak roundly to his conscience, and as to the girl, I will take her
in hand. Will it not be possible for Theophilus to grant me an
interview?"
"Hardly, at present," replied the priest. "As you know, Cynegius is here
and the fate of the Bishop and of our cause hangs on the next few days.
Give up your ambitious desires I beseech you, daughter, for even if
Theophilus were to admit you I firmly believe, nay--do not be angry--I
can but hope that he would never give way on this point."
"No?" said the widow looking down in some embarrassment; but when her
visitor was gone she lifted her head with a flash of wilful defiance.
She then made Marcus, who had on the previous day given her a full
account of his voyage from Rome, tell her all that had passed between
himself and Demetrius; she asked him how he liked his horse, whether he
hoped to win the approaching races, and generally what he had been doing
and was going to do. But it did not escape her notice that Marcus was
more reticent than usual and that he tried to bring the conversation
round to his voyage and to the guests in the Xenodochium; however, she
always stopped him, for she knew what he was aiming at and would not
listen to anything on that subject.
It was not till long after the slaves had lighted the three-branched
silver lamps that Demetrius appeared. His stepmother received him kindly
and began to talk on indifferent subjects; but he replied with
ill-disguised impatience, for he had not come to chatter and gossip. She
fully understood this; but it pleased her to check and provoke him and
she did it in a way which vividly reminded him of his early days, of the
desolation and unhappiness that had blighted his young life when this
woman had taken the place of his own tender gentle mother, and come
between him and his father. Day after day, in that bygone time, she had
received him just as she had this evening: with words that sounded
kindly, but with a cold, unloving heart. He knew that she had always seen
his boyish errors and petty faults in the worst light, attributing them
to bad propensities and innate wickedness, that she had injured him in
his father's eyes by painting a distorted image of his disposition and
doings--and all these sins he could not forgive her. At the time of his
father's assassination Demetrius was already grown to man's estate, and
as the eldest son it would have been his right and duty to take part with
his uncle Porphyrius in the management of the business; but he could not
endure the idea of living in the same place with his stepmother, so,
having a pronounced taste for a country life, he left the widow in
possession of the house in the Canopic street, persuaded his uncle to pay
over his father's share in the business in hard cash and then had quitted
Alexandria to take entire charge of the family estates in Cyrenaica. In
the course of a few years he had become an admirable farmer; the
landowners throughout the province were glad to take his advice or follow
his example, and the accounts which he now laid on the table by the side
of Mary's couch--three goodly rolls--proved by the irrefragable evidence
of figures that he had actually doubled their revenues from the estates
of which he had been the manager. He had earned his right to claim his
independence, to persist in his own determinations and to go his own way;
he was animated by the pride of an independent nature that recklessly
breaks away from a detested tie when it has means at command either to
rest without anxiety or to devote its energies to new enterprise.
When Demetrius had allowed his stepmother time enough for subjects in
which he took no interest, he laid his hand on the account-books and
abruptly observed that it was now time to talk seriously. He had already
explained to Marcus that he could no longer undertake to meet her
requirements; and as, with him, to decide was to act, he wished at once
to come to a decision as to whether he should continue to manage the
family estates in the way he thought proper, or should retire and devote
himself to the care of his own land. If Mary accepted the latter
alternative he would at once cancel their deed of agreement, but even
then he was very willing to stay on for a time in Cyrenaica, and put the
new steward, when she had appointed one, in the way of performing his
onerous duties. After that he would have nothing more to do with the
family estates. This was his last word; and whichever way she decided,
they might part without any final breach, which he was anxious to avoid
if only for the sake of Marcus.
Demetrius spoke gravely and calmly; still, the bitterness that filled his
soul imparted a flavor to his speech that did not escape the widow, and
she replied with some emphasis that she should be very sorry to think
that any motives personal to herself had led to his decision; she owed
much, very much, to his exertions and had great pleasure in expressing
her obligations. He was aware, of course, that the property he had been
managing had been purchased originally partly with her fortune and partly
out of her husband's pocket, and that half of it was therefore hers and
half of it the property of Marcus and himself; but that by her husband's
will the control and management were hers absolutely. She had endeavored
to carry out the intentions of her deceased husband by entrusting the
stewardship of the estate to Demetrius while he was still quite young;
under his care the income had increased, and she had no doubt that in the
future he might achieve even greater results; at the same time, the
misunderstandings that the whole business had given rise to were not to
be endured, and must positively be put an end to, even if their income
were to diminish by half.
"I," she exclaimed, "am a Christian, with my whole heart and soul. I have
dedicated my body and life to the service of my Saviour. What shall all
the treasures of the world profit me if I lose my soul; and that, which
is my immortal part, must inevitably perish if I allow my pockets to be
filled by the toil of heathen peasants and slaves. I therefore must
insist--and on this point I will not yield a jot--that our slaves in
Cyrenaica, a flock of more than three thousand erring sheep, shall either
submit to be baptized or be removed to make way for Christians."
"That is to say . . ." began Demetrius hastily.
"I have not yet done," she interrupted. "So far as the peasants are
concerned who rent and farm our land they all, without exception--as you
said yesterday--are stiff-necked idolaters. We must give them time to
think it over, but the annual agreement will not be renewed with any who
will not pledge themselves to give up the old sacrifices and to worship
the Redeemer. If they submit they will be safe--in this world and the
next; if they refuse they must go, and the land must be let to Christians
in their stead."
"Just as I change this seat for another!" said Demetrius with a laugh,
and lifting up a heavy bronze chair he flung it down again on the hard
mosaic pavement so that the floor shook.
Maria started violently.
"My body may tremble," she said in great excitement, "but my soul is firm
when its everlasting bliss is at stake. I insist--and my representative,
whether he be you or another, must carry my orders into effect without an
hour's delay--I insist that every heathen shrine, every image of the
field and garden-gods, every altar and sacred stone which the heathens
use for their idolatrous practices shall be pulled down, overthrown,
mutilated and destroyed. That is what I require and insist on."
"And that is what I will never consent to," cried Demetrius in a voice
like low thunder. "I cannot and will not. These things have been held
precious and sacred to men for thousands of years and I cannot, will not,
blow them off the face of the earth, as you blow a feather off your
cloak. You may go and do it yourself; you may be able to achieve it."
"What do you mean?" asked Mary drawing herself up with a glance of
indignant protest.
"Yes--if any one can do it you can!" repeated Demetrius imperturbably. "I
went to-day to seek the images of our forefathers--the venerable images
that were clear to our infancy, the portraits of our fathers' fathers and
mothers, the founders of the honor of our race. And where are they? They
have gone with the protectors of our home, the pride and ornament of this
house--of the street, of the city--the Hermes and Pallas Athene that
you--you flung into the lime-kiln. Old Phabis told me with tears in his
eyes. Alas poor house that is robbed of its past, of its glory, and of
its patron deities!"
"I have placed it under a better safeguard," replied Maria in a tremulous
voice, and she looked it Marcus with an appeal for sympathy. "Now, for
the last time, I ask you: Will you accede to my demands or will you not?"
"I will not," said Demetrius resolutely.
"Then I must find a new agent to manage the estates."
"You will soon find one; but your land--which is our land too--will
become a desert. Poor land! If you destroy its shrines and sanctuaries
you will destroy its soul; for they are the soul of the land. The first
inhabitants gathered round the sanctuary, and on that sanctuary and the
gods that dwell there the peasant founds his hopes of increase on what he
sows and plants, and of prosperity for his wife and children and cattle
and all that he has. In destroying his shrines you ruin his hopes, and
with them all the joy of life. I know the peasant; he believes that his
labors must be vain if you deprive him of the gods that make it thrive.
He sows in hope, in the swelling of the grain he sees the hand of the
gods who claim his joyful thanksgiving after the harvest is gathered in.
You are depriving him of all that encourages and uplifts and rejoices his
soul when you ruin his shrines and altars!"
"But I give him other and better ones," replied Mary.
"Take care then that they are such as he can appreciate," said Demetrius
gravely. "Persuade him to love, to believe, to hope in the creed you
force upon him; but do not rob him of what he trusts in before he is
prepared to accept the substitute you offer him.--Now, let me go; we are
neither of us in the temper to make the best arrangements for the future.
One thing, at any rate, is certain: I have nothing more to do with the
estate."
CHAPTER VI.
After leaving his stepmother Demetrius made good use of his time and
dictated a number of letters to his secretary, a slave he had brought
with him to Alexandria, for the use of the pen was to him unendurable
labor. The letters were on business, relating to his departure from
Cyrenaica and his purpose of managing his own estates for the future, and
when they lay before him, finished, rolled up and sealed, he felt that he
had come to a mile-stone on his road, a landmark in his life. He paced
the room in silence, trying to picture to himself the fate of the slaves
and peasants who, for so many years, had been his faithful servants and
fellow-laborers, whose confidence he had entirely won, and many of whom
he truly loved. But he could not conceive of their life, their toil or
their festivals, bereft of images, offerings, garlands, and hymns of
rejoicing. To him they were as children, forbidden to laugh and play, and
he could not help once more recurring to his boyhood and the day of his
going to school, when, instead of running and shouting in his father's
sunny garden, he had been made to sit still and silent in a dull
class-room. And now had the whole world reached such a boundary line in
existence beyond which there was to be no more freedom and careless
joy--where a ceaseless struggle for higher things must begin and never
end?
If the Gospel were indeed true, and if all it promised could ever find
fulfilment, it might perhaps be prudent to admit the sinfulness of man
and to give up the joys and glories of this world to win the eternal
treasure that it described. Many a good and wise man whom he had
known--nay the Emperor, the great and learned Theodosius himself--was
devoted heart and soul to the Christian faith, and Demetrius knew from
his own experience that his mother's creed, in which he had been
initiated as a boy and from which his father, after holding him at the
font had perverted him at an early age, offered great consolations and
enduring help to those whose existence was one of care, poverty, and
suffering. But his laborers and servants? They were healthy and
contented. What power on earth could induce them--a race that clung
devotedly to custom--to desert the faith of their fathers, and the
time-honored traditions to which they owed all the comforts and pleasures
of life, or to seek in a strange creed the aid which they already
believed that they possessed.
He did not repent of his determination; but he nevertheless said to
himself that, when once he was gone, Mary would proceed only too soon on
the work of extermination and destruction; and every temple on the
estate, every statue, every whispering grotto, every shrine and stone
anointed by pious hands, doomed now to perish, rose before his fancy.
Demetrius was accustomed to rise at cock-crow and go to bed at an early
hour, and he was on the point of retiring even before the usual time,
when Marcus came to his room and begged him to give him yet an hour.
"You are angry with my mother," said the younger man with a look of
melancholy entreaty, "but you know there is nothing that she would not
sacrifice for the faith. And you can smile so bitterly! But only put
yourself in my place. Loving my mother as I do, it is acutely painful to
me to see another person--to see you whom I love, too, for you are my
friend and brother--to see you, I say, turn your back on her so
completely. My heart is heavy enough to-day I can tell you."
"Poor boy!" said the countryman. "Yes, I am truly your friend, and am
anxious to remain so; you are not to blame in this business--and for that
matter, I am anything but cheerful. You have chosen to say: Down with the
shrines! Perish all those who do not think as we do! Still, look at the
thing as you will, in some cases certainly violence must ensue--nay, if
no blood is shed it will be a wonder! You sum up the matter in one common
term: The heathen peasants on the estate. My view of it is totally
different; I know these farmers and their wives and children, each one by
name and by sight. There is not one but is ready to bid me good day and
shake my hand or kiss my dress. Many a one has come to me in tears and
left me happy.--By the great Zeus! no one ever accused me of being
soft-hearted, but I could wish this day that I were harder; and my blood
turns to gall as I ask--What is all this for--to what possible end?"
"For the sake and honor of the faith, Demetrius; for the eternal
salvation of our people."
"Indeed!" retorted Demetrius with a drawl, "I know better. If that and
that alone were intended you would build churches and chapels and send us
worthy priests--Eusebius and the like--and would try to win men's hearts
to your Lord by the love you are always talking so much about. That was
my advice to your mother, only this morning. I believe the end might be
attained by those means, among us as elsewhere; ultimately it will, no
doubt, be gained--but not to-day nor to-morrow. A peasant, when he had
become accustomed to the church and grasped a trust in the new God, would
of his own accord give up the old gods and their sanctuaries; I could
count you off a dozen such instances. That I could have looked on at
calmly, for I want only men's arms and legs and do not ask for their
souls; but to burn down the old house before you have collected wood and
stone to build a new one I call wicked.--It is cruelty and madness, and
when so shrewd a woman as your mother is bent on carrying through such a
measure, come what may, there is something more behind it."
"You think she wants to get rid of you--you, Demetrius!" interrupted
Marcus eagerly. "But you are mistaken, you are altogether wrong. What you
have done for the estate . . ."
"Oh! as for that!" cried the other, "what has my work to do with all
this? Ere the year is out everything that can remind us of the heathen
gods is to be swept away from the hamlets and fields of the pious Mary.
That is what is intended! Then they will hurry off to the Bishop with the
great news and to crown one marvel with another, the reversion will be
secured of a martyr's nimbus. And this is what all this zeal is for--this
and nothing else!"
"You are speaking of my mother, remember!" cried Marcus, looking at his
brother with a touching appeal in his eyes. Demetrius shook his shaggy
head and spoke more temperately as he went on:
"Yes, child, I had forgotten that--and I may be mistaken of course, for I
am no more than human. Here one thing follows so close on another, and in
this house I feel so battered and storm-tossed, that I hardly know
myself. But old Phabis tells me that steps are being seriously taken to
procure the title of Martyr for our father Apelles."
"My mother is quite convinced that he died for the faith, and she loved
him devotedly . . ."
"Then it is so!" cried Demetrius, grinding his teeth and thumping his
fist down on the table. "The lies sown by one single man have produced a
deadly weed that is smothering this miserable house! You--to be sure,
what can you know of our father? I knew him; I have been present when he
and his friends, the philosophers, have laughed to scorn things which not
only you Christians but even pious heathen regard as sacred. Lucretius
was his evangelist, and the Cosmogony of that utter atheist lay by his
pillow and was his companion wherever he went."
"He admired the heathen poets, but he was a Christian all the same,"
replied Marcus.
"Neither more nor less than Porphyrius, our uncle, or myself," retorted
his brother. "Since the day when our grandfather Philippus was baptized,
wealth and happiness have deserted this house. He gave up the old gods
solely that he might not lose the right of supplying the city and the
Emperor with corn, and became a Christian and made his sons Christians.
But he had us educated by his heathen friends, and though we passed for
Christians we were not so in fact. When it was absolutely necessary he
showed himself in church with us; but our daily life, our pleasures, our
pastimes were heathen, and when life began for us in earnest we offered a
bleeding sacrifice to the gods. It was impossible to retract honestly,
since a renegade Christian returning to the worship of the old gods is
incapacitated by law from making a will. You know this; and when you ask
me why I am content to live alone, without either wife or child--and I
love children, even those of other people--a solitary man dragging out my
days and nights joylessly enough--I tell you: I am openly and honestly a
worshipper of our old gods, and I will not go to church because I scorn a
lie. What should I do with children who, in consequence of my
retractation, must forfeit all I might leave them? It was this question
of inheritance only that induced my father to have us baptized and to
make a pretense of Christianity. He set out for Petra with his Lucretius
in his satchel--I packed it with my own hands into his money-bag--to put
in a claim to supply grain to the 'Rock city.' He was slain on his way.
home; most likely by his servant Anubis, who certainly knew what money he
had with him, and who vanished and left no trace. Because--about the same
time--a band of Saracens had fallen on some Christian anchorites and
travellers, in the district between Petra and Aila, your mother chose to
assume a right to call our father a martyr! But she knew his opinions
full well, I tell you, and shed many a tear over them, too.--Now she has
expended vast sums on church-building, she has opened the Xenodochium and
pours her money by lavish handfuls clown the insatiable throats of monks
and priests. To what end? To have her husband recognized as a martyr.
Hitherto her toil and money have been wasted. In my estimation the Bishop
is a perfectly detestable tyrant, and if I know him at all he will take
all she will give and never grant her wish. Now she is preparing her
great move, and hopes to startle him into compliance by a new marvel. She
thinks that, like a juggler who turns a white egg black, she can turn a
heathen district into a Christian one by a twist of her finger. Well--so
far as I am concerned I will have nothing to do with the trick."
During this harangue Marcus had alternately gazed at the floor and fixed
his large eyes in anguish on his brother's face. For some minutes he
found nothing to reply, and he was evidently going through a bitter
mental struggle. Demetrius spoke no more, but arranged the sheets of
papyrus that strewed the table. At length Marcus, after a deep sigh,
broke out in a tone of fervent conviction and with a blissful smile that
lighted up his whole face:
"Poor mother! And others misunderstand her just as you do; I myself was
in danger of doubting her. But I think that now I understand her
perfectly. She loved my father so completely that she hopes now to win
for his immortal soul the grace which he, in the flesh, neglected to
strive after. He was baptized, so she longs to win, by her prayers and
oblations, the mercy of the Lord who is so ready to forgive. She herself
firmly believes in the martyrdom of her beloved dead, and if only the
Church will rank him among those who have died for Her, he will be saved,
and she will find him standing in the pure radiance of the realms above,
with open arms, overflowing with fervent love and gratitude, to welcome
the faithful helpmate who will have purged his soul. Yes, now I quite
understand; and from this day forth I will aid and second her; the
hardest task shall not be too hard, the best shall not be too good, if
only we may open the gates of Heaven to my poor father's imperilled
soul."
As he spoke his eye glistened with ecstatic light; his brother, too, was
touched, and to hide his emotion, he exclaimed, more recklessly and
sharply than was his wont:
"That will come all right, never fear, lad!" But he hastily wiped his
eyes with his hand, slapped Marcus on the shoulder, and added gaily: "It
is better to choke than to swallow down the thing you think right, and it
never hurt a man yet to make a clean breast of his feelings, even if we
do not quite agree we understand each other the better for it. I have my
way of thinking, you have yours; thus we each know what the other means;
but after the tragedy comes the satyr play, and we may as well finish
this agitating evening with an hour's friendly chat."
So saying Demetrius stretched himself on a divan and invited Marcus to do
the same, and in a few minutes their conversation had turned, as usual,
to the subject of horses. Marcus was full of praises of the stallions his
brother had bred for him, and which he had ridden that very day round the
Myssa--[The Myssa was the Meta, or turning-post]--in the Hippodrome, and
his brother added with no small complacency:
"They were all bred from the same sire and from the choicest mares. I
broke them in myself, and I only wish. . . . But why did you not come to the
stables this morning?"
"I could not," replied Marcus coloring slightly. Then we will go
to-morrow to Nicopolis and I will show you how to get Megaera past the
Taraxippios."--[The terror of the horses.]
"To-morrow?" said Marcus somewhat embarrassed. "In the morning I must go
to see Eusebius and then. . . ."
"Well, then?"
"Then I must--I mean I should like. . . ."
"What?"
"Well, to be sure I might, all the same.--But no, it is not to be done--I
have. . . ."
"What, what?" cried Demetrius with increasing impatience: "My time is
limited and if you start the horses without knowing my way of managing
them they will certainly not do their best. As soon as the market begins
to fill we will set out. We shall need a few hours for the Hippodrome,
then we will dine with Damon, and before dark. . . ."
"No, no," replied Marcus, "to-morrow, certainly, I positively
cannot. . . ."
"People who have nothing to do always lack time," replied the other. "Is
to-morrow one of your festivals?"
"No, not that=-and Good Heavens! If only I could. . . ."
"Could, could!" cried Demetrius angrily and standing close in front of
his brother with his arms folded. "Say out honestly: 'I will not go,' or
else, 'my affairs are my own secret and I mean to keep it.'--But give me
no more of your silly equivocations."
His vehemence increased the younger man's embarrassment, and as he stood
trying to find an explanation which might come somewhat near the truth
and yet not betray him, Demetrius, who had stood watching him closely,
suddenly exclaimed:
"By Aphrodite, the daughter of the foam! it is a love affair--an
assignation.--Woman, woman, always woman!"
"An assignation!" cried Marcus shaking his head. "No indeed, no one
expects me; and yet--I had rather you should misunderstand me than think
that I had lied. Yes--I am going to seek a woman; and if I do not find
her to-morrow, if in the course of tomorrow I do not succeed in my
heart's desire, she is lost--not only to me, though I cannot give up the
heavenly love for the sake of the earthly and fleshly--but to my Lord and
Saviour. It is the life--the everlasting life or death of one of God's
loveliest creatures that hangs on to-morrow's work."
Demetrius was greatly astonished, and it was with an angry gesture of
impatience that he replied:
"Again you have overstepped the boundary within which we can possibly
understand each other. In my opinion you are hardly old enough to
undertake the salvation of the imperilled souls of pretty women. Take
care what you are about, youngster! It is safe enough to go into the
water with those who can swim, but those who sink are apt to draw you
down with them. You are a good-looking young fellow, you have money and
fine horses, and there are women enough who are only too ready to spread
their nets abroad. . ."
"What are you thinking of?" cried Marcus passionately. "It is I who am
the fisher--a fisher of souls, and so every true believer ought to be.
She--she is innocence and simplicity itself, in spite of her roguish
sauciness. But she has fallen into the hands of a reprobate heathen, and
here, where vice prowls about the city like a roaring lion, she will be
lost--lost, if I do not rescue her. Twice have I seen her in my dreams;
once close to the cavern of a raging dragon, and again on the edge of a
precipitous cliff, and each time an angel called out to me and bid me
save her from the jaws of the monster, and from falling into the abyss.
Since then I seem to see her constantly; at meals, when I am in company,
when I am driving,--and I always hear the warning voice of the angel. And
now I feel it a sacred duty to save her--a creature on whom the Almighty
has lavished every gift he ever bestowed on the daughters of Eve--to lead
her into the path of Salvation."
Demetrius had listened to his brother's enthusiastic speech with growing
anxiety, but he merely shrugged his shoulders and said:
"I almost envy you your acquaintance with this favorite of the gods; but
you might, it seems to me, postpone the work of salvation. You were away
from Alexandria for half a year, and if she could hold out so long as
that . . ."
"Do not speak so; you ought not to speak so!" cried Marcus, pressing his
hand on his heart as though in physical pain. "But I have no time to
lose, for I must at once find out where the old singer has taken her. I
am not so inexperienced as you seem to think. He has brought her here to
trade in her beauty, and enrich himself. Why, you, too, saw her on board
ship; I, as you know, had arranged for them to be taken in at my mother's
Xenodochium."
"Whom?" asked Demetrius folding his hands.
"The singers whom I brought with me from Ostia. And now they have
disappeared from thence, and Dada . . ."
"Dada!" cried Demetrius, bursting into a loud laugh without heeding
Marcus who stepped up to him, crimson with rage. "Dada! that little fair
puss! You see her day and night and an angel calls upon you to save that
child's merry soul? You ought to be ashamed of yourself, boy! Why, what
shall I wager now? I will stake this roll of gold that I could make her
come with me to-morrow--with me, a hard-featured countryman, freckled all
over like a plover's egg, where my clothes do not protect my skin, and
with hair on end like the top of a broom--yes, that she will follow me to
Arsinoe or wherever I choose to bid her. Let the hussy go, you simple
innocent. Such a Soul as hers is of small account even in a less
exclusive Heaven than yours is."
"Take back those words!" cried Marcus, beside himself and clenching his
fist. "But that is just like you! Your impure eyes and heart defile
purity itself, and see spots even in the sun. Nothing is too bad for a
'singing girl,' I know. But that is just the marrow of the matter; it is
from that very curse that I mean to save her. If you can accuse her of
anything, speak; if not, and if you do not want to appear a base
slanderer in my eyes, take back the words you have just spoken!"
"Oh! I take them back of course," said Demetrius indifferently. "I know
nothing of your beauty beyond what she has herself said to me and you and
Cynegius and his Secretaries--with her pretty, saucy eyes. But the
language of the eye, they say, is not always to be depended on; so take
it as unsaid. And, if I understood you rightly, you do not even know
where the singers are hiding? If you have no objection, I will help you
to seek them out."
"That is as you please," answered Marcus hotly. "All your mockery will
not prevent my doing my duty."
"Very right, very right," said his brother. "Perhaps this damsel is
unlike all the other singing-girls with whom I used so often to spend a
jolly evening in my younger days. Once, at Barca, I saw a white
raven--but perhaps after all it was only a dove. Your opinion, in this
case, is at any rate better founded than mine, for I never thought twice
about the girl and you did.--But it is late; till to-morrow, Marcus."
The brothers parted for the night, but when Demetrius found himself alone
he walked up and down the room, shaking his head doubtfully. Presently,
when his body-slave came in to pack for him, he called out crossly:
"Let that alone--I shall stay in Alexandria a few days longer."
Marcus could not go to bed; his brother's scorn had shaken his soul to
the foundations. An inward voice told him that his more experienced
senior might be right, but at the same time he hated and contemned
himself for listening to its warnings at all. The curse that rested on
Dada was that of her position; she herself was pure--as pure as a lily,
as pure as the heart of a child, as pure as the blue of her eyes and the
ring of her voice. He would obey the angel's behest! He could and he must
save her!
In the greatest excitement he went out of the house, through the great
gate, into the Canopic way, and walked on. As he was about to turn down a
side street to go to the lake he found the road stopped by soldiers, for
this street led past the prefect's house where Cynegius, the Emperor's
emissary, was staying; he had come, it was said, to close the Temples,
and the excited populace had gathered outside the building, during the
afternoon, to signify their indignant disapprobation. At sundown an armed
force had been called out and had dispersed the crowd; but it was by
another road that the young Christian at length made his way to the
shore.
CHAPTER VII.
While Marcus was restlessly wandering on the shore of Mareotis, dreaming
of Dada's image and arranging speeches of persuasive eloquence by which
to touch her heart and appeal to her soul, silence had fallen on the
floating home of the singers. A light white mist, like a filmy veil--a
tissue of clouds and moonbeams--hung over the lake. Work was long since
over in the ship-yard, and the huge skeletons of the unfinished ships
threw weird and ghostly shadows on the silvered strand-forms like black
visions of crayfish, centipedes, or enormous spiders.
From the town there came not a sound; it lay in the silence of
intoxicated sleep. The Roman troops had cleared the streets, the lights
were dead in every house, and in all the alleys and squares; only the
moon shone over the roofs of Alexandria, while the blazing beacon of the
light-house on the north-eastern point of the island of Pharos shone like
a sun through the darkness.
In a large cabin in the stern of the vessel lay the two girls, on soft
woollen couches and covered with rugs. Agne was gazing wide-eyed into the
darkness; Dada had long been asleep, but she breathed painfully and her
rosy lips were puckered now and then as if she were in some distress. She
was dreaming of the infuriated mob who had snatched the garland from her
hair--she saw Marcus suddenly interfere to protect her and rescue her
from her persecutors--then she thought she had fallen off the gangway
that led from the land to the barge, and was in the water while old Damia
stood on the shore and laughed at her without trying to help her. Night
generally brought the child sound sleep or pleasant dreams, but now one
hideous face after another haunted her.
And yet the evening had brought her a great pleasure. Not long after
their return from their walk the steward had come down to the boat and
brought her a very beautiful dress, with greetings from his old mistress;
he had at the same time brought an Egyptian slave-woman, well skilled in
all the arts of the toilet, who was to wait upon her so long as she
remained in Alexandria. Dada had never owned such a lovely dress! The
under-robe was of soft sea-green bombyx silk, with a broad border,
delicately embroidered, of a garland of roses and buds. The peplos was of
the same color and decorated to match; costly clasps of mosaic,
representing full-blown roses and set in oval gold settings, fastened it
on the shoulders. In a separate case were a gold girdle, a bracelet, also
of gold, in the shape of a snake, a gold crescent with a rose, like those
on the shoulder-clasps, in its centre, and a metal mirror of spotless
lustre.
The slave, a middle-aged woman with a dark cunning face, had helped her
to put on this new garment; she had also insisted on dressing her hair,
and all the time had never ceased praising the charms that nature had
bestowed on her young mistress, with the zeal of a lover.
Agne had looked on smiling, good-naturedly handing the slave the pins and
ribbands she had needed, and sincerely rejoicing in her companion's
beauty and delight.
At last Dada had made her appearance in the deckroom and was greeted by
many an Ah! and Oh! of admiration from the men of the party, including
Medius, the singer whom Karnis had met in the street. Even Herse, who had
received her quite disagreeably on her return from the city, could not
suppress a smile of kindly approval, though she shook her finger at her
saying:
"The old lady has set her heart on turning your head completely I see.
All that is very pretty, but all the good it will do will be to rouse
spiteful tongues. Remember, Dada, that you are my sister's child; I
promise you I shall not forget it, and I shall keep my eye upon you."
Orpheus made haste to light every lamp and taper, of which there were
plenty, for the barge was handsomely furnished, and when Dada was plainly
visible in the brilliant illumination Karnis exclaimed:
"You look like a senator's daughter! Long live the Fair!"
She ran up to him and kissed him; but when Orpheus walked all round her,
examining the fineness of the tissue and the artistic finish of the
clasps, and even turned the snake above her round elbow, she sharply bid
him let her be.
Medius, a man of the age of Karnis who had formerly been his intimate
companion, never took his eyes off the girl, and whispered to the old
musician that Dada would easily carry off the palm for beauty in
Alexandria, and that with such a jewel in his keeping he might recover
wealth and position and by quite honest means. At his suggestion she then
assumed a variety of attitudes; she stood as Hebe, offering nectar to the
gods--as Nausicae, listening to the tale of Odysseus--and as Sappho,
singing to her lyre. The girl was delighted at all this, and when Medius,
who kept close to her, tried to persuade her to perform in a similar
manner in the magical representations at the house of Posidonius, before
a select company of spectators, she clapped her hands exclaiming:
"You took me all round the city, father, and as your reward I should like
to earn back your pretty vineyards, I should stand like this, you know,
and like this--to be stared at. I only hope I might not be seized with a
sudden impulse to make a face at the audience. But if they did not come
too close I really might . . ."
"You could do no better than to play the parts that Posidonius might give
you," interrupted Medius. "His audiences like to see good daemons, the
kindly protecting spirits, and so forth. You would have to appear among
clouds behind a transparent veil, and the people would hail you with
acclamations or even raise their hands in adoration."
All this seemed to Dada perfectly delightful, and she was on the point of
giving her hand to Medius in token of agreement, when her eye caught the
anxious gaze of the young Christian girl who stood before her with a deep
flush on her face. Agne seemed to be blushing for her. The color rushed
to her own cheeks, and shortly saying: "No--after all, I think not," she
turned her back on the old man and threw herself on the cushions close to
where the wine-jug was standing. Medius now began to besiege Karnis and
Herse with arguments, but they refused all his offers as they intended
quitting Alexandria in a few days, so he had no alternative but to
submit. Still, he did not altogether throw up the game, and to win Dada's
consent, at any rate, he made her laugh with a variety of comical pranks
and showed her some ingenious conjuring tricks, and ere long their
floating home echoed with merriment, with the clinking of wine-cups and
with songs, in which even Agne was obliged to take part. Medius did not
leave till near midnight and Herse then sent them all to bed.
As soon as the slave had undressed her young mistress and left the girls
alone, Dada threw herself into the arms of Agne who was on the point of
getting into bed, and kissed her vehemently, exclaiming: "You are
much--so much better than I! How is that you always know what is right?"
Then she lay down; but before she fell asleep she once more spoke to
Agne: "Marcus will find us out, I am certain," she said, "and I should
really like to know what he has to say to me."
In a few minutes sleep had sealed her eyes, but the Christian girl lay
awake; her thoughts would not rest, and Sleep, who the night before had
taken her to his heart, to-night would not come near her pillow; so much
to agitate and disturb her soul had taken place during the day.
She had often before now been a silent spectator of the wild rejoicings
of the musician's family, and she had always thought of these
light-hearted creatures as spendthrifts who waste all their substance in
a few days to linger afterwards through years of privation and
repentance. Troubled, as she could not fail to be, as to the eternal
salvation of these lost souls, though happy in her own faith, she had
constantly turned for peace to her Saviour and always found it; but
to-night it was not so, for a new and unexpected temptation had sprung up
for her in the house of Porphyrius.
She had heard Gorgo sing again, and joined her own voice with hers.
Dirges, yearning hymns, passionate outpourings in praise of the mighty
and beautiful divinity had filled her ear and stirred her soul with an
ecstatic thrill, although she knew that they, were the composition of
heathen poets and had first been sung to the harmony of lutes by
reprobate idolaters. And yet, and yet they had touched her heart, and
moved her soul to rapture, and filled her eyes with tears.
She could not but confess to herself that she could have given no purer,
sweeter, or loftier expression to her own woes, thankfulness,
aspirations, and hopes of ever lasting life and glory, than this gifted
creature had given to the utterance of her idolatry. Surprise, unrest,
nay, some little jealousy had been mingled with her delight at Gorgo's
singing. How was it that this heathen could feel and utter emotions which
she had always conceived of as the special privilege of the Christian,
and, for her own part, had never felt so fervently as in the hours when
she had drawn closest to her Lord? Were not her own sentiments the true
and right ones; had her intercourse with these heathens tainted her?
This doubt disturbed her greatly; it must be based on something more than
mere self-torture, for she had not once thought of asking to whom the
two-part hymn, with its tender appeal, was addressed, when Karnis had
first gone through it with her alone; nor even subsequently, when she had
sung it with Gorgo--timidly at first, more boldly the second time, and
finally without a mistake, but carried completely away by the beauty and
passion of the emotions it expressed.
She knew now, for Karnis himself had told her. It was the Lament of Isis
for her--lost husband and brother--oh that horrible heathen
confusion!--The departed Osiris. The wailing widow, who called on him to
return with "the silent speech of tears," was that queen of the
idolater's devils whose shameful worship her father had often spoke of
with horror. Still, this dirge was so true and noble, so penetrated with
fervent, agonized grief, that it had gone to her heart. The sorrowing
Mother of God, Mary herself, might thus have besought the resurrection of
her Son; just thus must the "God-like maid"--as she was called in the
Arian confession of her father--have uttered her grief, her prayers, and
her longings.
But it was all a heathen delusion, all the trickery and jugglery of the
Devil, though she had failed to see through it, and had given herself up
to it, heart and soul. Nay, worse! for after she had learnt that Gorgo
was to represent Isis and she herself Nephthys, the sister of the divine
pair, she had opposed the suggestion but feebly, even though she knew
that they were to sing the hymn together in the Temple of Isis; and when
Gorgo had clasped her in her arms with sisterly kindness, begging her not
to spoil her plans but to oblige her in this, she had not repulsed the
tempter with firm decision, but merely asked for time to think it over.
How indeed could she have found the heart to refuse the noble girl, whose
beauty and voice had so struck and fascinated her, when she flung her
arms round her neck, looked into her eyes and earnestly besought her:
"Do it for my sake, to please me. I do not ask you to do anything wicked.
Pure song is acceptable to every god. Think of your lament, if you like,
as being for your own god who suffered on the cross. But I like singing
with you so much; say yes. Do not refuse, for my sake!"
She had thrown her arms so gladly, so much too gladly round the heathen
lady--for she had a loving heart and no one else had ever made it a
return in kind--and clinging closely to her she had said:
"As you will; I will do whatever you like."
Then Orpheus, too, had urged her to oblige Gorgo, and himself, and all of
them; and it had seemed almost impossible to refuse the first request
that the modest youth--to whom she would willingly have granted anything
and everything--had ever made. Still, she had held back; and in her
anxious bewilderment, not daring to think or act, she had tried every
form of excuse and postponement. She would probably have been awkward
enough about this, but Gorgo was content to press her no further, and
when, after leaving the house, she had summoned up courage to refuse to
enter the Temple of Isis, Karnis had only said: "Be thankful that this
gifted lady, the favorite of the Muses, should think you worthy to sing
with her. We will see about the rest by-and-bye."
Now, in the watches of the sleepless night, she saw clearly the abyss
above which she was standing. She, like Judas, was on the point of
betraying her Saviour; not indeed for money, but in obedience to the
transient sound of an earthly voice, for the pleasure of exercising her
art, to indulge a hastily-formed liking; nay, perhaps because it
satisfied her childish vanity to find herself put on an equality with a
lady of rank and wealth, and matched with a singer who had roused Karnis
and Orpheus to such ardent admiration.
She was an enigma to herself; while passages out of the Bible crowded on
her memory to reproach her conscience.
There lay Dada's embroidered dress. Worn for the first time this day, in
a month it would be unpresentably shabby and then, ere long, flung aside
as past wearing. Like this--just like this--was every earthly pleasure,
every joy of this brief existence. Alas, she certainly was not happy here
in Karnis' sense of the word; but in the other world there were joys
eternal, and she had only to deny herself the petty enjoyments of this
life to secure unfailing and everlasting happiness in the next. There she
would find an endless flow of all her soul could desire, there perhaps
she might be allowed to cool the lips of Gorgo, as Lazarus cooled those
of the rich man.
She was quite clear now what her answer would be to-morrow, and, firmly
resolved not to allow herself to think of singing in the Temple of Isis,
she at last fell asleep just as the light began to dawn in the east. She
did not wake till late, and it was with downcast eyes and set lips that
she went with Karnis and Orpheus to the house of Porphyrius.
CHAPTER VIII.
When the steward went to summons the musicians to his master's house he
had again had no bidding for Dada, and she was very indignant at being
left behind. "That old cornsack's daughter," she said, "was full of her
airs, and would have nothing to say to them excepting to make use of them
for her own purposes!" If she had not been afraid of being thought
intrusive she would have acted on old Damia's invitation to visit her
frequently, and have made her appearance, in defiance of Gorgo, dropping
like a shooting-star into the midst of their practising. It never
occurred to her to fancy that the young lady had any personal dislike to
her, for, though she might be ignored and forgotten, who had ever had any
but a kind word for her. At the same time she assumed the right of
feeling that "she could not bear" the haughty Gorgo, and as the party set
out she exclaimed to Agne, "Well, you need not kill her for me, but at
any rate, I send her no greeting; it is a shame that I should be left to
mope alone with Herse. Do not be surprised if you find me turned to a
stark, brown mummy--for we are in Egypt, you know, the land of mummies. I
bequeath my old dress to you, my dear, for I know you would never put on
the new one. If you bewail me as you ought I will visit you in a dream,
and put a sugarplum in your mouth--a cake of ambrosia such as the gods
eat. You are not even leaving me Papias to tease!"
For in fact Agne's little brother, dressed in a clean garment, was to be
taken to Gorgo who had expressed a wish to see him.
When they had all left the ship Dada soon betrayed how superficial her
indignation had been; for, presently spying through the window of the
cabin the young cavalry officer's grey-bearded father, she sprang up the
narrow steps--barefoot as she was accustomed to be when at home--and
threw herself on a cushion to lean over the gunwale of the upper deck,
which was shaded by a canvas awning, to watch the ship-yard and the
shore-path. Before she had begun to weary of this occupation the
waiting-slave, who had been up to the house to put various matters in
order, came back to the vessel, and squatting down at her feet was ready
to give her all the information she chose to require. Dada's first
questions naturally related to Gorgo. The young mistress, said the slave,
had already dismissed many suitors, the sons of the greatest families of
Alexandria, and if her suspicions--those of Sachepris, the slave--were
well founded, all for the sake of the old shipbuilder's son, whom she had
known from childhood and who was now an officer in the Imperial guard.
However, as she opined, this attachment could hardly lead to marriage,
since Constantine was a zealous Christian and his family were
immeasurably beneath that of Porphyrius in rank; and though he had
distinguished himself greatly and risen to the grade of Prefect, Damia,
who on all occasions had the casting-vote, had quite other views for her
granddaughter.
All this excited Dada's sympathies to the highest pitch, but she listened
with even greater attention when her gossip began to speak of Marcus, his
mother, and his brother. In this the Egyptian slave was the tool of old
Damia. She had counted on being questioned about the young Christian, and
as soon as Dada mentioned his name she shuffled on her knees close up to
the girl, laid her hand gently on her arm and looking up into her eyes
with a meaning flash, she whispered in broken Greek--and hastily, for
Herse was bustling about the deck: "Such a pretty mistress, such a young
mistress as you, and kept here like a slave! If the young mistress only
chose she could easily--quite easily--have as good a lover as our Gorgo,
and better; so pretty and so young! And I know some one who would dress
the pretty mistress in red gold and pale pearls and bright jewels, if
sweet Dada only said the word."
"And why should sweet Dada not say the word?" echoed the girl gaily. "Who
is it that has so many nice things and all for me? You--I shall never
remember your name if I live to be as old as Damia. . . ."
"Sachepris, Sachepris is my name," said the woman, but call me anything
else you like. The lover I mean is the son of the rich Christian, Mary. A
handsome man, my lord Marcus; and he has horses, such fine horses, and
more gold pieces than the pebbles on the shore there. Sachepris knows
that he has sent out slaves to look for the pretty mistress. Send him a
token--write to my lord Marcus."
"Write?" laughed Dada. "Girls learn other things in my country; but if I
could--shall I tell you something? I would not write him a line. Those
who want me may seek me!"
"He is seeking, he is trying to find the pretty mistress," declared the
woman; "he is full of you, quite full of you, and if I dared. . . ."
"Well?"
"I would go and say to my lord Marcus, quite in a secret. . . ."
"Well, what? Speak out, woman."
"First I would tell him where the pretty mistress is hidden; and then say
that he might hope once--this evening perhaps--he is not far off, he is
quite near this . . . over there; do you see that little white house? It
is a tavern and the host is a freedman attached to the lady Damia, and
for money he would shut his shop up for a day, for a night, for many
days.--Well, and then I would say--shall I tell you all? My lord Marcus
is there, waiting for his pretty mistress, and has brought her dresses
that would make the rose-garment look a rag. You would have gold too, as
much gold as heart can wish. I can take you there, and he will meet you
with open arms."
"What, this evening?" cried Dada, and the blue veins swelled on her white
forehead. "You hateful, brown serpent! Did Gorgo teach you such things as
this? It is horrible, disgraceful, sickening!"
So base a proposal was the last thing she would ever have expected from
Marcus--of all men in the world, Marcus, whom she had imagined so good
and pure! She could not believe it; and as her glance met the cunning
glitter of the Egyptian's eyes her own sparkled keenly, and she exclaimed
with a vehemence and decision which her attendant had never suspected in
her:
"It is deceit and falsehood from beginning to end! Go, woman, I will hear
no more of it. Why should Marcus have come to you since yesterday if he
does not know where I am? You are silent--you will not say? . . . Oh! I
understand it all. He--I know he would never have ventured it. But it is
your 'noble lady Damia'--that old woman, who has told you what to say.
You are her echo, and as for Marcus. . . . Confess, confess at once, you
witch. . . ."
"Sachepris is only a poor slave," said the woman raising her hands in
entreaty. "Sachepris can only obey, and if the pretty mistress were to
tell my lady Damia . . ."
"It was she then who sent for me to go to the little tavern?"
The woman nodded. "And Marcus?"
"If the pretty mistress had consented . . ."
"Well?"
"Then--but Great Isis! if you tell of me!"
"I will not tell; go on."
"I should have gone to my lord Marcus and invited him, from you . . ."
"It is shameful!" interrupted Dada, and a shudder ran through her slight
frame. "How cruel, how horrible it is! You--you will stay here till the
others come home and then you will go home to the old woman. I thank the
gods, I have two hands and need no maid to wait upon me! But look
there--what is the meaning of that? That pretty litter has stopped and
there is an old man signing to you."
"It is the widow Mary's house steward," whined the woman, while Dada
turned pale, wondering what a messenger from Marcus' mother could want
here.
Herse, who had kept a watchful eye on the landing-plank, on Dada's
account, had also seen the approach of the widow's messenger and
suspected a love-message from Marcus; but she was utterly astounded when
the old man politely but imperiously desired her--Herse to get into the
litter which would convey her to his mistress's house. Was this a trap?
Did he merely want to tempt her from the vessel so as to clear the way
for his young master? No--for he handed her a tablet on which there was a
written message, and she, an Alexandrian, had been well educated and
could read:
"Mary, the widow of Apelles, to the wife of Karnis, the singer." And then
followed the same urgent request as she had already received by word of
mouth. To reassure herself entirely she called the slave-woman aside, and
asked her whether Phabis was indeed a trust worthy servant of the
widow's. Evidently there was no treason to be apprehended and she must
obey the invitation, though it disturbed her greatly; but she was a
cautious woman, with not only her heart but her brains and tongue in the
right place, and she at once made up her mind what must be done under the
circumstances. While she gave a few decorative touches to her person she
handed the tablet to the waiting-woman, whom she had taken into her own
room, and desired her to carry it at once to her husband, and tell him
whither she had gone, and to beg him to return without delay to take care
of Dada. But what if her husband and son could not come away? The girl
would be left quite alone, and then. . . The picture rose before her
anxious mind of Marcus appearing on the scene and tempting Dada on
shore--of her niece stealing away by herself even, if the young Christian
failed to discover her present residence--loitering alone along the
Canopic way or the Bruclumn, where, at noon, all that was most
disreputable in Alexandria was to be seen at this time of year--she saw,
shuddered, considered--and suddenly thought of an expedient which seemed
to promise an issue from the difficulty. It was nothing new and a
favorite trick among the Egyptians; she had seen is turned to account by
a lame tailor at whose house her father had lodged, when he had to go out
to his customers and leave his young negress wife alone at home. Dada was
lying barefoot on the deck: Herse would hide her shoes.
She hastily acted on this idea, locking up not only Dada's sandals, but
also Agne's and her own, in the trunk they had saved; a glance at the
slave's feet assured her that hers could be of no use.
"Not if fire were to break out," thought she, "would my Dada be seen in
the streets with those preposterous things on her pretty little feet."
When this was done Herse breathed more freely, and as she took leave of
her niece, feeling perhaps that she owed her some little reparation, she
said in an unusually kind tone:
"Good bye, child. Try to amuse yourself while I am gone. There is plenty
to look at here, and the others will soon be back again. If the city is
fairly quiet this evening we will all go out together, to Canopus, to eat
oysters. Good bye till we meet again, my pet!" She kissed the child, who
looked up at her in astonishment, for her adopted mother was not usually
lavish of such endearments.
Before long Dada was alone, cooling herself with her new fan and eating
sweetmeats; but she could not cease thinking of the shameful treachery
planned by old Damia, and while she rejoiced to reflect that she had not
fallen into the net, and had seen through the plot, her wrath against the
wicked old woman and Gorgo--whom she could not help including--burnt
within her. Meanwhile she looked about her, expecting to see Marcus, or
perhaps the young officer. Finding it impossible to think any evil of the
young Christian, and having already trusted him so far, her fancy dwelt
on him with particular pleasure; but she was curious, too, about the
prefect, the early love of the proud merchant's daughter.
Time went on; the sun was high in the heavens, she was tired of staring,
wondering and thinking, and, yawning wearily, she began to consider
whether she would make herself comfortable for a nap, or go down stairs
and fill up the time by dressing herself up in her new garments. However,
before she could do either, the slave returned from her errand to the
house, and a few moments after she espied the young officer crossing the
ship-yard towards the lake; she sat up, set the crescent straight that
she wore in her hair, and waved her fan in a graceful greeting.
The cavalry prefect, who knew that, of old, the barge was often used by
Porphyrius' guests, though he did not happen to have heard who were its
present occupants--bowed, with military politeness and precision, to the
pretty girl lounging on the deck. Dada returned the greeting; but this
seemed likely to be the end of their acquaintance, for the soldier walked
on without turning round. He looked handsomer even than he had seemed the
day before; his hair was freshly oiled and curled, his scale-armor
gleamed as brightly, and his crimson tunic was as new and rich as if he
were going at once to guard the Imperial throne. The merchant's daughter
had good taste, but her friend looked no less haughty than herself. Dada
longed to make his acquaintance and find out whether he really had no
eyes for any one but Gorgo. To discover that it was not so, little as she
cared about him personally, would have given her infinite satisfaction,
and she decided that she must put him to the test. But there was no time
to lose, so, as it would hardly do to call after him, she obeyed a sudden
impulse, flung overboard the handsome fan which had been in her
possession but one day, and gave a little cry in which alarm and regret
were most skilfully and naturally expressed.
This had the wished-for effect. The officer turned round, his eyes met
hers, and Dada leaned far over the boat's side pointing to the water and
exclaiming:
"It is in the water--it has fallen into the lake!--my fan!"
The officer again bowed slightly; then he walked from the path down to
the water's edge, while Dada went on more quietly:
"There, close there! Oh, if only you would! . . .
"I am so fond of the fan, it is so pretty. Do you see, it is quite
obliging? it is floating towards you!" Constantine had soon secured the
fan, and shook it to dry it as he went across the plank to the vessel.
Dada joyfully received it, stroked the feathers smooth, and warmly
thanked its preserver, while he assured her that he only wished he could
have rendered her some greater service. He was then about to retire with
a bow no less distant than before, but he found himself unexpectedly
detained by the Egyptian slave who, placing herself in his way, kissed
the hem of his tunic and exclaimed:
"What joy for my lord your father and the lady your mother, and for poor
Sachepris! My lord Constantine at home again!"
"Yes, at home at last," said the soldier in a deep pleasant voice. "Your
old mistress is still hale and hearty? That is well. I am on my way to
the others."
"They know that you have come," replied the slave. "Glad, they are all
glad. They asked if my lord Constantine forgot old friends."
"Never, not one!"
"How long now since my lord Constantine went away--two, three years, and
just the same. Only a cut over the eyes--may the hand wither that gave
the blow!"
Dada had already observed a broad scar which marked the soldier's brow as
high up as she could see it for the helmet, and she broke in:
"How can you men like to slash and kill each other? Just think, if that
cut had been only a finger's breadth lower--you would have lost your
eyes, and oh! it is better to be dead than blind. When all the world is
bright not to be able to see it; what must that be! The whole earth in
darkness so that you see nothing--no one; neither the sky, nor the lake,
nor the boat, nor even me."
"That would indeed be a pity," said the prefect with a laugh and a shrug.
"A pity!" exclaimed Dada. "As if it were nothing at all! I should find
something else to say than that. It gives me a shudder only to think of
being blind. How dreadfully dull life can be with one's eyes open! so
what must it be when they are of no use and one cannot even look about
one. Do you know that you have done me not one service only, but two at
once?"
"I?" said the officer.
"Yes, you. But the second is not yet complete. Sit down awhile, I
beg--there is a seat. You know it is a fatal omen if a visitor does not
sit down before he leaves.--That is well.--And now, may I ask you: do you
take off your helmet when you go into battle? No.--Then how could a
swordcut hurt your forehead?"
"In a hand to hand scuffle," said the young man, "everything gets out of
place. One man knocked my helmet off and another gave me this cut in my
face."
"Where did it happen?"
"On the Savus, where we defeated Maximus."
"And had you this same helmet on?"
"Certainly."
"Oh! pray let me look at it! I can still see the dent in the metal; how
heavy such a thing must be to wear!"
Constantine took off his helmet with resigned politeness and put it into
her hands. She weighed it, thought it fearfully heavy, and then lifted it
up to put it on her own fair curls; but this did not seem to please her
new acquaintance, and saying rather shortly: "Allow me--" he took it from
her, set it on his head and rose.
But Dada pointed eagerly to the seat.
"No, no," she said, "I have not yet had enough of your second kindness. I
was on the point of death from sheer tedium; then you came, just in time;
and if you want to carry out your work of mercy you must tell me
something about the battle where you were wounded, and who took care of
you afterwards, and whether the women of Pannonia are really as handsome
as they are said to be. . ."
"I am sorry to say that I have not time," interrupted the officer.
"Sachepris here is far better qualified to amuse you than I; some years
since, at any rate, she lead a wonderful store of tales. I wish you a
pleasant day!"
And with this farewell greeting, Constantine left the vessel, nor did he
once look back at it or its pretty inhabitant as he made his way towards
the house of Porphyrius.
Dada as she gazed after him colored with vexation; again she had done a
thing that Herse and--which she regretted still more--that Agne would
certainly disapprove of. The stranger whom she had tried to draw into a
flirtation was a really chivalrous man. Gorgo might be proud of such a
lover; and if now, he were to go to her and tell her, probably with some
annoyance, how provokingly he had been delayed by that pert little
singing-girl, it would be all her own fault. She felt as though there
were something in her which forced her to seem much worse than she really
was, and wished to be. Agne, Marcus, the young soldier--nay, even Gorgo,
were loftier and nobler than she or her people, and she was conscious for
the first time that the dangers from which Marcus had longed to protect
her were not the offspring of his fancy. She could not have found a name
for them, but she understood that she was whirled and tossed through life
from one thing to another, like a leaf before the wind, bereft of every
stay or holdfast, defenceless even against the foolish vagaries of her
own nature. Everyone, thought the girl to herself, distrusted and
suspected her, and, solely because she was one of a family of singers,
dared to insult and dishonor her. A strange spite against Fate, against
her uncle and aunt, against herself even, surged up in her, and with it a
vague longing for another and a better life.
Thus meditating she looked down into the water, not noticing what was
going on around her, till the slave-woman, addressing her by name,
pointed to a carriage drawn up at the side of the road that divided the
grove of the Temple of Isis from the ship-yard, and which the Egyptian
believed that she recognized as belonging to Marcus. Dada started up and
ran off to the cabin to fetch her shoes, but everything in the shape of a
sandal had vanished, and Herse had been wise when she had looked at those
of the Egyptian, for Dada did the same and would not have hesitated to
borrow them if they had been a little less dirty and clumsy.
Herse, no doubt, had played her this trick, and it was easy to guess why!
It was only to divert her suspicions that the false woman had been so
affectionate at parting. It was cheating, treachery-cruel and shameful!
She, who had always submitted like a lamb--but this was too much--this
she could not bear--this! . . . The slave-woman now followed her to desire
her to come up on deck; a new visitor had appeared on the scene, an old
acquaintance and fellow-voyager: Demetrius, Marcus' elder brother.
At any other time she would have made him gladly welcome, as a companion
and comfort in her solitude; but he had chosen an evil hour for his visit
and his proposals, as the girl's red cheeks and tearful eyes at once told
him.
He had come to fetch her, cost him what it might, and to carry her away
to his country-home, near Arsinoe on the coast. It was not that he had
any mad desire to make her his own, but that he thought it his most
urgent duty to preserve his inexperienced brother from the danger into
which his foolish passion for the little singing-girl was certain to
plunge him. A purse full of gold, and a necklace of turquoise and
diamonds, which he had purchased from a jeweller in the Jews' quarter for
a sum for which he had often sold a ship-load of corn or a whole cellar
full of wine or oil, were to supplement his proposals; and he went
straight to the point, asking the girl simply and plainly to leave her
friends and accompany him to Arsinoe. When she asked him, in much
astonishment, "What to do there?" he told her he wanted a cheerful
companion; he had taken a fancy to her saucy little nose, and though he
could not flatter himself that he had ever found favor in her eyes he had
brought something with him which she would certainly like, and which
might help him to win her kindness. He was not niggardly, and if
this--and this--and he displayed the sparkling necklace and laid the
purse on her pillow--could please her she might regard them as an earnest
of more, as much more as she chose, for his pockets were deep.
Dada did not interrupt him, for the growing indignation with which she
heard him took away her breath. This fresh humiliation was beyond the
bounds of endurance; and when at last she recovered her powers of speech
and action, she flung the purse off the divan, and as it fell clattering
on the floor, she kicked it away as far as possible, as though it were
plague-tainted. Then, standing upright in front of her suitor, she
exclaimed:
"Shame upon you all! You thought that because I am a poor girl, a
singing-girl, and because you have filthy gold. . . . Your brother Marcus
would never have done such a thing, I am very sure! . . . And you, a horrid
peasant! . . . If you ever dare set foot on this vessel again, Karnis and
Orpheus shall drive you away as if you were a thief or an assassin!
Eternal Gods! what is it that I have done, that everyone thinks I must be
wicked? Eternal Gods. . . ."
And she burst into loud spasmodic sobs and vanished down the steps that
led below.
Demetrius called after her in soothing words and tones, but she would not
listen. Then he sent down the slave to beg Dada to grant him a hearing,
but the only answer he received was an order to quit the barge at once.
He obeyed, and as he picked up the purse he thought to himself:
"I may buy ship and vineyard back again; but I would send four more after
those if I could undo this luckless deed. If I were a better and a
worthier man, I might not so easily give others credit for being evil and
unworthy."
CHAPTER IX.
The town of Alexandria was stirred to its very foundations. From dawn
till night every centre of public traffic and intercourse was the scene
of hostile meetings between Christians and heathen, with frequent frays
and bloodshed, only stopped by the intervention of the soldiery. Still,
as we see that the trivial round of daily tasks is necessarily fulfilled,
even when the hand of Fate lies heaviest on a household, and that
children cannot forego their play even when their father is stretched on
his death-bed, so the minor interests of individual lives pursued their
course, even in the midst of the general agitation and peril.
The current of trade and of public business was, of course, checked at
many points, but they never came to a stand-still. The physician visited
the sick, the convalescent made his first attempt, leaning on a friendly
arm, to walk from his bedroom to the "viridarium," and alms were given
and received. Hatred was abroad and rampant, but love held its own,
strengthening old ties and forming new ones. Terror and grief weighed on
thousands of hearts, while some tried to make a profit out of the
prevailing anxiety, and others--many others--went forth, as light-hearted
as ever, in pursuit of pleasure and amusement.
Horses were ridden and driven in the Hippodrome, and feasts were held in
the pleasure-houses of Canopus, with music and noisy mirth; in the public
gardens round the Paneum cock-fighting and quail-fighting were as popular
as ever, and eager was the betting in new gold or humble copper. Thus may
we see a child, safe on the roof of its father's house, floating its toy
boat on the flood that has drowned them all out; thus might a boy fly his
gaudy kite in the face of a gathering storm; thus does the miser, on whom
death has already laid its bony hand, count his hoarded coin; thus
thoughtless youth dances over the heaving soil at the very foot of a
volcano. What do these care for the common weal? Each has his separate
life and personal interests. What he himself needs or desires--the
greatest or the least--is to him more important and more absorbing than
the requirements of the vast organism in which he is no more than a drop
of blood or the hair of an eyelash.
Olympius was still in concealment in the house of Porphyrius--Olympius,
whose mind and will had formerly had such imperious hold on the fate of
the city, and to whose nod above half of the inhabitants were still
obedient. Porphyrius and his family shared his views and regarded
themselves as his confederates; but, even among them, the minor details
of life claimed their place, and Gorgo, who entered into the struggle for
the triumph of the old gods, gave but a half-hearted attention to the
great cause to which she was enthusiastically devoted, because a
companion of her childhood, to whose attentions she had every claim,
delayed his visit longer than was kind.
She had performed her 'Isis' lament the day before with all her heart and
soul, and had urgently claimed Agne's assistance; but to-day, though she
had been singing again and well, she had stopped to listen whenever she
heard a door open in the adjoining room or voices in the garden, and had
sung altogether with so much less feeling and energy than before that
Karnis longed to reprove her sharply enough. This, however, would have
been too indiscreet, so he could only express his annoyance by saying to
his son, in a loud whisper:
"The most remarkable gifts, you see, and the highest abilities are of no
avail so long as Art and Life are not one and the same--so long as Art is
not the Alpha and Omega of existence, but merely an amusement or a
decoration."
Agne had been true to herself, and had modestly but steadfastly declared
that she could not possibly enter the temple of Isis, and her refusal had
been accepted quite calmly, and without any argument or controversy. She
had not been able to refuse Gorgo's request that she would repeat to-day
the rehearsal she had gone through yesterday, since, to all appearance,
her cooperation at the festival had been altogether given up. How could
the girl guess that the venerable philosopher, who had listened with
breathless admiration to their joint performance, had taken upon himself
to dissipate her doubts and persuade her into compliance?
Olympius laid the greatest stress on Agne's assistance, for every one who
clung to the worship of the old gods was to assemble in the sanctuary of
Isis; and the more brilliant and splendid the ceremony could be made the
more would that enthusiasm be fired which, only too soon, would be put to
crucial proof. On quitting the temple the crowd of worshippers, all in
holiday garb, were to pass in front of the Prefect's residence, and if
only they could effect this great march through the city in the right
frame of mind, it might confidently be expected that every one who was
not avowedly Jew or Christian, would join the procession. It would thus
become a demonstration of overwhelming magnitude and Cynegius, the
Emperor's representative, could not fail to see what the feeling was of
the majority of the towns folk, and what it was to drive matters to
extremes and lay hands on the chief temples of such a city.
To Olympius the orator, grown grey in the exercise of logic and
eloquence, it seemed but a small matter to confute the foolish doubts of
a wilful girl. He would sweep her arguments to the winds as the storm
drives the clouds before it; and any one who had seen the two
together--the fine old man with the face and front of Zeus, with his
thoughtful brow and broad chest, who could pour forth a flood of
eloquence fascinatingly persuasive or convincingly powerful, and the
modest, timid girl--could not have doubted on which side the victory must
be.
To-day, for the first time, Olympius had found leisure for a prolonged
interview with his old friend Karnis, and while the girls were in the
garden, amusing little Papias by showing him the swans and tame gazelles,
the philosopher had made enquiries as to the Christian girl's history and
then had heard a full account of the old musician's past life. Karnis
felt it as a great favor that his old friend, famous now for his
learning--the leader of his fellow-thinkers in the second city of the
world, the high-priest of Serapis, to whose superior intellect he himself
had bowed even in their student days--should remember his insignificant
person and allow him to give him the history of the vicissitudes which
had reduced him--the learned son of a wealthy house--to the position of a
wandering singer.
Olympius had been his friend at the time when Karnis, on leaving college,
instead of devoting himself to business and accounts, as his father
wished, had thrown himself into the study of music, and at once
distinguished himself as a singer, lute-player and leader of heathen
choirs. Karnis was in Alexandria when the news reached him of his
father's death. Before quitting the city he married Herse, who was
beneath him alike in birth and in fortune, and who accompanied him on his
return to Tauromenium in Sicily, where he found himself the possessor of
an inheritance of which the extent and importance greatly astonished him.
At Alexandria he had been far better acquainted with the theatre than
with the Museum or the school of the Serapeum; nay, as an amateur, he had
often sung in the chorus there and acted as deputy for the regular
leader. The theatre in his native town of Tauromenium had also been a
famous one of old, but, at the time of his return, it had sunk to a very
low ebb. Most of the inhabitants of the beautiful city nestling at the
foot off Etna, had been converted to Christianity; among them the wealthy
citizens at whose cost the plays had been performed and the chorus
maintained. Small entertainments were still frequently given, but the
singers and actors had fallen off, and in that fine and spacious theatre
nothing was ever done at all worthy of its past glories. This Karnis
deeply regretted, and with his wonted energy and vigor he soon managed to
win the interest of those of his fellow-citizens who remained faithful to
the old gods and had still some feeling for the music and poetry of the
ancient Greeks, in his plans for their revival.
His purpose was to make the theatre the centre of a reaction against the
influence of the Christians, by vieing with the Church in its efforts to
win back the renegade heathen and confirming the faithful in their
adhesion. The Greeks of Tauromenium should be reminded from the
stage-boards of the might of the old gods and the glories of their past.
To this end it was needful to restore the ruined theatre, and Karnis,
after advancing the greater part of the money required, was entrusted
with the management. He devoted himself zealously to the task, and soon
was so successful that the plays at Tauromenium, and the musical
performances in its Odeum, attracted the citizens in crowds, and were
talked of far and wide. Such success was of course only purchased at a
heavy cost, and in spite of Herse's warnings, Karnis would never hesitate
when the object in view was the preservation or advancement of his great
work.
Thus passed twenty years; then there came a day when his fine fortune was
exhausted, and a time when the Christian congregation strained every
nerve to deal a death-blow to the abomination of desolation in their
midst. Again and again, and with increasing frequency, there were
sanguinary riots between the Christians who forced their way into the
theatre and the heathen audience, till at last a decree of the Emperor
Theodosius prohibited the performance of heathen plays or music.
Now, the theatre at Tauromenium, for which Karnis had either given or
advanced his whole inheritance, had ceased to exist, and the usurers who,
when his own fortune was spent, had lent him moneys on the security of
the theatre itself--while it still flourished--or on his personal
security, seized his house and lands and would have cast him into the
debtor's prison if he had not escaped that last disgrace by flight. Some
good friends had rescued his family and helped them to follow him, and
when they rejoined him he had begun his wanderings as a singer. Many a
time had life proved miserable enough; still, he had always remained true
to his art and to the gods of Olympus.
Olympius had listened to his narrative with many tokens of sympathy and
agreement, and when Karnis, with tears in his eyes, brought his story to
a close, the philosopher laid his hand on his friend's shoulder and
drawing him towards him, exclaimed:
"Well done, my brave old comrade! We will both be faithful to the same
good cause! You have made sacrifices for it as I have; and we need not
despair yet. If we triumph here our friends in a thousand towns will
begin to look up. The reading of the stars last night, and the auguries
drawn from this morning's victims, portend great changes. What is down to
the ground to-day may float high in the air to-morrow. All the signs
indicate: 'A fall to the Greatest;' and what can be greater than Rome,
the old tyrant queen of the nations? The immediate future, it is true,
can hardly bring the final crash, but it is fraught with important
consequences to us. I dreamed of the fall of the Caesars, and of a great
Greek Empire risen from the ruins, powerful and brilliant under the
special protection of the gods of Olympus; and each one of us must labor
to bring about the realization of this dream. You have set a noble
example of devotion and self-sacrifice, and I thank you in the name of
all those who feel with us--nay, in the name of the gods themselves whom
I serve! The first thing to be done now is to avert the blow which the
Bishop intends shall strike us by the hand of Cynegius--it has already
fallen on the magnificent sanctuary of the Apamaean Zeus. If the
ambassador retires without having gained his purpose the balance will be
greatly--enormously, in our favor, and it will cease to be a folly to
believe in the success of our cause."
"Ah! teach us to hope once more," cried the musician. "That in itself is
half the victory; still, I cannot see how this delay. . ."
"It would give us time, and that is what we want," replied Olympius.
"Everything is in preparation, but nothing is ready. Alexandria, Athens,
Antioch, and Neapolis are to be the centres of the outbreak. The great
Libanius is not a man of action, and even he approves of our scheme. No
less a man than Florentin has undertaken to recruit for our cause among
the heathen officers in the army. Messala, and the great Gothic captains
Fraiut and Generid are ready to fight for the old gods. Our army will not
lack leaders. . ."
"Our army!" exclaimed Karnis in surprise. "Is the matter so far
advanced?"
"I mean the army of the future," cried Olympius enthusiastically. "It
does not count a man as yet, but is already distributed into several
legions. The vigor of mind and body--our learned youth on one hand and
strong-armed peasantry on the other--form the nucleus of our force.
Maximus could collect, in the utmost haste, the army which deprived
Gratian of his throne and life, and was within a Hair-breadth of
overthrowing Theodosius; and what was he but an ambitious rebel, and what
tempted his followers but their hopes of a share in the booty? But we--we
enlist them in the name of the loftiest ideas and warmest desires of the
human heart, and, as the prize of victory, we show them the ancient faith
with freedom of thought--the ancient loveliness of life. The beings whom
the Christians can win over--a patch-work medley of loathsome
Barbarians--let them wear out their lives as they choose! We are
Greeks--the thinking brain, the subtle and sentient soul of the world.
The polity, the empire, that we shall found on the overthrow of
Theodosius and of Rome shall be Hellenic, purely Hellenic. The old
national spirit, which made the Greeks omnipotent against the millions of
Darius and Xerxes, shall live again, and we will keep the Barbarians at a
distance as a Patrician forbids his inferiors to count themselves as
belonging to his illustrious house. The Greek gods, Greek heroism, Greek
art and Greek learning, under our rule shall rise from the dust--all the
more promptly for the stringent oppression under which their indomitable
spirit has so long languished."
"You speak to my heart!" cried Karnis. "My old blood flows more swiftly
already, and if I only had a thousand talents left to give. . ."
"You would stake them on the future Greek Empire," said Olympius eagerly.
"And we have adherents without number who feel as you do, my trusty
friend. We shall succeed--as the great Julian would have succeeded but
for the assassins who laid him low at so early an age; for Rome. . ."
"Rome is still powerful."
"Rome is a colossus built up of a thousand blocks; but among them a
hundred and more be but loosely in their places, and are ready to drop
away from the body of the foul monster--sooner rather than later. Our
shout alone will shake them down, and they will fall on our side, we may
choose the best for our own use. Ere long--a few months only--the hosts
will gather in the champaign country at the foot of Vesuvius, by land and
by sea; Rome will open its gates wide to us who bring her back her old
gods; the Senate will proclaim the emperor deposed and the Republic
restored. Theodosius will come out against us. But the Idea for which we
go forth to fight will hover before us, will stir the hearts of those
soldiers and officers who would gladly--ah! how gladly-sacrifice to the
Olympian gods and who only kiss the wounds of the crucified Jew under
compulsion. They will desert from the labarum, which Constantine carried
to victory, to our standards; and those standards are all there, ready
for use; they have been made in this city and are lying hidden in the
house of Apollodorus. Heaven-sent daemons showed them in a vision to my
disciple Ammonius, when he was full of the divinity and lost in ecstasy,
and I have had them made from his instructions."
"And what do they represent?"
"The bust of Serapis with the 'modius' on his head. It is framed in a
circle with the signs of the zodiac and the images of the great Olympian
deities. We have given our god the head of Zeus, and the corn-measure on
his head is emblematic of the blessing that the husbandman hopes for. The
zodiac promises us a good star, and the figures representing it are not
the common emblems, but each deeply significant. The Twins, for instance,
are the mariner's divinities, Castor and Pollux; Hercules stands by the
Lion whom he has subdued; and the Fishes are dolphins, which love music.
In the Scales, one holds the cross high in the air while the other is
weighed down by Apollo's laurel-wreath and the bolts of Zeus; in short,
our standard displays everything that is most dear to the soul of a Greek
or that fills him with devotion. Above all, Nike hovers with the crown of
victory. If only fitting leaders are to be found at the centres of the
movement, these standards will at once be sent out, and with them arms
for the country-folk. A place of meeting has already been selected in
each province, the pass-word will be given, and a day fixed for a general
rising."
"And they will flock round you!" interrupted Karnis, "and--I, my son,
will not be absent. Oh glorious, happy, and triumphant day! Gladly will I
die if only I may first live to see the smoking offerings sending up
their fragrance to the gods before the open doors of every temple in
Greece; see the young men and maidens dancing in rapt enthusiasm to the
sound of lutes and pipes, and joining their voices in the chorus! Then
light will shine once more on the world, then life will once more mean
joy, and death a departure from a scene of bliss."
"Aye, and thus shall it be!" cried Olympius, fired by this eager
exposition of his own excitement, and he wrung the musician's hand. "We
will restore life to the Greeks and teach them to scorn death as of yore.
Let the Christians, the Barbarians, make life miserable and seek joy in
death, if they list! But the girls have ceased singing. There is still
much to be done to-day, and first of all I must confute the objections of
your recalcitrant pupil."
"You will not find it an easy task," said Karnis. "Reason is a feeble
weapon in contending with a woman."
"Not always," replied the philosopher. "But you must know how to use it.
Leave me to deal with the child. There are really no singing-women left
here; we have tried three, but they were all vulgar and ill taught. This
girl, when she sings with Gorgo, has a voice that will go to the heart of
the audience. What we want is to fire the crowd with enthusiasm, and she
will help us to do it."
"Well, well. But you, Olympius, you who are the very soul of the
revulsion we hope for, you must not be present at the festival. Indeed,
sheltered as you are under Porphyrius' roof, there is a price on your
head, and this house swarms with slaves, who all know you; if one of
them, tempted by filthy lucre . . ."
"They will not betray me," smiled the philosopher. "They know that their
aged mistress, Damia, and I myself command the daemons of the upper and
lower spheres, and that at a sign from her or from me they would
instantly perish; and even if there were an Ephialtes among them, a
spring through that loop-hole would save me. Be easy, my friend. Oracles
and stars alike foretell me death from another cause than the treason of
a slave."
CHAPTER X.
Olympius followed Agne into the garden where he found her sitting by the
marble margin of a small pool, giving her little brother pieces of bread
to feed the swans with. He greeted her kindly and, taking up the child,
showed him a ball which rose and fell on the jet of water from the
fountain. Papias was not at all frightened by the big man with his white
beard, for a bright and kindly gleam shone in his eyes, and his voice was
soft and attractive as he asked him whether he had such another ball and
could toss it as cleverly as the fountain did.
Papias said: "No," and Olympius, turning to Agne, went on:
"You should get him a ball. There is no better plaything, for play ought
to consist in pleasant exertion which is in itself its object and gain.
Play is the toil of a little child; and a ball, which he can throw and
run after or catch, trains his eye, gives exercise to his limbs and
includes a double moral which men of every age and position should act
upon: To look down on the earth and keep his gaze on the heavens."
Agne nodded agreement and thanks, while Olympius set the child down and
bid him run away to the paddock where some tame gazelles were kept. Then,
going straight to the point, he said:
"I hear you have declined to sing in the temple of Isis; you have been
taught to regard the goddess to whom many good men turn in faith and
confidence, as a monster of iniquity, but, tell me, do you know what she
embodies?"
"No," replied Agne looking down; but she hastily rose from her seat and
added with some spirit: "And I do not want to know, for I am a Christian
and your gods are not mine."
"Well, well; your beliefs, of course, differ from ours in many points:
still, I fancy that you and I have much in common. We belong to those who
have learnt to 'look upwards'--there goes the ball, up again!--and who
find comfort in doing so. Do you know that many men believe that the
universe was formed by concurrence of mechanical processes and is still
slowly developing, that there is no divinity whose love and power guard,
guide and lend grace to the lives of men?"
"Oh! yes, I have been obliged to hear many such blasphemous things in
Rome!"
"And they ran off you like water off the silvery sheen of that swan's
plumage as he dips and raises his neck. Those who deny a God are, in your
estimation, foolish or perhaps abominable?"
"I pity them, with all my heart."
"And with very good reason. You are an orphan and what its parents are to
a child the divinity is to every member of the human race. In this Gorgo,
and I, and many others whom you call heathen, feel exactly as you do; but
you--have you ever asked yourself why and how it is that you, to whom
life has been so bitter, have such a perfect conviction that there is a
benevolent divinity who rules the world and your own fate to kindly ends?
Why, in short, do you believe in a God?"
"I?" said Ague, looking puzzled, but straight into his face. "How could
anything exist without God? You ask such strange questions. All I can see
was created by our Father in Heaven."
"But there are men born blind who nevertheless believe in Him."
"They feel Him just as I see Him."
"Nay you should say: 'As I believe that I see and feel Him.' But I, for
my part, think that the intellect has a right to test what the soul only
divines, and that it must be a real happiness to see this divination
proved by well-founded arguments, and thus transformed to certainty. Did
you ever hear of Plato, the philosopher?"
"Yes, Karnis often speaks of him when he and Orpheus are discussing
things which I do not understand."
"Well, Plato, by his intellect, worked out the proof of the problem which
our feelings alone are so capable of apprehending rightly. Listen to me:
If you stand on a spit of land at the entrance to a harbor and see a ship
in the distance sailing towards you--a ship which carefully avoids the
rocks, and makes straight for the shelter of the port--are you not
justified in concluding that there is, on board that ship, a man who
guides and steers it? Certainly. You not only may, but must infer that it
is directed by a pilot. And if you look up at the sky and contemplate the
well-ordered courses of the stars--when you see how everything on earth,
great and small, obeys eternal laws and unerringly tends to certain
preordained ends and issues, you may and must infer the existence of a
ruling hand. Whose then but that of the Great Pilot of the universe--the
Almighty Godhead.--Do you like my illustration?"
"Very much. But it only proves what I knew before."
"Nevertheless, you must, I think, be pleased to find it so beautifully
expressed."
"Certainly."
"And must admire the wise man who thought out the comparison. Yes?--Well,
that man again was one of those whom you call heathen, who believed as we
believe, and who at the same time worked out the evidence of the
foundations of his faith for you as well as himself. And we, the later
disciples of Plato--[Known as the school of the Neo-Platonists]--have
gone even further than our master, and in many respects are much nearer
to you Christians than you perhaps suspect. You see at once, of course,
that we are no more inclined than you to conceive of the existence of the
world and the destiny of man as independent of a God? However, I dare say
you still think that your divinity and ours are as far asunder as the
east from the west. But can you tell me where any difference lies?"
"I do not know," said Ague uneasily. "I am only an ignorant girl; and who
can learn the names even of all your gods?"
"Very true," said Olympius. "There is great Serapis, whose temple you saw
yesterday; there is Apollo, to whom Karnis prefers to offer sacrifice;
there is Isis the bountiful, and her sister Nephthys, whose lament you
and my young friend sing together so thrillingly; and besides these there
are more immortals than I could name while Gorgo--who is leading your
little brother to the lake out there--walked ten times from the shore to
us and back; and yet--and yet my child, your God is ours and ours is
yours."
"No, no, He is not, indeed!" cried Agne with increasing alarm.
"But listen," Olympius went on, with the same kind urgency but with
extreme dignity, "and answer my questions simply and honestly. We are
agreed, are we not?--that we perceive the divinity in the works of his
creation, and even in his workings in our own souls. Then which are the
phenomena of nature in which you discern Him as especially near to you?
You are silent. I see, you have outlived your school-days and do not
choose to answer to an uninvited catechism. And yet the things I wish you
to name are lovely in themselves and dear to your heart; and if only you
did not keep your soft lips so firmly closed, but would give me the
answer I ask for, you would remember much that is grand and beautiful.
You would speak of the pale light of dawn, the tender flush that tinges
the clouds as the glowing day-star rises from the waves, of the splendor
of the sun-as glorious as truth and as warm as divine love. You would
say: In the myriad blossoms that open to the morning, in the dew that
bathes them and covers them with diamonds, in the ripening ears in the
field, in the swelling fruit on the trees--in all these I see the mercy
and wisdom of the divinity. I feel his infinite greatness as I gaze on
the wide expanse of deep blue sea; it comes home to me at night when I
lift my eyes to the skies and see the sparkling hosts of stars roll over
my head. Who created that countless multitude, who guides them so that
they glide past in glorious harmony, and rise and set, accurately timed
to minutes and seconds, silent but full of meaning, immeasurably distant
and yet closely linked with the fate of individual men?--All this bears
witness to the existence of a God, and as you contemplate it and admire
it with thankful emotion, you feel yourself drawn near to the Omnipotent.
Aye, and even if you were deaf and blind, and lay bound and fettered in
the gloom of a closely-shut cavern, you still could feel if love and pity
and hope touched your heart. Rejoice then, child! for the immortals have
endowed you with good gifts, and granted you sound senses by which to
enjoy the beauty of creation. You exercise an art which binds you to the
divinity like a bridge; when you give utterance to your whole soul in
song that divinity itself speaks through you, and when you hear noble
music its voice appeals to your ear. All round you and within you, you
can recognize its power just as we feel it--everywhere and at all times.
"And this incomprehensible, infinite, unfettered, bountiful and
infallibly wise Power, which penetrates and permeates the life of the
universe as it does the hearts of men, though called by different names
in different lands, is the same to every race, wherever it may dwell,
whatever its language or its beliefs. You Christians call him the
Heavenly Father, we give him the name of the Primal One. To you, too,
your God speaks in the surging seas, the waving corn, the pure light of
day; you, too, regard music which enchants your heart, and love which
draws man to man, as his gifts; and we go only a step further, giving a
special name to each phenomenon of nature, and each lofty emotion of the
soul in which we recognize the direct influence of the Most High; calling
the sea Poseidon, the corn-field Demeter, the charm of music Apollo, and
the rapture of love Eros. When you see us offering sacrifice at the foot
of a marble image you must not suppose that the lifeless, perishable
stone is the object of our adoration. The god does not descend to inform
the statue; but the statue is made after the Idea figured forth by the
divinity it is intended to represent; and through that Idea the image is
as intimately connected with the Godhead, as, by the bond of Soul,
everything else that is manifest to our senses is connected with the
phenomena of the supersensuous World. But this is beyond you; it will be
enough for you if I assure you that the statue of Demeter, with the sheaf
in her arms, is only intended to remind us to be grateful to the Divinity
for our daily bread--a hymn of praise to Apollo expresses our thanks to
the Primal One for the wings of music and song, on which our soul is
borne upwards till it feels the very presence of the Most High. These are
names, mere names that divide us; but if you were called anything else
than Agne--Ismene, for instance, or Eudoxia--would you be at all
different from what you are?--There you see--no, stay where you are--you
must listen while I tell you that Isis, the much--maligned Isis, is
nothing and represents nothing but the kindly influences of the Divinity,
on nature and on human life. What she embodies to us is the abstraction
which you call the loving-kindness of the Father, revealed in his
manifold gifts, wherever we turn our eyes. The image of Isis reminds us
of the lavish bounties of the Creator, just as you are reminded by the
cross, the fish, and the lamb, of your Redeemer. Isis is the earth from
whose maternal bosom the creative God brings forth food and comfort for
man and beast; she is the tender yearning which He implants in the hearts
of the lover and the beloved one; she is the bond of affection which
unites husband and wife, brother and sister, which is rapture to the
mother with a child at her breast and makes her ready and able for any
sacrifice for the darling she has brought into the world. She shines, a
star in the midnight sky, giving comfort to the sorrowing heart; she, who
has languished in grief, pours balm into the wounded souls of the
desolate and bereaved, and gives health and refreshment to the suffering.
When nature pines in winter cold or in summer drought and lacks power to
revive, when the sun is darkened, when lies and evil instincts alienate
the soul from its pure first cause, then Isis uplifts her complaint,
calling on her husband, Osiris, to return, to take her once more in his
arms and fill her with new powers, to show the benevolence of God once
more to the earth and to us men. You have learnt that lament; and when
you sing it at her festival, picture yourself as standing with the Mother
of Sorrows--the mother of your crucified divinity, by his open grave, and
cry to your God that he may let him rise from the dead."
Olympius spoke the last words with excited enthusiasm as though he were
certain of the young girl's consent; but the effect was not what he
counted on; for Agne, who had listened to him, so far, with increasing
agitation, setting herself against his arguments like a bird under the
fascinating glare of the snake's eye, at this last address seemed
suddenly to shake off the spell of his seductive eloquence as the leaves
drop from the crown of a tree shaken by the blast; the ideas of her
Saviour and of the hymn she was to sing were utterly irreconcilable in
her mind; she remembered the struggle she had fought out during the
night, and the determination with which she had come to the house this
morning. All the insidious language she had just heard was forgotten,
swept away like dust from a rocky path, and her voice was firmly
repellent as she said:
"Your Isis has nothing in common with the Mother of our God, and how can
you dare to compare your Osiris with the Lord who redeemed the world from
death?"
Olympius, startled at the decision of her tone, rose from his seat, but
he went on, as though he had expected this refusal:
"I will tell you--I will show you. Osiris--we will take him as being an
Egyptian god, instead of Serapis in whose mysterious attributes you would
find much to commend itself even to a Christian soul--Osiris, like your
Master, voluntarily passed through death--to redeem the world from
death--in this resembling your Christ. He, the Risen One, gives new
light, and life, and blossom, and verdure to all that is darkened, dead
and withered. All that seems to have fallen a prey to death is, by him,
restored to a more beautiful existence; he, who has risen again, can
bring even the departed soul to a resurrection; and when during this life
its high aims have kept it unspotted by the dust of the sensual life, and
he, as the judge, sees that it has preserved itself worthy of its pure
First Cause, he allows it to return to the eternal and supreme Spirit
whence it originally proceeded.
"And do not you, too, strive after purification, to the end that your
soul may find an everlasting home in the radiant realms? Again and again
do we meet with the same ideas, only they bear different forms and names.
Try to feel the true bearing of my words, and then you will gladly join
in the pathetic appeal to the sublime god to return. How like he is to
your Lord! Is he not, like your Christ, a Saviour, and risen from the
dead? The Temple or the Church--both are the sanctuaries of the Deity. By
the ivy-wreathed altar of the weeping goddess, at the foot of the tall
cypresses which cast their mysterious shadows on the snowy whiteness of
the marble steps on which lies the bier of the god, you will feel the
sacred awe which falls upon every pure soul when it is conscious of the
presence of the Deity--call Him what you will.
"Isis, whom you now know, and who is neither more nor less than a
personification of divine mercy, will make you a return by restoring you
to the freedom for which you pine. She will allow you to find a home in
some Christian house through our intervention, in acknowledgment of the
pious service you are rendering, not to her but to the faith in divine
goodness. There you may live with your little brother, as free as heart
can desire. To-morrow you will go with Gorgo to the temple of the goddess
. . ."
But Agne broke in on his speech: "No, I will not go with her!"
Her cheeks were scarlet and her breath came short and fast with
excitement as she went on:
"I will not, I must not, I cannot! Do what you will with me: sell me and
my brother, put us to turn a mill--but I will not sing in the temple!"
Olympius knit his brows; his beard quivered and his lips parted in wrath,
but he controlled himself and going close to the girl he laid his hand on
her shoulder and said in a deep grave tone of fatherly admonition:
"Reflect, child, pause; think over what I have been saying to you;
remember, too, what you owe the little one you love, and to-morrow
morning tell us that you have duly weighed your answer. Give me your
hand, my daughter; believe me, Olympius is one of your sincerest
well-wishers."
He turned his back on her and was going in doors. In front of the house
Porphyrius and Karnis were standing in eager colloquy. The news that
Marcus' mother Mary had sent for Herse had reached the singer, and his
vivid fancy painted his wife as surrounded by a thousand perils,
threatened by the widow, and carried before the judges. The merchant
advised him to wait and see what came of it, as did Damia and Gorgo who
were attracted to the spot by the vehemence of the discussion; but Karnis
would not be detained, and he and Orpheus hurried off to the rescue. Thus
Agne was left alone in the garden with her little brother, and perceiving
that no one paid any further attention to their proceedings, she fell on
her knees, clasped the child closely to her and whispered:
"Pray with me, Papias; pray, pray that the Lord will protect us, and that
we may not be turned out of the way that leads us to our parents! Pray,
as I do!"
For a minute she remained prostrate with the child by her side. Then,
rising quickly, she took him by the hand and led him in almost breathless
haste through the garden-gate out into the road, bending her steps
towards the lake and then down the first turning that led to the city.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
People who have nothing to do always lack time
Perish all those who do not think as we do
Reason is a feeble weapon in contending with a woman
Words that sounded kindly, but with a cold, unloving heart
SERAPIS
By Georg Ebers
Volume 3.
CHAPTER XI.
Agne's flight remained unperceived for some little time, for every member
of the merchant's household was at the moment intent on some personal
interest. When Karnis and Orpheus had set out Gorgo was left with her
grandmother and it was not till some little time after that she went out
into the colonnade on the garden side of the house, whence she had a view
over the park and the shore as far as the ship-yard. There, leaning
against the shaft of a pillar, under the shade of the blossoming shrubs,
she stood gazing thoughtfully to the southward.
She was dreaming of the past, of her childhood's joys and privations.
Fate had bereft her of a mother's love, that sun of life's spring. Below
her, in a splendid mausoleum of purple porphyry, lay the mortal remains
of the beautiful woman who had given her birth, and who had been snatched
away before she could give her infant a first caress. But all round the
solemn monument gardens bloomed in the sunshine, and on the further side
of the wall covered with creepers, was the ship-yard, the scene of
numberless delightful games. She sighed as she looked at the tall hulks,
and watched for the man who, from her earliest girlhood, had owned her
heart, whose image was inseparable from every thing of joy and beauty
that she had ever known, and every grief her young soul had suffered
under.
Constantine, the younger son of Clemens the shipbuilder, had been her
brothers' companion and closest friend. He had proved himself their
superior in talents and gifts, and in all their games had been the
recognized leader. While still a tiny thing she would always be at their
heels, and Constantine had never failed to be patient with her, or to
help and protect her, and then came a time when the lads were all eager
to win her sympathy for their games and undertakings. When her
grandmother read in the stars that some evil influences were to cross the
path of Gorgo's planet, the girl was carefully kept in the house; at
other times she was free to go with the boys in the garden, on the lake
or to the ship-yard. There the happy playmates built houses or boats;
there, in a separate room, old Melampus modelled figure-heads for the
finished vessels, and he would supply them with clay and let them model
too. Constantine was an apt pupil, and Gorgo would sit quiet while he
took her likeness, till, out of twenty images that he had made of her,
several were really very like. Melampus declared that his young master
might be a very distinguished sculptor if only he were the son of poor
parents, and Gorgo's father appreciated his talent and was pleased when
the boy attempted to copy the beautiful busts and statues of which the
house was full; but to his parents, and especially his mother, his
artistic proclivities were an offence. He himself, indeed, never
seriously thought of devoting himself to such a heathenish occupation,
for he was deeply penetrated by the Christian sentiments of his family,
and he had even succeeded in inflaming the sons of Porphyrius, who had
been baptized at an early age, with zeal for their faith. The merchant
perceived this and submitted in silence, for the boys must be and remain
Christians in consequence of the edict referring to wills; but the
necessity for confessing a creed which was hateful to him was so painful
and repulsive to a nature which, though naturally magnanimous was not
very steadfast, that he was anxious to spare his sons the same
experience, and allowed them to accompany Constantine to church and to
wear blue--the badge of the Christians--at races and public games, with a
shrug of silent consent.
With Gorgo it was different. She was a woman and need wear no colors; and
her enthusiasm for the old gods and Greek taste and prejudices were the
delight of her father. She was the pride of his life, and as he heard his
own convictions echoed in her childish prattle, and later in her
conversation and exquisite singing, he was grateful to his mother and to
his friend Olympius who had implanted and cherished these feelings in his
daughter. Constantine's endeavors to show her the beauty of his creed and
to win her to Christianity were entirely futile; and the older they grew,
and the less they agreed, the worse could each endure the dissent of the
other.
An early and passionate affection attracted the young man to his charming
playfellow; the more ardently he cherished his faith the more fervently
did he desire to win her for his wife. But Olympius' fair pupil was not
easy of conquest; nay, he was not unfrequently hard beset by her
questions and arguments, and while, to her, the fight for a creed was no
more than an amusing wrestling match, in which to display her strength,
to him it was a matter in which his heart was engaged.
Damia and Porphyrius took a vain pleasure in their eager discussions, and
clapped with delight, as though it were a game of skill, when Gorgo
laughingly checkmated her excited opponent with some unanswerable
argument.
But there came a day when Constantine discovered that his eager defence
of that which to him was high and holy, was, to his hearers, no more than
a subject of mockery, and henceforth the lad, now fast growing to
manhood, kept away from the merchant's house. Still, Gorgo could always
win him back again, and sometimes, when they were alone together, the old
strife would be renewed, and more seriously and bitterly than of old. But
while he loved her, she also loved him, and when he had so far mastered
himself as to remain away for any length of time she wore herself out
with longing to see him. They felt that they belonged to each other, but
they also felt that an insuperable gulf yawned between them, and that
whenever they attempted to clasp hands across the abyss a mysterious and
irresistible impulse drove them to open it wider, and to dig it deeper by
fresh discussions, till at last Constantine could not endure that she, of
all people, should mock at his Holy of Holies and drag it in the dust.
He must go--he must leave Gorgo, quit Alexandria, cost what it might. The
travellers' tales that he had heard from the captains of trading-vessels
and ships of war who frequented his father's house had filled him with a
love of danger and enterprise, and a desire to see distant lands and
foreign peoples. His father's business, for which he was intended, did
not attract him. Away--away--he would go away; and a happy coincidence
opened a path for him.
Porphyrius had taken him one day on some errand to Canopus; the elder man
had gone in his chariot, his two sons and Constantine escorting him on
horseback. At the city-gates they met Romanus, the general in command of
the Imperial army, with his staff of officers, and he, drawing rein by
the great merchant's carriage, had asked him, pointing to Constantine,
whether that were his son.
"No," replied Porphyrius, "but I wish he were." At these words the
ship-master's son colored deeply, while Romanus turned his horse round,
laid his hand on the young man's arm and called out to the commander of
the cavalry of Arsinoe: "A soldier after Ares' own heart, Columella! Do
not let him slip."
Before the clouds of dust raised by the officers' horses as they rode
off, had fairly settled, Constantine had made up his mind to be a
soldier. In his parents' house, however, this decision was seen under
various aspects. His father found little to say against it, for he had
three sons and only two shipyards, and the question seemed settled by the
fact that Constantine, with his resolute and powerful nature, was cut out
to be a soldier. His pious mother, on the other hand, appealed to the
learned works of Clemens and Tertullian, who forbid the faithful
Christian to draw the sword; and she related the legend of the holy
Maximilianus, who, being compelled, under Diocletian, to join the army,
had suffered death at the hands of the executioner rather than shed his
fellow-creatures' blood in battle. The use of weapons, she added, was
incompatible with a godly and Christian life.
His father, however, would not listen to this reasoning; new times, he
said, were come; the greater part of the army had been baptized; the
Church prayed for, victory, and at the head of the troops stood the great
Theodosius, an exemplar of an orthodox and zealous Christian.
Clemens was master in his own house, and Constantine joined the heavy
cavalry at Arsinoe. In the war against the Blemmyes he was so fortunate
as to merit the highest distinction; after that he was in garrison at
Arsinoe, and, as Alexandria was within easy reach of that town, he was in
frequent intercourse with his own family and that of Porphyrius. Not
quite three years previously, when a revolt had broken out in favor of
the usurper Maximus in his native town, Constantine had assisted in
suppressing it, and almost immediately afterwards he was sent to Europe
to take part in the war which Theodosius had begun, again against
Maximus.
An unpleasant misunderstanding had embittered his parting from Gorgo; old
Damia, as she held his hand had volunteered a promise that she and her
granddaughter would from time to time slay a beast in sacrifice on his
behalf. Perhaps she had had no spiteful meaning in this, but he had
regarded it as an insult, and had turned away angry and hurt. Gorgo,
however, could not bear to let him go thus; disregarding her
grandmother's look of surprise, she had called him back, and giving him
both hands had warmly bidden him farewell. Damia had looked after him in
silence and had ever afterwards avoided mentioning his name in Gorgo's
presence.
After the victory over Maximus, Constantine, though still very young, was
promoted to the command of the troop in the place of Columella, and he
had arrived in Alexandria the day before at the head of his 'ala
miliaria'.
[The ala miliaria consisted of 24 'turmae' or 960 mounted troopers
under the conduct of a Prefect.]
Gorgo had never at any time ceased to think of him, but her passion had
constantly appeared to her in the light of treason and a breach of faith
towards the gods, so, to condone the sins she committed on one side by
zeal on another, she had come forth from the privacy of her father's
house to give active support to Olympius in his struggle for the faith of
their ancestors. She had become a daily worshipper at the temple of Isis,
and the hope of hearing her sing had already mere than once filled it to
overflowing at high festivals. Then, while Olympius was defending the
sanctuary of Serapis against the attacks of the Christians, she and her
grandmother had become the leaders of a party of women who made it their
task to provide the champions of the faith with the means of subsistence.
All this had given purpose to her life; still, every little victory in
this contest had filled her soul with regrets and anxieties. For months
and years she had been conspicuous as the opponent of her lover's creed,
and the bright eager child had developed into a grave girl a clear-headed
and resolute woman. She was the only person in the house who dared to
contradict her grandmother, and to insist on a thing when she thought it
right. The longing of her heart she could not still, but her high spirit
found food for its needs in all that surrounded her, and, by degrees,
would no doubt have gained the mastery and have been supreme in all her
being and doing, but that music and song still fostered the softer
emotions of her strong, womanly nature.
The news of Constantine's return had shaken her soul to the foundations.
Would it bring her the greatest happiness or only fresh anguish and
unrest?
She saw him coming!--The plume of his helmet first came in sight above
the bushes, and then his whole figure emerged from among the shrubbery.
She leaned against the pillar for support now, for her knees trembled
under her. Tall and stately, his armor blazing in the sunshine, he came
straight towards her--a man, a hero--exactly as her fancy had painted him
in many a dark and sleepless hour. As he passed her mother's tomb, she
felt as though a cold hand laid a grip on her beating heart. In a swift
flash of thought she saw her own home with its wealth and splendor, and
then the ship-builder's house-simple, chillingly bare, with its
comfortless rooms; she felt as though she must perish, nipped and
withered, in such a home. Again she thought of him standing on his
father's threshold, she fancied she could hear his bright boyish laugh
and her heart glowed once more. She forgot for the moment--clear-headed
woman though she was, and trained by her philosopher to "know
herself"--she forgot what she had fully acknowledged only the night
before: That he would no more give up his Christ than she would her Isis,
and that if they should ever reach the dreamed-of pinnacle of joy it must
be for an instant only, followed by a weary length of misery. Yes--she
forgot everything; doubts and fears were cast aside; as his approaching
footsteps fell on her ear, she could hardly keep herself from flying,
open armed, to meet him.
He was standing before her; she offered him her hand with frank gladness,
and, as he clasped it in his, their hearts were too full for words. Only
their eyes gave utterance to their feelings, and when he perceived that
hers were sparkling through tears, he spoke her name once,
twice--joyfully and yet doubtfully, as if he dared not interpret her
emotion as he would. She laid her left hand lightly on his which still
grasped her right, and said with a brilliant smile: "Welcome,
Constantine, welcome home! How glad I am to see you back again!"
"And I--and I . . . " he began, greatly moved.
"O Gorgo! Can it really be years since we parted?"
"Yes, indeed," she said. "Anxious, busy, struggling years!"
"But to-day we celebrate the festival of Peace," he exclaimed fervently.
"I have learnt to leave every man to go his own way so long as I am
allowed to go mine. The old strife is buried; take me as I am and I, for
my part, will think only of the noble and beautiful traits in which your
nature is so rich. The fruit of all wholesome strife must be peace; let
us pluck that fruit, Gorgo, and enjoy it together. Ah! as I stand here
and gaze out over the gardens and the lake, hearing the hammers of the
shipwrights, and rejoicing in your presence, I feel as though our
childhood might begin all over again--only better, fuller and more
beautiful!"
"If only my brothers were here!"
"I saw them."
"Oh! where?"
"At Thessalonica, well and happy--I have letters for you from them."
"Letters!" cried Gorgo, drawing away her hand. "Well, you are a tardy
messenger! Our houses are within a stone's throw, and yet in a whole day,
from noon till noon, so old a friend could not find a few minutes to
deliver the letters entrusted to him, or to call upon such near neighbors
. . ."
"First there were my parents," interrupted the young soldier. "And then
the tyrant military duty, which kept me on the stretch from yesterday
afternoon till an hour or two since. Romanus robbed me even of my sleep,
and kept me in attendance till the morn had set. However, I lost but
little by that, for I could not have closed my eyes till they had beheld
you! This morning again I was on duty, and rarely have I ridden to the
front with such reluctance. After that I was delayed by various details;
even on my way here--but for that I cannot be sorry for it gave me this
chance of finding you alone. All I ask now is that we may remain so, for
such a moment is not likely to be repeated.--There, I heard a door . . ."
"Come into the garden," cried Gorgo, signing to him to follow her. "My
heart is as full as yours. Down by the tank under the old sycamores--we
shall be quietest there."
Under the dense shade of the centenarian trees was a rough-hewn bench
that they themselves had made years before; there Gorgo seated herself,
but her companion remained standing.
"Yes!" he exclaimed. "Here--here you must hear me! Here where we have
been so happy together!"
"So happy!" she echoed softly,
"And now," he went on, "we are together once more. My heart beats wildly,
Gorgo; it is well that this breastplate holds it fast, for I feel as
though it would burst with hope and thankfulness."
"Thankfulness?" said Gorgo, looking down.
"Yes, thankfulness--sheer, fervent passionate gratitude! What you have
given me, what an inestimable boon, you yourself hardly know; but no
emperor could reward love and fidelity more lavishly than you have
done--you, the care and the consolation, the pain and the joy of my life!
My mother told me--it was the first thing she thought of--how you shed
tears of grief on her bosom when the false report of my death reached
home. Those tears fell as morning dew on the drooping hopes in my heart,
they were a welcome such as few travellers find on their return home. I
am no orator, and if I were, how could speech in any way express my
feelings? But you know them--you understand what it is, after so many
years . . ."
"I know," she said looking up into his eyes, and allowing him to seize
her hand as he dropped on the bench by her side. "If I did not I could
not bear this--and I freely confess that I shed many more tears over you
than you could imagine. You love me, Constantine . . ."
He threw his arm round her; but she disengaged herself, exclaiming:
"Nay--I implore you, not so--not yet, till I have told you what troubles
me, what keeps me from throwing myself wholly, freely into the arms of
happiness. I know what you will ask--what you have a right to ask; but
before you speak, Constantine, remember once more all that has so often
saddened our life, even as children, that has torn us asunder like a
whirlwind although, ever since we can remember, our hearts have flowed
towards each other. But I need not remind you of what binds us--that we
both know well, only too well. . . ."
"Nay," he replied boldly: "That we are only beginning to know in all its
fullness and rapture. The other thing the whirlwind of which you speak,
has indeed tossed and tormented me, more than it has you perhaps; but
since I have known that you could shed tears for me and love me I have
had no more anxieties; I know for certain that all must come right! You
love me as I am, Gorgo. I am no dreamer nor poet; but I can look forward
to finding life lovely and noble if shared with you, so long as one--only
one thing is sure. I ask you plainly and truly: Is your heart as full of
love for me as mine is for you? When I was away did you think of me every
day, every night, as I thought of you, day and night without fail?"
Gorgo's head sank and blushes dyed her cheeks as she replied: "I love
you, and I have never even thought of any one else. My thoughts and
yearnings followed you all the while you were away . . . and yet . . .
oh, Constantine! That one thing . . ."
"It cannot part us," said the young man passionately, "since we have
love--the mighty and gracious power which conquers all things! When love
beckon: the whirlwind dies away like the breath from a child's lips; it
can bridge over any abyss; it created the world and preserves the
existence of humanity, it can remove mountains--and these are the most
beautiful words of the greatest of the apostles: 'It is long suffering
and kind, it believes all things, hopes all things' and it knows no end.
It remains with us till death and will teach us to find that peace whose
bulwark and adornment, whose child and parent it is!"
Gorgo had looked lovingly at him while he spoke, and he, pressing her
hand to his lips went on with ardent feeling:
"Yes, you shall be mine--I dare, and I will go to ask you of your father.
There are some words spoken in one's life which can never be forgotten.
Once your father said that he wished that I was his son. On the march, in
camp, in battle, wherever I have wandered, those words have been in my
mind; for me they could have but one meaning: I would be his son--I shall
be his son when Gorgo is my wife!--And now the time has come . . ."
"Not yet, not to-day," she interrupted eagerly. "My hopes are the same as
yours. I believe with you that our love can bring all that is sweetest
into our lives. What you believe I must believe, and I will never urge
upon you the things that I regard as holiest. I can give up much, bear
much, and it will all seem easy for your sake. We can agree, and settle
what shall be conceded to your Christ and what to our gods--but not
to-day; not even to-morrow. For the present let me first carry out the
task I have undertaken--when that is done and past, then. . . . You have
my heart, my love; but if I were to prove a deserter from the cause to-day
or to-morrow it would give others--Olympius--a right to point at me with
scorn."
"What is it then that you have undertaken?" asked Constantine with grave
anxiety.
"To crown and close my past life. Before I can say: I am yours, wholly
yours . . ."
"Are you not mine now, to-day, at once?" he urged.
"To day-no," she replied firmly. "The great cause still has a claim upon
me; the cause which I must renounce for your sake. But the woman who
gives only one person reason to despise her signs the death-warrant of
her own dignity. I will carry out what I have undertaken. . . . Do not ask me
what it is; it would grieve you to know.--The day after tomorrow, when
the feast of Isis is over. . . ."
"Gorgo, Gorgo!" shouted Damia's shrill voice, interrupting the young girl
in her speech, and half a dozen slave-women came rushing out in search of
her.
They rose, and as they went towards the house Constantine said very
earnestly:
"I will not insist; but trust my experience: When we have to give
something up sooner or later, if the wrench is a painful one, the sooner
and the more definitely it is done the better. Nothing is gained by
postponement and the pain is only prolonged. Hesitation and delay, Gorgo,
are a barrier built up by your own hand between us and our happiness. You
always had abundance of determination; be brave then, now, and cut short
at once a state of things that cannot last."
"Well, well," she said hurriedly. "But you must not, you will not require
me to do anything that is beyond my strength, or that would involve
breaking my word. To-morrow is not, and cannot be yours; it must be a day
of leave-taking and parting. After that I am yours, I cannot live without
you. I want you and nothing else. Your happiness shall be mine; only, do
not make it too hard to me to part from all that has been dear to me from
my infancy. Shut your eyes to tomorrow's proceedings, and then--oh! if
only we were sure of the right path, if only we could tread it together!
We know each other so perfectly, and I know, I feel, that it will perhaps
be a comfort to our hearts to be patient with each other over matters
which our judgment fails to comprehend or even to approve. I might be so
unutterably happy; but my heart trembles within me, and I am not, I dare
not be quite glad yet."
CHAPTER XII.
The young soldier was heartily welcomed by his friends of the merchant's
family; but old Damia was a little uneasy at the attitude which he and
Gorgo had taken up after their first greeting. He was agitated and grave,
she was eager and excited, with an air of determined enterprise.
Was Eros at the bottom of it all? Were the young people going to carry
out the jest of their childhood in sober earnest? The young officer was
handsome and attractive enough, and her granddaughter after all was but a
woman.
So far as Constantine was concerned the old lady had no personal
objection to him; nay, she appreciated his steady, grave manliness and,
for his own sake, was very glad to see him once more; but to contemplate
the ship-builder's son--the grandson of a freedman--a Christian and
devoted to the Emperor, even though he were a prefect or of even higher
grade--as a possible suitor for her Gorgo, the beautiful heiress of the
greater part of her wealth--the centre of attraction to all the gilded
youth of Alexandria--this was too much for her philosophy; and, as she
had never in her life restrained the expression of her sentiments, though
she gave him a friendly hand and the usual greeting, she very soon showed
him, by her irony and impertinence, that she was as hostile to his creed
as ever.
She put her word in on every subject, and when, presently,
Demetrius--who, after Dada's rebuff, had come on to see his uncle--began
speaking of the horses he had been breeding for Marcus, and Constantine
enquired whether any Arabs from his stables were to be purchased in the
town, Damia broke out:
"You out-do your crucified God in most things I observe! He could ride on
an ass, and a stout Egyptian nag is not good enough for you."
However, the young officer was not to be provoked; and though he was very
well able to hold his own in a strife of words, he kept himself under
control and pretended to see nothing in the old woman's taunts but
harmless jesting.
Gorgo triumphed in his temperate demeanor, and thanked him with grateful
glances and a silent grasp of the hand when opportunity offered.
Demetrius, who had also known Constantine as a boy, and who, through
Porphyrius, had sold him his first charger, met him very warmly and told
him with a laugh that he had seen him before that day, that he had
evidently learnt something on his travels, that he had tracked the
prettiest head of game in all the city; and he slapped him on the
shoulder and gave him what he meant to be a very knowing glance.
Constantine could not think where Demetrius had seen him or what he
meant; while Gorgo supposed that he alluded to her, and thought him
perfectly odious.
Porphyrius pelted the prefect with questions which Constantine was very
ready to answer, till they were interrupted by some commotion in the
garden. On looking out they saw a strange and unpleasing procession,
headed by Herse who was scolding, thumping and dragging Dada's Egyptian
slave, while her husband followed, imploring her to moderate her fury.
Behind them came Orpheus, now and then throwing out a persuasive word to
soothe the indignant matron. This party soon came up with the others, and
Herse, unasked, poured out an explanation of her wrath.
She had had but a brief interview with Mary, Marcus' mother, for she had
positively opposed the Christian lady's suggestion that Karnis and his
family would do well to quit Alexandria as soon as possible, accepting an
indemnification from Mary herself. To the widow's threats of seeking the
intervention of the law, she had retorted that they were not public
singers but free citizens who performed for their own enjoyment; to the
anxious mother's complaints that Dada was doing all she could to attract
Marcus, she had answered promptly and to the point that her niece's good
name would certainly out-weigh anything that could be said against a
young man to whom so much license was allowed in Alexandria. She would
find some means of protecting her own sister's child. Mary had replied
that Herse would do well to remember that she--Mary--had means at her
command of bringing justice down on those who should attempt to entrap a
Christian youth, and tempt him into the path of sin.
This had closed the interview. Herse had found her husband and son
waiting for her at the door of Mary's house and had at once returned with
them to the ship. There an unpleasant surprise awaited them; they had
found no one on board but the Egyptian slave, who told them that Dada had
sent her on shore to procure her some sandals; on her return the girl had
vanished. The woman at the same time declared that she had seen Agne and
her brother leave the garden and make for the high-road.
So far as the Christian girl was concerned Herse declared there would be
no difficulty; but Dada, her own niece, had always clung to them
faithfully, and though Alexandria was full of sorcerers and Magians they
could hardly succeed in making away with a fullgrown, rational, and
healthy girl. In her inexperience she had, no doubt, gone at the bidding
of some perfidious wretch, and the Egyptian witch, the brown slave had,
of course, had a finger in the trick. She would accuse no one, but she
knew some people who would be only too glad if Dada and that baby-faced
young Christian got into trouble and disgrace together. She delivered
herself of this long story with tears of rage and regret, angrily
refusing to admit any qualifying parentheses from her husband, to whose
natural delicacy her rough and vociferous complaints were offensive in
the presence of the high-bred ladies of the house. Old Damia, however,
had listened attentively to her indignant torrent of words, and had only
shrugged her shoulders with a scornful smile at the implied accusation of
herself.
Porphyrius, to whom the whole business was simply revolting, questioned
Herse closely and when the facts were clearly established, and it also
was plainly proved that Agne had escaped from the garden, he desired the
slave-woman to tell her story of all that had occurred during the absence
of Karnis, promising her half a dozen stripes from the cane on the soles
of her feet for every false word she might utter. The threat was enough
to raise a howl from the Egyptian; but this Porphyries soon put a stop
to, and Sachepris, with perfect veracity, told her tale of all that had
happened till Herse's return to the vessel. The beginning of the
narrative was of no special interest, but when she was pressed to go
faster to the point she went on to say:
"And then--then my lord Constantine came to us on the ship, and the
pretty mistress laughed with him and asked him to take off his helmet,
because the pretty mistress wanted to see the cut, the great sword-cut
above his eyes, and my lord Constantine took it off."
"It is a lie!" exclaimed Gorgo.
"No, no; it is true. Sachepris does not want her feet flayed, mistress,"
cried the slave. "Ask my lord Constantine himself."
"Yes, I went on board," said Constantine. "Just as I was crossing the
ship-yard a young girl dropped her fan into the lake. I fished it out at
her request, and carried it back to her."
"Yes, that was it," cried Sachepris. "And the pretty mistress laughed
with my lord Constantine--is it not true?--and she took his helmet out of
his hand and weighed it in hers . . ."
"And you could stop on your way here to trifle with that child?" cried
Gorgo wrathfully. "Pah! what men will do!"
These words portended rage and intense disgust to Constantine. "Gorgo!"
he cried with a reproachful accent, but she could not control her
indignation and went on more vehemently than ever:
"You stopped--with that little hussy--on your way to me--stopped to
trifle and flirt with her! Shame! Yes, I say shame! Men are thought lucky
in being light-hearted, but, for my part, may the gods preserve me from
such luck! Trifling, whispering, caressing--a tender squeeze of the
hand--solemnly, passionately earnest!--And what next? Who dares warrant
that it will not all be repeated before the shadows are an ell long on
the shore!"
She laughed, a sharp, bitter laugh; but it was a short one. She ceased
and turned pale, for her lover's face had undergone a change that
terrified her. The scar on his forehead was purple, and his voice was
strange, harsh and hoarse as he leaned forward to bring his face on a
level with hers, and said:
"Even if you had seen me with your own eyes you ought not to have
believed them! And if you dare to say that you do believe it, I can say
Shame! as well as you. My life may be at stake but I say: Shame!"
As he spoke he clutched the back of a chair with convulsive fury and
stood facing the girl like an avenging god of war, his eyes flashing to
meet hers. This was too much for old Damia; she could contain herself no
longer, and striking her crutch on the floor she broke out:
"What next shall we hear! You threaten and storm at the daughter of this
house as if she were a soldier in your camp! Listen to me, my fine
gentleman, and mind what I say: In the house of a free Alexandrian
citizen no one has any right to give his orders--be he Caesar, Consul or
Comes; he has only to observe the laws of good manners." Then turning to
Gorgo she shook her head with pathetic emphasis; "This, my love, is the
consequence of too much familiar condescension. Come, an end of this!
Greeting and parting often go hand in hand."
The prefect turned on his heel and went towards the steps leading to the
garden; but Gorgo flew after him and seized his hand, calling out to the
old woman:
"No, no, grandmother; he is in the right, I am certain he is in the
right. Stop, Constantine--wait, stay, and forgive my folly! If you love
me, mother, say no more--he will explain it all presently."
The soldier heaved a sigh of relief and assented in silence, while the
slave went on with her story: "And when my lord Constantine was gone, my
lord Demetrius came and he--but what should poor Sachepris say--ask my
lord Demetrius himself to tell you."
"That is soon done," replied Demetrius, who had failed to understand a
great deal of all that had been going forward. My brother Marcus is over
head and ears in love with the little puss--she is a pretty creature--and
to save that simple soul from mischief I thought I would take the
business on my own shoulders which are broader and stronger than his. I
went boldly to work and offered the girl--more shame for me, I must
say--the treasures of Midas; however, offering is one thing and accepting
is another, and the child snapped me up and sent me to the right
about--by Castor and Pollux! packed me off with my tail between my legs!
My only comfort was that Constantine had just quitted the pretty little
hussy. By the side of the god of war, thought I, a country Pan makes but
a poor figure; but this Ares was dismissed by Venus, and so, if only to
keep up my self-respect, I was forced to conclude that the girl, with all
her pertness, was of a better sort than we had supposed. My presents,
which would have tempted any other girl in Alexandria to follow a cripple
to Hades, she took as an insult; she positively cried with indignation,
and I really respect pretty little Dada!"
"She is my very own sister's child," Herse threw in, honestly angered by
the cheap estimation in which every one seemed to hold her adopted child.
"My own sister's," she insisted, with an emphasis which seemed to imply
that she had a whole family of half-sisters. "Though we now earn our
bread as singers, we have seen better days; and in these hard times
Croesus to-day may be Irus to-morrow. As for us, Karnis did not dissipate
his money in riotous living. It was foolish perhaps but it was
splendid--I believe we should do the same again; he spent all his
inheritance in trying to reinstate Art. However, what is the use of
looking after money when it is gone! If you can win it, or keep it you
will be held of some account, but if you are poor the dogs will snap at
you!--The girl, Dada--we have taken as much care of her as if she were
our own, and divided our last mouthful with her before now. Karnis used
to tease her about training her voice--and now, when she could really do
something to satisfy even good judges--now, when she might have helped us
to earn a living-now. . ."
The good woman broke down and burst into tears, while Karnis tried to
soothe and comfort her.
"We shall get on without them somehow," he said. "'Nil desperandum' says
Horace the Roman. And after all they are not lizards that can hide in the
cracks of the walls; I know every corner of Alexandria and I will go and
hunt them up at once."
"And I will help you, my friend," said Demetrius, "We will go to the
Hippodrome--the gentry you will meet with there are capital blood-hounds
after such game as the daughter of your 'own sister,' my good woman. As
to the black-haired Christian girl--I have seen her many a time on board
ship. . ."
"Oh! she will take refuge with some fellow-Christians," remarked
Porphyrius. "Olympius told me all about her. I know plenty of the same
sort in the Church. They fling away life and happiness as if they were
apple-peelings to snatch at something which they believe to constitute
salvation. It is folly, madness! pure unmitigated madness! To have sung
in the temple of the she-devil Isis with Gorgo and the other worshippers
would have cost her her seat in Paradise. That, as I believe, is the
cause of her flight."
"That and nothing else!" cried Karnis. "How vexed the noble Olympius will
be. Indeed, Apollo be my witness! I have not been so disturbed about
anything for many a day. Do you happen to recollect," he went on, turning
to Demetrius, "our conversation on board ship about a dirge for Pytho?
Well, we had transposed the lament of Isis into the Lydian mode, and when
this young lady's wonderful voice gave it out, in harmony with Agne's and
with Orpheus' flute, it was quite exquisite! My old heart floated on
wings as I listened! And only the day after to-morrow the whole crowd of
worshippers in the temple of Isis were to enjoy that treat!--It would
have roused them to unheard-of enthusiasm. Yesterday the girl was in it,
heart and soul; nay, only this morning she and the noble Gorgo sang it
through from beginning to end. One more rehearsal to-morrow, and then the
two voices would have given such a performance as perhaps was never
before heard within the temple walls."
Constantine had listened to this rhapsody with growing agitation; he was
standing close to Gorgo, and while the rest of the party held anxious
consultation as to what could be done to follow up and capture the
fugitives, he asked Gorgo in a low voice, but with gloomy looks:
"You intended to sing in the temple of Isis? Before the crowd, and with a
girl of this stamp?"
"Yes," she said firmly.
"And you knew yesterday that I had come home?" She nodded.
"And yet, this morning even, while you were actually expecting me, you
could practise the hymn with such a creature?"
"Agne is not such another as the girl who played tricks with your
helmet," replied Gorgo, and the black arches of her eyebrows knit into
something very like a scowl. "I told you just now that I was not yours
today, nor to-morrow. We still serve different gods."
"Indeed we do!" he exclaimed, so vehemently that the others looked round,
and old Damia again began to fidget in her chair.
Then with a strong effort he recovered himself and, after standing for
some minutes gazing in silence at the ground, he said in a low tone:
"I have borne enough for to-day. Gorgo, pause, reflect. God preserve me
from despair!"
He bowed, hastily explained that his duties called him away, and left the
spot.
CHAPTER XIII.
The amateurs of horse-racing who assembled in the Hippodrome could afford
no clue to Dada's hiding-place, because she had not, in fact, run away
with any gay young gallant. Within a few minutes of her sending Sachepris
to fetch her a pair of shoes, Medius had hailed her from the shore; he
wanted to speak with Karnis, and having come on an ass it was not in vain
that the incensed damsel entreated him to take her with him. He had in
fact only come to try to persuade Karnis and his wife to spare Dada for a
few performances, such as he had described, in the house of Posidonius.
His hopes of success had been but slender; and now the whole thing had
settled itself, and Dada's wish that her people should not, for a while,
know where to find her was most opportune for his plans.
In the days when Karnis was the manager of the theatre at Tauromenium
Medius had led the chorus, and had received much kindness at the hands of
the girl's uncle. All this, he thought, he could now repay, for certainly
his old patron was poor enough, and he intended honestly to share with
his former benefactor the profits he expected to realize with so fair a
prodigy as Dada. No harm could come to the girl, and gold--said he to
himself--glitters as brightly and is just as serviceable, even when it
has been earned for us against our will.
Medius, being a cautious man, made the girl bring her new dress away with
her, and the girdle and jewels belonging to it, and his neat hands packed
everything into the smallest compass. He filled up the basket which he
took for the purpose with sweetmeats, oranges and pomegranates "for the
children at home," and easily consoled Dada for the loss of her shoes. He
would lead the ass and she should ride. She covered her face with a veil,
and her little feet could be hidden under her dress. When they reached
his house he would at once have "a sweet little pair of sandals" made for
her by the shoemaker who worked for the wife of the Comes and the
daughters of the Alabarch--[The chief of the Jewish colony in
Alexandria.]--These preparations and the start only took a few minutes;
and their rapid search and broken conversation caused so much absurd
confusion that Dada had quite recovered her spirits and laughed merrily
as she tripped bare-foot across the strand. She sprang gaily on to the
little donkey and as they made their way along the road, the basket
containing her small wardrobe placed in front of her on the ass's
shoulders, she remarked that she should be mistaken for the young wife of
a shabby old husband, returning from market with a load of provisions.
She was delighted to think of what Herse's face would be when, on her
return home, she should discover that the prisoner could make her escape
even without shoes.
"Let her have a good hunt for me!" she cried quite enchanted. "Why should
I always be supposed to be ready for folly and wickedness! But one thing
I warn you: If I am not comfortable and happy with you, and if I do not
like the parts you want me to fill, we part as quickly as we have come
together.--Why are you taking me through all these dirty alleys? I want
to ride through the main streets and see what is going on." But Medius
would not agree to this, for in the great arteries of the town there were
excitement and tumult, and they might think themselves fortunate if they
reached his house unmolested.
He lived in a little square, between the Greek quarter and Rhacotis where
the Egyptians lived, and his house, which was exactly opposite the church
of St. Marcus, accommodated Medius himself, his wife, his widowed
daughter and her five children, besides being crammed from top to bottom
with all sorts of strange properties, standing or hanging in every
available space. Dada's curiosity had no rest, and by the time she had
spent a few hours in the house her host's pretty little grandchildren
were clinging to her with devoted affection.
Agne had not been so fortunate as to find a refuge so easily. With no
escort, unveiled, and left entirely to her own guidance, leading the
little boy, she hurried forward, not knowing whither. All she thought was
to get away--far away from these men who were trying to imperil her
immortal soul.
She knew that Karnis had actually bought her, and that she was,
therefore, his property and chattel. Even Christian doctrine taught her
that the slave must obey his master; but she could not feel like a slave,
and if indeed she were one her owner might destroy and kill her body, but
not her soul. The law, however, was on the side of Karnis, and it allowed
him to pursue her and cast her into prison. This idea haunted her, and
for fear of being caught she avoided all the chief thoroughfares and kept
close to the houses as she stole through the side streets and alleys.
Once, in Antioch, she had seen a runaway slave, who, having succeeded in
reaching a statue of the Emperor and laying his hand on it, was by that
act safe from his pursuers. There must surely be such a statue somewhere
in Alexandria--but where? A woman, of whom she enquired, directed her
down a wider street that would take her into the Canopic Way. If she
crossed that and went down the first turning to the left she would reach
a large open square in the Bruchium, and there, in front of the Prefect's
residence and by the side of the Bishop's house, stood the new statue of
Theodosius.
This information, and the mention of the Bishop, gave a new course to her
proceedings. It was wrong to defy and desert her master, but to obey him
would be deadly sin. Which must she choose and which avoid? Only one
person could advise in such a case--only one could relieve her mind of
its difficulties and terrors: The Shepherd of souls in the city--the
Bishop himself. She too was a lamb of his flock; to him and to no one
else could she turn.
This thought fell on her heart like a ray of light dispersing the clouds
of uncertainty and alarm. With a deep breath of relief she took the child
in her arms and told him--for he was whimpering to know where she was
taking him, and why he might not go back to Dada--that they were going to
see a good, kind man who would tell them the way home to their father and
mother. Papias, however, still wailed to go to Dada and not to the man.
Half insisting and half coaxing him with promises, she dragged him along
as far as the main street. This was full of an excited throng; soldiers
on foot and on horseback were doing what they could to keep the peace,
and the bustle amused the little boy's curiosity so that he soon forgot
his homesickness. When, at length, Ague found the street that led to the
Prefect's house she was fairly carried along by the surging, rushing mob.
To turn was quite impossible; the utmost she could do was to keep her
wits about her, and concentrate her strength so as not to be parted from
the child. Pushed, pulled, squeezed, scolded, and abused by other women
for her folly in bringing a child out into such a crowd, she at last
found herself in the great square. A hideous hubbub of coarse, loud
voices pierced her unaccustomed ears; she could have sunk on the earth
and cried; but she kept up her courage and collected all her energies,
for she saw in the distance a large gilt cross over a lofty doorway. It
was like a greeting and welcome home. Under its protection she would
certainly, find rest, consolation and safety.
But how was she to reach it? The space before her was packed with men as
a quiver is packed with arrows; there was not room for a pin between. The
only chance of getting forward was by forcing her way, and nine-tenths of
the crowd were men--angry and storming men, whose wild and strange
demeanor filled her with terror and disgust. Most of them were monks who
had flocked in at the Bishop's appeal from the monasteries of the desert,
or from the Lauras and hermitages of Kolzum by the Red Sea, or even from
Tabenna in Upper Egypt, and whose hoarse voices rent the air with
vehement cries of: "Down with the idols! Down with Serapis! Death to the
heathen!"
This army of the Saviour whose very essence was gentleness and whose
spirit was love, seemed indeed to have deserted from his standard of
light and grace to the blood-stained banner of murderous hatred. Their
matted locks and beards fringed savage faces with glowing eyes; their
haggard or paunchy nakedness was scarcely covered by undressed hides of
sheep and goats; their parched skins were scarred and striped by the use
of the scourges that hung at their girdles. One--a "crown bearer"--had a
face streaming with blood, from the crown of thorns which he had vowed to
wear day and night in memory and imitation of the Redeemer's sufferings,
and which on this great occasion he pressed hard into the flesh with
ostentatious martyrdom. One, who, in his monastery, had earned the name
of the "oil-jar," supported himself on his neighbors' arms, for his
emaciated legs could hardly carry his dropsical carcass which, for the
last ten years, he had fed exclusively on gourds, snails, locusts and
Nile water. Another was chained inseparably to a comrade, and the couple
dwelt together in a cave in the limestone hills near Lycopolis. These two
had vowed never to let each other sleep, that so their time for
repentance might be doubled, and their bliss in the next world enhanced
in proportion to their mortifications in this.
One and all, they were allies in a great fight, and the same hopes,
ideas, and wishes fired them all. The Abominable Thing--which imperilled
hundreds of thousands of souls, which invited Satan to assert his
dominion in this world--should fall this day and be annihilated forever!
To them the whole heathen world was the "great whore;" and though the
gems she wore were beautiful to see and rejoiced the mind and heart of
fools, they must be snatched from her painted brow; they would scourge
her from off the face of the redeemed earth and destroy the seducer of
souls forever. "Down with the idols! Down with Serapis! Down with the
heathen!" Their shouts thundered and bellowed all about Agne; but, just
as the uproar and crush were at the worst, a tall and majestic figure
appeared on a balcony above the cross and extended his hand in calm and
dignified benediction towards the seething mass of humanity. As he raised
it all present, including Ague, bowed and bent the knee.
Agne felt, knew, that this stately man was the Bishop whom she sought,
but she did not point him out to her little brother, for his aspect was
that of some proud sovereign rather than of "the good, kind man" of whom
she had dreamed. She could never dare to force her way into the presence
of this great lord! How should the ruler over a million souls find time
or patience for her and her trivial griefs?
However, there must be within his dwelling sundry presbyters and deacons,
and she would address herself to one of them, as soon as the crowd had
dispersed enough for her to make her way to the door beneath the cross.
Twenty times at least did she renew her efforts, but she made very small
progress; most of the monks, as she tried to squeeze past them, roughly
pushed her back; one, on whose arm she ventured to lay her hand, begging
him to make way for her, broke out into shrieks as though a serpent had
stung him, and when the crush brought her into contact with the
crown-bearer he thrust her away exclaiming:
"Away woman! Do not touch me, spawn of Satan tool of the evil one! or I
will tread you under foot!"
Retreat had been as impossible as progress, and long hours went by which
to her seemed like days; still she felt no fatigue, only alarm and
disgust, and, more than anything else, an ardent desire to reach the
Bishop's palace and take counsel of a priest. It was long past noon when
a diversion took place which served at any rate to interest and amuse the
crying child.
On the platform above the doorway Cynegius came forth--Cynegius, the
Emperor's delegate; a stout man of middle height, with a shrewd round
head and a lawyer's face. State dignitaries, Consuls and Prefects had, at
this date, ceased to wear the costume that had marked the patricians of
old Rome--a woollen toga that fell in broad and dignified folds from the
shoulders; a long, close-fitting robe had taken its place, of purple silk
brocade with gold flowers. On the envoy's shoulder blazed the badge of
the highest officials, a cruciform ornament of a peculiarly thick and
costly tissue. He greeted the crowd with a condescending bow, a herald
blew three blasts on the tuba, and then Cynegius, with a wave of his hand
introduced his private secretary who stood by his side, and who at once
opened a roll he held and shouted at the top of a ringing voice:
"Silence in Caesar's name!"
The trumpet then sounded for the fourth time, and silence so complete
fell on the crowded square that the horses of the mounted guard in front
of the Prefect's house could be heard snorting and champing.
"In Caesar's name," repeated the official, who had been selected for the
duty of reading the Imperial message. Cynegius himself bent his head,
again waved his hand towards his secretary, and then towards the statues
of the Emperor and Empress which, mounted on gilt standards, were
displayed to the populace on each side of the balcony; then the reading
began:
"Theodosius Caesar greets the inhabitants of the great and noble city of
Alexandria, by Cynegius, his faithful ambassador and servant. He knows
that its true and honest citizens confess the Holy Faith in all piety and
steadfastness, as delivered to believers in the beginning by Peter, the
prince of the Apostles; he knows that they hold the true Christian faith,
and abide by the doctrine delivered by the Holy Ghost to the Fathers of
the Church in council at Nicaea.
"Theodosius Caesar who, in all humility and pride, claims to be the sword
and shield, the champion and the rampart of the one true faith,
congratulates his subjects of the great and noble city of Alexandria
inasmuch as that most of them have turned from the devilish heresy of
Arius, and have confessed the true Nicaean creed; and he announces to
them, by his faithful and noble servant Cynegius, that this faith and no
other shall be recognized in Alexandria, as throughout his dominions.
"In Egypt, as in all his lands and provinces, every doctrine opposed to
this precious creed shall be persecuted, and all who confess, preach or
diffuse any other doctrine shall be considered heretics and treated as
such."
The secretary paused, for loud and repeated shouts of joy broke from the
multitude. Not a dissentient word was heard-indeed, the man who should
have dared to utter one would certainly not have escaped unpunished. It
was not till the herald had several times blown a warning blast that the
reader could proceed, as follows:
"It has come to the ears of your Caesar, to the deep grieving of his
Christian soul, that the ancient idolatry, which so long smote mankind
with blindness and kept them wandering far from the gates of Paradise,
still, through the power of the devil, has some temples and altars in
your great and noble city. But because it is grievous to the Christian
and clement heart of the Emperor to avenge the persecutions and death
which so many holy martyrs have endured at the hands of the bloodthirsty
and cruel heathen on their posterity, or on the miscreant
and--misbelieving enemies of our holy faith--and because the Lord hath
said 'vengeance is mine'--Theodosius Caesar only decrees that the temples
of the heathen idols in this great and noble city of Alexandria shall be
closed, their images destroyed and their altars overthrown. Whosoever
shall defile himself with blood, or slay an innocent beast for sacrifice,
or enter a heathen temple, or perform any religious ceremony therein, or
worship any image of a god made by hands-nay, or pray in any temple in
the country or in the city, shall be at once required to pay a fine of
fifteen pounds of gold; and whosoever shall know of such a crime being
committed without giving information of it, shall be fined to the same
amount."--[Codex Theodosianus XVI, 10, 10.]
The last words were spoken to the winds, for a shout of triumph, louder
and wilder than had ever before been heard even on this favorite
meeting-place of the populace, rent the very skies. Nor did it cease, nor
yield to any trumpet-blast, but rolled on in spreading waves down every
street and alley; it reached the ships in the port, and rang through the
halls of the rich and the hovels of the poor; it even found a dull echo
in the light-house at the point of Pharos, where the watchman was
trimming the lamp for the night; and in an incredibly short time all
Alexandria knew that Caesar had dealt a death-blow to the worship of the
heathen gods.
The great and fateful rumor was heard, too, in the Museum and the
Serapeum; once more the youth who had grown up in the high schools of the
city, studying the wisdom of the heathen, gathered together; men who had
refined and purified their intellect at the spring of Greek philosophy
and fired their spirit with enthusiasm for all that was good and lovely
in the teaching of ancient Greece--these obeyed the summons of their
master, Olympius, or flew to arms under the leadership of Orestes, the
Governor, for the High-Priest himself had to see to the defences of the
Serapeum.--Olympius had weapons ready in abundance, and the youths
rapidly collected round the standards he had prepared, and rushed into
the square before the Prefect's house to drive away the monks and to
insist that Cynegius should return forthwith to Rome with the Emperor's
edict.
Young and noble lads were they who marched forth to the struggle,
equipped like the Helleman soldiers of the palmy days of Athens; and as
they went they sang a battle-song of Callinus which some one--who, no one
could tell--had slightly altered for the occasion:
"Come, rouse ye Greeks; what, sleeping still!
Is courage dead, is shame unknown?
Start up, rush forth with zealous will,
And smite the mocking Christians down!"
Everything that opposed their progress was overthrown. Two maniples of
foot-soldiers who held the high-road across the Bruchium attempted to
turn them, but the advance of the inflamed young warriors was
irresistible and they reached the street of the Caesareum and the square
in front of the Prefect's residence. Here they paused to sing the last
lines of their battlesong:
"Fate seeks the coward out at home,
He dies unwept, unknown to fame,
While by the hero's honored tomb
Our grandsons' grandsons shall proclaim:
'In the great conflict's fiercest hour
He stood unmoved, our shield and tower.'"
It was here, at the wide opening into the square, that the collision took
place: on one side the handsome youths, crowned with garlands, with their
noble Greek type of heads, thoughtful brows, perfumed curls, and anointed
limbs exercised in the gymnasium--on the other the sinister fanatics in
sheep-skin, ascetic visionaries grown grey in fasting, scourging, and
self-denial.
The monks now prepared to meet the onset of the young enthusiasts who
were fighting for freedom of thought and enquiry, for Art and Beauty.
Each side was defending what it felt to be the highest Good, each was
equally in earnest as to its convictions, both fought for something
dearer and more precious than this earthly span of existence. But the
philosophers' party had swords; the monks' sole weapon was the scourge,
and they were accustomed to ply that, not on each other but on their own
rebellious flesh. A wild and disorderly struggle began with swingeing
blows on both sides; prayers and psalms mingling with the battle-song of
the heathen. Here a monk fell wounded, there one lay dead, there again
lay a fine and delicate-looking youth, felled by the heavy fist of a
recluse. A hermit wrestled hand to hand with a young philosopher who,
only yesterday had delivered his first lecture on the Neo-Platonism of
Plotinus to an interested audience.
And in the midst of this mad struggle stood Agne with her little brother,
who clung closely to her skirts and was too terrified to shed a tear or
utter a cry. The girl was resolutely calm, but she was too utterly
terror-stricken even to pray. Fear, absorbing fear had stunned her
thoughts; it overmastered her like some acute physical pain which began
in her heart and penetrated every fibre of her frame.
Even while the Imperial message was being read she had been too
frightened to take it all in; and now she simply shut her eyes tight and
hardly understood what was going on around her, till a new and different
noise sounded close in her ears: the clatter of hoofs, blare of trumpets
and shouts and screams. At last the tumult died away and, when she
ventured to open her eyes and look about her, the place all round her was
as clear as though it had been swept by invisible hands; here and there
lay a dead body and there still was a dense crowd in the street leading
to the Caesareum, but even that was dispersing and retreating before the
advance of a mounted force.
She breathed freely once more, and released the child's head from the
skirt of her dress in which he had wrapped and buried it. The end of her
alarms was not yet come, however, for a troop of the young heathen came
flying across the square in wild retreat before a division of the heavy
cavalry, which had intervened to part the combatants.
The fugitives came straight towards her; again she closed her eyes
tightly, expecting every instant to find herself under the horses' feet.
Then one of the runaways knocked down Papias, and she could bear no more;
her senses deserted her, her knees failed under her, she lost
consciousness, and with a dull groan she fell on the dusty pavement.
Close to her, as she lay, rushed the pursued and the pursuers--and at
last, how long after she knew not, when she recovered her senses she felt
as if she were floating in the air, and presently perceived that a
soldier had her in his arms and was carrying her like a child.
Fresh alarms and fresh shame overwhelmed the poor girl; she tried to free
herself and found him quite ready to set her down. When she was once more
on her feet and felt that she could stand she glanced wildly round her
with sudden recollection, and then uttered a hoarse cry, for her mouth
and tongue were parched:
"Christ Jesus! Where is my brother?" She pushed back her hair with a
desperate gesture, pressing her hands to her temples and peering all
round her with a look of fevered misery.
She was still in the square and close to the door of the Prefect's house;
a man on horseback, in all probability her preserver's servant, was
following them, leading his master's horse. On the pavement lay wounded
men groaning with pain; the street of the Caesareum was lined with a
double row of footsoldiers of Papias no sign!
Again she called him, and with such deep anguish in her voice, which was
harsh and shrill with terror, that the young officer looked at her with
extreme compassion.
"Papias, Papias--my little brother! O God my Saviour!--where, where is
the child?"
"We will have him sought for," said the soldier whose voice was gentle
and kind. "You are too young and pretty--what brought you into this crowd
and amid such an uproar?"
She colored deeply and looking down answered low and hurriedly: "I was
going to see the Bishop."
"You chose an evil hour," replied Constantine, for it was he who had
found her lying on the pavement and who had thought it only an act of
mercy not to trust so young and fair a girl to the protection of his
followers. "You may thank God that you have got off so cheaply. Now, I
must return to my men. You know where the Bishop lives? Yes, here. And
with regard to your little brother. . . . Stay; do you live in Alexandria?"
"No, my lord."
"But you have some relation or friend whom you lodge with?"
"No, my lord. I am . . . I have . . . I told you, I only want to see my
lord the Bishop."
"Very strange! Well, take care of yourself. My time is not my own; but
by-and-bye, in a very short time, I will speak to the city watchmen; how
old is the boy?"
"Nearly six."
"And with black hair like yours?"
"No, my lord--fair hair," and as she spoke the tears started to her eyes.
"He has light curly hair and a sweet, pretty little face."
The prefect smiled and nodded. "And if they find him," he went on,
"Papias, you say, is his name where is he to be taken?"
"I do not know, my lord, for--and yet! Oh! my head aches, I cannot
think--if only I knew. . . . If they find him he must come here--here
to my lord the Bishop."
"To Theophilus?" said Constantine in surprise. "Yes, yes--to him," she
said hastily. "Or--stay--to the gate-keeper at the Bishop's palace."
"Well, that is less aristocratic, but perhaps it is more to the purpose,"
said the officer; and with a sign to his servant, he twisted his hand in
his horse's mane, leaped into the saddle, waved her a farewell, and
rejoined his men without paying any heed to her thanks.
CHAPTER XIV.
There was much bustle and stir in the hall of the Episcopal palace.
Priests and monks were crowding in and out; widows, who, as deaconesses,
were entrusted with the care of the sick, were waiting, bandages in hand,
and discussing their work and cases, while acolytes lifted the wounded on
to the litters to carry them to the hospitals.
The deacon Eusebius, whom we have met as the spiritual adviser of Marcus,
was superintending the good work, and he took particular care that as
much attention should be shown to the wounded heathen as to the
Christians.
In front of the building veterans of the twenty-first legion paced up and
down in the place of the ordinary gate-keepers, who were sufficient
protection in times of peace.
Agne looked in vain for any but soldiers, but at last she slipped in
unobserved among the men and women who were tending the wounded. She was
terribly thirsty, and seeing one of the widows mixing some wine and water
and offer it to one of the wounded men who pushed it away, she took
courage and begged the deaconess to give her a drink. The woman handed
her the cup at once, asking to whom she belonged that she was here.
"I want to see my lord, the Bishop," replied Agne, but then correcting
herself, she added hastily: "If I could see the Bishop's gate-keeper, I
might speak to him."
"There he is," said the deaconess, pointing to an enormously tall man
standing in the darkest and remotest corner of the hall. The darkness
reminded her for the first time that it was now evening. Night was
drawing on, and then where could she take refuge and find shelter? She
shuddered and simply saying: "Thank you," she went to the man who had
been pointed out to her and begged that if her little brother should be
found and brought to him, he would take charge of him.
"To be sure," said the big man good-naturedly. "He can be taken to the
orphanage of the 'Good Samaritan' if they bring him here, and you can
enquire for him there."
She then made so bold as to ask if she could see a priest; but for this
she was directed to go to the church, as all those who were immediately
attached to the Bishop were to-day fully occupied, and had no time for
trifles. Agne, however, persisted in her request till the man lost
patience altogether and told her to be off at once; but at this instant
three ecclesiastics came in at the door by which her friend was on guard,
and Agne, collecting all her courage, went up to one of them, a priest of
advanced age, and besought him urgently:
"Oh! reverend Father, I beg of you to hear me. I must speak to a priest,
and that man drives me away and says you none of you have time to attend
to me!"
"Did he say that!" asked the priest, and he turned angrily on the culprit
saying: "The Church and her ministers never lack time to attend to the
needs of any faithful soul--I will follow you, brothers.--Now, my child,
what is it that you need?"
"It lies so heavily on my soul," replied Agne, raising her eyes and hands
in humble supplication. "I love my Saviour, but I cannot always do
exactly as I should wish, and I do not know how I ought to act so as not
to fall into sin."
"Come with me," said the priest, and leading the way across a small
garden, he took her into a wide open court and from thence in at a side
door and up a flight of stairs which led to the upper floor. As she
followed him her heart beat high with painful and yet hopeful excitement.
She kept her hands tightly clasped and tried to pray, but she could
hardly control her thoughts of her brother and of all she wanted to say
to the presbyter.
They presently entered a lofty room where the window-shutters were
closed, and where a number of lamps, already lighted, were hanging over
the cushioned divans on which sat rows of busy scribes of all ages.
"Here we are," said the priest kindly, as he seated himself in an
easy-chair at some little distance from the writers. "Now, tell me fully
what troubles you; but as briefly as you can, for I am sparing you these
minutes from important business."
"My lord," she began, "my parents were freeborn, natives of Augusta
Trevirorum. My father was a collector of tribute in the Emperor's service
. . ."
"Very good--but has this anything to do with the matter?"
"Yes, yes, it has. My father and mother were good Christians and in the
riots at Antioch--you remember, my lord, three years ago--they were
killed and I and my brother--Papias is his name . . ."
"Yes, yes--go on."
"We were sold. My master paid for us--I saw the money; but he did not
treat us as slaves. But now he wants me--he, Sir, is wholly devoted to
the heathen gods-and he wants me . . ."
"To serve his idols?"
"Yes, reverend Father, and so we ran away."
"Quite right, my child."
"But the scriptures say that the slave shall obey his master?"
"True; but higher than the master in the flesh is the Father in Heaven,
and it is better a thousand times to sin against man than against God."
This conversation had been carried on in an undertone on account of the
scribes occupied at the desks; but the priest raised his voice with his
last words, and he must have been heard in the adjoining room, for a
heavy curtain of plain cloth was opened, and an unusually deep and
powerful voice exclaimed:
"Back again already, Irenaeus! That is well; I want to speak with you."
"Immediately, my lord--I am at your service in a moment.--Now, my child,"
he added, rising, "you know what your duty is. And if your master looks
you up and insists on your assisting at the sacrifice or what ever it may
be, you will find shelter with us. My name is Irenaeus."
Here he was again interrupted, for the curtain was lifted once more and a
man came out of the inner room whom no one could forget after having once
met him. It was the Bishop whom Agne had seen on the balcony; she
recognized him at once, and dropped on her knees to kiss the hem of his
robe in all humility. Theophilus accepted the homage as a matter of
course, hastily glancing at the child with his large keen eyes; Agne not
daring to raise hers, for there was certainly something strangely
impressive in his aspect. Then, with a wave of his long thin hand to
indicate Agne, he asked:
"What does this girl want?"
"A freeborn girl--parents Christian--comes from Antioch. . ." replied
Irenaeus. "Sold to a heathen master--commanded to serve idols--has run
away and now has doubts. . ."
"You have told her to which Lord her service is due?" interrupted the
Bishop. Then, turning to Agne, he said: "And why did you come here
instead of going to the deacon of your own church?"
"We have only been here a few days," replied the girl timidly, as she
ventured to raise her eyes to the handsome face of this princely prelate,
whose fine, pale features looked as if they had been carved out of
marble.
"Then go to partake of the sacred Eucharist in the basilica of Mary,"
replied the Bishop. "It is just now the hour--but no, stop. You are a
stranger here you say; you have run away from your master--and you are
young, very young and very. . . . It is dark too. Where are you intending
to sleep?"
"I do not know," said Agne, and her eyes filled with tears.
"That is what I call courage!" murmured Theophilus to the priest, and
then he added to Agne: "Well, thanks to the saints, we have asylums for
such as you, here in the city. That scribe will give you a document which
will secure your admission to one. So you come from Antioch? Then there
is the refuge of Seleucus of Antioch. To what parish--[Parochia in
Latin]--did your parents belong?"
"To that of John the Baptist?"
"Where Damascius was the preacher?"
"Yes, holy Father. He was the shepherd of our souls."
"What! Damascius the Arian?" cried the Bishop. He drew his fine and
stately figure up to its most commanding height and closed his thin lips
in august contempt, while Irenaeus, clasping his hands in horror, asked
her:
"And you--do you, too, confess the heresy of Arius?"
"My parents were Arians," replied Agne in much surprise. "They taught me
to worship the godlike Saviour."
"Enough!" exclaimed the Bishop severely. "Come Irenaeus."
He nodded to the priest to follow him, opened the curtain and went in
first with supreme dignity.
Agne stood as if a thunderbolt had fallen, pale, trembling and desperate.
Then was she not a Christian? Was it a sin in a child to accept the creed
of her parents? And were those who, after charitably extending a saving
hand, had so promptly withdrawn it--were they Christians in the full
meaning of the All-merciful Redeemer?
Agonizing doubts of everything that she had hitherto deemed sacred and
inviolable fell upon her soul; doubts of everything in heaven and earth,
and not merely of Christ and of his godlike, or divine goodness--for what
difference was there to her apprehension in the meaning of the two words
which set man to hunt and persecute man? In the distress and hopeless
dilemma in which she found herself, she shed no tears; she simply stood
rooted to the spot where she had heard the Bishop's verdict.
Presently her attention was roused by the shrill voice of an old writer
who called out to one of the younger assistants.
"That girl disturbs me, Petubastis; show her out." Petubastis, a pretty
Egyptian lad, was more than glad of an interruption to his work which
somehow seemed endless to-day; he put aside his implements, stroked back
the black hair that had fallen over his face, and removing the reed-pen
from behind his ear, stuck in a sprig of dark blue larkspur. Then he
tripped to the door, opened it, looked at the girl with the cool
impudence of a connoisseur in beauty, bowed slightly, and pointing the
way out said with airified politeness:
"Allow me!"
Agne at once obeyed and with a drooping head left the room; but the young
Egyptian stole out after her, and as soon as the door was shut he seized
her hand and said in a whisper: "If you can wait half an hour at the
bottom of the stairs, pretty one, I will take you somewhere where you
will enjoy yourself."
She had stopped to listen, and looked enquiringly into his face, for she
had no suspicion of his meaning; the young fellow, encouraged by this,
laid his hand on her shoulder and would have drawn her towards him but
that she, thrusting him from her as if he were some horrible animal, flew
down the steps as fast as her feet could carry her, and through the
courtyard back into the great entrance-hall.
Here all was, by this time, dark and still; only a few lamps lighted the
pillared space and the flare of a torch fell upon the benches placed
there for the accommodation of priests, laymen and supplicants generally.
Utterly worn out--whether by terror or disappointment or by hunger and
fatigue she scarcely knew--she sank on a seat and buried her face in her
hands.
During her absence the wounded had been conveyed to the sick-houses; one
only was left whom they had not been able to move. He was lying on a
mattress between two of the columns at some little distance from Agne,
and the light of a lamp, standing on a medicine-chest, fell on his
handsome but bloodless features. A deaconess was kneeling at his head and
gazed in silence in the face of the dead, while old Eusebius crouched
prostrate by his side, resting his cheek on the breast of the man whose
eyes were sealed in eternal sleep. Two sounds only broke the profound
silence of the deserted hall: an occasional faint sob from the old man
and the steady step of the soldiers on guard in front of the Bishop's
palace. The widow, kneeling with clasped hands, never took her eyes off
the face of the youth, nor moved for fear of disturbing the deacon who,
as she knew, was praying--praying for the salvation of the heathen soul
snatched away before it could repent. Many minutes passed before the old
man rose, dried his moist eyes, pressed his lips to the cold hand of the
dead and said sadly:
"So young--so handsome--a masterpiece of the Creator's hand! . . . Only
to-day as gay as a lark, the pride and joy of his mother-and now! How
many hopes, how much triumph and happiness are extinct with that life. O
Lord my Saviour, Thou hast said that not only those who call Thee Lord,
Lord, shall find grace with our Father in Heaven, and that Thou hast shed
Thy blood for the salvation even of the heathen--save, redeem this one!
Thou that are the Good Shepherd, have mercy on this wandering sheep!"
Stirred to the bottom of his soul the old man threw up his arms and gazed
upwards rapt in ecstasy. But presently, with an effort, he said to the
deaconess:
"You know, Sister, that this lad was the only son of Berenice, the widow
of Asclepiodorus, the rich shipowner. Poor, bereaved mother! Only
yesterday he was driving his guadriga out of the gate on the road to
Marea, and now--here! Go and tell her of this terrible occurrence. I
would go myself but that, as I am a priest, it might be painful to her to
learn of his tragic end from one of the very men against whom the poor
darkened youth had drawn the sword. So do you go, Sister, and treat the
poor soul very tenderly; and if you find it suitable show her very gently
that there is One who has balm for every wound, and that we--we and all
who believe in Him--lose what is dear to us only to find it again. Tell
her of hope: Hope is everything. They say that green is the color of
hope, for it is the spring-tide of the heart. There may be a Spring for
her yet."
The deaconess rose, pressed a kiss on the eyes of the dead youth,
promised Eusebius that she would do her best and went away. He, too, was
about to leave when he heard a sound of low sobbing from one of the
benches. He stood still to listen, shook his old head, and muttering to
himself:
"Great God--merciful and kind. . . . Thou alone canst know wherefore Thou
hast set the rose-garland of life with so many sharp thorns," he went up
to Agne who rose at his approach.
"Why, my child," he said kindly, "what are you weeping for? Have you,
too, lost some dear one killed in the fray?"
"No, no," she hastily replied with a gesture of terror at the thought.
"What then do you want here at so late an hour?"
"Nothing--nothing," she said. "That is all over! Good God, how long I
must have been sitting here--I--I know I must go; yes, I know it."
"And are you alone-no one with you?"
She shook her head sadly. The old man looked at her narrowly.
"Then I will take you safe home," he said. "You see I am an old man and a
priest. Where do you live, my child?"
"I? I. . ." stammered Agne, and a torrent of scalding tears fell down her
cheeks. "My God! my God! where, where am I to go?"
"You have no home, no one belonging to you?" asked the old man. "Come,
child, pluck up your courage and tell me truly what it is that troubles
you; perhaps I may be able to help you."
"You?" she said with bitter melancholy. "Are not you one of the Bishop's
priests?"
"I am a deacon, and Theophilus is the head of my church; but for that
very reason . . ."
"No," said Agne sharply, "I will deceive no one. My parents were Arians,
and as my beliefs are the same as theirs the Bishop has driven me away as
an outcast, finally and without pity."
"Indeed," said Eusebius. "Did the Bishop do that? Well, as the head of a
large community of Christians he, of course, is bound to look at things
in their widest aspect; small things, small people can be nothing to him.
I, on the contrary, am myself but a small personage, and I care for small
things. You know, child, that the Lord has said 'that in his Father's
kingdom there are many mansions,' and that in which Arius dwells is not
mine; but it is in the Father's kingdom nevertheless. It cannot be so
much amiss after all that you should cling to the creed of your parents.
What is your name?"
"Agne."
"Agne, or the lamb. A pretty, good name! It is a name I love, as I, too,
am a shepherd, though but a very humble one, so trust yourself to me,
little lamb. Tell me, why are you crying? And whom do you seek here? And
how is it that you do not know where to find a home?"
Eusebius spoke with such homely kindness, and his voice was so full of
fatherly sympathy that hope revived in Agne's breast, and she told him
with frank confidence all he wanted to know.
The old man listened with many a "Hum" and "Ha"--then he bid her
accompany him to his own house, where his wife would find a corner that
she might fill.
She gladly agreed, and thanked him eagerly when he also told the
doorkeeper to bring Papias after them if he should be found. Relieved of
the worst of her griefs, Agne followed her new friend through the streets
and lanes, till they paused at the gate of a small garden and he said:
"Here we are. What we have we give gladly, but it is little, very little.
Indeed, who can bear to live in luxury when so many are perishing in want
and misery?"
As they went across the plot, between the little flower-beds, the deacon
pointed to a tree and said with some pride: "Last year that tree bore me
three hundred and seven peaches, and it is still healthy and productive."
A hospitable light twinkled in the little house at the end of the garden,
and as they entered a queer-looking dog came out to meet his master,
barking his welcome. He jumped with considerable agility on his
fore-legs, but his hind legs were paralyzed and his body sloped away and
stuck up in the air as though it were attached to an invisible board.
"This is my good friend Lazarus," said the old man cheerfully. "I found
the poor beggar in the road one day, and as he was one of God's
creatures, although he is a cripple, I comfort myself with the verse from
the Psalms: 'The Lord has no joy in the strength of a horse, neither
taketh he pleasure in any man's legs.'"
He was so evidently content and merry that Agne could not help laughing
too, and when, in a few minutes, the deacon's wife gave her a warm and
motherly reception she would have been happier than she had been for a
long time past, if only her little brother had not been a weight on her
mind and if she had not longed so sadly to have him safe by her side. But
even that anxiety presently found relief, for she was so weary and
exhausted that, after eating a few mouthfuls, she was thankful to lie
down in the clean bed that Elizabeth had prepared for her, and she
instantly fell asleep. She was in the old deacon's bed, and he made ready
to pass the night on the couch in his little sitting-room.
As soon as the old couple were alone Eusebius told his wife how and where
he had met the girl and ended by saying:
"It is a puzzling question as to these Arians and other Christian
heretics. I cannot be hard on them so long as they cling faithfully to
the One Lord who is necessary to all. If we are in the right--and I
firmly believe that we are--and the Son is of one substance of the
Father, he is without spot or blemish; and what can be more divine than
to overlook the error of another if it concerns ourselves, or what more
meanly human than to take such an error amiss and indulge in a cruel or
sanguinary revenge on the erring soul? Do not misunderstand me. I,
unfortunately--or rather, I say, thank God!--I have done nothing great
here on earth, and have never risen to be anything more than a deacon.
But if a boy comes up to me and mistakes me for an acolyte or something
of that kind, is that a reason why I should flout or punish him? Not a
bit of it.
"And to my belief our Saviour is too purely divine to hate those who
regard Him as only 'God-like.' He is Love. And when Arius goes to Heaven
and sees Jesus Christ in all His divine glory, and falls down before Him
in an ecstasy of joy and repentance, the worst the Lord will do to him
will be to take him by the ear and say: 'Thou fool! Now thou seest what I
really am; but thine errors be forgiven!'"
Elizabeth nodded assent. "Amen," she said, "so be it.--And so, no doubt,
it will be. Did the Lord cast out the woman taken in adultery? Did he not
give us the parable of the Samaritan?--Poor little girl! We have often
wished for a daughter and now we have found one; a pretty creature she is
too. God grants us all our wishes! But you must be tired, old man; go to
rest now."
"Directly, directly," said Eusebius; but then, striking his forehead with
his hand, he went on in much annoyance: "And with all this tumult and
worry I had quite forgotten the most important thing of all: Marcus! He
is like a possessed creature, and if I do not make a successful appeal to
his conscience before he sleeps this night mischief will come of it. Yes,
I am very tired; but duty before rest. It is of no use to contradict me,
Mother. Get me my cloak; I must go to the lad." And a few minutes later
the old man was making his way to the house in the Canopic street.
CHAPTER XV.
Dread and anxiety had taken possession of the merchant's household after
Constantine had left them. Messengers came hurrying in, one after
another, to request the presence of Olympius. A heathen secretary of
Evagrius the Governor, had revealed what was astir, and the philosopher
had at once prepared to return to the Serapeum. Porphyrius himself
ordered his closed harmamaxa to be brought out, and undertook to fetch
weapons and standards to the temple from a storehouse where they were
laid by. This building stood on a plot of ground belonging to him in
Rhacotis, behind a timber-yard which was accessible from the streets in
front and behind, but sheltered from the public gaze by sheds and
wood-stacks.
The old aqueduct, which supplied the courts of sacrifice and the
Subterranean crypts of the temple where the mysteries of Serapis were
celebrated, passed close by the back-wall of this warehouse. Since the
destruction of the watercourse, under the Emperor Julian, the underground
conduit had been dry and empty, and a man by slightly stooping could
readily pass through it unseen into the Serapeum. This mysterious passage
had lately been secretly cleared out, and it was now to be used for the
transport of the arms to the temple precincts.
Damia had been present at the brief but vehement interview between her
son and Olympius, and had thrown in a word now and again: "It is serious,
very serious!" or, "Fight it out--no quarter!"
The parting was evidently a very painful one to Olympius; when the
merchant held out both his hands the older man clasped them in his and
held them to his breast, saying: "Thanks, my friend; thanks for all you
have done. We have lived--and if now we perish it is for the future
happiness of our grandchildren. What would life be to you and me if it
were marred by scourgings and questionings?--The omens read ill, and if I
am not completely deceived we are at the beginning of the end. What lies
beyond! . . . we as philosophers must meet it calmly. The supreme Mind that
governs us has planned the universe so well, that it is not likely that
those things of which we now have no knowledge should not also be ordered
for the best. The pinions of my soul beat indeed more freely and lightly
as I foresee the moment when it shall be released from the burden of this
flesh!"
The High-Priest raised his arms as though indeed he were prepared to soar
and uttered a fervent and inspired prayer in which he rehearsed to the
gods all that he and his had done in their honor and vowed to offer them
fresh sacrifices. His expressions were so lofty, and his flow of language
so beautiful and free, that Porphyrius did not dare to interrupt him,
though this long delay on the part of the leader of the cause made him
intolerably anxious. When the old man--who was as emotional as a
boy--ceased speaking, his white beard was wet with tears, and seeing that
even Damia's and Gorgo's eyes were moist, he was preparing to address
them again; but Porphyrius interposed. He gave him time only to press his
lips to Datnia's hand and to bid Gorgo farewell.
"You were born into stirring times," he said to her, "but under a good
sign. Two worlds are in collision; which shall survive?--For you, my
darling, I have but one wish: May you be happy!"
He left the room and the merchant paced up and down lost in gloomy
thoughts. Presently, as he caught his mother's eye fixed uneasily upon
him, he murmured, less to her than to himself: "If he can think thus of
what the end will be, who can still dare to hope?" Damia drew herself up
in her chair.
"I," she exclaimed passionately, "I--I dare, and I do hope and trust in
the future. Is everything to perish which our forefathers planned and
founded? Is this dismal superstition to overwhelm and bury the world and
all that is bright and beautiful, as the lava stream rolled over the
cities of Vesuvius? No, a thousand times no! Our retrograde and cowardly
generation, which has lost all heart to enjoy life in sheer dread of
future annihilation, may perhaps be doomed by the gods, as was that of
Deucalion's day. Well--if so, what must be must! But such a world as they
dream of never can, never will last. Let them succeed in their monstrous
scheme! if the Temple of temples, the House of Serapis, were to be in
ashes and the image of the mighty god to be dashed to pieces, what
then. . . . I say what then? Then indeed everything will be at an end--we,
everybody; but they too, they, too, will perish."
She clenched her fist with hatred and revenge and went on: "I know what I
know--there are legible and infallible signs, and it is given to me to
interpret them, and I tell you: It is true, unerringly true, as every
Alexandrian child has learnt from its nurse: When Serapis falls the earth
will collapse like a dry puff-ball under a horse's hoof. A hundred
oracles have announced it, it is written in the prophecies of the
heavenly bodies, and in the scroll of Fate. Let them be! Let it come! The
end is sweet to those who, in the hour of death, can see the enemy thrust
the sword into his own breast."
The old woman sank back panting and gasping for breath, but Gorgo
hastened to support her in her arms and she soon recovered. Hardly had
she opened her eyes again than, seeing her son still in the room, she
went on angrily:
"You--here still? Do you think there is any time to spare? They will be
waiting, waiting for you! You have the key and they need weapons."
"I know what I am about," replied Porphyrius calmly. "All in good time. I
shall be on the spot long before the youngsters have assembled. Cyrus
will bring me the pass-words and signs; I shall send off the messengers,
and then I shall still be in time for action."
"Messengers! To whom?"
"To Barkas. He is at the head of more than a thousand Libyan peasants and
slaves. I shall send one, too, to Pachomius to bid him win us over
adherents among the Biamite fishermen and the population of the eastern
Delta."
"Right, right--I know. Twenty talents--Pachomius is poor--twenty talents
shall be his, out of my private coffer, if only they are here in time."
"I would give ten, thirty times as much if they were only here now!"
cried the merchant, giving way for the first time to the expression of
his real feelings. "When I began life my father taught me the new
superstitions. Its chains still hang about me; but in this fateful hour I
feel more strongly than ever, and I mean to show, that I am faithful to
the old gods. We will not be wanting; but alas! there is no escape for us
now if the Imperial party are staunch. If they fall upon us before Barkas
can join us, all is lost; if, on the contrary, Barkas comes at once and
in time, there is still some hope; all may yet be well. What can a party
of monks do? And as yet only our Constantine's heavy cavalry have come to
the assistance of the two legions of the garrison."
"Our Constantine!" shrieked Damia. "Whose? I ask you, whose? We have
nothing to do with that miserable Christian!"
But Gorgo turned upon her at once:
"Indeed, grandmother," she exclaimed, quivering with rage, "but we have!
He is a soldier and must do his duty; but he is fondly attached to us."
"Us, us?" retorted the old woman with a laugh. "Has he sworn love to you,
let me ask? Has he? and you-do you believe him, simple fool? I know him,
I know him! Why, for a scrap of bread and a drop of wine from the hand of
his priest he would see you and all of us plunged into misery! But see,
here are the messengers."
Porphyrius gave his instructions to the young men who now entered the
hall, hurried them off, clasped Gorgo in a tender embrace and then bent
over his mother to kiss her--a thing he had not done for many a day. Old
Damia laid aside her stick, and taking her son's face in both her
withered hands, muttered a few words which were half a fond appeal and
half a magical formula, and then the women were alone. For a long while
both were silent. The old woman sat sunk in her arm-chair while Gorgo
stood with her back against the pedestal of a bust of Plato, gazing
meditatively at the ground. At last it was Damia who spoke, asking to be
carried into the women's rooms.
Gorgo, however, stopped her with a gesture, went close to her and said:
"No, wait a minute, mother; first you must hear what I have to say."
"What you have to say?" asked her grandmother, shrugging her shoulders.
"Yes. I have never deceived you; but one thing I have hitherto concealed
from you because I was never till this morning sure of it myself--now I
am. Now I know that I love him."
"The Christian?" said the old woman, pushing aside a shade that screened
her eyes.
"Yes, Constantine; I will not hear you abuse him." Damia laughed sharply,
and said in a tone of supreme scorn:
"You will not? Then you had better stop your ears, my dear, for as long
as my tongue can wag. . . ."
"Hush, grandmother, say no more," said the girl resolutely. "Do not
provoke me with more than I can bear. Eros has pierced me later than he
does most girls and has done it but once, but how deeply you can never
know. If you speak ill of him you only aggravate the wound and you would
not be so cruel! Do not--I entreat you; drop the subject or else. . ."
"Or else?"
"Or else I must die, mother--and you know you love me."
Her tone was soft but firm; her words referred to the future, but that
future was as clear to Gorgo's view as if it were past. Damia gave a
hasty, sidelong glance at her grandchild, and a cold chill ran through
her; the--girl stood and spoke with an air of inspiration--she was full
of the divinity as Damia thought, and the old woman herself felt as
though she were in a temple and in the immediate presence of the
Immortals.
Gorgo waited for a reply, but in vain; and as her grandmother remained
silent she went back to her place by the pedestal. At last Damia raised
her wrinkled face, looked straight in the girl's eyes and asked:
"And what is to be the end of it?"
"Aye--what?" said Gorgo gloomily and she shook her head. "I ask myself
and can find no answer, for his image is ever present to me and yet walls
and mountains stand between us. That face, that image--I might perhaps
force myself to shatter it; but nothing shall ever induce me to let it be
defiled or disgraced! Nothing!"
The old woman sank into brooding thought once more; mechanically she
repeated Gorgo's last word, and at intervals that gradually became longer
she murmured, at last scarcely audibly: "Nothing--nothing!"
She had lost all sense of time and of her immediate surroundings, and
long-forgotten sorrows crowded on her memory: The dreadful day when a
young freedman--a gifted astronomer and philosopher who had been
appointed her tutor, and whom she had loved with all the passion of a
vehement nature--had been kicked out of her father's house by slaves, for
daring to aspire to her hand. She had given him up--she had been forced
to do so; and after she was the wife of another and he had risen to fame,
she had never given him any token that she had not forgotten him. Two
thirds of a century lay between that happy and terrible time, and the
present. He had been dead many a long year, and still she remembered him,
and was thinking of him even now. A singular effort of fancy showed her
herself, as she had then been, and Gorgo--whom she saw not with her
bodily eyes, though the girl was standing in front of her--two young
creatures side by side. The two were but one in her vision; the same
anguish that embittered one life now threatened the other. But after all
she, Damia, had dragged this grief after her through the weary decades,
like the iron ball at the end of a chain which keeps the galley-slave to
his place at the oar, and from which he can no more escape than from a
ponderous and ever-present shadow; and Gorgo's sorrow could not at any
rate be for long, since the end of all things was at hand--it was coming
slowly but with inevitable certainty, nearer and nearer every hour.
When had a troop of enthusiastic students and hastily-collected
peasant-soldiers ever been able to snake an effectual stand against the
hosts of Rome? Damia, who only a few minutes since had spoken with such
determined encouragement to her son, had terrible visions of the Imperial
legions putting Olympius to rout, with the Libyans under Barkas and the
Biamite rabble under Pachomius; storming the Serapeum and reducing it to
ruin: Firebrands flying through its sacred halls, the roof giving way,
the vaults falling in; the sublime image of the god--the magnificent work
of Bryaxis--battered by a hail of stones, and sinking to mingle with the
reeking dust. Then a cry rose up from all nature, as though every star in
heaven, every wave of ocean, every leaf of the forest, every blade in the
meadow, every rock on the shore and every grain of sand in the
measureless desert had found a voice; and this universal wail of "Woe,
woe!" was drowned by rolling thunder such as the ear of man had never
heard, and no mortal creature could hear and live. The heavens opened,
and out of the black gulf of death-bearing clouds poured streams of fire;
consuming flames rose to meet it from the riven womb of earth, rushing
up to lick the sky. What had been air turned to fire and ashes, the
silver and gold stars fell crashing from the firmament, and the heavens
themselves bowed and collapsed, burying the ruined earth. Ashes, ashes,
fine grey dusty ashes pervaded space, till presently a hurricane rose and
swept away the chaos of gloom, and vast nothingness yawned before her: a
bottomless abyss--an insatiable throat, swallowing down with greedy
thirst all that was left; till where the world had been, with gods and
men and all their works, there was only nothingness; hideous, inscrutable
and unfathomable. And in it, above it, around it--for what are the
dimensions of nothingness?--there reigned the incomprehensible Unity of
the Primal One, in calm and pitiless self-concentration, beyond--the
Real, nay even beyond the Conceivable--for conception implies
plurality--the Supreme One of the Neo-Platonists to whose school she
belonged.
The old woman's blood ran cold and hot as she pictured the scene; but she
believed in it, and chose to believe in it; "Nothing, nothing . . ." which
she had begun by muttering, insensibly changed to "Nothingness,
nothingness!" and at last she spoke it aloud.
Gorgo stood spellbound as she gazed at her grandmother. What had come
over her? What was the meaning of this glaring eye, this gasping breath,
this awful expression in her face, this convulsive action of her hands?
Was she mad? And what did she mean by "Nothingness, nothingness. . ."
repeated in a sort of hollow cry?
Terrified beyond bearing she laid her hand on Dalnia's shoulder, saying:
"Mother, mother! wake up! What do you mean by saying 'nothingness,
nothingness' in that dreadful way?"
Dainia collected her scattered wits, shivered with cold and then said,
dully at first, but with a growing cheerfulness that made Gorgo's blood
run cold: "Did I say 'nothingness'? Did I speak of the great void, my
child? You are quick of hearing. Nothingness--well, you have learnt to
think; are you capable of defining the meaning of the word--a monster
that has neither head nor tail, neither front nor back--can you, I say,
define the idea of nothingness?"
"What do you mean, mother?" said Gorgo with growing alarm.
"No, she does not know, she does not understand," muttered the old woman
with a dreary smile. "And yet Melampus told me, only yesterday, that you
understood his lesson on conic sections better than many men. Aye, aye,
child; I, too, learnt mathematics once, and I still go through various
calculations every night in my observatory; but to this day I find it
difficult to conceive of a mathematical point. It is nothing and yet it
is something. But the great final nothingness!--And that even is
nonsense, for it can be neither great nor small, and come neither sooner
nor later. Is it not so, my sweet? Think of nothing--who cannot do that;
but it is very hard to imagine nothingness. We can neither of us achieve
that. Not even the One has a place in it. But what is the use of racking
our brains? Only wait till to-morrow or the day after; something will
happen then which will reduce our own precious persons and this beautiful
world to that nothingness which to-day is inconceivable. It is coming; I
can hear from afar the brazen tramp of the airy and incorporeal monster.
A queer sort of giant--smaller than the mathematical point of which we
were speaking, and yet vast beyond all measurement. Aye, aye; our
intelligence, polyp-like, has long arms and can apprehend vast size and
wide extent; but it can no more conceive of nothingness than it can of
infinite space or time.
"I was dreaming that this monstrous Nought had come to his kingdom and
was opening a yawning mouth and toothless jaws to swallow its all down
into the throat that it has not got--you, and me, and your young officer,
with this splendid, recreant city and the sky and the earth. Wait, only
wait! The glorious image of Serapis still stands radiant, but the cross
casts an ominous shadow that has already darkened the light over half the
earth! Our gods are an abomination to Caesar, and Cynegius only carries
out his wishes. . ."
Here Damia was interrupted by the steward, who rushed breathless into the
room, exclaiming:
"Lost! All is lost! An edict of Theodosius commands that every temple of
the gods shall be closed, and the heavy cavalry have dispersed our
force."
"Ah ha!" croaked the old woman in shrill accents. "You see, you see!
There it is: the beginning of the end! Yes--your cavalry are a powerful
force. They are digging a grave--wide and deep, with room in it for many:
for you, for me, and for themselves, too, and for their Prefect.--Call
Argus, man, and carry me into the Gynaeconitis--[The women's
apartment]--and there tell us what has happened." In the women's room the
steward told all he knew, and a sad tale it was; one thing, however, gave
him some comfort: Olympius was at the Serapeunt and had begun to fortify
the temple, and garrison it with a strong force of adherents.
Damia had definitively given up all hope, and hardly heeded this part of
his story, while on Gorgo's mind it had a startling effect. She loved
Constantine with all the fervor of a first, and only, and long-suppressed
passion; she had repented long since of her little fit of suspicion, and
it would have cost her no perceptible effort to humble her pride, to fly
to him and pray for forgiveness. But she could not--dared not--now, when
everything was at stake, renounce her fidelity to the gods for whose sake
she had let him leave her in anger, and to whom she must cling, cost what
it might; that would be a base desertion. If Olympius were to triumph in
the struggle she might go to her lover and say: "Do you remain a
Christian, and leave me the creed of my childhood, or else open my heart
to yours." But, as matters now stood, her first duty was to quell her
passion and retrain faithful to the end, even though the cause were lost.
She was Greek to the backbone; she knew it and felt it, and yet her eye
had sparkled with pride as she heard the steward's tale, and she seemed
to see Constantine at the head of his horsemen, rushing upon the heathen
and driving them to the four winds like a flock of sheep. Her heart beat
high for the foe rather than for her hapless friends--these were but
bruised reeds--those were the incarnation of victorious strength.
These divided feelings worried and vexed her; but her grandmother had
suggested a way of reconciling them. Where he commanded victory followed,
and if the Christians should succeed in destroying the image of Serapis
the joints of the world would crack and the earth would crumble away. She
herself was familiar with the traditions and the oracles which with one
consent foretold this doom; she had learnt them as an infant from her
nurse, from the slave-women at the loom, from learned men and astute
philosophers--and to her the horrible prophecy meant a solution of every
contradiction and the bitter-sweet hope of perishing with the man she
loved.
As it grew dark another person appeared: the Moschosphragist--[The
examiner of sacrificed animals]--from the temple of Serapis, who, every
day, examined the entrails of a slaughtered beast for Damia; to-day the
augury had been so bad that he was almost afraid of revealing it. But the
old woman, sure of it beforehand, took his soothsaying quite calmly, and
only desired to be carried up to her observatory that she might watch the
risings of the stars.
Gorgo remained alone below. From the adjoining workrooms came the
monotonous rattle of the loom at which, as usual, a number of slaves were
working.
Suddenly the clatter ceased. Damia had sent a slave-girl down to say that
they might leave off work and rest till next day if they chose. She had
ordered that wine should be distributed to them in the great hall, as
freely as at the great festival of Dionysus.
All was silent in the Gynaeconitis. The garlands of flowers, which Gorgo
herself had helped some damsels of her acquaintance to twine for the
temple of Isis, lay in a heap-the steward had told her that the venerable
sanctuary was to be closed and surrounded by soldiers. This then put an
end to the festival; and she could have been heartily glad, for it
relieved her of the necessity of defying Constantine; still, it was with
tender melancholy that she thought of the gentle goddess in whose
sanctuary she had so often found comfort and support. She could remember,
as a tiny child, gathering the first flowers in her little garden, and
sticking them in the ground near the tank from which water was fetched
for libations in the temple; with the pocketmoney given her by her
elders, she had bought perfumes to pour on the altars of the divinity;
and often when her heart was heavy she had found relief in prayer before
the marble statue of the goddess. How splendid had the festivals of Isis
been, how gladly and rapturously had she sung in their honor! Almost
everything that had lent poetry and dignity to her childhood had been
bound up with Isis and her sanctuary--and now it was closed and the image
of the divine mother was perhaps lying in fragments in the dirt!
Gorgo knew all the lofty ideals which lay at the foundation of the
worship of this goddess; but it was not to them that she had turned for
help, but to the image in whose mystical strength she trusted. And what
had already been done to Isis and her temple might soon be done to
Serapis and to his house.
She could not bear the thought, for she had been accustomed to regard the
Serapeum as the very heart of the universe--the centre and fulcrum on
which the balance of the earth depended; to her, Serapis himself was
inseparable from his temple and its atmosphere of magical and mystical
power. Every prophecy, every Sibylline text, every oracle must be false
if the overthrow of that image could remain unpunished--if the
destruction of the universe failed to follow, as surely as a, flood
ensues from a breach in a dyke. How indeed could it be otherwise,
according to the explanation which her teacher had given her of the
Neo-Platonic conception of the nature of the god?
It was not Serapis but the great and unapproachable One--supreme above
comprehension and sublime beyond conception, for whose majesty every name
was too mean, the fount and crown of Good and Beauty, in whole all that
exists ever has been and ever shall be. He it was who, like a brimful
vessel, overflowed with the quintessence of what we call divine; and from
this effluence emanated the divine Mind, the pure intelligence which is
to the One what light is to the sun. This Mind with its vitality--a life
not of time but of eternity--could stir or remain passive as it listed;
it included a Plurality, while the One was Unity, and forever
indivisible. The concept of each living creature proceeded from the
second: The eternal Mind; and this vivifying and energizing intelligence
comprehended the prototypes of every living being, hence, also, of the
immortal gods--not themselves but their idea or image. And just as the
eternal Mind proceeded from the One, so, in the third place, did the Soul
of the universe proceed from the second; that Soul whose twofold nature
on one side touched the supreme Mind, and, on the other, the baser world
of matter. This was the immortal Aphrodite, cradled in bliss in the pure
radiance of the ideal world and yet unable to free herself from the gross
clay of matter fouled by sensuality and the vehicle of sin.
The head of Serapis was the eternal Mind; in his broad breast slept the
Soul of the Universe, and the prototypes of all created things; the world
of matter was the footstool under his feet. All the subordinate forces
obeyed him, the mighty first Cause, whose head towered up to the realm of
the incomprehensible and inconceivable One. He was the sum total of the
universe, the epitome of things created; and at the same time he was the
power which gave them life and intelligence and preserved them from
perishing by perpetual procreation. It was his might that kept the
multiform structure of the material and psychical world in perennial
harmony. All that lived--Nature and its Soul as much as Man and his
Soul--were inseparably dependent on him. If he--if Serapis were to fall,
the order of the universe must be destroyed; and with him: The Synthesis
of the Universe--the Universe itself must cease to exist.
But what would survive would not be the nothingness--the void of which
her grandmother had spoken; it would be the One--the cold, ineffable,
incomprehensible One! This world would perish with Serapis; but perhaps
it might please that One to call another world into being out of his
overflowing essence, peopled by other and different beings.
Gorgo was startled out of these meditations by a wild tumult which came
up from the slaves' hall some distance off and reached her ears in the
women's sitting-room. Could her grandmother have opened the wine stores
all too freely; were the miserable wretches already drunk?
No, the noise was not that of a troop of slaves who have forgotten
themselves, and given the rein to their wild revelry under the influence
of Dionysus! She listened and could distinctly hear lamentable howls and
wild cries of grief. Something frightful must have happened! Had some
evil befallen her father? Greatly alarmed she flew across the courtyard
to the slaves' quarters and found the whole establishment, black and
white alike, in a state of frenzy. The women were rushing about with
their hair unbound over their faces, beating their breasts and wailing,
the men squatted in silence with their wine-cups before them untouched,
softly sobbing and whining.
What had come upon them--what blow had fallen on the house?
Gorgo called her old nurse and learnt from her that the Moschosphragist
had just told them that the troops had been placed all round the Serapeum
and that the Emperor had commanded the Prefect of the East to lay violent
hands on the temple of the King of gods. Today or to-morrow the crime was
to be perpetrated. They had been warned to pray and repent of their sins,
for at the moment when the holiest sanctuary on earth should fall the
whole world would crumble into nothingness. The entrails of the beast
sacrificed by Damia had been black as though scorched, and a terrific
groan had been heard from the god himself in the great shrine; the
pillars of the great hypostyle had trembled and the three heads of
Cerberus, lying at the feet of Serapis; had opened their jaws.
Gorgo listened in silence to the old woman's story; and all she said in
reply was: "Let them wail."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Pretended to see nothing in the old woman's taunts
Very hard to imagine nothingness
SERAPIS
By Georg Ebers
Volume 4.
CHAPTER XVI.
The day had flown swiftly for Dada under the roof of Medius; there were
costumes and scenery in wonderful variety for her to look over; the
children were bright and friendly, and she had enjoyed playing with them,
for all her little tricks and rhymes, which Papias was familiar with by
this time, were to them new and delightful. It amused her, too, to see
what the domestic difficulties were of which the singer had described
himself as being a victim.
Medius was one of those men who buy everything that strikes them as
cheap--for instance, that very morning, at Kibotus he had stood to watch
a fish auction and had bought a whole tub-full of pickled fish for "a
mere trifle;" but when, presently, the cargo was delivered, his wife flew
into a great rage, which she vented first on the innocent lad who brought
the fish, and then on the less innocent purchaser. They would not get to
the bottom of the barrel and eat the last herring, she asserted, till
they were a century old. Medius, while he disputed so monstrous a
statement, vehemently declared that such wholesome and nutritious food as
those fish was undoubtedly calculated to prolong the lives of the whole
family to an exceptionally great age.
This discussion, which was not at all by way of a jest, amused Dada far
more than the tablets, cylinders and cones covered with numbers and
cabalistic signs, to which Medius tried to direct her attention. She
darted off in the midst of his eager explanations to show his
grandchildren how a rabbit sniffs and moves his ears when he is offered a
cabbage-leaf.
The report, which reached them in the afternoon, of the proceedings in
the square by the Prefect's house, disturbed Medius greatly, and he set
off at once for the scene of action.
He did not return till evening, and then he looked like an altered man.
He must have witnessed something very terrible, for his face was as pale
as death, and his usually confident and swaggering manner had given place
to a stricken and care-worn air. He walked up and down the room, groaning
as he went; he flung himself on the divan and stared fixedly at the
ground; he wandered into the atrium and gazed cautiously out on the
street. Dada's presence seemed suddenly to be the source of much anxiety
to him, and the girl, painfully conscious of this, hastened to tell him
that she would prefer to return home at once to her uncle and aunt.
"You can please yourself," was all he said, with a shrug and a sigh. "You
may stay for aught I care. It is all the same now!"
So far his wife had left him to himself, for she was used to his violent
and eccentric behavior whenever anything had crossed him; but now she
peremptorily desired to be informed what had happened to him and he at
once acceded. He had been unwilling to frighten them sooner than was
needful, but they must learn it sooner or later: Cynegius had arrived to
overthrow the image of Serapis, and what must ensue they knew only too
well. "To-day," he cried, "we will live; but by to-morrow--a thousand to
one-by to-morrow there will be an end of all our joys and the earth will
swallow up the old home and us with it!"
His words fell on prepared ground; his wife and daughter were appalled,
and as Medius went on to paint the imminent catastrophe in more vivid
colors, his energy growing in proportion to its effect on them, they
began at first to sob and whimper and then to wail loudly. When the
children, who by this time were in bed, heard the lamentations of their
elders, they, too, set up a howl, and even Dada caught the infection. As
for Medius himself, he had talked himself into such a state of terror by
his own descriptions of the approaching destruction of the world that he
abandoned all claim to his proud reputation as a strong-minded man, and
quite forgot his favorite theory that everything that went by the name of
God was a mere invention of priests and rulers to delude and oppress the
ignorant; at last he even went so far as to mutter a, prayer, and when
his wife begged to be allowed to join a family of neighbors in
sacrificing a black lamb at daybreak, he recklessly gave her a handful of
money.
None of the party closed an eye that night. Dada could not bear to remain
in the house. Perhaps all these horrors existed only in Medius' fancy;
but if destruction were indeed impending, she would a thousand times
rattier perish with her own relations than with these people, in whom
there was something--she did not know what--for which she felt a deep
aversion. This she explained to her host early in the day and he was
ready to set out at once and restore her to the care of Karnis.
In fact, the purpose for which he had needed her must certainly come to
nothing. He himself was attached to the service of Posidonius, a great
magician and wizard, to whom half Alexandria flocked--Christians, Jews,
and heathens--in order to communicate with the dead, with gods and with
demons, to obtain spells and charms by which to attract lovers or injure
foes, to learn the art of becoming invisible, or to gain a glimpse into
the future. In the performance which was being planned Dada was to have
appeared to a bereaved mother as the glorified presence of her lost
daughter; but the disturbance in the city had driven the matron, who was
rich, to take refuge in the country the previous afternoon. Nor was it
likely that the sorcerer's other clients--even if all turned out better
than could be hoped--would venture into the streets by night. Rich people
were timid and suspicious; and as the Emperor had lately promulgated
fresh and more stringent edicts against the magic arts, Posidonius had
thought it prudent to postpone the meeting. Hence Medius had at present
no use for the girl; but he affected to agree so readily to her wishes
merely out of anxiety to relieve Isarnis as soon as possible of his
uneasiness as to her fate.
The morning was bright and hot, and the town was swarming with an excited
mob soon after sunrise. Terror, curiosity and defiance were painted on
every face; however, Medius and his young companion made their way
unhindered as far as the temple of Isis by the lake. The doors of the
sanctuary were closed, and guarded by soldiers; but the southern and
western walls were surrounded by thousands and thousands of heathen. Some
hundreds, indeed, had passed the night there in prayer, or in sheer
terror of the catastrophe which could not fail to ensue, and they were
kneeling in groups, groaning, weeping, and cursing, or squatting in
stolid resignation, weary, crushed and hopeless. It was a heart-rending
sight, and neither Dada--who till this moment had been dreading Dame
Herse's scolding tongue far more than the destruction of the world--nor
her companion could forbear joining in the wail that rose from this vast
multitude. Medius fell on his knees groaning aloud and pulled the girl
down beside him; for, upon the wall that enclosed the temple precincts,
they now saw a priest who, after holding the sacred Sistrum up to view
and muttering some unintelligible prayers and invocations, proceeded to
address the people.
He was a short stout man, and the sweat streamed down his face as he
stood under the blazing sun to sketch a fearful picture of the monstrous
doom which was hanging over the city and its inhabitants. He spoke with
pompous exaggeration, in a shrill, harsh voice, wiping his face meanwhile
with his white linen robe or gasping for air, when breath failed him,
like a fish stranded on the beach. All this, however, did not trouble his
audience, for the hatred that inspired his language, and the terror of
the immediate future which betrayed itself in every word exactly
reflected their feelings. Dada alone was moved to mirth; the longer she
looked at him the more she felt inclined to laugh; besides, the day was
so bright--a pigeon on the wall pattered round his mate, nodding and
wriggling after the funny manner of pigeons in love--and, above all, her
heart beat so high and she had such a happy instinctive feeling that all
was ordered for the best, that the world seemed to her a beautiful and
fairly secure dwelling-place, in spite of the dark forebodings of the
zealous preacher. On the eve of destruction the earth must surely look
differently from this; and it struck her as highly improbable that the
gods should have revealed their purpose to such a queer old driveller as
this priest, and have hidden it from other men. The very fact that this
burly personage should prophesy evil with such conviction made her doubt
it; and presently, when the plumes of three or four helmets became
visible behind the speaker, and a pair of strong hands grasped his thick
ancles and suddenly dragged him down from his eminence and back into the
temple, she could hardly keep herself from laughing outright.
Now, however, there was more real cause for alarm a trumpet-blast was
heard, and a maniple of the twenty-second legion marched down in close
order on the crowd who fled before them. Medius was one of the first to
make off; Dada kept close to his side, and when, in his alarm, he fairly
took to his heels, she did the same; for, in spite of the reception she
apprehended, she felt that the sooner she could rejoin her own people the
better. Never till now had she known how dear they were to her. Herse
might scold; but her sharpest words were truer and better than the smooth
flattery of Medius. It was a joy to think of seeing them again--Agne,
too, and little Papias--and she felt as though she were about to meet
them after years of separation.
By this time they were at the ship-yard, which was divided only by a lane
from the Temple-grove; there lay the barge. Dada pulled off her veil and
waved it in the air, but the signal met with no response. They were at
the house, no doubt, for some men were in the very act of drawing up the
wooden gangway which connected the vessel with the land. Medius hurried
forward and was so fortunate as to overtake the steward, who had been
superintending the operation, before he reached the garden-gate.
The old man was rejoiced to see them, and told them at once that his old
mistress had promised Herse to give Dada shelter if she should return to
them. But Dada was proud. She had no liking for Gorgo or her grandmother;
and when she had caught up to Medius, quite out of breath, she positively
refused the old lady's hospitality.
The barge was deserted. Karnis--so the steward informed her--had
withdrawn to the temple of Serapis with his son, intending to assist in
its defence; and Herse had accompanied them, for Olympius had said that
women would be found useful in the beleaguered sanctuary, in preparing
food for the combatants and in nursing the wounded.
Dada stood looking at their floating home, utterly disappointed and
discouraged. She longed to follow her aunt and to gain admission to the
Serapeutn; but how could she do this now, and of what use could she hope
to be? There was nothing heroic in her composition, and from her infancy
she had always sickened at the sight of blood. She had no alternative but
to return with Medius, and take refuge under his roof.
The singer gave her ample time for reflection; he had seated himself,
with the steward, under the shade of a sycamore, and the two men were
absorbed in convincing each other, by a hundred arguments which they had
picked up during the last day or two, how inevitably the earth must be
annihilated if the statue of Serapis should be overthrown. In the warmth
of their discussion they paid no heed to the young girl, who was sitting
on a fallen Hermes by the road-side. Her vigorous and lively temperament
rendered her little apt to dream, or even meditate, in broad daylight;
but the heat and the recent excitement had overwrought her and she felt
into a drowsy reverie. Now and again, as her heavy head drooped on her
breast, she fancied the Serapeum had actually fallen; then, as she raised
it again, she recovered her consciousness that it was hot, that she had
lost her home, and that she must, however unwillingly, return with
Medius. But at length her eyelids closed, and as she sat in the full
blaze of the sun, a rosy light filled her eyes and a bright vision
floated before her: Marcus took the modius--the corn measure--from the
head of the statue of Serapis and offered it to her; it was quite full of
lilies and roses and violets, and she was delighted with the flowers and
thanked him warmly when he set the modius down before her. He held out
his hands to her calmly and kindly, and she gave him hers, feeling very
happy under the steady, compassionate gaze of his large eyes which had
often watched her, on board ship, for some minutes at a time. She longed
to say something to him, but she could not speak; and she looked on quite
unmoved as the statue of the god and the hall in which it stood were
wrapt in flames. No smoke mingled with this clear and genial blaze, but
it compelled her to shade her dazzled eyes; and as she lifted her hand
she woke to see Medius standing in front of her.
He desired her to come home with him at once, and she rose to obey,
listening in silence to his assurances that the lives of Karnis and
Orpheus would not be worth a sesterce if they fell into the hands of the
Roman soldiers.
She walked on, more hopeless and depressed than she had ever felt in her
life before, past the unfinished hulks in the ship-yard where no one was
at work to-day when, coming down the lane that divided the wharf from the
temple precincts, she saw an old man and a little boy. She had not time
to ask herself whether she saw rightly or was mistaken before the child
caught sight of her, snatched his hand away from that of his companion,
and flew towards her, shouting her name. In the next moment little Papias
had rushed rapturously into her arms and, as she lifted him up, had
thrown his hands round her neck, clinging to her as if he would never
leave go again, while she hugged him closely for joy, and kissed him with
her eyes full of tears. She was herself again at once; the sad and
anxious girl was the lively Dada once more.
The man who had been leading the little boy was immediately besieged with
questions, and from his answers they learnt that he had found the child
the evening before at the corner of a street, crying bitterly; that he
had taken him home, and with some little difficulty had ascertained from
him that he belonged to some people who were living on board a barge,
close to a ship-yard. In spite of the excitement that prevailed he had
brought the child home as soon as possible, for he could fancy how
anxious his parents must be. Dada thanked the kind-hearted artisan with
sincere warmth, and the man, seeing how happy the girl and the child were
at having met, went his way quite satisfied.
Medius had stood by and had said nothing, but he looked on the pretty
little boy with much favor. If the earth were not to crumble into
nothingness after all, this child would be a real treasure trove; and
when Dada begged him to find a corner for Papias in his house, though he
hinted at the smallness of his earnings and the limited space at his
command, he yielded, if reluctantly, to her entreaties, on her offering
him her gold brooch to cover his expenses.
As they made their way back she cast many loving glances at the child;
she was extremely fond of him, and he seemed a link to bind her to her
own people.
CHAPTER XVII.
The singer's wife and daughter had joined some neighbors in sacrificing a
black lamb to Zeus, a ceremony that was usual on the occasion of
earthquakes or very severe storms; but it was done very secretly, for the
edicts prohibiting the sacrifice of victims to the gods were promptly and
rigidly enforced. The more the different members of the family came into
contact with other citizens, the more deeply rooted was their terror that
the end of all things was at hand. As soon as it was dark the old man
buried all his savings, for even if everyone else were to perish, he felt
that he--though how or why he knew not--might be exempt from the common
doom.
The night was warm, and great and small alike slept--or lay awake--under
the stars so as not to be overwhelmed by the crash of roofs and walls;
the next day was oppressively hot, and the family cowered in a row in the
scanty shade of a palm and of a fig-tree, the only growth of any size in
the singer's garden. Medius himself, in spite of the scorching sun, could
not be still.
He rushed off to the town again and again, but only to return each time
to enhance the anguish of the household by relating all sorts of horrors
which he had picked up in his wanderings. They were obliged to satisfy
their hunger with bread, cheese, and fruit, for the two slave-women
positively refused to risk their lives by cooking in the house.
Medius' temper varied as he came and went; now he was gentle and
affectionate, and then again he raged like a madman; and his wife outdid
him. At one moment she would abandon him and the children, while she
anointed the household altar and put up prayers; at the next she railed
at the baseness and cruelty of the gods. When her husband brought the
news that the Serapeum was surrounded by the Imperial troops, she scoffed
and spit at the sacred images, and five minutes later she was vowing a
sacrifice to the deities of Olympus. The general confusion was
distracting; as the sun rose, the anguish, physical and mental, of the
whole family greatly increased, and by noon had reached an appalling
pitch.
Dada looked on intensely disgusted, and only shook her head when one or
another of her companions was sure she felt a shock of earthquake or
heard the roll of distant thunder. She could not explain to herself why
she, who was usually timid enough, was exempt from the universal panic
though she felt deeply pitiful towards the terrified women and children.
None of them troubled themselves about her; the day dragged on with
intolerable slowness, quenching all her gay vivacity, while she was
utterly exhausted by the scorching African sun, of which, till now, she
had never known the power. At last, in the afternoon, she found the
little garden, which was by this time heated like an oven, quite
unbearable, and she looked round for Papias. The child was sitting on the
wall looking at the congregation streaming into the basilica of St. Mark.
Dada followed his example, and when the many-voiced psalms rang out of
the open door of the church, she listened to the music, for it seemed
long since she had heard any, and after wiping the perspiration from the
little boy's face with her peplos, she pointed to the building and said:
"It must be nice and cool in there."
"Of course it is," said Papias.
"It is never too hot in church. I will tell you what--we will go there."
This was a bright idea; for, thought Dada, any place must be pleasanter
than this; and she felt strongly tempted, too, to see the inside of one
of Agne's temples and to sing once more, or, at any rate, hear others
sing.
"Come along," she said, and they stole through the deserted house to get
into the street by the atrium. Medius saw them, but he made no attempt to
detain them; he had sunk into lethargic indifference. It was not an hour
since he had taken stock of his life and means, setting the small figure
of his average income against his hospitality to Dada and her little
companion; but then, again, he had calculated that, if all went well, he
might make considerable profits out of the girl and the child. Now, he
felt it was all the same to him whether he and his family and Dada met
their doom in the house or out of it.
Dada and Papias soon reached the church of St. Mark, the oldest Christian
basilica in the city. It consisted of a vestibule--the narthex--and the
body of the church, a very long hall, with a flat roof ceiled with
stained wood and supported on a double row of quite simple columns. This
space was divided into two parts by a screen of pierced work; the
innermost portion had a raised floor or podium, on which stood a table
with chairs placed round it in a semicircle. The centre seat was higher
and more richly decorated than the others. These chairs were unoccupied;
a few deacons in 'talares' of light-colored brocade were busied about the
table.
In the middle of the vestibule there was a small tank; here a number of
penitents had collected who, with their flayed ribs and abject
lamentations, offered a more melancholy spectacle than even the terrified
crowd whom Dada had seen the day before, gathered round the temple of
Isis. Indeed, site would have withdrawn at once but that Papias dragged
her forward, and when she had passed through the great door into the nave
she breathed a sigh of relief. A soothing sense of respite came over her,
such as she had rarely felt; for the lofty building, which was only half
full, was deliciously cool and the subdued light was restful to her eyes.
The slight perfume of incense and the sober singing of the assembled
worshippers were soothing to her senses, and, as she took a seat on one
of the benches, she felt sheltered and safe.
The old church struck her as a home of perfect peace; in all the city,
she thought, there could hardly be another spot where she might rest so
quietly and contentedly. So for some little time she gave herself up,
body and soul, to the refreshing influences of the coolness, the
solemnity, the fragrance and the music; but presently her attention was
attracted to two women in the seats just in front of her.
One of them, who had a child on her arm, whispered to her neighbor:
"You here, Hannah, among the unbaptized? How are you going on at home?"
"I cannot stay long," was the answer. "It is all the same where one sits,
and when I leave I shall disturb no one. But my heart is heavy; the child
is very bad. The doctor says he cannot live through the day, and I felt
as if I must come to church."
Very right, very right. Do you stay here and I will go to your house at
once; my husband will not mind waiting."
"Thank you very much, but Katharine is staying with the boy and he is
quite safe there."
"Then I will stay and pray with you for the dear little child."
Dada had not missed a word of this simple dialogue. The woman whose child
was ill at home, and who had come here to pray for strength or mercy, had
a remarkably sweet face; as the girl saw the two friends bow their heads
and fold their hands with downcast eyes, she thought to herself: "Now
they are praying for the sick child . . ." and involuntarily she, too,
bent her curly head, and murmured softly: "O ye gods, or thou God of the
Christians, or whatever thou art called that hast power over life and
death, make this poor woman's little son well again. When I get home
again I will offer up a cake or a fowl--a lamb is so costly."
And she fancied that some invisible spirit heard her, and it gave her a
vague satisfaction to repeat her simple supplication over and over again.
Meanwhile a miserable blind dwarf had seated himself by her side; near
him stood the old dog that guided him. He held him by a string and had
been allowed to bring his indispensable comrade into the church. The old
man joined loudly and devoutly in the psalm which the rest of the
congregation were singing; his voice had lost its freshness, no doubt,
but he sang in perfect tune. It was a pleasure to Dada to listen, and
though she only half understood the words of the psalm she easily caught
the air and began to sing too, at first timidly and hardly audibly; but
she soon gained courage and, following the example of little Papias,
joined in with all her might.
She felt as though she had reached land after a stormy and uncomfortable
voyage, and had found refuge in a hospitable home; she looked about her
to discover whether the news of the approaching destruction of the world
had not penetrated even here, but she could not feel certain; for, though
many faces expressed anguish of mind, contrition, and a passionate
desire--perhaps for help or, perhaps, for something quite different--not
a cry of lamentation was to be heard, such as had rent the air by the
temple of Isis, and most of the men and women assembled here were
singing, or praying in silent absorption. There were none of the frenzied
monks who had terrified her in the Xenodochium and in the streets; on
this day of tumult and anxiety they are devoting all their small strength
and great enthusiasm to the service of the Church militant.
This meeting, at so unusual an hour, had been convened by Eusebius, the
deacon of the district, with the intention of calming the spirits of
those who had caught the general infection of alarm. Dada could see the
old man step up into a raised pulpit on the inner side of the screen
which parted the baptized from the unbaptized members of the
congregation; his silvery hair and beard, and the cheerful calm of his
face, with the high white forehead and gentle, loving gaze, attracted her
greatly. She had heard Karnis speak of Plato, and knew by heart some
axioms of his doctrine, and she had always thought of the sage as a young
man; but in advanced age, she fancied, he might have looked like
Eusebius. Aye, and it would have well beseemed this old man to die, like
the great Athenian, at a mirthful wedding-feast.
The priest was evidently about to give a discourse, and much as she
admired him, this idea prompted her to quit the church; for, though she
could sit still for hours to hear music, she found nothing more irksome
than to be compelled to listen for any length of time to a speech she
might not interrupt. She was therefore rising to leave; but Papias held
her back and entreated her so pathetically with his blue baby-eyes not to
take him away and spoil his pleasure that she yielded, though the
opportunity was favorable for moving unobserved, as the woman in front of
her was preparing to go and was shaking hands with her neighbor. She had
indeed risen from her seat when a little girl came in behind her and
whispered, loud enough for Dada's keen ears to catch the words: "Come
mother, come home at once. He has opened his eyes and called for you. The
physician says all danger is over."
The mother in her turn whispered to her friend in glad haste: "All is
well!" and hurried away with the girl. The friend she had left raised her
hands and eyes in thanksgiving, and Dada, too, smiled in sympathy and
pleasure. Had the God of the Christian heard her prayer with theirs.
Meanwhile the preacher had ended his preliminary prayer and began to
explain to his hearers that he had bidden them to the church in order to
warn them against foolish terrors, and to lead them into the frame of
mind in which the true Christian ought to live in these momentous times
of disturbance. He wished to point out to his brethren and sisters in the
Lord what was to be feared from the idols and their overthrow, what the
world really owed to the heathen, and what he expected from his
fellow-believers when the splendid and imminent triumph of the Church
should be achieved.
"Let us look back a little, my beloved," he said, after this brief
introduction. "You have all heard of the great Alexander, to whom this
noble city owes its existence and its name. He was a mighty instrument in
the hand of the Lord, for he carried the tongue and the wisdom of the
Greeks throughout all lands, so that, in the fulness of time, the
doctrine which should proceed from the only Son of God might be
understood by all nations and go home to all hearts. In those days every
people had its own idols by hundreds, and in every tongue on earth men
put up their prayers to the supreme Power which makes itself felt
wherever mortal creatures dwell. Here, by the Nile, after Alexander's
death, reigned the Ptolemies; and the Egyptian citizens of Alexandria
prayed to other gods than their Greek neighbors, so that they could never
unite in worshipping their divinities; but Philadelphus, the second
Ptolemy, a very wise man, gave them a god in common. In consequence of a
vision seen in a dream he had the divinity brought from Sinope, on the
shores of Pontus, to this town. This idol was Serapis, and he was raised
to the throne of divinity here, not by Heaven, but by a shrewd and
prudent man; a grand temple was built for him, which is to this day one
of the wonders of the world, and a statue of him was made, as beautiful
as any image ever formed by the hand of man. You have seen and know them
both, and you know too, how, before the gospel was preached in
Alexandria, crowds of all classes, excepting the Jews, thronged the
Serapeum.
"A dim perception of the sublime teaching of the Lord by whom God has
redeemed the world had dawned, even before His appearance on earth, on
the spirit of the best of the heathen, and in the hearts of those wise
men who--though not born into the state of grace--sought and strove after
the truth, after inward purity, and an apprehension of the Almighty. The
Lord chose them out to prepare the hearts of mankind for the good
tidings, and make them fit to receive the gospel when the Star should
rise over Bethlehem.
"Many of these sages had infused precious doctrine into the worship of
Serapis before the hour of true redemption had come. They enjoined the
servants of Serapis to be more zealous in the care of the soul than in
that of the body, for they had detected the imperishable nature of the
spiritual and divine part of man; they saw that we are brought into
existence by sin and love, and we must therefore die to our sinful love
and rise again through the might of love eternal. These Hellenes, like
the Egyptian sages of the times of the Pharaohs, divined and declared
that the soul was held responsible after death for all it had done of
good or evil in its mortal body. They distinguished virtue and sin by the
eternal law, which was written in the hearts even of the heathen, to the
end that they, by nature, might do the works of the law; nay, there were
some of their loftiest spirits who, though they knew not the Lord, it is
true, required the repentance in the sinner, in the name of Serapis, and
pronounced that it was good to give up the delusive joys and vain
pleasures of the flesh and to break away from the evil--whether of body
or of soul--which we are led into by the senses. They called upon their
disciples to hold meetings for meditation whereby they might discern
truth and the divinity; and the vast precincts of the Serapeum contained
cells and alcoves for penitents and devotees, in which many a soul
touched by grace, dead to the world and absorbed in the contemplation of
such things as they esteemed high and heavenly, has ripened to old age
and death.
"But, my beloved, the Light in which we rejoice, through no merits or
deserts of our own, had not yet been shed on the lost children of those
days of darkness; and all those noble, and indeed most admirable efforts
were polluted by an admixture, even here, of coarse superstition, bloody
sacrifices, and foolish adoration of perishable stone idols and beasts
without understanding; and in other places by the false and delusive arts
of Magians and sorcerers. Even the dim apprehension of true salvation was
darkened and distorted by the subtleties of a vain and inconsistent
philosophy, which held a theory as immutably true one day and overthrew
or denied it the next. Thus, by degrees, the temple of the idol of Sinope
degenerated into a stronghold of deceit and bloodshed, of the basest
superstition, the pleasures of the flesh, and abominations that cried to
Heaven. Learning, to be sure, was still cherished in the halls of the
Serapeum; but its disciples turned with hardened hearts from the truth
which was sent into the world by the grace of God, and they remained the
prophets of error. The doctrines which the sages had associated with the
idea of Serapis, debased and degraded by the most contemptible
trivialities; lost all their worth and dignity; and after the great
Apostle to whom this basilica is dedicated, had brought the gospel to
Alexandria, the idol's throne began to totter, and the tidings of
salvation shook its foundations and brought it to the verge of
destruction in spite of the persecutions, in spite of the edicts of the
apostate Julian, in spite of the desperate efforts of the philosophers,
sophists, and heathen--for our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, has given
certainty and actuality to the fleeting shadow of half-divined truth
which lies in the core of the worship of Serapis. The pure and radiant
star of Christian love has risen in the place of the dim nebulous mist of
Serapis; and just as the moon pales when the sun appears triumphant, the
worship of Serapis has died away in a thousand places where the gospel
has been received. Even here, in Alexandria, its feeble flame is kept
alive only by infinite care, and if the might of our pious and Christian
Emperor makes itself felt-tomorrow, or next day--then, my beloved, it
will vanish in smoke, and no power on earth can fan it into life again.
Not our grandsons, no, but our own children will ask: Who--what was
Serapis? For he who shall be overthrown is no longer a mighty god but an
idol bereft of his splendor and his dignity. This is no struggle of might
against might; it is the death-stroke given to a wounded and vanquished
foe. The tree is rotten to the core and can crush no one in its fall, but
it will cover all who stand near it with dust and rubbish. The sovereign
has outlived his dominion, and when his fingers drop the sceptre few
indeed will bewail him, for the new King has already mounted the throne
and His is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever! Amen."
Dada had listened to the deacon's address with no particular interest,
but the conclusion struck her attention. The old man looked dignified and
honest; but Father Karnis was a well-meaning man, no doubt, and one of
those who are wont to keep on the winning side. How was it that the
preacher could draw so pitiable a picture of the very same god whose
greatness her uncle had praised in such glowing terms only two days
since? How could the same thing appear so totally different to two
different people?
The priest looked more sagacious than the musician; Marcus, the young
Christian, had a most kind heart; there was not a better or gentler
creature under the sun than Agne--it was quite possible that Christianity
was something very different in reality from what her foster parents
chose to represent. As to the frightful consequences of the overthrow of
the temple of Serapis, on that point she was completely reassured, and
she prepared to listen with greater attention as Eusebius went on:
"Let us rejoice, beloved! The great idol's days are numbered! Do you know
what that false worship has been in our midst? It has been like a
splendid and richly-dressed trireme sailing, plague-stricken, into a
harbor full of ships and boats. Woe to those who allow themselves to be
tempted on board by the magnificence of its decorations! How great is
their chance of infection, how easily they will carry it from ship to
ship, and from the ships on to the shore, till the pestilence has spread
from the harbor to the city! Let us then be thankful to those who destroy
the gorgeous vessel, who drive it from amongst us, or sink or burn it.
May our Father in Heaven give courage to their hearts, strength to their
hands and blessing on their deeds! When we hear: 'Great Serapis has
fallen to the earth and is no more, we and the world are free from him!'
then, in this city, and wherever Christians dwell and worship, let a
solemn festival be held.
"But still let us be just, still let us bear in mind all the great and
good gifts that the trireme brought to our parents when it rode the waves
manned by a healthy crew. If we do, it will be with sincere pity that we
shall watch the proud vessel sink to the bottom, and we shall understand
the grief of those whom once it bore over ebb and flow, and who believe
they owe every thing to it. We shall rejoice doubly, too, to think that
we ourselves have a safe bark with stout planks and strong masts, and a
trustworthy pilot at the helm; and that we may confidently invite others
to join us on board as soon as they have purified themselves of the
plague with which they have been smitten.
"I think you will all have understood this parable. When Serapis falls
there will be lamentation and woe among the heathen; but we, who are true
Christians, ought not to pass them by, but must strive to heal and save
the wounded and sick at heart. When Serapis falls you must be the
physicians--healers of souls, as the Lord hath said; and if we desire to
heal, our first task must be to discover in what the sufferings consist
of those we wish to succor, for our choice of medicine must depend on the
nature of the injury.
"What I mean is this: None can give comfort but those who know how to
sympathize with the soul that craves it, who feel the sorrows of others
as keenly as though they were their own. And this gift, my brethren, is,
next to faith, the Christian grace which of all others best pleases our
Heavenly Master.
"I see it in my mind's eye! The ruined edifice of the Serapeum, the
masterpiece of Bryaxis laid in fragments in the dust, and thousands of
wailing heathen! As the Jews wept and hung their harps on the trees by
the waters of Babylon when they remembered Zion, so do I see the heathen
weep as they think of the perished splendor. They themselves, indeed,
ruined and desecrated the glory they bewail; and when something higher
and purer took its place they hardened their hearts, and, instead of
leaving the dead to bury their dead and throwing themselves hopefully
into the new life, they refused to be parted from the putrefying corpse.
They were fools, but their folly was fidelity; and if we can win them
over to our holy faith they will be faithful unto death, as they have
been to their old gods, clinging to Jesus and earning the crown of life.
'There will be more joy in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth than
over ninety and nine that need no repentance,'--that you have heard; and
whichever among you loves the Saviour can procure him a great joy if he
guides only one of these weeping heathen into the Kingdom of Heaven.
"But perhaps you will ask: Is not the sorrow of the heathen a vain thing?
What is it after all that they bewail? To understand that, try to picture
to yourselves what it is that they think they are losing. Verily it is
not a small matter, and it includes many things for which we and all
mankind owe them a debt of gratitude. We call ourselves Christians and
are proud of the name; but we also call ourselves Hellenes, and are proud
of that name too. It was under the protection of the old gods, whose fall
is about to be consummated, that the Greeks achieved marvellous deeds,
nurturing the gifts of the intellect which the Almighty bestowed on their
race, like faithful gardeners, and making them bring forth marvellous
fruit. In the realm of thought the Greek is sovereign of the nations, and
he has given to perishable matter a perfection of form which has elevated
and vivified it to immortality. Nothing more beautiful has ever been
imagined or executed, before or since, or by any other people, than was
produced by Greece in its prime. But perhaps you will ask, why did not
the Redeemer come down among our fathers in those glorious days? Because
beauty, as they conceived and still conceive of it, is a mere perishable
accident of matter, and because a race which thus devoted every thought
and feeling to an inspired and fervent worship of beauty--which was so
absorbed in the contemplation of the visible, could have no longing for
the invisible which is the real life that came down among us with the
only-begotten Son of God. Nevertheless Beauty is beautiful; and when the
time shall come when the visible is married to the invisible, when
eternal Truth is clothed in perfect form, then, and not till then, will
the ideal which our fathers strove after in the great old days be
realized, by the grace of the Saviour.
"But this visible beauty, which they so passionately cherished, does us
good service too, so long as we do not allow it to dazzle us and lead us
astray from the one thing needful. To whom, if not to the heathen
Hellenes, do our great teachers owe, under God, the noble art of
coordinating their loftiest feelings, and casting them in forms which are
intelligible to the Christian and at once instruct, delight, and edify
him? It was in a heathen school that each one of your pastors--that even
I, the humblest of them--studied that rhetoric which enables me to utter
with a flowing tongue the things which the Spirit gives me to speak to
you; and if some day there are Christian schools, in which our sons may
acquire the same power, they must adopt many of the laws devised by the
heathen. If in the future we are rich enough to raise churches to the
Almighty, to the Virgin Mary and the great Saints, in any way worthy of
their sublime merits, we shall owe our skill to the famous architects of
heathen Hellas. We are indebted to the arts of the heathen for a thousand
things in daily use, beside numberless others that lend charm to
existence. Yes, my beloved, when we consider all they did for us we
cannot in justice withhold our tribute of gratitude and admiration.
"Nor can we doubt that the best of them were acceptable to the Almighty
himself, for he granted to them to see darkly and from afar what he has
brought nigh to us, and poured into our hearts by divine revelation. You
all know the name of Plato. He, from whom Salvation was hidden, saw
remotely, by presentiment as it were, many things which to us, the
Redeemed, are clear and plain and near. He perceived the relation of
earthly beauty and heavenly truth. The great gift of Love binds and
supports us all and Plato gave the name of the divine Eros, that is
divine love, to an inspired devotion to the Imperishable. He placed
goodness--the Good--at the top of the great scale of Ideas which he
constructed. The Good was, to him, the highest Idea and the uttermost of
which we can conceive:--Good, whose properties he made manifest by every
means his lofty and lucid mind could command. This heathen, my brethren
and sisters, was well worthy of the grace bestowed on us. Do justice then
to the blinded souls, justice in Plato's sense of the word; he calls the
virtue of reason Wisdom; the virtue of spirit Courage, and the virtue of
the senses Temperance. Well, well! 'Prove all things and hold fast that
which is good.' That is to say: consider what may be worth anything in
the works of the heathen that it may be duly preserved; but, on the other
hand, tread all that is idolatry in the dust, all that brings the unclean
thing among us, all that imperils our souls and bodies, or anything that
is high and pure in life; but do not forget, my beloved, all that the
heathen have done for us. Be temperate in all things; avoid excess of
zeal; for thus, and thus only, can we be just. 'It is not to hate, but to
love each other that we are here.' It was not a Christian but Sophocles,
one of the greatest of the heathen, who uttered those words, and he
speaks them still to us!"
Eusebius paused and drew a deep breath.
Dada had listened eagerly, for it pleased her to hear all that she had
been wont to prize spoken of here with due appreciation. But since
Eusebius had begun to discourse about Plato she had been disturbed by two
men sitting just in front of her. One was tall and lean, with a long
narrow head, and the other a shorter and more comfortable-looking
personage. The first fidgeted incessantly, nudging and twitching his
companion, and looking now and then as if he were ready to start up and
interrupt the preacher. This behavior evidently annoyed his neighbors who
kept signing to him to be quiet and hushing him down, while he took no
notice of their demonstrations but kept clearing his throat with
obtrusive emphasis and at last scraped and shuffled his feet on the
floor, though not very noisily. But Eusebius began again:
"And now, my brethren, how ought we to demean ourselves in these fateful
times of disturbance? As Christians; only--or rather, by God's aiding
grace as Christians in the true sense of our Lord and Master, according
to the precepts given by Him through the Apostles. Their words shall be
mine. They say there are two paths--the path of Life and the path of
Death, and there is a great difference between them. The path of Life is
this: First, Thou shalt love God who hath created thee; next thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself, and whatsoever thou wouldst men should do
unto thee even so do unto them; but what thou wouldst not have done unto
thee do thou not to them. And the sum of the doctrine contained in these
words is this: Bless those that curse you, pray for your enemies and
repent for those who persecute you, for 'if ye love them that love you
what thank have ye? Do not even the heathen the same?' Love those that
hate you and you will have no enemies.
"Take this teaching of the holy Apostles to heart this day. Beware of
mocking or persecuting those who have been your enemies. Even the nobler
heathen regarded it as an act of grace to respect the conquered foe, and
to you, as Christians, it should be a law. It is not so hard to forgive
an enemy when we regard him as a possible friend in the future; and the
Christian can go so far as to love him when he remembers that every man
is his brother and neighbor, and equally precious in the sight of the
Saviour who is dearer to us than life.
"The heathen, the idolater, is the Christian's archfoe; but soon he will
be in fetters at our feet. And, then, my brethren, pray for him; for if
the Almighty, who is without spot or stain and perfect beyond words, can
forgive the sinner, ye who are base and guilty may surely forgive.
'Fishers of souls' we all should be; try to fulfil the injunction. Draw
the enemy to you by kindness and love; show him by your example the
beauty of the Christian life; let him perceive the benefits of Salvation;
lead those whose gods and temples we have overthrown, into our churches;
and when, after triumphing over those blind souls by the sword, we have
also conquered them by love, faith and prayer--when they can rejoice with
us in the Redemption by our Lord Jesus Christ--then shall we all be as
one fold under one shepherd, and peace and joy shall reign in the city
which is now torn by dissension and strife."
At this point the preacher was interrupted, for a loud uproar broke out
in the Narthex--[The vestibule of the early Christian basilica which was
open to penitents.]--shouts and cries of men fighting, mingled with the
dull roar of a bull.
The congregation started to their feet in extreme consternation, and the
door was flung open and a host of heathen youths rushed into the nave,
followed by an overwhelming force of Christians from whom they had sought
refuge in the sanctuary. Here they turned at bay to make a last desperate
resistance. Garlands, stripped of their leaves and flowers, still crowned
their heads and hung over their shoulders. They had been attacked close
to the church, by a party of monks when in the act of driving a
gaily-decorated steer to the temple of Apollo, in defiance of the
Imperial edict; and the beast, terrified by the tumult, had rushed into
the narthex for shelter.
The fight in the church was a short one; the idolaters were soon
vanquished; but Eusebius threw himself between them and the monks, and
tried to save the victims from the revengeful fury of the conquerors. The
women had all made for the door, but they did not venture out into the
vestibule, for the young bull was still raging there, trampling or
tossing everything that came in his way. At last, however, a soldier of
the city-watch dealt him a sword-thrust in the neck, and he fell rolling
in his own blood. At once the congregation forced their way out,
shrieking with alarm and excitement, Dada among the number, dragging the
child with her. Papias pulled with all his might to keep her back,
declaring with vehement insistence that he had seen Agne in the church
and wanted to go back to her. Dada, however, neither heard nor heeded;
frightened out of her wits she went on with the crowd, taking him with
her.
She never paused till she reached the house of Medius, quite out of
breath; but then, as the little boy still asserted that he had seen his
sister in the sanctuary, she turned back with him, as soon as the throng
had dispersed. In the church there was no one to hinder them; but they
got no further than the dividing screen, for on the floor beyond lay the
mutilated and bleeding bodies of many a youth who had fallen in the
contest.
How she made her way back to the house of Medius once more she never
knew. For the first time she had been brought face to face with life in
hideous earnest, and when the singer went to look for her in her room, at
dusk, he was startled to find her bright face clouded and her eyes dim
with tears. How bitterly she had been weeping Medius indeed could not
know; he ascribed her altered appearance to fear of the approaching
cataclysm and was happy to be able to tell her, in all good faith, that
the danger was as good as over. Posidonius, the Magian, had been to see
him, and had completely reassured him. This man, whose accomplice he had
been again and again in producing false apparitions of spirits and
demons, had once gained an extraordinary influence over him by casting
some mysterious spell upon him and reducing his will to abject subjection
to his own; and this magician, who had recovered his own self-possession,
had assured him, with an inimitable air of infallibility, that the fall
of the Temple of Serapis would involve no greater catastrophe than that
of any old worn-out statue. Since this announcement Medius had laughed at
his own alarms; he had recovered his "strong-mindedness," and when
Posidonius had given him three tickets for the Hippodrome he had jumped
at the offer.
The races were to be run next day, in spite of the general panic that had
fallen on the citizens; and Dada, when he invited her to join him and his
daughter in-the enjoyment of so great a treat, dried her eyes and
accepted gleefully.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Alarming as was the outlook in Alexandria, the races, were to be held as
usual. This had been decided only a few hours since at the Bishop's
palace, and criers had been sent abroad throughout the streets and
squares of the city to bid the inhabitants to this popular entertainment.
In the writing-office of the Ephemeris, which would be given to the
public the first thing in the morning, five hundred slaves or more were
occupied in writing from dictation a list of the owners of the horses, of
the 'agitatores' who would drive them, and of the prizes offered to the
winners, whether Christians or heathen.
[Ephemeris--The news-sheet, which was brought out, not only in Rome,
but in all the cities of the Empire, and which kept the citizens
informed of all important events.]
The heat in the Episcopal council-hall had been oppressive, and not less
so the heat of temper among the priests assembled there; for they had
fully determined, for once, not to obey their prelate with blind
submission, and they knew full well that Theophilus, on occasion, if his
will were opposed, could not merely thunder but wield the bolt.
Besides the ecclesiastical members of the council, Cynegius, the Imperial
legate--Evagrius, the Prefect--and Romanus, the commander-in-chief and
Comes of Egypt,--had all been present. The officials of the Empire--Roman
statesmen who knew Alexandria and her citizens well, and who had often
smarted under the spiritual haughtiness of her Bishop--were on the
prelate's side. Cynegius was doubtful; but the priests, who had not
altogether escaped the alarms that had stricken the whole population,
were so bold as to declare against a too hasty decision, and to say that
the celebration of the games at a time of such desperate peril was not
only presumptuous but sinful, and a tempting of God.
In answer to a scornful enquiry from Theophilus as to where the danger
lay if--as the Comes promised--Serapis were to be overthrown on the
morrow, one of the assembly answered in the name of his colleagues. This
man, now very old, had formerly been a wonderfully successful exorcist,
and, notwithstanding that he was a faithful Christian, he was the leader
of a gnostic sect and a diligent student of magic. He proceeded to argue,
with all the zeal and vehemence of conviction, that Serapis was the most
terrible of all the heathen daemons, and that all the oracles of
antiquity, all the prophecies of the seers, and all the conclusions of
the Magians and astrologers would be proved false if his fall--which the
present assembly could only regard as a great boon from Heaven--did not
entail some tremendous convulsion of nature.
At this Theophilus gave the reins to his wrath; he snatched a little
crucifix from the wall above his episcopal throne, and broke it in
fragments, exclaiming in deep tones that quavered with wrath:
"And which do you regard as the greater: The only-begotten Son of God, or
that helpless image?" And he flung the pieces of the broken crucifix down
on the table round which they were sitting. Then, as though
horror-stricken at his own daring act, he fell on his knees, raised his
eyes and hands in prayer, and gathering up the broken image, kissed it
devoutly.
This rapid scene had a tremendous effect. Amazement and suspense were
painted on every face, not a hand, not a lip moved as Theophilus rose
again and cast a glance of proud and stern defiance round the assembly,
which each man took to himself. For some moments he remained silent, as
though awaiting a reply; but his repellent mien and majestic bearing made
it sufficiently clear that he was ready to annihilate any opponent. In
fact none of the priests contradicted him; and, though Evagrius looked at
him with a doubting shake of his shrewd head, Cynegius on the other hand
nodded assent. The Bishop, however, seemed to care for neither dissent
nor approval, and it was in brief and cutting terms, with no flourish of
rhetoric, that he laid it down that wood and stone had nothing to do with
the divine Majesty, even though they were made in the image of all that
was Holy and worshipful or were most lavishly beautified by the hand of
man with the foul splendors of perishable wealth. The greater the power
ascribed by superstition to the base material--whatever form it bore--the
more odious must it be to the Christian. Any man who should believe that
a daemon could turn even a breath of the Most High to its own will and
purpose, would do well to beware of idolatry, for Satan had already laid
his clutches somewhere on his robe.
At this sweeping accusation many a cheek colored wrathfully, and not a
word was spoken when the Bishop proceeded to require of his hearers that,
if the Serapeum should fall into the hands of the Imperial troops, it
should be at once and ruthlessly destroyed, and that his hearers should
not cease from the work of ruin till this scandal of the city should be
swept from the face of the earth.
"If then the world crumbles to atoms!" he cried, "well and good--the
heathen are right and we are wrong, and in that case it were better to
perish; but as surely as I sit on this throne by the grace of God,
Serapis is the vain imagining of fools and blind, and there is no god but
the God whose minister I am!"
"Whose Kingdom is everlasting, Amen!" chanted an old priest; and Cynegius
rose to explain that he should do nothing to hinder the total overthrow
of the temple and image.
Then the Comes spoke in defence of the Bishop's resolution to allow the
races to be held, as usual, on the morrow. He sketched a striking picture
of the shallow, unstable nature of the Alexandrians, a people wholly
given over to enjoyment. The troops at his command were few in number in
comparison with the heathen population of the city, and it was a very
important matter to keep a large proportion of the worshippers of Serapis
occupied elsewhere at the moment of the decisive onset. Gladiator-fights
were prohibited, and the people were tired of wild beasts; but races, in
which heathen and Christian alike might enter their horses for
competition, must certainly prove most attractive just at this time of
bitter rivalry and oppugnancy between the two religions, and would draw
thousands of the most able-bodied idolaters to the Hippodrome. All this
he had already considered and discussed with the Bishop and Cynegius;
nay, that zealous destroyer of heathen worship had come to Alexandria
with the express purpose of overthrowing the Serapeum; but, as a prudent
statesman, he had first made sure that the time and circumstances were
propitious for the work of annihilation. All that he had here seen and
heard had only strengthened his purpose; so, after suggesting a few
possible difficulties, and enjoining moderation and mercy as the guiding
principles of his sovereign, he commanded, in the Emperor's name, that
the sanctuary of Serapis should be seized by force of arms and utterly
destroyed, and that the races should be held on the morrow.
The assembled council bowed low; and when Theophilus had closed the
meeting with a prayer he withdrew to his ungarnished study, with his head
bent and an air of profound humility, as though he had met with a defeat
instead of gaining a victory.
.......................
The fate of the great god of the heathen was sealed, but in the wide
precincts of the Serapeum no one thought of surrender or of prompt
defeat. The basement of the building, on which stood the grandest temple
ever erected by the Hellenes, presented a smooth and slightly scarped
rampart of impregnable strength to the foe. A sloping way extended up
over a handsomely-decorated incline, and from the middle of the grand
curve described by this road, two flights of steps led up to the three
great doors in the facade of the building.
The heathen had taken care to barricade this approach in all haste,
piling the road and steps with statuary-images of the gods of the finest
workmanship, figures and busts of kings, queens, and heroes, Hermes,
columns, stelae, sacrificial stones, chairs and benches-torn from their
places by a thousand eager hands. The squared flags of the pavement and
the granite blocks of the steps had been built up into walls and these
were still being added to after the besiegers had surrounded the temple;
for the defenders tore down stones, pilasters, gutters and pieces of the
cornice, and flung them on to the outworks, or, when they could, on to
the foe who for the present were not eager to commence hostilities.
The captains of the Imperial force had miscalculated the strength of the
heathen garrison. They supposed a few hundreds might have entrenched
themselves, but on the roof alone above a thousand men were to be seen,
and every hour seemed to increase the number of men and women crowding
into the Serapeum. The Romans could only suppose that this constantly
growing multitude had been concealed in the secret halls and chambers of
the temple ever since Cynegius had first arrived, and had no idea that
they were still being constantly reinforced.
Karnis, Herse, and Orpheus, among others, had made their way thither from
the timber-yard, down the dry conduit, and an almost incessant stream of
the adherents of the old gods had preceded and followed them.
While Eusebius had been exhorting his congregation in the church of St.
Mark to Christian love towards the idolaters, these had collected in the
temple precincts to the number of about four thousand, all eager for the
struggle. A vast multitude! But the extent of the Serapeum was so
enormous that the mass of people was by no means densely packed on the
roof, in the halls, and in the underground passages and rooms. There was
no crowding anywhere, least of all in the central halls of the temple
itself; indeed, in the great vestibule crowned with a dome which formed
the entrance, in the vast hall next to it, and in the magnificent
hypostyle with a semicircular niche on the furthest side in which stood
the far-famed image of the god, there were only scattered groups of men,
who looked like dwarfs as the eye compared them with the endless rows of
huge columns.
The full blaze of day penetrated nowhere but into the circular vestibule,
which was lighted by openings in the drum of the cupola that rested on
four gigantic columns. In the inner hall there was only dim twilight;
while the hypostyle was quite dark, but for a singularly contrived shaft
of light which produced a most mysterious effect.
The shadows of the great columns in the fore hall, and of the double
colonnade on each side of the hypostyle, lay like bands of crape on the
many-colored pavement; borders, circles, and ellipses of mosaic
diversified the smooth and lucent surface, in which were mirrored the
astrological figures which sparkled in brighter hues on the ceiling, the
trophies of symbols and mythological groups that graced the walls in
tinted high relief, and the statues and Hermes between the columns. A
wreath of lovely forms and colors dazzled the eye with their multiplicity
and profusion, and the heavy atmosphere of incense which filled the halls
was almost suffocating, while the magical and mystical signs and figures
were so many and so new that the enquiring mind, craving for an
explanation and an interpretation of all these incomprehensible
mysteries, hardly dared investigate them in detail.
A heavy curtain, that looked as though giants must have woven it on a
loom of superhuman proportions, hung, like a thick cloud shrouding a
mountain-peak, from the very top of the hypostyle, in grand folds over
the niche containing the statue, and down to the floor; and while it hid
the sacred image from the gaze of the worshipper it attracted his
attention by the infinite variety of symbolical patterns and beautiful
designs which were woven in it and embroidered on it.
The gold and silver vessels and precious jewels that lay concealed by
this hanging were of more value than many a mighty king's treasure; and
everything was on so vast a scale that man shuddered to feel his own
littleness, and the mind sought some new standard of measurement by which
to realize such unwonted proportions. The finite here seemed to pass into
the infinite; and as the spectator gazed up, with his head thrown back,
at the capitals of the lofty columns and the remote height of the
ceiling, his sight failed him before he had succeeded in distinguishing
or even perceiving a small portion only of the bewildering confusion of
figures and emblems that were crowded on to the surface. Greek feeling
for beauty had here worked hand in hand with Oriental taste for gorgeous
magnificence, and every detail could bear examination; for there was not
a motive of the architecture, not a work of sculpture, painting, or
mosaic, not a product of the foundry or the loom, which did not bear the
stamp of thorough workmanship and elaborate finish. The ruddy, flecked
porphyry, the red, white, green, or yellow marbles which had been used
for the decorations were all the finest and purest ever wrought upon by
Greek craftsmen. Each of the hundreds of sculptured works which here had
found a home was the masterpiece of some great artist; as the curious
visitor lingered in loving contemplation of the mosaics on the polished
floor, or examined the ornamental mouldings that framed the reliefs,
dividing the walls into panels, he was filled with wonder and delight at
the beauty, the elegance and the inventiveness that had given charm,
dignity, and significance to every detail.
Adjoining these great halls devoted especially to the worship of the god,
were hundreds of courts, passages, colonnades and rooms, and others not
less numerous lay underground. There were long rows of rooms containing
above a hundred thousand rolls of books, the famous library of the
Serapeum, with separate apartments for readers and copyists; there were
store-rooms, refectories and assembly-rooms for the high-priests of the
temple, for teachers and disciples; while acrid odors came up from the
laboratories, and the fragrance of cooking from the kitchen and
bake-houses. In the very thickness of the walls of the basement were
cells for penitents and recluses, long since abandoned, and rooms for the
menials and slaves, of whom hundreds were employed in the precincts;
under ground spread the mystical array of halls, grottoes, galleries and
catacombs dedicated to the practice of the Mysteries and the initiation
of neophytes; on the roof stood various observatories--among them one
erected for the study of the heavens by Eratosthenes, where Claudius
Ptolemaeus had watched and worked. Up here astronomers, star-gazers,
horoscopists and Magians spent their nights, while, far below them, in
the temple-courts that were surrounded by store-houses and stables, the
blood of sacrificed beasts was shed and the entrails of the victims were
examined.
The house of Serapis was a whole world in little, and centuries had
enriched it with wealth, beauty, and the noblest treasures of art and
learning. Magic and witchcraft hedged it in with a maze of mystical and
symbolical secrets, and philosophy had woven a tissue of speculation
round the person of the god. The sanctuary was indeed the centre of
Hellenic culture in the city of Alexander; what marvel then, that the
heathen should believe that with the overthrow of Serapis and his temple,
the earth, nay the universe itself must sink into the abyss?
Anxious spirits and throbbing hearts were those that now sought shelter
in the Serapeum, fully prepared to perish with their god, and yet eager
with enthusiasm to avert his fall if possible.
A strange medley indeed of men and women had collected within these
sacred precincts! Grave sages, philosophers, grammarians, mathematicians,
naturalists, and physicians clung to Olympius and obeyed him in silence.
Rhetoricians with shaven faces, Magians and sorcerers, whose long beards
flowed over robes embroidered with strange figures; students, dressed
after the fashion of their forefathers in the palmy days of Athens; men
of every age, who dubbed themselves artists though they were no more than
imitators of the works of a greater epoch, unhappy in that no one at this
period of indifference to beauty called upon them to prove what they
could do, or to put forth their highest powers. Actors, again, from the
neglected theatres, starving histrions, to whom the stage was prohibited
by the Emperor and Bishop, singers and flute-players; hungry priests and
temple-servitors expelled from the closed sanctuaries; lawyers, scribes,
ships' captains, artisans, though but very few merchants, for
Christianity had ceased to be the creed of the poor, and the wealthy
attached themselves to the faith professed by those in authority.
One of the students had contrived to bring a girl with him, and several
others, seeing this, went back into the streets by the secret way and
brought in damsels of no very fair repute, till the crowd of men was
diversified by a considerable sprinkling of wreathed and painted girls,
some of them the outcast maids of various temples, and others priestesses
of higher character, who had remained faithful to the old gods or who
practised magic arts.
Among these women one, a tall and dignified matron in mourning robes, was
a conspicuous figure. This was Berenice, the mother of the young heathen
who had been ridden down and wounded in the skirmish near the Prefect's
house, and whose eyes Eusebius had afterwards closed. She had come to the
Serapeum expressly to avenge her son's death and then to perish with the
fall of the gods for whom he had sacrificed his young life. But the mad
turmoil that surrounded her was more than she could bear; she stood, hour
after hour, closely veiled and absorbed in her own thoughts, neither
raising her eyes nor uttering a word, at the foot of a bronze statue of
justice dispensing rewards and punishments.
Olympius had entrusted the command of the little garrison of armed men to
Memnon, a veteran legate of great experience, who had lost his left arm
in the war against the Goths. The high-priest himself was occupied
alternately in trying to persuade the hastily-collected force to obey
their leader, and in settling quarrels, smoothing difficulties,
suppressing insubordination, and considering plans with reference to
supplies for his adherents, and the offering of a great sacrifice at
which all the worshippers of Serapis were to assist. Karnis kept near his
friend, helping him so far as was possible; Orpheus, with others of the
younger men, had been ordered to the roof, where they were
employed--under the scorching sun, reflected from the copper-plated
covering and the radiating surface of the dome--in loosening blocks of
stone from the balustrade to be hurled down to-morrow on the besieging
force.
Herse devoted herself to the sick and wounded, for a few who had ventured
forth too boldly to aid in barricading the entrance, had been hurt by
arrows and lances flung by the idle soldiery; and a still greater number
were suffering from sun-stroke in consequence of toiling on the top of
the building.
Inside the vast, thick-walled halls it was much cooler than in the
streets even, and the hours glided fast to the besieged heathen. Many of
them were fully occupied, or placed on guard; others were discussing the
situation, and disputing or guessing at what the outcome might, or must
be. Numbers, panic-stricken or absorbed in pious awe, sat huddled on the
ground, praying, muttering magical formulas, or wailing aloud. The
Magians and astrologers had retired with knots of followers into the
adjoining studies, where they were comparing registers, making
calculations, reading signs, devising new formulas and defending them
against their opponents.
An incessant bustle went on, to and fro between these rooms and the great
library, and the tables were covered with rolls and tablets containing
ancient prophecies, horoscopes and potent exorcisms. Messengers, one
after another, were sent out from thence to command silence in the great
halls, where the assembled youths and girls were kissing, singing,
shouting and dancing to the shrill pipe of flutes and twang of lutes,
clapping their hands, rattling tambourines--in short, enjoying to the
utmost the few hours that might yet be theirs before they must make the
fatal leap into nothingness, or at least into the dim shades of death.
The sun was sinking when suddenly the great brazen gong was loudly
struck, and the hard, blatant clatter rent the air of the temple-hall.
The mighty waves of sound reverberated from the walls of the sanctuary
like the surge of a clangorous sea, and sent their metallic vibration
ringing through every room and cell, from the topmost observatory-turret
to the deepest vault beneath, calling all who were within the precincts
to assemble. The holy places filled at once; the throng poured in through
the vestibule, and in a few minutes even the hypostyle, the sanctum of
the veiled statue, was full to overflowing. Without any distinction of
rank or sex, and regardless of all the usual formalities or the degrees
of initiation which each had passed through, the worshippers of Serapis
crowded towards the sacred niche, till a chain, held up by
neokores--[Temple-servants]--at a respectful distance from the mystical
spot, checked their advance. Densely packed and in almost breathless
silence, they filled the nave and the colonnades, watching for what might
befall.
Presently a dull low chant of men's voices was heard. This went on for a
few minutes, and then a loud pean in honor of the god rang through the
temple with an accompaniment of flutes, cymbals, lutes and trumpets.
Karnis had found a place with his wife and son; all three, holding hands,
joined enthusiastically in the stirring hymn; and, with them, Porphyrius,
who by accident was close to them, swelling the song of the multitude.
All now stood with hands uplifted and eyes fixed in anxious expectancy on
the curtain. The figures and emblems on the hanging were invisible in the
gloom--but now-now there was a stir, as of life, in the ponderous
folds,--they moved--they began to ripple like streams, brooks,
water-falls, recovering motion after long stagnation--the curtain slowly
sank, and at length it fell so suddenly that the eye could scarcely note
the instant. From every lip, as but one voice, rose a cry of admiration,
amazement, and delight, for Serapis stood revealed to his people.
The noble manhood of the god sat with dignity on a golden throne that was
covered with a blaze of jewels; his gracious and solemn face looked down
on the crowd of worshippers. The hair that curled upon his thoughtful
brow, and the kalathos that crowned it were of pure gold At his feet
crouched Cerberus, raising his three fierce heads with glistening ruby
eyes. The body of the god--a model of strength in repose--and the drapery
were of gold and ivory. In its perfect harmony as a whole, and the
exquisite beauty of every detail, this statue bore the stamp of supreme
power and divine majesty. When such a divinity as this should rise from
his throne the earth indeed might quake and the heavens tremble! Before
such a Lord the strongest might gladly bow, for no mortal ever shone in
such radiant beauty. This Sovereign must triumph over every foe, even
over death--the monster that lay writhing in impotent rage at his feet!
Gasping and thrilled with pious awe, enraptured but dumb with reverent
fear, the assembled thousands gazed on the god dimly revealed to them in
the twilight, when suddenly, for a moment of solemn glory, a ray of the
setting sun--a shaft of intense brightness--pierced the star-spangled
apse of the niche and fell on the lips of the god as though to kiss its
Lord and Father.
A shout like a thunder-clap-like the roar of breakers on a reef, burst
from the spectators; a shout of triumph so mighty that the statues
quivered, the brazen altars rang, the hangings swayed, the sacred vessels
clattered and the lamps trembled and swung; the echo rolled round the
aisles like a whirlpool at the flood, and was dashed from pillar to
column in a hundred wavelets of sound. The glorious sun still recognized
its lord; Serapis still reigned in undiminished might; he had not yet
lost the power to defend himself, his world and his children!
The sun was gone, night fell on the temple and suddenly there was a
swaying movement of the apse above the statue; the stars were shaken by
invisible hands, and colored flames twinkled with dazzling brightness
from a myriad five-rayed perforations. Once more the god was revealed to
his worshippers under a flood of magical glory, and now fully visible in
his unique beauty. Again the great halls rang with the acclamations of
the delirious throng; Olympius stepped forth, arrayed in a flowing robe
with the insignia and decorations of the high-priesthood; standing in
front of the image he poured on the pedestal a libation to the gods out
of a golden cup, and waved a censer of the costliest incense. Then, in
burning words, he exhorted all the followers of Serapis to fight and
conquer for their god, or--if need must--to perish for and with him. He
added a fervent prayer in a loud ringing voice--a cry for help that came
from the bottom of his heart, and went to the souls of his hearers.
Then a solemn hymn was chanted as the curtain was raised; and while the
assembled multitude watched it rise in reverent silence, the
temple-servants lighted the lamps that illuminated the sanctuary from
every cornice and pillar.
Karnis had left hold of his companions' hands, for he wanted to wipe away
the tears of devotional excitement that flowed down his withered cheeks;
Orpheus had thrown his arms round his mother, and Porphyrius, who had
joined a group of philosophers and sages, sent a glance of sympathy to
the old musician.
CHAPTER XIX.
By an hour after sunset the sacrifice of a bull in the great court of the
Serapeum was consummated, and the Moscosphragist announced that the god
had graciously accepted it--the examination of the entrails showed more
favorable indications than it had the day before. The flesh of the
slaughtered beast went forthwith to the kitchen; and, if the savor of
roast beef that presently rose up was as grateful to Serapis as to his
worshippers, they might surely reckon on a happy issue from the struggle.
The besieged, indeed, were, ere long, in excellent spirits; for Olympius
had taken care to store the cellars of the sanctuary with plenty of good
wine, and the happy auguries drawn from the appearance of the god and the
state of the victim had filled them with fresh confidence. As there was
not sleeping accommodation for nearly all the men, they had to turn night
into day; and as, to most of them, life consisted wholly in the enjoyment
of the moment, and all was delightful that was new or strange, they soon
eat and drank themselves into a valiant frame of mind.
Couches, such as they were wont to be on at meals, there were not, so
each man snatched up the first thing he could lay his hands on to serve
as a seat. When cups were lacking the jugs and vessels from the sanctuary
were sent for, and passed from one to another. Many a youth lounged with
his head in some fair one's lap; many a girl leaned back to back with
some old man; and as flowers were not to be had, messengers were sent to
the town to buy them, with vine-wreaths and other greenery.
They were easily procured, and with them came the news that the races
were to be held next morning.
This information was regarded by many as being of the first importance;
Nicarchus, the son of the rich Hippocleides, and Zenodotus a weaver of
tapestry--whose quadriga had once proved victorious--hastily made their
way into the town to give the requisite orders in their stables, and they
were closely followed by Hippias, the handsome agitator, who was the
favorite driver in the arena for the horses belonging to wealthy owners.
In the train of these three every lover of horses vanished from the
scene, with a number of Hippias' friends, and of flower-sellers,
door-keepers, and ticket-holders-in short, of all who expected to derive
special pleasure or profit from the games. Each man reflected that one
could not be missed, and as the god was favorably disposed he might
surely contrive to defend his own temple till after the races were over;
they would then return to conquer or die with the rest.
Then some others began to think of wives and children in bed at home, and
they, too, departed; still, by far the larger proportion remained
behind--above three thousand in all, men and women. These at once
possessed themselves of the half-emptied wine-jars left by the deserters;
gay music was got up, and then, wreathed with garlands on their heads and
shoulders, and 'filled with the god' they drank, shouted and danced far
into the night. The merry feast soon became a wild orgy; loud cries of
Evoe, and tumultuous singing reached the ears of the Magians, who had
once more settled down to calculations and discussions over their rolls
and tablets.
The mother of the youth that had been killed still sat huddled at the
foot of the statue of justice, enduring the anguish of listening to these
drunken revels with dull resignation. Every shout of laughter, every
burst of mad mirth from the revellers above cut her to the heart--and
yet, how they would have gladdened her if only one other voice could have
mingled with those hundreds! When Olympius, still in his fullest dress,
and carrying his head loftily as became him, made his way through the
temple at the head of his subordinates, he noticed Berenice--whom he had
known as a proud and happy mother--and begged her to join the friends
whom he had bidden to his own table; but she dreaded any social contact
with men whom she knew, and preferred to remain where she was at the feet
of the goddess.
Wherever the high-priest went he was hailed with enthusiasm: "Rejoice,"
he would say to encourage the feasters, cheering them with wise and
fervid exhortations, reminding them of Pharaoh Mycerinus who, having been
told by an oracle that he had only six years to live, determined to prove
the prophecy false, and by carousing through every night made the six
years allotted to him a good dozen.
"Imitate him!" cried Olympius as he raised a cup to his lips, "crowd the
joys of a year into the few hours that still are left us, and pour a
libation to the god as I do, out of every cup ere you drink."
His appeal was answered by a rapturous shout; the flutes and cymbals
piped and clanged, metal cups rang sharply as the drinkers pledged each
other, and the girls thumped their tambourines, till the calf-skin droned
and the bells in the frames tinkled shrilly.
Olympius thanked them, and bowed on all sides, as he walked from group to
group of his adherents. Seldom, indeed, had his heart beat so high! His
end perhaps was very near, but it should at least be worthy of his life.
He knew how the sunbeam had been reflected so as to kiss the statue's
lips. For centuries had this startling little scene and the sudden
illumination of the niche round the head of the god been worked in
precisely the same way at high festivals--[They are mentioned by
Rufinus.]--these were mere stimulants to the dull souls of the vulgar who
needed to be stirred up by the miraculous power of the god, which the
elect recognized throughout the universe, in the wondrous co-operation of
forces and results in nature, and in the lives of men. He, for his part,
firmly believed in Serapis and his might, and in the prophecies and
calculations which declared that his fall must involve the dissolution of
the organic world and its relapse into chaos.
Many winds were battling in the air, each one driving the ship of life
towards the whirlpool. To-day or to-morrow--what matter which? The
threatened cataclysm had no terrors for Olympius. One thing only was a
pang to his vanity: No succeeding generations would preserve the memory
of his heroic struggle and death for the cause of the gods. But all was
not yet lost, and his sunny nature read in the glow of the dying clay the
promise and dawn of a brilliant morrow. If the expected succor should
arrive--if the good cause should triumph here in Alexandria--if the
rising were to be general throughout Greek heathendom, then indeed had he
been rightly named Olympius by his parents--then he would not change
places with any god of Olympus--then the glory of his name, more lasting
than bronze or marble, would shine forth like the sun, so long as one
Greek heart honored the ancient gods and loved its native land.
This night--perhaps its last--should see a grand, a sumptuous feast; he
invited his friends and adherents--the leaders of spiritual life in
Alexandria--to a 'symposium', after the manner of the philosophers and
dilettanti of ancient Athens, to be held in the great concert-hall of the
Serapeum.
How different was its aspect from that of the Bishop's council-chamber!
The Christians sat within bare walls, on wooden benches, round a plain
table; the large room in which Olympius received his supporters was
magnificently decorated, and furnished with treasures of art in fine
inlaid work, beaten brass and purple stuffs-a hall for kings to meet in.
Thick cushions, covered with lion and panther-skins, tempted fatigue or
indolence; and when the hero of the hour joined his guests, after his
progress through the precincts, every couch was occupied. To his right
lay Helladius, the famous grammarian and high-priest of Zeus; Porphyrius,
the benefactor of the Serapeum, was on his left; even Karnis had been
allotted a place in his old friend's social circle, and greatly
appreciated the noble juice of the grape, that was passed round, as well
as the eager and intelligent friction of minds, from which he had long
been cut off.
Olympius himself was unanimously chosen Symposiarch, and he invited the
company to discuss, in the first instance, the time-honored question:
Which was the highest good?
One and all, he said, they were standing on a threshold, as it were; and
as travellers, quitting an old and beloved home to seek a new and unknown
one in a distant land, pause to consider what particular joy that they
have known under the shelter of the old Penates has been the dearest, so
it would beseem them to reflect, at this supreme moment, what had been
the highest good of their life in this world. They were on the eve,
perhaps, of a splendid victory; but, perchance, on the other hand, their
foot was already on the plank that led from the shore of life to Charon's
bark.
The subject was a familiar one and a warm discussion was immediately
started. The talk was more flowery and brilliant, no doubt, than in old
Athens, but it led to no deeper views and threw no clearer light on the
well-worn question. The wranglers could only quote what had been said
long since as to the highest Good, and when presently Helladius called
upon them to bring their minds to bear on the nature of humanity, a
vehement disputation arose as to whether man were the best or the worst
of created beings. This led to various utterances as to the mystical
connection of the spiritual and material worlds, and nothing could be
more amazing than the power of imagination which had enabled these
mystical thinkers to people with spirits and daemons every circle of the
ladder-like structure which connected the incomprehensible and
self-sufficing One with the divine manifestation known as Man. It became
quite intelligible that many Alexandrians should fear to fling a stone
lest it might hit one of the good daemons of which the air was full--a
spirit of light perhaps, or a protecting spirit. The more obscure their
theories, the more were they overloaded with image and metaphor; all
simplicity of statement was lost, and yet the disputants prided
themselves on the brilliancy of their language and the wealth of their
ideas. They believed that they had brought the transcendental within the
grasp of intelligent sense, and that their empty speculations had carried
them far beyond the narrow limits of the Ancients.
Karnis was in raptures; Porphyrius only wished for Gorgo by his side,
for, like all fathers, he would rather that his child should have enjoyed
this supreme intellectual treat than himself.
........................
In Porphyrius' house, meanwhile, all was gloom and anxiety. In spite of
the terrific heat Damia would not be persuaded to come down from the
turret-room where she had collected all the instruments, manuals and
formulas used by astrologers and Magians. A certain priest of Saturn, who
had a great reputation as a master of such arts, and who, for many years,
had been her assistant whenever she sought to apply her science to any
important event, was in attendance--to give her the astrological tables,
to draw circles, ellipses or triangles at her bidding, to interpret the
mystical sense of numbers or letters, which now and then escaped her aged
memory; he made her calculations or tested those she made herself, and
read out the incantations which she thought efficacious under the
circumstances. Occasionally, too, he suggested some new method or fresh
formula by which she might verify her results.
She had fasted, according to rule, the whole forenoon, and was frequently
so far overcome by the heat as to drop asleep in the midst of her
studies; then, when she woke with a start, if her assistant had meanwhile
worked out his calculation to a result contrary to her anticipations, she
took him up sharply and made him begin again from the beginning. Gorge,
went up from time to time; but, though she offered the old woman
refreshment prepared by her own hand, she could not persuade her even to
moisten her lips with a little fruitsyrup, for to break the prescribed
fast might endanger the accuracy of her prognostications and the result
of all her labor. However, when she seemed to doze, her granddaughter
sprinkled strong waters about the room to freshen the air, poured a few
drops on the old lady's dress, wiped the dews from her brow, and fanned
her to cool her. Damia submitted to all this; and though she had only
closed her weary eyes, she pretended to be asleep in order to have the
pleasure of being cared for by her darling.
Towards noon she dismissed the Magian and allowed herself a short
interval of rest and sleep; but as soon as she woke she collected her
wits, and set to work again with fresh zeal and diligence. When, at last,
she had mastered all the signs and omens, she knew for certain that
nothing could avert the awful doom foretold by the oracles of old.
The fall of Serapis and the end of the world were at hand.
The Magian covered his head as he saw, plainly demonstrated, how she had
reached this conclusion, and he groaned in sincere terror; she, however,
dismissed him with perfect equanimity, handing him her purse, which she
had filled in the morning, and saying:
"To last till the end."
The sun was now long past the meridian and the old woman, quite worn out,
threw herself back in her chair and desired Gorgo to let no one disturb
her; nay, not to return herself till she was sent for. As soon as Damia
was alone she gazed at herself in a mirror for some little time,
murmuring the seven vocables incessantly while she did so; and then she
fixed her eyes intently on the sky. These strange proceedings were
directed to a particular end, she was endeavoring to close her senses to
the external world, to become blind, deaf, and impervious to everything
material--the polluting burthen which divided her divine and spiritual
part from the celestia fount whence it was derived; to set her soul free
from its earthly shroud--free to gaze on the god that was its father. She
had already more than once nearly attained to this state by long fasting
and resolute abstraction and once, in a moment she could never forget,
had enjoyed the dizzy ecstasy of feeling herself float, as it were
through infinite space, like a cloud, bathed in glorious radiance. The
fatigue that had been gradually over powering her now seconded her
efforts; she soon felt slight tremor; a cold sweat broke out all over
her; she lost all consciousness of her limbs, and all sense of sighs and
hearing; a fresher and cooler air seemed to revive not her lungs only,
but every part of her body, while undulating rays of red and violet light
danced before her eyes. Was not their strange radiance an emanation from
the eternal glory that she sought? Was not some mysterious power
uplifting her, bearing her towards the highest goal? Was her soul already
free from the bondage of the flesh? Had she indeed become one with God
and had her earnest seeking for the Divinity ended in glorification? No;
her arms which she had thrown up as if to fly, fell by her side it was
all in vain. A pain--a trifling pain in her foot, had brought her down
again to the base world of sense which she so ardently strove to soar
away from.
Several times she took up the mirror, looked in it fixedly as before, and
then gazed upwards; but each time that she lost consciousness of the
material world and that her liberated soul began to move its unfettered
pinions, some little noise, the twitch of a muscle, a fly settling on her
hand, a drop of perspiration falling from her brow on to her cheek,
roused her senses to reassert themselves.
Why--why was it so difficult to shake off this burthen of mortal clay?
She thought of herself as of a sculptor who chisels away all superfluous
material froth his block of marble, to reveal the image of the god
within; but it was easier to remove the enclosing stone than to release
the soul from the body to which it was so closely knit. Still, she did
not give up the struggle to attain the object which others had achieved
before her; but she got no nearer to it--indeed, less and less near, for,
between her and that hoped-for climax, rose up a series of memories and
strange faces which she could not get rid of. The chisel slipped aside,
went wrong or lost its edge before the image could be extracted from the
block.
One illusion after another floated before her eyes first it was Gorgo,
the idol of her old heart, lying pale and fair on a sea of surf that
rocked her on its watery waste--up high on the crest of a wave and then
deep down in the abyss that yawned behind it. She, too--so young, a
hardly-opened blossom--must perish in the universal ruin, and be crushed
by the same omnipotent hand that could overthrow the greatest of the
gods; and a glow of passionate hatred snatched her away from the aim of
her hopes. Then the dream changed she saw a scattered flock of ravens
flying in wide circles, at an unattainable height, against the clouds;
suddenly they vanished and she saw, in a grey mist, the monument to
Porphyrius' wife, Gorgo's long-departed mother. She had often visited the
mausoleum with tender emotion, but she did not want to see it now--not
now, and she shook it off; but in its place rose up the image of her
daughter-in-law herself, the dweller in that tomb, and no effort of will
or energy availed to banish that face. She saw the dead woman as she had
seen her on the last fateful occasion in her short life. A solemn and
festal procession was passing out through the door of their house, headed
by flute-players and singing-girls; then came a white bull; a garland of
the scarlet flowers of the pomegranate--[This tree was regarded as the
symbol of fertility, on account of its many-seeded fruit.]--hung round
its massive neck, and its horns were gilt. By its side walked slaves,
carrying white baskets full of bread and cakes and heaps of flowers, and
these were followed by others, bearing light-blue cages containing geese
and doves. The bull, the calves, the flowers and the birds were all to be
deposited in the temple of Eileithyia, as a sacrifice to the protecting
goddess of women in child-birth. Close behind the bull came Gorgo's
mother, dressed with wreaths, walking slowly and timidly, with shy,
downcast eyes-thinking perhaps of the anguish to come, and putting up a
silent prayer.
Damia followed with the female friends of the house, the clients and
their wives and some personal attendants, all carrying pomegranates in
the right hand, and holding in the left a long wreath of flowers which
thus connected the whole procession.
In this order they reached the ship-yard; but at that spot they were met
by a band of crazy monks from the desert monasteries, who, seeing the
beast for sacrifice, abused them loudly, cursing the heathen. The slaves
indignantly drove them off, but then the starveling anchorites fell upon
the innocent beast which was the chief abomination in their eyes. The
bull tossed his huge head, snuffing and snorting to right and left, stuck
out his tail and rushed away from the boy whose guidance he had till now
meekly followed, flung a monk high in the air with his huge horns, and
then turned in his fury on the women who were behind.
They fled like a flock of doves on which a hawk comes swooping down; some
were driven quite into the lake and others up against the paling of the
shipyard, while Damia herself--who was going through it all again in the
midst of her efforts to rise to the divinity--and the young wife whom she
had vainly tried to shelter and support, were both knocked down. To that
hour of terror Gorgo owed her birth, while to her mother it was death.
On the following day Alexandria beheld a funeral ceremony as solemn, as
magnificent, and as crowded as though a conquering hero were being
entombed; it was that of the monk whom the bull had gored; the Bishop had
proclaimed that by this attack on the abomination of desolation--the
blood-sacrifice of idolatry--he had won an eternal crown in Paradise.
But now the black ravens crossed Damia's vision once more, till presently
a handsome young Greek gaily drove them off with his thyrsus. His
powerful and supple limbs shone with oil, applied in the gymnasium of
Timagetes, the scene of his frequent triumphs in all the sports and
exercises of the youthful Greeks. His features and waving hair were those
of her son Apelles; but suddenly his aspect changed: he was an emaciated
penitent, his knees bent under the weight of a heavy cross; his widow,
Mary, had declared him a martyr to the cause of the crucified Jew and
defamed his memory in the eyes of his own son and of all men. Damia
clenched her trembling hands. Again those ravens came swirling round,
flapping their wings wildly over the prostrate penitent.
Then her husband appeared to her, calmly indifferent to the birds of
ill-omen. He looked just as she remembered him many--so many years ago,
when he had come in smiling and said: "The best stroke of business I ever
did! For a sprinkling of water I have secured the corn trade with
Thessalonica and Constantinople; that is a hundred gold solidi for each
drop."
Yes, he had made a good bargain. The profits of that day's work were
multiplied by tens, and water, nothing in the world but Nile
water--Baptismal water the priest had called it--had filled her son's
money-bags, too, and had turned their plot of land into broad estates;
but it had been tacitly understood that this sprinkling of water
established a claim for a return, and this both father and son had
solemnly promised. Its magic turned everything they touched to gold, but
it brought a blight on the peace of the household. One branch, which had
grown up in the traditions of the old Macedonian stock, had separated
from the other; and her husband's great lie lay between them and the
family still living in the Canopic way, like a wide ocean embittered with
the salt of hatred. That he had infused poison into his son's life and
compelled him, proud as he was, to forfeit the dignity of a free and
high-minded man. Though devoted in his heart to the old gods he had
humbled himself, year after year, to bow the knee with the hated votaries
of the Christian faith, and in their church, to their crucified Lord, and
had publicly confessed Christ. The water--the terrible thaumaturgic
stream--clung to him more inseparably than the brand-mark on a slave's
arm. It could neither be dried up nor wiped away; for if the false
Christian, who was really a zealous heathen, had boldly confessed the
Olympian gods and abjured the odious new faith, the gifts of the
all-powerful water and all the possessions of their old family would be
confiscated to the State and Church, and the children of Porphyrius, the
grandchildren of the wealthy Damia, would be beggars. And this--all
this--for the sake of a crucified Jew.
The gods be praised the end of all this wretchedness was at hand! A
thrill of ecstasy ran through her as she reflected that with herself and
her children, every soul, everything that bore the name of Christian
would be crushed, shattered and annihilated. She could have laughed aloud
but that her throat was so dry, her tongue so parched; but her scornful
triumph was expressed in every feature, as her fancy showed her Marcus
riding along the Canopic street with that little heathen hussy Dada, the
singing girl, while her much-hated daughter-in-law looked after them,
beating her forehead in grief and rage.
Quite beside herself with delight the old woman rocked backwards and
forwards in her chair; not for long, however, for the black birds seemed
to fill the whole room, describing swift, interminable spirals round her
head. She could not hear them, but she could see them, and the whirling
vortex fascinated her; she could not help turning her head to follow
their flight; she grew giddy and she was forced to try to recover her
balance.
The old woman sat huddled in her chair, her hands convulsively clutching
the arms, like a horseman whose steed has run away with him round and
round the arena; till at length, worn out by excitement and exhaustion,
she became unconscious, and sank in a heap on the ground, rigid and
apparently lifeless.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Christianity had ceased to be the creed of the poor
He spoke with pompous exaggeration
Whether man were the best or the worst of created beings
SERAPIS
By Georg Ebers
Volume 5.
CHAPTER XX.
Gorgo, when she had left her grandmother, could not rest. Her lofty
calmness of demeanor had given way to a restless mood such as she had
always contemned severely in others, since she had ceased to be a
vehement child and grown to be a woman. She tried to beguile the alarm
that made her pulses beat so quickly, and the heart-sickness that ached
like a wound, by music and singing; but this only added to her torment.
The means by which she could usually recover her equanimity of mind had
lost their efficacy, and Sappho's longing hymn, which she began to sing,
had only served to bring the fervid longing of her own heart to light--to
set it, as it were, in the full glare of the sun. She had become aware
that every fibre, every nerve of her being yearned for the man she loved;
she would have thrown away her life like a hollow nut for one single hour
of perfect joy with him and in him. The faith in the old gods, the
heathen world which contained the ideal of her young soul, her
detestation of Christianity, her beautiful art--everything, in short,
that had filled the spiritual side of her life, was cast into the shade
by the one absorbing passion that possessed her soul. Every feeling,
every instinct, urged her to abandon herself entirely to her lover, and
yet she never for one instant doubted which side she would take in the
approaching conflict of the great powers that ruled the world. The last
few hours had only confirmed her conviction that the end of all things
was at hand. The world was on the eve of destruction; she foresaw that
she must perish--perish with Constantine, and that, in her eyes, was a
grace from the gods.
While Damia was vainly struggling to liberate her soul from the bondage
of the flesh, Gorgo had been wandering uneasily about the house; now
going to the slaves, encouraging them with brave words, and giving them
employment to keep them from utter desperation, and then stealing up to
see whether her grandmother might not by this time be in need of her. As
it grew dark she observed that several of the women, and even some of the
men, had made their escape. These were such as had already shown a
leaning towards the new faith, and who now made off to join their
fellow-Christians, or to seek refuge in the churches under the protection
of the crucified God whose supreme power might, perhaps, even yet, avert
the impending catastrophe.
Twice had Porphyrius sent a messenger to assure his mother and daughter
that all was well with him, that a powerful party was prepared to defend
the Serapeum, and that he should pass the night in the temple. The Romans
were evidently hesitating to attack it, and if, next morning, the heathen
should succeed in repelling the first onset, reinforcements might yet be
brought up in time. Gorgo could not share these hopes; a client of her
father's had brought in a rumor that the Biamites, after advancing as far
as Naucratis, had been dispersed by a few of the Imperial maniples. Fate
was stalking on its way, and no one could give it pause.
The evening brought no coolness, and when it was already quite dark, as
her grandmother had not yet called her, Gorgo could no longer control her
increasing anxiety, so, after knocking in vain at the door of the
observatory, she went in. Her old nurse preceded her with a lamp, and the
two women stood dumb with consternation, for the old lady lay senseless
on the ground. Her head was thrown back against the seat of the chair off
which she had slipped, and her pale face was lifeless and horrible to
look at, with its half-closed eyes and dropped jaw. Wine, water, and
strong essences were all at hand, and they laid the unconscious woman on
a couch intended for the occasional use of the wearied observer. In a few
minutes they had succeeded in reviving the old lady; but her eyes rested
without recognition on the girl who knelt by her side, and she murmured
to herself: "The ravens--where are they gone? Ravens!"
Her glance wandered round the room, to the tablets and rolls which had
been tossed off the couch and the table to make room for her, and for the
lamps and medicaments. They lay in disorder on the floor, and the sight
of this confusion produced a favorable excitement and reaction; she
succeeded in expressing herself in husky accents and broken, hardly
intelligible sentences, so far as to scold them sharply for their
irreverence for the precious documents, and for the disorder they had
created. The waiting-woman proceeded to pick them up: but Damia again
became unconscious. Gorgo bathed her brow and tried to pour some wine
between her teeth, but she clenched them too firmly, till the slave-woman
came to her assistance and they succeeded in making Damia swallow a few
drops. The old woman opened her eyes, smacking her tongue feebly; but she
took the cup into her own hand to hold it to her lips; and though she
trembled so that half the contents were spilt, she drank eagerly till it
was quite empty. "More," she gasped with the eagerness of intense thirst,
"more--I want drink!"
Gorgo gave her a second and a third draught which Damia drank with equal
eagerness; then, with a deep breath, she looked up fully conscious, at
her granddaughter.
"Thank you, child," she said. "Now I shall do very well for a little
while. The material world and all that belongs to it weighs us down and
clings to us like iron fetters. We may long and strive to be free, but it
pursues us and holds us fast. Only those who are content with their
miserable humanity can enjoy it. They laugh, as you know, at Praxilla,
the poetess, because she makes the dying Adonis lament, when face to face
with death, that he is forced to leave the apples and pears behind him.
But is not that subtly true? Yes, yes; Praxilla is right! We fast, we
mortify ourselves--I have felt it all myself--to partake of divinity. We
almost perish of hunger and thirst, when we might be so happy if only we
would be satisfied with apples and pears! No man has ever yet succeeded
in the great effort; those who would be truly happy must be content with
small things. That is what makes children so happy. Apples and pears!
Well, everything will be at an end for me ere long--even those. But if
the great First Cause spares himself in the universal crash, there is
still the grand idea of Apples and Pears; and who knows but that it may
please Him, when this world is destroyed, to frame another to come after
it. Will He then once more embody the ideas of Man--and Apples and Pears?
It would be plagiarism from himself. Nay, if He is merciful, He will
never again give substance to that hybrid idea called Man; or, if He
does, He will let the poor wretch be happy with apples and pears--I mean
trivial joys; for all higher joys, be they what they may, are vanity and
vexation. . . . Give me another draught. Ah, that is good! And to-morrow is
the end. I could find it in my heart to regret the good gifts of Dionysus
myself; it is better than apples and pears; next to that comes the joy
that Eros bestows on mortals, and there must be an end to all that, too.
That, however, is above the level of apples and pears. It is great, very
great happiness, and mingled therefor with bitter sorrow. Rapture and
anguish--who can lay down the border line that divides them? Smiles and
tears alike belong to both. And you are weeping? Aye, aye--poor child!
Come here and kiss me." Damia drew the head of the kneeling girl close to
her bosom and pressed her lips to Gorge's brow. Presently, however, she
relaxed her embrace and, looking about the room, she exclaimed:
"How you have mixed and upset the book-rolls! If only I could show you
how clearly everything agrees and coincides. We know now exactly how it
will all happen. By the day after to-morrow there will be no more earth,
no more sky; and I will tell you this, child: If, when Serapis falls, the
universe does not crumble to pieces like a ruinous hovel, then the wisdom
of the Magians is a lie, the course of the stars has nothing to do with
the destinies of the earth and its inhabitants, the planets are mere
lamps, the sun is no more than a luminous furnace, the old gods are
marsh-fires, emanations from the dark bog of men's minds--and the great
Serapis. . . . But why be angry with him? There is no doubt--no if nor
but. . . . Give me the diptychon and I will show you our doom. There--just
here--my sight is so dazzled, I cannot make it out.--And if I could, what
matter? Who can alter here below what has been decided above? Leave me to
sleep now, and I will explain it all to you to-morrow if there is still
time. Poor child, when I think how we have tormented you to learn what
you know, and how industrious you have been! And now--to what end? I ask
you, to what end? The great gulf will swallow up one and all."
"So be it, so be it!" cried Gorgo interrupting her. "Then, at any rate,
nothing that I love on earth will be lost to me before I die!"
"And the enemy will perish in the same ruin!" continued Damia, her eyes
sparkling with revived fire. "But where shall we go to--where? The soul
is divine by nature and cannot be destroyed. It must return--say, am I
right or wrong?--It will return to its first fount and cause; for like
attracts and absorbs like, and thus our deification, our union with the
god will be accomplished."
"I believe it--I am sure of it!" replied Gorgo with conviction.
"You are sure of it?" retorted the old woman. "But I am not. For our
clearest knowledge is but guesswork when it is not based on numbers.
Nothing is proved or provable but by numbers, but they are surer than the
rocks in the sea; that is why I believe in our coming doom, for, on those
tablets, we have calculated it to a certainty. But who can calculate
evidence of the future fate of the soul? If, indeed, the old order should
not pass away--if the depths should remain below and the empyrean still
keep its place above--then, to be sure, your studies would not be in
vain; for then your soul, which is fixed on spiritual, supernatural and
sublime conceptions, would be drawn upwards to the great Intelligence of
which it is the offspring, to the very god, and become one with
him--absorbed into him, as the rain-drop fallen from a cloud rises again
and is reunited to its parent vapor. Then--for there may be a
metempsychosis--your songful spirit might revive to inform a nightingale,
then . . ."
Damia paused; and gazed upwards as if in ecstasy, and it was not till a
few minutes later that she went on, with a changed expression in her
face: "Then my son's widow, Mary, would be hatched out of a serpent's egg
and would creep a writhing asp. . . . Great gods! the ravens! What can
they mean? They come again. Air, air! Wine! I cannot--I am choking--take
it away!--To-morrow--to-day. . . . Everything is going; do you see--do
you feel? It is all black--no, red; and now black again. Everything is
sinking; hold me, save me; the floor is going from under me.--Where is
Porphyrius? Where is my son?--My feet are so cold; rub them. It is the
water! rising--it is up to my knees. I am sinking--help! save me! help!"
The dying woman fought with her arms as if she were drowning; her cries
for help grew fainter, her head drooped on her laboring chest, and in a
few minutes she had breathed her last in her grandchild's arms, and her
restless, suffering soul was free.
Never before had Gorgo seen death. She could not persuade herself that
the heart which had been so cold for others, but had throbbed so warmly
and tenderly for her, was now stilled for ever; that the spirit which,
even in sleep, had never been at rest, had now found eternal peace. The
slave-woman had hastily taken her place, had closed the dead woman's eyes
and mouth, and done all she could to diminish the horror of the scene,
and the terrible aspect of the dead in the sight of the girl who had been
her one darling. But Gorgo had remained by her side, and, while she did
everything in her power to revive the stiffening body, the overwhelming
might of Death had come home to her with appalling clearness. She felt
the limbs of one she had loved growing cold and rigid under her hands,
and her spirit rose in obstinate rebellion against the idea that
annihilation stood between her and the woman who had so amply filled a
mother's place. She insisted on having every method of resuscitation
tried that had ever been heard of, and made her nurse send for
physicians, though the woman solemnly assured her that human help was of
no avail: then she sent for the priest of Saturn who--as the dead woman
herself had told her--knew mighty spells which had called back many a
departed spirit to the body it had quitted.
When, at last, she was alone and gazed on the hard, set features of the
dead, though she shuddered with horror, she so far controlled herself as
to press her lips in sorrow and gratitude to the thin hand whose caresses
she had been wont to accept as a mere matter of course. How cold and
heavy it was! She shivered and dropped it, and the large rings on the
fingers rattled on the wooden frame of the couch. There was no hope; she
understood that her friend and mother was indeed dead and silent forever.
Deep and bitter grief overwhelmed her completely, with the sense of
abandoned loneliness, the humiliating feeling of helplessness against a
brutal power that marches on, scorning humanity, as a warrior treads down
the grass and flowers in his path. She fell on her knees by the corpse,
sobbing passionately, and crying like an indignant child when a stronger
companion has robbed it of some precious possession. She wept with rage
at her own impotence; and her tears flowed faster and faster as she more
fully realized how lonely she was, and what a blow this must be to her
father. In this hour no pleasant reminiscences of past family happiness
came to infuse a drop of sweetness into the bitterness of her grief. Only
one reflection brought her any comfort, and that was the thought that the
grave which had yawned already for her grandmother would soon, very soon,
open for herself and all living souls. On the table, close at hand, lay
the evidence of their impending doom, and a longing for that end
gradually took complete possession of her, excluding every other feeling.
Thinking of this she rose from her knees and ceased to weep.
When, presently, her waiting-woman should return, she was resolved to
leave the house at once; she could not bear to stay; her feelings and
duty alike indicated the place where she might find the last hour's
happiness that she expected or desired of life. Her father must learn
from herself, and not from a stranger, of the loss that had befallen
them, and she knew that he was in the Serapeum--on the very spot where
she might hope next morning to meet Constantine. It would be her lover's
duty to open the gate to destruction, and she would be there to pass
through it at his side.
She waited a long, long time, but at last there was a noise on the
stairs. That was her nurse's step, but she was not alone. Had she brought
the leech and the exorciser? The door opened and the old steward came in,
carrying a three-branched lamp; then followed the slave-woman, and
then--her heart stood still then came Constantine and his mother.
Gorgo, pale and speechless, received her unexpected visitors. The nurse
had failed to find the physician, whose aid would, at any rate, have come
too late; and as the housekeeper had taken herself off with others of the
Christian slaves, the faithful soul had said to herself that "her child"
would want some womanly help and comfort in her trouble, and had gone to
the house of their neighbor Clemens, to entreat his wife to come with her
to see the dead, and visit her forlorn young mistress. Constantine, who
had come home a short time previously, had said nothing, but had
accompanied the two women.
While Constantine gazed with no unkindly feelings at the still face of
Damia--to whom, after all, he owed many a little debt of kindness--and
then turned to look at Gorgo who stood downcast, pale, and struggling to
breathe calmly, Dame Marianne tried to proffer a few words of
consolation. She warmly praised everything in the dead woman which was
not in her estimation absolutely reprobate and godless, and brought
forward all the comforting arguments which a pious Christian can command
for the edification and encouragement of those who mourn a beloved
friend; but to Gorgo all this well-meant discourse was as the babble of
an unknown tongue; and it was only when, at length, Marianne went up to
her and drew her to her motherly bosom, to kiss her, and bid her be
welcome under Clelnens' roof till Porphyrius should be at home again,
that she understood that the good woman meant kindly, and honestly
desired to help and comfort her.
But the allusion to her father reminded her of the first duty in her
path; she roused her energies, thanked Marianne warmly, and begged her
only to assist her in carrying the corpse into the thalamos, and then to
take charge of the keys. She herself, she explained, meant at once to
seek her father, since he ought to learn from no one but herself of his
mother's death. Nor would she listen for a moment to her friend's
pressing entreaties that she would put off this task, and pass the night,
at any rate, under her roof.
Constantine had kept in the background; it was not till Gorgo approached
the dead and gave the order to carry the body down into the house that he
came forward, and with simple feeling offered her his hand. The girl
looked frankly in his face, and, as she put her hand in his, she said in
a low voice: "I was unjust to you, Constantine. I insulted and hurt you;
but I repented sincerely, even before you had left the house. And you owe
me no grudge, I know, for you understood how forlorn I must be and came
to see me. There is no ill-feeling, is there, nothing to come between
us?"
"Nothing, nothing!" he eagerly exclaimed, seizing her other hand with
passionate fervor.
She felt as if all the blood in her body had rushed in a full tide to her
heart--as if he were some part of her very being, that had been torn out,
snatched from her, and that she must have back again, even if it cost
them both their life and happiness. The impulse was irresistible; she
drew away her hands from his grasp and flung them round his neck,
clinging to him as a weary child clings to its mother. She did not know
how it had come about--how such a thing was possible, but it was done;
and without paying any heed to Marianne, who looked on in dismay while
her son's lips were pressed to the brow and lips of the lovely
idolatress, she wept upon her lover's shoulders, feeling a thousand roses
blossoming in her soul and a thousand thorns piercing and tearing her
heart.
It had to be, that she felt; it was at once their union and their
parting. Their common destiny was but for a moment, and that moment had
come and gone. All that now retrained for them was death--destruction,
with all things living; and she looked forward to this, as a man watches
for the dawn after a sleepless night. Marianne stood aside; she dimly
perceived that something vital was going on, that something inevitable
had happened which would admit of no interference. Gorgo, as she freed
herself from Constantine's embrace, stood strangely solemn and
unapproachable. To the simple matron she was an inscrutable riddle to
which she could find no clue; but she was pleased, nevertheless, when
Gorgo came up to her and kissed her hand. She could not utter a word, for
she felt that whatever she might say, it would not be the right thing;
and it was a real relief to her to busy herself over the removal of the
body, in which she could be helpful.
Gorgo had covered the dead face; and when old Damia had been carried down
to the thalamos and laid in state on the bridal bed, she strewed the
couch with flowers.
Meanwhile, the priest of Saturn had been found, and he declared in all
confidence that no power on earth could have recalled this departed soul.
Damia's sudden end and the girl's great grief went to his faithful heart,
and he gladly acceded to Gorgo's request that he would wait for her by
the garden-gate and escort her to the Serapeum. When he had left them she
gave the keys of her grandmother's chests and cupboards into Marianne's
keeping; then she went into the adjoining room, where Constantine had
been waiting while she decked the bed of death, and bid him a solemn, but
apparently calm, farewell. He put out his arm to clasp her to his heart,
but this she would not permit; and when he besought her to go home with
them she answered sadly, "No, my dearest . . . I must not; I have other
duties to fulfil."
"Yes," he replied emphatically, "and I, too--I have mine. But you have
given yourself to me. You are my very own; you belong to me only, and not
to yourself; and I desire, I command you to yield to my first request. Go
with my mother, or stay here, if you will, with the dead. Wherever your
father may be, it is not, cannot be, the right place for you--my
betrothed bride. I can guess where he is. Oh! Gorgo, be warned.
"The fate of the old gods is sealed. We are the stronger and to-morrow,
yes to-morrow--by your own head, by all I hold dear and sacred!--Serapis
will fall!"
"I know it," she said firmly. "And you are charged to lay hands on the
god?"
"I am, and I shall do it."
She nodded approbation and then said submissively and sweetly: "It is
your duty, and you cannot do otherwise. And come what may we are one,
Constantine, forever one. Nothing can part us. Whatever the future may
bring, we belong to each other, to stand or fall together. I with you,
you with me, till the end of time." She gave him her hand and looked
lovingly into his eyes; then she threw herself into his mother's arms and
kissed her fondly.
"Come, come with me, my child," said Marianne; but Gorgo freed herself,
exclaiming: "Go, go; if you love me leave me; go and let me be alone."
She went back into the thalamos where the dead lay at peace, and before
the others could follow her she had opened a door hidden behind some
tapestry near the bed, and fled into the garden.
CHAPTER XXI.
The night was hot and gloomy. Heavy clouds gathered in the north, and
wreaths of mist, like a hot vapor-bath, swayed over the crisply-foaming
wavelets that curled the lustreless waters of the Mareotis Lake. The moon
peeped, pale and shrouded, out of a russet halo, and ghostly twilight
reigned in the streets, still heated by the baked walls of the houses.
To the west, over the desert, a dull sulphurous yellow streaked the black
clouds, and from time to time the sultry air was rent by a blinding flash
sent across the firmament from the north. There was a hot, sluggish wind
blowing from the southwest, which drove the sand across the lake into the
streets; the fine grit stung: and burnt the face of the wanderer who
hurried on with half-closed eyes and tightly-shut lips. A deep oppression
seemed to have fallen on nature and on man; the sudden gusts of the
heated breeze, the arrow-like shafts of lightning, the weird shapes and
colors of the clouds, all combined to give a sinister, baleful and
portentous aspect to this night, as though skies and waters, earth and
air were brooding over some tremendous catastrophe.
Gorgo had thrown a veil and handkerchief round her head and followed the
priest with an aching brow and throbbing heart. When she heard a step
behind her she started-for it might be Constantine following her up; when
a gust of wind flung the stinging sand in her face, or the storm-flash
threw a lurid light on the sky, her heart stood still, for was not this
the prelude to the final crash.
She was familiar with the way they were going, but its length seemed to
have stretched tenfold. At last, however, they reached their destination.
She gave the pass-word at the gate of her father's timber-yard and
exchanged the signs agreed upon; in a few minutes she had made her way
through the piles of beams and planks that screened the entrance to the
aqueduct--a slave who knew her leading the way with a light--and she and
her companion entered the underground passage.
It was hot and close; bats, scared by the flare of the torch, fluttered
round her with a ghostly rustle, startling and disgusting her; still, she
felt less alarm here than outside; and when, as she went forward she
thought of the great temple she was coming to, of its wonderful beauty
and solemn majesty, she only cared to press onward to that refuge of
ineffable splendor where all would be peace. To die there, to perish
there with her lover, did not seem hard; nay, she felt proud to think
that she might await death in the noblest edifice ever raised to a god by
mortal hands. Here Fate might have its way; she had known the highest joy
she had ever dreamed of, and where on earth was there a sublimer tomb
than this sanctuary of the sovereign of the universe, whose supremacy
even the other gods acknowledged with trembling!
She had known the sacred halls of the temple from her childhood, and she
pictured them as filled with thousands of lofty souls, united in this
supreme hour by one feeling and one purpose. She even fancied she could
hear the inspired and heartfelt strains of the enthusiasts who were
prepared to give their lives for the god of their fathers, that she
breathed the odor of incense and burnt sacrifices, that she saw the
chorus of youths and maidens, led by priests and dancing with solemn
grace in mazy circles round the flower-decked altars. There among the
elders who had gathered round Olympius to meditate devoutly on the coming
doom and on the inmost meaning of the mysteries--among the adepts who
were anxiously noting, in the observatories of the Serapeum, the fateful
courses of the stars, the swirling of the clouds and the flight of birds,
she would doubtless find her father; and the fresh wound bled anew as she
remembered that she was the bearer of news which must deeply shock and
grieve him. Still, no doubt, she would find him wrapped in dignified
readiness for the worst, sorrowing serenely for the doomed world, and so
her melancholy message would come to a prepared and resigned heart.
She had no fear of the crowd of men she would find in the Serapeum. Her
father and Olympius were there to protect her, and Dame Herse, too, would
be a support and comfort; but even without those three, on such a night
as this--the last perhaps that they might ever see--she would have
ventured without hesitation among thousands, for she firmly believed that
every votary of the gods was awaiting his own end and the crash of
falling skies with devout expectancy, and perhaps with not less terror
than herself.
These were her thoughts as she and her guide stopped at a strong door.
This was presently opened and they found themselves in an underground
chamber, devoted to the mysteries of the worship of Serapis, in which the
adepts were required to go through certain severe ordeals before they
were esteemed worthy to be received into the highest order of the
initiated--the Esoterics. The halls and corridors which she now went
through, and which she had never before seen, were meagrely lighted with
lamps and torches, and all that met her eye filled her with reverent awe
while it excited her imagination. Everything, in fact--every room and
every image--was as unlike nature, and as far removed from ordinary types
as possible, in arrangement and appearance. After passing through a
pyramidal room, with triangular sides that sloped to a point, she came to
one in the shape of a polygonal prism. In a long, broad corridor she had
to walk on a narrow path, bordered by sphinxes; and there she clung
tightly to her guide, for on one side of the foot-way yawned a gulf of
great depth. In another place she heard, above her head, the sound of
rushing waters, which then fell into the abyss beneath with a loud roar.
After this she came upon a large grotto, hewn in the living rock and
defended by a row of staring crocodiles' heads, plated with gold; the
heavy smell of stale incense and acrid resins choked her, and her way now
lay over iron gratings and past strangely contrived furnaces. The walls
were decorated with colored reliefs: Tantalus, Ixion, and Sisyphus
toiling at his stone, looked down on her in hideous realism as she went.
Rock chambers, fast closed with iron doors, as though they enclosed
inestimable treasures or inscrutable secrets, lay on either hand, and her
dress swept against numerous images and vessels closely shrouded in
hangings.
When she ventured to look round, her eye fell on monstrous forms and
mystical signs and figures; if she glanced upwards, she saw human and
animal forms, and mixed with these the various constellations, sailing in
boats--the Egyptian notion of their motions--along the back of a woman
stretched out to an enormous length; or, again, figures by some Greek
artist: the Pleiades, Castor and Pollux as horsemen with stars on their
heads, and Berenice's star-gemmed hair.
The effect on the girl was bewildering, overpowering, as she made her way
through this underground world. The things she had glimpses of were very
sparely illuminated, nay scarcely discernible, and yet appallingly real;
what mysteries, what spells might not be hidden in all she did not see!
She felt as if the end of life, which she was looking for, had already
begun, as if she had already gone down, alive, into Hades.
The path gradually sloped upwards and at last she ascended, by a spiral
staircase, to the ground-floor of the temple. Once or twice she had met a
few men, but solemn silence reigned in those subterranean chambers.
The sound of their approaching and receding steps had only served to make
her aware of the complete stillness. This was just as it should be--just
as she would have it. This peace reminded her of the profound silence of
nature before a tempest bursts and rages.
Gorgo took off her veil as she went up the stairs, shook out the folds of
her dress, and assumed the dignified and reverent demeanor which became a
young girl of rank and position when approaching the altars of the
divinity. But as she reached the top a loud medley of noises and voices
met her ear-flutes, drums?--The sacred dance, she supposed, must be going
on.
She came out into a room on one side of the hypostyle; her companion
opened a high door, plated with gilt bronze and silver, and Gorgo
followed him, walking gravely with her head held high and her eyes fixed
on the ground, into the magnificent hall where the sacred image sat
enthroned in veiled majesty. They crossed the colonnade at the side of
the hypostyle and went down two steps into the vast nave of the temple.
The wild tumult that she had heard on first opening the door had
surprised and puzzled her; but now, as she timidly looked up and around
her, she felt a shock of horror and revulsion such as might come over a
man who, walking by night and believing that he is treading on flowers,
suddenly finds that the slimy slope of a bottomless bog is leading him to
perdition. She tottered and clutched at a statue, gazing about her,
listening to the uproar, and wondering whether she were awake or
dreaming.
She tried not to see and hear what was going on there; it was revolting,
loathsome, horrible; but it was too manifest to be overlooked or ignored;
its vulgarity and horror forced it on her attention. For some time she
stood spell-bound, paralyzed; but then she covered her face with her
hands; maidenly shame, bitter disillusion, and pious indignation at the
gross desecration of all that she deemed most sacred and inviolable
surged up in her stricken soul, and she burst into tears, weeping as she
had never wept in all her life before. Sobbing bitterly, she wrapped her
face in her veil, as though to protect herself from storm and chill.
No one heeded her; her companion had left her to seek her father. She
could only await his return, and she looked round for a hiding place.
Then she observed a woman in mourning garb sitting huddled at the foot of
the statue of justice; she recognized her as the widow of Asclepiodorus
and breathed more freely as she went up to her and said, between her sobs
"Let me sit by you; we can mourn together."
"Yes, yes, come," said the other; and without enquiring what Gorgo's
trouble might be, moved only by the mysterious charm of finding another
in like sorrow with herself, she drew the girl to her and bending over
her, at length found relief in tears.
The two weeping women sat in silence, side by side, while in front of
them the orgy went on its frantic course. A party of men and women were
dancing down the hall, singing and shouting. Flutes yelled, cymbals
clanged, drums rattled and droned, without either time or tune. Drunken
pastophori had flung open the rooms where the vestments and sacred
vessels were kept, and from these treasuries the ribald mob had dragged
forth panther-skins such as the priests wore when performing the sacred
functions, brass cars for carrying sacrifices, wooden biers on which the
images of the gods were borne in solemn processions, and other precious
objects. In a large room adjoining, a party of students and girls were
concocting some grand scheme for which they needed much time and large
supplies of wine; but most of those who had possessed themselves of the
plunder had taken it into the hypostyle and were vying with each other in
extravagant travesties.
A burly wine-grower was elected to represent Dionysus and was seated with
nothing but some wreaths of flowers to cover his naked limbs, in a
four-wheeled sacrificial car of beaten brass. An alabaster wine-jar stood
between his fat knees, and his heavy body rolled with laughter as he was
drawn in triumph through the sacred arcades by a shouting rabble, as fast
as they could run. Numbers of the intoxicated crew, mad with excitement
and wine, had cast off their clothes which lay in heaps between the
pillars, soaking in puddles of spilt wine. In their wild dance the girls'
hair had fallen about their heated faces, tangled with withered leaves
and faded flowers, and the men, young and old alike, leaped and waltzed
like possessed creatures, flourishing thyrsus-staves and the emblems of
the lusty wine-god.
A small band of priests and philosophers ventured into the chaos in the
hope of quelling the riot, but a tipsy flute-player placed himself in
front of them and throwing back his head blew a furious blast to heaven
on his double pipe, shrill enough to wake the dead, while a girl seconded
him by flinging her tambourine in the face of the intruding pacificators.
It bounced against the shaft of a column, and then fell on the shaven
head of a priestling, who seized it and tossed it back. The game was soon
taken up, and before long, one tambourine after another was flying over
the heads of the frenzied crew. Every one was eager to have one, and
sprung to catch them, scuffling and struggling and making the parchment
sound on his neighbor's head.
Some of the women had jumped on to the processional biers and were being
carried round the hall by staggering youths, screaming with alarm and
laughter; if one of them lost her balance and fell she was captured with
shrieks of merriment and forced to mount her insecure eminence again.
Presently the car of Dionysus came to wreck over the body of an
unconscious toper, but no one stopped to set it right; and though the
hapless representative of the god howled loudly to them to stop while he
extricated himself from the machine, in which he had stuck, it was in
vain; the score or so of youths who were dragging it tore on, passing
close by Gorgo, who noted with indignation, that the brasswork of the
axles was cutting deeply into the splendid mosaic of the pavement. At
last the burly god fell out by his sheer weight, and his followers
restored him to consciousness by taking him by the heels and dipping his
towzled and bleeding head into a huge jar of wine and water. Then some
hundreds of his drunken votaries danced madly round the rescued god; and
as all the tambourines were split and the flute-players had no breath
left, time was kept by beating with thyrsus-staves against the pillars,
while three men, who had found the brazen tubas among the temple vessels,
blew with all their might and main.
Strong opposition, however, was roused by this mad uproar. A party of
worshippers, in the first place, rebelled against it; these had been
standing with veiled heads, near the statue of Serapis, muttering
exorcisms after a Magian and howling lamentably at intervals; then a
preacher, who had succeeded in collecting a little knot of listeners, bid
the trumpeters cease; and finally, a party of actors and singers, who had
assembled in the outer hall to perform a satira play, tried to stop them,
though they themselves were making such a noise that the trumpet-blast
could have affected them but little. When the players found that
remonstrance had no effect they rushed into the hypostyle and tried to
reduce the musicians to silence by force.
Then a frenzied contest began; but the combatants were soon separated;
the actors and their antagonists fell on each other's necks, and a
Homeric poet, who had compiled an elegy for the evening on the "Gods
coerced by the hosts of the new superstition," made up simply of lines
culled from the Iliad and Odyssey, seized this favorable opportunity. He
had begun to read it at the top of his voice, screaming down the general
din, when everything was forgotten in the excitement caused by the
entrance of a procession which was the successful result of many raids on
the temple-treasuries and lumber-rooms.
A storm of applause greeted its appearance; the tipsiest stammered out
his approval, and the picture presented to drunken eyes was indeed a
beautiful and gorgeous one. On a high platform-intended for the display
of a small image of Serapis and certain symbols of the god, at great
festivals--Glycera, the loveliest hetaira of the town, was drawn in
triumph through the temple. She reclined in a sort of bowl representing a
shell, placed at the top of the platform, and on the lower stages sat
groups of fair girls, swaying gently with luxurious grace, and flinging
flowers down to the crowd who, with jealous rivalry, strove to catch
them. Everyone recognized the beautiful hetaira as Aphrodite, and she was
hailed, as with one voice, the Queen of the World. The men rushed forward
to pour libations in her honor, and to join hands and dance in a giddy
maze round her car.
"Take her to Serapis!" shouted a drunken student. "Marry her to the god.
Heavenly Love should be his bride!"
"Yes--take her to Serapis," yelled another. "It is the wedding of Serapis
and Glycera."
The crazy rabble pushed the machine towards the curtain, with the
beautiful, laughing woman on the top, and her bevy of languishing
attendants.
Until this instant the vivid lightning outside, and the growling of
distant thunder had not been heeded by the revellers, but now a blinding
flash lighted up the hall and, at the same instant, a tremendous peal
crashed and rattled just above them, and shook the desecrated shrine. A
sulphurous vapor came rolling in at the openings just below the roof, and
this first flash was immediately followed by another which seemed to have
rent the vault of heaven, for it was accompanied by a deafening and
stunning roar and a terrific rumbling and creaking, as though the metal
walls of the firmament had burst asunder and fallen in on the earth--on
Alexandria--on the Serapeum.
The whole awful force of an African tempest came crashing down upon them;
the wild revel was stilled; the trembling topers dropped their cups,
fevered checks turned pale, the dancers parted and threw up their hands
in agonized supplication, words of lust and blasphemy died on their lips
and turned to prayers and muttered charms. The terrified nymphs that
surrounded Venus sprang from the car, and the foam-born goddess in the
shell tried to free herself from the garlands and gauzes in which she was
involved, shrieking aloud when she perceived that she could not descend
unaided from her elevated position. Other voices mingled with
hers--lamenting, cursing, and entreating; for now the rainclouds burst,
and through the window-openings poured a cold flood, chilling and wetting
the drunken mob within.
The storm raved through the halls and corridors; lightning and thunder
raged fiercely overhead; and the terrified wretches, suddenly sobered,
rushed about or huddled together, like ants whose nest has been upturned.
And into the midst of this dismayed throng rushed Orpheus, the son of
Karnis, who had been till now on guard on the roof, crying out: "The
world is coming to an end, the heavens are opening! Father--where is my
father?"
And everyone believed him; they snatched off their garlands, tore their
hair and gave themselves up to the utmost despair. Wailing, sobbing,
howling-furious, but impotent, they appealed to each other; and though
they had no hope of living to see another morning, or perhaps another
hour, each one thought only of himself, of his garments, and of how he
might best cover his limbs that shivered with terror and cold. From the
Scuffling mob round the heaps of cast-off clothes came deep groans,
piteous weeping, the shrieks of women, and the despairing moans of the
panic-stricken wretches.
It was a fearful scene, at once heart-rending and revolting; Gorgo looked
on, gnashing her teeth with rage and disgust, and only wishing for the
end of the world and of her own life as a respite from it all. These
crazed and miserable wretches, cowardly fools, these beasts in the guise
of human beings, deserved no better than to perish; but was it
conceivable that the supreme being should destroy the whole of the
beautiful and wisely-planned world for the sake of this base and
loathsome rabble.
It thundered, it lightened, the foundations of the temple shook--but she
no longer looked for the final crash; she had ceased to believe in the
majesty, the power and the purity of the divinity behind the veil. Her
cheeks burnt with shame, she felt it a disgrace ever to have been
numbered among his adherents; and, as the howling of the terrified crowd
grew every moment louder and wilder, the memory of Constantine's grave
and fearless manliness rose before her, in all its strength and beauty.
She was his, his wholly and forever; and for the future all that was his
should be hers: his love, his home, his noble purpose--and his God.
CHAPTER XXII.
The doubtful light of dawn was beginning to break through the
storm-clouds as they exhausted their fury on the Serapeum, but the
terrified heathen did not notice it. No captain, no prophet, no comforter
had come to revive their courage and hopes; for Olympius and his guests,
the leaders of the intellectual life of Alexandria--and among them the
chief priests of the sanctuary--were tardy in making their appearance.
The lightning-flash which had fallen on the brassplated cupola, and then
discharged its force along a flagstaff, had alarmed even the sages and
philosophers; and the Symposium had come to an abrupt end but little more
dignified than the orgy in the temple-halls. Few, to be sure, of the
high-priest's friends had allowed themselves to be so far scared as to
betray their terrors frankly; on the contrary, when the crack of doom
really seemed to have sounded, rhetoric and argument grew even more eager
than before round Olympius' table; and Gorgo's opinion of her
fellow-heathen might not have been much raised if she could have heard
Helladius, the famous philologist and biographer, reciting verses from
"Prometheus bound," his knees quaking and lips quivering as he heard the
thunder; or seen Ammonius, another grammarian who had written a
celebrated work on "The Differences of Synonyms," rending his robe and
presenting his bared breast as a target to the lightning, with a glance
round at the company to challenge their admiration. His heroic display
was, unfortunately, observed by few; for most of them, including
Eunapius, a neo-platonic philosopher distinguished as a historian and an
implacable foe of the Christians, had wrapped their heads in their robes
and were awaiting the end in sullen resignation. Some had dropped on
their knees and were praying with uplifted hands, or murmuring
incantations; and a poet, who had been crowned for a poem entitled: "Man
the Lord and Master of the Gods," had fainted with fear, and his
laurel-wreath had fallen into a dish of oysters.
Olympius had risen from his place as Symposiarch and was leaning against
a door-post awaiting death with manly composure. Father Karnis, who had
made rather too free with the wine-cup, but had been completely sobered
by the sudden fury of the storm, had sprung up and hastened past the
high-priest to seek his wife and son; he knew they could not be far off,
and desired to perish with them.
Porphyrius and his next neighbor, Apuleius, the great physician, were
among those who had covered their faces. Porphyrius could look forward
more calmly than many to the approaching crisis; for, as a cautious man
and far-seeing merchant, he had made provision for every contingency. If,
in spite of a Christian victory, the world should still roll on, and if
the law which declared invalid the will of an apostate should be enforced
against him, a princely fortune, out of the reach of Church or State, lay
safe in the hands of a wealthy and trustworthy friend for his daughter's
use; if, on the other hand, heaven and earth met in a common doom, he had
by him an infallible remedy against a lingering and agonizing death.
The whole party had sat during some long and anxious minutes, listening
to the appalling thunder-claps, when Orpheus rushed into the
banqueting-room, with the same frenzied and terror-stricken haste as
before, among the revellers, crying: "It is the end-all is over! The
world is falling asunder! Fire is come down from heaven! The earth is in
flames already--I saw it with my own eyes! I have come down from the
roof. . . .
"Father! Where is my father?"
At this news the company started up in fresh alarm, Pappus, the
mathematician, cried out: "The conflagration has begun! Flame and fire
are falling from the skies!"
"Lost-lost!" wailed Eunapius; while Porphyrius hastily felt in the folds
of his purple garment, took out a small crystal phial and went, pale but
calm, up to the high-priest. He laid his hand on the arm of the friend
whom he had looked up to all his life with affectionate admiration, and
said with an expression of tender regret:
"Farewell. We have often disputed over the death of Cato--you
disapproving and I approving it. Now I follow his example. Look--there is
enough for us both."
He hastily put the phial to his mouth, and part of the liquid had passed
his lips before Olympius understood the situation and seized his arm. The
effect of the deadly fluid was instantly manifest; but Porphyrius had
hardly lost consciousness when Apuleius had rushed to his side. The
physician had succumbed to the universal panic and resigned himself
doggedly to Fate; but as soon as an appeal was made to his medical skill
and he heard a cry for help, he had thrown off the wrapper from his head
and hastened to the merchant's side to combat the effects of the poison,
as clear-headed and decisive as in his best hours by the bed of sickness
or in the lecture-room.
When the very backbone of the soul seems to be broken, a sense of duty is
the one and last thing that holds it together and keeps it upright; and
nature has implanted in us such a strong and instinctive regard for
life--which we are so apt to contemn--that even within a few paces of the
grave we cherish and foster it as carefully as in its prime, when the end
seems still remote.
The merchant's desperate deed had been done under the very eyes of
Orpheus, and the newer horror so completely overshadowed the older, that
he hastened unbidden to help the physician lay the unconscious man on the
nearest couch; but then he went off again in search of his parents.
Olympius, however, who at the sight of his friend's weakness had suddenly
comprehended how much depended, in these last hours, on his own resolute
demeanor, detained the youth, and sternly desired him to give an exact
and clear account of what had happened on the roof. The young musician
obeyed; and his report was certainly far from reassuring.
A ball of fire had fallen with a terrific noise on the cupola, mingling
with flames that seemed to rise like streams of fire from the earth.
Then, again the heavens had opened with a blinding flash and Orpheus had
seen--with his own eyes seen--a gigantic monster--an uprooted mountain
perhaps--which had slowly moved towards the back-wall of the Serapeum
with an appalling clatter; and not rain, but rivers, rushing torrents of
water, had poured down on the men on guard.
"It is Poseidon," cried the lad, "bringing up the ocean against the
temple, and I heard the neighing of his horses. It was not an illusion, I
heard it with my own ears. . . ."
"The horses of Poseidon!" interrupted Olympius. "The horses of the
Imperial cavalry were what you heard!"
He ran to the window with the activity of a younger man and, lifting the
curtain, looked out to the eastward. The storm had vanished as rapidly as
it had come up and it was day. Over the rosy skirts of Eos hung a full
and heavy robe of swelling grey and black clouds, edged with a fringe of
sheeny gold. To the north a sullen flash now and then zigzagged across
the dark sky, and the roll of the thunder was faint and distant; but the
horses whose neighing had affrighted Orpheus were already near; they were
standing close to the southern or back-wall of the temple, in which there
was no gate or entrance of any kind. What object could the Imperial
cavalry have in placing themselves by that strong and impenetrable spot?
But there was no time for much consideration, for at this instant the
gong, which was sounded to call the defenders of the Serapeum together,
rang through the precincts.
Olympius needed no spur or encouragement. He turned to his guests with
the passion and fire of a fanatical leader, of the champion of a great
but imperilled cause, and bid them be men and stand by him to resist the
foe till death. His voice was husky with excitement as he spoke his brief
but vehement call to arms, and the effect was immense, precisely because
the speaker, carried away by the tide of feeling, had not tried to
impress the learned and eloquent men whom he addressed by any tricks of
elocution or choice of words. They, too, were fired by the spark of the
old man's enthusiasm; they gathered round him, and followed him at once
to the rooms where the weapons had been deposited for use.
Breastplates girt on to their bodies, and swords wielded in their hands
made soldiers of the sages at once, and inspired them with martial ardor.
Little was spoken among these heroes of "the mighty word." They were bent
on action. Olympius Had desired Apuleius to go into his private room
adjoining the hypostyle with Porphyrius, on whose senseless and rigid
state no treatment had as yet had any effect. Some of the temple-servants
carried the merchant down a back staircase, while Olympius hastily and
silently led his comrades in arms up the main steps into the great halls
of the temple.
Here the chivalrous host were doomed to surprise and disappointment
greater than the most hopeless of them was prepared to meet. Olympius
himself for a moment despaired; for his ecstatic adherents had during the
night turned to poltroons and tipplers, and the sacred precincts of the
sanctuary looked as if a battle had been fought and lost there. Broken
and bruised furniture, smashed instruments, garments torn and wet,
draggled wreaths, and faded flowers were strewn in every direction. The
red wine lay in pools like blood on the scarred beauties of the inlaid
pavement; here and there, at the foot of a column, lay an inert
body--whether dead or merely senseless who could guess?--and the
sickening reek of hundreds of dying lamps filled the air, for in the
confusion they had been left to burn or die as they might.
And how wretched was the aspect of the sobered, terror-stricken, worn-out
men and women. An obscure consciousness of having insulted the god and
incurred his wrath lurked in every soul. To many a one prompt death would
have seemed most welcome, and one man--a promising pupil of Helladius,
had actually taken the leap from existence into the non-existence which,
as he believed, he should find beyond the grave; he had run his had
violently against a pillar, and lay at the foot of it with a broken
skull.
With reeling brains, aching brows, and dejected hearts, the unhappy
creatures had got so far as to curse the present; and those who dared to
contemplate the future thought of it only as a bottomless abyss, towards
which the flying hours were dragging them with unfelt but irresistible
force. Time was passing--each could feel and see that; night was gone, it
would soon be day; the storm had passed over, but instead of the
inexorable powers of nature a new terror now hung over them: the no less
inexorable power of Caesar. To the struggle of man against the gods there
was but one possible end: Annihilation. In the conflict of man against
man there might yet be, if not victory, at least escape. The veteran
Memnon, with his one arm, had kept watch on the temple-roof during that
night's orgy, planning measures for repulsing the enemy's attack, till
the storm had burst on him and his adherents with the "artillery of
heaven." Then the greater portion of the garrison had taken refuge in the
lower galleries of the Serapeum, and the old general was left alone at
his post, in the blinding and deafening tempest. He threw his remaining
arm round a statue that graced the parapet of the roof to save himself
from being swept or washed away; and he would still have shouted his
orders, but that the hurricane drowned his voice, and none of his few
remaining adherents could have heard him speak. He, too, had heard the
champing of horses and had seen the moving mountain which Orpheus had
described. It was in fact a Roman engine of war; and, faithful though he
was to the cause he had undertaken, something like a feeling of joy
stirred his warrior's soul, as he looked down on the fine and
well-drilled men who followed the Imperial standards under which he had,
ere now, shed his best blood. His old comrades in arms had not forgotten
how to defy the tempest, and their captains had been well advised in
preparing to attack first what seemed the securest side of the temple.
The struggle, he foresaw, would be against tried soldiers, and it was
with a deep curse and a smile of bitter scorn that he thought of the
inexperienced novices under his command. It was only yesterday that he
had tried to moderate Olympius' sanguine dreams, and had said to him: "It
is not by enthusiasm but by tactics that we defeat a foe!"
The skill and experience he had to contend with were in no respect
inferior to his own; and he would know, only too soon, what the practical
worth might be of the daring and enthusiastic youths whom he had
undertaken to command, and of whom he still had secret hopes for the
best.
The one thing to do was to prevent the Christians from effecting the
breach which they evidently intended to make in the back-wall, before the
Libyan army of relief should arrive; and, at the same time, to defend the
front of the temple from the roof. There was a use for every one who
could heave a stone or flourish a sword; and when he thought over the
number of his troops he believed he might succeed in holding the building
for some considerable time. But he was counting on false premises, for he
did not know how attractive the races had proved to his "enthusiastic
youth" and how great a change had come over most of them.
As soon as the wind had so far subsided that he could stand alone, he
went to collect those that still remained, and to have the brass gong
sounded which was to summon the combatants to their posts. Its metallic
clang rang loud and far through the dim dawn; a deaf man might have heard
it in the deepest recess of the sanctuary--and yet the minutes slipped
by--a quarter of an hour--and no one had come at its call. The old
captain's impatience turned to surprise, his surprise became wrath. The
messengers he sent down did not return and the great moving shed of the
Romans was brought nearer and nearer to the southern side of the temple,
screening the miners from the rare missiles which the few men remaining
with him cast clown by his orders.
The enemy were evidently making a suitable foundation on which to place
the storming engine--a beam with a ram's head of iron-to make a breach in
the temple-wall. Every minute's delay on the part of the besieged was an
advantage to the enemy. A hundred-two hundred more hands on the roof, and
their tactics might yet be defeated.
Tears of rage, of the bitter sense of impotence, started to the old
soldier's eyes; and when, at length, one of his messengers came back and
told him that the men and women alike seemed quite demented, and all and
each refused to come up on the roof, he uttered a wrathful curse and
rushed down-stairs himself.
He stormed in on the trembling wretches; and when he beheld with his own
eyes all that his volunteers had done dining that fateful night, he raved
and thundered; asked them, rather confusedly perhaps, if they knew what
it was to be expected to command and find no obedience; scolded the
refractory, driving some on in front of him; and then, as he perceived
that some of them were making off with the girls through the door leading
to the secret passage, he placed himself on guard with his sword drawn,
and threatened to cut down any who attempted to escape.
In the midst of all this Olympius and his party had come into the ball
and seeing the commander struggling, sword in hand, with the recalcitrant
fugitives, where the noise was loudest, he and his guests hastened to the
rescue and defended the door against the hundreds who were crowding to
fly. The old man was grieved to turn the weapons they had seized in their
sacred ardor, against the seceders from their own cause; but it had to
be. While the loyal party--among them Karnis and Orpheus--guarded the
passage to the underground rooms with shield and lance, Olympius took
council of the veteran captain, and they rapidly decided to allow all the
women to depart at once and to divide the men into two parties-one to be
sent to fight on the roof, and the other to defend the wall where the
Roman battering-ram was by this time almost ready to attack.
The high-priest took his stand boldly between his adherents and the
would-be runaways and appealed to them in loud and emphatic tones to do
their duty. They listened to him silently and respectfully; but when he
ended by stating that the women were commanded to withdraw, a terrific
outcry was raised, some of the girls clung to their lovers, while others
urged the men to fight their way out.
Several, however, and among them the fair Glycera who a few hours since
had smiled down triumphantly on her worshippers as Aphrodite, availed
themselves at once of the permission to quit this scene of horrors, and
made their way without delay to the subterranean passages. They had
adorers in plenty in the city. But they did not get far; they were met by
a temple-servant flying towards the great hall, who warned them to return
thither at once: the Imperial soldiers had discovered the entrance to the
aqueduct and posted sentries in the timber-yard. They turned and followed
him with loud lamentations, and hardly had they got back into the temple
when a new terror came upon them: the iron battering-ram came with a
first heavy shock, thundering against the southern wall.
The Imperial troops were in fact masters of the secret passage; and they
had begun the attack on the Serapeum in earnest. It was serious--but all
was not yet lost; and in this fateful hour Olympius and Memnon proved
their mettle. The high-priest commanded that the great stone trap-doors
should be dropped into their places, and that the bridges across the
gulfs, in the underground rooms reserved for the initiated, should be
destroyed; and this there was yet time to do, for the soldiers had not
yet ventured into those mysterious corridors, where there could not fail
to be traps and men in ambush. Memnon meanwhile had hurried to the spot
where the battering-ram had by this time dealt a second blow, shouting as
he went to every man who was not a coward to follow him.
Karnis, Orpheus and the rest of the high-priest's guests obeyed his call
and gathered round him; he commanded that everything portable should be
brought out of the temple to be built into a barricade behind the point
of attack, and that neither the most precious and beautiful statues, nor
the brass and marble stelae and altar-slabs should be spared. Screened by
this barricade, and armed with lances and bows--of which there were
plenty at hand--he proposed, when the breach was made, to check the
further advance of the foe.
He was not ill-pleased that the only way of escape was cut off; and as
soon as he had seen the statues dragged from their pedestals, the
altar-stones removed from the sacred places they had filled for half a
century, benches and jars piled together and a stone barricade thus
fairly advanced towards completion, he drafted off a small force for the
defences on the roof. There was no escape now; and many a one who, to the
very last, had hoped to find himself free, mounted the stairs
reluctantly, because he would there be more immediately in the face of
the foe than when defending the breach.
Olympius distributed weapons, and went from one to another, speaking
words of encouragement; presently he found Gorgo who, with the bereaved
widow, was still sitting at the foot of the statue of justice. He told
her that her father was ill, and desired a servant to show her the way to
his private room, that she might help the leech in attending on him.
Berenice could not be induced to stir; she longed only for the end and
was persuaded that it could not be far off. She listened eagerly to the
blows of the battering-engine; each one sounded to her like a shock to
the very structure of the universe. Another--and another--and at last the
ancient masonry must give way and the grave that had already opened for
her husband and her son would yawn to swallow her up with her sorrows.
She shuddered and drew her hood over her face to screen it from the sun
which now began to shine in. Its light was a grievance to her; she had
hoped never to see another day.
The women, and with them a few helpless weaklings, had withdrawn to the
rotunda, and before long they were laughing as saucily as ever.
From the roof blocks of stone and broken statues were hailing down on the
besiegers, and in the halls below, the toiler who paused to wipe the
sweat from his brow would brook no idleness in his comrade; the most
recalcitrant were forced to bestir themselves, and the barricade inside
the southern wall soon rose to a goodly height. No rampart was ever built
of nobler materials; each stone was a work of art and had been reverenced
for centuries as something sacred, or bore in an elegant inscription the
memorial of noble deeds. This wall was to protect the highest of the
gods, and among the detachment told off to defend it, were Karnis, his
son, and his wife.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Gorgo sat by the bed of her apparently lifeless father, gazing fondly at
the worn and wax-like features, and listening to his breathing, now soft
and easy and again painful and convulsive, as it fluttered through his
nostrils. She held his cold damp hand tightly clasped, or stroked it
gently, or now and then, when his closed eyelids quivered, raised it
tenderly to her lips.
The room in which they were lay on one side of the hypostyle and behind
the right-hand--or western--colonnade; more forward, therefore, than the
veiled statue and to its left hand. The noise of the toilers at the
barricade and the crash of the blows of the battering-ram came up from
just below, and at each thud of the engine the senseless man started
convulsively and a look of intense pain crossed his face. But, though it
was indeed grievous to Gorgo to see her father suffering, though she told
herself again and again that, ere long, the sanctuary must fall into the
hands of the Christians, she felt safe, thankful and sheltered up here,
in her old friend's half-lighted and barely-furnished room, shut off, at
any rate, from the frenzied wretches of whom she thought only with
loathing and fear.
She was wearied out with her night of unrest, but the agitation and
excitement she had gone through were still vividly present to her mind,
and even on the comfortable couch in her own snug room at home her
perturbed spirit would have prevented her sleeping. Her brain was still
in a ferment, and here, in comparative peace, she had time to think over
all she had gone through during the last few hours, and the catastrophes
that had befallen her grandmother and her father. She had exchanged but
few words with the physician, who was still unceasingly busy in trying to
restore his patient to consciousness, and who had assured her that he had
every hope of her father's recovery.
But at length the girl looked up with an eager gaze and said, sadly
enough: "You said something about an antidote to poison, Apuleius? Then
my father tried to escape the final destruction by attempting to kill
himself.--Is it so?"
The leech looked at her keenly, and after confirming her suspicion and
explaining to her exactly how the fateful deed had been accomplished, he
went on:
"The storm had completely unnerved him--it unmanned us all--and yet that
was only the prelude to the tremendous doom which is hanging over the
universe. It is at hand; we can hear its approach; the stones are
yielding! the Christian's engines are opening the way for it to enter!"
Apuleius spoke in a tone of sinister foreboding, and the falling stones
dislodged by the battering-ram thundered a solemn accompaniment to his
prophecy. Gorgo, turned pale; but it was not the physician's ominous
speech that alarmed her, but the quaking of the walls of the room. Still,
the Serapeum was built for eternity; the ram might bring down a wall, but
it could not destroy or even shake the building itself.
Outside, the hubbub of fighting men grew louder and louder every minute,
and Apuleius, increasingly anxious, went to the door to listen. Gorgo
could see that his hands trembled! he--a man--was frightened, while she
felt no anxiety but for her suffering father! Through that breach
Constantine would enter--and where he commanded she was safe. As to the
destruction of the universe--she no longer believed in it. When the
physician turned round and saw her calmly and quietly wiping the cold
drops from the sick man's brow, he said gloomily: "Of what use is it to
shut our eyes like the ostrich. They are fighting down there for life or
death--we had better prepare for the end. If they venture--and they
will--to lay a sacrilegious hand on the god, besiegers and besieged
alike--the whole world together, must perish."
But Gorgo shook her head. "No, no," she cried, with zealous confidence.
"No, Apuleius, Serapis is not what you believe him to be; for, if he
were, would he suffer his enemies to overthrow his temple and his image?
Why does he not, at this supreme moment, inspire his worshippers with
courage? I have seen the men--mere boys--and the women who have assembled
here to fight for him. They are nothing but drivellers and triflers. If
the master is like his men it serves him right if he is overthrown; to
weep for him would be waste of woe!"
"And can the daughter of Porphyrius say this?" exclaimed the leech.
"Yes, Apuleius, yes. After what I have seen, and heard, and endured this
night, I cannot speak otherwise. It was shameful, horrible, sickening; I
could rage at the mere thought of being supposed to be one of that
debased crew. It is disgrace and ignominy even to be named in the same
breath! A god who is served as this god has been is no god of mine! And
you--you are learned--a sage and a philosopher--how can you believe that
the God of the Christians when he has conquered and crippled yours, will
ever permit Serapis to destroy His world and the men He created?"
Apuleius drew himself up. "Are you then a Christian?" he asked swiftly
and sternly.
But Gorgo could not reply; she colored deeply and Apuleius vehemently
repeated his question: "Then you really are a Christian?"
She looked frankly in his face: "No," she said, "I am not; but I wish I
were."
The physician turned away with a shrug; but Gorgo drew a breath of
relief, feeling that her avowal had lifted a heavy burthen from her soul.
She hardly knew how the bold and momentous confession had got itself
spoken, but she felt that it was the only veracious answer to the
physician's question.
They spoke no more; she was better pleased to remain silent, for her own
utterance had opened out to her a new land of promise--of feeling and of
thought.
Her lover henceforth was no longer her enemy; and as the tumult of the
struggle by the breach fell on her ear, she could think with joy of his
victorious arms. She felt that this was the purer, the nobler, the better
cause; and she rejoiced in the love of which he had spoken as the support
and the stay of their future life together--as sheltering them like a
tower of strength and a mighty refuge. Compared with that love all that
she had hitherto held dear or indispensable as gracing life, now seemed
vain and worthless; and as she looked at her father's still face, and
remembered how he had lived and what he had suffered, she applied those
words of Paul which Constantine had spoken at their meeting after his
return, to him, too; and her heart overflowed with affection towards her
hapless parent. She knew full well the meaning of the deep lines that
marked his lips and brow; for Porphyrius had never made any secret of his
distress and vexation whenever he found himself compelled to confess a
creed in which he did not honestly believe. This great falsehood and
constant duplicity, this divided allegiance to two masters, had poisoned
the existence of a man by nature truthful; and Gorgo knew for whose sake
and for what reasons he had subjected himself to this moral martyrdom. It
was a lesson to her to see him lying there, and his look of anguish
warned her to become, heart and soul, a Christian as she felt prompted.
She would confess Christ for love's sake-aye, for love's sake; for in
this hour the thing she saw most clearly in the faith which she purposed
to adopt, and of which Constantine had so often spoken to her with
affectionate enthusiasm, was Everlasting Love.
Never in her life had she felt so much at peace, so open to all that was
good and beautiful; and yet, outside, the strife grew louder and more
furious; the Imperial tuba sounded above the battle-cry of the heathen,
and the uproar of the struggle came nearer and nearer.
The battering-ram had made a large breach in the southern wall, and,
protected by their shed, the heavy-armed infantry of the twenty-second
legion had forced their way up; but many a veteran had paid for his
rashness with his life, for the storming party had been met by a perfect
shower of arrows and javelins. Still, the great shield had turned many a
spear, and many an arrow had glanced harmless from the brazen armor and
helmets; the men that had escaped pressed onwards, while fresh ranks of
soldiers made their way in, over the bodies of the fallen. The
well-drilled foe came creeping up to the barricade on their knees, and
protected by bronze bucklers, while others, in the rear, flung lances and
arrows over their heads at the besieged. A few of the heathen fell, and
the sight of their blood had a wonderful effect on their comrades. Rage
surged up in the breasts of the most timid, and fear vanished before the
passion for revenge; cowardice turned to martial ardor, and philosophers
and artists thirsted for blood. The red glare of strife danced before the
eyes of the veriest book-worm; fired by the terrible impulse to kill, to
subdue, to destroy the foe, they fought desperately and blindly, staking
their lives on the issue.
Karnis, that zealous votary of the Muses, stood with Orpheus, on the very
top of the barricade throwing lance after lance, while he sang at the top
of his voice snatches of the verses of Tyrtaeus, in the teeth, as it
were, of the foe who were crowding through the breach; the sweat streamed
from his bald head and his eye flashed fire. By his side stood his son,
sending swift arrows from an enormous bow. The heavy curls of his hair
had come unbound and fell over his flushed face. When he hit one of the
Imperial soldiers his father applauded him eagerly; then, collecting all
his strength, flung another lance, chanting a hexameter or a verse of an
ode. Herse crouched half hidden behind a sacrificial stone which lay at
the top of the hastily-constructed rampart, and handed weapons to the
combatants as they needed them. Her dress was torn and blood-stained, her
grey hair had come loose from the ribbands and crescent that should have
confined it; the worthy matron had become a Megaera and shrieked to the
men: "Kill the dogs! Stand steady! Spare never a Christian!"
But the little garrison needed no incitement; the fevered zeal which
possessed them wholly, seconded their thirst for blood and doubled their
strength.
An arrow, shot by Orpheus, had just glanced over the breastplate and into
the throat of a centurion who had already set foot on the lowest step,
when Karnis suddenly dropped the spear he was preparing to fling and fell
without a cry. A Roman lance had hit him, and he lay transfixed by the
side of a living purple fount, like a rock in the surf from which a
sapling has sprung. Orpheus saw his father's life-blood flowing and fell
on his knees by his side; but the old man pointed to the bow that his son
had cast aside and murmured eagerly: "Leave me--let me be. What does it
matter about me? Fight--for the gods--I say. For the gods! Go on, aim
truly!"
But the lad would not leave the dying man, and seeing how deeply the
spear had struck to the old man's heart he groaned aloud, throwing up his
arms in despair. Then an arrow hit his shoulder, another pierced his
neck, and he, too, fell gasping for breath. Karnis saw him drop, and
painfully raised himself a little to help him; but it was too much for
him; he could only clench his fist in helpless fury and chant,
half-singing, half-speaking, as loud he was able, Electra's curse:
"This my last prayer, ye gods, do not disdain!
For them turn day to night and joy to pain!"
But the heavy infantry, who by this time were crowding through the
breach, neither heard nor heeded his curse. He lost consciousness and did
not recover it till Herse, after lifting up her son and propping him
against a plinth, pressed a cloth against the stump of the lance still
remaining in the wound to staunch the swiftly flowing blood, and
sprinkled his brow with wine. He felt her warm tears on his face, and as
he looked up into her kind, faithful eyes, brimming over with tears of
sympathy and regret, his heart melted to tenderness. All the happiest
hours of the life they had spent together crowded on his memory; he
answered her glance with a loving and grateful gaze and painfully held
out his hand. Herse pressed it to her lips, weeping bitterly; but he
smiled up at her, nodding his head and repeating again and again the line
from Lucian: "Be comforted: you, too, must soon follow."
"Yes, yes--I shall follow soon," she repeated with sobs. "Without you,
without either of you, without the gods--what would become of me here."
And she turned to her son who, fully conscious, had followed every word
and every gesture of his parents and tried himself to say something. But
the arrow in his neck choked his breath, and it was such agony to speak
that he could only say hoarsely: "Father mother!" But these poor words
were full of deep love and gratitude, and Karnis and Herse understood all
he longed to express.
Tears choked the poor woman's utterance so that neither of the three
could say another word, but they were at any rate close together, and
could look lovingly in each other's eyes. Thus passed some few minutes of
peace for them, in spite of the blare of trumpets, and shrieks and
butchery; but Herse's kerchief was dyed and soaked with her husband's
blood, and the old man's eyes were glazed and staring as they wandered
feebly on the scene, as though to get a last general picture of the world
in which they had always sought to see only what was fair. Suddenly they
remained fixed on the face of a statue of Apollo, which had been flung on
to the barricade; and the longer they dwelt on the beautiful countenance
of the god the more they sparkled with a clear transfigured gleam. Once
more, with a final effort, he raised his heavy hand and pointed to the
sun-crowned head of the immortal youth while he softly murmured:
"He--he--all that was fair in existence--Orpheus, Herse--we owe it all to
him. He dies with us.--They--the enemy--in conquering us conquer thee!
They dream of a Paradise beyond death; but where thou reignest, O
Phoebus, there is bliss even on earth! They boast that they love death
and hate life; and when they are the victors they will destroy lute and
pipe, nay, if they could, would exterminate beauty and extinguish the
sun. This beautiful happy world they would have dark, gloomy, melancholy,
hideous; thy kingdom, great Phoebus, is sunny, joyful and bright . . . !"
Here his strength failed him; but presently he rallied once more and went
on, with eager eyes: "We crave for light, for music, lutes and pipes--for
perfumed flowers on careless brows--we--hold me up Herse--and thou, heal
me, O Phoebus Apollo!--Hail, all hail! I thank thee--thou hast accepted
much from me and hast given me all! Come, thou joy of my soul! Come in
thy glorious chariot, attended by Muses and Hours! See, Orpheus,
Herse--do you see Him coming?"
He pointed with a confident gesture to the distance; and his anxious eyes
followed the indication of his hand; he raised himself a little by a last
supreme effort; but instantly fell back; his head sank on the bosom of
his faithful partner and a stream of blood flowed from his quivering
lips. The votary of the Muses was dead; and a few minutes after Orpheus,
too, fell senseless.
War-cries and trumpet-calls rang and echoed through the Serapeum. The
battle was now a hand-to-hand fight; the besiegers had surmounted the
barricade and stood face to face with the heathen. Herse saw them coming;
she snatched the dart from her husband's wound, and fired by hatred and a
wild thirst for vengeance, she rushed upon the besiegers with frantic and
helpless fury, cursing them loudly. She met the death she craved; a
javelin struck her and she fell close to her husband and son. Her death
struggle was a short one; she had only time and strength to extend a hand
to lay on each before she herself was a corpse.
The battle raged round the heap of dead; the Imperial troops drove the
garrison backwards into the temple-halls, and the plan of attack which
had been agreed upon at a council of war held in the palace of the Comes,
was carried out, point by point, with cool courage and irresistible
force. A few maniples pursued the fugitives into the main entrance hall,
helped them to force the gates open, and then drove them down the slope
and steps, over the stones that had been heaped up for protection, and
into the very arms of the division placed in front of the temple. These
at once surrounded them and took them prisoners, as the hunter traps the
game that rushes down upon him when driven by the dogs and beaters.
Foremost to fly were the women from the rotunda, who were welcomed with
acclamations by the soldiers.
But those who now tried to defend themselves found no quarter. Berenice
had picked up a sword that was lying on the ground and had opened a vein
with the point of it; her body, bathed in blood, was found at the foot of
the statue of justice.
No sooner had the Christians mastered the barricade than a few maniples
had been sent up to the roof, and the defenders had been compelled to
surrender or to throw themselves from the parapet. Old Memnon, who had
been fighting against his Imperial master and could hope for no mercy,
sprang at once into the gulf below, and others followed his example; for
the end of all things was now close at hand, and to the nobler souls to
die voluntarily in battle for great Serapis seemed finer and worthier
than to languish in the enemy's chains.
CHAPTER XXIV.
The terrific storm of the preceding night had thrown the whole city into
dismay. Everyone knew the danger that threatened Serapis, and what must
ensue if he were overthrown; and everyone had thought that the end of the
world had indeed come. But the tempest died away; the sun's bright glow
dispersed the clouds and mist; sea and sky smiled radiantly blue, and the
trees and herbage glistened in revived freshness.
Not yet had the Romans dared to lay hands on the chief of the gods, the
patron and protector of the city. Serapis had perhaps sent the lightning,
thunder and rain as a message to warn his foes. If only they might
abstain from the last, worst crime of desecrating his image!
Nor was this the hope of the heathen only; on the contrary: Jews and
Christians no less dreaded the fall of the god and of his temple. He was
the pride, the monumental glory of the city of Alexander; the centre of
foundations and schools which benefited thousands. The learning which was
the boast of Alexandria dwelt under his protection; to the Serapeum was
attached a medical Faculty which enjoyed the reputation of being the
first in the world; from its observatory the course of the year was
forecast and the calendar was promulgated. An hour's slumber in its halls
brought prophetic dreams, and the future must remain undivined if Serapis
were to fall, for the god revealed it to his priests, not merely by the
courses and positions of the stars, but by many other signs; and it was a
delight and a privilege to look forward from the certain, tangible
present to the mysteries of the morrow.
Even Christian seers answered the questionings of their followers in a
way which portended the worst, and it was a grief to many of the baptized
to think of their native city without Serapis and the Serapeum, just as
we cannot bear to cut down a tree planted by the hand of an ancestor,
even though it may darken our home. The temple ought to be closed, bloody
sacrifices to the god should be prohibited--but his image--the noblest
work of Bryaxis--to mutilate, or even to touch that would be a rash, a
fateful deed, treason to the city and an outrage on the world.
Thus thought the citizens; thus, too, thought the soldiers, who were
required by military discipline to draw the sword against the god in whom
many of them believed.
As the news spread that the troops were to attack the Serapeum early next
morning, thousands of spectators collected, and filled the temple itself
in breathless anxiety to watch the issue of the struggle.
The sky was as clear and blue as on any other fine day; but over the sea
to the north lay a light stratum of clouds--the harbingers perhaps of the
appalling blackness which the god would presently bring up against his
enemies.
The men who had defended the Serapeum were led away; it had been
determined in a council of war that they should be treated with clemency,
and Cynegius had proclaimed free and full pardon to every prisoner who
would swear never, for the future, to sacrifice to the god or worship in
his temple.
Not one of the hundreds who had fallen into the hands of the Romans had
refused to take the oath; they dispersed at once, though with suppressed
fury, many of them joining the crowd who stood waiting and watching for
the next step to be taken by the Romans--for the final crash of the
universe, perhaps.
The doors of the temple were thrown wide open; the temple-servants and
hundreds of soldiers were busied in clearing the steps and approaches of
the stones and fragments of statuary with which the heathen had
encumbered them. As soon as this task was finished the dead and wounded
were removed; among those who still breathed was Orpheus, the son of
Karnis. Those who had been so happy as to escape in the defence of the
sanctuary and had mingled with the crowd were besieged with questions,
and all agreed that the statue of the god was as yet inviolate.
The citizens were relieved, but ere long were startled by a new alarm; an
Ala of heavy cavalry came upon the scene, opening a way for an immensely
long procession whose chanted psalms rang out from afar, loud above the
cries and murmurs of the mob, the clatter of harness, and stamping of
horses. It was clear now where the monks had been. They were not usually
absent when there was a skirmish with the heathen; but, till this moment,
they had been seen only in twos or threes about the Serapeum. Now they
came forward shouting a psalm of triumph, their eyes glaring, wilder and
more ruthless than ever.
The Bishop marched at their head, in his vestments, under a magnificent
canopy; his lofty stature was drawn to its full height and his lips were
firmly closed.
He looked like a stern judge about to mount the tribunal to pronounce
sentence with inexorable severity on some execrable crime.
The crowd quailed.
The Bishop and the monks in the Serapeum, meant the overthrow of the
statue of the sovereign god--death and destruction. The boldest turned
pale; many who had left wife and children at home stole away to await the
end of the world with those they loved; others remained to watch the
menaced sanctuary, cursing or praying; but the greater number, men and
women alike, crowded into the temple, risking their lives to be present
at the stupendous events about to be enacted there and which promised to
be a drama of unequalled interest.
At the bottom of the ascent the Comes rode forth to meet the Bishop,
leaped from his saddle and greeted him with reverence. The Imperial
legate had not made his appearance; he had preferred to remain for the
present at the prefect's house, intending to preside, later in the day,
at the races as the Emperor's representative, side by side with the
Prefect Evagrius--who also kept aloof during the attack on the Serapeum.
After a brief colloquy, Romanus signed to Constantine, the captain of the
cavalry; the troop dismounted, and, led by their officer, marched up the
slope that led to the great gate of the Serapeum. They were followed by
the Comes with his staff; next to him pale and somewhat tremulous came
some of the city officials and a few Christian members of the senate; and
then the Bishop--who had preferred to come last--with all the Christian
priesthood and a crowd of chanting monks. The train was closed by a
division of heavy-armed infantry; and after them the populace rushed in,
unchecked by the soldiers who stood outside the temple.
The great halls of the Serapeum had been put in order as well as possible
in so short a time. Of all those who, the day before, had crowded in to
defend the god and his house, none were left but Porphyrius and those who
were nursing him. After a long and agonizing period of silence heavy
fists came thundering at the door. Gorgo started up to unbolt it, but
Apuleius held her back; so it was forced off its hinges and thing into
the temple-aisle on which the room opened. At the same instant a party of
soldiers entered the room and glanced round it enquiringly.
The physician turned as pale as death, and sank incapable of speech on a
seat by his patient's couch; but Gorgo turned with calm dignity to the
centurion who led the intruders, and explained to him who she was, and
that she was here under the protection of the leech to tend her suffering
father. She concluded by asking to speak with Constantine the prefect of
cavalry, or with the Comes Romanus, to whom she and her father were well
known.
There was nothing unusual in a sick man being brought into the Serapeum
for treatment, and the calm, undoubting superiority of Gorgo's tone as
well as the high rank of the men whose protection she appealed to,
commanded the centurion's respectful consideration; however, his orders
were to send every one out of the temple who was not a Roman soldier, so
he begged her to wait a few minutes, and soon returned with the legate
Volcatius, the captain of his legion. This knightly patrician well
knew--as did every lover of horses--the owner of the finest stable in
Alexandria, and was quite willing to allow Gorgo and Apuleius to remain
with their patient; at the same time he warned them that a great
catastrophe was imminent. Gorgo, however, persisted in her wish to be by
her father's side, so he left her a guard to protect them.
The soldiers were too busy to linger; instead of replacing the door they
had torn down, they pushed it out of their way; and Gorgo, seeing that
her father remained in precisely the same condition, drew back the
curtain which was all that now divided them from the hypostyle, and
looked out over the heads of a double row of soldiers. They were posted
close round the lower step of the platform that raised the hypostyle
above the nave and the colonnades on each side of it.
In the distance Gorgo could see a vast body of men slowly approaching in
detachments, and with long pauses at intervals. They stopped for some
time in the outer hall, and before they entered the basilica twenty
Christian priests came in with strange gestures and a still stranger
chant; these were exorcists, come to bann the evil spirits and daemons
that must surely haunt this high place of idolatry and abominations. They
carried crosses which they flourished like weapons against an unseen foe,
and touched the columns with them, the pavement and the few remaining
statues; they fell on their knees, making the sign of the cross with the
left hand; and, finally, they ranged themselves like soldiers in three
ranks in front of the niche containing the statue, pointed their crosses
at the god, and recited in loud, angry, and commanding tones the potent
anathemas and mysterious formulas which they thought calculated to expel
the most reprobate and obdurate of all the heathen devils. A host of
acolytes, following at their heels, swung their censers about the
plague-spot--the shrine of the king of idols; while the exorcists dipped
wands into a cauldron carried by their attendants, and sprinkled the
mystical figures on the hanging and on the mosaic pavement.
All this occupied several minutes. Then--and Gorgo's heart beat
high--then Constantine came in, armed and equipped, and behind him an Ala
of picked men, the elite of his troop; bearded men with tanned and
scarred faces. Instead of swords they carried axes, and they were
followed by sappers bearing tall ladders which, by Constantine's orders,
they leaned up against the niche. The infantry ranged under the
colonnades at the sides were evidently startled at the sight of these
ladders, and Gorgo could perceive by the trembling of the curtain near
which she and Apuleius were standing, how deeply the physician was
agitated. It was as though the axe had been displayed with which a king
was about to be decapitated.
Now the Bishop came in with the municipal dignitaries; priests and monks,
chanting as they walked, filled the broad hall, incessantly making the
sign of the cross; and the crowd that poured into the hypostyle pressed
as far forward as they were allowed by the chain which the soldiers held
outstretched between them and their superiors.
The populace-heathen and Christian of every sect and degree-filled the
aisles, too; but the chain also kept them off the upper end, on to which
the room opened in which Porphyrius lay; so that Gorgo's view of the
curtain and apse remained unhindered.
The psalm rang loudly through the temple-courts above the murmur and
grumble of the angry, terrified and expectant mob. They were prepared for
the worst; each one knew the crime which was to be perpetrated, and yet
few, perhaps, really believed that any one would dare to commit it.
Whichever way she looked Gorgo saw only white faces, stamped with
passion, dismay, and dread. The very priests and soldiers themselves had
turned pale, and stood with bloodless cheeks and set teeth, staring at
the ground; some, to disguise their alarm, cast wrathful and defiant
glances at the rebellious mob, who tried to drown the psalm-singing in
loud menaces and curses, and the echoes of the great building doubled
their thousand voices.
A strange unrest seethed in this dense mass of humanity. The heathen were
trembling with rage, clutching their amulets and charms, or shaking angry
fists; the Christians thrilled with anxiety and pious zeal, and used
their hands to lift the cross or to ward off the evil one with
outstretched fingers. Every face and every gesture, the muttered curses
and pious hymns--all showed that some terrible and fateful event was
impending over all. Gorgo herself felt as though she were standing on the
brink of a crater, while air and earth heaved around her; she felt and
saw the eruption of the volcano threatening, every instant, to burst at
her feet, and to choke and ruin every living thing.
The uproar among the heathen grew louder and louder; fragments of stone
and wood came flying towards the spot where the Bishop and officials were
standing; but, suddenly, the tumult ceased, and, as if by a miracle,
there was silence--perfect silence--in the temple. It was as though at a
sign from the Omnipotent Ruler the storm-lashed ocean had turned to the
calm of a land-locked lake. At a nod from the Bishop some acolytes had
stepped up to the niche where the statue of the god was shrouded and the
curtain, which till now had hidden it, slowly began to fall.
There sat Serapis, looking down in majestic indifference, as cold and
unapproachable as if his sublime dignity was far removed above the petty
doings of the crawling humanity at his feet; and the effect was as
impressive now as it had been the evening before. How beautiful--how
marvellously grand and lofty was this work of human hands! Even the
Christians could not repress a low, long-drawn murmur of surprise,
admiration, and astonishment. The heathen were at first silent, overcome
by pious awe and ecstasy; but then they broke out in a loud and
triumphant shout, and their cries of "Hail to Serapis!" "Serapis, reign
forever!" rang from pillar to pillar and echoed from the stony vault of
the apse and ceiling.
Gorgo crossed her hands over her bosom as she saw the god revealed in his
glorious beauty. Spotlessly pure, complete and perfect, the noble statue
stood before her; an idol indeed, and perishable--but still divine as a
matchless work, wrought by the loving hands of a votary of the god,
inspired by the immortals. She gazed spell-bound on the form which,
though human, transcended humanity as eternity transcends time, as the
light of the sun transcended the blazing beacon on Pharos; and she said
to herself that it was impossible that an irreverent hand should be laid
on this supremely lovely statue, crowned with the might of undying
beauty.
She saw that even the Bishop drew back a step when the curtain had
fallen, and his lips parted involuntarily to utter a cry of admiration
like the others; but she saw, too, that he closed them again and pressed
them more firmly together; that his eye sparkled with a fiercer light as
the shout of the heathen rose to heaven, that the knotted veins on his
high forehead swelled with rage as he heard the cry of "Serapis, Hail,
all hail!" Then she noted the Comes, as he whispered soothing words in
the prelate's ear, praying him perhaps to spare the statue--not as an
idol, but as a work of art; as he turned from Theophilus with a shrug;
and then--her heart stood still, and she had to cling to the curtain--he
pointed to the statue, with a nod of intelligence to Constantine. The
young officer bowed with military formality and gave a word of command to
his men, which was drowned by the wild cries of the heathen as soon as
they apprehended with dismay what its import was.
The veterans were stirred. A subaltern officer, putting the standard he
bore into the hands of the man next to him and taking his axe from him
instead, rushed towards the statue, gazed up at it--and then, letting the
axe sink, withdrew slowly to rejoin the others who still stood
hesitating, looking at each other with doubting and defiant eyes.
Once more Constantine shouted his order, louder and more positively than
before; but the men did not move. The subaltern flung his axe on the
ground and the rest followed his example, pointing eagerly to the god,
and vehemently adjuring their prefect--refusing apparently to obey his
commands--for he went to the recalcitrant standard-bearer, a grey-haired
veteran, and laying his hand on the man's shoulder shook him angrily,
evidently threatening him and his comrades.
In these brave souls a struggle was going on, between their sense of
discipline and devotion to their fine young leader, and their awe of the
god; it was visible in their puzzled faces, in their hands raised in
supplication. Constantine, however, relentlessly repeated his order; and,
when they still refused to obey, he turned his back on their ranks with a
gesture of bitter contempt, and shouted his commands to the infantry
posted by the colonnade behind which Gorgo was watching all these
proceedings.
But these also were refractory. The heathen were triumphant, and
encouraged the soldiers with loud cries to persist.
Constantine turned once more to his own men, and finding them obstinate
in their disobedience, he went forward himself to where the ladders were
standing, moved one of them from the wall and leaned it up against the
body of the statue, seized the axe that lay nearest, and mounted from
rung to rung. The murmurs of the heathen were suddenly silenced; the
multitude were so still that the least sound of one plate of armor
against another was audible, that each man could hear his neighbor
breathe, and that Gorgo fancied she could hear her own heart throb.
The man and the god stood face to face, and the man who was about to lay
hands on the god was her lover. She watched his movements with breathless
interest; she longed to call out to him, to follow him as he mounted the
ladder, to fall on his neck and keep him from committing such
sacrilege--not out of fear of the ruin he might bring upon the world, but
only because she felt that the first blow he should deal to this
beautiful and unique work of art might wreck her love for him, as his axe
would wreck the ivory. She was not afraid for him; he seemed to her
inviolable and invulnerable; but her whole soul shuddered at the deed
which he was steeling himself to perpetrate. She remembered their happy
childhood together, his own artistic attempts, the admiration with which
he had gazed at the great works of the ancient sculptors--and it seemed
impossible that he, of all men he, should lay hands on that masterpiece,
that he, of all men, should be the one to insult, mutilate and ruin it.
It was not--could not be true!
But there he was, at the top of the ladder; he passed the axe from his
left hand to his right, and leaning back a little, looked at the head of
the god from one side. She could see his face plainly, and note every
movement and look; she watched him keenly, and saw the loving and
compassionate expression with which he fixed his gaze on the noble
features of Serapis, saw him clutch his left hand to his heart as if in
pain. The crowd below might fancy that he lacked courage, that he was
absorbed in prayer, or that his soul shrank from dealing the fateful blow
to the great divinity; but she could see that he was bidding a silent
farewell, as it were, to the sublime work of an inspired artist, which it
pained and shocked him to destroy. And this comforted her; it gave her
views of the situation a new direction, and suggested the question
whether he, a soldier and a Christian, when commanded by his superior to
do this deed ought to shrink or hesitate, if he were indeed, heart and
soul, what, after all, he was. Her eyes clung to him, as a frightened
child clings to its mother's neck; and the expectant thousands, in an
agony of suspense, like her, saw nothing but him.
Stillness more profound never reigned in the heart of the desert than now
in this vast and densely-crowded hall. Of all man's five senses only one
was active: that of sight; and that was concentrated on a single object a
man's hand holding an axe. The hearts of thousands stood still, their
breath was suspended, there was a singing in their ears, a dazzling light
in their eyes--eyes that longed to see, that must see--and that could
not; thousands stood there like condemned criminals, whose heads are on
the block, who hear the executioner behind them, and who still, on the
very threshold of death, hope for respite and release.
Gorgo found no answer to her own questionings; but she, too, wanted to
see--must see. And she saw Constantine close his eyes, as though he dared
not contemplate the deed that Fate had condemned him to do; she saw him
lay his left hand on the god's sacred beard, saw him raise his right for
the fatal blow--saw, heard, felt the axe crash again and again on the
cheek of Serapis--saw the polished ivory fall in chips and shavings,
large and small, on the stone floor, and leap up with an elastic rebound
or shiver into splinters. She covered her face with her hands and hid her
head in the curtain, weeping aloud. She could only moan and sob, and feel
nothing, think nothing but that a momentous and sinister act had been
perpetrated. An appalling uproar like the noise of thunder and the
beating of surf rose up on every side, but she heeded it not; and when at
length the physician called her by her name, when she turned from the
curtain and once more looked out, instead of the sublime image of the god
she saw in the niche a shapeless log of wood, a hideous mass against
which several ladders were propped, while the ground was heaped and
strewed with scraps of ivory, fragments of gold-plate, and chips of
marble. Constantine had disappeared; the ladders and the plinth of the
statue were covered with a swarm of soldiers and monks who were finishing
the work of destruction. As soon as the young officer had struck the
first blow, and the god had submitted in abject impotence, they had
rushed upon him and saved their captain the trouble of ending the task he
had begun.
The great idol was desecrated. Serapis was no more--the heaven of the
heathen had lost its king. The worshippers of the deposed god, sullen,
furious, and bitterly disabused, made their way out of the temple and
looked up at the serene blue sky, the unclouded sunshine, for some
symptoms of an avenging tempest; but in vain.
Theophilus had also quitted the scene with the Comes, leaving the work of
devastation in the competent hands of the monks. He knew his skin-clad
adherents well; and he knew that within a very few days not an idol, not
a picture, not a token would remain intact to preserve the memory of the
old gods; a thousand slaves charged to sweep the Serapeum from the face
of the earth would have given his impatience twenty times as long to
wait. The Comes went off at once to the Hippodrome, preceded by hundreds
who had hurried off to tell the assembled multitude that Alexandria had
lost her god.
Constantine, however, had not left the temple; he had withdrawn into one
of the aisles and seated himself on the steps, where he remained, sunk in
thought and gazing at the ground. He was a soldier and took service and
discipline in earnest. What he had done he had been forced to do; but no
one could guess how hard it had been to him to fulfil this terrible duty.
His own act was abominable in his eyes, and yet he would have done it
again to-morrow, if it had again been required of him under similar
circumstances. He bewailed the beautiful statue as a lost treasure of
art; but he felt that it was indispensable that it should perish out of
the world. And at the same time he thought of Gorgo, wondering how
she--who had only the day before pledged herself to him, whom he loved
with fervent passion, to whom, as he well knew, his faith was something
monstrous in its contempt for beauty--would bear to learn that he, her
lover, was the man who, like some coarse barbarian, had defaced this
noble work and ruined this vision of beauty, no less dear to him than it
was to her. Still, as he sat brooding and searching the very depths of
his soul, he could not help feeling that he had certainly acted rightly
and would do the same again, even at the risk of losing her. To him
Gorgo, was the noblest of God's creatures, and how could he have borne to
go through life at her side with a stain on his honor? But he did not
conceal from himself the fact that his deed had opened a wide gulf
between them; and it was with deep pathos that his thoughts recurred to
the antique conception of tragedy--of fate which pursues its innocent
victims as though they were guilty. This day perhaps would witness the
sunset of his life's joy, would drive him forth once more to war--to
fight, and do nothing but fight, till death should meet him on the
battle-field. And as he sat there his eyes grew dim and heavy and his
head fell on his heaving breast.
Suddenly he felt a light touch on his shoulder, and turning round, he saw
Gorgo standing with her hand outstretched; he started to his feet, seized
it with eager passion and looking sadly into the young girl's eyes said,
with deep emotion:
"I would I might hold this hand forever--but you will leave me, you will
turn from me when I tell you of the deed that mine has done."
"I know it," she said firmly. "And it was a hard task even for you--a
painful duty--was it not?"
"Terrible! horrible!" he exclaimed with a shudder, as he recalled the
feelings of that momentous instant. She looked sympathetically into his
eyes.
"And you did it," she cried, "because you felt that you must and will be
wholly what you profess to be? It is right--the only right; I feel it so.
I will try to imitate you, and rise above the half-heartedness which is
the bane of existence, and which makes the firm path of life a trembling,
swaying bridge. I am yours, wholly yours; I have none other gods but
yours, and for love of you I will learn to love your God--for you have
often and often called him a God of Love."
"And He is a God of Love!" cried Constantine, "and you will know him and
confess him even without teaching; for our Saviour lives in every heart
that is filled with love. Oh! Gorgo, I have destroyed that beautiful
idol, but I will let you see that even a Christian can duly value and
cherish beauty in his home and in his heart."
"I am sure of it," she exclaimed joyfully. "The world goes on its way and
does not quake, in spite of the fall of Serapis; but I feel as though in
my inmost soul a world had perished and a new one was created, nobler and
purer, and perhaps even more lovely than the old one!"
He pressed her hand to his lips; she signed to him to follow her and led
the way to her father's couch. Porphyrius was sitting up, supported in
the physician's arms; his eyes were open, and as they entered he greeted
them with a faint smile.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Great happiness, and mingled therefor with bitter sorrow
It is not by enthusiasm but by tactics that we defeat a foe
Rapture and anguish--who can lay down the border line
SERAPIS
By Georg Ebers
Volume 6.
CHAPTER XXV.
The spacious Hippodrome was filled with some thousands of spectators. At
first many rows of seats had been left vacant, though usually on the eve
of the great races, the people would set out soon after midnight and
every place would be filled long before the games began; indeed the upper
tiers of the tribune, which were built of wood and were free to all
comers, with standing-room behind, were commonly so crowded early in the
morning that the crush ended in a free fight.
On this occasion, the storm of the previous night, the anxiety caused by
the conflict round the Serapeum, and the prevalent panic as to the
approaching end of the world, kept great numbers away from their favorite
diversion; but when the sky recovered its radiant blue, and when it
became known that the statue of Serapis had escaped uninjured in the
siege of his sanctuary--when Cynegius, the Imperial legate, and Evagrius,
the city-prefect, had entered the theatre with much pomp, followed by
several senators and ladies and gentlemen of rank-Christians, Heathen,
and Jews--the most timid took courage; the games had been postponed for
an hour, and before the first team was led into the arched shed whence
the chariots started, the seats, though less densely packed than usual,
were amply filled.
The number of chariots entered for competition was by no means smaller
than on former occasions, for the heathen had strained every nerve to
show their fellow-citizens of different creeds, and especially Caesar's
representative, that, in spite of persecution and in defiance of Imperial
edicts, they were still a power worthy of consideration. The Christians,
on their part, did their utmost to outdo the idolaters on the same ground
where, not long since, they had held quite the second place.
The Bishop's epigram: That Christianity had ceased to be the religion of
the poor, was amply confirmed; the greater proportion of the places for
senators, officials and rich citizens were occupied by its adherents, and
the men and women who professed the Faith were by no means behind their
heathen peers in magnificence of dress and jewels.
The horses, too, entered by the Christians could not fail to please the
connoisseur, as they punctually made their appearance behind the
starting-place, though he might have felt more confidence--and not
without reason--in the heathen steeds, and more particularly in their
drivers, each of whom had won on an average nine races out of ten.
The horses in the quadriga with which Marcus, the son of Mary, made his
appearance in the arena had never before been driven in the Hippodrome.
Demetrius, the owner's brother, had bred and trained them--four
magnificent black Arabs--and they excited much interest among the knowing
judges who were wont to collect and lounge about the 'oppidum', as it was
called, behind the 'carceres'--[The covered sheds or stalls in which the
horses were brought to wait for the start.]--to inspect the racers,
predict the winner, offer counsel to the drivers, and make bets. These
perfect creatures were perhaps as fine as the famous team of golden bays
belonging to Iphicrates, which so often had proved victorious; but the
agitatores, or drivers, attracted even more interest than the horses.
Marcus, though he knew how to handle the reins--he had already been seen
in experimental races--could hardly hold his own against Hippias, the
handsome young heathen, who, like most of the drivers in the arena, was
an agitator by profession. A story was told of his having driven over a
bridge which was not quite as wide as the outside edges of his
chariot-wheels; and there were many witnesses to the feat he had
performed of writing his mistress' name with his chariot-tracks in the
sand of the Hippodrome.
The betting was freest and the wagers highest on Hippias and the team
belonging to Iphicrates. Some few backed Marcus and his Arabs, but for
smaller sums; and when they compared the tall but narrow-shouldered
figure of the young Christian with the heroic breadth of Hippias' frame,
and his delicate features, dreamy blue eyes and downy black moustache
with the powerful Hermes-head of his rival, they were anxious about their
money. If his brother now, the farmer Demetrius--who was standing by the
horses' heads--or some well-known agitator had held the reins, it would
have been a pleasure and a profit to back such horses. Marcus had been
abroad, too, and men shrugged their shoulders over that, for it was not
till the last few days that he had been seen exercising his horses in the
Hippodrome.
Time was going on, and the Imperial envoy, who had been elected to
preside as judge, at length took his place; Demetrius whispered a few
last words of advice to his brother and went back into the arena. He had
secured a good place on the stone podium and on the shady side, though
there were several seats vacant among those belonging to his family; but
he did not care to occupy one of these, preferring to keep out of the way
of his step-mother, who had made her appearance with a senator and his
wife to whom she was related. He had not seen her for two days; his
promise to Karnis that he would try to find Dada, had kept him fully
occupied, and he had done his best in all earnest to discover the girl.
The honest indignation with which this young creature had refused his
splendid offers, in spite of the modest circumstances of her life, had
roused his respect, and he had felt it an insult to himself and to his
brother when Gorgo had spoken of her with contempt. For his part, he had
never met with any one more fascinating; he could not cease dreaming of
her, and the thought that she might be swallowed up in the foul mire of a
great city made him miserable. His brother had the first claim on her and
he would not dispute it; while he had sought her unweariedly in every
resort of the young and gay--nay even in Canopus--he had only meant to
place her in safety, as a treasure which runs a risk of being lost to the
family, though, when at last its possession is secured, it becomes the
property of the member who can prove the best right of ownership. But all
his efforts had been in vain; and it was in an unhappy mood that he went
at last to the Hippodrome. There the bitter hostility and party-feeling
which he had everywhere observed during his present visit to his native
city, were not less conspicuous than they had been in the streets. The
competing chariots usually arrived at the amphitheatre in grand
procession, but this had not been thought advisable in the prevailing
excitement; they had driven into the oppidum singly and without any
display; and the images of the gods, which in former days had always been
placed on the spina before the games began, had long since fallen into
disuse.
[The spina was the division down the middle of the arena. At each
end of it were placed the metae or goals, at a distance from it of
about 13 feet. The spina was originally constructed of wood,
subsequently it was of stone, and its height was generally about 29
feet. The spina in the Circus of Caracalla was more than 900 feet
long.]
All this was vexatious to Demetrius, and when he had taken his seat it
was in no pleasant temper that he looked round at the ranks of
spectators.
His step-mother was sitting on the stuffed bench covered with lion-skins
which was reserved for the family. Her tunic and skirt displayed the
color blue of the Christian charioteer, being made of bright blue and
silver brocade of a beautiful pattern in which the cross, the fish, and
the olive-branch were elegantly combined. Her black hair was closely and
simply smoothed over her temples and she wore no garland, but a string of
large grey pearls, from which hung a chaplet of sapphires and opals,
lying on her forehead. A veil fell over the back of her head and she sat
gazing into her lap as if she were absorbed in prayer; her hands were
folded and held a cross. This placid and demure attitude she deemed
becoming to a Christian matron and widow. Everyone might see that she had
not come for worldly pleasure, but merely to be present at a triumph of
her fellow-Christians--and especially her son--over the idolaters.
Everything about her bore witness to the Faith, even the pattern on her
dress and the shape of her ornaments; down to the embroidery on her silk
gloves, in which a cross and an anchor were so designed as to form a
Greek X, the initial letter of the name of Christ. Her ambition was to
appear simple and superior to all worldly vanities; still, all she wore
must be rich and costly, for she was here to do honor to her creed. She
would have regarded it as a heathen abomination to wear wreaths of fresh
and fragrant flowers, though for the money which that string of pearls
had cost she might have decked the circus with garlands from end to end,
or have fed a hundred poor for a twelvemonth. It seems so much easier to
cheat the omniscient Creator of the Universe than our fellow-fools!
So Dame Maria sat there in sour and virtuous dignity, looking like the
Virgin Mary as painters and sculptors were at that time wont to represent
her; and her farmer-son shuddered whenever his eye fell on his
step-mother. It did him good, by contrast, to hear a hearty peal of
laughter that came up from the lowest ranks of the podium. When he had
discovered the spot from whence it proceeded he could hardly believe his
eyes, for there sat the long-sought Dada, between an old man and a young
woman, laughing as though something had just occurred to amuse her
extremely. Demetrius stretched his limbs with a feeling of relief and
satisfaction; then he rose, and seeing his city agent seated just behind
the girl, he begged him to change places with him, as he thought it
advisable not to lose sight of the game now it was caught; the old man
was very ready to oblige him and went up to the other seat with a meaning
smile.
For the first time since she could recollect anything Dada had spent a
sleepless night. Whether the wind and thunder would have sufficed to keep
her awake who can tell; but the thoughts that had whirled through her
brain had been varied and exciting enough to rob her of sleep. Her own
people who were fighting for Serapis--how were they faring; and
Agne--what had become of her? Then her mind turned to the church, and the
worthy old priest's sermon; to the races that she was to see--and the
face and figure of the handsome young Christian rose vividly and
irresistibly before her fancy. Of course--of course, she wished his
horses to win; but it was strange enough that she, Karnis' niece, should
be on the side of the Christians. Stranger still that she had entirely
ceased to believe in all the abuse which, from her earliest childhood,
she had heard heaped on the followers of the crucified Jew. It could only
be that Karnis had never been able to forgive them for having ruined his
theatre at Tauromenium, and so, perhaps, had never known them thoroughly.
She had enjoyed many a happy hour at the festivals of the old gods; and
they were no doubt beautiful and festive divinities, or terrible when
they were wroth; still, in the depths of her soul there had for some time
lurked a vague, sweet longing which found no fulfilment in any heathen
temple. She knew no name for it and would have found it hard to describe,
but in the church, listening to the prayers and hymns and the old
deacon's discourse, it had for the first time been stilled; she had felt
then and there that, helpless and simple as she was, and even if she were
to remain parted from her foster parents, she need never feel abandoned,
but could rest and hope in a supreme, loving, and helpful power. And
indeed she needed such a protector; she was so easily beguiled.
Stephanion, a flute-player she had known in Rome, had wheedled everything
she had a fancy for out of poor Dada, and when she had got into any
mischief laid it all on Dada's shoulders. There must be something
particularly helpless about her, for everyone, as a matter of course,
took her in hand and treated her like a child, or said things that made
her angry.
In the Hippodrome, however, she forgot everything in the present
pleasure, and was happy enough in finding herself in the lowest row of
places, in the comfortable seats on the shady side, belonging to
Posidonius, the wealthy Magian. This was quite different from her
experience in Rome, where once, in the Circus Maximus, she had stood in
the second tier of the wooden gallery and had been squeezed and pushed,
while no one had taken any notice of her and she had only seen the races
from a distance, looking down on the heads of the men and horses. Herse
never would take her a second time, for, as they came out, they had been
followed and spoken to by men, young and old; and after that her aunt had
fancied she never could be safe, scenting danger at every turn, and would
not allow her ever again to go out alone in the city.
This was altogether a much finer place, for here she was parted from the
race-course only by a narrow watercourse which, as it happened, was
bridged over just in front of her; the horses would pass close to her;
and besides, it was pleasant to be seen and to feel conscious of a
thousand flattering glances centered on herself.
Even the great Cynegius, Caesar's envoy and deputy, who had often noticed
her on board ship, turned again and again to look at her. He was carried
in on a golden litter by ten huge negroes, preceded by twelve lictors
bearing fasces wreathed with laurel; and he took his seat, robed in
purple and embroidery, on a magnificent throne in the middle of the
tribune above the starting sheds; however, Dada troubled herself no more
about the overdressed old man.
Her eyes were everywhere, and she made Medius or his daughter name
everybody and explain everything. Demetrius was delighted with her eager
enjoyment; presently, nudging the singer, she whispered to him with much
satisfaction:
"Look how the people down below are craning their necks to look at us! My
dress is so very pretty--I wonder where your friend Posidonius gets these
lovely roses. There are above a hundred buds in this garland across my
shoulders and down to my girdle, I counted them in the litter as I came
along. It is a pity they should die so soon; I shall dry the leaves and
make scent of them."
Demetrius could not resist the temptation; he leaned forward and said
over her shoulder: "There are hardly enough for that."
At this unexpected address Dada looked round, and she blushed as she
recognized Marcus' brother; he, however, hastened to assure her that he
deeply regretted his audacious proposals of two days since, and the girl
laughed, and said that he had come off worst, and that she might have
sent him away a little more civilly perhaps; but the truth was she had
been out of temper to begin with--any one would be cross that was treated
as Dame Herse had treated her: hiding her shoes and leaving her a
prisoner on the deck of a barge in the middle of a lake! Then she
introduced him to Medius, and finally enquired about Marcus and his
horses, and whether he had any chance of winning the race.
The countryman answered all her questions; and when, presently, a
flower-girl came along the ranks of seats, selling wreaths of blue and
red flowers and ribbands, Demetrius bought two lovely olive-wreaths to
fling to the winner--his brother he hoped. Medius and his daughter wore
red knots--the color of the Heathen, and Dada, following their example,
had a similar bow on her shoulder; now, however, she accepted a blue
ribband that Demetrius bought for her and pinned it in the place of the
red one as being the color of Marcus, to the old singer's great
annoyance. Demetrius laughed loudly in his deep bass tones, declaring
that his brother was already most anxious to win, and that, when he saw
her with these ribbands he would strain every nerve, in gratitude for her
partisanship. He could assure her that Marcus thought of her constantly.
"I am glad of that," she said simply; and she added that it was the same
with her, for she had been thinking all night of Marcus and his horses.
Medius could not help remarking that Karnis and Herse would take it very
ill that she should display the Christian color to-day of all days; to
which she only replied that she was sorry for that, but that she liked
blue better than red. The answer was so abrupt and short that it startled
Demetrius, who had hitherto seen Dada gentle and pliant; and it struck
him at once how deep an aversion the girl felt for her present
protectors.
There was music, as usual, in the towers at either end of the row of
carceres; but it was less stirring and cheerful than of yore, for flutes,
and several of the heathen airs had been prohibited. Formerly, too, the
Hippodrome had been a place where lovers could meet and where many a
love-affair had been brought to a happy climax; but to-day none of the
daughters of the more respectable families were allowed to quit the
women's apartments in their own homes, for danger was in the air; the
course of events in the Serapeum had kept many of the younger men from
witnessing the races, and some mysterious influence seemed to weigh upon
the gaiety and mirth of which the Hippodrome on a gala day was usually
the headquarters.
Wild excitement, expectation strung to the highest pitch, and
party-feeling, both for and against, had always, of course, been rife
here; but to-day they were manifest in an acuter form--hatred had added
its taint and lent virulence to every emotion. The heathen were oppressed
and angered, their rights abridged and defied; they saw the Christians
triumphant at every point, and hatred is a protean monster which rages
most fiercely and most venomously when it has lurked in the foul career
of envy.
The Christians could hate, too, and they hated the idolaters who gloried
with haughty self-sufficiency in their intellectual inheritance; the
traditions of a brilliant past. They, who had been persecuted and
contemned, now had the upper hand; they were in power, and the more
insolently they treated their opponents, the more injustice they did
them, and the less the victimized heathen were able to revenge
themselves, the more bitterly did the Christians detest the party they
contemned as superstitious idolaters. In their care for the soul--the
spiritual and divine part--the Christians had hitherto neglected the
graces of the body; thus the heathen had remained the undisputed masters
of the palaestra and the hippodrome. In the gymnasium the Christian
refused even to compete, for the exhibition of his naked body he regarded
as an abomination; but on the race-course he had lately been willing to
display his horses, and many times had disputed the crown with the
hereditary victors, so that, even here, the heathen felt his time-honored
and undisputed supremacy endangered. This was intolerable--this must be
averted--the mere thought of being beaten on this ground roused the
idolaters to wrath and malice. They displayed their color in wreaths of
scarlet poppies, pomegranate flowers and red roses, with crimson ribbands
and dresses; white and green, the colors formerly adopted by the
competitors, were abandoned; for all the heathen were unanimous in
combining their forces against the common foe. The ladies used red
sun-shades and the very baskets, in which the refreshments were brought
for the day, were painted red.
The widow Mary, on the other hand, and all the Christians were robed in
blue from head to foot, their sandals being tied with blue ribbands; and
Dada's blue shoulder-knot was in conspicuous contrast to her bright
rose-colored dress.
The vendors of food who wandered round the circus had eggs dyed blue and
red, cakes with sugared icing and refreshing drinks in jars of both
colors. When a Christian and a Heathen found themselves seated side by
side, each turned a shoulder to the other, or, if they were forced to sit
face to face, eyed each other with a scowl.
Cynegius did all he could to postpone the races as long as possible; he
was anxious to wait till the Comes had finished his task in the Serapeum,
so that the troops might be free to act in any emergency that might arise
before the contests in the Hippodrome were fairly ended. Time did not
hang heavy on his hands for the vast multitude here assembled interested
him greatly, though he had frequently been a spectator of similar
festivities in Rome and Constantinople; but this crowd differed in many
particulars from the populace of those cities. In the topmost tiers of
free seats black and brown faces predominated greatly over white ones; in
the cushioned and carpeted ranks of the stone podium--the lower portion
of the amphitheatre--mingled with Greeks and Egyptians, sat thousands of
splendidly dressed men and women with strongly-marked Semitic features:
members of the wealthy Jewish community, whose venerable head, the
Alabarch, a dignified patriarch in Greek dress, sat with the chief
members of the senate, near the envoy's tribune.
The Alexandrians were not a patient race and they were beginning to rebel
against the delay, making no small noise and disturbance, when Cynegius
rose and with his white handkerchief waved the signal for the races to
begin. The number of spectators had gradually swelled from fifty to sixty
and to eighty thousand; and no less than thirty-six chariots were waiting
behind the carceres ready to start.
Four 'missus' or races were to be run. In each of the three first twelve
chariots were to start, and in the fourth only the leaders in the three
former ones were to compete. The winner of the olive-wreath and
palmbranch in this final heat would bear the honors of the day; his party
would be victorious and he would quit the Hippodrome in triumph.
Lots were now drawn in the oppidum to decide which shed each chariot was
to start from, and in which naissus each was to run. It was Marcus' fate
to start among the first lot, and, to the horror of those who had backed
his chances, Hippias, the hero of the Hippodrome, was his rival, with the
four famous bays.
Heathen priests poured libations to Poseidon, and Phoebus Apollo, the
patron divinities of horses and of the Hippodrome--for sacrifices of
blood were prohibited; while Christian presbyters and exorcists blessed
the rival steeds in the name of the Bishop. A few monks had crept in, but
they were turned out by the heathen with bitter jeers, as unbidden
intruders.
Cynegius repeated his signal. The sound of the tuba rang through the air,
and the first twelve chariots were led into the starting-sheds. A few
minutes later a machine was set in motion by which a bronze eagle was
made to rise with outspread wings high into the air, from an altar in
front of the carceres; this was the signal for the chariots to come forth
from their boxes. They took up their positions close behind a broad chalk
line, traced on the ground with diagonal slope, so as to reduce the
disadvantage of standing outermost and having a larger curve to cover.
Until this moment only the privileged possessors of the seats over the
carceres had been able, by craning backwards, to see the horses and
drivers; now the competitors were visible to the multitude which, at
their first appearance, broke out into vociferous applause. The
agitatores had to exert all their strength to hold in the startled and
eager teams, and make them stand even for a few short minutes; then
Cynegius signalled for the third time. A golden dolphin, which had been
suspended from a beam, and on which the eye of every charioteer was
fixed, dropped to the ground, a blast on the 'salpinx', or war-trumpet,
was sounded, and forty-eight horses flew forth as though thrown forward
by one impulsion.
The strength of four fine horses whirled each light, two-wheeled chariot
over the hard causeway as though it were a toy. The down-pour of the
previous night had laid the dust; the bright sunshine sparkled and danced
in rapidly-changing flashes, mirrored in the polished gilding of the
bronze or the silver fittings of the elegantly-decorated, semicircular
cars in which the drivers stood.
Five blue and seven red competitors had drawn the first lots. The eye
rested with pleasure on the sinewy figures whose bare feet seemed rooted
to the boards they stood on, while their eyes were riveted on the goal
they were striving to reach, though--as the eye of the archer sees arrow,
bow and mark all at once--they never lost sight of the horses they were
guiding. A close cap with floating ribbands confined their hair, and they
wore a short sleeveless tunic, swathed round the body with wide bands, as
if to brace their muscles and add to their strength. The reins were
fastened around the hips so as to leave the hands free, not only to hold
them but also to ply the whip and use the goad. Each charioteer had a
knife in his girdle, to enable him to release himself, in case of
accident, from a bond that might prove fatal.
Before long the bay team was leading alone. Behind were two Christian
drivers, followed by three red chariots; Marcus was last of all, but it
was easy to see that it was by choice and not by necessity that he was
hanging back. He was holding in his fiery team with all his strength and
weight--his body thrown back, his feet firmly set with his knees against
the silver bar of the chariot, and his hands gripping the reins. In a few
minutes he came flying past Dada and his brother, but he did not see
them. He had not even caught sight of his own mother, while the
professional charioteers had not failed to bow to Cynegius and nod to
their friends. He could only keep his eyes and mind fixed on his horses
and on the goal.
The multitude clapped, roared, shouted encouragement to their party,
hissed and whistled when they were disappointed--venting their utmost
indignation on Marcus as he came past behind the others; but he either
heard them not or would not hear. Dada's heart beat so wildly that she
thought it would burst. She could not sit still; she started to her feet
and then flung herself back on her cushions, shouting some spurring words
to Marcus in the flash of time when he might perhaps hear them. When he
had passed, her head fell and she said sadly enough: "Poor fellow!--We
have bought our wreaths for nothing after all, Demetrius!"
But Demetrius shook his head and smiled.
"Nay," he said, "the boy has iron sinews in that slight body. Look how he
holds the horses in! He is saving their strength till they need it. Seven
times, child, seven times he has to go round this great circus and past
the 'nyssa'. You will see, he will catch up what he has lost, yet.
Hippias, you see, is holding in his horses, too; it is his way of giving
himself airs at starting. Now he is close to the 'nyssa'--the
'kampter'--the 'meta' they call it at Rome; the smaller the bend he can
make round it the better for him, but it is risky work. There--you
see!--They drive round from right to left and that throws most of the
work on the lefthand beast; it has to turn almost in its own length.
Aura, our first horse, is as supple as a panther and I trained her to do
it, myself.--Now, look out there! that bronze figure of a rearing
horse--the 'Taraxippos' they call it--is put there to frighten the
horses, and Megaera, our third horse, is like a mad thing sometimes,
though she can go like a stag; every time Marcus gets her quietly past
the Taraxippos we are nearer to success.--Look, look,=-the first chariot
has got round the nyssa! It is Hippias! Yes, by Zeus, he has done it! He
is a detestable braggart, but he knows his business!"
This was one of the decisive moments of the race. The crowd was silent;
expectation was at the utmost pitch of tension, and Dada's eyes were
fixed spell-bound on the obelisk and on the quadrigas that whirled round
the bourn.
Next to Hippias came a blue team, and close behind were three red ones.
The Christian who had succeeded in reaching the nyssa second, boldly took
his horses close round the obelisk, hoping to gain space and get past
Hippias; but the left wheel of his chariot grazed the granite plinth, the
light car was overset, and the horses of the red chariot, whose noses
were almost on his shoulder, could not be pulled up short in time. They
fell over the Christian's team which rolled on the ground; the red
chariot, too, turned over, and eight snorting beasts lay struggling in
the sand.
The horses in the next chariot bolted as they were being driven past this
mass of plunging and neighing confusion; they defied their driver's
impotent efforts and galloped across the course back into the caiceres.
The rest had time and space enough to beware of the wreck and to give it
a wide berth, among them Marcus. The melee at the Meta had excited his
steeds almost beyond control, and as they tore past the Taraxippos the
third horse, Megaera, shied violently as Demetrius had predicted. She
flung herself on one side, thrust her hind quarters under the pole, and
kicked desperately, lifting the chariot quite off the ground; the young
charioteer lost his footing and slipped. Dada covered her face with her
hands, and his mother turned pale and knit her brows with apprehension.
The youth was still standing; his feet were on the sand of the arena; but
he had a firm grip on the right-hand spiral ornament that terminated the
bar round the chariot. Many a heart stood still with anxiety, and shouts
of triumph and mockery broke from the red party; but in less than half a
minute, by an effort of strength and agility, he had his knees on the
foot-board, and then, in the winking of an eye, he was on his feet in the
chariot, had gathered up the reins and was rushing onward.
Meanwhile, however, Hippias had far outstripped all the rest, and as he
flew past the carceres he checked his pace, snatched a cup from a
lemonade-seller, tossed the contents down his throat with haughty
audacity amid the plaudits of the crowd, and then dashed on again. A wide
gap, indeed, still lay between him and Marcus.
By the time the competitors again came round to the nyssa, the slaves in
attendance had cleared away the broken chariots and led off the horses. A
Christian still came next to Hippias followed by a red agitator; Marcus
had gained on the others and was now fourth.
In the third round the chariot of the red driver in front of Marcus made
too sharp a turn and ran up against the granite. The broken car was
dragged on by the terrified beasts, and the charioter with it, till, by
the time they were stopped, he was a corpse. In the fifth circuit the
Christian who till now had been second to Hippias shared the same fate,
though he escaped with his life; and then Marcus drove past the
starting-sheds next to Hippias.
Hippias had ceased to flout and dally. In spite of the delay that Marcus
had experienced from the Taraxippos, the space that parted his bays from
the black Arabs had sensibly diminished, round after round; and the
interest of the race now centered entirely in him and the young
Christian. Never before had so passionate and reckless a contest been
fought out on this venerable race-course, and the throng of spectators
were carried away by the almost frenzied rivalry of the two drivers. Not
a creature in the upper tiers had been able to keep his seat; men and
women alike had risen to their feet and were shouting and roaring to the
competitors. The music in the towers might have ceased, so completely was
it drowned by the tumult in the amphitheatre.
Only the ladies, in the best places above the starting-sheds, preserved
their aristocratic calm; Still, when the seventh and decisive round was
begun, even the widow Mary leaned forward a little and clasped her hands
more tightly over the cross in her lap. Each time that Marcus had driven
round the obelisk or past the Taraxippos, Dada had clutched her head with
her hands and set her teeth in her lip; each time, as he happily steered
clear of the fatal stone and whirled past the dreadful bronze statue, she
had relaxed her grip and leaned back in her seat with a sigh of relief.
Her sympathy made her one with Marcus; she felt as if his loss must be
her death and his victory her personal triumph.
During the sixth circuit Hippias was still a long way ahead of the young
Christian; the distance which lay between Marcus and the team of bays
seemed to have become a fixed quantity, for, do what he could, he could
not diminish it by a hand-breadth. The two agitatores had now completely
altered their tactics; instead of holding their horses in they urged them
onward, leaning over the front of their chariots, speaking to the horses,
Shouting at them with hoarse, breathless cries, and flogging them
unsparingly. Steamy sweat and lathering foam streaked the flanks of the
desperate, laboring brutes, while clouds of dust were flung up from the
dry, furrowed and trampled soil. The other chariots were left further and
further behind those of Hippias and Marcus, and when, for the seventh and
last time, these two were nearing the nyssa, the crowd for a moment held
its breath, only to break out into louder and wilder cries, and then
again to be hushed. It seemed as though their exhausted lungs found
renewed strength to shout with double energy when their excitement had
kept them silent for a while.
Dada spoke no more; pale and gasping, she sat with her eyes fixed on the
tall obelisk and on the cloud of dust which, as the chariots neared the
nyssa, seemed to grow denser. At about a hundred paces from the nyssa she
saw, above the sandy curtain, the red cap of Hippias flash past, and
then--close behind it--the blue cap worn by Marcus. Then a deafening,
thundering roar from thousands of throats went up to heaven, while, round
the obelisk--so close to it that not a horse, not a wheel could have
found room between the plinth and the driver-the blue cap came forward
out of the cloud, and, behind it now--no longer in front, though not more
than a length behind--came the red cap of Hippias. When within a few feet
of the nyssa, Marcus had overtaken his antagonist, had passed the point
with a bold and perilously close turn, and had left the bays behind him.
Demetrius saw it all, as though his eye had power to pierce the
dust-cloud, and now he, too, lost his phlegmatic calm. He threw up his
arms as if in prayer and shouted, as though his brother could hear him:
"Well done, splendid boy! Now for the kentron--the goad--drive it in,
send it home if they die for it! Give it them well!"
Dada, who could only guess what was happening, looked round at him,
asking in tremulous tones: "Has he passed him? Is he gaining on him? Will
he win?" But Demetrius did not answer; he only pointed to the foremost of
the flying clouds on which the second was fast advancing, and cried in a
frenzy of excitement:
"Death and Hades! The other is catching him up. The dog, the sneak! If
only the boy would use his goad. Give it them, Marcus! Give it them, lad!
Never give in now! Great Father Poseidon!--there--there!--no! I can
hardly stand--Yes, he is still in front, and now--now--this must settle
it! Thunder and lightning! They are close together again--may the dust
choke him! No--it is all right; my Arabs are in front! All is well, keep
it up, lad, well done! We have won!"
The horses were pulled up, the dust settled; Marcus, the Christian, had
won the first missus. Cynegius held out the crown to the victor, who
bowed to receive it. Then he waved his hand to his mother, who graciously
waved hers in return, and he drove into the oppidurn and was lost to
sight.
Hippias flung down his whip in a rage, but the triumphant shouts of the
Christians drowned the music, the trumpet-blasts and the angry murmurs of
the defeated heathen. Threatening fists were shaken in the air, while
behind the carceres the drivers and owners of the red party scolded,
squabbled and stormed; and Hippias, who by his audacious swagger had
given away the race to their hated foe--to the Blues, the
Christians--narrowly escaped being torn in pieces.
The tumult and excitement were unparalleled; but Dada saw and heard
nothing. She sat in a blissful dream, gazing into her lap, while tears of
joyful reaction rolled down her cheeks. Demetrius saw her tears and was
glad; then, pointing out Mary to the girl, he informed her that she was
the mother of Marcus. And he registered a secret vow that, cost what it
might, he would bring his victorious brother and this sweet child
together.
The second and third missus, like the first, were marked by serious
accidents; both, however, were won for the Red party. In the fourth, the
decisive race, there were but three competitors: Marcus and the two
heathen winners. Demetrius watched it with less anxiety; he knew that his
Arabs were far superior to the Egyptian breed in staying power, and they
also had the advantage of having had a longer rest. In fact, the final
victory was adjudged to the young Christian.
Long before it was decided Dada had been impatiently fingering her
wreaths, and could hardly wait any longer to fling them into Marcus'
chariot. When it was all over she might perhaps have an opportunity of
speaking to him; and she thought how delightful his voice was and what
fine, kind eyes he had. If only he were to bid her be his, she would
follow him whither and wherever he desired, whatever Karnis and Herse
might say to the contrary. She thought no one could be so glad of his
success as she was; she felt as if she belonged to him, had always
belonged to him, and only some spiteful trick of Fate had come between
them.
There was a fresh blast of trumpets; the victor, in obedience to a
time-honored custom, was to drive round the arena at a foot-pace and show
his brave team to the multitude. He came nearer and nearer, and Demetrius
proposed that they should cross the little watercourse that parted the
podium from the arena and follow the chariot, so as to give his brother
the wreaths instead of flinging them to him. The girl colored and could
say neither yes or no; but she rose, hung one of the olive-crowns on her
arm with a happy, bashful smile, and handed the other to her new friend;
then she followed him across the little bridge on to the race-course
which, now that the games were over, was crowded with Christians.
The brothers exchanged pleased greetings from afar, but Marcus did not
see Dada till she was close to him and stood, with a shy but radiant
glance of intense delight, holding out the olive-wreath for his
acceptance. He felt as though Heaven had wrought a miracle in his favor.
Never before had he thought her half so lovely. She seemed to have grown
since he had seen her last, to have gained a deeper and nobler
expression; and he observed, too, the blue favors on her shoulder and
among the roses that crowned her fair curls. Gladness and surprise
prevented his speaking; but he took the garland she offered him and,
seizing her hands, stammered out: "Thanks--thank you, Dada."
Their eyes met, and as he gazed into her face he forgot where he was, did
not even wonder why his brother had suddenly turned away and, beginning
some long-winded speech, had rushed after a man who hastily covered his
head and tried to escape; he did not notice that thousands of eyes were
fixed on him, and among them his mother's; he could merely repeat:
"thanks" and "Dada"--the only words he could find. He would perhaps have
gone on repeating them, but that he was interrupted; the 'porta
libitinaria'--the gate through which the dead or injured were usually
carried out, was thrown open, and a rabble of infuriated heathen rushed
in, crying: "Serapis is fallen! They have destroyed the image of Serapis!
The Christians are ruining the sanctuaries of the gods!"
A sudden panic seized the assembled multitude; the Reds rushed down from
their places into the arena to hear the details and ask questions--ready
to fight for the god or to fly for safety. In an instant the victor's
chariot was surrounded by an angry mob; Dada clutched it for protection,
and Marcus, without pausing to reflect--indeed hardly master of his own
actions--turned and lifted her into it by his side; then, urging his
horses forward, he forced a way through the crowd, past the caiceres. He
glanced anxiously up at the seats but could nowhere see his mother, so he
guided the exhausted beasts, steaming with sweat and dappled with foam,
through the open gate and out of the circus. His stable-slaves had run
after him; he released himself from the reins on his hips and flung them
to the grooms. Then he helped Dada to leap from the car.
"Will you come with me?" he asked her simply; and the girl's reply was:
"Wherever you bid me."
At the news that Serapis was overthrown Dame Mary had started from her
seat with eager haste that ill-became her dignity and, under the
protection of the body-guard in attendance on Cynegius, had found her way
to her litter.
In the Hippodrome the tumult rose to a riot; Reds and Blues rushed from
the upper tiers, down the ranks of the podium and into the dusty
race-course; falling on each other tooth and nail like wild beasts; and
the bloody fray--no uncommon termination to the day, even in more
peaceful times--lasted till the Imperial soldiery parted the unarmed
combatants.
The Bishop was triumphant; his adherents had won the day at every point;
nor was he sorry to learn that Olympius, Helladius, Ainmonius and many
other spiritual leaders of the heathen world had succeeded in escaping.
They might come back; they might preach and harangue as much as they
chose: their power was broken. The Church had nothing now to fear from
them, and their philosophy and learning would still and always be
valuable in the mental training of her priests.
CHAPTER XXVI.
The great Hippodrome of Alexandria was outside the Canopic gate, on the
northern side of the road leading to Eleusis which to-day was crowded
with passengers, all moving in the same direction. The tumult roused by
the intelligence that Serapis was overthrown made all the more peaceful
and peace-loving of the spectators hurry homewards; and as these, for the
most part, were of the richer classes, who came and went in litters or
chariots, their conveyances left but scanty space on the wide causeway
for foot passengers, still, there they were, in considerable numbers, all
wending their way towards the city, and the heathen who came rushing
towards the Hippodrome behind the first heralds of the disaster, had
great difficulty in making their way against the stream.
Marcus and Dada allowed themselves to be carried onward by the throng
which was tending towards the city-walls and the Canopic gate. Phabis,
Mary's old steward, whose duty it had been to help his young master to
dress after the races were over, had snatched the agitator's cap from the
youth's head and flung a cloak over his shoulders, hastily following him
as he went off with the young girl by his side. The old man quite
understood what was in the wind for he it was who had conducted Dame
Herse to his mistress' presence. He had thought her a shrewd and
kind-hearted woman, and it now struck him that she must certainly have
been in the right when she accused Marcus of designs on her pretty niece.
At the time he had refused to believe it, for he had never in his life
detected his young master in any underhand or forbidden courses; but,
after all, Marcus was his father's son, and, in his younger days, the old
man had often and often had to risk his skin in Apelles' love-intrigues.
And now it was the Son's turn--and if he were to take his fancy for that
pretty chit as seriously as he did most things, if he got the notion into
his head of marrying the little singer--what a storm there was brewing
between him and his mother!
The old man did his best to keep up with Marcus who did not see or heed
him, for his eyes and attention were centered on the fair companion who
was clinging to his arm, while he tried to force a passage through the
mob, towards the gate. Miracle on miracle seemed to him to have been
wrought in his behalf; for Heaven had not only sent him Dada, but she was
wearing blue ribbands; and when he asked her why, she had replied "For
your sake, and because I like your Faith."
He was tired to death; but as soon as Dada had put her hand through his
arm he lead felt refreshed as if by magic. His swollen and blistered
hands, to be sure, were painful and his shoulders ached and winced from
stiffness; but as she pressed his arm to her side and looked up gladly in
his face--telling him how happy she was while he responded: "And how I
love you!"--he felt himself in Heaven, and pain and discomfort were
forgotten. The crush did not allow them to say more than a few words; but
the things their eyes and lips could smile were sweeter and dearer than
anything they had ever known before.
They had got through the gate and were in the Canopic way when Dada
suddenly perceived that his lips were white, and felt the arm tremble on
which her hand was lying. She asked him what ailed him; he made no reply,
but put his hand to his head, so she led him aside into the public garden
that lay to their right between the little Stadium and the Maeandrian
circus. In this pretty spot, fresh with verdure and spring flowers, she
soon found a bench shaded by a semicircular screen of dark-tufted
tamarisk, and there she made him lie down. He yielded at once, and his
pale face and fixed gaze showed her that he was in a fainting state.
Indeed, he must be quite worn out by the terrible struggle of the race,
and after it was over he had not given himself time to take a cup of
drink or a scrap of food for refreshment. It was only too natural that
his strength should fail him, so, without feeling at all alarmed but only
very pitiful and anxious to help, she ran back to a fruit-stall which
they had passed at the entrance to the garden from the street.
How glad she was that she still had the four drachmae which she had
coaxed out of Karnis in the Xenodochium that evening; she could buy
whatever she liked for her lover. When she went back-loaded with oranges,
apples, hard-boiled eggs, bread and salt, in the skirt of her dress that
she gathered up with one hand, and with a flask of wine and water, and a
gourdbowl in the other-she found him still lying unconscious. However,
when she had moistened his forehead and lips he opened his eyes, and then
she peeled him an orange as daintily as she could and begged him to try
it, and as she was herself very hungry she took a hearty share. She was
enchanted at making him her guest, and at finding that he enjoyed the
simple meal and soon was quite revived. In fact, in a few minutes he had
altogether recovered his strength and consciousness of satisfaction; and
as he lay back with Dada's hand in his, gazing happily and thankfully
into her sweet eyes, a sense of peace, rest and bliss came over him such
as he had never before known. He thought he had never tasted such
delicious food, or such exquisite wine as the wretched Mareotic from the
fruitstall. He took the apple she had begun eating out of her hand and
bit it where her white teeth had been; he made her drink first out of the
gourd-cup, and, as one of the three eggs she had brought with her was
bad, they had quite a little battle for the last, till he finally gave
way and eat it.
When they had finished Dada's purchases to the last mouthful she asked
him, for the first time, where he meant to take her, and he said he
intended placing her in the house of his former tutor, Eusebius, the
deacon, where she would be a welcome guest and find her old companion
Agne. Of this she was sincerely glad; and when, on hearing the title of
Deacon, she questioned Marcus further, and identified Eusebius as the
worthy old man whose discourse in the basilica had so deeply impressed
her, she told Marcus how she had gone into the church, and how, from that
hour, she had felt at peace. A quite new feeling had sprung up in her
soul, and since then she had constantly longed to see him again and talk
it all over with him:--The little she had learnt of Christian doctrine
did her heart good and had given her comfort and courage. The world was
so beautiful, and there were many more good men than bad. It was a
pleasure to love one's neighbor, and as for forgiving a wrong--that she
had never found difficult. It must be good to live on earth if everyone
loved his neighbor as she loved him and he loved her; and life could not
be a great hardship if in every trouble there was some one who was always
ready to hear our cry and help us, out of pure beneficence.
Her innocent talk was to Marcus the greatest marvel of this day of
miracles. The soul which he had dreamed that he was called to save had,
of its own accord, turned to walk in the path of salvation; he went on to
tell her of the things which he felt to be most sublime and glorious in
his creed, and at length he confessed that, though he had always loved
his neighbor for Christ's sake, never till now had true and perfect love
been revealed to him. No power on earth could now part him from her, and
when she should have been baptized there would be no further difficulty;
their love might last till, and beyond, death, through all the ages of
eternity. And she listened to him, perfectly content; and said that she
was his, wholly his, now, and for ever and ever.
There were to-day but few people in the garden which was usually full in
the afternoon, of idlers, and of children with their nurses; but the
disturbance in the streets had kept these at home, and the idlers had
found more to attract them at the Hippodrome and in the crowded roads.
This favored the lovers, who could sit hand in hand, looking into each
other's eyes; and when old Phabis, who had lost sight of them long since,
at length discovered them in the park, he could see from his
lurking-place as he crept closer, that his young master, after glancing
cautiously round, pressed a kiss on the little singer's hair, and then on
her eyes and at last on her lips.
The hours flew fast between serious talk and delightful dalliance, and
when they tore themselves away from their quiet retreat it was already
dusk. They soon found themselves in the Canopic way, in the thick of the
crowd which they were now occasionally obliged to meet, for those who
were making homewards had long since dispersed, and thousands were still
crowding to the Hippodrome where a brisk fight was still going on. As
they passed his mother's house Marcus paused and, pointing it out to
Dada, told her that the day was not far distant when he should bring her
home hither. But the girl's face fell.
"Oh no!" she exclaimed, in a low voice. "Not here-not to this great
palace in a street. Let us live in a little house, quite quietly, by
ourselves. A house with a garden, and a seat in the shade. Your mother
lives here!"
And then she blushed scarlet and looked down. He guessed, however, what
was passing in her mind, and bid her only to have patience, for as soon
as she was a baptized Christian Eusebius would intercede for her. And he
spoke warmly of his mother's piety and virtues, and asked Dada if she had
seen her at the races.
"Yes," she replied timidly; and when he went on to ask her if she had not
thought Mary very handsome and dignified, she answered frankly:
"Yes--very; but then she is so tall and grand-looking-she must wish for a
daughter-in-law very different from a poor, forsaken orphan like me--a
mere singer, looked down upon by every one! It is different with you; you
are satisfied with me as I am, and you know that I love you. If I never
find my uncle again I have no one on earth to care for me but you; but I
want no other, for you are my one and only hope, and to live for you and
with you is enough. Only you must never leave me or I shall die! But you
never can, for you told me that my soul was dearer to you than your own
life; and so long as I have you and your love I shall grow better and
better every day; but if you ever let me be parted from you I shall be
utterly lost. Yes, understand that once for all--ruined and lost, body
and soul!--I do not know what it is that terrifies me, but do let us go
on, away from this house. Suppose your mother were to see us!"
He did as she wished and tried to soothe her, praising his mother's
virtues with the affectionate blindness of a son; but she only half
listened to his eulogy, for, as they approached Rhacotis the throng grew
denser, they had no opportunities for conversation, they could think of
nothing but battling their way through the crowd; still, they were happy.
[The quarter of the city inhabited by the Egyptians. It was the old
town close to which Alexander the Great built his splendid new
city.]
They thus got to the street of the Sun--one of the main arteries of the
city cutting the Canopic way at right angles--and they went down it
towards the Gate of Helios in the south wall. The Serapeum lay to their
right, several streets leading to it from the street of the Sun. To reach
the house where Eusebius lived they ought to have turned down the street
of the Acropolis, but a compact mass of frenzied creatures came storming
down it from the Serapeum, and towards them. The sun was now fast setting
over the City of the Dead on the western horizon. Marcus tried to get out
of the middle of the road and place Dada in safety by the house at the
corner, but in vain; the rabble that came crowding out of the side street
was mad with excitement, and could think of nothing but the trophies it
had snatched from the temple. Several dozen men, black and white
alike--and among them some monks and even women, had harnessed themselves
to an enormous truck, commonly used for the carriage of beams, columns,
and heavy blocks of stone, on which they had erected a huge but shapeless
mass of wood, the core, and all that remained, of the image of Serapis;
this they were dragging through the streets.
"To the Hippodrome! Burn it! Down with the idols! Look at the divine form
of Serapis! Behold the god!"
These were the cries that rent the air from a thousand throats, an
ear-splitting accompaniment to the surging storm of humanity.
The monks had torn the desecrated block from the niche in the Serapeum,
hauled it through the courts on to the steps, and were now taking it to
the arena where it was to be burnt. Others of their kidney, and some of
the Christian citizens who had caught the destructive mania, had forced
their way into the temple of Anubis, hard by the Serapeumn, where they
had overthrown and wrecked the jackal-headed idols and the Canopic
gods--four huge jars with lids representing respectively a man's head, an
ape's, a hawk's and a jackal's. They were now bearing these heads in
triumph, while others were shouldering the limbs of broken statues of
Apollo, of Athene, or of Aphrodite, or carrying the fragments in baskets
to cast them into the flames in the Hippodrome after the wooden stock of
the great Serapis. The mob had broken off the noses of all the heads, had
smeared the marble with pitch, or painted it grossly with the red paint
they had found in the writing-rooms of the Sera peum. Every one who could
get near enough to the remains of the statue, or to a fragment of a
ruined idol, spit upon it, struck it or thrust at it; and not a heathen
had, as yet, dared to interfere.
Behind the oak block of the image of Serapis and the other trophies of
victory, came an endless stream of men of all ages, of monks and of
women, compelling a large carruca--[A four-wheeled chariot used in the
city and for travelling.]--that had fallen into their hands, and which
they had completely surrounded, to keep pace with them. The two fine
horses that drew it had to be led by the bridle; they were trembling with
terror and excitement and made repeated attempts to kick over the pole or
to rear.
In this vehicle was Porphyrius, who had fully recovered consciousness,
and by his side sat Gorgo. Constantine had not stirred from the side of
the convalescent till Apuleius had pronounced him out of all danger; but
then the young officer's duty had called him away. The merchant had
hailed the news of his daughter's, union with the companion of her
childhood as a most satisfactory and long-expected event.
A party of the Prefect's guards had been charged to bring the carriage
for Porphyrius to the door of the temple, and the abbot of a monastery at
Arsinoe, who was well known to the Prefect, undertook to escort them on
their road home and protect them from the attacks of the raving mob. At
the spot where the side street intersected the street of the Sun, and
where Marcus and Dada had been forced to stop, unable either to proceed
or to return, a troop of armed heathen had given the Christian rabble a
check at the very moment when the carruca came up, and falling on the foe
who had mocked and insulted their most sacred treasure, began a furious
fray. Quite close to the young lovers a heathen cut down a Christian who
was carrying the besmirched head of a Muse. Dada clung in terror to
Marcus, who was beginning to be seriously alarmed for her when, looking
round for aid or refuge, he caught sight of his brother forcing his way
through the throng, and gesticulating vehemently. The farmer was
telegraphing to the occupants of the carruca as well, and when he at last
reached Marcus he briefly explained to him that the first thing to be
done was to place Dada in safety.
Only too glad to be out of the crush and danger, the girl nimbly climbed
into the chariot, and, after hastily greeting the father and daughter,
signed to Marcus to follow her; but Demetrius held his brother back, and
it was hurriedly agreed that Dada should be sent for that evening to the
house of Porphyrius. Demetrius whispered a few words of enthusiastic
praise of the little singer into Gorgo's ear; then the carriage moved on
again. Many of the heathen who had collected round it recognized
Porphyrius, the noble friend of the great Olympius, and cleared a passage
for him, so that at last he got out of the gate uninjured, and turned
into the quieter street of Euergetes which led to the temple of Isis, the
ship-yard and the merchant's residence.
But few words were exchanged in the chariot, for it was only step by step
and with considerable difficulty that the horses could get along. It was
now quite dark and the mob had spread even into this usually deserted
quarter.
A flaring glow that tinged the temple, the wharf and the deep sky itself
with a gorgeous crimson glare, showed very plainly what the populace were
employed in doing. The monks had set fire to the temple of Isis and the
flames had been driven by the northwest wind down into the ship-yard,
where they had found ample food in the enormous timber stacks and the
skeletons of ships. Tall jets of rushing and crackling sparks were thrown
skywards to mingle with the paler stars. Porphyrius could see what danger
his house was in; but thanks to the old steward's foresight and the
indefatigable diligence of the slaves, it escaped the conflagration.
The two brothers, meanwhile, had left the mob far behind them. Demetrius
was not alone, and as soon as he had introduced Marcus to his companion,
an abbot of friendly mien, the monk warmly expressed his pleasure at
meeting another son of Apelles, to whom he had once owed his life.
Demetrius then told his brother what his adventures had been during the
last few hours, and where he had met this worthy Father.
While taking Dada down into the arena to join Marcus, he had caught sight
of Anubis, the Egyptian slave who had been his father's companion in his
last memorable journey to Syria, and who, since the death of Apelles, had
totally disappeared, the countryman had instantly followed him, seized
him--not without a struggle and some little danger--and then had him led
off by the city-guard to the prison by the Prefect's house. Once secured
he had been induced to speak, and his narrative proved beyond a doubt
that Apelles had perished in a skirmish with the Saracens; the Egyptian
slave had only taken advantage of his master's death to make off with the
money he had with him. He had found his way to Crete, where he had
purchased a plot of ground with his plunder; but then, craving to see his
wife and children once more, he had come back to fetch them away to his
new home. Finally, to confirm the truth of his story, which--clearing him
apparently of the murder of his master--did not invite implicit belief,
he told Demetrius that he had seen in Alexandria, only the day before, a
recluse who had been present when Apelles fell, and Demetrius had at once
set out to find this monk, enquiring among those who had swarmed into the
city. He had very soon been successful; Kosnias, who since then had been
elected abbot of the monastery to which he belonged, now again told
Marcus the story of his father's heroic courage in the struggle with the
freebooters who had attacked his caravan. Apelles, he said, had saved his
life and that of two other anchorites, one of whom was in Alexandria at
this very time. They were travelling from Hebron to Aila, a party of
seven, and had placed themselves under the protection of the Alexandrian
merchant's escort; everything had gone well till the infidel Saracens had
fallen upon them in the high land south of Petra. Four of the monks had
been butchered out of hand; but Apelles, with a few of the more resolute
spirits in the company, had fought the heathen with the valor of a lion.
He, Kosmas, and his two surviving comrades had effected their escape,
while Apelles engaged the foe; but from a rocky height which they climbed
in their flight they saw him fall, and from that hour they had always
mentioned him in their prayers. It would be an unspeakable satisfaction
to him to do his utmost to procure for such a man as Apelles the rank he
deserved in the list of martyrs for the Faith.
Marcus, only too happy, wanted to hurry away at once to his mother and
tell her what he had heard, but Demetrius detained him. The Bishop-he
told his brother--had desired his immediate presence, to be congratulated
on his victory; his first duty was to obey that mandate, and he should at
once avail himself of its favorable opportunity to obtain for his
deceased parent the honor he had earned.
It rather startled Marcus to find his brother taking its interest in a
matter which, so lately, he had vehemently opposed; however, he proceeded
at once to the episcopal palace, accompanied by the abbot, and half an
hour later Demetrius, who had awaited his return, met him coming out with
sparkling eyes. The Prelate, he said, had received him very graciously,
had thanked him for his prowess and had bid him crave a reward. He at
once had spoken of his father, and called the recluse to witness to the
facts. The Bishop had listened his story, and had ended by declaring
himself quite willing to put the name of Apelles on the list of the
Syrian martyrs. Theophilus had been most unwilling hitherto to reject the
petitions of so good and illustrious Christian as Mary; and now, after
such ample testimony as to the manner of her husband's death, it was with
sincere satisfaction that he bestowed this high mark of honor on the
Christian victor and his admirable mother. "So now," added the young man,
"I shall fly home, and how happy my mother will be. . . ."
But Demetrius would not allow him to finish his sentence. He laid his
hand on the young man's shoulder saying: "Patience, my dear fellow,
patience! You must stay with me for the present, and not go to your
mother till I have settled everything that is necessary. Do not
contradict me I entreat you, unless you want to deprive me of the
happiness of remedying an injustice to your pretty Dada. What you most
desire for yourself and her is your mother's blessing--and do you think
that will be easy to obtain? Far from it, lad! But I can manage it for
you; and I will, too, if only you will do as I bid you, and if the old
Heathen's niece can be induced to be baptized. . . ."
"She is a Christian already!" exclaimed Marcus eagerly.
"Well then, she can be yours to-morrow," Demetrius went on calmly, "if
you listen to the advice of your older and wiser brother. It cannot be
very hard upon you, for you must own that if I had not fought it out with
Anubis--and the rascal bit all he could reach like a trapped fox--if I
had not got him locked up and almost run my legs off in hunting down the
worthy abbot, our father would never have enjoyed the promotion which he
is at last to obtain. Who would ever have believed that I should get any
satisfaction out of this 'Crown of Martyrdom'? By the gods! It is by no
means impossible, and I hope the manes of the deceased will forgive me
for your sake. But it is getting late, so only one thing more: for my own
share of the business all I claim is my right to tell your mother myself
of all that has occurred; you, on your part, must go at once to Eusebius
and beg him to receive Dada in his house. If he consents--and he
certainly will--take him with you to our uncle Porphyrius and wait there
till I come; then, if all goes well, I will take you and Dada to your
mother--or, if not, we will go with Eusebius."
"Dada to my mother!" cried Marcus. "But what will she. . . ."
"She will receive her as a daughter," interrupted his brother, "if you
hold your tongue about the whole business till I give you leave to
speak.--There, the tall gate-keeper is closing the episcopal palace, so
nothing more can come out of there to-night. You are a lucky fellow--well
good-bye till we meet again; I am in a hurry."
The farmer went off, leaving Marcus with a thousand questions still
unasked. However, the young man did his bidding and went, hopeful though
not altogether free from doubts, to find his old tutor and friend.
CHAPTER XXVII.
While Marcus carried out his brother's instructions Dada was expecting
him and Eusebius with the greatest impatience. Gorgo had charged her
waiting-woman to conduct the girl into the music-room and to tell her
that she would join her there if her father was in such a state as to
allow of it. Some refreshments were brought in to her, all delicate and
tempting enough; but Dada would not touch them, for she fancied that the
merchant's daughter was avoiding her intentionally, and her heart ached
with a sense of bereavement and loneliness. To distract her thoughts she
wandered round the room, looking at the works of art that stood against
the walls, feeling the stuffs with which the cushions were covered and
striking a lute which was leaning against the pedestal of a Muse. She
only played a few chords, but they sufficed to call up a whole train of
memories; she sank on a divan in the darkest corner she could find in the
brilliantly-lighted room, and gave herself up to reviewing the many
events of the last few days. It was all so bright, so delightful, that it
hardly seemed real, and her hopes were so radiantly happy that for a
moment she trembled to think of their fulfilment--but only for a moment;
her young soul was full of confidence and elation, and if a doubt weighed
it down for an instant it was soon cast off and her spirit rose with bold
expectancy.
Her heart overflowed with happiness and thankfulness as she thought of
Marcus and his love for her; her fancy painted the future always by his
side, and though her annoyance at Gorgo's continued absence, and her
dread of her lover's mother slightly clouded her gladness, the sense of
peace and rapture constantly came triumphantly to the front. She forgot
time as it sped, till at length Gorgo made her appearance.
She had not deliberately kept out of the little singer's way; on the
contrary, she had been detained by her father, for not till now had she
dared to tell him that his mother, the beloved mistress of his house, was
no more. In the Serapeum she had not mentioned it, by the physician's
orders; and now, in addition, through the indiscretion of a friend, he
had received some terrible tidings which had already been known for some
hours in the city and which dealt him a serious blow. His two sons were
in Thessalonica, and a ship, just arrived from thence, brought the
news-only too well substantiated, that fifteen thousand of the
inhabitants of that town had been treacherously assassinated in the
Circus there.
This hideous massacre had been carried out by the Imperial troops at
Caesar's command, the wretched citizens having been bidden to witness the
races and then ruthlessly butchered. A general of the Imperial army--a
Goth named Botheric--had been killed by the mob, and the Emperor had thus
avenged his death.
Porphyrius knew only too well that his sons would never have been absent
from any races or games. They certainly must have been among the
spectators and have fallen victims to the sword of the slaughterer. His
mother and two noble sons were snatched from him in a day; and he would
again have had recourse to poison as a refuge from all, if a dim ray of
hope had not permitted him to believe in their escape. But all the same
he was sunk in despair, and behaved as though he had nothing on earth
left to live for. Gorgo tried to console him, encouraged his belief in
her brothers' possible safety, reminded him that it was the duty of a
philosopher to bear the strokes of Fate with fortitude; but he would not
listen to her, and only varied his lamentations with bursts of rage.
At last he said he wished to be alone and reminded Gorgo that she ought
to go to Dada. His daughter obeyed, but against her will; in spite of all
that Demetrius had said in the young girl's favor she felt a little shy
of her, and in approaching her more closely she had something of the
feeling of a fine lady who condescends to enter the squalid hovel of
poverty. But her father was right: Dada was her guest and she must treat
her with kindness.
Outside the door of the music-room she dried away her tears for her
brothers, for her emotion seemed to her too sacred to be confessed to a
creature who boldly defied the laws laid down by custom for the conduct
of women. From Dada's appearance she felt sure that all those lofty
ideas, which she herself had been taught to call "moral dignity" and "a
yearning for the highest things," must be quite foreign to this girl with
whom her cousin had condescended to intrigue. She felt herself
immeasurably her superior; but it would be ungenerous to allow her to see
this, and she spoke very kindly; but Dada answered timidly and formally.
"I am glad," Gorgo began, "that accident brought you in our way;" and
Dada replied hastily: "I owe it to your father's kindness, and not to
accident."
"Yes, he is very kind," said Gorgo, ignoring Dada's indignant tone. "And
the last few hours have brought him terrible sorrows. You have heard, no
doubt, that he has lost his mother; you knew her--she had taken quite a
fancy to you, I suppose you know."
"Oh! forget it!" cried Dada.
"She was hard to win," Gorgo went on, "but she liked you. Do you not
believe me? You should have seen how carefully she chose the dress you
have on at this minute, and matched the ornaments to wear with it."
"Pray, pray say no more about it," Dada begged. "She is dead, and I have
forgiven her--but she thought badly, very badly of me."
"It is very bad of you to speak so," interrupted Gorgo, making no attempt
to conceal her annoyance at the girl's reply. "She--who is dead--deserves
more gratitude for her liberality and kindness!"
Dada shook her head.
"No," she said firmly. "I am grateful, even for the smallest kindness; I
have not often met with disinterested generosity. But she had an end in
view--I must say it once for all. She wanted to make use of me to bring
shame on Marcus and grief on his mother. You surely must know it; for why
should you have thought me too vile to sing with you if you did not
believe that I was a good-for-nothing hussy, and quite ready to do your
dead grandmother's bidding? Everybody, of course, looked down upon us all
and thought we must be wicked because we were singers; but you knew
better; you made a distinction; for you invited Agne to come to your
house and sing with you.--No, unless you wish to insult me, say no more
about my owing the dead lady a debt of gratitude!"
Gorgo's eyes fell; but presently she looked up again and said:
"You do not know what that poor soul had suffered. Mary, her son's widow,
had been very cruel to her, had done her injuries she could never
forgive--so perhaps you are right in your notion; but all the same, my
grandmother had a great liking for you--and after all her wish is
fulfilled, for Marcus has found you and he loves you, too, if I am not
mistaken!"
"If you are not mistaken!" retorted Dada. "The gods forefend!--Yes, we
have found each other, we love each other. Why should I conceal it?"
"And Mary, his mother--what has she to say to it?" asked Gorgo.
"I do not know," replied Dada abashed.
"But she is his mother, you know!" cried Gorgo severely. "And he will
never--never--marry against her will. He depends on her for all that he
has in the world."
"Then let her keep it!" exclaimed Dada. "The smaller and humbler the home
he gives me the better I shall like it. I want his love and nothing more.
All--all he desires of me is right and good; he is not like other men; he
does not care for nothing but my pretty face. I will do whatever he bids
me in perfect confidence; and what he thinks about me you may judge for
yourself, for he is going to put me in the care of his tutor Eusebius."
"Then you have accepted his creed?" asked Gorgo. "Certainly I have," said
Dada.
"I am glad of that for his sake," said the merchant's daughter. "And if
the Christians only did what their preachers enjoin on them one might be
glad to become one. But they make a riot and destroy everything that is
fine and beautiful. What have you to say to that--you, who were brought
up by Karnis, a true votary of the Muses?"
"I?" said Dada. "There are bad men everywhere, and when they rise to
destroy what is beautiful I am very sorry. But we can love it and cherish
it all the same."
"You are happy indeed if you can shut your eyes at the dictates of your
heart!" retorted Gorgo, but she sighed. "Happy are they and much to be
envied who can compel their judgment to silence when it is grief to hear
its voice. I--I who have been taught to think, cannot abandon my
judgment; it builds up a barrier between me and the happiness that
beckons me. And yet, so long as truth remains the highest aim of man, I
will bless the faculty of seeking it with all the powers of my mind. My
betrothed husband, like yours, is a Christian; and I would I could accept
his creed as unflinchingly as you; but it is not in my nature to leap
into a pool when I know that it is full of currents and
whirlpools.--However, the present question has to do with you and not
with me. Marcus, no doubt, will be happy to have won you; but if he does
not succeed in gaining his mother's consent he will not continue happy
you may rely upon it. I know these Christians! they cannot conceive of
any possible joy in married life without their parents' blessing, and if
Marcus defies his mother he will torture his conscience and lead a
death-in-life, as though he were under some heavy load of guilt."
"For all that, and all that," Dada insisted, "he can no more be happy
without me than I can without him. I have never in my life paid court to
any one, but I have always met with kindness. Why then should I not be
able to win his mother's heart? I will wager anything and everything that
she will take kindly to me, for, after all, she must be glad when she
sees her son happy. Eusebius will speak for us and she will give its her
blessing! But if it is not to be, if I may never be his wife honestly and
in the face of the world, still I will not give him up, nor he me. He may
deal with me as he will--as if he were my god and I were his slave!"
"But, my poor child, do you know nothing of womanly honor and womanly
dignity?" cried Gorgo clasping her hands. "You complain of the lot of a
singing-girl, and the cruel prejudices of the world--and what are you
saying? Let me have my way, you would say, or I scorn your morality?"
"Scorn!" exclaimed Dada firing up. "Do you say I scorn morality? No,
indeed no. I am an insignificant little person; there is nothing proud or
great about me, and as I know it full well I am quite humble; in all my
life I never dared to think of scorn, even of a child. But here, in my
heart, something was awoke to life--through Marcus, only through
him--something that makes me strong; and when I see custom and tradition
in league against me because I am a singer, when they combine to keep me
out of what I have a right to have--well, within these few hours I have
found the spirit to defend myself, to the death if need be! What you call
womanly honor I have been taught to hold as sacred as you yourself, and I
have kept it as untainted as any girl living. Not that I meant to do
anything grand, but you have no idea of what it is when every man thinks
he has a right to oppress and insult a girl and try to entrap her. You,
and others like you, know nothing of small things, for you are sheltered
by walls and privileges. We are every man's game, while they approach you
as humbly as if you were goddesses.--Besides! It is not only what I have
heard from Karnis, who knows the world and fine folks like you; I have
seen it for myself at Rome, in the senators' houses, where there were
plenty of young lords and great men's daughters--for I have not gone
through life with my eyes shut; with you love is like lukewarm water in a
bath, but it catches us like fire. Sappho of Lesbos flung herself from
the Leucadian rock because Phaon flouted her, and if I could save Marcus
from any calamity by doing the same, I would follow her example.--You
have a lover, too; but your feeling for him, with all the 'intellect' and
'reflections,' and 'thought' of which you spoke, cannot be the right one.
There is no but or if in my, love at any rate; and yet, for all that, my
heart aches so sorely and beats so wildly, I will wait patiently with
Eusebius and submit to whatever I am bidden.--And in spite of it all you
condemn me unheard, for you. . . . But why do you stand and look like
that? You look just like you did that time when I heard you sing. By all
the Muses! but you, too, like us, have some fire in your veins, you are
not one of the lukewarm sort; you are an artist, and a better one than I;
and if you ever should feel the right love, then--then take care lest you
break loose from propriety and custom--or whatever name you give to the
sacred powers that subdue passion--even more wildly than I--who am an
honest girl, and mean to remain so, for all the fire and flame in my
breast!"
Gorgo remembered the hour in which she had, in fact, proffered to the man
of her choice as a free gift, the love which, by every canon of
propriety, she ought only to have granted to his urgent wooing. She
blushed and her eyes fell before the humble little singer; but while she
was considering what answer she could make men's steps were heard
approaching, and presently Eusebius and Marcus entered the room, followed
by Gorgo's lover. Constantine was in deep dejection, for one of his
brothers had lost his life in the burning of his father's ship-yard, and
as compared with this grief, the destruction of the timber stores which
constituted the chief part of his wealth scarcely counted as a calamity.
Gorgo had met him with a doubtful and embarrassed air; but when she
learnt of the blow that had fallen on him and his parents, she clung to
him caressingly and tried to comfort him. The others sympathized deeply
with his sorrow; but soon it was Dada's turn to weep, for Eusebius
brought the news of her foster-parent's death in the fight at the
Serapeum, and of Orpheus being severely wounded.
The cheerful music-room was a scene of woe till Demetrius came to conduct
his brother and Dada to the widow Mary who was expecting them. He had
arrived in a chariot, for he declared his legs would no longer carry him.
"Men," said he, "are like horses. A swift saddle-horse is soon tired when
it is driven in harness and a heavy cart-horse when it is made to gallop.
His hoofs were spoilt for city pavements, and scheming, struggling and
running about the streets were too much for his country brains and wore
him out, as trotting under a saddle would weary a plough-horse. He
thanked the gods that this day was over. He would not be rested enough
till to-morrow to be really glad of all his success."--But in spite of
this assertion he was radiant with overflowing satisfaction, and that in
itself cheered the mourners whom he tried to encourage. When he said they
must be going, Gorgo kissed the little singer; indeed, as soon as she saw
how deeply she was grieved, shedding bitter but silent tears, she had
hastened to take her in her arms and comfort her like a sister.
Constantine, Gorgo and old Eusebius were left together, and the young
girl was longing to unburden her over-full heart. She had agreed to her
lover's request that she would at once accompany him to see his sorrowing
parents; still, she could not appear before the old Christian couple and
crave their blessing in her present mood. Recent events had embittered
her happy belief in the creed into which she had thrown herself, and much
as it pained her to add a drop to Constantine's cup of sorrow, duty and
honesty commanded that she should show him the secrets of her soul and
the doubts and questionings which had begun to trouble her. The old
priest's presence was a comfort to her; for her earnest wish was to
become a Christian from conviction; as soon as they were alone she poured
out before them all the accusations she had to bring against the
adherents of their Faith: They had triumphed in ruining the creations of
Art; the Temple of Isis and the ship-yard lay in ashes, destroyed by
Christian incendiaries; their tears were not yet dry when they flowed
afresh for the sons of Porphyrius--Christians themselves--who, unless
some happy accident had saved them, must have perished with thousands of
innocent sufferers--believers and infidels together--by the orders of the
Emperor whom Constantine had always lauded as a wise sovereign and pious
Christian, as the Defender of the Faith, and as a faithful disciple of
the Redeemer.
When, at last, she came to an end of her indictment she appealed to
Constantine and Eusebius to defend the proceedings of their
co-religionists, and to give her good grounds for confessing a creed
which could sanction such ruthless deeds.
Neither the Deacon nor his pupil attempted to excuse these acts; nay,
Constantine thought they were in plain defiance of that high law of Love
which the Christian Faith imposes on all its followers. The wicked
servant, he declared, had committed crimes in direct opposition to the
spirit and the letter of the Master.
But this admission by no means satisfied Gorgo; she represented to the
young Christian that a master must be judged by the deeds of his servant;
she herself had turned from the old gods only because she felt such
intense contempt for their worshippers; but now it had been her lot to
see--the Deacon must pardon her for saying so--that many a Christian far
outdid the infidels in coarse brutality and cruelty. Such an experience
had filled her with distrust of the creed she was required to subscribe
to--she was shaken to the very foundations of her being.
Eusebius had, till now, listened in silence; but as she ended he went
towards her, and asked her gently whether she would think it right to
turn the fertilizing Nile from its bed and leave its shores dry, because,
from time to time, it destroyed fields and villages in the excess of its
overflow? "This day and its deeds of shame," he went on sadly, "are a
blot on the pure and sublime book of the History of our Faith, and every
true Christian must bitterly bewail the excesses of a frenzied mob. The
Church must no less condemn Caesar's sanguinary vengeance; it casts a
shade on his honor and his fair name, and his conscience no doubt will
punish him for such a crime. Far be it from me to defend deeds which
nothing can justify. . ."
But Gorgo interrupted him. "All this," she said, "does not alter the fact
that such crimes are just as possible and as frequent with you, as with
those whom I am expected to give up, and who. . ."
"But it is not merely on account of their ill deeds that you are giving
them up, Gorgo," Constantine broke in. "Confess, dear girl, that your
wrath makes you unjust to yourself and your own heart. It was not out of
aversion for the ruthless and base adherents of the old gods but--as I
hope and believe--out of love for me that you consented to adopt my
faith--our faith."
"True, true," she exclaimed, coloring as she remembered the doubts Dada
had cast on the truth of her love.
"True, out of love for you--love of Love and of peace, I consented to
become a Christian. But with regard to the deeds committed by your
followers, tell me yourself--and I appeal to you reverend Father--what
inspired them: Love or Hate."
"Hate!" said Constantine gloomily; and Eusebius added sorrowfully
"In these dark days our Faith is seen under an aspect that by no means
fairly represents its true nature, noble lady; trust my words! Have you
not yourself seen, even in your short life, that what is highest and
greatest can in its excess, be all that is most hideous? A noble pride,
if not kept within bounds, becomes overweening ambition; the lovely grace
of humility degenerates into an indolent sacrifice of opinion and will;
high-hearted enterprise into a mad chase after fortune, in which we ride
down everything that comes in the way of success. What is nobler than a
mother's love, but when she fights for her child she becomes a raving
Megaera. In the same way the Faith--the consoler of hearts--turns to a
raging wild-beast when it stoops to become religious partisanship. If you
would really understand Christianity you must look neither down to the
deluded masses, and those ambitious worldlings who only use it as a means
to an end by inflaming their baser passions, nor up to the throne, where
power translates the impulse of a disastrous moment into sinister deeds.
If you want to know what true and pure Christianity is, look into our
homes, look at the family life of our fellow believers. I know them well,
for my humble functions lead me into daily and hourly intercourse with
them. Look to them if you purpose to give your hand to a Christian and
make your home with him. There, my child, you will see all the blessings
of the Saviour's teaching, love and soberness, pitifulness to the poor
and a real heart-felt eagerness to forgive injuries. I have seen a
Christian bestow his last crust on his hapless foe, on the enemy of his
house, on the Heathen or the Jew, because they, too, are men, because our
neighbor's woes should be as our own--I have seen them taken in and
cherished as though they were fellow-Christians.--There you will find a
striving after all that is good, a never-fading hope in better days to
come, even under the worst afflictions; and when death requires the
sacrifice of all that is dearest, or swoops down on life itself, a firm
assurance of the forgiveness of sins through Christ. Believe me,
mistress, there is no home so happy as that of the Christian; for he who
really apprehends the Saviour and understands his teaching need not mar
his own joys in this life to the end that he may be a partaker of the
bliss of the next. On the contrary: He who called the erring to himself,
who drew little children to his heart, who esteemed the poor above the
rich, who was a cheerful guest at wedding-feasts, who bid us gain
interest on the spiritual talents in our care, who commanded us to
remember Him at a social meal, who opened hearts to love--He longed to
release the life of the humblest creature from want and suffering. Where
love and peace reign must there not be happiness? And as He preached love
and peace above all else, He cannot have desired that we should
intentionally darken our lives on earth and load them with sorrow and
miseries in order to will our share of Heaven. The soul that is full of
the happy confidence of being one with Him and his love, is released from
the bondage of sin and sorrow, even here below; for Jesus has taken all
the sins and pains of the world on himself; and if Fate visits the
Christian with the heaviest blows he bears them in silence and patience.
Our Lord is Love itself; neither hatred nor envy are known to Him as they
are to the gods of the Heathen; and when he afflicts us, it is as the
wise and tender pastor of our souls, and for our good. The omniscient
Lord knows his own counsel, and the Christian submits as a child does to
a wise father whose loving kindness he can always trust; nay, he can even
thank him for sorrow and pain as though they were pleasurable benefits."
Gorgo shook her head.
"That all sounds very beautiful and good; it is required of the
Christian, and sometimes, no doubt, fulfilled; but the Stoa demands the
same virtues of its disciples. You, Constantine, knew Damon the Stoic,
and you will remember how strictly he enjoined on all that they should
rise superior to pain and grief. And then, when his only daughter lost
her sight--she was a great friend of mine--he behaved like one possessed.
My father, too, has often spoken to you of philosophy as a help to
contemning the discomforts of life, and bearing the sports of Fate with a
lofty mind; and now? You should see the poor man, reverend Father. What
good have all the teachings of the great master done him?"
"But he has lost so much--so much!" sighed Constantine thinking of his
own loss; and Eusebius shook his head.
"In sorrow such as his, no philosophy, no mental effort can avail. The
blows that wound the affections can only be healed by the affections, and
not by the intellect and considerations of reason. Faith, child! Faith is
the true Herb of Grace. The intellect is its foe; the feelings are its
native soil where it finds constant nourishment; and however deep the
bleeding wound of the mourner may be, Faith can heal it and reconcile the
sufferer to his loss. You have been taught to value a fine understanding,
to measure everything by it, to build everything on its decisions. To you
the knowledge you have attained to by argument and inference is supreme;
but the Creator has given us a heart as well as a brain; our affections,
too, stir and grow in their own way, and the knowledge they can attain
to, my child, is Faith. You love--and Love is part of your affections;
and now take my advice; do not let that reasoning intelligence, which has
nothing to do with love, have anything to say in the matter; cherish your
love and nurture it from the rich stores of your heart; thus only can it
thrive to beauty and harmony.--And this must suffice for to-day, for I
have already kept the wounded waiting too long in the Serapeum. If you
desire it, another time I will show you Christianity in all its depth and
beauty, and your love for this good man will prepare the way and open
your heart to my teaching. A day will come when you will be able to
listen to the voice of your heart as gladly as you have hitherto obeyed
the dictates of your intellect; something new will be born in you which
you will esteem as a treasure above all you ever acquired by reason and
thought. That day will assuredly dawn on you; for he whom you love has
opened the path for you that leads to the gates of Truth; and as you seek
you will not fail to find.--And so farewell. When you crave a teacher you
have only to come to him--and I know he will not have long to wait."
Gorgo looked thoughtfully at the old man as he went away and then went
with Constantine to see his parents. It was in total silence that they
made their way along the short piece of road to the house of Clemens.
Lights were visible in the viridarium and the curtains of the doorway
were drawn back; as they reached the threshold Constantine pointed to a
bier which had been placed in the little court among the flower-beds; his
parents were on their knees by the side of it.
Neither he nor Gorgo ventured to disturb their wordless devotions, but
presently the ship-master rose, drawing his fine, stalwart figure to its
full height; then turning his kind, manly, grave face to his wife, who
had also risen to her feet, he laid one hand on her still abundant white
hair and held out the other which she took in hers. Mariamne dried her
eyes and looked up, in her husband's face as he said firmly and calmly:
"The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away!' She hid her face on his
shoulder and responded sadly but fervently:
"Blessed be the name of the Lord!"
"Yea--Blessed!" repeated Clemens emphatically but he passed his arm
across his eyes. "For thirty-two years hath He lent him to us; and in our
hearts . . . ." and he struck his broad breast, "in here, he will never
die for you or for me. As for the rest--and there was a deal of property
of our own and of other folks in these wood-piles--well, in time we shall
get over that. We may bless the Almighty for what we have left!"
Gorgo felt her lover's hand grasp hers more tightly and she understood
what he meant; she clung closer to him and whispered softly: "Yes, that
is grand--that is the Truth."
CHAPTER XXVIII.
In the great house in the Canopic street it was late ere all was quiet
for the night. Even Demetrius, in spite of his fatigue, broke through his
rule of "early to bed"; he felt he must see the reaping of the harvest he
had sown for his brother.
It had been no easy task to persuade Mary to accede to his importunities,
but to his great joy he at last succeeded.
He would have met with a rough dismissal if he had begun by praising Dada
and expressing his wish to see her married to Marcus; he had gained his
point inch by inch, very quietly; but when he had explained to her that
it was in his hands to secure the martyr's crown for her husband she had
turned suspicious and ironical, had made him swear that it was true,
threatening him with punishments in this world and in the next; but he
had let it all pass over his head, had solemnly sworn as she desired him,
pledging not merely the salvation of his soul but his possessions in this
world; till, at length, convinced that it really was in his power to
gratify the dearest wish of her heart, she had yielded somewhat and
altered her demeanor. Still, he had not spoken a word to help her through
her deliberations and bewilderment, but had left her to fight out the
hard struggle with her own soul; not without some malicious enjoyment but
also not without anxiety, till the first decisive question was put to him
by his stepmother.
She had heard that Dada was quite resolved to be baptized, and having
once more made sure of the fact that the girl was anxious to become a
Christian, she next asked:
"And it was Marcus who won her to the faith?"
"He alone."
"And you can swear that she is a pure-minded and well-conducted girl?"
Certainly, with the firmest conviction."
"I saw her in the arena--she is pretty, uncommonly charming indeed--and
Marcus . . . ?"
"He has set his heart on the girl, and I am sure that his passion is
sincere and unselfish. On the other hand I need hardly remind you that in
this city there are many women, even among those of the first rank, whose
birth and origin are far more doubtful than those of your son's little
friend, for she, at any rate, is descended from free and respectable
parents. Her uncle's connections are among the best families in Sicily;
not that we need trouble ourselves about that, for the wife of Philip's
grandson would command respect even if she were only a freed-woman."
"I know, I know," murmured Mary, as though all this were of minor
importance in her eyes; and then for some little time she remained
silent. At last she looked up and exclaimed in a voice that betrayed the
struggle still going on in her soul:
"What have I to care for but my child's happiness? In the sight of God we
are all equal--great and small alike; and I myself am but a weak woman,
full of defects and sins--but for all that I could have wished that the
only son of a noble house might have chosen differently. All I can say is
that I must look upon this marriage as a humiliation laid upon me by the
Almighty--still, I give it my sanction and blessing, and I will do freely
and with my whole heart if my son's bride brings as her marriage-portion
the one thing which is the first and last aim of all my desires: The
everlasting glory of Apelles. The martyr's crown will open the gates of
Heaven to him--who was your father, too, Demetrius. Gain that and I
myself will lead the singer to my son's arms."
"That is a bargain!" cried Demetrius--and soon after midnight he had
retired to rest, after seeing Mary fulfil her promise to give a parental
blessing to the betrothed pair.
A few weeks later Dada and Gorgo were both baptized, and both by the name
of Cecilia; and then, at Mary's special entreaty, Marcus' marriage was
solemnized with much pomp by the Bishop himself.
Still, and in spite of the lavish demonstrations of more than motherly
affection which the widow showered her daughter-in-law, Dada felt a
stranger, and ill at ease in the great house in the Canopic way. When
Demetrius, a few weeks after their marriage, proposed Marcus that he
should undertake the management of family estates in Cyrenaica, she
jumped at the suggestion; and Marcus at once decided to act upon it when
his brother promised to remain with him for the first year or two,
helping him with his advice and instructions.
Their fears lest Mary should oppose the project, proved unfounded; for,
though the widow declared that life would be a burden to her without her
children, she soon acceded to her son's wishes and admitted that they
were kind and wise. She need not fear isolation, for, as the widow of the
martyred Apelles, she was the recognized leader of the Christian
sisterhood in the town, and preferred working in a larger circle than
that of the family. She always spoke with enthusiasm to her visitors of
her daughter-in-law Cecilia, of her beauty, her piety and her gentleness;
in fact, she did all she could to make it appear that she herself had
chosen her son's wife. But she did not care to keep this "beloved
daughter" with her in Alexandria, for the foremost position in every
department of social life was far more certain to be conceded to the
noble widow of a "martyred witness" in the absence of the pretty little
converted singer.
So the young couple moved to Cyrenaica, and Dada was happy in learning to
govern her husband's large estates with prudence and good sense. The gay
singing-girl became a capable housewife, and the idle horse-loving Marcus
a diligent farmer. For three years Demetrius staid with them as adviser
and superintendent; even afterwards he frequently visited them, and for
months at a time, and he was wont to say:
"In Alexandria I am heart and soul, a Heathen, but in the house with your
Cecilia I am happy to be a Christian."
Before they quitted the city a terrible blow fell on Eusebius. The sermon
he had delivered just before the overthrow of Serapes, to soothe the
excited multitude and guide them in the right way, had been regarded by
the Bishop of the zealot priests, who happened to be present, as
blasphemous and as pandering to the infidels; Theophilus, therefore, had
charged his nephew Cyril--his successor in the see--to verify the facts
and enquire into the deacon's orthodoxy. It thus came to light that Agne,
an Arian, was not only living under his roof, but had been trusted by him
to nurse certain sick persons among the orthodox; the old man was
condemned by Cyril to severe acts of penance, but Theophilus decided that
he must be deprived of his office in the city, where men of sterner stuff
were needed, and only allowed the charge of souls in a country
congregation.
It was a cruel blow to the venerable couple to be forced to quit the
house and the little garden where they had been happy together for half a
lifetime; however, the change proved to be to their advantage, for Marcus
invited his worthy teacher to be the spiritual pastor of his estates. The
churches he built for his peasants were consecrated by Eusebius, whose
mild doctrine and kindly influence persuaded many laborers and slaves to
be baptized and to join his flock of disciples. But the example and
amiability of their young mistress was even more effectual than his
preaching. Men and women, slaves and free, all adored and respected her;
to imitate her in all she did could only lead to honor and happiness,
could only be right and good and wise. Thus by degrees, and without the
exertion of any compulsion, the temples and shrines on the Martyr's
inheritance were voluntarily abandoned, and fell into ruin and decay.
It was the same on the property of Constantine, which lay at no more than
a day's journey from that of Marcus; the two young couples were faithful
friends and good neighbors. The estate which had come into Constantine's
possession had belonged to Barkas, the Libyan, who, with his troops, had
been so anxiously and vainly expected to succor the Serapeum. The State
had confiscated his extensive and valuable lands, and the young officer,
after retiring from the service, had purchased them with the splendid
fortune left to Gorgo by her grandmother.
The two sons of Porphyrius had, as it proved, been so happy as to escape
in the massacre at Thessalonica; and as they were Christians and piously
orthodox, the old man transferred to them, during his lifetime, the chief
share of his wealth; so that henceforth he could live honestly--alienated
from the Church and a worshipper of the old gods, without anxiety as to
his will. The treasures of art which Constantine and Gorgo found in the
house of Barkas they carefully preserved, though, ere long, few heathen
were to be found even in this neighborhood which had formerly been the
headquarters of rebellion on behalf of the old religion.
Papias was brought up with the children of Marcus and Dada Cecilia, while
his sister Agne, finding herself relieved of all care on his account,
sought and found her own way through life.
Orpheus, after seeing his parents killed in the fight at the Serapeum,
was carried, sorely wounded, to the sick-house of which Eusebius was
spiritual director. Agne had volunteered to nurse him and had watched by
his couch day and night. Eusebius had also brought Dada and Papias to
visit them, and Dada had promised, on behalf of Marcus, that Agne and her
brother should always be provided for, even in the event of the good
Deacon's death. The little boy was for the moment placed in Eusebius'
care, and it was a, cause of daily rejoicing to Agne to hear from the
kind old man of all the charming qualities he discovered in the child who
was perfectly happy with the old folks, and who, though he was always
delighted to see his sister, was quite content to part from her and
return home with Eusebius, or with Dada, to whole he was devoted.
Orpheus recognized no one, neither Agne nor the child--and when visitors
had been to see him, in his fevered ravings he would talk more vehemently
than ever of great Apollo and other heathen divinities. Then he would
fancy that he was still fighting in the Serapeum and butchering thousands
of Christian foes with his own hand. Agne, whom he rarely recognized for
a moment, would talk soothingly to him, and even try to say a few words
about the Saviour and the life to come; but he always interrupted her
with blasphemous exclamations, and cursed and abused her. Never had she
gone through such anguish of soul as by his bed of suffering, and yet she
could not help gazing at his face; and when she told herself that he must
soon be no more, that the light of his eyes would cease to shine on hers,
she felt as though the sun were about to be extinguished and the earth
darkened for all time. However, his healthy vigor kept him lingering for
many days and nights.
On the last evening of his life he took Agne for a Muse, and calling to
her to come to him seized her hand and sank back unconscious, never to
move again. She stood there as the minutes slowly passed, waiting in
agonized suspense till his hand should be cold in hers; and as she waited
she overheard a dialogue between two deaconesses who were watching by a
sleeping patient. One of them was telling the other that her sister's
husband, a mason, had died an obdurate heathen and a bitter enemy of the
Christian Church. Then Dorothea, his widow, had devoted herself to saving
his soul; she left her children, abandoning them to the charity of the
congregation, and had withdrawn to a cloister to pray in silence and
unceasingly for the soul of her deceased husband. At first he used to
appear to her in her dreams, with furious gestures, accompanied by
centaurs and goat-footed creatures, and had desired her to go home to her
children and leave his soil in peace, for that he was in very good
quarters with the jolly devils; but soon after she had seen him again
with scorched limbs, and he lead implored her to pray fervently for mercy
on him, for that they were torturing him cruelly in hell.
Dorothea had then retired into the desert of Kolzoum where she was still
living in a cave, feeding on herbs, roots, and shell-fish thrown up on
the sea-shore. She had schooled herself to do without sleep, and prayed
day and night for her husband's soul; and she lead obtained strength
never to think of anything but her own and her husband's salvation, and
to forget her children completely. Her fervid devotion had at length met
with full reward; for some little time her husband had appeared to her in
a robe of shining light and often attended by lovely angels.
Agne had not lost a word of this narrative, and when, next morning, she
felt the cold hand of the dead youth and looked at his drawn and
pain-stricken features, she shuddered with vague terrors: he, she
thought, like Dorothea's husband, must have hell-torments to endure. When
she presently found herself alone with the corpse she bent over it and
kissed the pale lips, and swore to herself that she would save his soul.
That same evening she went back to Eusebius and told him of her wish to
withdraw to the desert of Koizoum and become a recluse. The old man
besought her to remain with him, to take charge of her little brother,
and not to abandon him and his old wife; for that it was a no less lovely
Christian duty to be compassionate and helpful, and cherish the feeble in
their old age. His wife added her entreaties and tears; but a sudden
chill had gripped Agne's heart; dry-eyed and rigid she resisted their
prayers, and took leave of her benefactors and of Papias. Bare-foot and
begging her way, she started for the south-east and reached the shores of
the Red Sea. There she found the stonemason's widow, emaciated and
haggard, with matted hair, evidently dying. Agne remained with her,
closed her eyes, and then lived on as Dorothea had lived, in the same
cave, till the fame of her sanctity spread far beyond the boundaries of
Egypt.
When Papias had grown to man's estate and was installed as steward to
Demetrius, he sought his sister many times and tried to persuade her to
live with him in his new home; but she never would consent to quit her
solitary cell. She would not have exchanged it for a king's palace; for
Orpheus appeared to her in nightly visions, radiant with the glories of
Heaven; and time was passing and the hour drawing near when she might
hope to be with him once more.
The widow Mary, in her later years, made many pilgrimages to holy places
and saintly persons, and among others to Agne, the recluse; but she would
never be induced to visit Cyrenaica, whither she was frequently invited
by her children and grandchildren; some more powerful excitant was needed
to prompt her to face the discomforts of a journey.
The old Heathen cults had completely vanished from the Greek capital long
before her death. With it died the splendor and the power of the second
city in the world; and of all the glories of the city of Serapis nothing
now remains but a mighty column--[Known as Pompey's Pillar.]--towering to
the skies, the last surviving fragment of the beautiful temple of the
sovereign-god whose fall marked so momentous an epoch in the life of the
human race. But, like this pillar, outward Beauty--the sense of form that
characterized the heathen mind--has survived through the ages. We can
gaze up at the one and the other, and wherever the living Truth--the
Spirit of Christianity--has informed and penetrated that form of Beauty,
the highest hopes of old Eusebius have been realized. Their union is
solemnized in Christian Art.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE SERAPIS:
Christian hypocrites who pretend to hate life and love death
Christianity had ceased to be the creed of the poor
Great happiness, and mingled therefor with bitter sorrow
He may talk about the soul--what he is after is the girl
He spoke with pompous exaggeration
It is not by enthusiasm but by tactics that we defeat a foe
Love means suffering--those who love drag a chain with them
People who have nothing to do always lack time
Perish all those who do not think as we do
Pretended to see nothing in the old woman's taunts
Rapture and anguish--who can lay down the border line
Reason is a feeble weapon in contending with a woman
To her it was not a belief but a certainty
Trifling incident gains importance when undue emphasis is laid
Very hard to imagine nothingness
Whether man were the best or the worst of created beings
Words that sounded kindly, but with a cold, unloving heart
ARACHNE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 1.
Translated from the German by Mary J. Safford
CHAPTER I.
Deep silence brooded over the water and the green islands which rose like
oases from its glittering surface. The palms, silver poplars, and
sycamores on the largest one were already casting longer shadows as the
slanting rays of the sun touched their dark crowns, while its glowing
ball still poured a flood of golden radiance upon the bushes along the
shore, and the light, feathery tufts at the tops of the papyrus reeds in
the brackish water.
More than one flock of large and small waterfowl flew past beneath the
silvery cloudlets flecking the lofty azure vault of heaven; here and
there a pelican or a pair of wild ducks plunged, with short calls which
ceased abruptly, into the lush green thicket, but their cackling and
quacking belonged to the voices of Nature, and, when heard, soon died
away in the heights of the tipper air, or in the darkness of the
underbrush that received the birds. Very few reached the little city of
Tennis, which now, during the period of inundation in the year 274 B.C.,
was completely encircled by water.
From the small island, separated from it by a channel scarcely three
arrow-shots wide, it seemed as though sleep or paralysis had fallen upon
the citizens of the busy little industrial town, for few people appeared
in the streets, and the scanty number of porters and sailors who were
working among the ships and boats in the little fleet performed their
tasks noiselessly, exhausted by the heat and labour of the day.
Columns of light smoke rose from many of the buildings, but the sunbeams
prevented its ascent into the clear, still air, and forced it to spread
over the roofs as if it, too, needed rest.
Silence also reigned in the little island diagonally opposite to the
harbour. The Tennites called it the Owl's Nest, and, though for no
especial reason, neither they nor the magistrates of King Ptolemy II ever
stepped upon its shores. Indeed, a short time before, the latter had even
been forbidden to concern themselves about the pursuits of its
inhabitants; since, though for centuries it had belonged to a family of
seafaring folk who were suspected of piracy, it had received, two
generations ago, from Alexander the Great himself, the right of asylum,
because its owner, in those days, had commanded a little fleet which
proved extremely useful to the conqueror of the world in the siege of
Gaza and during the expedition to Egypt. True, under the reign of Ptolemy
I, the owners of the Owl's Nest were on the point of being deprived of
this favour, because they were repeatedly accused of piracy in distant
seas; but it had not been done. Yet for the past two years an
investigation had threatened Satabus, the distinguished head of the
family, and during this period he, with his ships and his sons, had
avoided Tennis and the Egyptian coast.
The house occupied by the islanders stood on the shore facing the little
city. It had once been a stately building, but now every part of it
seemed to be going to ruin except the central portion, which presented a
less dilapidated appearance than the sorely damaged, utterly neglected
side wings.
The roof of the whole long structure had originally consisted of palm
branches, upon which mud and turf had been piled; but this, too, was now
in repair only on the central building. On the right and left wings the
rain which often falls in the northeastern part of the Nile Delta, near
the sea, had washed off the protecting earth, and the wind had borne it
away as dust.
Once the house had been spacious enough to shelter a numerous family and
to store a great quantity of goods and provisions, but it was now long
since the ruinous chambers had been occupied. Smoke rose only from the
opening in the roof of the main building, but its slender column showed
from what a very scanty fire it ascended.
The purpose which this was to serve was readily discovered, for in front
of the open door of the dwelling, that seemed far too large and on
account of the pillars at the entrance, which supported a triangular
pediment--also too stately for its sole occupant, sat an old woman,
plucking three ducks.
In front of her a girl, paying no heed to her companion, stood leaning
against the trunk of the low, wide-branching sycamore tree near the
shore. A narrow boat, now concealed from view by the dense growth of
rushes, had brought her to the spot.
The beautiful, motherless young creature, needing counsel, had come to
old Tabus to appeal to her art of prophecy and, if she wanted them, to
render her any little services; for the old dame on the island was
closely bound to Ledscha, the daughter of one of the principal
ship-owners in Tennis, and had once been even more closely united to the
girl.
Now, as the sun was about to set, the latter gave herself up to a wild
tumult of sweet memories, anxious fears, and yearning expectation.
Not until a cool breath from the neighbouring sea fanned her brow did she
throw down the cord and implement with which she had been adding a few
meshes to a net, and rising, gaze sometimes across the water at a large
white house in the northern part of the city, sometimes at the little
harbour or the vessels on the horizon steering toward Tennis, among which
her keen eyes discovered a magnificent ship with bright-hued sails.
Drawing a long breath, she enjoyed the coolness which precedes the
departure of the daystar.
But the effect of this harbinger of night upon her surroundings was even
more powerful than upon herself, for the sun in the western horizon
scarcely began to sink slowly behind the papyrus thicket on the shore of
the straight Tanite arm of the Nile, dug by human hands, than one new and
strange phenomenon followed another.
First a fan, composed of countless glowing rays which spread in dazzling
radiance over the west, rose from the vanishing orb and for several
minutes adorned the lofty dome of the deep-blue sky like the tail of a
gigantic peacock. Then the glitter of the shining plumes paled. The
light-giving body from which they emanated disappeared and, in its stead,
a crimson mantle, with gold-bordered, crocus-yellow edges, spread itself
over the space it had left until the gleaming tints merged into the
deeper hues of the violet.
But the girl paid no heed to this splendid spectacle. Perhaps she noticed
how the fading light diffused a delicate rose-hued veil over the
light-blue sails, embroidered with silver vines, of the approaching state
galley, making its gilded prow glitter more brightly, and saw one fishing
boat after another move toward the harbour, but she gave the whole scene
only a few careless glances.
Ledscha cared little for the poor fishermen of Tennis, and the glittering
state galley could scarcely bring or bear away anything of importance to
her.
The epistrategus of the whole province was daily expected. But of what
consequence to the young girl were the changes which it was rumoured he
intended to introduce into the government of the country, concerning
which her father had expressed such bitter dissatisfaction before he set
out on his last trip to Pontus?
A very different matter occupied her thoughts, and as, pressing her hand
upon her heart, she gazed at the little city, gleaming with crimson hues
in the reflection of the setting sun, a strange, restless stir pervaded
the former stillness of Nature. Pelicans and flamingoes, geese and ducks,
storks and herons, ibises and cranes, bitterns and lapwings, flew in dark
flocks of manifold forms from all directions. Countless multitudes of
waterfowl darkened the air as they alighted upon the uninhabited islands,
and with ear-splitting croaking and cackling, whistling and chirping,
clapping and twittering, dropped into the sedges and bushes which
concealed their nests, while in the city the doors of the houses opened,
and men, women, and children, after toiling at the loom and in the
workshop, came out to enjoy the coolness of the evening in the open air.
One fishing boat after another was already throwing a rope to the shore,
as the ship with the gay sails approached the little roadstead.
How large and magnificent it was!
None of the king's officials had ever used such a galley, not even the
epistrategus of the Delta, who last year had given the banking and the
oil trade to new lessees. Besides, the two transports that had followed
the magnificent vessel appeared to belong to it.
Ledscha had watched the ships indifferently enough, but suddenly her
gaze--and with it the austere beauty of her face--assumed a different
expression.
Her large black eyes dilated, and with passionate intentness she looked
from the gaily ornamented galley to the shore, which several men in Greek
costume were approaching.
The first two had come from the large white house whose door, since
sunset, had been the principal object of her attention.
It was Hermon, the taller one, for whom she was waiting with old Tabus.
He had promised to take her from the Owl's Nest, after nightfall, for a
lonely row upon the water.
Now he was not coming alone, but with his fellow-artist, the sculptor
Myrtilus, the nomarch and the notary--she recognised both
distinctly--Gorgias, the rich owner of the second largest weaving
establishment in Tennis, and several slaves.
What did it mean?
A sudden flush crimsoned her face, now slightly tanned, to the brow, and
her lips were compressed, giving her mouth an expression of repellent,
almost cruel harshness.
But the tension of her charming features, whose lines, though sharp, were
delicately outlined, soon vanished. There was still plenty of time before
the darkness would permit Hermon to join her unnoticed. A reception, from
which he could not be absent, was evidently about to take place.
Yes, that was certainly the case; for now the magnificent galley had
approached as near the land as the shallow water permitted, and the
whistle of the rowers' flute-player, shouts of command, and the barking
of dogs could be heard.
Then a handkerchief waved a greeting from the vessel to the men on shore,
but the hand that held it was a woman's. Ledscha would have recognised it
had the twilight been far deeper.
The features of the new arrival could no longer be distinguished; but she
must be young. An elderly woman would not have sprung so nimbly into the
skiff that was to convey her to the land.
The man who assisted her in doing so was the same sculptor, Hermon, for
whom she had watched with so much longing.
Again the blood mounted into Ledscha's cheeks, and when she saw the
stranger lay her hand upon the shoulder of the Alexandrian who, only
yesterday, had assured the young girl of his love with ardent vows, and
allow him to lift her out of the boat, she buried her little white teeth
deeply in her lips.
She had never seen Hermon in the society of a woman of his own class,
and, full of jealous displeasure; perceived with what zealous assiduity
he who bowed before no one in Tennis, paid court to the stranger no less
eagerly than did his friend Myrtilus.
The whole scene passed like a shadow in the dusk before Ledscha's eyes,
half dimmed by uneasiness, perplexity, and suddenly inflamed jealousy.
The Egyptian twilight is short, and when Hermon disappeared with the
new-comer it was no longer possible to recognise the man who entered the
very boat in which she was to have taken the nocturnal voyage with her
lover, and which was now rowed toward the Owl's Nest.
Surely it would bring her a message from Hermon; and as the stranger, who
was now joined by a number of other women and two packs of barking dogs,
with their keepers, vanished in the darkness, the skiff already touched
the shore close at her side.
CHAPTER II.
In spite of the surrounding gloom, Ledscha recognised the man who left
the boat.
The greeting he shouted told her that it was Hermon's slave, Pias, a
Biamite, whom she had met in the house of some neighbours who were his
relatives and had sharply rebuffed when he ventured to accost her more
familiarly than was seemly for one in bondage.
True, in his childhood this man had lived near Tennis as the son of a
free papyrus raiser, but when still a lad was sold into slavery in
Alexandria with his father, who had been seized for taking part in an
insurrection against the last king.
In the service of Areluas, his present master's uncle, who had given him
to his nephew, and as the slave of the impetuous yet anything but cruel
sculptor, Hermon, he had become accustomed to bondage, but was still far
more strongly attached to his Biamite race than to the Greek, to whom, it
is true, his master belonged, but who had robbed him and his family of
freedom.
The man of forty did not lack mother wit, and as his hard fate rendered
him thoughtful and often led him to use figurative turns of speech, which
were by no means intended as jests, he had been called by his first
master "Bias" for the sage of Priene.
In the house of Hermon, who associated with the best artists in
Alexandria, he had picked up all sorts of knowledge and gladly welcomed
instruction. His highest desire was to win esteem, and he often did so.
Hermon prized the useful fellow highly. He had no secrets from him, and
was sure of his silence and good will.
Bias had managed to lure many a young beauty in Alexandria, in whom the
sculptor had seen a desirable model, to his studio, even under the most
difficult circumstances; but he was vexed to find that his master had
cast his eye upon the daughter of one of the most distinguished families
among his own people. He knew, too, that the Biamites jealously guarded
the honour of their women, and had represented to Hermon what a dangerous
game he was playing when he began to offer vows of love to Ledscha.
So it was an extremely welcome task to be permitted to inform her that
she was awaiting his master in vain.
In reply to her inquiry whether it was the aristocrat who had just
arrived who kept Hermon from her, he admitted that she was right, but
added that the gods were above even kings, and his master was obliged to
yield to the Alexandrian's will.
Ledscha laughed incredulously: "He--obey a woman!"
"He certainly would not submit to a man," replied the slave. "Artists,
you must know, would rather oppose ten of the most powerful men than one
weak woman, if she is only beautiful. As for the daughter of
Archias--thereby hangs a tale."
"Archias?" interrupted the girl. "The rich Alexandrian who owns the great
weaving house?"
"The very man."
"So it is his daughter who is keeping Hermon? And you say he is obliged
to serve her?"
"As men serve the Deity, to the utmost, or truth," replied the slave
importantly. "Archias, the father, it is true, imposed upon us the debt
which is most tardily paid, and which people, even in this country, call
'gratitude.' We are under obligations to the old man--there's no denying
it--and therefore also to his only child."
"For what?" Ledscha indignantly exclaimed, and the dark eyebrows which
met above her delicate nose contracted suspiciously. "I must know!"
"Must!" repeated the slave. "That word is a ploughshare which suits only
loose soil, and mine, now that my master is waiting for me, can not be
tilled even by the sharpest. Another time! But if, meanwhile, you have
any message for Hermon----"
"Nothing," she replied defiantly; but Bias, in a tone of the most eager
assent, exclaimed: "One friendly word, girl. You are the fairest among
the daughters of the highest Biamite families, and probably the richest
also, and therefore a thousand times too good to yield what adorns you to
the Greek, that it may tickle the curiosity of the Alexandrian apes.
There are more than enough women in the capital to serve that purpose.
Trust the experience of a man not wholly devoid of wisdom, my girl. He
will throw you aside like an empty wine bottle when he has used you for a
model."
"Used?" interrupted Ledscha disdainfully; but he repeated with firm
decision: "Yes, used! What could you learn of life, of art and artists,
here in the weaver's nest in the midst of the waves? I know them. A
sculptor needs beautiful women as a cobbler wants leather, and the charms
he seeks in you he does not conceal from his friend Myrtilus, at least.
They are your large almond-shaped eyes and your arms. They make him
fairly wild with delight by their curves when, in drawing water, you hold
the jug balanced on your head. Your slender arched foot, too, is a
welcome morsel to him."
The darkness prevented Bias from seeing Ledscha's features, but it was
easy to perceive what was passing in her mind as, hoarse with
indignation, she gasped: "How can I know the object of your accusations?
but fie upon the servant who would alienate from his own kind master what
his soul desires!"
Then Bias changed not only his tone of voice, but his language, and,
deeply offended, poured forth a torrent of wrath in the dialect of his
people: "If to guard you, and my master with you, from harm, my words had
the power to put between you and Hermon the distance which separates
yonder rising moon from Tennis, I would make them sound as loud as the
lion's roar. Yet perhaps you would not understand them, for you go
through life as though you were deaf and blind. Did you ever even ask
yourself whether the Greek is not differently constituted from the sons
of the Biamite sailors and fishermen, with whom you grew up, and to whom
he is an abomination? Yet he is no more like them than poppy juice is
like pure water. He and his companions turn life upside down. There is no
more distinction between right and wrong in Alexandria than we here in
the dark can make between blue and green. To me, the slave, who is
already growing old, Hermon is a kind master. I know without your aid
what I owe him, and serve him as loyally as any one; but where he
threatens to lead to ruin the innocent daughter of the race whose blood
flows in my veins as well as yours, and in doing so perhaps finally
destroy himself too, conscience commands me to raise my voice as loud as
the sentinel crane when danger threatens the flock. Beware, girl, I
repeat! Keep your beauty, which is now to be degraded to feast the eyes
of gaping Greeks, for the worthiest husband among our people. Though
Hermon has vowed, I know not what, your love-dallying will very soon be
over; we shall leave Tennis within the next few days. When he has gone
there will be one more deceived Biamite who will call down the curse of
the gods upon the head of a Greek. You are not the only one who will
execrate the destiny that brought us here. Others have been caught in his
net too."
"Here?" asked Ledscha in a hollow tone; and the slave eagerly answered:
"Where else? And that you may know the truth--among those who visited
Hermon in his studio is your own young sister."
"Our Taus? That child?" exclaimed the girl, stretching her hands toward
the slave in horror, as if to ward off some impending disaster.
"That child, who, I think, has grown into a very charming girl--and,
before her, pretty Gula, the wife of Paseth, who, like your father, is
away on his ship."
Here, in a tone of triumphant confidence, the answer rang from the
Biamite's lips: "There the slanderer stands revealed! Now you are
detected, now I perceive the meaning of your threat. Because, miserable
slave, you cherish the mad hope of beguiling me yourself, you do your
utmost to estrange me from your master. Gula, you say, visited Hermon in
his studio, and it may be true. But though I have been at home only a
short time, Tennis is too full of the praises of the heroic Greek who, at
the risk of his own life, rescued a child from Paseth's burning house,
for the tale not to reach my ears from ten or a dozen different quarters.
Gula is the mother of the little girl whose life was saved by Hermon's
bold deed, and perhaps the young mother only knocked at her benefactor's
door to thank him; but you, base defamer--"
"I," Bias continued, maintaining his composure with difficulty, "I saw
Gula secretly glide into our rooms again and again to permit her child's
preserver to imitate in clay what he considered beautiful. To seek your
love, as you know, the slave forbade himself, although a man no more
loses tender desires with his freedom than the tree which is encircled by
a fence ceases to put forth buds and blossoms. Eros chooses the slave's
heart also as the target for his arrows; but his aim at yours was better
than at mine. Now I know how deeply he wounds, and so, as soon as yonder
ship in the harbour bears our visitor away again, I shall see you,
Schalit's daughter, Ledscha, standing before Hermon's modelling table and
behold him scan your beauty to determine what seems worth copying."
The Biamite, panting for breath, had listened to the end. Then, raising
her little clinched hand menacingly, she muttered through her set teeth:
"Let him try even to touch my veil with his fingers! If I had not been
obliged to go away, this would not have happened to my Taus and luckless
Gula."
"Scarcely," replied Bias calmly. "If the chicken runs into the water, the
hen can not save it. For the rest--I grew up as a boy in freedom with the
husband of your sister, who summoned you to her aid. His father's
brick-kiln was next to our papyrus plantation. Then we fared like so many
others--the great devour the small, the just cause is the lost one, and
the gods are like men. My father, who drew the sword against oppression
and violence, was robbed of liberty, and your brother-in-law, in payment
for his honest courage, met an early death. Is the story which is told of
you here true? I heard that soon after the poor fellow's burial the
slaves in the brick-kiln refused to obey his widow. There were a dozen
rebellious brick-moulders, and you--one can forgive you much for it--you,
the weak girl----"
"I am not weak," interrupted Ledscha proudly. "I could have taught three
times twelve of the scoundrels who was master. Now they obey my sister,
and yet I wish I had stayed in Tennis. Our Taus," she continued in a more
gentle tone, "is still so young, and our mother died when she was a
little child; but I, fool, who should have warned her, left her alone,
and if she yielded to Hermon's temptations the fault is mine, wholly
mine."
During this outburst the light of the fire, which old Tabus had fed with
fresh straw and dry rushes, fell upon the face of the agitated girl. It
revealed her thoughts plainly enough, and, pleased with the success of
his warning, Bias exclaimed: "And Ledscha, you, too, will not grant him
that from which you would so gladly have withheld your sister. So I will
go and tell my master that you refuse to give him another appointment."
He had confidently expected an assent, and therefore started indignantly
at her exclamation: "I intend to do just the contrary." Yet she eagerly
added, as if in explanation: "He must give me an account of himself, no
matter where, and, since it can not be to-day, to-morrow at latest."
The slave, disappointed and anxious, now tried to make her understand how
foolish and hard to accomplish her wish was, but she obstinately insisted
upon having her own way.
Bias angrily turned his back upon her and, in the early light of the
moon, walked toward the shore, but she hastened after him, seized his arm
and, with imperious firmness, commanded: "You will stay! I must first
know whether Hermon really means to leave Tennis so soon."
"That was his intention early this morning," replied the other, releasing
himself from her grasp. "What are we to do here longer, now that his work
is as good as finished?"
"But when is he going?" she urged with increased eagerness.
"Day after to-morrow," was the reply, "in five, or perhaps even in six
days, just as it suits him. Usually we do not even know to-day what is to
be done to-morrow. So long as the Alexandrian remains, he will scarcely
leave her, or Myrtilus either. Probably she will take both hunting with
her, for, though a kind, fair-minded woman, she loves the chase, and as
both have finished their work, they probably will not be reluctant to go
with Daphne."
He stepped into the boat as he spoke, but Ledscha again detained him,
asking impatiently: "And 'the work,' as you call it? It was covered with
a cloth when I visited the studio, but Hermon himself termed it the
statue of a goddess. Yet what it represents--Does it look like my sister
Taus--enough like her, I mean, to be recognised?"
A half-compassionate, half-mocking smile flitted over the Biamite's
copper-coloured visage, and in a tone of patronizing instruction assumed
by the better informed, he began: "You are thinking of the face? Why no,
child! What that requires can be found in the countenance of no Biamite,
hardly even in yours, the fairest of all."
"And the goddess's figure?" asked Ledscha eagerly.
"For that he first used as a model the fair-haired Heliodora, whom he
summoned from Alexandria, and as the wild cat could endure the loneliness
only a fortnight, the sisters Nico and Pagis came together. But Tennis
was too quiet for them too. The rabble can only be contented among those
of their own sort in the capital. But the great preliminary work was
already finished before we left Alexandria."
"And Gula--my sister?"
"They were not used for the Demeter," said the slave, smiling. "Just
think, that slender scarcely grown creature, Taus, and the matronly
patroness of marriage. And Gula? True, her little round face is fresh and
not ill-looking--but the model of a goddess requires something more. That
can only be obtained in Alexandria. What do not the women there do for
the care of the body! They learn it in the Aphrodision, as the boys study
reading and writing. But you! What do you here know even about colouring
the eyelids and the lips, curling the hair, and treating the nails on the
hands and feet? And the clothes! You let them hang just as you put them
on, and my master's work is full of folds and little lines in the robe
and the peplos--But I have staid too long already. Do you really insist
upon meeting Hermon again?
"I will and must see him," she eagerly declared.
"Well, then," he answered harshly. "But if you cast my warning to the
winds, pity will also fly away with it."
"I do not need it," the girl retorted in a contemptuous tone.
"Then let Fate take its course," said the slave, shrugging his shoulders
regretfully. "My master shall learn what you wish. I shall remain at home
until the market is empty. There are plenty of servants at your farm.
Your messenger shall bring you Hermon's answer."
"I will come myself and wait for it under the acacia," she cried hastily,
and went toward the house, but this time it was Bias who called her back.
Ledscha reluctantly fulfilled his wish, but she soon regretted it, for
though what he had to say was doubtless kindly meant, it contained a
fresh and severe offence: the slave represented to her the possibility
that, so long as the daughter of Archias remained his guest, Hermon might
rebuff her like a troublesome beggar.
Then, as if sure of her cause, she indignantly cut short his words: "You
measure him according to your own standard, and do not know what depends
upon it for us. Remind him of the full moon on the coming night and,
though ten Alexandrians detained him, he would escape from them to hear
what I bring him."
With these words Ledscha again turned her back upon him, but Bias, with a
low imprecation, pushed the boat from the shore and rowed toward the
city.
CHAPTER III.
When Ledscha heard the strokes of the oars she stopped again and, with
glowing cheeks, gazed after the boat and the glimmering silver furrow
which it left upon the calm surface of the moonlit water.
Her heart was heavy. The doubts of her lover's sincerity which the slave
had awakened tortured her proud soul.
Was Hermon really only trifling mischievously with her affection?
Surely it was impossible.
She would rather endure everything, everything, than this torturing
uncertainty.
Yet she was here on the Owl's Nest to seek the aid of old Tabus's magic
arts. If any one could give her satisfaction, it was she and the demons
who obeyed her will, and the old woman was glad to oblige Ledscha; she
was bound to her by closer ties than most people in Tennis knew.
Ledscha had no cause to be ashamed of her frequent visits to the Owl's
Nest, for old Tabus had no equal as a leech and a prophetess, and the
corsair family, of which she was the female head, stood in high repute
among the Biamites. People bore them no ill-will because they practised
piracy; many of their race pursued the same calling, and the sailors made
common cause with them.
Ledscha's father, too, was on good terms with the pirates, and when Abus,
a handsome fellow who commanded his father's second ship and had won a
certain degree of renown by many a bold deed, sought the hand of his
oldest daughter, he did not refuse him, and only imposed the condition
that when he had gained riches enough and made Ledscha his wife, he would
cease his piratical pursuits and, in partnership with him, take goods and
slaves from Pontus to the Syrian and Egyptian harbours, and grain and
textiles from the Nile to the coasts of the Black Sea.
Young Abus had yielded to this demand, since his grandmother on the Owl's
Nest thought it wise to delay for a time the girl's marriage to him, the
best beloved of her grandsons; she was then scarcely beyond childhood.
Yet Ledscha had felt a strong affection for the young pirate, in whom she
saw the embodiment of heroic manhood. She accompanied him in imagination
through all his perilous expeditions; but she had been permitted to enjoy
his society only after long intervals for a few days.
Once he remained absent longer than usual, and this very voyage was to
have been his last on a pirate craft--the peaceful seafaring life was to
begin, after his landing, with the marriage.
Ledscha had expected her lover's return with eager longing, but week
after week elapsed, yet nothing was seen or heard of the ships owned by
the Owl's Nest family; then a rumour spread that this time the corsairs
were defeated in a battle with the Syrian war-galleys.
The first person who received sure tidings was old Tabus. Her grandson
Hanno, who escaped with his life, at the bidding of his father Satabus,
who revered his mother, had made his way to her amid great perils to
convey the sorrowful news. Two of the best ships in the family had been
sunk, and on one the brave Abus, Ledscha's betrothed husband, who
commanded it, had lost his life; on the other the aged dame's oldest son
and three of her grandchildren.
Tabus fell as if struck by lightning when she heard the tidings, and
since that time her tongue had lost its power of fluent speech, her ear
its sharpness; but Ledscha did not leave her side, and saved her life by
tireless, faithful nursing.
Neither Satabus, the old woman's second son, who now commanded the little
pirate fleet, nor his sons, Hanno and Labaja, had been seen in the
neighbourhood of Tennis since the disaster, but after Tabus had recovered
sufficiently to provide for herself, Ledscha returned to Tennis to manage
her father's great household and supply the mother's place to her younger
sister, Taus.
She had not recovered the careless cheerfulness of earlier years, but,
graver than the companions of her own age, she absented herself from the
gaieties of the Biamite maidens. Meanwhile her beauty had increased
wonderfully, and, attracting attention far and wide, drew many suitors
from neighbouring towns to Tennis. Only a few, however, had made offers
of marriage to her father; the beautiful girl's cold, repellent manner
disheartened them. She herself desired nothing better; yet it secretly
incensed her and pierced her soul with pain to see herself at twenty
unwedded, while far less attractive companions of her own age had long
been wives and mothers.
The arduous task which she had performed a short time before for her
widowed sister had increased the seriousness of her disposition to sullen
moroseness.
After her return home she often rowed to the Owl's Nest, for Ledscha felt
bound to old Tabus, and, so far as lay in her power, under obligation to
atone for the injury which the horror of her lover's sudden death had
inflicted upon his grandmother.
Now she had at last been subjugated by a new passion--love for the Greek
sculptor Hermon, who did his best to win the heart of the Biamite girl,
whose austere, extremely singular beauty attracted his artist eyes.
To-day Ledscha had come to the sorceress to learn from her what awaited
her and her love. She had landed on the island, sure of favourable
predictions, but now her hopes lay as if crushed by hailstones.
If Bias, who was superior to an ordinary slave, was right, she was to be
degraded to a toy and useful tool by the man who had already proved his
pernicious power over other women of her race, even her own young sister,
whom she had hitherto guarded with faithful care. It had by no means
escaped her notice that the girl was concealing something from her,
though she did not perceive the true cause of the change.
The bright moonbeams, which now wove a silvery web over every surrounding
object, seemed like a mockery of her darkened soul.
If the demons of the heights and depths had been subject to her, as to
the aged enchantress she would have commanded them to cover the heavens
with black clouds. Now they must show her what she had to hope or to
fear.
She shook her head slightly, as if she no longer believed in a favourable
turn of affairs, pushed the little curls which had escaped from the
wealth of her black hair back from her forehead with her slender hand,
and walked firmly to the house.
The old dame was crouching beside the hearth in the middle room, turning
the metal spit, on which she had put the ducks, over the freshly kindled
fire.
The smoke hurt her eyes, which were slightly inflamed, yet they seemed to
serve their purpose better than her half-dulled ear, for, after a swift
glance at Ledscha, she stammered in her faltering speech: "What has
happened? Nothing good, certainly. It is written on your face."
The girl nodded assent, pointed with a significant gesture to her eyes
and the open air, and went down to the shore again to convince herself
that no other vessel was approaching.
What she had to confide to Tabus was intended for her alone, and
experience taught how far spoken words could be heard at night over the
water.
When she had returned to the hut, she bent down to the old woman's ear
and, holding her curved hand to her lips, cried, "He is not coming!"
Tabus shrugged her shoulders, and the smile of satisfaction which flitted
over her brown, wrinkled face showed that the news was welcome.
For her murdered grandson's sake the girl's confession that she had given
her heart to a Greek affected her painfully; but Tabus also had something
else on her mind for her beautiful darling.
Now she only intimated by a silent nod that she understood Ledscha, and
her head remained constantly in motion as the latter continued: "True, I
shall see him again to-morrow, but when we part, it will hardly be in
love. At any rate--do you hear, grandmother?--to-morrow must decide
everything. Therefore--do you understand me?--you must question the cords
now, to-night, for to-morrow evening what they advised might be too
late."
"Now?" repeated Tabus in surprise, letting her gaze rest inquiringly upon
the girl. Then she took the spit from the fire, exclaiming angrily:
"Directly, do you mean? As if that could be! As if the stars obeyed us
mortals like maids or men servants! The moon must be at the full to learn
the truth from the cords. Wait, child! What is life but waiting? Only
have patience, girl! True, few know how to practise this art at your age,
and it is alien to many all their lives. But the stars! From them, the
least and the greatest, man can learn to go his way patiently, year by
year. Always the same course and the same pace. No deviation even one
hair's breadth, no swifter or slower movement for the unresting
wanderers. No sudden wrath, no ardent desire, no weariness or aversion
urges or delays them. How I love and honour them! They willingly submit
to the great law until the end of all things. What they appoint for this
hour is for it alone, not for the next one. Everything in the vast
universe is connected with them. Whoever should delay their course a
moment would make the earth reel. Night would become day, the rivers
would return to their sources. People would walk on their heads instead
of their feet, joy would be transformed to sorrow and power to servitude.
Therefore, child, the full moon has a different effect from the waxing or
waning one during the other twenty-nine nights of the month. To ask of
one what belongs to another is to expect an answer from the foreigner who
does not understand your language. How young you are, child, and how
foolish! To question the cords for you in the moonlight now is to expect
to gather grapes from thorns. Take my word for that!"
Here she interrupted the words uttered with so much difficulty, and with
her blackish-blue cotton dress wiped her perspiring face, strangely
flushed by the exertion and the firelight.
Ledscha had listened with increasing disappointment.
The wise old dame was doubtless right, yet before she ventured to the
sculptor's workshop the next day she must know at every cost how matters
stood, what she had to fear or to hope from him; so after a brief silence
she ventured to ask the question, "But are there only the stars and the
cords which predict what fate holds in store for one who is so nearly
allied to you?"
"No, child, no," was the reply. "But nothing can be clone about looking
into the future now. It requires rigid fasting from early dawn, and I ate
the dates you brought me. I inhaled the odor of the roasting ducks, too,
and then--it must be done at midnight; and at midnight your people will
be anxious if you are not at home by that time, or perhaps send a slave
to seek you here at my house, and that--that must not be done--I must
prevent it."
"So you are expecting some one," Ledscha eagerly replied. "And I know who
it is. Your son Satabus, or one of your grandsons. Else why are the ducks
cooked? And for what is the wine jar which I just took from its hiding
place?"
A vehement gesture of denial from Tabus contradicted the girl's
conjecture; but directly after she scanned her with a keen, searching
glance, and said: "No, no. We have nothing to fear from you, surely. Poor
Abus! Through him you will always belong to us. In spite of the Greek,
ours you are and ours you will remain. The stars confirm it, and you have
always been faithful to the old woman. You are shrewd and steadfast. You
would have been the right mate for him who was also wise and firm. Poor,
dear, brave boy! But why pity him? Because the salt waves now flow over
him? Fools that we are! There is nothing better than death, for it is
peace. And almost all of them have found it. Of nine sons and twenty
grandsons, only three are left. The others are all calm after so much
conflict and danger. How long ago it is since seven perished at once! The
last three their turn will come too. How I envy them that best of
blessings, only may they not also go before me!"
Here she lowered her voice, and in a scarcely audible whisper murmured:
"You shall know it. My son Satabus, with his brave boys Hanno and Labaja,
are coming later in the evening. About midnight--if ye protect them, ye
powers above--they will be with me. And you, child, I know your soul to
its inmost depths. Before you would betray the last of Abus's kindred--"
"My hand and tongue should wither!" Ledscha passionately interrupted, and
then, with zealous feminine solicitude, she asked whether the three ducks
would suffice to satisfy the hunger of these strong men.
The old woman smiled and pointed to a pile of fresh leaves heaped one
above another, beneath which lay several fine shad. They were not to be
cooked until the expected visitors arrived, and she had plenty of bread
besides.
In the presence of these proofs of maternal solicitude the morose,
wrinkled countenance of the old sorceress wore a kind, almost tender
expression, and the light of joyous anticipation beamed upon her young
guest from her red-rimmed eyes.
"I am to see them once more!" cried Tabus in an agitated tone. "The
last--and all three, all! If they--But no; they will not set to work so
near Pelusium. No, no! They will not, lest they should spoil the meeting
with the old woman. Oh, they are kind; no one knows how kind my rough
Satabus can be. He would be your father now, girl, if we could have kept
our Abus--he was the best of all--longer. It is fortunate that you are
here, for they must see you, and it would have been hard for me to fetch
the other things: the salt, the Indian pepper, and the jug of Pelusinian
zythus, which Satabus is always so fond of drinking."
Then Ledscha went into the ruinous left wing of the house, where she took
from a covered hole in the floor what the old woman had kept for the last
of her race, and she performed her task gladly and with rare skill.
Next she prepared the fish and the pan, and while her hands were moving
busily she earnestly entreated the old woman to gratify her wish and look
into the future for her.
Tabus, however, persisted in her refusal, until Ledscha again called her
"grandmother," and entreated her, by the heads of the three beloved ones
whom she expected, to fulfil her desire.
Then the old dame rose, and while the girl, panting for breath, took the
roasted ducks from the spit, the former, with her own trembling hands,
drew from the little chest which she kept concealed behind a heap of dry
reeds, branches, and straw, a shining copper dish, tossed the gold coins
which had been in it back into the box, and moistened the bottom with the
blackish-red juice of the grape from the wine jar.
After carefully making these preparations she called Ledscha and repeated
that the cords possessed the power of prophecy only on nights when the
moon was full, and that she would use another means of looking into the
future.
Then she commanded the girl to let her hands rest now and to think of
nothing except the questions whose answer she had at heart. Lastly, she
muttered into the vessel a series of incantations, which Ledscha repeated
after her, and gazed as if spellbound at the dark liquid which covered
the bottom.
The girl, panting for breath, watched every movement of the sorceress,
but some time elapsed ere the latter suddenly exclaimed, "There he is!"
and then, without removing her eyes from the bottom of the vessel, she
went on, with faltering accents, as though she was describing a scene
close before her eyes. "Two young men-both Greeks, if the dress does not
deceive--one is at your right hand, the other at your left. The former is
fair-haired; the glance of his eyes is deep and constant. It is he, I
think--But no! His image is fading, and you are turning your back upon
him. You do it intentionally. No, no, you two are not destined for each
other. You think of the one with the waving black hair and beard--of him
alone. He is growing more and more distinct--a handsome man, and how his
brow shines! Yet his glance--it sees more than that of many others, but,
like the rest of his nature, it lacks steadfastness."
Here she paused, raised her shaking head, looked at Ledscha's flushed
face, and in a grave, warning tone, said: "Many signs of happiness, but
also many dark shadows and black spots. If he is the one, child, you must
be on your guard."
"He is," murmured the girl softly, as if speaking to herself.
But the deaf old crone had read the words from her lips, and while gazing
intently at the wine, went on impatiently: "If the picture would only
grow more distinct! As it was, so it has remained. And now! The image of
the fair man with the deep-blue eyes melts away entirely, and a gray
cloud flutters between you and the other one with the black beard. If it
would only scatter! But we shall never make any progress in this way. Now
pay attention, girl."
The words had an imperious tone, and with outstretched head and throbbing
heart Ledscha awaited the old woman's further commands.
They came at once and ordered her to confess, as freely and openly as
though she was talking to herself, where she had met the man whom she
loved, how he had succeeded in snaring her heart, and how he repaid her
for the passion which he had awakened.
These commands were so confused and mingled in utterance that any one
less familiar with the speaker would scarcely have comprehended what they
required of her, but Ledscha understood and was ready to obey.
CHAPTER IV.
This reserved, thoroughly self-reliant creature would never have betrayed
to any human being what moved her soul and filled it some times with
inspiring hope, sometimes with a consuming desire for vengeance; but
Ledscha did not shrink from confiding it to the demons who were to help
her to regain her composure.
So, obeying a swift impulse, she threw herself on her knees by the old
woman's side. Then, supporting her head with her hands, she gazed at the
still glimmering fire, and, as if one memory after another received new
life from it, she began the difficult confession:
"I returned from my sister's brick-kiln a fortnight ago," she commenced,
while the sorceress leaned her deaf ear nearer to her lips.
"During my absence something--I know not what it was--had saddened the
cheerful spirits of my young sister Taus. At the recent festival of
Astarte she regained them, and obtained some beautiful bright flowers to
make wreaths for herself and me. So we joined the procession of the
Tennis maidens and, as the fairest, they placed us directly behind the
daughters of Hiram.
"When we were about to go home after the sacrifice, two young Greeks
approached us and greeted Hiram's daughters and my sister also.
"One was a quiet young man, with narrow shoulders and light, curling
hair; the other towered above him in stature. His powerful figure was
magnificently formed, and he carried his head with its splendid black
beard proudly.
"Since the gods snatched Abus from me, though so many men had wooed me, I
had cared for no one; but the fair-haired Greek with the sparkling light
in his blue eyes and the faint flush on his cheeks pleased me, and his
name, 'Myrtilus,' fell upon my ear like music. I was glad when he joined
me and asked, as simply as though he were merely inquiring the way, why
he had never seen me, the loveliest among the beauties in the temple, in
Tennis.
"I scarcely noticed the other. Besides, he seemed to have eyes only for
Taus and the daughters of Hiram. He played all sorts of pranks with them,
and they laughed so heartily that, fearing the strangers, of whom there
was no lack, might class them with the Hieroduli who followed the sailors
and young men in the temple grottoes, I motioned to Taus to restrain
herself.
"Hermon--this was the name of the tall, bearded man--noticed it and
turned toward me. In doing so his eyes met mine, and it seemed as though
sweet wine flowed through my veins, for I perceived that my appearance
paralyzed his reckless tongue. Yet he did not accost me; but Myrtilus,
the fair one, entreated me not to lessen for the beautiful children the
pleasure to which we are all born.
"I thought this remark foolish--how much sorrow and how little pleasure I
had experienced from childhood!--so I only shrugged my shoulders
disdainfully.
"Then the black-bearded man asked if, young and beautiful as I was, I had
forgotten to believe in mirth and joy. My reply was intended to tell him
that, though this was not the case, I did not belong to those who spent
their lives in loud laughing and extravagant jests.
"The answer was aimed at the black-bearded man's reckless conduct; but
the fair-haired one parried the attack in his stead, and retorted that I
seemed to misunderstand his friend. Pleasure belonged to a festival, as
light belonged to the sun; but usually Hermon laboured earnestly, and
only a short time before he had saved the little daughter of Gula, the
sailor's wife, from a burning house.
"The other did not let Myrtilus finish, but exclaimed that this would
only confirm my opinion of him, for this very leap into the flames had
afforded him the utmost joy.
"The words fell from his bearded lips as if the affair was very simple, a
mere matter of course, yet I knew that the bold deed had nearly cost him
his life--I said to myself that no one but our Abus would have done it,
and then I may have looked at him more kindly, for he cried out that I,
too, understood how to smile, and would never cease doing so if I knew
how it became me.
"As he spoke he turned away from the girls to my side, while Myrtilus
joined them. Hermon's handsome face had become grave and thoughtful, and
when our eyes met I could have wished that they would never part again.
But on account of the others I soon looked down at the ground and we
walked on in this way, side by side, for some distance; but as he did not
address a word to me, only sometimes gazed into my face as if seeking or
examining, I grew vexed and asked him why he, who had just entertained
the others gaily enough, had suddenly become so silent.
"He shook his head and answered--every word impressed itself firmly upon
my memory: 'Because speech fails even the eloquent when confronted with a
miracle.'
"What, except me and my beauty, could be meant by that? But he probably
perceived how strangely his words confused me, for he suddenly seized my
hand, pressing it so firmly that it hurt me, and while I tried to
withdraw it he whispered, 'How the immortals must love you, that they
lend you so large a share of their own divine beauty!'"
"Greek honey," interposed the sorceress, "but strong enough to turn such
a poor young head. And what more happened? The demons desire to hear
all--all--down to the least detail--all!"
"The least detail?" repeated Ledscha reluctantly, gazing into vacancy as
if seeking aid. Then, pressing her hand on her brow, she indignantly
exclaimed: "Ah, if I only knew myself how it conquered me so quickly! If
I could understand and put it into intelligible words, I should need no
stranger's counsel to regain my peace of mind. But as it is! I was driven
by my anxiety from temple to temple, and now to you and your demons. I
went from hour to hour as though in a burning fever. If I left the house
firmly resolved to bethink myself and, as I had bidden my sister, avoid
danger and the gossip of the people, my feet still led me only where he
desired to meet me. Oh, and how well he understood how to flatter, to
describe my beauty! Surely it was impossible not to believe in it and
trust its power!"
Here she hesitated, and while gazing silently into vacancy a sunny light
flitted over her grave face, and, drawing a long breath, she began again:
"I could curse those days of weakness and ecstasy which now--at least I
hope so--are over. Yet they were wonderfully beautiful, and never can I
forget them!"
Here she again bowed her head silently, but the old dame nodded
encouragingly, saying eagerly; "Well, well! I understand all that, and I
shall learn what more is coming, for whatever appears in the mirror of
the wine is infallible--but it must become still more distinct. Let
me--first conjure up the seventy-seven great and the seven hundred and
seventy-seven little demons. They will do their duty, if you open your
heart to us without reserve."
This demand sounded urgent enough, and Ledscha pressed her head against
the old woman's shoulder as if seeking assistance, exclaiming: "I can
not--no, I can not! As if the spirits who obey you did not know already
what had happened and will happen in the future! Let them search the
depths of my soul. There they will see, with their own eyes, what I
should never, never succeed in describing. I could not tell even you,
grandmother, for who among the Biamites ever found such lofty,
heart-bewitching words as Hermon? And what looks, what language he had at
command, when he desired to put an end to my jealous complaints! Could I
still be angry with him, when he confessed that there were other beauties
here whom he admired, and then gazed deep into my eyes and said that when
I appeared they all vanished like the stars at sunrise? Then every
reproach was forgotten, and resentment was transformed into doubly ardent
longing. This, however, by no means escaped his keen glance, which
detects everything, and so he urged me with touching, ardent entreaties
to go with him to his studio, though but for one poor, brief hour."
"And you granted his wish?" Tabus anxiously interrupted.
"Yes," she answered frankly, "but it was the evening of the day before
yesterday--that was the only time. Secrecy--nothing, Grand mother, was
more hateful to me from childhood."
"But he," the old woman again interrupted, "he--I know it--he praised it
to you as the noblest virtue."
A silent nod from Ledscha confirmed this conjecture, and she added
hesitatingly: "'Only far from the haunts of men,' he said, 'when the
light had vanished, did we hear the nightingale trill in the dark
thickets. Those are his own words, and though it angers you, Grandmother,
they are true."
"Until the secrecy is over, and the sun shines upon misery," the
sorceress answered in her faltering speech, with menacing severity.
"And beneath the tempter's roof you enjoyed the lauded secret love until
the cock roused you?"
"No," replied Ledscha firmly. "Did I ever tell you a lie, that you look
at me so incredulously?"
"Incredulously?" replied the old woman in protest. "I only trembled at
the danger into which you plunged."
"There could be no greater peril," the girl admitted. "I foresaw it
clearly enough, and yet--this is the most terrible part of it--yet my
feet moved as if obeying a will of their own, instead of mine, and when I
crossed his threshold, resistance was silenced, for I was received like a
princess. The lofty, spacious apartment was brilliantly illuminated, and
the door was garlanded with flowers.
"It was magnificent! Then, in a manner as respectful as if welcoming an
illustrious guest, he invited me to take my place opposite to him, that
he might form a goddess after my model. This was the highest flattery of
all, and I willingly assumed the position he directed, but he looked at
me from every side, with sparkling eyes, and asked me to let down my hair
and remove the veil from the back of my head. Then--need I assure you of
it?--my blood boiled with righteous indignation; but instead of being
ashamed of the outrage, he raised his hand to my head and pulled the
veil. Resentment and wrath suddenly flamed in my soul, and before he
could detain me I had left the room. In spite of his representations and
entreaties, I did not enter it again."
"Yet," asked the sorceress in perplexity, "you once more obeyed his
summons?"
"Yesterday also I could not help it," Ledscha answered softly.
"Fool!" cried Tabus indignantly, but the girl exclaimed, in a tone of
sincere shame: "You do well to call me that. Perhaps I deserve still
harsher names, for, in spite of the sternness with which I forbade him
ever to remind me of the studio by even a single word, I soon listened to
him willingly when he besought me, if I really loved him, not to refuse
what would make him happy. If I allowed him to model my figure, his
renown and greatness would be secured. And how clearly he made me
understand this! I could not help believing it, and at last promised
that, in spite of my father and the women of Tennis, I would grant all,
all, and accompany him again to the work room if he would have patience
until the night of the next day but one, when the moon would be at the
full."
"And he?" asked Tabus anxiously.
"He called the brief hours which I required him to wait an eternity,"
replied the girl, "and they seemed no less long to me--but neither
entreaties nor urgency availed; what you predicted for me from the cords
last year strengthened my courage. I should wantonly throw away--I
constantly reminded myself--whatever great good fortune Fate destined for
me if I yielded to my longing and took prematurely what was already so
close at hand; for--do you remember?--at that time it was promised that
on a night when the moon was at the full a new period of the utmost
happiness would begin for me. And now--unless everything deceives me--now
it awaits me. Whether it will come with the full moon of to-morrow night,
or the next, or the following one, your spirits alone can know; but
yesterday was surely too soon to expect the new happiness."
"And he?" asked the old dame.
"He certainly did not make it easy for me," was the reply, "but as I
remained firm, he was obliged to yield. I granted only his earnest desire
to see me again this evening. I fancy I can still hear him exclaim, with
loving impetuosity, that he hated every day and every night which kept
him from me. And now? Now? For another's sake he lets me wait for him in
vain, and if his slave does not lie, this is only the beginning of his
infamous, treacherous game."
She had uttered the last words in a hoarse cry, but Tabus answered
soothingly: "Hush, child, hush! The first thing is to see clearly, if I
am to interpret correctly what is shown me here. The demons are to be
fully informed they have required it. But you? Did you come to hear
whether the spirits still intend to keep the promise they made then?"
Ledscha eagerly assented to this question, and the old woman continued
urgently: "Then tell me first what suddenly incenses you so violently
against the man whom you have so highly praised?"
The girl related what had formerly been rumoured in Tennis, and which she
had just heard from the slave.
He had lured other women--even her innocent young sister--to his studio.
Now he wanted to induce Ledscha to go there, not from love, but merely to
model her limbs so far as he considered them useful for his work. He was
in haste to do so because he intended to return to the capital
immediately. Whether he meant to leave her in the lurch after using her
for his selfish purposes, she also desired to learn from the sorceress.
But she would ask him that question herself to-morrow. Woe betide him if
the spirits recognised in him the deceiver she now believed him.
Hitherto Tabus had listened quietly, but when she closed her passionate
threats with the exclamation that he also deserved punishment for
alienating Gula, the sailor's wife, from her absent husband, the
enchantress also lost her composure and cried out angrily: "If that is
true, if the Greek really committed that crime--then certainly. The
foreigners destroy, with their laughing levity, much that is good among
us. We must endure it; but whoever broke the Biamite's marriage bond,
from the earliest times, forfeited his life, and so, the gods be thanked,
it has remained. This very last year the fisherman Phabis killed with a
hammer the Alexandrian clerk who had stolen into his house, and drowned
his faithless wife. But your lover--though you should weep for sorrow
till your eyes are red--"
"I would denounce the traitor, if he made himself worthy of death,"
Ledscha passionately interrupted, with flashing eyes. "What portion of
the slave's charge is true will appear at once--and if it proves correct,
to morrow's full moon shall indeed bring me the greatest bliss; for
though, when I was younger and happier, I contradicted Abus when he
declared that one thing surpassed even the raptures of love--satisfied
vengeance--now I would agree with him."
A loud cry of "Right! right!" from the old crone's lips expressed the
gray-haired Biamite's pleasure in this worthy daughter of her race.
Then she again gazed at the wine in the vessel, and this time she did so
silently, as if spellbound by the mirror on its bottom.
At last, raising her aged head, she said in a tone of the most sincere
compassion: "Poor child! Yes, you would be cruelly and shamefully
deceived. Tear your love for this man from your heart, like poisonous
hemlock. But the full moon which is to bring you great happiness is
scarcely the next, perhaps not even the one which follows it, but surely
and certainly a later one will rise, by whose light the utmost bliss
awaits you. True, I see it come from another man than the Greek."
The girl had listened with panting breath. She believed as firmly in the
infallibility of the knowledge which the witch received from the demons
who obeyed her as she did in her own existence.
All her happiness, all that had filled her joyous soul with freshly
awakened hopes, now lay shattered at her feet, and sobbing aloud she
threw herself down beside the old woman and buried her beautiful face in
her lap.
Completely overwhelmed by the great misfortune which had come upon her,
without thinking of the vengeance which had just made her hold her head
so proudly erect, or the rare delight which a later full moon was to
bring, she remained motionless, while the old woman, who loved her and
who remembered an hour in the distant past when she herself had been
dissolved in tears at the prediction of another prophetess, laid her
trembling hand upon her head.
Let the child weep her fill.
Time, perhaps vengeance also, cured many a heartache, and when they had
accomplished this office upon the girl who had once been betrothed to her
grandson, perhaps the full moon bringing happiness, whose appearance
first the cords, then the wine mirror in the bottom of the vessel had
predicted, would come to Ledscha, and she believed she knew at whose side
the girl could regain what she had twice lost--satisfaction for the young
heart that yearned for love.
"Only wait, wait," she cried at last, repeating the consoling words again
and again, till Ledscha raised her tear-stained face.
Impulse urged her to kiss the sufferer, but as she bent over the mourner
the copper dish slipped from her knees and fell rattling on the floor.
Ledscha started up in terror, and at the same moment the Alexandrian's
packs of hounds on the shore opposite to the Owl's Nest began to bark so
loudly that the deaf old woman heard the baying as if it came from a
great distance; but the girl ran out into the open air and, returning at
the end of a few minutes, called joyously to the sorceress from the
threshold, "They are coming!"
"They, they," faltered Tabus, hurriedly pushing her disordered gray hair
under the veil on the back of her head, while exclaiming, scarcely able
to use her voice in her joyous excitement: "I knew it. He keeps his word.
My Satabus is coming. The ducks, the bread, the fish, girl! Good, loyal
heart."
Then a wide, long shadow fell across the dimly lighted room, and from the
darkened threshold a strangely deep, gasping peal of laughter rang from a
man's broad breast.
"Satabus! My boy!" the witch's shriek rose above the peculiar sound.
"Mother!" answered the gray-bearded lips of the pirate.
For one short moment he remained standing at the door with outstretched
arms. Then he took a step toward the beloved being from whom he had been
separated more than two years, and suddenly throwing himself down before
her, while his huge lower limbs covered part of the floor, he stretched
his hands toward the little crooked old woman, who had not strength to
rise from her crouching posture, and seizing her with loving impetuosity,
lifted her as if she were a child, and placing her on his knees, drew her
into a close embrace.
Tabus willingly submitted to this act of violence, and passing her thin
left arm around her son's bull neck with her free hand, patted his
bearded cheeks, wrinkled brow, and bushy, almost white hair.
No intelligible words passed the lips of either the mother or the son at
this meeting; nothing but a confused medley of tender and uncouth natural
sounds, which no language knows.
Yet they understood each other, and Ledscha, who had moved silently
aside, also comprehended that these low laughs, moans, cries, and
stammers were the expressions of love of two deeply agitated hearts, and
for a moment an emotion of envy seized her.
The gods had early bereft her of her mother, while this savage fighter
against the might of the waves, justice, law, and their pitiless, too
powerful defenders, this man, already on the verge of age, still
possessed his, and sunned his rude heart in her love.
It was some time before the old pirate had satisfied his yearning for
affection and placed his light burden down beside the fire.
Tabus now regained the power to utter distinct words, and, difficult as
it was for her half paralyzed tongue to speak, she poured a flood of
tender pet names and affectionate thanks upon the head of her rude son,
the last one left, who had grown gray in bloody warfare; but with the
eyes of her soul she again saw in him the little boy whom, with warm
maternal love, she had once pressed to her breast and cradled in her
arms.
When, in his rough fashion, he warmly returned her professions of
tenderness, her eyes grew wet with tears, and at the question what he
could still find in her, a withered, good-for-nothing little creature who
just dragged along from one day to another, an object of pity to herself,
he again burst into his mighty laugh, and his deep voice shouted: "Do you
want to know that? But where would be the lime that holds us on the ships
if you were no longer here? The best capture wouldn't be worth a drachm
if we could not say, 'Hurrah! how pleased the old mother will be when she
hears it!' And when things go badly, when men have been wounded or
perished in the sea, we should despair of our lives if we did not know
that whatever troubles our hearts the old mother feels, too, and we shall
always get from her the kind words needed to press on again. And then,
when the strait is sore and life is at stake, whence would come the
courage to cast the die if we did not know that you are with us day and
night, and will send your spirits to help us if the need is great?
Hundreds of times they rushed to our aid just at the right time, and
assisted us to hew off the hand of the foe which was already choking us.
But that is only something extra, which we could do without, if
necessary. That you are here, that a man still has his dear mother, whose
heart wishes us everything good and our foes death and destruction, whose
aged eyes will weep if anything harms us, that, mother dear, that is the
main thing!"
He bent his clumsy figure over her as he spoke, and cautiously, as if he
were afraid of doing her some injury, kissed her head with tender care.
Then, rising, he turned to Ledscha, whom he always regarded as his dead
son's betrothed bride, and greeted her with sincere kindness.
Her great beauty strengthened his plan of uniting her to his oldest son,
and when the latter entered the house he cast a searching glance at him.
The result was favourable, for a smile of satisfaction flitted over his
scarred features.
The young pirate's stately figure was not inferior in height to the old
one's, but his shoulders were narrower, his features less broad and full,
and his hair and beard had the glossy raven hue of the blackbird's
plumage.
The young man paused on the threshold in embarrassment, and gazed at
Ledscha with pleased surprise. When he saw her last his grandmother had
not been stricken by paralysis, and the girl was the promised wife of his
older brother, to whom custom forbade him to raise his eyes.
He had thought of her numberless times as the most desirable of women.
Now nothing prevented his wooing her, and finding her far more beautiful
than memory had showed her, strengthened his intention of winning her.
This purpose had matured in the utmost secrecy. He had concealed it even
from his father and his brother Labaja, who was still keeping watch on
the ships, for he had a reserved disposition, and though obliged to obey
his father, wherever it was possible he pursued his own way.
Though Satabus shared Hanno's wish, it vexed him that at this meeting,
after so long a separation, his son should neglect his beloved and
honoured mother for the sake of a beautiful girl. So, turning his back on
Ledscha, he seized the young giant's shoulder with a powerful grip to
drag him toward the old woman; but Hanno perceived his error, and now, in
brief but affectionate words, showed his grandmother that he, too,
rejoiced at seeing her again.
The sorceress gazed at her grandson's stalwart figure with a pleasant
smile, and, after welcoming him, exclaimed to Ledscha: "It seems as if
Abus had risen from the grave."
The girl vouchsafed her dead lover's brother a brief glance, and, while
pouring oil upon the fish in the pan, answered carelessly: "He is a
little like him."
"Not only in person," remarked the old pirate, with fatherly pride, and
pointing to the broad scar across the young man's forehead, visible even
in the dim light, he added by way of explanation: "When we took vengeance
for Abus, he bore away that decoration of honour. The blow nearly made
him follow his brother, but the youth first sent the souls of half a
dozen enemies to greet him in the nether world."
Then Ledscha held out her hand to Hanno, and permitted him to detain it
till an ardent glance from his black eyes met hers, and she withdrew it
blushing. As she did so she said to Tabus: "You can put them on the fire,
and there stands whatever else you need. I must go home now."
In taking leave of the men she asked if she could hope to find them here
again the next day. "The full moon will make it damnably light," replied
the father, "but they will scarcely venture to assail the right of
asylum, and the ships anchored according to regulation at Tanis, with a
cargo of wood from Sinope. Besides, for two years people have believed
that we have abandoned these waters, and the guards think that if we
should return, the last time to choose would be these bright nights.
Still, I should not like to decide anything positively about the morrow
until news came from Labaja."
"You will find me, whatever happens," Hanno declared after his father had
ceased speaking. Old Tabus exchanged a swift glance with her son, and
Satabus said: "He is his own master. If I am obliged to go--which may
happen--then, my girl, you must be content with the youth. Besides, you
are better suited to him than to the graybeard."
He shook hands with Ledscha as he spoke, and Hanno accompanied her to her
boat.
At first he was silent, but as she was stepping into the skiff he
repeated his promise of meeting her here the following night.
"Very well," she answered quickly. "Perhaps I may have a commission to
give you."
"I will fulfil it," he answered firmly.
"To-morrow, then," she called, "unless something unexpected prevents."
But when seated on the thwart she again turned to him, and asked: "Does
it need a long time to bring your ship, with brave men on board, to this
place?"
"We can be here in four hours, and with favourable winds still sooner,"
was the reply.
"Even if it displeases your father?"
"Even then, and though the gods, many as there are, should forbid--if
only your gratitude will be gained."
"It will," she answered firmly, and the water plashed lightly under the
strokes of her oars.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Cast my warning to the winds, pity will also fly away with it
Must--that word is a ploughshare which suits only loose soil
Tender and uncouth natural sounds, which no language knows
There is nothing better than death, for it is peace
Tone of patronizing instruction assumed by the better informed
Wait, child! What is life but waiting?
ARACHNE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 2.
CHAPTER V.
In the extreme northern portion of the little city of Tennis a large,
perfectly plain whitewashed building stood on an open, grass-grown
square.
The side facing the north rested upon a solid substructure of hard blocks
of hewn stone washed by the waves.
This protecting wall extended along both sides of the long, plain
edifice, and prevented the water from overflowing the open space which
belonged to it.
Archias, the owner of the largest weaving establishment in Tennis, the
father of the Alexandrian aristocrat who had arrived the evening before,
was the owner of the house, as well as of the broad plain on which he had
had it built, with the indestructible sea wall, to serve as a storehouse
to receive the supplies of linen, flax, and wool which were manufactured
in his factories.
It was favourably situated for this purpose, for the raw materials could
be moved from the ships which brought them to Tennis directly into the
building. But as the factories were at a considerable distance, the
transportation required much time and expense, and therefore Archias had
had a canal dug connecting the workshops with the water, and at its end
erected a new storehouse, which rendered a second transportation of the
ships' cargoes unnecessary.
The white mansion had not yet been devoted to any other purpose when the
owner determined to offer the spacious empty rooms of the ware house to
his nephews, the sculptors Hermon and Myrtilus, for the production of two
works with whose completion he associated expectations of good fortune
both for the young artists, who were his nephews and wards, and himself.
The very extensive building which now contained the studios and spacious
living apartments for the sculptors and their slaves would also have
afforded ample room for his daughter and her attendants, but Daphne had
learned from the reports of the artists that rats, mice, and other
disagreeable vermin shared the former storehouse with them, so she had
preferred to have tents pitched in the large open space which belonged
it.
True, the broad field was exposed to the burning sun, and its soil was
covered only with sand and pitiably scorched turf, but three palm trees,
a few sunt acacias, two carob trees, a small clump of fig trees, and the
superb, wide-branched sycamore on the extreme outer edge had won for it
the proud name of a "garden."
Now a great change in its favour had taken place, for Daphne's beautiful
tent, with walls and top of blue and white striped sail-cloth, and the
small adjoining tents of the same colours, gave it a brighter aspect.
The very roomy main tent contained the splendidly furnished sitting and
dining rooms. The beds occupied by Daphne and her companion, Chrysilla,
had been placed in an adjoining one, which was nearly as large, and the
cook, with his assistants, was quartered in a third.
The head keeper, the master of the hounds, and most of the slaves
remained in the transports which had followed the state galley. Some had
slept under the open sky beside the dog kennel hastily erected for
Daphne's pack of hounds.
So, on the morning after the wholly unexpected arrival of the owner's
daughter, the "garden" in front of the white house, but yesterday a
desolate field, resembled an encampment, whose busy life was varied and
noisy enough.
Slaves and freedmen had been astir before sunrise, for Daphne was up
betimes in order to begin the hunt in the early hour when the birds left
their secret nooks on the islands.
Her cousins, the young sculptors, to please her, had gone out, too, but
the sport did not last long; for when the market place of Tennis, just
between the morning and noontide hours, was most crowded, the little
boats which the hunters had used again touched the shore.
With them and Daphne's servants seafaring men also left the
boats--Biamite fishermen and boatmen, who knew the breeding places and
nests of the feathered prey--and before them, barking loudly and shaking
their dripping bodies, the young huntress's brown and white spotted dogs
ran toward the tents.
Dark-skinned slaves carried the game, which had been tied in bunches
while in the boats, to the white house, where they laid three rows of
large water fowl, upon the steps leading to the entrance.
Daphne's arrows were supposed to have killed all these, but the master of
the hunt had taken care to place among his mistress's booty some of the
largest pelicans and vultures which had been shot by the others.
Before retiring to her tent, she inspected the result of the shooting
expedition and was satisfied.
She had been told of the numbers of birds in this archipelago, but the
quantity of game which had been killed far exceeded her greatest
expectations, and her pleasant blue eyes sparkled with joy as she began
to examine the birds which had been slaughtered in so short a time.
Yet, ere she had finished the task, a slight shadow flitted over her
well-formed and attractive though not beautiful features.
The odour emanating from so many dead fowls, on which the sun, already
high in the heavens, was shining, became disagreeable to her, and a
strong sense of discomfort, whose cause, however, she did not seek, made
her turn from them.
The movement with which she did so was full of quiet, stately grace, and
the admiring glance with which Hermon, a tall, black-bearded young man,
watched it, showed that he knew how to value the exquisite symmetry of
her figure.
The somewhat full outlines of her form and the self-possession of her
bearing would have led every one to think her a young matron rather than
a girl; but the two artists who accompanied her on the shooting party had
been intimate with her from childhood, and knew how much modesty and
genuine kindness of heart were united with the resolute nature of this
maiden, who numbered two and twenty years.
Fair-haired Myrtilus seemed to pay little heed to the game which Gras,
Archias's Bithynian house steward, was counting, but black-bearded Hermon
had given it more attention, and when Daphne drew back he nodded
approvingly, and pointing to the heap of motionless inhabitants of the
air, exclaimed with sincere regret: "Fie upon us human wretches! Would
the most bloodthirsty hyena destroy such a number of living creatures in
a few hours? Other beasts of prey do not kill even one wretched sparrow
more than they need to appease their hunger. But we and you,
tender-hearted priestess of a gracious goddess--leading us friends of the
Muse--we pursue a different course! What a mound of corpses! And what
will become of it? Perhaps a few geese and ducks will go into the
kitchen; but the rest--the red flamingoes and the brave pelicans who feed
their young with their own blood? They are only fit to throw away, for
the Biamites eat no game that is shot, and your black slaves, too, would
refuse to taste it. So we destroy hundreds of lives for pastime. Base
word! As if we had so many superfluous hours at our disposal ere we
descend into Hades. A philosopher among brutes would be entitled to cry
out, 'Shame upon you, raging monster!'"
"Shame on you, you perpetual grumbler," interrupted Daphne in an offended
tone. "Who would ever have thought it cruel to test the steady hand and
the keen eye upon senseless animals in the joyous chase? But what shall
we call the fault-finder, who spoils his friend's innocent enjoyment of a
happy morning by his sharp reproaches?"
Hermon shrugged his shoulders, and, in a voice which expressed far more
compassion than resentment, answered: "If this pile of dead birds pleases
you, go on with the slaughter. You can sometimes save the arrows and
catch the swarming game with your hands. If your lifeless victims yonder
were human beings, after all, they would have cause to thank you; for
what is existence?"
"To these creatures, everything," said Myrtilus, the Alexandrian's other
cousin, beckoning to Daphne, who had summoned him to her aid by a
beseeching glance, to draw nearer. "Gladly as I would always and
everywhere uphold your cause, I can not do so this time. Only look here!
Your arrow merely broke the wing of yonder sea eagle, and he is just
recovering from the shock. What a magnificent fellow! How wrathfully and
vengefully his eyes sparkle! How fiercely he stretches his brave head
toward us in helpless fury, and--step back!--how vigorously, spite of the
pain of his poor, wounded, drooping pinion, he flaps the other, and
raises his yellow claws to punish his foes! His plumage glistens and
shines exquisitely where it lies smooth, and how savagely he puffs out
the feathers on his neck! A wonderful spectacle! The embodiment of
powerful life! And the others by his side. We transformed the poor
creatures into a motionless, miserable mass, and just now they were
cleaving the air with their strong wings, proclaiming by proud, glad
cries to their families among the reeds their approach with an abundant
store of prey. Every one was a feast to the eyes before our arrows struck
it, and now? When Hermon, with his pitying heart, condemns this kind of
hunting, he is right. It deprives free, harmless creatures of their best
possession--life--and us thereby of a pleasant sight. In general, a
bird's existence seems to me also of little value, but beauty, to me as
to you, transcends everything else. What would existence be without it?
and wherever it appears, to injure it is infamous."
Here a slight cough interrupted the young artist, and the moist glitter
of his blue eyes also betrayed that he was suffering from an attack of
severe pain in his lungs; but Daphne nodded assent to him, and to Hermon
also, and commanded the steward Gras to take the birds out of her sight.
"But," said the Bithynian, "our mistress will doubtless allow us at least
to take the hard lower part of the pelicans' beaks, and the wing feathers
of the flamingoes and birds of prey, to show our master on our return as
trophies."
"Trophies?" repeated the girl scornfully. "Hermon, you are better than I
and the rest of us, and I see that you are right. Where game flies toward
us in such quantities, hunting becomes almost murder. And successes won
by so slight an exertion offer little charm. The second expedition before
sunset, Gras, shall be given up. The master of the hounds, with his men
and the dogs, will return home on the transports this very day. I am
disgusted with sport here. Birds of prey, and those only when brought
down from the air, would probably be the right game in this place."
"Those are the very ones to which I would grant life," said Hermon,
smiling, "because they enjoy it most."
"Then we will at least save the sea eagle," cried Daphne, and ordered the
steward, who was already having the dead fowl carried off, to care for
the wounded bird of prey; but when the latter struck furiously with his
beak at the Biamite who attempted to remove it, Hermon again turned to
the girl, saying: "I thank you in the eagle's name for your good will,
you best of women; but I fear even the most careful nursing will not help
this wounded creature, for the higher one seeks to soar, the more surely
he goes to destruction if his power of flight is broken. Mine, too, was
seriously injured."
"Here?" asked Daphne anxiously. "At this time, which is of such great
importance to you and your art?"
Then she interrupted herself to ask Myrtilus's opinion, but as he had
gone away coughing, she continued, in a softer tone: "How anxious you can
make one, Hermon! Has anything really happened which clouds your pleasure
in creating, and your hope of success?"
"Let us wait," he answered, hastily throwing back his head, with its
thick, waving raven locks. "If, in leaping over the ditch, I should fall
into the marsh, I must endure it, if thereby I can only reach the shore
where my roses bloom!"
"Then you fear that you have failed in the Demeter?" asked Daphne.
"Failed?" repeated the other. "That seems too strong. Only the work is
not proving as good as I originally expected. For the head we both used a
model--you will see--whose fitness could not be surpassed. But the body!
Myrtilus knows how earnestly I laboured, and, without looking to the
right or the left, devoted all my powers to the task of creation. True,
the models did not remain. But even had a magic spell doubled my ability,
the toil would still have been futile. The error is there; yet I am
repairing it. To be sure, many things must aid me in doing so, for which
I now hope; who knows whether it will not again be in vain? You are
acquainted with my past life. It has never yet granted me any great,
complete success, and if I was occasionally permitted to pluck a flower,
my hands were pricked by thorns and nettles!"
He pursed up his lips as if to hiss the unfriendly fate, and Daphne felt
that he, whose career she had watched from childhood with the interest of
affection, and to whom, though she did not confess it even to herself,
she had clung for years with far more than sisterly love, needed a kind
word.
Her heart ached, and it was difficult for her to assume the cheerful tone
which she desired to use; but she succeeded, and her voice sounded gay
and careless enough as she exclaimed to the by no means happy artist and
Myrtilus, who was just returning: "Give up your foolish opposition, you
obstinate men, and let me see what you have accomplished during this long
time. You promised my father that you would show your work to no one
before him, but believe my words, if he were here he would give you back
the pledge and lead me himself to the last production of your study.
Compassion would compel you disobliging fellows to yield, if you could
only imagine how curiosity tortures us women. We can conquer it where
more indifferent matters are concerned. But here!--it need not make you
vainer than you already are, but except my father, you are dearest in all
the world to me. And then, only listen! In my character as priestess of
Demeter I hereby release you from your vow, and thus from any evil
consequences of your, moreover, very trivial guilt; for a father and
daughter who live together, as I do with your uncle, are just the same as
one person. So come! Wearied as I am by the miserable hunting excursion
which caused me such vexation, in the presence of your works--rely upon
it--I shall instantly be gay again, and all my life will thank you for
your noble indulgence."
While speaking, she walked toward the white house, beckoning to the young
men with a winning, encouraging smile.
It seemed to produce the effect intended, for the artists looked at each
other irresolutely, and Hermon was already asking himself whether
Daphne's arguments had convinced Myrtilus also, when the latter, in great
excitement, called after her: "How gladly we would do it, but we must not
fulfil your wish, for it was no light promise--no, your father exacted an
oath. He alone can absolve us from the obligation of showing him, before
any one else, what we finish here. It is not to be submitted to the
judges until after he has seen it."
"Listen to me!" Daphne interrupted with urgent warmth, and began to
assail the artists with fresh entreaties.
For the second time black-bearded Hermon seemed inclined to give up his
resistance, but Myrtilus cried in zealous refusal: "For Hermon's sake, I
insist upon my denial. The judges must not talk about the work until both
tasks are completed, for then each of us will be as good as certain of a
prize. I myself believe that the one for Demeter will fall to me."
"But Hermon will succeed better with the Arachne?" asked Daphne eagerly.
Myrtilus warmly assented, but Hermon exclaimed: "If I could only rely
upon the good will of the judges!"
"Why not?" the girl interrupted. "My father is just, the king is an
incorruptible connoisseur, and certainly yesterday evening you, too,
believed the others to be honest men; as for your fellow-candidate
Myrtilus, he will no more grudge a prize to you than to himself."
"Why should he?" asked Hermon, as if he, too, was perfectly sure of his
friend. "We have shared many a bit of bread together. When we determined
upon this competition each knew the other's ability. Your father
commissioned us to create peaceful Demeter, the patroness of agriculture,
peace, marriage, and Arachne, the mortal who was the most skilful of
spinners; for he is both a grain dealer and owner of spinning factories.
The best Demeter is to be placed in the Alexandrian temple of the
goddess, to whose priestesses you belong; the less successful one in your
own house in the city, but whose Demeter is destined for the sanctuary, I
repeat, is now virtually decided. Myrtilus will add this prize to the
others, and grant me with all his heart the one for the Arachne. The
subject, at any rate, is better adapted to my art than to his, and so I
should be tolerably certain of my cause. Yet my anxiety about the verdict
of the judges remains, for surely you know how much the majority are
opposed to my tendency. I, and the few Alexandrians who, following me,
sacrifice beauty to truth, swim against the stream which bears you,
Myrtilus, and those who are on your side, smoothly along. I know that you
do it from thorough conviction, but with other acknowledged great artists
and our judges, you, too, demand beauty--always beauty. Am I right, or
wrong? Is not any one who refuses to follow in the footsteps left by the
ancients of Athens as certain of condemnation as the convicted thief or
murderer? But I will not follow the lead of the Athenians, inimitably
great though they are in their own way, because I would fain be more than
the ancients of Ilissus: a disciple and an Alexandrian."
"The never-ending dispute," Myrtilus answered his fellow-artist, with a
cordiality in which, nevertheless, there was a slight accent of pity.
"Surely you know it, Daphne. To me the ideal and its embodiment within
the limits of the natural, according to the models of Phidias,
Polycletus, and Myron is the highest goal, but he and his co-workers seek
objects nearer at hand."
"Or rather we found them," cried Hermon, interrupting his companion with
angry positiveness. "The city of Alexandria, which is growing with
unprecedented vigour, is their home. There, the place to which every race
on earth sends a representative, the pulse of the whole world is
throbbing. There, whoever does not run with the rest is run over; there,
but one thing is important--actual life. Science has undertaken to fathom
it, and the results which it gains with measures and numbers is of a
different value and more lasting than that which the idle sport of the
intellects of the older philosophers obtained. But art, her nobler
sister, must pursue the same paths. To copy life as it is, to reproduce
the real as it presents itself, not as it might or must be, is the task
which I set myself. If you would have me carve gods, whom man can not
represent to himself except in his own form, allow me also to represent
them as reality shows me mortals. I will form them after the models of
the greatest, highest, and best, and also, when the subject permits, in
powerful action in accordance with my own power, but always as real men
from head to foot. We must also cling to the old symbols which those who
order demand, because they serve as signs of recognition, and my Demeter,
too, received the bundle of wheat."
As the excited artist uttered this challenge a defiant glance rested upon
his comrade and Daphne. But Myrtilus, with a soothing gesture of the
hand, answered: "What is the cause of this heat? I at least watch your
work with interest, and do not dispute your art so long as it does not
cross the boundaries of the beautiful, which to me are those of art."
Here the conversation was interrupted; the steward Gras brought a letter
which a courier from Pelusium had just delivered.
Thyone, the wife of Philippus, the commander of the strong border
fortress of Pelusium, near Tennis, had written it. She and her husband
had been intimate friends of Hermon's father, who had served under the
old general as hipparch, and through him had become well acquainted with
his wealthy brother Archias and his relatives.
The Alexandrian merchant had informed Philippus--whom, like all the
world, he held in the highest honour as one of the former companions of
Alexander the Great--of his daughter's journey, and his wife now
announced her visit to Daphne. She expected to reach Tennis that evening
with her husband and several friends, and mentioned especially her
anticipation of meeting Hermon, the son of her beloved Erigone and her
husband's brave companion in arms.
Daphne and Myrtilus received the announcement with pleasure; but Hermon,
who only the day before had spoken of the old couple with great
affection, seemed disturbed by the arrival of the unexpected guests. To
avoid them entirely appeared impossible even to him, but he declared in
an embarrassed tone, and without giving any reason, that he should
scarcely be able to devote the entire evening to Daphne and the
Pelusinians.
Then he turned quickly toward the house, to which a signal from his slave
Bias summoned him.
CHAPTER VI.
As soon as Hermon had disappeared behind the door Daphne begged Myrtilus
to accompany her into the tent.
After taking their seats there, the anxious exclamation escaped her lips:
"How excited he became again! The stay in Tennis does not seem to agree
with you--you are coughing, and father expected so much benefit to your
ailment from the pure moist air, and to Hermon still more from the lonely
life here in your society. But I have rarely seen him more strongly
enlisted in behalf of the tendency opposed to beauty."
"Then your father must be satisfied with the good effect which our
residence here has exerted upon me," replied Myrtilus. "I know that he
was thinking of my illness when he proposed to us to complete his
commissions here. Hermon--the good fellow!--could never have been induced
to leave his Alexandria, had not the hope of thereby doing me a kindness
induced him to follow me. I will add it to the many for which I am
already indebted to his friendship. As for art, he will go his own way,
and any opposition would be futile. A goddess--he perceives it
himself--was certainly the most unfortunate subject possible for his--"
"Is his Demeter a complete failure?" asked Daphne anxiously.
"Certainly not," replied Myrtilus eagerly.
"The head is even one of his very best. Only the figure awakens grave
doubts. In the effort to be faithful to reality, the fear of making
concessions to beauty, he lapsed into ungraceful angularity and a
sturdiness which, in my opinion, would be unpleasing even in a mortal
woman. The excess of unbridled power again makes it self visible in the
wonderfully gifted man. Many things reached him too late, and others too
soon."
Daphne eagerly asked what he meant by these words, and Myrtilus replied:
"Surely you know how he became a sculptor. Your father had intended him
to be his successor in business, but Hermon felt the vocation to become
an artist--probably first in my studio--awake with intense force. While I
early placed myself under the instruction of the great Bryaxis, he was
being trained for a merchant's life. When he was to guide the reed in the
counting-house, he sketched; when he was sent to the harbour to direct the
loading of the ships, he became absorbed in gazing at the statues placed
there. In the warehouse he secretly modelled, instead of attending to the
bales of goods. You are certainly aware what a sad breach occurred then,
and how long Hermon was restrained before he succeeded in turning his
back upon trade."
"My father meant so kindly toward him," Daphne protested. "He was
appointed guardian to you both. You are rich, and therefore he aided in
every possible way your taste for art; but Hermon did not inherit from
his parents a single drachm, and so my father saw the most serious
struggles awaiting him if he devoted himself to sculpture. And, besides,
he had destined his nephew to become his successor, the head of one of
the largest commercial houses in the city."
"And in doing so," Myrtilus responded, "he believed he had made the best
provision for his happiness. But there is something peculiar in art. I
know from your father himself how kind his intentions were when he
withdrew his assistance from Hermon, and when he had escaped to the
island of Rhodes, left him to make his own way during the first period of
apprenticeship through which he passed there. Necessity, he thought,
would bring him back to where he had a life free from anxiety awaiting
him. But the result was different. Far be it from me to blame the
admirable Archias, yet had he permitted his ward to follow his true
vocation earlier, it would have been better for him."
"Then you think that he began to study too late?" asked Daphne eagerly.
"Not too late," was the reply, "but with his passionate struggle to
advance, an earlier commencement would have been more favourable. While
the companions of his own age were already doing independent work, he was
still a student, and so it happened that he began for himself too soon."
"Yet," Daphne answered, "can you deny that, directly after Hermon
produced his first work which made his talent undeniable, my father again
treated him like his own son?"
"On the contrary," replied Myrtilus, "I remember only too well how
Archias at that time, probably not entirely without your intercession,
fairly showered gold upon his nephew, but unfortunately this abundance
was by no means to his advantage."
"What do you mean?" asked Daphne. "Were not you, at that very time, in
full possession of the great wealth inherited from your father and
mother, and yet did you not work far beyond your strength? Bryaxis--I
heard him--was full of your praises, and yet entreated my father to use
all his influence, as guardian, to warn you against overwork."
"My kind master!" cried Myrtilus, deeply moved. "He was as anxious about
me as a father."
"Because he perceived that you were destined for great achievements."
"And because it did not escape his penetration how much I needed care. My
lungs, Daphne, my lungs--surely you know how the malicious disease became
fatal to my clear mother, and to my brother and sister also. All three
sank prematurely into the grave, and for years the shades of my parents
have been beckoning to me too. When the cough shakes my chest, I see
Charon raise his oar and invite me also to enter his sable boat."
"But you just assured me that you were doing well," observed the girl.
"The cough alone makes me a little anxious. If you could only see for
yourself what a beautiful colour the pure air has given your cheeks!"
"This flush," replied Myrtilus gravely, "is the sunset of life's closing
day, not the dawn of approaching convalescence. But let us drop the
subject. I allude to these sorrowful things only to prevent your praises
of me at Hermon's expense. True, even while a student I possessed wealth
far beyond my needs, but the early deaths of my brother and sister had
taught me even then to be economical of the brief span of life allotted
to me. Hermon, on the contrary, was overflowing with manly vigour, and
the strongest among the Ephebi in the wrestling school. After three
nights' revel he would not even feel weary, and how difficult the women
made it for the handsome, black-bearded fellow to commence his work
early! Did you ever ask yourself why young steeds are not broken in
flowery meadows, but upon sand? Nothing which attracts their attention
and awakens their desires must surround them; but your father's gold led
Hermon, ere the season of apprenticeship was over, into the most
luxuriant clover fields. Honour and respect the handsome, hot-blooded
youth that, nevertheless, he allowed himself to be diverted from work
only a short time and soon resumed it with ardent zeal, at first in
superabundance, and then amid fresh need and privation."
"O Myrtilus," the girl interrupted, "how terribly I suffered in those
days! For the first time the gods made me experience that there are black
clouds, as well as bright sunshine, in the human soul. For weeks an
impassable gulf separated me from my father, with whom I had always had
one heart and soul. But I never saw him as he was then. The first prize
had been awarded to you for your Aphrodite, radiant in marvellous beauty,
and your brow had also been already crowned for your statue of Alexander,
when Hermon stepped forward with his works. They were at the same time
the first which were to show what he believed to be the true mission of
art--a hideous hawker, hide in hand, praising his wares with open mouth,
and the struggling Maenads. Surely you know the horrible women who throw
one another on the ground, tearing and rending with bestial fury. The
spectacle of these fruits of the industry of one dear to me grieved me
also, and I could not understand how you and the others saw anything to
admire in them. And my father! At the sight of these things the colour
faded from his cheeks and lips, and, as if by virtue of his guardianship
he had a right to direct Hermon in the paths of art also, he forbade his
ward to waste any more time in such horrible scarecrows, and awaken
loathing and wrath instead of gratification, exultation, and joy. You
know the consequences, but you do not know how my heart ached when
Hermon, frantic with wounded pride and indignation, turned his back upon
my father and severed every tie that united him to us. In spite of his
deep vexation and the unbridled violence with which the nephew had
allowed himself to address his uncle, my father did not dream of
withholding his assistance from him. But Hermon no longer came to our
house, and when I sent for him to bring him to reason, he positively
declared that he would not accept another obolus from my father--he would
rather starve than permit any one to dictate to him in the choice of his
subjects. Liberty was worth more than his uncle's gold. Yet my father
sent him his annual allowance."
"But he refused it," added Myrtilus. "I remember that day well, how I
tried to persuade him, and, when he persisted in his intention, besought
him to accept from my abundance what he needed. But this, too, he
resolutely refused, though at that time I was already so deeply in his
debt that I could not repay him at all with paltry money."
"You are thinking of the devotion with which he nursed you when you were
so ill?" asked Daphne.
"Certainly; yet not of that alone," was the reply. "You do not know how
he stood by me in the worst days. Who was it that after my first great
successes, when base envy clouded many an hour of my life, rejoiced with
me as though he himself had won the laurel? It was he, the ambitious
artist, though recognition held even farther aloof from his creations
than success. And when, just at that time, the insidious disease attacked
me more cruelly than ever, he devoted himself to me like a loving
brother. While formerly, in the overflowing joy of existence, he had
revelled all day and caroused all night, how often he paused in the rush
of gaiety to exchange the festal hall for a place beside my couch,
frequently remaining there until Eos dyed the east, that he might hold my
fevered hand and support my shaken frame! Frequently too, when already
garlanded for some gay banquet, he took the flowers from his head and
devoted the night to his friend, that he might not leave him to the
attendance of the slaves. It is owing to him, and the care and skill of
the great leech Erasistratus, that I am still standing before you alive
and can praise what my Hermon was and proved himself to me in those days.
Yet I must also accuse him of a wrong; to this hour I bear him a grudge
for having, in those sorrowful hours, refused to share my property with
me fraternally. What manly pride would have cheerfully permitted him to
accept was opposed by the defiant desire to show me, your father, you,
the whole world, that he would depend upon himself, and needed assistance
neither from human beings nor even the gods. In the same way, while
working, he obstinately rejected my counsel and my help, though the Muse
grants me some things which he unfortunately lacks. Great as his talent
is, firmly as I believe that he will yet succeed some day in creating
something grand, nay, perhaps something mighty, the unbelieving disciple
of Straton lacks the power of comprehending the august dignity, the
superhuman majesty of the divine nature, and he does not succeed in
representing the bewitching charm of woman, because he hates it as the
bull hates a red rag. Only once hitherto has he been successful, and that
was with your bust."
Daphne's cheeks suddenly flamed with a burning flush, and feeling it she
raised her feather fan to her eyes, and with forced indifference
murmured: "We were good friends from our earliest childhood. And,
besides, how small is the charm with which the artist who chooses me for
a model has to deal!"
"It is rather an unusually fascinating one," Myrtilus asserted
resolutely. "I have no idea of flattering you, and you are certainly
aware that I do not number you among the beauties of Alexandria. But
instead of the delicate, symmetrical features which artists need, the
gods bestowed upon you a face which wins all hearts, even those of women,
because it is a mirror of genuine, helpful, womanly kindness, a sincere
disposition, and a healthy, receptive mind. To reproduce such a face, not
exactly beautiful, and yet bewitching, is the hardest possible task, and
Hermon, I repeat it, has succeeded. You are the only one of your noble
sex who inspires the motherless man with respect, and for whom he feels
more than a fleeting fancy. What does he not owe you? After the bridge
which united him to his uncle and paternal friend had been so suddenly
broken, it was you who rebuilt it. Now, I think, it is stronger than
ever. I could not imagine anything that would induce him to give you up;
and all honour to your father, who, instead of bearing the insubordinate
fellow a grudge, only drew him more warmly to his heart, and gave us two
commissions which will permit each to do his best. If I see clearly, the
daughter of Archias is closely connected with this admirable deed."
"Of course," replied Daphne, "my father discussed his intention with me,
but the thought was entirely his own. True, Hermon's Street-Boy eating
Figs was not exactly according to his taste, but it pleased him better
than his former works, and I agree with Euphranor, it is remarkably true
to nature. My father perceived this too. Besides, he is a merchant who
sets a high value upon what he has earned, and Hermon's refusal of his
gold startled him. Then the good man also saw how nobly, in spite of his
wild life, his obstinacy, and the work so unpleasing to him, his nephew
always showed the noble impulses inherited from his brave father, and
thus Hermon gained the day."
"But what would have become of him last year, after the mortifying
rejection of his model of The Happy Return Home for the harbour of
Eunostus," asked Myrtilus, "if you and your encouragement had not cheered
him?"
"That verdict, too, was abominable!" exclaimed Daphne indignantly. "The
mother opening her arms to the returning son was unlovely, it is true,
and did not please me either; but the youth with the travelling hat and
staff is magnificent in his vigour and natural action."
"That opinion, as you know, is mine also," replied Myrtilus. "In the
mother the expression was intended to take the place of beauty. For the
returning son, as well as for the fig-eater, he found a suitable model.
True, the best was at his disposal for his Demeter."
Here he hesitated; but Daphne so urgently asked to know what he, who had
already denied her admission to the studios, was now again withholding
from her, that, smiling indulgently, he added: "Then I must probably
consent to tell in advance the secret with which you were to be
surprised. Before him, as well as before me, hovered--since you wish to
know it--in Alexandria, when we first began to model the head of the
goddess, a certain charming face which is as dear to one as to the
other."
Daphne, joyously excited, held out her hand to the artist, exclaiming:
"Oh, how kind that is! Yet how was it possible, since I posed neither to
him nor to you?"
"Hermon had finished your bust only a short time before, and you
permitted me to use your head for my statue of the goddess of Peace,
which went down with the ship on the voyage to Ostia. This was at the
disposal of us both in three or four reproductions, and, besides, it
hovered before our mental vision clearly enough. When the time to show
you our work arrives, you will be surprised to discover how differently
two persons see and copy the same object."
"Now that I know so much, and have a certain share in your works, I
insist upon seeing them!" cried Daphne with far greater impetuosity than
usual. "Tell Hermon so, and remind him that I shall at any rate expect
him to meet the Pelusinian guests at the banquet. Threaten him seriously
with my grave displeasure if he persists in leaving it speedily."
"I will not fail to do my part," replied Myrtilus; "but as to your wish
to see the two Demeters--"
"That will come to pass," interrupted Daphne, "as soon as we three are
together again like a clover leaf." She returned the sculptor's farewell
greeting as she spoke, but before he reached the entrance to the tent she
again detained him with the exclamation: "Only this one thing more: Does
Hermon deceive himself when he hopes so confidently for success with the
weaver, Arachne?"
"Hardly--if the model whom he desires does not fail him."
"Is she beautiful, and did he find her here in Tennis?" asked Daphne,
trying to assume an indifferent manner; but Myrtilus was not deceived,
and answered gaily: "That's the way people question children to find out
things. Farewell until the banquet, fair curiosity!"
CHAPTER VII.
The slave Bias had not gone to the hunting party with his master. He had
never been fit for such expeditions, since the Egyptian guard who took
him to the slave market for sale crippled the arch-traitor's son's left
leg by a blow, but he was all the more useful in the house, and even the
keenest eye could scarcely now perceive the injury which lessened his
commercial value.
He had prepared everything his master would need to shoot the birds very
early in the morning, and after helping the men push the boats into the
water, he, too, remained out of doors.
The old Nubian doorkeeper's little badger dog ran to meet him, as usual,
barking loudly, and startled a flock of sparrows, which flew up directly
in front of Bias and fluttered to and fro in confusion.
The slave regarded this as an infallible omen, and when Stephanion,
Daphne's maid, who had grown gray in the household of Archias, and though
a freed woman still worked in the old way, came out of the tent, he
called to her the gay Greek greeting, "Rejoice!" pointed to the sparrows,
and eagerly continued: "How one flies above another! how they flutter and
chirp and twitter! It will be a busy day."
Stephanion thought this interpretation of the ordinary action of the
birds very consistent with Bias's wisdom, which was highly esteemed in
the household of Archias, and it also just suited her inclination to chat
with him for a while, especially as she had brought a great deal of news
from Alexandria.
By way of introduction she mentioned the marriages and deaths in their
circle of acquaintances, bond and free, and then confided to the slave
what had induced her mistress to remain so long absent from her father,
whom she usually left alone for only a few hours at the utmost.
Archias himself had sent her here, after young Philotas, who was now
apparently wooing her with better success than other suitors, had spoken
of the enormous booty which one of his friends had brought from a
shooting expedition at Tennis, and Daphne had expressed a wish to empty
her quiver there too.
True, Philotas himself had been eager to guide the hunting party, but
Daphne declined his escort because--so the maid asserted--she cared far
more about meeting her cousins, the sculptors, than for the chase. Her
mistress had frankly told her so, but her father was delighted to hear
her express a wish, because for several months she had been so quiet and
listless that she, Stephanion, had become anxious about her. Meanwhile,
Daphne had tried honestly to conceal her feelings from the old man, but
such games of hide and seek were useless against the master's keen
penetration. He spared no pains in the preparations for the journey, and
the girl now seemed already transformed. This was caused solely by
meeting her cousins again; but if any one should ask her whether Daphne
preferred Myrtilus or Hermon, she could not give a positive answer.
"Cautious inquiry saves recantation," replied Bias importantly. "Yet you
may believe my experience, it is Myrtilus. Fame inspires love, and what
the world will not grant my master, in spite of his great talent, it
conceded to the other long ago. And, besides, we are not starving; but
Myrtilus is as rich as King Croesus of Sardis. Not that Daphne, who is
stifling in gold herself, would care about that, but whoever knows life
knows--where doves are, doves will fly."
Stephanion, however, was of a different opinion, not only because Daphne
talked far more about the black-bearded cousin than the fair one, but
because she knew the girl, and was seldom mistaken in such matters. She
would not deny that Daphne was also fond of Myrtilus. Yet probably
neither of the artists, but Philotas, would lead home the bride, for he
was related to the royal family--a fine, handsome man; and, besides, her
father preferred him to the other suitors who hovered around her as flies
buzzed about honey. Of course, matters would be more favourable to
Philotas in any other household. Who else in Alexandria would consult the
daughter long, when he was choosing her future husband? But Archias was a
white raven among fathers, and would never force his only child to do
anything.
Marrying and loving, however, were two different affairs. If Eros had the
final decision, her choice might perhaps fall on one of the artists.
Here she was interrupted by the slave's indignant exclamation: "What
contradictions! 'Woman's hair is long, but her wit is short,' says the
proverb. 'Waiting is the merchant's wisdom,' I have heard your master say
more than once, and to obey the words of shrewd people is the best plan
for those who are not so wise. Meanwhile, I am of the opinion that
curiosity alone brought Daphne--who, after all, is only a woman--to this
place. She wants to see the statues of Demeter which her father ordered
from us."
"And the Arachne?" asked the maid. This was an opportune question to the
slave--how often he had heard the artists utter the word "Arachne!"--and
his pride of education had suffered from the consciousness that he knew
nothing about her except the name, which in Greek meant "the spider."
Some special story must surely be associated with this Arachne, for which
his master desired to use his young countrywoman, Ledscha, as a model,
and whose statues Archias intended to place in his house in Alexandria
and in the great weaving establishment at Tennis beside the statue of
Demeter.
Stephanion, a Greek woman who grew up in a Macedonian household, must
know something about her.
So he cautiously turned the conversation to the spinner Arachne, and when
Stephanion entered into it, admitted that he, too, was curious to learn
in what way the sculptors would represent her.
"Yes," replied the maid, "my mistress has more than once racked her
brains over that, and Archias too. Perhaps they will carve her as a girl
at work in the house of her father Idmon, the purple dyer of Colophon."
"Never," replied Bias in a tone of dissent. "Just imagine how the loom
would look wrought in gold and ivory!"
"I thought so too," said Stephanion, in apology for the foolish idea."
Daphne thinks that the two will model her in different ways: Myrtilus, as
mistress in the weaving room, showing with proud delight a piece just
completed to the nymphs from the Pactolus and other rivers, who sought
her at Colophon to admire her work; but Hermon, after she aroused the
wrath of Athene because she dared to weave into the hangings the love
adventures of the gods with mortal women."
"Father Zeus as a swan toying with Leda," replied Bias as confidently as
if Arachne's works were before his eyes, "and in the form of a bull
bearing away Europa, the chaste Artemis bending over the sleeping
Endymion."
"How that pleases you men!" interrupted the maid, striking him lightly on
the arm with the duster which she had brought from the tent. "But ought
the virgin Athene to be blamed because she punished the weaver who, with
all her skill, was only a mortal woman, for thus exposing her divine
kindred?"
"Certainly not," replied Bias, and Stephanion went on eagerly: "And when
the great Athene, who invented weaving and protects weavers, condescended
to compete with Arachne, and was excelled by her, surely her gall must
have overflowed. Whoever is just will scarcely blame her for striking the
audacious conqueror on the brow with the weaver's shuttle."
"It is that very thing," replied Bias modestly, "which to a short-sighted
fool like myself--may the great goddess not bear me a grudge for
it!--never seemed just in her. Even the mortal who succumbs in a fair
fight ought not to be enraged against the victor. At least, so I was
taught. But what, I ask myself, when I think of the stones which were
flung at Hermon's struggling Maenads, could be less suited for imitation
than two women, one of whom strikes the other?"
"The woman who in her desperation at that blow desires to hang herself,
must produce a still more horrible impression," replied Stephanion.
"Probably she will be represented as Athene releases her from the noose
rather than when, as a punishment for her insolence, she transforms
Arachne into a spider."
"That she might be permitted, in the form of an insect, to make artistic
webs until the end of her life," the slave, now sufficiently well
informed, added importantly. "Since that transformation, as you know, the
spider has been called by the Greeks Arachne. Perhaps--I always thought
so--Hermon will represent her twisting the rope with which she is to kill
herself. You have seen many of our works, and know that we love the
terrible."
"Oh, let me go into your studio!" the maid now entreated no less urgently
than her mistress had done a short time before, but her wish, too,
remained ungratified.
"The sculptors," Bias truthfully asserted, "always kept their workrooms
carefully locked." They were as inaccessible as the strongest fortress,
and it was wise, less on account of curious spectators, from whom there
was nothing to fear, than of the thievish propensities of the people. The
statues, by Archias's orders, were to be executed in chryselephantine
work, and the gold and ivory which this required might only too easily
awaken the vice of cupidity in the honest and frugal Biamites. So nothing
could be done about it, not to mention the fact that he was forbidden, on
pain of being sold to work in a stone quarry, to open the studio to any
one without his master's consent.
So the maid, too, was obliged to submit, and the sacrifice was rendered
easier for her because, just at that moment, a young female slave called
her back to the tent where Chrysilla, Daphne's companion, a matron who
belonged to a distinguished Greek family, needed her services.
Bias, rejoicing that he had at last learned, without exposing his own
ignorance, the story of the much-discussed Arachne, returned to the
house, where he remained until Daphne came back from shooting with her
companions. While the latter were talking about the birds they had
killed, Bias went out of doors; but he was forced to give up his desire
to listen to a conversation which was exactly suited to arrest his
attention, for after the first few sentences he perceived behind the
thorny acacias in the "garden" his countrywoman Ledscha.
So she was keeping her promise. He recognised her plainly, in spite of
the veil which covered the back of her head and the lower portion of her
face. Her black eyes were visible, and what a sinister light shone in
them as she fixed them sometimes on Daphne, sometimes on Hermon, who
stood talking together by the steps!
The evening before Bias had caught a glimpse of this passionate
creature's agitated soul. If anything happened here that incensed or
wounded her she would be capable of committing some unprecedented act
before the very master's honoured guest.
To prevent this was a duty to the master whom he loved, and against whom
he had only warned Ledscha because he was reluctant to see a free maiden
of his own race placed on a level with the venal Alexandrian models, but
still more because any serious love affair between Hermon and the Biamite
might bring disastrous consequences upon both, and therefore also on
himself. He knew that the free men of his little nation would not suffer
an insult offered by a Greek to a virgin daughter of their lineage to
pass unavenged.
True, in his bondage he had by no means remained free from all the bad
qualities of slaves, but he was faithfully devoted to his master, who had
imposed upon him a great debt of gratitude; for though, during the trying
period of variance with his rich and generous uncle, Hermon had often
been offered so large a sum for him that it would have relieved the
artist from want, he could not be induced to yield his "wise and faithful
Bias" to another. The slave had sworn to himself that he would never
forget this, and he kept his oath.
Freedmen and slaves were moving to and fro in the large open square
before him, amid the barking of the dogs and the shouts of the male and
female venders of fruit, vegetables, and fish, who hoped to dispose of
their wares in the kitchen tent of the wealthy strangers.
The single veiled woman attracted no attention here, but Bias kept his
gaze fixed steadily upon her, and as she curved her little slender hand
above her brow to shade her watchful eyes from the dazzling sunlight, and
set her beautifully arched foot on a stone near one of the trees in order
to gain a better view, he thought of the story of the weaver which he had
just heard.
Though the stillness of the hot noontide was interrupted by many sounds,
it exerted a bewitching influence over him.
Ledscha seemed like the embodiment of some great danger, and when she
lowered one arm and raised the other to protect herself again from the
radiance of the noonday sun, he started; for through the brain of the
usually fearless man darted the thought that now the nimble spider-legs
were moving to draw him toward her, entwine him, and suck his heart's
blood.
The illusion lasted only a few brief moments, but when it vanished and
the girl had regained the figure of an unusually slender, veiled Biamite
woman, he shook his head with a sigh of relief, for never had such a
vision appeared to him in broad noonday and while awake, and it must have
been sent to warn him and his master against this uncanny maiden.
It positively announced some approaching misfortune which proceeded from
this beautiful creature.
The Biamite now advanced hesitatingly toward Hermon and Daphne, who were
still a considerable distance from her. But Bias had also quitted his
post of observation, and after she had taken a few steps forward, barred
her way.
With a curt "Come," he took her hand, whispering, "Hermon is joyously
expecting your visit."
Ledscha's veil concealed her mouth, but the expression of her eyes made
him think that it curled scornfully.
Yet she silently followed him.
At first he led her by the hand, but on the way he saw at the edge of her
upper veil the thick, dark eyebrows which met each other, and her fingers
seemed to him so strangely cold and tapering that a shudder ran through
his frame and he released them.
Ledscha scarcely seemed to notice it, and, with bowed head, walked beside
him through the side entrance to the door of Hermon's studio.
It was a disappointment to her to find it locked, but Bias did not heed
her angry complaint, and led her into the artist's sitting room,
requesting her to wait for his master there.
Then he hurried to the steps, and by a significant sign informed the
sculptor that something important required his attention.
Hermon understood him, and Bias soon had an opportunity to tell the
artist who it was that desired to speak to him and where he had taken
Ledscha. He also made him aware that he feared some evil from her, and
that, in an alarming vision, she had appeared to him as a hideous spider.
Hermon laughed softly. "As a spider? The omen is appropriate. We will
make her a woman spider--an Arachne that is worth looking at. But this
strange beauty is one of the most obstinate of her sex, and if I let her
carry out her bold visit in broad daylight she will get the better of me
completely. The blood must first be washed from my hands here. The
wounded sea eagle tore the skin with its claw, and I concealed the
scratch from Daphne. A strip of linen to bandage it! Meanwhile, let the
impatient intruder learn that her sign is not enough to open every door."
Then he entered his sitting room, greeted Ledscha curtly, invited her to
go into the studio, unlocked it, and left her there alone while he went
to his chamber with the slave and had the slight wound bandaged
comfortably.
While Bias was helping his master he repeated with sincere anxiety his
warning against the dangerous beauty whose eyebrows, which had grown
together, proved that she was possessed by the demons of the nether
world.
"Yet they increase the austere beauty of her face," assented the artist.
"I should not want to omit them in modelling Arachne while the goddess is
transforming her into a spider! What a subject! A bolder one was scarcely
ever attempted and, like you, I already see before me the coming spider."
Then, without the slightest haste, he exchanged the huntsman's chiton for
the white chlamys, which was extremely becoming to his long, waving
beard, and at last, exclaiming gaily, "If I stay any longer, she will
transform herself into empty air instead of the spider," he went to her.
CHAPTER VIII.
While waiting in the studio Ledscha had used the time to satisfy her
curiosity.
What was there not to be seen!
On pedestals and upon the boards of the floor, on boxes, racks, and along
the wall, stood, lay, or hung the greatest variety of articles: plaster
casts of human limbs and parts of the bodies of animals, male and female,
of clay and wax, withered garlands, all sorts of sculptor's tools, a
ladder, vases, cups and jars for wine and water, a frame over which linen
and soft woollen materials were spread, a lute and a zither, several
seats, an armchair, and in one corner a small table with three
dilapidated book rolls, writing tablets, metal styluses, and reed pens.
All these articles were arranged haphazard, and showed that Bias
possessed more wisdom than care in the use of duster and broom.
It would have been difficult to count the number of things brought
together here, but the unusually long, wide room was by no means crowded.
Ledscha cast a wondering glance sometimes at one object, sometimes at
another, but without understanding its meaning or its use.
The huge figure on the pedestal in the middle of the studio, upon which
the full glare of light fell through the open windows, was certainly the
statue of the goddess on which Hermon was working; but a large gray cloth
concealed it from her gaze.
How tall it was!
When she looked at it more closely she felt small and oppressed by
comparison.
A passionate longing urged her to remove the cloth, but the boldness of
the act restrained her. After she had taken another survey of the
spacious apartment, which she was visiting for the first time by
daylight, the torturing feeling of being neglected gained possession of
her.
She clinched her white teeth more firmly, and when there was a noise at
the door that died away again without bringing the man she expected, she
went up to the statue which she had already walked past quietly several
times and, obeying an impatient impulse, freed it from its covering.
The goddess, now illumined by the sunlight, shone before her in gleaming
yellow gold and snowy ivory.
She had never seen such a statue, and drew back dazzled.
What a master was the man who had deceived her trusting heart!
He had created a Demeter; the wheat in her hand showed it.
How beautiful this work was--and how valuable! It produced a powerful
impression upon her mind, wholly unaccustomed to the estimate of such
things.
The goddess before her was the very one whose statue stood in the temple
of Demeter, and to whom she also sacrificed, with the Greeks in Tennis,
when danger threatened the harvest. Involuntarily she removed the lower
veil from her face and raised her hand in prayer.
Meanwhile she gazed into the pallid face, carved from ivory, of the
immortal dispenser of blessings, and suddenly the blood crimsoned her
cheeks, the nostrils of her delicate, slightly arched nose rose and fell
more swiftly, for the countenance of the goddess--she was not
mistaken--was that of the Alexandrian whom she had just watched so
intently, and for whose sake Hermon had left her in the lurch the evening
before.
Now, too, she remembered for what purpose the sculptor was said to have
lured Gula, the sailor's wife, and her own young sister Taus, to his
studio, and in increasing excitement she drew the cloth also from the
bust beside the Demeter.
Again the Alexandrian's face--the likeness was even more unmistakable
than in the goddess.
The Greek girl alone occupied his thoughts. Hermon had disdained to model
the Biamite's head.
What could the others, or she herself, be to him, since he loved the rich
foreigner in the tent outside, and her alone? How firmly her image must
have been impressed upon his soul, that he could reproduce the features
of the absent one with such lifelike fidelity!
Yet with what bold assurance he had protested that his heart belonged
solely to her. But she thought that she now perceived his purpose. If the
slave was right, it was done that she might permit him to model what he
admired in her figure, only not the head and face, whose beauty,
nevertheless, he praised so extravagantly.
Had he attracted Gula and her sister with similar sweet flatteries? Had
the promise to bestow their charms upon a goddess been made to them also?
The swift throbbing of her indignant heart made it impossible for her to
think calmly, but its vehement pulsation reminded her of the object of
her presence here.
She had come to obtain a clear understanding between him and herself.
She stood here as a judge.
She must know whether she had been betrayed or deceived.
He should confess what his intentions toward her were. The next moments
must decide the fate of her life, and she added, drawing a long breath,
perhaps of his also.
Suddenly Ledscha started. She had not heard Hermon enter the studio, and
was now startled by his greeting.
It was not positively unkind, but certainly not a lover's.
Perhaps the words might have been warmer, but for his annoyance at the
insolent boldness with which she had removed the coverings from his
works. He restrained himself from openly blaming her, it is true, but he
exclaimed, with a tinge of gay sarcasm: "You seem to feel very much at
home here already, fairest of the fair. Or was it the goddess herself who
removed the curtain from her image in order to show herself to her
successor upon this pedestal?"
But the question was to remain unanswered, for under the spell of the
resentment which filled her heart, and in the effort not to lose sight of
the object that brought her here, Ledscha had only half understood its
meaning, and pointing her slender forefinger at the face of his completed
work, she demanded to know whom she recognised in this statue.
"The goddess Demeter," he answered quietly; "but if it pleases you
better, as you seem to be on the right track, also the daughter of
Archias."
Then, angered by the wrathful glance she cast at him, he added more
sternly: "She is kind-hearted, free from disagreeable whims and the
disposition to torture others who are kindly disposed toward her. So I
adorned the goddess with her pleasant features."
"Mine, you mean to say," Ledscha answered bitterly, "would be less
suitable for this purpose. Yet they, too, can wear a different expression
from the present one. You, I think, have learned this. Only I shall never
acquire the art of dissimulation, not even in your society."
"You seem to be angry on account of my absence yesterday evening?" Hermon
asked in an altered tone, clasping her hand; but Ledscha snatched it from
him, exclaiming: "The model of the Demeter, the daughter of the wealthy
Archias, detained you, you were going to tell me, and you think that
ought to satisfy the barbarian maiden."
"Folly!" he answered angrily. "I owe a debt of gratitude to her father,
who was my guardian, and custom commands you also to honour a guest. But
your obstinacy and jealousy are unbearable. What great thing is it that I
ask of your love? A little patience. Practise it. Then your turn will
come too."
"Of course, the second and third will follow the first," she answered
bitterly. "After Gula, the sailor's wife, you lured my innocent young
sister, Taus, to this apartment; or am I mistaken in the order, and was
Gula the second?"
"So that's it!" cried Hermon, who was surprised rather than alarmed by
this betrayal of his secret. "If you want confirmation of the fact, very
well--both were here."
"Because you deluded them with false vows of love."
"By no means. My heart has nothing what ever to do with these visits.
Gula came to thank me because I rendered her a service--you know
it--which to every mother seems greater than it is."
"But you certainly did not underestimate it," Ledscha impetuously
interrupted, "for you demanded her honour in return."
"Guard your tongue!" the artist burst forth angrily. "The woman visited
me unasked, and I let her leave me as faithful or as unfaithful to her
husband as she came. If I used her as a model--"
"Gula, whom the sculptor transforms into a goddess," Ledscha interrupted,
with a sneering laugh.
"Into a fish-seller, if you wish to know it," cried Hermon indignantly.
"I saw in the market a young woman selling shad. I took the subject, and
found in Gula a suitable model. Unfortunately, she ventured here far too
seldom. But I can finish it with the help of the sketch--it stands in
yonder cupboard."
"A fish-seller," Ledscha repeated contemptuously. "And for what did my
Taus, poor lovely child, seem desirable?"
"Over opposite," Hermon answered quickly, as if he wished to get rid of a
troublesome duty, pointing through the window out of doors, "the free
maidens, during the hot days, took off their sandals and waded through
the water. There I saw your sister's feet. They were the prettiest of
all, and Gula brought the young girl to me. I had commenced in Alexandria
a figure of a girl holding her foot in her hand to take out a thorn, so I
used your sister's for it."
"And when my turn comes?" Ledscha demanded.
"Then," he replied, freshly captivated by the magic of her beauty, in a
kinder, almost tender tone, "then I will make of you, in gold and ivory,
you wonderfully lovely creature, the counterpart of this goddess."
"And you will need a long time for it?"
"The oftener you come the faster the work will advance."
"And the more surely the Biamite women will point their fingers at me."
"Yet you ventured here to-day, unasked, in the broad light of noon."
"Because I wish to remind you myself that I shall expect you this
evening. Yesterday you did not appear; but to-day-I am right, am I
not?--to-day you will come."
"With the greatest delight, if it is possible," he answered eagerly.
A warmer glance from her dark eyes rested upon him. The blood seethed in
his veins, and as he extended both hands to her and ardently uttered her
name, she rushed forward, clinging to him with passionate devotion, as if
seeking assistance, but when his lips touched hers she shrank back and
loosed her soft arms from his neck.
"What does this mean?" asked the sculptor in surprise, trying to draw her
toward him again; but Ledscha would not permit it, pleading in a softer
tone than before: "Not now; but--am I not right, dearest--I may expect
you this evening? Just this once let the daughter of Archias yield to me,
who loves you better. We shall have a full moon to-night, and you have
heard what was predicted to me--to-night the highest bliss which the gods
can bestow upon a mortal awaits me."
"And me also," cried Hermon, "if you will permit me to share it with you."
"Then I will expect you on the Pelican Island--just when the full moon is
over the lofty poplars there. You will come? Not to the Owl's Nest: to
the Pelican Island. And though your love is far less, far cooler than
mine, yet you will not defraud me of the best happiness of my life?"
"How could I?" he asked, as if he felt wounded by such distrust. "What
detains me must be something absolutely unavoidable."
Ledscha's eyebrows contracted sharply, and in a choked voice she
exclaimed: "Nothing must detain you--nothing, whatever it may be! Though
death should threaten, you will be with me just at midnight."
"I will, if it is possible," he protested, painfully touched by the
vehemence of her urging. "What can be more welcome to me also than to
spend happy hours with you in the silence of a moonlight night? Besides,
my stay in Tennis will not be long."
"You are going?" she asked in a hollow tone.
"In three or four days," he answered carelessly; "then Myrtilus and I
will be expected in Alexandria. But gently--gently--how pale you are,
girl! Yes, the parting! But in six weeks at latest I shall be here again;
then real life will first begin, and Eros will make the roses bloom for
us."
Ledscha nodded silently, and gazing into his face with a searching look
asked, "And how long will this season of blossoming last?"
"Several months, girl; three, if not six."
"And then?"
"Who looks so far into the future?"
She lowered her glance, and, as if yielding to the inevitable, answered:
"What a fool I was! Who knows what the morrow may bring? Are we even sure
whether, six months hence, we shall not hate, instead of loving, each
other?"
She passed her hand across her brow as she spoke, exclaiming: "You said
just now that only the present belonged to man. Then let us enjoy it as
though every moment might be the last. By the light of the full moon
to-night, the happiness which has been predicted to me must begin. After
it, the orb between the horns of Astarte will become smaller; but when it
fulls and wanes again, if you keep your promise and return, then, though
they may curse and condemn me, I will come to your studio and grant what
you ask. But which of the goddesses do you intend to model from me as a
companion statue to the Demeter?"
"This time it can not be one of the immortelles," he answered
hesitatingly, "but a famous woman, an artist who succeeded in a
competition in vanquishing even the august Athene."
"So it is no goddess?" Ledscha asked in a disappointed tone.
"No, child, but the most skilful woman who ever plied the weaver's
shuttle."
"And her name?"
"Arachne."
The young girl started, exclaiming contemptuously: "Arachne? That
is--that is what you Greeks call the most repulsive of creatures--the
spider."
"The most skilful of all creatures, that taught man the noble art of
weaving," he eagerly retorted.
Here he was interrupted; his friend Myrtilus put his fair head into the
room, exclaiming: "Pardon me if I interrupt you--but we shall not see
each other again for some time. I have important business in the city,
and may be detained a long while. Yet before I go I must perform the
commission Daphne gave me for you. She sends word that she shall expect
you without fail at the banquet for the Pelusinian guests. Your absence,
do you hear?--pardon the interruption, fairest Ledscha--your absence
would seriously anger her."
"Then I shall be prepared for considerable trouble in appeasing her,"
replied Hermon, glancing significantly at the young girl.
Myrtilus crossed the threshold, turned to the Biamite, and said in his
quiet, cheerful manner: "Where beautiful gifts are to be brought to Eros,
it beseems the friend to strew with flowers the path of the one who is
offering the sacrifices; and you, if everything does not deceive me,
would fain choose to-night to serve him with the utmost devotion.
Therefore, I shall need forgiveness from you and the god, if I beseech
you to defer the offering, were it only until to-morrow."
Ledscha silently shrugged her shoulders and made no answer to the
inquiring glance with which Hermon sought hers, but Myrtilus changed his
tone and addressed a grave warning to his friend to consider well that it
would be an insult to the manes of his dead parents if he should avoid
the old couple from Pelusium, who had been their best friends and had
taken the journey hither for his sake.
Hermon looked after him in painful perplexity, but the Biamite also
approached the threshold, and holding her head haughtily erect, said
coldly: "The choice is difficult for you, as I see. Then recall to your
memory again what this night of the full moon means--you are well aware
of it--to me. If, nevertheless, you still decide in favour of the banquet
with your friends, I can not help it; but I must now know: Shall this
night belong to me, or to the daughter of Archias?"
"Is it impossible to talk with you, unlucky girl, as one would with other
sensible people?" Hermon burst forth wrathfully. "Everything is carried
to extremes; you condemn a brief necessary delay as breach of faith and
base treachery. This behaviour is unbearable."
"Then you will not come?" she asked apathetically, laying her hand upon
the door; but Hermon cried out in a tone half beseeching, half imperious:
"You must not go so! If you insist upon it, surely I will come. There is
no room in your obstinate soul for kind indulgence. No one, by the dog,
ever accused me of being specially skilled in this smooth art; yet there
may be duties and circumstances--"
Here Ledscha gently opened the door; but, seized with a fear of losing
this rare creature, whose singular beauty attracted him powerfully, even
now, this peerless model for a work on which he placed the highest hopes,
he strode swiftly to her side, and drawing her back from the threshold,
exclaimed: "Difficult as it is for me on this special day, I will come,
only you must not demand what is impossible. The right course often lies
midway. Half the night must belong to the banquet with my old friends and
Daphne; the second half--"
"To the barbarian, you think--the spider," she gasped hoarsely. "But my
welfare as well as yours depends on the decision. Stay here, or come to
the island--you have your choice."
Wrenching herself from his hold as she spoke, she slipped through the
doorway and left the room.
Hermon, with a muttered oath, stood still, shrugging his shoulders
angrily.
He could do nothing but yield to this obstinate creature's will.
In the atrium Ledscha met the slave Bias, and returned his greeting only
by a wave of the hand; but before opening the side door which was to lead
her into the open air, she paused, and asked bluntly in the language of
their people: "Was Arachne--I don't mean the spider, but the weaver whom
the Greeks call by that name--a woman like the rest of us? Yet it is said
that she remained victor in a contest with the goddess Athene."
"That is perfectly true," answered Bias, "but she had to atone cruelly
for this triumph; the goddess struck her on the forehead with the
weaver's shuttle, and when, in her shame and rage, she tried to hang
herself, she was transformed into the spider."
Ledscha stood still, and, while drawing the veil over her pallid face,
asked with quivering lips, "And is there no other Arachne?"
"Not among mortals," was the reply, "but even here in this house there
are more than enough of the disagreeable, creeping creatures which bear
the same name."
Ledscha now went clown the steps which led to the lawn, and Bias saw that
she stumbled on the last one and would have fallen had not her lithe body
regained its balance in time.
"A bad omen!" thought the slave. "If I had the power to build a wall
between my master and the spider yonder, it should be higher than the
lighthouse of Sostratus. To heed omens guides one safely through life. I
know what I know, and will keep my eyes open, for my master too."
CHAPTER IX.
Hermon had intended to add a few more touches to his Demeter, but he
could not do it. Ledscha, her demand, and the resentment with which she
had left him, were not to be driven from his mind.
There was no doubt that he must seek her if he was not to lose her, yet
he reproached himself for having acted like a thoughtless fool when he
proposed to divide the night between her and Daphne.
There was something offensive in the proposal to so proud a creature. He
ought to have promised positively to come, and then left the banquet
somewhat earlier. It would have been easy to apologize for his late
arrival, and Ledscha would have had no cause to be angry with him.
Now she had, and her resentment awakened in him--though he certainly did
not lack manly courage--an uncomfortable feeling closely allied to
anxiety.
Angered by his own conduct, he asked himself whether he loved the
barbarian, and could find no satisfactory answer.
At their first meeting he had felt that she was far superior to the other
Biamite maidens, not only in beauty but in everything else. The very
acerbity of her nature had seemed charming. To win this wonderful, pliant
creature, slender as a cypress, whose independence merged into fierce
obstinacy, had appeared to him worth any sacrifice; and having perceived
in her an admirable model for his Arachne, he had also determined to
brave the dangers which might easily arise for the Greek from a love
affair with a Biamite girl, whose family was free and distinguished.
It had been easier for him to win her heart than he expected; yet at none
of the meetings which she granted him had he rejoiced in the secret bond
between them.
Hitherto her austere reserve had been invincible, and during the greater
part of their interviews he had been compelled to exert all his influence
to soothe, appease her, and atone for imprudent acts which he had
committed.
True, she, too, had often allowed herself to display passionate
tenderness, but always only to torture him with reproaches and demands
inspired by her jealousy, suspicion, and wounded pride.
Yet her beauty, and the strong power of resistance which she offered to
his wooing, exerted so bewitching a thrall over him that he had been led
into conceding far too much, and making vows which he could not and did
not desire to fulfil.
Love had usually been to him a richly flowing well-spring of gay delight,
but this bond had plunged him from one vexation into another, one anxiety
to another, and now that he had almost reached the goal of his wishes, he
could not help fearing that he had transformed Ledscha's love to hate.
Daphne was dear to him. He esteemed her highly, and owed her a great debt
of gratitude. Yet in this hour he anathematized her unexpected journey to
Tennis; for without it he would have obtained from Ledscha that very day
what he desired, and could have returned to Alexandria with the certainty
of finding her ready later to pose as the model for his Arachne.
Never could he find anywhere a more fitting one.
He had devoted himself with passionate love to his art, and even his
enemies numbered him among its most promising disciples. Yet hither to he
had not succeeded in obtaining a great and undisputed success. On the
other hand, he had experienced what were termed failures in abundant
measure.
The art to which he had gained entrance by so severe a struggle, and on
whose soil he had laboured diligently enough, proved, so far as outward
recognition was concerned, cruel to the enthusiastic disciple. Yet even
now he would not have abandoned it at any price; the joy of creation
compensated him richly for suffering and disappointment. Confidence in
his own powers and the final triumph of his conviction had deserted him
only occasionally, and for a few brief hours.
He was born for conflicts. What ill-success, what antagonism and
difficulties he had encountered! Some day the laurel which had so long
adorned the brow of Myrtilus must also grow green for him and the great
talent whose possession he felt. With the Arachne--he was sure of
this--he would compel even his opponents to accord him the recognition
for which hitherto he had striven in vain.
While pacing restlessly up and down the spacious apartment, stopping from
time to time before his work to fix his eyes angrily upon it, he thought
of his friend's Demeter, whose head also had Daphne's features, who also
bore in her hand a bundle of wheat, and even in attitude did not differ
very widely from his own. And yet--eternal gods!--how thoroughly
dissimilar the two were!
In the figure created by Myrtilus, supernatural dignity blended with the
utmost womanly charm; in his, a pleasing head rested upon a body in whose
formation he had used various models without striving to accomplish
anything except to depart as far as possible from established custom,
with which he was at variance.
Yet had he not found himself, nevertheless, compelled to follow the old
rules? One arm was raised, the other hung down; the right foot was put
forward, the left one back.
Exactly the same as in Myrtilus's statue, and thousands of other figures
of Demeter!
If he could have used the hammer and chisel, the thing might have become
more powerful; but how many things he had had to consider in employing
the accursed gold and ivory upon which Archias obstinately insisted!
This hammering, chipping, and filing told unfavourably upon his power and
his aspiration toward grandeur.
This time the battle seemed to be lost.
It was fortunate that the conqueror was no other than Myrtilus. Often as
he had gone astray in his young life, many as were the errors he had
committed, not even the faintest shadow of an envious feeling concerning
his friend's more successful work had ever stained his soul.
True, the fact that fate, in addition to such abundant gifts of mind and
spirit, had also endowed the latter with great worldly possessions, while
he, but for the generosity of his uncle Archias, must have starved, had
often led Hermon to inveigh angrily against the injustice of the gods.
Yet he did not grudge Myrtilus the wealth without which he could not
imagine him, and which his invalid friend needed to continue successfully
the struggle against the insidious disease inherited with the gold. And
his sufferings! Hermon could not have endured keener pain had they been
his own. He must even rejoice over the poor dear fellow's victory; for if
he, Hermon, succeeded with his Arachne as he hoped, it would make
Myrtilus--he could swear to it--happier than his own triumph.
After these reflections, which again reminded him of the second
appointment and of Ledscha, the sculptor turned away from his work and
went to the window to look across at Pelican Island, where she must not
await him in vain.
The boat which was to convey him over to it lay ready in the little
flotilla, where a magnificently equipped galley had just been moored to
the shore, undoubtedly the one that had brought the guests from Pelusium
hither. The best thing he could do was to greet them at once, share the
banquet with them, and, before the dessert was served, seek the beautiful
woman whom his absence threatened to make his foe. And she was certainly
justified in resenting it if, with cruel lack of consideration, he paid
no heed to what had been prophesied for her on this night of the full
moon.
For the first time compassion mingled with his feelings for Ledscha. If
to avoid the fleeting censure of aristocratic friends he left in the
lurch the simple barbarian maiden who loved him with ardent passion, it
was no evidence of resolute strength of soul, but of pitiful,
reprehensible weakness. No, no! He must take the nocturnal voyage in
order not to grieve Ledscha.
Soon after the girl's abrupt departure he dressed himself in festal
garments for the banquet. It would flatter Ledscha also if he went to her
in this attire and, with his figure drawn up to its full height, he
walked toward the door to go to the Alexandrian's tent.
But what did this mean? Myrtilus was standing before his Demeter,
scanning it intently with his keen artist eyes. Hermon had not noticed
his entrance, and did not disturb him now, but fixed his gaze upon his
mobile features in intense expectation.
There were few of his fellow-artists whose opinion he valued as highly as
that of this darling of the Muse.
At a slight shake of the head, which Hermon interpreted as disapproval,
he clinched his teeth; but soon his lips relaxed and his breast heaved
with a sigh of relief, for the sunny glance that Myrtilus bent upon the
face of the goddess seemed to show Hermon that it aroused his approval,
and, as if relieved from an oppressive nightmare, he approached his
friend.
The latter turned toward him, exclaiming: Daphne! As in the case of
yonder bust, you have succeeded most perfectly with this dear
face--only--"
"Only," Hermon repeated slowly; "I am familiar with that evil word.
Doubts knock at the door with it. Out with them honestly. I gave up my
last hope of the prize yesterday while looking at your Demeter. Besides,
careful scrutiny has just destroyed the last gleam of satisfaction with
my own work. But if you like the head, what seem to you the greatest
defects in the figure?"
"It has nothing to do with defects, which, with your rare ability, can
scarcely exist," replied the other, the faint pink flush in his beardless
cheeks deepening to a more vivid hue. "It refers rather to the expression
which you have given the divinity in yonder statue." Here Myrtilus
hesitated, and, turning so that he stood face to face with Hermon, asked
frankly, "Did you ever seek the goddess and, when you found her, did you
feel any supernatural power and beauty?"
"What a question!" exclaimed Hermon in astonishment. "A pupil of Straton,
and go in search of beings and powers whose existence he denies! What my
mother instilled into my heart I lost with my childhood, and you address
your question only to the artist who holds his own ground, not to the
boy. The power that calls creation to life, and maintains it, has for me
long had nothing in common with those beings like mortals whom the
multitude designates by the name of divinities."
"I think differently," replied Myrtilus. "While I numbered myself among
the Epicureans, whose doctrine still possesses the greatest charm for me,
I nevertheless shared the master's opinion that it is insulting the gods
to suppose that they will disturb their blissful repose for the sake of
us insignificant mortals. Now my mind and my experience rebel against
holding to this view, yet I believe with Epicurus, and with you, that the
eternal laws of Nature bow to neither divine nor human will."
"And yet," said Hermon, "you expect me to trouble myself about those who
are as powerless as myself!"
"I only wished that you might do so," answered Myrtilus; "for they are
not powerless to those who from the first assumed that they can do
nothing in opposition to those changeless laws. The state, too, rules
according to them, and the wise king who refrains from interfering with
them in the smallest trifle can therefore wield the sceptre with mighty
power. So, in my opinion, it is perfectly allowable to expect aid from
the gods. But we will let that pass. A healthy man, full of exuberant
vigour like yourself, rarely learns early what they can bestow in
suffering and misfortune; yet where the great majority believe in them,
he, too, will be unable to help forming some idea of them; nay, even you
and I have experienced it. By a thousand phenomena they force themselves
into the world which surrounds us and our emotional life. Epicurus, who
denied their power, saw in them at least immortal beings who possess in
stainless perfection everything which in mortals is disfigured by errors,
weaknesses, and afflictions. To him they are the intensified, reflected
image of our own nature, and I think we can do nothing wiser than to
cling to that, because it shows us to what heights of beauty and power,
intellect, goodness, and purity we may attain. To completely deny their
existence would hardly be possible even for you, because their persons
have found a place in your imagination. Since this is the case, it can
only benefit you to recognise in them magnificent models, by whose means
we artists, if we imitate, perfect, and model them, will create works far
more sublime and beautiful than anything visible to our senses which we
meet here beneath the sun."
"It is this very superiority in sublimity and beauty which I, and those
who pursue the same path with me, oppose," replied Hermon. "Nature is
sufficient for us. To take anything from her, mutilates; to add anything,
disfigures her."
"But not," replied Myrtilus firmly, "when it is done only in a special
sense, and within the limits of Nature, to which the gods also belong.
The final task of art, fiercely as you and your few followers contend
against it, lies in the disentanglement, enhancing, and ennobling of
Nature. You, too, ought not to overlook it when you undertake to model a
Demeter; for she is a goddess, no mortal like yourself. The rest or I
ought rather to say the alteration which converts the mortal woman into
the immortal one, the goddess--I miss, and with special regret, because
you do not even deem it worth consideration."
"That I shall never do," retorted Hermon irritably, "so long as it is a
changing chimera which presents itself differently to every mind."
"Yet, should it really be a chimera, it is at any rate a sublime one,"
Myrtilus protested, "and whoever among us artists wanders through Nature
with open eyes and heart, and then examines his own soul, will find it
worth while to attempt to give his ideal form."
"Whatever stirs my breast during such walks, unless it is some unusual
human being, I leave to the poet," replied Hermon. "I should be satisfied
with the Demeter yonder, and you, too, probably, if--entirely apart from
that--I had only succeeded fully and entirely in making her an
individual--that is, a clearly outlined, distinct personality. This, you
have often told me, is just wherein I am usually most successful. But
here, I admit, I am baffled. Demeter hovered before me as a kindly
dispenser of good gifts, a faithful, loving wife. Daphne's head expresses
this; but in modelling the body I lost sight of the whole creation.
While, for instance, in my fig-eater, every toe, every scrap of the
tattered garments, belongs to the street urchin whom I wished to
represent, in the goddess everything came by chance as the model
suggested it, and you know that I used several. Had the Demeter from head
to foot resembled Daphne, who has so much in common with our goddess, the
statue would have been harmonious, complete, and you would perhaps have
been the first to acknowledge it."
"By no means," Myrtilus eagerly interrupted. "What our statues of the
gods are we two know best: a wooden block, covered with gold and sheets
of ivory. But to tens of thousands the statue of the divinity must be
much more. When they raise their hearts, eyes, hands to it in prayer,
they must be possessed by the idea of the deity which animated us while
creating it, and with which we, as it were, permeated it. If it shows
them only a woman endowed with praiseworthy qualities--"
"Then," interrupted Hermon, "the worshipper should thank the sculptor;
for is it not more profitable to him to be encouraged by the statue to
emulate the human virtues whose successful embodiment it shows him than
to strive for the aid of the botchwork of human hands, which possesses as
much or as little power as the wood, gold, and ivory that compose it? If
the worshipper does not appeal to the statue, but to the goddess, I fear
it will be no less futile. So I shall consider it no blemish if you see
in my Demeter a mortal woman, and no goddess; nay, it reconciles me in
some degree to her weaknesses, to which I by no means close my eyes. I,
too--I confess it--often feel a great desire to give the power of
imagination greater play, and I know the divinities in whom I have lost
faith as well as any one; for I, too, was once a child, and few have ever
prayed to them more fervently, but with the increasing impulse toward
liberty came the perception: There are no gods, and whoever bows to the
power of the immortals makes himself a slave. So what I banished from
life I will also remove from art, and model nothing which might not meet
me to-day or to-morrow."
"Then, as an honest man, abstain altogether from making statues of the
gods," interrupted his friend.
"That was my intention long ago, as you are aware," the other answered.
"You could not commit a worse robbery upon yourself," cried Myrtilus. "I
know you; nay, perhaps I see farther into your soul than you yourself. By
ingenious fetters you force the mighty winged intellect to content itself
within the narrow world of reality. But the time when you will yourself
rend the bonds and find the divinity you have lost, will come, and then,
with your mighty power once more free, you will outstrip most of us, and
me also if I live to see it."
Then he pressed his hand upon his rattling chest and walked slowly to the
couch; but Hermon followed, helped him to lie down, and with affectionate
solicitude arranged his pillows.
"It is nothing," Myrtilus said soothingly, after a few minutes' silence.
"My undermined strength has been heavily taxed to-day. The Olympians know
how calmly I await death. It ends all things. Nothing will be left of me
except the ashes, to which you will reduce my body, and what you call
'possession.' But even this can no longer belong to me after death,
because I shall then be no more, and the idea of possession requires a
possessor. My estate, too, is now disposed of. I have just been to the
notary, and sixteen witnesses--neither more nor less--have signed my will
according to the custom of this ceremonious country. There, now, if you
please, go before me, and let me stay here alone a little while. Remember
me to Daphne and the Pelusinians. I will join you in an hour."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Cautious inquiry saves recantation
Nature is sufficient for us
There are no gods, and whoever bows makes himself a slave
Waiting is the merchant's wisdom
Woman's hair is long, but her wit is short
ARACHNE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 3.
CHAPTER X.
"When the moon is over Pelican Island." How often Ledscha had repeated
this sentence to herself while Hermon was detained by Daphne and her
Pelusinian guests!
When she entered the boat after nightfall she exclaimed hopefully, sure
of her cause, "When the moon is over Pelican Island he will come."
Her goal was quickly reached in the skiff; the place selected for the
nocturnal meeting was a familiar one to her.
The pirates had remained absent from it quite two years. Formerly they
had often visited the spot to conceal their arms and booty on the densely
wooded island. The large papyrus thicket on the shore also hid boats from
spying eyes, and near the spot where Ledscha landed was a grassy seat
which looked like an ordinary resting place, but beneath it the corsairs
had built a long, walled passage, that led to the other side of the
island, and had enabled many a fugitive to vanish from the sight of
pursuers, as though the earth had swallowed them.
"When the moon is over the island," Ledscha repeated after she had waited
more than an hour.
The time had not yet come; the expanse of water lay before her
motionless, in hue a dull, leaden gray, and only the dimly illumined air
and a glimmering radiance along the edges of the waves that washed the
island showed that the moon was already brightening the night.
When its full orb floated above the island Hermon, too, would appear, and
the happiness which had been predicted to Ledscha would begin.
Happiness?
A bitter smile hovered around her delicately cut lips as she repeated the
word.
Hitherto no feeling was more distant from her; for when love and longing
began to stir in her heart, it seemed as though a hideous spider was
weaving its web about her, and vague fears, painful memories, and in
their train fierce hate would force glad expectation into the shadow.
Yet she yearned with passionate fervour to see Hermon again, and when he
was once there all must be well between them. The prediction of old
Tabus, who ruled as mistress over so many demons, could not deceive.
After Ledscha had so lately reminded the lover who so vehemently roused
her jealous wrath what this night of the full moon meant to her, she
could rely upon his appearance in spite of everything.
Various matters undoubtedly held him firmly enough in Tennis--she
admitted this to herself after she grew calmer--but he had promised to
come; he would surely enter the boat, and she--she would submit to share
the night with the Hellene.
Her whole being longed for the bliss awaiting her, and it could come from
no one save the man whose lips would seek hers when the moon rose over
the Pelican Island.
How tardily and sluggishly the cow-headed goddess who bore the silver orb
between her horns rose to-night! how slowly the time passed, yet she did
not move forward more certainly that the man whom Ledscha expected must
arrive.
Of the possibility of his non-appearance she would not think; but when
the fear that she was perhaps looking for him in vain assailed her, the
blood crimsoned her face as if she felt the shame of a humiliating
insult. Yet why should she make the period of waiting more torturing than
it was already?
Surely he must come!
Sometimes she rested on the grassy seat and gazed across the dull gray
surface of the water into the distance; sometimes she walked to and fro,
stopping at every turn to look across at Tennis and the bright torches
and lights which surrounded the Alexandrian's tent.
So one quarter of an hour after another passed away.
A light breeze rose, and gradually the tops of the rushes began to shine,
and the leafage before, beside, and above her to glitter in the silvery
light.
The water was no longer calm, but furrowed by countless little ripples,
on whose crests the rays from above played, sparkling and flashing
restlessly. A web of shimmering silvery radiance covered the edges of
every island, and suddenly the brilliant full moon was reflected in
argent lustre like a magnificent quivering column upon the surface of the
water, now rippled by the evening breeze.
The time during which Ledscha could repeat "When the moon is over Pelican
Island" was past; already its course had led it beyond.
The island lay behind it, and it continued its pilgrimage before the
young girl's eyes.
The glittering column of light upon the water proved that she was not
mistaken; the time which she had appointed for Hermon had already
expired.
The moon in calm majesty sailed farther and farther onward in its course,
and with it minute after minute elapsed, until they became a half hour,
then a whole one.
"How long is it since the moon was over Pelican Island?" was the question
which now pressed itself upon her again and again, and to which she found
an answer at every glance upward, for she had learned to estimate time by
the position of the stars.
Rarely was the silence of the night interrupted by the call of a human
being or the barking of a dog from the city, or even the hooting of an
owl at a still greater distance; but the farther the moon moved on above
her the fiercer grew the uproar in Ledscha's proud, cruelly wronged soul.
She felt offended, scorned, insulted, and at the same time defrauded of
the happiness which this night of the full moon contained for her. Or had
the demons who promised happiness meant something else in their
prediction than Hermon's love? Was she to owe the bliss they had foretold
to hate and pitiless retribution?
When the midnight hour had nearly arrived she prepared to depart, but
after she had already set her foot on the edge of the boat she returned
to the grassy seat. She would wait a little longer yet. Then there would
be nothing which could give Hermon a right to consideration; then she
might let loose upon him the avenging powers at her command.
Ledscha again gazed over the calm landscape, but in the wild tumult of
her heart she no longer distinguished the details upon which her eyes
rested. Doubtless she saw the light mists hovering like ghosts, or the
restless shades of the unburied dead, over the shining expanse before
her, and the filmy vapours that veiled the brightness of the stars, but
she had ceased to question the heavenly bodies about the time.
What did she care for the progress of the hours, since the constellation
of Charles's Wain showed her that it was past midnight?
The moon no longer stood forth in sharp outlines against the deep azure
of the vaulted sky, but, robbed of its radiance, floated in a circle of
dimly illumined mists.
Not only the feelings which stirred Ledscha's soul, but the scene around
her, had gained a totally different aspect.
Since every hope of the happiness awaiting her was destroyed, she no
longer sought to palliate the wrongs Hermon had inflicted upon her. While
dwelling on them, she by no means forgot the trivial purpose for which
the artist intended to use her charms; and when she again gazed up at the
slightly-clouded sky, the shrouded moon no longer reminded her of the
silver orb between the horns of Astarte.
She did not ask herself how the transformation had occurred, but in its
place, high above her head, hung a huge gray spider. Its gigantic limbs
extended over the whole firmament, and seemed striving to clutch and
stifle the world beneath. The enormous monster was weaving its gray net
over Tennis, and all the islands in the water, the Pelican Island, and
she herself upon the seat of turf, and held them all prisoned in it.
It was a horrible vision, fraught with terrors which, even when she shut
her eyes in order to escape it, showed very little change.
Assailed by anxious fears, Ledscha started up, and a few seconds later
was urging her boat with steady strokes toward the Owl's Nest.
Even now lights were still shining from the Alexandrian's tent through
the sultry, veiled night.
There seemed to be no waking life on the pirates' island. Even old Tabus
had probably put out the fire and gone to sleep, for deathlike silence
and deep darkness surrounded it.
Had Hanno, who agreed to meet her here after midnight, also failed to
come? Had the pirate learned, like the Greek, to break his promise?
Only half conscious what she was doing, she left the boat; but her
slender foot had scarcely touched the land when a tall figure emerged
from the thicket near the shore and approached her through the darkness.
"Hanno!" she exclaimed, as if relieved from a burden, and the young
pirate repeated "Hanno" as if the name was the watchword of the night.
Her own name, uttered in a tone of intense yearning, followed. Not
another syllable accompanied it, but the expression with which it fell
upon her ear revealed so plainly what the young pirate felt for and
expected from her that, in spite of the darkness which concealed her, she
felt her face flush.
Then he tried to clasp her hand, and she dared not withdraw it from the
man whom she had chosen for her tool. So she unresistingly permitted him
to hold her right hand while he whispered his desire to take the place of
the fallen Abus and make her his wife.
Ledscha, in hurried, embarrassed tones, answered that she appreciated the
honour of his suit, but before she gave full consent she must discuss an
important matter with him.
Then Hanno begged her to go out on the water.
His father and his brother Labaja were sitting in the house by the fire
with his grandmother. They had learned, in following the trade of piracy,
to hide the glimmer of lights. The old people had approved his choice,
but the conversation in the dwelling would soon be over, and then the
opportunity of seeing each other alone would be at an end.
Without uttering a word in reply, Ledscha stepped back into the boat, but
Hanno plied the oars with the utmost caution and guided the skiff without
the slightest sound away from the island to an open part of the water far
distant from any shore.
Here he took in the oars and asked her to speak. They had no cause to
fear being overheard, for the surrounding mists merely subdued the light
of the full moon, and no other boat could have approached them
unobserved.
The few night birds, sweeping swiftly on their strong pinions from one
island to another, flew past them like flitting shadows. One hawk only,
in search of nocturnal booty, circled around the motionless skiff, and
sometimes, with expanded wings, swooped down close to the couple who were
talking together so eagerly; but both spoke so low that it would have
been impossible, even for the bird's keen hearing, to follow the course
of their consultation. Merely a few louder words and exclamations reached
the height where it hovered.
The young pirate himself was obliged to listen with the most strained
attention while Ledscha, in low whispers, accused the Greek sculptor of
having basely wronged and deceived her; but the curse with which Hanno
received this acknowledgment reached even the bird circling around the
boat, and it seemed as if it wished to express its approval to the
corsair, for this time its fierce croak, as it suddenly swooped down to
the surface of the water behind the boat, sounded shrilly through the
silent night. But it soon soared again, and now Ledscha's declaration
that she would become Hanno's bride only on condition that he would aid
her to punish the Hellenic traitor also reached him.
Then came the words "valuable booty," "slight risk," "thanks and reward."
The girl's whispered allusion to two colossal statues made of pure gold
and genuine ivory was followed by a laugh of disagreeable meaning from
the pirate.
At last he raised his deep voice to ask whether Ledscha, if the venture
in which he would willingly risk his life were successful, would
accompany him on board the Hydra, the good ship whose command his father
intrusted to him. The firm "Yes" with which she answered, and her
indignant exclamation as she repulsed Hanno's premature attempt at
tenderness, might have been heard by the hawk even at a greater distance.
Then the pirate's promised bride lowered her voice again, and did not
raise her tones until she saw in imagination the fulfilment of the
judgment which she was calling down upon the man who had torn her heart
with such pitiless cruelty.
Was this the happiness predicted for her on the night of the full moon?
It might be, and, radiant with secret joy, her eyes sparkling and her
bosom heaving as if her foot was already on the breast of the fallen foe,
she assured Hanno that the gold and the ivory should belong to him, and
to him alone; but not until he had delivered the base traitor to her
alive, and left his punishment in her hands, would she be ready to go
with him wherever he wished--not until then, and not one moment earlier.
The pirate, with a proud "I'll capture him!" consented to this condition;
but Ledscha, in hurried words, now described how she had planned the
attack, while the corsair, at her bidding, plied the oars so as to bring
the boat nearer to the scene of the assault.
The vulture followed the skiff; but when it stopped opposite to the large
white building, one side of which was washed by the waves, Ledscha
pointed to the windows of Hermon's studio, exclaiming hoarsely to the
young pirate: "You will seize him there--the Greek with the long, soft
black beard, and the slender figure, I mean. Then you will bind and gag
him, but, you hear, without killing him, for I can only inflict what he
deserves upon the living man. I am not bargaining for a dead one."
Just at that instant the bird of prey, with a shrill, greedy cry, as if
it were invited to a delicious banquet, flew far away into the distance
and did not return. It flew toward the left; the girl noticed it, and her
heavy black eyebrows, which already met, contracted still more. The
direction taken by the bird, which soon vanished in the darkness of the
night, indicated approaching misfortune; but she was here only to sow
destruction, and the more terrible growth it attained the better!
With an acuteness which aroused the admiration of the young corsair, who
was trained to similar plots, she explained hers.
That they must wait until after the departure of the Alexandrian with her
numerous train, and for the first dark night, was a matter of course.
One signal was to notify Hanno to hold himself in readiness, another to
inform him that every one in the white house had gone to rest, and that
Hermon was there too. The pirates were to enter the black-bearded Greek's
studio. While some were shattering his statues to carry away in sacks the
gold and ivory which they contained, others were to force their way into
Myrtilus's workroom, which was on the opposite side of the house. There
they would find the second statue; but this they must spare, because, on
account of the great fame of its creator, it was more valuable than the
other. The fair-haired artist was ill, and it would be no difficult
matter to take him alive, even if he should put himself on the defensive.
Hermon, on the contrary, was a strong fellow, and to bind him without
injuring him severely would require both strength and skill. Yet it must
be done, for only in case Hanno succeeded in delivering both sculptors to
her alive would she consider herself--she could not repeat it often
enough--bound to fulfil what she had promised him.
With the exception of the two artists, only Myrtilus's servant, the old
doorkeeper, and Bias, Hermon's slave, remained during the night in the
house which was to be attacked, and Hanno would undertake the assault
with twenty-five sturdy fellows whom he commanded on the Hydra if his
brother Labaja consented to share in the assault, this force could be
considerably increased.
To take the old corsair into their confidence now would not be advisable,
for, on account of his mother's near presence, he would scarcely consent
to enter into the peril. Should the venture fail, everything would be
over; but if it succeeded, the old man could only praise the courage and
skill with which it had been executed.
Nothing was to be feared from the coast guard, for since Abus's death the
authorities believed that piracy had vanished from these waters, and the
ships commanded by Satabus and his sons had been admitted from Pontus
into the Tanite arm of the Nile as trading vessels.
CHAPTER XI.
While Hanno was discussing these considerations, he rowed the boat past
the landing place from which the "garden" with the Alexandrian's tent
could be seen.
The third hour after midnight had begun. Smoking flames were still rising
from the pitch pans and blazing torches, and long rows of lanterns also
illumined the broad space.
It was as light as day in the vicinity of the tent, and Biamite huntsmen
and traders were moving to and fro among the slaves and attendants as
though it was market time.
"Your father, too," Hanno remarked in his awkward fashion, "will scarcely
make life hard for us. We shall probably find him in Pontus. He is
getting a cargo of wood for Egypt there. We have had dealings with him a
long time. He thought highly of Abus, and I, too, have already been
useful to him. There were handsome young fellows on the Pontine coast,
and we captured them. At the peril of our lives we took them to the mart.
He may even risk it in Alexandria. So the old man makes over to him a
large number of these youths, and often a girl into the bargain, and he
does it far too cheaply. One might envy him the profit--if it were not
your father! When you are once my wife, I'll make a special contract with
him about the slaves. And, besides, since the last great capture, in
which the old man allowed me a share of my own, I, too, need not complain
of poverty. I shall be ready for the dowry. Do you want to know what you
are worth to me?"
But Ledscha's attention was attracted by other things, and even after
Hanno, with proud conceit, repeated his momentous question, he waited in
vain for a reply.
Then he perceived that the girl was gazing at the brilliantly lighted
square as if spellbound, and now he himself saw before the tent a shed
with a canopied roof, and beneath it cushioned couches, on which several
Greeks--men and women--were half sitting, half lying, watching with eager
attention the spectacle which a slender young Hellenic woman was
presenting to them.
The tall man with the magnificent black beard, who seemed fairly
devouring her with his eyes, must be the sculptor whom Ledscha commanded
him to capture.
To the rude pirate the Greek girl, who in a light, half-transparent
bombyx robe, was exhibiting herself to the eyes of the men upon a
pedestal draped with cloths, seemed bold and shameless.
Behind her stood two female attendants, holding soft white garments
ready, and a handsome Pontine boy with black, waving locks, who gazed up
at her waiting for her signs.
"Nearer," Ledscha ordered the pirate in a stifled voice, and he rowed the
boat noiselessly under the shadow of a willow on the bank. But the skiff
had scarcely been brought to a stop there when an elderly matron, who
shared the couch of an old Macedonian man of a distinguished, soldierly
appearance, called the name "Niobe."
The Hellene on the pedestal took a cloth from the hand of one of the
female attendants, and beckoned to the boy, who obediently drew through
his girdle the short blue chiton which hung only to his knees, and sprang
upon the platform.
There the Greek girl manipulated in some way the red tresses piled high
upon her head, and confined above the brow by a costly gold diadem, flung
the white linen fabric which the young slave handed to her over her head,
wound her arm around the shoulders of the raven-locked boy, and drew him
toward her with passionate tenderness. At the same time she raised the
end of the linen drapery with her left hand, spreading it over him like a
protecting canopy.
The mobile features which had just smiled so radiantly expressed mortal
terror, and the pirate, to whom even the name "Niobe" was unfamiliar,
looked around him for the terrible danger threatening the innocent child,
from which the woman on the pedestal was protecting it with loving
devotion.
The mortal terror of a mother robbed by a higher power of her child could
scarcely be more vividly depicted, and yet haughty defiance hovered
around her slightly pouting lips; the uplifted hands seemed not only
anxiously to defend, but also to defy an invisible foe with powerless
anger.
The pirate's eyes rested on this spectacle as if spellbound, and the man
who in Pontus had dragged hundreds of young creatures--boys and girls--on
his ship to sell them into slavery, never thinking of the tears which he
thereby caused in huts and mansions, clinched his rough hand to attack
the base wretch who was robbing the poor mother of her lovely darling.
But just as Hanno was rising to look around him for the invisible
evildoer, the loud shouts of many voices startled him. He glanced toward
the pedestal; but now, instead of the hapless mother, he found there the
bold woman whom he had previously seen, as radiant as if some great piece
of good fortune had befallen her, bowing and waving her hand to the other
Greeks, who were thanking her with loud applause.
The sorely threatened boy, bowing merrily, sprang to the ground; but
Hanno put his hand on Ledscha's arm, and in great perplexity whispered,
"What did that mean?"
"Hush!" said the girl softly, stretching her slender neck toward the
illuminated square, for the performer had remained standing upon the
pedestal, and Chrysilla, Daphne's companion, sat erect on her couch,
exclaiming, "If it is agreeable to you, beautiful Althea, show us Nike
crowning the victor."
Even the Biamite's keen ear could not catch the reply and the purport of
the rapid conversation which followed; but she guessed the point in
question when the young men who were present rose hastily, rushed toward
the pedestal, loosed the wreaths from their heads, and offered them to
the Greek girl whom Chrysilla had just called "beautiful Althea."
Four Hellenic officers in the strong military force under Philippus, the
commandant of the "Key of Egypt," as Pelusium was justly called, had
accompanied the old Macedonian general to visit his friend Archias's
daughter at Tennis; but Althea rejected their garlands with an
explanation which seemed to satisfy them.
Ledscha could not hear what she said, but when only Hermon and Myrtilus
still stood with their wreaths of flowers opposite the "beautiful
Althea," and she glanced hesitatingly from one to the other, as if she
found the choice difficult, and then drew from her finger a sparkling
ring, the Biamite detected the swift look of understanding which Hermon
exchanged with her.
The girl's heart began to throb faster, and, with the keen premonition of
a jealous soul, she recognised in Althea her rival and foe.
Now there was no doubt of it; now, as the actress, skilled in every wile,
hid the hand holding the ring, as well as the other empty one, behind her
back, she would know how to manage so that she could use the garland
which Hermon handed her.
Ledscha's foreboding was instantly fulfilled, for when Althea held out
her little tightly clinched fist to the artists and asked Myrtilus to
choose, the hand to which he pointed and she then opened was empty, and
she took from the other the ring, which she displayed with well-feigned
regret to the spectators.
Then Hermon knelt before her, and, as he offered Althea his wreath, his
dark eyes gazed so ardently into the blue ones of the red-haired
Greek-like Queen Arsinoe, she was of Thracian descent--that Ledscha was
now positively certain she knew for whose sake her lover had so basely
betrayed her.
How she hated this bold woman!
Yet she was forced to keep quiet, and pressed her lips tightly together
as Althea seized the white sheet and with marvellous celerity wound it
about her until it fell in exquisite folds like a long robe.
Surprise, curiosity, and a pleasant sense of satisfaction in seeing what
seemed to her a shameless display withdrawn from her lover's eyes,
rendered it easier for Ledscha to maintain her composure; yet she felt
the blood throbbing in her temples as Hermon remained kneeling before the
Hellene, gazing intently into her expressive face.
Was it not too narrow wholly to please the man who had known how to
praise her own beauty so passionately? Did not the outlines of Althea's
figure, which the bombyx robe only partially concealed, lack roundness
even more than her own?
And yet! As soon as Althea had transformed the sheet into a robe, and
held the wreath above him, Hermon's gaze rested on hers as though
enraptured, while from her bright blue eyes a flood of ardent admiration
poured upon the man for whom she held the victor's wreath.
This was done with the upper portion of her body bending very far
forward. The slender figure was poised on one foot; the other, covered to
the ankle with the long robe, hovered in the air. Had not the wings
which, as Nike, belonged to her been lacking, every one would have been
convinced that she was flying--that she had just descended from the
heights of Olympus to crown the kneeling victor. Not only her hand, her
gaze and her every feature awarded the prize to the man at her feet.
There was no doubt that, if Nike herself came to the earth to make the
best man happy with the noblest of crowns, the spectacle would be a
similar one.
And Hermon! No garlanded victor could look up to the gracious divinity
more joyously, more completely enthralled by grateful rapture.
The applause which now rang out more and more loudly was certainly not
undeserved, but it pierced Ledscha's soul like a mockery, like the
bitterest scorn.
Hanno, on the contrary, seemed to consider the scene scarcely worth
looking at. Something more powerful was required to stir him. He was
particularly averse to all exhibitions. The utmost which his relatives
could induce the quiet, reserved man to do when they ventured into the
great seaports was to attend the animal fights and the games of the
athletes. He felt thoroughly happy only when at sea, on board of his good
ship. His best pleasure was to gaze up at the stars on calm nights, guide
the helm, and meanwhile dream--of late most gladly of making the
beautiful girl who had seemed to him worthy of his brave brother Abus,
his own wife.
In the secluded monotony of his life as a scar over memory had exalted
Ledscha into the most desirable of all women, and the slaughtered Abus
into the greatest of heroes.
To win the love of this much-praised maiden seemed to Hanno peerless
happiness, and the young corsair felt that he was worthy of it; for on
the high seas, when a superior foe was to be opposed by force and
stratagem, when a ship was to be boarded and death spread over her deck,
he had proved himself a man of unflinching courage.
His suit had progressed more easily than he expected. His father would
rejoice, and his heart exulted at the thought of encountering a serious
peril for the girl he loved. His whole existence was a venture of life,
and, had he had ten to lose, they would not have been too dear a price to
him to win Ledscha.
While Althea, as the goddess of Victory, held the wreath aloft, and loud
applause hailed her, Hanno was thinking of the treasures which he had
garnered since his father had allowed him a share of the booty, and of
the future.
When he had accumulated ten talents of gold he would give up piracy, like
Abus, and carry on his own ships wood and slaves from Pontus to Egypt,
and textiles from Tennis, arms and other manufactured articles from
Alexandria to the Pontine cities. In this way Ledscha's father had become
a rich man, and he would also, not for his own sake--he needed
little--but to make life sweet for his wife, surround her with splendour
and luxury, and adorn her beautiful person with costly jewels. Many a
stolen ornament was already lying in the safe hiding place that even his
brother Labaja did not know.
At last the shouts died away, and as the stopping of the clattering wheel
wakes the miller, so the stillness on the shore roused Hanno from his
dream.
What was it that Ledscha saw there so fascinating that she did not even
hear his low call? His father and Labaja had undoubtedly left his
grandmother's house long ago, and were looking for him in vain.
Yes, he was right; the old pirate's shrill whistle reached his ear from
the Owl's Nest, and he was accustomed to obedience.
So, lightly touching Ledscha on the shoulder, he whispered that he must
return to the island at once. His father would be rejoiced if she went
with him.
"To-morrow," she answered in a tone of resolute denial. Then, reminding
him once more of the meaning of the signals she had promised to give, she
waved her hand to him, sprang swiftly past him to the prow of the boat,
caught an overhanging bough of the willow on the shore, and, as she had
learned during the games of her childhood, swung herself as lightly as a
bird into the thicket at the water's edge, which concealed her from every
eye.
CHAPTER XII.
Without even vouchsafing Hanno another glance, Ledscha glided forward in
the shadow of the bushes to the great sycamore, whose thick, broad top on
the side toward the tents was striped with light from the flood of
radiance streaming from them. On the opposite side the leafage vanished
in the darkness of the night, but Myrtilus had had a bench placed there,
that he might rest in the shade, and from this spot the girl could obtain
the best view of what she desired to see.
How gay and animated it was under the awning!
A throng of companions had arrived with the Pelusinians, and some also
had probably been on the ship which--she knew it from Bias--had come to
Tennis directly from Alexandria that afternoon. The galley was said to
belong to Philotas, an aristocratic relative of King Ptolemy. If she was
not mistaken, he was the stately young Greek who was just picking up the
ostrich-feather fan that had slipped from Daphne's lap.
The performance was over.
Young slaves in gay garments, and nimble female servants with glittering
gold circlets round their upper arms and on their ankles, were passing
from couch to couch, and from one guest to another, offering
refreshments. Hermon had risen from his knees, and the wreath of bright
flowers again adorned his black curls. He held himself as proudly erect
as if the goddess of Victory herself had crowned him, while Althea was
reaping applause and thanks. Ledscha gazed past her and the others to
watch every movement of the sculptor.
It was scarcely the daughter of Archias who had detained Hermon, for he
made only a brief answer--Ledscha could not hear what it was--when she
accosted him pleasantly, to devote himself to Althea, and--this could be
perceived even at a distance--thank her with ardent devotion.
And now--now he even raised the hem of her peplos to his lips.
A scornful smile hovered around Ledscha's mouth; but Daphne's guests also
noticed this mark of homage--an unusual one in their circle--and young
Philotas, who had followed Daphne from Alexandria, cast a significant
glance at a man with a smooth, thin, birdlike face, whose hair was
already turning gray. His name was Proclus, and, as grammateus of the
Dionysian games and high priest of Apollo, he was one of the most
influential men in Alexandria, especially as he was one of the favoured
courtiers of Queen Arsinoe.
He had gone by her command to the Syrian court, had enjoyed on his
return, at Pelusium, with his travelling companion Althea, the
hospitality of Philippus, and accompanied the venerable officer to Tennis
in order to win him over to certain plans. In spite of his advanced age,
he still strove to gain the favour of fair women, and the sculptor's
excessive ardour had displeased him.
So he let his somewhat mocking glance wander from Althea to Hermon, and
called to the latter: "My congratulations, young master; but I need
scarcely remind you that Nike suffers no one--not even goodness and grace
personified--to take from her hand what it is her sole duty to bestow."
While speaking he adjusted the laurel on his own thin hair; but Thyone,
the wife of Philippus, answered eagerly: "If I were a young man like
Hermon, instead of an old woman, noble Proclus, I think the wreath which
Beauty bestows would render me scarcely less happy than stern Nike's
crown of victory."
While making this pleasant reply the matron's wrinkled face wore an
expression of such cordial kindness, and her deep voice was so winning in
its melody, that Hermon forced himself to heed the glance of urgent
warning Daphne cast at him, and leave the sharp retort that hovered on
his lips unuttered. Turning half to the grammateus, half to the matron,
he merely said, in a cold, self-conscious tone, that Thyone was right. In
this gay circle, the wreath of bright flowers proffered by the hands of a
beautiful woman was the dearest of all gifts, and he would know how to
value it.
"Until other more precious ones cast it into oblivion," observed Althea.
"Let me see, Hermon: ivy and roses. The former is lasting, but the
roses--" She shook her finger in roguish menace at the sculptor as she
spoke.
"The roses," Proclus broke in again, "are of course the most welcome to
our young friend from such a hand; yet these flowers of the goddess of
Beauty have little in common with his art, which is hostile to beauty.
Still, I do not know what wreath will be offered to the new tendency with
which he surprised us."
At this Hermon raised his head higher, and answered sharply: "Doubtless
there must have been few of them, since you, who are so often among the
judges, do not know them. At any rate, those which justice bestows have
hitherto been lacking."
"I should deplore that," replied Proclus, stroking his sharp chin with
his thumb and forefinger; "but I fear that our beautiful Nike also cared
little for this lofty virtue of the judge in the last coronation.
However, her immortal model lacks it often enough."
"Because she is a woman," said one of the young officers, laughing; and
another added gaily: "That very thing may be acceptable to us soldiers.
For my part, I think everything about the goddess of Victory is beautiful
and just, that she may remain graciously disposed toward us. Nay, I
accuse the noble Althea of withholding from Nike, in her personation, her
special ornament--her swift, powerful wings."
"She gave those to Eros, to speed his flight," laughed Proclus, casting a
meaning look at Althea and Hermon.
No one failed to notice that this jest alluded to the love which seemed
to have been awakened in the sculptor as quickly as in the personator of
the goddess of Victory, and, while it excited the merriment of the
others, the blood mounted into Hermon's cheeks; but Myrtilus perceived
what was passing in the mind of his irritable friend, and, as the
grammateus praised Nike because in this coronation she had omitted the
laurel, the fair-haired Greek interrupted him with the exclamation:
"Quite right, noble Proclus, the grave laurel does not suit our gay
pastime; but roses belong to the artist everywhere, and are always
welcome to him. The more, the better!"
"Then we will wait till the laurel is distributed in some other place,"
replied the grammateus; and Myrtilus quickly added, "I will answer for it
that Hermon does not leave it empty-handed."
"No one will greet the work which brings your friend the wreath of
victory with warmer joy," Proclus protested. "But, if I am correctly
informed, yonder house hides completed treasures whose inspection would
give the fitting consecration to this happy meeting. Do you know what an
exquisite effect gold and ivory statues produce in a full glow of
lamplight? I first learned it a short time ago at the court of King
Antiochus. There is no lack of lights here. What do you say, gentlemen?
Will you not have the studios lighted till the rooms are as bright as
day, and add a noble enjoyment of art to the pleasures of this wonderful
night?"
But Hermon and Myrtilus opposed this proposal with equal decision.
Their refusal awakened keen regret, and the old commandant of Pelusium
would not willingly yield to it.
Angrily shaking his large head, around which, in spite of his advanced
age, thick snowwhite locks floated like a lion's mane, he exclaimed,
"Must we then really return to our Pelusium, where Ares restricts the
native rights of the Muses, without having admired the noble works which
arose in such mysterious secrecy here, where Arachne rules and swings the
weaver's shuttle?"
"But my two cruel cousins have closed their doors even upon me, who came
here for the sake of their works," Daphne interrupted, "and, as rather
Zeus is threatening a storm--just see what black clouds are rising!--we
ought not to urge our artists further; a solemn oath forbids them to show
their creations now to any one."
This earnest assurance silenced the curious, and, while the conversation
took another turn, the gray-haired general's wife drew Myrtilus aside.
Hermon's parents had been intimate friends of her own, as well as of her
husband's, and with the interest of sincere affection she desired to know
whether the young sculptor could really hope for the success of which
Myrtilus had just spoken.
It was years since she had visited Alexandria, but what she heard of
Hermon's artistic work from many guests, and now again through Proclus,
filled her with anxiety.
He had succeeded, it was said, in attracting attention, and his great
talent was beyond question; but in this age, to which beauty was as much
one of the necessities of life as bread and wine, and which could not
separate it from art, he ventured to deny it recognition. He headed a
current in art which was striving to destroy what had been proved and
acknowledged, yet, though his creations were undeniably powerful, and
even showed many other admirable qualities, instead of pleasing,
satisfying, and ennobling, they repelled.
These opinions had troubled the matron, who understood men, and was the
more disposed to credit them the more distinctly she perceived traces of
discontent and instability in Hermon's manner during the present meeting.
So it afforded her special pleasure to learn from Myrtilus his firm
conviction that, in Arachne, Hermon would produce a masterpiece which
could scarcely be excelled.
During this conversation Althea had come to Thyone's side, and, as Hermon
had already spoken to her of the Arachne, she eagerly expressed her
belief that this work seemed as if it were specially created for him.
The Greek matron leaned back comfortably upon her cushions, her wrinkled,
owl-like face assumed a cheerful expression, and, with the easy
confidence conferred by aristocratic birth, a distinguished social
position, and a light heart, she exclaimed: "Lucifer is probably already
behind yonder clouds, preparing to announce day, and this exquisite
banquet ought to have a close worthy of it. What do you say, you
wonder-working darling of the Muses"--she held out her hand to Althea as
she spoke--"to showing us and the two competing artists yonder the model
of the Arachne they are to represent in gold and ivory?"
Althea fixed her eyes upon the ground, and, after a short period of
reflection, answered hesitatingly: "The task which you set before me is
certainly no easy one, but I shall rely upon your indulgence."
"She will!" cried the matron to the others.
Then, clapping her hands, she continued gaily, in the tone of the
director of an entertainment issuing invitations to a performance: "Your
attention is requested! In this city of weavers the noble Thracian,
Althea, will depict before you all the weaver of weavers, Arachne, in
person."
"Take heed and follow my advice to sharpen your eyes," added Philotas,
who, conscious of his inferiority in intellect and talents to the men and
women assembled here, took advantage of this opportunity to assert
himself in a manner suited to his aristocratic birth. "This artistic yet
hapless Arachne, if any one, teaches the lesson how the lofty Olympians
punish those who venture to place themselves on the same level; so let
artists beware. We stepchildren of the Muse can lull ourselves
comfortably in the assurance of not giving the jealous gods the slightest
cause for the doom which overtook the pitiable weaver."
Not a word of this declaration of the Macedonian aristocrat escaped the
listening Ledscha. Scales seemed to fall from her eyes. Hermon had won
her love in order to use her for the model of his statue of Arachne, and,
now that he had met Althea, who perhaps suited his purpose even better,
he no longer needed the barbarian. He had cast her aside like a tight
shoe as soon as he found a more acceptable one in this female juggler.
The girl had already asked herself, with a slight thrill of horror,
whether she had not prematurely called down so terrible a punishment upon
her lover; now she rejoiced in her swift action. If anything else
remained for her to do, it was to make the vengeance with which she
intended to requite him still more severe.
There he stood beside the woman she hated. Could he bestow even one poor
thought upon the Biamite girl and the wrong he had inflicted?
Oh, no! His heart was filled to overflowing by the Greek--every look
revealed it.
What was the shameless creature probably whispering to him now?
Perhaps a meeting was just being granted. The rapture which had been
predicted to her for this moonlight night, and of which Hermon had robbed
her, was mirrored in his features. He could think of everything except
her and her poor, crushed heart.
But Ledscha was mistaken. Althea had asked the sculptor whether he still
regretted having been detained by her before midnight, and he had
confessed that his remaining at the banquet had been connected with a
great sacrifice--nay, with an offence which weighed heavily on his mind.
Yet he was grateful to the favour of the gods that had guided his
decision, for Althea had it in her power to compensate him richly for
what he had lost.
A glance full of promise flashed upon him from her eloquent eyes, and,
turning toward the pedestal at the same instant, she asked softly, "Is
the compensation I must and will bestow connected with the Arachne?"
An eager "Yes" confirmed this question, and a swift movement of her
expressive lips showed him that his boldest anticipations were to be
surpassed.
How gladly he would have detained her longer!--but she was already the
object of all eyes, and his, too, followed her in expectant suspense as
she gave an order to the female attendant and then stood thoughtfully for
some time before the platform.
When she at last ascended it, the spectators supposed that she would
again use a cloth; but, instead of asking anything more from the
assistants, she cast aside even the peplos that covered her shoulders.
Now, almost lean in her slenderness, she stood with downcast eyes; but
suddenly she loosed the double chain, adorned with flashing gems, from
her neck, the circlets from her upper arms and wrists, and, lastly, even
the diadem, a gift bestowed by her relative, Queen Arsinoe, from her
narrow brow.
The female slaves received them, and then with swift movements Althea
divided her thick long tresses of red hair into narrower strands, which
she flung over her back, bosom, and shoulders.
Next, as if delirious, she threw her head so far on one side that it
almost touched her left shoulder, and stared wildly upward toward the
right, at the same time raising her bare arms so high that they extended
far above her head.
It was again her purpose to present the appearance of defending herself
against a viewless power, yet she was wholly unlike the Niobe whom she
had formerly personated, for not only anguish, horror, and defiance, but
deep despair and inexpressible astonishment were portrayed by her
features, which obediently expressed the slightest emotion.
Something unprecedented, incomprehensible even to herself, was occurring,
and to Ledscha, who watched her with an expectation as passionate as if
her own weal and woe depended upon Althea's every movement, it seemed as
if an unintelligible marvel was happening before her eyes, and a still
greater one was impending; for was the woman up there really a woman like
herself and the others whose eyes were now fixed upon the hated actress
no less intently than her own?
Did her keen senses deceive her, or was not what was occurring actually a
mysterious transformation?
As Althea stood there, her delicate arms seemed to have lengthened and
lost even their slight roundness, her figure to have become even more
slender and incorporeal, and how strangely her thin fingers spread apart!
How stiffly the strands of the parted, wholly uncurled locks stood out in
the air!
Did it not seem as if they were to help her move?
The black shadow which Althea's figure and limbs cast upon the surface of
the brightly lighted pedestal-no, it was no deception, it not only
resembled the spinner among insects, it presented the exact picture of a
spider.
The Greek's slender body had contracted, her delicate arms and narrow
braids of hair changed into spider legs, and the many-jointed hands were
already grasping for their prey like a spider, or preparing to wind the
murderous threads around another living creature.
"Arachne, the spider!" fell almost inaudibly from her quivering lips,
and, overpowered by torturing fear, she was already turning away from the
frightful image, when the storm of applause which burst from the
Alexandrian guests soothed her excited imagination.
Instead of the spider, a slender, lank woman, with long, outstretched
bare arms, and fingers spread wide apart, fluttering hair, and wandering
eyes again stood before Ledscha.
But no peace was yet granted to her throbbing heart, for while Althea,
with perspiring brow and quivering lips, descended from the pedestal, and
was received with loud demonstrations of astonishment and delight, the
glare of a flash of lightning burst through the clouds, and a loud peal
of thunder shook the night air and reverberated a long time over the
water.
At the same instant a loud cry rang from beneath the canopy.
Thyone, the wife of Alexander the Great's comrade, though absolutely
fearless in the presence of human foes, dreaded the thunder by which Zeus
announced his anger. Seized with sudden terror, she commanded a slave to
obtain a black lamb for a sacrifice, and earnestly entreated her husband
and her other companions to go on board the ship with her and seek
shelter in its safe, rain-proof cabin, for already heavy drops were
beginning to fall upon the tensely drawn awning.
"Nemesis!" exclaimed the grammateus.
"Nemesis!" whispered young Philotas to Daphne in a confidential murmur,
throwing his own costly purple cloak around her to shield her from the
rain. "Nowhere that we mortals overstep the bounds allotted to us do we
await her in vain."
Then bending down to her again, he added, by way of explanation: "The
winged daughter of Night would prove herself negligent if she allowed me
to enjoy wholly without drawback the overwhelming happiness of being with
you once more."
"Nemesis!" remarked Thoas, an aristocratic young hipparch of the guards
of the Diadochi, who had studied in Athens and belonged to the
Peripatetics there. "The master sees in the figure of this goddess the
indignation which the good fortune of the base or the unworthy use of
good fortune inspires in us. She keeps the happy mean between envy and
malicious satisfaction." The young soldier looked around him, expecting
applause, but no one was listening; the tempest was spreading terror
among most of the freedmen and slaves.
Philotas and Myrtilus were following Daphne and her companion Chrysilla
as they hurried into the tent. The deep, commanding tones of old
Philippus vainly shouted the name of Althea, whom, as he had bestowed his
hospitality upon her in Pelusium, he regarded as his charge, while at
intervals he reprimanded the black slaves who were to carry his wife to
the ship, but at another heavy peal of thunder set down the litter to
throw themselves on their knees and beseech the angry god for mercy.
Gras, the steward whom Archias had given to his daughter, a Bithynian who
had attached himself to one school of philosophy after an other, and
thereby ceased to believe in the power of the Olympians, lost his quiet
composure in this confusion, and even his usual good nature deserted him.
With harsh words, and no less harsh blows, he rushed upon the servants,
who, instead of carrying the costly household utensils and embroidered
cushions into the tent, drew out their amulets and idols to confide their
own imperilled lives to the protection of higher powers.
Meanwhile the gusts of wind which accompanied the outbreak of the storm
extinguished the lamps and pitch-pans. The awning was torn from the
posts, and amid the wild confusion rang the commandant of Pelusium's
shouts for Althea and the screams of two Egyptian slave women, who, with
their foreheads pressed to the ground, were praying, while the angry Gras
was trying, by kicks and blows, to compel them to rise and go to work.
The officers were holding a whispered consultation whether they should
accept the invitation of Proclus and spend the short remnant of the night
on his galley over the wine, or first, according to the counsel of their
pious commandant, wait in the neighbouring temple of Zeus until the storm
was over.
The tempest had completely scattered Daphne's guests. Even Ledscha
glanced very rarely toward the tents. She had thrown her self on the
ground under the sycamore to beseech the angry deity for mercy, but,
deeply as fear moved her agitated soul, she could not pray, but listened
anxiously whenever an unexpected noise came from the meeting place of the
Greeks.
Then the tones of a familiar voice reached her. It was Hermon's, and the
person to whom he was speaking could be no one but the uncanny
spider-woman, Althea.
They were coming to have a secret conversation under the shade of the
dense foliage of the sycamore. That was easily perceived, and in an
instant Ledscha's fear yielded to a different feeling.
Holding her breath, she nestled close to the trunk of the ancient tree to
listen, and the first word she heard was the name "Nemesis," which had
just reached her from the tent.
She knew its meaning, for Tennis also had a little temple dedicated to
the terrible goddess, which was visited by the Egyptians and Biamites as
well as the Greeks.
A triumphant smile flitted over her unveiled features, for there was no
other divinity on whose aid she could more confidently rely. She could
unchain the vengeance which threatened Hermon with a far more terrible
danger than the thunder clouds above, under the protection--nay, as it
were at the behest of Nemesis.
To-morrow she would be the first to anoint her altar.
Now she rejoiced that her wealthy father imposed no restriction upon her
in the management of household affairs, for she need spare no expense in
choosing the animal she intended to offer as a sacrifice.
This reflection flashed through her mind with the speed of lightning
while she was listening to Althea's conversation with the sculptor.
"The question here can be no clever play upon the name and the nature of
the daughter of Erebus and Night," said the Thracian gravely. "I will
remind you that there is another Nemesis besides the just being who
drives from his stolen ease the unworthy mortal who suns himself in good
fortune. The Nemesis whom I will recall to-day, while angry Zeus is
hurling his thunderbolts, is the other, who chastises sacrilege--Ate, the
swiftest and most terrible of the Erinyes. I will invoke her wrath upon
you in this hour if you do not confess the truth to me fully and
entirely."
"Ask," Hermon interrupted in a hollow tone. "Only, you strange woman--"
"Only," she hastily broke in, "whatever the answer may be, I must pose to
you as the model for your Arachne--and perhaps it may come to that--but
first I must know, briefly and quickly, for they will be looking for me
immediately. Do you love Daphne?"
"No," he answered positively. "True, she has been dear to me from
childhood--"
"And," Althea added, completing the sentence, "you owe her father a debt
of gratitude. But that is not new to me; I know also how little reason
you gave her for loving you. Yet her heart belongs neither to Philotas,
the great lord with the little brain, nor to the famous sculptor
Myrtilus, whose body is really too delicate to bear all the laurels with
which he is overloaded, but to you, and you alone--I know it."
Hermon tried to contradict her, but Althea, without allowing him to
speak, went on hurriedly: "No matter! I wished to know whether you loved
her. True, according to appearances, your heart does not glow for her,
and hitherto you have disdained to transform by her aid, at a single
stroke, the poverty which ill suits you into wealth. But it was not
merely to speak of the daughter of Archias that I accompanied you into
this tempest, from which I would fain escape as quickly as possible. So
speak quickly. I am to serve you in your art, and yet, if I understood
you correctly, you have already found here another excellent model."
"A native of the country," answered Hermon in an embarrassed tone.
"And for my sake you allowed her to wait for you in vain?"
"It is as you say."
"And you had promised to seek her?"
"Certainly; but before the appointed hour came I met you. You rose before
me like a new sun, shedding a new light that was full of promise.
Everything else sank into darkness, and, if you will fulfil the hope
which you awakened in this heart--"
Just at that moment another flash of lightning blazed, and, while the
thunder still shook the air, Althea continued his interrupted
protestation: "Then you will give yourself to me, body and soul--but
Zeus, who hears oaths, is reminding us of his presence--and what will
await you if the Biamite whom you betrayed invokes the wrath of Nemesis
against you?"
"The Nemesis of the barbarians!" he retorted contemptuously. "She only
placed herself at the service of my art reluctantly; but you, Althea, if
you will loan yourself to me as a model, I shall succeed in doing my very
best; for you have just permitted me to behold a miracle, Arachne
herself, whom you became, you enchantress. It was real, actual life, and
that--that is the highest goal."
"The highest?" she asked hesitatingly. "You will have to represent the
female form, and beauty, Hermon, beauty?"
"Will be there, allied with truth," flamed Hermon, "if you, you peerless,
more than beautiful creature, keep your word to me. But you will! Let me
be sure of it. Is a little love also blended with the wish to serve the
artist?"
"A little love?" she repeated scornfully.
"This matter concerns love complete and full--or none. We will see each
other again to-morrow. Then show me what the model Althea is worth to
you."
With these words she vanished in the darkness, while the call of her name
again rang from the tents.
"Althea!" he cried in a tone of mournful reproach as he perceived her
disappearance, hurrying after her; but the dense gloom soon forced him to
give up the pursuit.
Ledscha, too, left her place beneath the sycamore.
She had seen and heard enough.
Duty now commanded her to execute vengeance, and the bold Hanno was ready
to risk his life for her.
CHAPTER XIII.
The following day the sun shone radiantly, with scorching brilliancy,
upon Tennis and the archipelago, which at this season of the year
surrounded the little city of weavers.
Young Philotas, without going to rest, had set out at dawn in pursuit of
game, accompanied by a numerous hunting party, to which several of the
Pelusinian officers belonged. He, too, had brought home a great quantity
of booty, with which he had expected to awaken Daphne's admiration, and
to lay as a token of homage at her feet. He had intended to lead before
her garlanded slaves bearing, tied by ropes, bunches of slaughtered wild
fowl, but his reception was very different from what he had anticipated.
Instead of praising his exploit, he had been indignantly requested to
remove the poor, easily killed victims from her presence; and, wounded
and disappointed, he had retired to his magnificent Nile boat, where,
spent by his sleepless night, he slumbered so soundly on his soft
cushions that he did not appear at the breakfast which the gray-haired
commander of Pelusium had invited him to attend on his galley.
While the others were still feasting there, Daphne was enjoying an hour
alone with her companion Chrysilla.
She had remained absent from Philippus's banquet, and her pale cheeks
showed the ill effects produced by the excitement of the previous night.
A little before noon Hermon came to see her. He, too, had not gone to the
Pelusinian's breakfast.
After Althea had left him the evening before he went directly back to the
white house, and, instead of going to rest, devoted himself to Myrtilus;
for the difficulty of breathing, which during his industrious life in
quiet seclusion had not troubled him for several months, attacked him
with twofold violence after the gaiety of the previous night. Hermon had
not left him an instant until day brought the sufferer relief, and he no
longer needed the supporting hand of his kind nurse.
While Hermon, in his own sleeping room, ordered Bias to anoint his hair
and beard and put on festal garments, the slave told him certain things
that destroyed the last remnant of composure in his easily agitated soul.
With the firm resolution to keep the appointment on Pelican Island,
Hermon had gone at sunset, in response to the Alexandrian's invitation,
to attend her banquet, and by no means unwillingly, for his parents' old
friends were dear to him, and he knew by experience the beneficial
influence Daphne's sunny, warmhearted nature exerted upon him.
Yet this time he did not find what he expected.
In the first place, he had been obliged to witness how earnestly Philotas
was pressing his suit, and perceived that her companion Chrysilla was
most eagerly assisting him. As she saw in the young aristocrat a suitable
husband for the daughter of Archias, and it was her duty to assign the
guests their seats at the banquet, she had given the cushion beside
Daphne to Philotas, and also willingly fulfilled Althea's desire to have
Hermon for her neighbour.
When Chrysilla presented the black-bearded artist to the Thracian, she
would have sworn that Althea found an old acquaintance in the sculptor;
but Hermon treated the far-famed relative of Queen Arsinoe as coldly and
distantly as if he now saw her for the first time, and with little
pleasure.
In truth, he was glad to avoid women of Althea's stamp. For some time he
had preferred to associate with the common people, among whom he found
his best subjects, and kept far aloof from the court circles to which
Althea belonged, and which, thanks to his birth and his ability as an
artist, would easily have been accessible to him also.
The over-refined women who gave themselves airs of avoiding everything
which imposes a restraint upon Nature, and therefore, in their
transparent robes, treated with contempt all that modest Macedonian dames
deemed worthy of a genuine woman's consideration, were repulsive to
him--perhaps because they formed so rude a contrast to his noble dead
mother and to Daphne.
Although he had been very frequently in feminine society, Althea's manner
at first caused him a certain degree of embarrassment; for, in spite of
the fact that he believed he met her here for the first time, there was
something familiar about her, especially in the tone of her voice, and he
fancied that her first words were associated with some former ones.
Yet no! If he had ever met her, he would surely have remembered her
red-gold hair and the other peculiarities of a personality which was
remarkable in every respect.
It soon proved that they were total strangers, and he wished matters to
remain so.
He was glad that she attracted him so little, for at least she would
scarcely make the early departure to the Biamite, which he considered his
duty, a difficult task.
True, he admired from the first the rare milk-white line of her delicate
skin, which was wholly free from rouge--his artist eye perceived that and
the wonderfully beautiful shape of her hands and feet. The pose of the
head on the neck, too, as she turned toward him seemed remarkably fine.
This slender, pliant woman would have been an admirable model!
Again and again she reminded him of a gay Lesbian with whom he had
caroused for a night during the last Dionysia in Alexandria, yet, on
closer inspection, the two were as different as possible.
The former had been as free and reckless in her conduct as Althea was
reserved. The hair and eyebrows of the Lesbian, instead of reddish gold,
were the deepest black, and her complexion--he remembered it
perfectly--was much darker. The resemblance probably consisted merely in
the shape of the somewhat too narrow face, with its absolutely straight
nose, and a chin which was rather too small, as well as in the sound of
the high voice.
Not a serious word had reached his ears from the wanton lips of the
Lesbian, while Althea at once desired information concerning his art, and
showed that she was thoroughly familiar with the works and the
aspirations of the Alexandrian sculptors. Although aware that Hermon had
begun his career as an artist, and was the leader of a new tendency, she
pretended to belong to the old school, and thereby irritated him to
contradiction and the explanation of his efforts, which were rooted in
the demands of the present day and the life of the flourishing capital.
The Thracian listened to the description of the new art struggling to
present truth, as if these things were welcome surprises, grand
revelations, for which she had waited with eager longing. True, she
opposed every statement hostile to the old beliefs; but her extremely
expressive features soon betrayed to him that he was stirring her to
reflect, shaking her opinions, and winning her to his side.
Already, for the sake of the good cause, he devoted himself with the
utmost zeal to the task of convincing Althea; she, however, did not make
it an easy one, but presented clever arguments against his assertions.
Whenever he or she, by way of example, mentioned any well-known work of
art, she imitated, as if involuntarily, its pose and action with
surprising fidelity, frequently also in admirable caricature, whose
effect was extremely comical. What a woman!
She was familiar with whatever Grecian art had created, and the animated
conversation became a bewitching spectacle. When the grammateus Proclus,
who as Althea's travelling companion had a certain claim upon her
attention, mingled for a while in the discussion and attracted Althea's
notice, Hermon felt injured, and answered his sensible remarks with such
rudeness that the elder man, whose social position was so much higher,
angrily turned his back upon him.
Althea had imposed a certain degree of restraint upon herself while
talking to the grammateus, but during the further conversation with
Hermon she confessed that she was decidedly of his opinion, and added to
the old reasons for the deposition of beauty and ideality in favour of
truth and reality new ones which surprised the sculptor. When she at last
offered him her hand for a firm alliance, his brain was fevered, and it
seemed a great honour when she asked eagerly what would occupy him in the
immediate future.
Passionate sympathy echoed in every word, was expressed in every feature,
and she listened as if a great happiness was in store for herself when he
disclosed the hopes which he based upon the statue of Arachne.
True, as time passed he had spoken more than once of the necessity of
retiring, and before midnight really tried to depart; but he had fallen
under Althea's thrall, and, in reply to her inquiry what must shorten
these exquisite hours, had informed her, in significant words, what drew
him away, and that his delay threatened him with the loss of a model such
as the favour of fate rarely bestowed upon an artist.
Now the Thracian for the first time permitted her eyes to make frank
confessions. She also bent forward with a natural movement to examine the
artistic work on a silver vase, and as while doing so her peplos fell
over his hand, she pressed it tenderly.
He gazed ardently up at her; but she whispered softly: "Stay! You will
gain through me something better than awaits you there, and not only for
to-day and to-morrow. We shall meet again in Alexandria, and to serve
your art there shall be a beloved duty."
His power of resistance was broken; yet he beckoned to his slave Bias,
who was busied with the mixing jars, and ordered him to seek Ledscha and
tell her not to wait longer; urgent duties detained him.
While he was giving this direction, Althea had become engaged in the gay
conversation of the others, and, as Thyone called Hermon, and he was also
obliged to speak to Daphne, he could not again obtain an opportunity for
private talk with the wonderful woman who held out far grander prospects
for his art than the refractory, rude Biamite maiden.
Soon Althea's performance seemed to prove how fortunate a choice he had
made. Her Arachne appeared like a revelation to him. If she kept her
promise, and he succeeded in modelling her in the pose assumed while
imagining the process of transformation, and presented her idea to the
spectators, the great success which hitherto--because he had not yielded
to demands which were opposed to his convictions--he had vainly expected,
could no longer escape him. The Alexandrian fellow-artists who belonged
to his party would gratefully welcome this special work; for what grew
out of it would have nothing in common with the fascination of superhuman
beauty, by which the older artists ensnared the hearts and minds of the
multitude. He would create a genuine woman, who would not lack defects,
yet who, though she inspired neither gratification nor rapture, would
touch, perhaps even thrill, the heart by absolute truth.
While Althea was standing on the pedestal, she had not only represented
the transformation into the spider, but experienced it, and the features
of the spectators revealed that they believed they were witnessing the
sinister event. His aim was now to awaken the same feeling in the
beholders of his Arachne. Nothing, nothing at all must be changed in the
figure of the model, in which many might miss the roundness and plumpness
so pleasing to the eye. Althea's very defects would perfect the figure of
the restless, wretched weaver whom Athene transformed into the spider.
While devoting himself to nursing his friend, he had thought far less of
the new love-happiness which, in spite of her swift flight, was probably
awaiting him through Althea than of the work which was to fill his
existence in the immediate future.
His healthy body, steeled in the palaestra, felt no fatigue after the
sleepless night passed amid so many powerful excitements when he retired
to his chamber and committed himself to the hands of his slave.
It had not been possible to hear his report before, but when he at last
received it Hermon was to learn something extremely unpleasant, and not
only because no word of apology or even explanation of his absence had
reached Ledscha.
Bias was little to blame for this neglect, for, in the first place, he
had found no boat to reach the Pelican Island, because half Tennis was on
the road to Tanis, where, on the night of the full moon, the brilliant
festivals of the full eye of Horns and the great Astarte were celebrated
by the mixed population of this place. When a boat which belonged to
Daphne's galley was finally given to him, the Biamite girl was no longer
at the place appointed for the meeting.
Hoping to find her on the Owl's Nest with old Tabus, he then landed
there, but had been so uncivilly rebuffed on the shore by a rough fellow
that he might be glad to have escaped with sound limbs. Lastly, he stole
to Ledscha's home, and, knowing that her father was absent, had ventured
as far as the open courtyard in the centre of the stately dwelling. The
dogs knew him, and as a light was shining from one of the rooms that
opened upon the courtyard, he peeped in and saw Taus, Ledscha's younger
sister. She was kneeling before the statue of a god at the back of the
room, weeping, while the old housekeeper had fallen asleep with the
distaff in her lap.
He called cautiously to the pretty child. She was awaiting the return of
her sister, who, she supposed, was still detained on the Owl's Nest by
old Tabus's predictions; she had sorrowful tidings for her.
The husband of her friend Gula had returned on his ship and learned that
his wife had gone to the Greek's studio. He had raged like a madman, and
turned the unfortunate woman pitilessly out of doors after sunset. Her
own parents had only been induced to receive her with great difficulty.
Paseth, the jealous husband, had spared her life and refrained from going
at once to kill the artist solely because Hermon had saved his little
daughter at his own peril from the burning house.
"Now," said Ledscha's pretty little sister, "it would also be known that
she had gone with Gula to his master, who was certainly a handsome man,
but for whom, now that young Smethis was wooing her, she cared no more
than she did for her runaway cat. All Tennis would point at her, and she
dared not even think what her father would do when he came home."
These communications had increased Hermon's anxiety.
He was a brave man, and did not fear the vengeance of the enraged
husband, against whom he was conscious of no guilt except having
persuaded his wife to commit an imprudence. What troubled him was only
the consciousness that he had given her and innocent little Taus every
reason to curse their meeting.
The ardent warmth with which Gula blessed him as the preserver of her
child had given him infinite pleasure. Now it seemed as if he had been
guilty of an act of baseness by inducing her to render a service which
was by no means free from danger, as though he wished to be paid for a
good deed.
Besides, the slave had represented the possible consequences of his
imprudence in the most gloomy light, and, with the assurance of knowing
the disposition of his fellow-countrymen, urged his master to leave
Tennis at once; the other Biamite men, who would bear anything rather
than the interference of a Greek in their married lives, might force
Gula's husband to take vengeance on him.
He said nothing about anxiety concerning his own safety, but he had good
reason to fear being regarded as a go-between and called to account for
it.
But his warnings and entreaties seemed to find deaf ears in Hermon. True,
he intended to leave Tennis as soon as possible, for what advantage could
he now find here? First, however, he must attend to the packing of the
statues, and then try to appease Ledscha, and make Gula's husband
understand that he was casting off his pretty wife unjustly.
He would not think of making a hasty departure, he told the slave,
especially as he was to meet Althea, Queen Arsinoe's art-appreciating
relative, in whom he had gained a friend, later in Alexandria.
Then Bias informed him of a discovery to which one of the Thracian's
slave women had helped him, and what he carelessly told his master drove
the blood from his cheeks, and, though his voice was almost stifled by
surprise and shame, made him assail him with questions.
What great thing had he revealed? There had been reckless gaiety at every
festival of Dionysus since he had been in the artist's service, and the
slaves had indulged in the festal mirth no less freely than the masters.
To intoxicate themselves with wine, the gift of the god to whom they were
paying homage, was not only permitted, but commanded, and the juice of
the grape proved its all-equalizing power.
There had been no lack of pretty companions even for him, the bondman,
and the most beautiful of all had made eyes at his master, the tall,
slender man with the splendid black beard.
The reckless Lesbian who had favoured Hermon at the last Dionysia had
played pranks with him madly enough, but then had suddenly vanished. By
his master's orders Bias had tried to find her again, but, in spite of
honest search, in vain.
Just now he had met, as Althea's maid, the little Syrian Margula, who had
been in her company, and raced along in the procession of bacchanals in
his, Bias's, arms. True, she could not be persuaded to make a frank
confession, but he, Bias, would let his right hand wither if Hermon's
companion at the Dionysia was any other than Althea. His master would own
that he was right if he imagined her with black hair instead of red.
Plenty of people in Alexandria practised the art of dyeing, and it was
well known that Queen Arsinoe herself willingly mingled in the throng at
the Dionysia with a handsome Ephebi, who did not suspect the identity of
his companion.
This was the information which had so deeply agitated Hermon, and then
led him, after pacing to and fro a short time, to go first to Myrtilus
and then to Daphne.
He had found his friend sleeping, and though every fibre of his being
urged him to speak to him, he forced himself to leave the sufferer
undisturbed.
Yet so torturing a sense of dissatisfaction with himself, so keen a
resentment against his own adverse destiny had awaked within him, that he
could no longer endure to remain in the presence of his work, with which
he was more and more dissatisfied.
Away from the studio!
There was a gay party on board the galley of his parents' old friends.
Wine should bring him forgetfulness, too, bless him again with the sense
of joyous existence which he knew so well, and which he now seemed on the
point of losing.
When he had once talked and drunk himself into the right mood, life would
wear a less gloomy face.
No! It should once more be a gay and reckless one.
And Althea?
He would meet her, with whom he had once caroused and revelled madly
enough in the intoxication of the last Dionysia, and, instead of allowing
himself to be fooled any longer and continuing to bow respectfully before
her, would assert all the rights she had formerly so liberally granted.
He would enjoy to-day, forget to-morrow, and be gay with the gay.
Eager for new pleasure, he drew a long breath as he went out into the
open air, pressed his hands upon his broad chest, and with his eyes fixed
upon the commandant of Pelusium's galley, bedecked with flags, walked
swiftly toward the landing place.
Suddenly from the deck, shaded by an awning, the loud laugh of a woman's
shrill voice reached his ear, blended with the deeper tones of the
grammateus, whose attacks on the previous night Hermon had not forgotten.
He stopped as if the laugh had pierced him to the heart. Proclus appeared
to be on the most familiar terms with Althea, and to meet him with the
Thracian now seemed impossible. He longed for mirth and pleasure, but was
unwilling to share it with these two. As he dared not disturb Myrtilus,
there was only one place where he could find what he needed, and this
was--he had said so to himself when he turned his back on his sleeping
friend--in Daphne's society.
Only yesterday he would have sought her without a second thought, but
to-day Althea's declaration that he was the only man whom the daughter of
Archias loved stood between him and his friend.
He knew that from childhood she had watched his every step with sisterly
affection. A hundred times she had proved her loyalty; yet, dear as she
was to him, willingly as he would have risked his life to save her from a
danger, it had never entered his mind to give the tie that united them
the name of love.
An older relative of both in Alexandria had once advised him, when he was
complaining of his poverty, to seek her hand, but his pride of manhood
rebelled against having the wealth which fate denied flung into his lap
by a woman. When she looked at him with her honest eyes, he could never
have brought himself to feign anything, least of all a passion of which,
tenderly attached to her though he had been for years, hitherto he had
known nothing.
"Do you love her?" Hermon asked himself as he walked toward Daphne's
tent, and the anticipated "No" had pressed itself upon him far less
quickly than he expected.
One thing was undeniably certain: whoever won her for a wife--even though
she were the poorest of the poor--must be numbered among the most
enviable of men. And should he not recognise in his aversion to every one
of her suitors, and now to the aristocratic young Philotas, a feeling
which resembled jealousy?
No! He did not and would not love Daphne. If she were really his, and
whatever concerned him had become hers, with whom could he have sought in
hours like these soothing, kind, and sensible counsel, comfort that
calmed the heart, and the refreshing dew which his fading courage and
faltering creative power required?
The bare thought of touching clay and wax with his fingers, or taking
hammer, chisel, and file in his hands, was now repulsive; and when, just
outside of the tent, a Biamite woman who was bringing fish to the cook
reminded him of Ledscha, and that he had lost in her the right model for
his Arachne, he scarcely regretted it.
ARACHNE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 4.
CHAPTER XIV.
Outside the door of the tent Hermon was trying to banish Althea's image
from his mind. How foolishly he had overestimated last night the value of
this miserable actress, who as a woman had lost all charm for him--even
as a model for his Arachne!
He would rather have appeared before his pure friend with unsightly
stains on his robe than while mastered by yearning for the Thracian.
The first glance at Daphne's beloved face, the first words of her
greeting, taught him that he should find with her everything for which he
longed.
In simple, truthful words she reproached him for having neglected her to
the verge of incivility the evening before, but there was no trace of
bitterness or resentment in the accusation, and she gave Hermon little
time for apology, but quickly gladdened him with words of forgiveness.
In the opinion of her companion Chrysilla, Daphne ought to have kept the
capricious artist waiting much longer for pardon. True, the cautious
woman took no part in the conversation afterward, but she kept her charge
in sight while she was skilfully knotting the fringe into a cloth which
she had woven herself. On account of her favourite Philotas, it was well
for Daphne to be aware that she was watched.
Chrysilla was acquainted with life, and knew that Eros never mingles more
arbitrarily in the intercourse of a young couple than when, after a long
separation, there is anything whatever to forgive.
Besides, many words which the two exchanged escaped her hearing, for they
talked in low tones, and it was hot in the tent. Often the fatigue she
felt after the sleepless night bowed her head, still comely with its
unwrinkled face, though she was no longer young; then she quickly raised
it again.
Neither Daphne nor Hermon noticed her. The former at once perceived that
something was weighing on the sculptor's mind, but he did not need any
long inquiry. He had come to confide his troubles to her, and she kindly
lightened the task for him by asking why he had not gone to breakfast
with the Pelusinians.
"Because I am not fit for gay company today," was the reply.
"Again dissatisfied with Fate?"
"True, it has given me small cause for contentment of late."
"Put in place of Fate the far-seeing care of the gods, and you will
accept what befalls you less unkindly."
"Let us stick to us mortals, I entreat you."
"Very well, then. Your Demeter does not fully satisfy you."
A discontented shrug of the shoulders was the reply.
"Then work with twofold zeal upon the Arachne."
"Although one model I hoped to obtain forsook me, and my soul is
estranged from the other."
"Althea?" she asked eagerly, and he nodded assent.
Daphne clapped her hands joyfully, exclaiming so loudly that Chrysilla's
head sprang up with a jerk. "It could not help being so! O Hermon! how
anxious I have been! Now, I thought, when this horrible woman represented
the transformation into the spider with such repulsive accuracy, Hermon
will believe that this is the true, and therefore the right, ideal; nay,
I was deceived myself while gazing. But, eternal gods! as soon as I
imagined this Arachne in marble or chryselephantine work, what a painful
feeling overpowered me!"
"Of course!" he replied in an irritated tone. "The thirst for beauty, to
which you all succumb, would not have much satisfaction to expect from
this work."
"No, no, no!" Daphne interrupted in a louder tone than usual, and with
the earnest desire to convince him. "Precisely because I transported
myself into your tendency, your aspirations, I recognised the danger. O
Hermon! what produced so sinister an effect by the wavering light of the
lamps and torches, while the thunderstorm was rising--the strands of
hair, the outspread fingers, the bewildered, staring blue eyes--do you
not feel yourself how artificial, how unnatural it all was? This
transformation was only a clever trick of acting, nothing more. Before a
quiet spectator, in the pure, truthful light of Apollo, the foe of all
deception, what would this Arachne probably become? Even now--I have
already said so--when I imagine her executed in marble or in gold and
ivory! Beauty? Who would expect to find in the active, constantly toiling
weaver, the mortal daughter of an industrious dyer in purple, the calm,
refreshing charm of divine women? I at least am neither foolish nor
unjust enough to do so. The degree of beauty Althea possesses would
entirely satisfy me for the Arachne. But when I imagine a plastic work
faithful to the model of yesterday evening--though I have seen a great
deal with my own eyes, and am always ready to defer to riper judgment--I
would think, while looking at it: This statue came to the artist from the
stage, but never from Nature. Such would be my view, and I am not one of
the initiated. But the adepts! The King, with his thorough
connoisseurship and fine taste, my father, and the other famous judges,
how much more keenly they would perceive and define it!"
Here she hesitated, for the blood had left Hermon's cheeks, and she saw
with surprise the deep impression which the candid expression of her
opinion had produced upon the artist, usually so independent and disposed
to contradiction. Her judgment had undoubtedly disturbed, nay, perhaps
convinced him; but at the same time his features revealed such deep
depression that, far from rejoicing in so rare a success, she patted his
arm like an affectionate sister, saying: "You have not yet found time to
realize calmly what yesterday dazzled us all--and you," she added in a
lower tone, "the most strongly."
"But now," he murmured sadly, half to himself, half to, her, "my vision
is doubly clear. Close before the success of which I dreamed failure and
bitter disappointment."
"If this 'doubly' refers to your completed work, and also to the
Arachne," cried Daphne in the affectionate desire to soothe him, "a
pleasant surprise will perhaps soon await you, for Myrtilus judges your
Demeter much more favourably than you yourself do, and he also betrayed
to me whom it resembles."
She blushed slightly as she spoke, and, as her companion's gloomy face
brightened for a short time, went on eagerly: "And now for the Arachne.
You will and must succeed in what you so ardently strive to accomplish, a
subject so exactly adapted to your magnificent virile genius and so
strangely suited to the course which your art has once entered upon. And
you can not fail to secure the right model. You had not found it in
Althea, no, certainly not! O Hermon! if I could only make you see clearly
how ill suited she, in whom everything is false, is to you--your art,
your only too powerful strength, your aspiration after truth--"
"You hate her," he broke in here in a repellent tone; but Daphne dropped
her quiet composure, and her gray eyes, usually so gentle, flashed
fiercely as she exclaimed: "Yes, and again yes! From my inmost soul I do,
and I rejoice in it. I have long disliked her, but since yesterday I
abhor her like the spider which she can simulate, like snakes and toads,
falsehood and vice."
Hermon had never seen his uncle's peaceful daughter in this mood. The
emotions that rendered this kindly soul so unlike itself could only be
the one powerful couple, love and jealousy; and while gazing intently at
her face, which in this moment seemed to him as beautiful as Dallas
Athene armed for battle, he listened breathlessly as she continued:
"Already the murderous spider had half entangled you in her net. She drew
you out into the tempest--our steward Gras saw it--in order, while Zeus
was raging, to deliver you to the wrath of the other gods also and the
contempt of all good men; for whoever yields himself to her she destroys,
sucks the marrow from his bones like the greedy harpies, and all that is
noble from his soul."
"Why, Daphne," interrupted Chrysilla, raising herself from her cushions
in alarm, "must I remind you of the moderation which distinguishes the
Greeks from the barbarians, and especially the Hellenic woman--"
Here Daphne indignantly broke in: "Whoever practises moderation in the
conflict against vice has already gone halfway over to evil. She utterly
ruined--how long ago is it?--the unfortunate Menander, my poor Ismene's
young husband. You know them both, Hermon. Here, of course, you scarcely
heard how she lured him from his wife and the lovely little girl who
bears my name. She tempted the poor fellow to her ship, only to cast him
off at the end of a month for another. Now he is at home again, but he
thinks Ismene is the statue from the Temple of Isis, which has gained
life and speech; for he has lost his mind, and when I saw him I felt as
if I should die of horror and pity. Now she is coming home with Proclus,
and, as the way led through Pelusium, she attached herself to our friends
and forces herself in here with them. What does she care about her
elderly travelling companion? But you--yes, you, Hermon--are the next
person whom she means to capture. Just now, when my eyes closed But no!
It is not only in my dreams; the hideous gray threads which proceed from
this greedy spider are continually floating before me and dim the light."
Here she paused, for the maid Stephanion announced the coming of
visitors, and at the same time loud voices were heard outside, and the
merry party who had been attending the breakfast given by the commandant
of Pelusium entered the tent.
Althea was among the guests, but she took little notice of Hermon.
Proclus, her associate in Queen Arsinoe's favour, was again asserting his
rights as her travelling companion, and she showed him plainly that the
attention which he paid her was acceptable.
Meanwhile her eager, bright blue eyes were roving everywhere, and nothing
that was passing around her escaped her notice.
As she greeted Daphne she perceived that her cheeks had flushed during
her conversation with Hermon.
How reserved and embarrassed the sculptor's manner was now to his uncle's
daughter, whom only yesterday he had treated with as much freedom as
though she were his sister! What a bungler in dissimulation! how
short-sighted was this big, strong man and remarkable artist! He had
carried her, Althea, in his arms like a child for a whole quarter of an
hour at the festival of Dionysus, and, in spite of the sculptor's keen
eye, he did not recognise her again!
What would not dyes and a change of manner accomplish!
Or had the memory of those mad hours revived and caused his
embarrassment? If he should know that her companion, the Milesian Nanno,
whom he had feasted with her on oyster pasties at Canopus after she had
given the slip to her handsome young companion was Queen Arsinoe! Perhaps
she would inform him of it some day if he recognised her.
Yet that could scarcely have happened. He had only been told what she
betrayed to him yesterday, and was now neglecting her for Daphne's sake.
That was undoubtedly the way the matter stood. How the girl's cheeks were
glowing when she entered!
The obstacle that stood between her and Hermon was the daughter of
Archias, and she, fool that she was, had attracted Hermon's attention to
her.
No matter!
He would want her for the Arachne, and she needed only to stretch out her
hand to draw him to her again if she found no better amusement in
Alexandria. Now she would awaken his fears that the best of models would
recall her favour. Besides, it would not do to resume the pleasant game
with him under the eyes of Philippus and his wife, who was a follower of
the manners of old times. The right course now was to keep him until
later.
Standing at Proclus's side, she took part gaily in the general
conversation; but when Myrtilus and Philemon had joined the others, and
Daphne had consented to go with Philippus and Thyone that evening, in
order, after offering sacrifice together to Selene, to sail for Pelusium,
Althea requested the grammateus to take her, into the open air.
Before leaving the tent, however, she dropped her ostrich-feather fan as
she passed Hermon, and, when he picked it up, whispered with a
significant glance at Daphne, "I see that what was learned of her heart
is turned to account promptly enough."
Then, laughing gaily, she continued loudly enough to be heard by her
companion also: "Yesterday our young artist maintained that the Muse
shunned abundance; but the works of his wealthy friend Myrtilus
contradicted him, and he changed his view with the speed of lightning."
"Would that this swift alteration had concerned the direction of his
art," replied Proclus in a tone audible to her alone.
Both left the tent as he spoke, and Hermon uttered a sigh of relief as he
looked after them. She attributed the basest motives to him, and Daphne's
opinion of her was scarcely too severe.
He no longer needed to fear her power of attraction, though, now that he
had seen her again, he better understood the spell which she had exerted
over him. Every movement of her lithe figure had an exquisite grace,
whose charm was soothing to the artist's eye. Only there was something
piercing in her gaze when it did not woo love, and, while making the base
charge, her extremely thin lips had showed her sharp teeth in a manner
that reminded him of the way the she-wolf among the King's wild beasts in
the Paneum gardens raised her lips when any one went near her cage.
Daphne was right. Ledscha would have been infinitely better as a model
for the Arachne. Everything in this proud creature was genuine and
original, which was certainly not the case with Althea. Besides, stern
austerity was as much a part of the Biamite as her hair and her hands,
yet what ardent passion he had seen glow in her eyes! The model so long
sought in vain he had found in Ledscha, who in so many respects resembled
Arachne. Fool that he was to have yielded to a swift and false ebullition
of feeling!
Since Myrtilus was again near him Hermon had devoted himself with fresh
eagerness to his artistic task, while a voice within cried more and more
loudly that the success of his new work depended entirely upon Ledscha.
He must try to regain her as a model for the Arachne! But while pondering
over the "how," he felt a rare sense of pleasure when Daphne spoke to him
or her glance met his.
At first he had devoted himself eagerly to his father's old friends, and
especially to Thyone, and had not found it quite easy to remain firm
when, in her frank, kindly, cordial manner, she tried to persuade him to
accompany her and the others to Pelusium. Yet he had succeeded in
refusing the worthy couple's invitation. But when he saw Philotas, whose
resemblance to the King, his cousin, had just been mentioned by one of
the officers, become more and more eager in his attentions to Daphne, and
heard him also invited by Philippus to share the nocturnal voyage, he
felt disturbed, and could not conceal from himself that the uneasiness
which constantly obtained a greater mastery over him arose from the fear
of losing his friend to the young aristocrat.
This was jealousy, and where it flamed so hotly love could scarcely be
absent. Yet, had the shaft of Eros really struck him, how was it possible
that the longing to win Ledscha back stirred so strongly within him that
he finally reached a resolution concerning her?
As soon as the guests left Tennis he would approach the Biamite again. He
had already whispered this intention to Myrtilus, when he heard Daphne's
companion say to Thyone, "Philotas will accompany us, and on this voyage
they will plight their troth if Aphrodite's powerful son accepts my
sacrifice."
He involuntarily looked at the pair who were intended for each other, and
saw Daphne lower her eyes, blushing, at a whisper from the young
Macedonian.
His blood also crimsoned his cheeks, and when, soon after, he asked his
friend whether she cared for his companionship, and Daphne assented in
the most eager way, he said that he would share the voyage to Pelusium.
Daphne's eyes had never yet beamed upon him so gladly and graciously.
Althea was right. She must love him, and it seemed as if this conviction
awoke a new star of happiness in his troubled soul.
If Philotas imagined that he could pluck the daughter of Archias like a
ripe fruit from a tree, he would find himself mistaken.
Hermon did not yet exactly understand himself, only he felt certain that
it would be impossible to surrender Daphne to another, and that for her
sake he would give up twenty Ledschas, though he cherished infinitely
great expectations from the Biamite for his art, which hitherto had been
more to him than all else.
Everything that he still had to do in Tennis he could intrust to his
conscientious Bias, to Myrtilus, and his slaves.
If he returned to the city of weavers, he would earnestly endeavour to
palliate the offence which he had inflicted on Ledscha, and, if possible,
obtain her forgiveness. Only one thing detained him--anxiety about his
friend, who positively refused to share the night voyage.
He had promised his uncle Archias to care for him like a brother, and his
own kind heart bade him stay with Myrtilus, and not leave him to the
nursing of his very skilful but utterly unreliable body-servant, after
the last night had proved to what severe attacks of his disease he was
still liable.
Myrtilus, however, earnestly entreated him not to deprive himself on his
account of a pleasure which he would gladly have shared. There was plenty
of time to pack the statues. As for himself, nothing would do him more
good just now than complete rest in his beloved solitude, which, as
Hermon knew, was more welcome to him than the gayest society. Nothing was
to be feared for him now. The thunderstorm had purified the air, and
another one was not to be expected soon in this dry region. He had always
been well here in sunny weather. Storms, which were especially harmful to
him, never came at this season of the year.
Myrtilus secretly thought that Hermon's departure would be desirable,
because the slave Bias had confided to him what dangers threatened his
friend from the incensed Biamite husbands.
Finally, Myrtilus turned to the others and begged them not to let Hermon
leave Pelusium quickly.
When, at parting, he was alone with him, he embraced him and said more
tenderly than usual: "You know how easy it will be for me to depart from
life; but it would be easier still if I could leave you behind without
anxiety, and that would happen if the hymeneal hymns at your marriage to
Daphne preceded the dirges which will soon resound above my coffin.
Yesterday I first became sure that she loves you, and, much good as you
have in your nature, you owe the best to her."
Hermon clasped him in his arms with passionate affection, and after
confessing that he, too, felt drawn with the utmost power toward Daphne,
and urging him to anticipate complete recovery instead of an early death,
he held out his hand to his friend; but Myrtilus clasped it a long time
in his own, saying earnestly: "Only this one frank warning: An Arachne
like the model which Althea presented yesterday evening would deal the
past of your art a blow in the face. No one at Rhodes--and this is just
what I prize in you--hated imitation more, yet what would using the
Arachne on the pedestal for a model be except showing the world not how
Hermon, but how Althea imagines the hapless transformed mortal? Even if
Ledscha withdraws from you, hold fast to her image. It will live on in
your soul. Recall it there, free it from whatever is superfluous, supply
whatever it lacks, animate it with the idea of the tireless artist, the
mocking, defiant mortal woman who ended her life as the weaver of weavers
in the insect world, as you have so often vividly described her to me.
Then, my dear fellow, you will remain loyal to yourself, and therefore
also to the higher truth, toward which every one of us who labours
earnestly strives, and, myself included, there is no one who wields
hammer and chisel in Greece who could contest the prize with you."
CHAPTER XV.
When the sun was approaching the western horizon the travellers started.
Light mists veiled the radiant right eye of the goddess of heaven. The
blood of the contending spirits of light and darkness, which usually dyed
the west of Egypt crimson at the departure of the great sun god, to-day
vanished from sight.
The sultry air was damp and oppressive, and experienced old Philippus,
who had commanded a fleet of considerable size under the first Ptolemies,
agreed with the captain of the vessel, who pointed to several small dark
clouds under the silvery stratus, and expressed the fear that Selene
would hardly illumine the ship's course during the coming night.
But before the departure the travellers had offered sacrifices to the
foam-born Cyprian Aphrodite and the Dioscuri, the protectors of mariners,
and the conversation took the gayest turn.
In the harbour of the neighbouring seaport Tanis they went aboard of the
commandant's state galley, one of the largest and finest in the royal
fleet, where a banquet awaited them.
Cushions were arranged on the high poop, and the sea was as smooth as the
silver dishes in which viands were offered to the guests.
True, not a breath stirred the still, sultry air, but the three long
double ranks of rowers in the hold of the ship provided for her swift
progress, and if no contrary wind sprang up she would run into the
harbour of Pelusium before the last goblet was emptied.
Soon after the departure it seemed as if the captain of the little vessel
had erred in his prediction, for the moon burst victoriously through the
black clouds, only its shining orb was surrounded by a dull, glimmering
halo.
Doubtless many a guest longed for a cool breeze, but when the mixed wine
had moistened the parched tongues the talk gained fresh animation.
Every one did his or her part, for the point in question was to induce
Philippus and his wife to visit Alexandria again and spend some time
there as beloved guests with Daphne in her father's house or in the
palace of Philotas, who jestingly, yet with many reasons, contested the
honour with the absent Archias.
The old warrior had remained away from the capital for several years; he
alone knew why. Now the act which had incensed him and the offence
inflicted upon him were forgotten, and, having passed seventy four years,
he intended to ask the commander in chief once more for the retirement
from the army which the monarch had several times refused, in order, as a
free man, to seek again the city which in his present position he had so
long avoided.
Thyone, it is true, thought that her husband's youthful vigour rendered
this step premature, but the visit to Alexandria harmonized with her own
wishes.
Proclus eagerly sided with her. "To him," said the man of manifold
knowledge, who as high priest of Apollo was fond of speaking in an
instructive tone, "experience showed that men like Philippus, who solely
on account of the number of their years withdrew their services from the
state, felt unhappy, and, like the unused ploughshare, became prematurely
rusty. What they lacked, and what Philippus would also miss, was not
merely the occupation, which might easily be supplied by another, but
still more the habit of command. One who had had thousands subject to his
will was readily overcome by the feeling that he was going down hill,
when only a few dozen of his own slaves and his wife obeyed him."
This word aroused the mirth of old Philippus, who praised all the good
qualities of Macedonian wives except that of obedience, while Thyone
protested that during her more than forty years of married life her
husband had become so much accustomed to her complete submission than he
no longer noticed it. If Philippus should command her to-morrow to leave
their comfortable palace in Pelusium to accompany him to Alexandria,
where they possessed no home of their own, he would see how willingly she
obeyed him.
While speaking, her bright, clear eyes, which seemed to float in the deep
hollows sunk by age, sparkled so merrily in her wrinkled face that
Philippus shook his finger gaily at her and showed plainly how much
pleasure the jest of the old companion of his wanderings gave him.
Yet he insisted upon his purpose of not entering Alexandria again until
he had resigned his office, and to do this at present was impossible,
since he was bound just now, as if with chains, to the important frontier
fortress. Besides, there had probably been little change in the capital
since the death of his beloved old companion in arms and master, the late
King.
This assertion evoked a storm of contradiction, and even the younger
officers, who usually imposed severe restraint upon themselves in the
general's presence, raised their voices to prove that they, too, had
looked around the flourishing capital with open eyes.
Yet it was not six decades since Philippus, then a lad of seventeen, had
been present at its foundation.
His father, who had commanded as hipparch a division of cavalry in the
army of Alexander the Great, had sent for the sturdy youth just at that
time to come to Egypt, that he might enter the army. The conqueror of the
world had himself assigned him, as a young Macedonian of good family, to
the corps of the Hetairoi; and how the vigorous old man's eyes sparkled
as, with youthful enthusiasm, he spoke of the divine vanquisher of the
world who had at that time condescended to address him, gazed at him
keenly yet encouragingly with his all-discerning but kindly blue eyes,
and extended his hand to him!
"That," he cried, "made this rough right hand precious to me. Often when,
in Asia, in scorching India, and later here also, wounded or exhausted,
it was ready to refuse its service, a spirit voice within cried, 'Do not
forget that he touched it'; and then, as if I had drunk the noble wine of
Byblus, a fiery stream flowed from my heart into the paralyzed hand, and,
as though animated with new life, I used it again and kept it worthy of
his touch. To have seen a darling of the gods like him, young men, makes
us greater. It teaches us how even we human beings are permitted to
resemble the immortals. Now he is transported among the gods, and the
Olympians received him, if any one, gladly. Whoever shared the deeds of
such a hero takes a small portion of his renown with him through life and
into the grave, and whom he touched, as befell me, feels himself
consecrated, and whatever is petty and base flows away from him like
water from the anointed body of the wrestler. Therefore I consider myself
fortunate above thousands of others, and if there is anything which still
tempts me to go to Alexandria, it is the desire to touch his dead body
once more. To do that before I die is my most ardent desire."
"Then gratify it!" cried Thyone with urgent impatience; but Proclus
turned to the matron, and, after exchanging a hasty glance with Althea,
said: "You probably know, my venerable friend, that Queen Arsinoe, who
most deeply honours your illustrious husband, had already arranged to
have him summoned to the capital as priest of Alexander. True, in this
position he would have had the burden of disposing of all the revenues
from the temples throughout Egypt; but, on the other hand, he would
always have his master's mortal remains near and be permitted to be their
guardian. What influences baffled the Queen's wish certainly have not
remained hidden from you here."
"You are mistaken," replied Philippus gravely. "Not the least whisper of
this matter reached my ears, and it is fortunate."
"Impossible!" Althea eagerly interrupted; "nothing else was talked of for
weeks in the royal palace. Queen Arsinoe--you might be jealous, Lady
Thyone--has been fairly in love with your hero ever since her last stay
in your house on her way home from Thrace, and she has not yet given up
her desire to see him in the capital as priest of Alexander. It seems to
her just and fair that the old companion of the greatest of the great
should have the highest place, next to her husband's, in the city whose
foundation he witnessed. Arsinoe speaks of you also with all the
affection natural to her feeling heart."
"This is as flattering as it is surprising," replied Thyone. "The
attention we showed her in Pelusium was nothing more than we owed to the
wife of the sovereign. But the court is not the principal attraction that
draws me to the capital. It would make Philippus happy--you have just
heard him say so--to remember his old master beside the tomb of
Alexander."
"And," added Daphne, "how amazed you will be when you see the present
form of the 'Soma', in which rests the golden coffin with the body of the
divine hero whom the fortunate Philippus aided to conquer the world!"
"You are jesting," interrupted the old warrior. "I aided him only as the
drops in the stream help to turn the wheel of the mill. As to his body,
true, I marched at the head of the procession which bore it to Memphis
and thence to Alexandria. In the Soma I was permitted to think of him
with devout reverence, and meantime I felt as if I had again seen him
with these eyes--exactly as he looked in the Egyptian fishing village of
Rhacotis, which he transformed into your magnificent Alexandria. What a
youth he was! Even what would have been a defect in others became a
beauty in him. The powerful neck which supported his divine head was a
little crooked; but what grace it lent him when he turned kindly to any
one! One scarcely noticed it, and yet it was like the bend of a
petitioner, and gave the wish which he expressed resistless power. When
he stood erect, the sharpest eye could not detect it. Would that he could
appear before me thus once more! Besides, the buildings which surrounded
the golden coffin were nearly completed at the time of our departure."
"But the statues, reliefs, and mosaic work were lacking," said Hermon.
"They were executed by Lysippus, Euphranor, and others of our greatest
artists; the paintings by Apelles himself, Antiphilus, and Nicias. Only
those who had won renown were permitted to take part in this work, and
the Ares rushing to battle, created by our Myrtilus, can be seen among
the others. The tomb of Alexander was not entirely completed until three
years ago."
"At the same time as the Paneum," added Philotas, completing the
sentence; and Althea, waving her beaker toward the old hero, remarked:
"When you have your quarters in the royal palace with your crowned
admirer, Arsinoe--which, I hope, will be very soon--I will be your
guide."
"That office is already bestowed on me by the Lady Thyone," Daphne
quietly replied.
"And you think that, in this case, obedience is the husband's duty?"
cried the other, with a sneering laugh.
"It would only be the confirmation of a wise choice," replied Philippus,
who disliked the Thracian's fawning manner.
Thyone, too, did not favour her, and had glanced indignantly at her when
Althea made her rude remark. Now she turned to Daphne, and her plain face
regained its pleasant expression as she exclaimed: "We really promised
your father to let him show us the way, child; but, unfortunately, we are
not yet in Alexandria and the Paneum."
"But you would set out to-morrow," Hermon protested, "if we could succeed
in fitly describing what now awaits you there. There is only one
Alexandria, and no city in the world can offer a more beautiful scene
than is visible from the mountain in the Paneum gardens."
"Certainly not," protested the young hipparch, who had studied in Athens.
"I stood on the Acropolis; I was permitted to visit Rhodes and Miletus--"
"And you saw nothing more beautiful there," cried Proclus. "The
aristocratic Roman envoys, who left us a short time ago, admitted the
same thing. They are just men, for the view from the Capitol of their
growing city is also to be seen. When the King's command led me to the
Tiber, many things surprised me; but, as a whole, how shall I compare the
two cities? The older Rome, with her admirable military power: a
barbarian who is just beginning to cultivate more refined
manners--Alexandria: a rich, aristocratic Hellene who, like you, my young
friend, completed her education in Ilissus, and unites to the elegant
taste and intellect of the Athenian the mysterious thoughtfulness of the
Egyptian, the tireless industry of the Jew, and the many-sided wisdom and
brilliant magnificence of the other Oriental countries."
"But who disdains to dazzle the eyes with Asiatic splendour," interrupted
Philotas.
"And yet what do we not hear about the unprecedented luxury in the royal
palace!" growled the gray-haired warrior.
"Parsimony--the gods be praised!--no one need expect from our royal
pair," Althea broke in; "but King Ptolemy uses his paternal wealth for
very different purposes than glittering gems and golden chambers. If you
disdain my guidance, honoured hero, at least accept that of some genuine
Alexandrian. Then you will understand Proclus's apt simile. You ought to
begin with the royal palaces in the Brucheium."
"No, no-with the harbour of Eunostus!" interrupted the grammateus.
"With the Soma!" cried the young hipparch, while Daphne wished to have
the tour begin in the Paneum gardens.
"They were already laid out when we left Alexandria," said Thyone.
"And they have grown marvellously, as if creative Nature had doubled her
powers in their behalf," Hermon added eagerly. "But man has also wrought
amazing miracles here. Industrious hands reared an actual mountain. A
winding path leads to the top, and when you stand upon the summit and
look northward you at first feel like the sailor who steps on shore and
hears the people speak a language which is new to him. It seems like a
jumble of meaningless sounds until he learns, not only to understand the
words, but also to distinguish the sentences. Temples and palaces,
statues and columns appear everywhere in motley confusion. Each one, if
you separate it from the whole and give it a careful examination, is
worthy of inspection, nay, of admiration. Here are light, graceful
creations of Hellenic, yonder heavy, sombre ones of Egyptian art, and in
the background the exquisite azure of the eternal sea, which the
marvellous structure of the heptastadium unites to the land; while on the
island of Pharos the lighthouse of Sostratus towers aloft almost to the
sky, and with a flood of light points out the way to mariners who
approach the great harbour at night. Countless vessels are also at anchor
in the Eunostus. The riches of the whole earth flow into both havens. And
the life and movement there and in the inland harbour on Lake Mareotis,
where the Nile boats land! From early until late, what a busy throng,
what an abundance of wares--and how many of the most valuable goods are
made in our own city! for whatever useful, fine, and costly articles
industrial art produces are manufactured here. The roof has not yet been
put on many a factory in which busy workers are already making beautiful
things. Here the weaver's shuttle flies, yonder gold is spun around
slender threads of sheep guts, elsewhere costly materials are embroidered
by women's nimble fingers with the prepared gold thread. There glass is
blown, or weapons and iron utensils are forged. Finely polished knives
split the pith of the papyrus, and long rows of workmen and workwomen gum
the strips together. No hand, no head is permitted to rest. In the Museum
the brains of the great thinkers and investigators are toiling. Here,
too, reality asserts its rights. The time for chimeras and wretched
polemics is over. Now it is observing, fathoming, turning to account,
nothing more!"
"Gently, my young friend," Proclus interrupted the artist. "I know that
you, too, sat at the feet of some of the philosophers in the Museum, and
still uphold the teachings of Straton, which your fellow-pupil, King
Ptolemy, outgrew long ago. Yet he, also, recognised in philosophy, first
of all, the bond which unites the widely sundered acquisitions of the
intellect, the vital breath which pervades them, the touchstone which
proves each true or false. If the praise of Alexandria is to be sung, we
must not forget the library to which the most precious treasures of
knowledge of the East and West are flowing, and which feeds those who
thirst for knowledge with the intellectual gains of former ages and other
nations. Honour, too, to our King, and, that I may be just, to his
illustrious wife; for wherever in the Grecian world a friend of the Muses
appears, whether he is investigator, poet, architect, sculptor, artist,
actor, or singer, he is drawn to Alexandria, and, that he may not be
idle, work is provided. Palaces spring from the earth quickly enough."
"Yet not like mushrooms," Hermon interrupted, "but as the noblest, most
carefully executed creations of art-sculpture and painting provide for
their decoration both without and within."
"And," Proclus went on, "abodes are erected for the gods as well as for
men, both Egyptian and Hellenic divinities, each in their own style, and
so beautiful that it must be a pleasure for them to dwell under the new
roof."
"Go to the gardens of the Paneum, friends!" cried young Philotas; and
Hermon, nodding to Thyone, added gaily: "Then you must climb the mountain
and keep your eyes open while you are ascending the winding path. You
will find enough to do to look at all the new sights. You will stand
there with dry feet, but your soul will bathe in eternal, imperishable,
divine beauty."
"The foe of beauty!" exclaimed Proclus, pointing to the sculptor with a
scornful glance; but Daphne, full of joyous emotion, whispered to Hermon
as he approached her: "Eternal, divine beauty! To hear it thus praised by
you makes me happy."
"Yes," cried the artist, "what else should I call what has so often
filled me with the deepest rapture? The Greek language has no more
fitting expression for the grand and lofty things that hovered before me,
and which I called by that chameleon of a word. Yet I have a different
meaning from what appears before you at its sound. Were I to call it
truth, you would scarcely understand me, but when I conjure before my
soul the image of Alexandria, with all that springs from it, all that is
moving, creating, and thriving with such marvellous freedom, naturalness,
and variety within it, it is not alone the beauty that pleases the eye
which delights me; I value more the sound natural growth, the genuine,
abundant life. To truth, Daphne, as I mean it."
He raised his goblet as he spoke and drank to her.
She willingly pledged him, but, after removing her lips from the cup, she
eagerly exclaimed: "Show it to us, with the mind which animates it, in
perfect form, and I should not know wherein it was to be distinguished
from the beauty which hitherto has been our highest goal."
Here the helmsman's loud shout, "The light of Pelusium!" interrupted the
conversation. The bright glare from the lighthouse of this city was
really piercing the misty night air, which for some time had again
concealed the moon.
There was no further connected conversation, for the sea was now rising
and falling in broad, leaden, almost imperceptible waves. The comfort of
most of Philippus's guests was destroyed, and the ladies uttered a sigh
of relief when they had descended from the lofty galley and the boats
that conveyed them ashore, and their feet once more pressed the solid
land. The party of travellers went to the commandant's magnificent palace
to rest, and Hermon also retired to his room, but sleep fled from his
couch.
No one on earth was nearer to his heart and mind than Daphne, and it
often seemed as if her kind, loyal, yet firm look was resting upon him;
but the memory of Ledscha also constantly forced itself upon his mind and
stirred his blood. When he thought of the menacing fire of her dark eyes,
she seemed to him as terrible as one of the unlovely creatures born of
Night, the Erinyes, Apate, and Eris.
Then he could not help recalling their meetings in the grove of Astarte,
her self-forgetting, passionate tenderness, and the wonderfully delicate
beauty of her foreign type. True, she had never laughed in his presence;
but what a peculiar charm there was in her smile! Had he really lost her
entirely and forever? Would it not yet be possible to obtain her
forgiveness and persuade her to pose as the model of his Arachne?
During the voyage to Pelusium he had caught Althea's eye again and again,
and rejected as an insult her demand to give her his whole love. The
success of the Arachne depended upon Ledscha, and on her alone. He had
nothing good to expect from the Demeter, and during the nocturnal
meditation, which shows everything in the darkest colours, his best plan
seemed to be to destroy the unsuccessful statue and not exhibit it for
the verdict of the judges.
But if he went to work again in Tennis to model the Arachne, did not love
for Daphne forbid him to sue afresh for Ledscha's favour?
What a terrible conflict of feelings!
But perhaps all this might gain a more satisfactory aspect by daylight.
Now he felt as though he had entangled himself in a snare. Besides, other
thoughts drove sleep from his couch.
The window spaces were closed by wooden shutters, and whenever they moved
with a low creaking or louder banging Hermon started and forgot
everything else in anxiety about his invalid friend, whose suffering
every strong wind brought on again, and often seriously increased.
Three times he sprang up from the soft wool, covered with linen sheets,
and looked out to convince himself that no storm had risen. But, though
masses of black clouds concealed the moon and stars, and the sea beat
heavily against the solid walls of the harbour, as yet only a sultry
breeze of no great strength blew on his head as he thrust it into the
night air.
This weather could scarcely be dangerous to Myrtilus, yet when the
morning relieved him from the torturing anxiety which he had found under
his host's roof instead of rest and sleep, gray and black clouds were
sweeping as swiftly over the port and the ramparts beside him as if they
were already driven by a tempest, and warm raindrops besprinkled his
face.
He went, full of anxiety, to take his bath, and, while committing the
care of the adornment of his outer man to one of the household slaves, he
determined that unless--as often happened in this country--the sun gained
the victory over the clouds, he would return to Tennis and join Myrtilus.
In the hall of the men he met the rest of the old hero's guests.
They received him pleasantly enough, Althea alone barely noticed his
greeting; she seemed to suspect in what way he thought of her.
Thyone and Daphne extended their hands to him all the more cordially.
Philippus did not appear until after breakfast. He had been detained by
important despatches from Alexandria, and by questions and communications
from Proclus. The latter desired to ascertain whether the influential
warrior who commanded the most important fortress in the country could be
persuaded to join a conspiracy formed by Arsinoe against her royal
husband, but he seemed to have left Philippus with very faint hopes.
Subordinate officers and messengers also frequently claimed the
commandant's attention. When the market place was filling, however, the
sturdy old soldier kindly fulfilled his duties as host by offering to
show his guests the sights of the fortified seaport.
Hermon also accompanied him at Daphne's side, but he made it easy for
Philotas to engross her attention; for, though the immense thickness of
the walls and the arrangement of the wooden towers which, crowned with
battlements, rose at long intervals, seemed to him also well worth
seeing, he gave them only partial attention.
While Philippus was showing the guests how safely the archers and
slingers could be concealed behind the walls and battlements and
discharge their missiles, and explaining the purpose of the great
catapults on the outermost dike washed by the sea, the artist was
listening to the ever-increasing roar of the waves which poured into the
harbour from the open sea, to their loud dashing against the strong mole,
to the shrill scream of the sea gulls, the flapping of the sails, which
were being taken in everywhere--in short, to all the sounds occasioned by
the rising violence of the wind.
There were not a few war ships in the port and among them perfect giants
of amazing size and unusual construction, but Hermon had already seen
many similar ones.
When, shortly after noon, the sun for a few brief moments pierced with
scorching rays the dark curtain that shrouded it from sight, and then
suddenly dense masses of clouds, driven from the sea by the tempest,
covered the day star, his eyes and cars were engrossed entirely by the
uproar of the elements.
The air darkened as if night was falling at this noontide hour, and with
savage fury the foaming mountain waves rushed like mad wild beasts in
fierce assault upon the mole, the walls, and the dikes of the fortified
port.
"Home!" cried Thyone, and again entered the litter which she had left to
inspect the new catapults.
Althea, trembling, drew her peplos together as the storm swept her light
figure before it, and, shrieking, struggled against the black slaves who
tried to lift her upon the war elephant which had borne her here.
Philotas gave his arm to Daphne. Hermon had ceased to notice her; he had
just gone to his gray-haired host with the entreaty that he would give
him a ship for the voyage to Tennis, where Myrtilus would need his
assistance.
"It is impossible in such weather," was the reply.
"Then I will ride!" cried Hermon resolutely, and Philippus scanned the
son of his old friend and companion in arms with an expression of quiet
satisfaction in his eyes, still sparkling brightly, and answered quickly,
"You shall have two horses, my boy, and a guide who knows the road
besides."
Then, turning swiftly to one of the officers who accompanied him, he
ordered him to provide what was necessary.
When, soon after, in the impluvium, the tempest tore the velarium that
covered the open space from its rings, and the ladies endeavoured to
detain Hermon, Philippus silenced them with the remark:
"A disagreeable ride is before him, but what urges him on is pleasing to
the gods. I have just ventured to send out a carrier dove," he added,
turning to the artist, "to inform Myrtilus that he may expect you before
sunset. The storm comes from the cast, otherwise it would hardly reach
the goal. Put even if it should be lost, what does it matter?"
Thyone nodded to her old husband with a look of pleasure, and her eyes
shone through tears at Hermon as she clasped his hand and, remembering
her friend, his mother, exclaimed: "Go, then, you true son of your
father, and tell your friend that we will offer sacrifices for his
welfare."
"A lean chicken to Aesculapius," whispered the grammateus to Althea. "She
holds on to the oboli."
"Which, at any rate, would be hard enough to dispose of in this wretched
place unless one were a dealer in weapons or a thirsty sailor," sighed
the Thracian. "As soon as the sky and sea are blue again, chains could
not keep me here. And the cooing around this insipid rich beauty into the
bargain!"
This remark referred to Philotas, who was just offering Daphne a
magnificent bunch of roses, which a mounted messenger had brought to him
from Alexandria.
The girl received it with a grateful glance, but she instantly separated
one of the most beautiful blossoms from its companions and handed it to
Hermon, saying, "For our suffering friend, with my affectionate
remembrances."
The artist pressed her dear hand with a tender look of love, intended to
express how difficult it was for him to leave her, and when, just at that
moment, a slave announced that the horses were waiting, Thyone whispered:
"Have no anxiety, my son! Your ride away from her through the tempest
will bring you a better reward than his slave's swift horse will bear the
giver of the roses."
CHAPTER XVI.
Hermon, with the rose for his friend fastened in the breast folds of his
chiton, mounted his horse gratefully, and his companion, a sinewy,
bronzed Midianite, who was also to attend to the opening of the fortress
gates, did the same.
Before reaching the open country the sculptor had to ride through the
whole city, with which he was entirely unfamiliar. Fiercely as the storm
was sweeping down the streets and squares, and often as the horseman was
forced to hold on to his travelling hat and draw his chlamys closer
around him, he felt the anxieties which had made his night sleepless and
saddened his day suddenly leave him as if by a miracle. Was it the
consciousness of having acted rightly? was it the friendly farewell which
Daphne had given him, and the hope Thyone had aroused, or the expectation
of seeing Ledscha once more, and at least regaining her good will, that
had restored his lost light-heartedness? He did not know himself, nor did
he desire to know.
While formerly he had merely glanced carelessly about him in Pelusium,
and only half listened to the explanations given by the veteran's deep
voice, now whatever he saw appeared in clear outlines and awakened his
interest, in spite of the annoyances caused by the storm.
Had he not known that he was in Pelusium, it would have been difficult
for him to determine whether the city he was crossing was an Egyptian, a
Hellenic, or a Syrian one; for here rose an ancient temple of the time of
the Pharaohs, with obelisks and colossal statues before the lofty pylons,
yonder the sanctuary of Poseidon, surrounded by stately rows of Doric
columns, and farther on the smaller temple dedicated to the Dioscuri, and
the circular Grecian building that belonged to Aphrodite.
In another spot, still close to the harbour, he saw the large buildings
consecrated to the worship of the Syrian Baal and Astarte.
Here he was obliged to wait awhile, for the tempest had excited the war
elephants which were returning from their exercising ground, and their
black keepers only succeeded with the utmost difficulty in restraining
them. Shrieking with fear, the few persons who were in the street besides
the soldiers, that were everywhere present, scattered before the huge,
terrified animals.
The costume and appearance of the citizens, too, gave no clew to the
country to which the place belonged; there were as many Egyptians among
them as Greeks, Syrians, and negroes. Asiatics appeared in the majority
only in the market place, where the dealers were just leaving their
stands to secure their goods from the storm. In front of the big building
where the famous Pelusinian xythus beer was brewed, the drink was being
carried away in jugs and wineskins, in ox-carts and on donkeys. Here,
too, men were loading camels, which were rarely seen in Egypt, and had
been introduced there only a short time before.
How forcibly all these things riveted Hermon's attention, now that no one
was at hand to explain them and no delay was permitted! He scarcely had
time for recollection and expectation.
Finally, the last gate was unlocked, and the ramparts and moats lay
behind him.
Thus far the wind had kept back the rain, and only scattered drops lashed
the riders' faces; but as soon as they entered the open country, it
seemed as though the pent-up floods burst the barriers which retained
them above, and a torrent of water such as only those dry regions know
rushed, not in straight or slanting lines, but in thick streams, whirled
by the hurricane, upon the marshy land which stretched from Pelusium to
Tennis, and on the horsemen.
The road led along a dike raised above fields which, at this season of
the year, were under water, and Hermon's companion knew it well.
For a time both riders allowed themselves to be drenched in silence. The
water ran down upon them from their broad-brimmed hats, and their
dripping horses trotted with drooping heads and steaming flanks one
behind the other until, at the very brick-kiln where Ledscha had recalled
her widowed sister's unruly slaves to obedience, the guide stopped with
an oath, and pointed to the water which had risen to the top of the dam,
and in some places concealed the road from their eyes.
Now it was no longer possible to trot, for the guide was obliged to seek
the traces of the dike with great caution. Meanwhile the force of the
pouring rain by no means lessened--nay, it even seemed to increase--and
the horses were already wading in water up to their fetlocks.
But if the votive stones, the little altars and statues of the gods, the
bushes and single trees along the sides of the dike road were overflowed
while the travellers were in the region of the marsh, they would be
obliged to interrupt their journey, for the danger of sinking into the
morass with their horses would then threaten them.
Even at the brick-kiln travellers, soldiers, and trains of merchandise
had stopped to wait for the end of the cloud-burst.
In front of the farmhouse, too, which Hermon and his companion next
reached, they saw dozens of people seeking shelter, and the Midianite
urged his master to join them for a short time at least. The wisest
course here was probably to yield, and Hermon was already turning his
horse's head toward the house when a Greek messenger dashed past the
beckoning refuge and also by him.
"Do you dare to ride farther?" the artist shouted in a tone of warning
inquiry to the man on the dripping bay, and the latter, without pausing,
answered: "Duty! On business for the King!"
Then Hermon turned his steed back toward the road, beat the water from
his soaked beard with the edge of his hand, and with a curt "Forward!"
announced his decision to his companion. Duty summoned him also, and what
another risked for the King he would not fail to do for his friend.
The Midianite, shaking his head, rode angrily after him; but, though the
violence of the rain was lessening, the wind began to blow with redoubled
force, beating and lashing the boundless expanse of the quickly formed
lake with such savage fury that it rolled in surges like the sea, and
sweeping over it dense clouds of foam like the sand waves tossed by the
desert tempests.
Sometimes moaning, sometimes whistling, the gusts of the hurricane drove
the water and the travellers before it, while the rain poured from the
sky to the earth, and wherever it struck splashed upward, making little
whirlpools and swiftly breaking bubbles.
What might not Myrtilus suffer in this storm! This thought strengthened
Hermon's courage to twice ride past other farmhouses which offered
shelter. At the third the horse refused to wade farther in such a
tempest, so there was nothing to be done except spring off and lead it to
the higher ground which the water had not yet reached.
The interior of the peasant hut was filled with people who had sought
shelter there, and the stifling atmosphere which the artist felt at the
door induced him to remain outside.
He had stood there dripping barely fifteen minutes when loud shouts and
yells were heard on the road from Pelusium by which he had come, and upon
the flooded dike appeared a body of men rushing forward with marvellous
speed.
The nearer they came the fiercer and more bewildering sounded the loud,
shrill medley of their frantic cries, mingled with hoarse laughter, and
the spectacle presented to the eyes was no less rough and bold.
The majority seemed to be powerful men. Their complexions were as light
as the Macedonians; their fair, red, and brown locks were thick, unkempt,
and bristling. Most of the reckless, defiantly bold faces were
smooth-shaven, with only a mustache on the upper lip, and sometimes a
short imperial. All carried weapons, and a fleece covered the shoulders
of many, while chains, ornamented with the teeth of animals, hung on
their white muscular chests.
"Galatians," Hermon heard one man near him call to another. "They came to
the fortress as auxiliary troops. Philippus forbade them to plunder on
pain of death, and showed them--the gods be thanked!--that he was in
earnest. Otherwise it would soon look here as though the plagues of
locusts, flood, and fire had visited us at once. Red-haired men are not
the only sons of Typhon!"
And Hermon thought that he had indeed never seen any human beings equally
fierce, bold to the verge of reckless madness, as these Gallic warriors.
The tempest which swept them forward, and the water through which they
waded, only seemed to increase their enjoyment, for sheer delight rang in
their exulting shouts and yells.
Oh, yes! To march amid this uproar of the elements was a pleasure to the
healthy men. It afforded them the rarest, most enlivening delight. For a
long time nothing had so strongly reminded them of the roaring of the
wind and the rushing of the rain in their northern home. It seemed a
delicious relief, after the heat and dryness of the south, which they had
endured with groans.
When they perceived the eyes fixed upon them they swung their weapons,
arched their breasts with conscious vanity, distorted their faces into
terrible threatening grimaces, or raised bugle horns to their lips, drew
from them shrill, ear-piercing notes and gloated, with childish delight,
in the terror of the gaping crowd, on whom the restraint of authority
sternly forbade them to show their mettle.
Lust of rapine and greed for booty glittered in many a fiery, longing
look, but their leaders kept them in check with the sword. So they rushed
on without stopping, like a thunderstorm pregnant with destruction which
the wind drives over a terrified village.
Hermon also had to take the road they followed, and, after giving the
Gauls a long start, he set out again.
But though he succeeded in passing the marshy region without injury,
there had been delay after delay; here the horses had left the flooded
dike road and floundered up to their knees in the morass, there trees
from the roadside, uprooted by the storm, barred the way.
As night closed in the rain ceased and the wind began to subside, but
dark clouds covered the sky, and the horsemen were still an hour's ride
from the place where the road ended at the little harbour from which
travellers entered the boat which conveyed them to Tennis.
The way no longer led through the marsh, but through tilled lands, and
crossed the ditches which irrigated the fields on wooden bridges.
On their account, in the dense darkness which prevailed, caution was
necessary, and this the guide certainly did not lack. He rode at a slow
walk in front of the artist, and had just pointed out to him the light at
the landing place of the boat which went to Tennis, when Hermon was
suddenly startled by a loud cry, followed by clattering and splashing.
With swift presence of mind he sprang from his horse and found his
conjecture verified. The bridge had broken down, and horse and rider had
fallen into the broad canal.
"The Galatians!" reached Hermon from the dark depths, and the exclamation
relieved him concerning the fate of the Midianite.
The latter soon struggled up to the road uninjured. The bridge must have
given way under the feet of the savage horde, unless the Gallic monsters,
with brutal malice, had intentionally shattered it.
The first supposition, however, seemed to be the correct one, for as
Hermon approached the canal he heard moans of pain. One of the Gauls had
apparently met with an accident in the fall of the bridge and been
deserted by his comrades. With the skill acquired in the wrestling
school, Hermon descended into the canal to look for the wounded man,
while his guide undertook to get the horses ashore.
The deep darkness considerably increased the difficulty of carrying out
his purpose, but the young Greek went up to his neck in the water he
could not become wetter than he was already. So he remained in the ditch
until he found the injured man whose groans of suffering pierced his
compassionate heart.
He was obliged to release the luckless Gaul from the broken timbers of
the bridge, and, when Hermon had dragged him out on the opposite bank of
the canal, he made no answer to any question. A falling beam had probably
struck him senseless.
His hair, which Hermon's groping fingers informed him was thick and
rough, seemed to denote a Gaul, but a full, long beard was very rarely
seen in this nation, and the wounded man wore one. Nor could anything be
discovered from the ornaments or weapons of this fierce barbarian.
But to whatever people he might belong, he certainly was not a Greek. The
thoroughly un-Hellenic wrapping up of the legs proved that.
No matter! Hermon at any rate was dealing with some one who was severely
injured, and the self-sacrificing pity with which even suffering animals
inspired him, and which in his boyhood had drawn upon him the jeers of
the companions of his own age, did not abandon him now.
Reluctantly obeying his command, the Midianite helped him bandage the
sufferer's head, in which a wound could be felt, as well as it could be
done in the darkness, and lift him on the artist's horse. During this
time fresh groans issued from the bearded lips of the injured warrior,
and Hermon walked by his side, guarding the senseless man from the danger
of falling from the back of the horse as it slowly followed the
Midianite's.
This tiresome walk, however, did not last long; the landing place was
reached sooner than Hermon expected, and the ferryboat bore the
travellers and the horses to Tennis.
By the flickering light of the captain's lantern it was ascertained that
the wounded man, in spite of his long dark beard, was probably a Gaul.
The stupor was to be attributed to the fall of a beam on his head, and
the shock, rather than to the wound. The great loss of blood sustained by
the young and powerful soldier had probably caused the duration of the
swoon.
During the attempts at resuscitation a sailor boy offered his assistance.
He carefully held the lantern, and, as its flickering light fell for
brief moments upon the artist's face, the lad of thirteen or fourteen
asked if he was Hermon of Alexandria.
A curt "If you will permit," answered the question, considered by the
Hellenes an unseemly one, especially from such a youth; but the sculptor
paid no further attention to him, for, while devoting himself honestly to
the wounded man, his anxiety about his invalid friend increased, and
Ledscha's image also rose again before him.
At last the ferryboat touched the land, and when Hermon looked around for
the lad he had already leaped ashore, and was just vanishing in the
darkness.
It was probably within an hour of midnight.
The gale was still blowing fiercely over the water, driving the black
clouds across the dark sky, sometimes with long-drawn, wailing sounds,
sometimes with sharp, whistling ones. The rain had wholly ceased, and
seemed to have exhausted itself here in the afternoon.
As Archias's white house was a considerable distance from the landing
place of the ferryboat, Hermon had the wounded warrior carried to it by
Biamite sailors, and again mounted his horse to ride to Myrtilus at as
swift a trot as the soaked, wretched, but familiar road would permit.
Considerable time had been spent in obtaining a litter for the Gaul, yet
Hermon was surprised to meet the lad who had questioned him so boldly on
the ferryboat coming, not from the landing place, but running toward it
again from the city, and then saw him follow the shore, carrying a
blazing torch, which he waved saucily. The wind blew aside the flame and
smoke which came from the burning pitch, but it shone brightly through
the gloom and permitted the boy to be distinctly seen. Whence had the
nimble fellow come so quickly? How had he succeeded, in this fierce gale,
in kindling the torch so soon into a powerful flame? Was it not foolish
to let a child amuse itself in the middle of the night with so dangerous
a toy?
Hermon hastily thought over these questions, but the supposition that the
light of the torch might be intended for a signal did not occur to him.
Besides, the boy and the light in his hand occupied his mind only a short
time. He had better things to think of. With what longing Myrtilus must
now be expecting his arrival! But the Gaul needed his aid no less
urgently than his friend. Accurately as he knew what remedies relieved
Myrtilus in severe attacks of illness, he could scarcely dispense with an
assistant or a leech for the other, and the idea swiftly flashed upon him
that the wounded man would afford him an opportunity of seeing Ledscha
again.
She had told him more than once about the healing art possessed by old
Tabus on the Owl's Nest. Suppose he should now seek the angry girl to
entreat her to speak to the aged miracle-worker in behalf of the sorely
wounded young foreigner?
Here he interrupted himself; something new claimed his attention.
A dim light glimmered through the intense darkness from a bit of rising
ground by the wayside. It came from the Temple of Nemesis--a pretty
little structure belonging to the time of Alexander the Great, which he
had often examined with pleasure. Several steps led to the anteroom,
supported by Ionic columns, which adjoined the naos.
Two lamps were burning at the side of the door leading into the little
open cella, and at the back of the consecrated place the statue of the
winged goddess was visible in the light of a small altar fire.
In her right hand she held the bridle and scourge, and at her feet stood
the wheel, whose turning indicates the influence exerted by her power
upon the destiny of mortals. With stern severity that boded evil, she
gazed down upon her left forearm, bent at the elbow, which corresponds
with the ell, the just measure.
Hermon certainly now, if ever, lacked both time and inclination to
examine again this modest work of an ordinary artist, yet he quickly
stopped his weary horse; for in the little pronaos directly in front of
the cella door stood a slender figure clad in a long floating dark robe,
extending its hands through the cella door toward the statue in fervent
prayer. She was pressing her brow against the left post of the door, but
at her feet, on the right side, cowered another figure, which could
scarcely be recognised as a human being.
This, too, was a woman.
Deeply absorbed in her own thoughts, she was also extending her arms
toward the statue of Nemesis.
Hermon knew them both.
At first he fancied that his excited imagination was showing him a
threatening illusion. But no!
The erect figure was Ledscha, the crouching one Gula, the sailor's wife
whose child he had rescued from the flames, and who had recently been
cast out by her husband.
"Ledscha!" escaped his lips in a muttered tone, and he involuntarily
extended his hands toward her as she was doing toward the goddess.
But she did not seem to hear him, and the other woman also retained the
same attitude, as if hewn from stone.
Then he called the supplicant's name loud tone, and the next instant
still more loudly; and now she turned, and, in the faint light of the
little lamp, showed the marvellously noble outlines of her profile. He
called again, and this time Ledscha heard anguished yearning in his deep
tones; but they seemed to have lost their influence over her, for her
large dark eyes gazed at him so repellently and sternly that a cold
tremor ran down his spine.
Swinging himself from his horse, he ascended the steps of the temple, and
in the most tender tones at his command exclaimed: "Ledscha! Severely as
I have offended you, Ledscha--oh, do not say no! Will you hear me?"
"No!" she answered firmly, and, before he could speak, continued: "This
place is ill chosen for another meeting! Your presence is hateful to me!
Do not disturb me a moment longer!"
"As you command," he began hesitatingly; but she swiftly interrupted with
the question, "Do you come from Pelusium, and are you going directly
home?"
"I did not heed the storm on account of Myrtilus's illness," he answered
quietly, "and if you demand it, I will return home at once; but first let
me make one more entreaty, which will be pleasing also to the gods."
"Get your response from yonder deity!" she impatiently interrupted,
pointing with a grand, queenly gesture, which at any other time would
have delighted his artist eye, to the statue of Nemesis in the cella.
Meanwhile Gula had also turned her face toward Hermon, and he now
addressed her, saying with a faint tone of reproach: "And did hatred lead
you also, Gula, to this sanctuary at midnight to implore the goddess to
destroy me in her wrath?"
The young mother rose and pointed to Ledscha, exclaiming, "She desires
it."
"And I?" he asked gently. "Have I really done you so much evil?"
She raised her hand to her brow as if bewildered; her glance fell on the
artist's troubled face, and lingered there for a short time. Then her
eyes wandered to Ledscha, and from her to the goddess, and finally back
again to the sculptor. Meanwhile Hermon saw how her young figure was
trembling, and, before he had time to address a soothing-word to her, she
sobbed aloud, crying out to Ledscha: "You are not a mother! My child, he
rescued it from the flames. I will not, and I can not--I will no longer
pray for his misfortune!"
She drew her veil over her pretty, tear-stained face as she spoke, and
darted lightly down the temple steps close beside him to seek shelter in
her parents' house, which had been unwillingly opened to the cast-off
wife, but now afforded her a home rich in affection.
Immeasurably bitter scorn was depicted in Ledscha's features as she gazed
after Gula. She did not appear to notice Hermon, and when at last he
appealed to her and briefly urged her to ask the old enchantress on the
Owl's Nest for a remedy for the wounded Gaul, she again leaned against
the post of the cella door, extended both arms with passionate fervour
toward the goddess, and remained standing there motionless, deaf to his
petition.
His blood seethed in his veins, and he was tempted to go nearer and force
her to hear him; but before he had ascended the first of the flight of
steps leading to the pronaos, he heard the footsteps of the men who were
bearing the wounded warrior after him.
They must not see him here with one of their countrywomen at this hour,
and manly pride forbade him to address her again as a supplicant.
So he went back to the road, mounted his horse, and rode on without
vouchsafing a word of farewell to the woman who was invoking destruction
upon his head. As he did so his eyes again rested on the stern face of
Nemesis, and the wheel whose turning determined the destiny of men at her
feet.
Assailed by horrible fears, and overpowered by presentiments of evil, he
pursued his way through the darkness.
Perhaps Myrtilus had succumbed to the terrible attack which must have
visited him in such a storm, and life without his friend would be bereft
of half its charm. Orphaned, poor, a struggler who had gained no complete
victory, it had been rich only in disappointments to him, in spite of his
conviction that he was a genuine artist, and was fighting for a good
cause. Now he knew that he had also lost the woman by whose assistance he
was certain of a great success in his own much-disputed course, and
Ledscha, if any one, was right in expecting a favourable hearing from the
goddess who punished injustice.
He did not think of Daphne again until he was approaching the place where
her tents had stood, and the remembrance of her fell like a ray of light
into his darkened soul.
Yet on that spot had also been erected the wooden platform from which
Althea had showed him the transformation into the spider, and the
recollection of the foolish error into which the Thracian had drawn him
disagreeably clouded the pleasant thought of Daphne.
CHAPTER XVII.
Complete darkness enfolded the white house. Hermon saw only two windows
lighted, the ones in his friend's studio, which looked out into the open
square, while his own faced the water.
What did this mean?
It must be nearly midnight, and he could no longer expect Myrtilus to be
still at work. He had supposed that he should find him in his chamber,
supported by his slaves, struggling for breath. What was the meaning of
the light in the workrooms now?
Where was his usually efficient Bias? He never went to rest when his
master was to return home, yet the carrier dove must have announced his
coming!
But Hermon had also enjoined the care of Myrtilus upon the slave, and he
was undoubtedly beside the sufferer's couch, supporting him in the same
way that he had often seen his master.
He was now riding across the open space, and he heard the men who carried
the Gaul talking close behind him.
Was the wounded barbarian the sole acquisition of this journey?
The beat of his horse's hoofs and the voices of the Biamites echoed
distinctly enough amid the stillness of the night, which was interrupted
only by the roaring of the wind. And this disturbance of the deep silence
around had entered the lighted windows before him, for a figure appeared
at one of them, and--could he believe his own eyes?--Myrtilus looked down
into the square, and a joyous welcome rang from his lips as loudly as in
his days of health.
The darkness of the night suddenly seemed to Hermon to be illumined. A
leap to the ground, two bounds up the steps leading to the house, an
eager rush through the corridor that separated him from the room in which
Myrtilus was, the bursting instead of opening of the door, and, as if
frantic with happy surprise, he impetuously embraced his friend, who,
burin and file in hand, was just approaching the threshold, and kissed
his brow and cheeks in the pure joy of his heart.
Then what questions, answers, tidings! In spite of the torrents of rain
and the gale, the invalid's health had been excellent. The solitude had
done him good. He knew nothing about the carrier dove. The hurricane had
probably "blown it away," as the breeders of the swift messengers said.
Question and reply now followed one another in rapid succession, and both
were soon acquainted with everything worth knowing; nay, Hermon had even
delivered Daphne's rose to his friend, and informed him what had befallen
the Gaul who was being brought into the house.
Bias and the other slaves had quickly appeared, and Hermon soon rendered
the wounded man the help he needed in an airy chamber in the second story
of the house, which, owing to the heat that prevailed in summer so close
under the roof, the slaves had never occupied.
Bias assisted his master with equal readiness and skill, and at last the
Gaul opened his eyes and, in the language of his country, asked a few
brief questions which were incomprehensible to the others. Then,
groaning, he again closed his lids.
Hitherto Hermon had not even allowed himself time to look around his
friend's studio and examine what he had created during his absence. But,
after perceiving that his kind act had not been in vain, and consuming
with a vigorous appetite the food and wine which Bias set before him, he
obliged Myrtilus--for another day was coming--to go to rest, that the
storm might not still prove hurtful to him.
Yet he held his friend's hand in a firm clasp for a long time, and, when
the latter at last prepared to go, he pressed it so closely that it
actually hurt Myrtilus. But he understood his meaning, and, with a loving
glance that sank deep into Hermon's heart, called a last good night.
After two sleepless nights and the fatiguing ride which he had just
taken, the sculptor felt weary enough; but when he laid his hand on the
Gaul's brow and breast, and felt their burning heat, he refused Bias's
voluntary offer to watch the sufferer in his place.
If to amuse or forget himself he had caroused far more nights in
succession in Alexandria, why should he not keep awake when the object in
question was to wrest a young life from the grasp of death? This man and
his life were now his highest goal, and he had never yet repented his
foolish eccentricity of imposing discomforts upon himself to help the
suffering.
Bias, on his part, was very willing to go to rest. He had plenty of cause
for weariness; Myrtilus's unscrupulous body-servant had stolen off with
the other slaves the night before, and did not return, with staggering
gait, until the next morning, but, in order to keep his promise to his
master, he had scarcely closed his eyes, that he might be at hand if
Myrtilus should need assistance.
So Bias fell asleep quickly enough in his little room in the lower story,
while his master, by the exertion of all his strength of will, watched
beside the couch of the Gaul.
Yet, after the first quarter of an hour, his head, no matter how he
struggled to prevent it, drooped again and again upon his breast. But
just as slumber was completely overpowering him his patient made him
start up, for he had left his bed, and when Hermon, fully roused, looked
for him, was standing in the middle of the room, gazing about him.
The artist thought that fever had driven the wounded warrior from his
couch, as it formerly did his fellow-pupil Lycon, whom, in the delirium
of typhus, he could keep in bed only by force. So he led the Gaul
carefully back to the couch he had deserted, and, after moistening the
bandage with healing balm from Myrtilus's medicine chest, ordered him to
keep quiet.
The barbarian yielded as obediently as a child, but at first remained in
a sitting posture and asked, in scarcely intelligible broken Greek, how
he came to this place.
After Hermon had satisfied his curiosity, he also put a few questions,
and learned that his charge not only wore a mustache, like his fellow
countrymen, but also a full beard, because the latter was the badge of
the bridge builders, to which class he belonged. While examining the one
crossing the canal, it had fallen in upon him.
He closed his eyes as he spoke, and Hermon wondered if it was not time
for him to lie down also; but the wounded man's brow was still burning,
and the Gallic words which he constantly muttered were probably about the
phantoms of fever, which Hermon recognised from Lycon's illness.
So he resolved to wait and continue to devote the night, which he had
already intended to give him, to the sufferer. From the chair at the foot
of the bed he looked directly into his face. The soft light of the lamp,
which with two others hung from a tall, heavy bronze stand in the shape
of an anchor, which Bias had brought, shone brightly enough to allow him
to perceive how powerful was the man whose life he had saved. His own
face was scarcely lighter in hue than the barbarian's, and how sharp was
the contrast between his long, thick black beard and his white face and
bare arched chest!
Hermon had noticed this same contrast in his own person. Otherwise the
Gaul did not resemble him in a single feature, and he might even have
refused to compare his soft, wavy beard with the harsh, almost bristly
one of the barbarian. And what a defiant, almost evil expression his
countenance wore when--perhaps because his wound ached--he closed his
lips more firmly! The children who so willingly let him, Hermon, take
them in his arms would certainly have been afraid of this savage-looking
fellow.
Yet in build, and at any rate in height and breadth of shoulders, there
was some resemblance between him and the Gaul.
As a bridge builder, the injured man belonged, in a certain sense, to the
ranks of the artists, and this increased Hermon's interest in his
patient, who was now probably out of the most serious danger.
True, the Greek still cast many a searching glance at the barbarian, but
his eyes closed more and more frequently, and at last the idea took
possession of him that he himself was the wounded man on the couch, and
some one else, who again was himself, was caring for him.
He vainly strove to understand the impossibility of this division of his
own being, but the more eagerly he did so the greater became his
bewilderment.
Suddenly the scene changed; Ledscha had appeared.
Bending over him, she lavished words of love; but when, in passionate
excitement, he sprang from the couch to draw her toward him, she changed
into the Nemesis to whose statue she had just prayed.
He stood still as if petrified, and the goddess, too, did not stir. Only
the wheel which had rested at her feet began to move, and rolled, with a
thundering din, sometimes around him, sometimes around the people who, as
if they had sprung from the ground, formed a jeering company of
spectators, and clapped their hands, laughed, and shouted whenever it
rolled toward him and he sprang back in fear.
Meanwhile the wheel constantly grew larger, and seemed to become heavier,
for the wooden beams over which it rolled splintered, crashing like thin
laths, and the spectators' shouts of applause sounded ruder and fiercer.
Then mortal terror suddenly seized him, and while he shouted for help to
Myrtilus, Daphne, and her father Archias, his slave Bias, the old comrade
of Alexander, Philippus, and his wife, he awoke, bathed in perspiration,
and looked about him.
But he must still be under the spell of the horrible dream, for the
rattling and clattering around him continued, and the bed where the
wounded Gaul had lain was empty.
Hermon involuntarily dipped his hand into the water which stood ready to
wet the bandages, and sprinkled his own face with it; but if he had ever
beheld life with waking eyes, he was doing so now. Yet the barbarian had
vanished, and the noise in the house still continued.
Was it possible that rats and mice--? No! That was the shriek of a
terrified human being--that a cry for help! This sound was the imperious
command of a rough man's voice, that--no, he was not mistaken--that was
his own name, and it came from the lips of his Myrtilus, anxiously,
urgently calling for assistance.
Then he suddenly realized that the white house had been attacked, that
his friend must be rescued from robbers or the fury of a mob of Biamites,
and, like the bent wood of a projectile when released from the noose
which holds it to the ground, the virile energy that characterized him
sprang upward with mighty power. The swift glance that swept the room was
sent to discover a weapon, and before it completed the circuit Hermon had
already grasped the bronze anchor with the long rod twined with leaves
and the teeth turned downward. Only one of the three little vessels
filled with oil that hung from it was burning. Before swinging the heavy
standard aloft, he freed it from the lamps, which struck the floor with a
clanging noise.
The man to whom he dealt a blow with this ponderous implement would
forget to rise. Then, as if running for a prize in the gymnasium, he
rushed through the darkness to the staircase, and with breathless haste
groped his way down the narrow, ladderlike steps. He felt himself an
avenging, punishing power, like the Nemesis who had pursued him in his
dreams. He must wrest the friend who was to him the most beloved of
mortals from the rioters. To defeat them himself seemed a small matter.
His shout--"I am coming, Myrtilus! Snuphis, Bias, Dorcas, Syrus! here,
follow me!" was to summon the old Egyptian doorkeeper and the slaves, and
inform his friend of the approach of a deliverer.
The loudest uproar echoed from his own studio. Its door stood wide open,
and black smoke, mingled with the deep red and yellow flames of burning
pitch, poured from it toward him.
"Myrtilus!" he shouted at the top of his voice as he leaped across the
threshold into the tumult which filled the spacious apartment, at the
same time clashing the heavy iron anchor down upon the head of the
broad-shouldered, half-naked fellow who was raising a clumsy lance
against him.
The pirate fell as though struck by lightning, and he again shouted
"Myrtilus!" into the big room, so familiar to him, where the conflict was
raging chaotically amid a savage clamour, and the smoke did not allow him
to distinguish a single individual.
For the second time he swung the terrible weapon, and it struck to the
floor the monster with a blackened face who had rushed toward him, but at
the same time the anchor broke in two.
Only a short metal rod remained in his hand, and, while he raised his
arm, determined to crush the temples of the giant carrying a torch who
sprang forward to meet him, it suddenly seemed as if a vulture with
glowing plumage and burning beak was attacking his face, and the terrible
bird of prey was striking its hard, sharp, red-hot talons more and more
furiously into his lips, cheeks, and eyes.
At first a glare as bright as sunshine had flashed before his gaze; then,
where he had just seen figures and things half veiled by the smoke, he
beheld only a scarlet surface, which changed to a violet, and finally a
black spot, followed by a violet-blue one, while the vulture continued to
rend his face with beak and talons.
Then the name "Myrtilus!" once more escaped his lips; this time, however,
it did not sound like the encouraging shout of an avenging hero, but the
cry for aid of one succumbing to defeat, and it was soon followed by a
succession of frantic outbursts of suffering, terror, and despair.
But now sharp whistles from the water shrilly pierced the air and
penetrated into the darkened room, and, while the tumult around Hermon
gradually died away, he strove, tortured by burning pain, to grope his
way toward the door; but here his foot struck against a human body, there
against something hard, whose form he could not distinguish, and finally
a large object which felt cool, and could be nothing but his Demeter.
But she seemed doomed to destruction, for the smoke was increasing every
moment, and constantly made his open wounds smart more fiercely.
Suddenly a cooler air fanned his burning face, and at the same time he
heard hurrying steps approach and the mingled cries of human voices.
Again he began to shout the names of his friends, the slaves, and the
porter; but no answer came from any of them, though hasty questions in
the Greek language fell upon his ear.
The strategist, with his officers, the nomarch of the district with his
subordinates, and many citizens of Tennis had arrived. Hermon knew most
of them by their voices, but their figures were not visible. The red,
violet, and black cloud before him was all he could see.
Yet, although the pain continued to torture him, and a voice in his soul
told him that he was blinded, he did not allow the government officials
who eagerly surrounded him to speak, only pointed hastily to his eyes,
and then bade them enter Myrtilus's studio. The Egyptian Chello, the
Tennis goldsmith, who had assisted the artists in the preparation of the
noble metal, and one of the police officers who had been summoned to rid
the old house of the rats and mice which infested it, both knew the way.
They must first try to save Myrtilus's work and, when that was
accomplished, preserve his also from destruction by the flames.
Leaning on the goldsmith's arm, Hermon went to his friend's studio; but
before they reached it smoke and flames poured out so densely that it was
impossible even to gain the door.
"Destroyed--a prey to the flames!" he groaned. "And he--he--he--"
Then like a madman he asked if no one had seen Myrtilus, and where he
was; but in vain, always in vain.
At last the goldsmith who was leading him asked him to move aside, for
all who had flocked to the white house when it was seized by the flames
had joined in the effort to save the statue of Demeter, which they had
found unharmed in his studio.
Seventeen men, by the exertion of all their strength, were dragging the
heavy statue from the house, which was almost on the point of falling in,
into the square. Several others were bearing corpses into the open
air-the old porter Snuphis and Myrtilus's body servant. Some motionless
forms they were obliged to leave behind. Both the bodies had deep wounds.
There was no trace of Myrtilus and Bias.
Outside the storm had subsided, and a cool breeze blew refreshingly into
Hermon's face. As he walked arm in arm with the notary Melampus, who had
invited him to his house, and heard some one at his side exclaim, "How
lavishly Eos is scattering her roses to-day!" he involuntarily lifted the
cloth with which he had covered his smarting face to enjoy the beautiful
flush of dawn, but again beheld nothing save a black and violet-blue
surface.
Then drawing his hand from his guide's arm, he pressed it upon his poor,
sightless, burning eyes, and in helpless rage, like a beast of prey which
feels the teeth of the hunter's iron trap rend his flesh, groaned
fiercely, "Blind! blind!" and again, and yet again, "Blind!"
While the morning star was still paling, the lad who after Hermon's
landing had raced along the shore with the burning torch glided into the
little pronaos of the Temple of Nemesis.
Ledscha was still standing by the doorpost of the cella with uplifted
hand, so deeply absorbed in fervent prayer that she did not perceive the
approach of the messenger until he called her.
"Succeeded?" she asked in a muffled tone, interrupting his hasty
greeting.
"You must give the goddess what you vowed," was the reply. "Hanno sends
you the message. And also, 'You must come with me in the boat quickly-at
once!'"
"Where?" the girl demanded.
"Not on board the Hydra yet," replied the boy hurriedly. "First only to
the old man on the Megara. The dowry is ready for your father. But there
is not a moment to lose."
"Well, well!" she gasped hoarsely. "But, first, shall I find the man with
the black beard on board of one of the ships?"
"Certainly!" answered the lad proudly, grasping her arm to hurry her; but
she shook him off violently, turned toward the cella again, and once more
lifted her hands and eyes to the statue of Nemesis.
Then she took up the bundle she had hidden behind a pillar, drew from it
a handful of gold coins, which she flung into the box intended for
offerings, and followed the boy.
"Alive?" she asked as she descended the steps; but the lad understood the
meaning of the question, and exclaimed: "Yes, indeed! Hanno says the
wounds are not at all dangerous."
"And the other?"
"Not a scratch. On the Hydra, with two severely wounded slaves. The
porter and the others were killed."
"And the statues?"
"They-such things can't be accomplished without some little
blunder-Labaja thinks so, too."
"Did they escape you?"
"Only one. I myself helped to smash the other, which stood in the
workroom that looks out upon the water. The gold and ivory are on the
ship. We had horrible work with the statue which stood in the room whose
windows faced the square. They dragged the great monster carefully into
the studio that fronts upon the water. But probably it is still standing
there, if the thing is not already--just see how the flames are whirling
upward!--if it is not already burned with the house."
"What a misfortune!" Ledscha reproachfully exclaimed.
"It could not be helped," the boy protested. "People from Tennis suddenly
rushed in. The first--a big, furious fellow-killed our Loule and the
fierce Judas. Now he has to pay for it. Little Chareb threw the black
powder into his eyes, while Hanno himself thrust the torch in his face."
"And Bias, the blackbeard's slave?"
"I don't know. Oh, yes! Wounded, I believe, on board the ship."
Meanwhile the lad, a precocious fourteen-year-old cabin-boy from the
Hydra, pointed to the boat which lay ready, and took Ledscha's bundle in
his hand; but she sprang into the light skiff before him and ordered it
to be rowed to the Owl's Nest, where she must bid Mother Tabus good-bye.
The cabin-boy, however, declared positively that the command could not be
obeyed now, and at his signal two black sailors urged it with swift oar
strokes toward the northwest, to Satabus's ship. Hanno wished to receive
his bride as a wife from his father's hand.
Ledscha had not insisted upon the fulfilment of her desire, but as the
boat passed the Pelican Island her gaze rested on the lustreless waning
disk of the moon. She thought of the torturing night, during which she
had vainly waited here for Hermon, and a triumphant smile hovered around
her lips; but soon the heavy eyebrows of the girl who was thus leaving
her home contracted in a frown--she again fancied she saw, where the moon
was just fading, the body of a gigantic, hideous spider. She banished the
illusion by speaking to the boy--spiders in the morning mean misfortune.
The early dawn, which was now crimsoning the east, reminded her of the
blood which, as an avenger, she must yet shed.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARK:
Camels, which were rarely seen in Egypt
ARACHNE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 5.
CHAPTER I.
While the market place in Tennis was filling, Archias's white house had
become a heap of smouldering ruins. Hundreds of men and women were
standing around the scene of the conflagration, but no one saw the statue
of Demeter, which had been removed from Hermon's studio just in time. The
nomarch had had it locked up in the neighbouring temple of the goddess.
It was rumoured that the divinity had saved her own statue by a miracle;
Pamaut, the police officer, said that he had seen her himself as,
surrounded by a brilliant light, she soared upward on the smoke that
poured from the burning house. The strategist and the nomarch used every
means in their power to capture the robbers, but without the least
success.
As it had become known that Paseth, Gula's husband, had cast off his wife
because she had gone to Hermon's studio, the magistrates believed that
the attack had been made by the Biamites; yet Paseth was absent from the
city during the assault, and the innocence of the others could also be
proved.
Since, for two entire years, piracy had entirely ceased in this
neighbourhood, no one thought of corsairs, and the bodies of the
incendiaries having been consumed by the flames with the white house, it
could not be ascertained to what class the marauders belonged.
The blinded sculptor could only testify that one of the robbers was a
negro, or at any rate had had his face blackened, and that the size of
another had appeared to him almost superhuman. This circumstance gave
rise to the fable that, during the terrible storm of the previous clay,
Hades had opened and spirits of darkness had rushed into the studio of
the Greek betrayer.
The strategist, it is true, did not believe such tales, but the
superstition of the Biamites, who, moreover, aided the Greeks reluctantly
to punish a crime which threatened to involve their own countrymen, put
obstacles in the way of his measures.
Not until he heard of Ledscha's disappearance, and was informed by the
priest of Nemesis of the handsome sum which had been found in the
offering box of the temple shortly after the attack, did he arrive at a
conjecture not very far from the real state of affairs; only it was still
incomprehensible to him what body of men could have placed themselves at
the disposal of a girl's vengeful plan.
On the second day after the fire, the epistrategus of the whole Delta,
who had accidentally come to the border fortress, arrived at Tennis on
the galley of the commandant of Pelusium, and with him Proclus, the
grammateus of the Dionysian artists, the Lady Thyone, Daphne, and her
companion Chrysilla.
The old hero Philippus was detained in the fortress by the preparations
for war.
Althea had returned to Alexandria, and Philotas, who disliked her, had
gone there himself, as Chrysilla intimated to him that he could hope for
no success in his suit to her ward so long as Daphne had to devote
herself to the care of the blinded Hermon.
The epistrategus proceeded with great caution, but his efforts also
remained futile. He ordered a report to be made of all the vessels which
had entered the harbours and bays of the northeastern Delta, but those
commanded by Satabus and his sons gave no cause for investigation; they
had come into the Tanite arm of the Nile as lumber ships from Pontus, and
had discharged beams and planks for the account of a well-known
commercial house in Sinope.
Yet the official ordered the Owl's Nest to be searched. In doing this he
made himself guilty of an act of violence, as the island's right of
asylum still existed, and this incensed the irritable and refractory
Biamites the more violently, the deeper was the reverent awe with which
the nation regarded Tabus, who, according to their belief, was over a
hundred years old. The Biamites honoured her not only as an enchantress
and a leech, but as the ancestress of a race of mighty men. By molesting
this aged woman, and interfering with an ancient privilege, the
epistrategus lost the aid of the hostile fishermen, sailors, and weavers.
Any information from their ranks to him was regarded as treachery; and,
besides, his stay in Tennis could be but brief, as the King, on account
of the impending war, had summoned him back to the capital.
On the third day after his arrival he left Tennis and sailed from Tanis
for Alexandria. He had had little time to attend to Thyone and her
guests.
Proclus, too, could not devote himself to them until after the departure
of the epistrategus, since he had gone immediately to Tanis, where, as
head of the Dionysian artists of all Egypt, he had been occupied in
attending to the affairs of the newly established theatre.
On his return to Tennis he had instantly requested to be conducted to the
Temple of Demeter, to inspect the blinded Hermon's rescued work.
He had entered the cella of the sanctuary with the expectation of finding
a peculiar, probably a powerful work, but one repugnant to his taste, and
left it fairly overpowered by the beauty of this noble work of art.
What he had formerly seen of Hermon's productions had prejudiced him
against the artist, whose talent was great, but who, instead of
dedicating it to the service of the beautiful and the sublime, chose
subjects which, to Proclus, did not seem worthy of artistic treatment,
or, when they were, sedulously deprived them of that by which, in his
eyes, they gained genuine value. In Hermon's Olympian Banquet he--who
also held the office of a high priest of Apollo in Alexandria--had even
seen an insult to the dignity of the deity. In the Street Boy Eating
Figs, the connoisseur's eye had recognised a peculiar masterpiece, but he
had been repelled by this also; for, instead of a handsome boy, it
represented a starving, emaciated vagabond.
True to life as this figure might be, it seemed to him reprehensible, for
it had already induced others to choose similar vulgar subjects.
When recently at Althea's performance he had met Hermon and saw how
quickly his beautiful travelling companion allowed herself to be induced
to bestow the wreath on the handsome, black-bearded fellow, it vexed him,
and he had therefore treated him with distant coldness, and allowed him
to perceive the disapproval which the direction taken by his art had
awakened in his mind.
In the presence of Hermon's Demeter, the opinion of the experienced man
and intelligent connoisseur had suddenly changed.
The creator of this work was not only one of the foremost artists of his
day, nay, he had also been permitted to fathom the nature of the deity
and to bestow upon it a perfect form.
This Demeter was the most successful personification of the divine
goodness which rewards the sowing of seed with the harvest. When Hermon
created it, Daphne's image had hovered before his mind, even if he had
not been permitted to use her as a model, and of all the maidens whom he
knew there was scarcely one better suited to serve as the type for the
Demeter.
So what he had seen in Pelusium, and learned from women, was true. The
heart and mind of the artist who had created this work were not filled
with the image of Althea--who during the journey had bestowed many a mark
of favour upon the aging man, and with whom he was obliged to work hand
in hand for Queen Arsinoe's plans--but the daughter of Archias, and this
circumstance also aided in producing his change of view.
Hermon's blindness, it was to be hoped, would be cured.
Duty, and perhaps also interest, commanded him to show him frankly how
highly he estimated his art and his last work.
After the arrival of Thyone and Daphne, Hermon had consented to accompany
them on board the Proserpina, their spacious galley. True, he had yielded
reluctantly to this arrangement of his parents' old friend, and neither
she nor Daphne had hitherto succeeded in soothing the fierce resentment
against fate which filled his soul after the loss of his sight and his
dearest friend. As yet every attempt to induce him to bear his terrible
misfortune with even a certain degree of composure had failed.
The Tennis leech, trained by the Egyptian priests at Sais in the art of
healing, who was attached as a pastophorus to the Temple of Isis, in the
city of weavers, had covered the artist's scorched face with bandages,
and earnestly adjured him never in his absence to raise them, and to keep
every ray of light from his blinded eyes. But the agitation which had
mastered Hermon's whole being was so great that, in spite of the woman's
protestations, he lifted the covering again and again to see whether he
could not perceive once more at least a glimmer of the sunlight whose
warming power he felt. The thought of living in darkness until the end of
his life seemed unendurable, especially as now all the horrors which,
hitherto, had only visited him in times of trial during the night
assailed him with never-ceasing cruelty.
The image of the spider often forced itself upon him, and he fancied that
the busy insect was spreading its quickly made web over his blinded eyes,
which he was not to touch, yet over which he passed his hand to free them
from the repulsive veil.
The myth related that because Athene's blow had struck the ambitious
weaver Arachne, she had resolved, before the goddess transformed her into
a spider, to put an end to her disgrace.
How infinitely harder was the one dealt to him! How much better reason he
had to use the privilege in which man possesses an advantage over the
immortals, of putting himself to death with his own hand when he deems
the fitting time has come! What should he, the artist, to whom his eyes
brought whatever made life valuable, do longer in this hideous black
night, brightened by no sunbeam?
He was often overwhelmed, too, by the remembrance of the terrible end of
the friend in whom he saw the only person who might have given him
consolation in this distress, and the painful thought of his poverty.
He was supported solely by what his art brought and his wealthy uncle
allowed him. The Demeter which Archias had ordered had been partially
paid for in advance, and he had intended to use the gold--a considerable
sum--to pay debts in Alexandria. But it was consumed with the rest of his
property--tools, clothing, mementoes of his dead parents, and a few books
which contained his favourite poems and the writings of his master,
Straton.
These precious rolls had aided him to maintain the proud conviction of
owing everything which he attained or possessed solely to himself. It had
again become perfectly clear to him that the destiny of earth-born
mortals was not directed by the gods whom men had invented after their
own likeness, in order to find causes for the effects which they
perceived, but by deaf and blind chance. Else how could even worse
misfortune, according to the opinion of most people, have befallen the
pure, guiltless Myrtilus, who so deeply revered the Olympians and
understood how to honour them so magnificently by his art, than himself,
the despiser of the gods?
But was the death for which he longed a misfortune?
Was the Nemesis who had so swiftly and fully granted the fervent prayer
of an ill-used girl also only an image conjured up by the power of human
imagination?
It was scarcely possible!
Yet if there was one goddess, did not that admit the probability of the
existence of all the others?
He shuddered at the idea; for if the immortals thought, felt, acted, how
terribly his already cruel fate would still develop! He had denied and
insulted almost all the Olympians, and not even stirred a finger to the
praise and honour of a single one.
What marvel if they should choose him for the target of their resentment
and revenge?
He had just believed that the heaviest misfortune which can befall a man
and an artist had already stricken him. Now he felt that this, too, had
been an error; for, like a physical pain, he realized the collapse of the
proud delusion of being independent of every power except himself, freely
and arbitrarily controlling his own destiny, owing no gratitude except to
his own might, and being compelled to yield to nothing save the
enigmatical, pitiless power of eternal laws or their co-operation, so
incomprehensible to the human intellect, called "chance," which took no
heed of merit or unworthiness.
Must he, who had learned to silence and to starve every covetous desire,
in order to require no gifts from his own uncle and his wealthy kinsman
and friend, and be able to continue to hold his head high, as the most
independent of the independent, now, in addition to all his other woe, be
forced to believe in powers that exercised an influence over his every
act? Must he recognise praying to them and thanking them as the demand of
justice, of duty, and wisdom? Was this possible either?
And, believing himself alone, since he could not see Thyone and Daphne,
who were close by him, he struck his scorched brow with his clinched
fist, because he felt like a free man who suddenly realizes that a rope
which he can not break is bound around his hands and feet, and a giant
pulls and loosens it at his pleasure.
Yet no! Better die than become for gods and men a puppet that obeys every
jerk of visible and invisible hands.
Starting up in violent excitement, he tore the bandage from his face and
eyes, declaring, as Thyone seriously reprimanded him, that he would go
away, no matter where, and earn his daily bread at the handmill, like the
blind Ethiopian slave whom he had seen in the cabinetmaker's house at
Tennis.
Then Daphne spoke to him tenderly, but her soothing voice caused him
keener pain than his old friend's stern one.
To sit still longer seemed unendurable, and, with the intention of
regaining his lost composure by pacing to and fro, he began to walk; but
at the first free step he struck against the little table in front of
Thyone's couch, and as it upset and the vessels containing water fell
with it, clinking and breaking, he stopped and, as if utterly crushed,
groped his way back, with both arms outstretched, to the armchair he had
quitted.
If he could only have seen Daphne press her handkerchief first to her
eyes, from which tears were streaming, and then to her lips, that he
might not hear her sobs, if he could have perceived how Thyone's wrinkled
old face contracted as if she were swallowing a colocynth apple, while at
the same time she patted his strong shoulder briskly, exclaiming with
forced cheerfulness: "Go on, my boy! The steed rears when the hornet
stings! Try again, if it only soothes you! We will take everything out of
your way. You need not mind the water-jars. The potter will make new
ones!"
Then Hermon threw back his burning head, rested it against the back of
the chair, and did not stir until the bandage was renewed.
How comfortable it felt!
He knew, too, that he owed it to Daphne; the matron's fingers could not
be so slender and delicate, and he would have been more than glad to
raise them to his lips and thank her; but he denied himself the pleasure.
If she really did love him, the bond between them must now be severed;
for, even if her goodness of heart extended far enough to induce her to
unite her blooming young existence to his crippled one, how could he have
accepted the sacrifice without humiliating himself? Whether such a
marriage would have made her happy or miserable he did not ask, but he
was all the more keenly aware that if, in this condition, he became her
husband, he would be the recipient of alms, and he would far rather, he
mentally repeated, share the fate of the negro at the handmill.
The expression of his features revealed the current of his thoughts to
Daphne, and, much as she wished to speak to him, she forced herself to
remain silent, that the tones of her voice might not betray how deeply
she was suffering with him; but he himself now longed for a kind word
from her lips, and he had just asked if she was still there when Thyone
announced a visit from the grammateus Proclus.
He had recently felt that this man was unfriendly to him, and again his
anger burst forth. To be exposed in the midst of his misery to the scorn
of a despiser of his art was too much for his exhausted patience.
But here he was interrupted by Proclus himself, who had entered the
darkened cabin where the blind man remained very soon after Thyone.
Hermon's last words had betrayed to the experienced courtier how well he
remembered his unkind remarks, so he deferred the expression of his
approval, and began by delivering the farewell message of the
epistrategus, who had been summoned away so quickly.
He stated that his investigations had discovered nothing of importance,
except, perhaps, the confirmation of the sorrowful apprehension that the
admirable Myrtilus had been killed by the marauders. A carved stone had
been found under the ashes, and Chello, the Tennis goldsmith, said he had
had in his own workshop the gem set in the hapless artist's shoulder
clasp, and supplied it with a new pin.
While speaking, he took Hermon's hand and gave him the stone, but the
artist instantly used his finger tips to feel it.
Perhaps it really did belong to the clasp Myrtilus wore, for, although
still unpractised in groping, he recognised that a human head was carved
in relief upon the stone, and Mrytilus's had been adorned with the
likeness of the Epicurean.
The damaged little work of art, in the opinion of Proclus and Daphne,
appeared to represent this philosopher, and at the thought that his
friend had fallen a victim to the flames Hermon bowed his head and
exerted all his strength of will in order not to betray by violent sobs
how deeply this idea pierced his heart.
Thyone, shrugging her shoulders mournfully, pointed to the suffering
artist. Proclus nodded significantly, and, moving nearer to Hermon,
informed him that he had sought out his Demeter and found the statue
uninjured. He was well aware that it would be presumptuous to offer
consolation in so heavy an affliction, and after the loss of his dearest
friend, yet perhaps Hermon would be glad to hear his assurance that he,
whose judgment was certainly not unpractised, numbered his work among the
most perfect which the sculptor's art had created in recent years.
"I myself best know the value of this Demeter," the sculptor broke in
harshly. "Your praise is the bit of honey which is put into the mouth of
the hurt child."
"No, my friend," Proclus protested with grave decision. "I should express
no less warmly the ardent admiration with which this noble figure of the
goddess fills me if you were well and still possessed your sight. You
were right just now when you alluded to my aversion, or, let us say, lack
of appreciation of the individuality of your art; but this noble work
changes everything, and nothing affords me more pleasure than that I am
to be the first to assure you how magnificently you have succeeded in
this statue."
"The first!" Hermon again interrupted harshly. "But the second and third
will be lacking in Alexandria. What a pleasure it is to pour the gifts of
sympathy upon one to whom we wish ill! But, however successful my Demeter
may be, you would have awarded the prize twice over to the one by
Myrtilus."
"Wrong, my young friend!" the statesman protested with honest zeal. "All
honour to the great dead, whose end was so lamentable; but in this
contest--let me swear it by the goddess herself!--you would have remained
victor; for, at the utmost, nothing can rank with the incomparable save a
work of equal merit, and--I know life and art--two artists rarely or
never succeed in producing anything so perfect as this masterpiece at the
same time and in the same place."
"Enough!" gasped Hermon, hoarse with excitement; but Proclus, with
increasing animation, continued: "Brief as is our acquaintance, you have
probably perceived that I do not belong to the class of flatterers, and
in Alexandria it has hardly remained unknown to you that the younger
artists number me, to whom the office of judge so often falls, among the
sterner critics. Only because I desire their best good do I frankly point
out their errors. The multitude provides the praise. It will soon flow
upon you also in torrents, I can see its approach, and as this blindness,
if the august Aesculapius and healing Isis aid, will pass away like a
dreary winter night, it would seem to me criminal to deceive you about
your own ability and success. I already behold you creating other works
to the delight of gods and men; but this Demeter extorts boundless,
enthusiastic appreciation; both as a whole, and in detail, it is
faultless and worthy of the most ardent praise. Oh, how long it is, my
dear, unfortunate friend, since I could congratulate any other
Alexandrian with such joyful confidence upon the most magnificent
success! Every word--you may believe it!--which comes to you in
commendation of this last work from lips unused to eulogy is sincerely
meant, and as I utter it to you I shall repeat it in the presence of the
King, Archias, and the other judges."
Daphne, with hurried breath, deeply flushed cheeks, and sparkling eyes,
had fairly hung upon the lips of the clever connoisseur. She knew
Proclus, and his dreaded, absolutely inconsiderate acuteness, and was
aware that this praise expressed his deepest conviction. Had he been
dissatisfied with the statue of Demeter, or even merely superficially
touched by its beauty, he might have shrunk from wounding the unfortunate
artist by censure, and remained silent; but only something grand,
consummate, could lead him to such warmth of recognition.
She now felt it a misfortune that she and Thyone had hitherto been
prevented, by anxiety for their patient, from admiring his work. Had it
still been light, she would have gone to the temple of Demeter at once;
but the sun had just set, and Proclus was obliged to beg her to have
patience.
As the cases were standing finished at the cabinetmaker's, the statue had
been packed immediately, under his own direction, and carried on board
his ship, which would convey it with him to the capital the next day.
While this arrangement called forth loud expressions of regret from
Daphne and the vivacious matron, Hermon assented to it, for it would at
least secure the ladies, until their arrival in Alexandria, from a
painful disappointment.
"Rather," Proclus protested with firm dissent, "it will rob you for some
time of a great pleasure, and you, noble daughter of Archias, probably of
the deepest emotion of gratitude with which the favour of the immortals
has hitherto rendered you happy; yet the master who created this genuine
goddess owes the best part of it to your own face."
"He told me himself that he thought of me while at work," Daphne
admitted, and a flood of the warmest love reached Hermon's ears in her
agitated tones, while, greatly perplexed, he wondered with increasing
anxiety whether the stern critic Proclus had really been serious in the
extravagant eulogium, so alien to his reputation in the city.
Myrtilus, too, had admired the head of his Demeter, and--this he himself
might admit--he had succeeded in it, and yet ought not the figure, with
its too pronounced inclination forward, which, it is true, corresponded
with Daphne's usual bearing, and the somewhat angular bend of the arms,
have induced this keen-sighted connoisseur to moderate the exalted strain
of his praise? Or was the whole really so admirable that it would have
seemed petty to find fault with the less successful details? At any rate,
Proclus's eulogy ought to give him twofold pleasure, because his art had
formerly repelled him, and Hermon tried to let it produce this effect
upon him. But it would not do; he was continually overpowered by the
feeling that under the enthusiastic homage of the intriguing Queen
Arsinoe's favourite lurked a sting which he should some day feel. Or
could Proclus have been persuaded by Thyone and Daphne to help them
reconcile the hapless blind man to his hard fate?
Hermon's every movement betrayed the great anxiety which filled his mind,
and it by no means escaped Proclus's attention, but he attributed it to
the blinded sculptor's anguish in being prevented, after so great a
success, from pursuing his art further.
Sincerely touched, he laid his slender hand on the sufferer's muscular
arm, saying: "A more severe trial than yours, my young friend, can
scarcely be imposed upon the artist who has just attained the highest
goal, but three things warrant you to hope for recovery--your vigorous
youth, the skill of our Alexandrian leeches, and the favour of the
immortal gods. You shrug your shoulders? Yet I insist that you have won
this favour by your Demeter. True, you owe it less to yourself than to
yonder maiden. What pleasure it affords one whom, like myself, taste and
office bind to the arts, to perceive such a revolution in an artist's
course of creation, and trace it to its source! I indulged myself in it
and, if you will listen, I should like to show you the result."
"Speak," replied Hermon dully, bowing his head as if submitting to the
inevitable, while Proclus began:
"Hitherto your art imitated, not without success, what your eyes showed
you, and if this was filled with the warm breath of life, your work
succeeded. All respect to your Boy Eating Figs, in whose presence you
would feel the pleasure he himself enjoyed while consuming the sweet
fruit. Here, among the works of Egyptian antiquity, there is imminent
danger of falling under the tyranny of the canon of proportions which can
be expressed in figures, or merely even the demands of the style hallowed
by thousands of years, but in a subject like the 'Fig-eater' such a
reproach is not to be feared. He speaks his own intelligible language,
and whoever reproduces it without turning to the right or left has won,
for he has created a work whose value every true friend of art, no matter
to what school he belongs, prizes highly.
"To me personally such works of living reality are cordially welcome. Yet
art neither can nor will be satisfied with snatches of what is close at
hand; but you are late-born, sons of a time when the two great tendencies
of art have nearly reached the limits of what is attainable to them. You
were everywhere confronted with completed work, and you are right when
you refuse to sink to mere imitators of earlier works, and therefore
return to Nature, with which we Hellenes, and perhaps the Egyptians also,
began. The latter forgot her; the former--we Greeks--continued to cling
to her closely."
"Some few," Hermon eagerly interrupted the other, "still think it worth
the trouble to take from her what she alone can bestow. They save
themselves the toilsome search for the model which others so successfully
used before them, and bronze and marble still keep wonderfully well.
Bring out the old masterpieces. Take the head from this one, the arm from
that, etc. The pupil impresses the proportions on his mind. Only so far
as the longing for the beautiful permits do even the better ones remain
faithful to Nature, not a finger's breadth more."
"Quite right," the other went on calmly. "But your objection only brings
one nearer the goal. How many who care only for applause content
themselves to-day, unfortunately, with Nature at second hand! Without
returning to her eternally fresh, inexhaustible spring, they draw from
the conveniently accessible wells which the great ancients dug for them."
"I know these many," Hermon wrathfully exclaimed. "They are the brothers
of the Homeric poets, who take verses from the Iliad and Odyssey to piece
out from them their own pitiful poems."
"Excellent, my son!" exclaimed Thyone, laughing, and Daphne remarked that
the poet Cleon had surprised her father with such a poem a few weeks
before. It was a marvellous bit of botchwork, and yet there was a certain
meaning in the production, compiled solely from Homeric verses.
"Diomed's Hecuba," observed Proclus, "and the Aphrodite by Hippias, which
were executed in marble, originated in the same way, and deserve no
better fate, although they please the great multitude. But, praised be my
lord, Apollo, our age can also boast of other artists. Filled with the
spirit of the god, they are able to model truthfully and faithfully even
the forms of the immortals invisible to the physical eye. They stand
before the spectator as if borrowed from Nature, for their creators have
filled them with their own healthy vigour. Our poor Myrtilus belonged to
this class and, after your Demeter, the world will include you in it
also."
"And yet," answered Hermon in a tone of dissent, "I remained faithful to
myself, and put nothing, nothing at all of my own personality, into the
forms borrowed from Nature."
"What need of that was there?" asked Proclus with a subtle smile. "Your
model spared you the task. And this at last brings me to the goal I
desired to reach. As the great Athenians created types for eternity, so
also does Nature at times in a happy hour, for her own pleasure, and such
a model you found in our Daphne.-No contradiction, my dear young lady!
The outlines of the figure--By the dog! Hermon might possibly have found
forms no less beautiful in the Aphrosion, but how charming and lifelike
is the somewhat unusual yet graceful pose of yours! And then the heart,
the soul! In your companionship our artist had nothing to do except
lovingly to share your feelings in order to have at his disposal
everything which renders so dear to us all the giver of bread, the
preserver of peace, the protector of marriage, the creator and supporter
of the law of moderation in Nature, as well as in human existence. Where
would all these traits be found more perfectly united in a single human
being than in your person, Daphne, your quiet, kindly rule?"
"Oh, stop!" the girl entreated. "I am only too well aware--"
"That you also are not free from human frailties," Proclus continued,
undismayed. "We will take them, great or small as they may be, into the
bargain. The secret ones do not concern the sculptor, who does not or
will not see them. What he perceives in you, what you enable him to
recognise through every feature of your sweet, tranquillizing face, is
enough for the genuine artist to imagine the goddess; for the distinction
between the mortal and the immortal is only the degree of perfection, and
the human intellect and artist soul can find nothing more perfect in the
whole domain of Demeter's jurisdiction than is presented to them in your
nature. Our friend yonder seized it, and his magnificent work of art
proves how nearly it approaches the purest and loftiest conception we
form of the goddess whom he had to represent. It is not that he deified
you, Daphne; he merely bestowed on the divinity forms which he recognised
in you."
Just at that moment, obeying an uncontrollable impulse, Hermon pulled the
bandage from his eyes to see once more the woman to whom this warm homage
was paid.
Was the experienced connoisseur of art and the artist soul in the right?
He had told himself the same thing when he selected Daphne for a model,
and her head reproduced what Proclus praised as the common possession of
Daphne and Demeter. Truthful Myrtilus had also seen it. Perhaps his work
had really been so marvellously successful because, while he was engaged
upon it, his friend had constantly stood before his mind in all the charm
of her inexhaustible goodness.
Animated by the ardent desire to gaze once more at the beloved face, to
which he now owed also this unexpectedly great success, he turned toward
the spot whence her voice had reached him; but a wall of violet mist,
dotted with black specks, was all that his blinded eyes showed him, and
with a low groan he drew the linen cloth over the burns.
This time Proclus also perceived what was passing in the poor artist's
mind, and when he took leave of him it was with the resolve to do his
utmost to brighten with the stars of recognition and renown the dark
night of suffering which enshrouded this highly gifted sculptor, whose
unexpectedly great modesty had prepossessed him still more in his favour.
CHAPTER II.
After the grammateus had retired, Daphne insisted upon leaving Tennis the
next day.
The desire to see Hermon's masterpiece drew her back to Alexandria even
more strongly than the knowledge of being missed by her father.
Only the separation from Thyone rendered the departure difficult, for the
motherless girl had found in her something for which she had long
yearned, and most sorely missed in her companion Chrysilla, who from
expediency approved of everything she did or said.
The matron, too, had become warmly attached to Daphne, and would gladly
have done all that lay in her power to lighten Hermon's sad fate, yet she
persisted in her determination to return speedily to her old husband in
Pelusium.
But she did not fully realize how difficult this departure would be for
her until the blind man, after a long silence, asked whether it was
night, if the stars were in the sky, and if she really intended to leave
him.
Then burning sympathy filled her compassionate soul, and she could no
longer restrain her tears. Daphne, too, covered her face, and imposed the
strongest restraint upon herself that she might not sob aloud.
So it seemed a boon to both when Hermon expressed the desire to spend
part of the night on deck.
This desire contained a summons to action, and to be able to bestir
themselves in useful service appeared like a favour to Thyone and Daphne.
Without calling upon a slave, a female servant, or even Chrysilla for the
smallest office, the two prepared a couch on deck for the blind man, and,
leaning on the girl's stronger arm, he went up into the open air.
There he stretched both arms heavenward, inhaled deep breaths of the cool
night breeze, and thirstily emptied the goblet of wine which Daphne mixed
and gave him with her own hand.
Then, with a sigh of relief, he said: "Everything has not grown black
yet. A delightful feeling of pleasure takes possession even of the blind
man when the open air refreshes him and the wine warms his blood in the
sunshine of your kindness."
"And much better things are still in prospect," Daphne assured him. "Just
think what rapture it will be when you are permitted to see the light
again after so long a period of darkness!"
"When--" repeated Hermon, his head drooping as he spoke.
"It must, it must be so!" rang with confident assurance from Thyone's
lips.
"And then," added Daphne, gazing sometimes upward to the firmament strewn
with shining stars, sometimes across the broad, rippling expanse of the
water, in which the reflection of the heavenly bodies shimmered in
glittering, silvery radiance, "yes, Hermon, who would not be glad to
exchange with you then? You may shake your head, but I would take your
place quickly and with joyous courage. There is a proof of the existence
of the gods, which so exactly suits the hour when you will again see,
enjoy, admire what this dreary darkness now hides from you. It was a
philosopher who used it; I no longer know which one. How often I have
thought of it since this cruel misfortune befell you! And now--"
"Go on," Hermon interrupted with a smile of superiority. "You are
thinking of Aristotle's man who grew up in a dark cave. The conditions
which must precede the devout astonishment of the liberated youth when he
first emerged into the light and the verdant world would certainly exist
in me."
"Oh, not in that way," pleaded the wounded girl; and Thyone exclaimed:
"What is the story of the man you mention? We don't talk about Aristotle
and such subjects in Pelusium."
"Perhaps they are only too much discussed in Alexandria," said the blind
artist. "The Stagirite, as you have just heard, seeks to prove the
existence of the gods by the man of whom I spoke."
"No, he does prove it," protested Daphne. "Just listen, Mother Thyone. A
little boy grows up from earliest childhood into a youth in a dark cave.
Then suddenly its doors are opened to him. For the first time he sees the
sun, moon, and stars, flowers and trees, perhaps even a beautiful human
face. But at the moment when all these things rush upon him like so many
incomprehensible marvels, must he not ask himself who created all this
magnificence? And the answer which comes to him--"
"There is only one," cried the matron; "the omnipotent gods. Do you shrug
your shoulders at that, son of the pious Erigone? Why, of course! The
child who still feels the blows probably rebels against his earthly
father. But if I see aright, the resentment will not last when you, like
the man, go out of the cave and your darkness also passes away. Then the
power from which you turned defiantly will force itself upon you, and you
will raise your hands in grateful prayer to the rescuing divinity. As to
us women, we need not be drawn out of a cave to recognise it. A mother
who reared three stalwart sons--I will say nothing of the daughters--can
not live without them. Why are they so necessary to her? Because we love
our children twice as much as ourselves, and the danger which threatens
them alarms the poor mother's heart thrice as much as her own. Then it
needs the helping powers. Even though they often refuse their aid, we may
still be grateful for the expectation of relief. I have poured forth many
prayers for the three, I assure you, and after doing so with my whole
soul, then, my son, no matter how wildly the storm had raged within my
breast, calmness returned, and Hope again took her place at the helm. In
the school of the denier of the gods, you forgot the immortals above and
depended on yourself alone. Now you need a guide, or even two or three of
them, in order to find the way. If your mother were still alive, you
would run back to her to hide your face in her lap. But she is dead, and
if I were as proud as you, before clasping the sustaining hand of another
mortal I would first try whether one would not be voluntarily extended
from among the Olympians. If I were you, I would begin with Demeter, whom
you honoured by so marvellous a work."
Hermon waved his hand as if brushing away a troublesome fly, exclaiming
impatiently: "The gods, always the gods! I know by my own mother, Thyone,
what you women are, though I was only seven years old when I was bereft
of her by the same powers that you call good and wise, and who have also
robbed me of my eyesight, my friend, and all else that was dear. I thank
you for your kind intention, and you, too, Daphne, for recalling the
beautiful allegory. How often we have argued over its meaning! If we
continued the discussion, perhaps it might pleasantly shorten the next
few hours, which I dread as I do my whole future existence, but I should
be obliged in the outset to yield the victory to you. The great
Herophilus is right when he transfers the seat of thought from the heart
to the head. What a wild tumult is raging here behind my brow, and how
one voice drowns another! The medley baffles description. I could more
easily count with my blind eyes the cells in a honeycomb than refute with
my bewildered brain even one shrewd objection. It seems to me that we
need our eyes to understand things. We certainly do to taste. Whatever I
eat and drink--langustae and melons, light Mareotic wine and the dark
liquor of Byblus my tongue can scarcely distinguish it. The leech assures
me that this will pass away, but until the chaos within merges into
endurable order there is nothing better for me than solitude and rest,
rest, rest."
"We will not deny them to you," replied Thyone, glancing significantly at
Daphne. "Proclus's enthusiastic judgment was sincerely meant. Begin by
rejoicing over it in the inmost depths of your heart, and vividly
imagining what a wealth of exquisite joys will be yours through your last
masterpiece."
"Willingly, if I can," replied the blind man, gratefully extending his
hand. "If I could only escape the doubt whether the most cruel tyrant
could devise anything baser than to rob the artist, the very person to
whom it is everything, of his sight."
"Yes, it is terrible," Daphne assented. "Yet it seems to me that a richer
compensation for the lost gift is at the disposal of you artists than of
us other mortals, for you understand how to look with the eyes of the
soul. With them you retain what you have seen, and illumine it with a
special radiance. Homer was blind, and for that very reason, I think, the
world and life became clear and transfigured for him though a veil
concealed both from his physical vision."
"The poet!" Hermon exclaimed. "He draws from his own soul what sight, and
sight alone, brings to us sculptors. And, besides, his spirit remained
free from the horrible darkness that assailed mine. Joy itself, Daphne,
has lost its illuminating power within. What, girl, what is to become of
the heart in which even hope was destroyed?"
"Defend it manfully and keep up your courage," she answered softly; but
he pressed her hand firmly, and, in order not to betray how
self-compassion was melting his own soul, burst forth impetuously: "Say
rather: Crush the wish whose fulfilment is self-humiliation! I will go
back to Alexandria. Even the blind and crippled can find ways to earn
their bread there. Now grant me rest, and leave me alone!"
Thyone drew the girl away with her into the ship's cabin.
A short time after, the steward Gras went to Hermon to entreat him to
yield to Thyone's entreaties and leave the deck.
The leech had directed the sufferer to protect himself from draughts and
dampness, and the cool night mists were rising more and more densely from
the water.
Hermon doubtless felt them, but the thought of returning to the close
cabin was unendurable. He fancied that his torturing thoughts would
stifle him in the gloom where even fresh air was denied him.
He allowed the careful Bithynian to throw a coverlet over him and draw
the hood of his cloak over his head, but his entreaties and warnings were
futile.
The steward's watchful nursing reminded Hermon of his own solicitude for
his friend and of his faithful slave Bias, both of whom he had lost. Then
he remembered the eulogy of the grammateus, and it brought up the
question whether Myrtilus would have agreed with him. Like Proclus, his
keen-sighted and honest friend had called Daphne the best model for the
kindly goddess. He, too, had given to his statue the features of the
daughter of Archias, and admitted that he had been less successful. But
the figure! Perhaps he, Hermon, in his perpetual dissatisfaction with
himself had condemned his own work too severely, but that it lacked the
proper harmony had escaped neither Myrtilus nor himself. Now he recalled
the whole creation to his remembrance, and its weaknesses forced
themselves upon him so strongly and objectionably that the extravagant
praise of the stern critic awakened fresh doubts in his mind.
Yet a man like the grammateus, who on the morrow or the day following it
would be obliged to repeat his opinion before the King and the judges,
certainly would not have allowed himself to be carried away by mere
compassion to so great a falsification of his judgment.
Or was he himself sharing the experience of many a fellow-artist? How
often the creator deceived himself concerning the value of his own work!
He had expected the greatest success from his Polyphemus hurling the rock
at Odysseus escaping in the boat, and a gigantic smith had posed for a
model. Yet the judges had condemned it in the severest manner as a work
far exceeding the bounds of moderation, and arousing positive dislike.
The clay figure had not been executed in stone or metal, and crumbled
away. The opposite would probably now happen with the Demeter. Her
bending attitude had seemed to him daring, nay, hazardous; but the acute
critic Proclus had perceived that it was in accord with one of Daphne's
habits, and therefore numbered it among the excellences of the statue.
If the judges who awarded the prize agreed with the verdict of the
grammateus, he must accustom himself to value his own work higher,
perhaps even above that of Myrtilus.
But was this possible?
He saw his friend's Demeter as though it was standing before him, and
again he recognised in it the noblest masterpiece its maker had ever
created. What praise this marvellous work would have deserved if his own
really merited such high encomiums!
Suddenly an idea came to him, which at first he rejected as
inconceivable; but it would not allow itself to be thrust aside, and its
consideration made his breath fail.
What if his own Demeter had been destroyed and Myrtilus's statue saved?
If the latter was falsely believed to be his work, then Proclus's
judgment was explained--then--then---
Seized by a torturing anguish, he groaned aloud, and the steward Gras
inquired what he wanted.
Hermon hastily grasped the Bithynian's arm, and asked what he knew about
the rescue of his statue.
The answer was by no means satisfying. Gras had only heard that, after
being found uninjured in his studio, it had been dragged with great
exertion into the open air. The goldsmith Chello had directed the work.
Hermon remembered all this himself, yet, with an imperious curtness in
marked contrast to his usual pleasant manner to this worthy servant, he
hoarsely commanded him to bring Chello to him early the next morning, and
then again relapsed into his solitary meditations.
If the terrible conjecture which had just entered his mind should be
confirmed, no course remained save to extinguish the only new light which
now illumined the darkness of his night, or to become a cheat.
Yet his resolution was instantly formed. If the goldsmith corroborated
his fear, he would publicly attribute the rescued work to the man who
created it. And he persisted in this intention, indignantly silencing the
secret voice which strove to shake it. It temptingly urged that Myrtilus,
so rich in successes, needed no new garland. His lost sight would permit
him, Hermon, from reaping fresh laurels, and his friend would so gladly
bestow this one upon him. But he angrily closed his ears to these
enticements, and felt it a humiliation that they dared to approach him.
With proud self-reliance he threw back his head, saying to himself that,
though Myrtilus should permit him ten times over to deck him self with
his feathers, he would reject them. He would remain himself, and was
conscious of possessing powers which perhaps surpassed his friend's. He
was as well qualified to create a genuine work of art as the best
sculptor, only hitherto the Muse had denied him success in awakening
pleasure, and blindness would put an end to creating anything of his own.
The more vividly he recalled to memory his own work and his friend's, the
more probable appeared his disquieting supposition.
He also saw Myrtilus's figure before him, and in imagination heard his
friend again promise that, with the Arachne, he would wrest the prize
even from him.
During the terrible events of the last hours he had thought but seldom
and briefly of the weaver, whom it had seemed a rare piece of good
fortune to be permitted to represent. Now the remembrance of her took
possession of his soul with fresh power.
The image of Arachne illumined by the lamplight, which Althea had showed
him, appeared like worthless jugglery, and he soon drove it back into the
darkness which surrounded him. Ledscha's figure, however, rose before him
all the more radiantly. The desire to possess her had flown to the four
winds; but he thought he had never before beheld anything more peculiar,
more powerful, or better worth modelling than the Biamite girl as he saw
her in the Temple of Nemesis, with uplifted hand, invoking the vengeance
of the goddess upon him, and there--he discovered it now--Daphne was not
at all mistaken. Images never presented themselves as distinctly to those
who could see as to the blind man in his darkness. If he was ever
permitted to receive his sight, what a statue of the avenging goddess he
could create from this greatest event in the history of his vision!
After this work--of that he was sure--he would no longer need the
borrowed fame which, moreover, he rejected with honest indignation.
CHAPTER III.
It must be late, for Hermon felt the cool breeze, which in this region
rose between midnight and sunrise, on his burned face and, shivering,
drew his mantle closer round him.
Yet it seemed impossible to return to the cabin; the memory of Ledscha
imploring vengeance, and the stern image of the avenging goddess in the
cella of the little Temple of Nemesis, completely mastered him. In the
close cabin these terrible visions, united with the fear of having reaped
undeserved praise, would have crouched upon his breast like harpies and
stifled or driven him mad. After what had happened, to number the swift
granting of the insulted Biamite's prayer among the freaks of chance was
probably a more arbitrary and foolish proceeding than, with so many
others, to recognise the incomprehensible power of Nemesis. Ledscha had
loosed it against him and his health, perhaps even his life, and he
imagined that she was standing before him with the bridle and wheel,
threatening him afresh.
Shivering, as if chilled to the bone, overwhelmed by intense horror, he
turned his blinded eyes upward to the blackness above and raised his
hand, for the first time since he had joined the pupils of Straton in the
Museum, to pray. He besought Nemesis to be content, and not add to
blindness new tortures to augment the terrible ones which rent his soul,
and he did so with all the ardour of his passionate nature.
The steward Gras had received orders to wake the Lady Thyone if anything
unusual happened to the blind man, and when he heard the unfortunate
artist groan so pitifully that it would have moved a stone, and saw him
raise his hand despairingly to his head, he thought it was time to utter
words of consolation, and a short time after the anxious matron followed
him.
Her low exclamation startled Hermon. To be disturbed in the first prayer
after so long a time, in the midst of the cries of distress of a
despairing soul, is scarcely endurable, and the blind man imposed little
restraint upon himself when his old friend asked what had occurred, and
urged him not to expose himself longer to the damp night air.
At first he resolutely resisted, declaring that he should lose his senses
alone in the close cabin.
Then, in her cordial, simple way, she offered to bear him company in the
cabin. She could not sleep longer, at any rate; she must leave him early
in the morning, and they still had many things to confide to each other.
Touched by so much kindness, he yielded and, leaning on the Bithynian's
arm, followed her, not into his little cabin, but into the captain's
spacious sitting room.
Only a single lamp dimly lighted the wainscoting, composed of ebony,
ivory, and tortoise shell, the gay rug carpet, and the giraffe and
panther skins hung on the walls and doors and flung on the couches and
the floor.
Thyone needed no brilliant illumination for this conversation, and the
blinded man was ordered to avoid it.
The matron was glad to be permitted to communicate to Hermon so speedily
all that filled her own heart.
While he remained on deck, she had gone to Daphne's cabin.
She had already retired, and when Thyone went to the side of the couch
she found the girl, with her cheeks wet with tears, still weeping, and
easily succeeded in leading the motherless maiden to make a frank
confession.
Both cousins had been dear to her from childhood; but while Myrtilus,
though often impeded by his pitiable sufferings, had reached by a smooth
pathway the highest recognition, Hermon's impetuous toiling and striving
had constantly compelled her to watch his course with anxious solicitude
and, often unobserved, extend a helping hand.
Sympathy, disapproval, and fear, which, however, was always blended with
admiration of his transcendent powers, had merged into love. Though he
had disdained to return it, it had nevertheless been perfectly evident
that he needed her, and valued her and her opinion. Often as their views
differed, the obstinate boy and youth had never allowed any one except
herself a strong influence over his acts and conduct. But, far as he
seemed to wander from the paths which she believed the right ones, she
had always held fast to the conviction that he was a man of noble nature,
and an artist who, if he only once fixed his eyes upon the true goal,
would far surpass by his mighty power the other Alexandrian sculptors,
whatever names they bore, and perhaps even Myrtilus.
To the great vexation of her father who, after her mother's death, in an
hour when his heart was softened, had promised that he would never impose
any constraint upon her in the choice of a husband, she had hitherto
rejected every suitor. She had showed even the distinguished Philotas in
Pelusium, without the least reserve, that he was seeking her in vain; for
just at that time she thought she had perceived that Hermon returned her
love, and after his abrupt departure it had become perfectly evident that
the happiness of her life depended upon him.
The terrible misfortune which had now befallen him had only bound her
more firmly to the man she loved. She felt that she belonged to him
indissolubly, and the leech's positive assurance that his blindness was
incurable had only increased the magic of the thought of being and
affording tenfold more to the man bereft of sight than when, possessing
his vision, the world, life, and art belonged to him. To be able to
lavish everything upon the most beloved of mortals, and do whatever her
warm, ever-helpful heart prompted, seemed to her a special favour of the
gods in whom she believed.
That it was Demeter, to the ranks of whose priestesses she belonged, who
was so closely associated with his blinding, also seemed to her no mere
work of chance. The goddess on whom Hermon had bestowed the features of
her own face had deprived him of sight to confer upon her the happiness
of brightening and beautifying the darkness of his life.
If she saw aright, and it was only the fear of obtaining, with herself,
her wealth, that still kept him from her, the path which would finally
unite them must be found at last. She hoped to conquer also her father's
reluctance to give his only child in marriage to a blind man, especially
as Hermon's last work promised to give him the right to rank with the
best artists of his age.
The matron had listened to this confession with an agitated heart. She
had transported herself in imagination into the soul of the girl's
mother, and brought before her mind what objections the dead woman would
have made to her daughter's union with a man deprived of sight; but
Daphne had firmly insisted upon her wish, and supported it by many a
sensible and surprising answer. She was beyond childhood, and her
three-and-twenty years enabled her to realize the consequences which so
unusual a marriage threatened to entail.
As for Thyone herself, she was always disposed to look on the bright
side, and the thought that this vigorous young man, this artist crowned
with the highest success, must remain in darkness to the end of his life,
was utterly incompatible with her belief in the goodness of the gods. But
if Hermon was cured, a rare wealth of the greatest happiness awaited him
in the union with Daphne.
The mood in which she found the blind man had wounded and troubled her.
Now she renewed the bandage, saying: "How gladly I would continue to use
my old hands for you, but this will be the last time in a long while that
I am permitted to do this for the son of my Erigone; I must leave you
to-morrow."
Hermon clasped her hand closely, exclaiming with affectionate warmth:
"You must not go, Thyone! Stay here, even if it is only a few days
longer."
What pleasure these words gave her, and how gladly she would have
fulfilled his wish! But it could not be, and he did not venture to detain
her by fresh entreaties after she had described how her aged husband was
suffering from her absence.
"I often ask myself what he still finds in me," she said. "True, so long
a period of wedded life is a firm tie. If I am gone and he does not find
me when he returns home from inspections, he wanders about as if lost,
and does not even relish his food, though the same cook has prepared it
for years. And he, who forgets nothing and knows by name a large number
of the many thousand men he commands, would very probably, when I am
away, join the troops with only sandals on his feet. To miss my ugly old
face really can not be so difficult! When he wooed me, of course I looked
very different. And so--he confessed it himself--so he always sees me,
and most plainly when I am absent from his sight. But that, Hermon, will
be your good fortune also. All you now know as young and beautiful will
continue so to you as long as this sorrowful blindness lasts, and on that
very account you must not remain alone, my boy--that is, if your heart
has already decided in favour of any one--and that is the case, unless
these old eyes deceive me."
"Daphne," he answered dejectedly, "why should I deny that she is dear to
me? And yet, how dare the blind man take upon himself the sin of binding
her young life--"
"Stop! stop!" Thyone interrupted with eager warmth. "She loves you, and
to be everything to you is the greatest happiness she can imagine."
"Until repentance awakes, and it is too late," he answered gravely. "But
even were her love strong enough to share her husband's misfortune
patiently--nay, perhaps with joyous courage--it would still be
contemptible baseness were I to profit by that love and seek her hand."
"Hermon!" the matron now exclaimed reproachfully; but he repeated with
strong emphasis: "Yes, it would be baseness so great that even her most
ardent love could not save me from the reproach of having committed it. I
will not speak of her father, to whom I am so greatly indebted. It may be
that it might satisfy Daphne, full of kindness as she is, to devote
herself, body and soul, to the service of her helpless companion. But I?
Far from thinking constantly, like her, solely of others and their
welfare, I should only too often, selfish as I now am, be mindful of
myself. But when I realize who I am, I see before me a blind man who is
poorer than a beggar, because the scorching flames melted even the gold
which was to help him pay his debts."
"Folly!" cried the matron. "For what did Archias gather his boundless
treasures? And when his daughter is once yours--"
"Then," Hermon went on bitterly, "the blinded artist's poverty will be
over. That is your opinion, and the majority of people will share it. But
I have my peculiarities, and the thought of being rescued from hunger and
thirst by the woman I love, and who ought to see in me the man from whom
she receives the best gifts--to be dependent on her as the recipient of
her alms--seems to me worse than if I were once more to lose my sight. I
could not endure it at all! Every mouthful would choke me. Just because
she is so dear to me, I can not seek her hand; for, in return for her
great self-sacrificing love, I could give her nothing save the keen
discontent which seizes the proud soul that is forced constantly to
accept benefits, as surely as the ringing sound follows the blow upon the
brass. My whole future life would become a chain of humiliations, and do
you know whither this unfortunate marriage would lead? My teacher Straton
once said that a man learns to hate no one more easily than the person
from whom he receives benefits which it is out of his power to repay.
That is wise, and before I will see my great love for Daphne transformed
to hate, I will again try the starving which, while I was a sculptor at
Rhodes, I learned tolerably well."
"But would not a great love," asked Thyone, "suffice to repay tenfold the
perishable gifts that can be bought with gold and silver?"
"No, and again no!" Hermon answered in an agitated tone. "Something else
would blend with the love I brought to the marriage, something that must
destroy all the compensation it might offer; for I see myself becoming a
resentful misanthrope if I am compelled to relinquish the pleasure of
creating and, condemned to dull inaction, can do nothing except allow
myself to be tended, drink, eat, and sleep. The gloomy mood of her
unfortunate husband would sadden Daphne's existence even more than my
own; for, Thyone, though I should strive with all my strength to bear
patiently, with her dear aid, the burden imposed upon me, and move on
through the darkness with joyous courage, like many another blind man, I
could not succeed."
"You are a man," the matron exclaimed indignantly, "and what thousands
have done before you--"
"There," he loudly protested, "I should surely fail; for, you dear woman,
who mean so kindly by me, my fate is worse than theirs. Do you know what
just forced from my lips the exclamation of pain which alarmed you? I,
the only child of the devout Erigone, for whose sake you are so well
disposed toward me, am doomed to misfortune as surely as the victim
dragged to the altar is certain of death. Of all the goddesses, there is
only one in whose power I believe, and to whom I just raised my hands in
prayer. It is the terrible one to whom I was delivered by hate and the
deceived love which is now dragging me by the hair, and will rob and
torture me till I despair of life. I mean the gray daughter of Night,
whom no one escapes, dread Nemesis."
Thyone sank down into the chair by the blind artist's side, asking
softly, "And what gave you into her avenging hands, hapless boy?"
"My own abominable folly," he answered mournfully and, with the feeling
that it would relieve his heart to pour out to this true friend what he
would usually have confided only to his Myrtilus, he hurriedly related
how he had recognised in Ledscha the best model for his Arachne, how he
had sought her love, and then, detained by Althea, left her in the lurch
and most deeply offended and insulted her. Lastly, he gave a brief but
vivid description of his meeting with the vengeful barbarian girl in the
Temple of Nemesis, how Ledscha had invoked upon him the wrath of the
terrible goddess, and how the most horrible punishment had fallen upon
him directly after the harsh accusation of the Biamite.
The matron had listened to this confession in breathless suspense. Now
she fixed her eyes on the floor, shook her gray head gently, and said
anxiously: "Is that it? It certainly puts things in a different light. As
the son of your never-to-be-forgotten mother, you are indeed dear to my
heart; but Daphne is not less dear to me, and though in your marriage I
just saw happiness for you both, that is now past. What is poverty, what
is blindness! Eros would reconcile far more difficult problems, but his
arrows are shattered on the armour of Nemesis. Where there is a pair of
lovers, and she raises her scourge against one of them, the other will
also be struck. Until you feel that you are freed from this persecutor,
it would be criminal to bind a loving woman to you and your destiny. It
is not easy to find the right path for you both, for even Nemesis and her
power do not make the slightest change in the fact that you need faithful
care and watching in your blindness. Daylight brings wisdom, and we will
talk further to-morrow."
She rose as she spoke; but Hermon detained her, while from his lips
escaped the anxious question, "So you will take Daphne away from me, and
leave me alone in my blindness?"
"You in your blindness?" cried Thyone, and the mere reproachful tone of
the question banished the fear. "I would as quickly deprive my own son of
my support as I would you just at this time, my poor boy; but whether my
conscience will permit me to let Daphne remain near you only grant me, I
repeat it, until sunrise to-morrow for reflection. My old heart will then
find the right way."
"Yet whatever you may decide concerning us," pleaded the blind man, "tell
Daphne that, on the eve of losing her, I first felt in its full power how
warmly I love her. Even without Nemesis, the joy of making her mine would
have been denied me. Fate will never permit me to possess her; yet never
again to hear her gentle voice, never more to feel her dear presence,
would be blinding me a second time."
"It need not be imposed upon you long," said the matron soothingly.
Then she went close to him, laid her hand on his shoulder, and said: "The
power of the goddess who punishes the misdeeds of the reckless is called
irresistible and uncontrollable; but one thing softens even her, and
checks her usually resistless wheel: it is a mother's prayer. I heard
this from my own mother, and experienced it myself, especially in my
oldest son Eumedes, who from the wildest madcap became an ornament of his
class, and to whom the King--you doubtless know it--intrusted the command
of the fleet which is to open the Ethiopian land of elephants to the
Egyptian power. You, Hermon, are an orphan, but for you, too, the souls
of your parents live on. Only I do not know whether you still honour and
pray to them."
"I did until a few years ago," replied Hermon.
"But later you neglected this sacred duty," added Thyone. "Yet how was
that possible? In our barren Pelusium I could not help thinking hundreds
of times of the grove which Archias planted in your necropolis for the
dead members of his family, and how often, while we were in Alexandria,
it attracted me to think in its shade of your never-to-be-forgotten
mother. There I felt her soul near me; for there was her home, and in
imagination I saw her walking and resting under the trees. And you--her
beloved child--you remained aloof from this hallowed spot! Even at the
festival of the dead you omitted prayers and sacrifices?"
The blind artist assented to this question by a silent bend of the head;
but the matron indignantly exclaimed: "And did not you know, unhappy man,
that you were thus casting away the shield which protects mortals from
the avenging gods? And your glorious mother, who would have given her
life for you? Yet you loved her, I suppose?"
"Thyone!" Hermon cried, deeply wounded, holding out his right hand as if
in defence. "Well, well!" said the matron. "I know that you revere her
memory. But that alone is not sufficient. On memorial festivals, and
especially on the birthdays, a mother's soul needs a prayer and a gift
from the son, a wreath, a fillet, fragrant ointment, a piece of honey, a
cup of wine or milk--all these things even the poor man spares from his
penury--yet a warm prayer, in pure remembrance and love, would suffice to
rob the wrath of Nemesis, which the enraged barbarian girl let loose upon
you, of its power. Only your mother, Hermon, the soul of the noble woman
who bore you, can restore to you what you have lost. Appeal for aid to
her, son of Erigone, and she will yet make everything right."
Bending quickly over the artist as she spoke, she kissed his brow and
moved steadily away, though he called her name with yearning entreaty.
A short time after, the steward Gras led Hermon to his cabin, and while
undressing him reported that a messenger from Pelusium had announced that
the commandant Philippus was coming to Tennis the next morning, before
the market place filled, to take his wife with him to Alexandria, where
he was going by the King's command.
Hermon only half listened, and then ordered the Bithynian to leave him.
After he had reclined on the couch a short time, he softly called the
names of the steward, Thyone, and Daphne. As he received no answer, and
thus learned that he was alone, he rose, drew himself up to his full
height, gazed heavenward with his bandaged eyes, stretched both hands
toward the ceiling of the low cabin, and obeyed his friend's bidding.
Thoroughly convinced that he was doing right, and ashamed of having so
long neglected what the duty of a son commanded, he implored his mother's
soul for forgiveness.
While doing so he again found that the figure which he recalled to his
memory appeared before him with marvellous distinctness. Never had she
been so near him since, when a boy of seven, she clasped him for the last
time to her heart. She tenderly held out her arms to him, and he rushed
into her embrace, shouting exultantly while she hugged and kissed him.
Every pet name which he had once been so glad to hear, and during recent
years had forgotten, again fell from her lips. As had often happened in
days long past, he again saw his mother crown him for a festival. Pleased
with the little new garment which she herself had woven for him and
embroidered with a tiny tree with red apples, beneath which stood a
bright-plumaged duckling, she led him by the hand in the necropolis to
the empty tomb dedicated to his father.
It was a building the height of a man, constructed of red Cyprian marble,
on which, cast in bronze, shield, sword, and lance, as well as a
beautiful helmet, lay beside a sleeping lion. It was dedicated to the
memory of the brave hipparch whom he had been permitted to call his
father, and who had been burned beside the battlefield on which he had
found a hero's death.
Hermon now again beheld himself, with his mother, garlanding, anointing,
and twining with fresh fillets the mausoleum erected by his uncle Archias
to his brave brother. The species of every flower, the colour of the
fillets-nay, even the designs embroidered on his little holiday
robe--again returned to his mind, and, while these pleasant memories
hovered around him, he appealed to his mother in prayer.
She stood before him, young and beautiful, listening without reproach or
censure as he besought her forgiveness and confided to her his sins, and
how severely he was punished by Nemesis.
During this confession he felt as though he was kneeling before the
beloved dead, hiding his face in her lap, while she bent over him and
stroked his thick, black hair. True, he did not hear her speak; but when
he looked up again he could see, by the expression of her faithful blue
eyes, that his manly appearance surprised her, and that she rejoiced in
his return to her arms.
She listened compassionately to his laments, and when he paused pressed
his head to her bosom and gazed into his face with such joyous confidence
that his heart swelled, and he told himself that she could not look at
him thus unless she saw happiness in store for him.
Lastly, he began also to confide that he loved no woman on earth more
ardently than the very Daphne whom, when only a pretty little child, she
had carried in her arms, yet that he could not seek the wealthy heiress
because manly pride forbade this to the blind beggar.
Here the anguish of renunciation seized him with great violence, and when
he wished to appeal again to his mother his exhausted imagination refused
its service, and the vision would not appear.
Then he groped his way back to the bed, and, as he let his head sink upon
the pillows, he fancied that he would soon be again enwrapped in the
sweet slumber of childhood, which had long shunned his couch.
It was years since he had felt so full of peace and hope, and he told
himself, with grateful joy, that every childlike emotion had not yet died
within him, that the stern conflicts and struggles of the last years had
not yet steeled every gentle emotion.
CHAPTER IV.
The sun of the following day had long passed its meridian when Hermon at
last woke. The steward Gras, who had grown gray in the service of
Archias, was standing beside the couch.
There was nothing in the round, beardless face of this well-fed yet
active man that could have attracted the artist, yet the quiet tones of
his deep voice recalled to memory the clear, steadfast gaze of his gray
eyes, from which so often, in former days, inviolable fidelity, sound
sense, caution, and prudence had looked forth at him.
What the blind man heard from Gras surprised him--nay, at first seemed
impossible. To sleep until the afternoon was something unprecedented for
his wakeful temperament; but what was he to say to the tidings that the
commandant of Pelusium had arrived in his state galley early in the
morning and taken his wife, Daphne, and Chrysilla away with him to
Alexandria?
Yet it sounded credible enough when the Bithynian further informed him
that the ladies had left messages of remembrance for him, and said that
Archias's ship, upon which he was, would be at his disposal for any
length of time he might desire. Gras was commissioned to attend him. The
Lady Thyone especially desired him to heed her counsel.
While the steward was communicating this startling news as calmly as if
everything was a matter of course, the events of the preceding night came
back to Hermon's memory with perfect distinctness, and again the fear
assailed him that the rescued Demeter was the work of Myrtilus, and not
his own.
So the first question he addressed to Gras concerned the Tennis
goldsmith, and it was a keen disappointment to Hermon when he learned
that the earliest time he could expect to see him would be the following
day. The skilful artisan had been engaged for weeks upon the gold
ornaments on the new doors of the holy of holies in the Temple of Amon at
Tanis. Urgent business had called him home from the neighbouring city
just before the night of the attack; but yesterday evening he had
returned to Tanis, where his wife said he would have only two days' work
to do.
This answer, however, by no means appeased Hermon's impatience. He
commanded that a special messenger should be sent to summon the
goldsmith, and the Bithynian received the order with a slight shake of
his round head.
What new trouble had befallen the usually alert young artist that he
received this unexpected change in his situation as apathetically as a
horse which is led from one stall to another, and, instead of questioning
him, thought only of hastening his interview with the goldsmith? If his
mistress, who had left him full of anxiety from the fear that her
departure would deeply agitate the blind man, should learn how
indifferently he had received it! He, Gras, certainly would not betray
it. Eternal gods--these artists! He knew them. Their work was dearer to
their hearts than their own lives, love, or friendship.
During breakfast, of which the steward was obliged to remind him, Hermon
pondered over his fate; but how could he attain any degree of clearness
of vision until he secured accurate information concerning the statue of
Demeter? Like a dark cloud, which sweeps over the starry sky and prevents
the astronomer from seeing the planets which he desires to observe, the
fear that Proclus's praise had been bestowed upon the work of Myrtilus
stood between him and every goal of his thought.
Only the fact that he still remained blind, and not even the faintest
glimmer of light pierced the surrounding darkness, while the sun
continued its course with glowing radiance, and that, blinded and
beggared, he must despise himself if he sought to win Daphne, was
certain. No reflection could alter it.
Again the peace of mind which he thought he had regained during slumber
was destroyed. Fear of the artisan's statement even rendered it
impossible to pray to his mother with the affectionate devotion he had
felt the day before.
The goldsmith had directed the rescue of the Demeter, yet he would
scarcely have been able to distinguish it from the statue by Myrtilus;
for though, like his friend, he had often employed his skilful hands in
the arrangement of the gold plates at the commencement of the work, the
Egyptian had been summoned to Tennis before the statues had attained
recognisable form. He had not entered the studios for several months,
unless Bias had granted him admittance without informing his master. This
was quite possible, for the slave's keen eyes certainly had not failed to
notice how little he and Myrtilus valued the opinion of the honest,
skilful, but extremely practical and unimaginative man, who could not
create independently even the smallest detail.
So it was impossible to determine at present whether Chello had seen the
finished statues or not, yet Hermon desired the former with actual
fervour, that he might have positive certainty.
While reflecting over these matters, the image of the lean Egyptian
goldsmith, with his narrow, brown, smooth-shaven face and skull,
prominent cheek bones, receding brow, projecting ears and, with all its
keenness, lustreless glance, rose before him as if he could see his
bodily presence. Not a single word unconnected with his trade, the
weather, or an accident, had ever reached the friends' ears from Chello's
thick lips, and this circumstance seemed to warrant Hermon in the
expectation of learning from him the pure, unadulterated truth.
Rarely had a messenger of love been awaited with such feverish suspense
as the slave whom Gras had despatched to Tanis to induce the goldsmith to
return home. He might come soon after nightfall, and Hermon used the
interval to ask the Bithynian the questions which he had long expected.
The replies afforded little additional information. He learned only that
Philippus had been summoned to Alexandria by the King, and that the Lady
Thyone and her husband had talked with the leech and assented to his
opinion that it would be better for Hermon to wait here until the burns
on his face were healed before returning to Alexandria.
For Daphne's sake this decision had undoubtedly been welcome to the
matron, and it pleased him also; for he still felt so ill physically, and
so agitated mentally, that he shrank from meeting his numerous
acquaintances in the capital.
The goldsmith! the goldsmith! It depended upon his decision whether he
would return to Alexandria at all.
Soon after Hermon had learned from Gras that the stars had risen, he was
informed that he must wait patiently for his interview with the Egyptian,
as he had been summoned to the capital that very day by a messenger from
Proclus.
Then the steward had fresh cause to marvel at his charge, for this news
aroused the most vehement excitement.
In fact, it afforded the prospect of a series--perhaps a long one--of the
most torturing days and nights. And the dreaded hours actually came--nay,
the anguish of uncertainty had become almost unendurable, when, on the
seventh day, the Egyptian at last returned from Alexandria. They had
seemed like weeks to Hermon, had made his face thinner, and mingled the
first silver hairs in his black beard.
The calls of the cheerful notary and the daily visits of the leech, an
elderly man, who had depressed rather than cheered him by informing him
of many cases like his own which all proved incurable, had been his sole
diversion. True, the heads of the Greek residents of Tennis had also
sometimes sought him: the higher government officials, the lessees of the
oil monopoly and the royal bank, as well as Gorgias, who, next to Archias
the Alexandrian, owned the largest weaving establishments, but the tales
of daily incidents with which they entertained Hermon wearied him. He
listened with interest only to the story of Ledscha's disappearance, yet
he perceived, from the very slight impression it made upon him, how
little he had really cared for the Biamite girl.
His inquiries about Gula called down upon him many well-meant jests. She
was with her parents; while Taus, Ledscha's young sister, was staying at
the brick-kiln, where the former had reduced the unruly slaves to
submission.
Care had been taken to provide for his personal safety, for the attack
might perhaps yet prove to have been connected with the jealousy of the
Biamite husbands.
The commandant of Pelusium had therefore placed a small garrison of
heavily armed soldiers and archers in Tennis, for whom tents had been
pitched on the site of the burned white house.
Words of command and signals for changing the guards often reached Hermon
when he was on the deck of his ship, and visitors praised the wise
caution and prompt action of Alexander the Great's old comrade.
The notary, a vivacious man of fifty, who had lived a long time in
Alexandria and, asserting that he grew dull and withered in little
Tennis, went to the capital as frequently as possible, had often called
upon the sculptor at first, and been disposed to discuss art and the
other subjects dear to Hermon's heart, but on the third day he again set
off for his beloved Alexandria. When saying farewell, he had been
unusually merry, and asked Hermon to send him away with good wishes and
offer sacrifices for the success of his business, since he hoped to bring
a valuable gift on his return from the journey.
The blind artist was glad to have other visits for a short time, but he
preferred to be alone and devote his thoughts to his own affairs.
He now knew that his love was genuine. Daphne seemed the very incarnation
of desirable, artless, heart-refreshing womanliness, but his memory could
not dwell with her long; anxiety concerning Chello's report only too
quickly interrupted it, as soon as he yielded to its charm.
He did not think at all of the future. What was he to appoint for a time
which the words of a third person might render unendurable?
When Gras at last ushered in the goldsmith, his heart throbbed so
violently that it was difficult for him to find the words needed for the
questions he desired to ask.
The Egyptian had really been summoned to Alexandria by Proclus, not on
account of the Demeter, but the clasp said to belong to Myrtilus, found
amid the ruins of the fallen house, and he had been able to identify it
with absolute positiveness as the sculptor's property.
He had been referred from one office to another, until finally the Tennis
notary and Proclus opened the right doors to him.
Now the importance of his testimony appeared, since the will of the
wealthy young sculptor could not be opened until his death was proved,
and the clasp which had been found aided in doing so.
Hermon's question whether he had heard any particulars about this will
was answered by the cold-hearted, dull-brained man in the negative.
He had done enough, he said, by expressing his opinion. He had gone to
Alexandria unwillingly, and would certainly have stayed in Tennis if he
could have foreseen what a number of tiresome examinations he would be
obliged to undergo. He had been burning with impatience to quit the
place, on account of the important work left behind in Tanis, and he did
not even know whether he would be reimbursed for his travelling expenses.
During this preliminary conversation Hermon gained the composure he
needed.
He began by ascertaining whether Chello remembered the interior
arrangement of the burned white house, and it soon appeared that he
recollected it accurately.
Then the blind man requested him to tell how the rescue of the statue had
been managed, and the account of the extremely prosaic artisan described
so clearly and practically how, on entering the burning building, he
found Myrtilus's studio already inaccessible, but the statue of Demeter
in Hermon's still uninjured, that the trustworthiness of his story could
not be doubted.
One circumstance only appeared strange, yet it was easily explained.
Instead of standing on the pedestal, the Demeter was beside it, and even
the slow-witted goldsmith inferred from this fact that the robbers had
intended to steal it and placed it on the floor for that purpose, but
were prevented from accomplishing their design by the interference of
Hermon and the people from Tennis.
After the Egyptian, in reply to the artist's inquiry concerning what
other works of art and implements he had seen in the studio, had answered
that nothing else could be distinguished on account of the smoke, he
congratulated the sculptor on his last work. People were already making a
great stir about the new Demeter. It had been discussed not only in the
workshop of his brother, who, like himself, followed their father's
calling, but also in the offices, at the harbour, in the barbers' rooms
and the cookshops, and he, too, must admit that, for a Greek goddess,
that always lacked genuine, earnest dignity, it really was a pretty bit
of work.
Lastly, the Egyptian asked to whom he should apply for payment for the
remainder of his labour.
The strip of gold, from which Hermon had ordered the diadem to be made,
had attracted his attention on the head of his Demeter, and compensation
for the work upon this ornament was still due.
Hermon, deeply agitated, asked, with glowing cheeks, whether Chello
really positively remembered having prepared for him the gold diadem
which he had seen in Alexandria, and the Egyptian eagerly assured him
that he had done so. Hitherto he had found the sculptors honest men, and
Hermon would not withhold the payment for his well-earned toil.
The artist strenuously denied such an intention; but when, in his desire
to have the most absolute assurance, he again asked questions about the
diadem, the Egyptian thought that the blind sculptor doubted the justice
of his demand, and wrathfully insisted upon his claim, until Gras managed
to whisper, undetected by Hermon, that he would have the money ready for
him.
This satisfied the angry man. He honestly believed that he had prepared
the gold for the ornament on the head of the Demeter in Alexandria; yet
the statue chiselled by Myrtilus had also been adorned with a diadem, and
Chello had wrought the strip of gold it required. Only it had escaped his
memory, because he had been paid for the work immediately after its
delivery.
Glad to obey his mistress's orders to settle at once any debts which the
artist might have in Tennis, the steward followed the goldsmith while
Hermon, seizing the huge goblet which had just been filled with wine and
water for him drained it at one long draught. Then, with sigh of relief,
he restored it to its place, raised his hand and his blinded eyes
heavenward, and offered a brief, fervent thanksgiving to his mother's
soul and the great Demeter, whom, he might now believe it himself, he had
honoured with a masterpiece which had extorted warm admiration even from
a connoisseur unfriendly his art.
When Gras returned, he said, with a grin of satisfaction, that the
goldsmith was like all the rest of his countrymen. The artists did not
owe him another drachm; the never-to-be-forgotten Myrtilus had paid for
the work ordered by Hermon also.
Then, for the first time since he had been led on board the ship, a gay
laugh rang fro the blind man's lips, rising in deep, pure, joyous tones
from his relieved breast.
The faithful gray eyes of honest Gras glittered with tears at the musical
tones, and how ardently he wished for his beloved mistress when the
sculptor, not content with this, exclaimed as gleefully as in happier
days: "Hitherto I have had no real pleasure from my successful work, old
Gras, but it is awaking now! If my Myrtilus were still alive, and these
miserable eyes yet possessed the power of rejoicing in the light and in
beautiful human forms, by the dog! I would have the mixing vessels
filled, wreath after wreath brought, boon companions summoned, and with
flute-playing, songs, and fiery words, offer the Muses, Demeter, and
Dionysus their due meed of homage!"
Gras declared that this wish might easily be fulfilled. There was no lack
of wine or drinking cups on the vessel, the flute-players whom he had
heard in the Odeum at Tanis did not understand their business amiss,
flowers and wreaths could be obtained, and all who spoke Greek in Tennis
would accept his invitation.
But the Bithynian soon regretted this proposal, for it fell like a
hoar-frost upon the blind man's happy mood. He curtly declined. He would
not play host where he was himself a guest, and pride forbade him to use
the property of others as though it were his own.
He could not regain his suddenly awakened pleasure in existence before
Gras warned him it was time to go to rest. Not until he was alone in the
quiet cabin did the sense of joy in his first great success overpower him
afresh.
He might well feel proud delight in the work which he had created, for he
had accomplished it without being unfaithful to the aims he had set
before him.
It had been taken from his own studio, and the skilful old artisan had
recognised his preliminary work upon the diadem which he, Hermon, had
afterward adorned with ornaments himself. But, alas! this first must at
the same time be his last great success, and he was condemned to live on
in darkness.
Although abundant recognition awaited him in Alexandria, his quickly
gained renown would soon be forgotten, and he would remain a beggared
blind man. But it was now allowable for him to think secretly of
possessing Daphne; perhaps she would wait for him and reject other
suitors until he learned in the capital whether he might not hope to
recover his lost sight. He was at least secure against external want; the
generous Archias would hardly withhold from him the prize he had intended
for the successful statue, although the second had been destroyed. The
great merchant would do everything for his fame-crowned nephew, and he,
Hermon, was conscious that had his uncle been in his situation he would
have divided his last obol with him. Refusal of his assistance would have
been an insult to his paternal friend and guardian.
Lastly, he might hope that Archias would take him to the most skilful
leeches in Alexandria and, if they succeeded in restoring his lost power
of vision, then--then Yet it seemed so presumptuous to lull himself in
this hope that he forbade himself the pleasure of indulging it.
Amid these consoling reflections, Hermon fell asleep, and awoke fresher
and more cheerful than he had been for some time.
He had to spend two whole weeks more in Tennis, for the burns healed
slowly, and an anxious fear kept him away from Alexandria.
There the woman he loved would again meet him and, though he could assure
Thyone that Nemesis had turned her wheel away from him, he would have
been permitted to treat Daphne only with cool reserve, while every fibre
of his being urged him to confess his love and clasp her in his arms.
Gras had already written twice to his master, telling him with what
gratifying patience Hermon was beginning to submit to his great
misfortune, when the notary Melampus returned from Alexandria with news
which produced the most delightful transformation in the blind artist's
outer life.
More swiftly than his great corpulence usually permitted the jovial man
to move, he ascended to the deck, calling: "Great, greater, the greatest
of news I bring, as the heaviest but by no means the most dilatory of
messengers of good fortune from the city of cities. Prick up your ears,
my friend, and summon all your strength, for there are instances of the
fatal effect of especially lavish gifts from the blind and yet often sure
aim of the goddess of Fortune. The Demeter, in whom you proved so
marvellously that the art of a mortal is sufficient to create immortals,
is beginning to show her gratitude. She is helping to twine wreaths for
you in Alexandria."
Here the vivacious man suddenly hesitated and, while wiping his plump
cheeks, perspiring brow, and smooth, fat double chin with his kerchief,
added in a tone of sincere regret: "That's the way with me! In one thing
which really moves me, I always forget the other. The fault sticks to me
like my ears and nose. When my mother gave me two errands, I attended to
the first in the best possible way, but overlooked the second entirely,
and was paid for it with my father's staff, yet even the blue wales made
no change in the fault. But for that I should still be in the city of
cities; but it robbed me of my best clients, and so I was transferred to
this dullest of holes. Even here it clings to me. My detestable
exultation just now proves it. Yet I know how dear to you was the dead
man who manifests his love even from the grave. But you will forgive me
the false note into which my weakness led me; it sprang from regard for
you, my young friend. To serve your cause, I forgot everything else. Like
my mother's first errand, it was performed in the best possible way. You
will learn directly. By the lightnings of Father Zeus and the owl of
Athene, the news I bring is certainly great and beautiful; but he who
yearned to make you happy was snatched from you and, though his noble
legacy must inspire pleasure and gratitude, it will nevertheless fill
your poor eyes with sorrowful tears."
Melampus turned, as he spoke, to the misshapen Egyptian slave who
performed the duties of a clerk, and took several rolls from the
drumshaped case that hung around his neck; but his prediction concerning
Hermon was speedily fulfilled, for the notary handed him the will of his
friend Myrtilus.
It made him the heir of his entire fortune and, however happy the
unexpected royal gift rendered the blind man, however cheering might be
the prospects it opened to him for the future and the desire of his
heart, sobs nevertheless interrupted the affectionate words which
commenced the document Melampus read aloud to him.
Doubtless the tears which Hermon dedicated to the most beloved of human
beings made his blinded eyes smart, but he could not restrain them, and
even long after the notary had left him, and the steward had
congratulated him on his good fortune, the deep emotion of his tender
heart again and again called forth a fresh flood of tears consecrated to
the memory of his friend.
The notary had already informed the grammateus of the disposition which
Myrtilus had made of his property in Hermon's favour a few days before,
but, by the advice of the experienced Proclus, the contents of the will
had been withheld from the sculptor; the unfortunate man ought to be
spared any disappointment, and proof that Myrtilus was really among the
victims of the accident must first be obtained.
The clasp found in the ruins of the white house appeared to furnish this,
and the notary had put all other business aside and gone to Alexandria to
settle the matter.
The goldsmith Chello, who had fastened a new pin to the clasp, and could
swear that it had belonged to Myrtilus, had been summoned to the capital
as a witness, and, with the aid of the influential grammateus of the
Dionysian games and priest of Apollo, the zeal of Melampus had
accomplished in a short time the settlement of this difficult affair,
which otherwise might perhaps have consumed several months.
The violent death of Myrtilus had been admitted as proved by the
magistrate, who had been prepossessed in Hermon's favour by his
masterpiece. Besides, no doubts could be raised concerning the validity
of a will attested by sixteen witnesses. The execution of this last
testament had been intrusted to Archias, as Myrtilus's nearest relative,
and several other distinguished Alexandrians.
The amount of the fortune bequeathed had surprised even these wealthy
men, for under the prudent management of Archias the property inherited
by the modest young sculptor had trebled in value.
The poor blind artist had suddenly become a man who might be termed
"rich," even in the great capital.
Again the steward shook his head; this vast, unexpected inheritance did
not seem to make half so deep an impression upon the eccentric blind man
as the news received a short time ago that his trivial debt to the
goldsmith Chello was already settled. But Hermon must have dearly loved
the friend to whom he owed this great change of fortune, and grief for
him had cast joy in his immense new wealth completely into the shade.
This conjecture was confirmed on the following morning, for the blind man
had himself led to the Greek necropolis to offer sacrifices to the gods
of the nether world and to think of his friend.
When, soon after noon, the lessee of the royal bank appeared on the ship
to offer him as many drachmae or talents as he might need for present
use, he asked for a considerable sum to purchase a larger death-offering
for his murdered friend. The next morning he went with the architect of
the province to the scene of the conflagration, and had him mark the spot
of ground on which he desired to erect to his Myrtilus a monument to be
made in Alexandria.
At sunset, leaning on the steward's arm, he went to the Temple of
Nemesis, where he prayed and commissioned the priest to offer a costly
sacrifice to the goddess in his name.
On the return home, Hermon suddenly stood still and mentioned to Gras the
sum which he intended to bestow upon the blind in Tennis. He knew now
what it means to live bereft of light, and, he added in a low tone, to be
also poor and unable to earn his daily bread.
On the ship he asked the Bithynian whether his burned face had become
presentable again, and no longer made a repulsive impression.
This Gras could truthfully assure him. Then the artist's features
brightened, and the Bithynian heard genuine cheerfulness ring in the
tones of his voice as he exclaimed: "Then, old Gras, we will set out for
Alexandria as soon as the ship is ready to sail. Back to life, to the
society of men of my own stamp, to reap the praise earned by my own
creations, and to the only divine maiden among mortals--to Daphne!"
"The day after to-morrow!" exclaimed the steward in joyous excitement;
and soon after the carrier dove was flying toward the house of Archias,
bearing the letter which stated the hour when his fame-crowned blind
nephew would enter the great harbour of Alexandria.
The evening of the next day but one the Proserpina was bearing Hermon
away from the city of weavers toward home.
As the evening breeze fanned his brow, his thoughts dwelt sadly on his
Myrtilus. Hitherto it had always seemed as if he was bound, and must
commit some atrocious deed to use the seething power condemned to
inaction. But as the galley left the Tanitic branch of the Nile behind,
and the blind man inhaled the cool air upon the calm sea, his heart
swelled, and for the first time he became fully aware that, though the
light of the sun would probably never shine for him again, and therefore
the joy of creating, the rapture of once more testing his fettered
strength, would probably be forever denied him, other stars might perhaps
illumine his path, and he was going, in a position of brilliant
independence, toward his native city, fame, and--eternal gods!--love.
Daphne had conquered, and he gave only a passing thought to Ledscha and
the hapless weaver Arachne.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Chance, which took no heed of merit or unworthiness
Deceived himself concerning the value of his own work
Gods whom men had invented after their own likeness
Hate the person from whom he receives benefits
ARACHNE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 6.
CHAPTER V.
At the third hour after sunrise a distinguished assemblage of people
gathered at the landing place east of the Temple of Poseidon in the great
harbour of Alexandria.
Its members belonged to the upper classes, for many had come in carriages
and litters, and numerous pedestrians were accompanied by slaves bearing
in delicately woven baskets and cornucopias a laurel wreath, a papyrus
crown, or bright-hued flowers.
The most aristocratic among the gentlemen had gathered on the western
side of the great sanctuary, between the cella and the long row of Doric
columns which supported the roof of the marble temple.
The Macedonian Council of the city was already represented by several of
its members. Among their number was Archias, Daphne's father, a man of
middle height and comfortable portliness, from whose well-formed,
beardless face looked forth a pair of shrewd eyes, and whose quick
movements revealed the slight irritability of his temperament.
Several members of the Council and wealthy merchants surrounded him,
while the grammateus Proclus first talked animatedly with other
government officials and representatives of the priesthood, and then with
Archias. The head of the Museum, who bore the title of "high priest," had
also appeared there with several members of this famous centre of the
intellectual life of the capital. They shared the shade of this part of
the temple with distinguished masters of sculpture and painting,
architecture and poetry, and conversed together with the graceful
animation of Greeks endowed with great intellectual gifts.
Among them mingled, distinguishable neither by costume nor language, a
number of prominent patrons of art in the great Jewish community. Their
principal, the alabarch, was talking eagerly with the philosopher
Hegesias and the Rhodian leech Chrysippus; Queen Arsinoe's favourite,
whom at Althea's instigation she had sent with Proclus to receive the
returning traveller.
Sometimes all gazed toward the mouth of the harbour, where the expected
ship must soon pass the recently completed masterpiece of Sostratus, the
towering lighthouse, still shining in its marble purity.
Soon many Alexandrians also crowded the large platform in front of the
Temple of Poseidon, and the very wide marble staircase leading from it to
the landing place.
Beneath the bronze statues of the Dioscuri, at the right and left of the
topmost step, had also gathered the magnificent figures of the Phebi and
the younger men from the wrestling school of Timagetes, with garlands on
their curling locks, as well as many younger artists and pupils of the
older masters.
The statues of the gods and goddesses of the sea and their lofty
pedestals, standing at the sides of the staircase, cast upon the marble
steps, gleaming in the radiance of the morning sun, narrow shadows, which
attracted the male and female chorus singers, who, also wearing beautiful
garlands, had come to greet the expected arrival with solemn chants.
Several actors were just coming from rehearsal in the theatre of
Dionysus, east of the Temple of Poseidon, of which, like all the stages
in the city, Proclus was chief manager.
A pretty dancing girl, who hung on the arm of the youngest, extended her
hand with a graceful gesture toward the staircase, and asked:
"Whom can they be expecting there? Probably some huge new animal for the
Museum which has been caught somewhere for the King, for yonder stiff
wearer of a laurel crown, who throws his head back as though he would
like to eat the Olympians and take the King for a luncheon into the
bargain, is Straton, the denier of the gods, and the little man with the
bullethead is the grammarian Zoilus."
"Of course," replied her companion. "But there, too, is Apollodorus, the
alabarch of the Jews, and the heavy money-bag Archias--"
"Why look at them!" cried the younger mime. "It's far better worth while
to stretch your neck for those farther in front. They are genuine friends
of the Muses--the poets Theocritus and Zenodotus."
"The great Athene, Apollo, and all his nine Pierides, have sent their
envoys," said the older actor pathetically, "for there, too, are the
sculptors Euphranor and Chares, and the godlike builder of the
lighthouse, Sostratus in person."
"A handsome man," cried the girl flute-player, "but vain, I tell you,
vain--"
"Self-conscious, you ought to say," corrected her companion.
"Certainly," added the older actor, patting his smooth cheeks and chin
with a rose he held in his hand. Who can defend himself against the
highest merit, self-knowledge? But the person who is to have this
reception, by the staff of Dionysus! if modesty flies away from him like
the bird from a girl, it ought Just look there! The tall,
broad-shouldered fellow yonder is Chrysippus, the right hand of Arsinoe,
as our grammateus Proclus is her left. So probably some prince is
expected."
"The gentlemen of the Museum and the great artists yonder would not stir
a foot, far less lose so precious a morning hour, for any mere wearer of
a crown or sceptre," protested the other actor; "it must be--"
"That the King or the Queen command it," interrupted the older player.
"Only Arsinoe is represented here. Or do you see any envoy of Ptolemy?
Perhaps they will yet arrive. If there were ambassadors of the great
Roman Senate--"
"Or," added the dancer, "envoys from King Antiochus. But--goose that I
am!--then they would not be received here, but in the royal harbour at
the Lochias. See if I don't prove to be right! Divine honours are to be
paid to some newly attracted hero of the intellect. But--just follow my
finger! There--yonder--it comes floating along at the left of the island
of Antirrhodus. That may be his galley! Magnificent! Wonderfully
beautiful! Brilliant! Like a swan! No, no, like a swimming peacock! And
the silver embroidery on the blue sails! It glitters and sparkles like
stars in the azure sky."
Meanwhile the elder actor, shading his eyes with his hand, had been
gazing at the harbour, where, amid the innumerable vessels, the expected
one, whose sails were just being reefed, was steered by a skilful hand.
Now he interrupted the blond beauty with the exclamation: "It is
Archias's Proserpina! I know it well." Then, in a declamatory tone, he
continued: "I, too, was permitted on the deck of the glittering vessel,
lightly rocked by the crimson waves, to reach my welcome goal; as the
guest of peerless Archias, I mean. The most magnificent festival in his
villa! There was a little performance there in which Mentor and I allowed
ourselves to be persuaded to take part. But just see how the beautiful
ship uses the narrow passage between the two triremes, as if it had the
bloodleech's power of contraction! But to return to the festival of
Archias: the oyster ragout served there, the pheasant pasties--"
Here he interrupted himself, exclaiming in surprise: "By the club of
Hercules, the Proserpina is to be received with a full chorus! And there
is the owner himself descending the stairs! Whom is she bringing?"
"Come! come!" cried the dancing girl to her companion, dragging him after
her, "I shall die of curiosity."
The singing and shouting of many voices greeted the actors as they
approached the platform of the Temple of Poseidon.
When from this spot the dancer fixed her eyes upon the landing place, she
suddenly dropped her companion's arm, exclaiming: "It is the handsome
blind sculptor, Hermon, the heir of the wealthy Myrtilus. Do you learn
this now for the first time, you jealous Thersites? Hail, hail, divine
Hermon! Hail, noble victim of the ungrateful Olympians! Hail to thee,
Hermon, and thy immortal works! Hail, hail, hail!"
Meanwhile she waved her handkerchief with frenzied eagerness, as if she
could thus force the blind man to see her, and a group of actors whom
Proclus, the grammateus of the Dionysian arts, had sent here to receive
Hermon worthily, followed her example.
But her cries were drowned by the singing of the chorus and by thousands
of shouting voices, while Hermon was embraced by Archias on board the
galley, and then, by his guidance, stepped on shore and ascended the
staircase of the Temple of Poseidon.
Before the ship entered the harbour, the artist had had a large goblet of
unmixed wine given to him, that he might conquer the emotion that had
overpowered him.
Though his blind eyes did not show him even the faintest outline of a
figure, he felt as if he was flooded with brilliant sunshine.
While the Proserpina was bearing him past the lighthouse, Gras told him
that they had now reached the great harbour, and at the same time he
heard the shouts, whistles, signals, and varying sounds of the landing
place with its crowded shipping, and of the capital.
His blood surged in his veins, and before his mind rose the vision of the
corn-flower blue sky, mirrored in the calm surface of the bluest of seas.
The pharos built by Sostratus towered in dazzling whiteness above the
tide, and before him rose the noble temple buildings, palaces, and
porticoes of the city of Alexandria, with which he was familiar, and
before and between them statue after statue of marble and bronze, the
whole flooded with radiant golden light.
True, darkness sometimes swallowed this wonderful picture, but an effort
of the will was sufficient to show it to him again.
"The Temple of Poseidon!" cried Gras. "The Proserpina is to land at the
foot of the steps." And now Hermon listened to the sounds from the shore,
whose hum and buzz transported him into the midst of the long-missed city
of commerce, knowledge, and arts.
Then the captain's shouts of command fell imperiously upon his ears, the
strokes of the oars ceased, their blades sank with a loud splash into the
water, and at the same instant from the temple steps Hermon was greeted
by the solemn notes of the chorus, from whose rhythm his own name rang
forth again and again like so many shouts of victory.
He thought his heart would fairly burst through his arched chest, and the
passionate violence of its throbbing did not lessen when Gras exclaimed:
"Half Alexandria has assembled to greet you. Ah, if you could only see
it! How the kerchiefs are waving! Laurel after laurel in every hand! All
the distinguished people in the capital have gathered on the sacred soil
of the Temple of Poseidon. There is Archias, too; there are the artists
and the famous gentlemen of the Museum, the members of the Ephebi, and
the priests of the great gods."
Hermon listened with his hand pressed on his breast, and while doing so
the power of his imagination showed the vast, harmoniously noble
structure of the many-pillared Temple of Poseidon, surrounded by as many
thousands as there were in reality hundreds. From all parts of the
sanctuary, even from the tops of the roofs, he beheld laurel branches and
kerchiefs waving and tossing, and wreaths flung on the ground before him.
If this picture was correct, the whole city was greeting him, headed by
the men whom he honoured as great and meritorious, and in front of them
all Daphne, with drooping head, full of feminine grace and heart-winning
goodness.
While the chorus continued their song, and the welcoming shouts grew
louder, the brilliant picture faded away, but in return he felt friendly
arms clasp him. First Archias, then Proclus, and after him a succession
of fellow-artists-the greatest of all--drew him into a warm embrace.
Finally he felt himself led away, placed his feet as his Uncle Archias
whispered directions, and as they gropingly obeyed them ascended the
temple steps and stood in utter darkness upon the platform listening to
the speeches which so many had prepared.
All the distinguished men in the city expressed their sympathy, their
pity, their admiration, their hopes, or sent assurances of them to him.
The Rhodian Chrysippus, despatched by the Queen, delivered the wreath
which the monarch bestowed, and informed Hermon, with her greetings, that
Arsinoe deemed his Demeter worthy of the laurel.
The most famous masters of his art, the great scholars from the Museum,
the whole priesthood of Demeter, which included Daphne, the servants of
Apollo, his dear Ephebi, the comrades of his physical exercises--all whom
he honoured, admired, loved-loaded him with praises and good wishes, as
well as the assurance of their pride in numbering him among them.
No form, no colour from the visible world, penetrated the darkness
surrounding him, not even the image of the woman he loved. Only his ears
enabled him to receive the praises, honours, congratulations lavished
here and, though he sometimes thought he had received enough, he again
listened willingly and intently when a new speaker addressed him in warm
words of eulogy. What share compassion for his unprecedentedly sorrowful
fate had in this extravagantly laudatory and cordial greeting, he did not
ask; he only felt with a throbbing heart that he now stood upon a summit
which he had scarcely ventured to hope ever to attain. His dreams of
outward success which had not been realized, because he deemed it treason
to his art to deviate from the course which he believed right and best
adapted to it, he now, without having yielded to the demands of the old
school, heard praised as his well-earned possessions.
He felt as if he breathed the lighter, purer air of the realms of the
blessed, and the laurel crown which the Queen's envoy pressed upon his
brow, the wreaths which his fellow-artists presented to him by hands no
less distinguished than those of the great sculptor Protogenes, and
Nicias, the most admired artist after the death of Apelles, seemed, like
the wings on the hat and shoes of Hermes, messenger of the gods, to raise
him out of himself and into the air.
Darkness surrounded him, yet a bright dazzling light issued from his soul
and illuminated his whole being with the warm golden radiance of the sun.
Not even the faintest shadow dimmed it until Soteles, his fellow-student
at Rhodes, who sustained him with ardent earnestness in the struggle to
prefer truth to beauty, greeted him.
He welcomed him and wished that he might recover his lost sight as warmly
as his predecessors. He praised the Demeter, too, but added that this was
not the place to say what he missed in her. Yet that she did lack it
awakened in him an emotion of pain, for this, Hermon's last work,
apparently gave the followers of the ancients a right to number him in
their ranks.
His cautious expression of regret must refer to the head of his Demeter.
Yet surely it was not his fault that Daphne's features bore the impress
of that gentle, winning kindness which he himself and Soteles, imitating
him, had often condemned as weak and characterless.
The correctness of his belief was instantly proved to him by the address
of gray-haired, highly praised Euphranor, who spoke of the Demeter's
countenance with warm admiration. And how ardently the poets Theocritus
and Zenodotus extolled his work to the skies!
Amid so much laudation, one faint word of dissatisfaction vanished like a
drop of blood that falls into a clear stream.
The welcome concluded with a final chant by the chorus, and continued to
echo in Hermon's ears as he entered his uncle's chariot and drove away
with him, crowned with laurel and intoxicated as if by fiery wine.
Oh, if he could only have seen his fellow-citizens who so eagerly
expressed their good will, their sympathy, their admiration! But the
black and coloured mist before his eyes revealed no human figure, not
even that of the woman he loved, who, he now learned for the first time
from her father, had appeared among the priestesses of Demeter to greet
him.
Doubtless he was gladdened by the sound of her voice, the clasp of her
hand, the faint fragrance of violets exhaling from her fair hair, which
he had often remembered with so much pleasure when alone in Tennis; but
the time to devote himself to her fully and completely had not yet come,
for what manifold and powerful impressions, how much that was elevating,
delightful, and entertaining awaited him immediately!
The Queen's envoy had expressed his mistress's desire to receive the
creator of the Demeter, the Ephebi and his fellow-artists had invited him
to a festival which they desired to give in his honour, and on the way
Archias informed him that many of his wealthy friends in the Macedonian
Council expected that he, the honoured hero of the day, would adorn with
his presence a banquet in their houses.
What a rich, brilliant life awaited him in spite of his blindness! When
he entered his uncle's magnificent city home, and not only all the
servants and clients of the family, but also a select party of ladies and
gentlemen greeted him with flowers and hundreds of other tokens of
affection and appreciation, he gave himself up without reserve to this
novel excess of fame and admiration.
Notwithstanding his blindness, he felt, after the burns on his face had
healed, thoroughly well, as strong as a giant--nay, more vigorous and
capable of enjoyment than ever. What prevented him from revelling to the
full in the superabundant gifts which Fate, recently so cruel, now
suddenly cast into his lap with lavish kindness?
Yet many flattering and pleasant things as he had experienced that day,
he was far from feeling satiety. On entering the hall of the men in his
uncle's dwelling, the names of famous men and proud beauties had been
repeated to him. Formerly they had taken little notice of him, yet now
even the most renowned received him like an Olympian victor.
What did all these vain women really care for him? Yet their favour was
part of the triumph whose celebration he must permit to-day. His heart
held but one being for whom it yearned, and with whom thus far he had
been able only to exchange a few tender greetings.
The time for a long conversation had not yet arrived, but he asked Thyone
to lead him to her and, while she listened anxiously, described with
feverish animation the incidents of the last few days. But he soon
lowered his voice to assure her that he had not ceased to think of her
even for a single hour, and the feeling of happiness which, in spite of
his misfortune, had filled and lent wings to his soul, was not least due
to the knowledge of being near her again.
And her presence really benefited him almost as much as he had
anticipated during the hours of solitary yearning in Tennis; he felt it a
great favour of Fate to be permitted to strive to possess her, felt even
during the delirium of this reception that he loved her. What a
tremendous longing to clasp her at once in his arms as his betrothed
bride overwhelmed him; but her father's opposition to the union of his
only child with a blind man must first be conquered, and the great
agitation in his soul, as well as the tumult around him, seemed like a
mockery of the quiet happiness which hovered before him when he thought
of his marriage with Daphne. Not until everything was calmer would the
time come to woo her. Until then both must be satisfied with knowing from
each other's lips their mutual love, and he thought he perceived in the
tone of her voice the deep emotion of her heart.
Perhaps this had prevented Daphne's expressing her congratulations upon
the success of his Demeter as eagerly and fully as he had expected.
Painfully disturbed by her reserve, he had just attempted to induce her
to give a less superficial opinion of his work, when the curtains of the
dining room parted-the music of flutes, singing, and pleasant odours
greeted him and the guests. Archias summoned them to breakfast, and a
band of beautiful boys, with flowers and garlands of ivy, obeyed the
command to crown them.
Then Thyone approached the newly united pair and, after exchanging a few
words with Daphne, whispered in an agitated voice to the blind sculptor,
over whose breast a brown-locked young slave was just twining a garland
of roses: "Poverty no longer stands between you and the object of your
love; is it Nemesis who even now still seals your lips?"
Hermon stretched out his hand to draw her nearer to him and murmur softly
that her counsel had aided him to break the power of the terrible
goddess, but he grasped the empty air. At the same time the deep voice of
his love's father, whose opposition threatened to cloud his new
happiness, singing, flute-playing, and the laughter of fair women greeted
him and, only half master of his own will, he assented, by a slight bend
of the head, to the matron's question. A light shiver ran through his
frame with the speed of lightning, and the Epicurean's maxim that fear
and cold are companions darted through his brain. But what should he
fear? He had endured severe trials, it is true, for the sake of remaining
faithful to truth in art and life; but who probably ever reached the age
of manhood without once deviating from it? Besides, he was surely aware
that, had he been obliged to answer Thyone in words, he would not have
been guilty of the falsehood. His reply had consisted of a slight motion
of the head, and it negatived nothing; it was merely intended to defer
for a short time the thing he most desired.
Yet the rash answer weighed heavily on his mind; but it could no longer
be recalled that day, and was believed, for Thyone whispered, "We shall
succeed in reconciling the terrible being."
Again the light tremour ran through him, but it lasted only an instant;
for Chrysilla, the representative of the dead mistress of the house,
whose duty it was to assign the guests their places, called to Hermon,
"The beautiful Glycera does you the honour of choosing you for a
neighbour" and, before the sentence was finished, Archias himself seized
his arm and led him to the cushions at the side of the much-courted
beauty.
The guests began the banquet in a very joyous mood.
Greek gaiety, and the quick intellect and keen wit of the Alexandrians,
combined with the choicest viands of the luxurious capital, where the
wines and dainties of all the countries of the Mediterranean found
sellers and buyers, and the cook's vocation was developed into a fine
art, to spice this banquet with a hundred charms for the mind and senses.
To-day the principal place in this distinguished circle of famous men,
great and wealthy nobles, beautiful and aristocratic women, was awarded
to the blind sculptor. He was pledged by every one who had admired his
Demeter, who compassionated his sad fate, or who desired to be agreeable
to him or his host.
Every kind remark about his person, his blindness, and his masterpiece
was repeated to him and, after the wine and the effort to attract
Daphne's attention and shine in the presence of his beautiful neighbour
had heated and winged his thoughts, he found an apt reply to each
noteworthy word.
When the dessert was finally eaten, and after sunset, in the brilliant
light of the lamps and candles, greater attention was paid to the mixing
vessels, all remained silent to listen to his fervid speech.
Glycera had asked him, at the beginning of the banquet, to tell her about
the attack in Tennis. Now he yielded to her wish that he should repeat
the captivating tale to the others, and the spirits of the wine helped
him to perform the task with such animation that his hearers listened to
his description in breathless suspense, and many eyes rested on the
handsome face of the great blind artist as if spellbound.
When he paused, loud applause rewarded him, and as it reached him from
every part of the spacious room, his deep, resonant voice put him in
communication even with the more distant guests, and he might have been
taken for the symposiarch or director of the banquet.
This conspicuous position of the feted artist did not please every one,
and a rhetorician, famed for his sharp tongue, whispered to his
neighbour, one of Hermon's older fellow-artists, "What his eyes have lost
seems to benefit his tongue." The sculptor answered: "At any rate, the
impetuous young artist might succeed better in proving himself, by its
assistance, a good entertainer, than in creating more mediocre
masterpieces like the Demeter."
Similar remarks were made on other cushions; but when the philosopher
Hegesias asked the famous sculptor Euphranor what he thought of Hermon's
Demeter, the kindly old man answered, "I should laud this noble work as a
memorable event, even if it did not mark the end, as well as the
beginning, of its highly gifted creator's new career."
Nothing of this kind was uttered near Hermon. Everything that reached him
expressed delight, admiration, sympathy, and hope. At dessert the
beautiful Glycera divided her apple, whispering as she gave him one half,
"Let the fruit tell you what the eyes can no longer reveal, you poor and
yet so abundantly rich darling of the gods."
He murmured in reply that his happiness would awake the envy of the
immortals if, in addition, he were permitted to feast upon the sight of
her beauty.
Had he been able to see himself, Hermon, who, as a genuine Greek, was
accustomed to moderate his feelings in intercourse with others, would
have endeavoured to express the emotions of joy which filled his heart
with more reserve, and to excel his companions at the festival less
recklessly.
His enthusiastic delight carried many away with him; others, especially
Daphne, were filled with anxious forebodings by his conduct, and others
still with grave displeasure.
Among the latter was the famous leech Erasistratus, who shared Archias's
cushions, and had been solicited by the latter to try to restore his
blind nephew's sight. But the kindly physician, who gladly aided even the
poorest sufferer, curtly and positively refused. To devote his time and
skill to a blind man who, under the severest of visitations, lulled
himself so contentedly in happiness, he considered unjust to others who
desired recovery more ardently.
"When the intoxication of this unbridled strength passes away, and is
followed by a different mood," remarked the merchant, "we will talk of
this matter again," and the confident tone of his deep voice gave the
simple sentence such significance that the learned leech held out his
hand, saying: "Only where deep, earnest longing for recovery fills the
sufferer's mind will the gods aid the physician. We will wait for the
change which you predict, Archias!"
The guests did not disperse until late, and the best satisfied of all was
the grammateus Proclus, who had taken advantage of the rich merchant's
happy mood, and his own warm intercession in behalf of his nephew's work,
to persuade Archias to advance Queen Arsinoe a large sum of money for an
enterprise whose object he still carefully concealed.
The highly honoured blind artist spent the night under his uncle's roof.
CHAPTER VI.
Hermon rose from his couch the next morning alert and ready for new
pleasures.
He had scarcely left the bath when envoys from the Ephebi and the younger
artists invited him to the festivities which they had arranged in his
honour. He joyously accepted, and also promised messengers from many of
Archias's friends, who wished to have the famous blind sculptor among
their guests, to be present at their banquets.
He still felt as if he were intoxicated, and found neither disposition
nor time for quiet reflection. His great strength, fettered as it were by
his loss of sight, now also began to stir. Fate itself withheld him from
the labour which he loved, yet in return it offered him a wealth of
varying pleasure, whose stimulating power he had learned the day before.
He still relished the draught from the beaker of homage proffered by his
fellow-citizens; nay, it seemed as if it could not lose its sweetness for
a long time.
He joined the ladies before noon, and his newly awakened feeling of joy
beamed upon them scarcely less radiantly than yesterday. Though Thyone
might wonder that a man pursued by Nemesis could allow himself to be
borne along so thoughtlessly by the stream of pleasure, Daphne certainly
did not grudge him the festal season which, when it had passed, could
never return to the blind artist. When it was over, he would yearn for
the quiet happiness at her side, which gazed at him like the calm eyes of
the woman he loved. With her he would cast anchor for the remainder of
his life; but first must come the period when he enjoyed the compensation
now awarded to him for such severe sufferings.
His heart was full of joy as he greeted Daphne and the Lady Thyone, whom
he found with her; but his warm description of the happy emotion which
had overpowered him at the abundant honours lavished upon him was
interrupted by Archias.
In his usual quick, brisk manner, he asked whether Hermon wished to
occupy the beautiful villa with the magnificent garden on Lake Mareotis,
inherited from Myrtilus, which could scarcely be reached in a vehicle
from the Brucheium in less than an hour, or the house situated in the
centre of the city, and Hermon promptly decided in favour of the latter.
His uncle, and probably the ladies also, had expected the contrary. Their
silence showed this plainly enough, and Hermon therefore added in a tone
of explanation that later the villa would perhaps suit his condition
better, but now he thought it would be a mistake to retire to the quiet
which half the city was conspiring to disturb. No one contradicted him,
and he left the women's apartment with a slight feeling of vexation,
which, however, was soon jested away by the gay friends who sought him.
When he removed to the city house the next day, he had not yet found time
for a serious talk with Daphne. His uncle, who had managed the estate of
Myrtilus, and wished to give Hermon an account of his inheritance, was
refused by the blind artist, who assured him that he knew Archias had
greatly increased rather than diminished his property, and thanked him
sincerely and warmly. In the convenient and spacious city house the young
sculptor very soon thought he had good reason to be satisfied with his
choice.
Most of his friends were busy artists, and what loss of time every visit
to the remote villa would have imposed upon them, what haste he himself
would have been obliged to use to reach home from the bath, where he
often spent many hours, from the wrestling school, from the meetings of
fashionable people in the Paneum gardens, and at sunset by the seashore
on the royal highway in the Brucheium. All these places were very far
from the villa. It would have required whole hours, too, to reach a
famous cookshop in the Canopus, at whose table he liked to assemble
beloved guests or revel with his friends. The theatre, the Odeum, most of
the public buildings, as well as the houses of his best friends, and
especially the beautiful Glycera, were easily reached from his city home,
and, among the temples, that of Demeter, which he often visited to pray,
offer sacrifices, and rejoice in the power of attraction which his statue
of the goddess exerted upon the multitude. It stood at the back of the
cella in a place accessible to the priesthood alone, visible only through
the open doors, upon a pedestal which his fellow-artists pronounced
rather too high. Yet his offer to have it made smaller was not accepted,
because had it been lower the devout supplicants who stood there to pray
could not have raised their eyes to it.
It was not only at the festivals of the dead that he went to the Greek
cemetery, where he had had a magnificent monument erected for his dead
mother. If his head ached after a nocturnal carouse, or the disagreeable
alarming chill stole over him which he had felt for the first time when
he falsely answered Thyone that he was still under the ban of Nemesis, he
went to the family monuments, supplied them with gifts, had sacrifices
offered to the souls of the beloved dead, and in this way sometimes
regained a portion of his lost peace of mind.
The banquet in the evening always dispelled whatever still oppressed him
on his return home from these visits, for, though months had elapsed
since his brilliant reception, he was still numbered, especially in
artist circles, with the most honoured men; he, the blind man, no longer
stood in any one's way; conversation gained energy and meaning through
the vivacity of his fervid intellect, which seemed actually deepened by
his blindness when questions concerning art were at issue, and from a
modest fellow-struggler he had become a patron bestowing orders.
The sculptor Soteles, who had followed his footsteps since the
apprenticeship in Rhodes, was intrusted with the erection of the monument
to Myrtilus in Tennis, and another highly gifted young sculptor, who
pursued his former course, with the execution of the one to his mother.
From a third he ordered a large new mixing vessel of chased silver for
the society of Ephebi, whose members had lauded him, at the magnificent
festival given in his honour, with genuine youthful fervour.
In the designs for these works his rich and bold gift of invention and
the power of his imagination proved their full value, and even his older
fellow-artists followed him with sincere admiration when, in spite of his
darkened eyes, he brought before them distinctly, and often even with the
charcoal or wax tablet in his hand, what he had in mind. What magnificent
things might not this man have created had he retained his sight, what
masterpieces might not have been expected! and his former works, which
had been condemned as unlovely, offensive, and exaggerated, were now
loudly admired; nay, the furious Maenads struggling on the ground and the
Street Boy Eating Figs, which were no longer his property, were sold at
high prices. No meeting of artists was complete without Hermon, and the
great self-possession which success and wealth bestowed, besides his
remarkable talent and the energy peculiar to him, soon aided him to great
influence among the members of his profession; nay, he would speedily
have reached the head of their leaders had not the passionate impetuosity
of his warlike nature led the more cautious to seek to restrain the
powerful enthusiast.
Archias's wealthy friends had no such apprehension. To them the lauded
blind artist was not much more than a costly dish certain to please their
guests; yet this, too, was no trifle in social circles which spent small
fortunes for a rare fish.
At the banquets of these princes of commerce he often met Daphne, still
more frequently the beautiful Glycera, whose husband, an old ship-owner
of regal wealth, was pleased to see famous men harnessed to his young
wife's chariot of victory. Hermon's heart had little to do with the
flirtation to which Glycera encouraged him at every new meeting, and the
Thracian Althea only served to train his intellect to sharp debates. But
in this manner he so admirably fulfilled her desire to attract attention
that she more than once pointed out to the Queen, her relative, the
remarkably handsome blind man whose acquaintance she had made on a night
of mad revel during the last Dionysia but one. Althea even thought it
necessary to win him, in whom she saw the future son-in-law of the
wealthy Archias, for through the graminateus Proclus the merchant had
been persuaded to advance the King's wife hundreds of talents, and
Arsinoe cherished plans which threatened to consume other large sums.
Thyrone watched Hermon's conduct with increasing indignation, while
Daphne perceived that these women had no more power to estrange her lover
from her than the bedizened beauties who were never absent from the
artists' festivals. How totally different was his intercourse with her!
His love and respect were hers alone; yet she saw in him a soul-sick man,
and persistently rejected Philotas, who wooed her with the same zeal as
before, and the other suitors who were striving to win the wealthy
heiress. She had confessed her feelings to her father, her best friend,
and persuaded him to have patience a little longer, and wait for the
change which he himself expected in his nephew.
This had not been difficult, for Archias loved Hermon, in spite of the
many anxieties he had caused him, as if he were his own son and, knowing
his daughter, he was aware that she could be happy with the man who
possessed her heart though he was deprived of sight.
The fame which Hermon had won by great genius and ability had gratified
him more than he expressed, and he could not contradict Daphne when she
asserted that, in spite of the aimless life of pleasure to which he
devoted himself, he had remained the kind-hearted, noble man he had
always been.
In fact, he used, unasked and secretly, a considerable portion of his
large revenues to relieve the distress of the poor and suffering. Archias
learned this as the steward of his nephew's property, and when to do good
he made new demands upon him, he gladly fulfilled them; only he
constantly admonished the blind man to think of his own severe sufferings
and his cure. Daphne did the same, and he willingly obeyed her advice;
for, loudly and recklessly as he pursued pleasure in social circles, he
showed himself tenderly devoted to her when he found her alone in her
father's house. Then, as in better days, he opened his heart to her
naturally and modestly and, though he refrained from vows of love, he
showed her that he did not cease to seek with her, and her alone, what
his noisy pleasures denied. Then he also found the old tone of affection,
and of late he came more frequently, and what he confided to no one else
implied to her, at least by hints.
Satiety and dissatisfaction were beginning to appear, and what he had
attempted to do for the cure of his eyes had hitherto been futile. The
remedies of the oculists to whom he had been directed by Daphne herself
had proved ineffectual. The great physician Erasistratus, from whom he
first sought help, had refrained, at her entreaty and her father's, from
refusing to aid him, but indignantly sent him away when he persisted in
the declaration that it would be impossible for him to remain for months
secluded from all society and subsist for weeks on scanty fare.
He would submit even to that, he assured Daphne, after she represented to
him what he was losing by such lack of resignation, when the time of rest
had come for which he longed, but from which many things still withheld
him. Yesterday the King had invited him to the palace for the first time,
and to decline such an honour was impossible.
In fact, he had long wished for this summons, because he had been
informed that no representative of the sovereign had been present at his
reception. Only his wife Arsinoe had honoured him by a wreath and
congratulations. This lack of interest on the part of the King had
wounded him, and the absence of an invitation from the royal connoisseur
had cast a shadow into the midst of many a mirthful hour. He had
doubtless been aware what great and important affairs of state were
claiming the conscientious sovereign just at this time, and how almost
unbearable his restless, unloving spouse was rendering his domestic life;
yet Hermon thought Ptolemy might have spared a short time for an event in
the art life of the city, as his Demeter had been called hundreds of
times.
Now the long-desired command to appear before the sovereign had finally
reached him, and, in the secure belief that it would bring fresh
recognition and rare honours, he entered the royal palace.
Proclus, who neglected no opportunity of serving the nephew of the rich
man whose aid he constantly required for the Queen's finances, was his
guide, and described the decoration of the inner apartments of the royal
residence. Their unostentatious simplicity showed the refined taste of
their royal occupant. There was no lack of marble and other rare kinds of
stone, and the numerous bas-reliefs which covered the walls like the most
superb tapestry were worthy of special attention. In the oblong apartment
through which the blind man was guided these marble pictures represented
in magnificent work scenes from the campaigns in which Ptolemy, the
King's father, had participated as Alexander's general. Others showed
Athene, Apollo, the Muses, and Hermes, surrounding or hastening toward
the throne of the same monarch, and others again Greek poets and
philosophers. Magnificent coloured mosaic pictures covered the floor and
many flat spaces above door and windows, but gold and silver had been
sparingly used.
Masterpieces of painting and sculpture were the ornaments of the room. In
the antechamber, where Hermon waited for the King, Proclus mentioned one
of the finest statues of Alexander by Lysippus, and an exquisite Eros by
Praxiteles.
The period of waiting, however, became so long to the spoiled artist that
he anticipated the monarch's appearance with painful discomfort, and the
result of the few minutes which Ptolemy II devoted to his reception was
far behind the hopes he had fixed upon them.
In former days he had often seen the narrow-shouldered man of barely
medium height who, to secure his own safety, had had two brothers killed
and sent another into exile, but now ruled Egypt shrewdly and prudently,
and developed the prosperity of Alexandria with equal energy and
foresight.
Now, for the first time, Hermon heard him speak. He could not deny that
his voice was unusually pleasant in tone, yet it unmistakably issued from
the lips of a sufferer.
The brief questions with which he received the blind artist were kindly,
and as natural as though addressing an equal, and every remark made in
connection with Hermon's answers revealed a very quick and keen
intellect.
He had seen the Demeter, and praised the conception of the goddess
because it corresponded with her nature. The sanctity which, as it were,
pervaded the figure of the divine woman pleased him, because it made the
supplicants in the temple feel that they were in the presence of a being
who was elevated far above them in superhuman majesty.
"True," he added, "your Demeter is by no means a powerful helper in time
of need. She is a goddess such as Epicurus imagines the immortals.
Without interfering with human destiny, she stands above it in sublime
grandeur and typical dignity. You belong, if I see correctly, to the
Epicureans?"
"No," replied Hermon. "Like my lord and King, I, too, number myself among
the pupils of the wise Straton."
"Indeed?" asked Ptolemy in a drawling tone, at the same time casting a
glance of astonishment at the blind man's powerful figure and
well-formed, intellectual face. Then he went on eagerly: "I shall
scarcely be wrong in the inference that you, the creator of the
Fig-eater, had experienced a far-reaching mental change before your
unfortunate loss of sight?"
"I had to struggle hard," replied Hermon, "but I probably owe the success
of the Demeter to the circumstance that I found a model whose mind and
nature correspond with those of the goddess to a rare degree."
The monarch shook his fair head, and protested in a tone of positive
superior knowledge: "As to the model, however well selected it may be, it
was not well chosen for this work, far less for you. I have watched your
battle against beauty in behalf of truth, and rejoiced, though I often
saw you and your little band of young disciples shoot beyond the mark.
You brought something new, whose foundation seemed to me sound, and on
which further additions might be erected. When the excrescences fell off,
I thought, this Hermon, his shadow Soteles, and the others who follow him
will perhaps open new paths to the declining art which is constantly
going back to former days. Our time will become the point of departure of
a new art. But for that very reason, let me confess it, I regret to see
you fall back from your bold advance. You now claim for your work that it
cleaves strictly to Nature, because the model is taken from life itself.
It does not become me to doubt this, yet the stamp of divinity which your
Demeter bears is found in no mortal woman. Understand me correctly! This
is certainly no departure from the truth, for the ideal often deserves
this lofty name better than anything the visible world offers to the eye;
but hitherto you have done honour to another truth. If I comprehend your
art aright, its essence is opposed to the addition of superhuman dignity
and beauty, with which you, or the model you used, strove to ennoble and
deify your Demeter. Admirably as you succeeded in doing so, it forces
your work out of the sphere of reality, whose boundary I never before saw
you cross by a single inch. Whether this occurred unconsciously to you in
an hour of mental ecstasy, or whether you felt that you still lacked the
means to represent the divine, and therefore returned to the older
methods, I do not venture to decide. But at the first examination of your
work I was conscious of one thing: It means for you a revolution, a
rupture with your former aspirations; and as--I willingly confess it--you
had been marvellously successful, it would have driven you, had your
sight been spared, out of your own course and into the arms of the
ancients, perhaps to your material profit, but scarcely to the advantage
of art, which needs a renewal of its vital energies."
"Let me assure you, my lord," Hermon protested, "that had I remained able
to continue to create, the success of the Demeter would never, never have
rendered me faithless to the conviction and method of creation which I
believed right; nay, before losing my sight, my whole soul was absorbed
in a new work which would have permitted me to remain wholly and
completely within the bounds of reality."
"The Arachne?" asked the King.
"Yes, my lord," cried Hermon ardently. "With its completion I expected to
render the greatest service, not only to myself, but to the cause of
truth."
Here Ptolemy interrupted with icy coldness: "Yet you were certainly
wrong; at least, if the Thracian Althea, who is the personification of
falsehood, had continued to be the model." Then he changed his tone, and
with the exclamation: "You are protected from the needs of life, unless
your rich uncle throws his property into the most insatiable of gulfs.
May Straton's philosophy help you better to sustain your courage in the
darkness which surrounds you than it has aided me to bear other trials!"
he left the room.
Thus ended the artist's conversation with the King, from which Hermon had
expected such great results and, deeply agitated, he ordered the driver
of his horses to take him to Daphne. She was the only person to whom he
could confide what disappointment this interview had caused him.
Others had previously reproached him, as the King had just done, with
having, in the Demeter, become faithless to his artistic past. How false
and foolish this was! Many a remark from the critics would have been
better suited to Myrtilus's work than to his. Yet his fear in Tennis had
not been true. Only Daphne's sweet face did not suit his more vigorous
method of emphasizing distinctions.
What a many-hued chameleon was the verdict upon works of plastic art!
Once--on his return to the capital--thousands had united in the same one,
and now how widely they differed again!
His earlier works, which were now lauded to the skies, had formerly
invited censure and vehement attacks.
What would he not have given for the possibility of seeing his admired
work once more!
As his way led past the Temple of Demeter, he stopped near it and was
guided to the sanctuary.
It was filled with worshippers, and when, in his resolute manner, he told
the curator and the officiating priest that he wished to enter the cella,
and asked for a ladder to feel the goddess, he was most positively
refused.
What he requested seemed a profanation of the sacred image, and it would
not do to disturb the devout throng. His desire to lower the pedestal
could not be gratified.
The high priest who came forward upheld his subordinates and, after a
short dispute, Hermon left the sanctuary with his wish unfulfilled.
Never had he so keenly lamented his lost vision as during the remainder
of the drive, and when Daphne received him he described with passionate
lamentation how terribly blindness embittered his life, and declared
himself ready to submit to the severest suffering to regain his sight.
She earnestly entreated him to apply to the great physician Erasistratus
again, and Hermon willingly consented. He had promised to attend a
banquet given that day by the wealthy ship-owner Archon. The feast lasted
until early morning, but toward noon Hermon again appeared in his uncle's
house, and met Daphne full of joyous confidence, as if he were completely
transformed.
While at Archon's table he had determined to place his cure in the hands
of higher powers. This was the will of Fate; for the guest whose cushion
he shared was Silanus, the host's son, and the first thing he learned
from him was the news that he was going the next day, with several
friends, to the oracle of Amon in the Libyan Desert, to ask it what
should be done for his mother, who had been for several years an invalid
whom no physician could help. He had heard from many quarters that the
counsel of the god, who had greeted Alexander the Great as his son, was
infallible.
Then Hermon had been most urgently pressed by the young man to accompany
him. Every comfort would be provided. One of his father's fine ships
would convey them to Paraetonium, where tents, saddle horses, and guides
for the short land journey would be ready.
So he had promised to go with Silanus, and his decision was warmly
approved by his uncle, Daphne, and the gray-haired Pelusinian couple.
Perhaps the god would show the blind man the right path to recovery. He
would always be able to call the skill of the Alexandrian leeches to his
aid.
Soon after Hermon went on board Archon's splendidly equipped vessel and,
instead of a tiresome journey, began a new and riotous period of
festivity.
Lavish provision had been made for gay companions of both sexes, merry
entertainment by means of dancing, music, and song, well filled dishes
and mixing vessels, and life during the ride through the coast and desert
regions was not less jovial and luxurious than on the ship.
It seemed to the blind man like one vast banquet in the dark, interrupted
only by sleep.
The hope of counsel from the gods cheered the depressed mood which had
weighed upon him for several weeks, and rich young Silanus praised the
lucky fate which had enabled him to find a travelling companion whose
intellect and wit charmed him and the others, and often detained them
over the wine until late into the night.
Here, too, Hermon felt himself the most distinguished person, the
animating and attracting power, until it was said that the voyage was
over, and the company pitched their tents in the famous oasis near the
Temple of Amon.
The musicians and dancers, with due regard to propriety, had been left
behind in the seaport of Paraetonium. Yet the young travellers were
sufficiently gay while Silanus and Hermon waited for admission to the
place of the oracle. A week after their arrival it was opened to them,
yet the words repeated to them by the priest satisfied neither Hermon nor
Archon's son, for the oracle advised the latter to bring his mother
herself to the oasis by the land road if she earnestly desired recovery,
while to Hermon was shouted the ambiguous saying:
"Only night and darkness spring from the rank marsh of pleasure;
Morning and day rise brightly from the starving sand."
Could Silanus's mother, who was unable to move, endure the desert
journey? And what was the meaning of the sand, from which morning and
day--which was probably the fresh enjoyment of the light--were to rise
for Hermon? The sentence of the oracle weighed heavily upon him, as well
as on Archon's son, who loved his mother, and the homeward journey became
to the blind man by no means a cheerful but rather a very troubled dream.
Thoughtful, very disturbed, dissatisfied with himself, and resolved to
turn his back upon the dreary life of pleasure which for so long a time
had allowed him no rest, and now disgusted him, he kept aloof from his
travelling companions, and rejoiced when, at Alexandria, he was led
ashore in the harbour of Eunostus.
CHAPTER VII.
Hermon entered his house with drooping head.
Here he was informed that the grammateus of the Dionysian artists had
already called twice to speak to him concerning an important matter. When
he came from the bath, Proclus visited him again. His errand was to
invite him to a banquet which was to take place that evening at his
residence in a wing of the royal palace.
But Hermon was not in the mood to share a joyous revel, and he frankly
said so, although immediately after his return he had accepted the
invitation to the festival which the whole fellowship of artists would
give the following day in honour of the seventieth birthday of the old
sculptor Euphranor. The grammateus alluded to this, and most positively
insisted that he could not release him; for he came not only by his own
wish, but in obedience to the command of Queen Arsinoe, who desired to
tell the creator of the Demeter how highly she esteemed his work and his
art. She would appear herself at dessert, and the banquet must therefore
begin at an unusually early hour. He, Proclus, was to have the high
honour of including the royal lady among his guests solely on Hermon's
account, and his refusal would be an insult to the Queen.
So the artist found himself obliged to relinquish his opposition. He did
this reluctantly; but the Queen's attention to him and his art flattered
his vanity and, if he was to abandon the intoxicating and barren life of
pleasure, it could scarcely be done more worthily than at a festival
where the King's consort intended to distinguish him in person.
The banquet was to begin in a few hours, yet he could not let the day
pass without seeing Daphne and telling her the words of the oracle. He
longed, with ardent yearning, for the sound of her voice, and still more
to unburden his sorely troubled soul to her.
Oh, if only his Myrtilus still walked among the living! How totally
different, in spite of his lost vision, would his life have been!
Daphne was now the only one whom he could put in his place.
Since his return from the oracle, the fear that the rescued Demeter might
yet be the work of Myrtilus had again mastered him. However loudly
outward circumstances might oppose this, he now felt, with a certainty
which surprised him, that this work was not his own. The approval, as
well as the doubts, which it aroused in others strengthened his opinion,
although even now he could not succeed in bringing it into harmony with
the facts. How deep had been the intoxication in which he had so long
reeled from one day to the next, since it had succeeded in keeping every
doubt of the authorship of this work far from him!
Now he must obtain certainty, and Daphne could help him to it; for, as a
priestess of Demeter, she possessed the right to procure him access to
the cella and get permission for him to climb the lofty pedestal and feel
the statue with his fingers, whose sense of touch had become much keener.
He would frankly inform her of his fear, and her truthful nature would
find the doubt that gnawed his heart as unendurable as he himself.
It would have been a grave crime to woo her before he was relieved of
this uncertainty, and he would utter the decisive words that very day,
and ask her whether her love was great enough to share the joys and
sorrows of life with him, the blind man, who perhaps must also divest
himself of a false fame.
Time pressed.
He called at Archias's house with a wreath on his head and in festal
robes; but Daphne was in the temple, whither old Philippus and Thyone had
gone, and his uncle was attending a late session of the Council.
He would have liked to follow Daphne to the sanctuary, but the late hour
forbade it, and he therefore only charged Gras to tell his young mistress
that he was going to Proclus's banquet, and would return early the next
morning to discuss a most important subject with her.
Then he went directly to the neighbouring palace. The Queen might have
appeared already, and it would not do to keep her waiting.
He was aware that she lived at variance with her husband, but how could
he have suspected that she cherished the more than bold design of hurling
the sovereign from his throne and seizing the Egyptian crown herself.
Proclus and Althea were among the conspirators who supported Arsinoe, and
the Queen thought it would be an easy matter to win over to her cause and
herself the handsome sculptor, whom she remembered at the last Dionysia.
The wealthy blind artist, so highly esteemed among the members of his
profession, might become valuable to the conspiracy, for she knew what
enthusiastic devotion the Alexandrian artists felt for the King, and
everything depended upon forming a party in her own favour among them.
This task was to fall to Hermon, and also another, still more important
one; for he, his nephew and future son-in-law, if any one, could persuade
the wealthy Archias to lend the plot his valuable aid. Hitherto the
merchant had been induced, it is true, to advance large sums of money to
the Queen, but the loyal devotion which he showed to her royal husband
had rendered it impossible to give him even a hint of the conspiracy.
Althea, however, declared that the blind man's marriage to Daphne was
only a question of time, and Proclus added that the easily excited nephew
would show himself more pliant than the uncle if Arsinoe exerted upon him
the irresistible charm of her personality.
When Hermon entered the residence of the grammateus in the palace, the
guests had already assembled. The Queen was not to appear until after the
feast, when the mixing jars were filled. The place by Hermon's side,
which Althea had chosen for herself, would then be given up to Arsinoe.
The sovereign was as unaccustomed to the society of a blind artist as
Hermon was to that of a queen, and both eagerly anticipated the
approaching meeting.
Yet it was difficult for Hermon to turn a bright face toward his
companion. The sources of anxiety and grief which had previously burdened
his mind would not vanish, even under the roof of the royal palace.
Althea's presence reminded him of Tennis, Ledscha, and Nemesis, who for
so long a time seemed to have suspended her persecution, but since he had
returned from the abode of the oracle was again asserting the old right
to him. During many a sleepless hour of the night he had once more heard
the rolling of her terrible wheel.
Even before the journey to the oasis of Amon, everything life could offer
him, the idle rake, in his perpetual darkness, had seemed shallow and
scarcely worth stretching out his hand for it.
True, an interesting conversation still had power to charm him, but often
during its continuance the full consciousness of his misfortune forced
itself upon his mind; for the majority of the subjects discussed by the
artists came to them through the medium of sight, and referred to new
creations of architecture, sculpture, and painting, from whose enjoyment
his blindness debarred him.
When returning home from a banquet, if his way lay through the city, he
was reminded of the superb buildings, marble terraces and fountains,
statues and porticoes, which had formerly satiated his eyes with delight,
and must now be illumined with a brilliant radiance by the morning
sunbeams, though a hostile fate shut them out from his eyes, starving and
thirsting for beautiful forms.
But it had seemed to him still harder to bear that his blinded eyes
refused to show him the most beautiful of all beautiful things, the human
form, when he lingered among the Ephebi or the spectators of a festal
procession, or visited the gymnasium, the theatre, the Aphrodisium, or
the Paneum gardens, where the beautiful women met at sunset.
The Queen was to appear immediately, and when she took her place near him
his blindness would again deprive him of the sight of her delicately cut
features, prevent his returning the glances from her sparkling eyes, and
admiring the noble outlines of her thinly veiled figure.
Would his troubled spirit at least permit him to enjoy and enter without
restraint into the play of her quick wit?
Perhaps her arrival would relieve him from the discomfort which oppressed
him here.
A stranger, out of his own sphere, he felt chilled among these closely
united men and women, to whom no tie bound him save the presence of the
same host.
He was not acquainted with a single individual except the mythograph
Crates, who for several months had been one of the members of the Museum,
and who had attached himself to Hermon at Straton's lectures.
The artist was surprised to find this man in such a circle, but he
learned from Althea that the young member of the Museum was a relative of
Proclus, and a suitor of the beautiful Nico, one of the Queen's ladies in
waiting, who was among the guests.
Crates had really been invited in order to win him over to the Queen's
cause; but charming fair-haired Nico had been commissioned by the
conspirators to persuade him to sing Arsinoe's praises among his
professional associates.
The rest of the men present stood in close connection with Arsinoe, and
were fellow-conspirators against her husband's throne and life. The
ladies whom Proclus had invited were all confidants of Arsinoe, the wives
and daughters of his other guests. All were members of the highest class
of society, and their manners showed the entire freedom from restraint
that existed in the Queen's immediate circle. Althea profited by the
advantage of being Hermon's only acquaintance here. So, when he took his
place on the cushion at her side, she greeted him familiarly and
cordially, as she had treated him for a long time, wherever they met, and
in a low voice told him, sometimes in a kindly tone, sometimes with
biting sarcasm, the names and characters of the other guests.
The most aristocratic was Amyntas, who stood highest of all in the
Queen's favour because he had good reason to hate the other Arsinoe, the
sister of the King. His son had been this royal dame's first husband, and
she had deserted him to marry Lysimachus, the aged King of Thrace.
The Rhodian Chrysippus, her leech and trusted counsellor, also possessed
great influence over the Queen.
"The noble lady," whispered Althea, "needs the faithful devotion of every
well-disposed subject, for perhaps you have already learned how cruelly
the King embitters the life of the mother of his three children. Many a
caprice can be forgiven the suffering Ptolemy, who recently expressed a
wish that he could change places with the common workmen whom he saw
eating their meal with a good appetite, and who is now tortured by the
gout; yet he watches the hapless woman with the jealousy of a tiger,
though he himself is openly faithless to her. What is the Queen to him,
since the widow of Lysimachus returned from Thrace--no, from Cassandrea,
Ephesus, and sacred Samothrace, or whatever other places there are which
would no longer tolerate the murderess?"
"The King's sister--the object of his love?" cried Hermon incredulously.
"She must be forty years old now."
"Very true," Althea assented. "But we are in Egypt, where marriages
between brothers and sisters are pleasing to gods and men; and besides,
we make our own moral laws here. Her age! We women are only as old as we
look, and the leeches and tiring women of this beauty of forty practise
arts which give her the appearance of twenty-five, yet perhaps the King
values her intellect more than her person, and the wisdom of a hundred
serpents is certainly united in this woman's head. She will make our poor
Queen suffer unless real friends guard her from the worst. The three most
trustworthy ones are here: Amyntas, the leech Chrysippus, and the
admirable Proclus. Let us hope that you will make this three-leaved
clover the luck-promising four-leaved one. Your uncle, too, has often
with praiseworthy generosity helped Arsinoe in many an embarrassment.
Only make the acquaintance of this beautiful royal lady, and the last
drop of your blood will not seem too precious to shed for her!
Besides--Proclus told me so in confidence--you have little favour to
expect from the King. How long he kept you waiting for the first word
concerning a work which justly transported the whole city with delight!
When he did finally summon you, he said things which must have wounded
you."
"That is going too far," replied Hermon.
"Then he kept back his real opinion," Althea protested. "Had I not made
it a rule to maintain absolute silence concerning everything I hear in
conversation from those with whom I am closely associated--"
Here she was interrupted by Chrysippus, who asked if Althea had told her
neighbour about his Rhodian eye-salve.
He winked at her and made a significant gesture as he spoke, and then
informed the blind artist how graciously Arsinoe had remembered him when
she heard of the remedy by whose aid many a wonderful cure of blind eyes
had been made in Rhodes. The royal lady had inquired about him and his
sufferings with almost sisterly interest, and Althea eagerly confirmed
the statement.
Hermon listened to the pair in silence.
He had not been able to see them, it is true, yet he had perceived their
design as if the loss of sight had sharpened his mental vision. He
imagined that he could see the favourite and Althea nudge each other with
sneering gestures, and believed that their sole purpose was to render
him--he knew not for what object--the obedient tool of the Queen, who had
probably also succeeded in persuading his usually cautious uncle to
render her great services.
The remembrance of Arsinoe's undignified conduct at the Dionysia, and the
shameful stories of her which he had heard returned to his mind. At the
same time he saw Daphne rise before him in her aristocratic dignity and
kindly goodness, and a smile of satisfaction hovered around his lips as
he said to himself: "The spider Althea again! But, in spite of my
blindness, I will be caught neither in her net nor in the Queen's. They
are the last to bar the way which leads to Daphne and real happiness."
The Rhodian was just beginning to praise Arsinoe also as a special friend
and connoisseur of the sculptor's art when Crates, Hermon's
fellow-student, asked the blind artist, in behalf of his beautiful
companion, why his Demeter was placed upon a pedestal which, to others as
well as himself, seemed too high for the size of the statue.
Hermon replied that he had heard several make this criticism, but the
priests of the goddess refused to take it into account.
Here he hesitated, for, like a blow from an invisible hand, the thought
darted through his mind that perhaps, on the morrow, he would see himself
compelled before the whole world to cast aside the crown of fame which he
owed to the statue on the lofty pedestal. He did not have even the
remotest idea of continuing to deck himself with false renown if his
dread was realized; yet he doubtless imagined how this whole aristocratic
circle, with the Queen, Althea, and Proclus at its head, would turn with
reckless haste from the hapless man who had led them into such a shameful
error.
Yet what mattered it, even if these miserable people considered
themselves deceived and pointed the finger of scorn at him? Better people
would thereby be robbed of the right to accuse him of faithlessness to
himself. This thought darted through his heated brain like a flash of
lightning, and when, in spite of his silence, the conversation was
continued and Althea told the others that only Hermon's blindness had
prevented the creation of a work which could have been confidently
expected far to surpass the Demeter, since it seemed to have been exactly
suited to his special talent, he answered his beautiful companion's
remark curtly and absently.
She perceived this with annoyance and perplexity.
A woman who yearns for the regard of all men, and makes love a toy,
easily lessens the demands she imposes upon individuals. Only, even
though love has wholly disappeared, she still claims consideration, and
Althea did not wish to lose Hermon's regard.
When Amyntas, the head of the conspirators, attracted the attention of
the company by malicious remarks about the King's sister, the Thracian
laid her hand on the blind artist's arm, whispering: "Has the image of
the Arachne which, at Tennis, charmed you even in the presence of the
angry Zeus, completely vanished from your memory? How indifferent you
look! But I tell you"--her deep blue eyes flashed as she spoke--"that so
long as you were still a genuine creating artist the case was different.
Even while putting the last touches of the file to the Demeter, for which
Archias's devout daughter posed as your model, another whom you could not
banish from your mind filled your imagination. Though so loud a denial is
written on your face, I persist in my conviction, and that no idle
delusion ensnares me I can prove!"
Hermon raised his sightless eyes to her inquiringly, but she went on with
eager positiveness: "Or, if you did not think of the weaver while carving
the goddess, how did you happen to engrave a spider on the ribbon twined
around the ears of grain in Demeter's hand? Not the smallest detail of a
work produced by the hand of a valued friend escapes my notice, and I
perceived it before the Demeter came to the temple and the lofty
pedestal. Now I would scarcely be able to discover it in the dusky cella,
yet at that time I took pleasure in the sight of the ugly insect, not
only because it is cleverly done, but because it reminded me of
something"--here she lowered her voice still more--"that pleased me,
though probably it would seem less flattering to the daughter of Archias,
who perhaps is better suited to act as guide to the blind. How bewildered
you look! Eternal gods! Many things are forgotten after long months have
passed, but it will be easy for me to sharpen your memory. 'At the time
Hermon had just finished the Demeter,' the spider called to me, 'he
scratched me on the gold.' But at that very time--yes, my handsome
friend, I can reckon accurately--you had met me, Althea, in Tennis, I had
brought the spider-woman before your eyes. Was it really nothing but
foolish vanity that led me to the conviction that you were thinking of me
also when you engraved on the ribbon the despised spider-for which,
however, I always felt a certain regard--with the delicate web beneath
its slender legs?"
Hitherto Hermon had listened to every word in silence, labouring for
breath. He was transported as if by magic to the hour of his return from
Pelusium; he saw himself enter Myrtilus's studio and watch his friend
scratch something, he did not know what, upon the ribbon which fastened
the bunch of golden grain. It was--nay, it could have been nothing
else--that very spider. The honoured work was not his, but his dead
friend's. How the exchange had occurred he could not now understand, but
to disbelieve that it had taken place would have been madness or
self-deception.
Now he also understood the doubts of Soteles and the King. Not
he--Myrtilus, and he alone, was the creator of the much-lauded Demeter!
This conviction raised a hundred-pound weight from his soul.
What was applause! What was recognition! What were fame and laurel
wreaths! He desired clearness and truth for himself and all the world
and, as if frantic, he suddenly sprang from his cushions, shouting to the
startled guests: "I myself and this whole great city were deceived! The
Demeter is not mine, not the work of Hermon! The dead Myrtilus created
it!"
Then pressing his hand to his brow, he called his student friend to his
side, and, as the scholar anxiously laid his arm on his shoulder,
whispered: "Away, away from here! Only let me get out of doors into the
open air!"
Crates, bewildered and prepared for the worst, obeyed his wish; but
Althea and the other guests left behind felt more and more impressed by
the suddenly awakened conviction that the hapless blind man had now also
become the victim of madness.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARK:
Aimless life of pleasure
ARACHNE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 7.
CHAPTER VIII.
Without a word of explanation, Hermon dragged his guide along in
breathless haste. No one stopped them.
The atrium, usually swarming with guards, servants, and officials until a
far later hour, was completely deserted when the blind man hurried
through it with his friend.
The door leading into the outer air stood open, but Hermon, leaning on
the scholar's arm, had scarcely crossed the threshold and entered the
little courtyard encircled with ornamental plants, which separated this
portion of the palace from the street, when both were surrounded by a
band of armed Macedonian soldiers, whose commander exclaimed: "In the
name of the King! Not a sound, if you value your lives!"
Incensed, and believing that there was some mistake, Hermon announced
himself as a sculptor and Crates as a member of the Museum, but this
statement did not produce the slightest effect upon the warrior; nay,
when the friends answered the officer's inquiry whether they were coming
from Proclus's banquet in the affirmative; he curtly commanded them to be
put in chains.
To offer resistance would have been madness, for even Hermon perceived,
by the loud clanking of weapons around them, the greatly superior power
of the enemy, and they were acting by the orders of the King. "To the
prison near the place of execution!" cried the officer; and now not only
the mythograph, but Hermon also was startled--this dungeon opened only to
those sentenced to death.
Was he to be led to the executioner's block? A cold shudder ran through
his frame; but the next moment he threw back his waving locks, and his
chest heaved with a long breath.
What pleasure had life to offer him, the blind man, who was already dead
to his art? Ought he not to greet this sudden end as a boon from the
immortals?
Did it not spare him a humiliation as great and painful as could be
imagined?
He had already taken care that the false renown should not follow him to
the grave, and Myrtilus should have his just due, and he would do
whatever else lay in his power to further this object. Wherever the
beloved dead might be, he desired to go there also. Whatever might await
him, he desired no better fate. If he had passed into annihilation, he,
Hermon, wished to follow him thither, and annihilation certainly meant
redemption from pain and misery. But if he were destined to meet his
Myrtilus and his mother in the world beyond the grave, what had he not to
tell them, how sure he was of finding a joyful reception there from both!
The power which delivered him over to death just at that moment was not
Nemesis--no, it was a kindly deity.
Only his heart grew heavy at the thought of leaving Daphne to the
tireless wooer Philotas or some other--everything else from which it is
usually hard to part seemed like a burden that we gladly cast aside.
"Forward!" he called blithely and boldly to the officer; while Crates,
with loud lamentations, was protesting his innocence to the warrior who
was putting fetters upon him.
A chain was just being clasped around Hermon's wrists also when he
suddenly started. His keen ear could not deceive him, and yet a demon
must be mocking him, for the voice that had called his name was the
girl's of whom, in the presence of welcome death, he had thought with
longing regret.
Yet it was no illusion that deceived him. Again he heard the beloved
voice, and this time it addressed not only him, but with the utmost haste
the commander of the soldiers.
Sometimes with touching entreaty, sometimes with imperious command, she
protested, after giving him her name, that this matter could be nothing
but an unfortunate mistake. Lastly, with earnest warmth, she besought
him, before taking the prisoners away, to permit her to speak to the
commanding general, Philippus, her father's guest, who, she was certain,
was in the palace. The blood of these innocent men would be on his head
if he did not listen to her representations.
"Daphne!" cried Hermon in grateful agitation; but she would not listen to
him, and followed the soldier whom the captain detailed to guide her into
the palace.
After a few moments, which the blind artist used to inspire the
despairing scholar with courage, the girl returned, and she did not come
alone. The gray-haired comrade of Alexander accompanied her, and after a
few minutes both prisoners were released from their fetters. Philippus
hastily refused their thanks and, after addressing a few words to the
officer, he changed his tone, and his deep voice sounded paternally
cordial as he exclaimed to Daphne: "Fifteen minutes more, you dear,
foolhardy girl, and it would have been too late. To-morrow you shall
confess to me who treacherously directed you to this dangerous path."
Lastly, he turned to the prisoners to explain that they would be
conducted to the adjacent barracks of the Diadochi, and spend the night
there.
Early the next morning they should be examined, and, if they could clear
themselves from the suspicion of belonging to the ranks of the
conspirators, released.
Daphne again pleaded for the liberation of the prisoners, but Philippus
silenced her with the grave exclamation, "The order of the King!"
The old commander offered no objection to her wish to accompany Hermon to
prison. Daphne now slipped her arm through her cousin's, and commanded
the steward Gras, who had brought her here, to follow them.
The goal of the nocturnal walk, which was close at hand, was reached at
the end of a few minutes, and the prisoners were delivered to the
commander of the Diadochi. This kindly disposed officer had served under
Hermon's father, and when the names of the prisoners were given, and the
officer reported to him that General Philippus recommended them to his
care as innocent men, he had a special room opened for the sculptor and
his fair guide, and ordered Crates to enter another.
He could permit the beautiful daughter of the honoured Archias to remain
with Hermon for half an hour, then he must beg her to allow herself to be
escorted to her home, as the barracks were closed at that time.
As soon as the captive artist was alone with the woman he loved, he
clasped her hand, pouring forth incoherent words of the most ardent
gratitude, and when he felt her warmly return the pressure, he could not
restrain the desire to clasp her to his heart. For the first time his
lips met hers, he confessed his love, and that he had just regarded death
as a deliverer; but his life was now gaining new charm through her
affection.
Then Daphne herself threw her arms around his neck with fervent devotion.
The love that resistlessly drew his heart to her was returned with equal
strength and ardour. In spite of his deep mental distress, he could have
shouted aloud in his delight and gratitude. He might now have been
permitted to bind forever to his life the woman who had just rescued him
from the greatest danger, but the confession he must make to his
fellow-artists in the palaestra the following morning still sealed his
lips. Yet in this hour he felt that he was united to her, and ought not
to conceal what awaited him; so, obeying a strong impulse, he exclaimed:
"You know that I love you! Words can not express the strength of my
devotion, but for that very reason I must do what duty commands before I
ask the question, 'Will you join your fate to mine?'"
"I love you and have loved you always!" Daphne exclaimed tenderly. "What
more is needed?"
But Hermon, with drooping head, murmured: "To-morrow I shall no longer be
what I am now. Wait until I have done what duty enjoins; when that is
accomplished, you shall ask yourself what worth the blind artist still
possesses who bartered spurious fame for mockery and disgrace in order
not to become a hypocrite."
Then Daphne raised her face to his, asking, "So the Demeter is the work
of Myrtilus?"
"Certainly," he answered firmly. "It is the work of Myrtilus."
"Oh, my poor, deceived love!" cried Daphne, strongly agitated, in a tone
of the deepest sorrow. "What a terrible ordeal again awaits you! It must
indeed distress me--and yet Do not misunderstand me! It seems
nevertheless as if I ought to rejoice, for you and your art have not
spoken to me even a single moment from this much-lauded work."
"And therefore," he interrupted with passionate delight, "therefore alone
you withheld the enthusiastic praise with which the others intoxicated
me? And I, fool, blinded also in mind, could be vexed with you for it!
But only wait, wait! Soon-to-morrow even--there will be no one in
Alexandria who can accuse me of deserting my own honest aspiration, and,
if the gods will only restore my sight and the ability to use my hands as
a sculptor, then, girl, then--"
Here he was interrupted by a loud knocking at the door.
The time allowed had expired.
Hermon again warmly embraced Daphne, saying: "Then go! Nothing can cloud
what these brief moments have bestowed. I must remain blind; but you have
restored the lost sight to my poor darkened soul. To-morrow I shall stand
in the palaestra before my comrades, and explain to them what a malicious
accident deceived me, and with me this whole great city. Many will not
believe me, and even your father will perhaps consider it a disgrace to
give his arm to his scorned, calumniated nephew to guide him home. Bring
this before your mind, and everything else that you must accept with it,
if you consent, when the time arrives, to become mine. Conceal and
palliate nothing! But should the Lady Thyone speak of the Eumenides who
pursued me, tell her that they had probably again extended their arms
toward me, but when I return to-morrow from the palaestra I shall be
freed from the terrible beings."
Lastly, he asked to be told quickly how she had happened to come to the
palace at the right time at so late an hour, and Daphne informed him as
briefly and modestly as if the hazardous venture which, in strong
opposition to her retiring, womanly nature, she had undertaken, was a
mere matter of course.
When Thyone in her presence heard from Gras that Hermon intended to go to
Proclus's banquet, she started up in horror, exclaiming, "Then the
unfortunate man is lost!"
Her husband, who had long trusted even the gravest secrets to his
discreet old wife, had informed her of the terrible office the King had
confided to him. All the male guests of Proclus were to be executed; the
women--the Queen at their head--would be sent into exile.
Then Daphne, on her knees, besought the matron to tell her what
threatened Hermon, and succeeded in persuading her to speak.
The terrified girl, accompanied by Gras, went first to her lover's house
and, when she did not find him there, hastened to the King's palace.
If Hermon could have seen her with her fluttering hair, dishevelled by
the night breeze, and checks blanched by excitement and terror, if he had
been told how she struggled with Thyone, who tried to detain her and lock
her up before she left her father's house, he would have perceived with
still prouder joy, had that been possible, what he possessed in the
devoted love of this true woman.
Grateful and moved by joyous hopes, he informed Daphne of the words of
the oracle, which had imprinted themselves upon his memory.
She, too, quickly retained them, and murmured softly:
"Noise and dazzling radiance are hostile to the purer light, Morning and
day will rise quietly from the starving sand."
What could the verse mean except that the blind man would regain the
power to behold the light of clay amid the sands of the silent desert?
Perhaps it would be well for him to leave Alexandria now, and she
described how much benefit she had received while hunting from the
silence of the wilderness, when she had left the noise of the city behind
her. But before she had quite finished, the knocking at the door was
repeated.
The lovers took leave of each other with one last kiss, and the final
words of the departing girl echoed consolingly in the blind man's heart,
"The more they take from you, the more closely I will cling to you."
Hermon spent the latter portion of the night rejoicing in the
consciousness of a great happiness, yet also troubled by the difficult
task which he could not escape.
When the market place was filling, gray-haired Philippus visited him.
He desired before the examination, for which every preparation had been
made, to understand personally the relation of his dead comrade's son to
the defeated conspiracy, and he soon perceived that Hermon's presence at
the banquet was due solely to an unlucky accident or in consequence of
the Queen's desire to win him over to her plot.
Yet he was forced to advise the blind sculptor to leave Alexandria. The
suspicion that he had been associated with the conspirators was the more
difficult to refute, because his Uncle Archias had imprudently allowed
himself to be persuaded by Proclus and Arsinoe to lend the Queen large
sums, which had undoubtedly been used to promote her abominable plans.
Philippus also informed him that he had just come from Archias, whom he
had earnestly urged to fly as quickly as possible from the persecution
which was inevitable; for, secure as Hermon's uncle felt in his
innocence, the receipts for the large sums loaned by him, which had just
been found in Proclus's possession, would bear witness against him. Envy
and ill will would also have a share in this affair, and the usually
benevolent King knew no mercy where crime against his own person was
concerned. So Archias intended to leave the city on one of his own ships
that very day. Daphne, of course, would accompany him.
The prisoner listened in surprise and anxiety.
His uncle driven from his secure possessions to distant lands! Daphne
taken from him, he knew not whither nor for how long a time, after he had
just been assured of her great love! He himself on the way to expose
himself to the malice and mockery of the whole city!
His heart contracted painfully, and his solicitude about his uncle's fate
increased when Philippus informed him that the conspirators had been
arrested at the banquet and, headed by Amyntas, the Rhodian, Chrysippus,
and Proclus, had perished by the executioner's sword at sunrise.
The Queen, Althea, and the other ladies were already on the way to
Coptos, in Upper Egypt, whither the King had exiled them.
Ptolemy had intrusted the execution of this severe punishment to
Alexander's former comrade as the most trustworthy and discreet of his
subjects, but rejected, with angry curtness, Philippus's attempt to
uphold the innocence of his friend Archias.
The old man's conversation with Hermon was interrupted by the
functionaries who subjected him and Crates to the examination. It lasted
a long time, and referred to every incident in the artist's life since
his return to Alexandria. The result was favourable, and the prisoner was
dismissed from confinement with the learned companion of his fate.
When, accompanied by Philippus, Hermon reached his house, it was so late
that the artists' festival in honour of the sculptor Euphranor, who
entered his seventieth year of life that day, must have already
commenced.
On the way the blind man told the general what a severe trial awaited
him, and the latter approved his course and, on bidding him farewell,
with sincere emotion urged Hermon to take courage.
After hastily strengthening himself with a few mouthfuls of food and a
draught of wine, his slave Patran, who understood writing, wished to put
on the full laurel wreath; but Hermon was seized with a painful sense of
dissatisfaction, and angrily waved it back.
Without a single green leaf on his head, he walked, leaning on the
Egyptian's arm, into the palaestra, which was diagonally opposite to his
house.
Doubtless he longed to hasten at once to Daphne, but he felt that he
could not take leave of her until he had first cast off, as his heart and
mind dictated, the terrible burden which oppressed his soul. Besides, he
knew that the object of his love would not part from him without granting
him one last word.
On the way his heart throbbed almost to bursting.
Even Daphne's image, and what threatened her father, and her with him,
receded far into the background. He could think only of his design, and
how he was to execute it.
Yet ought he not to have the laurel wreath put on, in order, after
removing it, to bestow it on the genius of Myrtilus?
Yet no!
Did he still possess the right to award this noble branch to any one? He
was appearing before his companions only to give truth its just due. It
was repulsive to endow this explanation of an unfortunate error with a
captivating aspect by any theatrical adornment. To be honest, even for
the porter, was a simple requirement of duty, and no praiseworthy merit.
The guide forced a path for him through carriages, litters, and whole
throngs of slaves and common people, who had assembled before the
neighbouring palaestra.
The doorkeepers admitted the blind man, who was well known here, without
delay; but he called to the slave: "Quick, Patran, and not among the
spectators--in the centre of the arena!"
The Egyptian obeyed, and his master crossed the wide space, strewn with
sand, and approached the stage which had been erected for the festal
performances.
Even had his eyes retained the power of sight, his blood was coursing so
wildly through his veins that he might perhaps have been unable to
distinguish the statues around him and the thousands of spectators, who,
crowded closely together, richly garlanded, their cheeks glowing with
enthusiasm, surrounded the arena.
"Hermon!" shouted his friend Soteles in joyful surprise in the midst of
this painful walk. "Hermon!" resounded here, there, and everywhere as,
leaning on his friend's arm, he stepped upon the stage, and the
acclamations grew louder and louder as Soteles fulfilled the sculptor's
request and led him to the front of the platform.
Obeying a sign from the director of the festival, the chorus, which had
just sung a hymn to the Muses, was silent.
Now the sculptor began to speak, and noisy applause thundered around him
as he concluded the well-chosen words of homage with which he offered
cordial congratulations to the estimable Euphranor, to whom the festival
was given; but the shouts soon ceased, for the audience had heard his
modest entreaty to be permitted to say a few words, concerning a personal
matter, to those who were his professional colleagues, as well as to the
others who had honoured him with their interest and, only too loudly,
with undeserved applause. The more closely what he had to say concerned
himself, the briefer he would make his story.
And, in fact, he did not long claim the attention of his hearers. Clearly
and curtly he stated how it had been possible to mistake Mrytilus's work
for his, how the Tennis goldsmith had dispelled his first suspicion, and
how vainly he had besought the priests of Demeter to be permitted to feel
his statue. Then, without entering into details, he informed them that,
through an accident, he had now reached the firm conviction that he had
long worn wreaths which belonged to another. But, though the latter could
not rise from the grave, he still owed it to truth, to whose service he
had dedicated his art from the beginning, and to the simple honesty, dear
alike to the peasant and the artist, to divest himself of the fame to
which he was not entitled. Even while he believed himself to be the
creator of the Demeter, he had been seriously troubled by the praise of
so many critics, because it had exposed him to the suspicion of having
become faithless to his art and his nature. In the name of the dead, he
thanked his dear comrades for the enthusiastic appreciation his
masterpiece had found. Honour to Myrtilus and his art, but he trusted
this noble festal assemblage would pardon the unintentional deception,
and aid his prayer for recovery. If it should be granted he hoped to show
that Hermon had not been wholly unworthy to adorn himself for a short
time with the wreaths of Myrtilus.
When he closed, deep silence reigned for a brief interval, and one man
looked at another irresolutely until the hero of the day, gray-haired
Euphranor, rose and, leaning on the arm of his favourite pupil, walked
through the centre of the arena to the stage, mounted it, embraced Hermon
with paternal warmth, and made him happy by the words: "The deception
that has fallen to your lot, my poor young friend, is a lamentable one;
but honour to every one who honestly means to uphold the truth. We will
beseech the immortals with prayers and sacrifices to restore sight to
your artist eyes. If I am permitted, my dear young comrade, to see you
continue to create, it will be a source of joy to me and all of us; yet
the Muses, even though unasked, lead into the eternal realm of beauty the
elect who consecrates his art to truth with the right earnestness."
The embrace with which the venerable hero of the festival seemed to
absolve Hermon was greeted with loud applause; but the kind words which
Euphranor, in the weak voice of age, had addressed to the blind man had
been unintelligible to the large circle of guests.
When he again descended to the arena new plaudits rose; but soon hisses
and other signs of disapproval blended with them, which increased in
strength and number when a well known critic, who had written a learned
treatise concerning the relation of the Demeter to Hermon's earlier
works, expressed his annoyance in a loud whistle. The dissatisfied and
disappointed spectators now vied with one another to silence those who
were cheering by a hideous uproar while the latter expressed more and
more loud the sincere esteem with which they were inspired by the
confession of the artist who, though cruelly prevented from winning fresh
fame, cast aside the wreath which a dead man had, as were, proffered from
his tomb.
Probably every man thought that, in the same situation, he would have
done the same yet not only justice--nay, compassion--dictated showing the
blind artist that they believed in and would sustain him. The
ill-disposed insisted that Hermon had only done what duty commanded the
meanest man, and the fact that he had deceived all Alexandria still
remained. Not a few joined this party, for larger possession excite envy
perhaps even more frequently than greater fame.
Soon the approving and opposing voices mingled in an actual conflict. But
before the famous sculptor Chares, the great and venerable artist Nicias,
and several younger friends of Hermon quelled this unpleasant disturbance
of the beautiful festival, the blind man, leaning on the arm of his
fellow-artist Soteles, had left the palaestra.
At the exit he, parted from his friend, who had been made happy by the
ability to absolve his more distinguished leader from the reproach of
having become faithless to their common purpose, and who intended to
intercede further in his behalf in the palaestra.
Hermon no longer needed him; for, besides his slave Patran, he found the
steward Gras, who, by his master's order, guided the blind man to
Archias's closed harmamaxa, which was waiting outside the building.
CHAPTER IX.
The sculptor's head was burning feverishly when he entered the vehicle.
He had never imagined that the consequences of his explanation would be
so terrible. During the drive--by no means a long one--to the great
harbour, he strove to collect his thoughts. Groaning aloud, he covered
his ears with his hands to shut out the shouts and hisses from the
palaestra, which in reality were no longer audible.
True, he would not need to expose himself to this uproar a second time,
yet if he remained in Alexandria the witticisms, mockery, and jibes of
the whole city, though in a gentler form, would echo hundreds of times
around him.
He must leave the city. He would have preferred to go on board the
staunch Tacheia and be borne far away with his uncle and Daphne, but he
was obliged to deny himself the fulfilment of this desire. He must now
think solely of regaining his sight.
Obedient to the oracle, he would go to the desert where from the
"starving sand" the radiant daylight was to rise anew for him.
There he would, at any rate, be permitted to recover the clearness of
perception and feeling which he had lost in the delirium of the dissolute
life of pleasure that he had led in the past. Pythagoras had already
forbidden the folly of spoiling the present by remorse; and he, too, did
not do this. It would have been repugnant to his genuinely Greek nature.
Instead of looking backward with peevish regret, his purpose was to look
with blithe confidence toward the future, and to do his best to render it
better and more fruitful than the months of revel which lay behind him.
He could no longer imagine a life worth living without Daphne, and the
thought that if his uncle were robbed of his wealth he would become her
support cheered his heart. If the oracle did not fulfil its promise, he
would again appeal to medical skill, and submit even to the most severe
suffering which might be imposed upon him.
The drive to the great harbour was soon over, but the boat which lay
waiting for him had a considerable distance to traverse, for the Tacheia
was no longer at the landing place, but was tacking outside the Pharos,
in order, if the warrant of arrest were issued, not to be stopped at the
channel dominated by the lighthouse. He found the slender trireme
pervaded by a restless stir. His uncle had long been expecting him with
burning impatience.
He knew, through Philippus, what duty still detained the deceived artist,
but he learned, at the same time, that his own imprisonment had been
determined, and it would be advisable for him to leave the city behind
him as quickly as possible. Yet neither Daphne nor he was willing to
depart without saying farewell to Hermon.
But the danger was increasing every moment, and, warm as was the parting,
the last clasp of the hand and kiss swiftly followed the first words of
greeting.
So the blind artist learned only that Archias was going to the island of
Lesbos, his mother's home, and that he had promised his daughter to give
Hermon time to recover his sight. The property bequeathed to him by
Myrtilus had been placed by the merchant in the royal bank, and he had
also protected himself against any chance of poverty. Hermon was to send
news of his health to Lesbos from time to time if a safe opportunity
offered and, when Daphne knew where he was to be found, she could let him
have tidings. Of course, for the present great caution must be exercised
in order not to betray the abode of the fugitives.
Hermon, too, ought to evade the pursuit of the incensed King as quickly
as possible.
Not only Daphne's eyes, but her father's also, overflowed with tears at
this parting, and Hermon perceived more plainly than ever that he was as
dear to his uncle as though he were his own son.
The low words which the artist exchanged with the woman whose love, even
during the period of separation, would shed light and warmth upon his
darkened life, were deeply impressed upon the souls of both.
For the present, faithful Gras was to remain in charge of his master's
house in Alexandria. Leaning on his arm, the blind man left the Tacheia,
which, as soon as both had entered the boat, was urged forward by
powerful strokes of the oars.
The Bithynian informed Hermon that kerchiefs were waving him a farewell
from the trireme, that the sails had been unfurled, and the wind was
driving the swift vessel before it like a swallow.
At the Pharos Gras reported that a royal galley was just passing them,
undoubtedly in pursuit of the Tacheia; but the latter was the swiftest of
all the Greek vessels, and they need not fear that she would be overtaken
by the war ship.
With a sore heart and the desolate feeling of being now utterly alone,
Hermon again landed and ordered that his uncle's harmamaxa should convey
him to the necropolis. He desired to seek peace at his mother's grave,
and to take leave of these beloved tombs.
Guided by the steward, he left them cheered and with fresh confidence in
the future, and the faithful servant's account of the energy with which
Daphne had aided the preparations for departure benefited him like a
refreshing bath.
When he was again at home, one visitor after another was announced, who
came there from the festival in the palaestra, and, in spite of his great
reluctance to receive them, he denied no one admittance, but listened
even to the ill-disposed and spiteful.
In the battle which he had commenced he must not shrink from wounds, and
he was struck by many a poisoned shaft. But, to make amends, a clear
understanding was effected between him and those whom he esteemed.
The last caller left him just before midnight.
Hermon now made many preparations for departure.
He intended to go into the desert with very little luggage, as the oracle
seemed to direct. How long a time his absence would extend could not be
estimated, and the many poor people whom he had fed and supported must
not suffer through his departure. The arrangements required to effect
this he dictated to the slave, who understood writing. He had gained in
him an extremely capable servant, and Patran expressed his readiness to
follow him into the desert; but the wry face which, sure that the blind
man could not see him, he made while saying so, seemed to prove the
contrary.
Weary, and yet too excited to find sleep, Hermon at last went to rest.
If his Myrtilus had been with him now, what would he not have had to say
to express his gratitude, to explain! How overjoyed he would have been at
the fulfilment of his wish to see him united to Daphne, at least in
heart; with what fiery ardour he would have upbraided those who believed
him capable of having appropriated what belonged to another!
But Myrtilus was no more, and who could tell whether his body had not
remained unburied, and his soul was therefore condemned to be borne
restlessly between heaven and earth, like a leaf driven by the wind? Yet,
if the earth covered him, where was the spot on which sacrifices could be
offered to his soul, his tombstone could be anointed, and he himself
remembered?
Then a doubt which had never before entered his mind suddenly took
possession of Hermon.
Since for so many months he had firmly believed his friend's work to be
his own, he might also have fallen into another delusion, and Myrtilus
might still dwell among the living.
At this thought the blind man, with a swift movement, sat erect upon his
couch; it seemed as if a bright light blazed before his eyes in the dark
room.
The reasons which had led the authorities to pronounce Myrtilus dead
rendered his early end probable, it is true, yet by no means proved it
absolutely. He must hold fast to that.
He who, ever since he returned to Alexandria from Tennis, had squandered
precious time as if possessed by evil demons, would now make a better use
of it. Besides, he longed to leave the capital. What! Suppose he should
now, even though it were necessary to delay obeying the oracle's command,
search, traverse, sail through the world in pursuit of Myrtilus, even, if
it must be, to the uttermost Thule?
But he fell back upon the couch as quickly as he had started up.
"Blind! blind!" he groaned in dull despair. How could he, who was not
able even to see his hand before his eyes, succeed in finding his friend?
And yet, yet----
Had his mind been darkened with his eyes, that this thought came to him
now for the first time, that he had not sent messengers to all quarters
of the globe to find some trace of the assailants and, with them, of the
lost man?
Perhaps it was Ledscha who had him in her power, and, while he was
pondering and forming plans for the best way of conducting
investigations, the dimmed image of the Biamite again returned distinctly
to his mind, and with it that of Arachne and the spider, into which the
goddess transformed the weaver.
Half overcome by sleep, he saw himself, staff in hand, led by Daphne,
cross green meadows and deserts, valleys and mountains, to seek his
friend; yet whenever he fancied he caught sight of him, and Ledscha with
him, in the distance, the spider descended from above and, with magical
speed, wove a net which concealed both from his gaze.
Groaning and deeply disturbed, half awake, he struggled onward, always
toward one goal, to find his Myrtilus again, when suddenly the sound of
the knocker on the entrance door and the barking of Lycas, his Arabian
greyhound, shook the house.
Recalled to waking life, he started up and listened.
Had the men who were to arrest him or inquisitive visitors not allowed
themselves to be deterred even by the late hour?
He listened angrily as the old porter sternly accosted the late guest;
but, directly after, the gray-haired native of the region near the First
Cataract burst into the strange Nubian oaths which he lavished liberally
whenever anything stirred his aged soul.
The dog, which Hermon had owned only a few months, continued to bark; but
above his hostile baying the blind man thought he recognised a name at
whose sound the blood surged hotly into his cheeks. Yet he could scarcely
have heard aright!
Still he sprang from the couch, groped his way to the door, opened it,
and entered the impluvium that adjoined his bedroom. The cool night air
blew upon him from the open ceiling. A strong draught showed that the
door leading from the atrium was being opened, and now a shout, half
choked by weeping, greeted him: "Hermon! My clear, my poor beloved
master!"
"Bias, faithful Bias!" fell from the blind man's lips, and when he felt
the returned slave sink down before him, cover his hand with kisses and
wet it with tears, he raised him in his strong arms, clasped him in a
warm embrace, kissed his checks, and gasped, "And Myrtilus, my Myrtilus,
is he alive?"
"Yes, yes, yes," sobbed Bias. "But you, my lord-blind, blind! Can it be
true?"
When Hermon released him to inquire again about his friend, Bias
stammered: "He isn't faring so badly; but you, you, bereft of light and
also of the joy of seeing your faithful Bias again! And the immortals
prolong one's years to experience such evils! Two griefs always belong to
one joy, like two horses to a chariot."
"My wise Bias! Just as you were of old!" cried Hermon in joyful
excitement.
Then he quieted the hound and ordered one of the attendants, who came
hurrying in, to bring out whatever dainty viands the house contained and
a jar of the best Byblus wine from the cellar.
Meanwhile he did not cease his inquiries about his friend's health, and
ordered a goblet to be brought him also, that he might pledge the slave
and give brief answers to his sympathizing questions about the cause of
the blindness, the noble Archias, the gracious young mistress Daphne, the
famous Philippus and his wife, the companion Chrysilla, and the steward
Gras. Amid all this he resolved to free the faithful fellow and, while
Bias was eating, he could not refrain from telling him that he had found
a mistress for him, that Daphne was the wife whom he had chosen, but the
wedding was still a long way off.
He controlled his impatience to learn the particulars concerning his
friend's fate until Bias had partially satisfied his hunger.
A short time ago Hermon would have declared it impossible that he could
ever become so happy during this period of conflict and separation from
the object of his love.
The thought of his lost inheritance doubtless flitted through his mind,
but it seemed merely like worthless dust, and the certainty that Myrtilus
still walked among the living filled him with unclouded happiness. Even
though he could no longer see him, he might expect to hear his beloved
voice again. Oh, what delight that he was permitted to have his friend
once more, as well as Daphne, that he could meet him so freely and
joyously and keep the laurel, which had rested with such leaden weight
upon his head, for Myrtilus, and for him alone!
But where was he?
What was the name of the miracle which had saved him, and yet kept him
away from his embrace so long?
How had Myrtilus and Bias escaped the flames and death on that night of
horror?
A flood of questions assailed the slave before he could begin a connected
account, and Hermon constantly interrupted it to ask for details
concerning his friend and his health at each period and on every
occasion.
Much surprised by his discreet manner, the artist listened to the
bondman's narrative; for though Bias had formerly allowed himself to
indulge in various little familiarities toward his master, he refrained
from them entirely in this story, and the blind man's misfortune invested
him in his eyes with a peculiar sacredness.
CHAPTER X.
He had arrived wounded on the pirate ship with his master's friend, the
returned bondman began. When he had regained consciousness, he met
Ledscha on board the Hydra, as the wife of the pirate Hanno. She had
nursed Myrtilus with tireless solicitude, and also often cared for his,
Bias's, wounds. After the recovery of the prisoners, she became their
protectress, and placed Bias in the service of the Greek artist.
They, the Gaul Lutarius, and one of the sculptor's slaves, were the only
ones who had been brought on board the Hydra alive from the attack in
Tennis, but the latter soon succumbed to his wounds.
Hermon owed it solely to the bridge-builder that he had escaped from the
vengeance of his Biamite foe, for the tall Gaul, whose thick beard
resembled Hermon's in length and blackness, was mistaken by Hanno for the
person whom Ledscha had directed him to deliver alive into her power.
The pirate had surrendered the wrong captive to the woman he loved and,
as Bias declared, to his serious disadvantage; for, though Hanno and the
Biamite girl were husband and wife, no one could help perceiving the cold
dislike with which Ledscha rebuffed the giant who read her every wish in
her eyes. Finally, the captain of the pirate ship, a silent man by
nature, often did not open his lips for days except to give orders to the
crew. Frequently he even refused to be relieved from duty, and remained
all night at the helm.
Only when, at his own risk, or with the vessels of his father and
brother, he attacked merchant ships or defended himself against a war
galley, did he wake to vigorous life and rush with gallant recklessness
into battle.
A single man on the Hydra was little inferior to him in strength and
daring--the Gaul Lutarius. He had been enrolled among the pirates, and
when Hanno was wounded in an engagement with a Syrian war galley, was
elected his representative. During this time Ledscha faithfully performed
her duty as her young husband's nurse, but afterward treated him as
coldly as before.
Yet she devoted herself eagerly to the ship and the crew, and the fierce,
lawless fellows cheerfully submitted to the sensible arrangements of
their captain's beautiful, energetic wife. At this period Bias had often
met Ledscha engaged in secret conversation with the Gaul, yet if any
tender emotion really attracted her toward any one other than her
husband, Myrtilus would have been suspected rather than the black-bearded
bridge-builder; for she not only showed the sculptor the kindest
consideration, but often entered into conversation with him, and even
persuaded him, when the sea was calm, or the Hydra lay at anchor in one
of the hidden bays known to the pirates, to practise his art, and at last
to make a bust of her. She had succeeded in getting him clay, wax, and
tools for the purpose. After asking which goddess had ill-treated the
weaver Arachne, she commanded him to make a head of Athene, adorned with
the helmet, modelled from her own. During this time she frequently
inquired whether her features really were not beautiful enough to be
copied for the countenance of a goddess, and when he eagerly assured her
of the fact, made him swear that he was not deceiving her with flattery.
Neither Bias nor Myrtilus had ever been allowed to remain on shore; but,
on the whole, the slave protested, Myrtilus's health, thanks to the pure
sea air on the Hydra, had improved, in spite of the longing which often
assailed him, and the great excitements to which he was sometimes
exposed.
There had been anxious hours when Hanno's father and brothers visited the
Hydra to induce her captain to make money out of the captive sculptor,
and either sell him at a high price or extort a large ransom from him;
but Bias had overheard how resolutely Ledscha opposed these proposals,
and represented to old Satabus of what priceless importance Myrtilus
might become to them if either should be captured and imprisoned.
The greatest excitements, of course, had been connected with the battles
of the pirates. Myrtilus, who, in spite of his feeble health, by no means
lacked courage, found it especially hard to bear that during the
conflicts he was locked up with Bias, but even Ledscha could neither
prevent nor restrict these measures.
Bias could not tell what seas the Hydra had sailed, nor at what--usually
desolate-shores she had touched. He only knew that she had gone to Sinope
in Pontus, passed through the Propontis, and then sought booty near the
coasts of Asia Minor. Ledscha had refused to answer every question that
referred to these things.
Latterly, the young wife had become very grave, and apparently completely
severed her relations with her husband; but she also studiously avoided
the Gaul and, if they talked to each other at all, it was in hurried
whispers.
So events went on until something occurred which was to affect the lives
of the prisoners deeply. It must have been just beyond the outlet from
the Hellespont into the AEgean Sea; for, in order to pass through the
narrow straits leading thither from Pontus, the Hydra had been most
skilfully given the appearance of a peaceful merchant vessel.
The slave's soul must have been greatly agitated by this experience, for
while, hitherto, whenever he was interrupted by Hermon he had retained
his composure, and could not refrain from occasionally connecting a
practical application with his report, now, mastered by the power of the
remembrance, he uttered what he wished to tell his master in an oppressed
tone, while bright drops of perspiration bedewed the speaker's brow.
A large merchant ship had approached them, and three men came on board
the Hydra--old Satabus, his son Labaja, and a gray-haired, bearded
seafarer of tall stature and dignified bearing, Schalit, Ledscha's
father.
The meeting between the Biamite ship-owner and his child, after so long a
separation, was a singular one; for the young wife held out her hand to
her father timidly, with downcast eyes, and he refused to take it.
Directly after, however, as if constrained by an irresistible impulse, he
drew his unruly daughter toward him and kissed her brow and cheeks.
Roast meat and the best wine had been served in the large ship's cabin;
but though Myrtilus and Bias had been locked up as if a bloody battle was
expected, the loud, angry uproar of men's deep voices reached them, and
Ledscha's shrill tones shrieking in passionate wrath blended in the
strife. Furniture must have been upset and dishes broken, yet the giants
who were disputing here did not come to blows.
At last the savage turmoil subsided.
When Bias and his master were again released, Ledscha was standing, in
the dusk of evening, at the foot of the mainmast, pressing her brow
against the wood as if she needed some support to save herself from
falling.
She checked Myrtilus's words with an imperious "Let me alone!" The next
day she had paced restlessly up and down the deck like a caged beast of
prey, and would permit no one to speak to her.
At noon Hanno was about to get into a boat to go to her father's ship,
and she insisted upon accompanying him. But this time the corsair seemed
completely transformed, and with the pitiless sternness, which he so well
knew how to use in issuing commands, ordered her to remain on the Hydra.
She, however, by no means obeyed her husband's mandate without
resistance, and, at the recollection of the conflict which now occurred
between the pair, in which she raged like a tigress, the narrator's
cheeks crimsoned.
The quarrel was ended by the powerful seaman's taking in his arms his
lithe, slender wife, who resisted him with all her strength and had
already touched the side of the boat with her foot, and putting her down
on the deck of his ship.
Then Hanno leaped back into the skiff, while Ledscha, groaning with rage,
retired to the cabin.
An hour after she again appeared on deck, called Myrtilus and Bias and,
showing them her eyes, reddened by tears, told them, as if in apology for
her weakness, that she had not been permitted to bid her father farewell.
Then, pallid as a corpse, she had turned the conversation upon Hermon,
and informed Myrtilus that an Alexandrian pilot had told her father that
he was blind, and her brother-in-law Labaja had heard the same thing.
While saying this, her lips curled scornfully, but when she saw how
deeply their friend's misfortune moved her two prisoners, she waved her
hand, declaring that he did not need their sympathy; the pilot had
reported that he was living in magnificence and pleasure, and the people
in the capital honoured and praised him as if he were a god.
Thereupon she had laughed shrilly and reviled so bitterly the
contemptible blind Fortune that remains most loyal to those who deserve
to perish in the deepest misery, that Bias avoided repeating her words to
his master.
The news of Myrtilus's legacy had not reached her ears, and Bias, too,
had just heard of it for the first time.
Ledscha's object had been to relieve her troubled soul by attacks upon
the man whom she hated, but she suddenly turned to the master and servant
to ask if they desired to obtain their liberty.
Oh, how quickly a hopeful "Yes" reached the ears of the gloomy woman! how
ready both were to swear, by a solemn oath, to fulfil the conditions the
Biamite desired to impose!
As soon as opportunity offered, both were to leave the Hydra with one
other person who, like Bias and herself, understood how to mange a boat.
The favourable moment soon came. One moonless night, when the steering of
the Hydra was intrusted to the Gaul, Ledscha waked the two prisoners and,
with the Gaul Lutarius, Myrtilus, and the slave, entered the boat, which
conveyed them to the shore without accident or interruption.
Bias knew the name of the place where it had anchored, it is true, but
the oath which Ledscha had made him swear there was so terrible that he
would not have broken it at any cost.
This oath required the slave, who, three days after their landing, was
sent to Alexandria by the first ship that sailed for that port, to
maintain the most absolute secrecy concerning Myrtilus's hiding place
until he was authorized to speak. Bias was to go to Alexandria without
delay, and there obtain from Archias, who managed Myrtilus's property,
the sums which Ledscha intended to use in the following manner: Two attic
talents Bias was to bring back. These were for the Gaul, probably in
payment for his assistance. Two more were to be taken by the slave to the
Temple of Nemesis. Lastly, Bias was to deliver five talents to old Tabus,
who kept the treasure of the pirate family on the Owl's Nest, and tell
her that Ledscha, in this money, sent back the bridal dowry which Hanno
had paid her father for his daughter. With this she released herself from
the husband who inspired her with feelings very unlike love.
Hermon asked to have this commission repeated, and received the
directions Myrtilus had given to the slave. The blind man's hope that
they must also include greetings and news from his friend's hand was
destroyed by Bias, whom Myrtilus, in the leisure hours on the Hydra, had
taught to read. This was not so difficult a task for the slave, who
longed for knowledge, and had already tried it before. But with writing,
on the other hand, he could make no headway. He was too old, and his hand
had become too clumsy to acquire this difficult art.
In reply to Hermon's anxious question whether his friend needed anything
in his present abode, the slave reported that he was at liberty to move
about at will, and was not even obliged to share Ledscha's lodgings. He
lacked nothing, for the Biamite, besides some gold, had left with him
also gems and pearls of such great value that they would suffice to
support him several years. As for himself, she had supplied him more than
abundantly with money for travelling expenses.
Myrtilus was awaiting his return in a city prospering under a rich and
wise regent, and sent whole cargoes of affectionate remembrances. The
sculptor, too, was firmly resolved to keep the oath imposed upon him.
As soon as he, Bias, had performed the commission intrusted to him, he
and Myrtilus would be released from their vow, and Hermon would learn his
friend's residence.
CHAPTER XI.
No morning brightened Hermon's night of darkness.
When the returned slave had finished his report, the sun was already
shining into his master's room.
Without lying down again, the latter went at once to the Tennis notary,
who had moved to Alexandria two months before, and with his assistance
raised the money which his friend needed.
Worthy Melampus had received the news that Myrtilus was still alive in a
very singular manner. Even now he could grasp only one thing at a time,
and he loved Hermon with sincere devotion. Therefore the lawyer who had
so zealously striven to expedite the blind man's entering into possession
of his friend's inheritance would very willingly have permitted
Myrtilus--doubtless an invalid--to continue to rest quietly among the
dead. Yet his kind heart rejoiced at the deliverance of the famous young
artist, and so during Hermon's story he had passed from sincere regret to
loud expressions of joyous sympathy.
Lastly, he had placed his whole property at the disposal of Hermon, who
had paid him liberally for his work, to provide for the blind sculptor's
future. This generous offer had been declined; but he now assisted Hermon
to prepare the emancipation papers for his faithful Bias, and found a
ship that was bound to Tanis. Toward evening he accompanied Hermon to the
harbour and, after a cordial farewell from his helpful friend, the
artist, with the new "freedman" Bias and the slave clerk Patran, went on
board the vessel, now ready to sail.
The voyage was one of the speediest, yet the end came too soon for both
master and servant--Hermon had not yet heard enough of the friend beyond
his reach, and Bias was far from having related everything he desired to
tell about Myrtilus and Ledscha; yet he was now permitted to express
every opinion that entered his mind, and this had occupied a great deal
of time.
Bias also sought to know much more about Hermon's past and future than he
had yet learned, not merely from curiosity, but because he foresaw that
Myrtilus would not cease to question him about his blind friend.
The misfortune must have produced a deep and lasting effect upon the
artist's joyous nature, for his whole bearing was pervaded by such
earnestness and dignity that years, instead of months, seemed to have
elapsed since their separation.
It was characteristic of Daphne that her lover's blindness did not
alienate her from him; yet why had not the girl, who still desired to
become his wife, been able to wed the helpless man who had lost his
sight? If the father did not wish to be separated from his daughter,
surely he could live with the young couple. A home was quickly made
everywhere for the rich, and, if Archias was tired of his house in
Alexandria, as Hermon had intimated, there was room enough in the world
for a new one.
But that was the way with things here below! Man was the cause of man's
misfortune! Daphne and Hermon remained the same; but Archias from an
affectionate father had become transformed into an entirely different
person. If the former had been allowed to follow their inclinations, they
would now be united and happy, while, because a third person so willed,
they must go their way solitary and wretched.
He expressed this view to his master, and insisted upon his opinion until
Hermon confided to him what had driven Archias from Alexandria.
Patran, Bias's successor, was by no means satisfactory to him. Had Hermon
retained his sight, he certainly would not have purchased him, in spite
of his skill as a scribe, for the Egyptian had a "bad face."
Oh, if only he could have been permitted to stay with his benefactor
instead of this sullen man! How carefully he would have removed the
stones from his darkened pathway!
During the voyage he was obliged to undergo severe struggles to keep the
oath of secrecy imposed upon him; but perjury threatened him with the
most horrible tortures, not to mention the sorceress Tabus, whom he was
to meet.
So Myrtilus's abode remained unknown to Hermon.
Bias approved his master's intention of going into the desert. He had
often seen the oracle of Amon tested, and he himself had experienced the
healthfulness of the desert air. Besides, it made him proud to see that
Hermon was disposed to follow his suggestion of pitching his tent in a
spot which he designated. This was at the end of the arm of the sea at
Clysma. Several trees grew there beside small springs, and a peaceful
family of Amalekites raised vegetables in their little garden, situated
on higher ground, watered by the desert wells.
When a boy, before the doom of slavery had been pronounced upon him and
his father, his mother, by the priest's advice, took him there to recover
from the severe attack of fever which he could not shake off amid the
damp papyrus plantations surrounding his parents' house. In the dry, pure
air of the desert he recovered, and he would guide Hermon there before
returning to Myrtilus.
From Tanis they reached Tennis in a few hours, and found shelter in the
home of the superintendent of Archias's weaving establishments, whose
hospitality Myrtilus and Hermon had enjoyed before their installation in
the white house, now burned to the ground. The Alexandrian bills of
exchange were paid in gold by the lessee of the royal bank, who was a
good friend of Hermon. Toward evening, both rowed to the Owl's Nest,
taking the five talents with which the runaway wife intended to purchase
freedom from her husband.
As the men approached the central door of the pirates' house, a
middy-aged Biamite woman appeared and rudely ordered them to leave the
island. Tabus was weak, and refused to see visitors. But she was
mistaken; for when Bias, in the dialect of his tribe, shouted loudly that
messengers from the wife of her grandson Hanno had arrived, there was a
movement at the back of the room, and broken sentences, gasped with
difficulty, expressed the old dame's wish to receive the strangers.
On a sheep's-wool couch, over which was spread a wolfskin, the last gift
of her son Satabus, lay the sorceress, who raised herself as Hermon
passed through the door.
After his greeting, she pointed to her deaf ear and begged him to speak
louder. At the same time she gazed into his eyes with a keen, penetrating
glance, and interrupted him by the question: "The Greek sculptor whose
studio was burned over his head? And blind? Blind still?"
"In both eyes," Bias answered for his master.
"And you, fellow?" the old dame asked; then, recollecting herself,
stopped the reply on the servant's lips with the hasty remark: "You are
the blackbeard's slave--a Biamite? Oh, I remember perfectly! You
disappeared with the burning house."
Then she gazed intently and thoughtfully from one to the other, and at
last, pointing to Bias, muttered in a whisper: "You alone come from Hanno
and Ledscha, and were with them on the Hydra? Very well. What news have
you for the old woman from the young couple?"
The freedman began to relate what brought him to the Owl's Nest, and the
gray-haired crone listened eagerly until he said that Ledscha lived
unhappily with her husband, and therefore had left him. She sent back to
her, as the head of Hanno's family, the bridal dowry with which Hanno had
bought her from her father as his wife.
Then Tabus struggled into a little more erect posture, and asked: "What
does this mean? Five talents--and gold, not silver talents? And she sends
the money to me? To me? And she ran away from her husband? But no--no!
Once more--you are a Biamite--repeat it in our own language--and loudly.
This ear is the better one."
Bias obeyed, and the old dame listened to the end without interrupting
him: then raising her brown right hand, covered with a network of
blue-black veins, she clinched it into a fist, which she shook far more
violently than Bias would have believed possible in her weak condition.
At the same time she pressed her lips so tightly together that her
toothless mouth deepened into a hole, and her dim eyes shone with a keen,
menacing light. For some time she found no reply, though strange,
rattling, gasping sounds escaped her heaving breast.
At last she succeeded in uttering words, and shrieked shrilly:
"This--this--away with the golden trash! With the bridal dowry of the
family rejected, and once more free, the base fool thinks she would be
like the captive fox that gnawed the rope! Oh, this age, these people!
And this, this is the haughty, strong Ledscha, the daughter of the
Biamites, who--there stands the blind girl--deceiver!--who so admirably
avenged herself?"
Here her voice failed, and Hermon began to speak to assure her that she
understood Ledscha's wish aright. Then he asked her for a token by which
she acknowledged the receipt of the gold, which he handed her in a stout
linen bag.
But his purpose was not fulfilled, for suddenly, flaming with passionate
wrath, she thrust the purse aside, groaning: "Not an obol of the accursed
destruction of souls shall come back to Hanno, nor even into the family
store. Until his heart and hers stop beating, the most indissoluble bond
will unite both. She desires to ransom herself from a lawful marriage
concluded by her father, as if she were a captive of war; perhaps she
even wants to follow another. Hanno, brave lad, was ready to go to death
for her sake, and she rewards him by bringing shame on his head and
disgrace on us all. Oh, these times, this world! Everything that is
inviolable and holy trampled in the dust! But they are not all so! In
spite of Grecian infidelity, marriage is still honoured among our people.
But she who mocks what is sacred, and tramples holy customs under foot,
shall be accursed, execrated, given over to want, hunger, disease,
death!"
With rattling breath and closed eyes she leaned farther back against the
cushions that supported her; but Bias, in their common language, tried to
soothe her, and informed her that, though Ledscha had probably run away
from her husband, she had by no means renounced her vengeance. He was
bringing two talents with him to place in the Temple of Nemesis.
"Of Nemesis?" repeated the old dame. Then she tried to raise herself and,
as she constantly sank back again, Bias aided her. But she had scarcely
recovered her sitting posture when she gasped to the freedman: "Nemesis,
who helped, and is to continue to help her to destroy her foe? Well,
well! Five talents--a great sum, a great sum! But the more the better! To
Nemesis with them, to Ate and the Erinyes! The talons of the avenging
goddess shall tear the beautiful face, the heart, and the liver of the
accursed one! A twofold malediction on her who has wronged the son of my
Satabus!"
While speaking, her head nodded swiftly up and down, and when at last she
bowed it wearily, her visitors heard her murmur the names of Satabus and
Hanno, sometimes tenderly, sometimes mournfully.
Finally she asked whether any one else was concerned in Ledscha's flight;
and when she learned that a Gallic bridge-builder accompanied the
fugitive wife, she again started up as if frantic, exclaiming: "Yes, to
Nemesis with the gold! We neither need nor want it, and Satabus, my son,
he will bless me for renunciation--"
Here exhaustion again silenced her. She gazed mutely and thoughtfully
into vacancy, until at last, turning to Bias, she began more calmly: "You
will see her again, man, and must tell her what the clan of Tabus bought
with her talents. Take her my curse, and let her know that her friends
would be my foes, and her foes should find in Tabus a benefactress!"
Then, deeply buried in thought, she again fixed her eyes on the floor;
but at last she called to Hermon, saying: "You, blind Greek--am I not
right?--the torch was thrust into your face, and you lost the sight of
both eyes?"
The artist assented to this question; but she bade him sit down before
her, and when he bent his face near her she raised one lid after the
other with trembling fingers, yet lightly and skilfully, gazed long and
intently into his eyes, and murmured: "Like black Psoti and lawless
Simeon, and they are both cured."
"Can you restore me?" Hermon now asked in great excitement. "Answer me
honestly, you experienced woman! Give me back my sight, and demand
whatever gold and valuables I still possess--"
"Keep them," Tabus contemptuously interrupted. "Not for gold or goods
will I restore you the best gift man can lose. I will cure you because
you are the person to whom the infamous wretch most ardently wished the
sorest trouble. When she hoped to destroy you, she perceived in this deed
the happiness which had been promised to her on a night when the full
moon was shining. To-day--this very night--the disk between Astarte's
horns rounds again, and presently--wait a little while!--presently you
shall have what the light restores you--" Then she called the Biamite
woman, ordered her to bring the medicine chest, and took from it one
vessel after another. The box she was seeking was among the last and,
while handing it to Bias, she muttered: "Oh, yes, certainly--it does one
good to destroy a foe, but no less to make her foe happy!"
Turning to the freedman, she went on in a louder tone: "You, slave, shall
inform Hanno's wife that old Tabus gave the sculptor, whose blindness she
caused, the remedy which restored the sight of black Psoti, whom she
knew." Here she paused, gazed upward, and murmured almost unintelligibly:
"Satabus, Hanno! If this is the last act of the old mother, it will give
ye pleasure."
Then she told Hermon to kneel again, and ordered the slave to hold the
lamp which her nurse Tasia had just lighted at the hearth fire.
"The last," she said, looking into the box, "but it will be enough. The
odour of the herb in the salve is as strong as if it had been prepared
yesterday."
She laid the first bandage on Hermon's eyes with her own weak fingers, at
the same time muttering an incantation; but it did not seem to satisfy
her. Great excitement had taken possession of her, and as the silver
light of the full moon shone into her room she waved her hands before the
artist's eyes and fixed her gaze upon the threshold illumined by the
moonbeams, ejaculating sentences incomprehensible to the blind man. Bias
supported her, for she had risen to her full height, and he felt how she
tottered and trembled.
Yet her strength held out to whisper to Hermon: "Nearer, still nearer! By
the light of the august one whose rays greet us, let it be said: You will
see again. Await your recovery patiently in a quiet place in the pure
air, not in the city. Refrain from everything with which the Greeks
intoxicate themselves. Shun wine, and whatever heats the blood. Recovery
is coming; I see it drawing near. You will see again as surely as I now
curse the woman who abandoned the husband to whom she vowed fidelity. She
rejoiced over your blindness, and she will gnash her teeth with rage and
grief when she hears that it was Tabus who brought light into the
darkness that surrounds you."
With these words she pushed off the freedman's supporting arms and sank
back upon the couch.
Again Hermon tried to thank her; but she would not permit it, and said in
an almost inaudible tone: "I really did not give the salve to do you
good--the last act of all--"
Finally she murmured a few words of direction for its use, and added that
he must keep the sunlight from his blind eyes by bandages and shades, as
if it were a cruel foe.
When she paused, and Bias asked her another question, she pointed to the
door, exclaiming as loudly as her weakness permitted, "Go, I tell you,
go!"
Hermon obeyed and left her, accompanied by the freedman, who carried the
box of salve so full of precious promise.
The next morning Bias delivered to the astonished priest of Nemesis the
large gifts intended for the avenging goddess.
Before Hermon entered the boat with him and his Egyptian slave, the
freedman told his master that Gula was again living in perfect harmony
with the husband who had cast her off, and Taus, Ledscha's younger
sister, was the wife of the young Biamite who, she had feared, would give
up his wooing on account of her visit to Hermon's studio.
After a long voyage through the canal which had been dug a short time
before, connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, the three men
reached Clysma. Opposite to it, on the eastern shore of the narrow
northern point of the Erythraean sea--[Red Sea]--lay the goal of their
journey, and thither Bias led his blind master, followed by the slave, on
shore.
CHAPTER XII.
It was long since Hermon had felt so free and light-hearted as during
this voyage.
He firmly believed in his recovery.
A few days before he had escaped death in the royal palace as if by a
miracle, and he owed his deliverance to the woman he loved.
In the Temple of Nemesis at Tennis the conviction that the goddess had
ceased to persecute him took possession of his mind.
True, his blind eyes had been unable to see her menacing statue, but not
even the slightest thrill of horror had seized him in its presence. In
Alexandria, after his departure from Proclus's banquet, she had desisted
from pursuing him. Else how would she have permitted him to escape
uninjured when he was already standing upon the verge of an abyss, and a
wave of her hand would have sufficed to hurl him into the death-dealing
gulf?
But his swift confession, and the transformation which followed it, had
reconciled him not only with her, but also with the other gods; for they
appeared to him in forms as radiant and friendly as in the days of his
boyhood, when, while Bias took the helm on the long voyage through the
canal and the Bitter Lakes, he recalled the visible world to his memory
and, from the rising sun, Phoebus Apollo, the lord of light and purity,
gazed at him from his golden chariot, drawn by four horses, and
Aphrodite, the embodiment of all beauty, rose before him from the snowy
foam of the azure waves. Demeter, in the form of Daphne, appeared,
dispensing prosperity, above the swaying golden waves of the ripening
grain fields and bestowing peace beside the domestic hearth. The whole
world once more seemed peopled with deities, and he felt their rule in
his own breast.
The place of which Bias had told him was situated on a lofty portion of
the shore. Beside the springs which there gushed from the soil of the
desert grew green palm trees and thorny acacias. Farther on flourished
the fragrant betharan. About a thousand paces from this spot the faithful
freedman pitched the little tent obtained in Tennis under the shade of
several tall palm trees and a sejal acacia.
Not far from the springs lived the same family of Amalekites whom Bias
had known from boyhood. They raised a few vegetables in little beds, and
the men acted as guards to the caravans which came from Egypt through the
peninsula of Sinai to Petrea and Hebron. The daughter of the aged sheik
whose men accompanied the trains of goods, a pleasant, middle-aged woman,
recognised the Biamite, who when a boy had recovered under her mother's
nursing, and promised Bias to honour his blind master as a valued guest
of the tribe.
Not until after he had done everything in his power to render life in the
wilderness endurable, and had placed a fresh bandage over his eyes, would
Bias leave his master.
The freedman entered the boat weeping, and Hermon, deeply agitated,
turned his face toward him.
When he was left alone with his Egyptian slave, with whom he rarely
exchanged a word, he fancied that, amid the murmur of the waves washing
the strand at his feet, blended the sounds of the street which led past
his house in Alexandria, and with them all sorts of disagreeable memories
crowded upon him; but soon he no longer heard them, and the next night
brought refreshing sleep.
Even on the second day he felt that the profound silence which surrounded
him was a benefit. The stillness affected him like something physical.
The life was certainly monotonous, and at first there were hours when the
course of the new existence, so devoid of any change, op pressed him, but
he experienced no tedium. His mental life was too rich, and the
unburdening of his anxious soul too great a relief for that.
He had shunned serious thought since he left the philosopher's school;
but here it soon afforded him the highest pleasure, for never had his
mind moved so freely, so undisturbed by any limit or obstacle.
He did not need to search for what he hoped to find in the wilderness.
His whole past life passed before him as if by its own volition. All that
he had ever experienced, learned, thought, felt, rose before his mind
with wonderful distinctness, and when he overlooked all his mental
possessions, as if from a high watch-tower in the bright sunshine, he
began to consider how he had used the details and how he could continue
to do so.
Whatever he had seen incorrectly forced itself resistlessly upon him, yet
here also the Greek nature, deeply implanted in his soul, guarded him,
and it was easy for him to avoid self-torturing remorse. He only desired
to utilize for improvement what he recognised as false.
When in this delicious silence he listened to the contradictory demands
of his intellect and his senses, it often seemed as though he was present
at a discussion between two guests who were exchanging their opinions
concerning the subject that occupied his mind.
Here he first learned to deepen sound intellectual power and listen to
the demands of the heart, or to repulse and condemn them.
Ah, yes, he was still blind; but never had he observed and recognised
human life and its stage, down to the minutest detail, which his eyes
refused to show him, so keenly as during these clays. The phenomena which
had attracted or repelled his vision here appeared nearer and more
distinctly.
What he called "reality" and believed he understood thoroughly and
estimated correctly, now disclosed many a secret which had previously
remained concealed.
How defective his visual perception had been! how necessary it now seemed
to subject his judgment to a new test! Doubtless a wealth of artistic
subjects had come to him from the world of reality which he had placed
far above everything else, but a greater and nobler one from the sphere
which he had shunned as unfruitful and corrupting.
As if by magic, the world of ideality opened before him in this exquisite
silence. He again found in his own soul the joyous creative forces of
Nature, and the surrounding stillness increased tenfold his capacity of
perceiving it; nay, he felt as if creative energy dwelt in solitude
itself.
His mind had always turned toward greatness. The desire to impress his
works with the stamp of his own overflowing power had carried him far
beyond moderation in modelling his struggling Maenads.
Now, when he sought for subjects, beside the smaller and more simple ones
appeared mighty and manifold ones, often of superhuman grandeur.
Oh, if a higher power would at some future day permit him to model with
his strong hands this battle of the Amazons, this Phoebus Apollo, radiant
in beauty and the glow of victory, conquering the dragons of darkness!
Arachne, too, returned to his mind, and also Demeter. But she did not
hover before him as the peaceful dispenser of blessings, the preserver of
peace, but as the maternal earth goddess, robbed of her daughter
Proserpina. How varied in meaning was this myth!--and he strove to follow
it in every direction.
Nothing more could come to the blind artist from Nature by the aid of his
physical vision. The realm of reality was closed to him; but he had found
the key to that of the ideal, and what he found in it proved to be no
less true than the objects the other had offered.
How rich in forms was the new world which forced itself unbidden on his
imagination! He who, a short time before, had believed whatever could not
be touched by the hands was useless for his art, now had the choice among
a hundred subjects, full of glowing life, which were attainable by no
organ of the senses. He need fear to undertake none, if only it was
worthy of representation; for he was sure of his ability, and difficulty
did not alarm him, but promised to lend creating for the first time its
true charm.
And, besides, without the interest of animated conversation, without
festal scenes where, with garlanded head and intoxicating pleasure
soaring upward from the dust of earth, existence had seemed to him
shallow and not worth the trouble it imposed upon mortals, solitude now
offered him hours as happy as he had ever experienced while revelling
with gay companions.
At first many things had disturbed them, especially the dissatisfied,
almost gloomy disposition of his Egyptian slave, who, born in the city
and accustomed to its life, found it unbearable to stay in the desert
with the strange blind master, who lived like a porter, and ordered him
to prepare his wretched fare with the hands skilled in the use of the
pen.
But this living disturber of the peace was not to annoy the recluse long.
Scarcely a fortnight after Bias's departure, the slave Patran, who had
cost so extravagant a sum, vanished one morning with the sculptor's money
and silver cup.
This rascally trick of a servant whom he had treated with almost
brotherly kindness wounded Hermon, but he soon regarded the morose
fellow's disappearance as a benefit.
When for the first time he drank water from an earthen jug, instead of a
silver goblet, he thought of Diogenes, who cast his cup aside when he saw
a boy raise water to his lips in his hand, yet with whom the great
Macedonian conqueror of the world would have changed places "if he had
not been Alexander."
The active, merry son of Bias's Amalekite friend gladly rendered him the
help and guidance for which he had been reluctant to ask his ill-tempered
slave, and he soon became accustomed to the simple fare of the nomads.
Bread and milk, fruits and vegetables from his neighbour's little garden,
satisfied him, and when the wine he had drunk was used, he contented
himself, obedient to old Tabus's advice, with pure water.
As he still had several gold coins on his person, and wore two costly
rings on his finger, he doubtless thought of sending to Clysma for meat,
poultry, and wine, but he had refrained from doing so through the advice
of the Amalekite woman, who anointed his eyes with Tabus's salve and
protected them by a shade of fresh leaves from the dazzling rays of the
desert sun. She, like the sorceress on the Owl's Nest, warned him against
all viands that inflamed the blood, and he willingly allowed her to take
away what she and her gray-haired father, the experienced head of the
tribe, pronounced detrimental to his recovery.
At first the "beggar's fare" seemed repulsive, but he soon felt that it
was benefiting him after the riotous life of the last few months.
One day, when the Amalekite took off his bandage, he thought he saw a
faint glimmer of light, and how his heart exulted at this faint foretaste
of the pleasure of sight!
In an instant hope sprang up with fresh power in his excitable soul, and
his lost cheerfulness returned to him like a butterfly to the newly
opened flower. The image of his beloved Daphne rose before him in sunny
radiance, and he saw himself in his studio in the service of his art.
He had always been fond of children, and the little ones in the Amalekite
family quickly discovered this, and crowded around their blind friend,
who played all sorts of games with them, and in spite of the bandaged
eyes, over which spread a broad shade of green leaves, could make
whistles with his skilful artist hands from the reeds and willow branches
they brought.
He saw before him the object to which his heart still clung as distinctly
as if he need only stretch out his hand to draw it nearer, and
perhaps--surely and certainly, the Amalekite said--the time would come
when he would behold it also with his bodily eyes.
If the longing should be fulfilled! If his eyes were again permitted to
convey to him what formerly filled his soul with delight! Yes,
beauty--was entitled to a higher place than truth, and if it again
unfolded itself to his gaze, how gladly and gratefully he would pay
homage to it with his art!
The hope that he might enjoy it once more now grew stronger, for the
glimmer of light became brighter, and one day, when his skilful nurse
again took the bandage from his milk-white pupils, he saw something long
appear, as if through, a mist. It was only the thorny acacia tree at his
tent; but the sight of the most beautiful of beautiful things never
filled him with more joyful gratitude.
Then he ordered the less valuable of his two rings to be sold to offer a
sacrifice to health-bestowing Isis, who had a little temple in Clysma.
How fervently he now prayed also to the great Apollo, the foe of darkness
and the lord of everything light and pure! How yearningly he besought
Aphrodite to bless him again with the enjoyment of eternal beauty, and
Eros to heal the wound which his arrow had inflicted upon his heart and
Daphne's, and bring them together after so much distress and need!
When, after the lapse of another week, the bandage was again removed, his
inmost soul rejoiced, for his eyes showed him the rippling emerald-green
surface of the Red Sea, and the outlines of the palms, the tents, the
Amalekite woman, her boy, and her two long-eared goats.
How ardently he thanked the gracious deities who, in spite of Straton's
precepts, were no mere figments of human imagination and, as if he had
become a child again, poured forth his overflowing heart with mute
gratitude to his mother's soul!
The artist nature, yearning to create, began to stir within more
ceaselessly than ever before. Already he saw clay and wax assuming forms
beneath his skilful hands; already he imagined himself, with fresh power
and delight, cutting majestic figures from blocks of marble, or, by
hammering, carving, and filing, shaping them from gold and ivory.
And he would not take what he intended to create solely from the world of
reality perceptible to the senses. Oh, no! He desired to show through his
art the loftiest of ideals. How could he still shrink from using the
liberty which he had formerly rejected, the liberty of drawing from his
own inner consciousness what he needed in order to bestow upon the ideal
images he longed to create the grandeur, strength, and sublimity in which
he beheld them rise before his purified soul!
Yet, with all this, he must remain faithful to truth, copy from Nature
what he desired to represent. Every finger, every lock of hair, must
correspond with reality to the minutest detail, and yet the whole must be
pervaded and penetrated, as the blood flows through the body, by the
thought that filled his mind and soul.
A reflected image of the ideal and of his own mood, faithful to truth,
free, and yet obedient to the demands of moderation--in this sentence
Hermon summed up the result of his solitary meditations upon art and
works of art. Since he had found the gods again, he perceived that the
Muse had confided to him a sacerdotal office. He intended to perform its
duties, and not only attract and please the beholder's eyes through his
works, but elevate his heart and mind, as beauty, truth, grandeur, and
eternity uplifted his own soul. He recognised in the tireless creative
power which keeps Nature ever new, fresh, and bewitching, the presence of
the same deity whose rule manifested itself in the life of his own soul.
So long as he denied its existence, he had recognised no being more
powerful than himself; now that he again felt insignificant beside it, he
knew himself to be stronger than ever before, that the greatest of all
powers had become his ally. Now it was difficult for him to understand
how he could have turned away from the deity. As an artist he, too, was a
creator, and, while he believed those who considered the universe had
come into existence of itself, instead of having been created, he had
robbed himself of the most sublime model. Besides, the greatest charm of
his noble profession was lost to him. Now he knew it, and was striving
toward the goal attainable by the artist alone among mortals--to hold
intercourse with the deity, and by creations full of its essence elevate
the world to its grandeur and beauty.
One day, at the end of the second month of his stay in the desert, when
the Amalekite woman removed the bandage, her boy, whose form he
distinguished as if through a veil, suddenly exclaimed: "The white cover
on your eyes is melting! They are beginning to sparkle a little, and soon
they will be perfectly well, and you can carve the lion's head on my
cane."
Perhaps the artist might really have succeeded in doing so, but he
forbade himself the attempt.
He thought that the time for departure had now arrived, and an
irresistible longing urged him back to the world and Daphne.
But he could not resist the entreaties of the old sheik and his daughter
not to risk what he had gained, so he continued to use the shade of
leaves, and allowed himself to be persuaded to defer his departure until
the dimness which still prevented his seeing anything distinctly passed
away.
True, the beautiful peace which he had enjoyed of late was over and,
besides, anxiety for the dear ones in distant lands was constantly
increasing. He had had no news of them for a long time, and when he
imagined what fate might have overtaken Archias, and his daughter with
him, if he had been carried back to the enraged King in Alexandria, a
terrible dread took possession of him, which scattered even joy in his
wonderful recovery to the four winds, and finally led him to the
resolution to return to the world at any risk and devote himself to those
whose fate was nearer to his heart than his own weal and woe.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Forbidden the folly of spoiling the present by remorse
Two griefs always belong to one joy
ARACHNE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 8.
CHAPTER XIII.
Hermon, filled with longing, went down toward evening to the shore.
The sun was setting, and the riot of colours in the western horizon
seemed like a mockery of the torturing anxiety which had mastered his
soul.
He did not notice the boat that was approaching the land; many travellers
who intended to go through Arabia Petrea landed here, and for several
days--he knew why--there had been more stir in these quiet waters.
Suddenly he was surprised by the ringing shout with which he had formerly
announced his approach to Myrtilus.
Unconsciously agitated by joy, as if the sunset glow before him had
suddenly been transformed into the dawn of a happy day, he answered by a
loud cry glad with hope. Although his dim eyes did not yet permit him to
distinguish who was standing erect in the boat, waving greetings to him,
he thought he knew whom this exquisite evening was bringing.
Soon his own name reached him. It was his "wise Bias" who shouted, and
soon, with a throbbing heart, he held out both hands to him.
The freedman had performed his commission in the best possible manner,
and was now no longer bound to silence by oath.
Ledscha had left him and Myrtilus to themselves and, as Bias thought he
had heard, had sailed with the Gaul Lutarius for Paraetonium, the
frontier city between the kingdom of Egypt and that of Cyrene.
Myrtilus felt stronger than he had done for a long time, and had sent him
back to the blind friend who would need him more than he did.
But worthy Bias also brought messages from Archias and Daphne. They were
well, and his uncle now had scarcely any cause to fear pursuers.
Before the landing of the boat, the shade had covered Hermon's eyes; but
when, after the freedman's first timid question about his sight, he
raised it again, at the same time reporting and showing what progress he
had already made toward recovery, the excess of joy overpowered the
freedman, and sometimes laughing, sometimes weeping, he kissed the
convalescent's hands and simple robe. It was some time before he calmed
himself again, then laying his forefinger on the side of his nose, he
said: "Therein the immortals differ from human beings. We sculptors can
only create good work with good tools, but the immortals often use the
very poorest of all to accomplish the best things. You owe your sight to
the hate of this old witch and mother of pirates, so may she find peace
in the grave. She is dead. I heard it from a fellow-countryman whom I met
in Herocipolis. Her end came soon after our visit."
Then Bias related what he knew of Hermon's uncle, of Daphne, and
Myrtilus.
Two letters were to give him further particulars.
They came from the woman he loved and from his friend, and as soon as
Bias had lighted the lamp in the tent, at the same time telling his
master in advance many items of news they contained, he set about the
difficult task of reading.
He had certainly scarcely become a master of this art on board the Hydra,
yet his slow performance did all honour to the patience of his teacher
Myrtilus.
He began with Daphne's letter, but by the desire of prudent Archias it
communicated few facts. But the protestations of love and expressions of
longing which filled it pierced the freedman's soul so deeply that his
voice more than once failed while reading them.
Myrtilus's letter, on the contrary, gave a minute description of his mode
of life, and informed his friend what he expected for him and himself in
the future. The contents of both relieved Hermon's sorely troubled heart,
made life with those who were dearest to him possible, and explained many
things which the reports of the slave had not rendered perfectly clear.
Archias had gone with Daphne to the island of Lesbos, his mother's native
city. The ships which conveyed travellers to Pergamus, where Myrtilus was
living, touched at this port, and Bias, to whom Hermon had confided the
refuge of the father and daughter, had sought them there, and found them
in a beautiful villa.
After being released from his oath, Myrtilus had put himself into
communication with his uncle, and just before Bias's departure the
merchant had come to Pergamus with his daughter. As he had the most
cordial reception from the Regent Philetaerus, he seemed inclined to
settle permanently there.
As for Myrtilus, he had cast anchor with Ledscha in the little Mysian
seaport town of Pitane, near the mouth of the Caicus River, on which,
farther inland, was the rapidly growing city of Pergamus.
She had found a hospitable welcome in the family of a seafarer who were
relatives, while the Gaul continued his voyage to obtain information
about his tribe in Syria. But he had already returned when Bias reached
Pitane with the two talents intended for him. Myrtilus had availed
himself of Ledscha's permission long before and gone to Pergamus, where
he had lived and worked in secrecy until, after the freedman's return
from Ledscha, who at once left Pitane with the Gaul, he was released from
his oath.
During the absence of Bias he had modelled a large relief, a triumphal
procession of Dionysus, and as the renown of his name had previously
reached Pergamus, the artists and the most distinguished men in the city
flocked to his studio to admire the work of the famous Alexandrian.
Soon Philetoerus, who had founded the Pergamenian kingdom seven years
before, and governed it with great wisdom, came to Myrtilus.
Like his nephew and heir Eumenes, he was a friend to art, and induced the
laurel-crowned Alexandrian to execute the relief, modelled in clay, in
marble for the Temple of Dionysus at Pergamus.
The heir to the throne of Philetaerus, who was now advancing in years,
was especially friendly to Myrtilus, and did everything in his power to
bind him to Pergamus.
He succeeded, for in the beautiful house, located in an extremely
healthful site, which Eumenes had assigned for a residence and studio to
the Alexandrian artist, whose work he most ardently admired, and whom he
regarded as the most welcome of guests, Myrtilus felt better physically
than he had for years. Besides, he thought that, for many reasons, his
friend would be less willing to settle in Alexandria, and that the
presence of his uncle and Daphne would attract him to Pergamus.
Moreover, Hermon surely knew that if he came to him as a blind man he
would find a brother; if he came restored to sight, he would also find a
brother, and likewise a fellow-artist with whom he could live and work.
Myrtilus had told the heir to the throne of Pergamus of his richly gifted
blind relative, and of the peculiarity of his art, and Eumenes eagerly
endeavoured to induce his beloved guest to persuade his friend to remove
to his capital, where there was no lack of distinguished leeches.
If Hermon remained blind, he would honour him; if he recovered his sight,
he would give him large commissions.
How deeply these letters moved the heart of the recovering man! What
prospects they opened for his future life, for love, friendship, and, not
least, for his art!
If he could see--if he could only see again! This exclamation blended
with everything he thought, felt, and uttered. Even in sleep it haunted
him. To regain the clearness of vision he needed for his work, he would
willingly have submitted to the severest tortures.
In Alexandria alone lived the great leeches who could complete the work
which the salve of an ignorant old woman had begun. Thither he must go,
though it cost him liberty and life. The most famous surgeon of the
Museum at the capital had refused his aid under other circumstances.
Perhaps he would relent if Philippus, a friend of Erasistratus, smoothed
the way for him, and the old hero was now living very near. The ships,
whose number on the sea at his feet was constantly increasing, were
attracted hither by the presence of the Egyptian King and Queen on the
isthmus which connects Asia and Africa. The priest of Apollo at Clysma,
and other distinguished Greeks whom he met there, had told him the day
before yesterday, and on two former visits to the place, what was going
on in the world, and informed him how great an honour awaited the eastern
frontier in these days. The appearance of their Majesties in person must
not only mean the founding of a city, the reception of a victorious naval
commander, and the consecration of a restored temple, but also have still
deeper causes.
During the last few years severe physical suffering had brought the
unfortunate second king of the house of Ptolemy to this place to seek the
aid of the ancient Egyptian gods, and, besides the philosophy, busy
himself with the mystic teachings and magic arts of their priesthood.
Only a short period of life seemed allotted to the invalid ruler, and the
service of the time-honoured god of the dead, to whom he had erected one
of the most magnificent temples in the world at Alexandria, to which
Egyptians and Hellenes repaired with equal devotion, opened hopes for the
life after death which seemed to him worthy of examination.
For this reason also he desired to secure the favour of the Egyptian
priesthood.
For this purpose, for the execution of his wise and beneficent
arrangements, as well as for the gratification of his expensive tastes,
large sums of money were required; therefore he devoted himself with
especial zeal to enlarging the resources of his country, already so rich
by nature.
In all these things he had found an admirable assistant in his sister
Arsinoe. As the daughter of the father and mother to whom he himself owed
existence, he could claim for her unassailable legitimacy the same
recognition from the priesthood, and the same submission from the people
rendered to his own person, whom the religion of the country commanded
them to revere as the representative of the sun god.
As marriages between brothers and sisters had been customary from ancient
times, and were sanctioned by religion and myth, he had married the
second Arsinoe, his sister, immediately after the banishment of the first
Queen of this name.
After the union with her, he called himself Philadelphus--brotherly
love--and honoured his sister and wife with the same name.
True, this led the sarcastic Alexandrians to utter many a biting, more or
less witty jest, but he never had cause to regret his choice; in spite of
her forty years, and more than one bloody deed which before her marriage
to him she had committed as Queen of Thrace and as a widow, the second
Arsinoe was always a pattern of regally aristocratic, dignified bearing
and haughty womanly beauty.
Though the first Philadelphus could expect no descendants from her, he
had provided for securing them through her, for he had induced her to
adopt the first Arsinoe's three children, who had been taken from their
exiled mother.
Arsinoe was now accompanying her royal husband Philadelphus to the
eastern frontier. There the latter expected to name the city to be newly
founded "Arsinoe" for her, and-to show his esteem for the priesthood--to
consecrate in person the new Temple of Tum in the city of Pithom, near
Heroopolis.
Lastly, the monarch had been endeavouring to form new connections with
the coast countries of eastern Africa, and open them to Egyptian
commerce.
Admiral Eumedes, the oldest son of Philippus and Thyone, had succeeded in
doing this most admirably, for the distinguished commander had not only
founded on the Ethiopian shore of the Red Sea a city which he named for
the King "Ptolemais," but also won over the princes and tribes of that
region to Egypt.
He was now returning from Ethiopia with a wealth of treasures.
After the brilliant festivals the invalid King, with his new wife, was to
give himself up to complete rest for a month in the healthful air of the
desert region which surrounded Pithom, far from the tumult of the capital
and the exhausting duties of government.
The magnificent shows which were to be expected, and the presence of the
royal pair, had attracted thousands of spectators on foot or horseback,
and by water, and the morning after Bias's return the sea near Clysma was
swarming with vessels of all kinds and sizes.
It was more than probable that Philippus, the father, and Thyone, the
mother of the famous returning Admiral Eumedes, would not fail to be
present at his reception on his native soil, and therefore Hermon wished
to seek out his dear old friends in Heroopolis, where the greeting was to
take place, and obtain their advice.
The boat on which the freedman had come was at the disposal of his master
and himself. Before Hermon entered it, he took leave, with an agitated
heart and open hand, of his Amalekite friends and, in spite of the mist
which still obscured everything he beheld, he perceived how reluctantly
the simple dwellers in the wilderness saw him depart.
When the master and servant entered the boat, in spite of the sturdy
sailors who manned it, it proved even more difficult than they had feared
to make any progress; for the whole narrow end of the arm of the sea,
which here extended between Egypt and Arabia Petrea, was covered with war
galleys and transports, boats and skiffs. The two most magnificent state
galleys from Heroopolis were coming here, bearing the ambassadors who, in
the King's name, were to receive the fleet and its commander. Other large
and small, richly equipped, or unpretending ships and boats were filled
with curious spectators.
What a gay, animated scene! What brilliant, varied, strange, hitherto
unseen objects were gathered here: vessels of every form and size, sails
white, brown, and black, and on the state galleys and boats purple, blue,
and every colour, adorned with more or less costly embroidery! What
rising and falling of swiftly or slowly moving oars!
"From Alexandria!" cried Bias, pointing to a state galley which the King
was sending to the commander of the southern fleet.
"And there," remarked Hermon, proud of his regained power of
distinguishing one thing from another, and letting his eyes rest on one
of the returning transports, on whose deck stood six huge African
elephants, whose trumpeting mingled with the roaring of the lions and
tigers on the huge freight vessels, and the exulting shouts of the men
and women in the ships and boats.
"After the King's heart!" exclaimed Bias. "He probably never received at
one time before so large an accession to his collection of rare animals.
What is the transport with the huge lotus flower on the prow probably
bringing?"
"Oh, and the monkeys and parrots over yonder!" joyously exclaimed the
Amalekite boy who had been Hermon's guide, and had accompanied him into
the boat. Then he suddenly lowered his voice and, fearing that his
delight might give pain to the less keen-sighted man whom he loved, he
asked, "You can see them, my lord, can't you?"
"Certainly, my boy, though less plainly than you do," replied Hermon,
stroking the lad's dark hair.
Meanwhile the admiral's ship had approached the shore.
Bias pointed to the poop, where the commander Eumedes was standing
directing the course of the fleet.
As if moulded in bronze, a man thoroughly equal to his office, he seemed,
in spite of the shouts, greetings, and acclamations thundering around
him, to close his eyes and ears to the vessels thronging about his ship
and devote himself body and soul to the fulfilment of his duty. He had
just embraced his father and mother, who had come here to meet him.
"The King undoubtedly sent by his father the laurel wreath on his
helmet," observed Bias, pointing to the admiral. "So many honours while
he is still so young! When you went to the wrestling school in
Alexandria, Eumedes was scarcely eight years older than you, and I
remember how he preferred you to the others. A sign, and he will notice
us and allow you to go on his ship, or, at any rate, send us a boat in
which we can enter the canal."
"No, no," replied Hermon. "My call would disturb him now."
"Then let us make ourselves known to the Lady Thyone or her husband," the
freedman continued. "They will certainly take us on their large state
galley, from which, though your eyes do not yet see as far as a falcon's,
not a ship, not a man, not a movement will escape them."
But Hermon added one more surprise to the many which he had already
given, for he kindly declined Bias's well-meant counsel, and, resting his
hand on the Amalekite boy's shoulder, said modestly: "I am no longer the
Hermon whom Eumedes preferred to the others. And the Lady Thyone must not
be reminded of anything sad in this festal hour for the mother's heart. I
shall meet her to-morrow, or the day after, and yet I had intended to let
no one who is loyal to me look into my healing eyes before Daphne."
Then he felt the freedman's hand secretly press his, and it comforted
him, after the sorrowful thoughts to which he had yielded, amid the
shouts of joy ringing around him. How quietly, with what calm dignity,
Eumedes received the well-merited homage, and how disgracefully the false
fame had bewildered his own senses!
Yet he had not passed through the purifying fire of misfortune in vain!
The past should not cloud the glad anticipation of brighter days!
Drawing a long breath, he straightened himself into a more erect posture,
and ordered the men to push the boat from the shore. Then he pressed a
farewell kiss on the Amalekite boy's forehead, the lad sprang ashore, and
the journey northward began.
At first the sailors feared that the crowd would be too great, and the
boat would be refused admission to the canal; but the helmsman succeeded
in keeping close behind a vessel of medium size, and the Macedonian
guards of the channel put no obstacle in their countryman's way, while
boats occupied by Egyptians and other barbarians were kept back.
In the Bitter Lakes, whose entire length was to be traversed, the ships
had more room, and after a long voyage through dazzling sunlight, and
along desolate shores, the boat anchored at nightfall at Heroopolis.
Hermon and Bias obtained shelter on one of the ships which the sovereign
had placed at the disposal of the Greeks who came to participate in the
festivals to be celebrated.
Before his master went to rest, the freedman--whom he had sent out to
look for a vessel bound to Pelusium and Alexandria the next day or the
following one--returned to the ship.
He had talked with the Lady Thyone, and told Hermon from her that she
would visit or send for him the next day, after the festival.
His own mother, the freedman protested, could not have rejoiced more
warmly over the commencement of his recovery, and she would have come
with him at once had not Philippus prevented his aged wife, who was
exhausted by the long journey.
The next morning the sun poured a wealth of radiant light upon the
desert, the green water of the harbour, and the gray and yellow walls of
the border fortress.
Three worlds held out their hands to one another on this water way
surrounded by the barren wilderness--Egypt, Hellas, and Semitic Asia.
To the first belonged the processions of priests, who, with images of the
gods, consecrated vessels, and caskets of relics, took their places at
the edge of the harbour. The tawny and black, half-naked soldiers who,
with high shields, lances, battle-axes and bows, gathered around
strangely shaped standards, joined them, amid the beating of drums and
blare of trumpets, as if for their protection. Behind them surged a vast
multitude of Egyptians and dark-skinned Africans.
On the other side of the canal the Asiatics were moving to and fro. The
best places for spectators had been assigned to the petty kings and
princes of tribes, Phoenician and Syrian merchants, and well-equipped,
richly armed warriors. Among them thronged owners of herds and seafarers
from the coast. Until the reception began, fresh parties of bearded sons
of the desert, in floating white bernouse, mounted on noble steeds, were
constantly joining the other Asiatics.
The centre was occupied by the Greeks. The appearance of every individual
showed that they were rulers of the land, and that they deserved to be.
How free and bold was their bearing! how brightly and joyously sparkled
the eyes of these men, whose wreaths of green leaves and bright-hued
flowers adorned locks anointed for the festivals! Strong and slender,
they were conspicuous in their stately grace among the lean Egyptians,
unbridled in their jests and jeers, and the excitable Asiatics.
Now the blare of trumpets and the roll of drums shook the air like
echoing lightning and heavy peals of thunder; the Egyptian priests sang a
hymn of praise to the God King and Goddess Queen, and the aristocratic
priestesses of the deity tinkled the brass rings on the sistrum. Then a
chorus of Hellenic singers began a polyphonous hymn, and amid its full,
melodious notes, which rose above the enthusiastic shouts of "Hail!" from
the multitude, King Ptolemy and his sister-wife showed themselves to the
waiting throng. Seated on golden thrones borne on the broad shoulders of
gigantic black Ethiopians, and shaded by lofty canopies, both were raised
above the crowd, whom they saluted by gracious gestures.
The athletic young bearers of the large round ostrich-feather fans which
protected them from the sunbeams were followed in ranks by the monarch's
"relatives" and "friends," the dignitaries, the dark and fair-haired
bands of the guards of Grecian youths and boys, as well as divisions of
the picked corps of the Hetairoi, Diadochi, and Epigoni, in beautiful
plain Macedonian armour.
They were followed in the most informal manner by scholars from the
Museum, many Hellenic artists, and wealthy gentlemen of Alexandria of
Greek and Jewish origin, whom the King had invited to the festival.
In his train they went on board the huge galley on which the reception
was to take place. Scarcely had the last one stepped on the deck when it
began.
Eumedes came from the admiral's galley to the King's. Ptolemy embraced
him like a friend, and Arsinoe added a wreath of fresh roses to the
laurel crown which the sovereign had sent the day before.
At the same time thundering plaudits echoed from the walls of the
fortifications and broke, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, against
the ships and masts in the calm water of the harbour.
The King had little time to lose. Even festal joy must move swiftly.
There were many and varied things to be seen and done; but in the course
of an hour--so ran the order--this portion of the festivities must be
over, and it was fully obeyed.
The hands and feet of the woolly-headed blacks who, amid loud
acclamations, carried on shore the cages in which lions, panthers, and
leopards shook the bars with savage fury, moved as if they were winged.
The slender, dark-brown Ethiopians who led giraffes, apes, gazelles, and
greyhounds past the royal pair rushed along as if they were under the
lash; and the sixty elephants which Eumedes and his men had caught in the
land of Chatyth moved at a rapid pace past the royal state galley.
At the sight of them the King joined in the cheers of thousands of voices
on the shore; these giant animals were to him auxiliaries who could put
to flight a whole corps of hostile cavalry, and Arsinoe-Philadelphus, the
Queen, sympathized with his pleasure.
She raised her voice with her royal husband, and it seemed to the
spectators on the shore as if they had a share in the narrative when she
listened to Eumedes's first brief report.
Only specimens of the gold and ivory, spices and rare woods, juniper
trees and skins of animals which the ships brought home could be borne
past their Majesties, and the black and brown men who carried them moved
at a breathless rate.
The sun was still far from the meridian when the royal couple and their
train withdrew from the scene of the reception ceremonial, and drove, in
a magnificent chariot drawn by four horses, to the neighbouring city of
Pithoin, where new entertainments and a long period of rest awaited them.
Hermon had seen, as if through a veil of white mists, the objects that
aroused the enthusiasm of the throng, and so, he said to himself, it had
been during the whole course of his life. Only the surface of the
phenomena on which he fixed his eyes had been visible to him; he had not
learned to penetrate further into their nature, fathom them to their
depths, until he became blind.
If the gods fulfilled his hope, if he regained his vision entirely, and
even the last mists had vanished, he would hold firmly to the capacity he
had gained, and use it in life as well as in art.
CHAPTER XIV.
The messenger from Philippus appeared in the afternoon. It was the young
hipparch who had studied in Athens and accompanied the commandant of
Pelusium to Tennis the year before. He came charged with the commission
to convey the artist, in the carriage of the gray-haired comrade of
Alexander, to the neighbouring city of Pithom, where Philippus, by the
King's command, was now residing.
On the way the hipparch told the sculptor that the Lady Thyone had
recently done things unprecedented for a woman of her age.
She had been present at the founding of the city of Arsinoe, as well as
at the laying of the corner stone of the temple which was to be
consecrated to the new god Serapis in the neighbourhood. The day before
she had welcomed her returning son before the entry of the fleet into the
canal, and to-day had remained from the beginning to the end of his
reception by the King, without being unduly wearied.
Her first thought, after the close of the ceremony, had concerned her
convalescing young friend. New entertainments, in which the Queen
commanded her to participate, awaited her in Pithom, but pleasure at the
return of her famous son appeared to double her power of endurance.
Pithom was the sacred name of the temple precincts of the desert city of
Thekut--[The biblical Suchot]--near Heroopolis, where the citizens lived
and pursued their business.
The travellers reached the place very speedily. Garlands of flowers and
hangings adorned the houses. The sacred precinct Pithom, above which
towered the magnificently restored temple of the god Turn, was also still
adorned with many superb ones, as well as lofty masts, banners, and
triumphal arches.
Before they reached it the equipage passed the sumptuous tents which had
been erected for the royal pair and their attendants. If Hermon had not
known how long the monarch intended to remain here, their size and number
would have surprised him.
A regular messenger and carrier-dove service had been established between
Alexandria and Pithom for the period of Ptolemy's relaxation; and the
sovereign was accompanied not only by several of the chief councillors
and secretaries, but artists and some of the Museum scientists with whom
he was on specially intimate terms, who were to adorn the festival on the
frontier with their presence, and cheer the invalid King, who needed
entertainment. Singers and actors also belonged to the train.
As they passed the encampment of the troops who accompanied the
sovereign, the hipparch could show Hermon a magnificent military
spectacle.
Heroopolis was fortified, and belonged to the military colonies which
Alexander the Great had established throughout all Egypt in order to win
it over more quickly to Grecian customs. A Hellenic phalanx and Libyan
mercenaries formed the garrison there, but at Pithom the King had
gathered the flower of his troops around him, and this circumstance
showed how little serious consideration the cautious ruler, who usually
carefully regarded every detail, gave to the war with Cyrene, in which he
took no personal part. The four thousand Gauls whom he had sent across
the frontier as auxiliary troops promised to become perilous to the foe,
who was also threatened in the rear by one of the most powerful Libyan
tribes.
Therefore, the artist was assured by his military companion, Philadelphus
could let the campaign take its course, and permit himself the brief
period of rest in this strangely chosen place, which the leeches had
advised.
The house where the aged couple lived with their son, Admiral Eumedes,
was on the edge of the precincts of the temple. It belonged to the most
distinguished merchant in the place, and consisted of a large open
courtyard in the form of a square, surrounded by the building and its
communicating wings.
When the hipparch led Hermon into this place a number of people had
already assembled there. Soldiers and sailors stood in groups in the
centre, awaiting the orders of the old general and his subordinate
officers. Messengers and slaves, coming and going on various errands,
were crossing it, and on the shady side benches and chairs stood under a
light awning. Most of these were occupied by visitors who came to
congratulate the mother of the fame-crowned admiral.
Thyone was reclining on a divan in their midst, submitting with a sigh to
the social duties which her high position imposed upon her.
Her face was turned toward the large doorway of the main entrance, while
she sometimes greeted newly introduced guests, sometimes bade farewell to
departing ones, and meanwhile answered and asked questions.
She had been more wearied by the exertions of the last few days than her
animated manner revealed. Yet as soon as Hermon, leaning on the young
hipparch's arm, approached her, she rose and cordially extended both
hands to him. True, the recovering man was still unable to see her
features distinctly, but he felt the maternal kindness with which she
received him, and what his eyes could not distinguish his ears taught him
in her warm greetings. His heart dilated and, after he had kissed her
dear old hand more than once with affectionate devotion, she led him
among her guests and presented him to them as the son of her dearest
friend.
A strange stir ran through the assembled group, nearly all whose members
belonged to the King's train, and the low whispers and murmurs around him
revealed to Hermon that the false wreaths he wore had by no means been
forgotten in this circle.
A painful feeling of discomfort overwhelmed the man accustomed to the
silence of the desert, and a voice within cried with earnest insistence,
"Away from here!"
But he had no time to obey it; an unusually tall, broad-shouldered man,
with a thick gray beard and grave, well-formed features, in whom he
thought he recognised the great physician Erasistratus, approached
Thyone, and asked, "The recluse from the desert with restored sight?"
"The same," replied the matron, and whispered to the other, who was
really the famous scientist and leech whom Hermon had desired to seek in
Alexandria. "Exhaustion will soon overcome me, and how many important
matters I had to discuss with you and the poor fellow yonder!"
The physician laid his hand on the matron's temples, and, raising his
voice, said in a tone of grave anxiety: "Exhaustion! It would be better
for you, honoured lady, to keep your bed."
"Surely and certainly!" the wife of the chief huntsman instantly
assented. "We have already taxed your strength far too long, my noble
friend."
This welcome confession produced a wonderful effect upon the other
visitors, and very soon the last one had vanished from the space under
the awning and the courtyard. Not a single person had vouchsafed Hermon a
greeting; for the artist, divested of the highest esteem, had been
involved in the ugly suspicion of having driven his uncle from
Alexandria, and the monarch was said to have spoken unfavourably of him.
When the last one had left the courtyard, the leech exchanged a quick
glance of understanding, which also included Hermon, with Thyone, and the
majordomo received orders to admit no more visitors, while Erasistratus
exclaimed gaily, "It is one of the physician's principal duties to keep
all harmful things--including living ones--from his patient."
Then he turned to Hermon and had already begun to question him about his
health, when the majordomo announced another visitor. "A very
distinguished gentleman, apparently," he said hastily; "Herophilus of
Chalcedon, who would not be denied admittance."
Again the eyes of Erasistratus and the matron met, and the former
hastened toward his professional colleague.
The two physicians stopped in the middle of the courtyard and talked
eagerly together, while Thyone, with cordial interest, asked Hermon to
tell her what she had already partially learned through the freedman
Bias.
Finally Erasistratus persuaded the matron, who seemed to have forgotten
her previous exhaustion, to share the consultation, but the
convalescent's heart throbbed faster as he watched the famous leeches.
If these two men took charge of his case, the most ardent desire of his
soul might be fulfilled, and Thyone was certainly trying to induce them
to undertake his treatment; what else would have drawn her away from him
before she had said even one word about Daphne?
The sculptor saw, as if through a cloud of dust, the three consulting
together in the centre of the courtyard, away from the soldiers and
messengers.
Hermon had only seen Erasistratus indistinctly, but before his eyes were
blinded he had met him beside the sick-bed of Myrtilus, and no one who
had once beheld it could forget the manly bearded face, with the grave,
thoughtful eyes, whose gaze deliberately sought their goal.
The other also belonged to the great men in the realm of intellect.
Hermon knew him well, for he had listened eagerly in the Museum to the
lectures of the famous Herophilus, and his image also had stamped itself
upon his soul.
Even at that time the long, smooth hair of the famous investigator had
turned gray. From the oval of his closely shaven, well-formed face, with
the long, thin, slightly hooked nose, a pair of sparkling eyes had gazed
with penetrating keenness at the listeners. Hermon had imagined Aristotle
like him, while the bust of Pythagoras, with which he was familiar,
resembled Erasistratus.
The convalescent could scarcely expect anything more than beneficial
advice from Herophilus; for this tireless investigator rarely rendered
assistance to the sick in the city, because the lion's share of his time
and strength were devoted to difficult researches. The King favoured
these by placing at his disposal the criminals sentenced to death. In his
work of dissection he had found that the human brain was the seat of the
soul, and the nerves originated in it.
Erasistratus, on the contrary, devoted himself to a large medical
practice, though science owed him no less important discoveries.
The circle of artists had heard what he taught concerning the blood in
the veins and the air bubbles in the arteries, how he explained the
process of breathing, and what he had found in the investigation of the
beating of the heart.
But he performed his most wonderful work with the knife in his hand as a
surgeon. He had opened the body of one of Archias's slaves, who had been
nursed by Daphne, and cured him after all other physicians had given him
up.
When this man's voice reached Hermon, he repeated to himself the words of
refusal with which the great physician had formerly declined to devote
his time and skill to him. Perhaps he was right then--and how differently
he treated him to-day!
Thyone had informed the famous scientist of everything which she knew
from Hermon, and had learned of the last period of his life through Bias.
She now listened with eager interest, sometimes completing Hermon's
acknowledgments by an explanatory or propitiating word, as the leeches
subjected him to a rigid examination, but the latter felt that his
statements were not to serve curiosity, but an honest desire to aid him.
So he spoke to them with absolute frankness.
When the examination was over, Erasistratus exclaimed to his professional
colleague: "This old woman! Precisely as I would have prescribed. She
ordered the strictest diet with the treatment. She rejected every strong
internal remedy, and forbade him wine, much meat, and all kinds of
seasoning. Our patient was directed to live on milk and the same simple
gifts of Nature which I would have ordered for him. The herb juice in the
clever sorceress's salve proved the best remedy. The incantations could
do no harm. On the contrary, they often produce a wonderful effect on the
mind, and from it proceed further."
Here Erasistratus asked to have a description of the troubles which still
affected Hermon's vision, and the passionate eagerness with which the
leeches gazed into his eyes strengthened the artist's budding hope. Never
had he wished more ardently that Daphne was back at his side.
He also listened with keen attention when the scientists finally
discussed in low tones what they had perceived, and caught the words,
"White scar on the cornea," "leucoma," and "operation." He also heard
Herophilus declare that an injury of the cornea by the flame of the torch
was the cause of the blindness. In the work which led him to the
discovery of the retina in the eye he had devoted himself sedulously to
the organs of sight. This case seemed as if it had been created for his
friend's keen knife.
What expectations this assurance aroused in the half-cured man, who felt
as if the goal was already gained, when, shortly after, Erasistratus, the
greatest physician of his time, offered to make the attempt in Alexandria
to remove, by a few little incisions, what still dimmed his impaired
vision!
Hermon, deeply agitated, thanked the leech, and when Thyone perceived
what was passing in his mind she ventured to ask the question whether it
would not be feasible to perform the beneficent work here, and, if
possible, the next day, and the surgeon was ready to fulfil the wish of
the matron and the sufferer speedily. He would bring the necessary
instruments with him. It only depended upon whether a suitable room could
be found in the crowded city, and Thyone believed that such a one could
not be lacking in the great building at her disposal.
A short conversation with the steward confirmed this opinion.
Then Erasistratus appointed the next morning for the operation. During
the ceremony of consecrating the temple it would be quiet in the house
and its vicinity. The preliminary fasting which he imposed upon his
patients Hermon had already undergone.
"The pure desert air here," he added, "will be of the utmost assistance
in recovery. The operation is slight, and free from danger. A few days
will determine its success. I shall remain here with their Majesties,
only"--and here he hesitated doubtfully--"where shall I find a
competent assistant?"
Herophilus looked his colleague in the face with a sly smile, saying, "If
you credit the old man of Chalcedon with the needful skill, he is at your
disposal."
"Herophilus!" cried Thyone, and tears of emotion wet her aged eyes, which
easily overflowed; but when Hermon tried to give expression to his
fervent gratitude in words, Erasistratus interrupted him, exclaiming, as
he grasped his comrade's hand, "It honours the general in his purple
robe, when he uses the spade in the work of intrenchment."
Many other matters were discussed before the professional friends
withdrew, promising to go to work early the next morning.
They kept their word, and while the temple of the god Turn resounded with
music and the chanting of hymns by the priests, whose dying notes entered
the windows of the sick-room, while Queen Arsinoe-Philadelphus led the
procession, and the King, who was prevented by the gout from entering and
passing around the sanctuary at her side, ordered a monument to be
erected in commemoration of this festival, the famous leeches toiled
busily.
When the music and the acclamations of the crowd died away, their task
was accomplished. The great Herophilus had rendered his equally
distinguished colleague the aid of an apprentice. When Hermon's lips
again tried to pour forth his gratitude, Herophilus interrupted him with
the exclamation: "Use the sight you have regained, young master, in
creating superb works of art, and I shall be in your debt, since, with
little trouble, I was permitted to render a service to the whole Grecian
world."
Hermon spent seven long days and nights full of anxious expectation in a
darkened room. Bias and a careful old female slave of the Lady Thyone
watched him faithfully. Philippus, his wife, and his famous son Eumedes
were allowed to pay him only brief visits; but Erasistratus watched the
success of the operation every morning. True, it had been by no means
dangerous, and certainly would not have required his frequent visits, but
it pleased the investigator, reared in the school of Stoics, to watch how
this warm-blooded young artist voluntarily submitted to live in accord
with reason and Nature--the guiding stars of his own existence.
But Hermon opened his soul to his learned friend, and what Erasistratus
thus learned strengthened the conviction of this great alleviator of
physical pain that suffering and knowledge of self were the best
physicians for the human soul. The scientist, who saw in the arts the
noblest ornament of mortal life, anticipated with eager interest Hermon's
future creative work.
On the seventh day the leech removed the bandage from his patient's eyes,
and the cry of rapture with which Hermon clasped him in his arms richly
rewarded him for his trouble and solicitude.
The restored man beheld in sharp, clear, undimmed outlines everything at
which the physician desired him to look.
Now Erasistratus could write to his friend Herophilus in Alexandria that
the operation was successful.
The sculptor was ordered to avoid the dazzling sunlight a fortnight
longer, then he might once more use his eyes without restriction, and
appeal to the Muse to help in creating works of art.
Thyone was present at this explanation. After she had conquered the great
emotion which for a time sealed her lips, her first question, after the
physician's departure, was: "And Nemesis? She too, I think, has fled
before the new light?"
Hermon pressed her hand still more warmly, exclaiming with joyous
confidence: "No, Thyone! True, I now have little reason to fear the
avenging goddess who pursues the criminal, but all the more the other
Nemesis, who limits the excess of happiness. Will she not turn her swift
wheel, when I again, with clear eyes, see Daphne, and am permitted to
work in my studio once more with keen eyes and steady hand?"
Now the barriers which had hitherto restricted Hermon's social
intercourse also fell. Eumedes, the commander of the fleet, often visited
him, and while exchanging tales of their experiences they became friends.
When Hermon was alone with Thyone and her gray-haired husband, the
conversation frequently turned upon Daphne and her father.
Then the recovered artist learned to whom Archias owed his escape from
being sentenced to death and having his property confiscated. Papers,
undeniably genuine, had proved what large sums had been advanced by the
merchant during the period of the first Queen Arsinoe's conspiracy, and
envious foes had done their best to prejudice the King and his
sister-wife against Archias. Then the gray-haired hero fearlessly
interceded for his friend, and the monarch did not remain deaf to his
representations. King Ptolemy was writing the history of the conqueror of
the world, and needed the aged comrade of Alexander, the sole survivor
who had held a prominent position in the great Macedonian's campaigns. It
might be detrimental to his work, on which he set great value, if he
angered the old warrior, who was a living source of history. Yet the King
was still ill-disposed to the merchant, for while he destroyed Archias's
death sentence which had been laid before him for his signature, he said
to Philippus: "The money-bag whose life I give you was the friend of my
foe. Let him beware that my arm does not yet reach him from afar!"
Nay, his resentment went so far that he refused to receive Hermon, when
Eumedes begged permission to present the artist whose sight had been so
wonderfully restored.
"To me he is still the unjustly crowned conspirator," Philadelphus
replied. "Let him create the remarkable work which I formerly expected
from him, and perhaps I shall have a somewhat better opinion of him, deem
him more worthy of our favour."
Under these circumstances it was advisable for Archias and Daphne to
remain absent from Alexandria, and the experienced couple could only
approve Hermon's decision to go to Pergamus as soon as Erasistratus
dismissed him. A letter from Daphne, which reached Thyone's hands at this
time, increased the convalescent's already ardent yearning to the highest
pitch. The girl entreated her maternal friend to tell her frankly the
condition of her lover's health. If he had recovered, he would know how
to find her speedily; if the blindness was incurable, she would come
herself to help him bear the burden of his darkened existence. Chrysilla
would accompany her, but she could leave her father alone in Pergamus a
few months without anxiety, for he had a second son there in his nephew
Myrtilus, and had found a kind friend in Philetaerus, the ruler of the
country.
From this time Hermon daily urged Erasistratus to grant him entire
liberty, but the leech steadfastly refused, though he knew whither his
young friend longed to go.
Not until the beginning of the fourth week after the operation did he
himself lead Hermon into the full sunlight, and when the recovered artist
came out of the house he raised his hands in mute prayer, gushing from
the inmost depths of his heart.
The King was to return to Alexandria in a few days, and at the same time
Philippus and Thyone were going back to Pelusium. Hermon wished to
accompany them there and sail thence on a ship bound for Pergamus.
With Eumedes he visited the unfamiliar scenes around him, and his newly
restored gift of sight presented to him here many things that formerly he
would scarcely have noticed, but which now filled him with grateful joy.
Gratitude, intense gratitude, had taken possession of his whole being.
This feeling mastered him completely and seemed to be fostered and
strengthened by every breath, every heart throb, every glance into his
own soul and the future.
Besides, many beauties, nay, even many marvels, presented themselves to
his restored eyes. The whole wealth of the magic of beauty, intellect,
and pleasure in life, characteristic of the Greek nature, appeared to
have followed King Ptolemy and Queen Arsinoe-Philadelphus hither. Gardens
had been created on the arid, sandy soil, whose gray and yellow surface
extended in every direction, the water on the shore of the canal which
united Pithom with the Nile not sufficing to render it possible to make
even a narrow strip of arable land. Fresh water flowed from beautiful
fountains adorned with rich carvings, and the pure fluid filled large
porphyry and marble basins. Statues, single and in groups, stood forth in
harmonious arrangement against green masses of leafage, and Grecian
temples, halls, and even a theatre, rapidly constructed in the noblest
forms from light material, invited the people to devotion, to the
enjoyment of the most exquisite music, and to witness the perfect
performance of many a tragedy and comedy.
Statues surrounded the hurriedly erected palaestra where the Ephebi every
morning practised their nude, anointed bodies in racing, wrestling, and
throwing the discus. What a delight it was to Hermon to feast his eyes
upon these spectacles! What a stimulus to the artist, so long absorbed in
his own thoughts, who had so recently returned from the wilderness to the
world of active life, when he was permitted, in Erasistratus's tent, to
listen to the great scholars who had accompanied the King to the desert!
Only the regret that Daphne was not present to share his pleasure clouded
Hermon's enjoyment, when Eumedes related to his parents, himself, and a
few chosen friends the adventures encountered, and the experiences
gathered in distant Ethiopia, on land and water, in battle and the chase,
as investigator and commander.
The utmost degree of variety had entered into the simplicity of the
monotonous desert, the most refined abundance for the intellect and the
need of beauty appeared amid its barrenness.
The poet Callimachus had just arrived with a new chorus of singers,
tablets by Antiphilus and Nicias had come to beautify the last days of
the residence in the desert--when doves, the birds of Aphrodite, flew
with the speed of lightning into Pithom, but instead of bringing a new
message of love and announcing the approach of fresh pleasure, they bore
terrible tidings which put joy to flight and stifled mirthfulness.
The unbridled greed of rude barbarians had chosen Alexandria for its
goal, and startled the royal pair and their chosen companions from the
sea of pleasure where they would probably have remained for weeks.
The four thousand Gauls who had been obtained to fight against Cyrene
were in the act of rushing rapaciously upon the richest city in the
world. The most terrible danger hung like a black cloud over the capital
founded by Alexander, whose growth had been so rapid. True, General
Satvrus asserted that he was strong enough, with the troops at his
disposal, to defeat the formidable hordes; but a second dove, sent by the
epitropus who had remained in Alexandria, alluded to serious disaster
which it would scarcely be possible to avert.
The doves now flew swiftly to and fro; but before the third arrived,
Eumedes, the commander of the fleet just from Ethiopia, was already on
the way to Alexandria with all the troops assembled on the frontier.
The King and Queen, with the corps of pages and the corps of youths,
entered the boats waiting for them to return, drawn by teams of four
swift horses, to Memphis, to await within the impregnable fortress of the
White Castle the restoration of security in the capital.
The Greeks prized the most valiant fearlessness so highly that no shadow
could be suffered to rest upon the King's, and therefore the monarch's
hurried departure was made in a way which permitted no thought of flight,
and merely resembled impatient yearning for new festivals and the earnest
desire to fulfil grave duties in another portion of the kingdom.
Many of the companions of the royal pair, among them Erasistratus,
accompanied them. Hermon bade him farewell with a troubled heart, and the
leech, too, parted with regret from the artist to whom, a year before, he
had refused his aid.
CHAPTER XV.
Hermon went, with Philippus and Thyone, on board the ship which was to
convey them through the new canal to Pelusium, where the old commandant
had to plan all sorts of measures. In the border fortress the artist was
again obliged to exercise patience, for no ship bound to Pergamus or
Lesbos could be found in the harbour. Philippus had as much work as he
could do, but all his arrangements were made when carrier doves announced
that the surprise intended by the Gauls had been completely thwarted, and
his son Eumedes was empowered to punish them.
The admiral would take his fleet to the Sebennytic mouth of the Nile.
Another dove came from King Ptolemy, and summoned the old general at once
to the capital. Philippus resolved to set off without delay and, as the
way led past that mouth of the Nile, met his son on the voyage.
Hermon must accompany him and his wife to Alexandria, whence, without
entering the city, he could sail for Pergamus; ships bound to all the
ports in the Mediterranean were always in one of the harbours of the
capital. A galley ready to weigh anchor was constantly at the disposal of
the commandant of the fortress, and the next noon the noble pair, with
Hermon and his faithful Bias, went on board the Galatea.
The weather was dull, and gray clouds were sweeping across the sky over
the swift vessel, which hugged the coast, and, unless the wind shifted,
would reach the narrow tongue of land pierced by the Sebennytic mouth of
the Nile before sunrise.
Though the general and his wife went to rest early, Hermon could not
endure the close air of the cabin. Wrapped in his cloak he went on deck.
The moon, almost full, was sailing in the sky, sometimes covered by dark
clouds, sometimes leaving them behind. Like a swan emerging from the
shadow of the thickets along the shore upon the pure bosom of the lake,
it finally floated into the deep azure of the radiant firmament. Hermon's
heart swelled.
How he rejoiced that he was again permitted to behold the starry sky, and
satiate his soul with the beauty of creation! What delight it gave him
that the eternal wanderers above were no longer soulless forms, that he
again saw in the pure silver disk above friendly Selene, in the rolling
salt waves the kingdom of Poseidon! To-morrow, when the deep blue water
was calm, he would greet the sea-god Glaucus, and when snowy foam crowned
the crests of the waves, white-armed Thetis. The wind was no longer an
empty sound to him; no, it, too, came from a deity. All Nature had
regained a new, divine life. Doubtless he felt much nearer to his
childhood than before, but he was infinitely less distant from the
eternal divinity. And all the forms, so full of meaning, which appeared
to him from Nature, and from every powerful emotion of his own soul, were
waiting to be represented by his art in the noblest of forms, those of
human beings. There were few with whose nature he had not become familiar
in the darkness and solitude that once surrounded him.
When he began to create again, he had only to summon them, and he
awaited, with the suspense of the general who is in command of new troops
on the eve of battle, the success of his own work after the great
transformation which had taken place in him.
What a stress and tumult!
He had controlled it since the first hour when he regained his full
vision. He would fain have transformed the moon into the sun, the ship
into the studio, and begun to model.
He knew, too, what he desired to create.
He would model an Apollo trampling under foot the slain dragon of
darkness.
He would succeed in this work now. And as he looked up and saw Selene
just emerging again from the black cloud island, the thought entered his
mind that it was a moonlight night like this when all the unspeakably
terrible misfortune occurred--which was now past.
Yet neither the calm wanderer above nor a resentful woman had exposed him
to the persecution of Nemesis. In the stillness of the desert he had
perceived what had brought all this terrible suffering upon him; but he
would not repeat it to himself now, for he felt within his soul the power
to remain faithful to his best self in the future.
With clear eyes he gazed keenly and blithely at the new life. Nothing,
least of all, futile self-torturing regret for faults committed, should
cloud the fair morning dawning anew for him, which summoned him to active
work, to gratitude and love.
Uttering a sigh of relief, he paced the deck--now brilliantly illuminated
by silvery light--with long strides.
The moon above his head reminded him of Ledscha. He was no longer angry
with her. The means by which she had intended to destroy him had been
transformed into a benefit, and while in the desert he had perceived how
often man finally blesses, as the highest gain, what he at first regarded
as the most cruel affliction.
How distinctly the image of the Biamite again stood before his agitated
soul!
Had he not loved her once?
Or how had it happened that, though his heart was Daphne's, and hers
alone, he had felt wounded and insulted when his Bias, who was leaning
over the railing of the deck yonder, gazing at the glittering waves, had
informed him that Ledscha had been accompanied in her flight from her
unloved husband by the Gaul whose life he, Hermon, had saved? Was this
due to jealousy or merely wounded vanity at being supplanted in a heart
which he firmly believed belonged, though only in bitter hate, solely to
him?
She certainly had not forgotten him, and while the remembrance of her
blended with the yearning for Daphne which never left him, he sat down
and gazed out into the darkness till his head drooped on his breast.
Then a dream showed the Biamite to the slumbering man, yet no longer in
the guise of a woman, but as the spider Arachne. She increased before his
eyes to an enormous size and alighted upon the pharos erected by
Sostratus. Uninjured by the flames of the lighthouse, above which she
hovered, she wove a net of endlessly long gray threads over the whole
city of Alexandria, with its temples, palaces, and halls, harbours and
ships, until Daphne suddenly appeared with a light step and quietly cut
one after the other.
Suddenly a shrill whistle aroused him. It was the signal of the
flute-player to relieve the rowers.
A faint yellow line was now tingeing the eastern horizon of the gray,
cloudy sky. At his left extended the flat, dull-brown coast line, which
seemed to be lower than the turbid waves of the restless sea. The cold
morning wind was blowing light mists over the absolutely barren shore.
Not a tree, not a bush, not a human dwelling was to be seen in this
dreary wilderness. Wherever the eye turned, there was nothing but sand
and water, which united at the edge of the land. Long lines of surf
poured over the arid desert, and, as if repelled by the desolation of
this strand, returned to the wide sea whence they came.
The shrill screams of the sea-gulls behind the ship, and the hoarse,
hungry croaking of the ravens on the shore blended with the roaring of
the waves. Hermon shuddered at this scene. Shivering, he wrapped his
cloak closer around him, yet he did not go to the protecting cabin, but
followed the nauarch, who pointed out to him the numerous vessels which,
in a wide curve, surrounded the place where the Sebennytic arm of the
Nile pierced the tongue of land to empty into the sea.
The experienced seaman did not know what ships were doing there, but it
was hardly anything good; for ravens in a countless multitude were to be
seen on the shore and all moved toward the left.
Philippus's appearance on deck interrupted the nauarch. He anxiously
showed the birds to the old hero also, and the latter's only reply was,
"Watch the helm and sails!"
Yonder squadron, Philippus said to the artist, was a part of his son's
fleet; what brought it there was a mystery to him too.
After the early meal, the galley of Eumedes approached his father's
trireme. Two other galleys, not much inferior in size, were behind, and
probably fifty smaller vessels were moving about the mouth of the Nile
and the whole dreary tongue of land.
All belonged to the royal war fleet, and the deck of every one was
crowded with armed soldiers.
On one a forest of lances bristled in the murky air, and upon its
southward side a row of archers, each man holding his bow in his hand,
stood shoulder to shoulder.
At what mark were their arrows to be aimed? The men on board the Galatea
saw it distinctly, for the shore was swarming with human figures, here
standing crowded closely together, like horses attacked by a pack of
wolves; yonder running, singly or in groups, toward the sea or into the
land. Dark spots on the light sand marked the places where others had
thrown themselves on the ground, or, kneeling, stretched out their arms
as if in defence.
Who were the people who populated this usually uninhabited, inhospitable
place so densely and in so strange a manner?
This could not be distinguished from the Galatea with the naked eye, but
Philippus thought that they were the Gauls whose punishment had been
intrusted to his son, and it soon proved that the old general was right;
for just as the Galatea was approaching the shore, a band of twenty or
thirty men plunged into the sea. They were Gauls. The light complexions
and fair and red bristling hair showed this--Philippus knew them, and
Hermon remembered the hordes of men who had rushed past him on the ride
to Tennis.
But the watchers were allowed only a short time for observation; brief
shouts of command rang from the ships near them, long bows were raised in
the air, and one after another of the light-hued forms in the water threw
up its arms, sprang up, or sank motionless into the waves around them,
which were dyed with a crimson stain.
The artist shuddered; the gray-haired general covered his head with his
cloak, and the Lady Thyone followed his example, uttering her son's name
in a tone of loud lamentation.
The nauarch pointed to the black birds in the air and close above the
shore and the water; but the shout, "A boat from the admiral's galley!"
soon attracted the attention of the voyagers on the Galatea in a new
direction.
Thirty powerful rowers were urging the long, narrow boat toward them.
Sometimes raised high on the crest of a mountain wave, sometimes sinking
into the hollow, it completed its trip, and Eumedes mounted a swinging
rope ladder to the Galatea's deck as nimbly as a boy.
Here the young commander of the fleet hastened toward his parents. His
mother sobbed aloud at his anything but cheerful greeting; Philippus said
mournfully, "I have heard nothing yet, but I know all."
"Father," replied the admiral, and raising the helmet from his head,
covered with brown curls, he added mournfully: "First as to these men
here. It will teach you to understand the other terrible things. Your
Uncle Archias's house was destroyed; yonder men were the criminals."
"In the capital!" Philippus exclaimed furiously, and Hermon cried in no
less vehement excitement: "How did my uncle get the ill will of these
monsters? But as the vengeance is in your hands, they will atone for this
breach of the peace!"
"Severely, perhaps too severely," replied Eumedes gloomily, and Philippus
asked his son how this evil deed could have happened, and the purport of
the King's command.
The admiral related what had occurred in the capital since his departure
from Pithom.
The four thousand Gauls who had been sent by King Antiochus to the
Egyptian army as auxiliary troops against Cyrene refused, before reaching
Paraetonium, on the western frontier of the Egyptian kingdom, to obey
their Greek commanders. As they tried to force them to continue their
march, the barbarians left them bound in the road. They spared their
lives, but rushed with loud shouts of exultation toward Alexandria, which
was close at hand.
They had learned that the city was almost stripped of troops, and the
most savage instinct urged them toward the wealthy capital.
Without encountering any resistance, they broke through the necropolis
into Alexandria, crossed the Draco canal, and marched past the unfinished
Temple of Serapis through the Rhakotis. At the Canopic Way they turned
eastward and rushed through this main artery of traffic till, in the
Brucheium, they hastened in a northerly direction toward the sea.
South of the Theatre of Dionysus they halted. One division turned toward
the market-place, another toward the royal palaces.
Until they reached the Brucheium the hordes, so eager for booty, had
refrained from plunder and pillage.
Their whole strength was to be reserved, as the examination proved, for
the attack upon the royal palaces. Several people who were thoroughly
familiar with Alexandria had acted as guides.
The instigator of the mutiny was said to be a Gallic captain who had
taken part in the surprise of Delphi, but, having ventured to punish
disobedient soldiers, he was killed. A bridge-builder from the ranks, and
his wife, who was not of Gallic blood, had taken his place.
This woman, a resolute and obstinate but rarely beautiful creature, when
the division that was to attack the royal palaces was marching past the
house which Hermon had occupied as the heir of Myrtilus, pressed forward
herself across the threshold, to order the mutineers who followed her to
destroy and steal whatever came in their way. The bridge-builder went to
the market-place, and in pillaging the wealthy merchants' houses began
with Archias's. Meanwhile it was set on fire and, with the large
warehouses adjoining it, was burned to the foundation walls.
But the robbers were to obtain no permanent success, either in the
market-place or in Myrtilus's house, which was diagonally opposite to the
palaestra; for General Satyrus, at the first tidings of their approach,
had collected all the troops at his disposal and the crews of several war
galleys, and imprisoned the division in the market-place as though in a
mouse-trap. The bands to which the woman belonged were forced by the
cavalry into the palaestra and the neighbouring Maander, and kept there
until Eumedes brought re-enforcements and compelled the Gauls to
surrender.
The King sent from Memphis the order to take the vanquished men to the
tongue of land where they now were, and could easily be imprisoned
between the sea and the Sebennytic inland lake. They were guilty of death
to the last man, and starvation was to perform the executioner's office
upon them.
He, Eumedes, the admiral concluded, was in the King's service, and must
do what his commander in chief ordered.
"Duty," sighed Philippus; "yet what a punishment!"
He held out his hand to his son as he spoke, but the Lady Thyone shook
her head mournfully, saying: "There are four thousand over yonder; and
the philosopher and historian on the throne, the admirable art critic who
bestows upon his capital and Egypt all the gifts of peace, who
understands how to guard and develop it better than any one else--yet
what influence the gloomy powers exert upon him!"
Here she hesitated, and went on in a low whisper: "The blood of two
brothers stains his hand and his conscience. The oldest, to whom the
throne would have belonged, he exiled. And our friend, Demetrius
Phalereus, his father's noble councillor! Because you, Philippus,
interceded for him--though you were in a position of command, because
Ptolemy knows your ability--you were sent to distant Pelusium, and there
we should be still--"
"Guard your tongue, wife!" interrupted the old general in a tone of grave
rebuke. "The vipers on the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt symbolize the
King's swift power over life and death. To the Egyptians the Philadelphi,
Ptolemy and Arsinoe, are gods, and what cause have we to reproach them
except that they use their omnipotence?"
"And, mother," Eumedes eagerly added, "do not the royal pair on the
throne merely follow the example of far greater ones among the immortal
gods? When the very Gauls who are devoted to death yonder, greedy for
booty, attacked Delphi, four years ago, it was the august brother and
sister, Apollo and Artemis, who sent them to Hades with their arrows,
while Zeus hurled his thunderbolts at them and ordered heavy boulders to
fall upon them from the shaken mountains. Many of the men over there fled
from destruction at Delphi. Unconverted, they added new crimes to the old
ones, but now retribution will overtake them. The worse the crime, the
more bloody the vengeance.
"Even the last must die, as my sovereign commands; only I shall determine
the mode of death according to my own judgment, and at the same time,
mother, feel sure of your approval. Instead of lingering starvation, I
shall use swift arrows. Now you know what you were obliged to learn. It
would be wise, mother, for you to leave this abode of misery. Duty
summons me to my ship." He held out his hand to his parents and Hermon as
he spoke, but the latter clasped it firmly, exclaiming in a tone of
passionate emotion, "What is the name of the woman to whom, though she is
not of their race, the lawless barbarians yielded?"
"Ledscha," replied the admiral.
Hermon started as if stung by a scorpion, and asked, "Where is she?"
"On my ship," was the reply, "if she has not yet been taken ashore with
the others."
"To be killed with the pitiable band there?" cried Thyone angrily,
looking her son reproachfully in the face.
"No, mother," replied Eumedes. "She will be taken to the others under the
escort of trustworthy men in order, perhaps, to induce her to speak. It
must be ascertained whether there were accomplices in the attack on the
royal palaces, and lastly whence the woman comes."
"I can tell you that myself," replied Hermon. "Allow me to accompany you.
I must see and speak to her."
"The Arachne of Tennis?" asked Thyone. Hermon's mute nod of assent
answered the question, but she exclaimed: "The unhappy woman, who called
down the wrath of Nemesis upon you, and who has now herself fallen a prey
to the avenging goddess. What do you want from her?"
Hermon bent down to his old friend and whispered, "To lighten her
terrible fate, if it is in my power."
"Go, then," replied the matron, and turned to her son, saying, "Let
Hermon tell you how deeply this woman has influenced his life, and, when
her turn comes, think of your mother."
"She is a woman," replied Eumedes, "and the King's mandate only commands
me to punish men. Besides, I promised her indulgence if she would make a
confession."
"And she?" asked Hermon.
"Neither by threats nor promises," answered the admiral, "can this
sinister, beautiful creature be induced to speak."
"Certainly not," said the artist, and a smile of satisfaction flitted
over his face.
CHAPTER XVI.
A short row took Hermon and Eumedes the admiral's galley. Ledscha had
already been carried ashore. There she was to be confronted with the men
who were suspected of having showed the mutineers the way to the city.
Absorbed in his own thoughts, Hermon waited for the admiral, who at first
was claimed by one official duty after another. The artist's thoughts
lingered with Daphne. To her father the loss of his house, nay, perhaps
of his wealth, would seem almost unendurable, yet even were he beggared,
provision was made for him and his daughter. He, Hermon, could again
create, as in former days, and what happiness it would be if he were
permitted to repay the man to whom he owed so much for the kindness
bestowed upon him!
He longed to give to the woman he loved again and again, and it would
have seemed to him a favour of fortune if the flames had consumed even
the last drachm of her wealthy father.
Completely engrossed by these reflections, he forgot the horrors before
him, but when he raised his eyes and saw the archers continuing their
terrible work he shuddered.
The admiral's galley lay so near the shore that he distinguished the
figures of the Gauls separately. Some, obeying the instinct of self
preservation, fled from the places which could be reached by the arrows
of the archers on the ships, but others pressed toward the shafts. A
frightful, heart-rending spectacle, yet how rich in food for the
long-darkened eyes of the artist! Two brothers of unusual height, who,
nude like all their comrades in death, offered their broad, beautifully
arched chests to the arrows, would not leave his memory. It was a
terrible sight, yet grand and worthy of being wrested from oblivion by
art, and it impressed itself firmly on his mind.
After noon Eumedes could at last devote himself to his young friend.
Although the wind drove showers of fine rain before it, the admiral
remained on deck with the sculptor. What cared they for the inclement
weather, while one was recalling to mind and telling his friend how the
hate of an offended woman had unchained the gloomy spirits of revenge
upon him, the other, who had defied death on land water, listened to his
story, sometimes in surprise, sometimes with silent horror?
After the examination to which she had been subjected, Eumedes had
believed Ledscha to be as Hermon described her. He found nothing petty in
this beautiful, passionate creature who avenged the injustice inflicted
upon her as Fate took vengeance, who, with unsparing energy, anticipated
the Nemesis to whom she appealed, compelled men's obedience, and instead
of enriching herself cast away the talents extorted to bring down fresh
ruin upon the man who had transformed her love to hate.
While the friends consulted together with lowered voices, their
conjecture became conviction that it was the Biamite's inextinguishable
hate which had led her to the Gauls and induced her to share the attack
upon the capital.
The assault upon the houses of Archias and Myrtilus was a proof of this,
for the latter was still believed to be Hermon's property. She had
probably supposed that the merchant's palace sheltered Daphne, in whom,
even at Tennis, she had seen and hated her successful rival.
Only the undeniable fact that Ledscha was the bridge-builder's companion
presented an enigma difficult to solve. The freedman Bias had remained on
Philippus's galley, and could not now be appealed to for a confirmation
of his assertions, but Hermon distinctly remembered his statement that
Ledscha had allowed the Gaul, after he had received the money intended
for him, to take her from Pitane to Africa.
When the short November day was drawing to a close, and the friends had
strengthened themselves with food and drink, the rain ceased and, as the
sun set, its after-glow broke through the rifts and fissures in the black
wall of clouds in the western horizon like blazing flames in the
conflagration of a solid stone building. Yet the glow vanished swiftly
enough. The darkness of night spread over the sea and the arid strip of
land in the south, but the greedy croaking of the ravens and vultures
echoed more and more loudly from the upper air. From time to time the
outbursts of rage and agony of despairing men, and horrible jeering
laughter, drowned the voices of the flocks of birds and the roaring of
the tempestuous sea. Sometimes, too, a sharp word of command, or a signal
heard for a long distance, pierced through the awful sounds.
Here and there, and at last everywhere on the squadron, which surrounded
the tongue of land in a shallow curve, dim lights began to appear on the
masts and prows of the ships; but darkness brooded over the coast. Only
in the three fortified guardhouses, which had been hastily erected here,
the feeble light of a lantern illumined the gloom.
Twinkling lights also appeared in the night heavens between the swiftly
flying clouds. One star after another began to adorn the blue islands in
the cloudy firmament, and at last the full moon burst through the heavy
banks of dark clouds, and shone in pure brilliancy above their heads,
like a huge silver vessel in the black catafalque of a giant.
At the end of the first hour after sunset Eumedes ordered the boat to be
manned.
Armed as if for battle, he prepared for the row to the scene of misery,
and requested Hermon to buckle a coat of mail under his chlamys and put
on the sword he gave him. True, a division of reliable Macedonian
warriors was to accompany them, and Ledscha was in a well-guarded place,
yet it might perhaps be necessary to defend themselves against an
outburst of despair among the condemned prisoners. On the short trip, the
crests of the tossing waves sometimes shone with a flickering light,
while elsewhere long shadows spread like dark sails over the sea. The
flat coast on which both men soon stepped was brightly illumined by the
moonbeams, and the forms of the doomed men stood forth, like the black
figures on the red background of a vase, upon the yellowish-brown sand on
which they were standing, running, walking, or lying.
At the western end of the tongue of land a sand hill had been surrounded
by a wall and moat, guarded by heavily armed soldiers and several
archers. The level ground below had been made secure against any attack,
and on the right side was a roof supported by pillars.
The officials intrusted with the examination of the ringleaders had
remained during the day in this hastily erected open hut. The latter,
bound to posts, awaited their sentence.
The only woman among them was Ledscha, who crouched, unfettered, on the
ground behind the enclosure, which consisted of short stakes fastened by
a rope.
Without presenting any serious obstacle, it merely indicated how far the
prisoners might venture to go. Whoever crossed it must expect to be
struck down by an arrow from the wall. This earthwork, it is true,
menaced those held captive here, but they also owed it a debt of
gratitude, for it shut from their eyes the horrible incidents on the
sandy plain between the sea and the inland lake.
This spot was now made as light as day by the rays of the full moon which
floated in the pure azure sky far above the black cloud mountains, like a
white lotus flower on clear waters, and poured floods of silvery radiance
upon the earth.
Eumedes commanded the Macedonians who formed his escort to remain at the
fortress on the dune, and, pointing out Ledscha by a wave of the hand, he
whispered to Hermon: "By the girdle of Aphrodite! she is terribly
beautiful! For whom is the Medea probably brewing in imagination the
poisoned draught?"
Then he gave the sculptor permission to promise her immunity from
punishment if she would consent at least to explain the Gauls' connection
with the royal palaces; but Hermon strenuously refused to undertake this
or a similar commission to Ledscha.
Eumedes had expected the denial, and merely expressed to his friend his
desire to speak to the Biamite after his interview was over. However
refractory she might be, his mother's intercession should benefit her.
Hermon might assure her that he, the commander, meant to deal leniently.
He pressed the artist's hand as he spoke, and walked rapidly away to
ascertain the condition of affairs in the other guardhouses.
Never had the brave artist's heart throbbed faster in any danger than on
the eve of this meeting; but it was no longer love that thrilled it so
passionately, far less hate or the desire to let his foe feel that her
revenge was baffled.
It was easy for the victor to exercise magnanimity, and easiest of all
for the sculptor in the presence of so beautiful an enemy, and Hermon
thought he had never seen the Biamite look fairer. How exquisitely
rounded was the oval, how delicately cut the profile of her face, how
large were the widely separated, sparkling eyes, above which, even in the
pale moonlight, the thick black brows were visible, united under the
forehead as if for a dark deed to be performed in common!
Time had rather enhanced than lessened the spell of this wonderful young
creature. Now she rose from the ground where she had been crouching and
paced several times up and down the short path at her disposal; but she
started suddenly, for one of the Gauls bound to the posts, in whom Hermon
recognised the bridge-builder, Lutarius, called her name, and when she
turned her face toward him, panted in broken Greek like one overwhelmed
by despair: "Once more--it shall be the last time--I beseech you! Lay
your hand upon my brow, and if that is too much, speak but one kind word
to me before all is over! I only want to hear that you do not hate me
like a foe and despise me like a dog. What can it cost you? You need only
tell me in two words that you are sorry for your harshness."
"The same fate awaits us both," cried Ledscha curtly and firmly. "Let
each take care of himself. When my turn comes and my eyes grow dim in
death, I will thank them that they will not show you to me again, base
wretch, throughout eternity."
Lutarius shrieked aloud in savage fury, and tore so frantically at the
strong ropes which bound him that the firm posts shook, but Ledscha
turned away and approached the hut.
She leaned thoughtfully against one of the pillars that supported the
roof, and the artist's eyes watched her intently; every movement seemed
to him noble and worth remembering.
With her hand shading her brow, she gazed upward to the full moon.
Hermon had already delayed speaking to her too long, but he would have
deemed it criminal to startle her from this attitude. So must Arachne
have stood when the goddess, in unjust anger, raised the weaver's shuttle
against the more skilful mortal; for while Ledscha's brow frowned
angrily, a triumphant smile hovered around her mouth. At the same time
she slightly opened her exquisitely formed lips, and the little white
teeth which Hermon had once thought so bewitchingly beautiful glittered
between them.
Like the astronomer who fixes his gaze and tries to imprint upon his
memory some rare star in the firmament which a cloud is threatening to
obscure, he now strove to obtain Ledscha's image. He would and could
model her in this attitude, exactly as she stood there, without her veil,
which had been torn from her during the hand-to-hand conflict when she
was captured, with her thick, half-loosened tresses falling over her left
shoulder; nav, even with the slightly hooked nose, which was opposed to
the old rule of art that permitted only the straight bridge of the nose
to be given to beautiful women. Her nature harmonized with the ideal.
even in the smallest detail; here any deviation from reality must tend to
injure the work.
She remained motionless for minutes in the same attitude, as if she knew
that she was posing to an artist; but Hermon gazed at her as if spell
bound till the fettered Gaul again called her name.
Then she left the supporting pillar, approached the barrier, stopped at
the rope which extended from one short stake to another, and gazed at the
man who was following her outside of the rope.
It was a Greek who stood directly opposite to her. A black beard adorned
his grave, handsome countenance. He, too, had a chlamys, such as she had
formerly seen on another. Only the short sword, which he wore suspended
at his right side in the Hellenic fashion, would not suit that other; but
suddenly a rush of hot blood crimsoned her face. As if to save herself
from falling, she flung out both arms and clutched a stake with her right
and her left hand, thrusting her head and the upper portion of her body
across the rope toward the man whose appearance had created so wild a
tumult in her whole being.
At last she called Hermon's name in such keen suspense that it fell upon
his ear like a shrill cry.
"Ledscha," he answered warmly, extending both hands to her in sincere
sympathy; but she did not heed the movement, and her tone of calm
self-satisfaction surprised him as she answered: "So you seek me in
misfortune? Even the blind man knows how to find me here."
"I would far rather have met you again in the greatest happiness!" he
interrupted gently. "But I am no longer blind. The immortals again permit
me, as in former days, to feast my eyes upon your marvellous beauty."
A shrill laugh cut short his words, and the "Not blind!" which fell again
and again from her lips sounded more like laughter than speech.
There are tears of grief and of joy, and the laugh which is an
accompaniment of pleasure is also heard on the narrow boundary between
suffering and despair.
It pierced the artist's heart more deeply than the most savage outburst
of fury, and when Ledscha gasped: "Not blind! Cured! Rich and possessed
of sight, perfect sight!" he understood her fully for the first time, and
could account for the smile of satisfaction which had just surprised him
on her lips.
He gazed at her, absolutely unable to utter a word; but she went on
speaking, while a low, sinister laugh mingled with her tones: "So this is
avenging justice! It allows us women to be trampled under foot, and holds
its hands in its lap! My vengeance! How I have lauded Nemesis! How
exquisitely my retaliation seemed to have succeeded! And now? It was mere
delusion and deception. He who was blind sees. He who was to perish in
misery is permitted, with a sword at his side, to gloat over our
destruction. Listen, if the good news has not already reached you! I,
too, am condemned to death. But what do I care for myself? Even less than
those to whom we pray and offer sacrifices for the betrayed woman. Now I
am learning to know them! Thus Nemesis thanks me for the lavish gifts I
have bestowed upon her? Just before my end she throws you, the rewarded
traitor, into my way! I must submit to have the hated foe, whose blinding
was the sole pleasure in my ruined life, look me in the face with
insolent joy."
Hermon's quick blood boiled.
With fierce resentment he grasped her hand, which lay on the rope,
pressed it violently in his strong clasp, and exclaimed, "Stop, mad
woman, that I may not be forced to think of you as a poisonous serpent
and repulsive spider!"
Ledscha had vainly endeavoured to withdraw her hand while he was
speaking. Now he himself released it; but she looked up at him in
bewilderment, as if seeking aid, and said sadly: "Once--you know that
yourself--I was different--even as long as I supposed my vengeance had
succeeded. But now? The false goddess has baffled every means with which
I sought to punish you. Who averted the sorest ill treatment from my
head? And I was even defrauded of the revenge which it was my right, nay,
my duty, to exercise."
She finished the sentence with drooping head, as if utterly crushed, and
this time she did not laugh, but Hermon felt his wrath transformed to
sympathy, and he asked warmly and kindly if she would let nothing appease
her, not even if he begged her forgiveness for the wrong he had done her,
and promised to obtain her life, nay, also her liberty.
Ledscha shook her head gently, and gravely answered: "What is left me
without hate? What are the things which others deem best and highest to a
miserable wretch like me?"
Here Hermon pointed to the bridge-builder, bound to the post, saying,
"Yonder man led you away from the husband whom you had wedded, and from
him you received compensation for the love you had lost."
"From him?" she cried furiously, and, raising her voice in a tone of the
most intense loathing: "Ask yonder scoundrel himself! Because I needed a
guide, I permitted him to take me away from my unloved husband and from
the Hydra. Because he would help me to shatter the new and undeserved
good fortune which you--yes, you--do you hear?--enjoyed, I remained with
him among the Gauls. More than one Alexandrian brought me the news that
you were revelling in golden wealth, and the wretch promised to make you
and your uncle beggars if the surprise succeeded. He did this, though he
knew that it was you who took him up from the road and saved his life;
for nothing good and noble dwells in his knavish soul. He yearned for me,
and still more ardently for the Alexandrians' gold. Worse than the wolf
that licked the hand of the man who bandaged its wounds, he would have
shown his teeth to the preserver of his life. I have learned this, and if
he dies here of starvation and thirst he will receive only what he
deserves. He knows, too, what I think of him. The greedy beast of prey
was not permitted even to touch my hand. Just ask him! There he is. Let
him tell you how I listened to his vows of love. Before I would have
permitted yonder wretch to recall to life what you crushed in this
heart--"
Here Lutarius interrupted her with a flood of savage, scarcely
intelligible curses, but very soon one of the guards, who came out of the
hut, stopped him with a lash.
When the Gaul, howling under the blows, was silenced, Hermon asked, "So
your mad thirst for vengeance also caused this suicidal attack?"
"No," she answered simply; "but when they determined upon the assault,
and had killed their leader, Belgius, yonder monster stole to their head.
So it happened--I myself do not know how--that they also obeyed me, and I
took advantage of it and induced them to begin with your house and
Archias's. When they had captured the royal palaces, they intended to
assail the Temple of Demeter also."
"Then you thought that even the terrible affliction of blindness would
not suffice to punish the man you hated?" asked Hermon.
"No," she answered firmly; "for you could buy with your gold everything
life offers except sight, while in me--yes, in me--gloom darker than the
blackest night shrouded my soul. Through your fault I was robbed of all,
all that is clear to woman's heart: my father's house, his love, my
sister. Even the pleasure in myself which had been awakened by your sweet
flatteries was transformed by you into loathing."
"By me?" cried Hermon, amazed by the injustice of this severe reproach;
but Ledscha answered his question with the resolute assertion, "By you
and you alone!" and then impatiently added: "You, who, by your art, could
transform mortal women into goddesses, wished to make me a humiliated
creature, with the rope which was to strangle her about her neck, and at
the same time the most repulsive of creeping insects. 'The hideous, gray,
eight-legged spider!' I exclaimed to myself, when I raised my arms and
saw my shadow on the sunlit ground. 'The spider!' I thought, when I shook
the distaff to draw threads from the flax in leisure hours. 'Your image!'
I said, when I saw spiders hanging in dusty corners, and catching flies
and gnats. All these things made me a horror to myself. And at the same
time to know that the Demeter, on whom you bestowed the features of the
daughter of Archias, was kindling the whole great city of Alexandria with
enthusiasm, and drawing countless worshippers to her sanctuary! She, an
object of adoration to thousands, I--the much-praised beauty--a horror to
myself! This is what fed my desire for vengeance with fresh food by day
and night; this urged me to remain with yonder wretch; for he had
promised, after pillaging the royal palaces, to shatter your Demeter, the
image of the daughter of Archias, which they lauded and which brought you
fame and honour--it was to be done before my eyes--into fragments."
"Mad woman!" Hermon again broke forth indignantly, and hastily told her
how she had been misinformed.
Ledscha's large black eyes dilated as if some hideous spectre was rising
from the ground before her, while she heard that the Demeter was the work
of Myrtilus and not his; that his friend's legacy had long since ceased
to belong to him, and that he was again as poor as when he was in Tennis
during the time of their love.
"And the blindness?" she asked sadly.
"It transformed life for me into one long night, illumined by no single
ray of light," was the reply; "but, the immortals be praised, I was cured
of it, and it was old Tabus, on the Owl's Nest at Tennis, whose wisdom
and magic arts you so often lauded, who gave the remedy and advice to
which I owe my recovery."
Here he hesitated, for Ledscha had seized the rope with one hand and the
stake at her right with the other, in order not to fall upon her knees;
but Hermon perceived how terribly his words agitated her, and spoke to
her soothingly. Ledscha did not seem to hear him, for while still
clinging to the rope she looked sometimes at the sand at her feet,
sometimes up to the full moon, which was now flooding both sky and earth
with light.
At last she dropped it, and said in a hollow tone: "Now I understand
everything. You met her when Bias gave her the bridal dowry which was to
purchase my release from my husband. How it must have enraged her! I
thought of it all, pondered and pondered how to spare her; but through
whom, except Tabus, could I return to Hanno the property, won in battle
by his blood, which he had thrown away for me? Tabus kept the family
wealth. And she--the marriage bond which two persons formed was sacred
and unassailable--the woman who broke her faith with her husband and
turned from him--was an abomination to her. How she loved her sons and
grandsons! I knew that she would never forgive the wrong I did Hanno.
From resentment to me she cured the man whom I hated."
"Yet probably also," said Hermon, "because my blighted youth aroused her
pity."
"Perhaps so," replied Ledscha hesitatingly, gazing thoughtfully into
vacancy. "She was what her demons made her. Hard as steel and gentle as a
tender girl. I have experienced it. Oh, that she should die with rancour
against me in her faithful old heart! She could be so kind!--even when I
confessed that you had won my love, she still held me dear. But there are
many great and small demons, and most of them were probably subject to
her. Tabus must have learned through them how deeply I offended her son
Satabus, and how greatly his son Hanno's life was darkened through me.
That is why she thwarted my vengeance, and her spirits aided her. Thus
all these things happened. I suspected it when I heard that she had
succumbed to death, which I--yes, I here--had held back from her with
severe toil through many a sleepless night. O these demons! They will
continue to act in the service of the dead. Wherever I may go, they will
pursue me and, at their mistress's bidding, baffle what I hope and
desire. I have learned this only too distinctly!"
"No, Ledscha, no," Hermon protested. "Every power ceases with death, even
that of the sorceress over spirits. You shall be freed, poor woman! You
will be permitted to go wherever you desire; and I shall model no spider
after your person, but the fairest of women. Thousands will see and
admire her, and--if the Muse aids me--whoever, enraptured by her beauty,
asks, 'Who was the model for this work which inflames the most obdurate
heart?' will be told, 'It was Ledscha, the daughter of Shalit, the
Biamite, whom Hermon of Alexandria found worthy of carving in costly
marble."
Ledscha uttered a deep sigh of relief, and asked: "Is that true? May I
believe it?"
"As true," he answered warmly, "as that Selene, who promised to grant you
in her full radiance the greatest happiness, is now shedding her mild,
forgiving light upon us both."
"The full moon," she murmured softly, gazing upward at the shining disk.
Then she added in a louder tone: "Old Tabus's demons promised me
happiness--you know. It was the spider which so cruelly shadowed it for
me on every full moon, every day, and every night. Will you now swear to
model a statue from me, the statue of a beautiful human being that will
arouse the delight of all who see it? Delight--do you hear?--not
loathing--I ask again, will you?"
"I will, and I shall succeed," he said earnestly, holding out his hand
across the rope. She clasped it, looked up to the full moon again, and
whispered: "This time--I will believe it--you will keep your promise
better than when you were in Tennis. And I--I will cease to wish you
evil, and I will tell you why. Bend your ear nearer, that I may confess
it openly." Hermon willingly obeyed the request, but she leaned her head
against his, and he felt her laboured breathing and the warm tears that
coursed silently down her cheeks as she said, in a low whisper: "Because
the moon is full, and will yet bring me what the demons promised, and
because, though strong, I am still a woman. Happiness! How long ago I
ceased to expect it!--but now-yes, it is what I now feel! I am happy, and
yet can not tell why. My love--oh, yes! It was more ardent than the
burning hate. Now you know it, too, Hermon. And I--I shall be free, you
say? And Tabus, how she lauded rest--eternal rest! Oh dearest--this
sorely tortured heart, too--you can not even imagine how weary I am!"
Here she was silent, but the man into whose face she was gazing with
loving devotion felt a sudden movement at his side as she uttered the
exclamation.
He did not notice it, for the sweet tone of her voice was penetrating the
inmost depths of his heart. It sounded as though she was speaking from
the happiest of dreams.
"Ledscha!" he exclaimed warmly, extending his arm toward her--but she had
already stepped back from his side, and he now perceived the terrible
object--she had snatched his sword from its sheath, and as, seized by
sudden terror, he gazed at her, he saw the shining blade glitter in the
moonlight and suddenly vanish.
In an instant he swung his agile body over the rope and rushed to her.
But she had already sunk to her knees, and while he clasped her in is
arms to support her, he heard her call his own name tenderly, then murmur
it in a lower tone, and the words "Full moon" and "Happiness" escape her
lips.
Then she was silent, and her beautiful head dropped on her breast like a
flower broken by a tempest.
CHAPTER XVII.
"It was best so for her and for us," said Eumedes, after gazing long at
Ledscha's touchingly beautiful, still, dead face.
Then he ordered her to be buried at once and shouted to the guards:
"Everything must be over on this strip of land early to-morrow morning!
Let all who bear arms begin at once. Selene will light the men brightly
enough for the work."
The terrible order given in mercy was fulfilled, and hunger and thirst
were robbed of their numerous prey. When the new day dawned the friends
were still on deck, engaged in grave conversation. The cloudless sky now
arched in radiant light above the azure sea. White seagulls came flying
from the right across the ship, and sportive dolphins gambolled around
her keel.
The flutes of the musicians, marking time for the rowers, echoed gaily up
from the hold, and, obedient to quick words of command, the seamen were
spreading the sails.
The voyage began with a favourable wind. As Hermon looked back for the
last time, the flat, desolate tongue of land appeared like a line of gray
mist in the southeastern horizon; but over it hovered, like a gloomy
thundercloud, the flocks of vultures and ravens, whose numbers were
constantly increasing. Their greedy screaming could still be heard,
though but faintly, yet the eye could no longer distinguish anything in
the fast-vanishing abode of horror, save the hovering whirl of dark
spots--ravens and vultures, vultures and ravens.
Whatever human life had moved there yesterday, now rested from bloody
greed for booty, after victory and defeat, mortal terror, fury, and
despair.
Eumedes pointed out the quiet grave by the sea to his parents, saying:
"The King's command is fulfilled. Not even the one man who is usually
spared to carry the news remains out of the four thousand."
"I thank you," exclaimed Alexander's gray-haired comrade, shaking his
son's right hand, but Thyone laid her hand on Hermon's arm, saving:
"Where the birds are darkening the air behind us lies buried what
incensed Nemesis against you. You must leave the soil of Egypt. True, it
is said that to live in foreign lands, far from the beloved home, darkens
the existence; yet Pergamus, too, is Grecian soil, and there I see the
two noblest of stars illumine your path with their pure light-art and
love."
And his old friend's premonition was fulfilled.
.......................
The story of Arachne is ended. It closed on the Nile. Hermon's new life
began in Pergamus.
As Daphne's husband, under the same roof with the wonderfully invigorated
Myrtilus, his Uncle Archias, and faithful Bias, Hermon found in the new
home what had hovered before the blind man as the fairest goal of
existence in art, love, and friendship.
He did not long miss the gay varied life of Alexandria, because he found
a rich compensation for it, and because Pergamus, too, was a rapidly
growing city, whose artistic decoration was inferior to no other in
Greece.
Of the numerous works which Hermon completed in the service of the first
three art-loving rulers of the new Pergamenian kingdom, Philetaerus,
Eumenes, and Attalus, nothing was preserved except the head of a Gaul.
This noble masterpiece proves how faithful Hermon remained to truth,
which he had early chosen for the guiding star of his art. It is the
modest remnant of the group in which Hermon perpetuated in marble the two
Gallic brothers whom he saw before his last meeting with Ledscha, as they
offered their breasts to the fatal shafts.
One had gazed defiantly at the arrows of the conquerors; the other, whose
head has been preserved, feeling the inevitable approach of death,
anticipates, with sorrowful emotion, the end so close at hand.
Philetaerus had sent this touching work to King Ptolemy to thank him for
the severity with which he had chastised the daring of the barbarians,
who had not spared his kingdom also. The Gaul's head was again found on
Egyptian soil.
[Copied in Th. Schrieber's The Head of the Gaul in the Museum of
Ghizeh in Cairo. Leipsic, 1896. With appendix. By H. Curschmann.]
Hermon also took other subjects in Pergamus from the domain of real life,
though, in most of his work he crossed the limits which he had formerly
imposed upon himself. But one barrier, often as he rushed forward to its
outermost verge, he never dared to pass--moderation, the noblest demand,
to which his liberty-loving race subjected themselves willingly in life
as well as in art. The whole infinite, limitless world of the ideal had
opened itself to the blind man.
He made himself at home in it by remaining faithful to the rule which he
had found in the desert for his creative work, and the genuine happiness
which he enjoyed through Daphne's love and the great fame his sculptures
brought him increased the strong individuality of his power.
The fruits of his tireless industry, the much-admired god of light,
Phoebus Apollo, slaying the dragons of darkness, as well as his
bewitching Arachne, gazing proudly at the fabric with which she thinks
she has surpassed the skill of the goddess, were overtaken by
destruction. In this statue Bias recognised his countrywoman Ledscha, and
often gazed long at it with devout ecstasy. Even Hermon's works of
colossal size vanished from the earth: the Battle of the Amazons and the
relief containing numerous figures: the Sea Gods, which the Regent
Eumenes ordered for the Temple of Poseidon in Pergamus.
The works of his grandson and grandson's pupils, however, are preserved
on the great altar of victory in Pergamus.
The power and energy natural to Hermon, the skill he had acquired in
Rhodes, everything in the changeful life of Alexandria which had induced
him to consecrate his art to reality, and to that alone, and whatever he
had, finally, in quiet seclusion, recognised as right and in harmony with
the Greek nature and his own, blend in those works of his successor,
which a gracious dispensation of Providence permits us still to admire at
the present day, and which we call in its entirety, the art of Pergamus.
The city was a second beloved home to him, as well as to his wife and
Myrtilus. The rulers of the country took the old Alexandrian Archias into
their confidence and knew how to honour him by many a distinction. He
understood how to value the happiness of his only daughter, the beautiful
development of his grandchildren, and the high place that Hermon and
Myrtilus, whom he loved as if they were his own sons, attained among the
artists of their time. Yet he struggled vainly against the longing for
his dear old home. Therefore Hermon deemed it one of the best days of his
life when his turn came to make Daphne's father a happy man.
King Ptolemy Philadelphus had sent laurel to the artist who had fallen
under suspicion in Egypt, and his messenger invited him and Myrtilus, and
with them also the exiled merchant, to return to his presence. In
gratitude for the pleasure which Hermon's creation afforded him and his
wife, the cause that kept the fugitive Archias from his home should be
forgiven and forgotten.
The gray-haired son of the capital returned with the Bithynian Gras to
his beloved Alexandria, as if his lost youth was again restored. There he
found unchanged the busy, active life, the Macedonian Council, the bath,
the marketplace, the bewitching conversation, the biting wit, the
exquisite feasts of the eyes--in short, everything for which his heart
had longed even amid the happiness and love of his dear ones in Pergamus.
For two years he endeavoured to enjoy everything as before; but when the
works of the Pergamenian artists, obtained by Ptolemy, had been exhibited
in the royal palaces, he returned home with a troubled mind. Like the
rest of the world, he thought that the reliefs of Myrtilus, representing
scenes of rural life, were wonderful.
The Capture of Proserpina, a life-size marble group by his son-in-law
Hermon, seemed to him no less perfect; but it exerted a peculiar
influence upon his paternal heart, for, in the Demeter, he recognised
Daphne, in the Proserpina her oldest daughter Erigone, who bore the name
of Hermon's mother and resembled her in womanly charm. How lovely this
budding girl, who was his grand-daughter, seemed to the grandfather! How
graceful, in spite of the womanly dignity peculiar to her, was the
mother, encircling her imperilled child with her protecting arm!
No work of sculpture had ever produced such an effect upon the old patron
of art.
Gras heard him, in his bedroom, murmur the names "Daphne" and "Erigone,"
and therefore it did not surprise him when, the next morning, he received
the command to prepare everything for the return to Pergamus. It pleased
the Bithynian, for he cared more for Daphne, Hermon, and their children
than all the pleasures of the capital.
A few weeks later Archias found himself again in Pergamus with his
family, and he never left it, though he reached extreme old age, and was
even permitted to gaze in wondering admiration at the first attempts of
the oldest son of Hermon and Daphne, and to hear them praised by others.
This grandson of the Alexandrian Archias afterward became the master who
taught the generation of artists who created the Pergamenian works, in
examining which the question forced itself upon the narrator of this
story: How do these sculptures possess the qualities which distinguish
them so strongly from the other statues of later Hellenic antiquity?
Did the great weaver Imagination err when she blended them, through the
mighty wrestler Hermon, with a tendency of Alexandrian science and art,
which we see appearing again among us children of a period so much later?
Science, which is now once more pursuing similar paths, ought and will
follow them further, but Hermon's words remain applicable to the present
clay: "We will remain loyal servants of the truth; yet it alone does not
hold the key to the holy of holies of art. To him for whom Apollo, the
pure among the gods, and the Muses, friends of beauty, do not open it at
the same time with truth, its gates will remain closed, no matter how
strongly and persistently he shakes them."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARK:
Regular messenger and carrier-dove service had been established
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE ARACHNE:
Aimless life of pleasure
Camels, which were rarely seen in Egypt
Cast my warning to the winds, pity will also fly away with it
Cautious inquiry saves recantation
Forbidden the folly of spoiling the present by remorse
Must--that word is a ploughshare which suits only loose soil
Nature is sufficient for us
Regular messenger and carrier-dove service had been established
Tender and uncouth natural sounds, which no language knows
There is nothing better than death, for it is peace
There are no gods, and whoever bows makes himself a slave
Tone of patronizing instruction assumed by the better informed
Two griefs always belong to one joy
Wait, child! What is life but waiting?
Waiting is the merchant's wisdom
Woman's hair is long, but her wit is short
THE BRIDE OF THE NILE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 1.
Translated from the German by Clara Bell
PREFACE.
The "Bride of the Nile" needs no preface. For the professional student I
may observe that I have relied on the authority of de Goeje in adhering
to my own original opinion that the word Mukaukas is not to be regarded
as a name but as a title, since the Arab writers to which I have made
reference apply it to the responsible representatives of the Byzantine
Emperor in antagonism to the Moslem power. I was unfortunately unable to
make further use of Karabacek's researches as to the Mukaukas.
I shall not be held justified in placing the ancient Horus Apollo
(Horapollo) in the seventh century after Christ by any one who regards
the author of the Hieroglyphica as identical with the Egyptian
philosopher of the same name who, according to Suidas, lived under
Theodosius, and to whom Stephanus of Byzantium refers, writing so early
as at the end of the fifth century. But the lexicographer Suidas
enumerates the works of Horapollo, the philologer and commentator on
Greek poetry, without naming the Hieroglyphica, which is the only
treatise alluded to by Stephanus. Besides, all the other ancient writers
who mention Horapollo at all leave us quite free to suppose that there
may have been two sages of the same name--as does C. Leemans, who is most
intimately versed in the Hieroglyphica--and the second certainly cannot
have lived earlier than the VIIth century, since an accurate knowledge of
hieroglyphic writing must have been lost far more completely in his time
than we can suppose possible in the IVth century. It must be remembered
that we still possess well-executed hieroglyphic inscriptions dating from
the time of Decius, 250 years after Christ. Thus the Egyptian commentator
on Greek poetry could hardly have needed a translator, whereas the
Hieroglyphica seems to have been first rendered into Greek by Philippus.
The combination by which the author called in Egyptian Horus (the son of
Isis) is supposed to have been born in Philae, where the cultus of the
Egyptian heathen was longest practised, and where some familiarity with
hieroglyphics must have been preserved to a late date, takes into due
account the real state of affairs at the period I have selected for my
story.
GEORG EBERS.
October 1st, 1886.
CHAPTER I.
Half a lustrum had elapsed since Egypt had become subject to the youthful
power of the Arabs, which had risen with such unexampled vigor and
rapidity. It had fallen an easy prey, cheaply bought, into the hands of a
small, well-captained troop of Moslem warriors; and the fair province,
which so lately had been a jewel of the Byzantine Empire and the most
faithful foster-mother to Christianity, now owned the sway of the Khalif
Omar and saw the Crescent raised by the side of the Cross.
It was long since a hotter season had afflicted the land; and the Nile,
whose rising had been watched for on the Night of Dropping--the 17th of
June--with the usual festive preparations, had cheated the hopes of the
Egyptians, and instead of rising had shrunk narrower and still narrower
in its bed.--It was in this time of sore anxiety, on the 10th of July,
A.D. 643, that a caravan from the North reached Memphis.
It was but a small one; but its appearance in the decayed and deserted
city of the Pyramids--which had grown only lengthwise, like a huge
reed-leaf, since its breadth was confined between the Nile and the Libyan
Hills--attracted the gaze of the passers-by, though in former years a
Memphite would scarcely have thought it worth while to turn his head to
gaze at an interminable pile of wagons loaded with merchandise, an
imposing train of vehicles drawn by oxen, the flashing maniples of the
imperial cavalry, or an endless procession wending its way down the five
miles of high street.
The merchant who, riding a dromedary of the choicest breed, conducted
this caravan, was a lean Moslem of mature age, robed in soft silk. A vast
turban covered his small head and cast a shadow over his delicate and
venerable features.
The Egyptian guide who rode on a brisk little ass by his side, looked up
frequently and with evident pleasure at the merchant's face--not in
itself a handsome one with its hollow cheeks, meagre beard and large
aquiline nose--for it was lighted up by a pair of bright eyes, full of
attractive thoughtfulness and genuine kindness. But that this
fragile-looking man, in whose benevolent countenance grief and
infirmities had graven many a furrow, could not only command but compel
submission was legible alike in his thin, firmly-closed lips and in the
zeal with which his following of truculent and bearded fighting men,
armed to the teeth, obeyed his slightest sign.
His Egyptian attendant, the head of the Hermeneutai--the guild of the
Dragomans of that period--was a swarthy and surly native of Memphis;
whenever he accidentally came too close to the fierce-looking riders of
the dromedaries he shrunk his shoulders as if he expected a blow or a
push, while he poured out question and answer to the Merchant Haschim,
the owner of the caravan, without timidity and with the voluble garrulity
of his tribe.
"You seem very much at home here in Memphis," he observed, when the old
man had expressed his surprise at the decadence and melancholy change in
the city.
"Thirty years ago," replied the merchant, "my business often brought me
hither. How many houses are now empty and in ruins where formerly only
heavy coin could secure admittance! Ruins on all sides!--Who has so
cruelly mutilated that fine church? My fellow-believers left every
Christian fane untouched--that I know from our chief Amru himself."
"It was the principal church of the Melchites, the Emperor's minions,"
cried the guide, as if that were ample explanation of the fact. The
merchant, however, did not take it so.
"Well," he said, "and what is there so dreadful in their creed?"
"What?" said the Egyptian, and his eye flashed wrathfully. "What?--They
dismember the divine person of the Saviour and attribute to it two
distinct natures. And then!--All the Greeks settled here, and encouraged
by the protection of the emperor, treated us, the owners of the land,
like slaves, till your nation came to put an end to their oppression.
They drove us by force into their churches, and every true-born Egyptian
was punished as a rebel and a leper. They mocked at us and persecuted us
for our faith in the one divine nature of our Lord."
"And so," interrupted the merchant, "as soon as we drove out the Greeks
you behaved more unmercifully to them and their sanctuaries than we--whom
you scorn as infidels--did to you!"
"Mercy?--for them!" cried the Egyptian indignantly, as he cast an evil
eye on the demolished edifice. "They have reaped what they sowed; and now
every one in Egypt who does not believe in your One God--blessed be the
Saviour!--confesses the one sole nature of our Lord Jesus Christ. You
drove out the Melchite rabble, and then it was our part to demolish the
temples of their wretched Saviour, who lost His divine Unity at the synod
of Chalcedon--damnation wait upon it!"
"But still the Melchites are fellow-believers with you--they are
Christians," said the merchant.
"Christians?" echoed the guide with a contemptuous shrug. "They may
regard themselves as Christians; but I, with every one else great and
small in this land, am of opinion that they have no right whatever to
call themselves our fellow-believers and Christians. They all are and
shall be for ever accursed with their hundreds--nay thousands of devilish
heresies, by which they degrade our God and Redeemer to the level of that
idol on the stone pillar. Half a cow and half a man! Why, what rational
being, I ask you, could pray to such a mongrel thing? We Jacobites or
Monophysites or whatever they choose to call us will not yield a jot or
tittle of the divine nature of our Lord and Saviour; and if the old faith
must die out, I will turn Moslem and be converted to your One Omnipotent
God; for before I confess the heresies of the Melchites I will be hewn in
pieces, and my wife and children with me. Who knows what may be coming to
pass? And there are many advantages in going over to your side: for the
power is in your hands, and long may you keep it! We have got to be ruled
by strangers; and who would not rather pay small tribute to the wise and
healthy Khalif at Medina than a heavy one to the sickly imperial brood of
Melchites at Constantinople. The Mukaukas George, to be sure, is not a
bad sort of man, and as he so soon gave up all idea of resisting you he
was no doubt of my opinion. Regarding you as just and pious folks, as our
next neighbors, and perhaps even of our own race and blood, he preferred
you--my brother told me so--to those Byzantine heretics, flayers of men
and thirsting for blood, but yet, the Mukaukas is as good a Christian as
breathes."
The Arab had listened attentively and with a subtle smile to the
Memphite, whose duties as guide now compelled him to break off. The
Egyptian made the whole caravan turn down an alley that led into a street
running parallel to the river, where a few fine houses still stood in the
midst of their gardens. When men and beasts were making their way along a
better pavement the merchant observed: "I knew the father of the man you
were speaking of, very well. He was wealthy and virtuous; of his son too
I hear nothing but good. But is he still allowed to bear the title of
governor, or, what did you call him?--Mukaukas?"
"Certainly, Master," said the guide. "There is no older family than his
in all Egypt, and if old Menas was rich the Mukaukas is richer, both by
inheritance and by his wife's dower. Nor could we wish for a more
sensible or a juster governor! He keeps his eye on his underlings too;
still, business is not done now as briskly as formerly, for though he is
not much older than I am--and I am not yet sixty--he is always ailing and
has not been seen out of the house for months. Even when your chief wants
to see him he comes over to this side of the river. It is a pity with
such a man as he; and who was it that broke down his stalwart strength?
Why, those Melchite dogs; you may ask all along the Nile, long as it is,
who was at the bottom of any misfortune, and you will always get the same
answer: Wherever the Melchite or the Greek sets foot the grass refuses to
grow."
"But the Mukaukas, the emperor's representative . . . the Arab began. The
Egyptian broke in however:
"He, you think, must be safe from them? They did not certainly injure his
person; but they did worse, for when the Melchites rose up against our
party--it was at Alexandria, and the late Greek patriarch Cyrus had a
finger in that pie--they killed his two sons, two fine, splendid
men--killed them like dogs; and it crushed him completely."
"Poor man!" sighed the Arab. "And has he no child left?"
"Oh, yes. One son, and the widow of his eldest. She went into a convent
after her husband's death, but she left her child, her little Mary--she
must be ten years old now--to live with her grandparents."
"That is well," said the old man, "that will bring some sunshine into the
house."
"No doubt, Master. And just lately they have had some cause for
rejoicing. The only surviving son--Orion is his name--came home only the
day before yesterday from Constantinople where he has been for a long
time. There was a to-do! Half the city went crazy. Thousands went out to
meet him, as though he were the Saviour; they erected triumphal arches,
even folks of my creed--no one thought of hanging back. One and all
wanted to see the son of the great Mukaukas, and the women of course were
first and foremost!"
"You speak, however," said the Arab, "as though the returning hero were
not worthy of so much honor."
"That is as folks think," replied the Egyptian shrugging his shoulders.
"At any rate he is the only son of the greatest man in the land."
"But he does not promise to be like the old man?"
"Oh, yes, indeed," said the guide. "My brother, a priest, and the head of
one of our great schools, was his tutor, and he never met such a clever
head as Orion's, he tells me. He learnt everything without any trouble
and at the same time worked as hard as a poor man's son. We may expect
him to win fame and honor--so Marcus says--for his parents and for the
city of Memphis: but for my part, I can see the shady side, and I tell
you the women will turn his head and bring him to a bad end. He is
handsome, taller even than the old man in his best days, and he knows how
to make the most of himself when he meets a pretty face--and pretty faces
are always to be met in his path . . ."
"And the young rascal takes what he finds!" said the Moslem laughing. "If
that is all you are alarmed at I am glad for the youth. He is young and
such things are allowable."
"Nay, Sir, even my brother--he lives now in Alexandria, and is blind and
foolish enough still in all that concerns his former pupil--and even he
thinks this is a dangerous rock ahead. If he does not change in this
respect he will wander further and further from the law of the Lord, and
imperil his soul, for dangers surround him on all sides like roaring
lions. The noble gifts of a handsome and engaging person will lead him to
his ruin; and though I do not desire it, I suspect. . . ."
"You look on the dark side and judge hardly," replied the old man. "The
young. . . ."
"Even the young, or at least the Christian young, ought to control
themselves, though I, if any one, am inclined to make the utmost
allowance for the handsome lad--nay, and I may confess: when he smiles at
me I feel at once as if I had met with some good-luck; and there are a
thousand other men in Memphis who feel the same, and still more the women
you may be sure--but many a one has shed bitter tears on his account for
all that.--But, by all the saints!--Talk of the wolf and you see his
tail! Look, there he is!--Halt! Stop a minute, you men; it is worth
while, Sir, to tarry a moment."
"Is that his fine quadriga in front of the high garden gate yonder?"
"Those are the Pannonian horses he brought with him, as swift as
lightning and as. . . . But look! Ah, now they have disappeared behind the
hedge; but you, high up on your dromedary, must be able to see them. The
little maid by his side is the widow Susannah's daughter. This garden and
the beautiful mansion behind the trees belong to her."
"A very handsome property!" said the Arab.
"I should think so indeed!" replied the Memphite. "The garden goes down
to the Nile, and then, what care is taken of it!"
"Was it not here that Philommon the corn-merchant lived formerly?" asked
the old man, as though some memories were coming back to him.
"To be sure. He was Susannah's husband and must have been a man of fifty
when he first wooed her. The little girl is their only child and the
richest heiress in the whole province; but she is not altogether grown up
though she is sixteen years old--an old man's child, you understand, but
a pretty, merry creature, a laughing dove in human form, and so quick and
lively. Her own people call her the little water-wagtail."
"Good!--Good and very appropriate," said the merchant well pleased. "She
is small too, a child rather than a maiden; but the graceful, gladsome
creature takes my fancy. And the governor's son--what is his name?"
"Orion, Sir," replied the guide.
"And by my beard," said the old man smiling. "You have not over-praised
him, man! Such a youth as this Orion is not to be seen every day. What a
tall fellow, and how becoming are those brown curls. Such as he are
spoilt to begin with by their mothers, and then all the other women
follow suit. And he has a frank, shrewd face with something behind it. If
only he had left his purple coat and gold frippery in Constantinople!
Such finery is out of place in this dismal ruinous city."
While he was yet speaking the Memphite urged his ass forward, but the
Arab held him back, for his attention was riveted by what was taking
place within the enclosure. He saw handsome Orion place a small white
dog, a silky creature of great beauty that evidently belonged to him--in
the little maiden's arms saw her kiss it and then put a blade of grass
round its neck as if to measure its size. The old man watched them as,
both laughing gaily, they looked into each other's eyes and presently bid
each other farewell. The girl stood on tiptoe in front of some rare shrub
to reach two exquisite purple flowers that blossomed at the top, hastily
plucked them and offered them to him with a deep blush; she pushed away
the hand he had put out to support her as she stretched up for the
flowers with a saucy slap; and a bright glance of happiness lighted up
her sweet face as the young man kissed the place her fingers had hit, and
then pressed the flowers to his lips. The old man looked on with
sympathetic pleasure, as though it roused the sweetest memories in his
mind; and his kind eyes shone as Orion, no less mischievously happy than
the young girl, whispered something in her ear; she drew the long stem of
grass out of her waist-belt to administer immediate and condign
punishment withal, struck it across his face, and then fled over
grass-plot and flower-bed, as swift as a roe, without heeding his
repeated shouts of "Katharina! bewitching, big damsel, Katharina!" till
she reached the house.
It was a charming little interlude. Old Haschim was still pondering it in
his memory with much satisfaction when he and his caravan had gone some
distance further. He felt obliged to Orion for this pretty scene, and
when he heard the young man's quadriga approaching at an easy trot behind
him, he turned round to gaze. But the Arab's face had lost its
contentment by the time the four Pannonians and the chariot, overlaid
with silver ornamentation and forming, with its driver, a picture of rare
beauty and in perfect taste, had slowly driven past, to fly on like the
wind as soon as the road was clear, and to vanish presently in clouds of
dust. There was something of melancholy in his voice as he desired his
young camel-driver to pick up the flowers, which now lay in the dust of
the road, and to bring them to him. He himself had observed the handsome
youth as, with a glance and a gesture of annoyance with himself, he flung
the innocent gift on the hot, sandy highway.
"Your brother is right," cried the old man to the Memphite. "Women are
indeed the rock ahead in this young fellow's life--and he in theirs, I
fear! Poor little girl!"
"The little water-wagtail do you mean? Oh! with her it may perhaps turn
to real earnest. The two mothers have settled the matter already. They
are both rolling in gold, and where doves nest doves resort.--Thank God,
the sun is low down over the Pyramids! Let your people rest at the large
inn yonder; the host is an honest man and lacks nothing, not even shade!"
"So far as the beasts and drivers are concerned," said the merchant,
"they may stop here. But I, and the leader of the caravan, and some of my
men will only take some refreshment, and then you must guide us to the
governor; I have to speak with him. It is growing late. . ."
"That does not matter," said the Egyptian. "The Mukaukas prefers to see
strangers after sundown on such a scorching day. If you have any dealings
with him I am the very man for you. You have only to make play with a
gold piece and I can obtain you an audience at once through Sebek, the
house-steward he is my cousin. While you are resting here I will ride on
to the governor's palace and bring you word as to how matters stand."
CHAPTER II.
The caravansary into which Haschim and his following now turned off stood
on a plot of rising ground surrounded by palm-trees. Before the
destruction of the heathen sanctuaries it had been a temple of Imhotep,
the Egyptian Esculapius, the beneficient god of healing, who had had his
places of special worship even in the city of the dead. It was half
relined, half buried in desert sand when an enterprising inn-keeper had
bought the elegant structure with the adjacent grove for a very moderate
sum. Since then it had passed to various owners, a large wooden building
for the accommodation of travellers had been added to the massive
edifice, and among the palm-trees, which extended as far as the
ill-repaired quay, stables were erected and plots of ground fenced in for
beasts of all kinds. The whole place looked like a cattle-fair, and
indeed it was a great resort of the butchers and horse-dealers of the
town, who came there to purchase. The palm-grove, being one of the few
remaining close to the city, also served the Memphites as a
pleasure-ground where they could "sniff fresh air" and treat themselves
in a pleasant shade. 'Tables and seats had been set out close to the
river, and there were boats on hire in mine host's little creek; and
those who took their pleasure in coming thither by water were glad to put
in and refresh themselves under the palms of Nesptah.
Two rows of houses had formerly divided this rendezvous for the sober and
the reckless from the highroad, but they had long since been pulled down
and laid level with the ground by successive landlords. Even now some
hundreds of laborers might be seen, in spite of the scorching heat,
toiling under Arab overseers to demolish a vast ruin of the date of the
Ptolemies. and transporting the huge blocks of limestone and marble, and
the numberless columns which once had supported the roof of the temple of
Zeus, to the eastern shore of the Nile-loading them on to trucks drawn by
oxen which hauled them down to the quay to cross the river in
flat-bottomed boats.
Amru, the Khaliff's general and representative, was there building his
new capital. For this the temples of the old gods were used as quarries,
and they supplied not only finely-squared blocks of the most durable
stone, but also myriads of Greek columns of every order, which had only
to be ferried over and set up again on the other shore; for the Arabs
disdained nothing in the way of materials, and made indiscriminate use of
blocks and pillars in their own sanctuaries, whether they took them from
heathen temples or Christian churches.
The walls of the temple of Imhotep had originally been completely covered
with pictures of the gods, and hieroglyphic inscriptions; but the smoke
of reeking hearths had long since blackened them, fanatical hands had
never been wanting to deface them, and in many places they had been
lime-washed and scrawled with Christian symbols or very unchristian
mottoes, in Greek and the spoken dialect of the Egyptians. The Arab and
his men took their meal in what had been the great hall of the
temple--none of them drinking wine excepting the captain of the caravan,
who was no Moslem but belonged to the Parsee sect of the Masdakites.
When the old merchant, sitting at a table by himself, had satisfied his
hunger, he called this chief and desired him to load the bale containing
the hanging on a litter between the two largest baggage camels, and to
fasten it securely but so that it could easily be removed.
"It is done," replied the Persian, as he wiped his thick moustache--he
was a magnificent man as tall and stalwart as an oak, with light flowing
hair like a lion's mane.
"So much the better," said Haschim. "Then come out with me." And he led
the way to the palmgrove.
The sun had sunk to rest behind the pyramids, the Necropolis, and the
Libyan hills; the eastern sky, and the bare limestone rock of Babylon on
the opposite shore were shining with hues of indescribable diversity and
beauty. It seemed as though every variety of rose reared by the skilled
gardeners of Arsinoe or Naukratis had yielded its hues, from golden buff
to crimson and the deepest wine-tinted violet, to shed their magic glow
on the plains, the peaks and gorges of the hills, with the swiftness of
thought.
The old man's heart beat high as he gazed at the scene; he drew a deep
breath, and laying his slender hand on the Persian's mighty arm he said:
"Your prophet, Masdak, taught that it was God's will that no one should
think himself more or less chosen than another, and that there should be
neither rich nor poor on earth, but that every possession should belong
to all in common. Well, look around you here as I do. The man who has not
seen this has seen nothing. There is no fairer scene here below and to
whom does it belong? To poor simple Salech yonder, whom we allowed to
tramp half naked at our camels' heels out of pity.--It is his as much as
it is yours or mine or the Khaliff's. God has given us all an equal share
in the glory of his works, as your prophet would have it. How much beauty
is the common possession of our race! Let us be thankful for it, Rustem,
for indeed it is no small matter.--But as to property, such as man may
win or lose, that is quite a different matter. We all start on the same
race-course, and what you Masdakites ask is that lead should be tied to
the feet of the swift so that no one should outstrip another; but that
would be. . . . Well, well! Let us feast our eyes now on the marvellous
beauty before us. Look: What just now was the purple of this flower is
now deep ruby red; what before was a violet gleam now is the richest
amethyst. Do you see the golden fringe to those clouds? It is like a
setting.--And all this is ours--is yours and mine--so long as we have
eyes and heart to enjoy and be uplifted by it!"
The Masdakite laughed, a fresh, sonorous laugh, and said: "Yes, Master,
for those who see as you see. The colors are bright no doubt over the sky
and the hills, and we do not often see such a red as that at home in my
country; but of what use is all that magic show? You see rubies and
amethysts--but as for me! The gems in your hanging stand for something
more than that shining show. I mean no harm, Master, but I would give all
the sunsets that ever glowed on earth for your bales and never repent of
the bargain!" He laughed more heartily than before and added: "But you,
worthy Father, would think twice before you signed it.--As to what we
Masdakites hope for, our time is not yet come."
"And suppose it were, and that the hanging were yours?"
"I should sell it and add the price to my savings, and go home and buy
some land, and take a pretty wife, and breed camels and horses."
"And next day would come the poorer men who had laid nothing by, and had
made no bargain over hangings and sunsets; and they would ask for a share
of your land, and a camel and a foal each, and you would not be able ever
to see a sunset again but must wander about the world, and your pretty
wife with you to help you share everything with others.--Let us abide by
the old order, my Rustem, and may the Most High preserve you your good
heart, for you have but a foolish and crotchety head."
The big man bent over his master and gratefully kissed his arm; at this
moment the guide rejoined them, but with a long face for he had promised
more than he could perform. The Mukaukas George had set out--a quite
unheard of event--for an excursion on the river in his barge, with his
son and the ladies of the house just as he was hoping to secure an
audience for the Arab. Orion's return--the steward had explained--had
made the old man quite young again. Haschim must now wait till the
morrow, and he, the guide, would counsel him to pass the night in the
city at an inn kept by one Moschion, where he would be well cared for.
But the merchant preferred to remain where he was. He did not care about
the delay, more particularly as he wished to consult an Egyptian
physician with regard to an old standing complaint he suffered from, and
there was no more skilful or learned leech in the whole land, the
Egyptian guide assured him, than the famous Philip of Memphis. The
situation here, outside the town, was very pleasant, and from the river's
bank he might observe the comet which had been visible for some nights
past--a portent of evil no doubt. The natives of the city had been
paralysed with terror; that indeed was evident even here in Nesptah's
caravansary, for usually as the evening grew cool, the tables and benches
under the palms were crowded with guests; but who would care to think of
enjoyment in those days of dread?
So he remounted his ass to fetch the physician, while old Haschim,
leaning on the Masdakite's arm, betook himself to a bench by the river.
There he sat gazing thoughtfully at the starry sky, and his companion
dreamed of home and of buying a meadow, even without the price of the
gorgeous hanging, of building a house, and of choosing a pretty little
wife to manage it. Should she be fair or dark? He would rather she should
be fair.
But his castle in the air was shattered at this point, for an object was
approaching across the Nile which attracted his attention, and which he
pointed out to his chief. The stream lay before them like a broad belt of
black and silver brocade. The waxing moon was mirrored in the almost
unruffled surface and where a ripple curled it the tiny crest glittered
like white flame. Bats swooped to and fro in the gloom from the city of
the dead to the river, and flitted above it like shadows blown about by
the wind. A few lateen sails moved like pale, gigantic birds over the
dark waters; but now from the north--and from the city--a larger mass
came towards the palm-grove with bright, gleaming eyes of light.
"A fine boat,--the governor's no doubt," said the merchant, as it slowly
came towards the grove from the middle of the stream. At the same time
the clatter of hoofs became audible from the road behind the inn. Haschim
turned round and was aware of torchbearers running ahead of a chariot.
"The sick man has come so far by water," said the Arab, "and now, he is
to be driven home.--Strange! this is the second time to-day that I have
met his much-talked-of son!"
The governor's pleasure-barge was nearing the palm-grove. It was a large
and handsome boat, built of cedar-wood and richly gilt, with an image of
John, the patron-saint of the family, for a figure-head. The nimbus round
the head was a crown of lamps, and large lanterns shone both at the bows
and stern of the vessel. The Mukaukas George was reclining under an
awning, his wife Neforis by his side. Opposite to them sat their son and
a tall young girl, at whose feet a child of ten sat on the ground,
leaning her pretty head against her knees. An older Greek woman, the
child's governess, had a place by the side of a very tall man, on an
ottoman beyond the verge of the awning. This man was Philip the leech.
The cheerful sound of the lute accompanied the barge, and the performer
was the returned wanderer Orion, who touched the strings with skill and
deep feeling.
It was altogether a pleasing scene--a fair picture of a wealthy and
united family. But who was the damsel sitting by Orion's side? He was
devoting his whole attention to her; as he struck the strings with deeper
emphasis his eyes sought hers, and it seemed as though he were playing
for her alone. Nor did she appear unworthy of such homage, for when the
barge ran into the little haven and Haschim could distinguish her
features he was startled by her noble and purely Greek beauty.
A few handsomely-dressed slaves, who must have come with the vehicle by
the road, now went on board the boat to carry their invalid lord to his
chariot; and it then became apparent that the seat in which he reclined
was provided with arms by which it could be lifted and moved. A burly
negro took this at the back, but just as another was stooping to lift it
in front Orion pushed him away and took his place, raised the couch with
his father on it, and carried him across the landing-stage between the
deck and the shore, past Haschim to the chariot. The young man did the
work of bearer with cheerful ease, and looked affectionately at his
father while he shouted to the ladies--for only his mother and the
physician accompanied the invalid after carefully wrapping him in
shawls--to get out of the barge and wait for him. Then he went forward,
lighted by the torches which were carried before them.
"Poor man!" thought the merchant as he looked after the Mukaukas. "But to
a man who has such a son to carry him the saddest and hardest lot floats
by like a cloud before the wind."
He was now ready to forgive Orion even the rejected flowers; and when the
young girl stepped on shore, the child clinging fondly to her arm, he
confessed to himself that Dame Susannah's little daughter would find it
hard indeed to hold her own by the side of this tall and royal vision of
beauty. What a form was this maiden's, and what princely bearing; and how
sweet and engaging the voice in which she named some of the
constellations to her little companion, and pointed out the comet which
was just rising!
Haschim was sitting in shadow; he could see without being seen, and note
all that took place on the bench, which was lighted by one of the barge's
lanterns. The unexpected entertainment gave him pleasure, for everything
that affected the governor's son roused his sympathy and interest. The
idea of forming an opinion of this remarkable young man smiled on his
fancy, and the sight of the beautiful girl who sat on the bench yonder
warmed his old heart. The child must certainly be Mary, the governor's
granddaughter.
Then the chariot started off, clattering away down the road, and in a few
minutes Orion came back to the rest of the party.
Alas! Poor little heiress of Susannah's wealth! How different was his
demeanor to this beautiful damsel from his treatment of that little
thing! His eyes rested on her face in rapture, his speech failed him now
and again as he addressed her, and what he said must be sometimes grave
and captivating and sometimes witty, for not she alone but the little
maid's governess listened to him eagerly, and when the fair one laughed
it was in particularly sweet, clear tones. There was something so lofty
in her mien that this frank expression of contentment was almost
startling; like a breath of perfume from some gorgeous flower which seems
created to rejoice the eye only. And she, to whom all that Orion had to
say was addressed, listened to him not only with deep attention, but in a
way which showed the merchant that she cared even more for the speaker
than for what he was so eager in expressing. If this maiden wedded the
governor's son, they would indeed be a pair! Taus, the innkeeper's wife,
now came out, a buxom and vigorous Egyptian woman of middle age, carrying
some of the puffs for which she was famous, and which she had just made
with her own hands. She also served them with milk, grapes and other
fruit, her eyes sparkling with delight and gratified ambition; for the
son of the great Mukaukas, the pride of the city, who in former years had
often been her visitor, and not only for the sake of her cakes, in water
parties with his gay companions--mostly Greek officers who now were all
dead and gone or exiles from the country--now did her the honor to come
here so soon after his return. Her facile tongue knew no pause as she
told him that she and her husband had gone forth with the rest to welcome
him at the triumphal arch near Menes' Gate, and Emau with them, and the
little one. Yes, Emau was married now, and had called her first child
Orion. And when the young man asked Dame Taus whether Emau was as
charming as ever and as like her mother as she used to be, she shook her
finger at him and asked in her turn, as she pointed towards the young
lady, whether the fickle bird at whose departure so many had sighed, was
to be caged at last, and whether yon fair lady. . . .
But Orion cut her short, saying that he was still his own master though
he already felt the noose round his neck; and the fair lady blushed even
more deeply than at the good woman's first question. He however soon got
over his awkwardness and gaily declared that the worthy Taus' little
daughter was one of the prettiest girls in Memphis, and had had quite as
many admirers as her excellent mother's puff-pastry. Taus was to greet
her kindly from him.
The landlady departed, much touched and flattered; Orion took up his
lute, and while the ladies refreshed themselves he did the maiden's
bidding and sang the song by Alcaeus which she asked for, in a rich
though subdued voice to the lute, playing it like a master. The young
girl's eyes were fixed on his lips, and again, he seemed to be making
music for her alone. When it was time to start homewards, and the ladies
returned to the barge, he went up to the inn to pay the reckoning. As he
presently returned alone the Arab saw him pick up a handkerchief that the
young lady had left on the table, and hastily press it to his lips as he
went towards the barge.
The gorgeous red blossoms had fared worse in the morning. The young man's
heart was given to that maiden on the water. She could not be his sister;
what then was the connection between them?
The merchant soon gained this information, for the guide on his return
could give it him. She was Paula, the daughter of Thomas, the famous
Greek general who had defended the city of Damascus so long and so
bravely against the armies of Islam. She was Mukaukas George's niece, but
her fortune was small; she was a poor relation of the family, and after
her father's disappearance--for his body had never been found--she had
been received into the governor's house out of pity and charity--she, a
Melchite! The interpreter had little to say in her favor, by reason of
her sect; and though he could find no flaw in her beauty, he insisted on
it that she was proud and ungracious, and incapable of winning any man's
love; only the child, little Mary--she, to be sure, was very fond of her.
It was no secret that even her uncle's wife, worthy Neforis, did not care
for her haughty niece and only suffered her to please the invalid. And
what business had a Melchite at Memphis, under the roof of a good
Jacobite? Every word the dragoman spoke breathed the scorn which a mean
and narrow-minded man is always ready to heap on those who share the
kindness of his own benefactors.
But this beautiful and lofty-looking daughter of a great man had
conquered the merchant's old heart, and his opinion of her was quite
unmoved by the Memphite's strictures. It was ere long confirmed indeed,
for Philip, the leech whom the guide had been to find, and whose
dignified personality inspired the Arab with confidence, was a daily
visitor to the governor, and he spoke of Paula as one of the most perfect
creatures that Heaven had ever formed in a happy hour. But the Almighty
seemed to have forgotten to care for his own masterpiece; for years her
life had been indeed a sad one.
The physician could promise the old man some mitigation of his
sufferings, and they liked each other so well that they parted the best
of friends, and not till a late hour.
CHAPTER III.
The Mukaukas' barge, urged forward by powerful rowers, made its way
smoothly down the river. On board there was whispering, and now and again
singing. Little Mary had dropped asleep on Paula's shoulder; the Greek
duenna gazed sometimes at the comet which filled her with terrors,
sometimes at Orion, whose handsome face had bewitched her mature heart,
and sometimes at the young girl whom she was ill-pleased to see thus
preferred by this favorite of the gods. It was a deliciously warm, still
night, and the moon, which makes the ocean swell and flow, stirs the tide
of feeling to rise in the human breast.
Whatever Paula asked for Orion sang, as though nothing was unknown to him
that had ever sounded on a Greek lute; and the longer they went on the
clearer and richer his voice grew, the more melting and seductive its
expression, and the more urgently it appealed to the young girl's heart.
Paula gave herself up to the sweet enchantment, and when he laid down the
lute and asked in low tones if his native land was not lovely on such a
night as this, or which song she liked best, and whether she had any idea
of what it had been to him to find her in his parents' house, she yielded
to the charm and answered him in whispers like his own.
Under the dense foliage of the sleeping garden he pressed her hand to his
lips, and she, tremulous, let him have his way.--Bitter, bitter years lay
behind her. The physician had spoken only too truly. The hardest blows of
fate had brought her--the proud daughter of a noble father--to a course
of cruel humiliations. The life of a friendless though not penniless
relation, taken into a wealthy house out of charity, had proved a thorny
path to tread, but now-since the day before yesterday--all was changed.
Orion had come. His home and the city had held high festival on his
return, as at some gift of Fortune, in which she too had a goodly share.
He had met her, not as the dependent relative, but as a beautiful and
high-born woman. There was sunshine in his presence which warmed her very
heart, and made her raise her head once more like a flower that is
brought out under the open sky after long privation of light and air. His
bright spirit and gladness of life refreshed her heart and brain; the
respect he paid her revived her crushed self-confidence and filled her
soul with fervent gratitude. Ah! and how delightful it was to feel that
she might be grateful, devotedly grateful.--And then, then this evening
had been hers, the sweetest, most blessed that she had known for years.
He had reminded her of what she had almost forgotten: that she was still
young, that she was still lovely, that she had a right to be happy, to
enchant and be enchanted--perhaps even to love and to be loved.
Her hand was still conscious of his burning kiss as she entered the cool
room where the Lady Neforis sat awaiting the return of the party, turning
her spinning-wheel by the couch of her invalid husband who always went to
rest at late hours. It was with an overflowing heart that Paula raised
her uncle's hand to her lips--Orion's father, might she not say HER
Orion's?--Then she kissed her aunt--his mother, and it was long since she
had done so--as she and little Mary bid her good-night. Neforis accepted
the kiss coolly but with some surprise, and looked up enquiringly at the
girl and at her son. No doubt she thought many things, but deemed it
prudent to give them no utterance for the present. She allowed the girl
to retire as though nothing unusual had occurred, superintended the
servants who came to carry her husband into his bedroom, gave him the
white globule which was to secure him sleep, and with indefatigable
patience turned and moved his pillows till his couch was to his mind. Not
till then, nor till she was satisfied that a servant was keeping watch in
the adjoining room, did she leave him; and then--for there was danger in
delay--she went to seek her son.
This tall, large and rather too portly woman had been in her youth a
slender and elegant girl; a graceful creature though her calm and
expressionless features had never been strikingly beautiful. Age had
altered them but little; her face was now that of a good-looking, plump,
easy-going matron, which had lost its freshness through long and devoted
attendance on the sick man. Her birth and position gave her confidence
and self-reliance, but there was nothing gracious or captivating in her
individuality. The joys and woes of others were not hers; still she could
be moved and stirred by them, even to self-denial, and was very capable
of feeling quite a passionate interest for others; only, those others
must be her own immediate belongings and no one else. Thus a more devoted
and anxious wife, or a more loving mother would have been hard to find;
but, if we compare her faculty for loving with a star, its rays were too
short to reach further than to those nearest to her, and these regarded
it as an exceptional state of grace to be included within the narrow
circle of those beloved by her somewhat grudging soul.
She knocked at Orion's sitting-room, and he hailed her late visit with
surprise and pleasure. She had come to speak of a matter of importance,
and had done so promptly, for her son's and Paula's conduct just now
urged her to lose no time. Something was going on between these two and
her husband's niece was far outside the narrow limits of her loving
kindness.
This, she began by saying, would not allow her to sleep. She had but one
heart's desire and his father shared it: Orion must know full well what
she meant; she had spoken to him about it only yesterday. His father had
received him with warm affection, had paid his debts unhesitatingly and
without a word of reproach, and now it was his part to turn over a new
leaf: to break with his former reckless life and set up a home of his
own. The bride, as he knew, was chosen for him. "Susannah was here just
now," she said. "You scapegrace, she confessed that you had quite turned
her Katharina's little head this morning."
"I am sorry for it," he interrupted in a tone of annoyance. "These ways
with women have grown upon me as a habit; but I have done with them
henceforth. They are unworthy of me now, and I feel, my dear
Mother. . . ."
"That life is beginning in earnest," Neforis threw in. "The wish which
brings me to you now entirely accords with that. You know what it is, and
I cannot imagine what you can have to say against it. In short, you must
let me settle the matter to-morrow with Dame Susannah. You are sure of
her daughter's affection, she is the richest heiress in the country, well
brought up, and as I said before, she has quite lost her little heart to
you."
"And she had better have kept it!" said Orion with a laugh.
Then his mother waxed wroth and exclaimed: "I must beg you to reserve
your mirth for a more fitting season and for laughable things. I am very
much in earnest when I say: The girl is a sweet, good little creature and
will be a faithful and loving wife to you, under God. Or have you left
your heart in Constantinople? Has the Senator Justinus' fair
relation.--But nonsense! You can hardly suppose that that volatile Greek
girl. . . ."
Orion clasped her in his arms, and said tenderly, "No, dearest mother,
no. Constantinople lies far, far behind me, in grey mist beyond the
farthest Thule; and here, close here, under my father's roof, I have
found something far more lovely and more perfect than has ever been
beheld by the dwellers on the Bosphorus. That little girl is no match for
a son of our stalwart and broad-shouldered race. Our future generations
must still tower proudly above the common herd in every respect; I want
no plaything for a wife, but a woman, such as you yourself were in
youth--tall, dignified and handsome. My heart goes forth to no
gold-crested wren but to a really royal maiden.--Of what use to waste
words! Paula, the noble daughter of a glorious father, is my choice. It
came upon me just now like a revelation; I ask your blessing on my union
with her!"
So far had Neforis allowed her son to speak. He had frankly and boldly
uttered what she had indeed feared to hear. And so long she had succeeded
in keeping silence!--But now her patience gave way. Trembling with anger
she abruptly broke in, exclaiming, as her face grew crimson:
"No more, no more! Heaven grant that this which I have been compelled to
hear may be no more than a fleeting and foolish whim! Have you quite
forgotten who and what we are? Have you forgotten that those were
Melchites who slew your two dear brothers--our two noble sons? Of what
account are we among the orthodox Greeks? While among the Egyptians and
all who confess the saving doctrine of Eutyches, among the Monophysites
we are the chief, and we will remain so, and close our ears and hearts
against all heretics and their superstitions. What! A grandson of Menas,
the brother of two martyrs for our glorious faith, married to a Melchite!
The mere idea is sacrilege, is blasphemy; I can give it no milder name! I
and your father will die childless before we consent! And it is for the
love of this woman, whose heart is so cold that I shiver only to think of
it--for this waif and stray, who has nothing but her ragged pride and the
mere scrapings of a lost fortune, which never could compare with
ours--for this thankless creature, who can hardly bring herself to bid
me, your mother, such a civil good-morning--by Heaven it is the truth--as
I can say to a slave--for her that I, that your parents are to be bereft
of their son, the only child that a gracious Providence has left to be
their joy and comfort? No, no, never! Far be it from me! You, Orion, my
heart's darling, you have been a wilful fellow all your life, but you
cannot have such a perverse heart as to bring your old mother, who has
kept you in her heart these four and twenty years, in sorrow to the grave
and embitter your father's few remaining days--for his hours are
numbered!--And all for the sake of this cold beauty, whom you have seen
for a few hours these last two days. You cannot have the heart to do
this, my heart's treasure, no, you cannot!--But if you should in some
accursed hour, I tell you--and I have been a tender mother to you all
your life-but as surely as God shall be my stay and your father's in our
last hour, I will tear all love for you out of my heart like a poisonous
weed--I will, though that heart should break!"
Orion put his arms round the excited woman, who lead freed herself from
his embrace, laid his hand lightly on her lips and kissed her eyes,
whispering in her ear:
"I have not the heart indeed, and could scarcely find it." Then, taking
both her hands, he looked straight into her face.
"Brrr!" he exclaimed, "your daredevil son was never so much frightened in
his life as by your threats. What dreadful words are these--and even
worse were at the tip of your tongue! Mother--Mother Neforis! Your name
means kindness, but you can be cruel, bitterly cruel!"
Still he drew her fondly to him, and kissed her hair and brow and cheeks
with eager haste, in a vehemence of feeling which came over him like a
revulsion after the shock he had gone through; and when they parted he
had given her leave to negotiate for little Katharina's hand on his
behalf, and she had promised in return that it should be not on the
morrow but the day after at soonest. This delay seemed to him a sort of
victory and when he found himself alone and reflected on what he had done
in yielding to his mother, though his heart bled from the wounds of which
he himself knew not the depth, he rejoiced that he had not bound Paula by
any closer tie. His eyes had indeed told her much, but the word "Love"
had not passed his lips--and yet that was what it came to.--But surely a
cousin might be allowed to kiss the hand of a lovely relation. She was a
desirable woman--ah, how desirable!--and must ever be: but to quarrel
with his parents for the sake of a girl, were she Aphrodite herself, or
one of the Muses or the Graces--that was impossible! There were thousands
of pretty women in the world, but only one mother; and how often had his
heart beat high and won another heart, taken all it had to give, and then
easily and quickly recovered its balance.
This time however, it seemed more deeply hit than on former occasions;
even the lovely Persian slave for whose sake he had committed the wildest
follies while yet scarcely more than a school-boy--even the bewitching
Heliodora at Constantinople for whom he still had a tender thought, had
not agitated him so strongly. It was hard to give up this Paula; but
there was no help for it. To-morrow he must do his best to establish
their intercourse on a friendly and fraternal footing; for he could have
no hope that she would be content to accept his love only, like the
gentle Heliodora, who was quite her equal in birth. Life would have been
fair, unutterably fair, with this splendid creature by his side! If only
he could take her to the Capital he felt sure that all the world would
stand still to turn round and gaze at her. And if she loved him--if she
met him open-armed. . . . Oh, why had spiteful fate made her a Melchite? But
then, alas, alas! There must surely be something wrong with her nature
and temper; would she not otherwise have been able in two years to gain
the love, instead of the dislike, of his excellent and fond
mother?--Well, after all, it was best so; but Paula's image haunted him
nevertheless and spoilt his sleep, and his longing for her was not to be
stilled.
Neforis, meanwhile, did not return at once to her husband but went to
find Paula. This business must be settled on all sides and at once. If
she could have believed that her victory would give the invalid
unqualified pleasure she would have hastened to him with the good news,
for she knew no higher joy than to procure him a moment's happiness; but
the Mukaukas had agreed to her choice very reluctantly. Katharina seemed
to him too small and childish for his noble son, whose mental superiority
had been revealed to him unmistakably and undeniably, in many long
discussions since his return, to the delight of his father's heart. "The
water-wagtail," though he wished her every happiness, did not satisfy him
for Orion. To him, the father, Paula would have been a well-beloved
daughter-in-law, and he had often found pleasure in picturing her by
Orion's side. But she was a Melchite; he knew too how ill-affected his
wife was towards her, so he kept his wish locked in his own breast in
order not to vex the faithful companion who lived, thought, and felt for
him alone; and Dame Neforis knew or guessed all this, and said to herself
that it would cost him his night's rest if he were to be told at once
what a concession Orion had made.
With Paula it was different. The sooner she learnt that she had nothing
to expect from their son, the better for her.
That very morning she and Orion had greeted each other like a couple of
lovers and just now they had parted like a promised bride and bridegroom.
She would not again be witness to such vexatious doings; so she went to
the young girl's room and confided to her with much satisfaction the
happy prospects her son had promised them,--only Paula must say nothing
about it till the day after to-morrow.
The moment she entered the room Paula inferred from her beaming
expression that she had something to say unpleasant to herself, so she
preserved due composure. Her face wore a look of unmoved indifference
while she submitted to the overflow of a too-happy mother's heart; and
she wished the betrothed couple joy: but she did so with a smile that
infuriated Neforis.
She was not on the whole spiteful; but face to face with this girl, her
nature was transformed, and she rather liked the idea of showing her,
once more in her life, that in her place humility would beseem her. All
this she said to herself as she quitted Paula's room; but perhaps this
woman, who had much that was good in her, might have felt some ruth, if
in the course of the next few hours she could but have looked into the
heart of the orphan entrusted to her protection. Only once did Paula sob
aloud; then she indignantly dried her tears, and sat for a long time
gazing at the floor, shaking her pretty head again and again as though
something unheard-of and incredible had befallen her.
At last, with a bitter sigh, she went to bed; and while she vainly strove
for sleep, and for strength to pray and be silently resigned, Time seemed
to her a wild-beast chase, Fate a relentless hunter, and the quarry he
was pursuing was herself.
CHAPTER IV.
On the following evening Haschim, the merchant, came to the governor's
house with a small part of his caravan. A stranger might have taken the
mansion for the home of a wealthy country-gentleman rather than the
official residence of a high official; for at this hour, after sunset,
large herds of beasts and sheep were being driven into the vast
court-yard behind the house, surrounded on three sides by out-buildings;
half a hundred horses of choice breed came, tied in couples, from the
watering-place; and in a well-sanded paddock enclosed by hurdles, slaves,
brown and black, were bringing fodder to a large troop of camels.
The house itself was well-fitted by its unusually palatial size and
antique splendor to be the residence of the emperor's viceroy, and the
Mukaukas, to whom it all belonged, had in fact held the office for a long
time. After the conquest of the country by the Arabs they had left him in
possession, and at the present date he managed the affairs of his
Egyptian fellow-countrymen, no more in the name of the emperor at
Byzantium, but under the authority of the Khaliff at Medina and his great
general, Amru. The Moslem conquerors had found him a ready and judicious
mediator; while his fellow-Christians and country-men obeyed him as being
the noblest and wealthiest of their race and the descendant of ancestors
who had enjoyed high distinction even under the Pharaohs.
Only the governor's residence was Greek--or rather Alexandrian-in style;
the court-yards and out-buildings on the contrary, looked as though they
belonged to some Oriental magnate-to some Erpaha (or prince of a
province) as the Mukaukas' forefathers had been called, a rank which
commanded respect both at court and among the populace.
The dragoman had not told the merchant too much beforehand of the
governor's possessions: he had vast estates, in both Upper and Lower
Egypt, tilled by thousands of slaves under numerous overseers. Here in
Memphis was the centre of administration of his property, and besides the
offices for his private affairs were those he needed as a state official.
Well-kept quays, and the wide road running along the harbor side, divided
his large domain from the river, and a street ran along the wall which
enclosed it on the north. On this side was the great gate, always wide
open by day, by which servants or persons on business-errands made their
entrance; the other gate, a handsome portal with Corinthian columns
opening from the Nile-quay, was that by which the waterparty had returned
the evening before. This was kept closed, and only opened for the family,
or for guests and distinguished visitors. There was a guardhouse at the
north gate with a small detachment of Egyptian soldiers, who were
entrusted with the protection of the Mukaukas' person.
As soon as the refreshing evening breeze came up from the river after the
heat of the day there was a stir in the great court-yard. Men, women and
girls came trooping out of the retainers' dwellings to breathe the cooler
air. Waiting-maids and slaves dipped for water into enormous earthen
vessels and carried it away in graceful jars; the free-men of the
household rested in groups after the fatigues of the day, chatting,
playing and singing. From the slaves' quarters in another court-yard came
confused sounds of singing hymns, with the shrill tones of the double
pipe and duller noise of the tabor--an invitation to dance; scolding and
laughter; the jubilant shouts of a girl led out to dance, and the shrieks
of a victim to the overseer's rod.
The servant's gateway, still hung with flowers and wreaths in honor of
Orion's recent return, was wide open for the coming and going of the
accountants and scribes, or of such citizens as came very willingly to
pay an evening call on their friends in the governor's household; for
there were always some officials near the Mukaukas' person who knew more
than other folks of the latest events in Church and State.
Ere long a considerable number of men had assembled to sit under the deep
wooden porch of the head-steward's dwelling, all taking eager part in the
conversation, which they would have found very enjoyable even without the
beer which their host offered them in honor of the great event of his
young lord's return; for what was ever dearer to Egyptians than a brisk
exchange of talk, at the same time heaping ridicule or scorn on their
unapproachable superiors in rank, and on all they deem enemies to their
creed or their country.
Many a trenchant word and many a witty jest must have been uttered this
evening, for hearty laughter and loud applause were incessant in the head
steward's porch; the captain of the guard at the gate cast envious and
impatient glances at the merry band, which he would gladly have joined;
but he could not yet leave his post. The messengers' horses were standing
saddled while their riders awaited their orders, there were supplicants
and traders to be admitted or turned away, and there were still a number
of persons lingering in the large vestibule of the governor's palace and
craving to speak with him, for it was well known in Memphis that during
the hot season the ailing Mukaukas granted audience only in the evening.
The Egyptians had not yet acquired full confidence in the Arab
government, and every one tried to avoid being handed over to its
representative; for none of its officials could be so wise or so just as
their old Mukaukas. How the suffering man found strength and time to keep
an eye on everything, it was hard to imagine; but the fact remained that
he himself looked into every decision. At the same time no one could be
sure of his affairs being settled out of hand unless he could get at the
governor himself.
Business hours were now over; the anxiety caused both by the delay in the
rising of the Nile and by the advent of the comet had filled the
waiting-rooms with more petitioners than usual. Deputations from town and
village magistrates had been admitted in parties; supplicants on private
business had gone in one by one; and most of them had come forth content,
or at any rate well advised. Only one man still lingered,--a countryman
whose case had long been awaiting settlement--in the hope that a gift to
the great man's doorkeeper, of a few drachmae out of his poverty might at
length secure him the fruit of his long patience--when the chamberlain,
bidding him return on the morrow, officiously flung open the high doors
that led to the Mukaukas' apartments, to admit the Arab merchant, in
consideration of Haschim's gold piece which had come to him through his
cousin the dragoman. Haschim, however, had observed the countryman, and
insisted on his being shown in first. This was done, and a few minutes
later the peasant came out satisfied, and gratefully kissed the Arab's
hand.
Then the chamberlain led the old merchant, and the men who followed him
with a heavy bale, into a magnificent anteroom to wait; and his patience
was put to a severe test before his name was called and he could show the
governor his merchandise.
The Mukaukas, in fact, after signifying by a speechless nod that he would
presently receive the merchant--who came well recommended--had retired to
recreate himself, and was now engaged in a game of draughts, heedless of
those whom he kept waiting. He reclined on a divan covered with a sleek
lioness' skin, while his young antagonist sat opposite on a low stool,
The doors of the room, facing the Nile, where he received petitioners
were left half open to admit the fresher but still warm evening-air. The
green velarium or awning, which during the day had screened off the sun's
rays where the middle of the ceiling was open to the sky, was now rolled
back, and the moon and stars looked down into the room. It was well
adapted to its purpose as a refuge from the heat of the summer day, for
the walls were lined with cool, colored earthenware tiles, the floor was
a brightly-tinted mosaic of patterns on a ground of gold glass, and in
the circular central ornament of this artistic pavement stood the real
source of freshness: a basin, two man's length across, of brown porphyry
flecked with white, from which a fountain leaped, filling the surrounding
air with misty spray. A few stools, couches and small tables, all of
cool-looking metal, formed the sole furniture of this lofty apartment
which was brilliantly lighted by numerous lamps.
A light air blew in through the open roof and doors, made the lamps
flicker, and played with Paula's brown hair as she sat absorbed, as it
seemed, in the game. Orion, who stood behind her, had several times
endeavored to attract her attention, but in vain. He now eagerly offered
his services to fetch her a handkerchief to preserve her from a chill;
this, however, she shortly and decidedly declined, though the breeze came
up damp from the river and she had more than once drawn her peplos more
closely across her bosom.
The young man set his teeth at this fresh repulse. He did not know that
his mother had told Paula what he had yesterday agreed to, and could not
account for the girl's altered behavior. All day she had treated him with
icy coldness, had scarcely answered his questions with a distant "Yes,"
or "No;" and to him, the spoilt favorite of women, this conduct had
become more and more intolerable. Yes, his mother had judged her rightly:
she allowed herself to be swayed in a most extraordinary manner by her
moods; and now even he was to feel the insolence of her haughtiness, of
which he had as yet seen nothing. This repellent coldness bordered on
rudeness and he had no mind to submit to it for long. It was with deep
vexation that he watched every turn of her hand, every movement of her
body, and the varying expression of her face; and the more the image of
this proud maiden sank into his heart the more lovely and perfect he
thought her, and the greater grew his desire to see her smile once more,
to see her again as sweetly womanly as she had been but yesterday. Now
she was like nothing so much as a splendid marble statue, though he knew
indeed that it had a soul--and what a glorious task it would be to free
this fair being from herself, as it were, from the foolish tempers that
enslaved her, to show her--by severity if need should be--what best
beseems a woman, a maiden.
He became more and more exclusively absorbed in watching the young girl,
as his mother--who was sitting with Dame Susannah on a couch at some
little distance from the players--observed with growing annoyance, and
she tried to divert his attention by questions and small errands, so as
to give his evident excitement a fresh direction.
Who could have thought, yesterday morning, that her darling would so soon
cause her fresh vexation and anxiety.
He had come home just such a man as she and his father could have wished:
independent and experienced in the ways of the great world. In the
Capital he had, no doubt, enjoyed all that seems pleasant in the eyes of
a wealthy youth, but in spite of that he had remained fresh and
open-hearted even to the smallest things; and this was what most rejoiced
his father. In him there was no trace of the satiety, the blunted faculty
for enjoyment, which fell like a blight on so many men of his age and
rank. He could still play as merrily with little Mary, still take as much
pleasure in a rare flower or a fine horse, as before his departure. At
the same time he had gained keen insight into the political situation of
the time, into the state of the empire and the court, into
administration, and the innovations in church matters; it was a joy to
his father to hear him discourse; and he assured his wife that he had
learnt a great deal from the boy, that Orion was on the high road to be a
great statesman and was already quite capable of taking his father's
place.
When Neforis confessed how large a sum in debts Orion had left in
Constantinople the old man put his hand in his purse with a sort of
pride, delighted to find that his sole remaining heir knew how to spend
the immense wealth which to him was now a burden rather than a
pleasure--to make good use of it, as he himself had done in his day, and
display a magnificence of which the lustre was reflected on him and on
his name.
"With him, at any rate," said the old man, "one gets something for the
money. His horses cost a great deal but he knows how to win with them;
his entertainments swallow up a pretty sum, but they gain him respect
wherever he goes. He brought me a letter from the Senator Justinus, and
the worthy man tells me what a leading part he plays among the gilded
youth of the Capital. All this is not to be had for nothing, and it will
be cheap in the end. What need we care about a hundred talents more or
less! And there is something magnanimous in the lad that has given him
the spirit to feel that."
And it was not a hale old grey-beard who spoke thus, but a broken man,
whose only joy it was to lavish on his son the riches which he had long
been incapable of enjoying. The high-spirited and gifted youth, scarcely
more than a boy in years, whom he had sent to the Capital with no small
misgivings, must have led a far less lawless life than might have been
expected; of this the ruddy tinge in his sunburnt cheeks was ample
guarantee, the vigorous solidity of his muscles, and the thick waves of
his hair, which was artificially curled and fell in a fringe, as was then
the fashion, over his high brow, giving him a certain resemblance to the
portraits of Antinous, the handsomest youth in the time of the Emperor
Hadrian. Even his mother owned that he looked like health itself, and no
member of the Imperial family could be more richly, carefully and
fashionably dressed than her darling. But even in the humblest garb he
would have been a handsome--a splendid youth, and his mother's pride!
When he left home there was still a smack of the provincial about him;
but now every kind of awkwardness had vanished, and wherever he might
go--even in the Capital, he was certain to be one of the first to attract
observation and approval.
And what had he not known in his city experience? The events of half a
century had followed each other with intoxicating rapidity in the course
of the thirty months he had spent there. The greater the excitement, the
greater the pleasure was the watchword of his time; and though he had
rioted and revelled on the shores of the Bosphorus if ever man did, still
the pleasures of feasting and of love, or of racing with his own
victorious horses--all of which he had enjoyed there to the full--were as
child's play compared with the nervous tension to which he had been
strung by the appalling events he had witnessed on all sides. How petty
was the excitement of an Alexandrian horse-race! Whether Timon or Ptolemy
or he himself should win--what did it matter? It was a fine thing no
doubt to carry off the crown in the circus at Byzantium, but there were
other and soul-stirring crises there beyond those which were bound up
with horses or chariots. There a throne was the prize, and might cost the
blood and life of thousands!--What did a man bring home from the churches
in the Nile valley? But if he crossed the threshold of St. Sophia's in
Constantinople he often might have his blood curdled, or bring home--what
matter?--bleeding wounds, or even be carried home--a corpse.
Three times had he seen the throne change masters. An emperor and an
empress had been stripped of the purple and mutilated before his eyes.
Aye, then and there he had had real and intense excitement to thrill him
to the marrow and quick. As for the rest! Well, yes, he had had more
trivial pleasures too. He had not been received as other Egyptians were:
half-educated philosophers--who called themselves Sages and assumed a
mystic and pompously solemn demeanor, Astrologers, Rhetoricians,
poverty-stricken but witty and venemous satirists, physicians making a
display of the learning of their forefathers, fanatical
theologians--always ready to avail themselves of other weapons than
reason and dogma in their bitter contests over articles of faith, hermits
and recluses--as foul in mind as they were dirty in their persons,
corn-merchants and usurers with whom it was dangerous to conclude a
bargain without witnesses. Orion was none of these. As the handsome,
genial, and original-minded son of the rich and noble Governor, Mukaukas
George, he was welcomed as a sort of ambassador; whatever the golden
youth of the city allowed themselves was permitted to him. His purse was
as well lined as theirs, his health and vigor far more enduring; and his
horses had beaten theirs in three races, though he drove them himself and
did not trust them to paid charioteers. The "rich Egyptian," the "New
Antinous," "handsome Orion," as he was called, could never be spared from
feast or entertainment. He was a welcome guest at the first houses in the
city, and in the palace and the villa of the Senator Justinus, an old
friend of his father, he was as much at home as a son of the house.
It was under his roof, and the auspices of his kindhearted wife Martina,
that he made acquaintance with the fair Heliodora, the widow of a nephew
of the Senator; and the whole city had been set talking of the tender
intimacy Orion had formed with the beautiful young woman whose rigid
virtue had hitherto been a subject of admiration no less than her fair
hair and the big jewels with which she loved to set off her simple but
costly dress. And many a fair Byzantine had striven for the young
Egyptian's good graces before Heliodora had driven them all out of the
field. Still, she had not yet succeeded in enslaving Orion deeply and
permanently; and when, last evening, he had assured his mother that she
was not mistress of his heart he spoke truly.
His conduct in the Capital had not certainly been exemplary, but he had
never run wild, and had enjoyed the respect not only of his companions in
pleasure, but of grave and venerable men whom he had met in the house of
Justinus, and who sang the praises of his intelligence and eagerness to
learn. As a boy he had been a diligent scholar, and here he let no
opportunity slip. Not least had he cultivated his musical talents in the
Imperial city, and had acquired a rare mastery in singing and playing the
lute.
He would gladly have remained some time longer at the Capital, but at
last the place grew too hot to hold him-mainly on his father's account.
The conviction that George had largely contributed to the disaffection of
Egypt for the Byzantine Empire and had played into the hands of the
irresistible and detested upstart Arabs, had found increasing acceptance
in the highest circles, especially since Cyrus--the deposed and now
deceased Patriarch of Alexandria--had retired to Constantinople. Orion's
capture was in fact already decided on, when the Senator Justinus and
some other friends had hinted a warning which he had acted on just in
time.
His father's line of conduct had placed him in great peril; but he owed
him no grudge for it--indeed, he most deeply approved of it. A thousand
times had he witnessed the contempt heaped on the Egyptians by the
Greeks, and the loathing and hatred of the Orthodox for the Monophysite
creed of his fellow-countrymen.
He had with difficulty controlled his wrath as he had listened again and
again to the abuse and scorn poured out on his country and people by
gentle and simple, laymen and priests, even in his presence; regarding
him no doubt as one of themselves--a Greek in whose eyes everything
"Barbarian" was as odious and as contemptible as in their own.
But the blood of his race flowed in the veins of the "new Antinous" who
could sing Greek songs so well and with so pure an accent; every insult
to his people was stamped deep in his heart, every sneer at his faith
revived his memory of the day when the Melchites had slain his two
brothers. And these bloody deeds, these innumerable acts of oppression by
which the Greek; had provoked and offended the schismatic Egyptian and
hunted them to death, were now avenged by his father. It lifted up his
heart and made him proud to think of it. He showed his secret soul to the
old man who was as much surprised as delighted at what he found there;
for he had feared that Orion might not be able wholly to escape the
powerful influences of Greek beguilements;--nay, he had often felt
anxious lest his own son might disapprove of his having surrendered to
the Arab conquerors the province entrusted to his rule, and concluded a
peace with them.
The Mukaukas now felt himself as one with Orion, and from time to time
looked tenderly up at him from the draught-board. Neforis was doing her
best to entertain the mother of her son's future bride, and divert her
attention from his strange demeanor. She seemed indeed to be successful,
for Dame Susannah agreed to everything she said; but she betrayed the
fact that she was keeping a sharp watch by suddenly asking: "Does your
husband's lofty niece not think us worthy of a single word?"
"Oh no!" said Neforis bitterly. "I only hope she may soon find some other
people to whom she can behave more graciously. You may depend upon it I
will put no obstacle in her way."
Then she brought the conversation round to Katharina, and the widow told
her that her brother-in-law, Chrysippus, was now in Memphis with his two
little daughters. They were to go away on the morrow, so the young girl
had been obliged to devote herself to them: "And so the poor child is
sitting there at this minute," she lamented, "and must keep those two
little chatter-boxes quiet while she is longing to be here instead."
Orion quite understood these last words; he asked after the young girl,
and then added gaily:
"She promised me a collar yesterday for my little white keepsake from
Constantinople. Fie! Mary, you should not tease the poor little beast."
"No, let the dog go," added the widow, addressing the governor's little
granddaughter, who was trying to make the recalcitrant dog kiss her doll.
"But you know, Orion, this tiny creature is really too delicate for such
a big man as you are! You should give him to some pretty young lady and
then he would fulfil his destiny! And Katharina is embroidering him a
collar; I ought not to tell her little secret, but it is to have gold
stars on a blue ground."
"Because Orion is a star," cried the little girl. "So she is working
nothing but Orions."
"But fortunately there is but one star of my name," observed he. "Pray
tell her that Dame Susa."
The child clapped her hands. "He does not choose to have any other star
near him!" she exclaimed.
The widow broke in: "Little simpleton! I know people who cannot even bear
to have a likeness traced between themselves and any one else.--But this
you must permit, Orion--you were quite right just now, Neforis; his mouth
and brow might have been taken from his father's face."
The remark was quite accurate; and yet it would have been hard to imagine
two men more unlike than the bright youth full of vitality, and the
languid old man on the couch, to whom even the small exertion of moving
the men was an effort. The Mukaukas might once have been like his son,
but in some long past time. Thin grey locks now only covered one half of
his bald head, and of his eyes, which, thirty years since, had sparkled
perhaps as keenly as Orion's, there was usually nothing, or very little
to be seen; for the heavy lids always drooped over them as though they
had lost the power to open, and this gave his handsome but deathly-pale
face a somewhat owl-like look. It was not morose, however; on the
contrary the mingled lines of suffering and of benevolent kindliness
resulted in an expression only of melancholy. The mouth and flabby cheeks
were as motionless as though they were dead. Grief, anxiety and alarms
seemed to have passed over them with a paralysing hand and had left their
trace there. He looked like a man weary unto death, and still living only
because fate had denied him the grace to die. Indeed, he had often been
taken for dead by his family when he had dipped too freely into a certain
little blood-stone box to take too many of the white opium-pills, one of
which he placed between his colorless lips at long intervals, even during
his game of draughts.
He lifted each piece slowly, like a sleeper with his eyes half shut; and
yet his opponent could not hold her own against his wary tactics and was
defeated by him now for the third time, though her uncle himself called
her a good player. It was easy to read in her high, smooth brow and
dark-blue eyes with their direct gaze, that she could think clearly and
decisively, and also feel deeply. But she seemed wilful too, and
contradictory--at any rate to-day; for when Orion pointed out some move
to her she rarely took his advice, but with set lips, pushed the piece
according to her own, rarely wiser, judgment. It was quite plain that she
was refractory under the guidance of this--especially of this counsellor.
The bystanders could not fail to see the girl's repellent manner and
Orion's eager attempts to propitiate her; and for this reason Neforis was
glad when, just as her husband had finished the third game, and had
pushed the men together on the board with the back of his hand, his
chamberlain reminded him that the Arab was without, awaiting his pleasure
with growing impatience. The Mukaukas answered only by a sign, drew his
long caftan of the finest wool closer around him, and pointed to the
doors and the open roof. The rest of the party had long felt the chill of
the damp night air that blew through the room from the river, but knowing
that the father suffered more from heat than from anything, they had all
willingly endured the draught. Now, however, Orion called the slaves, and
before the strangers were admitted the doors were closed and the roof
covered.
Paula rose; the governor lay motionless and kept his eyes apparently
closed; he must, however, have seen what was going forward through an
imperceptible slit, for he turned first to Paula and then to the other
women saying: "Is it not strange?--Most old folks, like children, seek
the sun, and love to sit, as the others play, in its heat. While
I--something that happened to me years ago--you know;--and it seemed to
freeze my blood. Now it never gets warm, and I feel the contrast between
the coolness in here and the heat outside most acutely, almost as a pain.
The older we grow the more ready we are to abandon to the young the
things we ourselves used most to enjoy. The only thing which we old folks
do not willingly relinquish is personal comfort, and I thank you for
enduring annoyances so patiently for the sake of securing mine.--It is a
terrific summer! You, Paula, from the heights of Lebanon, know what ice
is. How often have I wished that I could have a bed of snow. To feel
myself one with that fresh, still coldness would be all I wish for! The
cold air which you dread does me good. But the warmth of youth rebels
against everything that is cool."
This was the first long sentence the Mukaukas had uttered since the
beginning of the game. Orion listened respectfully to the end, but then
he said with a laugh: "But there are some young people who seem to take
pleasure in being cool and icy--for what cause God alone knows!"
As he spoke he looked the girl at whom the words were aimed, full in the
face; but she turned silently and proudly away, and an angry shade passed
over her lovely features.
CHAPTER V.
When the Arab was at last admitted to the governor's presence his
attendants unfolded a hanging before him. The giant Masdakite did the
chief share of the work; but as soon as the Mukaukas caught sight of the
big man, with his bushy, mane-like hair, and a dagger and a battle-axe
stuck through his belt, he cried out:
"Away, away with him! That man--those weapons--I will not look at the
hanging till he is gone."
His hands were trembling, and the merchant at once desired his faithful
Rustem, the most harmless of mortals, to quit the room. The governor,
whose sensitive nerves had been liable to such attacks of panic ever
since an exiled Greek had once attempted to murder him, now soon
recovered his composure, and looked with great admiration at the hanging
round which the family were standing. They all confessed they had never
seen anything like it, and the vivacious Dame Susannah proposed to send
for her daughter and her visitors; but it was already late, and her house
was so far from the governor's that she gave that up. The father and son
had already heard of this marvellous piece of work, which had formed part
of the plunder taken by the Arab conquerors of the Persian Empire at the
sack of the "White Tower"--the royal palace of Madam, the capital of the
Sassanidze. They knew that it had been originally 300 ells long and 60
ells wide, and had heard with indignation that the Khaliff Omar, who
always lived and dressed and ate like the chief of a caravan, and looked
down with contempt on all such objects of luxury, had cut this
inestimable treasure of art into pieces and divided it among the
Companions of the Prophet.
Haschim explained to them that this particular fragment had been the
share of the booty allotted to Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law. Haschim
himself had seen the work before its dismemberment at Madain, where it
hung on the wall of the magnificent throne-room, and subsequently, at
Medina.
His audience eagerly requested him to describe the other portions; he,
however, seemed somewhat uneasy, looking down at his bare feet which were
standing on the mosaic pavement, damp from the fountain; for, after the
manner of his nation, he had left his shoes in the outer room. The
governor had noticed the old man's gestures as he repeatedly put his hand
to his mouth, and while his wife, Orion, and the widow were besieging the
merchant with questions, he whispered a few words to one of the slaves.
The man vanished, and returned bringing in, by his master's orders, a
long strip of carpet which he laid in front of the Arab's brown and
strong but delicately-formed feet.
A wonderful change came over the merchant's whole being as this was done.
He drew himself up with a dignity which none of those present had
suspected in the man who had so humbly entered the room and so diligently
praised his wares; an expression of satisfaction overspread his calm,
mild features, a sweet smile parted his lips, and his kind eyes sparkled
through tears like those of a child unexpectedly pleased. Then he bowed
before the Mukaukas, touching his brow, lips and breast with the
finger-tips of the right hand to express: "All my thoughts, words and
feelings are devoted to you,"--while he said: "Thanks, Son of Menas. That
was the act of Moslem."
"Of a Christian!" cried Orion hastily. But his father shook his head
gently, and said, slowly and impressively: "Only of a man."
"Of a man," repeated the merchant, and then he added thoughtfully: "Of a
man! Yes, that is the highest mark so long as we are what we ought to be
The image of the one God. Who is more compassionate than He? And every
mother's son who is likewise compassionate, is like him."
"Another Christian rule, thou strange Moslem!" said Orion interrupting
him.
"And yet," said Haschim, with tranquil dignity, "it corresponds word for
word with the teaching of the Best of men--our Prophet. I am one of those
who knew him here on earth. His brother's smallest pain filled his soft
heart with friendly sympathy; his law insists on charity, even towards
the shrub by the, wayside; he pronounces it mortal sin to injure it, and
every Moslem must obey him. Compassion for all is the command of the
Prophet. . . ." Here the Arab was suddenly and roughly interrupted;
Paula, who, till now, had been leaning against a pilaster, contemplating
the hanging and silently listening to the conversation, hastily stepped
nearer to the old man, and with flaming cheeks and flashing eyes pointed
at him wrathfully, while she exclaimed in a trembling voice-heedless
alike of the astonished and indignant bystanders, and of the little dog
which flew at the Arab, barking furiously:
"You--you, the followers of the false prophet--you, the companions of the
bloodhound Khalid--you and Charity! I know you! I know what you did in
Syria. With these eyes have I seen you, and your bloodthirsty women, and
the foam on your raging lips. Here I stand to bear witness against you
and I cast it in your teeth: You broke faith in Damascus, and the victims
of your treachery--defenceless women and tender infants as well as
men--you killed with the sword or strangled with your hands. You--you the
Apostle of Compassion?--have you ever heard of Abyla? You, the friend of
your Prophet--I ask you what did you, who so tenderly spare the tree by
the wayside, do to the innocent folk of Abyla, whom you fell upon like
wolves in a sheepfold? You--you and Compassionate!" The vehement girl, to
whom no one had ever shown any pity, and on whose soul the word had
fallen like a mockery, who for long hours had been suffering suppressed
and torturing misery, felt it a relief to give free vent to the anguish
of her soul; she ended with a hard laugh, and waved her hand round her
head as though to disperse a swarm of gadflies.
What a woman!
Orion's gaze was fixed on her in horror--but in enchantment. Yes, his
mother had judged her rightly. No gentle, tender-hearted woman laughed
like that; but she was grand, splendid, wonderful in her wrath. She
reminded him of the picture of the goddess of vengeance, by Apelles,
which he had seen in Constantinople. His mother shrugged her shoulders
and cast a meaning glance at the widow, and even his father was startled
at the sight. He knew what had roused her; still he felt that he could
not permit this, and he recalled the excited girl to her senses by
speaking her name, half-reproachfully and half-regretfully, at first
quite gently but then louder and more severely.
She started like a sleep-walker suddenly awaked from her trance, passed
her hand over her eyes, and said, as she bowed her head before the
governor:
"Forgive me, Uncle, I am sorry for what has occurred--but it was too much
for me. You know what my past has been, and when I am reminded--when I
must listen to the praises even of the wretches to whom my father and
brother. . . ."
A loud sob interrupted her; little Mary was clinging to her and weeping.
Orion could hardly keep himself from hastening to her and clasping her in
his arms. Ah, how well her woman's weakness became the noble girl! How
strongly it drew him to her!
But Paula soon recovered from it; even while the governor was soothing
her with kind words she mastered her violent agitation, and said gently,
though her tears still quietly flowed: "Let me go to my room, I
beg. . . ."
"Good-night, then, child," said the Mukaukas affectionately, and Paula
turned towards the door with a silent greeting to the rest of the party;
but the Moslem detained her and said:
"I know who you are, noble daughter of Thomas, and I have heard that your
brother was the bridegroom who had come to Abyla to solemnize his
marriage with the daughter of the prefect of Tripolis. Alas, alas! I
myself was there with my merchandise at the fair, when a maddened horde
of my fellow-believers fell upon the peaceful town. Poor child, poor
child! Your father was the greatest and most redoubtable of our foes.
Whether still on earth or in heaven he yet, no doubt honors our sword as
we honor his. But your brother, whom we sent to his grave as a
bridegroom--he cursed us with his dying breath. You have inherited his
rancor; and when it surges up against me, a Moslem, I can do no more than
bow my head and do penance for the guilt of those whose blood runs in my
veins and whose faith I confess. I have nothing to plead--no, noble
maiden, nothing that can excuse the deed of Abyla. There--there alone it
was the fate of my grey hairs to be ashamed of my fellow-Moslems--believe
me, maiden, it was grievous to me. War, and the memory of many friends
slain and of wealth lightly plundered had unchained men's passion; and
where passion's pinions wave, whether in the struggle for mine and thine
or for other possessions, ever since the days of Cain and Abel, it is
always and everywhere the same."
Paula, who till now had stood motionless in front of the old man, shook
her head and said bitterly:
"But all this will not give me back my father and brother. You yourself
look like a kind-hearted man; but for the future--if you are as just as
you are kind--find out to whom you are speaking before you talk of the
compassion of the Moslems!"
She once more bowed good-night and left the room. Orion followed her;
come what might he must see her. But he returned a few minutes after,
breathing hard and with his teeth set. He had taken her hand, had tried
to tell her all a loving heart could find to say; but how sharply, how
icily had he been repulsed, with what an air of intolerable scorn had she
turned her back upon him! And now that he was in their midst again he
scarcely heard his father express his regrets that so painful a scene
should have occurred under his roof, while the Arab said that he could
quite understand why the daughter of Thomas should have been betrayed to
anger: the massacre of Abyla was quite inexcusable.
"But then," the old man went on, "in what war do not such things take
place? Even the Christian is not always master of himself: you yourself I
know, lost two promising sons--and who were the murderers?
Christians--your own fellow-believers. . ."
"The bitterest foes of my beliefs," said the governor slowly, and every
syllable was a calm and dignified reproof to the Moslem for supposing
that the creed of those who had killed his sons could be his. As he spoke
he opened his eyes wide with the look of those hard, opaquely-glittering
stones which his ancestors had been wont to set for eyes in their
portrait statues. But he suddenly closed them again and said
indifferently:
"At what price do you value your hanging? I have a fancy to buy it. Name
your lowest terms: I cannot bear to bargain."
"I had thought of asking five hundred thousand drachmae," said the
dealer. "Four hundred thousand drachmae, and it is yours."
The governor's wife clasped her hands at such a sum and made warning
signals to her husband, shaking her head disapprovingly, when Orion,
making a great effort to show that he too took an interest in this
important transaction, said: "It may be worth three hundred thousand."
"Four hundred thousand," repeated the merchant coolly. "Your father
wished to know the lowest price, and I am asking no more than is right.
The rubies and garnets in these grapes, the pearls in the myrtle
blossoms, the turquoises in the forget-me-nots, the diamonds hanging as
dew on the grass, the emeralds which give brilliancy to the green
leaves--this one especially, which is an immense stone--alone are worth
more."
"Then why do you not cut them out of the tissue?" asked Neforis.
"Because I cannot bear to destroy this noble work," replied the Arab. "I
will sell it as it is or not at all." At these words the Mukaukas nodded
to his son, heedless of the disapprobation his wife persisted in
expressing, asked for a tablet which lay near the chessboard, and on it
wrote a few words.
"We are agreed," he said to the merchant. "The treasurer, Nilus, will
hand you the payment to-morrow morning on presenting this order."
A fresh emotion now took possession of Orion, and crying: "Splendid!
Splendid!" he rushed up to his father and excitedly kissed his hand.
Then, turning to his mother, whose eyes were full of tears of vexation,
he put his hand under her chin, kissed her brow, and exclaimed with
triumphant satisfaction: "This is how we and the emperor do business!
When the father is the most liberal of men the son is apt to look small.
Meaning no harm, worthy merchant! As far as the hanging is concerned, it
may be more precious than all the treasures of Croesus; but you have
something yet to give us into the bargain before you load your camels
with our gold: Tell us what the whole work was like before it was
divided."
The Moslem, who had placed the precious tablet in his girdle, at once
obeyed this request.
"You know how enormous were its length and breadth," he began. "The hall
it decorated could hold several thousand guests, besides space for a
hundred body guards to stand on each side of the throne. As many weavers,
embroiderers and jewellers as there are days in the year worked on it,
they say, for the years of a man's life. The woven picture represented
paradise as the Persians imagine it--full of green trees, flowers and
fruits. Here you can still see a fragment of the sparkling fountain
which, when seen from a distance, with its sprinkling of diamonds,
sapphires and emeralds, looked like living water. Here the pearls
represent the foam on a wave. These leaves, cut across here, belonged to
a rose-bush which grew by the fountain of Eden before the evil of the
first rain fell on the world.
"Originally all roses were white, but as the limbs of the first woman
shone with more dazzling whiteness they blushed for shame, and since then
there are crimson as well as white roses. So the Persians say."
"And this--our piece?" asked Orion.
"This," replied the merchant, with a pleasant glance at the young man,
"was the very middle of the hanging. On the left you see the judgment at
the bridge of Chinvat. The damned were not represented, but only the
winged, Fravashi, Genii who, as the Persians believe, dwell one with each
mortal as his guardian angel through life, united to him but separable.
They were depicted in stormy pursuit of the damned--the miscreant
followers of Angramainjus, the evil Spirit, of whom you must imagine a
vast multitude fleeing before them. The souls in bliss, the pure and
faithful servants of the Persian divinity Auramazda, enter with songs of
triumph into the flower-decked pleasure-garden, while at their feet the
spirits were shown of those who were neither altogether cursed nor
altogether blessed, vanishing in humble silence into a dusky grove. The
pure enjoyed the gifts of paradise in peace and contentment.--All this
was explained to me by a priest of the Fire-worshippers. Here, you see,
is a huge bunch of grapes which one of the happy ones is about to pluck;
the hand is uninjured--the arm unfortunately is cut through; but here is
a splendid fragment of the wreath of fruit and flowers which framed the
whole. That emerald forming a bud--how much do you think it is worth?"
"A magnificent stone!" cried Orion. "Even Heliodora has nothing to equal
it.--Well, father, what do you say is its value?"
"Great, very great," replied the Mukaukas. "And yet the whole unmutilated
work would be too small an offering for Him to whom I propose to offer
it."
"To the great general, Amru?" asked Orion.
"No child," said the governor decidedly. "To the great, indivisible and
divine Person of Jesus Christ and his Church."
Orion looked down greatly disappointed; the idea of seeing this splendid
gem hidden away in a reliquary in some dim cupboard did not please him:
He could have found a much more gratifying use for it.
Neither his father nor his mother observed his dissatisfaction, for
Neforis had rushed up to her husband's couch, and fallen on her knees by
his side, covering his cold, slender hand with kisses, as joyful as
though this determination had relieved her of a heavy burden of dread:
"Our souls, our souls, George! For such a gift--only wait--you will be
forgiven all, and recover your lost peace!"
The governor shrugged his shoulders and said nothing; the hanging was
rolled up and locked into the tablinum by Orion; then the Mukaukas bid
the chamberlain show the Arab and his followers to quarters for the
night.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Abandon to the young the things we ourselves used most to enjoy
Spoilt to begin with by their mothers, and then all the women
Talk of the wolf and you see his tail
Temples of the old gods were used as quarries
Women are indeed the rock ahead in this young fellow's life
THE BRIDE OF THE NILE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 2.
CHAPTER VI.
Pangs of soul and doubtings of conscience had, in fact, prompted the
governor to purchase the hanging and he therefore might have been glad if
it had cost him still dearer. The greater the gift the better founded his
hope of grace and favor from the recipient! And he had grounds for being
uneasy and for asking himself whether he had acted rightly. Revenge was
no Christian virtue, but to let the evil done to him by the Melchites go
unpunished when the opportunity offered for crushing them was more than
he could bring himself to. Nay, what father whose two bright young sons
had been murdered, but would have done as he did? That fearful blow had
struck him in a vital spot. Since that day he had felt himself slowly
dying; and that sense of weakness, those desperate tremors, the
discomforts and suffering which blighted every hour of his life, were
also to be set down to the account of the Melchite tyrants.
His waning powers had indeed only been kept up by his original vigor and
his burning thirst for revenge, and fate had allowed him to quench it in
a way which, as time went on, seemed too absolute to his peace-loving
nature. Though not indeed by his act, still with his complicity he saw
the Byzantine Empire bereft of the rich province which Caesar had
entrusted to his rule, saw the Greeks and everything that bore the name
of Melchite driven out of Egypt with ignominy--though he would gladly
have prevented it--in many places slain like dogs by the furious populace
who hailed the Moslems as their deliverers.
Thus all the evil he had invoked on the murderers of his children and the
oppressors and torturers of his people had come upon them; his revenge
was complete. But, in the midst of his satisfaction at this strange
fulfilment of the fervent wish of years, his conscience had lifted up its
voice; new, and hitherto unknown terrors had come upon him. He lacked the
strength of mind to be a hero or a reformer. Too great an event had been
wrought through his agency, too fearful a doom visited on thousands of
men! The Christian Faith--to him the highest consideration--had been too
greatly imperilled by his act, for the thought that he had caused all
this to be calmly endurable. The responsibility proved too heavy for his
shoulders; and whenever he repeated to himself that it was not he who had
invited the Arabs into the land, and that he must have been crushed in
the attempt to repel them, he could hear voices all round him denouncing
him as the man who had surrendered his native land to them, and he
fancied himself environed by dangers--believing those who spoke to him of
assassins sent forth by the Byzantines to kill him.--But even more
appalling, was his dread of the wrath of Heaven against the man who had
betrayed a Christian country to the Infidels. Even his consciousness of
having been, all his life long, a right-minded, just man could not
fortify him against this terror; there was but one thing which could
raise his quelled spirit: the white pillules which had long been as
indispensable to him as air and water. The kind-hearted old bishop of
Memphis, Plotinus, and his clergy had forgiveness for all; the Patriarch
Benjamin, on the contrary, had treated him as a reprobate sentenced to
eternal damnation, though at the time of this prelate's exile in the
desert he had hailed the Arabs as their deliverers from the tyranny of
the Melchites, and though George had principally contributed to his
recall and reinstatement, and had therefore counted on his support. And,
although the Mukaukas could clearly see through the secondary motives
which influenced the Patriarch, he nevertheless believed that Benjamin's
office as Shepherd of souls gave him power to close the Gates of Heaven
against any sheep in his flock.
The more firmly the Arabs took root in his land, the wiser their rule,
and the, more numerous the Egyptian converts from the Cross to the
Crescent, the greater he deemed his guilt; and when, after the
accomplishment of his work of vengeance--his double treason as the Greeks
called it--instead of the wrath of God, everything fell to his lot which
men call happiness and the favors of fortune, the superstitious man
feared lest this was the wages of the Devil, into whose clutches his
hasty compact with the Moslems had driven so many Christian souls.
He had unexpectedly fallen heir to two vast estates, and his excavators
in the Necropolis had found more gold in the old heathen tombs than all
the others put together. The Moslem Khaliff and his viceroy had left him
in office and shown him friendship and respect; the bulaites--[Town
councillors]--of the town had given him the cognomen of "the Just" by
acclamation of the whole municipality; his lands had never yielded
greater revenues; he received letters from his son's widow in her convent
full of happiness over the new and higher aims in life that she had
found; his grandchild, her daughter, was a creature whose bright and
lovely blossoming was a joy even to strangers; his son's frequent
epistles from Constantinople assured him that he was making progress in
all respects; and he did not forget his parents; for he was never weary
of reporting to them, of his own free impulse, every, pleasure he enjoyed
and every success he won.
Thus even in a foreign land he had lived with the father and mother who
to him were all that was noblest and dearest.
And Paula! Though his wife could not feel warmly towards her the old man
regarded her presence in the house as a happy dispensation to which he
owed many a pleasant hour, not only over the draughts-board.
All these things might indeed be the wages of Satan; but if indeed it
were so, he--George the Mukaukas--would show the Evil One that he was no
servant of his, but devoted to the Saviour in whose mercy he trusted.
With what fervent gratitude to the Almighty was his soul filled for the
return of such a son! Every impulse of his being urged him to give
expression to this feeling; his terrors and gratitude alike prompted him
to spend so vast a sum in order to dedicate a matchless gift to the
Church of Christ. He viewed himself as a prisoner of war whose ransom has
just been paid, as he handed to the merchant the tablet with the order
for the money; and when he was carried to bed, and his wife was not yet
weary of thanking him for his pious intention, he felt happier and more
light-hearted than he had done for many years. Generally he could hear
Paula walking up and down her room which was over his; for she went late
to rest, and in the silence of the night would indulge in sweet and
painful memories. How many loved ones a cruel fate had snatched from her!
Father, brother, her nearest relations and friends; all at once, by the
hand of the Moslems to whom he had abandoned her native land almost
without resistance.
"I do not hear Paula to-night," he remarked, glancing up as though he
missed something. "The poor child has no doubt gone to bed early after
what passed."
"Leave her alone!" said Neforis who did not like to be interrupted in her
jubilant effusiveness, and she shrugged her shoulders angrily. "How she
behaved herself again! We have heard a great deal too much about charity,
and though I do not want to boast of my own I am very ready to exercise
it--indeed, it is no more than my duty to show every kindness to a
destitute relation of yours. But this girl! She tries me too far, and
after all I am no more than human. I can have no pleasure in her
presence; if she comes into the room I feel as though misfortune had
crossed the threshold. Besides!--You never see such things; but Orion
thinks of her a great deal more than is good. I only wish she had been
safe out of the house!"
"Neforis!" her husband said in mild reproach; and he would have reproved
her more sharply but that since he had become a slave to opium he had
lost all power of asserting himself vigorously whether in small matters
or great.
Ere long the Mukaukas had fallen into an uneasy sleep; but he opened his
eyes more frequently than usual. He missed the light footfall overhead to
which he had been accustomed for these two years past; but she who was
wont to pace the floor above half the night through had not gone to rest
as he supposed. After the events of the evening she had indeed retired to
her room with tingling cheeks and burning eyes; but the slave-girls, who
paid little attention to a guest who was no more than endured and looked
on askance by their mistress, had neglected to open her window-shutters
after sundown, as she had requested, and the room was oppressively sultry
and airless. The wooden shutters felt hot to the touch, so did the linen
sheets over the wool mattrasses. The water in her jug, and even the
handkerchief she took up were warm. To an Egyptian all this would have
been a matter of course; but the native of Damascus had always passed the
summer in her father's country house on the heights of Lebanon, in cool
and lucent shade, and the all-pervading heat of the past day had been to
her intolerable.
Outside it was pleasant now; so without much reflection she pushed open
the shutter, wrapped a long, dark-hued kerchief about her head and stole
down the steep steps and out through a little side door into the
court-yard.
There she drew a deep breath and spread out her arms longingly, as though
she would fain fly far, far from thence; but then she dropped them again
and looked about her. It was not the want of fresh air alone that had
brought her out; no, what she most craved for was to open her oppressed
and rebellious heart to another; and here, in the servants' quarters,
there were two souls, one of which knew, understood and loved her, while
the other was as devoted to her as a faithful dog, and did errands for
her which were to be kept hidden from the governor's house and its
inhabitants.
The first was her nurse who had accompanied her to Egypt; the other was a
freed slave, her father's head groom, who had escorted the women with his
son, a lad, giving them shelter when, after the massacre of Abyla, they
had ventured out of their hiding-place, and after lurking for some time
in the valley of Lebanon, had found no better issue than to fly to Egypt
and put themselves under the protection of the Mukaukas, whose sister had
been Paula's father's first wife. She herself was the child of his second
marriage with a Syrian of high rank, a relation of the Emperor Heraclius,
who had died, quite young, shortly after Paula's birth.
Both these servants had been parted from her. Perpetua, the nurse, had
been found useful by the governor's wife, who soon discovered that size
was particularly skilled in weaving and who had made her superintendent
of the slave-girls employed at the loom; the old woman had willingly
undertaken the duties though she herself was free-born, for her first
point in life was to remain near her beloved foster-child. Hiram too, the
groom, and his son had found their place among the Mukaukas' household;
in the first instance to take charge of the five horses from her father's
stable which had brought the fugitives to Egypt, but afterwards--for the
governor was not slow to discern his skill in such matters--as a leech
for all sorts of beasts, and as an adviser is purchasing horses.
Paula wanted to speak with them both, and she knew exactly where to find
them; but she could not get to them without exposing herself to much that
was unpleasant, for the governor's free retainers and their friends, not
to mention the guard of soldiers who, now that the gates were closed,
were still sitting in parties to gossip; they would certainly not break
up for some time yet, since the slaves were only now bringing out the
soldiers' supper.
The clatter in the court-yard was unceasing, for every one who was free
to come out was enjoying the coolness of the night. Among them there were
no slaves; these had been sent to their quarters when the gates were
shut; but even in their dwellings voices were still audible.
With a beating heart Paula tried to see and hear all that came within the
ken of her keen eyes and ears. The growing moon lighted up half the
enclosure, the rest, so far as the shadow fell, lay in darkness. But in
the middle of a large semi-circle of free servants a fire was blazing,
throwing a fitful light on their brown faces; and now and again, as fresh
pine-cones were thrown in, it flared up and illuminated even the darker
half of the space before her. This added to her trepidation; she had to
cross the court-yard, as she hoped, unseen; for innocent and natural as
her proceedings were, she knew that her uncle's wife would put a wrong
construction on her nocturnal expedition.
At first Neforis had begged her husband to assist Paula in her search for
her father, of whose death no one had any positive assurance. But his
wife's urgency had not been needed: the Mukaukas, of his own free will,
had for a whole year done everything in his power to learn the truth as
to the lost man's end, from Christian or Moslem, till, many months since,
Neforis had declared that any further exertions in the matter were mere
folly, and her weak-willed husband had soon been brought to share her
views and give up the search for the missing hero. He had secured for
Paula, not without some personal sacrifice, much of her father's
property, had sold the landed estates to advantage, collected outstanding
debts wherever it was still possible, and was anxious to lay before her a
statement of what he had recovered for her. But she knew that her
interests were safe in his hands and was satisfied to learn that, though
she was not rich in the eyes of this Egyptian Croesus, she was possessed
of a considerable fortune. When once and again she had asked for a
portion of it to prosecute her search, the Mukaukas at once caused it to
be paid to her; but the third time he refused, with the best intentions
but quite firmly, to yield to her wishes. He said he was her Kyrios and
natural guardian, and explained that it was his duty to hinder her from
dissipating a fortune which she might some day find a boon or indeed
indispensable, in pursuit of a phantom--for that was what this search had
long since become.
[Kyrios: The woman's legal proxy, who represented her in courts of
justice. His presence gave her equal rights with a man in the eyes
of the Law.]
The money she had already spent he had replaced out of his own coffers.
This, she felt, was a noble action; still she urged him again and again
to grant her wish, but always in vain. He laid his hand with firm
determination on the wealth in his charge and would not allow her another
solidus for the sole and dearest aim of her life.
She seemed to submit; but her purpose of spending her all to recover any
trace of her lost parent never wavered in her determined soul. She had
sold a string of pearls, and for the price, her faithful Hiram had been
able first to make a long journey himself and then to send out a number
of messengers into various lands. By this time one at least might very
well have reached home with some news, and she must see the freed-man.
But how could she get to him undetected? For some minutes she stood
watching and listening for a favorable moment for crossing the
court-yard. Suddenly a blaze lighted up a face--it was Hiram's.
At this moment the merry semi-circle laughed loudly as with one voice;
she hastily made up her mind--drew her kerchief closer over her face, ran
quickly along the darker half of the quadrangle and, stooping low,
hurried across the moonlight towards the slaves' quarters.
At the entrance she paused; her heart throbbed violently. Had she been
observed? No.--There was not a cry, not a following footstep--every dog
knew her; the soldiers who were commonly on guard here had quitted their
posts and were sitting with their comrades round the fire.
The long building to the left was the weaving shop and her nurse Perpetua
lived there, in the upper story. But even here she must be cautious, for
the governor's wife often came out to give her orders to the workwomen,
and to see and criticise the produce of the hundred looms which were
always in motion, early and late. If she should be seen, one of the
weavers might only too probably betray the fact of her nocturnal visit.
They had not yet gone to rest, for loud laughter fell upon her ear from
the large sheds, open on all sides, which stood over the dyers' vats.
This class of the governor's people were also enjoying the cool night
after the fierce heat of the day, and the girls too had lighted a fire.
Paula must pass them in full moonshine--but not just yet; and she
crouched close to the straw thatch which stretched over the huge clay
water-jars placed here for the slave-girls to get drink from. It cast a
dark triangular shadow on the dusty ground that gleamed in the moonlight,
and thus screened her from the gaze of the girls, while she could hear
and see what was going on in the sheds.
The dreadful day of torture ending in a harsh discord was at end; and
behind it she looked back on a few blissful hours full of the promise of
new happiness;--beyond these lay a long period of humiliation, the sequel
of a terrible disaster. How bright and sunny had her childhood been, how
delightful her early youth! For long years of her life she had waked
every morning to new joys, and gone to rest every evening with sincere
and fervent thanksgivings, that had welled from her soul as freely and
naturally as perfume from a rose. How often had she shaken her head in
perplexed unbelief when she heard life spoken of as a vale of sorrows,
and the lot of man bewailed as lamentable. Now she knew better; and in
many a lonely hour, in many a sleepless night, she had asked herself
whether He could, indeed, be a kind and fatherly-loving God who could let
a child be born and grow up, and fill its soul with every hope, and then
bereave it of everything that was dear and desirable--even of hope.
But the hapless girl had been piously brought up; she could still believe
and pray; and lately it had seemed as though Heaven would grant that for
which her tender heart most longed: the love of a beloved and love-worthy
man. And now--now?
There she stood with an inconsolable sense of bereavement--empty-hearted;
and if she had been miserable before Orion's return, now she was far more
so; for whereas she had then been lonely she was now defrauded--she, the
daughter of Thomas, the relation and inmate of the wealthiest house in
the country; and close to her, from the rough hewn, dirty dyers' sheds
such clear and happy laughter rang out from a troop of wretched slave
wenches, always liable to the blows of the overseer's rod, that she could
not help listening and turning to look at the girls on whom such an
overflow of high spirits and light-heartedness was bestowed.
A large party had collected under the wide palm-thatched roof of the
dyeing shed-pretty and ugly, brown and fair, tall and short; some upright
and some bent by toil at the loom from early youth, but all young; not
one more than eighteen years old. Slaves were capital, bearing interest
in the form of work and of children. Every slave girl was married to a
slave as soon as she was old enough. Girls and married women alike were
employed in the weaving shop, but the married ones slept in separate
quarters with their husbands and children, while the maids passed the
night in large sleeping-barracks adjoining the worksheds. They were now
enjoying the evening respite and had gathered in two groups. One party
were watching an Egyptian girl who was scribbling sketches on a tablet;
the others were amusing themselves with a simple game. This consisted in
each one in turn flinging her shoe over her head. If it flew beyond a
chalk-line to which she turned her back she was destined soon to marry
the man she loved; if it fell between her and the mark she must yet have
patience, or would be united to a companion she did not care for.
The girl who was drawing, and round whom at least twenty others were
crowded, was a designer of patterns for weaving; she had too the gift
which had characterized her heathen ancestors, of representing faces in
profile, with a few simple lines, in such a way that, though often
comically distorted, they were easily recognizable. She was executing
these works of art on a wax tablet with a copper stylus, and the others
were to guess for whom they were meant.
One girl only sat by herself by the furthest post of the shed, and gazed
silently into her lap.
Paula looked on and could understand everything that was going forward,
though no coherent sentence was uttered and there was nothing to be heard
but laughter--loud, hearty, irresistible mirth. When a girl threw the
shoe far enough the youthful crowd laughed with all their might, each one
shouting the name of some one who was to marry her successful companion;
if the shoe fell within the line they laughed even louder than before,
and called out the names of all the oldest and dirtiest slaves. A dusky
Syrian had failed to hit the mark, but she boldly seized the chalk and
drew a fresh line between herself and the shoe so that it lay beyond, at
any rate; and their merriment reached a climax when a number of them
rushed up to wipe out the new line, a saucy, crisp-haired Nubian tossed
the shoe in the air and caught it again, while the rest could not cease
for delight in such a good joke and cried every name they could think of
as that of the lover for whom their companion had so boldly seized a
spoke in Fortune's wheel.
Some spirit of mirth seemed to have taken up his quarters in the draughty
shed; the group round the sketcher was not less noisy than the other. If
a likeness was recognized they were all triumphant, if not they cried the
names of this or that one for whom it might be intended. A storm of
applause greeted a successful caricature of the severest of the
overseers. All who saw it held their sides for laughing, and great was
the uproar when one of the girls snatched away the tablet and the rest
fell upon her to scuffle for it.
Paula had watched all this at first with distant amazement, shaking her
head. How could they find so much pleasure in such folly, in such
senseless amusements? When she was but a little child even she, of
course, could laugh at nothing, and these grown-up girls, in their
ignorance and the narrow limitations of their minds, were they not one
and all children still? The walls of the governor's house enclosed their
world, they never looked beyond the present moment--just like children;
and so, like children, they could laugh.
"Fate," thought she, "at this moment indemnifies them for the misfortune
of their birth and for a thousand days of misery, and presently they will
go tired and happy to bed. I could envy these poor creatures! If it were
permissible I would join them and be a child again."
The comic portrait of the overseer was by this time finished, and a
short, stout wench burst into a fit of uproarious and unquenchable
laughter before any of the rest. It came so naturally, too, from the very
depths of her plump little body that Paula, who had certainly not come
hither to be gay, suddenly caught the infection and had to laugh whether
she would or no. Sorrow and anxiety were suddenly forgotten, thought and
calculation were far from her; for some minutes she felt nothing but that
she, too, was laughing heartily, irrepressibly, like the young healthful
human creature that she was. Ah, how good it was thus to forget herself
for once! She did not put this into words, but she felt it, and she
laughed afresh when the girl who had been sitting apart joined the
others, and exclaimed something which was unintelligible to Paula, but
which gave a new impetus to their mirth.
The tall slight form of this maiden was now standing by the fire. Paula
had never seen her before and yet she was by far the handsomest of them
all; but she did not look happy and perhaps was in some pain, for she had
a handkerchief over her head which was tied at the top over the thick
fair hair as though she had the toothache. As she looked at her Paula
recovered herself, and as soon as she began to think merriment was at an
end. The slave-girls were not of this mind; but their laughter was less
innocent and frank than it had been; for it had found an object which
they would have done better to pass by.
The girl with the handkerchief over her head was a slave too, but she had
only lately come into the weaving-sheds after being employed for a long
time at needle work under two old women, widows of slaves. She had been
brought as an infant from Persia to Alexandria with her mother, by the
troops of Heraclius, after the conquest of Chosroes II.; and they had
been bought together for the Mukaukas. When her little one was but
thirteen the mother died under the yoke to which she was not born; the
child was a sweet little girl with a skin as white as the swan and thick
golden hair, which now shone with strange splendor in the firelight.
Orion had remarked her before his journey, and fascinated by the beauty
of the Persian girl, had wished to have her for his own. Servants and
officials, in unscrupulous collusion, had managed to transport her to a
country-house belonging to the Mukaukas on the other side of the Nile,
and there Orion had been able to visit her undisturbed as often as fancy
prompted him. The slave-girl, scarcely yet sixteen, ignorant and
unprotected, had not dared nor desired to resist her master's handsome
son, and when Orion had set out for Constantinople--heedless and weary
already of the girl who had nothing to give him but her beauty--Dame
Neforis found out her connection with her son and ordered the head
overseer to take care that the unhappy girl should not "ply her seductive
arts" any more. The man had carried out her instructions by condemning
the fair Persian, according to an ancient custom, to have her ears cut
off. After this cruel punishment the mutilated beauty sank into a state
of melancholy madness, and although the exorcists of the Church and other
thaumaturgists had vainly endeavored to expel the demon of madness, she
remained as before: a gentle, good-humored creature, quiet and diligent
at her work, under the women who had charge of her, and now in the common
work-shop. It was only when she was idle that her craziness became
evident, and of this the other girls took advantage for their own
amusement.
They now led Mandane to the fire, and with farcical reverence requested
her to be seated on her throne--an empty color cask, for she suffered
under the strange permanent delusion that she was the wife of the
Mukaukas George. They laughingly did her homage, craved some favor or
made enquiries as to her husband's health and the state of her affairs.
Hitherto a decent instinct of reserve had kept these poor ignorant
creatures from mentioning Orion's name in her presence, but now a
woolly-headed negress, a lean, spiteful hussy, went up to her, and said
with a horrible grimace:
"Oh, mistress, and where is your little son Orion?" The crazy girl did
not seem startled by the question; she replied very gravely: "I have
married him to the emperor's daughter at Constantinople."
"Hey day! A splendid match!" exclaimed the black girl. "Did you know that
the young lord was here again? He has brought home his grand wife to you
no doubt, and we shall see purple and crowns in these parts!"
These words brought a deep flush into the poor creature's face. She
anxiously pressed her hands on the bandage that covered her ears and
said: "Really Has he really come home?"
"Only quite lately," said another and more good-natured girl, to soothe
her.
"Do not believe her!" cried the negress. "And if you want to know the
latest news of him: Last night he was out boating on the Nile with the
tall Syrian. My brother, the boatman, was among the rowers; and he went
on finely with the lady I can tell you, finely. . . ."
"My husband, the great Mukaukas?" asked Mandane, trying to collect her
ideas.
"No. Your son Orion, who married the emperor's daughter," laughed the
negress.
The crazy girl stood up, looked about with a restless glance, and then,
as though she had not fully understood what had been said to her,
repeated: "Orion? Handsome Orion?"
"Aye, your sweet son, Orion!" they all shouted, as loud as though she
were deaf. Then the usually placable girl, holding her hand over her ear,
with the other hit her tormentor such a smack on her thick lips that it
resounded, while she shrieked out loud, in shrill tones:
"My son, did you say? My son Orion?--As if you did not know! Why, he was
my lover; yes, he himself said he was, and that was why they came and
bound me and cut my ears.--But you know it. But I do not love him--I
could, I might wish, I. . . ." She clenched her fists, and gnashed her
white teeth, and went on with panting breath:
"Where is he?--You will not tell me? Wait a bit--only wait. Oh, I am
sharp enough, I know you have him here.--Where is be? Orion, Orion, where
are you?"
She sprang away, ran through the sheds and lifted the lids of all the
color-vats, stooping low to look down into each as if she expected to
find him there, while the others roared with laughter.
Most of her companions giggled at this witless behavior; but some, who
felt it somewhat uncanny and whom the unhappy girl's bitter cry had
struck painfully, drew apart and had already organized some new
amusement, when a neat little woman appeared on the scene, clapping her
plump hands and exclaiming:
"Enough of laughter--now, to bed, you swarm of bees. The night is over
too soon in the morning, and the looms must be rattling again by sunrise.
One this way and one that, just like mice when the cat appears. Will you
make haste, you night-birds? Come, will you make haste?"
The girls had learnt to obey, and they hurried past the matron to their
sleeping-quarters. Perpetua, a woman scarcely past fifty, whose face wore
a pleasant expression of mingled shrewdness and kindness, stood pricking
up her ears and listening; she heard from the water-shed a peculiar low,
long-drawn Wheeuh!--a signal with which she was familiar as that by which
the prefect Thomas had been wont to call together his scattered household
from the garden of his villa on Mount Lebanon. It was now Paula who gave
the whistle to attract her nurse's attention.
Perpetua shook her head anxiously. What could have brought her beloved
child to see her at so late an hour? Something serious must have
occurred, and with characteristic presence of mind she called out, to
show that she had heard Paula's signal: "Now, make haste. Will you be
quick? Wheeuh! girls--wheeuh! Hurry, hurry!"
She followed the last of the slave-girls into the sleeping-room, and when
she had assured herself that they were all there but the crazy Persian
she enquired where she was. They had all seen her a few minutes ago in
the shed; so she bid them good-night and left them, letting it be
understood that she was about to seek the missing girl.
CHAPTER VII.
Paula went into her nurse's room, and Perpetua, after a short and vain
search for the crazy girl, abandoned her to her fate, not without some
small scruples of conscience.
A beautifully-polished copper lamp hung from the ceiling and the little
room exactly suited its mistress both were neat and clean, trim and
spruce, simple and yet nice. Snowy transparent curtains enclosed the bed
as a protection against the mosquitoes, a crucifix of delicate
workmanship hung above the head of the couch, and the seats were covered
with good cloth of various colors, fag-ends from the looms. Pretty straw
mats lay on the floor, and pots of plants, filling the little room with
fragrance, stood on the window-sill and in a corner of the room where a
clay statuette of the Good Shepherd looked down on a praying-desk.
The door had scarcely closed behind them when Perpetua exclaimed: "But
child, how you frightened me! At so late an hour!"
"I felt I must come," said Paula. I could contain myself no longer."
"What, tears?" sighed the woman, and her own bright little eyes twinkled
through moisture. "Poor soul, what has happened now?"
She went up to the young girl to stroke her hair, but Paula rushed into
her arms, clung passionately round her neck, and burst into loud and
bitter weeping. The little matron let her weep for a while; then she
released herself, and wiped away her own tears and those of her tall
darling, which had fallen on her smooth grey hair. She took Paula's chin
in a firm hand and turned her face towards her own, saying tenderly but
decidedly: "There, that is enough. You might cry and welcome, for it
eases the heart, but that it is so late. Is it the old story:
home-sickness, annoyances, and so forth, or is there anything new?"
"Alas, indeed!" replied the girl. She pressed her handkerchief in her
hands as she went on with excited vehemence: "I am in the last extremity,
I can bear it no longer, I cannot--I cannot! I am no longer a child, and
when in the evening you dread the night and in the morning dread the day
which must be so wretched, so utterly unendurable. . . ."
"Then you listen to reason, my darling, and say to yourself that of two
evils it is wise to choose the lesser. You must hear me say once more
what I have so often represented to you before now: If we renounce our
city of refuge here and venture out into the wide world again, what shall
we find that will be an improvement?"
"Perhaps nothing but a hovel by a well under a couple of palm-trees; that
would satisfy me, if I only had you and could be free--free from every
one else!"
"What is this; what does this mean?" muttered the elder woman shaking her
head. "You were quite content only the day before yesterday. Something
must have. . . ."
"Yes, must have happened and has," interrupted the girl almost beside
herself. "My uncle's son.--You were there when he arrived--and I
thought, even I firmly believed that he was worthy of such a
reception.--I--I--pity me, for I . . . You do not know what influence that
man exercises over hearts.--And I--I believed his eyes, his words, his
songs and--yes, I must confess all--even his kisses on this hand! But it
was all false, all--a lie, a cruel sport with a weak, simple heart, or
even worse--more insulting still! In short, while he was doing all in his
power to entrap me--even the slaves in the barge observed it--he was in
the very act--I heard it from Dame Neforis, who is only too glad when she
can hurt me--in the very act of suing for the hand of that little
doll--you know her--little Katharina. She is his betrothed; and yet the
shameless wretch dares to carry on his game with me; he has the
face. . . ."
Again Paula sobbed aloud; but the older woman did not know how to help in
the matter and could only mutter to herself: "Bad, bad--what, this
too!--Merciful Heaven! . . ." But she presently recovered herself and
said firmly: "This is indeed a new and terrible misfortune; but we have
known worse--much, much worse! So hold up your head, and whatever liking
you may have in your heart for the traitor, tear it out and trample on
it. Your pride will help you; and if you have only just found out what my
lord Orion is, you may thank God that things had gone no further between
you!" Then she repeated to Paula all that she knew of Orion's misconduct
to the frenzied Mandane, and as Paula gave strong utterance to her
indignation, she went on:
"Yes, child, he is a man to break hearts and ruin happiness, and perhaps
it was my duty to warn you against him; but as he is not a bad man in
other things--he saved the brother of Hathor the designer--you know
her--from drowning, at the risk of his own life--and as I hoped you might
be on friendly terms with him at least, on his return home, I
refrained. . . . And besides, old fool that I am, I fancied your proud
heart wore a breastplate of mail, and after all it is only a foolish
girl's heart like any other, and now in its twenty-first year has given
its love to a man for the first time."
But Paula interrupted her: "I love the traitor no more! No, I hate him,
hate him beyond words! And the rest of them! I loathe them all!"
"Alas! that it should be so!" sighed the nurse. "Your lot is no doubt a
hard one. He--Orion--of course is out of the question; but I often ask
myself whether you might not mend matters with the others. If you had not
made it too hard for them, child, they must have loved you; they could
not have helped it; but ever since you have been in the house you have
only felt miserable and wished that they would let you go your own way,
and they--well they have done so; and now you find it ill to bear the lot
you chose for yourself. It is so indeed, child, you need not contradict
me. This once we will put the matter plainly: Who can hope to win love
that gives none, but turns away morosely from his fellow-creatures? If
each of us could make his neighbors after his own pattern--then indeed!
But life requires us to take them just as we find them, and you,
sweetheart, have never let this sink into your mind!"
"Well, I am what I am!"
"No doubt, and among the good you are the best--but which of them all can
guess that? Every one to some extent plays a part. And you! What wonder
if they never see in you anything but that you are unhappy? God knows it
is ten thousand times a pity that you should be! But who can take
pleasure in always seeing a gloomy face?"
"I have never uttered a single word of complaint of my troubles to any
one of them!" cried Paula, drawing herself up proudly.
"That is just the difficulty," replied Perpetua. "They took you in, and
thought it gave them a claim on your person and also on your sorrows.
Perhaps they longed to comfort you; for, believe me, child, there is a
secret pleasure in doing so. Any one who is able to show us sympathy
feels that it does him more good than it does us. I know life! Has it
never occurred to you that you are perhaps depriving your relations in
the great house of a pleasure, perhaps even doing them an injury by
locking up your heart from them? Your grief is the best side of you, and
of that you do indeed allow them to catch a glimpse; but where the pain
is you carefully conceal. Every good man longs to heal a wound when he
sees it, but your whole demeanor cries out: 'Stay where you are, and
leave me in peace.'--If only you were good to your uncle!"
"But I am, and I have felt prompted a hundred times to confide in
him--but then. . ."
"Well--then?"
"Only look at him, Betta; see how he lies as cold as marble, rigid and
apathetic, half dead and half alive. At first the words often rose to my
lips. . ."
"And now?"
"Now all the worst is so long past; I feel I have forfeited the right to
complain to him of all that weighs me down."
"Hm," said Perpetua who had no answer ready. "But take heart, my child.
Orion has at any rate learnt how far he may venture. You can hold your
head high enough and look cool enough. Bear all that cannot be mended,
and if an inward voice does not deceive me, he whom we seek. . ."
"That was what brought me here. Are none of our messengers returned yet?"
"Yes, the little Nabathaean is come," replied her nurse with some
hesitation, "and he indeed--but for God's sake, child, form no vain
hopes! Hiram came to me soon after sun-down. . ."
"Betta!" screamed the girl, clinging to her nurse's arm. "What has he
heard, what news does he bring?"
"Nothing, nothing! How you rush at conclusions! What he found out is next
to nothing. I had only a minute to speak to Hiram. To-morrow morning he
is to bring the man to me. The only thing he told me. . ."
"By Christ's Wounds! What was it?"
"He said that the messenger had heard of an elderly recluse, who had
formerly been a great warrior."
"My father, my father!" cried Paula. "Hiram is sitting by the fire with
the others. Fetch him here at once--at once; I command you, Perpetua, do
you hear? Oh best, dearest Betta! Come with me; we will go to him."
"Patience, sweetheart, a little patience!" urged the nurse. "Ah, poor
dear soul, it will turn out to be nothing again; and if we again follow
up a false clue it will only lead to fresh disappointment."
"Never mind: you are to come with me."
"To all the servants round the fire, and at this time of night? I should
think so indeed!--But do you wait here, child. I know how it can be
managed.
"I will wake Hiram's Joseph. He sleeps in the stable yonder--and then he
will fetch his father. Ah! what impatience! What a stormy, passionate
little heart it is! If I do not do your bidding, I shall have you awake
all night, and wandering about to-morrow as if in a dream.--There, be
quiet, be quiet, I am going."
As she spoke she wrapped her kerchief round her head and hurried out;
Paula fell on her knees before the crucifix over the bed, and prayed
fervently till her nurse returned, Soon after she heard a man's steps on
the stairs and Hiram came in.
He was a powerful man of about fifty, with a pair of honest blue eyes in
his plain face. Any one looking at his broad chest would conclude that
when he spoke it would be in a deep bass voice; but Hiram had stammered
from his infancy; and from constant companionship with horses he had
accustomed himself to make a variety of strange, inarticulate noises in a
high, shrill voice. Besides, he was always unwilling to speak. When he
found himself face to face with the daughter of his master and
benefactor, he knelt at her feet, looked up at her with faithful,
dog-like eyes full of affection, and kissed first her dress, and then her
hand which she held out to him. Paula kindly but decidedly cut short the
expressions of delight at seeing her again which he painfully stammered
out; and when he at length began to tell his story his words came far too
slowly for her impatience.
He told her that the Nabathaean who had brought the rumor that had
excited her hopes, was not unwilling to follow up the trace he had found,
but he would not wait beyond noon the next day and had tried to bid for
high terms.
"He shall have them--as much as he wants!" cried Paula. But Hiram
entreated her, more by looks and vague cries than by articulate words,
not to hope for too much. Dusare the Nabathaean--Perpetua now took up the
tale--had heard of a recluse, living at Raithu on the Red Sea, who had
been a great warrior, by birth a Greek, and who for two years had been
leading a life of penance in great seclusion among the pious brethren on
the sacred Mount of Sinai. The messenger had not been able to learn what
his name in the world had been, but among the hermits he was known as
Paulus."
"Paulus!" interrupted the girl with panting breath. "A name that must
remind him of my mother and of me, yes, of me! And he, the hero of
Damascus, who was called Thomas in the world, believing that I was dead,
has no doubt dedicated himself to the service of God and of Christ, and
has taken the name of Paulus, as Saul, the other man of Damascus did
after his con version,--exactly like him! Oh! Betta, Hiram, you will see:
it is he, it must be! How can you doubt it?"
The Syrian shook his head doubtfully and gave vent to a long-drawn
whistle, and Perpetua clasped her hands exclaiming distressfully: "Did I
not say so? She takes the fire lighted by shepherds at night to warm
their hands for the rising sun--the rattle of chariots for the thunders
of the Almighty!--Why, how many thousands have called themselves Paulus!
By all the Saints, child, I beseech you keep quiet, and do not try to
weave a holiday-robe out of airy mist! Be prepared for the worst; then
you are armed against failure and preserve your right to hope! Tell her,
tell her, Hiram, what else the messenger said; it is nothing positive;
everything is as uncertain as dust in the breeze."
The freedman then explained that this Nabathaean was a trustworthy man,
far better skilled in such errands than himself, for he understood both
Syriac and Egyptian, Greek and Aramaic; and nevertheless he had failed to
find out anything more about this hermit Paulus at Tor, where the monks
of the monastery of the Transfiguration had a colony. Subsequently,
however, on the sea voyage to Holzum, he had been informed by some monks
that there was a second Sinai. The monastery there--but here Perpetua
again was the speaker, for the hapless stammerer's brow was beaded with
sweat--the monastery at the foot of the peaked, heaven-kissing mountain,
had been closed in consequence of the heresies of its inhabitants; but in
the gorges of these great heights there were still many recluses, some in
a small Coenobium, some in Lauras and separate caves, and among these
perchance Paulus might be found. This clue seemed a good one and she and
Hiram had already made up their minds to follow it up; but the warrior
monk was very possibly a stranger, and they had thought it would be cruel
to expose her to so keen a disappointment.
Here Paula interrupted her, crying in joyful excitement:
"And why should not something besides disappointment be my portion for
once? How could you have the heart to deprive me of the hope on which my
poor heart still feeds?--But I will not be robbed of it. Your Paulus of
Sinai is my lost father. I feel it, I know it! If I had not sold my
pearls, the Nabathaean. . . . But as it is. When can you start, my good
Hiram?"
"Not before a fort--a fortnight at--at--at--soonest," said the man. "I am
in the governor's service now, and the day after to-morrow is the great
horse-fair at Niku. The young master wants some stallions bought and
there are our foals to. . . ."
"I will implore my uncle to-morrow, to spare you," cried Paula. "I will
go on my knees to him."
"He will not let him go," said the nurse. "Sebek the steward told him all
about it from me before the hour of audience and tried to have Hiram
released."
"And he said . . . ?"
"The lady Neforis said it was all a mere will-o'-the-wisp, and my lord
agreed with her. Then your uncle forbade Sebek to betray the matter to
you, and sent word to me that he would possibly send Hiram to Sinai when
the horse-fair was over. So take patience, sweetheart. What are two
weeks, or at most three--and then. . . ."
"But I shall die before then!" cried Paula. "The Nabathaean, you say, is
here and willing to go."
"Yes, Mistress."
"Then we will secure him," said Paula resolutely. Perpetua, however, who
must have discussed the matter fully with her fellow-countryman, shook
her head mournfully and said: "He asks too much for us!"
She then explained that the man, being such a good linguist, had already
been offered an engagement to conduct a caravan to Ctesiphon. This would
be a year's pay to him, and he was not inclined to break off his
negotiations with the merchant Hanno and search the deserts of Arabia
Petraea for less than two thousand drachmae.
"Two thousand drachmae!" echoed Paula, looking down in distress and
confusion; but she presently looked up and exclaimed with angry
determination: "How dare they keep from me that which is my own? If my
uncle refuses what I have to ask, and will ask, then the inevitable must
happen, though for his sake it will grieve me; I must put my affairs in
the hands of the judges."
"The judges?" Perpetua smiled. "But you cannot lay a complaint without
your kyrios, and your uncle is yours. Besides: before they have settled
the matter the messenger may have been to Ctesiphon and back, far as it
is."
Again her nurse entreated her to have patience till the horse-fair should
be over. Paula fixed her eyes on the ground. She seemed quite crushed;
but Perpetua started violently and Hiram drew back a step when she
suddenly broke out in a loud, joyful cry of "Father in Heaven, I have
what we need!"
"How, child, what?" asked the nurse, pressing her hand to her heart. But
Paula vouchsafed no information; she turned quickly to the Syrian:
"Is the outer court-yard clear yet? Are the people gone?" she asked.
The reply was in the affirmative. The freed servants had retired when
Hiram left them. The officials would not break up for some time yet, but
there was less difficulty in passing them.
"Very good," said the girl. "Then you, Hiram, lead the way and wait for
me by the little side door. I will give you something in my room which
will pay the Nabathaean's charges ten times over. Do not look so
horrified, Betta. I will give him the large emerald out of my mother's
necklace." The woman clasped her hands, and cried out in dismay and
warning.
"Child, child! That splendid gem! an heirloom in the family--that stone
which came to you from the saintly Emperor Theodosius--to sell that of
all things! Nay-to throw it away; not to rescue your father either, but
merely--yes child, for that is the truth, merely because you lack
patience to wait two little weeks!"
"That is hard, that is unjust, Betta," Paula broke in reprovingly. "It
will be a question of a month, and we all know how much depends on the
messenger. Do you forget how highly Hiram spoke of this very man's
intelligence? And besides--must I, the younger, remind you?--What is the
life of man? An instant may decide his life or death; and my father is an
old man, scarred from many wounds even before the siege. It may make just
the difference between our meeting, or never meeting again."
"Yes, yes," said the old woman in subdued tones, "perhaps you are right,
and if I. . ." But Paula stopped her mouth with a kiss, and then desired
Hiram to carry the gem, the first thing in the morning, to Gamaliel the
Jew, a wealthy and honest man, and not to sell it for less than twelve
thousand drachmae. If the goldsmith could not pay so much for it at once,
he might be satisfied to bring away the two thousand drachmae for the
messenger, and fetch the remainder at another season.
The Syrian led the way, and when, after a long leave-taking, she quitted
her nurse's pleasant little room, Hiram had done her bidding and was
waiting for her at the little side door.
CHAPTER VIII.
As Hiram had supposed, the better class of the household were still
sitting with their friends, and they had been joined by the guide and by
the Arab merchant's head man: Rustem the Masdakite, as well as his
secretary and interpreter.
With the exception only of Gamaliel the Jewish goldsmith, and the Arab's
followers, the whole of the party were Christians; and it had gone
against the grain to admit the Moslems into their circle--the Jew had for
years been a welcome member of the society. However, they had done so,
and not without marked civility; for their lord had desired that the
strangers should be made welcome, and they might expect to hear much that
was new from wanderers from such a distance. In this, to be sure, they
were disappointed, for the dragoman was taciturn and the Masdakite could
speak no Egyptian, and Greek very ill. So, after various futile attempts
to make the new-comers talk, they paid no further heed to them, and
Orion's secretary became the chief speaker. He had already told them
yesterday much that was fresh and interesting about the Imperial court;
to-day he entered into fuller details of the brilliant life his young
lord had led at Constantinople, whither he had accompanied him. He
described the three races he had won in the Circus with his own horses;
gave a lively picture of his forcing his way with only five followers
through a raging mob of rioters, from the palace to the church of St.
Sophia; and then enlarged on Orion's successes among the beauties of the
Capital.
"The queen of them all," he went on in boastful accents, "was
Heliodora--no flute-player nor anything of that kind; no indeed, but a
rich, elegant, and virtuous patrician lady, the widow of Flavianus,
nephew to Justinus the senator, and a relation of the Emperor. All
Constantinople was at her feet, the great Gratian himself sought to win
her, but of course, in vain. There is no palace to compare with hers in
all Egypt, not even in Alexandria. The governor's residence here--for I
think nothing of mere size--is a peasant's hut--a wretched barn by
comparison! I will tell you another time what that casket of treasures is
like. Its door was besieged day and night by slaves and freedmen bringing
her offerings of flowers and fruit, rare gifts, and tender verses written
on perfumed, rose-colored silk; but her favors were not to be purchased
till she met Orion. Would you believe it: from the first time she saw him
in Justinus' villa she fell desperately in love with him; it was all over
with her; she was his as completely as the ring on my finger is mine!"
And in his vanity he showed his hearers a gold ring, with a gem of some
value, which he owed to the liberality of his young master. "From that
day forth," he eagerly went on, "the names of Orion and Heliodora were in
every mouth, and how often have I seen men quite beside themselves over
the beauty of this divine pair. In the Circus, in the theatre, or sailing
about the Bosphorus--they were to be seen everywhere together; and
through the hideous, bloody struggle for the throne they lived in a
Paradise of their own. He often took her out in his chariot; or she took
him in hers."
"Such a woman has horses too?" asked the head groom contemptuously.
"A woman!" cried the secretary. "A lady of rank!--She has none but bright
chestnuts; large horses of Armenian breed, and small, swift beasts from
the island of Sardinia, which fly on with the chariot, four abreast, like
hunted foxes. Her horses are always decked with flowers and ribbons
fluttering from the gold harness, and the grooms know how to drive them
too!--Well, every one thought that our young lord and the handsome widow
would marry; and it was a terrible blow to the hapless Heliodora when
nothing came of it--she looks like a saint and is as soft as a kitten. I
was by when they parted, and she shed such bitter tears it was pitiable
to see. Still, she could not be angry with her idol, poor, gentle, tender
kitten. She even gave him her lap-dog for a keepsake--that little silky
thing you have seen here. And take my word for it, that was a true
love-token, for her heart was as much set on that little beast as if it
had been her favorite child. And he felt the parting too, felt it deeply;
however, I am his confidential secretary, and it would never do for me to
tell tales out of school. He clasped the little dog to his heart as he
bid her farewell, and he promised her to send some keepsake in return
which should show her how precious her love had been--and it will be no
trifle, that any one may swear who knows my master. You, Gamaliel, I
daresay he has been to you about it by this time."
The man thus addressed--the same to whom Hiram was to offer Paula's
emerald--was a rich Alexandrian of a happy turn of mind; as soon as the
incursion of the Saracens had made Alexandria an unsafe residence, so
that the majority of his fellow Israelites had fled from the great port,
he had found his way to Memphis, where he could count on the protection
of his patron, the Mukaukas George.
He shook his grizzled curls at this question, but he presently whispered
in the secretary's ear. "We have the very thing he wants. You bring me
the cow and you shall have a calf--and a calf with twelve legs too. Is it
a bargain?"
"Twelve per cent on the profits? Done!" replied the secretary in the same
tone, with a sly smile of intelligence.
When, by-and-bye, an accountant asked him why Orion had not brought home
this fair dame, the bearer too of a noble name, to his parents as their
daughter-in-law, he replied that, being a Greek, she was of course a
Melchite. Those present asked no better reason; as soon as the question
of creed was raised the conversation, as usual in these convivial
evenings, became a squabble over dogmatic differences; in the course of
it a legal official ventured to opine that if the case had been that of a
less personage than a son of the Mukaukas--for whom it was, of course,
out of the question--of a mere Jacobite citizen and his Melchite
sweetheart, for instance, some compromise might have been effected. They
need only have made up their minds each, respectively, to subscribe to
the Monothelitic doctrine--though, he, for his part, could have nothing
to say to anything of the kind; it was warmly upheld by the Imperial
court, and by Cyrus, the deceased patriarch of Alexandria, and was based
on the assumption that there were indeed two natures in Christ, but both
under the control of one and the same will. By this dogma there were in
the Saviour two persons no doubt; still it asserted His unity in a
certain qualified sense, and this was the most important point.
Such an heretical proposition was of course loudly disapproved of by the
assembled Jacobites; differences of opinion were more and more strongly
asserted, and a calm interchange of views turned to a riotous quarrel
which threatened to end in actual violence.
This discussion was already beginning when Paula succeeded in slipping
unseen across the court-yard.
She silently beckoned to Hiram to follow her; he cautiously took off his
shoes, pushed them under the steep servants' stairs, and in a few minutes
was standing in the young girl's room. Paula at once opened a chest, and
took out a costly and beautifully-wrought necklace set with pearls. This
she handed to the Syrian, desiring him to wrench from its setting a large
emerald which hung from the middle. The freedman's strong hand, with the
aid of a knife, quickly and easily did the work; and he stood weighing
the gem, as it lay freed from the gold hemisphere that had held it,
larger than a walnut, shining and sparkling on his palm, while Paula
repeated the instructions she had already given him in her nurse's room.
The faithful soul had no sooner left his beloved mistress than she
proceeded to unplait her long thick hair, smiling the while with happy
hope; but she had not yet begun to undress when she heard a knock. She
started, flew to the door and hastily bolted it, while she enquired:
"Who is there?"--preparing herself for the worst. "Hiram," was the
whispered reply. She opened the door, and he told her that meanwhile the
side door had been locked, and that he knew no other way out from the
great rambling house whither he rarely had occasion to come.
What was to be done? He could not wait till the door was opened again,
for he must carry out her commission quite early in the morning, and if
he were caught and locked up for only half the day the Nabathaean would
take some other engagement.
With swift decision she twisted up her hair, threw a handkerchief over
her head, and said: "Then come with me; the moon is still up; it would
not be safe to carry a lamp. I will lead the way and you must keep behind
me If only the kitchen is empty, we can reach the Viridarium unseen. If
the upper servants are still sitting in the court-yard the great door
will be open, for several of them sleep in the house. At any rate you
must go through the vestibule; you cannot miss your way out of the
viridarium. But stay! Beki generally lies in front of the tablinum--the
fierce dog from Herrionthis in Thebais; and he does not know you, for he
never goes out of the house, but he will obey me.
"When I lift my hand, hang back a little. He is quite quiet with his
masters, and does not hurt a stranger if they are by. Now, we must not
utter another word.--If we are discovered, I will confess the truth; if
you alone are seen, you can say--well, say you were waiting for Orion, to
speak to him very early about the horse-fair at Niku."
"A horse was off--off--offered me for sale this very day."
"Good, very good; then you lingered in the vestibule to speak of that--to
ask the master about it before he should go out. It must be daylight in a
few hours.--Now, come."
Paula went down the stairs with a sure and rapid step. At the bottom
Hiram again took off his shoes, holding them in his hand, so as to lose
no time in following his mistress. They went on in silence through the
darkness till they reached the kitchen. Here Paula turned and said to the
Syrian:
"If there is any one here, I will say I came to fetch some water; if
there is no one I will cough and you can follow. At any rate I will leave
the door open, and then you will hear what happens. If I am obliged to
return, do you hurry on before me back by the way we came. In that case I
will return to my room where you must wait outside till the side door is
opened again, and if you are found there leave the explanation to
me.--Shrink back, quite into that corner."
She softly opened the door into the kitchen; the roof was open to the
light of the declining moon and myriad stars. The room was quite empty:
only a cat lay on a bench by the wide hearth, and a few bats flitted to
and fro on noiseless wings; a few live coals still glowed among the ashes
under the spits, like the eyes of lurking beasts of prey. Paula coughed
gently, and immediately heard Hiram's step behind her; then, with a
beating heart and agonizing fears, she proceeded on her way. First down a
few steps, then through a dark passage, where the bats in their
unswerving flight shot by close to her head. At last they had to cross
the large, open dining-hall. This led into the viridarium, a spacious
quadrangle, paved at the edges and planted in the middle, where a
fountain played; round this square the Governor's residence was built.
All was still and peaceful in this secluded space, vaulted over by the
high heavens whose deep blue was thickly dotted with stars. The moon
would soon be hidden behind the top of the cornice which crowned the roof
of the building. The large-leaved plants in the middle of the quadrangle
threw strange, ghostly shadows on the dewy grass-plot; the water in the
fountain splashed more loudly than by day, but with a soothing,
monotonous gurgle, broken now and then by a sudden short pause. The
marble pillars gleamed as white as snow, and filmy mists, which were
beginning to rise from the damp lawn, floated languidly hither and
thither on the soft night breeze, like ghosts veiled in flowing crape.
Moths flitted noiselessly round and over the clumps of bushes, and the
whole quiet and restful enclosure was full of sweetness from the Lotos
flowers in the marble basin, from the blossoms of the luxuriant shrubs
and the succulent tropical herbs at their feet. At any other time it
would have been a joy to pause and look round, only to breathe and let
the silent magic of the night exert its spell; but Paula's soul was
closed against these charms. The sequestered silence lent a threatening
accent to the furious wrangling in the court-yard, which was audible even
here in bursts of uproar; and it was with an anxious heart that she
observed that everything was not in its usual order; for her sharp eyes
could discern no one, nothing, at the entrance to the tablinum, which was
usually guarded by an armed sentinel or by the watch-dog; and
surely--yes, she was not mistaken--the bronze doors were open, and the
moon shone on the bright metal of one half which stood ajar.
She stopped, and Hiram behind her did the same. They both listened with
such tension that the veins in their foreheads swelled; but from the
tablinum, which was hardly thirty paces from them, came only very faint
and intermittent sounds, indistinct in character and drowned by the
tumult without.
A few long and anxious minutes, and then the half-closed door was
suddenly opened and a man came forth. Paula's heart stood still, but she
did not for an instant lose her keenness of vision; she at once and
positively recognized the man who came out of the tablinum as Orion and
none other, and the big, long-haired dog too came out and past him,
sniffed the air and then, with a loud bark, rushed on the two watchers.
Trembling and with clenched teeth, but still mistress of herself, she let
him come close to her, and then, calling him by his name: "Beki" in low,
caressing tones, as soon as he recognized her, she laid her hand on his
shaggy head to scratch his ears, as he loved it done.
Paula and her companion were standing behind a column in the deepest
shadow. Thus Orion could not see her, and the dog's loud bark had
prevented his hearing her coaxing call; so when Beki was quiet and stood
still, Orion whistled to him. The obedient and watchful beast, ran back,
wagging his tail; and his master, greeting him as "a stupid old
cat-hunter," let him spring over his arm, hugged the creature and then
pushed him off again in play. Then he closed the door and went into the
apartments leading to the courtyard.
"But he must come back this way to go to his own rooms," said Paula to
her companion with a sigh of relief. "We must wait. But now we must not
lose a minute. Come over to the door of the tablinum. The dog will know
me now and will not bark again." They hastened on, and when they had
reached the door, which lay in shadow within a deep doorway, Paula asked
her companion: "Did you see who the man was who came out?"
"My lord Orion," said Hiram. "He was co--co--coming home from the town
when I preceded you across the yard."
"Indeed?" she said with apparent indifference, and as she leaned against
the cold metal door-panels she looked back into the garden and thought
she was now free to return. She would describe to the freedman the way he
must now go--it was quite simple; but she had not had time to do so when,
from a room dividing the viridarium from the vestibule she heard first a
woman's shrill voice; then the deeper tones of a man; and hardly had they
exchanged a few sentences, when every sound was lost in the furious
barking of the hound, and immediately after a loud shriek of pain from a
woman fell upon her ear, and the noise of a heavy object falling to the
ground.
What had happened? It must be something portentous and terrible; of that
there could be no doubt; and ere long Paula's fears were justified. Out
from the room where the scene had taken place rushed Orion, and with him
the dog, across the grass-plot which was usually respected and cherished
as holy ground, towards the side of the house facing the river, which was
where he and all the family had their rooms.
"Now!" cried Paula, quickly leading the way.
She flew in breathless haste through the first room and into the
unguarded hall; but she had not reached the middle of it when she gave a
scream, for before her in the moonlight, lay a body, motionless, at full
length, on the hard, marble floor.
"Run, Hiram, fly!" she cried to her companion. "The door is
ajar--open--I can see it is."
She fell on her knees by the side of the lifeless form, raised the head,
and saw--the beautiful, deathlike face of the crazy Persian slave. She
felt her hand wet with the blood that had soaked the hapless girl's
thick, fair hair, and she shuddered; but she resisted her impulse of
horror and loathing, and perceiving some dark stains on the torn peplos
she pulled it aside and saw that the white bosom was bleeding from deep
wounds made in the tender flesh by the cruel fangs of the hound.
Paula's heart thrilled with indignation, grief and pity. He--he whom she
had only yesterday held to be the epitome of every manly
perfection--Orion, was guilty of so foul a deed! He, of whose
unflinching, dauntless courage she had heard so much, had fled like a
coward, and had left the victim to her fate--twice a victim to him!
But something must be done besides lamenting and raging, and wondering
how in one human soul there could be room for so much that was noble and
fine with so much that was shameful and cruel. She must save the girl,
she must seek help, for Mandane's bosom still faintly rose and fell under
Paula's tremulous fingers.
The freedman's brave heart would not allow him to fly to leave her with
the injured girl; he flung his shoes on the floor, raised the senseless
form, and propped it against one of the columns that stood round the
hall. It was not till his mistress had repeated her orders that he
hurried away. Paula watched him depart; as soon as she heard the heavy
door of the atrium close upon him, heedless of her own suspicious-looking
position, she shouted for help, so loudly that her cries rang through the
nocturnal silence of the house, and in a few minutes, from this side and
that, a slave, a maid, a clerk, a cook, a watchman, came hurrying in.
Foremost of all--so soon indeed that he must have been on his way when he
heard her cry--came Orion. He wore a light night-dress, intended, so she
said to herself, to give the wretch the appearance of having sprung out
of bed. But was this indeed he? Was this man with a flushed face, staring
eyes, disordered hair and hoarse voice, that favorite of fortune whose
happy nature, easy demeanor, sunny gaze and enchanting song had bewitched
her soul? His hand shook as he came close to her and the injured slave;
and how forced and embarrassed was his enquiry as to what had happened;
how scared he looked as he asked her what had brought her into this part
of the house at such an hour.
She made no reply; but when his mother repeated the question soon after,
in a sharp voice, she--she who had never in her life told a lie--said
with hasty decision: "I could not sleep, and the bark of the dog and a
cry for help brought me here."
"I call that having sharp ears!" retorted Neforis with an incredulous
shrug. "For the future, at any rate, under similar circumstances you need
not be so prompt. How long, pray, have young girls trusted themselves
alone when murder is cried?"
"If you had but armed yourself, fair daughter of heroes!" added Orion;
but he had no sooner spoken than he bitterly regretted it. What a glance
Paula cast at him! It was more than she could bear to hear him address
her in jest, almost in mockery: him of all men, and at this moment for
the first time--and to be thus reminded of her father! She answered
proudly and with cutting sharpness: "I leave weapons to fighting men and
murderers!"
"To fighting men, and murderers!" repeated Orion, pretending not to
understand the point of her words. He forced a smile; but then, feeling
that he must make some defence, he added bitterly: "Really, that sounds
like the utterance of a feeble-hearted damsel! But let me beg you to come
closer and be calm. These pitiable gashes on the poor creature's
shoulder--I care more about her than you do, take my word for it--were
inflicted by a four-footed assassin, whose weapons were given by nature.
Yes, that is what happened. Rough old Beki keeps watch at the door of the
tablinum. What brought the poor child here I know not, but he caught
scent of her and pulled her down."
"Or nothing of the kind!" interrupted Neforis, picking up a pair of man's
shoes which lay on the ground by the sufferer.
Orion turned as pale as death and hastily took the shoes from his
mother's hand; he would have liked to fling them up and away through the
open roof. How came they here? Whose were they? Who had been here this
night? Before going into the tablinum he had locked the outer door on
that side, and had returned subsequently to open it again for the people
in the court-yard. It was not till after he had done this that the crazy
girl had rushed upon him; she must have been lurking somewhere about when
he first went through the atrium but had not then found courage enough to
place herself in his way. When she had thrown herself upon him, the dog
had pulled her down before he could prevent it: he would certainly have
sprung past her and have come to the rescue but that he must thus have
betrayed his visit to the tablinum.
It had required all his presence of mind to hurry to his room, fling on
his night garments, and rush back to the scene of disaster. When Paula
had first called for help he was already on his way, and with what
feelings! Never had he felt so bewildered, so confused, so deeply
dissatisfied with himself; for the first time in his life, as he stood
face to face with Paula, he dared not look straight into the eyes of his
fellow-man.
And now these shoes! The owner must have come there with the crazy girl,
and if he had seen him in the tablinum and betrayed what he was doing
there, how could he ever again appear in his parents' presence? He had
looked upon it as a good joke, but now it had turned to bitter earnest.
At any cost he must and would prevent his nocturnal doings from becoming
known! Some new wrong-doing-nay, the worst was preferable to a stain on
his honor.--Whose could the shoes be? He suddenly held them up on high,
crying with a loud voice: "Do these shoes belong to any of you, you
people? To the gate-keeper perhaps?"
When all were silent, and the porter denied the ownership, he stood
thinking; then he added with a defiant glare, and in a husky voice: "Then
some one who had broken into the house has been startled and dropped
them. Our house-stamp is here on the leather: they were made in our
work-shop, and they still smell of the stable-here, Sebek, you can
convince yourself. Take them into your keeping, man; and tomorrow morning
we will see who has left this suspicious offering in our vestibule.--You
were the first to reach the spot, fair Paula. Did you see a man about?"
"Yes," she replied with a hostile and challenging stare.
"And which way did he go?"
"He fled across the viridarium like a coward, running across the poor,
well-kept grass-plot to save time, and vanished upstairs in the
dwelling-rooms."
Orion ground his teeth, and a mad hatred surged up in him of this mystery
in woman's form in whose power, as it seemed, his ruin lay, and whose
eyes mashed with revenge and the desire to undo him. What was she
plotting against him? Was there a being on earth who would dare to accuse
him, the spoilt favorite of great and small . . . ? And her look had meant
more than aversion, it had expressed contempt. . . . How dare she look so
at him? Who in the wide world had a right to accuse him of anything that
could justify such a feeling? Never, never had he met with enmity like
this, least of all from a girl. He longed to annihilate the high-handed,
cold-hearted, ungrateful creature who could humble him so outrageously
after he had allowed her to see that his heart was hers, and who could
make him quail--a man whose courage had been proved a hundred times. He
had to exercise his utmost self-control not to forget that she was a
woman.--What had happened? What demon had been playing tricks on
him--What had so completely altered him within this half-hour that his
whole being seemed subverted even to himself, and that any one dared to
treat him so?
His mother at once observed the terrible change that came over her son's
face when Paula declared that a man had fled towards the dwelling-rooms;
but she accounted for it in her own way, and exclaimed in genuine alarm:
"Towards the Nile-wing, the rooms where your father sleeps? Merciful
Heaven! suppose they have planned an attack there! Run--fly, Sebek.
"Go across with some armed men! Search the whole house from top to
bottom! Perhaps you will catch the rascal--he had trodden down the
grass--you must find him--you must not let him escape."
The steward hurried off, but Paula begged the head gardener, who had come
in with the rest, to compare the foot-prints of the fugitive, which must.
yet be visible on the damp grass, with the shoes; her heart beat wildly,
and again she tried to catch the young man's eye. Orion, however, started
forward and went into the viridarium, saying as he went: "That is my
concern."
But he was ashamed of himself, and felt as if something tight was
throttling him. In his own eyes he appeared like a thief caught in the
act, a traitor, a contemptible rascal; and he began to perceive that he
was indeed no longer what he had been before he had committed that fatal
deed in the tablinum.
Paula breathed hard as she watched him go out. Had he sunk so low as to
falsify the evidence, and to declare that the groom's broad sole fitted
the tracks of his small and shapely feet? She hated him, and yet she
could have found it in her heart to pray that this, at least, he might
not do; and when he came back and said in some confusion that he could
not be sure, that the shoes did not seem exactly to fit the foot-marks,
she drew a breath of relief and turned again to the wounded girl and the
physician, who, had now made his appearance. Before Neforis followed her
example she drew Orion aside and anxiously asked him what ailed him, he
looked so pale and upset. He only said with some hesitation: "That poor
girl's fate . . ." and he pointed to the Persian slave.--"It troubles
me."
"You are so soft-hearted--you were as a boy!" said his mother soothingly.
She had seen the moisture sparkling in his eyes; but his tears were not
for the Persian, but for the mysterious something--he himself knew not
what to call it--that he had forfeited in this last hour, and of which
the loss gave him unspeakable pain.
But their dialogue was interrupted: the first misfortune of this luckless
night had brought its attendant: the body of Rustem, the splendid and
radiantly youthful Rustem, the faithful Persian leader of the caravan,
was borne into the hall, senseless. He had made some satirical remark on
the quarrel over creeds, and a furious Jacobite had fallen upon him with
a log of wood, and dealt him a deep and perhaps mortal wound. The leech
at once gave him his care, and several of the crowd of muttering and
whispering men, who had made their way in out of curiosity or with a wish
to be of use, now hurried hither and thither in obedience to the
physician's orders.
As soon as he saw the Masdakite's wound he exclaimed angrily:
"A true Egyptian blow, dealt from behind!--What does this mob want here?
Out with every man who does not belong to the place! The first things
needed are litters. Will you, Dame Neforis, desire that two rooms may be
got ready; one for that poor, gentle creature, and one for this fine
fellow, though all will soon be over with him, short of a miracle."
"To the north of the viridarium," replied the lady, "there are two rooms
at your service."
"Not there!" cried the leech. "I must have rooms with plenty of fresh
air, looking out upon the river."
"There are none but the handsome rooms in the visitor's quarters, where
my husband's niece has hers, Sick persons of the family have often lain
there, but for such humble folk--you understand?"
"No--I am deaf," replied the physician.
"Oh, I know that," laughed Neforis. "But those rooms are really just
refurnished for exalted guests."
"It would be hard to find any more exalted than such as these, sick unto
death," replied Philippus. "They are nearer to God in Heaven than you
are; to your advantage I believe. Here, you people! Carry these poor
souls up to the guests' rooms."
CHAPTER IX.
"It is impossible, impossible, impossible!" cried Orion, jumping up from
his writing-table. He thought of what he had done as a misfortune, and
not as a crime; he himself hardly knew how it had all come about. Yes,
there must be demons, evil, spiteful demons--and it was they who had led
him to so mad a deed.
Yesterday evening, after the buying of the hanging, he had yielded to his
mother's request that he should escort the widow Susannah home. At her
house he had met her husband's brother, a jovial old fellow named
Chrysippus; and when the conversation turned on the tapestry, and the
Mukaukas' purpose of dedicating this work of art with all the gems worked
into it, to the Church, the old man had clasped his hands, fully sharing
Orion's disapproval, and had exclaimed laughing "What, you the son, and
is not even a part of the precious stones to fall to your share? Why
Katharina? Just a little diamond, a tiny opal might well add to the
earthly happiness of the young, though the old must lay up treasure in
heaven.--Do not be a fool! The Church's maw is full enough, and really a
mouthful is your due."
And then they drank a good deal of fine wine, till at last the older man
had accompanied Orion home, to stretch his limbs in the cool night air. A
litter was carried behind him for him to return in, and all the way he
had continued to persuade the youth to induce his father not to fling the
whole treasure into the jaws of the Church, but to spare him a few stones
at least for a more pleasing use. They had laughed over it a good deal,
and Orion in his heart had thought Chrysippus very right, and had
remembered Heliodora, and her love of large, handsome gems, and the
keepsake he owed her. But that neither his father nor his mother would
remove a single stone, and that the whole hanging would be dedicated, was
beyond a doubt; at the same time, some of this superfluous splendor was
in fact his due as their son, and a prettier gift to Heliodora than the
large emerald could not be imagined. Yes--and she should have it! How
delighted she would be! He even thought of the chief idea for the verses
to accompany the gift.
He had the key of the tablinum, in which the work was lying, about his
person; and when, on his return, he found the servants still sitting
round the fire, he shut the door of the out-buildings while a feeling
came over him which he remembered having experienced last on occasions
when he and his brothers had robbed a forbidden fruit-tree. He was on the
point of giving up his mad project; and when, in the tablinum itself, a
horrible inward tremor again came over him he had actually turned to
retreat--but he remembered old Chrysippus and his prompts. To turn and
fly now would be cowardice. Heliodora must have the large emerald, and
with his verses; his father might give away all the rest as he pleased.
When he was kneeling in front of the work with his knife in his hand,
that sickening terror had come over him for the third time; if the large
emerald had not come off into his hand at the first effort he would
certainly have rolled the bale up again and have left the tablinum
clean-handed. But the evil demon had been at his elbow, had thrust the
gem into his hand, as it were, so that two cuts with the knife had
sufficed to displace it from its setting. It rolled into his hand and he
felt its noble weight; he cast aside all care, and had thought no more
with anything but pleasure of this splendid trick, which he would relate
to-morrow to old Chrysippus--of course under seal of secrecy.
But now, in the sober light of day, how different did this mad, rash deed
appear; how heavily had he already been punished; what consequences might
it not entail? His hatred of Paula grew every minute: she had certainly
seen all that had happened and would not hesitate to betray him--that she
had shown last night. War, as it were, was declared between them, and he
vowed to himself, with fire in his eyes, that he would not shirk it! At
the same time he could not deny that she had never looked handsomer than
when she stood, with hair half undone, confronting him--threatening him.
"It is to be love or hate between us." he muttered to himself. "No
half-measures: and she has chosen hate! Good! Hitherto I have only had to
fight against men; but this bold, hard, and scornful maiden, who rejects
every gentle feeling, is no despicable foe. She has me at bay. If she
does her worst by me I will return it in kind!--And who is the owner of
the shoes? I have taken all possible means to find him. Shameful,
shameful! that I cannot hold up my head to look boldly at my own face in
the glass. Heliodora is a sweet creature, an angel of kindness. She loved
me truly; but this--this--Ah; even for her, this is too great a
sacrifice!"
He pressed his hand to his brow and flung himself on a divan. He might
well be weary, for he had not closed his eyes for more than thirty hours
and had already done much business that morning. He had given orders to
Sebek the house-steward and to the captain of the Egyptian guard to hunt
out the owner of the sandals by the aid of the dogs, and to cast him into
prison; next he had of his own accord--since his father generally did not
fall asleep till the morning and had not yet left his room--tried to
pacify the Arab merchant with regard to the mishap that had befallen his
head man under the governor's roof; but with small success.
Finally the young man had indulged his desire to compose a few lines
addressed to the fair Heliodora--for there was no form of physical or
mental effort to which he was not trained. He had not lost the idea that
had occurred to him yesterday before his theft in the tablinum, and to
put it into verse was in his present mood an easy task. He wrote as
follows:
"'Like liketh like' saith the saw; and like to like is but fitting.
Yet, in the hardest of gems thy soft nature rejoices?
Nay, but if noble and rare, if its beauty is priceless,
Then, Heliodora, the stone is like thee--akin to thy beauty.
Thus let this emerald please thee;--and know that the fire
That fills it with light burns more fierce in the heart of thy
Friend."
He penned the lines rapidly; and as he did so he felt, he knew not why,
an excited thrill, as though every word he threw off was a blow aimed at
Paula. Last night he had intended to send the costly jewel to the
handsome widow in a suitable setting; but now it would be madly imprudent
to order such a thing. He must send it away at once; he had hastened to
pack it up with the verses, with his own hand, and entrusted it to
Chusar, a horsedealer's groom from Constantinople, who had brought his
Pannonian steeds to Memphis. He had himself seen off this trustworthy
messenger, who could speak no Egyptian and very little Greek, and when
his horse was lost to sight in the dust of the road leading to Alexandria
he had returned home in a calmer mood. Ships were constantly putting to
sea from that port for Constantinople, and Chusar was enjoined to sail by
the first that should be leaving. At least the odious deed should not
have been committed in vain; and yet he would have given a year of his
life if now he could but know that it had never been done.
"Impossible!" and "Curse it!" were the words he had most frequently
repeated in the course of his retrospect during the past night and
morning. How he had had to rush and hurry under the broiling sun! and the
sense of being compelled to do so for mere concealment's sake seemed to
him--who had never in his life before done anything that he could not
justify in the eyes of honest men--so humiliating, that it brought the
sweat to his burning brow. He--Orion--to dread discovery as a thief! It
was inconceivable, and he was afraid, positively afraid for the first
time since his boyhood. His fortunate star, which in the Capital had
shone on him so brightly and benevolently, seemed to have proved
faithless in this ruinous hole! What had that Persian girl taken into her
crazy head that she must rush upon him like some furious beast of prey?
He had been bound to her once, no doubt, by a transient passion--and what
youth of his age was blind to the charms of a pretty slave-girl? She had
been a lovely child, and it was a vexation, nay a grief to him, that she
should have been so shamefully punished. If she should recover, and he
could have prayed that she might, it would of course be his part to
provide for her--of course. To be just, he could not but confess that she
indeed had good reason to hate him: but Paula? He had shown her nothing
but kindness and yet how unhesitatingly, how openly she had displayed her
enmity. He could see her now with the name "murderer" on her quivering
lips; the word had stung him like a lance-thrust. What a hideous,
degrading and unjust accusation lay in that exclamation! Should he submit
to it unrevenged?
Was she as innocent as she was haughty and cold? What was she doing in
the viridarium at midnight?--For she must have been there before that
ill-starred dog flew at Mandane. An assignation with the owner of the
shoes his mother had found was out of the question, for they belonged to
some man about the stables. Love, thought he, for a wonder had nothing to
do with it; but as he came in he had noticed a man crossing the
court-yard who looked like Paula's freedman, Hiram the trainer. Probably
she had arranged a meeting with her stammering friend in order--in
order?--Well, there was but one thing that seemed likely: She was
plotting to fly from his parents' house and needed this man's assistance.
He had seen within a few hours of his return that his mother did not make
life sweet to the girl, and yet his father had very possibly opposed her
wish to seek another home. But why should she avoid and hate him? In that
expedition on the river and on their way home he could have sworn that
she loved him, and the remembrance of those hours brought her near to him
again, and wiped out his schemes of vengeance against her, of punishment
to be visited on her. Then he thought of little Katharina whom his mother
intended him to marry, and at the thought he laughed softly to himself.
In the Imperial gardens at Constantinople he had once seen a strange
Indian bird, with a tiny body and head and an immensely long tail,
shining like silver and mother of pearl. This was Katharina! She herself
a mere nothing; but then her tail! vast estates and immense sums of
money; and this--this was all his mother saw. But did he need more than
he had? How rich his father must be to spend so large a sum on an
offering to the Church as heedlessly as men give alms to a beggar.
Katharina--and Paula!
Yes, the little girl was a bright, brisk creature; but then Thomas'
daughter--what power there was in her eye, what majesty in her gait,
how--how--how enchanting her--her voice could be--her voice. . . .
He was asleep, worn out by heat and fatigue; and in a dream he saw Paula
lying on a couch strewn with roses while all about her sounded wonderful
heart-ensnaring music; and the couch was not solid but blue water, gently
moving: he went towards her and suddenly a large black eagle swooped down
on him, flapped his wings in his face and when, half-blinded, he put his
hand to his eyes the bird pecked the roses as a hen picks millet and
barley. Then he was angry, rushed at the eagle, and tried to clutch him
with his hands; but his feet seemed rooted to the ground, and the more he
struggled to move freely the more firmly he was dragged backwards. He
fought like a madman against the hindering force, and suddenly it
released him. He was still under this impression when he woke, streaming
with perspiration, and opened his eyes. By his couch stood his mother who
had laid her hand on his feet to rouse him.
She looked pale and anxious and begged him to come quickly to his father
who was much disturbed, and wished to speak with him. Then she hurried
away.
While he hastily arranged his hair and had his shoes clasped he felt
vexed that, under the influence of that foolish dream, and still half
asleep, he had let his mother go before ascertaining what the
circumstances were that had given rise to his father's anxiety. Had it
anything to do with the incidents of the past night? No.--If he had been
suspected his mother would have told him and warned him. It must refer to
something else. Perhaps the old merchant's stalwart headman had died of
his wounds, and his father wished to send him--Orion--across the Nile to
the Arab viceroy to obtain forgiveness for the murder of a Moslem,
actually within the precincts of the governor's house. This fatal blow
might indeed entail serious consequences; however, the matter might very
likely be quite other than this.
When he left his room the brooding heat that filled the house struck him
as peculiarly oppressive, and a painful feeling, closely resembling
shame, stole over him as he crossed the viridarium, and glanced at the
grass from which--thanks to Paula's ill-meant warning--he had carefully
brushed away his foot-marks before daybreak. How cowardly, how base, it
all was The best of all in life: honor, self-respect, the proud
consciousness of being an honest man--all staked and all lost for nothing
at all! He could have slapped his own face or cried aloud like a child
that has broken its most treasured toy. But of what use was all this?
What was done could not be undone; and now he must keep his wits about
him so as to remain, in the eyes of others at least, what he had always
been, low as he had fallen in his own.
It was scorchingly hot in the enclosed garden-plot, surrounded by
buildings, and open to the sun; not a human creature was in sight; the
house seemed dead. The gaudy flag-staffs and trellis-work, and the
pillars of the verandah, which had all been newly painted in honor of his
return and were still wreathed with garlands, exhaled a smell, to him
quite sickening, of melting resin, drying varnish and faded flowers.
Though there was no breath of air the atmosphere quivered, as it seemed
from the fierce rays of the sun, which were reflected like arrows from
everything around him. The butterflies and dragonflies appeared to Orion
to move their wings more languidly as they hovered over the plants and
flowers, the very fountain danced up more lazily and not so high as
usual: everything about him was hot, sweltering, oppressive; and the man
who had always been so independent and looked up to, who for years had
been free to career through life uncontrolled, and guarded by every good
Genius now felt trammelled, hemmed in and harassed.
In his father's cool fountain-room he could breathe more freely; but only
for a moment. The blood faded from his cheeks, and he had to make a
strong effort to greet his father calmly and in his usual manner; for in
front of the divan where the governor commonly reclined, lay the Persian
hanging, and close by stood his mother and the Arab merchant. Sebek, the
steward awaited his master's orders, in the background in the attitude of
humility which was torture to his old back, but in which he was never
required to remain: Orion now signed to him to stand up:
The Arab's mild features wore a look of extreme gravity, and deep
vexation could be read in his kindly eyes. As the young man entered he
bowed slightly; they had already met that morning. The Mukaukas, who was
lying deathly pale with colorless lips, scarcely opened his eyes at his
son's greeting. It might have been thought that a bier was waiting in the
next room and that the mourners had assembled here.
The piece of work was only half unrolled, but Orion at once saw the spot
whence its crowning glory was now missing--the large emerald which, as he
alone could know, was on its way to Constantinople. His theft had been
discovered. How fearful, how fatal might the issue be!
"Courage, courage!" he said to himself. "Only preserve your presence of
mind. What profit is life with loss of honor? Keep your eyes open;
everything depends on that, Orion!"
He succeeded in hastily collecting his thoughts, and exclaimed in a voice
which lacked little of its usual eager cheerfulness:
"How dismal you all look! It is indeed a terrible disaster that the dog
should have handled the poor girl so roughly, and that our people should
have behaved so outrageously; but, as I told you this morning, worthy
Merchant, the guilty parties shall pay for it with their lives. My
father, I am sure, will agree that you should deal with them according to
your pleasure, and our leech Philippus, in spite of his youth, is a
perfect Hippocrates I can assure you! He will patch up the fine
fellow--your head-man I mean, and as to any question of compensation, my
father--well, you know he is no haggler."
"I beg you not to add insult to the injury that I have suffered under
your roof," interrupted Haschim. "No amount of money can buy off my wrath
over the spilt blood of a friend--and Rustem was my friend--a free and
valiant youth. As to the punishment of the guilty: on that I insist.
Blood cries for blood. That is our creed; and though yours, to be sure,
enjoins the contrary, so far as I know you act by the same rule as we.
All honor to your physician; but it goes to my heart, and raises my gall
to see such things take place in the house of the man to whom the Khaliff
has confided the weal or woe of Egyptian Christians. Your boasted
tolerance has led to the death of an honest though humble man in a time
of perfect peace--or at least maimed him for life. As to your honesty, it
would seem. . ."
"Who dares impugn it?" cried Orion.
"I, young man," replied the merchant with the calm dignity of age. "I,
who sold this piece of work last evening, and find it this morning robbed
of its most precious ornament."
"The great emerald has been cut from the hanging during the night." Dame
Neforis explained. "You yourself went with the man who carried it to the
tablinum and saw it laid there."
"And in the very cloth in which your people had wrapped it," added Orion.
"Our good old Sebek there was with me. Who fetched away the bale this
morning; who brought it here and opened it?"
"Happily for us," said the Arab, "it was your lady mother herself, with
that man--your steward if I mistake not--and your own slaves."
"Why was it not left where it was?" asked Orion, giving vent to the
annoyance which at this moment he really felt.
"Because I had assured your father, and with good reason, that the beauty
of this splendid work and of the gems that decorate it show to much
greater advantage by daylight and in the sunshine than under the lamps
and torches."
"And besides, your father wished to see his new purchase once more,"
Neforis broke in, "and to ask the merchant how the gems might be removed
without injury to the work itself. So I went to the tablinum myself with
Sebek."
"But I had the key!" cried Orion putting his hand into the breast of his
robe.
"That I had forgotten," replied his mother. "But unfortunately we did not
need it. The tablinum was open."
"I locked it yesterday; you saw me do it, Sebek. . ."
"So I told the mistress," replied the steward. "I perfectly recollect
hearing the snap of the strong lock."
Orion shrugged his shoulders, and his mother went on:
But the bronze doors must have been opened during the night with a false
key, or by some other means; for part of the hanging had been pulled out
of the wrapper, and when we looked closely we saw that the large emerald
had been wrenched out of the setting."
"Shameful!" exclaimed Orion.
"Disgraceful!" added the governor, vehemently starting up. He had fallen
a prey to fearful unrest and horror: he thought that his Lord and
Saviour, to whom he had dedicated the precious jewel, regarded him as so
sinful and worthless that He would not accept the gift at his hands. But
perhaps it was only Satan striving to hinder him from approaching the
Most High with so noble an offering. At any rate, human cunning had been
at work, so he said with stern resolution:
"The matter shall be enquired into, and in the name of Jesus Christ, to
whom the stone already belongs, I will never rest nor cease till the
criminal is in my hands."
"And in the name of Allah and the Prophet," added the Arab, "I will aid
thee, if I have to appeal for help to the great chief Amru, the Khaliff's
representative in this country.--A word was spoken here just now that I
cannot and will not forget. And the tone you have chosen to adopt, young
man, seems to spring from the same fount: the old fox, you think, put a
false gem of impossible size into the hanging, and has had it stolen that
his fraud may not be detected when a jeweller examines the work by
daylight. This is too much! I am an honest man, Sirs, and I am fain to
add a rich one; and the man who tries to cast a stain on the character I
have borne through a long life shall learn, to his ruing, that old
Haschim has greater and more powerful friends to back him than you may
care to meet!"
As he uttered this threat the merchant's eyes glistened through tears; it
grieved him to be unjustly suspected and to be forced to express himself
so hardly to the Mukaukas for whom he felt both reverence and pity. It
was clear from the tone of his speech that he was in fact a determined
and a powerful personage, and Orion interrupted him with the eager
enquiry: "Who has dared to think so basely of you?"
"Your own mother, I regret to say," replied the Moslem sadly, with an
oriental shrug of distress and annoyance--his shoulders up to his ears.
"Forget it, I beg of you," said the governor. "God knows women have
softer hearts than men, and yet they more readily incline to think evil
of their fellow-creatures, and particularly of the enemies of their
faith. On the other hand they are more sensitive to kindness. A woman's
hair is long and her wits short, says the saw."
"You have plenty to say against us women!" retorted Neforis. "But scold
away--scold if it is a comfort to you!" But she added, while she
affectionately turned her husband's pillows and gave him another of his
white pillules: "I will submit to the worst to-day for I am in the wrong.
I have already asked your pardon, worthy Haschim, and I do so again, with
all my heart."
As she spoke, she went up to the Arab and held out her hand; he took it,
but lightly, however, and quickly released it, saying:
"I do not find it hard to forgive. But I find it impossible, here or
anywhere, to let so much as a grain of dust rest on my bright good name.
I shall follow up this affair, turning neither to the right hand nor to
the left.--And now, one question: Is the dog that guarded the tablinum a
watchful, savage beast?"
"How savage he is he unfortunately proved on the person of the poor
Persian slave; and his watchfulness is known to all the household," cried
Orion.
"But I would beg you, worthy merchant," said Neforis, "and in the name of
all present, to give us the help of your experience. I myself--wait a
little wait: in spite of her long hair and her short wits a woman often
has a happy idea. I, probably, was the first to come on the robber's
track. It is clear that he must belong to the household since the dog did
not attack him. Paula, who was so wonderfully quick in coming to the
rescue of the Persian, is of course not to be thought of. . ."
Here her husband interrupted her with an angry exclamation: "Leave the
girl quite out of the question wife!"
"As if I supposed her to be the thief!" retorted Neforis indignantly, and
she shrugged her shoulders as Orion, in mild reproach, also cried:
"Mother! consider . . ." and the merchant asked:
"Do you mean the young girl from whom I had to take such hard words last
night?--Well, then, I will stake my whole fortune on her innocence. That
beautiful, passionate creature is incapable of any underhand dealings."
"Passionate!" Neforis smiled. "Her heart is as cold and as hard as the
lost emerald; we have proved that by experience."
"Nevertheless," said Orion, "she is incapable of baseness."
"How zealous men can be for a pair of fine eyes!" interrupted his mother.
"But I have not the most remote suspicion of her; I have something quite
different in my mind. A pair of man's shoes were found lying by the
wounded girl. Did you do what my lord Orion ordered, Sebek?"
"At once, Mistress," replied the steward, "and I have been expecting the
captain of the watch for some time; for Psamtik. . . ."
But here he was interrupted: the officer in question, who for more than
twenty years had commanded the Mukaukas' guard of honor, was shown into
the room; after answering a few preliminary enquiries he began his report
in a voice so loud that it hurt the governor, and his wife was obliged to
request the soldier to speak more gently.
The bloodhounds and terriers had been let out after being allowed to
smell at the shoes, and a couple of them had soon found their way to the
side-door where Hiram had waited for Paula. There they paused, sniffing
about on all sides, and had then jumped up a few steps.
"And those stairs lead to Paula's room," observed Neforis with a shrug.
"But they were on a false scent," the officer eagerly added. "The little
toads might have thrown suspicion on an innocent person. The curs
immediately after rushed into the stables, and ran up and down like Satan
after a lost soul. The pack had soon pulled down the boy--the son of the
freedman who came here from Damascus with the daughter of the great
Thomas--and they went quite mad in his father's room: Heaven and earth!
what a howling and barking and yelping. They poked their noses into every
old rag, and now we knew where the hole in the wine-skin was.--I am sorry
for the man. He stammered horribly, but as a trainer, and in all that has
to do with horses, all honor to him!--The shoes are Hiram's as surely as
my eyes are in my head; but we have not caught him yet. He is across the
river, for a boat is missing and where it had been lying the dogs began
again. Unless the unbelievers over there give him shelter we are certain
to have him."
"Then we know who is the criminal!" cried Orion, with a sigh as deep as
though some great burden were lifted from his soul. Then he went on in a
commanding tone--and his voice rang so fiercely that the color which had
mounted to his cheeks could hardly be due to satisfaction at this last
good news. . . .
"As it is not yet two hours after noon, send all your men out to search
for him and deliver him up. My father will give you a warrant, and the
Arabs on the other shore will assist you. Perhaps the thief may fall into
our hands even sooner and with him the emerald, unless the rogue has
succeeded in hiding it or selling it." Then his voice sank, and he added
in a tone of regret. It is a pity as concerns the man, we had not one in
our stables who knew more about horses! Fresh proof of your maxim,
mother: if you want to be well served you must buy rascals!"
"Strictly speaking," said Neforis meditatively, "Hiram is not one of our
people. He was a freedman of Thomas' and came here with his daughter.
Every one speaks highly of his skill in the stable; but for this robbery
we might have kept him for the rest of his life still, if the girl had
ever taken it into her head to leave us and to take him with her, we
could not have detained him.--You may say what you will, and abuse me and
mock me; I have none of what you call imagination; I see things simply as
they are: but there must be some understanding between that girl and the
thief."
"You are not to say another word of such monstrous nonsense!" exclaimed
her husband; and he would have said more, but that at that moment the
groom of the chambers announced that Gamaliel, the Jewish goldsmith,
begged an audience. The man had come to give information with regard to
the fate of the lost emerald.
At this statement Orion changed color, and he turned away from the
merchant as the slave admitted the same Israelite who had been sitting
over the fire with the head-servants. He at once plunged into his story,
telling it in his peculiar light-hearted style. He was so rich that the
loss he might suffer did not trouble him enough to spoil his good-humor,
and so honest that it was a pleasure to him to restore the stolen
property to its rightful owner. Early that morning, so he told them,
Hiram the groom had been to him to offer him a wonderfully large and
splendid emerald for sale. The freedman had assured him that the stone
was part of the property left by the famous Thomas, his former master. It
had decorated the head-stall of the horse which the hero of Damascus had
last ridden, and it had come to him with the steed.
"I offered him what I thought fair," the Jew went on, "and paid him two
thousand drachmae on account; the remainder he begged me to take charge
of for the present. To this I agreed, but ere long a fly began to hum
suspicion in my ear. Then the police rushed through the town with the
bloodhounds. Good Heavens, what a barking! The creatures yelped as if
they would bark my poor house down, like the trumpets round the walls of
Jericho--you know. 'What is the matter now,' I asked of the dog-keepers,
and behold! my suspicions about the emerald were justified; so here, my
lord Governor, I have brought you the stone, and as every suckling in
Memphis hears from its nurse--unless it is deaf--what a just man Mukaukas
George is, you will no doubt make good to me what I advanced to that
stammering scoundrel. And you will have the best of the bargain, noble
Sir; for I make no demand for interest or even maintenance for the two
hours during which it was mine."
"Give me the stone!" interrupted the Arab, who was annoyed by the Jew's
jesting tone; he snatched the emerald from him, weighed it in his hand,
put it close to his eyes, held it far off, tapped it with a small hammer
that he took out of his breast-pocket, slipped it into its place in the
work, examining it keenly, suspiciously, and at last with satisfaction.
During all this, Orion had more than once turned pale, and the sweat
broke out on his handsome, pale face. Had a miracle been wrought here?
How could this gem, which was surely on its way to Alexandria, have found
its way into the Jew's hands? Or could Chusar have opened the little
packet and have sold the emerald to Hiram, and through him to the
jeweller? He must get to the bottom of it, and while the Arab was
examining the gem he went up to Gamaliel and asked him: "Are you
positively certain--it is a matter of freedom or the dungeon--certain
that you had this stone from Hiram the Syrian and from no one else? I
mean, is the man so well-known to you that no mistake is possible?"
"God preserve us!" exclaimed the Jew drawing back a step from Orion, who
was gazing at him with a sinister light in his eyes. "How can my lord
doubt it? Your respected father has known me these thirty years, and do
you suppose that I--I do not know the Syrian? Why, who in Memphis can
stammer to compare with him? And has he not killed half my children with
your wild young horses?--Half killed every one of my children I
mean--half killed them, I say, with fright. They are all still alive and
well, God preserve them, but none the better for your horsebreaker; for
fresh air is good for children and my little Rebecca would stop indoors
till he was at home again for fear of his terrifying pranks."
"Well, well!" Orion broke in. "And at what hour did he bring you the
emerald for sale? Exactly. Now, recollect: when was it? You surely must
remember."
"Adonai! How should I?" said the Jew. "But wait, Sir, perhaps I may be
able to tell you. In this hot weather we are up before sunrise; then we
said our prayers and had our morning broth; then. . . ."
"Senseless chatter!" urged Orion. But Gamaliel went on without allowing
himself to be checked. "Then little Ruth jumped into my lap to pull out
the white hairs that will grow under my nose and, just as the child was
doing it and I cried out: 'Oh, you hurt me!' the sun fell upon the earth
bank on which I was sitting."
"And at what time does it reach the bank?" cried the young man.
"Exactly two hours after sunrise," replied the Jew, "at this time of
year. Do me the honor of a visit tomorrow morning; you will not regret
it, for I can show you some beautiful, exquisite things--and you can
watch the shadow yourself."
"Two hours after sunrise," murmured Orion to himself, and then with fresh
qualms he reflected that it was fully four hours later when he had given
the packet to Chusar. It was impossible to doubt the Jew's statement. The
man was rich, honest and content: he did not lie. The jewel Orion had
sent away and that purchased from Hiram could not in any case be
identical. But how could all this be explained? It was enough to
turn his brain. And not to dare to speak when mere silence was
falsehood--falsehood to his father and mother!--If only the hapless
stammerer might escape! If he were caught; then--then merciful Heaven!
But no; it was not to be thought of.--On, then, on; and if it came to the
worst the honor of a hundred stablemen could not outweigh that of one
Orion; horrible as it was, the man must be sacrificed. He would see that
his life was spared and that he was soon set at liberty!
The Arab meanwhile had concluded his examination; still he was not
perfectly satisfied. Orion longed to interpose; for if the merchant
expressed no doubts and acknowledged the recovered gem to be the stolen
one, much would be gained; so he turned to him again and said: "May I ask
you to show me the emerald once more? It is quite impossible, do you
think, that a second should be found to match it?"
"That is too much to assert," said the Arab gravely. "This stone
resembles that on the hanging to a hair; and yet it has a little
inequality which I do not remember noticing on it. It is true I had never
seen it out of the setting, and this little boss may have been turned
towards the stuff, and yet, and yet.--Tell me, goldsmith, did the thief
give you the emerald bare--unset?"
"As bare as Adam and Eve before they ate the apple," said the Jew.
"That is a pity--a great pity!--And still I fancy that the stone in the
work was a trifle longer. In such a case it is almost folly and
perversity to doubt, and yet I feel--and yet I ask myself: Is this really
the stone that formed that bud?"
"But Heaven bless us!" cried Orion, "the twin of such an unique gem would
surely not drop from the skies and at the same moment into one and the
same house. Let us be glad that the lost sheep has come back to us. Now,
I will lock it into this iron casket, Father, and as soon as the robber
is caught you send for me: do you understand, Psamtik?" He nodded to his
parents, offered his hand to the Arab, and that in a way which could not
fail to satisfy any one, so that even the old man was won over; and then
he left the room.
The merchant's honor was saved; still his conscientious soul was
disturbed by a doubt that he could not away with. He was about to take
leave but the Mukaukas was so buried in pillows, and kept his eyes so
closely shut, that no one could detect whether he were sleeping or
waking; so the Arab, not wishing to disturb him, withdrew without
speaking.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Ancient custom, to have her ears cut off
Caught the infection and had to laugh whether she would or no
Gave them a claim on your person and also on your sorrows
How could they find so much pleasure in such folly
Of two evils it is wise to choose the lesser
Prepared for the worst; then you are armed against failure
Who can hope to win love that gives none
Who can take pleasure in always seeing a gloomy face?
THE BRIDE OF THE NILE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 3.
CHAPTER X.
After the great excitement of the night Paula had thrown herself on her
bed with throbbing pulses. Sleep would not come to her, and so at rather
more than two hours after sunrise she went to the window to close the
shutters. As she did so she looked out, and she saw Hiram leap into a
boat and push the light bark from the shore. She dared neither signal nor
call to him; but when the faithful soul had reached open water he looked
back at her window, recognized her in her white morning dress and
flourished the oar high in the air. This could only mean that he had
fulfilled his commission and sold her jewel. Now he was going to the
other side to engage the Nabathaean.
When she had closed the shutters and darkened the room she again lay
down. Youth asserted its rights the weary girl fell into deep, dreamless
slumbers.
When she woke, with the heat drops on her forehead, the sun was nearly at
the meridian, only an hour till the Ariston would be served, the Greek
breakfast, the first meal in the morning, which the family eat together
as they also did the principal meal later in the clay. She had never yet
failed to appear, and her absence would excite remark.
The governor's household, like that of every Egyptian of rank, was
conducted more on the Greek than the Egyptian plan; and this was the case
not merely as regarded the meals but in many other things, and especially
the language spoken. From the Mukaukas himself down to the youngest
member of the family, all spoke Greek among themselves, and Coptic, the
old native dialect, only to the servants. Nay, many borrowed and foreign
words had already crept into use in the Coptic.
The governor's granddaughter, pretty little Mary, had learnt to speak
Greek fluently and correctly before she spoke Coptic, but when Paula had
first arrived she could not as yet write the beautiful language of Greece
with due accuracy. Paula loved children; she longed for some occupation,
and she had therefore volunteered to instruct the little girl in the art.
At first her hosts had seemed pleased that she should render this
service, but ere long the relation between the Lady Neforis and her
husband's niece had taken the unpleasant aspect which it was destined to
retain. She had put a stop to the lessons, and the reason she had
assigned for this insulting step was that Paula had dictated to her pupil
long sentences out of her Orthodox Greek prayerbook. This, it was true,
she had done; but without the smallest concealment; and the passages she
had chosen had contained nothing but what must elevate the soul of every
Christian, of whatever confession.
The child had wept bitterly over her grandmother's fiat, though Paula had
always taken the lessons quite seriously, for Mary loved her older
companion with all the enthusiasm of a half-grown girl--as a child of ten
really is in Egypt; her passionate little heart worshipped the beautiful
maiden who was in every respect so far above her, and Paula's arms had
opened wide to embrace the child who brought sunshine into the gloomy,
chill atmosphere she breathed in her uncle's house. But Neforis regarded
the child's ardent love for her Melchite relation as exaggerated and
morbid, imperilling perhaps her religious faith; and she fancied that
under Paula's influence Mary had transferred her affections from her to
the younger woman with added warmth. Nor was this idea wholly fanciful;
the child's strong sense of justice could not bear to see her friend
misunderstood and slighted, often simply and entirely misjudged and
hardly blamed, so Mary felt it her duty, as far as in her lay, to make up
for her grandmother's delinquencies in regard to the guest who in the
child's eyes was perfection.
But Neforis was not the woman to put up with this demeanor in a child.
Mary was her granddaughter, the only child of her lost son, and no one
should come between them. So she forbid the little girl to go to Paula's
room without an express message, and when a Greek teacher was engaged for
her, her instructions were that she should keep her pupil as much as
possible out of the Syrian damsel's way. All this only fanned the child's
vehement affection; and tenderly as her grandmother would sometimes
caress her--while Mary on her part never failed in dutiful
obedience--neither of them ever felt a true and steady warmth of heart
towards the other; and for this Paula was no doubt to blame, though
against her will and by her mere existence.
Often, indeed, and by a hundred covert hints Dame Neforis gave Paula to
understand that she it was who had alienated her grandchild; there was
nothing for it but to keep the child for whom she yearned, at a distance,
and only rarely reveal to her the abundance of her love. At last her life
was so full of grievance that she was hardly able to be innocent with the
innocent--a child with the child; Mary was not slow to note this, and
ascribed Paula's altered manner to the suffering caused by her
grandmother's severity.
Mary's most frequent opportunities of speaking to her friend were just
before meals; for at that time no one was watching her, and her
grandmother had not forbidden her calling Paula to table. A visit to her
room was the child's greatest delight--partly because it was
forbidden--but no less because Paula, up in her own room, was quite
different from what she seemed with the others, and because they could
there look at each other and kiss without interference, and say what ever
they pleased. There Mary could tell her as much as she dared of the
events in their little circle, but the lively and sometimes hoydenish
little girl was often withheld from confessing a misdemeanor, or even an
inoffensive piece of childishness, by sheer admiration for one who to her
appeared nobler, greater and loftier than other beings.
Just as Paula had finished putting up her hair, Mary, who would rush like
a whirlwind even into her grandmother's presence, knocked humbly at the
door. She did not fly into Paula's arms as she did into those of Susannah
or her daughter Katharina, but only kissed her white arm with fervent
devotion, and colored with happiness when Paula bent down to her, pressed
her lips to her brow and hair, and wiped her wet, glowing cheeks. Then
she took Mary's head fondly between her hands and said:
"What is wrong with you, madcap?"
In fact the sweet little face was crimson, and her eyes swelled as if she
had been crying violently.
"It is so fearfully hot," said Mary. "Eudoxia"--her Greek
governess--"says that Egypt in summer is a fiery furnace, a hell upon
earth. She is quite ill with the heat, and lies like a fish on the sand;
the only good thing about it is. . ."
"That she lets you run off and gives you no lessons?"
Mary nodded, but as no lecture followed the confession she put her head
on one side and looked up into Paula's face with large roguish eyes.
"And yet you have been crying!--a great girl like you?"
"I--I crying?"
"Yes, crying. I can see it in your eyes. Now confess: what has happened?"
"You will not scold me?"
"Certainly not."
"Well then. At first it was fun, such fun you cannot think, and I do not
mind the heat; but when the great hunt had gone by I wanted to go to my
grand mother and I was not allowed. Do you know, something very
particular had been going on in the fountain-room; and as they all came
out again I crept behind Orion into the tablinum--there are such
wonderful things there, and I wanted just to frighten him a little; we
have often played games together before. At first he did not see me, and
as he was bending over the hanging, from which the gem was stolen--I
believe he was counting the stones in the faded old thing--I just jumped
on to his shoulder, and he was so frightened--I can tell you, awfully
frightened! And he turned upon me like a fighting-cock and--and he gave
me a box on the ear; such a slap, it is burning now--and all sorts of
colors danced before my eyes. He always used to be so nice and kind to
me, and to you, too, and so I used to be fond of him--he is my uncle
too--but a box on the ears, a slap such as the cook might give to the
turnspit--I am too big for that; that I will certainly not put up with
it! Since my last birthday all the slaves and upper servants, too, have
had to treat me as a lady and to bow down to me! And now!--it was just
here.--How dare he?" She began to cry again and sobbed out: "But that was
not all. He locked me into the dark tablinum and left--left me. . . ."
her tears flowed faster and faster, "left me sitting there! It was so
horrible; and I might have been there now if I had not found a gold
plate; I seized my great-grandfather--I mean the silver image of Menas,
and hammered on it, and screamed Fire! Then Sebek heard me and fetched
Orion, and he let me out, and made such a fuss over me and kissed me. But
what is the good of that; my grandfather will be angry, for in my terror
I beat his father's nose quite flat on the plate."
Paula had listened, now amused and now grave, to the little girl's story;
when she ceased, she once more wiped her eyes and said:
"Your uncle is a man, and you must not play with him as if he were a
child like yourself. The reminder you got was rather a hard one, no
doubt, but Orion tried to make up for it.--But the great hunt, what was
that?"
At this question Mary's eyes suddenly sparkled again. In an instant all
her woes were forgotten, even her ancestor's flattened nose, and with a
merry, hearty laugh she exclaimed:
"Oh! you should have seen it! You would have been amused too. They wanted
to catch the bad man who cut the emerald out of the hanging. He had left
his shoes and they had held them under the dogs' noses and then off they
went! First they rushed here to the stairs; then to the stables, then to
the lodgings of one of the horse-trainers, and I kept close behind, after
the terriers and the other dogs. Then they stopped to consider and at
last they all ran out at the gate towards the town. I ought not to have
gone beyond the court-yard, but--do not be cross with me--it was such
fun!--Out they went, along Hapi Street, across the square, and at last
into the Goldsmith's Street, and there the whole pack plunged into
Gamaliel's shop--the Jew who is always so merry. While he was talking to
the others his wife gave me some apricot tartlets; we do not have such
good ones at home."
"And did they find the man?" asked Paula, who had changed color
repeatedly during the child's story.
"I do not know," said Mary sadly. "They were not chasing any one in
particular. The dogs kept their noses to the ground, and we ran after
them."
"And only to catch a man, who certainly had nothing whatever to do with
the theft.--Reflect a little, Mary. The shoes gave the dogs the scent and
they were set on to seize the man who had worn them, but whom no judge
had examined. The shoes were found in the hall; perhaps he had dropped
them by accident, or some one else may have carried them there. Now think
of yourself in the place of an innocent man, a Christian like ourselves,
hunted with a pack of dogs like a wild beast. Is it not frightful? No
good heart should laugh at such a thing!"
Paula spoke with such impressive gravity and deep sorrow, and her whole
manner betrayed such great and genuine distress that the child looked tip
at her anxiously, with tearful eyes, threw herself against her, and
hiding her face in Paula's dress exclaimed: "I did not know that they
were hunting a poor man, and if it makes you so sad, I wish I had not
been there! But is it really and truly so bad? You are so often unhappy
when we others laugh!" She gazed into Paula's face with wide, wondering
eyes through her tears, and Paula clasped her to her, kissed her fondly,
and replied with melancholy sweetness:
"I would gladly be as gay as you, but I have gone through so much to
sadden me. Laugh and be merry to your heart's content; I am glad you
should. But with regard to the poor hunted man, I fear he is my father's
freedman, the most faithful, honest soul! Did your exciting hunt drive
any one out of the goldsmith's shop?"
Mary shook her head; then she asked:
"Is it Hiram, the stammerer, the trainer, that they are hunting?"
"I fear it is."
"Yes, yes," said the child. "Stay--oh, dear! it will grieve you again,
but I think--I think they said--the shoes belonged--but I did not attend.
However, they were talking of a groom--a freedman--a stammerer. . . ."
"Then they certainly are hunting down an innocent man," cried Paula with
a deep sigh; and she sat down again in front of her toilet-table to
finish dressing. Her hands still moved mechanically, but she was lost in
thought; she answered the child vaguely, and let her rummage in her open
trunk till Mary pulled out the necklace that had been bereft of its gem,
and hung it round her neck. Just then there was a knock at the door and
Katharina, the widow Susannah's little daughter, came into the room. The
young girl, to whom the governor's wife wished to marry her tall son
scarcely reached to Paula's shoulder, but she was plump and pleasant to
look upon; as neat as if she had just been taken out of a box, with a
fresh, merry lovable little face. When she laughed she showed a gleaming
row of small teeth, set rather wide apart, but as white as snow; and her
bright eyes beamed on the world as gladly as though they had nothing that
was not pleasing to look for, innocent mischief to dream of. She too,
tried to win Paula's favor; but with none of Mary's devoted and unvarying
enthusiasm. Often, to be sure, she would devote herself to Paula with
such stormy vehemence that the elder girl was forced to be repellent;
then, on the other hand, if she fancied her self slighted, or treated
more coolly than Mary, she would turn her back on Paula with sulky
jealousy, temper and pouting. It always was in Paula's power to put an
end to the "Water-wagtails tantrums"--which generally had their comic
side--by a kind word or kiss; but without some such advances Katharina
was quite capable of indulging her humors to the utmost.
On the present occasion she flew into Paula's arm, and when her friend
begged, more quietly than usual that she would allow her first to finish
dressing, she turned away without any display of touchiness and took the
necklace from Mary's hand to put it on herself. It was of fine
workmanship, set with pearls, and took her fancy greatly; only the empty
medallion from which Hiram had removed the emerald with his knife spoiled
the whole effect. Still, it was a princely jewel, and when she had also
taken from the chest a large fan of ostrich feathers she showed off to
her play-fellow, with droll, stiff dignity, how the empress and
princesses at Court curtsied and bowed graciously to their inferiors. At
this they both laughed a great deal. When Paula had finished her toilet
and proceeded to take the necklace off Katharina, the empty setting,
which Hiram's knife had bent, caught in the thin tissue of her dress.
Mary disengaged it, and Paula tossed the jewel back into the trunk.
While she was locking the box she asked Katharina whether she had met
Orion.
"Orion!" repeated the younger girl, in a tone which implied that she
alone had the right to enquire about him. "Yes, we came upstairs
together; he went to see the wounded man. Have you anything to say to
him?"
She crimsoned as she spoke and looked suspiciously at Paula, who simply
replied: "Perhaps," and then added, as she hung the ribbon with the key
round her neck: "Now, you little girls, it is breakfast time; I am not
going down to-day."
"Oh, dear!" cried Mary disappointed, "my grandfather is ailing and
grandmother will stay with him; so if you do not come I shall have to sit
alone with Eudoxia; for Katharina's chariot is waiting and she must go
home at once. Oh! do come. Just to please me; you do not know how odious
Eudoxia can be when it is so hot."
"Yes, do go down," urged Katharina. "What will you do up hereby yourself?
And this evening mother and I will come again."
"Very well," said Paula. "But first I must go to see the invalids."
"May I go with you?" asked the Water wagtail, coaxingly stroking Paula's
arm. But Mary clapped her hands, exclaiming:
"She only wants to go to Orion--she is so fond of him. . . ."
Katharina put her hand over the child's mouth, but Paula, with quickened
breath, explained that she had very serious matters to discuss with
Orion; so Katharina, turning her back on her with a hasty gesture of
defiance, sulkily went down stairs, while Mary slipped down the bannister
rail. Not many days since, Katharina, who was but just sixteen, would
gladly have followed her example.
Paula meanwhile knocked at the first of the sickrooms and entered it as
softly as the door was opened by a nursing-sister from the convent of St.
Katharine. Orion, whom she was seeking, had been there, but had just
left.
In this first room lay the leader of the caravan; in that beyond was the
crazy Persian. In a sitting-room adjoining the first room, which, being
intended for guests of distinction, was furnished with royal
magnificence, sat two men in earnest conversation: the Arab merchant and
Philippus the physician, a young man of little more than thirty, tall and
bony, in a dress of clean but very coarse stuff without any kind of
adornment. He had a shrewd, pale face, out of which a pair of bright
black eyes shone benevolently but with keen vivacity. His large
cheek-bones were much too prominent; the lower part of his face was
small, ugly and, as it were, compressed, while his high broad forehead
crowned the whole and stamped it as that of a thinker, as a fine cupola
may crown an insignificant and homely structure.
This man, devoid of charm, though his strongly-characterized
individuality made it difficult to overlook him even in the midst of a
distinguished circle, had been conversing eagerly with the Arab, who, in
the course of their two-days' acquaintance, had inspired him with a
regard which was fully reciprocated. At last Orion had been the theme of
their discourse, and the physician, a restless toiler who could not like
any man whose life was one of idle enjoyment, though he did full justice
to his brilliant gifts and well-applied studies, had judged him far more
hardly than the older man. To the leech all forms of human life were
sacred, and in his eyes everything that could injure the body or soul of
a man was worthy of destruction. He knew all that Orion had brought upon
the hapless Mandane, and how lightly he had trifled with the hearts of
other women; in his eyes this made him a mischievous and criminal member
of society. He regarded life as an obligation to be discharged by work
alone, of whatever kind, if only it were a benefit to society as a whole.
And such youths as Orion not only did not recognize this, but used the
whole and the parts also for base and selfish ends. The old Moslem, on
the contrary, viewed life as a dream whose fairest portion, the time of
youth, each one should enjoy with alert senses, and only take care that
at the waking which must come with death he might hope to find admission
into Paradise. How little could man do against the iron force of fate!
That could not be forefended by hard work; there was nothing for it but
to take up a right attitude, and to confront and meet it with dignity.
The bark of Orion's existence lacked ballast; in fine weather it drifted
wherever the breeze carried it, He himself had taken care to equip it
well; and if only the chances of life should freight it heavily--very
heavily, and fling it on the rocks, then Orion might show who and what he
was; he, Haschim, firmly believed that his character would prove itself
admirable. It was in the hour of shipwreck that a man showed his worth.
Here the physician interrupted him to prove that it was not Fate, as
imagined by Moslems, but man himself who guided the bark of life--but at
this moment Paula looked into the room, and he broke off. The merchant
bowed profoundly, Philippus respectfully, but with more embarrassment
than might have been expected from the general confidence of his manner.
For some years he had been a daily visitor in the governor's house, and
after carefully ignoring Paula on her first arrival, since Dame Neforis
had taken to treating her so coolly he drew her out whenever he had the
opportunity. Her conversations with him had now become dear and even
necessary to her, though at first his dry, cutting tone had displeased
her, and he had often driven her into a corner in a way that was hard to
bear. They kept her mind alert in a circle which never busied itself with
anything but the trivial details of family life in the decayed city, or
with dogmatic polemics--for the Mukaukas seldom or never took part in the
gossip of the women.
The leech never talked of daily events, but expressed his views as to
other and graver subjects in life, or in books with which they were both
familiar; and he had the art of eliciting replies from her which he met
with wit and acumen. By degrees she had become accustomed to his bold
mode of thought, sometimes, it is true, too recklessly expressed; and the
gifted girl now preferred a discussion with him to any other form of
conversation, recognizing that a childlike and supremely unselfish soul
animated this thoughtful reservoir of all knowledge. Almost everything
she did displeased her uncle's wife, and so, of course, did her familiar
intercourse with this man, whose appearance certainly had in it nothing
to attract a young girl.--The physician to a family of rank was there to
keep its members in good health, and it was unbecoming in one of them to
converse with him on intimate terms as an equal. She reproached
Paula--whose pride she was constantly blaming--for her unseemly
condescension to Philippus; but what chiefly annoyed her was that Paula
took up many a half-hour which otherwise Philippus would have devoted to
her husband; and in him and his health her life and thoughts were
centred.
The Arab at once recognized his foe of the previous evening; but they
soon came to a friendly understanding--Paula confessing her folly in
holding a single and kindly-disposed man answerable for the crimes of a
whole nation. Haschim replied that a right-minded spirit always came to a
just conclusion at last; and then the conversation turned on her father,
and the physician explained to the Arab that she was resolved never to
weary of seeking the missing man.
"Nay, it is the sole aim and end of my life," cried the girl.
"A great mistake, in my opinion," said the leech. But the merchant
differed: there were things, he said, too precious to be given up for
lost, even when the hope of finding them seemed as feeble and thin as a
rotten reed.
"That is what I feel!" cried Paula. "And how can you think differently,
Philip? Have I not heard from your own lips that you never give up all
hope of a sick man till death has put an end to it? Well, and I cling to
mine--more than ever now, and I feel that I am right. My last thought, my
last coin shall be spent in the search for my father, even without my
uncle and his wife, and in spite of their prohibition."
"But in such a task a young girl can hardly do without a man's succor,"
said the merchant. "I wander a great deal about the world, I speak with
many foreigners from distant lands, and if you will do me the honor, pray
regard me as your coadjutor, and allow me to help you in seeking for the
lost hero."
"Thanks--I fervently thank you!" cried Paula, grasping the Moslem's hand
with hearty pleasure. "Wherever you go bear my lost father in mind; I am
but a poor, lonely girl, but if you find him. . ."
"Then you will know that even among the Moslems there are men. . ."
"Men who are ready to show compassion and to succor friendless women!"
interrupted Paula.
"And with good success, by the blessing of the Almighty," replied the
Arab. "As soon as I find a clue you shall hear from me; now, however, I
must go across the Nile to see Amru the great general; I go in all
confidence for I know that my poor, brave Rustem is in good hands, friend
Philippus. My first enquiries shall be made in Fostat, rely upon that, my
daughter."
"I do indeed," said Paula with pleased emotion. "When shall we meet
again?"
"To-morrow, or the morning after at latest."
The young girl went up to him and whispered: "We have just heard of a
clue; indeed, I hope my messenger is already on his way. Have you time to
hear about it now?"
"I ought long since to have been on the other shore; so not to-day, but
to-morrow I hope." The Arab shook hands with her and the physician, and
hastily took his leave.
Paula stood still, thinking. Then it struck her that Hiram was now on the
further side of the Nile, within the jurisdiction of the Arab ruler, and
that the merchant could perhaps intercede for him, if she were to tell
him all she knew. She felt the fullest confidence in the old man, whose
kind and sympathetic face was still visible to her mind's eye, and
without paying any further heed to the physician she went quickly towards
the door of the sick-room. A crucifix hung close by, and the nun had
fallen on her knees before it, praying for her infidel patient, and
beseeching the Good Shepherd to have mercy on the sheep that was not of
His fold. Paula did not venture to disturb the worshipper, who was
kneeling just in the narrow passage; so some minutes elapsed before the
leech, observing her uneasiness, came out of the larger room, touched the
nun on the shoulder, and said in a low voice of genuine kindness:
"One moment, good Sister. Your pious intercession will be heard--but this
damsel is in haste." The nun rose at once and made way, sending a
wrathful glance after Paula as she hurried down the stairs.
At the door of the court-yard she looked out and about for the Arab, but
in vain. Then she enquired of a slave who told her that the merchant's
horse had waited for him at the gate a long time, that he had just come
galloping out, and by this time must have reached the bridge of boats
which connected Memphis with the island of Rodah and, beyond the island,
with the fort of Babylon and the new town of Fostat.
CHAPTER XI.
Paula went up-stairs again, distressed and vexed with herself. Was it the
heat that had enervated her and robbed her of the presence of mind she
usually had at her command? She herself could not understand how it was
that she had not at once taken advantage of the opportunity to plead to
Haschim for her faithful retainer. The merchant might have interested
himself for Hiram.
The slave at the gate had told her that he had not yet been taken; the
time to intercede, then, had not yet come. But she was resolved to do so,
to draw the wrath of her relations down on herself, and, if need should
be, to relate all she had seen in the course of the night, to save her
devoted servant. It was no less than her duty: still, before humiliating
Orion so deeply she would warn him. The thought of charging him with so
shameful a deed pained her like the need for inflicting an injury on
herself. She hated him, but she would rather have broken the most
precious work of art than have branded him--him whose image still reigned
in her heart, supremely glorious and attractive.
Instead of following Mary to breakfast, or offering herself as usual to
play draughts with her uncle, she went back to the sick-room. To meet
Neforis or Orion at this moment would have been painful, indeed odious to
her. It was long since she had felt so weary and oppressed. A
conversation with the physician might perhaps prove refreshing; after the
various agitations of the last few hours she longed for something, be it
what it might, that should revive her spirits and give a fresh turn to
her thoughts.
In the Masdakite's room the Sister coldly asked her what she wanted, and
who had given her leave to assist in tending the sufferers. The leech,
who at that moment was moistening the bandage on the wounded man's head,
at this turned to the nun and informed her decidedly that he desired the
young girl's assistance in attending on both his patients. Then he led
the way sitting-room, saying in subdued into the adjoining tones:
"For the present all is well. Let us rest here a little while."
She sat down on a divan, and he on a seat opposite, and Philippus began:
"You were seeking handsome Orion just now, but you must. . . ."
"What?" she asked gravely. "And I would have you to know that the son of
the house is no more to me than his mother is. Your phrase 'Handsome
Orion' seems to imply something that I do not again wish to hear. But I
must speak to him, and soon, in reference to an important matter."
"To what, then, do I owe the pleasure of seeing you here again? To
confess the truth I did not hope for your return."
"And why not?"
"Excuse me from answering. No one likes to hear unpleasant things. If one
of my profession thinks any one is not well. . . ."
"If that is meant for me," replied the girl, "all I can tell you is that
the one thing on which I still can pride myself is my health. Say what
you will--the very worst for aught I care. I want something to-day to
rouse me from lethargy, even if it should make me angry."
"Very well then," replied the leech, "though I am plunging into deep
waters!--As to health, as it is commonly understood, a fish might envy
you; but the higher health--health of mind: that I fear you cannot boast
of."
"This is a serious beginning," said Paula. "Your reproof would seem to
imply that I have done you or some one else a wrong."
"If only you had!" exclaimed he. "No, you have not sinned against us in
any way.--'I am as I am' is what you think of yourself; and what do you
care for others?"
"That must depend on whom you mean by 'others!'"
"Nothing less than all and each of those with whom you live--here, in
this house, in this town, in this world. To you they are mere air--or
less; for the air is a tangible thing that can fill a ship's sails and
drive it against the stream, whose varying nature can bring comfort or
suffering to your body."
"My world is within!" said Paula, laying her hand on her heart.
"Very true. And all creation may find room there; for what cannot the
human heart, as it is called, contain! The more we require it to take and
keep, the more ready it is to hold it. It is unsafe to let the lock rust;
for, if once it has grown stiff, when we want to open it no pulling and
wrenching will avail. And besides--but I do not want to grieve you.--You
have a habit of only looking backwards. . . ."
"And what that is pleasurable lies before me? Your blame is harsh and at
the same time unjust.--Indeed, and how can you tell which way I look?"
"Because I have watched you with the eye of a friend. In truth, Paula,
you have forgotten how to look around and forward. The life which lies
behind you and which you have lost is all your world. I once showed you
on a fragmentary papyrus that belonged to my foster father, Horus Apollo,
a heathen demon represented as going forwards, while his head was turned
on his neck so that the face and eyes looked behind him."
"I remember it perfectly."
Well, you have long been just like him. 'All things move,' says
Heraclitus, so you are forced to float onwards with the great stream; or,
to vary the image, you must walk forwards on the high-road of life
towards the common goal; but your eye is fixed on what lies behind you,
feasting on the prospect of a handsome and wealthy home, kindness and
tenderness, noble and loving faces, and a happy, but alas! long-lost
existence. All the same, on you must go.--What must the result be?"
"I must stumble, you think, and fall?"
The physician's reproof had hit Paula all the harder because she could
not conceal from herself that there was much truth in it. She had come
hither on purpose to find encouragement, and these accusations troubled
even her sense of high health. Why should she submit to be taken to task
like a school-girl by this man, himself still young? If this went on she
would let him hear. . . . But he was speaking again, and his reply calmed
her, and strengthened her conviction that he was a true and well-meaning
friend.
"Not that perhaps," he said, "because--well, because nature has blessed
you with perfect balance, and you go forward in full self-possession as
becomes the daughter of a hero. We must not forget that it is of your
soul that I am speaking; and that maintains its innate dignity of feeling
among so much that is petty and mean."
"Then why need I fear to look back when it gives me so much comfort?" she
eagerly enquired, as she gazed in his face with fresh spirit.
"Because it may easily lead you to tread on other people's feet! That
hurts them; then they are annoyed, and they get accustomed to think
grudgingly of you--you who are more lovable than they are."
"But quite unjustly; for I am not conscious of ever having intentionally
grieved or hurt any one in my whole life."
"I know that; but you have done so unintentionally a thousand times."
"Then it would be better I should quit them altogether."
"No, and a thousand times no! The man who avoids his kind and lives in
solitude fancies he is doing some great thing and raising himself above
the level of the existence he despises. But look a little closer: it is
self-interest and egoism which drive him into the cave and the cloister.
In any case he neglects his highest duty towards humanity--or let us say
merely towards the society he belongs to--in order to win what he
believes to be his own salvation. Society is a great body, and every
individual should regard himself as a member of it, bound to serve and
succor it, and even, when necessary, to make sacrifices for it. The
greatest are not too great. But those who crave isolation,--you
yourself--nay, hear me out, for I may never again risk the danger of
incurring your wrath--desire to be a body apart. What Paula has known and
possessed, she keeps locked in the treasure-house of her memory under
bolt and key; What Paula is, she feels she still must be--and for whom?
Again, for that same Paula. She has suffered great sorrow and on that her
soul lives; but this is evil nourishment, unwholesome and bad for her."
She was about to rise; but he bent forward, with a zealous conviction
that he must not allow himself to be interrupted, and lightly touched her
arm as though to prevent her quitting her seat, while he went on
unhesitatingly:
"You feed on your old sorrows! Well and good. Many a time have I seen
that trial can elevate the soul. It can teach a brave heart to feel the
woes of others more deeply; it can rouse a desire to assuage the griefs
of others with beautiful self-devotion. Those who have known pain and
affliction enjoy ease and pleasure with double satisfaction; sufferers
learn to be grateful for even the smaller joys of life. But you?--I have
long striven for courage to tell you so--you derive no benefit from
suffering because you lock it up in your breast--as if a man were to
enclose some precious seed in a silver trinket to carry about with him.
It should be sown in the earth, to sprout and bear fruit! However, I do
not blame you; I only wish to advise you as a true and devoted friend.
Learn to feel yourself a member of the body to which your destiny has
bound you for the present, whether you like it or not. Try to contribute
to it all that your capacities allow you achieve. You will find that you
can do something for it; the casket will open, and to your surprise and
delight you will perceive that the seed dropped into the soil will
germinate, that flowers will open and fruit will form of which you may
make bread, or extract from it a balm for yourself or for others! Then
you will leave the dead to bury the dead, as the Bible has it, and
dedicate to the living those great powers and gracious gifts which an
illustrious father and a noble mother--nay, and a long succession of
distinguished ancestors, have bequeathed to a descendant worthy of them.
Then you will recover that which you have lost: the joy in existence
which we ought both to feel and to diffuse, because it brings with it an
obligation which it which is only granted to us once to fulfil. Kind fate
has fitted you above a hundred thousand others for being loved; and if
you do not forget the gratitude you owe for that, hearts will be turned
to you, though now they shun the tree which has beset itself
intentionally with thorns, and which lets its branches droop like the
weeping-willows by the Nile. Thus you will lead a new and beautiful life,
receiving and giving joy. The isolated and charmless existence you drag
through here, to the satisfaction of none and least of all to your own,
you can transform to one of fruition and satisfaction--breathing and
moving healthily and beneficently in the light of day. It lies in your
power. When you came up here to give your care to these poor injured
creatures, you took the first step in the new path I desire to show you,
to true happiness. I did not expect you, and I am thankful that you have
come; for I know that as you entered that door you may have started on
the road to renewed happiness, if you have the will to walk in it.--Thank
God! That is said and over!"
The leech rose and wiped his forehead, looking uneasily at Paula who had
remained seated; her breath came fast, and she was more confused and
undecided than he had ever seen her. She clasped her hand over her brow,
and gazed, speechless, into her lap as though she wished to smother some
pain.
The young physician beat his arms together, like a laborer in the winter
when his hands are frozen, and exclaimed with distressful emotion: "Yes,
I have spoken, and I cannot regret having done so; but what I foresaw has
come to pass: The greatest happiness that ever sweetened my daily life is
gone out of it! To love Plato is a noble rule, but greater than Plato is
the truth; and yet, those who preach it must be prepared to find that
truth scares away friends from the unpleasing vicinity of its ill-starred
Apostles!"
At this Paula rose, and following the impulse of her generous heart,
offered the leech her hand in all sincerity; he grasped it in both his,
pressing it so tightly that it almost hurt her, and his eyes glistened
with moisture as he exclaimed: "That is as I hoped; that is splendid,
that is noble! Let me but be your brother, high-souled maiden!--Now,
come. That poor, crazy, lovely girl will heal of her death-wound under
your hands if under any!"
"I will come!" she replied heartily; and there was something healthy and
cheerful in her manner as they entered the sick-room; but her expression
suddenly changed, and she asked pensively:
"And supposing we restore the unhappy girl--what good will she get by
it?"
"She will breathe and see the sunshine," replied the leech; "she will be
grateful to you, and finally she will contribute what she can to the
whole body. She will be alive in short, she will live. For life--feel it,
understand it as I do--life is the best thing we have." Paula gazed with
astonishment in the man's unlovely but enthusiastic face. How radiantly
joyful!
No one could have called it ugly at this moment, or have said that it
lacked charm.
He believed what he had asserted with such fervent feeling, though it was
in contradiction to a view he had held only yesterday and often defended:
that life in itself was misery to all who could not grasp it of their own
strength, and make something of it worth making. At this moment he really
felt that it was the best gift.
Paula went forward, and his eyes followed her, as the gaze of the pious
pilgrim is fixed on the holy image he has travelled to see, over seas and
mountains, with bruised feet.
They went up to the sick girl's bed. The nun drew back, making her own
reflections on the physician's altered mien, and his childlike, beaming
contentment, as he explained to Paula what particular peril threatened
the sufferer, and by what treatment he hoped to save her; how to make the
bandages and give the medicines, and how necessary it was to accept the
poor crazy girl's fancies and treat them as rational ideas so long as the
fever lasted.
At last he was forced to go and attend to other patients. Paula remained
sitting at the head of the bed and gazing at the face of the sufferer.
How fair it was! And Orion had snatched this rose in the bud, and trodden
it under foot! She had, no doubt, felt for him what Paula herself felt.
And now? Did she feel nothing but hatred of him, or could her heart, in
spite of her indignation and scorn, not altogether cast off the spell
that had once bound it?
What weakness was this! She was, she must, she would be his foe!
Her thoughts went back to the idle and futile life that she had led for
so many years. The physician had hit the mark; and he had been too easy
rather than severe. Yes, she would begin to make good use of her
powers--but how, in what way, here and among these people? How
transfigured poor Philippus had seemed when she had given him her hand;
with what energy had he poured forth his words.
"And how false," she mused, "is the saying that the body is the mirror of
the soul! If it were so, Philippus would have the face of Orion, and
Orion that of Philippus." But could Orion's heart be wholly reprobate?
Nay, that was impossible; her every impulse resisted the belief. She must
either love him or hate him, there was no third alternative; but as yet
the two passions were struggling within her in a way that was quite
intolerable.
The physician had spoken of being a brother to her, and she could not
help smiling at the idea. She could, she thought, live very happily and
calmly with him, with her nurse Betta, and with the learned old friend
who shared his home, and of whom he had often talked to her; she could
join him in his studies, help him in his calling, and discuss many things
well worth knowing. Such a life, she told herself, would be a thousand
times preferable to this, with Neforis. In him she had certainly found a
friend; and her glad recognition of the fact was the first step towards
the fulfilment of his promise, since it showed that her heart was still
ready to go forth to the kindness of another.
Amid these meditations, however, her anxiety for Hiram constantly
recurred to her, and it was clear to her mind that, if she and Orion
should come to extremities, she could no longer dwell under the
governor's roof. Often she had longed for nothing so fervently as to be
able to quit it; but to-day it filled her with dread, for parting from
her uncle necessarily involved parting from his son. She hated him;
still, to lose sight of him altogether would be very hard to bear. To go
with Philippus and live with him as his sister would never do; nay, it
struck her as something inconceivable, strangely incongruous.
Meanwhile she listened to Mandane's breathing and treated her in
obedience to the leech's orders, longing for his return; presently
however, not he but the nun came to the bed-side, laid her hand on the
girl's forehead, and without paying any heed to Paula, whispered kindly:
"That is right child, sleep away; have a nice long sleep. So long as she
can be kept quiet; if only she goes on like this!--Her head is cooler.
Philippus will certainly say there is scarcely any fever. Thank God, the
worst danger is over!"
"Oh, how glad I am!" cried Paula, and she spoke with such warmth and
sincerity that the nun gave her a friendly nod and left the sick girl to
her care, quite satisfied.
It was long since Paula had felt so happy. She fancied that her presence
had had a good affect on the sufferer, that Mandane had already been
brought by her nursing to the threshold of a new life. Paula, who but
just now had regarded herself as a persecuted victim of Fate, now
breathed more freely in the belief that she too might bring joy to some
one. She looked into Mandane's more than pretty face with real joy and
tenderness, laid the bandage which had slipped aside gently over her
ears, and breathed a soft kiss on her long silken lashes.
She rapidly grew in favor with the shrewd nun; when the hour for prayer
came round, the sister included in her petitions--Paula--the orphan under
a stranger's roof, the Greek girl born, by the inscrutable decrees of
God, outside the pale of her saving creed. At length Philippus returned;
he was rejoiced at his new friend's brightened aspect, and declared that
Mandane had, under her care, got past the first and worst danger, and
might be expected to recover, slowly indeed, but completely.
After Paula had renewed the compress--and he intentionally left her to do
it unaided, he said encouragingly:
"How quickly you have learnt your business.--Now, the patient is asleep
again; the Sister will keep watch, and for the present we can be of no
use to the girl; sleep is the best nourishment she can have. But with
us--or at any rate with me, it is different. We have still two hours to
wait for the next meal: my breakfast is standing untouched, and yours no
doubt fared the same; so be my guest. They always send up enough to
satisfy six bargemen."
Paula liked the proposal, for she had long been hungry. The nun was
desired to hasten to fetch some more plates, of drinking-vessels there
was no lack--and soon the new allies were seated face to face, each at a
small table. He carved the duck and the roast quails, put the salad
before her and some steaming artichokes, which the nun had brought up at
the request of the cook whose only son the physician had saved; he
invited her attention to the little pies, the fruits and cakes which were
laid ready, and played the part of butler; and then, while they heartily
enjoyed the meal, they carried on a lively conversation.
Paula for the first time asked Philippus to tell her something of his
early youth; he began with an account of his present mode of life, as a
partner in the home of the singular old priest of Isis, Horus Apollo, a
diligent student; he described his strenuous activity by day and his
quiet studies by night, and gave everything such an amusing aspect that
often she could not help laughing. But presently he was sad, as he told
her how at an early age he had lost his father and mother, and was left
to depend solely on himself and on a very small fortune, having no
relations; for his father had been a grammarian, invited to Alexandria
from Athens, who had been forced to make a road for himself through life,
which had lain before him like an overgrown jungle of papyrus and reeds.
Every hour of his life was devoted to his work, for a rough, outspoken
Goliath, such as he, never could find it easy to meet with helpful
patrons. He had managed to live by teaching in the high schools of
Alexandria, Athens, and Caesarea, and by preparing medicines from choice
herbs--drinking water instead of wine, eating bread and fruit instead of
quails and pies; and he had made a friend of many a good man, but never
yet of a woman--it would be difficult with such a face as his!
"Then I am the first?" said Paula, who felt deep respect for the man who
had made his way by his own energy to the eminent position which he had
long held, not merely in Memphis, but among Egyptian physicians
generally.
He nodded, and with such a blissful smile that she felt as though a
sunbeam had shone into her very soul. He noticed this at once, raised his
goblet, and drank to her, exclaiming with a flush on his cheek:
"The joy that comes to others early has come to me late; but then the
woman I call my friend is matchless!"
"Well, it is to be hoped she may not prove to be so wicked as you just
now described her.--If only our alliance is not fated to end soon and
abruptly."
"Ah!" cried the physician, "every drop of blood in my veins. . . ."
"You would be ready to shed it for me," Paula broke in, with a pathetic
gesture, borrowed from a great tragedian she had seen at the theatre in
Damascus. "But never fear: it will not be a matter of life and death--at
worst they will but turn me out of the house and of Memphis."
"You?" cried Philippus startled, "but who would dare to do so?"
"They who still regard me as a stranger.--You described the case
admirably. If they have their way, my dear new friend, our fate will be
like that of the learned Dionysius of Cyrene."
"Of Cyrene?"
"Yes. It was my father who told me the story. When Dionysius sent his son
to the High School at Athens, he sat down to write a treatise for him on
all the things a student should do and avoid. He devoted himself to the
task with the utmost diligence; but when, at the end of four years, he
could write on the last leaf of the roll. 'Here this book hath a happy
ending,' the young man whose studies it was intended to guide came home
to Cyrene, a finished scholar."
"And we have struck up a friendship . . . ?"
"And made a treaty of alliance, only to be parted ere long."
Philippus struck his fist vehemently on the little table in front of his
couch and exclaimed: "That I will find means to prevent!--But now, tell
me in confidence, what has last happened between you and the family
down-stairs?"
"You will know quite soon enough."
"Whichever of them fancies that you can be turned out of doors without
more ado and there will be an end between us, may find himself mistaken!"
cried the physician with an angry sparkle in his eyes. "I have a right to
put in a word in this house. It has not nearly come to that yet, and what
is more, it never shall. You shall quit it certainly; but of your own
free will, and holding your head high. . . ."
As he spoke the door of the outer room was hastily opened and the next
instant Orion was standing before them, looking with great surprise at
the pair who had just finished their meal. He said coldly:
"I am disturbing you, I see."
"Not in the least," replied the leech; and the young man, perceiving what
bad taste it would be and how much out of place to give expression to his
jealous annoyance, said, with a smile: "If only it had been granted to a
third person to join in this symposium!"
"We found each other all-sufficient company," answered Philippus.
"A man who could believe in all the doctrines of the Church as readily as
in that statement would be assured of salvation," laughed Orion. "I am no
spoilsport, respected friends; but I deeply regret that I must, on the
present occasion, disturb your happiness. The matter in question. . . ."
And he felt he might now abandon the jesting tone which so little
answered to his mood, "is a serious one. In the first instance it
concerns your freedman, my fair foe."
"Has Hiram come back?" asked Paula, feeling herself turn pale.
"They have brought him in," replied Orion. "My father at once summoned
the court of judges. Justice has a swift foot here with us; I am sorry
for the man, but I cannot prevent its taking its course. I must beg of
you to appear at the examination when you are called."
"The whole truth shall be told!" said Paula sternly and firmly.
"Of course," replied Orion. Then turning to the physician, he added: "I
would request you, worthy Esculapius, to leave me and my cousin together
for a few minutes. I want to give her a word of counsel which will
certainly be to her advantage."
Philippus glanced enquiringly at the girl; she said with clear decision:
"You and I can have no secrets. What I may hear, Philippus too may know."
Orion, with a shrug, turned to leave the room:
On the threshold he paused, exclaiming with some excitement and genuine
distress:
"If you will not listen to me for your own sake, do so at least, whatever
ill-feeling you may bear me, because I implore you not to refuse me this
favor. It is a matter of life or death to one human being, of joy or
misery to another. Do not refuse me.--I ask nothing unreasonable,
Philippus. Do as I entreat you and leave us for a moment alone."
Again the physician's eyes consulted the young girl's; this time she
said: "Go!" and he immediately quitted the room.
Orion closed the door.
"What have I done, Paula," he began with panting breath, "that since
yesterday you have shunned me like a leper--that you are doing your
utmost to bring me to ruin?"
"I mean to plead for the life of a trusty servant; nothing more," she
said indifferently.
"At the risk of disgracing me!" he retorted bitterly.
"At that risk, no doubt, if you are indeed so base as to throw your own
guilt on the shoulders of an honest man."
"Then you watched me last night?"
"The merest chance led me to see you come out of the tablinum. . . ."
"I do not ask you now what took you there so late," he interrupted, "for
it revolts me to think anything of you but the best, the highest.--But
you? What have you experienced at my hands but friendship--nay, for
concealment or dissimulation is here folly--but what a lover . . .?"
"A lover!" cried Paula indignantly. "A lover? Dare you utter the word,
when you have offered your heart and hand to another--you. . . ."
"Who told you so?" asked Orion gloomily.
"Your own mother."
"That is it; so that is it?" cried the young man, clasping his hands
convulsively. "Now I begin to see, now I understand. But stay. For if it
is indeed that which has roused you to hate me and persecute me, you must
love me, Paula--you do love me, and then, noblest and sweetest. . . ." He
held out his hand; but she struck it aside, exclaiming in a tremulous
voice:
"Be under no delusion. I am not one of the feeble lambs whom you have
beguiled by the misuse of your gifts and advantages; and who then are
eager to kiss your hands. I am the daughter of Thomas; and another
woman's betrothed, who craves my embraces on the way to his wedding, will
learn to his rueing that there are women who scorn his disgraceful suit
and can avenge the insult intended them. Go--go to your judges! You, a
false witness, may accuse Hiram, but I will proclaim you, you the son of
this house, as the thief! We shall see which they believe."
"Me!" cried Orion, and his eyes flashed as wrathfully and vindictively as
her own. "The son of the Mukaukas! Oh, that you were not a woman! I would
force you to your knees and compel you to crave my pardon. How dare you
point your finger at a man whose life has hitherto been as spotless as
your own white raiment? Yes, I did go to the tablinum--I did tear the
emerald from the hanging; but I did it in a fit of recklessness, and in
the knowledge that what is my father's is mine. I threw away the gem to
gratify a mere fancy, a transient whim. Cursed be the hour when I did
it!--Not on account of the deed itself, but of the consequences it may
entail through your mad hatred. Jealousy, petty, unworthy jealousy is at
the bottom of it! And of whom are you jealous?"
"Of no one; not even of your betrothed, Katharina," replied Paula with
forced composure. "What are you to me that, to spare you humiliation, I
should risk the life of the most honest soul living? I have said: The
judges shall decide between you."
"No, they shall not!" stormed Orion. "At least, not as you intend!
Beware, beware, I say, of driving me to extremities! I still see in you
the woman I loved; I still offer you what lies within my power: to let
everything end for the best for you. . . ."
"For me! Then I, too, am to suffer for your guilt?"
"Did you hear the barking of hounds just now?"
"I heard dogs yelping."
"Very well.--Your freedman has been brought in, the pack got on his scent
and have now been let into the house close to the tablinum. The dogs
would not stir beyond the threshold and on the white marble step, towards
the right-hand side, the print of a man's foot was found in the dust. It
is a peculiar one, for instead of five toes there are but three. Your
Hiram was fetched in, and he was found to have the same number of toes as
the mark on the marble, neither more nor less. A horse trod on his foot,
in your father's stable, and two of his toes had to be cut off: we got
this out of the stammering wretch with some difficulty.--On the other
side of the door-way there was a smaller print, but though the dogs paid
no heed to that I examined it, and assured myself--how, I need not tell
you--that it was you who had stood there. He, who has no business
whatever in the house, must have made his way last night into the
tablinum, our treasury. Now, put yourself in the judges' place. How can
such facts be outweighed by the mere word of a girl who, as every one
knows, is on anything rather than good terms with my mother, and who will
leave no stone unturned to save her servant."
"Infamous!" cried Paula. "Hiram did not steal the gem, as you must know
who stole it. The emerald he sold was my property; and were those stones
really so much alike that even the seller. . ."
"Yes, indeed. He could not tell one from the other. Evil spirits have
been at work all through, devilish, malignant demons. It would be enough
to turn one's brain, if life were not so full of enigmas! You yourself
are the greatest.--Did you give the Syrian your emerald to sell in order
to fly from this house with the money?--You are silent? Then I am right.
What can my father be to you--you do not love my mother--and the
son!--Paula, Paula, you are perhaps doing him an injustice--you hate him,
and it is a pleasure to you to injure him."
"I do not wish to hurt you or any one," replied the girl. "And you have
guessed wrongly. Your father refused me the means of seeking mine."
"And you wanted to procure money to search for one who is long since
dead!--Even my mother admits that you speak the truth; if she is right,
and you really take no pleasure in doing me a mischief, listen to me,
follow my advice, and grant my prayer! I do not ask any great matter."
"Speak on then."
"Do you know what a man's honor is to him? Need I tell you that I am a
lost and despised man if I am found guilty of this act of the maddest
folly by the judges of my own house? It may cost my father his life if he
hears that the word 'guilty' is pronounced on me; and I--I--what would
become of me I cannot foresee!--I--oh God, oh God, preserve me from
frenzy!--But I must be calm; time presses. . . . How different it is for
your servant; he seems ready even now to take the guilt on himself, for,
whatever he is asked, he still keeps silence. Do you do the same; and if
the judges insist on knowing what you had to do with the Syrian last
night--for the dogs traced the scent to your staircase--hazard a
conjecture that the faithful fellow stole the emerald in order to gratify
your desire to search for your father, his beloved master. If you can
make up your mind to so great a sacrifice--oh, that I should have to ask
it of you!--I swear to you by all I hold sacred, by yourself and by my
father's head, I will set Hiram free within three days, unbeaten and
unhurt, and magnificently indemnified; and I will myself help him on the
way whither he may desire to go, or you to send him, in search of your
father.--Be silent; remain neutral in the background; that is all I ask,
and I will keep my word--that, at any rate, you do not doubt?" She had
listened to him with bated breath; she pitied him deeply as he stood
there, a suppliant in bitter anguish of soul, a criminal who still could
not understand that he was one, and who relied on the confidence that,
only yesterday, he still had had the right to exact from all the world.
He appeared before her like a fine proud tree struck by lightning, whose
riven trunk, trembling to its fall, must be crushed to the earth by the
first storm, unless the gardener props it up. She longed to be able to
forget all he had brought upon her and to grasp his hand in friendly
consolation; but her deeply aggrieved pride helped her to preserve the
cold and repellent manner she had so far succeeded in assuming.
With much hesitation and reserve she consented to be silent as long as he
kept his promise. It was for his father's sake, rather than his own, that
she would so far become his accomplice: at the same time everything else
was at an end between them, and she should bless the hour which might see
her severed from him and his for ever.
The end of her speech was in a strangely hard and repellent tone; she
felt she must adopt it to disguise how deeply she was touched by his
unhappiness and by the extinction of the sunshine in him which had once
warmed her own heart too with bliss. To him it seemed that an icy rigor
breathed in her words--bitter contempt and hostile revulsion. He had some
difficulty in keeping himself from breaking out again in violent wrath.
He was almost sorry that he had trusted her with his secret and begged
her for mercy, instead of leaving things to run their course, and if it
had come to the worst, dragging her to perdition with him. Sooner would
he forfeit honor and peace than humble himself again before this pitiless
and cold-hearted foe. At this moment he really hated her, and only wished
it were possible to fight her, to break her pride, to see her vanquished
and crying for quarter at his feet. It was with a great effort--with
tingling cheeks and constrained utterance that he said:
"Severance from you is indeed best for us all.--Be ready: the judges will
send for you soon."
"Very well," she replied. "I will be silent; you have only to provide for
the Syrian's safety. You have given me your word."
"And so long as you keep yours I will keep mine. Or else. . ." the words
would come from his quivering lips--"or else war to the knife!"
"War to the knife!" she echoed with flashing eyes. "But one thing more. I
have proof that the emerald which Hiram sold belonged to me. By all the
saints--proof!"
"So much the better for you," he said. "Woe to us both, if you force me
to forget that you are a woman!"
And he left the room with a rapid step.
CHAPTER XII.
Orion went down stairs scowling and clenching his fists. His heart ached
to bursting.
What had he done, what had befallen him? That a woman should dare to
treat him so!--a woman whom he had deigned to love--the loveliest and
noblest of women; but at the same time the haughtiest, most vengeful, and
most hateful.
He had once read this maxim: "When a man has committed a base action, if
only one other knows of it he carries the death-warrant of his peace in
the bosom of his garment." He felt the full weight of this sentence; and
the other--the one who knew--was Paula, the woman of all others whom he
most wished should look up to him. But yesterday it had been a vision of
heaven on earth to dream of holding her in his arms and calling her his;
now he had but one wish: that he could humble and punish her. Oh, that
his hands should be tied, that he should be dependent on her mercy like a
condemned criminal! It was inconceivable--intolerable!
But she should be taught to know him. He had passed through life hitherto
as white as a swan; if this luckless hour and this woman made him appear
as a vulture, it was not his fault, it was hers. She should soon see
which was the stronger of the two. He would punish her in every way in
which a woman can be punished, even if the way to it led through crime
and misery! He was not afraid that the leech bad won her affections, for
he knew, with strange certainty that, in spite of the hostility she
displayed, her heart was his and his alone. "The gold coin called love,"
said he to himself, "has two faces: tender devotion and bitter aversion;
just now she is showing me the latter. But, however different the image
and superscription may be on the two sides, if you ring it, it always
gives out the same tone; and I can hear it even in her most insulting
words."
When the family met at table he made Paula's excuses; he himself ate only
a few mouthfuls, for the judges had assembled some time since and were
waiting for him.
The right of life and death had been placed in the hands of the ancestors
of the Mukaukas, powerful princes of provinces; they had certainly
wielded it even in the dynasty of Psammitichus, whose power had been put
to a terrible end by Cambyses the Persian. And still the Uraeus
snake--the asp whose bite caused almost instant death, reared its head as
the time-honored emblem of this privilege, by the side of St. George the
Dragon-slayer, over the palaces of the Mukaukas at Memphis, and at
Lykopolis in Upper Egypt. And in both these places the head of the family
retained the right of arbitrary judgment and capital punishment over the
retainers of his house and the inhabitants of the district he governed,
after Justinian first, and then the Emperor Heraclius, had confirmed them
in their old prerogative. The chivalrous St. George was placed between
the snakes so as to replace a heathen symbol by a Christian one. Formerly
indeed the knight himself had had the head of a sparrow-hawk: that is to
say of the god Horus, who had overthrown the evil-spirit, Seth-Typhon, to
avenge his father; but about two centuries since the heathen
crocodile-destroyer had been transformed into the Christian conqueror of
the dragon.
After the Arab conquest the Moslems had left all ancient customs and
rights undisturbed, including those of the Mukaukas.
The court which assembled to sit in judgment on all cases concerning the
adherents of the house consisted of the higher officials of the
governor's establishment. The Mukaukas himself was president, and his
grown-up son was his natural deputy. During Orion's absence, Nilus, the
head of the exchequer, a shrewd and judicious Egyptian, had generally
represented his invalid master; but on the present occasion Orion was
appointed to take his place, and to preside over the assembly.
The governor's son hastened to his father's bedroom to beg him to lend
him his ring as a token of the authority transferred to him; the Mukaukas
had willingly allowed him to take it off his finger, and had enjoined him
to exercise relentless severity. Generally he inclined to leniency; but
breaking into a house was punishable with death, and in this instance it
was but right to show no mercy, out of deference to the Arab merchant.
But Orion, mindful of his covenant with Paula, begged his father to give
him full discretion. The old Moslem was a just man, who would agree to a
mitigated sentence under the circumstances; besides, the culprit was not
in strict fact a member of the household, but in the service of a
relation.
The Mukaukas applauded his son's moderation and judgment. If only he had
been in rather better health he himself would have had the pleasure of
being present at the sitting, to see him fulfil for the first time so
important a function, worthy of his birth and position.
Orion kissed his father's hand with heart-felt but melancholy emotion,
for this praise from the man he so truly loved was a keen pleasure; and
yet he felt that it was of ill-omen that his duties as judge, of which he
knew the sacred solemnity, should be thus--thus begun.
It was in a softened mood, sunk in thought as to how he could best save
Hiram and leave Paula's name altogether out of the matter, that he went
to the hall of justice; and there he found the nurse Perpetua in eager
discussion with Nilus.
The old woman was quite beside herself. In the clatter of her loom she
had heard nothing of what had been going on till a few minutes ago; now
she was ready to swear to the luckless Hiram's innocence. The stone he
had sold had belonged to his young mistress, and thank God there was no
lack of evidence of the fact; the setting of the emerald was lying safe
and sound in Paula's trunk. Happily she had had an opportunity of
speaking to her; and that she, the daughter of Thomas, should be brought
before the tribunal, like a citizen's daughter or slave-girl, was unheard
of, shameful!
At this Orion roughly interfered; he desired the old gate-keeper to
conduct Perpetua at once to the storeroom next to the tablinum, where the
various stuffs prepared for the use of the household were laid by, and to
keep her there under safe guard till further notice. The tone in which he
gave the order was such that even the nurse did not remonstrate; and
Nilus, for his part obeyed in silence when Orion bid him return to his
place among the judges.
Nilus went back to the judgment-hall in uneasy consternation. Never
before had he seen his young lord in this mood. As he heard the nurse's
statement the veins had swelled in his smooth youthful forehead, his
nostrils had quivered with convulsive agitation, his voice had lost all
its sweetness, and his eyes had a sinister gleam.
Orion was now alone; he ground his teeth with rage. Paula had betrayed
him in spite of her promise, and how mean was her woman's cunning! She
could be silent before the judges--yes. Silent in all confidence now, to
the very last; but the nurse, her mouthpiece, had already put Nilus, the
keenest and most important member of the court, in possession of the
evidence which spoke for her and against him. It was shocking,
disgraceful! Base and deliberately malicious treachery. But the end was
not yet: he still was free to act and to ward off the spiteful stroke by
a counterthrust. How it should be dealt was clear from Perpetua's
statement; but his conscience, his instincts and long habits of
submission to what was right, good, and fitting held him back. Not only
had he never himself done a base or a mean action; he loathed it in
another, and the only thing he could do to render Paula's perfidy
harmless was, as he could not deny, original and bold, but at the same
time detestable and shameful.
Still, he could not and he would not succumb in this struggle. Time
pressed. Long reflection was impossible; suddenly he felt carried away by
a fierce and mad longing to fight it out--he felt as he had felt on a
race-day in the hippodrome, when he had driven his own quadriga ahead of
all the rest.
Onwards, then, onwards; and if the chariot were wrecked, if the horses
were killed, if his wheels maimed his comrades overthrown in the
arena-still, onwards, onwards!
A few hasty steps brought him to the lodge of the gate-keeper, a sturdy
old man who had held his post for forty years. He had formerly been a
locksmith and it still was part of his duty to undertake the repairs of
the simple household utensils. Orion as a youth had been a beautiful and
engaging boy and a great favorite with this worthy man; he had delighted
in sitting in his little room and handing him the tools for his work. He
himself had remarkable mechanical facility and had been the old man's apt
pupil; nay, he had made such progress as to be able to carve pretty
little boxes, prayer-book cases, and such like, and provide them with
locks, as gifts to his parents on their birth days--a festival always
kept with peculiar solemnity in Egypt, and marked by giving and receiving
presents. He understood the use of tools, and he now hastily selected
such as he needed. On the window-ledge stood a bunch of flowers which he
had ordered for Paula the day before, and which he had forgotten to fetch
this terrible morning. With this in one hand, and the tools in the breast
of his robe he hastened upstairs.
"Onwards, I must keep on!" he muttered, as he entered Paula's room,
bolted the door inside and, kneeling before her chest, tossed the flowers
aside. If he was discovered, he would say that he had gone into his
cousin's chamber to give her the bouquet.
"Onwards; I must go on!" was still his thought, as he unscrewed the hinge
on which the lid of the trunk moved. His hands trembled, his breath came
fast, but he did his task quickly. This was the right way to work, for
the lock was a peculiar one, and could not have been opened without
spoiling it. He raised the lid, and the first thing his hand came upon in
the chest was the necklace with the empty medallion--it was as though
some kind Genius were aiding him. The medallion hung but slightly to the
elegantly-wrought chain; to detach it and conceal it about his person was
the work of a minute.
But now the most resolute. "On, on. . . ." was of no further avail. This
was theft: he had robbed her whom, if she only had chosen it, he was
ready to load with everything wherewith fate had so superabundantly
blessed him. No, this--this. . . .
A singular idea suddenly flashed through his brain; a thought which
brought a smile to his lips even at this moment of frightful tension. He
acted upon it forth with: he drew out from within his under-garment a gem
that hung round his neck by a gold chain. This jewel--a masterpiece by
one of the famous Greek engravers of heathen antiquity--had been given
him in Constantinople in exchange for a team of four horses to which his
greatest friend there had taken a fancy. It was in fact of greater price
than half a dozen fine horses. Half beside himself, and as if
intoxicated, Orion followed the wild impulse to which he had yielded;
indeed, he was glad to have so precious a jewel at hand to hang in the
place of the worthless gold frame-work. It was done with a pinch; but
screwing up the hinge again was a longer task, for his hands trembled
violently--and as the moment drew near in which he meant to let Paula
feel his power, the more quickly his heart beat, and the more difficult
he found it to control his mind to calm deliberation.
After he had unbolted the door he stood like a thief spying the long
corridor of the strangers' wing, and this increased his excitement to a
frenzy of rage with the world, and fate, and most of all with her who had
compelled him to stoop to such base conduct. But now the charioteer had
the reins and goad in his hand. Onwards now, onwards!
He flew down stairs, three steps at a time, as he had been wont when a
boy. In the anteroom he met Eudoxia, Mary's Greek governess, who had just
brought her refractory pupil into the house, and he tossed her the
nosegay he still held in his hands; then, without heeding the languishing
glances the middle-aged damsel sent after him with her thanks, he
hastened back to the gate-keeper's lodge where he hurriedly disburdened
himself of the locksmith's tools.
A few minutes later he entered the judgment-hall. Nilus the treasurer
showed him to the governor's raised seat, but an overpowering bashfulness
kept him from taking this position of honor. It was with a burning brow,
and looks so ominously dark that the assembly gazed at him with timid
astonishment, that he opened the proceedings with a few broken sentences.
He himself scarcely knew what he was saying, and heard his own voice as
vaguely as though it were the distant roar of waves. However, he
succeeded in clearly stating all that had happened: he showed the
assembly the stone which had been stolen and recovered; he explained how
the thief had been taken; he declared Paula's freedman to be guilty of
the robbery, and called upon him to bring forward anything he could in
his own defence. But the accused could only stammer out that he was not
guilty. He was not able to defend himself, but his mistress could no
doubt give evidence that would justify him.
Orion pushed the hair from his forehead, proudly raised his aching head,
and addressed the judges:
"His mistress is a lady of rank allied to our house. Let us keep her out
of this odious affair as is but seemly. Her nurse gave Nilus some
information which may perhaps avail to save this unhappy man. We will
neglect nothing to that end; but you, who are less familiar with the
leading circumstances, must bear this in mind to guard yourselves against
being misled: This lady is much attached to the accused; she clings to
him and Perpetua as the only friends remaining to her from her native
home. Moreover, there is nothing to surprise me or you in the fact that a
noble woman, as she is, should assume the onus of another's crime, and
place herself in a doubtful light to save a man who has hitherto been
honest and faithful. The nurse is here; shall she be called, or have you,
Nilus, heard from her everything that her mistress can say in favor of
her freedman?"
"Perpetua told me, and told you, too, my lord, certain credible facts,"
replied the treasurer. "But I could not repeat them so exactly as she
herself, and I am of opinion that the woman should be brought before the
court."
"Then call her," said Orion, fixing his eyes on vacancy above the heads
of the assembly, with a look of sullen dignity.
After a long and anxious pause the old woman was brought in. Confident in
her righteous cause she came forward boldly; she blamed Hiram somewhat
sharply for keeping silence so long, and then explained that Paula, to
procure money for her search for her father, had made the freedman take a
costly emerald out of its setting in her necklace, and that it was the
sale of this gem that had involved her fellow-countryman in this
unfortunate suspicion.
The nurse's deposition seemed to have biased the greater part of the
council in favor of the accused; but Orion did not give them time to
discuss their impressions among themselves. Hardly had Perpetua ceased
speaking, when Orion took up the emerald, which was lying on the table
before him, exclaiming excitedly, nay, angrily:
"And the stone which is recognized by the man who sold it--an expert in
gems--as being that which was taken from the hanging, and unique of its
kind, is supposed, by some miracle of nature, to have suddenly appeared
in duplicate?--Malignant spirits still wander through the world, but
would hardly dare to play their tricks in this Christian house. You all
know what 'old women's tales' are; and the tale that old woman has told
us is one of the most improbable of its class. 'Tell that to Apelles the
Jew,' said Horace the Roman; but his fellow-Israelite, Gamaliel'--and he
turned to the jeweller who was sitting with the other witnesses will
certainly not believe it; still less I, who see through this tissue of
falsehood. The daughter of the noble Thomas has condescended to weave it
with the help of that woman--a skilled weaver, she--to spread it before
us in order to mislead us, and so to save her faithful servant from
imprisonment, from the mines, or from death. These are the facts.--Do I
err, woman, or do you still adhere to your statement?"
The nurse, who had hoped to find in Orion her mistress' advocate, had
listened to his speech with growing horror. Her eyes flashed as she
looked at him, first with mockery and then with vehement disgust; but,
though they filled with tears at this unlooked-for attack, she preserved
her presence of mind, and declared she had spoken the truth, and nothing
but the truth, as she always did. The setting of her mistress' emerald
would prove her statement.
Orion shrugged his shoulders, desired the woman to fetch her mistress,
whose presence was now indispensable, and called to the treasurer:
"Go with her, Nilus! And let a servant bring the trunk here that the
owner may open it in the presence of us all and before any one else
touches the contents. I should not be the right person to undertake it
since no one in this Jacobite household--hardly even one of
yourselves--has found favor in the eyes of the Melchite. She has
unfortunately a special aversion for me, so I must depute to others every
proceeding that could lead to a misunderstanding.--Conduct her hither,
Nilus; of course with the respect due to a maiden of high rank."
While the envoy was gone Orion paced the room with swift, restless steps,
Once only he paused and addressed the judges:
"But supposing the empty setting should be found, how do you account for
the existence of two--two gems, each unique of its kind? It is
distracting. Here is a soft-hearted girl daring to mislead a serious
council of justice for the sake, for the sake of. . . ." he stamped his
foot with rage and continued his silent march.
"He is as yet but a beginner," thought the assembled officials as they
watched his agitation. "Otherwise how could he allow such an absurd
attempt to clear an accused thief to affect him so deeply, or disturb his
temper?"
Paula's arrival presently put an end to Orion's pacing the room. He
received her with a respectful bow and signed to her to be seated. Then
he bid Nilus recapitulate the results of the proceedings up to the
present stage, and what he and his colleagues supposed to be her motive
for asserting that the stolen emerald was her property. He would as far
as possible leave it to the others to question her, since she knew full
well on what terms she was with himself. Even before he had come into the
council-room she had offered her explanation of the robbery to Nilus,
through her nurse Perpetua; but it would have seemed fairer and more
friendly in his eyes--and here he raised his voice--if she had chosen to
confide to him, Orion, her plan for helping the freedman. Then he might
have been able to warn her. He could only regard this mode of action,
independently of him, as a fresh proof of her dislike, and she must hold
herself responsible for the consequences. Justice must now take its
course with inexorable rigor.
The wrathful light in his eyes showed her what she had to expect from
him, and that he was prepared to fight her to the end. She saw that he
thought that she had broken the promise she had but just now given him;
but she had not commissioned Perpetua to interfere in the matter; on the
contrary, she had desired the woman to leave it to her to produce her
evidence only in the last extremity. Orion must believe that she had done
him a wrong; still, could that make him so far forget himself as to carry
out his threats, and sacrifice an innocent man--to divert suspicion from
himself, while he branded her as a false witness? Aye, even from that he
would not shrink! His flaming glance, his abrupt demeanor, his laboring
breath, proclaimed it plainly enough.--Then let the struggle begin! At
this moment she would have died rather than have tried to mollify him by
a word of excuse. The turmoil in his whole being vibrated through hers.
She was ready to throw herself at his feet and implore him to control
himself, to guard himself against further wrong-doing--but she maintained
her proud dignity, and the eyes that met his were not less indignant and
defiant than his own.
They stood face to face like two young eagles preparing to fight, with
feathers on end, arching their pinions and stretching their necks. She,
confident of victory in the righteousness of her cause, and far more
anxious for him than for herself; he, almost blind to his own danger,
but, like a gladiator confronting his antagonist in the arena, far more
eager to conquer than to protect his own life and limb.
While Nilus explained to her what, in part, she already knew, and
repeated their suspicion that she had been tempted to make a false
declaration to save the life of her servant, whose devotion, no doubt, to
his missing master had led him to commit the robbery; she kept her eye on
Orion rather than on the speaker. At last Nilus referred to the trunk,
which had been brought from Paula's room under her own eyes, informing
her that the assembly were ready to hear and examine into anything she
had to say in her own defence.
Orion's agitation rose to its highest pitch. He felt that the blood had
fled from his cheeks, and his thoughts were in utter confusion. The
council, the accused, his enemy Paula--everything in the room lay before
him shrouded in a whirl of green mist. All he saw seemed to be tinted
with light emerald green. The hair, the faces, the dresses of those
present gleamed and floated in a greenish light; and not till Paula went
up to the chest with a firm, haughty step, drew out a small key, gave it
to the treasurer, and answered his speech with three words: "Open the
box!"--uttering them with cold condescension as though even this were too
much--not till then did he see clearly once more: her bright brown hair,
the fire of her blue eyes, the rose and white of her complexion, the
light dress which draped her fine figure in noble folds, and her
triumphant smile. How beautiful, how desirable was this woman! A few
minutes and she would be worsted in this contest; but the triumph had
cost him not only herself, but all that was good and pure in his soul,
and worthy of his forefathers. An inward voice cried it out to him, but
he drowned it in the shout of "Onwards," like a chariot-driver. Yes--on;
still on towards the goal; away over ruins and stones, through blood and
dust, till she bowed her proud neck, crushed and beaten, and sued for
mercy.
The lid of the trunk flew open. Paula stooped, lifted the necklace, held
it out to the judges, pulling it straight by the two ends. . . . Ah! what
a terrible, heartrending cry of despair! Orion even, never, never wished
to hear the like again. Then she flung the jewel on the table,
exclaiming: "Shameful, shameful! atrocious!" she tottered backwards and
clung to her faithful Betta; for her knees were giving way, and she felt
herself in danger of sinking to the ground.
Orion sprang forward to support her, but she thrust him aside, with a
glance so full of anguish, rage and intense contempt that he stood
motionless, and clasped his hand over his heart.--And this deed, which
was to work such misery for two human beings, he had smiled in doing!
This practical joke which concealed a death-warrant--to what fearful
issues might it not lead?
Paula had sunk speechless on to a seat, and he stood staring in silence,
till a burst of laughter broke from the assembly and old Psamtik, the
captain of the guard, who had long been a member of the council of
justice, exclaimed:
"By my soul, a splendid stone! There is the heathen god Eros with his
winged sweetheart Psyche smiling in his face. Did you never read that
pretty story by Apuleius--'The Golden Ass' it is called? The passage is
in that. Holy Luke! how finely it is carved. The lady has taken out the
wrong necklace. Look, Gamaliel, where could your green pigeon's egg have
found a place in that thing?" and he pointed to the gem.
"Nowhere," said the Jew. "The noble lady. . ." But Orion roughly bid the
witness to be silent, and Nilus, taking up the engraved gem, examined it
closely. Then he--he the grave, just man, on whose support Paula had
confidently reckoned--went up to her and with a regretful shrug asked her
whether the other necklace with the setting of which she had spoken was
in the trunk.
The blood ran cold in her veins. This thing that had happened was as
startling as a miracle. But no! No higher Power had anything to do with
this blow. Orion believed that she had failed in her promise of screening
him by her silence, and this, this was his revenge. By what means--how he
had gone to work, was a mystery. What a trick!--and it had succeeded! But
should she take it like a patient child? No. A thousand times no!
Suddenly all her old powers of resistance came back; hatred steeled her
wavering will; and, as in fancy, he had seen himself in the circus,
driving in a race, so she pictured herself seated at the chess-board. She
felt herself playing with all her might to win; but not, as with his
father, for flowers, trifling presents or mere glory; nay, for a very
different stake Life or Death!
She would do everything, anything to conquer him; and yet, no--come what
might--not everything. Sooner would she succumb than betray him as the
thief or reveal what she had discovered in the viridarium. She had
promised to keep the secret; and she would repay the father's kindness by
screening the son from this disgrace. How beautiful, how noble had
Orion's image been in her heart. She would not stain it with this
disgrace in her own eyes and in those of the world. But every other
reservation must be cast far, far away, to snatch the victory from him
and to save Hiram. Every fair weapon she might use; only this treachery
she could not, might not have recourse to. He must be made to feel that
she was more magnanimous than he; that she, under all conceivable
circumstances, kept her word. That was settled; her bosom once more rose
and fell, and her eye brightened again; still it was some little time
before she could find the right words with which to begin the contest.
Orion could see the seething turmoil in her soul; he felt that she was
arming herself for resistance, and he longed to spur her on to deal the
first blow. Not a word had she uttered of surprise or anger, not a
syllable of reproach had passed her lips. What was she thinking of, what
was she plotting? The more startling and dangerous the better; the more
bravely she bore herself, the more completely in the background might he
leave the painful sense of fighting against a woman. Even heroes had
boasted of a victory over Amazons.
At last, at last!--She rose and went towards Hiram. He had been tied to
the stake to which criminals were bound, and as an imploring glance from
his honest eyes met hers, the spell that fettered her tongue was
unloosed; she suddenly understood that she had not merely to protect
herself, but to fulfil a solemn duty. With a few rapid steps she went up
to the table at which her judges sat in a semi-circle, and leaning on it
with her left hand, raised her right high in the air, exclaiming:
"You are the victims of a cruel fraud; and I of an unparalleled and
wicked trick, intended to bring me to ruin!--Look at that man at the
stake. Does he look like a robber? A more honest and faithful servant
never earned his freedom, and the gratitude Hiram owed to his master, my
father, he has discharged to the daughter for whose sake he quitted his
home, his wife and child. He followed me, an orphan, here into a strange
land.--But that matters not to you.--Still, if you will hear the truth,
the strict and whole. . . ."
"Speak!" Orion put in; but she went on, addressing herself exclusively to
Nilus, and his peers, and ignoring him completely:
"Your president, the son of the Mukaukas, knows that, instead of the
accused, I might, if I chose, be the accuser. But I scorn it--for love of
his father, and because I am more high-minded than he. He will
understand!--With regard to this particular emerald Hiram, my freedman,
took it out of its setting last evening, under my eyes, with his knife;
other persons besides us, thank God! have seen the setting, empty, on the
chain to which it belonged. This afternoon it was still in the place to
which some criminal hand afterwards found access, and attached that gem
instead. That I have just now seen for the first time--I swear it by
Christ's wounds. It is an exquisite work. Only a very rich man--the
richest man here, can give away such a treasure, for whatever purpose he
may have in view--to destroy an enemy let us say.--Gamaliel," and she
turned to the Jew--"At what sum would you value that onyx?"
The Israelite asked to see the gem once more; he turned it about, and
then said with a grin: "Well, fair lady, if my black hen laid me little
things like that I would feed it on cakes from Arsinoe and oysters from
Canopus. The stone is worth a landed estate, and though I am not a rich
man, I would pay down two talents for it at any moment, even if I had to
borrow the money."
This statement could not fail to make a great impression on the judges.
Orion, however, exclaimed: "Wonders on wonders mark this eventful day!
The prodigal generosity which had become an empty name has revived again
among us! Some lavish demon has turned a worthless plate of gold into a
costly gem.--And may I ask who it was that saw the empty setting hanging
to your chain?" Paula was in danger of forgetting even that last reserve
she had imposed on herself; she answered with trembling accents:
"Apparently your confederates or you yourself did. You, and you alone,
have any cause. . . ."
But he would not allow her to proceed. He abruptly interrupted her,
exclaiming: "This is really too much! Oh, that you were a man! How far
your generosity reaches I have already seen. Even hatred, the bitterest
hostility. . . ."
"They would have every right to ruin you completely!" she cried, roused
to the utmost. "And if I were to charge you with the most horrible crime.
. . ."
"You yourself would be committing a crime, against me and against this
house," he said menacingly. "Beware! Can self-delusion go so far that you
dare to appeal to me to testify to the fable you have trumped up. . . ."
"No. Oh, no! That would be counting on some honesty in you yet," she
loudly broke in. "I have other witnesses: Mary, the granddaughter of the
Mukaukas," and she tried to catch his eye.
"The child whose little heart you have won, and who follows you about
like a pet dog!" he cried.
"And besides Mary, Katharina, the widow Susannah's daughter," she added,
sure of her triumph, and the color mounted to her cheeks. "She is no
longer a child, but a maiden grown, as you know. I therefore demand of
you--" and she again turned to the assembly--"that you will fulfil your
functions worthily and promote justice in my behalf by calling in both
these witnesses and hearing their evidence."
On this Orion interposed with forced composure: "As to whether a
soft-hearted child ought to be exposed to the temptation to save the
friend she absolutely worships by giving evidence before the judges, be
it what it may, only her grandparents can decide. Her tender years would
at any rate detract from the validity of her evidence, and I am averse to
involving a child of this house in this dubious affair. With regard to
Katharina, it is, on the contrary, the duty of this court to request her
presence, and I offer myself to go and fetch her."
He resolutely resisted Paula's attempts to interrupt him again: she
should have a patient hearing presently in the presence of her witness.
The gem no doubt had come to her from her father. But at this her
righteous indignation was again too much for her; she cried out quite
beside herself:
"No, and again no. Some reprobate scoundrel, an accomplice of yours--yes,
I repeat it--made his way into my room while I was in the sick-room, and
either forced the lock of my trunk or opened it with a false key."
"That can easily be proved," said Orion. In a confident tone he desired
that the box should be placed on the table, and requested one of the
council, who understood such matters, to give his opinion. Paula knew the
man well. He was one of the most respected members of the household, the
chief mechanician whose duty it was to test and repair the water-clocks,
balances, measures and other instruments. He at once proceeded to examine
the lock and found it in perfect order, though the key, which was of
peculiar form, could certainly not have found a substitute in any false
key; and Paula was forced to admit that she had left the trunk locked at
noon and had worn the key round her neck ever since. Orion listened to
his opinion with a shrug, and before going to seek Katharina gave orders
that Paula and the nurse should be conducted to separate rooms. To arrive
at any clear decision in this matter, it was necessary that any
communication between these two should be rendered impossible. As soon as
the door was shut on them he hastened into the garden, where he hoped to
find Katharina.
The council looked after him with divided feelings. They were here
confronted by riddles that were hard to solve. No one of them felt that
he had a right to doubt the good intentions of their lord's son, whom
they looked up to as a talented and high-minded youth. His dispute with
Paula had struck them painfully, and each one asked himself how it was
that such a favorite with women should have failed to rouse any sentiment
but that of hatred in one of the handsomest of her sex. The marked
hostility she displayed to Orion injured her cause in the eyes of her
judges, who knew only too well how unpleasant her relations were with
Neforis. It was more than audacious in her to accuse the Mukaukas' son of
having broken open her trunk; only hatred could have prompted her to
utter such a charge. Still, there was something in her demeanor which
encouraged confidence in her assertions, and if Katharina could really
testify to having seen the empty medallion on the chain there would be no
alternative but to begin the enquiry again from a fresh point of view,
and to inculpate another robber. But who could have lavished such a
treasure as this gem in exchange for mere rubbish? It was inconceivable;
Ammonius the mechanician was right when he said that a woman full of
hatred was capable of anything, even the incredible and impossible.
Meanwhile it was growing dusk and the scorching day had turned to the
tempered heat of a glorious evening. The Mukaukas was still in his room
while his wife with Susannah and her daughter, Mary and her governess,
were enjoying the air and chatting in the open hall looking out on the
garden and the Nile. The ladies had covered their heads with gauze veils
as a protection against the mosquitoes, which were attracted in swarms
from the river by the lights, and also against the mists that rose from
the shallowing Nile; they were in the act of drinking some cooling
fruit-syrup which had just been brought in, when Orion made his
appearance.
"What has happened?" cried his mother in some anxiety, for she concluded
from his dishevelled hair and heated cheeks that the meeting had gone
anything rather than smoothly.
"Incredible things," he replied. "Paula fought like a lioness for her
father's freedman. . ."
"Simply to annoy us and put us in a difficulty," replied Neforis.
"No, no, Mother," replied Orion with some warmth. "But she has a will of
iron; a woman who never pauses at anything when she wants to carry her
point; and at the same time she goes to work with a keen wit that is
worthy of the greatest lawyer that I ever heard defend a cause in the
high court of the capital. Besides this her air of superiority, and her
divine beauty turn the heads of our poor household officers. It is fine
and noble, of course, to be so zealous in the cause of a servant; but it
can do no good, for the evidence against her stammering favorite is
overwhelming, and when her last plea is demolished the matter is ended.
She says that she showed a necklace to the child, and to you, charming
Katharina."
"Showed it?" cried the young girl. "She took it away from us--did not
she, Mary?"
"Well, we had taken it without her leave," replied the child.
"And she wants our children to appear in a court of justice to bear
witness for her highness?" asked Neforis indignantly.
"Certainly," replied Orion. "But Mary's evidence is of no value in law."
"And even if it were," replied his mother, "the child should not be mixed
up with this disgraceful business under any circumstances."
"Because I should speak for Paula!" cried Mary, springing up in great
excitement.
"You will just hold your tongue," her grandmother exclaimed.
"And as for Katharina," said the widow, "I do not at all like the notion
of her offering herself to be stared at by all those gentlemen."
"Gentlemen!" observed the girl. "Men--household officials and such like.
They may wait long enough for me!"
"You must nevertheless do their bidding, haughty rosebud," said Orion
laughing. "For you, thank God, are no longer a child, and a court of
justice has the right of requiring the presence of every grown person as
a witness. No harm will come to you, for you are under my protection.
Come with me. We must learn every lesson in life. Resistance is vain.
Besides, all you will have to do will be to state what you have seen, and
then, if I possibly can, I will bring you back under the tender escort of
this arm, to your mother once more. You must entrust your jewel to me
to-day, Susannah, and this trustworthy witness shall tell you afterwards
how she fared under my care."
Katharina was quite capable of reading the implied meaning of these
words, and she was not ill-pleased to be obliged to go off alone with the
governor's handsome son, the first man for whom her little heart had beat
quicker; she sprang up eagerly; but Mary clung to her arm, and insisted
so vehemently and obstinately on being taken with them to bear witness in
Paula's behalf, that her governess and Dame Neforis had the greatest
difficulty in reducing her to obedience and letting the pair go off
without her. Both mothers looked after them with great satisfaction, and
the governor's wife whispered to Susannah: "Before the judges to-day, but
ere long, please God, before the altar at Church!"
To reach the hall of judgment they could go either through the house or
round it. If the more circuitous route were chosen, it lay first through
the garden; and this was the course taken by Orion. He had made a very
great effort in the presence of the ladies to remain master of the
agitation that possessed him; he saw that the battle he had begun, and
from which he, at any rate, could not and would not now retire, was
raging more and more fiercely, obliging him to drag the young creature
who must become his wife--the die was already cast--into the course of
crime he had started on.
When he had agreed with his mother that he was not to prefer his suit for
Katharina till the following day, he had hoped to prove to her in the
interval that this little thing was no wife for him; and now--oh! Irony
of Fate--he found himself compelled to the very reverse of what he longed
to do: to fight the woman he loved--Yes, still loved--as if she were his
mortal foe, and pay his court to the girl who really did not suit him. It
was maddening, but inevitable; and once more spurring himself with the
word "Onwards!" he flung himself into the accomplishment of the unholy
task of subduing the inexperienced child at his elbow into committing
even a crime for his sake. His heart was beating wildly; but no pause, no
retreat was possible: he must conquer. "Onwards, then, onwards!"
When they had passed out of the light of the lamps into the shade he took
his young companion's slender hand-thankful that the darkness concealed
his features--and pressed the delicate fingers to his lips.
"Oh!--Orion!" she exclaimed shyly, but she did not resist.
"I only claim my due, sunshine of my soul!" he said insinuatingly. "If
your heart beat as loud as mine, our mothers might hear them!"
"But it does!" she joyfully replied, her curly head bent on one side.
"Not as mine does," he said with a sigh, laying her little hand on his
heart. He could do so in all confidence, for its spasmodic throbbing
threatened to suffocate him.
"Yes indeed," she said. "It is beating. . ."
"So that they can hear it indoors," he added with a forced laugh. "Do you
think your dear mother has not long since read our feelings?"
"Of course she has," whispered Katharina. "I have rarely seen her in such
good spirits as since your return."
"And you, you little witch?"
"I? Of course I was glad--we all were.--And your parents!"
"Nay, nay, Katharina! What you yourself felt when we met once more, that
is what I want to know."
"Oh, let that pass! How can I describe such a thing?"
"Is that quite impossible?" he asked and clasped her arm more closely in
his own. He must win her over, and his romantic fancy helped him to paint
feelings he had never had, in glowing colors. He poured out sweet words
of love, and she was only too ready to believe them. At a sign from him
she sat down confidingly on a wooden bench in the old avenue which led to
the northern side of the house. Flowers were opening on many of the
shrubs and shedding rich, oppressive perfume. The moonlight pierced
through the solemn foliage of the sycamores, and shimmering streaks and
rings of light played in the branches, on the trunks, and on the dark
ground. The heat of the day still lingered in the leafy roofs overhead,
sultry and heavy even now; and in this alley he called her for the first
time his own, his betrothed, and enthralled her heart in chains and
bonds. Each fervent word thrilled with the wild and painful agitation
that was torturing his soul, and sounded heartfelt and sincere. The scent
of flowers, too, intoxicated her young and inexperienced heart; she
willingly offered her lips to his kisses, and with exquisite bliss felt
the first glow of youthful love returned.
She could have lingered thus with him for a lifetime; but in a few
minutes he sprang up, anxious to put an end to this tender dalliance
which was beginning to be too much even for him, and exclaimed:
"This cursed, this infernal trial! But such is the fate of man! Duty
calls, and he must return from all the bliss of Paradise to the world
again. Give me your arm, my only love, my all!"
And Katharina obeyed. Dazzled and bewildered by the extraordinary
happiness that had come to meet her, she allowed him to lead her on,
listening with suspended breath as he added: "Out of this beatitude back
to the sternest of duties!--And how odious, how immeasurably loathesome
is the case in question! How gladly would I have been a friend to Paula,
a faithful protector instead of a foe!"
As he spoke he felt the girl's left hand clench tighter on his arm, and
this spurred him on in his guilty purpose. Katharina herself had
suggested to his mind the course he must pursue to attain his end. He
went on to influence her jealousy by praising Paula's charm and
loftiness, excusing himself in his own eyes by persuading himself that a
lover was justified in inducing his betrothed to save his happiness and
his honor.
Still, as he uttered each flattering word, he felt that he was lowering
himself and doing a fresh injustice to Paula. He found it only too easy
to sing her praises; but as he did so with growing enthusiasm Katharina
hit him on the arm exclaiming, half in jest and half seriously vexed:
"Oh, she is a goddess! And pray do you love her or me? You had better not
make me jealous! Do you hear?"
"You little simpleton!" he said gaily; and then he added soothingly: "She
is like the cold moon, but you are the bright warming sun. Yes,
Paula!--we will leave Paula to some Olympian god, some archangel. I
rejoice in my gladsome little maiden who will enjoy life with me, and all
its pleasures!"
"That we will!" she exclaimed triumphantly; the horizon of her future was
radiant with sunshine.
"Good Heavens!" he exclaimed as if in surprise. "The lights are already
shining in that miserable hall of justice! Ah, love, love! Under that
enchantment we had forgotten the object for which we came out.--Tell me,
my darling, do you remember exactly what the necklace was like that you
and Mary were playing with this afternoon?"
"It was very finely wrought, but in the middle hung a rubbishy broken
medallion of gold."
"You are a pretty judge of works of art! Then you overlooked the fine
engraved gem which was set in that modest gold frame?"
"Certainly not."
"I assure you, little wise-head!"
"No, my dearest." As she spoke she looked up saucily, as though she had
achieved some great triumph. "I know very well what gems are. My father
left a very fine collection, and my mother says that by his will they are
all to belong to my future husband."
"Then I can set you, my jewel, in a frame of the rarest gems."
"No, no," she cried gaily. "Let me have a setting indeed, for I am but a
fugitive thing; but only, only in your heart."
"That piece of goldsmith's work is already done.--But seriously my child;
with regard to Paula's necklace: it really was a gem, and you must have
happened to see only the back of it. That is just as you describe it: a
plain setting of gold."
"But Orion. . . ."
"If you love me, sweetheart, contradict me no further. In the future I
will always accept your views, but in this case your mistake might
involve us in a serious misunderstanding, by compelling me to give in to
Paula and make her my ally.--Here we are! But wait one moment
longer.--And once more, as to this gem. You see we may both be wrong--I
as much as you; but I firmly believe that I am in the right. If you make
a statement contrary to mine I shall appear before the judges as a liar.
We are now betrothed--we are but one, wholly one; what damages or
dignifies one of us humiliates or elevates the other. If you, who love
me--you, who, as it is already whispered, are soon to be the mistress of
the governor's house--make a statement opposed to mine they are certain
to believe it. You see, your whole nature is pure kindness, but you are
still too young and innocent quite to understand all the duties of that
omnipotent love which beareth and endureth all things. If you do not
yield to me cheerfully in this case you certainly do not love me as you
ought. And what is it to ask? I require nothing of you but that you
should state before the court that you saw Paula's necklace at noon
to-day, and that there was a gem hanging to it--a gem with Love and
Psyche engraved on it."
"And I am to say that before all those men?" asked Katharina doubtfully.
"You must indeed, you kind little angel!" cried Orion tenderly. "And do
you think it pretty in a betrothed bride to refuse her lover's first
request so grudgingly, suspiciously, and ungraciously? Nay, nay. If there
is the tiniest spark of love for me in your heart, if you do not want to
see me reduced to implore Paula for mercy. . . ."
"But what is it all about? How can it matter so much to any one whether a
gem or a mere plate of gold . . . ?"
"All that I will explain later," he hastily replied.
"Tell me now. . . ."
"Impossible. We have already put the patience of the judges to too severe
a test. We have not a moment to lose."
"Very well then; but I shall die of confusion and shame if I have to make
a declaration. . . ."
"Which is perfectly truthful, and by which you can prove to me that you
love me," he urged.
"But it is dreadful!" she exclaimed anxiously. "At least fasten my veil
closely over my face.--All those bearded men. . . ."
"Like the ostrich," said Orion, laughing as he complied. "If you really
cannot agree with your. . . . What is it you called me just now? Say it
again."
"My dearest!" she said shyly but tenderly.
She helped Orion to fold her veil twice over her face, and did not thrust
him aside when he whispered in her ear: "Let us see if a kiss cannot be
sweet even through all that wrapping!--Now, come. It will be all over in
a few minutes."
He led the way into the anteroom to the great hall, begged her to wait a
moment, and then went in and hastily informed the assembly that Dame
Susannah had entrusted her daughter to him only on condition that he
should escort her back again as soon as she had given her testimony. Then
Paula was brought in and he desired her to be seated.
It was with a sinking and anxious heart that Katharina had entered the
anteroom. She had screened herself from a scolding before now by trivial
subterfuges, but never had told a serious lie; and every instinct
rebelled against the demand that she should now state a direct falsehood.
But could Orion, the noblest of mankind, the idol of the whole town, so
pressingly entreat her to do anything that was wrong? Did not love--as he
had said--make it her duty to do everything that might screen him from
loss or injury? It did not seem to her to be quite as it should be, but
perhaps she did not altogether understand the matter; she was so young
and inexperienced. She hated the idea, too, that, if she opposed her
lover, he would have to come to terms with Paula. She had no lack of
self-possession, and she told herself that she might hold her own with
any girl in Memphis; still, she felt the superiority of the handsome,
tall, proud Syrian, nor could she forget how, the day before yesterday,
when Paula had been walking up and down the garden with Orion the chief
officer of Memphis had exclaimed: "What a wonderfully handsome couple!"
She herself had often thought that no more beautiful, elegant and lovable
creature than Thomas' daughter walked the earth; she had longed and
watched for a glance or a kind word from her. But since hearing those
words a bitter feeling had possessed her soul against Paula, and there
had been much to foster it. Paula always treated her like a child instead
of a grown-up girl, as she was. Why, that very morning, had she sought
out her betrothed--for she might call him so now--and tried to keep her
away from him? And how was it that Orion, even while declaring his love
for her, had spoken more than warmly--enthusiastically of Paula? She must
be on her guard, and though others should speak of the great good fortune
that had fallen to her lot, Paula, at any rate, would not rejoice in it,
for Katharina felt and knew that she was not indifferent to Orion. She
had not another enemy in the world, but Paula was one; her love had
everything to fear from her--and suddenly she asked herself whether the
gold medallion she had seen might not indeed have been a gem? Had she
examined the necklace closely, even for a moment? And why should she
fancy she had sharper sight than Orion with his large, splendid eyes?
He was right, as he always was. Most engraved gems were oval in form, and
the pendant which she had seen and was to give evidence about, was
undoubtedly oval. Then it was not like Orion to require a falsehood of
her. In any case it was her duty to her betrothed to preserve from evil,
and prevent him from concluding any alliance with that false Siren. She
knew what she had to say; and she was about to loosen a portion of her
veil from her face that she might look Paula steadfastly in the eyes,
when Orion came back to fetch her into the hall where the Court was
sitting. To his delight--nay almost to his astonishment--she stated with
perfect confidence that a gem had been hanging to Paula's necklace at
noon that day; and when the onyx was shown her and she was asked if she
remembered the stone, she calmly replied:
"It may or it may not be the same; I only remember the oval gold back to
it: besides I was only allowed to have the necklace in my hands for a
very short time."
When Nilus, the treasurer, desired her to look more closely at the
figures of Eros and Psyche to refresh her memory, she evaded it by
saying: "I do not like such heathen images: we Jacobite maidens wear
different adornments."
At this Paula rose and stepped towards her with a look of stern reproof;
little Katharina was glad now that it had occurred to her to cover her
face with a double veil. But the utter confusion she felt under the
Syrian girl's gaze did not last long. Paula exclaimed reproach fully:
"You speak of your faith. Like mine, it requires you to respect the
truth. Consider how much depends on your declaration; I implore you,
child. . ."
But the girl interrupted her rival exclaiming with much irritation and
vehement excitement:
"I am no longer a child, not even as compared with you; and I think
before I speak, as I was taught to do."
She threw back her little head with a confident air, and said very
decidedly:
"That onyx hung to the middle of the chain."
"How dare you, you audacious hussy!" It was Perpetua, quite unable to
contain herself, who flung the words in her face. Katharina started as
though an asp had stung her and turned round on the woman who had dared
to insult her so grossly and so boldly. She was on the verge of tears as
she looked helplessly about her for a defender; but she had not long to
wait, for Orion instantly gave orders that Perpetua should be imprisoned
for bearing false witness. Paula, however, as she had not perjured
herself, but had merely invented an impossible tale with a good motive,
was dismissed, and her chest was to be replaced in her room.
At this Paula once more stepped forth; she unhooked the onyx from the
chain and flung it towards Gamaliel, who caught it, while she exclaimed:
"I make you a present of it, Jew! Perhaps the villain who hung it to my
chain may buy it back again. The chain was given to my great-grandmother
by the saintly Theodosius, and rather than defile it by contact with that
gift from a villain, I will throw it into the Nile!--You--you, poor,
deluded judges--I cannot be wroth with you, but I pity you!--My
Hiram . . ." and she looked at the freedman, "is an honest soul whom I
shall remember with gratitude to my dying day; but as to that unrighteous
son of a most righteous father, that man . . ." and she raised her voice,
while she pointed straight at Orion's face; but the young man interrupted
her with a loud:
"Enough!"
She tried to control herself and replied:
"I will submit. Your conscience will tell you a hundred times over what I
need not say. One last word. . ." She went close up to him and said in
his ear:
"I have been able to refrain from using my deadliest weapon against you
for the sake of keeping my word. Now you, if you are not the basest
wretch living, keep yours, and save Hiram."
His only reply was an assenting nod; Paula paused on the threshold and,
turning to Katharina, she added: "You, child--for you are but a
child--with what nameless suffering will not the son of the Mukaukas
repay you for the service you have rendered him!" Then she left the room.
Her knees trembled under her as she mounted the stairs, but when she had
again taken her place by the side of the hapless, crazy girl a merciful
God granted her the relief of tears. Her friend saw her and left her to
weep undisturbed, till she herself called him and confided to him all she
had gone through in the course of this miserable day.
Orion and Katharina had lost their good spirits; they went back to the
colonnade in a dejected mood. On the way she pressed him to explain to
her why he had insisted on her making this declaration, but he put her
off till the morrow. They found Susannah alone, for his mother had been
sent for by her husband, who was suffering more than usual, and she had
taken Mary with her.
After bidding the widow good-night and escorting her to her chariot, he
returned to the hall where the Court was still sitting. There he
recapitulated the case as it now stood, and all the evidence against the
freed man. The verdict was then pronounced: Hiram was condemned to death
with but one dissentient voice that of Nilus the treasurer.
Orion ordered that the execution of the sentence should be postponed; he
did not go back into the house, however, but had his most spirited horse
saddled and rode off alone into the desert. He had won, but he felt as
though in this race he had rushed into a morass and must be choked in it.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Love has two faces: tender devotion and bitter aversion
Self-interest and egoism which drive him into the cave
The man who avoids his kind and lives in solitude
You have a habit of only looking backwards
THE BRIDE OF THE NILE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 4.
CHAPTER XIII.
Paula's report of the day's proceedings, of Orion's behavior, and of the
results of the trial angered the leech beyond measure; he vehemently
approved the girl's determination to quit this cave of robbers, this
house of wickedness, of treachery, of imbecile judges and false
witnesses, as soon as possible. But she had no opportunity for a quiet
conversation with him, for Philippus soon had his hands full in the care
of the sufferers.
Rustem, the Masdakite, who till now had been lying unconscious, had been
roused from his lethargy by some change of treatment, and loudly called
for his master Haschim. When the Arab did not appear, and it was
explained to him that he could not hope to see him before the morning,
the young giant sat up among his pillows, propping himself on his arms
set firmly against the couch behind him, looked about him with a
wandering gaze, and shook his big head like an aggrieved lion--but that
his thick mane of hair had been cut off--abusing the physician all the
time in his native tongue, and in a deep, rolling, bass voice that rang
through the rooms though no one understood a word. Philippus, quite
undaunted, was trying to adjust the bandage over his wound, when Rustem
suddenly flung his arms round his body and tried with all his might, and
with foaming lips, to drag him down. He clung to his antagonist, roaring
like a wild beast; even now Philippus never for an instant lost his
presence of mind but desired the nun to fetch two strong slaves. The
Sister hurried away, and Paula remained the eyewitness of a fearful
struggle. The physician had twisted his ancles round those of the
stalwart Persian, and putting forth a degree of strength which could
hardly have been looked for in a stooping student, tall and large-boned
as he was, he wrenched the Persian's hands from his hips, pressed his
fingers between those of Rustem, forced him back on to his pillows, set
his knees against the brazen frame of the couch, and so effectually held
him down that he could not sit up again. Rustem exerted every muscle to
shake off his opponent; but the leech was the stronger, for the Masdakite
was weakened by fever and loss of blood. Paula watched this contest
between intelligent force and the animal strength of a raving giant with
a beating heart, trembling in every limb. She could not help her friend,
but she followed his every movement as she stood at the head of the bed;
and as he held down the powerful creature before whom her frail uncle had
cowered in abject terror, she could not help admiring his manly beauty;
for his eyes sparkled with unwonted fire, and the mean chin seemed to
lengthen with the frightful effort he was putting forth, and so to be
brought into proportion with his wide forehead and the rest of his
features. Her spirit quaked for him; she fancied she could see something
great and heroic in the man, in whom she had hitherto discovered no merit
but his superior intellect.
The struggle had lasted some minutes before Philip felt the man's arms
grow limp, and he called to Paula to bring him a sheet--a rope--what
not--to bind the raving man. She flew into the next room, quite
collected; fetched her handkerchief, snatched off the silken girdle that
bound her waist, rushed back and helped the leech to tie the maniac's
hands. She understood her friend's least word, or a movement of his
finger; and when the slaves whom the nun had fetched came into the room,
they found Rustem with his hands firmly bound, and had only to prevent
him from leaping out of bed or throwing himself over the edge. Philippus,
quite out of breath, explained to the slaves how they were to act, and
when he opened his medicine-chest Paula noticed that his swollen, purple
fingers were trembling. She took out the phial to which he pointed, mixed
the draught according to his orders, and was not afraid to pour it
between the teeth of the raving man, forcing them open with the help of
the slaves.
The soothing medicine calmed him in a few minutes, and the leech himself
could presently wash the wound and apply a fresh dressing with the
practised aid of the Sister.
Meanwhile the crazy girl had been waked by the ravings of the Persian,
and was anxiously enquiring if the dog--the dreadful dog--was there. But
she soon allowed herself to be quieted by Paula, and she answered the
questions put to her so rationally and gently, that her nurse called the
physician who could confirm Paula in her hope that a favorable change had
taker place in her mental condition. Her words were melancholy and mild;
and when Paula remarked on this Philippus observed:
"It is on the bed of sickness that we learn to know our fellow-creatures.
The frantic girl, who perhaps fell on the son of this house with
murderous intent, now reveals her true, sweet nature. And as for that
poor fellow, he is a powerful creature, an honest one too; I would stake
my ten fingers on it!"
"What makes you so sure of that?"
"Even in his delirium he did hot once scratch or bite, but only defended
himself like a man.--Thank you, now, for your assistance. If you had not
flung the cord round his hands, the game might have ended very
differently."
"Surely not!" exclaimed Paula decidedly. "How strong you are, Philip. I
feel quite alarmed!"
"You?" said the leech laughing. "On the contrary, you need never be
alarmed again now that you have seen by chance that your champion is no
weakling.--Pfooh! I shall be glad now of a little rest." She offered him
her handkerchief, and while he thankfully used it to wipe his
brow--controlling with much difficulty the impulse to press it to his
lips, he added lightly:
"With such an assistant everything must go well. There is no merit in
being strong; every one can be strong who comes into the world with
healthy blood and well-knit bones, who keeps all his limbs well
exercised, as I did in my youth, and who does not destroy his inheritance
by dissipated living.--However, I still feel the struggle in my hands;
but there is some good wine in the next room yet, and two or three cups
of it will do me good." They went together into the adjoining room where,
by this time, most of the lamps were extinguished. Paula poured out the
wine, touched the goblet with her lips, and he emptied it at a draught;
but he was not to be allowed to drink off a second, for he had scarcely
raised it, when they heard voices in the Masdakite's room, and Neforis
came in. The governor's careful wife had not quitted her husband's
couch--even Rustem's storming had not induced her to leave her post; but
when she was informed by the slaves what had been going on, and that
Paula was still up-stairs with the leech, she had come to the strangers'
rooms as soon as her husband could spare her to speak to Philippus, to
represent to Paula what the proprieties required, and to find out what
the strange noises could be which still seemed to fill the house--at this
hour usually as silent as the grave. They proceeded from the sick-rooms,
but also from Orion, who had just come in, and from Nilus the treasurer,
who had been called by the former into his room, though the night was
fast drawing on to morning. To the governor's wife everything seemed
ominous at the close of this terrible day, marked in the calendar as
unlucky; so she made her way up-stairs, escorted by her husband's night
watcher, and holding in her hand a small reliquary to which she ascribed
the power of banning vile spirits.
She came into the sick-room swiftly and noiselessly, put the nun through
a strict cross-examination with the fretful sharpness of a person
disturbed in her night's rest. Then she went into the sitting-room where
Philippus was on the point of pledging Paula in his second cup of wine,
while she stood before him with dishevelled hair and robe ungirt. All
this was an offence against good manners such as she would not suffer in
her house, and she stoutly ordered her husband's niece to go to bed.
After all the offences that had been pardoned her this day--no,
yesterday--she exclaimed, it would have been more becoming in the girl to
examine herself in silence, in her own room, to exorcise the lying
spirits which had her in their power, and implore her Saviour for
forgiveness, than to pretend to be nursing the sick while she was
carrying on, with a young man, an orgy which, as the Sister had just told
her, had lasted since mid-day.
Paula spoke not a word, though the color changed in her face more than
once as she listened to this speech. But when Neforis finally pointed to
the door, she said, with all the cold pride she had at her command when
she was the object of unworthy suspicions:
"Your aim is easily seen through. I should scorn to reply, but that you
are the wife of the man who, till you set him against me, was glad to
call himself my friend and protector, and who is also related to me. As
usual, you attribute to me an unworthy motive. In showing me the door of
this room consecrated by suffering, you are turning me out of your house,
which you and your son--for I must say it for once--have made a hell to
me."
"I! And my--No! this is indeed--" exclaimed the matron in panting rage.
She clasped her hands over her heaving bosom and her pale face was dyed
crimson, while her eyes flashed wrathful lightnings. "That is too much; a
thousand times too much--a thousand times--do you hear?--And I--I
condescend to answer you! We picked her up in the street, and have
treated her like a daughter, spent enormous sums on her, and now. . . ."
This was addressed to the leech rather than to Paula; but she took up the
gauntlet and replied in a tone of unqualified scorn:
"And now I plainly declare, as a woman of full age, free to dispose of
myself, that to-morrow morning I leave this house with everything that
belongs to me, even if I should go as a beggar;--this house, where I have
been grossly insulted, where I and my faithful servant have been falsely
condemned, and where he is even now about to be murdered."
"And where you have been dealt with far too mildly," Neforis shrieked at
her audacious antagonist, "and preserved from sharing the fate of the
robber you smuggled into the house. To save a criminal--it is unheard
of:--you dared to accuse the son of your benefactor of being a corrupt
judge."
"And so he is," exclaimed Paula furious. "And what is more, he has
inveigled the child whom you destine to be his wife into bearing false
witness. More--much more could I say, but that, even if I did not respect
the mother, your husband has deserved that I should spare him."
"Spare him-spare!" cried Neforis contemptuously. "You--you will spare us!
The accused will be merciful and spare the judge! But you shall be made
to speak;--aye, made to speak! And as to what you, a slanderer, can say
about false witness. . ."
"Your own granddaughter," interrupted the leech, "will be compelled to
repeat it before all the world, noble lady, if you do not moderate
yourself."
Neforis laughed hysterically.
"So that is the way the wind blows!" she exclaimed, quite beside herself.
"The sick-room is a temple of Bacchus and Venus; and this disgraceful
conduct is not enough, but you must conspire to heap shame and disgrace
on this righteous house and its masters."
Then, resting her left hand which held the reliquary on her hip, she
added with hasty vehemence:
"So be it. Go away; go wherever you please! If I find you under this roof
to-morrow at noon, you thankless, wicked girl, I will have you turned out
into the streets by the guard. I hate you--for once I will ease my poor,
tormented heart--I loathe you; your very existence is an offence to me
and brings misfortune on me and on all of us; and besides--besides, I
should prefer to keep the emeralds we have left."
This last and cruelest taunt, which she had brought out against her
better feelings, seemed to have relieved her soul of a hundred-weight of
care; she drew a deep breath, and turning to Philippus, went on far more
quietly and rationally:
"As for you, Philip, my husband needs you. You know well what we have
offered you and you know George's liberal hand. Perhaps you will think
better of it, and will learn to perceive. . ."
"I! . . ." said the leech with a lofty smile. "Do you really know me so
little? Your husband, I am ready to admit, stands high in my esteem, and
when he wants me he will no doubt send for me. But never again will I
cross this threshold uninvited, or enter a house where right is trodden
underfoot, where defenceless innocence is insulted and abandoned to
despair.
"You may stare in astonishment! Your son has desecrated his father's
judgment-seat, and the blood of guiltless Hiram is on his
head.--You--well, you may still cling to your emeralds. Paula will not
touch them; she is too high-souled to tell you who it is that you would
indeed do well to lock up in the deepest dungeon-cell! What I have heard
from your lips breaks every tie that time had knit between us. I do not
demand that my friends should be wealthy, that they should have any
attractions or charm, any special gifts of mind or body; but we must meet
on common ground: that of honorable feeling. That you did not bring into
the world, or you have lost it; and from this hour I am a stranger to you
and never wish to see you again, excepting by the side of your husband
when he requires me."
He spoke the last words with such immeasurable dignity that Neforis was
startled and bereft of all self-control. She had been treated as a wretch
worthy of utter scorn by a man beneath her in rank, but whom she always
regarded as one of the most honest, frank and pure-minded she had ever
known; a man indispensable to her husband, because he knew how to
mitigate his sufferings, and could restrain him from the abuse of his
narcotic anodyne. He was the only physician of repute, far and wide. She
was to be deprived of the services of this valuable ally, to whom little
Mary and many of the household owed their lives, by this Syrian girl; and
she herself, sure that she was a good and capable wife and mother, was to
stand there like a thing despised and avoided by every honest man,
through this evil genius of her house!
It was too much. Tortured by rage, vexation, and sincere distress, she
said in a complaining voice, while the tears started to her eyes:
"But what is the meaning of all this? You, who know me, who have seen me
ruling and caring for my family, you turn your back upon me in my own
house and point the finger at me? Have I not always been a faithful wife,
nursing my husband for years and never leaving his sick-bed, never
thinking of anything but how to ease his pain? I have lived like a
recluse from sheer sense of duty and faithful lose, while other wives,
who have less means than I, live in state and go to entertainments.--And
whose slaves are better kept and more often freed than ours? Where is the
beggar so sure of an alms as in our house, where I, and I alone, uphold
piety?--And now am I so fallen that the sun may not shine on me, and that
a worthy man like you should withdraw his friendship all in a moment, and
for the sake of this ungrateful, loveless creature--because, because,
what did you call it--because the mind is wanting in me--or what did you
call it that I must have before you . . . ?"
"It is called feeling," interrupted the leech, who was sorry for the
unhappy woman, in whom he knew there was much that was good. "Is the word
quite new to you, my lady Neforis?--It is born with us; but a firm will
can elevate the least noble feeling, and the best that nature can bestow
will deteriorate through self-indulgence. But, in the day of judgment, if
I am not very much mistaken, it is not our acts but our feeling that will
be weighed. It would ill-become me to blame you, but I may be allowed to
pity you, for I see the disease in your soul which, like gangrene in the
body. . ."
"What next!" cried Neforis.
"This disease," the physician calmly went on--"I mean hatred, should be
far indeed from so pious a Christian. It has stolen into your heart like
a thief in the night, has eaten you up, has made bad blood, and led you
to treat this heavily-afflicted orphan as though you were to put stocks
and stones in the path of a blind man to make him fall. If, as it would
seem, my opinion still weighs with you a little, before Paula leaves your
house you will ask her pardon for the hatred with which you have
persecuted her for years, which has now led you to add an intolerable
insult--in which you yourself do not believe--to all the rest."
At this Paula, who had been watching the physician all through his
speech, turned to Dame Neforis, and unclasped her hands which were lying
in her lap, ready to shake hands with her uncle's wife if she only
offered hers, though she was still fully resolved to leave the house.
A terrible storm was raging in the lady's soul. She felt that she had
often been unkind to Paula. That a painful doubt still obscured the
question as to who had stolen the emerald she had unwillingly confessed
before she had come up here. She knew that she would be doing her husband
a great service by inducing the girl to remain, and she would only too
gladly have kept the leech in the house;--but then how deeply had she,
and her son, been humiliated by this haughty creature!
Should she humble herself to her, a woman so much younger, offer her
hand, make. . . .
At this moment they heard the tinkle of the silver bowl, into which her
husband threw a little ball when he wanted her. His pale, suffering face
rose before her inward eye, she could hear him asking for his opponent at
draughts, she could see his sad, reproachful gaze when she told him
to-morrow that she, Neforis, had driven his niece, the daughter of the
noble Thomas, out of the house--, with a swift impulse she went towards
Paula, grasping the reliquary in her left hand and holding out her right,
and said in a low voice.
"Shake hands, girl. I often ought to have behaved differently to you; but
why have you never in the smallest thing sought my love? God is my
witness that at first I was fully disposed to regard you as a daughter,
but you--well, let it pass. I am sorry now that I should--if I have
distressed you."
At the first words Paula had placed her hand in that of Neforis. Hers was
as cold as marble, the elder woman's was hot and moist; it seemed as
though their hands were typical of the repugnance of their hearts. They
both felt it so, and their clasp was but a brief one. When Paula withdrew
hers, she preserved her composure better than the governor's wife, and
said quite calmly, though her cheeks were burning:
"Then we will try to part without any ill-will, and I thank you for
having made that possible. To-morrow morning I hope I may be permitted to
take leave of my uncle in peace, for I love him; and of little Mary."
"But you need not go now! On the contrary, I urgently request you to
stay," Neforis eagerly put in.
"George will not let you leave. You yourself know how fond he is of you."
"He has often been as a father to me," said Paula, and even her eyes
shone through tears. "I would gladly have stayed with him till the end.
Still, it is fixed--I must go."
"And if your uncle adds his entreaties to mine?"
"It will be in vain."
Neforis took the maiden's hand in her own again, and tried with genuine
anxiety to persuade her,--but Paula was firm. She adhered to her
determination to leave the governor's house in the morning.
"But where will you find a suitable house?" cried Neforis. "A residence
that will be fit for you?"
"That shall be my business," replied the physician. "Believe me, noble
lady, it would be best for all that Paula should seek another home. But
it is to be hoped that she may decide on remaining in Memphis."
At this Neforis exclaimed:
"Here, with us, is her natural home!--Perhaps God may turn your heart for
your uncle's sake, and we may begin a new and happier life." Paula's only
reply was a shake of the head; but Neforis did not see it the metal
tinkle sounded for the third time, and it was her duty to respond to its
call.
As soon as she had left the room Paula drew a deep breath, exclaiming:
"O God! O God! How hard it was to refrain from flinging in her teeth the
crime her wicked son. . . . No, no; nothing should have made me do that.
But I cannot tell you how the mere sight of that woman angers me, how
light-hearted I feel since I have broken down the bridge that connected
me with this house and with Memphis."
"With Memphis?" asked Philippus.
"Yes," said Paula gladly. "I go away--away from hence, out of the
vicinity of this woman and her son!--Whither? Oh! back to Syria, or to
Greece--every road is the right one, if it only takes me away from this
place."
"And I, your friend?" asked Philippus.
"I shall bear the remembrance of you in a grateful heart."
The physician smiled, as though something had happened just as he
expected; after a moment's reflection he said:
"And where can the Nabathaean find you, if indeed he discovers your
father in the hermit of Sinai?"
The question startled and surprised Paula, and Philippus now adduced
every argument to convince her that it was necessary that she should
remain in the City of the Pyramids. In the first place she must liberate
her nurse--in this he could promise to help her--and everything he said
was so judicious in its bearing on the circumstances that had to be
reckoned with, and the facts actual or possible, that she was astonished
at the practical good sense of this man, with whom she had generally
talked only of matters apart from this world. Finally she yielded,
chiefly for the sake of her father and Perpetua; but partly in the hope
of still enjoying his society. She would remain in Memphis, at any rate
for the present, under the roof of a friend of the physician's--long
known to her by report--a Melchite like herself, and there await the
further development of her fate.
To be away from Orion and never, never to see him again was her heartfelt
wish. All places were the same to her where she had no fear of meeting
him. She hated him; still she knew that her heart would have no peace so
long as such a meeting was possible. Still, she longed to free herself
from a desire to see what his further career would be, which came over
her again and again with overwhelming and terrible power. For that
reason, and for that only, she longed to go far, far away, and she was
hardly satisfied by the leech's assurance that her new protector would be
able to keep away all visitors whom she might not wish to receive. And he
himself, he added, would make it his business to stand between her and
all intruders the moment she sent for him.
They did not part till the sun was rising above the eastern hills; as
they separated Paula said:
"So this morning a new life begins for me, which I can well imagine will,
by your help, be pleasanter than that which is past."
And Philippus replied with happy emotion: "The new life for me began
yesterday."
CHAPTER XIV.
Between morning and noon Mary was sitting on a low cane seat under the
sycamores which yesterday had shaded Katharina's brief young happiness;
by her side was her governess Eudoxia, under whose superintendence she
was writing out the Ten Commandments from a Greek catechism.
The teacher had been lulled to sleep by the increasing heat and the
pervading scent of flowers, and her pupil had ceased to write. Her eyes,
red with tears, were fixed on the shells with which the path was strewn,
and she was using her long ruler, at first to stir them about, and then
to write the words: "Paula," and "Paula, Mary's darling," in large
capital letters. Now and again a butterfly, following the motion of the
rod, brought a smile to her pretty little face from which the dark spirit
"Trouble" had not wholly succeeded in banishing gladness. Still, her
heart was heavy. Everything around her, in the garden and in the house,
was still; for her grandfather's state had become seriously worse at
sunrise, and every sound must be hushed. Mary was thinking of the poor
sufferer: what pain he had to bear, and how the parting from Paula would
grieve him, when Katharina came towards her down the path.
The young girl did little credit to-day to her nickname of "the
water-wagtail;" her little feet shuffled through the shelly gravel, her
head hung wearily, and when one of the myriad insects, that were busy in
the morning sunshine, came within her reach she beat it away angrily with
her fan. As she came up to Mary she greeted her with the usual "All
hail!" but the child only nodded in response, and half turning her back
went on with her inscription.
Katharina, however, paid no heed to this cool reception, but said in
sympathetic tones:
"Your poor grandfather is not so well, I hear?" Mary shrugged her
shoulders.
"They say he is very dangerously ill. I saw Philippus himself."
"Indeed?" said Mary without looking up, and she went on writing.
"Orion is with him," Katharina went on. "And Paula is really going away?"
The child nodded dumbly, and her eyes again filled with tears.
Katharina now observed how sad the little girl was looking, and that she
intentionally refused to answer her. At any other time she would not have
troubled herself about this, but to-day this taciturnity provoked her,
nay it really worried her; she stood straight in front of Mary, who was
still indefatigably busy with the ruler, and said loudly and with some
irritation:
"I have fallen into disgrace with you, it would seem, since yesterday.
Every one to his liking; but I will not put up with such bad manners, I
can tell you!"
The last words were spoken loud enough to wake Eudoxia, who heard them,
and drawing herself up with dignity she said severely:
"Is that the way to behave to a kind and welcome visitor, Mary?"
"I do not see one," retorted the child with a determined pout.
"But I do," cried the governess. "You are behaving like a little
barbarian, not like a little girl who has been taught Greek manners.
Katharina is no longer a child, though she is still often kind enough to
play with you. Go to her at once and beg her pardon for being so rude."
"I!" exclaimed Mary, and her tone conveyed the most positive refusal to
obey this behest. She sprang to her feet, and with flashing eyes, she
cried: "We are not Greeks, neither she nor I, and I can tell you once for
all that she is not my kind and welcome visitor, nor my friend any more!
We have nothing, nothing whatever to do with each other any more!"
"Are you gone mad?" cried Eudoxia, and her long face assumed a
threatening expression, while she rose from her easy-chair in spite of
the increasing heat, intending to capture her pupil and compel her to
apologize; but Mary was more nimble than the middle-aged damsel and fled
down the alley towards the river, as nimble as a gazelle.
Eudoxia began to run after her; but the heat was soon too much for her,
and when she stopped, exhausted and panting, she perceived that
Katharina, worthy once more of her name of "water-wagtail," had flown
past her and was chasing the little girl at a pace that she shuddered to
contemplate. Mary soon saw that no one but Katharina was in pursuit; she
moderated her pace, and awaited her cast-off friend under the shade of a
tall shrub. In a moment Katharina was facing her; with a heightened color
she seized both her hands and exclaimed passionately:
"What was it you said? You--you--If I did not know what a wrong-headed
little simpleton you were, I could . . . ."
"You could accuse me falsely!--But now, leave go of my hands or I will
bite you. And as Katharina, at this threat, released her she went on
vehemently.
"Oh! I know you now--since yesterday! And I tell you, once for all, I say
thank you for nothing for such friends. You ought to sink into the earth
for shame of the sin you have committed. I am only ten years old, but
rather than have done such a thing I would have let myself be shut up in
that hot hole with poor, innocent Perpetua, or I would have let myself be
killed, as you want poor, honest Hiram to be! Oh, shame!"
Katharina's crimson cheeks bad turned pale at this address and, as she
had no answer ready, she could only toss her head and say, with as much
pride and dignity as she could assume:
"What can a child like you know about things that puzzle the heads of
grown-up people?"
"Grown-up people!" laughed Mary, who was not three inches shorter than
her antagonist. "You must be a great deal taller before I call you grown
up! In two years time, you will scarcely be up to my eyes." At this the
irascible Egyptian fired up; she gave the child a slap in the face with
the palm of her hand. Mary only stood still as if petrified, and after
gazing at the ground for a minute or two without a cry, she turned her
back on her companion and silently went back into the shaded walk.
Katharina watched her with tears in her eyes. She felt that Mary was
justified in disapproving of what she had done the day before; for she
herself had been unable to sleep and had become more and more convinced
that she had acted wrongly, nay, unpardonably. And now again she had done
an inexcusable thing. She felt that she had deeply hurt the child's
feelings, and this sincerely grieved her. She followed Mary in silence,
at some little distance, like a maid-servant. She longed to hold her back
by her dress, to say something kind to her, nay, to ask her pardon. As
they drew near to the spot where the governess had dropped into her chair
again, a hapless victim to the heat of Egypt, Katharina called Mary by
her name, and when the child paid no heed, laid her hand on her shoulder,
saying in gentle entreaty: "Forgive me for having so far forgotten
myself. But how can I help being so little? You know very well when any
one laughs at me for it. . . ."
"You get angry and slap!" retorted the child, walking on. "Yesterday,
perhaps, I might have laughed over a box on the ear--it is not the
first--or have given it to you back again; but to-day!--Just now," and
she shuddered involuntarily, "just now I felt as if some black slave had
laid his dirty hand on my cheek. You are not what you were. You walk
quite differently, and you look--depend upon it you do not look as nice
and as bright as you used, and I know why: You did a very bad thing last
evening."
"But dear pet," said the other, "you must not be so hard. Perhaps I did
not really tell the judges everything I knew, but Orion, who loves me so,
and whose wife I am to be. . . ."
"He led you into sin!--Yes; and he was always merry and kind till
yesterday; but since--Oh, that unlucky day!"
Here she was interrupted by Eudoxia, who poured out a flood of reproaches
and finally desired her to resume her task. The child obeyed
unresistingly; but she had scarcely settled to her wax tablets again when
Katharina was by her side, whispering to her that Orion would certainly
not have asserted anything that he did not believe to be true, and that
she had really been in doubt as to whether a gem with a gold back, or a
mere gold frame-work, had been hanging to Paula's chain. At this Mary
turned sharply and quickly upon her, looked her straight in the eyes and
exclaimed--but in Egyptian that the governess might not understand, for
she had disdained to learn a single word of it:
"A rubbishy gold frame with a broken edge was hanging to the chain, and,
what is more, it caught in your dress. Why, I can see it now! And, when
you bore witness that it was a gem, you told a lie--Look here; here are
the laws which God Almighty himself gave on the sacred Mount of Sinai,
and there it stands written: 'Thou shalt not bear false witness against
thy neighbor.' And those who do, the priest told me, are guilty of mortal
sin, for which there is no forgiveness on earth or in Heaven, unless
after bitter repentance and our Saviour's special mercy. So it is
written; and you could actually declare before the judges a thing that
was false, and that you knew would bring others to ruin?"
The young criminal looked down in shame and confusion, and answered
hesitatingly:
"Orion asserted it so positively and clearly, and then--I do not know
what came over me--but I was so angry, so--I could have murdered her!"
"Whom?" asked Mary in surprise. "You know very well: Paula."
"Paula!" said Mary, and her large eyes again filled with tears. "Is it
possible? Did you not love her as much as I do? Have not you often and
often clung about her like a bur?"
"Yes, yes, very true. But before the judges she was so intolerably proud,
and then.--But believe me, Mary you really and truly cannot understand
anything of all this."
"Can I not?" asked the child folding her arms.
"Why do you think me so stupid?"
"You are in love with Orion--and he is a man whom few can match, over
head and ears in love; and because Paula looks like a queen by the side
of you, and is so much handsomer and taller than you are, and Orion, till
yesterday--I could see it all--cared a thousand times more for her than
for you, you were jealous and envious of her. Oh, I know all about
it.--And I know that all the women fall in love with him, and that
Mandaile had her ears cut off on his account, and that it was a lady who
loved him in Constantinople that gave him the little white dog. The
slave-girls tell me what they hear and what I like.--And after all, you
may well be jealous of Paula, for if she only made a point of it, how
soon Orion would make up his mind never to look at you again! She is the
handsomest and the wisest and the best girl in the whole world, and why
should she not be proud? The false witness you bore will cost poor Hiram
his life: but the merciful Saviour may forgive you at last. It is your
affair, and no concern of mine; but when Paula is forced to leave the
house and all through you, so that I shall never, never, never see her
any more--I cannot forget it, and I do not think I ever shall; but I will
pray God to make me."
She burst into loud sobs, and the governess had started up to put an end
to a dialogue which she could not understand, and which was therefore
vexatious and provoking, when the water-wagtail fell on her knees before
the little girl, threw her arms round her, and bursting into tears,
exclaimed:
"Mary--darling little Mary forgive me.
[The German has the diminutive 'Mariechen'. To this Dr. Ebers
appends this note. "An ignorant critic took exception to the use of
the diminutive form of names (as for instance 'Irenchen', little
Irene) in 'The Sisters,' as an anachronism. It is nevertheless a
fact that the Greeks settled in Egypt were so fond of using the
diminutive form of woman's names that they preferred them, even in
the tax-rolls. This form was common in Attic Greek,"]
Oh, if you could but know what I endured before I came out here! Forgive
me, Mary; be my sweet, dear little Mary once more. Indeed and indeed you
are much better than I am. Merciful Saviour, what possessed me last
evening? And all through him, through the man no one can help
loving--through Orion!--And would you believe it: I do not even know why
he led me into this sin. But I must try to care for him no more, to
forget him entirely, although, although,--only think, he called me his
betrothed; but now that he has betrayed me into sin, can I dare to become
his wife? It has given me no peace all night. I love him, yes I love him,
you cannot think how dearly; still, I cannot be his! Sooner will I go
into a convent, or drown myself in the Nile!--And I will say all this to
my mother, this very day."
The Greek governess had looked on in astonishment, for it was indeed
strange to see the young girl kneeling in front of the child. She
listened to her eager flow of unintelligible words, wondering whether she
could ever teach her pupil--with her grandmother's help if need should
be--to cultivate a more sedate and Greek demeanor.
At this juncture Paula came down the path. Some slaves followed her,
carrying several boxes and bundles and a large litter, all making their
way to the Nile, where a boat was waiting to ferry her up the river to
her new home.
As she lingered unobserved, her eye rested on the touching picture of the
two young things clasped in each other's arms, and she overheard the last
words of the gentle little creature who had done her such cruel wrong.
She could only guess at what had occurred, but she did not like to be a
listener, so she called Mary; and when the child started up and flew to
throw her arms round her neck with vehement and devoted tenderness, she
covered her little face and hair with kisses. Then she freed herself from
the little girl's embrace, and said, with tearful eyes:
"Good-bye, my darling! In a few minutes I shall no longer belong here;
another and a strange home must be mine. Love me always, and do not
forget me, and be quite sure of one thing: you have no truer friend on
earth than I am."
At this, fresh tears flowed; the child implored her not to go away, not
to leave her; but Paula could but refuse, though she was touched and
astonished to find that she had reaped so rich a harvest of love, here
where she had sown so little. Then she gave her hand at parting to the
governess, and when she turned to Katharina, to bid farewell, hard as it
was, to the murderer of her happiness, the young girl fell at her feet
bathed in tears of repentance, covered her knees and hands with kisses,
and confessed herself guilty of a terrible sin. Paula, however, would not
allow her to finish; she lifted her up, kissed her forehead, and said
that she quite understood how she had been led into it, and that she,
like Mary, would try to forgive her.
Standing by the governor's many-oared barge, to which the young girls now
escorted her, she found Orion. Twice already this morning he had tried in
vain to get speech with her, and he looked pale and agitated. He had a
splendid bunch of flowers in his hand; he bestowed a hasty greeting on
Mary and his betrothed, and did not heed the fact that Katharina returned
it hesitatingly and without a word.
He went close up to Paula, told her in a low voice that Hiram was safe,
and implored her, as she hoped to be forgiven for her own sins, to grant
him a few minutes. When she rejected his prayer with a silent shrug, and
went on towards the boat he put out his hand to help her, but she
intentionally overlooked it and gave her hand to the physician. At this
he sprang after her into the barge, saying in her ear in a tremulous
whisper:
"A wretch, a miserable man entreats your mercy. I was mad yesterday. I
love you, I love you--how deeply!--you will see!"
"Enough," she broke in firmly, and she stood up in the swaying boat.
Philippus supported her, and Orion, laying the flowers in her lap, cried
so that all could hear: "Your departure will sorely distress my father.
He is so ill that we did not dare allow you to take leave of him. If you
have anything to say to him. . ."
"I will find another messenger," she replied sternly.
"And if he asks the reason for your sudden departure?"
"Your mother and Philippus can give him an answer."
"But he was your guardian, and your fortune, I know. . ."
"In his hands it is safe."
"And if the physician's fears should be justified?"
"Then I will demand its restitution through a new Kyrios."
"You will receive it without that! Have you no pity, no forgiveness?" For
all answer she flung the flowers he had given her into the river; he
leaped on shore, and regardless of the bystanders, pushed his fingers
through his hair, clasping his hands to his burning brow.
The barge was pushed off, the rowers plied their oars like men; Orion
gazed after it, panting with laboring breath, till a little hand grasped
his, and Mary's sweet, childish voice exclaimed:
"Be comforted, uncle. I know just what is troubling you."
"What do you know?" he asked roughly.
"That you are sorry that you and Katharina should have spoken against her
last evening, and against poor Hiram."
"Nonsense!" he angrily broke in. "Where is Katharina?"
"I was to tell you that she could not see you today. She loves you
dearly, but she, too, is so very, very sorry."
"She may spare herself!" said the young man. "If there is anything to be
sorry for it falls on me--it is crushing me to death. But what is
this!--The devil's in it! What business is it of the child's? Now, be off
with you this minute. Eudoxia, take this little girl to her tasks."
He took Mary's head between his hands, kissed her forehead with impetuous
affection, and then pushed her towards her governess, who dutifully led
her away.
When Orion found himself alone, he leaned against a tree and groaned like
a wounded wild beast. His heart was full to bursting.
"Gone, gone! Thrown away, lost! The best on earth!" He laid his hands on
the tree-stem and pressed his head against it till it hurt him. He did
not know how to contain himself for misery and self-reproach. He felt
like a man who has been drunk and has reduced his own house to ashes in
his intoxication. How all this could have come to pass he now no longer
knew. After his nocturnal ride he had caused Nilus the treasurer to be
waked, and had charged him to liberate Hiram secretly. But it was the
sight of his stricken father that first brought him completely to his
sober senses. By his bed-side, death in its terrible reality had stared
him in the face, and he had felt that he could not bear to see that
beloved parent die till he had made his peace with Paula, won her
forgiveness, brought her whom his father loved so well into his presence,
and besought his blessing on her and on himself.
Twice he had hastened from the chamber of suffering to her room, to
entreat her to hear him, but in vain; and now, how terrible had their
parting been! She was hard, implacable, cruel; and as he recalled her
person and individuality as they had struck him before their quarrel, he
was forced to confess that there was something in her present behavior
which was not natural to her. This inhuman severity in the beautiful
woman whose affection had once been his, and who, but now, had flung his
flowers into the water, had not come from her heart; it was deliberately
planned to make him feel her anger. What had withheld her, under such
great provocation, from betraying that she had detected him in the theft
of the emerald? All was not yet lost; and he breathed more freely as he
went back to the house where duty, and his anxiety for his father,
required his presence. There were his flowers, floating on the stream.
"Hatred cast them there," thought he, "but before they reach the sea many
blossoms will have opened which were mere hard buds when she flung them
away. She can never love any man but me, I feel it, I know it. The first
time we looked into each other's eyes the fate of our hearts was sealed.
What she hates in me is my mad crime; what first set her against me was
her righteous anger at my suit for Katharina. But that sin was but a
dream in my life, which can never recur; and as for Katharina--I have
sinned against her once, but I will not continue to sin through a whole,
long lifetime. I have been permitted to trifle with love unpunished so
often, that at last I have learnt to under-estimate its power. I could
laugh as I sacrificed mine to my mother's wishes; but that, and that
alone, has given rise to all these horrors. But no, all is not yet lost!
Paula will listen to me; and when she sees what my inmost feelings
are--when I have confessed all to her, good and evil alike--when she
knows that my heart did but wander, and has returned to her who has
taught me that love is no jest, but solemn earnest, swaying all mankind,
she will come round--everything will come right."
A noble and rapturous light came into his face, and as he walked on, his
hopes rose:
"When she is mine I know that everything good in me that I have inherited
from my forefathers will blossom forth. When my mother called me to my
father's bed-side, she said: 'Come, Orion, life is earnest for you and me
and all our house, your father. . .' Yes, it is earnest indeed, however
all this may end! To win Paula, to conciliate her, to bring her near to
me, to have her by my side and do something great, something worthy of
her--this is such a purpose in life as I need! With her, only with her I
know I could achieve it; without her, or with that gilded toy Katharina,
old age will bring me nothing but satiety, sobering and regrets--or, to
call it by its Christian designation: bitter repentance. As Antaeus
renewed his strength by contact with mother earth, so, father do I feel
myself grow taller when I only think of her. She is salvation and honor;
the other is ruin and misery in the future. My poor, dear Father, you
will, you must survive this stroke to see the fulfilment of all your
joyful hopes of your son. You always loved Paula; perhaps you may be the
one to appease her and bring her back to me; and how dear will she be to
you, and, God willing, to my mother, too, when you see her reigning by my
side an ornament to this house, to this city, to this country--reigning
like a queen, your son's redeeming and guardian angel!"
Uplifted, carried away by these thoughts, he had reached the viridarium.
He there found Sebek the steward waiting for his young master: "My lord
is asleep now," he whispered, "as the physician foretold, but his
face. . . . Oh, if only we had Philippus here again!"
"Have you sent the chariot with the fast horses to the Convent of St.
Cecilia?" asked Orion eagerly; and when Sebek had replied in the
affirmative and vanished again indoors, the young man, overwhelmed with
painful forebodings, sank on his knees near a column to which a crucifix
was hung, and lifted up his hands and soul in fervent prayer.
CHAPTER XV.
The physician had installed Paula in her new home, and had introduced her
to the family who were henceforth to be her protectors, and to enable her
to lead a happier life.
He had but a few minutes to devote to her and her hosts; for scarcely had
he taken her into the spacious rooms, gay with flowers, of which she now
took possession, when he was enquired for by two messengers, both anxious
to speak with him. Paula knew how critical her uncle's state was, and
now, contemplating the probability of losing him, she first understood
what he had been to her. Thus sorrow was her first companion in her new
abode--a sorrow to which the comfort of her pretty, airy rooms added
keenness.
One of the messengers was a young Arab from the other side of the river,
who handed to Philippus a letter from the merchant Haschim. The old man
informed him that, in consequence of a bad fall his eldest son had had,
he was forced to start at once for Djiddah on the Red Sea. He begged the
physician to take every care of his caravan-leader, to whom he was much
attached, to remove him when he thought fit from the governor's house,
and to nurse him till he was well, in some quiet retreat. He would bear
in mind the commission given him by the daughter of the illustrious
Thomas. He sent with this letter a purse well-filled with gold pieces.
The other messenger was to take the leech back again in the light chariot
with the fast horses to the suffering Mukaukas. He at once obeyed the
summons, and the steeds, which the driver did not spare, soon carried him
back to the governor's house.
A glance at his patient told him that this was the beginning of the end;
still, faithful to his principle of never abandoning hope till the heart
of the sufferer had ceased to beat, he raised the senseless man, heedless
of Orion, who was on his knees by his father's pillow, signed to the
deaconess in attendance, an experienced nurse, and laid cool, wet cloths
on the head and neck of the sufferer, who was stricken with apoplexy.
Then he bled him.
Presently the Mukaukas wearily opened his eyes, turned uneasily from side
to side, and recognizing his kneeling son and his wife, bathed in tears,
he murmured, almost inarticulately, for his paralyzed tongue no longer
did his will: "Two pillules, Philip!"
The physician unhesitatingly acceded to the request of the dying man, who
again closed his eyes; but only to reopen them, and to say, with the same
difficulty, but with perfect consciousness: "The end is at hand! The
blessing of the Church--Orion, the Bishop."
The young man hastened out of the room to fetch the prelate, who was
waiting in the viridarium with two deacons, an exorcist, and a sacristan
bearing the sacred vessels.
The governor listened in devout composure to the service of the last
sacrament, looked on at the ceremonies performed by the exorcist as, with
waving of hands and pious ejaculations he banned the evil spirits and
cast out from the dying man the devil that might have part in him; but he
could no longer swallow the bread which, in the Jacobite rite, was
administered soaked in the wine. Orion took the holy elements for him,
and the dying man, with a smile, murmured to his son:
"God be with thee, my son! The Lord, it seems, denies me His precious
Blood--and yet--let me try once more."
This time he succeeded in swallowing the wine and a few crumbs of bread;
and the bishop Ptolimus, a gentle old man of a beautiful and dignified
presence, spoke comfort to him, and asked him whether he felt that he was
dying penitent and in perfect faith in the mercy of his Lord and Saviour,
and whether he repented of his sins and forgave his enemies.
The sick man bowed his head with an effort and murmured:
"Even the Melchites who murdered my sons--and even the head of our
Church, the Patriarch, who was only too glad to leave it to me to achieve
things which he scrupled to do himself. That--that--But you, Ptolimus--a
wise and worthy servant of the Lord--tell me to the best of your
convictions: May I die in the belief that it was not a sin to conclude a
peace with the Arab conquerors of the Greeks?--May I, even at this hour,
think of the Melchites as heretics?"
The prelate drew his still upright figure to its full height, and his
mild features assumed a determined--nay a stern expression as he
exclaimed:
"You know the, decision pronounced by the Synod of Ephesus--the words
which should be graven on the heart of every true Jacobite as on marble
and brass 'May all who divide the nature of Christ--and this is what the
Melchites do--be divided with the sword, be hewn in pieces and be burnt
alive!'--No Head of our Church has ever hurled such a curse at the
Moslems who adore the One God!"
The sufferer drew a deep breath, but he presently added with a sigh:
"But Benjamin the Patriarch, and John of Niku have tormented my soul with
fears! Still, you too, Ptolimus, bear the crosier, and to you I will
confess that your brethren in office, the shepherds of the Jacobite fold,
have ruined my peace for hundreds of days and nights, and I have been
near to cursing them. But before the night fell the Lord sent light into
my soul, and I forgave them, and now, through you, I crave their pardon
and their blessing. The Church has but reluctantly opened the doors to me
in these last years; but what servant can be allowed to complain of the
Master from whom he expects grace? So listen to me. I close my eyes as a
faithful and devoted adherent of the Church, and in token thereof I will
endow her to the best of my power and adorn her with rich and costly
gifts; I will--but I can say no more.--Speak for me, Orion. You know--the
gems--the hanging. . . ."
His son explained to the bishop what a splendid gift, in priceless
jewels, the dying man intended to offer to the Church. He desired to be
buried in the church of St. John at Alexandria by his father's side, and
to be prayed for in front of the mortuary chapel of his ancestors in the
Necropolis; he had set aside a sum of money, in his will, to pay for the
prayers to be offered for his soul. The priests were well pleased to hear
this, and they absolved him unconditionally and completely; then, after
blessing him fervently, they quitted the room.
Philippus heaved a sigh of relief when the ecclesiastics had departed,
and constantly renewed the wet compress, while the dying governor lay for
a long time in silence with his eyes shut. Presently he rubbed them as
though he felt revived, raised his head a little with the physician's
help, and looking up, said:
"Draw the ring off my finger, Orion, and wear it worthily.--Where is
little Mary, where is Paula? I should wish to bid them farewell too."
The young man and his mother exchanged uneasy glances, but Neforis
collected herself at once and replied:
"We have sent for Mary; but Paula--you know she never was happy with
us--and since the events of yesterday. . . ."
"Well?" asked the invalid.
"She hastily quitted the house; but we parted friends, I can assure you
of that; she is still in Memphis, and she spoke of you most
affectionately and wished to see you, and charged me with many loving
messages for you; so, if you really care to see her. . . ."
The sick man tried to nod his head, but in vain. He did not, however,
insist on her being sent for, but his face wore an expression of deep
melancholy and the words came faintly from his lips.
"Thomas' daughter! The noblest and loveliest of all."
"The noblest and loveliest," echoed Orion, in a voice that was tremulous
with strong, deep and sincere emotion; then he begged the leech and the
deaconess to leave him alone with his parents. As soon as they had left
the room the young man spoke softly but urgently into his father's ear:
"You are quite right, Father," he said. "She is better and more noble,
more beautiful and more highminded than any girl living. I love her, and
will stake everything to win her heart. Oh, God! Oh, God! Merciful
Heaven!--Are you glad, do you give your consent, Father? You dearest and
best of men; I see it in your face."
"Yes, yes, yes," murmured the governor; his yellow, bloodshot eyes looked
up to Heaven, and with a terrible effort he stammered out: "Blessing--my
blessing, on you and Paula.--Tell her from me. . . . If she had confided
in her old uncle, as she used to do, the freedman would never have robbed
us.--She is a brave soul; how she fought for the poor fellow. I will hear
more about it if my strength holds out.--Why is she not here?"
"She wished so much to bid you farewell," replied Neforis, "but you were
asleep."
"Was she in such a hurry to be gone?" asked her husband with a bitter
smile. "Fear about the emerald may have had something to do with it? But
how could I be angry with her? Hiram acted without her knowledge, I
suppose? Yes, I knew it!--Ah; that dear, sweet face! If I could but see
it once more. The joy--of my eyes, and my companion at draughts! A
faithful heart too; how she clung to her father! she was ready to
sacrifice everything for him.--And you, you, my old. . . . But no--no
reproaches at such a time. You, Mother--you, my Neforis, thanks, a
thousand thanks for all your love and kindness. What a mystical and magic
bond is that of a Christian marriage like ours? Mark that, Orion. And
you, Mother: I am anxious about this. You--do not hurt the girl's
feelings again. Say--say you bless this union; it will make me happier at
the last.--Paula and Orion; both of them-both.--I never dared before--but
what better could we wish?"
The matron clasped her hands and sobbed out:
"Anything, everything you wish! But Father, Orion, our faith!--And then,
merciful Saviour, that poor little Katharina!"
"Katharina!" repeated the sick man, and his feeble lips parted in a
compassionate smile. "Our boy and the water--water--you know what I would
say."
Then his eyes began to sparkle more brightly and he said in a low voice,
but still eagerly, as though death were yet far from him:
"My name is George, the son of the Mukaukas; I am the great Mukaukas and
our family--all fine men of a proud race; all: My father, my uncle, our
lost sons, and Orion here--all palms and oaks! And shall a dwarf, a mere
blade of rice be grafted on to the grand old stalwart stock? What would
come of that?--Oh, ho! a miserable little brood! But Paula! The cedar of
Lebanon--Paula; she would give new life to the grand old race."
"But our faith, our faith," moaned Neforis. "And you, Orion, do you even
know what her feeling is towards you?"
"Yes and no. Let that rest for the present," said the youth, who was
deeply moved. "Oh Father! if I only knew that your blessing. . ."
"The Faith, the Faith," interrupted the Mukaukas in a broken voice.
"I will be true to my own!" cried Orion, raising his father's hand to his
lips. "But think, picture to yourself, how Paula and I would reign in
this house, and how another generation would grow up in it worthy of the
great Mukaukas and his ancestors!"
"I see it, I see it," murmured the sick man sinking back on his pillows,
unconscious.
Philippus was immediately called in, and, with him, little Mary came
weeping into the room. The physician's efforts to revive the sufferer
were presently successful; again the sick man opened his eyes, and spoke
more distinctly and loudly than before:
"There is a perfume of musk. It is the fragrance that heralds the Angel
of Death."
After this he lay still and silent for a long time. His eyes were closed,
but his brows were knit and showed that he was thinking with a painful
effort. At length, with a sigh, he said, almost inaudibly: "So it was and
so it is: The Greek oppressed my people with arbitrary cruelty as if we
were dogs; the Moslem, too, is a stranger, but he is just. That which
happened it was out of my power to prevent; and it is well, it is very
well that it turned out so.--Very well," he repeated several times, and
then he shivered and said with a groan:
"My feet are so cold! But never mind, never mind, I like to be cool."
The leech and the deaconess at once set to work to heat blocks of wood to
warm his feet; the sick man looked up gratefully and went on: "At church,
in the House of God, I have often found it deliciously cool and to-day it
is the Church that eases my death-bed by her pardon. Do you, my Son, be
faithful to her. No member of our house should ever be an apostate. As to
the new faith--it is overspreading land after land with incredible power;
ambition and covetousness are driving thousands into its fold. But we--we
are faithful to Christ Jesus, we are no traitors. If I, I the Mukaukas,
had consented to go over to the Khaliff I might have been a prince in
purple, and have governed my own country in his name. How many have
deserted to the Moslems! And the temptation will come to you, too, and
their faith offers much that is attractive to the crowd. They imagine a
Paradise full of unspeakably alluring joys--but we, my son--we shall meet
again in our own, shall we not?"
"Yes, yes, Father!" cried the young man. "I will remain a Christian,
staunch and true. . ."
"That is right," interrupted the sick man. He was determined to forget
that his son wished to marry a Melchite and went on quickly:
"Paula. . . . But no more of that. Remain faithful to your own
creed--otherwise. . . . However, child, seek your own road; you are--but
you will walk in the right way, and it is because I know that, know it
surely, that I can die so calmly.
"I have provided abundantly for your temporal welfare. I have been a good
husband, a faithful father, have I not, O Saviour?--Have I not, Neforis?
And that which is my best and surest comfort is that for many long years
I have administered justice in this land, and never, never once--and Thou
my Refuge and Comforter art my witness!--never once consciously or
willingly have I been an unrighteous judge. Before me the poor were equal
with the rich, the powerful with the helpless widow. Who would have
dared. . . ." Here he broke off; his eyes, wandering feebly round the
room, fell on Mary who had sunk on her knees, opposite to Orion on the
other side of the bed. The dying man, who had thus summed up the outcome
of a long and busy life, ceased his reflections, and when the child saw
that he was vainly trying to turn his powerless head towards her, she
threw her arms round him with passionate grief; unscared by his fixed
gaze or the altered hue of his beloved face, she kissed his lips and
cheeks, exclaiming:
"Grandfather, dear grandfather, do not leave us; stay with us, pray, pray
stay with us!"
Something faintly resembling a smile parted his parched lips, and all the
tenderness with which his soul was overflowing for this sweet young bud
of humanity would have found expression in his voice but that he could
only mutter huskily:
"Mary, my darling! For your sake I should be glad to live a long while
yet, a very long while; but the other world--I am standing already on its
threshold. Good-bye--I must indeed say good-bye."
"No, no--I will pray; oh! I will pray so fervently that you may get well
again!" cried the child. But he replied:
"Nay, nay. The Saviour is already taking me by the hand. Farewell, and
again farewell. Did you bring Paula? I do not see her. Did you bring
Paula with you, sweetheart? She--did she leave us in anger? If she only
knew; ah! your Paula has treated us ill." The child's heart was still
full of the horrible crime which had so revolted her truthful nature, and
which had deprived her of rest all through an evening, a long night and a
morning; she laid her little head close to that of the old man--her
dearest and best friend. For years he had filled her father's place, and
now he was dying, leaving her forever! But she could not let him depart
with a false idea of the woman whom she worshipped with all the fervor of
her child's heart; in a subdued voice, but with eager feeling, she said,
close to his ear:
"But Grandfather, there is one thing you must know before the Saviour
takes you away to be happy in Heaven. Paula told the truth, and never,
never told a lie, not even for Hiram's sake. An empty gold frame hung to
her necklace and no gem at all. Whatever Orion may say, I saw it myself
and cannot be mistaken, as truly as I hope to see you and my poor father
in heaven! And Katharina, too, thought better of it, and confessed to me
just now that she had committed a great sin and had borne false witness
before the judges to please her dear Orion. I do not know what Hiram had
done to offend him; but on the strength of Katharina's evidence the
judges condemned him to death. But Paula--you must understand that Paula
had nothing, positively nothing whatever to do with the stealing of the
emerald."
Orion, kneeling there, was condemned to hear every word the little girl
so vehemently whispered, and each one pierced his heart like a
dagger-thrust. Again and again he felt inclined to clutch at her across
the bed and fling her on the ground before his father's eyes; but grief
and astonishment seemed to have paralyzed his whole being; he had not
even the power to interrupt her with a single word.
She had spoken, and all was told.
He clung to the couch like a shattered wretch; and when his father turned
his eyes on him and gasped out: "Then the Court--our Court of justice
pronounced an unrighteous sentence?" he bowed his head in contrition.
The dying man murmured even less articulately and incoherently than
before: "The gem--the hanging--you, you perhaps--was it you? that
emerald--I cannot. . ."
Orion helped his father in his vain efforts to utter the dreadful words.
Sooner would he have died with the old man than have deceived him in such
a moment; he replied humbly and in a low voice:
"Yes, Father--I took it. But as surely as I love you and my mother this,
the first reckless act of my life, which has brought such horrors in its
train. . . Shall be the last," he would have said; but the words "I took
it," had scarcely passed his lips when his father was shaken by a violent
trembling, the expression of his eyes changed fearfully, and before the
son had spoken his vow to the end the unhappy father was, by a tremendous
effort, sitting upright. Loud sobs of penitence broke from the young
man's heaving breast, as the Mukaukas wrathfully exclaimed, in thick
accents, as quickly as the heavy, paralyzed tongue would allow:
"You, you! A disgrace to our ancient and blameless Court! You?--Away with
you! A thief, an unjust judge, a false witness,--and the only descendant
of Menas! If only these hands were able--you--you--Go, villain!" And with
this wild outcry, George, the gentle and just Mukaukas, sank back on his
pillows; his bloodshot eyes were staring, fixed on vacancy; his gasping
lips repeated again and again, but less and less audibly the one word
"Villain;" his swollen fingers clutched at the light coverlet that lay
over him; a strange, shrill wheezing came through his open mouth, and the
heavy corpse of the great dignitary fell, like a falling palm-tree, into
Orion's arms.
Orion started up, his eyes inflamed, his hair all dishevelled, and shook
the dead man as though to compel him back to life again, to hear his oath
and accept his vow, to see his tears of repentance, to pardon him and
take back the name of infamy which had been his parting word to his loved
and spoilt child.
In the midst of this wild outbreak the physician came back, glanced at
the dead man's distorted features, laid a hand on his heart, and said
with solemn regret as he led little Mary away from the couch:
"A good and just man is gone from the land of the living."
Orion cried aloud and pushed away Mary, who had stolen close to him; for,
young as she was, she felt that it was she who had brought the worst woe
on her uncle, and that it was her part to show him some affection.
She ran then to her grandmother; but she, too, put her aside and fell on
her knees by the side of her wretched son to weep with him; to console
him who was inconsolable, and in whom, a few minutes since, she had hoped
to find her own best consolation; but her fond words of motherly comfort
found no echo in his broken spirit.
CHAPTER XVI.
When Philippus had parted from Paula he had told her that the Mukaukas
might indeed die at any moment, but that it was possible that he might
yet struggle with death for weeks to come. This hope had comforted her;
for she could not bear to think that the only true friend she had had in
Memphis, till she had become more intimate with the physician, should
quit the world forever without having heard her justification. Nothing
could be more unlikely than that any one in Neforis' household--excepting
her little grandchild should ever remember her with kindness; and she
scarcely desired it; but she rebelled against the idea of forfeiting the
respect she had earned, even in the governor's house. If her friend
should succeed in prolonging her uncle's life, by a confidential
interview with him she might win back his old affection and his good
opinion.
Her new home she felt was but a resting-place, a tabernacle in the
desert-journey of her solitary pilgrimage, and she here meant to avail
herself of the information she had gathered from her Melchite dependents.
Hope had now risen supreme in her heart over grief and disappointment.
Orion's presence alone hung like a threatening hail-cloud over the
sprouting harvest of her peace of mind. And yet, next to the necessity of
waiting at Memphis for the return of her messenger, nothing tied her to
the place so strongly as her interest in watching the future course of
his life, at any rate from a distance. What she felt for him-and she told
herself it was deep aversion-nevertheless constituted a large share of
her inner life, little as she would confess it to herself.
Her new hosts had received her as a welcome guest, and they certainly did
not seem to be poor. The house was spacious, and though it was old and
unpretentious it was comfortable and furnished with artistic taste. The
garden had amazed her by the care lavished on it; she had seen a
hump-backed gardener and several children at work in it. A strange
party-for every one of them, like their chief, was in some way deformed
or crippled.
The plot of ground--which extended towards the river to the road-way for
foot passengers, vehicles and the files of men towing the Nile-boats--was
but narrow, and bounded on either side by extensive premises. Not far
from the spot where it lay nearest to the river was the bridge of boats
connecting Memphis with the island of Rodah. To the right was the
magnificent residence--a palace indeed--belonging to Susannah; to the
left was an extensive grove, where tall palms, sycamores with spreading
foliage, and dense thickets of blue-green tamarisk trees cast their
shade. Above this bower of splendid shrubs and ancient trees rose a long,
yellow building crowned with a turret; and this too was not unknown to
her, for she had often heard it spoken of in her uncle's house, and had
even gone there now and then escorted by Perpetua. It was the convent of
St. Cecilia, the refuge of the last nuns of the orthodox creed left in
Memphis; for, though all the other sisterhoods of her confession had long
since been banished, these had been allowed to remain in their old home,
not only because they were famous sick-nurses, a distinction common to
all the Melchite orders, but even more because the decaying municipality
could not afford to sacrifice the large tax they annually paid to it.
This tax was the interest on a considerable capital bequeathed to the
convent by a certain wise predecessor of the Mukaukas', with the prudent
proviso, ratified under the imperial seal of Theodosius II., that if the
convent were at any time broken up, this endowment, with the land and
buildings which it likewise owed to the generosity of the same
benefactor, should become the property of the Christian emperor at that
time reigning.
Mukaukas George, notwithstanding his well-founded aversion for everything
Melchite, had taken good care not to press this useful Sisterhood too
hardly, or to deprive his impoverished capital of its revenues only to
throw them into the hands of the wealthy Moslems. The title-deed on which
the Sisters relied was good; and the governor, who was a good lawyer as
well as a just man, had not only left them unmolested, but in spite of
his fears--during the last few years--for his own safety, had shown
himself no respecter of persons by defending their rights firmly and
resolutely against the powerful patriarch of the Jacobite Church. The
Senate of the ancient capital naturally, approved his course, and had not
merely suffered the heretic Sisterhood to remain, but had helped and
encouraged it.
The Jacobite clergy of the city shut their eyes, and only opened them to
watch the convent at Easter-tide; for on the Saturday before Easter, the
nuns, in obedience to an agreement made before the Monophysite Schism,
were required to pay a tribute of embroidered vestments to the head of
the Christian Churches, with wine of the best vintages of Kochome near
the Pyramid of steps, and a considerable quantity of flowers and
confectionary. So the ancient coenobium of women was maintained, and
though all Egypt was by this time Jacobite or Moslem, and many of the
older Sisters had departed this life within the last year, no one had
thought of enquiring how it was that the number of the nuns remained
still the same, till the Jacobite archbishop Benjamin filled the
patriarchal throne of Alexandria in the place of the Melchite Cyrus.
To Benjamin the heretical Sisters at Memphis--the hawks in a dove-cote,
as he called them--were an offence, and he thought that the deed might
bear a new interpretation: that as there was no longer a Christian
emperor, and as the word "Christian" was used in the document, if the
convent were broken up the property should pass into the hands of the
only Christian magnate then existing in the country: himself, namely, and
his Church. The ill-feeling which the Patriarch fostered against the
Mukaukas had been aggravated to hostility by their antagonism on this
matter.
A musical dirge now fell on Paula's ear from the convent chapel. Was the
worthy Mother Superior dead? No, this lament must be for some other
death, for the strange skirling wail of the Egyptian women came up to her
corner window from the road, from the bridge, and from the boats on the
river. No Jacobite of Memphis would have dared to express her grief so
publicly for the death of a Melchite; and as the chorus of voices
swelled, the thought struck her with a chill that it must be her uncle
and friend who had closed his weary eyes in death.
It was with deep emotion and many tears that she perceived how sincerely
the death of this righteous man was bewailed by all his fellow-citizens.
Yes, he only, and no other Egyptian, could have called forth this great
and expressive regret. The wailing women in the road were daubing the mud
of the river on their foreheads and bosoms; men were standing in large
groups and beating their heads and breasts with passionate gestures. On
the bridge of boats the men would stop others, and from thence, too,
piercing shrieks came across to her.
At last Philippus came in and confirmed her fears. The governor's death
had shocked him no less than it did her, and he had to tell Paula all he
knew of the dead man's last hours.
"Still, one good thing has come out of this misery," he said. "There is
nothing so comforting as the discovery that we have been deceived in
thinking ill of a man and of his character. This Orion, who has sinned so
basely against himself and against you, is not utterly reprobate."
"Not?" interrupted Paula. "Then he has taken you in too!"
"Taken me in?" said the leech. "Hardly, I think. I have, alas! stood by
many a death-bed; for I am too often sent for when Death is already
beckoning the sick man away. I have met thousands of mourners in these
melancholy scenes, which, I can assure you, are the very best school for
training any one who desires to search the hearts of his
fellow-creatures. By the bed of death, or in the mart, where everything
is a question of Mine and Thine, it is easy to see how some--we for
instance--are as careful to hide from the world all that is great and
noble in us as others are to conceal what is petty and mean--we read
men's hearts as an open page. From my observations of the dying and of
those who sorrow for them, I, who am not Menander not Lucian, could draw
a series of portraits which should be as truthful likenesses as though
the men had turned themselves inside out before me."
"That a dying man should show himself as he really is I can well
believe," replied Paula. "He need have no further care for the opinions
of others; but the mourners? Why, custom requires them to assume an air
of grief and to shed tears."
"Very true; regret repeats itself by the side of the dead," replied the
physician. "But the chamber of the dying is like a church. Death
consecrates it, and the man who stands face to face with death often
drops the mask by which he cheats his fellows. There we may see faces
which you would shudder to look on, but others, too, which merely to see
is enough to make us regard the degenerate species to which we belong
with renewed respect."
"And you found such a comforting vision in Orion,--the thief, the false
witness, the corrupt judge!" exclaimed Paula, starting up in indignant
astonishment.
"There! you see," laughed Philippus. "Just like a woman! A little
juggling, and lo! what was only rose color is turned to purple. No. The
son of the Mukaukas has not yet undergone such a dazzling change of hue;
but he has a feeling and impressible heart--and I hold even that in high
esteem. I have no doubt that he loved his father deeply, nay
passionately; though I have ample reason to believe him capable of the
very worst. So long as I was present at the scene of death the father and
son were parting in all friendship and tenderness, and when the good old
man's heart had ceased to beat I found Orion in a state which is only
possible to have when love has lost what it held dearest."
"All acting!" Paula put in.
"But there was no audience, dear friend. Orion would not have got up such
a performance for his mother and little Mary."
"But he is a poet--and a highly-gifted one too. He sings beautiful songs
of his own invention to the lyre; his ecstatic and versatile mind works
him up into any frame of feeling; but his soul is perverted; it is soaked
in wickedness as a sponge drinks up water. He is a vessel full of
beautiful gifts, but he has forfeited all that was good and noble in
him--all!"
The words came in eager haste from her indignant lips. Her cheeks glowed
with her vehemence, and she thought she had won over the physician; but
he gravely shook his head, and said:
"Your righteous anger carries you too far. How often have you blamed me
for severity and suspicions but now I have to beg you to allow me to ask
your sympathy for an experience to which you would probably have raised
no objection the day before yesterday:
"I have met with evil-doers of every degree. Think, for instance, how
many cases of wilful poisoning I have had to investigate."
"Even Homer called Egypt the land of poison," exclaimed Paula. "And it
seems almost incredible that Christianity has not altered it in the
least. Kosmas, who had seen the whole earth, could nowhere find more
malice, deceit, hatred, and ill-will than exist here."
"Then you see in what good schools my experience of the wickedness of men
has ripened," said Philippus smiling, "and they have taught me chiefly
that there is never a criminal, a sinner, or a scapegrace, however
infamous he may be, however cruel or lost to virtue, in whom some good
quality or other may not be discovered.--Do you remember Nechebt, the
horrible woman who poisoned her two brothers and her own father? She was
captured scarcely three weeks ago; and that very monster in human form
could almost die of hunger and thirst for the sake of her rascally son,
who is a common soldier in the imperial army; at last she took to
concocting poisons, not to improve her own wretched condition, but to
send the shameless wretch means for a fresh debauch. I have known a
thousand similar cases, but I will only mention that of one of the
wildest and blood-thirstiest of robbers, who had evaded the vigilance of
the watch again and again, but at last fell into their hands--and how?
Because he had heard that his old mother was ill and he longed to see the
withered old woman once more and give her a kiss, since he was her own
child! In the same way Orion, however reprobate we may think him, has at
any rate one characteristic which we must approve of: a tender affection
for his father and mother. Your sponge is not utterly steeped in
wickedness; there are still some pores, some cells which resist it; and
if in him, as in so many others, the heart is one of them, then I say
hopefully, like Horace the Roman: 'Nil desperandum.' It would be unjust
to give him up altogether for lost."
To this assurance Paula found no answer; indeed, it struck her that--if
Orion had told her the truth--it was only to please his mother that he
had asked Katharina to marry him, while she herself occupied his
heart.--The physician, wishing to change the subject, was about to speak
again of the death of the Mukaukas, when one of the crippled serving
girls came to announce a woman who asked to speak with Paula. A few
minutes later she was clasped in the embrace of her faithful old friend
and nurse, who rejoiced as heartily, laughing and crying for sheer
delight, as if no tidings of misfortune had reached her; while Paula,
though so much younger, was cut to the heart, and could not shake off the
spell of her grief.
Perpetua understood this and owed her no grudge for the coolness with
which she met her joyful excitement.
She told Paula that she had been well treated in her hot cell, and that
about half an hour since Orion himself, the young Master now, had opened
the door of her prison. He had been very gracious to her, but looked so
pale and sad. The overbearing young man was quite altered; his eyes,
which were dim with weeping, had moved her, Perpetua, to tears. She
trusted that God would forgive him for his sins against herself and
Paula; he must have been possessed by some evil demon; he had not been at
all like himself; for he had a kind, warm heart, and though he had been
so hard and unjust yesterday to poor Hiram he had made it up to him the
first thing this morning, and had not only let him out of prison but had
sent him and his son home to Damascus with large gifts and two horses.
Nilus had told her this. He who hoped to be forgiven by his neighbor must
also be ready to forgive. The great Augustine, even, had been no model of
virtue in his youth and yet he had become a shining light in the Church;
and now the son of the Mukaukas would tread in his father's footsteps. He
was a handsome, engaging man, who would be the joy of their hearts yet,
they might be very sure. Why, he had been as grave and as solemn as a
bishop to-day; perhaps he had already turned over a new leaf. He himself
had put her into his mother's chariot and desired the charioteer to drive
her hither: what would Paula say to that? Her things were to be given
over to her to-morrow morning, and packed under her own eyes, and sent
after her. Nilus, the treasurer, had come with her to deliver a message
to Paula; but he had gone first to the convent.
Paula desired the old woman to go thither and fetch him; as soon as
Perpetua had left the room, she exclaimed:
"There, you see, is some one who is quite of your opinion. What creatures
we are! Last evening my good Betta would have thought no pit of hell too
deep for our enemy, and now? To be led to a chariot by such a fine
gentleman in person is no doubt flattering; and how quickly the old body
has forgotten all her grievances, how soothed and satisfied she is by the
gracious permission to pack her precious and cherished possessions with
her own hands.--You told me once that the Jacobites had made a Saint
Orion out of the pagan god Osiris, and my old Betta sees a future Saint
Augustine in the governor's son. I can see that she already regards him
as her tutelary patron, and when we get back to Syria, she will be
begging me to join her in a pilgrimage to his shrine!"
"And you will perhaps consent," replied the physician, to whom Paula at
this moment, for the first time since his heart had glowed with love for
her, did not seem to be quite what a man looks for in the woman he
adores. Hitherto he had seen and heard nothing that was not high-minded
and worthy of her; but her last words had, been spoken with vehement and
indignant irony--and in Philip's opinion irony, blame which was intended
to wound and not to improve its object, was unbecoming in a noble woman.
The scornful laugh, with which she had triumphantly ended her speech, had
opened as it were a wide abyss between his mind and hers. He, as he
freely confessed to himself, was of a coarser and humbler grain than
Paula, and he was apt to be satirical oftener than was right. She had
been wont to dislike this habit in him; he had been glad that she did; it
answered to the ideal he had formed of what the woman he loved should be.
But now she had turned satirical; and her irony was no jest of the lips.
It sprang, full of passion, from her agitated soul; this it was that
grieved the leech who knew human nature, and at the same time roused his
apprehensions. Paula read his disapproval in his face, and felt that
there was a deep significance in his words And you will perhaps consent."
"Men are vexed," thought she, "when, after they have decisively expressed
an opinion, we women dare unhesitatingly to assert a different one," so,
as she would on no account hurt the feelings of the friend to whom she
owed so much, she said kindly:
"I do not care to enquire into the meaning of your strange
prognostication. Thank God, by your kindness and care I have severed
every tie that could have bound me to my poor uncle's son!--Now we will
drop the subject; we have said too much about him already."
"That is quite my opinion," replied Philippus. "And, indeed, I would beg
you quite to forget my 'perhaps.' I live wholly in the present and am no
prophet; but I foresee, nevertheless, that Orion will make every effort,
cost what it may. . . ."
"Well?"
"To approach you again, to win your forgiveness, to touch your heart,
to. . . ."
"Let him dare" exclaimed Paula lifting her hand with a threatening
gesture.
"And when he, gifted as he is in every way, has found his better self
again and can come forward purified and worthy of the approbation of the
best. . . ."
"Still I will never, never forget how he has sinned and what he brought
upon me!--Do you think that I have already forgotten your conversation
with Neforis? You ask nothing of your friends but honest feeling akin to
your own,--and what is it that repels me from Orion but feeling?
Thousands have altered their behavior, but--answer me frankly--surely not
what we mean by their feeling?"
"Yes, that too," said the leech with stern gravity. "Feeling, too, may
change. Or do you range yourself on the side of the Arab merchant and his
fellow-Moslems, who regard man as the plaything of a blind Fate?--But our
spiritual teachers tell us that the evil to which we are predestined,
which is that born into the world with us, may be averted, turned and
guided to good by what they call spiritual regeneration. But who that
lives in the tumult of the world can ever succeed in 'killing himself' in
their sense of the word, in dying while yet he lives, to be born again, a
new man? The penitent's garb does not suit the stature of an Orion;
however, there is for him another way of returning to the path he has
lost. Fortune has hitherto offered her spoilt favorite so much pleasure,
that sheer enjoyment has left him no time to think seriously on life
itself; now she is showing him its graver side, she is inviting him to
reflect; and if he only finds a friend to give him the counsel which my
father left in a letter for me, his only child, as a youth--and if he is
ready to listen, I regard him as saved."
"And that word of counsel--what is it?" asked Paula with interest.
"To put it briefly, it is this: Life is not a banquet spread by fate for
our enjoyment, but a duty which we are bound to fulfil to the best of our
power. Each one must test his nature and gifts, and the better he uses
them for the weal and benefit of the body of which he was born a member,
the higher will his inmost gladness be, the more certainly will he attain
to a beautiful peace of mind, the less terrors will Death have for him.
In the consciousness of having sown seed for eternity he will close his
eyes like a faithful steward at the end of each day, and of the last hour
vouchsafed to him on earth. If Orion recognizes this, if he submits to
accept the duties imposed on him by existence, if he devotes himself to
them now for the first time to the best of his powers, a day may come
when I shall look up to him with respect--nay, with admiration. The
shipwreck of which the Arab spoke has overtaken him. Let us see how he
will save himself from the waves, and behave when he is cast on shore."
"Let us see!" repeated Paula, "and wish that he may find such an adviser!
As you were speaking it struck me that it was my part.--But no, no! He
has placed himself beyond the pale of the compassion which I might have
felt even for an enemy after such a frightful blow. He! He can and shall
never be anything to me till the end of time. I have to thank you for
having found me this haven of rest. Help me now to keep out everything
that can intrude itself here to disturb my peace. If Orion should ever
dare, for whatever purpose, to force or steal a way into this house, I
trust to you, my friend and deliverer!"
She held out her hand to Philippus, and as he took it the blood seethed
in his veins with tender emotion.
"My strength, like my heart, is wholly yours!" he exclaimed ardently.
"Command them, and if the devoted love of a faithful, plain-spoken man--"
"Say no more, no, no!" Paula broke in with anxious vehemence. "Let us
remain closely bound together by friendship-as brother and sister."
"As brother and sister?" he dully echoed with a melancholy smile. "Aye,
friendship too is a beautiful, beautiful thing. But yet--let me speak--I
have dreamed of love, the tossing sea of passion; I have felt its surges
here--in here; I feel them still. . . . But man, man," and he struck his
forehead with his fist, "have you forgotten, like a fool, what your image
is in the mirror; have you forgotten that you are an ugly, clumsy fellow,
and that the gorgeous flower you long for. . . ."
Paula had shrunk back, startled by her friend's vehemence; but she now
went up to him, and taking his hand with frank spirit, she said
impressively:
"It is not so, Philippus, my dear, kind, only friend. The gorgeous flower
you desire I can no longer give you--or any one. It is mine no longer;
for when it had opened, once for all, cruel feet trod it down. Do not
abuse your mirrored image; do not call yourself a clumsy fellow. The best
and fairest might be proud of your love, just as you are. Am I not proud,
shall I not always be proud of your friendship?"
"Friendship, friendship!" he retorted, snatching away his hand. "This
burning, longing heart thirsts for other feelings! Oh, woman! I know the
wretch who has trodden down the flower of flowers in your heart, and I,
madman that I am, can sing his praises, can take his part; and cost what
it may, I will still do so as long as you. . . . But perhaps the glorious
flower may strike new roots in the soil of hatred and I, the hapless
wretch who water it, may see it."
At this, Paula again took both his hands, and exclaimed in deep and
painful agitation of mind:
"Say no more, I beg and entreat you. How can I live in peace here, under
your protection and in constant intercourse with you, without knowing
myself guilty of a breach of propriety such as the most sacred feelings
of a young girl bid her avoid, if you persist in overstepping the limits
which bound true and faithful friendship? I am a lonely girl and should
give myself up to despair, as lost, if I could not take refuge in the
belief that I can rely upon myself. Be satisfied with what I have to
offer you, my friend, and may God reward you! Let us both remain worthy
of the esteem which, thank Heaven! we are fully justified in feeling for
each other."
The physician, deeply moved, bent his head; scarcely able to control
himself, he pressed her firm white hand to his lips, while, just at this
moment, Perpetua and the treasurer came into the room.
This worthy official--a perfectly commonplace man, neither tall nor
short, neither old nor young, with a pale, anxious face, furrowed by work
and responsibility, but shrewd and finely cut-glanced keenly at the pair,
and then proceeded to lay a considerable sum in gold pieces before Paula.
His young master had sent it, in obedience to his deceased father's
wishes, for her immediate needs; the rest, the larger part of her
fortune, with a full account, would be given over to her after the
Mukaukas was buried. Nilus could, however, give her an approximate idea
of the sum, and it was so considerable that Paula could not believe her
ears. She now saw herself secure against external anxiety, nay, in such
ease that she was justified in living at some expense.
Philippus was present throughout the interview, and it cut him to the
heart. It had made him so happy to think that he was all in all to the
poor orphan, and could shelter her against pressing want. He had been
prepared to take upon himself the care of providing Paula with the home
she had found and everything she could need; and now, as it turned out,
his protege was not merely higher in rank than himself, but much richer.
He felt as though Orion's envoy had robbed him of the best joy in life.
After introducing Paula to her worthy host and his family, he quitted the
house of Rufinus with a very crushed aspect.
When night came Perpetua once more enjoyed the privilege of assisting her
young mistress to undress; but Paula could not sleep, and when she joined
her new friends next morning she told herself that here, if anywhere, was
the place where she might recover her lost peace, but that she must still
have a hard struggle and a long pilgrimage before she could achieve this.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
In whom some good quality or other may not be discovered
Life is not a banquet
THE BRIDE OF THE NILE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 5.
CHAPTER XVII.
During all these hours Orion had been in the solitude of his own rooms.
Next to them was little Mary's sleeping-room; he had not seen the child
again since leaving his father's death-bed. He knew that she was lying
there in a very feverish state, but he could not so far command himself
as to enquire for her. When, now and again, he could not help thinking of
her, he involuntarily clenched his fists. His soul was shaken to the
foundations; desperate, beside himself, incapable of any thought but that
he was the most miserable man on earth--that his father's curse had
blighted him--that nothing could undo what had happened--that some cruel
and inexorable power had turned his truest friend into a foe and had
sundered them so completely that there was no possibility of atonement or
of moving him to a word of pardon or a kindly glance--he paced the long
room from end to end, flinging himself on his knees at intervals before
the divan, and burying his burning face in the soft pillows. From time to
time he could pray, but each time he broke off; for what Power in Heaven
or on earth could unseal those closed eyes and stir that heart to beat
again, that tongue to speak--could vouchsafe to him, the outcast, the one
thing for which his soul thirsted and without which he thought he must
die: Pardon, pardon, his father's pardon! Now and then he struck his
forehead and heart like a man demented, with cries of anguish, curses and
lamentations.
About midnight--it was but just twelve hours since that fearful scene,
and to him it seemed like as many days--he threw himself on the couch,
dressed as he was in the dark mourning garments, which he had half torn
off in his rage and despair, and broke out into such loud groans that he
himself was almost frightened in the silence of the night. Full of
self-pity and horror at his own deep grief, he turned his face to the
wall to screen his eyes from the clear, full moon, which only showed him
things he did not want to see, while it hurt him.
His torture was beginning to be quite unbearable; he fancied his soul was
actually wounded, riven, and torn; it had even occurred to him to seize
his sharpest sword and throw himself upon it like Ajax in his fury--and
like Cato--and so put a sudden end to this intolerable and overwhelming
misery.
He started up for--surely it was no illusion, no mistake-the door of his
room was softly opened and a white figure came in with noiseless, ghostly
steps. He was a brave man, but his blood ran cold; however, in a moment
he recognized his nocturnal visitor as little Mary. She came across the
moonlight without speaking, but he exclaimed in a sharp tone:
"What is the meaning of this? What do you want?"
The child started and stood still in alarm, stretching out imploring
hands and whispering timidly:
"I heard you lamenting. Poor, poor Orion! And it was I who brought it all
on you, and so I could not stay in bed any longer--I must--I could not
help. . . ." But she could say no more for sobs. Orion exclaimed:
"Very well, very well: go back to your own room and sleep. I will try not
to groan so loud."
He ended his speech in a less rough tone, for he observed that the child
had come to see him, though she was ill, with bare feet and only in her
night-shift, and was trembling with cold, excitement, and grief. Mary,
however, stood still, shook her head, and replied, still weeping though
less violently:
"No, no. I shall stop here and not go away till you tell me that you--Oh,
God, you never can forgive me, but still I must say it, I must."
With a sudden impulse she ran straight up to him, threw her arms round
his neck, laid her head against his, and then, as he did not immediately
push her away, kissed his cheeks and brow.
At this a strange feeling came over him; he himself did not know what it
was, but it was as though something within him yielded and gave way, and
the moisture which felt warm in his eyes and on his cheeks was not from
the child's tears but his own. This lasted through many minutes of
silence; but at last he took the little one's arms from about his neck,
saying:
"How hot your hands and your cheeks are, poor thing! You are feverish,
and the night air blows in chill--you will catch fresh cold by this mad
behavior."
He had controlled his tears with difficulty, and as he spoke, in broken
accents, he carefully wrapped her in the black robe he had thrown off and
said kindly:
"Now, be calm, and I will try to compose myself. You did not mean any
harm, and I owe you no grudge. Now go; you will not feel the draught in
the anteroom with that wrap on. Go; be quick."
"No, no," she eagerly replied. "You must let me say what I have to say or
I cannot sleep. You see I never thought of hurting you so dreadfully, so
horribly--never, never! I was angry with you, to be sure, because--but
when I spoke I really and truly did not think of you, but only of poor
Paula. You do not know how good she is, and grandfather was so fond of
her before you came home; and he was lying there and going to die so
soon, and I knew that he believed Paula to be a thief and a liar, and it
seemed to me so horrible, so unbearable to see him close his eyes with
such a mistake in his mind, such an injustice!--Not for his sake, oh no!
but for Paula's; so then I--Oh Orion! the Merciful Saviour is my witness,
I could not help it; if I had had to die for it I could not have helped
it! I should have died, if I had not spoken!"
"And perhaps it was well that you spoke," interrupted the young man, with
a deep sigh. "You see, child, your lost father's miserable brother is a
ruined man and it matters little about him; but Paula, who is a thousand
times better than I am, has at least had justice done her; and as I love
her far more dearly than your little heart can conceive of, I will gladly
be friends with you again: nay, I shall be more fond of you than ever.
That is nothing great or noble, for I need love--much love to make life
tolerable. The best love a man may have I have forfeited, fool that I am!
and now dear, good little soul, I could not bear to lose yours! So there
is my hand upon it; now, give me another kiss and then go to bed and
sleep."
But still Mary would not do his bidding, but only thanked him vehemently
and then asked with sparkling eyes:
"Really, truly? Do you love Paula so dearly?" At this point however she
suddenly checked herself. "And little Katharina. . ."
"Never mind about that," he replied with a sigh. "And learn a lesson from
all this. I, you see, in an hour of recklessness did a wrong thing; to
hide it I had to do further wrong, till it grew to a mountain which fell
on me and crushed me. Now, I am the most miserable of men and I might
perhaps have been the happiest. I have spoilt my own life by my own
folly, weakness, and guilt; and I have lost Paula, who is dearer to me
than all the other creatures on earth put together. Yes, Mary, if she had
been mine, your poor uncle would have been the most enviable fellow in
the world, and he might have been a fine fellow, too, a man of great
achievements. But as it is!--Well, what is done cannot be undone! Now go
to bed child; you cannot understand it all till you are older."
"Oh I understand it already and much better perhaps than you suppose,"
cried the ten years' old child. "And if you love Paula so much why should
not she love you? You are so handsome, you can do so many things, every
one likes you, and Paula would have loved you, too, if only. . . . Will
you promise not to be angry with me, and may I say it?"
"Speak out, little simpleton."
"She cannot owe you any grudge when she knows how dreadfully you are
suffering on her account and that you are good at heart, and only that
once ever did--you know what. Before you came home, grandfather said a
hundred times over what a joy you had been to him all your life through,
and now, now. . . . Well, you are my uncle, and I am only a stupid little
girl; still, I know that it will be just the same with you as it was with
the prodigal son in the Bible. You and grandfather parted in anger. . . ."
"He cursed me," Orion put in gloomily.
"No, no! For I heard every word he said. He only spoke of your evil deed
in those dreadful words and bid you go out of his sight."
"And what is the difference--Cursed or outcast?"
"Oh! a very great difference! He had good reason to be angry with you;
but the prodigal son in the Bible became his father's best beloved, and
he had the fatted calf slain for him and forgave him all; and so will
grandfather in heaven forgive, if you are good again, as you used to be
to him and to all of us. Paula will forgive you, too; I know her--you
will see. Katharina loved you of course; but she, dear Heaven! She is
almost as much a child as I am; and if only you are kind to her and make
her some pretty present she will soon be comforted. She really deserves
to be punished for bearing false witness, and her punishment cannot, at
any rate, be so heavy as yours."
These words from the lips of an innocent child could not but fall like
seed corn on the harrowed field of the young man's tortured soul and
refresh it as with morning dew. Long after Mary had gone to rest he lay
thinking them over.
CHAPTER XVIII.
The funeral rites over the body of the deceased Mukaukas were performed
on the day after the morrow. Since the priesthood had forbidden the old
heathen practice of mummifying the dead, and even cremation had been
forbidden by the Antonines, the dead had to be interred soon after
decease; only those of high rank were hastily embalmed and lay in state
in some church or chapel to which they had contributed an endowment.
Mukaukas George was, by his own desire, to be conveyed to Alexandria and
there buried in the church of St. John by his father's side; but the
carrier pigeon, by which the news of the governor's death had been sent
to the Patriarch, had returned with instructions to deposit the body in
the family tomb at Memphis, as there were difficulties in the way of the
fulfillment of his wishes.
Such a funeral procession had not been seen there within the memory of
man. Even the Moslem viceroy, the great general Amru, came over from the
other side of the Nile, with his chief military and civil officers, to
pay the last honors to the just and revered governor. Their brown, sinewy
figures, and handsome calm faces, their golden helmets and shirts of
mail, set with precious stones--trophies of the war of destruction in
Persia and Syria--their magnificent horses with splendid trappings, and
the authoritative dignity of their bearing made a great impression on the
crowd. They arrived with slow and impressive solemnity; they returned
like a cloud driven before the storm, galloping homewards from the
burial-ground along the quay, and then thundering and clattering over the
bridge of boats. Vivid and dazzling lightnings had flashed through the
wreaths of white dust that shrouded them, as their gold armor reflected
the sun. Verily, these horsemen, each of them worthy to be a prince in
his pride, could find it no very hard task to subdue the mightiest realms
on earth.
Men and women alike had gazed at them with trembling admiration: most of
all at the heroic stature and noble dusky face of Amru, and at the son of
the deceased Mukaukas, who, by the Moslem's desire, rode at his side in
mourning garb on a fiery black horse.
The handsome youth, and the lordly, powerful man were a pair from whom
the women were loth to turn their eyes; for both alike were of noble
demeanor, both of splendid stature, both equally skilled in controlling
the impatience of their steeds, both born to command. Many a Memphite was
more deeply impressed by the head of the famous warrior, erect on a long
and massive throat, with its sharply-chiselled aquiline nose and flashing
black eyes, than by the more regular features and fine, slightly-waving
locks of the governor's son--the last representative of the oldest and
proudest race in all Egypt.
The Arab looked straight before him with a steady, commanding gaze; the
youth, too, looked up and forwards, but turned from time to time to
survey the crowd of mourners. As he caught sight of Paula, among the
group of women who had joined the procession, a gleam of joy passed over
his pale face, and a faint flush tinged his cheeks; his fixed outlook had
knit his brows and had given his features an expression of such ominous
sternness that one and another of the bystanders whispered:
"Our gay and affable young lord will make a severe ruler."
The cause of his indignation had not escaped the notice either of his
noble companion or of the crowd. He alone knew as yet that the Patriarch
had prohibited the removal of his father's remains to Alexandria; but
every one could see that the larger portion of the priesthood of Memphis
were absent from this unprecedented following. The Bishop alone marched
in front of the six horses drawing the catafalque on which the costly
sarcophagus was conveyed to the burying-place, in accordance with ancient
custom:--Bishop Plotinus, with John, a learned and courageous priest, and
a few choristers bearing a crucifix and chanting psalms.
On arriving at the Necropolis they all dismounted, and the barefooted
runners in attendance on the Arabs came forward to hold the horses. By
the tomb the Bishop pronounced a few warm words of eulogy, after which
the thin chant of the choristers sounded trivial and meagre enough; but
scarcely had they ceased when the crowd uplifted its many thousand
voices, and a hymn of mourning rang out so loud and grand that this
burial ground had scarcely ever heard the like. The remaining ceremonies
were hasty and incomplete, since the priests who were indispensable to
their performance had not made their appearance.
Amru, whose falcon eye nothing could escape, at once noted the omission
and exclaimed, in so loud and inconsiderate a voice that it could be
heard even at some distance.
"The dead is made to atone for what the living, in his wisdom, did for
his country's good, hand-in-hand with us Moslems."
"By the Patriarch's orders," replied Orion, and his voice quavered, while
the veins in his forehead swelled with rage. "But I swear, by my father's
soul, that as surely as there is a just God, it shall be an evil day for
Benjamin when he closes the gate of Heaven against this noblest of noble
souls."
"We carry the key of ours under our own belt," replied the general,
striking his deep chest, while he smiled consciously and with a kindly
eye on the young man. "Come and see me on Saturday, my young friend; I
have something to say to you! I shall expect you at sundown at my house
over there. If I am not at home by dusk, you must wait for me."
As he spoke he twisted his hand in his horse's mane and Orion prepared to
assist him to mount; but the Arab, though a man of fifty, was too quick
for him. He flung himself into the saddle as lightly as a youth, and gave
his followers the signal for departure.
Paula had been standing close to the entrance of the tomb with Dame
Neforis, and she had heard every word of the dialogue between the two
men. Pale, as she beheld him, in costly but simple, flowing, mourning
robes, stricken by solemn and manly indignation, it was impossible that
she should not confess that the events of the last days had had a
powerful effect on the misguided youth.
When Paula had led the grief-worn but tearless widow to her chariot, and
had then returned home with Perpetua, the image of the handsome and
wrathful youth as he lifted his powerful arm and tightly-clenched fist
and shook them in the air, still constantly haunted her. She had not
failed to observe that he had seen her standing opposite to him by the
open tomb and she had been able to avoid meeting his eye; but her heart
had throbbed so violently that she still felt it quivering, she had not
succeeded in thinking of the beloved dead with due devotion.
Orion, as yet, had neither come near her in her peaceful retreat, nor
sent any messenger to deliver her belongings, and this she thought very
natural; for she needed no one to tell her how many claims there must be
on his time.
But though, before the funeral, she had firmly resolved to refuse to see
him if he came, and had given her nurse fall powers to receive from his
hand the whole of her property, after the ceremony this line of conduct
no longer struck her as seemly; indeed, she considered it no more than
her duty to the departed not to repel Orion if he should crave her
forgiveness.
And there was another thing which she owed to her uncle. She desired to
be the first to point out to Orion, from Philip's point of view, that
life was a post, a duty; and then, if his heart seemed opened to this
admonition, then--but no, this must be all that could pass between
them--then all must be at an end, extinct, dead, like the fires in a
sunken raft, like a soap-bubble that the wind has burst, like an echo
that has died away--all over and utterly gone.
And as to the counsel she thought of offering to the man she had once
looked up to? What right had she to give it? Did he not look like a man
quite capable of planning and living his own life in his own strength?
Her heart thirsted for him, every fibre of her being yearned to see him
again, to hear his voice, and it was this longing, this craving to which
she gave the name of duty, connecting it with the gratitude she owed to
the dead.
She was so much absorbed in these reflections and doubts that she
scarcely heard all the garrulous old nurse was saying as she walked by
her side.
Perpetua could not be easy over such a funeral ceremony as this; so
different to anything that Memphis had been wont to see. No priests, a
procession on horseback, mourners riding, and among them the son even of
the dead--while of old the survivors had always followed the body on
foot, as was everywhere the custom! And then a mere chirping of crickets
at the tomb of such illustrious dead, followed by the disorderly
squalling of an immense mob--it had nearly cracked her ears! However, the
citizens might be forgiven for that, since it was all in honor of their
departed governor!--this thought touched even her resolute heart and
brought the tears to her eyes; but it roused her wrath, too, for had she
not seen quite humble folk buried in a more solemn manner and with
worthier ceremonial than the great and good Mukaukas George, who had made
such a magnificent gift to the Church. Oh those Jacobites! They only were
capable of such ingratitude, only their heretical prelate could commit
such a crime. Every one in the Convent of St. Cecilia, from the abbess
down to the youngest novice, knew that the Patriarch had sent word by a
carrier pigeon forbidding the Bishop to allow the priests to take part in
the ceremony. Plotinus was a worthy man, and he had been highly indignant
at these instructions; it was not in his power to contravene them; but at
any rate he had led the procession in person, and had not forbidden
John's accompanying him. Orion, however, had not looked as though he
meant to brook such an insult to his father or let it pass unpunished.
And whose arm was long enough to reach the Patriarch's throne if
not. . . . But no, it was impossible! the mere thought of such a thing
made her blood run cold. Still, still. . . . And how graciously the
Moslem leader had talked with him!--Merciful Heaven! If he were to turn
apostate from the holy Christian faith, like so many reprobate Egyptians,
and subscribe to the wicked doctrines of the Arabian false prophet! It
was a tempting creed for shameless men, allowing them to have half a
dozen wives or more without regarding it as a sin. A man like Orion could
afford to keep them, of course; for the abbess had said that every one
knew that the great Mukaukas was a very rich man, though even the chief
magistrate of the city could not fully satisfy himself concerning the
enormous amount of property left. Well, well; God's ways were past
finding out. Why should He smother one under heaps of gold, while He gave
thousands of poor creatures too little to satisfy their hunger!
By the end of this torrent of words the two women had reached the house;
and not till then was Paula clear in her own mind: Away, away with the
passion which still strove for the mastery, whether it were in deed
hatred or love! For she felt that she could not rightly enjoy her
recovered freedom, her new and quiet happiness in the pretty home she
owed to the physician's thoughtful care, till she had finally given up
Orion and broken the last tie that had bound her to his house.
Could she desire anything more than what the present had to offer her?
She had found a true haven of rest where she lacked for nothing that she
could desire for herself after listening to the admonitions of Philip
pus. Round her were good souls who felt with and for her, many
occupations for which she was well-fitted, and which suited her tastes,
with ample opportunities of bestowing and winning love. Then, a few steps
through pleasant shades took her to the convent where she could every day
attend divine service among pious companions of her own creed, as she had
done in her childhood. She had longed intensely for such food for the
spirit, and the abbess--who was the widow of a distinguished patrician of
Constantinople and had known Paula's parents--could supply it in
abundance. How gladly she talked to the girl of the goodness and the
beauty of those to whom she owed her being and whom she had so early
lost! She could pour out to this motherly soul all that weighed on her
own, and was received by her as a beloved daughter of her old age.
And her hosts--what kind-hearted though singular folks! nay, in their
way, remarkable. She had never dreamed that there could be on earth any
beings at once so odd and so lovable.
First there was old Rufinus, the head of the house, a vigorous, hale old
man, who, with his long silky, snow-white hair and beard, looked
something like the aged St. John and something like a warrior grown grey
in service. What an amiable spirit of childlike meekness he had, in spite
of the rough ways he sometimes fell into. Though inclined to be
contradictory in his intercourse with his fellow-men, he was merry and
jocose when his views were opposed to theirs. She had never met a more
contented soul or a franker disposition, and she could well understand
how much it must fret and gall such a man to live on,--day after day,
appearing, in one respect at any rate, different from what he really was.
For he, too, belonged to her confession; but, though he sent his wife and
daughter to worship in the convent chapel, he himself was compelled to
profess himself a Coptic Christian, and submit to the necessity of
attending a Jacobite church with all his family on certain holy days,
averse as he was to its unattractive form of worship.
Rufinus possessed a sufficient fortune to secure him a comfortable
maintenance; and yet he was hard at work, in his own way, from morning
till night. Not that his labors brought him any revenues; on the
contrary, they led to claims on his resources; every one knew that he was
a man of good means, and this would have certainly involved him in
persecution if the Patriarch's spies had discovered him to be a Melchite,
resulting in exile and probably the confiscation of his goods. Hence it
was necessary to exercise caution, and if the old man could have found a
purchaser for his house and garden, in a city where there were ten times
as many houses empty as occupied, he would long since have set out with
all his household to seek a new home.
Most aged people of vehement spirit and not too keen intellect, adopt a
saying as a stop-gap or resting-place, and he was fond of using two
phrases one of which ran: "As sure as man is the standard of all things"
and the other--referring to his house--"As sure as I long to be quit of
this lumber." But the lumber consisted of a well-built and very spacious
dwellinghouse, with a garden which had commanded a high price in earlier
times on account of its situation near the river. He himself had acquired
it at very small cost shortly before the Arab incursion, and--so quickly
do times change--he had actually bought it from a Jacobite Christian who
had been forced by the Melchite Patriarch Cyrus, then in power, to fly in
haste because he had found means to convert his orthodox slaves to his
confession.
It was Philippus who had persuaded his accomplished and experienced
friend to come to Memphis; he had clung to him faithfully, and they
assisted each other in their works.
Rufinus' wife, a frail, ailing little woman, with a small face and rather
hollow cheeks, who must once have been very attractive and engaging,
might have passed for his daughter; she was, in fact, twenty years
younger than her husband. It was evident that she had suffered much in
the course of her life, but had taken it patiently and all for the best.
Her restless husband had caused her the greatest trouble and alarms, and
yet she exerted herself to the utmost to make his life pleasant. She had
the art of keeping every obstacle and discomfort out of his way, and
guessed with wonderful instinct what would help him, comfort him, and
bring him joy. The physician declared that her stooping attitude, her
bent head, and the enquiring expression of her bright, black eyes were
the result of her constant efforts to discover even a straw that might
bring harm to Rufinus if his callous and restless foot should tread on
it.
Their daughter Pulcheria, was commonly called "Pul" for short, to save
time, excepting when the old man spoke of her by preference as "the poor
child." There was at all times something compassionate in his attitude
towards his daughter; for he rarely looked at her without asking himself
what could become of this beloved child when he, who was so much older,
should have closed his eyes in death and his Joanna perhaps should soon
have followed him; while Pulcheria, seeing her mother take such care of
her father that nothing was left for her to do, regarded herself as the
most superfluous creature on earth and would have been ready at any time
to lay down her life for her parents, for the abbess, for her faith, for
the leech; nay, and though she had known her for no more than two days,
even for Paula. However, she was a very pretty, well-grown girl, with
great open blue eyes and a dreamy expression, and magnificent red-gold
hair which could hardly be matched in all Egypt. Her father had long
known of her desire to enter the convent as a novice and become a nursing
sister; but though he had devoted his whole life to a similar impulse, he
had more than once positively refused to accede to her wishes, for he
must ere long be gathered to his fathers and then her mother, while she
survived him, would want some one else to wear herself out for.
Just now "Pul" was longing less than usual to take the veil; for she had
found in Paula a being before whom she felt small indeed, and to whom her
unenvious soul, yearning and striving for the highest, could look up in
satisfied and rapturous admiration. In addition to this, there were under
her own roof two sufferers needing her care: Rustem, the wounded
Masdakite, and the Persian girl. Neforis, who since the fearful hour of
her husband's death had seemed stunned and indifferent to all the claims
of daily life, living only in her memories of the departed, had been more
than willing to leave to the physician the disposal of these two and
their removal from her house.
In the evening after Paula's arrival Philippus had consulted with his
friends as to the reception of these new guests, and the old man had
interrupted him, as soon as he raised the question of pecuniary
indemnification, exclaiming:
"They are all very welcome. If they have wounds, we will make them heal;
if their heads are turned, we will screw them the right way round; if
their souls are dark, we will light up a flame in them. If the fair Paula
takes a fancy to us, she and her old woman may stay as long as it suits
her and us. We made her welcome with all our hearts; but, on the other
hand, you must understand that we must be free to bid her farewell--as
free as she is to depart. It is impossible ever to know exactly how such
grand folks will get on with humble ones, and as sure as I long to be
quit of this piece of lumber I might one day take it into my head to
leave it to the owls and jackals and fare forth, staff in hand.--You know
me. As to indemnification--we understand each other. A full purse hangs
behind the sick, and the sound one has ten times more than she needs, so
they may pay. You must decide how much; only--for the women's sake, and I
mean it seriously--be liberal. You know what I need Mammon for; and it
would be well for Joanna if she had less need to turn over every silver
piece before she spends it in the housekeeping. Besides, the lady herself
will be more comfortable if she contributes to pay for the food and
drink. It would ill beseem the daughter of Thomas to be down every
evening under the roof of such birds of passage as we are with thanks for
favors received. When each one pays his share we stand on a footing of
give and take; and if either one feels any particular affection to
another it is not strangled by 'thanks' or 'take it;' it is love for
love's sake and a joy to both parties."
"Amen," said the leech; and Paula had been quite satisfied by her
friend's arrangements.
By the next day she felt herself one of the household, though she every
hour found something that could not fail to strike her as strange.
CHAPTER XIX.
When Paula had eaten with Rufinus and his family after the funeral
ceremonies, she went into the garden with Pul and the old man--it had
been impossible to induce Perpetua to sit at the same table with her
mistress. The sun was now low, and its level beams gave added lustre to
the colors of the flowers and to the sheen of the thick, metallic foliage
of the south, which the drought and scorching heat had still spared. A
bright-hued humped ox and an ass were turning the wheel which raised
cooling waters from the Nile and poured them into a large tank from which
they flowed through narrow rivulets to irrigate the beds. This toil was
now very laborious, for the river had fallen to so low a level as to give
cause for anxiety, even at this season of extreme ebb. Numbers of birds
with ruffled feathers, with little splints on their legs, or with sadly
drooping heads, were going to roost in small cages hung from the branches
to protect them from cats and other beasts of prey; to each, as he went
by, Rufinus spoke a kindly word, or chirruped to encourage and cheer it.
Aromatic odors filled the garden, and rural silence; every object shone
in golden glory, even the black back of the negro working at the
water-wheel, and the white and yellow skin of the ox; while the clear
voices of the choir of nuns thrilled through the convent-grove. Pul
listened, turning her face to meet it, and crossing her arms over her
heart. Her father pointed to her as he said to Paula:
"That is where her heart is. May she ever have her God before her eyes!
That cannot but be the best thing for a woman. Still, among such as we
are, we must hold to the rule: Every man for his fellowman on earth, in
the name of the merciful Lord!--Can our wise and reasonable Father in
Heaven desire that brother should neglect brother, or--as in our case--a
child forsake its parents?"
"Certainly not," replied Paula. "For my own part, nothing keeps me from
taking the veil but my hope of finding my long-lost father; I, like your
Pulcheria, have often longed for the peace of the cloister. How piously
rapt your daughter stands there! What a sweet and touching sight!--In my
heart all was dark and desolate; but here, among you all, it is already
beginning to feel lighter, and here, if anywhere, I shall recover what I
lost in my other home.--Happy child! Could you not fancy, as she stands
there in the evening light, that the pure devotion which fills her soul,
radiated from her? If I were not afraid of disturbing her, and if I were
worthy, how gladly would I join my prayers to hers!"
"You have a part in them as it is," replied the old man with a smile. "At
this moment St. Cecilia appears to her under the guise of your features.
We will ask her--you will see."
"No, leave her alone!" entreated Paula with a blush, and she led Rufinus
away to the other end of the garden.
They soon reached a spot where a high hedge of thorny shrubs parted the
old man's plot from that of Susannah. Rufinus here pricked up his ears
and then angrily exclaimed:
"As sure as I long to be quit of this lumber, they are cutting my hedge
again! Only last evening I caught one of the slaves just as he was going
to work on the branches; but how could I get at the black rascal through
the thorns? It was to make a peep-hole for curious eyes, or for spies,
for the Patriarch knows how to make use of a petticoat; but I will be
even with them! Do you go on, pray, as if you had seen and heard nothing;
I will fetch my whip."
The old man hurried away, and Paula was about to obey him; but scarcely
had he disappeared when she heard herself called in a shrill girl's voice
through a gap in the hedge, and looking round, she spied a pretty face
between the boughs which had yesterday been forced asunder by a man's
hands--like a picture wreathed with greenery.
Even in the twilight she recognized it at once, and when Katharina put
her curly head forward, and said in a beseeching tone: "May I get
through, and will you listen to me?" she gladly signified her consent.
The water-wagtail, heedless of Paula's hand held out to help her, slipped
through the gap so nimbly that it was evident that she had not long
ceased surmounting such obstacles in her games with Mary. As swift as the
wind she came down on her feet, holding out her arms to rush at Paula;
but she suddenly let them fall in visible hesitancy, and drew back a
step. Paula, however, saw her embarrassment; she drew the girl to her,
kissed her forehead, and gaily exclaimed:
"Trespassing! And why could you not come in by the gate? Here comes my
host with his hippopotamus thong.--Stop, stop, good Rufinus, for the
breach effected in your flowery wall was intended against me and not
against you. There stands the hostile power, and I should be greatly
surprised if you did not recognize her as a neighbor?"
"Recognize her?" said the old man, whose wrath was quickly appeased. "Do
we know each other, fair damsel--yes or no? It is an open question."
"Of course!" cried Katharina, "I have seen you a hundred times from the
gnat-tower."
"You have had less pleasure than I should have had, if I had been so
happy as to see you.--We came across each other about a year ago. I was
then so happy as to find you in my large peach-tree, which to this day
takes the liberty of growing over your garden-plot."
"I was but a child then," laughed Katharina, who very well remembered how
the old man, whose handsome white head she had always particularly
admired, had spied her out among the boughs of his peach-tree and had
advised her, with a good-natured nod, to enjoy herself there.
"A child!" repeated Rufinus. "And now we are quite grown up and do not
care to climb so high, but creep humbly through our neighbor's hedge."
"Then you really are strangers?" cried Paula in surprise. "And have you
never met Pulcheria, Katharina?"
"Pul?--oh, how glad I should have been to call her!" said Katharina. "I
have been on the point of it a hundred times; for her mere appearance
makes one fall in love with her,--but my mother. . . ."
"Well, and what has your mother got to say against her neighbors?" asked
Rufinus. "I believe we are peaceable folks who do no one any harm."
"No, no, God forbid! But my mother has her own way of viewing things; you
and she are strangers still, and as you are so rarely to be seen in
church. . . ."
"She naturally takes us for the ungodly. Tell her that she is mistaken,
and if you are Paula's friend and you come to see her--but prettily,
through the gate, and not through the hedge, for it will be closely
twined again by to-morrow morning--if you come here, I say, you will find
that we have a great deal to do and a great many creatures to nurse and
care for--poor human creatures some of them, and some with fur or
feathers, just as it comes; and man serves his Maker if he only makes
life easier to the beings that come in his way; for He loves them all.
Tell that to your mother, little wagtail, and come again very often."
"Thank you very much. But let me ask you, if I may, where you heard that
odious nickname? I hate it."
"From the same person who told you the secret that my Pulcheria is called
Pul!" said Rufinus; he laughed and bowed and left the two girls together.
"What a dear old man!" cried Katharina. "Oh, I know quite well how he
spends his Days! And his pretty wife and Pul--I know them all. How often
I have watched them--I will show you the place one day! I can see over
the whole garden, only not what goes on near the convent on the other
side of the house, or beyond those trees. You know my mother; if she once
dislikes any one. . . . But Pul, you understand, would be such a friend
for me!"
"Of course she would," replied Paula. "And a girl of your age must chose
older companions than little Mary."
"Oh, you shall not say a word against her!" cried Katharina eagerly. "She
is only ten years old, but many a grown-up person is not so upright or so
capable as I have found her during these last few miserable days."
"Poor child!" said Paula stroking her hair.
At this a bitter sob broke suddenly and passionately from Katharina; she
tried with all her might to suppress it, but could not succeed. Her fit
of weeping was so violent that she could not utter a word, till Paula had
led her to a bench under a spreading sycamore, had induced her with
gentle force to sit down by her side, clasping her in her arms like a
suffering child, and speaking to her words of comfort and encouragement.
Birds without number were going to rest in the dense branches overhead,
owls and bats had begun their nocturnal raids, the sky put on its
spangled glory of gold and silver stars, from the western end of the town
came the jackals' bark as they left their lurking-places among the ruined
houses and stole out in search of prey, the heavy dew, falling through
the mild air silently covered the leaves, the grass, and the flowers; the
garden was more powerfully fragrant now than during the day-time, and
Paula felt that it was high time to take refuge from the mists that came
up from the shallow stream. But still she lingered while the little
maiden poured out all that weighed upon her, all she repented of,
believing she could never atone for it; and then all she had gone
through, thinking it must break her heart, and all she still had to live
down and drive out of her mind.
She told Paula how Orion had wooed her, how much she loved him, how her
heart had been tortured by jealousy of her, Paula, and how she had
allowed herself to be led away into bearing false witness before the
judges. And then she went on to say it was Mary who had first opened her
eyes to the abyss by which she was standing. In the afternoon after the
death of the Mukaukas she had gone with her mother to the governor's
house to join in her friends' lamentations. She had at once asked after
Mary, but had not been allowed to see her, for she was still in bed and
very feverish. She was then on her way to the cool hall when she heard
her mother's voice--not in grief, but angry and vehement--so, thinking it
would be more becoming to keep out of the way, she wandered off into the
pillared vestibule opening towards the Nile. She would not for worlds
have met Orion, and was terribly afraid she might do so, but as she went
out, for it was still quite light, there she found him--and in what a
state! He was sitting all in a heap, dressed in black, with his head
buried in his hands. He had not observed her presence; but she pitied him
deeply, for though it was very hot he was trembling in every limb, and
his strong frame shuddered repeatedly. She had therefore spoken to him,
begging him to be comforted, at which he had started to his feet in
dismay, and had pushed his unkempt hair back from his face, looking so
pale, so desperate, that she had been quite terrified and could not
manage to bring out the consoling words she had ready. For some time
neither of them had uttered a syllable, but at length he had pulled
himself together as if for some great deed, he came slowly towards her
and laid his hands on her shoulders with a solemn dignity which no one
certainly had ever before seen in him. He stood gazing into her face--his
eyes were red with much weeping--and he sighed from his very heart the
two words: "Unhappy Child!"--She could hear them still sounding in her
ears.
And he was altered: from head to foot quite different, like a stranger.
His voice, even, sounded changed and deeper than usual as he went on:
"Child, child! Perhaps I have given much pain in my life without knowing
it; but you have certainly suffered most through me, for I have made you,
an innocent, trusting creature, my accomplice in crime. The great sin we
both committed has been visited on me alone, but the punishment is a
hundred--a thousand times too heavy!"
"And with this," Katharina went on, "he covered his face with his hands,
threw himself on the couch again, and groaned and sighed. Then he sprang
up once more, crying out so loud and passionately that I felt as if I
must die of grief and pity: 'Forgive me if you can! Forgive me, wholly,
freely. I want it--you must, you must! I was going to run up to him and
throw my arms round him and forgive him everything, his trouble
distressed me so much; but he gravely pushed me away--not roughly or
sternly, and he said that there was an end of all love-making and
betrothal between us--that I was young, and that I should be able to
forget him. He would still be a true friend to me and to my mother, and
the more we required of him the more gladly would he serve us.
"I was about to answer him, but he hastily interrupted me and said firmly
and decisively: 'Lovable as you are, I cannot love you as you deserve;
for it is my duty to tell you, I have another and a greater love in my
heart--my first and my last; and though once in my life I have proved
myself a wretch, still, it was but once; and I would rather endure your
anger, and hurt both you and myself now, than continue this unrighteous
tie and cheat you and others.'--At this I was greatly startled, and
asked: 'Paula?' However, he did not answer, but bent over me and touched
my forehead with his lips, just as my father often kissed me, and then
went quickly out into the garden.
"Just then my mother came up, as red as a poppy and panting for breath:
she took me by the hand without a word, dragged me into the chariot after
her, and then cried out quite beside herself--she could not even shed a
tear for rage: 'What insolence! what unheard-of behavior--How can I find
the heart to tell you, poor sacrificed lamb. . .'"
"And she would have gone on, but that I would not let her finish; I told
her at once that I knew all, and happily I was able to keep quite calm. I
had some bad hours at home; and when Nilus came to us yesterday, after
the opening of the will, and brought me the pretty little gold box with
turquoises and pearls that I have always admired, and told me that the
good Mukaukas had written with his own hand, in his last will, that it
was to be given to me I his bright little 'Katharina,' my mother insisted
on my not taking it and sent it back to Neforis, though I begged and
prayed to keep it. And of course I shall never go to that house again;
indeed my mother talks of quitting Memphis altogether and settling in
Constantinople or some other city under Christian rule. 'Then our nice,
pretty house must be given up, and our dear, lovely garden be sold to the
peasant folk, my mother says. It was just the same a year and a half ago
with Memnon's palace. His garden was turned into a corn-field, and the
splendid ground-floor rooms, with their mosaics and pictures, are now
dirty stables for cows and sheep, and pigs are fed in the rooms that
belonged to Hathor and Dorothea. Good Heavens! And they were my clearest
friends! And I am never to play with Mary any more; and mother has not a
kind word for any living soul, hardly even for me, and my old nurse is as
deaf as a mole! Am I not a really miserable, lonely creature? And if you,
even you, will have nothing to say to me, who is there in all Memphis
whom I can trust in? But you will not be so cruel, will you? And it will
not be for long, for my mother really means to go away. You are older
than I am, of course, and much graver and wiser. . . ."
"I will be kind to you, child; but try to make friends with Pulcheria!"
"Gladly, gladly. But then my mother! I should get on very well by myself
if it were not. . . Well, you yourself heard what Orion said to me, that
time in the avenue. He surely loved me a little! What sweet, tender names
he gave me then. Oh God! no man can speak like that to any one he is not
fond of!--And he is rich himself; it cannot have been only my fortune
that bewitched him. And does he look like a man who would allow himself
to be parted from a girl by his mother, whether he would or no?"
"He was always fond of me I think; but then, afterwards, he remembered
what a high position he had to fill and regarded me as too little and too
childish. Oh, how many tears I have shed over being so absurdly little! A
Water-wagtail--that is what I shall always be. Your old host called me
so; and if a man like Orion feels that he must have a stately wife I can
hardly blame him. That other one whom he thinks he loves better than he
does me is tall and beautiful and majestic--like you; and I have always
told myself that his future wife ought to look like you. It is all over
between him and me, and I will submit humbly; but at the same time I
cannot help thinking that when he came home he thought me pretty and
attractive, and had a real fancy and liking for me. Yes, it was so, it
certainly was so!--But then he saw that other one, and I cannot compare
with her. She is indeed the woman he wants,--and that other, Paula, is
yourself. Yes, indeed, you yourself; an inner voice tells me so. And I
tell you truly, you may quite believe me: it is a pain no doubt, but I
can be glad of it too. I should hate any mere girl to whom he held out
his hand--but, if you are that other--and if you are his wife. . ."
"Nonsense," exclaimed Paula decidedly. "Consider what you are saying.
When Orion tempted you to perjure yourself, did he behave as my friend or
as my foe, my bitterest and most implacable enemy?"
"Before the judges, to be sure . . ." replied the girl looking down
thoughtfully. But she soon looked up again, fixed her eyes on Paula's
face with a sparkling, determined glance, and frankly and unhesitatingly
exclaimed: "And you?--In spite of it all he is so handsome, so clever, so
manly. You can hardly help it--you love him!"
Paula withdrew her arm, which had been round Katharina, and answered
candidly.
"Until to-day, at the funeral, I hated and abominated him; but there, by
his father's tomb, he struck me as a new man, and I found it easy to
forgive him in my heart."
"Then you mean to say that you do not love him?" urged Katharina,
clasping her friend's round arm with her slender fingers.
Paula started to feel how icy cold her hand was. The moon was up, the
stars rose higher and higher, so, simply saying: "Come away," she rose.
"It must be within an hour of midnight," she added. "Your mother will be
anxious about you."
"Only an hour of midnight!" repeated the girl in alarm. "Good Heavens, I
shall have a scolding! She is still playing draughts with the Bishop, no
doubt, as she does every evening. Good-bye then for the present. The
shortest way is through the hedge again."
"No," said Paula firmly, "you are no longer a child; you are grown up,
and must feel it and show it. You are not to creep through the bushes,
but to go home by the gate. Rufinus and I will go with you and explain to
your mother. . ."
"No, no!" cried Katharina in terror. "She is as angry with you as she is
with them. Only yesterday she forbid. . ."
"Forbid you to come to me?" asked Paula. "Does she believe. . ."
"That it was for your sake that Orion. . . . Yes, she is only too glad to
lay all the blame on you. But now that I have talked to you I. . . . Look,
do you see that light? It is in her sitting-room."
And, before Paula could prevent her, she ran to the hedge and slipped
through the gap as nimbly as a weasel.
Paula looked after her with mingled feelings, and then went back to the
house, and to bed. Katharina's story kept her awake for a long time, and
the suspicion--nay almost the conviction--that it was herself, indeed,
who had aroused that "great love" in Orion's heart gave her no rest. If
it were she? There, under her hand was the instrument of revenge on the
miscreant; she could make him taste of all the bitterness he had brewed
for her aching spirit. But which of them would the punishment hurt most
sorely: him or herself? Had not the little girl's confidences revealed a
world of rapture to her and her longing heart? No, no. It would be too
humiliating to allow the same hand that had smitten her so ruthlessly to
uplift her to heaven; it would be treason against herself.
Slumber overtook her in the midst of these conflicting feelings and
thoughts, and towards morning she had a dream which, even by daylight,
haunted her and made her shudder.
She saw Orion coming towards her, as pale as death, robed in mourning,
pacing slowly on a coal-black horse; she had not the strength to fly, and
without speaking to her or looking at her, he lifted her high in the air
like a child, and placed her in front of him on the horse. She put forth
all her strength to get free and dismount, but he clasped her with both
arms like iron clamps and quelled her efforts. Life itself would not have
seemed too great a price for escape from this constraint; but, the more
wildly she fought, the more closely she was held by the silent and
pitiless horseman. At their feet flowed the swirling river, but Orion did
not seem to notice it, and without moving his lips, he coolly guided the
steed towards the water. Beside herself now with horror and dread, she
implored him to turn away; but he did not heed her, and went on unmoved
into the midst of the stream. Her terror increased to an agonizing pitch
as the horse bore her deeper and deeper into the water; of her own free
will she threw her arms round the rider's neck; his paleness vanished,
his cheeks gained a ruddy hue, his lips sought hers in a kiss; and, in
the midst of the very anguish of death, she felt a thrill of rapture that
she had never known before. She could have gone on thus for ever, even to
destruction; and, in fact, they were still sinking--she felt the water
rising breast high, but she cared not. Not a word had either of them
spoken. Suddenly she felt urged to break the silence, and as if she could
not help it she asked: "Am I the other?" At this the waves surged down on
them from all sides; a whirlpool dragged away the horse, spinning him
round, and with him Orion and herself, a shrill blast swept past them,
and then the current and the waves, the roaring of the whirlpool, the
howling of the storm--all at once and together, as with one voice, louder
than all else and filling her ears, shouted: "Thou!"--Only Orion remained
speechless. An eddy caught the horse and sucked him under, a wave carried
her away from him, she was sinking, sinking, and stretched out her arms
with longing.--A cold dew stood on her brow as she slept, and the nurse,
waking her from her uneasy dream, shook her head as she said:
"Why, child? What ails you? You have been calling Orion again and again,
at first in terror and then so tenderly.--Yes, believe me, tenderly."
CHAPTER XX.
In the neat rooms which Rufinus' wife had made ready for her sick guests
perfect peace reigned, and it was noon. A soft twilight fell through the
thick green curtains which mitigated the sunshine, and the nurses had
lately cleared away after the morning meal. Paula was moistening the
bandage on the Masdakite's head, and Pulcheria was busy in the adjoining
room with Mandane, who obeyed the physician's instructions with
intelligent submission and showed no signs of insanity.
Paula was still spellbound by her past dream. She was possessed by such
unrest that, quite against her wont, she could not long remain quiet, and
when Pulcheria came to her to tell her this or that, she listened with so
little attention and sympathy that the humble-minded girl, fearing to
disturb her, withdrew to her patient's bed-side and waited quietly till
her new divinity called her.
In fact, it was not without reason that Paula gave herself up to a
certain anxiety; for, if she was not mistaken, Orion must necessarily
present himself to hand over to her the remainder of her fortune; and
though even yesterday, on her way from the cemetery, she had said to
herself that she must and would refuse to meet him, the excitement
produced by Katharina's story and her subsequent dream had confirmed her
in her determination.
Perpetua awaited Orion's visit on the ground-floor, charged to announce
him to Rufinus and not to her mistress. The old man had willingly
undertaken to receive the money as her representative; for Philippus had
not concealed from her that he had acquainted him with the circumstances
under which Paula had quitted the governor's house, describing Orion as a
man whom she had good reason for desiring to avoid.
By about two hours after noon Paula's restlessness had increased so much
that now and then she wandered out of the sick-room, which looked over
the garden, to watch the Nile-quay from the window of the anteroom; for
he might arrive by either way. She never thought of the security of her
property; but the question arose in her mind as to whether it were not
actually a breach of duty to avoid the agitation it would cost her to
meet her cousin face to face. On this point no one could advise her, not
even Perpetua; her own mother could hardly have understood all her
feelings on such an occasion. She scarcely knew herself indeed; for
hitherto she had never failed, even in the most difficult cases, to know
at once and without long reflection, what to do and to leave undone, what
under special circumstances was right or wrong. But now she felt herself
a yielding reed, a leaf tossed hither and thither; and every time she set
her teeth and clenched her hands, determined to think calmly and to
reason out the "for" and "against," her mind wandered away again, while
the memory of her dream, of Orion as he stood by his father's grave--of
Katharina's tale of "the other," and the fearful punishment which he had
to suffer, nay indeed, certainly had suffered--came and went in her mind
like the flocks of birds over the Nile, whose dipping and soaring had
often passed like a fluttering veil between her eye and some object on
the further shore.
It was three hours past noon, and she had returned to the sick-room, when
she thought that she heard hoofs in the garden and hurried to the window
once more. Her heart had not beat more wildly when the dog had flown at
her and Hiram that fateful night, than it did now as she hearkened to the
approach of a horseman, still hidden from her gaze by the shrubs. It must
be Orion--but why did he not dismount? No, it could not be he; his tall
figure would have overtopped the shrubbery which was of low growth.
She did not know her host's friends; it was one of them very likely. Now
the horse had turned the corner; now it was coming up the path from the
front gate; now Rufinus had gone forth to meet the visitor--and it was
not Orion, but his secretary, a much smaller man, who slipped off a mule
that she at once recognized, threw the reins to a lad, handed something
to the old man, and then dropped on to a bench to yawn and stretch his
legs.
Then she saw Rufinus come towards the house. Had Orion charged this
messenger to bring her her possessions? She thought this somewhat
insulting, and her blood boiled with wrath. But there could be no
question here of a surrender of property; for what her host was holding
in his hand was nothing heavy, but a quite small object; probably, nay,
certainly a roll of papyrus. He was coming up the narrow stairs, so she
ran out to meet him, blushing as though she were doing something wrong.
The old man observed this and said, as he handed her the scroll:
"You need not be frightened, daughter of a hero. The young lord is not
here himself, he prefers, it would seem, to treat with you by letter; and
it is best so for both parties."
Paula nodded agreement; she took the roll, and then, while she tore the
silken tie from the seal, she turned her back on the old man; for she
felt that the blood had faded from her face, and her hands were
trembling.
"The messenger awaits an answer," remarked Rufinus, before she began to
read it. "I shall be below and at your service." He left; Paula returned
to the sick-room, and leaning against the frame of the casement, read as
follows, with eager agitation:
"Orion, the son of George the Mukaukas who sleeps in the Lord, to his
cousin the daughter of the noble Thomas of Damascus, greeting.
"I have destroyed several letters that I had written to you before this
one." Paula shrugged her shoulders incredulously. "I hope I may succeed
better this time in saying what I feel to be indispensable for your
welfare and my own. I have both to crave a favor and offer counsel."
"Counsel! he!" thought the girl with a scornful curl of the lips, as she
went on. "May the memory of the man who loved you as his daughter, and
who on his death-bed wished for nothing so much as to see you--averse as
he was to your creed--and bless you as his daughter indeed, as his son's
wife,--may the remembrance of that just man so far prevail over your
indignant and outraged soul that these words from the most wretched man
on earth, for that am I, Paula, may not be left unread. Grant me the last
favor I have to ask of you--I demand it in my father's name."
"Demand!" repeated the damsel; her cheeks flamed, her eye sparkled
angrily, and her hands clutched the opposite sides of the letter as
though to tear it across. But the next words: "Do not fear," checked her
hasty impulse--she smoothed out the papyrus and read on with growing
excitement:
"Do not fear that I shall address you as a lover--as the man for whom
there is but one woman on earth. And that one can only be she whom I have
so deeply injured, whom I fought with as frantic, relentless, and cruel
weapons as ever I used against a foe of my own sex."
"But one," murmured the girl; she passed her hand across her brow, and a
faint smile of happy pride dwelt on her lips as she went on:
"I shall love you as long as breath animates this crushed and wretched
heart."
Again the letter was in danger of destruction, but again it escaped
unharmed, and Paula's expression became one of calm and tender pleasure
as she read to the end of Orion's clearly written epistle:
"I am fully conscious that I have forfeited your esteem, nay even all
good feeling towards me, by my own fault; and that, unless divine love
works some miracle in your heart, I have sacrificed all joy on earth. You
are revenged; for it was for your sake--understand that--for your sake
alone, that my beloved and dying father withdrew the blessings he had
heaped on my remorseful head, and in wrath that was only too just at the
recreant who had desecrated the judgment-seat of his ancestors, turned
that blessing to a curse."
Paula turned pale as she read. This then was what Katharina had meant.
This was what had so changed his appearance, and perhaps, too, his whole
inward being. And this, this bore the stamp of truth, this could not be a
lie--it was for her sake that a father's curse had blighted his only son!
How had it all happened? Had Philippus failed to observe it, or had he
held his peace out of respect for the secrets of another?--Poor man, poor
young man! She must see him, must speak to him. She could not have a
moment's ease till she knew how it was that her uncle, a tender
father.--But she must go on, quickly to the end:
"I come to you only as what I am: a heart-broken man, too young to give
myself over for lost, and at the same time determined to make use of all
that remains to me of the steadfast will, the talents, and the
self-respect of my forefathers to render me worthy of them, and I implore
you to grant me a brief interview. Not a word, not a look shall betray
the passion within and which threatens to destroy me.
"You must on no account fail to read what follows, since it is of no
small real importance even to you. In the first place restitution must be
made to you of all of your inheritance which the deceased was able to
rescue and to add to by his fatherly stewardship. In these agitated times
it will be a matter of some difficulty to invest this capital safely and
to good advantage. Consider: just as the Arabs drove out the Byzantines,
the Byzantines might drive them out again in their turn. The Persians,
though stricken to the earth, the Avars, or some other people whose very
name is as yet unknown to history, may succeed our present rulers, who,
only ten years since, were regarded as a mere handful of unsettled
camel-drivers, caravan-leaders, and poverty-stricken desert-tribes. The
safety of your fortune would be less difficult to provide for if, as was
formerly the case here, we could entrust it to the merchants of
Alexandria. But one great house after another is being ruined there, and
all security is at an end. As to hiding or burying your possessions, as
most Egyptians do in these hard times, it is impossible, for the same
reason as prevents our depositing it on interest in the state
land-register. You must be able to get it at the shortest notice; since
you might at some time wish to quit Egypt in haste with all your
possessions.
"These are matters with which a woman cannot be familiar. I would
therefore propose that you should leave the arrangement of them to us
men; to Philippus, the physician, Rufinus, your host--who is, I am
assured, an honest man--and to our experienced and trustworthy treasurer
Nilus, whom you know as an incorruptible judge.
"I propose that the business should be settled tomorrow in the house of
Rufinus. You can be present or not, as you please. If we men agree in our
ideas I beg you--I beseech you to grant me an interview apart. It will
last but a few minutes, and the only subject of discussion will be a
matter--an exchange by which you will recover something you value and
have lost, and grant me I hope, if not your esteem, at any rate a word of
forgiveness. I need it sorely, believe me, Paula; it is as indispensable
to me as the breath of life, if I am to succeed in the work I have begun
on myself. If you have prevailed on yourself to read through this letter,
simply answer 'Yes' by my messenger, to relieve me from torturing
uncertainty. If you do not--which God forefend for both our sakes, Nilus
shall this very day carry to you all that belongs to you. But, if you
have read these lines, I will make my appearance to-morrow, at two hours
after noon, with Nilus to explain to the others the arrangement of which
I have spoken. God be with you and infuse some ruth into your proud and
noble soul!"
Paula drew a deep breath as the hand holding this momentous epistle
dropped by her side; she stood for some time by the window, lost in grave
meditation. Then calling Pulcheria, she begged her to tend her patient,
too, for a short time. The girl looked up at her with rapt admiration in
her clear eyes, and asked sympathetically why she was so pale; Paula
kissed her lips and eyes, and saying affectionately: "Good, happy child!"
she retired to her own room on the opposite side of the house. There she
once more read through the letter.
Oh yes; this was Orion as she had known him after his return till the
evening of that never-to-be-forgotten water-party. He was, indeed, a
poet; nature herself had made it so easy to him to seduce unguarded souls
into a belief in him! And yet no! This letter was honestly meant.
Philippus knew men well; Orion really had a heart, a warm heart. Not the
most reckless of criminals could mock at the curse hurled at him by a
beloved father in his last moments. And, as she once more read the
sentence in which he told her that it was his crime as an unjust judge
towards her that had turned the dying man's blessing to a curse, she
shuddered and reflected that their relative attitude was now reversed,
and that he had suffered more and worse through her than she had through
him. His pale face, as she had seen it in the Necropolis, came back
vividly to her mind, and if he could have stood before her at this moment
she would have flown to him, have offered him a compassionate hand, and
have assured him that the woes she had brought upon him filled her with
the deepest and sincerest pity.
That morning she had asked the Masdakite whether he had besought Heaven
to grant him a speedy recovery, and the man replied that Persians never
prayed for any particular blessing, but only for "that which was good;"
for that none but the Omnipotent knew what was good for mortals. How
wise! For in this instance might not the most terrible blow that could
fall on a son--his father's curse--prove a blessing? It was undoubtedly
that curse which had led him to look into his soul and to start on this
new path. She saw him treading it, she longed to believe in his
conversion--and she did believe in it. In this letter he spoke of his
love; he even asked her hand. Only yesterday this would have roused her
wrath; to-day she could forgive him; for she could forgive anything to
this unhappy soul--to the man on whom she had brought such deep anguish.
Her heart could now beat high in the hope of seeing him again; nay, it
even seemed to her that the youth, whose return had been hailed with such
welcome and who had so powerfully attracted her, had only now grown and
ripened to full and perfect manhood through his sin, his penitence, and
his suffering.
And how noble a task it would be to assist him in seeking the right way,
and in becoming what he aspired to be!
The prudent care he had given to her worldly welfare merited her
gratitude. What could he mean by the "exchange" he proposed? The "great
love" of which he had spoken to Katharina was legible in every line of
his letter, and any woman can forgive any man--were he a sinner, and a
scarecrow into the bargain--for his audacity in loving her. Oh! that he
might but set his heart on her--for hers, it was vain to deny it, was
strongly drawn to him. Still she would not call it Love that stirred
within her; it could only be the holy impulse to point out to him the
highest goal of life and smooth the path for him. The pale horseman who
had clutched her in her dream should not drag her away; no, she would
joyfully lift him up to the highest pinnacle attainable by a brave and
noble man.
So her thoughts ran, and her cheeks flushed as, with swift decision, she
opened her trunk, took out papyrus, writing implements and a seal, and
seated herself at a little desk which Rufinus had placed for her in the
window, to write her answer.
At this a sudden fervent longing for Orion came over her. She made a
great effort to shake it off; still, she felt that in writing to him it
was impossible that she should find the right words, and as she replaced
the papyrus in the chest and looked at the seal a strange thing happened
to her; for the device on her father's well-known ring: a star above two
crossed swords--perchance the star of Orion--caught her eye, with the
motto in Greek: "The immortal gods have set sweat before virtue," meaning
that the man who aims at being virtuous must grudge neither sweat nor
toil.
She closed her trunk with a pleased smile, for the motto round the star
was, she felt, of good augury. At the same time she resolved to speak to
Orion, taking these words, which her forefathers had adopted from old
Hesiod, as her text. She hastened down stairs, crossed the garden,
passing by Rufinus, his wife and the physician, awoke the secretary who
had long since dropped asleep, and enjoined him to say: "Yes" to his
master, as he expected. However, before the messenger had mounted his
mule, she begged him to wait yet a few minutes and returned to the two
men; for she had forgotten in her eagerness to speak to them of Orion's
plans. They were both willing to meet him at the hour proposed and, while
Philippus went to tell the messenger that they would expect his master on
the next day, the old man looked at Paula with undisguised satisfaction
and said:
"We were fearing lest the news from the governor's house should have
spoilt your happy mood, but, thank God, you look as if you had just come
from a refreshing bath.--What do you say, Joanna? Twenty years ago such
an inmate here would have made you jealous? Or was there never a place
for such evil passions in your dove-like soul?"
"Nonsense!" laughed the matron. "How can I tell how many fair beings you
have gazed after, wanderer that you are in all the wide world far away?"
"Well, old woman, but as sure as man is the standard of all things,
nowhere that I have carried my staff, have I met with a goddess like
this!"
"I certainly have not either, living here like a snail in its shell,"
said Dame Joanna, fixing her bright eyes on Paula with fervent
admiration.
CHAPTER XXI.
That evening Rufinus was sitting in the garden with his wife and daughter
and their friend Philippus. Paula, too, was there, and from time to time
she stroked Pulcheria's silky golden hair, for the girl had seated
herself at her feet, leaning her head against Paula's knee.
The moon was full, and it was so light out of doors that they could see
each other plainly, so Rufinus' proposition that they should remain to
watch an eclipse which was to take place an hour before midnight found
all the more ready acceptance because the air was pleasant. The men had
been discussing the expected phenomenon, lamenting that the Church should
still lend itself to the superstitions of the populace by regarding it as
of evil omen, and organizing a penitential procession for the occasion to
implore God to avert all ill. Rufinus declared that it was blasphemy
against the Almighty to interpret events happening in the course of
eternal law and calculable beforehand, as a threatening sign from Him; as
though man's deserts had any connection with the courses of the sun and
moon. The Bishop and all the priests of the province were to head the
procession, and thus a simple natural phenomenon was forced in the minds
of the people into a significance it did not possess.
"And if the little comet which my old foster father discovered last week
continues to increase," added the physician, "so that its tail spreads
over a portion of the sky, the panic will reach its highest pitch; I can
see already that they will behave like mad creatures."
"But a comet really does portend war, drought, plague, and famine," said
Pulcheria, with full conviction; and Paula added:
"So I have always believed."
"But very wrongly," replied the leech. "There are a thousand reasons to
the contrary; and it is a crime to confirm the mob in such a
superstition. It fills them with grief and alarms; and, would you believe
it--such anguish of mind, especially when the Nile is so low and there is
more sickness than usual, gives rise to numberless forms of disease? We
shall have our hands full, Rufinus."
"I am yours to command," replied the old man. "But at the same time, if
the tailed wanderer must do some mischief, I would rather it should break
folks' arms and legs than turn their brains."
"What a wish!" exclaimed Paula. "But you often say things--and I see
things about you too--which seem to me extraordinary. Yesterday you
promised. . . ."
"To explain to you why I gather about me so many of God's creatures who
have to struggle under the burden of life as cripples, or with injured
limbs."
"Just so," replied Paula. "Nothing can be more truly merciful than to
render life bearable to such hapless beings. . . ."
"But still, you think," interrupted the eager old man, "that this noble
motive alone would hardly account for the old oddity's riding his hobby
so hard.--Well, you are right. From my earliest youth the structure of
the bones in man and beast has captivated me exceedingly; and just as
collectors of horns, when once they have a complete series of every
variety of stag, roe, and gazelle, set to work with fresh zeal to find
deformed or monstrous growths, so I have found pleasure in studying every
kind of malformation and injury in the bones of men and beasts."
"And to remedy them," added Philippus. "It has been his passion from
childhood.
"And the passion has grown upon me since I broke my own hip bone and know
what it means," the old man went on. "With the help of my fellow-student
there, from a mere dilettante I became a practised surgeon; and, what is
more, I am one of those who serve Esculapius at my own expense. However,
there are accessory reasons for which I have chosen such strange
companions: deformed slaves are cheap and besides that, certain
investigations afford me inestimable and peculiar satisfaction. But this
cannot interest a young girl."
"Indeed it does!" cried Paula. "So far as I have understood Philippus
when he explains some details of natural history. . . ."
"Stay," laughed Rufinus, "our friend will take good care not to explain
this. He regards it as folly, and all he will admit is that no surgeon or
student could wish for better, more willing, or more amusing house-mates
than my cripples."
"They are grateful to you," cried Paula.
"Grateful?" asked the old man. "That is true sometimes, no doubt; still,
gratitude is a tribute on which no wise man ever reckons. Now I have told
you enough; for the sake of Philippus we will let the rest pass."
"No, no," said Paula putting up entreating hands, and Rufinus answered
gaily:
"Who can refuse you anything? I will cut it short, but you must pay good
heed.--Well then Man is the standard of all things. Do you understand
that?"
"Yes, I often hear you say so. Things you mean are only what they seem to
us."
"To us, you say, because we--you and I and the rest of us here--are sound
in body and mind. And we must regard all things--being God's
handiwork--as by nature sound and normal. Thus we are justified in
requiring that man, who gives the standard for them shall, first and
foremost, himself be sound and normal. Can a carpenter measure straight
planks properly with a crooked or sloping rod?"
"Certainly not."
"Then you will understand how I came to ask myself: 'Do sickly, crippled,
and deformed men measure things by a different standard to that of sound
men? And might it not be a useful task to investigate how their estimates
differ from ours?'"
"And have your researches among your cripples led to any results?"
"To many important ones," the old man declared; but Philippus interrupted
him with a loud: "Oho!" adding that his friend was in too great a hurry
to deduce laws from individual cases. Many of his observations were, no
doubt, of considerable interest. . . . Here Rufinus broke in with some
vehemence, and the discussion would have become a dispute if Paula had
not intervened by requesting her zealous host to give her the results, at
any rate, of his studies.
"I find," said Rufinus very confidently, as he stroked down his long
beard, "that they are not merely shrewd because their faculties are early
sharpened to make up by mental qualifications for what they lack in
physical advantages; they are also witty, like AEesop the fabulist and
Besa the Egyptian god, who, as I have been told by our old friend Horus,
from whom we derive all our Egyptian lore, presided among those heathen
over festivity, jesting, and wit, and also over the toilet of women. This
shows the subtle observation of the ancients; for the hunchback whose
body is bent, applies a crooked standard to things in general. His keen
insight often enables him to measure life as the majority of men do, that
is by a straight rule; but in some happy moments when he yields to
natural impulse he makes the straight crooked and the crooked straight;
and this gives rise to wit, which only consists in looking at things
obliquely and--setting them askew as it were. You have only to talk to my
hump-backed gardener Gibbus, or listen to what he says. When he is
sitting with the rest of our people in an evening, they all laugh as soon
as he opens his mouth.--And why? Because his conformation makes him utter
nothing but paradoxes.--You know what they are?"
"Certainly."
"And you, Pul?"
"No, Father."
"You are too straight-nay, and so is your simple soul, to know what the
thing is! Well, listen then: It would be a paradox, for instance, if I
were to say to the Bishop as he marches past in procession: 'You are
godless out of sheer piety;' or if I were to say to Paula, by way of
excuse for all the flattery which I and your mother offered her just now:
'Our incense was nauseous for very sweetness.'--These paradoxes, when
examined, are truths in a crooked form, and so they best suit the
deformed. Do you understand?"
"Certainly," said Paula.
"And you, Pul?"
"I am not quite sure. I should be better pleased to be simply told: 'We
ought not to have made such flattering speeches; they may vex a young
girl.'"
"Very good, my straightforward child," laughed her father. "But look,
there is the man! Here, good Gibbus--come here!--Now, just consider:
supposing you had flattered some one so grossly that you had offended him
instead of pleasing him: How would you explain the state of affairs in
telling me of it?"
The gardener, a short, square man, with a huge hump but a clever face and
good features, reflected a minute and then replied: "I wanted to make an
ass smell at some roses and I put thistles under his nose."
"Capital!" cried Paula; and as Gibbus turned away, laughing to himself,
the physician said:
"One might almost envy the man his hump. But yet, fair Paula, I think we
have some straight-limbed folks who can make use of such crooked phrases,
too, when occasion serves."
But Rufinus spoke before Paula could reply, referring her to his Essay on
the deformed in soul and body; and then he went on vehemently:
"I call you all to witness, does not Baste, the lame woman, restrict her
views to the lower aspect of things, to the surface of the earth indeed?
She has one leg much shorter than the other, and it is only with much
pains that we have contrived that it should carry her. To limp along at
all she is forced always to look down at the ground, and what is the
consequence? She can never tell you what is hanging to a tree, and about
three weeks since I asked her under a clear sky and a waning moon whether
the moon had been shining the evening before and she could not tell me,
though she had been sitting out of doors with the others till quite late,
evening after evening. I have noticed, too, that she scarcely recognizes
men who are rather tall, though she may have seen them three or four
times. Her standard has fallen short-like her leg. Now, am I right or
wrong?"
"In this instance you are right," replied Philippus, "still, I know some
lame people. . ."
And again words ran high between the friends; Pulcheria, however, put an
end to the discussion this time, by exclaiming enthusiastically:
"Baste is the best and most good-natured soul in the whole house!"
"Because she looks into her own heart," replied Rufinus. "She knows
herself; and, because she knows how painful pain is, she treats others
tenderly. Do you remember, Philippus, how we disputed after that
anatomical lecture we heard together at Caesarea?"
"Perfectly well," said the leech, "and later life has but confirmed the
opinion I then held. There is no less true or less just saying than the
Latin motto: 'Mens sana in corpore sano,' as it is generally interpreted
to mean that a healthy soul is only to be found in a healthy body. As the
expression of a wish it may pass, but I have often felt inclined to doubt
even that. It has been my lot to meet with a strength of mind, a
hopefulness, and a thankfulness for the smallest mercies in the sickliest
bodies, and at the same time a delicacy of feeling, a wise reserve, and
an undeviating devotion to lofty things such as I have never seen in a
healthy frame. The body is but the tenement of the soul, and just as we
find righteous men and sinners, wise men and fools, alike in the palace
and the hovel--nay, and often see truer worth in a cottage than in the
splendid mansions of the great--so we may discover noble souls both in
the ugly and the fair, in the healthy and the infirm, and most
frequently, perhaps, in the least vigorous. We should be careful how we
go about repeating such false axioms, for they can only do harm to those
who have a heavy burthen to bear through life as it is. In my opinion a
hunchback's thoughts are as straightforward as an athlete's; or do you
imagine that if a mother were to place her new-born children in a spiral
chamber and let them grow up in it, they could not tend upwards as all
men do by nature?"
"Your comparison limps," cried Rufinus, "and needs setting to rights. If
we are not to find ourselves in open antagonism. . . ."
"You must keep the peace," Joanna put in addressing her husband; and
before Rufinus could retort, Paula had asked him with frank simplicity:
"How old are you, my worthy host?"
"Your arrival at my house blessed the second day of my seventieth year,"
replied Rufinus with a courteous bow. His wife shook her finger at him,
exclaiming:
"I wonder whether you have not a secret hump? Such fine phrases. . ."
"He is catching the style from his cripples," said Paula laughing at him.
"But now it is your turn, friend Philippus. Your exposition was worthy of
an antique sage, and it struck me--for the sake of Rufinus here I will
not say convinced me. I respect you--and yet I should like to know how
old. . . ."
"I shall soon be thirty-one," said Philippus, anticipating her question.
"That is an honest answer," observed Dame Joanna. "At your age many a man
clings to his twenties."
"Why?" asked Pulcheria.
"Well," said her mother, "only because there are some girls who think a
man of thirty too old to be attractive."
"Stupid creatures," answered Pulcheria. "Let them find me a young man who
is more lovable than my father; and if Philippus--yes you,
Philippus--were ten or twenty years over nine and twenty, would that make
you less clever or kind?"
"Not less ugly, at any rate," said the physician. Pulcheria laughed, but
with some annoyance, as though she had herself been the object of the
remark. "You are not a bit ugly!" she exclaimed. "Any one who says so has
no eyes. And you will hear nothing said of you but that you are a tall,
fine man!"
As the warm-hearted girl thus spoke, defending her friend against
himself, Paula stroked her golden hair and added to the physician:
"Pulcheria's father is so far right that she, at any rate, measures men
by a true and straight standard. Note that, Philippus!--But do not take
my questioning ill.--I cannot help wondering how a man of one and thirty
and one of seventy should have been studying in the high schools at the
same time? The moon will not be eclipsed for a long time yet--how bright
and clear it is!--So you, Rufinus, who have wandered so far through the
wide world, if you would do me a great pleasure, will tell us something
of your past life and how you came to settle in Memphis."
"His history?" cried Joanna. "If he were to tell it, in all its details
from beginning to end, the night would wane and breakfast would get cold.
He has had as many adventures as travelled Odysseus. But tell us
something husband; you know there is nothing we should like better."
"I must be off to my duties," said the leech, and when he had taken a
friendly leave of the others and bidden farewell to Paula with less
effusiveness than of late, Rufinus began his story.
"I was born in Alexandria, where, at that time, commerce and industry
still flourished. My father was an armorer; above two hundred slaves and
free laborers were employed in his work-shops. He required the finest
metal, and commonly procured it by way of Massilia from Britain. On one
occasion he himself went to that remote island in a friend's ship, and he
there met my mother. Her ruddy gold hair, which Pul has inherited, seems
to have bewitched him and, as the handsome foreigner pleased her
well--for men like my father are hard to match nowadays--she turned
Christian for his sake and came home with him. They neither of them ever
regretted it; for though she was a quiet woman, and to her dying day
spoke Greek like a foreigner, the old man often said she was his best
counsellor. At the same time she was so soft-hearted, that she could not
bear that any living creature should suffer, and though she looked keenly
after everything at the hearth and loom, she could never see a fowl, a
goose, or a pig slaughtered. And I have inherited her weakness--shall I
say 'alas!' or 'thank God?'
"I had two elder brothers who both had to help my father, and who were to
carry on the business. When I was ten years old my calling was decided
on. My mother would have liked to make a priest of me and at that time I
should have consented joyfully; but my father would not agree, and as we
had an uncle who was making a great deal of money as a Rhetor, my father
accepted a proposal from him that I should devote myself to that career.
So I went from one teacher to another and made good progress in the
schools.
"Till my twentieth year I continued to live with my parents, and during
my many hours of leisure I was free to do or leave undone whatever I had
a fancy for; and this was always something medical, if that is not too
big a word. I was but a lad of twelve when this fancy first took me, and
that through pure accident. Of course I was fond of wandering about the
workshops, and there they kept a magpie, a quaint little bird, which my
mother had fed out of compassion. It could say 'Blockhead,' and call my
name and a few other words, and it seemed to like the noise, for it
always would fly off to where the smiths were hammering and filing their
loudest, and whenever it perched close to one of the anvils there were
sure to be mirthful faces over the shaping and scraping and polishing.
For many years its sociable ways made it a favorite; but one day it got
caught in a vice and its left leg was broken. Poor little creature!"
The old man stooped to wipe his eyes unseen, but he went on without
pausing:
"It fell on its back and looked at me so pathetically that I snatched the
tongs out of the bellows-man's hand--for he was going to put an end to
its sufferings in all kindness--and, picking it up gently, I made up my
mind I would cure it. Then I carried the bird into my own room, and to
keep it quiet that it might not hurt itself, I tied it down to a frame
that I contrived, straightened its little leg, warmed the injured bone by
sucking it, and strapped it to little wooden splints. And behold it
really set: the bird got quite well and fluttered about the workshops
again as sound as before, and whenever it saw me it would perch upon my
shoulder and peck very gently at my hair with its sharp beak.
"From that moment I could have found it in me to break the legs of every
hen in the yard, that I might set them again; but I thought of something
better. I went to the barbers and told them that if any one had a bird, a
dog, or a cat, with a broken limb, he might bring it to me, and that I
was prepared to cure all these injuries gratis; they might tell all their
customers. The very next day I had a patient brought me: a black hound,
with tan spots over his eyes, whose leg had been smashed by a badly-aimed
spear: I can see him now! Others followed; feathered or four-footed
sufferers; and this was the beginning of my surgical career. The invalid
birds on the trees I still owe to my old allies the barbers. I only
occasionally take beasts in hand. The lame children, whom you saw in the
garden, come to me from poor parents who cannot afford a surgeon's aid.
The merry, curly-headed boy who brought you a rose just now is to go home
again in a few days.--But to return to the story of my youth.
"The more serious events which gave my life this particular bias occurred
in my twentieth year, when I had already left even the high school behind
me; nor was I fully carried away by their influence till after my uncle
had procured me several opportunities of proving my proficiency in my
calling. I may say without vanity that my speeches won approval; but I
was revolted by the pompous, flowery bombast, without which I should have
been hissed down, and though my parents rejoiced when I went home from
Niku, Arsmoe, or some other little provincial town, with laurel-wreaths
and gold pieces, to myself I always seemed an impostor. Still, for my
father's sake, I dared not give up my profession, although I hated more
and more the task of praising people to the skies whom I neither loved
nor respected, and of shedding tears of pathos while all the time I was
minded to laugh.
"I had plenty of time to myself, and as I did not lack courage and held
stoutly to our Greek confession, I was always to be found where there was
any stir or contention between the various sects. They generally passed
off with nothing worse than bruises and scratches, but now and then
swords were drawn. On one occasion thousands came forth to meet
thousands, and the Prefect called out the troops--all Greeks--to restore
order by force. A massacre ensued in which thousands were killed. I could
not describe it! Such scenes were not rare, and the fury and greed of the
mob were often directed against the Jews by the machinations of the
creatures of the archbishop and the government. The things I saw there
were so horrible, so shocking, that the tongue refuses to tell them; but
one poor Jewess, whose husband the wretches--our fellow
Christians--killed, and then pillaged the house, I have never forgotten!
A soldier dragged her down by her hair, while a ruffian snatched the
child from her breast and, holding it by its feet, dashed its skull
against the wall before her eyes--as you might slash a wet cloth against
a pillar to dry it--I shall never forget that handsome young mother and
her child; they come before me in my dreams at night even now.
"All these things I saw; and I shuddered to behold God's creatures,
beings endowed with reason, persecuting their fellows, plunging them into
misery, tearing them limb from limb--and why? Merciful Saviour, why? For
sheer hatred--as sure as man is the standard for all things--merely
carried away by a hideous impulse to spite their neighbor for not
thinking as they do--nay, simply for not being themselves--to hurt him,
insult him, work him woe. And these fanatics, these armies who raised the
standard of ruthlessness, of extermination, of bloodthirstiness, were
Christians, were baptized in the name of Him who bids us forgive our
enemies, who enlarged the borders of love from the home and the city and
the state to include all mankind; who raised the adulteress from the
dust, who took children into his arms, and would have more joy over a
sinner who repents than over ninety and nine just persons!--Blood, blood,
was what they craved; and did not the doctrine of Him whose followers
they boastfully called themselves grow out of the blood of Him who shed
it for all men alike,--just as that lotos flower grows out of the clear
water in the marble tank? And it was the highest guardians and keepers of
this teaching of mercy, who goaded on the fury of the mob: Patriarchs,
bishops, priests and deacons--instead of pointing to the picture of the
Shepherd who tenderly carries the lost sheep and brings it home to the
fold.
"My own times seemed to me the worst that had ever been; aye, and--as
surely as man is the standard of all things--so they are! for love is
turned to hatred, mercy to implacable hardheartedness. The thrones not
only of the temporal but of the spiritual rulers, are dripping with the
blood of their fellow-men. Emperors and bishops set the example; subjects
and churchmen follow it. The great, the leading men of the struggle are
copied by the small, by the peaceful candidates for spiritual benefices.
All that I saw as a man, in the open streets, I had already seen as a boy
both in the low and high schools. Every doctrine has its adherents; the
man who casts in his lot with Cneius is hated by Caius, who forthwith
speaks and writes to no other end than to vex and put down Cneius, and
give him pain. Each for his part strives his utmost to find out faults in
his neighbor and to put him in the pillory, particularly if his
antagonist is held the greater man, or is likely to overtop him. Listen
to the girls at the well, to the women at the spindle; no one is sure of
applause who cannot tell some evil of the other men or women. Who cares
to listen to his neighbor's praises? The man who hears that his brother
is happy at once envies him! Hatred, hatred everywhere! Everywhere the
will, the desire, the passion for bringing grief and ruin on others
rather than to help them, raise them and heal them!
"That is the spirit of my time; and everything within me revolted against
it with sacred wrath. I vowed in my heart that I would live and act
differently; that my sole aim should be to succor the unfortunate, to
help the wretched, to open my arms to those who had fallen into unmerited
contumely, to set the crooked straight for my neighbor, to mend what was
broken, to pour in balm, to heal and to save!
"And, thank God! it has been vouchsafed to me in some degree to keep this
vow; and though, later, some whims and a passionate curiosity got mixed
up with my zeal, still, never have I lost sight of the great task of
which I have spoken, since my father's death and since my uncle also left
me his large fortune. Then I had done with the Rhetor's art, and
travelled east and west to seek the land where love unites men's hearts
and where hatred is only a disease; but as sure as man is the standard of
all things, to this day all my endeavors to find it have been in vain.
Meanwhile I have kept my own house on such a footing that it has become a
stronghold of love; in its atmosphere hatred cannot grow, but is nipped
in the germ.
"In spite of this I am no saint. I have committed many a folly, many an
injustice; and much of my goods and gold, which I should perhaps have
done better to save for my family, has slipped through my fingers, though
in the execution, no doubt, of what I deemed the highest duties. Would
you believe it, Paula?--Forgive an old man for such fatherly familiarity
with the daughter of Thomas;--hardly five years after my marriage with
this good wife, not long after we had lost our only son, I left her and
our little daughter, Pul there, for more than two years, to follow the
Emperor Heraclius of my own free will to the war against the Persians who
had done me no harm--not, indeed, as a soldier, but as a surgeon eager
for experience. To confess the truth I was quite as eager to see and
treat fractures and wounds and injuries in great numbers, as I was to
exercise benevolence. I came home with a broken hip-bone, tolerably
patched up, and again, a few years later, I could not keep still in one
place. The bird of passage must need drag wife and child from the peace
of hearth and homestead, and take them to where he could go to the high
school. A husband, a father, and already grey-headed, I was a singular
exception among the youths who sat listening to the lectures and
explanations of their teachers; but as sure as man is the standard of all
things, they none of them outdid me in diligence and zeal, though many a
one was greatly my superior in gifts and intellect, and among them the
foremost was our friend Philippus. Thus it came about, noble Paula, that
the old man and the youth in his prime were fellow-students; but to this
day the senior gladly bows down to his young brother in learning and
feeling. To straighten, to comfort, and to heal: this is the aim of his
life too. And even I, an old man, who started long before Philippus on
the same career, often long to call myself his disciple."
Here Rufinus paused and rose; Paula, too, got up, grasped his hand
warmly, and said:
"If I were a man, I would join you! But Philippus has told me that even a
woman may be allowed to work with the same purpose.--And now let me beg
of you never to call me anything but Paula--you will not refuse me this
favor. I never thought I could be so happy again as I am with you; here
my heart is free and whole. Dame Joanna, do you be my mother! I have lost
the best of fathers, and till I find him again, you, Rufinus, must fill
his place!"
"Gladly, gladly!" cried the old man; he clasped both her hands and went
on vivaciously: "And in return I ask you to be an elder sister to Pul.
Make that timid little thing such a maiden as you are yourself.--But
look, children, look up quickly; it is beginning!--Typhon, in the form of
a boar, is swallowing the eye of Horns: so the heathen of old in this
country used to believe when the moon suffered an eclipse. See how the
shadow is covering the bright disk. When the ancients saw this happening
they used to make a noise, shaking the sistrum with its metal rings,
drumming and trumpeting, shouting and yelling, to scare off the evil one
and drive him away. It may be about four hundred years since that last
took place, but to this day--draw your kerchiefs more closely round your
heads and come with me to the river--to this day Christians degrade
themselves by similar rites. Wherever I have been in Christian lands, I
have always witnessed the same scenes: our holy faith has, to be sure,
demolished the religions of the heathen; but their superstitions have
survived, and have forced their way through rifts and chinks into our
ceremonial. They are marching round now, with the bishop at their head,
and you can hear the loud wailing of the women, and the cries of the men,
drowning the chant of the priests. Only listen! They are as passionate
and agonized in their entreaty as though old Typhon were even now about
to swallow the moon, and the greatest catastrophe was hanging over the
world. Aye, as surely as man is the standard of all things, those
terrified beings are diseased in mind; and how are we to forgive those
who dare to scare Christians; yes, Christian souls, with the traditions
of heathen folly, and to blind their inward vision?"
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Gratitude is a tribute on which no wise man ever reckons
Healthy soul is only to be found in a healthy body
Man is the standard of all things
Persians never prayed for any particular blessing
The immortal gods have set sweat before virtue
Things you mean are only what they seem to us
Would want some one else to wear herself out for
Any woman can forgive any man for his audacity in loving her
THE BRIDE OF THE NILE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 6.
CHAPTER XXII.
Up to within a few days Katharina had still been a dependent and docile
child, who had made it a point of honor to obey instantly, not only her
mother's lightest word, but Dame Neforis, too; and, since her own Greek
instructress had been dismissed, even the acid Eudoxia. She had never
concealed from her mother, or the worthy teacher whom she had truly
loved, the smallest breach of rules, the least naughtiness or wilful act
of which she had been guilty; nay, she had never been able to rest till
she had poured out a confession, before evening prayer, of all that her
little heart told her was not perfectly right, to some one whom she
loved, and obtained full forgiveness. Night after night the
"Water-wagtail" had gone to sleep with a conscience as clear and as white
as the breast of her whitest dove, and the worst sin she had ever
committed during the day was some forbidden scramble, some dainty or,
more frequently, some rude and angry word.
But a change had first come over her after Orion's kiss in the
intoxicating perfume of the flowering trees; and almost every hour since
had roused her to new hopes and new views. It had never before occurred
to her to criticise or judge her mother; now she was constantly doing so.
The way in which Susannah had cut herself off from her neighbors in the
governor's house, to her daughter seemed perverse and in bad taste; and
the bitterly vindictive attacks on her old friends, which were constantly
on Susannah's lips, aggrieved the girl, and finally set her in opposition
to her mother, whose judgment had hitherto seemed to her infallible.
Thus, when the governor's house was closed against her, there was no one
in whom she cared to confide, for a barrier stood between her and Paula,
and she was painfully conscious of its height each time the wish to pass
it recurred to her mind. Paula was certainly "that other" of whom Orion
had spoken; when she had stolen away to see her in the evening after the
funeral, she had been prompted less by a burning wish to pour out her
heart to a sympathizing hearer, than by torturing curiosity mingled with
jealousy. She had crept through the hedge with a strangely-mixed feeling
of tender longing and sullen hatred; when they had met in the garden she
had at first given herself up to the full delight of being free to speak,
and of finding a listener in a woman so much her superior; but Paula's
reserved replies to her bold questioning had revived her feelings of envy
and grudge. Any one who did not hate Orion must, she was convinced, love
him.
Were they not perhaps already pledged to each other! Very likely Paula
had thought of her as merely a credulous child, and so had concealed the
fact!
This "very likely" was torture to her, and she was determined to try, at
any rate, to settle the doubt. She had an ally at her command; this was
her foster-brother, the son of her deaf old nurse; she knew that he would
blindly obey all her wishes--nay, to please her, would throw himself to
the crocodiles in the Nile. Anubis had been her comrade in all her
childish sports, till at the age of fourteen, after learning to read and
write, her mother had obtained an appointment for him in the governor's
household, as an assistant to be further trained by the treasurer Nilus.
Dame Susannah intended to find him employment at a future date on her
estates, or at Memphis, the centre of their administration, as he might
prove himself capable. The lad was still living with his mother under the
rich widow's roof, and only spent his working days at the governor's
house, he was industrious and clever during office hours, though between
whiles he busied himself with things altogether foreign to his future
calling. At Katharina's request he had opened a communication between the
two houses by means of carrier-pigeons, and many missives were thus
despatched with little gossip, invitations, excuses, and the like, from
Katharina to Mary and back again. Anubis took great pleasure in the
pretty creatures, and by the permission of his superiors a dovecote was
erected on the roof of the treasurer's house. Mary was now lying ill, and
their intercourse was at an end; still, the well-trained messengers need
not be idle, and Katharina had begun to use them for a very different
purpose.
Orion's envoy had been detained a long time at Rufinus' door the day
before; and she had since learnt from Anubis, who was acquainted with all
that took place in Nilus' office, that Paula's moneys were to be
delivered over to her very shortly, and in all probability by Orion
himself. They must then have an interview, and perhaps she might succeed
in overhearing it. She knew well how this could be managed; the only
thing was to be on the spot at the right moment.
On the morning after the full-moon, at two hours and a half before noon,
the little boy whose task it was to feed the feathered messengers in
their dove-cote brought her a written scrap, on which Anubis informed her
that Orion was about to set out; but he was not very warmly welcomed, for
the hour did not suit her at all. Early in the morning Bishop Plotinus
had come to inform Susannah that Benjamin, Patriarch of Alexandria, was
visiting Amru on the opposite shore, and would presently honor Memphis
with his presence. He proposed to remain one day; he had begged to have
no formal reception, and had left it to the bishop to find suitable
quarters for himself and his escort, as he did not wish to put up at the
governor's house. The vain widow had at once pressingly urged her
readiness to receive the illustrious guest under her roof: The prelate's
presence must bring a blessing on the house, and she thought, too, that
she might turn it to advantage for several ends she just now happened to
have in view.
A handsome reception must be prepared; there were but a few hours to
spare, and even before the bishop had left her, she had begun to call the
servants together and give them orders. The whole house must be turned
upside down; some of the kitchen staff were hurried off into the town to
make purchases, others bustled round the fire; the gardeners plundered
the beds and bushes to weave wreaths and nosegays for decorations; from
cellar to roof half a hundred of slaves, white, brown and black, were
toiling with all their might, for each believed that, by rendering a
service to the Patriarch, he might count on the special favor of Heaven,
while their unresting mistress never ceased screaming out her orders as
to what she wished done.
Susannah, who as a girl had been the eldest of a numerous and not wealthy
family, and had been obliged to put her own hand to things, quite forgot
now that she was a woman of position and fortune whom it ill-beseemed to
do her own household work; she was here, there, and everywhere, and had
an eye on all--excepting indeed her own daughter; but she was the petted
darling of the house, brought up to Greek refinement, whose help in such
arduous labors was not to be thought of; indeed, she would only have been
in the way.
When the bishop had taken his leave Katharina was merely desired to be
ready in her best attire, with a nosegay in her hand, to receive the
Patriarch under the awning spread outside the entrance. More than this
the widow did not require of her, and as the girl flew up the stairs to
her room she was thinking: "Orion will be coming directly: it still wants
fully two hours of noon, and if he stays there half an hour that will be
more than enough. I shall have time then to change my dress, but I will
put my new sandals on at once as a precaution; nurse and the maid must
wait for me in my room. They must have everything ready for my
return--perhaps he and Paula may have much to say to each other. He will
not get off without a lecture, unless she has already found an
opportunity elsewhere of expressing her indignation."
A few minutes later she had sprung to the top of a mound of earth covered
with turf, which she had some time since ordered to be thrown up close
behind the hedge through which she had yesterday made her way. Her little
feet were shod with handsome gold sandals set with sapphires, and she
seated herself on a low bench with a satisfied smile, as though to assist
at a theatrical performance. Some broad-leaved shrubs, placed behind this
place of ambush, screened her to some extent from the heat of the sun,
and as she sat watching and listening in this lurking place, which she
was not using for the first time, her heart began to beat more quickly;
indeed, in her excitement she quite forgot some sweetmeats which she had
brought to wile away the time and had poured into a large leaf in her
lap.
Happily she had not long to wait; Orion arrived in his mother's
four-wheeled covered chariot. By the side of the driver sat a servant,
and a slave was perched on the step to the door on each side of the
vehicle. It was followed by a few idlers, men and women, and a crowd of
half-naked children. But they got nothing by their curiosity, for the
carruca did not draw up in the road, but was driven into Rufinus' garden,
and the trees and shrubs hid it from the gaze of the expectant mob, which
presently dispersed.
Orion got out at the principal door of the house, followed by the
treasurer; and while the old man welcomed the son of the Mukaukas, Nilus
superintended the transfer of a considerable number of heavy sacks to
their host's private room.
Nothing of all this had seemed noteworthy to Katharina but the quantity
and size of the bags--full, no doubt, of gold--and the man, whom alone
she cared to see. Never had she thought Orion so handsome; the long,
flowing mourning robe, which he had flung over his shoulder in rich
folds, added to the height of his stately form; his abundant hair, not
curled but waving naturally, set off his face which, pale and grave as it
was, both touched and attracted her ir resistibly. The thought that this
splendid creature had once courted her, loved her, kissed her--that he
had once been hers, and that she had lost him to another, was a pang like
physical agony, mounting from her heart to her brain.
After Orion had vanished indoors, she still seemed to see him; and when
she thrust his image from her fancy, forced to remind herself that he was
now standing face to face with that other, and was looking at Paula as, a
few days since, he had looked at her, the anguish of her soul was
doubled. And was Paula only half as happy as she had been in that hour of
supreme bliss? Ah! how her heart ached! She longed to leap over the
hedge--she could have rushed into the house and flung herself between
Paula and Orion.
Still, there she sat; restless but without moving; wholly under the
dominion of evil thoughts, among which a good one rarely and timidly
intruded, with her eyes fixed on Rufinus' dwelling. It stood in the broad
sunshine as silent as death, as if all were sleeping. In the garden, too,
all was motionless but the thin jet of water, which danced up from the
marble tank with a soft and fitful, but monotonous tinkle, while
butterflies, dragonflies, bees, and beetles, whose hum she could not
hear, seemed to circle round the flowers without a sound. The birds must
be asleep, for not one was to be seen or broke the oppressive stillness
by a chirp or a twitter. The chariot at the door might have been
spellbound; the driver had dismounted, and he, with the other slaves, had
stretched himself in the narrow strips of shade cast by the pillars of
the verandah; their chins buried in their breasts, they spoke not a word.
The horses alone were stirring-flicking off the flies with their flowing
tails, or turning to bite the burning stings they inflicted. This now and
then lifted the pole, and as the chariot crunched backwards a few inches,
the charioteer growled out a sleepy "Brrr."
Katharina had laid a large leaf on her head for protection against the
sun; she did not dare use a parasol or a hat for fear of being seen. The
shade cast by the shrubs was but scanty, the noontide heat was torment;
still, though minute followed minute and one-quarter of an hour after
another crept by at a snail's pace, she was far too much excited to be
sleepy. She needed no dial to tell her the time; she knew exactly how
late it was as one shadow stole to this point and another to that, and,
by risking the danger to her eyes of glancing up at the sun, she could
make doubly sure.
It was now within three-quarters of an hour of noon, and in that house
all was as still as before; the Patriarch, however, might be expected to
be punctual, and she had done nothing towards dressing but putting on
those gilt sandals. This brought her to swift decision she hurried to her
room, desired the maid not to dress her hair, contenting herself with
pinning a few roses into its natural curls. Then, in fierce haste, she
made her throw on her sea-green dress of bombyx silk edged with fine
embroidery, and fasten her peplos with the first pins that came to hand;
and when the snap of her bracelet of costly sapphires broke, as she
herself was fastening it, she flung it back among her other trinkets as
she might have tossed an unripe apple back upon a heap. She slipped her
little hand into a gold spiral which curled round half her arm, and
gathered up the rest of her jewels, to put them on out of doors as she
sat watching. The waiting-woman was ordered to come for her at noon with
the flowers for the Patriarch, and, in a quarter of an hour after leaving
her lurking place, she was back there again. Just in time;--for while she
was putting on the trinkets Nilus came out, followed by some slaves with
several leather bags which they replaced in the chariot. Then the
treasurer stepped in and with him Philippus, and the vehicle drove away.
"So Paula has entrusted her property to Orion again," thought Katharina.
"They are one again; and henceforth there will be endless going and
coming between the governor's house and that of Rufinus. A very pretty
game!--But wait, only wait." And she set her little white teeth; but she
retained enough self-possession to mark all that took place.
During her absence indoors Orion's black horse had been brought into the
garden; a groom on horseback was leading him, and as she watched their
movements she muttered to herself with a smile of scorn: "At any rate he
is not going to carry her home with him at once."
A few minutes passed in silence, and at last Paula came out, and close
behind her, almost by her side, walked Orion.
His cheeks were no longer pale, far from it, no more than Katharina's
were; they were crimson! How bright his eyes were, how radiant with
satisfaction and gladness!--She only wished she were a viper to sting
them both in the heel!--At the same time Paula had lost none of her proud
and noble dignity--and he? He gazed at his companion like a rapt soul;
she fancied she could see the folds of his mourning cloak rising and
falling with the beating of his heart. Paula, too, was in mourning. Of
course. They were one; his sorrow must be hers, although she had fled
from his father's house as though it were a prison. And of course this
virtuous beauty knew full well that nothing became her better than dark
colors! In manner, gait and height this pair looked like two superior
beings, destined for each other by Fate; Katharina herself could not but
confess it.
Some spiteful demon--a friendly one, she thought--led them past her, so
close that her sharp ears could catch every word they said as they slowly
walked on, or now and then stood still, dogged by the agile
water-wagtail, who stole along parallel with them on the other side of
the hedge.
"I have so much to thank you for," were the first words she caught from
Orion, "that I am shy of asking you yet another favor; but this one
indeed concerns yourself. You know how deep a blow was struck me by
little Mary's childish hand; still, the impulse that prompted her had its
rise in her honest, upright feeling and her idolizing love of you."
"And you would like me to take charge of her?" asked Paula. "Such a wish
is of course granted beforehand--only. . . ."
"Only?" repeated Orion.
"Only you must send her here; for you know that I will never enter your
doors again."
"Alas that it should be so!--But the child has been very ill and can
hardly leave the house at present; and--since I must own it--my mother
avoids her in a way which distresses the child, who is over-excited as it
is, and fills her with new terrors."
"How can Neforis treat her little favorite so?"
"Remember," said Orion, "what my father has been to my poor mother. She
is now completely crushed: and, when she sees the little girl, that last
scene of her unhappy husband's life is brought back to her, with all that
came upon my father and me, beyond a doubt through Mary. She looks on the
poor little thing as the bane of the family?"
"Then she must come away," said Paula much touched. "Send her to us. Kind
and comforting souls dwell under Rufinus' roof."
"I thank you warmly. I will entreat my mother most urgently. . . ."
"Do so," interrupted Paula. "Have you ever seen Pulcheria, the daughter
of my worthy host?"
"Yes.--A singularly lovable creature!"
"She will soon take Mary into her faithful heart--"
"And our poor little girl needs a friend, now that Susannah has forbidden
her daughter to visit at our house."
The conversation now turned on the two girls, of whom they spoke as sweet
children, both much to be pitied; and, when Orion observed that his niece
was old for her tender years, Paula replied with a slight accent of
reproach: "But Katharina, too, has ripened much during the last few days;
the lively child has become a sober girl; her recent experience is a
heavy burden on her light heart."
"But, if I know her at all, it will soon be cast off," replied Orion.
"She is a sweet, happy little creature; and, of all the dreadful things I
did on that day of horrors, the most dreadful perhaps was the woe I
wrought for her. There is no excuse possible, and yet it was solely to
gratify my mother's darling wish that I consented to marry
Katharina.--However, enough of that.--Henceforth I must march through
life with large strides, and she to whom love gives courage to become my
wife, must be able to keep pace with me."
Katharina could only just hear these last words. The speakers now turned
down the path, sparsely shaded from the midday sun by a few trees, which
led to the tank in the centre of the garden, and they went further and
further from her.
She heard no more--still, she knew enough and could supply the rest. The
object of her ambush was gained: she knew now with perfect certainty who
was "the other." And how they had spoken of her! Not as a deserted bride,
whose rights had been trodden in the dust, but as a child who is
dismissed from the room as soon as it begins to be in the way. But she
thought she could see through that couple and knew why they had spoken of
her thus. Paula, of course, must prevent any new tie from being formed
between herself and Orion; and as for Orion, common prudence required
that he should mention her--her, whom he had but lately loaded with
tenderness--as a mere child, to protect himself against the jealousy of
that austere "other" one. That he had loved her, at any rate that evening
under the trees, she obstinately maintained in her own mind; to that
conviction she must cling desperately, or lose her last foothold. Her
whole being was a prey to a frightful turmoil of feeling. Her hands
shook; her mouth was parched as by the midday heat; she knew that there
were withered leaves between her feet and the sandals she wore, that
twigs had got caught in her hair; but she could not care and when the
pair were screened from her by the denser shrubs she flew back to her
raised seat-from which she could again discover them. At this moment she
would have given all she held best and dearest, to be the thing it vexed
her so much to be called: a water-wagtail, or some other bird.
It must be very near noon if not already past; she dusted her sandals and
tidied her curly hair, picking out the dry leaves and not noticing that
at the same time a rose fell out on the ground. Only her hands were busy;
her eyes were elsewhere, and suddenly they brightened again, for the
couple on which she kept them fixed were coming back, straight towards
the hedge, and she would soon be able again to hear what they were
saying.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Orion and Paula had had much to talk about, since the young man had
arrived. The discussion over the safe keeping of the girl's money had
been tedious. Finally, her counsellors had decided to entrust half of it
to Gamaliel the jeweller and his brother, who carried on a large business
in Constantinople. He happened to be in Memphis, and they had both
declared themselves willing each to take half of the sum in question and
use it at interest. They would be equally responsible for its security,
so that each should make good the whole of the property in their hands in
case of the other stopping payment. Nilus undertook to procure legal
sanction and the necessary sixteen witnesses to this transaction.
The other half of her fortune was, by the advice of Philippus, to be
placed in the hands of a brother of Haschim's, the Arab merchant, who had
a large business as money changer in Fostat, the new town on the further
shore, in which the merchant himself was a partner. This investment had
the advantage of being perfectly safe, at any rate so long as the Arabs
ruled the land.
After all this was settled Nilus departed with that half of the money
which Orion was to hand over to the keeping of the Moslem money changer
on the following morning.
Paula, though she had taken no part in the men's discussion, had been
present throughout, and had expressed her grateful consent. The
clearness, gravity, and decision which Orion had displayed had not
escaped her notice; and though the treasurer's shrewd remarks, briefly
and modestly made, had in every case proved final, it was Orion's
reasoning and explanations that had most come home to her, for it seemed
to her that he was always prompted by loftier, wider, and more
statesmanlike considerations than the others.
When this was over she and Orion were left together, and neither she nor
the young man had been able to escape a few moments of anxious
heart-beating.
It was not till the governor's son had summoned up his courage and,
sinking on his knees, was imploring her pardon, that she recovered some
firmness and reminded him of the letter he had sent her. But her heart
drew her to him almost irresistibly, and in order not to yield to its
urgent prompts, she hastily enquired what he had meant by the exchange he
had written about.
At this he went up to her with downcast eyes, drew a small box out of the
breast of his robe, and took out the emerald with the damaged setting. He
held them towards her with a beseeching gesture, exclaiming, with all the
peculiar sweetness of his deep voice:
"It is your property! Take it and give me in return your confidence, your
forgiveness."
She drew back a little, looking first at him and then at the stone and
its setting--surprised, pleased, and deeply moved, with a bright light in
her eyes. The young man found it impossible to utter a single word, only
holding the jewel and the broken setting closer to her, and yet closer,
like some poor man who makes bold to offer the best he has to a wealthy
superior, though conscious that it is all too humble a gift to find
favor.
And Paula was not long undecided; she took the proffered gem and feasted
her glistening eyes with glad thankfulness on her recovered treasure.
Two days ago she had thought of it as defiled and desecrated; it had
gratified her pride to fancy that she had cast the precious jewel at the
feet, as it were, of Neforis and her son, never to see it again. So hard
is it to forego the right of hating those who have basely brought grief
into our lives and anguish to our souls!--and yet Paula, who would not
have yielded this right at any price a short time since, now waived it of
her own free will--nay, thrust it from her like some tormenting incubus
which choked her pulses and kept her from breathing freely. In this gem
she saw once more a cherished memorial of her lost mother, the honorable
gift of a great monarch to her forefathers; and she was happy to possess
it once more. But it was not this that gave life to the warm, sunny glow
of happiness which thrilled through her, or occasioned its quick and
delightful growth; for her eye did not linger on the large and glittering
stone, but rested spellbound on the poor gold frame which had once held
it, and which had cost her such hours of anguish. This broken and
worthless thing, it is true, was powerful to justify her in the opinions
of her judges and her enemies; with this in her hand she would easily
confute her accusers. Still, it was not that which so greatly consoled
her. The physician's remark, that there was no greater joy than the
discovery that we have been deceived in thinking ill of another, recurred
to her mind; and she had once loved the man who now stood before her open
to every good influence, deeply moved in her presence; and her judgment
of him had been a hundred, a thousand times too hard. Only a noble soul
could confidently expect magnanimity from a foe and he, he had put
himself defenceless into the power of her who had been mortally stricken
by the most fateful, and perhaps the only disgraceful act of his life. In
giving up this gold frame Orion also gave himself up; with this talisman
in her possession she stood before him as irresistible Fate. And now, as
she looked up at him and met his large eyes, full of life and intellect
but sparkling through tears of violent agitation, she felt absolutely
certain that this favorite of Fortune, though he had indeed sinned deeply
and disastrously, was capable of the highest and greatest aims if he had
a friend to show him what life required of him and were but ready to
follow such guidance. And such a friend she would be to him!
She, like Orion, could not for some time speak; but he, at last, was
unable to contain himself; he hastened towards her and pressed her hand
to his lips with fervent gratitude, while she--she had to submit; nay,
she would have been incapable of resisting him if, as in her dream, he
had clasped her in his arms, to his heart. His burning lips had rested
fervently on her hand, but it was only for an instant that she abandoned
herself to the violent agitation that mastered her. Then with a great
effort her instinct and determination to do right enabled her to control
it; she pushed him from her decisively but not ungently, and then, with
some emotion and an arch sweetness which he had never before seen in her,
and which charmed him even more than her noble and lofty pride, she said,
threatening him with her finger.
"Take care, Orion! Now I have the stone and the setting; yes, that very
setting. Beware of the consequences, rash man!"
"Not at all. Say rather: Fool, who at last has succeeded in doing
something rational," he replied joyfully. "What I have brought you is not
a gift; it is your own. To you it can be neither more nor less than it
was before; but to me it has gained inestimably in value since it places
my honor, perhaps my life even, in your keeping; I am in your power as
completely as the humblest slave in the palace is in that of the Emperor.
Keep the gem, and use it and this fateful gold trifle till the day shall
come when my weal and woe are one with yours."
"For your dead father's sake," she answered, coloring deeply, "your weal
lies already very near my heart. Am not I, who brought upon you your
father's curse, bound indeed to help you to free yourself from the burden
of it? And it may perhaps be in my power to do so, Orion, if you do not
scorn to listen to the counsels of an ignorant girl?"
"Speak," he cried; but she did not reply immediately. She only begged him
to come into the garden with her; the close atmosphere of the room had
become intolerable to both, and when they got out and Katharina had first
caught sight of them their flushed cheeks had not escaped her watchful
eye.
In the open air, a scarcely perceptible breath from the river moderated
the noontide heat, and then Paula found courage to tell him what
Philippus had called his apprehension in life. It was not new to him;
indeed it fully answered to the principles he had laid down for the
future. He accepted it gratefully: "Life is a function, a ministry, a
duty!" the words were a motto, a precept that should aid him in carrying
out his plans.
"And the device," he exclaimed, "will be doubly precious to me as having
come from your lips.--But I no longer need its warning. The wisest and
most practical axioms of conduct never made any man the better. Who does
not bring a stock of them with him when he quits school for the world at
large? Precepts are of no use unless, in the voyage of life, a manly will
holds the rudder. I have called on mine, and it will steer me to the
goal, for a bright guiding star lights the pilot on his way. You know
that star; it is. . . ."
"It is what you call your love," she interposed, with a deep blush.--Your
love for me, and I will trust it."
"You will!" he cried passionately. "You allow me to hope. . . ."
"Yes, yes, hope!" she again broke in, "but meanwhile. . . ."
"Meanwhile," he said, "'do not press me further,' ought to end your
sentence. Oh! I quite understand you; and until I feel that you have good
reason once more to respect the maniac who lost you by his own fault, I,
who fought you like your most deadly foe, will not even speak the final
word. I will silence my longing, I will try. . . ."
"You will try to show me--nay, you will show me--that in you, my foe and
persecutor, I have gained my dearest friend!--And now to quite another
matter. We know how we stand towards each other and can count on each
other with glad and perfect confidence, thanking the Almighty for having
opened out a new life to us. To Him we will this day. . . ."
"Offer praise and thanksgiving," Orion joyfully put in.
And here began the conversation relating to little Mary which Katharina
had overheard.
They had gone out of hearing again when Orion explained to Paula that all
arrangements for the little girl must be postponed till the morrow, as he
had business now with Amru, on the other shore of the Nile. He decisively
confuted her fears lest he should allow himself to be perverted by the
Moslems to their faith; for though he ardently desired to let the
Patriarch feel that he had no mind to submit patiently to the affront to
his deceased father, he clung too firmly to his creed, and knew too well
what was due to the memory of the dead, and to Paula herself, ever to
take this extreme step. He spoke in glowing terms as he described how,
for the future, he purposed to devote his best powers to his hapless and
oppressed country, whether it were in the service of the Khaliff or in
some other way; and she eagerly entered into his schemes, quite carried
away by his noble enthusiasm, and acknowledging to herself with silent
rapture the superiority of his mind and the soaring loftiness of his
soul.
When, presently, they began talking again of the past she asked him quite
frankly, but in a low voice and without looking up, what had become of
the emerald he had taken from the Persian hanging. He turned pale at
this, looked at the ground, and hesitatingly replied that he had sent it
to Constantinople--"to have it set--set in an ornament--worthy of her
whom--whom he. . . ."
But here he broke off, stamped angrily with his foot, and looking
straight into the girl's eyes exclaimed:
"A pack of lies, foul and unworthy lies!--I have been truthful by nature
all my life; but does it not seem as though that accursed day forced me
to some base action every time it is even mentioned? Yes, Paula; the gem
is really on its way to Byzantium. But the stolen gift was never meant
for you, but for a fair, gentle creature, in nothing blameworthy, who
gave me her heart. To me she was never anything but a pretty plaything;
still, there were moments when I believed--poor soul!--I first learnt
what love meant through you, how great and how sacred it is!--Now you
know all; this, indeed, is the truth!"
They walked on again, and Katharina, who had not been able to gather the
whole of this explanation, could plainly hear Paula's reply in warm, glad
accents:
"Yes, that is the truth, I feel. And henceforth that horrible day is
blotted out, erased from your life and mine; and whatever you tell me in
the future I shall believe."
And the listener heard the young man answer in a tremulous voice:
"And you shall never be deceived in me. Now I must leave you; and I go,
in spite of my griefs, a happy man, entitled to rejoice anew. O Paula,
what do I not owe to you! And when we next meet you will receive me, will
you not, as you did that evening on the river after my return?"
"Yes, indeed; and with even more glad confidence," replied Paula, holding
out her hand with a lovely graciousness that came from her heart; he
pressed it a moment to his lips, and then sprang on to his horse and rode
off at a round trot, his slave following him.
"Katharina, child, Katharina!" was shouted from Susannah's house in a
woman's high-pitched voice. The water-wagtail started up, hastily
smoothing her hair and casting an evil glance at her rival, "the other,"
the supplanter who had basely betrayed her under the sycamores; she
clenched her little fist as she saw Paula watching Orion's retreating
form with beaming eyes. Paula went back into the house, happy and walking
on air, while the other poor, deeply-wounded child burst into violent
weeping at the first hasty words from her mother, who was not at all
satisfied with the disorder of her dress; and she ended by declaring with
defiant audacity that she would not present the flowers to the patriarch,
and would remain in her own room, for she was dying of headache.--And so
she did.
CHAPTER XXIV.
In the course of the afternoon Orion paid his visit to the Arab governor.
He crossed the bridge of boats on his finest horse.
Only two years since, the land where the new town of Fostat was now
growing up under the old citadel of Babylon had been fields and gardens;
but at Amru's word it had started into being as by a miracle; house after
house already lined the streets, the docks were full of ships and barges,
the market was alive with dealers, and on a spot where, during the siege
of the fortress, a sutler's booth had stood, a long colonnade marked out
the site of a new mosque.
There was little to be seen here now of native Egyptian life; it looked
as though some magician had transported a part of Medina itself to the
shores of the Nile. Men and beasts, dwellings and shops, though they had
adopted much of what they had found in this ancient land of culture,
still bore the stamp of their origin; and wherever Orion's eye fell on
one of his fellow-countrymen, he was a laborer or a scribe in the service
of the conquerors who had so quickly made themselves at home.
Before his departure for Constantinople one of his father's palm-groves
had occupied the spot where Amru's residence now stood opposite the
half-finished mosque. Where, now, thousands of Moslems, some on foot,
some on richly caparisoned steeds, were passing to and fro, turbaned and
robed after the manner of their tribe, with such adornment as they had
stolen or adopted from intercourse with splendor-loving nations, and
where long trains of camels dragged quarried stones to the building, in
former times only an occasional ox-cart with creaking wheels was to be
seen, an Egyptian riding an ass or a bare-backed nag, and now and then a
few insolent Greek soldiers. On all sides he heard the sharper and more
emphatic accent of the sons of the desert instead of the language of his
forefathers and their Greek conquerors. Without the aid of the servant
who rode at his side he could not have made himself understood on the
soil of his native land.
He soon reached Amru's house and was there informed by an Egyptian
secretary that his master was gone out hunting and would receive him, not
in the town, but at the citadel. There, on a pleasant site on the
limestone hills which rose behind the fortress of Babylon and the
newly-founded city, stood some fine buildings, originally planned as a
residence for the Prefect; and thither Amru had transported his wives,
children, and favorite horses, preferring it, with very good reason, to
the palace in the town, where he transacted business, and where the new
mosque intercepted the view of the Nile, while this eminence commanded a
wide prospect.
The sun was near setting when Orion reached the spot, but the general had
not yet come in from the chase, and the gate-keeper requested that he
would wait.
Orion was accustomed to be treated in his own country as the heir of the
greatest man in it; the color mounted to his brow and his Egyptian heart
revolted at having to bend his pride and swallow his wrath before an
Arab. He was one of the subject race, and the thought that one word from
his lips would suffice to secure his reception in the ranks of the rulers
forced itself suddenly on his mind; but he repressed it with all his
might, and silently allowed himself to be conducted to a terrace screened
by a vine-covered trellis from the heat of the sun.
He sat down on one of the marble seats by the parapet of this hanging
garden and looked westward. He knew the scene well, it was the playground
of his childhood and youth; hundreds of times the picture had spread
before him, and yet it affected him to-day as it had never done before.
Was there on earth--he asked himself--a more fertile and luxuriant land?
Had not even the Greek poets sung of the Nile as the most venerable of
rivers? Had not great Caesar himself been so fascinated by the idea of
discovering its source that to that end--so he had declared--he would
have thought the dominion of the world well lost? On the produce of those
wide fields the weal and woe of the mightiest cities of the earth had
been dependent for centuries; nay, imperial Rome and sovereign
Constantinople had quaked with fears of famine, when a bad harvest here
had disappointed the hopes of the husbandman.
And was there anywhere a more industrious nation of laborers, had there
ever been, before them, a thriftier or a more skilful race? When he
looked back on the fate and deeds of nations, on the remotest horizon
where the thread of history was scarcely perceptible, that same gigantic
Sphinx was there--the first and earliest monument of human joy in
creative art--those Pyramids which still proudly stood in undiminished
and inaccessible majesty beyond the Nile, beyond the ruined capital of
his forefathers, at the foot of the Libyan range. He was the son of the
men who had raised these imperishable works, and in his veins perchance
there still might flow a drop of the blood of those Pharaohs who had
sought eternal rest in these vast tombs, and whose greater progeny, had
overrun half the world with their armies, and had exacted tribute and
submission. He, who had often felt flattered at being praised for the
purity of his Greek--pure not merely for his time: an age of bastard
tongues--and for the engaging Hellenism of his person, here and now had
an impulse of pride of his Egyptian origin. He drew a deep breath, as he
gazed at the sinking sun; it seemed to lend intentional significance to
the rich beauty of his home as its magical glory transmuted the fields,
the stream, and the palm-groves, the roofs of the city, and even the
barren desert-range and the Pyramids to burning gold. It was fast going
to rest behind the Libyan chain. The bare, colorless limestone sparkled
like translucent crystal; the glowing sphere looked as though it were
melting into the very heart of the mountains behind which it was
vanishing, while its rays, shooting upwards like millions of gold
threads, bound his native valley to heaven--the dwelling of the Divine
Power who had blessed it above all other lands.
To free this beautiful spot of earth and its children from their
oppressors--to restore to them the might and greatness which had once
been theirs--to snatch down the crescent from the tents and buildings
which lay below him and plant the cross which from his infancy he had
held sacred--to lead enthusiastic troops of Egyptians against the
Moslems--to quell their arrogance and drive them back to the East like
Sesostris, the hero of history and legend--this was a task worthy of the
grandson of Menas, of the son of George the great and just Mukaukas.
Paula would not oppose such an enterprise; his excited imagination
pictured her indeed as a second Zenobia by his side, ready for any great
achievement, fit to aid him and to rule.
Fully possessed by this dream of the future, he had long ceased to gaze
at the glories of the sunset and was sitting with eyes fixed on the
ground. Suddenly his soaring visions were interrupted by men's voices
coming up from the street just below the terrace. He looked over and
perceived at its foot about a score of Egyptian laborers; free men, with
no degrading tokens of slavery, making their way along, evidently against
their will and yet in sullen obedience, with no thought of resistance or
evasion, though only a single Arab held them under control.
The sight fell on his excited mood like rain on a smouldering fire, like
hail on sprouting seed. His eye, which a moment ago had sparkled with
enthusiasm, looked down with contempt and disappointment on the miserable
creatures of whose race he came. A line of bitter scorn curled his lip,
for this troop of voluntary slaves were beneath his anger--all the more
so as he more vividly pictured to himself what his people had once been
and what they were now. He did not think of all this precisely, but as
dusk fell, one scene after another from his own experience rose before
his mind's eye--occasions on which the Egyptians had behaved
ignominiously, and had proved that they were unworthy of freedom and
inured to bow in servitude. Just as one Arab was now able to reduce a
host of his fellow-countrymen to subjection, so formerly three Greeks had
held them in bondage. He had known numberless instances of almost glad
submission on the part of freeborn Egyptians--peasants, village magnates,
and officials, even on his father's estates and farms. In Alexandria and
Memphis the sons of the soil had willingly borne the foreign yoke,
allowing themselves to be thrust into the shade and humbled by Greeks, as
though they were of a baser species and origin, so long only as their
religious tenets and the subtleties of their creed remained untouched.
Then he had seen them rise and shed their blood, yet even then only with
loud outcries and a promising display of enthusiasm. But their first
defeat had been fatal and it had required only a small number of trained
soldiers to rout them.
To make any attempt against a bold and powerful invader as the leader of
such a race would be madness; there was no choice but to rule his people
in the service of the enemy and so exert his best energies to make their
lot more endurable. His father's wiser and more experienced judgment had
decided that the better course was to serve his people as mediator
between them and the Arabs rather than to attempt futile resistance at
the head of Byzantine troops.
"Wretched and degenerate brood!" he muttered wrathfully, and he began to
consider whether he should not quit the spot and show the arrogant Arab
that one Egyptian, at any rate, still had spirit enough to resent his
contempt, or whether he should yet wait for the sake of the good cause,
and swallow down his indignation. No! he, the son of the Mukaukas, could
not--ought not to brook such treatment. Rather would he lose his life as
a rebel, or wander an exile through the world and seek far from home a
wider field for deeds of prowess, than put his free neck under the feet
of the foe.
But his reflections were disturbed by the sound of footsteps, and looking
round he saw the gleam of lanterns moving to and fro on the terrace,
turned directly on him. These must be Amru's servants come to conduct him
to their master, who, as he supposed, would now do him the honor to
receive him--tired out with hunting, no doubt, and stretched on his divan
while he imperiously informed his guest, as if he were some freed slave,
what his wishes were.
But the steps were not those of a messenger. The great general himself
had come to welcome him; the lantern-bearers were not to show the way to
Amru's couch, but to guide Amru to the "son of his dear departed friend."
The haughty Vicar of the Khaliffs was the most cordial host, prompted by
hospitality to make his guest's brief stay beneath his roof as pleasant
as possible, and giving him the right hand of welcome.
He apologized for his prolonged absence in very intelligible Greek,
having learnt it in his youth as a caravan-leader to Alexandria; he
expressed his regret at having left Orion to wait so long, blamed his
servants for not inviting him indoors and for neglecting to offer him
refreshment. As they crossed the garden-terrace he laid his hand on the
youth's shoulder, explained to him that the lion he had been pursuing,
though wounded by one of his arrows, had got away, and added that he
hoped to make good his loss by the conquest of a nobler quarry than the
beast of prey.
There was nothing for it but that the young man should return courtesy
for courtesy; nor did he find it difficult. The Arab's fine pleasant
voice, full of sincere cordiality, and the simple distinction and dignity
of his manner appealed to Orion, flattered him, gave him confidence, and
attracted him to the older man who was, besides, a valiant hero.
In his brightly-lighted room hung with costly Persian tapestry, Amru
invited his guest to share his simple hunter's supper after the Arab
fashion; so Orion placed himself on one side of the divan while the
Governor and his Vekeel--[Deputy]--Obada--a Goliath with a perfectly
black moorish face squatted rather than sat on the other, after the
manner of his people.
Amru informed his guest that the black giant knew no Greek, and he only
now and then threw in a few words which the general interpreted to Orion
when he thought fit; but the negro's remarks were not more pleasing to
the young Egyptian than his manner and appearance.
Obada had in his childhood been a slave and had worked his way up to his
present high position by his own exertions; his whole attention seemed
centred in the food before him, which he swallowed noisily and greedily,
and yet that he was able to follow the conversation very well, in spite
of his ignorance of Greek, his remarks sufficiently proved. Whenever he
looked up from the dishes, which were placed in the midst on low tables,
to put in a word, he rolled his big eyes so that only the whites remained
visible; but when he turned them on Orion, their small, black pupils
transfixed him with a keen and, as the young man thought, exceedingly
sinister glare.
The presence of this man oppressed him; he had heard of his base origin,
which to Orion's lofty ideas rendered him contemptible, of his fierce
valor, and remarkable shrewdness; and though he did not understand what
Obada said, more than once there was something in the man's tone that
brought the blood into his face and made him set his teeth. The more
kindly and delightful the effect of the Arab's speech and manner, the
more irritating and repulsive was his subordinate; and Orion was
conscious that he would have expressed himself more freely, and have
replied more candidly to many questions, if he had been alone with Amru.
At first his host made enquiries as to his residence in Constantinople
and asked much about his father; and he seemed to take great interest in
all he heard till Obada interrupted Orion, in the midst of a sentence,
with an enquiry addressed to his superior. Amru hastily answered him in
Arabic and soon after gave a fresh turn to the conversation.
The Vekeel had asked why Amru allowed that Egyptian boy to chatter so
much before settling the matter about which he had sent for him, and his
master had replied that a man is best entertained when he has most
opportunity given him for hearing himself talk; that moreover the young
man was well-informed, and that all he had to say was interesting and
important.
The Moslems drank nothing; Orion was served with capital wine, but he
took very little, and at length Amru began to speak of his father's
funeral, alluding to the Patriarch's hostility, and adding that he had
talked with him that morning and had been surprised at the marked
antagonism he had confessed towards his deceased fellow-believer, who
seemed formerly to have been his friend. Then Orion spoke out; he
explained fully what the reasons were that had moved the Patriarch to
display such conspicuous and far-reaching animosity towards his father.
All that Benjamin cared for was to stand clear in the eyes of Christendom
of the reproach of having abandoned a Christian land to conquerors who
were what Christians termed "infidels" and his aim at present was to put
his father forward as the man wholly and solely responsible for the
supremacy of the Moslems in the land.
"True, true; I understand," Amru put in, and when the young man went on
to tell him that the final breach between the Patriarch and the Mukaukas
George had been about the convent of St. Cecilia, whose rights the
prelate had tried to abrogate by an illegal interpretation of certain
ancient and perfectly clear documents; the Arab exchanged rapid glances
with the Vekeel and then broke in:
"And you? Are you disposed to submit patiently to the blow struck at you
and at your parent's worthy memory by this restless old man, who hates
you as he did your father before you?"
"Certainly not," replied the youth proudly.
"That is right!" cried the general. "That is what I expected of you; but
tell me now, with what weapons you, a Christian, propose to defy this
shrewd and powerful man, in whose hands--as I know full well--you have
placed the weal and woe, not of your souls alone. . . ."
"I do not know yet," replied Orion, and as he met a glance of scorn from
the Vekeel, he looked down.
At this Amru rose, went closer to him, and said "And you will seek them
in vain, my young friend; nor, if you found them, could you use them. It
is easier to hit a woman, an eel, a soaring bird, than these supple,
weak, unarmed, robed creatures, who have love and peace on their tongues
and use their physical helplessness as a defence, aiming invisible but
poisoned darts at those they hate--at you first and foremost, Son of the
Mukaukas; I know it and I advise you: Be on your guard! If indeed manly
revenge for this slight on your father's memory is dear to your heart you
can easily procure it--but only on one condition."
"Show it me!" cried Orion with flaming eyes. "Become one of us."
"That is what I came here for. My brain and my arm from this day forth
are at the service of the rulers of my country: yourself and our common
master the Khaliff."
"Ya Salaam--that is well!" cried Amru, laying his hand on Orion's
shoulder. "There is but one God, and yours is ours, too, for there is
none other but He! you will not have to sacrifice much in becoming a
Moslem, for we, too, count your lord Jesus as one of the prophets; and
even you must confess that the last and greatest of them is Mohammed, the
true prophet of God. Every man must acknowledge our lord Mohammed, who
does not wilfully shut his eyes to the events which have come about under
his government and in his name. Your own father admitted. . ."
"My father?"
"He was forced to admit that we are more zealous, more earnest, more
deeply possessed by our faith than you, his own fellow-believers."
"I know it."
"And when I told him that I had given orders that the desk for the reader
of the Koran in our new mosque should be discarded, because when he
stepped up to it he was uplifted above the other worshippers, the weary
Mukaukas was quite agitated with satisfaction and uttered a loud cry of
approbation. We Moslems--for that was what my commands implied--must all
be equal in the presence of God, the Eternal, the Almighty, the
All-merciful; their leader in prayer must not be raised above them, even
by a head; the teaching of the Prophet points the road to Paradise, to
all alike, we need no earthly guide to show us the way. It is our faith,
our righteousness, our good deeds that open or close the gates of heaven;
not a key in the hand of a priest. When you are one of us, no Benjamin
can embitter your happiness on earth, no Patriarch can abrogate your
claims and your father's to eternal bliss. You have chosen well, boy!
Your hand, my convert to the true faith!"
And he held out his hand to Orion with glad excitement. But the young man
did not take it; he drew back a little and said rather uneasily:
"Do not misunderstand me, great Captain. Here is my hand, and I can know
no greater honor than that of grasping yours, of wielding my sword under
your command, of wearing it out in your service and in that of my lord
the Khaliff; but I cannot be untrue to my faith."
"Then be crushed by Benjamin--you and all your people!" cried Armu,
disappointed and angry. He waved his hand with a gesture of disgust and
dismissal, and then turned to the Vekeel with a shrug, to answer the
man's scornful exclamation.
Orion looked at them in dumb indecision; but he quickly collected
himself, and said in a tone of modest but urgent entreaty:
"Nay; hear me and do not reject my petition. It could only be to my
advantage to go over to you; and yet I can resist so great a temptation;
but for that very reason I shall keep faith with you as I do to my
religion."
"Until the priests compel you to break it," interrupted the Arab roughly.
"No, no!" cried Orion. "I know that Benjamin is my foe; but I have lost a
beloved parent, and I believe in a meeting beyond the grave."
"So do I," replied the Moslem. "And there is but one Paradise and one
Hell, as there is but one God."
"What gives you this conviction?"
"My faith."
"Then forgive me if I cling to mine, and hope to see my father once more
in that Heaven. . . ."
"The heaven to which, as you fools believe, no souls but your own are
admitted! But supposing that it is open only to the immortal spirit of
Moslems and closed against Christians?--What do you know of that
Paradise? I know your sacred Scriptures--Is it described in them? But the
All-merciful allowed our Prophet to look in, and what he saw he has
described as though the Most High himself had guided his reed. The Moslem
knows what Heaven has to offer him,--but you? Your Hell, you do know;
your priests are more readier to curse than to bless. If one of you
deviates by one hair's breadth from their teaching they thrust him out
forthwith to the abode of the damned.--Me and mine, the Greek Christians,
and--take my word for it boy--first and foremost you and your father!"
"If only I were sure of finding him there!" cried Orion striking his
breast. "I really should not fear to follow him. I must meet him, must
see him again, were it in Hell itself!"
At these words the Vekeel burst into loud laughter, and when Amru
reproved him sharply the negro retorted and a vehement dialogue ensued.
Obada's contumely had roused Orion's wrath; he was longing, burning to
reduce this insolent antagonist to silence. However, he contained himself
by a supreme effort of will, till Amru turned to him once more and said
in a reserved tone, but not unkindly:
"This clear-sighted man has mentioned a suspicion which I myself had
already felt. A worldly-minded young Christian of your rank is not so
ready to give up earthly joys and happiness for the doubtful bliss of
your Paradise and when you do so and are prepared to forego all that a
man holds most dear: Honor, temporal possessions, a wide field of action,
and revenge on your enemies, to meet the spirit of the departed once more
after death, there must be some special reason in the background. Try to
compose yourself, and believe my assurances that I like you and that you
will find in me a zealous protector and a discreet friend if you will but
tell me candidly and fully what are the motives of your conduct. I myself
really desire that our interview should be fruitful of advantages on both
sides. So put your trust in a man so much your senior and your father's
friend, and speak."
"On no consideration in the presence of that man!" said Orion in a
tremulous voice. "Though he is supposed not to understand Greek, he
follows every word I say with malicious watchfulness; he dared to laugh
at me, he. . ."
"He is as discreet as he is brave, and my Vekeel," interrupted Amru
reprovingly. "If you join us you will have to obey him; and remember
this, young man. I sent for you to impose conditions on you, not to have
them dictated to me. I grant you an audience as the ruler of this
country, as the Vicar of Omar, your Khaliff and mine."
"Then I entreat you to dismiss me, for in the presence of that man my
heart and lips are sealed; I feel that he is my enemy."
"Beware of his becoming so!" cried the governor, while Obada shrugged his
shoulders scornfully.
Orion understood this gesture, and although he again succeeded in keeping
cool he felt that he could no longer be sure of himself; he bowed low,
without paying any heed to the Vekeel, and begged Amru to excuse him for
the present.
Amru, who had not failed to observe Obada's demeanor and who keenly
sympathized with what was going on in the young man's mind, did not
detain him; but his manner changed once more; he again became the
pressing host and invited his guest, as it was growing late, to pass the
night under his roof. Orion politely declined, and when at length he
quitted the room--without deigning even to look at the Negro--Amru
accompanied him into the anteroom. There he grasped the young man's hand,
and said in a low voice full of sincere and fatherly interest:
"Beware of the Negro; you let him perceive that you saw through him--it
was brave but rash. For my part I honestly wish you well."
"I believe it, I know it," replied Orion, on whose perturbed soul the
noble Arab's warm, deep accents fell like balm. "And now we are alone I
will gladly confide in you. I, my Lord, I--my father--you knew him. In
cruel wrath, before he closed his eyes, he withdrew his blessing from his
only son."
The memory of the most fearful hour of his life choked his voice for a
moment, but he soon went on: "One single act of criminal folly roused his
anger; but afterwards, in grief and penitence, I thought over my whole
life, and I saw how useless it had been; and now, when I came hither with
a heart full of glad expectancy to place all I have to offer of mind and
gifts at your disposal, I did so, my Lord, because I long to achieve
great and noble, and difficult or, if it might be, impossible deeds--to
be active, to be doing. . ."
Here he was interrupted by Amru, who said, laying his sinewy arm across
the youth's shoulders:
"And because you long to let the spirit of your dead father, that
righteous man, see that a heedless act of youthful recklessness has not
made you unworthy of his blessing; because you hope by valiant deeds to
compel his wrath to turn to approval, his scorn to esteem. . ."
"Yes, yes, that is the thing, the very thing!" Orion broke in with fiery
enthusiasm; but the Arab eagerly signed to him to lower his voice, as
though to cheat some listener, and whispered hastily, but with warm
kindliness:
"And I, I will help you in this praiseworthy endeavor. Oh, how much you
remind me of the son of my heart who, like you, erred, and who was
permitted to atone for all, for more than all by dying like a hero for
his faith on the field of battle!--Count on me, and let your purpose
become deed. In me you have found a friend.--Now, go. You shall hear from
me before long. But, once more: Do not provoke the Negro; beware of him;
and the next time you meet him subdue your pride and make as though you
had never seen him before."
He looked sadly at Orion, as though the sight of him revived some loved
image in his mind, kissed his brow, and as soon as the youth had left the
anteroom he hastily drew open the curtain that hung across the door into
the dining-room.--A few steps behind it stood the Vekeel, who was
arranging the straps of his sword-belt.
"Listener!" exclaimed the Arab with intense scorn, "you, a man of gifts,
a man of deeds! A hero in battle and in council; lion, serpent, and toad
in one! When will you cast out of your soul all that is contemptible and
base? Be what you have made yourself, not what you were; do not
constantly remind the man who helped you to rise that you were born of a
slave!"
"My Lord!" began the Moor, and the whites of his rolling eyes were
ominously conspicuous in his black face. But Amru took the words out of
his mouth and went on in stern and determined reproof:
"You behaved to that noble youth like an idiot, like a buffoon at a fair,
like a madman."
"To Hell with him!" cried Obada, "I hate the gilded upstart."
"Envious wretch! Do not provoke him! Times change, and the day may come
when you will have reason to fear him."
"Him?" shrieked the other. "I could crush the puppet like a fly! And he
shall live to know it."
"Your turn first and then his!" said Amru. "To us he is the more
important of the two--yes, he, the up start, the puppet. Do you hear? Do
you understand? If you touch a hair of his head, it will cost you your
nose and ears! Never for an hour forget that you live--and ought not to
live--only so long as two pairs of lips are sealed. You know whose. That
clever head remains on your shoulders only as long as they choose. Cling
to it, man; you have only one to lose! It was necessary, my lord Vekeel,
to remind you of that once more!"
The Negro groaned like a wounded beast and sullenly panted out: "This is
the reward of past services; these are the thanks of Moslem to
Moslem!--And all for the sake of a Christian dog."
"You have had thanks, and more than are your due," replied Amru more
calmly. "You know what you pledged yourself to before I raised you to be
my Vekeel for the sake of your brains and your sword, and what I had to
overlook before I did so--not on your behalf, but for the great cause of
Islam. And, if you wish to remain where you are, you will do well to
sacrifice your wild ambition. If you cannot, I will send you back to the
army, and to-day rather than to-morrow; and if you carry it with too high
a hand you will find yourself at Medina in fetters, with your
death-warrant stuck in your girdle."
The Negro again groaned sullenly; but his master was not to be checked.
"Why should you hate this youth? Why, a child could see through it! In
the son and heir of George you see the future Mukaukas, while you are
cherishing the insane wish to become the Mukaukas yourself."
"And why should such a wish be insane?" cried the other in a harsh voice.
"Putting you out of the question, who is there here that is shrewder or
stronger than I?"
"No Moslem, perhaps. But neither you nor any other true believer will
succeed to the dead man's office, but an Egyptian and a Christian.
Prudence requires it, and the Khaliff commands it."
"And does he also command that this curled ape shall be left in
possession of his millions?"
"So that is what you covet, you greedy curmudgeon--that is it? Do not all
the crimes you have committed out of avarice weigh upon you heavily
enough? Gold, and yet more gold--that is the end, the foul end, of all
your desires. A fat morsel, no doubt: the Mukaukas' estates, his talents
of gold, his gems, slaves, and horses; I admit that. But thank God the
All-merciful, we are not thieves and robbers!"
"And who was it that dug out the hidden millions from beneath the
reservoir of Peter the Egyptian, and who made him bite the dust?"
"I--I. But--as you know--only to send the money to Medina. Peter had
hidden it before we killed him. The Mukaukas and his son have declared
all their possessions to the uttermost dinar and hide of land; they have
faithfully paid the taxes, and consequently their property belongs to
them as our swords, our horses, our wives belong to you or me. What will
not your grasping spirit lead you to!--Take your hand from your
dagger!--Not a copper coin from them shall fall into your hungry maw, so
help me God! Do not again cast an evil eye on the Mukaukas' son! Do not
try my patience too far, man, or else--Hold your head tight on your
shoulders or you will have to seek it at your feet; and what I say I
mean!--Now, good-night! To-morrow morning in the divan you are to explain
your scheme for the new distribution of the land; it will not suit me in
any way, and I shall have other projects to propose for discussion."
With this the Arab turned his back on the Vekeel; but no sooner had the
door closed on him than Obada clenched his fist in fury at his lord and
master, who had hitherto said nothing of his having had purloined a
portion of the consignment of gold which Amru had charged him to escort
to Medina. Then he rushed up and down the room, snorting and foaming till
slaves came in to clear the tables.
CHAPTER XXV.
Orion made his way home under the moonlit and starry night. He held his
head high, and not since that evening on the water with Paula had he felt
so glad or so hopeful. On the other side of the bridge he did not at once
turn his horse's head homewards; the fresh night air was so delightful,
his heart beat so high that he shrunk from the oppression of a room. Full
of renewed life, freed from a burden as it were, he made his way at a
round pace to the house that held his beloved, picturing to himself how
gladly she would welcome the news that he had found Amru ready to
encourage him in his projects, indeed, to be a fatherly friend.
The Arab general, whose lofty character, intellect, and rectitude his
father had esteemed highly, had impressed him, too, as the ideal of noble
manliness, and as he compared him with the highest officials and warriors
he had met at the Court of Byzantium he could not help smiling. By the
side of this dignified, but impetuous and warm-hearted man they appeared
like the old, rigid idols of his ancestors in comparison with the
freely-wrought works of Greek art. He could bless the memory of his
father for having freed the land from that degenerate race. Now, he felt,
that lost parent, whose image lived in his soul, was satisfied with him,
and this gave him a sense of happiness which he meant to cling to and
enhance by every thought and deed in the future. "Life is a function, a
ministry, and a duty!" this watchword, which had been given him by those
beloved lips, should keep him in the new path; and soon he hoped to feel
sure of himself, to be able to look back on such deeds of valor as would
give him a right in his own judgment to unite his lot to that of this
noblest of women.
Full of such thoughts as these, he made his way to the house of Rufinus.
The windows of the corner room on the upper floor were lighted up; two of
these windows looked out on the river and the quay. He did not know which
rooms were Paula's, but he looked up at the late-burning light with a
vague feeling that it must be hers; a female figure which now appeared
framed in the opening, showed him that he was not mistaken; it was that of
Perpetua. The sound of hoofs had roused her curiosity, but she did not
seem to recognize him in the dim starlight.
He slowly rode past, and when he presently turned back and again looked
up, in the hope this time of seeing Paula, the place was vacant: however,
he perceived a tall dark shadow moving across from one side of the room
to the other, which could not be that of the nurse nor of her slender
mistress. It must indeed be that of a remarkably big man, and stopping to
gaze with anxious and unpleasant apprehension, he plainly recognized
Philippus.
It was past midnight. How could he account for his being with Paula at
this hour?--Was she ill?--Was this room hers after all?--Was it merely by
chance that the nurse was in Rufinus' room with the physician.
No. The woman whom he could now see pass across the window and go
straight up to the man, with outstretched hands, was Paula and none
other. Isis heart was already beating fast, and now a suspicion grew
strong in him which his vanity had hitherto held in check, though he had
often seen the friendly relations that subsisted between Paula and the
leech.--Perhaps it was a warmer feeling than friendship and guileless
trust, which had led her so unreservedly to claim this man's protection
and service. Could he have won Paula's heart--Paula's love?
Was it conceivable!--But why not?
What was there against Philippus but his homely face and humble birth?
And how many a woman had he not seen set her heart on quite other things!
The physician was not more than five years his senior; and recalling the
expression in his eyes as he looked at Paula only that morning Orion felt
more and more uneasy.
Philippus loved Paula.--A trifling incident suddenly occurred to his mind
which made him certain on that point; he had only too much experience in
such matters. Yesterday, it had struck him that ever since his father's
death--that was ever since Paula's change of residence--Philippus dressed
more carefully than had been his wont. "Now this," thought he, "is a
change that does not come over so serious a man unless it is caused by
love."
A mingled torment of pain and rage shot through him as he again saw the
tall shadow cross the window. For the first time in his life he felt the
pangs of jealousy, which he had so often laughed at in his friends; but
was it not absurd to allow it to torture him; was he not sure, since that
morning's meeting, quite sure of Paula? And Philippus! Even if he, Orion,
must retire into the background before a higher judge, in the eyes of a
woman he surely had the advantage!--But in spite of all this it troubled
him to know that the physician was with Paula at such an hour; he angrily
pulled his horse's head round, and it was a pleasure to him to feel the
fiery creature, unused as it was to such rough treatment, turn restive at
it now. By the time he had gone a hundred steps from those windows with
their cursed glare, the horse was displaying all the temper and vice that
had been taken out of him as a foal. Orion had to fight a pitched battle
with his steed, and it was a relief to him to exercise his power with
curb and knee. In vain did the creature dance round and round; in vain
did he rear and plunge; the steady rider was his master; and it was not
till he had brought him to quietness and submission that Orion drew
breath and looked about him while he patted the horse's smooth neck.
Close at hand, behind a low hedge, spread the thick, dark groves of
Susannah's garden and between them the back of the house was visible,
being more brilliantly lighted than even Paula's rooms. Three of the
windows showed lights; two were rather dim, however, the result probably
of one lamp only.
All this could not matter to him; nevertheless he remained gazing at the
roof of the colonnade which went round the house below the upper floor;
for, on the terrace it formed, leaning against a window-frame, stood a
small figure with her head thrust so far forth to listen that the light
shone through the curls that framed it. Katharina was trying to overhear
a dialogue between the Patriarch Benjamin--whose bearded and apostolic
head Orion could clearly recognize--and the priest John, an insignificant
looking little man, of whom, however, the deceased Mukaukas had testified
that he was far superior to old Plotinus the Bishop in intellect and
energy.
The young man could easily have watched Katharina's every movement, but
he did not think it worth while. Nevertheless, as he rode on, the
water-wagtail's little figure dwelt in his mind; not alone, however, for
that of Paula immediately rose by her side; and the smaller Katharina's
seemed, the more ample and noble did the other appear. Every word he had
heard that day from Paula's lips rushed to his remembrance, and the vivid
and lovely memory drove out all care. That woman, who only a few hours
since, had declared herself ready, with him, to hope all things, to
believe all things, and to accept his protection--that lordly maiden whom
he had been glad to bid fix her eye, with him, on the goal of his future
efforts, whose pure gaze could restrain his passion and impetuosity as by
a charm, and who yet granted him the right to strive to possess her--that
proud daughter of heroes, whom even his father would have clasped to his
heart as a daughter--was it possible that she should betray him like some
pleasure-seeking city beauty? Could she forget her dignity as a
woman?--No! and a thousand times no. To doubt her was to insult her--was
to wrong her and himself.
The physician loved her; but it certainly was not any warmer feeling than
friendship on her part that made her receive him at this late hour. The
shame would be his own, if he ever again allowed such base suspicion to
find place in his soul!
He breathed a deep sigh of relief. And when his servant, who had lingered
to pay the toll at the bridge, came up with him, Orion dismounted and
desired him to lead his horse home, for he himself wished to return on
foot, alone with his thoughts. He walked meditatively and slowly under
the sycamores, but he had not gone far when, on the other side of the
deserted road, he heard some one overtaking him with long, quick strides.
He recognized the leech Philippus at a glance and was glad, for this
proved to him how senseless and unjust his doubts had been, and how
little ground he had for regarding the physician as a rival; for indeed
this man did not look like a happy lover. He hurried on with his head
bent, as though under a heavy burthen, and clasped his hand to his
forehead with a gesture of despair. No, this nocturnal wanderer had left
no hour of bliss behind him; and if his demeanor was calculated to rouse
any feeling it was not envy, but pity.
Philippus did not heed Orion; absorbed in himself, he strode on, moaning
dully, as if in pain. For a few minutes he disappeared into a house
whence came loud cries of suffering, and when he came out again, he
walked on, shaking his head now and then, as a man who sees many things
happen which his understanding fails to account for.
The end of his walk was a large, palatial building. The stucco had fallen
off in places, and in the upper story the windows had been broken away
till their open ings were a world too wide. In former times this house
had accommodated the State officers of Finance for the province, and the
ground-floor rooms had been suitably and comfortably fitted up for the
Ideologos--the supreme controller of this department, who usually resided
at Alexandria, but who often spent some weeks at Memphis when on a tour
of inspection. But the Arabians had transferred the management of the
finances of the whole country to the new capital of Fostat on the other
shore of the river, and that of the monetary affairs of the decaying city
had been incorporated with the treasurer's department of the Mukaukas'
household. The senate of the city had found the expense of this huge
building too heavy, and had been well content to let the lower rooms to
Philippus and his Egyptian friend, Horapollo.
The two men occupied different rooms, but the same slaves attended to
their common housekeeping and also waited on the physician's assistant, a
modest and well-informed Alexandrian.
When Philippus entered his old friend's lofty and spacious study he found
him still up, sitting before a great number of rolls of manuscript, and
so absorbed in his work that he did not notice his late-coming comrade
till the leech bid him good-evening. His only reply was an unintelligible
murmur, for some minutes longer the old man was lost in study; at last,
however, he looked up at Philippus, impatiently tossing an ivory
ruler-which he had been using to open and smooth the papyrus on to the
table; and at the same moment a dark bundle under it began to move--this
was the old man's slave who had long been sleeping there.
Three lamps on the writing-table threw a bright light on the old man and
his surroundings, while the physician, who had thrown himself on a couch
in a corner of the large room, remained in the dark.
What startled the midnight student was his housemate's unwonted silence;
it disturbed him as the cessation of the clatter of the wheel disturbs a
man who lives in a mill. He looked at his friend with surprised enquiry,
but Philippus was dumb, and the old man turned once more to his rolls of
manuscript. But he had lost the necessary concentration; his brown hand,
in which the blue veins stood out like cords, fidgeted with the scrolls
and the ivory rule, and his sunken lips, which had before been firmly
closed, were now twitching restlessly.
The man's whole aspect was singular and not altogether pleasing: his lean
brown figure was bent with age, his thoroughly Egyptian face, with broad
cheekbones and outstanding ears, was seamed and wrinkled like oak-bark;
his scalp was bare of its last hair, and his face clean-shaved, but for a
few tufts of grey hair by way of beard, sprouting from the deep furrows
on his cheeks and chin, like reeds from the narrow bed of a brook; the
razor could not reach them there, and they gave him an untidy and
uncared-for appearance. His dress answered to his face--if indeed that
could be called dress which consisted of a linen apron and a white
kerchief thrown over his shoulders after sundown. Still, no one meeting
him in the road could have taken him for a beggar; for his linen was fine
and as white as snow, and his keen, far-seeing eyes, above which, exactly
in the middle, his bristly eyebrows grew strangely long and thick, shone
and sparkled with clear intelligence, firm self-reliance, and a repellent
severity which would no more have become an intending mendicant than the
resolute and often scornful expression which played about his lips. There
was nothing amiable, nothing prepossessing, nothing soft in this man's
face; and those who knew what his life had been could not wonder that the
years had failed to sweeten his abrupt and contradictory acerbity or to
transmute them into that kindly forbearance which old men, remembering
how often they have stumbled and how many they have seen fall, sometimes
find pleasure in practising.
He had been born, eighty years before, in the lovely island of Philae,
beyond the cataract in the district of the temple of Isis, and under the
shadow of the only Egyptian sanctuary in which the heathen cultus was
kept up, and that publicly, as late as in his youth. Since Theodosius the
Great, one emperor and one Praefectus Augustalis after another had sent
foot-soldiers and cavalry above the falls to put an end to idolatry in
the beautiful isle; but they had always been routed or destroyed by the
brave Blemmyes who haunted the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea.
These restless nomad tribes acknowledged the Isis of Philae as their
tutelary goddess, and, by a very ancient agreement, the image of their
patroness was carried every year by her priests in a solemn procession to
the Blemmyes, and then remained for a few weeks in their keeping.
Horapollo's father was the last of the horoscope readers, and his
grandfather had been the last high-priest of the Isis of Philae. His
childhood had been passed on the island but then a Byzantine legion had
succeeded in beating the Blemmyes, in investing the island, and in
plundering and closing the temple. The priests of Isis escaped the
imperial raid and Horapollo had spent all his early years with his
father, his grandfather, and two younger sisters, in constant peril and
flight. His youthful spirit was unremittingly fed with hatred of the
persecutors, the cruel contemners and exterminators of the faith of his
forefathers; and this hatred rose to irreconcilable bitterness after the
massacre at Antioch where the imperial soldiery fell upon all his family,
and his grandfather and two innocent sisters were murdered. These horrors
were committed at the instigation of the Bishop, who denounced the
Egyptian strangers as idolaters, and to whom the Roman prefect, a proud
and haughty patrician, had readily lent the support of an armed force. It
was owing to the narrowest chance--or, as the old man would have it, to
the interposition of great Isis, that his father had been so happy as to
get away with him and the treasures he had brought from the temple at
Philae. Thus they had means to enable them to travel farther under an
assumed name, and they finally settled in Alexandria. Here the persecuted
youth changed his name, Horus, to its Greek equivalent, and henceforth he
was known at home and in the schools as Apollo. He was highly gifted by
nature, and availed himself with the utmost zeal of the means of learning
that abounded in Alexandria; he labored indefatigably and dug deep into
every field of Greek science, gaining, under his father's guidance, all
the knowledge of Egyptian horoscopy, which was not wholly lost even at
this late period.
In the midst of the contentious Christian sects of the capital, both
father and son remained heathen and worshippers of Isis; and when the old
priest died at an advanced age, Horapollo moved to Memphis where he led
the quiet and secluded life of a student, mingling only now and then with
the astronomers, astrologers, and calendar-makers at the observatory, or
visiting the alchemists' laboratories, where, even in Christian Egypt,
they still devoted themselves to attempts to transmute the baser into the
noble metals. Alchemists and star-readers alike soon detected the old
man's superior knowledge, and in spite of his acrid and often
offensively-repellent demeanor, took counsel of him on difficult
questions. His fame had even reached the Arabs, and, when it was
necessary to find the exact direction towards Mecca for the prayer niche
in Amru's new mosque, he was appealed to, and his decision was final.
Philippus had, some years since, been called to the old man's bedside in
sickness, and being then a beginner and in no great request, he had given
the best of his time and powers to the case. Horapollo had been much
attracted by the young physician's wide culture and earnest studiousness;
he had conceived a warm liking for him, the warmest perhaps that he had
ever felt for any fellow-human since the death of his own family. At last
the elder took the younger man into his heart with such overflowing
affection, that it seemed as though his spirit longed to make up now for
the stint of love it had hitherto shown. No father could have clung to
his son with more fervent devotion, and when a relapse once more brought
him to death's door he took Philippus wholly into his confidence,
unrolled before his eyes the scroll of his inner and outer life from its
beginnings, and made him his heir on condition that he should abide by
him to the end.
Philippus, who, from the first, had felt a sympathetic attraction to this
venerable and talented man, agreed to the bargain; and when he
subsequently became associated with the old man in his studies, assisting
him from time to time, Horapollo desired that he would help him to
complete a work he hoped to finish before he died. It was a treatise on
hieroglyphic writing, and was to interpret the various signs so far as
was still possible, and make them intelligible to posterity.
The old man disliked writing anything but Egyptian, using Greek
unwillingly and clumsily, so he entrusted to his young friend the task of
rendering his explanations into that language. Thus the two men--so
different in age and character, but so closely allied in intellectual
aims--led a joint existence which was both pleasant and helpful to both,
in spite of the various eccentricities, the harshness and severity of the
elder.
Horapollo lived after the manner of the early Egyptian priests,
subjecting himself to much ablution and shaving; eating little but bread,
vegetables, and poultry, and abstaining from pulse and the flesh of all
beasts--not merely of the prohibited animal, swine; wearing nothing but
pure linen clothing, and setting apart certain hours for the recitation
of those heathen forms of prayer whose magic power was to compel the gods
to grant the desires of those who thus appealed to them.
And if the old man had given his full confidence to Philippus, the leech,
on his part, had no secrets from him; or, if he withheld anything,
Horapollo, with wonderful acumen, was at once aware of it. Philippus had
often spoken of Paula to his parental friend, describing her charms with
all the fervor of a lover, but the old man was already prejudiced against
her, if only as the daughter of a patrician and a prefect. All who bore
these titles were to him objects of hatred, for a patrician and a prefect
had been guilty of the blood of those he had held most dear. The Governor
of Antioch, to be sure, had acted only under the orders of the bishop;
but old Horapollo, and his father before him, from the first had chosen
to throw all the blame on the prefect, for it afforded some satisfaction
to the descendant of an ancestral race of priests to be able to vent all
his wrathful spite on any one rather than on the minister of a god--be
that god who or what he might.
So when Philippus praised Paula's dignified grandeur, her superior
elegance, the height of her stature or the loftiness of her mind, the old
man would bound up exclaiming: "Of course--of course!--Beware boy,
beware! You are disguising haughtiness, conceit, and arrogance under
noble names. The word 'patrician' includes everything we can conceive of
as most insolent and inhuman; and those apes in purple who disgrace the
Imperial throne pick out the worst of them, the most cold-hearted and
covetous, to make prefects of them. And as they are, so are their
children! Everything which they in their vainglory regard as 'beneath
them' they tread into the dust--and we--you and I, all who labor with
their hands in the service of the state--we, in their dull eyes, are
beneath them. Mark me, boy! To-day the governor's daughter, the patrician
maiden, can smile at you because she needs you; tomorrow she will cast
you aside as I push away the old panther-skin which keeps my feet warm in
winter, as soon as the March days come!"
Nor was his aversion less for the son of the Mukaukas, whom, however, he
had never seen; when the leech had confessed to him how deep a grudge
against Orion dwelt in the heart of Paula, old Horapollo had chuckled
scornfully, and he exclaimed, as though he could read hearts and look
into the future--: "They snap at each other now, and in a day or two they
will kiss again! Hatred and love are the opposite ends of the same rod;
and how easily it is reversed!--Those two!--Like in blood is like in
kind;--such people attract each other as the lodestone tends towards the
iron and the iron towards the lodestone!"
But these and similar admonitions had produced little effect on the
physician's sentiments; even Paula's repulse of his ardent appeal after
she had moved to the house of Rufinus had failed to extinguish his hope
of winning her at last. This very morning, in the course of the
discussion as to the stewardship of her fortune, Paula had been ready and
glad to accept him as her Kyrios--her legal protector and representative;
but he now thought that he could perceive by various signs that his
venerable friend was right: that the rod had been reversed, and that
aversion had been transformed to love in the girl's heart. The anguish of
this discovery was hard to bear. And yet Paula had never shown him such
hearty warmth of manner, never had she spoken to him in a voice so soft
and so full of feeling, as this evening in the garden. More cheerful and
talkative than usual, she had constantly turned to address him, while he
had felt his pain and torment of mind gradually eased, till in him too,
sentiment had blossomed anew, and his intellectual power had expanded.
Never--so he believed--had he expressed his thoughts better or more
brilliantly than in that hour. Nor had she withheld her approval; she had
heartily agreed with his views; and when, half an hour before midnight,
he had gone with her to visit his patients, rapturous hopes had sprung
once more in his breast. Ecstatically happy, like a man intoxicated, he
had, by her own desire, accompanied her into her sitting-room, and
then--and there. . . .
Poor, disappointed man, sitting on the divan in a dark corner of the
spacious room! In his soul hitherto the intellect had alone made itself
heard, the voice of the heart had never been listened to.
How he had found his way home he never knew. All he remembered was that,
in the course of duty, he had gone into the house of a man whose
wife--the mother of several children--he had left at noon in a dying
state; that he had seen her a corpse, surrounded by loud but sincere
mourners; that he had gone on his way, weighed down by their grief and
his own, and that he had entered his friend's rooms rather than his own,
to feel safe from himself. Life had no charm, no value for him now;
still, he felt ashamed to think that a woman could thus divert him from
the fairest aims of life, that he could allow her to destroy the peace of
mind he needed to enable him to carry out his calling in the spirit of
his friend Rufinus. He knew his house-mate well and felt that he would
only pour vitriol into his wounds, but it was best so. The old man had
already often tried to bring down Paula's image from its high pedestal in
his soul, but always in vain; and even now he should not succeed. He
would mar nothing, scatter nothing to the winds, tread nothing in the
dust but the burning passion, the fevered longing for her, which had
fired his blood ever since that night when he had vanquished the raving
Masdakite. That old sage by the table, on whose stern, cold features the
light fell so brightly, was the very man to accomplish such a work of
destruction, and Philippus awaited his first words as a wounded man
watches the surgeon heating the iron with which to cauterize the sore.
Poor disappointed wretch, sorely in need of a healing hand!
He lay back on the divan, and saw how his friend leaned over his scroll
as if listening, and fidgeted up and down in his arm-chair.
It was clear that Horapollo was uneasy at Philippus' long silence, and
his pointed eyebrows, raised high on his brow, plainly showed that he was
drawing his own conclusions from it--no doubt the right ones. The peace
must soon be broken, and Philippus awaited the attack. He was prepared
for the worst; but how could he bring himself to make his torturer's task
easy for him. Thus many minutes slipped away; while the leech was waiting
for the old man to speak, Horapollo waited for Philippus. However, the
impatience and curiosity of the elder were stronger than the young man's
craving for comfort; he suddenly laid down the roll of manuscript,
impatiently snatched up the ivory stick which he had thrown aside, set
his heavy seat at an angle with a shove of amazing vigor for his age,
turned full on Philippus, and asked him, in a loud voice, pointing his
ruler at him as if threatening him with it:
"So the play is out. A tragedy, of course!"
"Hardly, since I am still alive," replied the other.
"But there is inward bleeding, and the wound is painful," retorted the
old man. Then, after a short pause, he went on: "Those who will not
listen must feel! The fox was warned of the trap, but the bait was too
tempting! Yesterday there would still have been time to pull his foot out
of the spring, if only he had sincerely desired it; he knew the hunter's
guile. Now the foe is down on the victim; he has not spared his weapons,
and there lies the prey dumb with pain and ignominy, cursing his own
folly.--You seem inclined for silence this evening. Shall I tell you just
how it all came about?"
"I know only too well," said Philippus.
"While I, to be sure, can only imagine it!" growled the old man. "So long
as that patrician hussy needed the poor beast of burthen she could pet it
and throw barley and dates to it. Now she is rolling in gold and living
under a sheltering roof, and hey presto, the discarded protector is sent
to the right about in no time. This mistress of the hearts of our weak
and bondage-loving sex raises this rich Adonis to fill the place of the
hapless, overgrown leech, just as the sky lets the sun rise when the pale
moon sinks behind the hills. If that is not the fact give me the lie!"
"I only wish I could," sighed Philippus. "You have seen rightly,
wonderfully rightly--and yet, as wrongly as possible."
"Dark indeed!" said the old man quietly. "But I can see even in the dark.
The facts are certain, though you are still so blinded as not to see
their first cause. However, I am satisfied to know that your delusion has
come to so abrupt, and in my opinion so happy, an end. To its cause--a
woman, as usual--I am perfectly indifferent. Why should I needlessly
ascribe to her any worse sin than she had committed? If only for your
sake I will avoid doing so, for an honorable soul clings to those whom it
sees maligned. Still, it seems to me that it is for you to speak, not for
me. I should know you for a philosopher, without such persistent silence;
and as for myself, I am not altogether bereft of curiosity, in spite of
my eighty years."
At this Philippus hastily rose and pacing the room while he spoke, or
pausing occasionally in front of the old man, he poured out with glowing
cheeks and eager gestures, the history of his hopes and sufferings--how
Paula had filled him with fresh confidence, and had invited him to her
rooms--only to show him her whole heart; she had been strongly moved,
surprised at herself, but unable and unwilling to conceal from him the
happiness that had come into her life. She had spoken to him, her best
friend, as a burthened soul pours itself out to a priest: had confessed
all that she had felt since the funeral of the deceased Mukaukas, and
said that she felt convinced now that Orion had come to a right mind
again after his great sin.
"And that there, was so much joy over him in heaven," interrupted
Horapollo, "that she really could not delay doing her cast-off lover the
honor of inviting his sympathy!"
"On the contrary. It was with the utmost effort that she uttered all her
heart prompted her to tell; she had nothing to look for from me but
mockery, warning, and reproach, and yet she opened her heart to me."
"But why? To what end?" shrieked the old man. "Shall I tell you. Because
a man who is a friend must still be half a lover, and a woman cannot bear
to give up even a quarter of one."
"Not so!" exclaimed Philippus, indignantly interrupting him. "It was
because she esteems and values me,--because she regards me as a brother,
and--I am not a vain man--and could not bear--those were her very
words--to cheat me of my affection for even an hour! It was noble, it was
generous, worthy of her! And though every fibre of my nature rebelled I
found myself compelled to admire her sincerity, her true friendship, her
disregard of her own feelings, and her womanly tenderness!--Nay, do not
interrupt me again, do not laugh at me. It is no small matter for a proud
girl, conscious of her own dignity, to lay bare her heart's weakness to a
man who, as she knows, loves her, as she did just now to me. She called
me her benefactor and said she would be a sister to me; and whatever
motive you--who hate her out of a habit of prejudice without really
knowing her--may choose to ascribe her conduct to, I--I believe in her,
and understand her.
"Could I refuse to grasp the hand she held out to me as she entreated me
with tears in her eyes to be still her friend, her protector, and her
Kyrios! And yet, and yet!--Where shall I find resolution enough to ask of
her who excites me to the height of passion no more than a kind glance, a
clasp of the hand, an intelligent interest in what I say? How am I to
preserve self-control, calmness, patience, when I see her in the arms of
that handsome young demi-god whom I scorned only yesterday as a worthless
scoundrel? What ice may cool the fire of this burning heart? What spear
can transfix the dragon of passion which rages here? I have lived almost
half my life without ever feeling or yearning for the love of which the
poets sing. I have never known anything of such feelings but through the
pangs of some friend whose weakness had roused my pity; and now, when
love has come upon me so late with all its irresistible force--has
subjugated me, cast me into bondage--how shall I, how can I get free?
"My faithful friend, you who call me your son, whom I am glad to hear
speak to me as 'boy,' and 'child,' who have taken the place of the father
I lost so young--there is but one issue: I must leave you and this
city--flee from her neighborhood--seek a new home far from her with whom
I could have been as happy as the Saints in bliss, and who has made me
more wretched than the damned in everlasting fire. Away, away! I will
go--I must go unless you, who can do so much, can teach me to kill this
passion or to transmute it into calm, brotherly regard."
He stood still, close in front of the old man and hid his face in his
hands. At his favorite's concluding words, Horapollo had started to his
feet with all the vigor of youth; he now snatched his hand down from his
face, and exclaimed in a voice hoarse with indignation and the deepest
concern:
"And you can say that in earnest? Can a sensible man like you have sunk
so deep in folly? Is it not enough that your own peace of mind should
have been sacrificed, flung at the feet of this--what can I call her?--Do
you understand at last why I warned you against the Patrician brood?--The
faith, gratitude, and love of a good man!--What does she care for them?
Unhook the whiting; away with him in the dust! Here comes a fine large
fish who perhaps may swallow the bait!--Do you want to ruin, for her
sake, and the sake of that rascally son of the governor, the comfort and
happiness of an old man's last years when he has become accustomed to
love you, who so well deserve it, as his own son? Will you--an energetic
student, you--a man of powerful intellect, zealous in your duty, and in
favor with the gods--will you pine like a deserted maiden or spring from
the Leucadian rock like love-sick Sappho in the play while the spectators
shake with laughter? You must stay, Boy, you must stay; and I will show
you how a man must deal with a passion that dishonors him."
"Show me," replied Philippus in a dull voice. "I ask no more. Do you
suppose that I am not myself ashamed of my own weakness? It ill beseems
me of all men, formed by fate for anything rather than to be a sighing
and rapturous lover. I will struggle with it, wrestle with it with all
the strength that is in me; but here, in Memphis, close to her and as her
Kyrios, I should be forced every day to see her, and day after day be
exposed to fresh and humiliating defeat! Here, constantly near her and
with her, the struggle must wear me out--I should perish, body and soul.
The same place, the same city, cannot hold her and me."
"Then she must make way for you," croaked Horus. Philippus raised his
bowed head and asked, in some surprise and with stern reproof:
"What do you mean by that?"
"Nothing," replied the other airily. He shrugged his shoulders and went
on more gently: "Memphis has greater need of you than of the patrician
hussy." Then he shook himself as if he were cold, struck his breast and
added: "All is turmoil here within; I can neither help nor advise you.
Day must soon be dawning in the east; we will try to sleep. A knot can
often be untied by daylight which by lamplight seems inextricable, and
perhaps on my sleepless couch the goddess may reveal to me the way I have
promised to show you. A little more lightness of heart would do neither
of us any harm.--Try to forget your own griefs in those of others; you
see enough of them every day. To wish you a good night would probably be
waste of words, but I may wish you a soothing one, You may count on my
aid; but you will not let me, a poor old man, hear another word about
flight and departure and the like, will you? No, no. I know you better,
Philippus--you will never treat your lonely old friend so!"
These were the tenderest words that the leech had ever heard from the old
man's lips, and it comforted him when Horapollo pressed him to his heart
in a hasty embrace. He thought no more of the hint that it was Paula's
part to make room for him. But the old man had spoken in all seriousness,
for, no sooner was he alone than he petulantly flung down the ivory ruler
on the table, and murmured, at first angrily and then scornfully, his
eyes sparkling the while:
"For this true heart, and to preserve myself and the world from losing
such a man, I would send a dozen such born hussies to Amentis--[The
Nether world of the ancient Egyptians.]--Hey, hey! My beauty! So this
noble leech is not good enough for the like of us; he may be tossed away
like a date-stone that we spit out? Well, every one to his taste; but how
would it be if old Horapollo taught us his value? Wait a bit, wait!--With
a definite aim before my eyes I have never yet failed to find my way--in
the realm of science, of course; but what is life--the life of the sage
but applied knowledge? And why should not old Horapollo, for once before
he dies, try what his brains can contrive to achieve in the busy world of
outside human existence? Pleasant as you may think it to be in Memphis
with your lover, fair heart-breaker, you will have to make way for the
plaything you have so lightly tossed aside! Aye, you certainly will,
depend upon that my beauty, depend upon that!--Here, Anubis!"
He gave the slave, who had fallen asleep again under the table, a kick
with his bare foot, and while Anubis lighted his master to his
sleeping-room, and helped him in his long and elaborate ablutions,
Horapollo never ceased muttering broken sentences and curses, or laughing
maliciously to himself.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A knot can often be untied by daylight
Hatred and love are the opposite ends of the same rod
Life is a function, a ministry, a duty
So hard is it to forego the right of hating
Those who will not listen must feel
Use their physical helplessness as a defence
THE BRIDE OF THE NILE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 7.
CHAPTER I.
If Philippus found no sleep that night, neither did Orion. He no longer
doubted Paula, but his heart was full of longing to hear her say once
more that she loved him and him alone, and the yearning kept him awake.
He sprang from his bed at the first glimmer of dawn, glad that the night
was past, and started to cross the Nile in order to place half of Paula's
fortune in the hands of Salech, the brother of Haschim the merchant.
In Memphis all was still silent, and all he saw in the old town struck
him as strangely worn-out, torpid, and decayed; it seemed only fit to be
left to ruin, while on the other side of the river, in the new town of
Fostat, on all hands busy, eager, new-born vitality met his eyes.
He involuntarily compared the old capital of the Pharaohs to a time-eaten
mummy, and Amru's new city to a vigorous youth. Here every one was astir
and in brisk activity. The money-changer, who had risen, like all
Moslems, to perform his morning prayer, "as soon as a white thread could
be distinguished from a black one," was already busy with his rolls of
gold and silver coin; and how quick, clear, and decisive the Arab was in
concluding his bargain with Orion and with Nilus, who had accompanied
him!
Whichever way the young man turned, bright and flashing eyes met his
gaze, energetic, resolute, and enterprising faces; no bowed heads, no
dull, brooding looks, no gloomy resignation like those in his native town
on the other shore. Here, in Fostat, his blood flowed more swiftly;
there, existence was an oppressive burden. Everything attracted him to
the Arabs!
The changer's shop, like all those in the Sook or Bazaar of Fostat,
consisted of a wooden stall in which he sat with his assistants. On the
side open to the street he transacted business with his customers, who,
when the affair promised to be lengthy, were invited by the Arab to seat
themselves with him on his little platform.
Orion and Nilus had accepted such an invitation, and it happened that,
while they sat in treaty with Salech, visible to the passers-by, the
Vekeel Obada, who had so deeply stirred the wrath of the governor's son
on the previous evening, came by, close to him. To Orion's amazement he
greeted him with great amiability, and he, remembering Amru's warning,
responded, though not without an effort, to his hated foe's civility.
When Obada passed the stall a second and a third time, Orion felt that he
was watching him; however, it was quite possible that the Vekeel might
also have business with the money-changer and be waiting only for the
conclusion of his.
At any rate Orion ere long forgot the incident, for matters of more
pressing importance claimed his attention at home.
As often happens, the death of one man had changed everything in his
house so utterly as to make it unlike the same; though his removal had
made it neither richer nor poorer, and though his secluded presence of
late had scarcely had an appreciable influence. The rooms formerly so
full of life now seemed dead. Petitioners and suppliants no longer
crowded the anteroom, and all visits of condolence had, according to the
ancient custom, been received on the day after the funeral. The Lady
Neforis had ceased fussing and bustling, the clatter of her keys and her
scolding were no longer to be heard; she sat apart, either in her
sleeping-room or the cool hall with the fountain which had been her
husband's favorite room, excepting when she was at church whither she
went twice every day. She returned from thence with the same weary,
abstracted expression that she took there, and any one seeing her lying
on the divan which her husband had formerly occupied, idly absorbed in
gloomy thought, would hardly have recognized her as the same woman who
had but lately been so active and managing. She did not exactly mourn or
bewail her loss; indeed, she had no tears for her grief, as though she
had shed them all, once for all, during the night after his death and
burial. But she could not attain to that state of sadness made sacred by
memories with which consoling angels so often mingle some drops of
sweetness, after the first anguish is overpast. She felt--she knew--that
with her husband a portion of her own being had been riven from her, but
she could not yet perceive that this last portion was nothing less than
the very foundations of her whole moral and social being.
Her father and her husband's father had been the two leading men in
Memphis, nay, in all Egypt. She had given her hand and a heart full of
love to the son of Menas, a proud and happy woman. It was as one with
her, and not by himself alone, that he had risen to the highest dignity
attainable by a native Egyptian, and she had done everything that lay in
her power to uphold him in a position which many envied him, and in
filling it with dignity and effect. After many years of rare happiness
their grief at the loss of their murdered sons only bound the attached
couple more closely, and when her husband had fallen into bad health she
had gladly shared his seclusion, had devoted herself entirely to caring
for him, and divided all the doubts and anxieties which came upon him
from his political action. The consciousness of being not merely much but
everything to him, was her pride and her joy. Her dislike of Paula had
its rise, in the first instance, in the discovery that she, his wife, was
no longer indispensable to the sufferer when he had his fair young
niece's company. And now?
At night, after long lying awake, when she woke from a snatch of uneasy
sleep, she involuntarily listened for the faint panting breath, but no
heart now throbbed by her side; and when she quitted her lonely couch at
dawn the coming day lay before her as a desert and treeless solitude. By
night, as by day, she constantly tried to call up the image of the dead,
but whenever her small imaginative power had succeeded in doing so--not
unfrequently at first--she had seen him as in the last moments of his
life, a curse on his only son on his trembling lips. This horrible
impression deprived her of the last consolation of the mourner: a
beautiful memory, while it destroyed her proud and glad satisfaction in
her only child. The youth, who had till now been her soul's idol, was
stigmatized and branded in her eyes. She might not ignore the burden laid
on Orion by that most just man; instead of taking him to her heart with
double tenderness and softening or healing the fearful punishment
inflicted by his father, she could only pity him. When Orion came to see
her she would stroke his waving hair and, as she desired not to wound him
and make him even more unhappy than he must be already, she neither
blamed nor admonished him, and never reminded him of his father's curse.
And how beggared was that frugal heart, accustomed to spend all its store
of love on so few objects--nay, chiefly on one alone who was now no more!
The happy voices of the children had always given her pleasure, so long
as they did not disturb her suffering husband; now, they too were silent.
She had withdrawn the sunshine of her narrow affection from her only
grandchild, who had hitherto held a place in it, for little Mary had had
a share in the horrors that had come upon her and Orion in her husband's
last moments. Indeed, the bereaved woman's excited fancy had firmly
conceived the mad notion that the child was the evil genius of the house
and the tool of Satan.
Neforis had, however, enjoyed some hours of greater ease during the last
two days. In the misery of wakefulness which was beginning to torture her
like an acute pain, she had suddenly recollected what relief from
sleeplessness her husband had been wont to find in the opium pillules,
and a box of the medicine, only just opened, was at hand. And was not
she, too, suffering unutterable wretchedness? Why should she neglect the
remedy which had so greatly mitigated her husband's distress? It was said
to have a bad effect after long and frequent use, and she had often
checked the Mukaukas in taking it too freely; but could her sufferings be
greater? Would she not, indeed, be thankful to the drug if it should
shorten her miserable existence?
So she took the familiar remedy, at first hesitatingly and then more
freely; and on the second day again, with real pleasure and happy
expectancy, for it had not merely procured her a good night but had
brought her joy in the morning: The dead had appeared to her, and for the
first time not in the act of cursing, but as a young and happy man.
No one in the house knew what comfort the widow had had recourse to; the
physician and her son had been glad yesterday to find her more composed.
When Orion returned home, after concluding his business with the
money-changer at Fostat, he had to make his way through a crowd of
people, and found the court-yard full of men, and the guards and servants
in the greatest excitement. No less a personage than the Patriarch had
arrived on a visit, and was now in conference with Neforis. Sebek, the
steward, informed Orion that he had asked for him, and that his mother
wished that he should immediately join them and pay his respects to the
very reverend Father.
"She wished it?" asked the young man, as he tossed his riding-hat to a
slave, and he stood hesitating.
He was too much a son of his time, and the Church and her ministers had
exercised too marked influence on his education, for the great prelate's
visit to be regarded otherwise than as a high honor. At the same time he
could not forget the insult done to his father's vanes, nor the Arab
general's warning to be on his guard against Benjamin's enmity; and
perhaps, he said to himself, it might be better to avoid a meeting with
the powerful priest than to expose himself to the danger of losing his
self-control and finding fresh food for his wrath.
However, he had in fact no choice, for the patriarch just now came out of
the fountain-hall into the viridarium. The old man's tall figure was not
bent, his snowy hair flowed in abundance round his proud head, and a
white beard fell in soft waves far down his breast. His fine eyes rested
on the young man with a keen glance, and though he had last seen Orion as
a boy he recognized him at once as the master of the house. While Orion
bowed low before him, the patriarch, in his deep, rich voice, addressed
him with cheerful dignity.
"All hail, son of my never-to-be-forgotten friend! The child I remember,
has, I see, grown to a fine man. I have devoted a short time to the
mother, and now I must say what is needful to the son."
"In my father's study," Orion said to the steward; and he led the way
with the ceremonious politeness of a chamberlain of the imperial court.
The patriarch, as he followed him, signed to his escort to remain behind,
and as soon as the door was closed upon them, he went up to Orion and
exclaimed: "Again I greet you! This, then, is the descendant of the great
Menas, the son of Mukaukas George, the adored ruler of my flock at
Memphis, who held the first place among the gilded youth of
Constantinople in their gay whirl! A strange achievement for an Egyptian
and a Christian! But first of all, child, first give me your hand!" He
held out his right hand and Orion accepted it, but not without reserve,
for he had suspected a scornful ring in the patriarch's address, and he
could not help asking himself whether this man honestly meant so well by
him, that he could address him thus paternally as "child" in all
sincerity of heart? To refuse his hand was, however, impossible; still,
he found courage to reply:
"I can but obey your desire, holy Father; but, at the same time, I do not
know whether it becomes the son to grasp the hand of the foe who was not
to be appeased even by Death, the reconciler--who grossly insulted the
father, the noblest of men, and, in him, the son too, at the grave
itself."
The patriarch shook his head with a supercilious smile, and a hot thrill
shot through Orion as Benjamin laid his hand on his shoulder and said
with grave kindness:
"A Christian does not find it hard to forgive a sinner, an antagonist, an
enemy; and it is a joy to me to pardon the son who feels himself injured
through his lost father, blind and foolish as his indignation may be.
Your wrath can no more affect me, Child, than the Almighty in Heaven, and
it would not even be blameworthy, but that--and of this we must speak
presently--but that--well, I will be frank with you at once--but that
your manner clearly and unmistakably betrays what you lack to make you a
true Christian, and such a man as he must be who fills so conspicuous a
position in this land governed by infidels. You know what I mean?"
The prelate let his hand slip from the young man's shoulder, looking
enquiringly in his face; and when Orion, finding no reply ready, drew
back a step or two, the old man went on with growing excitement:
"It is humility, pious and submissive faith, that I find you lack, my
friend. Who, indeed, am I? But as the Vicar, the representative of Him
before whom we all are as worms in the dust, I must insist that every man
who calls himself a Christian, a Jacobite, shall submit to my will and
orders, without hesitation or doubt, as obediently and unresistingly as
though salvation or woe had fallen on him from above. What would become
of us, if individuals were to take upon themselves to defy me and walk in
their own way? In one miserable generation, and with the death of the
elders who had grown up as true Christians, the doctrine of the Saviour
would be extinct on the shores of the Nile, the crescent would rise in
the place of the Cross, and our cry would go up to Heaven for so many
lost souls. Learn, haughty youth, to bow humbly and submissively to the
will of the Most High and of His vicar on earth, and let me show you,
from your demeanor to myself especially, how far your own judgment is to
be relied on. You regard me as your father's enemy?"
"Yes," said Orion firmly.
"And I loved him as a brother!" replied the patriarch in a softer voice.
"How gladly would I have heaped his bier with palm branches of peace,
such as the Church alone can grow, wet with my own tears!"
"And yet," cried Orion, "you denied to him, whom you call your friend,
what the Church does not refuse to thieves and murderers, if only they
desire forgiveness and have received absolution from a priest; and that.
. . ."
"And that your father did!" interrupted the old man. "Peace be to him! He
is now, no doubt, gazing on the glory of the Lord. And nevertheless I
could forbid the priesthood here showing him honor at the grave.--Why?
For what urgent reason was such a prohibition spoken by a friend against
a friend?"
"Because you wished to brand him, in the eyes of the world, as the man
who lent his support to the unbelievers and helped them to victory," said
Orion gloomily.
"How well the boy can read the thoughts of men!" exclaimed the prelate,
looking at the young man with approbation in which, however, there was
some irony and annoyance. "Very good. We will assume that my object was
to show the Christians of Memphis what fate awaits the man, who
surrenders his country to the enemy and walks hand-in-hand with
unbelievers? And may I not possibly have been right?"
"Do you suppose my father invited the Arabs?" interrupted the young man.
"No, Child," replied the patriarch, "the enemy came of his own free
will."
"And you," Orion went on, "after the Greeks had driven you into exile,
prophesied from the desert that they would come and overthrow the
Melchites, the Greek enemies of our faith, drive them out of the
country."
"It was revealed to me by the Lord!" replied the old man, bowing his head
reverently. "And yet other things were shown to me while I dwelt a devout
ascetic, mortifying my flesh under the scorching sun of the desert.
Beware my son, beware! Heed my warning, lest it should be fulfilled and
the house of Menas vanish like clouds swept before the wind.--Your
father, I know, regarded my prophecy as advice given by me to receive the
infidels as the instrument of the Almighty and to support them in driving
the Melchite oppressors out of the land."
"Your prophecy," replied Orion, "had, no doubt, a marked effect on my
father; and when the cause of the emperor and the Greeks was lost, your
opinion that the Melchites were unbelievers as much as the sons of Islam,
was of infinite comfort to him. For he, if any one--as you know--had good
reason to hate the sectarians who killed his two sons in their prime.
What followed, he did to rescue his and your unfortunate brethren and
dependants from destruction. Here, here in this desk, lies his answer to
the emperor's accusations, as given to the Greek deputation who had
speech of him in this very room. He wrote it down as soon as they had
left him. Will you hear it?"
"I can guess its purport."
"No, no!" cried the excited youth; he hastily opened his father's desk,
laid his hand at once on the wax tablet, and exclaimed: "This was his
reply!" And he proceeded to read:
"These Arabs, few as they are, are stronger and more powerful than we
with all our numbers. One man of them is equal to a hundred of us, for
they rush on death and love it better than life. Each of them presses to
the front in battle, and they have no longing to return home and to their
families. For every Christian they kill they look for a great reward in
Heaven, and they say that the gates of Paradise open at once for those
who fall in the fight. They have not a wish in this world beyond the
satisfaction of their barest need of food and clothing. We, on the
contrary, love life and dread death;--how can we stand against them? I
tell you that I will not break the peace I have concluded with the Arabs.
. . ."
"And what is the upshot of all this reply?" interrupted the patriarch
shrugging his shoulders.
"That my father found himself compelled to conclude a peace, and
that--but read on.--That as a wise man he was forced to ally himself with
the foe."
"The foe to whom he yielded more readily and paid much greater honor than
became him as a Christian!--Does not this discourse convey the idea that
the joys of Paradise solely and exclusively await our damned and
blood-thirsty oppressors?--And the Moslem Paradise! What is it but a gulf
of iniquity, in which they are to wallow in sensual delight? The false
prophet invented it to tempt his followers to force his lying creed, by
might of arms and in mad contempt of death, on nation after nation. Our
Lord, the Word made flesh, came down on earth to win hearts and souls by
the persuasive power of the living truth, one and eternal, which emanates
from Him as light proceeds from the sun; this Mohammed, on the contrary,
is a sword made flesh! For me, then, there is no choice but to submit to
superior strength; but I can still hate and loathe their accursed and
soul-destroying superstition.--And so I do, and so I shall, to the last
throb of this old heart, which only longs for rest, the sooner the
better. . . .
"But you? And your father? Verily, verily, the man who, even for an
instant, ceases to hate unbelief or false doctrine has sinned for his
whole life on this side of the grave and beyond it; sinned against the
only true and saving faith and its divine Founder. Blasphemous and
flattering praise of the piety and moderation of our foes, the very
antichrist incarnate, who kill both body and soul.--With these your
father fouled his heart and tongue. . ."
"Fouled?" cried Orion and the blood tingled in his cheeks. "He kept his
heart and tongue alike pure and honorable; never did a false word pass
his lips. Justice, justice to all, even to his enemies, was the ruling
principle, the guiding clue of his blameless life; and the noblest of the
heathen Greeks admired the man who could so far triumph over himself as
to recognize what was fine and good in a foe."
"And they were right," replied the patriarch, "for they were not yet
acquainted with truth. In a worldly sense, even now, each of us may aim
at such magnanimity; but the man who forgives those who tamper with the
sacred truth, which is the bread, meat, and wine of the Christian's soul,
sins against that truth; and, if he is a leader of men, he draws on those
who look up to him, and who are only too ready to follow his example,
into everlasting fire. Where your father ought to have been a
recalcitrant though conquered enemy, he became an ally; nay, so far as
the leader of the infidels was concerned, a friend--how many tears it
cost me! And our hapless people were forced to see this attitude of their
chief, and imitated it.--Forgive their seducer, Merciful God!--forming
their conduct on his. Thousands fell away from our saving faith and went
over to those, who in their eyes could not be reprobate, could not be
damned, since they saw them dwelling and working hand-in-hand with their
wise and righteous leader; and it was simply and solely to warn his
misguided people that I did not hesitate to wound my own heart, to raise
the voice of reproof at the grave of a dear friend, and to refuse the
honor and blessing of which his just and virtuous life rendered him more
worthy than thousands of others. I have spoken, and now your foolish
anger must be appeased; now you will grasp the hand held out to you by
the shepherd of the souls entrusted to him with an easy and willing
heart."
And again he offered his hand to Orion, who, however, again took it
doubtfully, and instead of looking the prelate in the face, cast down his
eyes in gloomy bewilderment. The patriarch appeared not to observe the
young man's repulsion and clasped his hand warmly. Then he changed the
subject, speaking of the grieving widow, of the decadence of Memphis, of
Orion's plans for the future, and finally of the gems dedicated to the
Church by the deceased Mukaukas. The dialogue had taken a calm,
conversational tone; the patriarch was sitting in the dead man's
arm-chair, and there was nothing forced or unnatural in his asking, in
the course of discussing the jewels, what had become of the great
emerald.
Orion replied, in the same tone, that this stone was not, strictly
speaking, any part of his father's gift; but Benjamin expressed an
opposite opinion.
All the tortures Orion had endured since that luckless deed in the
tablinum revived in his soul during this discussion; however, it was some
small relief to him to perceive, that neither his mother nor Dame
Susannah seemed to have told the patriarch the guilt he had incurred by
reason of that gem. Susannah, of course, had said nothing of the incident
in order to avoid speaking of her daughter's false evidence; still, this
miserable business might easily have come to the ears of the stern old
man, and to the guilty youth no sacrifice seemed too great to smother any
enquiry for the ill-fated jewel. He unhesitatingly explained that the
emerald had disappeared, but that he was quite ready to make good its
value. Benjamin might fix his own estimate, and name any sum he wished
for some benevolent purpose, and he, Orion, was ready to pay it to him on
the spot.
The prelate, however, calmly persisted in his demand, enjoined Orion to
have a diligent search made for the gem, and declared that he regarded it
as the property of the Church. He added that, when his patience was at an
end, he should positively insist on its surrender and bring every means
at his disposal into play to procure it.
Orion had no choice but to say that he would prosecute his search for the
lost stone; but his acquiescence was sullen, as that of a man who accedes
to an unreasonable demand.
At first the patriarch took this coolly; but presently, when he rose to
take leave, his demeanor changed; he said, with stern solemnity:
"I know you now, Son of Mukaukas George, and I end as I began: The
humility of the Christian is far from you, you are ignorant of the power
and dignity of our Faith, you do not even know the vast love that
animates it, and the fervent longing to lead the straying sinner back to
the path of salvation.--Your admirable mother has told me, with tears in
her eyes, of the abyss over which you are standing. It is your desire to
bind yourself for life to a heretic, a Melchite--and there is another
thing which fills her pious mother's heart with fears, which tortures it
as she thinks of you and your eternal welfare. She promised to confide
this to my ear in church, and I shall find leisure to consider of it on
my return home; but at any rate, and be it what it may, it cannot more
greatly imperil your soul than marriage with a Melchite.
"On what have you set your heart? On the mere joys of earth! You sue for
the hand of an unbeliever, the daughter of an unbelieving heretic; you go
over to Fostat--nay, hear me out--and place your brain and your strong
arm at the service of the infidels--it is but yesterday; but I, I, the
shepherd of my flock, will not suffer that he who is the highest in rank,
the richest in possessions, the most powerful by the mere dignity of his
name, shall pervert thousands of the Jacobite brethren. I have the will
and the power too, to close the sluice gates against such a disaster.
Obey me, or you shall rue it with tears of blood."
The prelate paused, expecting to see Orion fall on his knees before him;
but the young man did nothing of the kind. He stood looking at him,
open-eyed and agitated, but undecided, and Benjamin went on with added
vehemence:
"I came to you to lift up my voice in protest, and I desire, I require, I
command you: sever all ties with the enemies of your nation and of your
faith, cast out your love for the Melchite Siren, who will seduce your
immortal part to inevitable perdition. . . ."
Till this Orion had listened with bowed head and in silence to the
diatribe which the patriarch had hurled at him like a curse; but at this
point his whole being rose in revolt, all self-control forsook him, and
he interrupted the speaker in loud tones:
"Never, never, never will I do such a thing! Insult me as you will. What
I am, I will still be: a faithful son of the Church to which my fathers
belonged, and for which my brothers died. In all humility I acknowledge
Jesus Christ as my Lord. I believe in him, believe in the God-made-man
who died to save us, and who brought love into the world, and I will
remain unpersuaded and faithful to my own love. Never will I forsake her
who has been to me like a messenger from God, like a good angel to teach
me how to lay hold on what is earnest and noble in life-her whom my
father, too, held dear. Power, indeed, is yours. Demand of me anything
reasonable, and within my attainment, and I will try to force myself to
obedience; but I never can and never will be faithless to her, to prove
my faith to you; and as to the Arabs. . . ."
"Enough!" exclaimed the prelate. "I am on my way to Upper Egypt. Make
your choice by my return. I give you till then to come to a right mind,
to think the matter over; and it is quite deliberately that I bid you to
forget the Melchite. That you, of all men, should marry a heretic would
be an abomination not to be borne. With regard to your alliance with the
Arabs, and whether it becomes you--being what you are--to take service
with them, we will discuss it at a future day. If, by the time I return,
you have thought better of the matter as regards your marriage--and you
are free to choose any Jacobite maiden--then I will speak to you in a
different tone. I will then offer you my friendship and support; instead
of the Church's curse I will pronounce her blessing on you--the pardon
and grace of the Almighty, a smooth path to eternity and peace, and the
prospect of giving new joy to the aching heart of your sorrowing mother.
My last word is that you must and shall give up the woman from whom you
can look for nothing but perdition."
"I cannot, and shall not, and I never will!" replied Orion firmly.
"Then I can, and shall, and will make you feel how heavily the curse
falls which, in the last resort, I shall not hesitate to pronounce upon
you!"
"It is in your power," said Orion. "But if you proceed to extremities
with me, you will drive me to seek the blessing for which my soul thirsts
more ardently than you, my lord, can imagine, and the salvation I crave,
with her whom you hold reprobate, and on the further side of the Nile."
"I dare you!" cried the patriarch, quitting the room with a resolute step
and flaming cheeks.
CHAPTER II.
Orion was alone in the spacious room, feeling as though the whole world
were sinking into nothingness after the rack of storm and tempest. At
first he was merely conscious of having gone through a fearful
experience, which threatened to fling him far outside the sphere of
everything he was wont to reverence and hold sacred. For love and honor
of his guardian angel he had declared war to the patriarch, and that
man's power was as great as his stature. Still, the image of Paula rose
high and supreme above that of the terrible old man, in Orion's fancy,
and his father, as it seemed to him, was like an ally in the battle he
was destined to wage in his own strength.
The young man's vivid imagination and excellent memory recapitulated
every word the prelate had uttered. The domineering old man, overflowing
with bigoted zeal, had played with him as a cat with a mouse. He had
tried to search his soul and sift him to the bottom before he attacked
the subject with which he ought to have begun, and concerning which he
was fully informed when he offered him his hand that first time--as
cheerfully, too, as though he had no serious grievance seething in his
soul. Orion resolved that he would cling fast to his faith without
Benjamin's interposition, and not allow his hold on the two other
Christian graces, Hope and Love, to be weakened by his influence.
By some miracle his mother had not yet told the prelate of his father's
curse, in spite of the anguish of her aching heart; and what a weapon
would not that have been in Benjamin's hand. It was with the deepest pity
that he thought of that poor, grief-stricken woman, and the idea flashed
through his mind that the patriarch might have gone back to his mother to
accuse him and to urge her to further revelations.
Many minutes had passed since the patriarch had left him; Orion had
allowed his illustrious guest to depart unescorted, and this could not
fail to excite surprise. Such a breach of good manners, of the uncodified
laws of society, struck Orion, the son of a noble and ancient house, who
had drunk in his regard for them as it were with his mother's milk, as an
indignity to himself; and to repair it he started up, hastily smoothing
down his tumbled hair, and hurried into the viridarium. His fears were
confirmed, for the patriarch's following were standing in the
fountain-hall close to the exit; his mother, too, was there and Benjamin
was in the act of departure.
The old man accepted his offered escort with dignified affability, as if
nothing but what was pleasant had passed between him and Orion. As they
crossed the viridarium he asked his young host what was the name of some
rare flower, and counselled him to take care that shade-giving trees were
planted in abundance on his various estates. In the outer hall, on either
side of the door, was a statue: Truth and justice, two fine works by
Aristeas of Alexandria, who flourished in the time of the Emperor
Hadrian. Justice held the scales and sword, Truth was gazing into her
mirror. As the patriarch approached them, he said to the priest who
walked by his side: "Still here!" Then, standing still, he said, partly
to Orion and partly to his companion:
"Your father, I see, neglected my suggestion that these heathen images
had no place in any Christian house, and least of all in one attached, as
this is, to a public function. We, no doubt, know the meaning of the
symbols they bear; but how easily might the ordinary man, waiting here,
mistake the figure with the mirror for Vanity and that with the scales
Venality: 'Pay us what we ask,' she might be saying, 'or else your life
is a forfeit,'--so the sword would imply."
He smiled and walked on, but added airily to Orion:
"When I come again--you know--I shall be pleased if my eye is no longer
offended by these mementos of an extinct idolatry."
"Truth and justice!" replied Orion in a constrained voice. "They have
dwelt on this spot and ruled in this house for nearly five hundred
years."
"It would look better, and be more suitable," retorted the patriarch, "if
you could say that of Him to whom alone the place of honor is due in a
Christian house; in His presence every virtue flourishes of itself. The
Christian should proscribe every image from his dwelling; at the door of
his heart only should he raise an image on the one hand of Faith and on
the other of Humility."
By this time they had reached the court-yard, where Susannah's chariot
was waiting. Orion helped the prelate into it, and when Benjamin offered
him his hand to kiss, in the presence of several hundred slaves and
servants, all on their knees, the young man lightly touched it with his
lips. He stood bowed low in reverence so long as the holy father remained
visible, in the attitude of blessing the crowd from the open side of the
chariot; then he hurried away to join his mother.
He expected to find her exhausted by the excitement of the patriarch's
visit; but, in fact, she was more composed than he had seen her yet since
his father's death. Her eyes indeed, commonly so sober in their
expression, were bright with a kind of rapture which puzzled Orion. Had
she been thinking of his father? Could the patriarch have succeeded in
inspiring her pious fervor to such a pitch, that it had carried her, so
to speak, out of herself?
She was dressed to go to church, and after expressing her delight at the
honor done to herself and her whole household by the prelate's visit, she
invited Orion to accompany her. Though he had proposed devoting the next
few hours to a different purpose, the dutiful son at once acceded to this
wish; he helped her into her chariot, bid the driver go slowly, and
seated himself by her side.
As they drove along he asked her what she had told the patriarch, and her
replies might have reassured him but that she filled him with grave
anxiety on fresh grounds. Her mind seemed to have suffered under the
stress of grief. It was usually so clear, so judicious, so reasonable;
and now all she said was incoherent and not more than half intelligible.
Still, one thing he distinctly understood: that she had not confided to
the patriarch the fact of his father's curse. The prelate must certainly
have censured the conduct of the deceased to her also and that had sealed
her lips. She complained to her son that Benjamin had never understood
her lost husband, and that she had felt compelled to repress her desire
to disclose everything to him. Nowhere but in church, in the very
presence of the Redeemer, could she bring herself to allow him to read
her heart as it were an open book. A voice had warned her that in the
house of God alone, could she find salvation for herself and her son;
that voice she heard day and night, and much as it pained her to grieve
him he must hear it now--: That voice never ceased to enjoin her to tear
asunder his connection with the Melchite maiden. Last evening it had
seemed to her that it was her eldest son, who had died for the Jacobite
faith, that was speaking to her. The voice had sounded like his, and it
had warned her that the ancient house of Menas must perish, if a Melchite
should taint the pure blood of their race. And Benjamin had confirmed her
fears; he had come back to her on purpose to beseech her to oppose
Orion's sinful affection for Thomas' daughter with the utmost maternal
authority, and, as the patriarch expressed the same desire as the voice,
it must be from God and she must obey it.
Her old grudge against Paula had revived, and her very tones betrayed
that it grew stronger with every word she spoke which had any reference
to the girl.
At this Orion begged her to be calm, reminding her of the promise she had
made him by his father's deathbed; and just as his mother was about to
reply in a tone of pitiful recrimination, the chariot stopped at the door
of the church. He did everything in his power to soothe her; his gentle
and tender tones comforted her, and she nodded to him more happily,
following him into the sanctuary.
Beyond the narthex--the vestibule of the church, where three penitents
were flaying their backs with scourges by the side of a small marble
fountain, and in full view of the crowd--they were forced to part, as the
women were divided from the men by a screen of finely-carved woodwork.
As Neforis went to her place, she shook her bowed head: she was
meditating on the choice offered her by Orion, of yielding to the
patriarch's commands or to her son's wishes. How gladly would she have
seen her son in bright spirits again. But Benjamin had threatened her
with the loss of all the joys of Heaven, if she should agree to Orion's
alliance with the heretic--and the joys of Heaven to her meant a meeting,
a recognition, for which she would willingly have sacrificed her son and
everything else that was dear to her heart.
Orion assisted at the service in the place reserved for the men of his
family, close to the hekel, or holy of holies, where the altar stood and
the priests performed their functions. A partition, covered with
ill-wrought images and a few gilt ornaments, divided it from the main
body of the church, and the whole edifice produced an impression that was
neither splendid nor particularly edifying. The basilica, which had once
been richly decorated, had been plundered by the Melchites in a fight
between them and the Jacobites, and the impoverished city had not been in
a position to restore the venerable church to anything approaching its
original splendor. Orion looked round him; but could see nothing
calculated to raise his devotion.
The congregation were required to stand all through the service; and as
it often was a very long business, not the women only, behind the screen,
but many of the men supported themselves like cripples on crutches. How
unpleasing, too, were the tones of the Egyptian chant, accompanied by the
frequent clang of a metal cymbal and mingled with the babble of
chattering men and women, checked only when the talk became a quarrel, by
a priest who loudly and vehemently shouted for silence from the hekel.
Generally the chanted liturgy constituted the whole function, unless the
Lord's Supper was administered; but in these anxious times, for above a
week past, a priest or a monk preached a daily sermon. This began a short
while after the young man had taken his place, and it was with painful
feelings that he recognized, in the hollow-eyed and ragged monk who
mounted the pulpit, a priest whom he had seen more than once drunk to
imbecility, in Nesptah's tavern, And the revolting creature, who thus
flaunted his dirty, dishevelled person even in the pulpit, thundered down
on the trembling congregation declarations that the delay in the rising
of the Nile was the consequence of their sins, and God's punishment for
their evil deeds. Instead of comforting the terrified souls, or
encouraging their faith and bidding them hope for better times, he set
before them in burning words the punishment that awaited their wicked
despondency.
God Almighty was plaguing them and the land with great heat; but this was
like the cool north wind at Advent-tide, as compared with the fierceness
of the furnace of hell which Satan was making hot for them. The scorching
sun on earth at any rate gave them daylight, but the flames of hell shed
no light, that the terrors might never cease of those whom the devil's
myrmidons drove over the narrow bridge leading to his horrible realm,
goading them with spears and pitchforks, with heavy cudgelling or gnawing
of their flesh. In the anguish of death, and the crush by the way,
mothers trod down their infants and fathers their daughters; and when the
damned reached the spiked threshold of hell itself, a hideous and
poisoned vapor rose up to meet them, choking them, and yet giving them
renewed strength to feel fresh torments with increased keenness of every
sense. Then the devil's shrieks of anguish, which shake the vault of
hell, came thundering on their ears; with hideous yells he snatched at
them from the grate on which he lay, crushed and squeezed them in his
iron jaws like a bunch of grapes, and swallowed them into his fiery maw;
or else they were hung up by their tongues by attendant friends in
Satan's fiery furnace, or dragged alternately through ice and flames, and
finally beaten to pieces on the anvil of hell, or throttled and wrung
with ropes and cloths.--As compared with the torments they would suffer
there, every present anxiety was as the kiss of a lover. Mothers would
hear the brain seething in their infants' skulls. . . .
At this point of the monk's grewsome discourse, Orion turned away with a
shudder. The curse with which the patriarch had threatened him recurred
to his mind; he could have fancied that the hot, stuffy, incense-laden
air of the church was full of flapping daws and hideous bats. Deadly
horror crept over him; but then, suddenly, the rebound came of youthful
vigor, longing for freedom and joy in living; a voice within cried out:
"Away with coercion and chains! Winged spirit, use your pinions! Down
with the god of terrors! He is not that Heavenly Father whose love
embraces mankind. Forward, leap up and be free! Trusting in your own
strength, guided by your own will, go boldly forth into the open sunshine
of life! Be free, be free!--Still, be not like a slave who is no sooner
cut adrift and left to himself than he falls a slave again to his own
senses. No; but striving unceasingly and of your own free will, in the
sweat of your brow, to reach the high goal, to work out to its fulfilment
and fruition everything that is best in your soul and mind. Yes--life is
a ministry. . . . I, like the disciples of the Stoa, will strive after all
that is known as virtue, with no other end in view than to practise it
for its own sake, because it is fair and gives unmixed joys. I will rely
on myself to seek the truth--and do what I feel to be right and good;
this, henceforth, shall be the lofty aim of my existence. To the two
chief desires of my heart--: atonement to my father and union with Paula,
I here add a third: the attainment of the loftiest goal that I may reach,
by valiant striving to get as near to it as my strength will allow. The
road thither is by Work; the guiding star I must keep before me that I
may not go astray is my Love!"
His cheeks were burning, and with a deep breath he looked about him as
though to find an adversary with whom he might measure his strength. The
horrible sermon was ended and the words of the chanting crowd fell on his
ear. "Lord, reward me not according to mine iniquities!" The load of his
own sin fell on his heart again, and his dying father's curse; his proud
head drooped on his breast, and he said to himself that his burthen was
too heavy for him to venture on the bold flight for which he had but now
spread his wings. The ban was not yet lifted; he was not yet redeemed
from its crushing weight. But the mere word "redeemed" brought to his
mind the image of Him who took on Himself the sins of the world; and the
more deeply he contemplated the nature of the Saviour whom he had loved
from his childhood, the more surely he felt that it would be doing no
violence to the freedom of his own will, but rather be the fulfilment of
a long-felt desire, if he were to tell Jesus simply all that oppressed
him; that his love for Him, his faith in Him, had a saving power even for
his soul. He lifted up his eyes and heart to Him, and to Him, as to a
trusted friend, confided all that troubled and hindered him and besought
His aid.
In loving Him, he and Paula were one, he knew, though they had not the
same idea of His nature.
Orion, as he meditated, thought out the points on which her views
deviated from his own: she believed that the divine and the human natures
were distinct in the person of Christ. And as he reflected on this creed,
till now so horrible in his eyes, he felt that the unique individuality
of the Saviour, shedding forth love and truth, came home to him more
closely when he pictured Him perfect and spotless, yet feeling as a man;
walking among men with all their joy in life in His heart, alive to every
pang and sorrow which can torture mortals, rejoicing with them, and
taking upon Himself unspeakable humiliation, suffering, and death, with a
stricken, bleeding, and yet self-devoting heart, for pure love of the
wretched race to which He could stoop from His glory. Yes, this Christ
could be his Redeemer too. The Almighty Lord had become his perfect and
most loving friend, his glorious, but lenient and tender brother, to whom
he could gladly give his whole heart, who understood everything, who was
ready to forgive everything--even all that was seething in his aching
heart which longed for purification--and all because He once had suffered
as a man suffers.
For the first time he, the Jacobite, dared to confess so much to himself;
and not solely for Paula's sake. A violent clanging on a cracked metal
plate roused him from his meditations by its harsh clamor; the sacrament
of the Last Supper was about to be administered: the invariable
conclusion of the Jacobite service. The bishop came forth from behind the
screen of the inner sanctuary, poured some wine into a silver cup and
crumbled into it two little cakes stamped with the Coptic cross. Of this
mixture he first partook, and then gave it in a spoon to each member of
the congregation who came up to receive it. Orion approached after two
elders of the Church. Finally the priest rinsed out the cup, and drained
the very washings, that no drop of the saving liquid should be lost.
How high had Orion's heart throbbed when, as a youth, he had been
admitted for the first time to this most sacred of all Christian
privileges! He was instructed in its deep and glorious symbolism, and had
often felt the purifying, saving, and refreshing effect of the sacrament,
strengthening him in all goodness, when he had partaken of it with his
parents and brothers. Hand-in-hand, they had gone home feeling as if
newly robed in body and soul and more closely bound together than before.
And to-day, insensible as he was to the repulsiveness of the forms of
worship of his confession he felt as though the bread and wine--the Flesh
and Blood of the Saviour--had sealed the bond he had silently entered
into with himself; as though the Lord had put forth an invisible hand to
remove the guilt and the curse that crushed him so sorely. Deep devotion
fell on his soul: his future life, he thought, should bring him nearer to
God than ever before, and be spent in loving, and in the more earnest,
full, and laborious exercise of the gifts Heaven had bestowed on him.
CHAPTER III.
Orion had dreaded the drive home with his mother, but after complaining
to him of Susannah's conduct in having made a startling display of her
vexation in the women's place behind the screen, she had leaned on him
and fallen fast asleep. Her head was on her son's shoulder when they
reached home, and Orion's anxiety for the mother he truly loved was
enhanced when he found it difficult to rouse her. He felt her stagger
like a drunken creature, and he led her not into the fountain-room but to
her bed-chamber, where she only begged to lie down; and hardly had she
done so when she was again overcome by sleep.
Orion now made his way to Gamaliel the jeweller, to purchase from him a
very large and costly diamond, plainly set, and the Israelite's brother
undertook to deliver it to the fair widow at Constantinople, who was
known to him as one of his customers. Orion, in the jeweller's
sitting-room, wrote a letter to his former mistress, in which he begged
her in the most urgent manner to accept the diamond, and in exchange to
return to him the emerald by a swift and trustworthy messenger, whom
Simeon the goldsmith would provide with everything needful.
After all this he went home hungry and weary, to the late midday meal
which he shared, as for many days past, with no one but Eudoxia, Mary's
governess. The little girl was not yet allowed to leave her room, and of
this, for one reason, her instructress was glad, for a dinner alone with
the handsome youth brought extreme gratification to her mature heart. How
considerate was the wealthy and noble heir in desiring the slaves to
offer every dish to her first, how kind in listening to her stories of
her young days and of the illustrious houses in which she had formerly
given lessons! She would have died for him; but, as no opportunity
offered for such a sacrifice, at any rate she never omitted to point out
to him the most delicate morsels, and to supply his room with fresh
flowers.
Besides this, however, she had devoted herself with the most admirable
unselfishness to her pupil, since the child had been ill and her
grandmother had turned against her, noticing, too, that Orion took a
tender and quite fatherly interest in his little niece. This morning the
young man had not had time to enquire for Mary, and Eudoxia's report that
she seemed even more excited than on the day before disturbed him so
greatly, that he rose from table, in spite of Eudoxia's protest, without
waiting till the end of the meal, to visit the little invalid.
It was with genuine anxiety that he mounted the stairs. His heart was
heavy over many things, and as he went towards the child's room he said
to himself with a melancholy smile, that he, who had contemned many a
distinguished man and many a courted fair one at Constantinople because
they had fallen short of his lofty standard, had here no one but this
child who would be sure to understand him. Some minutes elapsed before
his knock was answered with the request to 'come in,' and he heard a
hasty bustle within. He found Mary lying, as the physician had ordered,
on a couch by the window, which was wide open and well-shaded; her couch
was surrounded by flowering plants and, on a little table in front of
her, were two large nosegays, one fading, the other quite fresh and
particularly beautiful.
How sadly the child had changed in these few days. The soft round cheeks
had disappeared, and the pretty little face had sunk into nothingness by
comparison with the wonderful, large eyes, which had gained in size and
brilliancy. Yesterday she had been free from fever and very pale, but
to-day her cheeks were crimson, and a twitching of her lips and of her
right shoulder, which had come on since the scene at the grandfather's
deathbed, was so incessant that Orion sat down by her side in some alarm.
"Has your grandmother been to see you?" was his first question, but the
answer was a mournful shake of her head.
The blossoming plants were his own gift and so was the fading nosegay;
the other, fresher one had not come from him, so he enquired who was the
giver, and was not a little astonished to see his favorite's confusion
and agitation at the question. There must be something special connected
with the posey, that was very evident, and the young man, who did not
wish to excite her sensitive nerves unnecessarily, but could not recall
his words, was wishing he had never spoken them, when the discovery of a
feather fan cut the knot of his difficulty; he took it up, exclaiming:
"Hey--what have we here?"
A deeper flush dyed Mary's cheek, and raising her large eyes imploringly
to his face, she laid a finger on her lips. He nodded, as understanding
her, and said in a low voice:
"Katharina has been here? Susannah's gardener ties up flowers like that.
The fan--when I knocked--she is here still perhaps?"
He had guessed rightly; Mary pointed dumbly to the door of the adjoining
room.
"But, in Heaven's name, child," Orion went on, in an undertone, "what
does she want here?"
"She came by stealth, in the boat," whispered the child. "She sent Anubis
from the treasurer's office to ask me if she might not come, she could
not do without me any longer, and she never did me any harm and so I said
yes--and then, when I knew it was your knock, whisk--off she went into
the bedroom."
"And if your grandmother were to come across her?"
"Then--well, then I do not know what would become of me! But oh! Orion,
if you only knew how--how. . . ." Two big tears rolled down her cheeks and
Orion understood her; he stroked her hair lovingly and said in a whisper,
glancing now and again at the door of the next room.
"But I came up on purpose to tell you something more about Paula. She
sends you her love, and she invites you to go to her and stay with her,
always. But you must keep it quite a secret and tell no one, not even
Eudoxia and Katharina; for I do not know myself how we can contrive to
get your grandmother's consent. At any rate we must set to work very
prudently and cautiously, do you understand? I have only taken you into
our confidence that you may look forward to it and have something to be
glad of at night, when you are such a silly little thing as to keep your
eyes open like the hares, instead of sleeping like a good child. If
things go well, you may be with Paula to-morrow perhaps--think of that! I
had quite given up all hope of managing it at all; but now, just now--is
it not odd--just within these two minutes I suddenly said to myself: 'It
will come all right!'--So it must be done somehow."
A flood of tears streamed down Mary's burning cheeks but, freely as they
flowed, she did not sob and her bosom did not heave. Nor did she speak,
but such pure and fervent gratitude and joy shone from her glistening
eyes that Orion felt his own grow moist. He was glad to find some way of
concealing his emotion when Mary seized his hand and, pressing a long
kiss on it, wetted it with her tears.
"See!" he exclaimed. "All wet! as if I had just taken it out of the
fountain."
But he said no more, for the bedroom door was suddenly thrown open and
Eudoxia's high, thin voice was heard saying:
"But why make any fuss? Mary will be enchanted! Here, Child, here is your
long-lost friend! Such a surprise!" And the water-wagtail, pushed forward
by no gentle hand, appeared within the doorway. Eudoxia was as radiant as
though she had achieved some heroic deed; but she drew back a little when
she found that Orion was still in the room. The divided couple stood face
to face. What was done could not be undone; but, though he greeted her
with only a calm bow, and she fluttered her fan with abrupt little jerks
to conceal her embarrassment, nothing took place which could surprise the
bystander; indeed, Katharina's pretty features assumed a defiant
expression when he enquired how the little white dog was, and she coldly
replied that she had had him chained up in the poultry-yard, for that the
patriarch, who was their guest, could not endure dogs.
"He honors a good many men with the same sentiments," replied Orion, but
Katharina retorted, readily enough.
"When they deserve it."
The dialogue went on in this key for some few minutes; but the young man
was not in the humor either to take the young girl's pert stings or to
repay her in the same coin; he rose to go but, before he could take
leave, Katharina, observing from the window how low the sun was, cried:
"Mercy on me! how late it is--I must be off; I must not be absent at
supper time. My boat is lying close to yours in the fishing-cove. I only
hope the gate of the treasurer's house is still open."
Orion, too, looked at the sun and then remarked: "To-day is Sanutius."
"I know," said Katharina. "That is why Anubis was free at noon."
"And for the same reason," added Orion, "there is not a soul at work now
in the office."
This was awkward. Not for worlds would she have been seen in the house;
and knowing, as she did from her games with Mary, every nook and corner
of it, she began to consider her position. Her delicate features assumed
a sinister expression quite new to Orion, which both displeased him and
roused his anxiety--not for himself but for Mary, who could certainly get
no good from such a companion as this. These visits must not be repeated
very often; he would not allude to the subject in the child's presence,
but Katharina should at once have a hint. She could not get out of the
place without his assistance; so he intruded on her meditations to inform
her that he had the key of the office about him. Then he went to see if
the hall were empty, and led her at once to the treasurer's office
through the various passages which connected it with the main buildings.
The office at this hour was as lonely as the grave, and when Orion found
himself standing with her, close to the door which opened on the road to
the harbor, and had already raised the key to unlock it, he paused and
for the first time broke the silence they had both preserved during their
unpleasant walk, saying:
"What brought you to see Mary, Katharina? Tell me honestly." Her heart,
which had been beating high since she had found herself alone with him in
the silent and deserted house, began to throb wildly; a great terror, she
knew not of what, came over her.
"She had come to the house for several reasons, but one had outweighed
all the rest: Mary must be told that her young uncle and Paula were
betrothed; for she knew by experience that the child could keep nothing
of importance from her grandmother, and that Neforis had no love for
Paula was an open secret. As yet she certainly could know nothing of her
son's formal suit, but if once she were informed of it she would do
everything in her power--of this Katharina had not a doubt--to keep Orion
and Paula apart. So the girl had told Mary that it was already reported
that they were a betrothed and happy pair, and that she herself had
watched them making love in her neighbor's garden. To her great
annoyance, however, Mary took this all very coolly and without any
special excitement.
"So, when Orion enquired of his companion what had brought her to the
governor's house, she could only reply that she longed so desperately to
see little Mary.
"Of course," said Orion. "But I must beg of you not to yield again to
your affectionate impulse. Your mother makes a public display of her
grudge against mine, and her ill-feeling will only be increased if she is
told that we are encouraging you to disregard her wishes. Perhaps you
may, ere long, have opportunities of seeing Mary more frequently; but, if
that should be the case, I must especially request you not to talk of
things that may agitate her. You have seen for yourself how excitable she
is and how fragile she looks. Her little heart, her too precocious brain
and feelings must have rest, must not be stirred and goaded by fresh
incitements such as you are in a position to apply. The patriarch is my
enemy, the enemy of our house, and you--I do not say it to offend
you--you overheard what he was saying last night, and probably gathered
much important information, some of which may concern me and my family."
Katharina stood looking at her companion, as pale as death. He knew that
she had played the listener, and when, and where! The shock it gave her,
and the almost unendurable pang of feeling herself lowered in his eyes,
quite dazed her. She felt bewildered, offended, menaced; however, she
retained enough presence of mind to reply in a moment to her antagonist:
"Do not be alarmed! I will come no more. I should not have come at all,
if I could have foreseen. . ."
"That you would meet me?"
"Perhaps.--But do not flatter yourself too much on that account!--As to
my listening. . . . Well, yes; I was standing at the window. Inside the
room I could only half hear, and who does not want to hear what great men
have to say to each other? And, excepting your father, I have met none
such in Memphis since Memnon left the city. We women have inherited some
curiosity from our mother Eve; but we rarely indulge it so far as to hunt
for a necklace in our neighbor's trunk! I have no luck as a criminal, my
dear Orion. Twice have I deserved the name. Thanks to the generous and
liberal use you made of my inexperience I sinned--sinned so deeply that
it has ruined my whole life; and now, again, in a more venial way; but I
was caught out, you see, in both cases."
"Your taunts are merited," said Orion sadly. "And yet, Child, we may both
thank Providence, which did not leave us to wander long on the wrong
road. Once already I have besought your forgiveness, and I do so now
again. That does not satisfy you I see--and I can hardly blame you.
Perhaps you will be better pleased, when I assure you once more that no
sin was ever more bitterly or cruelly punished than mine has been."
"Indeed!" said Katharina with a drawl; then, with a flutter of her fan,
she went on airily: "And yet you look anything rather than crushed; and
have even succeeded in winning 'the other'--Paula, if I am not mistaken."
"That will do!" said Orion decisively, and he raised the key to the lock.
Katharina, however, placed herself in his way, raised a threatening
finger, and exclaimed:
"So I should think!--Now I am certain. However, you are right with your
insolent 'That will do!' I do not care a rush for your love affairs;
still, there is one thing I should like to know, which concerns myself
alone; how could you see over our garden hedge? Anubis is scarcely a head
shorter than you are. . . ."
"And you made him try?" interrupted Orion, who could not forbear smiling,
perceiving that his honestly meant gravity was thrown away on Katharina.
"Notwithstanding such a praiseworthy experiment, I may beg you to note
for future cases that what is true of him is not true of every one, and
that, besides foot-passengers, a tall man sometimes mounts a tall horse?"
"It was you, then, who rode by last night?"
"And who could not resist glancing up at your window."
At these words she drew back in surprise, and her eyes lighted up, but
only for an instant; then, clenching the feathers of her fan in both
hands, she sharply asked:
"Is that in mockery?"
"Certainly not," said Orion coolly; "for though you have reason enough to
be angry with me. . . ."
"I, at any rate, have, so far given you none," she petulantly broke in.
"No, I have not. It is I, and I alone, who have been insulted and
ill-used; you must confess that you owe me some amends, and that I have a
right to ask them."
"Do so," replied he. "I am yours to command." She looked him straight in
the face.
"First of all," she began, "have you told any one else that I was. . ."
"That you were listening? No--not a living soul."
"And will you promise never to betray me?"
"Willingly. Now, what is the 'secondly' to this 'first of all?'"
But there was no immediate answer; the water-wagtail evidently found it
difficult. However, she presently said, with downcast eyes:
"I want. . . . You will think me a greater fool than I am . . .
nevertheless, yes, I will ask you, though it will involve me in fresh
humiliation.--I want to know the truth; and if there is anything you hold
sacred, before I ask, you must swear by what is holiest to answer me, not
as if I were a silly girl, but as if I were the Supreme judge at the last
day.--Do you hear?"
"This is very solemn," said Orion. "And you must allow me to observe that
there are some questions which do not concern us alone, and if yours is
such. . . ."
"No, no," replied Katharina, "what I mean concerns you and me alone."
"Then I see no reason for refusing," he said. "Still, I may ask you a
favor in return. It seems to me no less important than it did to you, to
know what a great man like the patriarch finds to talk about, and since I
place myself at your commands. . . ."
"I thought," said the girl with a smile, "that your first object would be
to discharge some small portion of your debt to me; however, I expect no
excessive magnanimity, and the little I heard is soon told. It cannot
matter much to you either--so I will agree to your wishes, and you, in
return, must promise. . . ."
"To speak the whole truth."
"As truly as you hope for forgiveness of your sins?"
"As truly as that."
"That is well."
"And what is it that you want to know?"
At this she shook her head, exclaiming uneasily:
"Nay, nay, not yet. It cannot be done so lightly. First let me speak; and
then open the door, and if I want to fly let me go without saying or
asking me another word.--Give me that chair; I must sit down." And in
fact she seemed to need it; for some minutes she had looked very pale and
exhausted, and her hands trembled as she drew her handkerchief across her
face.
When she was seated she began her story; and while her words flowed on
quickly but without expression, as though she spoke mechanically, Orion
listened with eager interest, for what she had to tell struck him as
highly significant and important.
He had been watched by the patriarch's orders. By midnight Benjamin had
already been informed of Orion's visit to Fostat, and to the Arab
general. Nothing, however, had been said about it beyond a fear lest he
had gone thither with a view to abjuring the faith of his fathers and
going over to the Infidels. Far more important were the facts Orion
gathered as to the prelate's negotiations with the Khaliff's
representative. Amru had urged a reduction of the number of convents and
of the monks and nuns who lived on the bequests and gifts of the pious,
busied in all kinds of handiwork according to the rule of Pachomius, and
enabled, by the fact of their living at free quarters, to produce almost
all the necessaries of life, from the mats on the floors to the shoes
worn by the citizens, at a much lower price than the independent
artisans, whether in town or country. The great majority of these poor
creatures were already ruined by such competition, and Amru, seeing the
Arab leather-workers, weavers, ropemakers, and the rest, threatened with
the same fate, had determined to set himself firmly to restrict all this
monastic work. The patriarch had resisted stoutly and held out long, but
at last he had been forced to sacrifice almost half the convents for
monks and nuns.
But nothing had been conceded without an equivalent; for Benjamin was
well aware of the immense difficulties which he, as chief of the Church,
could put in the way of the new government of the country. So it was left
to him to designate which convents should be suppressed, and he had, of
course, begun by laying hands on the few remaining Melchite retreats,
among them the Convent of St. Cecilia, next to the house of Rufinus. This
establishment was now to be closed within three days and to become the
property of the Jacobite Church; but it was to be done quite quietly, for
there was no small fear that now, when the delayed rising of the river
was causing a fever of anxiety in all minds, the impoverished populace of
the town might rise in defence of the wealthy sisterhood to whom they
were beholden for much benevolence and kind care.
Opposition from the town-senate was also to be looked for, since the
deceased Mukaukas had pronounced this measure unjust and detrimental to
the common welfare. The evicted orthodox nuns were to be taken into
various Jacobite convents as lay sisters similar cases had already been
known; but the abbess, whose superior intellect, high rank, and
far-reaching influence might, if she were left free to act, easily rouse
the prelates of the East to oppose Benjamin, was to be conveyed to a
remote convent in Ethiopia, whence no flight or return was possible.
Katharina's report took but few minutes, and she gave it with apparent
indifference; what could the suppression of an orthodox cloister, and the
dispersion of its heretic sisterhood, matter to her, or to Orion, whose
brothers had fallen victims to Melchite fanaticism? Orion did not betray
his deep interest in all he heard, and when at length Katharina rose and
pointed feebly to the door, all she said, as though she were vexed at
having wasted so much time, was: "That, on the whole, is all."
"All?" asked Orion unlocking the door.
"Certainly, all," she repeated uneasily. "What I meant to ask--whether I
ever know it or not--it does not matter.--It would be better perhaps-yes,
that is all.--Let me go."
But he did not obey her.
"Ask," he said kindly. "I will answer you gladly."
"Gladly?" she retorted, with an incredulous shrug. "In point of fact you
ought to feel uncomfortable whenever you see me; but things do not always
turn out as they ought, in Memphis or in the world; for what do you men
care what becomes of a poor girl like me? Do not imagine that I mean to
reproach you; God forbid! I do not even owe you a grudge. If anyone can
live such a thing down I can. Do not you think so? Everything is
admirably arranged for me; I cannot fail to do well. I am very rich, and
not ugly, and I shall have a hundred suitors yet. Oh, I am a most
enviable creature! I have had one lover already, and the next will be
more faithful, at any rate, and not throw me over so ruthlessly as the
first.--Do not you think so?"
"I hope so," said Oriole gravely. "Bitter as the cup is that you offer me
to drink. . ."
"Well?"
"I can only repeat that I must even drink it, since the fault was mine.
Nothing would so truly gladden me as to be able to atone in some degree
for my sin against you."
"Oh dear no!" she scornfully threw in. "Our hopes shall not be fixed so
high as that! All is at an end between us, and if you ever were anything
to me, you are nothing to me now--absolutely nothing. One hour in the
past we had in common; it was short indeed, but to me--would you believe
it?--a very great matter. It aged the young creature, whom you, but
yesterday, still regarded as a mere child--that much I know--with amazing
rapidity; aye, and made a worse woman of her than you can fancy."
"That indeed would grieve me to the bottom of my soul," replied Orion.
"There is, I know, no excuse for my conduct. Still, as you yourself know,
our mothers' wish in the first instance. . ."
"Destined us for each other, you would say. Quite true!--And it was all
to please Dame Neforis that you put your arms round me, under the
acacias, and called me your own, your all, your darling, your rose-bud?
Was that--and this is exactly what I want to ask you, what I insist on
knowing--was that all a lie--or did you, at any rate, in that brief
moment, under the trees, love me with all your heart--love me as now you
love--I cannot name her--that other?--The truth, Orion, the whole truth,
on your oath!"
She had raised her voice and her eyes glowed with the excitement of
passion; and now, when she ceased speaking, their sparkling, glistening
enquiry plainly and unreservedly confessed that her heart still was his,
that she counted on his high-mindedness and expected him to say "yes."
Her round arm lay closely pressed to her bosom, as though to keep its
wild heaving within bounds. Her delicate face had lost its pallor and
seemed bathed in a glow, now tender and now crimson. Her little mouth,
which but now had uttered such bitter words, was parted in a smile as if
ready to bestow a sweet reward for the consoling, saving answer, for
which her whole being yearned, and her eager eyes, shining through tears,
did not cease to entreat him so pathetically, so passionately! How
bewitching an image of helpless, love-sick, beseeching youth and grace.
"As you love that other,--on your oath."--The words still rang in the
young man's ear. All that was soft in his soul urged him to make good the
evil he had brought upon this fair, hapless young creature; but those
very words gave him strength to remain steadfast; and though he felt
himself appealed to for comfort and compassion, he could only stretch out
imploring hands, as though praying for help, and say:
"Ah Katharina, and you are as lovely, as charming now, as you were then;
but--much as you attracted me, the great love that fills a life can come
but once. . . . Forget what happened afterwards. . . . Put your question
in another form, alter it a little, and ask me again--or let me assure
you."
But he had no time to say more; for, before he could atop her, she had
slipped past him and flown away like some swift wild thing into the road
and down to the fishing cove.
CHAPTER IV.
Orion stood alone gazing sadly after her. Was this his father's
curse--that all who loved him must reap pain and grief in return?
He shivered; still, his youthful energy and powers of resistance were
strong enough to give him speedy mastery over these torturing
reflections. What opportunities lay before him of proving his prowess!
Even while Katharina was telling her story, the brave and strenuous youth
had set himself the problem of rescuing the cloistered sisters. The
greater the danger its solution might involve him in, the more impossible
it seemed at first sight, the more gladly, in his present mood, would he
undertake it. He stepped out into the road and closed the door behind him
with a feeling of combative energy.
It was growing dusk. Philippus must now be with Mary and, with the
leech's aid, he was resolved to get the child away from his mother's
house. Not till he felt that she was safe with Paula in Rufinus' house,
could he be free to attempt the enterprise which floated before his eyes.
On the stairs he shouted to a slave:
"My chariot with the Persian trotting horse!" and a few minutes after he
entered the little girl's room at the same time with a slave girl who
carried in a lamp. Neither Mary nor the physician observed him at first,
and he heard her say to Philippus, who sat holding her wrist between his
fingers.
"What is the matter with you this evening? Good heavens, how pale and
melancholy you look!" The lamplight fell full on his face. "Look here, I
have just made such a smart little man out of wax. . ."
She hoped to amuse the friend who was always so kind to her with this
comical work of art; but, as she leaned forward to reach it, she caught
sight of her uncle and exclaimed: "Philippus comes here to cure me, but
he looks as if he wanted a draught himself. Take care, or you will have
to drink that bitter brown stuff you sent yesterday; then you will know
for once how nasty it can be." Though the child's exclamation was
well-meant, neither of the men took any notice of it. They stood face to
face in utter silence and with only a formal greeting; for Orion, without
Mary's remark, had been struck by the change that had come over the
physician since yesterday. Ignoring Orion's presence, he asked the child
a few brief questions, begged Eudoxia to persevere in the same course of
treatment, and then hastily bid a general farewell to all present; Orion,
however, did not respond, but said, with an affectionate glance at the
little patient: "One word with you presently."
This made Philippus turn to look at Mary and, as the eyes of the rivals
met, they knew that on one subject at any rate they thought and felt
alike. The leech already knew how tenderly the young man had taken to
Mary, and he followed him into the room which Orion now occupied, and
which, as Philippus was aware, had formerly been Paula's.
"In the cause of duty," he said to himself again and again, to keep
himself calm and enable him to gather at least the general sense of what
the handsome young fellow opposite to him was saying in his rich,
pleasant voice, and urging as a request with more warmth than the leech
had given him credit for. Philippus, of course, had heard of the
grandmother's lamentable revulsion of feeling against her grandchild, and
he thought Orion's wish to remove the little girl fully justified. But,
on learning that she was to be placed under Paula's care, he seemed
startled, and gazed at the floor in such sullen gloom that the other
easily guessed what was going on in his mind. In fact, the physician
suspected that the child was to serve merely as an excuse for the more
frequent meetings of the lovers. Unable to bury this apprehension in his
own breast he started to his feet, and was about to put it into words,
when Orion took the words out of his mouth, saying modestly but frankly,
with downcast eyes:
"I speak only for the child's--for Mary's sake. By my father's
soul. . . ."
But Philippus shook his head dismally, went up to his rival, and murmured
dully:
"For the sake of that child I am capable of doing or enduring a great
deal. She could not be better cared for than with Rufinus and Paula; but
if I could suppose," and he raised his voice, while his eyes took a
sinister and threatening expression, "if I could suppose that her sacred
and suffering innocence were merely an excuse. . . ."
"No, no," said Orion urgently. "Again, on my sacred word, I assure you
that I have no aim in view but the child's safety; and, as we have said
so much, I will not stick at a word more or less! Rufinus' house is open
to you day and night, and I, if all turns out as I expect, shall ere long
be far from hence--from Memphis--from Paula. There is mischief brewing--I
dare say no more--an act of treachery; and I will try to prevent it at
the risk of my life. You, every one, shall no longer have a right to
think me capable of things which are as repulsive to my nature as to
yours. You and I, if I mistake not, strive for the same prize, and so far
are rivals; but why should the child therefor suffer? Forget it in her
presence, and that forgetting will, as you well know, enhance your merit
in her--her eyes."
"My merit?" retorted the other scornfully. "Merit is not in the balance;
nothing but the gifts of blind Fortune--a nose, a chin, an eye, anything
in short--a crime as much as a deed of heroism--that happens to make a
deep impression on the wax of a girl's soft heart. But curse me," and he
shouted the words at Orion as if he were beside himself, "if I know how
we came to talk of such things! Has my folly gone running through the
streets, bare-bosomed, to display itself to the world at large? How do
you know what my feelings are? She, perhaps, has laughed with you at her
ridiculous lover?--Well, no matter. You know already, or will know by
to-morrow, which of us has won the cock-fight. You have only to look at
me! What woman ever broke her heart for such a Thersites-face. Good-luck
to the winner, and the other one--well, since it must be so, farewell
till to-morrow."
He hastily made his way towards the door; Orion, however, detained him,
imploring him to set aside his ill-feeling--at any rate for the present;
assured him that Paula had not betrayed what his feelings were; that, on
the contrary, he himself, seeing him with her so late on the previous
night, had been consumed by jealousy, and entreated him to vent his wrath
on him in abusive words, if that could ease his heart, only, by all that
was good, not to withdraw his succor from that poor, innocent child.
The physician's humane heart was not proof against his prayer; and when
at length he prepared to depart, in the joyful and yet painful conviction
that his happier rival had become more worthy of the prize, he had agreed
that he would impress on Neforis, whose mind he suspected to be slightly
affected, that the air of the governor's residence did not suit Mary, and
that she should place her in the care of a physician outside the town.
As soon as Philippus had quitted the house, Orion went to see Rufinus,
who, on his briefly assuring him that he had come on grave and important
business, begged him to accompany him to his private room. The young man,
however, detained him till he had made all clear with the women as to the
reception of little Mary.
"By degrees all the inhabitants of the residence will be transplanted
into our garden!" exclaimed Rufinus. "Well, I have no objection; and you,
old woman, what do you say to it?"
"I have none certainly," replied his wife. "Besides, neither you nor I
have to decide in this case: the child is to be Paula's guest."
"I only wish she were here already," said Paula, "for who can say whether
your mother, Orion--the air here is perilously Melchite."
"Leave Philippus and me to settle that.--You should have seen how pleased
Mary was."
Then, drawing Paula aside, he hastily added:
"Have I not hoped too much? Is your heart mine? Come what may, can I
count on you--on your lov-?"
"Yes, Yes!" The words rushed up from the very bottom of her heart, and
Orion, with a sigh of relief, followed the old man, glad and comforted.
The study was lighted up, and there, without mentioning Katharina, he
told Rufinus of the patriarch's scheme for dispersing the nuns of St.
Cecilia. What could he care for these Melchite sisters? But, since that
consoling hour in the church, he felt as though it were his duty to stand
forth for all that was right, and to do battle against everything that
was base. Besides, he knew how warmly and steadfastly his father had
taken the part of this very convent against the patriarch. Finally, he
had heard how strongly his beloved was attached to this retreat and its
superior, so he prepared himself gleefully to come forth a new man of
deeds, and show his prowess.
The old man listened with growing surprise and horror, and when Orion had
finished his story he rose, helplessly wringing his hands. Orion spoke to
him encouragingly, and told him that he had come, not merely to give the
terrible news, but to hold council with him as to how the innocent
victims might be rescued. At this the grey-headed philanthropist and
wanderer pricked up his ears; and as an old war horse, though harnessed
to the plough, when he hears the trumpet sound lifts his head and arches
his neck as proudly and nobly as of yore under his glittering trappings,
so Rufinus drew himself up, his old eyes sparkled, and he exclaimed with
all the enthusiasm and eagerness of youth:
"Very good, very good; I am with you; not merely as an adviser; no, no.
Head, and hand, and foot, from crown to heel! And as for you, young
man--as for you! I always saw the stuff that was in you in spite--in
spite.--But, as surely as man is the standard of all things, those who
reach the stronghold of virtue by a winding road are often better
citizens than those who are born in it.--It is growing late, but evensong
will not yet have begun and I shall still be able to see the abbess. Have
you any plan to propose?"
"Yes; the day after to-morrow at this hour. . . ."
"And why not to-morrow?" interrupted the ardent old man.
"Because I have preparations to make which cannot be done in twelve hours
of daylight."
"Good! Good!"
"The day after to-morrow at dusk, a large barge--not one of ours--will be
lying by the bank at the foot of the convent garden. I will escort the
sisters as far as Doomiat on the Lake. I will send on a mounted messenger
to-night, and I will charter a ship for the fugitives by the help of my
cousin Columella, the greatest ship-owner of that town. That will take
them over seas wherever the abbess may command."
"Capital, splendid!" cried Rufinus enthusiastically. He took up his hat
and stick, and the radiant expression of his face changed to a very grave
one. He went up to the young man with solemn dignity, looked at him with
fatherly kindliness, and said:
"I know what woes befell your house through those of our confession, the
fellow-believers of these whom you propose to protect with so much
prudence and courage; and that, young man, is noble, nay, is truly great.
I find in you--you who were described to me as a man of the world and not
over-precise--for the first time that which I have sought in vain for
many years and in many lands, among the pious and virtuous: the spirit of
willing self-sacrifice to save an enemy of a different creed from
pressing peril.--But you are young, Orion, and I am old. You triumph in
the action only, I foresee the consequences. Do you know what lies before
you, if it should be discovered that you have covered the escape of the
prey whom the patriarch already sees in his net? Have you considered that
Benjamin, the most implacable and most powerful hater among the
Jacobites, will pursue you as his mortal foe with all the fearful means
at his command?"
"I have considered it," replied Orion.
Rufinus laid his left hand on the young man's shoulder, and his right
hand on his head, saying, "Then take with you, to begin with, an old
man's--a father's blessing."
"Yes, a father's," repeated Orion softly. A happy thrill ran through his
body and soul, and he fell on the old man's neck deeply moved.
For a minute they stood clasped in each other's arms; then Rufinus freed
himself, and set out to seek the abbess. Orion returned to the women,
whose curiosity had been roused to a high pitch by seeing Rufinus
disappear through the gate leading to the convent-garden. Dame Joanna
could not sit still for excitement, and Pulcheria answered at random when
Orion and Paula, who had an infinity of things to say or whisper to each
other, now and then tried to draw her into the conversation. Once she
sighed deeply, and when her friend asked her: "What ails you, Child?" she
answered anxiously:
"Something serious must be going forward, I feel it. If only Philippus
were here!"
"But we are all safe and well, thank God!" observed Orion, and she
quickly replied:
"Yes indeed, the Lord be praised!" But she thought to herself:
"You think he is of no use but to heal the sick; but it is only when he
is here that everything goes right and happens for the best!"
Still, all felt that there was something unusual and ominous in the air,
and when the old man presently returned his face confirmed their
suspicions. He laid aside his hat and staff in speechless gravity; then
he put his arm affectionately round his wife and said:
"You will need all your courage and self-command once more, as you have
often done before, good wife; I have taken upon myself a serious duty."
Joanna had turned very pale, and while she clung to her husband and
begged him to speak and not to torture her with suspense, her frail
figure was trembling, and bitter tears ran down her cheeks. She could
guess that her husband was once more going away from her and their child,
in the service and for the benefit of others, and she knew full well that
she could not prevent it. If she could, she never would have had the
heart to interfere: for she always understood him, and felt with him that
something to take him out of the narrow circle of home-life was
indispensable to his happiness.
He read her thoughts, and they gave him pain; but he was not to be
diverted from his purpose. The man who would try to heal every suffering
brute was accustomed to see those whom he loved best grieve on his
account. Marriage, he would say, ought not to hinder a man in following
his soul's vocation; and he was fond of using this high-sounding name to
justify himself in his own and his wife's eyes, in doing things to which
he was prompted only by restlessness and unsatisfied energy. Without this
he would, no doubt, have done his best for the imperilled sisterhood, but
it added to his enjoyment of the grand and dangerous rescue.
The wretched fate of the hapless nuns, and the thought of losing them as
near neighbors, grieved the women deeply, and the men saw many tears
flow; at the same time they had the satisfaction of finding them all
three firmly and equally determined to venture all, and to bid these whom
they loved venture all, to hinder the success of a deed which filled them
with horror and disgust.
Joanna spoke not a word of demur when Rufinus said that he intended to
accompany the fugitives; and when, with beaming looks, he went on to
praise Orion's foresight and keen decisiveness, Paula flew to him proudly
and gladly, holding out both her hands. As for the young man, he felt as
though wings were growing from his shoulders, and this fateful evening
was one of the happiest of his life.
The superior had agreed to his scheme, and in some details had improved
upon it. Two lay sisters and one nun should remain behind. The two former
were to attend to the sick in the infirmary, to ring the bell and chant
the services as usual, that the escape of the rest might not be
suspected; and Joanna, Paula, and Pulcheria, were to assist them.
When, at a late hour, Orion was about to leave, Rufinus asked whether,
under these circumstances, it would be well to bring Mary to his house;
he himself doubted it. Joanna was of his opinion; Paula, on the contrary,
said that she believed it would be better to let the child run the risk
of a remote danger--hardly to be called danger, than to leave her to pine
away body and soul in her old home. Pulcheria supported her, but the two
girls were forced to yield to the decision of the elders.
THE BRIDE OF THE NILE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 8.
CHAPTER V.
After that interview with Orion, Philippus hurried off through the town,
paying so little heed to the people he met and to the processions
besieging Heaven with loud psalms to let the Nile at last begin to rise,
that he ran up against more than one passer-by, and had many a word of
abuse shouted after him. He went into two or three houses, and neither
his patients nor their attendants could recognize, in this abrupt and
hasty visitor, the physician and friend who was usually so sympathetic to
the sufferer: who would speak with a cordiality that brought new life to
his heart, who would toss the children in the air, kiss one and nod
merrily to another. To-day their elders even felt shy and anxious in his
presence. For the first time he found the duty he loved a wearisome
burthen; the sick man was a tormenting spirit in league with the world
against his peace of mind. What possessed him, that he should feel such
love of his fellow-men as to deprive himself of all comfort in life and
of his night's rest for their sake? Rufinus was right. In these times
each man lived solely to spite his neighbor, and he who could be most
brazenly selfish, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, was
the most certain to get on in life. Fool that he was to let other folks'
woes destroy his peace and hinder him in his scientific advancement!
Tormented by such bitter thoughts as these, he went into a neat little
house by the harbor where a worthy pilot lay dying, surrounded by his
wife and children; and there, at once, he was himself again, putting
forth all his knowledge and heartfelt kindliness, quitting the scene with
a bleeding heart and an empty purse; but no sooner was he out of doors
than his former mood closed in upon him with double gloom. The case was
plain: Even with the fixed determination not to sacrifice himself for
others he could not help doing it; the impulse was too strong for him. He
could no more help suffering with the sufferer, and giving the best he
had to give with no hope of a return, than the drunkard can help
drinking. He was made to be plundered; it was his fate!
With a drooping head he returned to his old friend's work-room. Horapollo
was sitting, just as he had sat the night before, at his writing-table
with his scrolls and his three lamps, a slave below, snoring while he
awaited his master's pleasure.
The leech's pretty Greek greeting "Rejoice!" sounded rather like "May
you choke!" as he flung aside his upper garment; and to the old man's
answer and anxious exclamation: "How badly you look, Philip!" he answered
crossly: "Like a man who deserves a kick rather than a welcome; a booby
who has submitted to have his nose pulled; a cur who has licked the hand
of the lout who has thrashed him!"
He threw himself on the divan and told Horapollo all that had passed
between him and Orion. "And the maddest part of it all," he ended, "is
that I almost like the man; that he really seems to me to be on the high
road to become a capital fellow; and that I no longer feel inclined to
pitch him into a lime-kiln at the mere thought of his putting out a hand
to Paula. At the same time," and he started to his feet, "even if I help
him to bring the poor little girl away from that demented old hag, I
cannot and will not continue to be her physician. There are plenty of
quacks about in this corpse of a town, and they may find one of them.
"You will continue to treat the child," interrupted the old man quietly.
"To have my heart daily flogged with nettles!" exclaimed the leech, going
towards Horapollo with wild gesticulations. "And do you believe that I
have any desire to meet that young fellow's sweetheart day after day,
often twice a day, that the barb may be twisted round and round in my
bleeding wound?"
"I expect a quite different result from your frequent meeting," said the
other. "You will get accustomed to see her under the aspect which alone
she can hence forth bear to you: that of a handsome girl--there are
thousands such in Egypt,--and the betrothed of another."
"Certainly, if my heart were like a hunting-dog that lies down the moment
it is bid," said Philippus with a scornful laugh. "The end of it is that
I must go away, away from Memphis--away from this miserable world for all
I care! I?--Recover my peace of mind within reach of her? Alas, for my
blissful, lost peace!"
"And why not? To every man a thing is only as he conceives of it. Only
listen to me: I had finished a treatise on the old and new Calendars, and
my master desired me to deliver a lecture on it in the Museum--if the
school of pedants in Alexandria now deserves the name; but I did not wish
to do so because I knew that the presence of such a large and learned
audience would embarrass me. But my master advised me to imagine that my
hearers were not men, but mere cabbages. This gave me new light; I took
his advice, got over my shyness, and my speech flowed like oil."
"A very good story," said Philippus, "but I do not see. . . ."
"The moral of it for you," interrupted the old man, "is that you must
regard the supremely adorable lady of your love as one among a dozen
others--I will not say as a cabbage--as one with whom your heart has no
more concern. Put a little strength of will into it, and you will
succeed."
"If a heart were a cipher, and if passion were calendar-making! . . ."
retorted Philippus. "You are a very wise man, and your manuscripts and
tables have stood like walls between you and passion."
"Who can tell?" said Horapollo. "But at any rate, it never should have
had such power over me as to make me embitter the few remaining days
under the sun yet granted to my father and friend for the sake of a woman
who scorned my devotion. Will you promise me to talk no more nonsense
about flying from Memphis, or anything of the kind?"
"Teach me first to measure my strength of will."
"Will you try, at any rate?"
"Yes, for your sake."
"Will you promise to continue your treatment of that poor little girl,
whom I love dearly in spite of her forbears?"
"As long as I can endure the daily meeting with her--you know. . ."
"That, then, is a bargain.--Now, come and let us translate a few more
chapters."
The friends sat at work together till a late hour, and when the old man
was alone again he reflected: "So long as he can be of use to the child
he will not go away, and by that time I shall have dug a pit for that
damned siren."
.........................
Orion had his hands full of work for the next morning. Before it was
light he sent off two trustworthy messengers to Doomiat, giving each of
them a letter with instructions that a sailing vessel should be held in
readiness for the fugitives. One was to start three hours after the
other, so that the business in hand should not fail if either of them
should come to grief.
He then went out; first to the harbor, where he succeeded in hiring a
large, good Nile-boat from Doomiat, whose captain, a trustworthy and
experienced man, promised to keep their agreement a secret and to be
prepared to start by noon next day. Next, after taking council with
himself, he went to the treasurer's office, and there, with the
assistance of Nilus, made his will, to be ratified and signed next
morning in the presence of a notary and witnesses. His mother, little
Mary, and Paula were to inherit the bulk of his property. He also
bequeathed a considerable sum as a legacy to the hospitals and orphan
asylums, as well as to the Church, to the end that they might pray for
his soul; and a legacy to Nilus "as the most just judge of his
household." Eudoxia, Mary's Greek governess, was not forgotten; and
finally he commanded that all his house-slaves should be liberated, and
to the end that they might not suffer from want he bequeathed to them one
of his largest estates in Upper Egypt, where they might settle and labor
for their common good. He increased the handsome sums already devised by
his father to the freedmen of his family.
This business occupied several hours. Nilus, who wrote while Orion
dictated, giving the document a legal form, was deeply touched by the
young man's fore thought and kindness; for in truth, since his
desecration of the judgment-seat, he had given him up for a lost soul.
By Orion's orders this will was to be opened after four weeks, in case he
should not have returned from a journey on which he proposed starting on
the morrow, and this injunction revealed to the faithful steward, who had
grown grey in the service, that the last scion of the house expected to
run considerable risk; however, he was too modest to ask any questions,
and his master did not take him into his confidence.
When, after all this, the two men went back into the anteroom, Anubis,
the young clerk and Katharina's ally, was standing there. Nilus took no
notice of him, and while he, with tearful eyes, stooped to kiss the hand
Orion held out to him as he bid him come to take leave of him once more
next evening, Anubis, who had withdrawn respectfully to a little
distance, keeping his ears open, however, officiously opened the heavy
iron-plated door.
Orion was exhausted and hungry; he enquired for his mother, and hearing
that she had gone to lie down, he went into the dining-room to get some
food. Although breakfast had but just been served, Eudoxia was awaiting
him with evident impatience. Her heart was bursting with a great piece of
news, and as Orion entered, greeting her, she cried out:
"Have you heard? Do you know?" Then she began, encouraged by his curt
negative, to pour out to him how that Neforis, by the desire of the
physician who had lately been to see her, had decided on sending her,
Eudoxia, away with her granddaughter to enjoy better air under the roof
of a friend of the leech's; they were to go this very day, or to-morrow
at latest.
Orion was disagreeably startled by this intelligence. He had not expected
that Philippus would come so early, and he himself had been the first to
promote a scheme which now no longer seemed advisable.
"How very provoking!" he muttered between his teeth, as a slave offered
him a roast fowl and asparagus.
"Is it not? And perhaps we shall have to go quite far into the country,"
said the Greek, with a languishing look, as she drew one of the long
stems between her teeth.
The words and the glance made Orion feel as if he grudged the old fool
the good food she was eating, and his voice was not particularly
ingratiating as he replied that town and country were all the same, the
only point was which would be best for the child. When he went on to say
that he was quitting home next evening, Eudoxia cried out, let a stick of
asparagus drop in her lap, and said despairingly: "Oh, then everything is
at an end!"
He, however, interposed reproachfully: "On the contrary, then your duty
begins; you must devote yourself wholly and exclusively to the child. You
know that her own grandmother is averse to her. Give her your best
affection, as you have already begun to do, be a mother to her; and if
you really are my well-wisher, show it in that way. For my part you will
find me grateful, and not in words alone. Go tomorrow to the treasurer's
office; Nilus will give you the only thing by which I can at present
prove my gratitude. Do your best to cherish the child; I have taken care
to provide for your old age."
He rose, cutting short the Greek's profuse expressions of thanks, and
betook himself to his mother. She was still in her room; however, he now
sent word that he had come to see her, and she was ready to admit him,
having expected that he would come even sooner.
She was reclining, half-sitting, on a divan in her cool and shady
bedroom, and she at once told her son of her determination to follow the
physician's advice and entrust the little girl to his friend. She spoke
in a tone of sleepy indifference; but as soon as Orion opposed her and
begged her to keep Mary at home, she grew more lively, and looking him
wrathfully in the face exclaimed: "Can you wish that? How can you ask
me?" and she went on in repining lamentation:
"Everything is changed nowadays. Old age no longer forgets; it is youth
that has a short memory. Your head has long been full of other things,
but I--I still remember who it was that made my lost dear one's last
hours on earth a hell, even in view of the gates of Heaven!" Her breast
heaved with feeble, tearless sobs--a short, convulsive gasping, and Orion
did not dare contravene her wishes. He sought to soothe her with loving
words and, when she recovered herself, he told her that he proposed to
leave her for a short time to look after his estates, as the law
required, and this information gladdened her greatly. To be
alone--solitary and unobserved now seemed delightful. Those white pills
did more for her, raised her spirits better, than any human society. They
brought her dreams, sleeping or waking; dreams a thousand times more
delightful than her real, desolate existence. To give herself up to
memory, to pray, to dream, to picture herself in the other world among
her beloved dead--and besides that to eat and drink, which she was always
ready to do very freely--this was all she asked henceforth of life on
earth.
When, to her further questions, Orion replied that he was going first to
the Delta, she expressed her regret, since, if he had gone to Upper
Egypt, he might have visited his sister-in-law, Mary's mother, in her
convent. She sat up as she spoke, passed her hand across her forehead,
and pointed to a little table near the head of the couch, on which, by
the side of a cup with fruit syrup, phials, boxes, and other objects, lay
a writing-tablet and a letter-scroll. This she took up and handed to
Orion, saying:
"A letter from your sister-in-law. It came last evening and I began to
read it; but the first words are a complaint of your father, and
that--you know, just before going to sleep--I could not read any more; I
could not bear it! And to-day; first there was church, and then the
physician came with his request about the child; I have not yet found
courage to read the rest of it.--What can any letter bring to me but
evil! Do you know at all whence anything pleasant could come to me? But
now: read me the letter. Not that part again about your father; that I
will keep till presently for myself alone."
Orion undid the roll, and with quivering lips glanced over the nun's
accusations against his father. The wildest fanaticism breathed in every
line of this epistle from the martyr's widow. She had found in the
cloister all she sought: she lived now, she said, in God alone and in the
Divine Saviour. She thought of her child, even, only as an alien, one of
God's young creatures for whom it was a joy to pray. At the same time it
was her duty to care for the little one's soul, and if it were not too
hard for her grandmother to part from her, she longed to see Mary once
more. She had lately been chosen abbess of her convent--and no one could
prevent her taking possession of the child; but she feared lest an
overwhelming natural affection might drag her back to the carnal world,
which she had for ever renounced, so she would have Mary brought up in a
neighboring nunnery, and led to Heavenly joys, not to earthly misery--to
be the wife of no sinful husband, but a pure bride of Christ.
Orion shuddered as he read and, when he laid the letter down, his mother
exclaimed:
"Perhaps she is right, perhaps it is already ordained that the child
should be sent to the convent, and not to the leech's friend, and started
on the only path that leads to Heaven without danger or hindrance!"
But Orion said to himself that he would make it his duty to guard the
happy-hearted child from this fate, and he begged his mother to consider
that the first important point was to restore the little girl to health.
He now saw that she had been right. His father had always obeyed the
prescriptions of Philippus, and for that reason, if for no other, it
would be her duty to act by his advice.
Neforis, who for some time had been casting longing eyes at a small box
by her side, did not contradict him; and in the course of the afternoon
Orion conducted little Mary and her governess to the house of Rufinus,
who, notwithstanding the doubts he had expressed the day before, made
them heartily welcome.
When Mary was lying in her bed, close by the side of Paula's, the child
threw her arms round the young girl's neck as she leaned over her, and
laying her head on her bosom, felt herself in soft and warm security.
There, as one released from prison and bondage, she wept out her woes,
pouring all the grief of her deeply wounded child's heart into that of
her friend.
Paula, however, heard Orion's voice, and she longed to go down to her
lover, whom she had greeted but briefly on his arrival; still, she could
not bear to snatch the child from her bosom, to disturb her in her
newly-found happiness and leave her at this very moment! And yet, she
must--she must see him! Every impulse urged her towards him and, when
Pulcheria came into the room, she placed Mary's hand in hers and said:
"There, now make friends and stay together like good children till I come
back again and have something nice to tell you. You are fond of Orion,
little one, my story shall be all about him."
"He was obliged to go," said Pulcheria, interrupting her. "Here is his
message on this tablet. He was almost dying of impatience, and when he
could wait no longer he wrote this for you."
Paula took the tablet, with a cry of regret, and carried it to her room
to read. He had longed for their meeting as eagerly as herself, but at
last he could wait no longer. How differently--so he wrote--had he hoped
to end this day which must be devoted to the rescue of her friends.
Why, oh why had she allowed herself to be detained here? Why had she not
flown to him, at least for a few moments, to thank him for his kindness
and faithfulness, and to hear him confess publicly and aloud what he had
but murmured in her ear the day before? She returned to the little girl,
anxious and dissatisfied with herself.
Orion had in fact postponed his departure till the last moment; he
thought it necessary to give Amru due notice of his journey and of his
rupture with the patriarch. Of all the motives which could prompt him to
aid the nuns, revenge was that which the Arab could best understand.
CHAPTER VI.
As Orion rode across the bridge of boats to Fostat, the gladness that had
inspired him died away. Could not--ought not Paula to have spared him a
small part of the time she had devoted to the child? He had been left to
make the most of a kind grasp of the hand and a grateful look of welcome.
Would she not have flown to meet him, if the love of which she had
assured him yesterday were as fervent, as ardent as his own? Was the
proud spirit of this girl, who, as his mother said, was cold and
unapproachable, incapable of passionate, self-forgetting devotion? Was
there no way of lighting up in her the sacred fire which burnt in him? He
was tormented by many doubts and a bitter feeling of disappointment, and
a crowd of suspicions forced themselves upon him, which would never have
troubled him if only he had seen her once more, had heard her happy words
of love, and felt his lips consecrated by his mistress' first kiss.
He was out of spirits, indeed out of temper, as he entered the Arab
general's dwelling. In the anteroom he was met by rejected petitioners,
and he said to himself, with a bitter smile, that he had just been sent
about his business in the same unsatisfied mood--yes, sent about his
business--and by whom?
He was announced, and his spirits rose a little when he was at once
admitted and led past many, who were left waiting, into the Arab
governor's presence-chamber. He was received with paternal warmth; and,
when Amru heard that Orion and the patriarch had come to high words, he
jumped up and holding out both his hands exclaimed:
"My right hand on that, my friend; come over to Islam, and with my left I
will appoint you your father's successor, in the Khaliff's name, in spite
of your youth. Away with hesitation! Clasp hands; at once, quickly! I
cannot bear to quit Egypt and know that there is no governor at Memphis!"
The blood tingled in the young man's veins. His father's successor! He,
the new Mukaukas! How it flattered his ambition, what a way to all
activity it opened out to him! It dazzled his vision, and moved him
strongly to grasp the right hand which his generous patron still held out
to him. But suddenly his excited fancy showed him the image of the
Redeemer with whom he had entered into a silent covenant in the church,
sadly averting his gentle face. At this he remembered what he had vowed;
at this he forgot all his grievance against Paula; he took the general's
hand, indeed, but only to raise it to his lips as he thanked him with all
his heart. But then he implored him, with earnest, pleading urgency, not
to be wroth with him if he remained firm and clung to the faith of his
father and his ancestors. And Amru was not wroth, though it was with none
of the hearty interest with which he had at first welcomed him, that he
hastily warned Orion to be on his guard against the prelate, since, so
long as he remained a Christian, he had no power to protect him against
Benjamin.
When Orion went on to tell him that he was intending to travel for a
short time, and had, in fact, come to take leave of him, the Arab was
much annoyed. He, too, he said, must be going away and was starting
within two days for Medina.
"And in casting my eye on you," he went on, "in spite of your youth, to
fill your father's place, I took care to find a task for you which would
enable you to prove that I had not put too great confidence in you. But,
if you persist in your own opinions, I cannot possibly entrust so
important a post as the governorship of Memphis to a Christian so young
as you are; with the youthful Moslem I might have ventured on
it.--However, I will not deprive you of the enterprise which I had
intended for you. If you succeed in it, it will be a good thing for
yourself, and I can, I believe, turn it to the benefit of the whole
province--for what could take me from hence at this time, when my
presence is so needful for a hundred incomplete projects, but my anxiety
for the good of this country--in which I am but an alien, while you must
love it as your native soil, the home of your race?--I am going to Medina
because the Khaliff, in this letter, complains that I send too small a
revenue into the treasury from so rich a land as Egypt. And yet not a
single dinar of your taxes finds its way into my own coffers. I keep a
hundred and fifty thousand laborers at work to restore the canals and
waterworks which my predecessors, the blood-sucking Byzantines, neglected
so disgracefully and left to fall to ruin--I build, and plan, and sow
seed for posterity to reap. All this costs money. It swallows up the
lion's share of the revenue. And I am making the journey, not merely to
purge myself from reproach, but to obtain Omar's permission for the
future to exact no extortionate payments, but to consider only the true
weal of the province. I am most unwilling to go, for a thousand reasons;
and you, young man, if you care for your native land, ought. . . . Do you
really love it and wish it well?"
"With all my soul!" cried Orion.
"Well then, at this time, if by any possibility you can arrange it so,
you ought to remain at home, and devote yourself heart and soul to the
task I have to propose to you. I hate postponements. Ride straight at the
foe, and do not canter up and down till you tire the horses! that is my
principle, and not in battle only. Take the moral to heart!--And you will
have no time to waste; what I require is no light matter: It is that you
should endeavor to sketch a new division of the districts, drawing on
your own knowledge of the country and its inhabitants, and using the
records and lists in the archives of your ancient government-offices, of
which your father has told me; you must have special regard to the
financial condition of each district. That the old mode of levying taxes
is unsatisfactory we find every day; you will have ample room for
improvements in every respect. Overthrow the existing arrangements, if
you consider it necessary. Other men have attempted to redistribute the
divisions and devise new modes of collecting the revenue. The best scheme
will have the preference; and you seem to me to be the man to win the
prize, and, with it, a wide and noble field of work in the future. It is
not a mere sense of tedium, or a longing for the pleasures of the capital
to which you are accustomed, that are tempting you to quit Memphis the
melancholy. . . ."
"No, indeed, my Lord," Orion assured him. "The duty I have in view does
not even profit me, and if I had not given my word I would throw myself,
heart and soul, into so grand a task, no later than to-morrow. That you
should expect me to solve so hard a problem is the most precious incense
ever offered me. If it is only to be worthy of your confidence, I will
return as soon as possible and put forth my utmost powers of intelligence
and prudence, of endurance and patriotism. I have always been a diligent
student; and it would be a shame indeed, if my experiences as a youth
could hinder the man from outdoing the school-boy."
"That is right, well said!" replied Amru, holding out his hand. "Do your
best, and you shall have ample opportunity of proving your powers.--Take
my warnings to heart as regards the patriarch and the black Vekeel. I
unfortunately have no one who could fill his place except the worthy Kadi
Othman; but he is no soldier, and he cannot be spared from his post. Keep
out of Obada's way, return soon, and may the All-merciful protect
you. . . . "
When Orion had recrossed the bridge on his way home, he saw a
gaily-dressed Nile-boat, such as now but rarely stopped at Memphis, lying
at anchor in the dock, and on the road he met two litters followed by
beasts of burden and a train of servants. The whole party had a brilliant
and wealthy appearance, and at any other time would have roused his
curiosity; but to-day he merely wondered for a moment who these
new-comers might be, and then continued to meditate on the task proposed
to him by Amru. From the bottom of his heart he cursed the hour in which
he had pledged himself to take the part of these strangers; for after
such long idleness he longed to be able to prove his powers. Suddenly,
and as if by a miracle, he saw the way opened before him which he had
himself hoped to tread, and now he was fettered and held back from an
enterprise which he felt he could carry out with success and benefit to
his country, while it attracted him as with a hundred lode-stones.
Next morning, when his will had been duly signed and witnessed, he called
the treasurer for an interview alone with him. He had made up his mind
that one person, at least, must be informed of the enterprise he had
planned, and that one could be no other than Nilus. So he begged him to
accompany him to the impluvium of his private residence; and several
office scribes who were present heard the invitation given. They did not,
however, allow themselves to be disturbed in their work; the youngest
only--a handsome lad of sixteen, an olive-complexioned Egyptian, with
keen, eager black eyes, who had listened sharply to every word spoken by
the treasurer and his master, quietly rose from his squatting posture as
soon as they had quitted the office, and, stole, unobserved into the
anteroom. From thence he flew up the ladder-like steps which led to the
dovecote of which he had the care, sprang on to the roof of the lower
story, and crept flat on his face till he was close to the edge of the
large square opening which gave light and air to the impluvium below.
With a swift movement of the hand he pushed back the awning which shaded
it at midday, and listened intently to the dialogue that went on below.
This listener was Anubis, the water-wagtail's foster-brother; and he
seemed to be in no way behind his beloved mistress in the art of
listening; for no one could prick up his ears more sharply than Anubis.
He knew, too, what was to be his reward for exposing himself on a roof to
the shafts of the pitiless African sun, for Katharina, his adored
play-fellow and the mistress of his ardent boy's heart, had promised him
a sweet kiss, if only he would bring her back some more exact news as to
Orion's perilous journey. Anubis had told her, the evening before, all he
had heard in the anteroom to the office, but such general information had
not satisfied her. She must see clearly before her, must know exactly
what was going on, and she was not mistaken when she imagined that the
reward she had promised the lad would spur him to the utmost.
Anubis had not indeed expected to gain his end so soon, boldly as he
dared to hope; scarcely had he pushed aside the awning, when Orion began
to explain to Nilus all his plan and purpose.
When he had finished speaking, the boy did not wait to hear Nilus reply.
Intoxicated with his success, and the prospect of a guerdon which to him
included all the bliss of heaven, he crept back to the dovecote. But he
could not go back by the way by which he had come; for if one of the
older scribes should meet him in the anteroom, he would be condemned to
return to his work. He therefore wriggled along the ridge of the roof
towards the fishing-cove, got over it, and laid hold of a gutter pipe,
intending to slip down it; unfortunately it was old and rotten-rain was
rare in Memphis--and hardly had he trusted his body after his hands when
the lead gave way. The rash youth fell with the clattering fragments of
the gutter from a height of four men; a heavy thump on the pavement was
followed by a loud cry, and in a few minutes all the officials had heard
that poor Anubis, nimble as he was, had fallen from the roof while
attending to his pets, and had broken his leg.
The two men in the impluvium were not informed of the accident till some
time later, for strict orders had been given that they were not to be
disturbed.
Nilus had received his young master's communication with growing
amazement, indignation, and horror. When Orion ended, the treasurer put
forth all the eloquence of a faithful heart, anxious for the safety of
the body and soul of the youth he loved, to dissuade him from a deed of
daring which could bring him nothing but misapprehension, disaster, and
persecution. Nilus was with all his soul a Jacobite; and the idea that
his young master was about to risk everything for a party of Melchite
nuns, and draw down upon himself the wrath and maledictions of the
patriarch, was more than he could bear.
His faithful friend's warnings and entreaties did not leave Orion
unmoved; but he clung to his determination, representing to Nilus that he
had pledged his word to Rufinus, and could not now draw back, though he
had already lost all his pleasure in the enterprise. But it went against
him to leave the brave old man to face the danger alone--indeed, it was
out of the question.
Genuine anxiety is fertile in expedient; Orion had scarcely done
speaking, when Nilus had a proposal to make which seemed well calculated
to dispel the youth's last objections. Melampus, the chief shipbuilder,
was a Greek and a zealous Melchite, though he no longer dared to confess
his creed openly. He and his sons, two bold and sturdy ships carpenters,
had often given proof of their daring, and Nilus had no doubt that they
would be more than willing to share in an expedition which had for its
object the rescue of so many pious fellow-believers. They might take
Orion's place, and would be far more helpful to the old man than Orion
himself.
Orion so far approved of this suggestion as to promise himself good aid
from the brave artisans, who were well known to him; and he was willing
to take them with him, though he would not give up his own share in the
business.
Nilus, though he adhered firmly to his objections, was at last reduced to
silence. However, Orion went with his anxious friend to the ship-yard;
the old ship-builder, a kind-hearted giant, was as ready and glad to
undertake the rescue of the Sisters as if each one was his own mother. It
would be a real treat to the youngsters to have a hand in such a
job,--and he was right, for when they were taken into confidence one
flourished his hatchet with enthusiasm, and the tether struck his horny
fist against his left palm as gleefully as though he were bidden to a
dance.
Orion took boat at once with the three men, and was rowed to the house of
Rufinus, to whom he introduced them; the old man was entirely satisfied.
Orion remained with him after dismissing them. He had promised last
evening to breakfast with him, and the meal was waiting. Paula had gone,
about an hour since, to the convent, and Joanna expected her to return at
any moment. They began without her, however; the various dishes were
carried away, the meal was nearly ended-still she had not returned.
Orion, who had at first been able to conceal his disappointment, was now
so uneasy that his host could with difficulty extract brief and
inadvertent replies to his repeated questions. Rufinus himself was
anxious; but just as he rose to go in search of her, Pulcheria, who was
at the window, saw her coming, and joyfully exclaiming: "There she is!"
ran out.
But now again minute after minute passed, a quarter of an hour grew to
half an hour, and still Orion was waiting in vain. Glad expectation had
long since turned to impatience, impatience to a feeling of injured
dignity, and this to annoyance and bitter vexation, when at last
Pulcheria came back instead of Paula, and begged him from Paula to join
her in the garden.
She had been detained too long at the convent. The terrible rumor had
scared the pious sisters out of their wonted peace and put them all into
confusion, like smoke blown into a bee-hive. The first thing was to pack
their most valuable possessions; and although Orion had expressly said
only a small number of cases and bags could be taken on board, one was
for dragging her prayer-desk, another a large picture of some saint, a
third a copper fish-kettle, and the fourth, fifth, and sixth the great
reliquary with the bones of Ammonius the Martyr, to which the chapel owed
its reputation for peculiar sanctity. To reduce this excess of baggage,
the abbess had been obliged to exert all her energy and authority, and
many a sister retired weeping over some dear but too bulky treasure.
The superior had therefore been unable to devote herself to Paula till
this portable property had been under review. Then the damsel had been
admitted to her parlor, a room furnished with rich and elegant
simplicity, and there she had been allowed to pour out her whole heart to
warm and sympathetic ears.
Any one who could have seen these two together might have thought that
this was a daughter in grief seeking counsel on her mother's breast. In
her youth the grey-haired abbess must have been very like Thomas'
daughter; but the lofty and yet graceful mien of the younger woman had
changed in the matron to majestic and condescending dignity, and it was
impossible to guess from her defiantly set mouth that it had once been
the chief charm of her face.
As she listened to the girl's outpourings the expression of her calm eyes
changed frequently; when her soul was fired by fanatical zeal they could
gleam brightly; but now she was listening to a variety of experiences,
for Paula regarded this interview as a solemn confession, and concealed
nothing from the friend who was both mother and priest-neither of what
had happened to her in external circumstances, nor of what had moved her
heart and mind ever since she had first entered the house of the
Mtikaukas. Not a corner of her soul did she leave unsearched; she neither
concealed nor palliated anything; and when she described her lover's
strenuous efforts to apprehend the whole seriousness of life, her love
and enthusiasm fairly carried her away, making his image shine all the
more brightly by comparison with the brief, but dark shadow, that had
fallen upon it. When Paula had at last ended her confession, the superior
had remained silent for some time; then drawing the girl to her, she had
affectionately asked her:
"And now? Now, tell me truly, does not the passion that has such
wonderful power over you prompt and urge your inmost soul to yield--to
fly to the embrace of the man you love--to give all up for him and say:
'Here I am--I am yours! Call a priest to bless our union!--Is it not
so--am I not right?'"
Paula, deeply blushing, bowed assent; but the old woman drew her head on
to her motherly bosom, and went on thoughtfully:
"I saw him drive past in his quadriga, and was reminded of many a noble
statue of the heathen Greeks. Beauty, rank, wealth, aye--and talents and
intellect--all that could ruin the heart of a Paula are his, and she--I
see it plainly--will give it to him gladly."
And again the maiden bowed her head. The abbess sighed, and went on as
though she had with difficulty succeeded in submitting to the inevitable
"Then all warning would be in vain.--Still, he is not of our confession,
he. . . ."
"But how highly he esteems it!" cried Paula. "That he proves by risking
his freedom and life for you and your household."
"Say rather for you whom he loves," replied the other. "But putting that
out of the question, it pains me deeply to think of Thomas' daughter as
the wife of a Jacobite. You will not, I know, give him up; and the Father
of Love often leads true love to good ends by wonderful ways, even though
they are ways of error, passing through pitfalls and abysses."
Paula fell on her neck to kiss her gratefully: but the abbess could only
allow the girl a few minutes to enjoy her happiness. She desired her to
sit down by her side, and holding Paula's hand in both her own, she spoke
to her in a tone of calm deliberation. She and her sisterhood, she began
by saying, were deeply indebted to Orion. She had no dearer wish than
that Paula should find the greatest earthly happiness in her marriage;
still, it was her part to tender advice, and she dared not blind herself
to the dangers which threatened this happiness. She herself had a long
life behind her of varied experience, in which she had seen hundreds of
young men who had been given up as lost sinners by father and
mother--lost to the Church and to all goodness--and among these many a
one, like Saul, had had his journey to Damascus. A turning point had come
to them, and the outcast sons had become excellent and pious men.
Paula, as she listened, had drawn closer to the speaker, and her eyes
beamed with joy; but the elder woman shook her head, and her gaze grew
more devout and rapt, as she went on with deep solemnity:
"But then, my child, in all of these Grace had done its perfect work; the
miracle was accomplished which we term regeneration. They were still the
same men in the flesh and in the elements of their sensible nature, but
their relation to the world and to life was altogether new. All that they
had formerly thought desirable they could now hate; what they had deemed
important was now worthless, and the worthless precious in their eyes;
whereas they once referred everything to their own desires, they now
referred all to God and His will. Their impulses were the same as of old,
but they kept them within bounds by a never-sleeping consciousness that
they led, not to joys, but to everlasting punishment. These regenerate
souls learned to contemn the world, and instead of gazing down at the
dust their eyes were fixed upwards on Heaven. If either of them tottered,
his whole 'new man' prompted him to recover his balance before he fell to
the ground.--But Orion! Your lover? His guilt seems to have passed over
him; he hopes for reunion with God from a more meritorious life in the
world. Not only is his nature unaltered, but his attitude with regard to
life and to the joys it offers to the children of this world. Earthly
love is spurring him on to strive for what is noble and great and he
earnestly seeks to attain it; but he will fall over every stone that the
devil casts in his path, and find it hard to pick himself up again, for
misfortune has not led him to the new birth or the new life in God. Just
such men have I seen, numbers of times, relapsing into the sins they had
escaped from. Before we can entirely trust a man who has once--though but
once-wandered so far from God's ways, while Grace has not yet worked
effectually in him, we shall do well to watch his dealings and course for
more than a few short days. If you still feel that you must follow the
dictates of your heart, at any rate do not fly into your lover's open
arms, do not abandon to him the pure sanctuary of your body and soul, do
not be wholly his till he has been fully put to the proof."
"But I believe in him entirely!" cried Paula, with a flood of tears.
"You believe because you love him," replied the abbess.
"And because he deserves it."
"And how long has he deserved it?"
"Was he not a splendid man before his fall?"
"And so was many a murderer. Most criminals become outcasts from society
in a single moment."
"But society still accepts Orion."
"Because he is the son of the Mukaukas."
"And because he wins all hearts!"
"Even that of the Almighty?"
"Oh! Mother, Mother! why do you measure him by the standard of your own
sanctified soul? How few are the elect who find a share of the grace of
which you speak!"
"But those who have sinned like him must strive for it."
"And he does so, Mother, in his way."
"It is the wrong way; wrong for those who have sinned as he has. All he
strives for is worldly happiness."
"No, no. He is firm in his faith in God and the Saviour. He is not a
liar."
"And yet he thinks he may escape the penalty?"
"And does not the Lord pardon true repentance?--He has repented; and how
bitterly, how fearfully he has suffered!"
"Say rather that he has felt the stripes that his own sin brought upon
him.--There are more to come; and how will he take them? Temptation lurks
in every path, and how will he avoid it? As your mother, indeed it is my
duty to warn you: Keep your passion and yourself still under control;
continue to watch him, and grant him nothing--not the smallest favor, as
you are a maiden, before he. . ."
"Till when; how long am I to be so basely on my guard?" sobbed Paula. "Is
that love which trusts not and is not ready to share the lot even of the
backslider?"
"Yes, child, yes," interrupted the old woman. "To suffer all things, to
endure all things, is the duty of true love, and therefore of yours; but
you must not allow the most indissoluble of all bonds to unite you to him
till the back-slider has learnt to walk firmly. Follow him step by step,
hold him up with faithful care, never despair of him if he seems other
than what you had hoped. Make it your duty, pious soul, to render him
worthy of grace--but do not be in a hurry to speak the final yes--do not
say it yet."
Paula yielded, though unwillingly, to this last word of counsel; but, in
fact, Orion's fault had filled the abbess with deep distrust. So great a
sinner, under the blight, too, of a father's curse, ought, in her
opinion, to have retired from the world and besieged Heaven for grace and
a new birth, instead of seeking joys, such as she thought none but the
most blameless--and, those of her own confession--could deserve, in union
with so exceptional a creature as her beloved Paula. Indeed, having
herself found peace for her soul only in the cloister, after a stormy and
worldly youth, she would gladly have received the noble daughter of her
old friend as the Bride of Christ within those walls, to be, perhaps, her
successor as Mother Superior. She longed that her darling should be
spared the sufferings she had known through the ruthlessness of faithless
men; so she would not abate a jot of the tenor of her advice, or cease to
impress on Paula, firmly though lovingly, the necessity of following it.
At last Paula took leave of her, bound by a promise not to pledge herself
irrevocably to Orion till his return from Doomiat, and till the abbess
had informed her by letter what opinion she had formed of him in the
course of their flight.
The high-spirited girl had not shed so many tears, as in the course of
this interview, since the fatal affair at Abyla where she had lost her
father and brother; it was with a tear-stained face and aching head that
she had made her way back, under the scorching mid-day sun, to Rufinus'
house, where she sought her old nurse. Betta had earnestly entreated her
to lie down, and when Paula refused to hear of it she persuaded her at
any rate to bathe her head with water as cold as was procurable in this
terrific heat, and to have her hair carefully rearranged by her skilful
hand; for this had been her mother's favorite remedy against headache.
When, at length, Paula and her lover stood face to face, in a shady spot
in the garden, they both looked embarrassed and estranged. He was pale,
and gazed at her with some annoyance; and her red eyes and knit brows,
for her brain was throbbing with piercing pain, did not tend to improve
his mood. It was her part to explain and excuse herself; and as he did
not at once address her after they had exchanged greetings, she said in a
low tone of urgent entreaty:
"Forgive me for coming so late. How long you must have been waiting! But
parting from my best friend, my second mother, agitated me so
painfully--it was so unspeakably sad.--I did not know how to hold up my
head, it ached so when I came home, and now--oh, I had hoped that we
might meet to-day so differently!"
"But even yesterday you had no time to spare for me," he retorted
sullenly, "and this morning--you were present when Rufinus invited
me--this morning!--I am not exacting, and to you, good God! How could I
be?--But have we not to part, to bid each other farewell--perhaps for
ever? Why should you have given up so much time and strength to your
friend, that so scanty a remnant is left for the lover? That is an unfair
division."
"How could I deny it?" she said with melancholy entreaty. "You are indeed
very right; but I could not leave the child last evening, as soon as she
came, and while she was weeping out all her sorrows; and if you only knew
how surprised and grieved I was--how my heart ached when, instead of
finding you, your note. . . ."
"I was obliged to go to Amru," interrupted Orion. "This undertaking
compels me to leave much behind, and I am no longer the freest of the
free, as I used to be. During this dreadful breakfast I have been sitting
on thorns. But let all that pass. I came hither with a heart high with
hope--and now?--You see, Paula, this enterprise tears me in two in more
ways than you can imagine, puts me into a more critical position, and
weighs more on my mind than you can think or know--I will explain it all
to you at another time--and to bear it all, to keep up the spirit and
happy energy that I need, I must be secure of the one thing for which I
could take far greater toil and danger as mere child's play; I must
know. . . ."
"You must know," she interposed, "whether my heart is fully and wholly
open to your love. . . ."
"And whether," he added, with growing ardor, "in spite of the bitter
suffering that weighs on my wretched soul, I may hope to be happier than
the saints in bliss. O Paula, adored and only woman, may I. . . ."
"You may," she said clearly and fervently. "I love you, Orion, and shall
never, never cease to love you with my whole soul."
He flew to her side, clasped both her hands as if beside himself,
snatched them to his lips regardless of the nearness of the house, whence
ten pairs of eyes might have seen him, and covered them with burning
kisses, till she drew them from him with the entreaty: "No, no; forbear,
I entreat you. No--not now."
"Yes, now, at this very moment--or, if not, when?" he asked vehemently.
"But here, in this garden--you are right, this is no place for two human
beings so happy as we are. Come with me; come into the house and lead the
way to a spot where we may be unseen and unheard, alone with each other
and our happiness."
"No, no, no!" she hastily put in, pressing her hand to her aching brow.
"Come with me to the bench under the sycamore; it is shady there, and you
can tell me everything, and hear once more how entirely love has taken
possession of me."
He looked in her face, surprised and disappointed; but she turned towards
the sycamore and sat down beneath it. He slowly followed her. She signed
to him to take a seat by her side, but he stood up in front of her,
saying sadly and despondently.
"Always the same--always calm and cold. Is this fair, Paula? Is this the
overwhelming love of which you spoke? Is this your response to the
yearning cry of a passionately ardent heart? Is this all that love can
grant to love--that a betrothed owes to her lover on the very eve of
parting?"
At this she looked up at him, deeply distressed, and said in pathetically
urgent entreaty: "O Orion, Orion! Have I not told you, can you not see
and feel how much I love you? You must know and feel it; and if you do,
be content, I entreat. You, whom alone I love, be satisfied to know that
this heart is yours, that your Paula--your own Paula, for that indeed I
am--will think of nothing, care for nothing, pray and entreat Heaven for
nothing but you, yes you, my own, my all."
"Then come, come with me," he insisted, "and grant your betrothed the
rights that are his due.
"Nay, not my betrothed--not yet," she besought him, with all the fervor
of her tortured soul. "In my veins too the blood flows warm with
yearning. Gladly would I fly to your arms and lay my head against yours,
but not to-day can I become your betrothed, not yet; I cannot, I dare
not!"
"And why not? Tell me, at any rate, why not," he cried indignantly,
clenching his fist to his breast. "Why will you not be my bride, if
indeed it is true that you love me? Why have you invented this new and
intolerable torment?"
"Because prudence tells me," she replied in a low, hurried voice, while
her bosom heaved painfully, as though she were afraid to hear her own
words; "because I see that the time is not yet come. Ah, Orion! you have
not yet learnt to bridle the desires and cravings that burn within you;
you have forgotten all too quickly what is past--what a mountain we had
to cross before we succeeded in finding each other, before I--for I must
say it, my dear one--before I could look you in the face without anger
and aversion. A strange and mysterious ordering has brought it about; and
you, too, have honestly done your best that everything should be changed,
that what was white should now be black, that the chill north wind should
turn to a hot southerly one. Thus poison turns to healing, and a curse to
a blessing. In this foolish heart of mine passionate hatred has given way
to no less fervent love. Still, I cannot yet be your bride, your wife.
Call it cowardice, call it selfish caution, what you will. I call it
prudence, and applaud it; though it cost my poor eyes a thousand bitter
tears before my heart and brain could consent to be guided by the warning
voice. Of one thing you may be fully assured: my heart will never be
another's, come what may--it is yours with my whole soul!--But I will not
be your bride till I can say to you with glad confidence, as well as with
passionate love: 'You have conquered--take me, I am yours!' Then you
shall feel and confess that Paula's love is not less vehement, less
ardent. . . . O God! Orion, learn to know and understand me. You must--for
my sake and your own, you must!--My head, merciful Heaven, my head!"
She bowed her face and clasped her hands to her burning brow; Orion, pale
and shivering, laid his hand on her shoulder, and said in a harsh, forced
voice that had lost all its music: "The Esoterics impose severe trials on
their disciples before they admit them into the mysteries. And we are in
Egypt--but the difference is a wide one when the rule is applied to love.
How ever, all this is not from yourself. What you call prudence is the
voice of that nun!"
"It is the voice of reason," replied Paula softly. "The yearning of my
heart had overpowered it, and I owe to my friend. . . ."
"What do you owe her?" cried the young man furiously indignant. "You
should curse her, rather, for doing you so ill a turn, as I do at this
moment. What does she know of me? Has she ever heard a word from my lips?
If that despotic and casuistic recluse could have known what my heart and
soul are like, she would have advised you differently. Even as a childs'
confidence and love alone could influence me. Whatever my faults might
be, I never was false to kindness and trust.--And, so far as you are
concerned--you who are prudence and reason in person--blest in your love,
I should have cared only for your approbation. If I could have overcome
the last of your scruples, I should indeed have been proud and happy!--I
would have brought the sun and stars down from the sky for you, and have
laughed temptation to scorn!--But as it is--instead of being raised I am
lowered, a laughing-stock even in my own eyes. One with you, I could have
led the way on wings to the realms of light where Perfection holds
sway!--But as it is? What a task lies before me!--To heat your frigid
love to flaming point by good deeds, as though they were olive-logs. A
pretty task for a man--to put himself to the proof before the woman he
loves! It is a hideous and insulting torture which I will not submit to,
against which my whole inner man revolts, and which you will and must
forego--if indeed it is true that you love me!"
"I love you, oh! I love you," she cried, beside herself, and seizing his
hands. "Perhaps you are right. I--my God what shall I do? Only do not ask
me yet, to speak the final yes or no. I cannot control myself to the
feeblest thought. You see, you see, how I am suffering!"
"Yes, I see it," he replied, looking compassionately at her pale face and
drawn brow. "And if it must be so, I say: till this evening then. Try to
rest now, and take care of yourself.--But then. . . ."
"Then, during the voyage, the flight, repeat to the abbess all you have
just said to me. She is a noble woman, and she, too, will learn to
understand and to love you, I am sure. She will retract the word I know.
. . ."
"What word?"
"My word, given to her, that I would not be yours. . . ."
"Till I had gone through the Esoteric tests?" exclaimed Orion with an
angry shrug. "Now go,--go and lie down. This hour, which should have been
the sweetest of our lives, a stranger has embittered and darkened. You
are not sure of yourself--nor I of myself. Anything more that we could
say now and here would lead to no good issue for either you or me. Go and
rest; sleep off your pain, and I--I will try to forget.--If you could but
see the turmoil in my soul!--But farewell till our next, more friendly--I
hardly dare trust myself to say our happier meeting."
He hastily turned away, but she called after him in sad lament: "Orion do
not forget--Orion, you know that I love you."
But he did not hear; he buried on with his head bowed over his breast,
down to the road, without reentering Rufinus' house.
CHAPTER VII.
When Orion reached home, wounded to the quick, he flung himself on a
divan. Paula had said that her heart was his indeed, but what a cool and
grudging love was this that would give nothing till it had insured its
future. And how could Paula have allowed a third person to come between
them, and rule her feelings and actions? She must have revealed to that
third person all that had previously passed between them--and it was for
this Melchite nun, his personal foe, that he was about to--it was enough
to drive him mad!--But he could not withdraw; he had pledged himself to
the brave old man to carry out this crazy enterprise. And in the place of
the lofty, noble mistress of his whole being, his fancy pictured Paula as
a tearful, vacillating, and cold-hearted woman.
There lay the maps and plans which he had desired Nilus to send in from
his room for his study of the task set him by Amru; as his eye fell upon
them, he struck his fist against the wall, started up, and ran like a
madman up and down the room which had been sacred to her peaceful life.
There stood her lute; he had freshly strung and tuned it. To calm himself
he drew it to him, took up the plectrum, and began to play. But it was a
poor instrument; she had been content with this wretched thing! He flung
it on the couch and took up his own, the gift of Heliodora. How sweetly,
how delightfully she had been wont to play it! Even now its strings gave
forth a glorious tone; by degrees he began to rejoice in his own playing,
and music soothed his excitement, as it had often done before. It was
grand and touching, though he several times struck the strings so
violently that their loud clanging and sighing and throbbing answered
each other like the wild wailing of a soul in torment.
Under this vehement usage the bridge of the lute suddenly snapped off
with a dull report; and at the same instant his secretary, who had been
with him at Constantinople, threw open the door in glad excitement, and
began, even before he had crossed the threshold:
"Only think, my lord! Here is a messenger come from the inn kept by
Sostratus with this tablet for you.--It is open, so I read it. Only
think! it is hardly credible! The Senator Justinus is here with his wife,
the noble Martina--here in Memphis, and they beg you to visit them at
once to speak of matters of importance. They came last night, the
messenger tells me, and now--what joy! Think of all the hospitality you
enjoyed in their house. Can we leave them in an inn? So long as
hospitality endures, it would be a crime!"
"Impossible, quite impossible!" cried Orion, who had cast aside the lute,
and was now reading the letter himself. "It is true indeed! his own
handwriting. And that immovable pair are in Egypt--in Memphis! By
Zeus!"--for this was still the favorite oath of the golden youth of
Alexandria and Constantinople, even in these Christian times.--"By Zeus,
I ought to receive them here like princes!--Wait!--of course you must
tell the messenger that I am coming at once--have the four new Pannonians
harnessed to the silver-plated chariot. I must go to my mother; but there
is time enough for that. Desire Sebek to have the guest-chambers prepared
for distinguished guests--those sick people are out of them, thank God!
Take my present room for them too; I will go back to the old one. Of
course they have a numerous suite. Set twenty or thirty slaves to work.
Everything must be ready in two hours at furthest. The two sitting-rooms
are particularly handsome, but where anything is lacking, place
everything in the house at Sebek's command.--Justinus in Egypt!--But make
haste, man! Nay, stay! One thing more. Carry these maps and scrolls--no;
they are too heavy for you. Desire a slave to fetch them, and take them
to Rufinus; he must keep them till I come. Tell him I meant to use them
on the way--he knows."
The secretary rushed off; Orion performed a rapid toilet and had his
mourning dress rearranged in fresh folds; then he went to his mother. She
had often heard of the cordial reception that her son, and her husband,
too, in former days, had met with in the senator's house, and she took it
quite as a matter of course that the strangers' rooms, and among them
that which had been Paula's, should be prepared for the travellers; all
she asked was that it should be explained that she was suffering, so that
she might not have to trouble herself to entertain them.
She advised Orion to put off his journey and to devote himself to his
friends; but he explained that even their arrival must not delay him. He
had entire confidence in Sebek and the upper housekeeper, and the emperor
himself would remit the duties of hostess to a sick woman. Once, at any
rate, she would surely allow the illustrious guests to pay their respects
to her,--but even this Neforis refused It would be quite enough if her
visitors received messages and greetings daily in her name, with
offerings of choice fruit and flowers, and on the last day some costly
gift. Orion thought this proposal quite worthy of them both, and
presently drove off behind his Pannonians to the hostelry.
By the harbor he met the captain of the boat he had hired; to him he held
up two fingers, and the boatman signified by repeated nodding that he had
understood the meaning of this signal: "Be ready at two hours before
midnight."
The sight of this weather-beaten pilot, and the prospect of making some
return to his noble friends for all their kindness, cheered Orion
greatly; and though he regretted being obliged to leave these guests of
all others, the perils that lay before him reasserted their charm. He
could surely win over the abbess in the course of the voyage, and Paula
might be brought to reason, perhaps, this very evening. Justinus and his
wife were Melchites, and he knew that both these friends--for whom he had
a particular regard--would be enchanted with his scheme if he took them
into his confidence.
The inn kept by Sostratus, a large, square building surrounding a
spacious court-yard, was the best and most frequented in the town. The
eastern side faced the road and the river, and contained the best rooms,
in which, on the previous night, the senator had established himself with
his wife and servants. The clatter of the quadriga drew Justinus to the
window; as soon as he recognized Orion he waved a table-napkin to him,
shouting a hearty "Welcome!" and then retired into the room again.
"Here he is!" he cried to his wife, who was lying on a couch in the
lightest permissible attire, and sipping fruit-syrup from time to time to
moisten her dry lips, while a boy fanned her for coolness.
"That is well indeed!" she exclaimed, and desired her maid to be quick,
very quick, and fetch her a wrap, but to be sure it was a thin one. Then,
turning to a very lovely young woman who had started to her feet at
Justinus' first exclamation, she asked:
"Would you rather that he should find you here, my darling, or shall we
see him first, and tell him that we have brought you with us?"
"That will be best," answered the other in a sweet voice, and she sighed
softly before she added: "What will he not think of me? We may grow
older, but folly--folly. . ."
"Grows with years?" laughed the matron. "Or do you think it
decreases?--But here he is."
The younger woman hurried away by a side door, behind which she
disappeared. Martina looked after her, and pointing that way to direct
her husband's glance, she observed: "She has left herself a chink. Good
God! Fancy being in love in such heat as this; what a hideous thought!"
At this moment the door was opened, and the heartiest greetings ensued.
It was evident that the meeting was as great a pleasure to the elderly
pair as to the young man. Justinus embraced him warmly, while the matron
cried out: "And a kiss for me too!" And when the youth immediately and
heartily gave it, she exclaimed with a groan:
"O man, and child of man, great Sesostris! How did your famous ancestor
ever achieve heroic deeds under such a sun as this? For my part I am fast
disappearing, melting away like butter; but what will a man not do for
love's sake?--Syra, Syra; for God's sake bring me something, however
small, that looks like a garment! How rational is the fashion of the
people of Africa whom we met with on our journey. If they have three
fingers' breadth of cloth about them, they consider themselves elegantly
dressed.--But come, sit down--there, at my feet. A seat, Argos, and some
wine, and water in a damp clay pitcher, and cool like the last. Husband,
the boy seems to me handsomer than ever. But dear God! he is in mourning,
and how becoming it is! Poor boy, poor boy! Yes, we heard in Alexandria."
She wiped first her eyes and then her damp brow, and her husband added
his expressions of sympathy at the death of the Mukaukas.
They were a genial and comfortable couple, Justinus and his wife Martina.
Two beings who felt perfectly secure in their vast inherited wealth, and
who, both being of noble birth, never need make any display of dignity,
because they were sure of it in the eyes of high and low alike. They had
asserted their right to remain natural and human under the formalities of
the most elaborately ceremonious society; those who did not like the easy
tone adopted by them in their house might stay away. He, devoid of
ambition, a senator in virtue of his possessions and his name, never
caring to make any use of his adventitious dignity but that of procuring
good appointments for his favorite clients, or good places for his family
on any festive occasion, was a hospitable soul; the good friend of all
his friends, whose motto was "live and let live." Martina, with a heart
as good as gold, had never made any pretensions to beauty, but had
nevertheless been much courted. This worthy couple had for many years
thought that nothing could be more delightful than a residence in the
capital, or at their beautiful villa on the Bosphorus, scorning to follow
the example of other rich and fashionable folks, and go to take baths or
make journeys. It was enough for them to be able to make others happy
under their roof; and there was never any lack of visitors, just because
those who were weary of bending their backs at the Byzantine Court, found
this unceremonious circle particularly restful.
Martina was especially fond of having young people about her, and
Heliodora, the widow of her nephew, had found comfort with her in her
trouble; it was in her house that Orion and Heliodora had met. The young
widow was a great favorite with the old couple, but higher in their
esteem even than she, had been the younger brother of her deceased
husband. He was to have been their heir; but they had mourned his death
now two years; for news had reached them that Narses, who had served in
the Imperial army as tribune of cavalry, had fallen in battle against the
infidels. No one, however, had ever brought a more exact report of his
death; and at last their indefatigable enquiries had resulted in their
learning that he had been taken prisoner by the Saracens and carried into
slavery in Arabia. This report received confirmation through the efforts
of Orion and his deceased father. Within a few hours of the young
Egyptian's departure, they received a letter from the youth they had
given up for lost, written in trembling characters, in which he implored
them to effect his deliverance through Amru, the Arab governor of Egypt.
The old people had set forth at once on their pilgrimage, and Heliodora
had done her part in urging them to this step. Her passion for Orion, to
whom, for more than a year, her gentle heart had been wholly devoted, had
increased every hour since his departure. She had not concealed it from
Martina, who thought it no less than her duty to stand by the poor
lovesick child; for Heliodora had nursed her husband, the senator's
nephew, to the end, with touching fidelity and care; and besides, Martina
had given the young Egyptian--with whom she was "quite in love
herself"--every opportunity of paying his addresses to the young widow.
They were a pair that seemed made for each other, and Martina delighted
in match-making. But in this case, though hearts had met, hands had not,
and finally it had been a real grief to Martina to hear Orion and
Heliodora called--and with good reason--a pair of lovers.
Once she had appealed in her genial way to the young man's conscience,
and he had replied that his father, who was a Jacobite, would never
consent to his union with a woman of any other confession. At that time
she had found little to answer; but she had often thought if only she
could make the Mukaukas acquainted with Heliodora, he, whom she had known
in the capital as a young and handsome admirer of every charming woman,
would certainly capitulate.
Her favorite niece had indeed every grace that a father's heart could
desire to attract the son. She was of good family, the widow of a man of
rank, rich, but just two and twenty, and beautiful enough to bewitch old
or young. A sweeter and gentler soul Martina had never known. Those large
dewy eyes-imploring eyes, she called them--might soften a stone, and her
fair waving hair was as soft as her nature. Add to this her full, supple
figure--and how perfectly she dressed, how exquisitely she sang and
struck the lute! It was not for nothing that she was courted by every
youth of rank in Constantinople--and if the old Mukaukas could but hear
her laugh! There was not a sound on earth more clear, more glad than
Heliodora's laugh. She was not indeed remarkable for intellect, but no
one could call her a simpleton, and your very clever women were not to
every man's taste.
So, when they were to travel to Egypt, Martina took it for granted that
Heliodora must go with them, and that the flirtation which had made her
favorite the talk of the town must, in Memphis, become courtship in
earnest. Then, when she heard at Alexandria that the Mukaukas was lately
dead, she regarded the game as won. Now they were in Memphis, Orion was
sitting before her, and the young man had invited her and her following
of above twenty persons to stay in his house. It was a foregone
conclusion that the travellers were to accept this bidding as prescribed
by the laws of hospitality, and preparations for the move were
immediately set on foot.
Justinus meanwhile explained what had brought them to Egypt, and begged
Orion's assistance. The young man had known the senator's nephew well as
one of the most brilliant and amiable youths of the capital, and he was
sincerely distressed to be forced to inform his friends that Amru, who
could easily have procured the release of Narses, was to start within two
days for Medina, while he himself was compelled to set out on a journey
that very evening, at an hour he could not name.
He saw how greatly this firmly-expressed determination agitated and
disturbed the old couple, and the senator's urgency led him to tell them,
under the pledge of strict secrecy, what business it was that took him
away and what a perilous enterprise he had before him.
He began his story confident of his orthodox guests' sympathy; but to his
amazement they both disapproved of the undertaking, and not, as they
declared, on his account only or for the sake of the help they had
counted on.
The senator reminded him that he was the natural chief of the Egyptian
population in Memphis, and that, by such a scheme, he was undermining his
influence with those whose leader he was by right and duty as his
father's son. His ambition ought to make him aim at this leadership; and
instead of offering such a rebuff to the patriarch, it was his part to
work with him--whose power he greatly underrated--so as to make life
tolerable to their fellow-Christians in a land ruled by Moslems.
Paula's name was not once mentioned; but Orion thought of her and
remained firm, though not without an inward struggle.
At the same time, to prove to his friends how sincerely he desired to
please them, he proposed that he and Justinus should immediately cross
the Nile to lay his application before the Khaliff's vicar. A glance at
the sky showed him that it wanted still an hour and a half of sunset. His
swift horses would not need more than that time for the journey, and
during their absence the rest of the party could move from the inn. Carts
for the baggage were already in waiting below, and chariots had been
ordered to follow and convey his beloved guests to their new quarters.
The senator agreed to this proposal, and as the two men went off Martina
called after Orion.
"My senator must talk to you on the road, and if you can be brought to
reason you will find your reward waiting for you! Do not be saving of
your talents of gold, old man, till the general has promised to procure
the lad's release.--And listen to me, Orion; give up your mad scheme."
The sun had not wholly disappeared behind the Libyan range when the
snorting Pannonians, all flecked with foam, drove back into the
court-yard of the governor's residence. The two men had unfortunately
gained nothing; for Amru was absent, reviewing the troops between
Heliopolis and Onix, and was not expected home till night or even next
morning. The party had removed from the inn and the senator's white
slaves were already mixing with the black and brown ones of the
establishment.
Martina was delighted with her new quarters, and with the beautiful
flowers--most of them new to her--with which the invalid mistress of the
house had had the two great reception-rooms garnished in token of
welcome; but the failure of Justinus' visit to Fostat fell like
hoar-frost on her happy mood.
Orion, she asserted, ought to regard this stroke of ill-luck as a
judgment from God. It was the will of Heaven that he should give up his
enterprise and be content to make due preparations for a noble work which
could be carried through without him, in order to accomplish another, out
of friendship, which urgently needed his help. However, he again
expressed his regret that in spite of everything he must adhere to his
purpose; and when Martina asked him: "What, even if my reward is one that
would especially delight you?" he nodded regretfully. "Yes, even then."
So she merely added, "Well, we shall see," and went on impressively:
"Every one has some peculiarity which stamps his individuality and
becomes him well: in you it is amiability, my son. Such obstinacy does
not suit you; it is quite foreign to you, and is the very opposite to
what I call amiability. Be yourself, even in this instance."
"That is to say weak and yielding, especially when a kind woman. . . ."
"When old friends ask it," she hastily put in; but almost before she had
finished she turned to her husband, exclaiming: "Good Heavens! come to
the window. Did you ever see such a glorious mingling of purple and gold
in the sky? It is as though the old pyramids and the whole land of Egypt
were in flames. But now, great Sesostris,"--the name she gave to Orion
when she was in a good humor with him, "it is time that you should see
what I have brought you. In the first place this trinket," and she gave
him a costly bracelet of old Greek workmanship set with precious stones,
"and then--nay, no Thanks--and then--Well the object is rather large, and
besides--come with me."
As she spoke she went from the reception-room into the anteroom, led the
way to the door of the room which had once been Paula's, and then his
own, opened it a little way, peeped in, and then pushed Orion forward,
saying hastily: "There--do you see--there it is!"
By the window stood Heliodora. The bright radiance of the sinking sun
bathed her slender but round and graceful form, her "imploring" eyes
looked up at him with rapturous delight, and her white arms folded across
her bosom gave her the aspect of a saint, waiting with humble longing for
some miracle, in expectation of unutterable joys.
Martina's eyes, too, were fixed on Orion; she saw how pale he turned at
seeing the young widow, she saw him start as though suddenly overcome by
some emotion--what, she could not guess--and shrink back from the sunlit
vision in the window. These were effects which the worthy matron had not
anticipated.
Never off the stage, thought she, had she seen a man so stricken by love;
for she could not suspect that to him it was as though a gulf had
suddenly yawned at his feet.
With a swiftness which no one could have looked for from her heavy and
bulky figure, Martina hastily returned to her husband, and even at the
door exclaimed: "It is all right, all has gone well! At the sight of her
he seemed thunderstruck! Mark my words: we shall have a wedding here by
the Nile."
"My blessing on it," replied Justinus. "But, wedding or no wedding, all I
care is that she should persuade that fine young fellow to give up his
crazy scheme. I saw how even the brown rascals in the Arab's service
bowed down before him; and he will persuade the general, if any one can,
to do all in his power for Narses. He must not and shall not go! You
impressed it strongly on Heliodora. . . ."
"That she should keep him?" laughed the matron. "I tell you, she will
nail him down if need be."
"So much the better," replied her husband. "But, wife, folks might say
that it was not quite seemly in you to force them together. Properly
speaking, you are as it were her female mentor, the motherly patroness."
"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Martina. "At home they invited no witnesses to
look on at their meetings. The poor love-lorn souls must at any rate have
a chance of speaking to each other and rejoicing that they have met once
more. I will step in presently, and be the anxious, motherly friend.
Tine, Tine! And if it does not end in a wedding, I will make a pilgrimage
to St. Agatha, barefoot."
"And I with only one shoe!" the senator declared, "for, everything in
reason--but the talk about Dora was at last beyond all bounds. It was no
longer possible to have them both together under the same roof. And you
yourself--no, seriously; go in to them."
"Directly, directly.--But first look out of this window once more. Oh,
what a sun!--there, now it is too late. Only two minutes ago the whole
heaven was of the hue of my red Syrian cloak; and now it is all
dark!--The house and garden are beautiful, and everything is old and
handsome; just what I should have expected in the home of the rich
Mukaukas."
"And I too," replied Justinus. "But now, go. If they have come to an
understanding, Dora may certainly congratulate herself."
"I should think so! But she need not be ashamed even of her villa, and
they must spend every summer there, I will manage that. If that poor,
dear fellow Narses does not escape with his life--for two years of
slavery are a serious matter--then I should be able. . . ."
"To alter your will? Not a bad idea; but there is no hurry for that; and
now, you really must go."
"Yes, yes, in a minute. Surely I may have time to speak.--I, for my part,
know of no one whom I would sooner put in the place of Narses. . . ."
"Than Orion and Heliodora? Certainly, I have no objection; but now. . . ."
"Well, perhaps it is wicked to think of a man who may still be alive as
numbered with the dead.--At any rate the poor boy cannot go back to his
legion. . . ."
"On no consideration. But, Martina. . . ."
"To-morrow morning Orion must urge our case on the Arab . . . ."
"If he does not go away."
"Will you bet that she fails to keep him."
"I should be a fool for my pains," laughed Justinus. "Do you ever pay me
when I win?--But now, joking apart, you must go and see what they are
about."
And this time she obeyed. She would have won her bet; for Orion, who had
remained unmoved by his sister-in-law's letter, by the warning voice of
the faith of his childhood, by the faithful council of his honest servant
Nilus, or by the senator's convincing arguments--had yielded to
Heliodora's sweet blandishments.
How ardently had her loving heart flamed up, when she saw him so deeply
agitated at the sight of her! With what touching devotion had she sunk
into his arms; how humbly-half faint with sweet sorrow and sweeter
ecstasy--had she fallen at his feet, and clasped his knees, and entreated
him, with eyes full of tears of adoring rapture, not to leave to-day, to
wait only till tomorrow, and then, if he would, to tread her in the dust.
Now--now when she had just found him again after being worn out with
pining and longing-to part now, to see him rush on an uncertain fate--it
would kill her, it would certainly be her death! And when he still had
tried to resist she had rushed into his arms, had stopped his lips with
burning kisses, and whispered in his ear all the flattering words of love
he once had held so dear.
Why had he never seriously tried to win her, why had he so soon forgotten
her? Because she, who could assert her dignity firmly enough with others,
had abandoned herself to him unresistingly after a few meetings, as if
befooled by some magician's spell. The precious spoil so easily won had
soon lost its value in his eyes. But to-day the fire which had died out
blazed up again. Yes, this was the love he craved, he must have! To be
loved with entire and utter devotion, with a heart that thought only of
him and not of itself, that asked only for love in return for love, that
did not fence itself round with caution and invoke the aid of others for
protection against him. This lovely creature, all passion, who had taken
upon herself to endure the contumely of society, and pain and grief for
his sake, knowing too that he had abandoned her, and would never make her
his wife before God and men--she indeed knew what it was to love; and he
who was so often inclined to despair of himself felt his heart uplifted
at the thought that he was so precious in her eyes, nay--he would own
it--so idolized.
And how sweet, how purely womanly she was! Those imploring eyes--which he
had grown quite sick of in Constantinople, for they were as full of
pathetic entreaty when she merely begged him to hold her cloak for her as
when she appealed to his heart of hearts not to leave her--that
entrancing play of glances which had first bewitched him, came to him
to-day as something new and worked the old spell.
In this moment of tender reunion he had promised her at any rate to
consider whether he could not release himself from the pledge by which he
was bound; but hardly had he spoken the words when the memory of Paula
revived in his mind, and an inward voice cried out to him that she was a
being of nobler mould than this yielding, weak woman, abject before
him--that she symbolized his upward struggle, Heliodora his perdition.
At length he was able to tear himself from her embrace; and at the first
step out of this intoxication into real life again he looked about like
one roused from sleep, feeling as though it were by some mocking sport of
the devil himself that Paula's room should have been the scene of this
meeting and of his weakness.
An enquiry from Heliodora, as to the fate of the little white dog that
she had given him as a remembrance, recalled to his mind that luckless
emerald which was to have been his return offering or antidoron. He
evasively replied that, remembering her love of rare gems, he had sent
her a remarkably fine stone about which he had a good deal to say; and
she gave such childlike and charming expression to her delight and
gratitude, and took such skilful advantage of his pleasure in her
clinging tenderness, to convince him of the necessity for remaining at
home, that he himself began to believe in it, and gave way. The more this
conclusion suited his own wishes the easier it became to find reasons for
it: old Rufinus really did not need him; and if he--Orion--had cause to
be ashamed of his vacillation, on the other hand he could comfort himself
by reflecting that it would be unkind and ungrateful to his good friends
to leave them in the lurch just when he could be of use to them. One pair
of protecting arms more or less could not matter to the nuns, while the
captive Narses might very probably perish before he could be rescued
without his interest with the Arab general.
It was high time to decide one way or the other.--Well, no; he ought not
to go away to-day!
That was settled!
Rufinus must at once be informed of his change of purpose. To sit down
and write at such a moment he felt was impossible: Nilus should go and
speak in his name; and he knew how gladly and zealously he would perform
such an errand.
Heliodora clapped her hands, and just as Martina knocked at the door the
pair came out into the anteroom: She, radiant with happiness, and so
graceful in her fashionable, costly, and well-chosen garb, so
royal-looking in spite of her no more than middle height, that even in
the capital she would have excited the admiration of the men and the envy
of the women: He, content, but with a thoughtful smile on his lips.
He had not yet closed the door when in the anteroom he perceived two
female figures, who had come in while Martina was knocking at her niece's
door. These were Katharina and her waiting-maid.
Anubis had been brought to these rooms after his fall from the roof, and
notwithstanding the preparations that had been made for illustrious
guests Philippus could not be persuaded to allow his patient, for whom
perfect quiet was indispensable, to be moved to the lower floor.
The listener who had been so severely punished had with him his mother,
Katharina's old nurse; the water-wagtail, with her maid, had accompanied
her to see the lad, for she was very anxious to assure herself whether
her foster-brother, before his tumble, had succeeded in hearing anything;
but the poor fellow was so weak and his pain so severe that she had not
the heart to torment him with questions. However, her Samaritan's visit
brought her some reward, for to meet Orion coming out of Paula's room
with so beautiful and elegant a woman was a thing worth opening her eyes.
to see. She would have walked from home hither twice over only to see the
clothes and jewels of this heaven sent stranger. Such a being rarely
strayed to Memphis,--and might not this radiant and beautiful creature be
"the other" after all, and not Paula? Might not Orion have been trifling
with her rival as he had already trifled with her? They must have had a
rapturous meeting in that room; every feature of the fair beauty's
saint-like face betrayed the fact. Oh, that Orion! She would have liked
to throttle him; and yet she was glad to think that there was another
besides herself--and she so elegant and lovely--whom he had betrayed.
"He will stay!" Heliodora exclaimed as she came out of the room; and
Martina held out her hand to the young man, with a fervent: "God bless
you for that!"
She was delighted to see how happy her niece looked but the lively old
woman's eyes were everywhere at once, and when she caught sight of
Katharina who had stood still with curiosity, she turned to her with a
friendly nod and said to Orion:
"Your sister? Or the little niece of whom you used to speak?"
Orion called Katharina and introduced her to his guests, and the girl
explained what had brought her hither; in such a sweet and pathetic
manner--for she was sincerely fond of her foster-brother and
play-fellow--that she quite charmed Martina and Heliodora, and the
younger woman expressed a hope that they might see her often. Indeed,
when she was gone, Martina exclaimed: "A charming little thing! As fresh
and bright as a newly-fledged bird, so brisk and pretty too--and how
nicely she prattles!"
"And the richest heiress in Memphis into the bargain," added Orion. But,
noticing that on this Heliodora cast down her eyes with a troubled
expression, he went on with a laugh: "Our mothers destined us to marry
each other, but we are too ill-matched in size, and not exactly made for
a pair in other ways."
Then, taking leave of them, he went to Nilus and informed him of his
decision. His request that the treasurer would make his excuses to
Rufinus, carry his greetings to Thomas' daughter, and make the most of
his reasons for remaining behind, sent the good man almost beside himself
for joy; and he so far forgot his modest reserve as to embrace Orion as a
son.
The young host sat with his visitors till nearly midnight: and when, on
the following morning, Martina first greeted her niece--who looked
peacefully happy though somewhat tired--she was able to tell her that the
two men had already gone across the Nile, and, she hoped, settled
everything with the Arab governor. Great was her disappointment when
presently Justinus and Orion came back to say that Amru, instead of
returning to Fostat from the review at Heliopolis, had gone straight to
Alexandria. He had engagements there for a few days, and would then start
for Medina.
The senator saw nothing for it but to follow him up, and Orion
volunteered to accompany him.
A faint attempt on Heliodora's part to detain him met with a decisive,
nay, stern refusal. This journey was indeed sheer flight from his own
weakness and from the beautiful creature who could never be anything to
him.
Early in the day he had found time to write to Paula; but he had cast
aside more than one unfinished letter before he could find the right
words. He told her that he loved her and her alone; and as his stylus
marked the wax he felt, with horror of himself, that in fact his heart
was Paula's, and his determination ripened to put an end once for all to
his connection with Heliodora, and not allow himself to see Paula again
till he had forever cut the tie that bound him to the young widow.
The two women went out to see the travellers start, and as they returned
to the house, hanging their heads like defeated warriors, in the
vestibule they met Katharina and her maid. Martina wanted to detain the
little girl, and to persuade her to go up to their rooms with them; but
Katharina refused, and appeared to be in a great hurry. She had just come
from seeing Anubis, who was in less pain to-day, and who had done his
best to tell her what he had overheard. That the flight was to be
northwards he was certain; but he had either misunderstood or forgotten
the name of the place whither the sisters were bound.
His mother and the nurse were dismissed from the room, and then the
water-wagtail in her gratitude had bent over him, had raised his pretty
face a little, and had given him two such sweet kisses that the poor boy
had been quite uneasy. But, when he was alone with his mother once more,
he had felt happier and happier, and the remembrance of the transient
rapture he had known had alleviated the pain he was suffering on
Katharina's account.
Katharina, meanwhile, did not go home at once to her mother; on the
contrary, she went straight off to the Bishop of Memphis, to whom she
divulged all she had learnt with regard to the inhabitants of the convent
and the intended rescue. The gentle Plotinus even had been roused to
great wrath, and no sooner had she left him than he set out for Fostat to
invoke the help of Amru, and--finding him absent--of his Vekeel to enable
him to pursue the fugitive Melchite sisters.
When the water-wagtail was at home again and alone in her room, she said
to herself, with calm satisfaction, that she had now contrived something
which would spoil several days for Orion and for Paula, and that might
prove even fatal, so far as she was concerned.
CHAPTER VIII.
Nilus had performed his errand well, and Rufinus was forced to admit that
Orion had done his part and had planned the enterprise with so much care
and unselfishness that his personal assistance could be dispensed with.
Under these circumstances he scarcely owed the young man a grudge for
placing himself at the service of his Byzantine friends; still, his not
coming to the house disturbed and vexed him, less on his own account, or
that of the good cause, than for Paula's sake, for her feelings towards
Orion had remained no secret to him or his wife.
Dame Joanna, indeed, felt the young man's conduct more keenly than
Rufinus; she would have been glad to withhold her husband from the
enterprise, whose dangers now appeared to her frightened soul tenfold
greater than they were. But she knew that the Nile would flow backwards
before she could dissuade him from keeping his promise to the abbess, so
she forced herself to preserve at any rate outward composure.
Before Paula, Rufinus declared that Orion was fully justified and he
loudly praised the young man's liberality in providing the Nile-boat and
the vessel for the sea-voyage, and such admirable substitutes for
himself. Pulcheria was delighted with her father's undertaking; she only
longed to go with him and help him to save her dear nuns. The
ship-builder had brought with him, besides his sons, three other Greeks
of the orthodox confession, shipwrights like himself, who were out of
work in consequence of the low ebb of the Nile, which had greatly
restricted the navigation. Hence they were glad to put a hand to such a
good work, especially as it would be profitable, too, for Orion had
provided the old man with ample funds.
As the evening grew cooler after sundown Paula had got better. She did
not, indeed, know what to think of Orion's refusal to start. First she
was grieved, then she rejoiced; for it certainly preserved him from great
perils. In the early days after his return from Constantinople she had
heard his praise of the senator's kindness and hospitality, in which the
Mukaukas, who had pleasant memories of the capital, heartily joined. He
must, of course, be glad to be able to assist those friends, of all
others; and Nilus, who was respectfully devoted to her, had greeted her
from Orion with peculiar warmth. He would come to-morrow, no doubt; and
the oftener she repeated to herself his assertion that he had never
betrayed affectionate trust, the more earnestly she felt prompted, in
spite of the abbess' counsel, to abandon all hesitancy, to follow the
impulse of her heart, and to be his at once in full and happy confidence.
The waning moon had not yet risen, and the night was very dark when the
nuns set forth. The boat was too large to come close to the shore in the
present low state of the river, and the sisters, disguised as
peasant-women, had to be carried on board one by one from the convent
garden. Last of all the abbess was to be lifted over the shallow water,
and the old ship-builder held himself in readiness to perform this
service. Joanna, Pulcheria, Perpetua, and Eudoxia, who was also zealously
orthodox, were standing round as she gave Paula a parting kiss and
whispered: "God bless thee, child!--All now depends on you, and you must
be doubly careful to abide by your promise."
"I owe him, in the first place, friendly trust," was Paula's whispered
reply, and the abbess answered: "But you owe yourself firmness and
caution." Rufinus was the last; his wife and daughter clung around him
still.
"Take example from that poor girl," cried the old man, clasping his wife
in his arms. "As sure as man is the standard of all things, all must go
well with me this time if everlasting Love is not napping. Till we meet
again, best of good women!--And, if ill befalls your stupid old husband,
always remember that he brought it upon himself in trying to save a
quarter of a hundred innocent women from the worst misfortunes. At any
rate I shall fall on the road I myself have chosen.--But why has
Philippus not come to take leave of me?"
Dame Joanna burst into tears: "That-that is so hard too! What has come
over him that he has deserted us, and just now of all times? Ah, husband!
If you love me, take Gibbus with you on the voyage."
"Yes, master, take me," the hunchbacked gardener interposed. "The Nile
will be rising again by the time we come back, and till then the flowers
can die without my help. I dreamt last night that you picked a rose from
the middle of my Bump. It stuck up there like the knob on the lid of a
pot. There is some meaning in it and, if you leave me at home, what is
the good of the rose--that is to say what good will you get out of me?"
"Well then, carry your strange flower-bed on board," said the old man
laughing. "Now, are you satisfied Joanna?"
Once more he embraced her and Pulcheria and, as a tear from his wife's
eyes dropped on his hand, he whispered in her ear: "You have been the
rose of my life; and without you Eden--Paradise itself can have no joys."
The boat pushed out into the middle of the stream and was soon hidden by
the darkness from the eyes of the women on the bank.
The convent bells were soon heard tolling after the fugitives: Paula and
Pulcheria were pulling them. There was not a breath of air; not enough
even to fill the small sail of the seaward-bound boat; but the rowers
pulled with all their might and the vessel glided northward. The captain
stood at the prow with his pole; sounding the current: his brother, no
less skilled, took the helm.--The shallowness of the water made
navigation very difficult, and those who knew the river best might easily
run aground on unexpected shoals or newly-formed mud-drifts. The moon had
scarcely risen when the boat was stranded at a short distance below
Fostat, and the men had to go overboard to push it off to an
accompaniment of loud singing which, as it were, welded their individual
wills and efforts into one. Thus it was floated off again; but such
delays were not unfrequent till they reached Letopolis, where the Nile
forks, and where they hoped to steal past the toll-takers unobserved.
Almost against their expectation, the large boat slipped through under
the heavy mist which rises from the waters before sunrise, and the
captain and crew, steering down the Phatmetic branch of the river with
renewed spirit, ascribed their success to the intercession of the pious
sisters.
By daylight it was easier to avoid the sand-banks; but how narrow was the
water-way-at this season usually overflowing! The beds of papyrus on the
banks now grew partly on dry land, and their rank green had faded to
straw-color. The shifting ooze of the shore had hardened to stone, and
the light west wind, which now rose and allowed of their hoisting the
sail, swept clouds of white dust before it. In many cases the soil was
deeply fissured and wide cracks ran across the black surface, yawning to
heaven for water like thirsty throats. The water-wheels stood idle, far
away from the stream, and the fields they were wont to irrigate looked
like the threshing floors on which the crops they bore should be threshed
out. The villages and palm-groves were shrouded in shimmering mist,
quivering heat, and dazzling yellow light; and the passer-by on the
raised dykes of the shore bent his head as he dragged his weary feet
through the deep dust.
The sun blazed pitilessly in the cloudless sky, down on land and river,
and on the fugitive nuns who had spread their white head-cloths above
them for an awning and sat in dull lethargy, awaiting what might he
before them.
The water-jar passed from hand to band; but the more they drank the more
acute was their discomfort, and their longing for some other refreshment.
At meal time the dishes were returned to the tiny cabin almost untouched.
The abbess and Rufinus tried to speak comfort to them; but in the
afternoon the superior herself was overpowered by the heat, and the air
in the little cabin, to which she retired, was even less tolerable stuffy
than on deck.
Thus passed a long day of torment, the hottest that even the men could
remember; and they on the whole suffered least from it, though they
toiled at the oar without ceasing and with wonderful endurance.
At length evening fell after those fearful midday hours; and as a cool
breeze rose shortly before sunset to fan their moist brows, the hapless
victims awoke to new energies. Their immediate torment had so crushed
them that, incapable of anticipating the future, they had ceased either
to fear or to hope; but now they could rejoice in thinking of the start
they had gained over their pursuers. They were hungry and enjoyed their
evening meal; the abbess made friends with the worthy ship-wright, and
began an eager conversation with Rufinus as to Paula and Orion: Her wish
that the young man should spend a time of probation did not at all please
Rufinus; with such a wife as Paula, he could not fail to be at all times
the noble fellow which his old friend held him to be in spite of his
having remained at home.
The hump-backed gardener made the younger nuns merry with his jests, and
after supper they all united in prayer.
Even the oarsmen had found new vigor and new life; and it was well that
few of the Greek sisters understood Egyptian, for the more jovial of them
started a song in praise of the charms of the maids they loved, which was
not composed for women's ears.
The nuns chatted of those they had left behind, and many a one spoke of a
happy meeting at home once more; but an elderly nun put a stop to this,
saying that it was a sin to anticipate the ways of God's mercy, or, when
His help was still so sorely needed, to speak as though He had already
bestowed it. They could only tremble and pray, for they knew from
experience that a threatening disaster never turned to a good end unless
it had been expected with real dread.
Another one then began to speculate as to whether their pursuers could
overtake them on foot or on horseback, and as it seemed only too probable
that they could, their hearts sank again with anxiety. Ere long, however,
the moon rose; the objects that loomed on the banks and were mirrored in
the stream, were again clearly visible and lost their terrors.
The lower down they sailed, the denser were the thickets of papyrus on
the shore. Thousands of birds were roosting there, but they were all
asleep; a "dark ness that might be felt" brooded over the silent land
scape. The image of the moon floated on the dark water, like a gigantic
lotos-flower below the smaller, fragrant lotos-blossoms that it out-did
in sheeny whiteness; the boat left a bright wake in its track, and every
stroke of the oar broke the blackness of the water, which reflected the
light in every drop. The moonlight played on the delicate tufts that
crowned the slender papyrus-stems, filmy mist, like diaphanous brocade of
violet and silver, veiled the trees; and owls that shun the day, flew
from one branch to another on noiseless, rhythmic wings.
The magic of the night fell on the souls of the nuns; they ceased
prattling; but when Sister Martha, the nightingale of the sisterhood,
began to sing a hymn the others followed her example. The sailors' songs
were hushed, and the psalms of the virgin sisters, imploring the
protection of the Almighty, seemed to float round the gliding boat as
softly as the light of the circling moon. For hours--and with increased
zeal as the comet rose in the sky--they gave themselves up to the
soothing and encouraging pleasure of singing; but one by one the voices
died away and their peaceful hymn was borne down the river to the sea, by
degrees more low, more weary, more dreamlike.
They sat looking in their laps, gazing in rapture up to heaven, or at the
dazzling ripples and the lotos flowers on the surface. No one thought of
the shore, not even the men, who had been lulled to sleep or daydreams by
the nuns' singing. The pilot's eyes were riveted on the channel--and yet,
as morning drew near, from time to time there was a twinkle, a flash
behind the reed-beds on the eastern bank, and now and then there was a
rustling and clatter there. Was it a jackal that had plunged into the
dense growth to surprise a brood of water-fowl; was it a hyena trampling
through the thicket?
The flashing, the rustling, the dull footfall on parched earth followed
the barge all through the night like a sinister, lurid, and muttering
shadow.
Suddenly the captain started and gazed eastwards.--What was that?
There was a herd of cattle feeding in a field beyond the reeds-two bulls
perhaps were sharpening their horns. The river was so low, and the banks
rose so high, that it was impossible to see over them. But at this moment
a shrill voice spoke his name, and then the hunchback whispered in his
ear:
"There--over there--it is glittering again.--I will bite off my own nose
if that is not--there, again. Merciful God! I am not mistaken.
Harness--and there, that is the neighing of a horse; I know the sound.
The east is growing grey. By all the saints, we are pursued!"
The captain looked eastwards with every sense alert, and after a few
minutes silence he said decidedly "Yes."
"Like a flight of quail for whom the fowler spreads his net," sighed the
gardener; but the boatman impatiently signed to him to be quiet, and
gazed cautiously on every side. Then he desired Gibbus to wake Rufinus
and the shipwrights, and to hide all the nuns in the cabin.
"They will be packed as close as the dates sent to Rome in boxes,"
muttered the gardener, as he went to call Rufinus. "Poor souls, their
saints may save them from suffocation; and as for me, on my faith, if it
were not that Dame Joanna was the very best creature on two legs, and if
I had not promised her to stick to the master, I would jump into the
water and try the hospitality of the flamingoes and storks in the reeds!
We must learn to condescend!"
While he was fulfilling his errand, the captain was exchanging a few
words with his brother at the helm. There was no bridge near, and that
was well. If the horsemen were indeed in pursuit of them, they must ride
through the water to reach them; and scarcely three stadia lower down,
the river grew wider and ran through a marshy tract of country; the only
channel was near the western bank, and horsemen attempting to get to it
ran the risk of foundering in the mud. If the boat could but get as far
as that reach, much would be gained.
The captain urged the men to put forth all their strength, and very soon
the boat was flying along under the western shore, and divided by an oozy
flat from the eastern bank. Day was breaking, and the sky was tinged red
as with blood--a sinister omen that this morning was destined to witness
bitter strife and gaping wounds.
The seed sown by Katharina was beginning to grow. At the bishop's request
the Vekeel had despatched a troop of horse in pursuit of the nuns, with
orders to bring the fugitives back to Memphis and take their escort
prisoners. As the boat had slipped by the toll watch unperceived, the
Arabs had been obliged to divide, so as to follow down each arm of the
Nile. Twelve horsemen had been told off to pursue the Phasmetic branch;
for by every calculation these must suffice for the capture of a score or
so of nuns, and a handful of sailors would scarcely dare to attempt to
defend themselves. The Vekeel had heard nothing of the addition to the
party of the ship-master and his sons.
The pursuers had set out at noon of the previous day, and had overtaken
the vessel about two hours before daylight. But their leader thought it
well to postpone the attack till after sunrise, lest any of the fugitives
should escape. He and his men were all Arabs, and though well acquainted
with the course of that branch of the river which they were to follow,
they were not familiar with its peculiarities.
As soon as the morning star was invisible, the Moslems performed their
devotions, and then rushed out of the papyrus-beds. Their leader, making
a speaking trumpet of his hand, shouted to the boat his orders to stop.
He was commissioned by the governor to bring it back to Fostat. And the
fugitives seemed disposed to obey, for the boat lay to. The captain had
recognized the speaker as the captain of the watch from Fostat, an
inexorable man; and now, for the first time, he clearly understood the
deadly peril of the enterprise. He was accustomed, no doubt, to evade the
commands of his superiors, but would no more have defied them than have
confronted Fate; and he at once declared that resistance was madness, and
that there was no alternative but to yield. Rufinus, however, vehemently
denied this; he pointed out to him that the same punishment awaited him,
whether he laid down his arms or defended himself, and the old
ship-wright eagerly exclaimed:
"We built this boat, and I know you of old, Setnau; You will not turn
Judas--and, if you do, you know that Christian blood will be shed on this
deck before we can show our teeth to those Infidels."
The captain, with all the extravagant excitability of his southern blood,
beat his forehead and his breast, bemoaned himself as a betrayed and
ruined man, and bewailed his wife and children. Rufinus, however, put an
end to his ravings. He had consulted with the abbess, and he put it
strongly to the unhappy man that he could, in any case, hope for no mercy
from the unbelievers; while, on Christian ground, he would easily find a
safe and comfortable refuge for himself and his family. The abbess would
undertake to give them all a passage on board the ship that was awaiting
her, and to set them on shore wherever he might choose.
Setnau thought of a brother living in Cyprus; still, for him it meant
sacrificing his house and garden at Doomiat, where, at this very hour,
fifty date-palms were ripening their fruit; it meant leaving the fine new
Nile-boat by which he and his family got their living; and as he
represented this to the old man, bitter tears rolled down his brown
cheeks. Rufinus explained to him that, if he should succeed in saving the
sisters, he might certainly claim some indemnification. He might even
calculate the value of his property, and not only would he have the
equivalent paid to him out of the convent treasure, now on board in heavy
coffers, but a handsome gift into the bargain.
Setnau exchanged a meaning glance with his brother, who was a single man,
and when it was also agreed that he, too, might embark on the sea-voyage
he shook hands with Rufinus on the bargain. Then, giving himself a shake,
as if he had thrown off something that cramped him, and sticking his
leather cap knowingly on one side of his shaven head, he drew himself up
to his full height and scornfully shouted back to the Arab--who had
before now treated him and other Egyptian natives with insolent
haughtiness--that if he wanted anything of him he might come and fetch
it.
The Moslem's patience was long since exhausted, and at this challenge he
signed to his followers and sprang first into the river; but the foremost
horses soon sank so deep in the ooze that further advance was evidently
impossible, and the signal to return was perforce given. In this
manoeuvre a refractory horse lost his footing, and his rider was choked
in the mud.
On this, the men in the boat could see the foe holding council with
lively gesticulations, and the captain expressed his fears lest they
should give up all hope of capturing the boat, and ride forward to
Doomiat to combine with the Arab garrison to cut off their further
flight. But he had not reckoned on the warlike spirit of these men, who
had overcome far greater difficulties in twenty fights ere this. They
were determined to seize the boat, to take its freight prisoners, and
have them duly punished.
Six horsemen, among them the leader of the party, were now seen to
dismount; they tied their horses up, and then proceeded to fell three
tall palms with their battle-axes; the other five went off southwards.
These, no doubt, were to ride round the morass, and ford the river at a
favorable spot so as to attack the vessel from the west, while the others
tried to reach it from the east with the aid of the palm-trunks.
On the right, or eastern shore, where the Arabs were constructing the
raft, spread solid ground-fields through which lay the road to Doomiat;
on the other shore, near which the boat was lying, the bog extended for a
long way. An interminable jungle of papyrus, sedge, and reeds, burnt
yellow by the heat of the sun and the extraordinary drought, covered
almost the whole of this parched and baked wilderness; and, when a stiff
morning breeze rose from the northeast, the captain was inspired with a
happy thought. The five men who had ridden forward would have to force
their way through the mass of scorched and dried up vegetation. If the
Christians could but set fire to it, on the further side of a canal which
must hinder their making a wide sweep to the north, the wind would carry
it towards the enemy; and, they would be fortunate if it did not stifle
them or compel them to jump into the river, where, when the flames
reached the morass, they must inevitably perish.
As soon as the helmsman's keen eyes had made sure, from the mast-head,
that the Arabs had forded the river at a point to the south, they set
fire to several places and it roared and flared up immediately. The wind
swept it southwards, and with it clouds of pale grey smoke through which
the rising sun shot shafts of light. The flames writhed and darted over
the baked earth like gigantic yellow and orange lizards, here shooting
upwards, there creeping low. Almost colorless in the ardent daylight,
they greedily consumed everything they approached, and white ashes marked
their track. Their breath added to the heat of the advancing day; and
though the smoke was borne southwards by the wind, a few cloudlets came
over to the boat, choking the sisters and their deliverers.
A large vessel now came towards them from Doomiat and found the narrow
channel barred by the other one. The captain was related to Setnau, and
when Setnau shouted to him that they were engaged in a struggle with Arab
robbers, his friend followed his advice, turned the boat's head with
considerable difficulty, and cast anchor at the nearest village to warn
other vessels southward bound not to get themselves involved in so
perilous an adventure. Any that were coming north would be checked by
the fire and smoke.
The six horsemen left on the eastern shore beheld the spreading blaze
with rage and dismay; however, they had by this time bound the
palm-trunks together, and were preparing by their aid to inflict condign
punishment on the refractory Christians. These, meanwhile, had not been
idle. Every man on board was armed, and one of the ship-wrights was sent
on shore with a sailor, to steal through the reeds, ford the river at a
point lower down and, as soon as the Arabs put out to the attack, to
slaughter their horses, or--if one of them should be left to go forward
on the road to Doomiat--to drag him from his steed.
The six men now laid hold of the slightly-constructed float, on which
they placed their bows and quivers; they pushed it before them, and it
supported them above the shallow water, while their feet only just
touched the oozy bottom. They were all thorough soldiers, true sons of
the desert and of their race--men whom nature seemed to have conceived as
a counterpart to the eagle, the master-piece of the winged creation.
Keen-eyed, strongly-knit though small-boned, bereft of every fibre of
superfluous flesh on their sinewy limbs, with bold brown faces and
sharply-cut features, suggesting the king of birds not merely by the
aquiline nose, they had also the eagle's courage, thirst for blood, and
greed of victory.
Each held on to the raft by one lean, wiry arm, carrying on the other the
round bucklers on which the arrows that came whistling from the boat,
fell and stuck as soon as they were within shot. They ground their white
teeth with fury and nothing within ken escaped their bright hawk's eyes.
They had come to fight, even if the boat had been defended by fifty
Egyptian soldiers instead of carrying a score or so of sailors and
artisans. Their brave hearts felt safe under their shirts of mail, and
their ready, fertile brains under their brazen helmets; and they marked
the dull rattle of the arrows against their metal shields with elation
and contempt. To deal death was the wish of their souls; to meet it
caused them no dread; for their glowing fancy painted an open Paradise
where beautiful women awaited them open-armed, and brimming goblets
promised to satisfy every desire.
Their keen ears heard their captain's whispered commands; when they
reached the ship's side, one caught hold of the sill of the cabin window,
their leader, as quick as thought, sprang on to his shoulders, and from
thence on to the deck, thrusting his lance through the body of a sailor
who tried to stop him with his axe. A second Arab was close at his heels;
two gleaming scimitars flashed in the sun, the shrill, guttural, savage
war-cry of the Moslems rent the air, and the captain fell, the first
victim to their blood-thirsty fury, with a deep cut across the face and
forehead; in a moment, however, a heavy spar sang through the air down on
the head of the Moslem leader and laid him low. The helmsman, the brother
of the fallen pilot, had wielded it with the might of the avenger.
A fearful din, increased by the shrieks and wailing of the nuns, now
filled the vessel. The second Arab dealt death on all sides with the
courage and strength of desperation, and three of his fellows managed to
climb up the boat's side; but the last man was pushed back into the
water. By this time two of the shipwrights and five sailors had fallen.
Rufinus was kneeling by the captain, who was crying feebly for help,
bleeding profusely, though not mortally wounded. Setnau had spoken with
much anxiety of his wife and children, and Rufinus, hoping to save his
life for their sakes, was binding up the wounds, which were wide and
deep, when suddenly a sabre stroke came down on the back of his head and
neck, and a dark stream of blood rushed forth. But he, too, was soon
avenged: the old shipwright hewed down his foe with his heavy axe. On the
eastern shore, meanwhile, the men charged to kill the Arabs' horses were
doing their work, so as to prevent any who might escape from returning to
Fostat, or riding forward to Doormat and reporting what had occurred.
On board silence now prevailed. All five Arabs were stretched on the
deck, and the insatiate boatmen were dealing a finishing stroke to those
who were only wounded. A sailor, who had taken refuge up a mast, could
see how the other five horsemen had plunged into the bog to avoid the
fire and had disappeared beneath the waters; so that none of the Moslems
had escaped alive--not even that one which Fate and romance love to save
as a bearer of the disastrous tidings.
By degrees the nuns ventured out on deck again.
Those who were skilled in tending the wounded gathered round them, and
opened their medicine cases; as they proceeded on their voyage, under the
guidance of the steersman, they had their hands full of work and the zeal
they gave to it mitigated the torment of the heat.
The bodies of the five Moslems and eight Christians--among these, two of
the Greek ship-wrights--were laid on the shore in groups apart, in the
neighborhood of a village; in the hand of one of them the abbess placed a
tablet with this inscription:
"These eight Christians met their death bravely fighting to defend a
party of pious and persecuted believers. Pray for them and bury them as
well as those who, in obedience to their duty and their commander, took
their lives."
Rufinus, lying with his head on the gardener's knee, and sheltered from
the sun under the abbess' umbrella, presently recovered his senses;
looking about him he said to himself in a low voice, as he saw the
captain lying by his side:
"I, too, had a wife and a dear child at home, and yet--Ah! how this
aches! We may well do all we can to soothe such pain. The only reality
here below is not pleasure, it is pain, vulgar, physical pain; and though
my head burns and aches more than enough.--Water, a drink of water.--How
comfortable I could be at this moment with my Joanna, in our shady
house.--But yet, but yet--we must heal or save, it is all the same, any
who need it.--A drink--wine and water, if it is to be had, worthy
Mother!"
The abbess had it at hand; as she put the cup to his lips she spoke her
warm and effusive thanks, and many words of comfort; then she asked him
what she could do for him and his, when they should be in safety.
"Love them truly," he said gently. "Pul will certainly never be quite
happy till she is in a convent. But she must not leave her mother--she
must stay with her; Joanna-Joanna. . . ."
He repeated the name several times as if the sound pleased his ear and
heart. Then he shuddered again and again, and muttered to himself:
"Brrr!--a cold shiver runs all over me--it is of no use!--The cut in my
shoulder.--It is my head that hurts worst, but the other--it is bad luck
that it should have fallen on the left side. And yet, no; it is best so;
for if he--if it had damaged my right shoulder I could not write, and I
must--I must-before it is too late. A tablet and stylus; quick, quick!
And when I have written, good mother, close the tablet and seal it--close
and tight. Promise! Only one person may read it, he to whom it must
go.--Gibbus, do you hear, Gibbus?--It is for Philippus the leech. Take it
to him.--Your dream about a rose on your hump, if I read rightly, means
that peace and joy in Heaven blossom from our misery on earth.--Yes, to
Philippus. And listen my old school friend Christodorus, a leech too,
lives at Doomiat. Take my body to him--mind me now? He is to pack it with
sand which will preserve it, and have it buried by the side of my mother
at Alexandria. Joanna and the child--they can come and visit me there. I
have not much to leave; whatever that may cost. . . ."
"That is my affair, or the convent's," cried the abbess.
"Matters are not so bad as that," said the old man smiling. "I can pay
for my own share of the business; your revenue belongs to the poor, noble
Mother.--You will find more than enough in this wallet, good Gibbus. But
now, quick, make haste--the tablets."
When he had one in his hand, and a stylus for writing with, he thought
for some time, and then wrote with trembling fingers, though exerting all
his strength. How acutely he was suffering could be seen in his drawn
mouth and sad eyes, but he would not allow himself to be interrupted,
often as the abbess and the gardener entreated him to lay aside the
stylus. At last, with a deep sigh of relief, he closed the tablets,
handed them to the abbess, and said:
"There! Close it fast.--To Philippus the physician; into his own hand:
You hear, Gibbus?"
Here he fainted; but after they had bathed his forehead and wounds he
came to himself, and softly murmured: "I was dreaming of Joanna and the
poor child. They brought me a comic mask. What can that mean? That I have
been a fool all my life for thinking of other folks' troubles and
forgetting myself and my own family? No, no, no! As surely as man is the
standard of all things--if it were so, then, then folly would be truth
and right.--I, I--my desire--the aim to which my life was devoted. . . ."
He paused; then he suddenly raised himself, looked up with a bright light
in his eyes, and cried aloud with joy: "O Thou, most merciful Saviour!
Yes, yes--I see it all now. I thank thee--All that I strove for and lived
for, Thou, my Redeemer who art Love itself--Ah how good, how comforting
to think of that!--It is for this that Thou grantest me to die!"
Again he lost consciousness; his head grew very hot, his breath came
hoarsely and his parched lips, though frequently moistened by careful
hands, could only murmur the names of those he loved best, and among them
that of Paula.
At about five hours after noon he fell back on the hunchback's knees; he
had ceased to suffer. A happy smile lighted up his features, and in death
the old man's calm face looked like that of a child.
The gardener felt as though he had lost his own father, and his lively
tongue remained speechless till he entered Doormat with the rescued
sisters, and proceeded to carry out his master's last orders. The abbess'
ship took the wounded captain Setnau on board, with his wife, his
children, his brother the steersman, and the surviving ship-wrights.
At the very hour when Rufinus closed his eyes, the town-watch of Memphis,
led by Bishop Plotinus, appeared to claim the Melchite convent of St.
Cecilia, and all the possessions of the sisterhood, in the name of the
patriarch and the Jacobite church. Next morning the bishop set out for
Upper Egypt to make his report to the prelate.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
He was made to be plundered
Old age no longer forgets; it is youth that has a short memory
THE BRIDE OF THE NILE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 9.
CHAPTER IX.
Philippus started up from the divan on which he had been reclining at
breakfast with his old friend. Before Horapollo was a half-empty plate;
he had swallowed his meal less rapidly than his companion, and looked
disapprovingly at the leech, who drank off his wine and water as he
stood, whereas he generally would sit and enjoy it as he talked to the
old man of matters light or grave. To the elder this was always the
pleasantest hour of the day; but now Philippus would hardly allow himself
more than just time enough to eat, even at their principal evening meal.
Indeed, not he alone, but every physician in the city, had as much as he
could do with the utmost exertion. Nearly three weeks had elapsed since
the attack on the nuns, and the fearful heat had still gone on in
creasing. The river, instead of rising had sunk lower and lower; the
carrier-pigeons from Ethiopia, looked for day by day with growing anxiety
and excitement, brought no news of a rising stream even in the upper
Nile, and the shallow, stagnant and evil-smelling waters by the banks
began to be injurious, nay, fatal, to the health of the whole population.
Close to the shore, especially, the water had a reddish tinge, and the
usually sweet, pure fluid in the canals was full of strange vegetable
growths and other foreign bodies putrid and undrinkable. The common
people usually shirked the trouble of filtering it, and it was among them
that the greater number died of a mortal and infectious pestilence, till
then unknown. The number of victims swelled daily, and the approach of
the comet kept pace with the growing misery of the town. Every one
connected it with the intense heat of the season, with the delay in the
inundation, and the appearance of the sickness; and the leech and his
friend often argued about these matters, for Philippus would not admit
that the meteor had any influence on human affairs, while Horapollo
believed that it had, and supported his view by a long series of
examples.
His antagonist would not accept them and asked for arguments; at the same
time he, like every one else, felt the influence of a vague dread of some
imminent and terrible disaster hanging over the earth and humanity at
large.
And, just as every heart in Memphis felt oppressed by such forebodings,
and by the weight of a calamity, which indeed no longer threatened them
but had actually come upon them, so the roads, the gardens, the palms and
sycamores by the way-side were covered by thick layers of dingy, choking
dust. The hedges of tamarisk and shrubs looked like decaying walls of
colorless, unburnt mud-bricks; even in the high-roads the wayfarer walked
in the midst of dense white clouds raised by his feet, and if a chariot,
or a horseman galloped down the scorching street, fine, grey sand at once
filled the air, compelling the foot-passengers to shut their eyes and
lips.
The town was so silent, so empty, so deserted! No one came out of doors
unless under pressure of business or piety. Every house was a furnace,
and even a bath brought no refreshment, for the water had long since
ceased to be cold. A disease had also attacked the ripening dates as they
hung; they dropped off in thousands from the heavy clusters under the
beautiful bending crown of leaves; and now for two days hundreds of dead
fish had been left on the banks. Even the scaly natives of the river were
plague-stricken; and the physician explained to his friend that this
brought the inhabitants a fresh danger; for who could clear the shores of
the dead fish?--And, in such heat, how soon they would become putrid!
The old man did not conceal from himself that it was hard, cruelly hard,
for the physician to follow his calling conscientiously at such a time;
but he knew his friend; he had seen him during months of pestilence two
years since--always brisk, decisive and gay, indeed inspired to greater
effort by the greater demands on him. What had so completely altered him,
had poisoned and vexed his soul as with a malignant spell? It was not the
almost superhuman sacrifices required by his duties;--it came of the
unfortunate infatuation of his heart, of which he could not rid himself.
Philippus had kept his promise. He went every day to the house of
Rufinus, and every day he saw Paula; but, as a murdered body bleeds
afresh in the presence of the assassin, so every day the old pain revived
when he was forced to meet her and speak with her. The only cure for this
particular sufferer was to remove the cause of his pain: that is to say,
to take Paula away out of his path; and this the old man made his care
and duty.
Little Mary and the other patients under Rufinus' roof were on the way to
recovery; still there was much to cast gloomy shadows over this happy
termination. Joanna and Pulcheria were very anxious as to the fate of
Rufinus. No news had been received of him or of the sisters, and
Philippus was the vessel into which the forsaken wife and Pulcheria--who
looked up to him as to a kind, faithful, and all-powerful protecting
spirit-poured all their sorrows, cares, and fears. Their forebodings were
aggravated by the fact that three times Arab officials had come to the
house to enquire about the master and his continued absence. All that the
women told them was written down, and Dame Joanna, whose lips had never
yet uttered a lie, had found herself forced to give a false clue by
saying that her husband had gone to Alexandria on business, and might
perhaps have to proceed to Syria.--What could these enquiries forebode?
Did they not indicate that Rufinus' complicity in the rescue of the nuns
was known at Fostat?
The authorities there were, in fact, better informed than the women could
suspect. But they kept their knowledge a secret, for it would never do to
let the oppressed people know that a handful of Egyptians had succeeded
in defeating a party of Arab soldiers; so the Memphites heard no more
than a dark rumor of what had occurred.
Philippus had known nothing of the old man's purpose till he had gone too
far to be dissuaded; and it was misery to him now to reflect that his
dear old friend, and his whole household, might come to ruin for the sake
of the sisterhood who were nothing to them; for he had received private
information that there had been a skirmish between the Moslems and the
deliverers of the nuns, which had cost the lives of several combatants on
both sides.
And Paula! If only he could have seen her happy--But she was pale; and
that which robbed the young girl--healthy as she was in mind and body--of
her proud, frank, independent bearing was not the heat, which tormented
all creation, but a secret, devouring sorrow; and this sorrow was the
work of one alone--of him on whom she had set her heart, and who made,
ah! what a return, for the royal gift of her love.
Philippus had frequent business at the governor's residence, and a
fortnight since he had plainly perceived what it was that had brought
Neforis into this strange state. She was taking the opium that her
husband had had, taking it in excessive quantities; and she could easily
procure more through some other physician. However, her piteous prayer
that Philippus would not abandon her to her fate had prevailed to induce
him to continue to see her, in the hope of possibly restricting her use
of the drug.
The senator's wife, Martina, also required his visits to the palace. She
was not actually ill, but she suffered cruelly from the heat, and she had
always been wont to see her worthy old house-physician every day, to hear
all the latest gossip, and complain of her little ailments when anything
went wrong with her usually sound health. Philippus was indeed too much
overburdened to chatter, but his professional advice was good and helped
her to endure the fires of this pitiless sky. She liked this incisive,
shrewd, plain-spoken man--often indeed sharp and abrupt in his
freedom--and he appreciated her bright, natural ways. Now and then
Martina even succeeded in winning a smile from "Hermes Trismegistus," who
was "generally as solemn as though there was no such thing on earth as a
jest," and in spurring him to a rejoinder which showed that this dolorous
being had a particularly keen and ready wit.
Heliodora attracted him but little. There was, to be sure, an
unmistakable likeness in her "imploring eyes" to those of Pulcheria; but
the girl's spoke fervent yearning for the grace and love of God, while
the widow's expressed an eager desire for the admiration of the men she
preferred. She was a graceful creature beyond all question, but such
softness, which never even attempted to assert a purpose or an opinion,
did not commend itself to his determined nature; it annoyed him, when he
had contradicted her, to hear her repeat his last statement and take his
side, as if she were ashamed of her own silliness. Her society, indeed,
did not seem to satisfy the clever older woman, who at home, was
accustomed to a succession of visitors, and to whom the word "evening"
was synonymous with lively conversation and a large gathering. She spoke
of the leech's visits as the oasis in the Egyptian desert, and little
Katharina even she regarded as a Godsend.
The water-wagtail was her daily visitant, and the girl's gay and often
spiteful gossip helped to beguile her during this terrific heat.
Katharina's mother made no difficulties; for Heliodora had gone to see
her in all her magnificence, and had offered her and her daughter
hospitality, some day, at Constantinople. They were very likely going
thither; at any rate they would not remain in Memphis, and then it would
be a piece of good fortune to be introduced to the society of the capital
by such people as their new acquaintances.
Martina thus heard a great deal about Paula; and though it was all
adverse and colored to her prejudice she would have liked to see the
daughter of the great and famous Thomas whom she had known; besides,
after all she had heard, she could fear nothing from Paula for her niece:
uncommonly handsome, but haughty, repellent, unamiable, and--like
Heliodora herself--of the orthodox sect.--What could tempt "great
Sesostris" to give her the preference?
Katharina herself proposed to Martina to make them acquainted; but
nothing would have induced Dame Martina to go out of her rooms, protected
to the utmost from the torrid sunshine, so she left it to Heliodora to
pay the visit and give her a report of the hero's daughter. Heliodora had
devoted herself heart and soul to the little heiress, and humored her on
many points.
This was carried out. Katharina actually had the audacity to bring the
rivals together, even after she had reported to each all she knew of
Orion's position with regard to the other. It was exquisite sport; still,
in one respect it did not fulfil her intentions, for Paula gave no sign
of suffering the agonies of jealousy which Katharina had hoped to excite
in her. Heliodora, on the other hand, came home depressed and uneasy;
Paula had received her coldly and with polite formality, and the young
widow had remained fully aware that so remarkable a woman might well cast
her own image in Orion's heart into the shade, or supplant it altogether.
Like a wounded man who, in spite of the anguish, cannot resist touching
the wound to assure himself of its state, Heliodora went constantly to
see Katharina in order to watch her rival from the garden or to be taken
to call on her, though she was always very coldly received.
At first Katharina had pitied the young woman whose superior in
intelligence she knew herself to be; but a certain incident had
extinguished this feeling; she now simply hated her, and pricked her with
needle-thrusts whenever she had a chance. Paula seemed invulnerable; but
there was not a pang which Katharina would not gladly have given her to
whom she owed the deepest humiliation her young life had ever known. How
was it that Paula failed to regard Heliodora as a rival? She had
reflected that, if Orion had really returned the widow's passion, he
could not have borne so long a separation. It was on purpose to avoid
Heliodora, and to remain faithful to what he was and must always be to
Paula, that he had gone with the senator, far from Memphis.
Heliodora--her instinct assured her--was the poor, forsaken woman with
whom he had trifled at Byzantium, and for whom he had committed that
fatal theft of the emerald. If Fate would but bring him home to her, and
if she then yielded all he asked--all her own soul urged her to grant,
then she would be the sole mistress and queen of his heart--she must be,
she was sure of it! And though, even as she thought of it, she bowed her
head in care, it was not from fear of losing him; it was only her anxiety
about her father, her good old friend, Rufinus, and his family, whom she
had made so entirely her own.
This was the state of affairs this morning, when to his old friend's
vexation, Philippus had so hastily and silently drunk off his
after-breakfast draught; just as he set down the cup, the black
door-keeper announced that a hump-backed man wished to see his master at
once on important business.
"Important business!" repeated the leech. "Give me four more legs in
addition to my own two, or a machine to make time longer than it is, and
then I will take new patients-otherwise no! Tell the fellow. . . ."
"No, not sick. . . ." interrupted the negro. "Come long way. Gardener to
Greek man Rufinus."
Philippus started: he could guess what this messenger had to say, and his
heart sank with dread as he desired that he might be shown in.
A glance at Gibbus told him what he had rightly feared. The poor fellow
was hardly recognizable. He was coated with dust from head to foot, and
this made him look like a grey-haired old man; his sandals hung to his
feet in strips; the sweat, pouring down his cheeks, had made gutters as
it were in the dust on his face, and his tears, as the physician held out
his hand to him, washed out other channels.
In reply to the leech's anxious, long drawn "Dead?" he nodded silently;
and when Philippus, clasping his hands to his temples, cried out: "Dead!
My poor old Rufinus dead! But how, in Heaven's name, did it happen?
Speak, man, speak!"--Gibbus pointed to the old philosopher and said:
"Come out then, with me, Master. No third person. . . ."
Philippus, however, gave him to understand that Horapollo was his second
self; and the hunch-back went on to tell him what he had seen, and how
his beloved master had met his end. Horapollo sat listening in
astonishment, shaking his head disapprovingly, while the physician
muttered curses. But the bearer of evil tidings was not interrupted, and
it was not till he had ended that Philippus, with bowed head and tearful
eyes, said:
"Poor, faithful old man; to think that he should die thus--he who leaves
behind him all that is best in life, while I--I. . . ." And he groaned
aloud. The old man glanced at him with reproachful displeasure.
While the leech broke the seals of the tablets, which the abbess had
carefully closed, and began to read the contents, Horapollo asked the
gardener: "And the nuns? Did they all escape?"
"Yes, Master! on the morning after we reached Doomiat, a trireme took
them all out to sea."
And the old man grumbled to himself: "The working bees killed and the
Drones saved!"
Gibbus, however, contradicted him, praising the laborious and useful life
of the sisters, in whose care he himself had once been.
Meanwhile Philippus had read his friend's last letter. Greatly disturbed
by it he turned hither and thither, paced the room with long steps, and
finally paused in front of the gardener, exclaiming: "And what next? Who
is to tell them the news?"
"You," replied Gibbus, raising his hands in entreaty.
"I-oh, of course, I!" growled the physician. "Whatever is difficult,
painful, intolerable, falls on my shoulders as a matter of course! But I
cannot--ought not--I will not do it. Had I any part or lot in devising
this mad expedition? You observe, Father?--What he, the simpleton,
brewed, I--I again am to drink. Fate has settled that!"
"It is hard, it is hard, child!" replied the old man. "Still, it is your
duty. Only consider--if that man, as he stands before us now, were to
appear before the women. . . ."
But Philippus broke in: "No, no, that would not do! And you, Gibbus--this
very day there has been an Arab again to see Joanna; and if they were to
suspect that you had been with your master--for you look strangely.--No,
man; your devotion merits a better reward. They shall not catch you. I
release you from your service to the widow, and we--what do you say,
Father?--we will keep him here."
"Right, very right," said Horapollo. "The Nile must some day rise again.
Stay with us; I have long had a fancy to eat vegetables of my own
growing."
But Gibbus firmly declined the offer, saying he wished to return to his
old mistress. When the physician again pointed out to him how great a
danger he was running into, and the old man desired to know his reasons,
the hunch-back exclaimed:
"I promised my master to stay with the women; and now, while in all the
household I am the only free man, shall I leave them unprotected to
secure my own miserable life? Sooner would I see a scimitar at my throat.
When my head is off the rascals are welcome to all that is left."
The words came hollow and broken from his parched tongue, and as he spoke
the faithful fellow's face changed. Even under the dust he turned pale,
and Philippus had to support him, for his feet refused their office. His
long tramp through the torrid heat had exhausted his strength; but a
draught of wine soon brought him to himself again and Horapollo ordered
the slave to lead him to the kitchen and desire the cook to take the best
care of him.
As soon as the friends were alone, the elder observed:
"That worthy, foolhardy, old child who is now dead, seems to have left
you some strange request. I could see that as you were reading."
"There--take it!" replied Philippus; and again he walked up and down the
room, while Horapollo took the letter. Both faces of the tablets were
covered with irregular, up-and-down lines of writing to the following
effect:
"Rufinus, in view of death, to his beloved Philippus:
"One shivering fit after another comes over me; I shall certainly
die to-day. I must make haste. Writing is difficult. If only I
can say what is most pressing.--First: Joanna and the poor child.
Be everything you can be to them. Protect them as their guardian,
Kyrios, and friend. They have enough to live on and something still
to spare for others. My brother Leonax manages the property, and he
is honest. Joanna knows all about it.--Tell her and the poor child
that I send them ten thousand blessings--and to Joanna endless
thanks for all her goodness.--And to you, my friend: heed the old
man's words. Rid your heart of Paula. She is not for you: you
know, young Orion. But as to yourself: Those who were born in high
places rarely suit us, who have dragged ourselves up from below to a
better position. Be her friend; that she deserves--but let that be
all. Do not live alone, a wife brings all that is best into a man's
life; it is she who weaves sweet dreams into his dull sleep. You
know nothing of all this as yet; and your worthy old friend--to whom
my greetings--has held aloof from it all his life. . . .
"For your private eye: it is a dying man who speaks thus. You must
know that my poor child, our Pul, regards you as the most perfect of
men and esteems you above all others. You know her and Joanna.
Bear witness to your friend that no evil word ever passed the lips
of either of them. Far be it from me to advise you, who bear the
image of another woman in your heart,--to say: marry the child, she
is the wife for you. But this much to you both--Father and son--I
do advise you to live with the mother and daughter as true and
friendly house-mates. You will none of you repent doing so. This
is a dying man's word. I can write no more. You are the women's
guardian, Philip, a faithful one I know. A common aim makes men
grow alike. You and I, for many a year.--Take good care of them for
me; I entreat you--good care."
The last words were separated and written all astray; the old man could
hardly make them out. He now sat looking, as Phillipus had done before,
sorely puzzled and undecided over this strange document.
"Well?" asked the leech at last.
"Aye-well?" repeated the other with a shrug. Then both again were silent;
till Horapollo rose, and taking his staff, also paced the room while he
murmured, half to himself and half to his younger friend "They are two
quiet, reasonable women. There are not many of that sort, I fancy. How
the little one helped me up from the low seat in the garden!" It was a
reminiscence that made him chuckle to himself; he stopped Philippus, who
was pacing at his side, by lightly patting his arm, exclaiming with
unwonted vivacity: "A man should be ready to try everything--the care of
women even, before he steps into the grave. And is it a fact that neither
of them is a scold or a chatter-box?"
"It is indeed."
"And what 'if' or 'but' remains behind?" asked the old man. "Let us be
reckless for once, brother! If the whole business were not so
diabolically serious, it would be quite laughable. The young one for me
and the old one for you in our leisure hours, my son; better washed
linen; clothes without holes in them; no dust on our books; a pleasant
'Rejoice' every morning, or at meal-times;--only look at the fruit on
that dish! No better than the oats they strew before horses. At the old
man's everything was as nice as it used to be in my own home at Philae:
Supper a little work of art, a feast for the eye as well as the appetite!
Pulcheria seems to understand all that as well as my poor dead sister
did. And then, when I want to rise, such a kind, pretty little hand to
help one up! I have long hated this dwelling. Lime and dust fall from the
ceiling in my bedroom, and here there are wide gaps in the flooring-I
stumbled over one yesterday--and our niggardly landlords, the officials,
say that if we want anything repaired we may do it ourselves, that they
have no money left for such things. Now, under that worthy old man's roof
everything was in the best order." The philosopher chuckled aloud and
rubbed his hands as he went on: "Supposing we kick over the traces for
once, Philip. Supposing we were to carry out our friend's dying wish?
Merciful Isis! It would certainly be a good action, and I have not many
to boast of. But cautiously--what do you say? We can always throw it up
at a month's notice."
Then he grew grave again, shook his head, and said meditatively: "No, no;
such plans only disturb one's peace of mind. A pleasant vision! But
scarcely feasible."
"Not for the present, at any rate," replied the leech.
"So long as Paula's fate remains undecided, I beg you to let the matter
rest."
The old man muttered a curse on her; then he said with a vicious, sharp
flash in his eyes: "That patrician viper! Every where in everything--she
spoils it all! But wait a while! I fancy she will soon be removed from
our path, and then. . . . No, even now, at the present time, I will not
allow that we should be deprived of what would embellish life, of doing a
thing which may turn the scale in my favor in the day of judgment. The
wishes of a dying man are sacred: So our fathers held it; and they were
right. The old man's will must be done! Yes, yes, yes. It is settled. As
soon as that hindrance is removed, we will keep house with the two women.
I have said; and I mean it."
At this point the gardener came in again, and the old man called out to
him:
"Listen, man. We shall live together after all; you shall hear more of
this later. Stay with my people till sundown, but you must keep your own
counsel, for they are all listeners and blabs. The physician here will
now take the melancholy tidings to the unfortunate widow, and then you
can talk it all over with her at night. Nothing startling must take place
at the house there; and with regard to your master, even his death must
remain a secret from every one but us and his family."
The gardener knew full well how much depended on his silence; Philippus
tacitly agreed to the old man's arrangement, but for the present he
avoided discussing the matter with the women. When, at length he set off
on his painful errand to the widow, Horapollo dismissed him saying:
"Courage, courage, my Son.--And as you pass by, just glance at our little
garden;--we grieved to see the fine old palm-tree perish; but now a young
and vigorous shoot is growing from the root."
"It has been drooping since yesterday and will die away," replied
Philippus shrugging his shoulders.
But the old man exclaimed: "Water it, Gibbus! the palm-tree must be
watered at once."
"Aye, you have water at hand for that!" retorted the leech, but he added
bitterly as he reached the stairs, "If it were so in all cases!"
"Patience and good purpose will always win," murmured the old man; and
when he was alone he growled on angrily: "Only be rid of that dry old
palm-tree--his past life in all its relations to that patrician hussy
Away with it, into the fire!--But how am I to get her? How can I manage
it?"
He threw himself back in his arm-chair, rubbing his forehead with the
tips of his fingers. He had come to no result when the negro requested an
audience for some visitors. These were the heads of the senate of
Memphis, who had come as a deputation to ask counsel of the old sage. He,
if any one, would find some means of averting or, at any rate, mitigating
the fearful calamity impending over the town and country, and against
which prayer, sacrifice, processions, and pilgrimages had proved
abortive. They were quite resolved to leave no means untried, not even if
heathen magic should be the last resource.
CHAPTER X.
All Katharina's sympathy with Heliodora had died finally in the course of
the past, moonless night. She had secretly accompanied her, with her maid
and an old deaf and dumb stable-slave, to a soothsayer--for there still
were many in Memphis, as well as magicians and alchemists; and this woman
had told the young widow that her line of life led to the greatest
happiness, and that even the wildest wishes of her heart would find
fulfilment. What those wishes were Katharina knew only too well; the
probability of their accomplishment had roused her fierce jealousy and
made her hate Heliodora.
Heliodora had gone to consult the sorceress in a simple but rich dress.
Her peplos was fastened on the shoulder, not by an ordinary gold pin, but
by a button which betrayed her taste for fine jewels, as it consisted of
a sapphire of remarkable size; this had at once caught the eye of the
witch, showing her that she had to deal with a woman of rank and wealth.
She had taken Katharina, who had come very plainly dressed, for her
companion or poor friend, so she had promised her no more than the
removal of certain hindrances, and a happy life at last, with a husband
no longer young and a large family of children.
The woman's business was evidently a paying one; the interior of her
house was conspicuously superior to the wretched hovels which surrounded
it, in the poorest and most squalid part of the town. Outside, indeed, it
differed little from its neighbors; in fact; it was intentionally
neglected, to mislead the authorities, for witchcraft and the practice of
magic arts were under the penalty of death. But the fittings of the
roofless centre-chamber in which she was wont to perform her incantations
and divinations argued no small outlay. On the walls were hangings with
occult figures; the pillars were painted with weird and grewsome
pictures; crucibles and cauldrons of various sizes were simmering over
braziers on little altars; on the shelves and tables stood cups, phials,
and vases, a wheel on which a wryneck hopped up and down, wax images of
men and women--some with needles through their hearts, a cage full of
bats, and glass jars containing spiders, frogs, leeches, beetles,
scorpions, centipedes and other foul creatures; and lengthways down the
room was stretched a short rope walk, used in a Thracian form of magic.
Perfumes and pungent vapors filled the air, and from behind a curtain
which hid the performers came a monotonous music of children's voices,
bells, and dull drumming.
Medea, so the wise woman was called, though scarcely past five and forty,
harmonized in appearance with this strange habitation, full as it was of
objects calculated to rouse repulsion, dread, and amazement. Her face was
pale, and her extraordinary height was increased by a mass of coal-black
hair, curled high over a comb at the very top of her head.
At the end of the first visit paid her by the two young women, who had
taken her by surprise, so that several things were lacking which on the
second occasion proved to be very effective in the exercise of her art,
she had made Heliodora promise to return in three days' time. The young
widow had kept her word, and had made her appearance punctually with
Katharina.
To be in Egypt, the land of sorcery and the magic arts, without putting
them to the test, was impossible. Even Martina allowed this, though she
did not care for such things for herself. She was content with her lot;
and if any change for the worse were in prospect she would rather not be
tormented beforehand by a wise prophet; nor was it better to be deluded
by a foolish one. Happiness as of Heaven itself she no longer craved; it
would only have disturbed her peace. But she was the last person to think
ill of the young, whose life still lay before them, if they longed to
look into futurity.
The fair widow and her companion crossed the sorceress' threshold in some
trepidation, and Katharina was the more agitated of the two; for this
afternoon she had seen Philippus leave the house of Rufinus, and not long
after some Arab officials had called there. Paula had come into the
garden shortly before sundown, her eyes red with weeping; and when, soon
after, Pulcheria and her mother had joined her there, Paula had thrown
herself on Joanna's neck, sobbing so bitterly that the mother and
daughter--"whose tears were near her eyes"--had both followed her
example. Something serious had occurred; but when she had gone to the
house to pick up further information, old Betta, who was particularly
snappish with her, had refused her admission quite rudely.
Then, on their way hither, she and Heliodora had had a painful adventure;
the chariot, lent by Neforis to convey them as far as the edge of the
necropolis, was stopped on the way by a troop of Arab horse, and they
were subjected to a catechism by the leader.
So they entered the house of "Medea of the curls," as the common people
called the witch, with uneasy and throbbing hearts; they were received,
however, with such servile politeness that they soon recovered
themselves, and even the timid Heliodora began to breathe freely again.
The sorceress knew this time who Katharina was, and paid more respectful
attention to the daughter of the wealthy widow.
The young crescent moon had risen, a circumstance which Medea declared
enabled her to see more clearly into the future than she could do at the
time of the Luna-negers as she called the moonless night. Her inward
vision had been held in typhornian darkness at the time of their first
visit, by the influence of some hostile power. She had felt this as soon
as they had quitted her, but to-day she saw clearer. Her mind's eye was
as clear as a silver mirror, she had purified it by three days' fasting
and not a mote could escape her sight.--"Help, ye children of Horapollo!
Help, Hapi and Ye three holy ones!"
"Oh, my beauties, my beauties!" she went on enthusiastically. "Hundreds
of great dames have proved my art, but such splendid fortunes I never
before saw crowding round any two heads as round yours. Do you hear how
the cauldrons of fortune are seething? The very lids lift! Amazing,
amazing."
She stretched out her hand towards the vessels as though conjuring them
and said solemnly: "Abundance of happiness; brimming over, brimming over!
Bursting storehouses! Zefa-oo Metramao. Return, return, to the right
levels, the right heights, the right depth, the right measure! Your Elle
Mei-Measurer, Leveller, require them, Techuti, require them, double
Ibis!"
She made them both sit down on elegant seats in front of the boiling
pots, tied the "thread of Anubis" round the ring-finger of each, asked in
a low whisper between muttered words of incantation for a hair of each,
and after placing the hairs both in one cauldron she cried out with wild
vehemence, as though the weal or woe of her two visitors were involved in
the smallest omission:
"Press the finger with the thread of Anubis on your heart; fix your eyes
on the cauldron and the steam which rises to the spirits above, the
spirits of light, the great One on high!"
The two women obeyed the sorceress' directions with beating hearts, while
she began spinning round on her toes with dizzy rapidity; her curls flew
out, and the magic wand in her extended hand described a large and
beautiful curve. Suddenly, and as if stricken by terror, she stopped her
whirl, and at the same instant the lamps went out and the only light was
from the stars and the twinkling coals under the cauldrons. The low music
died away, and a fresh strong perfume welled out from behind the curtain.
Medea fell on her knees, lifted up her hands to Heaven, threw her head so
far back that her whole face was turned up to the sky and her eyes gazed
straight up at the stars-an attitude only possible to so supple a spine.
In this torturing attitude she sang one invocation after another, to the
zenith of the blue vault over their heads, in a clear voice of fervent
appeal. Her body was thrown forward, her mass of hair no longer stood up
but was turned towards the two young women, who every moment expected
that the supplicant would be suffocated by the blood mounting to her
head, and fall backwards; but she sang and sang, while her white teeth
glittered in the starlight that fell straight upon her face. Presently,
in the midst of the torrent of demoniacal names and magic formulas that
she sang and warbled out, a piteous and terrifying sound came from behind
the curtain as of two persons gasping, sighing, and moaning: one voice
seemed to be that of a man oppressed by great anguish; the other was the
half-suffocated wailing of a suffering child. This soon became louder,
and at length a voice said in Egyptian: "Water, a drink of water."
The woman started to her feet, exclaiming: "It is the cry of the poor and
oppressed who have been robbed to enrich those who have too much already;
the lament of those whom Fate has plundered to heap you with wealth
enough for hundreds." As she spoke these words, in Greek and with much
unction, she turned to the curtain and added solemnly, but in Egyptian:
"Give drink to the thirsty; the happy ones will spare him a drop from
their overflow. Give the white drink to the wailing child-spirit, that he
may be soothed and quenched.--Play, music, and drown the lamentations of
the spirits in sorrow."
Then, turning to Heliodora's kettle she said sternly, as if in obedience
to some higher power:
"Seven gold pieces to complete the work,"--and while the young widow drew
out her purse the sorceress lighted the lamps, singing as she did so and
as she dropped the coin into the boiling fluid: "Pure, bright gold!
Sunlight buried in a mine! Holy Seven. Shashef, Shashef! Holy Seven,
marry and mingle--melt together!"
When this was done she poured out of the cauldron a steaming fluid as
black as ink, into a shallow saucer, called Heliodora to her side, and
told her what she could see in the mirror of its surface.
It was all fair, and gave none but delightful replies to the widow's
questioning. And all the sorceress said tended to confirm the young
woman's confidence in her magic art; she described Orion as exactly as
though she saw him indeed in the surface of the ink, and said he was
travelling with an older man. And lo! he was returning already; in the
bright mirror she could see Heliodora clasped in her lover's arms; and
now--it was like a picture: A stranger--not the bishop of Memphis--laid
her hand in his and blessed their union before the altar in a vast and
magnificent cathedral.
Katharina, who had been chilled with apprehensions and a thrill of awe,
as she listened to Medea's song, listened to every word with anxious
attention; what Medea said--how she described Orion--that was more
wonderful than anything else, beyond all she had believed possible. And
the cathedral in which the lovers were to be united was the church of St.
Sophia at Constantinople, of which she had heard so much.
A tight grip seemed to clutch her heart; still, eagerly as she listened
to Medea's words, her sharp ears heard the doleful gasping and whimpering
behind the hanging; and this distressed and dismayed her; her breath came
short, and a deep, torturing sense of misfortune possessed her wholly.
The wailing child-spirit within, a portion of whose joys Medea said had
been allotted to her--nay, she had not robbed him, certainly not--for who
could be more wretched than she? It was only that beautiful, languishing
young creature who was so lavishly endowed by Fortune with gifts enough
and to spare for others without number. Oh! if she could but have
snatched them from her one after another, from the splendid ruby she was
wearing to-day, to Orion's love!
She was pale and tremulous as she rose at the call of the sorceress,
after she also had offered seven gold pieces. She would gladly have
purchased annihilating curses to destroy her happier rival.
The black liquid in the saucer began to stir, and a sharply smelling
vapor rose from it; the witch blew this aside, and as soon as the murky
fluid was a little cool, and the surface was smooth and mirror-like, she
asked Katharina what she most desired to know. But the answer was checked
on her lips; a fearful thundering and roaring suddenly made the house
shake; Medea dropped the saucer with a piercing shriek, the contents
splashed up, and warm, sticky drops fell on the girl's arms and dress.
She was quite overcome with the startling horror, and Heliodora, who
could herself scarcely stand, had to support her, for she tottered and
would have fallen.
The sorceress had vanished; a half-grown lad, a young man, and a very
tall Egyptian girl in scanty attire were rushing about the room. They
flew hither and thither, throwing all the vessels they could lay hands on
into an opening in the floor from which they had lifted a trap-door;
pouring water on the braziers and extinguishing the lights, while they
drove the two strangers into a corner of the hall, rating and abusing
them. Then the lads clambered like cats up to the opening in the roof,
and sprang off and away.
A shrill whistle rang through the house, and in moment Medea burst into
the room again, clutched the two trembling women by the shoulders, and
exclaimed: "For Christ's sake, be merciful! My life is at stake Sorcery
is punishable by death. I have done my best for you. You came here--that
is what you must say--out of charity to nurse the sick." She pushed them
both behind the hanging whence they still heard feeble groans, into a
low, stuffy room, and the over-grown girl slipped in behind them.
Here, on miserable couches, lay an old man shivering, and showing dark
spots on his bare breast and face: and a child of five, whose crimson
cheeks were burning with fever.
Heliodora felt as if she must suffocate in the plague stricken, heavy
atmosphere, and Katharina clung to her helplessly; but the soothsayer
pulled her away, saying: "Each to one bed: you to the child, and you--the
old man."
Involuntarily they obeyed the woman who was panting with fright. The
water-wagtail, who never in her life thought of a sick person, turned
very sick and looked away from the sufferer; but the your widow, who had
spent many and many a night by the death-bed of a man she had loved, and
who, tender-hearted, had often tended her sick slaves with her own hand,
looked compassionately into the pretty, pain-stricken face of the child,
and wiped the dews from his clammy brow.
Katharina shuddered; but her attention was presently attracted to
something fresh; from the other side of the house came a clatter of
weapons, the door was pushed open, and the physician Philippus walked
into the room. He desired the night-watch, who were with him, to wait
outside. He had come by the command of the police authorities, to whose
ears information had been brought that there were persons sick of the
plague in the house of Medea, and that she, nevertheless, continued to
receive visitors. It had long been decided that she must be taken in the
act of sorcery, and warning had that day been given that she expected
illustrious company in the evening. The watch were to find her
red-handed, so to speak; the leech was to prove whether her house was
indeed plague-stricken; and in either case the senate wished to have the
sorceress safe in prison and at their mercy, though even Philippus had
not been taken into their confidence.
The visitors he had come upon were the last he had expected to find here.
He looked at them with a disapproving shake of the head, interrupted the
woman's voluble asseverations that these noble ladies had come, out of
Christian charity, to comfort and help the sick, with a rough
exclamation: "A pack of lies!" and at once led the coerced sick nurses
out of the house. He then represented to them the fearful risk to which
their folly had exposed them, and insisted very positively on their
returning home and, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour, taking a
bath and putting on fresh garments.
With trembling knees they found their way back to the chariot; but even
before it could start Heliodora had broken down in tears, while
Katharina, throwing herself back on the cushions, thought, as she glanced
at her weeping companion: "This is the beginning of the wonderful
happiness she was promised! It is to be hoped it may continue!"
It seemed indeed as though Katharina's guardian spirit had overheard this
amiable wish; for, as the chariot drove past the guard-house into the
court-yard of the governor's house, it was stopped by armed men with
brown, warlike faces, and they had to wait some minutes till an Arab
officer appeared to enquire who they were, and what they wanted. This
they explained in fear and trembling, and they then learnt that the Arab
government had that very evening taken possession of the residence. Orion
was accused of serious crimes, and his guests were to depart on the
following day.
Katharina, who was known to the interpreter, was allowed to go with
Heliodora to the senator's wife; she might also use the chariot to return
home in, and if she pleased, take the Byzantines with her, for the palace
would be in the hands of the soldiery for the next few days.
The two young women held council. Katharina pressed her friend to come at
once to her mother's house, for she felt certain that they were
plague-stricken, and how could they procure a bath in a house full of
soldiers? Heliodora could not and must not remain with Martina in this
condition, and the senator's wife could follow her next day. Her mother,
she added, would be delighted to welcome so dear a guest.
The widow was passive, and when Martina had gladly consented to accept
the invitation of her "delivering angel," the chariot carried them to
Susannah's house. The widow had long been in bed, firmly convinced that
her daughter was asleep and dreaming in her own pretty room.
Katharina would not have her disturbed, and the bath-room was so far from
Susannah's apartment that she slept on quietly while Katharina and her
guest purified themselves.
CHAPTER XI.
The inhabitants of the governor's residence passed a fearful night.
Martina asked herself what sin she had committed that she, of all people,
should be picked out to witness such a disaster.
And where were her schemes of marriage now? Any movement in such heat was
indeed scarcely endurable; but she would have moved from one part of the
house to another a dozen times, and allowed herself to be tossed hither
and thither like a ball, if it could have enabled her to save her dear
"great Sesostris" from such hideous peril. And at the bottom of all this
was, no doubt, this wild, senseless business of the nuns.
And these Arabs! They simply helped themselves to whatever they fancied,
and were, of course, in a position to strip the son of the great Mukaukas
of all he possessed and reduce him to beggary. A pretty business this!
Heliodora, to be sure, had enough for both, and she and her husband would
not forget them in their will; but there was more than this in the
balance now: it was a matter of life and death.
A cold shudder ran through her at the thought; and her fears were only
too well founded: the black Arab who had come to parley with her, and had
finally allowed her to remain under this roof till next day, had told her
as much through the interpreter. A fearful, horrible, nameless
catastrophe! And that she should be in the midst of it and have to see it
all!
Then her husband, her poor Justinus! How hard this would fall on him! She
could not cease weeping; and before she fell asleep she prayed fervently
indeed, to the saints and the dear Mother of God, that they would bring
all to a happy issue. She closed her eyes on the thought: "What a
misfortune!" and she woke to it again early in the morning.
She, however, had known nothing of the worst horrors of that fatal night.
A troop of Arab soldiers had crossed the Nile at nightfall, some on foot
or on horseback and some in boats, led by Obada the Vekeel, and had
invested the governor's residence. When they had fully assured themselves
that Orion was indeed absent they took Nilus prisoner. It was then
Obada's business to inform the Mukaukas' widow of what had happened, and
to tell her that she must quit the house next day. This must be done,
because he had views of his own as to what was to become of the venerable
house of the oldest family in the country.
Neforis was still up, and when the interpreter was announced as Obada's
forerunner, she was in the fountain-room. He found her a good deal
excited; for, although she was incapable of any consecutive train of
thought and, when her mind was required to exert itself, her ideas only
came like lightning-flashes through her brain, she had observed that
something unusual was going on. Sebek and her maid had evaded her
enquiries, and would say no more than that Amru's representative had come
to speak with the young master. It seemed to be something important,
perhaps some false accusation.
The interpreter now explained that Orion himself was accused of having
planned and aided an enterprise which had cost the lives of twelve Arab
soldiers; and, as she knew, any injury inflicted even on a single Moslem
by an Egyptian was punished by death and the confiscation of his goods.
Besides this, her son was accused of a robbery.
At the close of this communication, to which Neforis listened with a
vacant stare, horrified and at last almost crushed, the interpreter
begged that she would grant the Vekeel an audience.
"Not just yet--give me a few minutes," said the widow, bringing out the
words with difficulty: first she must have recourse to her secret
specific. When she had done so, she expressed her readiness to see Obada.
Her son's swarthy foe was anxious to appear a mild and magnanimous man in
her eyes, so it was with flattering servility and many smirking grins
that he communicated to her the necessity for her quitting the house in
which she had passed the longest and happiest half of her life, and no
later than next day.
To his announcement that her private fortune would remain untouched, and
that she would be at liberty to reside in Memphis or to go to her own
house in Alexandria, she indifferently replied that "she should see."
She then enquired whether the Arabs had yet succeeded in capturing her
son.
"Not actually," replied the Vekeel. "But we know where he is hiding, and
by to-morrow or the next day we shall lay hands on the unhappy young
man."
But, as he spoke, the widow detected a malicious gleam in his eyes to
which, so far, he had tried to give a sympathetic expression, and she
went on with a slight shake of the bead: "Then it is a case of life and
death?"
"Compose yourself, noble lady," was the reply. "Of death alone."
Neforis looked up to heaven and for some minutes did not speak; then she
asked:
"And who has accused him of robbery?" "The head of his own Church. . . ."
"Benjamin?" she murmured with a peculiar smile. Only yesterday she had
made her will in favor of the patriarch and the Church. "If Benjamin
could see that," said she to herself, "he would change his views of you
and your people, and have prayers constantly said for us."
As she spoke no more the Vekeel sat looking at her inquisitively and
somewhat at a loss, till at length she rose, and with no little dignity
dismissed him, remarking that now their business was at an end and she
had nothing further to say to him.
This closed the interview; and as the Vekeel quitted the fountain-room he
muttered to himself: "What a woman! Either she is possessed and her brain
is crazed, or she is of a rarely heroic pattern."
Neforis was supported to her own room; when she was in bed she desired
her maid to bring a small box out of her chest and place it on the little
table containing medicines by the bead of the couch.
As soon as she was alone she took out two letters which George had
written to her before their marriage, and a poem which Orion had once
addressed to her; she tried to read them, but the words danced before her
eyes, and she was forced to lay them aside. She took up a little packet
containing hair cut from the heads of her sons after death, and a lock of
her husband's. She gazed on these dear memorials with rapt tenderness,
and now the poppy juice began to take effect: the images of those
departed ones rose clear in her mind, and she was as near to them as
though they were standing in living actuality by her side.
Still holding the curls in her hand, she looked up into vacancy, trying
to apprehend clearly what had occurred within the last few hours and what
lay before her: She must leave this room, this ample couch, this
house--all, in short, that was bound up with the dearest memories of
those she had loved. She was to be forced to this--but did it beseem her
to submit to this Negro, this stranger in the house where she was
mistress? She shook her head with a scornful smile; then opening a glass
phial, which was still half-full of opium pillules, she placed a few on
her tongue and again gazed sky-wards.--Another face now looked down on
her; she saw the husband from whom not even death could divide her, and
at his feet their two murdered sons. Presently Orion seemed to rise out
of the clouds, as a diver comes up from the water, and make for the shore
of the island on which George and the other two seemed to be standing.
His father opened his arms to receive him and clasped him to his heart,
while she herself--or was it only her wraith--went to the others, who
hurried forward to greet her tenderly; and then her husband, too, met
her, and she found rest on his bosom.
For hours, and long before the incursion of the Arabs, she had been
feeling half stunned and her mind clouded; but now a delicious,
slumberous lethargy came over her, to which her whole being urged her to
yield. But every time her eyes closed, the thought of the morrow shot
through her brain, and finally, with a great effort, she sat up, took
some water--which was always close at hand--shook into it the remaining
pillules in the bottle, and drank it off to the very last drop.
Her hand was steady; the happy smile on her lips, and the eager
expression of her eyes, might have led a spectator to believe that she
was thirsty and had mixed herself a refreshing draught. She had no look
of a desperate creature laying violent hands on her own life; she felt no
hesitancy, no fear of death, no burthen of the guilt she was
incurring--nothing but ecstatic weariness and hope; blissful hope of a
life without end, united to those she loved.
Hardly had she swallowed the deadly draught when she shivered with a
sudden chill. Raising herself a little she called her maid, who was
sitting up in the adjoining room; and as the woman looked alarmed at her
mistress's fixed stare, she stammered out: "A priest--quick--I am dying."
The woman flew off to the viridarium to call Sebek, who was standing in
front of the tablinum with the Vekeel; she told him what had happened,
and the Negro gave him leave to obey his dying mistress, escorting him as
far as the gate. Just outside, the steward met a deacon who had been
giving the blessing of the Church to a poor creature dying of the
pestilence, and in a few minutes they were standing by the widow's bed.
The locks of her sons' hair lay by her side; her hands were folded over a
crucifix; but her eyes, which had been fixed on the features of the
Saviour, had wandered from it and again gazed up to Heaven.
The priest spoke her name, but she mistook him for her son and murmured
in loving accents:
"Orion, poor, poor child! And you, Mary, my darling, my sweet little pet!
Your father--yes, dear boy, only come with me.--Your father is kind again
and forgives you. All those I loved are together now, and no one--Who can
part us? Husband--George, listen. . ."
The priest performed his office, but she paid no heed, still staring
upwards; her smiling lips continued to move, but no articulate sound came
from them. At last they were still, her eyelids fell, her hands dropped
the crucifix, a slight shiver ran through her limbs, which then relaxed,
and she opened her mouth as though to draw a deeper breath. But it closed
no more, and when the faithful steward pressed her lips together her face
was rigid and her heart had ceased to beat.
The honest man sobbed aloud; when he carried the melancholy news to the
Vekeel, Obada growled out a curse, and said to a subaltern officer who
was super-intending the loading of his camels with the treasures from the
tablinum:
"I meant to have treated that cursed old woman with conspicuous
generosity, and now she has played me this trick; and in Medina they will
lay her death at my door, unless. . ."
But here he broke off; and as he once more watched the loading of the
camels, he only thought to himself: "In playing for such high stake's, a
few gold pieces more or less do not count. A few more heads must fall
yet--the handsome Egyptian first and foremost.--If the conspirators at
Medina only play their part! The fall of Omar means that of Amru, and
that will set everything right."
CHAPTER XII.
Katharina slept little and rose very early, as was her habit, while
Heliodora was glad to sleep away the morning hours. In this scorching
season they were, to be sure, the pleasantest of the twenty-four, and the
water-wagtail usually found them so; but to-day, though a splendid Indian
flower had bloomed for the first time, and the head gardener pointed it
out to her with just pride, she could not enjoy it and be glad. It might
perish for aught she cared, and the whole world with it!
There was no one stirring yet in the next garden, but the tall leech
Philippus might be seen coming along the road to pay a visit to the
women.
A few swift steps carried her to the gate, whence she called him. She
must entreat him to say nothing of her last night's expedition; but
before she had time to prefer her request he had paused to tell her that
the widow of the Mukaukas, overcome by alarm and horror, had followed her
husband to the next world.
There had been a time when Katharina had been devoted to Neforis,
regarding her as a second mother; when the governor's residence had
seemed to her the epitome of all that was great, venerable, and
illustrious; and when she had been proud and happy to be allowed to run
in and out, and to be loved like a child of the family. The tears that
started to her eyes were sincere, and it was a relief to her, too, to lay
aside the gay and defiantly happy mien which she wore as a mask, while
all in her soul was dark, wild, and desperate.
The physician understood her grief; he readily promised not to betray her
to any one, and did not blame her, though he again pointed out the danger
she had incurred and earnestly insisted that every article of clothing,
which she or Heliodora had worn, must be destroyed. The subtle germ of
the malady, he said, clung to everything; every fragment of stuff which
had been touched by the plague-stricken was especially fitted to carry
the infection and disseminate the disease. She listened to him in deep
alarm, but she could satisfy him on this point; everything she or her
companion had worn had been burnt in the bath-room furnace.
The physician went on; and she, heedless of the growing heat, wandered
restlessly about the grounds. Her heart beat with short, quick, painful
jerks; an invisible burthen weighed upon her and prevented her breathing
freely. A host of torturing thoughts haunted her unbidden; they were not
to be exorcised, and added to her misery: Neforis dead; the residence in
the hands of the Arabs; Orion bereft of his possessions and held guilty
of a capital crime.
And the peaceful house beyond the hedge--what trouble was hanging over
its white-haired master and his guileless wife and daughter? A storm was
gathering, she could see it approaching--and beyond it, like another
murky, death-dealing thunder-cloud, was the pestilence, the fearful
pestilence.
And it was she, a fragile, feeble girl--a volatile water-wagtail--who had
brought all these terrors down on them, who had opened the sluice-gates
through which ruin was now beginning to pour in on all around her. She
could see the flood surging, swelling--saw it lapping round her own
house, her own feet; drops of sweat bedewed her forehead and hands from
terror at the mere thought. And yet, and yet!--If she had really had the
power to bind calamity in the clouds, to turn the tide back into its
channel, she would not have done so! The uttermost that she longed for,
as the fruit of the seed she had sown and which she longed to see ripen,
had not yet come to pass--and to see that she would endure anything, even
death and parting from this deceitful, burning, unlovely world.
Death awaited Orion; and before it overtook him he should know who had
sharpened the sword. Perhaps he might escape with his life; but the Arab
would not disgorge what he once had seized, and if that young and
splendid Croesus should come out of prison alive, but a beggar,
then--then. . . . And as for Paula! As for Heliodora! For once her little
hand had wrenched the thunderbolts from Zeus' eagle, and she would find
one for them!
The sense of her terrible power, to which more than one victim had
already fallen, intoxicated her. She would drive Orion--Orion who had
betrayed her--into utter ruin and misery; she would see him a beggar at
her feet!--And this it was that gave her courage to do her worst; this,
and this alone. What she would do then, she herself knew not; that lay as
yet in the womb of the Future. She might take a fancy to do something
kind, compassionate, and tender.
By the time she went into the house again her fears and depression had
vanished; revived energy possessed her soul, and the little eavesdropper
and tale-bearer had become in this short hour a purposeful and terrible
woman, ready for any crime.
"Poor little lamb!" thought Philippus, as he went into Rufinus' garden.
"That miserable man may have brought pangs enough to her little heart!"
His old friend's garden-plot was deserted. Under the sycamore, however,
he perceived the figures of a very tall young man and a pretty woman,
delicate, fair-haired, and rather pale. The big young fellow was holding
a skein of wool on his huge, outstretched hands; the girl was winding it
on to a ball. These were Rustem the Masdakite and Mandane, both now
recovered from their injuries; the girl, indeed, had been restored to the
new life of a calm and understanding mind. Philippus had watched over
this wonderful resuscitation with intense interest and care. He ascribed
it, in the first instance, to the great loss of blood from the wound in
her head; and secondly, to the fresh air and perfect nursing she had had.
All that was now needful was to protect her against agitation and violent
emotions. In the Masdakite she had found a friend and a submissive
adorer; and Philippus could rejoice as he looked at the couple, for his
skill had indeed brought him nothing but credit.
His greeting to them was cheery and hearty, and in answer to his enquiry:
"How are you getting on?" Rustem replied, "As lively as a fish in water,"
adding, as he pointed to Mandane, "and I can say the same for my
fellow-countrywoman."
"You are agreed then?" said the leech, and she nodded eager assent.
At this Philippus shook his finger at the man, exclaiming: "Do not get
too tightly entangled here, my friend. Who knows how soon Haschim may
call you away."
Then, turning his back on the convalescents, he murmured to himself:
"Here again is something to cheer us in the midst of all this
trouble-these two, and little Mary."
Rufinus, before starting on his journey, had sent back all the crippled
children he had had in his care to their various parents; thus the
anteroom was empty.
The women apparently were at breakfast in the dining-room. No, he was
mistaken; it was yet too early, and Pulcheria was still busy laying the
table. She did not notice him as he went in, for she was busy arranging
grapes, figs, pomegranates and sycamore-figs, a fruit resembling
mulberries in flavor which grow in clusters from the trunk of the
tree-between leaves, which the drought and heat of the past weeks had
turned almost yellow. The tempting heap was fast rising in an elegant
many-hued hemisphere; but her thoughts were not in her occupation, for
tears were coursing each other down her cheeks.
"Those tears are for her father," thought the leech as he watched her
from the threshold. "Poor child!"--How often he had heard his old friend
call her so!
And till now he had never thought of her but as a child; but to-day he
must look at her with different eyes--her own father had enjoined it. And
in fact he gazed at her as though he beheld a miracle.
What had come over little Pulcheria?--How was it that he had never
noticed it before?--It was a well-grown maiden that he saw, moving round,
snowwhite arms; and he could have sworn that she had only thin, childish
arms, for she had thrown them round his neck many a time when she had
ridden up and down the garden on his back, calling him her fine horse.
How long ago was that? Ten years! She was now seventeen!
And how slender, and delicate, and white her hands were--those hands for
which her mother had often scolded her when, after building castles of
sand, she had sat down to table unwashed.
Now she was laying the grapes round the pomegranates, and he remembered
how Horapollo, only yesterday, had praised her dainty skill.
The windows were well screened, but a few sunbeams forced their way into
the room and fell on her red-gold hair. Even the fair Boeotians, whom he
had admired in his student-days at Athens, had no such glorious crown of
hair. That she had a sweet and pretty face he had always known; but now,
as she raised her eyes and first observed him, meeting his gaze with
maidenly embarrassment and sweet surprise, and yet with perfect welcome,
he felt himself color and he had to pause a moment to collect himself
before he could respond with something more than an ordinary greeting to
hers. The dialogue that flashed through his mind in that instant began
with sentences full of meaning. But all he said was:
"Yes, here I am," which really did not deserve the hearty reply:
"Thank God for that!" nor the bewitching embarrassment of the explanation
that ensued: "on my mother's account."
Again he blushed; he, the man who had long since forgotten his youthful
shyness. He asked after Dame Joanna, and how she was bearing her trouble,
and then he said gravely: "I was the bearer of bad news yesterday, and
to-day again I have come like a bird of ill-omen."
"You?" she said with a smile, and the simple word conveyed so sweet a
doubt of his capacity for bringing evil that he could not help saying to
himself that his friend, in leaving this child, this girl, to his care,
had bequeathed to him the best gift that one mortal can devise to
another: a dear, trustful, innocent daughter--or no, a younger sister--as
pure, as engaging, and as lovable as only the child of such parents could
be.
While he stood telling her of what had happened at the governor's house,
he noted how deeply, for Paula's and Mary's sake, she took to heart the
widow's death, though Neforis had been nothing to her; and he decided
that he would at once make Pulcheria's mother acquainted with her dead
husband's wishes.
All this did not supplant his old passion for Paula; far from it--that
tortured him still as deeply and hotly as ever. But at the same time he
was conscious of its evil influence; he knew that by cherishing it he was
doing himself harm--nay a real injury since it was not returned. He knew
that within reach of Paula, and condemned to live with her, he could
never recover his peace, but must suffer constant pangs. It was only away
from her, and yet under the same roof with Joanna and her daughter, that
he could ever hope to be a contented and happy man; but he dared not put
this thought into words.
Pulcheria detected that he had something in reserve, and feared lest he
should know of some new impending woe; however, on this head he could
reassure her, telling her that, on the contrary, he had something in his
mind which, so far at least as he was concerned, was a source of
pleasure. Her grieved and anxious spirit could indeed hardly believe him;
and he begged her not to lose all hope in better days, asking her if she
had true and entire trust in him.
She warmly replied that he must surely feel that she did; and now, as the
others came into the room, she nodded to her mother, whom she had already
seen quite early, and offering him her hand shook his heartily. This had
been a restful interval; but the sight of Paula, and the news he had to
give her, threw him back into his old depressed and miserable mood.
Little Mary, whose cheeks had recovered their roses and who looked quite
well again, threw her arms round Paula's neck as she heard the evil
tidings; but Paula herself was calmer than he had expected. She turned
very pale at the first shock, but soon she could listen to him with
composure, and presently quite recovered her usual demeanor. Philippus,
as he watched her, had to control himself sternly, and as soon as
possible he took his leave.
It was as though he had been fated once more to see with agonizing
clearness what he had lost in her; she walked through life as though
borne up by lofty feeling, and a thoughtful radiance lent her noble
features a bewitching charm which grieved while it enchanted him.
Orion a prisoner, and all his possessions confiscated! The thought had
horrified her for a little while; but then it had come to her that this
was just as it should be--that what had at first looked like a dreadful
disaster had been sent to enable her love to cast off its husks, to
appear in all its loftiness and purity, and to give it, by the help of
the All-merciful, its true consecration.
She did not fear for his life, for he had told her and written to her
that Amru had been paternal in his kindness; and all that had occurred
was, she was sure, the work of the Vekeel, of whose odious and cruel
character he had given her a horrible picture that day when Rufinus had
gone to warn the abbess.
When Philippus had left his friends, he sighed deeply. How different he
had found these women from what he had expected. Yes, his old friend knew
men well!
From trifling details he had succeeded in forming a more accurate idea of
Pulcheria than the leech himself had gained in years of intimacy.
Horapollo had foreseen, too, that the danger which threatened the
Mukaukas' son would fan Paula's passions like a fresh breeze; and Joanna,
frail, ailing Joanna! she had behaved heroically under the loss of the
companion with whom she had lived for so many years in faithful love. He
could not help comparing her with the wretched Neforis; what was it that
enabled one to bear the equal loss with so much more dignity than the
other? Nothing but the presence of the tender-hearted Pulcheria, who
shared her sorrow with such beautiful resignation, such ready and
complete sympathy. This the governor's widow had wholly lacked; and how
happy were they who could call such a heart their own! He walked through
the garden with his head bent, and looking neither to the right hand nor
the left.
The Masdakite, who was still sitting with Mandane under the sycamore, as
indifferent to the torrid heat as she was, looked after him, and said
with a sigh as he pointed to him:
"There he goes. This is the first time he ever said a rude word to you or
to me: or did you not understand?"
"Oh yes," said she in a low voice, looking down at her needlework.
They talked in Persian, for she had not forgotten the language which her
mother had spoken till her dying day.
Life is sometimes as strange as a fairy-tale; and the accident was indeed
wonderful which had brought these two beings, of all others, at the same
time to the sick room. His distant home was also hers, and he even knew
her uncle--her father's brother--and her father's sad history.
When the Greek army had taken possession of the province where they had
lived, the men had fled into the woods with their flocks and herds, while
the women and children took refuge in the fortress which defended the
main road. This had not long held out against the Byzantines, and the
women, among them Mandane with her mother, had been handed over to the
soldiers as precious booty. Her father had then joined the troops to
rescue the women, but he and his comrades had only lost their lives in
the attempt. To this day the valiant man's end was a tale told in his
native place, and his property and valuable rose gardens now belonged to
his younger brother. So the two convalescents had plenty to talk about.
It was curious to note how clearly the memories of her childhood were
stamped on Mandane's mind.
She had laid her wounded head on the pillow of sickness with a darkened
brain, and the new pain had lifted the veil from her mind as a storm
clears the oppressive atmosphere of a sultry summer's day. She loved to
linger now among the scenes of her childhood--the time when she had a
mother.--Or she would talk of the present; all between was like a
night-sky black, and only lighted up by an awful comet and shining stars.
That comet was Orion. All she had enjoyed with him and suffered through
him she consigned to the period of her craziness; she had taught herself
to regard it all as part of the madness to which she had been a victim.
Her nature was not capable of cherishing hatred and she could feel no
animosity towards the Mukaukas' son. She thought of him as of one who,
without evil intent, had done her great wrong; one whom she might not
even remember without running into peril.
"Then you mean to say," the Masdakite began once more, "that you would
really miss me if Haschim sent for me?"
"Yes indeed, Rustem; I should be very sorry."
"Oh!" said the other, passing his hand over his big head, on which the
dense mane of hair which had been shaved off was beginning to grow again.
"Well then, Mandane, in that case--I wanted to say it yesterday, but I
could not get it out.--Tell me: why would you be sorry if I were to leave
you?"
"Because--well, no one can have all their reasons ready; because you have
always been kind to me; and because you came from my country, and talk
Persian with me as my mother used."
"Is that all?" said the man slowly, and he rubbed his forehead.
"No, no. Because--if once you go away, you will not be here."
"Aye that is it; that is just the thing. And if you would be sorry for
that, then you must have liked being here--with me."
"And why not? It has been very nice," said the girl blushing and trying
not to meet his eyes.
"That it has--and that it is!" cried Rustem, striking his palm with the
other huge fist. "And that is why I must have it out; that is why, if we
have any sense, we two need never part."
"But your master is sure to want you," said she with growing confusion,
"and we cannot always remain a burthen on the kind folks here. I shall
not work at the loom again; but as I am now free, and have the scroll
that proves it, I must soon look about for some employment. And a strong,
healthy fellow like you cannot always be nursing yourself."
"Nursing myself!" and he laughed gaily. "I will earn money, and enough
for three!"
"By your camels always, up and down the country?"
"I have done with that," said he with a grin. "We will go back to our own
country; there I will buy a good piece of pasture land, for my eldest
brother has our little estate, and you may ask Haschim whether I
understand camel-breeding."
"But Rustem, consider."
"Consider! Think this, and think that! Where there's a will there's a
way. That is the upshot of it all. And if you mean to say that before you
buy you must have money, and that the best may come to grief, all I can
tell you is. . . . Can you read? No? nor I; but here in my pocket I have
my accounts in the master's own hand. Eleven thousand, three hundred and
sixty drachmae were due to me for wages the last time we reckoned: all
the profit the master had set down to my credit since I led his caravan.
He has kept almost all of it for me; for food was allowed, and there was
almost always a bit of stuff for a garment to be found among the bales,
and I never was a sot. Eleven thousand, three hundred and sixty drachmae!
Hey, little one, that is the figure. And now what do you say? Can we buy
something with that? Yes or no?"
He looked at her triumphantly, and she eagerly replied: "Yes, yes indeed;
and in our country I think something worth having."
"And we--you and I--we will begin a quite new life. I was seventeen when
I first set out with my master, and I was twenty-six last midsummer. How
many years wandering does that make?"
They both thought this over for some time; then Mandane said doubtfully
"If I am not mistaken it is eight."
"I believe it is nine," he exclaimed. "Let us see. Here, give me your
little paw! There, I begin with seventeen, that is where I started. First
your little-finger--what a mite of a thing, and then the rest." He took
her right hand and counted off her fingers till he ended with the last
finger of the left. The result puzzled him; he shook his head, saying:
"There are ten fingers on both hands, sure enough, and yet it cannot be
ten years; it is nine at most I know."
He began the counting, which he liked uncommonly, all over again; but
with the same result. Mandane said it was but nine, she had counted it up
herself; and he agreed, and declared that her little fingers must be
bewitched. And this game would have gone on still longer but that she
remembered that the seventeen must not be included at all, and that he
ought to begin with eighteen. Rustem could not immediately take this in,
and even when he admitted it he did not release her hand, but went on
with gay resolution:
"And you see, my girl, I mean to keep this little hand--you may pull it
away if you choose--but it is mine, and the pretty little maid, and all
that belongs to it. And I will take you and both your hands, bewitched
fingers and all, home with me. There they may weave and stitch as much as
you like; but as man and wife no one shall part us, and we will lead a
life such a life! The joys of Paradise shall be no better than a rap on
the skull with an olive-wood log in comparison!"
He tried to take her hand again, but she drew it away, saying in deep
confusion and without looking up: "No, Rustem. I was afraid yesterday
that it would come to this; but it can never, never be. I am
grateful--oh! so grateful; but no, it cannot be, and that must be the end
of it. I can never be your wife. Rustem."
"No?" he asked with a scowl, and the veins swelled in his low forehead.
"Then you have been making a fool of me!--as to the gratitude you talk
of. . . ."
He stood up in hot excitement; she laid her hand on his arm, drew him
down on to the seat again, and ventured to steal an imploring look into
his eyes, which never could long flash with anger. Then she said:
How you break out! I shall really and truly be very grieved to part from
you; cannot you see that I am fond of you? But indeed, indeed it will
never do, I--oh! if only I might go back, home, and with you. Yes, with
you, as your wife. What a proud and happy thought! And how gladly would I
work for us both--for I am very handy and hard-working, but. . . ."
"But?" he repeated, and he put his big, sun-burnt face close to hers,
looking as if he could break her in pieces.
"But it cannot be, for your sake; it must not be, positively, certainly.
I will not make you so bad a return for all your kindness. What! have you
forgotten what I was, what I am? You, as a freeman, will soon have a nice
little estate at home, and may command respect and reverence from all;
but how different it would be if you had a wife like me at your heels--if
only from the fact that I was once a slave."
"That is the history of it all!" he interrupted, and his brow cleared.
"That is what is troubling your dear little soul! But do you not know who
and what I am? Have I not told you what a Masdakite is?
[Eutychius, Bishop of Alexandria thus describes the communistic
doctrine of Masdak: "God has given to men on earth that which is of
the earth to the end that it may be divided equally among them, and
that no more falls to the lot of one than another. And if one hath
more than is seemly of money or wives or slaves or movable goods, we
will take it from him to the end that he and the rest may be equal."]
We Masdakites believe, nay, we know, that all men are born equal, and
that this mad-cap world would be a better place if there were neither
masters nor servants; however, as things are, so they must remain. The
great Lord of Heaven will suffer it yet for a season; but sooner or
later, perhaps very soon, everything will be quite different, and it is
our business to make ready for the day of equality. Then Paradise will
return on earth; there will be none greater or less than another, but we
shall all walk hand-in-hand and stand by each other on an equal footing.
Then shall war and misery cease; for all that is fair and good on earth
belongs to all men in common; and then all men shall be as willing to
give and to help others, as they now are to seize and to oppress.--We
have no marriage bond like other people; but when a man loves a woman he
says, 'Will you be mine?' and if her heart consents she follows him home;
and one may quit the other if love grows cold. Still, no married couple,
whether Christian or Parsee, ever clung together more faithfully than my
parents or my grandparents; and we will do the same to the end, for our
love will bind us firmly together with strong cords that will last longer
than our lives.--So now you know the doctrine of our master Masdak; my
father and grandfather both followed it, and I was taught it by my mother
when I was a little child. All in our village were Masdakites; and there
was not a slave in the place; the land belonged to all in common and was
tilled by all, and the harvest was equally shared. However, they no
longer receive strangers, and I must seek for fellow-believers elsewhere.
Still, a Masdakite I shall always remain; and, if I were to take a slave
for my wife, I should only be acting on the precepts of the master and
helping them on. But as for you, the case does not apply to you, for you
are the child of a brave freeman, respected in all the land; our people
will regard you as a prisoner of war, not as a slave. They will look up
to me as your deliverer. And if I had found you, just as you are, the
meanest of slaves and keeping pigs, I would have put my hand in my wallet
at once and have bought your freedom and have carried you off home as my
wife--and no Masdakite who saw you would ever blame me. Now you know all
about it, and there, I hope, is an end of your coyness and mincing."
Mandane, however, still would not yield; she looked at him with eyes that
entreated his pity, and pointed to her cropped ears.
Rustem shrugged his shoulders with a laugh. "Of course, that too, into
the bargain; You will not let me off any part of it! If it had been your
eyes now, you would not have been able to see, and no countryman can do
with a blind wife, so I should leave you where you are. But you, little
one, have hearing as sharp as a bird's? And what bird--pretty little
things--did you ever see with ears, unless it were a bat or a nasty
owl?--That is all nonsense. Besides, who can see what you have lost now
that Pulcheria has brought your hair down so prettily? And do not you
remember the head-dress our women wear? You might have ears as long as a
hare's, and what good would it do you?--no one could see them. Just as
you are, a lily grown like a cypress, you are ten times sweeter to look
at than the prettiest girl there, if she had three or even four ears. A
girl with three ears! Only think, Mandane, where could the third ear
grow?"
How heartily he laughed, and how glad he was to have hit on this jest and
have turned off a subject which might so well be painful to her! But his
mirth failed of its effect, and only brought a silent smile to her lips.
Even this died quickly away, and in its place there came such a sad,
pathetic expression, as she hung her pretty head, that he could neither
carry on the joke nor reproach her sharply. He said compassionately, with
a little shake of the head:
"But you must not look like that, my pigeon: I cannot bear it. What is it
that is weighing on your little soul? Courage, courage, sweetheart, and
make a clean breast of it!--But no! Do not speak. I can spare you that! I
know, poor little darling--it is that old story of the governor's son."
She nodded, and her eyes filled with tears; and he, with a loud sigh,
exclaimed: "I thought as much, I was right, poor child!"
He took her hand, and went on bravely:
"Yes, that has given me some bad hours, too, and a great deal to think
about; in fact, I came very near to leaving you alone and spoiling my own
happiness and yours too. But I came to my senses before it was too late.
Not on account of what Dame Joanna said the day before yesterday--though
what she says must be true, and she told me that all--you know what--was
at an end. No; my own sense told me this time; for I said to myself: Such
a motherless, helpless little thing, a slave, too, and as pretty as the
angels, her master's son took a fancy to her, how could she defend
herself? And how cruelly the poor little soul was punished!--Yes, little
one, you may well weep! Why, my own eyes are full of tears. Well, so it
had to be and so it was. You and I and the Lord Almighty and the Hosts of
Heaven--who can do anything against us?--So you see that even a poor fool
like me can understand how it all came about; and I do not accuse you,
nor have I anything to forgive. It was just a dreadful misfortune. But it
has come to a good end, thank God I and I can forget it entirely and for
ever, if only you can say: 'It is all over and done with and buried like
the dead!'"
Before he could hinder her, she snatched his hand, to her lips with
passionate affection and sobbed out:
"You are so good! Oh! Rustem, there is not another man on earth so good
as you are, and my mother will bless you for it. Do what you will with
me! And I declare to you, once for all that all that is past and gone,
and only to think of it gives me horror. And it was exactly as you say:
my mother dead, no one to warn me or protect me,--I was hardly sixteen, a
simple, ignorant creature, and he called me, and it all came over me like
a dream in my sleep; and when I awoke. . . ."
"There we are," he interrupted and he tried to laugh as he wiped his
eyes. "Both laid up with holes in our heads.--And when I am in my own
country I always think the prettiest time is just when the hard
winter-frost is over, and the snow melted, and all the flowers in the
valleys rush into bloom--and so I feel now, my little girl. Everything
will be well now, we shall be so wonderfully happy. The day before
yesterday, do you know, I still was not quite clear about it all. Your
trouble gave me no peace, and it went against the grain-well, you can
understand. But then, later, when I was lying in my room and the moon
shone down on my bed . . . " and a rapt expression came into his face that
strangely beautified his harsh features, "I could not help asking myself:
'Although the moon went down into the sea this morning, does that prevent
its shining as brightly as ever to-night, and bringing a cooler breeze?'
And if a human soul has gone under in the same way, may it not rise up
again, bright and shining, when it has bathed and rested? And such a
heart--of course every man would like to have its love all to himself,
but it may have enough to give more than once. For, as I remembered, my
mother, though she loved me dearly, when another child came and yet
another gave them the best she had to give; and I was none the worse when
she had my youngest sister at the breast, nor was she when I was petted
and kissed. And it must be just the same with you. Thought I to myself:
though she once loved another man, she may still have a good share left
for me!"
"Yes, indeed, Rustem!" she exclaimed, looking tearfully but gratefully
into his eyes. "All that is in me of love and tenderness is for you--for
you only."
At this he joyfully exclaimed:
"All, that is indeed good hearing! That will do for me; that is what I
call a good morning's work! I sat down under this tree a vagabond and a
wanderer, and I get up a future land-holder, with the sweetest little
wife in the world to keep house for me."
They sat a long time under the shady foliage; he craved no more than to
gaze at her and, when he put the old questions asked by all lovers, to be
answered with lips and eyes, or merely a speechless nod. Her hands no
longer plied the needle, and the pair would have smiled in pity on any
one who should have complained of the intolerable heat of this scorching,
parching forenoon. A pair of turtle doves over their heads were less
indifferent to the sun's rays than they, for the birds had closed their
eyes, and the head of the mother bird was resting languidly against the
dark collar round her mate's neck.
THE BRIDE OF THE NILE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 10.
CHAPTER XIII.
The Vekeel, like the Persian lovers, did not allow the heat of the day to
interfere with his plans. He regarded the governor's house as his own;
all he found there aroused, not merely his avarice, but his interest. His
first object was to find some document which might justify his
proceedings against Orion and the sequestration of his estates, in the
eyes of the authorities at Medina.
Great schemes were brewing there; if the conspiracy against the Khaliff
Omar should succeed, he had little to fear; and the greater the sum he
could ere long forward to the new sovereign, the more surely he could
count on his patronage--a sum exceeding, if possible, the largest which
his predecessor had ever cast into the Khaliff's treasury.
He went from room to room with the curiosity and avidity of a child,
touching everything, testing the softness of the pillows, peeping into
scrolls which he did not understand, tossing them aside, smelling at the
perfumes in the dead woman's rooms, and the medicines she had used. He
showed his teeth with delight when he found in her trunks some costly
jewels and gold coins, stuck the finest of her diamond rings on his
finger, already covered with gems, and then eagerly searched every corner
of the rooms which Orion had occupied.
His interpreter, who could read Greek, had to translate every document he
found that did not contain verses. While he listened, he clawed and
strummed on the young man's lyre and poured out the scented oil which
Orion had been wont to use to smear it over his beard. In front of the
bright silver mirror he could not cease from making faces.
To his great disgust he could find nothing among the hundred objects and
trifles that lay about to justify suspicion, till, just as he was leaving
the room, he noticed in a basket near the writing-table some discarded
tablets. He at once pointed them out to the interpreter and, though there
was but little to read on the Diptychon,--[Double writing-tablets, which
folded together]--it seemed important to the negro for it ran as follows:
"Orion, the son of George, to Paula the daughter of Thomas!
"You have heard already that it is now impossible for me to assist in the
rescue of the nuns. But do not misunderstand me. Your noble, and only too
well-founded desire to lend succor to your fellow-believers would have
sufficed. . ."
From this point the words written on the wax were carefully effaced, and
hardly a letter was decipherable; indeed, there were so few lines that it
seemed as though the letter had never been ended-which was the fact.
Though it gave the Vekeel no inculpating evidence against Orion it
pointed to his connection with the guilty parties: Paula, doubtless, had
been concerned in the scheme which had cost the lives of so many brave
Moslems. The negro had learnt, through the money-changer at Fostat, that
she was on terms of close intimacy with the Mukaukas' son and had
entrusted her property to his stewardship. They must both be accused as
accomplices in the deed, and the document proved Orion's knowledge of it,
at any rate.
Plotinus, the bishop, at whose instigation the fugitives had been chased,
could fill up what the damsel might choose to conceal.
He had started to follow the patriarch immediately after the pursuers had
set out, and had only returned from Upper Egypt early on the previous
day. On his arrival he had forwarded to the Vekeel two indictments
brought against Orion by the prelate: the first relating to the evasion
of the nuns; the other to the embezzlement of a costly emerald; the
rightful property of the church. These accusations were what had
encouraged the Negro to confiscate the young man's estate, particularly
as the bitter tone of the patriarch's document sufficiently proved that
in him he had found an ally.
Paula must next be placed in safe custody, and he had no doubt whatever
that her statement would incriminate Orion in some degree. He would
gladly have cross-examined her at once, but he had other matters in hand
to-day.
The longest part of his task was ransacking the treasurer's office; Nilus
himself had to conduct the search. Everything which he pointed out as a
legal document, title-deed, contract for purchase or sale, revenue
account or the like, was at once placed in oxcarts or on camels, with the
large sums of gold and silver coin, and carried across the river under a
strong escort. All the more antique deeds and the family archives, the
Vekeel left untouched. He was indeed an indefatigable man, for although
these details kept him busy the whole day, he allowed himself no rest nor
did he once ask for the refreshment of food or a cooling draught. As the
day went on he enquired again and again for the bishop, with increasing
impatience and irritation. It would have been his part to wait on the
patriarch, but who was Plotinus? Thin-skinned, like all up-starts in
authority, he took the bishop's delay as an act of personal contumely.
But the shepherd of the flock at Memphis was not a haughty prelate, but a
very humble and pious minister. His superior, the patriarch, had
entrusted him with an important mission to Amru or his lieutenant, and
yet he could let the Vekeel wait in vain, and not even send him a message
of explanation; in the afternoon, however, his old housekeeper dispatched
the acolyte who was attached to his person to seek Philippus. Her master,
a hale and vigorous man, had gone to bed by broad day-light a few hours
after his return home, and had not again left it. He was hot and thirsty,
and did not seem fully conscious of where he was or of what was
happening.
Plotinus had always maintained that prayer was the Christian's best
medicine; still, as his poor body had become alarmingly heated the old
woman ventured to send for the physician; but the messenger came back
saying that Philippus was absent on a journey. This was in fact the case:
He had quitted Memphis in obedience to a letter from Haschim. The
merchant's unfortunate son was not getting better. There seemed to be an
injury to some internal organ, which threatened his life. The anxious
father besought the leech, in whom he had the greatest confidence, to
hasten to Djidda, there to examine the sufferer and undertake the case.
At the same time he desired that Rustem should join him as soon as his
health would permit.
This letter--which ended with greetings to Paula, for whose father he was
making diligent search--agitated Philippus greatly. How could he leave
Memphis at a time of such famine and sickness?--And Dame Joanna and her
daughter!
On the other hand he was much drawn to get away on Paula's account--away,
far away; and then how gladly would he do his best to save that fine old
man's son. In spite of all this he would have remained, but that his old
friend, quite unexpectedly, took Haschim's side of the question and
implored him to make the journey. He would make it his business and his
pleasure to take charge of the women in Rufinus' house; Philip's
assistant could fill his place at the bedside of many of the sick, and
the rest could die without him. Had not he himself said that there was no
remedy for the disease? Again, Philip had said not long since that there
could be no peace for him within reach of Paula: here was a favorable
opportunity for escape without attracting remark, and at the same time
for doing a work of the truest charity.
So Philippus had yielded, and had started on his journey with very mixed
feelings.
Horapollo did not devote any particular attention to his personal
comfort; but in one respect he took especial care of himself. He had
great difficulty in walking and, as he loved to breathe the fresh air at
sundown, and sometimes to study the stars at a late hour, he kept an ass
of the best and finest breed. He did not hesitate to pay a high price for
such a beast if it really answered his requirements; that is to say if it
were strong, surefooted, gentle, and light-colored. His father and
grandfather, priests of Isis, had always ridden white asses, and so he
would do the same.
During the last few sultry weeks he had rarely gone out of doors, and
to-day he waited till the hour before sunset before starting to keep his
promise.
Robed in snowy-white linen, with new sandals on his feet, freshly shaven,
and protected from the sun's rays by a crisply curled, flowing wig, after
the manner of his fathers, as well as by an umbrella, he mounted his
beautiful white ass in the conviction that he had done his best for his
outer man, and set forth, followed by his black slave trotting on foot.
It was not yet dark when he stopped at the house of Rufinus. His heart
had not beat so high for many a day.
"I feel as if I had come courting," said he, laughing at himself. "Well,
and I really am come to propose an alliance for the rest of my life!
Still, curiosity, one would think, might be shed with the hair and the
teeth!" However, it still clung to him, and he could not deny to himself
that he was very curious as to the person whom he hated, though he had
never seen her, simply because she was the daughter of a patrician and a
prefect, and had made his Philippus miserable. As he was dismounting, a
graceful young girl and an older woman, in very costly though simple
dresses, came through the garden. These must be the water-wagtail, and
Orion's Byzantine guest.--How annoying! So many women at once!
Their presence here could only embarrass and disturb him--a lonely
student unused to the society of women. However, there was no help for
it; and the new-comers were not so bad after all.
Katharina was a very attractive, pretty little mouse, and even without
her millions much too good for the libertine Orion. The matron, who had a
kind, pleasant face, was exactly what Philippus had described her. But
then--and this spoilt all--in their presence he must not allude to the
death of Rufinus, so that he could not mention his proposed arrangement.
He had swallowed all that dust, and borne that heat for nothing, and
to-morrow he must ignominiously go through it all again!
The first people he met were a handsome young couple: Rustem and Mandane.
There could be no doubt as to their identity; so he went up to them and
gave Rustem the merchant's message, offering in Philip's name to advance
the money for the journey. But the Masdakite patted his sleeve, in which
he carried a good round sum in gold pieces, and exclaimed cheerily:
"It is all here, and enough for two travellers to the East.--My little
wife, by your leave; the time has come, little pigeon! Off we go,
homeward bound!"
The huge fellow shouted it out in his deep voice with such effervescent
contentment, and the pretty girl, as she looked up at him, was so glad,
so much in love, and so grateful, that it quite cheered the old man; and
he, who read an omen in every incident, accepted this meeting as of good
augury at his first entering the house which was probably to be his home.
His visit went on as well as it had begun, for he was welcomed very
warmly both by the widow and daughter of Rufinus. Pulcheria at once
pushed forward her father's arm-chair and placed a pillow behind his
back, and she did it so quietly, so simply, and so amiably that it warmed
his old heart, and he said to himself that it would be almost too much of
a good thing to have such care given him every day and every hour.
He could not forbear from a kindly jest with the young girl over her
attentions, and Martina at once entered into the joke. She had seen him
coming on his fine ass; she praised the steed, and then refused to
believe that the rider was past eighty. His news of Philip's departure
was regretted by all, and he was delighted to perceive that Pulcheria
seemed startled and presently shrank into the background. What a sweet,
pure, kind face the child had--and pretty withal; she must and should be
his little daughter; and all the while he was talking, or listening to
Katharina's small jokes and a friendly catechism from Martina and Dame
Joanna, in his mind's eye he saw Philippus and that dear little creature
as man and wife, surrounded by pretty children playing all about him.
He had come to comfort and to condole, and lo! he was having as pleasant
an hour as he had known in a long time.
He and the other visitors had been received in the vindarium, which was
now brightly lighted up, and now and then he glanced at the doors which
opened on this, the centre of the house, trying to imagine what the
different rooms should by-and-bye be used for.
But he heard a light step behind him; Martina rose, the water-wagtail
hurried to meet the new-comer, and there appeared on the scene the tall
figure of a girl dressed in mourning-robes. She greeted the matron with
distinguished dignity, cast a cordial glance of sympathetic intelligence
to Joanna and Pulcheria, and when the mistress of the house told her who
the old man was, she went up to him and held out her hand--a cool,
slender hand, as white as marble; the true patrician hand.
Yes, she was beautiful, wonderfully beautiful! He could hardly remember
ever to have seen her equal. A spotless masterpiece of the Creator's
hand, made like some unapproachable goddess, to command the worship of
subject adorers; however, she must renounce all hope of his, for those
marble features, all the whiter by contrast with her black dress, had no
attraction for him. No warming glow shone in those proud eyes; and under
that lordly bosom beat no loving or lovable heart; he shivered at the
touch of her fingers, and her presence, he thought, had a chilling and
paralyzing influence on all the party.
This was, in fact, the case.
Paula had been sent for to see the senator's wife and Katharina. Martina,
thought she, had come out of mere curiosity, and she had a preconceived
dislike to any one connected with Heliodora. She had lost her confidence
in the water-wagtail, for only two days ago the acolyte in personal
attendance on the bishop--and whose child Rufinus had cured of a lame
foot--had been to the house to warn Joanna against the girl. Katharina,
he told her, had a short while since betrayed to Plotinus some important
secret relating to her husband, and the bishop had immediately gone over
to Fostat. It was hard to believe such a thing of any friend, still, the
girl who, by her own confession, had been so ready to play the part of
spy in the neighboring garden, was the only person who would have told
the prelate what plan was in hand for the rescue of the sisters. The
acolyte's positive statement, indeed, left no room for doubt.
It was not in Paula's nature to think ill of others; but in this case her
candid spirit, incapable of falsehood, would not suffer her to be
anything but cool to the child; the more effusively Katharina clung to
her, the more icily Paula repelled her.
The old man saw this, and he concluded that this mien and demeanor were
natural to Paula at all times patrician haughtiness, cold-hearted
selfishness, the insolent and boundless pride of the race he
loathed--noble by birth alone--stood before him incarnate. He hated the
whole class, and he hated this specimen of the class; and his aversion
increased tenfold as he remembered what woe this cold siren had wrought
for the son of his affections and might bring on him if she should thwart
his favorite project. Sooner would he end his days in loneliness, parted
even from Philippus, than share his home, his table, and his daily life
with this woman, who could repel the sincerely-meant caresses of that
pretty, childlike, simple little Katharina with such frigid and
supercilious haughtiness. The mere sight of her at meals would embitter
every mouthful; only to hear her domineering tones in the next room would
spoil his pleasure in working; the touch of her cold hand as she bid him
good-night would destroy his night's rest!
Here and now her presence was more than he could bear. It was an offense
to him, a challenge; and if ever he had wished to clear her out of his
path and the physician's--by force, if need should be--the idea wholly
possessed him now.
Irritated and provoked, he took leave of all the others, carefully
avoiding a glance even at Paula, though, after he rose, she went up to
him on purpose to say a few pleasant words, and to assure him how highly
she esteemed his adopted son.
Pulcheria escorted him through the garden and he promised her to return
on the morrow, or the day after, and then she must take care that he
found her and her mother alone, for he had no fancy to allow Paula to
thrust her pride and airs under his nose a second time.
He angrily rejected Pulcheria's attempts to take her friend's part, and
he trotted home again, mumbling curses between his old lips.
Martina, meanwhile, had made friends with Paula in her genial, frank way.
She had met her parents in time past in Constantinople and spoke of them
with heart-felt warmth. This broke the ice between them, and when Martina
spoke of Orion--her 'great Sesostris'--of the regard and popularity he
had enjoyed in Constantinople, and then, with due recognition and
sympathy, of his misfortune, Paula felt drawn towards her indeed. Her
reserve vanished entirely, and the conversation between the new
acquaintances became more and more eager, intimate, and delightful.
When they parted both felt that they could only gain by further
intercourse. Paula was called away at the very moment of leave-taking,
and left the room with warm expressions intended only for the matron:
"Not good-bye--we must meet again. But of course it is my part, as the
younger, to go to you!" And she was no sooner gone than Martina
exclaimed:
"What a lovely creature! The worthy daughter of a noble father! And her
mother! O dame Joanna! A sweeter being has rarely graced this miserable
world; she was born to die young, she was only made to bloom and fade!"
Then, turning to Katharina, she went on: with kindly reproof. "Evil
tongues gave me a very false idea of this girl. 'A silver kernel in a
golden shell,' says the proverb, but in this case both alike are of
gold.--Between you two--good God!--But I know what has blinded your clear
eyes, poor little kitten. After all, we all see things as we wish to see
them. I would lay a wager, dame Joanna, that you are of my opinion in
thinking the fair Paula a perfectly noble creature. Aye, a noble
creature; it is an expressive word and God knows! How seldom is it a true
one? It is one I am little apt to use, but I know no other for such as
she is, and on her it is not ill-bestowed."
"Indeed it is not!" answered Joanna with warm assent; but Martina sighed,
for she was thinking to herself! "Poor Heliodora! I cannot but confess
that Paula is the only match for my 'great Sesostris.' But what in
Heaven's name will become of that poor, unfortunate, love-sick little
woman?"
All this flashed through her quick brain while Katharina was trying to
justify herself, and asserting that she fully recognised Paula's great
qualities, but that she was proud, fearfully proud--she had given Martina
herself some evidence of that.
At this Pulcheria interposed in zealous defense of her friend. She,
however, had hardly begun to speak when she, too, was interrupted, for
men's voices were heard in loud discussion in the vestibule, and Perpetua
suddenly rushed in with a terrified face, exclaiming, heedless of the
strangers: "Oh Dame Joanna! Here is another, dreadful misfortune! Those
Arab devils have come again, with an interpreter and a writer. And they
have been sent--Merciful Saviour, is it possible?--they have brought a
warrant to take away my poor dear child, to take her to prison--to drag
her all through the city on foot and throw her into prison."
The faithful soul sobbed aloud and covered her face with her hands.
Terror fell upon them all; Joanna left the viridarium in speechless
dismay, and Martina exclaimed:
"What a horrible, vile country! Good God, they are even falling on us
women. Children, children--give me a seat, I feel quite ill.--In prison!
that beautiful, matchless creature dragged through the streets to prison.
If the warrant is all right she must go--she must! Not an angel from
heaven could save her. But that she should be marched through the town,
that noble and splendid creature, as if she were a common thief--it is
not to be borne. So much as one woman can do for another at any rate
shall be done, so long as I am here to stand on two feet!--Katharina,
child, do not you understand? Why do you stand gaping at me as if I were
a feathered ape? What do your fat horses eat oats for? What, you do not
understand me yet? Be off at once, this minute, and have the horses put
in the large closed chariot in which I came here, and bring it to the
door.--Ah! At last you see daylight; now, take to your heels and fly!"
And she clapped her hands as if she were driving hens off a garden-bed;
Katharina had no alternative but to obey.
Martina then felt for her purse, and when she had found it she added
confidently:
"Thank God! I can talk to these villains! This is a language," and she
clinked the gold pieces, intelligible to all. "Come, where are the
rascals?"
The universal tongue had the desired effect. The chief of the guard
allowed it to persuade him to convey Paula to prison in the chariot, and
to promise that she should find decent accommodation there, while he also
granted old Betta the leave she insisted on with floods of tears, to
share the girl's captivity.
Paula maintained her dignity and composure under this unexpected shock.
Only when it came to taking leave of Pulcheria and Mary, who clung to her
in frantic grief and begged to go with her and Betta to prison, she could
not restrain her tears.
The scribe had informed her that she was charged dy Bishop Plotinus with
having plotted the escape and flight of the nuns, and Joanna's knees
trembled under her when Paula whispered in her ear:
"Beware of Katharina! No one else could have betrayed us; if she has also
revealed what Rufinus did for the sisters we must deny it, positively and
unflinchingly. Fear nothing: they will get not a word out of me." Then
she added aloud: "I need not beg you to remember me lovingly; thanks to
you both--the warmest, deepest thanks for all. . . . You, Pul. . . ." And
she clasped the mother and daughter to her bosom, while Mary, clinging to
her, hid her little face in her skirts, weeping bitterly. . . . "You,
Dame Joanna, took me in, a forlorn creature, and made me happy till Fate
fell on us all--you know, ah! you know too well.--The kindness you have
shown to me show now to my little Mary. And there is one thing more--here
comes the interpreter again!--A moment yet, I beg!--If the messenger
should return and bring news of my father or, my God! my God!--my father
himself, let me know, or bring him to me!--Or, if I am dead by the time
he comes, tell him that to find him, to see him once more, was my heart's
dearest wish. And beg my father," she breathed the words into Joanna's
ear, "to love Orion as a son. And tell them both that I loved them to the
last, deeply, perfectly, beyond words!" Then she added aloud as: she
kissed each on her eyes and lips: "I love you and shall always love
you--you, Joanna, and you, my Pulcheria, and you, Mary, my sweet,
precious darling."
At this the water-wagtail humed forward with outstretched arms, but Dame
Joanna put out a significantly warning hand; and they who were one in
heart clasped each other in a last embrace as though they were indeed but
one and no stranger could have any part in it.
Once more Katharina tried to approach Paula; but Martina, whose eyes
filled with tears as she looked on the parting, held her back by the
shoulder and whispered:
"Do not disturb them, child. Such hearts spontaneously attract those for
whom they yearn. I, old as I am, would gladly be worthy to be called."
The interpreter now sternly insisted on starting. The three women parted;
but still the little girl held tightly to Paula, even when she went up to
the matron and kissed her with a natural impulse. Martina took her head
between her hands, kissed her fondly, and said in a voice she could
scarcely control: "God protect and keep you, child! I thank Him for
having brought us together. A soul so pure and clear as yours is not to
be found in the capital, but we still know how to be friends to our
friends--at any rate I and my husband do--and if Heaven but grants me the
opportunity you shall prove it. You never need feel alone in the world;
never, so long as Justinus and his wife are still in it. Remember that,
child; I mean it in solemn earnest."
With this, she again embraced Paula, who as she went out to enter the
chariot also bestowed a farewell kiss on Eudoxia and Mandane, for they,
too, stood modestly weeping in the background; then she gave her hand to
the hump-backed gardener, and to the Masdakite, down whose cheeks tears
were rolling. At this moment Katharina stood in her path, seized her arm
in mortified excitement, and said insistently:
"And have you not a word for me?"
Paula freed herself from her clutch and said in a low voice: "I thank you
for lending me the chariot. As you know, it is taking me to prison, and I
fear it is your perfidy that has brought me to this. If I am wrong,
forgive me--if I am right, your punishment will hardly be lighter than my
fate. You are still young, Katharina; try to grow better."
And with this she stepped into the chariot with old Betta, and the last
she saw was little Mary who threw herself sobbing into Joanna's arms.
CHAPTER XIV.
Susannah had never particularly cared for Paula, but her fate shocked her
and moved her to pity. She must at once enquire whether it was not
possible to send her some better food than the ordinary prison-fare. That
was but Christian charity, and her daughter seemed to take her friend's
misfortune much to heart. When she and Martina returned home she looked
so cast down and distracted that no stranger now would ever have dreamed
of comparing her with a brisk little bird.
Once more a poisoned arrow had struck her. Till now she had been wicked
only in her own eyes; now she was wicked in the eyes of another. Paula
knew it was she who had betrayed her. The traitoress had been met by
treachery. The woman she hated had a right to regard her as spiteful and
malignant, and for this she hated her more than ever.
Till now she had nowhere failed to find an affectionate greeting and
welcome; and to-day how coldly she had been repulsed--and not by Paula
alone, but also by Martina, who no doubt had noticed something, and whose
dry reserve had been quite intolerable to the girl.
It was all the old bishop's fault; he had not kept his promise that her
tale-bearing should remain as secret as a confession. Indeed, he must
have deliberately revealed it, for no one but herself knew of the facts.
Perhaps he had even mentioned her name to the Arabs; in that case she
would have to bear witness before the judges, and then in what light
would she appear to Orion, to her mother, to Joanna and Martina?
She had not failed to understand that old Rufinus must have perished in
the expedition, and she was truly grieved. His wife and daughter had
always been kind neighbors to her; and she would not have willingly
brought sorrow on them. If she were called up to give evidence it might
go hard with them, and she wished no harm to any one but those who had
cheated her out of Orion's love. This idea of standing before a court of
justice was the worst of all; this must be warded off at any cost.
Where could Bishop Plotinus be? He had returned to Memphis the day
before, and yet he had not been to see her mother, to whom he usually
paid a daily visit. This absence seemed to her ominous. Everything
depended on her reminding the old man of his promise as soon as possible;
for if at the trial next morning--which of course, he must attend--he
should happen to mention her name, the guards, the interpreter, and the
scribe would invade her home too and then-horror! She had given evidence
once already, and could never again go through all that had ensued.
But how was she to get at the bishop in the course of the night or early
to-morrow at latest?
The chariot had not yet returned, and if--it still wanted two hours of
midnight; yes--it must be done.
She began talking to her mother of the prelate's absence; Susannah, too,
was uneasy about it, particularly since she had heard that the old man
had come home ill and that his servant had been out and about in search
of a physician. Katharina promptly proposed to go and see him: the horses
were still in harness, her nurse could accompany her. She really must go
and learn how her venerable friend was going on.
Susannah thought this very sweet; still, she said it was very late for
such a visit; however, her spoilt child had said that she "must" and the
answer was a foregone conclusion. Dame Susannah gave way; the nurse was
sent for, and as soon as the chariot came round Katharina flung her arms
round her mother's neck, promising her not to stay long, and in a few
minutes the chariot stopped at the door of the bishop's palace. She bid
the nurse wait for her and went alone into the vast, rambling house.
The spacious hall, lighted feebly by a single lamp, was silent and
deserted, even the door-keeper had left his post; however, she was
familiar with every step and turning, and went on through the impluvium
into the library where, at this hour, the bishop was wont to be found.
But it was dark, and her gentle call met with no reply. In the next room,
to which she timidly felt her way, a slave lay snoring; beside him were a
wine jar and a hand-lamp. The sight somewhat reassured her. Beyond was
the bishop's bedroom, which she had never been into. A dim light gleamed
through the open door and she heard a low moaning and gasping. She called
the house-keeper by name once, twice; no answer. The sleeping slave did
not stir; but a familiar voice addressed her from the bedroom, groaning
rather than saying:
"Who is there? Is he come? Have you found him at last?"
The whole household had fled in fear of the pestilence; even the acolyte,
who had indeed a wife and children. The housekeeper had been forced to
leave the master to seek the physician, who had already been there once,
and the last remaining slave, a faithful, goodhearted, heedless sot, had
been left in charge; but he had brought a jar of wine up from the
unguarded cellar, had soon emptied it, and then, overcome by drink and
the heat of the night, he had fallen asleep.
Katharina at once spoke her name and the old man answered her, saying
kindly, but with difficulty: "Ah, it is you, you, my child!"
She took up the lamp and went close to the sick man. He put out his lean
arm to welcome her; but, as her approach brought the light near to him he
covered his eyes, crying out distressfully: "No, no; that hurts. Take
away the lamp."
Katharina set it down on a low chest behind the head of the bed; then she
went up to the sufferer, gave him her mother's message, and asked him how
he was and why he was left alone. He could only give incoherent answers
which he gasped out with great difficulty, bidding her go close to him
for he could not hear her distinctly. He was very ill, he told
her--dying. It was good of her to have come for she had always been his
pet, his dear, good little girl.
"And it was a happy impulse that brought you," he added, "to receive an
old man's blessing. I give it you with my whole heart."
As he spoke he put forth his hand and she, following an instinctive
prompting, fell on her knees by the side of the couch.
He laid his burning right hand on her head and murmured some words of
blessing; she, however, scarcely heeded them, for his hand felt like lead
and its heat oppressed and distressed her dreadfully. It was a sincere
grief to her to see this true old friend of her childhood suffering
thus--perhaps indeed dying; at the same time she did not forget what had
brought her here--still, she dared not disturb him in this act of love.
He gave her his blessing--that was kind; but his mutterings did not come
to an end, the weight of the hot hand on her head grew heavier and
heavier, and at last became intolerable. She felt quite dazed, but with
an effort she collected her senses and then perceived that the old man
had wandered off from the usual formulas of blessing and was murmuring
disconnected and inarticulate words.
At this she raised the terrible, fevered hand, laid it on the bed, and
was about to ask him whether he had betrayed her to Benjamin, and if he
had mentioned her name, when--Merciful God! there on his cheeks were the
same livid spots that she had noticed on those of the plague stricken man
in Medea's house. With a cry of horror she sprang up, snatched at the
lamp, held it over the sufferer, heedless of his cries of anguish, looked
into his face, and pulled away the weary hands with which he tried to
screen his eyes from the light. Then, having convinced herself that she
was not mistaken, she fled from room to room out into the hall.
Here she was met by the housekeeper, who took the lamp out of her hand
and was about to question her; but Katharina only screamed:
"The plague is in the house! Lock the doors!" and then rushed away, past
the leech who was coming in. With one bound she was in the chariot, and
as the horses started she wailed out to the nurse:
"The plague--they have the plague. Plotinus has taken the plague!"
The terrified woman tried to soothe her, assuring her that she must be
mistaken for such hellish fiends did not dare come near so holy a man.
But the girl vouchsafed no reply, merely desiring her to have a bath made
ready for her as soon as they should reach home.
She felt utterly shattered; on the spot where the old man's
plague-stricken hand had rested she was conscious of a heavy, hateful
pressure, and when the chariot at length drove into their own garden
something warm and heavy-something she could not shake off, still seemed
to weigh on her brain.
The windows were all dark excepting one on the ground-floor, where a
light was still visible in the room inhabited by Heliodora. A diabolical
thought flashed through her over-excited and restless mind; without
looking to the right hand or the left she obeyed the impulse and went
forward, just as she was, into her friend's sitting-room and then,
lifting a curtain, on into the bedroom. Heliodora was lying on her couch,
still suffering from a headache which had prevented her going to visit
their neighbors; at first she did not notice the late visitor who stood
by her side and bid her good evening.
A single lamp shed a dim light in the spacious room, and the young girl
had never thought their guest so lovely as she looked in that twilight. A
night wrapper of the thinnest material only half hid her beautiful limbs.
Round her flowing, fair hair, floated the subtle, hardly perceptible
perfume which always pervaded this favorite of fortune. Two heavy plaits
lay like sheeny snakes over her bosom and the white sheet. Her face was
turned upwards and was exquisitely calm and sweet; and as she lay
motionless and smiled up at Katharina, she looked like an angel wearied
in well-doing.
No man could resist the charms of this woman, and Orion had succumbed. By
her side was a lute, from which she brought the softest and most soothing
tones, and thus added to the witchery of her appearance.
Katharina's whole being was in wild revolt; she did not know how she was
able to return Heliodora's greeting, and to ask her how she could
possibly play the lute with a headache.
"Just gliding my fingers over the strings calms and refreshes my blood,"
she replied pleasantly. "But you, child, look as if you were suffering
far worse than I.--Did you come home in the chariot that drove up just
now?"
"Yes," replied Katharina. "I have been to see our dear old bishop. He is
very ill, dying; he will soon be taken from us. Oh, what a fearful day!
First Orion's mother, then Paula, and now this to crown all! Oh,
Heliodora, Heliodora!"
She fell on her knees by the bed and pressed her face against her pitying
friend's bosom. Heliodora saw the tears which had risen with unaffected
feeling to the girl's eyes; her tender soul was full of sympathy with the
sorrow of such a gladsome young creature, who had already had so much to
suffer, and she leaned over the child, kissing her affectionately on the
brow, and murmuring words of consolation. Katharina clung to her closely,
and pointing to the top of her head where that burning hand had pressed
it, she said: "There, kiss there: there is where the pain is worst!--Ah,
that is nice, that does me good."
And, as the tender-hearted Heliodora's fresh lips rested on the
plague-tainted hair, Katharina closed her eyes and felt as a gladiator
might who hitherto has only tried his weapons on the practising ground,
and now for the first time uses them in the arena to pierce his
opponent's heart. She had a vision of herself as some one else, taller
and stronger than she was; aye, as Death itself, the destroyer, breathing
herself into her victim's breast.
These feelings entirely possessed her as she knelt on the soft carpet,
and she did not notice that another woman was crossing it noiselessly to
her comforter's bed-side, with a glance of intelligence at Heliodora.
Just as she exclaimed: "Another kiss there-it burns so dreadfully," she
felt two hands on her temples and two lips, not Heliodora's, were pressed
on her head.
She looked up in astonishment and saw the smiling face of her mother, who
had come after her to ask how the bishop was, and who wished to take her
share in soothing the pain of her darling.
How well her little surprise had succeeded!
But what came over the child? She started to her feet as if lightning had
struck her, as if an asp had stung her, looked horror-stricken into her
mother's eyes, and then, as Susannah was on the point of clasping the
little head to her bosom once more to kiss the aching, the cursed spot,
Katharina pushed her away, flew, distracted, through the sitting-room
into the vestibule, and down the narrow steps leading to the bathroom.
Her mother looked after her, shaking her head in bewilderment. Then she
turned to Heliodora with a shrug, and said, as the tears filled her eyes:
"Poor, poor little thing! Too many troubles have come upon her at once.
Her life till lately was like a long, sunny day, and now the hail is
pelting her from all sides at once. She has bad news of the bishop, I
fear."
"He is dying, she said," replied the young widow with feeling.
"Our best and truest friend," sobbed Susannah. "It is, it really is too
much. I often think that I must myself succumb, and as for her--hardly
more than a child!--And with what resignation she bears the heaviest
sorrows!--You, Heliodora, are far from knowing what she has gone through;
but you have no doubt seen how her only thought is to seem bright, so as
to cheer my heart. Not a sigh, not a complaint has passed her lips. She
submits like a saint to everything, without a murmur. But, now that her
clear old friend is stricken, she has lost her self-control for the first
time. She knows all that Plotinus has been to me." And she broke down
into fresh sobbing. When she was a little calmer, she apologised for her
weakness and bid her fair guest good night.
Katharina, meanwhile, was taking a bath.
A bathroom was an indispensable adjunct to every wealthy Graeco-Egyptian
house, and her father had taken particular pains with its construction.
It consisted of two chambers, one for men and one for women; both fitted
with equal splendor.
White marble, yellow alabaster, purple porphyry on all sides; while the
pavement was of fine Byzantine mosaic on a gold ground. There were no
statues, as in the baths of the heathen; the walls were decorated with
bible texts in gold letters, and above the divan, which was covered with
a giraffe skin, there was a crucifix. On the middle panel of the coffered
ceiling was inscribed defiantly, in the Coptic language the first axiom
of the Jacobite creed: "We believe in the single, indivisible nature of
Christ Jesus." And below this hung silver lamps.
The large bath had been filled immediately for Katharina, as the furnace
was heated every evening for the ladies of the house. As she was
undressing, her maid showed her a diseased date. The head gardener, had
brought it to her, for he had that afternoon, discovered that his palms,
too, had been attacked. But the woman soon regretted her loquacity, for
when she went on to say that Anchhor, the worthy shoemaker who, only the
day before yesterday, had brought home her pretty new sandals, had died
of the plague, Katharina scolded her sharply and bid her be silent. But
as the maid knelt before her to unfasten her sandals, Katharina herself
took up the story again, asking her whether the shoemaker's pretty young
wife had also been attacked. The girl said that she was still alive, but
that the old mother-in-law and all the children had been shut into the
house, and even the shutters barred as soon as the corpse had been
brought out. The authorities had ordered that this should be done in
every case, so that the pestilence might not pervade the streets or be
disseminated among the healthy. Food and drink were handed to the
captives through a wicket in the door. Such regulations, she added,
seemed particularly well-considered and wise. But she would have done
better to keep her opinions to herself, for before she had done speaking
Katharina gave her an angry push with her foot. Then she desired her not
to be sparing with the 'smegma',--[A material like soap, but used in a
soft state.]--and to wash her hair as thoroughly as possible.
This was done; and Katharina herself rubbed her hands and arms with
passionate diligence. Then she had water poured over her head again and
again, till, when she desired the maid to desist, she had to lean
breathless and almost exhausted against the marble.
But in spite of smegma and water she still felt the pressure of the
burning hand on top of her head, and her heart seemed oppressed by some
invisible load of lead.
Her mother! oh, her mother! She had kissed her there, where the plague
had actually touched her, and in fancy she could hear her gasping and
begging for a drink of water like the dying wretches to whom her fate had
led her. And then--then came the servants of the senate and shut her into
the pestilential house with the sick; she saw the pest in mortal form, a
cruel and malignant witch; behind her, tall and threatening, stood her
inexorable companion Death, reaching out a bony hand and clutching her
mother, and then all who were in the house with her, and last of all,
herself.
Her arms dropped by her side: powerful and terrible as she had felt
herself this morning, she was now crushed by a sense of miserable and
impotent weakness. Her defiance had been addressed to a mortal, a frail,
tender woman; and God and Fate had put her in the front of the battle
instead of Heliodora. She shuddered at the thought.
As she went up from the bath-room, her mother met her in the hall and
said:
"What, still here, Child? How you startled me! And is it true? Is
Plotinus really ill of a complaint akin to the plague?"
"Worse than that, mother," she replied sadly. "He has the plague; and I
remembered that a bath is the right thing when one has been in a
plague-stricken house; you, too, have kissed and touched me. Pray have
the fire lighted again, late as it is, and take a bath too."
"But, Child," Susannah began with a laugh; but Katharina gave her no
peace till she yielded, and promised to bathe in the men's room, which
had not been used at all since the appearance of the epidemic. When Dame
Susannah found herself alone she smiled to herself in silent
thankfulness, and in the bath again she lifted up her heart and hands in
prayer for her only child, the loving daughter who cared for her so
tenderly.
Katharina went to her own room, after ascertaining that the clothes she
had worn this evening had been sacrificed in the bath-furnace.
It was past midnight, but still she bid the maid sit up, and she did not
go to bed. She could not have found rest there. She was tempted to go out
on the balcony, and she sat down there on a rocking chair. The night was
sultry and still. Every house, every tree, every wall seemed to radiate
the heat it had absorbed during the day. Along the quay came a long
procession of pilgrims; this was followed by a funeral train and soon
after came another--both so shrouded in clouds of dust that the torches
of the followers looked like coals glimmering under ashes. Several who
had died of the pestilence, and whom it had been impossible to bury by
day, were being borne to the grave together. One of these funerals, so
she vaguely fancied, was Heliodora's; the other her own perhaps--or her
mother's--and she shivered at the thought. The long train wandered on
under its shroud of dust, and stood still when it reached the Necropolis;
then the sledge with the bier came back empty on red hot runners--but she
was not one of the mourners--she was imprisoned in the pestiferous house.
Then, when she was freed again--she saw it all quite clearly--two heads
had been cut off in the courtyard of the Hall of justice: Orion's and
Paula's--and she was left alone, quite alone and forlorn. Her mother was
lying by her father's side under the sand in the cemetery, and who was
there to care for her, to be troubled about her, to protect her? She was
alone in the world like a tree without roots, like a leaf blown out to
sea, like an unfledged bird that has fallen out of the nest.
Then, for the first time since that evening when she had borne false
witness, her memory reverted to all she had been taught at school and in
the church of the torments of hell, and she pictured the abode of the
damned, and the scorching, seething Lake of fire in which murderers,
heretics, false witnesses. . . .
What was that?
Had hell indeed yawned, and were the flames soaring up to the sky through
the riven shell of the earth? Had the firmament opened to pour living
fire and black fumes on the northern part of the city?
She started up in dismay, her eyes fixed on the terrible sight. The whole
sky seemed to be in flames; a fiery furnace, with dense smoke and myriads
of shooting sparks, filled the whole space between earth and heaven. A
devouring conflagration was apparently about to annihilate the town, the
river, the starry vault itself; the metal heralds which usually called
the faithful to church lifted up their voices; the quiet road at her feet
suddenly swarmed with thousands of people; shrieks, yells and frantic
commands came up from below, and in the confusion of tongues she could
distinguish the words "Governor's Palace"--"Arabs"--"Mukaukas"--"Orion"
--"fire"--"Put it out"--"Save it."
At this moment the old head-gardener called up to her from the
lotos-tank: "The palace is in flames! And in this drought--God
All-merciful save the town!"
Her knees gave way; she put out her hands with a faint cry to feel for
some support, and two arms were thrown about her-the arms which she so
lately had pushed away: her mother's: that mother who had bent over her
only child and inhaled death in a kiss on her plague-tainted hair.
CHAPTER XV.
The governor's palace, the pride and glory of Memphis, the magnificent
home of the oldest and noblest family of the land--the last house that
had given birth to a race of native Egyptians held worthy, even by the
Greeks, to represent the emperor and uphold the highest dignity in the
world--the very citadel of native life, lay in ashes; and just as a giant
of the woods crushes and destroys in its fall many plants of humbler
growth, so the burning of the great house destroyed hundreds of smaller
dwellings.
This night's work had torn the mast and rudder, and many a plank besides,
from that foundering vessel, the town of Memphis. It seemed indeed a
miracle that had saved the whole from being reduced to cinders; and for
this, next to God's providence, they might thank the black incendiary
himself and his Arabs. The crime was committed with cool and shrewd
foresight, and carried through to the end. During his visitation
throughout the rambling buildings Obada had looked out for spots that
might suit his purpose, and two hours after sunset he had lighted fire
after fire with his own hand, in secret and undetected. The troops he
intended to employ later were waiting under arms at Fostat, and when the
fire broke out, first in the treasury and afterwards in three other
places in the palace, they were immediately marched across and very
judiciously employed.
All that was precious in this ancient home of a wealthy race, was
conveyed to a place of safety, even the numerous fine horses in the
stables; and the title-deeds of the estate, slaves, and so forth were
already secured at Fostat; still, the flames consumed vast quantities of
treasures that could never be replaced. Beautiful works of art,
manuscripts and books such as were only preserved here, old and splendid
plants from every zone, vessels and woven stuffs that had been the
delight of connoisseurs--all perished in heaps. But the incendiary
regretted none of them, for all possibility of proving how much that was
precious had fallen into his hands was buried under their ashes.
The worst that could happen to him now was to be deposed from office for
his too audacious proceedings. Of all the towns he had seen in the course
of the triumphant incursions of Islam none had attracted him so greatly
as Damascus, and he now had the means of spending the latter half of his
life there in luxurious enjoyment.
At the same time it was desirable to rescue as much as possible from the
flames; for it would have given his enemies a fatal hold upon him, if the
famous old city of Memphis should perish by his neglect. And he was a man
to give battle to the awful element.
Not another building fell a prey to it on the Nile quay; but a light
southerly breeze carried burning fragments to the northwest, and several
houses in the poorer quarter on the edge of the desert caught fire.
Thither the larger portion of those who could combat the flames and
rescue the inhabitants were at once directed; and here, as at the palace,
he acted on the principle of sacrificing whatever could not be saved
entire. Thus a whole quarter of the town was destroyed, hundreds of
beggared families lost all they possessed; and yet he, whose ruthless
avarice had cast so many into misery, was admired and lauded; for he was
everywhere at once: now by the river and now by the desert, always where
the danger was greatest, and where the presence of the leader was most
needed. Here he was seen in the very midst of the fire, there he swung
the axe with his own hand; now, mounted on horseback, he rode down the
line where the dry grass was to be torn up by the roots and soaked with
water; now, on foot, he directed the scanty jet from the pipes or, with
Herculean strength, flung back into the flames a beam which had fallen
beyond the limits he had set. His shrill voice sounded, as his huge
height towered, above all others; every eye was fixed on his black face
and flashing eyes and teeth, while his example carried away all his
followers to imitate it. His shouts of command made the scene of the fire
like a battle-field; the Moslems, so ably led, regardless of life as they
were and ready to strain and exert their strength to the utmost, wrought
wonders in the name of their God and His Prophet.
The Egyptians, too, did their best; but they felt themselves impotent by
comparison with what these Arabs did, and they hardly felt anything but
the disgrace of being over-mastered by them.
The light shone far across the country; even he whose splendid
inheritance was feeding the flames perceived, between midnight and dawn,
a glow on the distant western horizon which he was unable to account for.
He had been riding towards it for about half an hour when the caravan
halted at the last station but one, on the high road between Kolzum and
Babylon.
[Suez, and the Greek citadel near which Amru founded Fostat and
Cairo subsequently grew up.]
A considerable troop of horse soldiers dismounted at the same time, but
Orion had not summoned these to protect him; on the contrary, he was in
their charge and they were taking him, a prisoner, to Fostat. He had
quitted the chariot in which he had set out and had been made to mount a
dromedary; two horsemen armed to the teeth rode constantly at his side.
His fellow-travellers were allowed to remain in their chariot.
At the inn which they had now reached Justinus got out and desired his
companion, a pale-faced man who sat sunk into a heap, to do the same; but
with a weary shake of the head he declined to move.
"Are you in pain, Narses?" asked Justinus affectionately, and Narses
briefly replied in a husky voice: "All over," and settled himself against
the cushion at the back of the chariot. He even refused the refreshments
brought out to him by the Senator's servant and interpreter. He seemed
sunk in apathy and to crave nothing but peace.
This was the senator's nephew.
With Orion's help, and armed with letters of protection and
recommendation from Amru, the senator had gained his purpose. He had
ransomed Narses, but not before the wretched man had toiled for some time
as a prisoner, first at the canal on the line of the old one constructed
by the Pharaohs, which was being restored under the Khaliff Omar, to
secure the speediest way of transporting grain from Egypt to Arabia and
afterwards in the rock-bound harbor of Aila. On the burning shores of the
Red Sea, under the fearful sun of those latitudes, Narses was condemned
to drag blocks of stone; many days had elapsed before his uncle could
trace him--and in what a state did Justinus find him at last!
A week before he could reach him, the ex-officer of cavalry had laid
himself down in the wretched sheds for the sick provided for the
laborers; his back still bore the scars of the blows by which the
overseer had spurred the waning strength of his exhausted and suffering
victim. The fine young soldier was a wreck, broken alike in heart and
body and sunk in melancholy. Justinus had hoped to take him home jubilant
to Martina, and he had only this ruin to show her, doomed to the grave.
The senator was glad, nevertheless, to have saved this much at any rate.
The sight of the sufferer touched him deeply, and the less Narses would
take or give, the more thankful was Justinus when he gave the faintest
sign of reviving interest.
In the course of this journey by land and water--and latterly as sharing
the senator's care of his nephew--Orion had become very dear to his old
friend; and at the risk of incurring his displeasure he had even
confessed the reasons that had prompted him to leave Memphis.
He never could cease to feel that everything good or lofty in himself was
Paula's alone; that her love ennobled and strengthened him; that to
desert her was to abandon himself. His trifling with Heliodora could but
divert him from the high aim he had set before himself. This aim he kept
constantly in view; his spirit hungered for peaceful days in which he
might act on the resolution he had formed in church and fulfil the task
set before him by the Arab governor.
The knowledge that he had inherited an enormous fortune now afforded him
no joy, for he was forced to confess to himself that but for this
superabundant wealth he might have been a very different man; and more
than once a vehement wish came over him to fling away all his possessions
and wrestle for peace of mind and the esteem of the best men by his own
unaided powers.
The senator had taken his confession as it was meant: if Thomas' daughter
was indeed what Orion described her there could be but small hope for his
beautiful favorite. He and Martina must e'en make their way home again
with two adopted dear ones, and it must be the care of the old folks to
comfort the young ones instead of the young succoring the old as was
natural. And in spite of everything Orion had won on his affections, for
every day, every hour he was struck by some new quality, some greater
trait than he had looked for in the young man.
Torches were flaring in the inn-yard where, under a palm-thatched roof
supported on poles and covering a square space in the middle, benches
stood for the guests to rest. Here Justinus and Orion again met for a few
minutes' conversation.
His warders were also seated near them; they did not let Orion out of
their sight even while they ate their meal of mutton, bread, onions, and
dates. The senator's servants brought some food from the chariot, and
just as Justinus and Orion had begun their attack on it, a tall man came
into the yard and made his way to the benches. This was Philippus,
pausing on his road to Djidda. He had learnt, even before coming in, whom
he would find here, a prisoner; and the Arabs, to whom the leech was
known, allowed him to join the pair, though at the same time they came a
little nearer, and their leader understood Greek.
Philippus was anything rather than cordially disposed towards Orion;
still, he knew what peril hung over the youth, and how sad a loss he had
suffered. His conscience bid him do all he could to prove helpful in the
trial that awaited him in the matter of the expedition in which Rufinus
had perished. He was the bearer, too, of sad news which the Arabs must
necessarily hear. Orion was indeed furious when he heard of the seizure
and occupation of the governor's residence; still, he believed that Amru
would insist on restitution; but on hearing of his mother's death he
broke down completely. Even the Arabs, seeing the strong man shaken with
sobs and learning the cause of his grief, respectfully withdrew; for the
anguish of a son at the loss of his mother was sacred in their eyes. They
regard the man who mourns for one he loves as stricken by the hand of the
Almighty and hallowed by his touch and treat him with the reverence of
pious awe.
Orion had not observed their absence, but Philippus at once took
advantage of it to tell him, as briefly as possible, all that related to
the escape of the nuns. He himself knew not yet of the burning of the
palace, or of Paula's imprisonment; but he could tell the senator where
he would find his wife and niece. So by the time he was bidden to mount
and start once more Orion was informed of all that had happened.
It was with a drooping head, and sunk in melancholy thought that he rode
on his way.
As for the residence!--whether the Arabs gave it back to him or not, what
did he care?--but his mother, his mother! All she had been to him from
his earliest years rose before his mind; in the deep woe of this parting
he forgot the imminent danger and the dungeon that awaited him, and the
intolerable insult to his rights; nay, even the image of the woman he
loved paled by the side of that of the beloved dead. Perhaps he might not
even gain permission to bury her!
The way lay through a parched tract of rocky desert, and the further they
went the more intense was that wonderful flush in the west, till day
broke behind the travellers and the glory of the sunrise quenched the
vividness of its glow.
Another scorching day! The rocks by the wayside still threw long shadows
on the sandy desert-road, when a party of Arab horsemen came from Fostat
to meet the travellers, shouting the latest news to the prisoner's
escort. It was evidently important; but Orion did not understand a word
of what they said. Evil tidings fly fast, however; while the men were
talking together, the dragoman rode up to him and told him that his home
was burnt to the ground and half Memphis still in flames. Then came other
newsbearers, on horseback and on dromedaries; and they met chariots and
files of camels loaded with corn and Egyptian merchandise; and each and
all shouted to the Arab escort reports of what was going on in Memphis,
hoping to be the first to tell the homeward bound party.
How many times did Orion hear the story--and each time that a traveller
began with: "Have you heard?" pointing westward, the wounds the first
news had inflicted bled anew.
What lay beneath that mass of ashes? How much had the flames consumed
that never could be replaced! Much that he had silently wished were
possible had in fact been fulfilled--and so soon! Where now was the
burthen of great wealth which had hung about his heels and hindered his
running freely? And yet he did not, even now, feel free; the way was not
yet open before him; he secretly mourned over the ruined house of his
fathers and the wrecked home; a miserable sense of insecurity weighed him
down. No father--no mother-no parental roof! For years he had been, in
fact, perfectly independent, and yet he felt now like a pilot whose boat
had lost its rudder.
Before him lay a prison, and the closing act of the great tragedy of
which he himself had been the hero. Fate had fallen on his house, had
marked it for destruction as erewhile that of Tantalus. It lay in ashes,
and the victims were already many: two brothers, father, mother--and, far
away from home, Rufinus too.
But whose was the guilt?
It was not his ancestors who had sinned; it could only be his own that
had called down this ruin. But was there then such a power as the Destiny
of the ancients--inexorable, iron Fate? Had he not repented and suffered,
been reconciled to his Redeemer, and prepared himself to fight the hard
fight? Perhaps he was indeed to be the hero of a tragedy; then he would
show that it was not the blind Inevitable, but what a man can make of
himself, and what he can do by the aid of the God of might, which
determines his fate. If he must still succumb, it should only be after a
valiant struggle and defense. He would battle fearlessly against every
foe, would press onward in the path he had laid down for himself. His
heart beat high once more; he felt as though he could see his father's
example as a guiding star in the sky, so that he must be true to that
whether to live or to die. And when he turned his eye earthwards again,
still, even there, he had that which made it seem worth the cost of
enduring the pangs of living and the brunt of the hardest battle: Paula
and her love.
The nearer he approached Fostat, the more ardently his heart swelled with
longing. Heaven must grant him to see her once more, once more to clasp
her in his arms, before--the end!
It seemed to him that what he had gone through in these few hours must
have removed and set aside everything that could part them. Now, he felt,
he had strength to remain worthy of her; if Heliodora were to come in his
way again he would now certainly, positively, regard and treat her only
as a sister.
He was conducted at once to the house of the Kadi; but this official was
at the Divan--the council, which his arch-foe, that black monster Obada,
had called together.
After the labors of the past night the Negro had allowed himself only a
few hours rest, and then had met the council, where he had not been slow
to discover that he had as many enemies as there were members present.
His most determined opponents were the Kadi Othman, the head of the
Courts of justice and administration, and Khalid the governor of the
exchequer. Neither of them hesitated to express his opinion; and indeed,
no one present at this meeting would have suspected for a moment that
most of the members had, in their peaceful youth, guarded flocks as
shepherds on the mountains, led caravans across the desert, or managed
some small trade. In the contests of tribe against tribe they had found
opportunities for practice in the use of weapons, and for steeling their
courage; but where had they learnt to choose their words with so much
care, and emphasize them with gestures of such natural grace that any
Greek orator would have admired them? It was only when the indignant
orator "thundered and lightened" and was carried away by the heat of
passion that he forgot his dignified moderation, and then how grandly
voice, eye, and action helped each other! And never, even under the
highest excitement, was purity of language overlooked. These men, of whom
very few could read and write, had at their command all the most
effective verses of their poets having thousands of lines stored in their
minds.
The discussion to-day dealt with the social aspects of an ancient
civilization, unknown but a few years since to the warlike children of
the desert, and yet how ably had the four overseers of public buildings
the comptrollers of the markets, of the irrigation works, and of the
mills, achieved their ends. These bright and untarnished spirits were
equal to the hardest task and capable of carrying it through with energy,
acumen, and success.
And the sons of these men who had passed through no school were already
well-fitted and invited to give new splendor to cities in their decline,
and new life to the learning of the countries they had subdued.
Everything in this council revealed talent, vitality, and ardor; and
Obada, who had been a slave, found it by no means easy to uphold his
pre-eminence among these assertive scions of free and respectable
families.
The Kadi spoke frankly and fearlessly against his recent proceedings,
declaring in the name of every member of the Divan, that they disclaimed
all responsibility for what had been done, and that it rested on the
Vekeel alone. Obada was very ready to accept it; and he announced with
such fiery eloquence his determination to give shelter at Fostat to the
natives whom the conflagration had left roofless, he was so fair-spoken,
and he had shown his great qualities in so clear a light during the past
night, that they agreed to postpone their attainder and await the reply
from Medina to the complaints they had forwarded. Discipline, indeed,
required that they should submit; and many a man who would have flown to
meet death on the field as a bride, quailed before the terrible
adventurer who would not shrink from the most hideous deeds.
Obada had won by hard fighting. No one could prove a theft against him of
so much as a single drachma; but he nevertheless had to take many a rough
word, and with one consent the assembly refused him the deference justly
due to the governor's representative.
Bitterly indignant, he remained till the very last in the
council-chamber, no one staying with him, not even his own subalterns, to
speak a soothing word in praise of the power and eloquence of his
address, while the same cursed wretches would, under similar
circumstances, have buzzed round Amru like swarming bees, and have
escorted him home like curs wagging their tails. He ascribed the
contumely and opposition he met with to their prejudice, as haughty,
free-born men against his birth, and not to any fault of his own, and yet
he looked down on them all, feeling himself the superior of each by
himself; if the blow in Medina were successful, he would pick out his
victims, and then. . . .
His dreams of vengeance were abruptly broken by a messenger, covered with
dust from head to foot; he brought good news: Orion was taken and safely
bestowed in the Kadi's house.
"And why not in mine?" asked Obada in peremptory tones. "Who is the
governor's representative here. Othman or I? Take the prisoner to my
house."
And he forthwith went home. But instead of the prisoner there presently
appeared before him an official of the Kadi's household, who informed
him, from his master, that as the Khaliff had constituted Othman supreme
judge in Egypt this matter was in his hands; if Obada wished to see the
prisoner he might go to the Kadi's residence, or visit him later in the
town prison of Memphis, whither Orion would presently be transferred.
He rushed off, raging, to his enemy's house, but his stormy fury was met
by the placidity of a calm and judicial mind. Othman was a man between
forty and fifty years old, but his soft, black beard was already turning
grey; his noble dark face bore the stamp of a lofty, high-bred soul, and
a keen but temperate spirit shone in his eyes. There was something serene
and clear in his whole person; he was a man to bear the burthen of life's
vicissitudes with dignity, while he had set himself the task of saving
others from them so far as in him lay.
The patriarch's complaints had come also to the Kadi's knowledge, and he,
too, was minded to exact retribution for the massacre of the Moslem
soldiers; but the punishment should fall on none but the guilty. He would
have been sorry to believe that Orion was one of them, for he had
esteemed his father as a brave man and a just judge, and had taken many a
word of good advice from the experienced Egyptian.
The scene between him and the infuriated Vekeel was a painful one even
for the attendants who stood round; and Orion, who heard Obada's raging
from the adjoining room, could gather from it some idea of the relentless
hatred with which his negro enemy would persecute him.
However, as after the wildest storm the sea ebbs in ripples so even this
tempest came to a more peaceful conclusion. The Kadi represented to the
Vekeel what an unheard-of thing it would be, and in what a disgraceful
light it would set Moslem justice if one of the noblest families in the
country--to whose head, too, the cause of Islam owed so much--were robbed
of its possessions on mere suspicion. To this the Vekeel replied that
there were definite accusations brought by the head of the native Church,
and that nothing had been robbed, but merely confiscated and placed in
security. As to what Allah had thought fit to destroy by fire, no one
could be held answerable for that. There was no "mere suspicion" in the
case, for he himself had in his possession a document which amply proved
that Paula, Orion's beloved, had been the instigator of the crime which
had cost the lives of twelve of the true believers.--The girl herself had
been taken into custody yesterday. He would cross-examine her himself,
too, in spite of all the Kadis in the world; for though Othman might
choose to let any number of Moslems be murdered by these dogs of
Christians he, Obada, would not overlook it; and if he did, by tomorrow
morning the thousand Egyptians who were digging the canal would have
killed with their shovels the three Moslems who kept guard over them.
At this, Othman assured the Vekeel that he was no less anxious to punish
the miscreants, but that he must first make sure of their identity, and
that, in accordance with the law, justly and without fear of man or blind
hatred, with due caution and justice. He, as judge, was no less averse to
letting off the guilty than he was to punishing the innocent; so the
enquiry must be allowed to proceed quietly. If Obada wished to examine
Paula he, the Kadi, had no objection; to preside over the court and to
direct the trial was his business, and that he would not abdicate even
for the Khaliff himself so long as Omar thought him worthy to hold his
office.
To all this Obada had no choice but to agree, though with an ill-grace;
and as the Vekeel wished to see Orion, the young man was called in. The
huge negro looked at him from head to foot like a slave he proposed to
buy; and, when Othman went to the door and so could not see him, he could
not resist the malicious impulse: he glanced significantly at the
prisoner, and drew his forefinger sharply and quickly across his black
throat as though to divide the head from the trunk. Then he
contemptuously turned his back on the youth.
CHAPTER XVI.
In the course of the afternoon the Vekeel rode across to the prison in
Memphis. He expected to find the bishop there, but instead he was met
with the news that Plotinus was dead of the pestilence.
This was a malignant stroke of fate; for with the bishop perished the
witness who could have betrayed to him the scheme plotted for the rescue
of the nuns.--But no! The patriarch, too, no doubt, knew all.
Still, of what use was that at this moment? He had no time to lose, and
Benjamin could hardly be expected to return within three weeks.
Obada had met Paula's father in the battle-field by Damascus, and it had
often roused his ire to know that this hero's name was held famous even
among the Moslems. His envious soul grudged even to the greatest that
pure honor which friend and foe alike are ready to pay; he did not
believe in it, and regarded the man to whom it was given as a
time-serving hypocrite.
And as he hated the father so he did the daughter, though he had never
seen her. Orion's fate was sealed in his mind; and before his death he
should suffer more acutely through the execution of Paula, whether she
denied or owned her guilt. He might perhaps succeed in making her
confess, so he desired that she should at once be brought into the
judge's council-room; but he failed completely in his attempt, though he
promised her, through the interpreter, the greatest leniency if she
admitted her guilt and threatened her with an agonizing death if she
refused to do so. His prisoner, indeed, was not at all what he had
expected, and the calm pride with which she denied every accusation
greatly impressed the upstart slave. At first he tried to supplement the
interpreter by shouting words of broken Greek, or intimidating her by
glaring looks whose efficacy he had often proved on his subordinates but
without the least success; and then he had her informed that he possessed
a document which placed her guilt beyond doubt. Even this did not shake
her; she only begged to see it. He replied that she would know all about
it soon enough, and he accompanied the interpreter's repetition of the
answer with threatening gestures.
He had met with shrewd and influential women among his own people; he had
seen brave ones go forth to battle, and share the perils of a religious
war, with even wilder and more blood-thirsty defiance of death than the
soldiers themselves; but these had all been wives and mothers, and
whenever he had seen them break out of the domestic circle, beyond which
no maiden could ever venture, it was because they were under the dominion
of some passionate impulse and a burning partisanship for husband or son,
family or tribe. The women of his nation lived for the most part in
modest retirement, and none but those who were carried away by some
violent emotion infringed the custom.
But this girl! There she stood, immovably calm, like a warrior at the
head of his tribe. There was something in her mien that quelled him, and
at the same time roused to the utmost his desire to make her feel his
power and to crush her pride. She was as much taller than the women of
his nation as he was taller than any other captain in the Moslem army;
prompted by curiosity, he went close up to her to measure her height by
his own, and passed his hand through the air from his swarthy throat to
touch the crown of her head; and the depth of loathing with which she
shrank from him did not escape his notice. The blood mounted to his head;
he desired the interpreter to inform her that she was to hope for no
mercy, and inwardly devoted her to a cruel death.
Pale, but prepared to meet the worst, Paula returned to the squalid room
she occupied with her faithful Betta.
Her arrival at the prison had been terrible. The guards had seemed
disposed to place her in a room filled with a number of male and female
criminals, whence the rattle of their chains and a frantic uproar of
coarse voices met her ear; however, the interpreter and the captain of
the town-watch had taken charge of her, prompted by Martina's promise of
a handsome reward if they could go to her next morning with a report that
Paula had been decently accommodated.
The warder's mother-in-law, too, had taken her under her protection. This
woman was the inn-keeper's wife from the riverside inn of Nesptah, and
she at once recognized Paula as the handsome damsel who had refreshed
herself there after the evening on the river with Orion, and whom she had
supposed to be his betrothed. She happened to be visiting her daughter,
the keeper's wife, and induced her to do what she could to be agreeable
to Paula. So she and Betta were lodged in a separate cell, and her gold
coin proved acceptable to the man, who did his utmost to mitigate her
lot. Indeed, Pulcheria had even been allowed to visit her and to bring
her the last roses that the drought had left in the garden.
Susannah had carried out her purpose of sending her food and fruit; but
they remained in the outer room, and the messenger was desired to explain
that no more were to be sent, for that she was supplied with all she
needed.
Confident in her sense of innocence, she had looked forward calmly to her
fate building her hopes on the much lauded justice of the Arab judges.
But it was not they, it would seem, who were to decide it, but that black
monster Orion's foe; crushed by the sense of impotence against the
arbitrary despotism of the ruthless villain, whose victim she must be,
she sat sunk in gloomy apathy, and hardly heard the old nurse's words of
encouragement.
She did not fear death; but to die without having seen her father once
more, without saying and proving to Orion that she was his alone, wholly
his and for ever--that was too hard to bear.
While she was wringing her hands, in a state verging on despair, the man
who had ruined the happiness, the peace, and the fortunes of so many of
his fellow-creatures was cantering through the streets of Memphis,
mounted on the finest horse in Orion's stable, and firmly determined to
make his defiant prisoner feel his power. When he reached the great
market-place in the quarter known as Ta-anch he was forced to bring his
steed to a quieter pace, for in front of the Curia--the senatehouse--an
immense gathering of people had collected. The Vekeel forced his way
through them with cruel indifference. He knew what they wanted and paid
no heed to them. The hapless crowd had for some time past met here daily,
demanding from the authorities some succor in their fearful need.
Processions and pilgrimages had had no result yesterday, so to-day they
besieged the Curia. But could the senate make the Nile rise, or stay the
pestilence, or prevent the dates dropping from the palm-trees? Could they
help, when Heaven denied its aid?
These were the questions which the authorities had already put at least
ten times to the shrieking multitude from the balcony of the town hall,
and each time the crowd had yelled in reply: "Yes--yes. You must!--it is
your duty; you take the taxes, and you are put there to take care of us!"
Even yesterday the distracted creatures had been wholly unmanageable and
had thrown stones at the building: to-day, after the fearful
conflagration and the death of their bishop, they had assembled in vast
numbers, more furious and more desperate than ever. The senators sat
trembling on their antique seats of gilt ivory, the relics of departed
splendor imitated from those of the Roman senators, looking at each other
and shrugging their shoulders while they listened to a letter which had
just reached them from the hadi. This document required them, in
conformity with Obada's determination, to make known to the populace, by
public proclamation and declaration, that any citizen whose house had
been destroyed by the fire of the past night would be granted ground and
building materials without payment, at Fostat across the Nile, where he
might found a new home provided he would settle there and embrace Islam.
This degrading offer must be announced: no discussion or recalcitrancy
could help that.
And what could they, for their part, do for the complaining crowd?
The plague was snatching them away; the vegetables, which constituted
half their food at this season, were dried up; the river, their palatable
and refreshing drink, was poisoned; the dates, their chief luxury,
ripened only to be rejected with loathing. Then there was the comet in
the sky, no hope of a harvest--even of a single ear, for months to come.
The bishop dead, all confidence lost in the intercessions of the Church,
God's mercy extinct as it would seem, withdrawn from the land under
infidel rule!
And they on whose help the populace counted,--poor, weak men, councillors
of no counsel, liable from hour to hour to be called to follow those who
had succumbed to the plague, and who had but just quitted their vacant
seats in obedience to the fateful word.
Yesterday each one had felt convinced that their necessity and misery had
reached its height, and yet in the course of the night it had redoubled
for many. Their self-dependence was exhausted; but there still was one
sage in the city who might perhaps find some new way, suggest some new
means of saving the people from despair.
Stones were again flying down through the open roof, and the members of
the council started up from their ivory seats and sought shelter behind
the marble piers and columns. A wild turmoil came up from the
market-place to the terror-stricken Fathers of the city, and the mob was
hammering with fists and clubs on the heavy doors of the Curia. Happily
they were plated with bronze and fastened with strong iron bolts, but
they might fly open at any moment and then the furious mob would storm
into the hall.
But what was that?
For a moment the roar and yelling ceased, and then began again, but in a
much milder form. Instead of frenzied curses and imprecations shouts now
rose of "Hail, hail!" mixed with appeals: "Help us, save us, give us
council. Long live the sage!" "Help us with your magic, Father!" "You
know the secrets and the wisdom of the ancients!" "Save us, Save us! Show
those money-bags, those cheats in the Curia the way to help us!"
At this the president of the town-council ventured forth from his refuge
behind the statue of Trajan--the only image that the priesthood had
spared--and to climb a ladder which was used for lighting the hanging
lamps, so as to peep out of the high window.
He saw an old man in shining white linen robes, riding on a fine white
ass through the crowd which reverently made way for him. The lictors of
the town marched before him with their fasces, on to which they had tied
palm branches in token of a friendly embassy. Looking further he could
see that behind the old man came a slave, besides the one who drove his
ass, carrying a quantity of manuscript scrolls. This raised his hopes,
for the scrolls looked very old and yellow, and no doubt contained a
store of wisdom; nay, probably magic formulas and effectual charms.
With a loud exclamation of "Here he comes!" the senator descended the
ladder; in a few minutes the door was opened with a rattling of iron
bolts, and it was with a sigh of relief that they saw the old man come in
and none attempt to follow him.
When Horapollo entered the council-chamber he found the senators sitting
on their ivory chairs with as much dignified calm as though the meeting
had been uninterrupted; but at a sign from the president they all rose to
receive the old man, and he returned their greeting with reserve, as
homage due to him. He also accepted the raised seat, which the president
quitted in his honor while he himself took one of the ordinary chairs at
his side.
The negotiation began at once, and was not disturbed by the crowd, though
still from the market-place there came a ceaseless roar, like the
breaking of distant waves and the buzzing of thousands of swarming bees.
The sage began modestly, saying that he, in his simplicity, could not but
despair of finding any help where so many wise men had failed; he was
experienced only in the lore and mysteries of the Fathers, and he had
come thither merely to tell the council what they had considered
advisable in such cases, and to suggest that their example should be
followed.
He spoke low but fluently, and a murmur of approval followed; then, when
the president went on to speak of the low state of the Nile as the root
of all the evil, the old man interrupted him, begging them to begin by
considering the particular difficulties which they might attack by their
own efforts.
The pestilence was in possession of the city; he had just come through
the quarter that had been destroyed by the fire, and had seen above fifty
sick deprived of all care and reduced to destitution. Here something
could be done; here was a way of showing the angry populace that their
advisers and leaders were not sitting with their hands in their laps.
A councillor then proposed that the convent of St. Cecilia, or the now
deserted and dilapidated odeum should be given up to them; but Horapollo
objected explaining very clearly that such a crowd of sick in the midst
of the city would be highly dangerous to the healthy citizens. This
opinion was shared by his friend Philippus, who had indeed commended the
plan he had to propose as the only right one. Whither had their
forefathers transported, not merely their beneficent institutions, but
their vast temples and tomb-buildings which covered so much space? Always
to the desert outside the town. Arrianus had even written these verses on
the gigantic sphinx near the Pyramids.
"The gods erewhile created these far-shining forms, wisely sparing the
fields and fertile corn-bearing plain."
The moderns had forgotten thus to spare the arable land, and they had
also neglected to make good use of the desert. The dead and
plague-stricken must not be allowed to endanger the living; they must
therefore be lodged away from the town, in the Necropolis in the desert.
"But we cannot let them be under the broiling sun," cried the president.
"Still less," added another, "can we build a house for them in a day."
To this Horapollo replied:
"And who would be so foolish as to ask you to do either? But there are
linen and posts to be had in Memphis. Have some large tents pitched in
the Necropolis, and all who fall sick of the pestilence removed there at
the expense of the city and tended under their shade. Appoint three or
four of your number to carry this into execution and there will be a
shelter for the roofless sick in a few hours. How many boatmen and
shipwrights are standing idle on the quays! Call them together and in an
hour they will be at work."
This suggestion was approved. A linen-merchant present exclaimed: "I can
supply what is needed," and another who dealt in the same wares, and
exported this famous Egyptian manufacture to remote places, also put in a
word, desiring that his house might have the order as he could sell
cheaper. This squabble might have absorbed the attention of the meeting
till it rose, and perhaps have been renewed the next day, if Horapollo's
proposal that they should divide the commission equally had not been
hastily adopted.
The populace hailed the announcement that tents would be erected for the
sick in the desert, with applause from a thousand voices. The deputies
chosen to superintend the task set to work at once, and by night the most
destitute were safe under the first large hospital tent.
The old man settled some other important questions in the same way,
always appealing to the lore of the ancients.
At length he spoke of the chief subject, and he did so with great caution
and tact.
All the events of the last few weeks, he said, pointed to the conclusion
that Heaven was wroth with the hapless land of their fathers. As a sign
of their anger the Immortals had sent the comet, that terrible star whose
ominous splendor was increasing daily. To make the Nile rise was not in
the power of men; but the ancients--and here his audience listened with
bated breath--the ancients had been more intimately familiar with the
mysterious powers that rule the life of Nature than men in the later
times, whether priests or laymen. In those days every servant of the Most
High had been a naturalist and a student, and when Egypt had been visited
by such a calamity as that of this year, a sacrifice had been offered--a
precious victim against which all mankind, nay and all his own feelings
revolted; still, this sacrifice had never failed of its effect, no,
never. Here was the evidence--and he pointed to the manuscripts in his
lap.
The councillors had begun to be restless in their seats, and first the
president and then the others, one after another, exclaimed and asked:
"But the victim?"
"What did they sacrifice?"
"What about the victim?"
"Allow me to say no more about it till another time," said the old man.
"What good could it do to tell you that now? The first thing is to find
the thing that is acceptable to the gods."
"What is it?"
"Speak--do not keep us on the rack!" was shouted on all sides; but he
remained inexorable, promising only to call the council together when the
right time should come and desiring that the president would proclaim
from the balcony that Horapollo knew of a sacrifice which would cause the
Nile at last to rise. As soon as the right victim could be found, the
people should be invited to give their consent. In the time of their
forefathers it had never failed of its effect, so men, women, and
children might go home in all confidence, and await the future with new
and well-founded hopes.
And this announcement, with which the president mingled his praises of
the venerable Horapollo, had a powerful effect. The crowd hallooed with
glee, as though they had found new life. "Hail, hail!" was shouted again
and again, and it was addressed, not merely to the old man who had
promised them deliverance, but also to the Fathers of the city, who felt
as if a fearful load had fallen from their souls.
The old man's scheme was, to be sure, not pious nor rightly Christian;
but had the power of the Church been in any way effectual? And this
having failed they must of their own accord have had recourse to means
held reprobate by the priesthood. Magic and the black arts were genuinely
Egyptian; and when faith had no power, these asserted themselves and
superstition claimed its own. Though Medea had been taken by surprise and
imprisoned, this had not been done to satisfy the law, but with a view to
secretly utilizing her occult science for the benefit of the community.
In such dire need no means were too base; and though the old man himself
was horrified at those he proposed he was sure of public approbation if
only they had the desired result. If only they could avert the calamity
the sin could be expiated, and the Almighty was so merciful!
The bishop had a seat and voice in the council, but Fate itself had saved
them from the dilemma of having to meet his remonstrances.
When Horapollo went out into the market-place he was received with
acclamations, and as much gratitude as though he had already achieved the
deliverance of the people and country.
What had he done?--Whether the work he had set going were to fail or to
succeed he could not remain in Memphis, for in either case he would never
have peace again. But that did not daunt him; it would certainly be very
good for the two women to be removed from the perilous neighborhood of
the Arab capital, and he was firmly determined to take them away with
him. For his dear Philip, too, nothing could be better than a
transplantation into other soil.
At the house of Rufinus he now learnt the fate that had fallen on Paula.
She was out the way, at any rate for the present; still, if she should be
released to-morrow or the day after, or even a month hence, she would be
as great a hindrance as ever. His plots against her must therefore be
carried out. His own isolation provoked him, and what a satisfaction it
would be if only he should succeed in stirring up the Egyptian Christians
to the heathen deed to which he was endeavoring to prompt them.
If Paula should be condemned to death by the Arabs, the execution of the
scheme would be greatly promoted; and now the first point was to ensure
the favor of the black Vekeel, for everything depended on his consent.
Joanna and Pulcheria thought him more good-humored and amiable than they
had ever known him; his proposal that he and Philippus should join their
household was hailed with delight even by little Mary, and the women
conducted him all over the house, supporting his steps with affectionate
care. All he saw there pleased him beyond measure. Such neatness and
comfort could only exist where there was a woman's eye to direct and
watch over everything. The rooms on the ground floor, which had been the
master's, should be his, and the corresponding wing on the other side
could be made ready for Philippus. The dining-room, the large
ante-chamber, and the viridarium would be common ground, and the upper
story was large enough for the women and any guests. He would move in as
soon as he had settled some business he had in hand.
It must be something of a pleasant nature, for as the old man spoke of it
his sunken lips mumbled with satisfaction, while his sparkling eyes
seemed to say to Pulcheria: "And I have something good in store for you,
too, dear child."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Thin-skinned, like all up-starts in authority
THE BRIDE OF THE NILE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 11.
CHAPTER XVII.
Paula passed a fearful night in the small, frightfully hot prison-cell in
which she and Betta were shut up. She could not sleep, and when once she
succeeded in closing her eyes she was roused by the yells and clanking
chains of the captives in the common prison and the heavy step of another
sufferer who paced the room overhead, even more restless than herself.
Poor fellow-victim! Was it a tortured conscience that drove him hither
and thither, or was he as innocent as she was, and was it longing, love,
and anxiety that bereft him of sleep?
He was no vulgar criminal. There was no room for those in this part of
the building; and at midnight, when the noise in the large hall was
suddenly silenced, soft sounds of the lute came down to her from his
cell, and only a master could strike the strings with such skill.
She cared nothing for the stranger; but she was grateful for his gift of
music, for it diverted her thoughts from herself, and she listened with
growing interest. Glad of an excuse for rising from her hard, hot bed,
she sprang up and placed herself close to the one window, an opening
barred with iron. But then the music ceased and a conversation began
between the warder and her fellow-prisoner.
What voice was that? Did she deceive herself, or hear rightly?
Her heart stood still while she listened; and now every doubt was
silenced: It was Orion, and none other, whom she heard speaking in the
room above. Then the warder spoke his name; they were talking of her
deceased uncle; and now, as if in obedience to some sign, they lowered
their voices. She heard whispering but could not distinguish what was
said. At length parting words were uttered in louder tones, the door of
the cell was locked and the prisoner approached his window.
At this she pressed her face close to the heated iron bars, looked
upwards, listened a moment and, as nothing was stirring, she said, first
softly, and then rather louder: "Orion, Orion!"
And, from above, her name was spoken in reply. She greeted him and asked
how and when he had come hither; but he interrupted her at the first
words with a decisive: "Silence!" adding in a moment, "Look out!"
She listened in expectancy; the minutes crept on at a snail's pace to a
full half hour before he at last said: "Now!" And, in a few moments, she
held in her hand a written scroll that he let down to her by a lutestring
weighted with a scrap of wood.
She had neither light nor fire, and the night was moonless. So she called
up "Dark!" and immediately added, as he had done: "Look out."
She then tied to the string the two best roses of those Pulcheria had
brought her, and at her glad "Now!" they floated up.
He expressed his thanks in a few low chords overflowing with yearning and
passion; then all was still, for the warder had forbidden him to sing or
play at night and he dared not risk losing the man's favor.
Paula laid down again with Orion's letter in her hand, and when she felt
slumber stealing upon her, she pushed it under her pillow and ere long
was sleeping on it. When they both woke, soon after sunrise, they had
been dreaming of each other and gladly hailed the return of day.
How furious Orion had felt when the prison door closed upon him! He
longed to wrench the iron bars from the window and kick down or force the
door; and there is no more humiliating and enraging feeling for a man
than that of finding himself shut up like a wild beast, cut off from the
world to which he belongs and which he needs, both to give him all that
makes life worth having, and to receive such good as he can do and give.
Yesterday their dungeon had seemed a foretaste of hell, they had each
been on the verge of despair; to-day what different feelings animated
them! Orion had been the victim of blow on blow from Fate--Paula had
looked forward to his return with an anxious and aching heart; to-day how
calm were their souls, though both stood in peril of death.
The legend tells us that St. Cecilia, who was led away to the rack from
her marriage feast, even in the midst of the torments of martyrdom,
listened in ecstasy to heavenly music and sweet echoes of the organ; and
how many have had the same experience! In the extremity of anguish and
danger they find greater joys than in the midst of splendor, ease and the
intoxicating pleasures of life; for what we call happiness is the
constant guest of those who have within reach that for which their souls
most ardently long, irrespective of place and outward circumstances.
So these two in their prison were what they had not been for a long time:
full of heartfelt bliss; Paula with his letter, which he had begun at the
Kadi's house, and in which he poured out his whole soul to her; Orion in
the possession of her roses, on which he feasted his eyes and heart, and
which lay before him while he wrote the following lines, which the
kindhearted warder willingly transmitted to her:
Lo! As night in its gloom and horror fell on my prison,
Methought the sun sank black, dark forever in death.
I drew thy roses up, and behold! from their crimson petals
Beamed a glory of light, a glow as of sunshine and day!
Love! Love is the star that rose with those fragrant flowers;
Rose, as Phoebus' car comes up from the tossing waves.
Is not the ardent flame of a heart that burns with passion
Like the sparkling glow-worm hid in the heart of the rose?
While it yet was day, and we breathed in freedom and gladness,
While the sun still shone, that light seemed small and dim;
But now, when night has fallen, sinister, dark, portentous,
Its kindly ray beams forth to raise our drooping souls.
As seeds in the womb of earth break from the brooding darkness,
Or as the soul soars free, heaven-seeking from the grave,
So the hopeless soil of a dungeon blossoms to rapture,
Blooms with roses of Love, more sweet than the wildling rose!
And when had Paula ever felt happier than at the moment when this
offering from her lover, this humble prison-flower, first reached her.
Old Betta could not hear the verses too often, and cried with joy, not at
the poem, but at the wonderful change it had produced in her darling.
Paula was now the radiant being that she had been at home on the Lebanon;
and when she appeared before the assembled judges in the hall of justice
they gazed at her in amazement, for never had a woman on her trial for
life or death stood in their presence with eyes so full of happiness. And
yet she was in evil straits. The just and clement Kadi, himself the
loving father of daughters, felt a pang at his heart as he noted the
delusive confidence which so evidently filled the soul of this noble
maiden.
Yes, she was in evil straits: a crushing piece of evidence was in their
hands, and the constitution of the court--which was in strict conformity
with the law must in itself be unfavorable to her. Her case was to be
tried by an equal number of Egyptians and of Arabs. The Moslems were
included because by her co-operation, Arabs had been slain; while Paula,
as a Christian and a resident in Memphis, came under the jurisdiction of
the Egyptians.
The Kadi presided, and experience had taught him that the Jacobite
members of the bench of judges kept the sentence of death in their
sleeves when the accused was of the Melchite confession. What had
especially prejudiced them against this beautiful creature he knew not;
but he easily discovered that they were hostile to the accused, and if
they should utter the verdict "guilty", and only two Arabs should echo
it, the girl's fate was sealed.
And what was the declaration which that whiterobed old man among the
witnesses desired to make--the venerable and learned Horapollo? The
glances he cast at Paula augured her no good.
It was so oppressively, so insufferably hot in the hall! Each one felt
the crushing influence, and in spite of the importance of the occasion,
the proceedings every now and then came to a stand-still and then were
hurried on again with unseemly haste.
The prisoner herself seemed happily to be quite fresh and not affected by
the sultriness of the day. It had cost her small effort to adhere to her
statement that she had had no share in the escape of the sisters, when
catechised by the ruffianly negro; but she found it hard to defy Othman's
benevolent questioning. However, there was no choice, and she succeeded
in proving that she had never quitted Memphis nor the house of Rufinus at
the time when the Arab warriors met their death between Athribis and
Doomiat. The Kadi endeavored to turn this to account for her advantage
and Obada, who had found much to whisper over with his grey-headed
neighbor on the bench reserved for witnesses, let him talk; but no sooner
had he ended than the Vekeel rose and laid before the judges the note he
had found in Orion's room.
It was undoubtedly in the young man's handwriting and addressed to Paula,
and the final words: "But do not misunderstand me. Your noble, and only
too well-founded desire to lend succor to your fellow-believers would
have sufficed. . . ." could not fail to make a deep impression. When the
Kadi questioned Paula, however, she replied with perfect truth that this
document was absolutely unknown to her; at the same time she did not deny
that the sisters of St. Cecilia, who were of her own confession, had
always had her warmest wishes, and that she had hoped they might succeed
in asserting their rights in opposition to the patriarch.
The deceased Mukaukas, and the Jacobite members of the town-council even,
had shared these feelings and the Arabs had never interfered with the
pious sicknurses.
The calm conciseness with which she made these statements had a favorable
effect, on her Moslem judges especially, and the Kadi began to have some
hopes for her; he desired that Orion should be called as being best able
to account for the meaning of the letter he had written but never sent.
On this the young man appeared, and though he and Paula did their utmost
to preserve a suitable demeanor, every one could see the violent
agitation they felt at meeting each other in such a situation. Horapollo
never took his eyes off Orion, whom he now saw for the first time, and
his features put on a darkening and menacing expression.
The young man acknowledged that he had written the letter in question,
but he and Paula alike referred it to the danger with which the
sisterhood had long been threatened from the patriarch's hostility. The
assistance which, in that document, he had refused he would have afforded
readily and zealously at a later and fit season, and he could have
counted on the aid of the Arab governor Amru, who, as he would himself
confirm, shared the views of the Mukaukas George as to the nuns' rights.
At this the old sage murmured loud enough to be heard: "Clever, very
clever!" and the Vekeel laughed aloud, exclaiming:
"I call that a cunning way of lengthening your days! Be on your guard, my
lords. These two are partners in the game and are intimately allied. I
have proof of that in my own hands. That youngster takes as good care of
the damsel's fortune as though it were his own already, and what is
more. . . . "
Here Paula broke in. She did not know what the malicious man was going to
say, but it was something insulting beyond a doubt. And there stood
Orion, just as she had pictured him in moments of tender remembrance; she
felt his eye resting on her in ecstasy. To go up to him, to tell him all
she was feeling in this critical struggle for life or death, seemed
impossible; but as the Vekeel began to disclose to their judges matters
which concerned only herself and her lover, every impulse prompted her to
interpose and, in this fateful hour, to do her friend such service as she
once, like a coward, had shrank from. So with eager emotion, her eyes
flashing, she interrupted the negro "Stop!" she cried, "you are wasting
words and trouble. What you are trying to prove by subtlety I am proud
and glad to declare. Hear it, all of you. The son of the Mukaukas is my
betrothed!"
At the same time her eye sought to meet Orion's. And thus, in the very
extremity of danger, they enjoyed a solemn moment of the purest, deepest
happiness. Paula's eyes were moist with grateful tenderness, when Orion
exclaimed:
"You have heard from her own lips what makes the greatest bliss of my
life. The noble daughter of Thomas is my promised bride!"
There was a murmur among the Jacobite judges. 'Till this moment several
of them, oppressed by the heat, had sat dreaming with their heads sunk on
their breasts, but now they were suddenly as wide-awake and alert as
though a jet of cold water had been turned on to them, and one cried out:
"And your father, young man? You have forgotten him in a hurry! What
would he have said to such a disgrace to his blood as your marriage to a
Melchite, the daughter of those who caused your two brothers to be
murdered? Oh! if the dead could. . . ."
"He blessed our union on his death-bed," Orion put in.
"Did he, indeed?" asked another Jacobite with sarcastic scorn. "Then the
patriarch was in the right when he refused to let the priests follow his
corpse. That I should live to be witness to such crimes!"
But such words fell on the ears of the enraptured pair like the chirping
of crickets. They felt, they cared for nothing but what this blissful
moment had brought them, and never suspected that Paula's glad avowal had
sealed her death-warrant.
The wrath of the Jacobite faction now hastened the end. The prosecutor,
an Arab, now represented how many Moslems had lost their lives in the
affair of the nuns, and once more read Orion's letter. His Christian
colleagues tried to prove that this document could only refer to the
flight, so ingeniously plotted, of the sisters; and now something quite
new and unlooked-for occurred, which gave a fresh turn to the
proceedings: the old man interrupted the Kadi to make a statement. At
this Paula's confidence rose again for the last speaker had somewhat
shaken it. She felt sure that the tried friend and adoptive father of her
faithful Philippus would take her part.
But what was this?
The old man seemed to measure her height in a glance which struck to her
heart with its fierce enmity, and then he said deliberately:
"On the morning of the nuns' flight the accused, Paula, went to the
convent and there tolled the bell. Contradict me if you can, proud
prefect's daughter; but I warn you beforehand, that in that case, I shall
be compelled to bring forward fresh charges."
At this the horror-stricken girl pictured to herself the widow and
daughter of Rufinus at her side on the condemned bench before the judges,
and felt that denial would drag her friends to destruction with her; with
quivering lips she confirmed the old man's statement.
"And why did you toll the bell?" asked the Kadi.
"To help them," replied Paula. "They are my fellow-believers, and I love
them."
"She was the originator of the treasonable and bloody scheme," cried the
Vekeel, "and did it for no other purpose than to cheat us, the rulers of
this country."
The Kadi however signed to him to be silent and bid the Jacobite counsel
for the accused speak next. He had seen her early in the day, and came
forward in the Egyptian manner with a written defence in his hand; but it
was a dull formal performance and produced no effect; though the Kadi did
his utmost to give prominence to every point that might help to justify
her, she was pronounced guilty.
Still, could her crime be held worthy of death? It was amply proved that
she had had a hand in the rescue of the nuns; but it was no less clear
that she had been far enough away from the sisters and their defenders
when the struggle with the Arabs took place. And she was a woman, and how
pardonable it seemed in a pious maiden that she should help the
fellow-believers whom she loved to evade persecution.
All this Othman pointed out in eloquent words, repeatedly and sternly
silencing the Vekeel when he sought to argue in favor of the sentence of
death; and the humane persuasiveness of the lenient judge won the hearts
of most of the Moslems.
Paula's appearance had a powerful effect, too, and not less the
circumstance that their noblest and bravest foe had been the father of
the accused.
When at length it was put to the vote the extraordinary result was that
all her fellow Christians--the Jacobites--without exception demanded her
death, while of the infidels on the judges' bench only one supported this
severe meed of punishment.
Sentence was pronounced, and as the Vekeel Obada passed close to
Orion--who was led back to his cell pale and hardly master of himself--he
said, mocking him in broken Greek: "It will be your turn to-morrow, Son
of the Mukaukas!"
Orion's lips framed the retort: "And yours, too, some day, Son of a
Slave!"--but Paula was standing opposite, and to avoid infuriating her
foe he was able to do what he never could have done else: to let the
Vekeel and Horapollo pass on without a word in reply.
As soon as the door was closed on this couple, Othman nodded approvingly
at Orion and said:
"Rightly and wisely done, my friend! The eagle should never forget that
he must not use his pinions in a cage as he does between the desert and
the sky."
He signed to the guards to lead him away, and stood apart while the young
man looked and waived an adieu to his betrothed.
Finally the Kadi went up to Paula, whose heroic composure as she heard
the sentence of death had filled him with admiration.
"The court has decided against you, noble maiden," he said. "But its
verdict can he overruled by the clemency of our Sovereign Lord the
Khaliff and the mercy of God the compassionate. Do you pray to Him--I and
a few friends will appeal to the Khaliff."
He disclaimed her gratitude, and when she, too, had been led away he
added, in the figurative language of his nation, to the friends who were
waiting for him:
"My heart aches! To have to pronounce such a verdict oppressed me like a
load; but to have an Obada for a fellow Moslem and be bound to obey
him--there is no heavier lot on earth!"
CHAPTER XVIII.
The mysterious old sage had no sooner left the judgment-hall with the
Vekeel than he begged for a private interview. Obada did not hesitate to
turn the keeper of the prison, with his wife and infant, out of his room,
and there he listened while Horapollo informed him of the fate to which
he destined the condemned girl. The old man's scheme certainly found
favor with the Negro; still, it seemed to him in many respects so daring
that, but for an equivalent service which Horapollo was in a position to
offer Obada, he would scarcely have succeeded in obtaining his consent.
All the Vekeel aimed at was to make it very certain that Orion had had a
hand in the flight of the nuns, and chance had placed a document in the
old man's hands which seemed to set this beyond a doubt.
He had effected his removal to the widow's dwelling in the cool hours of
early morning. He had taken with him, in the first instance, only the
most valuable and important of his manuscripts, and as he was placing
these in a small desk--the very same which Rufinus had left for Paula's
use--Horapollo found in it the note which the youth had hastily written
when, after waiting in vain for Paula as she sat with little Mary, he had
at last been obliged to depart and take leave of Amru. This wax-tablet,
on which the writing was much defaced and partly illegible, could not
fail to convince the judges of Orion's guilt, and the production of this
piece of evidence enabled the old man to extort Obada's consent to his
proposal as to the mode of Paula's death. When they finally left the
warder's room, the Negro once more turned to the keeper of the prison and
told him with a snort, as he pointed to his pretty wife and the child at
her breast, that they should all three die if he allowed Orion to quit
his cell for so much as an instant.
He then swung himself on to his horse, while Horapollo rode off to the
Curia to desire the president of the council to call a meeting for that
evening; then he betook himself to his new quarters.
There he found his room carefully shaded, and as cool as was possible in
such heat. The floor had been sprinkled with water, flowers stood
wherever there was room for them, and all his properties in scrolls and
other matters had found places in chests or on shelves. There was not a
speck of dust to be seen, and a sweet pervading perfume greeted his
sensitive nostrils.
What a good exchange he had made! He rubbed his withered hands with
satisfaction as he seated himself in his accustomed chair, and when Mary
came to call him to dinner, it was a pleasure to him to jest with her.
Pulcheria must lead him through the viridarium into the dining-room; he
enjoyed his meal, and his cross, wrinkled old face lighted up amazingly
as he glanced round at his feminine associates; only Eudoxia was absent,
confined to her room by some slight ailment. He had something pleasant to
say to each; he frankly compared his former circumstances with his
present position, without disguising his heartfelt thankfulness; then,
with a merry glance at Pulcheria, he described how delightful it would be
when Philippus should come home to make the party complete--a true and
perfect star: for every Egyptian star must have five rays. The ancients
had never painted one otherwise nor graven it in stone; nay, they had
used it as the symbol for the number five.
At this Mary exclaimed: "But then I hope--I hope we shall make a
six-rayed star; for by that time poor Paula may be with us again!"
"God grant it!" sighed Dame Joanna. Pulcheria, however, asked the old man
what was wrong with him, for his face had suddenly clouded. His
cheerfulness had vanished, his tufted eyebrows were raised, and his
pinched lips seemed unwilling to part, when at length he reluctantly
said:
"Nothing--nothing is wrong. . . . At the same time; once for all--I loathe
that name."
"Paula?" cried the child in astonishment. "Oh! but if you knew. . ."
"I know more than enough," interrupted the old man. "I love you all--all;
my old heart expands as I sit in your midst; I am comfortable here, I
feel kindly towards you, I am grateful to you; every little attention you
show me does me good; for it comes from your hearts: if I could repay you
soon and abundantly--I should grow young again with joy. You may believe
me, as I can see indeed that you do. And yet," and again his brows went
up, "and yet, when I hear that name, and when you try to win me over to
that woman, or if you should even go so far as to assail my ears with her
praises--then, much as it would grieve me, I would go back again to the
place where I came from."
"Why, Horapollo, what are you saying?" cried Joanna, much distressed.
"I say," the old man went on, "I say that in her everything is
concentrated which I most hate and contemn in her class. I say that she
bears in her bosom a cold and treacherous heart; that she blights my days
and my nights; in short, that I would rather be condemned to live under
the same roof with clammy reptiles and cold-blooded snakes than. . ."
"Than with her, with Paula?" Mary broke in. The eager little thing sprang
to her feet, her eyes flashed lightnings and her voice quivered with
rage, as she exclaimed: "And you not only say it but mean it? Is it
possible?"
"Not only possible, but positive, sweetheart," replied the old man,
putting out his hand to take hers, but she shrank back, exclaiming
vehemently:
"I will not be your sweetheart, if you speak so of her! A man as old as
you are ought to be just. You do not know her at all, and what you say
about her heart. . ."
"Gently, gently, child," the widow put in; and Horapollo answered with
peculiar emphasis.
"That heart, my little whirlwind!--it would be well for us all if we
could forget it, forget it for good or for evil. She has been tried
to-day, and that heart is sentenced to cease beating."
"Sentenced! Merciful Heaven!" shrieked Pulcheria, and as she started up
her mother cried out:
"For God's sake do not jest about such things, it is a sin.--Is it
true?--Is it possible? Those wretches, those . . . I see in your face it
is true; they have condemned Paula."
"As you say," replied Horapollo calmly. "The girl is to be executed."
"And you only tell us now?" wept Pulcheria, while Mary broke out:
"And yet you have been able to jest and laugh, and you--I hate you! And
if you were not such a helpless, old, old man. . ." But here Joanna again
silenced the child, and she asked between her sobs:
"Executed?--Will they cut off her head? And is there no mercy for her who
was as far away from that luckless fight as we were--for her, a girl, and
the daughter of Thomas?"
To which the old man replied:
"Wait a while, only wait! Heaven has perhaps chosen her for great ends.
She may be destined to save a whole country and nation from destruction
by her death. It is even possible. . ."
"Speak out plainly; you make me shudder with your oracular hints," cried
the widow; but he only shrugged his shoulders and said coolly:
"What we foresee is not yet known. Heaven alone can decide in such a
case. It will be well for us all--for me, for her, for Pulcheria, and
even our absent Philip, if the divinity selects her as its instrument.
But who can see into darkness? If it is any comfort to you, Joanna, I can
inform you that the soft-hearted Kadi and his Arab colleagues, out of
sheer hatred of the Vekeel, who is immeasurably their superior in talent
and strength of will, will do everything in their power. . . ." "To save
her?" exclaimed the widow.
"To-morrow they will hold council and decide whether to send a messenger
to Medina to implore pardon for her," Horapollo went on with a horrible
smile. "The day after they will discuss who the messenger is to be, and
before he can reach Arabia fate will have overtaken the prisoner. The
Vekeel Obada moves faster than they do, and the power lies in his hands
so long as Amru is absent from Egypt. He, they say, perfectly dotes on
the Mukaukas' son, and for his sake--who knows? Paula as his betrothed."
"His betrothed?"
"He called her by that name before the judges, and congratulated himself
on his promised bride."
"Paula and Orion!" cried Pulcheria, jubilant in the midst of her tears,
and clapping her hands for joy.
"A pair indeed!" said the old man. "You may well rejoice, my girl! Feeble
hearts as you all are, respect the experience of the aged, and bless Fate
if it should lame the horse of the Kadi's messenger!--However, you will
not listen to anything oracular, so it will be better to talk of
something else."
"No, no," cried Joanna. "What can we think of but her and her fate? Oh,
Horapollo, I do not know you in this mood. What has that poor soul done
to you, persecuted as she is by the hardest fate--that noble creature who
is so dear to us all? And do you forget that the judges who have
sentenced her will now proceed to enquire what Rufinus, and we all of us.
. ."
"What you had to do with that mad scheme of rescue?" interrupted
Horapollo. "I will make it my business to prevent that. So long as this
old brain is able to think, and this mouth to speak, not a hair of your
heads shall be hurt."
"We are grateful to you," said Joanna. "But, if you have such power, set
to work--you know how dear Paula is to us all, how highly your friend
Philip esteems her--use your power to save her."
"I have no power, and refuse to have any," retorted the old man harshly."
"But Horapollo, Horapollo!--Come here, children!--We were to find in you
a second father--so you promised. Then prove that those were no empty
words, and be entreated by us."
The old man drew a deep breath; he rose to his feet with such vigor as he
could command, a bright, sharply-defined patch of color tinged each pale
cheek, and he exclaimed in husky tones:
"Not another word! No attempt to move me, not a cry of lamentation!
Enough, and a thousand times too much, of that already. You have heard
me, and I now say again--me or Paula, Paula or me. Come what may in the
future, if you cannot so far control yourselves as never to mention her
in my presence, I--no, I do not swear, but when I have said a thing I
keep to it--I will go back to my old den and drag out life the richer by
a disappointment--or die, as my ruling goddess shall please."
With this he left the room, and little Mary raised her clenched right
fist and shook it after him, exclaiming: "Then let him go, hard-hearted,
unjust, old scarecrow! Oh, if only I were a man!" And she burst out
crying aloud. Heedless of the widow's reproof, she went on quite beside
herself: "Oh, there is no one more wicked than he is, Dame Joanna! He
wants to see her die, he wishes her to be dead; I know it, he even wishes
it! Did you hear him, Pul, he would be glad if the messenger's horse went
lame before he could save her? And now she is my Orion's betrothed--I
always meant them for each other--and they want to kill him, too, but
they shall not, if there is still a God of justice in heaven! Oh if I--if
I. . ." Her voice failed her, choked with sobs. When she had somewhat
recovered she implored Pulcheria and her mother to take her to see Paula,
and as they shared her wish they prepared to start for the prison before
it should grow dark.
The nearer they went to the market-place, which they must cross, the more
crowded were the streets. Every one was going the same way; the throng
almost carried the women with it; yet, from the market came, as it were,
a contrary torrent of shouts and shrieks from a myriad of human throats.
Dame Joanna was terrified in the press by the uproarious doings in the
market, and she would gladly have turned back with the girls, or have
made her way through by-streets, but the tide bore her on, and it would
have been easier to swim against a swollen mountain stream than to return
home. Thus they soon reached the square, but there they were brought to a
standstill in the crush.
The widow's terrors now increased. It was dreadful to be kept fast with
the young people in such a mob. Pulcheria clung closely to her, and when
she bid Mary take her hand the child, who thoroughly enjoyed the
adventure, exclaimed: "Only look, Mother Joanna, there is our Rustem. He
is taller than any one."
"If only he were by our side!" sighed the widow. At this the little girl
snatched away her hand, made her way with the nimbleness of a squirrel
through the mass of men, and soon had reached the Masdakite. Rustem had
not yet quitted Memphis, for the first caravan, which he and his little
wife were to join, was not to start for a few days. The worthy Persian
and Mary were very good friends; as soon as he heard that his
benefactress was alarmed he pushed his way to her, with the child, and
the widow breathed more freely when he offered to remain near her and
protect her.
Meanwhile the yelling and shouting were louder than ever. Every face,
every eye was turned to the Curia, in the evident expectation of
something great and strange taking place there.
"What is it?" asked Mary, pulling at Rustem's coat. The giant said
nothing, but he stooped, and to her delight, a moment later she had her
feet on his arms, which he folded across his chest, and was settling
herself on his broad shoulder whence she could survey men and things as
from a tower. Joanna laid her hand in some tremor on the child's little
feet, but Mary called down to her: "Mother--Pulcheria--I am quite sure
our old Horapollo's white ass is standing in front of the Curia, and they
are putting a garland round the beast's neck--a garland of olive."
At this moment the blare of a tuba rang out from the Senate-house across
the square, through the suffocatingly hot, quivering air; a sudden
silence fell and spread till, when a man opened his mouth to shout or to
speak, a neighbor gave him a shove and bid him hold his tongue. At this
the widow held Mary's ankles more tightly, asking, while she wiped the
drops from her brow:
"What is going on?" and the child answered quickly, never taking her eyes
off the scene:
"Look, look up at the balcony of the Curia; there stands the chief of the
Senate--Alexander the dyer of purple--he often used to come to see my
grandfather, and grandmother could not bear his wife. And by his side--do
you not see who the man is close by him?
"It is old Horapollo. He is taking the laurel-crown off his
wig!--Alexander is going to speak."
She was interrupted by another trumpet call, and immediately after a
loud, manly voice was heard from the Curia, while the silence was so
profound that even the widow and her daughter lost very little of the
speech which followed:
"Fellow-citizens, Memphites, and comrades in misfortune," the president
began in slow, ringing tones, "you know what the sufferings are which we
all share. There is not a woe that has not befallen us, and even worse
loom before us."
The crowd expressed their agreement by a fearful outcry, but they were
reduced to silence by the sound of the tuba, and the speaker went on:
"We, the Senate, the fathers of the city, whom you have entrusted with
the care of your persons and your welfare. . ."
At this point he was interrupted by wild yells, and cries could be
distinguished of: "Then take care of us--do your duty!"
"Money bags!"
"Keep your pledge!"
"Save us from destruction!"
The trumpet call, however, again silenced them, and the speaker went on,
almost beside himself with vehement excitement.
"Hearken! Do not interrupt me! The dearth and misery fall on our heads as
much as on yours. My own wife and son died of the plague last night!"
At this only a low murmur ran through the crowd, and it died away of its
own accord as the dignified old man on the balcony wiped his eyes and
went on:
"If there is a single man among you who can prove us guilty of neglect--a
man, woman, or child--let him accuse us before God, before our new ruler
the Khaliff, and yourselves, the citizens of Memphis; but not now, my
fellow-sufferers, not now! At this time cease your cries and
lamentations; now when rescue is in sight. Listen to me, and let us know
what you feel with regard to the last and uttermost means of deliverance
which I now come to propose to you."
"Silence! Hear him! Down with the noisy ones!" was heard on all sides,
and the orator went on:
"We, as Christians, in the first instance addressed ourselves to our
Father in Heaven, to our one and only divine Redeemer, and to His Holy
Church to aid us; and I ask you: Has there been any lack of prayers,
processions, pilgrimages, and pious gifts? No, no, my beloved
fellow-citizens! Each one be my witness--certainly not! But Heaven has
remained blind and deaf and dumb in sight of our need, yea as though
paralyzed. And yet no; not indeed paralyzed, for it has been powerful and
swift to move only to heap new woes upon us. Not a thing that human
foresight and prudence could devise or execute has remained untried.
"The time-honored arts of the magicians, sorcerers, and diviners, which
aforetime have often availed to break the powers of evil spirits, have
proved no less delusive and ineffectual. So then we remembered our
glorious forefathers and ancestors, and we recollected that a man lives
in our midst who knew many things which we others have lost sight of in
the lapse of years. He has made the wisdom of our forefathers his own in
the course of a long life of laborious days and nights. He has the key to
the writing and the secrets of the ancients, and he has communicated to
us the means of deliverance to which they resorted, when they suffered
from such afflictions as have befallen us in these dreadful days; and
this venerable man at my side, the wise and truthful Horapollo, will
acquaint us with it. You see the antique scrolls in his hand: They teach
us the wonders it wrought in times past."
Here the speaker was interrupted by a cry of: "Hail Horapollo, the
Deliverer!" and thousands took it up and expressed their satisfaction and
gratitude by loud shouting.
The old man bowed modestly, pointed to his narrow chest and toothless
mouth and then to the head of the Council as the man who had undertaken
to transmit his opinion to the populace; so Alexander went on:
"Great favors, my friends and fellow-citizens, must be purchased by great
gifts. The ancients knew this, and when the river--on which, as we know
only too well, the weal or woe of this land solely depends--refused to
rise, and its low ebb brought evils of many kinds upon its banks, they
offered in sacrifice the thing they deemed most noble of all the earth
has to show a pure and beautiful maiden.
"It is just as we expected: you are horrified! I hear your murmur, I see
your horror-stricken faces; how can a Christian fail to be shocked at the
thought of such a victim? But is it indeed so extraordinary? Have we ever
wholly given up everything of the kind? Which of us does not entreat
Saint Orion, either at home or under the guidance of the priests in
church, whenever he craves a gift from our splendid river; and this very
year as usual, on the Night of Dropping, did we not cast into the waters
a little box containing a human finger.
[So late as in the XIV. century after Christ the Egyptian Christians
still threw a small casket containing a human finger into the Nile
to induce it to rise. This is confirmed by the trustworthy
Makrizi.]
"This lesser offering takes the place of the greater and more precious
sacrifice of the heathen; it has been offered, and its necessity has
never at any time been questioned; even the severest and holiest
luminaries of the Church--Antonius and Athanasius, Theophilus and
Cyrillus had nothing to say against it, and year after year it has been
thrown into the waters under their very eyes.
"A finger in a box! What a miserable exchange for the fairest and purest
that God has allowed to move on earth among men. Can we wonder if the
Almighty has at last disdained and rejected the wretched substitute, and
claims once more for His Nile that which was formerly given? But where is
the mother, where is the father, you will ask, who, in our selfish days,
is so penetrated with love for his country, his province, his native
town, that he will dedicate his virgin daughter to perish in the waters
for the common good? What daughter of our nation is ready of her own free
will to die for the salvation of others?
"But be not afraid. Have no fears for the growing maiden, the very apple
of your eye, in your women's rooms. Fear not for your granddaughters,
sisters, playfellows and betrothed: From the earliest ages a stringent
law forbade the sacrifice of Egyptian blood; strangers were to perish, or
those who worshipped other gods than those in Egypt.
"The same law, citizens and fellow-believers, is incumbent on us. And
mark me well, all of you! Would it not seem as though Fate desired to
help us to bring to our blessed Nile the offering which for so many
centuries has been withheld? The river claims it; and, as if by a
miracle, it has been brought to our hand. For a crime which does not
taint her purity our judges have to-day condemned to death a beautiful
and spotless maiden--a stranger, and at the same time a Greek and a
heretic Melchite.
"This stirs you, this fills your souls with joyful thankfulness; I see
it! Then make ready for thy bridal, noble stream, Benefactor of our land
and nation! The virgin, the bride that thou hast longed for, we deck for
thee, we lead to thine embrace--she shall be Thine!
"And you, Memphites, citizens and fellow-sufferers," and the orator
leaned far over the parapet towards the crowd, "when I ask you for your
suffrages, when I appeal to you in the name of the senate, and of this
venerable sage. . . ."
But here he was interrupted by the triumphant shout of the assembled
multitude; a thousand voices went up in a mighty, heaven-rending cry:
"To the Nile with her--the maiden to the Nile!"
"Marry the Melchite to the river! Bring wreaths for the bride of the
Nile, bring flowers for her marriage."
"Let us abide by the teaching of our fathers!"
"Hail to the councillor! Hail to the sage, Horapollo! Hail to our chief
Senator!"
These were the glad and enthusiastic shouts that rose in loud confusion;
and it was only on the north side, where the money-changers' tables now
stood deserted-for gold and silver had long since been placed in
safety--that a sinister murmur of dissent was heard. The little girl in
the Persian's arms had long since been breathing hard and deep. She
thought she knew whom that fiend up there had his eye upon for his cursed
heathen sacrifice; and as Mary bent down to Dame Joanna to see whether
she shared her hideous suspicion, she perceived that her eyes and
Pulcheria's were full of tears.--That was enough; she asked no questions,
for a new act in the drama claimed her attention.
Close to the money-changer's stalls a hand was lifted on high, holding a
crucifix, and the child could see it steadily progressing through the
crowd towards the Curia. Every one made way for the sacred symbol and the
bearer of it; and to Mary's fancy the throng parted on each side of the
advancing image of the Redeemer, as the waters of the Red Sea had parted
at the approach of the people of God. The murmurs in that part of the
square grew louder; the acclamations of the populace waxed fainter; every
voice seemed to fail, and presently a frail figure in bishop's robes,
small but rigidly dignified, was seen to mount the steps and finally
disappear within the portals of the Curia.
The turmoil sank like an ebbing wave to a low, enquiring mutter, and even
this died away when the diminutive personage, who looked the taller,
however, for the crucifix which he still held, came out on the balcony,
approached the parapet, and stretched forth the arm that held the image
above the heads of the foremost rows of the people.
At this Horapollo stepped up to Alexander, his eyes flashing with rage,
and demanded that the intruder should be forbidden to speak; but the
commanding eye of the new-comer rested on the dyer, who bowed his head
and allowed him to proceed. Nor did one of the senators dare to hinder
him, for every one recognized him as the zealous, learned, and determined
priest who had, since yesterday, filled the place of the deceased bishop.
Their new pastor began, addressing his flock in as loud a voice as he
could command:
"Look on this Cross and hearken to its minister! You languish for the
blessing of Christ, and you follow after heathen abominations. The
superstitious triumph, through which I have struggled to reach you, will
be turned to howls of anguish if you stop your ears and are deaf to the
words of salvation.
"Yea, you may murmur! You will not reduce me to silence, for Truth speaks
in me and can never be dumb. I say to each of you that knows it not: The
staff of the departed Plotinus has been placed in my hands. I would fain
bear it with gentleness and mercy; but, if I must, I will wield it as a
sword and a scourge till your wounds bleed and your bruises ache.
"Behold in my right hand the image of your Redeemer! I hold it up as a
wall between you and the heathen abomination which you hail with joy in
your blindness.
"Ye are accursed and apostate. Lift up your hearts, and look at Him who
died on the cross to save you. Verily He will not let him perish who
believeth in Him; but you! where is your faith? Because it is night ye
lament and cry: The Light is dead!' Because ye are sick ye say: 'The
physician cannot heal!'
"What are these blasphemies that I hear: 'The Lord and His Church are
powerless! Magic, enchantments, and heathen abominations may save
us.'--But, inasmuch as ye trust not in the true Saviour and Redeemer, but
in heathen wickedness, magic, and enchantments, punishment shall be
heaped on punishment; and so it will be,--I see it coming--till ye are
choked in the mud and seek with groans the only Hand that is able to
save.
"That whereby the blinded sons of men hope to escape from the evil, that,
and that only, is the source of their sufferings and I stand here to stay
that spring and dig a channel for its overflow.
"Children of Moloch ye try to be and I hope to make you Christians again.
But the maiden whom your fury would cast into the abyss of the river is
under the merciful protection of the supreme Church, for the death of her
body will bring death to your souls. Saint Orion turns from you with
horror! Away from the hapless victim! Away, I say, with your accursed
desires and sacrilegious hands!"
"And sit with them in our laps and wring them in prayer till they ache,
while want and the plague snatch away those that are left!" interrupted
the old man's voice, thin and feeble, but audible at a considerable
distance, and from the market-place thousands proclaimed their approval
by loud shouts.
The president of the senate had listened with a penitent mien and bowed
head, but now he recovered his presence of mind and exclaimed
indignantly:
"The people die, the town and country are going to ruin, plague and
horrors rise up from the river. Show us some other way of escape, or let
us trust to our forefathers and try this last means."
But the little man drew himself up more stiffly, pointed with his left
hand to the crucifix, and cried with unmoved composure:
"Believe, hope, and pray!"
"Perhaps you think that no evil is come upon us!" cried Alexander. "You,
to be sure, have seen no wife with glazing eyes, no child struggling for
breath. . . ." And a fresh tumult came up from below, wilder and louder
than ever. Each one whose home or beasts had been blighted by death,
whose gardens and fields had perished of drought, whose dates had dropped
one by one from the trees, lifted up his voice and shrieked:
"The victim, the victim!"
"To the river with the maiden!"
"All hail to our deliverer, the wise Horapollo!" But others shouted
against them:
"Let us remain Christians! Hail to Bishop John!"
"Think of our souls!"
The prelate made an effort once more to rivet the attention of the
populace, and failing in this he turned to the senators and the
trumpeters, whom at length he succeeded in persuading to blow again and
again, and more loudly through their brazen tuba. But the call produced
no effect, for in the market square groups had formed on opposite sides,
and blows and wrestling threatened to end in a sanguinary street-riot.
The women succeeded in getting away from the scene of action under the
protection of the Masdakite, before the Arab cavalry rode across to
separate the combatants; but in the Curia Bishop John explained to the
Fathers that he would make every effort to prevent this inhuman and
unchristian sacrifice of a young girl, even though she was a Melchite and
under sentence of death. This very day a carrier pigeon should be
dispatched to the patriarch in Upper Egypt, and bring back his decision.
When, on this, Horapollo replied that the Khaliff's representative here
had signified his consent to the proceedings, and that even against the
will of the clergy the misery of the people must be put an end to, the
Bishop broke out vehemently and threatened all who had first suggested
this hideous scheme with the anathema of the Church. But Horapollo
retorted again with flaming eloquence, the desperate Senators took his
part, and the Bishop left the Curia in the highest wrath.
CHAPTER XIX.
Few things could be more intolerable to the gentle and retiring widow
than such a riot of the people. The unchained passion, the tumult, and
all the vulgar accessories that surrounded her there grieved her tender
nature; all through the old man's speech she had felt nothing but the
desire to escape, but as soon as she had acquired the certainty that
Paula was the hapless being whom her terrible house-mate was preparing to
hand over to the superstition of the mob, she thought no more of getting
home, but waited in the crush till at length she and the two children
could be conducted by Rustem to the prison, though the way thither was
through the most crowded streets.
Had the nameless horrors that hung over Paula already found their way to
her ears through the prisonwalls, or might it yet be her privilege to be
able to prepare the girl for the worst, and to comfort the victim who
must already have been driven to the verge of desperation by the sentence
of death?
On the previous day the chief warder had acceded without demur to her
wish to see Paula, for the Kadi had enjoined him to show her and Orion
all possible courtesy, but the Vekeel's threats made him now refuse to
admit Dame Joanna. However, while he was talking with her, his infant son
stretched out his arms to Pulcheria, who had played with him the day
before in her sweet way, and she now took him up and kissed him, thus
bringing a kindly feeling to three hearts at once; and most of all to
that of the child's mother who immediately interested herself for them,
and persuaded her husband to oblige them once more.
Pretty Emau had always waited on the mirthful Orion, under the palms by
her father's inn, more gladly than on most other guests; and her husband
who, after the manner of the Egyptians, was docile to his better half
though till now he had not been quite free from jealousy, was even more
ready to serve his benefactor's son since hearing that he was betrothed
to the fair Paula.
There was a great uproar in the large common prison to-day, as usual when
the judges had passed sentence of death on any criminal, and the women
shuddered as the miserable wretches hallooed and bellowed. Many a shriek
came up, of which it was hard to say whether it was the expression of
wild defiance or of bitter jesting, and no more suitable accompaniment
could be conceived to this terrific riot than the clank of chains.
When the women reached Paula's cell their hearts throbbed painfully, for
within the door which the warder unlocked anguish and despair must dwell.
The prisoner was standing at the window, pressing her brow against the
iron bars and listening to the lute played by her lover, which sounded,
amid the turmoil of the other prisoners, like a bell above the roar of
thunder and the storm. By the bed sat Betta on a low stool, asleep with
the distaff in her lap; and neither she nor her mistress heeded the
entrance of the visitors. A miserable lamp lighted the squalid room.
Mary would have flown to her friend, but Joanna held her back and called
Paula tenderly by name in a low voice. But Paula did not hear; her soul
was no doubt absorbed in anguish and the terror of death. The widow now
raised her voice, and the ill-fated girl turned round; then, with a
little cry of joy, she hastened to meet the faithful creatures who could
find her even in prison, and clasped first the widow, then Pulcheria,
then the child in a tender embrace. Joanna put her hands fondly round her
face to kiss it, and to see how far fear and affliction had altered her
lovely features, and a faint cry of astonishment escaped her, for she was
looking, not at a grief and terror-stricken face, but a glad and calm
one, and a pair of large eyes looked brightly and gratefully into hers.
Had she not been told then what was hanging over her? Nay--for she at
once asked whether they had heard that she was condemned to die. And she
went on to tell them how things had gone with her at her trial, and how
her good Philip's friend and foster-father had suddenly and inexplicably
become her bitterest foe.
At this the others could not check their tears; it was Paula who had to
comfort and soothe them, by telling them that she had found a paternal
friend in the Kadi who had promised to intercede for her with the
Khaliff.
Dame Joanna could scarcely take it all in. This girl and her heroic
demeanor, in the face of such disaster, seemed to her miraculous. Her
trust was beautiful; but how easily might it be deceived! how insecure
was the ground in which she had cast the anchor of hope.
Even little Mary seemed more troubled than her friend, and threw herself
sobbing on her bosom. And Paula returned her fondness, and tried to
mollify Pulcheria as to the disgraceful conduct of their old housemate,
and smiled kindly at the widow when she asked where she had found such
composure in the face of so much misfortune, saying that it was from her
example that she had learnt resignation to the worst that could befall
her. Even in this dark hour she found more to be thankful for than to
lament over; indeed, it had brought her a glorious joy. And this for the
first time reminded Joanna and the girls that she was now betrothed, and
again she was clasped in their loving arms.
Just then the warder rapped; Paula rose thoughtfully, and exclaimed in a
low voice: "I have something to send to Orion that I dare not entrust to
a stranger: but now, now I have you, my Mary, and you shall take it to
him."
As she spoke she took out the emerald, gave it to the little girl, and
charged her to deliver it to her uncle as soon as they should be alone
together. In the little note which she had wrapped around it she implored
her lover to regard it as his own property, and to use it to satisfy the
claims of the Church.
The man was easily induced to take Mary to her uncle; and how happily she
ran on before him up to Orion's cell, how great was his joy at seeing her
again, how gratefully he pressed the emerald to his lips! But when she
exclaimed that her prophecy had been fulfilled, and that Paula, was now
his, his brow was knit as he replied, with gloomy regret, that though he
had won the woman he loved, it was only to lose her again.
"But the Kadi is your friend and will gain pardon from the Khaliff!"
cried the child.
"But then another enemy suddenly starts up: Horapollo!"
"Oh, our old man!" and the child ground her teeth. "If you did but know,
Orion!--And to think that I must live under the same roof with him!"
"You!" asked the young man.
"Yes, I. And Pulcheria, and Mother Joanna," and Mary went on to tell him
how the old man had come to live with them and Orion could guess from
various indications that she was concealing some important fact; so he
pressed her to keep nothing from him, till the child could not at last
evade telling him all she had seen and heard.
At this he lost all caution and self-control. Quite beside himself he
called aloud the name of his beloved, invoking in passionate tones the
return of the Governor Amru, the only man who could help them in this
crisis. His sole hope was in him. He had shown himself a real father to
him, and had set him a difficult but a noble task.
"Into which you have plunged over head and ears!" cried the child.
"I thought it all out while on my journey," replied Orion. "I tried
yesterday to write out a first sketch of it, but I lacked what I most
wanted: maps and lists. Nilus had put them all up together; I was to have
taken them with me on the voyage with the nuns, and I ordered that they
should be carried to the house of Rufinus. . . ."
"That they should come to us?" interrupted the child with sparkling eyes.
"Oh, they are all there! I saw the documents myself, when the chest was
cleared out for old Horapollo, and to-morrow, quite early to-morrow, you
shall have them." Orion kissed her brow with glad haste; then, striking
the wall of his cell with his fist, he waited till something had been
withdrawn with a grating sound on the other side, and exclaimed:
"Good news, Nilus! The plans and lists are found: I shall have them
to-morrow!"
"That is well!" replied the treasurer's thin voice from the adjoining
room. "We shall need something to comfort us! A prisoner has just been
brought in for having attacked an Arab horseman in a riot in the market
square. He tells me some dreadful news."
"Concerning my betrothed?"
"Alas! yes, my lord."
"Then I know it already," replied the young man; and after exchanging a
few words with his master with reference to the old man's atrocious
proposal, Nilus went on:
"My prison-mate tells me, too, that while he was in custody in the
guard-house the Arabs were speaking of a messenger from the governor
announcing his arrival at Medina, and also that he intended making only a
short stay there. So we may expect his return before long."
"Then he will have started long before the Kadi's messenger can have
arrived and laid the petition for pardon before the Khaliff!--We have no
hope but in Amru; if only we could send information to him on his
way. . . ."
"He would certainly not tarry in Upper Egypt, but hasten his journey, or
send on a plenipotentiary," said the voice on the other side of the wall.
"If we had but a trusty man to despatch! Our people are scattered to the
four winds, and to hunt them up now. . . ."
At this Mary's childish tones broke in with: "I can find a messenger."
"You? What are you thinking of, child?" said Orion. She did not heed his
remonstrance, but went on eagerly, quite sure of her own meaning:
"He shall be told everything, everything! Ought he to know what I heard
about your share in the flight of the sisters?"
"No, no; on no account!" cried Nilus and his master both at once; and
Mary understood that her proposition was accepted. She clapped her hands,
and exclaimed full of enterprise and with glowing cheeks:
"The messenger shall start to-morrow; rely on me. I can do it as well as
the greatest. And now tell me exactly the road he is to take. To make
sure, write the names of the stages on my little tablet.--But wait, I
must rub it smooth."
"What is this on the wax?" asked Orion. "A large heart with squares all
over it.--And that means?"
"Oh! mere nonsense," said the child somewhat abashed. "It was only to
show how my heart was divided among the persons I love. A whole half of
it belongs to Paula, this quarter is yours; but there, there, there," and
at each word she prodded the wax with the stylus, "that is where I had
kept a little corner for old Horapollo. He had better not come in my way
again!"
Her nimble fingers smoothed the wax, and over the effaced heart--a
child's whim--Orion wrote things on which the lives of two human beings
depended. He did so with sincere confidence in his little ally's
adroitness and fidelity. Early next morning she was to receive a letter
to be conveyed to Amru by the messengers.
"But a rapid journey costs money, and Amru always chooses the road by the
mountains and Berenice," observed the treasurer. "If we put together our
last gold pieces they will hardly suffice."
"Keep them, you will want them here," said the little girl. "And
yet--there are my pearls, to be sure, and my mother's jewels--at the same
time. . . ."
"You ought never to part from such things, you heart of gold!" cried
Orion.
"Oh yes, yes! What do I want with them? But Dame Joanna has my mother's
things in her keeping."
"And you are afraid to ask her for them?" asked the young man. He
appealed to Nilus, and when the treasurer had calculated the cost, Orion
took off a costly sapphire ring, which he gave to Mary, charging her to
hand it to Joanna. Gamaliel, the Jew, would lend her as much as she would
require on this gem. Mary joyfully took possession of the ring; but
presently, when the warder appeared to fetch her, her satisfaction
suddenly turned to no less vehement grief, and she took leave of Orion as
if they were parting for ever.
In the passage leading to Paula's cell the man suddenly stood still: some
one was approaching up the stairs.--If it should be the black Vekeel, and
he should find visitors in the prison at so late an hour!
But no. Two lamps were borne in front of the new-comers, and by their
light the warder recognized John, the new Bishop of Memphis, who had
often been here before now to console prisoners.
He had come to-night prompted by his desire to see the condemned
Melchite. Mary's dress and demeanor betrayed at once that she could not
belong to any official employed here; and, as soon as he had learnt who
she was, he whispered to his companion, an aged deacon who always
accompanied him when he visited a female prisoner: "We find her here!"
And when he had ascertained with whom the child had come hither at so
late an hour, he turned again to his colleague and added in a low voice:
"The wife and daughter of Rufinus! Just so: I have long had my eye on
these Greeks. In church once or twice every year!--Melchites in disguise!
Allied with this Melchite! And this is the school in which the Mukaukas'
granddaughter is growing up! An abominable trick! Benjamin judged
rightly, as he always did!" Then, in a subdued voice, he asked:
"Shall we take her away with us at once?" But, as the deacon made
objections, he hastily replied: "You are right; for the present it is
enough that we know where she is to be found."
The warder meanwhile had opened Paula's cell; before the bishop went in
he spoke a few kind words to the child, asking her whether she did not
long to see her mother; and when Mary replied: "Very often!" he stroked
her hair with his bony hand and said:
"So I thought.--You have a pretty name, child, and you, like your mother,
will perhaps ere long dedicate your life to the Blessed among women,
whose name you bear." And, holding the little girl by the hand, he
entered the cell. While Paula looked in amazement at the prelate who came
so late a visitor, Joanna and Pulcheria recognized him as the brave
ecclesiastic who had so valiantly opposed the old sage and the misled
populace, and they bowed with deep reverence. This the bishop observed,
and came to the conclusion that these Greeks perhaps after all belonged
to his Church. At any rate, the child might safely be left in their care
a few days longer.
After he had exchanged a few cordial words with them the widow prepared
to withdraw, and was about to take leave when he went up to her and
announced that he would pay her a visit the next day or the day after;
that he wished to speak with her of matters involving the happiness of
one who was dear to them both, and Dame Joanna, believing that he
referred to Paula, whispered:
"She has no idea as yet of the terrible fate the people have in store for
her. If possible, spare her the fearful truth before she sleeps this
night."
"If possible," repeated the prelate. Then, as Mary kissed his hand before
leaving, he drew her to him and said: "Like the Infant Christ, every
Christian child is the Mother's. You, Mary, are chosen before thousands!
The Lord took your father to himself as a martyr; your mother has
dedicated herself to Heaven. Your road is marked out for you, child,
reflect on this. To-morrow-no, the day after, I will see you and guide
you in the new path."
At these words Joanna turned pale. She now understood what the bishop's
purpose was in calling on her. At the bottom of the stairs, she threw her
arms round the child and asked her in--a low voice: "Do you pine for the
cloister--do you wish to go away from us like your mother, to think of
nothing but saving your soul, to live a nun in the holy seclusion which
Pulcheria has described to you so often?"
But this the child positively denied; and as Joanna's head drooped
anxiously and sadly, Mary looked up brightly and exclaimed: "Never fear,
Mother dear! Things will have altered greatly by the day after tomorrow.
Let the bishop come! I shall be a match for him!--Oh! you do not know me
yet. I have been like a lamb among you through all this misfortune and
serious trouble; but there is something more in me than that. You will be
quite astonished!"
"Nay, nay. Remain what you are," the widow said.
"Always and ever full of love for you and Pul. But I am a grand and
trusted person now! I have something very important to do for Orion
to-morrow. Something--Rustem will go with me.--Important, very important,
Mother Joanna. But what it is I must not tell--not even you!"
Here she was interrupted, for the heavy prison door opened for their
exit.
It was many hours before it was again unlocked to let out the bishop, so
long was he detained talking to Paula in her cell.
To his enquiry as to whether she was an orthodox Greek, or as the common
people called it, a Melchite, she replied that she was the latter; adding
that, if he had come with a view to perverting her from the confession of
her forefathers, his visit was thrown away; at the same time she
reverenced him as a Christian and a priest; as a learned man, and the
friend whom her deceased uncle had esteemed above every other minister of
his confession; she was gladly ready to disclose to him all that lay on
her soul in the face of death. He looked into the pure, calm face; and
though, at her first declaration, he had felt prompted to threaten her
with the hideous end which he had but just done his utmost to avert, he
now remembered the Greek widow's request and bound himself to keep
silence.
He allowed her to talk till midnight, giving him the whole history of all
she had known of joy and sorrow in the course of her young life; his keen
insight searched her soul, his pious heart rose to meet the strength and
courage of hers; and when he quitted her, as he walked home with the
deacon, the first words with which he broke a long silence were:
"While you were asleep, God vouchsafed me an edifying hour through that
heretic child of earth."
CHAPTER XX.
When the door in the tall prison-wall was closed behind the women, Joanna
made her way through streets still sultry under the silence of the night,
Rustem following with the child.
The giant's good heart was devoted to Mary, and he often passed his huge
hand over his eyes while she told him all that the scene they had
witnessed meant, and the fearful end that threatened Paula. He broke in
now and again, giving utterance to his grief and wrath in strange,
natural sounds; for he looked up to his beautiful sick nurse as to a
superior being, and Mandane, too, had often remarked that they could
never forget all that the noble maiden had done for them.
"If only," Rustem cried at length, clenching his powerful fist, "If only
I could--they should see. . . ." and the child looked up with shrewd,
imploring eyes, exclaiming eagerly:
"But you could, Rustem, you could!"
"I?" asked Rustem in surprise, and he shook his head doubtfully.
"Yes, you, Rustem; you of all men. We were talking over something in the
prison, and if only you were ready and willing to help us in the matter."
"Willing!" laughed the worthy fellow striking his heart; and he went on
in his strangely-broken Greek, which was, however, quite intelligible: "I
would give hair and skin for the noble lady. You have only to speak out."
The child clung to the big man with both hands and drew him to her
saying: "We knew you had a grate ful heart. But you see. . ." and she
interrupted herself to ask in an altered voice:
"Do you believe in a God? or stay--do you know what a sacred oath is? Can
you swear solemnly? Yes, yes . . ." and drawing herself up as tall as
possible she went on very seriously: "Swear by your bride Mandane--as
truly as you believe that she loves you. . . ."
"But, sweet soul. . . . "
"Swear that you will never betray to a living soul what I am going to
say--not even to Mother Joanna and Pulcheria; no, nor even to your
Mandane, unless you find you cannot help it and she gives her sacred
word. . . . "
"What is it? You quite frighten me! What am I to swear?"
"Not to reveal what I am now going to tell you."
"Yes, yes, little Mistress; I can promise you that." Mary sighed, a
long-drawn "Ah . . . !" and told him that a trustworthy messenger must be
found to go forth to meet Amru, so as to be in time to save Paula. Then
came the question whether he knew the road over the hills from Babylon to
the ancient town of Berenice; and when he replied that he had lately
travelled that way, and that it was the shortest road to the sea for
Djidda and Medina, she repeated her satisfied "Ah!" took his hand, and
went on with coaxing but emphatic entreaty while she played with his big
fingers: "And now, best and kindest Rustem, in all Memphis there is but
one really trusty messenger; but he, you see, is betrothed, and so he
would rather get married and go home with his bride than help us to save
the life of poor Paula."
"The cur!" growled the Persian.
At this Mary laughed out: "Yes, the cur!" and went on gaily: "But you are
abusing yourself, you stupid Rustem. You, you are the messenger I mean,
the only faithful and trustworthy one far or near. You, you must meet the
governor. . . ."
"I!" said the man, and he stood still with amazement; but Mary pulled him
onward, saying: "But come on, or the others will notice something.--Yes,
you, you must. . . ."
"But child, child," interrupted Rustem lamentably,
"I must go back to my master; and you see, common right and justice. . . ."
"You do not choose to leave your sweetheart; not even if the kind
creature who watched over you day and night should die for it--die the
most cruel and horrible death! You were ready enough to call that other,
as you supposed, a cur--that other whom no one nursed till he was well
again; but as for yourself. . . ."
"Have patience then! Hear me, little Mistress!" Rustem broke in again,
and pulled away his hand. "I am quite willing to wait and Mandane must
just submit. But one man is not good for all tasks. To ride, or guide a
train of merchandise, to keep the cameldrivers in order, to pitch a
camp---all that I can do; but to parley with grand folks, to go straight
up to such a man as the great chief Amru with prayers and
supplications--all that, you see, sweetheart--even if it were to save my
own father, that would be. . . ."
"But who asks you to do all that?" said the child. "You may stand as mute
as a fish: it will be your companion's business to do the talking."
"There is to be another one then? But, great Masdak! I hope that will be
enough at any rate!"
"Why will you constantly interrupt me?" the little girl put in. "Listen
first and raise objections after wards. The second messenger--now open
your ears wide--it is I, I myself;--but if you stand still again, you
will really betray me. The long and short of it is, that as surely as I
mean to save Paula, I mean to go forth to meet Amru, and if you refuse to
go with me I will set out alone and try whether Gibbus the
hunchback. . . ."
Rustem had needed some time to collect his senses after this stupendous
surprise, but now he exclaimed: "You--you--to Berenice, and over the
mountains. . . ."
"Yes, over the mountains," she repeated, "and if need be, through the
clouds."
"But such a thing was never heard of, never heard of on this earth!" the
Persian remonstrated. "A girl, a little lady like you--a messenger, and
all alone with a clumsy fellow like me. No, no, no!"
"And again no, and a hundred times over no!" cried the child merrily.
"The little lady will stop at home and you will take a boy with you--a
boy called Marius, not Mary."
"A boy! But I thought.--It is enough to puzzle one. . . ."
"A boy who is a girl and a boy in one," laughed Mary. "But if you must
have it in plain words: I shall dress up as a boy to go with you;
to-morrow when we set out you will see, you will take me for my own
brother."
"Your own brother! With a little face like yours! Then the most
impossible things will become possible," cried Rustem laughing, and he
looked down good humoredly at the little girl. But suddenly the
preposterousness of her scheme rose again before his mind, and he
exclaimed half-frantically: "But then my master!--It will not do--It will
never do!"
"It is for his sake that you will do us this service," said Mary
confidently. "He is Paula's friend and protector; and when he hears what
you have done for her he will praise you, while if you leave us in the
lurch I am quite sure. . . . "
"Well?"
"That he will say: 'I thought Rustem was a shrewder man and had a better
heart.'"
"You really think he will say that?"
"As surely as our house stands before us!--Well, we have no time for any
more discussion, so it is settled: we start together. Let me find you in
the garden early to-morrow morning. You must tell your Mandane that you
are called away by important business."
"And Dame Joanna?" asked the Persian, and his voice was grave and anxious
as he went on: "The thing I like least, child, is that you should not ask
her, and take her into your confidence."
"But she will hear all about it, only not immediately," replied Mary.
"And the day after to-morrow, when she knows what I have gone off for and
that you are with me, she will praise us and bless us; yes, she will, as
surely as I hope that the Almighty will succor us in our journey!"
At these words, which evidently came from the very depths of her heart,
the Masdakite's resistance altogether gave way--just in time, for their
walk was at an end, and they both felt as though the long distance had
been covered by quite a few steps. They had passed close to several
groups of noisy and quarrelsome citizens, and many a funeral train had
borne the plague-stricken dead to the grave by torchlight under their
very eyes, but they had heeded none of these things.
It was not till they reached the garden-gate that they observed what was
going on around them. There they found the gardener and all the
household, anxiously watching for the return of their belated mistress.
Eudoxia too was waiting for them with some alarm. In the house they were
met by Horapollo, but Joanna and Pulcheria returned his greeting with a
cold bow, while Mary purposely turned her back on him. The old man
shrugged his shoulders with regretful annoyance, and in the solitude of
his own room he muttered to himself:
"Oh, that woman! She will be the ruin even of the peaceful days I hoped
to enjoy during the short remainder of my life!"
The widow and her daughter for some time sat talking of Mary. She had bid
them good-night as devotedly and tenderly as though they were parting for
life. Poor child! She had forebodings of the terrible fate to which the
bishop, and perhaps her own mother had predestined her.
But Mary did not look as if she were going to meet misfortune; Eudoxia,
who slept by her side, was rejoiced on the contrary at seeing her so gay;
only she was surprised to see the child, who usually fell asleep as soon
as her little head was on the pillow, lying awake so long this evening.
The elderly Greek, who suffered from a variety of little ailments and
always went to sleep late, could not help watching the little girl's
movements.
What was that? Between midnight and dawn Mary sprang from her bed, threw
on her clothes, and stole into the next room with the night-lamp in her
hand. Presently a brighter light shone through the door-way. She must
have lighted a lamp,-and presently, hearing the door of the sitting-room
opened, Eudoxia rose and noiselessly watched her. Mary immediately
returned, carrying a boy's clothes--a suit, in point of fact, which
Pulcheria and Eudoxia had lately been making as a Sunday garb--for the
lame gardener's boy. The child smilingly tried on the little blue tunic;
then, after tossing the clothes into a chest, she sat down at the table
to write. But she seemed to have set herself some hard task; for now she
looked down at the papyrus and rubbed her forehead, and now she gazed
thoughtfully into vacancy. She had written a few sentences when she
started up, called Eudoxia by name, and went towards the sleeping-room.
Eudoxia went forward to meet her; Mary threw herself into her arms, and
before her governess could ask any questions she told her that she had
been chosen to accomplish a great and important action. She had been
intending to wake her, to make her her confidant and to ask her advice.
How sweet and genuine it all sounded, and how charmingly confused she
seemed in spite of the ardent zeal that inspired her!
Eudoxia's heart went forth to her; the words of reproof died on her lips,
and for the first time she felt as though the orphaned child were her
own; as though their joy and grief were one; as though she, who all her
life long had thought only of herself and her own advantage, and who had
regarded her care of Mary as a mere return in kind for a salary and home,
were ready and willing to sacrifice herself and her last coin for this
child. So, when the little girl now threw her arms round Eudoxia's neck,
imploring her not to betray her, but, on the contrary, to help her in the
good work which aimed at nothing less than the rescue of Paula and
Orion-the imperilled victims of Fate, her dry eyes sparkled through
tears; she kissed Mary's burning cheeks once more and called her her own
dear, dear little daughter. This gave the child courage; with tragical
dignity, which brought a smile to the governess' lips, she took Eudoxia's
bible from the desk, and said, fixing her beseeching gaze on the Greek's
face:
"Swear!--nay, you must be quite grave, for nothing can be more
solemn--swear not to tell a soul, not even Mother Joanna, what I want to
confess to you."
Eudoxia promised, but she would take no oath. "Yea, yea, and nay, nay,"
was the oath of the Christian by the law of the Lord; but Mary clung to
her, stroked her thin cheeks, and at last declared she could not say a
word unless Eudoxia yielded. In such an hour the Greek could not resist
this tender coaxing; she allowed Mary to take possession of her hand and
lay it on the Bible; and when once this was done Eudoxia gave way, and
with much head shaking repeated the oath that her pupil dictated, though
much against her will.
After this the governess threw herself on the divan, as if exhausted and
shocked at her own weakness; and the little girl took advantage of her
victory, seating herself at her feet, and telling her all she knew about
Paula and the perils that threatened her and Orion; and she was artful
enough to give special prominence to Orion's danger, having long since
observed how high he stood in Eudoxia's good graces. So far Eudoxia had
not ceased stroking her hair, while she assented to everything that was
said; but when she heard that Mary proposed to undertake the embassy to
Amru herself, she started to her feet in horror, and declared most
positively that she would never, never consent to such rashness, to such
fatal folly.
Mary now brought to bear her utmost resources of persuasion and flattery.
There was no other fit messenger to be found, and the lives of Orion and
Paula were at stake. Was a ride across the mountains such a tremendous
matter after all? How well she knew how to manage a beast, and how little
she suffered from the heat! Had she not ridden more than once from
Memphis to their estates by the seaboard? And faithful Rustem would be
always with her, and the road over the mountains was the safest in all
the country, with frequent stations for the accommodation of travellers.
Then, if they found Amru, she could give a more complete report than any
other living soul.
But Eudoxia was not to be shaken; though she admitted that Mary's project
was not so entirely crazy as it had at first appeared.
At this the little girl began again; after reminding Eudoxia once more of
her oath, she went on to tell her of the doom she herself hoped to escape
by setting out on her errand. She told Eudoxia of her meeting with the
bishop, and that even Joanna was uneasy as to her future fate. Ah! that
life within walls under lock and key seemed to her so frightful--and she
pictured her terrors, her love of freedom and of a busy, useful, active
life among men and her friends, and her hope that the great general,
Amru, would defend her against every one if once she could place herself
under his protection--painting it all so vividly, so passionately, and so
pathetically, that the governess was softened.
She clasped her hands over her eyes, which were streaming with tears, and
exclaimed: "It is horrible, unheard-of--still, perhaps it is the best
thing to do. Well, go to meet the governor,--ride off, ride off!"
And when the sweet, warm-hearted, joyous creature clang round her neck
she was glad of her own weakness: this fair, fresh, and blooming bud of
humanity should not pine in confinement and seclusion; she should find
and give happiness, to her own joy and that of all good souls, and unfold
to a full and perfect flower. And Eudoxia knew the widow well; she knew
that Joanna would by-and-bye understand why she helped the child to
escape the greatest peril that can hang over a human soul: that of living
in perpetual conflict with itself in the effort to become something
totally different from what, by natural gifts and inclinations, it is
intended to be.
With a sigh of anguish Eudoxia reflected what she herself, forced by
cruel fate and lacking freedom and pleasurable ease, had become, from an
ardent and generous young creature; and she, the narrow-hearted teacher,
could make allowances for the strange, adventurous yearning of a child,
where a larger souled woman might have derided, and blamed and repressed
it.
When it was daylight Eudoxia fulfilled the offices she commonly left to
the maid: she arranged Mary's hair, talking to her and listening the
while, as though in this night the child had developed into a woman. Then
she went into the garden with her, and hardly let her out of her sight.
At breakfast Joanna and Pulcheria wondered at her singular behavior, but
it did not displease them, and Marv was radiant with contentment.
The widow made no objection to allowing the child to go into the city to
execute her uncle's mysterious commission. Rustem was with her; and
whatever it was that made the child so happy must certainly be right and
unobjectionable. Orion's maps and lists were sent to the prison early in
the day, and before the child set out with her stalwart escort Gibbus had
returned with the prisoner's letter to the Arab governor.
On their way it was agreed that Mary should join Rustem at dusk at the
riverside inn of Nesptah. In these clays of famine and death beasts of
burthen of every description were easily procurable, as well as
attendants and guides; and the Masdakite, who was experienced in such
matters, thought it best to purchase none but swift dromedaries and to
carry only a light tent for the "little mistress!"
At the door of Gamaliel's shop Mary bid him wait; the jovial goldsmith
welcomed her with genuine pleasure. . . .
What had befallen the house of the Mukaukas! Fire had destroyed the
dwelling-place of justice, like the Egyptian cities to whom the prophet
had announced a similar fate a thousand years since.
Gamaliel knew in what peril Orion stood, and the fate that hung over the
noble maiden who had once given him the costliest of gems, and afterwards
entrusted to him a portion of her fortune.
To see any member of his patron's family alive and well rejoiced his
heart. He asked Mary one sympathizing question after another, and his
wife wanted to give her some of her good apricot tarts; but the little
girl begged Gamaliel to grant her at once a private interview, so the
jeweller led her into his little work-shop, bidding her trust him
entirely, for whatever a grandchild of Mukaukas George might ask of him
it was granted beforehand.
Blushing with confusion she took Orion's ring out of its wrapper, offered
it to the Jew, and desired him to give her whatever was right.
She looked enquiringly into his face with her bright eyes, in full
confidence that the kind-hearted man would at once pay her down gold
coins and to spare; but he did not even take the ring out of her hand. He
merely glanced at it, and said gravely:
"Nay, my little maid, we do not do business with children."
"But I want the money, Gamaliel," she urged. "I must have it."
"Must?" he repeated with a smile. "Well, must is a nail that drives
through wood, no doubt; but if it hits iron it is apt to bend. Not that I
am so hard as that; but money, money, money! And whose money do you mean,
little maid? If you want money of mine to spend in bread, or in cakes,
which is more likely, I will shut my eyes and put my hand boldly into my
wallet; but, if I am not mistaken, you are well provided for by Rufinus
the Greek, in whose house there is no lack of anything; and I have a nice
round sum in my own keeping which your grandfather placed in my hands at
interest two years since, with a remark that it was a legacy to you from
your godmother, and the papers stand in your name; so your necessity
looks very like what other folks would call ease."
"Necessity! I am in no necessity," Mary broke in. "But I want the money
all the same; and if I have some of my own, and you perhaps have it there
in your box, give me as much of it as I want."
"As much as you want?" laughed the jeweller. "Not so fast, little maid.
Before such matters can be settled here in Egypt we must have plenty of
time, and papyrus and ink, a grand law court, sixteen witnesses, a
Kyrios. . ."
"Well then, buy the ring! You are such a good, kind man Gamaliel. Just to
please me. Why, you yourself do not really think that I want to buy
cakes!"
"No. But in these hard times, when so many are starving, a soft heart may
be moved to other follies."
"No indeed! Do buy the ring; and if you will do me this favor. . ."
"Old Gamaliel will be both a rogue and a simpleton!--Have you forgotten
the emerald? I bought that, and a pretty piece of business that was! I
can have nothing to say to the ring, my little maid." Mary withdrew her
hand, and the grief and disappointment expressed by her large, tearful
eyes were so bitter and touching, that the Jew paused, and then went on
seriously and heartily:
"I would sooner give my own old head to be an anvil than distress you,
sweet child; and Adonai! I do not mean to say--why should I--that you
should ever leave old Gamaliel without money. He has plenty, and though
he is always ready to take, he is ready to give, too, when it is meet and
fitting. I cannot buy the ring, to be sure, but do not be down-hearted
and look me well in the face, little maid. It is much to ask, and I have
handsomer things in my stores, but if you see anything in it that gives
you confidence, speak out and whisper to the man of whom even your
grandfather had some good opinion: 'I want so much, and what is more--how
did you put it?--what is more, I must have it.'"
Mary did see something in the Jew's merry round face that inspired her
with trust, and in her childlike belief in the sanctity of an oath she
made a third person--a believer too, in a third form of religion--swear
not to betray her secret, only marvelling that the administering of the
oath, in which she had now had some practice, should be so easy. Even
grown-up people will sometimes buy another's dearest secret for a light
asseveration. And when she had thus ensured the Israelite's silence, she
confided to him that she was charged by Orion to send out a messenger to
meet Amru, that he and Paula might be reprieved in time. The goldsmith
listened attentively, and even before she had ended he was busying
himself with an iron chest built into the wall, and interrupted her to
ask! "How much?"
She named the sum that Nilus had suggested, and hardly had she finished
her story when the Jew, who kept the trick by which he opened the chest a
secret even from his wife, exclaimed:
"Now, go and look out of the window, you wonder among envoys and
money-borrowers, and if you see nothing in the courtyard, then fancy to
yourself that a man is standing there who looks like old Gamaliel, and
who puts his hand on your head and gives you a good kiss. And you may
fancy him, too, as saying to himself: 'God in Heaven! if only my little
daughter, my Ruth may be such another as little Mary, grandchild of the
just Mukaukas!'"
And as he spoke, the vivacious but stout man, who had dropped on his
knees, rose panting, left the lid of his strong box open, hurried up to
the child, who had been standing at the window all the while, and bending
over her from behind pressed a kiss on her curly head, saying with a
laugh: "There, little pickpocket, that is my interest. But look out
still, till I call you again." He nimbly trotted back on his short little
legs, wiping his eyes; took from the strong box a little bag of gold,
which contained rather more than the desired sum, locked the chest again,
looking at Mary with a mixture of suspicion and hearty approbation; then
at last he called her to him. He emptied the money-bag before her,
counted out the sum she needed, put the remainder of the coins into his
girdle, and handed the bag to the little girl requesting her to count his
"advance", back into it, while he, with a cunning smile, quitted the
room.
He presently returned and she had finished her task, but she timidly
observed: "One gold piece is wanting." At this he clasped his hands over
his breast and raised his eyes to Heaven exclaiming: "My God! what a
child. There is the solidus, child; and you may take my word for it as a
man of experience: whatever you undertake will prosper. You know what you
are about; and when you are grown up and a suitor comes he will go to a
good market. And now sign your name here. You are not of age, to be sure,
and the receipt is worth no more than any other note scribbled with
ink--however, it is according to rule."
Mary took the pen, but she first hastily glanced through what Gamaliel
had written; the Jew broke out in fresh enthusiasm:
"A girl--a mere child! And she reads, and considers, and makes all sure
before she will sign! God bless thee, Child!--And here come the tarts,
and you can taste them before. . . . Just Heaven! a mere child, and such
important business!"
THE BRIDE OF THE NILE
By Georg Ebers
Volume 12.
CHAPTER XXI.
While Rustem, to whom Mary had entrusted the jeweller's gold, was making
his preparations for their journey with all the care of a practised
guide, and while Mary was comforting her governess and Mandane, to whom
she explained that Rustem's journey was to save Paula's life, a fresh
trial was going forward in the Court of Justice.
This time Orion was the accused. He had scarcely begun to study the maps
and lists he required for his undertaking when he was bidden to appear
before his judges.
The members composing the Court were the same as yesterday. Among the
witnesses were Paula and the new bishop, as well as Gamaliel, who had
been sent for soon after Mary had left him.
The prosecutor accused the son of the Mukaukas of having made away, in
defiance of the patriarch's injunction, with a costly emerald bequeathed
to the Church by his father.
Orion had determined to conduct his own defence; he recapitulated
everything that he had told the prelate in self-justification in his
father's private room, and then added, that to put a speedy end to this
odious affair he was now prepared to restore the stone, and he placed it
at the disposal of his judges. He handed Paula's emerald to the Kadi who
presented it to the bishop. John, however, did not seem satisfied; he
referred to the written testimony of the widow Susannah, who had been
present when the deceased Mukaukas had designated all the jewels in the
Persian hanging as included in his gift to the Church. This was in
Orion's presence so he was still under suspicion of a fraud; and it was
difficult to determine whether the fine gem now lying on the table before
them were indeed the same to which the Church laid claim.
All this was urged with excessive vehemence and bore the stamp of a
hostile purpose.
Obedience and conviction alike prompted the zealous prelate to this
demeanor, for the same carrier-pigeon which had brought from the
patriarch his appointment to the bishopric required him to insist on
Orion's punishment, for he was a thorn in the flesh of the Jacobite
church, a tainted sheep who might infect the rest of the flock. If the
young man should offer an emerald it was therefore to be closely
examined, to see whether it were the original stone or a substitute.
On these grounds the bishop had expressed his doubts, and though they
gave rise to an indignant murmur among the judges, the Kadi so far
admitted the prelate's suspicions as to explain that last evening a
letter had reached him from his uncle at Djidda, Haschim the merchant, in
which mention was made of the emerald. His son happened to have weighed
that stone, without his knowledge, before he started for Egypt, and
Othman had here a note of its exact weight. The Jew Gamaliel had been
desired to attend with his balances, and could at once use them to
satisfy the bishop.
The jeweller immediately proceeded to do so, and old Horapollo, who was
an expert in such matters, went close up to him, and watched him
narrowly.
It was in feverish anxiety, and more eagerly than any other bystander,
that Paula and Orion kept their eyes fixed on the Jew's hands and lips;
after weighing it once, he did so a second time. Old Horapollo himself
weighed it a third time, with a keen eye though his hands trembled a
little; all three experiments gave the same result: this gem was heavier
by a few grains of doura than that which the merchant's son had weighed,
and yet the Jew declared that there was no purer, clearer, or finer
emerald in the world than this.
Orion breathed more freely, and the question arose among the judges as to
whether the young Arab might have failed in precision, or an exchange had
in fact been effected. This was difficult to imagine, since in that case
the accused would have given himself the loss, and the Church the
advantage.
The bishop, an honest man, now said that the patriarch's suspicions had
certainly led him too far in this instance, and after this he spoke no
more.
All through this enquiry the Vekeel had kept silence, but the defiant
gaze, assured of triumph, which he fixed on Paula and Orion alternately,
augured the worst.
When the prosecutor next accused the young man of complicity in the much
discussed escape of the nuns Orion again asserted his innocence, pointing
out that during the fatal contest between the Arabs and the champions of
the sisters, he had been with the Arab governor, as Amru himself could
testify. By an act of unparalleled despotism, he had been deprived of his
estates and his freedom on mere false suspicion, and he put his trust in
the first instance in a just sentence from his judges and, failing that,
he threw himself on the protection and satisfaction of his sovereign lord
the Khaliff.
As he spoke his eyes flashed flames at the Vekeel; but the negro still
preserved his self-control, and this doubled the alarm of those who
wished the youth well.
It was clear from all this that Obada felt sure that he had the noose
well around his victim's neck, and why he thought so, soon became
evident; for Orion had hardly finished his defence when he rose, and with
a malicious grin, handed to the Kadi the little tablet given him
yesterday by old Horapollo, describing it as a document addressed to
Paula and desiring the Kadi to examine it. The heat had effaced much of
what had been written on the wax, but most of the words could still be
deciphered. The venerable Horapollo had already made them out, and was
quite ready to read to the judges all that the accused--who by his own
account, was a spotless dove--had written in his innocence and
truthfulness for his fair one. He signed to the old man and helped him as
he rose with difficulty, but the Kadi begged him to wait, made himself
acquainted with the contents of the letter by the help of the
interpreter, and when the man had, with much pains, fulfilled his task,
he turned, not to Horapollo, but to Obada, and asked whence this document
had come.
"From Paula's desk," replied the Vekeel. "My old friend found it there."
He pointed to Horapollo, who confirmed his statement by a nod of assent.
The Kadi rose, went up to the girl, whose cheeks were pale with
indignation, and asked whether she recognized the tablets as her
property; Paula, after convincing herself, replied with a flaming glance
of scorn and aversion at Horapollo: "Yes, my lord. It is mine. That base
old man has taken it with atrocious meanness from among my things." For
an instant her voice failed her; then, turning to the judges, she
exclaimed:
"If there is one among you to whom helplessness and innocence are sacred
and malice and cunning odious, I beg him to go to Rufinus' wife, over
whose threshold this man has crept like a ferret into a dovecote, for no
other end but to tread hospitable kindness in the dust, to rifle her home
and make use of whatever might serve his vile purpose--to go, I say, and
warn the lonely woman against this treacherous spy and thief."
At this the old man, gasping and inarticulate, raised his withered arm;
the Christian judges whispered together, but at cross-purposes, while the
Jew fidgeted his round little person on the bench, drumming incessantly
with his fingers on his breast, and trying to meet Orion's or Paula's eye
and to make her understand that he was the man who would warn Joanna. But
a thump from the Vekeel's fist, that came down on his shoulder unawares,
reduced him to sitting still; and while he sat rubbing the place with
subdued sounds of pain, not daring to reproach the all-powerful negro for
his violence, the Kadi gave the tablets to Horapollo and bid him read the
letter.
But the terrible accusation cast at him by the hated Patrician maiden,
ascribing his removal to Rufinus house to a motive which, in truth, had
been far from his, had so enraged and agitated him that his old lungs, at
all times feeble, refused their office. This woman had done him a fresh
wrong, for he had gone to live with the widow from the kindest impulse;
only an accident had thrown this document in his way. And yet it would
not fail to be reported to Joanna in the course of the day that he had
gone to her house as a spy, and there would be an end to the pleasant
life of which he had dreamed--nay, even Philippus might perhaps quarrel
with him.
And all, all through this woman.
He could not utter a word but, as he sank back on the seat, a glance so
full of hatred, so dark with malignant fury, fell on Paula that she
shuddered, and told herself that this man was ready to die himself if
only he could drag her down too.
The interpreter now began to read Orion's letter and to translate it for
the Arabs; and while he blundered through it, declaring that not a letter
could be plainly made out, she recovered her self-control and, before the
interpreter had done his task, a gleam as of sunshine lighted up her pure
features. Some great, lofty, and rapturous thought must have flashed
through her brain, and it was evident that she had seized it and was
feeding on it.
Orion, sitting opposite to her, noticed this; still, he did not
understand what her beseeching gaze had to say to him, what it asked of
him as she pressed her hand on her breast, and looked into his eyes with
such urgent entreaty that it went to his very heart.
The interpreter ceased; but what he had read had had a great effect on
the judges. The Kadi's benevolent face expressed extreme apprehension,
and the contents of the letter were indeed such as to cause it. It ran as
follows:
"After waiting for you a long time in vain, I must at last make up my
mind to go; and how much I still had to say to you. A written farewell."
Here a few lines were effaced, and then came the--fatal and quite legible
conclusion:
"How far otherwise I had dreamed of ending this day, which has been for
the most part spent in preparations for the flight of the Sisters; and I
have found a pleasure in doing all that lay in my power for those kind
and innocent, unjustly persecuted nuns. We must hope for the best for
them; and for ourselves we must look to-morrow for an undisturbed
interview and a parting which may leave us memories on which we can live
for a long time. The noble governor Amru is, among the Arabs, such
another as he whom we mourn was among the Egyptians . . ." Here the
letter ended; not quite three lines were wanting to conclude it.
The Kadi held the tablets for a few minutes in his hand; then looking up
again at the assembly, who were waiting in great suspense, he began:
"Even if the accused was not one of those who raised their hands in
mutiny against our armed troops, it is nevertheless indisputable, after
what has just been read, that he not only knew of the escape of the nuns,
but aided them to the utmost.--When did you receive this communication,
noble maiden?"
At this Paula clasped her hands tightly and replied with a slightly bent
head and her eyes fixed on the ground.
"When did I receive it?--Never; for I wrote it myself. The writing is
mine."
"Yours?" said the Kadi in amazement. "It is from me to Orion," replied
Paula.
"From you to him? How then comes it in your desk?"
"In a very simple way," she explained, still looking down. "After writing
the letter to my betrothed I threw it in with the other tablets as soon
as I had no need for it; for he himself came, and there was no necessity
for his reading what could be better said by word of mouth."
As she spoke a peculiar smile passed over her lips and a loud murmur ran
through the room. Orion looked first at the girl and then at the Kadi in
growing bewilderment; but the Negro started up, struck his fist on the
table, making it shake, and roared out:
"An atrocious fabrication! Which of you can allow yourself to be taken in
by a woman's guile?" Horapollo, who had recovered himself by this time,
laughed hoarsely and maliciously; the judges looked at each other much
puzzled; but when the Vekeel went on raging the Kadi interrupted him, and
desired that Orion might speak, for he had twice tried to make himself
heard. Now, with scarlet cheeks and a choking utterance, he said:
"No, Othman--no, no indeed, my lords. Do not believe her. Not she, but
I--I wrote the letter that. . . ."
But Paula broke in:
"He? Do you not feel that all he wants is to save me, and so he takes my
guilt on himself? It is his generosity, his love for me! Do not, do not
believe him! Do not allow yourselves to be deceived by him."
"I? No, it is she, it is she," Orion again asserted; but, before he could
say more, Paula declared with a flashing glance that it was a poor sort
of love which sacrificed itself out of false generosity. And as, at the
same time, she again pressed her hand to her bosom with pathetic
entreaty, he was suddenly silent, and casting his eyes up to heaven, he
sank back on the prisoners' bench, deeply affected.
Paula joyfully went on:
"He has thought better of it, and given up his crazy attempt to take my
guilt on himself. You see, Othman, you all see, worthy men.--Let me atone
for what I did to help the poor nuns."
"Have your way!" shrieked the old man; but the Negro cried out:
"A hellish tissue of lies, an unheard-of deception! But in spite of the
shield a woman holds before you, I have my foot on your neck, treacherous
wretch! Is it credible--I ask you, judges--that a finished letter should
be found, after weeks had elapsed, in the hands of the writer and not
those of the person to whom it was addressed?"
The Kadi shrugged his shoulders and replied with calm dignity:
"Consider, Obada, that we are condemning this damsel on the evidence of a
letter which was found in possession, not of the person to whom it was
addressed, but of the writer. This document gave rise to no doubts in
your mind. The judge should mete out equal measure to all, Obada."
The aptness of these words, spoken in a dogmatic tone, aroused the
approval of the Arabs, and the Jew could not restrain himself from
exclaiming: "Capital!" but no sooner had it escaped him than he shrank as
quick as lightning out of the Vekeel's reach; and Obada hardly heard him,
for he did not allow himself to be interrupted by the Kadi but went on to
explain in wrathful words what a disgrace it was to them, as men and
judges, to have dust cast in their eyes by a woman, and allow themselves
to be molified by the arts of a pair of love-stricken fools; and how
desirable it must be in the eyes of every Moslem to guard the security of
life and bring the severest punishment on the instigator of a sanguinary
revolt against the champions of the Khaliff's power.
His eloquent and stormy address was not without effect; still, the
Christians, who ascribed every form of evil to the Melchite girl, would
have been satisfied with her death and have been ready to forgive the son
of the Mukaukas this crime--supposing him to have committed it. And it
was after the judges had agreed that it was impossible to decide by whom
the letter on the tablet had been written, and there had been a great
deal of argument on both sides, that the real discussion began.
It was long before the assembly could agree, and all the while Orion sat
now looking as though he had already been condemned to a cruel death, and
now exchanging glances with Paula, while he pressed his hand to his heart
as though to keep it from bursting. He perfectly understood her, and her
magnanimity upheld him. He had indeed persuaded himself to accept her
self-sacrifice, but he was fully determined that if she must die he would
follow her to the grave. "Non dolet,"--[It does not hurt]--Arria cried to
her lover Paetus, as she thrust the knife into her heart that she might
die before him; and the words rang in his ear; but he said to himself
that Paula would very likely be pardoned, and that then he would be free
and have a whole lifetime in which to thank her.
At last--at last. The Kadi announced the verdict: It was impossible to
find Orion worthy of death, and equally so to give up all belief in his
guilt; the court therefore declared itself inadequate to pronounce a
sentence, and left it to be decided by the Khaliff or by his
representative in Egypt, Amru. The court only went so far as to rule that
the prisoner was to be kept in close confinement, so that he might be
within reach of the hand of justice, if the supreme decision should be
"guilty!"
When the Kadi said that the matter was to be referred to the Khaliff or
his representative, the Vekeel cried out:
"I--I am Omar's vicar!" but a disapproving murmur from the judges, as
with one voice, rejected his pretensions, and at a proposal of the Kadi
it was resolved that the young man should be protected against any
arbitrary attack on the part of the Vekeel by a double guard; for many
grave accusations against Obada were already on their way to Medina. The
negro quitted the court, mad with rage, and concocting fresh indictments
against Paula with the old man.
When Paula returned to her cell old Betta thought that she must have been
pardoned; for how glad, how proud, how full of spirit she entered it! The
worst peril was diverted from her lover, and she and her love had saved
him!
She gave herself up for lost; but whatever fate might have in store for
her, life lay open before him; he would have time to prove his splendid
powers, and that he would do so, as she would have him do it, she felt
certain.
She had not ended telling her nurse of the judges' decision, when the
warder announced the Kadi. In a minute or two he made his appearance; she
expressed her thanks, and he warmly assured her that he regarded the
disgrace of being perhaps a beguiled judge as a favor of Fortune; then he
turned the conversation on the real object of his visit.
In the letter, he began, which he had received the evening before from
his uncle Haschim, there was a great deal about her. She had quite won
the old merchant's heart, and the enquiries for her father which he had
set on foot. . . .
Here she interrupted him saying: "Oh, my lord; is the wish, the prayer of
my life to be granted?"
"Your father, the noble Thomas, before whom even the Moslem bows, has
been . . . " and then Othman went on to tell her that the hero of
Damascus had in fact retired to Sinai and had been living there as a
hermit. But she must not indulge in premature rejoicing, for the
messengers had found him ill, consumed by disease arising from his
wounded lungs, and almost at death's door. His days were numbered. . . .
"And I, I am a prisoner," groaned the girl. "Held fast, helpless, robbed
of all means of flying to his arms!"
He again bid her be calm, and went on to tell her: in his soft, composed
manner, that two days since a Nabathaean had come to him and had asked
him, as the chief administrator of justice in Egypt, whether an old foe
of the Moslems, a general who had fought in the service of the emperor
and the cross against the Khaliff and the crescent, and who was now sick,
weary, and broken, might venture on Egyptian soil without fear of being
seized by the Arab authorities; and when he, Othman, had learnt that this
man was no other than Thomas, the hero of Damascus, he had promised him
his life and freedom, promised them gladly, as he felt assured his
sovereign the Khaliff would desire.
So this very day her father had reached Fostat, and the Kadi had received
him as a guest into his house. Thomas, indeed, stood on the brink of the
grave; but he was inspirited and sustained by the hope of seeing his
daughter. It had been falsely reported to him that she had perished in
the massacre at Abyla and he had already mourned her fate.
It was now his duty to fulfil the wish of a dying man, and he had ordered
the prison servants to prepare the room adjoining Paula's cell with
furniture which was on the way from his house. The door between the two
would be opened for her.
"And I shall see him again, have him again to live with--to close his
eyes, perhaps to die with him!" cried Paula; and, seizing the good man's
hand, she kissed it gratefully.
The Moslem's eyes filled with tears as he bid her not to thank him, but
God the All-merciful; and before the sun went down the head of the doomed
daughter was resting on the breast of the weary hero who was so near his
end, though his unimpaired mind and tender heart rejoiced in their
reunion as fully and deeply as did his beloved and only child. A new and
unutterable joy came to Paula in the gloom of her prison; and that same
day the warder carried a letter from her to Orion, conveying her father's
greetings; and, as he read the fervent blessing, he felt as though an
invisible hand had released him for ever from the curse his own father
had laid upon him. A wonderful glad sense of peace came over him with
power and pleasure in work, and he gave his brains and pen no rest till
morning was growing grey.
CHAPTER XXII.
Horapollo made his way home to his new quarters from the court of justice
with knit and gloomy brows. As he passed Susannah's garden hedge he saw a
knot of people gathered together and pointing out furtively to the
handsome residence beyond.
They, like a hundred other groups he had passed, hailed him with words of
welcome, thanks, and encouragement and, as he bowed to them slightly, his
eyes followed the direction of their terrified gaze and he started; above
the great garden gates hung the black tablet; a warning that looked like
a mark of disgrace, crying out to the passer-by: "Avoid this threshold!
Here rages the destroying pestilence!"
The old man had a horror of everything that might remind him of death,
and a cold shiver ran through him. To live so near to a focus of the
disease was most alarming and dangerous! How had it invaded this, the
healthiest part of the town, which the last raging epidemic had spared?
An officer of the town-council, whom he called to him, told him that two
slaves, father and son, whose duty it was to take charge of the baths in
the widow's house, had been first attacked, but they had been carried
quietly away in the night to the new tents for the sick; to-day, however,
the widow herself had fallen ill. To prevent the spread of the infection,
the plot of ground was now guarded on all sides.
"Be strict, be sharp; not a rat must creep out!" cried the old man as he
rode on.
He was later than he had been yesterday; supper must be ready. After a
short rest he was preparing to join the family at their meal, washing and
dressing with the help of his servant, when a lame slave-girl came into
his room and placed a tray covered with steaming dishes on the low table
by the divan.
What was the meaning of this? Before he could ask, he was informed that
for the future the women wished to eat by themselves; he would be served
in his own room.
At this a bright patch of red colored his cheeks; after brief reflection
he cried to his servant. "My ass!" and added to the girl: "Where is your
mistress?"
"In the viridarium with Gamaliel the goldsmith; but they are going to
supper immediately."
"And without their guest? I understand!" muttered the old man, taking up
his hat and marching past the maid out of the room. In the hall he met
Gamaliel, to whom a slave-girl was handing his stick. Horapollo could
guess that the Jew had come only to warn the women against him and,
without vouchsafing him a glance, he went into the dining-room. There he
found Pulchena and Mary kneeling in tears by the side of Joanna, who was
weeping too.
He guessed for whom were these lamentations, and prompted by the wish to
prove the falsity of the accusation that charged him with having entered
the house as a spy, he spoke to the widow. She shuddered as he entered,
and she now pointed to the door with an outstretched finger; when he
nevertheless stood still and was about to make his defence, she
interrupted him loudly and urgently: "No, no, my lord! This house is
henceforth closed against you! You yourself have broken every tie that
bound us! Do not any longer disturb our peace! Go back to the place you
came from."
At this the old man made one more attempt to speak; but the widow rose,
and saying: "Come, my children," she hastily withdrew with the girls into
the adjoining room, and closed the door.
Horapollo was left alone on the threshold.
Old as he was, in all his life he had never suffered such an insult; but
he did not lay it to the score of those who had shown him the door, but
to the already long one of the Syrian girl; as he rode back to his own
home on his white ass, he stopped several times to speak to the
passers-by.
During the following day or two he heeded not the heat of the weather,
nor his own need of rest for his body, and quiet occupation for his mind;
morning, noon and night he was riding about the streets stirring up the
people, and setting forth in insinuating speeches that they must perish
miserably if they rejected the only means of deliverance which he had
pointed out to them. He was present at every meeting of the Senate, and
his inflammatory eloquence kept the town council on his side, and
nullified the efforts of the bishop, while he pressed them to fix the day
of the marriage of the Nile with his bride.
He knew the Egyptians and their passion for the intoxicating joys of a
splendid ceremonial. This festival: the wedding of the Bride of the Nile
to her mighty and unresting spouse, on whom the weal or woe of the land
depended, was to be as a flowery oasis in the waste of dearth and
desolation. He recalled every detail of the reminiscences of his
childhood as to the processions in Honor of Isis, and the festivals
dedicated to her and her triad; every record of his own experience and
that of former generations; all he had read in books of the great
pilgrimages and dramas of heathen Egypt--and he described it all in his
speeches, painted it in glowing colors to the Senate and the mob, and
counselled the authorities to reproduce it all with unparalleled splendor
on the occasion of this marriage.
Every man in whose veins flowed Egyptian blood listened to him
attentively, took pleasure in his projects, and was quite ready to do his
utmost to enhance the glories of this ceremonial, in which every one was
to take part either active or passive. Thousands were ruined, but there
was yet enough and to spare for this marriage feast, and the Senate did
not hesitate to raise a fresh loan.
"Destruction or Deliverance!" was the watch-word Horapollo had given the
Memphites. If everything came to ruin their hoarded talents would be lost
too; if, on the other hand, the sacrifice produced its result, if the
Nile should bless its children with renewed prosperity, what need the
town or country care for a few thousand drachmae more or less?
So the day was fixed!
Not quite two weeks after Paula's trial, on the day of Saint Serapis the
miraculous, saving, auspicious ceremonial was to take place. And how
glowing was the picture given of the Bride's beauty by the old man, and
by the judges and officials who had seen her! How brightly old
Horapollo's eyes would flash with hate as he described it! The eyes of
love could not be more radiant.
All that this patrician hussy had done to aggrieve him--she should
expiate it all, and his triumph meant woe, not only to that one woman,
but to the Christian faith which he hated!
Bishop John, however, had not been idle meanwhile. Immediately after his
interference with the popular vote he had despatched a letter by a
carrier-pigeon to the patriarch in Upper Egypt, and Benjamin's reply
would no doubt give him powers for still more vigorous measures. In
church, before the Senate, and even in the highways, he and his clergy
did their utmost to combat the atrocious project of the authorities and
the populace, but the zeal which was stirred up by old Horapollo soon
broke into brighter flames than the conservatism, orthodoxy and breadth
of view which the ecclesiastics did their utmost to fan. The wind blew
with equal force from both quarters, but on one side it blew on
smoldering fuel, and on the other on overflowing and flaming stores.
Famine and despair had undermined faith, and weakened discipline; even
the mightiest weapons of the Church--Cursing and blessing--were
powerless. A floating beam was held out to sinking men, and they would no
longer wait for the life-boat that was approaching to rescue them, with
strong hands at the oars and a trusty pilot at the helm.
Horapollo went no more to the widow's home. A few hours after she had
shown him the door, his slaves came and fetched away the various things
he had carried there with him. His body servant at the same time brought
a large sealed phial and a letter to Dame Joanna, as follows:
"It is wrong to judge a man without hearing his defence. This you have
done; but I owe you no grudge. Philippus, on his return, will perhaps
pick up the ends of the tie and join again what you have this day cut. I
send you a portion of the remedy he left with me at parting to use
against the plague in case of need. Its good effects have been tested
within the last few days. May the sickness which has fallen on your
neighbors, spare you and yours."
Joanna was much pleased with this letter but, when she had read it aloud,
little Mary exclaimed:
"If any one should fall ill he shall not take a drop of that mixture! I
tell you he only wants to poison us!"
Joanna, however, maintained that the old man was not bad hearted in spite
of his unaccountable hatred of Paula; and Pulcheria declared that it must
be so, if only because Philip esteemed him so highly. If only he were
here, everything would have been different and have turned out well.
Mary remained with the mother and daughter till it grew dark; her chatter
always led them back to Paula; and when, in the afternoon, the Nabathaean
messenger came to them, and told them from their captive friend that he
had brought her father home to her, the women once more began to hope,
and Mary could allow herself to give free expression to her fond love
before she quitted them, without exciting their suspicions.
At length she said she must go to her lessons with Eudoxia; she had a
hard task before her and they must think of her and wish her good
success. She threw her arms first round the widow's neck and then round
Pulcheria's; and, as the tears would start to her eyes, she asked them if
she were not indeed a silly childish thing--but they were to think of her
all the same and never to forget her.
She met the governess in her own room; Eudoxia cut off the fine, soft
curls, shedding her first tears over them; and those tears flowed faster
as she placed round Mary's neck a little reliquary containing a lock from
the sheep-skin of St. John the Baptist, which had belonged to her own
mother. It was very dear and sacred to her, and she had never before
parted from it, but now it was to protect the child and bring her
happiness--great happiness.
Had it brought her such happiness?--Not much, in truth; and yet she
believed in the saving and beneficent influence of the relic.
At last Mary stood before her with short hair and in a boy's dress; and
what a sweet and lovely little fellow it was; Eudoxia could not weary of
looking at him. But Mary was too pretty, too frail for a boy; and Eudoxia
advised her to pull her broad travelling hat low over her eyes as soon as
she came in sight of men, or else to darken her color.
Gamaliel, who had in fact come to warn Dame Joanna against Horapollo, had
kept them informed of the progress of this day's sitting, and Paula's
conduct to save her lover had increased Mary's admiration for her. When
she should confront Amru she could answer him on every head, so she felt
equipped at all points as she stole through the garden with Eudoxia, and
down to the quay.
When she had passed the gateway she once more kissed her hand to the
house she loved and its inmates; then, pointing with a sigh to the
neighboring garden, she said:
"Poor Katharina! she is a prisoner now.--Do you know, Eudoxia, I am still
very fond of her, and when I think that she may take the plague, and die
but no!--Tell Mother Joanna and Pulcheria to be kind to her. To-morrow,
after breakfast, give them my letter; and this evening, if they get
anxious, you can only quiet them by saying you know all and that it is of
no use to fret about me. You will set it all right and not allow them to
grieve."
As they passed a Jacobite chapel that stood open, she begged Eudoxia to
wait for her and fell on her knees before the crucifix. In a few minutes
she came out again, bright and invigorated and, as they passed the last
houses in the town, she exclaimed:
"Is it not wicked, Eudoxia? I am leaving those I love dearly, very
dearly, and yet I feel as glad as a bird escaping from its cage. Good
Heaven! Only to think of the ride by night through the desert and over
the hills, a swift beast under me, and over my head no ceiling but the
blue sky and countless stars! Onward and still onward to a glorious end,
left entirely to myself and entrusted with an important task like a
grownup person! Is it not splendid? And by God's help--and if I find the
governor and succeed in touching his heart. . . . Now, confess, Eudoxia,
can there be a happier girl in the whole wide world?"
They found the Masdakite at Nesptah's inn with some capital dromedaries
and the necessary drivers and attendants. The Greek governess gave her
pupil much good advice, and added her "maternal" blessing with her whole
heart. Rustem lifted the child on to the dromedary, carefully settling
her in the saddle, and the little caravan set out. Mary waved repeated
adieux to her old governess and newly-found friend, and Eudoxia was still
gazing after her long after she had vanished in the darkness.
Then she made her way home, at first weeping silently with bowed head,
but afterwards tearless, upright, and with a confident step. She was in
unusually good spirits, her heart beat higher than it had done for years;
she felt uplifted by the sense of relief from a burthensome duty, and of
freedom to act independently on the dictates of her own intelligence. She
would assert herself, she would show the others that she had acted
rightly; and when at supper-time Mary was missing, and had not returned
even at bed-time, there was much to do to soothe and comfort them, and
much misconstruction to endure; but she took it all patiently, and it was
a consolation to her to bear such annoyance for her little favorite.
Next morning, when she had delivered Mary's letter to Dame Joanna, her
love and endurance were put to still severer proof; indeed, the
meek-tempered widow allowed herself to be carried away to such an
outbreak as hitherto would undoubtedly have led Eudoxia to request her
dismissal, with sharp recrimination; but she took it all calmly.
It was not till noon-day--when the bishop made his appearance to carry
the child off to the convent, and was highly wrathful at Mary's
disappearance, threatening the widow, and declaring that he would search
the whole country through for the little girl and find her at last, that
Eudoxia felt that the moment of her triumph had come. She quietly allowed
the bishop to depart, and then only did she send her last and best shaft
at Joanna by informing her that she had in fact encouraged the child in
her exploit on purpose to save her from the cloister. Her newly-found
motherly feeling made her eloquent, and with a result that she had almost
ceased to hope for: the warm-hearted little woman, who had hurt her with
such cruel words, threw her arms round Eudoxia's tall, meagre figure, put
up her face to kiss her, called her a brave, clever girl, and begged her
forgiveness for all she had said and done the day before.
So, when the Greek went to bed, she felt as if her life had turned
backwards and she had grown more like the happy young creature she had
once been with her sisters in her parents' house.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Paula now understood what hung over her. It is Bishop John who had told
her, as gently as he could, and with every assurance that he still clung
to the hope that he could stop the hideous heathen abomination; but even
without this she would certainly have known what was impending, for large
crowds of people gathered every day under the prisonwalls, and loud cries
reached her, demanding to see the "Bride of the Nile."
Now and again shouts of "Hail!" came up to her; but when the demented
creatures had shrieked themselves hoarse, and in vain, they would abuse
her vilely. The cry for the "Bride" never ceased from morning till night,
and the head warder of the prison was glad that the bishop had relieved
him of the task of explaining to Paula the meaning of the fateful word,
whose significance she had repeatedly asked him.
At first this fresh and terrible peril had startled and shaken her; but
she did her utmost to cling to the hope held out by the bishop so as to
appear calm, and as far as possible cheerful, in her sick father's
presence. And in this she succeeded so long as it was day; but at night
she was a prey to agonizing terrors. Then, in fancy she saw herself
surrounded by a raging mob, dragged to the river and cast into a watery
grave before a thousand eyes. Then, prayer was of no avail, nor any
resolve or effort; not the tender messages that constantly reached her
from Orion, nor the songs he would sing for her in the brief moments of
leisure he allowed himself; not the bishop's words of comfort, nor the
visits of those she loved. The warder would admit her friends as often as
he was able; and among those who found their way to her cell were the
Senator Justinus and his wife.
By great good fortune Martina had quitted Susannah's house as soon as the
two slaves had fallen ill and she had heard that the physician pronounced
them to be sickening of the plague. She had returned to her rooms in the
inn kept by Sostratus, but her nephew Narses had remained with Katharina
and her mother. He was indeed intending to follow her with Heliodora;
but, by the time they were ready to set out, Susannah, too, had fallen a
victim to the pestilence and the authorities had forbidden all egress
from her house.
Heliodora might have succeeded in leaving in time, alone; but she would
not abandon her unfortunate brother-in-law; for he never felt easy but in
her presence, would allow no one else to wait on him, and would take
neither food nor drink unless they were offered him by her. Besides this,
the cavalry officer, once so stalwart, had in his weakness become
pathetically like her lost husband, and she knew that Narses had been the
first to love her, and that it was only for his brother's sake that he
had concealed his passion. Her motherly instincts found an outlet in the
care of the half-crushed, but not hopelessly lost man; and the desire to
drag him back to life kept her busy day and night, and made her regard
everything else as trivial and of secondary importance. Her life had once
more found a purpose; her efforts were for an attainable end, and she
devoted herself to him body and soul.
Her uncle had told her that Orion was bound to Paula by a supreme
passion.--This had been a painful blow, but the Syrian girl had impressed
her; she looked up to her, and it soothed her wounded self-esteem to
reflect that she had lost her lover to no inferior woman. Though her
longing for him still surged up in many a silent hour, she felt it an
injustice, a stint of love to her invalid charge.
So far as Katharina was concerned, next to her mother, Heliodora was the
object of her deepest anxiety. The least word of complaint from either
terrified her; and if Susannah sank on the divan exhausted by the heat,
or Heliodora had a headache after watching through the night by the sick
man, the girl would turn pale, her heart would beat painfully, she would
paint them in fancy stricken by the plague, with burning brows and the
horrible, fatal spots on their foreheads and cheeks; and whenever these
alarms pressed on the young criminal she felt the ominous weight on the
top of her head where the dead bishop's hand had rested.
The senator's wife had so completely changed in her demeanor to the
water-wagtail, since Paula's imprisonment, that to Katharina she was as a
living reproach, so she had no regret at seeing the worthy pair depart.
But scarcely had they left when misfortune took their place as an
unbidden guest.
The slave whose duty it was to heat the baths had reserved a portion of
the infected garments that had been given to him to burn; his son had
helped him, and Katharina's nurse, the mother of her foster-brother
Anubis, had come into direct contact with her immediately after her
return from the soothsayer's and from the bishop's. All three had caught
the disease. They had all three been removed to the hospital tents--the
slave and the nurse as corpses.
But had the fearful infection been taken away with them? If not, it would
be the turn next of those whom she herself had pushed into the arms of
the fell monster: First Heliodora, and then her mother! And she,
rightfully, ought to have fallen before them; and if the pestilence
should seize her and death should drag her down into the grave it would
be showing her mercy. She was still so young, and yet she hated life. It
had nothing in store for her but humiliation and disappointment, arrows
which, sent from the prison, pierced her to the heart, and a torturing
fear which never gave her any peace, day or night.
When the physician came to transport the sick to the hospital in the
desert, he mentioned incidentally that the judges had condemned Paula to
death, and that the populace and senate, in spite of the new bishop's
prohibition, had determined to cast her into the river in accordance with
an ancient custom. Orion's fate was not to be decided till the following
day; but it would hardly be to his advantage in the eyes of his Jacobite
judges, that his betrothed was this Syrian Melchite.
At this Katharina was forced to support herself against her mother's
arm-chair to save herself from sinking on her knees; with tingling cheeks
she questioned the leech till he lost all patience and turned away much
annoyed at such excessive feminine curiosity.
Yes! "The other" was his betrothed before all the world; but only to die!
The blood rushed through her veins in a hot tide at the thought; she
could have laughed aloud and fallen on the neck of every one she met.
What she felt was hideous; malignant spite possessed her; but it gave her
rapture--delicious rapture--a flower of hell, but with splendid petals
and intoxicating perfume. But its splendor dazzled her and its fragrance
presently sickened her. Sheer horror of herself came over her, and yet
she could have shouted with joy each time that the thought flashed
through her brain: "The other must die!"
Her mother feared that her daughter, too, was about to fall ill, her eyes
glowed so strangely and she was so restless and nervously excitable.
Since Heliodora had taken the overwhelming news of Orion's betrothal to
Paula with astonishing though sorrowful calmness, to the hot-blooded girl
she was nothing, nobody, utterly unworthy of her notice.
To spite her she had committed a crime as like murder as one snake is
like another, and imperilled her own mother's life! It was enough to
drive her to despair, to make her scourge herself with rods!
When Susannah kissed her at parting for the night she complained of a
slight sore throat and of her lips, which she fancied must be swollen.
Katharina detained her, questioned her with a trembling voice, put the
lamp close to her, and held her breath while she examined her face, her
neck, and her arms for the dreadful spots. But none were to be seen and
her mother laughed at her terrors, called her a dutiful, anxious child,
and warned her not to be too full of fears, as they were supposed to
invite the disease.
All night the girl could not sleep. Her malicious triumph was past;
nothing but painful thoughts and grewsome images haunted her while awake,
and pursued her more persistently when she dozed. By dawn of day her
alarm for her mother was so great that she sprang out of bed and went to
her room; Susannah was sleeping so soundly that she did not even hear
her. Much relieved Katharina crept back to bed; but in the morning the
worst had happened: Susannah could no longer leave her bed; she was
feverish, and on her lips, the very lips which had kissed her child's
infected hair, there were indeed, between her nose and mouth, the first
terrible, unmistakable spots.
The leech came and confirmed the fact.--The house was closed and barred.
The physician and Susannah, who was still in full possession of her
senses, wished and insisted that Katharina should withdraw to the
gardener's house, but she refused with defiant obstinacy, saying she
would rather die with her mother than leave her.
Quite beside herself she threw herself on the sick woman, and kissed the
spots on her mouth to divert the poison into her own blood; but the
physician angrily pulled her away, and the sufferer reproved her with
tears in her eyes which spoke her fervent affection.
She was now allowed to nurse her mother. Two nuns came to her assistance,
and said, not only to the rich widow but behind her back, that they had
never seen so devoted and loving a daughter. Even Bishop John, who did
not shrink from entering the houses of the sick to give them spiritual
consolation, praised Katharina's conduct; and he, who had hitherto
regarded the water-wagtail as no more than a bright, restless child,
treated her with respect, talked to her as to a grown-up person, and
answered her questions--which for the most part referred to
Paula--gravely and fully.
The prelate, who was full of admiration for Thomas' daughter, told
Katharina how, to save her lover, she had taken a crime upon herself
which deprived her of every claim to mercy. The Syrian girl was only a
Melchite, but to take another's guilt, out of love, was treading indeed
in the footsteps of Christ, if ever anything was. At this Katharina
shrugged her shoulders, as though to say: "Do you think so much of that?
Could not I gladly have done the same?"
The priest saw this and admonished her kindly to be on her guard against
spiritual pride, though she had indeed earned the right to believe
herself capable of the sternest devotion, and did not cease to set an
example of filial and Christian love.
He departed; and Katharina, to whom every word in praise of her behavior
to her mother, whom her sin had brought to her death-bed, was a torturing
mockery, felt that she had deceived one more worthy soul. She did not, to
be sure, deserve to be charged with spiritual pride; for in this silent
chamber, where death stood on the threshold, she thought over all the
horrible things she had done, and told herself repeatedly that she was
the chief and most vile of sinners.
Many times she felt impelled to confide in another soul, to invite a
pitying eye to behold and share her inward suffering.
To the bishop above all, the most venerable priest she knew, she would
most readily have confessed everything and have submitted to any penance,
however severe, at his hands, but shame held her back; and even more did
another more urgent consideration. The prelate, she knew, would demand of
her that she should forsake her old life, root out from her soul the old
feelings and desires, and begin a new existence; but for this the time
had not yet come: her love was still an indispensable condition of life,
and her hatred was even more dear to her. When Paula's terrible doom
should indeed have overtaken her, and Katharina, her heart full of those
old feelings, had gloated over it; when she should have been able to
prove to Orion that her love was no less great and strong and
self-sacrificing than that of Thomas' daughter; when she should have
compelled him--as she would and must--to acknowledge that he had cruelly
misprized her and sinned against her; then, and not till then, would she
make peace with herself, with the Church, and with her Saviour. Nay, if
need be, she would take the veil and mourn away the rest of her young
life as a penitent, in a convent or a solitary rock-cell. But now--when
Paula, his betrothed, had done this great thing for him--to perish now,
with her love unseen, unknown, uncared for, perhaps forgotten by him, to
retire into herself and vanish from his ken--that was too much for human
nature! Sooner would she be lost forever; body and soul in everlasting
perdition, a prey to Satan and hell--in which she believed as firmly as
in her own existence.
So she went on nursing her mother, saw the red spots spread over the sick
woman's whole body--watched the fever that increased from day to day,
from hour to hour; listened with a mixture of horror and gladness--at
which she herself shuddered, though she fed her heart on it--to the
reports of the preparations for the sacrifice of the Bride of the Nile,
and to all the bishop could tell her of Paula, and her dying father, and
Orion. She trembled for little Mary, who had disappeared from the
neighboring garden, till she heard that the child had fled to escape the
cloister; each day she learnt that Heliodora, who had moved to the
gardener's house with her invalid, had as yet escaped the pestilence;
while in the prayers, which even now she never failed to offer up morning
and evening, she implored the Almighty and her patron saints to rescue
the young widow, to save her from causing the death of her own mother,
and to forgive her for having indirectly caused that of worthy old
Rufinus, who had always been so good to her, and of so many innocent
creatures by her treachery.
Thus the terrible days and nights of anguish passed by; and the captives
whom the girl's sins had brought to prison were happier than she, in
spite of the doom that threatened them.
The fate of his betrothed tortured Orion more than a hundred aching
wounds. Paula's terrible end was fast approaching, and his brain burned
at the mere thought. Now, as he was told by the warder, by the bishop,
and by Justinus, the day after to-morrow was fixed for the bridal of his
betrothed. In two days the bride, decked by base and mocking hands for an
atrocious and accursed farce, would be wreathed and wedded, not to him,
the bridegroom whom she loved, but to the Nile--the insensible,
death-dealing element. He rushed up and down his cell like a madman, and
tore his lute-strings when he tried to soothe his soul with music; but
then a calm, well-intentioned voice would come from the adjoining room,
exhorting him not to lose hope, to trust in God, not to forget his duty
and the task before him. And Orion would control himself resolutely, pull
himself together, and throw himself into his work again.
Day and night were alike to him. The senator had provided him with a lamp
and oil. When he was wearied out, he allowed himself no longer sleep on
his hard couch than human nature imperatively demanded; and as soon as he
had shaken it off he again became absorbed in maps and lists, plied his
pen, thought, sketched, calculated, and reflected. Then, if a doubt arose
in his mind or he could not trust his own memory and judgment, he knocked
at the wall, and his shrewd and experienced friend was at all times ready
to help him to the best of his knowledge and opinion. The senator went to
Arsinoe for him, to gain information as to the seaboard from the archives
preserved there; and so the work went forward, approaching its end,
strengthening and raising his sinking spirit, bringing him the pleasures
of success, and enabling him not unfrequently to forget for hours that
which otherwise might have brought the bravest to despair.
The warder, the senator or his worthy wife, Dame Joanna or Eudoxia--who
twice had the pleasure of accompanying her--each time they visited him
had some message or note to carry to Paula, telling her how far his work
had progressed; and to her it was a consolation and heartfelt joy to be
able to follow him in his labors. And many a token of his love, esteem,
and admiration gave her courage, when even her brave heart began to
quail.
Ah! It was not alone her terror of a horrible death that tortured her
soul. Her father, whom she considered it her greatest joy in life to have
found again, was fading beyond all hope under her loving hands. His poor
wounded lungs refused its service. It was with great difficulty that he
could swallow a few drops of wine and mouthfuls of food; and in these
last days his clear mind had lain as it were under a shroud--perhaps it
was happier so, as she told herself and as her friends said to comfort
her.
He, too, had heard the cries of: "Hail to the Bride of the Nile!"
"Bring out the Bride!"
"Away with the Bride of the Nile!" Though he had no suspicion of their
meaning, they had haunted his thoughts incessantly during the last few
days; and the terrible, strange words had seemed to charm his fancy, for
to Paula's distress he would murmur them to himself tenderly or
thoughtfully as the case might be.
Many times the idea occurred to her that she might put an end to her life
before the worst should befall, before she became a spectacle for a whole
nation, to be jeered at and made a delightful and exciting show to rouse
their cruelty or their compassion. But dared she do it? Dared she defy
the Most High, the Lord in whom she put her trust, into whose hand she
commended herself in a thousand dumb but fervent prayers.
No. To the very last she would trust and hope. And wonderful to say! Each
time she had reached the very limits of her powers of endurance, feeling
she could certainly bear no more and must succumb, something came to her
to revive her faith or her courage: a message would be brought her from
Orion, or Dame Joanna or Pulcheria came to see her; the bishop sought an
interview, or her father's mind rallied and he could speak to her in
beautiful and stimulating words. Often the warder would announce the
senator and his wife, and their vigorous and healthy minds always hit on
the very thing she needed. Martina, particularly, with her subtle
motherly instinct, always understood whatever was agitating her; and once
she showed her a letter from Heliodora, in which she spoke of the
calmness she had won through nursing their dear invalid, and said how
thankful she was to see the reward of her care and toil. Narses was
already quite another man, and she could know no higher task than that of
reconciling the hapless man to life, nay, of making it dear to him again.
She no longer thought of Orion but as she might of a beautiful song she
once had heard in a delightful hour.
Thus time passed, even for the imprisoned maiden, till only two nights
remained before St. Serapis' day when the fearful marriage was to be
solemnized.
It was evening when the bishop came to visit Paula. He regarded it as his
duty to tell her that the execution of her sentence was fixed for the day
after to-morrow. He should hope and believe till the last, but his own
power over the misguided mob was gone from him. In any case, and if the
worst should befall, he would be at her side to protect her by the
dignity of his office. He had come now, so as to give her time to prepare
her self in every respect. The care of her noble father till his last
hour on earth he would take upon himself as a dear and sacred duty.
Though she had believed herself surely prepared long since for the worst,
this news fell on her like a thunderbolt. What lay before her seemed so
monstrous, so unexampled, that it was impossible that she ever could look
forward to it firmly and calmly.
For a long time she could not help clinging desperately to her faithful
Betta, and it was only by degrees that she so far recovered herself as to
be able to speak to the bishop, and thank him. He, however, could only
lament his inability to earn her fullest gratitude, for the patriarch's
reply to his complaint of those who promised rescue to the people by the
instrumentality of a heathen abomination--a document on which he had
founded his highest hopes for her--had had a different result from that
which he had expected. The patriarch, to be sure, condemned the
abominable sacrifice, but he did it in a way which lacked the force
necessary to terrify and discourage the misled mob. However, he would try
what effect it might have on the people, and a number of scribes were at
work to make copies of it in the course of the night. These would be sent
to the Senators next morning, posted up in the market-place and public
buildings, and distributed to the people; but he feared all this would
have no effect.
"Then help me to prepare for death," said Paula gloomily. "You are not a
priest of my confession, but no church has a more worthy minister. If you
can absolve me in the name of your Redeemer, mine will pardon me. We look
at Him, it is true, with different eyes, but He is the Saviour of us
both, nevertheless." A contradictory reply struggled for utterance in the
strict Jacobite's mind, but at such a moment he felt he must repress it;
he only answered:
"Speak, daughter, I am listening."
And she poured forth all her soul, as though he had been a priest of her
own creed, and his eyes grew moist as he heard this confession of a pure
and loving heart, yearning for all that was highest and best. He promised
her the mercy of the Redeemer, and when he had ended with "Amen," and
blessed her, he looked down at the ground for some minutes and presently
said, "Follow me, Child."
"Whither?" she asked in surprise; for she thought that her last hour had
already come, and that he was about to lead her away to the place of
execution, or to her watery, ever-flowing tomb; but he smiled as he
replied: "No, child. To-day I have only the pleasing duty of blessing
your betrothal before God; if only you will promise not to estrange your
husband from the faith of his fathers--for what will not a man sacrifice
to win the love of a woman.--You promise? Then I will take you to your
Orion."
He rapped on the door of the cell, and when the warder had opened it he
whispered his orders; Paula followed him silently and with blushing
cheeks, and in a few minutes she was clasped to her lover's breast while,
for the first time--and perhaps the last--their lips met in a kiss.
The prelate gave them a few minutes together; when he had blessed them
both and solemnized their betrothal, he led her back to her cell.
However, she had hardly time to thank him out of the fulness of her
overflowing heart, when a town-watchman came to fetch him to see
Susannah; her last hour was at hand, if not already past. John at once
went with the messenger, and Paula drew a deep breath as she saw him
depart. Then she threw herself on to her nurse's shoulders, crying:
"Now, come what may! Nothing can divide us; not even death!"
CHAPTER XXIV.
The bishop was too late. He found the widow Susannah a corpse; standing
at the head of the bed was little Katharina, as pale as death,
speechless, tearless, utterly annihilated. He kindly tried to cheer her,
and to speak words of comfort; but she pushed him away, tore herself from
him, and before he could stop her, she had fled out of the room.
Poor child! He had seen many a loving daughter mourning for her mother,
but never such grief as this. Here, thought he, were two human souls all
in all to each other, and hence this overwhelming sorrow.
Katharina had escaped to her own room, had thrown herself on the
couch--cowering so close that no one entering the room would have taken
the undistinguishable heap for a human being, a grown up, passionately
suffering girl.
It was very hot, and yet a cold shiver ran through her slender frame. Was
she now attacked by the pestilence? No; it would be too merciful of Fate
to take such pity on her woes.
The mother was dead, dragged to the grave by her own daughter. The
disease had first shown itself on her lips; and how many times had the
physician expressed his surprise at the plague having broken out in this
healthy quarter of the town, and in a house kept so scrupulously clean.
She knew at whose bidding the avenging angel had entered there, and whose
criminal guile had trifled with him. The words "murdered your mother"
haunted her, and she remembered the law of the ancients which refused to
prescribe a punishment for the killing of parents, because they
considered such a monstrous deed impossible.
A scornful smile curled her lip. Laws! Principles! Was there one that she
had not defied? She had contemned God, meddled with magic, borne false
witness, committed murder--and as to the one law with promise, which, if
Philippus was right, was exactly the same in the code of her forefathers
as on the tables of Moses, how had she kept that? Her own mother was no
more, and by her act!
All through this frightful retrospect she had never ceased to shiver and,
as this was becoming unendurable, she took to walking up and down and
seeking excuses for her sinful doings: It was not her mother, but
Heliodora whom she had wished to kill; why had malicious Fate. . . ?
Here she was interrupted, for the young widow, who had heard the sad
news, sought her out to comfort her and offer her services. She spoke to
the girl with real affection; but her sweet, low tones reminded Katharina
of that evening after the old bishop's death; and when Heliodora put out
her arm to draw her to her, she shrank from her, begging her in a dry,
hoarse voice, not to touch her for her clothes were infected. She wanted
no comfort; all she asked was to be left alone--quite alone--nothing
more. The words were hard and unkind, and as the door closed on the young
woman Katharina's eyes glared after her.
Why had this doom passed over Heliodora's head and demanded the sacrifice
of one whose loss she could never cease to mourn?
This brought her mother vividly to her mind. She flew back to her
death-bed and fell on her knees--but even there she could not bear to
stay long, so she wandered into the garden and visited every spot where
she and her mother had been together. But there were such strange
crackings in the shrubs, and the trees and bushes cast such uncanny
shadows that she hailed daybreak as a deliverance.
She was on her way back to the house when her foster-brother Anubis came
limping to meet her. Poor fellow! She had made a cripple of him, too, and
his mother had died through her fault.
The lad spoke to her, giving expression to his sympathy, and she accepted
it; but she said such strange things, and answered him so utterly at
random, that he began to fear that grief had turned her brain. She went
on to ask him point-blank how much money she now had, and as he happened
to know approximately, he could tell her; she clasped her hands, for how
could any one human being who was not a king possess such enormous
wealth! Finally she enquired whether he knew how a will should be drawn
up, and that, too, he answered affirmatively.
She made him describe it all, and then he added that the signature must
be made valid by those of two witnesses; but she, he added, was too young
to be thinking of making her will.
"Why?" said she. "Is Paula much older than I am?"
"And the day after to-morrow," the boy went on, "she is to be cast into
the Nile. All the people call her the Bride of the Nile."
At this that hideous, malignant smile again curled her lips, but she
hastily suppressed it and walked straight on into the house. At the door
he timidly asked her whether he might once more look on his mistress; but
she was obliged to forbid it for fear of infection. However, he proudly
replied: "What you do not fear, has no terrors for me," and he followed
her to the side of the bed where the corpse now lay washed and in fine
array; and when he saw Katharina kiss the dead woman's hand he, too, as
soon as she looked away, pressed his lips on the place hers had touched.
Then he sat down by the bed and remained there till she sent him away.
Before noon the bishop arrived to perform the last rites. He found the
body surrounded by beautiful flowers. Katharina had been out in the
garden again and had cut all the rarest and finest; and though she had
allowed the gardener to carry the basket for her, she would not have him
help her in gathering them. The feeling that she was doing something for
her mother had been a comfort to her; still, by day everything about her
seemed even more intolerable than by night. Everything looked so large,
so coarse, so insistent, so menacing, and reminded her at every step of
some injustice or some deed of which she was ashamed. Every eye, she
fancied, must see through her; and now and then it seemed as though the
pillars of the great banqueting-hall, where her mother still lay, were
tottering, and the ceiling about to fall in and crush her.
She answered the bishop's questions absently and often quite at random,
and the old man supposed that she was stunned by her great sorrow; so to
give her thoughts a new direction he began telling her about Paula, and
believing that Katharina was fond of her, he confided to her that he had
taken Paula, the day before, to Orion's cell, and consecrated their
betrothal.
At this her face was convulsed in a manner that alarmed the bishop; a
fearful tumult raged in her soul, her bosom rose and fell spasmodically,
and all she could utter was the question: "But they will sacrifice her
all the same?"
The bishop thought he understood. She was horror stricken by the idea of
the sudden, cruel end that hung over the young bride, and he replied
sadly; "I shall not be able to restrain the wretches; still, no means
shall remain untried. The patriarch's rescript, condemning this mad
crime, shall be made public to-day, and I will read and expound it at the
Curia, and try to give it keener emphasis.--Would you like to read it?"
As she eagerly assented, the prelate signed to the acolyte who had waited
on him with the holy vessels, and he produced from a packet a written
sheet which he handed to Katharina. As soon as she was alone she read the
patriarch's epistle; at first superficially, then more carefully, and at
last in deep attention and growing interest, stirred by it to strange
thoughts, till at length her eyes flashed and her breath came fast, as
though this paper referred to herself, and could seal her fate for life.
When the bearers came in to fetch away the body she was still sitting
there, gazing as if spell-bound at the papyrus; but she sprang up, shook
herself, and then bid farewell to the cold rigid form of the mother on
whose warm heart she had so often rested, and to whom she had been the
dearest thing on earth--and even then the solace of tears was denied her.
She no longer suffered the deep remorse that had tormented her; for she
felt now that her intercourse with her last mother had not been put an
end to by death; that after a short parting they would meet again--soon
perhaps, perhaps even to-morrow--meet for a fulness of speech, an
outpouring of the heart, a revelation of all the past more open and
unreserved than could ever be between mortal beings, even between mother
and daughter. And when she who was sleeping there, blind, deaf, and
senseless, should awake again, up there, with eyes clearer than those of
men below, and the ears and senses of a spiritual being to see and hear
and judge all she had known and done, all she had felt and made others
feel--then, she told herself, her mother might perhaps blame her and
punish her more than she had ever done on earth, but she would also clasp
her more closely to her heart and comfort her more earnestly.
She whispered gently in her ear as if she were still alive: "Wait awhile,
only wait: I shall come soon and tell you everything!"
And then she kissed her so passionately and recklessly that the nuns were
shocked and dragged her away, ordering the bearers to close the coffin.
They obeyed, and when the wooden lid fell over the sleeping form,
shutting it in with a slam, and hiding it from the girl's sight, the
barrier gave way which had hitherto restrained her tears and she began to
weep bitterly; now, too, the feeling that she had indeed lost her mother
took complete possession of her--the sense of being an orphan and alone,
quite alone in the wide world.
She saw and heard no more of what took place round the beloved dead; for
when she took her hands from her face streaming with tears, the house of
the rich widow no longer sheltered its mistress; her remains had been
borne away to the nearest mortuary. The law forbade its being any longer
kept within doors, but did not allow of its being buried till night fell.
The child might not follow her own mother to the cemetery.
With a drooping head Katharina withdrew to her room and there stood
looking out into the garden. It all was hers now; she was mistress of it
all and of much besides, as free and unfettered to command as hitherto
she had been over the birds, her little dog, or the jewels that lay on
her toilet-table. She could make hundreds happy with a word, a wave of
the hand--but not herself. She had never felt so grown-up, independent,
womanly, nay powerful, and at the same time so unutterably wretched and
helpless as she felt in this hour.
What did she care for all these vanities? They could not suffice to check
one sigh of disappointed yearning.
She had parted from her mother with a promise; the fervent longing that
filled her soul was never still; and now the patriarch's letter had given
her a hint as to how she might fulfil the one and silence the other. She
hastily took the document up again, and read it through once more.
Its instructions were precise to stop the proceedings of the misguided
Memphites with stern promptitude. It explained that the death of the
Christ Jesus, who shed His blood to redeem the world, had satisfied the
need for a human victim. Throughout the wide realms which the Cross
overshadowed with blessing human sacrifice must therefore be accounted a
useless and accursed abomination. It went on to point out how the heathen
had devised their gods in the image of weak, sinful, earthly beings, and
chosen victims in accordance with this idea. "But our God," it said, "is
as high above men as the Spirit is above the flesh, and the sacrifice He
demands is not of the flesh, but of the spirit. Will He not turn away in
wrath and sorrow from the blinded Christians of Memphis who, in their
straits, feel and are about to act like the cruel and foolish heathen?
They take for their victim a heretic and a stranger, deeming that that
will diminish the abomination in the eyes of the Lord; but it moves Him
to loathing all the same, for no human blood may stain the pure and
sacred altars of our mild faith, which gives life and not death.
"Ask your blind and misguided flock, my brother: Can the Father of Love
feel joy at the sight of one of His children, even an erring one,
suffocated in the waters to the honor of the Most High, while struggling,
and cursing her executioners?
"If, indeed, there were a pure maiden, possessed with the blessed
intoxication of the love of God, who was ready to follow the example of
Him who redeemed man by His death, to fling herself into the waters while
she cried to Heaven with her dying breath: 'Take me and my innocence as
an offering, O Lord! Release my people from their extremity!'--that would
be a victim indeed; and perchance, the Lord might say: 'I will accept it;
but the will alone is enough. No child of mine may cast away the life
that I have lent her as the most sacred and precious of gifts.'"
The letter ended with pious exhortations to the community.
Then a maiden who should voluntarily sacrifice herself in the river to
save the people in their need would be a victim pleasing in the sight of
the Lord--so said the Man of God, through whose mouth the Most High
spoke. And this opinion, this hint, was to Katharina like a distaff from
which she spun a lengthening thread to warp to the loom and weave from it
a tangible tissue.
She would be the maiden whom the patriarch had imagined--the real, true
Bride of the Nile, inspired to cast off her young life to save her people
in their need. In this there was expiation such as Heaven might accept;
this would release her from the burthen of life that weighed upon her,
and would reunite her to her mother; in this way she could show her lover
and the bishop and all the world the immensity of her self-sacrifice,
which was in nothing behind that of "the other"--the much-vaunted
daughter of Thomas! She would do the great deed before Paula's eyes, in
sight of all the people. But Orion must know whose image she bore in her
heart and for whose sake she made that leap from blooming life into a
watery grave.
Oh! it was wonderful, splendid! Would she not thus compel him inevitably
to remember her whenever he should think of Paula? Yes, she would force
him to allow her image to dwell in his soul, inseparable from that
"other;" and would not such an unparalleled act add such height to her
figure, that it would be equal to that of her Syrian rival in the
estimation of all men--even in his?
She now began to long for the supreme moment. Her vain little heart
laughed in anticipation of the delight of being seen, praised and admired
by all. Tomorrow she, her little self, would tower above all the world;
and the more she felt the oppressive heat of the scorching day, the more
delicious it seemed to look forward to finding rest from the torments of
life in the cool element.
She saw no difficulties in the way of her achievement; she was mistress
now, and her slaves and servants must obey her orders. At the same time
she remembered, too, to protect her large possessions from falling into
the hands of relations for whom she did not care; with a firm hand she
drew up a will in which she bequeathed part of her fortune to her uncle
Chrysippus, small portions to her foster-brother Anubis, and to Rufinus'
widow, to whom she owed reparation for great wrong; then the larger half,
and she owned many millions, she bequeathed to her dear friend Orion,
whom she freely forgave, and who, she hoped, would see that even in the
little "water-wagtail" there had been room for some greatness. She begged
him also to take her house, since she had not been altogether guiltless
of the destruction of the home of his fathers.
The condition she attached to this bequest showed the same keen, alert
spirit that had guided her through life.
She knew that the patriarch's indignation might be fatal to the young
man, so to serve as a mediator, and at the same time to ensure for
herself the prayers of the Church, which she desired, she enjoined Orion
to bestow the greater part of his inheritance on the patriarch for the
Church and for benevolent purposes. But not at once, not for ten years,
and in instalments of which Orion himself was to determine the
proportion. In the event of his dying within the next three years all his
claims were to be transferred to her uncle Chrysippus. She added a
request to the Church, to which she belonged with her whole heart, that
every year on her saint's day and her mother's they should be prayed for
in every church in the land. A chapel was to be erected on the scene of
her self-immolation, and if the patriarch thought her worthy of the
honor, it was to bear the name of the Chapel of Susannah and Katharina.
She gave all her slaves their freedom and devised legacies to all the
officials of her household.
As she sat for long hours of serious meditation, drawing up this last
will, she smiled frequently with satisfaction. Then she copied it out
fair, and finally called the physician and all the free servants in the
house to witness her signature.
Though no one had suspected the "water-wagtail" of such forethought, it
was no matter of surprise that the young heiress, shut up in the
plague-stricken house, should dispose of her estates, and before
night-fall the physician brought Alexander, the chief of the Senate, to
the garden gate by her desire, and there they spoke to each other without
opening it. He was an old friend of her father's, and since the death of
the Mukaukas, had been her guardian; he now agreed to stand as her
Kyrios, and as such he ratified her will and the signature, though she
would not allow him to read the document.
Finally she went to the slaves quarters, from whence a few more sufferers
had been removed to the Necropolis, and desired her boatman to get the
holiday barge in readiness early in the morning, as she purposed seeing
the ceremonial from the river. She gave particular orders to the gardener
as to how it was to be decorated, and what flowers he was to cut for her
personal adornment.
She went to bed far less excited than she had been the night before, and
before she had ended her evening prayer, slumber overtook her weary
brain.
When she awoke at sunrise, the large and splendid boat, which her father
had had built at great cost in Alexandria, was manned and ready to put
out. No one interfered to prevent her embarking with Anubis and a few
female servants, for all the guards who had surrounded the house till
yesterday had been withdrawn to do duty at the great ceremonial of the
marriage and sacrifice, since a popular tumult was not unlikely to arise.
CHAPTER XXV.
A great number of persons had collected during the night on the quay near
Nesptah's inn. The crowd was increasing every minute, and in spite of the
intense heat, not a Memphite could bear to stop within doors, Men, women
and children were flocking to the scene of the festival; they came in
thousands from the neighboring towns, hamlets and villages, to witness
the unprecedented sacrifice which was to put an end to the misery of the
land. Who had ever heard of such a marriage? What a privilege, what a
happiness, to be so fortunate as to see it!
The senate had not been idle and had done all in their power to surround
it with magnificence and to enable as many as possible to enjoy the
pageant, which had been planned with a lavish hand and liberal
munificence.
Round the cove by Nesptah's inn a semi-circular wooden stand had been
constructed, on which thousands found seats or standing-room. Stalls
furnished with hangings were erected in the middle of the tribune for the
authorities and their families as well as for the leading Arab officials,
and arm-chairs were placed in them for the Vekeel, for the Kadi, for the
head of the senate, for old Horapollo and also for the Christian
priesthood, though it was well known that they would not be present at
the ceremony.
The lower classes, who could not afford to pay for admission to these
seats, had established themselves on the banks of the river; wandering
dealers had followed them, and wherever the crowd was densest they had
displayed their wares--light refreshments or solid food--on two-wheeled
trucks, or on little carpets spread on the ground. In the tribune itself
the cries of the water-sellers were incessant as they offered filtered
Nile water and fruit syrups for sale.
The parched tops of the palms, where turtle doves, lapwings and
sparrow-hawks were wont to perch, were crowded with the vagabond boys of
the town, who whiled away the time by pulling the withered and diseased
dates from the great clumps and flinging them down on the bystanders
below, till the guard took aim at them with their arrows and stopped the
game.
The centre of attraction to all eyes was a wooden platform or pontoon,
built far out into the stream; from thence the bride was to be flung into
the watery embrace of the expectant bridegroom. Here the masters of the
ceremonies had put forth their best efforts, and it was magnificently
decorated with hangings and handkerchiefs, palm-leaves and flags; with
heavy garlands of tamarisk and willow, mingled with bright blossoms of
the lotos and mallow, lilies and roses; with devices emblematic of the
province, and other gilt ornaments. Only the furthest end of it was
unadorned and without even a railing, that there might be nothing to
intercept the view of the "marriage."
Three hours before noon none were absent but those whose places were
secured, and ere long curiosity brought them also to the spot. The
town-watch found it required all their efforts to keep the front ranks of
the people from being pushed into the river by those behind; indeed, this
accident could not be everywhere guarded against; but, thanks to the
shallow state of the water, no one was the worse. But the cries of those
who were in danger nevertheless drowned the music of the bands performing
on raised platforms and the shouts of applause which rose on all sides to
hail Horapollo--who was here, there, everywhere on his white ass as brisk
as a lad--or to greet some leading official.
And now and again loud cries of anguish were heard, or the closely-packed
throng parted with exclamations of horror. A citizen had had a sunstroke,
or had been seized by the plague. Then the fugitives dragged others away
with them; screaming mothers trying to save their little ones from the
crush on one hand and the contagion on the other, oversetting one
dealer's truck, smashing the eggs and cakes of another. A whole party
were pushed into a deep but half-dried up water-course; the guardians of
the peace flourished their staves, yelling and making their victims yell
in their efforts to restore order--but all this hardly affected the vast
body of spectators, and suddenly peace reigned, the confusion subsided,
the shrieks were silenced. Those who were doomed might fall or die, be
crushed or plague-stricken. Trumpet calls and singing were heard
approaching from the town: the procession, the Bridal procession was
coming! Not a man but would have perished rather than be deprived of
seeing a single act of this stupendous drama.
Those Arabs--what fools they were! Besides the Vekeel only three of their
magnates were present, and those men whom no one knew. Even the Kadi was
nowhere to be seen; and he must have forbidden the Moslem women to come,
for not a single veiled beauty of the harem was visible. Not one Egyptian
woman would have failed to appear if the plague had not kept so many
imprisoned in their houses. Such a thing would never be seen again; this
day's doings would be a tale to tell to future great-grandchildren!
The music and singing came nearer and nearer; and it did not indeed sound
as if it were escorting a hapless creature to a fearful end. Blast after
blast rang out from the trumpets, filling the air with festive defiance;
cheerful bridal songs came nearer and nearer to the listeners, the shrill
chorus of boys and maidens sounding above the deeper and stronger chant
of youths and men of all ages; flutes piped a gay invitation to gladness;
the dull roar of drums muttered like the distant waves in time to a
march, broken by the clang of cymbals and the tinkle of bells hung around
tambourines held high by girlish hands which struck, rattled and waved
them above their flowing curls; lute players discoursed sweet music on
the strings; and as this vast tide of mingled tones came closer, behind
it there was still more music and more song.
To the ear the procession seemed endless, and the eye soon confirmed the
impression.
All were listening, gazing, watching to see the Bride and her escort.
Every eye seemed compelled to turn in the same direction; and presently
there came: first the trumpeters on spirited horses, and these ranged
themselves on each side of the road by the shore leading to the scene of
the "marriage." In front of them the choir of women took their stand to
the left and, on the right, the men who had marched after them. All alike
were arrayed in light sea-green garments, and loaded with lotos-flowers.
The women's hair, twined with white blossoms, flowed over their
shoulders; the men carried bunches of papyrus and reeds;--they
represented river gods that had risen from the stream.
Then came boys and bearded men, in white robes, with panther-skins on
their shoulders, as the heathen priests had been wont to wear them. They
were headed by two old men with long white beards, one holding a silver
cup and the other a golden one, ready to fling them into the waves as a
first offering, according to the practise of their forefathers, as
Horapollo had described and ordered it. These went on to the pontoon, to
its farthest end, and took their place on one side of the platform whence
the Bride was to be cast into the river. Behind them came a large troop
of flute-players and drummers, followed by fifty maidens holding
tambourines, and fifty men all dressed and carrying emblems as followers
of Dionysus, or Osiris-Bacchus, who had been worshipped here in the time
of the Romans; with these came the drunken Silenus, goathoofed Satyrs and
Pan, with his reed-pipes, all riding grey asses strangely bedaubed with
yellow.
Then followed giraffes, elephants, ostriches, antelopes, gazelles; even
some tamed lions and panthers were led past the wondering crowd; for this
had been done in the famous procession in honor of the second Ptolemy,
described by Callixenus of Rhodes.
Next came a large car drawn by twelve black horses, and on it a
symbolical group of Famine and Pestilence overthrown; they were
surrounded by shrieking black children, with pointed wings on their
shoulders and horns on their foreheads, bound to stakes to represent the
hosts of hell--a performance which they tried to make at once ghastly and
droll.
On another car the Goddess of the Inundation was to be seen. She sat amid
sheaves, fruits, and garlands of vine; while round her were groups of
children with apples and corn, pomegranates and bunches of dates,
wine-jars and cups in their hands.
Presently there appeared in a large shell, as though lounging in a bath,
the goddess of health; she was drawn by eight snow-white horses, and held
in one hand a golden goblet and in the other a caduceus. After her came
the river-god Nile, the bridegroom of the marriage, studied from the
famous statue carried away from Alexandria by the Romans: a splendid and
mighty bearded man, resting against an urn. Sixteen naked children--the
sixteen ells that the river must rise for its overflow to bless the
land--played round his herculean form, and a bridal wreath of
lotos-flowers crowned his flowing locks. This car, which was decorated
with crocodiles, sheaves, dates, grapes, and shells, was hailed with
shouts of enthusiasm; it was escorted by old men in the costume of the
heathen priesthood.
Behind this came more music and singers, with a troop of young men and
maidens led by lute-players singing. These too were dressed as the genie,
and nymphs of the river and were the groomsmen and bridesmaids in
attendance on the betrothed.
The longer the procession lasted and the nearer the looked-for victim
approached, the more eagerly attent were the gazing multitude.
When this group of youths and maidens had gone by, there was hardly a
sound to be heard in the tribune and among the crowd. No one felt the
fierce heat of the sun, no one heeded the thirst that parched every
tongue; all eyes were bent in one direction; only the black Vekeel, whose
colossal form towered up where he stood, occasionally sent a sinister and
anxious glance towards the town. He expected to see smoke rising from the
quarter near the prison, and suddenly his lips parted and he displayed
his dazzlingly white teeth in a scornful laugh. That which he looked for
had come to pass; the little grey cloud which he discerned grew blacker,
and then, in the heart of it, rose a crimson glow which did not take its
color from the sun. But of all those thousands he was the only one who
looked behind him and observed it.
The bride's attendants had by this time taken their station on the
pontoon; here came another band of youths with panther skins on their
shoulders; and now--at last, at last--a car came swaying along, drawn by
eight coal-black oxen dressed with green ostrich-feathers and
water-plants.
The car was shaded by a tall canopy, supported by four poles, against
which leaned four men in the robes of the heathen priesthood; this awning
was lavishly decorated with wreaths of lotos and reeds, and fenced about
with papyrus, bulrushes, tall grasses and blossoming river-weeds. Beneath
it sat the queen of the festival--the Bride of the Nile.
Robed in white and closely veiled, she was quite motionless. Her long,
thick brown hair fell over her shoulders; at her feet lay a wreath, and
rare rose-colored lotos-flowers were strewn on the car.
The bishop had been sitting at her side, the first Christian priest,
certainly, of all the swarms of monks and ecclesiastics in Memphis, who
had ever appeared at such a scene of heathen abomination. He was now
standing, looking down at the crowd with a deeply knit brow and menacing
gaze. What good had come of the penitential sermons in all the churches,
of his and his vicar's warnings and threats? In spite of all remonstrance
he had mounted the car with the condemned victim, after administering the
last consolations to her soul. It might cost him his life, but he would
keep his promise.
In her hand Paula held two roses: one was Orion's last greeting delivered
by Martina; the other Pulcheria had brought her early in the morning.
Yesterday, in a lucid moment, her dying father had given her his fondest
blessing, little knowing what hung over her; to-day he had not come to
himself, and had neither noticed nor returned her parting kiss. Quite
unconscious, he had been moved from the prison out of doors and to the
house of Rufinus. Dame Joanna would not forego the privilege of giving
him a resting-place and taking care of him till the end.
Orion's last note was placed in Paula's hands just before she set out; it
informed her that his task was now successfully ended. He had been told
that it was to-morrow, and not to-day, that the hideous act would be
accomplished; and it was a consolation to her to know that he was spared
the agony of following her in fancy in her fearful progress.
She had allowed the women who came to clothe her in bridal array to
perform their task; among them was Emau, the chief warder's wife, and her
overflowing compassion had done Paula good. But even in the prison-yard
she had felt it unendurable to exhibit herself decked in her bridal
wreaths to the gaping multitude; she had torn them from her and thrown
them on the ground.
How long--how interminably long--had the road to the river appeared; but
she had never raised her eyes to look at the curious crowd, never ceased
lifting up her heart in prayer; and when her proud blood boiled, or
despair had almost taken possession of her, she had grasped the bishop's
hand and he had never wearied of encouraging her and exhorting her to
cling to love and faith, and not even yet abandon all hope.
Thus they at last reached the pontoon at whose further end life would
begin for her in another world. The shouts of the crowd were as loud, as
triumphant, as expectant as ever; music and singing mingled with the roar
of thousands of spectators; she allowed herself to be lifted from the car
as though she were stunned, and followed the young men and maidens who
formed the bridal train, and in alternate choruses sang the finest
nuptial song of Sappho the fair Lesbian.
The bishop now made an attempt to address the people, but he was soon
reduced to silence. So he once more joined Paula, and hand in hand they
went on to the pier.
All she had in her of strength, pride, and heroic courage she summoned to
her aid to enable her to walk these last few paces with her head erect,
and without tottering; she had gone half way along the wooden structure,
with a mien as lofty and majestic as though she were marching to command
the obedience of the mob, when hoofs came thundering after her on the
boards.
Old Horapollo, on his white ass, had overtaken her and stopped her on her
road. Breathless, bathed in perspiration, scornful and triumphant, he
desired her to remove her veil, and ordered the bishop to leave her and
give up his place to the man who represented Father Nile--a gigantic
farrier who followed him, somewhat embarrassed in his costume, but very
ready to perform his part to the end.
The priest and Paula, however, refused to obey. At this the old man tore
the veil from her face and signed to the Nile-God; he stepped forward and
assumed his rights, after bowing respectfully to the prelate--who was
forced to make way--and then led the Bride to the end of the platform.
Here the two elders who had headed the procession in honor of Bacchus,
cast the gold cups as offerings into the river, and then a lawyer, in the
costume of a heathen priest, proceeded to expound, in a well-set speech,
the meaning of this betrothal and sacrifice. He took Paula's hand to
place in that of the farrier, who made ready to cast her into the river
for which he stood proxy.
But an obstacle intervened before he could do so. A large and splendid
barge had drawn up close to the platform, and shouts were heard from the
tribune and from the mob which had till now looked on in breathless
suspense and profound silence:
"Susannah's barge!"
"Look at the Nile, look at the river!"
"It is the water-wagtail--Philammon's rich heiress!"
"A pretty sight!"
"Another Bride--a second Bride!"
And the gaze of the multitude was now, as one eye, fixed on Katharina.
Susannah's handsome barge had been passing up and down near the platform
for the last hour, and the guards on duty had several times desired that
it was to be kept at a distance from the scene of the "marriage;" but in
vain; and they in their little boats were not strong enough to take
active measures against the larger vessel manned by fifty rowers. It had
now steered quite close to the pontoon, and the splendid gilding and
carving, the tall deck-house supported on silver pillars, and the crimson
embroidered sails would have been a gorgeous feast for the eye, but that
the black flag floating from the mast gave it a melancholy and gloomy
aspect.
Within the cabin Katharina had made her waiting-women dress her in white
and deck her with white flowers-myrtle, roses and lotos; but she
vouchsafed no reply to their anxious enquiries.
The maid who fastened the flowers on her bosom could feel her mistress's
heart beating under her hand, and the lotos-blossoms which drooped from
her shoulder rose and fell as though they were already rocking on the
waves of the Nile. Her lips, too, never ceased moving, and her cheeks
were as pale as death.
"What is she going to do?" her attendants asked each other.
Her mother dead only yesterday, and now she chose to be present at this
ceremonial, desiring the steersman to run close to the platform and keep
near to it, where all the world could see her. But she evidently wished
to display herself to the people in all her finery and be admired, for
she presently went up on the roof of the deck-house. And she looked
lovely, as lovely as a guileless angel, as she mounted the steps with
childlike diffidence-timidly, but with wide open eyes, as though
something grand was awaiting her there--something she had long yearned
for with her whole heart.
Anubis had to help her up the last steps, for her knees gave way; but
once at the top she sent him down again to remain below with the others,
as she wished to be alone. The lad was accustomed to obey; and Katharina
now stepped on a seat close to the side of the boat, turned to Paula,
whom she was now rapidly approaching, and held out to her and the bishop
two tall lily-stems covered with splendid blossoms. At the very moment
when the farrier was measuring by eye the distance between the platform
and the barge, and had judged it impossible to cast the Bride into the
stream till the vessel had moved on, Katharina cried out:
"Reverend Father John--and all of you! Take me, me and not the daughter
of Thomas! It is I, not she--I am the true Bride of the Nile. Of my own
free will--hear me, John!--of my own free will I am ready to give my life
for my hapless land and the misery of the people, and the patriarch said
that such a sacrifice as mine would be acceptable to Heaven. Farewell!
Pray for me!--Lord have mercy upon me! Mother, dear Mother, I am coming
to you!"
Then she called to the steersman: "Put out from the platform!" and as
soon as a few strokes of the oars had carried the barge into the deeper
channel she stepped nimbly on to the edge of the bulwark, dropped the
lilies into the river, and then with a smile, her head gracefully bent on
one side and her skirt modestly held round her, she slipped into the
water.
The waves closed over her; but she was a good swimmer and could not help
coming once to the surface. Her expression was that of a bather enjoying
the cool fresh water that laved and gurgled round her. Perhaps the wild
storm of applause, the mingled cries of horror, compassion and
thanksgiving that went up from the assembled thousands once more reached
her ear--but she dived head foremost to rise no more.
The "River-God," a good-hearted man, who in his daily life could never
have let a fellow-creature drown under his very eyes, forgot his part,
released Paula, and sprang after Katharina, as did Anubis and a few
boatmen; but they could not reach her, and the boy, who found swimming
difficult with his crippled leg followed the girl to whom his young heart
was wholly devoted to a watery death.
Her speech had reached no ears but those to whom it was addressed; but
before she was lost in the waters Bishop John turned to the people, took
Paula's hand--and she felt free once more when her terrible bridegroom
had deserted her--and holding up the Crucifix which hung at his girdle he
shouted loudly:
"Behold the desires of our holy Father Benjamin, by whom God himself
speaks to you, have met with fulfilment. A pure and noble Jacobite
maiden, of her own free and beautiful impulse, has sacrificed herself
after the example of the Saviour, for the sufferings of her nation,
before your eyes. This one," and he drew Paula to him, "this one is free;
the Nile has had his victim!"
But almost before he had done speaking--before the people could proclaim
their vote--Horapollo had rushed at him and interrupted him. He had
dismounted from his ass during the earlier part of the proceedings, and,
not to let his prey escape, he now came between Paula and the bishop,
grasped her dress and cried to the chorus of youths:
"Come on--at once! One of you take the part of the Nile-God--into the
river with the Bride!" The bishop however forced himself between the
speaker and the girl to protect her. But Horapollo flew into a fury and
rushed at the prelate to snatch away the image of the Saviour, while John
exclaimed in a voice of ominous thunder: "Anathema!"
This word of fear roused the Christian blood in the Egyptians; the
sacrilegious attempt stirred the zeal which they had proved in many a
struggle, and which had only been kept under by an effort during these
times of trouble: the leader of the choir dragged the old man away and
took part with the bishop. Others followed his example, while several, on
the contrary, sided with old Horapollo who clung tightly to Paula,
preferring to die himself rather than allow her to escape his hatred and
vengeance.
At this moment the clang of bells was heard from the town with a terrific
and unaccountable uproar, and a young man was seen forcing his way
through the throng, a naked sword in his hand, and in spite of his torn
garments, his wild hair, and his blackened face, he was at once
recognized as Orion. Every one made way for him, for he rushed on like a
madman; as he reached the pontoon and took in at a glance what was going
forward there, he sprang past the mummers with mighty leaps to the
platform, pushing aside sundry groups of fighting champions; and before
the principal actors were aware of his presence, he had snatched Paula
from the old man's clutch, and called her by her name. She sank on his
breast half-fainting with terror, surprise and unspeakable rapture, and
he clasped her to him with his left arm, while the flashing sword in his
right hand and his flaming looks warned all bystanders that it would be
as wise to attack a lioness defending her young as to defy this desperate
man, who was prepared to face death with the woman he loved.
His push had sent Horapollo tottering to some distance; and when the old
man had pulled himself together, to throw himself once more on his
victim, he found himself the centre of a fight. A wild troop had followed
Orion and beset the struggling mob, whom they presently drove over the
edge of the pontoon into the river, and with them Horapollo. Most of
these saved themselves by swimming, but the old man sank, and nothing
more was seen of him but his clenched fist, which rose in menace for some
minutes above the waters.
Meanwhile the Vekeel had become aware of what was going forward on the
platform; he leaped in fury from his seat to restore order, intending to
seize Orion whom he fancied he had seen, or, if necessary to cut him down
with his own hand.
But a vast multitude stopped his progress, for a fearful horde of
released prisoners with Orion at their head had come rushing down to the
scene of the festival yelling: "Fire! the prison is burning, the town is
in flames!"
Every one who could run fled at once to Memphis to save his house, his
possessions and those dear to him. Like a flock of doves scared by the
scream of a hawk, like autumn leaves driven before the wind, the
multitude dispersed. They hurried back to the town in wild tumult and
inextricable confusion, jumping into the festal cars, cutting loose the
horses from that of the goddess of health, to mount them and ride home,
overthrowing everything that stood in their way and dragging back the
Vekeel who was striving, sword in hand, to get to the pontoon.
The smoke and flames of the city were rising every moment, and acted like
magic in spurring the flying crowd to reach their homes in time. But,
before Obada had succeeded in his efforts, the pushing throng were once
more brought to a standstill; horses were heard approaching. Dense masses
of dust hid them and their riders; but it was certainly an armed troop
that was coming clattering onwards, for flashing gleams were seen here
and there through the dull clouds that shrouded them, the reflection of
the sun's bright rays from polished and glittering helmets,
breast-plates, and sabres.
Now they were visible even where the Vekeel was. Foremost rode the Kadi,
and just as he came up with Obada he sprang from the saddle on to the
wooden structure, and with a loud cry of: "Free-saved!" in which all the
joy of his heart found utterance, he stretched out both his hands to
Paula, who was advancing towards the shore clinging closely to Orion.
Othman did not observe the Vekeel, who was but a few paces distant. The
words "Free!" "Saved!" from the supreme judge, gave the negro to
understand that a pardon must have arrived for his youthful foe, and this
of course implied the condemnation of his own proceedings. All his hopes
were wrecked, for this meant that Omar still ruled and that the attempt
on the Khaliff's life had failed. Dismissal, punishment or death must be
his doom, when Amru should return. Still, he would not succumb till the
instrument of his ruin had preceded him to the grave. Taking the Kadi by
surprise he thrust him aside, and prepared to deal a fearful blow that
should fell Orion before he himself should fall. But the captain of the
body-guard, who had followed Othman, had watched his movements: Swift as
lightning he rose in his saddle and swung his cimeter, which cut deep
into the Vekeel's neck. With a hideous curse Obada let his arm drop, and
fell struggling for his last breath at the feet of the newly united
couple.
The populace afterwards declared that his blood was not red like that of
other men, but black like his skin and his soul. They had good cause to
curse his memory, for his villainy had reduced more than half Memphis to
ashes that day, and brought the city to beggary.
He had hired two venial wretches to set fire to the prison while the
festival was proceeding, with a view to suffocating Orion in his cell;
but the gang were detected and all the prisoners were released in time.
Thus the young man had been able to reach the scene of the ceremonial at
the head of his fellow-captives. The fire, however, had gained the upper
hand in the deserted town. It had spread from house to house along the
sun-scorched streets, and next day nothing remained of the city of the
Pyramids but the road along the shore, and a few wretched alleys. The
ancient Capital of the Pharaohs was reduced to a village, and the
houseless residents moved across to the eastern bank, to people as
Moslems the newly-founded town of Fostat, or sought a home on Christian
territory.
Among the houses that had escaped was that of Rufinus, and thither the
Kadi escorted Orion and Paula. It was to serve as their prison till the
return of Amru, and there they spent delightful days in the society of
their friends, and there Thomas was so happy as to clasp his children to
his heart once more, and bless them before he died.
A few minutes before the Kadi had reached the scene of the festival two
carrier pigeons had arrived, each bearing the Arab governor's commands
that the sacrifice of Paula was at any rate to be stopped, and her life
spared till his return. He also reserved the right of deciding Orion's
fate.
Mary and Rustem had met Amru at Berenice, on the Egyptian coast of the
Red Sea. This decaying sea-port was connected with Medina by a
pigeon-post, and in reply to his viceroy's enquiry with reference to the
victim about to be offered by the despairing Egyptians to the Nile, Omar
had sent a reply which had been immediately forwarded to the Kadi.
The burning of their town had brought new and fearful suffering on the
stricken Memphites, and notwithstanding Katharina's death the Nile still
did not rise. The Kadi therefore once more summoned a meeting of all the
inhabitants from both sides of the river, three days after the
interrupted marriage-festival. It was held under the palms by Nesptah's
inn, and there he proclaimed to the multitude, Moslem and Christian, by
means of the Arab herald and Egyptian interpreter, what the Khaliff
commanded him to declare, namely: that God, the One, the All-merciful,
scorned human sacrifice. In this firm conviction he, Omar, would beseech
Allah the Compassionate, and he sent a letter which was to be cast into
the river in his name.
And this letter was addressed:
"To the River of Egypt." And its contents were as follows:
"If thou, O River, flowest of thyself, then swell not; but if it be God,
the One, the Compassionate, that maketh thee to flow, then we entreat the
All-merciful that he will bid thee rise!"
"That which is not of God," wrote Amru in the letter which enclosed
Omar's, "what shall it profit men? But all things created are by Him, and
so is your noble river. The Most High will hearken to Omar's prayers and
ours, and I therefore command that all of you--Moslems, Christians, and
Jews, shall gather together in the Mosque on the other side of the Nile
which I have built to the glory of the All-merciful, and that you there
lift up your souls in one great common prayer, to the end that God may
hear you and take pity on your sufferings!"
And the Kadi bid all the people to go across the Nile and they obeyed his
bidding. Bishop John called on his clergy and marched at their head,
leading the Christians; the priests and elders of the Jews led their
people next to the Jacobites; and side by side with these the Moslems
gathered in the magnificent pillared sanctuary of Amru, where the three
congregations of different creeds lifted up, their hearts and eyes and
voices to the pitying Father in Heaven.
And this very Mosque of Amru has more than once been the scene of the
same sublime spectacle; even within the lifetime and before the eyes of
the narrator of this tale have Moslems, Christians, and Jews united there
in one pious prayer, which must have been acceptable indeed in the ears
of the Lord.
Not long after the letter from the Khaliff Omar had been cast into the
Nile, and the prayer of the united assembly had gone up to Heaven from
the Mosque of Armu, a pigeon came in announcing a sudden rise in the
waters at the cataracts; and after some still anxious but hopeful days of
patience, the Nile swelled higher and yet higher, overflowed its banks,
and gave the laborer a right to look forward to a rich harvest; and then,
when a heavy storm of rain had laid the choking dust, the plague, too,
disappeared.
Just when the river was beginning to rise perceptibly Amru returned;
bringing in his train little Mary and Rustem, Philippus the leech and
Haschim, who had joined the governor's caravan at Djidda.
In the course of their journey they received news of all that had been
happening at Memphis, and when the travellers were approaching their last
night-quarters, and the Pyramids were already in sight, the governor said
to little Mary:
"What do you say little one? Do we not owe the Memphites the treat of a
splendid marriage festival?"
"No, my lord, two," replied the child.
"How is that?" laughed Amru, "You are too young and do not count yet, and
I know no other maiden in Memphis whose wedding I should care to provide
for."
"But there is a man towards whom you feel most kindly, and who lives as
lonely as a recluse. I should like to see him married, and at the same
time as Orion and Paula. I mean our good friend Philippus."
"The physician? And is he still unwed?" asked Amru in surprise; for no
Moslem of the leech's age and position could remain unmarried without
exposing himself to the contempt of his fellow-believers. "He is a
widower then!"
"No," replied Mary. "He has never yet found a wife to suit him; but I
know one created on purpose for him by God himself!"
"You little Khatbe!"--[A professional go-between]--cried the governor.
"Well, settle the matter, and it shall be no fault of mine if the second
wedding lacks magnificence."
"And we will have a third!" interrupted the child, clapping her hands and
laughing. "My worthy escort Rustem. . . .
"The colossus! Why, child, to you all things are possible! Have you found
a wife for him too?"
"No, he found Mandane for himself without my help."
"It is the same thing!" cried the governor jovially. "I will provide for
her. But that must satisfy you, or else all those unbelievers whom we are
settling here will drive us Moslem Arabs out of the land."
The great man had often held such discourse as this with the child since
she had entered his tent at Berenice, there to lay before him the case of
the couple she loved, and for whom she had taken on herself great risk
and hardship; she had pleaded so eloquently, so kindly, and with such
fervent and pathetic words, that Amru had at once made up his mind to
grant her everything that lay in his power. Mary had done him a service,
too, by bringing him the information she could give him, for it enabled
him to avert perils which threatened the interests of the Crescent, and
also to save the children of two men he honored--the son of the Mukaukas,
and the daughter of Thomas--from imminent danger.
He found, on his return home, that the Vekeel's crimes far exceeded his
worst fears. Obada's proceedings had begun to undermine that respect for
Arab rule and Moslem justice which Amru had done his utmost to secure. It
was only by a miracle that Orion had escaped his plots, for he had three
times sent assassins to the prison, and it was entirely owing to the
watchful care of pretty Emau's husband that the youth had been able to
save himself in the fire. Obada had done all this to clear out of his
path the hated man whose statements and impeachments might ruin him. The
wretch had met a less ignominious death than his judges would have
granted him. The wealth found hoarded in his dwelling was sent to Medina;
and even Orion was forced to see the vast sums of which the Negro had
plundered his treasury, appropriated by the Arabs. The Arab governor
thought it only right to inflict this penalty for the share he had taken
in the rescue of the nuns; and the young man submitted willingly to a
punishment which restored him and his bride to freedom, and enabled Amru
to apply a larger proportion of the revenues of his native land for its
own benefit.
The Khaliff Omar, however, never received these moneys, which constituted
far more than half of Orion's patrimony. The Prophet's truest friend, the
wise and powerful ruler, fell by the assassin's hand, and the world now
learnt that the Vekeel had been one of the chief conspirators and had
been spurred on to the rashest extremes by his confidence of success.
Amru received the son of the Mukaukas as a father might; after examining
the result of his labors he found it far superior to his own efforts in
the same direction, and he charged Orion to carry out the new division of
the country, which he confirmed excepting in a few details.
"Perform your duty and do your utmost in the future to go on as you have
begun!" cried Amru; and the young man replied:
"In this bitter and yet happy interval I have become clear on many
points."
"And may I ask on what?" asked the governor. "I would gladly hear."
"I have discovered, my lord," replied Orion, "that there is no such thing
as happiness or unhappiness in the sense men give to the words. Life
appears to each of us as we ourselves paint it. Hard times which come
into our lives from outside are often no more than a brief night from
which a brighter day presently dawns--or the stab of a surgeon's knife,
which makes us sounder than before. What men call grief is, times without
number, a path to greater ease; whereas the ordinary happiness of mankind
flows, swiftly as running waters, down from that delightful sense of
ease. Like a ship, which, when her rudder is lost, is more likely to ride
out the storm on the high seas than near the sheltering coast, so a man
who has lost himself may easily recover himself and his true happiness in
the wildest turmoil of life, but rarely and with difficulty if his
existence runs calmly on. All other blessings are comparatively worthless
if we are not upheld by the consciousness of fulfilling the task of life
in faithful earnest, and of cheerfully dealing with the problems it sets
before us. The lost one was found as soon as he placed his whole being
and faculties at the service of a higher duty, with God in his heart and
before his eyes. I have learnt from my own experience, and from Paula's
good friends, to strive untiringly after what is right, and to find my
own weal in that of others.
"The sense of lost liberty is hard to bear; but leave me love, and give
me room and opportunity to prove my best powers in the service of the
community, even in a prison--and though I cannot be perfectly happy, for
that is impossible without freedom--I will be far happier than such an
idle and useless spendthrift of time and abilities as I used to be among
the dissipations of the capital."
"Then enjoy the consciousness of duty well performed, with liberty and
love," replied the governor. "And believe me, my friend, your father in
Paradise will no more grudge you all that is loveliest and best than I
do. You are on the road where every curse is turned to blessing."
The three marriages which Amru had promised to provide for, were
celebrated with due splendor.
That of Orion and Paula was a day never to be forgotten by the gay world
of Memphis. Bishop John performed the ceremony, and the young couple at
once took possession of the beautiful house left them by Katharina, the
real Bride of the Nile. If it could have been granted to her to read
Paula's and Orion's hearts, and see how they held her in remembrance, she
would have found that to them she was no longer the childish
water-wagtail, and that they knew how to value the sacrifice of her young
life.
Their first beloved guest, who went with them to their new home, was
little Mary, and she remained their dearest companion till she married
happily. The governess, Eudoxia, to whom also Orion offered an asylum,
accompanied Mary to her own delightful home; and there at last Mary
closed her old friend's eyes, after the good woman had brought up her
little ones, not like a hireling but as a true mother.
The Patriarch Benjamin, too, who was led by many considerations--and not
least by Katharina's will to remain on good terms with the son of the
Mukaukas, was a visitor to the youthful pair. Neither he nor the Church
ever had reason to repent his alliance with Orion; and when Paula
presented her husband with a son, the prelate offered to be his sponsor,
and named him George after his grandfather.
Orion's son, too, inherited the office of Mukaukas, when he came to man's
estate, from his father who was appointed to it, but under a new Arab
title, shortly after his marriage.
Ere long, however, Orion, as the highest Christian authority in his
native land, had to change his place of residence and leave Memphis,
which was doomed to ruin, for Alexandria. From thence his power extended
over the whole Nile-valley, and he devoted himself to his charge with so
much zeal, fidelity, justice, and prudence, that his name was remembered
with veneration and affection by generations long after.
Paula was the pride and joy of his life, and they lived together in
devoted union to an advanced age. He regarded it as one of the duties of
his life, to care for the woman who had made him what he was from a lost
and reprobate creature, and to fill every day of her life with joy. When
he built his palace at Alexandria, he graced it with the inscription that
had been engraved on Thomas' ring: "God hath set the sweat of man's brow
before virtue."
Philippus and his Pulcheria also found a new home in Alexandria. He had
no long wooing to do; for when, on his return, the girl of whom he had
thought constantly during his long journeying, met him for the first time
in her mother's house and held out both her hands with trustful warmth of
welcome, he clasped her to him and would not release her till Joanna had
given them her maternal blessing. The widow lived in the leech's house
with her children and grandchildren, and often visited her husband's
grave. At length she was laid to rest by him and his soft-hearted mother,
in the cemetery of Alexandria.
Rustem, made a rich man by Orion, became a famous breeder of horses and
camels in his own country, while Mandane ruled mildly but prudently over
his possessions--which he never shared with others, though he remained a
Masdakite till he died. The first daughter his wife bore him was named
Mary, and the first boy Haschim; but she would not agree to Rustem's
proposal that the second should be called Orion; she preferred to give
him the name of Rufinus, and his successors were Rustem and Philippus.
The senator and his wife were only too glad to quit Egypt. Martina,
however, had the satisfaction of assisting at the marriage of her dear
Heliodora on the shores of the Nile; not, indeed, to her "Great
Sesostris," but to her nephew Narses, who by the young widow's devoted
care was restored, if not to perfect vigor, at any rate to very endurable
good health.
Paula's wedding gift to her was the great emerald, which had meanwhile
been brought back again to Memphis. Justinus and Martina always remained
on terms of cordial friendship with the young Mukaukas and his wife:
Nilus lived long after to perform his duties with industry and judgment;
and whenever Haschim came to Alexandria there was a contest between Orion
and Philippus, for neither would yield him to the other. But Philip could
no longer envy his former rival the wife he had won. He had not, indeed,
ceased to admire her; but at the same time he would say: "My comfortable
little Pulcheria has not her match; our rooms would be too small for
Paula, but they suit my golden-haired girl best."
He remained unselfishly devoted to his work till the end, and, when he
saw Orion wearing himself out in energetic toil, he would often say: "He
knows now what life demands, and acts accordingly; and that is why he
grows no older, and his laugh is as winning and gay as ever. It is an
honor to be called friend by a woman who like the Bride of the Nile.
saved herself from certain death, and a man who, like the young Mukaukas,
has freed himself from the heaviest of all curses."
To this day the Bride of the Nile is not forgotten. Before the river
begins to rise on the Night of Dropping the inhabitants of the town of
Cairo, which grew up after the ruin of Memphis, on the eastern shore by
the side of Fostat, erect a figure of clay, representing a maiden form,
which they call Aroosa or the Bride.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Sea-port was connected with Medina by a pigeon-post
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE BRIDE OF THE NILE:
A knot can often be untied by daylight
Abandon to the young the things we ourselves used most to enjoy
Ancient custom, to have her ears cut off
Caught the infection and had to laugh whether she would or no
Gave them a claim on your person and also on your sorrows
Hatred and love are the opposite ends of the same rod
He was made to be plundered
How could they find so much pleasure in such folly
In whom some good quality or other may not be discovered
Life is not a banquet
Life is a function, a ministry, a duty
Love has two faces: tender devotion and bitter aversion
Of two evils it is wise to choose the lesser
Old age no longer forgets; it is youth that has a short memory
Prepared for the worst; then you are armed against failure
Sea-port was connected with Medina by a pigeon-post
Self-interest and egoism which drive him into the cave
So hard is it to forego the right of hating
Spoilt to begin with by their mothers, and then all the women
Talk of the wolf and you see his tail
Temples of the old gods were used as quarries
The man who avoids his kind and lives in solitude
Thin-skinned, like all up-starts in authority
Those who will not listen must feel
Use their physical helplessness as a defence
Who can hope to win love that gives none
Who can take pleasure in always seeing a gloomy face?
Women are indeed the rock ahead in this young fellow's life
You have a habit of only looking backwards
A THORNY PATH
By Georg Ebers
Volume 1.
CHAPTER I.
The green screen slowly rose, covering the lower portion of the broad
studio window where Heron, the gem-cutter, was at work. It was Melissa,
the artist's daughter, who had pulled it up, with bended knees and
outstretched arms, panting for breath.
"That is enough!" cried her father's impatient voice. He glanced up at
the flood of light which the blinding sun of Alexandria was pouring into
the room, as it did every autumn afternoon; but as soon as the shadow
fell on his work-table the old man's busy fingers were at work again, and
he heeded his daughter no more.
An hour later Melissa again, and without any bidding, pulled up the
screen as before, but it was so much too heavy for her that the effort
brought the blood into her calm, fair face, as the deep, rough "That is
enough" was again heard from the work-table.
Then silence reigned once more. Only the artist's low whistling as he
worked, or the patter and pipe of the birds in their cages by the window,
broke the stillness of the spacious room, till the voice and step of a
man were presently heard in the anteroom.
Heron laid by his graver and Melissa her gold embroidery, and the eyes of
father and daughter met for the first time for some hours. The very birds
seemed excited, and a starling, which had sat moping since the screen had
shut the sun out, now cried out, "Olympias!" Melissa rose, and after a
swift glance round the room she went to the door, come who might.
Ay, even if the brother she was expecting should bring a companion, or a
patron of art who desired her father's work, the room need not fear a
critical eye; and she was so well assured of the faultless neatness of
her own person, that she only passed a hand over her brown hair, and with
an involuntary movement pulled her simple white robe more tightly through
her girdle.
Heron's studio was as clean and as simple as his daughter's attire,
though it seemed larger than enough for the purpose it served, for only a
very small part of it was occupied by the artist, who sat as if in exile
behind the work-table on which his belongings were laid out: a set of
small instruments in a case, a tray filled with shells and bits of onyx
and other agates, a yellow ball of Cyrenian modeling-wax, pumice-stone,
bottles, boxes, and bowls.
Melissa had no sooner crossed the threshold, than the sculptor drew up
his broad shoulders and brawny person, and raised his hand to fling away
the slender stylus he had been using; however, he thought better of it,
and laid it carefully aside with the other tools. But this act of
self-control must have cost the hot-headed, powerful man a great effort;
for he shot a fierce look at the instrument which had had so narrow an
escape, and gave it a push of vexation with the back of his hand.
Then he turned towards the door, his sunburnt face looking surly enough,
in its frame of tangled gray hair and beard; and, as he waited for the
visitor whom Melissa was greeting outside, he tossed back his big head,
and threw out his broad, deep chest, as though preparing to wrestle.
Melissa presently returned, and the youth whose hand she still held was,
as might be seen in every feature, none other than the sculptor's son.
Both were dark-eyed, with noble and splendid heads, and in stature
perfectly equal; but while the son's countenance beamed with hearty
enjoyment, and seemed by its peculiar attractiveness to be made--and to
be accustomed--to charm men and women alike, his father's face was
expressive of disgust and misanthropy. It seemed, indeed, as though the
newcomer had roused his ire, for Heron answered his son's cheerful
greeting with no word but a reproachful "At last!" and paid no heed to
the hand the youth held out to him.
Alexander was no doubt inured to such a reception; he did not disturb
himself about the old man's ill-humor, but slapped him on the shoulder
with rough geniality, went up to the work-table with easy composure, took
up the vice which held the nearly finished gem, and, after holding it to
the light and examining it carefully, exclaimed: "Well done, father! You
have done nothing better than that for a long time."
"Poor stuff!" said his father. But his son laughed.
"If you will have it so. But I will give one of my eyes to see the man in
Alexandria who can do the like!"
At this the old man broke out, and shaking his fist he cried: "Because
the man who can find anything worth doing, takes good care not to waste
his time here, making divine art a mere mockery by such trifling with
toys! By Sirius! I should like to fling all those pebbles into the fire,
the onyx and shells and jasper and what not, and smash all those wretched
tools with these fists, which were certainly made for other work than
this."
The youth laid an arm round his father's stalwart neck, and gayly
interrupted his wrath. "Oh yes, Father Heron, Philip and I have felt
often enough that they know how to hit hard."
"Not nearly often enough," growled the artist, and the young man went on:
"That I grant, though every blow from you was equal to a dozen from the
hand of any other father in Alexandria. But that those mighty fists on
human arms should have evoked the bewitching smile on the sweet lips of
this Psyche, if it is not a miracle of art, is--"
"The degradation of art," the old man put in; but Alexander hastily
added:
"The victory of the exquisite over the coarse."
"A victory!" exclaimed Heron, with a scornful flourish of his hand. "I
know, boy, why you are trying to garland the oppressive yoke with flowers
of flattery. So long as your surly old father sits over the vice, he only
whistles a song and spares you his complaints. And then, there is the
money his work brings in!"
He laughed bitterly, and as Melissa looked anxiously up at him, her
brother exclaimed:
"If I did not know you well, master, and if it would not be too great a
pity, I would throw that lovely Psyche to the ostrich in Scopas's
court-yard; for, by Herakles! he would swallow your gem more easily than
we can swallow such cruel taunts. We do indeed bless the Muses that work
brings you some surcease of gloomy thoughts. But for the rest--I hate to
speak the word gold. We want it no more than you, who, when the coffer is
full, bury it or hide it with the rest. Apollodorus forced a whole talent
of the yellow curse upon me for painting his men's room. The sailor's
cap, into which I tossed it with the rest, will burst when Seleukus pays
me for the portrait of his daughter; and if a thief robs you, and me too,
we need not fret over it. My brush and your stylus will earn us more in
no time. And what are our needs? We do not bet on quail-fights; we do not
run races; I always had a loathing for purchased love; we do not want to
wear a heap of garments bought merely because they take our
fancy--indeed, I am too hot as it is under this scorching sun. The house
is your own. The rent paid by Glaukias, for the work-room and garden you
inherited from your father, pays for half at least of what we and the
birds and the slaves eat. As for Philip, he lives on air and philosophy;
and, besides, he is fed out of the great breadbasket of the Museum."
At this point the starling interrupted the youth's vehement speech with
the appropriate cry, "My strength! my strength!" The brother and sister
looked at each other, and Alexander went on with genuine enthusiasm:
"But it is not in you to believe us capable of such meanness. Dedicate
your next finished work to Isis or Serapis. Let your masterpiece grace
the goddess's head-gear, or the god's robe. We shall be quite content,
and perhaps the immortals may restore your joy in life as a reward."
The bird repeated its lamentable cry, "My strength!" and the youth
proceeded with increased vehemence:
"It would really be better that you should throw your vice and your
graver and your burnisher, and all that heap of dainty tools, into the
sea, and carve an Atlas such as we have heard you talk about ever since
we could first speak Greek. Come, set to work on a colossus! You have but
to speak the word, and the finest clay shall be ready on your
modeling-table by to-morrow, either here or in Glaukias's work-room,
which is indeed your own. I know where the best is to be found, and can
bring it to you in any quantity. Scopas will lend me his wagon. I can see
it now, and you valiantly struggling with it till your mighty arms ache.
You will not whistle and hum over that, but sing out with all your might,
as you used when my mother was alive, when you and your apprentices
joined Dionysus's drunken rout. Then your brow will grow smooth again;
and if the model is a success, and you want to buy marble, or pay the
founder, then out with your gold, out of the coffer and its hiding-place!
Then you can make use of all your strength, and your dream of producing
an Atlas such as the world has not seen--your beautiful dream-will become
a reality!"
Heron had listened eagerly to his son's rhapsody, but he now cast a timid
glance at the table where the wax and tools lay, pushed the rough hair
from his brow, and broke in with a bitter laugh: "My dream, do you
say--my dream? As if I did not know too well that I am no longer the man
to create an Atlas! As if I did not feel, without your words, that my
strength for it is a thing of the past!"
"Nay, father," exclaimed the painter. "Is it right to cast away the sword
before the battle? And even if you did not succeed--"
"You would be all the better pleased," the sculptor put in. "What surer
way could there be to teach the old simpleton, once for all, that the
time when he could do great work is over and gone?"
"That is unjust, father; that is unworthy of you," the young man
interrupted in great excitement; but his father went on, raising his
voice; "Silence, boy! One thing at any rate is left to me, as you
know--my keen eyes; and they did not fail me when you two looked at each
other as the starling cried, 'My strength!' Ay, the bird is in the right
when he bewails what was once so great and is now a mere laughing-stock.
But you--you ought to reverence the man to whom you owe your existence
and all you know; you allow yourself to shrug your shoulders over your
own father's humbler art, since your first pictures were fairly
successful.--How puffed up he is, since, by my devoted care, he has been
a painter! How he looks down on the poor wretch who, by the pinch of
necessity, has come down from being a sculptor of the highest promise to
being a mere gem-cutter! In the depths of your soul--and I know it--you
regard my laborious art as half a handicraft. Well, perhaps it deserves
no better name; but that you--both of you--should make common cause with
a bird, and mock the sacred fire which still burns in an old man, and
moves him to serve true and noble art and to mold something great--an
Atlas such as the world has never seen on a heroic scale; that--"
He covered his face with his hands and sobbed aloud. And the strong man's
passionate grief cut his children to the heart, though, since their
mother's death, their father's rage and discontent had many a time ere
now broken down into childish lamentation.
To-day no doubt the old man was in worse spirits than usual, for it was
the day of the Nekysia--the feast of the dead kept every autumn; and he
had that morning visited his wife's grave, accompanied by his daughter,
and had anointed the tombstone and decked it with flowers. The young
people tried to comfort him; and when at last he was more composed and
had dried his tears, he said, in so melancholy and subdued a tone that
the angry blusterer was scarcely recognizable: "There--leave me alone; it
will soon be over. I will finish this gem to-morrow, and then I must do
the Serapis I promised Theophilus, the high-priest. Nothing can come of
the Atlas. Perhaps you meant it in all sincerity, Alexander; but since
your mother left me, children, since then--my arms are no weaker than
they were; but in here--what it was that shriveled, broke, leaked away--I
can not find words for it. If you care for me--and I know you do--you
must not be vexed with me if my gall rises now and then; there is too
much bitterness in my soul. I can not reach the goal I strive after and
was meant to win; I have lost what I loved best, and where am I to find
comfort or compensation?"
His children tenderly assured him of their affection, and he allowed
Melissa to kiss him, and stroked Alexander's hair.
Then he inquired for Philip, his eldest son and his favorite; and on
learning that he, the only person who, as he believed, could understand
him, would not come to see him this day above all others, he again broke
out in wrath, abusing the degeneracy of the age and the ingratitude of
the young.
"Is it a visit which detains him again?" he inquired, and when Alexander
thought not, he exclaimed contemptuously: "Then it is some war of words
at the Museum. And for such poor stuff as that a son can forget his duty
to his father and mother!"
"But you, too, used to enjoy these conflicts of intellect," his daughter
humbly remarked; but the old man broke in:
"Only because they help a miserable world to forget the torments of
existence, and the hideous certainty of having been born only to die some
horrible death. But what can you know of this?"
"By my mother's death-bed," replied the girl, "we, too, had a glimpse
into the terrible mystery." And Alexander gravely added, "And since we
last met, father, I may certainly account myself as one of the
initiated."
"You have painted a dead body?" asked his father.
"Yes, father," replied the lad with a deep breath. "I warned you," said
Heron, in a tone of superior experience.
And then, as Melissa rearranged the folds of his blue robe, he said he
should go for a walk. He sighed as he spoke, and his children knew
whither he would go. It was to the grave to which Melissa had accompanied
him that morning; and he would visit it alone, to meditate undisturbed on
the wife he had lost.
CHAPTER II.
The brother and sister were left together. Melissa sighed deeply; but her
brother went up to her, laid his arm round her shoulder, and said: "Poor
child! you have indeed a hard time of it. Eighteen years old, and as
pretty as you are, to be kept locked up as if in prison! No one would
envy you, even if your fellow-captive and keeper were younger and less
gloomy than your father is! But we know what it all means. His grief eats
into his soul, and it does him as much good to storm and scold, as it
does us to laugh."
"If only the world could know how kind his heart really is!" said the
girl.
"He is not the same to his friends as to us," said Alexander; but Melissa
shook her head, and said sadly: "He broke out yesterday against Apion,
the dealer, and it was dreadful. For the fiftieth time he had waited
supper for you two in vain, and in the twilight, when he had done work,
his grief overcame him, and to see him weep is quite heartbreaking! The
Syrian dealer came in and found him all tearful, and being so bold as to
jest about it in his flippant way--"
"The old man would give him his answer, I know!" cried her brother with a
hearty laugh. "He will not again be in a hurry to stir up a wounded
lion."
"That is the very word," said Melissa, and her large eyes sparkled. "At
the fight in the Circus, I could not help thinking of my father, when the
huge king of the desert lay with a broken spear in his loins, whining
loudly, and burying his maned head between his great paws. The gods are
pitiless!"
"Indeed they are," replied the youth, with deep conviction; but his
sister looked up at him in surprise.
"Do you say so, Alexander? Yes, indeed--you looked just now as I never
saw you before. Has misfortune overtaken you too?"
"Misfortune?" he repeated, and he gently stroked her hair. "No, not
exactly; and you know my woes sit lightly enough on me. The immortals
have indeed shown me very plainly that it is their will sometimes to
spoil the feast of life with a right bitter draught. But, like the moon
itself, all it shines on is doomed to change--happily! Many things here
below seem strangely ordered. Like ears and eyes, hands and feet, many
things are by nature double, and misfortunes, as they say, commonly come
in couples yoked like oxen."
"Then you have had some twofold blow?" asked Melissa, clasping her hands
over her anxiously throbbing bosom.
"I, child! No, indeed. Nothing has befallen your father's younger son;
and if I were a philosopher, like Philip, I should be moved to wonder why
a man can only be wet when the rain falls on him, and yet can be so
wretched when disaster falls on another. But do not look at me with such
terror in your great eyes. I swear to you that, as a man and an artist, I
never felt better, and so I ought properly to be in my usual frame of
mind. But the skeleton at life's festival has been shown to me. What sort
of thing is that? It is an image--the image of a dead man which was
carried round by the Egyptians, and is to this day by the Romans, to
remind the feasters that they should fill every hour with enjoyment,
since enjoyment is all too soon at an end. Such an image, child--"
"You are thinking of the dead girl--Seleukus's daughter--whose portrait
you are painting?" asked Melissa.
Alexander nodded, sat down on the bench by his sister, and, taking up her
needlework, exclaimed "Give us some light, child. I want to see your
pretty face. I want to be sure that Diodorus did not perjure himself
when, at the 'Crane,' the other day, he swore that it had not its match
in Alexandria. Besides, I hate the darkness."
When Melissa returned with the lighted lamp, she found her brother, who
was not wont to keep still, sitting in the place where she had left him.
But he sprang up as she entered, and prevented her further greeting by
exclaiming:
"Patience! patience! You shall be told all. Only I did not want to worry
you on the day of the festival of the dead. And besides, to-morrow
perhaps he will be in a better frame of mind, and next day--"
Melissa became urgent. "If Philip is ill--" she put in.
"Not exactly ill," said he. "He has no fever, no ague-fit, no aches and
pains. He is not in bed, and has no bitter draughts to swallow. Yet is he
not well, any more than I, though but just now, in the dining-hall at the
Elephant, I ate like a starving wolf, and could at this moment jump over
this table. Shall I prove it?"
"No, no," said his sister, in growing distress. "But, if you love me,
tell me at once and plainly--"
"At once and plainly," sighed the painter. "That, in any case, will not
be easy. But I will do my best. You knew Korinna?"
"Seleukus's daughter?"
"She herself--the maiden from whose corpse I am painting her portrait."
"No. But you wanted--"
"I wanted to be brief, but I care even more to be understood; and if you
have never seen with your own eyes, if you do not yourself know what a
miracle of beauty the gods wrought when they molded that maiden, you are
indeed justified in regarding me as a fool and Philip as a madman--which,
thank the gods, he certainly is not yet."
"Then he too has seen the dead maiden?"
"No, no. And yet--perhaps. That at present remains a mystery. I hardly
know what happened even to myself. I succeeded in controlling myself in
my father's presence; but now, when it all rises up before me, before my
very eyes, so distinct, so real, so tangible, now--by Sirius! Melissa, if
you interrupt me again--"
"Begin again. I will be silent," she cried. "I can easily picture your
Korinna as a divinely beautiful creature."
Alexander raised his hands to heaven, exclaiming with passionate
vehemence: "Oh, how would I praise and glorify the gods, who formed that
marvel of their art, and my mouth should be full of their grace and
mercy, if they had but allowed the world to sun itself in the charm of
that glorious creature, and to worship their everlasting beauty in her
who was their image! But they have wantonly destroyed their own
masterpiece, have crushed the scarce-opened bud, have darkened the star
ere it has risen! If a man had done it, Melissa, a man what would his
doom have been! If he--"
Here the youth hid his face in his hands in passionate emotion; but,
feeling his sister's arm round his shoulder, he recovered himself, and
went on more calmly: "Well, you heard that she was dead. She was of just
your age; she is dead at eighteen, and her father commissioned me to
paint her in death.--Pour me out some water; then I will proceed as
coldly as a man crying the description of a runaway slave." He drank a
deep draught, and wandered restlessly up and down in front of his sister,
while he told her all that had happened to him during the last few days.
The day before yesterday, at noon, he had left the inn where he had been
carousing with friends, gay and careless, and had obeyed the call of
Seleukus. Just before raising the knocker he had been singing cheerfully
to himself. Never had he felt more fully content--the gayest of the gay.
One of the first men in the town, and a connoisseur, had honored him with
a fine commission, and the prospect of painting something dead had
pleased him. His old master had often admired the exquisite delicacy of
the flesh-tones of a recently deceased body. As his glance fell on the
implements that his slave carried after him, he had drawn himself up with
the proud feeling of having before him a noble task, to which he felt
equal. Then the porter, a gray-bearded Gaul, had opened the door to him,
and as he looked into his care-worn face and received from him a silent
permission to step in, he had already become more serious.
He had heard marvels of the magnificence of the house that he now
entered; and the lofty vestibule into which he was admitted, the mosaic
floor that he trod; the marble statues and high reliefs round the upper
hart of the walls, were well worth careful observation; yet he, whose
eyes usually carried away so vivid an impression of what he had once seen
that he could draw it from memory, gave no attention to any particular
thing among the various objects worthy of admiration. For already in the
anteroom a peculiar sensation had come over him. The large halls, which
were filled with odors of ambergris and incense, were as still as the
grave. And it seemed to him that even the sun, which had been shining
brilliantly a few minutes before in a cloudless sky, had disappeared
behind clouds, for a strange twilight, unlike anything he had ever seen,
surrounded him. Then he perceived that it came in through the black
velarium with which they had closed the open roof of the room through
which he was passing.
In the anteroom a young freedman had hurried silently past him--had
vanished like a shadow through the dusky rooms. His duty must have been
to announce the artist's arrival to the mother of the dead girl; for,
before Alexander had found time to feast his gaze on the luxurious mass
of flowering plants that surrounded the fountain in the middle of the
impluvium, a tall matron, in flowing mourning garments, came towards
him--Korinna's mother.
Without lifting the black veil which enveloped her from head to foot, she
speechlessly signed him to follow her. Till this moment not even a
whisper had met his ear from any human lips in this house of death and
mourning; and the stillness was so oppressive to the light-hearted young
painter, that, merely to hear the sound of his own voice, he ex-plained
to the lady who he was and wherefore he had come. But the only answer was
a dumb assenting bow of the head.
He had not far to go with his stately guide; their walk ended in a
spacious room. It had been made a perfect flower-garden with hundreds of
magnificent plants; piles of garlands strewed the floor, and in the midst
stood the couch on which lay the dead girl. In this hall, too, reigned
the same gloomy twilight which had startled him in the vestibule.
The dim, shrouded form lying motionless on the couch before him, with a
heavy wreath of lotus-flowers and white roses encircling it from head to
foot, was the subject for his brush. He was to paint here, where he could
scarcely distinguish one plant from another, or make out the form of the
vases which stood round the bed of death. The white blossoms alone
gleamed like pale lights in the gloom, and with a sister radiance
something smooth and round which lay on the couch--the bare arm of the
dead maiden.
His heart began to throb; the artist's love of his art had awaked within
him; he had collected his wits, and explained to the matron that to paint
in the darkness was impossible.
Again she bowed in reply, but at a signal two waiting women, who were
squatting on the floor behind the couch, started up in the twilight, as
if they had sprung from the earth, and approached their mistress.
A fresh shock chilled the painter's blood, for at the same moment the
lady's voice was suddenly audible close to his ear, almost as deep as a
man's but not unmelodious, ordering the girls to draw back the curtain as
far as the painter should desire.
Now, he felt, the spell was broken; curiosity and eagerness took the
place of reverence for death. He quietly gave his orders for the
necessary arrangements, lent the women the help of his stronger arm, took
out his painting implements, and then requested the matron to unveil the
dead girl, that he might see from which side it would be best to take the
portrait. But then again he was near losing his composure, for the lady
raised her veil, and measured him with a glance as though he had asked
something strange and audacious indeed.
Never had he met so piercing a glance from any woman's eyes; and yet they
were red with weeping and full of tears. Bitter grief spoke in every line
of her still youthful features, and their stern, majestic beauty was in
keeping with the deep tones of her speech. Oh that he had been so happy
as to see this woman in the bloom of youthful loveliness! She did not
heed his admiring surprise; before acceding to his demand, her regal form
trembled from head to foot, and she sighed as she lifted the shroud from
her daughter's face. Then, with a groan, she dropped on her knees by the
couch and laid her cheek against that of the dead maiden. At last she
rose, and murmured to the painter that if he were successful in his task
her gratitude would be beyond expression.
"What more she said," Alexander went on, "I could but half understand,
for she wept all the time, and I could not collect my thoughts. It was
not till afterward that I learned from her waiting-woman--a
Christian--that she meant to tell me that the relations and wailing women
were to come to-morrow morning. I could paint on till nightfall, but no
longer. I had been chosen for the task because Seleukus had heard from my
old teacher, Bion, that I should get a faithful likeness of the original
more quickly than any one else. She may have said more, but I heard
nothing; I only saw. For when the veil no longer hid that face from my
gaze, I felt as though the gods had revealed a mystery to me which till
now only the immortals had been permitted to know. Never was my soul so
steeped in devotion, never had my heart beat in such solemn uplifting as
at that moment. What I was gazing at and had to represent was a thing
neither human nor divine; it was beauty itself--that beauty of which I
have often dreamed in blissful rapture.
"And yet--do not misapprehend me--I never thought of bewailing the
maiden, or grieving over her early death. She was but sleeping--I could
fancy: I watched one I loved in her slumbers. My heart beat high! Ay,
child, and the work I did was pure joy, such joy as only the gods on
Olympus know at their golden board. Every feature, every line was of such
perfection as only the artist's soul can conceive of, nay, even dream of.
The ecstasy remained, but my unrest gave way to an indescribable and
wordless bliss. I drew with the red chalk, and mixed the colors with the
grinder, and all the while I could not feel the painful sense of painting
a corpse. If she were slumbering, she had fallen asleep with bright
images in her memory. I even fancied again and again that her lips moved
her exquisitely chiseled mouth, and that a faint breath played with her
abundant, waving, shining brown hair, as it does with yours.
"The Muse sped my hand and the portrait--Bion and the rest will praise
it, I think, though it is no more like the unapproachable original than
that lamp is like the evening star yonder."
"And shall we be allowed to see it?" asked Melissa, who had been
listening breathlessly to her brother's narrative.
The words seemed to have snatched the artist from a dream. He had to
pause and consider where he was and to whom he was speaking. He hastily
pushed the curling hair off his damp brow, and said:
"I do not understand. What is it you ask?"
"I only asked whether we should be allowed to see the portrait," she
answered timidly. "I was wrong to interrupt you. But how hot your head
is! Drink again before you go on. Had you really finished by sundown?"
Alexander shook his head, drank, and then went on more calmly: "No, no!
It is a pity you spoke. In fancy I was painting her still. There is the
moon rising already. I must make haste. I have told you all this for
Philip's sake, not for my own."
"I will not interrupt you again, I assure you," said Melissa. "Well,
well," said her brother. "There is not much that is pleasant left to
tell. Where was I?"
"Painting, so long as it was light--"
"To be sure--I remember. It began to grow dark. Then lamps were brought
in, large ones, and as many as I wished for. Just before sunset
Seleukus, Korinna's father, came in to look upon his daughter once more.
He bore his grief with dignified composure; yet by his child's bier he
found it hard to be calm. But you can imagine all that. He invited me to
eat, and the food they brought might have tempted a full man to excess,
but I could only swallow a few mouthfuls. Berenike--the mother--did not
even moisten her lips, but Seleukus did duty for us both, and this I
could see displeased his wife. During supper the merchant made many
inquiries about me and my father; for he had heard Philip's praises from
his brother Theophilus, the high-priest. I learned from him that Korinna
had caught her sickness from a slave girl she had nursed, and had died of
the fever in three days. But while I sat listening to him, as he talked
and ate, I could not keep my eyes off his wife who reclined opposite to
me silent and motionless, for the gods had created Korinna in her very
image. The lady Berenike's eyes indeed sparkle with a lurid, I might
almost say an alarming, fire, but they are shaped like Korinna's. I said
so, and asked whether they were of the same color; I wanted to know for
my portrait. On this Seleukus referred me to a picture painted by old
Sosibius, who has lately gone to Rome to work in Caesar's new baths. He
last year painted the wall of a room in the mer chant's country house at
Kanopus. In the center of the picture stands Galatea, and I know it now
to be a good and true likeness.
"The picture I finished that evening is to be placed at the head of the
young girl's sarcophagus; but I am to keep it two days longer, to
reproduce a second likeness more at my leisure, with the help of the
Galatea, which is to remain in Seleukus's town house.
"Then he left me alone with his wife.
"What a delightful commission! I set to work with renewed pleasure, and
more composure than at first. I had no need to hurry, for the first
picture is to be hidden in the tomb, and I could give all my care to the
second. Besides, Korinna's features were indelibly impressed on my eye.
"I generally can not paint at all by lamp-light; but this time I found no
difficulty, and I soon recovered that blissful, solemn mood which I had
felt in the presence of the dead. Only now and then it was clouded by a
sigh, or a faint moan from Berenike: 'Gone, gone! There is no
comfort--none, none!'
"And what could I answer? When did Death ever give back what he has
snatched away?
"' I can not even picture her as she was,' she murmured sadly to
herself--but this I might remedy by the help of my art, so I painted on
with increasing zeal; and at last her lamentations ceased to trouble me,
for she fell asleep, and her handsome head sank on her breast. The
watchers, too, had dropped asleep, and only their deep breathing broke
the stillness.
"Suddenly it flashed upon me that I was alone with Korinna, and the
feeling grew stronger and stronger; I fancied her lovely lips had moved,
that a smile gently parted them, inviting me to kiss them. As often as I
looked at them--and they bewitched me--I saw and felt the same, and at
last every impulse within me drove me toward her, and I could no longer
resist: my lips pressed hers in a kiss!"
Melissa softly sighed, but the artist did not hear; he went on: "And in
that kiss I became hers; she took the heart and soul of me. I can no
longer escape from her; awake or asleep, her image is before my eyes, and
my spirit is in her power."
Again he drank, emptying the cup at one deep gulp. Then he went on: "So
be it! Who sees a god, they say, must die. And it is well, for he has
known something more glorious than other men. Our brother Philip, too,
lives with his heart in bonds to that one alone, unless a demon has
cheated his senses. I am troubled about him, and you must help me."
He sprang up, pacing the room again with long strides, but his sister
clung to his arm and besought him to shake off the bewitching vision. How
earnest was her prayer, what eager tenderness rang in her every word, as
she entreated him to tell her when and where her elder brother, too, had
met the daughter of Seleukus!
The artist's soft heart was easily moved. Stroking the hair of the loving
creature at his side--so helpful as a rule, but now bewildered--he tried
to calm her by affecting a lighter mood than he really felt, assuring her
that he should soon recover his usual good spirits. She knew full well,
he said, that his living loves changed in frequent succession, and it
would be strange indeed if a dead one could bind him any longer. And his
adventure, so far as it concerned the house of Seleukus, ended with that
kiss; for the lady Berenike had presently waked, and urged him to finish
the portrait at his own house.
Next morning he had completed it with the help of the Galatea in the
villa at Kanopus, and he had heard a great deal about the dead maiden. A
young woman who was left in charge of the villa had supplied him with
whatever he needed. Her pretty face was swollen with weeping, and it was
in a voice choked with tears that she had told him that her husband, who
was a centurion in Caesar's pretorian guard, would arrive to-morrow or
next day at Alexandria, with his imperial master. She had not seen him
for a long time, and had an infant to show him which he had not yet seen;
and yet she could not be glad, for her young mistress's death had
extinguished all her joy.
"The affection which breathed in every word of the centurion's wife,"
Alexander said, "helped me in my work. I could be satisfied with the
result.
"The picture is so successful that I finished that for Seleukus in all
confidence, and for the sarcophagus I will copy it as well or as ill as
time will allow. It will hardly be seen in the half-dark tomb, and how
few will ever go to see it! None but a Seleukus can afford to employ so
costly a brush as your brother's is--thank the Muses! But the second
portrait is quite another thing, for that may chance to be hung next a
picture by Apelles; and it must restore to the parents so much of their
lost child as it lies in my power to give them. So, on my way, I made up
my mind to begin the copy at once by lamp-light, for it must be ready by
to-morrow night at latest.
"I hurried to my work-room, and my slave placed the picture on an easel,
while I welcomed my brother Philip who had come to see me, and who had
lighted a lamp, and of course had brought a book. He was so absorbed in
it that he did not observe that I had come in till I addressed him. Then
I told him whence I came and what had happened, and he thought it all
very strange and interesting.
"He was as usual rather hurried and hesitating, not quite clear, but
understanding it all. Then he began telling me something about a
philosopher who has just come to the front, a porter by trade, from whom
he had heard sundry wonders, and it was not till Syrus brought me in a
supper of oysters--for I could still eat nothing more solid--that he
asked to see the portrait.
"I pointed to the easel, and watched him; for the harder he is to please,
the more I value his opinion. This time I felt confident of praise, or
even of some admiration, if only for the beauty of the model.
"He threw off the veil from the picture with a hasty movement, but,
instead of gazing at it calmly, as he is wont, and snapping out his sharp
criticisms, he staggered backward, as though the noonday sun had dazzled
his sight. Then, bending forward, he stared at the painting, panting as
he might after racing for a wager. He stood in perfect silence, for I
know not how long, as though it were Medusa he was gazing on, and when at
last he clasped his hand to his brow, I called him by name. He made no
reply, but an impatient 'Leave me alone!' and then he still gazed at the
face as though to devour it with his eyes, and without a sound.
"I did not disturb him; for, thought I, he too is bewitched by the
exquisite beauty of those virgin features. So we were both silent, till
he asked, in a choked voice: 'And did you paint that? Is that, do you
say, the daughter that Seleukus has just lost?'
"Of course I said 'Yes'; but then he turned on me in a rage, and
reproached me bitterly for deceiving and cheating him, and jesting with
things that to him were sacred, though I might think them a subject for
sport.
"I assured him that my answer was as earnest as it was accurate, and that
every word of my story was true.
"This only made him more furious. I, too, began to get angry, and as he,
evidently deeply agitated, still persisted in saying that my picture
could not have been painted from the dead Korinna, I swore to him
solemnly, with the most sacred oath I could think of, that it was really
so.
"On this he declared to me in words so tender and touching as I never
before heard from his lips, that if I were deceiving him his peace of
mind would be forever destroyed-nay, that he feared for his reason; and
when I had repeatedly assured him, by the memory of our departed mother,
that I had never dreamed of playing a trick upon him, he shook his head,
grasped his brow, and turned to leave the room without another word."
"And you let him go?" cried Melissa, in anxious alarm.
"Certainly not," replied the painter. "On the contrary, I stood in his
way, and asked him whether he had known Korinna, and what all this might
mean. But he would make no reply, and tried to pass me and get away. It
must have been a strange scene, for we two big men struggled as if we
were at a wrestling-match. I got him down with one hand behind his knees,
and so he had to remain; and when I had promised to let him go, he
confessed that he had seen Korinna at the house of her uncle, the
high-priest, without knowing who she was or even speaking a word to her.
And he, who usually flees from every creature wearing a woman's robe, had
never forgotten that maiden and her noble beauty; and, though he did not
say so, it was obvious, from every word, that he was madly in love. Her
eyes had followed him wherever he went, and this he deemed a great
misfortune, for it had disturbed his power of thought. A month since he
went across Lake Mareotis to Polybius to visit Andreas, and while, on his
return, he was standing on the shore, he saw her again, with an old man
in white robes. But the last time he saw her was on the morning of the
very day when all this happened; and if he is to be believed, he not only
saw her but touched her hand. That, again, was by the lake; she was just
stepping out of the ferry-boat. The obolus she had ready to pay the
oarsman dropped on the ground, and Philip picked it up and returned it to
her. Then his fingers touched hers. He could feel it still, he declared,
and yet she had then ceased to walk among the living.
"Then it was my turn to doubt his word; but he maintained that his story
was true in every detail; he would hear nothing said about some one
resembling her, or anything of the kind, and spoke of daimons showing him
false visions, to cheat him and hinder him from working out his
investigations of the real nature of things to a successful issue. But
this is in direct antagonism to his views of daimons; and when at last he
rushed out of the house, he looked like one possessed of evil spirits.
"I hurried after him, but he disappeared down a dark alley. Then I had
enough to do to finish my copy, and yesterday I carried it home to
Seleukus.
"Then I had time to look for Philip, but I could hear nothing of him,
either in his own lodgings or at the Museum. To-day I have been hunting
for him since early in the morning. I even forgot to lay any flowers on
my mother's grave, as usual on the day of the Nekysia, because I was
thinking only of him. But he no doubt is gone to the city of the dead;
for, on my way hither, as I was ordering a garland in the flower-market,
pretty little Doxion showed me two beauties which she had woven for him,
and which he is presently to fetch. So he must now be in the Nekropolis;
and I know for whom he intends the second; for the door-keeper at
Seleukus's house told me that a man, who said he was my brother, had
twice called, and had eagerly inquired whether my picture had yet been
attached to Korinna's sarcophagus. The old man told him it had not,
because, of course, the embalming could not be complete as yet. But the
picture was to be displayed to-day, as being the feast of the dead, in
the hall of the embalmers. That was the plan, I know. So, now, child, set
your wise little woman's head to work, and devise something by which he
may be brought to his senses, and released from these crazy imaginings."
"The first thing to be done," Melissa exclaimed, "is to follow him and
talk to him.-Wait a moment; I must speak a word to the slaves. My
father's night-draught can be mixed in a minute. He might perhaps return
home before us, and I must leave his couch--I will be with you in a
minute."
CHAPTER III.
The brother and sister had walked some distance. The roads were full of
people, and the nearer they came to the Nekropolis the denser was the
throng.
As they skirted the town walls they took counsel together.
Being perfectly agreed that the girl who had touched Philip's hand could
certainly be no daimon who had assumed Korinna's form, they were inclined
to accept the view that a strong resemblance had deceived their brother.
They finally decided that Alexander should try to discover the maiden who
so strangely resembled the dead; and the artist was ready for the task,
for he could only work when his heart was light, and had never felt such
a weight on it before. The hope of meeting with a living creature who
resembled that fair dead maiden, combined with his wish to rescue his
brother from the disorder of mind which threatened him; and Melissa
perceived with glad surprise how quickly this new object in life restored
the youth's happy temper.
It was she who spoke most, and Alexander, whom nothing escaped that had
any form of beauty, feasted his ear on the pearly ring of her voice.
"And her face is to match," thought he as they went on in the darkness;
"and may the Charites who have endowed her with every charm, forgive my
father for burying her as he does his gold."
It was not in his nature to keep anything that stirred him deeply to
himself, when he was in the society of another, so he murmured to his
sister: "It is just as well that the Macedonian youths of this city
should not be able to see what a jewel our old man's house
contains.--Look how brightly Selene shines on us, and how gloriously the
stars burn! Nowhere do the heavens blaze more brilliantly than here. As
soon as we come out of the shadow that the great walls cast on the road
we shall be in broad light. There is the Serapeum rising out of the
darkness. They are rehearsing the great illumination which is to dazzle
the eyes of Caesar when he comes. But they must show too, that to-night,
at least, the gods of the nether world and death are all awake. You can
never have been in the Nekropolis at so late an hour before."
"How should I?" replied the girl. And he expressed the pleasure that it
gave him to be able to show her for the first time the wonderful night
scene of such a festival. And when he heard the deep-drawn "Ah!" with
which she hailed the sight of the greatest temple of all, blazing in the
midst of the darkness with tar-pans, torches, and lamps innumerable, he
replied with as much pride and satisfaction as though she owed the
display to him, "Ay, what do you think of that?"
Above the huge stone edifice which was thus lighted up, the dome of the
Serapeum rose high into the air, its summit appearing to touch the sky.
Never had the gigantic structure seemed so beautiful to the girl, who had
only seen it by daylight; for under the illumination, arranged by a
master-hand, every line stood out more clearly than in the sunlight; and
in the presence of this wonderful sight Melissa's impressionable young
soul forgot the trouble that had weighed on it, and her heart beat
higher.
Her lonely life with her father had hitherto fully satisfied her, and she
had, never yet dreamed of anything better in the future than a quiet and
modest existence, caring for him and her brothers; but now she thankfully
experienced the pleasure of seeing for once something really grand and
fine, and rejoiced at having escaped for a while from the monotony of
each day and hour.
Once, too, she had been with her brothers and Diodoros, Alexander's
greatest friend, to see a wild-beast fight, followed by a combat of
gladiators; but she had come home frightened and sorrowful, for what she
had seen had horrified more than it had interested her. Some of the
killed and tortured beings haunted her mind; and, besides, sitting in the
lowest and best seats belonging to Diodoros's wealthy father, she had
been stared at so boldly and defiantly whenever she raised her eyes, by a
young gallant opposite, that she had felt vexed and insulted; nay, had
wished above all things to get home as soon as possible. And yet she had
loved Diodoros from her childhood, and she would have enjoyed sitting
quietly by his side more than looking on at the show.
But on this occasion her curiosity was gratified, and the hope of being
able to help one who was dear to her filled her with quiet gladness. It
was a comfort to her, too, to find herself once more by her mother's
grave with Alexander, who was her especial friend. She could never come
here often enough, and the blessing which emanated from it--of that she
was convinced--must surely fall on her brother also, and avert from him
all that grieved his heart.
As they walked on between the Serapeum on one hand, towering high above
all else, and the Stadium on the other, the throng was dense; on the
bridge over the canal it was difficult to make any progress. Now, as the
full moon rose, the sacrifices and games in honor of the gods of the
under world were beginning, and now the workshops and factories had
emptied themselves into the streets already astir for the festival of the
dead, so every moment the road became more crowded.
Such a tumult was generally odious to her retiring nature; but to-night
she felt herself merely one drop in the great, flowing river, of which
every other drop felt the same impulse which was carrying her forward to
her destination. The desire to show the dead that they were not
forgotten, that their favor was courted and hoped for, animated men and
women, old and young alike.
There were few indeed who had not a wreath or a posy in their hands, or
carried behind them by a slave. In front of the brother and sister was a
large family of children. A black nurse carried the youngest on her
shoulder, and an ass bore a basket in which were flowers for the tomb,
with a wineflask and eatables. A memorial banquet was to be held at the
grave of their ancestors; and the little one, whose golden head rose
above the black, woolly poll of the negress, nodded gayly in response to
Melissa's smiles. The children were enchanted at the prospect of a meal
at such an unusual hour, and their parents rejoiced in them and in the
solemn pleasure they anticipated.
Many a one in this night of remembrance only cared to recall the happy
hours spent in the society of the beloved dead; others hoped to leave
their grief and pain behind them, and find fresh courage and contentment
in the City of the Dead; for tonight the gates of the nether world stood
open, and now, if ever, the gods that reigned there would accept the
offerings and hear the prayers of the devout.
Those lean Egyptians, who pushed past in silence and haranging their
heads, were no doubt bent on carrying offerings to Osiris and Anubis--for
the festival of the gods of death and resurrection coincided with the
Nekysia--and on winning their favors by magical formulas and spells.
Everything was plainly visible, for the desert tract of the Nekropolis,
where at this hour utter darkness and silence usually reigned, was
brightly lighted up. Still, the blaze failed to banish entirely the
thrill of fear which pervaded the spot at night; for the unwonted glare
dazzled and bewildered the bats and night-birds, and they fluttered about
over the heads of the intruders in dark, ghostly flight. Many a one
believed them to be the unresting souls of condemned sinners, and looked
up at them with awe.
Melissa drew her veil closer and clung more tightly to her brother, for a
sound of singing and wild cries, which she had heard behind her for some
time, was now coming closer. They were no longer treading the paved
street, but the hard-beaten soil of the desert. The crush was over, for
here the crowd could spread abroad; but the uproarious troop, which she
did not even dare to look at, came rushing past quite close to them. They
were Greeks, of all ages and of both sexes. The men flourished torches,
and were shouting a song with unbridled vehemence; the women, wearing
garlands, kept up with them. What they carried in the baskets on their
heads could not be seen, nor did Alexander know; for so many religious
brotherhoods and mystic societies existed here that it was impossible to
guess to which this noisy troop might belong.
The pair had presently overtaken a little train of white-robed men moving
forward at a solemn pace, whom the painter recognized as the
philosophical and religious fraternity of the Neo-Pythagoreans, when a
small knot of men and women in the greatest excitement came rushing past
as if they were mad. The men wore the loose red caps of their Phrygian
land; the women carried bowls full of fruits. Some beat small drums,
others clanged cymbals, and each hauled his neighbor along with deafening
cries, faster and faster, till the dust hid them from sight and a new din
drowned the last, for the votaries of Dionysus were already close upon
them, and vied with the Phrygians in uproariousness. But this wild troop
remained behind; for one of the light-colored oxen, covered with
decorations, which was being driven in the procession by a party of men
and boys, to be presently sacrificed, had broken away, maddened by the
lights and the shouting, and had to be caught and led again.
At last they reached the graveyard. But even now they could not make
their way to the long row of houses where the embalmers dwelt, for an
impenetrable mass of human beings stood pent up in front of them, and
Melissa begged her brother to give her a moment's breathing space.
All she had seen and heard on the way had excited her greatly; but she
had scarcely for a moment forgotten what it was that had brought her out
so late, who it was that she sought, or that it would need her utmost
endeavor to free him from the delusion that had fooled him. In this dense
throng and deafening tumult it was scarcely possible to recover that
collected calm which she had found in the morning at her mother's tomb.
In that, doubt had had no part, and the delightful feeling of freedom
which had shone on her soul, now shrank deep into the shade before a
growing curiosity and the longing for her usual repose.
If her father were to find her here! When she saw a tall figure
resembling his cross the torchlight, all clouded as it was by the dust,
she drew her brother away behind the stall of a seller of drinks and
other refreshments. The father, at any rate, must be spared the distress
she felt about Philip, who was his favorite. Besides, she knew full well
that, if he met her here, he would at once take her home.
The question now was where Philip might be found.
They were standing close to the booths where itinerant dealers sold food
and liquors of every description, flowers and wreaths, amulets and
papyrus-leaves, with strange charms written on them to secure health for
the living and salvation for the souls of the dead. An astrologer, who
foretold the course of a man's life from the position of the planets, had
erected a high platform with large tables displayed to view, and the
instrument wherewith he aimed at the stars as it were with a bow; and his
Syrian slave, accompanying himself on a gayly-painted drum, proclaimed
his master's powers. There were closed tents in which magical remedies
were to be obtained, though their open sale was forbidden by the
authorities, from love-philters to the wondrous fluid which, if rightly
applied, would turn lead, copper, or silver to gold. Here, old women
invited the passer-by to try Thracian and other spells; there, magicians
stalked to and fro in painted caps and flowing, gaudy robes, most of them
calling themselves priests of some god of the abyss. Men of every race
and tongue that dwelt in the north of Africa, or on the shores of the
Mediterranean, were packed in a noisy throng.
The greatest press was behind the houses of the men who buried the dead.
Here sacrifices were offered on the altars of Serapis, Isis, and Anubis;
here the sacred sistrum of Isis might be kissed; here hundreds of priests
performed solemn ceremonies, and half of those who came hither for the
festival of the dead collected about them. The mysteries were also
performed here, beginning before midnight; and a dramatic representation
might be seen of the woes of Isis, and the resurrection of her husband
Osiris. But neither here, nor at the stalls, nor among the graves, where
many families were feasting by torchlight and pouring libations in the
sand for the souls of the dead, did Alexander expect to find his brother.
Nor would Philip be attending the mysterious solemnities of any of the
fraternities. He had witnessed them often enough with his friend
Diodoros, who never missed the procession to Eleusis, because, as he
declared, the mysteries of Demeter alone could assure a man of the
immortality of the soul. The wild ceremonies of the Syrians, who maimed
themselves in their mad ecstasy, repelled him as being coarse and
barbarous.
As she made her way through this medley of cults, this worship of gods so
different that they were in some cases hostile, but more often merged
into each other, Melissa wondered to which she ought to turn in her
present need. Her mother had best loved to sacrifice to Serapis and Isis.
But since, in her last sickness, Melissa had offered everything she
possessed to these divinities of healing, and all in vain, and since she
had heard things in the Serapeum itself which even now brought a blush to
her cheek, she had turned away from the great god of the Alexandrians.
Though he who had offended her by such base proposals was but a priest of
the lower grade--and indeed, though she knew it not, was since dead--she
feared meeting him again, and had avoided the sanctuary where he
officiated.
She was a thorough Alexandrian, and had been accustomed from childhood to
listen to the philosophical disputations of the men about her. So she
perfectly understood her brother Philip, the skeptic, when he said that
he by no means denied the existence of the immortals, but that, on the
other hand, he could not believe in it; that thought brought him no
conviction; that man, in short, could be sure of nothing, and so could
know nothing whatever of the divinity. He had even denied, on logical
grounds, the goodness and omnipotence of the gods, the wisdom and fitness
of the ordering of the universe, and Melissa was proud of her brother's
acumen; but what appeals to the brain only, and not to the heart, can not
move a woman to anything great--least of all to a decisive change of life
or feeling. So the girl had remained constant to her mother's faith in
some mighty powers outside herself, which guided the life of Nature and
of human beings. Only she did not feel that she had found the true god,
either in Serapis or Isis, and so she had sought others. Thus she had
formulated a worship of ancestors, which, as she had learned from the
slave-woman of her friend Ino, was not unfamiliar to the Egyptians.
In Alexandria there were altars to every god, and worship in every form.
Hers, however, was not among them, for the genius of her creed was the
enfranchised soul of her mother, who had cast off the burden of this
perishable body. Nothing had ever come from her that was not good and
lovely; and she knew that if her mother were permitted, even in some
other than human form, she would never cease to watch over her with
tender care.
And those initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, as Diodoros had told
her, desired the immortality of the soul, to the end that they might
continue to participate in the life of those whom they had left behind.
What was it that brought such multitudes at this time out to the
Nekropolis, with their hands full of offerings, but the consciousness of
their nearness to the dead, and of being cared for by them so long as
they were not forgotten? And even if the glorified spirit of her mother
were not permitted to hear her prayers, she need not therefore cease to
turn to her; for it comforted her unspeakably to be with her in spirit,
and to confide to her all that moved her soul. And so her mother's tomb
had become her favorite place of rest. Here, if anywhere, she now hoped
once more to find comfort, some happy suggestion, and perhaps some
definite assistance.
She begged Alexander to take her thither, and he consented, though he was
of opinion that Philip would be found in the mortuary chamber, in the
presence of Korinna's portrait.
It was not easy to force their way through the thousands who had come out
to the great show this night; however, most of the visitors were
attracted by the mysteries far away from the Macedonian burial-ground,
and there was little to disturb the silence near the fine marble monument
which Alexander, to gratify his father, had erected with his first large
earnings. It was hung with various garlands, and Melissa, before she
prayed and anointed the stone, examined them with eye and hand.
Those which she and her father had placed there she recognized at once.
That humble garland of reeds with two lotus-flowers was the gift of their
old slave Argutis and his wife Dido. This beautiful wreath of choice
flowers had come from the garden of a neighbor who had loved her mother
well; and that splendid basketful of lovely roses, which had not been
there this morning, had been placed here by Andreas, steward to the
father of her young friend Diodoros, although he was of the Christian
sect. And these were all. Philip had not been here then, though it was
now past midnight.
For the first time in his life he had let this day pass by without a
thought for their dead. How bitterly this grieved Melissa, and even added
to her anxiety for him!
It was with a heavy heart that she and Alexander anointed the tombstone;
and while Melissa uplifted her hands in prayer, the painter stood in
silence, his eyes fixed on the ground. But no sooner had she let them
fall, than he exclaimed:
"He is here, I am sure, and in the house of the embalmers. That he
ordered two wreaths is perfectly certain; and if he meant one for
Korinna's picture, he surely intended the other for our mother. If he has
offered both to the young girl--"
"No, no!" Melissa put in. "He will bring his gift. Let us wait here a
little while, and do you, too, pray to the manes of our mother. Do it to
please me."
But her brother interrupted her eagerly I think of her wherever I may be;
for those we truly love always live for us. Not a day passes, nor if I
come in sober, not a night, when I do not see her dear face, either
waking or dreaming. Of all things sacred, the thought of her is the
highest; and if she had been raised to divine honors like the dead
Caesars who have brought so many curses on the world--"
"Hush--don't speak so loud!" said Melissa, seriously, for men were moving
to and fro among the tombs, and Roman guards kept watch over the
populace.
But the rash youth went on in the same tone:
"I would worship her gladly, though I have forgotten how to pray. For who
can tell here--unless he follows the herd and worships Serapis--who can
tell to which god of them all he shall turn when he happens to be at his
wits' end? While my mother lived, I, like you, could gladly worship and
sacrifice to the immortals; but Philip has spoiled me for all that. As to
the divine Caesars, every one thinks as I do. My mother would sooner have
entered a pesthouse than the banqueting-hall where they feast, on
Olympus. Caracalla among the gods! Why, Father Zeus cast his son
Hephaistos on earth from the height of Olympus, and only broke his leg;
but our Caesar accomplished a more powerful throw, for he cast his
brother through the earth into the nether world--an imperial thrust--and
not merely lamed him but killed him."
"Well done!" said a deep voice, interrupting the young artist. "Is that
you, Alexander? Hear what new titles to fame Heron's son can find for the
imperial guest who is to arrive to-morrow."
"Pray hush!" Melissa besought him, looking up at the bearded man who had
laid his arm on Alexander's shoulder. It was Glaukias the sculptor, her
father's tenant; for his work-room stood on the plot of ground by the
garden of Hermes, which the gem-cutter had inherited from his
father-in-law.
The man's bold, manly features were flushed with wine and revelry; his
twinkling eyes sparkled, and the ivy-leaves still clinging to his curly
hair showed that he had been one in the Dionysiac revellers; but the
Greek blood which ran in his veins preserved his grace even in
drunkenness. He bowed gayly to the young girl, and exclaimed to his
companions:
"The youngest pearl in Alexandria's crown of beauties!" while Bion,
Alexander's now gray-haired master, clapped the youth on the arm, and
added: "Yes, indeed, see what the little thing has grown! Do you
remember, pretty one, how you once--how many years ago, I
wonder?--spotted your little white garments all over with red dots! I can
see you now, your tiny finger plunged into the pot of paint, and then
carefully printing off the round pattern all over the white linen. Why,
the little painter has become a Hebe, a Charis, or, better still, a
sweetly dreaming Psyche."
"Ay, ay!" said Glaukias again. "My worthy landlord has a charming model.
He has not far to seek for a head for his best gems. His son, a Helios,
or the great Macedonian whose name he bears; his daughter--you are right,
Bion--the maid beloved of Eros. Now, if you can make verses, my young
friend of the Muses, give us an epigram in a line or two which we may
bear in mind as a compliment to our imperial visitor."
"But not here--not in the burial-ground," Melissa urged once more.
Among Glaukias's companions was Argeios, a vain and handsome young poet,
with scented locks betraying him from afar, who was fain to display the
promptness of his poetical powers; and, even while the elder artist was
speaking, he had run Alexander's satirical remarks into the mold of
rhythm. Not to save his life could he have suppressed the hastily
conceived distich, or have let slip such a justifiable claim to applause.
So, without heeding Melissa's remonstrance, he flung his sky-blue mantle
about him in fresh folds, and declaimed with comical emphasis:
"Down to earth did the god cast his son: but with mightier hand
Through it, to Hades, Caesar flung his brother the dwarf."
The versifier was rewarded by a shout of laughter, and, spurred by the
approval of his friends, he declared he had hit on the mode to which to
sing his lines, as he did in a fine, full voice.
But there was another poet, Mentor, also of the party, and as he could
not be happy under his rival's triumph, he exclaimed: "The great
dyer--for you know he uses blood instead of the Tyrian shell--has nothing
of Father Zeus about him that I can see, but far more of the great
Alexander, whose mausoleum he is to visit to-morrow. And if you would
like to know wherein the son of Severus resembles the giant of Macedon,
you shall hear."
He thrummed his thyrsus as though he struck the strings of a lyre, and,
having ended the dumb prelude, he sang:
"Wherein hath the knave Caracalla outdone Alexander?
He killed a brother, the hero a friend, in his rage."
These lines, however, met with no applause; for they were not so lightly
improvised as the former distich, and it was clumsy and tasteless, as
well as dangerous thus to name, in connection with such a jest, the
potentate at whom it was aimed. And the fears of the jovial party were
only too well founded, for a tall, lean Egyptian suddenly stood among the
Greeks as if he had sprung from the earth. They were sobered at once,
and, like a swarm of pigeons on which a hawk swoops down, they dispersed
in all directions.
Melissa beckoned to her brother to follow her; but the Egyptian intruder
snatched the mantle, quick as lightning, from Alexander's shoulders, and
ran off with it to the nearest pine-torch. The young man hurried after
the thief, as he supposed him to be, but there the spy flung the cloak
back to him, saying, in a tone of command, though not loud, for there
were still many persons among the graves:
"Hands off, son of Heron, unless you want me to call the watch! I have
seen your face by the light, and that is enough for this time. Now we
know each other, and we shall meet again in another place!"
With these words he vanished in the darkness, and Melissa asked, in great
alarm:
"In the name of all the gods, who was that?"
"Some rascally carpenter, or scribe, probably, who is in the service of
the night-watch as a spy. At least those sort of folks are often built
askew, as that scoundrel was," replied Alexander, lightly. But he knew
the man only too well. It was Zminis, the chief of the spies to the night
patrol; a man who was particularly inimical to Heron, and whose hatred
included the son, by whom he had been befooled and misled in more than
one wild ploy with his boon companions. This spy, whose cruelty and
cunning were universally feared, might do him a serious mischief, and he
therefore did not tell his sister, to whom the name of Zminis was well
known, who the listener was.
He cut short all further questioning by desiring her to come at once to
the mortuary hall.
"And if we do not find him there," she said, "let us go home at once; I
am so frightened."
"Yes, yes," said her brother, vaguely. "If only we could meet some one
you could join."
"No, we will keep together," replied Melissa, decisively; and simply
assenting, with a brief "All right," the painter drew her arm through
his, and they made their way through the now thinning crowd.
CHAPTER IV.
The houses of the embalmers, which earlier in the evening had shone
brightly out of the darkness, now made a less splendid display. The dust
kicked up by the crowd dimmed the few lamps and torches which had not by
this time burned out or been extinguished, and an oppressive atmosphere
of balsamic resin and spices met the brother and sister on the very
threshold. The vast hall which they now entered was one of a long row of
buildings of unburned bricks; but the Greeks insisted on some
ornamentation of the simplest structure, if it served a public purpose,
and the embalming-houses had a colonnade along their front, and their
walls were covered with stucco, painted in gaudy colors, here in the
Egyptian and there in the Greek taste. There were scenes from the
Egyptian realm of the dead, and others from the Hellenic myths; for the
painters had been enjoined to satisfy the requirements and views of
visitors of every race. The chief attraction, however, this night was
within; for the men whose duties were exercised on the dead had displayed
the finest and best of what they had to offer to their customers.
The ancient Greek practice of burning the dead had died out under the
Antonines. Of old, the objects used to deck the pyre had also been on
show here; now there was nothing to be seen but what related to interment
or entombment.
Side by side with the marble sarcophagus, or those of coarser stone, were
wooden coffins and mummy-cases, with a place at the head for the portrait
of the deceased. Vases and jars of every kind, amulets of various forms,
spices and balsams in vials and boxes, little images in burned clay of
the gods and of men, of which none but the Egyptians knew the allegorical
meaning, stood in long rows on low wooden shelves. On the higher shelves
were mummy bands and shrouds, some coarse, others of the very finest
texture, wigs for the bald heads of shaven corpses, or woolen fillets,
and simply or elaborately embroidered ribbons for the Greek dead.
Nothing was lacking of the various things in use for decking the corpse
of an Alexandrian, whatever his race or faith.
Some mummy-cases, too, were there, ready to be packed off to other towns.
The most costly were covered with fine red linen, wound about with
strings of beads and gold ornaments, and with the name of the dead
painted on the upper side. In a long, narrow room apart hung the
portraits, waiting to be attached to the upper end of the mummy-cases of
those lately deceased, and still in the hands of embalmers. Here, too,
most of the lamps were out, and the upper end of the room was already
dark. Only in the middle, where the best pictures were on show, the
lights had been renewed.
The portraits were painted on thin panels of sycamore or of cypress, and
in most of them the execution betrayed that their destiny was to be
hidden in the gloom of a tomb.
Alexander's portrait of Korinna was in the middle of the gallery, in a
good light, and stood out from the paintings on each side of it as a
genuine emerald amid green glass. It was constantly surrounded by a crowd
of the curious and connoisseurs. They pointed out the beautiful work to
each other; but, though most of them acknowledged the skill of the master
who had painted it, many ascribed its superiority to the magical charm of
the model. One could see in those wonderfully harmonious features that
Aristotle was right when he discerned beauty in order and proportion;
while another declared that he found there the evidence of Plato's
doctrine of the identity of the good and the beautiful--for this face was
so lovely because it was the mirror of a soul which had been disembodied
in the plenitude of maiden purity and virtue, unjarred by any discord;
and this gave rise to a vehement discussion as to the essential nature of
beauty and of virtue.
Others longed to know more about the early-dead original of this
enchanting portrait. Korinna's wealthy father and his brothers were among
the best-known men of the city. The elder, Timotheus, was high-priest of
the Temple of Serapis; and Zeno, the younger, had set the whole world
talking when he, who in his youth had been notoriously dissipated, had
retired from any concern in the corn-trade carried on by his family, the
greatest business of the kind in the world, perhaps, and--for this was an
open secret--had been baptized.
The body of the maiden, when embalmed and graced with her portrait, was
to be transported to the family tomb in the district of Arsinoe, where
they had large possessions, and the gossip of the embalmer was eagerly
swallowed as he expatiated on the splendor with which her liberal father
proposed to escort her thither.
Alexander and Melissa had entered the portrait-gallery before the
beginning of this narrative, and listened to it, standing behind several
rows of gazers who were between them and the portrait.
As the speaker ceased, the little crowd broke up, and when Melissa could
at last see her brother's work at her ease, she stood speechless for some
time; and then she turned to the artist, and exclaimed, from the depths
of her heart, "Beauty is perhaps the noblest thing in the world!"
"It is," replied Alexander, with perfect assurance. And he, bewitched
once more by the spell which had held him by Korinna's couch, gazed into
the dark eyes in his own picture, whose living glance his had never met,
and which he nevertheless had faithfully reproduced, giving them a look
of the longing of a pure soul for all that is lovely and worthy.
Melissa, an artist's daughter, as she looked at this portrait, understood
what it was that had so deeply stirred her brother while he painted it;
but this was not the place to tell him so. She soon tore herself away, to
look about for Philip once more and then to be taken home.
Alexander, too, was seeking Philip; but, sharp as the artist's eyes were,
Melissa's seemed to be keener, for, just as they were giving it up and
turning to go, she pointed to a dark corner and said softly, "There he
is."
And there, in fact, her brother was, sitting with two men, one very tall
and the other a little man, his brow resting on his hand in the deep
shadow of a sarcophagus, between the wall and a mummy-case set on end,
which till now had hidden him from Alexander and Melissa.
Who could the man be who had kept the young philosopher, somewhat
inaccessible in his pride of learning, so long in talk in that half-dark
corner? He was not one of the learned society at the Museum; Alexander
knew them all. Besides, he was not dressed like them, in the Greek
fashion, but in the flowing robe of a Magian. And the stranger was a man
of consequence, for he wore his splendid garment with a superior air, and
as Alexander approached him he remembered having somewhere seen this
tall, bearded figure, with the powerful head garnished with flowing and
carefully oiled black curls. Such handsome and well-chiseled features,
such fine eyes, and such a lordly, waving beard were not easily
forgotten; his memory suddenly awoke and threw a light on the man as he
sat in the gloom, and on the surroundings in which he had met him for the
first time.
It was at the feast of Dionysus. Among a drunken crowd, which was rushing
wildly along the streets, and which Alexander had joined, himself one of
the wildest, this man had marched, sober and dignified as he was at this
moment, in the same flowing raiment. This had provoked the feasters, who,
being full of wine and of the god, would have nothing that could remind
them of the serious side of life. Such sullen reserve on a day of
rejoicing was an insult to the jolly giver of the fruits of the earth,
and to wine itself, the care-killer; and the mad troop of artists,
disguised as Silenus, satyrs, and fauns, had crowded round the stranger
to compel him to join their rout and empty the wine-jar which a burly
Silenus was carrying before him on his ass.
At first the man had paid no heed to the youths' light mockery; but as
they grew bolder, he suddenly stood still, seized the tall faun, who was
trying to force the wine-jar on him, by both arms, and, holding him
firmly, fixed his grave, dark eyes on those of the youth. Alexander had
not forgotten the half-comical, half-threatening incident, but what he
remembered most clearly was the strange scene that followed: for, after
the Magian had released his enemy, he bade him take the jar back to
Silenus, and proceed on his way, like the ass, on all-fours. And the tall
faun, a headstrong, irascible Lesbian, had actually obeyed the stately
despot, and crept along on his hands and feet by the side of the donkey.
No threats nor mockery of his companions could persuade him to rise. The
high spirits of the boisterous crew were quite broken, and before they
could turn on the magician he had vanished.
Alexander had afterward learned that he was Serapion, the star-gazer and
thaumaturgist, whom all the spirits of heaven and earth obeyed.
When, at the time, the painter had told the story to Philip, the
philosopher had laughed at him, though Alexander had reminded him that
Plato even had spoken of the daimons as being the guardian spirits of
men; that in Alexandria, great and small alike believed in them as a fact
to be reckoned with; and that he--Philip himself--had told him that they
played a prominent part in the newest systems of philosophy.
But to the skeptic nothing was sure: and if he would deny the existence
of the Divinity, he naturally must disbelieve that of any beings in a
sphere between the supersensual immortals and sentient human creatures.
That a man, the weaker nature, could have any power over daimons, who, as
having a nearer affinity to the gods, must, if they existed, be the
stronger, he could refute with convincing arguments; and when he saw
others nibbling whitethorn-leaves, or daubing their thresholds with pitch
to preserve themselves and the house from evil spirits, he shrugged his
shoulders contemptuously, though his father often did such things.
Here was Philip, deep in conversation with the man he had mocked at, and
Alexander was flattered by seeing that wise and famous Serapion, in whose
powers he himself believed, was talking almost humbly to his brother, as
though to a superior. The magician was standing, while the philosopher,
as though it were his right, remained seated.
Of what could they be conversing?
Alexander himself was anxious to be going, and only his desire to hear at
any rate a few sentences of the talk of two such men detained him longer.
As he expected, it bore on Serapion's magical powers; but the bearded man
spoke in a very low tone, and if the painter ventured any nearer he would
be seen. He could only catch a few incoherent words, till Philip
exclaimed in a louder voice: "All that is well-reasoned. But you will be
able to write an enduring inscription on the shifting wave sooner than
you will shake my conviction that for our spirit, such as Nature has made
it, there is nothing infallible or certain."
The painter was familiar with this postulate, and was curious to hear the
Magian's reply; but he could not follow his argument till he ended by
saying, rather more emphatically: "You, even, do not deny the physical
connection of things; but I know the power that causes it. It is the
magical sympathy which displays itself more powerfully in the universe,
and among human beings, than any other force."
"That is just what remains to be proved," was the reply. But as the other
declared in all confidence, "And I can prove it," and was proceeding to
do so, Serapion's companion, a stunted, sharp-featured little Syrian,
caught sight of Alexander. The discourse was interrupted, and Alexander,
pointing to Melissa, begged his brother to grant them a few minutes'
speech with him. Philip, however, scarcely spared a moment for greeting
his brother and sister; and when, in answer to his request that they be
brief in what they had to say, they replied that a few words would not
suffice, Philip was for putting them off till the morrow, as he did not
choose to be disturbed just now.
At this Melissa took courage; she turned to Serapion and modestly
addressed him:
"You, sir, look like a grave, kind man, and seem to have a regard for my
brother. You, then, will help us, no doubt, to cure him of an illusion
which troubles us. A dead girl, he says, met him, and he touched her
hand."
"And do you, sweet child, think that impossible?" the Magian asked with
gentle gravity. "Have the thousands who bring not merely fruit and wine
and money for their dead, but who even burn a black sheep for them--you,
perhaps, have done the same--have they, I ask, done this so long in vain?
I can not believe it. Nay, I know from the ghosts themselves that this
gives them pleasure; so they must have the organs of sense."
"That we may rejoice departed souls by food and drink," said Melissa,
eagerly, "and that daimons at times mingle with the living, every one of
course, believes; but who ever heard that warm blood stirred in them? And
how can it be possible that they should remunerate a service with money,
which certainly was not coined in their airy realm, but in the mint
here?"
"Not too fast, fair maid," replied the Magian, raising a warning hand.
"There is no form which these intermediate beings can not assume. They
have the control of all and everything which mortals may use, so the soul
of Korinna revisiting these scenes may quite well have paid the ferryman
with an obolus."
"Then you know of it?" asked Melissa in surprise; but the Magian broke
in, saying:
"Few such things remain hidden from him who knows, not even the smallest,
if he strives after such knowledge."
As he spoke he gave the girl such a look as made her eyelids fall, and he
went on with greater warmth: "There would be fewer tears shed by
death-beds, my child, if we could but show the world the means by which
the initiated hold converse with the souls of the dead."
Melissa shook her pretty head sadly, and the Magian kindly stroked her
waving hair; then, looking her straight in the eyes, he said: "The dead
live. What once has been can never cease to be, any more than out of
nothing can anything come. It is so simple; and so, too, are the workings
of magic, which amaze you so much. What you call magic, when I practice
it, Eros, the great god of love, has wrought a thousand times in your
breast. When your heart leaps at your brother's caress, when the god's
arrow pierces you, and the glance of a lover fills you with gladness,
when the sweet harmonies of fine music wrap your soul above this earth,
or the wail of a child moves you to compassion, you have felt the magic
power stirring in your own soul. You feel it when some mysterious power,
without any will of your own, prompts you to some act, be it what it may.
And, besides all this, if a leaf flutters off the table without being
touched by any visible hand, you do not doubt that a draught of air,
which you can neither hear nor see, has swept through the room. If at
noon the world is suddenly darkened, you know, without looking up at the
sky, that it is overcast by a cloud. In the very same way you can feel
the nearness of a soul that was dear to you without being able to see it.
All that is necessary is to strengthen the faculty which knows its
presence, and give it the proper training, and then you will see and hear
them. The Magians have the key which unlocks the door of the world of
spirits to the human senses. Your noble brother, in whom the claims of
the spirit have long since triumphed over those of sense, has found this
key without seeking it, since he has been permitted to see Korinna's
soul. And if he follows a competent guide he will see her again."
"But why? What good will it do him?" asked Melissa, with a reproachful
and anxious look at the man whose influence, as she divined would be
pernicious to her brother, in spite of his knowledge. The Magian gave a
compassionate shrug, and in the look he cast at the philosopher, the
question was legible, "What have such as these to do with the highest
things?"
Philip nodded in impatient assent, and, without paying any further heed
to his brother and sister, besought his friend to give him the proofs of
the theory that the physical causation of things is weaker than the
sympathy which connects them. Melissa knew full well that any attempt now
to separate Philip from Serapion would be futile; however, she would not
leave the last chance untried, and asked him gravely whether he had
forgotten his mother's tomb.
He hastily assured her that he fully intended to visit it presently.
Fruit and fragrant oil could be had here at any hour of the night.
"And your two wreaths?" she said, in mild reproach, for she had observed
them both below the portrait of Korinna.
"I had another use for them," he said, evasively; and then he added,
apologetically: "You have brought flowers enough, I know. If I can find
time, I will go to-morrow to see my father." He nodded to them both,
turned to the Magian, and went on eagerly:
"Then that magical sympathy--"
They did not wait to hear the discussion; Alexander signed to his sister
to follow him.
He, too, knew that his brother's ear was deaf now to anything he could
say. What Serapion had said had riveted even his attention, and the
question whether it might indeed be vouchsafed to living mortals to see
the souls of the departed, and hear their voices, exercised his mind so
greatly that he could not forbear asking his sister's opinion on such
matters.
But Melissa's good sense had felt that there was something not quite
sound in the Magian's argument--nor did she conceal her conviction that
Philip, who was always hard to convince, had accepted Serapion's views,
not because he yielded to the weight of his reasons, but because he--and
Alexander, too, for that matter--hoped by his mediation to see the
beautiful Korinna again.
This the artist admitted; but when he jested of the danger of a jealous
quarrel between him and his brother, for the sake of a dead girl, there
was something hard in his tone, and very unlike him, which Melissa did
not like.
They breathed more freely as they got out into the open air, and her
efforts to change the subject of their conversation were happily
seconded; for at the door they met the family of their neighbor Skopas,
the owner of a stone-quarry, whose grave-plot adjoined theirs, and
Melissa was happy again as she heard her brother laughing as gayly as
ever with Skopas's pretty daughter. The mania had not taken such deep
hold of the light-hearted young painter as of Philip, the poring and
gloomy philosopher; and she was glad as she heard her friend Ino call
Alexander a faithless butterfly, while her sister Helena declared that he
was a godless scoffer.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Man, in short, could be sure of nothing
Misfortunes commonly come in couples yoked like oxen
A THORNY PATH
By Georg Ebers
Volume 2.
CHAPTER V.
The crowds on the road were now homeward bound, and they were all in such
wild, high spirits that, from what was to be seen and heard, it could
never have been supposed that they had come from so mournful a scene.
They took the road by the sea leading from the Nekropolis to Eleusis,
wandering on in the glowing moonlight.
A great procession of Greeks had been to Eleusis, to celebrate the
mysteries after the manner of the Greek Eleusis, on which that of
Alexandria was modeled. The newly initiated, and the elder adepts, whose
duty it was to superintend their reception, had remained in the temple;
but the other mystics now swelled the train of those who were coming from
the city of the dead.
Here, indeed, Serapis took the place of Pluto, and much that was Greek
had assumed strange and Egyptian forms: even the order of the ceremonies
had been entirely changed; still, on the African, as on the Attic shore,
the Greek cry went up, "To the sea, O mystics!" and the bidding to
Iakchos: "Be with us, O Iakchos!"
It could be heard from afar, but the voices of the shouters were already
weary, and most of the torches had burned low. The wreaths of ivy and
myrtle in their hair were limp; the singers of the hymn no longer kept
their ranks; and even Iambe, whose jests had cheered the mourning
Demeter, and whose lips at Eleusis had overflowed with witticisms, was
exhausted and silent. She still held in her hand the jar from which she
had given the bereaved goddess a reviving draught, but it was empty and
she longed for a drink. She was indeed a he: for it was a youth in
woman's dress who played the rollicking part of Iambe, and it was
Alexander's friend and comrade Diodoros who had represented the daughter
of Pan and Echo, who, the legend said, had acted as slave in the house of
Metaneira, the Eleusinian queen, when Demeter took refuge there. His
sturdy legs had good reason to be as weary as his tongue, which had known
no rest for five hours.
But he caught sight of the large vehicle drawn by four horses, in which
the vast corn-measure, the kalathos, which Serapis wore as his
distinguishing head-gear, had been conveyed to Eleusis. It was empty now,
for the contents had been offered to the god, and the four black horses
had an easy task with the great wagon. No one had as yet thought of using
it as a conveyance back to the town; but Diodoros, who was both ingenious
and tired, ran after it and leaped up. Several now wanted to follow his
example, but he pushed them off, even thrusting at them with a newly
lighted torch, for he could not be quiet in spite of his fatigue. In the
midst of the skirmishing he perceived his friend and Melissa.
His heart had been given to the gentle girl ever since they had been
playmates in his father's garden, and when he saw her, walking along
downcast, while her brother sported with his neighbor's daughters, he
beckoned to her, and, as she refused to accompany him in the wagon, he
nimbly sprang off, lifted her up in his arms, made strong by exercise in
the Palaestra, and gently deposited her, in spite of her struggles, on
the flat floor of the car, by the side of the empty kalathos.
"The rape of Persephone!" he cried. "The second performance in one.
night!"
Then the old reckless spirit seized Alexander too.
With as much gay audacity--as though he were free of every care and
grief, and had signed a compact with Fortune, he picked up pretty Ino,
lifted her into the wagon, as Diodoros had done with his sister, and
exclaiming, "The third performance!" seated himself by her side.
His bold example found immediate imitators. "A fourth!" "A fifth!" cried
one and another, shouting and laughing, with loud calls on Iakchos.
The horses found it hard work, for all along the edge of the car, and
round the kalathos of the great Serapis, sat the merry young couples in
close array. Alexander and Melissa soon were wreathed with myrtle and
ivy. In the vehicle and among the crowd there were none but radiant and
frolicsome faces, and no sound but triumphant revelry.
Fatigue was forgotten; it might have been supposed that the sinister
sisters, Care and Sorrow, had been banished from earth.
There was a smile even on Melissa's sweet, calm face. At first her old
friend's audacious jest had offended her maidenly coyness; but if
Diodoros had always loved her, so had she always loved him; and as other
well-conducted girls had been content to have the like done to them, and
her companion so confidently and roguishly sued for pardon, she gave him
a smile which filled his heart with rapture, and said more than words.
It was a comfort, too, to sit still and rest.
She spoke but little, but even she forgot what troubled her when she felt
her friend's hand on hers, and he whispered to her that this was the most
delightful night he had ever known, and that, of all the sweets the gods
had created, she was to him the sweetest?
The blue sea spread before them, the full moon mirrored on its scarcely
heaving surface like a tremulous column of pure and shining silver. The
murmur of the ripples came up from the strand as soothing and inviting as
the song of the Nereids; and if a white crest of foam rose on a wave, she
could fancy it was the arm of Thetis or Galatea. There, where the blue
was deepest, the sea-god Glaukos must dwell, and his heart be gladdened
by the merry doings on shore.
Nature is so great; and as the thought came to her that her heart was not
too small to take its greatness in, even to the farthest horizon, it
filled her with glad surprise.
And Nature was bountiful too. Melissa could see the happy and gracious
face of a divinity in everything she looked upon. The immortals who had
afflicted her, and whom she had often bitterly accused, could be kind and
merciful too. The sea, on whose shining surface the blue vault of heaven
with the moon and stars rocked and twinkled, the soft breeze which fanned
her brow, the new delicious longing which filled her heart-all she felt
and was conscious of, was a divinity or an emanation of the divine.
Mighty Poseidon and majestic Zeus, gentle Selene, and the sportive
children of the god of winds, seemed to be strangely near her as she rode
along. And it was the omnipotent son of Kypris, no doubt, who stirred her
heart to beat higher than it had ever done before.
Her visit to her mother's grave, too, her prayer and her offerings there,
had perhaps moved the spirit of the beloved dead to hover near her now as
a guardian genius.
Still, now and again the memory of something terrible passed over her
soul like a sweeping shadow; but what it was which threatened her and
those dear to her she did not see, and would not now inquire. What the
morrow might bring should not cloud the enchantment of this hour. For oh,
how fair the world was, and how blessed might mortals be!
"Iakchos! Iakchos!" the voices about her shouted, and it sounded as
gleeful as though the breasts of the revelers were overflowing with
gladness; and as the scented curls of Diodoros bent over her head, as his
hand closed on hers, and his whispered words of love were in her ear, she
murmured: "Alexander is right; the world is a banqueting-hall, and life
is fair."
"So fair!" echoed the youth, pensively. Then he shouted aloud to his
companions: "The world is a banqueting-hall! Bring roses, bring wine,
that we may sacrifice to Eros, and pour libations to Dionysus. Light the
flaming torches! Iakchos! come, Iakchos, and sanctify our glad festival!"
"Come, Iakchos, come!" cried one and another, and soon the enthusiastic
youth's cry was taken up on all sides. But wine-skin and jar were long
since emptied.
Hard by, below the cliff, and close to the sea, was a tavern, at the sign
of the Cock. Here cool drink was to be had; here the horses might
rest-for the drivers had been grumbling bitterly at the heavy load added
to the car over the deep sand--and here there was a level plot, under the
shade of a spreading sycamore, which had often before now served as a
floor for the choric dance.
The vehicle soon drew up in front of the whitewashed inn, surrounded on
three sides by a trellised arbor, overgrown with figs and vine. The young
couples sprang to the ground; and, while the host and his slave dragged
up a huge wine-jar with two ears, full of the red juice of the grape,
fresh torches were lighted and stuck on poles or fastened to the branches
of the sycamore, the youths took their places eager for the dance, and
suddenly the festal song went up from their clear throats unbidden, and
as though inspired by some mysterious power:
Iakchos, come! oh, come, Iakchos!
Hither come, to the scene of our revel,
The gladsome band of the faithful.
Shake the fragrant, berried garland,
Myrtle-twined, that crowns thy love-locks,
Shedding its odors!
Tread the measure, with fearless stamp,
Of this our reckless, rapturous dance,
In holy rejoicing!
Hand in hand, thrice beatified,
Lo we thread the rhythmic, fanciful,
Mystical mazes!
And the dance begins. Youths and maidens advance to meet each other with
graceful movements. Every step must be a thing of beauty, every bend and
rising, while the double flutes play faster and faster, and the measured
rhythm becomes a wild whirl. They all know the dance, and the music is a
guide to the feeling to be expressed; the dancing must be suited to it.
Every gesture is a stroke of color which may beautify or mar the picture.
Body and spirit are in perfect harmony, combining to represent the
feelings that stir the soul. It is a work of art, the art of the arms and
feet. Even when passion is at the highest the guiding law is observed.
Nay, when the dancers fly wildly apart, they, not merely come together
again with unerring certainty, but form in new combination another
delightful and perfectly harmonious picture.
"Seek and find" this dance might be called, for the first idea is to
represent the wandering of Demeter in search of her daughter Persephone,
whom Pluto has carried off to the nether world, till she finds her and
clasps her in her motherly arms once more. Thus does the earth bewail the
reaped fruit of the field, which is buried in the ground in the winter
sowing, to rise again in the spring; thus does a faithful heart pine
during absence till it is reunited to the beloved one; thus do we mourn
our dead till our soul is assured of their resurrection: and this belief
is the end and clew to the mystery.
All this grief and search, this longing and crying for the absent, this
final restoration and the bliss of new possession, is set forth by the
youths and damsels-now in slow and now in vehement action, but always
with infinite grace.
Melissa threw her whole soul into the dance while Demeter was seeking the
lost Persephone, her thoughts were with her brothers; and she laughed as
heartily as any one at the jests with which Iambe cheered the stricken
mother. And when the joy of meeting was to find expression, she need not
think of anything but the fact that the youth who held out his hand to
her loved her and cared for her. In this, for the moment, lay the end of
all her longing and seeking, the fulfillment of every wish; and as the
chorus shouted, "Iakchos!" again and again, her soul seemed to have taken
wings.
The reserve of her calm and maidenly nature broke down; in her ecstasy
she snatched from her shoulder the wreath of ivy with which Diodoros had
decked her, and waved it aloft. Her long hair had fallen loose in the
dance and flowed wildly about her, and her shout of "Iakchos!" rang clear
in the night air.
The youth she loved gazed at her with ravished eyes, as at some miracle;
she, heedless of the others, threw her arms round his neck, and, as he
kissed her, she said once more, but loud enough now to be heard from
afar, "The world is a banqueting-hall!" and again she joined in the shout
of "Iakchos!" her eyes bright with excitement. Cups filled high with wine
now circulated among the mad-cap mystics; even Melissa refreshed herself,
handing the beaker to her lover, and Diodoros raised to his mouth that
place on the rim which her lips had touched.
"O life! fount of joys!" cried Diodoros, kissing her and pressing her
closer to him. "Come, Iakchos! Behold with envy how thankfully two
mortals can bless the gift of life. But where is Alexander? To none but
to our Andreas have I ever confided the secret I have borne in my heart
since that day when we went to the circus. But now! Oh, it is so much
happiness for two hearts! My friend, too, must have part in it!"
At this Melissa clasped her hand to her brow, as though waking from a
dream. How hot she was from dancing, and the unusual strength of the wine
and water she had drunk!
The danger impending over both her brothers came back to her mind. She
had always been accustomed to think of others rather than herself, and
her festal mood dropped from her suddenly, like a mantle of which the
brooch breaks. She vehemently shook herself free of her lover's embrace,
and her eyes glanced from one to another in rapid search.
There stood pretty Ino, who had danced the mazy measure with Alexander.
Panting for breath, she stood leaning her weary head and tangled hair
against the trunk of the tree, a wine-cup upside down in her right hand.
It must be empty; but where was he who had emptied it?
Her neighbor's daughter would surely know. Had the reckless youth
quarreled with the girl? No, no!
One of the tavern-keeper's slaves, Ino told her, had whispered something
to Alexander, whereupon he had instantly followed the man into the house.
Melissa knew that it could be no trivial matter which detained him there,
and hurried after him into the tavern.
The host, a Greek, and his buxom wife, affected not to know for whom she
was inquiring; but, perceiving the anxiety which spoke in every line of
the girl's face, when she explained that she was Alexander's sister, they
at first looked at each other doubtingly, and then the woman, who had
children of her own, who fondly loved each other, felt her heart swell
within her, and she whispered, with her finger on her lips: "Do not be
uneasy, pretty maid; my husband will see him well through."
And then Melissa heard that the Egyptian, who had alarmed her in the
Nekropolis, was the spy Zminis, who, as her old slave Dido had once told
her, had been a rejected suitor of her mother's before she had married
Heron, and who was therefore always glad to bring trouble on all who
belonged to her father's house. How often had she heard of the annoyances
in which this man had involved her father and Alexander, who were apt to
be very short with the man!
This tale-bearer, who held the highest position as guardian of the peace
under the captain of the night-watch, was of all men in the city the most
hated and feared; and he had heard her brother speaking of Caesar in a
tone of mockery which was enough to bring him to prison, to the quarries,
nay, to death. Glaukias, the sculptor, had previously seen the Egyptian
on the bridge, where he had detained those who were returning home from
the city of the dead. He and his followers had already stopped the poet
Argeios on his way, but the thyrsus staves of the Dionysiac revelers had
somewhat spoiled the game for him and his satellites. He was probably
still standing on the bridge. Glaukias had immediately run back, at any
risk, to warn Alexander. He and the painter were now in hiding, and would
remain in safety, come what might, in the cellar at the Cock, till the
coast was clear again. The tavern-keeper strongly advised no one to go
meddling with his wine-skins and jars.
"Much less that Egyptian dog!" cried his wife, doubling her fist as
though the hated mischief-maker stood before her already.
"Poor, helpless lamb!" she murmured to herself, as she looked
compassionately at the fragile, town-bred girl, who stood gazing at the
ground as if she had been struck by lightning. She remembered, too, how
hard life had seemed to her in her own young days, and glanced with pride
at her brawny arms, which were able indeed to work and manage.
But what now?
The drooping flower suddenly raised her head, as if moved by a spring,
exclaiming: "Thank you heartily, thank you! But that will never do. If
Zminis searches your premises he will certainly go into the cellar; for
what can he not do in Caesar's name? I will not part from my brother."
"Then you, too, are a welcome guest at the Cock," interrupted the woman,
and her husband bowed low, assuring her that the Cock was as much her
house as it was his.
But the helpless town-bred damsel declined this friendly invitation; for
her shrewd little head had devised another plan for saving her brother,
though the tavern-keepers, to whom she confided it in a whisper, laughed
and shook their heads over it. Diodoros was waiting outside in anxious
impatience; he loved her, and he was her brother's best friend. All that
he could do to save Alexander he would gladly do, she knew. On the estate
which would some day be his, there was room and to spare to hide the
fugitives, for one of the largest gardens in the town was owned by his
father. His extensive grounds had been familiar to her from her
childhood, for her own mother and her lover's had been friends; and
Andreas, the freedman, the overseer of Polybius's gardens and
plantations, was dearer to her and her brothers than any one else in
Alexandria.
Nor had she deceived herself, for Diodoros made Alexander's cause his
own, in his eager, vehement way; and the plan for his deliverance seemed
doubly admirable as proceeding from Melissa. In a few minutes Alexander
and the sculptor were released from their hiding-place, and all further
care for them was left to Diodoros.
They were both very, craftily disguised. No one would have recognized the
artists in two sailors, whose Phrygian caps completely hid their hair,
while a heavy fisherman's apron was girt about their loins; still less
would any one have suspected from their laughing faces that imprisonment,
if nothing worse, hung over them. Their change of garb had given rise to
so much fun; and now, on hearing how they were to be smuggled into the
town, their merriment grew higher, and proved catching to those who were
taken into the secret. Only Melissa was oppressed with anxious care, in
spite of her lover's eager consolation.
Glaukias, a man of scarcely middle height, was sure of not being
recognized, and he and his comrades looked forward to whatever might
happen as merely an amusing jest. At the same time they had to balk the
hated chief of the city guards and his menials of their immediate prey;
but they had played them a trick or two ere now. It might turn out really
badly for Alexander; still, it was only needful to keep him concealed
till Caesar should arrive; then he would be safe, for the Emperor would
certainly absorb all the thoughts and time of the captain of the
night-watch and his chief officers. In Alexandria, anything once past was
so soon forgotten! When once Caracalla was gone--and it was to be hoped
that he would not stay long--no one would ever think again of any biting
speech made before his arrival.
The morning must bring what it might, so long as the present moment was
gay!
So, refreshed and cheered by rest and wine, the party of mystics prepared
to set out again; and, as the procession started, no one who did not know
it had observed that the two artists, disguised as sailors, were, by
Melissa's advice, hidden inside the kalathos of Serapis, which would
easily have held six, and was breast-high even for Alexander, who was a
tall man. They squatted on the floor of the huge vessel, with a jar of
wine between them, and peeped over now and then with a laugh at the
girls, who had again seated themselves on the edge of the car.
When they were fairly on their way once more, Alexander and his
companions were so daring that, whenever they could do it unobserved,
they pelted the damsels with the remains of the corn, or sprinkled them
with wine-drops. Glaukias had the art of imitating the pattering of rain
and the humming of a fly to perfection with his lips; and when the girls
complained of the tiresome insect buzzing in their faces, or declared,
when a drop fell on them, that in spite of the blue and cloudless sky it
was certainly beginning to rain, the two men had to cover their mouths
with their hands, that their laughter might not betray them.
Melissa, who had comforted Ino with the assurance that Alexander had been
called away quite unexpectedly, was now sitting by her side, and
perceived, of course, what tricks the men in the kalathos were playing;
but, instead of amusing her, they only made her anxious.
Every one about her was laughing and joking, but for her all mirth was at
an end. Fear, indeed, weighed on her like an incubus, when the car
reached the bridge and rattled across it. It was lined with soldiers and
lictors, who looked closely at each one, even at Melissa herself. But no
one spoke to her, and when the water lay behind them she breathed more
freely. But only for a moment; for she suddenly remembered that they
would presently have to pass through the gate leading past Hadrian's
western wall into the town. If Zminis were waiting there instead of on
the bridge, and were to search the vehicle, then all would be lost, for
he had looked her, too, in the face with those strange, fixed eyes of
his; and that where he saw the sister he would also seek the brother,
seemed to her quite certain. Thus her presence was a source of peril to
Alexander, and she must at any cost avert that.
She immediately put out her hand to Diodoros, who was walking at her
side, and with his help slipped down from her seat. Then she whispered
her fears to him, and begged him to quit the party and conduct her home.
This was a surprising and delightful task for her lover. With a jesting
word he leaped on to the car, and even succeeded in murmuring to
Alexander, unobserved, that Melissa had placed herself under his
protection. When they got home, they could tell Heron and Andreas that
the youths were safe in hiding. Melissa could explain, to-morrow morning,
how everything had happened. Then he drew Melissa's arm through his,
loudly shouted, "Iakchos!" and with a swift dance-step soon outstripped
the wagon.
Not fifty paces beyond, large pine torches sent bright flames up skyward,
and by their light the girl could see the dreaded gateway, with the
statues of Hadrian and Sabina, and in front of them, in the middle of the
road, a horseman, who, as they approached, came trotting forward to meet
them on his tall steed. His head towered above every one else in the
road; and as she looked up at him her heart almost ceased beating, for
her eyes met those of the dreaded Egyptian; their white balls showed
plainly in his brown, lean face, and their cruel, evil sparkle had
stamped them clearly on her memory.
On her right a street turned off from the road, and saying in a low tone,
"This way," she led Diodoros, to his surprise, into the shadow. His heart
beat high. Did she, whose coy and maidenly austerity before and after the
intoxication of the dance had vouchsafed him hardly a kind look or a
clasp of the hand-did she even yearn for some tender embrace alone and in
darkness? Did the quiet, modest girl, who, since she had ceased to be a
child, had but rarely given him a few poor words, long to tell him that
which hitherto only her bright eyes and the kiss of her pure young lips
had betrayed?
He drew her more closely to him in blissful expectation; but she shyly
shrank from his touch, and before he could murmur a single word of love
she exclaimed in terror, as though the hand of the persecutor were
already laid on her: "Fly, fly! That house will give us shelter."
And she dragged him after her into the open doorway of a large building.
Scarcely had they entered the dark vestibule when the sound of hoofs was
heard, and the glare of torches dispelled the darkness outside.
"Zminis! It is he--he is following us!" she whispered, scarcely able to
speak; and her alarm was well founded, for the Egyptian had recognized
her, and supposed her companion to be Alexander. He had ridden down the
street with his torchbearers, but where she had hidden herself his keen
eyes could not detect, for the departing sound of hoofs betrayed to the
breathless listeners that the pursuer had left their hiding-place far
behind him. Presently the pavement in front of the house which sheltered
them rang again with the tramp of the horse, till it died away at last in
the direction of Hadrian's gate. Not till then did Melissa lift her hand
from her painfully throbbing heart.
But the Egyptian would, no doubt, have left his spies in the street, and
Diodoros went out to see if the road was clear. Melissa remained alone in
the dark entrance, and began to be anxious as to how she could explain
her presence there if the inhabitants should happen to discover it; for
in this vast building, in spite of the lateness of the hour, there still
was some one astir. She had for some minutes heard a murmuring sound
which reached her from an inner chamber; but it was only by degrees that
she collected herself so far as to listen more closely, to ascertain
whence it came and what it could mean.
A large number of persons must be assembled there, for she could
distinguish several male voices, and now and then a woman's. A door was
opened. She shrank closer to the wall, but the seconds became minutes,
and no one appeared.
At last she fancied she heard the moving of benches or seats, and many
voices together shouting she knew not what. Then again a door creaked on
its hinges, and after that all was so still that she could have heard a
needle drop on the floor; and this alarming silence continued till
presently a deep, resonant man's voice was audible.
The singular manner in which this voice gave every word its full and
equal value suggested to her fancy that something was being read aloud.
She could distinctly hear the sentence with which the speech or reading
began. After a short pause it was repeated somewhat more quickly, as
though the speaker had this time uttered it from his own heart.
It consisted of these six simple words, "The fullness of the time was
come"; and Melissa listened no more to the discourse which followed,
spoken as it was in a low voice, for this sentence rang in her ears as if
it were repeated by an echo.
She did not, to be sure, understand its meaning, but she felt as though
it must have some deep significance. It came back to her again and again,
like a melody which haunts the inward ear against our will; and her
meditative fancy was trying to solve its meaning, when Diodoros returned
to tell her that the street was quite empty. He knew now where they were,
and, if she liked, he could lead her by a way which would not take them
through the gate. Only Christians, Egyptians, and other common folks
dwelt in this quarter; however, since his duty as her protector had this
day begun, he would fulfill it to the best of his ability.
She went with him out into the street, and when they had gone a little
way he clasped her to him and kissed her hair.
His heart was full. He knew now that she, whom he had loved when she
walked in his father's garden in her little child's tunic, holding her
mother's hand, returned his passion. Now the time was come for asking
whether she would permit him to beg her father's leave to woo her.
He stopped in the shadow of a house near, and, while he poured out to her
all that stirred his breast, carried away by tender passion, and
describing in his vehement way how great and deep his love was, in spite
of the utter fatigue which weighed on her body and soul after so many
agitations, she felt with deep thankfulness the immense happiness of
being more precious than aught else on earth to a dear, good man. Love,
which had so long lain dormant in her as a bud, and then opened so
quickly only to close again under her alarms, unfolded once more and
blossomed for him again--not as it had done just now in passionate
ecstasy, but, as beseemed her calm, transparent nature, with moderated
joy, which, however, did not lack due warmth and winning tenderness.
Happiness beyond words possessed them both. She suffered him to seal his
vows with kisses, herself offering him her lips, as her heart swelled
with fervent thanksgiving for so much joy and such a full measure of
love.
She was indeed a precious jewel, and the passion of his stormy heart was
tempered by such genuine reverence that he gladly kept within the bounds
which her maidenly modesty prescribed. And how much they had to say to
each other in this first opening of their hearts, how many hopes for the
future found utterance in words! The minutes flew on and became hours,
till at last Melissa begged him to quit the marble seat on which they had
so long been resting, if indeed her feet could still carry her home.
Little as it pleased him, he did her bidding. But as they went on he felt
that she hung heavy on his arm and could only lift her little feet with
the greatest difficulty. The street was too dark for him to see how pale
she was; and yet he never took his eyes off her dear but scarcely
distinguishable features. Suddenly he heard a faint whisper as in a
dream, "I can go no farther," and at once led her back to the marble
seat.
He first carefully spread his mantle over the stone and then wrapped her
in it as tenderly as a mother might cover her shivering child, for a
cooler breeze gave warning of the coming dawn. He himself crept close
under the wall by her side, so as not to be seen, for a long train of
people, with servants carrying lanterns before them, now came out of the
house they had just left and down the street. Who these could be who
walked at so late an hour in such solemn silence neither of them knew.
They certainly sent up no joyful shout of "Iakchos!" no wild lament; no
cheerful laughter nor sounds of mourning were to be heard from the long
procession which passed along the street, two and two, at a slow pace. As
soon as they had passed the last houses, men and women alike began to
sing; no leader started them, nor lyre accompanied them, and yet their
song went up as though with one voice.
Diodoros and Melissa knew every note sung by the Greeks or Egyptians of
Alexandria, at this or any other festival, but this melody was strange to
them; and when the young man whispered to the girl, "What is it that they
are singing?" she replied, as though startled from sleep, "They are no
mere mortals!"
Diodoros shuddered; he fancied that the procession was floating above the
earth; that, if they had been indeed men of flesh and blood, their steps
would have been more distinctly audible on the pavement. Some of them
appeared to him to be taller than common mortals, and their chant was
certainly that of another world than this where he dwelt. Perhaps these
were daimons, the souls of departed Egyptians, who, after a midnight
visit to those they had left behind them, were returning to the rock
tombs, of which there were many in the stony hills to which this street
led. They were walking toward these tombs, and not toward the gate; and
Diodoros whispered his suspicion to his companion, clasping his hand on
an amulet in the semblance of an eye, which his Egyptian nurse had
fastened round his neck long ago with an Anubic thread, to protect him
against the evil-eye and magic spells.
But Melissa was listening with such devout attention to the chant that
she did not hear him. The fatigue which had reached such a painful climax
had, during this peaceful rest, given way to a blissful unconsciousness
of self. It was a kind of happiness to feel no longer the burden of
exhaustion, and the song of the wanderers was like a cradle-song, lulling
her to sweet dreams. It filled her with gladness, and yet it was not
glad, not even cheerful. It went to her heart, and yet it was not
mournful-not in the least like the passionate lament of Isis for Osiris,
or that of Demeter bewailing her daughter. The emotion it aroused in her
was a sweetly sorrowful compassion, which included herself, her brothers,
her father, her lover, all who were doomed to suffering and death, even
the utter stranger, for whom she had hitherto felt no sympathy.
And the compassion bore within it a sense of comfort which she could not
explain, or perhaps would not inquire into. It struck her, too, now and
then, that the strain had a ring as of thanksgiving. It was, no doubt,
addressed to the gods, and for that reason it appealed to her, and she
would gladly have joined in it, for she, too, was grateful to the
immortals, and above all to Eros, for the love which had been born in her
heart and had found such an ardent return. She sighed as she listened to
every note of the chant, and it worked upon her like a healing draught.
The struggle of her will against bodily fatigue, and finally against the
mental exhaustion of so much bliss, the conviction that her heavy, weary
feet would perhaps fail to carry her home, and that she must seek shelter
somewhere for the night, had disturbed her greatly. Now she was quite
calm, and as much at ease as she was at home sitting with her father, her
stitching in her hand, while she dreamed of her mother and her childhood
in the past. The singing had fallen on her agitated soul like the oil
poured by the mariner on the sea to still the foaming breakers. She felt
it so.
She could not help thinking of the time when she could fall asleep on her
mother's bosom in the certainty that tender love was watching over her.
The happiness of childhood, when she loved everything she knew-her
family, the slaves, her father's birds, the flowers in the little garden,
the altar of the goddess to whom she made offering, the very stars in the
sky-seemed to come over her, and there she sat in dreamy lassitude, her
head on her lover's shoulder, till the last stragglers of the procession,
who, were women, many of them carrying little lamps in their hands, had
almost all gone past.
Then she suddenly felt an eager jerk in the shoulder on which her head
was resting.
"Look--look there!" he whispered; and as her eyes followed the direction
of his finger, she too started, and exclaimed, "Korinna!--Did you know
her?"
"She had often come to my father's garden," he replied, "and I saw her
portrait in Alexander's room. These are souls from Hades that we have
seen. We must offer sacrifice, for those to whom they show themselves
they draw after them." At this Melissa, too, shuddered, and exclaimed in
horror: "O Diodoros, not to death! We will ask the priests to-morrow
morning what sacrifice may redeem us. Anything rather than the grave and
the darkness of Hades!--Come, I am strong again now. Let us get away from
hence and go home."
"But we must go through the gate now," replied the youth. "It is not well
to follow in the footsteps of the dead."
Melissa, however, insisted on going on through the street. Terrified as
she was of the nether world and the disembodied souls, she would on no
account risk falling into the hands of the horrible Egyptian, who might
compel her to betray her brother's hiding-place; and Diodoros, who was
ashamed to show her the fears which still possessed him, did as she
desired.
But it was a comfort to him in this horror of death, which had come over
him now for the first time in his life, to kiss the maid once more, and
hold her warm hand in his as they walked on; while the strange chant of
the nocturnal procession still rang in her ears, and now and then the
words recurred to her mind which she had heard in the house where the
departed souls had gathered together:
"The fullness of the time was come."
Did this refer to the hour when the dead came to the end of their life on
earth; or was there some great event impending on the city and its
inhabitants, for which the time had now come? Had the words anything to
do with Caesar's visit? Had the dead come back to life to witness the
scenes which they saw approaching with eyes clearer than those of
mortals?
And then she remembered Korinna, whose fair, pale face had been strangely
lighted up by the lamp she carried; and, again, the Magian's assurance
that the souls of the departed were endowed with every faculty possessed
by the living, and that "those who knew" could see them and converse with
them.
Then Serapion had been right in saying this; and her hand trembled in her
lover's as she thought to herself that the danger which now threatened
Philip was estrangement from the living through intercourse with the
dead. Her own dead mother, perhaps, had floated past among these
wandering souls, and she grieved to think that she had neglected to look
for her and give her a loving greeting. Even Diodoros, who was not
generally given to silent meditation, had his own thoughts to pursue; and
so they walked on in silence till suddenly they heard a dull murmur of
voices. This startled them, and looking up they saw before them the rocky
cliffs in which the Egyptians long since, and now in later times the
Christians, had hewn caves and tombs. From the door of one of these, only
a few paces beyond where they stood, light streamed out; and as they were
about to pass it a large dog barked. Immediately on this a man came out,
and in a rough, deep voice asked them the pass-word. Diodoros, seized
with sudden terror of the dark figure, which he believed to be a risen
ghost, took to his heels, dragging Melissa with him. The dog flew after
them, barking loudly; and when the youth stooped to pick up a stone to
scare him off, the angry brute sprang on him and dragged him down.
Melissa screamed for help, but the gruff voice angrily bade her be
silent. Far from obeying him, the girl shouted louder than ever; and now,
out of the entrance to the cave, close behind the scene of the disaster,
came a number of men with lamps and tapers. They were the same daimons
whose song she had heard in the street; she could not be mistaken. On her
knees, by the side of her lover as he lay on the ground, she stared up at
the apparitions. A stone flew at the dog to scare him off, and a second,
larger than the first, whisked past her and hit Diodoros on the head; she
heard the dull blow. At this a cold hand seemed to clutch her heart;
everything about her melted into one whirling, colorless cloud. Pale as
death, she threw up her arms to protect herself, and then, overcome with
terror and fatigue, with a faint cry of anguish she lost consciousness.
When she opened her eyes again her head was resting in the lap of a kind,
motherly woman, while some men were just bearing away the senseless form
of Diodoros on a bier.
CHAPTER VI.
The sun had risen an hour since. Heron had betaken himself to his
workshop, whistling as he went, and in the kitchen his old slave Argutis
was standing over the hearth preparing his master's morning meal. He
dropped a pinch of dill into the barley-porridge, and shook his gray head
solemnly.
His companion Dido, a Syrian, whose wavy white hair contrasted strangely
with her dark skin, presently came in, and, starting up, he hastily
inquired, "Not in yet?"
"No," said the other woman, whose eyes were full of tears. "And you know
what my dream was. Some evil has come to her, I am certain; and when the
master hears of it--" Here she sobbed aloud; but the slave reproved her
for useless weeping.
"You never carried her in your arms," whimpered the woman.
"But often enough on my shoulder," retorted the Gaul, for Argutis was a
native of Augusta Trevirorum, on the Moselle. "Assoon as the porridge is
ready you must take it in and prepare the master."
"That his first fury may fall on me!" said the old woman, peevishly. "I
little thought when I was young!"
"That is a very old story," said Argutis, "and we both know what the
master's temper is. I should have been off long ago if only you could
make his porridge to his mind. As soon as I have dished it I will go to
seek Alexander--there is nothing to prevent me--for it was with him that
she left the house."
At this the old woman dried her tears, and cried "Yes, only go, and make
haste. I will do everything else. Great gods, if she should be brought
home dead! I know how it is; she could bear the old man's temper and this
moping life no longer, and has thrown herself into the water.
"My dream, my dream! Here--here is the dish, and now go and find the boy.
Still, Philip is the elder."
"He!" exclaimed the slave in a scornful tone. "Yes, if you want to know
what the flies are talking about! Alexander for me. He has his head
screwed on the right way, and he will find her if any man in Egypt can,
and bring her back, alive or dead."
"Dead!" echoed Dido, with a fresh burst of sobs, and her tears fell in
the porridge, which Argutis, indeed, in his distress of mind had
forgotten to salt.
While this conversation was going on the gemcutter was feeding his birds.
Can this man, who stands there like any girl, tempting his favorites to
feed, with fond words and whistling, and the offer of attractive
dainties, be the stormy blusterer of last night? There is not a coaxing
name that he does not lavish on them, while he fills their cups with
fresh seed and water; and how carefully he moves his big hand as he
strews the little cages with clean sand! He would not for worlds scare
the poor little prisoners who cheer his lonely hours, and who have long
since ceased to fear him. A turtle-dove takes peas, and a hedge-sparrow
picks ants' eggs from his lips; a white-throat perches on his left hand
to snatch a caterpillar from his right. The huge man was in his garden
soon after sunrise gathering the dewy leaves for his feathered pets. But
he talks and plays longest with the starling which his lost wife gave
him. She had bought it in secret from the Bedouin who for many years had
brought shells for sale from the Red Sea, to surprise her husband with
the gift. The clever bird had first learned to call her name, Olympias;
and then, without any teaching, had picked up his master's favorite
lament, "My strength, my strength!"
Heron regarded this bird as a friend who understood him, and, like him,
remembered the never-to-be-forsaken dead. For three years had the gem
cutter been a widower, and he still thought more constantly and fondly of
his lost wife than of the children she had left him. Heron scratched the
bird's knowing little head, saying in a tone which betrayed his pity both
for himself and his pet "Yes, old fellow, you would rather have a soft
white finger to stroke you down. I can hear her now, when she would call
you 'sweet little pet,' or 'dear little creature.' We shall neither of us
ever hear such gentle, loving words again. Do you remember how she would
look up with her dear sweet face--and was it not a lovely face?--when you
called her by her name 'Olympias'? How many a time have her rosy lips
blown up your feathers, and cried, 'Well done, little fellow! '--Ay, and
she would say 'Well done' to me too, when I had finished a piece of work
well. Ah, and what an eye she had, particularly for art! But now well,
the children give me a good word too, now that her lips are silent!"
"Olympias!" cried the bird loudly and articulately, and the clouds that
shadowed the gem-cutter's brow lifted a little, as with an affectionate
smile he went on:
"Yes, yes; you would be glad, too, to have her back again. You call her
now, as I did yesterday, standing by her grave--and she sends you her
love.
"Do you hear, little one? Peck away at the old man's finger; he knows you
mean it kindly, and it does not hurt. I was all alone out there, and
Selene looked down on us in silence. There was rioting and shouting all
round, but I could hear the voice of our dead. She was very near me, and
her sad soul showed me that she still cared for me. I had taken a jar of
our best wine of Byblos under my cloak; as soon as I had poured oil on
her gravestone and shed some of the noble liquor, the earth drank it up
as though it were thirsty. Not a drop was left. Yes, little fellow, she
accepted the gift; and when I fell on my knees to meditate on her, she
vouchsafed replies to many of my questions.
"We talked together as we used--you know. And we remembered you, too; I
gave you her love.
"You understand me, little fellow, don't you? And, I tell you, better
times are coming now."
He turned from the bird with a sharp movement of annoyance, for the
slave-woman came in with the bowl of barley-porridge.
"You!" exclaimed Heron, in surprise. "Where is Melissa?"
"She will come presently," said the old woman, in a low and doubtful
tone.
"Oh, thanks for the oracle!" said the artist, ironically.
"How you mock at a body!" said the old woman. "I meant--But eat
first--eat. Anger and grief are ill food for an empty stomach."
Heron sat down to the table and began to eat his porridge, but he
presently tossed away the spoon, exclaiming:
"I do not fancy it, eating by myself."
Then, with a puzzled glance at Dido, he asked in a tone of vexation:
"Well, why are you waiting here? And what is the meaning of all that
nipping and tugging at your dress? Have you broken another dish? No? Then
have done with that cursed head-shaking, and speak out at once!"
"Eat, eat," repeated Dido, retreating to the door, but Heron called her
back with vehement abuse; but when she began again her usual complaint,
"I never thought, when I was young--" Heron recovered the good temper he
had been rejoicing in so lately, and retorted: "Oh! yes, I know, I have
the daughter of a great potentate to wait on me. And if it had only
occurred to Caesar, when he was in Syria, to marry your sister, I should
have had his sister-in-law in my service. But at any rate I forbid
howling. You might have learned in the course of thirty years, that I do
not eat my fellow-creatures. So, now, confess at once what is wrong in
the kitchen, and then go and fetch Melissa." The woman was, perhaps, wise
to defer the evil moment as long as possible. Matters might soon change
for the better, and good or evil could come only from without. So Dido
clung to the literal sense of her master's question, and something
note-worthy had actually happened in the kitchen. She drew a deep breath,
and told him that a subordinate of the night-watch had come in and asked
whether Alexander were in the house, and where his painting-room was.
"And you gave him an exact description?" asked Heron.
But the slave shook her head; she again began to fidget with her dress,
and said, timidly:
"Argutis was there, and he says no good can come of the night-watch. He
told the man what he thought fit, and sent him about his business."
At this Heron interrupted the old woman with such a mighty blow of his
fist on the table that the porridge jumped in the bowl, and he exclaimed
in a fury:
"That is what comes of treating slaves as our equals! They begin to think
for themselves. A stupid blunder can spoil the best day! The captain of
the night-watch, I would have you to know, is a very great man, and very
likely a friend of Seleukus's, whose daughter Alexander has just painted.
The picture is attracting some attention.--Attention? What am I saying?
Every one who has been allowed to see it is quite crazy about it.
Everything else that was on show in the embalmers' hall was mere trash by
comparison. Often enough have I grumbled at the boy, who would rather be
anywhere than here; but, this time, I had some ground for being proud to
be his father! And now the captain of the watch sends his secretary, or
something of the kind, no doubt, in order to have his portrait, or his
wife's or daughter's--if he has one--painted by the artist who did
Korinna's; and his own father's slave--it drives me mad to think of
it--makes a face at the messenger and sends him all astray. I will give
Argutis a lesson! But by this time, perhaps--Just go and fetch him in."
With these words Heron again dropped his spoon, wiped his beard, and
then, seeing that Dido was still standing before him as though
spellbound, twitching her slave's gray gown, he repeated his order in
such angry tones--though before he had spoken to her as gently as if she
were one of his own children--that the old woman started violently and
made for the door, crouching low and whimpering bitterly.
The soft-hearted tyrant was really sorry for the faithful old servant he
had bought a generation since for the home to which he had brought his
fair young wife, and he began to speak kindly to her, as he had
previously done to the birds.
This comforted the old woman so much that again she could not help
crying; but, notwithstanding the sincerity of her tears, being accustomed
of old to take advantage of her master's moods, she felt that now was the
time to tell her melancholy story. First of all she would at any rate see
whether Melissa had not meanwhile returned; so she humbly kissed the hem
of his robe and hurried away.
"Send Argutis to me!" Heron roared after her, and he returned to his
breakfast with renewed energy.
He thought, as he ate, of his son's beautiful work, and the foolish
self-importance of Argutis, so faithful, and usually, it must be owned,
so shrewd. Then his eyes fell on Melissa's vacant place opposite to him,
and he suddenly pushed away his bowl and rose to seek his daughter.
At this moment the starling called, in a clear, inviting tone,
"Olympias!" and this cheered him, reminding him of the happy hour he had
passed at his wife's grave and the good augury he had had there. The
belief in a better time at hand, of which he had spoken to the bird,
again took possession of his sanguine soul; and, fully persuaded that
Melissa was detained in her own room or elsewhere by some trifling
matter, he went to the window and shouted her name; for hers, too, opened
on to the garden.
And it seemed as though the dear, obedient girl had come at his bidding,
for, as he turned back into the room again, Melissa was standing in the
open door.
After the pretty Greek greeting, "Joy be with you," which she faintly
answered, he asked her, as fractiously as though he had spent hours of
anxiety, where she had been so long. But he was suddenly silent, for he
was astonished to see that she had not come from her room, but, as her
dress betrayed, from some long expedition. Her appearance, too, had none
of the exquisite neatness which it usually displayed; and then--what a
state she was in! Whence had she come so early in the day?
The girl took off the kerchief that covered her head, and with a faint
groan pushed her tangled hair off her temples, and her bosom heaved as
she panted out in a weary voice: "Here I am! But O, father, what a night
I have spent!"
Heron could not for a minute or two find words to answer her.
What had happened to the girl? What could it be which made her seem so
strange and unlike her self? He gazed at her, speechless, and alarmed by
a hundred fearful suspicions. He felt as a mother might who has kissed
her child's fresh, healthy lips at night, and in the morning finds them
burning with fever.
Melissa had never been ill from the day of her birth; since she had
donned the dress of a full-grown maiden she had never altered; day after
day and at all hours she had been the same in her quiet, useful, patient
way, always thinking of her brothers, and caring for him rather than for
herself.
It had never entered into his head to suppose that she could alter; and
now, instead of the gentle, contented face with faintly rosy cheeks, he
saw a pallid countenance and quivering lips. What mysterious fire had
this night kindled in those calm eyes, which Alexander was fond of
comparing to those of a gazelle? They were sunk, and the dark shadows
that encircled them were a shock to his artistic eye. These were the eyes
of a girl who had raved like a maenad the night through. Had she not
slept in her quiet little room; had she been rushing with Alexander in
the wild Bacchic rout; or had something dreadful happened to his son?
Nothing could have been so great a relief to him as to rave and rage as
was his wont, and he felt strongly prompted to do so; but there was
something in her which moved him to pity or shyness, he knew not which,
and kept him quiet. He silently followed her with his eyes while she
folded her mantle and kerchief in her orderly way, and hastily gathered
together the stray, curly locks of her hair, smoothed them, and bound
them round her head.
Some one, however, must break the silence, and he gave a sigh of relief
when the girl came up to him and asked him, in a voice so husky as to
give him a fresh shock:
"Is it true that a Scythian, one of the nightwatch, has been here
already?"
Then he broke out, and it really did him good to give vent to his
repressed feelings in an angry speech:
"There again--the wisdom of slaves! The so-called Scythian brought a
message from his master.
"The captain of the night-watch--you will see--wishes to honor Alexander
with a commission."
"No, no," interrupted the girl. "They are hunting my brother down. I
thank the gods that the Scythian should have come; it shows that
Alexander is still free."
The gem-cutter clasped his bushy hair in both hands, for it seemed to him
that the room was whirling round. But his old habits still got the better
of him; he roared out with all the power of his mighty lungs: "What is
that? What do you say? What has Alexander done? Where have you--both of
you-been?" With two long strides the angry man came close up to the
terrified girl; the birds fluttered in their cages, and the starling
repeated his cries in melancholy tones. Heron stood still, pushing his
fingers through his thick gray hair, and with a sharp laugh exclaimed: "I
came away from her grave full of fresh hopes for better days, and this is
how they are fulfilled! I looked for fame, and I find disgrace! And you,
hussy! where have you spent this night--where have you come from? I ask
you once more!"
He raised his fist and shook it close in front of Melissa's eyes.
She stood before him as pale as death, and with wide-open eyes, from
which the heavy tears dropped slowly, one by one, trickling down her
cheeks as if they were tired. Heron saw them, and his rage melted. He
staggered to a seat like a drunken man, and, hiding his face in his
hands, moaned aloud, "Wretch, wretch that I am!" But his child's soft
hand was laid on his head; warm, girlish lips kissed his brow; and
Melissa whispered beseechingly: "Peace, father, peace. All may yet be
well. I have something to tell you that will make you glad too; yes, I am
sure it will make you glad."
Her father shrugged his shoulders incredulously, but wanted to know
immediately what the miracle was that could smooth his brow. Melissa,
however, would not tell him till it came in its place in her story. So he
had to submit; he drew his seat up to the table, and took up a lump of
modeling-wax to keep his restless fingers employed while he listened.
She, too, sat down; she could scarcely stand.
At first he listened calmly to her narrative; and when she told him of
Alexander's jest at Caesar's expense his face brightened. His Alexandrian
blood and his relish for a biting speech got the upper hand; he gave a
sounding slap on his mighty leg, and exclaimed: "A cursed good thought!
But the boy forgot that when Zeus only lamed his son it was because he is
immortal; while Caesar's brother was as feeble a mortal as Caracalla
himself is said to be at this day."
He laughed noisily; but it was for the last time that morning; for hardly
had he heard the name of Zminis, and learned that it was he who had over
heard Alexander, than he threw down the wax and started to his feet in
horror, crying:
"That dog, who dared to cast his eyes on your mother, and persecuted her
long after she had shown him the door! That sly mischief-maker! Many a
time has he set snares in our path. If he succeeds in tightening the
noose into which the boy has so heedlessly thrust his head--But first
tell me, has he caught him already, or is Alexander still at liberty?"
But no one, not even Argutis, who was still out on the search, could tell
him this; and he was now so greatly disturbed that, during the rest of
Melissa's narrative, he perpetually paced the room, interrupting her now
and then with questions or with outbursts of indignation. And then it
occurred to him that he ought himself to seek his son, and he occupied
himself with getting ready to go out.
Even when she spoke of the Magian, and his conviction that those who know
are able to hold intercourse with the souls of the dead, he shrugged his
shoulders incredulously, and went on lacing his sandals. But when Melissa
assured him that not she alone, but Diodoros with her, had seen the
wandering soul of the departed Korinna in the train of ghosts, he dropped
the straps he had bound round his ankle, and asked her who this Magian
was, and where he might be found. However, she knew no more than that his
name was Serapion, and she briefly described his dignified presence.
Heron had already seen the man, and he seemed still to be thinking of
him, when Melissa, with a blush and downcast eyes, confessed that, as
soon as he was well again, Diodoros was coming to her father to ask her
of him in marriage.
It was a long story before she came at last to her own concerns, but it
was always her way not to think of herself till every one else had had
his due.
But what about her father? Had she spoken inaudibly, or was he really
unable to-day to be glad? or what ailed him, that he paid no heed to the
news which, even for him, was not without its importance, but, without a
word of consent or disapproval, merely bade her go on with her story?
Melissa called him by name, as if to wake a man from sleep, and asked
whether it were indeed possible that he really felt no pleasure in the
happy prospect that lay before her, and that she had confessed to him.
And now Heron lent an ear, and gave her to understand the satisfaction of
his fatherly heart by kissing her. This news, in fact, made up for much
that was evil, for Diodoros was a son-in-law after his own heart, and not
merely because he was rich, or because his mother had been so great a
friend of Olympias's. No, the young man's father was, like himself, one
of the old Macedonian stock; he had seen his daughter's lover grow to
manhood, and there was not in the city a youth he could more heartily
welcome. This he freely admitted; he only regretted that when she should
set up house with her husband on the other side of the lake, he (Heron)
would be left as lonely as a statue on its pedestal. His sons had already
begun to avoid him like a leper!
Then, when he heard of what had befallen Diodoros, and Melissa went on to
say that the people who had thrown the stone at the dog were Christians,
and that they had carried the wounded youth into a large, clean dwelling,
where he was being carefully attended when she had left him, Heron broke
out into violent abuse. They were unpatriotic worshipers of a crucified
Jew, who multiplied like vermin, and only wanted to turn the good old
order of things upside down. But this time they should see--the
hypocrites, who pretended to so much humanity, and then set ferocious
dogs on peaceful folk!--they should learn that they could not fall on a
Macedonian citizen without paying for it.
He indignantly refused to hear Melissa's assurance that none of the
Christians had set the dog on her lover; she, however, maintained stoutly
that it was merely by an unfortunate accident that the stone had hit
Diodoros and cut his head so badly. She would not have quitted her lover
but that she feared lest her prolonged absence should have alarmed her
father.
Heron at last stood still for a minute or two, lost in thought, and then
brought out of his chest a casket, from which he took a few engraved
gems. He held them carefully up to the light, and asked his daughter: "If
I learn from Polybius, to whom I am now going, that they have already
caught Alexander, should I venture now, do you think, to offer a couple
of choice gems to Titianus, the prefect, to set him free again? He knows
what is good, and the captain of the watch is his subordinate."
But Melissa besought him to give up the idea of seeking out Alexander in
his hiding-place; for Heron, the gem-cutter, was known to every one, and
if a man-at-arms should see him he would certainly follow him. As
regarded the prefect, he would not apprehend any one this day, for, as
her father knew, Caesar was to arrive at Alexandria at noon, and Titianus
must be on the spot to meet him with all his train.
"But if you want to be out of doors and doing," she added, "go to see
Philip. Bring him to reason, and discuss with him what is to be done."
She spoke with firm decision, and Heron looked with amazement at the
giver of this counsel. Melissa had hitherto cared for his comfort in
silence, without expressing any opinions of her own, and submitting to be
the lightning-conductor for all his evil tempers. He did not rate her
girlish beauty very high, for there were no ugly faces in his family nor
in that of his deceased Olympias. And all the other consolations she
offered him he took as a matter of course--nay, he sometimes made them a
ground of complaint; for he would occasionally fancy that she wanted to
assume the place of his beloved lost wife, and he regarded it as a duty
to her to show his daughter, and often very harshly and unkindly, how far
she was from filling her mother's place.
Thus she had accustomed herself to do her duty as a daughter, with quiet
and wordless exactitude, looking for no thanks; while he thought he was
doing her a kindness merely by suffering her constant presence. That he
should ever exchange ideas with his daughter, or ask her opinion, would
have seemed to Heron absolutely impossible; yet it had come to this, and
for the second time this morning he looked in her face with utter
amazement.
He could not but approve her warning not to betray Alexander's
hiding-place, and her suggestion that he should go to see his eldest son
coincided with an unspoken desire which had been lurking in his mind ever
since she had told him of her having seen a disembodied soul. The
possibility of seeing her once more, whose memory was dearer to him than
all else on earth, had such a charm, that it moved him more deeply than
the danger of his son, who was, nevertheless, very dear to his strangely
tempered heart.
So he answered Melissa coolly, as if he were telling her of a decision
already formed:
"Of course! I meant to see Philip too; only"--and he paused, for anxiety
about Alexander again came to the front--"I can not bear to remain in
such uncertainty about the boy."
At this instant the door opened. The new-comer was Andreas, the man to
whom Diodoros had advised Alexander to apply for protection and counsel;
and Melissa greeted him with filial affection.
He was a freedman in her lover's family, and was the steward and manager
of his master's extensive gardens and lands, which were under his
absolute control. No one could have imagined that this man had ever been
a slave; his face was swarthy, but his fine black eyes lighted it up with
a glance of firm self reliance and fiery energy. It was the look of a man
who might be the moving spirit of one of those rebellions which were
frequent in Alexandria; there was an imperious ring in his voice, and
decision in the swift gestures of his hardened but shapely hands.
For twenty years, indeed, he had ruled over the numerous slaves of
Polybius, who was an easy-going master, and an invalid from gout in his
feet. He was at this time a victim to a fresh attack, and had therefore
sent his confidential steward into the town to tell Heron that he
approved of his son's choice, and that he would protect Alexander from
pursuit.
All this Andreas communicated in few and business-like words; but he then
turned to Melissa, and said, in a tone of kindly and affectionate
familiarity: "Polybius also wishes to know how your lover is being cared
for by the Christians, and from hence I am going on to see our sick boy."
"Then ask your friends," the gem-cutter broke in, to keep less ferocious
dogs for the future."
"That," replied the freedman, "will be unnecessary, for it is not likely
that the fierce brute belongs to the community whose friendship I am
proud to claim; and, if it does, they will be as much grieved over the
matter as we can be."
"A Christian would never do another an ill turn!" said Heron, with a
shrug.
"Never, so far as justice permits," replied Andreas, decisively. Then he
inquired whether Heron had any message or news to send to his son; and
when the gem-cutter replied that he had not, the freedman was about to
go. Melissa, however, detained him, saying:
"I will go with you if you will allow me."
"And I?" said Heron, irritably. "It seems to me that children are
learning to care less and less what their fathers' views and requirements
may be. I have to go to Philip. Who knows what may happen in my absence?
Besides--no offense to you, Andreas--what concern has my daughter among
the Christians?"
"To visit her lover," replied Andreas, sharply. And he added, more
quietly: "It will be a pleasure to me to escort her; and your Argutis is
a faithful fellow, and in case of need would be of more use here than an
inexperienced girl. I see no reasonable ground for detaining her, Heron.
I should like afterwards to take her home with me, across the lake; it
would be a comfort to Polybius and soothe his pain to have his favorite
with him, his future daughter.--Get ready, my child."
The artist had listened with growing anger, and a swift surge of rage
made him long to give the freedman a sharp lesson. But when his glaring
eye met the Christian's steady, grave gaze, he controlled himself, and
only said, with a shrug which sufficiently expressed his feeling that he
was surrendering his veto against his better judgment, addressing himself
to Melissa and ignoring Andreas:
"You are betrothed, and of age. Go, for aught I care, in obedience to him
whose wishes evidently outweigh mine. Polybius's son is your master
henceforth."
He folded his mantle, and when the girl hastened to help him he allowed
her to do it; but he went on, to the freedman: "And for aught I care, you
may take her across the lake, too. It is natural that Polybius should
wish to see his future daughter. But one thing I may ask for myself: You
have slaves and to spare; if anything happens to Alexander, let me hear
of it at once."
He kissed Melissa on the head, nodded patronizingly to Andreas, and left
the house.
His soft-hearted devotion to a vision had weakened his combativeness;
still, he would have yielded less readily to a man who had once been a
slave, but that the invitation to Melissa released him of her presence
for a while.
He was not, indeed, afraid of his daughter; but she need not know that he
wanted Philip to make him acquainted with Serapion, and that through his
mediation he hoped at least to see the spirit of the wife he mourned.
When he was fairly out of the house he smiled with satisfaction like a
school-boy who had escaped his master.
CHAPTER VII.
Melissa, too, had a sense of freedom when she found herself walking by
the side of Andreas.
In the garden of Hermes, where her father's house stood, there were few
signs of the excitement with which the citizens awaited Caesar's arrival.
Most of those who were out and about were going in the opposite
direction; they meant to await the grand reception of Caracalla at the
eastern end of the city, on his way from the Kanopic Gate to the Gate of
the Sun. Still, a good many--men, women and children--were, like
themselves, walking westward, for it was known that Caesar would alight
at the Serapeum.
They had scarcely left the house when Andreas asked the girl whether she
had a kerchief or a veil in the basket the slave was carrying behind her;
and on her replying in the affirmative, he expressed his satisfaction;
for Caracalla's soldiery, in consequence of the sovereign's weakened
discipline and reckless liberality, were little better than an unbridled
rabble.
"Then let us keep out of their way," urged Melissa.
"Certainly, as much as possible," said her companion. "At any rate, let
us hurry, so as to get back to the lake before the crowd stops the way.
"You have passed an eventful and anxious night, my child, and are tired,
no doubt."
"Oh, no!" said she, calmly; "I had some wine to refresh me, and some food
with the Christians."
"Then they received you kindly?"
"The only woman there nursed Diodoros like a mother; and the men were
considerate and careful. My father does not know them; and yet--Well, you
know how much he dislikes them."
"He follows the multitude," returned Andreas, "the common herd, who hate
everything exceptional, everything that disturbs their round of life, or
startles them out of the quietude of their dull dreams. Woe to those who
call by its true name what those blind souls call pleasure and enjoyment
as serving to hasten the flight of time--not too long at the most; woe to
those who dare raise even a finger against it!"
The man's deep, subdued tones were strongly expressive of the wrath
within him; and the girl, who kept close to his side, asked with eager
anxiety, "Then my father was right when he said that you are a member of
the Christian body?"
"Yes," he replied, emphatically; and when Melissa curiously inquired
whether it were true that the followers of the crucified God had
renounced their love for home and country, which yet ought to be dear to
every true man, Andreas answered with a superior smile, that even the
founder of the Stoa had required not only of his fellow-Greeks but of all
human beings, that they should regulate their existence by the same laws,
since they were brethren in reason and sense.
"He was right," added Andreas, more earnestly, "and I tell you, child,
the time is not far off when men shall no longer speak of Roman and
Greek, of Egyptian and Syrian, of free men and slaves; when there shall
be but one native land, but one class of life for all. Yea, the day is
beginning to dawn even now. The fullness of the time is come!"
Melissa looked up at him in amazement, exclaiming: "How strange! I have
heard those words once to-day already, and can not get them out of my
head. Nay, when you confirmed my father's report, I made up my mind to
ask you to explain them."
"What words?" asked Andreas, in surprise. "The fullness of the time is
come."
"And where did you hear them?"
"In the house where Diodoros and I took refuge from Zminis."
"A Christian meeting-house," replied Andreas, and his expressive face
darkened. "But those who assemble there are aliens to me; they follow
evil heresies. But never mind--they also call themselves Christians, and
the words which led you to ponder, stand to me at the very gate of the
doctrine of our divine master, like the obelisks before the door of an
Egyptian temple. Paul, the great preacher of the faith, wrote them to the
Galatians. They are easy to understand; nay, any one who looks about him
with his eyes open, or searches his own soul, can scarcely fail to see
their meaning, if only the desire is roused in him for something better
than what these cursed times can give us who live in them."
"Then it means that we are on the eve of great changes?"
"Yes!" cried Andreas, "only the word you use is too feeble. The old dull
sun must set, to rise again with greater glory."
Ill at ease, and by no means convinced, Melissa looked her excited
companion in the face as she replied:
"Of course I know, Andreas, that you speak figuratively, for the sun
which lights the day seems to me bright enough; and is not everything
flourishing in this gay, busy city? Are not its citizens under the
protection of the law? Were the gods ever more zealously worshiped? Is my
father wrong when he says that it is a proud thing to belong to the
mightiest realm on earth, before whose power barbarians tremble; a great
thing to feel and call yourself a Roman citizen?"
So far Andreas had listened to her with composure, but he here
interrupted, in a tone of scorn "Oh, yes! Caesar has made your father,
and your neighbor Skopas, and every free man in the country a Roman
citizen; but it is a pity that, while he gave each man his patent of
citizenship, he should have filched the money out of his purse."
"Apion, the dealer, was saying something to that effect the other day,
and I dare say it is true. But I can not be persuaded against the
evidence of my own eyes, and they light on many good and pleasant things.
If only you had been with us to the Nekropolis yesterday! Every man was
honoring the gods after his own manner. Some, indeed, were grave enough;
still, cheerfulness won the day among the people. Most of them were full
of the god. I myself, who generally live so quietly, was infected as the
mystics came back from Eleusis, and we joined their ranks."
"'Till the spy Zminis spoiled your happiness and imperiled your brother's
life for a careless speech."
"Very true!"
"And what your brother heedlessly proclaimed," Andreas went on, with
flashing eyes, "the very sparrows twitter on the house-tops. It is the
truth. The sovereign of the Roman Empire is a thousand times a murderer.
Some he sent to precede his own brother, and they were followed by
all--twenty thousand, it is said--who were attached to the hapless Geta,
or who even spoke his name. This is the lord and master to whom we owe
obedience whom God has set over us for our sins. And when this wretch in
the purple shall close his eyes, he, like the rest of the criminals who
have preceded him on the throne, will be proclaimed a god! A noble
company! When your beloved mother died I heard you, even you, revile the
gods for their cruelty; others call them kind. It is only a question of
how they accept the blood of the sacrificed beasts, their own creatures,
which you shed in their honor. If Serapis does not grant some fool the
thing he asks, then he turns to the altar of Isis, of Anubis, of Zeus, of
Demeter. At last he cries to Sabazios, or one of the new deities of
Olympus, who owe their existence to the decisions of the Roman Senate,
and who are for the most part scoundrels and villains. There certainly
never were more gods than there are now; and among those of whom the
myths tell us things strange enough to bring those who worship them into
contempt, or to the gallows, is the countless swarm of good and evil
daimons. Away with your Olympians! They ought to reward virtue and punish
vice; and they are no better than corruptible judges; for you know
beforehand just what and how much will avail to purchase their favors."
"You paint with dark colors," the girl broke in. "I have learned from
Philip that the Pythagoreans teach that not the sacrifice, but the spirit
of the offering, is what really matters."
"Quite right. He was thinking, no doubt, of the miracle-monger of Tyana,
Apollonius, who certainly had heard of the doctrine of the Redeemer. But
among the thousand nine hundred and ninety, who here bring beasts to the
altar, who ever remembers this? Quite lately I heard one of our garden
laborers ask how much a day he ought to sacrifice to the sun, his god. I
told him a keration--for that is what the poor creature earns for a whole
day's work. He thought that too much, for he must live; so the god must
be content with a tithe, for the taxes to the State on his earnings were
hardly more."
"The divinity ought no doubt to be above all else to us," Melissa
observed. "But when your laborer worships the sun, and looks for its
benefits, what is the difference between him and you, or me, or any of
us, though we call the sun Helios or Serapis, or what not?"
"Yes, yes," replied Andreas. "The sun is adored here under many different
names and forms, and your Serapis has swallowed up not only Zeus and
Pluto, but Phoebus Apollo and the Egyptian Osiris and Ammon, and Ra, to
swell his own importance. But to be serious, child, our fathers made to
themselves many gods indeed, of the sublime phenomena and powers of
Nature, and worshiped them admiringly; but to us only the names remain,
and those who offer to Apollo never think of the sun. With my laborer,
who is an Arab, it is different. He believes the light-giving globe
itself to be a god; and you, I perceive, do not think him wholly wrong.
But when you see a youth throw the discus with splendid strength, do you
praise the discus, or the thrower?"
"The thrower," replied Melissa. "But Phoebus Apollo himself guides his
chariot with his divine hands."
"And astronomers," the Christian went on, "can calculate for years to
come exactly where his steeds will be at each minute of the time. So no
one can be more completely a slave than he to whom so many mortals pray
that he will, of his own free-will, guide circumstances to suit them. I,
therefore, regard the sun as a star, like any other star; and worship
should be given, not to those rolling spheres moving across the sky in
prescribed paths, but to Him who created them and guides them by fixed
laws. I really pity your Apollo and the whole host of the Olympian gods,
since the world has become possessed by the mad idea that the gods and
daimons may be moved, or even compelled, by forms of prayer and
sacrifices and magic arts, to grant to each worshiper the particular
thing on which he may have set his covetous and changeable fancy."
"And yet," exclaimed Melissa, "you yourself told me that you prayed for
my mother when the leech saw no further hope. Every one hopes for a
miracle from the immortals when his own power has come to an end!
Thousands think so. And in our city the people have never been more
religious than they are now. The singer of the Ialemos at the feast of
Adonis particularly praised us for it."
"Because they have never been more fervently addicted to pleasure, and
therefore have never more deeply dreaded the terrors of hades. The great
and splendid Zeus of the Greeks has been transformed into Serapis here,
on the banks of the Nile, and has become a god of the nether world. Most
of the ceremonies and mysteries to which the people crowd are connected
with death. They hope that the folly over which they waste so many hours
will smooth their way to the fields of the blest, and yet they themselves
close the road by the pleasures they indulge in. But the fullness of time
is now come; the straight road lies open to all mankind, called as they
are to a higher life in a new world, and he who follows it may await
death as gladly as the bride awaits the bridegroom on her marriage day.
Yes, I prayed to my God for your dying mother, the sweetest and best of
women. But what I asked for her was not that her life might be preserved,
or that she might be permitted to linger longer among us, but that the
next world might be opened to her in all its glory."
At this point the speaker was interrupted by an armed troop which thrust
the crowd aside to make way for the steers which were to be slaughtered
in the Temple of Serapis at the approach of Caesar. There were several
hundred of them, each with a garland about its, neck, and the handsomest
which led the train had its horns gilded.
When the road was clear again, Andreas pointed to the beasts, and
whispered to his companion "Their blood will be shed in honor of the
future god Caracalla. He once killed a hundred bears in the arena with
his own hand. But I tell you, child, when the fullness of time is come,
innocent blood shall no more be shed. You were speaking with enthusiasm
of the splendor of the Roman Empire. But, like certain fruit-trees in our
garden which we manure with blood, it has grown great on blood, on the
life-juice of its victims. The mightiest realm on earth owes its power to
murder and rapine; but now sudden destruction is coming on the insatiate
city, and visitation for her sins."
"And if you are right--if the barbarians should indeed destroy the armies
of Caesar," asked Melissa, looking up in some alarm at the enthusiast,
"what then?"
"Then we may thank those who help to demolish the crumbling house!" cried
Andreas, with flashing eyes.
"And if it should be so," said the girl, with tremulous anxiety, "what
universal ruin! What is there on earth that could fill its place? If the
empire falls into the power of the barbarians, Rome will be made
desolate, and all the provinces laid waste which thrive under her
protection."
"Then," said Andreas, "will the kingdom of the Spirit arise, in which
peace and love shall reign instead of hatred and murder and wars. There
shall be one fold and one Shepherd, and the least shall be equal with the
greatest."
"Then there will be no more slaves?" asked Melissa, in growing amazement.
"Not one," replied her companion, and a gleam of inspiration seemed to
light up his stern features. "All shall be free, and all united in love
by the grace of Him who hath redeemed us."
But Melissa shook her head, and Andreas, understanding what was passing
in her mind, tried to catch her eye as he went on:
"You think that these are the impossible wishes of one who has himself
been a slave, or that it is the remembrance of past suffering and
unutterable wrong which speaks in me? For what right-minded man would not
desire to preserve others from the misery which once crushed him to earth
with its bitter burden?--But you are mistaken. Thousands of free-born men
and women think as I do, for to them, too, a higher Power has revealed
that the fullness of time is now come. He, the Greatest and Best, who
made all the woes of the world His own, has chosen the poor rather than
the rich, the suffering rather than the happy, the babes rather than the
wise and prudent; and in his kingdom the last shall be first--yea, the
least of the last, the poorest of the poor; and they, child, are the
slaves."
He ended his diatribe with a deep sigh, but Melissa pressed the hand
which held hers as they walked along the raised pathway, and said: "Poor
Andreas! How much you must have gone through before Polybius set you
free!"
He only nodded, and they both remained silent till they found themselves
in a quiet side street. Then the girl looked up at him inquiringly, and
began again:
"And now you hope for a second Spartacus? Or will you yourself lead a
rebellion of the slaves? You are the man for it, and I can be secret."
"If it has to be, why not?" he replied, and his eyes sparkled with a
strange fire. But seeing that she shrank from him, a smile passed over
his countenance, and he added in a soothing tone: "Do not be alarmed, my
child; what must come will come, without another Spartacus, or bloodshed,
or turmoil. And you, with your clear eyes and your kind heart, would you
find it difficult to distinguish right from wrong, and to feel for the
sorrows of others--? Yes, perhaps! For what will not custom excuse and
sanctify? You can pity the bird which is shut into a cage too small for
it, or the mule which breaks down under too heavy a load, and the cruelty
which hurts them rouses your indignation. But for the man whom a terrible
fate has robbed of his freedom, often through the fault of another, whose
soul endures even greater torments than his despised body, you have no
better comfort than the advice which might indeed serve a philosopher,
but which to him is bitter mockery: to bear his woes with patience. He is
only a slave, bought, or perhaps inherited. Which of you ever thinks of
asking who gave you, who are free, the right to enslave half of all the
inhabitants of the Roman Empire, and to rob them of the highest
prerogative of humanity? I know that many philosophers have spoken of
slavery as an injustice done by the strong to the weak: but they shrugged
their shoulders over it nevertheless, and excused it as an inevitable
evil; for, thought they, who will serve me if my slave is regarded as my
equal? You only smile at this confusion of the meditative recluses, but
you forget"--and a sinister fire glowed in his eyes--"that the slave,
too, has a soul, in which the same feelings stir as in your own. You
never think how a proud man may feel whose arm you brand, and whose very
breath of life is indignity; or what a slave thinks who is spurned by his
master's foot, though noble blood may run in his veins. All living
things, even the plants in the garden, have a right to happiness, and
only develop fully in freedom, and under loving care; and yet one half of
mankind robs the other half of this right. The sum total of suffering and
sorrow to which Fate had doomed the race is recklessly multiplied and
increased by the guilt of men themselves. But the cry of the poor and
wretched has gone up to heaven, and now that the fullness of time is
come, 'Thus far, and no farther,' is the word. No wild revolutionary has
been endowed with a giant's strength to burst the bonds of the victims
asunder. No, the Creator and Preserver of the world sent his Son to
redeem the poor in spirit, and, above all, the brethren and the sisters
who are weary and heavy laden. The magical word which shall break the
bars of the prisons where the chains of the slaves are heard is
Love. . . . But you, Melissa, can but half comprehend all this," he added,
interrupting the ardent flow of his enthusiastic speech. "You can not
understand it all. For you, too, child, the fullness of time is coming;
for you, too, freeborn though you are, are, I know, one of the heavy
laden who patiently suffer the burden laid upon you. You too--But keep
close to me; we shall find it difficult to get through this throng."
It was, in fact, no easy matter to get across the crowd which was pouring
noisily down the street of Hermes, into which this narrow way led. How
ever, they achieved it, and when Melissa had recovered her breath in a
quiet lane in Rhakotis, she turned to her companion again with the
question, "And when do you suppose that your predictions will be
fulfilled?"
"As soon as the breeze blows which shall shake the overripe fruit from
the tree. It may be tomorrow, or not yet, according to the long-suffering
of the Most High. But the entire collapse of the world in which we have
been living is as certain to come as that you are walking here with me!"
Melissa walked on with a quaking heart, as she heard her friend's tone of
conviction; he, however, was aware that the inmost meaning of his words
was sealed to her. To his inquiry, whether she could not rejoice in the
coming of the glorious time in store for redeemed humanity, she answered,
tremulously:
"All you hope for is glorious, no doubt, but what shall lead to it must
be a terror to all. Were you told of the kingdom of which you speak by an
oracle, or is it only a picture drawn by your imagination, a vision, and
the offspring of your soul's desire?"
"Neither," said Andreas, decidedly; and he went on in a louder voice: "I
know it by revelation. Believe me, child, it is as certainly true as that
the sun will set this night. The gates of the heavenly Jerusalem stand
open, and if you, too, would fain be blessed--But more of this later.
Here we are at our journey's end."
They entered the Christian home, where they found Diodoros, on a
comfortable couch, in a spacious, shady room, and in the care of a
friendly matron.
But he was in an evil case. The surgeon thought his wound a serious one;
for the heavy stone which had hit him had injured the skull, and the
unhappy youth was trembling with fever. His head was burning, and it was
with difficulty that he spoke a few coherent words. But his eyes betrayed
that he recognized Melissa, and that it was a joy to him to see her
again; and when he was told that Alexander had so far escaped, a bright
look lighted up his countenance. It was evidently a comfort to him to
gaze on Melissa's pretty face; her hand lay in his, and he understood her
when she greeted him from her father, and spoke to him of various
matters; but the lids ere long closed over his aching eyes.
Melissa felt that she must leave him to rest. She gently released his
hand from her grasp and laid it across his breast, and moved no more,
excepting to wipe the drops from his brow. Solemn stillness had reigned
for some time in the large, clean house, faintly smelling of lavender;
but, on a sudden, doors opened and shut; steps were heard in the
anteroom, seats were moved, and a loud confusion of men's voices became
audible, among them that of Andreas.
Melissa listened anxiously to the heated discussion which had already
become a vehement quarrel. She longed to implore the excited wranglers to
moderate their tones, for she could see by her lover's quivering lips
that the noise hurt him; but she could not leave him.
The dispute meanwhile grew louder and louder. The names of Montanus and
Tertullian, Clemens and Origen, fell on her ear, and at last she heard
Andreas exclaim in high wrath: "You are like the guests at a richly
furnished banquet who ask, after they have well eaten, when the meat will
be brought in. Paraclete is come, and yet you look for another."
He was not allowed to proceed; fierce and scornful contradiction checked
his speech, till a voice of thunder was heard above the rest:
"The heavenly Jerusalem is at hand. He who denies and doubts the calling
of Montanus is worse than the heathen, and I, for one, cast him off as
neither a brother nor a Christian!"
This furious denunciation was drowned in uproar; the anxious girl heard
seats overturned, and the yells and shouts of furious combatants; the
suffering youth meanwhile moaned with anguish, and an expression of acute
pain was stamped on his handsome features. Melissa could bear it no
longer; she had risen to go and entreat the men to make less noise, when
suddenly all was still.
Diodoros immediately became calmer, and looked up at the girl as
gratefully as though the soothing silence were owing to her. She could
now hear the deep tones of the head of the Church of Alexandria, and
understood that the matter in hand was the readmission into this
congregation of a man who had been turned out by some other sect. Some
would have him rejected, and commended him to the mercy of God; others,
less rigid, were willing to receive him, since he was ready to submit to
any penance.
Then the quarrel began again. High above every other voice rose the
shrill tones of a man who had just arrived from Carthage, and who boasted
of personal friendship with the venerable Tertullian. The listening girl
could no longer follow the connection of the discussion, but the same
names again met her ear; and, though she understood nothing of the
matter, it annoyed her, because the turmoil disturbed her lover's rest.
It was not till the sick-nurse came back that the tumult was appeased;
for, as soon as she learned how seriously the loud disputes of her
fellow-believers were disturbing the sick man's rest, she interfered so
effectually, that the house was as silent as before.
The deaconess Katharine was the name by which she was known, and in a few
minutes she returned to her patient's bedside.
Andreas followed her, with the leech, a man of middle height, whose
shrewd and well-formed head, bald but for a little hair at the sides, was
set on a somewhat ungainly body. His sharp eyes looked hither and
thither, and there was something jerky in his quick movements; still,
their grave decisiveness made up for the lack of grace. He paid no heed
to the bystanders, but threw himself forward rather than bent over the
patient, felt him, and with a light hand renewed his bandages; and then
he looked round the room, examining it as curiously as though he proposed
to take up his abode there, ending by fixing his prominent, round eyes on
Melissa. There was something so ruthlessly inquisitive in that look that
it might, under other circumstances, have angered her. However, as it
was, she submitted to it, for she saw that it was shrewd, and she would
have called the wisest physician on earth to her lover's bedside if she
had had the power.
When Ptolemaeus--for so he was called--had, in reply to the question,
"who is that?" learned who she was, he hastily murmured: "Then she can do
nothing but harm here. A man in a fever wants but one thing, and that is
perfect quiet."
And he beckoned Andreas to the window, and asked him shortly, "Has the
girl any sense?"
"Plenty," replied the freedman, decisively.
"As much, at any rate, as she can have at her age," the other retorted.
"Then it is to be hoped that she will go without any leave-taking or
tears. That fine lad is in a bad way. I have known all along what might
do him good, but I dare not attempt it alone, and there is no one in
Alexandria. . . . But Galen has come to join Caesar. If he, old as he
is--But it is not for the likes of us to intrude into Caesar's
quarters--Still--"
He paused, laying his hand on his brow, and rubbing it thoughtfully with
his short middle finger. Then he suddenly exclaimed: "The old man would
never come here. But the Serapeum, where the sick lie awaiting divine or
diabolical counsel in dreams--Galen will go there. If only we could carry
the boy thither."
"His nurse here would hardly allow that," said Andreas, doubtfully.
"He is a heathen." replied the leech, hotly. "Besides, what has faith to
do with the injury to the body? How many Caesars have employed Egyptian
and Jewish physicians? The lad would get the treatment he needs, and,
Christian as I am, I would, if necessary, convey him to the Serapeum,
though it is of all heathen temples the most heathen. I will find out by
hook or by crook at what time Galen is to visit the cubicles. To-morrow,
or next day at latest; and to-night, or, better still, to-morrow morning
before sunrise, I will have the youth carried there. If the deaconess
refuses--"
"And she will," Andreas put in.
"Very well.--Come here, maiden," he beckoned to Melissa, and went on loud
enough for the deaconess to hear: "If we can get your betrothed to the
Serapeum early to-morrow, he may probably be cured; otherwise I refuse to
be responsible. Tell your friends and his that I will be here before
sunrise to-morrow, and that they must provide a covered litter and good
bearers."
He then turned to the deaconess, who had followed him in silence, with
her hands clasped like a deserter, laid his broad, square hand on her
shoulder, and added:
"So it must be, Widow Katharine, Love endures and suffers all things, and
to save a neighbor's life, it is well to suffer in silence even things
that displease us. I will explain it all to you afterwards. Quiet, only
perfect quiet--No melancholy leave-taking, child! The sooner you are out
of the house the better."
He went back again to the bed, laid his hand for a moment on the sick
man's forehead, and then left the room.
Diodoros lay still and indifferent on the couch. Melissa kissed him on
the brow, and withdrew without his observing it, her eyes full of tears.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
For what will not custom excuse and sanctify?
A THORNY PATH
By Georg Ebers
Volume 3.
CHAPTER VIII.
The sun had passed the meridian when Melissa and Andreas left the house.
They walked on in silence through the deserted streets, the girl with her
eyes sadly fixed on the ground; for an inward voice warned her that her
lover's life was in danger. She did not sob, but more than once she wiped
away a large tear.
Andreas, too, was lost in his own thoughts. To win a soul to the Saviour
was surely a good work. He knew Melissa's sober, thoughtful nature, and
the retired, joyless life she led with her surly old father. So his
knowledge of human nature led him to think that she, if any one, might
easily be won over to the faith in which he found his chief happiness.
Baptism had given such sanctification to his life that he longed to lead
the daughter of the only woman for whom his heart had ever beat a shade
faster, to the baptismal font. In the heat of summer Olympias had often
been the guest for weeks together of Polybius's wife, now likewise dead.
Then she had taken a little house of her own for herself and her
children, and when his master's wife died, the lonely widower had known
no greater pleasure than that of receiving her on his estate for as long
as Heron would allow her to remain; he himself never left his work for
long. Thus Andreas had become the great ally of the gem-cutter's
children, and, as they could learn nothing from him that was not good and
worth knowing, Olympias had gladly allowed them to remain in his society,
and herself found a teacher and friend in the worthy steward. She knew
that Andreas had joined the Christians; she had made him tell her much
about his faith; still, as the daughter and wife of artists, she was
firmly attached to the old gods, and could only regard the Christian
doctrine as a new system of philosophy in which many things attracted
her, but many, on the other hand, repelled her. At that time his passion
for Melissa's mother had possessed him so wholly that his life was a
constant struggle against the temptation to covet his neighbor's wife.
And he had conquered, doing severe penance for every glance which might
for an instant betray to her the weakness of his soul. She had loved
flowers, and he knew the plant-world so well, and was so absolutely
master over everything which grew and bloomed in the gardens of which he
had charge, that he could often intrust his speechless favorites to tell
her things which lips and eyes might not reveal. Now she was no more, and
the culture of plants had lost half its charm since her eyes could no
longer watch their thriving. He now left the gardens for the most part to
his men, while he devoted himself to other cares with double diligence,
and to the strictest exercises of his faith.
But, as many a man adores the children of the woman he might not marry,
Alexander and Melissa daily grew dearer to Andreas. He took a father's
interest in their welfare, and, needing little himself, he carefully
hoarded his ample income to promote the cause of Christianity and
encourage good works; but he had paid Alexander's debts when his time of
apprenticeship was over, for they were so considerable that the reckless
youth had not dared confess the sum to his stern father.
Very soon after this, Alexander had become one of the most popular
painters of the town; and when he proposed to repay his friend the money
he had lent him, Andreas accepted it; but he added it to a capital of
which the purpose was his secret, but which, if his prayers were heard,
might return once more to benefit Alexander. Diodoros, too, was as dear
to the freedman as a son of his own could have been, though he was a
heathen. In the gymnasium and the race-course, or in the practice of the
mysteries, the good seed which he sowed in the lad's heart was trodden
down. Polybius, too, was an utter heathen; indeed, he was one of the
priests of Dionysus and Demeter, as his wealth and position in the senate
required.
Then, Diodoros had confessed to him that he hoped to win Melissa for his
wife, and this had been adverse to Andreas's hope and purpose of making a
Christian of the girl; for he knew by experience how easily married
happiness was wrecked when man and wife worship different gods. But when
the freedman had again seen the gem-cutter's brutality and the girl's
filial patience, an inward voice had called to him that this gentle,
gifted creature was one of those elect from among whom the Lord chose the
martyrs for the faith; and that it was his part to lead her into the fold
of the Redeemer. He had begun the work of converting her with the zeal he
put into everything. But fresh doubts had come upon him on the threshold
of the sick-room, after seeing the lad who was so dear to him, and whose
eye had met his with such a trustful, suffering look. Could it be right
to sow the seed of discord between him and his future wife? And supposing
Diodoros, too, should be converted by Melissa, could he thus alienate
from his father the son and heir of Polybius--his benefactor and master?
Then, he remembered, too, to what a position he had risen through that
master's confidence in him. Polybius knew nothing of the concerns of his
house but from the reports laid before him by Andreas; for the steward
controlled not merely the estate but the fortune of the family, and for
years had been at the head of the bank which he himself had founded to
increase the already vast income of the man to whom he owed his freedom.
Polybius paid him a considerable portion of each year's profits, and had
said one day at a banquet, with the epigrammatic wit of an Alexandrian,
that his freedman, Andreas, served his interests as only one other man
could do--namely, himself--but with the industry of ten. The Christian
greatly appreciated his confidence; and as he walked on by the side of
Melissa, he told himself again and again that it would be dishonorable to
betray it.
If only the sweet girl might find the way alone! If she were chosen to
salvation, the Lord himself would lead and guide her. Had he indeed not
beckoned her already by impressing on her heart those words, "The
fullness of the time is now come?"
That he was justified in keeping this remembrance alive he had no doubt;
and he was about to speak of it again, when she prevented him by raising
her large eyes beseechingly to his, and asking him:
"Is Diodoros in real danger? Tell me the truth. I would rather endure the
worst than this dreadful anxiety."
So Andreas acknowledged that the youth was in a bad way, but that
Ptolemaeus, himself well-skilled, hoped to cure him if his greater
colleague Galenus would aid him.
"And it is to secure his assistance, then," Melissa went on, "that the
leech would have him carried to the Serapeum?"
"Yes, my child. For he is in Caesar's train, and it would be vain to try
to speak with him to-day or to-morrow."
"But the journey through the town will do the sufferer a mischief."
"He will be carried in a litter."
"But even that is not good for him. Perfect quiet, Ptolemaeus said, was
the best medicine."
"But Galenus has even better remedies at hand," was the reply.
Melissa seemed satisfied with this assurance, for she walked on for some
time in silence. But when the uproar of the crowd in the vicinity of the
Serapeum became more audible as they advanced, she suddenly stood still,
and said:
"Come what may, I will find my way to the great physician's presence and
crave his help." "You?" cried the freedman; and when she firmly
reiterated her purpose, the strong man turned pale.
"You know not what you say!" he exclaimed, in deep concern. "The men who
guard the approaches to Caracalla are ruthless profligates, devoid of
courtesy or conscience. But, you may rely upon it, you will not even get
into the antechamber."
"Perhaps. Nevertheless, it is my duty, and I will try."
How firmly and decisively she spoke! And what strength of will sparkled
in the quiet, modest maiden's eyes! And the closely set lips, which
usually were slightly parted, and hardly covered two of her pearly white
teeth, gave her a look of such determination, that Andreas could see that
no obstacle would check her.
Still, love and duty alike required him to use every means in his power
to keep her from taking such a step. He lavished all his eloquence; but
she adhered to her purpose with steadfast persistency, and none of the
reasons he could adduce to prove the impossibility of the undertaking
convinced her. The only point which staggered her was the information
that the great leech was an old man, who walked with difficulty; and that
Galen, as a heathen and a disciple of Aristotle, would never be induced
to enter a Christian dwelling. Both these facts might be a serious
hindrance to her scheme; yet she would not now stop to reflect. They had
got back to the great street of Hermes, leading from the temple of that
god to the Serapeum, and must cross it to reach the lake, their immediate
destination. As in all the principal streets of Alexandria, a colonnade
bordered the street in front of the houses on each side of the wide and
handsome roadway. Under these arcades the foot-passengers were closely
packed, awaiting Caesar's passage. He must soon be coming, for the
reception, first at the Kanopic Gate, and then at the Gate of the Sun,
was long since over; and, even if he had carried out his purpose of
halting at the tomb of Alexander the Great, he could not be detained much
longer. The distance hither down the Kanopic Way was not great, and swift
horses would quickly bring him down the Aspendia street to that of
Hermes, leading straight to the Serapeum. His train was not to follow him
to the Soma, the mausoleum of the founder of the city, but to turn off to
the southward by the Paneum, and make a round into the street of Hermes.
The praetorians, the German body-guard, the imperial Macedonian phalanx,
and some mounted standard-bearers had by this time reached the spot where
Melissa was proceeding up the street holding Andreas's hand. Close by
them came also a train of slaves, carrying baskets full of palm-leaves
and fresh branches of ivy, myrtle, poplar, and pine, from the gardens of
the Paneum, to be carried to the Serapeum. They were escorted by lictors,
endeavoring with their axes and fasces to make a way for them through the
living wall which barred their way.
By the help of the mounted troops, who kept the main road clear, space
was made for them; and Andreas, who knew one of the overseers of the
garden-slaves, begged him as a favor to allow Melissa and himself to walk
among his people. This was willingly granted to so well-known a man; and
the way was quite free for the moment, because the imperial cartage had
not followed immediately on the soldiers who had now all marched past.
Thus, among the flower-bearers, they reached the middle of the street;
and while the slaves proceeded on their way to the Serapeum, the freedman
tried to cross the road, and reach the continuation of the street they
had come by, and which led to the lake. But the attempt was frustrated,
for some Roman lictors who had just come up stood in their way, and sent
them to the southern side of the street of Hermes, to mingle with the
gaping crowd under the arcade.
They were, of course, but ill received by these, since they naturally
found themselves in front of the foremost rank; but the stalwart frame
and determined face of Andreas, and the exceptional beauty of his young
companion, over whose pretty head most of the gazers could easily see,
protected her from rough treatment.
Andreas spoke a few words of apology to those standing nearest to them,
and a young goldsmith at once courteously made way, so that Melissa, who
had taken a place behind a column, might see better.
And in a few minutes--there was that to see which made every one forget
the intruders. Vehicles and outriders, litters swung between mules, and a
long train of imperial footmen, in red tunics embroidered with gold,
huntsmen with leashes of noble dogs, baggage-wagons and loaded elephants,
came trooping down toward the Serapeum; while suddenly, from the Aspendia
into the Hermes Way, the Numidian horse rushed out, followed by a troop
of mounted lictors, who galloped up the street, shouting their orders in
loud tones to the imperial train, in a mixture of Latin and Greek, of
which Melissa understood only the words "Caesar!" and "Make way to the
right!"
The command was instantly obeyed. Vehicles, foot-passengers, and riders
alike crowded to the southern or left-hand side of the road, and the
many-headed throng, of which Andreas and Melissa formed a part, drew as
far back as possible under the colonnade; for on the edge of the footway
there was the risk of being trampled on by a horse or crushed by a wheel.
The back rows of the populace, who had collected under the arcades, were
severely squeezed by this fresh pressure from without, and their outcries
were loud of anger, alarm; or pain; while on the other side of the street
arose shouts of delight and triumph, or, when anything singular came into
view, loud laughter at the wit and irony of some jester. Added to these
there were the clatter of hoofs and the roll of wheels, the whinnying of
horses, the shouts of command, the rattle of drums, the blare of
trumpets, and the shrill pipe of flutes, without a moment's pause. It was
a wild and ear-splitting tumult; to Melissa, however, neither painful nor
pleasing, for the one idea, that she must speak with the great physician,
silenced every other. But suddenly there came up from the east, from the
rising of the sun, whose course Caesar had followed, such a tremendous
roar that she involuntarily clutched her companion's hand.
Every instant the storm of noise increased, rolling on with irresistible
vehemence, gathering force as it came on, receiving, as it were, fresh
tributaries on its way, and rapidly swelling from the distance to the
immediate vicinity, compelling every one, as with a magic power, to yield
to the superior will of numbers and join in the cry. Even Melissa
cheered. She, too, was as a drop in the tide, a leaf on the rippling face
of the rushing torrent; her heart beat as wildly and her voice rang as
clear as that of the rest of the throng, intoxicated with they knew not
what, which crowded the colonnades by the roadway, and every window and
roof-top, waving handkerchiefs, strewing flowers on the ground, and
wiping the tears which this unwonted excitement had brought to their
eyes.
And now the shout is so tremendous that it could not possibly be louder.
It seems as though it were the union of voices innumerable rather than
the seabreeze, which flutters the pennons and flags which wave from every
house and arch, and sways the garlands hung across the street. Melissa
can see none but flushed faces, eyes swimming in tears, parted lips,
wildly waving arms and hands. Then suddenly a mysterious power hushes the
loud tones close round her; she hears only here and there the cry of
"Caesar!" "He is coming!" "Here he is!"--and the swift tramp of hoofs and
the clatter of wheels sounding like the rattle of an iron building after
a peal of thunder, above the shouts of ten thousand human beings. Closer
it comes and closer, without a pause, and followed by fresh shouting, as
a flock of daws follow an owl flying across the twilight, swelling again
to irrepressible triumph as the expected potentate rushes past Melissa
and her neighbors. They only see Caesar as a form scarcely discerned by
the eye during the space of a lightning-flash in a dark night.
Four tawny bay horses of medium size, dappled with black, harnessed
abreast and wide apart, fly along the cleared road like hunted foxes, the
light Gallic chariot at their heels. The wheels seem scarcely to touch
the smooth flags of the Alexandrian pavement. The charioteer wears the
red-bordered toga of the highest Roman officials. He is well known by
repute, and the subject of many a sharp jest; for this is Pandion,
formerly a stableboy, and now one of "Caesar's friends," a praetor, and
one of the great men of the empire. But he knows his business; and what
does Caracalla care for tradition or descent, for the murmurs and
discontent of high or low?
Pandion holds the reins with elegant composure, and urges the horses to a
frantic pace by a mere whistle, without ever using the whip. But why is
it that he whirls the mighty monarch of half a world, before whose
bloodthirsty power every one quakes, so swiftly past these eager
spectators? Sunk in the cushions on one side, Bassianus Antoninus is
reclining rather than sitting in the four-wheeled open chariot of Gallic
make which sweeps past. He does not vouchsafe a glance at the jubilant
crowd, but gazes down at the road, his well-shaped brow so deeply
furrowed with gloom that he might be meditating some evil deed.
It is easy to discern that he is of middle height; that his upper lip and
cheeks are unshaven, and his chin smooth; that his hair is already thin,
though he lacks two years of thirty; and that his complexion is pale and
sallow; indeed, his aspect is familiar from statues and coins, many of
which are of base metal.
Most of those who thus beheld the man who held in his hand the fate of
each individual he passed, as of the empire at large, involuntarily asked
themselves afterward what impression he had made on them; and Caracalla
himself would have rejoiced in the answer, for he aimed not at being
attractive or admired, but only at being feared. But, indeed, they had
long since learned that there was nothing too horrible to be expected of
him; and, now that they had seen him, they were of opinion that his
appearance answered to his deeds. It would be hard to picture a more
sinister and menacing looking man than this emperor, with his averted
looks and his haughty contempt for the world and mankind; and yet there
was something about him which made it difficult to take him seriously,
especially to an Alexandrian. There was a touch of the grotesque in the
Gallic robe with a red hood in which this ominous-looking contemner of
humanity was wrapped. It was called a 'Caracalla', and it was from this
garment that Bassianus Antoninus had gained his nickname.
The tyrant who wore this gaudy cloak was, no doubt, devoid alike of truth
and conscience; but, as to his being a philosopher, who knew the
worthlessness of earthly things and turned his back upon the world, those
who could might believe it! He was no more than an actor, who played the
part of Timon not amiss, and who made use of his public to work upon
their fears and enjoy the sight of their anguish. There was something
lacking in him to make one of those thorough-going haters of their kind
at whose mere aspect every knee must bend. The appearance, in short, of
this false philosopher was not calculated to subdue the rash tongues of
the Alexandrians.
To this many of them agreed; still, there was no time for such
reflections till the dust had shrouded the chariot, which vanished as
quickly as it had come, till the shouting was stilled, and the crowd had
spread over the roadway again. Then they began to ask themselves why they
had joined in the acclamations, and had been so wildly excited; how it
was that they had so promptly surrendered their self-possession and
dignity for the sake of this wicked little man. Perhaps it was his
unlimited control over the weal and woe of the world, over the life and
death of millions, which raised a mortal, not otherwise formed for
greatness, so far above common humanity to a semblance of divinity.
Perhaps it was the instinctive craving to take part in the grand
impulsive expression of thousands of others that had carried away each
individual. It was beyond a doubt a mysterious force which had compelled
every one to do as his neighbors did as soon as Caesar had appeared.
Melissa had succumbed with the rest; she had shouted and waved her
kerchief, and had not heeded Andreas when he held her hand and asked her
to consider what a criminal this man was whom she so eagerly hailed. It
was not till all was still again that she recollected herself, and her
determination to get the famous physician to visit her lover revived in
renewed strength.
Fully resolved to dare all, she looked about with calm scrutiny,
considering the ways and means of achieving her purpose without any aid
from Andreas. She was in a fever of impatience, and longed to force her
way at once into the Serapeum. But that was out of the question, for no
one moved from his place. There was, however, plenty to be seen. A
complete revulsion of feeling had come over the crowd. In the place of
Expectancy, its graceless step-child, Disappointment, held sway. There
were no more shouts of joy; men's lungs were no longer strained to the
utmost, but their tongues were all the busier. Caesar was for the most
part spoken of with contempt as Tarautas, and with the bitterness--the
grandchild of Expectancy-which comes of disappointment. Tarautas had
originally been the name of a stunted but particularly bloodthirsty
gladiator, in whom ill-will had traced some resemblance to Caesar.
The more remarkable figures in the imperial train were curiously gazed at
and discussed. A worker in mosaic, who stood near Melissa, had been
employed in the decoration of the baths of Caracalla at Rome, and had
much information to impart; he even knew the names of several of the
senators and courtiers attached to Caesar. And, with all this, time was
found to give vent to discontent.
The town had done its utmost to make itself fine enough to receive the
emperor. Statues had been erected of himself, of his father, his mother,
and even of his favorite heroes, above all of Alexander the Great;
triumphal arches without number had been constructed. The vast halls of
the Serapeum, through which he was to pass, had been magnificently
decorated; and in front of the new temple, outside the Kanopic Gate,
dedicated to his father, who now ranked among the gods, the elders of the
town had been received by Caesar, to do him homage and offer him the
gifts of the city. All this had cost many talents, a whole heap of gold;
but Alexandria was wealthy, and ready to make even greater sacrifices if
only they had been accepted with thanks and condescension. But a young
actor, who had been a spectator of the scene at the Kanopic Gate, and had
then hurried hither, declared, with dramatic indignation, that Caesar had
only replied in a few surly words to the address of the senate, and even
while he accepted the gift had looked as if he were being ill-used. The
delegates had retired as though they had been condemned to death. To none
but Timotheus, the high-priest of Serapis, had he spoken graciously.
Others confirmed this report; and dissatisfaction found expression in
muttered abuse or satirical remarks and bitter witticisms.
"Why did he drive past so quickly?" asked a tailor's wife; and some one
replied:
"Because the Eumenides, who haunt him for murdering his brother, lash him
on with their whips of snakes!"
A spice-merchant; who was not less indignant but more cautious, hearing a
neighbor inquire why Tarautas drove panther-spotted horses, replied that
such beasts of prey had spotted skins, and that like to like was a common
rule. A cynical philosopher, who proclaimed his sect by his ragged
garment, unkempt hair, and rough mode of speech, declared that Caesar had
a senator to guide his chariot because he had long since succeeded in
turning the senate-house into a stable.
To all this, however, Melissa turned a deaf ear, for the thought of the
great Roman leech possessed her mind entirely. She listened earnestly to
the mosaic-worker, who had come close up to her, and officiously
mentioned the names of the most important personages as they went past.
Caesar's train seemed endless. It included not merely horse and foot
soldiers, but numberless baggage-wagons, cars, elephants--which Caracalla
especially affected, because Alexander the Great had been fond of these
huge beasts--horses, mules, and asses, loaded with bales, cases, tents,
and camp and kitchen furniture. Mingling with these came sutlers,
attendants, pages, heralds, musicians, and slaves of the imperial
household, in knots and parties, looking boldly about them at the
bystanders. When they caught sight of a young and pretty woman on the
edge of the path, they would wave a greeting; and many expressed their
admiration of Melissa in a very insolent manner. Woolly-headed negroes
and swarthy natives of north Africa mixed with the fairer dwellers on the
Mediterranean and the yellow or red haired sons of northern Europe. Roman
lictors, and Scythian, Thracian, or Keltic men-at-arms kept every one out
of the way who did not belong to the imperial train, with relentless
determination. Only the Magians, wonder-workers, and street wenches were
suffered to push their way in among the horses, asses, elephants, dogs,
vehicles, and mounted troops.
Each time that one of the unwieldy traveling-carriages, drawn by several
horses, came in sight, in which the wealthy Roman was wont to take his
ease on a long journey, or whenever a particularly splendid litter was
borne past, Melissa asked the mosaic-worker for information. In some few
instances Andreas could satisfy her curiosity, for he had spent some
months at Antioch on a matter of business, and had there come to know by
sight some of Caesar's most illustrious companions.
So far the great Galenus was not of the number; for Caracalla, who was
ailing, had but lately commanded his presence. The famous physician had
sailed for Pelusium, in spite of his advanced age, and had only just
joined the sovereign's suite. The old man's chariot had been pointed out
to the mosaic-worker at the Kanopic Gate, and he was certain that he
could not mistake it for any other; it was one of the largest and
handsomest; the side doors of it were decorated with the AEsculapius
staff and the cup of Hygeia in silver, and on the top were statuettes in
wood of Minerva and of AEsculapius. On hearing all this, Melissa's face
beamed with happy and hopeful anticipation. With one hand pressed to her
throbbing bosom, she watched each vehicle as it drove past with such
intense expectancy that she paid no heed to Andreas's hint that they
might now be able to make their way through the crowd.
Now--and the freedman had called her once more--here was another
monstrous conveyance, belonging to Julius Paulinus, the former consul,
whose keen face, with its bright, merry eyes, looked out between the
silken curtains by the side of the grave, unsympathetic countenance of
Dion Cassius the senator and historian.
The consul, her informant told her--and Andreas confirmed the
statement--had displeased Severus, Caracalla's father, by some biting
jest, but, on being threatened with death, disarmed his wrath by saying,
"You can indeed have my head cut off, but neither you nor I can keep it
steady."
Those of the populace who stood near enough to the speaker to hear this
anecdote broke out in loud cheers, in which they were joined by others
who had no idea of what had given rise to them.
The consul's chariot was followed by a crowd of clients, domestic
officials, and slaves, in litters, on horses or mules, or on foot; and
behind these again came another vehicle, for some time concealed from
sight by dust. But when at last the ten fine horses which drew it had
gone past Melissa, and the top of the vehicle became visible, the color
mounted to her cheeks, for on the corners of the front she recognized the
figures of AEsculapius and Minerva, which, if the mosaic-worker were
right, distinguished the chariot of Galenus. She listened breathlessly to
the roll of the wheels of this coach, and she soon perceived the silver
AEsculapius staff and bowl on the wide door of this house on wheels,
which was painted blue. At an open window by the door a kindly old face
was visible, framed in long, gray hair.
Melissa started at hearing the order to halt shouted from the Serapeum,
far down the road, and again, close at hand, "Halt!" The procession came
to a standstill, the riders drew rein, the blue wheels ceased to turn,
the coach was immovable but a few steps in front of her, and her eyes met
those of the old man. The thought flashed through her brain that Fate
itself had brought about this pause just at this spot; and when she heard
the mosaic-worker exclaim, "The great Roman physician!" horses, coach,
and everything swam before her eyes; she snatched her hand away from that
of Andreas, and stepped out on the roadway. In an instant she was
standing face to face with the venerable leech.
She heard the warning voice of her companion, she saw the crowd staring
at her, she had, no doubt, a brief struggle with her maidenly shyness,
but she carried out her purpose. The thought that the gods themselves
were helping her to appeal to the only man who could save her lover,
encouraged her to defy every obstacle.
She was standing by the vehicle; and scarcely had she raised her sweet,
innocent, blushing face with pathetic and touching entreaty to the
white-haired Roman, her large, tear-filled eyes meeting his, when he
beckoned her to him, and in pleasant, sympathetic tones desired to know
what she wanted. Then she made bold to ask whether he were the great
Roman physician, and he replied with a flattered and kindly smile that he
was sometimes so called. Her thankful glance to heaven revealed what a
comfort his words were, and now her rosy lips moved freely, and she
hurriedly, but with growing courage, gave him to understand that her
betrothed, the son of a respected Roman citizen of Alexandria, was lying
badly wounded in the head by a stone, and that the leech who was treating
him had said that none but he, the great Galenus, could save the young
man's life. She also explained that Ptolemaeus, though he had said that
Diodoros needed quiet above all things, had proposed to carry him to the
Serapeum, and to commend him there to the care of his greater colleague,
but that she feared the worst results from the move. She glanced
pleadingly into the Roman's eyes, and added that he looked so kind that
she hoped that he would go instead to see the sufferer, who had, quite by
chance, been taken into a Christian house not very far from the Serapeum,
where he was being taken good care of, and--as a matter of course--cure
her lover.
The old man had only interrupted her tale with a few sly questions as to
her love-affair and her religion; for when she had told him that Diodoros
was under the care of Christians, it had occurred to him that this simply
but not poorly dressed girl, with her modest ways and sweet, calm face,
might herself be a Christian. He was almost surprised when she denied it,
and yet he seemed pleased, and promised to grant her request. It was not
fitting that a girl so young should enter any house where Caesar and his
train took up their abode; he would wait for her, "there"--and he pointed
to a small, round temple to Aphrodite, on the left-hand side of the
street of Hermes, where the road was rather wider--for the coach had
meanwhile slowly moved on.
Next day, at three hours after the rising of the fierce African sun--for
he could not bear its meridian heat--he would go thither in his litter.
"And be sure you are there in good time!" he added, shaking his finger at
her.
"If you come an hour too soon, you will find me waiting!" she cried.
He laughed, and said, "What pretty maid, indeed, would dare to be late
for an appointment under the very eyes of the goddess of Love!" He bade
her a friendly farewell, and lay back in the chariot.
Melissa, radiant with happiness, looked about her for the place where she
had left her companion. However, in spite of the lictors, Andreas had
followed her; he drew her hand under his arm, and led her through the
now-thinning crowd into a sidelane which led to the lake, opening out of
the colonnaded street opposite the little temple.
Melissa's steps were winged. Her joy at having gained her end so quickly
and so easily was uppermost in her mind, and as they threaded their way
among the people she tried to tell Andreas what the great physician had
promised. But the noise drowned her speech, for at this moment Caesar's
tame lion, named the "Sword of Persia" was being led through the street
by some Numidian slaves.
Every one was looking at the splendid beast; and, as she too turned to
gaze, her eye met the ardent glance of a tall, bearded man standing at
the window of a house just behind the round temple to Aphrodite. She at
once recognized Serapion, the Magian, and whispered his name to Andreas;
he, however, without looking round, only drew her along more quickly, and
did not breathe easily till they found themselves in the narrow, deserted
alley.
The Magian had observed her while she stood by the Roman's chariot, and
his conversation with a Syrian of middle age in his company had been of
her. His companion's appearance was as insignificant as his own was
stately and commanding. Nothing distinguished the Syrian from a thousand
of his fellows but the cunning stamped on his sharply-cut features;
still, the great Magian seemed to hold him in some esteem, for he readily
replied to the little man's questions and remarks.
At this moment the Syrian waved his hand in the air with a gesture common
to men of his race when displaying their own superior knowledge, as he
said "What did I spend ten years in Rome for, if I do not know Serenus
Samonicus? He is the greatest book-collector in the empire. And he
regards himself as a second AEsculapius, and has written a book on
medicine in verse, which Geta, Caesar's murdered brother, always had
about him, for he regarded the physicians here as mere bunglers. He is as
rich as the Alabarch, and riding in his coach is Galenus, for whom Caesar
sent. What can that girl want of him?"
"H'm!" muttered the other, stroking his beard with thoughtful dignity.
"She is a modest maiden; it can only be something urgent and important
which has prompted her to address the Roman."
"Your Castor will be able to find out," replied the Syrian Annianus.
"That omniscient rascal can get through a key-hole, and by to-morrow will
be the best friend of the Roman's people, if you care to know."
"We will see," said Serapion. "Her brother, perhaps, to-morrow evening,
will tell me what is going on."
"The philosopher?" said the other, with a contemptuous flourish. "You are
a great sage, Serapion, as the people hold; but you often sew with
needles too fine for me. Why, just now, when Caesar is here, and gain and
honor be in the streets for such a one as you only to stoop for--why, I
say, you should waste precious time on that poring fellow from the
Museum, I can not understand."
A superior smile parted the Magian's lips; he stepped back into the room,
followed by Annianus, and replied:
"You know how many who call themselves Magians will crowd round Caesar,
and the fame of Sosibius, Hananja, and Kaimis, is not much behind mine.
Each plies his art by his own formulas, though he may call himself a
Pythagorean or what not. None dare claim to belong to any recognized
school, since the philosophers of the guild pride themselves on
condemning the miracle-mongers. Now, in his youth, Caracalla went through
his courses of philosophy. He detests Aristotle, and has always attached
himself to Plato and the Pythagoreans. You yourself told me that by his
desire Philostratus is writing a life of Apollonius of Tyana; and, though
he may turn up his nose at the hair-splitting and frittering of the sages
of the Museum, it is in his blood to look for marvels from those
privileged philosophers. His mother has made courtiers of them again; and
he, who looks for everything from the magic arts, has never yet met a
Magian who could have been one of them."
At this the Syrian clapped his hands, exclaiming: "And you propose to use
Philip as your signbearer to talk to the emperor of a thaumaturgist who
is hand in hand with all the learning of the Museum? A cursed good idea!
But the gem-cutter's son does not look like a simpleton; and he is a
skeptic into the bargain, and believes in nothing. If you catch him, I
shall really and truly believe in your miraculous powers."
"There are harder things than catching him," said the Magian.
"You mean to break his will," said the Syrian, looking down at the
ground, "by your eye and the laying on of hands, as you did mine and
Triphis's two years ago?"
"That, no doubt, formed the first bond between us," said Serapion. "I now
need only your ventriloquism. Philip himself will come half-way to meet
me on the main point."
"And what is that?"
"You called him a skeptic, and he does, in fact, pride himself on going
further than the old masters of the school. Diligent study has brought
him to the point of regarding nothing as certain, but, on the other hand,
everything as possible. The last result he can arrive at is the
probability--since certainty there is none--that it is impossible ever to
know anything, be it what it may. He is always ready to listen with
sympathetic attention to the arguments for the reappearance of the souls
of the dead in the earthly form they have quitted, to visit and converse
with the living. He considers it a fallacy to say that anything is
impossible; and my arguments are substantial. Korinna will appear to him.
Castor has discovered a girl who is her very image. Your arts will
convince him that it is she who speaks to him, for he never heard her
voice in life, and all this must rouse his desire to see her again and
again. And thus the skeptic will be convinced, in spite of his own
doctrine. In this, as in every other case, it is the passionate wish that
gives rise to the belief."
"And when you have succeeded in getting him to this point?" asked the
Syrian, anxiously.
"Then," replied the Magian, "he will help me, with his triumphant
dialectics, to win Caesar over to the same conviction; and then we shall
be able to satisfy the emperor's desire to hold intercourse with the
dead; and for that I count on your power of making voices proceed from
any person present."
He said no more. The little man looked up at him approvingly, and said,
modestly: "You are indeed wise, Serapion, and I will do my best to help
you. The next thing to be done is to seek representatives of the great
Alexander, of Apollonius of Tyana, and of Caesar's brother,
father-in-law, and wife."
"Not forgetting Papinian, the noblest of his victims," added the Magian.
"Back again already, Castor?"
These words were addressed to a tall and apparently elderly man in a long
white robe, who had slipped in without a sound. His demeanor was so grave
and dignified that he looked precisely like a Christian priest impressed
with the sanctity of his office; but hardly had he got into the room, and
greeted the Magian with much unction, than he pulled the white garment
off over his head, rubbed from his cheeks the lines which gave him twenty
added years, stretched his lithe limbs, and exclaimed with delight:
"I have got her! Old Dorothea will bring her to your theatre!"--and the
young fellow's mobile face beamed with the happy radiance of success.
It almost seemed as though fermenting wine flowed in the man's veins
instead of blood; for, when he had made his report to the Magian, and had
been rewarded with a handful of gold-pieces, he tossed the coins in the
air, caught them like flies in the hollow of his hand, and then pitched
wheel fashion over head and heels from one end of the room to the other.
Then, when he stood on his feet once more, he went on, without a sign of
breathlessness:
"Forgive me, my lord! Nature asserts her rights. To play the pious for
three whole hours! Eternal gods, that is a hard task, and a man must--"
"I know all about it," Serapion broke in with a smile and a threatening
finger. "Now go and stretch your limbs, and then share your lightly
earned gains with some pretty flute-player. But I want you again this
evening; so, if you feel weak, I shall lock you up."
"Do," said Castor, as earnestly as if he had been promised some pleasure.
"What a merry, good-for-nothing set they are!-Dorothea will bring the
girl at the appointed hour. Everything is arranged."
Whereupon he danced out of the room, singing a tune.
"An invaluable creature!" said the Syrian, with an admiring glance.
"A better one spoiled," said Serapion. "He has the very highest gifts,
but is utterly devoid of conscience to set a limit to his excesses. How
should he have one? His father was one of a troupe of Ephesian
pantomimists, and his mother a golden-haired Cyprian dancer. But he knows
every corner of Alexandria--and then, what a memory! What an actor he
would have made! Without even a change of dress, merely by a grimace, he
at once becomes an old man, an idiot, or a philosopher."
"And what a genius for intrigue!" Annianus went on enthusiastically. "As
soon as he saw the portrait of Korinna he knew that he had seen her
double among the Christians on the other side of the lake. This morning
he tracked her out, and now she is caught in the snare. And how sharp of
him to make Dorothea bring her here!"
"I told him to do that, and use the name of Bishop Demetrius," observed
the Magian. "She would not have come with a stranger, and Dorothea must
be known to her in the meetings of their congregation."
CHAPTER IX.
While this conversation was taking place, Melissa and her companion had
reached the shore of the lake, the large inland sea which washed the
southern side of the city and afforded anchorage for the Nile-boats. The
ferry-boat which would convey them to the gardens of Polybius started
from the Agathodaemon Canal, an enlarged branch of the Nile, which
connected the lake with the royal harbor and the Mediterranean; they had,
therefore, to walk some distance along the shore.
The setting sun shot slanting rays on the glittering surface of the
glassy waters in which the numberless masts of the Nile-boats were
mirrored.
Vessels large and small, with white or gayly-painted lateen sails
gleaming in the evening glow, large galleys, light skiffs, and restless,
skimming pleasure-boats, were flitting to and fro; and among them, like
loaded wagons among chariots and horsemen, the low corn-barges scarcely
seemed to move, piled as they were with pyramids of straw and grain as
high as a house.
The bustle on the quay was less conspicuous than usual, for all who were
free to follow their curiosity had gone into the city. There were,
however, many slaves, and Caesar's visit no more affected their day's
toil than it did the course of the sun. To-day, as every other day, they
had to pack and unload; and though few ships were sailing, numbers were
arriving from the south, and throwing out the landing-bridges which
connected them with the shore.
The number of pleasure-boats, on the other hand, was greater than usual;
for business was suspended, and many who hated the crowd found pleasure
in rowing in their own boats. Others had come to see the imperial barge,
which had been newly furnished up, and which was splendid enough to
attract even the luxurious Alexandrians. Gold and ivory, purple sails,
bronze and marble statues at the prow and stern, and in the little
shrines on the after-deck, combined in a gorgeous display, made all the
more brilliant by the low sun, which added vividness to every hue.
It was pleasant to linger on the strand at this hour. Spreading sycamores
and plumed palms cast a pleasant shade; the heat of the day had abated,
and a light air, which always blew in from the lake, fanned Melissa's
brow. There was no crushing mob, and no dust came up from the
well-watered roadway, and yet the girl had lost her cheerful looks, in
spite of the success of her bold venture; and Andreas walked by her side,
silent and ill-pleased.
She could not understand him; for, as long as she could remember, his
grave looks had always brightened at anything that had brought gladness
to her or to her mother. Besides, her success with the Roman would be to
the advantage of Diodoros, and the freedman was devoted to him. Every now
and then she perceived that his eye rested on her with a compassionate
expression, and when she inquired whether he were anxious about the
sufferer, he gave her some evasive answer, quite unlike his usual
decisive speech. This added to her alarm. At last his dissatisfied and
unsatisfactory replies vexed the usually patient girl, and she told him
so; for she could not suspect how painfully her triumph in her hasty deed
jarred on her truth-loving friend. He knew that it was not to the great
Galenus, but to the wealthy Serenus Samonicus, that she had spoken; for
the physician's noble and thoughtful features were familiar to him from
medals, statues, and busts. He had seen Samonicus, too, at Antioch, and
held his medical lore, as expressed in verse, very cheap. How worthless
would this man's help be! In spite of his promise, Diodoros would after
all have to be conveyed to the Serapeum; and yet Andreas could not bear
to crush his darling's hopes.
He had hitherto known her as a patient, dutiful child; to-day he had seen
with what unhesitating determination she could carry out a purpose; and
he feared that, if he told her the truth, she would at once make her way
into Caesar's quarters, in defiance of every obstacle, to crave the
assistance of the true Galen. He must leave her in error, and yet he
could not bear to do so, for there was no art in which he was so inexpert
as that of deceit. How hard it was to find the right answer, when she
asked him whether he did not hope everything from the great physician's
intervention, or when she inquired what were the works to which Galen
owed his chief fame!
As they came near to the landing-stage whence the ferry started, she
wanted to know how old he should suppose the Roman leech to be; and again
he avoided answering, for Galen was above eighty, and Serenus scarcely
seventy.
She looked up at him with large, mournful eyes, saying, "Have I offended
you, or is there something you are concealing from me?"
"What could you do to offend me?" he replied; "life is full of sorrows,
my child. You must learn to have patience."
"Patience!" echoed Melissa, sadly. "That is the only knowledge I have
ever mastered. When my father is more sullen than you are, for a week at
a time, I scarcely heed it. But when you look like that, Andreas, it is
not without cause, and that is why I am anxious."
"One we love is very sick, child," he said, soothingly; but she was not
to be put off so, and exclaimed with conviction:
"No, no, it is not that. We have learned nothing fresh about Diodoro--and
you were ready enough to answer me when we came away from the Christian's
house. Nothing but good has happened to us since, and yet you look as if
the locusts had come down on your garden."
They had reached a spot on the shore where a ship was being unloaded of
its cargo of granite blocks from Syene. Black and brown slaves were
dragging them to land. An old blind man was piping a dismal tune on a
small reed flute to encourage them in their work, while two men of fairer
hue, whose burden had been too heavy for them, had let the end of the
column they were carrying sink on the ground, and were being mercilessly
flogged by the overseer to make them once more attempt the impossible.
Andreas had watched the scene; a surge of fury had brought the blood to
his face, and, stirred by great and genuine emotion, he broke out:
"There--there you see the locusts which destroy my garden--the hail which
ruins my crops! It falls on all that bears the name of humanity--on me
and you. Happy, girl? None of us can ever be happy till the Kingdom shall
arise for which the fullness of the time is come."
"But they dropped the column; I saw them myself," urged Melissa.
"Did you, indeed?" said Andreas. "Well, well, the whip, no doubt, can
revive exhausted powers. And that is how you look upon such deeds!--you,
who would not crush a worm in the garden, think this is right and just!"
It suddenly struck Melissa that Andreas, too, had once been a slave, and
the feeling that she had hurt him grieved her to the heart. She had often
heard him speak sternly and gravely, but never in scorn as he did now,
and that, too, distressed her; and as she could not think of the right
thing to say in atonement for the wrong she had done, she could only look
up with tearful entreaty and murmur, "Forgive me!"
"I have nothing to forgive," he replied in an altered tone. "You have
grown up among the unjust who are now in power. How should you see more
clearly than they, who all walk in darkness? But if the light should be
shown to you by one to whom it hath been revealed, it would not be
extinguished again.--Does it not seem a beautiful thing to you to live
among none but brethren and sisters, instead of among oppressors and
their scourged victims; or is there no place in a woman's soul for the
holy wrath that came upon Moses the Hebrew? But who would ever have
spoken his great name to you?"
Melissa was about to interrupt his vehement speech, for, in a town where
there were so many Jews, alike among the citizens and the slaves, even
she had heard that Moses had been their lawgiver; but he prevented her,
by adding hastily: "This only, child, I would have you remember--for here
is the ferry--the worst ills that man ever inflicts on his fellow-man are
the outcome of self-interest; and, of all the good he may do, the best is
the result of his achieving self-forgetfulness to secure the happiness
and welfare of others."
He said no more, for the ferry-boat was about to put off, and they had to
take their places as quickly as possible.
The large flat barge was almost unoccupied; for the multitude still
lingered in the town, and more than one seat was empty for the weary girl
to rest on. Andreas paced to and fro, for he was restless; but when
Melissa beckoned to him he came close to her, and, while he leaned
against the little cabin, received her assurance that she now quite
understood his desire to see all slaves made free. He, if any one, must
know what the feelings of those unhappy creatures were.
"Do I not know!" he exclaimed, with a shake of the head. Then, glancing
round at the few persons who were sitting at the other end of the boat,
he went on sadly: "To know that, a man must himself have been branded
with the marks of his humiliation." He showed her his arm, which was
usually hidden by the long sleeve of his tunic, and Melissa exclaimed in
sorrowful surprise: "But you were free-born! and none of our slaves bear
such a brand. You must have fallen into the hands of Syrian pirates."
He nodded, and added, "I and my father."
"But he," the girl eagerly put in, "was a great man."
"Till Fate overtook him," Andreas said.
Melissa's tearful eyes showed the warm sympathy she felt, as she asked:
"But how could it have happened that you were not ransomed by your
relations? Your father was, no doubt, a Roman citizen; and the law--"
"The law forbids that such a one should be sold into slavery," Andreas
broke in, "and yet the authorities of Rome left him in misery--left--"
At this, her large, gentle eyes flashed with indignation, and, stirred to
the depths of her nature, she exclaimed:
"How was such horrible injustice possible? Oh, let me hear. You know how
truly I love you, and no one can hear you."
The wind had risen, the waves splashed noisily against the broad boat,
and the song of the slaves, as they plied their oars, would have drowned
a stronger voice than the freedman's; so he sat down by her side to do
her bidding.
And the tale he had to tell was sad indeed.
His father had been of knightly rank, and in the reign of Marcus Aurelius
he had been in the service of Avidius Cassius, his fellow-countryman, the
illustrious governor of Asia as 'procurator ab epistolis'. As holding
this high post, he found himself involved in the conspiracy of Avidius
against the emperor. After the assassination of his patron, who had
already been proclaimed emperor by the troops, Andreas's father had been
deprived of his offices, his citizenship, and his honors; his possessions
were confiscated, and he was exiled to the island of Anaphe. It was to
Caesar's clemency that he owed his life.
On their voyage into exile the father and son fell into the hands of
Syrian pirates, and were sold in the slave-market of Alexandria to two
separate masters. Andreas was bought by a tavern-keeper; the procurator,
whose name as a slave was Smaragdus, by the father of Polybius; and this
worthy man soon learned to value his servant so highly, that he purchased
the son also, and restored him to his father. Thus they were once more
united.
Every attempt of the man who had once held so proud a position to get his
release, by an act of the senate, proved vain. It was with a broken heart
and enfeebled health that he did his duty to his master and to his only
child. He pined in torments of melancholy, till Christianity opened new
happiness to him, and revived hope brought him back from the very brink
of despair; and, even as a slave, he found the highest of all
dignities--that, namely, which a Christian derives from his faith.
At this point Melissa interrupted her friend's narrative, exclaiming, as
she pointed across the waters:
"There! there! look! In that boat--I am sure that is Alexander! And he is
making for the town."
Andreas started up, and after convincing himself that she was indeed
right, for the youth himself had recognized his sister, who waved her
hand to him, he wrathfully exclaimed:
"Madman!" and by intelligible and commanding signs he ordered the
reckless young artist to turn his little skiff, and follow in the wake of
the ferry-boat, which was by this time nearing land.
But Alexander signaled a negative, and, after gayly blowing a kiss to
Melissa, plied his oars again with as much speed and energy as though he
were rowing for a wager. How swiftly and steadily the keel of his little
boat cut through the crisply foaming waves on which it rose and fell! The
daring youth did not lack strength, that was certain, and the couple who
watched him with so much uneasiness soon understood that he was striving
to overtake another and larger bark which was at some distance in front
of him. It was being pulled by slaves, whose stalwart arms made the pace
a good one, and under the linen awning which shaded the middle part of it
two women were seated.
The rays of the sun, whose fiery globe was now sinking behind the
palm-groves on the western shore, flooded the sky with ruby light, and
tinged the white robes of these women, the light canopy over their heads,
and the whole face of the lake, with a rosy hue; but neither Andreas nor
his companion heeded the glorious farewell of departing day.
Melissa pointed out to her friend the strangeness of her brother's
attire, and the hood which, in the evening light, seemed to be bordered
with gold. He had on, in fact, a Gallic mantle, such as that which had
gained Caesar the nickname of Caracalla, and there was in this disguise
something to reassure them; for, if Alexander pulled the hood low enough,
it would hide the greater part of his face, and make it difficult to
recognize him. Whence he had procured this garment was not hard to
divine, for imperial servants had distributed them in numbers among the
crowd. Caesar was anxious to bring them into fashion, and it might safely
be expected that those Alexandrians who had held out their hands to
accept them would appear in them on the morrow, as no order required that
they should be worn. Alexander could not do better than wear one, if only
by such means he could escape Zminis and his men.
But who were the women he was pursuing? Before Melissa could ask the
question, Andreas pointed to the foremost boat, and said:
"Those are Christian women, and the bark they are in belongs to Zeno, the
brother of Seleukus and of the high-priest of Serapis. That is his
landing-creek. He lives with his family, and those of the faith to whom
he affords refuge, in the long, white house you can just see there among
the palm-trees. Those vineyards, too, are his. If I am not mistaken, one
of the ladies in that boat is his daughter, Agatha."
"But what can Alexander want of two Christian women?" asked Melissa.
Andreas fired up, and a vein started on his high forehead as he retorted
angrily:
"What should he not want! He and those who are like him--the blind--think
nothing so precious as what satisfies the eye.--There! the brightness has
vanished which turned the lake and the shore to gold. Such is beauty!--a
vain show, which only glitters to disappear, and is to fools,
nevertheless, the supreme object of adoration!"
"Then, is Zeno's daughter fair?" asked the girl.
"She is said to be," replied the other; and after a moment's pause he
added: "Yes, Agatha is a rarely accomplished woman; but I know better
things of her than that. It stirs my gall to think that her sacred purity
can arouse unholy thoughts. I love your brother dearly; for your mother's
sake I can forgive him much; but if he tries to ensnare Agatha--"
"Have no fear," said Melissa, interrupting his wrathful speech.
"Alexander is indeed a butterfly, fluttering from flower to flower, and
apt to be frivolous over serious matters, but at this moment he is
enslaved by a vision--that of a dead girl; and only last night, I
believe, he pledged himself to Ino, the pretty daughter of our neighbor
Skopas. Beauty is to him the highest thing in life; and how should it be
otherwise, for he is an artist! For the sake of beauty he defies every
danger. If you saw rightly, he is no doubt in pursuit of Zeno's daughter,
but most likely not to pay court to her, but for some other season."
"No praiseworthy reason, you may be sure," said Andreas. "Here we are.
Now take your kerchief out of the basket. It is damp and cool after
sundown, especially over there where I am draining the bog. The land we
are reclaiming by this means will bring your future husband a fine income
some day."
They disembarked, and ere long reached the little haven belonging to
Polybius's estate. There were boats moored there, large and small, and
Andreas hailed the man who kept them, and who sat eating his supper, to
ask him whether he had unmoored the green skiff for Alexander.
At this the old fellow laughed, and said: "The jolly painter and his
friend, the sculptor, met Zeno's daughter just as she was getting into
her boat with Mariamne. Down they came, running as if they had gone mad.
The girl must have turned their heads. My lord Alexander would have it
that he had seen the spirit of one who was dead, and he would gladly give
his life to see her once again."
It was now dark, or it would have alarmed Melissa to see the ominous
gravity with which Andreas listened to this tale; but she herself was
sufficiently startled, for she knew her brother well, and that no risk,
however great, would stop him if his artistic fancy were fired. He, whom
she had believed to be in safety, had gone straight into the hands of the
pursuers; and with him caution and reflection were flown to the winds
when passion held sway. She had hoped that her friend Ino had at last
captured the flutterer, and that he would begin to live a settled life
with her, as master of a house of his own; and now, for a pretty face, he
had thrown everything to the winds, even the duty of self-preservation.
Andreas had good reason to be angry, and he spoke no more till they
reached their destination, a country house of handsome and important
aspect.
No father could have received his future daughter more heartily than did
old Polybius. The fiend gout racked his big toes, stabbing, burning, and
nipping them. The slightest movement was torture, and yet he held out his
arms to her for a loving embrace, and, though it made him shut his eyes
and groan, he drew her pretty head down, and kissed her cheeks and hair.
He was now a heavy man, of almost shapeless stoutness, but in his youth
he must have resembled his handsome son. Silvery locks flowed round his
well-formed head, but a habit of drinking wine, which, in spite of the
gout, he could not bring himself to give up, had flushed his naturally
good features, and tinged them of a coppery red, which contrasted
strangely with his snowy hair and beard. But a kind heart, benevolence,
and a love of good living, beamed in every look.
His heavy limbs moved but slowly, and if ever full lips deserved to be
called sensual, they were those of this man, who was a priest of two
divinities.
How well his household understood the art of catering for his love of
high living, was evident in the meal which was served soon after
Melissa's arrival, and to eat which the old man made her recline on the
couch by his side.
Andreas also shared the supper; and not the attendant slaves only, but
Dame Praxilla, the sister of their host, whose house she managed, paid
him particular honor. She was a widow and childless, and, even during the
lifetime of Diodoros's mother, she had given her heart, no longer young,
to the freedman, without finding her love returned or even observed. For
his sake she would have become a Christian, though she regarded herself
as so indispensable to her brother that she had rarely left him to hold
intercourse with other Christians. Nor did Andreas encourage her; he
doubted her vocation. Whatever happened in the house, the excitable woman
made it her own concern; and, although she had known Melissa from
childhood, and was as fond of her as she could be of the child of
"strangers," the news that Diodoros was to marry the gem-cutter's
daughter was displeasing to her. A second woman in the house might
interfere with her supremacy; and, as an excuse for her annoyance, she
had represented to her brother that Diodoros might look higher for a
wife. Agatha, the beautiful daughter of their rich Christian neighbor
Zeno, was the right bride for the boy.
But Polybius had rated her sharply, declaring that he hoped for no
sweeter daughter than Melissa, who was quite pretty enough, and in whose
veins as pure Macedonian blood flowed as in his own. His son need look
for no wealth, he added with a laugh, since he would some day inherit his
aunt's.
In fact, Praxilla owned a fine fortune, increasing daily under the care
of Andreas, and she replied:
"If the young couple behave so well that I do not rather choose to bestow
my pittance on worthier heirs."
But the implied threat had not disturbed Polybius, for he knew his
sister's ways. The shriveled, irritable old lady often spoke words hard
to be forgiven, but she had not a bad heart; and when she learned that
Diodoros was in danger, she felt only how much she loved him, and her
proposal to go to the town next morning to nurse him was sincerely meant.
But when her brother retorted: "Go, by all means; I do not prevent you!"
she started up, exclaiming:
"And you, and your aches and pains! How you get on when once my back is
turned, we know by experience. My presence alone is medicine to you."
"And a bitter dose it is very often," replied the old man, with a laugh;
but Praxilla promptly retorted: "Like all effectual remedies. There is
your ingratitude again!"
The last words were accompanied by a whimper, so Polybius, who could not
bear to see any but cheerful faces, raised his cup and drank her health
with kindly words. Then refilling the tankard, he poured a libation, and
was about to empty it to Melissa's health, but Praxilla's lean frame was
standing by his side as quickly as though a serpent had stung her. She
was drawing a stick of asparagus between her teeth, but she hastily
dropped it on her plate, and with both hands snatched the cup from her
brother, exclaiming:
"It is the fourth; and if I allow you to empty it, you are a dead man!"
"Death is not so swift," replied Polybius, signing to a slave to bring
him back the cup. But he drank only half of it, and, at his sister's
pathetic entreaties, had more water mixed with the wine. And while
Praxilla carefully prepared his crayfish--for gout had crippled even his
fingers--he beckoned to his white-haired body-slave, and with a cunning
smile made him add more wine to the washy fluid. He fixed his twinkling
glance on Melissa, to invite her sympathy in his successful trick, but
her appearance startled him. How pale the child was--how dejected and
weary her sweet face, with the usually bright, expressive eyes!
It needed not the intuition of his kind heart to tell him that she was
completely exhausted, and he desired his sister to take her away to bed.
But Melissa was already sound asleep, and Praxilla would not wake her.
She gently placed a pillow under her head, laid her feet easily on the
couch, and covered them with a wrap. Polybius feasted his eyes on the
fair sleeper; and, indeed, nothing purer and more tender can be imagined
than the girl's face as she lay in dreamless slumber.
The conversation was now carried on in subdued tones, so as not to
disturb her, and Andreas completed the history of the day by informing
them that Melissa had, by mistake, engaged the assistance not of the
great Galen but of another Roman practiced in the healing art, but of
less illustrious proficiency. He must, therefore, still have Diodoros
conveyed to the Serapeum, and this could be done very easily in the
morning, before the populace should again besiege the temple. He must
forthwith go back to make the necessary arrangements. Praxilla whispered
tenderly:
"Devoted man that you are, you do not even get your night's rest." But
Andreas turned away to discuss some further matters with Polybius; and,
in spite of pain, the old man could express his views clearly and
intelligently.
At last he took his leave; and now Praxilla had to direct the slaves who
were to carry her brother to bed. She carefully arranged the cushions on
his couch, and gave him his medicine and night-draught. Then she returned
to Melissa, and the sight of the sleeping girl touched her heart. She
stood gazing at her for some time in silence, and then bent over her to
wake her with a kiss. She had at last made up her mind to regard the
gem-cutter's daughter as her niece, so, determined to treat her as a
child of her own, she called Melissa by name.
This awoke the sleeper, and when she had realized that she was still in
Polybius's eating-room, she asked for Andreas.
"He has gone back to the town, my child," replied Praxilla. "He was
anxious about your betrothed."
"Is he worse, then?" asked Melissa, in alarm. "No, no," said the widow,
soothingly. "It is only--I assure you we have heard nothing new--"
"But what then?" Melissa inquired. "The great Galen is to see him early
to-morrow." Praxilla tried to divert her thoughts. But as the girl would
take no answer to her declaration that Galen himself had promised to see
Diodoros, Praxilla, who was little used to self-command, and who was
offended by her persistency, betrayed the fact that Melissa had spoken to
the wrong man, and that Andreas was gone to remove Diodoros to the
Serapeum.
At this, Melissa suddenly understood why Andreas had not rejoiced with
her, and at the same time she said to herself that her lover must on no
account be exposed to so great a danger without her presence. She must
lend her aid in transporting him to the Serapeum; and when she firmly
expressed her views to the widow, Praxilla was shocked, and sincerely
repented of having lost her self-control. It was far too late, and when
the housekeeper came into the room and gladly volunteered to accompany
Melissa to the town, Praxilla threatened to rouse her brother, that he
might insist on their remaining at home; but at last she relented, for
the girl, she saw, would take her own way against any opposition.
The housekeeper had been nurse to Diodoros, and had been longing to help
in tending him. When she left the house with Melissa, her eyes were moist
with tears of joy and thankfulness.
CHAPTER X.
The Nubian boat-keeper and his boy had soon ferried them across the lake.
Melissa and her companion then turned off from the shore into a street
which must surely lead into that where the Christians dwelt. Still, even
as she went on, she began to be doubtful whether she had taken the right
one; and when she came out by a small temple, which she certainly had not
seen before, she knew not which way to go, for the streets here crossed
each other in a perfect labyrinth, and she was soon obliged to confess to
her companion that she had lost her road. In the morning she had trusted
herself to Andreas's knowledge of the town, and while talking eagerly to
him had paid no heed to anything else.
What was to be done? She stood meditating; and then she remembered the
spot where she had seen Caesar drive past. This she thought she could
certainly recognize, and from thence make her way to the street she
sought.
It was quite easy to find the street of Hermes, for the noise of the
revelers, who were to-night even more numerous than usual in this busy
highway, could be heard at a considerable distance. They must follow its
guidance till they should come to the little temple of Aphrodite; and
that was a bold enterprise, for the crowd of men who haunted the spot at
this hour might possibly hinder and annoy two unescorted women. However,
the elder woman was sturdy and determined, and sixty years of age; while
Melissa feared nothing, and thought herself sufficiently protected when
she had arranged her kerchief so as to hide her face from curious eyes.
As she made her way to the wide street with a throbbing heart, but quite
resolved to find the house she sought at any cost, she heard men's voices
on a side street; however, she paid no heed to them, for how, indeed,
could she guess that what they were saying could nearly concern her?
The conversation was between a woman and a man in the white robe of a
Christian priest. They were standing at the door of a large house; and
close to the wall, in the shadow of the porch of a building opposite,
stood a youth, his hair covered by the hood of a long caracalla,
listening with breathless attention.
This was Alexander.
He had been standing here for some time already, waiting for the return
of Agatha, the fair Christian whom he had followed across the lake, and
who had vanished into that house under the guidance of a deaconess. The
door had not long closed on them when several men had also been admitted,
whom he could not distinguish in the darkness, for the street was narrow
and the moon still low.
It was sheer folly--and yet he fancied that one of them was his father,
for his deep, loud voice was precisely like that of Heron; and, what was
even more strange, that of the man who answered him seemed to proceed
from his brother Philip. But, at such an hour, he could more easily have
supposed them to be on the top of Mount Etna than in this quarter of the
town.
The impatient painter was very tired of waiting, so, seating himself on a
feeding-manger for asses which stood in front of the adjoining house, he
presently fell asleep. He was tired from the sleepless night he had last
spent, and when he opened his eyes once more and looked down the street
into which the moon was now shining, he did not know how long he had been
slumbering. Perhaps the damsel he wanted to see had already left the
house, and he must see her again, cost him what it might; for she was so
amazingly like the dead Korinna whom he had painted, that he could not
shake off the notion that perhaps--for, after Serapion's discourse, it
seemed quite likely--perhaps he had seen the spirit of the departed girl.
He had had some difficulty in persuading Glaukias, who had come across
the lake with him, to allow him to follow up the fair vision
unaccompanied; and his entreaties and prohibitions would probably alike
have proved vain, but that Glaukias held taken it into his head to show
his latest work, which a slave was carrying, to some friends over a jar
of wine. It was a caricature of Caesar, whom he had seen at the Kanopic
Gate, modeled while he was in the house of Polybius, with a few happy
touches.
When Alexander woke, he crept into the shadow of the porch opposite to
the house into which Korinna's double had disappeared, and he now had no
lack of entertainment. A man came out of the tall white house and looked
into the street, and the moonlight enabled the artist to see all that
took place.
The tall youth who had come to the door wore the robe of a Christian
priest. Still, it struck Alexander that he was too young for such a
calling; and he soon detected that he was certainly not what he seemed,
but that there was some treachery in the wind; for no sooner had a woman
joined him, whom he evidently expected, than she blamed him for his want
of caution. To this he laughingly replied that he was too hot in his
disguise, and, pulling out a false beard, he showed it to the woman, who
was dressed as a Christian deaconess, exclaiming, "That will do it!"
He went on to tell her, in a quick, low tone, much of which escaped the
listener, that Serapion had dared much that day, and that the performance
had ended badly, for that the Christian girl he had so cleverly persuaded
to come from the other side of the lake had taken fright, and had
insisted on knowing where she was.
At this the deaconess seemed somewhat dismayed, and poured out endless
questions in a low voice. He, however, cast all the blame on the
philosopher, whom his master had got hold of the day before. Then, as the
woman desired more particular information, he briefly told her the story.
The fair Agatha, he said, after being invited by him, at noon, in the
name of Bishop Demetrius, to a meeting that evening, had reached the
ferryhouse at about sunset. She had been told that many things of
immediate importance were to be announced to the maidens of the Christian
congregation; more especially, a discussion was to be held as to the
order issued by the prefect for their taking part in a procession in
Caesar's honor when he should quit Alexandria. Old Dorothea had met the
girl at the ferry-house, and had brought her hither. The woman who had
attended her across the lake was certainly none of the wisest, for
Dorothea had easily persuaded her to remain in her house during the
meeting.
"Once there," the sham priest went on, "the girl's waiting-woman must
have had some dose in wine or sirup and water, for she is fast asleep at
this moment in the ferry-house, or wherever Dorothea took her, as she
could not be allowed to wake under Dorothea's roof.
"Thus every one was out of the way who could make any mischief; and when
the Syrian, dressed as a Christian priest, had explained to Agatha what
the patriarch required of his maidens, I led her on to the stage, on
which the spectators were to see the ghosts through a small opening.
"The Syrian had desired her to put up so many and such prayers for the
congregation in its peril from Caesar; and, by Aphrodite! she was as
docile as a lamb. She fell on her knees, and with hands and eyes to
heaven entreated her god. But hark!
"Did you hear anything? Something is stirring within. Well, I have nearly
done.
"The philosopher was to see her thus, and when he had gazed at her as if
bewitched for some little time through the small window, he suddenly
cried out, 'Korinna! Korinna!' and all sorts of nonsense, although
Serapion had strictly forbidden him to utter a sound. Of course, the
curtain instantly dropped. But Agatha had heard him call, and in a great
fright she wanted to know where she was, and asked to go home.--Serapion
was really grand. You should have heard how the fox soothed the dove, and
at the same time whispered to me what you now are to do!"
"I?" said the woman, with some annoyance. "If he thinks that I will risk
my good name in the congregation for the sake of his long beard--"
"Just be quiet," said Castor, in a pacifying tone. "The master's beard
has nothing to do with the case, but something much more substantial. Ten
solidi, full weight, shall be yours if you will take Agatha home with
you, or safe across the lake again, and pretend to have saved her from
mystics or magicians who have decoyed her to some evil end. She knows you
as a Christian deaconess, and will go with you at once. If you restore
her to her father, he is rich, and will not send you empty away. Tell him
that you heard her voice out in the street, and with the help of a worthy
old man--that am I--rescued her from any peril you may invent. If he asks
you where the heroic deed was done, name any house you please, only not
this. Your best plan is to lay it all on the shoulders of Hananja, the
thaumaturgist; we have owed him a grudge this many a day. However, I was
not to teach you any lesson, for your wits are at least a match for
ours."
"Flattery will not win me," the woman broke in. "Where is the gold?"
Castor handed her the solidi wrapped in a papyrus leaf, and then added:
"Stay one moment! I must remove this white robe. The girl must on no
account recognize me. I am going to force my way into the house with
you--you found me in the street, an old man, a total stranger, and
appealed to me for help. No harm is done, nothing lost but Dorothea's
credit among the Christians. We may have to get her safe out of the town.
I must escort you and Agatha, for nothing unpleasant must happen to her
on the way home. The master is imperative on that point, and so much
beauty will certainly not get through the crowded streets without remark.
And for my part, I, of course, am thinking of yours."
Here Castor laughed aloud, and rolled the white robe into a bundle.
Alexander peeped out of his nook and shook his head in amazement, for the
supple youth, who a moment before stood stalwart and upright, had
assumed, with a bent attitude and a long, white beard hastily placed on
his chin, the aspect of a weary, poor old man.
"I will give you a lesson!" muttered Alexander to himself, and he shook
his fist at the intriguing rascal as he vanished into the house with the
false deaconess.
So Serapion was a cheat! And the supposed ghost of Korinna was a
Christian maiden who was being shamefully deluded. But he would keep
watch over her, and bring that laughing villain to account. The first aim
of his life was not to lose sight of Agatha. His whole happiness, he
felt, depended on that. The gods had, as it were, raised her from the
dead for him; in her, everything that he most admired was united; she was
the embodiment of everything he cared for and prized; every feeling sank
into the shade beside the one desire to make her his. She was, at this
moment, the universe to him; and all else--the pursuers at his heels, his
father, his sister, pretty Ino, to whom he had vowed his love only the
night before--had ceased to exist for him.
Possessed wholly by the thought of her, he never took his eyes off the
door opposite; and when at last the maiden came out with the deaconess,
whom she called Elizabeth, and with Castor, Alexander followed the
ill-matched trio; and he had to be brisk, for at first they hurried
through the streets as though they feared to be overtaken. He carefully
kept close to the houses on the shady side, and when they presently
stopped, so did he.
The deaconess inquired of Agatha whither she would be taken. But when the
girl replied that she must go back to her own boat, waiting at the ferry,
and return home, the deaconess represented that this was impossible by
reason of the drunken seamen, who at this hour made the strand unsafe;
she could only advise Agatha to come home with her and remain till
daybreak. "This kind old man," and she pointed to Castor, "would no doubt
go and tell the oarsmen that they were not to be uneasy at her absence."
The two women stood talking in the broad moonlight, and the pale beams
fell on Agatha's beautiful unveiled features, giving them that unearthly,
corpse-like whiteness which Alexander had tried to represent in his
picture of Korinna. Again the thought that she was risen from the dead
sent a chill through his blood--that she would make him follow her,
perhaps to the tomb she had quitted. He cared not! If his senses had
cheated him--if,--in spite of what he had heard, that pale, unspeakably
lovely image were indeed a lamia, a goblin shape from Hecate's dark
abode, yet would he follow wherever she might lead, as to a festival,
only to be with her.
Agatha thanked the deaconess, and as she spoke raised her eyes to the
woman's face; and they were two large, dark orbs sparkling through tears,
and as unlike as possible to the eyes which a ghost might snatch from
their sockets to fling like balls or stones in the face of a pursuer. Oh,
if only those eyes might look into his own as warmly and gratefully as
they now gazed into the face of that treacherous woman!
He had a hard struggle with himself to subdue the impulse to put an end,
now and here, to the fiendish tricks which guile was playing on the
purest innocence; but the street was deserted, and if he had to struggle
with the bent old man, whose powerful and supple limbs he had already
seen, and if the villain should plant a knife in his ribs--for as a
wrestler he felt himself his match--Agatha would be bereft of a protector
and wholly in the deceiver's power.
This, at any rate, must not be, and he even controlled himself when he
heard the music of her words, and saw her grasp the hand of the pretended
graybeard, who, with an assumption of paternal kindness, dared to kiss
her hair, and then helped her to draw her kerchief over her face. The
street of Hermes, he explained, where the deaconess dwelt, was full of
people, and the divine gift of beauty, wherewith Heaven had blessed her,
would attract the baser kind, as a flame attracts bats and moths. The
hypocrite's voice was full of unction; the deaconess spoke with pious
gravity. He could see that she was a woman of middle age, and he asked
himself with rising fury whether the gods were not guilty who had lent
mean wretches like these such winning graces as to enable them to lay
traps for the guileless? For, in fact, the woman's face was well-favored,
gentle, and attractive.
Alexander never took his gaze off Agatha, and his artist-eye reveled in
her elastic step and her slender, shapely form. Above all, he was
bewitched by the way her head was set, with a little forward bend; and as
long as the way led through the silent lanes he was never weary of
comparing her with lovely images-with a poppy, whose flower bows the
stem; with a willow, whose head leans over the water; with the huntress
Artemis, who, chasing in the moonlight, bends to mark the game.
Thus, unwearied and unseen, he had followed them as far as the street of
Hermes; there his task became more difficult, for the road was swarming
with people. The older men were walking in groups of five or six, going
to or coming from some evening assembly, and talking as they walked; or
priests and temple servants on their way home, tired from night services
and ceremonies; but the greater number were young men and boys, some
wearing wreaths, and all more or less intoxicated, with street-wenches on
the lookout for a companion or surrounded by suitors, and trying to
attract a favorite or dismiss the less fortunate.
The flare of the torches which illuminated the street was mirrored in
eager eyes glowing with wine and passion, and in the glittering weapons
of the Roman soldiery. Most of these were attached to Caesar's train. As
in the field, so in the peaceful town, they aimed at conquest, and many a
Greek sulkily resigned his claims to some fickle beauty in favor of an
irresistible tribune or centurion. Where the courteous Alexandrians made
way, they pushed in or thrust aside whatever came in their path, securely
confident of being Caesar's favorite protectors, and unassailable while
he was near. Their coarse, barbaric tones shook the air, and reduced the
Greeks to silence; for, even in his drunken and most reckless moods, the
Greek never lost his subtle refinement. The warriors rarely met a
friendly glance from the eye of a native; still, the gold of these lavish
revelers was as welcome to the women as that of a fellow-countryman.
The blaze of light shone, too, on many a fray, such as flared up in an
instant whenever Greek and Roman came into contact. The lictors and
townwatch could generally succeed in parting the combatants, for the
orders of the authorities were that they should in every case side with
the Romans.
The shouts and squabbling of men, the laughing and singing of women,
mingled with the word of command. Flutes and lyres, cymbals and drums,
were heard from the trellised tavern arbors and cook-shops along the way;
and from the little temple to Aphrodite, where Melissa had promised to
meet the Roman physician next morning, came the laughter and song of
unbridled lovers. As a rule, the Kanopic Way was the busiest and gayest
street in the town; but on this night the street of Hermes had been the
most popular, for it led to the Serapeum, where Caesar was lodged; and
from the temple poured a tide of pleasure-seekers, mingling with the
flood of humanity which streamed on to catch a glimpse of imperial
splendor, or to look at the troops encamped on the space in front of the
Serapeum. The whole street was like a crowded fair; and Alexander had
several times to follow Agatha and her escort out into the roadway,
quitting the shelter of the arcade, to escape a party of rioters or the
impertinent addresses of strangers.
The sham old man, however, was so clever at making way for the damsel,
whose face and form were effectually screened by her kerchief from the
passers-by, that Alexander had no opportunity for offering her his aid,
or proving his devotion by some gallant act. That it was his duty to save
her from the perils of spending a whole night under the protection of
this venal deceiver and her worthless colleague, he had long since
convinced himself; still, the fear of bringing her into a more painful
position by attracting the attention of the crowd if he were to attack
her escort, kept him back.
They had now stopped again under the colonnade, on the left-hand side of
the road. Castor had taken the girl's hand, and, as he bade her
good-night, promised, in emphatic tones, to be with her again very early
and escort her to the lake. Agatha thanked him warmly. At this a storm of
rage blew Alexander's self-command to the four winds, and, before he knew
what he was doing; he stood between the rascal and the Christian damsel,
snatched their hands asunder, gripping Castor's wrist with his strong
right hand, while he held Agatha's firmly in his left, and exclaimed:
"You are being foully tricked, fair maid; the woman, even, is deceiving
you. This fellow is a base villain!"
And, releasing the arm which Castor was desperately but vainly trying to
free from his clutch, he snatched off the false beard.
Agatha, who had also been endeavoring to escape from his grasp, gave a
shriek of terror and indignation. The unmasked rogue, with a swift
movement, snatched the hood of the caracalla off Alexander's head, flew
at his throat with the fury and agility of a panther, and with much
presence of mind called for help. And Castor was strong too while
Alexander tried to keep him off with his right hand, holding on to Agatha
with his left, the shouts of the deaconess and her accomplice soon
collected a crowd. They were instantly surrounded by an inquisitive mob,
laughing or scolding the combatants, and urging them to fight or
beseeching them to separate. But just as the artist had succeeded in
twisting his opponent's wrist so effectually as to bring him to his
knees, a loud voice of malignant triumph, just behind him, exclaimed:
"Now we have snared our scoffer! The fox should not stop to kill the hare
when the hunters are at his heels!"
"Zminis!" gasped Alexander. He understood in a flash that life and
liberty were at stake.
Like a stag hemmed in by dogs, he turned his head to this side and that,
seeking a way of escape; and when he looked again where his antagonist
had stood, the spot was clear; the nimble rascal had taken to his heels
and vanished among the throng. But a pair of eyes met the painter's gaze,
which at once restored him to self-possession, and reminded him that he
must collect his wits and presence of mind. They were those of his sister
Melissa, who, as she made her way onward with her companion, had
recognized her brother's voice. In spite of the old woman's earnest
advice not to mix in the crowd, she had pushed her way through, and, as
the men-at-arms dispersed the mob, she came nearer to her favorite but
too reckless brother.
Alexander still held Agatha's hand. The poor girl herself, trembling with
terror, did not know what had befallen her. Her venerable escort was a
young man--a liar. What was she to think of the deaconess, who was his
confederate; what of this handsome youth who had unmasked the deceiver,
and saved her perhaps from some fearful fate?
As in a thunder-storm flash follows flash, so, in this dreadful night,
one horror had followed another, to bewilder the brain of a maiden who
had always lived a quiet life among good and quiet men and women. And now
the guardians of the peace had laid hands on the man who had so bravely
taken her part, and whose bright eyes had looked into her own with such
truth and devotion. He was to be dragged to prison; so he, too, no doubt,
was a criminal. At this thought she tried to release her hand, but he
would not let it go; for the deaconess had come close to Agatha, and, in
a tone of sanctimonious wrath, desired her to quit this scene.
What was she to do? Terrified and undecided, with deceit on one hand and
on the other peril and perhaps disaster, she looked first at Elizabeth
and then at Alexander, who, in spite of the threats of the man-at-arms,
gazed in turns at her and at the spot where his sister had stood.
The lictors who were keeping off the mob had stopped Melissa too; but
while Alexander had been gazing into Agatha's imploring eyes, feeling as
though all his blood had rushed to his heart and face, Melissa had
contrived to creep up close to him. And again the sight of her gave him
the composure he so greatly needed. He knew, indeed, that the hand which
still held Agatha's would in a moment be fettered, for Zminis had ordered
his slaves to bring fresh ropes and chains, since they had already found
use for those they had first brought out. It was to this circumstance
alone that he owed it that he still was free. And, above all things, he
must warn Agatha against the deaconess, who would fain persuade her to go
with her.
It struck his alert wit that Agatha would trust his sister rather than
himself, whom the Egyptian had several times abused as a criminal; and
seeing the old woman of Polybius's household making her way up to
Melissa, out of breath, indeed, and with disordered hair, he felt light
dawn on his soul, for this worthy woman was a fresh instrument to his
hand. She must know Agatha well, if the girl were indeed the daughter of
Zeno.
He lost not an instant. With swift decision, while Zminis and his men
were disputing as to whither they should conduct the traitor as soon as
the fetters were brought, he released the maiden's hand, placing it in
Melissa's, and exclaiming:
"This is my sister, the betrothed of Diodoros, Polybius's son--your
neighbor, if you are the daughter of Zeno. She will take care of you."
Agatha had at once recognized the old nurse, and when she confirmed
Alexander's statement, and the Christian looked in Melissa's face, she
saw beyond the possibility of doubt an innocent woman, whose heart she
might fully trust.
She threw her arm round Melissa, as if to lean on her, and the deaconess
turned away with well-curbed wrath and vanished into an open door.
All this had occupied but a very few minutes; and when Alexander saw the
two beings he most loved in each other's embrace, and Agatha rescued from
the deceiver and in safe keeping, he drew a deep breath, saying to his
sister, as if relieved from a heavy burden:
"Her name is Agatha, and to her, the image of the dead Korinna, my life
henceforth is given. Tell her this, Melissa."
His impassioned glance sought that of the Christian; and when she
returned it, blushing, but with grateful candor, his mirthful features
beamed with the old reckless jollity, and he glanced again at the crowd
about him.
What did he see there? Melissa observed that his whole face was suddenly
lighted up; and when Zminis signed to the man who was making his way to
the spot holding up the rope, Alexander began to sing the first words of
a familiar song. In an instant it was taken up by several voices, and
then, as if from an echo, by the whole populace.
It was the chant by which the lads in the Gymnasium of Timagetes were
wont to call on each other for help when they had a fray with those of
the Gymnasium of the Dioscuri, with whom they had a chronic feud.
Alexander had caught sight of his friends Jason and Pappus, of the
sculptor Glaukias, and of several other fellow-artists; they understood
the appeal, and, before the night-watch could use the rope on their
captive, the troop of young men had forced their way through the circle
of armed men under the leadership of Glaukias, had surrounded Alexander,
and run off with him in their midst, singing and shouting.
"Follow him! Catch him! Stop him!--living or dead, bring him back! A
price is on his head--a splendid price to any one who will take him!"
cried the Egyptian, foaming with rage and setting the example. But the
youth of the town, many of whom knew the artist, and who were at all
times ready to spoil sport for the sycophants and spies, crowded up
between the fugitive and his pursuers and barred the way.
The lictors and their underlings did indeed, at last, get through the
solid wall of shouting and scolding men and women; but by that time the
troop of artists had disappeared down a side street.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Force which had compelled every one to do as his neighbors
It is the passionate wish that gives rise to the belief
A THORNY PATH
By Georg Ebers
Volume 4.
CHAPTER XI.
Melissa, too, would probably have found herself a prisoner, but that
Zminis, seeing himself balked of a triumph, and beside himself with rage,
rushed after the fugitive with the rest. She had no further occasion to
seek the house where her lover was lying, for Agatha knew it well. Its
owner, Proterius, was an illustrious member of the Christian community,
and she had often been to see him with her father.
On their way the girls confided to each other what had brought them out
into the streets at so unusual an hour; and when Melissa spoke of her
companion's extraordinary resemblance to the dead daughter of
Seleukus--which, no doubt, had been Alexander's inducement to follow
her--Agatha told her that she had constantly been mistaken for her
uncle's daughter, so early lost. She herself had not seen her cousin for
some few years, for Seleukus had quarreled with his brother's family when
they had embraced Christianity. The third brother, Timotheus, the
high-priest of Serapis, had proved more placable, and his wife Euryale
was of all women the one she loved best. And presently it appeared that
Agatha, too, had lost her mother, and this drew the girls so closely
together, that they clasped hands and walked on like sisters or old and
dear friends.
They were not kept long waiting outside the house of Proterius, for
Andreas was in the vestibule arranging the litter for the conveyance of
Diodoros, with the willing help of Ptolemaeus. The freedman was indeed
amazed when he heard Melissa's voice, and blamed her for this fresh
adventure. However, he was glad to see her, for, although it seemed
almost beyond the bounds of possibility, he had already fancied more than
once, as steps had approached and passed, that she must surely be coming
to lend him a helping hand.
It was easy to hear in his tone of voice that her bold venture was at
least as praiseworthy as it was blameworthy in his eyes, and the grave
man was as cheerful as he commonly was only when among his flowers. Never
before had Melissa heard a word of compliment from his lips, but as
Agatha stood with one arm round Melissa's shoulders, he said to the
physician, as he pointed to the pair, "Like two roses on one stem!"
He had good reason, indeed, to be content. Diodoros was no worse, and
Galen was certainly expected to visit the sick in the Serapeum. He
regarded it, too, as a dispensation from Heaven that Agatha and Melissa
should have happened to meet, and Alexander's happy escape had taken a
weight from his mind. He willingly acceded to Melissa's request that he
would take her and Agatha to see the sick man; but he granted them only a
short time to gaze at the sleeper, and then requested the deaconess to
find a room for the two damsels, who needed rest.
The worthy woman rose at once; but Melissa urgently entreated to be
allowed to remain by her lover's side, and glanced anxiously at the keys
in the matron's hand.
At this Andreas whispered to her: "You are afraid lest I should prevent
your coming with us? But it is not so; and, indeed, of what use would it
be? You made your way past the guards to the senator's coach; you came
across the lake, and through the darkness and the drunken rabble in the
streets; if I were to lock you in, you would be brave enough to
jump out of the window. No, no; I confess you have conquered my
objections--indeed, if you should now refuse your assistance, I should be
obliged to crave it. But Ptolemaeus wishes to leave Diodoros quite
undisturbed till daybreak. He is now gone to the Serapeum to find a good
place for him. You, too, need rest, and you shall be waked in good time.
Go, now, with Dame Katharine.--As to your relations," he added, to
Agatha, "do not be uneasy. A boy is already on his way to your father, to
tell him where you are for the night."
The deaconess led the two girls to a room where there was a large double
bed. Here the new friends stretched their weary limbs; but, tired as they
were, neither of them seemed disposed to sleep; they were so happy to
have found each other, and had so much to ask and tell each other! As
soon as Katharine had lighted a three-branched lamp she left them to
themselves, and then their talk began.
Agatha, clinging to her new friend, laid her head on Melissa's shoulder;
and as Melissa looked on the beautiful face, and remembered the fond
passion which her heedless brother had conceived for its twin image, or
as now and again the Christian girl's loving words appealed to her more
especially, she stroked the long, flowing tresses of her brown hair.
It needed, indeed, no more than a common feeling, an experience gone
through together, an hour of confidential solitude, to join the hearts of
the two maidens; and as they awaited the day, shoulder to shoulder in
uninterrupted chat, they felt as though they had shared every joy and
sorrow from the cradle. Agatha's weaker nature found a support in the
calm strength of will which was evident in many things Melissa said; and
when the Christian opened her tender and pitying heart to Melissa with
touching candor, it was like a view into a new but most inviting world.
Agatha's extreme beauty, too, struck the artist's daughter as something
divine, and her eye often rested admiringly on her new friend's pure and
regular features.
When Agatha inquired of her about her father, Melissa briefly replied,
that since her mother's death he was often moody and rough, but that he
had a good, kind heart. The Christian girl, on the contrary, spoke with
enthusiasm of the warm, human loving-kindness of the man to whom she owed
her being; and the picture she drew of her home life was so fair, that
the little heathen could hardly believe in its truth. Her father, Agatha
said, lived in constant warfare with the misery and suffering of his
fellow-creatures, and he was, in fact, able to make those about him happy
and prosperous. The poorest were dearest to his loving heart, and on his
estate across the lake he had collected none but the sick and wretched.
The care of the children was left to her, and the little ones clung to
her as if she were their mother. She had neither brother nor sister.--And
so the conversation turned on Alexander, of whom Agatha could never hear
enough.
And how proud was Melissa to speak of the bright young artist, who till
now had been the sun of her joyless life! There was much that was good to
be said about him: for the best masters rated his talent highly in spite
of his youth; his comrades were faithful; and none knew so well as he how
to cheer his father's dark moods. Then, there were many amiable and
generous traits of which she had been told, or had herself known. With
his very first savings, he had had the Genius with a reversed torch cast
in bronze to grace his mother's grave, and give his father pleasure. Once
he had been brought home half dead after saving a woman and child from
drowning, and vainly endeavoring to rescue another child. He might be
wild and reckless, but he had always been faithful to his art and to his
love for his family.
Agatha's eyes opened widely when Melissa told her anything good about her
brother, and she clung in terror to her new friend as she heard of her
excited orgy with her lover.
Scared as though some imminent horror threatened herself, she clasped
Melissa's hand as she listened to the tale of the dangers Alexander had
so narrowly escaped.
Such things had never before reached the ears of the girl in her retired
Christian home beyond the lake; they sounded to her as the tales of some
bold seafarer to the peaceful husbandman on whose shores the storm has
wrecked him.
"And do you know," she exclaimed, "all this seems delightful to me,
though my father, I am sure, would judge it hardly! When your brother
risks his life, it is always for others, and that is right--that is the
highest life. I think of him as an angel with a flaming sword. But you do
not know our sacred scriptures."
Then Melissa would hear more of this book, of which Andreas had
frequently spoken; but there was a knock at the door, and she sprang out
of bed.
Agatha did the same; and when a slave-girl had brought in fresh, cold
water, she insisted on handing her friend the towels, on plaiting her
long hair, pinning her peplos in its place, and arranging its folds. She
had so often longed for a sister, and she felt as though she had found
one in Melissa! While she helped her to dress she kissed her preserver's
sister on the eyes and lips, and entreated her with affectionate urgency
to come to see her, as soon as she had done all she could for her lover.
She must be made acquainted with her father, and Agatha longed to show
her her poor children, her dogs, and her pigeons. And she would go to see
Melissa, when she was staying with Polybius.
"And there," Melissa put in, "you will see my brother, too."
On which the Christian girl exclaimed: "You must bring him to our house.
My father will be glad to thank him--" Here she paused, and then added,
"Only he must not again risk his life so rashly."
"He will be well hidden at the house of Polybius," replied Melissa,
consolingly. "And Andreas has him fast by this time."
She once more kissed Agatha, and went to the door, but her friend held
her back, and whispered "In my father's grounds there is a famous hiding
place, where no one would ever find him. It has often been a refuge for
weeks and months for persecuted members of our faith. When he is
seriously threatened, bring him to us. We will gladly provide for his
safety, and all else. Only think, if they should catch him! It would be
for my sake, and I should never be happy again. Promise me that you will
bring him."
"Yes, certainly," cried Melissa, as she hurried out into the vestibule,
where Andreas and the leech were waiting for her.
They had done well to enlist the girl's services, for, since nursing her
mother, she knew, as few did, how to handle the sick. It was not till
they had fairly set out that Melissa observed that Dame Katharine was of
the party; she had no doubt become reconciled to the idea of the sick
man's removal to the Serapeum, for she had the same look of kindly calm
which had so much attracted the girl at their first meeting.
The streets along which they passed in the pale morning light were now
deserted, and a film of mist, behind which glowed the golden light of the
newly risen sun, shrouded the horizon. The fresh air of morning was
delicious, and at this early hour there was no one to avoid--only the
peasants and their wives carrying the produce of their gardens and fields
to market on asses, or wagons drawn by oxen. The black slaves of the town
were sweeping the roadway. Here there were parties of men, women, and
children on their way to work in factories, which were at rest but for a
few hours in the bustling town. The bakers and other provision-dealers
were opening their shops; the cobblers and metalworkers were already busy
or lighting fires in their open stalls; and Andreas nodded to a file of
slave-girls who had come across from the farm and gardens of Polybius,
and who now walked up the street with large milk-jars and baskets of
vegetables poised on their heads and supported with one gracefully raised
arm.
They presently crossed the Aspendia Canal, where the fog hung over the
water like white smoke, hiding the figure of the tutelary goddess of the
town on the parapet of the bridge from those who crossed by the roadway.
The leaves of the mimosa-trees by the quay--nay, the very stones of the
houses and the statues, wet with the morning dew--looked revived and
newly washed; and a light breeze brought up from the Serapeum broken
tones of the chant, sung there every morning by a choir of priests, to
hail the triumph of light over darkness.
The crisp morning air was as invigorating to Melissa as her cold bath had
been, after a night which had brought her so little rest. She felt as
though she, and all Nature with her, had just crossed the threshold of a
new day, bidding her to fresh life and labor. Now and then a flame from
Lucifer's torch swallowed up a stretch of morning mist, while the Hours
escorted Phoebus Apollo, whose radiant diadem of beams was just rising
above the haze; Melissa could have declared she saw them dancing forth
before him and strewing the path of the sun with flowers. All this was
beautiful--as beautiful as the priest's chant, the aromatic sweetness of
the air, and the works of art in cast bronze or hewn marble which were to
be seen on the bridge, on the temple to Isis and Anubis to the right of
the street, under the colonnades of the handsomest houses, on the public
fountains--in short, wherever the eye might turn. Her lover, borne before
her in a litter, was on the way to the physician in whose hands lay the
power to cure him. She felt as though Hope led the way.
Since love had blossomed in her breast her quiet life had become an
eventful one. Most of what she had gone through had indeed filled her
with alarms. Serious questions to which she had never given a thought had
been brought before her; and yet, in this brief period of anxiety she had
gained the precious sense of youthfulness and of capacity for action when
she had to depend on herself. The last few hours had revealed to her the
possession of powers which only yesterday she had never suspected. She,
who had willingly yielded to every caprice of her father's, and who, for
love of her brothers, had always unresistingly done their bidding, now
knew that she had a will of her own and strength enough to assert it; and
this, again, added to her contentment this morning.
Alexander had told her, and old Dido, and Diodoros, that she was fair to
look upon--but these all saw her with the eyes of affection; so she had
always believed that she was a well-looking girl enough, but by no means
highly gifted in any respect--a girl whose future would be to bloom and
fade unknown in her father's service. But now she knew that she was
indeed beautiful; not only because she had heard it repeatedly in the
crowd of yesterday, or even because Agatha had declared it while braiding
her hair--an inward voice affirmed it, and for her lover's sake she was
happy to believe it.
As a rule, she would have been ready to drop with fatigue after so many
sleepless hours and such severe exertions; but to-day she felt as fresh
as the birds in the trees by the roadside, which greeted the sun with
cheerful twitterings.
"Yes, the world is indeed fair!" thought she; but at that very moment
Andreas's grave voice was heard ordering the bearers to turn down a dark
side alley which led into the street of Hermes, a few hundred paces from
the Rhakotis Canal.
How anxious the good man looked! Her world was not the world of the
Christian freedman; that she plainly understood when the litter in which
Diodoros lay was carried into one of the houses in the side street.
It was a large, plain building, with only a few windows, and those high
up-in fact, as Melissa was presently informed, it was a Christian church.
Before she could express her surprise, Andreas begged her to have a few
minutes' patience; the daemons of sickness were here to be exorcised and
driven out of the sufferer. He pointed to a seat in the vestibule to the
church, a wide but shallow room. Then, at a sign from Andreas, the slaves
carried the litter into a long, low hall with a flat roof.
From where she sat, Melissa could now see that a Christian in priest's
robes, whom they called the exorcist, spoke various invocations over the
sick man, the others listening so attentively that even she began to hope
for some good effect from these incomprehensible formulas; and at the
same time she remembered that her old slave-woman Dido, who worshiped
many gods, wore round her neck, besides a variety of heathen amulets, a
little cross which had been given her by a Christian woman. To her
question why she, a heathen, wore this about her, the old woman replied,
"You can never tell what may help you some day." So perhaps these
exorcisms might not be without some effect on her lover, particularly as
the God of the Christians must be powerful and good.
She herself strove to uplift her soul in prayer to the manes of her lost
mother; but the scene going on around her in the vestibule distracted her
mind with horror. Men, young and old, were slashing themselves with
vehement scourgings on their backs. One white-haired old man, indeed,
handed his whip of hippopotamus-hide to a stalwart lad whose shoulders
were streaming with blood, and begged him as a brother, as fervently as
though it were the greatest favor, to let him feel the lash. But the
younger man refused, and she saw the weak old fellow trying to apply it
to his own back.
All this was quite beyond her comprehension, and struck her as,
disgusting; and how haggard and hideous were the limbs of these people
who thus sinned against their own bodies--the noble temples of the Divine
Spirit!
When, a few minutes later, the litter was borne out of the church again,
the sun had triumphed over the mists and was rising with blinding
splendor in the cloudless sky. Everything was bathed in light; but the
dreadful sight of the penitents had cast a gloom over the clear gladness
she had been so full of but just now. It was with a sense of oppression
that she took leave of the deaconess, who left her with cheerful
contentment in the street of Hermes, and followed the litter to the open
square in front of the Serapeum.
Here every thought of gloom vanished from her mind as at the touch of a
magician, for before her stood the vast Temple of Serapis, founded, as it
were, for eternity, on a substructure of rock and closely fitted masonry,
the noblest building on earth of any dedicated to the gods. The great
cupola rose to the blue sky as though it fain would greet the sister
vault above with its own splendor, and the copper-plating which covered
it shone as dazzling as a second sun. From the wide front of the temple,
every being to whom the prayers and worship of mortals could be offered
looked down on her, hewn in marble or cast in bronze; for on the roof, on
brackets or on pedestals; in niches or as supporting the parapets and
balconies, were statues of all the guests at the Olympian banquet, with
images or busts of every hero or king, philosopher, poet, or artist whose
deeds or works had earned him immortality.
From infancy Melissa had looked up at this temple with admiration and
pride, for here every art had done its utmost to make it without parallel
on earth. It was the work of her beloved native city, and her mother had
often taken her into the Serapeum, where she herself had found comfort in
many a sorrow and disappointment, and had taught the child to love it.
That it had afterward been spoiled for her she forgot in her present
mood.
Never had she seen the great temple surrounded by so much gay and busy
life. The front of the building, toward the square, had in the early
hours of the morning been decked with garlands and heavy wreaths of
flowers, by a swarm of slaves standing on ladders and planks and benches
let down from the roof by ropes. The inclined ways, by which vehicles
drove up to the great door, were still deserted, and on the broad steps
in the middle no one was to be seen as yet but a few priests in gala
robes, and court officials; but the immense open space in front of the
sanctuary was one great camp, where, among the hastily pitched canvas
tents, horses were being dressed and weapons polished. Several maniples
of the praetorians and of the Macedonian phalanx were already drawn up in
compact ranks, to relieve guard at the gate of the imperial residence,
and stand at Caesar's orders.
But more attractive to the girl than all this display were a number of
altars which had been erected at the extreme edge of the great square,
and on each of which a fire was burning. Heavy clouds of smoke went up
from them in the still, pure atmosphere, like aerial columns, while the
flames, paling in the beams of the morning sun, flew up through the reek
as though striving to rise above it, with wan and changeful gleams of red
and yellow, now curling down, and now writhing upward like snakes. Of all
these fires there was not one from which the smoke did not mount straight
to heaven, though each burned to a different god; and Melissa regarded it
as a happy sign that none spread or failed to rise. The embers were
stirred from time to time by the priests and augurs of every god of the
East and West, who also superintended the sacrifices, while warriors of
every province of the empire stood round in prayer.
Melissa passed by all these unwonted and soul-stirring sights without a
regret; her hope for the cure soon to be wrought on her lover cast all
else into the shade. Still, while she looked around at the thousands who
were encamped here, and gazed up at the temple where so many men were
busied, like ants, it struck her that in fact all this belonged to one
and was done for one alone. Those legions followed him as the dust
follows the wind, the whole world trembled at his nod, and in his hand
lay the life and happiness of the millions he governed. And it was at
this omnipotent being, this god in human form, that her brother had
mocked; and the pursuers were at his heels. This recollection troubled
her joy, and when she looked in the freedman's grave and anxious face her
heart began to beat heavily again.
CHAPTER XII.
Melissa had supposed that, according to custom, the litter would be
carried up the incline or the steps, and into the Serapeum by the great
door; but in consequence of the emperor's visit this could not be. The
sick man was borne round the eastern side of the huge building, which
covered a space on which a whole village might have stood. The door at
the back, to the south, through which he was finally admitted, opened
into a gallery passing by the great quadrangle where sacrifice was made,
and leading to the inner rooms of the temple, to the cubicles among
others.
In these it was revealed to the sick in dreams by what means or remedies
they might hope to be healed: and there was no lack of priests to
interpret the visions, nor of physicians who came hither to watch
peculiar cases, to explain to the sufferers the purport of the counsel of
the gods--often very dark--or to give them the benefit of their own.
One of these, a friend of Ptolemaeus, who, though he had been secretly
baptized, still was one of the pastophori of the temple, was awaiting the
little party, and led the way as guide.
The bellowing of beasts met them on the very threshold. These were to be
slaughtered at this early hour by the special command of Caracalla; and,
as Caesar himself had promised to be present at the sacrificial rites,
none but the priests or "Caesar's friends" were admitted to the
court-yard. The litter was therefore carried up a staircase and through a
long hall forming part of the library, with large windows looking down on
the open place where the beasts were killed and the entrails examined.
Diodoros saw and heard nothing, for the injury to the skull had deprived
him of all consciousness; Ptolemaeus, however, to soothe Melissa, assured
her that he was sleeping soundly.
As they mounted the stairs she had kept close to her lover's side; but on
this assurance she lingered behind and looked about her.
As the little procession entered the gallery, in which the rolls of
manuscript lay in stone or wooden cases on long rows of shelves, the
shout was heard of "Hail, Caesar!" mingling with a solemn chant, and
announcing the sovereign's approach.
At this the physician pointed to the court-yard, and said to the girl,
whose beauty had greatly attracted him: "Look down there if you want to
see Caesar. We must wait here, at any rate, till the crowd has gone past
in the corridor beyond that door." And Melissa, whose feminine curiosity
had already tempted her to the window, looked down into the quadrangle
and on to the steps down which a maniple of the praetorian guard were
marching, with noble Romans in togas or the uniform of legates, augurs
wearing wreaths, and priests of various orders. Then for a few minutes
the steps were deserted, and Melissa thought she could hear her own heart
beating, when suddenly the cry: "Hail, Caesar!" was again heard, loud
trumpets rang out and echoed from the high stone walls which surrounded
the inclosure, and Caracalla appeared on the broad marble steps which led
down into the court of sacrifice.
Melissa's eyes were riveted as if spell-bound on this figure, which was
neither handsome nor dignified, and which nevertheless had a strange
attraction for her, she knew not why. What was it in this man, who was
short rather than tall, and feeble rather than majestic, which so
imperatively forbade all confident advances? The noble lion which walked
by his side, and in whose mane his left hand was buried, was not more
unapproachable than he. He called this terrible creature, which he
treated with as much familiarity as if it were a lapdog, his "Persian
sword"; and as Melissa looked she remembered what fate might be in store
for her brother through this man, and all the crimes of which he was
accused by the world--the murders of his brother, of his wife, and of
thousands besides.
For the first time in her life she felt that she could hate; she longed
to bring down every evil on that man's head. The blood mounted to her
cheeks, and her little fists were clinched, but she never took her eyes
off him; for everything in his person impressed her, if not as fine,
still as exceptional--if not as great, still as noteworthy.
She knew that he was not yet thirty, but yesterday, as he drove past her,
he had looked like a surly misanthropist of more than middle age. To-day
how young he seemed! Did he owe it to the laurel crown which rested on
his head, or to the white toga which fell about him in ample folds,
leaving only the sinewy arm bare by which he led the lion?
From where she stood she could only see his side-face as he came down the
steps, and indeed it was not ill-favored; brow, nose, and chin were
finely and nobly formed; his beard was thin, and a mustache curled over
his lips. His eyes, deeply set under the brows, were not visible to her,
but she had not forgotten since yesterday their sinister and terrible
scowl.
At this moment the lion crept closer to his master.
If only the brute should spring on that more blood-stained and terrible
beast of prey who could kill not only with claws and teeth but with a
word from his lips, a wave of his hand!--the world would be rid of the
ferocious curse. Ay, his eye, which had yesterday scorned to look at the
multitudes who had hailed his advent, was that of a cruel tyrant.
And then--she felt as if he must have guessed her thoughts--while he
patted the lion and gently pushed him aside he turned his face full on
her, and she knew not whether to be pleased or angry, for the odious,
squinting eyes were not now terrible or contemptuous; nay, they had
looked kindly on the beast, and with a somewhat suffering expression. The
dreadful face of the murderer was not hideous now, but engaging--the face
of a youth enduring torments of soul or of body.
She was not mistaken. On the very next step Caracalla stood still,
pressed his right hand to his temples, and set his lips as if to control
some acute pain. Then he sadly shook his head and gazed up at the walls
of the court, which had been decorated in his honor with hangings and
garlands of flowers. First he studied the frieze and the festal display
on his right, and when he turned his head to look at the side where
Melissa stood, an inward voice bade her withdraw, that the gaze of this
monster might not blight her. But an irresistible attraction held her
fast; then suddenly she felt as if the ground were sinking from under her
feet, and, as a shipwrecked wretch snatches at a floating spar, she clung
to the little column at the left of the window, clutching it with her
hand; for the dreadful thing had happened-Caracalla's eye had met hers
and had even rested on her for a while! And that gaze had nothing
bloodthirsty in it, nor the vile leer which had sparkled in the eyes of
the drunken rioters she had met last night in the streets; he only looked
astonished as at some wonderful thing which he had not expected to see in
this place. But presently a fresh attack of pain apparently made him turn
away, for his features betrayed acute suffering, as he slowly set his
foot on the next step below.
Again, and more closely, he pressed his hand to his brow, and then
beckoned to a tall, well-built man with flowing hair, who walked behind
him, and accepted the support of his offered arm.
"Theocritus, formerly an actor and dancer," the priest whispered to
Melissa. "Caesar's whim made the mimic a senator, a legate, and a
favorite."
But Melissa only knew that he was speaking, and did not take in the
purport of his speech; for this man, slowly descending the steps,
absorbed her whole sympathy. She knew well the look of those who suffer
and conceal it from the eyes of the world; and some cruel disease was
certainly consuming this youth, who ruled the earth, but whose purple
robes would be snatched at soon enough by greedy hands if he should cease
to seem strong and able. And now, again, he looked old and worn--poor
wretch, who yet was so young and born to be so abundantly happy! He was,
to be sure, a base and blood-stained tyrant, but not the less a miserable
and unhappy man. The more severe the pain he had to endure, the harder
must he find it to hide it from the crowd who were constantly about him.
There is but one antidote to hatred, and that is pity; it was with the
eager compassion of a woman's heart that Melissa marked every movement of
the imperial murderer, as soon as she recognized his sufferings, and when
their eyes had met. Nothing now escaped her keen glance which could add
to her sympathy for the man she had loathed but a minute before. She
noticed a slight limp in his gait and a convulsive twitching of his
eyelids; his slender, almost transparent hand, she reflected, was that of
a sick man, and pain and fever, no doubt, had thinned his hair, which had
left many places bald.
And when the high--priest of Serapis and the augurs met him at the bottom
of the steps and Caesar's eye again put on the cruel scowl of yesterday,
she would not doubt that it was stern self-command which gave him that
threatening glare, to seem terrible, in spite of his anguish, to those
whose obedience he required. He had really needed his companion's support
as they descended the stair, that she could plainly see; and she had
observed, too, how carefully his guide had striven to conceal the fact
that he was upholding him; but the courtier was too tall to achieve the
task he had set himself. Now, she was much shorter than Caesar, and she
was strong, too. Her arm would have afforded him a much better support.
But how could she think of such a thing?--she, the sister of Alexander,
the betrothed of Diodoros, whom she truly loved!
Caesar mingled with the priests, and her guide told her that the corridor
was now free. She peeped into the litter, and, seeing that Diodoros still
slept, she followed him, lost in thought, and giving short and heedless
answers to Andreas and the physicians She had not listened to the
priest's information, and scarcely turned her head to look out, when a
tall, thin man with a bullet-head and deeply wrinkled brow was pointed
out to her as Macrinus, the prefect of the body-guard, the most powerful
man in Rome next to Caesar; and then the "friends" of Caracalla, whom she
had seen yesterday, and the historian Dion Cassius, with other senators
and members of the imperial train.
Now, as they made their way through halls and passages where the foot of
the uninitiated rarely intruded, she looked about her with more interest
when the priest drew her attention to some particularly fine statue or
picture, or some symbolical presentment. Even now, however, though
association with her brothers had made her particularly alive to
everything that was beautiful or curious, she glanced round with less
interest than she otherwise might have done, for she had much else to
think of. In the first place, of the benefits Diodoros was to derive from
the great Galen; then of her father, who this day must dispense with her
assistance; and, finally, of the state of mind of her grave brother
Philip. He and Alexander, who usually were such united friends, now both
were in love with Agatha, and what could come of that? And from time to
time her thoughts flew back to Caesar, and she felt as though some tie,
she knew not what, linked them together.
As soon as the litter had to be carried up or down steps, she kept an eye
on the bearers, and gave such help as was needed when the sleeper's
position was changed. Whenever she looked in his handsome face, flushed
as it was by fever and framed in tumbled curls, her heart swelled, and
she felt that she had much to thank the gods for, seeing that her lover
was so full of splendid youth and in no respect resembled the prematurely
decrepit and sickly wearer of the purple. Nevertheless, she thought a
good deal of Caracalla, and it even occurred to her once that if it were
he who was being carried instead of Diodoros, she would tend him no less
carefully than her betrothed. Caesar, who had been as far out of her ken
as a god, and of whose overwhelming power she had heard, had suddenly
come down to her. She involuntarily thought of him as one of those few
with whom she had come into personal contact, and in whose weal or woe
she had some sympathetic interest. He could not be altogether evil and
hardened. If he could only know what pain it caused her to see him
suffer, he would surely command Zminis to abandon the pursuit of her
brother.
Just as they were reaching the end of their walk, the trumpets rang out
once more, reminding her that she was under the same roof with him. She
was so close to him--and yet how far he was from guessing the desires of
a heart which beat with compassion for him!
Several sick persons, eager for some communication from the gods, and
some who, without being sick, had slept in the Serapeum, had by this time
left their beds, and were taking counsel in the great hall with
interpreters and physicians. The bustle was like that of a market-place,
and there was one old man with unkempt hair and fiery eyes who repeated
again and again in a loud voice, "It was the god himself who appeared to
me, and his three-headed dog licked my cheeks." And presently a hideous
old woman plucked at Melissa's robe, whispering: "A healing draught for
your lover; tears from the eyes of the infant Horus. I have them from
Isis herself. The effect is rapid and certain. Come to Hezron, the dealer
in balsams in the street of the Nekropolis. Your lover's recovery--for
five drachmae."
But Melissa, who was no stranger here since her mother's last sickness,
went on without pausing, following the litter down the long hall full of
beds, a room with a stone roof resting on two rows of tall columns.
Familiar to her too was the aromatic scent of kyphi,--[incense]--which
filled the hall, although fresh air was constantly pouring in from
outside through the high windows. Red and green curtains hung in front of
them, and the subdued light which came through fell in tinted twilight on
the colored pictures in relief of the history of the gods, which covered
the walls. Speech was forbidden here, and their steps fell noiseless on
the thick, heavy mats.
Most of the beds were already empty; only those between the long wall and
the nearest row of columns were still for the most part occupied by the
sick who sought the help of the god. On one of these Diodoros was laid,
Melissa helping in silence, and with such skill as delighted even the
physicians. Still, this did not wake him, though on the next bed lay a
man who never ceased speaking, because in his dream he had been bidden to
repeat the name of Serapis as many times as there were drops in a cup of
water filled from the Agathodaemon Canal.
"A long stay in this strong perfume will be bad for him," whispered
Ptolemaeus to the freedman. "Galenus sent word that he would visit the
sick early to-day; but he is not here yet. He is an old man, and in Rome,
they say, it is the custom to sleep late."
He was interrupted by a stir in the long hall, which broke in on the
silence, no one knew from whence; and immediately after, officious hands
threw open the great double doors with a loud noise.
"He is coming," whispered their priestly guide; and the instant after an
old man crossed the threshold, followed by a troop of pastophori, as
obsequious as the courtiers at the heels of a prince.
"Gently, brothers," murmured the greatest physician of his age in a low
voice, as, leaning on a staff, he went toward the row of couches. It was
easy to see the traces of his eighty years, but his fine eyes still
gleamed with youthful light.
Melissa blushed to think that she could have mistaken Serenus Samonicus
for this noble old man. He must once have been a tall man; his back was
bent and his large head was bowed as though he were forever seeking
something. His face was pale and colorless, with a well-formed nose and
mouth, but not of classic mold. Blue veins showed through the clear white
skin, and the long, silky, silvery hair still flowed in unthinned waves
round his massive head, bald only on the crown. A snowy beard fell over
his breast. His aged form was wrapped in a long and ample robe of costly
white woolen stuff, and his whole appearance would have been striking for
its peculiar refinement, even if the eyes had not sparkled with such
vivid and piercing keenness from under the thick brows, and if the high,
smooth, slightly prominent forehead had not borne witness to the power
and profundity of his mind. Melissa knew of no one with whom to compare
him; he reminded Andreas of the picture of John as an old man, which a
wealthy fellow-Christian had presented to the church of Saint Mark.
If this man could do nothing, there was no help on earth. And how
dignified and self-possessed were the movements of this bent old man as
he leaned on his staff! He, a stranger here, seemed to be showing the
others the way, a guide in his own realm. Melissa had heard that the
strong scent of the kyphi might prove injurious to Diodoros, and her one
thought now was the desire that Galenus might soon approach his couch. He
did not, in fact, begin with the sick nearest to the door, but stood
awhile in the middle of the hall, leaning against a column and surveying
the place and the beds.
When his searching glance rested on that where Diodoros was lying, an
answering look met his with reverent entreaty from a pair of beautiful,
large, innocent eyes. A smile parted his bearded lips, and going up to
the girl he said: "Where beauty bids, even age must obey. Your lover,
child, or your brother?"
"My betrothed," Melissa hastened to reply; and the maidenly embarrassment
which flushed her cheek became her so well that he added:
"He must have much to recommend him if I allow him to carry you off, fair
maid."
With these words he went up to the couch, and looking at Diodoros as he
lay, he murmured, as if speaking to himself and without paying any heed
to the younger men who crowded round him:
"There are no true Greeks left here; but the beauty of the ancestral race
is not easily stamped out, and is still to be seen in their descendants.
What a head, what features, and what hair!"
Then he felt the lad's breast, shoulders, and arms, exclaiming in honest
admiration, "What a godlike form!"
He laid his delicate old hand, with its network of blue veins, on the
sick man's forehead, again glanced round the room, and listened to
Ptolemaeus, who gave him a brief and technical report of the case; then,
sniffing the heavy scent that filled the hall, he said, as the Christian
leech ceased speaking:
"We will try; but not here--in a room less full of incense. This perfume
brings dreams, but no less surely induces fever. Have you no other room
at hand where the air is purer?"
An eager "Yes," in many voices was the reply; and Diodoros was forthwith
transferred into a small cubicle adjoining.
While he was being moved, Galenus went from bed to bed, questioning the
chief physician and the patients. He seemed to have forgotten Diodoros
and Melissa; but after hastily glancing at some and carefully examining
others, and giving advice where it was needful, he desired to see the
fair Alexandrian's lover once more.
As he entered the room he nodded kindly to the girl. How gladly would she
have followed him! But she said to herself that if he had wished her to
be present he would certainly have called her; so she modestly awaited
his return. She had to wait a long time, and the minutes seemed hours
while she heard the voices of men through the closed door, the moaning
and sighing of the sufferer, the splashing of water, and the clatter of
metal instruments; and her lively imagination made her fancy that
something almost unendurable was being done to her lover.
At last the physician came out. His whole appearance betokened perfect
satisfaction. The younger men, who followed him, whispered among
themselves, shaking their heads as though some miracle had been
performed; and every eye that looked on him was radiant with enthusiastic
veneration. Melissa knew, as soon as his eyes met hers, that all was
well, and as she grasped the old man's hand she concluded from its cool
moisture that he had but just washed it, and had done with his own hand
all that Ptolemaeus had expected of his skill. Her eyes were dim with
grateful emotion, and though Galenus strove to hinder her from pressing
her lips to his hand she succeeded in doing so; he, however, kissed her
brow with fatherly delight in her warmhearted sweetness, and said:
"Now go home happy, my child. That stone had hit your lover's brain-roof
a hard blow; the pressure of the broken beam--I mean a piece of bone--had
robbed him of his consciousness of what a sweet bride the gods have
bestowed on him. But the knife has done its work; the beam is in its
place again; the splinters which were not needed have been taken out; the
roof is mended, and the pressure removed. Your friend has recovered
consciousness, and I will wager that at this moment he is thinking of you
and wishes you were with him. But for the present you had better defer
the meeting. For forty-eight hours he must remain in that little room,
for any movement would only delay his recovery."
"Then I shall stay here to nurse him," cried Melissa, eagerly. But
Galenus replied, decisively:
"That must not be if he is to get well. The presence of a woman for whom
the sufferer's heart is on fire is as certain to aggravate the fever as
the scent of incense. Besides, child, this is no place for such as you."
Her head drooped sadly, but he nodded to her cheeringly as he added:
"Ptolemaeus, who is worthy of your entire confidence, speaks of you as a
girl of much sense, and you will surely not do anything to spoil my work,
which was not easy. However, I must say farewell; other sick require my
care."
He held out his hand, but, seeing her eyes fixed on his and glittering
through tears, he asked her name and family. It seemed to him of good
augury for the long hours before him which he must devote to Caesar, that
he should, so early in the day, have met so pure and fair a flower of
girlhood.
When she had told him her own name and her father's, and also mentioned
her brothers, Philip the philosopher, and Alexander the painter, who was
already one of the chief masters of his art here, Galenus answered
heartily:
"All honor to his genius, then, for he is the one-eyed king in the land
of the blind. Like the old gods, who can scarce make themselves heard for
the new, the Muses too have been silenced. The many really beautiful
things to be seen here are not new; and the new, alas! are not beautiful.
But your brother's work," he added, kindly, "may be the exception."
"You should only see his portraits!" cried Melissa.
"Yours, perhaps, among them?" said the old man, with interest. "That is a
reminder I would gladly take back to Rome with me."
Alexander had indeed painted his sister not long before, and how glad she
was to be able to offer the picture to the reverend man to whom she owed
so much! So she promised with a blush to send it him as soon as she
should be at home again.
The unexpected gift was accepted with pleasure, and when he thanked her
eagerly and with simple heartiness, she interrupted him with the
assurance that in Alexandria art was not yet being borne to the grave.
Her brother's career, it was true, threatened to come to an untimely end,
for he stood in imminent danger. On this the old man--who had taken his
seat on a bench which the attendant physicians of the temple had brought
forward-desired to know the state of the case, and Melissa briefly
recounted Alexander's misdemeanor, and how near he had been, yesterday,
to falling into the hands of his pursuers. Then she looked up at the old
man beseechingly; and as he had praised her beauty, so now--she herself
knew not how she had such courage--the praises of his fame, his greatness
and goodness, flowed from her lips. And her bold entreaties ended with a
prayer that he would urge Caesar, who doubtless revered him as a father,
to cease from prosecuting her brother.
The old man's face had grown graver and graver; he had several times
stroked his white beard with an uneasy gesture; and when, as she spoke
the last words, she ventured to raise her timidly downcast eyes to his,
he rose stiffly and said in regretful tones:
"How can I be vexed with a sister who knocks at any door to save a
brother's life? But I would have given a great deal that it had not been
at mine. It is hard to refuse when I would so gladly accede, and yet so
it must be; for, though Claudius Galenus does his best for Bassianus
Antoninus as a patient, as he does for any other, Bassianus the man and
the emperor is as far from him as fire from water; and so it must ever be
during the short space of time which may yet be granted to him and me
under the light of the sun."
The last words were spoken in a bitter, repellent tone, and yet Melissa
felt that it pained the old man to refuse her. So she earnestly
exclaimed:
"Oh, forgive me! How could I guess--" She suddenly paused and added,
"Then you really think that Caesar has not long to live?"
She spoke with the most anxious excitement, and her question offended
Galenus. He mistook their purport, and his voice was wrathful as he
replied, "Long enough yet to punish an insult!"
Melissa turned pale. She fancied that she apprehended the meaning of
these stern words, and, prompted by an earnest desire not to be
misunderstood by this man, she eagerly exclaimed:
"I do not wish him dead--no, indeed not; not even for my brother's sake!
But just now I saw him near, and I thought I could see that he was
suffering great pain. Why, we pity a brute creature when it is in
anguish. He is still so young, and it must be so hard to die!"
Galenus nodded approvingly, and replied:
"I thank you, in the name of my imperial patient.--Well, send me your
portrait; but let it be soon, for I embark before sunset. I shall like to
remember you. As to Caesar's sufferings, they are so severe, your tender
soul would not wish your worst enemy to know such pain. My art has few
means of mitigating them, and the immortals are little inclined to
lighten the load they have laid on this man. Of the millions who tremble
before him, not one prays or offers sacrifice of his own free-will for
the prosperity of the monarch."
A flash of enthusiasm sparkled in Melissa's eye, but Galenus did not heed
it; he briefly bade her farewell and turned away to devote himself to
other patients.
"There is one, at any rate," thought she, as she looked after the
physician, "who will pray and sacrifice for that unhappy man. Diodoros
will not forbid it, I am sure."
She turned to Andreas and desired him to take her to her lover. Diodoros
was now really sleeping, and did not feel the kiss she breathed on his
fore head. He had all her love; the suffering criminal she only pitied.
When they had quitted the temple she pressed her hand to her bosom and
drew a deep breath as if she had just been freed from prison.
"My head is quite confused," she said, "by the heavy perfume and so much
anxiety and alarm; but O Andreas, my heart never beat with such joy and
gratitude! Now I must collect my thoughts, and get home to do what is
needful for Philip. And merciful gods! that good-natured old Roman,
Samonicus, will soon be expecting me at the Temple of Aphrodite; see how
high the sun is already. Let us walk faster, for, to keep him waiting--"
Andreas here interrupted her, saying, "If I am not greatly mistaken,
there is the Roman, in that open chariot, coming down the incline."
He was right; a few minutes later the chariot drew up close to Melissa,
and she managed to tell Samonicus all that had happened in so courteous
and graceful a manner that, far from being offended, he could wish every
success to the cure his great friend had begun. And indeed his promise
had somewhat weighed upon his mind, for to carry out two undertakings in
one day was too much, at his age, and he had to be present in the evening
at a banquet to which Caesar had invited himself in the house of Seleukus
the merchant."
"The high-priest's brother?" asked Melissa, in surprise, for death had
but just bereft that house of the only daughter.
"The same," said the Roman, gayly. Then he gave her his hand, with the
assurance that the thought of her would make it a pleasure to remember
Alexandria.
As she clasped his hand, Andreas came up, bowed gravely, and asked
whether it would be overbold in him, as a faithful retainer of the
maiden's family, to crave a favor, in her name, of Caesar's illustrious
and familiar friend.
The Roman eyed Andreas keenly, and the manly dignity, nay, the defiant
self-possession of the freedman--the very embodiment of all he had
expected to find in a genuine Alexandrian--so far won his confidence that
he bade him speak without fear. He hoped to hear something sufficiently
characteristic of the manners of the provincial capital to make an
anecdote for Caesar's table. Then, when he understood that the matter
concerned Melissa's brother, and a distinguished artist, he smiled
expectantly. Even when he learned that Alexander was being hunted down
for some heedless jest against the emperor, he only threatened Melissa
sportively with his finger; but on being told that this jest dealt with
the murder of Geta, he seemed startled, and the tone of his voice
betrayed serious displeasure as he replied to the petitioner, "Do you
suppose that I have three heads, like the Cerberus at the feet of your
god, that you ask me to lay one on the block for the smile of a pretty
girl?"
He signed to his charioteer, and the horses whirled the light vehicle
across the square and down the street of Hermes.
Andreas gazed after him, and muttered, with a shrug
"My first petition to a great man, and assuredly my last."
"The coward!" cried Melissa; but Andreas said, with a superior smile.
"Let us take a lesson from this, my child. Those who reckon on the help
of man are badly off indeed. We must all trust in God, and each in
himself."
CHAPTER XIII.
Andreas, who had so much on his shoulders, had lost much time, and was
urgently required at home. After gratifying Melissa's wish by describing
how Diodoros had immediately recovered consciousness on the completion of
the operation performed by Galen, and painting the deep amazement that
had fallen on all the other physicians at the skill of this fine old man,
he had done all he could for the present to be of use to the girl. He was
glad, therefore, when in the street of Hermes, now swarming again with
citizens, soldiers, and horsemen, he met the old nurse, who, after
conducting Agatha home to her father, had been sent back to the town to
remain in attendance, if necessary, on Diodoros. The freedman left it to
her to escort Melissa to her own home, and went back to report to
Polybius--in the first place, as to his son's state.
It was decided that Melissa should for the present remain with her
father; but, as soon as Diodoros should be allowed to leave the Serapeum,
she was to go across the lake to receive the convalescent on his return
home.
The old woman assured her, as they walked on, that Diodoros had always
been born to good luck; and it was clear that this had never been truer
than now, when Galenus had come in the nick of time to restore him to
life and health, and when he had won such a bride as Melissa. Then she
sang the praises of Agatha, of her beauty and goodness, and told her that
the Christian damsel had made many inquiries concerning Alexander. She,
the speaker, had not been chary of her praise of the youth, and, unless
she was much mistaken, the arrow of Eros had this time pierced Agatha's
heart, though till now she had been as a child--an innocent child--as she
herself could say, who had seen her grow up from the cradle. Her faith
need not trouble either Melissa or Alexander, for gentler and more modest
wives than the Christian women were not to be found among the Greeks--and
she had known many.
Melissa rarely interrupted the garrulous old woman; but, while she
listened, pleasant pictures of the future rose before her fancy. She saw
herself and Diodoros ruling over Polybius's household, and, close at
hand, on Zeno's estate, Alexander with his beautiful and adored wife.
There, under Zeno's watchful eye, the wild youth would become a noble
man. Her father would often come to visit them, and in their happiness
would learn to find pleasure in life again. Only now and then the thought
of the sacrifice which the vehement Philip must make for his younger
brother, and of the danger which still threatened Alexander, disturbed
the cheerful contentment of her soul, rich as it was in glad hopes.
The nearer they got to her own home, the more lightly her heart beat. She
had none but good news to report there. The old woman, panting for
breath, was obliged to beg her to consider her sixty years and moderate
her pace.
Melissa willingly checked her steps; and when, at the end of the street
of Hermes, they reached the temple of the god from whom it was named and
turned off to the right, the good woman parted from her, for in this
quiet neighborhood she could safely be trusted to take care of herself.
Melissa was now alone. On her left lay the gardens of Hermes, where, on
the southern side, stood her father's house and that of their neighbor
Skopas. Though the old nurse had indeed talked of nothing that was not
pleasant, it was a comfort not to have to listen to her, but to be free
to follow her own thoughts. Nor did she meet with anything to distract
them, for at this hour the great public garden was left almost entirely
to children and their attendants, or to the inhabitants of the immediate
neighborhood who frequented the temples of Hermes or Artemis, or the
little shrine of Asklepios, which stood in a grove of mimosas on the
skirt of the park, and to which Melissa herself felt attracted. It had
been a familiar spot at the time when her mother was at the worst. How
often had she flown hither from her home near at hand to pour oil on the
altar of the god of healing--to make some small offering and find comfort
in prayer!
The day was now hot, she was tired, and, when she saw the white marble
columns gleaming among the greenery, she yielded to the impulse to enjoy
a few minutes' rest in the cool cella and accomplish the vow she had
taken an hour or two since. She longed, indeed, to get home, that her
father might share the happiness which uplifted her heart; but then she
reflected that she would not soon have the opportunity of carrying out,
unobserved, the purpose she had in her mind. Now, if ever, was the time
to offer sacrifice for Caesar and for the mitigation of his sufferings.
The thought that Galenus perhaps was right, and that of Caracalla's
myriad subjects she might be the only one who would do so much for his
sake, strengthened her resolve.
The chief temple of Asklepios, whom the Egyptians called Imhotep, was at
the Serapeum. Imhotep was the son of Ptah, who, at Alexandria, was merged
in Serapis. There he was worshiped, conjointly with Serapis and Isis, by
Egyptians, Greeks, and Syrians alike. The little sanctuary near her
father's house was the resort of none but Greeks. Ptolemaeus
Philadelphus, the second Macedonian King of Egypt, had built it as an
appendage to the Temple of Artemis, after the recovery from sickness of
his wife Arsinoe.
It was small, but a masterpiece of Greek art, and the statues of Sleep
and of A Dream, at the entrance, with the marble group behind the altar,
representing Asklepios with his sister Hygeia and his wife Epione the
Soother, was reckoned by connoisseurs as among the noblest and most
noteworthy works of art in Alexandria.
The dignity and benevolence of the god were admirably expressed in the
features of the divinity, somewhat resembling the Olympian Zeus, who
leaned on his serpent staff; and the graceful, inviting sweetness of
Hygeia, holding out her cup as though she were offering health to the
sufferer, was well adapted to revive the hopes of the despondent. The
god's waving locks were bound with a folded scarf, and at his feet was a
dog, gazing up at his lord as if in entreaty.
The sacred snakes lay coiled in a cage by the altar; they were believed
to have the power of restoring themselves, and this was regarded as a
promise to the sick that they should cast off their disease as a serpent
casts its skin. The swift power of the reptile over life and death, was
an emblem to the votaries of the power of the god to postpone the death
of man or to shorten his days.
The inside of the little sanctuary was a cool and still retreat. Tablets
hung on the white marble walls, inscribed with the thanksgivings or vows
of those who had been healed. On several, the remedies were recorded
which had availed in certain cases; and on the left of the little hall,
behind a heavy hanging, a small recess contained the archives of the
temple, recipes, records of gifts, and documents referring to the history
of the sanctuary.
In this deserted, shady spot, between these thick marble walls, it was
much cooler than outside. Melissa lifted her hands in prayer before the
statue of the god. She was alone, with the exception of the priest in
charge. The temple-servant was absent, and the priest was asleep,
breathing heavily, in an arm-chair in a dark nook behind the marble
group. Thus she was free to follow the impulse of her heart, and pray,
first for her sick lover, and then for the sufferer to whom the whole
subservient world belonged.
For Diodoros, indeed, as she knew, other hands and hearts were uplifted
in loving sympathy. But who besides herself was praying for the hated
sovereign who had at his command the costliest and rarest gifts of
fortune, all poisoned by bitter anguish of mind and body? The world
thought only of the sufferings he had inflicted on others; no one dreamed
of the pangs he had to endure--no one but herself, to whom Galenus had
spoken of them. And had not his features and his look betrayed to her
that pain was gnawing at his vitals like the vulture at those of
Prometheus? Hapless, pitiable youth, born to the highest fortune, and now
a decrepit old man in the flower of his age! To pray and sacrifice for
him must be a pious deed, pleasing to the gods. Melissa besought the
marble images over the altar from the very bottom of her heart, never
even asking herself why she was bestowing on this stranger, this cruel
tryant, in whose name her own brother was in danger of the law, an
emotion which nothing but her care for those dearest to her had ever
stirred. But she did not feel that he was a stranger, and never thought
how far apart they were. Her prayers came easily, too, in this spot; the
bonds that linked her to these beautiful marble beings were familiar and
dear to her. While she gazed up into the face of Asklepios, imploring him
to be gracious to the imperial youth, and release him from the pain but
for which he might have been humane and beneficent, the stony features
seemed to live before her eyes, and the majesty and dignity that beamed
on the brow assured her that the god's power and wisdom were great enough
to heal every disease. The tender smile which played on his features
filled her soul with the certainty that he would vouchsafe to be
gracious; nay, she could believe that he moved those marble lips and
promised to grant her prayer. And when she turned to the statue of Hygeia
she fancied the beautiful, kind face nodded to her with a pledge of
fulfillment.
She raised her beseeching arms higher still, and addressed her sculptured
friends aloud, as though they could hear her:
"I know that nothing is hidden from you, eternal gods," she began, "and
when it was your will that my mother should be taken from me my foolish
heart rebelled. But I was then a child without understanding, and my soul
lay as it were asleep. Now it is different. You know that I have learned
to love a man; and many things, and, the certainty that the gods are
good, have come to me with that love. Forgive the maid the sins of the
child, and make my lover whole, as he lies under the protection and in
the sanctuary of the great Serapis, still needing your aid too. He is
mending, and the greatest of thy ministers, O Asklepios, says he will
recover, so it must be true. Yet without thee even the skill of Galenus
is of little avail; wherefore I beseech you both, Heal Diodoros, whom I
love!--But I would fain entreat you for another. You will wonder,
perhaps--for it is Bassianus Antoninus, whom they call Caracalla and
Caesar.
"Thou, Asklepios, dost look in amazement, and great Hygeia shakes her
head. And it is hard to say what moves me, who love another, to pray for
the blood-stained murderer for whom not another soul in his empire would
say a word to you. Nay, and I know not what it is. Perhaps it is but
pity; for he, who ought to be the happiest, is surely the most wretched
man under the sun. O great Asklepios, O bountiful and gracious Hygeia,
ease his sufferings, which are indeed beyond endurance! Nor shall you
lack an offering. I will dedicate a cock to you; and as the cock
announces a new day, so perchance shall you grant to Caracalla the dawn
of a new existence in better health.
"Alas, gracious god! but thou art grave, as though the offering were too
small. How gladly would I bring a goat, but I know not whether my money
will suffice, for it is only what I have saved. By and by, when the youth
I love is my husband, I will prove my gratitude; for he is as rich as he
is handsome and kind, and will, I know, refuse me nothing. And thou,
sweet goddess, dost not look down upon me as graciously as before; I fear
thou art angry. Yet think not"--and she gave a low laugh--"that I pray
for Caracalla because I care for him, or am in love with him. No, no, no,
no! my heart is wholly given to Diodoros, and not the smallest part of it
to any other. It is Caesar's misery alone that brings me hither. Sooner
would I kiss one of those serpents or a thorny hedgehog than him, the
fratricide in the purple. Believe me, it is true, strange as it must
seem.
"First and last, I pray and offer sacrifice indeed for Diodoros and his
recovery. My brother Alexander, too, who is in danger, I would fain
commend to you; but he is well in body, and your remedies are of no
effect against the perils which threaten him."
Here she ceased, and gazed into the faces of the statues, but they would
not look so friendly as before. It was, no doubt, the smallness of her
offering that had offended them. She anxiously drew out her little
money-bag and counted the contents. But when, after waking the priest,
she had asked how much a goat might cost for sacrifice, her countenance
cleared, for her savings were enough to pay for it and for a young cock
as well. All she had she left with the old man, to the last sesterce; but
she could only wait to see the cock sacrificed, for she felt she must go
home.
As soon as the blood of the bird had besprinkled the altar, and she had
told the divinities that a goat was also to be killed, she fancied that
they looked at her more kindly; and she was turning to the door, as light
and gay as if she had happily done some difficult task, when the curtain
screening off the library of archives was lifted, and a man came out
calling her by name. She turned round; but as soon as she saw that he was
a Roman, and, as his white toga told her, of the upper class, she took
fright. She hastily exclaimed that she was in a hurry, and flew down the
steps, through the garden, and into the road. Once there, she reproached
herself for foolish shyness of a stranger who was scarcely younger than
her own father; but by the time she had gone a few steps she had
forgotten the incident, and was rehearsing in her mind all she had to
tell Heron. She soon saw the tops of the palms and sycamores in their own
garden, her faithful old dog Melas barked with delight, and the happiness
which the meeting with the stranger had for a moment interrupted revived
with unchecked glow.
She was weary, and where could she rest so well as at home? She had
escaped many perils, and where could she feel so safe as under her
father's roof? Glad as she was at the prospect of her new and handsome
home on the other side of the lake, and of all the delights promised her
by Diodoros's affection, her heart still clung fondly to the pretty, neat
little dwelling whose low roof now gleamed in front of her. In the
garden, whose shell-strewn paths she now trod, she had played as a child;
that window belonged to the room where her mother had died. And then,
coming home was in itself a joy, when she had so much to tell that was
pleasant.
The dog leaped along by her side with vehement affection, jumping round
her and on her, and she heard the starling's cry, first "Olympias!" and
then "My strength!"
A happy smile parted her rosy lips as she glanced at the work-room; but
the two white teeth which always gleamed when she was gay were presently
hidden, for her father, it would seem, was out. He was certainly not at
work, for the wide window was unscreened, and it was now nearly noon. He
was almost always within at this hour, and it would spoil half her
gladness not to find him there.
But what was this? What could this mean? The dog had announced her
approach, and old Dido's gray head peeped out of the house-door, to
vanish again at once. How strangely she had looked at her--exactly as she
had looked that day when the physician had told the faithful creature
that her mistress's last hour was at hand!
Melissa's contentment was gone. Before she even crossed the threshold,
where the friendly word "Rejoice" greeted her in brown mosaic, she called
the old woman by name. No answer.
She went into the kitchen to find Dido; for she, according to her
invariable habit of postponing evil as long as possible, had fled to the
hearth. There she stood, though the fire was out, weeping bitterly, and
covering her wrinkled face with her hands, as though she quailed before
the eyes of the girl she must so deeply grieve. One glance at the woman,
and the tears which trickled through her fingers and down her lean arms
told Melissa that something dreadful had happened. Very pale, and
clasping her hand to her heaving bosom, she desired to be told all; but
for some time Dido was quite unable to speak intelligibly. And before she
could make up her mind to it, she looked anxiously for Argutis, whom she
held to be the wisest of mankind, and who, she knew, would reveal the
dreadful thing that must be told more judiciously than she could. But the
Gaul was not to be seen; so Dido, interrupted by sobs, began the
melancholy tale.
Heron had come home between midnight and sunrise and had gone to bed.
Next morning, while he was feeding the birds, Zminis, the captain of the
night-watch, had come in with some men-at-arms, and had tried to take the
artist prisoner in Caesar's name. On this, Heron had raved like a bull,
had appealed to his Macedonian birth, his rights as a Roman citizen, and
much besides, and demanded to know of what he was accused. He was then
informed that he was to be held in captivity by the special orders of the
head of the police, till his son Alexander, who was guilty of
high-treason, should surrender to the authorities. But her master, said
Dido, sobbing, had knocked down the man who had tried to bind him with a
mighty blow of his fist. At last there was a fearful uproar, and in fact
a bloody fight. The starling shouted his cry through it all, the birds
fluttered and piped with terror, and it was like the abode of the damned
in the nether world; and strangers came crowding about the house, till
Skopas arrived and advised Heron to go with the Egyptian.
"But even at the door," Dido added, "he called out to me that you,
Melissa, could remain with Polybius till he should recover his liberty.
Philip was to appeal for help to the prefect Titianus, and offer him the
gems--you know them, he said. And, last of all," and again she began to
cry, "he especially commended to my care the tomb--and the birds; and the
starling wants some fresh mealworms." Melissa heard with dismay; the
color had faded from her cheeks, and as Dido ended she asked gloomily:
"And Philip--and Alexander?"
"We have thought of everything," replied the old woman. "As soon as we
were alone we held a council, Argutis and I. He went to find Alexander,
and I went to Philip. I found him in his rooms. He had come home very
late, the porter said, and I saw him in bed, and I had trouble enough to
wake him. Then I told him all, and he went on in such mad talk--it will
be no wonder if the gods punish him. He wanted to rush off to the
prefect, with his hair uncombed, just as he was. I had to bring him to
his senses; and then, while I was oiling his hair and helping him into
his best new mantle, he changed his mind, for he declared he would come
home first, to talk with you and Argutis. Argutis was at home again, but
he had not found Alexander, for the poor youth has to hide himself as if
he were a murderer." And again she sobbed; nor was it till Melissa had
soothed her with kind speeches that she could go on with her story.
Philip had learned yesterday where Alexander was concealed, so he
undertook to go across the lake and inform him of what had occurred. But
Argutis, faithful and prudent, had hindered him, representing that
Alexander, who was easily moved, as soon as he heard that his father was
a prisoner would unhesitatingly give himself up to his enemies as a
hostage, and rush headlong into danger. Alexander must remain in hiding
so long as Caesar was in Alexandria. He (Argutis) would go instead of
Philip, who, for his part, might call on the prefect later. He would
cross the lake and warn Melissa not to return home, and to tell Alexander
what he might think necessary. The watch might possibly follow Argutis;
but he knew every lane and alley, and could mislead and avoid them.
Philip had listened to reason. The slave went, and must now soon be back
again.
Of how different a home-coming had Melissa dreamed! What new and terrible
griefs were these! Still, though distressed at the thought of her
vehement father in prison, she shed no tears, but told herself that
matters could only be mended by rational action on behalf of the victims,
and not by lamentations. She must be alone, to collect her strength and
consider the situation. So she desired Dido, to her great amazement, to
prepare some food, and bring her wine and water. Then, seating herself,
with a melancholy glance at her embroidery where it lay folded together,
she rested her elbow on the table and her head in her hand, considering
to whom she could appeal to save her father.
First she thought of Caesar himself, whose eye had met hers, and for whom
she had prayed and offered sacrifice. But the blood fired her cheeks at
the thought, and she repelled it at once. Yet her mind would linger at
the Serapeum, where her lover, too, still rested his fevered head. She
knew that the high-priests' spacious lodgings there, with their splendid
rooms and banqueting halls, had been prepared for the emperor; and she
remembered various things which her brother had told her of Timotheus,
who was at the head not only of the heathen priesthood, but also of the
museum. He was said to be a philosopher, and Philip had more than once
been distinguished by him, and invited to his house. Her brother must
apply to him. He, who was in a way Caracalla's host, would easily succeed
in obtaining her father's release, from his imperial guest.
Her grave face brightened at this thought, and, while she ate and drank,
another idea struck her. Alexander, too, must be known to the
high-priest; for Timotheus was the brother of Seleukus, whose daughter
the artist had just painted, and Timotheus had seen the portrait and
praised it highly. Thus it was not improbable that the generous man
would, if Philip besought him, intercede for Alexander. So all might turn
out better than she had ventured to hope.
Firmly convinced that it was her part to rescue her family, she once more
reviewed in her mind every acquaintance to whom she might look for aid;
but even during her meditations her tired frame asserted its rights, and
when Dido came in to remove the remains of the meal and the empty
wine-cup, she found Melissa sunk in sleep.
Shaking her head, and saying to herself that it served the old man right
for his cruel treatment of a dutiful child--though, for Alexander's sake,
she might have tried to keep awake--the faithful soul pushed a cushion
under the girl's head, drew the screen across the window, and stood
waving off the flies which buzzed about her darling's flushed face, till
presently the dog barked, and an energetic knock shook the house-door.
Melissa started from her slumbers, the old woman threw aside the fan,
and, as she hurried to admit the vehement visitor, cried out to Melissa:
"Be easy, dear child--be easy. It is nothing; depend upon that. I know
the knock; it is only Philip."
CHAPTER XIV.
Dido was right. Heron's eldest son had returned from his errand. Tired,
disappointed, and with fierce indignation in his eyes, he staggered in
like a drunken man who has been insulted in his cups; and, without
greeting her--as his mother had taught her children to greet even their
slaves--he merely asked in hoarse tones, "Is Melissa come in?"
"Yes, yes," replied Dido, laying her finger to her lips. "You roused her
from a nap. And what a state you are in! You must not let her see you so!
It is very clear what news you bring. The prefect will not help us?"
"Help us!" echoed Philip, wrathfully. "In Alexandria a man may drown
rather than another will risk wetting his feet."
"Nay, it is not so bad as that," said the old woman. "Alexander himself
has burned his fingers for others many a time. Wait a minute. I will
fetch you a draught of wine. There is some still in the kitchen; for if
you appear before your sister in that plight--"
But Melissa had recognized her brother's voice, and, although Philip had
smoothed his hair a little with his hands, one glance at his face showed
her that his efforts had been vain.
"Poor boy!" she said, when, in answer to her question as to what his news
was, he had answered gloomily, "As bad as possible."
She took his hand and led him into the work-room. There she reminded him
that she was giving him a new brother in Diodoros; and he embraced her
fondly, and wished her and her betrothed every happiness. She thanked him
out of a full heart, while he swallowed his wine, and then she begged him
to tell her all he had done.
He began, and, as she gazed at him, it struck her how little he resembled
his father and brother, though he was no less tall, and his head was
shaped like theirs. But his frame, instead of showing their stalwart
build, was lean and weakly. His spine did not seem strong enough for his
long body, and he never held himself upright. His head was always bent
forward, as if he were watching or seeking something; and even when he
had seated himself in his father's place at the work-table to tell his
tale, his hands and feet, even the muscles of his well-formed but
colorless face, were in constant movement. He would jump up, or throw
back his head to shake his long hair off his face, and his fine, large,
dark eyes glowed with wrathful fires.
"I received my first repulse from the prefect," he began, and as he
spoke, his arms, on whose graceful use the Greeks so strongly insisted,
flew up in the air as though by their own impulse rather than by the
speaker's will.
"Titianus affects the philosopher, because when he was young--long ago,
that is very certain--his feet trod the Stoa."
"Your master, Xanthos, said that he was a very sound philosopher,"
Melissa put in.
"Such praise is to be had cheap," said Philip, by the most influential
man in the town. But his methods are old-fashioned. He crawls after Zeno;
he submits to authority, and requires more independent spirits to do the
same. To him the divinity is the Great First Cause. In this world of ours
he can discern the working of a purposeful will, and confuses his mind
with windy, worn-out ideals. Virtue, he says--but to what end repeat such
stale old stuff?"
"We have no time for it," said Melissa, who saw that Philip was on the
point of losing himself in a philosophical dissertation, for he had begun
to enjoy the sound of his own voice, which was, in fact, unusually
musical.
"Why not?" he exclaimed, shrugging his shoulders, and with a bitter
smile. "When he has shot away all his arrows, the bowman may rest; and,
as you will soon hear, our quiver is empty--as empty as this cup which I
have drained."
"No, no!" exclaimed Melissa, eagerly. "If this first attempt has failed,
that is the very reason for planning another. I, too, can use figures of
speech. The archer who is really eager to hit the object on which he has
spent his arrows, does not retire from the fight, but fetches more; and
if he can find none, he fights with his bow, or falls on the enemy with
stones, fists, and teeth."
Philip looked at her in astonishment, and exclaimed in pleased surprise,
without any of the supercilious scorn which he commonly infused into his
tone when addressing his humble sister:
"Listen to our little girl! Where did those gentle eyes get that
determined flash? From misfortune--from misfortune! They rob the gentle
dove of her young--I mean her splendid Alexander--and lo, she becomes a
valiant falcon! I expected to find you a heart-broken lamb, over your
tear-stained stitching, and behold it is you who try to fire me. Well,
then, tell me what arrows we have left, when you have heard me out. But,
before I proceed, is Argutis at home again? No? He must go across again,
to take various things to Alexander--linen, garments, and the like. I met
Glaukias the sculptor, and he begged me not to forget it; for he knows
where the lad is hidden, and was on the point of going over to see him.
The man had made himself perfectly unrecognizable. He is a true friend,
if such a thing there be! And how grieved he was to hear of my father's
ill fortune! I believe he is envious of Diodoros."
Melissa shook a finger at him; but she turned pale, and curiously
inquired whether her brother had remembered to warn Glaukias on no
account to tell Alexander that it was in his power to release his father.
Philip struck his brow, and, with a helpless fall of the mouth, which was
usually so firmly set and ready to sneer, he exclaimed, like a boy caught
in mischief: "That, that--I can not imagine how I forgot it, but I did
not mention it. What strange absence of mind! But I can remedy it at once
on the spot. Argutis--nay, I will go myself."
He sprang up, and was on the point of carrying out his sudden purpose,
but Melissa detained him. With a decisiveness which again amazed him, she
desired him to remain; and while he paced the workroom with rapid
strides, heaping abuse on himself, now striking his breast, and now
pushing his fingers through his disordered hair, she made it clear to him
that he could not reach Alexander in time to prevent his knowing all, and
that the only result of his visit would be to put the watch on the track.
Instead of raving and lamenting, he would do better to tell her whither
he had been.
First, he hastily began, he had gone to the prefect Titianus, who was an
elderly man of a noble family, many of whose members had ere now occupied
the official residence of the prefect in Alexandria, and in other towns
of Egypt. He had often met Philip at the disputations he was wont to
attend in the Museum, and had a great regard for him. But of late
Titianus had been out of health, and had kept his house. He had undergone
some serious operation shortly before Caesar's arrival at Alexandria had
been announced, and this had made it impossible for him to be present at
the grand reception, or even to pay his respects to Caracalla.
When Philip had sent in his name, Titianus had been very ready to receive
him; but while the philosopher was still waiting in the anteroom,
wondering to find it so empty--for it was usually crowded with the
clients, petitioners, and friends of the most important man in the
province--a bustle had arisen behind him, and a tall man had been ushered
in past him, whom he recognized as the senator on whose arm Caracalla had
leaned in the morning. This was the actor, whom the priest of Serapis had
pointed out to Melissa as one of Caesar's most powerful favorites. From
being a mere dancer he had risen in the course of a few years to the
highest dignities. His name was Theocritus, and although he was
distinguished by great personal beauty and exceptional cleverness, his
unbridled greed had made him hated, and he had proved equally incompetent
as a statesman and a general.
As this man marched through the anteroom, he had glanced haughtily about
him, and the look of contempt which fell on the philosopher probably
reflected on the small number of persons present, for at that hour the
anterooms of Romans of rank were commonly thronged. Most visitors had
been dismissed, by reason of the prefect's illness, and many of the
acquaintances and supplicants who were generally to be found here were
assembled in the imperial quarters, or in the rooms of the praetorian
prefect and other powerful dignitaries in Caracalla's train. Titianus had
failed to be present at the emperor's arrival, and keen courtier noses
smelled a fall, and judged it wise to keep out of the way of a tottering
power.
Besides all this, the prefect's honesty was well known, and it was
strongly suspected that he, as steward of all the taxes of this wealthy
province, had been bold enough to reject a proposal made by Theocritus to
embezzle the whole freight of a fleet loaded with corn for Rome, and
charge it to the account of army munitions. It was a fact that this base
proposal had been made and rejected only the evening before, and the
scene of which Philip became the witness was the result of this refusal.
Theocritus, to whom an audience was always indispensable, carefully left
the curtains apart which divided the prefect's sick-room from the
antechamber, and thus Philip was witness of the proceedings he now
described to his sister.
Titianus received his visitor, lying down, and yet his demeanor revealed
the self-possessed dignity of a high-born Roman, and the calm of a Stoic
philosopher. He listened unmoved to the courtier, who, after the usual
formal greetings, took upon himself to overwhelm the older man with the
bitterest accusations and reproaches. People allowed themselves to take
strange liberties with Caesar in this town, Theocritus burst out;
insolent jests passed from lip to lip. An epigram against his sacred
person had found its way into the Serapeum, his present residence--an
insult worthy of any punishment, even of death and crucifixion.
When the prefect, with evident annoyance, but still quite calmly, desired
to know what this extraordinary insult might be, Theocritus showed that
even in his high position he had preserved the accurate memory of the
mime, and, half angry, but yet anxious to give full effect to the lines
by voice and gesture, he explained that "some wretch had fastened a rope
to one of the doors of the sanctuary, and had written below it the
blasphemous words:
'Hail! For so welcome a guest never came to the sovereign of Hades.
Who ever peopled his realm, Caesar, more freely than thou?
Laurels refuse to grow green in the darksome abode of Serapis;
Take, then, this rope for a gift, never more richly deserved.'"
"It is disgraceful!" exclaimed the prefect.
"Your indignation is well founded. But the biting tongue of the frivolous
mixed races dwelling in this city is well known. They have tried it on
me; and if, in this instance, any one is to blame, it is not I, the
imprisoned prefect, but the chief and captain of the night-watch, whose
business it is to guard Caesar's residence more strictly."
At this Theocritus was furious, and poured out a flood of words,
expatiating on the duties of a prefect as Caesar's representative in the
provinces. "His eye must be as omniscient as that of the all-seeing
Deity. The better he knew the uproarious rabble over whom he ruled, the
more evidently was it his duty to watch over Caesar's person as anxiously
as a mother over her child, as a miser over his treasure."
The high-sounding words flowed with dramatic emphasis, the sentimental
speaker adding to their impressiveness by the action of his hands, till
it was more than the invalid could bear. With a pinched smile, he raised
himself with difficulty, and interrupted Theocritus with the impatient
exclamation, "Still the actor!"
"Yes, still!" retorted the favorite, in a hard voice. "You, however, have
been even longer--what you have, indeed, been too long--Prefect of
Egypt!" With an angry fling he threw the corner of his toga over his
shoulder, and, though his hand shook with rage, the pliant drapery fell
in graceful folds over his athletic limbs. He turned his back on the
prefect, and, with the air of a general who has just been crowned with
laurels, he stalked through the anteroom and past Philip once more.
The philosopher had told his sister all this in a few sentences. He now
paused in his walk to and fro to answer Melissa's question as to whether
this upstart's influence were really great enough to turn so noble and
worthy a man out of his office.
"Can you ask?" said Philip. "Titianus had no doubts from the first; and
what I heard in the Serapeum--but all in good time. The prefect was sorry
for my father and Alexander, but ended by saying that he himself needed
an intercessor; for, if it were not to-day, at any rate to-morrow, the
actor would inveigle Caesar into signing his death-warrant."
"Impossible!" cried the girl, spreading out her hands in horror; but
Philip dropped into a seat, saying:
"Listen to the end. There was evidently nothing to be hoped for from
Titianus. He is, no doubt, a brave man, but there is a touch of the actor
in him too. He is a Stoic; and where would be the point of that, if a man
could not appear to look on approaching death as calmly as on taking a
bath?
"Titianus plays his part well. However, I next went to the Serapeum--it
is a long way, and it was very hot in the sun--to ask for help from my
old patron, the high-priest. Caesar is now his guest; and the prefect,
too, had advised me to place my father's cause in his hands."
Here Philip sprang up again, and rushed up and down, sometimes stopping
for a moment in front of his sister while he went on with his story.
Theocritus had long since reached the Serapeum in his swift chariot when
the philosopher at last arrived there on foot. He was well known as a
frequent visitor, and was shown at once into the hall of that part of his
abode which Timotheus had reserved for himself when he had given up all
the best rooms to his imperial visitor.
The anteroom was crowded, and before he got any farther he heard that the
favorite's accusations had already led to serious results, and rumors
were rife concerning the luckless witticisms of some heedless youth,
which would bring grief upon the peaceable citizens. But before he could
ask what was meant, he was admitted to the high-priest's room.
This was a marked favor on such a day as this, and the benevolence with
which he was received by the head of the priesthood of the whole city
filled him with good hopes of a successful issue. But hardly had Philip
begun to speak of his brother's misdemeanor, than Timotheus laid his hand
on his bearded lips, as a hint to be cautious, and whispered in his ear,
"Speak quickly and low, if you love your life!"
When Philip had hastily explained that Zminis had imprisoned his father,
the old man started to his feet with a promptitude to which his majestic
person was unaccustomed, and pointed to a curtained doorway on one side
of the room.
"Through that door," he whispered, "you will reach the western steps, and
the passage leading out of the precincts to the stadium. You are known to
the Romans in the anteroom. It is not the god to whom this building is
dedicated who now rules within these walls. Your brother's rash words are
repeated everywhere, and have even come to Caesar's knowledge; and he has
been told that it was the same traitor--who has for the moment escaped
Zminis and his men--who nailed a rope on one of our doors, and with it an
audacious inscription. To speak a single word in behalf of Alexander or
your father would be to fling myself into the fire without putting it
out. You do not know how fiercely it is burning. Theocritus is feeding
the flame, for he needs it to destroy the prefect. Now, not another word;
and, come what may, so long as the Roman visitors dwell under this roof,
beware of it!"
And the high-priest opened the door with his own hand.
"I hurried home," Philip added, "and if I forgot, in my dismay at this
fresh disaster, to warn Glaukias to be careful--But, no, no! It is
unpardonable!--Alexander is by this time crossing the lake, perhaps. I am
like Caracalla--my brother's murderer!"
But Melissa laid her arm on his shoulder and besought the poor fellow to
be comforted; and her loving words of excuse seemed to have some good
effect. But why was he always so reserved? Why could not Philip be as
frank with her as Alexander was? She had never been very near to him; and
now he was concealing from her something which moved him deeply.
She turned away sadly, for she could not even comfort him. But then again
Philip sighed from the bottom of his heart, and she could contain her
self no longer. More tenderly than she had ever addressed him before, she
besought her brother to open his heart to her. She would gladly help him
to endure what oppressed him; and she could understand, for she herself
had learned what the joys and sorrows of love were.
She had found the right clew. Philip nodded, and answered gloomily:
"Well, then, listen. It may do me good to speak." And thereupon he began
to tell her what she had already heard from Alexander; and, covering her
tingling cheeks with her hands, she listened with breathless attention,
not missing a word, though the question rose to her mind again and again
whether she should tell him the whole truth, which he as yet could not
know, or whether it would be better to spare his already burdened soul.
He described his love in glowing colors. Korinna's heart, he said, must
have gone forth to him; for, at their last meeting on the northern shore
of the lake, her hand had rested in his while he helped her out of the
boat; he could still feel the touch of her fingers. Nor had the meeting
been pure accident, for he had since seen and recognized the presence on
earth of her departed soul in her apparently living form. And she, too,
with the subtle senses of a disembodied spirit, must have had a yearning
towards him, for she had perceived all the depth and fervor of his
passion. Alexander had given him this certainty; for when he had seen
Korinna by the lake, her soul had long since abandoned its earthly
tenement. Before that, her mortal part was already beyond his reach; and
yet he was happy, for the spirit was not lost to him. Only last night
magic forces had brought her before him--his father, too, had been
present, and no deception was possible. He had gone to bed in rapturous
excitement, full of delicious hopes, and Korinna had at once appeared to
him in a dream, so lovely, so kind, and at the same time so subtle a
vision, ready to follow him in his thoughts and strivings. But just as he
had heard a full assurance of her love from her own lips, and was asking
her by what name he should call her when the craving to see her again
should wax strong in him, old Dido had waked him, to cast him out of
elysium into the deepest earthly woes.
But, he added--and he drew himself up proudly--he should soon possess the
Magian's art, for there was no kind of learning he could not master; even
as a boy he had proved that to his teachers. He, whose knowledge had but
yesterday culminated in the assurance that it was impossible to know
anything, could now assert with positive conviction, that the human soul
could exist apart from the matter it had animated. He had thus gained
that fixed footing outside the earth which Archimedes had demanded to
enable him to move it; and he should soon be able to exert his power over
departed souls, whose nature he now understood as well as--ay, and better
than--Serapion. Korinna's obedient spirit would help him, and when once
he should succeed in commanding the souls of the dead, as their master,
and in keeping them at hand among the living, a new era of happiness
would begin, not only for him and his father, but for every one who had
lost one dear to him by death.
But here Melissa interrupted his eager and confident speech. She had
listened with increasing uneasiness to the youth who, as she knew, had
been cheated. At first she thought it would be cruel to destroy his
bright illusions. He should at least in this be happy, till the anguish
of having thoughtlessly betrayed his brother to ruin should be a thing of
the past! But when she perceived that he purposed involving his father in
the Magian's snares by calling up his mother's Manes, she could no longer
be silent, and she broke out with indignant warning: "Leave my father
alone, Philip! For all you saw at the Magian's was mere trickery."
"Gently, child," said the philosopher, in a superior tone. "I was of
exactly the same opinion till after sundown yesterday. You know that the
tendency of the school of philosophy to which I belong insists, above
all, on a suspension of judgment; but if there is one thing which may be
asserted with any dogmatic certainty--"
But Melissa would hear no more. She briefly but clearly explained to him
who the maiden was whose hand he had held by the lake, and whom he had
seen again at Serapion's house; and as she went on his interruptions
became fewer. She did her utmost, with growing zeal, to destroy his
luckless dream; but when the blood faded altogether from his colorless
cheeks, and he clasped his hand over his brow as if to control some
physical suffering, she recovered her self-command; the beautiful fear of
a woman's heart of ever giving useless pain, made her withhold from
Philip what remained to be told of Agatha's meeting with Alexander.
But, without this further revelation, Philip sat staring at the ground as
if he were overwhelmed; and what hurt him so deeply was less the painful
sense of having been cheated by such coarse cunning, than the
annihilation of the treasured hopes which he had founded on the
experiences of the past night. He felt as though a brutal foot had
trampled down the promise of future joys on which he had counted; his
sister's revelations had spoiled not merely his life on earth, but all
eternity beyond the grave. Where hope ends despair steps in; and Philip,
with reckless vehemence, flung himself, as it were, into its arms. His
was an excitable nature; he had never thought of any one but himself, but
labored with egotistical zeal to cultivate his own mind and outdo his
fellows in the competition for learning. The sullen words in which he
called himself the most wretched man on earth, and the victim of the
blackest ill-fortune, fell from his lips like stones. He rudely repelled
his sister's encouraging words, like a sick child whose pain is the
greater for being pitied, till at last she appealed to his sense of duty,
reminding him that something must be done to rescue her father and
Alexander.
"They also! They also!" he cried. "It falls on us all. Blind Fate drives
us all, innocent as we are, to death and despair, like the Tantalides.
What sin have you committed, gentle, patient child; or our father, or our
happy-hearted and gifted brother; or I--I myself? Have those whom we call
the rulers of the universe the right to punish me because I make use of
the inquiring spirit they have bestowed on me? Ah, and how well they know
how to torture us! They hate me for my learning, and so they turn my
little errors to account to allow me to be cheated like a fool! They are
said to be just, and they behave like a father who disinherits his son
because, as a man, he notes his parent's weakness. With tears and anguish
have I striven for truth and knowledge. There is not a province of
thought whose deepest depths I have not tried to fathom; and when I
recognized that it is not given to mortals to apprehend the essence of
the divinity because the organs bestowed on us are too small and feeble;
when I refused to pronounce whether that which I can not apprehend exists
or not, was that my fault, or theirs? There may be divine forces which
created and govern the universe; but never talk to me of their goodness,
and reasonableness, and care for human creatures! Can a reasonable being,
who cares for the happiness of another, strew the place assigned to him
to dwell in with snares and traps, or implant in his breast a hundred
impulses of which the gratification only drags him into an abyss? Is that
Being my friend, who suffers me to be born and to grow up, and leaves me
tied to the martyr's stake, with very few real joys, and finally kills
me, innocent or guilty, as surely as I am born? If the divinity which is
supposed to bestow on us a portion of the divine essence in the form of
reason were constituted as the crowd are taught to believe, there could
be nothing on earth but wisdom and goodness; but the majority are fools
or wicked, and the good are like tall trees, which the lightning blasts
rather than the creeping weed. Titianus falls before the dancer
Theocritus, the noble Papinian before the murderer Caracalla, our
splendid Alexander before such a wretch as Zminis; and divine reason lets
it all happen, and allows human reason to proclaim the law. Happiness is
for fools and knaves; for those who cherish and uphold reason--ay,
reason, which is a part of the divinity--persecution, misery, and
despair."
"Have done!" Melissa exclaimed. "Have the judgments of the immortals not
fallen hardly enough on us? Would you provoke them to discharge their
fury in some more dreadful manner?"
At this the skeptic struck his breast with defiant pride, exclaiming: "I
do not fear them, and dare to proclaim openly the conclusions of my
thoughts. There are no gods! There is no rational guidance of the
universe. It has arisen self-evolved, by chance; and if a god created it,
he laid down eternal laws and has left them to govern its course without
mercy or grace, and without troubling himself about the puling of men who
creep about on the face of the earth like the ants on that of a pumpkin.
And well for us that it should be so! Better a thousand times is it to be
the servant of an iron law, than the slave of a capricious master who
takes a malignant and envious pleasure in destroying the best!"
"And this, you say, is the final outcome of your thoughts?" asked
Melissa, shaking her head sadly. "Do you not perceive that such an
outbreak of mad despair is simply unworthy of your own wisdom, of which
the end and aim should be a passionless, calm, and immovable moderation?"
"And do they show such moderation," Philip gasped out, "who pour the
poison of misfortune in floods on one tortured heart?"
"Then you can accuse those whose existence you disbelieve in?" retorted
Melissa with angry zeal. "Is this your much-belauded logic? What becomes
of your dogmas, in the face of the first misfortune--dogmas which enjoin
a reserve of decisive judgment, that you may preserve your equanimity,
and not overburden your soul, in addition to the misfortune itself, with
the conviction that something monstrous has befallen you? I remember how
much that pleased me the first time I heard it. For your own sake--for
the sake of us all--cease this foolish raving, and do not merely call
yourself a skeptic--be one; control the passion that is rending you. For
love of me--for love of us all--"
And as she spoke she laid her hand on his shoulder, for he had sat down
again; and although he pushed her away with some petulance, she went on
in a tone of gentle entreaty: "If we are not to be altogether too late in
the field, let us consider the situation calmly. I am but a girl, and
this fresh disaster will fall more hardly on me than on you; for what
would become of me without my father?"
"Life with him has at any rate taught you patient endurance," her brother
broke in with a sullen shrug.
"Yes, life," she replied, firmly: "life, which shows us the right way
better than all your books. Who can tell what may have detained Argutis?
I wilt wait no longer. The sun will have set before long, and this
evening Caesar is to sup with Seleukus, the father of Korinna. I happen
to know it from Samonicus, who is one of the guests. Seleukus and his
wife have a great regard for Alexander, and will do for him all that lies
in their power. The lady Berenike, he told me, is a noble dame. It should
be your part to entreat her help for our father and brother; but you must
not venture where Caesar is. So I will go, and I shall have no rest till
Korinna's mother listens to me and promises to aid us."
At this Philip exclaimed, in horror: "What! you will dare to enter the
house where Caracalla is feasting with the rabble he calls his friends?
You, an inexperienced girl, young, beautiful, whose mere appearance is
enough to stir their evil passions? Sooner than allow that, I will myself
find my way into the house of Seleukus, and among the spies who surround
the tyrant."
"That my father may lose another son, and I my only remaining brother?"
Melissa observed, with grave composure. "Say no more, Philip. I am going,
and you must wait for me here."
The philosopher broke out at this in despotic wrath:
"What has come over you, that you have suddenly forgotten how to obey?
But I insist; and rather than allow you to bring on us not trouble
merely, but shame and disgrace, I will lock you into your room!"
He seized her hand to drag her into the adjoining room. She struggled
with all her might; but he was the stronger, and he had got her as far as
the door, when the Gaul Argutis rushed, panting and breathless, into the
work-room through the anteroom, calling out to the struggling couple:
"What are you doing? By all the gods, you have chosen the wrong time for
a quarrel! Zminis is on the way hither to take you both prisoners; he
will be here in a minute! Fly into the kitchen, girl! Dido will hide you
in the wood-store behind the hearth.-You, Philip, must squeeze into the
henhouse. Only be quick, or it will be too late!"
"Go!" cried Melissa to her brother. "Out through the kitchen window you
can get into the poultry-yard!"
She threw herself weeping into his arms, kissed him, and added, hastily:
"Whatever happens to us, I shall risk all to save my father and
Alexander. Farewell! The gods preserve us!"
She now seized Philip's wrist, as he had before grasped hers, to drag him
away; but he freed himself, saying, with an indifference which terrified
her: "Then let the worst come. Ruin may take its course. Death rather
than dishonor!"
"Madman!" the slave could not help exclaiming; and the faithful fellow,
though wont to obey, threw his arms round his master's son to drag him
away into the kitchen, while Philip pushed him off, saying:
"I will not hide, like a frightened woman!"
But the Gaul heard the approach of marching men, so, paying no further
heed to the brother, he dragged Melissa into the kitchen, where old Dido
undertook to hide her.
Philip stood panting in the studio. Through the open window he could see
the pursuers coming nearer, and the instinct of self-preservation, which
asserts itself even in the strongest, prompted him to follow the slave's
advice. But before he could reach the door, in fancy he saw himself
joining the party of philosophers airing themselves under the arcades in
the great court of the Museum; he heard their laughter and their bitter
jests at the skeptic, the independent thinker, who had sought refuge
among the fowls, who had been hauled out of the hen-house; and this
picture confirmed his determination to yield to force rather than bring
on himself the curse of ridicule. But at the same time other reasons for
submitting to his fate suggested themselves unbidden--reasons more worthy
of his position, of the whole course and aim of his thoughts, and of the
sorrow which weighed upon his soul. It beseemed him as a skeptic to
endure the worst with equanimity; under all circumstances he liked to be
in the right, and he would fain have called out to his sister that the
cruel powers whose enmity he had incurred still persisted in driving him
on to despair and death, worthy as he was of a better fate.
A few minutes later Zminis came in, and put out his long lean arms to
apprehend him in Caesar's name. Philip submitted, and not a muscle of his
face moved. Once, indeed, a smile lighted it up, as he reflected that
they would hardly have carried him off to prison if Alexander were
already in their power; but the smile gave way only too soon to gloomy
gravity when Zminis informed him that his brother, the traitor, had just
given himself up to the chief of the night-watch, and was now safe under
lock and ward. But his crime was so great that, according to the law of
Egypt, his nearest relations were to be seized and punished with him.
Only his sister was now missing, but they would know how to find her.
"Possibly," Philip replied, coldly. "As justice is blind, Injustice has
no doubt all the sharper eyes."
"Well said," laughed the Egyptian. "A pinch of the salt which they give
you at the Museum with your porridge--for nothing."
Argutis had witnessed this scene; and when, half an hour later, the
men-at-arms had left the house without discovering Melissa's
hiding-place, he informed her that Alexander had, as they feared, given
himself up of his own free-will to procure Heron's release; but the
villains had kept the son, without liberating the father. Both were now
in prison, loaded with chains. The slave had ended his tale some minutes,
and Melissa still stood, pale and tearless, gazing on the ground as
though she were turned to stone; but suddenly she shivered, as if with
the chill of fever, and looked up, out through the windows into the
garden, now dim in the twilight. The sun had set, night was falling, and
again the words of the Christian preacher recurred to her mind: "The
fullness of the time is come."
To her and hers a portion of life had come to an end, and a new one must
grow out of it. Should the free-born race of Heron perish in captivity
and death?
The evening star blazed out on the distant horizon, seeming to her as a
sign from the gods; and she told herself that it must be her part, as the
last of the family who remained free, to guard the others from
destruction in this new life.
The heavens were soon blazing with stars. The banquet in Seleukus's
house, at which Caesar was to appear, would begin in an hour.
Irresolution and delay would ruin all; so she drew herself up resolutely
and called to Argutis, who had watched her with faithful sympathy:
"Take my father's blue cloak, Argutis, to make you more dignified; and
disguise yourself, for you must escort me, and we may be followed. You,
Dido, come and help me. Take my new dress, that I wore at the Feast of
Adonis, out of my trunk; and with it you will see my mother's blue fillet
with the gems. My father used to say I should first wear it at my
wedding, but--Well, you must bind my hair with it to-night. I am going to
a grand house, where no one will be admitted who does not look worthy of
people of mark. But take off the jewel; a supplicant should make no
display."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Begun to enjoy the sound of his own voice
Cast off their disease as a serpent casts its skin
A THORNY PATH
By Georg Ebers
Volume 5.
CHAPTER XV.
Nothing delighted old Dido more than to dress the daughter of her beloved
mistress in all her best, for she had helped to bring her up; but to-day
it was a cruel task; tears dimmed her old eyes. It was not till she had
put the finishing touches to braiding the girl's abundant brown hair,
pinned her peplos on the shoulders with brooches, and set the girdle
straight, that her face cleared, as she looked at the result. Never had
she seen her darling look so fair. Nothing, indeed, remained of the
child-like timidity and patient submissiveness which had touched Dido
only two days since, as she plaited Melissa's hair. The maiden's brow was
grave and thoughtful, the lips firmly set; but she seemed to Dido to have
grown, and to have gained something of her mother's mature dignity. She
looked, the old woman told her, like the image of Pallas Athene; adding,
to make her smile, that if she wanted an owl, she, Dido, could fill the
part. Jesting had never been the old woman's strong point, and to-day it
was less easy than ever; for, if the worst befell, and she were sent in
her old age to a strange house--and Argutis, no doubt, to another--she
would have to turn the handmill for the rest of her days.
But it was a hard task which the motherless--and now fatherless--girl had
set herself, and she must try to cheer her darling. While she was
dressing her, she never ceased praying to all the gods and goddesses she
could think of to come to the maiden's aid and move the souls of those
who could help her. And though she was, as a rule, ready to expect the
worst, this time she hoped for the best; for Seleukus's wife must have a
heart of stone if she could close it to such innocence, such beauty, and
the pathetic glance of those large, imploring eyes.
When at length Melissa quitted the house, deeply veiled, with Argutis to
escort her, she took his arm; and he, wearing his master's mantle, and
exempted long since from keeping his hair cropped, was so proud of this
that he walked with all the dignity of a freeman, and no one could have
guessed that he was a slave. Melissa's face was completely hidden, and
she, like her companion, was safe from recognition. Argutis,
nevertheless, led her through the quietest and darkest lanes to the
Kanopic way. Both were silent, and looked straight before them. Melissa,
as she walked on, could not think with her usual calm. Like a suffering
man who goes to the physician's house to die or be cured by the knife,
she felt that she was on her way to something terrible in itself, to
remedy, if possible, something still more dreadful. Her
father--Alexander, so reckless and so good-hearted--Philip, whom she
pitied--and her sick lover, came in turn before her fancy. But she could
not control her mind to dwell on either for long. Nor could she, as
usual, when she had any serious purpose in hand, put up a prayer to her
mother's manes or the immortals; and all the while an inner voice made
itself heard, confidently promising her that Caesar, for whom she had
sacrificed, and who might be kinder and more merciful than others
fancied, would at once grant all she should ask. But she would not
listen; and when she nevertheless ventured to consider how she could make
her way into Caesar's presence, a cold shiver ran down her back, and
again Philip's last words sounded in her ears, "Death rather than
dishonor!"
Other thoughts and feelings filled the slave's soul. He, who had always
watched over his master's children with far more anxious care than Heron
himself, had not said a word to dissuade Melissa from her perilous
expedition. Her plan had, indeed, seemed to him the only one which
promised any success. He was a man of sixty years, and a shrewd fellow,
who might easily have found a better master than Heron had been; but he
gave not a thought to his own prospects--only to Melissa's, whom he loved
as a child of his own. She had placed herself under his protection, and
he felt responsible for her fate. Thus he regarded it as great good
fortune that he could be of use in procuring her admission to the house
of Seleukus, for the door-keeper was a fellow-countryman of his, whom
Fate had brought hither from the banks of the Moselle. At every festival,
which secured a few hours' liberty to all the slaves, they had for years
been boon companions, and Argutis knew that his friend would do for him
and his young mistress all that lay in his power. It would, of course, be
difficult to get an audience of the mistress of a house where Caesar was
a guest, but the door-keeper was clever and ingenious, and would do
anything short of the impossible.
So he walked with his head high and his heart full of pride, and it
confirmed his courage when one of Zminis's men, whom they passed in the
brightly illuminated Kanopic street, and who had helped to secure Philip,
looked at him without recognizing him.
There was a great stir in this, the handsomest road through the city. The
people were waiting for Caesar; but stricter order was observed than on
the occasion of his arrival. The guard prohibited all traffic on the
southern side of the way, and only allowed the citizens to walk up and
down the footpath, shaded by trees, between the two roadways paved with
granite flags, and the arcades in front of the houses on either side. The
free inhabitants, unaccustomed to such restrictions, revenged themselves
by cutting witticisms at Caesar's expense, "for clearing the streets of
Alexandria by his men-at-arms as he did those of Rome by the executioner.
He seemed to have forgotten, as he kept the two roads open, that he only
needed one, now that he had murdered his brother and partner."
Melissa and her companion were ordered to join the crowd on the footway;
but Argutis managed to convince a man on guard that they were two of the
mimes who were to perform before Caesar--the door-keeper at the house of
Seleukus would confirm the fact--and the official himself made way for
them into the vestibule of this splendid dwelling.
But Melissa was as little in the humor to admire all the lavish
magnificence which surrounded her as Alexander had been a few days since.
Still veiled, she modestly took a place among the choir who stood on each
side of the hall ready to welcome Caesar with singing and music. Argutis
stopped to speak with his friend. She dimly felt that the whispering and
giggling all about her was at her expense; and when an elderly, man, the
choir-master, asked her what she wanted, and desired her to remove her
veil, she obeyed at once, saying: "Pray let me stand here, the Lady
Berenike will send for me."
"Very well," replied the musician; and he silenced the singers, who were
hazarding various impertinent guesses as to the arrival of so pretty a
girl just when Caesar was expected.
As Melissa dropped her veil the splendor of the scene, lighted up by
numberless tapers and lamps, forced itself on her attention. She now
perceived that the porphyry columns of the great hall were wreathed with
flowers, and that garlands swung in graceful curves from the open roof;
while at the farther end, statues had been placed of Septimus Severus and
Julia Domna, Caracalla's parents. On each side of these works of art
stood bowers of plants, in which gay-plumaged birds were fluttering
about, excited by the lights. But all these glories swam before her eyes,
and the first question which the artist's daughter was wont to ask
herself, "is it really beautiful or no?" never occurred to her mind. She
did not even notice the smell of incense, until some fresh powder was
thrown on, and it became oppressive.
She was fully conscious only of two facts, when at last Argutis returned:
that she was the object of much curious examination and that every one
was wondering what detained Caesar so long.
At last, after she had waited many long minutes, the door-keeper
approached her with a young woman in a rich but simple dress, in whom she
recognized Johanna, the Christian waiting-maid of whom Alexander had
spoken. She did not speak, but beckoned her to come.
Breathing anxiously, and bending her head low, Melissa, following her
guide, reached a handsome impluvium, where a fountain played in the midst
of a bed of roses. Here the moon and starlight mingled with that of lamps
without number, and the ruddy glare of a blaze; for all round the basin,
from which the playing waters danced skyward, stood marble genii,
carrying in their hands or on their heads silver dishes, in which the
leaping flames consumed cedar chips and aromatic resins.
At the back of this court, where it was as light as day, at the top of
three steps, stood the statues of Alexander the Great and Caracalla. They
were of equal size; and the artist, who had wrought the second in great
haste out of the slightest materials, had been enjoined to make Caesar as
like as possible in every respect to the hero he most revered. Thus they
looked like brothers. The figures were lighted up by the fires which
burned on two altars of ivory and gold. Beautiful boys, dressed as armed
Erotes, fed the flames.
The whole effect was magical and bewildering; but, as she followed her
guide, Melissa only felt that she was in the midst of a new world, such
as she might perhaps have seen in a dream; till, as they passed the
fountain, the cool drops sprinkled her face.
Then she suddenly remembered what had brought her hither. In a minute she
must appear as a supplicant in the presence of Korinna's mother--perhaps
even in that of Caesar himself--and the fate of all dear to her depended
on her demeanor. The sense of fulfilling a serious duty was uppermost in
her mind. She drew herself up, and replaced a stray lock of hair; and her
heart beat almost to bursting as she saw a number of, men standing on the
platform at the top of the steps, round a lady who had just risen from
her ivory seat. Giving her hand to a Roman senator, distinguished by the
purple edge to his toga, she descended the steps, and advanced to meet
Melissa.
This dignified matron, who was awaiting the ruler of the world and yet
could condescend to come forward to meet a humble artist's daughter, was
taller by half a head than her illustrious companion; and the few minutes
during which Berenike was coming toward her were enough to fill Melissa
with thankfulness, confidence, and admiration. And even in that short
time, as she gazed at the magnificent dress of blue brocade shot with
gold and sparkling with precious stones which draped the lady's majestic
figure, she thought how keen a pang it must cost the mother, so lately
bereft of her only child, to maintain a kindly, nay, a genial aspect, in
the midst of this display, toward Caesar and a troop of noisy guests.
The sincerest pity for this woman, rich and preeminent as she was, filled
the soul of the girl, who herself was so much to be pitied. But when the
lady had come up to her, and asked, in her deep voice, what was the
danger that threatened her brother, Melissa, with unembarrassed grace,
and although it was the first time she had ever addressed a lady of such
high degree, answered simply, with a full sense of the business in hand:
"My name is Melissa; I am the sister of Alexander the painter. I know it
is overbold to venture into your presence just now, when you have so much
else to think of; but I saw no other way of saving my brother's life,
which is in peril."
At this Berenike seemed surprised. She turned to her companion, who was
her sister's husband, and the first Egyptian who had been admitted to the
Roman Senate, and said, in a tone of gentle reproach:
"Did not I say so, Coeranus? Nothing but the most urgent need would have
brought Alexander's sister to speak with me at such an hour."
And the senator, whose black eyes had rested with pleasure on Melissa's
rare beauty, promptly replied, "And if she had come for the veriest
trifle she would be no less welcome to me."
"Let me hear no more of such speeches," Berenike exclaimed with some
annoyance.--"Now, my child, be quick. What about your brother?"
Melissa briefly and truthfully reported Alexander's heedless crime and
the results to her father and Philip. She ended by beseeching the noble
lady with fervent pathos to intercede for her father and brothers.
Meanwhile the senator's keen face had darkened, and the lady Berenike's
large eyes, too, were downcast. She evidently found it hard to come to a
decision; and for the moment she was relieved of the necessity, for
runners came hurrying up, and the senator hastily desired Melissa to
stand aside.
He whispered to his sister-in-law:
"It will never do to spoil Caesar's good-humor under your roof for the
sake of such people," and Berenike had only time to reply, "I am not
afraid of him," when the messenger explained to her that Caesar himself
was prevented from coming, but that his representatives, charged with his
apologies, were close at hand.
On this Coeranus exclaimed, with a sour smile: "Admit that I am a true
prophet! You have to put up with the same treatment that we senators have
often suffered under."
But the matron scarcely heard him. She cast her eyes up to heaven with
sincere thanksgiving as she murmured with a sigh of relief, "For this
mercy the gods be praised!"
She unclasped her hands from her heaving bosom, and said to the steward
who had followed the messengers:
"Caesar will not be present. Inform your lord, but so that no one else
may hear. He must come here and receive the imperial representatives with
me. Then have my couch quietly removed and the banquet served at once. O
Coeranus, you can not imagine the misery I am thus spared!"
"Berenike!" said the senator, in a warning voice, and he laid his finger
on his lips. Then turning to the young supplicant, he said to her in a
tone of regret: "So your walk is for nothing, fair maid. If you are as
sensible as you are pretty, you will understand that it is too much to
ask any one to stand between the lion and the prey which has roused his
ire."
The lady, however, did not heed the caution which her brother-in-law
intended to convey. As Melissa's imploring eyes met her own, she said,
with clear decision:
"Wait here. We shall see who it is that Caesar sends. I know better than
my lord here what it is to see those dear to us in peril. How old are
you, child?"
"Eighteen," replied Melissa.
"Eighteen?" repeated Berenike, as if the word were a pain to her, for her
daughter had been just of that age. Then she said, louder and with
encouraging kindness:
"All that lies in my power shall be done for you and yours.--And you,
Coeranus, must help me."
"If I can," he replied, "with all the zeal of my reverence for you and my
admiration for beauty. But here come the envoys. The elder, I see, is our
learned Philostratus, whose works are known to you; the younger is
Theocritus, the favorite of fortune of whom I was telling you. If the
charm of that face might but conquer the omnipotent youth--"
"Coeranus!" she exclaimed, with stern reproof; but she failed to hear the
senator's excuses, for her husband, Seleukus, followed her down the
steps, and with a hasty sign to her, advanced to meet his guests.
Theocritus was spokesman, and notwithstanding the mourning toga which
wrapped him in fine folds, his gestures did not belie his origin as an
actor and dancer. When Seleukus presented him to his wife, Theocritus
assured her that when, but an hour since, his sovereign lord, who was
already dressed and wreathed for the banquet, had learned that the gods
had bereft of their only child the couple whose hospitality had promised
him such a delightful evening, he had been equally shocked and grieved.
Caesar was deeply distressed at the unfortunate circumstance that he
should have happened in his ignorance to intrude on the seclusion which
was the prerogative of grief. He begged to assure her and her husband of
the high favor of the ruler of the world. As for himself, Theocritus, he
would not fail to describe the splendor with which they had decorated
their princely residence in Caesar's honor. His imperial master would be
touched, indeed, to hear that even the bereaved mother, who, like Niobe,
mourned for her offspring, had broken the stony spell which held her to
Sipylos, and had decked herself to receive the greatest of all earthly
guests as radiant as Juno at the golden table of the gods.
The lady succeeded in controlling herself and listening to the end of
these pompous phrases without interrupting the speaker. Every word which
flowed so glibly from his tongue fell on her ear as bitter mockery; and
he himself was so repugnant to her, that she felt it a release when,
after exchanging a few words with the master of the house, he begged
leave to retire, as important business called him away. And this, indeed,
was the truth. For no consideration would he have left this duty to
another, for it was to communicate to Titianus, who had offended him, the
intelligence that Caesar had deprived him of the office of prefect, and
intended to examine into certain complaints of his administration.
The second envoy, however, remained, though he refused Seleukus's
invitation to fill his place at the banquet. He exchanged a few words
with the lady Berenike, and presently found himself taken aside by the
senator, and, after a short explanation, led up to Melissa, whom Coeranus
desired to appeal for help to Philostratus, the famous philosopher, who
enjoyed Caesar's closest confidence.
Coeranus then obeyed a sign from Berenike, who wished to know whether he
would be answerable for introducing this rarely pretty girl, who had
placed herself under their protection--and whom she, for her part, meant
to protect--to a courtier of whom she knew nothing but that he was a
writer of taste.
The question seemed to amuse Coeranus, but, seeing that his sister-in-law
was very much in earnest, he dropped his flippant tone and admitted that
Philostratus, as a young man, had been one of the last with whom he would
trust a girl. His far-famed letters sufficiently proved that the witty
philosopher had been a devoted and successful courtier of women. But that
was all a thing of the past. He still, no doubt, did homage to female
beauty, but he led a regular life, and had become one of the most ardent
and earnest upholders of religion and virtue. He was one of the learned
circle which gathered round Julia Domna, and it was by her desire that he
had accompanied Caracalla, to keep his mad passions in check when it
might be possible.
The conversation between Melissa and the philosopher had meanwhile taken
an unexpected turn. At his very first address the reply had died on her
lips, for in Caesar's representative she had recognized the Roman whom
she had seen in the Temple of Asklepios, and who had perhaps overheard
her there. Philostratus, too, seemed to remember the meeting; for his
shrewd face--a pleasing mixture of grave and gay--lighted up at once with
a subtle smile as he said:
"If I am not mistaken, I owe the same pleasure this evening to divine
Caesar as to great Asklepios this morning?"
At this, Melissa cast a meaning glance at Coeranus and the lady, and,
although surprise and alarm sealed her lips, her uplifted hands and whole
gesture sufficiently expressed her entreaty that he would not betray her.
He understood and obeyed. It pleased him to share a secret with this fair
child. He had, in fact, overheard her, and understood with amazement that
she was praying fervently for Caesar.
This stirred his curiosity to the highest pitch. So he said, in an
undertone:
"All that I saw and heard in the temple is our secret, sweet maid. But
what on earth can have prompted you to pray so urgently for Caesar? Has
he done you or yours any great benefit?"
Melissa shook her head, and Philostratus went on with increased
curiosity:
"Then are you one of those whose heart Eros can fire at the sight of an
image, or the mere aspect of a man?"
To this she answered hastily:
"What an idea! No, no. Certainly not."
"No?" said her new friend, with greater surprise. "Then perhaps your
hopeful young soul expects that, being still but a youth, he may, by the
help of the gods, become, like Titus, a benefactor to the whole world?"
Melissa looked timidly at the matron, who was still talking with her
brother-in-law, and hastily replied:
"They all call him a murderer! But I know for certain that he suffers
fearful torments of mind and body; and one who knows many things told me
that there was not one among all the millions whom Caesar governs who
ever prays for him; and I was so sorry--I can not tell you--"
"And so," interrupted the philosopher, "you thought it praiseworthy and
pleasing to the gods that you should be the first and only one to offer
sacrifice for him, in secret, and of your own free will? That was how it
came about? Well, child, you need not be ashamed of it."
But then suddenly his face clouded, and he asked, in a grave and altered
voice:
"Are you a Christian?"
"No," she replied, firmly. "We are Greeks. How could I have offered a
sacrifice of blood to Asklepios if I had believed in the crucified god?"
"Then," said Philostratus, and his eyes flashed brightly, "I may promise
you, in the name of the gods, that your prayer and offering were pleasing
in their eyes. I myself, noble girl, owe you a rare pleasure. But, tell
me--how did you feel as you left the sanctuary?"
"Light-hearted, my lord, and content," she answered, with a frank, glad
look in her fine eyes. "I could have sung as I went down the road, though
there were people about."
"I should have liked to hear you," he said, kindly, and he still held her
hand, which he had grasped with the amiable geniality that characterized
him, when they were joined by the senator and his sister-in-law.
"Has she won your good offices?" asked Coeranus; and Philostratus
replied, quickly, "Anything that it lies in my power to do for her shall
certainly be done."
Berenike bade them both to join her in her own rooms, for everything that
had to do with the banquet was odious to her; and as they went, Melissa
told her new friend her brother's story. She ended it in the quiet
sitting-room of the mistress of the house, an artistic but not splendid
apartment, adorned only with the choicest works of early Alexandrian art.
Philostratus listened attentively, but, before she could put her petition
for help into words, he exclaimed:
"Then what we have to do is, to move Caesar to mercy, and that--Child,
you know not what you ask!"
They were interrupted by a message from Seleukus, desiring Coeranus to
join the other guests, and as soon as he had left them Berenike withdrew
to take off the splendor she hated. She promised to return immediately
and join their discussion, and Philostratus sat for a while lost in
thought. Then he turned to Melissa and asked her:
"Would you for their sakes be able to make up your mind to face bitter
humiliation, nay, perhaps imminent danger?"
"Anything! I would give my life for them!" replied the girl, with spirit,
and her eyes gleamed with such enthusiastic self-sacrifice that his
heart, though no longer young, warmed under their glow, and the principle
to which he had sternly adhered since he had been near the imperial
person, never to address a word to the sovereign but in reply, was blown
to the winds.
Holding her hand in his, with a keen look into her eyes, he went on:
"And if you were required to do a thing from which many a man even would
recoil--you would venture?"
And again the answer was a ready "Yes." Philostratus released her hand,
and said:
"Then we will dare the worst. I will smooth the way for you, and
to-morrow--do not start--tomorrow you yourself, under my protection,
shall appeal to Caesar."
The color faded from the girl's cheeks, which had been flushed with fresh
hopes, and her counselor had just expressed his wish to talk the matter
over with the lady Berenike, when she came into the room. She was now
dressed in mourning, and her pale, beautiful face showed the traces of
the tears she had just shed. The dark shadows which, when they surround a
woman's eyes, betray past storms of grief, as the halo round the
moon--the eye of night--gives warning of storms to come, were deeper than
ever; and when her sorrowful gaze fell on Melissa, the girl felt an
almost irresistible longing to throw herself into her arms and weep on
her motherly bosom.
Philostratus, too, was deeply touched by the appearance of this mother,
who possessed so much, but for whom everything dearest to a woman's heart
had been destroyed by a cruel stroke of Fate. He was glad to be able to
tell her that he hoped to soften Caesar. Still, his plan was a bold one;
Caracalla had been deeply offended by the scornful tone of the attacks on
him, and Melissa's brother was perhaps the only one of the scoffers who
had been taken. The crime of the Alexandrian wits could not be left
unpunished. For such a desperate case only desperate remedies could
avail; he therefore ventured to propose to conduct Melissa into Caesar's
presence, that she might appeal to his clemency.
The matron started as though a scorpion had stung her. In great
agitation, she threw her arm round the girl as if to shelter her from
imminent danger, and Melissa, seeking help, laid her head on that kind
breast. Berenike was reminded, by the scent that rose up from the girl's
hair, of the hours when her own child had thus fondly clung to her. Her
motherly heart had found a new object to love, and exclaiming,
"Impossible!" she clasped Melissa more closely.
But Philostratus begged to be heard. Any plea urged by a third person he
declared would only be the ruin of the rash mediator.
"Caracalla," he went on, looking at Melissa, "is terrible in his
passions, no one can deny that; but of late severe suffering has made him
irritably sensitive, and he insists on the strictest virtue in all who
are about his person. He pays no heed to female beauty, and this sweet
child, at any rate, will find many protectors. He shall know that the
high-priest's wife, one of the best of women, keeps an anxious eye on
Melissa's fate; and I myself, his mother's friend, shall be at hand. His
passion for revenge, on the other hand, is boundless--no one living can
control it; and not even the noble Julia can shield those who provoke it
from a cruel end. If you do not know it, child, I can tell you that he
had his brother Geta killed, though he took refuge in the arms of the
mother who bore them both. You must understand the worst; and again I ask
you, are you ready to risk all for those you love? Have you the courage
to venture into the lion's den?"
Melissa clung more closely to the motherly woman, and her pale lips
answered faintly but firmly, "I am ready, and he will grant my prayer."
"Child, child," cried Berenike in horror, "you know not what lies before
you! You are dazzled by the happy confidence of inexperienced youth. I
know what life is. I can see you, in your heart's blood, as red and pure
as the blood of a lamb! I see--Ah, child! you do not know death and its
terrible reality."
"I know it!" Melissa broke in with feverish excitement. "My dearest--my
mother--I saw her die with these eyes. What did I not bury in her grave!
And yet hope still lived in my heart; and though Caracalla may be a
reckless murderer, he will do nothing to me, precisely because I am so
feeble. And, lady, what am I? Of what account is my life if I lose my
father, and my brothers, who are both on the high-road to greatness?"
"But you are betrothed," Berenike eagerly put in. "And your lover, you
told me, is dear to you. What of him? He no doubt loves you, and, if you
come to harm, sorrow will mar his young life."
At this Melissa clasped her hands over her face and sobbed aloud. "Show
me, then, any other way--any! I will face the worst. But there is none;
and if Diodoros were here he would not stop me; for what my heart prompts
me to do is right, is my duty. But he is lying sick and with a clouded
mind, and I can not ask him. O noble lady, kindness looks out of your
eyes; cease to rub salt into my wounds! The task before me is hard enough
already. But I would do it, and try to get speech with that terrible man,
even if I had no one to protect me."
The lady had listened with varying feelings to this outpouring of the
young girl's heart. Every instinct rebelled against the thought of
sacrificing this pure, sweet creature to the fury of the tyrant whose
wickedness was as unlimited as his power, and yet she saw no other chance
of saving the artist, whom she held in affectionate regard. Her own noble
heart understood the girl's resolve to purchase the life of those she
loved, even with her blood; she, in the same place, would have done the
same thing; and she thought to herself that it would have made her happy
to see such a spirit in her own child. Her resistance melted away, and
almost involuntarily she exclaimed, "Well, do what you feel to be right."
Melissa flew into her arms again with a grateful sense of release from a
load, and Berenike did all she could to smooth the thorny way for her.
She discussed every point with Philostratus as thoroughly as though for a
child of her own; and, while the tumult came up from the banquet in the
men's rooms, they settled that Berenike herself should conduct the girl
to the wife of the high-priest of Serapis, the brother of Seleukus, and
there await Melissa's return. Philostratus named the hour and other
details, and then made further inquiries concerning the young artist
whose mocking spirit had brought so much trouble on his family.
On this the lady led him into an adjoining room, where the portrait of
her adored daughter was hanging. It was surrounded by a thick wreath of
violets, the dead girl's favorite flower. The beautiful picture was
lighted up by two three-branched lamps on high stands; and Philostratus,
a connoisseur who had described many paintings with great taste and
vividness, gazed in absorbed silence at the lovely features, which were
represented with rare mastery and the inspired devotion of loving
admiration. At last he turned to the mother, exclaiming:
"Happy artist, to have such a subject! It is a work worthy of the early,
best period, and of a master of the time of Apelies. The daughter who has
been snatched from you, noble lady, was indeed matchless, and no sorrow
is too deep to do her justice. But the divinity who has taken her knows
also how to give; and this portrait has preserved for you a part of what
you loved. This picture, too, may influence Melissa's fate; for Caesar
has a fine taste in art, and one of the wants of our time which has
helped to embitter him is the paralyzed state of the imitative arts. It
will be easier to win his favor for the painter who did this portrait
than for a man of noble birth. He needs such painters as this Alexander
for the Pinakothek in the splendid baths he has built at Rome. If you
would but lend me this treasure to-morrow--"
But she interrupted him with a decisive "Never!" and laid her hand on the
frame as if to protect it. Philostratus, however, was not to be put off;
he went on in a tone of the deepest disappointment: "This portrait is
yours, and no one can wonder at your refusal. We must, therefore,
consider how to attain our end without this important ally." Berenike's
gaze had lingered calmly on the sweet face while he spoke, looking more
and more deeply into the beautiful, expressive features. All was silent.
At last she slowly turned to Melissa, who stood gazing sadly at the
ground, and said in a low voice: "She resembled you in many ways. The
gods had formed her to shed joy and light around her. Where she could
wipe away a tear she always did so. Her portrait is speechless, and yet
it tells me to act as she herself would have acted. If this work can
indeed move Caracalla to clemency, then--You, Philostratus, really think
so?"
"Yes," he replied, decisively. "There can be no better mediator for
Alexander than this work." Berenike drew herself up, and said:
"Well, then, to-morrow morning early, I will send it to you at the
Serapeum. The portrait of the dead may perish if it may but save the life
of him who wrought it so lovingly." She turned away her face as she gave
the philosopher her hand, and then hastily left the room.
Melissa flew after her and, with overflowing gratitude, besought the
sobbing lady not to weep.
"I know something that will bring you greater comfort than my brother's
picture: I mean the living image of your Korinna--a young girl; she is
here in Alexandria."
"Zeno's daughter Agatha?" said Berenike; and when Melissa said yes, it
was she, the lady went on with a deep sigh: "Thanks for your kind
thought, my child; but she, too, is lost to me."
And as she spoke she sank on a couch, saying, in a low voice, "I would
rather be alone."
Melissa modestly withdrew into the adjoining room, and Philostratus, who
had been lost in the contemplation of the picture, took his leave.
He did not make use of the imperial chariot in waiting for him, but
returned to his lodgings on foot, in such good spirits, and so well
satisfied with himself, as he had not been before since leaving Rome.
When Berenike had rested in solitude for some little time she recalled
Melissa, and took as much care of her young guest as though she were her
lost darling, restored to her after a brief absence. First she allowed
the girl to send for Argutis; and when she had assured the faithful slave
that all promised well, she dismissed him with instructions to await at
home his young mistress's orders, for that Melissa would for the present
find shelter under her roof.
When the Gaul had departed, she desired her waiting-woman, Johanna, to
fetch her brother. During her absence the lady explained to Melissa that
they both were Christians. They were freeborn, the children of a freedman
of Berenike's house. Johannes had at an early age shown so much
intelligence that they had acceded to his wish to be educated as a
lawyer. He was now one of the most successful pleaders in the city; but
he always used his eloquence, which he had perfected not only at
Alexandria but also at Carthage, by preference in the service of accused
Christians. In his leisure hours he would visit the condemned in prison,
speak comfort to them, and give them presents out of the fine profits he
derived from his business among the wealthy. He was the very man to go
and see her father and brothers; he would revive their spirits, and carry
them her greeting.
When, presently, the Christian arrived he expressed himself as very ready
to undertake this commission. His sister was already busied in packing
wine and other comforts for the captives-more, no doubt, as Johannes told
Berenike, than the three men could possibly consume, even if their
imprisonment should be a long one. His smile showed how confidently he
counted on the lady's liberality, and Melissa quickly put her faith in
the young Christian, who would have reminded her of her brother Philip,
but that his slight figure was more upright, and his long hair quite
smooth, without a wave or curl. His eyes, above all, were unlike
Philip's; for they looked out on the world with a gaze as mild as
Philip's were keen and inquiring.
Melissa gave him many messages for her father and brothers, and when the
lady Berenike begged him to take care that the portrait of her daughter
was safely carried to the Serapeum, where it was to contribute to mollify
Caesar in the painter's favor, he praised her determination, and modestly
added: "For how long may we call our own any of these perishable joys? A
day, perhaps a year, at most a lustrum. But eternity is long, and those
who, for its sake, forget time and set all their hopes on eternity--which
is indeed time to the soul--soon cease to bewail the loss of any
transitory treasure, were it the noblest and dearest. Oh, would that I
could lead you to place your hopes on eternity, best of women and most
true-hearted mother! Eternity, which not the wisest brain can conceive
of!--I tell you, lady, for you are a philosopher--that is the hardest and
therefore the grandest idea for human thought to compass. Fix your eye on
that, and in its infinite realm, which must be your future home, you will
meet her again whom you have lost--not her image returned to you, but
herself."
"Cease," interrupted the matron, with impatient sharpness. "I know what
you are aiming at. But to conceive of eternity is the prerogative of the
immortals; our intellect is wrecked in the attempt. Our wings melt like
those of Ikarus, and we fall into the ocean--the ocean of madness, to
which I have often been near enough. You Christians fancy you know all
about eternity, and if you are right in that--But I will not reopen that
old discussion. Give me back my child for a year, a month, a day even, as
she was before murderous disease laid hands on her, and I will make you a
free gift of your cuckoo-cloud-land of eternity, and of the remainder of
my own life on earth into the bargain."
The vehement woman trembled with renewed sorrow, as if shivering with
ague; but as soon as she had recovered her self-command enough to speak
calmly, she exclaimed to the lawyer:
"I do not really wish to vex you, Johannes. I esteem you, and you are
dear to me. But if you wish our friendship to continue, give up these
foolish attempts to teach tortoises to fly. Do all you can for the poor
prisoners; and if you--"
"By daybreak to-morrow I will be with them," Johannes said, and he
hastily took leave.
As soon as they were alone Berenike observed "There he goes, quite
offended, as if I had done him a wrong. That is the way with all these
Christians. They think it their duty to force on others what they
themselves think right, and any one who turns a deaf ear to their
questionable truths they at once set down as narrow-minded, or as hostile
to what is good. Agatha, of whom you were just now speaking, and Zeno her
father, my husband's brother, are Christians. I had hoped that Korinna's
death would have brought the child back to us; I have longed to see her,
and have heard much that is sweet about her: but a common sorrow, which
so often brings divided hearts together, has only widened the gulf
between my husband and his brother. The fault is not on our side. Nay, I
was rejoiced when, a few hours after the worst was over, a letter from
Zeno informed me that he and his daughter would come to see us the same
evening. But the letter itself"--and her voice began to quiver with
indignation--"compelled us to beg him not to come. It is scarcely
credible--and I should do better not to pour fresh oil on my wrath--but
he bade us 'rejoice'; three, four, five times he repeated the cruel
words. And he wrote in a pompous strain of the bliss and rapture which
awaited our lost child--and this to a mother whose heart had been utterly
broken but a few hours before by a fearful stroke of Fate! He would meet
the bereaved, grieving, lonely mourner with a smile on his lips! Rejoice!
This climax of cruelty or aberration has parted us forever. Why, our
black gardener, whose god is a tree-stump that bears only the faintest
likeness to humanity, melted into tears at the news; and Zeno, our
brother, the uncle of that broken dower, could be glad and bid us
rejoice! My husband thinks that hatred and the long-standing feud
prompted his pen. For my part, I believe it was only this Christian
frenzy which made him suggest that I should sink lower than the brutes,
who defend their young with their lives. Seleukus has long since forgiven
him for his conduct in withdrawing his share of the capital from the
business when he became a Christian, to squander it on the baser sort;
but this 'Rejoice' neither he nor I can forgive, though things which
pierce me to the heart often slide off him like water off grease."
Her black hair had come down as she delivered this vehement speech, and,
when she ceased, her flushed cheeks and the fiery glow of her eyes gave
the majestic woman in her dark robes an aspect which terrified Melissa.
She, too, thought this "Rejoice," under such circumstances, unseemly and
insulting; but she kept her opinion to herself, partly out of modesty and
partly because she did not wish to encourage the estrangement between
this unhappy lady and the niece whose mere presence would have been so
great a comfort to her.
When Johanna returned to lead her to a bedroom, she gave a sigh of
relief; but the lady expressed a wish to keep Melissa near her, and in a
low voice desired the waiting-woman to prepare a bed for her in the
adjoining room, by the side of Korinna's, which was never to be
disturbed. Then, still greatly excited, she invited Melissa into her
daughter's pretty room.
There she showed her everything that Korinna had especially cared for.
Her bird hung in the same place; her lap-dog was sleeping in a basket, on
the cushion which Berenike had embroidered for her child. Melissa had to
admire the dead girl's lute, and her first piece of weaving, and the
elegant loom of ebony and ivory in which she had woven it. And Berenike
repeated to the girl the verses which Korinna had composed, in imitation
of Catullus, on the death of a favorite bird. And although Melissa's eyes
were almost closing with fatigue, she forced herself to attend to it all,
for she saw now how much her sympathy pleased her kind friend.
Meanwhile the voices of the men, who had done eating and were now
drinking, came louder and louder into the women's apartments. When the
merriment of her guests rose to a higher pitch than usual, or something
amusing gave rise to a shout of laughter, Berenike shrank, and either
muttered some unintelligible threat or besought the forgiveness of her
daughter's manes.
It seemed to be a relief to her to rush from one mood to the other; but
neither in her grief, nor when her motherly feeling led her to talk, nor
yet in her wrath, did she lose her perfect dignity. All Melissa saw and
heard moved her to pity or to horror. And meanwhile she was worn out with
anxiety for her family, and with increasing fatigue.
At last, however, she was released. A gay chorus of women's voices and
flutes came up from the banqueting-hall. With a haughty mien and dilated
nostrils Berenike listened to the first few bars. That such a song should
be heard in her house of woe was too much; with her own hand she closed
the shutters over the window next her; then she bade her young guest go
to bed.
Oh, how glad was the overtired girl to stretch herself on the soft couch!
As usual, before going to sleep, she told her mother in the spirit all
the history of the day. Then she prayed to the manes of the departed to
lend her aid in the heavy task before her; but in the midst of her prayer
sleep overcame her, and her young bosom was already rising and falling in
regular breathing when she was roused by a visit from the lady Berenike.
Melissa suddenly beheld her at the head of the bed, in a flowing white
night-dress, with her hair unpinned, and holding a silver lamp in her
hand; and the girl involuntarily put up her arms as if to protect
herself, for she fancied that the daemon of madness stared out of those
large black eyes. But the unhappy woman's expression changed, and she
looked down kindly on Melissa. She quietly set the lamp on the table, and
then, as the cool nightbreeze blew in through the open window, to which
there was no shutter, she tenderly wrapped the white woolen blanket round
Melissa, and muttered to herself, "She liked it so."
Then she knelt down by the side of the bed, pressed her lips on the brow
of the girl, now fully awake, and said:
"And you, too, are fair to look upon. He will grant your prayer!"
Then she asked Melissa about her lover, her father, her mother, and at
last she, unexpectedly, asked her in a whisper:
"Your brother Alexander, the painter--My daughter, though in death,
inspired his soul with love. Yes, Korinna was dear to him. Her image is
living in his soul. Am I right? Tell me the truth!"
On this Melissa confessed how deeply the painter had been impressed by
the dead girl's beauty, and that he had given her his heart and soul with
a fervor of devotion of which she had never imagined him capable. And the
poor mother smiled as she heard it, and murmured, "I was sure of it."
But then she shook her head, sadly, and said "Fool that I am!"
At last she bade Melissa good-night, and went back to her own bedroom.
There Johanna was awaiting her, and while she was plaiting her mistress's
hair the matron said, threateningly:
"If the wretch should not spare even her"--She was interrupted by loud
shouts of mirth from the banqueting-hall, and among the laughing voices
she fancied that she recognized her husband's. She started up with a
vehement movement, and exclaimed, in angry excitement:
"Seleukus might have prevented such an outrage! Oh, I know that sorrowing
father's heart! Fear, vanity, ambition, love of pleasure--"
"But consider," Johanna broke in, "to cross Caesar's wish is to forfeit
life!"
"Then he should have died!" replied the matron, with stern decision.
CHAPTER XVI.
Before sunrise the wind changed. Heavy clouds bore down from the north,
darkening the clear sky of Alexandria. By the time the market was filling
it was raining in torrents, and a cold breeze blew over the town from the
lake. Philostratus had only allowed himself a short time for sleep,
sitting till long after midnight over his history of Apolonius of Tyana.
His aim was to prove, by the example of this man, that a character not
less worthy of imitation than that of the lord of the Christians might be
formed in the faith of the ancients, and nourished by doctrines produced
by the many-branched tree of Greek religion and philosophy. Julia Domna,
Caracalla's mother, had encouraged the philosopher in this task, which
was to show her passionate and criminal son the dignity of moderation and
virtue. The book was also to bring home to Caesar the religion of his
forefathers and his country in all its beauty and elevating power; for
hitherto he had vacillated from one form to another, had not even
rejected Christianity, with which his nurse had tried to inoculate him as
a child, and had devoted himself to every superstition of his time in a
way which had disgusted those about him. It had been particularly
interesting to the writer, with a view to the purpose of this work, to
meet with a girl who practiced all the virtues the Christians most highly
prized, without belonging to that sect, who were always boasting of the
constraining power of their religion in conducing to pure morality.
In his work the day before he had taken occasion to regret the small
recognition his hero had met with among those nearest to him. In this, as
in other respects, he seemed to have shared the fate of Jesus Christ,
whose name, however, Philostratus purposely avoided mentioning. Now,
to-night, he reflected on the sacrifice offered by Melissa for Caesar
whom she knew not, and he wrote the following words as though proceeding
from the pen of Apollonius himself: "I know well how good a thing it is
to regard all the world as my home, and all mankind as my brethren and
friends; for we are all of the same divine race, and have all one
Father."
Then, looking up from the papyrus, he murmured to himself: "From such a
point of view as this Melissa might see in Caracalla a friend and a
brother. If only now it were possible to rouse the conscience of that
imperial criminal!"
He took up the written sheet on which he had begun a dissertation as to
what conscience is, as exerting a choice between good and evil. He had
written: "Understanding governs what we purpose; consciousness governs
what our understanding resolves upon. Hence, if our understanding choose
the good, consciousness is satisfied."
How flat it sounded! It could have no effect in that form.
Melissa had confessed with far greater warmth what her feelings had been
after she had sacrificed for the suffering sinner. Every one, no doubt,
would feel the same who, when called on to choose between good and evil,
should prefer the good; so he altered and expanded the last words: "Thus
consciousness sends a man with song and gladness into the sanctuaries and
groves, into the roads, and wherever mortals live. Even in sleep the song
makes itself heard, and a happy choir from the land of dreams lift up
their voices about his bed."
That was better! This pleasing picture might perhaps leave some
impression on the soul of the young criminal, in whom a preference for
good could still, though rarely, be fanned to a flame. Caesar read what
Philostratus wrote, because he took pleasure in the form of his work; and
this sentence would not have been written in vain if only it should
prompt Caracalla in some cases, however few, to choose the good.
The philosopher was fully determined to do his utmost for Melissa and her
brothers. He had often brought pictures under Caesar's notice, for he was
the first living authority as a connoisseur of painting, and as having
written many descriptions of pictures. He built some hopes, too, on
Melissa's innocence; and so the worthy man, when he retired to rest,
looked forward with confidence to the work of mediation, which was by no
means devoid of danger.
But next morning it presented itself in a less promising light. The
clouded sky, the storm, and rain might have a fatal effect on Caesar's
temper; and when he heard that old Galen, after examining his patient and
prescribing certain remedies, had yesterday evening taken ship, leaving
Caracalla in a frenzy of rage which had culminated in slight convulsions,
he almost repented of his promise. However, he felt himself pledged; so
as early as possible he went to Caesar's rooms, prepared for the worst.
His gloomy anticipations were aggravated by the scene which met his eyes.
In the anteroom he found the chief men of the city and some
representative members of the Alexandrian Senate, who were anxious for an
audience of their imperial visitor. They had been commanded to attend at
an unusually early hour, and had already been kept a long time waiting.
When Philostratus--who was always free to enter Caesar's presence--made
his appearance, Caracalla was seating himself on the throne which had
been placed for him in the splendidly fitted audience-chamber. He had
come from his bath, and was wrapped in the comfortable white woolen robe
which he wore on leaving it. His "friends" as they were called, senators,
and other men of mark, stood round in considerable numbers, among them
the high-priest of Serapis. Pandion, Caesar's charioteer, was occupied,
under the sovereign's instructions, in fastening the lion's chain to the
ring fixed for the purpose in the floor by the side of the throne; and as
the beast, whose collar had been drawn too tight, uttered a low,
complaining growl, Caracalla scolded the favorite. As soon as he caught
sight of Philostratus, he signed to him to approach:
"Do you see nothing strange in me?" he whispered. "Your Phoebus Apollo
appeared to me in a dream. He laid his hand on my shoulder toward
morning; indeed, I saw only horrible faces." Then he pointed out of the
window, exclaiming:
"The god hides his face to-day. Gloomy days have often brought me good
fortune; but this is a strange experience of the eternal sunshine of
Egypt! Men and sky have given me the same kind welcome; gray, gray, and
always gray-without and within--and my poor soldiers out on the square!
Macrinus tells me they are complaining. But my father's advice was sound:
'Keep them content, and never mind anything else.' The heads of the town
are waiting outside; they must give up their palaces to the bodyguard; if
they murmur, let them try for themselves how they like sleeping on the
soaking ground under dripping tents. It may cool their hot blood, and
perhaps dilute the salt of their wit.--Show them in, Theocritus."
He signed to the actor, and when he humbly asked whether Caesar had
forgotten to exchange his morning wrapper for another dress, Caracalla
laughed contemptuously, and replied:
"Why, an empty corn-sack over my shoulders would be dress enough for this
rabble of traders!" He stretched his small but muscular frame out at full
length, resting his head on his hand, and his comely face, which had lost
the suffering look it had worn the day before, suddenly changed in
expression. As was his habit when he wished to inspire awe or fear, he
knit his brows in deep furrows, set his teeth tightly, and assumed a
suspicious and sinister scowl.
The deputation entered, bowing low, headed by the exegetes, the head of
the city, and Timotheus, the chief-priest of Serapis. After these came
the civic authorities, the members of the senate, and then, as
representing the large Jewish colony in the city, their alabarch or
head-man. It was easy to see in each one as he came in, that the presence
of the lion, who had raised his head at their approach, was far from
encouraging; and a faint, scornful smile parted Caracalla's lips as he
noted the cowering knees of these gorgeously habited courtiers. The
high-priest alone, who, as Caesar's host, had gone up to the side of the
throne, and two or three others, among them the governor of the town, a
tall, elderly man of Macedonian descent, paid no heed to the brute. The
Macedonian bowed to his sovereign with calm dignity, and in the name of
the municipally hoped he had rested well. He then informed Caesar what
shows and performances were prepared in his honor, and finally named the
considerable sum which had been voted by the town of Alexandria to
express to him their joy at his visit. Caracalla waved his hand, and
said, carelessly:
"The priest of Alexander, as idiologos, will receive the gold with the
temple tribute. We can find use for it. We knew that you were rich. But
what do you want for your money? What have you to ask?"
"Nothing, noble Caesar," replied the governor. "Thy gracious presence--"
Caracalla interrupted him with a long-drawn "Indeed!" Then, leaning
forward, he gave him a keen, oblique look. "No one but the gods has
nothing to wish for; so it must be that you are afraid to ask. What can
that avail, unless to teach me that you look for nothing but evil from
me; that you are suspicious of me? And if that is so, you fear me; and if
you fear, you hate me. The insults I have received in this house
sufficiently prove the fact. And if you hate me," and he sprang up and
shook his fist, "I must protect myself!"
"Great Caesar," the exegetes began, in humble deprecation, but Caracalla
went on, wrathfully:
"I know when I have to protect myself, and from whom. It is not well to
trifle with me! An insolent tongue is easily hidden behind the lips; but
heads are less easy to hide, and I shall be content with them. Tell that
to your Alexandrian wits! Macrinus will inform you of all else. You may
go."
During this speech the lion, excited by his master's furious gestures,
had risen on his feet and showed his terrible teeth to the delegates. At
this their courage sank. Some laid their hands on their bent knees, as if
to shield them; others had gradually sidled to the door before Caesar had
uttered the last word. Then, in spite of the efforts of the governor and
the alabarch to detain them, in the hope of pacifying the potentate, as
soon as they heard the word "go," they hurried out; and, for better or
for worse, the few bolder spirits had to follow.
As soon as the door was closed upon them, Caesar's features lost their
cruel look. He patted the lion with soothing words of praise, and
exclaimed, contemptuously:
"These are the descendants of the Macedonians, with whom the greatest of
heroes conquered the world! Who was that fat old fellow who shrank into
himself so miserably, and made for the door while I was yet speaking?"
"Kimon, the chief of the night-watch and guardian of the peace of the
city," replied the high-priest of Alexander, who as a Roman had kept his
place by the throne; and Theocritus put in:
"The people must sleep badly under the ward of such a coward. Let him
follow the prefect, noble Caesar."
"Send him his dismissal at once," said Caracalla; "but see that his
successor is a man."
He then turned to the high-priest, and politely requested him to assist
Theocritus in choosing a new head for the town-guard, and Timotheus and
the favorite quitted the room together.
Philostratus took ingenious advantage of the incident, by at once
informing the emperor that it had come to his knowledge that this coward,
so worthily dismissed from office, had, on the merest suspicion, cast
into prison a painter who was undoubtedly one of the first of living
artists, and with him his guiltless relations.
"I will not have it!" Caesar broke out. "Nothing but blood will do any
good here, and petty aggravations will only stir their bile and increase
their insolence. Is the painter of whom you speak an Alexandrian?--I pine
for the open air, but the wind blows the rain against the windows."
"In the field," the philosopher remarked, "you have faced the weather
heroically enough. Here, in the city, enjoy what is placed before you.
Only yesterday I still believed that the art of Apelles was utterly
degenerate. But since then I have changed my opinion, for I have seen a
portrait which would be an ornament to the Pinakothek in your baths. The
northern windows are closed, or, in this land of inundations, and in such
weather as this, we might find ourselves afloat even under cover of a
roof; so it is too dark here to judge of a painting, but your
dressing-room is more favorably situated, and the large window there will
serve our purpose. May I be allowed the pleasure of showing you there the
work of the imprisoned artist?"
Caesar nodded, and led the way, accompanied by his lion and followed by
the philosopher, who desired an attendant to bring in the picture.
In this room it was much lighter than in the audience-chamber, and while
Caracalla awaited, with Philostratus, the arrival of the painting, his
Indian body-slave, a gift from the Parthian king, silently and skillfully
dressed his thin hair. The sovereign sighed deeply, and pressed his hand
to his brow as though in pain. The philosopher ventured to approach him,
and there was warm sympathy in his tone as he asked:
"What ails you, Bassianus? Just now you bore all the appearance of a
healthy, nay, and of a terrible man!"
"It is better again already," replied the sovereign. "And yet--!"
He groaned again, and then confessed that only yesterday he had in the
same way been tortured with pain.
"The attack came on in the morning, as you know," he went on, "and when
it was past I went down into the court of sacrifice; my feet would
scarcely carry me. Curiosity--and they were waiting for me; and some
great sign might be shown! Besides, some excitement helps me through this
torment. But there was nothing--nothing! Heart, lungs, liver, all in
their right place.--And then, Galenus--What I like is bad for me, what I
loathe is wholesome. And again and again the same foolish question, 'Do
you wish to escape an early death?' And all with an air as though Death
were a slave at his command--He can, no doubt, do more than others, and
has preserved his own life I know not how long. Well, and it is his duty
to prolong mine.
"I am Caesar. I had a right to insist on his remaining here. I did so;
for he knows my malady, and describes it as if he felt it himself. I
ordered him--nay, I entreated him. But he adhered to his own way. He
went--he is gone!"
"But he may be of use to you, even at a distance," Philostratus said.
"Did he do anything for my father, or for me in Rome, where he saw me
every day?" retorted Caesar. "He can mitigate and relieve the suffering,
but that is all; and of all the others, is there one fit to hand him a
cup of water? Perhaps he would be willing to cure me, but he can not; for
I tell you, Philostratus, the gods will not have it so. You know what
sacrifices I have offered, what gifts I have brought. I have prayed, I
have abased myself before them, but none will hear. One or another of the
gods, indeed, appears to me not infrequently as Apollo did last night.
But is it because he favors me? First, he laid his hand on my shoulder,
as my father used to do; but his was so heavy, that the weight pressed me
down till I fell on my knees, crushed. This is no good sign, you think? I
see it in your face. I do not myself think so. And how loudly I have
called on him, of all the gods! The whole empire, they say, men and women
alike, besought the immortals unbidden for the welfare of Titus. I, too,
am their lord; but"--and he laughed bitterly--"who has ever raised a hand
in prayer for me of his own impulse? My own mother always named my
brother first. He has paid for it,--But the rest!"
"They fear rather than love you," replied the philosopher. "He to whom
Phoebus Apollo appears may always expect some good to follow. And
yesterday--a happy omen, too--I overheard by chance a young Greek girl,
who believed herself unobserved, who of her own prompting fervently
entreated Asklepios to heal you. Nay, she collected all the coins in her
little purse, and had a goat and a cock sacrificed in your behalf."
"And you expect me to believe that!" said Caracalla, with a scornful
laugh.
But Philostratus eagerly replied:
"It is the pure truth. I went to the little temple because it was said
that Apollonius had left some documents there. Every word from his pen
is, as you know, of value to me in writing his history. The little
library was screened off from the cella by a curtain, and while I was
hunting through the manuscripts I heard a woman's voice."
"It spoke for some other Bassianus, Antoninus, Tarautus, or whatever they
choose to call me," Caesar broke in.
"Nay, my lord, not so. She prayed for you, the son of Severus. I spoke to
her afterwards. She had seen you yesterday morning, and fancied she had
noted how great and severe your sufferings were. This had gone to her
heart. So she went thither to pray and sacrifice for you, although she
knew that you were prosecuting her brother, the very painter of whom I
spoke. I would you too could have heard how fervently she addressed the
god, and then Hygeia!"
"A Greek, you say?" Caracalla remarked. "And she really did not know you,
or dream that you could hear her?"
"No, my lord; assuredly not. She is a sweet maid, and if you would care
to see her--"
Caesar had listened to the tale with great attention and evident
expectancy; but suddenly his face clouded, and, heedless of the slaves
who, under the guidance of his chamberlain Adventus, had now brought in
the portrait, he sprang up, went close to Philostratus, and stormed out:
"Woe to you if you lie to me! You want to get the brother out of prison,
and then, by chance, you come across the sister who is praying for me! A
fable to cheat a child with!"
"I am speaking the truth," replied Philostratus, coolly, though the rapid
winking of Caesar's eyelids warned him that his blood was boiling with
wrath.
"It was from the sister, whom I overheard in the temple, that I learned
of her brother's peril, and I afterward saw that portrait."
Caracalla stared at the floor for a moment in silence; then he looked up,
and said, in a tone husky with agitation:
"I only long for anything which may bring me nearer to the perverse race
over whom I rule, be it what it may. You offer it me. You are the only
man who never asked me for anything. I have believed you to be as
righteous as all other men are not. And now if you, if this time--"
He lowered his tones, which had become somewhat threatening, and went on
very earnestly: "By all you hold most sacred on earth, I ask you, Did the
girl pray for me, and of her own free impulse, not knowing that any one
could hear her?"
"I swear it, by the head of my mother!" replied Philostratus, solemnly.
"Your mother?" echoed Caesar, and his brow began to clear. But suddenly
the gleam of satisfaction, which for a moment had embellished his
features, vanished, and with a sharp laugh he added: "And my mother! Do
you suppose that I do not know what she requires of you? It is solely to
please her that you, a free man, remain with me. For her sake you are
bold enough to try now and then to quell the stormy sea of my passions.
You do it with a grace, so I submit. And now my hand is raised to strike
a wretch who mocks at me; he is a painter, of some talent, so, of course,
you take him under your protection. Then, in a moment, your inventive
genius devises a praying sister. Well, there is in that something which
might indeed mollify me. But you would betray Bassianus ten times over to
save an artist. And then, how my mother would fly to show her gratitude
to the man who could quell her furious son! Your mother!--But I only
squint when it suits me. My eye must become dimmer than it yet is before
I fail to see the connection of ideas which led you to swear by your
mother. You were thinking of mine when you spoke. To please her, you
would deceive her son. But as soon as he touches the lie it vanishes into
thin air, for it has no more substance than a soap bubble!" The last
words were at once sad, angry, and scornful; but the philosopher, who had
listened at first with astonishment and then with indignation, could no
longer contain himself.
"Enough!" he cried to the angry potentate, in an imperious tone. Then,
drawing himself up, he went on with offended dignity:
"I know what the end has been of so many who have aroused your wrath, and
yet I have courage enough to tell you to your face, that to injustice,
the outcome of distrust, you add the most senseless insult. Or do you
really think that a just man--for so you have called me more than
once--would outrage the manes of the beloved woman who bore him to please
the mother of another man, even though she be Caesar's? What I swear to
by the head of my mother, friend and foe alike must believe; and he who
does not, must hold me to be the vilest wretch on earth; my presence can
only be an offense to him. So I beg you to allow me to return to Rome."
The words were manly and spoken firmly, and they pleased Caracalla; for
the joy of believing in the philosopher's statement outweighed every
other feeling. And since he regarded Philostratus as the incarnation of
goodness--though he had lost faith in that--his threat of leaving
disturbed him greatly. He laid his hand on his brave adviser's arm, and
assured him that he was only too happy to believe a thing so incredible.
Any witness of the scene would have supposed this ruthless fatricide,
this tyrant--whose intercourse with the visions of a crazed and unbridled
fancy made him capable of any folly, and who loved to assume the aspect
of a cruel misanthrope--to be a docile disciple, who cared for nothing
but to recover the favor and forgiveness of his master. And Philostratus,
knowing this man, and the human heart, did not make it too easy for him
to achieve his end. When he at last gave up his purpose of returning to
Rome, and had more fully explained to Caesar how and where he had met
Melissa, and what he had heard about her brother the painter, he lifted
the wrapper from Korinna's portrait, placed it in a good light, and
pointed out to Caracalla the particular beauties of the purely Greek
features.
It was with sincere enthusiasm that he expatiated on the skill with which
the artist had reproduced in color the noble lines which Caracalla so
much admired in the sculpture of the great Greek masters; how warm and
tender the flesh was; how radiant the light of those glorious eyes; how
living the waving hair, as though it still breathed of the scented oil!
And when Philostratus explained that though Alexander had no doubt spoken
some rash and treasonable words, he could not in any case be the author
of the insulting verses which had been found at the Serapeum with the
rope, Caracalla echoed his praises of the picture, and desired to see
both the painter and his sister.
That morning, as he rose from his bed, he had been informed that the
planets which had been seen during the past night from the observatory of
the Serapeum, promised him fortune and happiness in the immediate future.
He was himself a practiced star-reader, and the chief astrologer of the
temple had pointed out to him how peculiarly favorable the constellation
was whence he had deduced his prediction. Then, Phoebus Apollo had
appeared to him in a dream; the auguries from the morning's sacrifices
had all been favorable; and, before he dispatched Philostratus to fetch
Melissa, he added:
"It is strange! The best fortune has always come to me from a gloomy sky.
How brightly the sun shone on my marriage with the odious Plautilla! It
has rained, on the contrary, on almost all my victories; and it was under
a heavy storm that the oracle assured me the soul of Alexander the Great
had selected this tortured frame in which to live out his too early ended
years on earth. Can such coincidence be mere chance? Phoebus Apollo, your
favorite divinity--and that, too, of the sage of Tyana--may perhaps have
been angry with me. He who purified himself from blood-guiltiness after
killing the Python is the god of expiation. I will address myself to him,
like the noble hero of your book. This morning the god visited me again;
so I will have such sacrifice slain before him as never yet was offered.
Will that satisfy you, O philosopher hard to be appeased?"
"More than satisfy me, my Bassianus," replied Philostratus. "Yet remember
that, according to Apollonius, the sacrifice is effective only through
the spirit in which it is offered."
"Always a 'but' and an 'if'!" exclaimed Caracalla, as his friend left the
room to call Melissa from the high-priest's quarters, where she was
waiting.
For the first time for some days Caesar found himself alone. Leading the
lion by the collar, he went to the window. The rain had ceased, but black
clouds still covered the heavens. Below him lay the opening of the street
of Hermes into the great square, swarming with human life, and covered
with the now drenched tents of the soldiery; and his eyes fell on that of
a centurion, a native of Alexandria, just then receiving a visit from his
family, to whom the varied fortunes of a warrior's life had brought him
back once more.
The bearded hero held an infant in his arms--assuredly his own--while a
girl and boy clung to him, gazing up in his face with wondering black
eyes; and another child, of about three, paying no heed to the others,
was crowing as it splashed through a puddle with its little bare feet.
Two women, one young and one elderly, the man's mother and his wife, no
doubt, seemed to hang on his lips as he recounted perhaps some deed of
valor.
The tuba sounded to arms. He kissed the infant, and carefully laid it on
its mother's bosom; then he took up the boy and the girl, laughingly
caught the little one, and pressed his bearded lips to each rosy mouth in
turn. Last of all he clasped the young wife to his breast, gently stroked
her hair, and whispered something in her ear at which she smiled up at
him through her tears and then blushingly looked down. His mother patted
him fondly on the shoulder, and, as they parted, he kissed her too on her
wrinkled brow.
Caracalla had remarked this centurion once before; his name was
Martialis, and he was a simple, commonplace, but well-conducted creature,
who had often distinguished himself by his contempt for death. The
imperial visit to Alexandria had meant for him a return home and the
greatest joy in life. How many arms had opened to receive the common
soldier; how many hearts had beat high at his coming! Not a day, it was
certain, had passed since his arrival without prayers going up to Heaven
for his preservation, from his mother, his wife, and his children. And
he, the ruler of the world, had thought it impossible that one, even one
of his millions of subjects, should have prayed for him. Who awaited him
with a longing heart? Where was his home?
He had first seen the light in Gaul. His father was an African; his
mother was born in Syria. The palace at Rome, his residence, he did not
care to remember. He traveled about the empire, leaving as wide a space
as possible between himself and that house of doom, from which he could
never wipe out the stain of his brother's blood.
And his mother? She feared--perhaps she hated him--her first-born son,
since he had killed her younger darling. What did she care for him, so
long as she had her philosophers to argue with, who knew how to ply her
with delicate flattery?
Then Plautilla, his wife? His father had compelled him to marry her, the
richest heiress in the world, whose dowry had been larger than the
collected treasure of a dozen queens; and as he thought of the sharp
features of that insignificant, sour-faced, and unspeakably pretentious
creature, he shuddered with aversion.
He had banished her, and then had her murdered. Others had done the deed,
and it did not strike him that he was responsible for the crime committed
in his service; but her loveless heart, without a care for him--her
bird-sharp face, looking out like a well-made mask from her abundant
hair--and her red, pinched lips, were very present to him. What cutting
words those lips could speak; what senseless demands they had uttered;
and nothing more insolent could be imagined than her way of pursing them
up if at any time he had suggested a kiss!
His child? One had been born to him, but it had followed its mother into
exile and to the grave. The little thing, which he had scarcely known,
was so inseparable from its detested mother that he had mourned it no
more than her. It was well that the assassins, without any orders from
him, should have cut short that wretched life. He could not long for the
embraces of the monster which should have united Plautilla's vices and
his own.
Among the men about his person, there was not one for whom other hearts
beat warmer; no creature that loved him excepting his lion; no spot on
earth where he was looked for with gladness. He waited, as for some
marvel, to see the one human being who had spontaneously entreated the
gods for him. The girl must probably be a poor, tearful creature, as weak
of brain as she was soft-hearted.
There stood the centurion at the head of his maniple, and raised his
staff. Enviable man! How content he looked; how clearly he spoke the word
of command! And how healthy the vulgar creature must be--while he,
Caesar, was suffering that acute headache again! He gnashed his teeth,
and felt a strong impulse to spoil the happiness of that shameless
upstart. If he were sent packing to Spain, now, or to Pontus, there would
be an end of his gladness. The centurion should know what it was to be a
solitary soul.
Acting on this malignant impulse, he had raised his hand to his mouth to
shout the cruel order to a tribune, when suddenly the clouds parted, and
the glorious sun of Africa appeared in a blue island amid the ocean of
gray, cheering the earth with glowing sheaves of rays. The beams were
blinding as they came reflected from the armor and weapons of the men,
reminding Caesar of the god to whom he had just vowed an unparalleled
sacrifice.
Philostratus had often praised Phoebus Apollo above all gods, because
wherever he appeared there was light, irradiating not the earth alone but
men's souls; and because, as the lord of music and harmony, he aided men
to arrive at that morally pure and equable frame of mind which was
accordant and pleasing to his glorious nature. Apollo had conquered the
dark heralds of the storm, and Caracalla looked up. Before this radiant
witness he was ashamed to carry out his dark purpose, and he said,
addressing the sun:
"For thy sake, Phoebus Apollo, I spare the man." Then, pleased with
himself, he looked down again. The restraint he had laid upon himself
struck him as in fact a great and noble effort, accustomed as he was to
yield to every impulse. But at the same time he observed that the clouds,
which had so often brought him good fortune, were dispersing, and this
gave him fresh uneasiness. Dazzled by the flood of sunshine which poured
in at the window, he withdrew discontentedly into the room. If this
bright day were to bring disaster? If the god disdained his offering?
But was not Apollo, perhaps, like the rest of the immortals, an idol of
the fancy, living only in the imagination of men who had devised it?
Stern thinkers and pious folks, like the skeptics and the Christians,
laughed the whole tribe of the Olympians to scorn. Still, the hand of
Phoebus Apollo had rested heavily on his shoulders in his dream. His
power, after all, might be great. The god must have the promised
sacrifice, come what might. Bitter wrath rose up in his soul at this
thought, as it had often done before, with the immortals, against whom
he, the all-powerful, was impotent. If only for an hour they could be his
subjects, he would make them rue the sufferings by which they spoiled his
existence.
"He is called Martialis. I will remember that name," he thought, as he
cast a last envious look at the centurion.
How long Philostratus was gone! Solitude weighed on him, and he looked
about him wildly, as though seeking some support. An attendant at this
moment announced the philosopher, and Caracalla, much relieved, went into
the tablinum to meet him. There he sat down on a seat in front of the
writing-table strewn with tablets and papyrus-rolls, rearranged the end
of the purple toga for which he had exchanged his bathing-robe, rested
one foot on the lion's neck and his head on his hand. He would receive
this wonderful girl in the character of an anxious sovereign meditating
on the welfare of his people.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Galenus--What I like is bad for me, what I loathe is wholesome
A THORNY PATH
By Georg Ebers
Volume 6.
CHAPTER XVII.
The philosopher announced the visitor to Caesar, and as some little time
elapsed before Melissa came in, Caracalla forgot his theatrical
assumption, and sat with a drooping head; for, in consequence, no doubt,
of the sunshine which beat on the top of his head, the pain had suddenly
become almost unendurably violent.
Without vouchsafing a glance at Melissa, he swallowed one of the
alleviating pills left him by Galenus, and hid his face in his hands. The
girl came forward, fearless of the lion, for Philostratos had assured her
that he was tamed, and most animals were willing to let her touch them.
Nor was she afraid of Caesar himself, for she saw that he was in pain,
and the alarm with which she had crossed the threshold gave way to pity.
Philostratus kept at her side, and anxiously watched Caracalla.
The courage the simple girl showed in the presence of the ferocious
brute, and the not less terrible man, struck him favorably, and his hopes
rose as a sunbeam fell on her shining hair, which the lady Berenike had
arranged with her own hand, twining it with strands of white Bombyx. She
must appear, even to this ruthless profligate, as the very type of pure
and innocent grace.
Her long robe and peplos, of the finest white wool, also gave her an air
of distinction which suited the circumstances. It was a costly garment,
which Berenike had had made for Korinna, and she had chosen it from among
many instead of the plainer robe in which old Dido had dressed her young
mistress. With admirable taste the matron had aimed at giving Melissa a
simple, dignified aspect, unadorned and almost priestess-like in its
severity. Nothing should suggest the desire to attract, and everything
must exclude the idea of a petitioner of the poorer and commoner sort.
Philostratus saw that her appearance had been judiciously cared for; but
Caesar's long silence, of which he knew the reason, began to cause him
some uneasiness: for, though pain sometimes softened the despot's mood,
it more often prompted him to revenge himself, as it were, for his own
sufferings, by brutal attacks on the comfort and happiness of others.
And, at last, even Melissa seemed to be losing the presence of mind he
had admired, for he saw her bosom heave faster and higher, her lips
quivered, and her large eyes sparkled through tears.
Caesar's countenance presently cleared a little. He raised his head, and
as his eye met Melissa's she pronounced in a low, sweet voice the
pleasant Greek greeting, "Rejoice!"
At this moment the philosopher was seized with a panic of anxiety; he
felt for the first time the weight of responsibility he had taken on
himself. Never had he thought her so lovely, so enchantingly bewitching
as now, when she looked up at Caracalla in sweet confusion and timidity,
but wholly possessed by her desire to win the favor of the man who, with
a word, could make her so happy or so wretched. If this slave of his
passions, whom a mere whim perhaps had moved to insist on the strictest
morality in his court, should take a fancy to this delightful young
creature, she was doomed to ruin. He turned pale, and his heart throbbed
painfully as he watched the development of the catastrophe for which he
had himself prepared the way.
But, once more, the unexpected upset the philosopher's anticipations.
Caracalla gazed at the girl in amazement, utterly discomposed, as though
some miracle had happened, or a ghost had started from the ground before
him. Springing up, while he clutched the back of his chair, he exclaimed:
"What is this? Do my senses deceive me, or is it some base trickery? No,
no! My eyes and my memory are good. This girl--"
"What ails thee, Caesar?" Philostratus broke in, with increasing anxiety.
"Something--something which will silence your foolish doubts--" Caesar
panted out. "Patience--wait. Only a minute, and you shall see.--But,
first"--and he turned to Melissa--"what is your name, girl?"
"Melissa," she replied, in a low and tremulous voice.
"And your father's and your mother's?"
"Heron is my father's name, and my mother--she is dead--was called
Olympias, the daughter of Philip."
"And you are of Macedonian race?"
"Yes, my lord. My father and mother both were of pure Macedonian
descent."
The emperor glanced triumphantly at Philostratus, and briefly exclaiming,
"That will do, I think," he clapped his hands, and instantly his old
chamberlain, Adventus, hurried in from the adjoining room, followed by
the whole band of "Caesar's friends." Caracalla, however, only said to
them:
"You can wait till I call you.--You, Adventus! I want the gem with the
marriage of Alexander." The freedman took the gem out of an ebony casket
standing on Caesar's writing-table, and Caracalla, holding the
philosopher by the arm, said, with excited emphasis:
"That gem I inherited from my father, the divine Severus. It was engraved
before that child came into the world. Now you shall see it, and if you
then say that it is an illusion--But why should you doubt it? Pythagoras
and your hero Apollonius both knew whose body their souls had inhabited
in a former existence. Mine--though my mother has laughed at my belief,
and others have dared to do the same-mine, five hundred years ago, dwelt
in the greatest of heroes, Alexander the Macedonian--a right royal
tabernacle!"
He snatched the gem from the chamberlain's hand, and while he devoured it
with his eyes, looking from time to time into Melissa's face, he eagerly
ran on:
"It is she. None but a blind man, a fool, a malignant idiot, could doubt
it! Any who henceforth shall dare mock at my conviction that I was
brought into the world to fulfill the life-span of that great hero, will
learn to rue it! Here--it is but natural--here, in the city he founded
and which bears his name, I have found positive proof that the bond which
unites the son of Philip with the son of Severus is something more than a
mere fancy. This maiden--look at her closely--is the re-embodiment of the
soul of Roxana, as I am of that of her husband. Even you must see now how
naturally it came about that she should uplift her heart and hands in
prayer for me. Her soul, when it once dwelt in Roxana, was fondly linked
with that of the hero; and now, in the bosom of this simple maiden, it is
drawn to the unforgotten fellow-soul which has found its home in my
breast."
He spoke with enthusiastic and firm conviction of the truth of his
strange imagining, as though he were delivering a revelation from the
gods. He bade Philostratus approach and compare the features of Roxana,
as carved in the onyx, with those of the young supplicant.
The fair Persian stood facing Alexander; they were clasping each other's
hands in pledge of marriage, and a winged Hymen fluttered above their
heads with his flaming torch.
Philostratus was, in fact, startled as he looked at the gem, and
expressed his surprise in the liveliest terms, for the features of Roxana
as carved in the cameo, no larger than a man's palm, were, line for line,
those of the daughter of Heron. And this sport of chance could not but be
amazing to any one who did not know--as neither of the three who were
examining the gem knew--that it was a work of Heron's youth, and that he
had given Roxana the features of his bride Olympias, whose living image
her daughter Melissa had grown to be.
"And how long have you had this work of art?" asked Philostratus.
"I inherited it, as I tell you, from my father," replied Caracalla.
"Severus sometimes wore it.--But wait. After the battle of Issos, in his
triumph over Pescennius Niger--I can see him now--he wore it on his
shoulder, and that was--"
"Two-and-twenty years ago," the philosopher put in; and Caracalla,
turning to Melissa, asked her:
"How old are you, child?"
"Eighteen, my lord." And the reply delighted Caesar; he laughed aloud,
and looked triumphantly at Philostratus.
The philosopher willingly admitted that there was something strange in
the incident, and he congratulated Caesar on having met with such strong
confirmation of his inward conviction. The soul of Alexander might now do
great things through him.
During this conversation the alarm which had come over Melissa at
Caesar's silence had entirely disappeared. The despot whose suffering had
appealed to her sympathetic soul, now struck her as singular rather than
terrible. The idea that she, the humble artist's daughter, could harbor
the soul of a Persian princess, amused her; and when the lion lifted his
head and lashed the floor with his tail at her approach, she felt that
she had won his approbation. Moved by a sudden impulse, she laid her hand
on his head and boldly stroked it. The light, warm touch soothed the
fettered prince of the desert, and, rubbing his brow against Melissa's
round arm, he muttered a low, contented growl.
At this Caesar was enchanted; it was to him a further proof of his
strange fancy. The "Sword of Persia" was rarely so friendly to any one;
and Theocritus owed much of the favor shown him by Caracalla to the fact
that at their first meeting the lion had been on particularly good terms
with him. Still, the brute had never shown so much liking for any
stranger as for this young girl, and never responded with such eager
swinging of his tail excepting to Caesar's own endearments. It must be
instinct which had revealed to the beast the old and singular bond which
linked his master and this new acquaintance. Caracalla, who, in all that
happened to him, traced the hand of a superior power, pointed this out to
Philostratus, and asked him whether, perhaps, the attack of pain he had
just suffered might not have yielded so quickly to the presence of the
revived Roxana rather than to Galen's pills.
Philostratus thought it wise not to dispute this assumption, and soon
diverted the conversation to the subject of Melissa's imprisoned
relations. He quietly represented to Caracalla that his noblest task must
be to satisfy the spirit of her who had been so dear to the hero whose
life he was to fulfill; and Caesar, who was delighted that the
philosopher should recognize as a fact the illusion which flattered him,
at once agreed. He questioned Melissa about her brother Alexander with a
gentleness of which few would have thought him capable; and the sound of
her voice, as she answered him modestly but frankly and with sisterly
affection, pleased him so well that he allowed her to speak without
interruption longer than was his wont. Finally, he promised her that he
would question the painter, and, if possible, be gracious to him.
He again clapped his hands, and ordered a freedman named Epagathos, who
was one of his favorite body-servants, to send immediately for Alexander
from the prison.
As before, when Adventus had been summoned, a crowd followed Epagathos,
and, as Caesar did not dismiss them, Melissa was about to withdraw; the
despot, however, desired her to wait.
Blushing, and confused with shyness, she remained standing by Caesar's
seat; and though she only ventured to raise her eyes now and then for a
stolen look, she felt herself the object of a hundred curious, defiant,
bold, or contemptuous glances.
How gladly would she have escaped, or have sunk into the earth! But there
she had to stand, her teeth set, while her lips trembled, to check the
tears which would rise.
Caesar, meanwhile, took no further notice of her. He was longing to
relate at full length, to his friends and companions, the wonderful and
important thing that had happened; but he would not approach the subject
while they took their places in his presence. Foremost of them, with
Theocritus, came the high-priest of Serapis, and Caracalla immediately
desired them to introduce the newly appointed head-guardian of the peace.
But the election was not yet final. The choice lay, Theocritus explained,
between two equally good men. One, Aristides, was a Greek of high repute,
and the other was only an Egyptian, but so distinguished for zealous
severity that, for his part, he should vote for him.
At this the high-priest broke in, saying that the man favored by
Theocritus did in fact possess the qualities for which he was commended,
but in such a measure that he was utterly hated by the Greek population;
and in Alexandria more could be achieved by justice and mercy than by
defiant severity.
But at this the favorite laughed, and said that he was convinced of the
contrary. A populace which could dare to mock at the divine Caesar, the
guest of their city, with such gross audacity, must be made to smart
under the power of Rome and its ruler. The deposed magistrate had lost
his place for the absurd measures he had proposed, and Aristides was in
danger of following in his footsteps.
"By no means," the high-priest said, with calm dignity. "The Greek, whom
I would propose, is a worthy and determined man. Now, Zminis the
Egyptian, the right hand of the man who has been turned out, is, it must
be said, a wretch without ruth or conscience."
But here the discussion was interrupted. Melissa, whose ears had tingled
as she listened, had started with horror as she heard that Zminis, the in
former, was to be appointed to the command of the whole watch of the
city. If this should happen, her brothers and father were certainly lost.
This must be prevented. As the high-priest ceased speaking, she laid her
hand on Caesar's, and, when he looked up at her in surprise, she
whispered to him, so low and so quickly that hardly any one observed it
"Not Zminis; he is our mortal enemy!"
Caracalla scarcely glanced at the face of the daring girl, but he saw how
pale she had turned. The delicate color in her cheeks, and the dimple he
had seen while she stroked the lion had struck him as particularly
fascinating. This had helped to make her so like the Roxana on the gem,
and the change in her roused his pity. She must smile again; and so,
accustomed as he was to visit his annoyance on others, he angrily
exclaimed to his "Friends":
"Can I be everywhere at once? Can not the simplest matter be settled
without me? It was the praetorian prefect's business to report to me
concerning the two candidates, if you could not agree; but I have not
seen him since last evening. The man who has to be sought when I need him
neglects his duty! Macrinus usually knows his. Does any one know what has
detained him?"
The question was asked in an angry, nay, in an ominous tone, but the
praetorian prefect was a powerful personage, whose importance made him
almost invulnerable. Yet the praetor Lucius Priscillianus was ready with
an answer. He was the most malicious and ill-natured scandal-monger at
court; and he hated the prefect, for he himself had coveted the post,
which was the highest in the state next to Caesar's. He had always some
slaves set to spy upon Macrinus, and he now said, with a contemptuous
shrug:
"It is a marvel to me that so zealous a man--though he is already
beginning to break down under his heavy duties--should be so late.
However, he here spends his evenings and nights in special occupations,
which must of course be far from beneficial to the health and peace of
mind which his office demands."
"What can those be?" asked Caracalla; but the praetor added without a
pause:
"Merciful gods! Who would not crave to glance into the future?"
"And it is that which makes him late?" said Caesar, with more curiosity
than anger.
"Hardly by broad daylight," replied Priscillianus. "The spirits he would
fain evoke shun the light of day, it is said. But he may be weary with
late watching and painful agitations."
"Then he calls up spirits at night?"
"Undoubtedly, great Caesar. But, in this capital of philosophy, spirits
are illogical it would seem. How can Macrinus interpret the prophecy that
he, who is already on the highest step attainable to us lower mortals,
shall rise yet higher?"
"We will ask him," said Caesar, indifferently. "But you--guard your
tongue. It has already cost some men their heads, whom I would gladly see
yet among the living. Wishes can not be punished. Who does not wish to
stand on the step next above his own? You, my friend, would like that of
Macrinus.--But deeds! You know me! I am safe from them, so long as each
of you so sincerely grudges his neighbor every promotion. You, my Lucius,
have again proved how keen your sight is, and, if it were not too great
an honor for this refractory city to have a Roman in the toga praetexta
at the head of its administration, I should like to make you the guardian
of the peace here. You see me," he went on, "in an elated mood
to-day.--Cilo, you know this gem which came tome from my father. Look at
it, and at this maiden.--Come nearer, priest of the divine Alexander; and
you too consider the marvel, Theocritus, Antigonus, Dio, Pandion,
Paulinus. Compare the face of the female figure with this girl by my
side. The master carved this Roxana long before she was born. You are
surprised? As Alexander's soul dwells in me, so she is Roxana, restored
to life. It has been proved by irrefragable evidence in the presence of
Philostratus."
The priest of Alexander here exclaimed, in a tone of firm conviction:
"A marvel indeed! We bow down to the noble vessel of the soul of
Alexander. I, the priest of that hero, attest that great Caesar has found
that in which Roxana's soul now exists." And as he spoke he pressed his
hand to his heart, bowing low before Caesar; the rest imitated his
example. Even Julius Paulinus, the satirist, followed the Roman priest's
lead; but he whispered in the ear of Cassius Dio "Alexander's soul was
inquisitive, and wanted to see how it could live in the body which, of
all mortal tenements on earth, least resembles his own."
A mocking word was on the ex-consul's lips as to the amiable frame of
mind which had so suddenly come over Caesar; but he preferred to watch
and listen, as Caracalla beckoned Theocritus to him and begged him to
give up the appointment of Zminis, though, as a rule, he indulged the
favorite's every whim. He could not bear, he said, to intrust the defense
of his own person and of the city of Alexander to an Egyptian, so long as
a Greek could be found capable of the duty. He proposed presently to have
the two candidates brought before him, and to decide between them in the
presence of the prefect of the praetorians. Then, turning to those of his
captains who stood around him, he said:
"Greet my soldiers from me. I could not show myself to them yesterday. I
saw just now, with deep regret, how the rain has drenched them in this
luxurious city. I will no longer endure it. The praetorians and the
Macedonian legion shall be housed in quarters of which they will tell
wonders for a long time to come. I would rather see them sleeping in
white wool and eating off silver than these vile traders. Tell them
that."
He was here interrupted, for Epagathos announced a deputation from the
Museum, and, at the same time, the painter Alexander, who had been
brought from prison. At this Caracalla exclaimed with disgust:
"Spare me the hair-splitting logicians!--Do you, Philostratus, receive
them in my name. If they make any impudent demands, you may tell them my
opinion of them and their Museum. Go, but come back quickly. Bring in the
painter. I will speak with him alone.--You, my friends, withdraw with our
idiologos, the priest of Alexander, who is well known here, and visit the
city. I shall not require you at present."
The whole troop hastened to obey. Caracalla now turned to Melissa once
more, and his eye brightened as he again discerned the dimple in her
cheeks, which had recovered their roses. Her imploring eyes met his, and
the happy expectation of seeing her brother lent them a light which
brought joy to the friendless sovereign. During his last speech he had
looked at her from time to time; but in the presence of so many strangers
she had avoided meeting his gaze. Now she thought that she might freely
show him that his favor was a happiness to her. Her soul, as Roxana, must
of course feel drawn to his; in that he firmly believed. Her prayer and
sacrifice for him sufficiently proved it--as he told himself once more.
When Alexander was brought in, it did not anger him to see that the
brother, who held out his arms to Melissa in his habitual eager way, had
to be reminded by her of the imperial presence. Every homage was due to
this fair being, and he was, besides, much struck by Alexander's splendid
appearance. It was long since any youthful figure had so vividly reminded
him of the marble statues of the great Athenian masters. Melissa's
brother stood before him, the very embodiment of the ideal of Greek
strength and manly beauty. His mantle had been taken from him in prison,
and he wore only the short chiton, which also left bare his powerful but
softly modeled arms. He had been allowed no time to arrange and anoint
his hair, and the light-brown curls were tossed in disorderly abundance
about his shapely head. This favorite of the gods appeared in Caesar's
eyes as an Olympic victor, who had come to claim the wreath with all the
traces of the struggle upon him.
No sign of fear, either of Caesar or his lion, marred this impression.
His bow, as he approached the potentate, was neither abject nor awkward,
and Caesar felt bitter wrath at the thought that this splendid youth, of
all men, should have selected him as the butt of his irony. He would have
regarded it as a peculiar gift of fortune if this man--such a brother of
such a sister--could but love him, and, with the eye of an artist,
discern in the despot the great qualities which, in spite of his many
crimes, he believed he could detect in himself. And he hoped, with an
admixture of anxiety such as he had never known before, that the
painter's demeanor would be such as should allow him to show mercy.
When Alexander besought him with a trustful mien to consider his youth,
and the Alexandrian manners which he had inherited both from his parents
and his grandparents, if indeed his tongue had wagged too boldly in
speaking of the all-powerful Caesar, and to remember the fable of the
lion and the mouse, the scowl he had put on to impress the youth with his
awfulness and power vanished from Caesar's brow. The idea that this great
artist, whose sharp eye could so surely distinguish the hideous from the
beautiful, should regard him as ill-favored, was odious to him. He had
listened to him in silence; but suddenly he inquired of Alexander whether
it was indeed he, whom he had never injured, who had written the horrible
epigram nailed with the rope to the door of the Serapeum and when the
painter emphatically denied it, Caesar breathed as though a burden had
fallen from his soul. He nevertheless insisted on hearing from the
youth's own lips what it was that he had actually dared to say. After
some hesitation, during which Melissa besought Caesar in vain to spare
her and her brother this confession, Alexander exclaimed:
"Then the hunted creature must walk into the net, and, unless your
clemency interferes, on to death! What I said referred partly to the
wonderful strength that you, my lord, have so often displayed in the
field and in the circus; and also to another thing, which I myself now
truly repent of having alluded to. It is said that my lord killed his
brother."
"That--ah! that was it!" said Caesar, and his face, involuntarily this
time, grew dark.
"Yes, my lord," Alexander went on, breathing hard. "To deny it would be
to add a second crime to the former one, and I am one of those who would
rather jump into cold water both feet at once, when it has to be done.
All the world knows what your strength is; and I said that it was greater
than that of Father Zeus; for that he had cast his son Hephaestos only on
the earth, and your strong fist had cast your brother through the earth
into the depths of Hades. That was all. I have not added nor concealed
anything."
Melissa had listened in terror to this bold confession. Papinian, the
brave praetorian prefect, one of the most learned lawyers of his time,
had incurred Caracalla's fury by refusing to say that the murder of Geta
was not without excuse; and his noble answer, that it was easier to
commit fratricide than to defend it, cost him his life.
So long as Caesar had been kind to her, Melissa had felt repelled by him;
but now, when he was angry, she was once more attracted to him.
As the wounds of a murdered man are said to bleed afresh when the
murderer approaches, Caracalla's irritable soul was wont to break out in
a frenzy of rage when any one was so rash as to allude to this, his
foulest crime. This reference to his brother's death had as usual stirred
his wrath, but he controlled it; for as a torrent of rain extinguishes
the fire which a lightning-flash has kindled, the homage to his strength,
in Alexander's satire, had modified his indignation. The irony which made
the artist's contemptuous words truly witty, would not have escaped
Caracalla's notice if they had applied to any one else; but he either did
not feel it, or would not remark it, for the sake of leaving Melissa in
the belief that his physical strength was really wonderful. Besides, he
thus could indulge his wish to avoid pronouncing sentence of death on
this youth; he only measured him with a severe eye, and said in
threatening tones, to repay mockery in kind and to remind the criminal of
the fate imperial clemency should spare him:
"I might be tempted to try my strength on you, but that it is worse to
try a fall with a vaporing wag, the sport of the winds, than with the son
of Caesar. And if I do not condescend to the struggle, it is because you
are too light for such an arm as this." And as he spoke he boastfully
grasped the muscles which constant practice had made thick and firm. "But
my hand reaches far. Every man-at-arms is one of its fingers, and there
are thousands of them. You have made acquaintance already, I fancy, with
those which clutched you."
"Not so," replied Alexander, with a faint smile, as he bowed humbly. "I
should not dare resist your great strength, but the watch-dogs of the law
tried in vain to track me. I gave myself up."
"Of your own accord?"
"To procure my father's release, as he had been put in prison."
"Most magnanimous!" said Caesar, ironically. "Such a deed sounds well,
but is apt to cost a man his life. You seem to have overlooked that."
"No, great Caesar; I expected to die."
"Then you are a philosopher, a contemner of life."
"Neither. I value life above all else; for, if it is taken from me, there
is an end of enjoying its best gifts."
"Best gifts!" echoed Caesar. "I should like to know which you honor with
the epithet."
"Love and art."
"Indeed?" said Caracalla, with a swift glance at Melissa. Then, in an
altered voice, he added, "And revenge?"
"That," said the artist, boldly, "is a pleasure I have not yet tasted. No
one ever did me a real injury till the villain Zminis robbed my guiltless
father of his liberty; and he is not worthy to do such mischief, as a
finger of your imperial hand."
At this, Caesar looked at him suspiciously, and said in stern tones:
"But you have now the opportunity of trying the fine flavor of vengeance.
If I were timid--since the Egyptian acted only as my instrument--I should
have cause to protect myself against you."
"By no means," said the painter, with an engaging smile, "it lies in your
power to do me the greatest benefit. Do it, Caesar! It would be a joy to
me to show that, though I have been reckless beyond measure, I am
nevertheless a grateful man."
"Grateful?" repeated Caracalla, with a cruel laugh. Then he rose slowly,
and looked keenly at Alexander, exclaiming:
"I should almost like to try you."
"And I will answer for it that you will never regret it!" Melissa put in.
"Greatly as he has erred, he is worthy of your clemency."
"Is he?" said Caesar, looking down at her kindly. "What Roxana's soul
affirms by those rosy lips I can not but believe."
Then again he paused, studying Alexander with a searching eye, and added:
"You think me strong; but you will change that opinion--which I value--if
I forgive you like a poor-spirited girl. You are in my power. You risked
your life. If I give it you, I must have a gift in return, that I may not
be cheated."
"Set my father free, and he will do whatever you may require of him,"
Melissa broke out. But Caracalla stopped her, saying: "No one makes
conditions with Caesar. Stand back, girl."
Melissa hung her head and obeyed; but she stood watching the eager
discussion between these two dissimilar men, at first with anxiety and
then with surprise.
Alexander seemed to resist Caesar's demands; but presently the despot
must have proposed something which pleased the artist, for Melissa heard
the low, musical laugh which had often cheered her in moments of sadness.
Then the conversation was more serious, and Caracalla said, so loud that
Melissa could hear him:
"Do not forget to whom you speak. If my word is not enough, you can go
back to prison." Then again she trembled for her brother; but some soft
word of his mollified the fury of the terrible man, who was never the
same for two minutes together. The lion, too, which lay unchained by his
master's seat, gave her a fright now and then; for if Caesar raised his
voice in anger, he growled and stood up.
How fearful were this beast and his lord! Rather would she spend her
whole life on a ship's deck, tossed to and fro by the surges, than share
this man's fate. And yet there was in him something which attracted her;
nay, and it nettled her that he should forget her presence.
At last Alexander humbly asked Caracalla whether he might not tell
Melissa to what he had pledged his word.
"That shall be my business," replied Caesar. "You think that a mere girl
is a better witness than none at all. Perhaps you are right. Then let it
be understood: whatever you may have to report to me, my wrath shall not
turn against you. This fellow--why should you not be told, child?--is
going into the town to collect all the jests and witty epigrams which
have been uttered in my honor."
"Alexander!" cried Melissa, clasping her hands and turning pale with
horror. But Caracalla laughed to himself, and went on cheerfully:
"Yes, it is dangerous work, no doubt; and for that reason I pledged my
word as Caesar not to require him to pay for the sins of others. On the
contrary, he is free, if the posy he culls for me is sufficient."
"Ay," said Alexander, on whom his sister's white face and warning looks
were having effect. "But you made me another promise on which I lay great
stress. You will not compel me to tell you, nor try to discover through
any other man, who may have spoken or written any particular satire."
"Enough!" said Caracalla, impatiently; but Alexander was not to be
checked. He went on vehemently: "I have not forgotten that you said
conditions were not to be made with Caesar; but, in spite of my
impotence, I maintain the right of returning to my prison and there
awaiting my doom, unless you once more assure me, in this girl's
presence, that you will neither inquire as to the names of the authors of
any gibes I may happen to have heard, nor compel me by any means whatever
to give up the names of the writers of epigrams. Why should I not satisfy
your curiosity and your relish of a sharp jest? But rather than do the
smallest thing which might savor of treachery--ten times rather the axe
or the gallows!"
And Caracalla replied with a dark frown, loudly and briefly:
"I promise."
"And if your rage is too much for you?" wailed Melissa, raising her hands
in entreaty; but the despot replied, sternly:
"There is no passion which can betray Caesar into perjury."
At this moment Philostratus came in again, with Epagathos, who announced
the praetorian prefect. Melissa, encouraged by the presence of her kind
protector, went on:
But, great Caesar, you will release my father and my other brother?"
"Perhaps," replied Caracalla. "First we will see how this one carries out
his task."
"You will be satisfied, my lord," said the young man, looking quite happy
again, for he was delighted at the prospect of saying audacious things to
the face of the tyrant whom all were bent on flattering, and holding up
the mirror to him without, as he firmly believed, bringing any danger on
himself or others.
He bowed to go. Melissa did the same, saying, as airily as though she
were free to come and go here:
"Accept my thanks, great Caesar. Oh, how fervently will I pray for you
all my life, if only you show mercy to my father and brothers!"
"That means that you are leaving me?" asked Caracalla.
"How can it be otherwise?" said Melissa, timidly. "I am but a girl, and
the men whom you expect--"
"But when they are gone?" Caesar insisted.
"Even then you can not want me," she murmured.
"You mean," said Caracalla, bitterly, "that you are afraid to come back.
You mean that you would rather keep out of the way of the man you prayed
for, so long as he is well. And if the pain which first aroused your
sympathy attacks him again, even then will you leave the irascible
sovereign to himself or the care of the gods?"
"Not so, not so," said Melissa, humbly, looking into his eyes with an
expression that pierced him to the heart, so that he added, with gentle
entreaty:
"Then show that you are she whom I believe you to be. I do not compel
you. Go whither you will, stay away even if I send for you; but"--and
here his brow clouded again--"why should I try to be merciful to her from
whom I looked for sympathy and kindliness, when she flees from me like
the rest?"
"O my lord!" Melissa sighed distressfully. "Go!" Caesar went on. "I do
not need you."
"No, no," the girl cried, in great trouble. "Call me, and I will come.
Only shelter me from the others, and from their looks of scorn; only--O
immortal gods!--If you need me, I will serve you, and willingly, with all
my heart. But if you really care for me, if you desire my presence, why
let me suffer the worst?" Here a sudden flood of tears choked her
utterance. A smile of triumph passed over Caesar's features, and drawing
Melissa's hands away from her tearful face, he said, kindly:
"Alexander's soul pines for Roxana's; that is what makes your presence so
dear to me. Never shall you have cause to rue coming at my call. I swear
it by the manes of my divine father--you, Philostratus, are witness."
The philosopher, who thought he knew Caracalla, gave a sigh of relief;
and Alexander gladly reflected that the danger he had feared for his
sister was averted. This craze about Roxana, of which Caracalla had just
now spoken to him as a certain fact, he regarded as a monstrous illusion
of this strange man's, which would, however, be a better safeguard for
Melissa than pledges and oaths.
He clasped her hand, and said with cheerful confidence: "Only send for
her when you are ill, my lord, as long as you remain here. I know from
your own lips that there is no passion which can betray Caesar into
perjury. Will you permit her to come with me for the present?"
"No," said Caracalla, sharply, and he bade him go about the business he
had in hand. Then, turning to Philostratus, he begged him to conduct
Melissa to Euryale, the high-priest's noble wife, for she had been a kind
and never-forgotten friend of his mother's.
The philosopher gladly escorted the young girl to the matron, who had
long been anxiously awaiting her return.
CHAPTER XVIII.
The statue of Serapis, a figure of colossal size, carved by the
master-hand of Bryaxis, out of ivory overlaid with gold, sat enthroned in
the inner chamber of the great Temple of Serapis, with the kalathos
crowning his bearded face, and the three-headed Cerberus at his feet,
gazing down in supreme silence on the scene around. He did not lack for
pious votaries and enthusiastic admirers, for, so long as Caesar was his
guest, the curtain was withdrawn which usually hid his majestic form from
their eyes. But his most devoted worshipers thought that the god's noble,
benevolent, grave countenance had a wrathful look; for, though nothing
had been altered in this, the finest pillared hall in the world; though
the beautiful pictures in relief on the walls and ceiling, the statues
and altars of marble, bronze, and precious metals between the columns,
and the costly mosaic-work of many colors which decked the floor in
regular patterns, were the same as of yore, this splendid pavement was
trodden to-day by thousands of feet which had no concern with the service
of the god.
Before Caesar's visit, solemn silence had ever reigned in this worthy
home of the deity, fragrant with the scarcely visible fumes of kyphi; and
the worshipers gathered without a sound round the foot of his statue, and
before the numerous altars and the smaller images of the divinities
allied to him or the votive tablets recording the gifts and services
instituted in honor of Serapis by pious kings or citizens. On feast-days,
and during daily worship, the chant of priestly choirs might be heard, or
the murmur of prayer; and the eye might watch the stolists who crowned
the statues with flowers and ribbons, as required by the ritual, or the
processions of priests in their various rank. Carrying sacred relics and
figures of the gods on trays or boats, with emblematic standards,
scepters, and cymbals, they moved about the sacred precinct in prescribed
order, and most of them fulfilled their duties with devotion and
edification.
But Caesar's presence seemed to have banished these solemn feelings. From
morning till night the great temple swarmed with visitors, but their
appearance and demeanor were more befitting the market-place or public
bath than the sanctuary. It was now no more than the anteroom to Caesar's
audience-chamber, and thronged with Roman senators, legates, tribunes,
and other men of rank, and the clients and "friends" of Caesar, mingled
with soldiers of inferior grades, scribes, freedmen, and slaves, who had
followed in Caracalla's train. There were, too, many Alexandrians who
expected to gain some benefit, promotion, or distinction through the
emperor's favorites. Most of these kept close to his friends and
intimates, to make what profit they could out of them. Some were corn and
wine dealers, or armorers, who wished to obtain contracts for supplying
the army; others were usurers, who had money to lend on the costly
objects which warriors often acquired as booty; and here, as everywhere,
bedizened and painted women were crowding round the free-handed
strangers. There were Magians, astrologers, and magicians by the dozen,
who considered this sacred spot the most suitable place in which to offer
their services to the Romans, always inquisitive for signs and charms.
They knew how highly Egyptian magic was esteemed throughout the empire;
though their arts were in fact prohibited, each outdid the other in
urgency, and not less in a style of dress which should excite curiosity
and expectancy.
Serapion held aloof. Excepting that he wore a beard and robe, his
appearance even had nothing in common with them; and his talar was not
like theirs, embroidered with hieroglyphics, tongues, and flames, but of
plain white stuff, which gave him the aspect of a learned and priestly
sage.
As Alexander, on his way through the temple to fulfill Caesar's
commission, went past the Magian, Castor, his supple accomplice, stole up
behind a statue, and, when the artist disappeared in the crowd, whispered
to his master:
"The rascally painter is at liberty!"
"Till further notice!" was the reply, and Serapion was about to give his
satellite some instructions, when a hand was laid on his shoulder, and
Zminis said in a low voice:
"I am glad to have found you here. Accusations are multiplying against
you, my friend; and though I have kept my eyes shut till now, that cannot
last much longer."
"Let us hope you are mistaken," replied the Magian, firmly. And then he
went on in a hurried whisper: "I know what your ambition is, and my
support may be of use to you. But we must not be seen together. We will
meet again in the instrument-room, to the left of the first stairs up to
the observatory. You will find me there."
"At once, then," said the other. "I am to be in Caesar's presence in a
quarter of an hour."
The Magian, as being one of the most skillful makers of astronomical
instruments, and attached to the sanctuary, had a key of the room he had
designated. Zminis found him there, and their business was quickly
settled. They knew each other well, and each knew things of the other
which inspired them with mutual fear. However, as time pressed, they set
aside all useless antagonisms, to unite against the common foe.
The Magian knew already that Zminis had been named to Caesar as a
possible successor to the chief of the night-watch, and that he had a
powerful rival. By the help of the Syrian, whose ventriloquism was so
perfect that he never failed to produce the illusion that his feigned
voice proceeded from any desired person or thing, Serapion had enmeshed
the praetorian prefect, the greatest magnate in the empire next to Caesar
himself, and in the course of the past night had gained a firm hold over
him.
Macrinus, a man of humble birth, who owed his promotion to Severus, the
father of Caracalla, had, the day before, been praying in the Pantheon to
the statue of his deceased patron. A voice had proceeded from the image,
telling him that the divine Severus needed him for a great work. A pious
seer was charged to tell him more exactly what this was; and he would
meet him if he went at about sunset to the shrine of Isis, and called
three times on the name of Severus before the altar of the goddess.
The Syrian ventriloquist had, by Serapion's orders, hidden behind a
pillar and spoken to the prefect from the statue; and Macrinus had, of
course, obeyed his instructions. He had met the Magian in the Temple of
Isis, and what he had seen, heard, and felt during the night had so
deeply affected him that he had promised to revisit Serapion the next
evening. What means he had used to enslave so powerful a man the Magian
did not tell his ally; but he declared that Macrinus was as wax in his
hands, and he came to an agreement with the Egyptian that if he,
Serapion, should bring about the promotion for which Zminis sighed,
Zminis, on his part, should give him a free hand, and commend his arts to
Caesar.
It needed but a few minutes to conclude this compact; but then the Magian
proceeded to insist that Alexander's father and brother should be made
away with.
"Impossible," replied Zminis. "I should be only too glad to wring the
necks of the whole brood; but, as it is, I am represented to Caesar as
too stern and ruthless. And a pretty little slut, old Heron's daughter,
has entangled him in her toils."
"No," said Serapion, positively. "I have seen the girl, and she is as
innocent as a child. But I know the force of contrast: when depravity
meets purity--"
"Come, no philosophizing!" interrupted the other. "We have better things
to attend to, and one or the other may turn to your advantage."
And he told him that Caesar, whose whim it was to spare Alexander's life,
regarded Melissa as an incarnation of Roxana.
"That is worth considering," said the Magian, stroking his beard
meditatively; then he suddenly exclaimed:
"By the law, as you know, all the relatives of a state criminal are sent
to the quarries or the mines. Dispatch Heron and his philosopher son
forthwith. Whither?--that is your concern; only, for the next few days
they must be out of reach."
"Good!" said the Egyptian, and an odious smile overspread his thin brown
face. "They may go as galley-slaves and row themselves to the Sardinian
mines. A good idea!"
"I have even better ideas than that to serve a friend," replied Serapion.
"Only get the philosopher out of the way. If Caesar lends an ear to his
ready tongue, I shall never see you guardian of the peace. The painter is
less dangerous."
"He shall share their fate," cried the spy, and he licked his thick lips
as if tasting some dainty morsel. He waved an adieu to the Magian, and
hastened back to the great hall. There he strictly instructed one of his
subordinates to take care that the gem-cutter and his son Philip found
places on board a galley bound for Sardinia.
At the great door he again met Serapion, with the Syrian at his heels,
and the Magian said:
"My friend here has just seen a clay figure, molded by some practiced
hand. It represents Caesar as a defiant warrior, but in the shape of a
deformed dwarf. It is hideously like him; you can see it at the Elephant
tavern."
The Egyptian pressed his hand, with an eager "That will serve," and
hastily went out.
Two hours slipped by, and Zminis was still waiting in Caesar's anteroom.
The Greek, Aristides, shared his fate, the captain hitherto of the armed
guard; while Zminis had been the head of the spies, intrusted with
communicating written reports to the chief of the night-watch. The
Greek's noble, soldierly figure looked strikingly fine by the slovenly,
lank frame of the tall Egyptian. They both knew that within an hour or so
one would be supreme over the other; but of this they thought it best to
say nothing. Zminis, as was his custom when he wished to assume an
appearance of respect which he did not feel, was alternately abject and
pressingly confidential; while Aristides calmly accepted his hypocritical
servility, and answered it with dignified condescension. Nor had they any
lack of subjects, for their interests were the same, and they both had
the satisfaction of reflecting what injury must ensue to public safety
through their long and useless detention here.
But when two full hours had elapsed without their being bidden to
Caesar's presence, or taken any notice of by their supporters, Zminis
grew wroth, and the Greek frowned in displeasure. Meanwhile the anteroom
was every moment more crowded, and neither chose to give vent to his
anger. Still, when the door to the inner chambers was opened for a
moment, and loud laughter and the ring of wine-cups fell on their ears,
Aristides shrugged his shoulders, and the Egyptian's eyes showed an
ominous white ring glaring out of his brown face.
Caracalla had meanwhile received the praetorian prefect; he had forgiven
him his long delay, when Macrinus, of his own accord, had told him of the
wonderful things Serapion had made known to him. The prefect's son, too,
had been invited to the banquet of Seleukus; and when Caracalla heard
from him and others of the splendor of the feast, he had begun to feel
hungry. Even with regard to food, Caesar acted only on the impulse of the
moment; and though, in the field, he would, to please his soldiers, be
content with a morsel of bread and a little porridge, at home he highly
appreciated the pleasures of the table. Whenever he gave the word, an
abundant meal must at once be ready. It was all the same to him what was
kept waiting or postponed, so long as something to his taste was set
before him. Macrinus, indeed, humbly reminded him that the guardians of
the peace were awaiting him; but he only waved his hand with contempt,
and proceeded to the dining-room, which was soon filled with a large
number of guests. Within a few minutes the first dish was set before his
couch, and, as plenty of good stories were told, and an admirable band of
flute-playing and singing girls filled up the pauses in the conversation,
he enjoyed his meal. In spite, too, of the warning which Galenus had
impressed on his Roman physician, he drank freely of the fine wine which
had been brought out for him from the airy lofts of the Serapeum, and
those about him were surprised at their master's unwonted good spirits.
He was especially gracious to the high-priest, whom he bade to a place by
his side; and he even accepted his arm as a support, when, the meal being
over, they returned to the tablinum.
'There he flung himself on a couch, with a burning head, and began
feeding the lion, without paying any heed to his company. It was a
pleasure to him to see the huge brute rend a young lamb. When the remains
of this introductory morsel had been removed and the pavement washed, he
gave the "Sword of Persia" pieces of raw flesh, teasing the beast by
snatching the daintiest bits out of his mouth, and then offering them to
him again, till the satiated brute stretched himself yawning at his feet.
During this entertainment, he had a letter read to him from the senate,
and dictated a reply to a secretary. His eyes twinkled with a tipsy leer
in his flushed face, and yet he was perfectly competent; and his
instructions to the senate, though imperious indeed, were neither more
nor less rational than in his soberest moods.
Then, after washing his hands in a golden basin, he acted on Macrinus's
suggestion, and the two candidates who had so long been waiting were at
last admitted. The prefect of the praetorians had, by the Magian's
desire, recommended the Egyptian; but Caesar wished to see for himself,
and then to decide. Both the applicants had received hints from their
supporters: the Egyptian, to moderate his rigor; the Greek, to express
himself in the severest terms. And this was made easy for him, for the
annoyance which had been pent up during his three hours' waiting was
sufficient to lend his handsome face a stern look. Zminis strove to
appear mild by assuming servile humility; but this so ill became his
cunning features that Caracalla saw with secret satisfaction that he
could accede to Melissa's wishes, and confirm the choice of the
high-priest, in whose god he had placed his hopes.
Still, his own safety was more precious to him than the wishes of any
living mortal; so he began by pouring out, on both, the vials of his
wrath at the bad management of the town. Their blundering tools had not
even succeeded in capturing the most guileless of men, the painter
Alexander. The report that the men-at-arms had seized him had been a
fabrication to deceive, for the artist had given himself up. Nor had he
as yet heard of any other traitor whom they had succeeded in laying hands
on, though the town was flooded with insolent epigrams directed against
the imperial person. And, as he spoke, he glared with fury at the two
candidates before him.
The Greek bowed his head in silence, as if conscious of his
short-comings; the Egyptian's eyes flashed, and, with an amazingly low
bend of his supple spine, he announced that, more than three hours since,
he had discovered a most abominable caricature in clay, representing
Caesar as a soldier in a horrible pygmy form.
"And the perpetrator," snarled Caracalla, listening with a scowl for the
reply.
Zminis explained that great Caesar himself had commanded his attendance
just as he hoped to find the traces of the criminal, and that, while he
was waiting, more than three precious hours had been lost. At this
Caracalla broke out in a fury:
"Catch the villain! And let me see his insolent rubbish. Where are your
eyes? You bungling louts ought to protect me against the foul brood that
peoples this city, and their venomous jests. Past grievances are
forgotten. Set the painter's father and brother at liberty. They have had
a warning. Now I want something new. Something new, I say; and, above
all, let me see the ringleaders in chains; the man who nailed up the
rope, and the caricaturists. We must have them, to serve as an example to
the others."
Aristides thought that the moment had now come for displaying his
severity, and he respectfully but decidedly represented to Caesar that he
would advise that the gem-cutter and his son should be kept in custody.
They were well-known persons, and too great clemency would only aggravate
the virulence of audacious tongues. The painter was free, and if his
relatives were also let out of prison, there was nothing to prevent their
going off to the other end of the world. Alexandria was a seaport, and a
ship would carry off the criminals before a man could turn round.
At this the emperor wrathfully asked him whether his opinion had been
invited; and the cunning Egyptian said to himself that Caracalla was
anxious to spare the father and his sons for the daughter's sake. And yet
Caesar would surely wish to keep them in safety, to have some hold over
the girl; so he lied with a bold face, affirming that, in obedience to
the law of the land, he had removed Heron and Philip, at any rate for the
moment, beyond the reach of Caesar's mercy. They had in the course of the
night been placed on board a galley and were now on the way to Sardinia.
But a swift vessel should presently be sent to overtake it and bring them
back.
And the informer was right, for Caesar's countenance brightened. He did,
indeed, blame the Egyptian's overhasty action; but he gave no orders for
following up the galley.
Then, after reflecting for a short time, he said:
"I do not find in either of you what I require; but at a pinch we are
fain to eat moldy bread, so I must need choose between you two. The one
who first brings me that clay figure, and the man who modeled it, in
chains and bonds, shall be appointed chief of the night-watch."
Meanwhile Alexander had entered the room. As soon as Caracalla saw him,
he beckoned to him, and the artist informed him that he had made good use
of his time and had much to communicate. Then he humbly inquired as to
the clay figure of which Caesar was speaking, and Caracalla referred him
to Zminis. The Egyptian repeated what the Magian had told him.
Alexander listened calmly; but when Zminis ceased speaking, the artist
took a deep breath, drew himself up, and pointing a contemptuous finger
at the spy, as if his presence poisoned the air, he said: "It is that
fellow's fault, great Caesar, if the citizens of my native town dare
commit such crimes. He torments and persecutes them in your name. How
many a felony has been committed here, merely to scoff at him and his
creatures, and to keep them on the alert! We are a light-headed race.
Like children, we love to do the forbidden thing, so long as it is no
stain on our honor. But that wretch treats all laughter and the most
innocent fun as a crime, or so interprets it that it seems so. From this
malignant delight in the woes of others, and in the hope of rising higher
in office, that wicked man has brought misery on hundreds. It has all
been done in thy great name, O Caesar! No man has raised you up more foes
than this wretch, who undermines your security instead of protecting it."
Here Zminis, whose swarthy face had become of ashy paleness, broke out in
a hoarse tone: "I will teach you, and the whole rabble of traitors at
your back--"
But Caesar wrathfully commanded him to be silent, and Alexander quietly
went on: "You can threaten, and you will array all your slanderous arts
against us, I know you. But here sits a sovereign who protects the
innocent--and I and mine are innocent. He will set his heel on your head
when he knows you--the curse of this city--for the adder that you are! He
is deceiving you now in small things, great Caesar, and later he will
deceive you in greater ones. Listen now how he has lied to you. He says
he discovered a caricature of your illustrious person in the guise of a
soldier. Why, then, did he not bring it away from the place where it
could only excite disaffection, and might even mislead those who should
see it into the belief that your noble person was that of a dwarf? The
answer is self-evident. He left it to betray others into further mockery,
to bring them to ruin."
Caesar had listened with approval, and now sternly asked the Egyptian:
"Did you see the image?"
"In the Elephant tavern!" yelled the man.
But Alexander shook his head doubtfully, and begged permission to ask the
Egyptian a question. This was granted, and the artist inquired whether
the soldier stood alone.
"So far as I remember, yes," replied Zminis, almost beside himself.
"Then your memory is as false as your soul!" Alexander shouted in his
face, "for there was another figure by the soldier's side. The clay,
still wet, clung to the same board as the figure of the soldier, modeled
by the same hand. No, no, my crafty fellow, you will not catch the
workman; for, being warned, he is already on the high-seas."
"It is false!" shrieked Zminis.
"That remains to be proved," said Alexander, scornfully.--"Allow me now,
great Caesar, to show you the figures. They have been brought by my
orders, and are in the anteroom-carefully covered up, of course, for the
fewer the persons who see them the better."
Caracalla nodded his consent, and Alexander hurried away; the despot
heaping abuse on Zminis, and demanding why he had not at once had the
images removed. The Egyptian now confessed that he had only heard of the
caricature from a friend, and declared that if he had seen it he should
have destroyed it on the spot. Macrinus here tried to excuse the spy, by
remarking that this zealous official had only tried to set his services
in a favorable light. The falsehood could not be approved, but was
excusable. But he had scarcely finished speaking, when his opponent, the
praetor, Lucius Priscillianus, observed, with a gravity he but rarely
displayed:
"I should have thought that it was the first duty of the man who ought to
be Caesar's mainstay and representative here, to let his sovereign hear
nothing but the undistorted truth. Nothing, it seems to me, can be less
excusable than a lie told to divine Caesar's face!"
A few courtiers, who were out of the prefect's favor, as well as the
high-priest of Serapis, agreed with the speaker. Caracalla, however, paid
no heed to them, but sat with his eyes fixed on the door, deeply wounded
in his vanity by the mere existence of such a caricature.
He had not long to wait. But when the wrapper was taken off the clay
figures, he uttered a low snarl, and his flushed face turned pale. Sounds
of indignation broke from the bystanders; the blood rose to his cheeks
again, and, shaking his fist, he muttered unintelligible threats, while
his eyes wandered again and again to the caricatures. They attracted his
attention more than all else, and as in an April day the sky is
alternately dark and bright, so red and white alternated in his face.
Then, while Alexander replied to a few questions, and assured him that
the host of the "Elephant" had been very angry, and had gladly handed
them over to him to be destroyed, Caracalla seemed to become accustomed
to them, for he gazed at them more calmly, and tried to affect
indifference. He inquired of Philostratus, as though he wished to be
informed, whether he did not think that the artist who had modeled these
figures must be a very clever follow; and when the philosopher assented
conditionally, he declared that he saw some resemblance to himself--in
the features of the apple-dealer. And then he pointed to his own straight
legs, only slightly disfigured by an injury to the ankle, to show how
shamefully unfair it was to compare them with the lower limbs of a
misshapen dwarf. Finally, the figure of the apple-dealer--a hideous pygmy
form, with the head of an old man, like enough to his own--roused his
curiosity. What was the point of this image? What peculiarity was it
intended to satirize? The basket which hung about the neck of the figure
was full of fruit, and the object he held in his hand might be an apple,
or might be anything else.
With eager and constrained cheerfulness, he inquired the opinion of his
"friends," treating as sheer flattery a suggestion from his favorite,
Theocritus, that this was not an apple-dealer, but a human figure, who,
though but a dwarf in comparison with the gods, nevertheless endowed the
world with the gifts of the immortals.
Alexander and Philostratus could offer no explanation; but when the
proconsul, Julius Paulinus, observed that the figure was offering the
apples for money, as Caesar offered the Roman citizenship to the
provincials, he knew for what, Caracalla nodded agreement.
He then provisionally appointed Aristides to the coveted office. The
Egyptian should be informed as to his fate. When the prefect was about to
remove the figures, Caesar hastily forbade it, and ordered the bystanders
to withdraw. Alexander alone was commanded to remain. As soon as they
were together, Caesar sprang up and vehemently demanded to know what news
he had brought. But the young man hesitated to begin his report.
Caracalla, of his own accord, pledged his word once more to keep his
oath, and then Alexander assured him that he knew no more than Caesar who
were the authors of the epigrams which he had picked up here and there;
and, though the satire they contained was venomous in some cases, still
he, the sovereign of the world, stood so high that he could laugh them to
scorn, as Socrates had laughed when Aristophanes placed him on the stage.
Caesar declared that he scorned these flies, but that their buzzing
annoyed him.
Alexander rejoiced at this, and only expressed his regret that most of
the epigrams he had collected turned on the death of Caesar's brother
Geta. He knew now that it was rash to condemn a deed which--
Here Caesar interrupted him, for he could not long remain quiet, saying
sternly:
"The deed was needful, not for me, but for the empire, which is dearer to
me than father, mother, or a hundred brothers, and a thousand times
dearer than men's opinions. Let me hear in what form the witty natives of
this city express their disapproval."
This sounded so dignified and gracious that Alexander ventured to repeat
a distich which he had heard at the public baths, whither he had first
directed his steps. It did not, however, refer to the murder of Geta, but
to the mantle-like garment to which Caesar owed the nickname of
Caracalla. It ran thus:
"Why should my lord Caracalla affect a garment so ample?
'Tis that the deeds are many of evil he needs to conceal."
At this Caesar laughed, saying: "Who is there that has nothing to
conceal? The lines are not amiss. Hand me your tablets; if the others are
no worse--"
"But they are," Alexander exclaimed, anxiously, and I only regret that I
should be the instrument of your tormenting yourself--"
"Tormenting?" echoed Caesar, disdainfully. "The verses amuse me, and I
find them most edifying. That is all. Hand me the tablets."
The command was so positive, that Alexander drew out the little diptych,
with the remark that painters wrote badly, and that what he had noted
down was only intended to aid his memory. The idea that Caesar should
hear a few home-truths through him had struck him as pleasant, but now
the greatness of the risk was clear to him. He glanced at the scrawled
characters, and it occurred to him that he had intended to change the
word dwarf in one line to Caesar, and to keep the third and most
trenchant epigram from the emperor. The fourth and last was very
innocent, and he had meant to read it last, to mollify him. So he did not
wish to show the tablets. But, as he was about to take them back,
Caracalla snatched them from his hand and read with some difficulty:
"Fraternal love was once esteemed
A virtue even in the great,
And Philadelphos then was deemed
A name to grace a potentate.
But now the dwarf upon the throne,
By murder of his mother's son,
As Misadelphos must be known."
"Indeed!" murmured Caesar, with a pale face, and then he went on in a
low, sullen tone: "Always the same story--my brother, and my small
stature. In this town they follow the example of the barbarians, it would
seem, who choose the tallest and broadest of their race to be king. If
the third epigram has nothing else in it, the shallow wit of your
fellow-citizens is simply tedious.--Now, what have we next? Trochaics!
Hardly anything new, I fear!--There is the water-jar. I will drink; fill
the cup." But Alexander did not immediately obey the command so hastily
given; assuring Caesar that he could not possibly read the writing, he
was about to take up the tablets. But Caesar laid his hand on them, and
said, imperiously: "Drink! Give me the cup."
He fixed his eyes on the wax, and with difficulty deciphered the clumsy
scrawl in which Alexander had noted down the following lines, which he
had heard at the "Elephant"
"Since on earth our days are numbered,
Ask me not what deeds of horror
Stain the hands of fell Tarautas.
Ask me of his noble actions,
And with one short word I answer,
'None!'-replying to your question
With no waste of precious hours."
Alexander meanwhile had done Caracalla's bidding, and when he had
replaced the jar on its stand and returned to Caesar, he was horrified;
for the emperor's head and arms were shaking and struggling to and fro,
and at his feet lay the two halves of the wax tablets which he had torn
apart when the convulsion came on. He foamed at the mouth, with low
moans, and, before Alexander could prevent him, racked with pain and
seeking for some support, he had set his teeth in the arm of the seat off
which he was slipping. Greatly shocked, and full of sincere pity,
Alexander tried to raise him; but the lion, who perhaps suspected the
artist of having been the cause of this sudden attack, rose on his feet
with a roar, and the young man would have had no chance of his life if
the beast had not happily been chained down after his meal. With much
presence of mind, Alexander sprang behind the chair and dragged it, with
the unconscious man who served him as a shield, away from the angry
brute.
Galen had urged Caesar to avoid excess in wine and violent emotions, and
the wisdom of the warning was sufficiently proved by the attack which had
seized him with such fearful violence, just when Caracalla had neglected
it in both particulars. Alexander had to exert all the strength of his
muscles, practised in the wrestling-school, to hold the sufferer on his
seat, for his strength, which was not small, was doubled by the demons of
epilepsy. In an instant the whole Court had rushed to the spot on hearing
the lion's roar of rage, which grew louder and louder, and could be heard
at no small distance, and then Alexander's shout for help. But the
private physician and Epagathos, the chamberlain, would allow no one to
enter the room; only old Adventus, who was half blind, was permitted to
assist them in succoring the sufferer. He had been raised by Caracalla
from the humble office of letter-carrier to the highest dignities and the
office of his private chamberlain; but the leech availed himself by
preference of the assistance of this experienced and quiet man, and
between them they soon brought Caesar to his senses. Caesar then lay pale
and exhausted on a couch which had hastily been arranged, his eyes fixed
on vacancy, scarcely able to move a finger. Alexander held his trembling
hand, and when the physician, a stout man of middle age, took the
artist's place and bade him retire, Caracalla, in a low voice, desired
him to remain.
As soon as Caesar's suspended faculties were fully awake again, he turned
to the cause of his attack. With a look of pain and entreaty he desired
Alexander to give him the tablets once more; but the artist assured
him--and Caracalla seemed not sorry to believe--that he had crushed the
wax in his convulsion. The sick man himself no doubt felt that such food
was too strong for him. After he had remained staring at nothing in
silence for some time, he began again to speak of the gibes of the
Alexandrians. Surrounded as he was by servile favorites, whose superior
he was in gifts and intellect, what had here come under his notice seemed
to interest him above measure.
He desired to know where and from whom the painter had got these
epigrams. But again Alexander declared that he did not know the names of
the authors; that he had found one at the public baths, the second in a
tavern, and the third at a hairdresser's shop. Caesar looked sadly at the
youth's abundant brown curls which had been freshly oiled, and said:
"Hair is like the other good gifts of life. It remains fine only with the
healthy. You, happy rascal, hardly know what sickness means!" Then again
he sat staring in silence, till he suddenly started up and asked
Alexander, as Philostratus had yesterday asked Melissa:
"Do you and your sister belong to the Christians?"
When he vehemently denied it, Caracalla went on: "And yet these epigrams
show plainly enough how the Alexandrians feel toward me. Melissa, too, is
a daughter of this town, and when I remember that she could bring herself
to pray for me, then--My nurse, who was the best of women, was a
Christian. I learned from her the doctrine of loving our enemies and
praying for those who despitefully treat us. I always regarded it as
impossible; but now--your sister--What I was saying just now about the
hair and good health reminds me of another speech of the Crucified one
which my nurse often repeated--how long ago!--'To him that hath shall be
given, and from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he
hath.' How cruel and yet how wise, how terribly striking and true! A
healthy man! What more can he want, and what abundant gifts that best of
all gifts will gain for him! If he is visited by infirmity--only look at
me!--how much misery I have suffered from this curse, terrible enough in
itself, and tainting everything with the bitterness of wormwood!"
He laughed softly but scornfully, and continued: "But I! I am the
sovereign of the universe. I have so much--oh yes, so much!--and for that
reason more shall be given to me, and my wildest wishes shall be
satisfied!"
"Yes, my liege!" interrupted Alexander, eagerly. "After pain comes
pleasure!
'Live, love, drink, and rejoice,
And wreath thyself with me!'
sings Sappho, and it is not a bad plan to follow Anakreon's advice, even
at the present day. Think of the short suffering which now and then
embitters for you the sweet cup of life, as being the ring of Polykrates,
with which you appease the envy of the gods who have given you so much.
In your place, eternal gods! how I would enjoy the happy hours of health,
and show the immortals and mortals alike how much true and real pleasure
power and riches can procure!"
The emperor's weary eyes brightened, and with the cry--
"So will I! I am still young, and I have the power!" he started suddenly
to his feet. But he sank back again directly on the couch, shaking his
head as if to say, "There, you see what a state I am in!" The fate of
this unhappy man touched Alexander's heart even more deeply than before.
His youthful mind, which easily received fresh impressions, forgot the
deeds of blood and shame which stained the soul of this pitiable wretch.
His artistic mind was accustomed to apprehend what he saw with his whole
soul and without secondary considerations, as if it stood there to be
painted; and the man that lay before him was to him at that moment only a
victim whom a cruel fate had defrauded of the greatest pleasures in life.
He also remembered how shamelessly he and others had mocked at Caesar.
Perhaps Caracalla had really spilled most of the blood to serve the
welfare and unity of the empire.
He, Alexander, was not his judge.
If Glaukias had seen the object of his derision lying thus, it certainly
would never have occurred to him to represent him as a pygmy monster. No,
no! Alexander's artistic eye knew the difference well between the
beautiful and the ugly--and the exhausted man lying on the divan, was no
hideous dwarf. A dreamy languor spread over his nobly chiselled features
An expression of pain but rarely passed over them, and Caesar's whole
appearance reminded the painter of the fine Ephesian gladiator hallistos
as he lay on the sand, severely wounded after his last fight, awaiting
the death-stroke. He would have liked to hasten home and fetch his
materials to paint the likeness of the misjudged man, and to show it to
the scoffers.
He stood silent, absorbed in studying the quiet face so finely formed by
Nature and so pathetic to look at. No thoroughly depraved miscreant could
look like that. Yet it was like a peaceful sea: when the hurricane should
break loose, what a boiling whirl of gray, hissing, tossing, foaming
waves would disfigure the peaceful, smooth, glittering surface!
And suddenly the emperor's features began to show signs of animation. His
eye, but now so dull, shone more brightly, and he cried out, as if the
long silence had scarcely broken the thread of his ideas, but in a still
husky voice:
"I should like to get up and go with you, but I am still too weak. Do you
go now, my friend, and bring me back fresh news."
Alexander then begged him to consider how dangerous every excitement
would be for him; yet Caracalla exclaimed, eagerly:
"It will strengthen me and dome good! Everything that surrounds me is so
hollow, so insipid, so contemptible--what I hear is so small. A strong,
highly spiced word, even if it is sharp, refreshes me--When you have
finished a picture, do you like to hear nothing but how well your friends
can flatter?"
The artist thought he understood Caesar. True to his nature, always
hoping for the best, he thought that, as the severe judgment of the
envious had often done him (Alexander) good, so the sharp satire of the
Alexandrians would lead Caracalla to introspection and greater
moderation; he only resolved to tell the sufferer nothing further that
was merely insulting.
When he bade him farewell, Caracalla glanced up at him with such a look
of pain that the artist longed to give him his hand, and speak to him
with real affection. The tormenting headache which followed each
convulsion had again come on, and Caesar submitted without resistance to
what the physician prescribed.
Alexander asked old Adventus at the door if he did not think that the
terrible attack had been brought on by annoyance at the Alexandrians'
satire, and if it would not be advisable in the future not to allow such
things to reach the emperor's ear; but the man, looking at him in
surprise with his half-blind eyes, replied with a brutal want of sympathy
that disgusted the youth: "Drinking brought on the attack. What makes him
ill are stronger things than words. If you yourself, young man, do not
suffer for Alexandrian wit, it will certainly not hurt Caesar!"
Alexander turned his back indignantly on the chamberlain, and he became
so absorbed in wondering how it was possible that the emperor, who was
cultivated and appreciated what was beautiful, could have dragged out of
the dust and kept near him two such miserable 'creatures as Theocritus
and this old man, that Philostratus, who met him in the next room, had
almost to shout at him.
Philostratus informed him that Melissa was staying with the chief
priest's wife; but just as he was about to inquire curiously what had
passed between the audacious painter and Caesar--for even Philostratus
was a courtier--he was called away to Caracalla.
CHAPTER XIX.
In one of the few rooms of his vast palace which the chief priest had
reserved for the accommodation of the members of his own household, the
youth was received by Melissa, Timotheus's wife Euryale, and the lady
Berenike.
This lady was pleased to see the artist again to whom she was indebted
for the portrait of her daughter. She had it now in her possession once
more, for Philostratus had had it taken back to her house while the
emperor was at his meal.
She rested on a sofa, quite worn out. She had passed through hours of
torment; for her concern about Melissa, who had become very dear to her,
had given her much more anxiety than even the loss of her beloved
picture. Besides, the young girl was to her for the moment the
representative of her sex, and the danger of seeing this pure, sweet
creature exposed to the will of a licentious tyrant drove her out of her
senses, and her lively fancy had resulted in violent outbreaks of
indignation. She now proposed all sorts of schemes, of which Euryale, the
more prudent but not less warm-hearted wife of the chief priest,
demonstrated the impossibility.
Like Berenike, a tender-hearted woman, whose smooth, brown hair had
already begun to turn gray, she had also lost her only child. But years
had passed since then, and she had accustomed herself to seek comfort in
the care of the sick and wretched. She was regarded all over the city as
the providence of all in need, whatever their condition and faith. Where
charity was to be bestowed on a large scale--if hospitals or almshouses
were to be erected or endowed--she was appealed to first, and if she
promised her quiet but valuable assistance, the result was at once
secured. For, besides her own and her husband's great riches, this lady
of high position, who was honored by all, had the purses of all the
heathens and Christians in the city at her disposal; both alike
considered that she belonged to them; and the latter, although she only
held with them in secret, had the better right.
At home, the society of distinguished men afforded her the greatest
pleasure. Her husband allowed her complete freedom; although he, as the
chief Greek priest of the city, would have preferred that she should not
also have had among her most constant visitors so many learned
Christians. But the god whom he served united in his own person most of
the others; and the mysteries which he superintended taught that even
Serapis was only a symbolical embodiment of the universal soul,
fulfilling its eternal existence by perpetually re-creating itself under
constant and immutable laws. A portion of that soul, which dwelt in all
created things, had its abode in each human being, to return to the
divine source after death. Timotheus firmly clung to this pantheist
creed; still, he held the honorable post of head of the Museum--in the
place of the Roman priest of Alexander, a man of less learning--and was
familiar not only with the tenets of his heathen predecessors, but with
the sacred scriptures of the Jews and Christians; and in the ethics of
these last he found much which met his views.
He, who, at the Museum, was counted among the skeptics, liked biblical
sentences, such as "All is vanity," and "We know but in part." The
command to love your neighbor, to seek peace, to thirst after truth, the
injunction to judge the tree by its fruit, and to fear more for the soul
than the body, were quite to his mind.
He was so rich that the gifts of the visitors to the temple, which his
predecessors had insisted on, were of no importance to him. Thus he
mingled a great deal that was Christian with the faith of which he was
chief minister and guardian. Only the conviction with which men like
Clemens and Origen, who were friends of his wife, declared that the
doctrine to which they adhered was the only right one--was, in fact, the
truth itself--seemed to the skeptic "foolishness."
His wife's friends had converted his brother Zeno to Christianity; but he
had no need to fear lest Euryale should follow them. She loved him too
much, and was too quiet and sensible, to be baptized, and thus expose
him, the heathen high-priest, to the danger of being deprived of the
power which she knew to be necessary to his happiness.
Every Alexandrian was free to belong to any other than the heathen
creeds, and no one had taken offence at his skeptical writings. When
Euryale acted like the best of the Christian women, he could not take it
amiss; and he would have scorned to blame her preference for the teaching
of the crucified God.
As to Caesar's character he had not yet made up his mind.
He had expected to find him a half-crazy villain, and his rage after he
had heard the epigram against himself, left with the rope, had
strengthened the chief priest's opinion. But since then he had heard of
much that was good in him; and Timotheus felt sure that his judgment was
unbiased by the high esteem Caesar showed to him, while he treated others
like slaves. His improved opinion had been raised by the intercourse he
had held with Caesar. The much-abused man had on these occasions shown
that he was not only well educated but also thoughtful; and yesterday
evening, before Caracalla had gone to rest exhausted, the high-priest,
with his wise experience, had received exactly the same impressions as
the easily influenced artist; for Caesar had bewailed his sad fate in
pathetic terms, and confessed himself indeed deeply guilty, but declared
that he had intended to act for the best, had sacrificed fortune, peace
of mind, and comfort to the welfare of the state. His keen eye had marked
the evils of the time, and he had acknowledged that his efforts to
extirpate the old maladies in order to make room for better things had
been a failure, and that, instead of earning thanks, he had drawn down on
himself the hatred of millions.
It was for this reason that Timotheus, on rejoining his household, had
assured them that, as he thought over this interview, he expected
something good--yes, perhaps the best--from the young criminal in the
purple.
But the lady Berenike had declared with scornful decision that Caracalla
had deceived her brother-in-law; and when Alexander likewise tried to say
a word for the sufferer, she got into a rage and accused him of foolish
credulity.
Melissa, who had already spoken in favor of the emperor, agreed, in spite
of the matron, with her brother. Yes, Caracalla had sinned greatly, and
his conviction that Alexander's soul lived in him and Roxana's in her was
foolish enough; but the marvelous likeness to her of the portrait on the
gem would astonish any one. That good and noble impulses stirred his soul
she was certain. But Berenike only shrugged her shoulders contemptuously;
and when the chief priest remarked that yesterday evening Caracalla had
in fact not been in a position to attend a feast, and that a portion, at
least, of his other offenses might certainly be put down to the charge of
his severe suffering, the lady exclaimed:
"And is it also his bodily condition that causes him to fill a house of
mourning with festive uproar? I am indifferent as to what makes him a
malefactor. For my part, I would sooner abandon this dear child to the
care of a criminal than to that of a madman."
But the chief priest and the brother and sister both declared Caesar's
mind to be as sound and sharp as any one's; and Timotheus asked who, at
the present time, was without superstition, and the desire of
communicating with departed souls. Still the matron would not allow
herself to be persuaded, and after the chief priest had been called away
to the service of the god, Euryale reproved her sister-in-law for her too
great zeal. When the wisdom of hoary old age and impetuous youth agree in
one opinion, it is commonly the right one.
"And I maintain," cried Berenike--and her large eyes flamed angrily--"it
is criminal to ignore my advice. Fate has robbed you as well as me of a
dear child. I will not also lose this one, who is as precious to me as a
daughter."
Melissa bent over the lady's hands and kissed them gratefully, exclaiming
with tearful eyes, "But he has been very good to me, and has assured me-"
"Assured!" repeated Berenike disdainfully. She then drew the young girl
impetuously toward her, kissed her on her forehead, placed her hands on
her head as if to protect her, and turned to the artist as she continued:
"I stand by what I recommended before. This very night Melissa must get
far away from here. You, Alexander, must accompany her. My own ship, the
'Berenike and Korinna'--Seleukus gave it to me and my daughter--is ready
to start. My sister lives in Carthage. Her husband, the first man in the
city, is my friend. You will find protection and shelter in their house."
"And how about our father and Philip?" interrupted Alexander. "If we
follow your advice, it is certain death to them!"
The matron laughed scornfully.
"And that is what you expect from this good, this great and noble
sovereign!"
"He proves himself full of favors to his friends," answered Alexander,
"but woe betide those who offend him!"
Berenike looked thoughtfully at the ground, and added, more quietly:
"Then try first to release your people, and afterward embark on my ship.
It shall be ready for you. Melissa will use it, I know.--My veil, child!
The chariot waits for me at the Temple of Isis.--You will accompany me
there, Alexander, and we will drive to the harbor. There I will introduce
you to the captain. It will be wise. Your father and brother are dearer
to you than your sister; she is more important to me. If only I could go
away myself--away from here, from the desolate house, and take her with
me!"
And she raised her arm, as if she would throw a stone into the distance.
She impetuously embraced the young girl, took leave of her sister-in-law,
and left the room with Alexander.
Directly Euryale was alone with Melissa, she comforted the girl in her
kind, composed manner; for the unhappy matron's gloomy presentiments had
filled Melissa with fresh anxieties.
And what had she not gone through during the day!
Soon after her perilous interview with Caracalla, Timotheus, with the
chief of the astrologers from the Serapeum, and the emperor's astronomer,
had come to her, to ask her on what day and at what hour she was born.
They also inquired concerning the birthdays of her parents, and other
events of her life. Timotheus had informed her that the emperor had
ordered them to cast her nativity.
Soon after dinner she had gone, accompanied by the lady Berenike, who had
found her at the chief priest's house, to visit her lover in the
sick-rooms of the Serapeum. Thankful and happy, she had found him with
fully recovered consciousness, but the physician and the freedman
Andreas, whom she met at the door of the chamber, had impressed on her
the importance of avoiding all excitement. So it had not been possible
for her to tell him what had happened to her people, or of the perilous
step she had taken in order to save them. But Diodoros had talked of
their wedding, and Andreas could confirm the fact that Polybius wished to
see it celebrated as soon as possible.
Several pleasant subjects were discussed; but between whiles Melissa had
to dissemble and give evasive answers to Diodoros's questions as to
whether she had already arranged with her brother and friends who should
be the youths and maidens to form the wedding procession, and sing the
hymeneal song.
As the two whispered to one another and looked tenderly at each
other--for Diodoros had insisted on her allowing him to kiss not only her
hands but also her sweet red lips--Berenike had pictured her dead
daughter in Melissa's place. What a couple they would have been! How
proudly and gladly she would have led them to the lovely villa at
Kanopus, which her husband and she had rebuilt and decorated with the
idea that some day Korinna, her husband, and--if the gods should grant
it--their children, might inhabit it! But even Melissa and Diodoros made
a fine couple, and she tried with all her heart not to grudge her all the
happiness that she had wished for her own child.
When it was time to depart, she joined the hands of the betrothed pair,
and called down a blessing from the gods.
Diodoros accepted this gratefully.
He only knew that this majestic lady had made Melissa's acquaintance
through Alexander, and had won her affection, and he encouraged the
impression that this woman, whose Juno-like beauty haunted him, had
visited him on his bed of sickness in the place of his long-lost mother.
Outside the sick-room Andreas again met Melissa, and, after she had told
him of her visit to the emperor, he impressed on her eagerly on no
account to obey the tyrant's call again. Then he had promised to hide her
securely, either on Zeno's estate or else in the house of another friend,
which was difficult of access. When Dame Berenike had again, and with
particular eagerness, suggested her ship, Andreas had exclaimed:
"In the garden, on the ship, under the earth--only not back to Caesar!"
The last question of the freedman's, as to whether she had meditated
further on his discourse, had reminded her of the sentence, "The fullness
of the time is come"; and afterward the thought occurred to her, again
and again, that in the course of the next few hours some decisive event
would happen to her, "fulfilling the time," as Andreas expressed it.
When, therefore, somewhat later, she was alone with the chief priest's
wife, who had concluded her comforting, pious exhortations, Melissa asked
the lady Euryale whether she had ever heard the sentence, "When the
fullness of the time is come."
At this the lady cried, gazing at the girl with surprised inquiry:
"Are you, then, after all, connected with the Christians?"
"Certainly not," answered the young girl, firmly. "I heard it
accidentally, and Andreas, Polybius's freedman, explained it to me."
"A good interpreter," replied the elder lady. "I am only an ignorant
woman; yet, child, even I have experienced that a day, an hour, comes to
every man in the course of his life in which he afterward sees that the
time was fulfilled. As the drops become mingled with the stream, so at
that moment the things we have done and thought unite to carry us on a
new current, either to salvation or perdition. Any moment may bring the
crisis; for that reason the Christians are right when they call on one
another to watch. You also must keep your eyes open. When the time--who
knows how soon?--is fulfilled for you, it will determine the good or evil
of your whole life."
"An inward voice tells me that also," answered Melissa, pressing her
hands on her panting bosom. "Just feel how my heart beats!"
Euryale, smiling, complied with this wish, and as she did so she
shuddered. How pure and lovable was this young creature; and Melissa
looked to her like a lamb that stood ready to hasten trustfully to meet
the wolf!
At last she led her guest into the room where supper was prepared.
The master of the house would not be able to share it, and while the two
women sat opposite one another, saying little, and scarcely touching
either food or drink, Philostratus was announced.
He came as messenger from Caracalla, who wished to speak to Melissa.
"At this hour? Never, never! It is impossible!" exclaimed Euryale, who
was usually so calm; but Philostratus declared, nevertheless, that denial
was useless. The emperor was suffering particularly severely, and begged
to remind Melissa of her promise to serve him gladly if he required her.
Her presence, he assured Euryale, would do the sick man good, and he
guaranteed that, so long as Caesar was tormented by this unbearable pain,
the young woman had nothing to fear.
Melissa, who had risen from her seat when the philosopher had entered,
exclaimed:
"I am not afraid, and will go with you gladly--"
"Quite right, child," answered Philostratus, affectionately. Euryale,
however, found it difficult to keep back her tears while she stroked the
girl's hair and arranged the folds of her garment. When at last she said
good-by to Melissa and was embracing her, she was reminded of the
farewell she had taken, many years ago, of a Christian friend before she
was led away by the lictors to martyrdom in the circus. Finally, she
whispered something in the philosopher's ear, and received from him the
promise to return with Melissa as soon as possible.
Philostratus was, in fact, quite easy. Just before, Caracalla's helpless
glance had met his sympathizing gaze, and the suffering Caesar had said
nothing to him but:
"O Philostratus, I am in such pain!" and these words still rang in the
ears of this warm-hearted man.
While he was endeavoring to comfort the emperor, Caesar's eyes had fallen
on the gem, and he asked to see it. He gazed at it attentively for some
time, and when he returned it to the philosopher he had ordered him to
fetch the prototype of Roxana.
Closely enveloped in the veil which Euryale had placed on her head,
Melissa passed from room to room, keeping near to the philosopher.
Wherever she appeared she heard murmuring and whispering that troubled
her, and tittering followed her from several of the rooms as she left
them; even from the large hall where the emperor's friends awaited his
orders in numbers, she heard a loud laugh that frightened and annoyed
her.
She no longer felt as unconstrained as she had been that morning when she
had come before Caesar. She knew that she would have to be on her guard;
that anything, even the worst, might be expected from him. But as
Philostratus described to her, on the way, how terribly the unfortunate
man suffered, her tender heart was again drawn to him, to whom--as she
now felt--she was bound by an indefinable tie. She, if any one, as she
repeated to herself, was able to help him; and her desire to put the
truth of this conviction to the proof--for she could only regard it as
too amazing to be grounded in fact--was seconded by the less
disinterested hope that, while attending on the sufferer, she might find
an opportunity of effecting the release of her father and brother.
Philostratus went on to announce her arrival, and she, while waiting,
tried to pray to the manes of her mother; but, before she could
sufficiently collect her thoughts, the door opened. Philostratus silently
beckoned to her, and she stepped into the tablinum, which was but dimly
lighted by a few lamps.
Caracalla was still resting here; for every movement increased the pain
that tormented him.
How quiet it was! She thought she could hear her own heart beating.
Philostratus remained standing by the door, but she went on tiptoe toward
the couch, fearing her light footsteps might disturb the emperor. Yet
before she had reached the divan she stopped still, and then she heard
the plaintive rattle in the sufferer's throat, and from the background of
the room the easy breathing of the burly physician and of old Adventus,
both of whom had fallen asleep; and then a peculiar tapping. The lion
beat the floor with his tail with pleasure at recognizing her.
This noise attracted the invalid's attention, and when he opened his
closed eyes and saw Melissa, who was anxiously watching all his
movements, he called to her lightly with his hand on his brow:
"The animal has a good memory, and greets you in my name. You were sure
to come--, I knew it!"
The young girl stepped nearer to him, and answered, kindly, "Since you
needed me, I gladly followed Philostratus."
"Because I needed you?" asked the emperor.
"Yes," she replied, "because you require nursing."
"Then, to keep you, I shall wish to be ill often," he answered, quickly;
but he added, sadly, "only not so dreadfully ill as I have been to-day."
One could hear how laborious talking was to him, and the few words he had
sought and found, in order to say something kind to Melissa, had so hurt
his shattered nerves and head that he sank back, gasping, on the
cushions.
Then for some time all was quiet, until Caracalla took his hand from his
forehead and continued, as if in excuse:
"No one seems to know what it is. And if I talk ever so softly, every
word vibrates through my brain."
"Then you must not speak," interrupted Melissa, eagerly. "If you want
anything, only make signs. I shall understand you without words, and the
quieter it is here the better."
"No, no; you must speak," begged the invalid. "When the others talk, they
make the beating in my head ten times worse, and excite me; but I like to
hear your voice."
"The beating?" interrupted Melissa, in whom this word awoke old memories.
"Perhaps you feel as if a hammer was hitting you over the left eye?
"If you move rapidly, does it not pierce your skull, and do you not feel
as sick as if you were on the rocking sea?"
"Then you also know this torment?" asked Caracalla, surprised; but she
answered, quietly, that her mother had suffered several times from
similar headaches, and had described them to her.
Caesar sank back again on the pillows, moved his dry lips, and glanced
toward the drink which Galen had prescribed for him; and Melissa, who
almost as a child had long nursed a dear invalid, guessed what he wanted,
brought him the goblet, and gave him a draught.
Caracalla rewarded her with a grateful look. But the physic only seemed
to increase the pain. He lay there panting and motionless, until, trying
to find a new position, he groaned, lightly:
"It is as if iron was being hammered here. One would think others might
hear it."
At the same time he seized the girl's hand and placed it on his burning
brow.
Melissa felt the pulse in the sufferer's temple throbbing hard and short
against her fingers, as she had her mother's when she laid her cool hand
on her aching forehead; and then, moved by the wish to comfort and heal,
she let her right hand rest over the sick man's eyes. As soon as she felt
one hand was hot, she put the other in its place; and it must have
relieved the patient, for his moans ceased by degrees, and he finally
said, gratefully:
"What good that does me! You are--I knew you would help me. It is already
quite quiet in my brain. Once more your hand, dear girl!"
Melissa willingly obeyed him, and as he breathed more and more easily,
she remembered that her mother's headache had often been relieved when
she had placed her hand on her forehead. Caesar, now opening his eyes
wide, and looking her full in the face, asked why she had not allowed him
sooner to reap the benefit of this remedy.
Melissa slowly withdrew her hand, and with drooping eyes answered gently:
"You are the emperor, a man. . . and I. . . . But Caracalla interrupted
her eagerly, and with a clear voice:
"Not so, Melissa! Do not you feel, like me, that something else draws us
to one another, like what binds a man to his wife?-There lies the gem.
Look at it once again--No, child, no! This resemblance is not mere
accident. The short-sighted, might call it superstition or a vain
illusion; I know better. At least a portion of Alexander's soul lives in
this breast. A hundred signs--I will tell you about it later--make it a
certainty to me. And yesterday morning. . . . I see it all again before
me. . . . You stood above me, on the left, at a window. . . . I looked
up; . . . our eyes met, and I felt in the depths of my heart a strange
emotion. . . . I asked myself, silently, where I had seen that lovely face
before. And the answer rang, you have already often met her; you know
her!"
"My face reminded you of the gem," interrupted Melissa, disquieted.
"No, no," continued Caesar. "It was some thing else. Why had none of my
many gems ever reminded me before of living people? Why did your picture,
I know not how often, recur to my mind? And you? Only recollect what you
have done for me. How marvelously we were brought together! And all this
in the course of a single, short day. And you also. . . . I ask you, by
all that is holy to you. . . Did you, after you saw me in the court of
sacrifice, not think of me so often and so vividly that it astonished
you?"
"You are Caesar," answered Melissa, with increasing anxiety.
"So you thought of my purple robes?" asked Caracalla, and his face
clouded over; "or perhaps only of my power that might be fatal to your
family? I will know. Speak the truth, girl, by the head of your father!"
Then Melissa poured forth this confession from her oppressed heart:
"Yes, I could not help remembering you constantly, . . . and I never saw
you in purple, but just as you had stood there on the steps; . . . and
then--ah! I have told you already how sorry I was for your sufferings. I
felt as if . . . but how can I describe it truly?--as if you stood much
nearer to me than the ruler of the world could to a poor, humble girl. It
was . . . eternal gods! . . ."
She stopped short; for she suddenly recollected anxiously that this
confession might prove fatal to her. The sentence about the time which
should be fulfilled for each was ringing in her ears, and it seemed to
her that she heard for the second time the lady Berenike's warning.
But Caracalla allowed her no time to think; for he interrupted her,
greatly pleased, with the cry:
"It is true, then! The immortals have wrought as great a miracle in you
as in me. We both owe them thanks, and I will show them how grateful I
can be by rich sacrifices. Our souls, which destiny had already once
united, have met again. That portion of the universal soul which of yore
dwelt in Roxana, and now in you, Melissa, has also vanquished the pain
which has embittered my life. . . You have proved it!--And now . . . it
is beginning to throb again more violently--now--beloved and restored
one, help me once more!"
Melissa perceived anxiously how the emperor's face had flushed again
during this last vehement speech, and at the same time the pain had again
contracted his forehead and eyes. And she obeyed his command, but this
time only in shy submission. When she found that he became quieter, and
the movement of her hand once more did him good, she recovered her
presence of mind. She remembered how often the quiet application of her
hand had helped her mother to sleep.
She therefore explained to Caracalla, in a low whisper directly he began
to speak again, that her desire to give him relief would be vain if he
did not keep his eyes and lips closed. And Caracalla yielded, while her
hand moved as lightly over the brow of the terrible man as when years ago
it had soothed her mother to sleep.
When the sufferer, after a little time, murmured, with closed eyes
"Perhaps I could sleep," she felt as if great happiness had befallen her.
She listened attentively to every breath, and looked as if spell-bound
into his face, until she was quite sure that sleep had completely
overcome Caesar.
She then crept gently on tiptoe to Philostratus, who had looked on in
silent surprise at all that had passed between his sovereign and the
girl. He, who was always inclined to believe in any miraculous cure, of
which so many had been wrought by his hero Apollonius, thought he had
actually witnessed one, and gazed with an admiration bordering on awe at
the young creature who appeared to him to be a gracious instrument of the
gods.
"Let me go now," Melissa whispered to her friend. "He sleeps, and will
not wake for some time."
"At your command," answered the philosopher, respectfully. At the same
moment a loud voice was heard from the next room, which Melissa
recognized as her brother Alexander's, who impetuously insisted on his
right of--being allowed at any time to see the emperor.
"He will wake him," murmured the philosopher, anxiously; but Melissa with
prompt determination threw her veil over her head and went into the
adjoining room.
Philostratus at first heard violent language issuing from the mouth of
Theocritus and the other courtiers, and the artist's answers were not
less passionate. Then he recognized Melissa's voice; and when quiet
suddenly reigned on that side of the door, the young girl again crossed
the threshold.
She glanced toward Caracalla to see if he still slept, and then, with a
sigh of relief, beckoned to her friend, and begged him in a whisper to
escort her past the staring men. Alexander followed them.
Anger and surprise were depicted on his countenance, which was usually so
happy. He had come with a report which might very likely induce Caesar to
order the release of his father and brother, and his heart had stood
still with fear and astonishment when the favorite Theocritus had told
him in the anteroom, in a way that made the blood rush into his face,
that his sister had been for some time endeavoring to comfort the
suffering emperor--and it was nearly midnight.
Quite beside himself, he wished to force his way into Caesar's presence,
but Melissa had at that moment come out and stood in his way, and had
desired him and the noble Romans, in such a decided and commanding tone,
to lower their voices, that they and her brother were speechless.
What had happened to his modest sister during the last few days? Melissa
giving him orders which he feebly obeyed! It seemed impossible! But there
was something reassuring in her manner. She must certainly have thought
it right to act thus, and it must have been worthy of her, or she would
not have carried her charming head so high, or looked him so freely and
calmly in the face.
But how had she dared to come between him and his duty to his father and
brother?
While he followed her closely and silently through the imperial rooms,
the implicit obedience he had shown her became more and more difficult to
comprehend; and when at last they stood in the empty corridor which
divided Caesar's quarters from those of the high-priest, and Philostratus
had returned to his post at the side of his sovereign, he could hold out
no longer, and cried to her indignantly:
"So far, I have followed you like a boy; I do not myself know why. But it
is not yet too late to turn round; and I ask you, what gave you the right
to prevent my doing my best for our people?"
"Your loud talking, that threatened to wake Caesar," she replied,
seriously. "His sleeping could alone save me from watching by him the
whole night."
Alexander then felt sorry he had been so foolishly turbulent, and after
Melissa had told him in a few words what she had gone through in the last
few hours he informed her of what had brought him to visit the emperor so
late.
Johannes the lawyer, Berenike's Christian freedman, he began, had visited
their father in prison and had heard the order given to place Heron and
Philip as state prisoners and oarsmen on board a galley.
This had taken place in the afternoon, and the Christian had further
learned that the prisoners would be led to the harbor two hours before
sunset. This was the truth, and yet the infamous Zminis had assured the
emperor, at noon, that their father and Philip were already far on their
way to Sardinia. The worthless Egyptian had, then, lied to the emperor;
and it would most likely cost the scoundrel his neck. But for this, there
would have been time enough next day. What had brought him there at so
late an hour was the desire to prevent the departure of the galley; for
John had heard, from the Christian harbor-watch that the anchor was not
yet weighed. The ship could therefore only get out to sea at sunrise; the
chain that closed the harbor would not be opened till then. If the order
to stop the galley came much after daybreak, she would certainly be by
that time well under way, and their father and Philip might have
succumbed to the hard rowing before a swift trireme could overtake and
release them.
Melissa had listened to this information with mixed feelings. She had
perhaps precipitated her father and brother into misery in order to save
herself; for a terrible fate awaited the state-prisoners at the oars. And
what could she do, an ignorant child, who was of so little use?
Andreas had told her that it was the duty of a Christian and of every
good man, if his neighbor's welfare were concerned, to sacrifice his own
fortunes; and for the happiness and lives of those dearest to her--for
they, of all others, were her "neighbors"--she felt that she could do so.
Perhaps she might yet succeed in repairing the mischief she had done when
she had allowed the emperor to sleep without giving one thought to her
father. Instead of waking him, she had misused her new power over her
brother, and, by preventing his speaking, had perhaps frustrated the
rescue of her people.
But idle lamenting was of as little use here as at any other time; so she
resolutely drew her veil closer round her head and called to her brother,
"Wait here till I return!"
"What are you going to do?" asked Alexander, startled.
"I am going back to the invalid," she explained, decisively.
On this her brother seized her arm, and, wildly excited, forbade this
step in the name of his father.
But at his vehement shout, "I will not allow it!" she struggled to free
herself, and cried out to him:
"And you? Did not you, whose life is a thousand times more important than
mine, of your own free-will go into captivity and to death in order to
save our father?"
"It was for my sake that he had been robbed of his freedom," interrupted
Alexander; but she added, quickly:
"And if I had not thought only of myself, the command to release him and
Philip would by this time have been at the harbor. I am going."
Alexander then took his hand from her arm, and exclaimed, as if urged by
some internal force, "Well, then, go!"
"And you," continued Melissa, hastily, "go and seek the lady Euryale. She
is expecting me. Tell her all, and beg her in my name to go to rest. Also
tell her I remembered the sentence about the time, which was fulfilled.
. . . Mark the words. If I am running again into danger, tell her that I do
it because a voice says to me that it is right. And it is right, believe
me, Alexander!"
The artist drew his sister to him and kissed her; yet she hardly
understood his anxious good wishes; for his voice was choked by emotion.
He had taken it for granted that he should accompany her as far as the
emperor's room, but she would not allow it. His reappearance would only
lead to fresh quarrels.
He also gave in to this; but he insisted on returning here to wait for
her.
After Melissa had vanished into Caesar's quarters he immediately carried
out his sister's wish, and told the lady Euryale of all that had
happened.
Encouraged by the matron, who was not less shocked than he had been at
Melissa's daring, he returned to the anteroom, where, at first, greatly
excited, he walked up and down, and then sank on a marble seat to wait
for his sister. He was frequently overpowered by sleep. The things that
cast a shadow on his sunny mind vanished from him, and a pleasing dream
showed him, instead of the alarming picture which haunted him before
sleeping, the beautiful Christian Agatha.
CHAPTER XX.
The waiting-room was empty when Melissa crossed it for the second time.
Most of the emperor's friends had retired to rest or into the city when
they had heard that Caesar slept; and the few who had remained behaved
quietly when she appeared, for Philostratus had told them that the
emperor held her in high esteem, as the only person who was able to give
him comfort in his suffering by her peculiar and wonderful healing power.
In the tablinum, which had been converted into a sick-room, nothing was
heard but the breathing and gentle snoring of the sleeping man. Even
Philostratus was asleep on an arm-chair at the back of the room.
When the philosopher had returned, Caracalla had noticed him, and dozing,
or perhaps in his dreams, he had ordered him to remain by him. So the
learned man felt bound to spend the night there.
Epagathos, the freedman, was lying on a mattress from the dining-room;
the corpulent physician slept soundly, and if he snored too loudly, old
Adventus poked him and quietly spoke a word of warning to him. This man,
who had formerly been a post messenger, was the only person who was
conscious of Melissa's entrance; but he only blinked at her through his
dim eyes, and, after he had silently considered why the young girl should
have returned, he turned over in order to sleep himself; for he had come
to the conclusion that this young, active creature would be awake and at
hand if his master required anything.
His wondering as to why Melissa had returned, had led to many guesses,
and had proved fruitless. "You can know nothing of women," was the end of
his reflections, "if you do not know that what seems most improbable is
what is most likely to be true. This maid is certainly not one of the
flute-players or the like. Who knows what incomprehensible whim or freak
may have brought her here? At any rate, it will be easier for her to keep
her eyes open than it is for me."
He then signed to her and asked her quietly to fetch his cloak out of the
next room, for his old body needed warmth; and Melissa gladly complied,
and laid the caracalla over the old mans cold feet with obliging care.
She then returned to the side of the sick-bed, to wait for the emperor's
awaking. He slept soundly; his regular breathing indicated this. The
others also slept, and Adventus's light snore, mingling with the louder
snoring of the physician, showed that he too had ceased to watch. The
slumbering Philostratus now and then murmured incomprehensible words to
himself; and the lion, who perhaps was dreaming of his freedom in his
sandy home, whined low in his sleep.
She watched alone.
It seemed to her as if she were in the habitation of sleep, and as if
phantoms and dreams were floating around her on the unfamiliar noises.
She was afraid, and the thought of being the only woman among so many men
caused her extreme uneasiness.
She could not sit still.
Inaudibly as a shadow she approached the head of the sleeping emperor,
holding her breath to listen to him. How soundly he slept! And she had
come that she might talk to him. If his sleep lasted till sunrise, the
pardon for her people would be too late, and her father and Philip,
chained to a hard bench, would have to ply heavy oars as galley slaves by
the side of robbers and murderers. How terribly then would her father's
wish to use his strength be granted! Was Philip, the narrow-chested
philosopher, capable of bearing the strain which had so often proved
fatal to stronger men?
She must wake the dreaded man, the only man who could possibly help her.
She now raised her hand to lay it on his shoulder, but she half withdrew
it.
It seemed to her as if it was not much less wicked to rob a sleeping man
of his rest, his best cure, than to take the life of a living being. It
was not too late yet, for the harbor-chain would not be opened till the
October sun had risen. He might enjoy his slumbers a little longer.
With this conclusion she once more sank down and listened to the noises
which broke the stillness of the night.
How hideous they were, how revolting they sounded! The vulgarest of the
sleepers, old Adventus, absolutely sawed the air with his snoring.
The emperor's breathing was scarcely perceptible, and how nobly cut was
the profile which she could see, the other side of his face leaning on
the pillow! Had she any real reason to fear his awakening? Perhaps he was
quite unlike what Berenike thought him to be. She remembered the sympathy
she had felt for him when they had first met, and, in spite of all the
trouble she had experienced since, she no longer felt afraid. A thought
then occurred to her which was sufficient excuse for disturbing the sick
man's sleep. If she delayed it, she would be making him guilty of a fresh
crime by allowing two blameless men to perish in misery. But she would
first convince herself whether the time was pressing. She looked out
through the open window at the stars and across the open place lying at
her feet. The third hour after midnight was past, and the sun would rise
before long.
Down below all was quiet. Macrinus, the praetorian prefect, on hearing
that the emperor had fallen into a refreshing sleep, in order that he
might not be disturbed, had forbidden all loud signals, and ordered the
camp to be closed to all the inhabitants of the city; so the girl heard
nothing but the regular footsteps of the sentries and the shrieks of the
owls returning to their nests in the roof of the Serapeum. The wind from
the sea drove the clouds before it across the sky, and the plain covered
with tents resembled a sea tossed into high white waves. The camp had
been reduced during the afternoon; for Caracalla had carried out his
threat of that morning by quartering a portion of the picked troops in
the houses of the richest Alexandrians.
Melissa, bending far out, looked toward the north. The sea-breeze blew
her hair into her face. Perhaps on the ocean whence it came the high
waves would, in a few hours, be tossing the ship on which her father and
brother, seated at the oar, would be toiling as disgraced galley-slaves.
That must not, could not be!
Hark! what was that?
She heard a light whisper. In spite of strict orders, a loving couple
were passing below. The wife of the centurion Martialis, who had been
separated for some time from her husband, had at his entreaty come
secretly from Ranopus, where she had charge of Seleukus's villa, to see
him, as his services prevented his going so far away. They now stood
whispering and making love in the shadow of the temple. Melissa could not
hear what they said, yet it reminded her of the sacred night hour when
she confessed her love to Diodoros. She felt as if she were standing by
his bedside, and his faithful eyes met hers. She would not, for all that
was best in the world, have awakened him yesterday at the Christian's
house, though the awakening would have brought her fresh promises of
love; and yet she was on the point of robbing another of his only cure,
the sleep the gods had sent him. But then she loved Diodoros, and what
was Caesar to her? It had been a matter of life and death with her lover,
while disturbing Caracalla would only postpone his recovery a few hours
at the utmost. It was she who had procured the imperial sleeper his rest,
which she could certainly restore to him even if she now woke him. Just
now she had vowed for the future not to care about her own welfare, and
that had at first made her doubtful about Caracalla; but had it not
really been exceedingly selfish to lose the time which could bring
freedom to her father and brother, only to protect her own soul from the
reproach of an easily forgiven wrong? With the question:
"What is your duty?" all doubts left her, and no longer on tiptoe, but
with a firm, determined tread, she walked toward the slumberer's couch,
and the outrage which she shrank from committing would, she saw, be a
deed of kindness; for she found the emperor with perspiring brow groaning
and frightened by a severe nightmare. He cried with the dull, toneless
voice of one talking in his sleep, as if he saw her close by:
"Away, mother, I say! He or I! Out of the way! You will not? But I, I--If
you--"
At the same he threw up his hands and gave a dull, painful cry.
"He is dreaming of his brother's murder," rushed through Melissa's mind,
and in the same instant she laid her hand on his arm and with urgent
entreaty cried in his ear: "Wake up, Caesar, I implore you! Great Caesar,
awake!"
Then he opened his eyes, and a low, prolonged "Ah!" rang from his
tortured breast.
He then, with a deep breath and perplexed glance, looked round him; and
as his eyes fell on the young girl his features brightened, and soon wore
a happy expression, as if he experienced a great joy.
"You?" he asked, with pleased surprise. "You, maiden, still here! It must
be nearly dawn? I slept well till just now. But then at the last--Oh, it
was fearful!--Adventus!"
Melissa, however, interrupted this cry, exhorting the emperor to be quiet
by putting her finger to her lips; and he understood her and willingly
obeyed, especially as she had guessed what he required from the
chamberlain, Adventus. She handed him the cloth that lay on the table for
him to wipe his streaming forehead. She then brought him drink, and after
Caracalla had sat up refreshed, and felt that the pain, which, after a
sharp attack, lasted sometimes for days, had now already left him, he
said, quite gently, mindful of her sign:
"How much better I feel already; and for this I thank you, Roxana; yes,
you know. I like to feel like Alexander, but usually--It is certainly a
pleasant thing to be ruler of the universe, for if we wish to punish or
reward, no one can limit us. You, child, shall learn that it is Caesar
whom you have laid under such obligations. Ask what you will, and I will
grant it you."
She whispered eagerly to him:
"Release my father and brother."
"Always the same thing," answered Caracalla, peevishly. "Do you know of
nothing better to wish for?"
"No, my lord, no!" cried Melissa, with importunate warmth. "If you will
give me what I most care for--"
"I will, yes, I will," interrupted the emperor in a softer voice; but
suddenly shrugging his shoulders, he continued, regretfully: "But you
must have patience; for, by the Egyptian's orders, your people have been
for some time afloat and at sea."
"No!" the girl assured him. "They are still here. Zminis has shamefully
deceived you;" and then she informed him of what she had learned from her
brother.
Caracalla, in obedience to a softer impulse, had wished to show himself
grateful to Melissa. But her demand displeased him; for the sculptor and
his son, the philosopher, were the security that should keep Melissa and
the painter attached to him. But though his distrust was so strong,
offended dignity and the tormenting sense of being deceived caused him to
forget everything else; he flew into a rage, and called loudly the names
of Epagathos and Adventus.
His voice, quavering with fury, awakened the others also out of their
sleep; and after he had shortly and severely rebuked them for their
laziness, he commissioned Epagathos to give the prefect, Macrinus,
immediate orders not to allow the ship on which Heron and Philip were, to
leave the harbor; to set the captives at liberty; and to throw Zminis,
the Egyptian, into prison, heavily chained.
When the freedman remarked, humbly, that the prefect was not likely to be
found, as he had purposed to be present again that night at the exorcisms
of the magician, Serapion, Caesar commanded that Macrinus should be
called away from the miracle-monger's house, and the orders given him.
"And if I can not find him?" asked Epagathos.
"Then, once more, events will prove how badly I am served," answered the
emperor. "In any case you can act the prefect, and see that my orders are
carried out."
The freedman left hastily, and Caracalla sank back exhausted on the
pillows.
Melissa let him rest a little while; then she approached him, thanked him
profusely, and begged him to keep quiet, lest the pain should return and
spoil the approaching day.
He then asked the time, and when Philostratus, who had walked to the
window, explained that the fifth hour after midnight was past, Caracalla
bade him prepare a bath.
The physician sanctioned this wish, and Caesar then gave his hand to the
girl, saying, feebly and in a gentle voice: "The pain still keeps away. I
should be better if I could moderate my impatience. An early bath often
does me good after a bad night. Only go. The sleep that you know so well
how to give to others, you scarcely allow to visit you. I only beg that
you will be at hand. We shall both, I think, feel strengthened when next
I call you."
Melissa then bade him a grateful farewell; but as she was approaching the
doorway he called again after her, and asked her with an altered voice,
shortly and sternly:
"You will agree with your father if he abuses me?"
"What an idea!" she answered, energetically. "He knows who robbed him of
his liberty, and from me shall he learn who has restored it to him."
"Good!" murmured the emperor. "Yet remember this also: I need your
assistance and that of your brother's, the painter. If your father
attempts to alienate you--"
Here he suddenly let fall his arm, which he had raised threateningly, and
continued in a confidential whisper: "But how can I ever show you
anything but kindness? Is it not so? You already feel the secret tie--You
know? Am I mistaken when I fancy that it grieves you to be separated from
me?"
"Certainly not," she replied, gently, and bowed her head.
"Then go," he continued, kindly. "The day will come yet when you will
feel that I am as necessary to your soul as you are to mine. But you do
not yet know how impatient I can be. I must be able to think of you with
pleasure--always with pleasure--always."
Thereupon he nodded to her, and his eyelids remained for some time in
spasmodic movement. Philostratus was prepared to accompany the young
girl, but Caracalla prevented him by calling:
"Lead me to my bath. If it does me good, as I trust it will, I have many
things to talk over with you."
Melissa did not hear the last words. Gladly and quickly she hurried
through the empty, dimly lighted rooms, and found Alexander in a sitting
position, half asleep and half awake, with closed eyes. Then she drew
near to him on tiptoe, and, as his nodding head fell on his breast, she
laughed and woke him with a kiss.
The lamps were not yet burned out, and, as he looked into her face with
surprise, his also brightened, and jumping up quickly he exclaimed:
"All's well; we have you back again, and you have succeeded! Our father-I
see it in your face--and Philip also, are at liberty!"
"Yes, yes, yes," she answered, gladly; "and now we will go together and
fetch them ourselves from the harbor."
Alexander raised his eyes and arms to heaven in rapture, and Melissa
imitated him; and thus, without words, though with fervent devotion, they
with one accord thanked the gods for their merciful ruling.
They then set out together, and Alexander said: "I feel as if nothing but
gratitude flowed through all my veins. At any rate, I have learned for
the first time what fear is. That evil guest certainly haunts this place.
Let us go now. On the way you shall tell me everything."
"Only one moment's patience," she begged, cheerfully, and hurried into
the chief priest's rooms. The lady Euryale was still expecting her, and
as she kissed her she looked with sincere pleasure into her bright but
tearful eyes.
At first she was bent on making Melissa rest; for she would yet require
all her strength. But she saw that the girl's wish to go and meet her
father was justifiable; she placed her own mantle over her shoulders--for
the air was cool before sunrise--and at last accompanied her into the
anteroom. Directly the girl had disappeared, she turned to her
sister-in-law's slave, who had waited there the whole night by order of
his mistress, and desired him to go and report to her what he had learned
about Melissa.
The brother and sister met the slave Argutis outside the Serapeum. He had
heard at Seleukus's house where his young mistress was staying, and had
made friends with the chief priest's servants.
When, late in the evening, he heard that Melissa was still with Caesar,
he had become so uneasy that he had waited the whole night through, first
on the steps of a staircase, then walking up and down outside the
Serapeum. With a light heart he now accompanied the couple as far as the
Aspendia quarter of the town, and he then only parted from them in order
that he might inform poor old Dido of his good news, and make
preparations for the reception of the home-comers.
After that Melissa hurried along, arm in arm with her brother, through
the quiet streets.
Youth, to whom the present belongs entirely, only cares to know the
bright side of the future; and even Melissa in her joy at being able to
restore liberty to her beloved relations, hardly thought at all of the
fact that, when this was done and Caesar should send for her again, there
would be new dangers to surmount.
Delighted with her grand success, she first told her brother what her
experiences had been with the suffering emperor. Then she started on the
recollections of her visit to her lover, and when Alexander opened his
heart to her and assured her with fiery ardor that he would not rest till
he had won the heart of the lovely Christian, Agatha, she gladly allowed
him to talk and promised him her assistance. At last they deliberated how
the favor of Caesar--who, Melissa assured him, was cruelly
misunderstood--was to be won for their father and Philip; and finally
they both imagined the surprise of the old man if he should be the first
to meet them after being set at liberty.
The way was far, and when they reached the sea, by the Caesareum in the
Bruchium, the palatial quarter of the town, the first glimmer of
approaching dawn was showing behind the peninsula of Lochias. The sea was
rough, and tossed with heavy, oily waves on the Choma that ran out into
the sea like a finger, and on the walls of the Timoneum at its point,
where Antonius had hidden his disgrace after the battle of Actium.
Alexander stopped by the pillared temple of Poseidon, which stood close
on the shore, between the Choma and the theatre, and, looking toward the
flat, horseshoe-shaped coast of the opposite island which still lay in
darkness, he asked:
"Do you still remember when we went with our mother over to Antirhodos,
and how she allowed us to gather shells in the little harbor? If she were
alive to-day, what more could we wish for?"
"That the emperor was gone," exclaimed the girl from the depths of her
heart; "that Diodoros were well again; that father could use his hands as
he used, and that I might stay with him until Diodoros came to fetch me,
and then . . . oh, if only something could happen to the empire that Caesar
might go away-far away, to the farthest hyperborean land!"
"That will soon happen now," answered Alexander. "Philostratus says that
the Romans will remain at the utmost a week longer."
"So long?" asked Melissa, startled; but Alexander soon pacified her with
the assurance that seven days flew speedily by, and when one looked back
on them they seemed to shrink into only as many hours.
"But do not," he continued, cheerfully, "look into the future! We will
rejoice, for everything is going so well now!"
He stopped here suddenly and gazed anxiously at the sea, which was no
longer completely obscured by the vanishing shadows of night. Melissa
looked in the direction of his pointing hand, and when he cried with
great excitement, "That is no little boat, it is a ship, and a large one,
too!" Melissa added, eagerly, "It is already near the Diabathra. It will
reach the Alveus Steganus in a moment, and pass the pharos."
"But yonder is the morning star in the heavens, and the fire is still
blazing on the tower," interrupted her brother. "Not till it has been
extinguished will they open the outside chain. And yet that ship is
steering in a northwesterly direction. It certainly comes out of the
royal harbor." He then drew his sister on faster, and when, in a few
minutes, they reached the harbor gate, he cried out, much relieved:
"Look there! The chain is still across the entrance. I see it clearly."
"And so do I," said Melissa, decidedly; and while her brother knocked at
the gate-house of the little harbor, she continued, eagerly:
"No ships dare go out before sunrise, on account of the rocks--Epagathos
said so just now--and that one near the pharos--"
But there was no time to put her thoughts into words; for the broad
harbor gate was thrown noisily open, and a troop of Roman soldiers
streamed out, followed by several Alexandrian men-at-arms. After them
came a prisoner loaded with chains, with whom a leading Roman in
warrior's dress was conversing. Both were tall and haggard, and when they
approached the brother and sister they recognized in them Macrinus the
praetorian prefect, while the prisoner was Zminis the informer.
But the Egyptian also noticed the artist and his companion. His eyes
sparkled brightly, and with triumphant scorn he pointed out to sea.
The magician Serapion had persuaded the prefect to let the Egyptian go
free. Nothing was yet known in the harbor of Zminis's disgrace, and he
had been promptly obeyed as usual, when, spurred on by the magician and
his old hatred, he gave the order for the galley which carried the
sculptor and his son on board to weigh anchor in spite of the early hour.
Heron and Philip, with chains on their feet, were now rowing on the same
bench with the worst criminals; and the old artist's two remaining
children stood gazing after the ship that carried away their father and
brother into the distance. Melissa stood mute, with tearful eyes, while
Alexander, quite beside himself, tried to relieve his rage and grief by
empty threats.
Soon, however, his sister's remonstrances caused him to restrain himself,
and make inquiry as to whether Macrinus, in obedience to the emperor's
orders, had sent a State ship after the galley.
This had been done, and comforted, though sadly disappointed, they
started on their way home.
The sun in the mean time had risen, and the streets were filling with
people.
They met the old sculptor Lysander, who had been a friend of their
father's, outside the magnificent pile of buildings of the Caesareum. The
old man took a deep interest in Heron's fate; and, when Alexander asked
him modestly what he was doing at that early hour, he pointed to the
interior of the building, where the statues of the emperors and empresses
stood in a wide circle surrounding a large court-yard, and invited them
to come in with him. He had not been able to complete his work--a marble
statue of Julia Domna, Caracalla's mother--before the arrival of the
emperor. It had been placed here yesterday evening. He had come to see
how it looked in its new position.
Melissa had often seen the portrait of Julia on coins and in various
pictures, but to-day she was far more strongly attracted than she had
ever been before to look in the face of the mother of the man who had so
powerfully influenced her own existence and that of her people.
The old master had seen Julia many years ago in her own home at Emesa, as
the daughter of Bassianus the high-priest of the Sun in that town; and
later, after she had become empress, he had been commanded to take her
portrait for her husband, Septimus Severus. While Melissa gazed on the
countenance of the beautiful statue, the old artist related how
Caracalla's mother had in her youth won all hearts by her wealth of
intellect, and the extraordinary knowledge which she had easily acquired
and continually added to, through intercourse with learned men. They
learned from him that his heart had not remained undisturbed by the
charms of his royal model, and Melissa became more and more absorbed in
her contemplation of this beautiful work of art.
Lysander had represented the imperial widow standing in flowing
draperies, which fell to her feet. She held her charming, youthful head
bent slightly on one side, and her right hand held aside the veil which
covered the back of her head and fell lightly on her shoulders, a little
open over the throat. Her face looked out from under it as if she were
listening to a fine song or an interesting speech. Her thick, slightly
waving hair framed the lovely oval of her face under the veil, and
Alexander agreed with his sister when she expressed the wish that she
might but once see this rarely beautiful creature. But the sculptor
assured them that they would be disappointed, for time had treated her
cruelly.
"I have shown her," he continued, "as she charmed me a generation ago.
What you see standing before you is the young girl Julia; I was not
capable of representing her as matron or mother. The thought of her son
would have spoiled everything."
"He is capable of better emotions," Alexander declared.
"May be," answered the old man-- "I do not know them. May your father and
brother be restored to you soon!--I must get to work!"
A THORNY PATH
By Georg Ebers
Volume 7.
CHAPTER XXI.
The high-priest of Serapis presided over the sacrifices to be offered
this morning. Caesar had given beasts in abundance to do honor to the
god; still, the priest had gone but ill-disposed to fulfill his part; for
the imperial command that the citizens' houses should be filled with the
troops, who were also authorized to make unheard-of demands on their
hosts, had roused his ire against the tyrant, who, in the morning, after
his bath, had appeared to him unhappy indeed, but at the same time a
gifted and conscientious ruler, capable of the highest and grandest
enterprise.
Melissa, in obedience to the lady Euryale, had taken an hour's rest, and
then refreshed herself by bathing. She now was breakfasting with her
venerated friend, and Philostratus had joined them. He was able to tell
them that a swift State galley was already on its way to overtake and
release her father and brother; and when he saw how glad she was to hear
it, how beautiful, fresh, and pure she was, he thought to himself with
anxiety that it would be a wonder if the imperial slave to his own
passions should not desire to possess this lovely creature.
Euryale also feared this, and Melissa realized what filled them with
anxiety; yet she by no means shared the feeling, and the happy confidence
with which she tried to comfort her old friends, at the same time
pacified and alarmed them. It seemed to her quite foolish and vain to
suppose that the emperor, the mighty ruler of the world, should fall in
love with her, the humble, obscure gem-cutter's child, who aspired to one
suitor alone. It was merely as a patient wishes for the physician, she
assured herself, that the emperor wished for her presence--Philostratus
had understood that. During the night she had certainly been seized with
great fears, but, as she now thought, without any cause. What she really
had to dread was that she might be falsely judged by his followers;
still, she cared nothing about all these Romans. However, she would beg
Euryale to see Diodoros, and to tell him what forced her to obey the
emperor's summons, if he should send for her. It was highly probable that
the sick man had been informed of her interview with Caracalla, and, as
her betrothed, he must be told how she felt toward Caesar; for this was
his right, and jealous agitation might injure him.
Her face so expressed the hope and confidence of a pure heart that when,
after a little time, she withdrew, Euryale said to the philosopher:
"We must not alarm her more! Her trustful innocence perhaps may protect
her better than anxious precautions."
And Philostratus agreed, and assured her that in any case he expected
good results for Melissa, for she was one of those who were the elect of
the gods and whom they chose to be their instruments. And then he related
what wonderful influence she had over Caesar's sufferings, and praised
her with his usual enthusiastic warmth.
When Melissa returned, Philostratus had left the matron. She was again
alone with Euryale, who reminded her of the lesson conveyed in the
Christian words that she had explained to her yesterday. Every deed,
every thought, had some influence on the way in which the fulfillment of
time would come for each one; and when the hour of death was over, no
regrets, repentance, or efforts could then alter the past. A single
moment, as her own young experience had taught her, was often sufficient
to brand the name of an estimable man. Till now, her way through life had
led along level paths, through meadows and gardens, and others had kept
their eyes open for her; now she was drawing near to the edge of a
precipice, and at every turning, even at the smallest step, she must
never forget the threatening danger. The best will and the greatest
prudence could not save her if she did not trust to a higher guidance;
and then she asked the girl to whom she raised her heart when she prayed;
and Melissa named Isis and other gods, and lastly the manes of her dead
mother.
During this confession, old Adventus appeared, to summon the girl to his
sovereign. Melissa promised to follow him immediately; and, when the old
man had gone, the matron said:
"Few here pray to the same gods, and he whose worship my husband leads is
not mine. I, with several others, know that there is a Father in heaven
who loves us men, his creatures, and guards us as his children. You do
not yet know him, and therefore you can not hope for anything from him;
but if you will follow the advice of a friend, who was also once young,
think in the future that your right hand is held firmly by the invisible,
beloved hand of your mother. Persuade yourself that she is by you, and
take care that every word, yes, every glance, meets with her approval.
Then she will be there, and will protect you whenever you require her
aid."
Melissa sank on the breast of her kind friend, embracing her as closely
and kissing her as sincerely as if she had been the beloved mother to
whose care Euryale had commended her,
The counsels of this true friend agreed with those of her own heart, and
so they must be right. When at last they had to part, Euryale wished to
send for one of the gentlemen of the court, whom she knew, that he might
escort her through the troops of Caesar's attendants and friends who were
waiting, and of the visitors and petitioners; but Melissa felt so happy
and so well protected by Adventus, that she followed him without further
delay. In fact, the old man had a friendly feeling for her, since she had
covered his feet so carefully the day before; she knew it by the tone of
his voice and by the troubled look in his dim eyes.
Even now she did not believe in the dangers at which her friends trembled
for her, and she walked calmly across the lofty marble halls, the
anteroom, and the other vast rooms of the imperial dwelling. The
attendants accompanied her respectfully from door to door, in obedience
to the emperor's commands, and she went on with a firm step, looking
straight in front of her, without noticing the inquisitive, approving, or
scornful glances which were aimed at her.
In the first rooms she needed an escort, for they were crowded with
Romans and Alexandrians who were waiting for a sign from Caesar to appeal
for his pardon or his verdict, or perhaps only wishing to see his
countenance. The emperor's "friends" sat at breakfast, of which Caracalla
did not partake. The generals, and the members of his court not
immediately attached to his person, stood together in the various rooms,
while the principal people of Alexandria--several senators and rich and
important citizens of the town--as well as the envoys of the Egyptian
provinces, in magnificent garments and rich gold ornaments, held aloof
from the Romans, and waited in groups for the call of the usher.
Melissa saw no one, nor did she observe the costly woven hangings on the
walls, the friezes decorated with rare works of art and high reliefs, nor
the mosaic floors over which she passed. She did not notice the hum and
murmur of the numerous voices which surrounded her; nor could she indeed
have understood a single coherent sentence; for, excepting the ushers and
the emperor's immediate attendants, at the reception-hour no one was
allowed to raise his voice. Expectancy and servility seemed here to
stifle every lively impulse; and when, now and then, the loud call of one
of the ushers rang above the murmur, one of those who were waiting
spontaneously bowed low, or another started up, as if ready to obey any
command. The sensation, shared by many, of waiting in the vicinity of a
high, almost godlike power, in whose hands lay their well-being or
misery, gave rise to a sense of solemnity. Every movement was subdued;
anxious, nay, fearful expectation was written on many faces, and on
others impatience and disappointment. After a little while it was
whispered from ear to ear that the emperor would only grant a few more
audiences; and how many had already waited in vain yesterday, for hours,
in the same place!
Without delay Melissa went on till she had reached the heavy curtain
which, as she already knew, shut off Caesar's inner apartments.
The usher obligingly drew it back, even before she had mentioned her
name, and while a deputation of the town senators, who had been received
by Caracalla, passed out, she was followed by Alexandrian citizens, the
chiefs of great merchant-houses, whose request for an audience he had
sanctioned. They were for the most part elderly men, and Melissa
recognized among them Seleukus, Berenike's husband.
Melissa bowed to him, but he did not notice her, and passed by without a
word. Perhaps he was considering the enormous sum to be expended on the
show at night which he, with a few friends, intended to arrange at the
circus in Caesar's honor.
All was quite still in the large hall which separated the emperor's
reception-room from the anteroom. Melissa observed only two soldiers, who
were looking out of window, and whose bodies were shaking as though they
were convulsed with profound merriment.
It happened that she had to wait here some time; for the usher begged her
to have patience until the merchants' audience was over. They were the
last who would be received that day. He invited her to rest on the couch
on which was spread a bright giraffe's skin, but she preferred to walk up
and down, for her heart was beating violently. And while the usher
vanished from the room, one of the warriors turned his head to look about
him, and directly he caught sight of Melissa he gave his comrade a push,
and said to him, loud enough for Melissa to hear:
"A wonder! Apollonaris, by Eros and all the Erotes, a precious wonder!"
The next moment they both stepped back from the window and stared at the
girl, who stood blushing and embarrassed, and gazed at the floor when she
found with whom she had been left alone.
They were two tribunes of the praetorians, but, notwithstanding their
high grade, they were only young men of about twenty. Twin brothers of
the honorable house of the Aurelia, they had entered the army as
centurions, but had soon been placed at the head of a thousand men, and
appointed tribunes in Caesar's body-guard. They resembled one another
exactly; and this likeness, which procured them much amusement, they
greatly enhanced by arranging their coal-black beards and hair in exactly
the same way, and by dressing alike down to the rings on their fingers.
One was called Apollonaris, the other Nemesianus Aurelius. They were of
the same height, and equally well grown, and no one could say which had
the finest black eyes, which mouth the haughtiest smile, or to which of
them the thick short beard and the artistically shaved spot between the
under lip and chin was most becoming. The beautifully embossed ornaments
on their breast-plates and shirts of mail, and on the belt of the short
sword, showed that they grudged no expense; in fact, they thought only of
enjoyment, and it was merely for the honor of it that they were serving
for a few years in the imperial guard. By and by they would rest, after
all the hardships of the campaign, in their palace at Rome, or in the
villas on the various estates that they had inherited from their father
and mother, and then, for a change, hold honorary positions in the public
service. Their friends knew that they also contemplated being married on
the same day, when the game of war should be a thing of the past.
In the mean time they desired nothing in the world but honor and
pleasure; and such pleasure as well-bred, healthy, and genial youths,
with amiability, strength, and money to spend, can always command, they
enjoyed to the full, without carrying it to reckless extravagance. Two
merrier, happier, more popular comrades probably did not exist in the
whole army. They did their duty in the field bravely; during peace, and
in a town like Alexandria, they appeared, on the contrary, like mere
effeminate men of fashion. At least, they spent a large part of their
time in having their black hair crimped; they gave ridiculous sums to
have it anointed with the most delicate perfumes; and it was difficult to
imagine how effectively their carefully kept hands could draw a sword,
and, if necessary, handle the hatchet or spade.
To-day Nemesianus was in the emperor's anteroom by command, and
Apollonaris, of his own freewill, had taken the place of another tribune,
that he might bear his brother company. They had caroused through half
the night, and had begun the new day by a visit to the flower market, for
love of the pretty saleswomen. Each had a half-opened rose stuck in
between his cuirass and shirt of mail on the left breast, plucked, as the
charming Daphnion had assured them, from a bush which had been introduced
from Persia only the year before. The brothers, at any rate, had never
seen any like them.
While they were looking out of the window they had passed the time by
examining every girl or woman who went by, intending to fling one rose at
the first whose perfect beauty should claim it, and the other flower at
the second; but during the half-hour none had appeared who was worthy of
such a gift. All the beauties in Alexandria were walking in the streets
in the cool hour before sunset, and really there was no lack of handsome
girls. The brothers had even heard that Caesar, who seemed to have
renounced the pleasures of love, had yielded to the charms of a lovely
Greek.
Directly they saw Melissa they were convinced that they had met the
beautiful plaything of the imperial fancy, and each with the same action
offered her his rose, as if moved by the same invisible power.
Apollonaris, who had come into the world a little sooner than his
brother, and who, by right of birth, had therefore a more audacious
manner, stepped boldly up to Melissa and presented his, while Nemesianus
at the same instant bowed to her, and begged her to give his the
preference.
Though their speeches were flattering and well-worded, Melissa repulsed
them by remarking sharply that she did not want their flowers.
"We can easily believe that," answered Apollonaris, "for are you not
yourself a lovely, blooming rose?"
"Vain flattery," replied Melissa; "and I certainly do not bloom for you."
"That is both cruel and unjust," sighed Nemesianus, "for that which you
refuse to us poor fellows you grant to another, who can obtain everything
that other mortals yearn for."
"But we," interrupted his brother, "are modest, nay, and pious warriors.
We had intended offering up these roses to Aphrodite, but lo! the goddess
has met us in person."
"Her image at any rate," added the other.
"And you should thank the foam-born goddess," continued Apollonaris; "for
she has lent you, in spite of the danger of seeing herself eclipsed, her
own divine charms. Do you think she will be displeased if we withdraw the
flowers and offer them to you?"
"I think nothing," answered Melissa, "excepting that your honeyed remarks
annoy me. Do what you like with your roses, I will not accept them."
"How dare you," asked Apollonaris, approaching her--"you, to whom the
mother of love has given such wonderfully fresh lips--misuse them by
refusing so sternly the humble petition of her faithful worshipers? If
you would not have Aphrodite enraged with you, hasten to atone for this
transgression. One kiss, my beauty, for her votary, and she will forgive
you."
Here Apollonaris stretched out his hand toward the girl to draw her to
him, but she motioned him back indignantly, declaring that it would be
reprehensible and cowardly in a soldier to use violence toward a modest
maid.
At this the two brothers laughed heartily, and Nemesianus exclaimed, "You
do not belong to the Temple of Vesta, most lovely of roses, and yet you
are well protected by such sharp thorns that it requires a great deal of
courage to venture to attack you."
"More," added Apollonaris, "than to storm a fortress. But what camp or
stronghold contains booty so well worth capturing?"
Thereupon he threw his arm round Melissa and drew her to him.
Neither he nor his brother had ever conducted themselves badly towards an
honorable woman; and if Melissa had been but the daughter of a simple
craftsman, her reproachful remarks would have sufficed to keep them at a
distance. But such immunity was not to be granted to the emperor's
sweetheart, who could so audaciously reject two brothers accustomed to
easy conquests; her demure severity could hardly be meant seriously.
Apollonaris therefore took no notice of her violent resistance, but held
her hands forcibly, and, though he could not succeed in kissing her for
her struggling, he pressed his lips to her cheek, while she endeavored to
free herself and pushed him off, breathless with real indignation.
'Till now, the brothers had taken the matter as a joke; but when
Apollonaris seized the girl again, and she, beside herself with fear,
cried for help, he at once set her free.
It was too late; for the curtains of the audience-room were already
withdrawn, and Caracalla approached. His countenance was red and
distorted; he trembled with rage, and his angry glance fell like a flash
of lightning on the luckless brothers. Close by his side was the prefect
Macrinus, who feared lest he should be attacked by a fresh fit; and
Melissa shared his fears, as Caracalla cried to Apollonaris in an angry
voice, "Scoundrel that you are, you shall repent of this!"
Still, Aurelius had, by various wanton jokes, incurred the emperor's
wrath before now, and he was accustomed to disarm it by some insinuating
confession, so he answered him with a roguish smile, while raising his
eyes to him humbly:
"Forgive me, great Caesar! Our poor strength, as you well know, is easily
defeated in conflicts against overpowering beauty. Dainties are sweet,
not only for children. Long ago Mars was drawn to Venus; and if I--"
He had spoken these words in Latin, which Melissa did not understand; but
the color left the emperor's face, and, pale with excitement, he
stammered out laboriously:
"You have--you have dared--"
"For this rose," began the youth again, "I begged a hasty kiss from the
beauty, which certainly blooms for all, and she--" He raised his hands
and eyes imploringly to the despot; but Caracalla had already snatched
Macrinus's sword from its sheath, and before Aurelius could defend
himself he was struck first on the head with the flat of the blade, and
then received a series of sharp cuts on his brow and face.
Streaming with blood from the gaping wounds which the victim, trembling
with fear and rage, covered with his hands, he surrendered himself to the
care of his startled brother, while Caesar overwhelmed them both with a
flood of furious reproaches.
When Nemesianus began to bind up his wounded brother's head with a
handkerchief handed to him by Melissa, and Caracalla saw the gaping
wounds he had inflicted, he became quieter, and said:
"I think those lips will not try to steal kisses again for some time from
honorable maidens. You and Nemesianus have forfeited your lives; how
ever, the beseeching look of those all-powerful eyes has saved you--you
are spared. Take your brother away, Nemesianus. You are not to leave your
quarters until further orders."
With this he turned his back on the twins, but on the threshold he again
addressed them and said:
"You were mistaken about this maiden. She is not less pure and noble than
your own sister."
The merchants were dismissed from the tablinum more hastily than was due
to the importance of their business, in which, until this interruption,
the sovereign had shown a sympathetic interest and intelligence which
surprised them; and they left Caesar's presence disappointed, but with
the promise that they should be received again in the evening.
As soon as they had retired, Caracalla threw himself again on the couch.
The bath had done him good. Still somewhat exhausted, though his head was
clear, he would not be hindered from receiving the deputation for which
he had important matters to decide; but this fresh attack of rage
revenged itself by a painful headache. Pale, and with slightly quivering
limbs, he dismissed the prefect and his other friends, and desired
Epagathos to call Melissa.
He needed rest, and again the girl's little hand, which had yesterday
done him good, proved its healing power. The throbbing in his head
yielded to her gentle touch, and by degrees exhaustion gave way to the
comfortable languor of convalesence.
To-day, as yesterday, he expressed his thanks to Melissa, but he found
her changed. She looked timidly and anxiously down into her lap excepting
when she replied to a direct question; and yet he had done everything to
please her. Her relations would soon be free and in Alexandria once more,
and Zminis was in prison, chained hand and foot. This he told her; and,
though she was glad, it was not enough to restore the calm cheerfulness
he had loved to see in her.
He urged her, with warm insistence, to tell him what it was that weighed
on her, and at last, with eyes full of tears, she forced herself to say:
"You yourself have seen what they take me for."
"And you have seen," he quickly replied, "how I punish those who forget
the respect they owe to you."
"But you are so dreadful in your wrath!" The words broke from her lips.
"Where others blame, you can destroy; and you do it, too, when passion
carries you away. I am bound to obey your call, and here I am. But I
fancy myself like the little dog--you may see him any day--which in the
beast-garden of the Panaeum, shares a cage with a royal tiger. The huge
brute puts up with a great deal from his small companion, but woe betide
the dog if the tiger once pats him with his heavy, murderous paw--and he
might, out of sheer forgetfulness!"
"But this hand," Caesar broke in, raising his delicate hand covered with
rings, "will never forget, any more than my heart, how much it owes to
you."
"Until I, in some unforeseen way--perhaps quite unconsciously--excite
your anger," sighed Melissa. "Then you will be carried away by passion,
and I shall share the common fate."
Caracalla was about to reply indignantly, but just then Adventus entered
the room, announcing the chief astrologer of the Temple of Serapis.
Caracalla refused to receive him just then, but he anxiously asked
whether he had any signs to report. The reply was in the affirmative, and
in a few minutes Caesar had in his hand a wax tablet covered with words
and figures. He studied it eagerly, and his countenance cleared; still
holding the tablets, he exclaimed to Melissa:
"You, daughter of Heron, have nothing to fear from me, you of all the
world! In some quiet hour I will explain to you how my planet yearns to
yours, and yours--that is, yourself--to mine. The gods have created us
for each other, child; I am already under your influence, but your heart
still hesitates, and I know why; it is because you distrust me."
Melissa raised her large eyes to his face in astonishment, and he went
on, pensively:
"The past must stand; it is like a scar which no water will wash out.
What have you not heard of my past? What did they feel, in their
self-conscious virtue, when they talked of my crimes? Did it ever occur
to any one, I wonder, that with the purple I assumed the sword, to
protect my empire and throne? And when I have used the blade, how eagerly
have fingers pointed at me, how gladly slanderous tongues have wagged!
Who has ever thought of asking what compulsion led me to shed blood, or
how much it cost me to do it? You, fair child--and the stars confirm
it--you were sent by fate to share the burden that oppresses me, and to
you I will ease my heart, to you I will confide all, unasked, because my
heart prompts me to do so. But first you must tell me with what tales
they taught you to hate the man to whom, as you yourself confessed, you
nevertheless felt drawn."
At this Melissa raised her hands in entreaty and remonstrance, and Caesar
went on:
"I will spare you the pains. They say that I am ever athirst for fresh
bloodshed if only some one is rash enough to suggest it to me. You were
told that Caesar murdered his brother Geta, with many more who did but
speak his victim's name. My father-in-law, and his daughter Plautilla, my
wife, were, it is said, the victims of my fury. I killed Papinian, the
lawyer and prefect, and Cilo--whom you saw yesterday--nearly shared the
same fate. What did they conceal? Nothing. Your nod confesses it--well,
and why should they, since speaking ill of others is their greatest
delight? It is all true, and I should never think of denying it. But did
it ever occur to you, or did any one ever suggest to you, to inquire how
it came to pass that I perpetrated such horrors; I--who was brought up in
the fear of the gods and the law, like you and other people?"
"No, my lord, never," replied Melissa, in distress. "But I beg you, I
beseech you, say no more about such dreadful things. I know full well
that you are not wicked; that you are much better than people think."
"And for that very reason," cried Caesar, whose cheeks were flushed with
pleasure in the hard task he had set himself, "you must hear me. I am
Caesar. There is no judge over me; I need give account to none for my
actions. Nor do I. Who, besides yourself, is more to me than the flies on
that cup?"
"And your conscience?" she timidly put in.
"It raises hideous questions from time to time," he replied, gloomily.
"It can be obtrusive, but we can teach ourselves not to answer--besides,
what you call conscience knows the motives for every action, and,
remembering them, judges leniently. You, child, should do the same; for
you--"
"O my lord, what can my poor judgment matter?" Melissa panted out; but
Caracalla exclaimed, as if the question pained him:
"Must I explain all that? The stars, as you know, proclaim to you, as to
me, that a higher power has joined us as light and warmth are joined.
Have you forgotten how we both felt only yesterday? Or am I mistaken? Has
not Roxana's soul entered into that divinely lovely form because it
longed for its lost companion spirit?"
He spoke vehemently, with a quivering of his eyelids; but feeling her
hand tremble in his own, he collected himself, and went on in a lower
tone, but with urgent emphasis:
"I will let you glance into this bosom, closed to every other eye; for my
desolate heart is inspired by you to fresh energy and life; I am as
grateful to you as a drowning man to his deliverer. I shall suffocate and
die if I repress the impulse to open my heart to you!"
What change was this that had come over this mysterious being? Melissa
felt as though she was gazing on the face of a stranger, for, though his
eyelids still quivered, his eyes were bright with ecstatic fire and his
features looked more youthful. On that noble brow the laurel wreath he
wore looked well. Also, as she now observed, he was magnificently
attired; he wore a close-fitting tunic, or breast-plate made of thick
woolen stuff, and over it a purple mantle, while from his bare throat
hung a precious medallion, shield-shaped, and set in gold and gems, the
center formed by a large head of Medusa, with beautiful though terrible
features. The lion-heads of gold attached to each corner of the short
cloak he wore over the sham coat of mail, were exquisite works of art,
and sandals embroidered with gold and gems covered his feet and ankles.
He was dressed to-day like the heir of a lordly house, anxious to charm;
nay, indeed, like an emperor, as he was; and with what care had his
body-slave arranged his thin curls!
He passed his hand over his brow and cast a glance at a silver mirror on
the low table at the head of his couch. When he turned to her again his
amorous eyes met Melissa's.
She looked down in startled alarm. Was it for her sake that Caesar had
thus decked himself and looked in the mirror? It seemed scarcely
possible, and yet it flattered and pleased her. But in the next instant
she longed more fervently than she ever had before for a magic charm by
which she might vanish and be borne far, far away from this dreadful man.
In fancy she saw the vessel which the lady Berenike had in readiness. She
would, she must fly hence, even if it should part her for a time from
Diodoros.
Did Caracalla read her thought? Nay, he could not see through her; so she
endured his gaze, tempting him to speak; and his heart beat high with
hope as he fancied he saw that she was beginning to be affected by his
intense agitation. At this moment he felt convinced, as he often had
been, that the most atrocious of his crimes had been necessary and
inevitable. There was something grand and vast in his deeds of blood, and
that--for he flattered himself he knew the female heart--must win her
admiration, besides the awe and love she already felt.
During the night, at his waking, and in his bath, he had felt that she
was as necessary to him as the breath of life and hope. What he
experienced was love as the poets had sung it. How often had he laughed
it to scorn, and boasted that he was armed against the arrows of Eros!
Now, for the first time, he was aware of the anxious rapture, the ardent
longing of which he had read in so many songs. There stood the object of
his passion. She must hear him, must be his--not by compulsion, not by
imperial command, but of the free impulse of her heart.
His confession would help to this end.
With a swift gesture, as if to throw off the last trace of fatigue, he
sat up and began in a firm voice, with a light in his eyes:
"Yes, I killed my brother Geta. You shudder. And yet, if at this day,
when I know all the results of the deed, the state of affairs were the
same as then, I would do it again! That shocks you. But only listen, and
then you will say with me that it was Fate which compelled me to act so,
and not otherwise."
He paused, and then mistaking the anxiety which was visible in Melissa's
face for sympathetic attention, he began his story, confident of her
interest:
"When I was born, my father had not yet assumed the purple, but he
already aimed at the sovereignty. Augury had promised it to him; my
mother knew this, and shared his ambition. While I was still at my
nurse's breast he was made consul; four years later he seized the throne.
Pertinax was killed, the wretched Didius Julianus bought the empire, and
this brought my father to Rome from Pannonia. Meanwhile he had sent us
children, my brother Geta and me, away from the city; nor was it till he
had quelled the last resistance on the Tiber that he recalled us.
"I was then but a child of five, and yet one day of that time I remember
vividly. My father was going through Rome in solemn procession. His first
object was to do due honor to the corpse of Pertinax. Rich hangings
floated from every window and balcony in the city. Garlands of flowers
and laurel wreaths adorned the houses, and pleasant odors were wafted to
us as we went. The jubilation of the people was mixed with the
trumpet-call of the soldiers; handkerchiefs were waved and acclamations
rang out. This was in honor of my father, and of me also, the future
Caesar. My little heart was almost bursting with pride; it seemed to me
that I had grown several heads taller, not only than other boys, but than
the people that surrounded me.
"When the funeral procession began, my mother wished me to go with her
into the arcade where seats had been placed for the ladies to view, but I
refused to follow her. My father became angry. But when he heard me
declare that I was a man and the future Emperor, that I would rather see
nothing than show myself to the people among the women, he smiled. He
ordered Cilo, who was then the prefect of Rome, to lead me to the seats
of the past consuls and the old senators. I was delighted at this; but
when he allowed my younger brother Geta to follow me, my pleasure was
entirely spoiled."
"And you were then five years old?" asked Melissa, astonished.
"That surprises you!" smiled Caracalla. "But I had already traveled
through half the empire, and had experienced more than other boys of
twice my age. I was, at any rate, still child enough to forget everything
else in the brilliant spectacle that unfolded before my eyes. I remember
to this day the colored wax statue which represented Pertinax so exactly
that it might have been himself risen from the grave. And the procession!
It seemed to have no end; one new thing followed another. All walked past
in mourning robes, even the choir of singing boys and men. Cilo explained
to me who had made the statues of the Romans who had served their
country, who the artists and scholars were, whose statues and busts were
carried by. Then came bronze groups of the people of every nation in the
empire, in their costumes. Cilo told me what they were called, and where
they lived; he then added that one day they would all belong to me; that
I must learn the art of fighting, in case they resisted me, and should
require suppressing. Also, when they carried the flags of the guilds
past, when the horse and foot soldiers, the race-horses from the circus
and several other things came by, he continued to explain them. I only
remember it now because it made me so happy. The old man spoke to me
alone; he regarded me alone as the future sovereign. He left Geta to eat
the sweets which his aunts had given him, and when I too wanted some my
brother refused to let me have any. Then Cilo stroked my hair, and said:
'leave him his toys. When you are a man you shall have the whole Roman
Empire for your own, and all the nations I told you of.' Geta meanwhile
had thought better of it, and pushed some of the sweetmeats toward me. I
would not have them, and, when he tried to make me take them, I threw
them into the road."
"And you remember all that?" said Melissa.
"More things than these are indelibly stamped on my mind from that day,"
said Caesar. "I can see before me now the pile on which Pertinax was to
be burned. It was splendidly decorated, and on the top stood the gilt
chariot in which he had loved to ride. Before the consuls fired the logs
of Indian wood, my father led us to the image of Pertinax, that we might
kiss it. He held me by the hand. Wherever we went, the senate and people
hailed us with acclamations. My mother carried Geta in her arms. This
delighted the populace. They shouted for her and my brother as
enthusiastically as for us, and I recollect to this day how that went to
my heart. He might have the sweets and welcome, but what the people had
to offer was due only to my father and me, not to my brother. At that
moment I first fully understood that Severus was the present and I the
future Caesar. Geta had only to obey, like every one else.
"After kissing the image, I stood, still holding my father's hand, to
watch the flames. I can see them now, crackling and writhing as they
gained on the wood, licking it and fawning, as it were, till it caught
and sent up a rush of sparks and fire. At last the whole pile was one
huge blaze. Then, suddenly, out of the heart of the flames an eagle rose.
The creature flapped its broad wings in the air, which was golden with
sunshine and quivering with heat, soaring above the smoke and fire, this
way and that. But it soon took flight, away from the furnace beneath. I
shouted with delight, and cried to my father: 'Look at the bird! Where is
he flying?' And he eagerly answered: 'Well done! If you desire to
preserve the power I have conquered for you always undiminished, you must
keep your eyes open. Let no sign pass unnoticed, no opportunity
neglected.'
"He himself acted on this rule. To him obstacles existed only to be
removed, and he taught me, too, to give myself neither peace nor rest,
and not to spare the life of a foe.--That festival secured my father the
suffrages of the Romans. Meanwhile Pescennius Niger rose up in the East
with a large army and took the field against Severus. But my father was
not the man to hesitate. Within a few months of the obsequies of Pertinax
his opponent was a headless corpse.
"There was yet another obstacle to be removed. You have heard of Clodius
Albinus. My father had adopted him and raised him to share his throne.
But Severus could not divide the rule with any man.
"When I was nine years old I saw, after the battle of Lugdunum, the dead
face of Albinus's head; it was set up in front of the Curia on a lance.
"I now was the second personage in the empire, next to my father; the
first among the youth of the whole world, and the future emperor. When I
was eleven the soldiers hailed me as Augustus; that was in the war
against the Parthians, before Ktesiphon. But they did the same to Geta.
This was like wormwood in the sweet draught; and if then--But what can a
girl care about the state, and the fate of rulers and nations?"
"Yes, go on," said Melissa. "I see already what you are coming to. You
disliked the idea of sharing your power with another."
"Nay," cried Caracalla, vehemently, "I not only disliked it, it was
intolerable, impossible! What I want you to see is that I did not grudge
my brother his share of my father's inheritance, like any petty trader.
The world--that is the point--the world itself was too small for two of
us. It was not I, but Fate, which had doomed Geta to die. I am certain of
this, and so must you be. Yes, it was Fate. Fate prompted the child's
little hand to attempt its brother's life. And that was long before my
brain could form a thought or my baby-lips could stammer his hated name."
"Then you tried to kill your brother even in infancy?" asked Melissa, and
her large eyes dilated with horror as she gazed at the terrible narrator.
But Caracalla went on, in an apologetic tone:
"I was then but two years old. It was at Mediolanum, soon after Geta's
birth. An egg was found in the court of the palace; a hen had laid it
close to a pillar. It was of a purple hue-red all over like the imperial
mantle, and this indicated that the newly born infant was destined to
sovereignty. Great was the rejoicing. The purple marvel was shown even to
me who could but just walk. I, like a naughty boy, flung it down; the
shell cracked, and the contents poured out on the pavement. My mother saw
it, and her exclamation, 'Wicked child, you have murdered your brother!'
was often repeated to me in after-years. It never struck me as
particularly motherly."
Here he paused, gazing meditatively into vacancy, and then asked the
girl, who had listened intently:
"Were you never haunted by a word so that you could not be rid of it?"
"Oh, yes," cried Melissa; "a striking rhythm in a song, or a line of
poetry--"
Caracalla nodded agreement, and went on more vehemently: "That is what I
experienced at the words, 'You have murdered your brother!' I not only
heard them now and then with my inward ear, but incessantly, like the
dreary hum of the flies in my camp-tent, for hours at a time, by day and
by night. No fanning could drive these away. The diabolical voice
whispered loudest when Geta had done anything to vex me; or if things had
been given him which I did not wish him to have. And how often that
happened! For I--I was only Bassianus to my mother; but her youngest was
her dear little Geta.
"So the years passed. We had, while still quite young, our own teams in
the circus. One day, when we were driving for a wager-we were still boys,
and I was ahead of the other lads--the horses of my chariot shied to one
side. I was thrown some distance on the course. Geta saw this. He turned
his horses to the right where I lay. He drove over his brother as he
would over straw and apple-parings in the dust; and his wheel broke my
thigh. Who knows what else it crushed in me? One thing is certain--from
that date the most painful of my sufferings originated. And he, the mean
scoundrel, had done it intentionally. He had sharp eyes. He knew how to
guide his steeds. He had never driven his wheel over a hazel-nut in the
sand of the arena against his will; and I was lying some distance from
the driving course."
Caesar's eyelids blinked spasmodically as he uttered this accusation, and
his very glance revealed the raging fire that was burning in his soul.
Melissa's sad cry of:
"What terrible suspicion!" he answered with a short, scornful laugh and
the furious assertion:
"Oh, there were friends enough who informed me what hope Geta had founded
on this act of treachery. The disappointment made him irritable and
listless, when Galenus had succeeded in curing me so far that I was able
to throw away my Crutch; and my limp--at least so they tell me--is hardly
perceptible."
"Not at all, most certainly not at all," Melissa sympathetically assured
him. He, however, went on:
"Yet what I endured meanwhile!--and while I passed so many long weeks of
pain and impatience on a couch, the words my mother had said about the
brother whom I murdered rang constantly in my ears as though a reciter
were engaged by day and night to reiterate them.
"But even this passed away. With the pain, which had spoiled many good
hours for me, the quiet had brought me something more to the
purpose-thoughts and plans. Yes, during those peaceful weeks the things
my father and tutor had taught me became clear and real for the first
time. I realized that I must become energetic if I meant ever to be a
thorough sovereign. As soon as I could use my foot again I became an
industrious and docile pupil under Cilo. From a child up to the time of
this cruel experience, my youthful heart had clung to my nurse. She was a
Christian from my father's African home--I knew she loved me best on
earth. My mother knew of no higher destiny than that of being the
Domna,--[Domna, lady or mistress, in corrupt Latin. Hence her name of
Julia Domna] the lady of the soldiers, the mother of the camp, and the
lady philosopher among the sages. What she gave me in the way of love was
but copper alms. She threw golden solidi of love into Geta's lap in
lavish abundance. And her sister and her nieces, who often lived with us,
treated me exactly as she did. They were distantly civil, or they shunned
me; but my brother was their spoiled plaything. I was as incapable as
Geta was master of the art of stealing hearts; but in my childhood I
needed none of them: for, if I wished for a kind word, a sweet kiss, or
the love of a woman, my nurse's arms were open to me. Nor was she an
ordinary woman. As the widow of a tribune who had fallen in my father's
service, she had undertaken to attend on me. She loved me as no one else
ever did. She was also the only person whom I would willingly obey. I
came into the world full of wild instincts, but she knew how to tame them
kindly. My aversion to my brother was the one thing she checked but
feebly, for he was a thorn in her side too. I learned this when she, who
was so gentle, explained to me, with asperity in her tone, that there was
but one God in heaven, and on earth but one emperor, who should govern
the world in his name. She also imparted these convictions to others, and
this turned to her disadvantage. My mother parted us, and sent her back
to her African home. She died soon after." He was silent, and gazed
pensively into vacancy; soon, however, he collected his thoughts and
said, lightly:
"Well, I became Cilo's diligent pupil."
"But," asked Melissa, "did you not say that at one time you attempted his
life?"
"I did so," replied Caracalla darkly; "for a moment arrived when I cursed
his teaching, and yet it was certainly wise and well meant. You see,
child, all of you who go through life humbly and without power are
trained to submit obediently to the will of Heaven. Cilo taught me to
place my own power, and the greatness of the realm which it would be
incumbent on me to reign over, above everything, even above the gods. It
was impressed upon you and yours to hold the life of another sacred; to
us, our duty as the sovereign transcends this law. Even the blood of a
brother must flow if it is for the good of the state intrusted to us. My
nurse had taught me that being good meant doing unto others as we would
be done by; Cilo cried to me: 'Strike down, that you may not be struck
down--away with mercy, if the welfare of the state is threatened!' And
how many hands are raised against Rome, the universal empire, which I
rule over! It needs a strong hand to keep its antagonistic parts
together. Otherwise it would fall apart like a bundle of arrows when the
string that bound them is broken. And I, even as a boy, had sworn to my
father, by the Terminus stone in the Capitol, never to abandon a single
inch of his ground without fighting for it. He, Severus, was the wisest
of the rulers. Only the blind love for his second son, encouraged by the
women, caused him to forget his moderation and prudence. My brother Geta
was to reign together with me over the empire, which ought to have been
mine alone as the first-born. Every year festivals were kept, with
prayers and sacrifices, to the 'love of the brothers.' You have perhaps
seen the coins, which show us hand in hand, and have on them the
inscription, 'Eternal union'!
"I in union--I hand in hand with the man I most hated under the sun! It
almost maddened me only to hear his voice. I would have liked best of all
to spring at his throat when I saw him with his learned fellows
squandering their time. Do you know what they did? They invented the
names by which the voices of different animals were to be known. Once I
snatched the pencil out of the hand of the freedman as he was writing the
sentences, 'The horse neighs, the pig grunts, the goat bleats, the cow
lows, the sheep baas.' 'He, himself,' I added, 'croaks like a hoarse
jay.'
"That I should share the government with this miserable, faint-hearted,
poisonous nobody could never be,--this enemy, who, when I said 'Yes,'
cried 'No!' Who frustrated all my measures,--it was impossible! It would
have caused the destruction of the state, as certainly as it was the
unfairest and unwisest of the deeds of Severus, to place the younger
brother as co-regent with the first-born, the rightful heir to the
throne. I, whom my father had taught to watch for signs, was reminded
every hour that this unbearable position must come to an end.
"After the death of Severus, we lived at first close to one another in
separate parts of the same palace like two lions in a cage across which a
partition has been erected, so that they may not reciprocally mangle each
other.
"We used to meet at my mother's.
"That morning my mastiff had bitten Geta's wolfhound and killed him,
and they had found a black liver in the beast he had sent for sacrifice.
I had been informed of this. Destiny was on my side. This indolent
inactivity must be brought to a close. I myself do not know how I felt
as I mounted the steps to my mother's rooms. I only remember distinctly
that a demon cried continually in my ear, 'You have murdered your
brother!' Then I suddenly found myself face to face with him. It was
in the empress's reception-room. And when I saw the hated flat-shaped
head so close to me, when his beardless mouth with its thick underlip
smiled at me so sweetly and at the same time so falsely, I felt as if I
again heard the cry with which he had cheered on his horse. And I felt
. . . I even felt the pain-as if he broke my thigh again with his
wheel. And at the same time a fiend whispered in my ear: 'Destroy him,
or he will kill you, and through him Rome will perish!'
"Then I seized my sword. In his odious, peevish voice he said
something--I forget what nonsense--to me. Then it appeared to me as if
all the sheep and goats over which he had squandered his time were
bleating at me. The blood rushed to my head. The room spun round me in a
circle. Black spots on a red ground danced before my eyes.
"And then--What flashed in my right hand was my own naked sword! I
neither heard nor said anything further. Nor had I planned, nor ever
thought of, what then occurred. . . . But suddenly I felt as if a
mountain of oppressive lead had fallen from my breast. How easily I could
breathe again! All that had just before turned round me in a mad,
whirling dance stood still. The sun shone brightly in the large room; a
shaft of light, showing dancing dust, fell on Geta. He sank on his knees
close to me, with my sword in his breast. My mother made a fruitless
effort to shield him. His blood trickled over her hand. I can still see
every ring on those slender, white fingers. I also remember distinctly
how, when I raised my sword against him, my mother rushed in between us
to protect her favorite. The sharp blade, as she tried to seize it,
accidentally grazed her hand--I know not how--only the skin was slightly
cut. Yet what a scream she gave over the wound which the son had given
his mother! Julia Maesa, her daughter Mammara, and the other women,
rushed in. How they exaggerated! They made a river out of every drop of
blood.
"So the dreadful deed was done; and yet, had I let the wretch live, I
should have been a traitor to Rome, to myself, and to my father's life's
work. That day, for the first time, I was ruler of the world. Those who
accuse me of fratricide no doubt believe themselves to be right. But they
certainly are not. I know better. You also know now with me that destiny,
and not I, struck Geta out from among the living."
Here he sat for some time in breathless silence. Then he asked Melissa:
"You understand now how I came to shed my brother's blood?"
She started, and repeated gently after him: "Yes, I understand it."
Deep compassion filled her heart, and yet she felt she dare not sanction
what she had heard and deplored. Torn by deep and conflicting feelings
she threw back her head, brushed her hair off her face, and cried: "Let
me go now; I can bear it no longer!"
"So soft-hearted?" asked he, and shook his head disapprovingly. "Life
rages more wildly round the throne than in an artist's home. You will
have to learn to swim through the roaring torrent with me. Believe me,
even enormities can become quite commonplace. And, besides, why does it
still shock you when you yourself know that it was indispensable?"
"I am only a weak girl, and I feel as if I had witnessed these fearful
deeds, and had to bear the terrible blood-guiltiness with you!" broke
from her lips.
"That is what you must and shall do! It is to that end that I have
confided to you what no one else has ever heard from my mouth!" cried
Caracalla, his eyes flashing more brightly. She felt as though this cry
called her from her slumbers and revealed the precipice to which she had
strayed in her sleepwalking.
When Caracalla had begun telling her of his youth, she had only listened
with half an ear; for she could not forget Berenike's rescuing ship. But
soon his confessions completely attracted her attention, and the lament
of this powerful man on whom so many injuries and wrongs had fallen, who
even in childhood had been deprived of the happiness of a mother's love,
had touched her tender heart. That which was afterward told to her she
had identified with her own humble life; she heard with a shudder that it
was to the malice of his brother that this unhappy being owed the injury
which, like a poisonous blight, had marred for him all the joys of
existence, while she owed all that was loveliest and best in her young
life to a brother's love.
The grounds on which Caracalla had based the assertion that destiny had
compelled him to murder Geta appeared to her young and inexperienced mind
as indisputable. He was only the pitiable victim of his birth and of a
cruel fate. Besides, the humblest and most sober-minded can not resist
the charm of majesty; and this hapless man, who had honored Melissa with
his confidence, and who had assured her so earnestly that she was of such
importance to him and could do so much for him, was the ruler of the
universe.
She had also felt, after Caesar's confession, that she had a right to be
proud, since he had thought her worthy to take an interest in the tragedy
in the imperial palace, as if she had been a member of the court. In her
lively imagination she had witnessed the ghastly act to which he--as she
had certainly believed, even when she had replied to his question--had
been forced by fate.
But the demand which had followed her answer now recurred to her. The
picture of Diodoros, which had completely vanished from her thoughts
while she had been listening, suddenly appeared to her, and, as she
fancied, he looked at her reproachfully.
Had she, then, transgressed against her betrothed?
No, no, indeed she had not!
She loved him, and only him; and for that very reason, her upright
judgment told her now, that it would be sinning against her lover to
carry out Caracalla's wish, as if she had become his fellow-culprit, or
certainly the advocate of the bloody outrage. She could think of no
answer to his "That is what you must and shall do!" that would not awaken
his wrath. Cautiously, and with sincere thanks for his confidence in her,
she begged him once more to allow her to leave him, because she needed
rest after such a shock to her mind. And it would also do him good to
grant himself a short rest. But he assured her he knew that he could only
rest when he had fulfilled his duty as a sovereign. His father had said,
a few minutes before he drew his last breath:
"If there is anything more to be done, give it me to do," and he, the
son, would do likewise.
"Moreover," he concluded, "it has done me good to bring to light that
which I had for so long kept sealed within me. To gaze in your face at
the same time was, perhaps, even better physic."
At this he rose and, seizing the startled girl by both hands, he cried:
"You, child, can satisfy the insatiable! The love which I offer you
resembles a full bunch of grapes, and yet I am quite content if you will
give me back but one berry."
At the very commencement, this declaration was drowned by a loud shout
which rang through the room in waves of sound.
Caracalla started, but, before he could reach the window, old Adventus
rushed in breathless; and he was followed, though in a more dignified
manner, with a not less hasty step and every sign of excitement, by
Macrinus, the prefect of the praetorians, with his handsome young son and
a few of Caesar's friends.
"This is how I rest!" exclaimed Caracalla, bitterly, as he released
Melissa's hand and turned inquiringly to the intruders.
The news had spread among the praetorians and the Macedonian legions,
that the emperor, who, contrary to his custom, had not shown himself for
two days, was seriously ill, and at the point of death. Feeling extremely
anxious about one who had showered gold on them, and given them such a
degree of freedom as no other imperator had ever allowed them, they had
collected before the Serapeum and demanded to see Caesar. Caracalla's
eyes lighted up at this information, and, excitedly pleased, he cried:
"They only are really faithful!"
He asked for his sword and helmet, and sent for the 'paludamentum', the
general's cloak of purple, embroidered with gold, which he never
otherwise wore except on the field. The soldiers should see that he
intended leading in future battles.
While they waited, he conversed quietly with Macrinus and the others;
when, however, the costly garment covered his shoulders, and when his
favorite, Theocritus, who had known best how to support him during his
illness, offered him an arm, he answered imperiously that he required no
assistance.
"Nevertheless, you should, after so serious an attack--" the physician in
ordinary ventured to exhort him; but he interrupted him scornfully, and,
glancing toward Melissa, exclaimed:
"Those little hands there contain more healing power than yours and the
great Galenus's put together."
Thereupon he beckoned to the young girl, and when she once more besought
his permission to go, he left the room with the commanding cry, "You are
to wait!"
He had rather far to go and some steps to mount in order to reach the
balcony which ran round the base of the cupola of the Pantheon which his
father had joined to the Serapeum, yet he undertook this willingly, as
thence he could best be seen and heard.
A few hours earlier it would have been impossible for him to reach this
point, and Epagathos had arranged that a sedan-chair and strong bearers
should be waiting at the foot of the steps; but he refused it, for he
felt entirely restored, and the shouts of his warriors intoxicated him
like sparkling wine.
Meanwhile Melissa remained behind in the audience-chamber. She must obey
Caesar's command. Yet it frightened her; and, besides, she was woman
enough to feel it as an offense that the man who had assured her so
sincerely of his gratitude, and who even feigned to love her, should have
refused so harshly her desire to rest. She foresaw that, as long as he
remained in Alexandria, she would have to be his constant companion. She
trembled at the idea; yet, if she tried to fly from him, all she loved
would be lost. No, this must not be thought of! She must remain.
She threw herself on a divan, lost in thought, and as she realized the
confidence of which the unapproachable, proud emperor had thought her
worthy, a secret voice whispered to her that it was certainly a
delightful thing to share the overwhelming agitations of the highest and
greatest. And was he then really bad, he who felt the necessity of
vindicating himself before a simple girl, and to whom it appeared so
intolerable to be misjudged and condemned even by her? Besides being the
emperor and a suffering man, Caracalla had also become her wooer. It
never once entered her mind to accept him; but still it flattered her
extremely that the greatest of men should declare his love for her. Why,
then, need she fear him? She was so important to him, she could do so
much for him, that he would surely take care not to insult or offend her.
This modest child, who till quite lately had trembled before her own
father's temper, now, in the consciousness of Caesar's favor, felt
herself strong to triumph over the wrath and passions of the most
powerful and most terrible of men. In the mean time she dared not risk
confessing to him that she was another's bride, for that might determine
him to let Diodoros feel his power. The thought that the emperor could
care about her good opinion greatly pleased her; it even had the effect
of raising the hope in her inexperienced mind that Caracalla would
moderate his passion for her sake--when old Adventus came into the room.
He was in a hurry; for preparations had to be made in the dining-hall for
the reception of the ambassadors. But when at his appearance Melissa rose
from the divan he begged her good-naturedly to continue resting. No one
could tell what humor Caracalla might be in when he returned. She had
often seen how rapidly that chameleon could change color. Who that had
seen him just now, going to meet his soldiers, would believe that he had
a few hours before sent away, with hard words, the widow of the Egyptian
governor, who had come to beg mercy for her husband?
"So that wretch, Theocritus, has really carried out his intention of
ruining the honest Titianus?" asked Melissa, horrified.
"Not only of ruining him," answered the chamberlain; "Titianus is by this
time beheaded."
The old man bowed and left the room; but Melissa remained behind, feeling
as if the floor had opened in front of her. He, whose ardent assurance
she had just now believed, that he had been forced to shed the blood of
an impious wretch, in obedience to an overpowering fate, was capable of
allowing the noblest of men to be beheaded, unjudged, merely to please a
mercenary favorite! His confession, then, had been nothing but a
revolting piece of acting! He had endeavored to vanquish the disgust she
felt for him merely to ensnare her and her healing hand more surely--as
his plaything, his physic, his sleeping draught. And she had entered the
trap, and acquitted him of the most horrible blood-guiltiness.
He had that very day rejected, without pity, a noble Roman lady who
petitioned for her husband's life, and with the same breath he had
afterwards befooled her!
She started up, indignant and deeply wounded. Was it not ignominious even
to wait here like a prisoner in obedience to the command of this wretch?
And she had dared for one moment to compare this monster with Diodoros,
the handsomest, the best, and most amiable of youths!
It seemed to her inconceivable. If only he had not the power to destroy
all that was dearest to her heart, what pleasure it would have been to
shout in his face:
"I detest you, murderer, and I am the betrothed of another, who is as
good and beautiful as you are vile and odious!"
Then the question occurred to her whether it was only for the sake of her
healing hands that he had felt attracted to her, and had made her an
avowal as if she were his equal.
The blood mounted to her face at this thought, and with a burning brow
she walked to the open window.
A crowd of presentiments rushed into her innocent and, till then,
unsuspecting heart, and they were all so alarming that it was a relief to
her when a shout of joy from the panoplied breasts of several thousand
armed men rent the air. Mingling with this overpowering demonstration of
united rejoicing from such huge masses, came the blare of the trumpets
and horns of the assembled legions. What a maddening noise!
Before her lay the square, filled with many legions of warriors who
surrounded the Serapeum in their shining armor, with their eagles and
vexilla. The praetorians stood by the picked men of the Macedonian
phalanx, and with these were all the troops who had escorted the imperial
general hither, and the garrisons of the city of Alexander who hoped to
be called out in the next war.
On the balcony, decorated with statues which surrounded the colonnade of
the Pantheon on which the cupola rested, she saw Caracalla, and at a
respectful distance a superb escort of his friends, in red and white
togas, bordered with purple stripes, and wearing armor. Having taken off
his gold helmet, the imperial general bowed to his people, and at every
nod of his head, and each more vigorous movement, the enthusiastic cheers
were renewed more loudly than ever.
Macrinus then stepped up to Caesar's side, and the lictors who followed
him, by lowering their fasces, signaled to the warriors to keep silence.
Instantly the ear-splitting din changed to a speechless lull.
At first she still heard the lances and shields, which several of the
warriors had waved in enthusiastic joy, ringing against the ground, and
the clatter of the swords being put back in their sheaths; then this also
ceased, and finally, although only the superior officers had arrived on
horseback, the stamping of hoofs, the snorting of the horses, and the
rattle of the chains at their bits, were the only sounds.
Melissa listened breathlessly, looking first at the square and the
soldiers below, then at the balcony where the emperor stood. In spite of
the aversion she felt, her heart beat quicker. It was as if this
immeasurable army had only one voice; as if an irresistible force drew
all these thousands of eyes toward one point--the one little man up there
on the Pantheon.
Directly he began to speak, Melissa's glance was also fixed on Caracalla.
She only heard the closing sentence, as, with raised voice, he shouted to
the soldiers; and from it she gathered that he thanked his companions in
arms for their anxiety, but that he still felt strong enough to share all
their difficulties with them. Severe exertions lay behind them. The rest
in this luxurious city would do them all good. There was still much to be
conquered in the rich East, and to add to what they had already won,
before they could return to Rome to celebrate a well-earned triumph. The
weary should make themselves comfortable here. The wealthy merchants in
whose houses he had quartered them had been told to attend to their
wants, and if they neglected to do so every single warrior was man enough
to show them what a soldier needed for his comfort. The people here
looked askance at him and his soldiers, but too much moderation would be
misplaced.
There certainly were some things even here which the host was not bound
to supply to his military; he, Caesar, would provide them with these, and
for that purpose he had put aside two million denarii out of his own
poverty to distribute among them.
This speech had several times been interrupted by applause, but now such
a tremendous shout of joy went up that it would have drowned the loudest
thunder. The number of voices as well as their power seemed to have
doubled.
Caracalla had added another link to the golden chain which already bound
him to these faithful people; and, as he smiled and nodded to the
delighted crowd from the balcony, he looked like a happy, light-hearted
youth who had prepared a great treat for himself and several beloved
friends.
What he said further was lost in the confusion of voices in the square.
The ranks were broken up, and the cuirasses, helmets, and arms of the
moving warriors caught the sun and sent bright beams of light crossing
one another over the wide space surrounded with dazzling white marble
statues.
When Caracalla left the balcony, Melissa drew back from the window.
The compassionate impulse to lighten the lot of a sufferer, which had
before drawn her so strongly to Caracalla, had now lost its sense and
meaning for this healthy, high-spirited man. She considered herself
cheated, as if she had been fooled by sham suffering into giving
excessively large alms to an artful beggar.
Besides, she loved her native town, and Caracalla's advice to the
soldiers to force the citizens to provide luxurious living for them, had
made her considerably more rebellious. If he ever put her again in a
position to speak her mind freely to him, she would tell him all
undisguisedly; but instantly it again rushed into her mind that she must
keep guard over her tongue before the easily unchained wrath of this
despot, until her father and brothers were in safety once more.
Before the emperor returned, the room was filled with people, of whom she
knew none, excepting her old friend the white-haired, learned Samonicus.
She was the aim and center of all eyes, and when even the kindly old man
greeted her from a distance, and so contemptuously, that the blood rushed
to her face, she begged Adventus to take her into the next room.
The Chamberlain did as she wished, but before he left her he whispered to
her: "Innocence is trusting; but it is not of much avail here. Take care,
child! They say there are sand-banks in the Nile which, like soft
pillows, entice one to rest. But if you use them they become alive, and a
crocodile creeps out, with open jaws. I am talking already in metaphor,
like an Alexandrian, but you will understand me."
Melissa bowed acknowledgment to him, and the old man went on:
"He may perhaps forget you; for many things had accumulated during his
illness. If the mass of business, as it comes in, is not settled for
twenty four hours, it swells like a mill-stream that has the sluice down.
But when work is begun, it quite carries him away. He forgets then to eat
and drink. Ambassadors have arrived also from the Empress-mother, from
Armenia, and Parthia. If he does not ask for you in half an hour, it will
be suppertime, and I will let you out through that door."
"Do so at once," begged Melissa, with raised, petitioning hands; but the
old man replied: "I should then reward you but ill for having warmed my
feet for me. Remember the crocodile under the sand! Patience, child!
There is Caesar's zithern. If you can play, amuse yourself with that. The
door shuts closely and the curtains are thick. My old ears just now were
listening to no purpose."
But Caracalla was so far from forgetting Melissa that although he had
attended to the communication brought to him by the ambassadors, and the
various dispatches from the senate, he asked for her even at the door of
the tablinum. He had seen her from the balcony looking out on the square;
so she had witnessed the reception his soldiers had given him. The
magnificent spectacle must have impressed her and filled her with joy. He
was anxious to hear all this from her own lips, before he settled down to
work.
Adverntus whispered to him where he had taken her, to avoid the
persecuting glances of the numerous strangers, and Caracalla nodded to
him approvingly and went into the next room.
She sat there with the zithern, letting her fingers glide gently over the
strings.
On his entering, she drew back hastily; but he cried to her brightly: "Do
not disturb yourself. I love that instrument. I am having a statue
erected to Mesomedes, the great zithern-player--you perhaps know his
songs. This evening, when the feast and the press of work are over, I
will hear how you play. I will also playa few airs to you."
Melissa then plucked up courage and said, decidedly: "No, my lord; I am
about to bid you farewell for to-day."
"That sounds very determined," he answered, half surprised and half
amused. "But may I be allowed to know what has made you decide on this
step?"
"There is a great deal of work waiting for you," she replied, quietly.
"That is my affair, not yours," was the crushing answer.
"It is also mine," she said, endeavoring to keep calm; "for you have not
yet completely recovered, and, should you require my help again this
evening, I could not attend to your call."
"No?" he asked, wrathfully, and his eyelids began to twitch.
"No, my lord; for it would not be seemly in a maiden to visit you by
night, unless you were ill and needed nursing. As it is, I shall meet
your friends--my heart stands still only to think of it--"
"I will teach them what is due to you!" Caracalla bellowed out, and his
brow was knit once more.
"But you can not compel me," she replied, firmly, "to change my mind as
to what is seemly," and the courage which failed her if she met a spider,
but which stood by her in serious danger as a faithful ally, made her
perfectly steadfast as she eagerly added: "Not an hour since you promised
me that so long as I remained with you I should need no other protector,
and might count on your gratitude. But those were mere words, for, when I
besought you to grant me some repose, you scorned my very reasonable
request, and roughly ordered me to remain and attend on you."
At this Caesar laughed aloud.
"Just so! You are a woman, and like all the rest. You are sweet and
gentle only so long as you have your own way."
"No, indeed," cried Melissa, and her eyes filled with tears. "I only look
further than from one hour to the next. If I should sacrifice what I
think right, merely to come and go at my own will, I should soon be not
only miserable myself, but the object of your contempt."
Overcome by irresistible distress, she broke into loud sobs; but
Caracalla, with a furious stamp of his foot, exclaimed:
"No tears! I can not, I will not see you weep. Can any harm come to you?
Nothing but good; nothing but the best of happiness do I propose for you.
By Apollo and Zeus, that is the truth! Till now you have been unlike
other women, but when you behave like them, you shall--I swear it--you
shall feel which of us two is the stronger!"
He roughly snatched her hand away from her face and thereby achieved his
end, for her indignation at being thus touched by a man's brutal hand
gave Melissa strength to suppress her sobs. Only her wet cheeks showed
what a flood of tears she had shed, as, almost beside herself with anger,
she exclaimed:
"Let my hand go! Shame on the man who insults a defenseless girl! You
swear! Then I, too, may take an oath, and, by the head of my mother, you
shall never see me again excepting as a corpse, if you ever attempt
violence! You are Caesar--you are the stronger. Who ever doubted it? But
you will never compel me to a vile action, not if you could inflict a
thousand deaths on me instead of one!"
Caracalla, without a word, had released her hand and was staring at her
in amazement.
A woman, and so gentle a woman, defying him as no man would have dared to
do!
She stood before him, her hand raised, her bosom heaving; a flame of
anger sparkled in her eyes through their tears, and he had never before
thought her so fair. What majesty there was in this girl, whose simple
grace had made him more than once address her as "child"! She was like a
queen, an empress; perhaps she might become one. The idea struck him for
the first time. And that little hand which now fell--what soothing power
it had, how much he owed to it! How fervently he had wished but just now
to be understood by her, and to be thought better of by her than by the
rest! And this wish still possessed him. Nay, he was more strongly
attracted than ever to this creature, worthy as she was of the highest in
the land, and made doubly bewitching by her proud willfulness. That he
should see her for the last time seemed to him as impossible as that he
should never again see daylight; and yet her whole aspect announced that
her threat was serious.
His aggrieved pride and offended sense of absolute power struggled with
his love, repentance, and fear of losing her healing presence; but the
struggle was brief, especially as a mass of business to be attended to
lay before him like a steep hill to climb, and haste was imperative.
He went up to her, shaking his head, and said in the superior tone of a
sage rebuking thoughtlessness:
"Like all the rest of them--I repeat it. My demands had no object in view
but to make you happy and derive comfort from you. How hot must the blood
be which boils and foams at the contact of a spark! Only too like my own;
and, since I understand you, I find it easy to forgive you. Indeed, I
must finally express myself grateful; for I was in danger of neglecting
my duties as a sovereign for the sake of pleasing my heart. Go, then, and
rest, while I devote myself to business."
At this, Melissa forced herself to smile, and said, still somewhat
tearfully: "How grateful I am! And you will not again require me to
remain, will you, when I assure you that it is not fitting?"
"Unluckily, I am not in the habit of yielding to a girl's whims."
"I have no whims," she eagerly declared. "But you will keep your word
now, and allow me to withdraw? I implore you to let me go!"
With a deep sigh and an amount of self-control of which he would
yesterday have thought himself incapable, he let go her hand, and she
with a shudder thought that she had found the answer to the question he
had asked her. His eyes, not his words, had betrayed it; for a woman can
see in a suitor's look what color his wishes take, while a woman's eyes
only tell her lover whether or no she reciprocates his feelings.
"I am going," she said, but he remarked the deadly paleness which
overspread her features, and her colorless cheeks encouraged him in the
belief that, after a sleepless night and the agitations of the last few
hours, it was only physical exhaustion which made Melissa so suddenly
anxious to escape from him. So, saying kindly:
"'Till to-morrow, then," he dismissed her.
But when she had almost left the room, he added: "One thing more!
To-morrow we will try our zitherns together. After my bath is the time I
like best for such pleasant things; Adventus will fetch you. I am curious
to hear you play and sing. Of all sounds, that of the human voice is the
sweetest. Even the shouting of my legions is pleasing to the ear and
heart. Do you not think so, and does not the acclamation of so many
thousands stir your soul?"
"Certainly," she replied hastily; and she longed to reproach him for the
injustice he was doing the populace of Alexandria to benefit his
warriors, but she felt that the time was ill chosen, and everything gave
way to her longing to be gone out of the dreadful man's sight.
In the next room she met Philostratus, and begged him to conduct her to
the lady Euryale; for all the anterooms were now thronged, and she had
lost the calm confidence in which she had come thither.
CHAPTER XXII.
As Melissa made her way with the philosopher through the crowd,
Philostratus said to her: "It is for your sake, child, that these
hundreds have had so long to wait to-day, and many hopes will be
disappointed. To satisfy all is a giant's task. But Caracalla must do it,
well or ill."
"Then he will forget me!" replied Melissa, with a sigh of relief.
"Hardly," answered the philosopher. He was sorry for the terrified girl,
and in his wish to lighten her woes as far as he could, he said, gravely:
"You called him terrible, and he can be more terrible than any man
living. But he has been kind to you so far, and, if you take my advice,
you will always seem to expect nothing from him that is not good and
noble."
"Then I must be a hypocrite," replied Melissa. "Only to-day he has
murdered the noble Titianus."
"That is an affair of state which does not concern you," replied
Philostratus. "Read my description of Achilles. I represent him among
other heroes such as Caracalla might be. Try, on your part, to see him in
that light. I know that it is sometimes a pleasure to him to justify the
good opinion of others. Encourage your imagination to think the best of
him. I shall tell him that you regard him as magnanimous and noble."
"No, no!" cried Melissa; "that would make everything worse."
But the philosopher interrupted her.
"Trust my riper experience. I know him. If you let him know your true
opinion of him, I will answer for nothing. My Achilles reveals the good
qualities with which he came into the world; and if you look closely you
may still find sparks among the ashes."
He here took his leave, for they had reached the vestibule leading to the
high-priest's lodgings, and a few minutes later Melissa found herself
with Euryale, to whom she related all that she had seen and felt. When
she told her older friend what Philostratus had advised, the lady stroked
her hair, and said: "Try to follow the advice of so experienced a man. It
can not be very difficult. When a woman's heart has once been attached to
a man--and pity is one of the strongest of human ties--the bond may be
strained and worn, but a few threads must always remain."
But Melissa hastily broke in:
"There is not a spider's thread left which binds me to that cruel man.
The murder of Titianus has snapped them all."
"Not so," replied the lady, confidently. "Pity is the only form of love
which even the worst crime can not eradicate from a kind heart. You
prayed for Caesar before you knew him, and that was out of pure human
charity. Exercise now a wider compassion, and reflect that Fate has
called you to take care of a hapless creature raving in fever and hard to
deal with. How many Christian women, especially such as call themselves
deaconesses, voluntarily assume such duties! and good is good, right is
right for all, whether they pray to one God or to several. If you keep
your heart pure, and constantly think of the time which shall be
fulfilled for each of us, to our ruin or to our salvation, you will pass
unharmed through this great peril. I know it, I feel it."
"But you do not know him," exclaimed Melissa, "and how terrible he can
be! And Diodoros! When he is well again, if he hears that I am with
Caesar, in obedience to his call whenever he sends for me, and if evil
tongues tell him dreadful things about me, he, too, will condemn me!"
"No, no," the matron declared, kissing her brow and eyes. "If he loves
you truly, he will trust you."
"He loves me," sobbed Melissa; "but, even if he does not desert me when I
am thus branded, his father will come between us."
"God forbid!" cried Euryale. "Remain what you are, and I will always be
the same to you, come what may; and those who love you will not refuse to
listen to an old woman who has grown gray in honor."
And Melissa believed her motherly, kind, worthy friend; and, with the new
confidence which revived in her, her longing for her lover began to stir
irresistibly. She wanted a fond glance from the eyes of the youth who
loved her, and to whom, for another man's sake, she could not give all
his due, nay, who had perhaps a right to complain of her. This she
frankly confessed, and the matron herself conducted the impatient girl to
see Diodoros.
Melissa again found Andreas in attendance on the sufferer, and she was
surprised at the warmth with which the high-priest's wife greeted the
Christian.
Diodoros was already able to be dressed and to sit up. He was pale and
weak, and his head was still bound up, but he welcomed the girl
affectionately, though with a mild reproach as to the rarity of her
visits.
Andreas had already informed him that Melissa was kept away by her
mediation for the prisoners, and so he was comforted by her assurance
that if her duty would allow of it she would never leave him again. And
the joy of having her there, the delight of gazing into her sweet, lovely
face, and the youthful gift of forgetting the past in favor of the
present, silenced every bitter reflection. He was soon blissfully
listening to her with a fresh color in his cheeks, and never had he seen
her so tender, so devoted, so anxious to show him the fullness of her
great love. The quiet, reserved girl was to-day the wooer, and with the
zeal called forth by her ardent wish to do him good, she expressed all
the tenderness of her warm heart so frankly and gladly that to him it
seemed as though Eros had never till now pierced her with the right
shaft.
As soon as Euryale was absorbed in conversation with Andreas, she offered
him her lips with gay audacity, as though in defiance of some stern
dragon of virtue, and he, drunk with rapture, enjoyed what she granted
him. And soon it was he who became daring, declaring that there would be
time enough to talk another day; that for the present her rosy mouth had
nothing to do but to cure him with kisses. And during this sweet give and
take, she implored him with pathetic fervor never, never to doubt her
love, whatever he might hear of her. Their older friends, who had turned
their backs on the couple and were talking busily by a window, paid no
heed to them, and the blissful conviction of being loved as ardently as
she loved flooded her whole being.
Only now and then did the thought of Caesar trouble for a moment the
rapture of that hour, like a hideous form appearing out of distant
clouds. She felt prompted indeed to tell her lover everything, but it
seemed so difficult to make him understand exactly how everything had
happened, and Diodoros must not be distressed. And, indeed, intoxicated
as he was with heated passion, he made the attempt impossible.
When he spoke it was only to assure her of his love; and when the lady
Euryale at last called her to go, and looked in the girl's glowing face,
Melissa felt as though she were snatched from a rapturous dream.
In the anteroom they were stopped by Andreas. Euryale had indeed relieved
his worst fears, still he was anxious to lay before the girl the question
whether she would not be wise to take advantage of this very night to
make her escape. She, however, her eyes still beaming with happiness,
laid her little hand coaxingly on his bearded mouth, and begged him not
to sadden her high spirits and hopes of a better time by warnings and
dismal forecasts. Even the lady Euryale had advised her to trust
fearlessly to herself, and sitting with her lover she had acquired the
certainty that it was best so. The freedman could not bear to disturb
this happy confidence, and only impressed on Melissa that she should send
for him if ever she needed him. He would find her a hiding-place, and the
lady Euryale had undertaken to provide a messenger. He then bade them
godspeed, and they returned to the high-priest's dwelling.
In the vestibule they found a servant from the lady Berenike; in his
mistress's name he desired Euryale to send Melissa to spend the night
with her.
This invitation, which would remove Melissa from the Serapeum, was
welcome to them both, and the matron herself accompanied the young girl
down a private staircase leading to a small side-door. Argutis, who had
come to inquire for his young mistress, was to be her escort and to bring
her back early next morning to the same entrance.
The old slave had much to tell her. He had been on his feet all day. He
had been to the harbor to inquire as to the return of the vessel with the
prisoners on board; to the Serapeum to inquire for her; to Dido, to give
her the news. He had met Alexander in the forenoon on the quay where the
imperial galleys were moored. When the young man learned that the trireme
could not come in before next morning at the soonest, he had set out to
cross the lake and see Zeus and his daughter. He had charged Argutis to
let Melissa know that his longing for the fair Agatha gave him no peace.
He and old Dido disapproved of their young master's feather-brain, which
had not been made more steady and patient even by the serious events of
this day and his sister's peril; however, he did not allow a word of
blame to escape him. He was happy only to be allowed to walk behind
Melissa, and to hear from her own lips that all was well with her, and
that Caesar was gracious.
Alexander, indeed, had also told the old man that he and Caesar were
"good friends"; and now the slave was thinking of Pandion, Theocritus,
and the other favorites of whom he had heard; and he assured Melissa
that, as soon as her father should be free, Caracalla would be certain to
raise him to the rank of knight, to give him lands and wealth, perhaps
one of the imperial residences on the Bruchium. Then he, Argutis, would
be house steward, and show that he knew other things besides keeping the
workroom and garden in order, splitting wood, and buying cheaply at
market.
Melissa laughed and said he should be no worse off if only the first wish
of her heart were fulfilled, and she were wife to Diodoros; and Argutis
declared he would be amply content if only she allowed him to remain with
her.
But she only half listened and answered absently, for she breathed faster
as she pictured to herself how she would show Caesar, on whom she had
already proved her power, that she had ceased to tremble before him.
Thus they came to the house of Seleukus.
A large force had taken up their quarters there. In the pillared hall
beyond the vestibule bearded soldiers were sitting on benches or
squatting in groups on the ground, drinking noisily and singing, or
laughing and squabbling as they threw the dice on the costly mosaic
pavement. A riotous party were toping and reveling in the beautiful
garden of the impluvium round a fire which they had lighted on the velvet
turf. A dozen or so of officers had stretched themselves on cushions
under one of the colonnades, and, without attempting to check the wild
behavior of their men, were watching the dancing of some Egyptian girls
who had been brought into the house of their involuntary host. Although
Melissa was closely veiled and accompanied by a servant, she did not
escape rude words and insolent glances. Indeed, an audacious young
praetorian had put out his hand to pull away her veil, but an older
officer stopped him.
The lady Berenike's rooms had so far not been intruded on; for Macrinus,
the praetorian prefect, who knew Berenike through her brother-in-law the
senator Coeranus, had given orders that the women's apartments were to be
exempt from the encroachments of the quartermaster of the body-guard.
Breathing rapidly and with a heightened color, Melissa at last entered
the room of Seleukus's wife.
The matron's voice was full of bitterness as she greeted her young
visitor with the exclamation "You look as if you had fled to escape
persecution! And in my house, too! Or"--and her large eyes flashed
brightly--"or is the blood-hound on the track of his prey? My boat is
quite ready--" When Melissa denied this, and related what had happened,
Berenike exclaimed: "But you know that the panther lies still and gathers
himself up before he springs; or, if you do not, you may see it to-morrow
at the Circus. There is to be a performance in Caesar's honor, the like
of which not even Nero ever saw. My husband bears the chief part cf the
cost, and can think of nothing else. He has even forgotten his only
child, and all to please the man who insults us, robs and humiliates us!
Now that men kiss the hands which maltreat them, it is the part of women
to defy them. You must fly, child! The harbor is now closed, but it will
be open again to-morrow morning, and, if your folks are set free in the
course of the day, then away with you at once! Or do you really hope for
any good from the tyrant who has made this house what you now see it?"
"I know him," replied Melissa, "and I look for nothing but the worst."
At this the elder woman warmly grasped the girl's hand, but she was
interrupted by the waiting woman Johanna, who said that a Roman officer
of rank, a tribune, craved to be admitted.
When Berenike refused to receive him, the maid assured her that he was a
young man, and had expressed his wish to bring an urgent request to the
lady's notice in a becoming and modest manner.
On this the matron allowed him to be shown in to her, and Melissa hastily
obeyed her instructions to withdraw into the adjoining room.
Only a half-drawn curtain divided it from the room where Berenike
received the soldier, and without listening she could hear the loud voice
which riveted her attention as soon as she had recognized it.
The young tribune, in a tone of courteous entreaty, begged his hostess to
provide a room for his brother, who was severely wounded. The sufferer
was in a high fever, and the physician said that the noise and rattle of
vehicles in the street, on which the room where he now lay looked out,
and the perpetual coming and going of the men, might endanger his life.
He had just been told that on the side of the women's apartments there
was a row of rooms looking out on the impluvium, and he ventured to
entreat her to spare one of them for the injured man. If she had a
brother or a child, she would forgive the boldness of his request.
So far she listened in silence; then she suddenly raised her head and
measured the petitioner's tall figure with a lurid fire in her eye. Then
she replied, while she looked into his handsome young face with a
half-scornful, half-indignant air: "Oh, yes! I know what it is to see one
we love suffer. I had an only child; she was the joy of my heart.
Death--death snatched her from me, and a few days later the sovereign
whom you serve commanded us to prepare a feast for him. It seemed to him
something new and delightful to hold a revel in a house of mourning. At
the last moment--all the guests were assembled--he sent us word that he
himself did not intend to appear. But his friends laughed and reveled
wildly enough! They enjoyed themselves, and no doubt praised our cook and
our wine. And now--another honor we can duly appreciate!--he sends his
praetorians to turn this house of mourning into a tavern, a wine-shop,
where they call creatures in from the street to dance and sing. The rank
to which you have risen while yet so young shows that you are of good
family, so you can imagine how highly we esteem the honor of seeing your
men trampling, destroying, and burning in their camp-fires everything
which years of labor and care had produced to make our little garden a
thing of beauty. 'Only look down on them!' Macrinus, who commands you,
promised me, moreover, that the women's apartments should be respected.
'No praetorian, whether common soldier or commander,' and here she raised
her voice, 'shall set foot within them!' Here is his writing. The prefect
set the seal beneath it in Caesar's name."
"I know of the order, noble lady," interrupted Nemesianus, "and should be
the last to wish to act against it. I do not demand, I only appeal humbly
to the heart of a woman and a mother.'
"A mother!" broke in Berenike, scornfully; "yes! and one whose soul your
lord has pierced with daggers--a woman whose home has been dishonored and
made hateful to her. I have enjoyed sufficient honor now, and shall stand
firmly on my rights."
"Hear but one thing more," began the youth, timidly; but the lady
Berenike had already turned her back upon him, and returned with a proud
and stately carriage to Melissa in the adjoining apartment.
Breathing hard, as if stunned by her words, the tribune remained standing
on the threshold where the terrible lady had vanished from his sight, and
then, striving to regain his composure, pushed back the curling locks
from his brow. But scarcely had Berenike entered the other room than
Melissa whispered to her: "The wounded man is the unfortunate Aurelius,
whose face Caracalla wounded for my sake."
At this the lady's eyes suddenly flashed and blazed so strangely that the
girl's blood ran cold. But she had no time to ask the reason of this
emotion, for the next moment the queenly woman grasped the weaker one by
the wrist with her strong right hand, and with a commanding "Come with
me," drew her back into the room they had just quitted. She called to the
tribune, whose hand was already on the door, to come back.
The young man stood still, surprised and startled to see Melissa; but the
lady Berenike said, calmly, "Now that I have learned the honor that has
been accorded to you, too, by the master whom you so faithfully serve,
the poor injured man whom you call your brother shall be made welcome
within these walls. He is my companion in suffering. A quiet, airy
chamber shall be set apart for him, and he shall not lack careful
attention, nor anything which even his own mother could offer him. Only
two things I desire of you in return: that you admit no one of your
companions-in-arms, nor any man whatever, into this dwelling, save only
the physician whom I shall send to you. Furthermore, that you do not
betray, even to your nearest friend, whom you found here besides myself."
Under the mortification that had wounded his brotherly heart, Aurelius
Nemesianus had lost countenance; but now he replied with a soldier's
ready presence of mind: "It is difficult for me to find a proper answer
to you, noble lady. I know right well that I owe you my warmest thanks,
and equally so that he whom you call our master has inflicted as deep a
wrong on us as on you; but Caesar is still my military chief."
"Still!" broke in Berenike. "But you are too youthful a tribune for me to
believe that you took up the sword as a means of livelihood."
"We are sons of the Aurelia," answered Nemesianus, haughtily, "and it is
very possible that this day's work may be the cause of our deserting the
eagles we have followed in order to win glory and taste the delights of
warfare. But all that is for the future to decide. Meanwhile, I thank
you, noble lady, and also in the name of my brother, who is my second
self. On behalf of Apollinaris, too, I beg you to pardon the rudeness
which we offered to this maiden--"
"I am not angry with you any more," cried Melissa, eagerly and frankly,
and the tribune thanked her in his own and his brother's name.
He began trying to explain the unfortunate occurrence, but Berenike
admonished him to lose no time. The soldier withdrew, and the lady
Berenike ordered her handmaiden to call the housekeeper and other
serving-women. Then she repaired quickly to the room she had destined for
the wounded man and his brother. But neither Melissa nor the other women
could succeed in really lending her any help, for she herself put forth
all her cleverness and power of head and hand, forgetting nothing that
might be useful or agreeable in the nursing of the sick. In that wealthy,
well-ordered house everything stood ready to hand; and in less than a
quarter of an hour the tribune Nemesianus was informed that the chamber
was ready for the reception of his brother.
The lady then returned with Melissa to her own sleeping apartment, and
took various little bottles and jars from a small medicine-chest, begging
the girl at the same time to excuse her, as she intended to undertake the
nursing of the wounded man herself. Here were books, and there Korinna's
lute. Johanna would attend to the evening meal. Tomorrow morning they
could consult further as to what was necessary to be done; then she
kissed her guest and left the room.
Left to herself, Melissa gave herself up to varying thoughts, till
Johanna brought her repast. While she hardly nibbled at it, the Christian
told her that matters looked ill with the tribune, and that the wound in
the forehead especially caused the physician much anxiety. Many questions
were needed to draw this much from the freedwoman, for she spoke but
little. When she did speak, however, it was with great kindliness, and
there lay something so simple and gentle in her whole manner that it
awakened confidence. Having satisfied her appetite, Melissa returned to
the lady Berenike's apartment; but there her heart grew heavy at the
thought of what awaited her on the morrow. When, at the moment of
leaving, Johanna inquired whether she desired anything further, she asked
her if she knew a saying of her fellow-believers, which ran, "The
fullness of time was come."
"Yes, surely," returned the other; "our Lord himself spoke them, and Paul
wrote them to the Galatians."
"Who is this Paul?" Melissa asked; and the Christian replied that of all
the teachers of her faith he was the one she most dearly loved. Then,
hesitating a little, she asked if Melissa, being a heathen, had inquired
the meaning of this saying.
"Andrew, the freedman of Polybius and the lady Euryale, explained it to
me. Did the moment ever come to you in which you felt assured that for
you the time was fulfilled?"
"Yes," replied Johanna, with decision; "and that moment comes, sooner or
later, in every life."
"You are a maiden like myself," began Melissa, simply. "A heavy task lies
before me, and if you would confide to me--"
But the Christian broke in: "My life has moved in other paths than yours,
and what has happened to me, the freedwoman and the Christian, can have
no interest for you. But the saying which has stirred your soul refers to
the coming of One who is all in all to us Christians. Did Andrew tell you
nothing of His life?"
"Only a little," answered the girl, "but I would gladly hear more of
Him."
Then the Christian seated herself at Melissa's side, and, clasping the
maiden's hand in hers, told her of the birth of the Saviour, of His
loving heart, and His willing death as a sacrifice for the sins of the
whole world. The girl listened with attentive ear. With no word did she
interrupt the narrative, and the image of the Crucified One rose before
her mind's eye, pure and noble, and worthy of all love. A thousand
questions rose to her lips, but, before she could ask one, the Christian
was called away to attend the lady Berenike, and Melissa was again alone.
What she had already heard of the teaching of the Christians occurred to
her once more, and above all that first saying from the sacred Scriptures
which had attracted her attention, and about which she had just asked
Johanna. Perhaps for her, too, the time was already fulfilled, when she
had taken courage to defy the emperor's commands.
She rejoiced at this action, for she felt that the strength would never
fail her now to set her will against his. She felt as though she bore a
charm against his power since she had parted from her lover, and since
the murder of the governor had opened her eyes to the true character of
him on whom she had all too willingly expended her pity. And yet she
shuddered at the thought of meeting the emperor again, and of having to
show him that she felt safe with him because she trusted to his
generosity.
Lost in deep thought, she waited for the return of the lady and the
Christian waiting-woman, but in vain. At last her eye fell upon the
scrolls which the lady Berenike had pointed out to her. They lay in
beautiful alabaster caskets on an ebony stand. If they had only been the
writings of the Christians, telling of the life and death of their
Saviour! But how should writings such as those come here? The casket only
held the works of Philostratus, and she took from it the roll containing
the story of the hero of whom he had himself spoken to her. Full of
curiosity, she smoothed out the papyrus with the ivory stick, and her
attention was soon engaged by the lively conversation between the vintner
and his Phoenician guest. She passed rapidly over the beginning, but soon
reached the part of which Philostratus had told her. Under the form of
Achilles he had striven to represent Caracalla as he appeared to the
author's indulgent imagination. But it was no true portrait; it described
the original at most as his mother would have wished him to be. There it
was written that the vehemence flashing from the hero's bright eyes, even
when peacefully inclined, showed how easily his wrath could break forth.
But to those who loved him he was even more endearing during these
outbursts than before. The Athenians felt toward him as they did toward a
lion; for, if the king of beasts pleased them when he was at rest, he
charmed them infinitely more when, foaming with bloodthirsty rage, he
fell upon a bull, a wild boar, or some such ferocious animal.
Yes, indeed! Caracalla, too, fell mercilessly upon his prey! Had she not
seen him hewing down Apollinaris a few hours ago?
Furthermore, Achilles was said to have declared that he could drive away
care by fearlessly encountering the greatest dangers for the sake of his
friends. But where were Caracalla's friends?
At best, the allusion could only refer to the Roman state, for whose sake
the emperor certainly did endure many a hardship and many a wearisome
task, and he was not the only person who had told her so.
Then she turned back a little and found the words: "But because he was
easily inclined to anger, Chiron instructed him in music; for is it not
inherent in this art to soothe violence and wrath--And Achilles acquired
without trouble the laws of harmony and sang to the lyre."
This all corresponded with the truth, and tomorrow she was to discover
what had suggested to Philostratus the story that when Achilles begged
Calliope to endow him with the gifts of music and poetry she had given
him so much of both as he required to enliven the feast and banish
sadness. He was also said to be a poet, and devoted himself most ardently
to verse when resting from the toils of war.
To hear that man unjustly blamed on whom her heart is set, only increases
a woman's love; but unmerited praise makes her criticise him more
sharply, and is apt to transform a fond smile into a scornful one. Thus
the picture that raised Caracalla to the level of an Achilles made
Melissa shrug her shoulders over the man she dreaded; and while she even
doubted Caesar's musical capacities, Diodoros's young, fresh, bell-like
voice rose doubly beautiful and true upon her memory's ear. The image of
her lover finally drove out that of the emperor, and, while she seemed to
hear the wedding song which the youths and maidens were so soon to sing
for them both, she fell asleep.
It was late when Johanna came to admonish her to retire to rest. Shortly
before sunrise she was awakened by Berenike, who wished to take some
rest, and who told her, before seeking her couch, that Apollinaris was
doing well. The lady was still sleeping when Johanna came to inform
Melissa that the slave Argutis was waiting to see her.
The Christian undertook to convey the maiden's farewell greetings to her
mistress.
As they entered the living-room, the gardener had just brought in fresh
flowers, among them three rose-bushes covered with full-blown flowers and
half-opened, dewy buds. Melissa asked Johanna timidly if the lady
Berenike would permit her to pluck one--there were so many; to which the
Christian replied that it would depend on the use it was to be put to.
"Only for the sick tribune," answered Melissa, reddening. So Johanna
plucked two of the fairest blooms and gave them to the maiden--one for
the man who had injured her and one for her betrothed. Melissa kissed
her, gratefully, and begged her to present the flowers to the sick man in
her name.
Johanna carried out her wish at once; but the wounded man, gazing
mournfully at the rose, murmured to himself: "Poor, lovely, gentle child!
She will be ruined or dead before Caracalla leaves Alexandria!"
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Obstacles existed only to be removed
Speaking ill of others is their greatest delight
The past must stand; it is like a scar
A THORNY PATH
By Georg Ebers
Volume 8.
CHAPTER XXIII.
The slave Argutis was waiting for Melissa in the antechamber. It was
evident that he brought good news, for he beamed with joy as she came
toward him; and before she left the house she knew that her father and
Philip had returned and had regained their freedom.
The slave had not allowed these joyful tidings to reach his beloved
mistress's ear, that he might have the undivided pleasure of bringing
them himself, and the delight she expressed was fully as great as he had
anticipated. Melissa even hurried back to Johanna to impart to her the
joyful intelligence that she might tell it to her mistress.
When they were in the street the slave told her that, at break of day,
the ship had cast anchor which brought back father and son. The prisoners
had received their freedom while they were still at sea, and had been
permitted to return home at once. All was well, only--he added,
hesitatingly and with tears in his eyes--things were not as they used to
be, and now the old were stronger than the young. Her father had taken no
harm from the heavy work at the oars, but Philip had returned from the
galleys very ill, and they had carried him forthwith to the bedchamber,
where Dido was now nursing him. It was a good thing that she had not been
there to hear how the master had stormed and cursed over the infamy they
had had to endure; but the meeting with his birds had calmed him down
quickly enough.
Melissa and her attendant were walking in the direction of the Serapeum,
but now she declared that she must first see the liberated prisoners. And
she insisted upon it, although Argutis assured her of her father's
intention of seeking her at the house of the high-priest, as soon as he
had removed all traces of his captivity and his shameful work at the
galleys in the bath. Philip she would, of course, find at home, he being
too weak to leave the house. The old man had some difficulty in following
his young mistress, and she soon stepped lightly over the "Welcome" on
the threshold of her father's house. Never had the red mosaic inscription
seemed to shine so bright and friendly, and she heard her name called in
delighted tones from the kitchen.
This joyful greeting from Dido was not to be returned from the door only.
In a moment Melissa was standing by the hearth; but the slave, speechless
with happiness, could only point with fork and spoon, first to the pot in
which a large piece of meat was being boiled down into a strengthening
soup for Philip, then to a spit on which two young chickens were browning
before the fire, and then to the pan where she was frying the little fish
of which the returned wanderer was so fond.
But the old woman's struggle between the duty that kept her near the fire
and the love that drew her away from it was not of long duration. In a
few minutes Melissa, her hands clasping the slave's withered arm, was
listening to the tender words of welcome that Dido had ready for her. The
slave woman declared that she scarcely dared to let her eyes rest upon
her mistress, much less touch her with the fingers that had just been
cleaning fish; for the girl was dressed as grandly as the daughter of the
high-priest. Melissa laughed at this; but the slave went on to say that
they had not been able to detain her master. His longing to see his
daughter and the desire to speak with Caesar had driven him out of the
house, and Alexander had, of course, accompanied him. Only Philip, poor,
crushed worm, was at home, and the sight of her would put more strength
into him than the strong soup and the old wine which his father had
fetched for him from the store-room, although he generally reserved it
for libations on her mother's grave.
Melissa soon stood beside her brother's couch, and the sight of him cast
a dark shadow over the brightness of this happy morn. As he recognized
her, a fleeting smile crossed the pale, spiritualized face, which seemed
to her to have grown ten years older in this short time; but it vanished
as quickly as it had come. Then the great eyes gazed blankly again from
the shadows that surrounded them, and a spasm of pain quivered from time
to time round the thin, tightly closed lips. Melissa could hardly
restrain her tears. Was this what he had been brought to-the youth who
only a few days ago had made them all feel conscious of the superiority
of his brilliant mind!
Her warm heart made her feel more lovingly toward her sick brother than
she had ever done when he was in health, and surely he was conscious of
the tenderness with which she strove to comfort him.
The unaccustomed, hard, and degrading work at the oars, she assured him,
would have worn out a stronger man than he; but he would soon be able to
visit the Museum again and argue as bravely as ever. With this, she bent
over him to kiss his brow, but he raised himself a little, and said, with
a contemptuous smile:
"Apathy--ataraxy--complete indifference--is the highest aim after which
the soul of the skeptic strives. That at least"--and here his eyes
flashed for a moment--"I have attained to in these cursed days. That a
thinking being could become so utterly callous to everything--everything,
be it what it may--even I could never have believed!" He sank into
silence, but his sister urged him to take courage--surely many a glad day
was before him yet.
At this he raised himself more energetically, and exclaimed:
"Glad days?--for me, and with you? That you should still be of such good
cheer would please or else astonish me if I were still capable of those
sentiments. If things were different, I should ask you now, what have you
given the imperial bloodhound in return for our freedom?"
Here Melissa exclaimed indignantly, but he continued unabashed:
"Alexander says you have found favor with our imperial master. He calls,
and you come. Naturally, it is for him to command. See how much can be
made of the child of a gem-cutter! But what says handsome Diodoros to all
this?--Why turn so pale? These, truly, are questions which I would fling
in your face were things as they used to be. Now I say in all unconcern,
do what you will!"
The blood had ebbed from Melissa's cheeks during this attack of her
brother's. His injurious and false accusations roused her indignation to
the utmost, but one glance at his weary, suffering face showed her how
great was the pain he endured, and in her compassionate heart pity strove
against righteous anger. The struggle was sharp, but pity prevailed; and,
instead of punishing him by a sharp retort, she forced herself to explain
to him in a few gentle words what had happened, in order to dispel the
unworthy suspicion that must surely hurt him as much as it did her. She
felt convinced that the sufferer would be cheered by her words; but he
made no attempt to show that he appreciated her kindly moderation, nor to
express any satisfaction. On the contrary, when he spoke it was in the
same tone as before.
"If that be the case," he said, "so much the better; but were it
otherwise, it would have to be endured just the same. I can think of
nothing that could affect me now, and it is well. Only my body troubles
me still. It weighs upon me like lead, and grows heavier with every word
I utter. Therefore, I pray you, leave me to myself!"
But his sister would not obey. "No, Philip," she cried, eagerly, "this
may not be. Let your strong spirit arise and burst asunder the bonds that
fetter and cripple it."
At this a groan of pain escaped the philosopher, and, turning again to
the girl, he answered, with a mournful smile:
"Bid the cushion in that arm-chair do so. It will succeed better than I!"
Then crying out impatiently and as loudly as he could, "Now go--you know
not how you torture me!" he turned away from her and buried his face in
the pillows.
But Melissa, as if beside herself, laid her hands upon his shoulder, and,
shaking him gently, exclaimed: "And even if it vexes you, I will not be
driven away thus. The misfortunes that have befallen you in these days
will end by destroying you, if you will not pull yourself together. We
must have patience, and it can only come about slowly, but you must make
an effort. The least thing that pains you hurts us too, and you, in
return, may not remain indifferent to what we feel. See, Philip, our
mother and Andrew taught us often not to think only of ourselves, but of
others. We ask so little of you; but if you--"
At this the philosopher shook himself free of her hand, and cried in a
voice of anguish:
"Away, I say! Leave me alone! One word more, and I die!" With this he hid
his head in the coverlet, and Melissa could see how his limbs quivered
convulsively as if shaken by an ague.
To see a being so dear to her thus utterly broken down cut her to the
heart. Oh, that she could help him! If she did not succeed, or if he
never found strength to rouse himself, he, too, would be one of Caesar's
victims. Corrupted and ruined lives marked the path of this terrible
being, and, with a shudder, she asked herself when her turn would come.
Her hair had become disordered, and as she smoothed it she looked in the
mirror, and could not but observe that in the simple but costly white
robe of the dead Korinna she looked like a maiden of noble birth rather
than the lowly daughter of an artist. She would have liked to tear it off
and replace it by another, but her one modest festival robe had been left
behind at the house of the lady Berenike. To appear in broad daylight
before the neighbors or to walk in the streets clad in this fashion
seemed to her impossible after her brother's unjust suspicion, and she
bade Argutis fetch her a litter.
When they parted, Dido could see distinctly that Philip had wounded her.
And she could guess how, so she withheld any questions, that she might
not hurt her. Over the fire, however, she stabbed fiercely into the fowl
destined for the philosopher, but cooked it, nevertheless, with all
possible care.
On the way to the Serapeum, Melissa's anxiety increased. Till now,
eagerness for the fray, fear, hope, and the joyful consciousness of
right-doing, had alternated in her mind. Now, for the first time, she was
seized with a premonition of misfortune. Fate itself had turned against
her. Even should she succeed in escaping, she could not hope to regain
her lost peace of mind.
Philip's biting words had shown her what most of them must think of her;
and, though the ship should bear her far away, would it be right to bring
Diodoros away from his old father to follow her? She must see her lover,
and if possible tell him all. The rose, too, which the Christian had
given her for him, and which lay in her lap, she wished so much to carry
to him herself. She could not go alone to the chamber of the
convalescent, and the attendance of a slave counted for nothing in the
eyes of other people. It was even doubtful if a bondsman might be
admitted into the inner apartments of the sanctuary. However, she would,
she must see Diodoros and speak to him; and thus planning ways and means
by which to accomplish this, looking forward joyfully to the meeting with
her father, and wondering how Agatha, the Christian, had received
Alexander, she lost the feeling of deep depression which had weighed on
her when she had left the house.
The litter stopped, and Argutis helped her to descend. He was breathless,
for it had been most difficult to open a way for her through the dense
crowds that were already thronging to the Circus, where the grand evening
performance in honor of the emperor was to begin as soon as it was dark.
Just as she was entering the house, she perceived Andreas coming toward
them along the street of Hermes, and she at once bade the slave call him.
He was soon at her side, and declared himself willing to accompany her to
Diodoros.
This time, however, she did not find her lover alone in the sick-room.
Two physicians were with him, and she grew pale as she recognized in one
of them the emperor's Roman body-physician.
But it was too late too escape detection; so she only hastened to her
lover's side, whispered warm words of love in his ear, and, while she
gave him the rose, conjured him ever and always to have faith in her and
in her love, whatever reports he might hear.
Diodoros was up and had fully recovered. His face lighted up with joy as
he saw her; but, when she repeated the old, disquieting request, he
anxiously begged to know what she meant by it. She assured him, however,
that she had already delayed too long, and referred him to Andreas and
the lady Euryale, who would relate to him what had befallen her and
spoiled every happy hour she had. Then, thinking herself unobserved by
those present, she breathed a kiss upon his lips. But he would not let
her go, urging with passionate tenderness his rights as her betrothed,
till she tore herself away from him and hurried from the room.
As she left, she heard a ringing laugh, followed by loud, sprightly
talking. It was not her lover's voice, and endeavoring, while she waited
for Andreas, to catch what was being said on the other side of the door,
she distinctly heard the body-physician (for no other pronounced the
Greek language in that curious, halting manner) exclaim, gayly: "By
Cerberus, young man, you are to be envied! The beauty my sovereign lord
is limping after flies unbidden into your arms!"
Then came loud laughter as before, but this time interrupted by
Diodoros's indignant question as to what this all meant. At last Melissa
heard Andreas's deep voice promising the young man to tell him everything
later on; and when the convalescent impatiently asked for an immediate
explanation, the Christian exhorted him to be calm, and finally requested
the physician to grant him a few moments' conversation.
Then there was quiet for a time in the room, only broken by Diodoros's
angry questions and the pacifying exclamations of the freedman. She felt
as if she must return to her lover and tell him herself what she had been
forced to do in these last days, but maidenly shyness restrained her,
till at last Andreas came out. The freedman's honest face expressed the
deepest solicitude, and his voice sounded rough and hasty as he
exclaimed, "You must fly--fly this day!"
"And my father and brother, and Diodoros?" she asked, anxiously.
But he answered, urgently: "Let them get away as they may. There is no
hole or corner obscure enough to keep you hidden. Therefore take
advantage of the ship that waits for you. Follow Argutis at once to the
lady Berenike. I can not accompany you, for it lies with me to occupy for
the next few hours the attention of the body-physician, from whom you
have the most to fear. He has consented to go with me to my garden across
the water. There I promised him a delicious, real Alexandrian feast, and
you know how gladly Polybius will seize the opportunity to share it with
him. No doubt, too, some golden means may be found to bind his tongue;
for woe to you if Caracalla discovers prematurely that you are promised
to another, and woe then to your betrothed! After sundown, when every one
here has gone to the Circus, I will take Diodoros to a place of safety.
Farewell, child, and may our heavenly Father defend you!"
He laid his right hand upon her head as if in blessing; but Melissa
cried, wringing her hands: "Oh, let me go to him once more! How can I
leave him and go far away without one word of farewell or of
forgiveness?"
But Andreas interrupted her, saying: "You can not. His life is at stake
as well as your own. I shall make it my business to look after his
safety. The wife of Seleukus will assist you in your flight."
"And you will persuade him to trust me?" urged Melissa, clinging
convulsively to his arm.
"I will try," answered the freedman, gloomily. Melissa, dropped his arm,
for loud, manly voices were approaching down the stairs near which they
stood.
It was Heron and Alexander, returning from their audience with the
emperor. Instantly the Christian went to meet them, and dismissed the
temple servant who accompanied them.
In the half-darkness of the corridor, Melissa threw herself weeping into
her father's arms. But he stroked her hair lovingly, and kissed her more
tenderly on brow and eyes than he had ever clone before, whispering gayly
to her: "Dry your tears, my darling. You have been a brave maiden, and
now comes your reward. Fear and sorrow will now be changed into happiness
and power, and all the glories of the world. I have not even told
Alexander yet what promises to make our fortunes, for I know my duty."
Then, raising his voice, he said to the freedman, "If I have been rightly
informed, we shall find the son of Polybius in one of the apartments
close at hand."
"Quite right," answered the freedman, gravely, and then went on to
explain to the gem-cutter that he could not see Diodoros just now, but
must instantly leave the country with his son and daughter on Berenike's
ship. Not a moment was to be lost. Melissa would tell him all on the way.
But Heron laughed scornfully: "That would be a pretty business! We have
plenty of time, and, with the greatness that lies before us, everything
must be done openly and in the right way. My first thought, you see, was
to come here, for I had promised the girl to Diodoros, and he must be
informed before I can consent to her betrothal to another."
"Father!" cried Melissa, scarcely able to command her voice. But Heron
took no notice of her, and continued, composedly: "Diodoros would have
been dear to me as a son-in-law. I shall certainly tell him so. But when
Caesar, the ruler of the world, condescends to ask a plain man for his
daughter, every other consideration must naturally be put aside. Diodoros
is sensible, and is sure to see it in the right light. We all know how
Caesar treats those who are in his way; but I wish the son of Polybius no
ill, so I forbore to betray to Caesar what tie had once bound you, my
child, to the gallant youth."
Heron had never liked the freedman. The man's firm character had always
gone against the gemcutter's surly, capricious nature; and it was no
little satisfaction to him to let him feel his superiority, and boast
before him of the apparent good luck that had befallen the artist's
family.
But Andreas had already heard from the physician that Caracalla had
informed his mother's envoys of his intended marriage with an
Alexandrian, the daughter of an artist of Macedonian extraction. This
could only refer to Melissa, and it was this news which had caused him to
urge the maiden to instant flight.
Pale, incapable of uttering a word, Melissa stood before her father; but
the freedman grasped her hand, looked Heron reproachfully in the face,
and asked, quietly, "And you would really have the heart to join this
dear child's life to that of a bloody tyrant?"
"Certainly I have," returned Heron with decision, and he drew his
daughter's hand out of that of Andreas, who turned his back upon the
artist with a meaning shrug of the shoulders. But Melissa ran after him,
and, clinging to him, cried as she turned first to him and then to her
father:
"I am promised to Diodoros, and shall hold fast to him and my love; tell
him that, Andreas! Come what may, I will be his and his alone! Caesar--"
"Swear not!" broke in Heron, angrily, "for by great Serapis--"
But Alexander interposed between them, and begged his father to consider
what he was asking of the girl. Caesar's proposals could scarcely have
been very pleasing to him, or why had he concealed till now what
Caracalla was whispering to him in the adjoining room? He might imagine
for himself what fate awaited the helpless child at the side of a husband
at whose name even men trembled. He should remember her mother, and what
she would have said to such a union. There was little, time to escape
from this terrible wooer.
Then Melissa turned to her brother and begged him earnestly: "Then you
take me to the ship Alexander; take charge of me yourself!"
"And I?" asked Heron, his eye cast gloomily on the ground.
"You must come with us!" implored the girl, clasping her hands.--"O
Andreas! say something! Tell him what I have to expect!"
"He knows that without my telling him," replied the freedman. "I must go
now, for two lives are at stake, Heron. If I can not keep the physician
away from Caesar, your daughter, too, will be in danger. If you desire to
see your daughter forever in fear of death, give her in marriage to
Caracalla. If you have her happiness at heart, then escape with her into
a far country."
He nodded to the brother and sister, and returned to the sick-room.
"Fly!--escape!" repeated the old man, and he waived his hand angrily.
"This Andreas--the freedman, the Christian--always in extremes. Why run
one's head against the wall? First consider, then act; that was what she
taught us whose sacred memory you have but now invoked, Alexander."
With this he walked out of the half-dark corridor into the open
court-yard, in front of his children. Here he looked at his daughter, who
was breathing fast, and evidently prepared to resist to the last. And as
he beheld her in Korinna's white and costly robes, like a noble
priestess, it occurred to him that even before his captivity she had
ceased to be the humble, unquestioning instrument of his capricious
temper. Into what a haughty beauty the quiet embroideress had been
transformed!
By all the gods! Caracalla had no cause to be ashamed of such an empress.
And, unaccustomed as he was to keep back anything whatever from his
children, he began to express these sentiments. But he did not get far,
for the hour for the morning meal being just over, the court-yard began
to fill from all sides with officials and servants of the temple. So,
father and son silently followed the maiden through the crowded galleries
and apartments, into the house of the highpriest.
Here they were received by Philostratus, who hardly gave Melissa time to
greet the lady Euryale before he informed her, but with unwonted hurry
and excitement, that the emperor was awaiting her with impatience.
The philosopher motioned to her to follow him, but she clung, as if
seeking help, to her brother, and cried: "I will not go again to
Caracalla! You are the kindest and best of them all, Philostratus, and
you will understand me. Evil will come of it if I follow you--I can not
go again to Caesar."
But it was impossible for the courtier to yield to her, in the face of
his monarch's direct commands; therefore, hard as it was to him, he said,
resolutely: "I well understand what holds you back; still, if you would
not ruin yourself and your family, you must submit. Besides which, you
know not what Caesar is about to offer you-fortunate, unhappy child!"
"I know--oh, I know it!" sobbed Melissa; "but it is just that . . . I
have served the emperor willingly, but before I consent become the wife
of such a monster--"
"She is right," broke in Euryale, and drew Melissa toward her. But the
philosopher took the girl's hand and said, kindly:--"You must come with
me now, my child, and pretend that you know nothing of Caesar's
intentions toward you. It is the only way to save you. But while you are
with the emperor, who, in any case, can devote but a short time to you
to-day, I will return here and consult with your people. There is much to
be decided, of the greatest moment, and not to you alone." Melissa turned
with tearful eyes to Euryale, and questioned her with a look; whereupon
the lady drew the girl's hand out of that of the philosopher, and saying
to him, "She shall be with you directly," took her away to her own
apartment.
Here she begged Melissa to dry her eyes, and arranging the girl's hair
and robe with her own hands, she promised to do all in her power to
facilitate her flight. She must do her part now by going into Caesar's
presence as frankly as she had done yesterday and the day before. She
might be quite easy; her interests were being faithfully watched over.
Taking a short leave of her father, who was looking very sulky because
nobody seemed to care for his opinion, and of Alexander, who lovingly
promised her his help, she took the philosopher's hand and walked with
him through one crowded apartment after another. They often had
difficulty in pressing through the throng of people who were waiting for
an audience, and in the antechamber, where the Aurelians had had to pay
so bitterly for their insolence yesterday, they were detained by the
blonde and red-Haired giants of the Uermanian body-guard, whose leader,
Sabinus, a Thracian of exceptional height and strength, was acquainted
with the philosopher.
Caracalla had given orders that no one was to be admitted till the
negotiations with the Parthian ambassadors, which had begun an hour ago,
were brought to a conclusion. Philostratus well knew that the emperor
would interrupt the most important business if Melissa were announced,
but there was much that he would have the maiden lay to heart before he
led her to the monarch; while she wished for nothing so earnestly as that
the door which separated her from her terrible wooer might remain closed
to the end of time. When the chamberlain Adventus looked out from the
imperial apartments, she begged him to give her a little time before
announcing her.
The old man blinked consent with his dim eyes, but the philosopher took
care that Melissa should not be left to herself and the terrors of her
heart. He employed all the eloquence at his command to make her
comprehend what it meant to be an empress and the consort of the ruler of
the world. In flaming colors he painted to her the good she might do in
such a position, and the tears she might wipe away. Then he reminded her
of the healing and soothing influence she had over Caracalla, and that
this influence came doubtless from the gods, since it passed the bounds
of nature and acted so beneficently. No one might reject such a gift from
the immortals merely to gratify an ordinary passion. The youth whose love
she must give up would be able to comfort himself with the thought that
many others had had much worse to bear, and he would find no difficulty
in getting a substitute, though not so beautiful a one. On the other
hand, she was the only one among millions whose heart, obedient to a
heaven-sent impulse, had turned in pity toward Caracalla. If she fled,
she would deprive the emperor of the only being on whose love he felt he
had some claim. If she listened to the wooing of her noble lover, she
would be able to tame this ungovernable being and soothe his fury, and
would gain in return for a sacrifice such as many had made before her,
the blissful consciousness of having rendered an inestimable service to
the whole world. For by her means and her love, the imperial tyrant would
be transformed into a beneficent ruler. The blessing of the thousands
whom she could protect and save would make the hardest task sweet and
endurable.
Here Philostratus paused, and gazed inquiringly at her; but she only
shook her head gently, and answered:
"My brain is so confused that I can scarcely hear even, but I feel that
your words are well meant and wise. What you put before me would
certainly be worth considering if there were anything left for me to
consider about. I have promised myself to another, who is more to me than
all the world--more than the gratitude and blessings of endangered lives
of which I know nothing. I am but a poor girl who only asks to be happy.
Neither gods nor men expect more of me than that I should do my duty
toward those whom I love. And, then, who can say for certain that I
should succeed in persuading Caesar to carry out my desires, whatever
they might be?"
"We were witnesses of the power you exercised over him," replied the
philosopher; but Melissa shook her head, and continued eagerly: "No, no!
he only values in me the hand that eases his pain and want of sleep. The
love which he may feel for me makes him neither gentler nor better. Only
an hour or two before he declared that his heart was inclined to me, he
had Titianus murdered!"
"One word from you," the philosopher assured her, "and it would never
have happened. As empress, they will obey you as much as him. Truly,
child, it is no small thing to sit, like the gods, far above the rest of
mankind."
"No, no!" cried Melissa, shuddering. "Those heights! Only to think of
them makes everything spin round me. Only one who is free from such
giddiness dare to occupy such a place. Every one must desire to do what
he can do best. I could be a good housewife to Diodoros, but I should be
a bad empress. I was not born to greatness. And, besides--what is
happiness? I only felt happy when I did what was my duty, in peace and
quiet. Were I empress, fear would never leave me for a moment. Oh. I know
enough of the hideous terror which this awful being creates around him;
and before I would consent to let it torture me to death by day and by
night-morning, noon, and evening--far rather would I die this very day.
Therefore, I have no choice. I must flee from Caesar's sight--away
hence--far, far, away!"
Tears nearly choked her voice, but she struggled bravely against them.
Philostratus, however, did not fail to observe it, and gazed, first
mournfully into her face and then thoughtfully on the ground. At length
he spoke with a slight sigh:
"We gather experience in life, and yet, however old we may be, we act
contrary to it. Now I have to pay for it. And yet it still lies in your
hands to make me bless the day on which I spoke on your behalf. Could you
but succeed in rising to real greatness of soul, girl--through you, I
swear it, the subjects of this mighty kingdom would be saved from great
tribulations!"
"But, my lord," Melissa broke in, "who would ask such lofty things of a
lowly maiden? My mother taught me to be kind and helpful to others in the
house, to my friends, and fellow-citizens; my own heart tells me to be
faithful to my betrothed. But I care not greatly for the Romans, and what
to me are Gauls, Dacians, or whatever else these barbarians may be
called?"
"And yet," said Philostratus, "you offered a sacrifice for the foreign
tyrant."
"Because his pain excited my compassion," rejoined Melissa, blushing.
"And would you have done the same for any masterless black slave, covered
with pitiably deep wounds?" asked the philosopher.
"No," she answered, quickly; "him I would have helped with my own hand.
When I can do without their aid, I do not appeal to the gods. And then--I
said before, his trouble seemed doubly great because it contrasted so
sharply with all the splendor and joy that surrounded him."
"Aye," said the philosopher, earnestly, "and a small thing that affects
the ruler recoils tenfold--a thousand-fold-on his subjects. Look at one
tree through a cut glass with many facets, and it be comes a forest. Thus
the merest trifle, when it affects the emperor, becomes important for the
millions over whom he rules. Caracalla's vexation entails evil on
thousands--his anger is death and ruin. I fear me, girl, your flight will
bring down heavy misfortune on those who surround Caesar, and first of
all upon the Alexandrians, to whom you belong, and against whom he
already bears a grudge. You once said your native city was dear to you."
"So it is," returned Melissa, who, at his last words had grown first red
and then pale; "but Caesar can not surely be so narrow-minded as to
punish a whole great city for what the poor daughter of a gem-cutter has
done."
"You are thinking of my Achilles," answered the philosopher. "But I only
transferred what I saw of good in Caracalla to the figure of my hero.
Besides, you know that Caesar is not himself when he is in wrath. Has not
experience taught me that no reasons are strong enough to convince a
loving woman's heart? Once more I entreat you, stay here! Reject not the
splendid gift which the gods offer you, that trouble may not come upon
your city as it did on hapless Troy, all for a woman's sake.
"What says the proverb? 'Zeus hearkens not to lovers' vows'; but I say
that to renounce love in order to make others happy, is greater and
harder than to hold fast to it when it is menaced."
These words reminded her of many a lesson of Andreas, and went to her
heart. In her mind's eye she saw Caracalla, after hearing of her flight,
set his lions on Philostratus, and then, foaming with rage, give orders
to drag her father and brothers, Polybius and his son, to the place of
execution, like Titianus. And Philostratus perceived what was going on in
her mind, and with the exhortation, "Remember how many persons' weal or
woe lies in your hands!" he rose and began a conversation with the
Thracian commander of the Germanic guard.
Melissa remained alone upon the divan. The picture changed before her,
and she saw herself in costly purple raiment, glittering with jewels, and
seated by the emperor's side in a golden chariot. A thousand voices
shouted to her, and beside her stood a horn of plenty, running over with
golden solidi and crimson roses, and it never grew empty, however much
she took from it. Her heart was moved; and when, in the crowd which her
lively imagination had conjured up before her, she caught sight of the
wife of the blacksmith Herophilus, who had been thrown into prison
through an accusation from Zminis, she turned to Caracalla whom she still
imagined seated beside her, and cried, "Pardon!" and Caracalla nodded a
gracious consent, and the next moment Herophilus's wife lay on her
liberated husband's breast, while the broken fetters still clanked upon
his wrists. Their children were there, too, and stretched up their arms
to their parents, offering their happy lips first to them and then to
Melissa.
How beautiful it all was, and how it cheered her compassionate heart!
And this, said the newly awakened, meditative spirit within her, need be
no dream; no, it lay in her power to impart this happiness to herself and
many others, day by day, until the end.
Then she felt that she must arise and cry to her friend, "I will follow
your counsel and remain!" But her imagination had already begun to work
again, and showed her the widow of Titianus, as she entreated Caesar to
spare her noble, innocent husband, while he mercilessly repulsed her. And
it flashed through her mind that her petitions might share the same fate,
when at that moment the emperor's threatening voice sounded from the
adjoining room.
How hateful its strident tones were to her ear! She dropped her eyes and
caught sight of a dark stain on the snow-white plumage of the doves in
the mosaic pavement at her feet.
That was a last trace of the blood of the young tribune, which the
attendants had been unable to remove. And this indelible mark of the
crime which she had witnessed brought the image of the wounded Aurelius
before her: just as he now lay, shaken with fever, so had she seen her
lover a few days before. His pale face rose before her inward sight;
would it not be to him a worse blow than that from the stone, when he
should learn that she had broken her faith to him in order to gain power
and greatness, and to protect others, who were strangers to her, from the
fury of the tyrant?
His heart had been hers from childhood's hour, and it would bleed and
break if she were false to the vows in which he placed his faith. And
even if he succeeded at last in recovering from the wound she must deal
him, his peace and happiness would be destroyed for many a long day. How
could she have doubted for a moment where her real duty lay?
If she followed Philostratus's advice--if she acceded to Caracalla's
wishes--Diodoros would have every right to condemn and curse her. And
could she then feel so entirely blameless? A voice within her instantly
said no; for there had been moments in which her pity had grown so strong
that she felt more warmly toward the sick Caesar than was justifiable.
She could not deny it, for she could not without a blush have described
to her lover what she felt when that mysterious, inexplicable power had
drawn her to the emperor.
And now the conviction rapidly grew strong in her that she must not only
preserve her lover from further trouble, but strive to make good to him
her past errors. The idea of renouncing her love in order to intercede
for others, most likely in vain, and lighten their lot by sacrificing
herself for strangers, while rendering her own and her lover's life
miserable, now seemed to her unnatural, criminal, impossible; and with a
sigh of relief she remembered her promise to Andreas. Now she could once
more look freely into the grave and earnest face of him who had ever
guided her in the right way.
This alone was right--this she would do!
But after the first quick step toward Philostratus, she stood still, once
more hesitating. The saying about the fulfilling of the time recurred to
her as she thought of the Christian, and she said to herself that the
critical moment which comes in every life was before her now. The weal or
woe of her whole future depended on the answer she should give to
Philostratus. The thought struck terror to her heart, but only for a
moment. Then she drew herself up proudly, and, as she approached her
friend, felt with joy that she had chosen the better part; yea, that it
would cost her but little to lay down her life for it.
Though apparently absorbed in his conversation with the Thracian,
Philostratus had not ceased to observe the girl, and his knowledge of
human nature showed him quickly to what decision she had come. Firmly
persuaded that he had won her over to Caracalla's side, he had left her
to her own reflections. He was certain that the seed he had sown in her
mind would take root; she could now clearly picture to herself what
pleasures she would enjoy as empress, and from what she could preserve
others. For she was shrewd and capable of reasoning, and above all--and
from this he hoped the most--she was but a woman. But just because she
was a woman he could not be surprised at her disappointing him in his
expectations. For the sake of Caracalla and those who surrounded him he
would have wished it to be otherwise; but he had become too fond of her,
and had too good a heart, not to be distressed at the thought of seeing
her fettered to the unbridled young tyrant.
Before she could address him, he took his leave of the Thracian. Then, as
he led her back to the divan, he whispered: "Well, I have gained one more
experience. The next time I leave a woman to come to a decision, I shall
anticipate from the first that she will come to an opposite conclusion to
that which, as a philosopher and logical thinker, I should expect of her.
You are determined to keep faith with your betrothed and stab the heart
of this highest of all wooers--after death he will be ranked among the
gods--for such will be the effect of your flight."
Melissa nodded gayly, and rejoined, "The blunt weapon that I carry would
surely not cost Caesar his life, even if he were no future immortal."
"Scarcely," answered Philostratus; "but what he may suffer through you
will drive him to turn his own all-too-sharp sword against others.
Caracalla being a man, my calculations regarding him have generally
proved right. You will see how firmly I believe in them in this case,
when I tell you that I have already taken advantage of a letter brought
by the messengers of the empress-mother to take my leave of the emperor.
For, I reasoned, if Melissa listens to the emperor, she will need no
other confederate than the boy Eros; if, however, she takes flight--then
woe betide those who are within range of the tyrant's arm, and ten times
woe to me who brought the fugitive before his notice! Early to-morrow,
before Caracalla leaves his couch, I shall return with the messengers to
Julia; my place in the ship--"
"O my lord," interrupted Melissa, in consternation, "if you, my kind
protector, forsake me, to whom shall I look for help?"
"You will not require it if you carry out your intentions," said the
philosopher. "Throughout this day you will doubtless need me; and let me
impress upon you once more to behave before Caracalla in such a manner
that even his suspicious mind may not guess what you intend to do. To-day
you will still find me ready to help you. But, hark! That is Caesar
raging again. It is thus he loves to dismiss ambassadors, when he wishes
they should clearly understand that their conditions are not agreeable to
him. And one word more: When a man has grown gray, it is doubly soothing
to his heart that a lovely maiden should so frankly regret the parting. I
was ever a friend of your amiable sex, and even to this day Eros is
sometimes not unfavorably inclined to me. But you, the more charming you
are, the more deeply do I regret that I may not be more to you than an
old and friendly mentor. But pity at first kept love from speaking, and
then the old truth that every woman's heart may be won save that which
already belongs to another."
The elderly admirer of the fair sex spoke these words in such a pleasant,
regretful tone that Melissa gave him an affectionate glance from her
large, bright eyes, and answered, archly: "Had Eros shown Philostratus
the way to Melissa instead of Diodoros, Philostratus might now be
occupying the place in this heart which belongs to the son of Polybius,
and which must always be his in spite of Caesar!"
CHAPTER XXIV.
The door of the tablinum flew open, and through it streamed the Parthian
ambassadors, seven stately personages, wearing the gorgeous costume of
their country, and followed by an interpreter and several scribes.
Melissa noticed how one of them, a young warrior with a fair beard
framing his finely molded, heroic face, and thick, curling locks escaping
from beneath his tiara, grasped the hilt of his sword in his sinewy hand,
and how his neighbor, a cautious, elderly man, was endeavoring to calm
him.
Scarcely had they left the antechamber than Adventus called Melissa and
Philostratus to the emperor. Caracalla was seated on a raised throne of
gold and ivory, with bright scarlet cushions. As on the preceding day, he
was magnificently dressed, and wore a laurel wreath on his head. The
lion, who lay chained beside the throne, stirred as he caught sight of
the new-comers, which caused Caracalla to exclaim to Melissa: "You have
stayed away from me so long that my 'Sword of Persia' fails to recognize
you. Were it not more to my taste to show you how dear you are to me, I
could be angry with you, coy bird that you are!"
As Melissa bent respectfully before him, he gazed delighted into her
glowing face, saying, as he turned half to her and half to Philostratus:
"How she blushes! She is ashamed that, though I could get no sleep during
the night, and was tortured by an indescribable restlessness, she refused
to obey my call, although she very well knows that the one remedy for her
sleepless friend lies in her beautiful little hand. Hush, hush! The
high-priest has told me that you did not sleep beneath the same roof as
I. But that only turned my thoughts in the right direction. Child,
child!--See now, Philostratus--the red rose has become a white one. And
how timid she is! Not that it offends me, far from it--it delights
me.--Those flowers, Philostratus! Take them, Melissa; they add less to
your beauty than you to theirs." He seized the splendid roses he had
ordered for her early that morning and fastened the finest in her girdle
himself. She did not forbid him, and stammered a few-low words of thanks.
How his face glowed! His eyes rested in ecstatic delight upon his chosen
one. In this past night, after he had called for her and waited in vain
with feverish longing for her coming, it had dawned on him with
convincing force that this gentle child had awakened a new, intense
passion in him. He loved her, and he was glad of it--he who till now had
taken but a passing pleasure in beautiful women. Longing for her till it
became torture, he swore to himself to make her his, and share his all
with her, even to the purple.
It was not his habit to hesitate, and at daybreak he had sent for his
mother's messengers that they might inform her of his resolve. No one
dared to gainsay him, and he expected it least of all from her whom he
designed to raise so high. But she felt utterly estranged from him, and
would gladly have told him to his face what she felt.
Still, it was absolutely necessary that she should restrain herself and
endure his insufferable endearments, and even force herself to speak. And
yet her tongue seemed tied, and it was only by the utmost effort of her
will that she could bring herself to express her astonishment at his
rapid return to health.
"It is like magic," she concluded, and he heartily agreed. Attacks of
that kind generally left their effects for four days or more. But the
most astonishing thing was that in spite of being in the best of health,
he was suffering from the gravest illness in the world. "I have fallen a
victim to the fever of love, my Philostratus," he cried, with a tender
glance at Melissa.
"Nay, Caesar," interrupted the philosopher, "love is not a disease, but
rather not loving."
"Prove this new assertion," laughed the emperor; and the philosopher
rejoined, with a meaning look at the maiden, "If love is born in the
eyes, then those who do not love are blind."
"But," answered Caracalla, gayly, "they say that love comes not only from
what delights the eye, but the soul and the mind as well."
"And have not the mind and the spirit eyes also?" was the reply, to which
the emperor heartily assented.
Then he turned to Melissa, and asked with gentle reproach why she, who
had proved herself so ready of wit yesterday, should be so reserved
today; but she excused her taciturnity on the score of the violent
emotions that had stormed in upon her since the morning.
Her voice broke at the end of this explanation, and Caracalla, concluding
that it was the thought of the grandeur that awaited her through his
favor which confused her and brought the delicate color to her cheeks,
seized her hand, and, obedient to an impulse of his better nature, said:
"I understand you, child. Things are befalling you that would make a
stouter heart tremble. You have only heard hints of what must effect such
a decisive change in your future life. You know how I feel toward you. I
acknowledged to you yesterday what you already knew without words. We
both feel the mysterious power that draws us to one another. We belong to
each other. In the future, neither time nor space nor any other thing may
part us. Where I am there you must be also. You shall be my equal in
every respect. Every honor paid to me shall be offered to you likewise. I
have shown the malcontents what they have to expect. The fate which
awaits the consul Claudius Vindex and his nephew, who by their want of
respect to you offended me, will teach the others to have a care."
"O my lord, that aged man!" cried Melissa, clasping her hands,
imploringly.
"He shall die, and his nephew," was the inexorable answer. "During my
conference with my mother's messengers they had the presumption to raise
objections against you and the ardent desire of my heart in a manner
which came very near to being treason. And they must suffer for it."
"You would punish them for my sake?" exclaimed Melissa. "But I forgive
them willingly. Grant them pardon! I beg, I entreat you."
"Impossible! Unless I make an example, it will be long before the
slanderous tongues would hold their peace. Their sentence stands."
But Melissa would not be appeased. With passionate eagerness she
entreated the emperor to grant a pardon, but he cut her short with the
request not to interfere in matters which he alone had to decide and
answer for.
"I owe it to you as well as to myself," he continued, "to remove every
obstacle from the path. Were I to spare Vindex, they would never again
believe in my strength of purpose. He shall die, and his nephew with him!
To raise a structure without first securing a solid foundation would be
an act of rashness and folly. Besides, I undertake nothing without
consulting the omens. The horoscope which the priest of this temple has
drawn up for you only confirms me in my purpose. The examination of the
sacrifices this morning was favorable. It now only remains to be seen
what the stars say to my resolve. I had not yet taken it when I last
questioned the fortune-tellers of the sky. This night we shall learn what
future the planets promise to our union. From the signs on yonder tablet
it is scarcely possible that their answer should be otherwise than
favorable. But even should they warn me of misfortune at your side, I
could not let you go now. It is too late for that. I should merely take
advantage of the warning, and continue with redoubled severity to sweep
away every obstacle that threatens our union. And one thing more--"
But he did not finish, for Epagathos here reminded him of the deputation
of Alexandrian citizens who had come to speak about the games in the
Circus. They had been waiting several hours, and had still many
arrangements to make.
"Did they send you to me?" inquired Caracalla, with irritation, and the
freedman answering in the affirmative, he cried: "The princes who wait in
my antechamber do not stir until their turn comes. These tradesmen's
senses are confused by the dazzle of their gold! Tell them they shall be
called when we find time to attend to them."
"The head of the night-watch too is waiting," said the freedman; and to
the emperor's question whether he had seen him, and if he had anything of
consequence to report, the other replied that the man was much
disquieted, but seemed to be exercising proper severity. He ventured to
remind his master of the saying that the Alexandrians must have 'Panem et
circenses'; they did not trouble themselves much about anything else. In
these days, when there had been neither games, nor pageants, nor
distribution of corn, the Romans and Caesar had been their sole subjects
of conversation. However, there was to be something quite unusually grand
in the Circus to-night. That would distract the attention of the impudent
slanderers. The night-watchman greatly desired to speak to the emperor
himself, to prepare him for the fact that excitement ran higher in the
Circus here than even in Rome. In spite of every precaution, he would not
be able to keep the rabble in the upper rows quiet.
"Nor need they be," broke in the emperor; "the louder they shout the
better; and I fancy they will see things which will be worth shouting
for. I have no time to see the man. Let him thoroughly realize that he is
answerable for any real breach of order."
He signed to Epagathos to retire, but Melissa went nearer to Caesar and
begged him gently not to let the worthy citizens wait any longer on her
account.
At this Caracalla frowned ominously, and cried: "For the second time, let
me ask you not to interfere in matters that do not concern you! If any
one dares to order me--" Here he stopped short, for, as Melissa drew back
from him frightened, he was conscious of having betrayed that even love
was not strong enough to make him control himself. He was angry with
himself, and with a great effort he went on, more quietly:
"When I give an order, my child, there often lies much behind it of which
I alone know. Those who force themselves upon Caesar, as these citizens
do, must learn to have patience. And you--if you would fill the position
to which I intend to raise you--must first take care to leave all paltry
considerations and doubts behind you. However, all that will come of
itself. Softness and mercy melt on the throne like ice before the sun.
You will soon learn to scorn this tribe of beggars who come whining round
us. If I flew in a passion just now, it was partly your fault. I had a
right to expect that you would be more eager to hear me out than to
shorten the time of waiting for these miserable merchants."
With this his voice grew rough again, but as she raised her eyes to him
and cried beseechingly, "O, my lord!" he continued, more gently:
"There was not much more to be said. You shall be mine. Should the stars
confirm their first revelations, I shall raise you to-morrow to my side,
here in the city of Alexandria, and make the people do homage to you as
their empress. The priest of Alexandria is ready to conduct the marriage
ceremonial. Philostratus will inform my mother of my determination."
Melissa had listened to these arrangements with growing distress; her
breath came fast, and she was incapable of uttering a word; but Caesar
was delighted at the lovely confusion painted on her features, and cried,
in joyful excitement:
"How I have looked forward to this moment--and I have succeeded in
surprising her! This is what makes imperial power divine; by one wave of
the hand it can raise the lowest to the highest place!"
With this he drew Melissa toward him, kissed the trembling girl upon the
brow, and continued, in delighted tones:
"Time does not stand still, and only a few hours separate us from the
accomplishment of our desires. Let us lend them wings. We resolved
yesterday to show one another what we could do as singers and
lute-players. There lies my lyre--give it me, Philostratus. I know what I
shall begin with."
The philosopher brought and tuned the instrument; but Melissa had some
difficulty in keeping back her tears. Caracalla's kiss burned like a
brand of infamy on her brow. A nameless, torturing restlessness had come
over her, and she wished she could dash the lyre to the ground, when
Caracalla began to play, and called out to Philostratus:
"As you are leaving us to-morrow, I will sing the song which you honored
with a place in your heroic tale."
He turned to Melissa, and, as she owned to having read the work of the
philosopher, he went on "You know, then, that I was the model for his
Achilles. The departed spirit of the hero is enjoying in the island of
Leuke, in the Pontus, the rest which he so richly deserves, after a life
full of heroic deeds. Now he finds time to sing to the lyre, and
Philostratus put the following verses--but they are mine--into his
mouth.--I am about to play, Adventus! Open the door!"
The freedman obeyed, and the emperor peered into the antechamber to see
for himself who was waiting there.
He required an audience when he sang. The Circus had accustomed him to
louder applause than his beloved and one skilled musician could award
him. At last he swept the strings, and began singing in a well-trained
tenor, whose sharp, hard quality, however, offended the girl's critical
ear, the song to the echo on the shores of Pontus:
Echo, by the rolling waters
Bathing Pontus' rocky shore,
Wake, and answer to the lyre
Swept by my inspired hand!
Wake, and raise thy voice in numbers
Sing to Homer, to the bard
Who has given life immortal
To the heroes of his lay.
He it was from death who snatched me;
He who gave Patroclus life;
Rescued, in perennial glory,
Godlike Ajax from the dead!
His the lute to whose sweet accents,
Ilion owes undying fame,
And the triumph and the praises
Which surround her deathless name.
The "Sword of Persia" seemed peculiarly affected by his master's song,
which he accompanied by a long-drawn howl of woe; and, before the
imperial virtuoso had concluded, a discordant cry sounded for a short
time from the street, in imitation of the squeaking of young pigs. It
arose from the crowd who were waiting round the Serapeum to see Caesar
drive to the Circus; and Caracalla must have noticed it, for, when it
waxed louder, he gave a sidelong glance toward the place from which it
came, and an ominous frown gathered upon his brow.
But it soon vanished, for scarcely had he finished when stormy shouts of
applause rose from the antechamber. They proceeded from the friends of
Caesar, and the deep voices of the Germanic bodyguard, who, joining in
with the cries they had learned in the Circus, lent such impetuous force
to the applause, as even to satisfy this artist in the purple.
Therefore, when Philostratus spoke words of praise, and Melissa thanked
him with a blush, he answered with a smile: "There is something frank and
untrammeled in their manner of expressing their feelings outside. Forced
applause sounds differently. There must be something in my singing that
carries the hearers away. My Alexandrian hosts, however, are overready to
show me what they think. It did not escape me, and I shall add it to the
rest."
Then he invited Melissa to make a return for his song by singing Sappho's
Ode to Aphrodite. Pale, and as if obeying some strange compulsion, she
seated herself at the instrument, and the prelude sounded clear and
tuneful from her skillful fingers.
"Beautiful! Worthy of Mesomedes!" cried Caracalla, but Melissa could not
sing, for at the first note her voice was broken by stormy sobs.
"The power of the goddess whom she meant to extol!" said Philostratus,
pointing to her; and the tearful, beseeching look with which she met the
emperor's gaze while she begged him in low tones--"Not now! I can not do
it to-day!"--confirmed Caracalla in his opinion that the passion he had
awakened in the maiden was in no way inferior to his own-perhaps even
greater. He relieved his full heart by whispering to Melissa a
passionate, "I love you," and, desiring to show her by a favor how kindly
he felt toward her, added: "I will not let your fellow-citizens wait
outside any longer--Adventus! The deputation from the Circus!"
The chamberlain withdrew at once, and the emperor throwing himself back
on the throne, continued, with a sigh:
"I wonder how any of these rich tradesmen would like to undertake what I
have already gone through this day. First, the bath; then, while I
rested, Macrinus's report; after that, the inspection of the sacrifices;
then a review of the troops, with a gracious word to every one. Scarcely
returned, I had to receive the ambassadors from my mother, and then came
the troublesome affair with Vindex. Then the dispatches from Rome
arrived, the letters to be examined, and each one to be decided on and
signed. Finally the settling of accounts with the idiologos, who, as
high-priest of my choosing, has to collect the tribute from all the
temples in Egypt. . . . Next I gave audience to several people--to your
father among the rest. He is strange, but a thorough man, and a true
Macedonian of the old stock. He repelled both greeting and presents, but
he longed to be revenged--heavily and bloodily--on Zminis, who denounced
him and brought him to the galleys. . . . How the old fellow must have
raged and stormed when he was a prisoner! I treated the droll old
gray-beard like my father. The giant pleases me, and what skillful
fingers he has on his powerful hands! He gave me that ring with the
portraits of Castor and Pollux."
"My brothers were the models," remarked Melissa, glad to find something
to say without dissembling.
Caracalla examined the stone in the gold ring more closely, and exclaimed
in admiration: "How delicate the little heads are! At the first glance
one recognizes the hand of the happily gifted artist. Your father's is
one of the noblest and most refined of the arts. If I can raise a statue
to a lute-player, I can do so to a gem-cutter."
Here the deputation for the arrangement of the festival was announced,
but the emperor, calling out once more, "Let them wait," continued:
"You are a handsome race--the men powerful, the women as lovely as
Aphrodite. That is as it should be! My father before me took the wisest
and fairest woman to wife. You are the fairest--the wisest?--well, that
too, perhaps. Time will show. But Aphrodite never has a high forehead,
and, according to Philostratus, beauty and wisdom are hostile sisters
with you women."
"Exceptions," interposed the philosopher, as he pointed to Melissa,
"prove the rule."
"Describe her in that manner to my mother," said Caracalla. "I would not
let you go from me, were you not the only person who knows Melissa. I may
trust in your eloquence to represent her as she deserves. And now," he
continued, hurriedly, "one thing more. As soon as the deputation is
dismissed and I have received a few other persons, the feast is to begin.
You would perhaps be entertained at it. However, it will be better to
introduce you to my 'friends' after the marriage ceremony. After dark, to
make up for it, there is the Circus, to which you will, of course,
accompany me."
"Oh, my lord!" exclaimed the maiden, frightened and unwilling. But
Caracalla cried, decisively: "No refusal, I must beg! I imagine that I
have proved sufficiently that I know how to shield you from what is not
fitting for a maiden. What I ask of you now is but the first step on the
new path of honor that awaits you as future empress."
Melissa raised both voice and hands in entreaty, but in vain. Caracalla
cut her short, saying in authoritative tones:
"I have arranged everything. You will go to the Circus. Not alone with
me-that would give welcome work to scandalous tongues. Your father shall
accompany you--your brothers, too, if you wish it. I shall not join you
till after the performance has begun. Your fellow-citizens will divine
the meaning of this visit. Besides, Theocritus and the rest have orders
to acquaint the people with the distinction that awaits you and the
Alexandrians. But why so pale? Your cheeks will regain their color in the
Circus. I know I am right--you will leave it delighted and enthralled.
You have only to learn for the first time how the acclamations of tens of
thousands take hold upon the heart and intoxicate the senses. Courage,
courage, Macedonian maiden! Everything grand and unexpected, even
unforeseen happiness, is alarming and bewildering. But we become
accustomed even to the impossible. A strong spirit like yours soon gets
over anything of the kind. But the time is running on. One word more: You
must be in the Circus by sunset. In any case, you must be in your place
before I come. Adventus will see that you have a chariot or a litter,
whichever you please. Theocritus will be waiting at the entrance to lead
you to your seats."
Melissa could restrain herself no longer, and, carried away by the wild
conflict of passions in her breast, she threw control and prudence to the
winds, and cried:
"I will not!" Then throwing back her head as if to call the heavens to
witness, she raised her great, wide-open eyes and gazed above.
But not for long. Her bold defiance had roused Caesar's utmost fury, and
he broke out with a growl of rage:
"You will not, you say? And you think, unreasoning fool, that this
settles the matter?"
He uttered a wild laugh, pressed his hand firmly on his left eyelid,
which began to twitch convulsively, and went on in a lower but defiantly
contemptuous tone:
"I know better! You shall! And you will not only go to the Circus, but
you will do it willingly, or at least with smiling lips. You will start
at sunset! At the time appointed I shall find you in your place. If
not!--Must I begin so soon to teach you that I can be serious? Have a
care, girl! You are dear to me; yet--by the head of my father!--if you
defy me, my Numidian lion-keepers shall drag you to the place you belong
to!"
Thus far Melissa had listened to the emperor's raging with panting bosom
and quivering nostrils, as at a performance, which must sooner or later
come to an end; and now she broke in regardless of the consequences:
"Send for them," she cried, "and order them to throw me to the wild
beasts! It will doubtless be a welcome surprise to the lookers-on. Which
of them can say they have ever seen the daughter of a free Roman citizen
who never yet came before the law, torn to pieces in the sand of the
arena? They delight in anything new! Yes, murder me, as you did
Plautilla, although I never offended either you or your mother! Better
die a hundred deaths than parade my dishonor before the eyes of the
multitude in the open Circus!"
She ceased, incapable of further resistance, threw herself weeping on the
divan, and buried her face in the cushions.
Confounded and bewildered by such audacity, the emperor had heard her
out. The soul of a hero dwelt in the frail body of this maiden! Majestic
as all-conquering Venus she had resisted him for the second tune, and now
how touching did she appear in her tears and weakness! He loved her, and
his heart yearned to raise her in his arms, to beg her forgiveness, and
fulfill her every wish. But he was a man and a monarch, and his desire to
show Melissa to the people in the Circus as his chosen bride had become a
fixed resolve during the past sleepless night. And indeed he was
incapable of renouncing any wish or a plan, even if he felt inclined to
do so. Yet he heartily regretted having stormed at the gentle Greek girl
like some wild barbarian, and thus himself thrown obstacles in the way of
attaining his desire. His hot blood had carried him away again. Surely
some demon led him so often into excesses which he afterward repented of.
This time the fiend had been strong in him, and he must use every gentle
persuasion he knew of to bend the deeply offended maiden to his will.
He was relieved not to meet her intense gaze as he advanced toward her
and took Philostratus's place, who whispered to her to control herself
and not bring death and ruin upon them all.
"I Truly I meant well toward you, dearest," he began, in altered tones.
"But we are both like overfull vessels--one drop will make them overflow.
You--confess now that you forgot yourself. And I--On the throne we grow
unaccustomed to opposition. It is fortunate that the flame of my anger
dies out so quickly. But it lies with you to prevent it from ever
breaking out; for I should always endeavor to fulfill a kindly expressed
wish, if it were possible. This time, however, I must insist--"
Melissa turned toward the emperor, and stretching out beseeching hands,
she cried:
"Bid me do anything, however hard, and it shall be done, but do not force
me to go with you to the Circus. If my mother were only alive! Wherever I
could go with her was right. But my father, not to speak of my madcap
brother Alexander, do not know what befits a maiden, nor does anybody
expect it of them."
"And rightly," interposed Caracalla. "Now I understand your opposition,
and thank you for it. But it fortunately lies in my power to remove your
objection. The women have to obey me, too. I shall at once issue the
necessary orders. You shall appear in the Circus surrounded by the
noblest matrons of the city. The wives of these citizens shall accompany
you. Even my mother will be sure to approve of this arrangement.
Farewell, then, till we meet again in the Circus!"
He spoke the last words with proud satisfaction, and with the grave
demeanor that Cilo had taught him to adopt in the curia.
He then gave the order to admit the Alexandrian citizens, and the words
of entreaty died upon the lips of the unfortunate imperial bride, for the
folding doors were thrown open and the deputation advanced through them.
Old Adventus signed to Melissa, and with drooping head she followed him
through the rooms and corridors that led to the apartments of the
highpriest.
CHAPTER XXV.
Melissa had wept her fill on the breast of the lady Euryale, who listened
to her woes with motherly sympathy, and yet she felt as if a biting frost
had broken and destroyed the blossoms which only yesterday had so richly
and hopefully decked her young heart. Diodoros's love had been to her
like the fair and sunny summer days that turn the sour, hard fruit into
sweet and juicy grapes. And now the frost had nipped them. The whole
future, and everything round her, now looked gray, colorless, and flat.
Only two thoughts held possession of her mind: on the one hand, that of
her betrothed, from whom this visit to the Circus threatened to separate
her forever; and on the other, that of her imperial lover, to escape whom
she would have flown anywhere, even to the grave.
Euryale remarked with concern how weary and broken Melissa looked--so
different from her usual bright self, while she listened to her father
and Alexander as they consulted with the lady as to the future.
Philostratus, who had promised his advice, did not appear; and to the
gem-cutter, no proposal could seem so unwelcome as that of leaving his
native city and his sick favorite, Philip.
He considered it senseless, and a result of the thoroughly wrong-headed
views of sentimental women, to reject the monarch of the world when he
made honorable proposals to an unpretending girl. But the lady
Euryale--of whom his late wife had always spoken with the highest
respect--and, supported by her, his son Alexander, had both represented
to him so forcibly that a union with the emperor would render Melissa
most unhappy, if it did not lead to death, that he had been reduced to
silence. Only, when they spoke of the necessity of flight, he burst out
again, declaring that the time had not yet come for such extreme
measures.
When Melissa now rejoined them, he spoke of the emperor's behavior toward
her as being worthy of a man of honor, and endeavored to touch her heart
by representing what an old man must feel who should be forced to leave
the house where his father and grandfather had lived before him, and even
the town whose earth held all that was dearest to him.
Here the tears which so easily rose to his eyes began to flow, and,
seeing that Melissa's tender heart was moved by his sorrow, he gained
confidence, and reproached his daughter for having kindled Caracalla's
love, by her radiant eyes--so like her mother's! Honestly believing that
his affection was returned, Caesar was offering her the highest honor in
his power; if she fled from him, he would have every right to complain of
having been basely deceived, and to call her a heartless wanton.
Alexander now came to his sister's aid, and reminded him how Melissa had
hazarded life and liberty to save him and her brothers. She had been
forced to look so kindly into the tyrant's face if only to sue for their
pardon, and it became him ill to make this a reproach to his daughter.
Melissa nodded gratefully to her brother, but Heron remained firm in his
assertion that to think of flight would be foolish, or at least
premature.
At this, Alexander repeated to him that Melissa had whispered in his ear
that she would rather die at once than live in splendor, but in perpetual
fear, by the side of an unloved husband; whereupon Heron began to breathe
hard, as he always did before an outburst of anger.
But a message, calling him to the emperor's presence, soon calmed him.
At parting, he kissed Melissa, and murmured "Would you really drive your
old father out of our dear home, away from his work, and his birds--from
his garden, and your mother's grave? Is it then so terrible to live as
empress, in splendor and honor? I am going to Caesar--you can not hinder
me from greeting him kindly from you?"
Without waiting for an answer, he left the room; but when he was outside
he took care to glance at himself in the mirror, arrange his beard and
hair, and place his gigantic form in a few of the dignified attitudes he
intended to adopt in the presence of the emperor.
Meanwhile Melissa had thrown off the indifference into which she had
fallen, and her old doubts raised their warning heads with renewed force.
Alexander swore to be her faithful ally; Euryale once more assured her of
her assistance; and yet, more especially when she was moved with pity for
her father, who was to leave all he loved for her sake, she felt as if
she were being driven hither and thither, in some frail bark, at the
mercy of the waves.
Suddenly a new idea flashed through her mind. She rose quickly.
"I will go to Diodoros," she cried, "and tell him all! He shall decide."
"Just now?" asked Euryale, startled. "You would certainly not find your
betrothed alone, and since all the world knows of Caracalla's intentions,
and gazes curiously after you, your visit would instantly be reported to
Caesar. Nor is it advisable for you to present yourself before your
offended lover, when you have neither Andreas nor any one else to speak
for you and take your part."
Melissa burst into tears, but the matron drew her to her and continued
tenderly:
"You must give that up--but, Alexander, do you go to your friend, and be
your sister's mouthpiece!"
The artist consented with all the ardor of brotherly affection, and
having received from Melissa, whose courage began to rise again, strict
injunctions as to what he was to say to her lover, he departed on his
errand.
Wholly absorbed by the stormy emotions of her heart, the maiden had
forgotten time and every external consideration; but the lady Euryale was
thoughtful for her, and now led her to her chamber to have her hair
dressed for the Circus. The matron carefully avoided, for the present,
all mention of her young friend's flight, though her mind was constantly
occupied with it--and not in vain.
The skillful waiting-woman, whom she had bought from the house of the
priest of Alexander, who was a Roman knight, loosened the girl's abundant
brown hair, and, with loud cries of admiration, declared it would be easy
to dress such locks in the most approved style of fashion. She then laid
the curling-irons on the dish of coals which stood on a slender tripod,
and was about to twist it into ringlets; but Melissa, who had never
resorted to such arts, refused to permit it. The slave assured her,
however, as earnestly as if it were a matter of the highest importance,
that it was impossible to arrange the curls of a lady of distinction
without the irons. Euryale, too, begged Melissa to allow it, as nothing
would make her so conspicuous in her overdressed surroundings as
excessive simplicity. That was quite true, but it made the girl realize
so vividly what was before her, that she covered her face with her hands
and sobbed out:
"To be exposed to the gaze of the whole city--to its envy and its scorn!"
The matron's warning inquiry, what had become of her favorite's
high-minded calm, and her advice to restrain her weeping, lest she should
appear before the public in the Amphitheater with tear-stained eyes,
helped her to compose herself.
The tire-woman had not finished her work when Alexander returned, and
Melissa dared not turn her head for fear of disturbing her in her task.
But when Alexander began his report with the exclamation, "Who knows what
foolish gossip has driven him to this?" she sprang up, regardless of the
slave's warning cry. And as her brother went on to relate how Diodoros
had left the Serapeum, in spite of the physician's entreaty to wait at
least until next morning, but that Melissa need not take it greatly to
heart, it was too much for the girl who had already that day gone through
such severe and varied experiences. The ground seemed to heave beneath
her feet; sick and giddy she put out her hand to find some support, that
she might not sink on her knees; in so doing, she caught the tall tripod
which held the dish of coals. It swayed and fell clattering to the
ground, bringing the irons with it. Its burning contents fell partly on
the floor and partly on the festal robe which Melissa had thrown over a
chair before loosening her hair. Alexander caught her just in time to
prevent her falling.
With her healthy nature, Melissa soon regained consciousness, and during
the first few moments her distress over the spoiled garment threw every
other thought into the background. Shaking her head gravely over the
black-edged holes which the coals had burned in the peplos and the
under-robes, Euryale secretly rejoiced at the accident. She remembered
that when her heart was torn and bleeding, after the death of her only
child, her thoughts were taken off herself by the necessary duty of
providing mourning garments for herself, her husband, and the slaves.
This trivial task had at least helped her to forget for a few hours the
bitterness of her grief.
Only anxious to lighten in some sort the fate of the sweet young creature
whom she had learned to love, she made much of the difficulty of
procuring a fresh dress for Melissa, though she was perfectly aware that
her sister-in-law possessed many such. Alexander was commissioned to take
one of the emperor's chariots--which always stood ready for the use of
the courtiers between the Serapeum and the springs on the east--and to
hasten to the lady Berenike. The lady begged that he, as an artist, would
assist in choosing the robe; and the less conspicuous and costly it was
the better.
To this Melissa heartily agreed, and, after Alexander had gone, Euryale
bore off her pale young charge to the eating-room, where she forced her
to take some old wine and a little food, which she would not touch
before. As the attendant filled the wine-cup, the high-priest himself
joined them, greeted Melissa briefly and with measured courtesy, and
begged his wife to follow him for a moment into the tablinum.
The attendant, a slave who had grown gray in the service of Timotheus,
now begged the young guest, as though he represented his mistress, to
take a little food, and not to sip so timidly from the winecup. But the
lonely repast was soon ended, and Melissa, strengthened and refreshed,
withdrew to the sleeping-apartment. Only light curtains hung at the doors
of the high-priest's hurriedly furnished rooms, and no one noticed
Melissa's entrance into the adjoining chamber.
She had never played the eavesdropper, but she had neither the presence
of mind to withdraw, nor could she avoid hearing that her own name was
mentioned.
It was the lady who spoke, and her husband answered in excited tones:
"As to your Christianity, and whatever there may be in it that is
offensive to me as high-priest of a heathen god, we will speak of that
later. It is not a question now of a difference of opinion, but of a
serious danger, which you with your easily-moved heart will bring down
upon yourself and me. The gem-cutter's daughter is a lovely creature--I
will not deny it--and worthy of your sympathy; besides which, you, as a
woman, can not bear to see her most sacred feelings wounded."
"And would you let your hands he idle in your lap," interposed his wife,
"if you saw a lovable, innocent child on the edge of a precipice, and
felt yourself strong enough to save her from falling? You can not have
asked yourself what would be the fate of a girl like Melissa if she were
Caracalla's wife."
"Indeed I have," Timotheus assured her gravely, "and nothing would please
me better than that the maiden should succeed in escaping that fate.
But--the time is short, and I must be brief--the emperor is our guest,
and honors me with boundless confidence. Just now he disclosed to me his
determination to make Melissa his wife, and I was forced to approve it.
Thus he looks to me to carry out his wishes; and if the maiden escapes,
and there falls on you, or, through you, on me, the shadow of a suspicion
of having assisted in her flight, he will have every right to regard me
as a traitor and to treat me as such. To others my life is made sacred by
my high office, but the man to whom a human life--no matter whose--is no
more than that of a sacrificial animal is to you or me, that man would
shed the blood of us both without a quiver of the eyelid."
"Then let him!" cried Euryale, hotly. "My bereaved and worn-out life is
but a small price to pay for that of an innocent, blameless creature,
glowing with youth and all the happiness of requited love, and with a
right to the highest joys that life can offer."
"And I?" exclaimed Timotheus, angrily. "What am I to you since the death
of our child? For the sake of the first person that came to you as a poor
substitute for our lost daughter, you are ready to go to your death, and
to drag me with you into the gloom of Hades. There speaks the Christian!
Even that gentle philosopher on the throne, Marcus Aurelius, was
disgusted at your fellow-believers' hideous mania for death. The
Christian expects in the next world all that is denied to him in this.
But we think of this life, in which the Deity has placed us. To me life
is the highest blessing, and yours is dearer to me than my own. Therefore
I say, firmly and decidedly: Melissa must not make her escape from this
house. If she is determined to fly this night, let her do so--I shall not
hinder her. If your counsel is of service to her, I am glad; but she must
not enter this house again after the performance in the Circus, unless
she be firmly resolved to become Caesar's wife. If she can not bring
herself to this, the apartments which belong to us must be closed against
her, as against a dangerous foe."
"And whither can she go?" asked Euryale, sadly and with tearful eyes, for
there was no gainsaying so definite an order from her lord and master.
"The moment she is missed, they will search her father's house; and, if
she takes advantage of Berenike's ship, it will soon be discovered that
it was your brother's wife who helped her to escape from Caracalla."
"Berenike will know what to do," answered Timotheus, composedly. "She, if
any one, knows how to take care of herself. She has the protection of her
influential brother-in-law, Coeranus; and just now there is nothing she
would not do to strike a blow at her hated enemy."
"How sorrow and revenge have worked upon that strange woman!" exclaimed
the lady, sadly. "Caracalla has injured her, it is true--"
"He has, and to-day he has added a further, deeper insult, for he forces
her to appear in the Amphitheater, with the wives of the other citizens
who bear the cost of this performance. I was there, and heard him say to
Seleukus, who was acting as spokesman, that he counted on seeing his
wife, of whom he had heard so much, in her appointed place this evening.
"This will add fuel to the fire of her hatred. If she only does not allow
her anger to carry her away, and to show it in a manner that she will
afterward regret!--But my time is short. I have to walk before the sacred
images in full ceremonial vestments, and accompanied by the priest of
Alexander. You, unfortunately, take no pleasure in such spectacles. Once
more, then--if the girl is determined to fly, she must not return here. I
repeat, if any one can help her to get away, it is Berenike. Our
sister-in-law must take the consequences. Caesar can not accuse her of
treason, at any rate, and her interference in the matter will clear us of
all suspicion of complicity."
No word of this conversation had escaped Melissa. She learned nothing new
from it, but it affected her deeply.
Warm-hearted as she was, she fully realized the debt of gratitude she
owed to the lady Euryale; and she could not blame the high-priest, whom
prudence certainly compelled to close his doors against her. And yet she
was wounded by his words. She had struggled so hard in these last days to
banish all thought of her own happiness, and shield her dear ones from
harm, that such selfishness appeared doubly cruel to her. Did it not seem
as if this priest of the great Deity to whom she had been taught to pray,
cared little what became of his nearest relatives, so long as he and his
wife were unmolested? That was the opposite of what Andreas had praised
as the highest duty, the last time she had walked with him to the ferry;
and since then Johanna had told her the story of Christ's sufferings, and
she understood the fervor with which the freedman had spoken of the
crucified Son of God--the great example of all unselfishness.
In the enthusiasm of her warm young heart she felt that what she had
heard of the Christians' teacher was beautiful, and that she too would
not find it hard to die for those she loved.
With drooping head Euryale re-entered the room, and gazed with kind,
anxious eyes into the girl's face, as if asking her forgiveness.
Following the impulse of her candid heart, Melissa threw her fair young
arms round the aged lady, and, to her great surprise, after kissing her
warmly on brow and mouth and eyes, cried in tones of tender entreaty:
"Forgive me. I did not want to listen, and yet I could not choose but
hear. No word of your discourse escaped me. I know now that I must not
fly, and that I must bear whatever fate the gods may send me. I used
often to say to myself, 'Of how little importance is my life or my
happiness!' And now that I must give up my lover, come what may I care
not what the future has in store for me. I can never forget Diodoros;
and, when I think that everything is at an end between us, it is as if my
heart were torn in pieces. But I have found out, in these last days, what
heavy troubles one may bear without breaking down. If my flight is to
bring danger, if not death and ruin, upon so many good people, I had
better stay. The man who lusts after me--it is true, when I think of his
embrace my blood runs cold! But perhaps I shall be able to endure even
that. And then--if I crush my heart into silence, and renounce Diodoros
forever, and give myself up to Caesar--as I must--tell me you will not
then close your doors against me, but that I may stay with you till the
horrid hour comes when Caracalla calls me?"
The matron had listened with deep emotion to Melissa's victory over her
desires and her aversions. This heathen maiden, brought up in the right
way by a good mother, and to whom life had taught many a hard lesson, was
she not already treading in the footsteps of the Saviour? This child was
offering up the great and pure love of her heart to preserve others from
sorrow and danger; and what a different course of action was she herself
to pursue in obedience to her husband's orders--her husband, whose duty
it was to offer a shining example to the whole heathen world!
She thought of Abraham's sacrifice, and wondered if the Lord might not
perhaps be satisfied with Melissa's willingness to lay her love upon the
altar. In any case, whatever she, Euryale, could do to save her from the
worst fate that could befall a woman, that should be done, and this time
it was she who drew the other toward her and kissed her.
Her heart was full to overflowing, and yet she did not forget to warn
Melissa to be careful, when she was about to lay her head with its
artificially arranged curls upon the lady's breast.
"No, no," she said, tenderly warding off the maiden's embrace. Then,
laying her hands on the girl's shoulders, she looked her straight in the
face, and continued: "Here you will ever find a resting-place. When your
hair lies smoothly round your sweet face, as it did yesterday, then lay
it on my breast as often as you will. Aye, and it can and shall be here
in the Serapeum; though not in these rooms, which my lord and master
closes against you. I told you of the time being fulfilled for each one
of us, and when yours came you proved yourself to be the good tree of
which our Lord speaks as bearing good fruit. You look at me inquiringly;
how indeed should you understand the words of a Christian? But I shall
find time enough in the next few days to explain them to you; for--I say
it again--you shall remain near me while the emperor searches the city
and half the world over for you. Keep that firmly in your mind and let it
help to give you courage in the Circus."
"But my father?" cried Melissa, pointing to the curtain, through which
Heron's loud voice now became audible.
"Depend on me," whispered the lady, hurriedly; "and rest assured that he
will be warned in time. Do not betray my promise. If we were to take him
into our confidence now, he would spoil all. As soon as he is gone, and
your brother has returned, you two shall hear--"
They were interrupted by the steward, who, with a peculiar smile upon his
clean-shaven lips, came to announce Heron's visit.
The communicative gem-cutter had already confided to the servant what it
was that agitated him so greatly, but Melissa was astonished at the
change in her father's manner.
The shuffling gait of the gigantic, unwieldy man, who had grown gray
stooping over his work, had gained a certain majestic dignity. His cheeks
glowed, and the gray eyes, which had long since acquired a fixed look
from straining over the gemcutting, now beamed with a blissful radiance.
Something wonderful must have happened to him, and, without waiting to be
questioned by the lady, he poured out to her the news that he would have
been overjoyed to have shouted in the market-place for all to hear.
The reception accorded to him at Caesar's table, he declared, had been
flattering beyond all words. The godlike monarch had treated him more
considerately, nay, sometimes with more reverence, than his own sons. The
best dishes had been put before him, and Caracalla had asked all sorts of
questions about his future consort, and, on hearing that Melissa had sent
him greetings, he had raised himself and drunk to him as if he were a
friend.
His table-companions, too, had treated Heron with every distinction.
Immediately on his arrival the monarch had desired them to honor him as
the father of the future empress. They had all agreed with him in
demanding that Zminis the Egyptian should be punished with death, and had
even encouraged him to give the reins to his righteous anger. He, if any
one, was in the habit of being moderate in all things, if only as a good
example to his sons; and he had proved in many a Dionysiac feast that the
god could not easily overpower him. The amount of wine he had drunk
to-day would generally have had no more effect upon him than water, and
yet he had felt now and then as if he were drunken, and the whole festal
hall turned round with him. Even now he would be quite incapable of
walking forward in a given straight line.
With the exclamation, "Such is life!--a few hours ago on the
rowing-bench, and fighting with the brander of the galleys for trying to
brand me with the slave-mark, and now one of the greatest among the
great!" he closed his tale, for a glance through the window showed him
that time pressed.
With strange bashfulness he then gazed at a ring upon his right hand, and
said hesitatingly that his own modesty made the avowal difficult to him;
but the fact was, he was not the same man as when he last left the
ladies. By the grace of the emperor he had been made a praetorian. Caesar
had at first wanted to make him a knight; but he esteemed his Macedonian
descent higher than that class, to which too many freed slaves belonged
for his taste. This he had frankly acknowledged, and the emperor must
have considered his objections valid, for he immediately spoke a few
words to the prefect Macrinus, and then told the others to greet him as
senator with the rank of praetorian.
Then indeed he felt as if the seat beneath him were transformed into a
wild steed carrying him away, through sea and sky-wherever it pleased. He
had had to hold tightly to the arm of the couch, and only remembered that
some one--who it was he did not know--had whispered to him to thank
Caesar.
"This," continued the gem-cutter, "restored me so far to myself that I
could express my gratitude to your future husband, my child. I am only
the second Egyptian who has entered the senate. Coeranus was the only one
before me. What favor! And how can I describe what followed? All the
distinguished members of the senate and the past consuls offered me a
brotherly embrace as their new colleague. When Caesar commanded me to
appear at your side in the Circus, wearing the white toga with the broad
purple stripe, and I remarked that the shops of the better
clothes-sellers would be shut by this time on account of the performance,
and that such a toga was not to be obtained, there was a great laugh over
the Alexandrian love of amusement. From all sides they offered me what I
required; but I gave the preference to Theocritus, on account of his
height. What is long enough for him will not be too short for me.--And
now one of the emperor's chariots is waiting for me. If only Alexander
were at home! The house ought to have been illuminated and hung with
garlands for my arrival, and a crowd of slaves waiting to kiss my hands.
"There will soon be more than our two. I hope Argutis may understand how
to fasten on the shoes with the straps and the crescent! Philip knows
even less of these things than I do myself, besides which the poor boy is
laid low. It is lucky that I remembered him. I had very nearly forgotten
his existence. Ah!--if your mother were still alive! She had
clever-fingers! She--Ah, lady Euryale, Melissa has perhaps told you about
her. Olympias she was called, like the mother of the great Alexander,
and, like her, she bore good children. You yourself were praising my boys
just now. And the girl! . . Only a few days ago, it was a pretty, shy
thing that no one would ever have expected to do anything great; and now,
what have we not to thank that gentle child for? The little one was
always her mother's darling. Eternal gods! I dare not think of it! If
only she who is gone might have had the joy of hearing me called senator
and praetor! O child! if she could have sat with us to-day in the
emperor's seats, and we two could have seen you there--you, our pride,
honored by the whole city, Caesar's future bride."
Here the strong man with the soft heart broke down, and, clasping his
hands over his face, sobbed aloud, while Melissa clung to him and stroked
his bearded cheeks.
Under her loving words of consolation he soon regained his composure,
and, still struggling against the rising tears, he cried:
"Thank Heaven, there can be no more foolish talk of flight! I shall stay
here; I shall never take advantage of the ivory chair that belongs to me
in the curia in Rome. Your husband, my child, and the state, would
scarcely expect it of me. If, however, Caesar presents me as his father,
with estates and treasures, my first thought shall be to raise a monument
to your mother. You shall see! A monument, I tell you, without a rival.
It shall represent the strength of man submissive to womanly charm."
He bent down to kiss his daughter's brow, and whispered in her ear:
"Gaze confidently into the future, my girl. A father's eye is not easily
deceived, and so I tell you--that the emperor has been forced to shed
blood do insure the safety of the throne; but, in personal intercourse
with him, I learned to know your future husband as a noble-hearted man.
Indeed, I am not rich enough to thank the gods for such a son-in-law!"
Melissa gazed after her father, incapable of speaking. It went to her
heart that all these hopes should be changed to sorrow and disappointment
through her. And so she said, with tearful eyes, and shook hey head when
the lady assured her that with her it was a question of a cruelly spoiled
life, whereas her father would only have to renounce some idle vanities
which he would forget as easily as he had seized upon them.
"You do not know him," answered the maiden, sadly. "If I fly, then he too
must hide himself in a far country. He will never be happy again if they
take him from the little house--his birds--our mother's grave. It was for
her sake alone that he took no thought for the ivory seat in the curia.
If you only knew how he clings to everything that reminds him of our
mother, and she never left our city."
Here she was interrupted by the entrance of Philostratus. He was not
alone; an imperial slave accompanied him, bringing a graceful basket with
gifts from the emperor to Melissa.
First came a wreath of roses and lotos-flowers, looking as if they had
been plucked just before sunrise, for among the blossoms and leaves there
flashed and sparkled a glittering dew of diamonds, lightly fastened on
delicate silver wires. Next came a bunch of flowers, round whose stems a
supple golden snake was twined, covered with rubies and diamonds and
destined to coil itself round a woman's arm. The third was a necklace of
extremely costly Persian pearls, which had once belonged--so the merchant
had declared--to great Cleopatra's treasure.
Melissa loved flowers; and the costly gifts that accompanied them could
not fail to rejoice a woman's heart. And yet she only gave them a passing
glance, reddening painfully as she did so.
What the bearer had to say to her was of more importance to her than the
gifts he brought, and in fact the troubled manner of the usually composed
philosopher betrayed that he had something more serious to deliver than
the gifts of his love-sick lord.
The lady Euryale, perceiving that he meant to try once more to persuade
Melissa to yield, hastened to declare that she had found ways and means
to help the maiden to escape; but he shook his head with a sigh, and
said, thoughtfully:
"Well--well--I shall go on board the ship while the wild beasts are doing
their part in the Circus. May we meet again happily, either here or else
where! My way leads me first to Caesar's mother, to inform her of his
choice of a wife. Not that he needs her consent: whose consent or
disapproval does Caracalla care for? But I am to win Julia's heart for
you. Possibly I may succeed; but you--you scorn it, and fly from her son.
And yet--believe me, child--the heart of that woman is a treasure that
has no equal, and, if she should open her arms to you, there would be
little that you could not endure. When I left you, just now, I put myself
in your place, and approved of your resolve; but it would be wrong not to
remind you once more of what you must expect if you follow your own will,
and if Caesar considers himself scorned, ill-treated, and deceived by
you."
"In the name of all the gods, what has happened?" broke in Melissa,
pallid with fear. Philostratus pressed his hand to his brow, and his
voice was hoarse with suppressed emotion as he continued: "Nothing
new-only things are taking their old course. You know that Caracalla
threatened old Claudius Vindex and his nephew with death because of their
opposition to his union with you. We all hoped, however, that he would be
moved to exercise mercy. He is in love--he was so gracious at the feast!
I myself was foremost among those who did their utmost to dispose Caesar
to clemency.. But he would not be moved, and, before the sun goes down
upon this day, the old man and the young one--the chiefest among the
nobles of Rome--will be no more. And it is Caracalla's love for you,
child, that sheds this blood. Ask yourself after this how many lives will
be sacrificed when your flight causes hatred and fury to reign supreme in
the soul of the cheated monarch!"
With quickened breath Euryale had listened to the philosopher, without
regarding the girl; but scarcely had Philostratus uttered his last words
than Melissa ran to her, and, clasping her hands passionately on the
matron's arm, she cried, "Ought I to obey you, Euryale, and the terrors
of my own heart, and flee?"
Then releasing the lady, she turned again to the philosopher, and burst
out: "Or are you in the right, Philostratus? Must I stay, to prevent the
misery that threatens to overtake others?"
Beside herself, torn by the storm that raged in her soul, she clasped her
hands upon her brow and continued, wildly: "You are both of you so wise,
and surely wish the best. How can you give me such opposite advice? And
my own heart?--why have the gods struck it dumb? Time was when it spoke
loudly enough if ever I was in doubt. One thing I know for certain: if by
the sacrifice of my life I could undo it all, I would joyfully cast
myself before the lions and panthers, like the Christian maiden whom my
mother saw smiling radiantly as she was led into the arena. Splendor and
power are as hateful to me as the flowers yonder with their false dew. I
was ever taught to close my ear to the voice of selfishness. If I have
any wish for myself, it is that I may keep my faith with him to whom it
was promised. But for love of my father, and if I could be certain of
saving many from death and misery, I would stay, though I should despise
myself and be separated forever from my beloved!"
"Submit to the inevitable," interposed the philosopher, with eager
entreaty. "The immortal gods will reward you with the blessings of
hundreds whom a word from you will have saved from ruin and destruction."
"And what say you?" asked the maiden, gazing with anxious expectancy into
the matron's face. "Follow your own heart!" replied the lady, deeply
moved.
Melissa had hearkened to both counselors with eager ear, and both hung
anxiously on her lips, while, as if taken out of herself, she gazed with
panting bosom into the empty air. They had not long to wait. Suddenly the
maiden approached Philostratus and said with a firmness and decision that
astonished her friend:
"This will I do--this--I feel it here--this is the right. I remain, I
renounce the love of my heart, and accept what Fate has laid upon me. It
will be hard, and the sacrifice that I offer is great. But I must first
have the certainty that it shall not be in vain."
"But, child," cried Philostratus, "who can look into the future, and
answer for what is still to come?"
"Who?" asked Melissa, undaunted. "He alone in whose hand lies my future.
To Caesar himself I leave the decision. Go you to him now and speak for
me. Bring him greeting from me, and tell him that I, whom he honors with
his love, dare to entreat him modestly but earnestly not to punish the
aged Claudius Vindex and his nephew for the fault they were guilty of on
my account. For my sake would he deign to grant them life--and liberty?
Add to this that it is the first proof I have asked of his magnanimity,
and clothe it all in such winning words as Peitho can lay upon your
eloquent lips. If he grants pardon to these unfortunate ones, it shall be
a sign to me that I may be permitted to shield others from his wrath. If
he refuses, and they are put to death, then will he himself have decided
our fate otherwise, and he sees me for the last time alive in the Circus.
Thus shall it be--I have spoken."
The last words came like a stern order, and Philostratus seemed to have
some hopes of the emperor's clemency, for his love's sake, and the
philosopher's own eloquence. The moment Melissa ceased, he seized her
hand and cried, eagerly:
"I will try it; and, if he grant your request, you remain?"
"Yes," answered the maiden, firmly. "Pray Caesar to have mercy, soften
his heart as much as you are able. I expect an answer before going to the
Circus."
She hurried back into the sleeping-room without regarding Philostratus's
answer. Once there, she threw herself upon her knees and prayed, now to
the manes of her mother, now--it was for the first time--to the crucified
Saviour of the Christians, who had taken upon himself a painful death to
bring happiness to others. First she prayed for strength to keep her vow,
come what might; and then she prayed for Diodoros, that he might not be
made wretched if she found herself compelled to break her troth with him.
Her father and brothers, too, were not forgotten, as she commended their
lives to a higher power.
When Euryale looked into the room, she found Melissa still upon her
knees, her young frame shaken as with fever. So she withdrew softly, and
in the Temple of Serapis, where her husband served as high-priest, she
prayed to Jesus Christ that he who suffered little children to come unto
him would lead this wandering lamb into the right path.
A THORNY PATH
By Georg Ebers
Volume 9.
CHAPTER XXVI
The lady Euryale's silent prayer was interrupted by the return of
Alexander. He brought the clothes which Seleukus's wife had given him for
Melissa. He was already dressed in his best, and crowned like all those
who occupied the first seats in the Circus; but his festal garb accorded
ill with the pained look on his features, from which every trace had
vanished of the overflowing joy in life which had embellished them only
this morning.
He had seen and heard things which made him feel that it would no longer
be a sacrifice to give his life to save his sister.
Sad thoughts had flitted across his cheerful spirit like dark bats, even
while he was talking with Melissa and her protectress, for he knew well
how infinitely hard his father would find it to have to quit Alexandria;
and if he himself fled with Melissa he would be obliged to give up the
winning of fair Agatha. The girl's Christian father had indeed received
him kindly, but had given him to understand plainly enough that he would
never allow a professed heathen to sue for his daughter's hand. Besides
this, he had met with other humiliations which placed themselves like a
wall between him and his beloved, the only child of a rich and respected
man. He had forfeited the right of appearing before Zeus as a suitor; for
indeed he was no longer such as he had been only yesterday.
The news that Caracalla proposed to marry Melissa had been echoed by
insolent tongues, with the addition that he, Alexander, had ingratiated
himself with Caesar by serving him as a spy. No one had expressly said
this to him; but, while he was hurrying through the city in Caesar's
chariot, on the ladies' message, it had been made very plain to his
apprehension. Honest men had avoided him--him to whom hitherto every one
for whose regard he cared had held out a friendly hand; and much else
that he had experienced in the course of this drive had been unpleasant
enough to give rise to a change of his whole inner being.
The feeling that every one was pointing at him the finger of scorn, or of
wrath, had never ceased to pursue him. And he had been under no illusion;
for when he met the old sculptor Lysander, who only yesterday had so
kindly told him and Melissa about Caesar's mother, as he nodded from the
chariot his greeting was not returned; and the honest artist had waved
his hand with a gesture which no Alexandrian could fail to understand as
meaning, "I no longer know you, and do not wish to be recognized by you."
He had from his childhood loved Diodoros as a brother, and in one of the
side streets, down which the chariot had turned to avoid the tumult in
the Kanopic way, Alexander had seen his old friend. He had desired the
charioteer to stop, and had leaped out on the road to speak to Diodoros
and give him at once Melissa's message; but the young man had turned his
back with evident displeasure, and to the painter's pathetic appeal,
"But, at any rate, hear me!" he answered, sharply: "The less I hear of
you and yours the better for me. Go on--go on, in Caesar's chariot!"
With this he had turned away and knocked at the door of an architect who
was known to them both; and Alexander, tortured with painful feelings,
had gone on, and for the first time the idea had taken possession of him
that he had indeed descended to the part of spy when he had betrayed to
Caesar what Alexandrian wit had to say about him. He could, of course,
tell himself that he would rather have faced death or imprisonment than
have betrayed to Caracalla the name of one of the gibers; still, he had
to admit to himself that, but for the hope of saving his father and
brother from death and imprisonment, he would hardly have done Caesar
such service. The mercy shown to them was certainly too like payment, and
his own part in the matter struck him as hateful and base. His
fellow-townsmen had a right to bear him a grudge, and his friends to keep
out of his way. A feeling came over him of bitter self-contempt, hitherto
strange to him; and he understood for the first time how Philip could
regard life as a burden and call it a malicious Danaus-gift of the gods.
When, finally, in the Kanopic way, close in front of Seleukus's house, a
youth unknown to him cried, scornfully, as the chariot was slowly making
its way through the throng, "The brother-in-law of Tarautas!" he had
great difficulty in restraining himself from leaping down and letting the
rascal feel the weight of his fists. He knew, too, that Tarautas was the
name of a hateful and bloodthirsty gladiator which had been given as a
nickname to Caesar in Rome; and when he heard the insolent fellow's cry
taken up by the mob, who shouted after him, "Tarautas's brother-in-law!"
wherever he went, he felt as though he were being pelted with mire and
stones.
It would have been a real comfort to him if the earth would have opened
to swallow him with the chariot, to hide him from the sight of men. He
could have burst out crying like a child that has been beaten. When at
last he was safe inside Seleukus's house, he was easier; for here he was
known; here he would be understood. Berenike must know what he thought of
Caesar's suit, and seeing her wholesome and honest hatred, he had sworn
to himself that he would snatch his sister from the hands of the tyrant,
if it were to lead him to the most agonizing death.
While she was engaged in selecting a dress for her protegee, he related
to the lady Euryale what had happened to him in the street and in the
house of Seleukus. He had been conducted past the soldiers in the
vestibule and impluvium to the lady's private rooms, and there he had
been witness to a violent matrimonial dispute. Seleukus had previously
delivered to his wife Caesar's command that she should appear in the
Amphitheater with the other noble dames of the city. Her answer was a
bitter laugh, and a declaration that she would mingle with the spectators
in none but mourning robes. Thereupon her husband, pointing out to her
the danger to which such conduct would expose them, had raised
objections, and she at last had seemed to yield. When Alexander joined
her he had found her in a splendid dress of shining purple brocade, her
black hair crowned with a wreath of roses, and a splendid diadem; a
garland of roses hung across her bosom, and precious stones sparkled
round her throat and arms. In short, she was arrayed like a happy mother
for her daughter's wedding-day.
Soon after Alexander's arrival Seleukus had come in, and this
conspicuously handsome dress, so unbecoming to the matron's age, and so
unlike her usual attire-chosen, evidently, to put the monstrosity of
Caesar's demand in the strongest light--had roused her husband's wrath.
He had expressed his dissatisfaction in strong terms, and again pointed
out to her the danger in which such a daring demonstration might involve
them; but this time there was no moving the lady; she would not despoil
herself of a single rose. After she had solemnly declared that she would
appear in the Circus either as she thought fit or not at all, her husband
had left her in anger.
"What a fool she is!" Euryale exclaimed.
Then she showed him a white robe of beautiful bombyx, woven in the isle
of Kos, which she had decided on for Melissa, and a peplos with a border
of tender sea-green; and Alexander approved of the choice.
Time pressed, and Euryale went at once to Melissa with the new festal
raiment. Once more she nodded kindly to the girl, and begged her, as she
herself had something to discuss with Alexander, to allow the
waiting-woman to dress her. She felt as if she were bringing the robe to
a condemned creature, in which she was to be led to execution, and
Melissa felt the same.
Euryale then returned to the painter, and bade him end his narrative.
The lady Berenike had forthwith desired Johanna to pack together all the
dead Korinna's festal dresses. Alexander had then followed her guidance,
accompanying her to a court in the slaves' quarters, where a number of
men were awaiting her. These were the captains of Seleukus's ships, which
were now in port, and the superintendents of his granaries and offices,
altogether above a hundred freedmen in the merchant's service. Each one
seemed to know what he was here for.
The matron responded to their hearty greetings with a word of thanks, and
added, bitterly:
"You see before you a mourning mother whom a ruthless tyrant compels to
go to a festival thus--thus--only look at me--bedizened like a peacock!"
At this the bearded assembly gave loud expression to their
dissatisfaction, but Berenike went on "Melapompus has taken care to
secure good places; but he has wisely not taken them all together. You
are all free men; I have no orders to give you. But, if you are indeed
indignant at the scorn and heart-ache inflicted on your lord's wife, make
it known in the Circus to him who has brought them on her. You are all
past your first youth, and will carefully avoid any rashness which may
involve you in ruin. May the avenging gods aid and protect you!"
With this she had turned her back on the multitude; but Johannes, the
Christian lawyer, the chief freedman of the household, had hurried into
the court-yard, just in time to entreat her to give up this ill-starred
demonstration, and to extinguish the fire she had tried to kindle. So
long as Caesar wore the purple, rebellion against him, to whom the
Divinity had intrusted the sovereignty, was a sin. The scheme she was
plotting was meant to punish him who had pained her; but she forgot that
it might cost these brave men, husbands and fathers, their life or
liberty. The vengeance she called on them to take might be balm to the
wounds of her own heart; but if Caesar in his wrath brought destruction
down on these, her innocent instruments, that balm would turn to burning
poison.
These words, whispered to her with entire conviction, had not been
without their effect. For some minutes Berenike had stared gloomily at
the ground; but then she had again approached the assembly, to repeat the
warning given her by the Christian, whom all respected, and by whom some
indeed had been persuaded to be baptized.
"Johannes is right," she ended. "This ill-used heart did wrong when it
sent up its cry of anguish before you. Rather will I be trodden under
foot by the enemy, as is the manner of the Christians, than bring such
misfortune on innocent men, who are so faithful to our house. Be
cautious, then. Give no overt expression to your feelings. Let each one
who feels too weak to control his wrath, avoid the Circus; and those who
go, keep still if they feel moved to act in my behalf. One thing only you
may do. Tell every one, far and wide, what I had purposed. What others
may do, they themselves must answer for."
The Christian had strongly disapproved of this last clause; but Berenike
had paid no heed, and had left the court-yard, followed by Alexander.
The shouts of the indignant multitude had rung in their ears, and, in
spite of her warning, they had sounded like a terrible threat. Johannes,
to be sure, had remained, to move them to moderation by further
remonstrances.
"What were the mad creatures plotting?" Euryale anxiously broke in; and
he hastily went on "They call Caesar by no name but Tarautas; every mouth
is full of gibes and rage at the new and monstrous taxes, the billeting
of the troops, and the intolerable insolence of the soldiery, which
Caracalla wickedly encourages. His contemptuous indifference has deeply
offended the heads of the town. And then his suit to my sister! Young and
old are wagging their tongues over it."
"It would be more like them to triumph in it," said the matron,
interrupting him. "An Alexandrian in the purple, on the throne of the
Caesars!"
"I too had hoped that," cried Alexander, "and it seemed so likely. But
who can understand the populace? Every woman in the place, I should have
thought, would hold her head higher, at the thought that an Alexandrian
girl was empress; but it was from the women that I heard the most
vindictive and shameless abuse. I heard more than enough; for, as we got
closer to the Serapeum, the more slowly was the chariot obliged to
proceed, to make its way through the crowd. And the things I heard! I
clinch my fists now as I only think of them.--And what will it be in the
Circus? What will not Melissa have to endure!"
"It is envy," the matron murmured to herself; but she was immediately
silent, for the young girl came toward them, out of the bedroom. Her
toilet was complete; the beautiful white dress became her well. The
wreath of roses, with diamond dewdrops, lay lightly on her hair, the
snake-shaped bracelet which her imperial suitor had sent her clasped her
white arm, and her small head, somewhat bent, her pale, sweet face, and
large, bashful, inquiring, drooping eyes formed such an engaging, modest,
and unspeakably touching picture, that Euryale dared to hope that even in
the Circus none but hardened hearts could harbor a hostile feeling
against this gentle, pure blossom, slightly drooping with silent sorrow.
She could not resist the impulse to kiss Melissa, and the half-formed
purpose ripened within her to venture the utmost for the child's
protection. The pity in her heart had turned to love; and when she saw
that to this sweet creature, at the mere sight of whom her heart went
forth, the most splendid jewels, in which any other girl would have been
glad to deck herself, were as a heavy burden to be borne but sadly, she
felt it a sacred duty to comfort her and lighten this trial, and shelter
Melissa, so far as was in her power, from insult and humiliation.
It was many years since she had visited the Amphitheater, where the
horrible butchery was an abomination to her; but to-day her heart bade
her conquer her old aversion, and accompany the girl to the Circus.
Had not Melissa taken the place in her heart of her lost daughter? Was
not she, Euryale, the only person who, by showing herself with Melissa
and declaring herself her friend, could give the people assurance that
the girl, who was exposed to misapprehension and odium by the favor she
had met with from the ruthless and hated sovereign, was in truth pure and
lovable? Under her guardianship, by her side, the girl, as she knew,
would be protected from misapprehension and insult; and she, an old woman
and a Christian, should she evade the first opportunity of taking up a
cross in imitation of the Divine Master, among whose followers she
joyfully counted herself--though secretly, for fear of men? All this
flashed through her mind with the swiftness of lightning, and her call,
"Doris!" addressed to her waiting-woman, was so clear and unexpected that
Melissa's overstrung nerves were startled. She looked up at the lady in
amazement, as, without a word of explanation, she said to the woman who
had hurried in:
"The blue robe I wore at the festival of Adonis, my mother's diadem, and
a large gem with the head of Serapis for my shoulder. My hair--oh, a veil
will cover it! What does it matter for an old woman?--You, child, why do
you look at me in such amazement? What mother would allow a pretty young
daughter to appear alone in the Circus? Besides, I may surely hope that
it will confirm your courage to feel that I am at your side. Perhaps the
populace may be moved a little in your favor if the wife of the
high-priest of their greatest god is your companion."
But she could scarcely end her speech, for Melissa had flown into her
arms, exclaiming, "And you will do this for me?" while Alexander, deeply
touched by gratitude and joy, kissed her thin arm and the hem of her
peplos.
While Melissa helped the matron to change her dress--in the next room
Alexander paced to and fro in great unrest. He knew the Alexandrians, and
there was not the slightest doubt but that the presence of this
universally revered lady would make them look with kindlier eyes on his
sister. Nothing else could so effectually impress them with the entire
propriety of her appearance in the Circus. The more seriously he had
feared that Melissa might be deeply insulted and offended by the rough
demonstrations of the mob, the more gratefully did his heart beat; nay,
his facile nature saw in this kind act the first smile of returning good
fortune.
He only longed to be hopeful once more, to enjoy the present--as so many
philosophers and poets advised--and especially the show in the Circus,
his last pleasure, perhaps; to forget the imminent future.
The old bright look came back to his face; but it soon vanished, for even
while he pictured himself in the amphitheatre, he remembered that there,
too, his former acquaintances might refuse to speak to him; that the
odious names of "Tarautas' brother-in-law" or of "traitor" might be
shouted after him on the road. A cold chill came over him, and the image
of pretty Ino rose up before him--Ino, who had trusted in his love; and
to whom, of all others, he had given cause to accuse him of
false-heartedness. An unpleasant sense came over him of dissatisfaction
with himself, such as he, who always regarded self-accusation,
repentance, and atonement as a foolish waste of life, had never before
experienced.
The fine, sunny autumn day had turned to a sultry, dull evening, and
Alexander went to the window to let the sea-breeze fan his dewy brow; but
he soon heard voices behind him, for Euryale and Melissa had re-entered
the room, followed by the house-steward, who presented to his mistress a
sealed tablet which a slave had just brought from Philostratus. The women
had been talking of Melissa's vow; and Euryale had promised her that, if
Fate should decide against Caesar, she would convey the girl to a place
of safety, where she could certainly not be discovered, and might look
forward in peace to the future. Then she had impressed on her that, if
things should be otherwise ordered, she must endure even the unendurable
with patience, as an obedient wife, as empress, but still ever conscious
of the solemn and beneficent power she might wield in her new position.
The tablets would now settle the question; and side by side the two women
hastily read the missive which Philostratus had written on the wax, in
his fine, legible hand. It was as follows:
"The condemned have ceased to live. Your efforts had no effect but to
hasten their end. Caesar's desire was to rid you of adversaries even
against your will. Vindex and his nephew are no more; but I embarked soon
enough to escape the rage of him who might have attained the highest
favors of fortune if he had but known how to be merciful."
"God be praised!--but alas, poor Vindex!" cried Euryale, as she laid down
the tablets. But Melissa kissed her, and then exclaimed to her brother:
"Now all doubts are at an end. I may fly. He himself has settled the
matter!"
Then she added, more gently, but still urgently "Do you take care of my
father, and Philip, and of yourself. The lady Euryale will protect me.
Oh, how thankful am I!"
She looked up to heaven with fervent devotion Euryale whispered to them:
"My plan is laid. As soon as the performance is over, Alexander shall
take you home, child, to your father's house; you must go in one of
Caesar's chariots. Afterward come back here with your brother; I will
wait for you below. But now we will go together to the Circus, and can
discuss the details on our way. You, my young friend, go now and order
away the imperial litter; bid my steward to have the horses put to my
covered harmamaxa. There is room in it for us all three."
By the time Alexander returned, the daylight was waning, and the clatter
of the chariots began to be audible which conveyed Caesar's court to the
Circus.
CHAPTER XXVII.
The great Amphitheatre of Dionysus was in the Bruchium, the splendid
palatial quarter of the city, close to the large harbor between the Choma
and the peninsula of Lochias. Hard by the spacious and lofty rotunda, in
which ten thousand spectators could be seated, stood the most fashionable
gymnasia and riding-schools. These buildings, which had been founded long
since by the Ptolemiac kings, and had been repeatedly extended and
beautified, formed, with the adjoining schools for gladiators and
beast-fighters, and the stables for wild beasts from every part of the
world, a little town by themselves.
At this moment the amphitheatre looked like a beehive, of which every
cell seems to be full, but in which a whole swarm expects yet to find
room. The upper places, mere standing-room for the common people, and the
cheaper seats, had been full early in the day. By the afternoon the
better class of citizens had come in, if their places were not reserved;
and now, at sunset, those who were arriving in litters and chariots, just
before the beginning of the show, were for the most part in Caesar's
train, court officials, senators, or the rich magnates of the city.
The strains of music were by this time mingling with the shouting and
loud talk of the spectators, or of the thousands who were crowding round
the building without hoping to obtain admission. But even for them there
was plenty to be seen. How delightful to watch the well-dressed women,
and the men of rank and wealth, crowned with wreaths, as they dismounted;
to see the learned men and artists arrive--more or less eagerly
applauded, according to the esteem in which they were held by the
populace! The most splendid sight of all was the procession of priests,
with Timotheus, the high-priest of Serapis, at their head, and by his
side the priest of Alexander, both marching with dignity under a canopy.
They were followed by the animals to be slaughtered for sacrifice, and
the images of the gods and the deified Caesars, which were to be placed
in the arena, as the most worshipful of all the spectators. Timotheus
wore the splendid insignia of his office; the priest of Alexander was in
purple, as being the idiologos and head of all the temples of Egypt, and
representative of Caesar.
The advent of the images of the Caesars gave rise to a sort of judgment
of the dead: for the mob hailed that of Julius Caesar with enthusiasm,
that of Augustus, with murmurs of disapproval; when Caligula appeared, he
was hissed; while the statues of Vespasian, Titus, Hadrian, and Antonine,
met with loud acclamations. That of Septimius Severus, Caracalla's
father, to whom the town owed many benefits, was very well received. The
images of the gods, too, had very various fates. Serapis, and Alexander,
the divine hero of the town, were enthusiastically welcomed, while
scarcely a voice was heard on the approach of Zeus-Jupiter and Ares-Mars.
They were regarded as the gods of the hated Romans.
The companies of the imperial body-guard, who were placed about the
amphitheatre, found no great difference, so long as it was daylight,
between the crowd round the Circus of Alexandria and that by the Tiber.
What chiefly struck them was the larger number of dusky faces, and the
fanciful garb of the Magians. The almost naked rabble, too, with nothing
on but a loin-cloth, who wriggled in and out of the throng, ready for any
service or errand, formed a feature unknown at Rome. But, as it grew
darker, the Romans began to perceive that it was not for nothing that
they had come hither.
At Rome, when some great show was promised, of beast-fighting,
gladiators, and the like, there were, no doubt, barbarian princes to be
seen, and envoys from the remotest ends of the earth in strange and
gorgeous array; and there, too, small wares of every kind were for sale.
By the Tiber, again, night shows were given, with grand illuminations,
especially for the feast of Flora; but here, as soon as the sun had set,
and the sports were about to begin, the scene was one never to be
forgotten. Some of the ladies who descended from the litters, wore
garments of indescribable splendor; the men even displayed strange and
handsome costumes as they were helped out of their gilt and plated
chariots by their servants. What untold wealth must these men have at
their command, to be able to dress their slaves in gold and silver
brocade; and the runners, who kept up with the swiftest horses, must have
lungs of iron! The praetorians, who had not for many a day seen anything
to cause them to forget the motto of the greatest philosopher among their
poets--never to be astonished at anything--repeatedly pushed each other
with surprise and admiration; nay, the centurion Julius Martialis, who
had just now had a visit in camp from his wife and children, in defiance
of orders, while Caesar himself was looking on, struck his fist on his
greaves, and, exclaiming loudly, "Look out!" pointed to Seleukus's
chariot, for which four runners, in tunics with long sleeves, made of
sea-green bombyx, richly embroidered with silver, were making a way
through the crowd.
The barefooted lads, with their nimble, gazellelike legs, were all well
looking, and might have been cast all in one mold. But what struck the
centurion and his comrades as most remarkable in their appearance were
the flash and sparkle from their slender ankles, as the setting sun
suddenly shot a fleeting ray through a rift in the heavy clouds. Each of
these fellows wore on his legs gold bands set with precious stones, and
the rubies which glittered on the harness of Seleukus's horse were of far
greater value.
He, as master of the festival, had come betimes, and this was the first
of many such displays of wealth which followed each other in quick
succession, as soon as the brief twilight of Egypt had given way to
darkness, and the lighting up of the Circus was begun.
Here came a beautifully dressed woman in a roomy litter, over which waved
a canopy entirely of white ostrich-plumes, which the evening breeze
swayed like a thicket of fern-leaves. This throne was borne by ten black
and ten white slave-girls, and before it two fair children rode on tame
ostriches. The tall heir of a noble house, who, like Caesar at Rome,
belonged to the "Blues," drove his own team of four splendid white
horses; and he himself was covered with turquoises, while the harness was
set with cut sapphires.
The centurion shook his head in silent admiration. His face had been
tanned in many wars, both in the East and West, and he had fought even in
distant Caledonia, but the low forehead, loose under lip, and dull eye
spoke of small gifts of intellect. Nevertheless, he was not lacking in
strength of will, and was regarded by his comrades as a good beast of
burden who would submit to a great deal before it became too much for
him. But then he would break out like a mad bull, and he might long ago
have risen to higher rank, had he not once in such a fit of passion
nearly throttled a fellow-soldier. For this crime he had been severely
punished, and condemned to begin again at the bottom of the ladder. He
owed it chiefly to the young tribune Aurelius Apollinaris that he had
very soon regained the centurion's staff, in spite of his humble birth;
he had saved that officer's life in the war with the Armenians--to be
here, in Alexandria, cruelly mutilated by the hand of his sovereign.
The centurion had a faithful heart. He was as much attached to the two
noble brothers as to his wife and children, for indeed he owed them much;
and if the service had allowed it he would long since have made his way
to the house of Seleukus to learn how the wounded tribune was faring. But
he had not time even to see his own family, for his younger and richer
comrades, who wanted to enjoy the pleasures of the city, had put upon him
no small share of their own duties. Only this morning a young soldier of
high birth, who had begun his career at the same time as Martialis, had
promised him some tickets of admission to the evening's performance in
the Circus if he would take his duty on guard outside the amphitheatre.
And this offer had been very welcome to the centurion, for he thus found
it possible to give those he loved best, his wife and his mother, the
greatest treat which could be offered to any Alexandrian. And now, when
anything noteworthy was to be seen outside, he only regretted that he had
already some time since conducted them to their seats in one of the upper
rows. He would have liked that they, too, should have seen the horses and
the chariots and the "Blue" charioteer's turquoises and sapphires;
although a decurion observed, as he saw them, that a Roman patrician
would scorn to dress out his person with such barbaric splendor, and an
Alexandrian of the praetorian guard declared that his fellow-citizens of
Greek extraction thought more of a graceful fold than of whole strings of
precious stones.
"But why, then, was this 'Blue' so vehemently hailed by the mob!" asked a
Pannonian in the guard.
"The mob!" retorted the Alexandrian, scornfully. "Only the Syrians and
other Asiatics. Look at the Greeks. The great merchant Seleukus is the
richest of them all, but splendid as his horses, his chariots, and his
slaves are, he himself wears only the simple Macedonian mantle. Though it
is of costly material, who would suspect it? If you see a man swaggering
in such a blaze of gems you may wager your house--if you have one--that
his birthplace lies not very far from Syria."
"Now, that one, in a mother-of-pearl shell on two wheels, is the Jew
Poseidonius," the Pannonian put in. "I am quartered on his father. But he
is dressed like a Greek."
At this the centurion, in his delight at knowing something, opened his
mouth with a broad grin: "I am a native here," said he, "and I can tell
you the Jew would make you answer for it if you took him for anything but
a Greek."
"And quite right," added another soldier, from Antioch. "The Jews here
are many, but they have little in common with those in Palestine. They
wish to pass for Greeks; they speak Greek, assume Greek names, and even
cease to believe in the great God their father; they study Greek
philosophy, and I know one who worships in the Temple of Serapis."
"Many do the same in Rome," said a man of Ostia. "I know an epigram which
ridicules them for it."
At this point they were interrupted, for Martialis pointed to a tall man
who was coming toward them, and whom his sharp eye had recognized as
Macrinus, the prefect of the praetorians. In an instant the soldiers were
erect and rigid, but still many a helmeted head was turned toward the
spot where their chief stood talking in an undertone to the Magian
Serapion.
Macrinus had persuaded Caesar to send for the exorciser, to test his
arts. Immediately after the performance, however late it might be, the
Magian was to be admitted to his presence.
Serapion thanked the prefect, and then whispered to him, "I have had a
second revelation."
"Not here!" exclaimed Macrinus, uneasily, and, leading away his handsome
little son, he turned toward the entrance.
Dusk, meanwhile, had given way to darkness, and several slaves stood
ready to light the innumerable little lamps which were to illuminate the
outside of the Circus. They edged the high arches which surrounded the
two lower stories, and supported the upper ranks of the enormous circular
structure. Separated only by narrow intervals, the rows of lights formed
a glittering series of frames which outlined the noble building and
rendered it visible from afar.
The arches on the ground-floor led to the cells from which the men and
beasts were let out into the arena; but some, too, were fitted with
shops, where flowers and wreaths, refreshments, drinks, handkerchiefs,
fans, and other articles in request, were sold. On the footway between
the building and the row of pitch torches which surrounded it, men and
women in thousands were walking to and fro. Smart, inquisitive girls were
pushing their way singly or in groups, and their laughter drowned the
deep, tragical voices of the soothsayers and Magians who announced their
magic powers to the passersby. Some of these even made their way into the
waiting-rooms of the gladiators and wrestlers, who to-day so greatly
needed their support that, in spite of severe and newly enforced
prohibitions, many a one stole out into the crowd to buy some effectual
charm or protecting amulet.
Where the illuminations were completed, attempts of another kind were
being made to work upon the mood of the people; nimble-tongued
fellows--some in the service of Macrinus and some in that of the anxious
senate--were distributing handkerchiefs to wave on Caesar's approach, or
flowers to strew in his path. More than one, who was known for a
malcontent, found a gold coin in his hand, with the image of the monarch
he was expected to hail; and on the way by which Caesar was to come many
of those who awaited him wore the caracalla. These were for the most part
bribed, and their acclamations were to mollify the tyrant's mood.
As soon as the prefect had disappeared within the building, the
praetorian ranks fell out again. It was lucky that among them were
several Alexandrians, besides the centurion Martialis, who had not long
been absent from their native town; for without them much would have
remained incomprehensible. The strangest thing to foreign eyes was a
stately though undecorated harmamaxa, out of which stepped first a
handsome wreathed youth, then a matron of middle age, and at last an
elegantly dressed girl, whose rare beauty made even Martialis--who rarely
noticed women--exclaim, "Now, she is to my taste the sweetest-thing of
all."
But there must have been something very remarkable about these three; for
when they appeared the crowd broke out at first in loud shouts and
outcries, which soon turned to acclamations and welcome, though through
it all shrill whistles and hisses were heard.
"Caesar's new mistress, the daughter of a gemcutter!" the Alexandrian
muttered to his comrades. That handsome boy is her brother, no doubt. He
is said to be a mean sycophant, a spy paid by Caesar."
"He?" said an older centurion, shaking his scarred head. "Sooner would I
believe that the shouts of the populace were intended for the old woman
and not for the young one."
"Then a sycophant he is and will remain," said the Alexandrian with a
laugh. "For, as a matter of fact, it is the elder lady they are greeting,
and, by Heracles, she deserves it! She is the wife of the high-priest of
Serapis. There are few poor in this city to whom she has not done a
kindness. She is well able, no doubt, for her husband is the brother of
Seleukus, and her father, too, sat over his ears in gold."
"Yes, she is able," interrupted Martialis, with a tone of pride, as
though it were some credit to himself. "But how many have even more, and
keep their purse-strings tight! I have known her since she was a child,
and she is the best of all that is good. What does not the town owe to
her! She risked her life to move Caesar's father to mercy toward the
citizens, after they had openly declared against him and in favor of his
rival Pescennius Niger. And she succeeded, too."
"Why, then, are they whistling?" asked the older centurion.
"Because her companion is a spy," repeated the Alexandrian. "And the
girl--In Caesar's favor! But, after all, which of you all would not
gladly see his sister or his niece Caesar's light of love?"
"Not I!" cried Martialis. "But the man who speaks ill of that girl only
does so because he likes blue eyes best. The maiden who comes in the lady
Euryale's chariot is spotless, you may swear."
"Nay, nay," said the younger Alexandrian soothingly. "That black-haired
fellow and his companions would whistle another tune if they knew any
evil of her, and she would not be in the lady Euryale's company--that is
the chief point--. But, look there! The shameless dogs are stopping their
way! 'Green' to a man.--But here come the lictors."
"Attention!" shouted Martialis, firmly resolved to uphold the guardians
of the peace, and not to suffer any harm to the matron and her fair
companion; for Euryale's husband was the brother of Seleukus, whom his
father and father-in-law had served years ago, while in the villa at
Kanopus his mother and wife were left in charge to keep it in order. He
felt that he was bound in duty to the merchant, and that all who were of
that household had a right to count on his protection. But no active
measures were needed; a number of "Blues" had driven off the "Greens" who
had tried to bar Alexander's way, and the lictors came to their
assistance.
A young man in festal array, who had pushed into the front rank of the
bystanders, had looked on with panting breath. He was very pale, and the
thick wreath he wore was scarcely sufficient to hide the bandage under
it. This was Diodoros, Melissa's lover. After resting awhile at his
friend's house he had been carried in a litter to the amphitheatre, for
he could yet hardly walk. His father being one of the senators of the
town, his family had a row of seats in the lowest and best tier; but
this, on this occasion, was entirely given up to Caesar and his court.
Consequently the different members of the senate could have only half the
usual number of seats. Still, the son of Polybius might in any case claim
two in his father's name; and his friend Timon--who had also provided him
with suitable clothing--had gone to procure the tickets from the curia.
They were to meet at the entrance leading to their places, and it would
be some little time yet before Timon could return.
Diodoros had thought he would behold his imperial rival; however, instead
of Caracalla he had seen the contemptuous reception which awaited
Alexander and Melissa, from some at least of the populace. Still, how
fair and desirable had she seemed in his eyes, whom, only that morning,
he had been blessed in calling his! As he now moved away from the main
entrance, he asked himself why it was such torture to him to witness the
humiliation of a being who had done him such a wrong, and whom he thought
he hated and scorned so utterly. Hardly an hour since he had declared to
Timon that he had rooted his love for Melissa out of his heart. He
himself would feel the better for using the whistle he wore, in derision
of her, and for seeing her faithlessness punished by the crowd. But now?
When the insolent uproar went up from the "Greens," whose color he
himself wore, he had found it difficult to refrain from rushing on the
cowardly crew and knocking some of them down.
He now made his way with feeble steps to the entrance where he was to
meet his friend. The blood throbbed in his temples, his mouth was
parched, and, as a fruit-seller cried her wares from one of the archways,
he took a few apples from her basket to refresh himself with their juice.
His hand trembled, and the experienced old woman, observing the bandage
under his wreath, supposed him to be one of the excited malcontents who
had perhaps already fallen into the hands of the lictors. So, with a
significant grin, she pointed under the table on which her fruit-baskets
stood, and said "I have plenty of rotten ones. Six in a wrapper, quite
easy to hide under your cloak. For whom you will. Caesar has given the
golden apple of Paris to a goddess of this town. I should best like to
see these flung at her brother, the sycophant."
"Do you know them?" asked Diodoros, hoarsely.
"No," replied the old woman. "No need for that. I have plenty of
customers and good ears. The slut broke her word with a handsome youth of
the town for the sake of the Roman, and they who do such things are
repaid by the avenging gods." Diodoros felt his knees failing under him,
and a wrathful answer was on his lips, when the huckster suddenly shouted
like mad: "Caesar, Caesar! He is coming."
The shouts of the crowd hailing their emperor had already become audible
through the heavy evening air, at first low and distant, and louder by
degrees. They now suddenly rose to a deafening uproar, and while the
sound rolled on like approaching thunder, broken by shrill whistles
suggesting lightning, the sturdy old apple-seller clambered unaided on to
her table, and shouted with all her might:
"Caesar! Here he is!--Hail, hail, hail to great Caesar!"
At the imminent risk of tumbling off her platform, she bent low down to
reach under the table for the blue cloth which covered her store of
rotten apples, snatched it off, and waved it with frantic enthusiasm, as
though her elderly heart had suddenly gone forth to the very man for whom
a moment ago she had been ready to sell her disgusting missiles. And
still she shouted in ringing tones, "Hail, hail, Caesar!" again and
again, with all her might, till there was no breath left in her
overbuxom, panting breast, and her round face was purple with the effort.
Nay, her emotion was so vehement that the bright tears streamed down her
fat cheeks.
And every one near was shrieking like the applewoman, "Hail, Caesar!" and
it was only where the crowd was densest that a sharp whistle now and then
rent the roar of acclamations.
Diodoros, meanwhile, had turned to look at the main entrance, and,
carried away by the universal desire to see, had perched himself on an
unopened case of dried figs. His tall figure now towered far above the
throng, and he set his teeth as he heard the old woman, almost speechless
with delight, gasp out:
"Lovely! wonderful! He would never have found the like in Rome. Here,
among us--"
But the cheers of the multitude now drowned every other sound. Fathers or
mothers who had children with them lifted them up as high as they could;
where a small man stood behind a tall one, way was willingly made, for it
would have been a shame to hinder his view of such a spectacle. Many had
already seen the great monarch in his shining, golden chariot, drawn by
four splendid horses; but such an array of torch-bearers as now preceded
Caracalla was a thing never seen within the memory of the oldest or most
traveled man. Three elephants marched before him and three came behind,
and all six carried in their trunks blazing torches, which they held now
low and now aloft to light his road. To think that beasts could be
trained to such a service! And that here, in Alexandria, such a display
could be made before the haughty and pampered Romans!
The chariot stood still, and the black Ethiopians who guided the huge
four-footed torch-bearers took the three leaders to join their fellows
behind the chariot. This really was a fine sight; this could not but fill
the heart of every one who loved his native town with pride and delight.
For what should a man ever shout himself hoarse, if not for such a
splendid and unique show? Diodoros himself could not take his eyes off
the elephants. At first he was delighted with them, but presently the
sight annoyed him even more than it had pleased him; for he reflected
that the tyrant, the villain, his deadly enemy, would certainly take to
himself the applause bestowed on the clever beasts. With this, he grasped
the reed pipe in the breast of his tunic. He had been on the point of
using it before now, to retaliate on Melissa for some portion of the pain
she had inflicted on him. At this thought, however, the paltriness of
such revenge struck him with horror, and with a hasty impulse he snapped
the pipe in two, and flung the pieces on the ground in front of the
apple-stall. The old woman observed it and exclaimed:
"Ay, ay, such a sight makes one forgive a great deal"; but he turned his
back on her in silence, and joined his friend at the appointed spot.
They made their way without difficulty to the seats reserved for the
senators' families, and when they had taken their places, the young man
replied but briefly to the sympathetic inquiries as to his health which
were addressed to him by his acquaintances. His friend Timon gazed
anxiously into his handsome but pale, sad face, as Diodoros sat crushed
and absorbed in thought. He would have liked to urge him to quit the
scene at once, for the seats just opposite were those destined to Caesar
and his court-among them, no doubt, Melissa. In the dim light which still
prevailed in the vast amphitheatre it was impossible to recognize faces.
But there would soon be a blaze of light, and what misery must await the
hapless victim of her faithlessness, still so far from perfect health!
After the glare of light outside, which was almost blinding, the twilight
within was for the moment a relief to Diodoros. His weary limbs were
resting, a pleasant smell came up from the perfumed fountains in the
arena, and his eyes, which could not here rest on anything to gratify
him, were fixed on vacancy.
And yet it was a comfort to him to think that he had broken his pipe. It
would have disgraced him to whistle it; and, moreover, the tone would
have reached the ear of the noble lady who had accompanied Melissa, and
whom he himself had, only yesterday, revered as a second mother.
Loud music now struck up, he heard shouts and cheers, and just above
him--for it could only proceed from the uppermost tiers--there was an
extraordinary tumult. Still he paid no heed, and as he thought of that
matron the question suddenly arose in his mind, whether she would have
consented to be seen with Melissa if she thought that the girl was indeed
capable of ruthless falsehood or any other unworthy act. He, who never
missed a show in the arena, had never seen the lady Euryale here. She
could hardly have come to-day for her own pleasure; she had come, then,
for Melissa's sake; and yet she knew that the girl was betrothed to him.
Unless Caesar had commanded the matron's presence, Melissa must still be
worthy of the esteem and affection of this best of women; and at this
reflection Hope once more raised her head in his tortured soul.
He now suddenly wished that brighter light might dispel the gloom which
just now he had found so restful; for the lady Euryale's demeanor would
show him whether Melissa were still a virtuous maiden. If the matron were
as friendly with her as ever, her heart was perhaps still his; it was not
the splendor of the purple that had led her astray, but the coercion of
the tyrant.
His silent reflections were here interrupted by the loud sounding of
trumpets, battle-cries, and, immediately after, the fall of some heavy
body, followed by repeated acclamations, noisy outcries, and the applause
of those about him. Not till then had he been aware that the performances
had begun. Below him, indeed, on the arena from which he had not once
raised his eyes, nothing was to be seen on the yellow sand but the
scented fountain and a shapeless body, by which a second and a third were
soon lying; but overhead something was astir, and, from the right-hand
side, bright rays flashed across the wide space. Above the vast circle of
seats, arranged on seven tiers, suns and huge, strangely shaped stars
were seen, which shed a subdued, many-tinted radiance; and what the youth
saw over his head was not the vault of heaven, which to-night bent over
his native city darkened by clouds, but a velarium of immense size on
which the nocturnal firmament was depicted. This covered in the whole of
the open space. Every constellation which rose over Alexandria was
plainly recognizable. Jupiter and Mars, Caesar's favorites, outdid the
other planets in size and brightness; and in the center of this picture
of the sky, which slowly revolved round it, stars were set to form the
letters of Caracalla's names, Bassianus and Antoninus. But their light,
too, was dim, and veiled as it were with clouds. Soft music was heard
from these artificial heavens, and in the stratum of air immediately
beneath, the blare of war-trumpets and battle-cries were heard. Thus all
eyes were directed upward, and Diodoros's with the rest.
He perceived, with amazement, that the givers of the entertainment, in
their anxiety to set something absolutely new before their imperial
guest, had arranged that the first games should take place in the air. A
battle was being fought overhead, on a level with the highest places, in
a way that must surely be a surprise even to the pampered Romans. Black
and gold barks were jostling each other in mid-air, and their crews were
fighting with the energy of despair. The Egyptian myth of the gods of the
great lights who sail the celestial ocean in golden barks, and of the
sun-god who each morning conquers the demons of darkness, had suggested
the subject of this performance.
The battle between the Spirits of Darkness and of Light was to be fought
out high above the best rows of seats occupied by Caesar and his court;
and the combatants were living men, for the most part such as had been
condemned to death or to the hardest forced labor. The black vessels were
manned by negroes, the golden by fair-haired criminals, and they had
embarked readily enough; for some of them would escape from the fray with
only a few wounds and some quite unhurt, and each one was resolved to use
his weapons so as to bring the frightful combat to a speedy end.
The woolly-haired blacks did not indeed know that they had been provided
with loosely made swords which would go to pieces at the first shock, and
with shields which could not resist a serious blow; while the fair-haired
representatives of the light were supplied with sharp and strong weapons
of offense and defense. At any cost the spirits of darkness must not be
allowed to triumph over those of light. Of what value was a negro's life,
especially when it was already forfeited?
While Euryale and Melissa sat with eyes averted from the horrible scene
going on above them, and the matron, holding her young companion's hand,
whispered to her:
"O child, child! to think that I should be compelled to bring you here!"
loud applause and uproarious clapping surrounded them on every side.
The gem-cutter Heron, occupying one of the foremost cushioned seats,
radiant with pride and delight in the red-bordered toga of his new
dignity, clapped his big hands with such vehemence that his immediate
neighbors were almost deafened. He, too, had been badly received, on his
arrival, with shrill whistling, but he had been far from troubling
himself about that. But when a troop of "Greens" had met him, just in
front of the imperial dais, shouting brutal abuse in his face, he had
paused, chucked the nearest man under the chin with his powerful fist,
and fired a storm of violent epithets at the rest. Thanks to the lictors,
he had got off without any harm, and as soon as he found himself among
friends and men of rank, on whom he looked in speechless respect, he had
recovered his spirits. He was looking forward with intense satisfaction
to the moment when he might ask Caesar what he now thought of Alexandria.
Like his father, Alexander was intent on the bloody struggle--gazing
upward with breathless interest as the combatants tried to fling each
other into the yawning depth below them. But at the same time he never
for an instant forgot the insults he had endured outside. How deeply he
felt them was legible in his clouded face. Only once did a smile pass
over it--when, toward the end of this first fight, the place was made
lighter, he perceived in the row of seats next above him the daughter of
his neighbor Skopas, pretty Ino, whom but a few days since he had vowed
to love. He was conscious of having treated her badly, and given her the
right to call him faithless. Toward her, indeed, he had been guilty of
treachery, and it had really weighed on his soul. Their eyes met, and she
gave him to understand in the plainest way that she had heard him
stigmatized as Caesar's spy, and had believed the calumny. The mere sight
of him seemed to fill her with anger, and she did her utmost to show him
that she had quickly found a substitute for him; and it was to Alexander,
no doubt, that Ktesias, her young kinsman, who had long paid her his
addresses, owed the kindliness with which Ino now gazed into his eyes.
This was some comfort to the luckless, banished lover. On her account, at
any rate, he need reproach himself no longer. Diodoros was sitting
opposite to him, and his attention, too, was frequently interrupted.
The flashing swords and torches in the hands of the Spirits of Light, and
the dimly gleaming stars above their heads, had not so far dispelled the
darkness as that the two young people could identify each other.
Diodoros, indeed, even throughout this absorbing fight, had frequently
glanced at the imperial seats, but had failed to distinguish his beloved
from the other women in Caracalla's immediate vicinity. But it now grew
lighter, for, while the battle was as yet undecided, a fresh bark, full
of Spirits of Light, flourishing their torches, was unexpectedly launched
to support their comrades, and Heaven seemed to have sent them forth to
win the fight, which had already lasted longer than the masters of the
ceremonies had thought possible.
The wild shouts of the combatants and the yells of the wounded had long
since drowned the soft music of the spheres above their heads. The call
of tubas and bugles rang without ceasing through the great building, to
the frequent accompaniment of the most horrible sound of all in this
hideous spectacle--the heavy fall of a dead man dropping from above into
the gulf.
But this dreadful thud was what gave rise to the loudest applause among
the spectators, falling on their satiated ears as a new sound. This
frenzied fight in the air, such as had never before been seen, gave rise
to the wildest delight, for it led the eye, which was wont in this place
to gaze downward, in a direction in which it had never yet been
attracted. And what a glorious spectacle it was when black and white
wrestled together! How well the contrast of color distinguished the
individual combatants, even when they clung together in close embrace!
And when, toward the end of the struggle, a bark was overturned bodily,
and some of the antagonists would not be parted, even as they fell,
trying to kill each other in their rage and hatred, the very walls of the
great structure shook with the wild clamor and applause of thousands of
every degree.
Only once did the roar of approval reach a higher pitch, and that was
after the battle was ended, at what succeeded. Hardly had the victorious
Spirits of Light been seen to stand up in their barks, waving their
torches, to receive from fluttering genii wreaths of laurel which they
flung down to where Caesar sat, than a perfumed vapor, emanating from the
place where the painted sky met the wall of the circular building, hid
the whole of the upper part of it from the sight of the spectators. The
music stopped, and from above there came a strange and ominous growling,
hissing, rustling, and crackling. A dull light, dimmer even than before,
filled the place, and anxious suspicions took possession of the ten
thousand spectators.
What was happening? Was the velarium on fire; had the machinery for
lighting up refused to work; and must they remain in this uncomfortable
twilight?
Here and there a shout of indignation was heard, or a shrill whistle from
the capricious mob. But the mist had already gradually vanished, and
those who gazed upward could see that the velarium with the sun and stars
had made way for a black surface. No one knew whether this was the real
cloudy sky, or whether another, colorless awning closed them in. But
suddenly the woven roof parted; invisible hands drew away the two halves.
Quick, soft music began as if at a signal from a magician, and at the
same time such a flood of light burst down into the theatre that every
one covered his eyes with his hand to avoid being blinded. The full glory
of sunshine followed on the footsteps of night, like a triumphant chorus
on a dismal mourning chant.
The machinists of Alexandria had done wonders. The Romans, who, even at
the night performances of the festival of Flora, had never seen the like,
hailed the effect with a storm of applause which showed no signs of
ceasing, for, when they had sufficiently admired the source of the light
which flooded the theatre, reflected from numberless mirrors, and glanced
round the auditorium, they began again to applaud with hands and voices.
At a given signal thousands of lights appeared round the tiers of seats,
and, if the splendor of the entertainment answered at all to that of the
Alexandrian spectators, something fine indeed was to be expected.
It was now possible to see the beauty of the women and the costliness of
their attire; not till now had the precious stones shown their flashing
and changeful radiance. How many gardens and lotus-pools must have been
plundered, how many laurel-groves stripped to supply the wreaths which
graced every head in the upper rows! And to look round those ranks and
note the handsome raiment in which men and women alike were arrayed,
suggested a belief that all the inhabitants of Alexandria must be rich.
Wherever the eye turned, something beautiful or magnificent was to be
seen; and the numerous delightful pictures which crowded on the sight
were framed with massive garlands of lotos and mallow, lilies and roses,
olive and laurel, tall papyrus and waving palm, branches of pine and
willow-here hanging in thick festoons, there twining round the columns or
wreathing the pilasters and backs of seats.
Of all the couples in this incomparable amphitheatre one alone neither
saw nor heard all that was going on. Scarcely had the darkness given way
to light, when Melissa's eyes met those of her lover, and recognition was
immediately followed by a swift inquiry and reply which filled the
unhappy pair with revived hopes. Melissa's eyes told Diodoros that she
loved him and him alone, and she read in his that he could never give her
up. Still, his also expressed the doubt and anxiety of his tortured soul,
and sent question after question across to Melissa.
And she understood the mute appeal as well as though looks were words.
Without heeding the curious crowd about her, or considering the danger of
such audacity, she took up her nosegay and waved it toward him as though
to refresh him with its fragrance, and then pressed a hasty kiss on the
finest of the half-opened buds. His responsive gesture showed that she
had been understood, for her lover's expressive eyes beamed with
unqualified love and gratitude. Never, she thought, had he gazed more
fervently in her face, and again she bent over the bunch of roses.
But even in the midst of her newly found happiness her cheeks tingled
with maidenly modesty at her own boldness. Too happy to regret what she
had done, but still anxious lest the friend whose opinion was all in all
to her should disapprove, she forgot time and place, and, laying her head
on Euryale's shoulder, looked up at her in inquiry with her large eyes as
though imploring forgiveness. The matron understood, for she had followed
the girl's glance and felt what it was that stirred her heart; and,
little thinking of the joy she was giving to a third person, she clasped
her closely and kissed her on the temple, regardless of the people about
them.
At this Diodoros felt as though he had won the prize in a race; and his
friend Timon, whose artistic eye was feasting on the magnificent scene,
started at the vehement and ardent pressure which Diodoros bestowed on
his hand.
What had come over the poor, suffering youth whom he, Timon, had escorted
to the Circus out of sheer compassion? His eyes sparkled, and he held his
head as high as ever. What was the meaning of his declaring that
everything would go well with him now? But it was in vain that he
questioned the youth, for Diodoros could not reveal, even to his best
friend, what it was that made him happy. It was enough for him to know
that Melissa loved him, and that the woman to whom he looked up with
enthusiastic reverence esteemed her as highly as ever. And now, for the
first time, he began to feel ashamed of his doubts of Melissa. How could
he, who had known her from childhood, have believed of her anything so
base and foul? It must be some strong compulsion which bound her to
Caesar, and she could never have looked at him thus unless she had some
scheme--in which, perhaps, the lady Euryale meant to abet her--for
escaping her imperial suitor before it was too late. Yes, it must be so;
and the oftener he gazed at her the more convinced he felt.
Now he rejoiced in the blaze of light about him, for it showed him his
beloved. The words which Euryale had whispered in her ear must have been
an admonition to prudence, for she only rarely bestowed on him a loving
glance, and he acknowledged that the mute but eager exchange of signals
would have been fraught with danger for both of them.
The first sudden illumination had revealed too many things to distract
the attention of the spectators, including Caesar's, for their
proceedings to be observed. Now curiosity was to some extent satisfied,
and even Diodoros felt that reserve was imperative.
Caracalla had not yet shown himself to the people. A golden screen, in
which there were holes for him to look through without being seen, hid
him from public gaze; still Diodoros could recognize those who were
admitted to his presence. First came the givers of the entertainment;
then the Parthian envoys, and some delegates from the municipal
authorities of the town. Finally, Seleukus presented the wives of the
magnates who had shared with him the cost of this display, and among
these, all magnificently dressed, the lady Berenike shone supreme by the
pride of her demeanor and the startling magnificence of her attire. As
her large eyes met those of Caesar with a flash of defiance, he frowned,
and remarked satirically:
"It seems to be the custom here to mourn in much splendor!"
But Berenike promptly replied:
"It has nothing to do with mourning. It is in honor of the sovereign who
commanded the presence of the mourner at the Circus."
Diodoros could not see the flame of rage in, Caesar's threatening eye,
nor hear his reply to the audacious matron:
"This is a misapprehension of how to do me honor, but an opportunity will
occur for teaching the Alexandrians better."
Even across the amphitheatre the youth could see the sudden flush and
pallor of the lady's haughty face; and immediately after, Macrinus, the
praetorian prefect, approached Caracalla with the master of the games,
the superintendent of the school of gladiators.
At the same time Diodoros heard his next neighbor, a member of the city
senate, say:
"How quietly it is going off! My proposal that Caesar should come in to a
dim light, so as to keep him and his unpopular favorites out of sight for
a while, has worked capitally. Who could the mob whistle at, so long as
they could not see one from another? Now they are too much delighted to
be uproarious. Caesar's bride, of all others, has reason to thank me. And
she reminds me of the Persian warriors who, before going into battle,
bound cats to their bucklers because they knew that the Egyptian foe
would not shoot at them so long as the sacred beasts were exposed to
being hit by his arrows."
"What do you mean by that?" asked another, and received the brisk reply:
"The lady Euryale is the cat who protects the damsel. Out of respect for
her, and for fear of hurting her, too, her companion has hitherto been
spared even by those fellows up there."
And he pointed to a party of "Greens" who were laying their heads
together in one of the topmost tiers. But his friend replied:
"Something besides that keeps them within bounds. The three beardless
fellows just behind them belong to the city watch, who are scattered
through the general mass like raisins in doughcakes."
"That is very judicious," replied the senator.
"We might otherwise have had to quit the Circus a great deal quicker than
we came in. We shall hardly get home with dry garments as it is. Look how
the lights up there are flaring; you can hear the lashing of the storm,
and such flashes are not produced by machinery. Zeus is preparing his
bolts, and if the storm bursts--"
Here his discourse was interrupted by the sound of trumpets, mingling
with the roar of distant thunder following a vivid flash. The procession
now began, which was the preliminary to every such performance.
The statues of the gods had, before Caesar's arrival, been placed on the
pedestals erected for them to prevent any risk of a demonstration at the
appearance of the deified emperors. The priests now first marched
solemnly round these statues, and Timotheus poured a libation on the sand
to Serapis, while the priest of Alexandria did the same to the tutelary
hero of the town. Then the masters of the games, the gladiators, and
beast-fighters came out, who were to make proof of their skill. As the
priests approached Caesar's dais, Caracalla came forward and greeted the
spectators, thus showing himself for the first time.
While he was still sitting behind the screen, he had sent for Melissa,
who had obeyed the command, under the protection of Euryale, and he had
spoken to her graciously. He now took no further notice of her, of her
father, or her brother, and by his orders their places had been separated
by some little distance from his. By the advice of Timotheus he would not
let her be seen at his side till the stars had once more been consulted,
and he would then conduct Melissa to the Circus as his wife-the day after
to-morrow, perhaps. He thanked the matron for having escorted Melissa,
and added, with a braggart air of virtue, that the world should see that
he, too, could sacrifice the most ardent wish of his heart to moral
propriety.
The elephant torch-bearers had greatly delighted him, and in the
expectation of seeing Melissa again, and of a public recognition that he
had won the fairest maid there, he had come into the Circus in the best
spirits. He still wore his natural expression; yet now and then his brow
was knit, for he was haunted by the eyes of Seleukus's wife. The haughty
woman--"that bedizened Niobe" he had contemptuously called her in
speaking to Macrinus--had appeared to him as an avenging goddess;
strangely enough, every time he thought of her, he remembered, too, the
consul Vindex and his nephew, whose execution Melissa's intercession had
only hastened, and he was vexed now that he had not lent an ear to her
entreaties. The fact that the name Vindex signified an avenger disturbed
him greatly, and he could no more get it out of his mind than the image
of the "Niobe" with her ominous dark eyes.
He would see her no more; and in this he was helped by the gladiators,
for they now approached him, and their frantic enthusiasm kept him for
some time from all other thoughts. While they flourished their
weapons-some the sword and buckler, and others the not less terrible net
and harpoon--the time-honored cry rose from their husky throats in eager
acclamation: "Hail, Caesar! those about to die salute thee!" Then, in
rows of ten men each, they crossed the arena at a rapid pace.
Between the first and second group one man swaggered past alone, as
though he were something apart, and he strutted and rolled as he walked
with pompous self-importance. It was his prescriptive right, and in his
broad, coarse features, with a snub nose, thick lips, and white, flashing
teeth like those of a beast of prey, it was easy to see that the
adversary would fare but ill who should try to humble him. And yet he was
not tall; but on his deep chest, his enormous square shoulders, and
short, bandy legs, the muscles stood out like elastic balls, showing the
connoisseur that in strength he was a giant. A loin-cloth was all he
wore, for he was proud of the many scars which gleamed red and white on
his fair skin. He had pushed back his little bronze helmet, so that the
terrible aspect of the left side of his face might not be lost on the
populace. While he was engaged in fighting three panthers and a lion, the
lion had torn out his eye and with it part of his cheek. His name was
Tarautas, and he was known throughout the empire as the most brutal of
gladiators, for he had also earned the further privilege of never
fighting but for life or death, and never under any circumstances either
granting or asking quarter. Where he was engaged corpses strewed the
plain.
Caesar knew that he himself had been nicknamed Tarautas after this man,
and he was not ill pleased; for, above all things, he aimed at being
thought strong and terrible, and this the gladiator was without a peer in
his own rank of life. They knew each other: Tarautas had received many a
gift from his imperial patron after hard-won victories in which his blood
had flowed. And now, as the scarred veteran, who, puffed up with conceit,
walked singly and apart in the long train of gladiators, cast a roving
and haughty glance on the ranks of spectators, he was filled out of due
time with the longing to center all eyes on himself, the one aim of his
so frequently risking his life in these games. His chest swelled, he
braced up the tension of his supple sinews, and as he passed the imperial
seats he whirled his short sword round his head, describing a circle in
the air, with such skill and such persistent rapidity, that it appeared
like a disk of flashing steel. At the same time his harsh, powerful voice
bellowed out, "Hail, Caesar!" sounding above the shouts of his comrades
like the roar of a lion; and Caracalla, who had not yet vouchsafed a
friendly word or pleasant look to any Alexandrian, waved his hand
graciously again and again to this audacious monster, whose strength and
skill delighted him.
This was the instant for which the "Greens" in the third tier were
waiting. No one could prohibit their applauding the man whom Caesar
himself approved, so they forthwith began shouting "Tarautas!" with all
their might. They knew that this would suggest the comparison between
Caesar and the sanguinary wretch whose name had been applied to him, and
all who were eager to give expression to their vexation or
dissatisfaction took the hint and joined in the outcry. Thus in a moment
the whole amphitheatre was ringing with the name of "Tarautas!"
At first it rose here and there; but soon, no one knew how, the whole
crowd in the upper ranks joined in one huge chorus, giving free vent to
their long-suppressed irritation with childish and increasing uproar,
shouting the word with steady reiteration and a sort of involuntary
rhythm. Before long it sounded as though the multitude must have
practiced the mad chant which swelled to a perfect roar.
"Tarau-Tarau-Tarautas!" and, as is always the case when a breach has been
made in the dam, one after another joined in, with here the shrill
whistle of a reed pipe and there the clatter of a rattle. Mingling with
these were the angry outcries of those whom the lictors or guardians of
the peace had laid hands on, or their indignant companions; and the
thunder outside rolled a solemn accompaniment to the mutinous tumult
within.
Caesar's scowling brow showed that a storm threatened in that quarter
also; and no sooner had he discerned the aim of the crowd than, foaming
with rage, he commanded Macrinus to restore order.
Then, above the chaos of voices, trumpet-calls were sounded. The masters
of the games perceived that, if only they could succeed in riveting the
attention of the mob by some exciting or interesting scene, that would
surely silence the demonstration which was threatening ruin to the whole
community; so the order was at once given to begin the performance with
the most important and effective scene with which it had been intended
that the whole should conclude.
The spectacle was to represent a camp of the Alemanni, surprised and
seized by Roman warriors. In this there was a covert compliment to
Caesar, who, after a doubtful victory over that valiant people, had
assumed the name of Alemannicus. Part of the gladiators, clothed in
skins, represented the barbarians, and wore long flowing wigs of red or
yellow hair; others played the part of Roman troops, who were to conquer
them. The Alemanni were all condemned criminals, who were allowed no
armor, and only blunt swords wherewith to defend themselves. But life and
freedom were promised to the women if, after the camp was seized, they
wounded themselves with the sharp knives with which each one was
provided, at least deeply enough to draw blood. And any who succeeded in
feigning death really deceptively were to earn a special reward. Among
the Germans there were, too, a few gladiators of exceptional stature,
armed with sharp weapons, so as to defer the decision for a while.
In a few minutes, and under the eyes of the spectators, carts, cattle,
and horses were placed together in a camp, and surrounded by a wall of
tree trunks, stones, and shields. Meanwhile shouts and whistles were
still heard; nay, when Tarautas came out on the arena in the highly
decorated armor of a Roman legate, at the head of a troop of heavily
armed men, and again greeted the emperor, the commotion began afresh. But
Caracalla's patience was exhausted, and the high-priest saw by his pale
cheeks and twitching eyelids what was passing in his mind; so, inspired
by the fervent hope of averting some incalculable disaster from his
fellow-citizens, he took his place in front of the statue of the god,
and, lifting up his hands, he began:
"In the name of Serapis, O Macedonians!" His deep, ringing tones sounded
above the voices of the insurgents in the upper rows, and there was
silence.
Not a sound was to be heard but the long-drawn howling of the wind, and
now and then the flap of a strip of cloth torn from the velarium by the
gale. Mingling with these might be heard the uncanny hooting of owls and
daws which the illumination had brought out of their nests in the
cornice, and which the storm was now driving in again.
Timotheus, in a clear and audible address, now appealed to his audience
to remain quiet, not to disturb the splendid entertainment here set
before them, and above all to remember that great Caesar, the divine
ruler of the world, was in their midst, an honor to each and all. As the
guest of the most hospitable city on earth, their illustrious sovereign
had a right to expect from every Alexandrian the most ardent endeavors to
make his stay here delightful. It was his part as high-priest to uplift
his warning voice in the name of the greatest of the gods, that the
ill-will of a few malcontents might not give rise to an idea in the mind
of their beloved guest that the natives of Alexandria were blind to the
blessings for which every citizen had to thank his beneficent rule.
A shrill whistle here interrupted his discourse, and a voice shouted:
"What blessings? We know of none."
But Timotheus was not to be checked, and went on more vehemently
"All of you who, by the grace of Caesar, have been made Roman citizens--"
But again a voice broke in--the speaker was the overseer of the granaries
of Seleukus, sitting in the second tier--"And do you suppose we do not
know what the honor costs us?"
This query was heartily applauded, and then suddenly, as if by magic, a
perfect chorus arose, chanting a distich which one man in the crowd had
first given out and then two or three had repeated, to which a fourth had
given a sort of tune, till it was shouted by every one present at the
very top of his voice, with marked application to him of whom it spoke.
From the topmost row of places, on every side of the amphitheatre, rang
out the following lines, which but a moment before no one had ever heard:
"Death to the living, to pay for burying those that are dead;
Since, what the taxes have spared, soldiers have ruthlessly seized."
And the words certainly came from the heart; of the people, for they
seemed never weary of repeating them; and it was not till a tremendous
clap of thunder shook the very walls that several were silent and looked
up with increasing alarm. The moment's pause was seized on to begin the
fight. Caesar bit his lip in powerless fury, and his hatred of the
towns-people, who had thus so plainly given him to understand their
sentiments, was rising from one minute to the next. He felt it a real
misfortune that he was unable to punish on the spot the insult thus
offered him; swelling with rage, he remembered a speech made by Caligula,
and wished the town had but one head, that he might sever it from the
body. The blood throbbed so fiercely in his temples, and there was such a
singing in his ears, that for some little time he neither saw nor heard
what was going on. This terrible agitation might cost him yet some hours
of great suffering. But he need no longer dread them so much; for there
sat the living remedy which he believed he had secured by the strongest
possible ties.
How fair she was! And, as he looked round once more at Melissa, he
observed that her eye was turned on him with evident anxiety. At this a
light seemed to dawn in his clouded soul, and he was once more conscious
of the love which had blossomed in his heart. But it would never do to
make her who had wrought the miracle so soon the confidante of his
hatred. He had seen her angry, had seen her weep, and had seen her smile;
and within the next few days, which were to make him a happy man instead
of a tortured victim, he longed only to see her great eyes sparkle and
her lips overflow with words of love, joy, and gratitude. His score with
the Alexandrians must be settled later, and it was in his power to make
them atone with their blood and bitterly rue the deeds of this night.
He passed his hand over his furrowed brow, as though to wake himself from
a bad dream; nay, he even found a smile when next his eyes met hers; and
those spectators to whom his aspect seemed more absorbing than the
horrible slaughter in the arena, looked at each other in amazement, for
the indifference or the dissimulation, whichever it might be, with which
Caesar regarded this unequaled scene of bloodshed, seemed to them quite
incredible.
Never, since his very first visit to a circus, had Caracalla left
unnoticed for so long a time the progress of such a battle as this.
However, nothing very remarkable had so far occurred, for the actual
seizure of the camp had but just begun with the massacre of the Alemanni
and the suicide of the women.
At this moment the gladiator Tarautas, as nimble as a cat and as
bloodthirsty as a hungry wolf, sprang on to one of the enemy's piled-up
wagons, and a tall swordsman, with a bear-skin over his shoulder, and
long, reddish-gold hair, flew to meet him.
This was no sham German! Caracalla knew the man. He had been brought to
Rome among the captive chiefs, and, as he had proved to be a splendid
horseman, he had found employment in Caesar's stables. His conduct had
always been blameless till, on the day when Caracalla had entered
Alexandria, he had, in a drunken fit, killed first the man set over him,
a hot-headed Gaul, and then the two lictors who had attempted to
apprehend him. He was condemned to death, and had been placed on the
German side to fight for his life in the arena.
And how he fought! How he defied the most determined of gladiators, and
parried his strokes with his short sword! This was a combat really worth
watching; indeed, it so captivated Caracalla that he forgot everything
else. The name of the German's antagonist had been applied to
him--Caesar. Just now the many-voiced yell "Tarautas!" had been meant for
him; and, accustomed as he was to read an omen in every incident, he said
to himself, and called Fate to witness, that the gladiator's doom would
foreshadow his own. If Tarautas fell, then Caesar's days were numbered;
if he triumphed, then a long and happy life would be his.
He could leave the decision to Tarautas with perfect confidence; he was
the strongest gladiator in the empire, and he was fighting with a sharp
sword against the blunt one in his antagonist's hand, who probably had
forgotten in the stable how to wield the sword as he had done of yore.
But the German was the son of a chief, and had followed arms from his
earliest youth. Here it was defense for dear life, however glorious it
might be to die under the eyes of the man whom he had learned to honor as
the conqueror and tyrant of many nations, among them his own. So the
strong and practiced athlete did his best.
He, like his opponent, felt that the eyes of ten thousand were on him,
and he also longed to purge himself of the dishonor which, by actual
murder, he had brought on himself and on the race of which he was still a
son. Every muscle of his powerful frame gained more rigid tension at the
thought, and when he was presently hit by the sword of his hitherto
unconquered foe, and felt the warm blood flow over his breast and left
arm, he collected all his strength. With the battle-cry of his tribe, he
flung his huge body on the gladiator. Heedless of the furious
sword-thrust with which Tarautas returned the assault, he threw himself
off the top of the packed wagon on to the stones of the camp inclosure,
and the combatants rolled, locked together like one man, from the wall
into the sand of the arena.
Caracalla started as though he himself had been the injured victim, and
watched, but in vain, to see the supple Tarautas, who had escaped such
perils before now, free himself from the weight of the German's body.
But the struggle continued to rage round the pair, and neither stirred a
finger. At this Caesar, greatly disturbed, started to his feet, and
desired Theocritus to make inquiry as to whether Tarautas were wounded or
dead; and while the favorite was gone he could not sit still. Agitated by
distressing fears, he rose to speak first to one and then to another of
his suite, only to drop on his seat again and glance once more at the
butchery below. He was fully persuaded that his own end must be near, if
indeed Tarautas were dead. At last he heard Theocritus's voice, and, as
he turned to ask him the news, he met a look from the lady Berenike, who
had risen to quit the theatre.
He shuddered!--the image of Vindex and his nephew rose once more before
his mind's eye; at the same moment, however, Theocritus hailed him with
the exclamation:
"That fellow, Tarautas, is not a man at all! I should call him an eel if
he were not so broad shouldered. The rascal is alive, and the physician
says that in three weeks he will be ready again to fight four bears or
two Alemanni!"
A light as of sudden sunshine broke on Caesar's face, and he was
perfectly cheerful again, though a fearful clap of thunder rattled
through the building, and one of those deluges of rain which are known
only in the south came pouring down into the open theatre, extinguishing
the fires and lights, and tearing the velarium from its fastenings till
it hung flapping in the wind and lashing the upper tiers of places, so as
to drive the spectators to a hasty retreat.
Men were flying, women screaming and sobbing, and the heralds loudly
proclaimed that the performance was suspended, and would be resumed on
the next day but one.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
He only longed to be hopeful once more, to enjoy the present
Never to be astonished at anything
A THORNY PATH
By Georg Ebers
Volume 10.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
The amphitheatre was soon emptied, amid the flare of lightning and the
crash and roll of thunder. Caracalla, thinking only of the happy omen of
Tarautas's wonderful escape, called out to Melissa, with affectionate
anxiety, to fly to shelter as quickly as possible; a chariot was in
waiting to convey her to the Serapeum. On this she humbly represented
that she would rather be permitted to return under her brother's escort
to her father's house, and Caracalla cheerfully acceded. He had business
on hand this night, which made it seem desirable to him that she should
not be too near him. He should expect her brother presently at the
Serapeum.
With his own hand he wrapped her in the caracalla and hood which old
Adventus was about to put on his master's shoulders, remarking, as he did
so, that he had weathered worse storms in the field.
Melissa thanked him with a blush, and, going close up to her, he
whispered: "To-morrow, if Fate grants us gracious answers to the
questions I shall put to her presently after this storm--tomorrow the
horn of happiness will be filled to overflowing for you and me. The
thrifty goddess promises to be lavish to me through you."
Slaves were standing round with lighted lanterns; for the torches in the
theatre were all extinguished, and the darkened auditorium lay like an
extinct crater, in which a crowd of indistinguishable figures were moving
to and fro. It reminded him of Hades and a troop of descending spirits;
but he would not allow anything but what was pleasant to occupy his mind
or eye. By a sudden impulse he took a lantern from one of the attendants,
held it up above Melissa's head, and gazed long and earnestly into her
brightly illuminated face. Then he dropped his hand with a sigh and said,
as though speaking in a dream: "Yes, this is life! Now I begin to live."
He lifted the dripping laurel crown from his head, tossed it into the
arena, and added to Melissa: "Now, get under shelter at once, sweetheart.
I have been able to see you this whole evening, even when the lamps were
out; for lightning gives light. Thus even the storm has brought me joy.
Sleep well. I shall expect you early, as soon as I have bathed."
Melissa wished him sound slumbers, and he replied, lightly:
"If only all life were a dream, and if to-morrow I might but wake up, no
longer the son of Severus, but Alexander; and you, not Melissa, but
Roxana, whom you so strongly resemble! To be sure I might find myself the
gladiator Tarautas. But, then, who would you be? And your stalwart
father, who stands there defying the rain, certainly does not look like a
vision, and this storm is not favorable to philosophizing."
He kissed his hand to her, had a dry caracalla thrown over his shoulders,
ordered Theocritus to take care of Tarautas and carry him a purse of
gold--which he handed to the favorite--and then, pulling the hood over
his head, led the way, followed by his impatient courtiers; but not till
he had answered Heron, who had come forward to ask him what he thought of
the mechanical arts of the Alexandrians, desiring him to postpone that
matter till the morrow.
The storm had silenced the music. Only a few stanch trumpeters had
remained in their places; and when they saw by the lanterns that Caesar
had left the Circus, they sounded a fanfare after him, which followed the
ruler of the world with a dull, hoarse echo.
Outside, the streets were still crowded with people pouring out of the
amphitheatre. Those of the commoner sort sought shelter under the
archways of the building, or else hurried boldly home through the rain.
Heron stood waiting at the entrance for his daughter, though the
purple-hemmed toga was wet, through and through. But she had, in fact,
hurried out while he was pushing forward to speak to Caesar, and in his
excitement overlooked everything else. The behavior of his
fellow-citizens had annoyed him, and he had an obscure impression that it
would be a blunder to claim Caesar's approval of anything they had done;
still, he had not self-control enough to suppress the question which had
fluttered on his lips all through the performance. At last, in high
dudgeon at the inconsiderateness of young people and at the rebuff he had
met with--with the prospect, too, of a cold for his pains--he made his
way homeward on foot.
To Caracalla the bad weather was for once really an advantage, for it put
a stop to the unpleasant demonstrations which the "Green" party had
prepared for him on his way home.
Alexander soon found the closed carruca intended for Melissa, and placed
her in it as soon as he had helped Euryale into her harmamaxa. He was
astonished to find a man inside it, waiting for his sister. This was
Diodoros, who, while Alexander was giving his directions to the
charioteer, had, under cover of the darkness, sprung into the vehicle
from the opposite side. An exclamation of surprise was followed by
explanations and excuses, and the three young people, each with a heart
full almost to bursting, drove off toward Heron's house. Their conveyance
was already rolling over the pavement, while most of the magnates of the
town were still waiting for their slaves to find their chariots or
litters.
For the lovers this was a very different scene from the terrible one they
had just witnessed in the Circus, for, in spite of the narrow space and
total darkness in which they sat, and the rain rattling and splashing on
the dripping black leather hood which sheltered them, in their hearts
they did not lack for sunshine. Caracalla's saying that the lightning,
too, was light, proved true more than once in the course of their drive,
for the vivid flashes which still followed in quick succession enabled
the reunited lovers to exchange many confidences with their eyes, for
which it would have been hard to find words. When both parties to a
quarrel are conscious of blame, it is more quickly made up than when one
only needs forgiveness; and the pair in the carruca were so fully
prepared to think the best of each other that there was no need for
Alexander's good offices to make them ready and willing to renew their
broken pledges. Besides, each had cause to fear for the other; for
Diodoros was afraid that the lady Euryale's power was not far-reaching
enough to conceal Melissa from Caesar's spies, and Melissa trembled at
the thought that the physician might too soon betray to Caesar that she
had been betrothed before he had ever seen her, and to whom; for, in that
case, Diodoros would be the object of relentless pursuit. So she urged on
her lover to embark, if possible, this very night.
Hitherto Alexander had taken no part in the conversation. He could not
forget the reception he had met with outside the amphitheatre. Euryale's
presence had saved his sister from evil imputations, but had not helped
him; and even his gay spirits could make no head against the
consciousness of being regarded by his fellow-citizens as a hired
traitor. He had withdrawn to one of the back seats to see the
performance; for as soon as the theatre was suddenly lighted up, he had
become the object of dark looks and threatening gestures. For the first
time in his life he had felt compassion for the criminals torn by wild
beasts, and for the wounded gladiators, whose companion in misfortune he
vaguely felt himself to be. But, what was worst of all, he could not
regard himself as altogether free from the reproach of having accepted a
reward for the service he had so thoughtlessly rendered.
Nor did he see the remotest possibility of ever making those whose
opinion he cared for understand how it had come to pass that he should
have acceded to the desire of the villain in the purple, now that his
father, by showing himself to the people in the 'toga pretexta', had set
the seal to their basest suspicions. The thought that henceforth he could
never hope to feel the grasp of an honest man's hand gnawed at his heart.
The esteem of Diodoros was dear to him, and, when his young comrade spoke
to him, he felt at first as though he were doing him an unexpected honor;
but then he fell back into the suspicion that this was only for his
sister's sake.
The deep sigh that broke from him induced Melissa to speak a few words of
comfort, and now the unhappy man's bursting heart overflowed. In eloquent
words he described to Diodoros and Melissa all he had felt, and the
terrible consequences of his heedless folly, and as he spoke acute regret
filled his eyes with tears.
He had pronounced judgment on himself, and expected nothing of his friend
but a little pity. But in the darkness Diodoros sought and found his
hand, and grasped it fervently; and if Alexander could but have seen his
old playfellow's face, he would have perceived that his eyes glistened as
he said what he could to encourage him to hope for better days.
Diodoros knew his friend well. He was incapable of falsehood; and his
deed, which under a false light so easily assumed an aspect of villainy,
had, in fact, been no more than an act of thoughtlessness such as he had
himself often lent a hand in. Alexander, however, seemed determined not
to hear the comfort offered him by his sister and his friend. A flash of
lightning revealed him to them, sitting with a bent head and his hands
over his brow; and this gloomy vision of one who so lately had been the
gayest of the gay troubled their revived happiness even more than the
thought of the danger which, as each knew, threatened the others.
As they passed the Temple of Artemis, which was brightly illuminated,
reminding them that they were reaching their destination, Alexander at
last looked up and begged the lovers to consider their immediate affairs.
His mind had remained clear, and what he said showed that he had not lost
sight of his sister's future.
As soon as Melissa should have effected her escape, Caesar would
undoubtedly seize, not only her lover, but his father as well. Diodoros
must forthwith cross the lake and rouse Polybius and Praxilla, to warn
them of the imminent danger, while Alexander undertook to hire a ship for
the party. Argutis would await the fugitives in a tavern by the harbor,
and conduct them on board the vessel which would be in readiness.
Diodoros, who was not yet able to walk far, promised to avail himself of
one of the litters waiting outside the Temple of Artemis.
Just before the vehicle stopped, the lovers took leave. They arranged
where and how they might have news of each other, and all they said, in
brief words and a fervent parting kiss, in this moment, when death or
imprisonment might await them, had the solemn purport of a vow.
The swift horses stopped. Alexander hastily leaned over to his friend,
kissed him on both cheeks, and whispered:
"Take good care of her; think of me kindly if we should never meet again,
and tell the others that wild Alexander has played another fool's trick,
at any rate, not a wicked one, however badly it may turn out for him."
For the sake of the charioteer, who, after Melissa's flight, would be
certainly cross-examined, Diodoros could make no reply. The carruca
rattled off by the way by which it had come; Diodoros vanished in the
darkness, and Melissa clasped her hands over her face. She felt as though
this were her last parting from her lover, and the sun would never shine
on earth again.
It was now near midnight. The slaves had heard the approach of the
chariot, and received them as heartily as ever, but in obedience to
Heron's orders they added the most respectful bows to their usual
well-meant welcome. Since their master had shown himself to Dido, in the
afternoon, with braggart dignity, as a Roman magnate, she had felt as
though the age of miracles had come, and nothing was impossible. Splendid
visions of future grandeur awaiting the whole family, including herself
and Argutis, had not ceased to haunt her; but as to the empress,
something seemed to have gone wrong, for why had the girl wet eyes and so
sad a face? What was all this long whispering with Argutis? But it was no
concern of hers, after all, and she would know all in good time, no
doubt. "What the masters plot to-day the slaves hear next week," was a
favorite saying of the Gauls, and she had often proved its truth.
But the cool way in which Melissa received the felicitations which the
old woman poured out in honor of the future empress, and her
tear-reddened eyes, seemed at any rate quite comprehensible. The child
was thinking, no doubt, of her handsome Diodoros. Among the splendors of
the palace she would soon forget. And how truly magnificent were the
dress and jewels in which the damsel had appeared in the amphitheatre!
"How they must have hailed her!" thought the old woman when she had
helped Melissa to exchange her dress for a simpler robe, and the girl sat
down to write. "If only the mistress had lived to see this day! And all
the other women must have been bursting with envy. Eternal gods! But,
after all, who knows whether the good luck we envy others is great or
small? Why, even in this house, which the gods have filled to the roof
with gifts and favors, misfortune has crept in through the key hole. Poor
Philip!
"Still, if all goes well with the girl. Things have befallen her such as
rarely come to any one, and yet no more than her due. The fairest and
best will be the greatest and wealthiest in the empire."
And she clutched the amulets and the cross which hung round her arm and
throat, and muttered a hasty prayer for her darling.
Argutis, for his part, did not know what to think of it all. He, if any
one, rejoiced in the good fortune of his master and Melissa; but Heron's
promotion to the rank of praetor had been too sudden, and Heron demeaned
himself too strangely in his purple-bordered toga. It was to be hoped
that this new and unexpected honor had not turned his brain! And the
state in which his master's eldest son remained caused him the greatest
anxiety. Instead of rejoicing in the honors of his family, he had at his
first interview with his father flown into a violent rage; and though he,
Argutis, had not understood what they were saying, he perceived that they
were in vehement altercation, and that Heron had turned away in great
wrath. And then--he remembered it with horror, and could hardly tell what
he had seen to Alexander and Melissa in a reasonable and respectful
manner--Philip had sprung out of bed, had dressed himself without help,
even to his shoes, and scarcely had his father set out in his litter
before Philip had come into the kitchen. He looked like one risen from
the grave, and his voice was hollow as he told the slaves that he meant
to go to the Circus to see for himself that justice was done. But Argutis
felt his heart sink within him when the philosopher desired him to fetch
the pipe his father used to teach the birds to whistle, and at the same
time took up the sharp kitchen knife with which Argutis slaughtered the
sheep.
The young man then turned to go, but even on the threshold he had
stumbled over the straps of his sandals which dragged unfastened, and
Argutis had had to lead him, almost to carry him in from the garden, for
a violent fit of coughing had left him quite exhausted. The effort of
pulling at the heavy oars on board the galley had been too much for his
weak chest. Argutis and Dido had carried him to bed, and he had soon
fallen into a deep sleep, from which he had not waked since.
And now what were these two plotting? They were writing; and not on wax
tablets, but with reed pens on papyrus, as though it were a matter of
importance.
All this gave the slave much to think about, and the faithful soul did
not know whether to weep for joy or grief when Alexander told him, with a
gravity which frightened him in this light-hearted youth, that, partly as
the reward of his faithful service and partly to put him in a position to
aid them all in a crisis of peculiar difficulty, he gave him his freedom.
His father had long since intended to do this, and the deed was already
drawn out. Here was the document; and he knew that, even as a freedman,
Argutis would continue to serve them as faithfully as ever. With this he
gave the slave his manumission, which he was in any case to have received
within a month, at the end of thirty years' service, and Argutis took it
with tears of joy, not unmixed with grief and anxiety, while only a few
hours since it would have been enough to make him the happiest of
mortals.
While he kissed their hands and stammered out words of gratitude, his
uncultured but upright spirit told him that he had been blind ever to
have rejoiced for a moment at the news that Melissa had been chosen to be
empress. All that he had seen during the last half-hour had convinced
him, as surely as if he had been told it in words, that his beloved young
mistress scorned her imperial suitor, and firmly intended to evade
him--how, Argutis could not guess. And, recognizing this, a spirit of
adventure and daring stirred him also. This was a struggle of the weak
against the strong; and to him, who had spent his life as one of the
oppressed, nothing could be more tempting than to help on the side of the
weak.
Argutis now undertook with ardent zeal to get Diodoros and his parents
safely on board the ship he was to engage, and to explain to Heron, as
soon as he should have read the letter which Alexander was now writing,
that, unless he could escape at once with Philip, he was lost. Finally,
he promised that the epistle to Caesar, which Melissa was composing,
should reach his hands on the morrow.
He could now receive his letter of freedom with gladness, and consented
to dress up in Heron's garments; for, as a slave, he would have been
forbidden to conclude a bargain with a ship's captain or any one else.
All this was done in hot haste, for Caesar was awaiting Alexander, and
Euryale expected Melissa. The ready zeal of the old man, free for the
first time to act on his own responsibility in matters which would have
been too much for many a free-born man, but to which he felt quite equal,
had an encouraging effect even on the oppressed hearts of the other two.
They knew now that, even if death should be their lot, Argutis would be
faithful to their father and sick brother, and the slave at once showed
his ingenuity and shrewdness; for, while the young people were vainly
trying to think of a hiding-place for Heron and Philip, he suggested a
spot which would hardly be discovered even by the sharpest spies.
Glaukias, the sculptor, who had already fled, was Heron's tenant. His
work-room, a barn-like structure, stood in the little vegetable-garden
which the gem-cutter had inherited from his father-in-law, and none but
Heron and the slave knew that, under the flooring, instead of a cellar,
there was a vast reservoir connected with the ancient aqueducts
constructed by Vespasian. Many years since Argutis had helped his master
to construct a trap-door to the entrance to these underground passages,
of which the existence had remained unknown even to Glaukias during all
the years he had inhabited the place. It was here that Heron kept his
gold, not taking his children even into his confidence; and only a few
months ago Argutis had been down with him and had found the old reservoir
dry, airy, and quite habitable. The gem-cutter would be quite content to
conceal himself where his treasure was, and the garden and work-room were
only distant a few hundred paces from his own home. To get Philip there
without being seen was to Argutis a mere trifle. Alexander, too, old
Dido, and, if needful, Diodoros, could all be concealed there. But for
Melissa, neither he nor Alexander thought it sufficiently secure.
As she took leave of him the young girl once more charged the newly freed
man to greet her father from her a thousand times, to beseech his
forgiveness of her for the bitter grief she must cause him, and to assure
him of her affection.
"Tell him," she added, as the tears streamed down her cheeks, "that I
feel as if I were going to my death. But, come what may, I am always his
dutiful child, always ready to sacrifice anything--excepting only the man
to whom, with my father's consent, I pledged my heart. Tell him that for
love of him I might have been ready even to give my hand to the
blood-stained Caesar, but that Fate--and perhaps the manes of her we
loved, and who is dead--have ordered it otherwise."
She then went into the room where her mother had closed her eyes. After a
short prayer by that bed, which still stood there, she hastened to
Philip's room. He lay sleeping heavily; she bent over him and kissed the
too high brow, which looked as though even in sleep the brain within were
still busy over some difficult and painful question.
Her way led her once more through her father's work-room, and she had
already crossed it when she hastily turned back to look once more--for
the last time-at the little table where she had sat for so many years,
busy with her needle, in modest contentment by the artist's side,
dreaming with waking eyes, and considering what she, with her small
resources and great love, could do that would be of use to those she
loved, or relieve them if they were in trouble. Then, as though she knew
that she was bidding a last farewell to all the pleasant companionship of
her youth, she looked at the birds, long since gone to roost in their
cages. In spite of his recent curule honors Heron had not forgotten them,
and, before quitting the house to display himself to the populace in the
'toga pretexa', he had as usual carefully covered them up. And now, as
Melissa lifted the cloth from the starling's cage, and the bird muttered
more gently than usual, and perhaps in its sleep, the cry, "Olympias!" a
shudder ran through her; and, as she stepped out into the road by
Alexander's side, she said, dejectedly:
"Everything is coming to an end! Well, and so it may; for what has come
over us all in these few days? Before Caesar came, what were you--what
was Philip? In my own heart what peace reigned!
"And my father? There is one comfort, at any rate; even as praetor he has
not forgotten his birds, and he will find feathered friends go where he
may.
"But I--And it is for my sake that he must hide like a criminal!"
But here Alexander vehemently broke in: "It was not you, it was I who
brought all this misery on us!" And he went on to accuse himself so
bitterly that Melissa regretted having alluded to the misfortunes of
their family, and did her best to inspire him with courage.
As soon as Caesar should have left the city and she had evaded his
pursuit, the citizens would be easily persuaded of his innocence. They
would see then how little she had cared for the splendor and wealth of
empire; why, he himself knew how quickly everything was forgotten in
Alexandria. His art, too, would be a comfort to him, and if he only had
the chance of making his way in his career he would have no difficulty in
winning Agatha. He would have her on his side, and Diodoros, and the lady
Euryale.
But to all these kind speeches the young man only sadly shook his head.
How could he, despised and contemned, dare to aspire to the daughter of
such a man as Zeno? He ended with a deep sigh; and Melissa, whose heart
grew heavier as they approached the Serapeum through the side streets,
still forced herself to express her confidence as though the lady
Euryale's protection had relieved her of every anxiety. It was so
difficult to appear calm and cheerful that more than once she had to wipe
her eyes; still, their eager talk shortened the way, and she stood still,
surprised to find herself so near her destination, when Alexander showed
her the chain which was stretched across the end of the street of Hermes
to close in the great square in front of the Serapeum.
The storm had passed away and the rain had ceased; the sky was clear and
cloudless, and the moon poured its silvery light in lavish splendor, as
though revived, on the temple and on the statues round the square. Here
they must part, for they saw that it was impossible that they should
cross the open space together.
It was almost deserted, for the populace were not allowed to go there. Of
the hundreds of tents which till lately had covered it, only those of the
seventh cohort of the praetorian guard remained; for these, having to
protect the person of the emperor, had not been quartered in the town. If
Alexander and Melissa had crossed this vast square, where it was now as
light as clay, they would certainly have been seen, and Melissa would
have brought not herself only but her protectress also into the greatest
danger.
She still had so much on her mind that she wanted to say to her brother,
especially with regard to her father's welfare; and then--what a
leavetaking was this when, as her gloomy forebodings told her, they were
parting never to meet again But Euryale must have been long and anxiously
waiting for her, and Alexander, too, was very late for his appointment.
It was impossible to let the girl cross the square alone, for it was
guarded by soldiers. If she could but reach the side of the sanctuary
where she was expected, and where the road was in the shadow of the
riding-school opposite, all would be well, and it seemed as though there
was no alternative but for Alexander to lead his sister through by-ways
to her destination. They had just made up their minds to this inevitable
waste of time, when a young woman was seen coming toward them from one of
the tents with a swift, light step, winged with gladness. Alexander
suddenly released his sister's hand, and saying:
"She will escort you," he advanced to meet her. This was the wife of
Martialis, who had charge of the villa at Kanopus, and whose acquaintance
the artist had made when he was studying the Galatea in the merchant's
country-house for the portrait of Korinna. Alexander had made friends
with the soldier's wife in his winning, lively way, and she was delighted
to meet him again, and quite willing to escort his sister across the
square, and hold her tongue about it. So, after a short grasp of the
hand, and a fervent last appeal to her brother, "Never for a moment let
us forget one another, and always remember our mother!" Melissa followed
her companion.
This evening the woman had sought her husband to tell him that she and
her mother had got safely out of the Circus, and to thank him for the
entertainment, of which the splendor, in spite of the various
disturbances and interruption, had filled their hearts and minds.
The first words she spoke to the girl led to the question as to whether
she, too, had been at the Circus; and when Melissa said yes, but that she
had been too frightened and horrified to see much, the chattering little
woman began to describe it all.
Quite the best view, she declared, had been obtained from the third tier
of places. Caesar's bride, too, had been pointed out to her. Poor thing!
She would pay dearly for the splendor of the purple. No one could dispute
Caracalla's taste, however, for the girl was lovely beyond description;
and as she spoke she paused to look at Melissa, for she fancied she
resembled Caesar's sweetheart. But she went on again quicker than before,
remarking that Melissa was not so tall, and that the other was more
brilliant looking, as beseemed an emperor's bride.
At this Melissa drew her kerchief more closely over her face; but it was
a comfort to her when the soldier's wife, after describing to her what
she herself had worn, added that Caracalla's choice had fallen on a
modest and well-conducted maiden, for, if she had not been, the
high-priest's wife would never have been so kind to her. And the lady
Euryale was sister-in-law to the master she herself served, and she had
known her all her life.
Then, when Melissa, to change the subject, asked why the public were
forbidden to approach the Serapeum, her companion told her that since his
return from the Circus Caesar had been devoting himself to astrology,
soothsaying, and other abstruse matters, and that the noise of the city
disturbed him. He was very learned in such things, and if she only had
time she could have told Melissa wonderful things. Thus conversing, they
crossed the square, and when it lay behind them and they were under the
shadow of the stadium, Melissa thanked her lively companion for her
escort, while she, on her part, declared that it had been a pleasure to
do the friendly painter a service.
The western side of the immense temple stood quite detached from the
town. There were on that side but few bronze doors, and these, which were
opened only to the inhabitants of the building, had long since been
locked for the night and needed no guard. As the inhabitants were
forbidden to cross the space dividing the stadium from the Serapeum, all
was perfectly still. Dark shadows lay on the road, and the high
structures which shut it in like cliffs seemed to tower to the sky. The
lonely girl's heart beat fast with fears as she stole along, close under
the wall, from which a warm vapor breathed on her after the recent rain.
The black circles which seemed to stare at her like dark, hollow
eye-sockets from the wall of the stadium, were the windows of the
stables.
If a runaway slave, an escaped wild beast, or a robber were to rush out
upon her! The owls swept across over her head on silent wings, and bats
flitted to and fro, from one building to the other, almost touching the
frightened girl. Her terrors increased at every step, and the wall which
she must follow to the end was so long--so endlessly long!
Supposing, too, that the lady Euryale had been tired of waiting and had
given her up! There would then be nothing for it but to make her way back
to the town past the guards, or to enter the temple through the great
gates--where that dreadful man was--and where she would at once be
recognized! Then there could be no escape, none--and she must, yes, she
must evade her dreadful suitor. Every thought of Diodoros cried, "You
must!"--even at the cost of her young life, of which, indeed, she saw the
imminent end nearer and nearer with every step. She knew not whither her
flight might take her, but a voice within declared that it would be to an
early grave.
Only a narrow strip of sky was visible between the tall buildings, but,
as she looked up to the heavens, she perceived that it was two hours past
midnight. She hurried on, but presently checked her pace again. From the
square, three trumpet-calls, one after another, rang through the silence
of the night. What could these signals mean at so unwonted an hour?
There could be but one explanation--Caesar had again condemned some
hapless wretch to death, and he was being led to execution. When Vindex
and his nephew were beheaded, three trumpet-calls had sounded; her
brother had told her so.
And now, before her inward eye, rose the crowd of victims to Caracalla's
thirst for blood. She fancied that Plautilla, whom her imperial consort
had murdered, was beckoning her to follow her to an early grave. The
terrors of the night were too much for her; and, as when a child, at play
with her brothers, she flew on as fast as her feet would carry her. She
fled as though she were pursued, her long dress hampering her steps,
along by the temple wall, till her gaze, fixed on her left, fell on the
spot which had been designated to her.
Here she stopped, out of breath; and, while she was identifying the
landmarks which she had impressed on her memory to guide her to the right
doorway, the temple wall seemed to open before her as if by a charm, and
a kind voice called her name, and then exclaimed, "At last!" and in a
moment she had grasped Euryale's hand and was drawn into the building.
Here, as if at the touch of a magician's wand, all fear and horror
vanished; and, although she still panted for breath, she would at once
have explained to her beloved protectress what it was that had prompted
her to run so fast, but that Euryale interrupted her, exclaiming: "Only
make haste! No one must see that block of porphyry turn on its pin. It is
invisible from the outside, and closes the passage by which the mystics
and adepts find their way to the mysteries after dedication. All who know
of it are sworn to secrecy."
With this she led the way into a dark vestibule adjoining the temple, and
in a few moments the great block of stone which had admitted them had
turned into its place again. Those who passed by, even in broad sunshine,
could not distinguish it from all the other blocks of which the
ground-floor of the edifice was built.
CHAPTER XXIX.
While the lady Euryale preceded her young charge with a lamp up a narrow,
dark staircase, Alexander waited in one of the audience-rooms till the
emperor should call him. The high-priest of Serapis, several soothsayers
of the temple, Aristides, the new head of the night-watch, and other
"friends" of the monarch had accompanied him thus far. But admittance to
the innermost apartments had not been permitted, for Caracalla had
ordered the magician Serapion to call up spirits before him, and was
having the future declared to him in the presence of the prefect of the
praetorians and a few other trusty followers.
The deputation of citizens, who had come to apologize to Caesar for the
annoying occurrences in the Circus, had been told to wait till the
exorcisms were over. Alexander would have preferred to hold aloof from
the others, but no one here seemed to think ill of him for his
thoughtless behavior. On the contrary, the courtiers pressed round
him--the brother of the future empress-with the greatest assiduity: the
high-priest inquired after his brother Philip; and Seleukus, the
merchant, who had come with the deputation, addressed many flattering
remarks to him on his sister's beauty. Some of the Roman senators whose
advances he had received coldly enough at first, now took up his whole
attention, and described to him the works of art and the paintings in the
new baths of Caracalla; they advised him to offer himself as a candidate
for the ornamentation of some of the unfinished rooms with frescoes, and
led him to expect their support. In short, they behaved toward the young
man as if he might command their services, in spite of their gray hairs.
But Alexander saw through their purpose.
Their discourse ceased suddenly, for voices were audible in the emperor's
apartments, and they all listened with outstretched necks and bated
breath if they might catch a word or two.
Alexander only regretted not having either charcoal or tablets at hand,
that he might fix their intent faces on the wood; but at last he stood
up, for the door was opened and the emperor entered from the tablinum,
accompanied by the magician who had shown Caesar several spirits of the
departed. In the middle of the demonstration, at Caracalla's desire, the
beheaded Papinian had appeared in answer to Serapion's call. Invisible
hands replaced his severed head upon his shoulders, and, having greeted
his sovereign, he promised him good fortune. Last of all great Alexander
had appeared, and assured the emperor in verse, and with many a flowery
phrase, that the soul of Roxana had chosen the form of Melissa to dwell
in. Caracalla would enjoy the greatest happiness through her, as long as
she was not alienated from him by love for another man. Should this
happen, Roxana would be destroyed and her whole race with her, but
Caesar's glory and greatness would reach its highest point. The monarch
need have no misgivings in continuing to live out his (Alexander's) life.
The spirit of his godlike father Severus watched over him, and had given
him a counselor in the person of Macrinus, in whose mortal body the soul
of Scipio Africanus had awakened to a new life.
With this, the apparition, which, like the others, had shown itself as a
colored picture moving to and fro upon the darkened wall of the tablinum,
vanished. The voice of the great Macedonian sounded hollow and unearthly,
but what he said had interested the emperor deeply and raised his
spirits.
However, his wish to see more spirits had remained unsatisfied. The
magician, who remained upon his knees with uplifted hands while the
apparitions were visible, declared that the forces he was obliged to
employ in exercising his magic power over the spirits had exhausted him.
His fine, bearded face was deathly pale, and his tall form trembled and
shook. His assistants had silently disappeared. They had kept themselves
and their great scrolls concealed behind a curtain. Serapion explained
that they were his pupils, whose office it was to support his
incantations by efficient formulas.
Caracalla dismissed him graciously, then turning to the assembled
company, he gave with much affability a detailed account of the wonders
he had seen and heard.
"A marvelous man, this Serapion," he exclaimed to the high-priest
Timotheus--"a master in his art. What he said before proceeding to the
incantations is convincing, and explains much to me. According to him,
magic holds the same relation to religion as power to love, as the
command to the request. Power! What magic effect it has in real life? We
have seen its influence upon the spirits, and who among the children of
men can resist it? To it I owe my greatest results, and hope to be still
further indebted. Even reluctant love must bow to it."
He gave a self-satisfied laugh, and continued: "As the pious worshiper of
the gods can move the heavenly ones by prayer and sacrifice, so--the
wondrous man declared--the magician can force them by means of his secret
lore to do his will. Therefore, he who knows and can call the gods and
spirits by the right name, him they must obey, as the slave his master.
The sages who served the Pharaohs in the gray dawn of time succeeded in
fathoming the mystery of these names given to the everlasting ones at
their birth, and their wisdom has come down to him through the
generations as a priceless secret. But it is not sufficient to murmur the
name to one's self, or be able to write it down. Every syllable has its
special meaning like every member of the human frame. It depends, too, on
how it is pronounced and where the emphasis lies; and this true name,
containing in itself the spiritual essence of the immortals, and the
outward sign of their presence, is different again from the names by
which they are known among men.
"Could I have any suspicion--and here Serapion addressed himself to
me--which god he forced to obey him when he uttered the words, 'Abar
Barbarie Eloce Sabaoth Pachnuphis,' and more like it! I have only
remembered the first few words. But, he continued, it was not enough to
be able to pronounce these words. The heavenly spirits would submit only
to those mortals who shared in some of their highest characteristics.
Before the Magian dared to call them, he must purify his soul from all
sensual taint, and sanctify his body by long and severe fasting. When the
Magian succeeded, as he had done in these days, in rendering himself
impervious to the allurements of the senses, and in making his soul, as
far as was humanly possible, independent of the body, only then had he
attained to that degree of godliness which entitled him to have
intercourse with the heavenly ones and the entire spirit-world as with
his equals, and to subdue them to his will.
"He exerted his power, and we saw with our bodily eyes that the spirits
came to his call. But we discovered that it was not done by words alone.
What a noble-looking man he is! And the mortifications that he
practices--these, too, are heroic deeds! The cavilers in the Museum might
take example from him. Serapion performed an action and a difficult one.
They waste their time over words, miserable words! They will prove to you
by convincing argument that yonder lion is a rabbit. The Magian waved his
hands and the king of beasts cringed before him. Like the worthies of the
Museum, every one in this city is merely a mouth on two legs. Where but
here would the Christians--I know their doctrines--have invented that
term for their sublime teacher--The Word become flesh? I have heard
nothing here," he turned to the deputation, "but words and again
words--from you, who humbly assure me of your love and reverence; from
those who think that their insignificant persons may slip through my
fingers and escape me, paltry, would-be witty words, dipped in poison and
gall. In the Circus, even, they aimed words at me. The Magian alone dared
to offer me deeds, and he succeeded wonderfully; he is a marvelous man!"
"What he showed you," said the high-priest, "was no more than what the
sorcerers achieved, as the old writings tell us, under the builders of
the Pyramids. Our astrologers, who traced out for you the path of the
stars--"
"They, too," interrupted Caesar, bowing slightly to the astrologers,
"have something better to show than words. As I owe to the Magian an
agreeable hour, so I thank you, my friends, for a happy one."
This remark had reference to the information which had been brought to
Caesar, during a pause in the incantations, that the stars predicted
great happiness for him in his union with Melissa, and that this
prediction was well-founded, was proved by the constellations which the
chief astrologer showed and explained to him.
While Caracalla was receiving the thanks of the astrologers, he caught
sight of Alexander, and at once graciously inquired how Melissa had got
back to her fathers house. He then asked, laughingly, if the wits of
Alexandria were going to treat him to another offering like the one on
his arrival. The youth, who had determined in the Circus to risk his
life, if need be, in order to clear himself of the taint of suspicion,
judged that the moment had come to make good the mistake which had robbed
him of his fellow-citizens' esteem.
The presence of so many witnesses strengthened his courage; and fully
expecting that, like the consul Vindex, his speech would cost him his
head, he drew himself up and answered gravely, "It is true, great Caesar,
that in a weak moment and without considering the results, I repeated
some of those witticisms to you--"
"I commanded, and you had to obey," retorted Caesar, and added, coldly,
"But what does this mean?"
"It means," began Alexander--who already saw the sword of execution leap
from its scabbard--with pathetic dignity, which astonished the emperor as
coming from him, "it means that I herewith declare before you, and my
Alexandrian fellow-citizens here present, that I bitterly repent my
indiscretion; nay, I curse it, since I heard from your own lips how their
ready wit has set you against the sons of my beloved native city."
"Ah, indeed! Hence these tears?" interposed Caesar, adopting a well-known
Latin phrase. He nodded to the painter, and continued, in a tone of
amused superiority: "Go on performing as an orator, if you like; only
moderate the tragic tone, which does not become you, and make it short,
for before the sun rises we all--these worthy citizens and myself--desire
to be in bed."
Blushes and pallor alternated on the young man's face. Sentence of death
would have been more welcome to him than this supercilious check to a
hazardous attempt, which he had looked upon as daring and heroic. Among
the Romans he caught sight of some laughing faces, and hurt, humiliated,
confused, scarcely capable of speaking a word, and yet moved by the
desire to justify himself, he stammered out: "I have--I meant to
assure--No, I am no spy! May my tongue wither before I--You can, of
course--It is in your power to take my life!"
"Most certainly it is," interposed Caracalla, and his tone was more
contemptuous than angry. He could see how deeply excited the artist was,
and to save him--Melissa's brother-from committing a folly which he would
be obliged to punish, he went on with gracious consideration: "But I much
prefer to see you live and wield the brush for a long time to come. You
are dismissed."
The young man bent his head, and then turned his back upon the emperor,
for he felt that he was threatened now with what, to an Alexandrian, was
the most unbearable fate-to appear ridiculous before so many.
Caracalla allowed him to go, but, as he stepped across the threshold, he
called after him: "Tomorrow, then, with your sister, after the bath! Tell
her the stars and the spirits are propitious to our union."
Caesar then beckoned to the chief of the nightwatch, and, having laid the
blame of the unpleasant occurrences in the Circus on his carelessness,
cut the frightened officer short when he proposed to take every one
prisoner whom the lictors had marked among the noisy.
"Not yet! On no account to-morrow," Caracalla ordered. "Mark each one
carefully. Keep your eyes open at the next performance. Put down the
names of the disaffected. Take care that the rope hangs about the neck of
the guilty. The time to draw it tight will come presently. When they
think themselves safe, the cowardly show their true faces. Wait till I
give the signal--certainly not in the next few days; then seize upon
them, and let none escape!"
Caesar had given these orders with smiling lips. He wanted first to make
Melissa his, and, like a shepherd, to revel with her in the sweetness of
their love. No moment of this time should be darkened for him by the
tears and prayers of his bride. When she should hear, later on, of her
husband's bloody vengeance upon his enemies, she would have to accept it
as an accomplished fact; and means, no doubt, would be found to soothe
her indignation.
Those who after the insulting occurrences in the Circus had expected to
see Caesar raging and storming, were hurried from one surprise to
another; for even after his conversation with the night-watch he looked
cheerful and contented, and exclaimed: "It is long since you have seen me
thus! My own mirror will ask itself if it has not changed owners. It is
to be hoped it may have cause to accustom itself to reflect me as a happy
man as often as I look in it. The two highest joys of life are before me,
and I know not what would be left for me to desire if only Philostratus
were here to share the coming days with me."
The grave senator Cassius Dio here stepped forward and observed that
there were advantages in their amiable friend's withdrawal from the
turmoil of court life. His Life of Apollonius, to which all the world was
looking forward, would come all the sooner to a close.
"If only that I might talk to him of the man of Tyana," cried the
emperor, "I wish his biographer were here to-day. To possess little and
require nothing is the wish of the sage; and I can well imagine
circumstances in which one who has enjoyed power and riches to satiety
should consider himself blessed as a simple countryman following out the
precept of Horace, 'procul negotiis,' plowing his fields and gathering
the fruit of his own trees. According to Apollonius, the wise man must
also be poor, and, though the citizens of his state are permitted to
acquire treasures, the wealthy are looked upon as dishonorable. There is
some sense in this paradox, for the possessions that are to be obtained
with money are but vulgar joys. I know by experience what it is that
purifies the soul, that lifts it up and makes it truly blessed. It does
not come of power or riches. Whoso has known it, he to whom it has been
revealed--"
He stopped short, surprised at himself; then laughed as he shook his head
and exclaimed, "Behold, the tragedy hero in the purple with one foot in
an idyl!" and wished the assembled company pleasant slumbers for the
short remains of the night.
He gave his hand to a few favored ones; but, as he clasped that of the
proconsul Julius Paulinus, who, with unheard-of audacity, had put on
mourning garments for his brother-in-law Vindex, beheaded that day,
Caesar's countenance grew dark, and, turning his back upon them all, he
walked rapidly away. Scarcely had he disappeared when the mourning
proconsul exclaimed in his dry manner, as if speaking to himself:
"The idyl is to begin. Would it might be the satyr-play that closes the
bloodiest of tragedies!"
"Caesar has not been himself to-day," said the favorite Theocritus; and
the senator Cassius Dio whispered to Paulinus, "And therefore he was more
bearable to look at."
Old Adventus gazed in astonishment as Arjuna, the emperor's Indian
body-slave, disrobed him; for, though Caracalla had entered the apartment
with a dark and threatening brow, while his sandals were being
unfastened, he laughed to himself, and cried to his old servant with
beaming eyes, "To-morrow!" and the chamberlain called down a blessing on
the morrow, and on her who was destined to fill the coming years with
sunshine for mighty Caesar.
........................
Caracalla, generally an early riser, slept this time longer than on other
days. He had retired very late to rest, and the chamberlain therefore put
off waking him, especially as he had been troubled by evil dreams, in
spite of his happy frame of mind when he sought his couch. When at last
he rose he first inquired about the weather, and expressed his
satisfaction when he heard that the sun had risen with burning rays, but
was now veiled in threatening clouds.
His first visit led him to the court of sacrifice. The offerings had
fallen out most favorably, and he rejoiced at the fresh and healthy
appearance of the bullocks' hearts and livers which the augurs showed
him. In the stomach of one of the oxen they had found a flint arrow-head,
and, on showing it to Caracalla, he laughed, and observed to the
high-priest Timotheus: "A shaft from Eros's quiver! A hint from the god
to offer him a sacrifice on this happy day."
After his bath he caused himself to be arrayed with peculiar care, and
then gave orders for the admittance, first, of the prefect of the
praetorians, and then of Melissa, for whom a mass of gorgeous flowers
stood ready.
But Macrinus was not to be found, although Caesar had commanded him
yesterday to give in his report before doing anything else. He had twice
come to the antechamber, but had gone away again shortly before, and had
not yet returned.
Determined to let nothing damp his spirits, Caesar merely shrugged his
shoulders, and gave orders to admit the maiden, and--should they have
accompanied her--her father and brother. But neither Melissa nor the men
had appeared as yet, though Caracalla distinctly remembered having
commanded all three to visit him after the bath, which he had taken
several hours later than usual.
Vexed, and yet endeavoring to keep his temper, he went to the window. The
sky was overcast, and a sharp wind from the sea drove the first
rain-drops in his face.
In the wide square at his feet a spectacle presented itself which would
have delighted him at another time, when in better spirits.
The younger men of the city--as many as were of Greek extraction--were
trooping in. They were divided into companies, according to the
wrestling-schools or the Circus and other societies to which they
belonged. The youths marched apart from the married men, and one could
see that they came gladly, and hoped for much enjoyment from the events
of the day. Some of the others looked less delighted. They were
unaccustomed to obey the orders of a despot, and many were ill-pleased to
lose a whole day from their work or business. But no one was permitted to
absent himself; for, when the chief citizens had invited the emperor to
visit their wrestling-schools, he replied that he preferred to inspect
the entire male youths of Alexandria in the Stadium. This was situated
close by his residence in the Serapeum, and in this great space a
spectacle would be afforded to him at one glance, which he could
otherwise only enjoy by journeying laboriously from one gymnasium to
another. He loved the strong effects produced by great masses; and being
on the race-course, the wrestlers and boxers, the runners and
discus-throwers, could give proof of their strength, dexterity, and
endurance.
It occurred to him at the moment that among these youths and men there
might be some of the descendants of the warriors who, under the command
of the great Alexander, had conquered the world. Here, then, was an
opportunity of gathering round him--rejuvenated and, so to speak, born
anew--those troops who, under the guidance of the man whose mission on
earth he was destined to accomplish, had won such deathless victories.
That was a pleasure he had every right to permit himself, and he wished
to show to Melissa the re-created military forces of him to whom, in a
former existence, as Roxana, she had been so dear.
Quick as ever to suit the deed to the word, he at once ordered the head
citizens to assemble the youth of Alexandria on the morning of the day in
question, and to form them into a Macedonian phalanx. He wished to
inspect them in the stadium, and they were now marching thither.
He had ordered helmets, shields, and lances to be made after well-known
Macedonian patterns and to be distributed to the new Hellenic legion.
Later on they might be intrusted with the guarding of the city, should
there be a Parthian war; and he required the attendance of the
Alexandrian garrison.
The inspection of this Greek regiment would be certain to give pleasure
to Melissa. He expected, too, to see Alexander among them. When once his
beloved shared the purple with him, he could raise her brother to the
command of this chosen phalanx.
Troop after troop streamed on to the course, and he thought he had seldom
seen anything finer than these slender youths, marching along with
elastic step, and garlands in their black, brown, or golden locks.
When the young noblemen who belonged to the school of Timagetes filed
past him, he took such delight in the beauty of their heads, the
wonderful symmetry of their limbs strengthened by athletic games, and the
supple grace of most of them, that he felt as if some magic spell had
carried him back to the golden age of Greece and the days of the Olympian
games in the Altis.
What could be keeping Melissa? This sight would assuredly please her, and
for once he would be able to say something flattering about her people.
One might easily overlook a good deal from such splendid youths.
Carried away by his admiration he waved his scarf to them, which being
remarked by the gymnasiarch, who with his two assistants-herculean
athletes--walked in front, was answered by him with a loud "Hail,
Caesar!"
The youths who followed him imitated his example, and the troop that came
after them returned his greeting loud and heartily. The young voices
could be heard from afar, and the news soon spread to the last ranks of
the first division to whom these greetings were addressed. But, among the
men who already were masters of households of their own, there were many
who deemed it shameful and unworthy to raise their voices in greeting to
the tyrant whose heavy hand had oppressed them more than once; and a
group of young men belonging to the party of the "Greens," who ran their
own horses, had the fatal audacity to agree among themselves that they
would leave Caesar's greeting unanswered. A many-headed crowd is like a
row of strings which sound together as soon as the note is struck to
which they are all attuned; and so each one now felt sure that his
acclamation would only increase the insolence of this fratricide, this
bloodstained monster, this oppressor and enemy of the citizens. The
succeeding ranks of "Greens" followed the example, and from the midst of
a troop of young married men, members in the gymnasium of the society of
the Dioscuri, one foolhardy spirit had the reckless temerity to blow a
shrill, far-sounding whistle between his fingers.
He found no imitators, but the insulting sound reached the emperor's ear,
and seemed to him like the signal-call of Fate; for, before it had died
away, the clouds broke, and a stream of brilliant sunshine spread over
the race-course and the assembled multitude. The cloudy day that was to
have brought happiness to Caesar had been suddenly transformed by the sun
of Africa into a bright one; and the radiant light which cheered the
hearts of others seemed to him to be a message from above to warn him
that, instead of the highest bliss, this day would bring him
disappointment and misfortune. He said nothing of this, for there was no
one there in whom it would be any relief to confide, or of whose sympathy
he could be sure. But those who watched him as he retired from the window
saw plainly that the idyl, which he had promised them should begin
to-day, would assuredly not do so for the next few hours at least, unless
some miracle should occur. No, he would have to wait awhile for the
pastoral joys he had promised himself. And it seemed as if, instead of
the satyr-play of which old Julius Paulinus had spoken, that fatal
whistle had given the signal for another act in Caracalla's terrible
life-tragedy.
The "friends" of the emperor looked at him anxiously as, with furrowed
brow, he asked, impatiently: "Macrinus not here yet?"
Theocritus and others who had looked with envy upon Melissa and her
relatives, and with distrust upon her union with the emperor, now
heartily wished the girl back again.
But the prefect Macrinus came not; and while the emperor, having sent
messengers to fetch Melissa, turned with darkly boding brow to his
station overlooking the brightly lighted race-course, still hoping the
augury would prove false, and the sunny day turn yet in his favor,
Macrinus was in the full belief that the gate of greatness and power was
opening to him. Superstitious as the emperor himself and every one else
of his time, he was to-day more firmly persuaded than ever of the
existence of men whose mysterious wisdom gave them powers to which even
he must bend--the hard-headed man who had raised himself from the lowest
to the highest station, next to the Caesar himself.
In past nights the Magian Serapion had caused him to see and hear much
that was incomprehensible. He believed in the powers exerted by that
remarkable man over spirits, and his ability to work miracles, for he had
proved in the most startling manner that he had perfect control even over
such a determined mind as that of the prefect. The evening before, the
magician had bidden Macrinus come to him at the third hour after sunrise
of the next day, which he had unhesitatingly promised to do. But the
emperor had risen later than usual this morning, and the prefect might
expect to be called to his master at any moment. In spite of this, and
although his absence threatened to rouse Caesar to fury, and everything
pointed to the necessity of his remaining within call, Macrinus, drawn by
an irresistible craving, had followed the invitation, which sounded more
like a command. This, indeed, had seemed to him decisive; for, as the
seer ruled over his stern spirit, albeit he was alive, even so must the
spirits of the departed do his bidding. His every interest urged him now
to believe in the prophecy made to him by Serapion, to-day for the third
time, which foretold that he, the prefect, should mount the throne of the
Caesars, clad in the purple of Caracalla. But it was not alone to repeat
this prophecy that the seer had called Macrinus to him, but to inform him
that the future empress was betrothed to a young Alexandrian, and that
the tender intercourse between the lovers had not been interrupted during
Caracalla's courtship. This had come to Serapion's ears yesterday
afternoon, through his adroit assistant Kastor, and he had taken
advantage of the information to prepare Caesar during the night for the
faithlessness of his chosen bride.
The Magian assured the prefect that what the spirit of the great
Macedonian had hinted at yesterday had since been confirmed by the demons
in his service. It would now be easy for Macrinus to possibly hinder
Melissa, who might have been all-powerful, from coming between him and
the great goal which the spirits had set before him.
Serapion then repeated the prophecy, which came with such convincing
power from the bearded lips of the sage that the prudent statesman cast
his last doubts from him, and, exclaiming, "I believe your words, and
shall press forward now in spite of every danger!" he grasped the
prophet's hand in farewell.
Up to this point Macrinus, the son of a poor cobbler, who had had
difficulty in rearing his children at all, had received these prophetic
utterances with cool deliberation, and had ventured no step nearer to the
exalted aim which had been offered to his ambition. In all good faith he
had done his best to perform the duties of his office as an obedient
servant to his master and the state. This had all changed now, and,
firmly resolved to risk the struggle for the purple, he returned to the
emperor's apartments.
Macrinus had no reason to expect a favorable reception when he entered
the tablinum, but his great purpose upheld his courage. He, the upstart,
was well aware that Fortune requires her favorites to keep their eyes
open and their hands active. He therefore took care to obtain a full
account of what had happened from his confidential friend the senator
Antigonus, a soldier of mean birth, who had gained favor with Caesar by a
daring piece of horsemanship. Antigonus closed his report with the
impudent whistle of the Greek athlete; he dwelt chiefly on his
astonishment at Melissa's absence. This gave food for thought to the
prefect, too; but before entering the tablinum he was stopped by the
freedman Epagathos, who handed over to him a scroll which had been given
to him for the emperor. The messenger had disappeared directly afterward,
and could not be overtaken. Might it not endanger the life of the reader
by exhaling a poisonous perfume?
"Nothing is impossible here," answered the prefect. "Ours it is to watch
over the safety of our godlike master."
This letter was that which Melissa had intrusted to the slave Argutis for
Caesar, and with unwarrantable boldness the prefect and Epagathos now
opened it and ran rapidly over its contents. They then agreed to keep
this strange missive from the emperor till Macrinus should send to ask
whether the youths were assembled in their full number on the
race-course. They judged it necessary to prepare Caesar in some sort, to
prevent a fresh attack of illness.
Caracalla was standing near a pillar at the window whence he might see
without being seen. That whistle still shrilled in his ears. But another
idea occupied him so intensely that he had not yet thought of wiping out
the insult with blood.
What could be delaying Melissa and her father and brother?
The painter ought to have joined the other Macedonian youths on the
race-course, and Caracalla was engaged in looking out for him, stretching
forward every time he caught sight of some curly head that rose above the
others.
There was a bitter taste in his mouth, and at every fresh disappointment
his rebellious, tortured heart beat faster; and yet the idea that Melissa
might have dared to flee from him never entered his mind.
The high-priest of Serapis had informed him that his wife had seen
nothing of her as yet. Then it suddenly occurred to him that she might
have been wet through by the rain yesterday and now lay shaken by fever,
and that this must keep her father away, too; a supposition which cheered
the egoist more than it pained him, and with a sigh of relief he turned
once more to the window.
How haughtily these boys carried their heads; their fleet, elastic feet
skimmed over the ground; how daringly they showed off the strength and
dexterity that almost seemed their birthright! This reminded him that,
prematurely aged as he was by the wild excesses of his younger years,
with his ill-set broken leg and his thin locks, he must make a lamentable
contrast to these others of his own age; and he said to himself that
perhaps the whistle had come from the lips of one of the strongest and
handsomest, who had not considered him worth greeting.
And yet he was not weaker than any single individual down there; aye, and
if he chose he could crush them all together, as he would the glow-worm
creeping on that window-sill. With one quick squeeze of his fingers he
put an end to the pretty little insect, and at that moment he heard
voices behind him.
Had his beloved come at last?
No, it was only the prefect. He should have been there long ago, if he
were obedient to his sovereign's commands. Macrinus was therefore a
convenient object on which to vent his anger. How mean was the face of
this long-legged upstart, with its small eyes, sharp nose, and furrowed
brow! Could the beautiful Diadumenianus really be his son? No matter! The
boy, the apple of his father's eye, was in his power, and was a surety
for the old man's loyalty. After all, Macrinus was a capable, serviceable
officer, and easier to deal with than the Romans of the old noble
families.
Notwithstanding these considerations, Caracalla addressed the prefect as
harshly as if he had been a disobedient slave, but Macrinus received the
flood of abuse with patience and humility. When the emperor reproached
him with never being at hand when he was wanted, he replied submissively
that it was just because he found he could be of service to Caesar that
he had dared to absent himself. The refractory young brood down there
were being kept well in hand, and it was entirely owing to his effectual
measures that they had contented themselves with that one whistle. Later
on it would be their duty to punish such audacity and high-treason with
the utmost rigor.
The emperor gazed in astonishment at the counselor, who till now had ever
advised him to use moderation, and only yesterday had begged him to
ascribe much to Alexandrian manners, which in Rome would have had to be
treated with severity. Had the insolence of these unruly citizens be come
unbearable even to this prudent, merciful man?
Yes, that must be it; and the grudge that Macrinus now showed against the
Alexandrians hastened the pardon which Caesar silently accorded him.
Caracalla even said to himself that he had underrated the prefect's
intellect, for his eyes flashed and glowed like fire, notwithstanding
their smallness, and lending a force to his ignoble face which Caracalla
had never noticed before. Had Caesar no premonition that in the last few
hours this man had grown to be such another as himself?--for in his
unyielding mind the firm resolve had been strengthened to hesitate at
nothing--not even at the death of as many as might come between him and
his high aim, the throne.
Macrinus knew enough of human nature to observe the miserable disquietude
that had seized upon the emperor at his bride's continued absence, but he
took good care not to refer to the subject. When Caracalla, however,
could no longer conceal his anxiety, and asked after her himself, the
prefect gave the appointed sign to Epagathos, who then handed Melissa's
freshly re-sealed letter to his master.
"Let me open it, great Caesar," entreated Macrinus. "Even Homer called
Egypt the land of poison."
But the emperor did not heed him. No one had told him, and he had never
in his life received a letter in a woman's hand, except from his mother;
and yet he knew that this delicate little roll had come from a
woman--from Melissa.
It was closed with a silken thread, and the seal with which Epagathos had
replaced the one they had broken. If Caracalla tore it open, the papyrus
and the writing might be damaged. He called impatiently for a knife, and
the body physician, who had just entered with other courtiers, handed him
his.
"Back again?" asked Caracalla as the physician drew the blade from its
sheath.
"At break of day, on somewhat unsteady legs," was the jovial answer.
Caracalla took the knife from him, cut the silk, hastily broke the seal,
and began to read.
Till now his hands had performed their office steadily, but suddenly they
began to tremble, and while he ran his eye over Melissa's refusal--there
were but a few lines-his knees shook, and a sharp, low cry burst from
him, like no sound that lies by nature in the throat of man. Rent in two
pieces, the strip of papyrus fluttered to the ground.
The prefect caught the despot, who, seized with giddiness, stretched out
his hands as if seeking a support. The physician hurriedly brought out
the drug which Galenus had advised him to use in such cases, and which he
always carried with him, and then, pointing to the letter, asked the
prefect:
"In the name of all the gods, from whom?"
"From the gem-cutter's fair daughter," replied Macrinus, with a
contemptuous shrug.
"From her?" cried the physician, indignantly. From that light Phryne, who
kissed and embraced my rich host's son down there in his sick-room?
"At this the emperor, who had not lost consciousness for one moment,
started as if stung by a serpent, and sprang at the physician's throat
screaming while he threatened to strangle him:
"What was that? What did you say? Cursed babbler! The truth, villain, and
the whole truth, if you love your life!"
The half-choked man, ever prone to talking, had no reason for concealing
from Caesar what he had seen with his own eyes, and had subsequently
heard in the Serapeum and at the table of Polybius.
When life was at stake a promise to a freedman could be of no account, so
he gave free rein to his tongue, and answered the questions Caracalla
hoarsely put to him without reserve, and--being a man used to the ways of
a court--with insinuations that were doubly welcome to a judge so eager
for damning evidence.
Yesterday, the day before, and the day before that--every day on which
Melissa had pretended to feel the mysterious ties that bound her heart to
his, every day that she had feigned love and led him on to woo her, she
had--as he now learned--granted to another what she had refused to him
with such stern discretion. Her prayer for him, the sympathy she said she
felt, the maidenly sensibility which had charmed him in her--all, all had
been lies, deceit, sham, in order to attain an object. And that old man
and the brothers to serve whom she had dared to approach him--they all
knew the cruel game she was playing with him and his heart's love. The
lips that had lured him into the vilest trap with lying words had kissed
another. He seemed to hear the Alexandrians laughing at the forsaken
bridegroom, to see them pointing the finger of derision at the man whom
cunning woman had deceived even before marriage. What a feast for their
ribald wit!
And yet--he would have willingly borne it all, and more, for the
certainty that she had really loved him once; that her heart had been
his, if only for one short hour.
On those shreds of papyrus scattered over the floor she confessed she was
not able to accede to his wishes, because she had already given her faith
to another before she ever saw Caracalla. It was true she had felt
herself drawn to him as to no other but her betrothed; and had he been
content to let her be near him as a faithful servant and sicknurse, then
indeed . . . In short, he was informed in so many words that every tie
that bound her to him must be broken in favor of another, and the
hypocritical regret with which she sought to cover up the hard facts only
made him doubly indignant.
Lies, lies--even in this letter nothing but lies and heartless
dissimulation!
How it stabbed his heart! But he possessed the power to wound her in
return. Wild beasts should tear her fair body limb from limb, as she had
torn his soul in this hour.
One wish alone filled his heart--to see her whom he had loved above all
others, to whom he had revealed his inmost soul, for whose sake he had
amended his actions as he had never done for his own mother--to see her
lying in the dust before him, and to inflict upon her such tortures as no
mortal had ever endured before. And not only she, but all whom she loved
and who were her accomplices, should atone for the torment of this hour.
The time of reckoning had come, and every evil instinct of his nature
mingled its exulting voice with the anguished cries of his bleeding
heart.
The prefect knew his master well, and watched his every expression while
apparently listening to the voluble physician, but in reality absorbed in
a train of thought. By the twitching of his eyelids, the sharply outlined
red patches on his cheeks, the quivering nostrils, and the deep furrows
between his eyes, he must be revolving some frightful plan in his mind.
Yesterday, had he found him in this condition, Macrinus would have
endeavored by every means in his power to calm his wrath; but to-day, if
Caesar had set the world in flames, he would only have added fuel to the
fire, for who could more surely upset the firmly established power of
this emperor and son of emperors as Caracalla himself? The people of Rome
had endured unimaginable sufferings at his hands; but the cup was full,
and, judging from Caesar's looks, he would cause it to overflow this day.
Then the rising flood which tore the son of an idolized father from the
throne, might possibly bear him, the child of lowliness and poverty, into
the palace.
But Macrinus remained silent. No word from him should change the tenor of
the emperor's thoughts. The plan he was thinking out must be allowed to
ripen to its full horror. The lowering, uncertain glance that Caracalla
cast round the tablinum at the close of the physician's narrative showed
that the prefect's reticence was an unnecessary precaution.
Caesar's mind and tongue still seemed paralyzed; but at that moment
something occurred which recalled him to himself and brought firmness to
his wandering gaze.
There was a sudden disturbance in the antechamber, with a confused sound
of cries and shouting. Those friends of Caesar who wore swords drew them,
and Caracalla, who was unarmed, called to Antigonus to give him his.
"A revolt?" he asked Macrinus with flashing eyes, and as if he wished the
answer to be in the affirmative; but the prefect had hastened to the door
with drawn sword. Before he reached it, it was thrown open, and Julius
Asper, the legate, burst into the tablinum as if beside himself, crying:
"Cursed den of murderers! An attempt on your life, great Caesar; but we
have him fast!"
"Assassination!" interrupted Caracalla with furious joy. "That was the
only thing left undone! Bring the murderer! But first"--and he addressed
himself to Aristides--"close the city gates and the harbor. Not a man,
not a ship must be let through without being searched. The vessels that
have weighed anchor since daybreak must be followed and brought back.
Mounted Numidians under efficient officers must scour the high-roads as
soon as the gate-keepers have been examined. Every house must be open to
your men, every temple, every refuge. Seize Heron, the gem-cutter, his
daughter, and his two sons. Also--Diodoros is the young villain's
name?--him, his parents, and everybody connected with them! The physician
knows where they are to be found. Alive, do you hear?--not dead! I will
have them alive! I give you till midnight! Your head, if you let the jade
and her brothers escape!"
With drooping head the unhappy officer departed. On the threshold he was
met by Martialis, the praetorian centurion. After him, his hands bound
behind his back, walked the criminal. A deep flush overspread his
handsome face, his eyes glowed under the too lofty brow with the fierce
light of fever, his waving locks stood out in wild confusion round his
head, while the finely cut upper lip with its disdainful curl seemed the
very seat of scorn and bitterest contempt. Every feature wore that same
expression, and not a trace of fear or regret. But his panting breast
betrayed to the physician's first glance that they had here to deal with
a sick man in raging fever.
They had already torn off his mantle and discovered beneath its folds the
sharp-edged butcher's knife which plainly betrayed his intentions. He had
penetrated to the first antechamber when a soldier of the Germanic
body-guard laid hold on him. Martialis had him by the girdle now, and the
emperor looked sharply and mistrustfully at the praetorian, as he asked
if it were he who had captured the assassin.
The centurion replied that he had not. Ingiomarus, the German, had
noticed the knife; he, Martialis, was here only in right of his privilege
as a praetorian to bring such prisoners before great Caesar.
Caracalla bent a searching gaze upon the soldier; for he thought he
recognized in him the man who had aroused his envy and whose happiness he
had once greatly desired to damp, when against orders he had received his
wife and child in the camp. Recollections rose in his mind that drove the
hot blood to his cheek, and he cried, disdainfully:
"I might have guessed it! What can be expected beyond the letter of their
service from one who so neglects his duties? Did you not disport yourself
with lewd women in the camp before my very eyes, setting at naught the
well-known rules? Hands off the prisoner! This is your last day as
praetorian and in Alexandria. As soon as the harbor is opened--to-morrow,
I expect--you go on board the ship that carries reinforcements to Edessa.
A winter on the Pontus will cool your lascivious blood."
This attack was so rapid and so unexpected to the somewhat dull-witted
centurion, that he failed at first to grasp its full significance. He
only understood that he was to be banished again from the loved ones he
had so long been deprived of. But when he recovered sufficiently to
excuse himself by declaring that it was his own wife and children who had
visited him, Caesar cut him short by commanding him to report his change
of service at once to the tribune of the legion.
The centurion bowed in silence and obeyed. Caracalla then went up to the
prisoner, and dragging him, weakly resisting, from the dark back ground
of the room to the window, he asked with a sneer:
"And what are assassins like in Alexandria? Ah, ha! this is not the face
of a hired cut-throat! Only thus do they look whose sharp wit I will
answer with still sharper steel."
"For that answer at least you are not wont to be at a loss," came
contemptuously from the lips of the prisoner.
The emperor winced as if he had been struck, and then exclaimed
"You may thank your bound hands that I do not instantly return you the
answer you seem to expect of me."
Then turning to his courtiers, he asked if any of them could give him
information as to the name and history of the assassin; but no one
appeared to know him. Even Timotheus, the priest of Serapis, who as head
of the Museum had so often delighted in the piercing intellect of this
youth, and had prophesied a great future for him, was silent, and looked
at him with troubled gaze.
It was the prisoner himself who satisfied Caesar's curiosity. Glancing
round the circle of courtiers, and casting a grateful look at his
priestly patron, he said:
"It would be asking too much of your Roman table-companions that they
should know a philosopher. You may spare yourself the question, Caesar. I
came here that you might make my acquaintance. My name is Philippus, and
I am son to Heron, the gem-cutter."
"Her brother!" screamed Caracalla, as he rushed at him, and thrusting his
hand into the neck of the sick youth's chiton--who already could scarcely
stand upon his feet--he shook him violently, crying, with a scoffing look
at the high-priest:
"And is this the ornament of the Museum, the free-thinker, the profound
skeptic Philippus?"
He stopped suddenly, and his eyes flashed as if a new light had burst
upon him; he dropped his hand from the prisoner's robe, and bending his
head close to the other, he whispered in his ear, "You have come from
Melissa?"
"Not from her," the other answered quickly, the flush deepening on his
face, "but in the name of that most unhappy, most pitiable maiden, and as
the representative of her noble Macedonian house, which you would defile
with shame and infamy; in the name of the inhabitants of this city, whom
you despoil and tread under foot; in the interests of the whole world,
which you disgrace!"
Trembling with fury Caracalla broke in:
"Who would choose you for their ambassador, miserable wretch?"
To which the philosopher replied with haughty calm:
"Think not so lightly of one who looks forward with longing to that of
which you have an abject fear."
"Of death, do you mean?" asked Caracalla, sneering, for his wrath had
given place to astonishment.
And Philip answered: "Yes, Death--with whom I have sworn friendship, and
who should be ten times blessed to me if he would but atone for my
clumsiness and rid the world of such a monster!"
The emperor, still spell-bound by the unheard-of audacity of the youth
before him, now felt moved to keep step with the philosopher, whom few
could equal in sharpness of wit; and, controlling the raging fury of his
blood, he cried, in a tone of superiority:
"So that is the boasted logic of the Museum? Death is your dearest
desire, and yet you would give it to your enemy?"
"Quite right," replied Philip, his lip curling with scorn. "For there is
something which to the philosopher stands higher than logic. It is a
stranger to you, but you know it perhaps by name--it is called justice."
These words, and the contemptuous tone in which they were spoken, burst
the flood-gates of Caracalla's painfully restrained passion; his voice
rose harsh and loud, till the lion growled angrily and dragged at his
chain, while his master flung hasty words of fury in the face of his
enemy:
"We shall soon see, my cunning fencer with words, whether I know how to
follow your advice, and how sternly I can exercise that virtue denied to
me by an assassin. Will any one accuse me now of injustice if I punish
the accursed brood that has grown up in this den of iniquity with all the
rigor that it deserves? Yes, glare at me with those great, burning eyes!
Alexandrian eyes, promising all and granting nothing--persuading him who
trusts in them to believe in innocence and chastity, truth and affection.
But let him look closer, and he finds nothing but deep corruption, foul
cunning, despicable self-seeking, and atrocious faithlessness!
"And everything else in this city is like those eyes! Where are there so
many gods and priests, where do they sacrifice so often, where do they
fast and apply themselves so assiduously to repentance and the cleansing
of the soul? And yet, where does vice display itself so freely and so
unchecked? This Alexandria--in her youth as dissolute as she was
fair--what is she now but an old hag? Now that she is toothless, now that
wrinkles disfigure her face, she has turned pious, that, like the wolf in
sheep's clothing, she may revenge herself by malice for the loss of joy
and of the admiration of her lovers! I can find no more striking
comparison than this; for, even as hags find a hideous pleasure in empty
chatter and spiteful slanderings, so she, once so beautiful and renowned,
has sunk deeper and deeper in the mire, and can not endure to see
anything that has achieved greatness or glory without maliciously
bespattering it with poison.
"Justice!--yes, I will exercise justice, oh, sublime and virtuous hero,
going forth to murder--a dagger hidden in your bosom! I thank you for
that lesson!
"Pride of the Museum!--you lead me to the source whence all your
corruption flows. It is that famous nursery of learning where you, too,
were bred up. There, yes, there they cherish the heresy that makes the
gods into puppets of straw, and the majesty of the throne into an owl for
pert and insignificant birds to peck at. Thence comes the doctrine that
teaches men and women to laugh at virtue and to break their word. There,
where in other days noble minds, protected by the overshadowing favor of
princes, followed out great ideas, they now teach nothing but
words--empty, useless words. I saw and said that yesterday, and now I
know it for certain--every poison shaft that your malice has aimed at me
was forged in the Museum."
He paused for breath, and then continued, with a contemptuous laugh:
"If the justice which you rate higher than logic were to take its course,
nothing would be juster than to make an end this day of this hot-bed of
corruption. But your unlearned fellow-citizens shall taste of my justice,
too. You yourself will be prevented by the beasts in the Circus from
looking on at the effect your warning words have produced. But as yet you
are alive, and you shall hear what the experiences are which make the
severest measures the highest justice.
"What did I hope to find, and what have I really found? I heard the
Alexandrians praised for their hospitality--for the ardor with which they
pursue learning--for the great proficiency of their astronomers--for the
piety which has raised so many altars and invented so many doctrines;
and, lastly, for the beauty and fine wit of their women.
"And this hospitality! All that I have known of it is a flood of
malicious abuse and knavish scoffing, which penetrated even to the gates
of this temple, my dwelling. I came here as emperor, and treason pursued
me wherever I went--even into my own apartments; for there you stand,
whom a barbarian had to hinder from stabbing me with the knife of the
assassin. And your learning? You have heard my opinion of the Museum. And
the astrologers of this renowned observatory? The very opposite of all
they promised me has come to pass.
"Religion? The people, of whom you know as little from the musty volumes
of the Museum as of 'Ultima Thule'--the people indeed practice it. The
old gods are necessary to them. They are the bread of life to them. But
instead of those you have offered them sour, unripe fruit, with a
glittering rind-from your own garden, of your own growing. The fruit of
trees is a gift from Nature, and all that she brings forth has some good
in it; but what you offer to the world is hollow and poisonous. Your
rhetoric gives it an attractive exterior, and that, too, comes from the
Museum. There they are shrewd enough to create new gods, which start up
out of the earth like mushrooms. If it should only occur to them, they
would raise murder to the dignity of god of gods, and you to be his
high-priest."
"That would be your office," interposed the philosopher.
"You shall see," returned the emperor, laughing shrilly, "and the
witlings of the Museum with you! You use the knife; but hear the words of
the master: The teeth of wild beasts and their claws are weapons not to
be despised. Your father and brother, and she who taught me what to think
of the virtue and faith of Alexandrian women, shall tell you this in
Hades. Soon shall every one of those follow you thither who forgot, even
by a glance of the eye, that I was Caesar and a guest of this city! After
the next performance in the Circus the offenders shall tell you in the
other world how I administer justice. No later than the day after
to-morrow, I imagine, you may meet there with several companions from the
Museum. There will be enough to clap applause at the disputations!"
Caracalla ended his vehement speech with a jeering laugh, and looked
round eagerly for applause from the "friends" for whose benefit his last
words had been spoken; and it was offered so energetically as to drown
the philosopher's reply.
But Caracalla heard it, and when the noise subsided he asked his
condemned victim:
"What did you mean by your exclamation, 'And yet I would that death might
spare me'?"
"In order, if that should come true," returned the philosopher quickly,
his voice trembling with indignation, "that I might be a witness of the
grim mockery with which the all-requiting gods will destroy you, their
defender."
"The gods!" laughed the emperor. "My respect for your logic grows less
and less. You, the skeptic, expect the deeds of a mortal man from the
gods whose existence you deny!"
Then cried Philip, and his great eyes burning with hatred and indignation
sought the emperor's: "Till this hour I was sure of nothing, and
therefore uncertain of the existence of a god; but now I believe firmly
that Nature, by whom everything is carried out according to everlasting,
immutable laws, and who casts out and destroys anything that threatens to
bring discord into the harmonious workings of all her parts, would of her
own accord bring forth a god, if there be not one already, who should
crush you, the destroyer of life and peace, in his all-powerful hand!"
Here his wild outburst of indignation was brought to an abrupt close, for
a furious blow from Caracalla's fist sent his enfeebled enemy staggering
back against the wall near the window.
Mad with rage, Caracalla shrieked hoarsely
"To the beasts with him! No, not to the beasts--to the torture! He and
his sister! The punishment I have bethought me of--scum of the earth--"
But the wild despair of the other, in whose breast hatred and fever
burned with equal strength, now reached the highest pitch. Like a hunted
deer which stays its flight for a moment to find an outlet or to turn
upon his pursuers, he gazed wildly round him, and before the emperor
could finish his threat; leaning against the pillar of the window as if
prepared to receive his death-blow, he interrupted Caracalla:
"If your dull wit can invent no death to satisfy your cruelty, the
blood-hound Zminis can aid you. You are a worthy couple. Curses on
you! . . .
"At him!" yelled the emperor to Macrinus and the legate, for no
substitute had appeared for the centurion he had dismissed.
But while the nobles advanced warily upon the madman, and Macrinus called
to the Germanic body-guard in the anteroom, Philip had turned like
lightning and disappeared through the window.
The legates and Caesar came too late to hold him back, and from below
came cries of: "Crushed!--dead! . . . What crime has he committed? They
cast him down! . . . He can not have done it himself . . . Impossible!
. . . His arms are bound. . . . A new manner of death invented specially
for the Alexandrians!"
Then another whistle sounded, and the shout, "Down with the tyrant!"
But no second cry followed. The place was too full of soldiers and
lictors.
"Caracalla heard it all. He turned back into the room, wiped the
perspiration from his brow, and said in a voice of studied unconcern, yet
with horrible harshness:
"He deserved his death-ten times over. However, I have to thank him for a
good suggestion. I had forgotten the Egyptian Zminis. If he is still
alive, Macrinus, take him from his dungeon and bring him here. But
quickly--in a chariot! Let him come just as he is. I can make use of him
now."
The prefect bowed assent, and by the rapidity with which he departed he
betrayed how willingly he carried out this order of his master's.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Possess little and require nothing
A THORNY PATH
By Georg Ebers
Volume 11.
CHAPTER XXX.
Scarcely had Macrinus closed the door behind him, when Caracalla threw
himself exhausted on the throne, and ordered wine to brought.
The gloomy gaze he bent upon the ground was not affected this time. The
physician noted with anxiety how his master's breast heaved and his
eyelids quivered; but when he offered Caesar a soothing potion, he waved
him away, and commanded him to cease from troubling him.
For all that, he listened a little later to the legate, who brought the
news that the youths of the city assembled on the race-course were
beginning to be impatient. They were singing and applauding boisterously,
and the songs they so loudly insisted on having repeated would certainly
not contain matter flattering to the Romans.
"Leave them alone," answered Caesar, roughly. "Every line is aimed at me
and no other. But the condemned are always allowed their favorite meal
before the last journey. The food they love is venomous satire. Let them
enjoy it to the full once more!--Is it far to Zminis's prison?"
The reply was in the negative; and as Caracalla exclaimed, "So much the
better!" a significant smile played on his lips.
The high-priest of Serapis had looked on in much distress of mind. He, as
the head of the Museum, had set high hopes on the youth who had come to
such a terrible end. If Caesar should carry his threats into execution,
there would be an end to that celebrated home of learning which, in his
opinion, bore such noble fruits of study. And what could Caracalla mean
by his dark saying that the sport and mockery of those youths below was
their last meal? The worst might indeed be expected from the fearful
tyrant who was at once so deeply wounded and so grievously offended; and
the high-priest had already sent messengers--Greeks of good credit--to
warn the insurgent youths in the stadium. But, as the chief minister of
the divinity, he also esteemed it his duty, at any risk to himself, to
warn the despot, whom he saw on the verge of being carried away to deeds
of unparalleled horror. He thought the time had come, when Caracalla
looked up from the brooding reverie into which he had again sunk, and
with an ominous scowl asked Timotheus whether his wife, under whose
protection Melissa had been seen the day before, had known that the
false-hearted girl had given herself to another man while she feigned
love for him.
The high-priest repelled the suspicion with his usual dignity, and went
on to adjure Caesar not to visit on an industrious and dutiful community
the sins of a light-minded girl's base folly and falsehood.
But Caracalla would not suffer him to finish; he wrathfully inquired who
had given him a right to force his advice on Caesar.
On this Timotheus replied, with calm dignity:
"Your own noble words, great Caesar, when, to your honor be it spoken,
you reminded the misguided skeptic of the true meaning of the old gods
and of what is due to them. The god whom I serve, great Caesar, is second
to none: the heavens are his head, the ocean is his body, and the earth
his feet; the sunshine is the light of his all-seeing eye, and everything
which stirs in the heart or brain of man is an emanation of his divine
spirit. Thus he is the all-pervading soul of the universe, and a portion
of that soul dwells in you, in me, in all of us. His power is greater
than any power on earth, and, though a well-grounded wrath and only too
just indignation urge you to exert the power lent you by him--"
"And I will exert it!" Caesar exclaimed with haughty rage. "It reaches
far. I need no help, not even that of your god!"
"That I know," replied Timotheus. "And the god will let those fall into
your hands who have sinned against your sacred majesty. Any punishment,
even the severest, will be pleasing in his sight which you may inflict on
those guilty of high-treason, for you wear the purple as his gift and in
his name; those who insult you sin also against the god. I myself, with
my small power, will help to bring the criminals to justice. But when a
whole population is accused, when it is beyond the power of human justice
to separate the innocent from the guilty, punishment is the prerogative
of the god. He will visit on this city the crimes it has committed
against you; and I implore you, in the name of your noble and admirable
mother--whom it has been my privilege to entertain under this roof, and
who in gratitude for the favors of Serapis--"
"And have I grudged sacrifices?" Caesar broke in. "I have done my utmost
to win the graces of your god--and with what success? Everything that can
most aggrieve the heart of man has befallen me here under his eyes. I
have as much reason to complain of him as to accuse the reprobate natives
of your city. He, no doubt, knows how to be avenged; the three-headed
monster at his feet does not look like a lap-dog. Why, he would despise
me if I should leave the punishment of the criminals to his tender
mercies! Nay, I can do that for myself. Though you have seen me in many
cases show mercy, it has always been for my mother's sake. You have done
well to remind me of her. That lady--she is, I know, a votary of your
god. But to me the Alexandrians have dared to violate the laws of
hospitality; to her they were cordial hosts. I will remember that in
their favor. And if many escape unpunished, I would have the traitors to
know that they owe it to the hospitality shown to my mother by their
parents, or perhaps by themselves."
He was here interrupted by the arrival of Aristides, who entered in great
haste and apparently pleased excitement. His spies had seized a
malefactor who had affixed an epigram of malignant purport to the statue
of Julia Domna in the Caesareum. The writer was a pupil of the Museum,
and had been taken in the stadium, where he was boasting of his exploit.
A spy, mingling with the crowd, had laid hands on him, and the captain of
the watch had forthwith hurried to the Serapeum to boast of a success
which might confirm him in his yet uncertain position. The rough sketch
of the lines had been found on the culprit, and Aristides held the
tablets on which they were written while Caracalla listened to his
report. Aristides was breathless with eagerness, and Caesar, snatching
the tablets impatiently from his hand, read the following lines:
"Wanton, I say, is this dam of irreconcilable brothers!" "Mean you
Jocasta?" "Nay, worse--Julia, the wife of Severus."
"The worst of all--but the last!" Caracalla snarled, as, turning pale, he
laid the tablets down. But he almost instantly took them up again, and
handing the malignant and lying effusion to the high-priest, he
exclaimed, with a laugh:
"This seals the warrant! Here is my mother slandered, too! Now, the man
who sues for mercy condemns himself to death!" And, clinching his fist,
he muttered, "And this, too, is from the Museum."
Timotheus, meanwhile, had also read the lines. Even paler than Caracalla,
and fully aware that any further counsel would be thrown away and only
turn the emperor's wrath against himself, he expressed his anger at this
calumny directed against the noblest of women, and by a boy hardly free
from school!
But Caracalla furiously broke in:
"And woe to you if your god refuses me the only thing I crave in return
for so many sacrifices--revenge, complete and sanguinary; atonement from
great and small alike!" But he interrupted himself with the exclamation:
"He grants it! Now for the tool I need."
The tool was ready--Zminis, the Egyptian, answering in every particular
to the image which Caracalla had had in his mind of the instrument who
might execute his most bloodthirsty purpose.
With hair in disorder and a blue-black stubble of beard on his haggard
yellow cheeks, in a dirty gray prison shirt, barefoot, and treading as
silently as Fate when it creeps on a victim, the rascal approached his
sovereign. He stood before Caracalla exactly as the prefect, in a swift
chariot, had brought him out of prison. The white of his long, narrow
eyes, which had so terrified Melissa, had turned yellow, and his glance
was as restless and shifting as that of a hyena. His small head on its
long neck was never for a moment still; the ruthless wretch had sat
waiting day after day in expectation of death, and it was by a miracle
that he found himself once more at the height of his ambition. But when
at last he inquired of Caracalla, in the husky voice which had gained an
added hoarseness from the damp dungeon whence he had been brought, what
his commands were, looking up at him like a starving dog which hopes for
a titbit from his master's hand, even the fratricide, who himself held
the sword sharpened to kill, shuddered at the sight and sound.
But Caesar at once recovered himself, and when he asked the Egyptian:
"Will you undertake to help me, as captain of the night-watch, to punish
the traitors of Alexandria?" the answer was confident:
"What man can do, I can do."
"Good!" replied Caracalla. "But this is not a matter of merely capturing
one or another. Every one--mark me--every one has merited death who has
broken the laws of hospitality, that hospitality which this lying city
offered me. Do you understand? Yes? Well, then, how are we to detect the
guilty? Where are we to find spies and executioners enough? How can we
punish worst those whose wickedness has involved the rest in guilt,
especially the epigramatists of the Museum? How are we to discover the
ringleaders of those who insulted me yesterday in the Circus, and of
those among the youths in the stadium who have dared to express their
vile disapproval by whistling in my very face? What steps will you take
to hinder a single one from escaping? Consider. How is it to be done so
effectually that I may lie down and say 'They have had their deserts. I
am content'?"
The Egyptian's eyes wandered round the floor, but he presently drew
himself up and answered briefly and positively, as though he were issuing
an order to his men:
"Kill them all!"
Caracalla started, and repeated dully, "All?"
"All!" repeated Zminis, with a hideous grin. "The young ones are all
there, safe in the stadium. The men in the Museum fear nothing. Those who
are in the streets can be cut down. Locked doors can be broken in."
At this, Caesar, who had dropped on to his throne, started to his feet,
flung the wine-cup he held across the room, laughed loudly, and
exclaimed:
"You are the man for me! To work at once! This will be a day!--Macrinus,
Theocritus, Antigonus, we need your troops. Send up the legates. Those
who do not like the taste of blood, may sweeten it with plunder."
He looked young again, as if relieved from some burden on his mind, and
the thought flashed through his brain whether revenge were not sweeter
than love.
No one spoke. Even Theocritus, on whose lips a word of flattery or
applause was always ready, looked down in his dismay; but Caracalla, in
his frenzy of excitement, heeded nothing.
The hideous suggestion of Zminis seemed to him worthy of his greatness by
its mere enormity. It must be carried out. Ever since he had first donned
the purple he had made it his aim to be feared. If this tremendous deed
were done, he need never frown again at those whom he wished to terrify.
And then, what a revenge! If Melissa should hear of it, what an effect it
must have on her!
To work, then!
And he added in a gentler tone, as if he had a delightful surprise in
store for some old friend:
"But silence, perfect silence--do you hear?--till all is ready.--You,
Zminis, may begin on the pipers in the stadium and the chatterers in the
Museum. The prize for soldiers and lictors alike lies in the merchants'
chests."
Still no one spoke; and now he observed it. His scheme was too grand for
these feeble spirits. He must teach them to silence their conscience and
the voice of Roman rectitude; he must take on himself the whole
responsibility of this deed, at which the timid quaked. So he drew
himself up to his full height, and, affecting not to see the hesitancy of
his companions, he said, in a tone of cheerful confidence:
"Let each man do his part. All I ask of you is to carry out the sentence
I pronounce as a judge. You know the crime of the citizens of this town,
and, by virtue of the power I exercise over life and death, be it known
to all that I, Caesar, condemn--mark the word, condemn--every free male
of Alexandria, of whatever age or rank, to die by the sword of a Roman
warrior! This is a conquered city, which has forfeited every claim to
quarter. The blood and the treasure of the inhabitants are the prize of
my soldiery. Only"--and he turned to Timotheus--"this house of your god,
which has given me shelter, with the priests and the treasure of great
Serapis, are spared. Now it lies with each of you to show whether or no
he is faithful to me. All of you"--and he addressed his friends--"all who
do me service in avenging me for the audacious insults which have been
offered to your sovereign, are assured of my imperial gratitude."
This declaration was not without effect, and murmurs of applause rose
from the "friends" and favorites, though less enthusiastic than Caracalla
was accustomed to hear. But the feebleness of this demonstration made him
all the prouder of his own undaunted resolve.
Macrinus was one of those who had most loudly approved him, and Caracalla
rejoiced to think that this prudent counselor should advise his drinking
the cup of vengeance to the dregs. Intoxicated already before he had even
sipped it, he called Macrinus and Zminis to his side, and with glowing
looks impressed on them to take particular care that Melissa, with her
father, Alexander, and Diodoros were brought to him alive.
"And remember," he added, "there will be many weeping mothers here by
to-morrow morning; but there is one I must see again, and that not as a
corpse--that bedizened thing in red whom I saw in the Circus--I mean the
wife of Seleukus, of the Kanopic way."
CHAPTER XXXI.
On the wide ascent leading to the Serapeum the praetorians stood awaiting
Caesar's commands. They had not yet formed in rank and file, but were
grouped round the centurion Martialis, who had come to tell them, sadly,
of his removal to Edessa, and to take leave of his comrades. He gave his
hand to each one of them in turn, and received a kindly pressure in
return; for the stubborn fellow, though not of the cleverest, had proved
himself a good soldier, and to many of them a trusty friend. There was
not one who did not regret his going from among them. But Caesar had
spoken, and there was no gainsaying his orders. In the camp, after
service, they might talk the matter over; for the present it were wise to
guard their tongues.
The centurion had just said farewell to the last of his cohort, when the
prefect, with the legate Quintus Flavius Nobilior, who commanded the
legion, and several other higher officers, appeared among them. Macrinus
greeted them briefly, and, instead of having the tuba blown as usual and
letting them fall into their ranks, he told them to gather close round
him, the centurions in front. He then disclosed to them the emperor's
secret orders. Caesar, he began, had long exercised patience and mercy,
but the insolence and malice of the Alexandrians knew no bounds;
therefore, in virtue of his power over life and death, he had pronounced
judgment upon them. To them as being nearest to his person he handed over
the most remunerative part of the work of punishment. Whomsoever they
found on the Kanopic way, the greatest and richest thoroughfare of the
city, they were to cut down as they would the rebellious inhabitants of a
conquered town. Only the women and children and the slaves were to be
spared. If for this task, a hideous one at best, they chose to pay
themselves out of the treasures of the citizens, nobody would blame them.
A loud cheer followed these orders, and many an eye gleamed brighter.
Even the coolest among them seemed to see a broad, deep pool of blood
into which he need only dip his hand and bring out something worth the
catching. And the fish that were to be had there were not miserable carp,
but heavy gold and silver vessels, and coins and magnificent ornaments.
Macrinus then proceeded to inform the higher and lower officers of the
course of action he had agreed upon with the emperor and Zminis. Seven
trumpet-blasts from the terrace of the Serapeum would give the signal for
the attack to begin. Then they were to advance, maniple on maniple; but
they were not required to keep their ranks--each man had his own work to
do. The legion was to assemble again at sunset at the Gate of the Sun, at
the eastern end of the road, after having swept it from end to end.
By order of the emperor, each man, however, must be particularly careful
whom he cut down in any hiding-place, for Caesar wished to give the
following Alexandrians--who had sinned most flagrantly against him--the
benefit of a trial, and they must therefore be taken alive. He then named
the gem-cutter Heron, his son Alexander, and his daughter Melissa, the
Alexandrian senator Polybius, his son Diodoros, and the wife of Seleukus.
He described them as well as he was able. For each one Caesar promised a
reward of three thousand drachmas, and for Heron's daughter twice as
much, but only on condition of their being delivered up unhurt. It would
therefore be to their own advantage to keep their eyes open in the
houses, and to be cautious. Whoever should take the daughter of the
gem-cutter--and he described Melissa once more--would render a special
service to Caesar and might reckon on promotion.
The centurion Julius Martialis stayed to hear the end of this discourse,
and then hurriedly departed. He felt just as he had done in the war with
the Alemanni when a red-haired German had dealt him a blow on the helmet
with his club. His head whirled and swam as it did then--only to-day
blood-red lights danced before his eyes instead of deep blue and gold. It
was some time before he could collect his thoughts to any purpose; but
when he did, he clinched his fists as he recalled Caesar's malignant
cruelty in forcing him away from his family.
Presently his large mouth widened into a satisfied smile. He was no
longer in that company, and need take no part in the horrid butchery. In
any other place he would no doubt have joined in it like the rest, glad
of the rich booty; but here, in his own home, where his mother and wife
and child dwelt, it seemed a monstrous and accursed deed. Besides the
gemcutter's family, in whom Martialis took no interest, Caesar seemed to
have a special grudge against the lady Berenike, whose husband Seleukus
had been master to the centurion's father; nay, his own wife was still in
the service of the merchant.
Not being skilled in any trade, he had entered the army early. As
Evocatus he had married the daughter of a free gardener of Seleukus, and
when he was ordered to Rome to join the praetorians his wife had obtained
the post of superintendent of the merchant's villa at Kanopus. For this
they had to thank the kindness of the lady Berenike and her now dead
daughter Korinna; and he was honestly grateful to the wife of Seleukus,
for, as his wife was established in the villa, he could leave her without
anxiety and go with the army wherever it was ordered.
Having by this time reached the Kanopic street on his way to his family,
he perceived the statues of Hermes and Demeter which stood on each side
of the entrance to the merchant's house, and his slow mind recapitulated
the long list of benefits he had received from Seleukus and his wife; a
secret voice urged upon him that it was his duty to warn them.
He owed nothing to Caesar, that crafty butcher, who out of pure malice
could deprive an honest soldier of his only joy in life and cheat him of
half his pay--for the praetorians had twice the wages of the other
troops; and if he only knew some handicraft, he would throw away his
sword today.
Here, at least, he could interfere with Caesar's ruthless schemes,
besides doing his benefactors a good turn. He therefore entered the house
of the merchant, instead of pursuing on his homeward way.
He was well known, and the mistress of the house was at once apprised of
his arrival.
All the lower apartments were empty, the soldiers who had been quartered
in them having joined the others at the Serapeum.
But what had happened to the exquisite garden in the impluvium? What
hideous traces showed where the soldiers had camped, and, drunk with
their host's costly wine, had given free play to their reckless spirits!
The velvet lawn looked like a stable-floor; the rare shrubs had been
denuded of their flowers and branches. Blackened patches on the mosaic
pavement showed where fires had been kindled; the colonnades were turned
into drying-grounds for the soldiers' linen, and a rope on which hung
some newly washed clothes was wound at one end round the neck of a Venus
from the hand of Praxiteles, and at the other round the lyre of an Apollo
fashioned in marble by Bryaxis. Some Indian shrubs, of which his
father-in-law had been very proud, were trampled underfoot; and in the
great banqueting-hall, which had served as sleeping-room for a hundred
praetorians, costly cushions and draperies were strewn, torn from the
couches and walls to make their beds more comfortable.
Used to the sights of war as he was, the soldier ground his teeth with
wrath at this scene. As long as he could remember, he had looked upon
everything here with reverence and awe; and to think that his comrades
had destroyed it all made his blood boil.
As he approached the women's apartments he took fright. How was he to
disclose to his mistress what threatened her?
But it must be done; so he followed the waiting-maid Johanna, who led him
to her lady's livingroom.
In it sat the Christian steward Johannes, with writing tablets and
scrolls of papyrus, working in the service of his patroness. She herself
was with the wounded Aurelius; and Martialis, on hearing this, begged to
be admitted to her.
Berenike was in the act of renewing the wounded soldier's bandages, and
when the centurion saw how cruelly disfigured was the handsome, blooming
face of the young tribune, to whom he was heartily attached, the tears
rose to his eyes. The matron observed it, and witnessed with much
surprise the affectionate greeting between the young noble and the plain
soldier.
The centurion greeted her respectfully; but it was not till Nernesianus
asked him how it was that the troops had been called to arms at this
hour, that Martialis plucked up courage and begged the lady of the house
to grant him an interview.
But Berenike had still to wash and bandage the wounds of her patient--a
task which she always performed herself and with the greatest care; she
therefore promised the soldier to be at his disposal in half an hour.
"Then it will be too late!" burst from the lips of the centurion; then
she knew, by his voice and the terror-stricken aspect of the man whom she
had known so long, that he meant to warn her, and there was but one from
whom the danger could come.
"Caesar?" she asked. "He is sending out his creatures to murder me?"
The imperious gaze of Berenike's large eyes so overpowered the simple
soldier as to render him speechless for a while. But Caesar had
threatened his mistress's life--he must collect himself, and thus he
managed to stammer:
"No, lady, no! He will not have you killed assuredly not! On the
contrary-they are to let you live when they cut down the others!"
"Cut down!" cried Apollinaris, raising himself up and staring horrified
at this messenger of terror; but his brother laid his hand upon the
centurion's broad shoulder, and, shaking him vigorously, commanded him as
his tribune to speak out.
The soldier, ever accustomed to obey, and only too anxious that his
warning should not come too late, disclosed in hurried words what he had
learned from the prefect. The brothers interrupted him from time to time
with some exclamation of horror or disgust, but Berenike remained silent
till Martialis stopped with a deep breath.
Then the lady gave a shrill laugh, and as the others looked at her in
amazement she said coolly "You men will wade through blood and shame with
that reprobate, if he but orders you to do so. I am only a woman, and yet
I will show him that there are limits even to his malignity."
She remained for a few moments lost in thought, and then ordered the
centurion to go and find out where her husband was.
Martialis obeyed at once, and no sooner was the door closed behind him
than she turned to the two brothers, and addressing herself first to one
and then to the other with equal vehemence, she cried "Who is right now?
Of all the villains who have brought shame upon the throne and name of
mighty Caesar, this is the most dastardly. He has written plainly enough
upon Apollinaris's face how much he values a brave soldier, the son of a
noble house. And you, Nemesianus--are you not also an Aurelius? You say
so; and yet, had he not chanced to let you care for your brother, you
would at this moment be wandering through the city like a mad dog, biting
all who crossed your path. Why do you not speak? Why not tell me once
more, Nemesianus, that a soldier must obey his commander blindly?--And
you, Apollinaris, will you dare still to assert that the hand with which
Caesar tore your face was guided only by righteous indignation at an
insult offered to an innocent maiden? Have you the courage to excuse the
murders by Caracalla of his own wife, and many other noble women, by his
anxiety for the safety of throne and state? I, too, am a woman, and may
hold up my head with the best; but what have I to do with the state or
with the throne? My eye met his, and from that moment the fiend was my
deadly enemy. A quick death at the hands of one of his soldiers seemed
too good for the woman he hated. Wild beasts were to tear me to pieces
before his eyes. Is that not sufficient for you? Put every abomination
together, everything unworthy of an honorable man and abhorrent to the
gods, and you have the man whom you so willingly obey. I am only the wife
of a citizen. But were I the widow of a noble Aurelian and your mother--"
Here Apollinaris, whose wounds were beginning to burn again, broke in:
"She would have counseled us to leave revenge to the gods. He is Caesar!"
"He is a villain!" shrieked the matron--"the curse, the shame of
humanity, a damnable destroyer of peace and honor and life, such as the
world has never beheld before! To kill him would be to earn the gratitude
and blessing of the universe. And you, the scions of a noble house, you,
I say, prove that there still are men among so many slaves! It is Rome
herself who calls you through me--like her, a woman maltreated and
wounded to the heart's core--to bear arms in her service till she gives
you the signal for making an end of the dastardly blood hound!"
The brothers gazed at one another pale and speechless, till at last
Nemesianus ventured to say "He deserves to die, we know, a thousand
deaths, but we are neither judges nor executioners. We can not do the
work of the assassin."
"No, lady, we can not," added Apollinaris, and shook his wounded head
energetically.
But the lady, nothing daunted, went on: "Who has ever called Brutus a
murderer? You are young--Life lies before you. To plunge a sword into the
heart of this monster is a deed for which you are too good. But I know a
hand that understands its work and would be ready to guide the steel.
Call it out at the right moment and be its guide!"
"And that hand?" Apollinaris asked in anxious expectation.
"It is there," replied Berenike, pointing to Martialis, who entered the
room at that moment. Again the brothers interchanged looks of doubt, but
the lady cried: "Consider for a moment! I would fain go hence with the
certainty that the one burning desire shall be fulfilled which still
warms this frozen heart."
She motioned to the centurion, left the apartment with him, and preceded
him to her own room. Arrived there, she ordered the astonished freedman
Johannes, in his office as notary, to add a codicil to her will. In the
event of her death, she left to Xanthe, the wife of the centurion
Martialis, her lawful property the villa at Kanopus, with all it
contained, and the gardens appertaining to it, for the free use of
herself and her children.
The soldier listened speechless with astonishment. This gift was worth
twenty houses in the city, and made its owner a rich man. But the
testator was scarcely ten years older than his Xanthe, and, as he kissed
the hem of his mistress's robe in grateful emotion, he cried: "May the
gods reward you for your generosity; but we will pray and offer up
sacrifices that it may be long before this comes into our hands!"
The lady shook her head with a bitter smile, and, drawing the soldier
aside, she disclosed to him in rapid words her determination to quit this
life before the praetorians entered the house. She then informed the
horror-stricken man that she had chosen him to be her avenger. To him,
too, the emperor had dealt a malicious blow. Let him remember that, when
the time came to plunge the sword in the tyrant's heart. Should this
deed, however, cost Martialis his life--which he had risked in many a
battle for miserable pay--her will would enable his widow to bring up
their children in happiness and comfort.
The centurion had thrown in a deprecatory word or two, but Berenike
continued as if she had not heard him, till at last Martialis cried:
"You ask too much of me, lady. Caesar is hateful to me, but I am no
longer one of the praetorians, and am banished the country. How is it
possible that I should approach him? How dare I, a common man--"
The lady came closer to him, and whispered:
"You will perform this deed to which I have appointed you in the name of
all the just. We demand nothing from you but your sword. Greater men than
you--the two Aurelians--will guide it. At their word of command you will
do the deed. When they give you the signal, brave Martialis, remember the
unfortunate woman in Alexandria whose death you swore to revenge. As soon
as the tribunes--"
But the centurion was suddenly transformed. "If the tribunes command it,"
he interrupted with decision, his dull eye flashing--"if they demand it
of me, I do it willingly. Tell them Martialis's sword is ever at their
service. It has made short work of stronger men than that vicious
stripling."
Berenike gave the soldier her hand, thanked him hurriedly, and begged
him, as he could pass unharmed through the city, to hasten to her
husband's counting-house by the water-side, to warn him and carry him her
last greetings.
With tears in his eyes Martialis did as she desired. When he had gone,
the steward began to implore his mistress to conceal herself, and not
cast away God's gift of life so sinfully; but she turned from him
resolutely though kindly, and repaired once more to the brothers' room.
One glance at them disclosed to her that they had come to no definite
conclusion; but their hesitation vanished as soon as they heard that the
centurion was ready to draw his sword upon the emperor when they should
give the signal; and Berenike breathed a sigh of relief at this
resolution, and clasped their hands in gratitude.
They, too, implored her to conceal herself, but she merely answered:
"May your youth grow into happy old age! Life can offer me nothing more,
since my child was taken from me--But time presses--I welcome the
murderers, now that I know that revenge will not sleep."
"And your husband?" interposed Nemesianus.
She answered with a bitter smile: "He? He has the gift of being easily
consoled.--But what was that?"
Loud voices were audible outside the sick-room. Nemesianus stationed
himself in front of the lady, sword in hand. This protection, however,
proved unnecessary, for, instead of the praetorians, Johanna entered the
room, supporting on her arm the half-sinking form of a young man in whom
no one would have recognized the once beautifully curled and carefully
dressed Alexander. A long caracalla covered his tall form; Dido the slave
had cut off his hair, and he himself had disguised his features with
streaks of paint. A large, broad-brimmed hat had slipped to the back of
his head like a drunken man's, and covered a wound from which the red
blood flowed down upon his neck. His whole aspect breathed pain and
horror, and Berenike, who took him for a hired cut-throat sent by
Caracalla, retreated hastily from him till Johanna revealed his name.
He nodded his head in confirmation, and then sank exhausted on his knees
beside Apollinaris's couch and managed with great difficulty to stammer
out: "I am searching for Philip. He went into the town-ill-out of his
senses. Did he not come to you?"
"No," answered Berenike. "But what is this fresh blood? Has the slaughter
begun?"
The wounded man nodded. Then he continued, with a groan: "In front of the
house of your neighbor Milon--the back of my head--I fled--a lance--"
His voice failed him, and Berenike cried to the tribune: "Support him,
Nemesianus! Look after him and tend him. He is the brother of the
maiden--you know--If I know you, you will do all in your power for him,
and keep him hidden here till all danger is over."
"We will defend him with our lives!" cried Apollinaris, giving his hand
to the lady.
But he withdrew it quickly, for from the impluvium arose the rattle of
arms, and loud, confused noise.
Berenike threw up her head and lifted her hands as if in prayer. Her
bosom heaved with her deep breath, the delicate nostrils quivered, and
the great eyes flashed with wrathful light. For a moment she stood thus
silent, then let her arms fall, and cried to the tribunes:
"My curse be upon you if you forget what you owe to yourselves, to the
Roman Empire, and to your dying friend. My blessing, if you hold fast to
what you have promised."
She pressed their hands, and, turning to do the same to the artist, found
that he had lost consciousness. Johanna and Nemesianus had removed his
hat and caracalla, to attend to his wound.
A strange smile passed over the matron's stern features. Snatching the
Gallic mantle from the Christian's hand, she threw it over her own
shoulders, exclaiming:
"How the ruffian will wonder when, instead of the living woman, they
bring him a corpse wrapped in his barbarian's mantle!"
She pressed the hat upon her head, and from a corner of the room where
the brothers' weapons stood, selected a hunting-spear. She asked if this
weapon might be recognized as belonging to them, and, on their answering
in the negative, said:
"My thanks, then, for this last gift!"
At the last moment she turned to the waiting-woman:
"Your brother will help you to burn Korinna's picture. No shameless gaze
shall dishonor it again." She tore her hand from that of the Christian,
who, with hot tears, tried to hold her back; then, carrying her head
proudly erect, she left them.
The brothers gazed shudderingly after her. "And to know," cried
Nemesianus, striking his forehead, "that our own comrades will slay her!
Never were the swords of Rome so disgraced!"
"He shall pay for it!" replied the wounded man, gnashing his teeth.
"Brother, we must avenge her!"
"Yes--her, and--may the gods hear me!--you too, Apollinaris," swore the
other, lifting his hand as for an oath.
Loud screams, the clash of arms, and quick orders sounded from below and
broke in upon the tribune's vow. He was rushing to the window to draw
back the curtain and look upon the horrid deed with his own eyes, when
Apollinaris called him back, reminding him of their duty toward Melissa's
brother, who was lost if the others discovered him here.
Hereupon Nemesianus lifted the fainting youth in his strong arms and
carried him into the adjoining room, laying him upon the mat which had
served their faithful old slave as a bed. He then covered him with his
own mantle, after hastily binding up the wound on his head and another on
his shoulder.
By the time the tribune returned to his brother the noise outside had
grown considerably less, only pitiable cries of anguish mingled with the
shouts of the soldiers.
Nemesianus hastily pulled aside the curtain, letting such a flood of
blinding sunshine into the room that Apollinaris covered his wounded face
with his hands and groaned aloud.
"Sickening! Horrible! Unheard of!" cried his brother, beside himself at
the sight that met his eyes. "A battle-field! What do I say? The peaceful
house of a Roman citizen turned into shambles. Fifteen, twenty, thirty
bodies on the grass! And the sunshine plays as brightly on the pools of
blood and the arms of the soldiers as if it rejoiced in it all. But
there--Oh, brother! our Marcipor--there lies our dear old Marci!--and
beside him the basket of roses he had fetched for the lady Berenike from
the flower-market. There they be, steeped in blood, the red and white
roses; and the bright sun looks down from heaven and laughs upon it!"
He broke down into sobs, and then continued, gnashing his teeth with
rage: "Apollo smiles upon it, but he sees it; and wait--wait but a little
longer, Tarautas! The god stretches out his hand already for the avenging
bow! Has Berenike ventured among them? Near the fountain-how it flashes
and glitters with the hues of Iris!--they are crowding round something on
the ground--Mayhap the body of Seleukus. No--the crowd is separating.
Eternal gods! It is she--it is the woman who tended you!"
"Dead?" asked the other.
"She is lying on the ground with a spear in her bosom. Now the
legate-yes, it is Quintus Flavius Nobilior--bends over her and draws it
out. Dead--dead! and slain by a man of our cohort!"
He clasped his hands before his face, while Apollinaris muttered curses,
and the name of their faithful Marcipor, who had served their father
before them, coupled with wild vows of vengeance.
Nemesianus at length composed himself sufficiently to follow the course
of the horrible events going on below.
"Now," he went on, describing it to his brother, "now they are
surrounding Rufus. That merciless scoundrel must have done something
abominable, that even goes beyond what his fellows can put up with. There
they have caught a slave with a bundle in his hand, perhaps stolen goods.
They will punish him with death, and are themselves no better than he. If
you could only see how they come swarming from every side with their
costly plunder! The magnificent golden jug set with jewels, out of which
the lady Berenike poured the Byblos wine for you, is there too!--Are we
still soldiers, or robbers and murderers?"
"If we are," cried Apollinaris, "I know who has made us so."
They were startled by the approaching rattle of arms in the corridor, and
then a loud knock at the chamber-door. The next moment a soldier's head
appeared in the doorway, to be quickly withdrawn with the exclamation,
"It is true--here lies Apollinaris!"
"One moment," said a second deep voice, and over the threshold stepped
the legate of the legion, Quintus Flavius Nobilior, in all the panoply of
war, and saluted the brothers.
Like them, he came of an old and honorable race, and was acting in place
of the prefect Macrinus, whose office in the state prevented him from
taking the military command of that mighty corps, the praetorians. Twenty
years older than the twins, and a companion-in-arms of their father, he
had managed their rapid promotion. He was their faithful friend and
patron, and Apollinaris's misfortune had disgusted him no less than the
order in the execution of which he was now obliged to take part. Having
greeted the brothers affectionately, observed their painful emotion, and
heard their complaints over the murder of their slave, he shook his manly
head, and pointing to the blood that dripped from his boots and greaves,
"Forgive me for thus defiling your apartments," he said. "If we came from
slaughtering men upon the field of battle, it could only do honor to the
soldier; but this is the blood of defenseless citizens, and even women's
gore is mixed with it."
"I saw the body of the lady of this house," said Nemesianus, gloomily.
"She has tended my brother like a mother."
"But, on the other hand, she was imprudent enough to draw down Caesar's
displeasure upon her," interposed the Flavian, shrugging his shoulders.
"We were to bring her to him alive, but he had anything but friendly
intentions toward her; however, she spoiled his game. A wonderful woman!
I have scarcely seen a man look death--and self-sought death--in the face
like that! While the soldiers down there were massacring all who fell
into their hands--those were the orders, and I looked on at the butchery,
for, rather than--well, you can imagine that for yourselves--through one
of the doors there came a tall, extraordinary figure. The wide brim of a
traveling hat concealed the features, and it was wrapped in one of the
emperor's fool's mantles. It hurried toward the maniple of Sempronius,
brandishing a javelin, and with a sonorous voice reviling the soldiers
till even my temper was roused. Here I caught sight of a flowing robe
beneath the caracalla, and, the hat having fallen back, a beautiful
woman's face with large and fear-inspiring eyes. Then it suddenly flashed
upon me that this grim despiser of death, being a woman, was doubtless
she whom we were to spare. I shouted this to my men; but--and at that
moment I was heartily ashamed of my profession--it was too late. Tall
Rufus pierced her through with his lance. Even in falling she preserved
the dignity of a queen, and when the men surrounded her she fixed each
one separately with her wonderful eyes and spoke through the death-rattle
in her throat:
"'Shame upon men and soldiers who let themselves be hounded on like dogs
to murder and dishonor!' Rufus raised his sword to make an end of her,
but I caught his arm and knelt beside her, begging her to let me see to
her wound. With that she seized the lance in her breast with both hands,
and with her last breath murmured, 'He desired to see the living
woman--bring him my body, and my curse with it! Then with a last supreme
effort she buried the spear still deeper in her bosom; but it was not
necessary.
"I gazed petrified at the high-bred, wrathful face, still beautiful in
death, and the mysterious, wide-open eyes that must have flashed so
proudly in life. It was enough to drive a man mad. Even after I had
closed her eyes and spread the mantle over her--"
"What has been done with the body?" asked Apollinaris.
"I caused it to be carried into the house and the door of the
death-chamber carefully locked. But when I returned to the men. I had to
prevent them from tearing Rufus to pieces for having lost them the large
reward which Caesar had promised for the living prisoner."
"And you," cried Apollinaris, excitedly, "had to look on while our men,
honest soldiers, plundered this house--which entertained many of us so
hospitably--as if they had been a band of robbers! I saw them dragging
out things which were used in our service only yesterday."
"The emperor--his permission!" sighed Flavius. "You know how it is. The
lowest instincts of every nature come out at such a time as this, and the
sun shines upon it all. Many a poor wretch of yesterday will go to bed a
wealthy man to-day. But, for all that, I believe much was hidden from
them. In the room of the mistress of the house whence I have just come, a
fire was still blazing in which a variety of objects had been burned. The
flames had destroyed a picture--a small painted fragment betrayed the
fact. They perhaps possessed masterpieces of Apelles or Zeuxis. This
woman's hatred would lead her to destroy them rather than let them fall
into the hands of her imperial enemy; and who can blame her?"
"It was her daughter's portrait," said Nemesianus, unguardedly.
The legate turned upon him in surprise. "Then she confided in you?" he
asked.
"Yes," returned the tribune, "and we are proud to have been so honored by
her. Before she went to her death she took leave of us. We let her go;
for we at least could not bring ourselves to lay hands upon a noble
lady."
The officer looked sternly at him and exclaimed, angrily:
"Do you suppose, young upstart, that it was less painful to me and many
another among us? Cursed be this day, that has soiled our weapons with
the blood of women and slaves, and may every drachma which I take from
the plunder here bring ill-luck with it! Call the accident that has kept
you out of this despicable work a stroke of good fortune, but beware how
you look down upon those whose oath forces them to crush out every human
feeling from their hearts! The soldier who takes part with his
commander's enemy--"
He was interrupted by the entrance of Johanna, the Christian, who saluted
the legate, and then stood confused and embarrassed by the side of
Apollinaris's bed. The furtive glance she cast first at the side-room and
then at Nemesianus did not pass unobserved by the quick eye of the
commander, and with soldierly firmness he insisted on knowing what was
concealed behind that door.
"An unfortunate man," was Apollinaris's answer.
"Seleukus, the master of this house?" asked Quintus Flavius, sternly.
"No," replied Nemesianus. "It is only a poor, wounded painter. And
yet--the praetorians will go through fire and water for you, if you
deliver up this man to them as their booty. But if you are what I hold
you to be--"
"The opinion of hot-headed boys is of as little consequence to me as the
favor of my subordinates," interposed the commander. "Whatever my con
science tells me is right, I shall do. Quick, now! Who is in there?"
"The brother of the maiden for whose sake Caesar--" stammered the wounded
man.
"The maiden whom you have to thank for that disfigured face?" cried the
legate. "You are true Aurelians, you boys; and, though you may doubt
whether I am the man you take me for, I confess with pleasure that you
are exactly as I would wish to have you. The praetorians have slain your
friend and servant; I give you that man to make amends for it."
With deep emotion Nemesianus seized his old friend's hands, and
Apollinaris spoke words of gratitude to him from his couch. The officer
would not listen to their thanks, and walked toward the door; but Johanna
stood before him, and entreated him to allow the twins, whose servant had
been killed, to take another, from whom they need have no fear of
treachery. He had been captured in the impluvium by the praetorians while
trying, in the face of every danger, to enter the house where the painter
lay, to whose father he had belonged for many years. He would be able to
tend both Apollinaris and Melissa's brother, and make it possible to keep
Alexander's hiding-place a secret. The soldiery would be certain to
penetrate as far as this, and other lives would be endangered if they
should bear off the faithful servant and force him on the rack to
disclose where Melissa's father and relatives were hidden.
The legate promised to insure the freedom of Argutis.
A few more words of thanks and farewell, and Quintus had fulfilled his
mission to the Aurelians. Shortly afterward the tuba sounded to assemble
the plunderers still scattered about Seleukus's house, and Nemesianus saw
the men marching in small companies into the great hall. They were
followed by their armor-bearers, loaded with treasure of every kind; and
three chariots, drawn by fine horses, belonging to Seleukus and his
murdered wife, conveyed such booty as was too heavy for men to carry. In
the last of these stood the statue of Eros by Praxiteles. The glorious
sunshine lighted up the smiling marble face; with the charm of bewitching
beauty he seemed to gaze at the lurid crimson pools on the ground, and at
the armed cohorts which marched in front to shed more blood and rouse
more hatred.
As Nemesianus withdrew from the window, Argutis came into the room. The
legate had released him; and when Johanna conducted the faithful fellow
to Alexander's bedside, and he saw the youth lying pale and with closed
eyes, as though death had claimed him for his prey, the old man dropped
on his knees, sobbing loudly.
CHAPTER XXXII.
While Alexander, well nursed by old Argutis and Johanna, lay in high
fever, raving in his delirium of Agatha and his brother Philip, and still
oftener calling for his sister, Melissa was alone in her hiding-place. It
was spacious enough, indeed, for she was concealed in the rooms prepared
to receive the Exoterics before the mysteries of Serapis. A whole suite
of apartments, sleeping-rooms and halls, were devoted to their use,
extending all across the building from east to west. Some of these were
square, others round or polygonal, but most of them much longer than they
were wide. Painters and sculptors had everywhere covered the walls with
pictures in color and in high relief, calculated to terrify or bewilder
the uninitiated. The statues, of which there were many, bore strange
symbols, the mosaic flooring was covered with images intended to excite
the fancy and the fears of the beholder.
When Melissa first entered her little sleeping room, darkness had
concealed all this from her gaze. She had been only too glad to obey the
matron's bidding and go to rest at once. Euryale had remained with her
some time, sitting on the edge of the bed to hear all that had happened
to the girl during the last few hours, and she had impressed on her how
she should conduct herself in case of her hiding-place being searched.
When she presently bade her good-night, Melissa repeated what the
waiting-woman Johanna had told her of the life of Jesus Christ; but she
expressed her interest in the person of the Redeemer in such a strange
and heathen fashion that Euryale only regretted that she could not at
once enlighten the exhausted girl. With a hearty kiss she left her to
rest, and Melissa was no sooner alone than sleep closed her weary young
eyes.
It was near morning when she fell asleep; and when she awoke, accustomed
as she was to early hours, she was startled to see how much of the day
was spent. So she rose hastily, and then perceived that the lady Euryale
must already have come to see her, for she found fresh milk by the
bedside, and some rolls of manuscript which had not been there the day
before. Her first thought was for her imperiled relatives--her father,
her brothers, her lover--and she prayed for each, appealing first to the
manes of her mother, and then to mighty Serapis and kindly Isis, who
would surely hear her in these precincts dedicate to them.
The danger of those she loved made her forget her own, and she vividly
pictured to herself what might be happening to each, what each one might
be doing to protect her and save her from the spies of the despot, who by
this time must have received her missive. Still, the doubt whether he
might not, after all, be magnanimous and forgive her, rose again and
again to her mind, though everything led her to think it impossible.
During her prayer and in her care for the others she had felt reasonably
calm; but at the first thought of Caesar a painful agitation took
possession of her soul, and to overcome it she began an inspection of her
spacious hiding-place, where the lady Euryale had prepared her to be
amazed. And, indeed, it was not merely strange, but it filled her heart
and mind with astonishment and terror. Wherever she looked, mystic
figures puzzled her; and Melissa turned from a picture in relief of
beheaded figures with their feet in the air, and a representation of the
damned stewing in great caldrons and fanning themselves with diabolical
irony, only to see a painting of a female form over whose writhing body
boats were sailing, or a four-headed ram, or birds with human heads
flying away with a mummified corpse. On the ceiling, too, there was
strange imagery; and when she looked at the floor to rest her bewildered
fancy, her eyes fell on a troop of furies pursuing the wicked, or a pool
of fire by which horrible monsters kept guard.
And all these pictures were not stiff and formal like Egyptian decorative
art, but executed by Greek artists with such liveliness and truth that
they seemed about to speak; and Melissa could have fancied many times
that they were moving toward her from the ceiling or the walls.
If she remained here long, she thought she must go out of her mind; and
yet she was attracted, here by a huge furnace on whose metal floor large
masses of fuel seemed to be, and there by a pool of water with
crocodiles, frogs, tortoises, and shells, wrought in mosaic.
Besides these and other similar objects, her curiosity was aroused by
some large chests in which book-rolls, strange vessels, and an endless
variety of raiment of every shape and size were stored, from the simple
chiton of the common laborer to the star-embroidered talar of the adept.
Her protectress had told her that the mystics who desired to be admitted
to the highest grades here passed through fire and water, and had to go
through many ceremonies in various costumes. She had also informed her
that the uninitiated who desired to enter these rooms had to open three
doors, each of which, as it was closed, gave rise to a violent ringing;
so that she might not venture to get away from the room, into which,
however, she could bar herself. If the danger were pressing, there was a
door, known only to the initiated, which led to the steps and out of the
building. Her sleeping-place, happily, was not far from a window looking
to the west, so that she was able to refresh her brain after the
bewildering impressions which had crowded on her in the inner rooms.
The paved roadway dividing the Serapeum from the stadium was at first
fairly crowded; but the chariots, horsemen, and foot-passengers on whose
heads she looked down from her high window interested her as little as
the wide inclosure of the stadium, part of which lay within sight.
A race, no doubt, was to be held there this morning, for slaves were
raking the sand smooth, and hanging flowers about a dais, which was no
doubt intended for Caesar. Was it to be her fate to see the dreadful man
from the place where she was hiding from him? Her heart began to beat
faster, and at the same time questions crowded on her excited brain, each
bringing with it fresh anxiety for those she loved, of whom, till now,
she had been thinking with calm reassurance.
Whither had Alexander fled?
Had her father and Philip succeeded in concealing themselves in the
sculptor's work-room?
Could Diodoros have escaped in time to reach the harbor with Polybius and
Praxilla?
How had Argutis contrived that her letter should reach Caesar's hands
without too greatly imperiling himself?
She was quite unconscious of any guilt toward Caracalla. There had been,
indeed, a strong and strange attraction which had drawn her to him; even
now she was glad to have been of service to him, and to have helped him
to endure the sufferings laid upon him by a cruel fate. But she could
never be his. Her heart belonged to another, and this she had confessed
in a letter--perhaps, indeed, too late. If he had a heart really capable
of love, and had set it on her, he would no doubt think it hard that he
should have bestowed his affections on a girl who was already plighted to
another, even when she first appeared before him as a suppliant, though
deeply moved by pity; still, he had certainly no right to condemn her
conduct. And this was her firm conviction.
If her refusal roused his ire--if her father's prophecy and
Philostratus's fears must be verified, that his rage would involve many
others besides herself in ruin, then--But here her thought broke off with
a shudder.
Then she recalled the hour when she had been ready and willing to be his,
to sacrifice love and happiness only to soften his wild mood and protect
others from his unbridled rage. Yes, she might have been his wife by this
time, if he himself had not proved to her that she could never gain such
power over him as would control his sudden fits of fury, or obtain mercy
for any victim of his cruelty. The murder of Vindex and his nephew had
been the death-blow of this hope. She best knew how seriously she had
come to the determination to give up every selfish claim to future
happiness in order that she might avert from others the horrors which
threatened them; and now, when she knew the history of the Divine Lord of
the Christians, she told herself that she had acted at that moment in a
manner well-pleasing to that sublime Teacher. Still, her strong common
sense assured her that to sacrifice the dearest and fondest wish of her
heart in vain would not have been right and good, but foolish.
The evil deeds which Caracalla was now preparing to commit he would have
done even if she were at his side. Of what small worth would she have
seemed to him, and to herself!--When this tyranny should be overpast,
when he should be gone to some other part of his immense empire, if those
she loved were spared she could be happy--ah! so happy with the man to
whom she had given her heart--as happy as she would have been miserable
if she had become the victim to unceasing terrors as Caesar's wife.
Euryale was right, and Fate, to which she had appealed, had decided well
for her. That, the greatest conceivable sacrifice, would have been in
vain; for the sake of a ruthless tyrant's foul desire she would have been
guilty of the basest breach of faith, have poisoned her lover's heart and
soul, and have wrecked his whole future life as well as her own. Away,
then, with foolish doubts! Pythagoras was wise in warning her against
torturing her heart. The die was cast. She and Caracalla must go on
divergent roads, Her duty now was to fight for her own happiness against
any who threatened it, and, above all, against the tyrant who had
compelled her, innocent as she was, to hide like a criminal.
She was full of righteous wrath against the sanguinary persecutor, and
holding her head high she went back into her sleeping-room to finish
dressing. She moved more quickly than usual, for the bookrolls which
Euryale had laid by her bed while she was still asleep attracted her eye
with a suggestion of promise. Eager to know what their contents were, she
took them up, drew a stool to the window, and tried to read.
But many voices came up to her from outside, and when she looked down
into the road she saw troops of youths crowding into the stadium. What
fine fellows they were, as they marched on, talking and singing; and she
said to herself that Diodoros and Alexander were taller even than most of
these, and would have been handsome among the handsomest! She amused
herself for some time with watching them; but when the last man had
entered the stadium, and they had formed in companies, she again took up
the rolls.
One contained the gospel of Matthew and the other that of Luke.
The first, beginning with the genealogy, gave her a string of strange,
barbarous names which did not attract her; so she took up the roll of
Luke, and his simple narrative style at once charmed her. There were
difficulties in it, no doubt, and she skipped sundry unintelligible
passages, but the second chapter captivated her attention. It spoke of
the birth of the great Teacher whom the Christians worshiped as their
God. Angels had announced to the shepherds in the field that great joy
should come on the whole world, because the Saviour was born; and this
Saviour and Redeemer was no hero, no sage, but a child wrapped in
swaddling-clothes and lying in a manger.
At this she smiled, for she loved little children, and had long known no
greater pleasure than to play with them and help them. How many
delightful hours did she owe to the grandchildren of their neighbor
Skopas!
And this child, hailed at its birth by a choir of angels, had become a
God in whom many believed! and the words of the angels' chant were:
"Glory to God on high, and on earth peace, good-will toward men!"
How great and good it sounded! With eager excitement she fastened the
rolls together, and on her features was depicted impatient longing to put
an end to an intolerable state of things, as she exclaimed, though there
was no one but herself to hear: "Ay, peace, salvation, good-will! Not
this hatred, this thirst for revenge, this blood, this persecution, and,
as their hideous fruit, this terror, these horrible, cruel fears--"
Here she was interrupted by the clatter of arms and rapping of hammers
which came up from below. Caesar's Macedonian guard and other infantry
troops were silently coming up in companies and vanishing into the
side-doors which led to the upper tiers of the stadium. What could this
mean? Meanwhile carpenters were busy fastening up the chief entrance with
wooden beams. It looked like closing up sluice-gates to hinder the
invasion of a high tide. But the stadium was already full of men. She had
seen thousands of youths march in, and there they stood in close ranks in
the arena below her. Besides these, there were now an immense number of
soldiers. They must all get out again presently, and what a crush there
would be in the side exits if the vomitorium were closed! She longed to
call down, to warn the carpenters of the folly of their act. Or was it
that the youth of the town were to be pent into the stadium to hear some
new and more severe decree, while some of the more refractory were
secured?
It must be so. What a shame!
Then came a few vexilla of Numidian troopers at a slow pace. At their
head, on a particularly high horse, rode the legate, a very tall man. He
glanced up to the side where she was, and Melissa recognized the Egyptian
Zminis. At this her hand sought the place of her heart, for she felt as
though it had ceased to beat. What! This wretch, the deadly foe of her
father and brother, here, at the head of the Roman troops? Something
horrible, impossible, must be about to happen!
The sun was mirrored in the shining coat of his horse, and in the
lictor's axe he bore, carrying it like a commander's staff. He raised it
once, twice, and, high as she was above him, she could see how sharp the
contrast was between the yellow whites of his eyes and the swarthy color
of his face.
Now, for the third time, the bright steel of the axe flashed in the
sunshine, and immediately after trumpet-calls sounded and were repeated
at short intervals, which still, to her, seemed intolerably long. How
Melissa had presence of mind enough to count them she knew not, but she
did. At the seventh all was still, and soon after a short blast on the
tuba rang out from above, below, and from all sides of the stadium. Each
went like an arrow to the heart of the anxious, breathless girl. From the
moment when she had seen Zminis she had expected the worst, but the cry
of rage and despair from a thousand voices which now split her ear told
her how far the incredible reality outdid her most horrible imaginings.
Breathless, and with a throbbing brain, she leaned out as far as she
could, and neither felt the burning sun-which was now beginning to fall
on the western face of the temple--nor heeded the risk of being seen and
involving herself and her protectress in ruin. Trembling like a gazelle
in a frosty winter's night, she would gladly have withdrawn from the
window, but she felt as if some spell held her there. She longed to shut
her ears and eyes, but she could not help looking on. Her every instinct
prompted her to shriek for help, but she could not utter a sound.
There she stood, seeing and hearing, and her low moaning changed to that
laughter which anguish borrows from gladness when it has exhausted all
forms of expression. At last she sank on her knees on the floor, and
while she shed tears of pain still laughed shrilly, till she understood
with sudden horror what was happening. She started violently; a sob
convulsed her bosom; she wept and wept, and these tears did her good.
When, at one in the afternoon, the sun fell full on her window, she had
not yet found strength to move. A flood of bright light, in which whirled
millions of motes, danced before her eyes; and as her breath sent the
atoms flying, it passed through her mind that at this very moment the
reprobate utterance of a madman's lips was blowing happiness, joy, peace,
and hope out of the lives of many thousands--blowing them into
nothingness, like the blast of a storm.
Then she commanded herself, for the horrible scene before her threatened
to stamp itself on her eye like the image her father could engrave on an
onyx; and she must avoid that, or give up all hope of ever being
light-hearted again. Hardly an hour since she had seen the arena looking
like a basket of fresh flowers, full of splendid, youthful men. Then the
warriors of the Macedonian phalanx had taken their places on the long
ranks of seats on which she looked down, with several cohorts of archers,
brown Numidians and black Ethiopians, like inquisitive spectators of the
expected show--but all in full armor. At first the youths and men had
formed in companies, with singing, talk, and laughter, and here and there
a satirical chant; but presently there had been squabbles with the
town-watch, and while the younger and more careless still were gay
enough, whole companies on the other hand had looked up indignantly at
the Romans; some had anxiously questioned each other's eyes, or stared
down in sullen dismay at the sand.
The hot, seething blood of these men--the sons of a free city, and
accustomed to a life of rapid action in hard work and frenzied
enjoyment--took the delay very much amiss; and when it was rumored that
the doors were being locked, impatience and distrust found emphatic
utterance. Timid whistling and other expressions of disapproval had been
followed by louder demonstrations, for to be locked up was intolerable.
But the lictors and guards took no notice, after removing the member of
the Museum who had perpetrated the epigram on Caesar's mother. This one,
who had certainly gone too far, was to pay for all, it would seem.
Then the trumpets sounded, and the most heedless of the troop of youths
began to feel acute anxiety and alarm. From her high post of observation
Melissa could see that, although the appearance of Zminis on the scene
had caused a fever of agitation, they now broke their serried squares,
wandered about as if undecided what to do, but prepared for the worst,
and turned their curly heads now to this side and now to that, till the
trumpetblast from the seats attracted every eye upward, and the butchery
began.
Did the cry, "Stop, wretches!" really break from Melissa's lips, or had
she only intended to shout it down to the people in the stadium? She did
not know; but as she recollected the long rank of Numidians who, quick as
lightning, lifted their curved bows and sent a shower of arrows down on
the defenseless lads in the arena, she felt as though she had again
shrieked out: "Stop!" Then it seemed as though a storm of wind had torn
thousands of straight boughs with metallic leaves that flashed in the
sunshine from some huge invisible tree, and flung them into the arena;
and, as her eve followed their fall, she could have fancied that she
looked on a corn-field beaten down by a terrific hail-storm; but the
boughs and leaves were lances and arrows, and each ear of corn cut down
was a young and promising human being.
Zminis's preposterous suggestion had been acted on. Caracalla was avenged
on the youth of Alexandria.
Not a tongue could wag now in abuse; every pair of young lips which had
dared utter a scornful cry or purse up to whistle at the sight of Caesar,
was silenced forever-and, with the few guilty, a hundred times more who
were innocent. She knew now why the great gate had been barred with
beams, and why the troop had entered by the side-doors. The scene of the
brilliant display had become a lake of blood, full of the dead and dying.
Death had invaded the rows of seats; instead of laurel wreaths and
prizes, deadly weapons were showered down into the arena. It seemed now
as though the sun, with its blinding radiance, were mercifully fain to
hinder the human eye from looking down on the horrible picture. To avoid
the sickening sight. Melissa closed her eyes and dragged herself to her
feet with an effort, to hide herself she knew not where.
But again there was a flourish of trumpets and loud acclamations, and
again an irresistible power dragged her to the window.
A splendid quadriga had stopped at the gate of the stadium, surrounded by
courtiers and guards. It was Caracalla's, for Pandion held the reins.
Could Caracalla approve of this most horrible crime, organized by the
wretch Zminis, by appearing on the scene; or might it not be that, in his
wrath at the bloodthirsty zeal of his vile tool, he had come to dismiss
him?
She hoped it was this; and, at any cost, she must know the truth as to
this question, which was not based on mere curiosity. Holding one hand to
her wildly beating heart, she looked across the bloodstained arena to the
rows of seats and the dais decorated for Caesar. There stood Caracalla,
with the Egyptian at his side, pointing down at the arena with his
finger. And what was to be seen on the spot he indicated was so horrible
that she again shut her eyes, and this time she even covered them with
her hands. But she would and must see, and once more she looked across;
and the man whose assurances she had once believed, that it was only his
care for the throne and state and the compulsion of cruel fate which had
ever made him shed blood--that man was standing side by side with the
vile, ruthless spy whose tall figure towered far above his master's. His
hand lay on the villain's arm, his eye rested on the corpse-strewn arena
beneath; and now he raised his head, he turned his face, whose look of
suffering had once moved her soul, toward her--and he laughed--she could
see every feature--laughed so loud, so heartily, so gleefully, as she had
never before seen him laugh. He laughed till his whole body and shoulders
shook. Now he took his hand from the Egyptian's arm and pointed to the
dead lying at his feet.
As she saw that laugh, of which she could not hear a sound, Melissa felt
as though a hyena had yelled in her ear, and, yielding to an irresistible
impulse, she looked down once more at the destruction of youthful life
and happiness which had been wrought in one short hour--at the stream of
blood after which so many bitter tears must flow. The sight indeed cut
her to the heart, and yet she was thankful for it; for the first time the
reckless cruelty of that laughing monster was evident in all its naked
atrocity. Horror, aversion, loathing for that man to whom everything but
power, cruelty, and cunning, was as nothing, left no room for fear or
pity, or even the least shade of self-reproach for having aroused in him
a desire which she could not gratify.
She clenched her little fists, and, without vouchsafing another glance at
the detestable butcher who had dared to cast his eyes on her, she
withdrew from the window and cried out aloud, though startled at the
sound of her own voice: "The time, the time! It is fulfilled for him this
day!"
And how her eyes flashed and her bosom heaved and fell! With what a firm
step did she pace the long suite of rooms, while the conviction was borne
in on her that this deed of the vile assassin in the purple must bring
the day of salvation and peace nearer--that day of which Andreas dreamed!
As in her silent walk she passed the book-rolls which the lady Euryale
had so quietly laid by her bedside, she took up the glad message of Luke
with enthusiastic excitement, held it on high, and shouted the angels'
greeting which had impressed itself on her memory out of the window, as
though she longed that Caracalla should hear it--"Peace on earth and
good-will toward men!"
Then she resumed her walk through the rooms of the heathen mystics,
repeating to herself all the comfortable words she had ever heard from
Euryale and the freedman Andreas. The image of the divine Lord, who had
come to bestow love on the world, and seal his sublime doctrine by
sacrificing his life, rose up before her soul, and all that the Christian
Johanna had told her of him made the picture clear, till he stood plainly
before her, beautiful and gentle, in a halo of love and kindness, and yet
strong and noble, for the crucified One was a heroic Saviour.
At this she remembered with satisfaction the struggle she herself had
fought, and her comfort when she had decided to sacrifice her own
happiness to save others from sorrow. She now resolutely grasped the lady
Euryale's book-rolls, for they contained the key to the inner chambers of
the wondrous structure into whose forecourt life itself and her own
intimate experience had led her. She was soon sitting with her back to
the window, and unrolled the gospel of Matthew till she came to the first
sentence which Euryale had marked for her with a red line.
Melissa was too restless to read straight on; as impatient as a child who
finds itself for the first time in a garden which its parents have
bought, she rushed from one tempting passage to another, applying each to
herself, to those whom she loved, or in another sense to the disturber of
her peace.
With a joyful heart she now believed the promise which at first had
staggered her, that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.
But her eye ran swiftly over the open roll, and was attracted by a mark
drawing her attention to a whole chapter. She there read how Jesus Christ
had gone up on to a mountain to address the vast multitude who followed
him. He spoke of the kingdom of heaven, and of who those were that should
be suffered to enter there. First, they were the poor in spirit--and she
no doubt was one of those. Among those who were rich in spirit her
brother Philip was certainly one of the richest, and whither had an acute
understanding and restless brain led him that they so seldom gave his
feelings time to make themselves heard?
Then the mourners were to be comforted. Oh, that she could have called
the lady Berenike to her side and bid her participate in this promise!
And the meek--well, they might come to power perhaps after the downfall
of the wretch who had flooded the world with blood, and who, of all men
on earth, was the farthest removed from the spirit which gazed at her
from this scripture, so mild and genial. Of those who hungered and
thirsted after righteousness she again was one: they should be filled,
and the lady Euryale and Andreas had already loaded the board for her.
The merciful, she read, should obtain mercy; and she, if any one, had a
right to regard herself as a peacemaker: thus to her was the promise that
she should be called one of the children of God.
But at the next verse she drew herself up, and her face was radiant with
joy, for it seemed to have been written expressly for her; nay, to find
it here struck her as a marvel of good fortune, for there stood the
words: "Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake:
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall revile
you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you."
All these things had come upon her in these last days-though not, indeed,
for the sake of Jesus Christ and righteousness, but only for the sake of
those she loved; yet she would have been ready to endure the worst.
And the hapless victims in the arena! Might not the promised bliss await
them too? Oh, how gladly would she have bestowed on them the fairest
reward! And if this should indeed be their lot after death, where was the
revenge of their bloodthirsty murderer?
Oh, that her mother were still alive--that she, Melissa, had been
permitted to share this great consolation with her! In a brief aspiration
she uplifted her soul to the beloved dead, and as she further unrolled
the manuscript her eye fell on the words: "Love your enemies; bless them
that curse you, and do good to them that hate you." No, she could not do
this; this seemed to her to be too much to ask; even Andreas had not
attained to this; and yet it must be good and lovely, if only because it
helped to cement the peace for which she longed more fervently than for
any other blessing.
Next she read: "For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged," and
she shuddered as she thought of the future fate of the man who had by
treachery brought murder and death on an industrious and flourishing city
as a punishment for the light words and jests of a few mockers, and the
disappointment he had suffered from an insignificant girl.
But then, again, she breathed more freely, for she read: "Ask, and it
shall be given unto you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be
opened." Could there be a more precious promise? And to her, she felt, it
was already fulfilled; for her trembling finger had, as it were, but just
touched the door, and, to! it stood open before her, and that which she
had so long sought she had now found. But it was quite natural that it
should be so, for the God of the Christians loved those who turned to him
as His own children. Here it was written why those who asked should
receive, and those who sought should find: "For what man is there of you
whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?"
If it were only as a peacemaker, she was already a child of Him who had
asked this, and she might look for none but good gifts from Him. And what
was commanded immediately after seemed to her so simple, so easy to obey,
and yet so wise. She thought it over a little, and saw that in this
precept--of which it was said that it was all the law and the
prophets--there was in fact a rule which, if it were obeyed, must keep
all mankind guiltless, and make every one happy. These words, she
thought, should be written over every door and on every heart, as the
winged sun was placed over every Egyptian temple gate, so that no one
should ever forget them for an instant. She herself would bear them in
mind, and she repeated them to herself in an undertone, "Whatsoever ye
would that men should do unto you, even so do unto them." Her eye
wandered to the window and out to the stadium. How happy might the world
be under a sovereign who should obey that law! And Caracalla?--No, she
would not allow the contentment which filled her to be troubled by a
thought of him.
With a hasty gesture she placed the ivory rod which she had found in the
middle of the roll so as to flatten it out, and her eye fell on the
words, "Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy-laden, and I will
give you rest." To her, if to any one, was this glorious bidding
addressed, for few had a heavier burden to bear. But indeed she already
felt it lighter, after the terrors she had gone through on the very verge
of despair; and now, even though she was still surrounded by dangers, she
was far from feeling oppressed or terrified. Now her heart beat higher
with hopeful gladness, and she was full of fervent gratitude as she told
herself with lively and confident assurance that she had found a new
guide, and, holding His loving and powerful hand, could walk in the way
in safety. She felt as though some beloved hand had given her a vial of
precious medicine that would cure every disease, when she had learned
this verse, too, by heart. She would never forget the friendly promise
and invitation that lay in those words. And to Alexander, at least--poor,
conscience-stricken Alexander--they might bring some comfort, if not to
her father and Philip, since the call of the Son of God was addressed to
him too. And she looked as happy as though she had heard something to
rejoice her heart and soul. Her red lips parted once more, showing the
two white teeth which were never to be seen but when she smiled and some
real happiness stirred her soul.
She fancied she was alone, but, even while she was reading the words in
which the Saviour called to him the weary and heavy-laden, the lady
Euryale had noiselessly opened a secret door leading to Melissa's
hiding-place, known only to herself and her husband, and had come close
to her. She now stood watching the girl with surprise and astonishment,
for she had expected to find her beside herself, desperate, and more than
ever needing comfort and soothing. The unhappy girl must have been drawn
to the window by the cries of the massacred, and at least have glanced at
the revolting scene in the stadium. She would have thought it more
natural if she had found Melissa overcome by the horrors she had
witnessed, half distraught or paralyzed by distress and rage. And there
sat the young creature, whom she knew to be soft-hearted and gentle,
smiling and with beaming eyes--though those eyes must have rested on the
most hideous spectacle--looking as though the roll in her lap were the
first enchanting raptures of a lover. The book lying on Melissa's knees
was the gospel of Matthew, which she herself early this morning, while
the girl was still sleeping, had laid by her side to comfort her and give
her some insight into the blessings of Christianity. But these
scriptures, so sacred to Euryale, had seemed to count for less than
nothing to this heathen girl, the sister of Philip the skeptic.
Euryale loved Melissa, but far dearer to her was the book to whose
all-important contents the maiden seemed to have closed her heart in
coldness.
It was for Melissa's sake that, when the high-priest's dwelling was
searched by the new magistrate's spies from cellar to garret, she had
patiently submitted to her husband's hard words. She had liked to think
that she might bring this girl as a pure white lamb into the fold of the
Good Shepherd, who to herself was so dear, and through whom her saddened
life had found new charm, her broken heart new joys. A few hours since
she had assured her friend Origen that she had found a young Greek who
would prove to him that a heathen who had gone through the school of
suffering with a pure and compassionate heart needed but a sign, a word
of flame, to recognize at once the beatitude of Christianity and long to
be baptized. And here she discovered the maiden of whom she had such fair
hopes, with a smile on her lips and beaming looks, while so many innocent
men were being slaughtered, as though this were a joy to her!
What had become of the girl's soft, tender heart, which but yesterday had
been ready for self-sacrifice if only she might secure the well-being of
those she loved? Was she, Euryale, in her dotage, that she could be so
deceived by a child?
Her heart beat faster with disappointment; and yet she would not condemn
the sinner unheard. So, with a swift impulse she took the roll up from
Melissa's lap, and her voice was sorrowful rather than severe as she
exclaimed:
"I had hoped, my child, that these scriptures might prove to you, as to
so many before you, a key to open the gates of eternal truth. I thought
that they would comfort you, and teach you to love the sublime Being
whose exemplary life and pathetic death are no longer unknown to you,
since Johanna told you the tale. Nay, I believed that they might
presently arouse in you the desire to join us who--"
But here she stopped, for Melissa had fallen on her neck, and while
Euryale, much amazed, tried to release herself from her embrace, the girl
cried out, half laughing and half in tears:
"It has all come about as you expected! I will live and die faithful to
that sublime Saviour, whom I love. I am one of you--yes, mother,
now--even before the baptism I long for. For I was weary and heavy-laden
above any, and the word of the Lord hath refreshed me. This book has
taught me that there is but one path to true happiness, and it is that
which is shown us by Jesus Christ. O lady, how much fairer would our life
on earth be if what is written here concerning blessedness were stamped
on every heart! I feel as though in this hour I had been born again. I do
not know myself; and how is it possible that a poor child of man, in such
fearful straits and peril as I, and after such a scene of horror, should
feel so thankful and so full of the purest gladness?"
The matron clasped her closely in her arms, and her tears bedewed the
girl's face while she kissed her again and again; and the cheerfulness
which had just now hurt her so deeply she now regarded as a beautiful
miracle.
Her time was limited, for she was watched; and she had seized the
half-hour during which the townguard had been mustered in the square to
report progress. So Melissa had to be brief, and in a few hasty words she
told her friend all that she had seen and heard from her high window, and
how the gospel of Matthew had been to her glad tidings; how it had given
her comfort and filled her soul with infinite happiness in this the most
terrible hour of her life. At this, Euryale also forgot the horrors which
surrounded them, till Melissa called her back to the dreadful present;
for, with bowed head and in deep anxiety, she desired to know whether her
friend knew anything of her relations and Diodoros.
The matron had a painful struggle with herself. It grieved her to inflict
anxiety on Melissa's heart, as she stood before her eyes like one of the
maidens robed in white and going to be baptized, to whom presents were
given on the festive occasion, and who were carefully sheltered from all
that could disturb them and destroy the silent, holy joy of their souls.
And yet the question must be answered: so she said that of the other two
she knew nothing, any more than of Berenike and Diodoros, but that of
Philip she had bad news. He was a noble man, and, notwithstanding his
errors in the search after truth, well worthy of pity. At this, Melissa
in great alarm begged to be told what had happened to her brother, and
the lady Euryale confessed that he no longer walked among the living, but
she did not relate the manner of his death; and she bade the weeping girl
to seek for comfort from the Friend of all who grieve and whom she now
knew; but to keep herself prepared for the worst, in full assurance that
none are tried beyond what they are able to bear, for that the fury of
the bloodthirsty tyrant hung like a black cloud over Alexandria and its
inhabitants. She herself, merely by coming to Melissa, exposed herself to
great danger, and she could not see her again till the morrow. To
Melissa's inquiry as to whether it was her refusal to be his which had
brought such a fearful fate on the innocent youth of Alexandria, Euryale
could reply in the negative; for she had heard from her husband that it
was a foul epigram written by a pupil of the Museum which had led to
Caesar's outbreak of rage.
With a few soothing words she pointed to a basket of food which she had
brought with her, showed the girl once more the secret door, and embraced
her at parting as fondly as though Heaven had restored to her in Melissa
the daughter she had lost.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Melissa was once more alone.
She now knew that Philip walked no longer among the living. He must have
fallen a victim to the fury of the monster, but the thought that he might
have been slain for her sake left her mind no peace.
She felt that with the death of this youth--so gifted, and so dear to
her--a corner-stone had been torn from the paternal house.
In the loving circle that surrounded her, death had made another gap
which yawned before her, dismal and void.
One storm more, and what was left standing would fall with the rest.
Her tears flowed fast, and the torturing thought that the emperor had
slain her brother as a punishment for his sister's flight pierced her to
the heart.
Now she belonged indeed to the afflicted and oppressed; and as yesterday,
in the trouble of her soul, she had called upon Jesus Christ, though she
scarcely knew of Him then, so now she lifted up her heart to Him who had
become her friend, praying to Him to remember His promise of comfort when
she came to Him weary and heavy-laden.
And while she tried to realize the nature of the Saviour who had laid
down His life for others, she remembered all she had dared for her father
and brothers, and what fate had been her's during the time since; and she
felt she might acknowledge to herself that even if Philip had met his
death because of Caracalla's anger toward her, at any rate she would
never have approached Caesar had she not wanted to save her father and
brothers. She had never glossed over any wrong-doing of her own; but her
open and truthful nature was just as little inclined to the torment of
self-reproach when she was not absolutely certain of having committed a
fault.
In this case she was not quite sure of herself; but she now remembered a
saying of Euryale and Andreas which she had not understood before. Jesus
Christ, it said, had taken upon Himself the sins of the world. If she
understood its meaning aright, the merciful Lord would surely forgive her
a sin which she had committed unwittingly and in no wise for her own
advantage. Her prayer grew more and more to be a discourse with her
new-found friend; and, as she finished, she felt absolutely sure that He
at least understood her and was not angry with her. This reassured her,
but her cheerfulness had fled, and she could read no more.
Deeply troubled, and more and more distressed as time went on by new
disturbing thoughts, she hurriedly paced from side to side of the long,
narrow chamber in the gathering darkness. The revolting images around her
began to affect her unbearably once more. Near her chamber, to the west,
lay the race-course with its horrible scenes; so she turned to the
eastern end that looked out upon the street of Hermes, where the sight
could scarcely be so terrible as from the windows at the opposite end.
But she was mistaken; for, looking down upon the pavement, she perceived
that this, too, swam with blood, and that the ground was covered with
corpses.
Seized with a sudden horror, she flew back into the middle of the long
room. There she remained standing, for the scene of slaughter in the west
was still more appalling than that from which she had just fled. She
could not help wondering who could here have fallen a victim to the
tyrant after he had swept all the youth of the city off the face of the
earth.
The evening sun cast long shafts of golden light across the race-course
and in at the western window, and Melissa knew how quickly the night fell
in Alexandria. If she wished to find out who they were who had been
sacrificed to the fury of the tyrant, it must be done at once, for the
immense building of the temple already cast long shadows. Determined to
force herself to look out, she walked quickly to the eastern window and
gazed below. But it was some moments before she had the fortitude to
distinguish one form from another; they melted before her reluctant eyes
into one repulsive mass.
At last she succeeded in looking more calmly and critically.
Not heaped on one another as on the racecourse, hundreds of Caracalla's
victims lay scattered separately over the open square as far as the
entrance to the street of Hermes. Here lay an old man with a thick beard,
probably a Syrian or a Jew; there, his dress betraying him, a seaman; and
farther on-no, she could not be mistaken--the youthful corpse that lay so
motionless just beneath the window was that of Myrtilos, a friend of
Philip, and, like him, a member of the Museum.
In a fresh fit of terror she was going to flee again into her dreadful
hiding-place, when she caught sight of a figure leaning against the basin
of the beautiful marble fountain just in front of the eastern side-door
of the Serapeum, and immediately below her. The figure moved, and could
therefore only be wounded, not dead; and round the head was bound a white
cloth, reminding her of her beloved, and thereby attracting her
attention. The youth moved again, turning his face upward, and with a low
cry she leaned farther forward and gazed and gazed, unmindful of the
danger of being seen and falling a victim to the tyrant's fury. The
wounded, living man-there, he had moved again--was no other than
Diodoros, her lover!
Till the last glimmer of light disappeared she stood at the window with
bated breath, and eyes fixed upon him. No faintest movement of his
escaped her, and at each one, trembling with awakening hope, she thanked
Heaven and prayed for his rescue. At length the growing darkness hid him
from her sight. With every instant the night deepened, and without
thinking, without stopping to reflect--driven on by one absorbing
thought--she felt her way back to her couch, beside which stood the lamp
and fire-stick, and lighted the wick; then, inspired with new courage at
the thought of rescuing her lover from death, she considered for a moment
what had best be done.
It was easy for her to get out. She had a little money with her; on her
peplos she wore a clasp that had once belonged to her mother, with two
gems in it from her father's hand, and on her rounded arm a golden
circlet. With these she could buy help. The only thing now was to
disguise herself.
On the great, smoke-blackened metal plate over which those mystics passed
who had to walk through fire, there lay plenty of charcoal, and yonder
hung robes of every description. The next moment she had thrown off her
own, in order to blacken her glistening white limbs and her face with
soot. Among the sewing materials which the lady Euryale had laid beside
the scrolls was a pair of scissors. These the girl seized, and with
quick, remorseless hand cut off the long, thick locks that were her
brother's and her lover's delight. Then she chose out a chiton, which,
reaching only to her knees, gave her the appearance of a boy. Her breath
came fast and her hands trembled, but she was already on her way to the
secret door through which she should flee from this place of horror, when
she came to a standstill, shaking her head gently. She had looked around
her, and the wild disorder she was leaving behind her in the little room
went against her womanly feelings. But though this feeling would not in
itself have kept her back, it warned her to steady her mind before
leaving the refuge her friend had accorded to her. Thoughtful, and
accustomed to have regard for others, she realized at once how dangerous
it might prove to Euryale if these unmistakable traces of her presence
there should be discovered by an enemy. The kindness of her motherly
friend should not bring misfortune upon her. With active presence of mind
she gathered up her garments from the floor, swept the long locks of hair
together, and threw them all, with the sewing and the basket that had
contained the food, into the stove on the hearth, and set them alight.
The scissors she took with her as a weapon in case of need.
Then, laying the books of the gospels beside the other manuscripts, and
casting a last look round to assure herself that every sign of her
presence had been destroyed, she addressed one more prayer to the tender
Comforter of the afflicted, who has promised to save those that are in
danger.
She then opened the secret door.
With a beating heart, and yet far more conscious of the desire to save
her lover while there was yet time than of the danger into which she was
rushing headlong, she flitted down the hidden staircase as lightly as a
child at play. So much time had been lost in clearing the room--and yet
she could not have left it so!
She had not forgotten where to press, so that the heavy stone which
closed the entrance should move aside; but as she sprang from the last
step her lamp had blown out, and blackest darkness concealed the surface
of the smooth granite wall which lay between her and the street.
What if, when she got outside, she should be seen by the lictors or
spies?
At this thought fear overcame her for the first time. As she felt about
the door her hands trembled and beads of perspiration stood upon her
brow. But she must go to her wounded lover! When any one was bleeding to
death every moment might bring the terrible "too late." It meant
Diodoros's death if she did not succeed in opening the granite slab.
She took her hands from the stone and forced herself, with the whole
strength of her will, to be calm.
Where had been the place by pressing which the granite might be moved?
It must have been high up on the right side. She carefully followed with
her fingers the groove in which the stone lay, and having recalled its
shape by her sense of touch, she began her search anew. Suddenly she felt
something beneath her finger-tips that was colder than the stone. She had
found the metal bolt! With a deep breath, and without stopping to think
of what might be before her, she pressed the spring; the slab turned-one
step-and she was in the street between the racecourse and the Serapeum.
All was still around her. Not a sound was to be heard except from the
square to the north of the temple, where all who carried arms had
gathered together to enjoy the wine which flowed in streams as a mark of
the emperor's approbation, and from the inner circle of the race-course
voices were audible. Of the citizens not one dared show himself in the
streets, although the butchery had ceased at sundown. All who did not
carry the imperial arms had shut themselves up in their houses, and the
streets and squares were deserted since the soldiers had assembled in
front of the Serapeum.
No one noticed Melissa. The dangers that threatened her from afar
troubled her but little. She only knew that she must go on--go on as fast
as her feet would carry her, if she were to reach her loved one in time.
Skirting the south side of the temple, in order to get to the fountain,
her chief thought was to keep in its shadow. The moon had not yet risen,
and they had forgotten to light either the pitch-pans or the torches
which usually burned in front of the south facade of the temple. They had
been too busy with other matters to-day, and now they needed all hands in
heaping the bodies together. The men whose voices sounded across to her
from the race-course had already begun the work. On--she must hurry on!
But it was not so easy as last night. Her light sandals were wet through,
and there was ever a fresh impediment in her way. She knew what it was
that had wetted her foot--blood--noble, human blood--and every obstacle
against which she stumbled was a human body. But she would not let
herself dwell upon it, and hurried on as though they were but water and
stones, ever seeing before her the image of the wounded youth who leaned
against the basin.
Thus she reached the east side of the temple. Already she could hear the
splashing of the fountain, she saw the marble gleaming through the
darkness, and began seeking for the spot where she had seen her lover.
She suddenly stopped short; at the same time as herself, lights faint and
bright were coming along from the south, from the entrance of the street
that led to Rhakotis, and down to the water. She was in the middle of the
street, without a possibility of concealing herself except in one of the
niches of the Serapeum.
Should she abandon him? She must go on, and to seek protection in the
outer wall of the temple meant turning back. So she stood still and held
her breath as she watched the advancing lights. Now they stopped. She
heard the rattle of arms and men's voices. The lantern-bearers were being
detained by the watch. They were the first soldiers she had seen, the
others being engaged in drinking, or in the work on the race-course.
Would the soldiers find her, too? But, no! They moved on, the
torch-bearers in front, toward the street of Hermes.
Who were those people who went wandering about among the slain, turning
first to this side and then to that, as if searching for something?
They could not be robbing the dead, or the watch would have seized them.
Now they came quite close to her, and she trembled with fright, for one
of them was a soldier. The light of the lantern shone upon his armor. He
went before a man and two lads who were following a laden ass, and in one
of them Melissa recognized with beating heart a garden slave of Polybius,
who had often done her a service.
And now she took courage to look more closely at the man--and it
was--yes, even in the peasant's clothes he wore he could not deceive her
quick eyes--it was Andreas!
She felt that every breath that came from her young bosom must be a
prayer of thanksgiving; nor was it long before the freedman recognized
Melissa in the light-footed black boy who seemed to spring from the earth
in order to show them the way, and he, too, felt as if a miracle had been
wrought.
Like fair flowers that spring up round a scaffold over which the hungry
ravens croak and hover, so here, in the midst of death and horror, joy
and hope began to blossom in thankful hearts. Diodoros lived! No
word-only a fleeting pressure of the hand and a quick look passed between
the elderly man and the maiden--who looked like a boy scarcely passed his
school-days--to show what they felt as they knelt beside the wounded
youth and bound up the deep gash in his shoulder dealt by the sword that
had felled him.
A little while afterward, Andreas drew from the basket which the ass
carried, and from which he had already taken bandages and medicine, a
light litter of matting. He then lifted Melissa on to the back of the
beast of burden, and they all moved onward.
The sights that surrounded them as long as they were near the Serapeum
forced her to close her eyes, especially when the ass had to walk round
some obstruction, or when it and its guide waded through slimy pools. She
could not forget that they were red, nor whence they came; and this ride
brought her moments in which she thought to expire of shuddering horror
and sorrow and wrath.
Not till they reached a quiet lane in Rhakotis, where they could advance
without let or hindrance, did she open her eyes. But a strange, heavy
pain oppressed her that she had never felt before, and her head burned so
that she could scarcely see Andreas and the two slaves, who, strong in
the joy of knowing that their young lord was alive, carried Diodoros
steadily along in the litter. The soldier--it was the centurion
Martialis, who had been banished to the Pontus--still accompanied them,
but Melissa's aching head pained her so much that she did not think of
asking who he was or why he was with them.
Once or twice she felt impelled to ask whither they were taking her, but
she had not the power to raise her voice. When Andreas came to her side
and pointed to the centurion, saying that without him he would never have
succeeded in saving her beloved, she heard it only as a hollow murmur,
without any consciousness of its meaning. Indeed, she wished rather that
the freedman would keep silent when he began explaining his opportune
arrival at the fountain, which must seem such a miracle to her.
The slave-brand on his arm had enabled him to penetrate into the house of
Seleukus, where he hoped to obtain news of her. There Johanna had led him
to Alexander, and with the Aurelians he had found the centurion and the
slave Argutis. Argutis had just returned from the lady Euryale, and swore
that he had seen the wounded Diodoros. Andreas had then declared his
intention of bringing the son of his former master to a place of safety,
and the centurion had been prevailed upon by the young tribunes to open a
way for the freedman through the sentinels. The gardeners of Polybius,
with their ass, had been detained in an inn on this side of Lake Mareotis
by the closing of the harbor, and Andreas had taken the precaution of
making use of them. Had it not been for the centurion, who was known to
the other soldiers, the watch would never have allowed the freedman to
get so far as the fountain; Andreas therefore begged Melissa to thank
their preserver. But his words fell upon her ear unnoticed, and when the
strange soldier left her to devote himself again to Diodoros she breathed
more freely, for his rapidly spoken words hurt her.
If he would only not come again--only not speak to her!
She had even ceased to look for her lover. Her one desire was to see and
hear nothing. When she did force herself to raise her heavy, throbbing
lids, she noticed that they were passing poor-looking houses which she
never remembered seeing before. She fancied, however, from the damp wind
that blew in her face and relieved her burning head, that they must be
nearing the lake or the sea. Surely that was a fishing-net hanging yonder
on the fence round a but on which the light of the lantern fell. But
perhaps it was something quite different, for the images that passed
before her heavy eyes began to mingle confusedly, to repeat themselves,
and be surrounded by a ring of rainbow colors. Her head had grown so
heavy that her mind had lost all sense of hope or fear; only her thoughts
stirred faintly as the procession moved on and on through the darkness,
without a pause for rest.
When they had passed the last of the huts she managed to look upward.
The evening star stood out clear against the sky, and she seemed to see
the other stars revolving quickly round it.
Her mouth was painful and parched, and more than once she had been seized
with giddiness, which forced her to hold tightly to the saddle.
Now they stopped beside a large piece of water, and she felt strangely
well and light of heart. That must be the dear, familiar lake. And there
stood Agatha waving to her, and at her side the lady Euryale under the
spreading shade of a mighty palm. Bright sunshine flooded them both, and
yet it was the night; for there was the evening star beaming down upon
her.
How could that be?
Yet, when she tried to understand it all, her head pained her so, and she
turned so giddy, that she clutched the neck of the ass to save herself
from falling.
When she raised herself again she saw a large boat, out of which several
people came to meet them, the foremost of them a tall man in a long,
white garment. That was no dream, she was quite certain. And yet-why did
the lantern which one of them held aloft burn her face so much and not
his? Oh, how it burned!
Everything turned in a circle round her, and grew dark before her eyes.
But not for long; suddenly it became light as day, and she heard a deep
and friendly voice calling her by name. She answered without fear, "Here
am I," and saw before her a stranger in a long, white robe, of lofty yet
gentle aspect, just as she had imagined the crucified Saviour of the
Christians, and in her ear sounded the loving message with which he bids
the weary and heavy-laden come to him that he may give them rest.
How gentle, how consoling, and how full of gracious promise were the
words, and how gladly would she do his bidding! "Here am I!" she cried
again, and saw the arms of the white-robed man stretched out to receive
her. She staggered toward him, and felt a firm and manly hand clasp hers,
and then rest in blessing on her throbbing brow. All grew dark again
before her, and she saw and heard no more.
Andreas had lifted her from the ass and supported her, while the two
Christians thanked the soldier for his timely aid.
Having assured them that he had had no thought of helping them, but only
of obeying his superior officers, he disappeared into the night, and the
freedman lifted Melissa in his strong arms and carried her down to Zeno's
boat, which was waiting for them.
"Her mind wanders," said the freedman, with a loving look at the precious
burden in his arms. "Her spirit is strong, but the shocks she has
sustained this day have been too much for her. 'Thou wilt give me rest,'
were her last words before losing consciousness. Can she have been
thinking of the promise of the Saviour?"
"If not," answered the deep, musical voice of Zeno, "we will show her Him
who called the little children to Him, and the weary and heavy-laden. She
belongs to them, and she will see that the Lord fulfills what He so
lovingly promises."
"One of Christ's sayings, and repeated by Paul in his letter to the
Galatians, has taken great hold upon her," added Andreas, "and I think
that in these days of terror, for her, too, the fullness of time has
come."
As he spoke he stepped on to the plank which led to the boat from the
shore: Diodoros had already been placed on board. When Andreas laid the
girl on the cushioned seat in the little cabin, he exclaimed, with a sigh
of relief, "Now we are safe!"
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
He has the gift of being easily consoled
A THORNY PATH
By Georg Ebers
Volume 12.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
Caracalla's evening meal was ended, and for years past his friends had
never seen the gloomy monarch in so mad a mood. The high-priest of
Serapis, with Dio Cassius the senator, and a few others of his suite, had
not indeed appeared at table; but the priest of Alexander, the prefect
Macrinus, his favorites Theocritus, Pandion, Antigonus, and others of
their kidney, had crowded round him, had drunk to his health, and wished
him joy of his glorious revenge.
Everything which legend or history had recorded of similar deeds was
compared with this day's work, and it was agreed that it transcended them
all. This delighted the half-drunken monarch. To-day, he declared with
flashing eyes, and not till to-day, he had dared to be entirely what Fate
had called him to be--at once the judge and the executioner of an
accursed and degenerate race. As Titus had been named "the Good," so he
would be called "the Terrible." And this day had secured him that grand
name, so pleasing to his inmost heart.
"Hail to the benevolent sovereign who would fain be terrible!" cried
Theocritus, raising his cup; and the rest of the guests echoed him.
Then the number of the slain was discussed. No one could estimate it
exactly. Zminis, the only man who could have seen everything, had not
appeared: Fifty, sixty, seventy thousand Alexandrians were supposed to
have suffered death; Macrinus, however, asserted that there must have
been more than a hundred thousand, and Caracalla rewarded him for his
statement by exclaiming loudly "Splendid! grand! Hardly comprehensible by
the vulgar mind! But, even so, it is not the end of what I mean to give
them. To-day I have racked their limbs; but I have yet to strike them to
the heart, as they have stricken me!"
He ceased, and after a short pause repeated unhesitatingly, and as though
by a sudden impulse, the lines with which Euripides ends several of his
tragedies:
"Jove in high heaven dispenses various fates;
And now the gods shower blessings which our hope
Dared not aspire to, now control the ills
We deemed inevitable. Thus the god
To these hath given an end we never thought."
--Potter's translation.
And this was the end of the revolting scene, for, as he spoke, Caesar
pushed away his cup and sat staring into vacancy, so pale that his
physician, foreseeing a fresh attack, brought out his medicine vial.
The praetorian prefect gave a signal to the rest that they should not
notice the change in their imperial host, and he did his best to keep the
conversation going, till Caracalla, after a long pause, wiped his brow
and exclaimed hoarsely: "What has become of the Egyptian? He was to bring
in the living prisoners--the living, I say! Let him bring me them."
He struck the table by his couch violently with his fist; and then, as if
the clatter of the metal vessels on it had brought him to himself, he
added, meditatively: "A hundred thousand! If they burned their dead here,
it would take a forest to reduce them to ashes."
"This day will cost him dear enough as it is," the high-priest of
Alexander whispered; he, as idiologos, having to deposit the tribute from
the temples and their estates in the imperial treasury. He addressed his
neighbor, old Julius Paulinus, who replied:
"Charon is doing the best business to-day. A hundred thousand obolus in a
few hours. If Tarautas reigns over us much longer, I will farm his
ferry!"
During this whispered dialogue Theocritus the favorite was assuring
Caesar in a loud voice that the possessions of the victims would suffice
for any form of interment, and an ample number of thank-offerings into
the bargain.
"An offering!" echoed Caracalla, and he pointed to a short sword which
lay beside him on the couch. "That helped in the work. My father wielded
it in many a fight, and I have not let it rust. Still, I doubt whether in
my hands and his together it ever before yesterday slaughtered a hundred
thousand."
He looked round for the high-priest of Serapis, and after seeking him in
vain among the guests, he exclaimed:
"The revered Timotheus withdraws his countenance from us to-day. Yet it
was to his god that I dedicated the work of vengeance. He laments the
loss of worshipers to great Serapis, as you, Vertinus"--and he turned to
the idiologos--"regret the slain tax-payers. Well, you are thinking of my
loss or gain, and that I can not but praise. Your colleague in the
service of Serapis has nothing to care for but the honor of his god; but
he does not succeed in rising to the occasion. Poor wretch! I will give
him a lesson. Here Epagathos, and you, Claudius--go at once to Timotheus;
carry him this sword. I devote it to his god. It is to be preserved in
his holy of holies, in memory of the greatest act of vengeance ever
known. If Timotheus should refuse the gift--But no, he has sense--he
knows me!"
He paused, and turned to look at Macrinus, who had risen to speak to some
officials and soldiers who had entered the room. They brought the news
that the Parthian envoys had broken off all negotiations, and had left
the city in the afternoon. They would enter into no alliance, and were
prepared to meet the Roman army.
Macrinus repeated this to Caesar with a shrug of his shoulders, but he
withheld the remark added by the venerable elder of the ambassadors, that
they did not fear a foe who by so vile a deed had incurred the wrath of
the gods.
"Then it is war with the Parthians!" cried Caracalla, and his eyes
flashed. "My breast-plated favorites will rejoice."
But then he looked grave, and inquired: "They are leaving the town, you
say? But are they birds? The gates and harbor are closed."
"A small Phoenician vessel stole out just before sundown between our
guard-ships," was the reply. "Curse it!" broke from Caesar's lips in a
loud voice, and, after a brief dialogue in an undertone with the prefect,
he desired to have papyrus and writing materials brought to him. He
himself must inform the senate of what had occurred, and he did so in a
few words.
He did not know the number of the slain, and he did not think it worth
while to make a rough estimate. All the Alexandrians, he said, had in
fact merited death. A swift trireme was to carry the letter to Ostia at
daybreak.
He did not, indeed, ask the opinion of the senate, and yet he felt that
it would be better that news of the day's events should reach the curia
under his own hand than through the distorting medium of rumor.
Nor did Macrinus impress on him, as usual, that he should give his
dispatch a respectful form. This crime, if anything, might help him to
the fulfillment of the Magian's prophecy.
As Caesar was rolling up his missive, the long-expected Zminis came into
the room. He had attired himself splendidly, and bore the insignia of his
new office. He humbly begged to be pardoned for his long delay. He had
had to make his outer man fit to appear among Caesar's guests, for--as he
boastfully explained--he himself had waded in blood, and in the
court-yard of the Museum the red life-juice of the Alexandrians had
reached above his horse's knees. The number of the dead, he declared with
sickening pride, was above a hundred thousand, as estimated by the
prefect.
"Then we will call it eleven myriad," Caracalla broke in. "Now, we have
had enough of the dead. Bring in the living."
"Whom?" asked the Egyptian, in surprise. Hereupon Caesar's eyelids began
to quiver, and in a threatening tone he reminded his bloody-handed tool
of those whom he had ordered him to take alive. Still Zminis was silent,
and Caesar furiously shrieked his demand as to whether by his blundering
Heron's daughter had escaped; whether he could not produce the gem-cutter
and his son. The blood-stained butcher then perceived that Caesar's
murderous sword might be turned against him also. Still, he was prepared
to defend himself by every means in his power. His brain was inventive,
and, seeing that the fault for which he would least easily be forgiven
was the failure to capture Melissa, he tried to screen himself by a lie.
Relying on an incident which he himself had witnessed, he began: "I felt
certain of securing the gem-cutter's pretty daughter, for my men had
surrounded his house. But it had come to the ears of these Alexandrian
scoundrels that a son of Heron's, a painter, and his sister, had betrayed
their fellow-citizens and excited your wrath. It was to them that they
ascribed the punishment which I executed upon them in your name. This
rabble have no notion of reflection; before we could hinder them they had
rushed on the innocent dwelling. They flung fire-brands into it, burned
it, and tore it down. Any one who was within perished, and thus the
daughter of Heron died. That is, unfortunately, proved. I can take the
old man and his son tomorrow. To-day I have had so much to do that there
has not been time to bind the sheaves. It is said that they had escaped
before the mob rushed on the house."
"And the gem-cutter's daughter?" asked Caracalla, in a trembling voice.
"You are sure she was burned in the building?"
"As sure as that I have zealously endeavored to let the Alexandrians feel
your avenging hand," replied the Egyptian resolutely, and with a bold
face he confirmed his he. "I have here the jewel she wore on her arm. It
was found on the charred body in the cellar. Adventus, your chamberlain,
says that Melissa received it yesterday as a gift from you. Here it is."
And he handed Caracalla the serpent-shaped bracelet which Caesar had sent
to his sweetheart before setting out for the Circus. The fire had damaged
it, but there was no mistaking it. It had been found beneath the ruins on
a human arm, and Zminis had only learned from the chamberlain, to whom he
had shown it, that it had belonged to the daughter of Heron.
"Even the features of the corpse," Zminis added, "were still
recognizable."
"The corpse!" Caesar echoed gloomily. "And it was the Alexandrians, you
say, who destroyed the house?"
"Yes, my lord; a raging mob, and mingled with them men of every
race-Jews, Greeks, Syrians, what not. Most of them had lost a father, a
son, or a brother, sent to Hades by your vengeance. Their wildest curses
were for Alexander, the painter, who in fact had played the spy for you.
But the Macedonian phalanx arrived at the right moment. They killed most
of them and took some prisoners. You can see them yourself in the
morning. As regards the wife of Seleukus--"
"Well," exclaimed Caesar, and his eye brightened again.
"She fell a victim to the clumsiness of the praetorians."
"Indeed!" interrupted the legate Quintus Flavius Nobilior, who had
granted Alexander's life to the prayer of the twins Aurelius; and
Macrinus also forbade any insulting observations as to the blameless
troops whom he had the honor to command.
But the Egyptian was not to be checked; he went on eagerly: "Pardon, my
lords. It is perfectly certain, nevertheless, that it was a
praetorian--his name is Rufus, and he belongs to the second cohort--who
pierced the lady Berenike with his spear."
Flavius here begged to be allowed to speak, and reported how Berenike had
sought and found her end. And he did so as though he were narrating the
death of a heroine, but he added, in a tone of disapproval: "Unhappily,
the misguided woman died with a curse on you, great Caesar, on her
treasonable lips."
"And this female hero finds her Homer in you!" cried Caesar. "We will
speak together again, my Quintus."
He raised a brimming cup to his lips and emptied it at a draught; then,
setting it on the table with such violence that it rang, he exclaimed
"Then you have brought me none of those whom I commanded you to capture?
Even the feeble girl who had not quitted her father's house you allowed
to be murdered by those coarse monsters! And you think I shall look on
you with favor? By this time to-morrow the gem-cutter and his son
Alexander are here before me, or by the head of my divine father you go
to the wild beasts in the Circus."
"They will not eat such as he," observed old Julius Paulinus, and Caesar
nodded approvingly. The Egyptian shuddered, for this imperial nod showed
him by how slender a thread his life hung.
In a flash he reflected whither he might fly if he should fail to find
this hated couple. If, after all, he should discover Melissa alive, so
much the better. Then, he might have been mistaken in identifying the
body; some slave girl might have stolen the bracelet and put it on before
the house was burned down. He knew for a fact that the charred corpse of
which he had spoken was that of a street wench who had rushed among the
foremost into the house of the much-envied imperial favorite--the
traitress--and had met her death in the spreading flames.
Zminis had but a moment to rack his inventive and prudent brain, but he
already had thought of something which might perhaps influence Caesar in
his favor. Of all the Alexandrians, the members of the Museum were those
whom Caracalla hated most. He had been particularly enjoined not to spare
one of them; and in the course of the ride which Caesar, attended by the
armed troopers of Arsinoe, had taken through the streets streaming with
blood, he had stayed longest gazing at the heap of corpses in the
court-yard of the Museum. In the portico, a colonnade copied from the
Stoa at Athens, whither a dozen or so of the philosophers had fled when
attacked, he had even stabbed several with his own hand. The blood on the
sword which Caracalla had dedicated to Serapis had been shed at the
Museum.
The Egyptian had himself led the massacre here, and had seen that it was
thoroughly effectual. The mention of those slaughtered hair-splitters
must, if anything, be likely to mitigate Caesar's wrath; so no sooner had
the applause died away with which the proconsul's jest at his expense had
been received, than Zminis began to give his report of the great massacre
in the Museum. He could boast of having spared scarcely one of the empty
word-pickers with whom the epigrams against Caesar and his mother had
originated. Teachers and pupils, even the domestic officials, had been
overtaken by the insulted sovereign's vengeance. Nothing was left but the
stones of that great institution, which had indeed long outlived its
fame. The Numidians who had helped in the work had been drunk with blood,
and had forced their way even into the physician's lecture-rooms and the
hospital adjoining. There, too, they had given no quarter; and among the
sufferers who had been carried thither to be healed they had found
Tarautas, the wounded gladiator. A Numidian, the youngest of the legion,
a beardless youth, had pinned the terrible conqueror of lions and men to
the bed with his spear, and then, with the same weapon, had released at
least a dozen of his fellow-sufferers from their pain.
As he told his story the Egyptian stood staring into vacancy, as though
he saw it all, and the whites of his eyeballs gleamed more hideously than
ever out of his swarthy face. The lean, sallow wretch stood before Caesar
like a talking corpse, and did not observe the effect his narrative of
the gladiator's death was producing. But he soon found out. While he was
yet speaking, Caracalla, leaning on the table by his couch with both
hands, fixed his eyes on his face, without a word.
Then he suddenly sprang up, and, beside himself with rage, he interrupted
the terrified Egyptian and railed at him furiously:
"My Tarautas, who had so narrowly escaped death! The bravest hero of his
kind basely murdered on his sick-bed, by a barbarian, a beardless boy!
And you, you loathsome jackal, could allow it? This deed--and you know
it, villain--will be set down to my score. It will be brought up against
me to the end of my days in Rome, in the provinces, everywhere. I shall
be cursed for your crime wherever there is a human heart to throb and
feel, and a human tongue to speak. And I--when did I ever order you to
slake your thirst for blood in that of the sick and suffering? Never! I
could never have done such a thing! I even told you to spare the women
and helpless slaves. You are all witnesses, But you all hear me--I will
punish the murderer of the wretched sick! I will avenge you, foully
murdered, brave, noble Tarautas!--Here, lictors! Bind him--away with him
to the Circus with the criminals thrown to the wild beasts! He allowed
the girl whose life I bade him spare to be burned to death before his
eyes, and the hapless sick were slain at his command by a beardless
boy!--And Tarautas! I valued him as I do all who are superior to their
kind; I cared for him. He was wounded for our entertainment, my friends.
Poor fellow--poor, brave Tarautas!"
He here broke into loud sobs, and it was so unheard-of, so
incomprehensible a thing that this man should weep who, even at his
father's death had not shed a tear, that Julius Paulinus himself held his
mocking tongue.
The rest of the spectators also kept anxious and uneasy silence while the
lictors bound Zminis's hands, and, in spite of his attempts to raise his
voice once more in self-defense, dragged him away and thrust him out
across the threshold of the dining-hall. The door closed behind him, and
no applause followed, though every one approved of the Egyptian's
condemnation, for Caracalla was still weeping.
Was it possible that these tears could be shed for sick people whom he
did not know, and for the coarse gladiator, the butcher of men and
beasts, who had had nothing to give Caesar but a few hours of excitement
at the intoxicating performances in the arena? So it must be; for from
time to time Caracalla moaned softly, "Those unhappy sick!" or "Poor
Tarautas!"
And, indeed, at this moment Caracalla himself could not have said whom he
was lamenting. He had in the Circus staked his life on that of Tarautas,
and when he shed tears over his memory it was certainly less for the
gladiator's sake than over the approaching end of his own existence, to
which he looked forward in consequence of Tarautas's death. But he had
often been near the gates of Hades in the battle-field with calm
indifference; and now, while he thus bewailed the sick and Tarautas with
bitter lamentations, in his mind he saw no sick-bed, nor, indeed, the
stunted form of the braggart hero of the arena, but the slender, graceful
figure of a sweet girl, and a blackened, charred arm on which glittered a
golden armlet.
That woman! Treacherous, shameless, but how lovely and beloved! That
woman, under his eyes, as it were, was swept out of the land of the
living; and with her, with Melissa, the only girl for whom his heart had
ever throbbed faster, the miracle-worker who had possessed the unique
power of exorcising his torments, whose love--for so he still chose to
believe, though he had always refused her petitions that he would show
mercy--whose love would have given him strength to become a benefactor to
all mankind, a second Trajan or Titus. He had quite forgotten that he had
intended her to meet a disgraceful end in the arena under fearful
torments, if she had been brought to him a prisoner. He felt as though
the fate of Roxana, with whom his most cherished dream had perished, had
quite broken his heart; and it was Melissa whom he really bewailed, with
the gladiator's name on his lips and the jewel before his eyes which had
been his gift, and which she had worn on her arm even in death. But he
ere long controlled this display of feeling, ashamed to shed tears for
her who had cheated him and who had fled from his love. Only once more
did he sob aloud. Then he raised himself, and while holding his
handkerchief to his eyes he addressed the company with theatrical pathos:
"Yes, my friends, tell whom you will that you have seen Bassianus weep;
but add that his tears flowed from grief at the necessity for punishing
so many of his subjects with such rigor. Say, too, that Caesar wept with
pity and indignation. For what good man would not be moved to sorrow at
seeing the sick and wounded thus maltreated? What humane heart could
refrain from loud lamentations at the sight of barbarity which is not
withheld from laying a murderous hand even on the sacred anguish of the
sick and wounded? Defend me, then, against those Romans who may shrug
their shoulders over the weakness of a weeping Caesar--the Terrible. My
office demands severity; and yet, my friends, I am not ashamed of these
tears."
With this he took leave of his guests and retired to rest, and those who
remained were soon agreed that every word of this speech, as well as
Caesar's tears, were rank hypocrisy. The mime Theocritus admired his
sovereign in all sincerity, for how rarely could even the greatest actors
succeed in forcing from their eyes, by sheer determination, a flood of
real, warm tears--he had seen them flow. As Caesar quitted the room, his
hand on the lion's mane, the praetor Priscillianus whispered to Cilo:
"Your disciple has been taking lessons here of the weeping crocodile."
.........................
Out on the great square the soldiers were resting after the day's bloody
work. They had lighted large fires in front of the most sacred sanctuary
of a great city, as though they were in the open field. Round each of
these, foot and horse soldiers lay or squatted on the ground, according
to their companies; and over the wine allowed them by Caesar they told
each other the hideous experiences of the day, which even those who had
grown rich by it could not think of without disgust. Gold and silver
cups, the plunder of the city, circulated round those camp-fires and the
juice of the vine was poured into them out of jugs of precious metal.
Tongues were wagging fast, for, though there was indeed but one opinion
as to what had been done, there were mercenaries enough and ambitious
pretenders who could dare to defend it. Every word might reach the
sovereign's ears, and the day might bring promotion as well as gold and
booty. Even the calmest were still in some excitement over the massacre
they had helped in; the plunder was discussed, and barter and exchange
were eagerly carried on.
As Caracalla passed the balcony he stepped out for a moment, followed by
the lamp-bearers, to thank his faithful warriors for the valor and
obedience they had shown this day. The traitorous Alexandrians had now
met their deserts. The greater the plunder his dear brethren in arms
could win, the better he would be pleased. This speech was hailed with a
shout of glee drowning his words; but Caracalla had heard his dearly
bought troops cheer him with greater zeal and vigor. There were here
whole groups of men who did not join at all, or hardly opened their
mouths. And his ear was sharp.
What cause could they have for dissatisfaction after such splendid booty,
although they did not yet know that a war with the Parthians was in
prospect?
He must know; but not to-day. They were to be depended on, he felt sure,
for they were those to whom he was most liberal, and he had taken care
that there should be no one in the empire whose means equaled his own.
But that they should be so lukewarm annoyed him. To-day, of all days, an
enthusiastic roar of acclamations would have been peculiarly gratifying.
They ought to have known it; and he went to his bedroom in silent anger.
There his freedman Epagathos was waiting for him, with Adventus and his
learned Indian body slave Arjuna. The Indian never spoke unless he was
spoken to, and the two others took good care not to address their lord.
So silence reigned in the spacious room while the Indian undressed
Caracalla. Caesar was wont to say that this man's hands were matchless
for lightness and delicacy of touch, but to-day they trembled as he
lifted the laurel wreath from Caesar's head and unbuckled the padded
breast plate. The events of the day had shaken this man's soul to the
foundations. In his Eastern home he had been taught from his infancy to
respect life even in beasts, living exclusively on vegetables, and
holding all blood in abhorrence. He now felt the deepest loathing of all
about him; and a passionate longing for the peaceful and pure home among
sages, from which he had been snatched as a boy, came over him with
increasing vehemence. There was nothing here but what it defiled him to
handle, and his fingers shrank involuntarily from their task, as duty
compelled him to touch the limbs of a man who, to his fancy, was dripping
with human blood, and who was as much accursed by gods and men as though
he were a leper.
Arjuna made haste that he might escape from the presence of the horrible
man, and Caesar took no heed either of the pallor of his handsome brown
face or the trembling of his slender fingers, for a crowd of thoughts
made him blind and deaf to all that was going on around him. They
reverted first to the events of the day; but as the Indian removed the
warm surcoat, the night breeze blew coldly into the room, and he
shivered. Was it the spirit of the slain Tarautas which had floated in at
the open window? The cold breath which fanned his cheek was certainly no
mere draught. It was exactly like a human sigh, only it was cold instead
of warm. If it proceeded from the ghost of the dead gladiator he must be
quite close to him. And the fancy gained reality in his mind; he saw a
floating human form which beckoned him and softly laid a cold hand on his
shoulder.
He, Caesar, had linked his fate to that of the gladiator, and now
Tarautas had come to warn him. But Caracalla had no mind to follow him;
he forbade the apparition with a loud cry of "Away!" At this the Indian
started, and though he could scarcely utter the words, he besought Caesar
to be seated that he might take off his laced shoes; and then Caracalla
perceived that it was an illusion that had terrified him, and he shrugged
his shoulders, somewhat ashamed. While the slave was busy he wiped his
damp brow, saying to himself with a proud smile that of course spirits
never appeared in broad light and when others were present.
At last he dismissed the Indian and lay down. His head was burning, and
his heart beat too violently for sleep. At his bidding Epagathos and
Adventus followed the Indian into the adjoining room after extinguishing
the lamp. . . Caracalla was alone in the dark. Awaiting sleep, he
stretched himself at full length, but he remained as wide awake as by
day. And still he could not help thinking of the immediate past. Even his
enemies could not deny that it was his duty as a man and an emperor to
inflict the severest punishment on this town, and to make it feel his
avenging hand; and yet he was beginning to be aware of the ruthlessness
of his commands. He would have been glad to talk it all over with some
one else. But Philostratus, the only man who understood him, was out of
reach; he had sent him to his mother. And for what purpose? To tell her
that he, Caesar, had found a wife after his own heart, and to win her
favor and consent. At this thought the blood surged up in him with rage
and shame. Even before they were wed his chosen bride had been false to
him; she had fled from his embraces, as he now knew, to death, never to
return.
He would gladly have sent a galley in pursuit to bring Philostratus back
again; but the vessel in which the philosopher had embarked was one of
the swiftest in the imperial fleet, and it had already so long a start
that to overtake it would be almost impossible. So within a few days
Philostratus would meet his mother; he, if any one, could describe
Melissa's beauty in the most glowing colors, and that he would do so to
the empress, his great friend, was beyond a doubt. But the haughty Julia
would scarcely be inclined to accept the gem-cutter's child for a
daughter; indeed, she did not wish that he should ever marry again.
But what was he to her? Her heart was given to the infant son of her
niece Mammaea;--[The third Caesar after Caracalla, Alexander Severus]--in
him she discovered every gift and virtue. What joy there would be among
the women of Julia's train when it was known that Caesar's chosen bride
had disdained him, and, in him, the very purple. But that joy would not
be of long duration, for the news of the punishment by death of a hundred
thousand Alexandrians would, he knew, fall like a lash on the women. He
fancied he could hear their howls and wailing, and see the horror of
Philostratus, and how he would join the women in bemoaning the horrible
deed! He, the philosopher, would perhaps be really grieved; aye, and if
he had been at his side this morning everything might perhaps have been
different. But the deed was done, and now he must take the consequences.
That the better sort would avoid him after such an act was
self-evident--they had already refused to eat with him. On the other
hand, it had brought nearer to him the favorites whom he had attracted to
his person. Theocritus and Pandion, Antigonus and Epagathos, the priest
of Alexander, who at Rome was overwhelmed with debt, and who in Egypt had
become a rich man again, would cling to him more closely.
"Base wretches!" he muttered to himself.
If only Philostratus would come back to him! But he scarcely dared hope
it. The evil took so much more care for their own well-being and
multiplication than the good. If one of the righteous fell away, all the
others forthwith turned their backs on him; and when the penitent desired
to return to the fold, the immaculate repelled or avoided him. But the
wicked could always find the fallen man at once, and would cling to him
and hinder him from returning. Their ranks were always open to him,
however closely he might formerly have been attached to the virtuous. To
live in exclusive intercourse with these reprobates was an odious
thought. He could compel whom he chose to live with him; but of what use
were silent and reluctant companions? And whose fault was it that he had
sent away Philostratus, the best of them all? Hers--the faithless
traitoress, from whom he had looked for peace and joy, who had declared
that she felt herself bound to him, the trickster in whom he had believed
he saw Roxana--But she was no more. On the table by his bed, among his
own jewels, lay the golden serpent he had given her--he fancied he could
see it in the dark--and she had worn it even in death. He shuddered; he
felt as though a woman's arm, all black and charred, was stretched out to
him in the night, and the golden snake uncurled from it and reached forth
as though to bite him.
He shivered, and hid his head under the coverlet; but, ashamed and vexed
at his own foolish weakness, he soon emerged from the stifling darkness,
and an inward voice scornfully asked him whether he still believed that
the soul of the great Macedonian inhabited his body. There was an end of
this proud conviction. He had no more connection with Alexander than
Melissa had with Roxana, whom she resembled.
The blood seethed hotly in his veins; to live on these terms seemed to
him impossible.
As soon as it was day it must surely be seen that he was very seriously
ill. The spirit of Tarautas would again appear to him--and not merely as
a vaporous illusion--and put an end to his utter misery.
But he felt his own pulse; it beat no more quickly than usual. He had no
fever, and yet he must be ill, very ill. And again he flushed so hotly
that he felt as if he should choke. Breathing hard, he sat up to call his
physician. Then he observed a light through the half-closed door of the
adjoining room. He heard voices--those of Adventus and the Indian.
Arjuna was generally so silent that Philostratus had vainly endeavored to
discover from him any particulars as to the doctrine of the Brahmans,
among whom Apollonius of Tyana declared that he had found the highest
wisdom, or concerning the manners of his people. And yet the Indian was a
man of learning, and could even read the manuscripts of his country. The
Parthian ambassador had expressly dwelt on this when he delivered Arjuna
to Caesar as a gift from his king. But Arjuna had never favored any of
these strangers with his confidence. Only with old Adventus did he ever
hold conversation, for the chamberlain took care that he should be
supplied with the vegetables and fruit on which he was accustomed to
live--for meat never passed his lips; and now he was talking with the old
man, and Caracalla sat up and laid his hand to his ear.
The Indian was absorbed in the study of a bookroll in his own tongue,
which he carried about him. "What are you reading?" asked Adventus.
"A book," replied Arjuna, "from which a man may learn what will become of
you and me, and all these slaughtered victims, after death."
"Who can know that?" said the old man with a sigh; and Arjuna replied
very positively:
"It is written here, and there is no doubt about it. Will you hear it?"
"Certainly," said Adventus eagerly, and the Indian began translating out
of his book:
"When a man dies his various parts go whither they belong. His voice goes
to the fire, his breath to the winds, his eyes to the sun, his spirit to
the moon, his hearing becomes one with space, his body goes to the earth,
his soul is absorbed into ether, his hairs become plants, the hair of his
head goes to crown the trees, his blood returns to water. Thus, every
portion of a man is restored to that portion of the universe to which it
belongs; and of himself, his own essence, nothing remains but one part
what that is called is a great secret."
Caracalla was listening intently. This discourse attracted him.
He, like the other Caesars, must after his death be deified by the
senate; but he felt convinced, for his part, that the Olympians would
never count him as one of themselves. At the same time he was philosopher
enough to understand that no existing thing could ever cease to exist.
The restoration of each part of his body to that portion of the universe
to which it was akin, pleased his fancy. There was no place in the
Indian's creed for the responsibility of the soul at the judgment of the
dead. Caesar was already on the point of asking the slave to reveal his
secret, when Adventus prevented him by exclaiming:
"You may confide to me what will be left of me--unless, indeed, you mean
the worms which shall eat me and so proceed from me. It can not be good
for much, at any rate, and I will tell no one."
To this Arjuna solemnly replied: "There is one thing which persists to
all eternity and can never be lost in all the ages of the universe, and
that is--the deed."
"I know that," replied the old man with an indifferent shrug; but the
word struck Caesar like a thunder-bolt. He listened breathlessly to hear
what more the Indian might say; but Arjuna, who regarded it as sacrilege
to waste the highest lore on one unworthy of it, went on reading to
himself, and Adventus stretched himself out to sleep.
All was silent in and about the sleeping-room, and the fearful words,
"the deed," still rang in the ears of the man who had just committed the
most monstrous of all atrocities. He could not get rid of the haunting
words; all the ill he had done from his childhood returned to him in
fancy, and seemed heaped up to form a mountain which weighed on him like
an incubus.
The deed!
His, too, must live on, and with it his name, cursed and hated to the
latest generations of men. The souls of the slain would have carried the
news of the deeds he had done even to Hades; and if Tarautas were to come
and fetch him away, he would be met below by legions of indignant
shades--a hundred thousand! And at their head his stern father, and the
other worthy men who had ruled Rome with wisdom and honor, would shout in
his face: "A hundred thousand times a murderer! robber of the state!
destroyer of the army!" and drag him before the judgment-seat; and before
judgment could be pronounced the hundred thousand, led by the noblest of
all his victims, the good Papinian, would rush upon him and tear him limb
from limb.
Dozing as he lay, he felt cold, ghostly hands on his shoulder, on his
head, wherever the cold breath of the waning night could fan him through
the open window; and with a loud cry he sprang out of bed as he fancied
he felt a touch of the shadowy hand of Vindex. On hearing his voice,
Adventus and the Indian hurried in, with Epagathos, who had even heard
his shriek in the farther room. They found him bathed in a sweat of
horror, and struggling for breath, his eyes fixed on vacancy; and the
freedman flew off to fetch the physician. When he came Caesar angrily
dismissed him, for he felt no physical disorder. Without dressing, he
went to the window. It was about three hours before sunrise.
However, he gave orders that his bath should be prepared, and desired to
be dressed; then Macrinus and others were to be sent for. Sooner would he
step into boiling water than return to that bed of terror. Day, life,
business must banish his terrors. But then, after the evening would come
another night; and if the sufferings he had just gone through should
repeat themselves then, and in those to follow, he should lose his wits,
and he would bless the spirit of Tarautas if it would but come to lead
him away to death.
But "the deed"! The Indian was right--that would survive him on earth,
and mankind would unite in cursing him.
Was there yet time--was he yet capable of atoning for what was done by
some great and splendid deed? But the hundred thousand--
The number rose before him like a mountain, blotting out every scheme he
tried to form as he went to his bath--taking his lion with him; he
reveled in the warm water, and finally lay down to rest in clean linen
wrappers. No one had dared to speak to him. His aspect was too
threatening.
In a room adjoining the bath-room he had breakfast served him. It was, as
usual, a simple meal, and yet he could only swallow a few mouthfuls, for
everything had a bitter taste. The praetorian prefect was roused, and
Caesar was glad to see him, for it was in attending to affairs that he
most easily forgot what weighed upon him. The more serious they were, the
better, and Macrinus looked as if there was something of grave importance
to be settled.
Caracalla's first question was with reference to the Parthian
ambassadors. They had, in fact, departed; now he must prepare for war.
Caesar was eager to decide at once on the destination of each legion, and
to call the legates together to a council of war; but Macrinus was not so
prompt and ready as usual on such occasions. He had that to communicate
which, as he knew, would to Caesar take the head of all else. If it
should prove true, it must withdraw him altogether from the affairs of
government; and this was what Macrinus aimed at when, before summoning
the legates, he observed with a show of reluctance that Caesar would be
wroth with him if, for the sake of a council of war, he were to defer a
report which had just reached his ears.
"Business first!" cried Caracalla, with decisive prohibition.
"As you will. I thought only of what I was told by an official of this
temple, that the gem-cutter's daughter--you know the girl--is still
alive--"
But he got no further, for Caesar sprang to his feet, and desired to hear
more of this.
Macrinus proceeded to relate that a slaughterer in the court of sacrifice
had told him that Melissa had been seen last evening, and was somewhere
in the Serapeum. More than this the prefect knew not, and Caesar
forthwith dismissed him to make further inquiry before he himself should
take steps to prove the truth of the report.
Then he paced the room with revived energy. His eye sparkled, and,
breathing fast, he strove to reduce the storm of schemes, plans, and
hopes which surged up within him to some sort of order. He must punish
the fugitive--but yet more surely he would never again let her out of his
sight. But if only he could first have her cast to the wild beasts, and
then bring her to life again, crown her with the imperial diadem, and
load her with every gift that power and wealth could procure! He would
read every wish in her eyes, if only she would once more lay her hand on
his forehead, charm away his pain, and bring sleep to his horror-stricken
bed. He had done nothing to vex her; nay, every petition she had
urged--But suddenly the image rose before him of old Vindex and his
nephew, whom he had sent to execution in spite of her intercession; and
again the awful word, "the deed," rang in his inward ear. Were these
hideous thoughts to haunt him even by day?
No, no! In his waking hours there was much to be done which might give
him the strength to dissipate them.
The kitchen-steward was by this time in attendance; but what did
Caracalla care for dainties to tickle his palate now that he had a hope
of seeing Melissa once more? With perfect indifference he left the
catering to the skillful and inventive cook; and hardly had he retired
when Macrinus returned.
The slaughterer had acquired his information through a comrade, who said
that he had twice caught sight of Melissa at the window of the chambers
of mystery in the upper story of the Serapeum, yesterday afternoon. He
had hoped to win the reward which was offered for the recovery of the
fugitive, and had promised his colleague half the money if he would help
him to capture the maiden. But just at sunset, hearing that the massacre
was ended, the man had incautiously gone out into the town, where he had
been slain by a drunken solder of the Scythian legion. The hapless man's
body had been found, but Macrinus's informant had assured him that he
could entirely rely on the report of his unfortunate colleague, who was a
sober and truthful man, as the chief augur would testify.
This was enough for Caracalla. Macrinus was at once to go for the
high-priest, and to take care that he took no further steps to conceal
Melissa. The slaughterer had ever since daybreak kept secret watch on all
the doors of the Serapeum, aided by his comrades, who were to share in
the reward, and especially on the stairway leading from the ground floor
up to the mystic's galleries.
The prefect at once obeyed the despot's command. On the threshold he met
the kitchen-steward returning to submit his list of dishes for Caesar's
approval.
He found Caracalla in an altered mood, rejuvenescent and in the highest
spirits. After hastily agreeing to the day's bill of fare, he asked the
steward in what part of the building the chambers of mystery were; and
when he learned that the stairs leading up to them began close to the
kitchens, which had been arranged for Caesar's convenience under the
temple laboratory, Caracalla declared in a condescending tone that he
would go to look round the scene of the cook's labors. And the lion
should come too, to return thanks for the good meat which was brought to
him so regularly.
The head cook, rejoiced at the unwonted graciousness of a master whose
wrath had often fallen on him, led the way to his kitchen hearth. This
had been constructed in a large hall, originally the largest of the
laboratories, where incense was prepared for the sanctuary and medicines
concocted for the sick in the temple hospital. There were smaller halls
and rooms adjoining, where at this moment some priests were busy
preparing kyphi and mixing drugs.
The steward, proud of Caesar's promised visit, announced to his
subordinates the honor they might expect, and he then went to the door of
the small laboratory to tell the old pastophoros who was employed there,
and who had done him many a good turn, that if he wished to see the
emperor he had only to open the door leading to the staircase. He was
about to visit the mystic chambers with his much-talked-of lion. No one
need be afraid of the beast; it was quite tame, and Caesar loved it as a
son.
At this the old drug-pounder muttered some reply, which sounded more like
a curse than the expected thanks, and the steward regretted having
compared the lion to a son in this man's presence, for the pastophoros
wore a mourning garment, and two promising sons had been snatched from
him, slain yesterday with the other youths in the stadium.
But the cook soon forgot the old man's ill-humor; he had to clear his
subordinates out of the way as quickly as possible and prepare for his
illustrious visitor. As he bustled around, here, there, and everywhere,
the pastophoros entered the kitchen and begged for a piece of mutton.
This was granted him by a hasty sign toward a freshly slaughtered sheep,
and the old man busied himself for some time behind the steward's back.
At last he had cut off what he wanted, and gazed with singular tenderness
at the piece of red, veinless meat. On returning to his laboratory, he
hastily bolted himself in, and when he came out again a few minutes later
his calm, wrinkled old face had a malignant and evil look. He stood at
the bottom of the stairs, looking about him cautiously; then he flew up
the steps with the agility of youth, and at a turn in the stairs he stuck
the piece of meat close to the foot of the balustrade.
He returned as nimbly as he had gone, cast a sorrowful glance through the
open laboratory window at the arena where all that had graced his life
lay dead, and passed his hand over his tearful face. At last he returned
to his task, but he was less able to do it than before. It was with a
trembling hand that he weighed out the juniper berries and cedar resin,
and he listened all the time with bated breath.
Presently there was a stir on the stairs, and the kitchen slaves shouted
that Caesar was coming. So he went out of the laboratory, which was
behind the stairs, to see what was going forward, and a turnspit at once
made way for the old man so as not to hinder his view.
Was that little young man, mounting the steps so gayly, with the
high-priest at his side and his suite at his heels, the dreadful monster
who had murdered his noble sons? He had pictured the dreadful tyrant
quite differently. Now Caesar was laughing, and the tall man next him
made some light and ready reply--the head cook said it was the Roman
priest of Alexander, who was not on good terms with Timotheus. Could they
be laughing at the high-priest? Never, in all the years he had known him,
had he seen Timotheus so pale and dejected.
The high-priest had indeed good cause for anxiety, for he suspected who
it was that Caesar hoped to find in the mystic rooms, and feared that his
wife might, in fact, have Melissa in hiding in that part of the building
to which he was now leading the way. After Macrinus had come to fetch him
he had had no opportunity of inquiring, for the prefect had not quitted
him for a moment, and Euryale was in the town busy with other women in
seeking out and nursing such of the wounded as had been found alive among
the dead.
Caesar triumphed in the changed, gloomy, and depressed demeanor of a man
usually so self-possessed; for he fancied that it betrayed some knowledge
on the part of Timotheus of Melissa's hiding-place; and he could jest
with the priest of Alexander and his favorite Theokritus and the other
friends who attended him, while he ignored the high-priest's presence and
never even alluded to Melissa.
Hardly had they gone past the old man when, just as the kitchen slaves
were shouting "Hail, Caesar!" the lady Euryale, as pale as death, hurried
in, and with a trembling voice inquired whither her husband was
conducting the emperor.
She had turned back when half way on her road, in obedience to the
impulse of her heart, which prompted her, before she went on her
Samaritan's errand, to visit Melissa in her hiding-place, and let her see
the face of a friend at the beginning of a new, lonely, and anxious day.
On hearing the reply which was readily given, her knees trembled beneath
her, and the steward, who saw her totter, supported her and led her into
the laboratory, where essences and strong waters soon restored her to
consciousness. Euryale had known the old pastophoros a long time, and,
noticing his mourning garb, she asked sympathetically: "And you, too, are
bereft?"
"Of both," was the answer. "You were always so good to them--Slaughtered
like beasts for sacrifice--down there in the stadium," and tears flowed
fast down the old man's furrowed cheeks. The lady uplifted her hands as
though calling on Heaven to avenge this outrageous crime; at the same
instant a loud howl of pain was heard from above, and a great confusion
of men's voices.
Euryale was beside herself with fear. If they had found Melissa in her
room her husband's fate was sealed, and she was guilty of his doom. But
they could scarcely yet have opened the chambers, and the girl was clever
and nimble, and might perhaps escape in time if she heard the men
approaching. She eagerly flew to the window. She could see below her the
stone which Melissa must move to get out; but between the wall and the
stadium the street was crowded, and at every door of the Serapeum lictors
were posted, even at that stone door known only to the initiated, with
the temple slaughterers and other servants who seemed all to be on guard.
If Melissa were to come out now she would be seized, and it must become
known who had shown her the way into the hiding-place that had sheltered
her.
At this moment Theokritus came leaping down the stairs, crying out to
her: "The lion--a physician--where shall I find a leech?"
The matron pointed to the old man, who was one of the medical students of
the sanctuary, and the favorite shouted out to him, "Come up!" and then
rushed on, paying no heed to Euryale's inquiry for Melissa; but the old
man laughed scornfully and shouted after him, "I am no beast-healer."
Then, turning to the lady, he added:
"I am sorry for the lion. You know me, lady. I could never till yesterday
bear to see a fly hurt. But this brute! It was as a son to that
bloodhound, and he shall feel for once something to grieve him. The lion
has had his portion. No physician in the world can bring him to life
again."
He bent his head and returned to his laboratory; but the matron
understood that this kind, peaceable man, in spite of his white hair, had
become a poisoner, and that the splendid, guiltless beast owed its death
to him. She shuddered. Wherever this unblest man went, good turned to
evil; terror, suffering, and death took the place of peace, happiness,
and life. He had forced her even into the sin of disobedience to her
husband and master. But now her secret hiding of Melissa against his will
would be avenged. He and she alike would probably pay for the deed with
their life; for the murder of his lion would inevitably rouse Caesar's
wildest passions.
Still, she knew that Caracalla respected her; for her sake, perhaps, he
would spare her husband. But Melissa? What would her fate be if she were
dragged out of her hiding-place?--and she must be discovered! He had
threatened to cast her to the beasts; and ought she not to prefer even
that fearful fate to forgiveness and a fresh outburst of Caesar's
passion?
Pale and tearless, but shaken with alarms, she bent over the balustrade
of the stairs and murmured a prayer commending herself, her husband, and
Melissa to God. Then she hastened up the steps. The great doors leading
to the chambers of mystery stood wide open, and the first person she met
was her husband.
"You here?" said he in an undertone. "You may thank the gods that your
kind heart did not betray you into hiding the girl here. I trembled for
her and for ourselves. But there is not a sign of her; neither here nor
on the secret stair. What a morning--and what a day must follow! There
lies Caesar's lion. If his suspicion that it has been poisoned should be
proved true, woe to this luckless city, woe to us all!"
And Caesar's aspect justified the worst anticipations. He had thrown
himself on the floor by the side of his dead favorite, hiding his face in
the lion's noble mane, with strange, quavering wailing. Then he raised
the brute's heavy head and kissed his dead eyes, and as it slipped from
his hand and fell on the floor, he started to his feet, shaking his fist,
and exclaiming:
"Yes, you have poisoned him! Bring the miscreant here, or you shall
follow him!"
Macrinus assured him that if indeed some basest of base wretches had
dared to destroy the life of this splendid and faithful king of beasts,
the murderer should infallibly be found. But Caracalla screamed in his
face:
"Found? Dare you speak of finding? Have you even brought me the girl who
was hidden here? Have you found her? Where is she? She was seen here and
she must be here!"
And he hurried from room to room in undignified haste, like a slave
hunting for some lost treasure of his master's, tearing open closets,
peeping behind curtains and up chimneys, and snatching the clothes,
behind which she might have hidden, from the pegs on which they hung. He
insisted on seeing every secret door, and ran first down and then up the
hidden stairs by which Melissa had in fact escaped.
In the great hall, where by this time physicians and courtiers had
gathered round the carcass of the lion, Caesar sank on to a seat, his
brow damp with heat, and stared at the floor; while the leeches, who, as
Alexandrians for the most part, were anxious not to rouse the despot's
rage, assured him that to all appearance the lion, who had been highly
fed and getting little exercise, had died of a fit. The poison had indeed
worked more rapidly than any the imperial body physician was acquainted
with; and he, not less anxious to mollify the sovereign, bore them out in
this opinion. But their diagnosis, though well meant, had the contrary
effect to that they had intended. The prosecution and punishment of a
murderer would have given occupation to his revengeful spirit and have
diverted his thoughts, and the capture of the criminal would have
pacified him; as it was, he could only regard the death of the lion as a
fresh stroke of fate directed against himself. He sat absorbed in sullen
gloom, muttering frantic curses, and haughtily desired the high-priest to
restore the offering he had wasted on a god who was so malignant, and as
hostile to him as all else in this city of abomination.
He then rose, desired every one to stand back from where the lion lay,
and gazed down at the beast for many minutes. And as he looked, his
excited imagination showed him Melissa stroking the noble brute, and the
lion lashing the ground with his tail when he heard the light step of her
little feet. He could hear the music of her voice when she spoke
coaxingly to the lion; and then again he started off to search the rooms
once more, shouting her name, heedless of the bystanders, till Macrinus
made so bold as to assure him that the slaughterer's report must have
been false. He must have mistaken some one else for Melissa, for it was
proved beyond a doubt that Melissa had been burned in her father's house.
At this Caesar looked the prefect in the face with glazed and wandering
eyes, and Macrinus started in horror as he suddenly shrieked, "The deed,
the deed!" and struck his brow with his fist.
From that hour Caracalla had lost forever the power of distinguishing the
illusions which pursued him from reality.
CHAPTER XXXV.
A week later Caracalla quitted Alexandria to make war on the Parthians.
What finally drove the unhappy man to hurry from the hated place was the
torturing fear of sharing his lion's fate, and of being sent after the
murdered Tarautas by the friends who had heard his appeal to fate.
Quite mad he was not, for the illusions which haunted him were often
absent for several hours, when he spoke with perfect lucidity, received
reports, and gave orders. It was with peculiar terror that his soul
avoided every recollection of his mother, of Theokritus, and all those
whose opinion he had formerly valued and whose judgment was not
indifferent to him.
In constant terror of the dagger of an avenger--a dread which, with many
other peculiarities, the leech could hardly ascribe to the diseased
phenomena of his mental state--he only showed himself to his soldiers,
and he might often be seen making a meal off a pottage he himself had
cooked to escape the poison which had been fatal to his lion. He was
never for an instant free from the horrible sense of being hated,
shunned, and persecuted by the whole world.
Sometimes he would remember that once a fair girl had prayed for him; but
when he tried to recall her features he could only see the charred arm
with the golden snake held up before him as he had pictured it that night
after the most hideous of his massacres; and every time, at the sight of
it, that word came back to him which still tortured his soul above all
else--"The deed." But his attendants, who heard him repeating it day and
night, never knew what he meant by it.
When Zminis met his end by the wild beasts in the arena, it was before
half-empty seats, though several legions had been ordered into the
amphitheatre to fill them. The larger number of the citizens were slain,
and the remainder were in mourning for relatives more or less near; and
they also kept away from the scene to avoid the hated despot.
Macrinus now governed the empire almost as a sovereign, for Caesar,
formerly a laborious and autocratic ruler, shrank from all business. Even
before they left Alexandria the plebeian prefect could see that
Serapion's prophecy was fulfilling itself. He remained in close intimacy
with the soothsayer; but only once more, and just before Caesar's
departure, could the magian be induced to raise the spirits of the dead,
for his clever accomplice, Castor, had fallen a victim in the massacre
because, prompted by the high price set on Alexander's head, and his own
fierce hatred of the young painter, he would go out to discover where he
and his sister had concealed themselves.
When at last the unhappy monarch quitted Alexandria one rainy morning,
followed by the curses of innumerable mourners--fathers, mothers, widows,
and orphans--as well as of ruined artisans and craftsmen, the ill-used
city, once so proudly gay, felt itself relieved of a crushing nightmare.
This time it was not to Caesar that the cloudy sky promised welfare--his
life was wrapped in gloom--but to the people he had so bitterly hated.
Thousands looked forward hopefully to life once more, in spite of their
mourning robes and widows' veils, and notwithstanding the serious
hindrances which the malice of their "afflicted" sovereign had placed in
the way of the resuscitation of their town, for Caracalla had commanded
that a wall should be built to divide the great merchant city into two
parts.
Nay, he had intended to strike a death-blow even at the learning to which
Alexandria owed a part of her greatness, by decreeing that the Museum and
schools should be removed and the theatres closed.
Maddening alike to heart and brain was the memory that he left behind
him, and the citizens would shake their fists if only his name were
spoken. But their biting tongues had ceased to mock or jest. Most of the
epigramatists were silenced forever, and the nimble wit of the survivors
was quelled for many a month by bitter curses or tears of sorrow.
But now--it was a fortnight since the dreadful man had left--the shops
and stores, which had been closed against the plunderers, were being
reopened. Life was astir again in the deserted and silent baths and
taverns, for there was no further fear of rapine from insolent soldiers,
or the treacherous ears of spies and delators. Women and girls could once
more venture into the highways, the market was filled with dealers, and
many an one who was conscious of a heedless speech or suspected of
whistling in the circus, or of some other crime, now came out of his
well-watched hiding-place.
Glaukias, the sculptor, among others, reopened his work-rooms in Heron's
garden-plot. In the cellar beneath the floor the gem-cutter had remained
hidden with Polybius and his sister Praxilla, for the easy-going old man
could not be induced to embark in the vessel which Argutis had hired for
them. Sooner would he die than leave Alexandria. He was too much petted
and too infirm to face the discomforts of a sea voyage. And his obstinacy
had served him well, for the ship in which they were to have sailed,
though it got out before the harbor was closed, was overtaken and brought
back by an imperial galley.
Polybius was, however, quite willing to accept Heron's invitation to
share his hiding-place.
Now they could both come out again; but these few weeks had affected them
very differently. The gem-cutter looked like the shadow of himself, and
had lost his upright carriage. He knew, indeed, that Melissa was alive,
and that Alexander, after being wounded, had been carried by Andreas to
the house of Zeno, and was on the way to recovery; but the death of his
favorite son preyed on his mind, and it was a great grievance that his
house should have been wrecked and burned. His hidden gold, which was
safe with him, would have allowed of his building a far finer one in its
stead, but the fact that it should be his fellow-citizens who had
destroyed it was worst of all. It weighed on his spirits, and made him
morose and silent.
Old Dido, who had risked her life more than once, looked at him with
mournful eyes, and besought all the gods she worshiped to restore her
good master's former vigor, that she might once more hear him curse and
storm; for his subdued mood seemed to her unnatural and alarming--a
portent of his approaching end.
Praxilla, too, the comfortable widow, had grown pale and thin, but old
Dido had learned a great deal from her teaching. Polybius only was more
cheerful than ever. He knew that his son and Melissa had escaped the most
imminent dangers. This made him glad; and then his sister had done
wonders that he might not too greatly miss his cook. His meals had
nevertheless been often scanty enough, and this compulsory temperance had
relieved him of his gout and done him so much good that, when Andreas led
him out into daylight once more, the burly old man exclaimed: "I feel as
light as a bird. If I had but wings I could fly across the lake to see
the boy. It is you, my brother, who have helped to make me so much
lighter." He laid his arm on the freedman's shoulder and kissed him on
the cheeks. It was for the first time; and never before had he called him
brother. But that his lips had obeyed the impulse of his heart might be
seen in the tearful glitter of his eyes, which met those of Andreas, and
they, too, were moist.
Polybius knew all that the Christian had done for his son and for
Melissa, for him and his, and his jest in saying that Andreas had helped
to make him lighter referred to his latest achievement. Julianus, the new
governor of the city, who now occupied the residence of the prefect
Titianus, had taken advantage of the oppressed people to extract money,
and Andreas, by the payment of a large sum, had succeeded in persuading
him to sign a document which exonerated Polybius and his son from all
criminality, and protected their person and property against soldiers and
town guards alike. This safe-conduct secured a peaceful future to the
genial old man, and filled the measure of what he owed to the freedman,
even to overflowing. Andreas, on his part, felt that his former owner's
kiss and brotherly greeting had sealed his acceptance as a free man. He
asked no greater reward than this he had just received; and there was
another thing which made his heart leap with gladness. He knew now that
the fullness of time had come in the best sense for the daughter of the
only woman he had ever loved, and that the Good Shepherd had called her
to be one of His flock. He could rejoice over this without a pang, for he
had learned that Diodoros, too, had entered on the path which hitherto he
had pointed out to him in vain.
A calm cheerfulness, which surprised all who knew him, brightened the
grave man; for him the essence of Christian love lay in the Resurrection,
and he saw with astonishment that a wonderful new vitality was rising out
of death. For Alexandria, too, the time was fulfilled. Men and women
crowded to the rite of baptism. Mothers brought their daughters, and
fathers their sons. These days of horror had multiplied the little
Christian congregation to a church of ten thousand members. Caracalla
turned hundreds from heathenism by his bloody sacrifices, his love of
fighting, his passion for revenge, and the blindness which made him cast
away all care for his eternal soul to secure the enjoyment of a brief
existence. That the sword which had slain thousands of their sons should
have been dedicated to Serapis, and accepted by the god, alienated many
of the citizens from the patron divinity of the town. Then the news that
Timotheus the high-priest had abdicated his office soon after Caesar's
departure, and, with his revered wife Euryale, had been baptized by their
friend the learned Clemens, confirmed many in their desire to be admitted
into the Christian community.
After these horrors of bloodshed, these orgies of hatred and vengeance,
every heart longed for love and peace and brotherly communion. Who of all
those that had looked death in the face in these days was not anxious to
know more of the creed which taught that the life beyond the grave was of
greater importance than that on earth?--while those who already held it
went forth to meet, as it were, a bridegroom. They had seen men trodden
down and all their rights trampled on, and now every ear was open when a
doctrine was preached which recognized the supreme value of humanity, by
ascribing, even to the humblest, the dignity of a child of God. They were
accustomed to pray to immortal beings who lived in privileged supremacy
and wild revelry at the golden tables of the Olympian banquet; and now
they were told that the church of the Christians meant the communion of
the faithful with their fatherly God, and with His Son who had mingled
with other mortals in the form of man and who had done more for them than
a brother, inasmuch as He had taken upon Himself to die on the cross for
love of them.
To a highly cultured race like the Alexandrians it had long seemed an
absurdity to try to purchase the favor of the god; by blood-offerings.
Many philosophical sects, and especially the Pythagoreans, had forbidden
such sacrifices, and had enjoined the bringing of offerings not to
purchase good fortune, but only to honor the gods; and now they saw the
Christians not making any offerings at all, but sharing a love-feast.
This, as they declared, was to keep them in remembrance of their
brotherhood and of their crucified Lord, whose blood, once shed, His
heavenly Father had accepted instead of every other sacrifice. The
voluntary and agonizing death of the Redeemer had saved the soul of every
Christian from sin and damnation; and many who in the late scenes of
horror had been inconsolable in anticipation of the grave, felt moved to
share in this divine gift of grace.
Beautiful, wise, and convincing sentences from the Bible went from lip to
lip; and a saying of Clemens, whose immense learning was well known, was
especially effective and popular. He had said that "faith was knowledge
of divine things through revelation, but that learning must give the
proof thereof"; and this speech led many men of high attainments to study
the new doctrines.
The lower classes were no doubt those most strongly attracted, the poor
and the slaves; and with them the sorrowing and oppressed. There were
many of these now in the town; ten thousand had seen those dearest to
them perish, and others, being wounded, had within a few days been ruined
both in health and estate.
As to Melissa in her peril, so to all these the Saviour's call to the
heavy-laden that He would give them rest had come as a promise of new
hope to car and heart. At the sound of these words they saw the buds of a
new spring-time for the soul before their eyes; any one who knew a
Christian improved his intimacy that he might hear more about the
tender-hearted Comforter, the Friend of children, the kind and helpful
Patron of the poor, the sorrowful, and the oppressed.
Assemblies of any kind were prohibited by the new governor; but the law
of Aelius Marcianus allowed gatherings for religious purposes, and the
learned lawyer, Johannes, directed his fellow-Christians to rely on that.
All Alexandria was bidden to these meetings, and the text with which
Andreas opened the first, "Now the fullness of time is come," passed from
mouth to mouth.
Apart from that period which had preceded the birth of Christ, these
words applied to none better than to the days of death and terror which
they had just gone through. Had a plainer boundary-stone ever been
erected between a past and a future time? Out of the old vain and
careless life, which had ended with such fearful horrors, a new life
would now proceed of peace and love and pious cares.
The greater number of the citizens, and at their head the wealthy and
proud, still crowded the heathen temples to serve the old gods and
purchase their favor with offerings; still, the Christian churches were
too small and few to hold the faithful, and these had risen to higher
consideration, for the community no longer consisted exclusively of the
lower rank of people and slaves. No, men and women of the best families
came streaming in, and this creed--as was proclaimed by Demetrius, the
eloquent bishop; by Origen, who in power and learning--was the superior
of any heathen philosopher; by the zealous Andreas, and many another
chosen spirit--this creed was the religion of the future.
The freedman had never yet lived in such a happy and elevated frame of
mind; as he looked back on his past existence he often remembered with
thankful joy the promise that the last should be first, and that the
lowly should be exalted. If the dead had risen from their graves before
his eyes it would scarcely have surprised him, for in these latter days
he had seen wonder follow on wonder. The utmost his soul had so fervently
desired, for which he had prayed and longed, had found fulfillment in a
way which far surpassed his hopes; and through what blood and fear had
the Lord led His own, to let them reach the highest goal! He knew from
the lady Euryale that his desire to win Melissa's soul to the true faith
had been granted, and that she craved to be baptized. This had not been
confirmed by the girl herself, for, attacked by a violent fever, she had
during nine days hovered between life and death; and since then Andreas
had for more than a week been detained in the town arranging affairs for
Polybius.
The task was now ended which he had set himself to carry through. He
could leave the city and see once more the young people he loved. He
parted from Polybius and his sister at the garden gate, and led Heron and
old Dido to a small cottage which his former master had given him to live
in.
The gem-cutter was not to be allowed to see his children till the leech
should give leave, and the unfortunate man could not get over his
surprise and emotion at finding in his new home not only a work-table,
with tools, wax, and stones, but several cages full of birds, and among
these feathered friends a starling. His faithful and now freed slave,
Argutis, had, by Polybius's orders, supplied everything needful; but the
birds were a thought of the Christian girl Agatha. All this was a
consolation in his grief, and when the gem-cutter was alone with old Dido
he burst into sobs. The slave woman followed his example, but he stopped
her with loud, harsh scolding. At first she was frightened; but then she
exclaimed with delight from the very bottom of her faithful heart, "The
gods be praised!" and from the moment when he could storm, she always
declared, Heron's recovery began.
........................
The sun was setting when Andreas made his way to Zeno's house--a long,
white-washed building.
The road led through a palm-grove on the Christian's estate. His anxiety
to see the beloved sufferers urged him forward so quickly that he
presently overtook another man who was walking in the same direction in
the cool of the evening. This was Ptolemaeus, the physician.
He greeted Andreas with cheerful kindness, and the freedman knew what he
meant when, without waiting to be asked, he said:
"We are out of the wood now; the fever has passed away. The delirious
fancies have left her, and since noon she has slept. When I quitted her
an hour ago she was sleeping soundly and quietly. Till now the shaken
soul has been living in a dream; but now that the fever has passed away,
she will soon be herself again. As yet she has recognized no one; neither
Agatha nor the lady Euryale; not even Diodoros, whom I allowed to look at
her yesterday for a moment. We have taken her away from the large house
in the garden, on account of the children, to the little villa opposite
the place of worship. It is quiet there, and the air blows in on her
through the open veranda. The Empress herself could not wish for a better
sick-room. And the care Agatha takes of her! You are right to hasten. The
last glimmer of sunshine is extinct, and divine service will soon begin.
I am satisfied with Diodoros too; youth is a soil on which the physician
reaps easy laurels. What will it not heal and strengthen! Only when the
soul is so deeply shaken, as with Melissa and her brother, matters go
more slowly, even with the young. However, as I said, we are past the
crisis."
"God be praised!" said Andreas. "Such news makes me young again. I could
run like a boy." They now entered the well-kept gardens which lay behind
Zeno's house. Noble clumps of tall old trees rose above the green grass
plots and splendid shrubs. Round a dancing fountain were carefully kept
beds of beautiful flowers. The garden ended at a palm-grove, which cast
its shade on Zeno's little private place of worship--an open plot
inclosed by tamarisk hedges like walls. The little villa in which Melissa
lay was in a bower of verdure, and the veranda with the wide door through
which the bed of the sufferer had been carried in, stood open in the cool
evening to the garden, the palm-grove, and the place of worship with its
garland, as it were, of fragile tamarisk boughs.
Agatha was keeping watch by Melissa; but as the last of the figures,
great and small, who could be seen moving across the garden, all in the
same direction, disappeared behind the tamarisk screen, the young
Christian looked lovingly down at her friend's pale and all too delicate
face, touched her forehead lightly with her lips, and whispered to the
sleeper, as though she could hear her voice:
"I am only going to pray for you and your brother."
And she went out.
A few moments later the brazen gong was heard--muffled out of regard for
the sick--which announced the hour of prayer to the little congregation.
It had sounded every evening without disturbing the sufferer, but
to-night it roused her from her slumbers.
She looked about her in bewilderment and tried to rise, but she was too
weak to lift herself. Terror, blood, Diodoros wounded, Andreas, the ass
on which she had ridden that night, were the images which first crowded
on her awakening spirit in bewildering confusion. She had heard that
piercing ring of smitten brass in the Serapeum. Was she still there? Had
she only dreamed of that night-ride with her wounded lover? Perhaps she
had lost consciousness in the mystic chambers, and the clang of the gong
had roused her.
And she shuddered. In her terror she dared not open her eyes for fear of
seeing on all hands the hideous images on the walls and ceiling. Merciful
gods! If her flight from the Serapeum and the rescue of Diodoros by
Andreas had really been but a dream, then the door might open at any
moment, and the Egyptian Zminis or his men might come in to drag her
before that dreadful Caesar.
She had half recovered consciousness several times, and as these thoughts
had come over her, her returning lucidity had vanished and a fresh attack
of fever had shaken her. But this time her head seemed clearer; the cloud
and humming had left her which had impeded the use of her ears and eyes.
Her brain too had recovered its faculties. As soon as she tried to think,
her restored intelligence told her that if she were indeed still in the
Serapeum and the door should open, the lady Euryale might come in to
speak courage to her and take her in her motherly arms, and--And she
suddenly recollected the promise which had come to her from the
Scriptures of the Christians. It stood before her soul in perfect
clearness that she had found a loving comforter in the Saviour; she
remembered how gladly she had declared to the lady Euryale that the
fullness of time had now indeed come to her, and that she had no more
fervent wish than to become a fellow-believer with her kind friend--a
baptized Christian. And all the while she felt as though light were
spreading in her and around her, and the vision she had last seen when
she lost consciousness rose again before her inward eye. Again she saw
the Redeemer as He had stood before her at the end of her ride,
stretching out His arms to her in the darkness, inviting her, who was
weary and heavy laden, to be refreshed by him. A glow of thankfulness
warmed her heart, and she closed her eyes once more.
But she did not sleep; and while she lay fully conscious, with her hands
on her bosom as it rose and fell regularly with her deep breathing,
thinking of the loving Teacher, of the Christians, and of all the
glorious promises she had read in the Sermon on the Mount, and which were
addressed to her too, she could fancy that her head rested on Euryale's
shoulder, while she saw the form of the Saviour robed in light and
beckoning to her.
Her whole frame was wrapped in pleasant languor. Just so had she felt
once before-she remembered it well--and she remembered when it was. She
had felt just as she did now after her lover had for the first time
clasped her to his heart, when, as night came on, she had sat by his side
on the marble bench, while the Christian procession passed. She had taken
the chanting train for the wandering souls of the dead and--how strange!
No--she was not mistaken. She heard at this moment the selfsame strain
which they had then sung so joyfully, in spite of its solemn mode. She
did know when it had begun, but again it filled her with a bitter-sweet
sense of pity. Only it struck deeper now than before, for she knew now
that it applied to all human beings, since they were all the children of
the same kind Father, and her own brethren and sisters.
But whence did the wonderful music proceed--Was she--and a shock of alarm
thrilled her at the thought--was she numbered with the dead? Had her
heart ceased to beat when the Saviour had taken her in His arms after her
ride through blood and darkness, when all had grown dim to her senses?
Was she now in the abode of the blest?
Andreas had painted it as a glorious place; and yet she shuddered at the
thought. But was not that foolish? If she were really dead, all terror
and pain were at an end. She would see her mother once more; and whatever
might happen to those she loved, she might perhaps be suffered to linger
near them, as she had done on earth, and hope with assurance to meet them
again here, sooner or later.
But no! Her heart was beating still; she could feel how strongly it
throbbed. Then where was she?
There certainly had not been any such coverlet as this on her bed in the
Serapeum, and the room there was much lower. She looked about her and
succeeded in turning on her side toward the evening breeze which blew in
on her, so pure and soft and sweet. She raised her delicate emaciated
hand to her head and found that her thick hair was gone. Then she must
have cut it off to disguise herself.
But where was she? Whither had she fled?
It mattered not. The Serapeum was far away, and she need no longer fear
Zminis and his spies. Now for the first time she raised her eyes
thankfully to Heaven, and next she looked about her; and while she gazed
and let her eyes feed themselves full, a faint cry of delight escaped her
lips. Before her, in the silvery light of the bright disk of the young
moon lay a splendid blooming garden, and over the palms which towered
above all else, in shadowy masses, in the distance the evening star was
rising just in front, the moonlight twinkled and flashed in the rising
and falling drops of the fountain; and as she lay, stirred to the depths
of her soul by this silent splendor, thinking of kindly Selene moving on
her peaceful path above, of Artemis hunting in the moonlight, of the
nymphs of the waters, and the dryads just now perhaps stealing out of the
great trees to dance with sportive fauns, the chant suddenly broke out
again in solemn measure, and she heard, to deep manly voices, the
beginning of the Psalm:
"Give thanks unto the Lord and declare his name; proclaim his wonders
among the nations.
"Sing of him and praise him; tell of all his wonders; glorify his holy
name; their hearts rejoice that seek the Lord."
Here the men ceased and the women began as though to confirm their praise
of the most High, singing the ninetieth Psalm with enthusiastic joy:
"O Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations.
"Before the mountains were brought forth, or, ever thou hadst formed the
earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.
"For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is
passed, and as a watch in the night."
Then the men's voices broke in again
"The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his
handiwork.
"Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge."
And the women in their turn took up the chant, and from their grateful
breasts rose clear and strong the Psalm of David:
"Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy
name.
"Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.
"Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases.
"Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with
loving-kindness and tender mercies."
Melissa listened breathlessly to the singing, of which she could hear
every word; and how gladly would she have mingled her voice with theirs
in thanksgiving to the kind Father in heaven who was hers as well as
theirs! There lay His wondrous works before her, and her heart echoed the
verse:
"Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with
loving-kindness and tender mercies," as though it were addressed
especially to her and sung for her by the choir of women.
The gods of whom she had but just been thinking with pious remembrance
appeared to her now as beautiful, merry, sportive children, as graceful
creatures of her own kind, in comparison with the Almighty Creator and
Ruler of the universe, whose works among the nations, whose holy name,
whose wonders, greatness, and loving-kindness these songs of praise
celebrated. The breath of His mouth dispersed the whole world of gods to
whom she had been wont to pray, as the autumn wind scatters the
many-tinted leaves of faded trees. She felt as though He embraced the
garden before her with mighty and yet loving arms, and with it the whole
world. She had loved the Olympian gods; but in this hour, for the first
time, she felt true reverence for one God, and it made her proud to think
that she might love this mighty Lord, this tender Father, and know that
she was beloved by Him. Her heart beat faster and faster, and she felt as
though, under the protection of this God, she need never more fear any
danger.
As she looked out again at the palm-trees beyond the tamarisks, above
whose plumy heads the evening star now rode in the azure blue of the
night sky, the singing was taken up again after a pause; she heard once
more the angelic greeting which had before struck her soul as so
comforting and full of promise when she read it in the Gospel:
"Glory to God on high, on earth peace, good-will toward men."
That which she had then so fervently longed for had, she thought, come to
pass. The peace, the rest for which she had yearned so miserably in the
midst of terror and bloodshed, now filled her heart-all that surrounded
her was so still and peaceful! A wonderful sense of home came over her,
and with it the conviction that here she would certainly find those for
whom she was longing.
Again she looked up to survey the scene, and she was now aware of a white
figure coming toward her from the tamarisk hedge. This was Euryale. She
had seen Agatha among the worshipers, and had quitted the congregation,
fearing that the sick girl might wake and find no one near her who cared
for her or loved her. She crossed the grass plot with a swift step. She
had passed the fountain; her head came into the moonlight, and Melissa
could see the dear, kind face. With glad excitement she called her by
name, and as the matron entered the veranda she heard the convalescent's
weak voice and hastened to her side. Lightly, as if joy had made her
young again, she sank on her knees by the bed of the resuscitated girl to
kiss her with motherly tenderness and press her head gently to her bosom.
While Melissa asked a hundred questions the lady had to warn her to
remain quiet, and at last to bid her to keep silence.
First of all Melissa wanted to know where she was. Then her lips
overflowed with thankfulness and joy, and declarations that she felt as
she was sure the souls in bliss must feel, when Euryale had told her in
subdued tones that her father was living, that Diodoros and her brother
had found a refuge in the house of Zeno, and that Andreas, Polybius, and
all dear to them were quite recovered after those evil days. The town had
long been rid of Caesar, and Zeno had consented to allow his daughter
Agatha to marry Alexander.
In obedience to her motherly adviser, the convalescent remained quiet for
a while; but joy seemed to have doubled her strength, for she desired to
see Agatha, Alexander, and Andreas, and--she colored, and a beseeching
glance met Euryale's eyes--and Diodoros.
But meanwhile the physician Ptolemaeus had come into the room, and he
would allow no one to come near her this evening but Zeno's daughter. His
grave eyes were dim with tears as, when taking leave, he whispered to the
Lady Euryale:
"All is well. Even her mind is saved."
He was right. From day to day and from hour to hour her recovery
progressed and her strength improved. And there was much for her to see
and hear, which did her more good than medicine, even though she had been
moved to fresh grief by the death of her brother and many friends.
Like Melissa, her lover and Alexander had been led by thorny paths to the
stars which shine on happy souls and shed their light in the hearts of
those to whom the higher truth is revealed. It was as Christians that
Diodoros and Alexander both came to visit the convalescent. That which
had won so many Alexandrians to the blessings of the new faith had
attracted them too, and the certainty of finding their beloved among the
Christians had been an added inducement to crave instruction from Zeno.
And it had been given them in so zealous and captivating a manner that,
in their impressionable hearts, the desire for learning had soon been
turned to firm conviction and inspired ardor.
Agatha was betrothed to Alexander.
The scorn of his fellow-citizens, which had fallen on the innocent youth
and which he had supposed would prevent his ever winning her love, had in
fact secured it to him, for Agatha's father was very ready to trust his
child to the man who had rescued her, whom she loved, and in whom he saw
one of the lowly who should be exalted.
Alexander was not told of Philip's death till his own wounds were healed;
but he had meanwhile confided to Andreas that he had made up his mind to
fly to a distant land that he might never again see Agatha, and thus not
rob the brother on whom he had brought such disaster of the woman he
loved. The freedman had heard him with deep emotion, and within a few
hours after Andreas had reported to Zeno the self-sacrificing youth's
purpose, Zeno had gone to Alexander and greeted him as his son.
Melissa found in Agatha the sister she had so long pined for; and how
happy it made her to see her brother's eyes once more sparkle with
gladness! Alexander, even as a Christian and as Agatha's husband,
remained an artist.
The fortune accumulated by Andreas--the solidi with which he had formerly
paid the scapegrace painter's debts included--was applied to the erection
of a new and beautiful house of God on the spot where Heron's house had
stood. Alexander decorated it with noble pictures, and as this church was
soon too small to accommodate the rapidly increasing congregation, he
painted the walls of yet another, with figures whose extreme beauty was
famous throughout Christendom, and which were preserved and admired till
gloomy zealots prohibited the arts in churches and destroyed their works.
Melissa could not be safe in Alexandria. After being quietly married in
the house of Polybius, she, with her young husband and Andreas, moved to
Carthage, where an uncle of Diodoros dwelt. Love went them, and, with
love, happiness. They were not long compelled to remain in exile; a few
months after their marriage news was brought to Carthage that Caesar had
been murdered by the centurion Martialis, prompted by the tribunes
Apollinaris and Nemesianus Aurelius. Immediately on this, Macrinus, the
praetorian prefect, was proclaimed emperor by the troops.
The ambitious man's sovereignty lasted less than a year; still, the
prophecy of Serapion was fulfilled. It cost the Magian his life indeed;
for a letter written by him to the prefect, in which he reminded him of
what he had foretold, fell into the hands of Caracalla's mother, who
opened the letters addressed to her ill-fated son at Antioch, where she
was then residing. The warning it contained did not arrive, however, till
after Caesar's death, and before the new sovereign could effectually
protect the soothsayer. As soon as Macrinus had mounted the throne the
persecution of those who had roused the ire of the unhappy Caracalla was
at an end. Diodoros and Melissa, Heron and Polybius, could mingle once
more with their fellow-citizens secure from all pursuit.
Diodoros and other friends took care that the suspicion of treachery
which had been cast on Heron's household should be abundantly disproved.
Nay, the death of Philip, and Melissa's and Alexander's evil fortunes,
placed them in the ranks of the foremost foes of tyranny.
Within ten months of his accession Macrinus was overthrown, after his
defeat at Immae, where, though the praetorians still fought for him
bravely, he took ignominious flight; Julia Domna's grandnephew was then
proclaimed Caesar by the troops, under the name of Heliogabalus, and the
young emperor of fourteen had a statue and a cenotaph erected at
Alexandria to Caracalla, whose son he was falsely reputed to be. These
two works of art suffered severely at the hands of those on whom the
hated and luckless emperor had inflicted such fearful evils. Still, on
certain memorial days they were decked with beautiful flowers; and when
the new prefect, by order of Caracalla's mother, made inquiry as to who
it was that laid them there, he was informed that they came from the
finest garden in Alexandria, and that it was Melissa, the wife of the
owner, who offered them. This comforted the heart of Julia Domna, and she
would have blessed the donor still more warmly if she could have known
that Melissa included the name of her crazed son in her prayers to her
dying day.
Old Heron, who had settled on the estate of Diodoros and lived there
among his birds, less surly than of old, still produced his miniature
works of art; he would shake his head over those strange offerings, and
once when he found himself alone with old Dido, now a freed-woman, he
said, irritably: "If that little fool had done as I told her she would be
empress now, and as good as Julia Domna. But all has turned out
well--only that Argutis, whom every one treats as if our old Macedonian
blood ran in his veins, was sent yesterday by Melissa with finer flowers
for Caracalla's cenotaph than for her own mother's tomb--May her
new-fangled god forgive her! There is some Christian nonsense at the
bottom of it, no doubt. I stick to the old gods whom my Olympias served,
and she always did the best in everything."
Old Polybius, too, remained a heathen; but he allowed the children to
please themselves. He and Heron saw their grandchildren brought up as
Christians without a remonstrance, for they both understood that
Christianity was the faith of the future.
Andreas to his latest day was ever the faithful adviser of old and young
alike. In the sunshine of love which smiled upon him his austere zeal
turned to considerate tenderness. When at last he lay on his death-bed,
and shortly before the end, Melissa asked him what was his favorite verse
of the Scriptures, he replied firmly and decidedly:
"Now the fullness of time is come."
"So be it," replied Melissa with tears in her eyes. He smiled and nodded,
signed to Diodoros to draw off his signet ring--the only thing his father
had saved from the days of his wealth and freedom--and desired Melissa to
keep it for his sake. Deeply moved, she put it on her finger; but Andreas
pointed to the motto, and said with failing utterance:
"That is your road--and mine--my father's motto: Per aspera ad astra. It
has guided me to my goal, and you--all of you. But the words are in
Latin; you understand them? By rough ways to the stars--Nay what they say
to me is: Upward, under the burden of the cross, to bliss here and
hereafter--And you too," he added, looking in his darling's face. "You
too, both of you; I know it."
He sighed deeply, and, laying his hand on Melissa's head as she knelt by
his bed, he closed his faithful eyes in the supporting arms of Diodoros.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE THORNY PATH:
Begun to enjoy the sound of his own voice
Cast off their disease as a serpent casts its skin
For what will not custom excuse and sanctify?
Force which had compelled every one to do as his neighbors
Galenus--What I like is bad for me, what I loathe is wholesome
He has the gift of being easily consoled
He only longed to be hopeful once more, to enjoy the present
It is the passionate wish that gives rise to the belief
Man, in short, could be sure of nothing
Misfortunes commonly come in couples yoked like oxen
Never to be astonished at anything
Obstacles existed only to be removed
Possess little and require nothing
Speaking ill of others is their greatest delight
The past must stand; it is like a scar
IN THE FIRE OF THE FORGE, Complete
A ROMANCE OF OLD NUREMBERG
By Georg Ebers
Volume 1.
Translated from the German by Mary J. Safford
CHAPTER I.
On the eve of St. Medard's Day in the year 1281, the moon, which had just
risen, was shining brightly upon the imperial free city of Nuremberg; its
rays found their way into the street leading from the strong Marienthurm
to the Frauenthor, but entrance to the Ortlieb mansion was barred by a
house, a watchtower, and--most successfully of all--by a tall linden
tree. Yet there was something to be seen here which even now, when
Nuremberg sheltered the Emperor Rudolph and so many secular and
ecclesiastical princes, counts, and knights, awakened Luna's curiosity.
True, this something had naught in common with the brilliant spectacles
of which there was no lack during this month of June; on the contrary, it
was very quiet here. An imperial command prohibited the soldiery from
moving about the city at night, and the Frauenthor, through which during
the day plenty of people and cattle passed in and out had been closed
long before. Very few of the worthy burghers--who went to bed betimes and
rose so early that they rarely had leisure to enjoy the moonlight
long--passed here at this hour. The last one, an honest master weaver,
had moved with a very crooked gait. As he saw the moon double--like
everything else around and above him--he had wondered whether the man up
there had a wife. He expected no very pleasant reception from his own at
home. The watchman, who--the moon did not exactly know why--lingered a
short time in front of the Ortlieb mansion, followed the burgher. Then
came a priest who, with the sacristan and several lantern bearers, was
carrying the sacrament to a dying man in St. Clarengasse.
There was usually more to be seen at this hour on the other side of the
city--the northwestern quarter--where the fortress rose on its hill,
dominating the Thiergartenthor at its foot; for the Emperor Rudolph
occupied the castle, and his brother-in-law, Burgrave Friedrich von
Zollern, his own residence. This evening, however, there was little
movement even there; the Emperor and his court, the Burgrave and his
train, with all the secular and ecclesiastical princes, counts, and
knights, had gone to the Town Hall with their ladies. High revel was held
there, and inspiring music echoed through the open windows of the
spacious apartment, where the Emperor Rudolph also remained during the
ball. Here the moonbeams might have been reflected from glittering steel
or the gold, silver, and gems adorning helmets, diadems, and gala robes;
or they might surely have found an opportunity to sparkle on the ripples
of the Pegnitz River, which divided the city into halves; but the
heavenly wanderer, from the earliest times, has preferred leafy hidden
nooks to scenes of noisy gaiety, a dim light to a brilliant glare. Luna
likes best to gaze where there is a secret to be discovered, and mortals
have always been glad to choose her as a confidante. Something exactly
suited to her taste must surely be going on just now near the linden
which, in all the splendour of fullest bloom, shaded the street in front
of the Ortlieb mansion; for she had seen two fair girls grow up in the
ancient dwelling with the carved escutcheon above the lofty oak door, and
the ample garden--and the younger, from her earliest childhood, had been
on especially intimate terms with her.
Now the topmost boughs of the linden, spite of their dense foliage,
permitted a glimpse of the broad courtyard which separated the patrician
residence from the street.
A chain, which with graceful curves united a short row of granite posts,
shut out the pedestrians, the vehicles and horsemen, the swine and other
animals driven through the city gate. In contrast with the street, which
in bad weather resembled an almost impassable swamp, it was always kept
scrupulously clean, and the city beadle might spare himself the trouble
of looking there for the carcasses of sucking pigs, cats, hens, and rats,
which it was his duty to carry away.
A young man with an unusually tall and powerful figure was standing in
this yard, gazing up at a window in the second story. The shadow of the
linden concealed his features and his dress, but the moon had already
seen him more than once in this very spot and knew that he was a handsome
fellow, whose bronzed countenance, with its prominent nose and broad
brow, plainly indicated a strong will. She had also seen the scar
stretching from the roots of his long brown locks across the whole
forehead to the left cheek-bone, that lent the face a martial air. Yet he
belonged to no military body, but was the son of a noble family of
Nuremberg, which boasted, it is true, of "knightly blood" and the right
of its sons to enter the lists of the tournament, but was engaged in
peaceful pursuits; for it carried on a trade with Italy and the
Netherlands, and every male scion of the Eysvogel race had the birthright
of being elected a member of the Honourable Council and taking part in
the government of Nuremberg.
The moon had long known that the young man in the courtyard was an
Eysvogel, nor was this difficult to discover. Every child in Nuremberg
was familiar with the large showy coat of arms lately placed above the
lofty doorway of the Eysvogel mansion; and the nocturnal visitor wore a
doublet on whose left breast was embroidered the same coat of arms, with
three birds in the shield and one on the helmet.
He had already waited some time in vain, but now a young girl's head
appeared at the window, and a gay fresh voice called his Christian name,
"Wolff!"
Waving his cap, he stepped nearer to the casement, greeted her warmly,
and told her that he had come at this late hour to say good-night, though
only from the front yard.
"Come in," she entreated. "True, my father and Eva have gone to the dance
at the Town Hall, but my aunt, the abbess, is sitting with my mother."
"No, no," replied Wolff, "I only stopped in passing. Besides, I am
stealing even this brief time."
"Business?" asked the young girl. "Do you know, I am beginning to be
jealous of the monster which, like an old spider, constantly binds you
closer and closer in its web. What sort of dealing is this?--to give the
whole day to business, and only a few minutes of moonlight to your
betrothed bride!
"I wish it were otherwise," sighed Wolff. "You do not know how hard these
times are, Els! Nor how many thoughts beset my brain, since my father has
placed me in charge of all his new enterprises."
"Always something new," replied Els, with a shade of reproach in her
tone. "What an omnivorous appetite this Eysvogel business possesses!
Ullmann Nutzel said lately: 'Wherever one wants to buy, the
bird--[vogel]--has been ahead and snapped up everything in Venice and
Milan. And the young one is even sharper at a bargain,' he added."
"Because I want to make a warm nest for you, dearest," replied Wolff.
"As if we were shopkeepers anxious to secure customers!" said the girl,
laughing. "I think the old Eysvogel house must have enough big stoves to
warm its son and his wife. At the Tuckers the business supports seven,
with their wives and children. What more do we want? I believe that we
love each other sincerely, and though I understand life better than Eva,
to whom poverty and happiness are synonymous, I don't need, like the
women of your family, gold plates for my breakfast porridge or a bed of
Levantine damask for my lapdog. And the dowry my father will give me
would supply the daughters of ten knights."
"I know it, sweetheart," interrupted Wolff dejectedly; "and how gladly I
would be content with the smallest--"
"Then be so!" she exclaimed cheerily. "What you would call 'the
smallest,' others term wealth. You want more than competence, and I--the
saints know-would be perfectly content with 'good.' Many a man has been
shipwrecked on the cliffs of 'better' and 'best.'"
Fired with passionate ardour, he exclaimed, "I am coming in now."
"And the business?" she asked mischievously. "Let it go as it will," he
answered eagerly, waving his hand. But the next instant he dropped it
again, saying thoughtfully: "No, no; it won't do, there is too much at
stake."
Els had already turned to send Katterle, the maid, to open the heavy
house door, but ere doing so she put her beautiful head out again, and
asked:
"Is the matter really so serious? Won't the monster grant you even a
good-night kiss?"
"No," he answered firmly. "Your menservants have gone, and before the
maid could open----There is the moon rising above the linden already. It
won't do. But I'll see you to-morrow and, please God, with a lighter
heart. We may have good news this very day."
"Of the wares from Venice and Milan?" asked Els anxiously.
"Yes, sweetheart. Two waggon trains will meet at Verona. The first
messenger came from Ingolstadt, the second from Munich, and the one from
Landshut has been here since day before yesterday. Another should have
arrived this morning, but the intense heat yesterday, or some cause--at
any rate there is reason for anxiety. You don't know what is at stake."
"But peace was proclaimed yesterday," said Els, "and if robber knights
and bandits should venture----But, no! Surely the waggons have a strong
escort."
"The strongest," answered Wolff. "The first wain could not arrive before
to-morrow morning."
"You see!" cried the girl gaily. "Just wait patiently. When you are once
mine I'll teach you not to look on the dark side. O Wolff, why is
everything made so much harder for us than for others? Now this evening,
it would have been so pleasant to go to the ball with you."
"Yet, how often, dearest, I have urged you in vain----" he began, but she
hastily interrupted "Yes, it was certainly no fault of yours, but one of
us must remain with my mother, and Eva----"
"Yesterday she complained to me with tears in her eyes that she would be
forced to go to this dance, which she detested."
"That is the very reason she ought to go," explained Els. "She is
eighteen years old, and has never yet been induced to enter into any of
the pleasures other girls enjoy. When she isn't in the convent she is
always at home, or with Aunt Kunigunde or one of the nuns in the woods
and fields. If she wants to take the veil later, who can prevent it, but
the abbess herself advises that she should have at least a glimpse of the
world before leaving it. Few need it more, it seems to me, than our Eva."
"Certainly," Wolff assented. "Such a lovely creature! I know no girl more
beautiful in all Nuremberg."
"Oh! you----," said his betrothed bride, shaking her finger at her lover,
but he answered promptly,
"You just told me that you preferred 'good' to 'better,' and so doubtless
'fair' to 'fairer,' and you are beautiful, Els, in person and in soul. As
for Eva, I admire, in pictures of madonnas and angels, those wonderful
saintly eyes with their uplifted gaze and marvellously long lashes, the
slight droop of the little head, and all the other charms; yet I gladly
dispense with them in my heart's darling and future wife. But you,
Els--if our Lord would permit me to fashion out of divine clay a life
companion after my own heart, do you know how she would look?"
"Like me--exactly like Els Ortlieb, of course," replied the girl
laughing.
"A correct guess, with all due modesty," Wolff answered gaily. "But take
care that she does not surpass your wishes. For you know, if the little
saint should meet at the dance some handsome fellow whom she likes better
than the garb of a nun, and becomes a good Nuremberg wife, the excess of
angelic virtue will vanish; and if I had a brother--in serious earnest--I
would send him to your Eva."
"And," cried Els, "however quickly her mood changes, it will surely do
her no harm. But as yet she cares nothing about you men. I know her, and
the tears she shed when our father gave her the costly Milan suckenie, in
which she went to the ball, were anything but tears of joy."
[Suckenie--A long garment, fitting the upper part of the body
closely and widening very much below the waist, with openings for
the arms.]
"I only wonder," added Wolff, "that you persuaded her to go; the pious
lamb knows how to use her horns fiercely enough."
"Oh, yes," Els assented, as if she knew it by experience; then she
eagerly continued, "She is still just like an April day."
"And therefore," Wolff remarked, "the dance which she began with tears
will end joyously enough. The young knights and nobles will gather round
her like bees about honey. Count von Montfort, my brother-in-law
Siebenburg says, is also at the Town Hall with his daughter."
"And the comet Cordula was followed, as usual, by a long train of
admirers," said Els. "My father was obliged to give the count lodgings;
it could not be avoided. The Emperor Rudolph had named him to the Council
among those who must be treated with special courtesy. So he was assigned
to us, and the whole suite of apartments in the back of the house,
overlooking the garden, is now filled with Montforts, Montfort household
officials, menservants, squires, pages, and chaplains. Montfort horses
and hounds crowd our good steeds out of their stalls. Besides the twenty
stabled here, eighteen were put in the brewery in the Hundsgasse, and
eight belong to Countess Cordula. Then the constant turmoil all day long
and until late at night! It is fortunate that they do not lodge with us
in the front of the house! It would be very bad for my mother!"
"Then you can rejoice over the departure all the more cordially,"
observed Wolff.
"It will hardly cause us much sorrow," Els admitted. "Yet the young
countess brings much merriment into our quiet house. She is certainly a
tireless madcap, and it will vex your proud sister Isabella to know that
your brother-in-law Siebenburg is one of her admirers. Did she not go to
the Town Hall?"
"No," Wolff answered; "the twins have changed her wonderfully. You saw
the dress my mother pressed upon her for the ball--Genoese velvet and
Venetian lace! Its cost would have bought a handsome house. She was
inclined, too, to appear as a young mother at the festival, and I assure
you that she looked fairly regal in the magnificent attire. But this
morning, after she had bathed the little boys, she changed her mind.
Though my mother, and even my grandmother, urged her to go, she insisted
that she belonged to the twins, and that some evil would befall the
little ones if she left them."
"That is noble!" cried Els in delight, "and if I should ever---. Yet no,
Isabella and I cannot be compared. My husband will never be numbered
among the admirers of another woman, like your detestable brother-in-law.
Besides, he is wasting time with Cordula. Her worldliness repels Eva, it
is true, but I have heard many pleasant things about her. Alas! she is a
motherless girl, and her father is an old reveller and huntsman, who
rejoices whenever she does any audacious act. But he keeps his purse open
to her, and she is kind-hearted and obliging to a degree----"
"Equalled by few," interrupted Wolff, with a sneer. "The men know how to
praise her for it. No paternoster would be imposed upon her in the
confessional on account of cruel harshness."
"Nor for a sinful or a spiteful deed," replied Els positively. "Don't say
anything against her to me, Wolff, in spite of your dissolute
brother-in-law. I have enough to do to intercede for her with Eva and
Aunt Kunigunde since she singed and oiled the locks of a Swiss knight
belonging to the Emperor's court. Our Katterle brought the coals. But
many other girls do that, since courtesy permits it. Her train to the
Town Hall certainly made a very brave show; the fifty freight waggons you
are expecting will scarcely form a longer line."
The young merchant started. The comparison roused his forgotten anxiety
afresh, and after a few brief, tender words of farewell he left the
object of his love. Els gazed thoughtfully after him; the moonlight
revealed his tall, powerful figure for a long time. Her heart throbbed
faster, and she felt more deeply than ever how warmly she loved him. He
moved as though some heavy burden of care bowed his strong shoulders. She
would fain have hastened after him, clung to him, and asked what troubled
him, what he was concealing from her who was ready to share everything
with him, but the Frauenthor, through which he entered the city, already
hid him from her gaze.
She turned back into the room with a faint sigh. It could scarcely be
solely anxiety about his expected goods that burdened her lover's mind.
True, his weak, arrogant mother, and still more his grandmother, the
daughter of a count, who lived with them in the Eysvogel house and still
ruled her daughter as if she were a child, had opposed her engagement to
Wolff, but their resistance had ceased since the betrothal. On the other
hand, she had often heard that Fran Eysvogel, the haughty mother,
dowerless herself, had many poor and extravagant relations besides her
daughter and her debt-laden, pleasure-loving husband, Sir Seitz
Siebenburg, who, it could not be denied, all drew heavily upon the
coffers of the ancient mercantile house. Yet it was one of the richest in
Nuremberg. Yes, something of which she was still ignorant must be
oppressing Wolff, and, with the firm resolve to give him no peace until
he confessed everything to her, she returned to the couch of her invalid
mother.
CHAPTER II.
Wolff had scarcely vanished from the street, and Els from the window,
when a man's slender figure appeared, as if it had risen from the earth,
beside the spurge-laurel tree at the left of the house. Directly after
some one rapped lightly on the pavement of the yard, and in a few minutes
the heavy ironbound oak doors opened and a woman's hand beckoned to the
late guest, who glided swiftly along in the narrow line of shadow cast by
the house and vanished through the entrance.
The moon looked after him doubtfully. In former days the
narrow-shouldered fellow had been seen near the Ortlieb house often
enough, and his movements had awakened Luna's curiosity; for he had been
engaged in amorous adventure even when work was still going on at the
recently completed convent of St. Clare--an institution endowed by the
Ebner brothers, to which Herr Ernst Ortlieb added a considerable sum. At
that time--about three years before--the bold fellow had gone there to
keep tryst evening after evening, and the pretty girl who met him was
Katterle, the waiting maid of the beautiful Els, as Nuremberg folk called
the Ortlieb sisters, Els and Eva. Many vows of ardent, changeless love
for her had risen to the moon, and the outward aspect of the man who made
them afforded a certain degree of assurance that he would fulfil his
pledges, for he then wore the long dark robe of reputable people, and on
the front of his cap, from which a net shaped like a bag hung down his
back, was a large S, and on the left shoulder of his long coat a T, the
initials of the words Steadfast and True. They bore witness that the
person who had them embroidered on his clothing deemed these virtues the
highest and noblest. It might have been believed that the lean fellow,
who scarcely looked his five-and-thirty years, possessed these lofty
traits of character; for, though three full years had passed since his
last meeting with Katterle at the building site, he had gone to his
sweetheart with his wonted steadfastness and truth immediately after the
Emperor Rudolph's entry.
He had given her reason to rely upon him; but the moon's gaze reaches
far, and had discovered the quality of Walther Biberli's "steadfastness
and truth."
In one respect it proved the best and noblest; for among thousands of
servitors the moon had not seen one who clung to his lord with more loyal
devotion. Towards pretty young women, on the contrary, he displayed his
principal virtues in a very singular way; for the pallid nocturnal
wanderer above had met him in various lands and cities, and wherever he
tarried long another maid was added to the list of those to whom Biberli
vowed steadfastness and truth.
True, whenever Sir Long Coat's travels led him back to any one to whom he
had sworn eternal love, he went first to her, if she, too, retained the
old affection. But Katterle had cause to care for him most, for he was
more warmly devoted to her than to any of the others, and in his own
fashion his intentions were honest. He seriously intended, as soon as his
master left the imperial court--which he hoped would not happen too
soon--and returned to his ancestral castle in his native Switzerland, to
establish a home of his own for his old age, and no one save Katterle
should light the hearth fire. Her outward circumstances pleased him, as
well as her disposition and person. She was free-born, like himself--the
son of a forest keeper--and, again like him, belonged to a Swiss family;
her heritage (she was an orphan), which consisted of a house and arable
land in her home, Sarnen, where she still sent her savings, satisfied his
requirements. But above all she believed in him and admired his versatile
mind and his experience. Moreover, she gave him absolute obedience, and
loved him so loyally that she had remained unwedded, though a number of
excellent men had sought her in marriage.
Katterle had met him for the first time more than three years before
when, after the battle of Marchfield, he remained several weeks in
Nuremberg. They had sat side by side at a tournament, and, recognising
each other as Swiss-born by the sharp sound of the letters "ch" and the
pronunciation of other words, were mutually attracted.
Katterle had a kind heart; yet at that time she almost yielded to the
temptation to pray Heaven not to hasten the cure of a brave man's wounds
too quickly, for she knew that Biberli was a squire in the service of the
young Swiss knight Heinz Schorlin, whose name was on every lip because,
in spite of his youth, he had distinguished himself at the battle of
Marchfield by his rare bravery, and that the young hero would remain in
Nuremberg only until his severe injuries were completely healed. His
departure would bring to her separation from his servant, and sometimes
when homesickness tortured her she thought she would be unable to survive
the parting. Meanwhile Biberli nursed his master with faithful zeal, as
if nothing bound him to Nuremberg, and even after his departure Katterle
remained in good health.
Now she had him again. Directly after the Emperor Rudolph's entrance,
five days before, Biberli had come openly to the Ortlieb house and
presented himself to Martsche,--[Margaret]--the old house keeper, as the
countryman and friend of the waiting maid, who had brought her a message
from home.
True, it had been impossible to say anything confidential either in the
crowded kitchen or in the servants' hall. To-night's meeting was to
afford the opportunity.
The menservants, carrying sedan chairs and torches, had all gone out with
their master, who had taken his younger daughter, Eva, to the dance. They
were to wait in front of the Town Hall, because it was doubtful whether
the daughter of the house, who had been very reluctant to go to the
entertainment, might not urge an early departure. Count von Montfort,
whose quarters were in the Ortlieb mansion, and his whole train of male
attendants, certainly would not come back till very late at night or even
early morning, for the Countess Cordula remained at a ball till the
close, and her father lingered over the wine cup till his daughter called
him from the revellers.
All this warranted the lovers in hoping for an undisturbed interview. The
place of meeting was well chosen. It was unsatisfactory only to the moon
for, after Biberli had closed the heavy door of the house behind him,
Luna found no chink or crevice through which a gliding ray might have
watched what the true and steadfast Biberli was saying to Katterle. There
was one little window beside the door, but it was closed, and the opening
was covered with sheepskin. So the moon's curiosity was not gratified.
Instead of her silver rays, the long entry of the Ortlieb house, with its
lofty ceiling, was illumined only by the light of three lanterns, which
struggled dimly through horn panes. The shining dots in a dark corner of
the spacious corridor were the eyes of a black cat, watching there for
rats and mice.
The spot really possessed many advantages for the secret meeting of two
lovers, for as it ran through the whole width of the house, it had two
doors, one leading to the street, the other into the yard. In the right
wall of the entry there were also two small doors, reached by a flight of
steps. At this hour both closed empty rooms, for the office and the
chamber where Herr Ernst Ortlieb received his business friends had not
been occupied since sunset, and the bathroom and dressing-room adjoining
were used only during the day.
True, some unbidden intruder might have come down the long broad
staircase leading to the upper story. But in that case the lovers had the
best possible hiding-place close at hand, for here large and small boxes,
standing side by side and one above another, formed a protecting wall;
yonder heaps of sacks and long rows of casks afforded room for
concealment behind them. Rolls of goods packed in sacking leaned against
the chests, inviting a fugitive to slip back of them, and surely no one
would suspect the presence of a pair of lovers in the rear of these
mountains of hides and bales wrapped in matting. Still it would scarcely
have been advisable to remain near them; for these packages, which the
Ortlieb house brought from Venice, contained pepper and other spices that
exhaled a pungent odor, endurable only by hardened nerves.
Valuable goods of various kinds lay here until they could be placed in
cellars or storehouses or sold. But there was many an empty space, too,
in the broad corridor for, spite of Emperor Rudolph's strictness, robbery
on the highroads had by no means ceased, and Herr Ernst Ortlieb was still
compelled to use caution in the transportation of costly wares.
After Biberli and his sweetheart had assured themselves that the ardour
of their love had by no means cooled, they sat down on some bags filled
with cloves and related to each other the experiences through which they
had passed during the period of separation.
Katterle's life had flowed on in a pleasant monotony. She had no cause to
complain of her employers.
Fran Maria Ortlieb, the invalid mistress of the house, rarely needed her
services.
During a ride to visit relatives in Ulm, the travellers, who were under
the same escort of men at arms as a number of Nuremberg freight waggons,
had been attacked by the robber knights Absbach and Hirschhorn. An arrow
had struck Frau Ortlieb's palfrey, causing the unfortunate woman a severe
fall, which produced an internal injury, from which she had not yet
recovered. The assault resulted unfortunately for young Hirschhorn, who
led it; he met with a shameful death on the gallows.
The information enraged Biberli. Instead of feeling any sympathy for the
severely injured lady, he insisted that the Nuremberg burghers had dealt
with Hirschhorn in a rascally fashion; for he was a knight, and
therefore, as honest judges familiar with the law, they ought to have put
him to death by the sword instead of with the rope. And Katterle agreed
with him; she never contradicted his opinions, and surely Biberli must
know what treatment befitted a knight, since he was the foster-brother of
one.
Nor did the maid, who was in the personal service of the daughters of the
house, make any complaint against them. Indeed, she could not praise Els,
the elder, sufficiently. She was very just, the careful nurse of her
invalid mother, and always unvarying in her cheerful kindness.
She had no fault to find with Eva either, especially as she was more
religious than any one in the whole house. Spite of her marvellous
beauty--Katterle knew that there was nothing false about it--she would
probably end by joining the nuns in the convent. But her mood changed
with every breath, like the weathercock on the steeple. If she got out of
bed the wrong way, or one did not guess her wishes before they were
uttered, she would fly into a rage at the least trifle. Then she
sometimes used very unkind words; but no one could cherish anger against
her long, for she had an indescribably lovely manner of trying to atone
for the offences which her hasty young blood made her commit. She had
gone to the ball that night as if it were a funeral; she shunned men like
poison, and even kept out of the way of her sister's friends.
Biberli laughed, as if there could be no doubt of his opinion, and
exclaimed: "Just wait a while! My master will meet her at the Town Hall
tonight, and if the scrawny little squirrel I saw three years ago has
really grown up into such a beauty, if he does not get on her track and
capture her, my name isn't Biberli."
"But surely," replied Katterle doubtfully, "you told me that you had not
yet succeeded in persuading him to imitate you in steadfastness and
truth."
"But he is a knight," replied the servant, striking himself pompously
under the T on his shoulder, as if he, too, belonged to this favoured
class, "and so he is as free to pursue a woman as to hunt the game in the
forest. And my Heinz Schorlin! You saw him, and admitted that he was
worth looking at. And that was when he had scarcely recovered from his
dangerous wounds, while now----The French Knight de Preully, in Paris,
with whom my dead foster-brother, until he fell sick-----" Here he
hesitated; an enquiring look from his sweetheart showed that--perhaps for
excellent reasons--he had omitted to tell her about his sojourn in Paris.
Now that he had grown older and abandoned the wild revelry of that period
in favour of truth and steadfastness, he quietly related everything she
desired to know.
He had acquired various branches of learning while sharing the studies of
his foster-brother, the eldest son of the old Knight Schorlin, who was
then living, and therefore, when scarcely twenty, was appointed
schoolmaster at Stansstadt. Perhaps he might have continued to teach--for
he promised to be successful--had not a vexatious discovery disgusted him
with his calling.
He was informed that the mercenaries in the Schnitzthurm guard were paid
five shillings a week more than he, spite of the knowledge he had gained
by so much toil.
In his indignation he went back to Schorlin Castle, which was always open
to him, and he arrived just at the right time.
His present master's older brother, whose health had always been
delicate, being unable to follow the profession of arms, was on the eve
of departing to attend the university at Paris, accompanied by the
chaplain and an equerry. When the Lady Wendula, his master's mother,
learned what an excellent reputation Biberli had gained as a
schoolmaster, she persuaded her husband to send him as esquire with their
sickly son.
In Paris there was at first no lack of pleasures of every description,
especially as they met among the king's mercenaries many a dissolute
Swiss knight and man at arms. His foster-brother, to his sorrow, was
unable to resist the temptations which Satan scatters in Paris as the
peasants elsewhere sow rye and oats, and the young knight was soon
attacked, by a severe illness. Then Biberli's gay life ended too. For
months he did not leave his foster-brother's sick bed a single hour, by
day or night, until death released him from his suffering.
On his return to Castle Schorlin he found many changes; the old knight
had been called away from earth a few days before his son's death, and
Heinz Schorlin, his present master, had fallen heir to castle and lands.
This, however, was no great fortune, for the large estates of the
Schorlin family were burdened by heavy debts.
The dead lord, as countryman, boon companion, and brother in arms of the
Emperor Rudolph, had been always ready to place his sword at his service,
and whenever a great tournament was held he never failed to be present.
So the property had been consumed, and the Lady Wendula and her son and
three daughters were left in moderate circumstances. The two older girls
had taken the veil, while the youngest, a merry little maiden, lived with
her mother.
But the Emperor Rudolph had by no means forgotten the Lady Wendula and
her dead husband, and with the utmost kindness requested her to send him
her only son as soon as he was able to wield a sword and lance. He
intended to repay Heinz for the love and loyalty his father had shown him
through his whole life.
"And the Hapsburg," Biberli added, "had kept his word."
In a few years his young lord was ready for a position at court.
Gotthard von Ramsweg, the Lady Wendula's older brother, a valiant knight,
went to his sister's home after her husband's death to manage the estate
and instruct his nephew in all the exercises of knighthood. Soon the
strong, agile, fearless son of a brave father, under the guidance of such
a teacher, excelled many an older youth. He was barely eighteen when the
Lady Wendula sent him to his imperial master. She had given him, with her
blessing, fiery horses, the finest pieces of his father's suits of mail,
an armour bearer, and a groom to take with him on his journey; and his
uncle had agreed to accompany him to Lausanne, where the Emperor Rudolph
was then holding his court to discuss with Pope Gregory--the tenth of the
name--arrangements for a new crusade. But nothing had yet been said about
Biberli. On the evening before the young noble's departure, however, a
travelling minstrel came to the castle, who sang of the deeds of former
crusaders, and alluded very touchingly to the loneliness of the wounded
knight, Herr Weisenthau, on his couch of pain. Then the Lady Wendula
remembered her eldest son, and the fraternal tendance which Biberli had
given him.
"And so," the servant went on, "in the anxiety of a mother's heart she
urged me to accompany Heinz, her darling, as esquire; and watch over his
welfare."
"Since I could use a pen, I was to write now and then what a mother
desires to hear of a son. She felt great confidence in me, because she
believed that I was true and steadfast. And I have kept in every respect
the vow I then made to the Lady Wendula--that she should not find herself
mistaken in me. I remember that evening as if it were only yesterday. To
keep constantly before my eyes the praise my mistress had bestowed upon
me, I ventured to ask my young master' sister to embroider the T and the
S on the cap and the new coat, and the young lady did so that very night.
Since that time these two initials have gone with me wherever our horses
bear us, and as, after the battle of Marchfield, Biberli nursed his
master back to health with care and toil, he thinks he can prove to you,
his sole sweetheart, that he wears his T and S with good reason."
In return for these words Katterle granted her friend the fitting reward
with such resignation that it was robbing the moon not to permit her to
look on. Her curiosity, however, was not to remain wholly ungratified;
for when Biberli found that it was time for him to repair to the Town
Hall to learn whether his master, Heinz Schorlin, needed his services,
Katterle came out of the house door with him.
They found much more to say and to do ere they parted.
First, the Swiss maid-servant wished to know how the Emperor Rudolph had
received Heinz Schorlin; and she had the most gratifying news.
During their stay at Lausanne, where he won the victory in a tournament,
Heinz was knighted; but after the battle of Marchfield he became still
dearer to the Emperor, especially when a firm friendship united the young
Swiss to Hartmann, Rudolph's eighteen-year-old son, who was now on the
Rhine. That very day Heinz had received a tangible proof of the imperial
favour, on account of which he had gone to the dance in an extremely
cheerful mood.
This good news concerning the knight, whom her young mistress had perhaps
already met, awakened in the maid, who was not averse to the business of
matchmaking, so dear to her sex, very aspiring plans which aimed at
nothing less than a union between Eva and Heinz Schorlin. But Biberli had
scarcely perceived the purport of Katterle's words when he anxiously
interrupted her and, declaring that he had already lingered too long, cut
short the suggestion by taking leave.
His master's marriage to a young girl who belonged to the city nobility,
which in his eyes was far inferior in rank to a Knight Schorlin, should
cast no stone in the pathway of fame that was leading him so swiftly
upward. Many things must happen before Biberli could honestly advise him
to give up his present free and happy life and seek rest in his own nest.
If Eva Ortlieb were as lovely as the Virgin herself, and Sir Heinz's
inflammable heart should blaze as fervently as it always did, she should
not lure him into the paralysing bondage of wedlock so long as he was
there and watched over him.
If he must be married, Biberli had something else in view for
him--something which would make him a great lord at a single stroke. But
it was too soon even for that.
When he crossed the Fleischbrucke in the market place and approached the
brilliantly lighted Town Hall, he had considerable difficulty in moving
forward, for the whole square was thronged with curious spectators,
servants in gala liveries, sedan chairs, richly caparisoned steeds, and
torchbearers. The von Montfort retinue, which had quarters in the Ortlieb
house, was one of the most brilliant and numerous of all, and Biberli's
eyes wandered with a look of satisfaction over the gold-mounted sedan
chair of the young countess. He would rather have given his master to her
than to the Nuremberg maiden whom Katterle compared to a weathercock, and
who therefore certainly did not possess the lofty virtue of
steadfastness.
CHAPTER III.
Sir Heinz Schorlin's servant was on intimate terms with many of the
servitors of the imperial family, and one of them conducted him to the
balcony of the city pipers, which afforded a view of the great hall. The
Emperor sat there at the head of the banquet table, and by his side, on a
lower throne, his sister, the Burgravine von Zollern. Only the most
distinguished and aristocratic personages whom the Reichstag attracted to
Nuremberg, with their ladies, shared the feast given by the city in their
honour.
But yonder, at a considerable distance from them, though within the space
enclosed by a black and yellow silk cord, separated from the glittering
throng of the other guests, he perceived--he would not trust his own
eyes--the Knight Heinz Schorlin, and by his side a wonderfully charming
young girl.
Biberli had not seen Eva Ortlieb for three years, yet he knew that it was
no other than she. But into what a lovely creature the active, angular
child with the thin little arms had developed!
The hall certainly did not lack superb women of all ages and every style
of figure and bearing suited to please the eye. Many might even boast of
more brilliant, aristocratic beauty, but not one could vie in witchery
with her on whom Katterle had cast an eye for his master. She had only
begun a modest allusion to it, but even that was vexatious; for Biberli
fancied that she had thereby "talked of the devil," and he did not wish
him to appear.
With a muttered imprecation, by no means in harmony with his character,
he prepared to leave the balcony; but the scene below, though it
constantly filled him with fresh vexation, bound him to the spot as if by
some mysterious spell.
Especially did he fancy that he had a bitter taste in his mouth when his
gaze noted the marvellous symmetry of Heinz Schorlin's powerful though
not unusually tall figure, his beautiful waving locks, and the
aristocratic ease with which he wore his superb velvet robe-sapphire blue
on the left side and white on the right, embroidered with silver
falcons-or perceived how graciously the noblest of the company greeted
him after the banquet; not, indeed, from envy, but because it pierced
his very heart to think that this splendid young favourite of fortune,
already so renowned, whom he warmly loved, should throw himself away on
the daughter of a city merchant, though his motley wares, which he had
just seen, were adorned by the escutcheon of a noble house.
But Heinz Schorlin had already been attracted by many more aristocratic
fair ones, only to weary of them speedily enough. This time, also,
Biberli would have relied calmly on his fickleness had Katterle's foolish
wish only remained unuttered, and had Heinz treated his companion in the
gay, bold fashion which usually marked his manner to other ladies. But
his glance had a modest, almost devout expression when he gazed into the
large blue eyes of the merchant's daughter. And now she raised them! It
could not fail to bewitch the most obdurate woman hater!
Faithful, steadfast Biberli clenched his fists, and once even thought of
shouting "Fire!", into the ballroom below to separate all who were
enjoying themselves there wooing and being wooed.
But those beneath perceived neither him nor his wrath--least of all his
master and the young girl who had come hither so reluctantly.
At home Eva had really done everything in her power to be permitted to
stay away from the Town Hall. Herr Ernst Ortlieb, her father, however,
had been inflexible. The chin of the little man with beardless face and
hollow cheeks had even begun to tremble, and this was usually the
precursor of an outburst of sudden wrath which sometimes overpowered him
to such a degree that he committed acts which he afterwards regretted.
This time he had been compelled not to tolerate the opposition of his
obstinate child. Emperor Rudolph himself had urged the "honourable"
members of the Council to gratify him and his daughter-in-law Agnes, whom
he wished to entertain pleasantly during her brief visit, by the presence
of their beautiful wives and daughters at the entertainment in the Town
Hall.
Herr Ortlieb's invalid wife could not spare Els, her older daughter and
faithful nurse, so he required Eva's obedience, and compelled her to give
up her opposition to attending the festival; but she dreaded the vain,
worldly gaiety--nay, actually felt a horror of it.
Even while still a pupil at the convent school she had often asked
herself whether it would not be the fairest fate for her, like her Aunt
Kunigunde, the abbess of the convent of St. Clare, to vow herself to the
Saviour and give up perishable joys to secure the rapture of heaven,
which lasted throughout eternity, and might begin even here on earth, in
a quiet life with God, a complete realisation of the Saviour's loving
nature, and the great sufferings which he took upon himself for love's
sake. Oh, even suffering and bleeding with the Most High were rich in
mysterious delight! Aye, no earthly happiness could compare with the
blissful feeling left by those hours of pious ecstasy.
Often she had sat with closed eyes for a long time, dreaming that she was
in the kingdom of heaven and, herself an angel, dwelt with angels. How
often she had wondered whether earthly love could bestow greater joy than
such a happy dream, or the walks through the garden and forest, during
which the abbess told her of St. Francis of Assisi, who founded her
order, the best and most warmhearted among the successors of Christ, of
whom the Pope himself said that he would hear even those whom God would
not! Moreover, there was no plant, no flower, no cry of any animal in the
woods which was not familiar to the Abbess Kunigunde. Like St. Francis;
she distinguished in everything which the ear heard and the eye beheld
voices that bore witness to the goodness and greatness of the Most High.
The abbess felt bound by ties of sisterly affection to every one of God's
creatures, and taught Eva to love them, too, and, as a person who treats
a child kindly wins the mother's heart also, to obtain by love of his
creatures that of the Creator.
Others had blamed her because she held aloof from her sister's friends
and amusements. They were ignorant of the joys of solitude, which her
aunt and her saint had taught her to know.
She had endured interruptions and reproaches, often humbly, oftener
still, when her hot blood swept away her self-control, with vehement
indignation and tears; but meanwhile she had always cherished the secret
thought that the time would come when she, too, would be permitted, at
one with God and the Saviour, to enjoy the raptures of eternal bliss. She
loved her invalid mother and, often as his sudden fits of passion alarmed
her, she was tenderly attached to her father; yet it would have seemed to
her an exquisite delight to be permitted to imitate the saints and sever
all bonds which united her to the world and its clogging demands. She had
long been yearning for the day when she would be allowed to entreat the
abbess to grant her admittance to the convent, whose doors would be flung
wide open for her because, next to the brothers Ebner, who founded it,
her parents had contributed the largest sum for its support.
But she was obliged to wait patiently, for Els, her older sister, would
probably soon marry her Wolff, and then it would be her turn to nurse her
invalid mother. Her own heart dictated this, and the abbess had said:
"Let her enter eternity clasping your hand before you begin, with us, to
devote all your strength to securing your own salvation. Besides, you
will thereby ascend a long row of steps nearer to your sublime goal."
But Eva would far rather have given her hand now, aloof from the world,
to the Most High in an inviolable bond. What marvel that, with such a
goal in view, she was deeply reluctant to enter the gay whirl of a noisy
ball!
With serious repugnance she had allowed Katterle and her sister to adorn
her, and entered the sedan chair which was to convey her to the Town
Hall. Doubtless her own image, reflected in the mirror, had seemed
charming enough, and the loud expressions of delight from the servants
and others who admired her rich costume had pleased her; but directly
after she realized the vanity of this emotion and, while approaching the
ballroom in her chair, she prayed to her saint to help her conquer it.
Striving honestly to vanquish this error, she entered the hall soon after
the Emperor and his young daughter-in-law; but there she was greeted from
the balcony occupied by the city pipers and musicians, long before
Biberli entered it, with the same fanfare that welcomed the illustrious
guests of the city, and with which blended the blare of the heralds'
trumpets. Thousands of candles in the chandeliers and candelabra diffused
a radiance as brilliant as that of day and, confused by the noise and
waves of light which surged around her, she had drawn closer to her
father, clinging to him for protection. She especially missed her sister,
with whom she had grown up, who had become her second self, and whom she
needed most when she emerged from her quiet life of introspection into
the gay world.
At first she had stood with downcast lashes, but soon her eyes wandered
over the waving plumes and flashing jewels, the splendour of silk and
velvet, the glitter of gold and glimmer of pearls.
Sometimes the display in church had been scarcely less brilliant, and
even without her sister's request she had gazed at it, but how entirely
different it was! There she had rejoiced in her own modest garb, and told
herself that her simplicity was more pleasing to God and the saints than
the vain splendour of the others, which she might so easily have imitated
or even surpassed. But here the anxious question of how she appeared
among the rest of the company forced itself upon her.
True, she knew that the brocade suckenie, which her father had ordered
from Milan, was costly; that the sea-green hue of the right side
harmonised admirably with the white on the left; that the tendrils and
lilies of the valley wrought in silver, which seemed to be scattered over
the whole, looked light and airy; yet she could not shake off the feeling
that everything she wore was in disorder--here something was pulled awry,
there something was crushed. Els, who had attended to her whole toilet,
was not there to arrange it, and she felt thoroughly uncomfortable in the
midst of this worldly magnificence and bustle.
Notwithstanding her father's presence, she had never been so desolate as
among these ladies and gentlemen, nearly all of whom were strangers.
Her sister was intimate with the other girls of her age and station, few
of whom were absent, and if Eva could have conjured her to her side
doubtless many would have joined them; but she knew no one well, and
though many greeted her, no one lingered. Everybody had friends with whom
they were on far more familiar terms. The young Countess von Montfort, a
girl of her own age and an inmate of her own home, also gave her only a
passing word. But this was agreeable to her--she disliked Cordula's free
manners.
Many who were friends of Els had gathered around Ursula Vorchtel, the
daughter of the richest man in the city, and she intentionally avoided
the Ortliebs because, before Wolff Eysvogel sued for Els's hand, he and
Ursula had been intended for each other.
Eva was just secretly vowing that this first ball should also be the
last, when the imperial magistrate, Herr Berthold Pfinzing, her
godfather, came to present her to the Emperor, who had requested to see
the little daughter of the Herr Ernst Ortlieb whose son had fallen in
battle for him. His "little saint," Herr Pfinzing added, looked no less
lovely amid the gay music of the Nuremberg pipers than kneeling in prayer
amid the notes of the organ.
Every tinge of colour had faded from Eva's cheeks, and though a few hours
before she had asked her sister what the Emperor's greatness signified in
the presence of God that she should be forced, for his sake, to be
faithless to the holiest things, now fear of the majesty of the powerful
sovereign made her breath come quicker.
How, clinging to her godfather's hand, she reached the Emperor Rudolph's
throne she could never describe, for what happened afterwards resembled a
confused dream of mingled bliss and pain, from which she was first
awakened by her father's warning that the time of departure had come.
When she raised her downcast eyes the monarch was standing before the
throne placed for him. She had been compelled to bend her head backward
in order to see his face, for his figure, seven feet in height, towered
like a statue of Roland above all who surrounded him. But when, after the
Austrian duchess, his daughter-in-law, who was scarcely beyond childhood,
and the Burgrave von Zollern, his sister, had graciously greeted her, and
Eva with modest thanks had also bowed low before the Emperor Rudolph, a
smile, spite of her timidity, flitted over her lips, for as she bent the
knee her head barely reached above his belt. The Burgravine, a vivacious
matron, must have noticed it, for she beckoned to her, and with a few
kind words mentioned the name of the young knight who stood behind her,
between her own seat and that of the young Duchess Agnes of Austria, and
recommended him as an excellent dancer. Heinz Schorlin, the master of the
true and steadfast Biberli, had bowed courteously, and answered
respectfully that he hoped he should not prove himself unworthy of praise
from such lips.
Meanwhile his glance met Eva's, and the Burgravine probably perceived
with what, ardent admiration the knight's gaze rested on the young
Nuremberg beauty, for she had scarcely stepped back after the farewell
greeting when the noble lady said in a low tone, but loud enough for
Eva's quick ear to catch the words, "Methinks yonder maiden will do well
to guard her little heart this evening against you, you unruly fellow!
What a sweet, angelic face!"
Eva's cheeks crimsoned with mingled shame and pleasure at such words from
such lips, and she would have been only too glad to hear what the knight
whispered to the noble lady.
The attention of the young Duchess Agnes, daughter of King Ottocar of
Bohemia and wife of the Emperor's third son, who also bore the name of
Rudolph, had been claimed during this incident by the Duke of Nassau, who
had presented his ladies to her, but they had scarcely retired when she
beckoned to Heinz Schorlin, and while talking with him gazed into his
eyes with such warm, childlike pleasure that Eva was incensed; she
thought it unseemly for a wife and a duchess to be on such familiar terms
with a simple knight. Nay, her disapproval of the princess's conduct must
have been very deep, for during the whole time of her conversation with
the knight there was a loud singing in the young girl's ears. The
Bohemian's face might be considered pretty; her dark eyes sparkled
brightly, animating the immature features, now slightly sunburnt; and
although four years younger than Eva, her figure, though not above middle
height, was well developed and, in spite of its flexibility, aristocratic
in bearing. While conversing with Heinz Schorlin she seemed joyously
excited, unrestrainedly cordial, but her manner expressed disappointment
and royal hauteur as another group of ladies and gentlemen came forward
to be presented, compelling her to turn her back upon the young Swiss
with a regretful shrug of her shoulders.
The counts and countesses, knights and ladies who thronged around her
concealed her from Eva's eyes, who, now that Heinz Schorlin had left the
Bohemian, again turned her attention to the Emperor, and even ventured to
approach him. What paternal gentleness Rudolph's deep tones expressed!
How much his face attracted her!
True, it could make no pretensions to beauty--the thin, hooked nose was
far too large and long; the corners of the mouth drooped downward too
much; perhaps it was this latter peculiarity which gave the whole face so
sorrowful an aspect. Eva thought she knew its source. The wound dealt a
few months before by the death of his faithful wife, the love of his
youth, still ached. His eyes could not be called either large or bright;
but how kindly, how earnest, shrewd and, when an amusing thought passed
through his mind, how mischievous they could look! His light-brown hair
had not yet turned very grey, spite of his sixty-three years, but the
locks had lost their luxuriance and fell straight, except for a slight
curl at the lower ends, below his neck.
Eva's father, when a young man, had met Frederic II, of the Hohenstaufen
line, in Italy, and was wont to call this a special boon of fate. True,
her aunt, the abbess, said she did not envy him the honour of meeting the
Antichrist; yet that very day after mass she had counselled Eva to
impress the Emperor Rudolph's appearance on her memory. To meet noble
great men elevates our hearts and makes us better, because in their
presence we become conscious of our own insignificance and the duty of
emulating them. She would willingly have given more than a year of her
life to be permitted to gaze into the pure, loving countenance of St.
Francis, who had closed his eyes seven years after her birth.
So Eva, who was accustomed to render strict obedience to her honoured
aunt, honestly strove to watch every movement of the Emperor; but her
attention had been continually diverted, mainly by the young knight, from
whom--the Emperor's sister, Burgravine Elizabeth, had said so
herself--danger threatened her heart.
But the young Countess Cordula von Montfort, the inmate of her home, also
compelled her to gaze after her, for Heinz Schorlin had approached the
vivacious native of the Vorarlberg, and the freedom with which she
treated him--allowing herself to go so far as to tap him on the arm with
her fan--vexed and offended her like an insult offered to her whole sex.
To think that a girl of high station should venture upon such conduct
before the eyes of the Emperor and his sister!
Not for the world would she have permitted any man to talk and laugh with
her in such a way. But the young knight whom she saw do this was again
the Swiss. Yet his bright eyes had just rested upon her with such devout
admiration that lack of respect for a lady was certainly not in his
nature, and he merely found himself compelled, contrary to his wish, to
defend himself against the countess and her audacity.
Eva had already heard much praise of the great valour of the young knight
Heinz Schorlin. When Katterle, whose friend and countryman was in his
service, spoke of him--and that happened by no means rarely--she had
always called him a devout knight, and that he was so, in truth, he
showed her plainly enough; for there was fervent devotion in the eyes
which now again sought hers like an humble penitent.
The musicians had just struck up the Polish dance, and probably the
knight, whom the Emperor's sister had recommended to her for a partner,
wished by this glance to apologise for inviting Countess Cordula von
Montfort instead. Therefore she did not need to avoid the look, and might
obey the impulse of her heart to give him a warning in the language of
the eyes which, though mute, is yet so easily understood. Hitherto she
had been unable to answer him, even by a word, yet she believed that she
was destined to become better acquainted, if only to show him that his
power, of which the Burgravine had spoken, was baffled when directed
against the heart of a pious maiden.
And something must also attract him to her, for while she had the honour
of being escorted up and down the hall by one of the handsome sons of the
Burgrave von Zollern to the music of the march performed by the city
pipers, Heinz Schorlin, it is true, did the same with his lady, but he
looked away from her and at Eva whenever she passed him.
Her partner was talkative enough, and his description of the German order
which he expected to enter, as his two brothers had already done, would
have seemed to her well worthy of attention at any other time, but now
she listened with but partial interest.
When the dance was over and Sir Heinz approached, her heart beat so
loudly that she fancied her neighbours must hear it; but ere he had
spoken a single word old Burgrave Frederick himself greeted her, inquired
about her invalid mother, her blithe sister, and her aunt, the abbess,
who in her youth had been the queen of every dance, and asked if she
found his son a satisfactory partner.
It was an unusual distinction to be engaged in conversation by this
distinguished gentleman, yet Eva would fain have sent him far away, and
her replies must have sounded monosyllabic enough; but the sweet shyness
that overpowered her so well suited the modest young girl, who had
scarcely passed beyond childhood, that he did not leave her until the
'Rai' began, and then quitted her with the entreaty that she would remove
the cap which had hitherto rendered her invisible, to the injury of
knights and gentlemen, and be present at the dance which he should soon
give at the castle.
The pleasant old nobleman had scarcely left her when she turned towards
the young man who had just approached with the evident intention of
leading her to the dance, but he was again standing beside Cordula von
Montfort, and a feeling of keen resentment overpowered her.
The young countess was challenging his attention still more boldly,
tossing her head back so impetuously that the turban-like roll on her
hair, spite of the broad ribbon that fastened it under her chin, almost
fell on the floor. But her advances not only produced no effect, but
seemed to annoy the knight. What charm could he find in a girl who, in a
costume which displayed the greatest extreme of fashion, resembled a Turk
rather than a Christian woman? True, she had an aristocratic bearing, and
perhaps Els was right in saying that her strongly marked features
revealed a certain degree of kindliness, but she wholly lacked the spell
of feminine modesty. Her pleasant grey eyes and full red lips seemed
created only for laughter, and the plump outlines of her figure were
better suited to a matron than a maiden in her early girlhood. Not the
slightest defect escaped Eva during this inspection. Meanwhile she
remembered her own image in the mirror, and a smile of satisfaction
hovered round her red lips.
Now the knight bowed.
Was he inviting the countess to dance again? No, he turned his back to
her and approached Eva, whose lovely, childlike face brightened as if a
sun beam had shone upon it. The possibility of refusing her hand for the
'Rai' never entered her head, but he told her voluntarily that he had
invited Countess Cordula for the Polish dance solely in consequence of
the Burgravine's command, but now that he was permitted to linger at her
side he meant to make up for lost time.
He kept his word, and was by no means content with the 'Rai'; for, after
the young Duchess Agnes had summoned him to a 'Zauner', and during its
continuance again talked with him far more confidentially than the modest
Nuremberg maiden could approve, he persuaded Eva to try the 'Schwabeln'
with him also; and though she had always disliked such dances she
yielded, and her natural grace, as well as her quick ear for time, helped
her to catch the unfamiliar steps without difficulty. While doing so he
whispered that even the angels in heaven could have no greater bliss than
it afforded him to float thus through the hall, clasping her in his arm,
while she glanced up at him with a happy look and bent her little head in
assent. She would gladly have exclaimed warmly: "Yes, indeed! Yet the
Burgravine says that danger threatens me from you, you dear, kind fellow,
and I should do well to avoid you."
Besides, she felt indebted to him. What would have befallen her here in
his absence! Moreover, it gave her a strange sense of pleasure to gaze
into his eyes, allow herself to be borne through the wide hall by his
strong arm, and while pressed closely to his side imagine that his
swiftly throbbing heart felt the pulsing of her own. Instead of injuring
her, wishing her evil, and asking her to do anything wrong, he certainly
had only good intentions. He had cared for her as if he occupied the
place of her own brother who fell in the battle of Marchfield. It would
have given him most pleasure--he had said so himself--to dance everything
with her, but decorum and the royal dames who kept him in attendance
would not permit it. However, he came to her in every pause to exchange
at least a few brief words and a glance. During the longest one, which
lasted more than an hour and was devoted to the refreshment of the
guests, he led her into a side room which had been transformed into a
blossoming garden.
Seats were placed behind the green birch trees--amid whose boughs hung
gay lamps--and the rose bushes which surrounded a fountain of perfumed
water, and Eva had already followed the Swiss knight across the threshold
when she saw among the branches at the end of the room the Countess
Cordula, at whose feet several young nobles knelt or reclined, among them
Seitz Siebenburg, the brother-in-law of Wolff Eysvogel, her sister's
betrothed bridegroom.
The manner of the husband and father whose wife, only six weeks before,
had become the mother of twin babies--beautiful boys--and who for
Cordula's sake so shamefully forgot his duties, crimsoned her cheeks with
a flush of anger, while the half-disapproving, half-troubled look that
Sir Boemund Altrosen cast, sometimes at the countess, sometimes at
Siebenburg, showed her that she herself was on the eve of doing something
which the best persons could not approve; for Altrosen, who leaned
silently against the wall beside the countess, ever and anon pushing back
the coal-black hair from his pale face, had been mentioned by her
godfather as the noblest of the younger knights gathered in Nuremberg. A
voice in her own heart, too, cried out that this was no fitting place for
her.
If Els had been with her, Eva said to herself, she certainly would not
have permitted her to enter this room, where such careless mirth
prevailed, alone with a knight, and the thought roused her for a short
time from the joyous intoxication in which she had hitherto revelled, and
awakened a suspicion that there might be peril in trusting herself to
Heinz Schorlin without reserve.
"Not here," she entreated, and he instantly obeyed her wish, though the
Countess Cordula, as if he were alone, instead of with a lady, loudly and
gaily bade him stay where pleasure had built a hut under roses.
Eva was pleased that her new friend did not even vouchsafe the young
countess an answer. His obedience led her also to believe that her
anxiety had been in vain. Yet she imposed greater reserve of manner upon
herself so rigidly that Heinz noticed it, and asked what cloud had dimmed
the pure radiance of her gracious sunshine.
Eva lowered her eyes and answered gently: "You ought not to have taken me
where the diffidence due to modesty is forgotten." Heinz Schorlin
understood her and rejoiced to hear the answer. In his eyes, also,
Countess Cordula this evening had exceeded the limits even of the liberty
which by common consent she was permitted above others. He believed that
he had found in Eva the embodiment of pure and beautiful womanhood.
He had given her his heart from the first moment that their eyes met. To
find her in every respect exactly what he had imagined, ere he heard a
single word from her lips, enhanced the pleasure he felt to the deepest
happiness which he had ever experienced.
He had already been fired with a fleeting fancy for many a maiden, but
not one had appeared to him, even in a remote degree, so lovable as this
graceful young creature who trusted him with such childlike confidence,
and whose innocent security by the side of the dreaded heart-breaker
touched him.
Never before had it entered his mind concerning any girl to ask himself
the question how she would please his mother at home. The thought that
she whom he so deeply honoured might possess a magic mirror which showed
her her reckless son as he dallied with the complaisant beauties whose
graciousness, next to dice-playing, most inflamed his blood, had
sometimes disturbed his peace of mind when Biberli suggested it. But when
Eva looked joyously up at him with the credulous confidence of a trusting
child, he could imagine no greater bliss than to hear his mother,
clasping the lovely creature in her arms, call her her dear little
daughter.
His reckless nature was subdued, and an emotion of tenderness which he
had never experienced before thrilled him as she whispered, "Take me to a
place where everybody can see us, but where we need not notice anyone
else."
How significant was that little word "we"! It showed that already she
united herself and him in her thoughts. To her pure nature nothing could
be acceptable which must be concealed from the light of the sun and the
eyes of man. And her wish could be fulfilled.
The place where Biberli had discovered them, and where refreshments had
just been served to the Emperor and the ladies and gentlemen nearest to
his person, who had been joined by several princes of the Church, was
shut off by the bannerets, thus preventing the entrance of any uninvited
person; but Heinz Schorlin belonged to the sovereign's suite and had
admittance everywhere.
So he led Eva behind the black and yellow rope to two vacant chairs at
the end of the enclosed space where the banquet had been swiftly arranged
for the Emperor and the other illustrious guests of Nuremberg.
These seats were in view of the whole company, yet it would have been as
difficult to interrupt him and his lady as any of the table companions of
the imperial pair. Eva followed the knight without anxiety, and took her
place beside him in the well-chosen seat.
A young cup-bearer of noble birth, with whom Heinz was well acquainted,
brought unasked to him and his companion sparkling Malvoisie in Venetian
glasses, and Heinz began the conversation by inviting Eva to drink to the
many days brightened by her favour which, if the saints heard his prayer,
should follow this, the most delightful evening of his life. He omitted
to ask her to pour the wine for him, knowing that many of the guests in
the ballroom were watching them; besides the saucy little count came
again and again to fill his goblet, and he wished to avoid everything
which might elicit sarcastic comment. The young cup-bearer desisted as
soon as he noticed the respectful reserve with which Heinz treated his
lady, and the youth was soon obliged to leave the hall with his liege
lord, Duke Rudolph of Austria, who was to set out for Carinthia early the
following morning, and withdrew with his wife without sharing the
banquet. The latter accompanied her husband to the castle, but she was to
remain in Nuremberg during the session of the Reichstag with the lonely
widowed Emperor, who was especially fond of the young Bohemian princess.
Before and during the dance with Heinz the latter had requested him to
use the noble Arabian steed, a gift from the Sultan Kalaun to the
Emperor, who had bestowed it upon her, and also expressed the hope of
meeting the knight frequently.
In the conversation which Heinz began with Eva he was at first obliged to
defend himself, for she had admitted that she had heard the Burgravine's
warning to beware of him.
At the same time she had found opportunity to tell him that her heart
yearned for something different from worldly love, and that she felt safe
from every one because St. Clare was constantly watching over her.
He replied that he had been reared in piety, that he knew the close
relations existing between her patron saint and the holy Francis of
Assisi, and that he, too, had experienced many things from this man of
God. Eva, with warm interest, asked when and where, and he willingly told
her.
On the way from Augsburg to Nuremberg, while riding in advance of the
imperial court, he had met an old barefooted man who, exhausted by the
heat of the day, had sunk down by the side of the road as if lifeless,
with his head resting against the trunk of a tree. Moved with compassion,
he dismounted, to try to do something for the greybeard. A few sips of
wine had restored him to consciousness, but his weary, wounded feet would
carry him no farther. Yet it would have grieved the old man sorely to be
forced to interrupt his journey, for the Chapter General in Portiuncula,
in Italy, had sent him with an important message to the brothers of his
order in Germany, and especially in Nuremberg.
The old Minorite monk was especially dignified in aspect, and when he
chanced to mention that he had known St. Francis well and was one of
those who had nursed him during his last illness, a dispute had arisen
between Heinz Schorlin, the armor bearer, and his servant Walther
Biberli, for each desired to give up his saddle to the old man and pursue
his journey on foot for his sake and the praise of God.
But the Minorite could not be persuaded to break his vow never again to
mount a knight's charger and, even had it not been evident from his
words, Heinz asserted that the aristocratic dignity of his bearing would
have shown that he belonged to a noble race.
Biberli's eloquence gained the victory in this case also, and though the
groom led by the bridle another young stallion which the ex-schoolmaster
might have mounted, he had walked cheerily beside the old monk, sweeping
up the dust with his long robe. At the tavern the knight and his
attendants had been abundantly repaid for their kindness to the Minorite,
for his conversation was both entertaining and edifying; and Heinz
repeated to his lady, who listened attentively, much that the monk had
related about St. Francis.
Eva, too, was also on the ground dearest and most familiar to her. Her
little tongue ran fast enough, and her large blue eyes sparkled with an
unusually bright and happy lustre as she completed and corrected what the
young knight told her about the saint.
How much that was lovable, benevolent, and wonderful there was to relate
concerning this prophet of peace and good-will, this apostle of poverty
and toil who, in every movement of nature, perceived and felt a summons
to recognise the omnipotence and goodness of God, an invitation to devout
submission to the Most High!
How many amusing, yet edifying and touching anecdotes, the Abbess
Kunigunde had narrated of him and the most beloved of his followers! Much
of this conversation Eva repeated to the knight, and her pleasure in the
subject of the conversation increased the vivacity of her active mind,
and soon led her to talk with eager eloquence. Heinz Schorlin fairly hung
on her lips, and his eyes, which betrayed how deeply all that he was
hearing moved him, rested on hers until a flourish of trumpets announced
that the interval between the dances was over.
He had listened in delight and, he felt, was forever bound to her. When
duty summoned him to attend the Emperor he asked himself whether such a
conversation had ever been held in the midst of a merry dance; whether
God, in his goodness, had ever created a being so perfect in soul and
body as this fair saint, who could transform a ballroom into a church.
Aye, Eva had done so; for, ardent as was the knight's love, something
akin to religious devotion blended with his yearning desire. The last
words which he addressed to her before leading her back to the others
contained the promise to make her patron saint, St. Clare, his own.
The Princess of Nassau had invited him for the next dance, but she found
Heinz Schorlin, whom the young Duchess Agnes had just said was merry
enough to bring the dead to life, a very quiet partner; while young Herr
Schurstab, who danced with Eva and, like all the members of the
Honourable Council, knew that she desired to take the veil, afterwards
told his friends that the younger beautiful E would suit a Carthusian
convent, where speech is prohibited, much better than a ballroom.
But after this "Zauner" Heinz Schorlin again loosed her tongue. When he
had told her how he came to the court, and she had learned that he had
joined the Emperor Rudolph at Lausanne just as he took the vow to take
part in the crusade, there was no end to her questions concerning the
reason that the German army had not already marched against the infidels,
and whether he himself did not long to make them feel his sword.
Then she asked still further particulars concerning Brother Benedictus,
the old Minorite whom he had treated so kindly. Heinz told her what he
knew, and when he at last enquired whether she still regretted having met
him whom she feared, she gazed frankly into his eyes and, smiling
faintly, shook her head.
This increased his ardour, and he warmly entreated her to tell him where
he could meet her again, and permit him to call her his lady. But she
hesitated to reply, and ere he could win from her even the faintest
shadow of consent, Ernst Ortlieb, who had been talking with other members
of the council in the room where the wine was served, interrupted him to
take his daughter home.
She went reluctantly. The clasp of the knight's hand was felt all the way
to the house, and it would have been impossible and certainly ungracious
not to return it.
Heinz Schorlin had obtained no assent, yet the last glance from her eyes
had been more eloquent than many a verbal promise, and he gazed after her
enraptured.
It seemed like desecration to give the hand in which hers had rested to
lead any one else to the dance, and when the rotund Duke of Pomerania
invited him to a drinking bout at his quarters at the Green Shield he
accepted; for without Eva the hall seemed deserted, the light robbed of
its brilliancy, and the gay music transformed to a melancholy dirge.
But when at the Green Shield the ducal wine sparkled in the beakers, the
gold shone and glistened on the tables, and the rattle of the dice
invited the bystanders to the game, he thought that whatever he undertook
on such a day of good fortune must have a lucky end.
The Emperor had filled his purse again, but the friendly gift did not
cover his debts, and he wanted to be rid of them before he told his
mother that he had found a dear, devout daughter for her, and intended to
return home to settle in the ancestral castle, his heritage, and share
with his uncle the maintenance of his rights and the management of fields
and forests.
Besides, he must test for the first time the power of his new patroness,
St. Clare, instead of his old one, St. Leodegar. But the former served
him ill enough--she denied him her aid, at any rate in gambling. The full
purse was drained to its last 'zecchin' only too soon, and Heinz,
laughing, turned it inside out before the eyes of his comrades. But
though the kind-hearted Duke of Pomerania, with whom Heinz was a special
favourite, pushed a little heap of gold towards him with his fat hands,
that the Swiss might try his luck again with borrowed money, which brings
good fortune, he remained steadfast for Eva's sake.
On his way to the Green Shield he had confessed to Biberli--who, torch in
hand, led the way--that he intended very shortly to turn his back on the
court and ride home, because this time he had found the right chatelaine
for his castle.
"That means the last one," the ex-schoolmaster answered quietly,
carefully avoiding fanning the flame of his young master's desire by
contradiction. Only he could not refrain from entreating him not to burn
his fingers with the dice, and, to confirm it, added that luck in
gambling was apt to be scanty where fortune was so lavish in the gifts of
love.
Heinz now remembered this warning. It had been predicted to his darling
that meeting him would bring her misfortune, but he was animated by the
sincere determination to force the jewel of his heart to remember Heinz
Schorlin with anything but sorrow and regret.
What would have seemed impossible to him a few hours before, he now
realised. With a steady hand he pushed back the gold to the duke, who
pressed it upon him with friendly glances from his kind little eyes and
an urgent whispered entreaty, and took his leave, saying that to-night
the dice and he were at odds.
With these words he left the room, though the host tried to detain him
almost by force, and the guests also earnestly endeavoured to keep the
pleasant, jovial fellow. The loss, over which Biberli shook his head
angrily, did, not trouble him. Even on his couch Heinz found but a short
time to think of his empty purse and the lovely maid who was to make the
old castle among his beloved Swiss mountains an earthly paradise, for
sleep soon closed his eyes.
The next morning the events of the evening seemed like a dream. Would
that they had been one! Only he would not have missed, at any cost, the
sweet memories associated with Eva. But could she really become his own?
He feared not; for the higher the sun rose the more impracticable his
intentions of the night before appeared. At last he even thought of the
religious conversation in the dancing hall with a superior smile, as if
it had been carried on by some one else. The resolve to ask from her
father the hand of the girl he loved he now rejected. No, he was not yet
fit for a husband and the quiet life in the old castle. Yet Eva should be
the lady of his heart, her patron saint should be his, and he would never
sue for the love of any other maiden. Hers he must secure. To press even
one kiss on her scarlet lips seemed to him worth the risk of life. When
he had stilled this fervent longing he could ride with her colour on helm
and shield from tourney to tourney, and break a lance for her in every
land through which he passed with the Emperor. What would happen
afterwards let the saints decide. As usual, Biberli was his confidant,
and declared himself ready to use Katterle's services in his master's
behalf.
He had his own designs in doing this. He could rely upon the waiting
maid's assistance, and if there were secret meetings between Eva Ortlieb
and his lord, which would appease the knight's ardour, even in a small
degree, the task of disgusting Heinz with his luckless idea of an early
marriage would not prove too difficult.
CHAPTER IV.
Eva Ortlieb had been borne home from the ball in her sedan chair with a
happy smile hovering round her fresh young lips.
It still lingered there when she found her sister in their chamber,
sitting at the spinning wheel. She had not left her suffering mother
until her eyes closed in slumber, and was now waiting for Eva, to hear
whether the entertainment had proved less disagreeable than she feared,
and--as she had sent her maid to bed--to help her undress.
One glance at Eva told her that she had perhaps left the ballroom even
more reluctantly than she entered it; but when Els questioned her so
affectionately, and with maternal care began to unfasten the ribbon which
tied her cap, the young girl, who in the sedan chair had determined to
confess to no one on earth what so deeply moved her heart, could not
resist the impulse to clasp her in her arms and kiss her with impetuous
warmth.
Els received the caress with surprise for, though both girls loved each
other tenderly, they, like most sisters, rarely expressed it by tangible
proofs of tenderness. Not until Eva released her did Els exclaim in merry
amazement: "So it was delightful, my darling?"
"Oh, so delightful!" Eva protested with hands uplifted, and at the same
time met her sister's eyes with a radiant glance.
Yet the thought entered her mind that it ill beseemed her to express so
much pleasure in a worldly amusement. Her glance fell in shame, and she
gently continued in that tone of self-compassion which was by no means
unfamiliar to the members of her family. "True, though the Emperor is so
noble, and both he and the Burgravine were so gracious to me, at
first--and not only for a brief quarter of an hour, but a very long time
I could feel no real pleasure. What am I saying? Pleasure! I was
indescribably desolate and alone among all those vain, bedizened
strangers. I was like a shipwrecked sailor washed ashore by the waves and
surrounded by people whose language is unfamiliar."
"But half Nuremberg was at the ball," her sister interrupted. "Now you
see the trouble, darling. Whoever, like you, remains in seclusion and
mounts a tall tree to be entirely alone, will be deserted; for who would
be kind-hearted enough to learn to climb for your sake? But it seems that
afterwards one and another----"
"Oh!" Eva interrupted, "if you think that any of your friends gave me
more than a passing greeting, you are mistaken. Not even Barbel, Ann, or
Metz took any special notice of your sister. They kept near Ursel
Vorchtel, and she and her brother Ulrich, of course, behaved as if I wore
a fern cap and had become invisible. I cannot tell you how uncomfortable
I felt, and then--yes, Els, then I first realised distinctly what you are
to me. Obstinate as I often am, in spite of all your kindness and care,
ungraciously as I often treat you, to-night I clearly perceived that we
belong together, like a pair of eyes, and that without you I am only half
myself--or, at any rate--not complete. And--as we are speaking in
images--I felt like a sapling whose prop has been removed; even your
Wolff can never have longed for you more ardently. My father found little
time to give me. As soon as he saw me take my place in the Polish dance
he went with Uncle Pfinzing to the drinking room, and I did not see him
again till he came to bring me home. He had asked Fran Nutzel to look
after me, but her Kathrin was taken ill, as I heard when we were leaving,
and she disappeared with her during the first dance. So I moved forlornly
here and there until he--Heinz Schorlin--came and took charge of me."
"He? Sir Heinz Schorlin?" asked Els in surprise, a look of anxious
suspense clouding her pretty, frank face. "The reckless Swiss, whom
Countess Cordula said yesterday was the pike in the dull carp pond of the
court, and the only person for whom it was worth while to bear the
penance imposed in the confessional?"
"Cordula von Montfort!" cried Eva scornfully. "If she speaks to me I
shall not answer her, I can tell you. My cheeks crimson when I think of
the liberty----"
"Never mind her," said her sister soothingly. "She is a motherless child,
and therefore unlike us. As for Heinz Schorlin, he is certainly a gallant
knight; but, my innocent lambkin, he is a wolf nevertheless."
"A wolf?" asked Eva, opening her large eyes as wide as if they beheld
some terrible object. But she soon laughed softly, and added quietly:
"But a very harmless wolf, who humbly changes his nature when the right
hand strokes him. How you stare at me! I am not thinking of your beloved
Wolff, whom you have tamed tolerably well, but the wolf of Gubbio, which
did so much mischief, and to which St. Francis went forth, accosted him
as Brother Wolf, and reminded him that they both owed their lives to the
goodness of the same divine Father. The animal seemed to understand this,
for it nodded to him. The saint now made a bargain with the wolf, which
gave him its paw in pledge of the oath; and it kept the promise, for it
followed St. Francis into the city, and never again harmed anyone. The
citizens of Gubbio fed the good beast, and when it died sincerely mourned
it. If you wish to know from whom I heard this edifying story--which is
true, and can be confirmed by some one now in Nuremberg who witnessed
it--let me tell you that it was the wicked wolf himself; not the Gubbio
one, but he from Switzerland. An old Minorite monk, to whom he
compassionately gave his horse, is the witness I mentioned. At the tavern
the priest told him what he had beheld with his own eyes. Do you still
inveigh against the dangerous beast, which acts like the good Samaritan,
and finds nothing more delightful than hearing or speaking of our dear
saint?"
"And this in the Town Hall during the dance?" asked Els, clasping her
hands as if she had heard something unprecedented.
Eva, fairly radiant with joy, nodded assent; and Els heard the ring of
pleasure in her clear voice, too, as she exclaimed: "That was just what
made the ball so delightful. The dancing! Oh, yes, it is easy enough to
walk and turn in time to the music when one has such a knight for a
partner; but that was by no means the pleasantest part of it. During the
interval--it seemed but an instant, yet it really lasted a considerable
time--we first entered into conversation."
"In one of the side rooms?" asked Els, the bright colour fading from her
cheeks.
"What are you thinking of?" replied Eva in a tone of offence. "I believe
I know what is seemly as well as anybody else. True, your Countess
Cordula did not set the most praiseworthy example. She allowed the whole
throng of knights to surround her in the ante-room, and your future
brother-in-law, Siebenburg, outdid them all. We--Heinz Schorlin and
I--sat near the Emperor's table in the great hall, where everybody could
see us. There the conversation naturally passed from the old Minorite to
the holy founder of his order, and remained there. And if ever valiant
knight possessed a devout mind, it is Heinz Schorlin. Whoever goes into
battle without relying upon God and his saints,' he said, 'will find his
courage lack wings, and his armour the surest defensive 'weapon.'"
"In the ballroom!" again fell from her sister's lips in the same tone of
amazement.
"Where else?" asked Eva angrily. "I never met him except there. What do
you other girls talk about at such entertainments, if it surprises you?
Besides, St. Francis was by no means our only subject; we spoke of the
future crusade, too. And oh!--you may believe me--we would have been glad
to talk of such things for hours. He knew many things about our saint;
but the precise one which makes him especially great and lovable, and
withal so powerful that he attracted all whom he deemed worthy to follow
him, he had not understood, and I was permitted to be the first person to
bring it clearly before his mind. Ah! and his wit is as keen as his
sword, and his heart is as open to all that is noble and sacred as it is
loyal to his lord and Emperor. If we meet again I shall win him for the
white cross on the black mantle and the battle against the enemies of the
faith."
"But, Eva," interrupted her sister, still under the spell of
astonishment, "such conversation amid the merry music of the pipers!"
"'Wherever three Christians meet, even though they are only laymen, there
is a church,' says Tertullian," Eva answered impressively. "One need not
go to the house of God to talk about the things which ought to be the
highest and dearest to every one; and Heinz Schorlin--I know it from his
own lips--is of the same opinion, for he told me voluntarily that he
would never forget the few hours which we had enjoyed together."
"Indeed!" said her sister thoughtfully. "But whether he does not owe this
pleasure more to the dancing than to the edifying conversation----"
"Certainly not!" replied Eva, very positively. "I can prove it, too; for
later, after he had heard many things about St. Clare, the female
counterpart of Francis, he vowed to make her his patron saint. Or do you
suppose that a knight changes his saints, as he does his doublet and coat
of mail, without having any great and powerful motive? Do you think it
possible that the idle pleasure of the dance led him to so important a
decision?"
"Certainly not. Nothing led him to it except the irresistible zeal of my
devout sister," answered Els, smiling, as she continued to comb her fair
hair. "She spoke with tongues in the ballroom, as the apostles did at
Pentecost, and thus our 'little saint' performed her first miracle: the
conversion of a godless knight during the dancing."
"Call it so, if you choose," replied Eva, her red lips pouting
scornfully, as if she felt raised above such pitiful derision. "How you
hurt, Els! You are pulling all the hair out of my head!"
The object of this rebuke had used the comb with the utmost care, but the
great luxuriance of the long, fair, waving locks had presented many an
impediment, and Eva seemed unusually sensitive that night. Els thought
she knew why, and made no answer to the unjust charge. She knew her
sister; and as she wound the braids about her head, and then, in the
maid's place, hung part of her finery on hooks, and laid part carefully
in the chest, she asked her numerous questions about the dance, but was
vouchsafed only monosyllabic replies.
At last Els knelt before the prie-dieu. Eva did the same, resting her
head so long upon her clasped hands that the patient older sister could
not wait for the "Amen," but, in order not to disturb Eva's devotion,
only pressed a light kiss upon her head and then carefully drew the
curtains closely over the windows which, instead of glass, contained
oiled parchment.
Eva's excitement filled her with anxiety. She knew, too, what a powerful
influence the bright moonlight sometimes exerted upon her while she
slept, and cast another glance at the closely curtained window before she
went to her own bed. There she lay a long time, with eyes wide open,
pondering over her sister's words, and in doing so perceived more and
more clearly that love was now knocking at the heart of the child
kneeling before the prie-dieu. Sir Heinz Schorlin, the wild butterfly,
desired to sip the honey from this sweet, untouched flower, and then
probably abandon her like so many before her. Love and anxiety made the
girl, whose opinion was usually milder than her sister's, a stern and
unwise judge, for she assumed that the Swiss--whose character in reality
was far removed from base hypocrisy--the man whom she had just termed a
wolf, had donned sheep's clothing to make her poor lambkin an easier
prey. But she was on guard and ready to spoil his game.
Did Eva really fail to understand the new feeling which had seized her so
swiftly and powerfully? Did she lull herself in the delusion that she
cared only for the welfare of the soul of the pious young knight?
Yes, it might be so, and prudent Els, who had watched her own little
world intently enough, said to herself that it would be pouring oil upon
the flames to tease Eva about the defeat which she, the "little saint,"
had sustained in the battle against the demands of the world and of the
feminine heart. Besides, her sister was too dear for her to rejoice in
her humiliation. Els resolved not to utter a word about the Swiss unless
compelled to do so.
Eva's prayers before retiring were often very long, but to-night it
seemed as if they would never end.
"She is not appealing to St. Clare for herself alone, but for another,"
thought Els. "I spend less time in doing it. True, a Heinz Schorlin needs
longer intercession than my Eva, my Wolff, and my poor pious mother. But
I won't disturb her yet."
Sighing faintly, she changed her position, but remained sitting propped
against the white pillows in order not to allow herself to be overcome by
sleep. But it was a hard struggle, and her lids often fell, her head
drooped upon her breast.
Dawn was already glimmering without when the supplicant at last rose and
sought her couch. Her sister let her lie quietly for a while, then she
rose and put out the lamp which Eva had forgotten to extinguish. The
latter noticed it, turned her face towards her and called her gently. "To
think that you should have to get up again, my poor Els! Give me a
good-night kiss."
"Gladly, dearest," replied the other. "But it is really quite time to say
'good-morning."'
"And you have kept awake so long!" replied Eva compassionately, as she
threw her arms gratefully around her sister's neck, kissed her tenderly,
and then pressed her hot cheek to hers.
"What is this?" cried Els, with sincere anxiety. "Are you hurt, child?
Surely you are weeping?"
"No, no," was the reply. "I am only--I only thought that I had adorned
myself, decked myself out with idle finery, although I know how many poor
people are starving in want and misery, and how much more pleasing in the
sight of the Lord is the grey robe of the cloistered nun. I could
scarcely leave the hall in my overweening pleasure, and yet it would have
beseemed me far better to share the sufferings of the crucified Saviour."
"But, child," replied Els, striving to soothe her sister, "how often I
have heard from you and our aunt, the abbess, that no one was so cheerful
and so glad to witness the enjoyment of human beings and animals as your
St. Francis!"
"He--he!" groaned Eva, "he who attained the highest goal, who heard the
voice of the Lord wherever he listened; he who chose poverty as his
beloved bride, who scorned show and parade and the trappings of wealth,
as he disdained earthly love; he who celebrated in song the love of the
soul glowing for the highest things, as no troubadour could do--oh, how
ardently he knew how to love, but to love the things which do not belong
to this world!"
Els longed to ask what Eva knew about the ardent fire of love; but she
restrained herself, darkened the bed as well as she could with the
movable curtain which hung from the ceiling on both sides above the
double couch, and said: "Be sensible, child, and put aside such thoughts.
How loudly the birds are twittering outside! If our father is obliged to
breakfast alone there may be a storm, and I should be glad to have an
hour's nap. You need slumber, too. Dancing is tiresome. Shut your eyes
and sleep as long as you can. I'll be as quiet as a mouse while I am
dressing."
As she spoke she turned away from her sister and no longer resisted the
sleep which soon closed her weary eyes.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Shipwrecked on the cliffs of 'better' and 'best'
IN THE FIRE OF THE FORGE
A ROMANCE OF OLD NUREMBERG
By Georg Ebers
Volume 2.
CHAPTER V.
As her father had ordered the servants not to disturb the young girls,
Els did not wake till the sun was high in the heavens. Eva's place at her
side was empty. She had already left the room. For the first time it had
been impossible to sleep even a few short moments, and when she heard
from the neighbouring cloister the ringing of the little bell that
summoned the nuns to prayers, she could stay in bed no longer.
Usually she liked to dress slowly, thinking meanwhile of many things
which stirred her soul. Sometimes while the maid or Els braided her hair
she could read a book of devotion which the abbess had given her. But
this morning she had carried the clothes she needed into the next room on
tiptoe, that she might not wake her sister, and urged Katterle, who
helped her dress, to hurry.
She longed to see her aunt at the convent. While kneeling at the
prie-dieu, she had reached the certainty that her patron saint had led
Heinz Schorlin to her. He was her knight and she his lady, so he must
render her obedience, and she would use it to estrange him from the
vanity of the world and make him a champion of the holy cause of the
Church of Christ, the victorious conqueror of her foes. Sky-blue, the
Holy Virgin's colour, should be hers, and thus his also, and every
victory gained by the knight with the sky-blue on his helmet, under St.
Clare's protection, would then be hers.
Heinz Schorlin was already one of the boldest and strongest knights; her
love must render him also one of the most godly. Yes, her love! If St.
Francis had not disdained to make a wolf his brother, why might she not
feel herself the loving sister of a youth who would obey her as a noble
falcon did his mistress, and whom she would teach to pursue the right
quarry? The abbess would not forbid such love, and the impulse that drew
her so strongly to the convent was the longing to know how her aunt would
receive her confession.
The night before when, after her conversation with Els, she began to
pray, she had feared that she had fallen into the snare of earthly love,
and dreaded the confession which she had to make to her aunt Kunigunde.
Now she found that it was no fleshly bond which united her to the knight.
Oh, no! As St. Francis had gone forth to console, to win souls for the
Lord, to bring peace and exhort to earnest labour in the service of the
Saviour, as his disciples had imitated him, and St. Clare had been
untiring in working, in his spirit, among women, she, too, would obey the
call which had come to her saint in Portiuncula, and prove herself for
the first time, according to the Scripture, "a fisher of souls."
Now she gladly anticipated the meeting; for though her sister did not
understand her, the abbess must know how to sympathise with what was
passing in her mind. This expectation was fulfilled; for as soon as she
was alone with her aunt she poured forth all her hopes and feelings
without reserve, eagerly and joyfully extolling her good fortune that,
through St. Clare, she had been enabled to find the noblest and most
valiant knight, that she might win him for the Holy War under her saint's
protection and to her honour.
The abbess, who knew women's hearts, had at first felt the same fear as
Els; but she soon changed her opinion, and thought that she might be
permitted to rejoice over the new emotion in her darling's breast.
No girl in love talked so openly and joyously of the conquest won, least
of all would her truthful, excitable niece, whom she had drawn into her
own path, speak thus of the man who disturbed her repose. No sensitive
girl, unfamiliar with the world and scarcely beyond childhood, would
decide with such steadfast firmness, so wholly free from every selfish
wish, the future of the man dearest to her heart. No, no! Eva had already
attained her new birth, and was not to be compared with other girls She
had already once reached that ecstatic rapture which followed only a long
absorption in God and an active sympathy with the deep human love of the
Saviour and the unspeakable sufferings which he had taken upon himself.
Little was to be feared from earthly love for one who devoted herself
with all the passion of her fervid nature to the divine Bridegroom. Among
the many whom Kunigunde received into the convent as novices, she was
most certainly "called." If she felt something which resembled love for
the young knight--and she made no concealment of it--it was only the
result of the sweet joy of winning for the Lord, the faith, and her saint
a soul which seemed to her worthy of such grace.
Dear, highly gifted child!
She, the abbess Kunigunde, was willing it should be so, and that Eva
should surpass herself. She should prove that genuine piety conquers even
the yearning of a quickly throbbing heart.
True, she must keep her eyes open in order to prevent Satan, who is
everywhere on the watch, from mingling in a game not wholly free from
peril. But, on the other hand, the abbess intended to help her beloved
niece to reap the reward of her piety.
It was scarcely to be doubted that Heinz Schorlin was fired with ardent
love for Eva; but, for that very reason, he would be ready to yield her
obedience, and therefore it was advisable to tell her exactly to what she
must persuade him. She must win him to join the Order of Malta, and if
the famous champion of Marchfield performed heroic deeds with the white
cross on his black mantle, or in war on his red tunic, he, the Emperor's
favourite, would be sure of a high position among the military members of
the order.
The young girl listened eagerly, but the elderly abbess herself became
excited while encouraging the young future "Sister" to her noble task.
The days when, with the inmates of the convent, she had prayed that the
Emperor Rudolph might fulfil the Pope's desire, and in a new crusade
again wrest the Holy Land from the infidels, came back to her memory, and
Heinz Schorlin, guided by the nuns of St. Clare, seemed the man to bring
the fulfilment of this old and cherished wish.
It appeared like a leading of the saints and a sign from God that Heinz
had been dubbed a knight, and commenced his glorious career at Lausanne
while the Emperor Rudolph pledged himself to a new crusade.
She detained Eva so long that dinner was over at the Ortlieb mansion, and
her impatient father would have sent for her had not the invalid mother
urged him to let her remain.
True, she longed to have a talk with her darling, who for the first time
in her life had attended a great entertainment, and doubtless it grieved
her to think that Eva did not feel the necessity of pouring out her heart
to her own mother rather than to any one else, and sharing with her all
the new emotions which undoubtedly had thrilled it; but she knew her
child, and would have considered it selfish to place any obstacle in the
pathway to eternal salvation of the elect whom God summoned with so loud
a voice. Formerly she would rather have seen the young girl, whose charms
were developing into such rare beauty, wedded to some good man; but now
she rejoiced in the idea that Eva was summoned to rule over the nuns in
the neighbouring cloister some day as abbess, in the place of her
sister-in-law Kunigunde. Her own days, she knew, were numbered, but where
could her child more surely find the happiness she desired for her than
with the beloved sisters of St. Clare, whose home she and her husband had
helped to build?
Els had concealed from her parents what she fancied she had discovered,
for any anxiety injured the invalid, and no one could anticipate how her
irritable father might receive the information of her fear. On the other
hand, she could confide her troubles without anxiety to Wolff, her
betrothed husband. He was wise, prudent, loved Eva like a sister, and in
exchanging thoughts with him she always discovered the right course to
pursue; but though she expected him so eagerly and confidently, he did
not come.
When, in the afternoon, Eva returned home, her whole manner expressed
such firm, cheerful composure that Els began to hope she might have been
mistaken. The undemonstrative yet tender affection with which she met her
mother, too, by no means harmonised with her fears.
How lovely the young girl looked as she sat on a low stool at the head of
the invalid's couch and, with her mother's emaciated hand clasped in
hers, told her all that she had seen and experienced the evening before!
To please the beloved sufferer, she dwelt longer on the description of
the gracious manner of the Emperor Rudolph and his sister to her and her
father, the conversation with which the Burgrave had honoured her, and
his son's invitation to dance. Then for the first time she mentioned
Heinz Schorlin, whom she had found a godly knight, and finally spoke
briefly of the distinguished foreign nobles and ladies whom he had
pointed out and named.
All this reminded the mother of former days and, in spite of the warning
of watchful Els not to talk too much, she did not cease questioning or
recalling the time when she herself attended such festivals, and as one
of the fairest maidens received much homage.
It had been a good day, for it was long since she had enjoyed so much
quiet in her own home. The von Montforts, she told Eva, had set off
early, with a great train of knights and servants, to ride to Radolzburg,
the castle of the Burgrave von Zollern. Her father thought they would
probably have a dance there, for the young sons of the Burgrave would act
as hosts.
Eva asked carelessly who rode with Cordula this time to submit to her
whims, but Els perceived by her sister's flushed cheeks and the tone of
her voice what she desired to know, and answered as if by accident that
Sir Heinz Schorlin certainly was not one of her companions, for he had
ridden through the Frauenthor that afternoon in the train of the Emperor
Rudolph and his Bohemian daughter-in-law.
Twilight was already beginning to gather, and Els could not see whether
this news afforded Eva pleasure or annoyance, for her mother had taken
too little heed of her weakness, and one of the attacks which the
physician so urgently ordered her to avoid by caution commenced.
Els and the convent Sister Renata, who helped her nurse the invalid, were
now completely absorbed in caring for her, but Eva turned away from the
beloved sufferer--her sensitive nature could not endure the sight of her
convulsions.
As soon as her mother again lay weak but quiet on the pillows which Els
had rearranged for her, Eva obeyed her entreaty to go away, and went to
her own chamber. When another attack drew her back to the invalid, a sign
from her sister as she reached the threshold bade her keep away from the
couch. Should it prove necessary, she whispered, she would call her. If
Wolff came, Eva was to tell him that she could not leave her mother, but
he must be sure to return early the next morning, as she had a great deal
to say to him.
Eva then went to her father, who was dressing to attend a banquet at the
house of Herr Berthold Vorchtel, the first Losunger--[Presiding
Officer]--in the Council, from which he would be loath to absent himself
for the very reason that his host's family had been hostile to him ever
since the rumour of the betrothal of Wolff Eysvogel, whom the Vorchtels
had regarded as their daughter Ursula's future husband.
Nevertheless, Herr Ernst would not have gone to the entertainment had his
wife's condition given cause for anxiety. But he was familiar with these
convulsions which, it is true, weakened the invalid, but produced no
other results; so he permitted Eva to help him put the last touches to
his dress, on which he lavished great care. Spick and span as if he were
just out of a bandbox, the elderly man, before leaving the house, went
once more to the sick-room, and Eva stood near as, after many questions
and requests, he whispered something to Els which she did not hear. With
excited curiosity she asked what he had said so secretly, but he only
answered hurriedly, "The name of the Man in the Moon's dog," kissed her
cheek, and ran downstairs.
At the foot he again turned to Eva and told her to send for him if her
mother should grow worse, for these entertainments at the Vorchtels
usually lasted a long time.
"Will the Eysvogels be there too?" asked the girl.
"Who knows," replied her father. "I shall be glad if Wolff comes."
The tone in which he uttered the name of his future son-in-law distinctly
showed how little he desired to meet any other member of the family, and
Eva said sympathisingly, "Then I hope you will have an opportunity to
remember me to Wolff."
"Shall I say nothing to Ursel?" asked the father, pressing a good-night
kiss upon the young girl's forehead.
"She would not care for it," was the reply. "It cannot be easy to forget
a man like Wolff."
"I wish he had stuck to Ursel, and let Els alone," her father answered
angrily. "It would have been better for both."
"Why, father," interrupted Eva reproachfully, "do not our lovers seem
really created for each other?"
"If the Eysvogels were only of the same opinion," exclaimed Ernst
Ortlieb, shrugging his shoulders with a faint sigh. "Whoever marries,
child, weds not only a man or a woman; all their kindred, unhappily, must
be taken into the bargain. However, Els did not lack earnest warning.
When your time comes, girl, your father will be more careful."
Smiling tenderly, he passed his hand over the little cap which covered
her thick, fair hair, and went out.
Eva returned to her room and sat down at the spinning-wheel in the bow
window, where Katterle had just drawn the curtains closely and lighted
the hanging lamp. But the distaff remained untouched, and her thoughts
wandered swiftly to the evening before and the ball at the Town Hall.
Heinz Schorlin's image rose more and more distinctly before her mind, and
this pleased her, for she fancied that he wore on his helm the blue
favour which she had chosen, and it led her to consider against what foe
she should first send him in the service of his lady and the Holy Church.
CHAPTER VI.
Eva had gazed into vacancy a long time, and beheld a succession of
pleasing pictures, in every one of which, Heinz Schorlin appeared. Once,
in imagination, she placed a wreath on his helmet after a great victory
over the infidels.
Why should not this vision become a reality? Doubtless it owed its origin
to a memory, for Wolff Eysvogel had been fired with love for her sister
while Els was winding laurel around his helmet.
After the Honourable Council had resolved that the youths belonging to
noble families, who had fought in the battle of Marchfield and returned
victorious, should be adorned with wreaths by the maidens of their
choice, Fate had appointed her sister to crown Eysvogel.
At that time Wolff had but recently recovered from the severe wounds with
which he had returned from the campaign. But while he knelt before Els
and his eyes met hers, love had overmastered him so swiftly and
powerfully, that at the end of a few days he determined to woo her.
Meanwhile his own family resolutely opposed his choice. The father
declared that he had made an agreement with Berthold Vorchtel to marry
him to his daughter Ursula, and withdrawal on his son's part would
embarrass him. His grandmother, the arrogant old Countess Rotterbach,
agreed with him, and declared that Wolff ought to wed no one except a
lady of the most aristocratic birth or an heiress like Ursula. Her
daughter Rosalinde Eysvogel, as usual, was the echo of her mother.
Herr Ernst Ortlieb, too, would far rather have seen his Els marry into
another home; but Wolff himself was a young man of such faultless honour,
and the bride he had chosen was so eager to become his, that he deemed it
a duty to forget the aversion inspired by the suitor's family.
As for Wolff, he had so firmly persisted in his resolve that his parents
at last permitted him to ask for his darling's hand, but his father had
made it a condition that the betrothal, on account of the youth of the
lovers, should not be announced till after Wolff had returned from Milan,
where he was to finish the studies commenced in Venice. True, everyone
had supposed that they were completed long ago, but Eysvogel senior
insisted upon his demand, and afterwards succeeded in deferring the
announcement of the betrothal, until the resolute persistence of Wolff,
who meanwhile had entered the great commercial house, and the wish of his
own aged mother, a sensible woman, who from the first had approved her
grandson's choice and to whom Herr Casper was obliged to show a certain
degree of consideration, compelled him to give it publicity.
A few days later Herr Casper's brother died, and soon after his estimable
old mother. He used these events as a pretext for longer delay, saying
that both he and his wife needed at least six months' interval ere they
could forget their mourning in a gay wedding festival. Besides, he would
prefer not to have the marriage take place until after Wolff's election
to the Council, which, in all probability, would occur after Walpurgis of
the coming year.
Ernst Ortlieb had sullenly submitted to all this. Nothing but his love
for his child and respect for Herr Casper's dead mother, who had taken
Els to her heart like a beloved granddaughter, would have enabled him to
conquer his hasty temper in his negotiations with the man whom he
detested in his inmost soul, and not hurl back the consent so reluctantly
granted to his son.
The friends who knew him admired the strength of will with which he
governed his impetuous nature in this transaction. Some asserted that
secret obligations compelled him to yield to the rich Eysvogel; for
though the Ortlieb mercantile house was reputed wealthy, the business
prudence of its head resulted in smaller profits, and people had not
forgotten that it had suffered heavy losses during the terrible period of
despotism which had preceded the Emperor Rudolph's accession to the
throne.
The insecurity of the high-roads had injured every merchant, but in
trying to find some explanation for Herr Ortlieb's submission the attacks
which had cost him one and another train of wares were regarded as
specially disastrous.
Finally, the dowry which Els was to bring bore no comparison to the large
sums Ernst Ortlieb had lavished upon the erection of the St. Clare
Convent, and hence it was inferred that the wealth of the firm had
sustained considerable losses. This found ready credence, owing to the
retired life led by the Ortliebs,--whose house had formerly been one of
the most hospitable in the city,--ever since the wife had become an
invalid and Eva had grown up with an aversion to the world. Few took the
trouble to inquire into the very apparent causes for the change.
Yet this view of the matter was opposed by many-nay, when the
conversation turned upon these subjects, Herr Berthold Vorchtel, perhaps
the richest and most distinguished man in Nuremberg, who rented the
imperial taxes, made comments from which, had it not been so difficult to
believe, people might have inferred that Casper Eysvogel was indebted to
Ernst Ortlieb rather than the latter to him.
Yet the cautious, prudent man never explained the foundation of his
opinion, for he very rarely mentioned either of the two firms; yet prior
to the battle of Marchfield he had believed that his own daughter Ursula
and Wolff Eysvogel would sooner or later wed. Herr Casper, the young
man's father, had strengthened this expectation. He himself and his wife
esteemed Wolff, and his "Ursel" had shown plainly enough that she
preferred him to the other friends of her elder brother Ulrich.
When he returned home the two met like brother and sister, and the
parents of Ursula Vorchtel had expected Wolff's proposal until the day on
which the wreaths were bestowed had made them poorer by a favourite wish
and destroyed the fairest hope of their daughter Ursula.
The worthy merchant, it is true, deemed love a beautiful thing, but in
Nuremberg it was the parents who chose wives and husbands for their sons
and daughters; yet, after marriage, love took possession of the newly
wedded pair. A transgression of this ancient custom was very rare, and
even though Wolff's heart was fired with love for Els Ortlieb, his
father, Herr Vorchtel thought, should have refused his consent to the
betrothal, especially as he had already treated Ursel as his future
daughter. Some compulsion must have been imposed upon him when he
permitted his son to choose a wife other than the one selected.
But what could render one merchant dependent upon another except business
obligations?--and Berthold Vorchtel was sharp-sighted. He knew the heavy
draft which Herr Casper had made upon the confidence reposed in the old
firm, and thought he had perceived that the great splendour displayed by
the women of the Eysvogel family, the liberality with which Herr Casper
had aided his impoverished noble relatives, and the lavish expenditure of
his son-in-law, the debt-laden Sir Seitz Siebenburg, drew too heavily
upon the revenues of the ancient house.
Even now Casper Eysvogel's whole conduct proved how unwelcome was his
son's choice. To him, Ursula's father, he still intimated on many an
occasion that he had by no means resigned every hope of becoming, through
his son, more nearly allied to his family, for a betrothal was not a
wedding.
Berthold Vorchtel, however, was not the man to enter into such
double-dealing, although he saw plainly enough how matters stood with his
poor child. She had confided her feelings to no one; yet, in spite of
Ursula's reserved nature, even a stranger could perceive that something
clouded her happiness. Besides, she had persistently refused the
distinguished suitors who sought the wealthy Herr Berthold's pretty
daughter, and only very recently had promised her parents, of her own
free will, to give up her opposition to marriage.
Ever since the betrothal, to the sincere sorrow of Els, she had
studiously avoided Wolff's future bride, who had been one of her dearest
friends; and Ulrich, Herr Vorchtel's oldest son, took his sister's part,
and at every opportunity showed Wolff--who from a child, and also in the
battle of Marchfield, had been a favourite comrade--that he bore him a
grudge, and considered his betrothal to any one except Ursula an act of
shameful perfidy.
The fair-minded father did not approve of his son's conduct, for his wife
had learned from her daughter that Wolff had never spoken to her of love,
or promised marriage.
Therefore, whenever Herr Berthold Vorchtel met Els's father--and this
often happened in the Council--he treated him with marked respect, and
when there was an entertainment in his house sent him an invitation, as
in former years, which Ernst Urtlieb accepted, unless something of
importance prevented.
But though the elder Vorchtel was powerless to change his children's
conduct, he never wearied of representing to his son how unjust and
dangerous were the attacks with which, on every occasion, he irritated
Wolff, whose strength and skill in fencing were almost unequalled in
Nuremberg. In fact, the latter would long since have challenged his
former friend had he not been so conscious of his own superiority, and
shrunk from the thought of bringing fresh sorrow upon Ursula and her
parents, whom he still remembered with friendly regard.
Eva was fond of her future brother-in-law, and it had not escaped her
notice that of late something troubled him.
What was it?
She thoughtfully gave the wheel a push, and as it turned swiftly she
remembered the Swiss dance the evening before, and suddenly clenched her
small right hand and dealt the palm of her left a light blow.
She fancied that she had discovered the cause of Wolff's depression, for
she again saw distinctly before her his sister Isabella's husband, Sir
Seitz Siebenburg, as he swung Countess Cordula around so recklessly that
her skirt, adorned with glittering jewels, fluttered far out from her
figure. In the room adjacent to the hall he had flung himself upon his
knees before the countess, and Eva fancied she again beheld his big, red
face, with its long, thick, yellow mustache, whose ends projected on both
sides in a fashion worn by few men of his rank. The expression of the
watery blue eyes, with which he stared Cordula in the face, were those of
a drunkard.
To-day he had followed her to the Kadolzburg, and probably meant to spend
the night there. So Wolff had ample reason to be anxious about his sister
and her peace of mind. That must be it!
Perhaps he would yet come that evening, to give Els at least a greeting
from the street. How late was it?
She hastily tried to draw the curtains aside from the window, but this
was not accomplished as quickly as she expected--they had been care fully
fastened with pins. Eva noticed it, and suddenly remembered her father's
whispered words to Els.
They were undoubtedly about the window. According to the calendar, the
moon would be full that day, and she knew very well that it had a strange
influence upon her. True, within the past year it appeared to have lost
its power; but formerly, especially when she had devoted herself very
earnestly to religious exercises, she had often, without knowing how or
why, left her bed and wandered about, not only in her chamber but through
the house. Once she had climbed to the dovecot in the courtyard, and
another time had mounted to the garret where, she did not know in what
way, she had been awakened. When she looked around, the moon was shining
into the spacious room, and showed her that she was perched on one of the
highest beams in the network of rafters which, joined with the utmost
skill, supported the roof. Below her yawned a deep gulf, and as she
looked down into it she was seized with such terror that she uttered a
loud shriek for help, and did not recover her calmness until the old
housekeeper, Martsche, who had started from her bed in alarm, brought her
father to her.
She had been taken down with the utmost care. No one was permitted to
help except white-haired Nickel, the old head packer, who often let a
whole day pass without opening his lips; for Herr Ernst seemed to lay
great stress upon keeping the moon's influence on Eva a secret. There was
indeed something uncanny about this night-walking, for even now it seemed
incomprehensible how she had reached the beam, which was at least the
height of three men above the floor. A fall might have cost her life, and
her father was right in trying to prevent a repetition of such nocturnal
excursions. This time Els had helped him.
How faithfully she cared for them all!
Yes, she had barred out even the faintest glimmer. Eva smiled as she saw
the numerous pins with which her sister had fastened the curtain, and an
irresistible longing seized her to see once more the wonderful light that
promoted the growth of the hair if cut during its increase, and also
exerted so strange an influence upon her.
She must look up at the moon!
Swiftly and skilfully, as if aided by invisible hands, her dainty fingers
opened curtain and window.
Drawing a deep breath, with an emotion of pleasure which she had not
experienced for a long time, she gazed at the linden before the house
steeped in silvery radiance, and upward to the pure disk of the full moon
sailing in the cloudless sky. How beautiful and still the night was! How
delightful it would be to walk up and down the garden, with her aunt the
abbess, with Els, and perhaps--she felt the blood crimson her
cheeks--with Heinz Schorlin!
Where was he now?
Undoubtedly with the Emperor and his ladies, perhaps at the side of the
Bohemian princess, the young Duchess Agnes, who yesterday had so plainly
showed her pleasure in his society.
Just then the watch, marching from the Marienthurn to the Frauenthor,
gave her vagrant thoughts a new turn. The city guard was soon followed by
a troop of horse, which probably belonged to the Emperor's train.
It was delightful to gaze, at this late hour, into the moonlit street,
and she wondered that she had never enjoyed it before. True, it would
have been still pleasanter had Els borne her company; and, besides, she
longed to tell her the new explanation she had found for Wolff's altered
manner.
Perhaps her mother was asleep, and she could come with her.
How still the house was!
Cautiously opening the door of the sick-room, she glanced in. Els was
standing at the head of the bed, supporting her mother with her strong
young arms, while Sister Renata pushed the cushions between the
sufferer's back and the bedstead.
The old difficulty of breathing had evidently attacked her again.
Yes, yes, the dim light of the lamp was shining on her pale face, and the
large sunken eyes were gazing with imploring anguish at the image of the
Virgin on the opposite wall.
How gladly Eva would have afforded her relief! She looked with a faint
sense of envy at her sister, whose skilful, careful hands did everything
to the satisfaction of the beloved sufferer, while in nursing she failed
only too often in giving the right touch. But she could pray--implore the
aid of her saint very fervently; nay, she was more familiar with her, and
might hope that she would fulfil a heartfelt wish of hers more quickly
than for her sister. It would not do to call Els to the window. She
closed the door gently, returned to her chamber, knelt and implored St.
Clare, with all the fervour of her heart, to grant her mother a good
night. Then she again drew the curtains closely over the window, and went
to call Katterle to help her undress.
But the maid was just entering with fresh water. What was the matter with
her?
Her hand trembled as she braided her young mistress's hair and sometimes,
with a faint sigh, she stopped the movement of the comb.
Her silence could be easily explained; for Eva had often forbidden
Katterle to talk, when she disturbed her meditation. Yet the girl must
have had some special burden on her mind, for when Eva had gone to bed
she could not resolve to leave the room, but remained standing on the
threshold in evident embarrassment.
Eva encouraged her to speak, and Katterle, so confused that she often
hesitated for words and pulled at her ribbons till she was in danger of
tearing them from her white apron, stammered that she did not come on her
own account, but for another person. It was well known in the household
that her betrothed husband, the true and steadfast Walther Biberli,
served a godly knight, her countryman.
"I know it," said Eva with apparent composure, "and your Biberli has
commissioned you to bear me the respectful greeting of Sir Heinz
Schorlin."
The girl looked at her young mistress in surprise. She had been prepared
for a sharp rebuke, and had yielded to her lover's entreaties to under
take this service amid tears, and with great anxiety; for if her act
should be betrayed, she would lose, amid bitter reproaches, the place she
so greatly prized. Yet Biberli's power over her and her faith in him were
so great that she would have followed him into a lion's den; and it had
scarcely seemed a more desirable venture to carry a love-greeting to the
pious maiden who held men in such disfavour, and could burst into
passionate anger as suddenly as her father.
And now?
Eva had expected such a message. It seemed like a miracle to Katterle.
With a sigh of relief, and a hasty thanksgiving to her patron saint, she
at once began to praise the virtue and piety of the servant as well as
his lord; but Eva again interrupted, and asked what Sir Heinz Schorlin
desired.
Katterle, with new-born confidence, repeated, as if it were some trivial
request, the words Biberli had impressed upon her mind.
"By virtue of the right of every good and devout knight to ask his lady
for her colour, Sir Heinz Schorlin, with all due reverence, humbly prays
you to name yours; for how could he hold up his head before you and all
the knights if he were denied the privilege of wearing it in your honour,
in war as well as in peace?"
Here her mistress again interrupted with a positive "I know," and, still
more emboldened, Katterle continued the ex-schoolmaster's lesson to the
end:
"His lord, my lover says, will wait here beneath the window, in all
reverence, though it should be till morning, until you show him your
sweet face. No, don't interrupt me yet, Mistress Eva, for you must know
that Sir Heinz's lady mother committed her dear son to my Biberli's care,
that he might guard him from injury and illness. But since his master met
you, he has been tottering about as though he had received a
spear-thrust, and as the knight confessed to his faithful servitor that
no leech could help him until you permitted him to open his heart to you
and show you with what humble devotion----"
But here the maid was interrupted in a manner very different from her
expectations, for Eva had raised herself on her pillows and, almost
unable to control her voice in the excess of her wrath, exclaimed:
"The master who presumes to seek through his servant----And by what right
does the knight dare thus insolently----But no! Who knows what modest
wish was transformed in your mouth to so unprecedented a demand? He
desired to see my face? He wanted to speak to me in person, to confess I
know not what? From you--you, Katterle, the maid--the knight expects----"
Here she struck her little hand angrily against the wood of the bedstead
and, panting for breath, continued:
"I'll show him!----Yet no! What I have to answer no one else----From me,
from me alone, he shall learn without delay. There is paper in yonder
chest, on the very top; bring it to me, with pen and ink."
Katterle silently hurried to obey this order, but Eva pressed her hand
upon her heaving bosom, and gazed silently into vacancy.
The manservant and the maid whom Heinz Schorlin had made his messengers
certainly could have no conception of the bond that united her to him;
even her own sister had misunderstood it. He should now learn that Eva
Ortlieb knew what beseemed her! But she, too, longed for another meeting,
and this conduct rendered it necessary.
The sooner they two had a conversation, the better. She could confidently
venture to invite him to the meeting which she had in view; her aunt, the
abbess, had promised to stand by her side, if she needed her, in her
intercourse with the knight.
But her colour?
Katterle had long since laid the paper and writing materials before her,
but she still pondered. At last, with a smile of satisfaction, she seized
the pen. The manner in which she intended to mention the colour should
show him the nature of the bond which united them.
She was mistress of the pen, for in the convent she had copied the
gospels, the psalms, and other portions of the Scriptures, yet her hand
trembled as she committed the following lines to the paper:
"I am angered--nay, even grieved--that you, a godly knight, who knows the
reverence due to a lady, have ventured to await my greeting in front of
my father's house. If you are a true knight, you must be aware that you
voluntarily promised to obey my every glance. I can rely upon this
pledge, and since I find it necessary to talk with you, I invite you to
an interview--when and where, my maid, who is betrothed to your servant,
shall inform him. A friend, who has your welfare at heart as well as
mine, will be with me. It must be soon, with the permission of St. Clare,
who, since you have chosen her for your patron saint, looks down upon you
as well as on me.
"As for my colour, I know not what to name; the baubles associated with
earthly love are unfamiliar to me. But blue is the colour of the pure
heaven and its noble queen, the gracious Virgin. If you make this colour
yours and fight for it, I shall rejoice, and am willing to name it mine."
At the bottom of the little note she wrote only her Christian name "Eva,"
and when she read it over she found that it contained, in apt and seemly
phrases, everything that she desired to say to the knight.
While folding the paper and considering how she could fasten it, as there
was no wax at hand, she thought of the narrow ribbons with which Els tied
together, in sets of half a dozen, the fine kerchiefs worn over the neck
and bosom, when they came from the wash. They were sky-blue, and nothing
could be more suitable for the purpose.
Katterle brought one from the top of the chest. Eva wound it swiftly
around the little roll, and the maid hastily left the room, sure of the
gratitude of the true and steadfast Biberli.
When Eva was again alone, she at first thought that she might rejoice
over her hasty act; but on asking herself what Els would say, she felt
certain that she would disapprove of it and, becoming disconcerted, began
to imagine what consequences it might entail.
The advice which her father had recently given Wolff, never to let any
important letter pass out of his hands until at least one night had
elapsed, returned to her memory, and from that instant the little note
burdened her soul like a hundred-pound weight.
She would fain have started up to get it back again, and a strong
attraction drew her towards the window to ascertain whether Heinz
Schorlin had really come and was awaiting her greeting.
Perhaps Katterle had not yet delivered the note. What if she were still
standing at the door of the house to wait for Biberli? If, to be
absolutely certain, she should just glance out, that would not be looking
for the knight, and she availed herself of the excuse without delay.
In an instant she sprang from her bed and gently drew the curtain aside.
The street was perfectly still. The linden and the neighbouring houses
cast dark, sharply outlined shadows upon the light pavement, and from the
convent garden the song of the nightingale echoed down the quiet moonlit
street.
Katterle had probably already given the note to Heinz Schorlin who,
obedient to his lady's command, as beseemed a knight, had gone away. This
soothed her anxiety, and with a sigh she went back to bed.
But the longing to look out into the street again was so strong that she
yielded to the temptation; yet, ere she reached the window, she summoned
the strength of will which was peculiar to her and, lying down, once more
closed her lids, with the firm resolve to see and hear nothing. As she
had not shut her eyes the night before and, from dread of the ball, had
slept very little during the preceding one, she soon, though the moon was
shining in through the parted curtains, lapsed into a condition midway
between sleep and waking. Extreme fatigue had deadened consciousness, yet
she fancied that at times she heard the sound of footsteps on the
pavement outside, and the deep voices of men.
Nor was what she heard in her half-dozing state, which was soon followed
by the sound slumber of youth, any delusion of the senses.
CHAPTER VII.
The moon found something in front of the Ortlieb house worth looking at.
Rarely had she lighted with purer, brighter radiance the pathway of the
mortals who excited her curiosity, than that of the two handsome young
men who, at a moderate interval of time, passed through the Frauenthor,
and finally entered the courtyard of the Ortlieb residence almost at the
same instant.
Luna first saw them pace silently to and fro, and delighted in the
resentful glances they cast at each other. This joy increased as the one
in the long coat, embroidered on the shoulder with birds, and then the
other, whose court costume well became his lithe, powerful limbs, sat
down, each on one of the chains connecting the granite posts between the
street and the courtyard.
The very tall one, who looked grave and anxious, was Wolff Eysvogel; the
other, somewhat shorter, who swung gaily to and fro on the chain as if it
afforded him much amusement, Heinz Schorlin.
Both frequently glanced up at the lighted bow-window and the smaller one
on the second story, behind which Eva lay half asleep. This was the first
meeting of the two men.
Wolff, aware of his excellent right to remain on this-spot, would have
shown the annoying intruder his displeasure long before, had he not
supposed that the other, whom at the first glance he recognised as a
knight, was one of Countess Cordula von Montfort's admirers. Yet he soon
became unable to control his anger and impatience. Yielding to a hasty
impulse, he left the chain, but as he approached the stranger the latter
gave his swaying seat a swifter motion and, without vouchsafing him
either greeting or introductory remark, said carelessly, "This is a
lovely night."
"I am of the same opinion," replied Wolff curtly. "But I would like to
ask, sir, what induced you to choose the courtyard of this house to enjoy
it?"
"Induced?" asked the Swiss in astonishment; then, looking the other in
the face with defiant sharpness, he added scornfully:
"I am warming the chain because it suits me to do so."
"You are allowed the pleasure," returned Wolff in an irritated tone;
"nay, I can understand that night birds of your sort find no better
amusement. Still, it seems to me that a knight who wishes to keep iron
hot might attain his object better in another way."
"Why, of course," cried Heinz Schorlin, springing swiftly to his feet
with rare elasticity. "It gives a pleasant warmth when blade strikes
blade or the hot blood wets them. I am no friend to darkness, and it
seems to me, sir, as if we were standing in each other's light here."
"There our opinions concur for the second time this lovely night,"
quietly replied the patrician's son, conscious of his unusual strength
and skill in fencing, with a slight touch of scorn. "Like you, I am
always ready to cross blades with another; only, the public street is
hardly the fitting place for it."
"May the plague take you!" muttered the Swiss in assent to Wolff's
opinion. "Besides, sir, who ever grasps iron so swiftly is worth a
parley. To ask whether you are of knightly lineage would be useless
trouble, and should it come to a genuine sword-dance.
"You will find a partner in me at any time," was the reply, "as I, who
wear my ancient escutcheon with good right, would gladly give you a
crimson memento of this hour--though you were but the son of a cobbler.
But first let us ascertain--for I, too, dislike darkness--whether we are
really standing in each other's light. With all due respect for your
fancy for warming chains, it would be wise, ere Sir Red Coat--[The
executioner]--puts his round our ankles for disturbing the peace, to have
a sensible talk."
"Try it, for aught I care," responded Heinz Schorlin cheerily. "Unluckily
for me, I live in a state of perpetual feud with good sense. One thing,
however, seems certain without any serious reflection: the attraction
which draws me here, as well as you, will not enter the cloister as a
monk, but as a little nun, wears no beard, but braids her hair. Briefly,
then, if you are here for Countess Cordula von Montfort's sake, your
errand is vain; she will sleep at Kadolzburg to-night."
"May her slumber be sweet!" replied Wolff calmly. "She is as near to me
as yonder moon."
"That gives the matter a more serious aspect," cried the knight angrily.
"You or I. What is your lady's name?"
"That, to my mind, is asking too much," replied Wolff firmly.
"And the law of love gives you the right to withhold an answer. But, sir,
we must nevertheless learn for the sake of what fairest fair we have each
foregone sleep."
"Then tell me, by your favour, your lady's colour," Wolff asked the
Swiss.
The latter laughed gaily: "I am still putting that question to my saint."
Then, noticing Wolff's shake of the head, he went on in a more serious
tone: "If you will have a little patience, I hope I may be able to tell
you, ere we part."
This assurance also seemed to Wolff an enigma. Who in the wide world
would come from under the respectable Ortlieb roof, at this hour, to tell
a stranger anything whatsoever concerning one of its daughters? Neither
could have given him the right to regard her as his lady, and steal at
night, like a marten, around the house which contained his dearest
treasure. This obscurity was an offence to Wolff Eysvogel, and he was not
the man to submit to it. Yonder insolent fellow should learn, to his
hurt, that he had made a blunder.
But scarcely had he begun to explain to Heinz that he claimed the right
to protect both the daughters of this house, the younger as well as the
older, since they had no brother, when the knight interrupted:
"Oho! There are two of them, and she, too, spoke of a sister. So, if it
comes to sharing, sir, we need not emulate the judgment of Solomon. Let
us see! The colour is uncertain, but to every Christian mortal a name
clings as closely as a shadow and, if I mention the initial letter of the
one which adorns my lady, I believe I shall commit no offence that a
court of love could condemn. The initial, which I like because it is
daintily rounded and not too difficult to write-mark it well--is 'E.'"
Wolff Eysvogel started slightly and gripped the dagger in his belt, but
instantly withdrew his hand and answered with mingled amusement and
indignation: "Thanks for your good will, Sir Knight, but this, too,
brings us no nearer our goal; the E is the initial of both the Ortlieb
sisters. The elder who, as you may know, is my betrothed bride, bears the
name of Elizabeth, or Els, as we say in Nuremberg."
"And the younger," cried Heinz joyously, "honours with her gracious
innocence the name of her through whom sin came into the world."
"But you, Sir Knight," exclaimed Wolff fiercely, "would do better not to
name sin and Eva Ortlieb in the same breath. If you are of a different
opinion----"
"Then," interrupted the Swiss, "we come back to warming the iron."
"As you say," cried Wolff resolutely. "In spite of the peace of the
country, I will be at your service at any time. As you see, I went out
unarmed, and it would not be well done to cross swords here."
"Certainly not," Heinz assented. "But many days and nights will follow
this moonlight one, and that you may have little difficulty in finding me
whenever you desire, know that my name is Heinrich--or to more intimate
friends, among whom you might easily be numbered if we don't deprive each
other of the pleasure of meeting again under the sun--Heinz Schorlin."
"Schorlin?" asked Wolff in surprise. "Then you are the knight who, when a
beardless boy, cut down on the Marchfield the Bohemian whose lance had
slain the Emperor's charger, the Swiss who aided him to mount the steed
of Ramsweg of Thurgau--your uncle, if I am not mistaken--and then took
the wild ride to bring up the tall Capeller, with his troops, who so
gloriously decided the day."
"And," laughed Heinz, "who was finally borne off the field as dead before
the fulfilment of his darling wish to redden Swiss steel with royal
Bohemian blood. This closed the chronicle, Herr--what shall I call you?"
"Wolff Eysvogel, of Nuremberg," replied the other.
"Aha! A son of the rich merchant where the Duke of Gulich found
quarters?" cried the Swiss, lifting his cap bordered with fine miniver.
"May confusion seize me! If I were not my father's son, I wouldn't mind
changing places with you. It must make the neck uncommonly stiff,
methinks, to have a knightly escutcheon on door and breast, and yet be
able to fling florins and zecchins broadcast without offending the devil
by an empty purse. If you don't happen to know how such a thing looks, I
can show you."
"Yet rumour says," observed Wolff, "that the Emperor is gracious to you,
and knows how to fill it again."
"If one doesn't go too far," replied Heinz, "and my royal master, who
lacks spending money himself only too often, doesn't keep his word that
it was done for the last time. I heard that yesterday morning, and
thought that the golden blessing which preceded it would last the dear
saints only knew how long. But ere the cock had crowed even once this
morning the last florin had vanished. Dice, Herr Wolff Eysvogel--dice!"
"Then I would keep my hands off them," said the other meaningly.
"If the Old Nick or some one else did not always guide them back! Did
you, a rich man's son, never try what the dice would do for you?"
"Yes, Sir Knight. It was at Venice, where I was pursuing my studies, and
tried my luck at gambling on many a merry evening with other sons of
mercantile families from Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Cologne."
"And your feathers were generously plucked?"
"By no means. I usually left a winner. But after they fleeced a dear
friend from Ulm, and he robbed his master, I dropped dice."
"And you did so as easily as if it were a short fast after an abundant
meal?"
"It was little more difficult," Wolff asserted. "My father would have
gladly seen me outdo my countrymen, and sent me more money than I needed.
Why should I deprive honest fellows who had less?"
"That's just the difficulty," cried his companion eagerly. "It was easy
for you to renounce games of chance because your winnings only added more
to the rest, and you did not wish to pluck poorer partners. But I! A poor
devil like me cannot maintain armour-bearer, servants, and steeds out of
what the dear little mother at home in her faithful care can spare from
crops and interest. How could we succeed in making a fair appearance at
court and in the tournament if it were not for the dice? And then, when I
lose, I again become but the poor knight the saints made me; when I win,
on the contrary, I am the great and wealthy lord I would have been born
had the Lord permitted me to choose my own cradle. Besides, those who
lose through me are mainly dukes, counts, and gentlemen with rich fiefs
and fat bourgs, whom losing doubtless benefits, as bleeding relieves a
sick man. What suits the soldier does not befit the merchant. We live
wholly amid risks and wagers. Every battle, every skirmish is a game
whose stake is life. Whoever reflects long is sure to lose. If I could
only describe, Herr Eysvogel, what it is to dash headlong upon the foe!"
"I could imagine that vividly enough," Wolff eagerly interposed. "I, too,
have broken many a lance in the lists and shed blood enough."
"What a dunce I am!" cried Heinz in amazement, pressing his hand upon his
brow. "That's why your face was so familiar! By my saint! I am no knight
if I did not see you then, before the battle waxed hot. It was close
beside your Burgrave Frederick, who held aloft the imperial banner."
"Probably," replied Wolff in a tone of assent. "He sometimes entrusted
the standard to me, when it grew too heavy for his powerful arm, because
I was the tallest and the strongest of our Nuremberg band. But,
unluckily, I could not render this service long. A scimitar gashed my
head. The larger part of the little scar is hidden under my hair."
"The little scar!" repeated Heinz gaily. "It was wide enough, at any
rate, for the greatest soul to slip through it. A scar on the head from a
wound received four years ago, and yet distinctly visible in the
moonlight!"
"It should serve as a warning," replied Wolff, glancing anxiously up the
street. "If the patrol, or any nocturnal reveller should catch sight of
us, it would be ill for the fair fame of the Ortlieb sisters, for
everybody knows that only one--Els's betrothed lover--has a right to
await a greeting here at so late an hour. So follow me into the shadow of
the linden, I entreat you; for yonder--surely you see it too--a figure is
gliding towards us."
Heinz Schorlin's laugh rang out like a bell as he whispered to the
Nuremberg patrician: "That figure is familiar to me, and neither we nor
our ladies need fear any evil from it. Excuse me moment, and I'll wager
twenty gold florins against yonder linden leaf that, ere the moonlight
has left the curbstone, I can tell you my lady's colour."
As he spoke he hastened towards the figure, now, standing motionless
within the shadow of the door post beside the lofty entrance.
Wolff Eysvogel remained alone, gazing thoughtfully upon the ground.
CHAPTER VIII.
The silent wanderer above had expected to behold a scene very unlike an
interview between two men. The latter required neither her purest,
fullest light, nor the shadow of a blossoming linden.
Now Luna saw the young Nuremberg merchant gaze after the Swiss with an
expression of such deep anxiety and pain upon his manly features that she
felt the utmost pity for him. He did not look upward as usual to the
window of his beautiful Els, but either fixed his eyes upon the spot
where his new acquaintance was conversing with another person, or bent
them anxiously upon the ground.
As Wolff thought of Heinz Schorlin, it seemed as if Fate had thrown him
into the way of the Swiss that he might feel with twofold anguish the
thorns besetting his own life path. The young knight was proffered the
rose without the thorn. What cares had he? The present threw into his lap
its fairest blessings, and when he looked into the future he beheld only
the cheering buds of hope.
Yet this favourite of fortune had expressed a desire to change places
with him. The thought that many others, too, would be glad to step into
his shoes tortured Wolff's honest heart as though he himself were to
blame for the delusion of these short-sighted folk.
Apart from his strength and health, his well-formed body, his noble
birth, his faith in the love of his betrothed bride--at this hour he
forgot how much these things were--he found nothing in his lot which
seemed worth desiring.
He might not even rejoice in his stainless honesty with the same perfect
confidence as in his betrothal.
Yes, he had cared for noble old Berthold Vorchtel's daughter as if she
were his sister. He had even found pleasure in the thought that Ursula
was destined to become his wife, yet no word either of love or allusion
to future marriage had been exchanged between them. He had felt free, and
had a right to consider himself so, when love for Els Ortlieb overwhelmed
him so swiftly and powerfully.
Yet Ursula and her oldest brother treated him as if he had been guilty of
base disloyalty. His pure conscience, however, enabled him to endure this
more easily than the other burden, of which he became aware on the
long-anticipated day when his father made him a partner in the old firm
and gave him an insight into the condition of the property and the course
of the business.
Then he had learned the heavy losses which had been sustained recently,
and the sad disparity existing between the great display by which his
father and mother, as well as his grandmother, the countess, maintained
the appearance of their former princely wealth, and the balances of the
last few years.
When he had just boasted to the reckless young knight that he had given
up gaming, he told but half the truth, for though since his period of
study in Venice, and later in Milan, he had not touched dice, he had been
forced to consent to a series of enterprises undertaken by his father,
whose stakes were far different from the gambling of the knights and
nobles at the Green Shield or in the camp.
Yet he intended to bind the fate of the woman he loved to his own, for
Els, spite of the opposition of his family, would have been already
indissolubly united to him, had not one failure after another destroyed
his courage to take her hand. Finally, he deemed it advisable to await
the result of the last great enterprise, now on the eve of decision. It
might compensate for many of the losses of recent years. Should it be
favourable, the heaviest burden would be lifted from his soul; in the
opposite case the old house would be shaken to its foundations. Yet even
its fall would have been easier for him to endure than this cruel
uncertainty, to which was added the torturing anxiety of bearing the
responsibility of things for which he was not to blame, and of which,
moreover, he was even denied a clear view. Yet he felt absolutely certain
that his father was concealing many things, perhaps the worst, and often
felt as if he were walking in the darkness over a mouldering bridge. Ah,
if it could only be propped up, and then rebuilt! But if it must give
way, he hoped the catastrophe would come soon. He knew that he possessed
the strength to build a new home for Els and himself. Even were it small
and modest, it should be erected on a firm foundation and afford a safe
abode for its inmates.
What did the young, joyous-hearted fellow who was wooing Eva know of such
cares? Fate had placed him on the sunny side of life, where everything
flourished, and set him, Wolff, in the shade, where grass and flowers
died.
There is a magic in fame which the young soul cannot easily escape, and
the name of Heinz Schorlin was indeed honoured and on every lip. The
imagination associated with it the cheerful nature which, like a loyal
comrade, goes hand in hand with success, deserved and undeserved good
fortune, woman's favour, doughty deeds, the highest and strongest traits
of character.
An atmosphere like sunshine, which melts all opposition, emanated from
Heinz. Wolff had experienced it himself. He had seriously intended to
make the insolent intruder feel his strong arm, but since he had learned
the identity of the Swiss his acts and nature appeared in a new light.
His insolence had gained the aspect of self-confidence which did not lack
justification, and when a valiant knight talked to him so frankly, like a
younger brother to an older and wiser one, it seemed to the lonely man
who, of late, completely absorbed in the course of business, had held
aloof from the sports, banquets, and diversions of the companions of his
own age, that he had experienced something unusually pleasant. How tender
and affectionate it sounded when Heinz alluded to the "little mother" at
home! He, Wolff, on the contrary, could think only with a shade of
bitterness of the weak woman to whom he owed his existence, and whom
filial duty and earnest resolution alike commanded him to love, yet who
made it so difficult for him to regard her with anything save anxiety or
secret disapproval.
Perhaps the greatest advantage which the Swiss possessed over him was his
manner of speaking of his family. How could it ever have entered Wolff
Eysvogel's mind to call the tall, stiff woman, who was the feeble echo of
her extravagant, arrogant mother, and who rustled towards him, even in
the early morning, adorned with feathers and robed in rich brocade, his
"dear little mother"?
Whoever spoke in the warm, loving tones that fell from the lips of Sir
Heinz when he mentioned his relatives at home certainly could have no
evil nature. No one need fear, though his usual mode of speech was so
wanton, that he would trifle with a pure, innocent creature like Eva.
How Heinz had succeeded in winning so speedily the devout child, who was
so averse to the idle coquetries of the companions of her own age, seemed
incomprehensible, but he had no time to investigate now.
He must go, for he had long been burning with impatience to depart. The
declaration of peace had taken effect only a few hours before, and the
long waggon trains from Italy, of which he had told Els yesterday, were
still delayed. The freight of spices and Levantine goods, Milan velvets,
silks, and fine Florentine cloths, which they were bringing from the city
of St. Mark, represented a large fortune. If it arrived in time, the
profits would cover a great portion of the losses of the past two years,
and the house would again be secure. If the worst should befall, how
would his family submit to deprivation, perhaps even to penury? He had
less fear of his grandmother's outbursts of wrath, but what would become
of his feeble mother, who was as dependent as a child on her own mother?
Yet he loved her; he felt deeply troubled by the thought of the severe
humiliation which menaced her. His sister Isabella, too, was dear to him,
in spite of her husband, the reckless Sir Seitz Siebenburg, in whose
hands the gold paid from the coffers of the firm melted away, yet who was
burdened with a mountain of debts.
Wolff had left orders at home to have his horse saddled. He had intended
only to wave a greeting to his Els and then ride to Neumarkt, or, if
necessary, as far as Ingolstadt, to meet the wains.
A word of farewell to the new acquaintance, who was probably destined to
be his brother-in, law, and then--But just at that moment Heinz
approached, and in reply to Wolff's low question "And your lady's
colour?" he answered joyously, pointing to the breast of his doublet: "I
am carrying the messenger which promises to inform me, here on my heart.
In the darkness it was silent; but the bright moonlight yonder will loose
its tongue, unless the characters here are too unlike those of the
prayer-book."
Drawing out Eva's little roll as he spoke, he approached a brightly
lighted spot, pointed to the ribbon which fastened it, and exclaimed:
"Doubtless she used her own colour to tie it. Blue, the pure, exquisite
blue of her eyes! I thought so Forget-me-not blue! The most beautiful of
colours. You must pardon my impatience!"
He was about to begin to read the lines; but Wolff stopped him by
pointing to the Ortlieb residence and to two drunken soldiers who came
out of the tavern "For Thirsty Troopers," and walked, singing and
staggering, up the opposite side of the street. Then, extending his hand
to Heinz in farewell, he asked in a low tone, pointing to Biberli's
figure just emerging from the shade, who was the messenger of love who
served him so admirably.
"My shadow," replied the knight. "I loosed him from my heels and bade him
stand there. But no offence, Herr Wolff Eysvogel; you'll make the queer
fellow's acquaintance if, like myself, it would be agreeable to you to
meet often, not only on iron chains, but on friendly terms with each
other."
"Nothing would please me more," replied the other. "But how in the world
could it happen that this well-guarded fortress surrendered to you after
so short a resistance?"
"Heinz Schorlin rides swiftly," he interrupted; but Wolff exclaimed:
"A swift ride awaits me, too, though of a different kind. When I return,
I shall expect you to tell me how you won our 'little saint,' my
sister-in-law Eva. The two beautiful Ortlieb 'Es' are one in the eyes of
the townsfolk, so we also will be often named in the same breath, and
shall do well to feel brotherly regard for each other. There shall be no
fault on my part. Farewell, till we meet again, an' it please God in and
not outside of our ladies' dwelling."
While speaking he clasped the knight's hand with so firm a grasp that it
seemed as if he wished to force him to feel its pressure a long time, and
hastened through the Frauenthor.
Heinz Schorlin gazed thoughtfully after him a short time, then beckoned
to Biberli and, though the interval required for him to reach his
master's side was very brief, it was sufficient for the bold young lover,
tortured by his ardent longing, to form another idea.
"Look yonder, Biberli!" he exclaimed. "The holy-water basin on the
door-post, the escutcheon on the lintel above, the helmet, which would
probably bear my weight. From there I can reach the window-sill with my
hand, and once I have grasped it, I need only make one bold spring and,
hurrah! I'm on it."
"May our patron saint have mercy on us!" cried the servant in horror.
"You can get there as easily as you can spring on your two feet over two
horses; but the coming down would certainly be a long distance lower than
you would fancy--into the 'Hole,' as they call the prison here, and,
moreover, though probably not until some time later, straight to the
flames of hell; for you would have committed a great sin against a noble
maiden rich in every virtue, who deemed you worthy of her love. And,
besides, there are two Es. They occupy the same room, and the house is
full of men and maid servants."
"Pedagogue!" said the knight, peevishly.
"Ay, that was Biberli's calling once," replied the servant, "and, for the
sake of your lady mother at home, I wish I were one still, and you, Sir
Heinz, would have to obey me like an obedient pupil. You are well aware
that I rarely use her sacred name to influence you, but I do so now; and
if you cherish her in your heart and do not wish to swoop down on the
innocent little dove like a destroying hawk, turn your back upon this
place, where we have already lingered too long."
But this well-meant warning seemed to have had brief influence upon the
person to whom it was addressed. Suddenly, with a joyous: "There she is!"
he snatched his cap from his head and waved a greeting to the window.
But in a few minutes he replaced it with a petulant gesture of the hand,
saying sullenly: "Vanished! She dared not grant me a greeting, because
she caught sight of you."
"Let us thank and praise a kind Providence for it," said his servitor
with a sigh of relief, "since our Lord and Saviour assumed the form of a
servant, that of a scarecrow, in which he has done admirable service, is
far too noble and distinguished for Biberli."
As he spoke he walked on before the knight, and pointing to the tavern
beside the Frauenthurm whose sign bore the words "For Thirsty Troopers,"
he added: "A green bush at the door. That means, unless the host is a
rogue, a cask fresh broached. I wonder whether my tongue is cleaving to
my palate from dread of your over-hasty courage, or whether it is really
so terribly sultry here!"
"At any rate," Heinz interrupted, "a cup of wine will harm neither of us;
for I myself feel how oppressive the air is. Besides, it is light in the
tavern, and who knows what the little note will tell me."
Meanwhile they passed the end of St. Klarengasse and went up to the green
bush, which projected from the end of a pole far out into the street.
Soldiers in the pay of the city, and men-at-arms in the employ of the
Emperor and the princes who had come to attend the Reichstag, were
sitting over their wine in the tavern. From the ceiling hung two crossed
iron triangles, forming a six-pointed star. The tallow candles burning
low in their sockets, which it contained, and some pitch-pans in the
corners, diffused but a dim light through the long apartment.
Master and man found an empty table apart from the other guests, in a
niche midway down the rear wall.
Without heeding the brawling and swearing, the rude songs and disorderly
shouts, the drumming of clenched fists upon the oak tables, the wild
laughter of drunken soldiers, the giggling and screeching of bar-maids,
and the scolding and imperious commands of the host, they proved that the
green bush had not lied, for the wine really did come from a freshly
opened cask just brought up from the cellar. But as the niche was
illumined only by the tiny oil lamp burning beneath the image of the
Virgin, bedizened with flowers and gold and silver tinsel, fastened
against the wall, Biberli asked the weary bar-maid for a brighter light.
When the girl withdrew he sighed heavily, saying: "O my lord, if you only
knew! Even now, when we are again among men and the wine has refreshed
me, I feel as if rats were gnawing at my soul. Conscience, my
lord-conscience!"
"You, too, are usually quite ready to play the elf in the rose-garden of
love," replied Heinz gaily. "Moreover, I shall soon need a T and an S
embroidered on my own doublet, for----Why don't they bring the light?
Another cup of wine, the note, and then with renewed vigour we'll go back
again."
"For God's sake," interrupted Biberli, "do not speak, do not even think,
of the bold deed you suggested! Doesn't it seem like a miracle that not
one of the many Ortlieb and Montfort servants crossed your path? Even
such a child of good luck as yourself can scarcely expect a second one
the same evening. And if there is not, and you go back under the window,
you will be recognised, perhaps even seized, and then--O my lord,
consider this!--then you will bear throughout your life the reproach of
having brought shame and bitter sorrow upon a maiden whom you yourself
know is lovely, devout, and pure. And I, too, who serve you loyally in
your lady mother's behalf, as well as the poor maid who, to pleasure me,
interceded for you with her mistress, will run the risk of our lives if
you are caught climbing into the window or committing any similar
offence; for in this city they are prompt with the stocks, the stone
collar, the rack, and the tearing of the tongue from the mouth whenever
any one is detected playing the part of go-between in affairs of love."
"Usually, old fellow," replied Heinz in a tone of faint reproach, "we
considered it a matter of course that, though we took the most daring
risks in such things, we were certain not to be caught. Yet, to be frank,
some incomprehensible burden weighs upon my soul. My feelings are
confused and strange. I would rather tear the crown from the head of
yonder image of the Virgin than do aught to this sweet innocence for
which she could not thank me."
Here he paused, for the bar-maid brought a two-branched candelabrum, in
which burned two tallow candles.
Heinz instantly opened the little roll.
How delicate were the characters it contained! His heart's beloved had
committed them to the paper with her own hand, and the knight's blood
surged hotly through his veins as he gazed at them. It seemed as though
he held in his hand a portion of herself and, obeying a hasty impulse, he
kissed the letter.
Then he eagerly began to study the writing; he had never seen anything so
delicate and peculiar in form.
The deciphering of the first lines in which, it is true, she called him a
godly knight, but also informed him that his boldness had angered her,
caused him much difficulty, and Biberli was often obliged to help.
Would she have rebuffed him so ungraciously with her lips as with the
pen? Was it possible that, on account of a request which every lover
ventured to address to his lady, she would withdraw the favour which
rendered him so happy? Oh, yes, for innocence is delicate and sensitive.
She ought to have repelled him thus. He was secretly rejoiced to see the
sweet modesty which had so charmed him again proved. He must know what
the rest of the letter contained, and the ex-schoolmaster was at hand to
give the information at once.
True, the hastily written sentences presented some difficulties even for
Biberli, but after glancing through the whole letter, he exclaimed with a
satisfied smile: "Just as I expected! At the first look one might think
that the devout little lady was wholly unlike the rest of her sex, but on
examining more closely she proves as much like any other beautiful girl
as two peas. With good reason and prudent caution she forbids the
languishing knight to remain beneath her window, yet she will risk a
pleasant little interview in some safe nook. That is wise for so young a
girl, and at the same time natural and womanly. I don't know why you knit
your brows. Since the first Eve came from a crooked rib, all her
daughters prefer devious ways. But first hear what she writes." Then,
without heeding his master's gloomy face, he began to read the note
aloud.
Heinz listened intently, and after he had heard that the lady of his love
did not desire to meet him alone, but only under the protection of a
friend and her saint, when he heard her name her colour, it is true, but
also express the expectation that, as a godly knight, he would fight for
her sake in honour of the gracious Virgin, his face brightened.
During Biberli's scoffing comments he had felt as if a tempest had hurled
her pure image in the dust. But now that he knew what she asked of him,
it returned as a matter of course to its old place and, with a sigh of
relief, he felt that he need not be ashamed of the emotions which this
wonderful young creature had awakened in his soul. She had opened her
pious heart like a trusting sister to an older brother, and what he had
seen there was something unusual--things which had appeared sacred to him
even when a child. Since he took leave of her in the ball-room he had
felt as though Heaven had loaned this, its darling, to earth for but a
brief space, and her brocade robe must conceal angel wings. Should it
surprise him that the pure innocence which filled her whole being was
expressed also in her letter, if she summoned him, not to idle
love-dalliance but to a covenant of souls, a mutual conflict for what was
highest and most sacred? Such a thing was incomprehensible to Biberli;
but notwithstanding her letter--nay, even on its account--he longed still
more ardently to lead her home to his mother and see her receive the
blessing of the woman whom he so deeply honoured.
He had Eva's letter read for the second and the third time. But when
Biberli paused, and in a few brief sentences cast fresh doubts upon the
writer, Heinz angrily stopped him. "The longing of the godly heart of a
pure maiden--mark this well--has naught in common with that diabolical
delight in secret love--dalliance for which others yearn. My wish to
force my way to her was sinful, and it was punished severely enough, for
during your rude scoffs I felt as though you had set fire to the house
over my head. But from this I perceive in what a sacred, inviolable spot
her image had found a place. True, it is denied you to follow the lofty,
heavenward aspiration of a pure soul--"
"O my lord," interrupted the servitor with hands uplifted in defence,
"who besought you not to measure this innocent daughter of a decorous
household, who was scarcely beyond childhood, by the standard you applied
to others? Who entreated you to spare her fair fame? And if you deem the
stuff of which the servant is made too coarse to understand what moves so
pure a soul, you do Biberli injustice, for, by my patron saint, though
duty commanded me to interpose doubts and scruples between you and a
passion from which could scarcely spring aught that would bring joy to
your mother's heart I, too, asked myself the question why, in these days,
a devout maiden should not long to try her skill in conversion upon a
valiant knight who served her. Ever since St. Francis of Assisi appeared
in Italy, barefooted monks and grey-robed nuns, who follow him,
Franciscans and Sisters of St. Clare stream hither as water flows into a
mill-race when the sluice-gates are opened. With what edification we,
too, listened to the old Minorite whom we picked up by the wayside, at
the tavern where we usually found pleasure in nothing but drinking,
gambling, shouting, and singing! Besides, I know from my sweetheart with
what exemplary devotion the lovely Eva follows St. Clare."
"Who is now and will remain my patron saint also, old Biber," interrupted
Heinz with joyful emotion, as he laid his hand gratefully on his
follower's shoulder; then rising and beckoning to the bar-maid, added:
"The stuff of which you are made, old comrade, is inferior to no man's.
Only now and then the pedagogue plays you a trick. Had you uttered your
real opinion in the first place, the wine would have tasted better to us
both. Let Eva try the work of conversion on me! What, save my lady's
love, is more to me than our holy faith? It must indeed be a delight to
take the field for the Church and against her foes!" While speaking, he
paid the reckoning and went out with Biberli.
The moon was now pouring her silver beams, with full radiance, over the
quiet street, the linden in front of the Ortlieb house, and its lofty
gable roof. Only a single room in the spacious mansion was still lighted,
the bow-windowed one occupied by the two sisters.
Heinz, without heeding Biberli's renewed protest, looked upward, silently
imploring Eva's pardon for having misjudged her even a moment. His gaze
rested devoutly on the open window, behind which a curtain was stirring.
Was it the night breeze that almost imperceptibly raised and lowered it,
or was her own dear self concealed behind it?
Just at that moment he suddenly felt his servant's hand on his arm, and
as he followed his horror-stricken gaze, a chill ran through his own
veins. From the heavy door of the house, which stood half open, a
white-robed figure emerged with the solemn, noiseless footfall of a
ghost, and advanced across the courtyard towards him.
Was it a restless spirit risen from its grave at the midnight hour, which
must be close at hand? Through his brain, like a flash of lightning,
darted the thought that Eva had spoken to him of her invalid mother. Had
she died? Was her wandering soul approaching him to drive him from the
threshold of the house which hid her endangered child?
But no!
The figure had stopped before the door and now, raising its head, gazed
with wide eyes upward at the moon, and--he was not mistaken--it was no
spectre of darkness; it was she for whom every pulse of his heart
throbbed--Eva!
No human creature had ever seemed to him so divinely fair as she in her
long white night-robe, over which fell the thick waves of her light hair.
The horror which had seized him yielded to the most ardent yearning.
Pressing his hand upon his throbbing heart, he watched her every
movement. He longed to go forward to meet her, yet a supernatural spell
seemed to paralyse his energy. He would sooner have dared clasp in his
arms the image of a beautiful Madonna than this embodiment of pure,
helpless, gracious innocence.
Now she herself drew nearer, but he felt as if his will was broken, and
with timid awe he drew back one step, and then another, till the chain
stopped him.
Just at that moment she paused, stretched out her white arm with a
beckoning gesture, and again turned towards the house, Heinz following
because he could not help it, her sign drew him after her with magnetic
power.
Now Eva entered the dimly lighted corridor, and again her uplifted hand
seemed to invite him to follow. Then--the impetuous throbbing of his
heart almost stifled him--she set her little white foot on the first step
of the stairs and led the way up to the first landing, where she paused,
lifting her face to the open window, through which the moonbeams streamed
into the hall, flooding her head, her figure, and every surrounding
object with their soft light.
Heinz followed step by step. It seemed as if the wild surges of a sea
were roaring in his ears, and glittering sparks were dancing before his
yearning, watchful eyes.
How he loved her! How intense was the longing which drew him after her!
And yet another emotion stirred in his heart with still greater
power-grief, sincere grief, which pierced his in, most soul, that she
could have beckoned to him, permitted him to follow her, granted him what
he would never have ventured to ask. Nay, when he set his foot on the
first step, it seemed as if the temple which contained his holiest
treasure fell crashing around him, and an inner voice cried loudly:
"Away, away from here! Would you exchange the purest and loftiest things
for what tomorrow will fill you with grief and loathing?" it continued to
admonish. "You will relinquish what is dearest and most sacred to secure
what is ready to rush into your arms on all the high-roads.
"Hence, hence, you poor, deluded mortal, ere it is too late!"
But even had he known it was the fair fiend Venus herself moving before
him under the guise of Eva, the spell of her unutterable beauty would
have constrained him to follow her, though the goal were the Horselberg,
death, and hell.
On the second landing she again stood still and, leaning against a
pillar, raised her arms and extended them towards the moon, in whose
silvery light they gleamed like marble. Heinz saw her lips move, heard
his own name fall from them, and all self-control vanished.
"Eva!" he cried with passionate fervor, holding out his arms to clasp
her; but, ere he even touched her, a shriek of despairing anguish echoed
loudly back from the walls.
The sound of her own name had broken the threads with which the
mysterious power of the moonlight had drawn her from her couch, down
through the house, out of doors, and again back to the stairs.
Sleep vanished with the dream which she had shared with him and,
shuddering, she perceived where she was, saw the knight before her,
became conscious that she had left her chamber in her night-robe, with
disordered hair and bare feet; and, frantic with horror at the thought of
the resistless might with which a mysterious force constrained her to
obey it against her own will, deeply wounded by the painful feeling that
she had been led so far across the bounds of maidenly modesty, hurt and
angered by the boldness of the man before her, who had dared to follow
her into her parents' house, she again raised her voice, this time to
call her from whom she was accustomed to seek and find help in every
situation in life.
"Els! Els!" rang up the stairs; and the next moment Els, who had already
heard Eva's first scream, sprang down the few steps to her sister's side.
One glance at the trembling girl in her nightrobe, and at the moonlight
which still bathed her in its rays, told Els what had drawn Eva to the
stairs.
The knight must have slipped into the house and found her there. She knew
him and, before Heinz had time to collect his thoughts, she said
soothingly to her sister, who threw her arms around her as though seeking
protection, "Go up to your room, child!--Help her, Katterle. I'll come
directly."
While Eva, leaning on the maid's arm, mounted the stairs with trembling
knees, Els turned to the Swiss and said in a grave, resolute tone: "If
you are worthy of your escutcheon, Sir Knight, you will not now fly like
a coward from this house across whose threshold you stole with shameful
insolence, but await me here until I return. You shall not be detained
long. But, to guard yourself and another from misinterpretation, you must
hear me."
Heinz nodded assent in silence, as if still under the spell of what he
had recently experienced. But, ere he reached the entry below, Martsche,
the old housekeeper, and Endres, the aged head packer, came towards him,
just as they had risen from their beds, the former with a petticoat flung
round her shoulders, the latter wrapped in a horse-blanket.
Eva's shriek had waked both, but Els enjoined silence on everyone and,
after telling them to go back to bed, said briefly that Eva in her
somnambulism had this time gone out into the street and been brought back
by the knight. Finally, she again said to Heinz, "Presently!" and then
went to her sister.
CHAPTER IX.
When Biberli bade farewell to his sweetheart, who gave him Eva's little
note, he had arranged to meet her again in an hour or, if his duties
detained him longer, in two; but after the "true and steadfast" fellow
left her, her heart throbbed more and more anxiously, for the wrong she
had done in acting as messenger between the young daughter of her
employers and a stranger knight was indeed hard to forgive.
Instead of waiting in the kitchen or entry for her lover's return, as she
had intended, she had gone to the image of the Virgin at the gate of the
Convent of St. Clare, before which she had often found consolation,
especially when homesick yearning for the mountains of her native
Switzerland pressed upon her too sorely. This time also it had been
gracious to her, for after she had prayed very devoutly and vowed to give
a candle to the Mother of God, as well as to St. Clare, she fancied that
the image smiled upon her and promised that she should go unpunished.
On her return the knight had just followed Eva into the house, and
Biberli pursued his master as far as the stairs. Here Katterle met her
lover, but, when she learned what was occurring, she became greatly
enraged and incensed by the base interpretation which the servant placed
upon Eva's going out into the street and, terrified by the danger into
which the knight threatened to plunge them all, she forgot the patience
and submission she was accustomed to show the true and steadfast Biberli.
But--resolved to protect her young mistress from the presumptuous
knight-scarcely had she angrily cried shame upon her lover for this base
suspicion, protesting that Eva had never gone to seek a knight but, as
she had often done on bright moonlight nights, walked in her sleep down
the stairs and out of doors, when the young girl's shriek of terror
summoned her to her aid.
Biberli looked after her sullenly, meanwhile execrating bitterly enough
the wild love which had robbed his master of reason and threatened to
hurl him, Biberli, and even the innocent Katterle, whose brave defence of
her mistress had especially pleased him, into serious misfortune.
When old Endres appeared he had slipped behind a wall formed of bales
heaped one above another, and did not stir until the entry was quiet
again.
To his amazement he had then found his master standing beside the door of
the house, but his question--which, it is true, was not wholly devoid of
a shade of sarcasm--whether the knight was waiting for the return of his
sleep-walking sweetheart, was so harshly rebuffed that he deemed it
advisable to keep silence for a time.
Though Heinz Schorlin had perceived that he had followed an unconscious
somnambulist, he was not yet capable of calmly reflecting upon what had
occurred or of regarding the future with prudence. He knew one thing
only: the fear was idle that the lovely creature whose image, surrounded
by a halo of light, still hovered before him like a vision from a higher,
more beautiful world, was an unworthy person who, with a face of angelic
innocence, transgressed the laws of custom and modesty. Her shriek of
terror, her horror at seeing him, and the cry for help which had brought
her sister to her aid and roused the servants from their sleep, gave him
the right to esteem her as highly as ever; and this conviction fanned
into such a blaze the feeling of happiness which love had awakened and
his foolish distrust had already begun to stifle, that he was firmly
resolved, cost what it might, to make Eva his own.
After he had reached this determination he began to reflect more quietly.
What cared he for liberty and a rapid advance in the career upon which he
had entered, if only his future life was beautified by her love!
If he were required to woo her in the usual form, he would do so. And
what a charming yet resolute creature was the other E, who, in her
anxiety about her sister, had crossed his path with such grave, firm
dignity! She was Wolff Eysvogel's betrothed bride, and it seemed to him a
very pleasant thing to call the young man, whom he had so quickly learned
to esteem, his brother-in-law.
If the father refused his daughter to him, he would leave Nuremberg and
ride to the Rhine, where Hartmann, the Emperor Rudolph's son, whom he
loved like a younger brother, was now living. Heinz had instructed the
lad of eighteen in the use of the lance and the sword, and Hartmann had
sent him word the day before that the Rhine was beautiful, but without
him he but half enjoyed even the pleasantest things. He needed him.
Hundreds of other knights and squires could break in the new horses for
the Emperor and the young Bohemian princess, though perhaps not quite so
skilfully. Hartmann would understand him and persuade his imperial father
to aid him in his suit. The warmhearted youth could not bear to see him
sorrowful, and without Eva there was no longer joy or happiness.
He was roused from these thoughts and dreams by his own name called in a
low tone.
Katterle had gone with Eva to the chamber, whither the older sister
followed them. Tenderly embracing the weeping girl, she had kissed her
wet eyes and whispered in an agitated voice, with which, however, blended
a great deal of affectionate mischief: "The wolf who forced his way into
the house does not seem quite so harmless as mine, whom I have succeeded
in taming very tolerably. Go to mother now, darling. I'll be back
directly."
"What do you intend to do?" asked Eva timidly, still unable, under the
influence of her strange experiences, to regain her self-control.
"To look around the house," replied her sister, beckoning to Katterle to
accompany her.
In the entry she questioned the maid with stern decision, and the
trembling girl owned, amid her tears, that Eva had sent a little note to
the knight in reply to his request that she would name her colour, and
whatever else her anxious mistress desired hastily to learn.
After a threatening "We will discuss your outrageous conduct later," Els
hurried down-stairs, and found in the entry the man whose pleasure in the
pursuit of the innocent child whom she protected she meant to spoil. But
though she expressed her indignation to the knight with the utmost
harshness, he besought a hearing with so much respect and in such seemly
words, that she requested him, in a gentler tone, to speak freely. But
scarcely had he begun to relate how Eva, at the ball, had filled his
heart with the purest love, when the trampling of horses' hoofs, which
had come nearer and nearer to the house, suddenly ceased, and Biberli,
who had gone into the court-yard, came hurrying back, exclaiming in a
tone of warning, "The von Montforts!"
At the same moment two men-servants threw back both leaves of the door,
torchlight mingled with the moonbeams in the courtyard, and the next
instant a goodly number of knights and gentlemen entered the hall.
Biberli was not mistaken. The von Montforts had returned home, instead of
spending the night at Kadolzburg, and neither Els nor the Swiss had the
time or disposition to seek concealment.
The intruders were preceded by men-servants, whose torches lighted the
long, lofty storehouse brilliantly. It seemed to Els as if her heart
stopped beating and she felt her cheeks blanch.
Here she beheld Count von Montfort's bronzed face, the countenance of a
sportsman and reveller; yonder the frank, handsome features of the young
Burgrave, Eitelfritz von Zollern, framed by the hood of the Knights of
St. John, drawn up during the night-ride; there the pale, noble visage of
the quiet knight Boemund Altrosen, far famed for his prowess with lance
and sword; beyond, the scarred, martial countenance of Count Casper
Schlick, set in a mass of tangled brown locks; and then the watery, blue
eyes of Sir Seitz Siebenburg, the husband of her future sister-in-law
Isabella.
They had pressed in, talking eagerly, laughing, and rejoicing that the
wild night ride proposed by Cordula von Montfort, which had led over dark
forest paths, lighted only by a stray moonbeam, and often across fields
and ditches and through streams, had ended without mischance to man or
beast.
Now they all crowded around the countess, Seitz Siebenburg bending
towards her with such zeal that the ends of his huge mustache brushed the
plumes in her cap, and Boemund Altrosen, who had just been gazing into
the flushed face of the daring girl with the warm joy of true love, cast
a look of menace at him.
Els, too, greatly disliked "the Mustache," as her future brother-in-law
was called because the huge ornament on his upper lip made him
conspicuous among the beardless knights. She was aware that he returned
the feeling, and had left no means untried to incite Wolff Eysvogel's
parents to oppose his betrothal. Now he was one of the first to notice
her and, after whispering with a malicious smile to the countess and
those nearest to him, he looked at her so malevolently that she could
easily guess what interpretation he was trying to put upon her nocturnal
meeting with the Swiss in the eyes of his companions.
Her cheeks flamed with wrath, and like a flash of lightning came the
thought of the pleasure it would afford this wanton company, whose
greatest delight was to gloat over the errors of their neighbours, if the
knight who had brought her into this suspicious situation, or she
herself, should confess that not she, but the devout Eva, had attracted
Heinz hither. What a satisfaction it would be to this reckless throng to
tell such a tale of a young girl of whom the Burgravine von Zollern had
said the evening before to their Uncle Pfinzing, that purity and piety
had chosen Eva's lovely face for a mirror!
What if Heinz Schorlin, to save her, Els, from evil report, should
confess that she was here only to rebuke his insolent intrusion into a
decorous household?
This must be prevented, and Heinz seemed to understand her; for after
their eyes had met, his glance of helpless enquiry told her that he would
leave her to find an escape from this labyrinth.
The merry party, who now perceived that they had interrupted the
nocturnal tryst of lovers, did not instantly know what to do and, as one
looked enquiringly at another, an embarrassed silence followed their
noisy jollity.
But the hush did not last long, and its interruption at first seemed to
Els to bode the worst result; it was a peal of gay, reckless laughter,
ringing from the lips of the very Cordula von Montfort, into whose eyes,
as the only one of her own sex who was present, Els had just gazed with a
look imploring aid.
Had Eva's aversion to the countess been justified, and was she about to
take advantage of her unpleasant position to jeer at her?
Had the two quarreled at the ball the night before, and did Cordula now
perceive an opportunity to punish the younger sister by the humiliation
of the older one?
Yet her laugh sounded by no means spiteful--rather, very gay and natural.
The pleasant grey eyes sparkled with the most genuine mirth, and she
clapped her little hands so joyously that the falcon's chain on the
gauntlet of her riding glove rattled.
And what was this?
No one looks at a person whom one desires to wound with an expression of
such cheerful encouragement as the look with which Cordula now gazed at
Els and Heinz Schorlin, who stood by her side. True, they were at first
extremely perplexed by the words she now shouted to those around her in a
tone of loud exultation, as though announcing a victory; but from the
beginning they felt that there was no evil purpose in them. Soon they
even caught the real meaning of the countess's statement, and Els was
ashamed of having feared any injury from the girl whose defender she had
always been.
"Won, Sir Knight--cleverly won!" was her first sentence to Heinz.
Then, turning to Els, she asked with no less animation: "And you, my fair
maid and very strict housemate, who has won the wager now? Do you still
believe it is an inconceivable thought that the modest daughter of a
decorous Nuremberg race, entitled to enter the lists of a tourney, would
grant a young knight a midnight meeting?" And addressing her companions,
she continued, in an explanatory yet still playful tone: "She was ready
to wager the beautiful brown locks which she now hides modestly under a
kerchief, and even her betrothed lover's ring. It should be mine if I
succeeded in leading her to commit such an abominable deed. But I was
content, if I won the wager, with a smaller forfeit; yet now that I have
gained it, Jungfrau Ortlieb, you must pay!"
The whole company listened in astonishment to this speech, which no one
understood, but the countess, nodding mischievously to her nearest
neighbours, went on:
"How bewildered you all look! It might tempt me to satisfy your curiosity
less speedily, but, after the delightful entertainment you gave us, my
Lord Burgrave, one becomes merciful. So you shall hear how I, as wise as
the serpent, craftily forced this haughty knight"--she tapped Heinz
Schorlin's arm with her riding whip--"and you, too, Jungfrau Ortlieb,
whose pardon I now entreat, to help me win the bet. No offence, noble
sirs! But this bet was what compelled me to drag you all from Kadolzburg
and its charms so early, and induce you to attend me on the reckless ride
through the moonlit night. Now accept the thanks of a lady whose heart is
grateful; for your obedience helped me win the wager. Look yonder at my
handsome, submissive knight, Sir Heinz Schorlin, so rich in every virtue.
I commanded, him, on pain of my anger, to meet me at midnight at the
entrance of our quarters--that is, the entry of the Ortlieb mansion; and
to this modest and happy betrothed bride (may she pardon the madcap!) I
represented how it troubled me and wounded my timid delicacy to enter so
late at night, accompanied only by gentlemen, the house which so
hospitably sheltered us, and go to my sleeping room, though I should not
fear the Sultan and his mamelukes, if with this in my hand"--she motioned
to her riding whip--"and my dear father at my side, I stood on my own
feet which, though by no means small, are well-shod and resolute. Yet, as
we are apt to measure others by our own standard, the timid, decorous
girl believed me, and poor Cordula, who indeed brought only her maids and
no female guardian, and therefore must dispense with being received on
her return by a lady capable of commanding respect, did not appeal in
vain to the charitable feelings of her beautiful housemate. She promised
faithfully to come down into the entry, when the horses approached, to
receive the poor lamb, surrounded by lynxes, wild-cats, foxes, and
wolves, and lead it into the safe fold--if one can call this stately
house by such a name. Both Sir Heinz Schorlin and Jungfrau Elizabeth
Ortlieb kept their word and joined each other here--to their extreme
amazement, I should suppose, as to my knowledge they never met before--to
receive me, and thus had an interview which, however loudly they may
contradict it, I call a nocturnal meeting. But my wager, fair child, is
won, and tomorrow you will deliver to me the exquisite carved ivory
casket, while I shall keep my bracelet."
Here she paused, paying no heed to the merry threats, exclamations of
amazement, and laughter of her companions.
But while her father, striking his broad chest, cried again and again,
with rapturous delight, "A paragon of a woman!" and Seitz Siebenburg, in
bitter disappointment, whispered, "The fourteen saintly helpers in time
of need might learn from you how to draw from the clamps what is not
worth rescue and probably despaired of escape," she was trying to give
time to recover more composure her young hostess, to whom she was
sincerely attached, and who, she felt sure, could have met Heinz
Schorlin, who perhaps had come hither on her own account, only by some
cruel chance. So she added in a quieter tone: "And now, Jungfrau Ortlieb,
in sober earnest I will ask your protection and guidance through the dark
house, and meanwhile you shall tell me how Sir Heinz greeted you and what
passed between you, either good or bad, during the time of waiting."
Els summoned up her courage and answered loud enough to be heard by all
present: "We were speaking of you, Countess Cordula, and the knight said:
"I ventured to remark, Countess," said Heinz, interrupting the new ally,
"that though you might understand how to show a poor knight his folly, no
kinder heart than yours throbbed under any bodice in Switzerland, Swabia,
or France." Cordula struck him lightly on the shoulder with her riding
whip, saying with a laugh: "Who permits you to peep under women's bodices
through so wide a tract of country, you scamp? Had I been in Jungfrau
Ortlieb's place I should have punished your entry into a respectable
house:
"Oh, my dear Countess," Heinz interrupted, and his words bore so
distinctly the stamp of truth and actual experience that even Sir Seitz
Siebenburg was puzzled, "though I am always disposed to be grateful to
you, I cannot feel a sense of obligation for this lady's reception of me,
even to the most gracious benefactress. For, by my patron saint, she
forbade me the house as if I were a thief and a burglar."
"And she was right!" exclaimed the countess. "I would have treated you
still more harshly. Only you would have spared yourself many a sharp word
had you confessed at once that it was I who summoned you here. I'll talk
with you tomorrow, and am I not right, Jungfrau Elsyou won't make him
suffer for losing the wager, but exercise your domestic authority after a
more gentle fashion?"
While speaking, she looked at Els with a glance so full of meaning that
the young girl's cheeks crimsoned, and the longing to put an end to this
deceitful game became almost uncontrollable. The thought of Eva alone
sealed her lips.
IN THE FIRE OF THE FORGE
A ROMANCE OF OLD NUREMBERG
By Georg Ebers
Volume 3.
CHAPTER X.
One person only besides Sir Seitz Siebenburg had not been deceived--the
young knight Boemund Altrosen, whose love for Cordula was genuine, and
who, by its unerring instinct, felt that she had invented her tale and
for a purpose which did honour to her kindness of heart. So his calm
black eyes rested upon the woman he loved with proud delight, while Seitz
Siebenburg twisted his mustache fiercely. Not a look or movement of
either of the two girls had escaped his notice, and Cordula's bold
interference in behalf of the reckless Swiss knight, who now seemed to
have ensnared his future sister-in-law also, increased the envy and
jealousy which tortured him until he was forced to exert the utmost
self-restraint in order not to tell the countess to her face that he, at
least, was far from being deceived by such a fable. Yet he succeeded in
controlling himself. But as he forced his lips to silence he gazed with
the most open scorn at the bales of merchandise heaped around him. He
would show the others that, though the husband of a merchant's daughter,
he retained the prejudices of his knightly rank.
But no one heeded the disagreeable fellow, who had no intimate friends in
the group. Most of the company were pressing round Heinz Schorlin with
jests and questions, but bluff Count von Montfort warmly clasped Els's
hand, while he apologised for the bold jest of his young daughter who, in
spite of her recklessness, meant kindly.
Nothing could have been more unwelcome to a girl in so unpleasant a
situation than this delay. She longed most ardently to get away but, ere
she succeeded in escaping from the friendly old noble, two gentlemen
hastily entered the brightly lighted entry, at sight of whom her heart
seemed to stop beating.
The old count, who noticed her blanched face, released her, asking
sympathisingly what troubled her, but Els did not hear him.
When she felt him loose her hand she would fain have fled up the stairs
to her mother and sister, to avoid the discussions which must now follow.
But she knew into what violent outbursts of sudden anger her usually
prudent father could be hurried if there was no one at hand to warn him.
There he stood in the doorway, his stern, gloomy expression forming a
strange contrast to the merry party who had entered in such a jovial
mood.
His companion, Herr Casper Eysvogel, had already noticed his future
daughter-in-law, recognised her by an amazed shrug of the shoulders which
was anything but a friendly greeting, and now eyed the excited revellers
with a look as grave and repellent as that of the owner of the house.
Herr Casper's unusual height permitted him to gaze over the heads of the
party though, with the exception of Count von Montfort, they were all
tall, nay, remarkably tall men, and the delicacy of his clear-cut,
pallid, beardless face had never seemed to Els handsomer or more
sinister. True, he was the father of her Wolff, but the son resembled
this cold-hearted man only in his unusual stature, and a chill ran
through her veins as she felt the stately old merchant's blue eyes, still
keen and glittering, rest upon her.
On the day of her betrothal she had rushed into his arms with a warm and
grateful heart, and he had kissed her, as custom dictated; but it was
done in a strange way--his thin, well-cut lips had barely brushed her
brow. Then he stepped back and turned to his wife with the low command,
"It is your turn now, Rosalinde." Her future mother-in-law rose quickly,
and doubtless intended to embrace her affectionately, but a loud cough
from her own mother seemed to check her, for ere she opened her arms to
Els she turned to her and excused her act by the words, "He wishes it."
Yet Els was finally clasped in Frau Rosalinde's arms and kissed more
warmly than--from what had previously occurred--she had expected.
Wolff's grandmother, old Countess Rotterbach, who rarely left the huge
gilt armchair in her daughter's sitting-room, had watched the whole scene
with a scornful smile; then, thrusting her prominent chin still farther
forward, she said to her daughter, loud enough for Els to hear, "This
into the bargain?"
All these things returned to the young girl's memory as she gazed at the
cold, statuesque face of her lover's father. It seemed as if he held his
tall, noble figure more haughtily erect than usual, and that his plain
dark garments were of richer material and more faultless cut than ever;
nay, she even fancied that, like the lion, which crouches and strains
every muscle ere it springs upon its victim, he was summoning all his
pride and sternness to crush her.
Els was innocent; nay, the motive which had brought her here to defend
her sister could not fail to be approved by every well-disposed person,
and certainly not last by her father, and it would have suited her
truthful nature to contradict openly Countess Cordula's friendly
falsehood had not her dread of fatally exposing Eva imposed silence.
How her father's cheeks glowed already! With increasing anxiety, she
attributed it to the indignation which overpowered him, yet he was only
heated by the haste with which, accompanied by his future son-in-law's
father, he had rushed here from the Frauenthor as fast as his feet would
carry him. Casper Eysvogel had also attended the Vorchtel entertainment
and accompanied Ernst Ortlieb into the street to discuss some business
matters.
He intended to persuade him to advance the capital for which he had just
vainly asked Herr Vorchtel. He stood in most urgent need for the next few
days of this great sum, of which his son and business partner must have
no knowledge, and at first Wolff Eysvogel's future father-in-law saw no
reason to refuse. But Herr Ernst was a cautious man, and when his
companion imposed the condition that his son should be kept in ignorance
of the loan, he was puzzled. He wished to learn why the business partner
should not know what must be recorded in the books of the house; but
Casper Eysvogel needed this capital to silence the Jew Pfefferkorn, from
whom he had secretly borrowed large sums to conceal the heavy losses
sustained in Venice the year before at the gaming table.
At first courteously, then with rising anger, he evaded the questions of
the business man, and his manner of doing so, with the little
contradictions in which the arrogant man, unaccustomed to falsehood,
involved himself, showed Herr Ernst that all was not as it should be.
By the time they reached the Frauenthor, he had told Casper Eysvogel
positively that he would not fulfil the request until Wolff was informed
of the matter.
Then the sorely pressed man perceived that nothing but a frank confession
could lead him to his goal. But what an advantage it would give his
companion, what a humiliation it would impose upon himself! He could not
force his lips to utter it, but resolved to venture a last essay by
appealing to the father, instead of to the business man; and therefore,
with the haughty, condescending manner natural to him, he asked Herr
Ernst, as if it were his final word, whether he had considered that his
refusal of a request, which twenty other men would deem it an honour to
fulfil, might give their relations a form very undesirable both to his
daughter and himself?
"No, I did not suppose that a necessity," replied his companion firmly,
and then added in an irritated tone: "But if you need the loan so much
that you require for your son a father-in-law who will advance it to you
more readily, why, then, Herr Casper--"
Here he paused abruptly. A flood of light streamed into the street from
the doorway of the Ortlieb house. It must be a fire, and with the
startled cry, "St. Florian aid us! my entry is burning!" he rushed
forward with his companion to the endangered house so quickly that the
torchbearers, who even in this bright night did good service in the
narrow streets, whose lofty houses barred out the moonlight, could
scarcely follow.
Thus Herr Ernst, far more anxious about his invalid, helpless wife than
his imperilled wares, soon reached his own door. His companion crossed
the threshold close behind him, sullen, deeply incensed, and determined
to order his son to choose between his love and favour and the daughter
of this unfriendly man, whom only a sudden accident had prevented from
breaking the betrothal.
The sight of so many torches blazing here was an exasperating spectacle
to Ernst Ortlieb, who with wise caution and love of order insisted that
nothing but lanterns should be used to light his house, which contained
inflammable wares of great value; but other things disturbed his
composure, already wavering, to an even greater degree.
What was his Els doing at this hour among these gentlemen, all of whom
were strangers?
Without heeding them or the countess, he was hastening towards her to
obtain a solution of this enigma, but the young Burgrave Eitelfritz von
Zollern, the Knight of Altrosen, Cordula von Montfort, and others barred
his way by greeting him and eagerly entreating him to pardon their
intrusion at so late an hour.
Having no alternative, he curtly assented, and was somewhat soothed as he
saw old Count von Montfort, who was still standing beside Els, engaged in
an animated conversation with her. His daughter's presence was probably
due to that of the guests quartered in his home, especially Cordula,
whom, since she disturbed the peace of his quiet household night after
night, he regarded as the personification of restlessness and reckless
freedom. He would have preferred to pass her unnoticed, but she had clung
to his arm and was trying, with coaxing graciousness, to soften his
indignation by gaily relating how she had come here and what had detained
her and her companions. But Ernst Ortlieb, who would usually have been
very susceptible to such an advance from a young and aristocratic lady,
could not now succeed in smoothing his brow. In his excitement he was not
even able to grasp the meaning of the story she related merrily, though
with well-feigned contrition. While listening to her with one ear, he was
straining the other to catch what Sir Seitz Siebenburg was saying to his
father-in-law, Casper Eysvogel.
He gathered from Countess Cordula's account that she had succeeded in
playing some bold prank in connection with Els and the Swiss knight Heinz
Schorlin, and the words "the Mustache" was whispering to his
father-in-law-the direction of his glance betrayed it--also referred to
Els and the Swiss. But the less Herr Ernst heard of this conversation the
more painfully it excited his already perturbed spirit.
Suddenly his pleasant features, which, on account of the lady at his
side, he had hitherto forced to wear a gracious aspect, assumed an
expression which filled the reckless countess with grave anxiety, and
urged the terrified Els, who had not turned her eyes from him, to a hasty
resolution. That was her father's look when on the point of an outbreak
of fury, and at this hour, surrounded by these people, he must not allow
himself to yield to rage; he must maintain a tolerable degree of
composure.
Without heeding the young Burgrave Eitelfritz or Sir Boemund Altrosen,
who were just approaching her, she forced her way nearer to her father,
He still maintained his self-control, but already the veins on his brow
had swollen and his short figure was rigidly erect. The cause of his
excitement--she had noticed it--was some word uttered by Seitz
Siebenburg. Her father was the only person who had understood it, but she
was not mistaken in the conjecture that it referred to her and the Swiss
knight, and she believed it to be base and spiteful.
In fact, after his father-in-law had told him that Ernst Ortlieb thought
his house was on fire, "the Mustache," in reply to Herr Casper's enquiry
how his son's betrothed bride happened to be there, answered scornfully:
"Els? She did not hasten hither, like the old man, to put the fire out,
but because one flame was not enough for her. Wolff must know it
to-morrow. By day the slender little flame of honourable betrothed love
flickers for him; by night it blazes more brightly for yonder Swiss
scoundrel. And the young lady chooses for the scene of this toying with
fire the easily ignited warehouse of her own father!"
"I will secure mine against such risks," Casper Eysvogel answered; then,
casting a contemptuous glance at Els and a wrathful one at the Swiss
knight, he added with angry resolution: "It is not yet too late. So long
as I am myself no one shall bring peril and disgrace upon my house and my
son."
Then Herr Ernst had suddenly become aware of the suspicion with which his
beautiful, brave, self-sacrificing child was regarded. Pale as death, he
struggled for composure, and when his eyes met the imploring gaze of the
basely defamed girl, he said to himself that he must maintain his
self-control in order not to afford the frivolous revellers who
surrounded him an entertaining spectacle.
Wolff was dear to him, but before he would have led his Els to the house
where the miserable "Mustache" lived, and whose head was the coldhearted,
gloomy man whose words had just struck him like a poisoned arrow, he,
whom the Lord had bereft of his beloved, gallant son, would have been
ready to deprive himself of his daughters also and take both to the
convent. Eva longed to go, and Els might find there a new and beautiful
happiness, like his sister, the Abbess Kunigunde. In the Eysvogel house,
never!
During these hasty reflections Els extended her hand toward him, and the
shining gold circlet which her lover had placed on her ring finger
glittered in the torchlight. A thought darted through his brain with the
speed of lightning, and without hesitation he drew the ring from the hand
of his astonished daughter, whispering curtly, yet tenderly, in reply to
her anxious cry, "What are you doing?"
"Trust me, child."
Then hastily approaching Casper Eysvogel, he beckoned to him to move a
little aside from the group.
The other followed, believing that Herr Ernst would now promise the sum
requested, yet firmly resolved, much as he needed it, to refuse.
Ernst Ortlieb, however, made no allusion to business matters, but with a
swift gesture handed him the ring which united their two children. Then,
after a rapid glance around had assured him that no one had followed
them, he whispered to Herr Casper: "Tell your Wolff that he was, and
would have remained, dear to us; but my daughter seems to me too good for
his father's house and for kindred who fear that she will bring injury
and shame upon them. Your wish is fulfilled. I hereby break the
betrothal."
"And, in so doing, you only anticipate the step which I intended to take
with more cogent motives," replied Casper Eysvogel with cool composure,
shrugging his shoulders contemptuously. "The city will judge to-morrow
which of the two parties was compelled to sever a bond sacred in the
sight of God and men. Unfortunately, it is impossible for me to give your
daughter the good opinion you cherish of my son."
Drawing his stately figure to its full height as he spoke, he gazed at
his diminutive adversary with a look of haughty contempt and, without
vouchsafing a word in farewell, turned his back upon him.
Repressed fury was seething in Ernst Ortlieb's breast, and he would
scarcely have succeeded in controlling himself longer but for the
consolation afforded by the thought that every tie was sundered between
his daughter and this cold, arrogant, unjust man and his haughty, evil
disposed kindred. But when he again looked for the daughter on whom his
hasty act had doubtless inflicted a severe blow, she was no longer
visible.
Directly after he took the ring she had glided silently, unnoticed by
most of the company, up the stairs to the second story. Cordula von
Montfort told him this in a low tone.
Els had made no answer to her questions, but her imploring, tearful eyes
pierced the young countess to the heart. Her quick ear had caught
Siebenburg's malicious words and Casper Eysvogel's harsh response and,
with deep pity, she felt how keenly the poor girl must suffer.
The happiness of a whole life destroyed without any fault of her own!
From their first meeting Els had seemed to her incapable of any careless
error, and she had merely tried, by her bold, interference, to protect
her from the gossip of evil tongues. But Heinz Schorlin had just
approached and whispered that, by his knightly honour, Els was a total
stranger to him, and he only wished he might find his own dear sister at
home as pure and free from any fault.
Poor child! But the countess knew who had frustrated her intervention in
behalf of Els. It was Sir Seitz Siebenburg, "the Mustache," whose
officious homage, at first amusing, had long since become repulsive. Her
heart shrank from the thought that, merely from vain pleasure in having a
throng of admirers, she had given this scoundrel more than one glance of
encouragement. The riding whip fairly quivered in her right hand as,
after informing Ernst Ortlieb where Els had gone, she warned the
gentlemen that it was time to depart, and Seitz Siebenburg submissively,
yet as familiarly as if he had a right to her special favour, held out
his hand in farewell.
But Countess Cordula withdrew hers with visible dislike, saying in a tone
of chilling repulse: "Remember me to your wife, Sir Knight. Tell her to
take care that her twin sons resemble their father as little as
possible."
"Then you want to have two ardent admirers the less?" asked Siebenburg
gaily, supposing that the countess's remark was a jest.
But when she did not, as he expected, give these insulting words an
interpretation favourable to him, but merely shrugged her shoulders
scornfully, he added, glancing fiercely at the Swiss knight:
"True, you would doubtless be better pleased should the boys grow up to
resemble the lucky Sir Heinz Schorlin, for whose sake you proved yourself
the inventor of tales more marvellous, if not more credible, than the
most skilful travelling minstrel."
"Perhaps so," replied the countess with contemptuous brevity. "But I
should be satisfied if the twins--and this agrees with my first wish
should grow up honest men. If you should pay me the honour of a visit
during the next few days, Sir Seitz, I could not receive it."
With these words she turned away, paying no further heed to him, though
he called her name aloud, as if half frantic.
CHAPTER XI.
It was after midnight when the servants closed the heavy door of the
Ortlieb mansion. The late guests had left it, mounted their horses, and
ridden away together through the Frauenthor into the city.
The moon no longer lighted their way. A sultry wind had swept from the
southwest masses of grey clouds, which constantly grew denser and darker.
Heinz Schorlin did not notice it, but his follower, Biberli, called his
attention to the rising storm and entreated him to choose the nearest
road to the city. To remain outside the gate in such darkness would be
uncomfortable, nay, perhaps not without peril, but the knight merely
flung him the peevish answer, "So much the better," and, to Biberli's
surprise, turned into St. Klarengasse, which brought him by no means
nearer to his distant lodgings in the Bindergasse.
It was unfortunate to be warmly devoted to a master who had no fear, whom
he was obliged to serve as a messenger of love, and who now probably
scarcely knew himself whither this love would lead him.
But true and steadfast Biberli would really have followed Sir Heinz, not
only in a dangerous nocturnal ramble, but through all the terrors of.
hell. So he only glanced down at his long, lean legs, which would be
exposed here to the bites of the dogs, with whom he stood on especially
bad terms, raised his long robe higher, as the paths over which they must
pass were of doubtful cleanliness, and deemed it a good omen when his
foot struck against a stout stick, which his patron saint had perhaps
thrown in his way as a weapon. Its possession was somewhat soothing, it
is true, yet he did not regain the pleasant consciousness of peace in
which his soul had rejoiced a few short hours before.
He knew what to expect from the irritable mood into which recent events
appeared to have thrown his master. Heinz usually soon forgot any such
trivial disappointment, but the difficulty threatening himself and
Katterle was far worse--nay, might even assume terrible proportions.
These alarming thoughts made him sigh so deeply that Heinz turned towards
him.
He would gladly have relieved his own troubled breast in the same way.
Never before had the soul of this light-hearted child of good fortune
served as the arena for so fierce a struggle of contending emotions.
He loved Eva, and the image of her white, supernaturally beautiful
figure, flooded by the moonlight, still stood before him as distinctly as
when, after her disappearance, he had resolved to plead his suit for her
to her sister; but the usually reckless fellow asked himself, shuddering,
what would have happened had he obeyed Eva's summons and been found with
her, as he had just been surprised with her sister. She was not wholly
free from guilt, for her note had really contained an invitation to a
meeting; yet she escaped. But his needless impetuosity and her sudden
appearance before the house had placed her modest, charming sister, the
betrothed bride of the gallant fellow who had fought with him in the
Marchfield, in danger of being misunderstood and despised. If the finger
of scorn were pointed at her, if a stain rested on her fair fame, the
austere Wolff Eysvogel would hardly desire to make her his wife, and then
this also would be his fault.
His kind, honest heart suffered keenly under these self-accusations, the
first which he had ever heeded.
Hitherto the volatile young fellow, who had often gaily risked his life
in battle and his last penny at the gaming table, had never thought of
seriously examining his own soul, battling by his own strength of will
against some secret longing and shunning its cause. On the contrary, from
childhood he had accustomed himself to rely on the protection and aid of
the Virgin and the saints; and when they passed the image with the
ever-burning lamp, where Katterle had just sought and found consolation,
he implored it not to let his bold intrusion into the home of the maiden
he loved bring evil upon her and her sister. He also vowed to the convent
and its saint--which, come what might, should also be his--a rich gift
whenever the Emperor or the gaming table again filled his purse.
The thought of being burdened his whole life long with the reproach of
having made two such charming, innocent creatures miserable seemed
unendurable. He would gladly have given gold and blood to remove it.
It was too late that day, but he resolved to go to the confessional on
the morrow, for absolution had always relieved and lightened his heart.
But how trivial his errors had been! True, the wrong he had now committed
was not a mortal sin, and would hardly impose a severe penance upon him,
yet it burdened him like the most infamous crime. He did not understand
himself, and often wondered why he, reckless Heinz, thus made a mountain
out of a molehill. Yet when, after this reflection, he uttered a sigh of
relief, it seemed as if a voice within commanded him not to think lightly
of what had passed, for on that evening he had ceased to bestow pleasure
on every one, and instead of, as usual, being helpful and agreeable, he
had plunged others who had done him no wrong--nay, perhaps a whole
household, whose daughter had given him the first love of her young
heart-into misery and disgrace. Had he considered the consequences of his
act, he would still be merry Heinz. Then he remembered how, when a boy,
playing with other lads high up among the mountains just as it was
beginning to thaw, he had hurled the work they had finished with so much
toil, a snow man, down the slope, rejoicing with his playfellows over its
swift descent towards the valley, until they noticed with what frightful
speed its bulk increased as it sped over its snowy road, till at last,
like a terrible avalanche, it swept away a herdsman's hut--fortunately an
empty one. Now, also, his heedlessness had set in motion a mass which
constantly rolled onward, and how terrible might be the harm it would do!
If Hartmann, the Emperor's son, were only there! He confided everything
to him, for he was sure of his silence. Both his duty as a knight and his
conscience forbade him to relate his experiences and ask counsel from any
one else.
He was still absorbed in these gloomy thoughts when, just before reaching
the Walch, he heard Biberli's deep sigh. Here, behind and beside the
frames of the cloth weavers, stood the tents before which the followers
and soldiers of the princes and dignitaries who had come to the Reichstag
were still sitting around the camp fire, carousing and laughing.
Any interruption was welcome to him, and to Biberli it seemed like a
deliverance to be permitted to use his poor endangered tongue, for his
master had asked what grief oppressed him.
"If you desired to know what trouble did not burden my soul I could find
a speedier answer," replied Biberli piteously. "Oh, this night, my lord!
What has it not brought upon us and others! Look at the black clouds
rising in the south. They are like the dark days impending over us poor
mortals."
Then he confided to Heinz his fears for himself and Katterle. The
knight's assurance that he would intercede for him and, if necessary,
even appeal to the Emperor's favour, somewhat cheered his servitor's
drooping spirits, it is true, but by no means restored his composure, and
his tone was lugubrious enough as he went on:
"And the poor innocent girl in the Ortlieb house! Your little lady, my
lord, broke the bread she must now eat herself, but the other, the older
E."
"I know," interrupted the knight sorrowfully. "But if the gracious Virgin
aids us, they will continue to believe in the wager Cordula von
Montfort----"
"She! she!" Biberli exclaimed, enthusiastically waving his stick aloft.
"The Lord created her in a good hour. Such a heart! Such friendly
kindness! And to think that she interposed so graciously for you--you,
Sir Heinz, to whom she showed the favour of combing your locks, as if you
were already her promised husband, and who afterwards, for another's
sake, left her at the ball as if she wore a fern cap and had become
invisible. I saw the whole from the musician's gallery. True, the
somnambulist is marvellously beautiful."
But the knight interrupted him by exclaiming so vehemently: "Silence!"
that he paused.
Both walked on without speaking for some distance ere Heinz began again:
"Even though I live to grow old and grey, never shall I behold aught more
beautiful than the vision of that white-robed girlish figure on the
stairs."
True and steadfast Biberli sighed faintly. Love for Eva Ortlieb held his
master as if in a vise; but a Schorlin seemed to him far too good a match
for a Nuremberg maiden who had grown up among sacks of pepper and chests
of goods and, moreover, was a somnambulist. He looked higher for his
Heinz, and had already found the right match for him. So, turning to him
again, he said earnestly:
"Drive the bewitching vision from your mind, Sir Heinz. You don't
know--but I could tell you some tales about women who walk in their sleep
by moonlight."
"Well?" asked Heinz eagerly.
"As a maiden," Biberli continued impressively, with the pious intention
of guarding his master from injury, "the somnambulist merely runs the
risk of falling from the roof, or whatever accident may happen to a
sleepwalker; but if she enters the estate of holy matrimony, the evil
power which has dominion over her sooner or later transforms her at
midnight into a troll, which seizes her husband's throat in his sleep and
strangles him."
"Nursery tales!" cried Heinz angrily, but Biberli answered calmly:
"It can make no difference to you what occurs in the case of such
possessed women, for henceforward the Ortlieb house will be closed
against you. And--begging your pardon--it is fortunate. For, my lord, the
horse mounted by the first Schorlin--the chaplain showed it to you in the
picture--came from the ark in which Noah saved it with the other animals
from the deluge, and the first Lady Schorlin whom the family chronicles
mention was a countess. Your ancestresses came from citadels and castles;
no Schorlin ever yet brought his bride from a tradesman's house. You, the
proudest of them all, will scarcely think of making such an error, though
it is true--"
"Ernst Ortlieb, spite of his trade, is a man of knightly lineage, to whom
the king of arms opens the lists at every tournament!" exclaimed Heinz
indignantly.
"In the combat with blunt weapons," replied Biberli contemptuously.
"Nay, for the jousts and single combat," cried Heinz excitedly. "The
Emperor Frederick himself dubbed Herr Ernst a knight."
"You know best," replied Biberli modestly. But his coat of arms, like his
entry, smells of cloves and pepper. Here is another, however, who, like
your first ancestress, has a countess's title, and who has a right--My
name isn't Biberli if your lady mother at home would not be more than
happy were I to inform her that the Countess von Montfort and the darling
of her heart, which you are:
"The name of Montfort and what goes with it," Heinz interrupted, "would
surely please those at home. But the rest! Where could a girl be found
who, setting aside Cordula's kind heart, would be so great a contrast to
my mother in every respect?"
"Stormy mornings merge into quiet days," said the servant. "Everything
depends, my lord, upon the heart of which you speak so slightingly--the
heart and, even above that, upon the blood. 'Help is needed there,' cried
the kind heart just now, and then the blood did its 'devoir'. The act
followed the desire as the sound follows the blow of the hammer, the
thunder the flash of lightning. Well for the castle that is ruled by such
a mistress! I am only the servant, and respect commands me to curb my
tongue; but to-day I had news from home through the Provost Werner, of
Lucerne, whom I knew at Stansstadt. I meant to tell you of it over the
wine at the Thirsty Troopers, but that accursed note and the misfortune
which followed prevented. It will not make either of us more cheerful,
but whoever is ordered by the leech to drink gall and wormwood does
wisely to swallow the dose at one gulp. Do you wish to empty the cup
now?"
The knight nodded assent, and Biberli went on. "Home affairs are not
going as they ought. Though your uncle's hair is already grey, the
knightly blood in his veins makes him grasp the sword too quickly. The
quarrel about the bridge-toll has broken out again more violently than
ever. The townsfolk drove off our cattle as security and, by way of
punishment, your uncle seized the goods of their merchants, and they came
to blows. True, the Schorlin retainers forced back the men from town with
bloody heads, but if the feud lasts much longer we cannot hold out, for
the others have the money, and since the war cry has sounded less
frequently there has been no lack of men at arms who will serve any one
who pays. Besides, the townsfolk can appeal to the treaty of peace, and
if your uncle continues to seize the merchant's wares they will apply to
the imperial magistrate, and then:
"Then," cried Heinz eagerly, "then the time will have come for me to
leave the court and return home to look after my rights."
"A single arm, no matter how strong it may be, can avail nothing there,
my lord," Biberli protested earnestly. "Your Uncle Ramsweg has scarcely
his peer as a leader, but even were it not so you could not bring
yourself to send the old man home and put yourself in his place. Besides,
it would be as unwise as it is unjust. What is lacking at home is money
to pay the town what it demands for the use of the bridge, or to increase
the number of your men, and therefore:
"Well?" asked Heinz eagerly.
"Therefore seek the Countess von Montfort, who favours you above every
one else," was the reply; "for with her all you need will be yours
without effort. Her dowry will suffice to settle twenty such bridge dues,
and if it should come to a fray, the brave huntress will ride to the
field at your side with helmet and spear. Which of the four Fs did
Countess Cordula von Montfort ever lack?"
"The four Fs?" asked Heinz, listening intently. "The Fs," explained the
ex-pedagogue, "are the four letters which marriageable knights should
consider. They are: Family, figure, favour, and fortune. But hold your
cap on! What a hot blast this is, as if the storm were coming straight
from the jaws of hell. And the dust! Where did all these withered leaves
come from in the month of June? They are whirling about as if the foliage
had already fallen. There are big raindrops driving into my face too
B-r-r! You need all four Fs. No rain will wash a single one of them away,
and I hope it won't efface the least word of my speech either. What,
according to human foresight, could be lacking to secure the fairest
happiness, if you and the countess--"
"Love," replied Heinz Schorlin curtly.
"That will come of itself," cried Biberli, as if sure of what he was
saying, "if the bride is Countess Cordula."
"Possibly," answered the knight, "but the heart must not be filled by
another's image."
Here he paused, for in the darkness he had stumbled into the ditch by the
road.
The whirlwind which preceded the bursting of the storm blew such clouds
of dust and everything it contained into their faces that it was
difficult to advance. But Biberli was glad, for he had not yet found a
fitting answer. He struggled silently on beside his master against the
wind, until it suddenly subsided, and a violent storm of rain streamed in
big warm drops on the thirsty earth and the belated pedestrians. Then,
spite of Heinz's protestations, Biberli hurriedly snatched the long robe
embroidered with the St from his shoulders and threw it over his master,
declaring that his shirt was as safe from injury as his skin, but the
rain would ruin the knight's delicate embroidered doublet.
Then he drew over his head the hood which hung from his coat, and
meanwhile must have decided upon an answer, for as soon as they moved on
he began again: "You must drive your love for the beautiful sleepwalker
out of your mind. Try to do so, my dear, dear master, for the sake of
your lady mother, your young sister who will soon be old enough to marry,
our light-hearted Maria, and the good old castle. For your own happiness,
your lofty career, which began so gloriously, you must hear me! O master,
my dear master, tear from your heart the image of the little Nuremberg
witch, tempting though it is, I admit. The wound will bleed for a brief
time, but after so much mirthful pleasure a fleeting disappointment in
love, I should think, would not be too hard to bear if it will be
speedily followed by the fairest and most enduring happiness."
Here a flash of lightning, which illumined the hospital door close before
them, and made every surrounding object as bright as day, interrupted the
affectionate entreaty of the faithful fellow, and at the same time a
tremendous peal of thunder crashed and rattled through the air.
Master and servant crossed themselves, but Heinz exclaimed:
"That struck the tower yonder. A little farther to the left, and all
doubts and misgivings would have been ended."
"You can say that!" exclaimed Biberli reproachfully while passing with
his master through the gate which had just been opened for an imperial
messenger. "And you dare to make such a speech in the midst of this
heavenly wrath! For the sake of a pair of lovely eyes you are ready to
execrate a life which the saints have so blessed with every gift that
thousands and tens of thousands would not give it up from sheer gratitude
and joy, even if it were not a blasphemous crime!"
Again the lightning and thunder drowned his words. Biberli's heart
trembled, and muttering prayers beseeching protection from the avenging
hand above, he walked swiftly onward till they reached the Corn Market.
Here they were again stopped, for, notwithstanding the late hour, a
throng of people, shouting and wailing, was just pouring from the
Ledergasse into the square, headed by a night watchman provided with
spear, horn, and lantern, a bailiff, torchbearers, and some police
officers, who were vainly trying to silence the loudest outcries.
Again a brilliant flash of lightning pierced the black mass of clouds,
and Heinz, shuddering, pointed to the crowd and asked, "Do you suppose
the lightning killed the man whom they are carrying yonder?"
"Let me see," replied Biberli, among whose small vices curiosity was by
no means the least. He must have understood news gathering thoroughly,
for he soon returned and informed Heinz, who had sought shelter from the
rain under the broad bow window of a lofty house, that the bearers were
just carrying to his parents' home a young man whose thread of life had
been suddenly severed by a stab through the breast in a duel. After the
witnesses had taken the corpse to the leech Otto, in the Ledergasse, and
the latter said that the youth was dead, they had quickly dispersed,
fearing a severe punishment on account of the breach of the peace. The
murdered man was Ulrich Vorchtel, the oldest son of the wealthy Berthold
Vorchel, who collected the imperial taxes.
Again Heinz shuddered. He had seen the unfortunate young man the day
before yesterday at the fencing school, and yesterday, full of
overflowing mirth, at the dance, and knew that he, too, had fought in the
battle of Marchfield. His foe must have been master of the art of
wielding the sword, for the dead man had been a skilful fencer, and was
tall and stalwart in figure.
When the servant ended his story Heinz stood still in the darkness for a
time, silently listening. The bells had begun to ring, the blast of the
watchman's horn blended with the wailing notes summoning aid, and in two
places--near the Thiergartenthor and the Frauenthor--the sky was
crimsoned by the reflection of a conflagration, probably kindled by some
flash of lightning, which flickered over the clouds, alternately rising
and falling, sometimes deeper and anon paler in hue. Throngs of people,
shouting "Fire!" pressed from the cross streets into the square. The
stillness of the night was over.
When Heinz again turned to Biberli he said in a hollow tone:
"If the earth should swallow up Nuremberg tonight it would not surprise
me. But over yonder--look, Biber, the Duke of Pomerania's quarters in the
Green Shield are still lighted. I'll wager that they are yet at the
gaming table. A plague upon it! I would be there, too, if my purse
allowed. I feel as if yonder dead man and his coffin were burdening my
soul. If it was really good fortune in love that snatched the zecchins
from my purse yesterday:
"Then," cried Biberli eagerly, "to-night is the very time, ere Countess
Cordula teaches you to forget what troubles you, to win them back. The
gold for the first stake is at your disposal."
"From the Duke of Pomerania, you think?" asked Heinz; then, in a quick,
resolute tone, added: "No! Often as the duke has offered me his purse, I
never borrow from my peers when the prospect of repayment looks so
uncertain."
"Gently, my lord," returned Biberli, slapping his belt importantly. "Here
is what you need for the stake as your own property. No miracles have
been wrought for us, only I forgot But look! There are the black clouds
rolling northward over the castle. That was a frightful storm! But a
spendthrift doesn't keep house long-and the thunder has not yet followed
that last flash of lightning. There is plenty of uproar without it. It's
hard work to hear one's self speak amid all the ringing, trumpeting,
yelling, and shrieking. It seems as if they expected to put out the fire
with noise. The fathers of the city can attend to that. It doesn't appear
to disturb the duke and his guests at their dice; and here, my lord, are
fifty florins which, I think, will do for the beginning."
Biberli handed the knight a little bag containing this sum, and when
Heinz asked in perplexity where he obtained it, the ex-schoolmaster
answered gaily: "They came just in the nick of time. I received them from
Suss, the jockey, while you were out riding this afternoon."
"For the black?" Heinz enquired.
"Certainly, my lord. It's a pity about the splendid stallion. But, as you
know, he has the staggers, and when I struck him on the coronet he stood
as if rooted to the earth, and the equerry, who was there, said that the
disease was proved. So the Jew silently submitted, let the horse be led
away, and paid back what we gave him. Fifty heavy florins! More than
enough for a beginning. If I may advise you, count on the two and the
five when fixed numbers are to be thrown or hit. Why? Because you must
turn your ill luck in love to advantage: and those from whom it comes are
the two beautiful Ortlieb Es, as Nuremberg folk call the ladies Els and
Eva. That makes the two. But E is the fifth letter in the alphabet, so I
should choose the five. If Biberli did not put things together
shrewdly--"
"He would be as oversharp as he has often been already," Heinz
interrupted, but he patted Biberli's wet arm as he spoke, and added
kindly "Yet every day proves that my Biberli is a true and steadfast
fellow; but where in the wide world did you, a schoolmaster, gain
instruction in the art of throwing the dice?"
"While we were studying in Paris, with my dead foster brother," replied
the servant with evident emotion. "But now go up, my lord, before the
fire alarm, and I know not what else, makes the people upstairs separate.
The iron must be forged during this wild night. Only a few drops of rain
are falling. You can cross the street dry even without my long garment."
While speaking he divested the knight of his robe, and continued eagerly:
"Now, my lord, from the coffin, or let us say rather the leaden weight,
which oppresses your soul, let a bolt be melted that will strike
misfortune to the heart. Glittering gold has a cheering colour."
"Stop! stop!" Heinz interrupted positively. "No good wishes on the eve of
hunting or gaming.
"But if I come bounding down the stairs of the Green Shield with a purse
as heavy as my heart is just now--why, Biberli, success puts a new face
on many things, and yours shall again look at me without anxiety."
CHAPTER XII.
The thunderclouds had gathered in the blackest masses above the
Frauenthor and the Ortlieb mansion. Ere the storm burst the oppressive
atmosphere had burdened the hearts within as heavily as it weighed
outside upon tree, bush, and all animated creation.
In the servants' rooms under the roof the maids slept quietly and
dreamlessly; and the men, with their mouths wide open, snored after the
labour of the day, unconscious of what was passing outside in the sky or
the events within which had destroyed the peace of their master and his
family.
The only bed unoccupied was the one in the little room next to the stairs
leading to the garret, which was occupied by Katterle. The Swiss,
kneeling before it with her face buried in the coarse linen pillow case,
alternately sobbed, prayed, and cursed herself and her recklessness.
When the gale, which preceded the thunderstorm, blew leaves and straws in
through the open window she started violently, imagining that Herr
Ortlieb had come to call her to account and her trial was to begin. The
barber's widow, whom she had seen a few days before in the pillory, with
a stone around her neck, because she had allowed a cloth weaver's
heedless daughter to come to her lodging with a handsome trumpeter who
belonged to the city musicians, rose before her mental vision. How the
poor thing had trembled and moaned after the executioner's assistant hung
the heavy stone around her neck! Then, driven frantic by the jeers and
insults of the people, the missiles flung by the street boys, and the
unbearable burden, she could control herself no longer but, pouring forth
a flood of curses, thrust out her tongue at her tormentors.
What a spectacle! But ere she, Katterle, would submit to such disgrace
she would bid farewell to life with all its joys; and even to the
countryman to whom her heart clung, and who, spite of his well-proven
truth and steadfastness, had brought misery upon her.
Now the memory of the hateful word which she, too, had called to the
barber's widow weighed heavily on her heart. Never, never again would she
be arrogant to a neighbour who had fallen into misfortune.
This vow, and many others, she made to St. Clare; then her thoughts
wandered to the city moat, to the Pegnitz, the Fischbach, and all the
other streams in and near Nuremberg, where it was possible to drown and
thus escape the terrible disgrace which threatened her. But in so doing
she had doubtless committed a heavy sin; for while recalling the Dutzen
Pond, from whose dark surface she had often gathered white water lilies
after passing through the Frauenthor into the open fields, and wondering
in what part of its reedy shore her design could be most easily executed,
a brilliant flash of lightning blazed through her room, and at the same
time a peal of thunder shook the old mansion to its foundations.
That was meant for her and her wicked thoughts. No! For the sake of
escaping disgrace here on earth, she dared not trifle with eternal
salvation and the hope of seeing her dead mother in the other world.
The remembrance of that dear mother, who had laboured so earnestly to
train her in every good path, soothed her. Surely she was looking down
upon her and knew that she had remained upright and honest, that she had
not defrauded her employers of even a pin, and that the little fault
which was to be so grievously punished had been committed solely out of
love for her countryman, who in his truth and steadfastness meant
honestly by her. What Biberli requested her to do could be no heavy sin.
But the powers above seemed to be of a different opinion; for again a
dazzling glare of light illumined the room, and the crash and rattle of
the thunder of the angry heavens accompanied it with a deafening din.
Katterle shrieked aloud; it seemed as if the gates of hell had opened
before her, or the destruction of the world had begun.
Frantic with terror, she sprang back from the window, through which the
raindrops were already sprinkling her face. They cooled her flushed
cheeks and brought her back to reality. The offence she had just
committed was no trivial one. She, whom Herr Ortlieb, with entire
confidence, had placed in the service of the fair young girl whose
invalid mother could not care for her, had permitted herself to be
induced to persuade Eva, who was scarcely beyond childhood, to a
rendezvous with a man whom she represented to the inexperienced maiden as
a godly, virtuous knight, though she knew from Biberli how far the latter
surpassed his master in fidelity and steadfastness.
"Lead us not into temptation!" How often she had repeated the words in
the Lord's Prayer, and now she herself had become the serpent that
tempted into sin the innocent child whom duty should have commanded her
to guard.
No, no! The guilt for which she was threatened with punishment was by no
means small, and even if her earthly judge did not call her to account,
she would go to confession to-morrow and honestly perform the penance
imposed.
Moved by these thoughts, she gazed across the courtyard to the convent.
Just at that moment the lightning again flashed, the thunder pealed, and
she covered her face with her hands. When she lowered her arms she saw on
the roof of the nuns' granary, which adjoined the cow-stable, a slender
column of smoke, followed by a narrow tongue of flame, which grew
steadily brighter.
The lightning had set it on fire.
Sympathy for the danger and losses of others forced her own grief and
anxiety into the background and, without pausing to think, she slipped on
her shoes, snatched her shawl from the chest, and ran downstairs,
shouting: "The lightning has struck! The convent is burning!"
Just at that moment the door of the chamber occupied by the two sisters
opened, and Ernst Ortlieb, with tangled hair and pallid cheeks, came
toward her.
Within the room the dim light of the little lamp and the fiery glare of
the lightning illumined tear-stained, agitated faces.
After Heinz Schorlin had called to her, and Els had hurried to her aid,
Eva, clad in her long, plain night robe, and barefooted, just as she had
risen from her couch, followed the maid to her room. What must the
knight, who but yesterday, she knew, had looked up to her as to a saint,
think of her now?
She felt as if she were disgraced, stained with shame. Yet it was through
no fault of her own, and overwhelmed by the terrible conviction that
mysterious, supernatural powers, against which resistance was hopeless,
were playing a cruel game with her, she had felt as if the stormy sea
were tossing her in a rudderless boat on its angry surges.
Unable to seek consolation in prayer, as usual, she had given herself up
to dull despair, but only for a short time. Els had soon returned, and
the firm, quiet manner with which her prudent, helpful friend and sister
met her, and even tried to raise her drooping courage by a jest ere she
sent her to their mother's sick room, had fallen on her soul like
refreshing dew; not because Els promised to act for her--on the contrary,
what she intended to do roused her to resistance.
She had been far too guilty and oppressed to oppose her, yet indignation
concerning the sharp words which Els had uttered about the knight, and
her intention of forbidding him the house, perhaps forever, had
stimulated her like strong acid wine.
Not until after her sister had left her did she become capable of clearly
understanding what she had felt during her period of somnambulism.
While her mother, thanks to a narcotic, slept soundly, breathing quietly,
and in the entry below something, she knew not what, perhaps due to her
father's return, was occurring, she sat thinking, pondering, while an
impetuous throng of rebellious wishes raised their voices, alternately
asking and denying, in her agitated breast.
How she had happened to rise from her couch and go out had vanished
utterly from her memory, but she was still perfectly conscious of her
feelings during the night walk. If hitherto she had yearned to drain
heavenly bliss from the chalice of faith, during her wanderings through
the house she had longed for nothing save to drink her fill from the cup
of earthly joy. Ardent kisses, of which she had forbidden herself even to
think, she awaited with blissful delight. Her timorous heart, held in
check by virgin modesty, accustomed to desire nothing save what she could
have confessed to her sister and the abbess, seemed as if it had cast off
every fetter and boldly resolved to risk the most daring deeds. The
somnambulist had longed for the moment when, after Heinz Schorlin's
confession that he loved her, she could throw her arms around his neck
with rapturous gratitude.
If, while awake, she had desired only to speak to him of her saint and of
his duty to overthrow the foes of the Church, she had wished while gazing
at the moon from the stairs, and in front of the house door, to whisper
sweet words of love, listen to his, and in so doing forget herself, the
world, and everything which did not belong to him, to her, and their
love.
And she remembered this longing and yearning in a way very unlike a mere
dream. It seemed rather as if, while the moon was attracting her by its
magic power, something, which had long slumbered in the depths of her
soul, had waked to life; something, from which formerly, ere her heart
and mind had been able rightly to understand it, she had shrunk with
pious horror, had assumed a tangible form.
Now she dreaded this newly recognised sinful part of her own nature,
which she had imagined a pure vessel that had room only for what was
noble, sacred, and innocent.
She, too--she knew it now--was only a girl like those on whose desire for
love she had looked down with arrogant contempt, no bride of heaven or
saint.
She had not yet taken the veil, and it was fortunate, for what would have
become of her had she not discovered until after her profession this part
of her nature, which she thought every true nun, if she possessed it,
must discard, like the hair which was shorn from her head, before taking
the vow of the order.
During this self-inspection it became more and more evident that she was
not one person, but two in one--a twofold nature with a single body and
two distinct souls; and this conviction caused her as much pain as if the
cut which had produced the separation were still bleeding.
Just at that moment her eyes fell upon the image of the Virgin opposite,
and the usual impulse to lift her soul in prayer took possession of her
even more powerfully than a short time before.
With fervent warmth she besought her to release her from this newly
awakened nature, which surely could not be pleasing in the sight of
Heaven, and let her once more become what she was before the unfortunate
ramble in the moonlight.
But the composure she needed for prayer was soon destroyed, for the image
of the knight rose before her again and again, and it seemed as if her
own name, which he had called with such ardent longing, once more rang in
her ears.
Whoever thus raises his voice in appeal to another loves that person.
Heinz Schorlin's love was great and sincere and, instead of heeding the
inner voice that warned her to return to prayer, she cried defiantly, "I
will not!"
She could not yet part from the man for whom her heart throbbed with such
passionate yearning, who was so brave and godly, so ardently devoted to
her.
True, it had been peacefully beautiful to dream herself into the bright
glory of heaven, yet the stormy rapture she had felt while thinking of
him and his love seemed richer and greater. She could not, would not part
from him.
Then she remembered her sister's intention of driving Heinz--Eva already
called the knight by that name in her soliloquy--from her presence, and
the thought that she might perhaps wound him so keenly that knightly
honour would forbid his return alarmed and incensed her.
What right had Els to distrust him? A godly knight played no base game
with the chosen lady of, his heart, and that, yes, that she certainly
was, since she had named her colour to him. Nothing should separate them.
She needed him for her happiness as much as she did light and air.
Hitherto she had longed for bliss in another world, but she was so young
she probably had a long life before her, and what could existence on
earth offer if robbed of the hope of his possession?
The newly awakened part of her nature demanded its rights. It would never
again allow itself to be forced into the old slumber.
If her sister came back and boasted of having driven away the dangerous
animal forever, she would show her that she had a different opinion of
the knight, and would permit no one to interpose between them. But, while
still pondering over this plan, the door of the sick-room was softly
opened and her father beckoned to her to follow him.
Silently leading the way through the dusky corridor, no longer illumined
by the moonlight, he entered his daughter's room before her. The lamp,
still burning there, revealed the agitated face of her sister who,
resting her chin on her hand, sat on the stool beside the spinning wheel.
Eva's courage, which had blazed up so brightly, instantly fell again.
"Good heavens! What has happened?" she cried in terror; but her father
answered in a hollow tone:
"For the sake of your noble sister, to whom I pledged my word, I will
force myself to remain calm. But look at her! Her poor heart must be like
a graveyard, for she was doomed to bury what she held dearest. And who,"
he continued furiously, so carried away by grief and indignation as to be
unmindful of his promise to maintain his composure, "who is to blame for
it all, save you and your boundless imprudence?"
Eva, with uplifted hands, tried to explain how, unconscious of her acts,
she had walked in her sleep down the stairs and out of the house, but he
imperiously cut her short with:
"Silence! I know all. My daughter gave a worthless tempter the right to
expect the worst from her. You, whom we deemed the ornament of this
house, whose purity hitherto was stainless, are to blame if people
passing on the street point at it! Alas! alas! Our honour, our ancient,
unsullied name!"
Groaning aloud, the father struck his brow with his clenched hand; but
when Els rose and passed her arm around his shoulders to speak words of
consolation, Eva, who hitherto had vainly struggled for words, could
endure no more.
"Whoever says that of me, my father," she exclaimed with flashing eyes;
scarcely able to control her voice, "has opened his ears to slander; and
whoever terms Heinz Schorlin a worthless tempter, is blinded by a
delusion, and I call him to his face, even were it my own father, to whom
I owe gratitude and respect--"
But here she stopped and extended her arms to keep off the deeply angered
man, for he had started forward with quivering lips, and--she perceived
it clearly--was already under the spell of one of the terrible fits of
fury which might lead him to the most unprecedented deeds. Els, however,
had clung to him and, while holding him back with all her strength, cried
out in a tone of keen reproach, "Is this the way you keep your promise?"
Then, lowering her voice, she continued with loving entreaty: "My dear,
dear father, can you doubt that she was asleep, unconscious of her acts,
when she did what has brought so much misery upon us?"
And, interrupting herself, she added eagerly in a tone of the firmest
conviction: "No, no, neither shame nor misery has yet touched you, my
father, nor the poor child yonder. The suspicion of evil rests on me, and
me alone, and if any one here must be wretched it is I."
Then Herr Ernst, regaining his self-control, drew back from Eva, but the
latter, as if fairly frantic, exclaimed: "Do you want to drive me out of
my senses by your mysterious words and accusations? What, in the name of
all the saints, has happened that can plunge my Els into misery and
shame?"
"Into misery and shame," repeated her father in a hollow tone, throwing
himself into a chair, where he sat motionless, with his face buried in
his hands, while Els told her sister what had occurred when she went down
into the entry to speak to the knight.
Eva listened to her story, fairly gasping for breath. For one brief
moment she cherished the suspicion that Cordula had not acted from pure
sympathy, but to impose upon Heinz Schorlin a debt of gratitude which
would bind him to her more firmly. Yet when she heard that her father had
given back his daughter's ring to Herr Casper Eysvogel and broken his
child's betrothal she thought of nothing save her sister's grief and,
sobbing aloud, threw herself into Els's arms.
The girls held each other in a close embrace until the first flash of
lightning and peal of thunder interrupted the conversation.
The father and daughters had been so deeply agitated that they had not
heard the storm rising outside, and the outbreak of the tempest surprised
them. The peal of thunder, which so swiftly followed the lightning, also
startled them and when, soon after, a second one shook the house with its
crashing, rattling roar, Herr Ernst went out to wake the chief packer.
But old Endres was already keeping watch among the wares entrusted to him
and when, after a brief absence, the master of the house returned, he
found Eva again clasped in her sister's arms, and saw the latter kissing
her brow and eyes as she tenderly strove to comfort her.
But Eva seemed deaf to her soothing words. Els, her faithful Els, was no
longer the betrothed bride of her Wolff; her great, beautiful happiness
was destroyed forever. On the morrow all Nuremberg would learn that Herr
Casper had broken his son's betrothal pledge, because his bride, for the
sake of a tempter, Sir Heinz Schorlin, had failed to keep her troth with
him.
How deeply all this pierced Eva's heart! how terrible was the torture of
the thought that she was the cause of this frightful misfortune!
Dissolved in an agony of tears, she entreated the poor girl to forgive
her; and Els did so willingly, and in a way that touched her father to
the very depths of his heart. How good the girls must be who, spite of
the sore suffering which one had brought upon the other, were still so
loving and loyal!
Convinced that Eva, too, had done nothing worthy of punishment, he went
towards them to clasp both in his arms, but ere he could do so the clap
of thunder which had frightened Katterle so terribly shook the whole
room. "St. Clare, aid us!" cried Eva, crossing herself and falling upon
her knees; but Els rushed to the window, opened it, and looked down the
street. Nothing was visible there save a faint red glow on the distant
northern horizon, and two mailed soldiers who were riding into the city
at a rapid trot. They had been sent from the stables in the Marienthurm
to keep order in case a fire should break out. Several men with hooks and
poles followed, also hurrying to the Frauenthor.
In reply to the question where the fire was and where they going, they
answered: "To the Fischbach, to help. Flames have burst out apparently
under the fortress at the Thiergartenthor."
The long-drawn call for help from the warder's horn, which came at the
same moment, proved that the men were right.
Herr Ernst hastened out of the room just as Katterle's shriek, "The
lightning struck! the convent is burning!" rung from the upper step of
the stairs.
He had already pronounced her sentence, and the sight of her roused his
wrath again so vehemently that, spite of the urgent peril, he shouted to
her that, whatever claimed his attention now, she certainly should not
escape the most severe punishment for her shameful conduct.
Then he ordered old Endres and two of the menservants to watch the
sleeping-room of his invalid wife, that in case anything should happen
the helpless woman might be instantly borne to a place of safety.
Ere he himself went to the scene of the conflagration he hurried back to
his daughters.
While the girls were giving him his hat and cloak he told them where the
fire had broken out, and this caused another detention of the anxious
master of the house, for Eva seized her shoes and stockings and, kicking
her little slippers from her feet, declared that she, too, would not
remain absent from the place when her dear nuns were in danger. But her
father commanded her to stay with her mother and sister, and went to the
door, turning back once more on the threshold to his daughters with the
anxious entreaty: "Think of your mother!"
Another peal of thunder drowned the sound of his footsteps hurrying down
the stairs. When Els, who had watched her father from the window a short
time, went back to her sister, Eva dried her eyes and cheeks, saying:
"Perhaps he is right; but whenever my heart urges me to obey any warm
impulse, obstacles are put in my way. What a weak nonentity is the
daughter of an honourable Nuremberg family!"
Els heard this complaint with astonishment. Was this her Eva, her "little
saint," who yesterday had desired nothing more ardently than with humble
obedience, far from the tumult of the world, to become worthy of her
Heavenly Bridegroom, and in the quiet peace of the convent raise her soul
to God? What had so changed the girl in these few hours? Even the most
worldly-minded of her friends would have taken such an impeachment ill.
But she had no time now to appeal to the conscience of her misguided
sister. Love and duty summoned her to her mother's couch. And then! The
child had become aware of her love, and was she, Els, who had been parted
from Wolff by her own father, and yet did not mean to give him up,
justified in advising her sister to cast aside her love and the hope of
future happiness with and through the man to whom she had given her
heart?
What miracles love wrought! If in a single night it had transformed the
devout future Bride of Heaven into an ardently loving woman, it could
accomplish the impossible for her also.
While Eva was gazing out of the window Els returned to her mother. She
was still asleep and, without permitting either curiosity or longing to
divert her from her duty, Els kept her place beside the couch of the
beloved invalid, spite of the fire alarm which, though somewhat subdued,
was heard in the room.
CHAPTER XIII.
Eva was standing at the open window. The violence of the storm seemed
exhausted. The clouds were rolling northward, and the thunder followed
the flashes of lightning at longer and longer intervals. Peace was
restored to the heavens, but the crowd and noise in the city and the
street constantly increased.
The iron tongues of the alarm bells had never swung so violently, the
warder's horn had never made the air quiver with such resonant appeals
for aid.
Nor did the metallic voices above call for help in vain, for while a
roseate glow tinged the linden in front of her window and the houses on
the opposite side of the street with the hues of dawn, the crowds
thronging from the Frauenthor to St. Klarengasse grew denser and denser.
The convent was not visible from her chamber, but the acrid odor of the
smoke and the loud voices which reached her ear from that direction
proved that the fire was no trivial one. While she was seeking out the
spot from which Heinz must have looked up to her window, the Ortlieb
menservants, with some of the Montfort retainers, came out of the house
with pails and ladders.
A female figure glided into the dark street after them. A black shawl
concealed her head and the upper part of her figure, and she held a
bundle in her hand.
It must be Katterle.
Where was she going at this hour? As she was carrying the package, she
could scarcely intend to help in putting out the fire. Was she stealing
away from fear of punishment? Poor thing! Even the maid was hurled into
misfortune through her guilt.
It pierced her very heart. But while she called to Katterle to stop her,
something else, which engrossed her still more, diverted her
attention--the loud voice of Countess Cordula reached her from the street
door. With whom was she talking? Did the girl, who ventured upon so many
things which ill-beseemed a modest maiden, intend to join the men? Eva
forgot that she, too, would have hurried to the nuns had not her father
prevented it. The countess was already standing in the courtyard.
After Eva had given her a hasty glance she again looked for the maid, but
Katterle had already vanished in the darkness. This grieved her; she had
neglected something which might have saved the girl, to whom she was
warmly attached, from some imprudent act. But while attracted by the
strange appearance of the countess she had forgotten the other.
Cordula had probably just left her couch, for she wore only a plain dress
tucked up very high, short boots, which she probably used in hunting, and
a shawl crossed over her bosom; another was wound round her head in the
fashion of the peasant women who brought their goods to market on cold
winter days. No farmer's wife could be more simply clad, and yet--Eva was
forced to admit it--there was something aristocratic in her firm bearing.
Her companions were her father's chaplain and the equerry who had grown
grey in his service. Both were trying to dissuade her. The former pointed
to a troop of women who were following the chief of police and some city
constables, and said warningly: "Those are all wanton queans, whom the
law of this city compels to lend their aid in putting out fires. How
would it beseem your rank to join these who shame their sex----No, no! It
would be said to-morrow that the ornament of the house of Montfort
had----"
"That Countess Cordula had used her hands in extinguishing the fire," she
interrupted with gay self-confidence. "Is there any disgrace in that?
Must my noble birth debar me from being numbered among those who help
their neighbours so far as lies in their power? If any good is
accomplished here, those poor women yonder will make it no worse by their
aid. If people here believe that they do, it will give me double pleasure
to ennoble it by working with them. Putting out the flames will not
degrade me, and will make the women better. So, forward! See how the fire
is blazing yonder! Help is needed there and, thank Heaven, I am no
weakling. Besides, there are women who want assistance and, to women in
peril, the most welcome aid is woman's."
The old equerry, his eyes glittering with tears, nodded assent, and led
the way into the street; but the countess, instead of following
instantly, glanced back for the page who was to carry the bandages which
she had learned to use among her retainers at home. The agile boy did not
delay her long; but while his mistress was looking to see that he had
forgotten nothing of importance, he perceived at the window Eva, whose
beauty had long since fired his young heart, and cast a languishing
glance at her. Then Cordula also noticed her and called a pleasant
greeting. Eva was on the point of answering in the same tone, when she
remembered that Cordula had spoken of Heinz Schorlin in the presence of
others as if he were awaiting her in all submission. Anger surged hotly
in her breast, and she drew back into the room as if she had not heard
the salutation.
The countess perceived it, and shrugged her shoulders pityingly.
Eva, dissatisfied with herself, continued to gaze down into the street
long after the crowds of people flocking from the city had concealed
Cordula from her eyes. It seemed as though she would never again succeed
in anything that would bring contentment. Never had she felt so weak, so
ill-tempered, so devoid of self-reliance. Yet she could not, as usual,
seek consolation with her saint. There was so much here below to divert
her attention.
The roseate glow on the linden had become a crimson glare, the flickering
light on the opposite walls a dazzling illumination. The wind, now
blowing from the west, bore from St. Klarengasse burning objects which
scattered sparks around them--bundles of hay caught by the flames--from
the convent barn to the Marienthurm opposite, and into the street.
Besides, the noise above and behind, before and below her, grew louder
and louder. The ringing of the bells and the blare of trumpets from the
steeples continued, and with this constant ringing, pealing, and crashing
from above, mingled the high, clear voices of the choir of nuns in the
convent, beseeching in fervent litanies the help of their patron saint.
True, the singing was often drowned by the noise from the street, for the
fire marshals and quartermasters had been informed in time, and watchmen,
soldiers in the pay of the city, men from the hospital, and the abandoned
women (required by law to help put out the fires) came in little groups,
while bailiffs and servants of the Council, barbers (who were obliged to
lend their aid, but whose surgical skill could find little employment
here), members of the Council, priests and monks arrived singly. The
street also echoed with the trampling of many steeds, for mounted
troopers in coats of mail first dashed by to aid the bailiffs in
maintaining order, then the inspector of water works, with his chief
subordinate, trotted along to St. Klarengasse on the clumsy horses placed
at their disposal by the Council in case of fire. He was followed by the
millers, with brass fire engines. While their well-fed nags drew on
sledges, with little noise, through the mire of the streets now softened
by the rain, the heavy wooden water barrels needed in the work of
extinguishing the flames, there was a loud rattling and clanking as the
carts appeared on which the men from the Public Works building were
bringing large and small ladders, hooks and levers, pails and torches, to
the scene of the conflagration.
Besides those who were constrained by the law, many others desired to aid
the popular Sisters of St. Clare and thereby earn a reward from God. A
brewer had furnished his powerful stallions to convey to the scene of
action, with their tools, the eight masons whose duty it was to use their
skill in extinguishing the flames. All sorts of people--men and
women--followed, yelling and shrieking, to seek their own profit during
the work of rescue. But the bailiffs kept a sharp eye on them, and made
way when the commander of the German knights, with several companions on
whose black mantles the white cross gleamed, appeared on horseback, and
at last old Herr Berthold Vorchtel trotted up on his noble grey, which
was known to the whole city. He still had a firm seat in the saddle, but
his head was bowed, and whoever knew that only one hour before the corpse
of his oldest son, slain in a duel, had been brought home, admired the
aged magistrate's strength of will. As First Losunger and commander in
chief he was the head of the Council, and therefore of the city also.
Duty had commanded him to mount his steed, but how pale and haggard was
his shrewd face, usually so animated!
Just in front of the Ortlieb mansion the commander of the German knights
rode to his side, and Eva saw how warmly he shook him by the hand, as if
he desired to show the old man very cordially his deep sympathy in some
sore trouble which had assailed him.
Ever since Wolff's betrothal to Els had been announced the Vorchtels had
ceased to be on terms of intimacy with the Ortliebs; but old Herr
Berthold, though he himself had probably regarded young Eysvogel as his
"Ursel's" future husband, had always treated Eva kindly, and she was not
mistaken--tears were glittering on his cheeks in the torchlight. The
sight touched the young girl's inmost heart. How eagerly she desired to
know what had befallen the Vorchtels, and to give the old man some token
of sympathy! What could have caused him so much sorrow? Only a few hours
before her father had returned from a gay entertainment at his house. It
could scarcely concern Herr Berthold's wife, his daughter Ursula, or
either of his two vigorous sons. Perhaps death had only bereft him of
some more distant, though beloved relative, yet surely she would have
known that, for the Ortliebs were connected by marriage both with the old
gentleman and his wife.
Tortured by a presentiment of evil, Eva gazed after him, and also watched
for Heinz Schorlin among the people in the street. Must not anxiety for
her bring him hither, if he learned how near her house the fire was
burning?
Whenever a helmet or knight's baret appeared above the crowd she thought
that he was coming. Once she believed that she had certainly recognised
him, for a tall young man of knightly bearing appeared, not mounted, but
on foot, and stopped opposite to the Ortlieb house. That must be he! But
when he looked up to her window, the reflection of the fire showed that
the man who had made her heart beat so quickly was indeed a young and
handsome knight, but by no means the person for whom she had mistaken
him. It was Boemund Altrosen, famed as victor in many a tournament, who
when a boy had often been at the house of her uncle, Herr Pfinzing. There
was no mistaking his coal-black, waving locks. It was said that the
dark-blue sleeve of a woman's robe which he wore on his helmet in the
jousts belonged to the Countess von Montfort. She was his lady, for whom
he had won so many victories.
Heinz Schorlin had mentioned him at the ball as his friend, and told her
that the gallant knight would vainly strive to win the reckless countess.
Perhaps he was now looking at the house so intently on Cordula's account.
Or had Heinz, his friend, sent him to watch over her while he was
possibly detained by the Emperor?
But, no; he had just gone nearer to the house to question a man in the
von Montfort livery, and the reply now led him to move on towards the
convent.
Were the tears which filled Eva's eyes caused by the smoke that poured
from the fire more and more densely into the street, or to disappointment
and bitter anguish?
The danger which threatened her aunt and her beloved nuns also increased
her excitement. True, the sisters themselves seemed to feel safe, for
snatches of their singing were still audible amid the ringing of the
bells and the blare of the trumpets, but the fire must have been very
hard to extinguish. This was proved by the bright glow on the linden tree
and the shouts of command which, though unintelligible, rose above every
other sound.
The street below was becoming less crowded. Most of those who had left
their beds to render aid had already reached the scene of the
conflagration. Only a few stragglers still passed through the open gate
towards the Marienthurm. Among them were horsemen, and Eva's heart again
throbbed more quickly, but only for a short time. Heinz Schorlin was far
taller than the man who had again deceived her, and his way would hardly
have been lighted by two mounted torch bearers. Soon her rosy lips even
parted in a smile, for the sturdy little man on the big, strong-boned
Vinzgau steed, whom she now saw distinctly, was her dearest relative, her
godfather, the kind, shrewd, imperial magistrate, Berthold Pfinzing, the
husband of her father's sister, good Aunt Christine.
If he looked up he would tell her about old Herr Vorchtel. Nor did he
ride past his darling's house without a glance at her window, and when he
saw Eva beckon he ordered the servants to keep back, and stopped behind
the chains.
After he had briefly greeted his niece and she had enquired what had
befallen the Vorchtels, he asked anxiously: "Then you know nothing yet?
And Els--has it been kept from her, too?"
"What, in the name of all the saints?" asked Eva, with increasing alarm.
Then Herr Pfinzing, who saw that the door of the house was open, asked
her to come down. Eva was soon standing beside her godfather's big bay,
and while patting the smooth neck of the splendid animal he said
hurriedly, in a low tone: "It's fortunate that it happened so. You can
break it gradually to your sister, child. To-night Summon up your
courage, for there are things which even a man--To make the story short,
then: Tonight Wolff Eysvogel and young Vorchtel quarreled, or rather
Ulrich irritated your Wolff so cruelly that he drew his sword--"
"Wolff!" shrieked Eva, whose hand had already dropped from the horse.
"Wolff! He is so terribly strong, and if he drew his sword in anger----"
"He dealt his foe one powerful thrust," replied the imperial magistrate
with an expressive gesture. "The sword pierced him through. But I must go
on Only this one thing more: Ulrich was borne back to his parents as a
corpse. And Wolff Where is he hiding? May the saints long be the only
ones who know! A quarrel with such a result under the Emperor's eyes, now
when peace has just been declared throughout the land! Who knows what
sentence will be pronounced if the bailiffs show themselves shrewder this
time than usual! My office compelled me to set the pack upon him. That is
the reason I am so late. Tell Els as cautiously as possible."
He bowed gallantly and trotted on, but Eva, as if hunted by enemies,
rushed up the staircase, threw herself on her knees before the prie dieu,
and sobbed aloud.
Young Vorchtel had undoubtedly heard of the events in the entry, taunted
Wolff with his betrothed bride's nocturnal interview with a knight, and
thus roused the strong man to fury. How terrible it all was! How could
she bear it! Her thoughtlessness had cost a human life, robbed parents of
their son! Through her fault her sister's betrothed husband, whom she
also loved, was in danger of being placed under ban, perhaps even of
being led to the executioner's block!
She had no thought of any other motive which might have induced the
hot-blooded young men to cross swords and, firmly convinced that her
luckless letter had drawn Heinz Schorlin to the house and thus led to all
these terrible things, she vainly struggled for composure.
Sometimes she beheld in imagination the despairing Els; sometimes the
aged Vorchtels, grieving themselves to death; sometimes Wolff, outlawed,
hiding like a hunted deer in the recesses of the forest; sometimes the
maid, fleeing with her little bundle into the darkness of the night;
sometimes the burning convent; and at intervals also Heinz Schorlin, as
he knelt before her and raised his clasped hands with passionate
entreaty.
But she repelled every thought of him as a sin, and even repressed the
impulse to look out into the street to seek him. Her sole duty now was to
pray to her patron saint and the Mother of God in behalf of her sister,
whom she had hurled into misfortune, and her poor heart bleeding from
such deep wounds; but the consolation which usually followed the mere
uplifting of her soul in prayer did not come, and it could not be
otherwise, for amid her continual looking into her own heart and
listening to what went on around her no real devotion was possible.
Although she constantly made fresh efforts to collect her thoughts, and
continued to kneel with clasped hands before the prie dieu, not a
hoof-beat, not a single loud voice, escaped her ear. Even the alternate
deepening and paling of the reflection of the fire, which streamed
through the window, attracted her attention, and the ringing of bells and
braying of trumpets, which still continued, maintained the agitation in
her soul.
Yet prayer was the sole atonement she could make for the wrong she had
done her sister; so she did not cease her endeavours to plead for her to
the Great Helper above, but her efforts were futile. Yet even when she
heard voices close by the house, among which she distinguished Countess
Cordula's and--if she was not mistaken--her father's, she resisted the
impulse to rise from her knees.
At last the vain struggle was ended by an interruption from without.
After unusually loud voices exclaiming and questioning had reached her
from the entry, the door of her chamber suddenly opened and old Martsche
looked in. The housekeeper was seeking something; but when she found the
devout child on her knees she did not wish to disturb her, and contented
herself with the evidence of her eyes. But Eva stopped her, and learned
that she was searching for Katterle, who could neither be found in her
room, or anywhere else. Herr Ortlieb had brought Countess von Montfort
home severely burned, and there were all sorts of things for the maid to
do.
Eva clung shuddering to the back of the prie dieu, for the certainty that
the unfortunate girl had really fled was like strewing salt on her
wounds.
When Martsche left her and Els entered, her excitement had risen to such
a pitch that she flung herself before her, as if frantic and, clinging to
her knees, heaping self-accusations upon herself with passionate
impetuosity, she pleaded, amid her sobs, for pardon and mercy.
Meanwhile Els had been informed by her father of her lover's fatal deed,
and as soon as she perceived what tortured her sister she relieved her,
with loving words of explanation, from the reproach of being the cause of
this misfortune also, for the quarrel had taken place so early that no
tidings of the meeting in the entry could have reached young Vorchtel
when he became involved in the fray with Wolff.
Nor was it solely to soothe Eva that she assured her that, deeply as she
mourned the death of the hapless Ulrich and his parents' grief, Wolff's
deed could not diminish either her love or her hope of becoming his.
Eva listened to this statement with sparkling eyes. The love in her
sister's heart was as immovably firm as the ancient stones of her native
stronghold, which defied every storm, and on which even the destroying,
kindling lightning could inflict no injury. This made her doubly dear,
and from the depths of dull despair her soul, ever prone to soar upwards,
rose swiftly to the heights of hopeful exaltation.
When Els at last entreated her to go to rest without her, she willingly
consented, for her mother was comfortable, and Sister Renata was watching
at her bedside.
Eva kept her promise, after Els, who wanted to see the Countess von
Montfort, had satisfied her concerning the welfare of the nuns and
promised to go to rest herself as soon as possible.
The stopping of the alarm bells proved that the fire was under control.
Even its reflection had disappeared, but the eastern sky was beginning to
be suffused with a faint tinge of rose colour.
When her sister left her Eva herself drew the curtains before the window,
and sleep soon ended her thoughts and yearnings, her grief and her hope.
CHAPTER XIV.
Countess Cordula von Montfort's room faced the east and looked out into
the garden. The sun of the June morning had just risen, filling it with
cheerful light.
The invalid's maid had wished to deny Els admittance, but the countess
called eagerly to her, and then ordered the windows to be opened, because
she never felt comfortable unless it was light around her and she could
breathe God's pure air.
The morning breeze bore the smoke which still rose from the fire in
another direction, and thus a refreshing air really entered the room from
the garden, for the thunderstorm had refreshed all nature, and flower
beds and grass, bush and tree, exhaled a fresh odour of earth and leafage
which it was a delight to breathe.
The leech Otto, to whom the severely wounded Ulrich Vorchtel had been
carried, had just left the countess. The burns on her hands and arms had
been bandaged--nay, the old gentleman had cut out the scorched portions
of her tresses with his own hand. Cordula's energetic action had made the
famous surgeon deem her worthy of such care. He had also advised her to
seek the nursing of the oldest daughter of her host, whose invalid wife
he was attending, and she had gladly assented; for Els had attracted her
from their first meeting, and she was accustomed to begin the day at
sunrise.
"How does it happen that you neither weep nor even hang your head after
all the sorrow which last night brought you?" asked Cordula, as the
Nuremberg maiden sat down beside her bed. "You are a stranger to the
Swiss knight, and when we surprised you with him you had not come to a
meeting--I know that full well. But if so true and warm a love unites you
to young Eysvogel, how does it happen that your joyous courage is so
little damped by his father's denial and his own unhappy deed, which at
this time could scarcely escape punishment? You do not seem frivolous,
and yet--"
"Yet," replied Els with a pleasant smile, "many things have made a deeper
impression. We are not all alike, Countess, yet there is much in your
nature which must render it easy for you to understand me; for,
Countess----"
"Call me Cordula," interrupted the girl in a tone of friendly entreaty.
"Why should I deny that I am fond of you? and at the risk of making you
vain, I will betray----"
"Well?" asked Els eagerly.
"That the splendid old leech described you to me exactly as I had
imagined you," was the reply. You were one of those, he said, whose mere
presence beside a sick-bed was as good as medicine, and so you are; and,
dear Jungfrau Els, this salutary medicine benefits me."
"If I am to dispense with the 'Countess,'" replied the other, "you must
spare me the 'Jungfrau.' Nursing you will give me all the more pleasure
on account of the warm gratitude----"
"Never mind that," interrupted Cordula. "But please look at the bandage,
beneath which the flesh burns and aches more than is necessary, and then
go on with your explanation."
Els examined the countess's arm, and then applied a household remedy
whose use she had learned from the wife of Herr Pfinzing, her Aunt
Christine, who was familiar with the healing art. It relieved the pain,
and when Cordula told her so, Els went on with her explanation. "When all
these blows fell upon me, they at first seemed, indeed, unprecedented and
scarcely possible to endure. When afterwards my Wolff's unhappy deed was
added, I felt as though I were standing in a dense, dark mist, where each
step forwards must lead me into a stifling morass or over a precipice.
Then I began to reflect upon what had happened, as is my custom; I
separated, in my thoughts, the evil menacing in the future from the good,
and had scarcely made a little progress in this way when morass and abyss
lost their terrors; both, I found, could be left to take care of
themselves, since neither Wolff nor I lack love and good will, and we
possess some degree of prudence and caution."
"Yes, this thinking and considering!" cried the countess, with a faint
sigh. "It succeeds in my case, too, only, unluckily, I usually don't
begin until it is too late and the folly has been committed."
"Then, henceforth, you must reverse the process," answered Els cheerily.
But directly after she changed her tone, which sounded serious enough as
she added: "The sorrow of the poor Vorchtels and the grief my betrothed
husband must endure, because the dead man was once a dear friend,
certainly casts a dark shadow upon many things; but you, who love the
chase, must surely be familiar with the misty autumn mornings to which I
allude. Everything, far and near, is covered by a thick veil, yet one
feels that there is bright sunshine behind it. Suddenly the mist
scatters----"
"And mountain and forest, land and water, lie before us in the radiant
sunlight!" cried the countess. "How well I know such scenes! And how I
should rejoice if a favourable wind would sweep the grey mist away for
you right speedily! Only--indeed, I am not disposed to look on the dark
side--only, perhaps you do not know how resolute the Emperor is that the
peace of the country shall be maintained. If your lover allowed himself
to be carried away----"
"This was not the first time," Els eagerly interrupted, "that young
Vorchtel tried to anger him in the presence of others; and he believed
that he was justified in bearing a grudge against his former friend--it
was considered a settled thing that Wolff and his sister Ursula were to
marry."
"Until," Cordula broke in, "he gazed into your bright eyes."
"How could you know that?" asked Els in confusion.
"Because, in love and hate, as well as in reckoning, two and three follow
one," laughed the countess. "As for your Wolff, in particular, I will
gladly believe, with you, that he can succeed in clearing himself before
the judges. But with regard to old Eysvogel, who looks as though, if he
met our dear Lord Himself, he would think first which of the two was the
richer, your future brother-in-law Siebenburg, that disagreeable
'Mustache,' and his poor wife, who sits at home grieving over her
dissolute husband--what gratitude you can expect from such kindred--"
"None," replied Els sadly. Yet a mischievous smile hovered around her
lips as, bending over the invalid, she added in a whisper: "But the good
I expect from all the evil is, that we and the Eysvogels will be
separated as if by wall and moat. They will never cross them, but Wolff
would find the way back to me, though we were parted by an ocean, and
mountains towering to the sky divided----"
"This confidence, indeed, maintains the courage," said the countess, and
with a faint sigh she added: "Whatever evil may befall you, many might
envy you."
"Then love has conquered you also?" Els began; but Cordula answered
evasively:
"Let that pass, dear Jungfrau. Perhaps love treats me as a mother deals
with a froward child, because I asked too much of her. My life has become
an endless battue. Much game of all kinds is thus driven out to be shot,
but the sportsman finds true pleasure only in tracking the single
heathcock, the solitary chamois. Yet, no," and in her eagerness she flung
her bandaged hand so high into the air that she groaned with pain and was
forced to keep silence. When able to speak once more, still tortured by
severe suffering, she exclaimed angrily: "No, I want neither driving nor
stalking. What do I care for the prey? I am a woman, too. I would fain be
the poor persecuted game, which the hunter pursues at the risk of
breaking his bones and neck. It must be delightful; one would willingly
bear the pain of a wound for its sake. I don't mean these pitiful burns,
but a deep and deadly one."
"You ought to have spared yourself these," said Els in a tone of
affectionate warning. "Consider what you are to your father, and how your
suffering pains him! To risk a precious human life for the sake of a
stupid brute--"
"They call it a sin, I know," Cordula burst forth. "And yet I would
commit the same tomorrow at the risk of again--Oh, you cautious city
people, you maidens with snow-white hands! What do you know of a girl
like me? You cannot even imagine what my child life was; and yet it is
told in a single word--motherless! I was never permitted to see her, to
hear her dear, warning voice. She paid with her own life for giving me
mine. My father? How kind he is! He meant to supply his dead wife's place
by anticipating my every wish. Had I desired to feast my eyes on the
castle in flames, it would, perhaps, now lie in ashes. So I became what I
am. True--and this is something--I grew to be at least one person's
joy--his. No, no, at home there are others also, though they dwell in
wretched hovels, who would gladly welcome me back. But except these, who
will ask about the reckless countess? I myself do not care to linger long
when the mirror shows me my image. Do you wish to know what this has to
do with the fire? Much; for otherwise I should scarcely have been
wounded. The lightning had struck only the convent barn; the cow stable,
when we arrived, was still safe, but the flames soon reached it also.
Neither the nuns nor the men had thought of driving the cattle out. Poor
city cattle! In the country the animals have more friendly care. When the
work of rescue was at last commenced the cows naturally refused to leave
their old home. Some prudent person had torn the door off the hinges that
they might not stifle. Just in front of it stood a pretty red cow with a
white star on her face. A calf was by her side, and the mother had
already sunk on her knees and was licking it in mortal terror. I pitied
the poor thing, and as Boemund Altrosen, the black-haired knight who
entered your house with the rest after the ride to Kadolzburg, had just
come there, I told him to save the calf. Of course he obeyed my wish, and
as it struggled he dragged it out of the stable with his strong arms. The
building was already blazing, and the thatched roof threatened to fall
in. Just at that moment the old cow looked at me so piteously and uttered
such a mournful bellow that it touched me to the heart. My eyes rested on
the calf, and a voice within whispered that it would be motherless, like
me, and miss during the first part of its life God's best gift. But
since, as you have heard, I act before I think, I went myself--I no
longer know how--into the burning stable. It was hard to breathe in the
dense smoke, and fiery sparks scorched my shawl and my hair, but I was
conscious of one thought: You must save the helpless little creature's
mother! So I called and lured her, as I do at home, where all the cows
are fond of me, but it was useless; and just as I perceived this the
thatched roof fell in, and I should probably have perished had not
Altrosen this time carried my own by no means light figure out of the
stable instead of the calf."
"And you?" asked Els eagerly.
"I submitted," replied the countess.
"No, no," urged Els. "Your heart throbbed faster with grateful joy, for
you saw the desire of your soul fulfilled. A hunter, and one of the
noblest of them all, risked his life in the pursuit of your love. O
Countess Cordula, I remember that knight well, and if the dark-blue
sleeve which he wore on his helm in the tournament was yours--"
"I believe it was," Cordula interrupted indifferently. "But, what was of
more importance, when I opened my eyes again the cow was standing
outside, licking her recovered calf."
"And the knight?" asked Els. "Whoever so heroically risks his life for
his lady's wish should be sure of her gratitude."
"Boemund can rely on that," said Cordula positively. "At least, what he
did this time for my sake weighs more heavily in the scale than the
lances he has broken, his love songs, or the mute language of his longing
eyes. Those are shafts which do not pierce my heart. How reproachfully
you look at me! Let him take lessons from his friend Heinz Schorlin, and
he may improve. Yes, the Swiss knight! He would be the man for me, spite
of your involuntary meeting with him and your devout sister, for whom he
forgot every one else, and me also, in the dancing hall. O Jungfrau Els,
I have the hunter's eyes, which are keen-sighted! For his sake your
beautiful Eva, with her saintly gaze, might easily forget to pray. It was
not you, but she, who drew him to-night to your house. Had this thought
entered my head downstairs in the entry I should probably, to be honest,
have omitted my little fairy tale and let matters take their course. St.
Clare ought to have protected her future votary. Besides, it pleases the
arrogant little lady to show me as plainly as possible, on every
occasion, that I am a horror to her. Let those who will accept such
insults. My Christianity does not go far enough to offer her the right
cheek too. And shall I tell you something? To spoil her game, I should be
capable, in spite of all the life preservers in the world, of binding
Schorlin to me in good earnest."
"Do not!" pleaded Els, raising her clasped hands beseechingly, and added,
as if in explanation: "For the noble Boemund Altrosen's sake, do not."
"To promise that, my darling, is beyond my power," replied Cordula
coolly, "because I myself do not know what I may do or leave undone
tomorrow or the day after. I am like a beech leaf on the stream. Let us
see where the current will carry it. It is certain," and she looked at
her bandaged hands, "that my greatest beauty, my round arms, are
disfigured. Scars adorn a man; on a woman they are ugly and repulsive. At
a dance they can be hidden under tight sleeves, but how hot that would be
in the 'Schwabeln' and 'Rai'! So I had better keep away from these
foolish gaieties in future. A calf turns a countess out of a ballroom!
What do you think of that? New things often happen."
Here she was interrupted; the housekeeper called Els. Sir Seitz
Siebenburg, spite of the untimely hour, had come to speak to her about an
important matter. Her father had gone to rest and sleep. The knight also
enquired sympathisingly about Countess von Montfort and presented his
respects.
"Of which I can make no use!" cried Cordula angrily. "Tell him so,
Martsche."
As the housekeeper withdrew she exclaimed impatiently: "How it burns! The
heat would be enough to convert the rescued calf into an appetising
roast. I wish I could sleep off the pain of my foolish prank! The
sunlight is beginning to be troublesome. I cannot bear it; it is
blinding. Draw the curtain over the window."
Cordula's own maid hastened to obey the order. Els helped the countess
turn on her pillows, and as in doing so she touched her arm, the sufferer
cried angrily: "Who cares what hurts me? Not even you!"
Here she paused. The pleading glance which Els had cast at her must have
pierced her soft heart, for her bosom suddenly heaved violently and,
struggling to repress her sobs, she gasped, "I know you mean kindly, but
I am not made of stone or iron either. I want to be alone and go to
sleep."
She closed her eyes as she spoke and, when Els bent to kiss her, tears
bedewed her cheeks.
Soon after Els went down into the entry to meet her lover's
brother-in-law. He had refused to enter the empty sitting-room. The
Countess von Montfort's unfriendly dismissal had vexed him sorely, yet it
made no lasting impression. Other events had forced into the background
the bitter attack of Cordula, for whom he had never felt any genuine
regard.
The experiences of the last few hours had converted the carefully
bedizened gallant into a coarse fellow, whose outward appearance bore
visible tokens of his mental depravity. The faultlessly cut garment was
pushed awry on his powerful limbs and soiled on the breast with wine
stains. The closely fitting steel chain armour, in which he had ridden
out, now hung in large folds upon his powerful frame. The long mustache,
which usually curled so arrogantly upwards, now drooped damp and limp
over his mouth and chin, and his long reddish hair fell in dishevelled
locks around his bloated face. His blue eyes, which usually sparkled so
brightly, now looked dull and bleared, and there were white spots on his
copper-coloured cheeks.
Since Countess Cordula gave him the insulting message to his wife he had
undergone more than he usually experienced in the course of years.
"An accursed night!" he had exclaimed, in reply to the housekeeper's
question concerning the cause of his disordered appearance.
Els, too, was startled by his looks and the hoarse sound of his voice.
Nay, she even drew back from him, for his wandering glance made her fear
that he was intoxicated.
Only a short time before, it is true, he had scarcely been able to stand
erect, but the terrible news which had assailed him had quickly sobered
him.
He had come at this unwontedly early hour to enquire whether the Ortliebs
had heard anything of his brother-in-law Wolff. There was not a word of
allusion to the broken betrothal.
In return for the promise that she would let the Eysvogels know as soon
as she received any tidings of her lover, which Els gave unasked,
Siebenburg, who had always treated her repellently or indifferently,
thanked her so humbly that she was surprised. She did not know how to
interpret it; nay, she anticipated nothing good when, with urgent
cordiality, he entreated her to forget the unpleasant events of the
preceding night, which she must attribute to a sudden fit of anger on
Herr Casper's part. She was far too dear to all the members of the family
for them to give her up so easily. What had occurred--she must admit that
herself--might have induced even her best friend to misunderstand it. For
one brief moment he, too, had been tempted to doubt her innocence. If she
knew old Eysvogel's terrible situation she would certainly do everything
in her power to persuade her father to receive him that morning,
or--which would be still better--go to his office. The weal and woe of
many persons were at stake, her own above all, since, as Wolff's
betrothed bride, she belonged to him inseparably.
"Even without the ring?" interrupted Els bitterly; and when Siebenburg
eagerly lamented that he had not brought it back, she answered proudly
"Don't trouble yourself, Sir Seitz! I need this sacred pledge as little
as the man who still wears mine. Tell your kinsfolk so. I will inform my
father of Herr Casper's wish; he is asleep now. Shall I guess aright in
believing that the other disasters which have overtaken you are connected
with the waggon trains Wolff so anxiously expected?"
Siebenburg, twirling his cap in confusion, assented to her question,
adding that he knew nothing except that they were lost and, after
repeating his entreaty that she would accomplish a meeting between the
two old gentlemen, left her.
It would indeed have been painful for him to talk with Els, for a
messenger had brought tidings that the waggons had been attacked and
robbed, and the perpetrators of the deed were his own brothers and their
cousin and accomplice Absbach. True, Seitz himself had had no share in
the assault, yet he did not feel wholly blameless for what had occurred,
since over the wine and cards he had boasted, in the presence of the
robbers, of the costly wares which his father-in-law was expecting, and
mentioned the road they would take.
Seitz Siebenburg's conscience was also burdened with something quite
different.
Vexed and irritated by the countess's insulting rebuff, he had gone to
the Green Shield to forget his annoyance at the gaming table in the Duke
of Pomerania's quarters. He had fared ill. There was no lack of fiery
Rhine wine supplied by the generous host; the sultry atmosphere caused by
the rising thunderstorm increased his thirst and, half intoxicated, and
incensed by the luck of Heinz Schorlin, in whom he saw the preferred
lover of the lady who had so suddenly withdrawn her favour, he had been
led on to stakes of unprecedented amount. At last he risked the lands,
castle, and village which he possessed in Hersbruck as his wife's dower.
Moreover, he was aware of having said things which, though he could not
recall them to memory in detail, had roused the indignation of many of
those who were present. The remarks referred principally to the Ortlieb
sisters.
Amid the wild uproar prevailing around the gaming table that night the
duel which had cost young Vorchtel his life was not mentioned until the
last dice had been thrown. In the discussion the victor's betrothed bride
had been named, and Siebenburg clearly remembered that he had spoken of
the breaking of his brother-in-law's engagement, and connected it with
accusations which involved him in a quarrel with several of the guests,
among them Heinz Schorlin.
Similar occurrences were frequent, and he was brave, strong, and skilful
enough to cope with any one, even the dreaded Swiss; only he was vexed
and troubled because he had disputed with the man to whom he had lost his
property. Besides, his father-in-law had so earnestly enjoined it upon
him to put no obstacle in the way of his desire to make peace with the
Ortliebs that he was obliged to bow his stiff neck to them.
The arrogant knight's position was critical, and real inward dignity was
unknown to him. Yet he would rather have been dragged with his brothers
to the executioner's block than humbled himself before the Swiss. But he
must talk with him for the sake of his twin sons, whose heritage he had
so shamefully gambled away. True, the utmost he intended was the
confession that, while intoxicated, he had staked his property at the
gaming table and said things which he regretted. Heinz Schorlin's
generosity was well known. Perhaps he might offer some acceptable
arrangement ere the notary conveyed his estate to him. He did not yet
feel that he could stoop so low as to receive a gift from this young
upstart.
If his father-in-law, who supported him, was really ruined, as he had
just asserted, he would indeed be plunged into beggary, with his wife,
whose stately figure constantly rose before him, with a look of mute
reproach, his beautiful twin boys, and his load of debt.
The gigantic man felt physically crushed by the terrible blows of fate
which had fallen upon him during this last wakeful night. He would fain
have gone to the nearest tavern and there left it to the wine to bring
forgetfulness. To drink, drink constantly, and in the intervals sleep
with his head resting on his arms, seemed the most tempting prospect. But
he was obliged to return to the Eysvogels. There was too much at stake.
Besides, he longed to see the twins who resembled him so closely, and of
whom Countess Cordula had said that she hoped they would not be like
their father.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Abandoned women (required by law to help put out the fires)
The heart must not be filled by another's image
IN THE FIRE OF THE FORGE
A ROMANCE OF OLD NUREMBERG
By Georg Ebers
Volume 4.
CHAPTER XV.
The city gates were already open. Peasants and peasant women bringing
vegetables and other farm produce to market thronged the streets, wains
loaded with grain or charcoal rumbled along, and herds of cattle and
swine, laden donkeys, the little carts of the farmers and bee keepers
conveying milk and honey to the city, passed over the dyke, which was
still softened by the rain of the preceding night.
The thunderstorm had cooled the air, but the rays of the morning sun were
already scorching. A few heavy little clouds were darkly relieved against
the blue sky, and a peasant, driving two sucking pigs before him, called
to another, who was carrying a goose under each arm, that the sun was
drawing water, and thundershowers seldom came singly.
Yet the city looked pleasant enough in the freshness of early June. The
maidservants who were opening the shutters glanced gaily out into the
streets, and arranged the flowers in front of the windows or bowed
reverently as a priest passed by on his way to mass. The barefooted
Capuchin, with his long beard, beckoned to the cook or the tradesman's
wife and, as she put something into his beggar's sack and he thanked her
kindly with some pious axiom, she felt as if she herself and all her
household had gained a right to the blessing of Heaven for that day, and
cheerily continued her work.
The brass counter in the low, broad bow window of the baker's house
glittered brightly, and the pale apprentice wiped the flour from his face
and gave his master's rosy-cheeked daughter fresh warm cakes to set on
the shining shelves. The barber's nimble apprentice hung the towel and
basin at the door, while his master, wearied by the wine-bibbing and talk
at the tavern or his labour at the fire, was still asleep. His active
wife had risen before him, strewed the shop with fresh sand, and renewed
the goldfinch's food.
The workshops and stores were adorned with birch branches, and the young
daughters of the burghers, in becoming caps, the maid servants and
apprentices, who were going to market with baskets on their arms, wore a
flower or something green on their breasts or in their caps.
The first notes of the bells, pealing solemnly, were summoning
worshippers to mass, the birds were singing in the garden, and the cocks
were crowing in the yards of the houses. The animals passing in the
street lowed, grunted, and cackled merrily in the dawn of the young day.
Gay young men, travelling students who had sought cheap quarters in the
country, now entered the city with a merry song on their lips just shaded
by the first down of manhood, and when a maiden met them she lowered her
eyes modestly before the riotous fellows.
The terrors of the frightful thunderstorm seemed forgotten. Nuremberg
looked gladsome; a carpet hung from many a bow-window, and flags and
streamers fluttered from roofs and balconies to honour the distinguished
guests. Many signs of their presence were visible, squires and equerries,
in their masters' colours, were riding spirited horses, and a few knights
who loved early rising were already in the saddle, their shining helmets
and coats of mail flashing brightly in the sunshine.
The gigantic figure of Sir Seitz Siebenburg moved with drooping head
through the budding joy of this June day towards the Eysvogel dwelling.
His gloomy, haggard face and disordered attire made two neatly dressed
young shoemaker's apprentices, on their way to their work, nudge each
other and look keenly at him.
"I'd rather meet him here in broad daylight among houses and people than
in the dusk on the highway," remarked one of them.
"There's no danger," replied the other. "He wears the curb now. He moved
from the robber nest into the rich Eysvogel house opposite. That's Herr
Casper's son-in-law. But such people can never let other folks' property
alone. Only here they work in another way. The shoes he wears were made
in our workshop, but the master still whistles for his pay, and he owes
everybody--the tailor, the lacemaker, the armourer, the girdlemaker, and
the goldsmith. If an apprentice reminds him of the debt, let him beware
of bruises."
"The Emperor Rudolph ought to issue an edict against such injustice!"
wrathfully exclaimed the other and taller youth, the handsome son of a
master of the craft from Weissenburg on the Sand, who expected soon to
take his father's place. "Up at Castle Graufels, which is saddled on our
little town, master and man would be going barefoot but for us; yet for
three years we haven't seen so much as a penny of his, though my father
says times have already improved, since the Hapsburg, as a just man----"
"Things have not been so bad here for a long while, the saints be
praised!" his companion broke in. "Siebenburg, or some of his wife's rich
kindred, will at last be compelled to settle matters. We have the law and
the Honourable Council to attend to that. Look up! Yonder stately old
house gave its daughter to the penniless knight. She is one of our
customers too; a handsome woman, and not one of the worst either. But her
mother, who was born a countess--if the shoe doesn't make a foot small
which Nature created big, there's such an outcry! True, the old woman,
her mother, is worse still; she scolds and screams. But look up at the
bow window. There she stands. I'm only a poor brewer's son, but before
I----"
"You don't say so!" the other interrupted. Have you seen the owl in the
cage in front of the guardhouse at the gate of the hospital? It is her
living image; and how her chin projects and moves up and down, as though
she were chewing leather!"
"And yet," said the other, as if insisting upon something difficult to
believe, "and yet the old woman is a real countess."
The Weissenburg apprentice expressed his astonishment with another: "You
don't say so!" but as he spoke he grasped his companion's arm, adding
earnestly: "Let us go. That ugly old woman just looked at me, and if it
wasn't the evil eye I shall go straight to the church and drive away the
misfortune with holy water."
"Come, then," answered the Nuremberg youth, but continued thoughtfully:
"Yet my master's grandmother, a woman of eighty, is probably older than
the one up there, but nobody could imagine a kinder, pleasanter dame.
When she looks approvingly at one it seems as if the dear God's blessing
were shining from two little windows."
"That's just like my grandmother at home!" exclaimed the Weissenburg
apprentice with sparkling eyes.
Turning from the Eysvogel mansion as they spoke, they pursued their way.
Siebenburg had overtaken the apprentices, but ere crossing the threshold
of the house which was now his home he stopped before it.
It might, perhaps, be called the largest and handsomest in Nuremberg; but
it was only a wide two-story structure, though the roof had been adorned
with battlements and the sides with a small bow-windowed turret. At the
second story a bracket, bearing an image of the Madonna, had been built
out on one side, and on the other the bow window from which old Countess
Rotterbach had looked down into the street.
The coat of arms was very striking and wholly out of harmony with the
simplicity of the rest of the building. Its showy splendour, visible for
a long distance, occupied the wide space between the door of the house
and the windows of the upper story. The escutcheon of the noble family
from which Rosalinde, Herr Casper's wife, had descended rested against
the shield bearing the birds. The Rotterbach supporters, a nude man and a
bear standing on its hind legs, rose on both sides of the double
escutcheon, and the stone cutter had surmounted the Eysvogel helmet with
a count's coronet.
This elaborate decoration of the ancient patrician house had become one
of the sights of the city, and had often made Herr Casper, at the
Honourable Council and elsewhere, clench his fist under his mantle, for
it had drawn open censure and bitter mockery upon the arrogant man, but
his desire to have it replaced by a more modest one had been baffled by
the opposition of the women of his family. They had had it put up, and
would not permit any one to touch it, though Wolff, after his return from
Italy, had strenuously urged its removal.
It had brought the Eysvogels no good fortune, for on the day of its
completion the business received its first serious blow, and it also
served to injure the commercial house externally in a very obvious
manner. Whereas formerly many wares which needed to be kept dry had been
hoisted from the outer door and the street to the spacious attic, this
was now prevented by the projecting figures of the nude men and the
bears. Therefore it became necessary to hoist the goods to be stored in
the attic from the courtyard, which caused delay and hindrances of many
kinds. Various expedients had been suggested, but the women opposed them
all, for they were glad that the ugly casks and bales no longer found
their way to the garret past their windows, and it also gratified their
arrogance that they were no longer visible from the street.
Siebenburg now looked up at the huge escutcheon and recalled the day
when, after having been specially favoured by Isabella Eysvogel at a
dance in the Town Hall, he had paused in the same place. A long line of
laden waggons had just stopped in front of the door surmounted by the
double escutcheon, and if he had previously hesitated whether to profit
by the favour of Isabella, whose haughty majesty, which attracted him,
also inspired him with a faint sense of uneasiness, he was now convinced
how foolish it would be not to forge the iron which seemed aglow in his
favour. What riches the men-servants were carrying into the vaulted
entry, which was twice as large as the one in the Ortlieb mansion!
Besides, the escutcheon with the count's coronet had given the knight
assurance that he would have no cause to be ashamed, in an assembly of
his peers, of his alliance with the Nuremberg maiden. Isabella's hand
could undoubtedly free him from the oppressive burden of his debts, and
she was certainly a magnificent woman! How well, too, her tall figure
would suit him and the Siebenburgs, whose name was said to be derived
from the seven feet of stature which some of them measured!
Now he again remembered the hour when she had laid her slender hand in
his. For a brief period he had been really happy; his heart had not felt
so light since early childhood, though at first he had ventured to
confess only one half his load of debt to his father-in-law. He had even
assumed fresh obligations to relieve his brothers from their most
pressing cares. They had attended his brilliant wedding, and it had
flattered his vanity to show them what he could accomplish as the wealthy
Eysvogel's son-in-law.
But how quickly all this had changed! He had learned that, besides the
woman who had given him her heart and inspired him with a passion
hitherto unknown, he had wedded two others.
Now, as the image of old Countess Rotterbach, Isabella's grandmother,
forced itself upon his mind, he unconsciously knit his brow. He had not
heard her say much, but with every word she bestowed upon him he was
forced to accept something bitter. She rarely left her place in the
armchair in the bow window in the sitting-room, but it seemed as if her
little eyes possessed the power of piercing walls and doors, for she knew
everything that concerned him, even his greatest secrets, which he
believed he had carefully concealed. More on her account than on that of
his mother-in-law, who did nothing except what the former commanded, he
had repeatedly tried to remove with his wife to the estate of
Tannenreuth, which had been assigned to him on the day of the marriage,
that its revenues might support the young couple, but the mother and
grandmother detained his wife, and their wishes were more to her than
his. Perhaps, however, he might have induced her to go with him had not
his father-in-law made his debts a snare, which he drew whenever it was
necessary to stifle his wishes, and he, too, wanted to retain his
daughter at home.
Since Wolff's return from Italy he had become aware that the stream of
gold from the Eysvogel coffers flowed more sparingly, or even failed
altogether to satisfy his extravagant tastes. Therefore his relations
with his brother-in-law, whose prudent caution he considered avarice, and
whose earnest protests against his often unprecedented demands frequently
roused his ire, became more and more unfriendly.
The inmates of the Eysvogel house rendered his home unendurable, and from
the experiences of his bachelor days he knew only too well where mirth
reigned in Nuremberg. So he became a rare guest at the Eysvogels, and
when Isabella found herself neglected and deceived, she made him feel her
resentment in her own haughty and--as soon as she deemed herself
injured--harsh manner.
At first her displeasure troubled him sorely, but the ardent passion
which had absorbed him during the early days of their marriage had died
out, and only flamed up with its old fervour occasionally; but at such
times the haughty, neglected wife repulsed him with insulting severity.
Yet she had never permitted any one to disparage her husband behind his
back. True, Siebenburg did not know this, but he perceived more and more
plainly that both the Eysvogels, father and son, were oppressed by some
grave anxiety, and that the sums which Wolff now paid him no longer
sufficed to hold his creditors in check. He was not accustomed to impose
any restraint upon himself, and thus it soon became known throughout the
city that he did not live at peace with his wife and her family.
Yet five weeks ago matters had appeared to improve. The birth of the
twins had brought something new into his life, which drew him nearer to
Isabella.
The children at first seemed to him two lovely miracles. Both boys, both
exactly like him. When they were brought to him on their white,
lace-trimmed pillows, his heart had swelled with joy, and it was his
greatest delight to gaze at them.
This was the natural result.
He, the stalwart Siebenburg, had not become the father of one ordinary
boy, but of two little knights at once. When he returned home--even if
his feet were unsteady--his first visit was to them, and he had often
felt that he was far too poor and insignificant to thank his neglected
wife aright for so precious a gift.
Whenever this feeling took possession of him he expressed his love to
Isabella with tender humility; while she, who had bestowed her hand upon
him solely from love, forgot all her wrongs, and her heart throbbed
faster with grateful joy when she saw him, with fatherly pride, carry the
twins about with bent knees, as if their weight was too heavy for his
giant arms to bear.
The second week after their birth Isabella fell slightly ill. Her mother
and grandmother undertook the nursing, and as the husband found them both
with the twins whenever he came to see the infants and their mother, the
sick-room grew distasteful to him. Again, as before their birth, he
sought compensation outside of the house for the annoyance caused by the
women at home; but the memory of the little boys haunted him, and when he
met his companions at the tavern he invited them to drink the children's
health in the host's best wine.
So life went on until the Reichstag brought the von Montforts, whom he
had met at a tournament in Augsburg, to the city of Nuremberg.
Mirth reigned wherever Countess Cordula appeared, and Siebenburg needed
amusement and joined the train of her admirers--with what evil result he
now clearly perceived for the first time.
He again stood before the stately dwelling where he had hoped to find
luxury and wealth, but where his heart now throbbed more anxiously than
those of his kinsmen had formerly done in the impoverished castle of his
father, who had died so long ago.
The Eysvogel dwelling, with its showy escutcheon above the door, was
threatened by want, and hand in hand with it, he knew, the most hideous
of all her children--disgrace.
Now he also remembered what he himself had done to increase the peril
menacing the ancient commercial house. Perhaps the old man within was
relying upon the estate of Tannenreuth, which he had assigned to him, to
protect some post upon which much depended, and he had gambled it away.
This must now be confessed, and also the amount of his own debts.
An unpleasant task confronted him but, humiliating and harassing as was
the interview awaiting him beyond the threshold before which he still
lingered, at least he would not find Wolff there. This seemed a boon,
since for the first time he would have felt himself in the wrong in the
presence of his unloved brother-in-law. Even the burden of his debts
weighed less heavily on his conscience than the irritating words with
which he had induced his father-in-law to break off Wolff's betrothal to
Els Ortlieb. The act was base and malicious. Greatly as he had erred, he
had never before been guilty of such a deed, and with a curse upon
himself on his bearded lips he approached the door; but when half way to
it he stopped again and looked up to the second-story windows behind
which the twins slept. With what delight he had always thought of them!
But this time the recollection of the little boys was spoiled by Countess
Cordula's message to his wife to rear them so that they would not be like
him, their father.
An evil wish! And yet the warmest love could have devised no better one
in behalf of the true welfare of the boys.
He told himself so as he passed beneath the escutcheon through the heavy
open door with its iron ornaments. He was expected, the steward told him,
but he arched his broad breast as if preparing for a wrestling match,
pulled his mustache still longer, and went up the stairs.
CHAPTER XVI.
The spacious, lofty sitting-room which Seitz Siebenburg entered looked
very magnificent. Gay Flanders tapestries hung on the walls. The ceiling
was slightly vaulted, and in the centre of each mesh of the net designed
upon it glittered a richly gilded kingfisher from the family coat of
arms. Bear and leopard skins lay on the cushions, and upon the shelf
which surrounded three sides of the apartment stood costly vases, gold
and silver utensils, Venetian mirrors and goblets. The chairs and
furniture were made of rare woods inlaid with ebony and mother of pearl,
brought by way of Genoa from Moorish Spain. In the bow window jutting out
into the street, where the old grandmother sat in her armchair, two green
and yellow parrots on brass perches interrupted the conversation,
whenever it grew louder, with the shrill screams of their ugly voices.
Siebenburg found all the family except Wolff and the twins. His wife was
half sitting, half reclining, on a divan. When Seitz entered she raised
her head from the white arm on which it had rested, turned her oval face
with its regular features towards him, and gathered up the fair locks
which, released from their braids, hung around her in long, thick
tresses. Her eyes showed that she had been weeping violently, and as her
husband approached she again sobbed painfully.
Her grandmother seemed annoyed by her lamentations for, pointing to
Isabella's tears, she exclaimed sharply, glancing angrily at Siebenburg:
"It's a pity for every one of them!"
The knight's blood boiled at the words, but they strengthened his
courage. He felt relieved from any consideration for these people, not
one of whom, except the poor woman shedding such burning tears, had given
him occasion to return love for love. Had they flowed only for the lost
wealth, and not for him and the grief he caused Isabella, they would not
have seemed "a pity" to the old countess.
Siebenburg's breath came quicker.
The gratitude he owed his father-in-law certainly did not outweigh the
humiliations with which he, his weak wife, and ill-natured mother-in-law
had embittered his existence.
Even now the old gentleman barely vouchsafed him a greeting. After he had
asked about his son, called himself a ruined man, and upbraided the
knight with insulting harshness because his brothers--the news had been
brought to him a short time before--were the robbers who had seized his
goods, and the old countess had chimed in with the exclamation, "They are
all just fit for the executioner's block!" Seitz could restrain himself
no longer; nay, it gave him actual pleasure to show these hated people
what he had done, on his part, to add to their embarrassments. He was no
orator, but now resentment loosened his tongue, and with swift, scornful
words he told Herr Casper that, as the son-in-law of a house which liked
to represent itself as immensely rich, he had borrowed from others
what--he was justified in believing it--had been withheld through
parsimony. Besides, his debts were small in comparison with the vast sums
Herr Casper had lavished in maintaining the impoverished estates of the
Rotterbach kindred. Like every knight whose own home was not pleasant, he
sometimes gambled; and when, yesterday, ill luck pursued him and he lost
the estate of Tannenreuth, he sincerely regretted the disaster, but it
could not be helped.
Terror and rage had sealed the old countess's lips, but now they parted
in the hoarse cry: "You deserve the wheel and the gallows, not the
honourable block!" and her daughter, Rosalinde Eysvogel, repeated in a
tone of sorrowful lamentation, "Yes, the wheel and the gallows."
A scornful laugh from Siebenburg greeted the threat, but when Herr
Casper, white as death and barely able to control his voice, asked
whether this incredible confession was merely intended to frighten the
women, and the knight assured him of the contrary, he groaned aloud:
"Then the old house must succumb to disgraceful ruin."
Years of life spent together may inspire and increase aversion instead of
love, but they undoubtedly produce a certain community of existence. The
bitter anguish of his aged household companion, the father of his wife,
to whom bonds of love still unsevered united him, touched even Seitz
Siebenburg. Besides, nothing moves the heart more quickly than the grief
of a proud, stern man. Herr Casper's confession did not make him dearer
to the knight, but it induced him to drop the irritating tone which he
had assumed, and in an altered voice he begged him not to give up his
cause as lost without resistance. For his daughter's sake old Herr
Ortlieb must lend his aid. Els, with whom he had just spoken, would cling
firmly to Wolff, and try to induce her father to do all that was possible
for her lover's house. He would endeavour to settle with his own
creditors himself. His sharp sword and strong arm would be welcome
everywhere, and the booty he won----Here he was interrupted by the
grandmother's query in a tone of cutting contempt: "Booty? On the
highway, do you mean?"
Once more the attack from the hostile old woman rendered the knight's
decision easier, for, struggling not to give way to his anger, he
answered: "Rather, I think, in the Holy Land, in the war against the
infidel Saracens. At any rate, my presence would be more welcome anywhere
than in this house, whose roof shelters you, Countess. If, Herr Casper,
you intend to share with my wife and the twins what is left after the old
wealth has gone, unfortunately, I cannot permit you to do so. I will
provide for them also. True, it was your duty; for ever since Isabella
became my wife you have taken advantage of my poverty and impaired my
right to command her. That must be changed from this very day. I have
learned the bitter taste of the bread which you provide. I shall confide
them to my uncle, the Knight Heideck. He was my dead mother's only
brother, and his wife, as you know, is the children's godmother. They are
childless, and would consider it the most precious of gifts to have such
boys in the castle. My deserted wife must stay with him, while I--I know
not yet in what master's service--provide that the three are not
supported only by the charity of strangers---"
"Oh, Seitz, Seitz!" interrupted Isabella, in a tone of urgent entreaty.
She had risen from her cushions, and was hurrying towards him. "Do not
go! You must not go so!"
Her tall figure nestled closely against him as she spoke, and she threw
her arms around his neck; but he kissed her brow and eyes, saying, with a
gentleness which surprised even her: "You are very kind, but I cannot,
must not remain here."
"The children, the little boys!" she exclaimed again, gazing up at him
with love-beaming eyes. Then his tortured heart seemed to shrink, and,
pressing his hand on his brow, he paused some time ere he answered
gloomily: "It is for them that I go. Words have been spoken which appeal
to me, and to you, too, Isabella: 'See that the innocent little creatures
are reared to be unlike their unhappy father.' And the person who uttered
them----"
"A sage, a great sage," giggled the countess, unable to control her
bitter wrath against the man whom she hated; but Siebenburg fiercely
retorted:
"Although no sage, at least no monster spitting venom."
"And you permit this insult to be offered to your grandmother?" Frau
Rosalinde Eysvogel wailed to her daughter as piteously as if the injury
had been inflicted on herself. But Isabella only clung more closely to
her husband, heeding neither her mother's appeal nor her father's warning
not to be deluded by Siebenburg's empty promises.
While the old countess vainly struggled for words, Rosalinde Eysvogel
stood beside the lofty mantelpiece, weeping softly. Before Siebenburg
appeared, spite of the early hour and the agitating news which she had
just received, she had used her leisure for an elaborate toilette. A long
trailing robe of costly brocade, blue on the left side and yellow on the
right, now floated around her tall figure. When the knight returned she
had looked radiant in her gold and gems, like a princess. Now, crushed
and feeble, she presented a pitiable image of powerless yet offensively
hollow splendour. It would have required too much exertion to assail her
son-in-law with invectives, like her energetic mother; but when she saw
her daughter, to whom she had already appealed several times in a tone of
anguished entreaty, rest her proud head so tenderly on her husband's
broad breast, as she had done during the first weeks of their marriage,
but never since, the unhappy woman clearly perceived that the knight's
incredible demand was meant seriously. What she had believed an idle
boast he actually requested. Yonder hated intruder expected her to part
with her only daughter, who was far more to her than her unloved husband,
her exacting mother, or the son who restricted her wishes, whom she had
never understood, and against whom her heart had long been hardened. But
it could not be and, losing all self-control and dignity, she shrieked
aloud, tore the blue headband from her hair and, repeating the "never"
constantly as if she had gone out of her senses, gasped: "Never, never,
never, so long as I live!"
As she spoke she rushed to her startled husband, pointed to her
son-in-law, who still held his wife in a close embrace, and in a
half-stifled voice commanded Herr Casper to strike down the gambler,
robber, spendthrift, and kidnapper of children, or drive him out of the
house like some savage, dangerous beast. Then she ordered Isabella to
leave the profligate who wanted to drag her down to ruin; and when her
daughter refused to obey, she burst into violent weeping, sobbing and
moaning till her strength failed and she was really attacked with one of
the convulsions she had often feigned, by the advice of her own mother,
to extort from her husband the gratification of some extravagant wish.
Indignant, yet full of sincere sympathy, Herr Casper supported his wife,
whose queenly beauty had once fired his heart, and in whose embrace he
had imagined that he would be vouchsafed here below the joys of the
redeemed. As she rested her head, with its long auburn tresses, still so
luxuriant, upon his shoulder, exquisite pictures of the past rose before
the mental vision of the elderly man; but the spell was quickly broken,
for the kerchief with which he wiped her face was dyed red from her
rouged cheeks.
A bitter smile hovered around his well-formed, beardless lips, and the
man of business remembered the vast sums which he had squandered to
gratify the extravagant wishes of the mother and daughter, and show these
countesses that he, the burgher, in whose veins ran noble blood,
understood as well as any man of their own rank how to increase the charm
of life by luxury and splendour.
While he supported his wife, and the old countess was seeking to relieve
her, Isabella also prepared to hasten to her mother's assistance, but her
husband stopped her with resistless strength, whispering: "You know that
these convulsions are not dangerous. Come with me to the children. I want
to bid them farewell. Show me in this last hour, at least, that these
women are not more to you than I." He released her as he spoke, and the
mental struggle which for a short time made her bosom heave violently
with her hurried breathing ended with a low exclamation, "I will come."
The nurse, whom Isabella sent out of the room when she entered with her
husband, silently obeyed, but stopped at the door to watch. She saw the
turbulent knight kneel beside the children's cradle before the wife whom
he had so basely neglected, raise his tearful eyes to the majestic woman,
whose stature was little less than his own and, lifting his clasped
hands, make a confession which she could not hear; saw her draw him
towards her, nestle with loving devotion against his broad breast, and
place first one and then the other twin boy in his arms.
The young mother's cheeks as well as the father's were wet, but the eyes
of both sparkled with grateful joy when Isabella, in taking leave of her
husband, thanked him with a last loving kiss for the vow that, wherever
he might go, he would treasure her and the children in his heart, and do
everything in his power to secure a fate that should be worthy of them.
As Siebenburg went downstairs he met his father-in-law on the
second-story landing. Herr Casper, deadly pale, was clinging with his
right hand to the baluster, pressing his left on his brow, as he vainly
struggled for composure and breath. He had forgotten to strengthen
himself with food and drink, and the terrible blows of fate which had
fallen upon him during these last hours of trial crushed, though but for
a short time, his still vigorous strength. The knight went nearer to help
him, but when he offered Herr Casper his arm the old merchant angrily
thrust it back and accepted a servant's support.
While the man assisted him upstairs he repented that he had yielded to
resentment, and not asked his son-in-law to try to discover Wolff's
hiding place, but no sooner had food and fiery wine strengthened him than
his act seemed wise. The return of the business partner, without whose
knowledge he had incurred great financial obligations, would have placed
him in the most painful situation. The old gentleman would have been
obliged to account to Wolff for the large sum which he owed to the Jew
Pfefferkorn, the most impatient of his creditors, though he need not have
told him that he had used it in Venice to gratify his love of gaming. How
should he answer his son if he asked why he had rejected his betrothed
bride, and soon after condescended to receive her again as his daughter
and enter into close relations with her father? Yet this must be done.
Ernst Ortlieb was the only person who could help him. It had become
impossible to seek aid from Herr Berthold Vorchtel, the man whose oldest
son Wolff had slain, and yet he possessed the means to save the sinking
ship from destruction.
When the news of the duel reached him the messenger's blanched face had
made him believe that Wolff had fallen. In that moment he had perceived
that his loss would have rendered him miserable for the rest of his life.
This was a source of pleasure, for since Wolff had extorted his consent
to the betrothal with Els Ortlieb, and thus estranged him from the
Vorchtels, he had seriously feared that he had ceased to love him. Nay,
in many an hour when he had cause to feel shame in the presence of his
prudent, cautious, and upright partner, it had seemed as if he hated him.
Now the fear of the judge whom he saw in Wolff was blended with sincere
anxiety concerning his only son, whose breach of the peace menaced him
with banishment--nay, if he could not pay the price of blood which the
Vorchtels might demand, with death. Doubtless he had done many things to
prejudice Wolff against his betrothed bride, yet he who had cast the
first stone at her now felt that, in her simple purity, she would be
capable of no repudiation of the fidelity she owed her future husband.
However strongly he had struggled against this conviction, he knew that
she, if any one, could make his son happy--far happier than he had ever
been with the tall, slender, snow-white, unapproachable countess, who had
helped bring him to ruin.
While consuming the food and drink, he heard his wife, usually a most
obedient daughter, disputing with her mother. This was fortunate; for, if
they were at variance, he need not fear that they would act as firm
allies against him when he expressed the wish to have Wolff's marriage
solemnised as soon as circumstances would permit.
It was not yet time to discuss the matter with any one. He would first go
to the Jew Pfefferkorn once more to persuade him to defer his claims, and
then, before the meeting of the Council, would repair to the Ortliebs, to
commit to Herr Ernst the destiny of the Eysvogel firm and his partner
Wolff, on which also depended the welfare of the young merchant's
betrothed bride. If the father remained obdurate, if he resented the
wrong he had inflicted yesterday upon him and his daughter, he was a lost
man; for he had already availed himself of the good will of all those
whose doors usually stood open to him. Doubtless the news of his recent
severe losses were in every one's mouth, and the letter which he had just
received threatened him with an indictment.
The luckless Siebenburg's creditors, too, would now be added to his own.
It was all very well for him to say that he would settle his debts him
self. As soon as it was rumoured abroad that he had gambled away the
estate of Tannenreuth, whose value gave the creditors some security, they
would rise as one man, and the house assailed would be his, Casper
Eysvogel's.
The harried man's thoughts of his son-in-law were by no means the most
kindly.
Meanwhile the latter set out for the second distasteful interview of the
morning.
His purpose was to make some arrangement with Heinz Schorlin about the
lost estate and obtain definite knowledge concerning his quarrel with
him, of which he remembered nothing except that intoxication and jealousy
had carried him further than would have happened otherwise. He had
undoubtedly spoken insultingly of Els; his words, when uttered against a
lady, had been sharper than beseemed a knight. Yet was not any one who
found a maiden alone at night with this man justified in doubting her
virtue? In the depths of his soul he believed in her innocence, yet he
avoided confessing it. Why should not the Swiss, whom Nature had given
such power over the hearts of women, have also entangled his
brother-in-law's betrothed bride in a love affair? Why should not the gay
girl who had pledged her troth to a grave, dull fellow like Wolff, have
been tempted into a little love dalliance with the bold, joyous Schorlin?
Not until he had received proof that he had erred would he submit to
recall his charges.
He had left his wife with fresh courage and full of good intentions. Now
that he was forced to bid her farewell, he first realised what she had
been to him. No doubt both had much to forgive, but she was a splendid
woman. Though her father's storehouses contained chests of spices and
bales of cloth, he did not know one more queenly. That he could have
preferred, even for a single moment, the Countess von Montfort, whose
sole advantage over her was her nimble tongue and gay, bold manners, now
seemed incomprehensible. He had joined Cordula's admirers only to forget
at her feet the annoyances with which he had been wearied at home. He had
but one thing for which to thank the countess--her remark concerning the
future of the twins.
Yet was he really so base that it would have been a disgrace for his
darlings to resemble him? "No!" a voice within cried loudly, and as the
same voice reminded him of the victories won in tournaments and sword
combats, of the open hand with which, since he had been the rich
Eysvogel's son-in-law, he had lent and given money to his brothers, and
especially of the manly resolve to provide for his wife and children as a
soldier in the service of some prince, another, lower, yet insistent,
recalled other things. It referred to the time when, with his brothers,
he had attacked a train of freight waggons and not cut down their armed
escort alone. The curse of a broad-shouldered Nordlinger carrier, whose
breast he had pierced with a lance though he cried out that he was a
father and had a wife and child to support, the shriek of the pretty boy
with curling brown hair who clung to the bridle of his steed as he rode
against the father, and whose arm he had cut off, still seemed to ring in
his ears. He also remembered the time when, after a rich capture on the
highway which had filled his purse, he had ridden to Nuremberg in
magnificent new clothes at the carnival season in order, by his brothers'
counsel, to win a wealthy bride. Fortune and the saints had permitted him
to find a woman to satisfy both his avarice and his heart, yet he had
neither kept faith with her nor even showed her proper consideration.
But, strangely enough, the warning voice reproached him still more
sharply for having, in the presence of others, accused and disparaged his
brother-in-law's betrothed bride, whose guilt he believed proved. Again
he felt how ignoble and unworthy of a knight his conduct had been. Why
had he pursued this course? Merely--he admitted it now--to harm Wolff,
the monitor and niggard whom he hated; perhaps also because he secretly
told himself that, if Wolff formed a happy marriage, he and his children,
not Siebenburg's twin boys, would obtain the larger share of the Eysvogel
property.
This greed of gain, which had brought him to Nuremberg to seek a wife,
was probably latent in his blood, though his reckless accumulation of
debts seemed to contradict it. Yesterday, at the Duke of Pomerania's, it
had again led him into that wild, mad dice-throwing.
Seitz Siebenburg was no calm thinker. All these thoughts passed singly in
swift flashes through his excited brain. Like the steady monotone of the
bass accompanying the rise and fall of the air, he constantly heard the
assurance that it would be a pity if his splendid twins should resemble
him.
Therefore they must grow up away from his influence, under the care of
his good uncle. With this man's example before their eyes they would
become knights as upright and noble as Kunz Heideck, whom every one
esteemed.
For the sake of the twins he had resolved to begin a new and worthier
life himself. His wife would aid him, and love should lend him strength
to conduct himself in future so that Countess von Montfort, and every one
who meant well by his sons, might wish them to resemble their father.
He walked on, holding his head proudly erect. Seeing the first
worshippers entering the Church of Our Lady, he went in, too, repeated
several Paternosters, commended the little boys and their mother to the
care of the gracious Virgin, and besought her to help him curb the
turbulent impulses which often led him to commit deeds he afterwards
regretted.
Many people knew Casper Eysvogel's tall, haughty son-in-law and marvelled
at the fervent devotion with which, kneeling in the first place he found
near the entrance, beside two old women, he continued to pray. Was it
true that the Eysvogel firm had been placed in a very critical situation
by the loss of great trains of merchandise? One of his neighbours had
heard him sigh, and declared that something must weigh heavily upon the
"Mustache." She would tell her nephew Hemerlein, the belt-maker, to whom
the knight owed large sums for saddles and harnesses, that he would be
wise to look after his money betimes.
Siebenburg quitted the church in a more hopeful mood than when he entered
it.
The prayers had helped him.
When he reached the fruit market he noticed that people gazed at him in
surprise. He had paid no heed to his dress since the morning of the
previous day, and as he always consumed large quantities of food and
drink he felt the need of refreshment. Entering the first barber's shop,
he had the stubble removed from his cheeks and chin, and arranged his
disordered attire, and then, going to a taproom close by, ate and drank,
without sitting down, what he found ready and, invigorated in body and
mind, continued his walk.
The fruit market was full of busy life. Juicy strawberries and early
cherries, red radishes, heads of cabbages, bunches of greens, and long
stalks of asparagus were offered for sale, with roses and auriculas,
balsams and early pinks, in pots and bouquets, and the ruddy peasant
lasses behind the stands, the stately burgher women in their big round
hats, the daughters of the master workmen with their long floating locks
escaping from under richly embroidered caps, the maidservants with neat
little baskets on their round arms, afforded a varied and pleasing scene.
Everything that reached the ear, too, was cheery and amusing, and
rendered the knight's mood brighter.
Proud of his newly acquired power of resistance, he walked on, after
yielding to the impulse to buy the handsomest bouquet of roses offered by
the pretty flower girl Kuni, whom, on Countess Cordula's account, during
the Reichstag he had patronised more frequently than usual. Without
knowing why himself, he did not tell the pretty girl, who had already
trusted him very often, for whom he intended it, but ordered it to be
charged with the rest.
At the corner of the Bindergasse, where Heinz Schorlin lodged, he found a
beggar woman with a bandaged head, whom he commissioned to carry the
roses to the Eysvogel mansion and give them to his wife, Fran Isabella
Siebenburg, in his--Sir Seitz's--name.
In front of the house occupied by the master cloth-maker Deichsler, where
the Swiss had his quarters, the tailor Ploss stopped him. He came from
Heinz Schorlin, and reminded Siebenburg of his by no means inconsiderable
debt; but the latter begged him to have patience a little longer, as he
had met with heavy losses at the gaming table the night before, and Ploss
agreed to wait till St. Heinrich's day--[15th July].
How many besides the tailor had large demands! and when could Seitz begin
to cancel his debts? The thought even darted through his mind that
instead of carrying his good intentions into effect he had not paid for
the roses--but flowers were so cheap in June!
Besides, he had no time to dwell upon this trifle, for while quieting the
tailor he had noticed a girl who, notwithstanding the heat of the day,
kept her face hidden so far under her Riese--[A kerchief for the head,
resembling a veil, made of fine linen.]--that nothing but her eyes and
the upper part of her nose were visible. She had given him a hasty nod
and, if he was not mistaken, it was the Ortlieb sisters' maid, whom he
had often seen.
When he again looked after the muffled figure she was hurrying up the
cloth-maker's stairs.
It was Katterle herself.
At the first landing she had glanced back, and in doing so pushed the
kerchief aside. What could she want with the Swiss? It could scarcely be
anything except to bring him a message from one of her mistresses,
doubtless Els.
So he had seen aright, and acted wisely not to believe the countess.
Poor Wolff! Deceived even when a betrothed lover! He did not exactly wish
him happiness even now, and yet he pitied him.
Seitz could now stand before Heinz Schorlin with the utmost confidence.
The Swiss must know how matters stood between the older E and him self,
though his knightly duty constrained him to deny it to others.
Siebenburg's self-reproaches had been vain. He had suspected no innocent
girl--only called a faithless betrothed bride by the fitting name.
The matter concerning his estate of Tannenreuth was worse. It had been
gambled away, and therefore forfeited. He had already given it up in
imagination; it was only necessary to have the transfer made by the
notary. The Swiss should learn how a true knight satisfies even the
heaviest losses at the gaming table. He would not spare Heinz Schorlin.
He meant to reproach the unprincipled fellow who by base arts had
alienated the betrothed bride of an honest man--for that Wolff certainly
was--when adverse circumstances prevented his watching the faithless
woman himself. Twisting the ends of his mustache with two rapid motions,
he knocked at the young knight's door.
CHAPTER XVII.
Twice, three times, Siebenburg rapped, but in vain. Yet the Swiss was
there. His armour-bearer had told Seitz so downstairs, and he heard his
voice within. At last he struck the door so heavily with the handle of
his dagger that the whole house echoed with the sound. This succeeded;
the door opened, and Biberli's narrow head appeared. He looked at the
visitor in astonishment.
"Tell your master," said the latter imperiously, recognising Heinz
Schorlin's servant, "that if he closes his lodgings against dunning
tradesfolk--"
"By your knock, my lord," Biberli interrupted, we really thought the
sword cutler had come with hammer and anvil. My master, however, need
have no fear of creditors; for though you may not yet know it, Sir
Knight, there are generous noblemen in Nuremberg during the Reichstag who
throw away castles and lands in his favour at the gaming table."
"And hurl their fists even more swiftly into the faces of insolent
varlets!" cried Siebenburg, raising his right hand threateningly. "Now
take me to your master at once!"
"Or, at any rate, within his four walls," replied the servitor, preceding
Seitz into the small anteroom from which he had come. "As to the 'at
once,' that rests with the saints, for you must know----"
"Nonsense!" interrupted the knight. "Tell your master that Siebenburg has
neither time nor inclination to wait in his antechamber."
"And certainly nothing could afford Sir Heinz Schorlin greater pleasure
than your speedy departure," Biberli retorted.
"Insolent knave!" thundered Seitz, who perceived the insult conveyed in
the reply, grasping the neck of his long robe; but Biberli felt that he
had seized only the hood, swiftly unclasped it, and as he hurried to a
side door, through which loud voices echoed, Siebenburg heard the low cry
of a woman. It came from behind a curtain spread over some clothes that
hung on the wall, and Seitz said to himself that the person must be the
maid whom he had just met. She was in Els Ortlieb's service, and he was
glad to have this living witness at hand.
If he could induce Heinz to talk with him here in the anteroom it would
be impossible for her to escape. So, feigning that he had noticed
nothing, he pretended to be much amused by Biberli's nimble flight.
Forcing a laugh, he flung the hood at his head, and before he opened the
door of the adjoining room again asked to speak to his master. Biberli
replied that he must wait; the knight was holding a religious
conversation with a devout old mendicant friar. If he might venture to
offer counsel, he would not interrupt his master now; he had received
very sad news, and the tailor who came to take his measure for his
mourning garments had just left him. If Seitz had any business with the
knight, and expected any benefit from his favour and rare generosity----
But Siebenburg let him get no farther. Forgetting the stratagem which was
to lure Heinz hither, he burst into a furious rage, fiercely declaring
that he sought favour and generosity from no man, least of all a Heinz
Schorlin and, advancing to the door, flung the servant who barred his
passage so rudely against the wall that he uttered a loud cry of pain.
Ere it had died away Heinz appeared on the threshold. A long white robe
increased the pallor of his face, but yesterday so ruddy, and his
reddened eyes showed traces of recent tears.
When he perceived what had occurred, and saw his faithful follower, with
a face distorted by pain, rubbing his shoulder, his cheeks flushed
angrily, and with just indignation he rebuked Siebenburg for his unseemly
intrusion into his quarters and his brutal conduct.
Then, without heeding the knight, he asked Biberli if he was seriously
injured, and when the latter answered in the negative he again turned to
Seitz and briefly enquired what he wanted. If he desired to own that,
while in a state of senseless intoxication he had slandered modest
maidens, and was ignorant of his actions when he staked his castle and
lands against the gold lying before him, Heinz Schorlin, he might keep
Tannenreuth. The form in which he would revoke his calumny to Jungfrau
Ortlieb he would discuss with him later. At present his mind was occupied
with more important matters than the senseless talk of a drunkard, and he
would therefore request the knight to leave him.
As Heinz uttered the last words he pointed to the door, and this
indiscreet, anything but inviting gesture robbed Siebenburg of the last
remnant of composure maintained with so much difficulty.
Nothing is more infuriating to weak natures than to have others expect
them to pursue a course opposite to that which, after a victory over
baser impulses, they have recognised as the right one and intended to
follow. He who had come to resign his lost property voluntarily was
regarded by the Swiss as an importunate mendicant; he who stood here to
prove that he was perfectly justified in accusing Els Ortlieb of a crime,
Schorlin expected to make a revocation against his better knowledge. And
what price did the insolent fellow demand for the restored estate and the
right to brand him as a slanderer? The pleasure of seeing the unwelcome
guest retire as quickly as possible. No greater degree of contempt and
offensive presumption could be imagined, and as Seitz set his own
admirable conduct during the past few hours far above the profligate
behaviour of the Swiss, he was fired with honest indignation and, far
from heeding the white robe and altered countenance of his enemy, gave
the reins to his wrath.
Pale with fury, he flung, as it were, the estate the Swiss had won from
him at his feet, amid no lack of insulting words.
At first Heinz listened to the luckless gambler's outbreak of rage in
silent amazement, but when the latter began to threaten, and even clapped
his hand on his sword, the composure which never failed him in the
presence of anything that resembled danger quickly returned.
He had felt a strong aversion to Siebenburg from their first meeting, and
the slanderous words with which he had dragged in the dust the good name
of a maiden who, Heinz knew, had incurred suspicion solely through his
fault, had filled him with scorn. So, with quiet contempt, he let him
rave on; but when the person to whom he had just been talking--the old
Minorite monk whom he had met on the highroad and accompanied to
Nuremberg--appeared at the door of the next room, he stopped Seitz with a
firm "Enough!" pointed to the old man, and in brief, simple words, gave
the castle and lands of Tannenreuth to the monastery of the mendicant
friars of the Franciscan order in Nuremberg.
Siebenburg listened with a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders, then he
said bitterly: "I thought that a life of poverty was the chief rule in
the order of St. Francis. But no matter! May the gift won at the gaming
table profit the holy Brothers. For you, Sir Knight, it will gain the
favour of the Saint of Assisi, whose power is renowned. So you have acted
wisely."
Here he hesitated; he felt choked with rage. But while the Minorite was
thanking Heinz for the generous gift, Siebenburg's eyes again rested on
the curtain behind which the maid was concealed.
It was now his turn to deal the Swiss a blow. The old mendicant friar was
a venerable person whose bearing commanded respect, and Heinz seemed to
value his good opinion. For that very reason the Minorite should learn
the character of this patron of his order.
"Since you so earnestly desire to be rid of my company, Sir Heinz
Schorlin," he continued, "I will fulfil your wish. Only just now you
appeared to consider certain words uttered last night in reference to a
lady--"
"Let that pass," interrupted Heinz with marked emphasis.
"I might expect that desire," replied Siebenburg scornfully; "for as you
are in the act of gaining the favour of Heaven by pious works, it will be
agreeable to you--"
"What?" asked the Swiss sharply.
"You will surely desire," was the reply, "to change conduct which is an
offence to honourable people, and still more to the saints above. You who
have estranged a betrothed bride from her lover and lured her to midnight
interviews, no doubt suppose yourself safe from the future husband, whom
the result of a duel--as you know--will keep from her side. But Wolff
happens to be my brother-in-law, and if I feel disposed to take his place
and break a lance with you----"
Heinz, pale as death, interrupted him, exclaiming in a tone of the
deepest indignation: "So be it, then. We will have a tilt with lances,
and then we will fight with our swords."
Siebenburg looked at him an instant, as if puzzled by his adversary's
sharp assault, but quickly regained his composure and answered: "Agreed!
In the joust--[single combat in the tourney]--with sharp weapons it will
soon appear who has right on his side."
"Right?" asked Heinz in astonishment, shrugging his shoulders scornfully.
"Yes, right," cried the other furiously, "which you have ceased to
prize."
"So far from it," the Swiss answered quietly, "that before we discuss the
mode of combat with the herald I must ask you to recall the insults with
which yesterday, in your drunkenness, you injured the honour of a
virtuous maiden in the presence of other knights and gentlemen."
"Whose protector," laughed Seitz, "you seem to have constituted yourself,
by your own choice, in her bridegroom's place."
"I accept the position," replied Heinz with cool deliberation. "Not you,
nay, I will fight in Wolff Eysvogel's stead--and with his consent, I
think. I know him, and esteem him so highly----"
"That you invite his plighted bride to nocturnal love dalliance, and
exchange love messages with her," interrupted the other.
This was too much for Heinz Schorlin and, with honest indignation, he
cried: "Prove it! Or, by our Lord's blood!--My sword, Biberli!--Spite of
the peace proclaimed throughout the land, you shall learn, ere you open
your slandering lips again----"
Here he paused suddenly, for while Biberli withdrew to obey the command
which, though it probably suited his wishes, he was slow in executing,
doubtless that he might save his master from a reckless act, Siebenburg,
frantic with fury, rushed to the curtain. Ere Heinz could interfere, he
jerked it back so violently that he tore it from the fastenings and
forced the terrified maid, whose arm he grasped, to approach the knight
with him.
Heinz had seen Katterle only by moonlight and in the twilight, so her
unexpected appearance gave him no information. He gazed at her
enquiringly, with as much amazement as though she had risen from the
earth. Siebenburg gave him no time to collect his thoughts, but dragged
the girl before the monk and, raising his voice in menace, commanded:
"Tell the holy Brother who you are, woman!"
"Katterle of Sarnen," she answered, weeping. "And whom do you serve?" the
knight demanded.
"The Ortlieb sisters, Jungfrau Els and Jungfrau Eva," was the reply.
"The beautiful Es, as they are called here, holy Brother," said
Siebenburg with a malicious laugh, "whose maid I recognise in this girl.
If she did not come hither to mend the linen of her mistress's friend--"
But here Biberli, who on his return to the anteroom had been terrified by
the sight of his sweetheart, interrupted the knight by turning to Heinz
with the exclamation: "Forgive me, my lord. Surely you know that she is
my betrothed bride. She came just now--scarcely a dozen Paternosters
ago-to talk with me about the marriage."
Katterle had listened in surprise to the bold words of her true and
steadfast lover, yet she was not ill pleased, for he had never before
spoken of their marriage voluntarily. At the same time she felt the
obligation of aiding him and nodded assent, while Siebenburg rudely
interrupted the servant by calling to the monk: "Lies and deception,
pious Brother. Black must be whitened here. She stole, muffled, to her
mistress's gallant, to bring a message from the older beautiful E, with
whom this godly knight was surprised last night."
Again the passionate outbreak of his foe restored the Swiss to composure.
With a calmness which seemed to the servant incomprehensible, though it
filled him with delight, he turned to the monk, saying earnestly and
simply: "Appearances may be against me, Pater Benedictus. I will tell you
all the circumstances at once. How this maid came here will be explained
later. As for the maiden whom this man calls the older beautiful E,
never--I swear it by our saint--have I sought her love or received from
her the smallest token of her favour."
Then turning to Siebenburg he continued, still calmly, but with menacing
sternness: "If I judge you aright, you will now go from one to another
telling whom you found here, in order to injure the fair fame of the
maiden whom your wife's valiant brother chose for his bride, and to place
my name with hers in the pillory."
"Where Els Ortlieb belongs rather than in the honourable home of a
Nuremberg patrician," retorted Siebenburg furiously. "If she became too
base for my brother-in-law, the fault is yours. I shall certainly take
care that he learns the truth and knows where, and at what an hour, his
betrothed bride met foreign heartbreakers. To open the eyes of others
concerning her will also be a pleasant duty."
Heinz sprang towards Biberli to snatch the sword from his hand, but he
held it firmly, seeking his master's eyes with a look of warning
entreaty; but his faithful solicitude would have been futile had not the
monk lent his aid. The old man's whispered exhortation to his young
friend to spare the imperial master, to whom he was so deeply indebted, a
fresh sorrow, restored to the infuriated young knight his power of
self-control. Pushing the thick locks back from his brow with a hasty
movement, he answered in a tone of the most intense contempt:
"Do what you will, but remember this: Beware that, ere the joust begins,
you do not ride the rail instead of the charger. The maidens whose pure
name you so yearn to sully are of noble birth, and if they appear to
complain of you----"
"Then I will proclaim the truth," Siebenburg retorted, "and the Court of
Love and Pursuivant at Arms will deprive you, the base seducer, of the
right to enter the lists rather than me, my handsome knight!"
"So be it," replied Heinz quietly. "You can discuss the other points with
my herald. Wolff Eysvogel, too--rely upon it--will challenge you, if you
fulfil your base design."
Then, turning his back upon Seitz without a word of farewell, he motioned
the monk towards the open door of the antechamber, and letting him lead
the way, closed it behind them.
"He will come to you, you boaster!" Siebenburg shouted contemptuously
after the Swiss, and then turned to Biberli and the maid with a
patronising question; but the former, without even opening his lips in
reply, hastened to the door and, with a significant gesture, induced the
knight to retire.
Seitz submitted and hastened down the stairs, his eyes flashing as if he
had won a great victory. At the door of the house he grasped the hilt of
his sword, and then, with rapid movements, twisted the ends of his
mustache. The surprise he had given the insolent Swiss by the discovery
of his love messenger--it had acted like a spell--could not have
succeeded better. And what had Schorlin alleged in justification?
Nothing, absolutely nothing at all. Wolff Eysvogel's herald should
challenge the Swiss, not him, who meant to open the deceived lover's eyes
concerning his betrothed bride.
He eagerly anticipated the joust and the sword combat with Heinz. The
sharper the herald's conditions the better. He had hurled more powerful
foes than the Swiss from the saddle, and from knightly "courtoisie" not
even used his strength without consideration. Heinz Schorlin should feel
it.
He gazed around him like a victor, and throwing his head back haughtily
he went down the Bindergasse, this time past the Franciscan monastery
towards the Town Hall and the fish market. Eber, the sword cutler, lived
there and, spite of the large sum he owed him, Seitz wished to talk with
him about the sharp weapons he needed for the joust. On his way he gave
his imagination free course. It showed him his impetuous onset, his
enemy's fall in the sand, the sword combat, and the end of the joust, the
swift death of his hated foe.
These pictures of the future occupied his thoughts so deeply that he
neither saw nor heard what was passing around him. Many a person for whom
he forgot to turn aside looked angrily after him. Suddenly he found his
farther progress arrested. The crier had just raised his voice to
announce some important tidings to the people who thronged around him
between the Town Hall and the Franciscan monastery. Perhaps he might have
succeeded in forcing a passage through the concourse, but when he heard
the name "Ernst Ortlieb," in the monotonous speech of the city crier, he
followed the remainder of his notice. It made known to the citizens of
Nuremberg that, since the thunderstorm of the preceding night, a maid had
been missing from the house of the Honourable Herr Ernst Ortlieb, of the
Council, a Swiss by birth, Katharina of Sarnen, called Katterle, a woman
of blameless reputation. Whoever should learn anything concerning the
girl was requested to bring the news to the Ortlieb residence.
What did this mean?
If the girl had vanished at midnight and not returned to her employers
since, she could scarcely have sought Heinz Schorlin as a messenger of
love from Els. But if she had not come to the Swiss from one of the Es,
what proof did he, Seitz, possess of the guilt of his brother-in-law's
bride? How should he succeed in making Wolff understand that his beloved
Els had wronged him if the maid was to play no part in proving it?
Yesterday evening he had not believed firmly in her guilt; that very
morning it had even seemed to him a shameful thing that he had cast
suspicion upon her in the presence of others. The encounter with the maid
at the Swiss knight's lodgings had first induced him to insist on his
accusation so defiantly. And now? If Heinz Schorlin, with the help of the
Ortliebs, succeeded in proving the innocence of those whom he had
accused, then--ah, he must not pursue that train of thought--then, at the
lady's accusation, he might be deprived of the right to enter the lists
in the tournament; then all the disgrace which could be inflicted upon
the slanderous defamer of character threatened him; then Wolff would
summon him to a reckoning, as well as Heinz Schorlin. Wolff, whom he had
begun to hate since, with his resistless arm of iron, he had exposed him
for the first time to the malicious glee of the bystanders in the fencing
hall.
Yet it was not this which suddenly bowed his head and loudly admonished
him that he had again behaved like a reckless fool. Cowardice was his
least fault. He did not fear what might befall him in battle. Whether he
would be barred out from the lists was the terrible question which
darkened the bright morning already verging towards noon. He had charged
Els with perfidy in the presence of others, and thereby exposed her, the
plighted bride of a knight, to the utmost scorn. And besides--fool that
he was!--his brothers had again attacked a train of waggons on the
highway and would soon be called to account as robbers. This would
certainly lead the Swiss and others to investigate his own past, and the
Pursuivant at Arms excluded from joust and tourney whoever "injured trade
or merchant." What would not his enemy, who was in such high favour with
the Emperor, do to compass his destruction? But--and at the thought he
uttered a low imprecation--how could he ride to the joust if his
father-in-law closed his strong box which, moreover, was said to be
empty? If the old man was forced to declare himself bankrupt Siebenburg's
creditors would instantly seize his splendid chargers and costly suits of
armour, scarcely one half of which were paid for. How much money he
needed as security in case of defeat! His sole property was debts. Yet
the thought seemed like an illumination--his wife's valuable old jewels
could probably still be saved, and she might be induced to give him part
of the ornaments for the tournament. He need only make her understand
that his honour and that of the twins were at stake. Would that Heaven
might spare his boys such hours of anxiety and self-accusation!
But what was this? Was he deluding himself? Did his over-excited
imagination make him hear a death knell pealing for his honour and his
hopes, which must be borne to their grave? Yet no! All the citizens and
peasants, men and women, great and small, who thronged the salt market,
which he had just entered, raised their heads to listen with him; for
from every steeple at once rang the mournful death knell which announced
to the city the decease of an "honourable" member of the Council, a
secular or ecclesiastical prince. The mourning banner was already waving
on the roof of the Town Hall, towards which he turned. Men in the service
of the city were hoisting other black flags upon the almshouse, and now
the Hegelein--[Proclaimer of decrees]--in mourning garments, mounted on a
steed caparisoned with crepe, came riding by at the head of other
horsemen clad in sable, proclaiming to the throng that Hartmann, the
Emperor Rudolph's promising son, had found an untimely end. The noble
youth was drowned while bathing in the Rhine.
It seemed as if a frost had blighted a blooming garden. The gay bustle in
the market place was paralysed. The loud sobs of many women blended with
exclamations of grief and pity from bearded lips which had just been
merrily bargaining for salt and fish, meat and game. Messengers with
crepe on their hats or caps forced a passage through the throng, and a
train of German knights, priests, and monks passed with bowed heads,
bearing candles in their hands, between the Town Hail and St. Sebald's
Church towards the corn magazine and the citadel.
Meanwhile dark clouds were spreading slowly over the bright-blue vault of
the June sky. A flock of rooks hovered around the Town Hall, and then
flew, with loud cries, towards the castle.
Seitz watched them indifferently. Even the great omnipotent sovereign
there had his own cross to bear; tears flowed in his proud palace also,
and sighs of anguish were heard. And this was just. He had never wished
evil to any one who did not injure him, but even if he could have averted
this sore sorrow from the Emperor Rudolph he would not have stirred a
finger. His coronation had been a blow to him and to his brothers.
Formerly they had been permitted to work their will on the highways, but
the Hapsburg, the Swiss, had pitilessly stopped their brigandage. Now for
the first time robber-knights were sentenced and their castles destroyed.
The Emperor meant to transform Germany into a sheepfold, Absbach
exclaimed. The Siebenburg brothers were his faithful allies, and though
they complained that the joyous, knightly clank of arms would be silenced
under such a sovereign, they themselves took care that the loud battle
shouts, cries of pain, and shrieks for aid were not hushed on the roads
used for traffic by the merchants. But this was not Seitz's sole reason
for shrugging his shoulders at the expressions of the warmest sympathy
which rose around him. The Emperor was tenderly attached to Heinz
Schorlin, and the man who was so kindly disposed to his foe could never
be his friend. Perhaps to-morrow Rudolph might behead his brothers and
elevate Heinz Schorlin to still greater honors. Seitz, whose eyes had
overflowed with tears when the warder of his native castle lost his aged
wife, who had been his nurse, now found no cause to grieve with the
mourners.
So he continued his way, burdened with his own anxieties, amid the tears
and lamentations of the multitude. The numerous retinue of servants in
the Eysvogel mansion were moving restlessly to and fro; the news of the
prince's death had reached them. Herr Casper had left the house. He was
probably at Herr Ernst Ortlieb's. If the latter had already learned what
he, Seitz Siebenburg, had said at the gaming table of his daughter,
perhaps his hand had dealt the first decisive blow at the tottering house
where, so long as it stood, his wife and the twins would under any
circumstances find shelter. Resentment against the Swiss, hatred, and
jealousy, had made him a knave, and at the same time the most
shortsighted of fools.
As he approached the second story, in which the nursery was situated and
where he expected to find his wife, it suddenly seemed as if a star had
risen amid the darkness. If he poured out his heart to Isabella and let
her share the terrible torture of his soul, perhaps it would awaken a
tender sympathy in the woman who still loved him, and who was dearer to
him than he could express. Her jewels were certainly very valuable, but
far more precious was the hope of being permitted to rest his aching head
upon her breast and feel her slender white hand push back the hair from
his anxious brow. Oh, if misfortune would draw her again as near to him
as during the early months of their married life and directly before it,
he could rise from his depression with fresh vigour and transform the
battle, now half lost, into victory. Besides, she was clever and had
power over the hearts of her family, so perhaps she might point out the
pathway of escape, which his brain, unused to reflection, could not
discover.
His heart throbbed high as, animated by fresh hope, he entered the
corridor from which opened the rooms which he occupied with her. But his
wish to find her alone was not to be fulfilled; several voices reached
him.
What was the meaning of the scene?
Isabella, her face deadly pale, and her tall figure drawn up to its full
height, stood before the door of the nursery with a stern, cold
expression on her lovely lips, like a princess pronouncing sentence upon
a criminal. She was panting for breath, and before her, her mother, and
her grandmother, Countess Cordula's pretty page, whom Siebenburg knew
only too well, was moving to and fro with eager gestures. He held in his
hand the bunch of roses which Seitz had sent to his newly-won wife and
darling as a token of reconciliation, and Siebenburg heard his clear,
boyish tones urge: "I have already said so and, noble lady, you may
believe me, this bouquet, which the woman brought us, was intended for my
gracious mistress, Countess von Montfort. It was meant to give her a fair
morning greeting, and--Do not let this vex you, for it was done only in
the joyous game of love, as custom dictated. Ever since we came here your
lord has daily honoured my countess with the loveliest flowers whose buds
unfold in the region near the Rhine. But my gracious mistress, as you
have already heard, believes that you, noble lady, have a better right to
these unusually beautiful children of the spring than she who last
evening bade your lord behold in you, not in her, fair lady, the most
fitting object of his homage. So she sent me hither, most gracious madam,
to lay what is yours at your feet."
As he spoke, the agile boy, with a graceful bow, tried to place the
flowers in Isabella's hand, but she would not receive the bouquet, and
the abrupt gesture with which she pushed them back flung the nosegay on
the floor. Paying no further heed to it, she answered in a cold, haughty
tone: "Thank your mistress, and tell her that I appreciated her kind
intention, but the roses which she sent me were too full of thorns."
Then, turning her back on the page, she advanced with majestic pride to
the door of the nursery.
Her mother and grandmother tried to follow, but Siebenburg pressed
between them and his wife, and his voice thrilled with the anguish of a
soul overwhelmed by despair as he cried imploringly: "Hear me, Isabella!
There is a most unhappy misunderstanding here. By all that is sacred to
me, by our love, by our children, I swear those roses were intended for
you, my heart's treasure, and for you alone."
But Countess Rotterbach cut him short by exclaiming with a loud chuckle:
"The unripe early pears will probably come from the fruit market to the
housewife's hands later; the roses found their way to Countess von
Montfort more quickly."
The malicious words were followed like an echo by Frau Rosalinde's
tearful "It is only too true. This also!"
The knight, unheeding the angry, upbraiding woman, hastened in pursuit of
his wife to throw himself at her feet and confess the whole truth; but
she, who had heard long before that Sir Seitz was paying Countess Cordula
more conspicuous attention than beseemed a faithful husband, and who,
after the happy hour so recently experienced, had expected, until the
arrival of the page, the dawn of brighter, better days, now felt doubly
abased, deceived, betrayed.
Without vouchsafing the unfortunate man even a glance or a word, she
entered the nursery before he reached her; but he, feeling that he must
follow her at any cost, laid his hand on the lock of the door and tried
to open it. The strong oak resisted his shaking and pulling. Isabella had
shot the heavy iron bolt into its place. Seitz first knocked with his
fingers and then with his clenched fist, until the grandmother exclaimed:
"You have destroyed the house, at least spare the doors."
Uttering a fierce imprecation, he went to his own chamber, hastily thrust
into his pockets all the gold and valuables which he possessed, and then
went out again into the street. His way led him past Kuni, the flower
girl from whom he had bought the roses. The beggar who was to carry them
to his wife did not hear distinctly, on account of her bandaged head, and
not understanding the knight, went to the girl from whom she had seen him
purchase the blossoms to ask where they belonged. Kuni pointed to the
lodgings of the von Montforts, where she had already sent so many
bouquets for Siebenburg. The latter saw both the flower-seller and the
beggar woman, but did not attempt to learn how the roses which he
intended for his wife had reached Countess Cordula. He suspected the
truth, but felt no desire to have it confirmed. Fate meant to destroy
him, he had learned that. The means employed mattered little. It would
have been folly to strive against the superior power of such an
adversary. Let ruin pursue its course. His sole wish was to forget his
misery, though but for a brief time. He knew he could accomplish this by
drink, so he entered the Mirror wine tavern and drained bumper after
bumper with a speed which made the landlord, though he was accustomed to
marvellous performances on the part of his guests, shake the head set on
his immensely thick neck somewhat suspiciously.
The few persons present had gathered in a group and were talking sadly
about the great misfortune which had assailed the Emperor. The universal
grief displayed so hypocritically, as Seitz thought, angered him, and he
gazed at them with such a sullen, threatening look that no one ventured
to approach him. Sometimes he stared into his wine, sometimes into
vacancy, sometimes at the vaulted ceiling above. He harshly rebuffed the
landlord and the waiter who tried to accost him, but when the peasant's
prediction was fulfilled and the thunderstorm of the preceding night was
followed at midnight by one equally severe, he arose and left the
hostelry. The rain tempted him into the open air. The taproom was so
sultry, so terribly sultry. The moisture of the heavens would refresh
him.
CHAPTER XVIII.
The fury of the tempest had ceased, but the sky was still obscured by
clouds. A cool breeze blew from the northeast through the damp, heavy
air.
Heinz Schorlin was coming from the fortress, and after crossing the
Diligengasse went directly towards his lodgings. His coat of mail, spurs,
and helmeted head were accoutrements for the saddle, yet he was on foot.
A throng of men, women, and children, whispering eagerly together,
accompanied him. One pointed him out to another, as if there was
something unusual about him. Two stalwart soldiers in the pay of the city
followed, carrying his saddle and the equipments of his horse, and kept
back the boys or women who boldly attempted to press too near.
Heinz did not heed the throng. He looked pale, and his thick locks,
falling in disorder from under his helmet, floated around his face. The
chain armour on his limbs and his long surcoat were covered with mire.
The young knight, usually so trim, looked disordered and, as it were,
thrown off his balance. His bright face bore the impress of a horror
still unconquered, as he gazed restlessly into vacancy, and seemed to be
seeking something, now above and now in the ground.
The pretty young hostess, Frau Barbara Deichsler, holding her little
three-year-old daughter by the hand, stood in front of the house in the
Bindergasse where he lodged. The knight usually had a pleasant or merry
word for her, and a gay jest or bit of candy for Annele. Nay, the young
noble, who was fond of children, liked to toss the little one in his arms
and play with her.
Frau Barbara had already heard that, as Heinz was returning from the
fortress, the lightning had struck directly in front of him, killing his
beautiful dun charger, which she had so often admired. It had happened
directly before the eyes of the guard, and the news had gone from man to
man of the incredible miracle which had saved the life of the young
Swiss, the dearest friend of the Emperor's dead son.
When Heinz approached the door Frau Barbara stepped forward with Annele
to congratulate him that the dear saints had so graciously protected him,
but he only answered gravely: "What are we mortals? Rejoice in the child,
Frau Barbara, so long as she is spared to you."
He passed into the entry as he spoke, but Frau Deichsler hastily prepared
to call his armour-bearer, a grey-bearded Swiss who had served the
knight's father and slept away the hours not devoted to his duties or to
the wine cup. He must supply the place of Biberli, who had left the house
a long time before, and for the first time in many years was keeping his
master waiting. But Heinz knew where he was, and while the armour-bearer
was divesting him, awkwardly enough, of his suit of mail and gala attire,
he was often seized with anxiety about his faithful follower, though many
things with which the morning had burdened his soul lay nearer to his
heart.
Never had he been so lucky in gambling as last night in the Duke of
Pomerania's quarters. Biberli's advice to trust to the two and five had
been repeatedly tested, and besides the estate of Tannenreuth, which
Siebenburg had staked against all his winnings, he had brought home more
gold than he had ever seen before.
Yet he had gone to rest in a mood by no means joyous. It was painful to
him to deprive any one of his lands and home. He had even resisted
accepting Siebenburg's reckless stake, but his obstinate persistence and
demand could not be opposed. The calumnies by which the "Mustache" had
assailed the innocent Els Ortlieb haunted him, and many others had shown
their indignation against the traducer. Probably thirty gentlemen at the
gaming table had been witnesses of these incidents, and if, to-morrow, it
was in everybody's mouth that he, Heinz, had been caught at mid-night in
an interview with the elder beautiful Ortlieb E, the fault was his, and
he would be burdened with the guilt of having sullied the honour and name
of a pure maiden, the betrothed bride of an estimable man.
And Eva!
When he woke in the morning his first thought had been of her. She had
seemed more desirable than ever. But his relatives at home, and the
counsel Biberli had urged upon him during their nocturnal wandering, had
constantly interposed between him and the maiden whom he so ardently
loved. Besides, it seemed certain that the passion which filled his heart
must end unhappily. Else what was the meaning of this unexampled good
luck at the gaming table? The torture of this thought had kept him awake
a long time. Then he had sunk into a deep, dreamless sleep. In the
morning Biberli, full of delight, roused him, and displayed three large
bags filled with florins and zecchins, the gains of the night before.
The servant had begged to be permitted to count the golden blessing,
which in itself would suffice to buy the right to use the bridge from the
city of Luzerne twice over, and the best thing about which was that it
would restore the peace of mind of his lady mother at Schorlin Castle.
Now, in the name of all the saints, let him continue his life of liberty,
and leave the somnambulist to walk over the roofs, and suffer Altrosen,
who had worn her colour so patiently, to wed the countess.
But how long the servitor's already narrow face became when Heinz, with a
grave resolution new to Biberli, answered positively that no ducats would
stray from these bags to Schorlin Castle. If, last night, anxiety had
burdened his mind like the corpse of a murdered man, these gains weighed
upon his soul like the loathsome body of a dead cat. Never in his whole
life had he felt so poor as with this devil's money. The witch-bait which
Biberli had given him with the two and the five had drawn it out of the
pockets of his fellow gamblers. He would be neither a cut-purse nor a
dealer in the black arts. The wages of hell should depart as quickly as
they came. While speaking, he seized the second largest bag and gave it
to the servant, exclaiming: "Now keep your promise to Katterle like an
honest man. The poor thing will have a hard time at her employer's. I
make but one condition: you are to remain in my service. I can't do
without you."
While the armour-bearer, in the agile Biberli's place, was handing him
the garments to be worn in the house, Heinz again remembered how the
faithful fellow had thrown himself on his knees and kissed his master's
hands and arms in the excess of his joyful surprise, and yet he had felt
as if a dark cloud was shadowing the brightness of his soul. The morning
sun had shone so radiantly into his window, and Annele had come with such
bewitching shyness to bring him a little bunch of lilies of the valley
with a rose in the centre, and a pleasant morning greeting from her
mother, that the cloud could not remain, yet it had only parted
occasionally to close again speedily, though it was less dense and dark
than before.
Yet he had taken the child in his arms and looked down into the narrow
street to show her the people going to market so gaily in the early
morning. But he soon put her down again, for he recognised in a horseman
approaching on a weary steed Count Curt Gleichen, the most intimate
friend of young Prince Hartmann and himself, and when he called to him he
had slid from his saddle with a faint greeting.
Heinz instantly rushed out of the house to meet him, but he had found him
beside his steed, which had sunk on its knees, and then, trembling and
panting, dragged itself, supported by its rider's hand, into the entry.
There it fell, rolled over on its side, and stretched its limbs stiffly
in death. It was the third horse which the messenger had killed since he
left the Rhine, yet he was sure of arriving too soon; for he had to
announce to a father the death of his promising son.
Heinz listened, utterly overwhelmed, to the narrative of the eye-witness,
who described how Hartmann, ere he could stretch out a hand to save him,
had been dragged into the depths by the waves of the Rhine.
In spite of the sunny brightness of the morning the young Swiss had had a
presentiment of some great misfortune, and had told himself that he would
welcome it if it relieved him from the burden which had darkened his soul
since the disgraceful good luck of the previous night. Now it had
happened, and how gladly he would have continued to bear the heaviest
load to undo the past. He had sobbed on his friend's breast like a child,
accusing Heaven for having visited him with this affliction.
Hartmann had been not only his friend but his pupil--and what a pupil! He
had instructed him in horsemanship and the use of the sword, and during
the last year shared everything with him and young Count Gleichen as if
they were three brothers and, like a brother, the prince had constantly
grown closer to his heart. Had he, Heinz, accompanied Hartmann to the
Rhine and been permitted to remain with him, neither or both would have
fallen victims to the river! And Hartmann's aged father, the noble man to
whom he owed everything, and who clung with his whole soul to the beloved
youth, his image in mind and person--how would the Emperor Rudolph endure
this? But a few months ago death had snatched from him his wife, the love
of his youth, the mother of his children, the companion of his glorious
career! The thought of him stirred Heinz to the depths of his soul, and
he would fain have hastened at once to the castle to help the stricken
father bear the new and terrible burden imposed upon him. But he must
first care for the messenger of these terrible tidings who, with lips
white from exhaustion, needed refreshment.
Biberli, who saw and thought of everything, had already urged the hostess
to do what she could, and sent the servant to the tailor that, when Heinz
rode to the fortress, he might not lack the mourning--a tabard would
suffice--which could be made in a few hours.
Frau Barbara had just brought the lunch and promised to obey the command
to keep the terrible news which she had just heard a secret from every
one, that the rumor might not reach the fortress prematurely, when
another visitor appeared--Heinz Schorlin's cousin, Sir Arnold Maier of
Silenen, a tall, broad-shouldered man of fifty, with stalwart frame and
powerful limbs.
His grave, bronzed countenance, framed by a grey beard, revealed that he,
too, brought no cheering news. He had never come to his young cousin's at
so early an hour.
His intelligent, kindly grey eyes surveyed Heinz with astonishment. What
had befallen the happy-hearted fellow? But when he heard the news which
had wet the young knight's eyes with tears, his own lips also quivered,
and his deep, manly tones faltered as he laid his heavy hands on the
mourner's shoulders and gazed tearfully into his eyes. At last he
exclaimed mournfully: "My poor, poor boy! Pray to Him to whom we owe all
that is good, and who tries us with the evil. Would to God I had less
painful tidings for you!"
Heinz shrank back, but his cousin told him the tidings learned from a
Swiss messenger scarcely an hour before. The dispute over the bridge toll
had caused a fight. The uncle who supplied a father's place to Heinz and
managed his affairs--brave old Walther Ramsweg--was killed; Schorlin
Castle had been taken by the city soldiery and, at the command of the
chief magistrate, razed to the ground. Wendula Schorlin, Heinz's mother,
with her daughter Maria, had fallen into the hands of the city soldiers
and been carried to the convent in Constance, where she and her youngest
child now remained with the two older daughters.
Heinz, deeply agitated by the news, exclaimed: "Uncle Ramsweg, our kind
second father, also in the grave without my being able to press his
brave, loyal hand in farewell! And Maria, our singing bird, our nimble
little squirrel, with those grave, world-weary Sisters! And my mother!
You, too, like every one, love her, Cousin--and you know her. She who has
been accustomed to command, and to manage the house and the lands, who
like a saint dried tears far and near amid trouble and deprivation--she,
deprived of her own strong will, in a convent! Oh, Cousin, Cousin! To
hear this, and not be able to rush upon the rabble who have robbed us of
the home of our ancestors, as a boy crushes a snail shell! Can it be
imagined? No Castle Schorlin towering high above the lake on the cliff at
the verge of the forest. The room where we all saw the light of the world
and listened to our mother's songs destroyed; the sacred chamber where
the father who so lovingly protected us closed his eyes; the chapel where
we prayed so devoutly and vowed to the Holy Virgin a candle from our
little possessions, or, in the lovely month of May, brought flowers to
her from our mother's little garden, the cliff, or the dark forest. The
courtyard where we learned to manage a steed and use our weapons, the
hall where we listened to the wandering minstrels, in ruins! Gone, gone,
all gone! My mother and Maria weeping prisoners!"
Here his cousin broke in to show him that love was leading him to look on
the dark side. His mother had chosen the convent for her daughter's sake;
she was by no means detained there by force. She could live wherever she
pleased, and her dowry, with what she had saved, would be ample to
support her and Maria, in the city or the country, in a style suited to
their rank.
This afforded Heinz some consolation, but enough remained to keep his
grief alive, and his voice sounded very sorrowful as he added: "That
lessens the bitterness of the cup. But who will re build the ancient
castle? Who will restore our uncle? And the Emperor, my beloved, fatherly
master, dying of grief! Our Hartmann dead! Washed away like a dry branch
which the swift Reuss seizes and hurries out of our sight! Too much, too
hard, too terrible! Yet the sun shines as brightly as before! The
children in the street below laugh as merrily as ever!"
Groaning aloud, he covered his face with his hands, and those from whom
he might have expected consolation were forced to leave him in the midst
of the deepest sorrow; for the Swiss mail, which had come to Maier of
Silenen as the most distinguished of his countrymen, was awaiting
distribution, and Count Gleichen was forced to fulfill his sorrowful duty
as messenger. His friend Heinz had lent him his second horse, the black,
to ride to the fortress.
While Heinz, pursued by grief and care, sometimes paced up and down the
room, sometimes threw himself into the armchair which Frau Barbara, to do
him special honour, had placed in the sitting-room, the Minorite monk
Benedictus, whom he had brought to Nuremberg, had come uninvited from the
neighbouring monastery to give him a morning greeting. The enthusiasm
with which St. Francis had filled his soul in his early years had not
died out in his aged breast. He who in his youth had borne the escutcheon
of his distinguished race in many a battle and tourney, as a knight
worthy of all honour, sympathised with his young equal in rank, and found
him in the mood to provide for his eternal salvation. On the ride to
Nuremberg he had perceived in Heinz a pious heart and a keen intellect
which yearned for higher things. But at that time the joyous youth had
not seemed to him ripe for the call of Heaven; when he found him bowed
with grief, his eyes, so radiant yesterday, swimming in tears, the
conviction was aroused that the Omnipotent One Himself had taken him by
the hand to lead the young Swiss, to whom he gratefully wished the best
blessings, into the path which the noble Saint of Assisi himself had
pointed out to him, and wherein he had found a bliss for which in the
world he had vainly yearned.
But his conversation with his young friend had been interrupted, first by
the tailor who was to make his mourning garb, then by Siebenburg, and
even later he had had no opportunity to school Heinz; for after Seitz had
gone Biberli and Katterle had needed questioning. The result of this was
sufficiently startling, and had induced Heinz to send the servant and his
sweetheart on the errand from which the former had not yet returned.
When the young knight found himself alone he repeated what the monk had
just urged upon him. Then Eva's image rose before him, and he had asked
himself whether she, the devout maiden, would not thank her saint when
she learned that he, obedient to her counsel, was beginning to provide
for his eternal salvation.
Moved by such thoughts, he had smiled as he told himself that the
Minorite seemed to be earnestly striving to win him for the monastery.
The old man meant kindly, but how could he renounce the trade of arms,
for which he was reared and which he loved?
Then he had been obliged to ride to the fortress to wait upon the Emperor
and tell him how deeply he sympathised with his grief. But he was denied
admittance. Rudolph desired to be alone, and would not see even his
nearest relatives.
On the way home he wished to pass through the inner gate of the
Thiergartnerthor into Thorstrasse to cross the milk market. The violence
of the noonday thundershower had already begun to abate, and he had
ridden quietly forward, absorbed in his grief, when suddenly a loud,
rattling crash had deafened his ears and made him feel as if the earth,
the gate, and the fortress were reeling. At the same moment his horse
leaped upward with all four feet at once, tossed its clever head
convulsively, and sank on its knees.
Half blinded by the dazzling light he saw, and bewildered by the
sulphurous vapour he noticed, Heinz nevertheless retained his presence of
mind, and had sprung from the saddle ere the quivering steed fell on its
side. Several of the guard at the gate quickly hastened to his
assistance, examined the horse with him, and found the noble animal
already dead. The lightning had darted along the iron mail on its
forehead and the steel bit, and struck the ground without injuring Heinz
himself. The soldiers and a Dominican monk who had sought shelter from
the rain in the guardhouse extolled this as a great miracle. The people
who had crowded to the spot were also seized with pious awe, and followed
the knight to whom Heaven had so distinctly showed its favour.
Heinz himself only felt that something extraordinary had happened. The
world had gained a new aspect. His life, which yesterday had appeared so
immeasurably long, now seemed brief, pitifully brief. Perhaps it would
end ere the sun sank to rest in the Haller meadows. He must deem every
hour that he was permitted to breathe as a gift, like the earnest money
he, placed in the trainer's hand in a horse trade. According to human
judgment the lightning should have killed him as well as the horse. If he
still lived and breathed and saw the grey clouds drifting across the sky,
this was granted only that he might secure his eternal salvation, to
which hitherto he had given so little concern. How grateful he ought to
be that this respite had been allowed him--that he had not been snatched
away unwarned, like Prince Hartmann, in the midst of his sins!
Would not Eva feel the same when she learned what had befallen him?
Perhaps Biberli would come back soon--he had been gone so long--and could
tell him about her.
Even before the thunderbolt had stirred the inmost depths of his being,
when he was merely touched by his deep grief and the monk's admonition,
he had striven to guide the servant and his sweetheart into the right
path, and the grey-haired monk aided him. The monastic life, it is true,
would not have suited Biberli, but he had shown himself ready to atone
for the wrong done the poor girl who had kept her troth for three long
years and, unasked, went back with her to her angry master.
Ere Heinz set forth on his ride to the fortress he had gone out declaring
that he would prove the meaning of his truth and steadfastness, thereby
incurring a peril which certainly gave him a right to wear the T and St
on his long robe and cap forever. He must expect to be held to a strict
account by Ernst Ortlieb. If the incensed father, who was a member of the
Council, used the full severity of the law, he might fare even worse than
ill. But he had realised the pass to which he had brought his sweetheart,
and the Minorite led his honest heart to the perception of the sin he
would commit if he permitted her to atone for an act which she had done
by his desire--nay, at his command.
With the gold Heinz had given him, and after his assurance that he would
retain him in his service even when a married man, he could, it is true,
more easily endure being punished with her who, as his wife, would soon
be destined to share evil with him as well as good. He had also secured
the aid of both his master and the Minorite, and had arranged an account
of what had occurred, which placed his own crime and the maid's in a
milder light. Finally--and he hoped the best result from this--Katterle
would bring the Ortliebs good news, and he was the very man to make it
useful to Jungfrau Els.
So he had committed his destiny to his beloved master, behind whom was
the Emperor himself, to the Minorite, who, judging from his great age and
dignified aspect, might be an influential man, St. Leodogar, and his own
full purse and, with a heart throbbing anxiously, entered the street with
the closely muffled Katterle, to take the unpleasant walk to the
exasperated master and father.
The morning had been rife with important events to Biberli also. The
means of establishing a household, the conviction that it would be hard
for him to remain a contented man without the idol of his heart, and the
still more important one that it would not be wise to defer happiness
long, because, as the death of young Prince Hartmann had shown, and Pater
Benedictus made still more evident, the possibility of enjoying the
pleasures of life might be over far too speedily.
He had been within an ace of losing his Katterle forever, and through no
one's guilt save that of the man on whose truth and steadfastness she so
firmly relied. After Siebenburg's departure she had confessed with tears
to him, his master, and the monk, what had befallen her, and how she had
finally reached the Bindergasse and Sir Heinz Schorlin's lodgings.
When, during the conflagration, fearing punishment, she had fled, she
went first to the Dutzen pond. Determined to end her existence, she
reached the goal of her nocturnal and her life pilgrimage. The mysterious
black water with its rush-grown shore, where ducks quacked and frogs
croaked in the sultry gloom, lay before her in the terrible darkness.
After she had repeated several Paternosters, the thought that she must
die without receiving the last unction weighed heavily on her soul. But
this she could not help, and it seemed more terrible to stand in the
stocks, like the barber's widow, and be insulted, spit upon by the
people, than to endure the flames of purgatory, where so many
others--probably among them Biberli, who had brought her to this
pass--would be tortured with her.
So she laid down the bundle which--she did not know why herself--she had
brought with her, and took off her shoes as if she were going into the
water to bathe. Just at that moment she suddenly saw a red light
glimmering on the dark surface of the water. It could not be the
reflection of the fires of purgatory, as she had thought at first. It
certainly did not proceed from the forge on the opposite shore, now
closed, for its outlines rose dark and motionless against the moon. No--a
brief glance around verified it--the light came from the burning of the
convent. The sky was coloured a vivid scarlet in two places, but the glow
was brightest towards the southeastern part of the city, where St.
Klarengasse must be. Then she was overpowered by torturing curiosity.
Must she die without knowing how much the fire had injured the newly
built convent, on whose site she had enjoyed the springtime of love, and
how the good Sisters fared? It seemed impossible, and her greatest fault
for the first time proved a blessing. It drew her back from the Dutzen
pond to the city.
On reaching the Marienthurm she learned that only a barn and a cow stable
had b@en destroyed by the flames. For this trivial loss she had suffered
intense anxiety and been faithless to her resolution to seek death, which
ends all fears.
Vexed by her own weakness, she determined to go back to her employer's
house and there accept whatever fate the saints bestowed. But when she
saw a light still shining through the parchment panes in the room
occupied by the two Es, she imagined that Herr Ernst was pronouncing
judgment upon Eva. In doing so her own guilt must be recalled, and the
thought terrified her so deeply that she joined the people returning from
the fire, for whom the Frauenthor still stood open, and allowed the crowd
to carry her on with them to St. Kunigunde's chapel in St. Lawrence's
church; and when some, passing the great Imhof residence, turned into the
Kotgasse, she followed.
Hitherto she had walked on without goal or purpose, but here the question
where to seek shelter confronted her; for the torchbearers who had
lighted the way disappeared one after another in the various houses. Deep
darkness suddenly surrounded her, and she was seized with terror. But ere
the last torch vanished, its light fell upon one of the brass basins
which hung in front of the barbers' shops.
The barber! The woman whom she had seen in the stocks was the widow of
one, and the house where she granted the lovers the meeting, on whose
account she had been condemned to so severe a punishment, was in the
Kotgasse, and had been pointed out to her. It must be directly opposite.
The thought entered her mind that the woman who had endured such a
terrible punishment, for a crime akin to her own, would understand better
than any one else the anguish of her heart. How could the widow yonder
refuse her companion in guilt a compassionate reception!
It was a happy idea, but she would never have ventured to rouse the woman
from her sleep, so she must wait. But the first grey light of dawn was
already appearing in the eastern horizon on the opposite side of the
square of St. Lawrence, and perhaps Frau Ratzer would open her house
early.
The street did honour to the name of Kotgasse--[Kot or koth-mire].
Holding her dress high around her, Katterle waded across to the northern
row of houses and reached the plank sidewalk covered with mud to her
ankles; but at the same moment a door directly in front of her opened,
and two persons, a man and a woman, entered the street and glided by; but
they came from Frau Ratzer's--she recognised it by the bow-window above
the entrance. The maid hurried towards the door, which still stood open,
and on its threshold was the woman to whom she intended to pay her early
visit.
Almost unable to speak, she entreated her to grant a poor girl, who did
not know where to seek shelter at this hour, the protection of her house.
The widow silently drew Katterle into the dark, narrow entry, shut the
door, and led her into a neat, gaily ornamented room. A lamp which was
still burning hung from the ceiling, but Frau Ratzer raised the tallow
candle she had carried to the door, threw its light upon her face, and
nodded approvingly. Katterle was a pretty girl, and the flush of shame
which crimsoned her cheeks was very becoming. The widow probably thought
so, too, for she stroked them with her fat hand, promising, as she did
so, to receive her and let her want for nothing if she proved an obedient
little daughter. Then she pinched the girl's arm with the tips of her
fingers so sharply that she shrank back and timidly told the woman what
had brought her there, saying that she was and intended to remain a
respectable girl, and had sought shelter with Frau Ratzer because she
knew what a sore disgrace she had suffered for the same fault which had
driven her from home.
But the widow, starting as if stung by a scorpion, denounced Katterle as
an impudent hussy, who rightfully belonged in the stocks, to which the
base injustice of the money-bags in the court had condemned her. There
was no room in her clean house for anyone who reminded her of this
outrage and believed that she had really committed so shameful an act.
Then, seizing the maid by the shoulders, she pushed her into the street.
Meanwhile it had grown light. The sun had just risen in the east above
the square of St. Lawrence and spread a golden fan of rays over the azure
sky. The radiant spectacle did not escape the eyes of the frightened
girl, and she rejoiced because it gave her the assurance that the
terrifying darkness of the night was over.
How fresh the morning was, how clear and beautiful the light of the young
day! And it shone not only on the great and the good, but on the lowly,
the poor, and the wicked. Even for the horrible woman within the sky
adorned itself with the exquisite blue and glorious brilliancy.
Uttering a sigh of relief she soon reached the Church of St. Lawrence,
which the old sexton was just opening. She was the first person who
entered the stately house of God that morning and knelt in one of the
pews to pray.
This had been the right thing for her to do. Dear Lord! Where was there
any maid in greater trouble, yet Heaven had preserved her from the death
on a red-hot gridiron which had rendered St. Lawrence, whose name the
church bore, a blessed martyr. Compared with that, even standing in the
pillory was not specially grievous. So she poured out her whole soul to
the saint, confessing everything which grieved and oppressed her, until
the early mass began. She had even confided to him that she was from
Sarnen in Switzerland, and had neither friend nor countryman here in
Nuremberg save her lover, the true and steadfast Biberli. Yet no! There
was one person from her home who probably would do her a kindness, the
wife of the gatekeeper in the von Zollern castle, a native of Berne, who
had come to Nuremberg and the fortress as the maid of the Countess
Elizabeth of Hapsburg, the present Burgravine. This excellent woman could
give her better counsel than any one, and she certainly owed the
recollection of Frau Gertrude to her patron saint.
After a brief thanksgiving she left the church and went to the fortress.
As she expected, her countrywoman received her kindly; and after Katterle
had confided everything to her, and in doing so mentioned Wolff Eysvogel,
the betrothed husband of the elder of her young mistresses, Frau Gertrude
listened intently and requested her to wait a short time.
Yet one quarter of an hour after another elapsed before she again
appeared. Her husband, the Bernese warder, a giant of a man to whom the
red and yellow Swiss uniform and glittering halberd he carried in his
hand were very becoming, accompanied his wife.
After briefly questioning Katterle, he exacted a solemn promise of
secrecy and then motioned to her to follow him. Meanwhile the maid had
been informed how the duel between Wolff Eysvogel and Ulrich Vorchtel had
ended, but while she still clasped her hands in horror, the Swiss had
opened the door of a bright, spacious apartment, where Els Ortlieb's
betrothed husband received her with a kind though sorrowful greeting.
Then he continued his writing, and at last gave her two letters. One, on
whose back he drew a little heart, that she might not mistake it for the
other, was addressed to his betrothed bride; the second to Heinz
Schorlin, whom Wolff--no, her ears did not deceive her--called the future
husband of his sister-in-law Eva. At breakfast, which she shared with her
country people and their little daughter, Katterle would have liked to
learn how Wolff reached the fortress, but the gatekeeper maintained
absolute silence on this subject.
The maid at last, without hindrance, reached the Deichsler house and
found Biberli (not) at home. She ought to have returned to the Ortliebs
in his company long before, but the knight still vainly awaited his
servant's appearance. He missed him sorely, since it did not enter his
head that his faithful shadow, Biberli, knew nothing of the thunderbolt
which had almost robbed him of his master and killed his pet, the dun
horse. Besides, he was anxious about his fate and curious to learn how he
had found the Ortlieb sisters; for, though Eva alone had power to make
Heinz Schorlin's heart beat faster, the misfortune of poor Els affected
him more deeply as the thought that he was its cause grew more and more
painful.
Wolff's letter, which Katterle delivered to him, revealed young
Eysvogel's steadfast love for the hapless girl. In it he also alluded to
his nocturnal interview with Heinz, and in cordial words admitted that he
thought he had found in him a sincere friend, to whom, if to any one, he
would not grudge his fair young sister-in-law Eva. Then he described how
the unfortunate duel had occurred.
After mentioning what had excited young Ulrich Vorchtel's animosity, he
related that, soon after his interview with Heinz, he had met young
Vorchtel, accompanied by several friends. Ulrich had barred his way,
loading him with invectives so fierce and so offensive to his honour,
that he was obliged to accept the challenge. As he wore no weapon save
the dagger in his belt, he used the sword which a German knight among
Ulrich's companions offered him. Calm in the consciousness that he had
given his former friend's sister no reason to believe in his love, and
firmly resolved merely to bestow a slight lesson on her brother, he took
the weapon. But when Ulrich shouted to the crusader that the blade he
lent was too good for the treacherous hand he permitted to wield it, his
blood boiled, and with his first powerful thrust all was over.
The German knight had then introduced himself as a son of the Burgrave
von Zollern and taken him to the castle, where, with his father's
knowledge, the noble young Knight Hospitaller concealed him, and the
point now was to show the matter, which was undoubtedly a breach of the
peace, to the Emperor Rudolph in the right light. The young Burgrave
thought that he, Heinz Schorlin, could aid in convincing the sovereign,
who would lend him a ready ear, that he, Wolff, had only drawn his sword
under compulsion. So truly as Heinz himself hoped to be a happy man
through Eva's love, he must help him to bridge the chasm which, by his
luckless deed, separated him from his betrothed bride.
Heinz had had this letter read aloud twice. Then when Biberli had gone
and he rode to the fortress, he had resolved to do everything in his
power for the young Nuremberg noble who had so quickly won his regard,
but the sorely stricken imperial father had refused to see him, and
therefore it was impossible to take any step in the matter.
Yet Wolff's letter had showed that he believed him in all earnestness to
be Eva's future husband, and thus strengthened his resolve to woo her as
soon as he felt a little more independent.
After the thunderbolt had killed the horse under him, and the old
Minorite had again come and showed him that the Lord Himself, through the
miracle He had wrought, had taken him firmly and swiftly by the hand as
His chosen follower, it seemed to his agitated mind, when he took up the
letter a second time, as though everything Wolff had written about him
and Els's sister was not intended for him.
Eva was happiness--but Heaven had vouchsafed a miracle to prove the
transitoriness of earthly life, that by renunciation here he might attain
endless bliss above. Sacrifice and again sacrifice, according to the
Minorite, was the magic spell that opened the gates of heaven, and what
harder sacrifice could he offer than that of his love? "Renounce!
renounce!" he heard a voice within cry in his ears as, with much
difficulty, he himself read Wolff's letter, but whatever he might cast
away of all that was his, he still would fail to take up his cross as
Father Benedictus required; for even as an unknown beggar he would have
enjoyed--this he firmly believed--in Eva's love the highest earthly
bliss. Yet divine love was said to be so much more rapturous, and how
much longer it endured!
And she? Did not the holy expression of her eyes and the aspiration of
her own soul show that she would understand him, approve his sacrifice,
imitate it, and exchange earthly for heavenly love? Neither could
renounce it without inflicting deep wounds on the heart, but every drop
of blood which gushed from them, the Minorite said, would add new and
heavy weight to their claim to eternal salvation.
Ay, Heinz would try to resign Eva! But when he yielded to the impulse to
read Wolff's letter again he felt like a dethroned prince whom some
stranger, ignorant of his misfortune, praises for his mighty power.
The visions of the future which the greyhaired monk conjured up, all that
he told hint of his own regeneration, transformation, and the happiness
which he would find as a disciple of St. Francis in poverty, liberty, and
the silent struggle for eternal bliss, everything which he described with
fervid eloquence, increased the tumult in the young knight's deeply
agitated soul.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Deem every hour that he was permitted to breathe as a gift
IN THE FIRE OF THE FORGE
A ROMANCE OF OLD NUREMBERG
By Georg Ebers
Volume 5.
IN THE FIRE OF THE FORGE--PART II.
CHAPTER I.
The vesper bells had already died away, yet Heinz was still listening
eagerly to the aged Minorite, who was now relating the story of St.
Francis, his breach with everything that he loved, and the sorrowful
commencement of his life. The monk could have desired no more attentive
auditor. Only the young knight often looked out of the window in search
of Biberli, who had not yet returned.
The latter had gone to the Ortlieb mansion with Katterle.
The runaway maid, whose disappearance, at old Martsche's earnest request,
had already been "cried" in the city, had no cause to complain of her
reception; for the housekeeper and the other servants, who knew nothing
of her guilt, greeted her as a favourite companion whom they had greatly
missed, and Biberli had taken care that she was provided with answers to
the questions of the inquisitive. The story which he had invented began
with the false report that a fire had broken out in the fortress. This
had startled Katterle, and attracted her to the citadel to aid her
countrywoman and her little daughter. Then came the statement that she
spent the night there, and lastly the tale that in the morning she was
detained in the Swiss warder's quarters by a gentleman of rank--perhaps
the Burgrave himself--who, after he had learned who she was, wished to
give her some important papers for Herr Ernst Ortlieb. She had waited
hours for them and finally, on the way home, chanced to meet Biberli.
At first the maid found it difficult to repeat this patchwork of truth
and fiction in proper order, but the ex-schoolmaster impressed it so
firmly on his sweetheart's mind that at last it flowed from her lips as
fluently as his pupils in Stanstadt had recited the alphabet.
So she became among the other servants the heroine of an innocent
adventure whose truth no one doubted, least of all the housekeeper, who
felt a maternal affection for her. Some time elapsed ere she could reach
the Es; they were still with their mother, who was so ill that the leech
Otto left the sick-room shaking his head.
As soon as he had gone Biberli stopped Els, who had accompanied the
physician outside the door of the sufferer's chamber, and earnestly
entreated her to forgive him and Katterle--who stood at his side with
drooping head, holding her apron to her eyes and persuade her father also
to let mercy take the place of justice.
But kind-hearted Els proved sterner than the maid had ever seen her.
As her mother had been as well as usual when she woke, they had told her
of the events of the previous night. Her father was very considerate, and
even kept back many incidents, but the invalid was too weak for so
unexpected and startling a communication. She was well aware of her
excitable daughter's passionate nature; but she had never expected that
her little "saint," the future bride of Heaven, would be so quickly fired
with earthly love, especially for a stranger knight. Moreover, the
conduct of Eva who, though she entreated her forgiveness, by no means
showed herself contritely ready to resign her lover, had given her so
much food for thought that she could not find the rest her frail body
required.
Soon after these disclosures she was again attacked with convulsions, and
Els thought of them and the fact that they were caused by Eva's
imprudence, instigated by the maid, when she refused Biberli her
intercession with her father in behalf of him and his bride, as he now
called Katterle.
The servitor uttered a few touching exclamations of grief, yet meanwhile
thrust his hand into the pocket of his long robe and, with a courteous
bow and the warmest message of love from her betrothed husband, whom
Katterle had seen in perfect health and under the best care in the
Zollern castle, delivered to the indignant girl the letter which Wolff
had entrusted to the maid. Els hurried with the missive so impatiently
expected to the window in the hall, through which the sun, not yet
reached by the rising clouds, was shining, and as it contained nothing
save tender words of love which proved that her betrothed husband firmly
relied upon her fidelity and, come what might, would not give her up, she
returned to the pair, and hurriedly, but in a more kindly tone, informed
them that her father was greatly incensed against both, but she would try
to soften him. At present he was in his office with Herr Casper Eysvogel;
Biberli might wait in the kitchen till the latter went away.
Els then entered the sick-chamber, but Biberli put his hand under his
sweetheart's chin, bent her head back gently, and said: "Now you see how
Biberli and other clever people manage. The best is kept until the last.
The result of the first throw matters little, only he who wins the last
goes home content. To know how to choose the bait is also an art. The
trout bites at the fly, the pike at the worm, and a yearning maiden at
her lover's letter. Take notice! To-day, which began with such cruel
sorrow, will yet have a tolerable end."
"Nay," cried Katterle, nudging him angrily with her elbow, "we never had
a day begin more happily for us. The gold with which we can set up
housekeeping--"
"Oh, yes," interrupted Biberli, "the zecchins and gold florins are
certainly no trifle. Much can be bought with them. But Schorlin Castle
razed to the ground, my master's lady mother and Fraulein Maria held as
half captives in the convent, to say nothing of the light-hearted Prince
Hartmann and Sir Heinz's piteous grief--if all these things could be
undone, child, I should not think the bag of gold, and another into the
bargain, too high a price to pay for it. What is the use of a house
filled with fine furniture when the heart is so full of sorrow? At home
we all eat together out of a cracked clay dish across which a tinker had
drawn a wire, with rude wooden spoons made by my father, yet how we all
relished it!--what more did we want?"
As he spoke he drew her into the kitchen, where he found a friendly
reception.
True, the Ortlieb servants were attached to their employers and sincerely
sorry for the ill health of the mistress of the house, but for several
years the lamentations and anxiety concerning her had been ceaseless. The
young prince's death had startled rather than saddened them. They did not
know him, but it was terrible to die so young and so suddenly. They would
not have listened to a merry tale which stirred them to laughter, but
Biberli's stories of distant lands, of the court, of war, of the
tournament, just suited their present mood, and the narrator was well
pleased to find ready listeners. He had so many things to forget, and he
never succeeded better than when permitted to use his tongue freely. He
wagged it valiantly, too, but when the thunderstorm burst he paused and
went to the window. His narrow face was blanched, and his agile limbs
moved restlessly. Suddenly remarking, "My master will need me," he held
out his hand to Katterle in farewell. But as the zigzag flash of
lightning had just been followed by the peal of thunder, she clung to
him, earnestly beseeching him not to leave her. He yielded, but went out
to learn whether Herr Casper was still in the office, and in a short time
returned, exclaiming angrily: "The old Eysvogel seems to be building his
nest here!"
Then, to the vexation of the clumsy old cook, whom he interrupted by his
restless movements in the Paternosters she was repeating on her rosary,
he began to stride up and down before the hearth.
His light heart had rarely been so heavy. He could not keep his thoughts
from his master, and felt sure that Heinz needed him; that he, Biberli,
would have cause to regret not being with him at this moment. Had the
storm destroyed the Ortlieb mansion he would have considered it only
natural; and as he glanced around the kitchen in search of Katterle, who,
like most of the others, was on her knees with her rosary in her hand,
old Martsche rushed in, hurried up to the cook, shook her as if to rouse
her from sleep, and exclaimed: "Hot water for the blood-letting! Quick!
Our mistress--she'll slip through our hands."
As she spoke, the young kitchen maid Metz helped the clumsy woman up, and
Biberli also lent his aid.
Just as the jug was filled, Els, too, hastened in, snatched it from the
hand of Martsche, whose old feet were too slow for her, and hurried with
it into the entry and up the stairs, passing her father, to whom she had
called on the way down.
Casper Eysvogel stood at the bottom of the steps, and called after her
that it would not be his fault, but her father's, if everything between
her and his son was over.
She probably heard the words, but made no answer, and hastened as fast as
her feet would carry her to her mother's bed.
The old physician was holding the gasping woman in his arms, and Eva
knelt beside the high bedstead sobbing, as she covered the dry, burning
hand with kisses.
When Ernst Ortlieb entered the chamber of his beloved wife a cold chill
ran down his back, for the odour of musk, which he had already inhaled
beside many a deathbed, reached him.
It had come to this! The end which he had so long delayed by tender love
and care was approaching. The flower which had adorned his youth and,
spite of its broken stem, had grown still dearer and was treasured beyond
everything else that bloomed in his garden, would be torn from him.
This time no friendly potion had helped her to sleep through the noise of
the thunderstorm. Soon after the attack of convulsions the agitated,
feeble sufferer had started up in terror at the first loud peal of
thunder. Fright followed fright, and when the leech came voluntarily to
enquire for her, he found a dying woman.
The bleeding restored her to consciousness for a short time, and she
evidently recognised her husband and her children. To the former she gave
a grateful, tender glance of love, to Els an affectionate, confidential
gesture, but Eva, her pride and joy, whom the past night had rendered a
child of sorrow, claimed her attention most fully.
Her kind, gentle eyes rested a long time upon her: then she looked toward
her husband as if beseeching him to cherish this child with special
tenderness in his heart; and when he returned the glance with another, in
which all the wealth of his great and loyal love shone through his tears,
her fever-flushed features brightened. Memories of the spring of her love
seemed to irradiate her last moments and, as her eyes again rested on
Eva, her lips once more smiled with the bewitching expression, once her
husband's delight, which had long deserted them.
It seemed during this time as if she had forgotten the faithful nurse who
for years had willingly sacrificed the pleasures of her days and the
sleep of her nights, to lavish upon the child of her anxiety all that her
mother-heart still contained, which was naught save love.
Els doubtless noticed it, but with no bitter or sorrowful thoughts. She
and the beloved dying woman understood one another. Each knew what she
was to the other. Her mother need not doubt, nor did she, that, whatever
obstacles life might place in her pathway, Els would pursue the right
course even without counsel and guidance. But Eva needed her love and
care so much just now, and when the sufferer gave her older daughter also
a tender glance and vainly strove to falter a few words of thanks, Els
herself replaced in Eva's the hand which her mother had withdrawn.
Fran Maria nodded gently to Els, as if asking her sensible elder daughter
to watch over her forsaken sister in her place.
Then her eyes again sought her husband, but the priest, to whom she had
just confessed, approached her instead.
After the holy man had performed the duties of his office, she again
turned her head toward Eva. It seemed as though she was feasting her eyes
on her daughter's charms. Meanwhile she strove to utter what more she
desired to say, but the bystanders understood only the words--they were
her last: "We thought--should be untouched--But now Heaven----"
Here she paused and, after closing her eyes for a time, went on in a
lower but perfectly distinct tone: "You are good--I hope--the forge-fire
of life--it is fortunate for you The heart and its demands The
hap--pi--ness--which it--gave--me----It ought--it must--you, too----"
Whilst speaking she had again glanced towards her husband, then at the
Abbess Kunigunde, who knelt beside him, and as the abbess met the look
she thought, "She is entrusting the child to me, and desires Eva to be
happy as one of us and the fairest of the brides of Heaven!" Ernst
Ortlieb, wholly overpowered by the deepest grief, was far from enquiring
into the meaning of these last words of his beloved dying wife.
Els, on the contrary, who had learned to read the sufferer's features and
understood her even without words when speech was difficult, had watched
every change in the expression of her features with the utmost attention.
Without reflecting or interpreting, she was sure that the movements of
her dying mother's lips had predicted to Eva that the "forge fire of
life" would exert its purifying and moulding influence on her also, and
wished that in the world, not in the convent, she might be as happy as
she herself had been rendered by her father's love.
After these farewell words Frau Maria's features became painfully
distorted, the lids drooped over her eyes, there was a brief struggle,
then a slight gesture from the physician announced to the weeping group
that her earthly pilgrimage was over.
No one spoke. All knelt silently, with clasped hands, beside the couch,
until Eva, as if roused from a dream, shrieked, "She will never come back
again!" and with passionate grief threw herself upon the lifeless form to
kiss the still face and beseech her to open her dear eyes once more and
not leave her.
How often she had remained away from the invalid in order to let her aunt
point out the path for her own higher happiness whilst Els nursed her
mother; but now that she had left her, she suddenly felt what she had
possessed and lost in her love. It seemed as if hitherto she had walked
beneath the shadow of leafy boughs, and her mother's death had stripped
them all away as an autumn tempest cruelly tears off the foliage.
Henceforth she must walk in the scorching sun without protection or
shelter. Meanwhile she beheld in imagination fierce flames blazing
brightly from the dark soot--the forge fire of life, to which the dead
woman's last words had referred. She knew what her mother had wished to
say, but at the present time she lacked both the desire and the strength
to realise it.
For a time each remained absorbed by individual grief. Then the father
drew both girls to his heart and confessed that, with their mother's
death life, already impoverished by the loss of his only son, had been
bereft of its last charm. His most ardent desire was to be summoned soon
to follow the departed ones.
Els summoned up her courage and asked: "And we--are we nothing to you,
father?"
Surprised by this rebuke, he started, removed his wet handkerchief from
his eyes, and answered: "Yes, yes--but the old do not reckon Ay, much is
left to me. But he who is robbed of his best possession easily forgets
the good things remaining, and good you both are."
He kissed his daughter lovingly as he spoke, as if wishing to retract the
words which had wounded her; then gazing at the still face of the dead,
he said: "Before you dress her, leave her alone with me for a
time----There is a wild turmoil here and here"--he pointed to his breast
and brow--"and yet The last hours----There is so much to settle and
consider in a future without her With her, with her dear calm features
before my eyes----"
Here a fresh outburst of grief stifled his voice; but Els pointed to the
image of the Virgin on the wall and beckoned to her sister.
Wholly engrossed by her own sorrow, Eva had scarcely heeded her father's
words, and now impetuously refused to leave her mother. Herr Ernst,
pleased by this immoderate grief for the one dearest to him, permitted
her to remain, and asked Els to attend to the outside affairs which a
death always brought with it.
Els accepted the new duty as a matter of course and went to the door; but
at the threshold she turned back, rushed to the deathbed, kissed the pure
brow and closed eyelids of the sleeper, and then knelt beside her in
silent prayer. When she rose she clasped Eva, who had knelt and risen
with her, in a close embrace, and whispered: "Whatever happens, you may
rely on me."
Then she consulted her father concerning certain arrangements which must
be made, and also asked him what she should say to the maid's lover, who
had come to beseech his forgiveness.
"Tell him to leave me in peace!" cried Herr Ernst vehemently. Els tried
to intercede for the servant, but her father pressed both hands over his
ears, exclaiming: "Who can reach a decision when he is out of his senses
himself? Let the man come to-morrow, or the day after. Whoever may call,
I will see no one, and don't wish to know who is here."
But the peace and solitude for which he longed seemed denied him. A few
hours after he left the chamber of death he was obliged to go to the Town
Hall on business which could not be deferred; and when, shortly before
sunset, he returned home and locked himself into his own room, old
Eysvogel again appeared.
He looked pale and agitated, and ordered the manservant--who denied him
admittance as he had been directed--to call Jungfrau Els. His voice
trembled as he entreated her to persuade her father to see him again. The
matter in question was the final decision of the fate of his ancient
house, of Wolff, and also her own and her marriage with his son. Perhaps
the death of his beloved wife might render her father's mood more gentle.
He did not yet know all Now he must learn it. If he again said "No," it
would seal the ruin of the Eysvogel firm.
How imploringly he could plead! how humbly the words fell from the old
merchant's lips, moving Els to her inmost heart as she remembered the
curt inflexibility with which, only yesterday, this arrogant man, in that
very spot, had refused any connection with the Ortliebs! How much it must
cost him to bow his stiff neck before her, who was so much younger, and
approach her father, whose heart he had so pitilessly trampled under
foot, in the character of a supplicant for aid, perhaps a beggar!
Besides, Wolff was his son!
Whatever wrong the father had done her she must forget it, and the task
was not difficult; for now--she felt it--no matter from what motive, he
honestly desired to unite her to his son. If her lover now led her
through the door adorned with the huge, showy escutcheon, she would no
longer come as a person unwillingly tolerated, but as a welcome
helper-perhaps as the saviour of the imperilled house. Of the women of
the Eysvogel family she forbade herself to think.
How touching the handsome, aristocratic, grey-haired man seemed to her in
his helpless weakness! If her father would only receive him, he would
find it no easier than she to deny him the compassion he so greatly
needed.
She knocked at the lonely mourner's door and was admitted.
He was sitting, with his head bowed on his hands, opposite to the large
portrait of her dead mother in her bridal robes. The dusk of the
gathering twilight concealed the picture, but he had doubtless gazed long
at the lovely features, and still beheld them with his mental vision.
Els was received with a mournful greeting; but when Herr Ernst heard what
had brought her to him, he fiercely commanded her to tell Herr Casper
that he would have nothing more to do with him.
Els interceded for the unfortunate man, begging, pleading, and assuring
her father that she would never give up Wolff. The happiness of her whole
life was centred in him and his love. If he refused the Eysvogels the aid
besought by the old merchant who, in his humility, seemed a different
man----
Here her father indignantly broke in, ordering her to disturb him no
longer. But now the heritage of his own nature asserted itself in Els
and, with an outburst of indignation, she pointed to the picture of her
mother, whose kind heart certainly could not have endured to see a
broken-hearted man, on whose rescue the happiness of her own child
depended, turned from her door like an importunate beggar.
At this the man whose locks had long been grey sprang from his chair with
the agility of a youth, exclaiming in vehement excitement: "To embitter
the hours devoted to the most sacred grief is genuine Eysvogel
selfishness. Everything for themselves! What do they care for others? I
except your Wolff; let the future decide what concerns him and you. I
will stand by you. But to hope for happiness and peace-nay, even a life
without bitter sorrow for you from the rest of the kin--is to expect to
gather sweet pears from juniper bushes. Ever since your betrothal your
mother and I have had no sleep, disturbed whenever we talked to each
other about your being condemned to live under the same roof with that
old devil, the countess, her pitiable daughter, and that worthless
Siebenburg. But within the past few hours all this has been changed. The
table-cloth has been cut between the Eysvogels and the Ortliebs. No power
in the world can ever join it. I have not told you what has happened. Now
you may learn that you----But first listen, and then decide on whose side
you will stand.
"Early this morning I went to the session of the Council. In the
market-place I met first one member of it, then a second, third, and
fourth; each asked me what had happened to the beautiful E, my lovely
little daughter. Gradually I learned what had reached their ears.
Yesterday evening, on his way home from here, the man outside, Casper
Eysvogel, sullied your--our--good name, child, in a way I have just
learned the particulars. He boasted, in the presence of those estimable
old gentlemen, the Brothers Ebner, that he had flung at my feet the ring
which bound you to his son. You had been surprised at midnight, he said,
in the arms of a Swiss knight, and that base scoundrel Siebenburg, his
daughter's husband, dared at the gaming-table, before a number of knights
and gentlemen--among them young Hans Gross, Veit Holzschuher, and
others-to put your interview with the Swiss in so false a light that No,
I cannot bring my lips to utter it----
"You need hear only this one thing more: the wretch said that he thanked
his patron saint that they had discovered the jade's tricks in time. And
this, child, was the real belief of the whole contemptible crew! But now
that the water is up to their necks, and they need my helping hand to
save them from drowning-now they will graciously take Ernst Ortlieb's
daughter if he will give them his property into the bargain, that they
may destroy both fortune and child. No--a thousand times no! It is not
seemly, at this hour, to yield to the spirit of hate; but she who is
lying in her last sleep above would not have counselled me by a single
word to such suicidal folly. I did not learn the worst until I went to
the Council, or I would have turned the importunate fellow from the door
this morning. Tell the old man so, and add that Ernst Ortlieb will have
nothing more to do with him."
Here the deeply incensed father pointed to the door.
Els had listened with eyes dilating in horror. The result surpassed her
worst fears.
She had felt so secure in her innocence, and the countess had interceded
for her so cleverly that, absorbed by anxieties concerning Eva, Cordula,
and her mother, she had already half forgotten the disagreeable incident.
Yet, now that her fair name was dragged through the mire, she could
scarcely be angry with those who pointed the finger of scorn at her; for
faithlessness to a betrothed lover was an offence as great as infidelity
to a husband. Nay, her friends were more ready to condemn a girl who
broke her vow than a wife who forgot her duty.
And if Wolff, in his biding-place in the citadel, should learn what was
said of his Els, to whom yesterday old and young raised their hats in
glad yet respectful greeting, would he not believe those who appealed to
his own father?
Yet ere she had fully realised this fear, she told herself that it was
her duty and her right to thrust it aside. Wolff would not be Wolff if
even for a moment he believed such a thing possible. They ought not,
could not, doubt each other. Though all Nuremberg should listen to the
base calumny and turn its back upon her, she was sure of her Wolff. Ay,
he would cherish her with twofold tenderness when he learned by whom this
terrible suffering had been inflicted upon her.
Drawing a long breath, she again fixed her eyes upon her mother's
portrait. Had she now rushed out to tell the old man who had so cruelly
injured her--oh, it would have lightened her heart!--the wrong he had
done and what she thought of him, her mother would certainly have stopped
her, saying: "Remember that he is your betrothed husband's father." She
would not forget it; she could not even hate the ruined man.
Any effort to change her father's mood now--she saw it plainly--would be
futile. Later, when his just anger had cooled, perhaps he might be
persuaded to aid the endangered house.
Herr Ernst gazed after her sorrowfully as, with a gesture of farewell,
she silently left the room to tell her lover's father that he had come in
vain.
The old merchant was waiting in the entry, where the wails of the
servants and the women in the neighbourhood who, according to custom,
were beating their brows and breasts and rending their garments, could be
heard distinctly.
Deadly pale, as if ready to sink, he tottered towards the door.
When Els saw him hesitate at the top of the few steps leading to the
entry, she gave him her arm to support him down. As he cautiously put one
foot after the other on the stairs, she wondered how it was possible that
this man, whose tall figure and handsome face were cast in so noble a
mould, could believe her to be so base; and at the same moment she
remembered the words which old Berthold Vorchtel had uttered in her
presence to his son Ulrich: "If anything obscure comes between you and a
friend, obtain a clear understanding and peace by truth."
Had the young man who had irritated his misjudged friend into crossing
swords with him followed this counsel, perhaps he would have been alive
now. She would take it herself, and frankly ask Wolff's father what
justified him in accusing her of so base a deed.
The lamps were already lighted in the hall, and the rays from the central
one fell upon Herr Casper's colourless face, which wore an expression of
despair. But just as her lips parted to ask the question the odour of
musk reached her from the death-chamber, whose door Eva had opened. Her
mother's gentle face, still in death, rose before her memory, and she was
forced to exert the utmost self-control not to weep aloud. Without
further reflection she imposed silence upon herself and--yesterday she
would not have ventured to do it--threw her arm around Herr Casper's
shoulders, gazed affectionately at him, and whispered: "You must not
despair, father. You have a faithful ally in this house in Els."
The old man looked down at her in astonishment, but instead of drawing
her closer to him he released himself with courteous coldness, saying
bitterly: "There is no longer any bond between us and the Ortliebs,
Jungfrau Els. From this day forth I am no more your father than you are
the bride of my son. Your will may be good, but how little it can
accomplish has unfortunately been proved."
Shrugging his shoulders wearily as he spoke, he nodded a farewell and
left the house.
Four bearers were waiting outside with the sedan-chair, three servants
with torches, and two stout attendants carrying clubs over their
shoulders. All wore costly liveries of the Eysvogel colours, and when
their master had taken his seat in the gilded conveyance and the men
lifted it, Els heard a weaver's wife, who lived near by, say to her
little boy: "That's the rich Herr Eysvogel, Fritzel. He has as much money
to spend every hour as we have in a whole year, and he is a very happy
man."
CHAPTER II.
Els went back into the house.
The repulse which she had just received caused her bitter sorrow. Her
father was right. Herr Casper had treated her kindly from a purely
selfish motive. She herself was nothing to him.
But there was so much for her to do that she found little time to grieve
over this new trouble.
Eva was praying in the death-chamber for the soul of the beloved dead
with some of the nuns from the convent, who had lost in her mother a
generous benefactress.
Els was glad to know that she was occupied; it was better that her sister
should be spared many of the duties which she was obliged to perform.
Whilst arranging with the coffin-maker and the "Hegelein," the sexton and
upholsterer, ordering a large number of candles and everything else
requisite at the funeral of the mistress of an aristocratic household,
she also found time to look after her father and Countess Cordula, who
was better. Yet she did not forget her own affairs.
Biberli had returned. He had much to relate; but when forced to admit
that nothing was urgent, she requested him to defer it until later, and
only commissioned him to go to the castle, greet Wolff in her name, and
announce her mother's death; Katterle would accompany him, in order to
obtain admittance through her countryman, the Swiss warder.
Els might have sent one of the Ortlieb servants; but, in the first place,
the fugitive's refuge must be concealed, and then she told herself that
Biberli, who had witnessed the occurrence of the previous evening, could
best inform Wolff of the real course of events. But when she gave him
permission to tell her betrothed husband all that he had seen and heard
the day before at the Ortlieb mansion, Biberli replied that a better
person than he had undertaken to do so. As he left his master, Sir Heinz
was just going to seek her lover. When she learned all that had befallen
the knight, she would understand that he was no longer himself. Els,
however, had no time to listen, and promised to hear his story when he
returned; but he was too full of the recent experience to leave it
untold, and briefly related how wonderfully Heaven had preserved his
master's life. Then he also told her hurriedly that the trouble which had
come upon her through Sir Heinz's fault burdened his soul. Therefore he
would not let the night pass without at least showing her betrothed
husband how he should regard the gossip of idle tongues if it penetrated
to his hiding-place.
Els uttered a sigh of relief. Surely Wolff must trust her! Yet what
viciously coloured reports might reach him from the Eysvogels! Now that
he would learn the actual truth from the most credible eye-witnesses she
no longer dreaded even the worst calumny.
No one appeared at supper except her father. Eva had begged to be
excused. She wished to remain undisturbed; but the world, with rude yet
beneficent hand, interrupted even her surrender to her grief for her
mother.
The tailor, who protested that, owing to the mourning for young Prince
Hartmann, he had fairly "stolen" this hour for the beautiful Ortlieb
sisters, came with his assistant, and at the same time a messenger
arrived from the cloth-house in the market-place bringing the packages of
white stuffs for selection. Then it was necessary to decide upon the
pattern and material; the sisters must appear in mourning the next
morning at the consecration, and later at the mass for the dead.
Eva had turned to these worldly matters with sincere repugnance, but Els
would not release her from giving them due attention.
It was well for her tortured soul and the poor eyes reddened by weeping.
But when she again knelt in the chamber of death beside her dear nuns and
saw the grey robe, which they all wore, the wish to don one, which she
had so often cherished, again awoke. No other was more pleasing to her
Heavenly Bridegroom, and she forbade herself in this hour to think of the
only person for whose sake she would gladly have adorned herself. Yet the
struggle to forget him constantly recalled him to her mind, no matter how
earnestly she strove to shut out his image whenever it appeared. But,
after her last conversation, must not her mother have died in the belief
that she would not give up her love? And the dead woman's last words?
Yet, no matter what they meant, here and now nothing should come between
her and the beloved departed. She devoted herself heart and soul to the
memory of the longing for her.
Grief for her loss, repentance for not having devoted herself faithfully
enough to her, and the hope that in the convent her prayers might obtain
a special place in the world beyond for the beloved sleeper, now revived
her wish to take the veil. She felt bound to the nuns, who shared her
aspirations. When her father came to send her to her rest and asked
whether, as a motherless child, she intended to trust his love and care
or to choose another mother who was not of this world, she answered
quietly with a loving glance at the picture of St. Clare, "As you wish,
and she commands."
Herr Ernst kindly replied that she still had ample time to make her
decision, and then again urged her to leave the watch beside the dead to
the women who had been appointed to it and the nuns, who desired to
remain with the body; but Eva insisted so eagerly upon sharing it that
Els, by a significant gesture to her father, induced him to yield.
She kept her sister away whilst the corpse was being laid out and the
women were performing their other duties by asking Eva to receive their
Aunt Christine, the wife of Berthold Pfinzing, who had hurried to the
city from Schweinau as soon as she had news of her sister-in-law's death.
Nothing must cloud the memory of the beloved sufferer in the mind of her
child, and Els knew that Frau Christine had been a dear friend of the
dead woman, that Eva clung to her like a second mother, and that nothing
could reach her sister from her honest heart which would not benefit her.
Nor was she mistaken, for the warm, affectionate manner in which the
matron greeted the young girl restored her composure; nay, when Fran
Christine was obliged to go, because her time was claimed by important
duties, she would gladly have detained her.
When Eva, in a calmer mood than before, at last entered the hall where
her mother's body now lay in a white silk shroud on the snowy satin
pillows, as she was to be placed before the altar for the service of
consecration on the morrow, she was again overwhelmed with all the
violence of the deepest grief; nay, the burning anguish of her soul
expressed itself so vehemently that the abbess, who had returned whilst
the sisters were still taking leave of their Aunt Christine, did not
succeed in soothing her until, drawing her aside, she whispered:
"Remember our saint, child. He called everything, even the sorest agony,
'Sister Sorrow'. So you, too, must greet sorrow as a sister, the daughter
of your heavenly Father. Remember the supreme, loving hand whence it
came, and you will bear it patiently."
Eva nodded gratefully, and when grief threatened to overpower her she
thought of the saint's soothing words, "Sister Sorrow," and her heart
grew calmer.
Els knew how much the emotions of the previous nights must have wearied
her, and had permitted her to share the vigil beside the corpse only
because she believed that she would be unable to resist sleep. She had
slipped a pillow between her back and that of the tall, handsome chair
which she had chosen for a seat, but Eva disappointed her expectation;
for whatever she earnestly desired she accomplished, and whilst Els often
closed her eyes, she remained wide awake. When sleep threatened to
overpower her she thought of her mother's last words, especially one
phrase, "the forge fire of life," which seemed specially pregnant with
meaning. Yet, ere she had reached any definite understanding of its true
significance, the cocks began to crow, the song of the nightingale
ceased, and the twittering of the other birds in the trees and bushes in
the garden greeted the dawning day.
Then she rose and, smiling, kissed Els, who was sleeping, on the
forehead, told Sister Renata that she would go to rest, and lay down on
her bed in the darkened chamber.
Whilst praying and reflecting she had thought constantly of her mother.
Now she dreamed that Heinz Schorlin had borne her in his strong arms out
of the burning convent, as Sir Boemund Altrosen had saved the Countess
von Montfort, and carried her to the dead woman, who looked as fresh and
well as in the days before her sickness.
When, three hours before noon, she awoke, she returned greatly refreshed
to her dead mother. How mild and gentle her face was even now; yet the
dear, silent lips could never again give her a morning greeting and,
overwhelmed by grief, she threw herself on her knees before the coffin.
But she soon rose again. Her recent slumber had transformed the
passionate anguish into quiet sorrow.
Now, too, she could think of external things. There was little to be done
in the last arrangement of the dead, but she could place the delicate,
pale hands in a more natural position, and the flowers which the gardener
had brought to adorn the coffin did not satisfy her. She knew all that
grew in the woods and fields near Nuremberg, and no one could dispose
bouquets more gracefully. Her mother had been especially fond of some of
them, and was always pleased when she brought them home from her walks
with the abbess or Sister Perpetua, the experienced old doctress of the
convent. Many grew in the forest, others on the brink of the water. The
beloved dead should not leave the house, whose guide and ornament she had
been, without her favourite blossoms.
Eva arranged the flowers brought by the gardener as gracefully as
possible, and then asked Sister Perpetua to go to walk with her, telling
her father and sister that she wished to be out of doors with the nun for
a short time.
She told no one what she meant to do. Her mother's favourite flowers
should be her own last gift to her.
Old Martsche received the order to send Ortel, the youngest manservant in
the household, a good-natured fellow eighteen years old, with a basket,
to wait for her and Sister Perpetua at the weir.
After the thunderstorm of the day before the air was specially fresh and
pure; it was a pleasure merely to breathe. The sun shone brightly from
the cloudless sky. It was a delightful walk through the meadows and
forest over the footpath which passed near the very Dutzen pool, where
Katterle the day before had resolved to seek death. All Nature seemed
revived as though by a refreshing bath. Larks flew heavenward with a low
sweet song, from amidst the grain growing luxuriantly for the winter
harvest, and butterflies hovered above the blossoming fields. Slender
dragon-flies and smaller busy insects flitted buzzing from flower to
flower, sucking honey from the brimming calyxes and bearing to others the
seeds needed to form fruit. The songs of finches and the twitter of
white-throats echoed from many a bush by the wayside.
In the forest they were surrounded by delightful shade animated by
hundreds of loud and low voices far away and close at hand. Countless
buds were opening under the moss and ferns, strawberries were ripening
close to the ground, and the delicate leafy boughs of the bilberry bushes
were full of juicy green oared fruit.
Near the weir they heard a loud clanking and echoing, but it had a very
different effect from the noise of the city; instead of exciting
curiosity there was something soothing in the regularity of the blows of
the iron hammer and the monotonous croaking of the frogs.
In this part of the forest, where the fairest flowers grew, the morning
dew still hung glittering from the blossoms and grasses. Here it was
secluded, yet full of life, and amidst the wealth of sounds in which
might be heard the tapping of the woodpecker, the cry of the lapwing, and
the call of the distant wood-pigeon, it was so still and peaceful that
Eva's heart grew lighter in spite of her grief.
Sister Perpetua spoke only to answer a question. She sympathised with
Eva's thought when she frankly expressed her pleasure in every new
discovery, for she knew for whom and with what purpose she was seeking
and culling the flowers and, instead of accusing her of want of feeling,
she watched with silent emotion the change wrought in the innocent child
by the effort to render, in league with Nature, an act of loving service
to the one she held dearest.
True, even now grief often rudely assailed Eva's heart. At such times she
paused, sighing silently, or exclaimed to her companion, "Ah, if she
could be with us!" or else asked thoughtfully if she remembered how her
mother had rejoiced over the fragrant orchid or the white water-lily
which she had just found.
Sister Perpetua had taken part of the blossoms which she had gathered;
but Ortel already stood waiting with the basket, and the house-dog,
Wasser, which had followed the young servant, ran barking joyously to
meet the ladies. Eva already had flowers enough to adorn the coffin as
she desired, and the sun showed that it was time to return.
Hitherto they had met no one. The blossoms could be arranged here in the
forest meadow under the shade of the thick hazel-bushes which bordered
the pine wood.
After Eva had thrown hers on the grass, she asked the nun to do the same
with her own motley bundle.
Between the thicket and the road stood a little chapel which had been
erected by the Mendel family on the spot where a son of old Herr Nikolaus
had been murdered. Four Frank robber knights had attacked him and the
train of waggons he had ridden out to meet, and killed the spirited young
man, who fought bravely in their defence.
Such an event would no longer have been possible so near the city. But
Eva knew what had befallen the Eysvogel wares and, although she did not
lack courage, she started in terror as she heard the tramp of horses'
hoofs and the clank of weapons, not from the city, but within the forest.
She hastily beckoned to her companion who, being slightly deaf had heard
nothing, to hide with her behind the hazel-bushes, and also told the
young servant, who had already placed the basket beside the flowers, to
conceal himself, and all three strained their ears to catch the sounds
from the wood.
Ortel held the dog by the collar, silenced him, and assured his mistress
that it was only another little band of troopers on their way from
Altdorf to join the imperial army.
But this surmise soon proved wrong, for the first persons to appear were
two armed horsemen, who turned their heads as nimbly as their steeds, now
to the right and now to the left, scanning the thickets along the road
distrustfully. After a somewhat lengthy interval the tall figure of an
elderly man followed, clad in deep mourning. Beneath his cap, bordered
with fine fur, long locks fell to his shoulders, and he was mounted on a
powerful Binzgau charger. At his side, on a beautiful spirited bay, rode
a very young woman whose pliant figure was extremely aristocratic in its
bearing.
As soon as the hazel-bushes and pine trees, which had concealed the noble
pair, permitted a view of them, Eva recognised in the gentleman the
Emperor Rudolph, and in his companion Duchess Agnes of Austria, his young
daughter-in-law, whom she had not forgotten since the dance at the Town
Hall. Behind them came several mailed knights, with the emblems of the
deepest mourning on their garments and helmets, and among those nearest
to the Emperor Eva perceived--her heart almost stood still--the person
whom she had least expected to meet here--Heinz Schorlin.
Whilst she was gathering the flowers for her mother's coffin his image
had almost vanished from her mind. Now he appeared before her in person,
and the sight moved her so deeply that Sister Perpetua, who saw her turn
pale and cling to the young pine by her side, attributed her altered
expression to fear of robber knights, and whispered, "Don't be troubled,
child; it is only the Emperor."
Neither the first horsemen-guards whom the magistrate, Berthold Pfinzing,
Eva's uncle, had assigned to the sovereign without his knowledge, to
protect him from unpleasant encounters during his early morning ride--nor
the Emperor and his companions could have seen Eva whilst they were
passing the chapel; but scarcely had they reached it when the dog Wasser,
which had escaped from Ortel's grasp, burst through the hazel copse and,
barking furiously, dashed towards the duchess's horse.
The spirited animal leaped aside, but a few seconds later Heinz Schorlin
had swung himself from the saddle and dealt the dog so vigorous a kick
that it retreated howling into the thicket. Meanwhile he had watched
every movement of the bay, and at the right instant his strong hand had
grasped its nostrils and forced it to stand.
"Always alert and on the spot at the right time!" cried the Emperor, then
added mournfully, "So was our Hartmann, too."
The duchess bent her head in assent, but the grieving father pointed to
Heinz, and added: "The boy owed his blithe vigour partly to the healthful
Swiss blood with which he was born, but yonder knight, during the
decisive years of life, set him the example. Will you dismount, child,
and let Schorlin quiet the bay?"
"Oh, no," replied the duchess, "I understand the animal. You have not yet
broken the wonderful son of the desert of shying, as you promised. It was
not the barking cur, but yonder basket that has dropped from the skies,
which frightened him."
She pointed, as she spoke, to the grass near the chapel where, beside
Eva's flowers, stood the light willow basket which was to receive them.
"Possibly, noble lady," replied Heinz, patting the glossy neck of the
Arabian, a gift to the Emperor Rudolph from the Egyptian Mameluke Sultan
Kalaun. "But perhaps the clever creature merely wished to force his royal
rider to linger here. Graciously look over yonder, Your Highness; does it
not seem as if the wood fairy herself had laid by the roadside for your
illustrious Majesty the fairest flowers that bloom in field and forest,
mere and moss?"
As he spoke he stooped, selected from the mass of blossoms gathered by
Eva those which specially pleased his eye, hastily arranged them in a
bouquet, and with a respectful bow presented them to the duchess.
She thanked him graciously, put the nosegay in her belt, and gazed at him
with so warm a light in her eyes that Eva felt as if her heart was
shrinking as she watched the scene.
Even princesses, who were separated from him by so wide a gulf, could not
help favouring this man. How could she, the simple maiden whom he had
assured of his love, ever have been able to give him up?
But she had no time to think and ponder; the Emperor was already riding
on with the Bohemian princess, and Heinz went to his horse, whose bridle
was held by one of the troopers who followed the train.
Ere he swung himself into the saddle again, however, he paused to
reflect.
The thought that he had robbed some flower or herb-gatherer of a portion
of the result of her morning's work had entered his mind and, obeying a
hasty impulse, he flung a glittering zecchin into the basket.
Eva saw it, and every fibre of her being urged her to step forward, tell
him that the flowers were hers, and thank him in the name of the poor for
whom she destined his gift; but maidenly diffidence held her in check,
although he gave her sufficient opportunity; for when he perceived the
image of the Virgin in the Mendel chapel, he crossed himself, removed his
helmet, and bending the knee repeated, whilst the others rode on without
him, a silent prayer. His brown locks floated around his head, and his
features expressed deep earnestness and glowing ardour.
Oh, how gladly Eva would have thrown herself on her knees beside him,
clasped his hands, and--nay, not prayed, her heart was throbbing too
stormily for that-rested her head upon his breast and told him that she
trusted him, and felt herself one with him in earthly as well as heavenly
love!
Whoever prayed thus in solitude had a soul yearning for the loftiest
things. Others might say what they chose, she knew him better. This man,
from the first hour of their meeting, had loved her with the most ardent
but also with the holiest passion; never, never had he sought her merely
for wanton amusement. Her mother's last wish would be fulfilled. She need
only trust him with her whole soul, and leave the "forge fire of life" to
strengthen and purify her.
Now she remembered where the dying woman had heard the phrase.
Her Aunt Christine had used it recently in her mother's presence. Young
Kunz Schurstab had fallen into evil ways in Lyons. Every one, even his
own father, had given him up for lost; but after several years he
returned home and proved himself capable of admirable work, both in his
father's business and in the Council. In reply to Frau Ortlieb's enquiry
where this transformation in the young man had occurred, her aunt
answered:
"In the forge fire of life." Eva told herself that she had intentionally
kept aloof from its flames, and in the convent, perhaps, they would never
have reached her. Yesterday they had seized upon her for the first time,
and henceforward she would not evade them, that she might obey her mother
and become worthy of the man praying silently yonder. He owed to his
heroic courage and good sword a renowned name; but what had she ever done
save selfishly to provide for her own welfare in this world and the next?
She had not even been strong enough to hold the head of the mother, to
whom she owed everything and who had loved her so tenderly, when the
convulsions attacked her.
Even after she closed her eyes in death--she had noticed it--she had been
kept from every duty in the household and for the beloved dead, because
it was deemed unsuitable for her, and Els and every one avoided putting
the serious demands of life between the "little saint" and her
aspirations towards the bliss of heaven. Yet Eva knew that she could
accomplish whatever she willed to do, and instead of using the strength
which she felt stirring with secret power in her fragile body, she had
preferred to let it remain idle, in order to dwell in another world from
that in which she had been permitted to prove her might. The fire of the
forge, by whose means pieces of worthless iron were transformed into
swords and ploughshares, should use its influence upon her also. Let it
burn and torture her, if it only made her a genuine, noble woman, a woman
like her Aunt Christine, from whom her mother had heard the phrase of
"the forge fire of life," who aided and pointed out the right path to
hundreds, and probably, at her age, had needed neither an Els nor an
Abbess Kunigunde to keep her, body and soul, in the right way. She loved
both; but some impulse within rebelled vehemently against being treated
like a child, and--now that her mother was dead--subjecting her own will
to that of any other person than the man to whom she would have gladly
looked up as a master.
Whilst Heinz knelt in front of the chapel without noticing Sister
Perpetua, who was praying before the altar within, these thoughts darted
through Eva's brain like a flash of lightning. Now he rose and went to
his horse, but ere he mounted it the dog, barking furiously, again broke
from the thicket close at her side.
Heinz must have seen her white mourning robes, for her own name reached
her ears in a sudden cry, and soon after--she herself could not have told
how--Heinz was standing beside the basket amidst the flowers, with her
hand clasped in his, gazing into her eyes so earnestly and sadly that he
seemed a different person from the reckless dancer in the Town Hall,
though the look was equally warm and tender. Whilst doing so, he spoke of
the deep wound inflicted upon her by her mother's death. Fate had dealt
him a severe blow also, but grief taught him to turn whither she, too,
had directed him.
Just at that moment the blast of the horn summoning the Emperor's train
to his side echoed through the forest.
"The Emperor!" cried Heinz; then bending towards the flowers he seized a
few forget-me-nots, and, whilst gazing tenderly at them and Eva, murmured
in a low tone, as if grief choked his utterance: "I know you will give
them to me, for they wear the colour of the Queen of Heaven, which is
also yours, and will be mine till my heart and eyes fail me."
Eva granted his request with a whispered "Keep them"; but he pressed his
hand to his brow and, as if torn by contending emotions, hastily added:
"Yes, it is that of the Holy Virgin. They say that Heaven has summoned me
by a miracle to serve only her and the highest, and it often seems to me
that they are right. But what will be the result of the conflicting
powers which since that flash of lightning have drawn one usually so
prompt in decision as I, now here, now there? Your blue, Eva, the hue of
these flowers, will remain mine whether I wear it in honour of the
Blessed Virgin, or--if the world does not release me--in yours. She or
you! You, too, Eva, I know, stand hesitating at the crossing of two
paths--which is the right one? We will pray Heaven to show it to you and
to me."
As he spoke he swung himself swiftly into the saddle and, obeying the
summons, dashed after his imperial master.
Eva gazed silently at the spot where he had vanished behind a group of
pine trees; but Ortel, who had gathered a few early strawberries for her,
soon roused her from her waking dream by exclaiming, as he clapped his
big hands: "I'll be hanged, Jungfrau Eva, if the knight who spoke to you
isn't the Swiss to whom the great miracle happened yesterday!"
"The miracle?" she asked eagerly, for Els had intentionally concealed
what she heard, and this evidently had something to do with the
"wonderful summons" of which Heinz had spoken without being understood.
"Yes, a great, genuine miracle," Ortel went on eagerly. "The lightning--I
heard it from the butcher boy who brings the meat, he learned it from his
master's wife herself, and now every child in the city knows it--the
lightning struck the knight's casque during the thundershower yesterday;
it ran along his armour, flashing brightly; the horse sank dead under him
without moving a limb, but he himself escaped unhurt, and the mark of a
cross can be seen in the place where the lightning struck his helmet."
"And you think this happened to the very knight who took the flowers
yonder?" asked Eva anxiously.
"As certainly as I hope to have the sacrament before I die, Jungfrau
Eva," the youth protested. "I saw him riding with that lank Biberli,
Katterle's lover, who serves him, and such noblemen are not found by the
dozen. Besides, he is one of those nearest to the Emperor Rudolph's
person. If it isn't he, I'll submit to torment----"
"Fie upon your miserable oaths!" Eva interrupted reprovingly. "Do you
know also that the tall, stately gentleman with the long grey hair----"
"That was the Emperor Rudolph!" cried Ortel, sure he was right. "Whoever
has once seen him does not forget him. Everything on earth belongs to
him; but when the knight took our flowers so freely just now as if they
were his own, I thought But there--there--there! See for yourself,
Jungfrau! A heavy, unclipped yellow zecchin!"
As he spoke he took the coin in his hand, crossed himself, and added
thoughtfully: "The little silver coin, or whatever he flung in
here--perhaps to pay for the flowers, which are not worth five
shillings--has been changed into pure gold by the saint who wrought the
miracle for him. My soul! If many in Nuremberg paid so high for forage,
the rich Eysvogel would leave the Council and go in search of wild
flowers!"
Eva begged the man to leave the zecchin, promising to give him another at
home and half a pound in coppers as earnest money. "This is what I call a
lucky morning!" cried Ortel. But directly after he changed his tone,
remembering Eva's white mourning robe and the object of their expedition,
and his fresh voice sounded very sympathetic as he added: "If one could
only call your lady mother back to life! Ah, me! I'd spend all my savings
to buy for the saints as many candles as my mother has in her little
shop, if that would change things."
Whilst speaking he filled the basket with flowers, and the nun helped
him. Eva walked before them with bowed head.
Could she hope to wed the man for whom Heaven had performed such a
miracle? Was it no sin to hope and plead that he would wear their common
colour, not in honour of the Queen of Heaven, but of the lowly Eva, in
whom nothing was strong save the desire for good? Was not Heinz forcing
her to enter into rivalry with one the most distant comparison with whom
meant defeat? Yet, no! Her gracious Friend above knew her and her heart.
She knew with what tender love and reverence she had looked up to her
from childhood, and she now confided the love in her heart to her who had
shown herself gracious a thousand times when she raised her soul to her
in prayer.
Eva was breathing heavily when she emerged from the forest and stopped to
wait until Sister Perpetua had finished her prayer in the chapel and
overtook her. Her heart was heavy, and when, in the meadow beyond the
woods, the heat of the sun, which was already approaching the zenith,
made itself felt, it seemed as if she had left the untroubled happiness
of childhood behind her in the green thicket. Yet she would not have
missed this forest walk at any price. She knew now that she had no rival
save the one whom Heinz ought to love no less than she. Whether they both
decided in favour of the world or the cloister, they would remain united
in love for her and her divine Son.
CHAPTER III.
Outside the courtyard of the Ortlieb mansion Eva saw Biberli going
towards the Frauenthor. He had been with Els a long time, giving a report
as frankly as ever. The day before he said to Katterle: "Calm yourself,
my little lamb. Now that the daughters need you and me to carry secret
messages, the father will leave us in peace too. A member of the Council
would be like the receiver of stolen goods if he allowed a man whom he
deemed worthy of the stocks to render him many services."
And Herr Ernst Ortlieb really did let him alone, because he was forced to
recognise that Biberli and Katterle were indispensable in carrying on his
daughter's intercourse with Wolff.
Els had forgiven the clever fellow the more willingly the more consoling
became the tidings he brought her from her betrothed bridegroom. Besides,
she regarded it as specially fortunate that she learned through him many
things concerning Heinz Schorlin, which for her sister's sake she was
glad to know.
True, it would have been useless trouble to try to extort from the true
and steadfast Biberli even a single word which, for his master's sake, it
would have been wiser to withhold, yet he discussed matters patiently,
and told her everything that he could communicate conscientiously. So,
when Eva returned, she was accurately informed of all that had befallen
and troubled the knight the day before.
She listened sympathisingly to the servant's lamentation over the
marvellous change which had taken place in Heinz since his horse was
killed under him. But she shook her head incredulously at Biberli's
statement that his master seriously intended to seek peace in the
cloister, like his two older sisters; yet at the man's animated
description of how Father Benedictus had profited by Sir Heinz's mood to
estrange him from the world, the doubt vanished.
Biberli's assurance that he had often seen other young knights rush into
the world with specially joyous recklessness, who had suddenly halted as
if in terror and known no other expedient than to change the coat of mail
for the monk's cowl, reminded her of similar incidents among her own
acquaintances. The man was right in his assertion that most of them had
been directed to the monastery by monks of the Order of St. Francis,
since the name of the Saint of Assisi and the miracles he performed had
become known in this country also. Whoever believed it impossible to see
the gay Sir Heinz in a monk's cowl, added the experienced fellow, might
find himself mistaken.
He had intentionally kept silence concerning Sir Seitz Siebenburg's
challenge and his master's other dealings with the "Mustache." On the
other hand, he had eagerly striven to inform Els of the minutest details
of the reception he met with from her betrothed lover. With what zealous
warmth he related that Wolff, like the upright man he was, had rejected
even the faintest shadow of doubt of her steadfastness and truth, which
were his own principal virtues also.
Even before Sir Heinz Schorlin's visit young Herr Eysvogel had known what
to think of the calumnies which, it is true, were repeated to him. His
calm, unclouded courage and clear mind were probably best shown by the
numerous sheets of paper he had covered with estimates, all relating to
the condition of the Eysvogel business. He had confided these documents
also to him to be delivered to his father, and after discharging this
duty he had come to her. According to his custom, he had reserved the
best thing for the last, but it was now time to give it to her.
As he spoke he drew from the breast pocket of his long coat a
wrought-iron rose. Els knew it well; it had adorned the clasp of her
lover's belt, and the unusual delicacy of the workmanship had often
aroused her admiration. What the gift was to announce she read on the
paper accompanying it, which contained the following simple lines:
"The iron rude, when shaped by fire and blows,
Delights our eyes as a most beauteous rose.
So may the lies which strove to work us ill
But serve our hearts with greater love to fill."
Biberli withdrew as soon as he had delivered the gift; his master was
awaiting him on his return from his early ride with the Emperor; but Els,
with glowing cheeks, read and reread the verse which brought such
cheering consolation from her lover. It seemed like a miracle that they
recalled the words of her dying mother concerning the forge fire which,
in her last moments, she had mentioned in connection with Eva's future.
Here it had formed from rude iron the fairest of flowers. Nothing sweeter
or lovelier, the sister thought, could be made from her darling. But
would the fire also possess the power to lead Eva, as it were, from
heaven to earth, and transform her into an energetic woman, symmetrical
in thought and deed? And what was the necessity? She was there to guide
her and remove every stone from her path.
Ah, if she should renounce the cloister and find a husband like her
Wolff! Again and again she read his greeting and pressed the beloved
sheet to her lips. She would fain have hastened to her mother's corpse to
show it to her. But just at that moment Eva returned. She must rejoice
with her over this beautiful confirmation of her hope, and as, with
flushed cheeks and brow moist with perspiration, she stood before her,
Els tenderly embraced her and, overflowing with gratitude, showed her her
lover's gift and verse, and invited her to share the great happiness
which so brightly illumined the darkness of her grief. Eva, who was so
weary that she could scarcely stand thought, like her sister, as Els read
Wolff's lines aloud, of her mother's last words. But the forge fire of
life must not transform her into a rose; she would become harder, firmer,
and she knew why and for whose sake. Only yesterday, had she been so
exhausted, nothing would have kept her, after a few brief words to
prevent Els's disappointment, from lying down, arranging her pillows
comfortably, and refreshing herself with some cooling drink; but now she
not only succeeded in appearing attentive, but in sympathising with all
her heart in her sister's happiness. How delightful it was, too, to be
able to give something to the person from whom hitherto she had only
received.
She succeeded so fully in concealing the struggle against the claims of
her wearied body that Els, after joyously perceiving how faithfully her
sister sympathised with her own delight, continued to relate what she had
just heard. Eva forced herself to listen and behave as if her account of
Heinz Schorlin's wonderful escape and desire to enter a monastery was
news to her.
Not until Els had narrated the last detail did she admit that she needed
rest; and when the former, startled by her own want of perception, urged
her to lie down, she would not do so until she had put the flowers she
had brought home into water. At last she stretched herself on the couch
beside her sister, who had so long needed sleep and rest, and a few
minutes after the deep dreamless slumber of youth chained both, until
Katterle, at the end of an hour, woke them.
Both used the favourable moments which follow the awakening from a sound
sleep to cherish the best thoughts and most healthful resolutions. When
Eva left her chamber she had clearly perceived what the last hours had
taken and bestowed, and found a positive answer to the important question
which she must now confront.
Els, like her lover, would cling fast to her love, and strive with
tireless patience to conquer whatever obstacles it might encounter,
especially from the Eysvogel family.
Before leaving home Eva adorned the beloved dead with the flowers,
leaves, and vines which the gardener had brought and she herself had
gathered, and at the church she put the last touches to this work so dear
to her heart. She gave the preference to the flowers which had been her
mother's favourites, but the others were also used. With a light hand and
a delicate appreciation of harmony and beauty she interwove the children
of the forest with those of the garden. She could not be satisfied till
every one was in the right place.
Countess Cordula had insisted upon attending the consecration, but she
had not known who cared for its adornment. Yet when she stood in the
church by the side of the open coffin she gazed long at the gentle face
of the quiet sufferer, charming even in death, who on her bright couch
seemed dreaming in a light slumber. At last she whispered to Els: "How
wonderfully beautiful! Did you arrange it?"
The latter shook her head, but Cordula added, as if soliloquising: "It
seems as though the hands of the Madonna herself had adorned a sleeping
saint with garden flowers, and child-angels had scattered over her the
blossoms of the forest."
Then Els, who hitherto had refused to talk in this place and this solemn
hour, broke her silence and briefly told Cordula who had artistically and
lovingly adorned her mother.
"Eva?" repeated the countess, as if surprised, gazing at her friend's
younger sister who, as the music of the organ and the alternate chanting
had just begun, had already risen from her knees. Cordula felt
spellbound, for the young girl looked as fresh as a May rose and so
touchingly beautiful in the deep, earnest devotion which filled her whole
being, and the white purity of her mourning robes, that the countess did
not understand how she could ever have disliked her. Eva, with her up
lifted eyes, seemed to be gazing directly into the open heavens.
Cordula paid little attention to the sacred service, but watched the Es,
as she liked to call the sisters, all the more closely. The elder, though
so overwhelmed with grief that she could not help sobbing aloud, did not
cease to think of her dear ones, and from time to time gazed with tender
sympathy at her father or with quiet sorrow at her sister. Eva, on the
contrary, was completely absorbed by her own anguish and the memory of
her to whom it was due. The others appeared to have no existence for her.
Whilst the large tears rolled slowly down her cheeks, she sometimes gazed
tenderly at the face of the beloved dead; sometimes, with fervent
entreaty, at the image of the Virgin. The pleading expression of the
large blue eyes seemed to the countess to express such childlike need of
help that the impetuous girl would fain have clasped her to her heart and
exclaimed:
"Wait, you lovely, obstinate little orphan; Cordula, whom you dislike, is
here, and though you don't wish to receive any kindness from her, you
must submit. What do I care for all the worshippers of a very poor idol
who call themselves my 'adorers'? I need only detain wandering pilgrims,
or invite minnesingers to the castle, to shorten the hours. And he for
whom yonder child-angel's heart yearns--would he not be a fool to prefer
a Will-o'-the-wisp like me? Besides, it is easy for the peasant to give
his neighbour the cloud which hangs over his field. True, before the
dance----But the past is past. Boemund Altrosen is the only person who is
always the same. One can rely upon him, but I really need neither. If I
could only do without the open air, the forest, horses, and hunting, I
should suit convent walls far better than this Eva, whom Heaven itself
seems to have created to be the delight of every man's heart. We will see
what she herself decides."
Then she recognised Sir Boemund Altrosen in the congregation and pursued
her train of thought. "He is a noble man, and whoever thus makes himself
miserable about me I ought to try to cure. Perhaps I will yet do so."
Similar reflections occupied her mind until she saw Heinz Schorlin
kneeling, half concealed by a pillar, behind Boemund Altrosen. He had
learned from Biberli at what hour the consecration would take place, and
his honest heart bade him attend the service for the dead woman who had
so much to forgive him.
The Ortlieb sisters did not see him, but Cordula unconsciously shook her
head as she gazed. Was this grave man, so absorbed in devotion that he
did not vouchsafe those who surrounded him even a single glance, the
Heinz whose delightful gaiety had captivated her heart? The linden, with
foliage withered by the autumn blasts, was more like the same tree in the
spring when the birds were singing in its boughs, than yonder absorbed
supplicant resembled the bold Heinz of a few days ago. The old mocker,
Chamberlain Wiesenthau, was right when he told her and her father that
morning that the gay Swiss had been transformed by the miracle which had
befallen him, like the Saul of holy writ, in the twinkling of an eye,
into a Paul. The calendar-makers were already preparing to assign a day
to St. Schorlin.
But she ought not to have joined in the boisterous laugh with which her
father rewarded the old slanderer's news. No! The knight's experience
must have made a deeper impression than the others suspected.
Perhaps little Eva's love would result in her seeking with the sisters of
St. Clare, and Heinz with the Franciscans, peace and a loftier passion.
She was certainly to be pitied if love had taken as firm a hold upon her
heart as Cordula thought she had perceived.
Again her kind heart throbbed with tender sympathy, and when the sisters
left the sedan chairs which had brought them back to the house, and
Cordula met Eva in the corridor, she held out her hand with frank
cordiality, saying, "Clasp it trustingly, girl. True, you do not value it
much, but it is offered to no one to whom Cordula does not mean kindly."
Eva, taken by surprise, obeyed her request. How frank and kindly her grey
eyes were! Cordula herself must be so, too, and, obeying a hasty impulse,
she nodded with friendly warmth; then, as if ashamed of her change of
mood, hurried past her up the stairs.
The following day had been appointed for the mass for the dead in St.
Sebald's Church.
Els had told Eva that the countess had seen Heinz Schorlin at the
consecration. The news pleased her, and she expressed her joy so
animatedly and spoke so confidently of the knight's love that Els felt
anxious. But she did not have courage to disturb her peace of mind, and
her father's two sisters, the abbess, and Herr Pfinzing's wife, also said
nothing to Eva concerning the future as they helped Els to arrange the
dead woman's clothing, which was to be given to the poor, decide to what
persons or charitable institutions it should be sent, and listened to her
account of the facts that formed the foundation of the slanders against
her, which were being more loudly and universally discussed throughout
the city.
Eva felt painfully how incapable of rendering assistance the others
considered her, and her pride forbade her to urge it upon them. Even her
Aunt Kunigunde scarcely asked her a question. It seemed to the abbess
that the right hour for a decisive enquiry had not yet come, and wise
Aunt Christine never talked with her younger niece upon religious
subjects unless she herself requested her to do so.
The mass for the dead was to be celebrated at an unusually early hour,
for another, which would be attended by the whole city and all the
distinguished persons, knights, and nobles who had come to the Reichstag,
was to begin four hours before noon. This was for Prince Hartmann, who
had been snatched away so prematurely.
The Ortliebs, with all their kindred and servants, the members of the
Council with their wives and daughters, and many burghers and burgher
women, assembled soon after sunrise in St. Sebald's Church.
Those present were almost lost in the spacious, lofty interior with its
three naves. At first there was little appearance of devotion, for the
early arrivals had many things to ask and whisper to one another. The
city architect lowered his loud voice very little as he discussed with a
brother in the craft from Cologne in what way the house of God, which
originally had been built in the Byzantine style, could be at least
partly adapted to the French pointed arch which was used with such
remarkable success in Germany, at Cologne and Marburg. They discussed the
eastern choir, which needed complete rebuilding, the missing steeples,
and the effect of the pointed arch which harmonised so admirably with the
German cast of character, and did not cease until the music began. Now
the great number of those present showed how much love the dead woman had
sowed and reaped. The sisters, when they first looked around them, saw
with grateful joy the father of the young man who had fallen in the duel
with Wolff, old Herr Berthold Vorchtel, his wife, and Ursula. On the
other hand, the pew adorned with the Eysvogel coat of arms was still
empty. This wounded Els deeply; but she uttered a sigh of relief
when--the introitus had just begun--at least one member of the haughty
family to which she felt allied through Wolff appeared, Isabella
Siebenburg, her lover's sister. It was kind in her to come
notwithstanding the absence of the others, and even her own husband. Els
would return it to her and her twins.
The music, whose heart-stirring notes accompanied the solemn service,
deeply moved the souls of both sisters; but when, after the Gloria in
excelsis Deo, the Cum Sancto Spiritu pealed forth, Eva, who, absorbed in
devotion, had long since ceased to gaze around her, felt her sister's
hand touch her arm and, following the direction of her glance, saw at
some distance the man for whom her heart yearned, and the grave, devout
knight yonder seemed far nearer to her than the gay companion who, in the
mazes of the dance, had gazed so boldly into the faces of the men, so
tenderly into those of the fair women. How fast her heart throbbed! how
ardently she longed for the moment when he would raise his head and look
across at her! But when he moved, it was only to follow the sacred
service and with it Christ's sacrifice upon the cross.
Then Eva reproached herself for depriving her dead mother, to the repose
of whose soul this hour was dedicated, of her just due, and she strove
with all her power to regain the spirit of devotion which she had lost.
But her lover sat opposite and, though she lowered her eyes, her earnest
endeavour to concentrate her thoughts was futile.
Her struggle was interrupted by the commencement of the Credo, and during
this confession, which brings before the Christian in a fixed form what
it is incumbent upon him to believe, the thought entered her mind of
beseeching her whose faithful love had always guided her safely and for
her good--the Queen of Heaven, to whom Heinz was as loyally devoted as
she herself--that she might give her a sign whether she might continue to
believe in his love and keep faith with him, or whether she should return
to the path which led to a different form of happiness.
During the singing of the Credo the heavenly Helper, for whose aid she
hoped, made known to her that if, before the end of the Sanctus, which
immediately followed the Credo, Heinz looked over at her and returned her
glance, she might deem it certain that the Holy Virgin would permit her
to hope for his love. If he omitted to do so, then she would consider it
decided that he renounced his earthly for his heavenly love, and try
herself to give up the earthly one, in which, however, she believed she
had recognised something divine. The Credo closed and died away, the
resonant harmonies of the Sanctus filled the wide space, and the knight,
with the same devout attention, followed the sacred service in which, in
the imagination of believers, the bread and wine is transformed into the
body and blood of Christ, and a significant, painless ceremony represents
the Saviour's bloody death upon the cross.
Eva told herself that she ought to have followed with the same intentness
as Heinz the mass celebrated for the soul of her own mother, but she
could no longer succeed in doing so. Besides, she was denied the
privilege of looking freely and often at him upon whose movements
depended the fate of her life. Many glances were undoubtedly directed at
her, the daughter of the dead woman in whose memory so many citizens had
gathered; many, perhaps, had come solely to see the beautiful Es.
Therefore propriety and modesty forbade her to watch Heinz. She only
ventured to cast a stolen glance at him.
Every note of the Sanctus was familiar to her, and when it drew near the
end Heinz retained the same position. The fairest hope of her life must
be laid with the flowers in her mother's coffin.
Now the last bars of the Sanctus were commencing. He had scarcely had
time to change his attitude since her last secret glance at him, yet she
could not resist the temptation, though it was useless, of looking at him
once more. She felt like the prisoner who sees the judge rise and does
not know whether he intends to acquit or condemn him. The city
lute-player who led the choir was just raising his hands again to let
them fall finally at the close of the Sanctus, and as she turned her eyes
from him in the direction whence only too soon she was to be deprived of
the fairest of rights, a burning blush suddenly crimsoned her cheeks.
Heinz Schorlin's eyes had met hers with a full, clear gaze.
Eva pressed her clasped hands, as if beseeching aid, upon her bosom,
which rose and fell beneath them with passionate emotion; and No, she
could not be mistaken; he had understood her, for his look expressed a
wealth of sympathy, the ardent, sorrowful sympathy which only love knows.
Then the eyes of both fell. When their glances met again, the hosanna of
the choir rang out to both like a shout of welcome with which liberated
Nature exultingly greets the awakening spring; and to the deeply agitated
knight, who had resolved to fly from the world and its vain pleasures,
the hosanna which poured its waves of sound towards him, whilst the eyes
of the woman he loved met his for the second time, seemed to revive the
waning joy of existence. The shout which had greeted the Saviour on his
entry into Jerusalem reached the "called" man like a command from love to
open wide the gate of the heart, and whether he willed it or not, love,
amidst the solemn melody of the hosanna, made a new and joyous entrance
into his grateful soul. But during the Benedictus he was already making
the first attempt to resist this emotion; and whilst Eva, first offering
thanks for the cheering decision, and then earnestly striving to enter
with her whole soul into the sacred service, modestly denied herself the
pleasure of looking across at her lover, Heinz was endeavouring to crush
the hopes which had again mastered the soul resolved on renunciation.
Yet he found the conflict harder than he expected and as, at the close of
the mass, the Dona nobis pacem (grant us peace) began, he joined
beseechingly in the prayer.
It was not granted, for even during the high mass for the soul of his
dearest friend, which also detained the Ortliebs in church, he sought
Eva's glance only too often, but always in vain. Once only, when the Dona
nobis pacem pealed forth again, this time for the prince, his eyes met
those of the woman he loved.
The young Duchess Agnes noticed whither he looked so often, but when
Countess Cordula knelt beside the Ortliebs, cordially returned every
glance of the knight's, and once even nodded slightly to him, the young
Bohemian believed the report that Heinz Schorlin and the countess were
the same as betrothed, and it vexed her--nay, spoiled the whole of the
day which had just begun.
When Heinz left the church Eva's image filled his heart and mind. He went
directly from the sanctuary to his lodgings; but there neither Frau
Barbara, his pretty young hostess, nor Biberli would believe their eyes
or ears, when the former heard in the entry, the latter in the adjoining
room, the lash of a scourge upon naked limbs, and loud groans. Both
sounds were familiar to Barbel through her father, and to Biberli from
the time of penance after his stay in Paris, and his own person.
Heinz Schorlin, certainly for the first time in his life, had scourged
himself.
It was done by the advice of Father Benedictus but, although he followed
the counsel so earnestly that for a long time large bloody stripes
covered his back and shoulders, this remedy for sinful thoughts produced
an effect exactly opposite to the one expected; for, whenever the places
where the scourge had struck him so severely smarted under his armour,
they reminded him of her for whose sake he had raised his hand against
himself, and the blissful glance from her eyes.
CHAPTER IV.
During the days which succeeded the mass for the dead the Ortlieb mansion
was very silent. The Burgrave von Zollern, who still gladly concealed in
his castle the brave companion in arms to whom he had entrusted the
imperial standard on the Marchfield, when his own strong arm needed rest,
had permitted Herr Ernst, as the young man's future father-in-law, to
visit him. Both were now in constant communication, as Els hoped, for the
advantage of the Eysvogel business.
Biberli did not cease acting as messenger between her and her future
bridegroom; nay, he could now devote the lion's share of his days to it;
his master, for the first time since he had entered his service, had left
him.
The Emperor had been informed of the great shock experienced by the young
knight, but it was unnecessary; an eye far less keen would not have
failed to note the change in Heinz Schorlin.
The noble man who, even as a sovereign, retained the warmth of heart
which had characterised him in his youth as a count, sincerely loved his
blithe, loyal, brave young countryman, whose father he had valued, whose
mother he highly esteemed, and who had been the dearest friend of the son
whom death had so early snatched from him.
He knew him thoroughly, and had watched his development with increasing
warmth of sympathy, the more so as many a trait of character which he
recognised in Heinz reminded him of his own nature and aspirations at his
age.
At the court of Frederick II he too had not always walked in the paths of
virtue but, like Heinz, he had never let this merge into licentiousness,
and had maintained the chivalrous dignity of his station even more
strictly than the former.
Neither had he at any time deviated from the sincere piety which he had
brought from his home to the imperial court, and this was far more
difficult in the train of the bold and intellectual Hohenstaufen, who was
prone to blaspheme even the holiest things, than for Heinz. Finally he,
too, had lapsed into the mood which threatened to lead the light-hearted
Schorlin into a monastery.
The mighty impulse which, at that time, owing to the example and
teachings of St. Francis in Italy, had taken possession of so many minds,
also left its impress on his young soul, already agitated by sympathy
with many an extravagant idea, many an opinion condemned by the Church.
But ere he had taken even the first decisive step he was summoned home.
His father had resolved to obtain on the sacred soil of Palestine the
mercy of Heaven which was denied to the excommunicated Emperor, and
desired his oldest son, Rudolph, to represent him at home.
Before his departure he confided to his noble son his aspirations for the
grandeur and enlargement of his house, and the youth of twenty-one did
not venture to tell the dignified, far-sighted man, whom his subjects
rightly surnamed "the Wise," his ardent desire to live henceforth solely
for the salvation of his endangered soul.
The sense of duty inherited from father and mother, which both had
imprinted deeply upon his soul, and also the ambition that had been
sedulously fostered at the court of the Emperor Frederick, had given him
courage to repress forever the wish with which he had left the
Hohenstaufen court. The sacrifice was hard, but he made it willingly as
soon as it became apparent to his reflective mind that not only his
earthly but his heavenly Father had appointed the task of devoting the
full wealth of his talents and the power of his will to the elevation of
the house of Hapsburg.
The very next year he stood in the place of his father who fell at
Ascalon, deeply lamented.
The arduous labour imposed by the management of his own great
possessions, and the ceaseless endeavour to enlarge them, in accordance
with the dead man's wishes, gave him no time to cherish the longing for
the peace of the cloister.
After his election as King of Germany, which had long been neglected
under the government of sham emperors, increased the burden of his duties
the more seriously he took them, and the more difficult the Bohemian king
Ottocar, especially, rendered it for him to maintain the crown he had
won, the more eagerly he strove, particularly after the victory of
Marchfield had secured his sovereignty, to increase the power of his
house.
A binding duty, a difficult task, must also withhold Heinz Schorlin from
the wish for whose fulfilment his fiery young soul now fervently longed,
and which he knew was receiving powerful sustenance from a worthy and
eloquent Minorite.
Rudolph's own brother had died in peace as canon of Basel and Strasbourg;
his sister was happy in her convent as a modest Dominican; but the young
knight over whose welfare he had promised his mother to watch, and whom
he loved, was not fitted for the monastic life.
However earnest might be his intention--after the miracle which seemed to
have been wrought specially for him--of renouncing the world, sooner or
later the time must come when Heinz would long to return to it and the
profession of arms, for which he was born and reared. But if he could not
be deterred from entering the modest order of the mendicant monks, who
proudly called poverty their beloved bride, and should become the head of
a bishopric while young, he would inevitably be one of those fighting
prelates who seemed to the Emperor--who disliked halfway
measures--neither knight nor priest, and with whom he had had many a
quarrel.
Opposition would merely have sharpened the young knight's desire;
therefore his imperial patron had treated him as if he were ignorant of
what was passing in his mind. Without circumlocution, he commanded him,
at the head of several bodies of Frank, Swabian, and Swiss troopers, whom
he placed at his orders, to attack the brothers Siebenburg and their
allies, and destroy their castle. If possible, he was to bring them alive
before the imperial judgment seat, and recover for the Eysvogels the
merchandise of which they had been robbed.
When Heinz, after the Emperor Rudolph had mentioned the latter name,
earnestly entreated him to prevent Wolff's persecution, the sovereign
promised to fulfil the wish as soon as the proper time came. He himself
desired to be gracious to the brave champion of Marchfield, who under
great irritation had drawn his sword. But when Heinz also asked the
Emperor to send his friend Count Gleichen with him, the request was
refused. He must have the entire responsibility of the expedition which
he commanded; for nothing except an important duty that no one would help
him bear, gave promise of making him forget everything that usually
engrossed his attention, and thus his new object of longing. Besides, if
he returned victorious his fame and reward would be undivided.
The Hapsburg wished to try upon his young favourite the means which had
availed to keep his own footsteps in the path which he desired to see
Heinz follow: constant occupation associated with heavy responsibility,
the success which brings with it the hope of future achievement and
thereby rouses ambition.
The wisdom and kindness of heart of the Emperor Rudolph, whom the
grey-haired ruler's friends called "Wisdom," had certainly chosen the
right course for Heinz. But he who had always regarded every opportunity
of drawing his sword for his master as a rare piece of good fortune,
shrank in dismay from this, the most important and honourable charge that
had ever been bestowed upon him. It drew him away from the new path in
which he did not yet feel at home, because the love he could not abjure
constantly thrust him into the world, into the midst of the life and
tumult from which Heaven itself commanded him to turn aside.
The Minorite had scarcely been right in the assertion that only the first
rounds of the ladder which leads to heavenly bliss were hard to climb.
How quickly he had set his foot on the first step; but each upward stride
was followed by one that dragged him down-nay, it had seemed advisable
wholly to renounce the effort to ascend them, when the monk expected him
to sever the bond which united him to the Emperor, and to tell the
sovereign that he had entered the service of a greater Master, who
commanded him to fight with other weapons than the sword and lance.
Heinz had regarded this demand as a summons to turn traitor. It did not
seem to be the call of the devout, experienced director of souls to the
disciples, but the Guelph to the Ghibelline, for Ghibelline he meant to
remain. Gratitude was a Christian virtue, too, and to refuse his service
to the Emperor, who had been a father to him, to whom he had sworn
fealty, and who had loaded him with benefits, could not be pleasing in
the sight of any God. He could never become a Guelph, he told his
venerable friend. The Emperor Rudolph was his beloved master, from whom
he had received nothing but kindness. He might as well be required to
refuse obedience to his own father.
"What Guelph? What Ghibelline?" cried the Minorite in a tone of grave
rebuke. "The question is submission to the Most High, or to the world and
its claims. And why should not Heaven require, as you term it, that you
should obey the Lord more willingly than your earthly father--you, whom
the mercy of God summoned amidst thunder and lightning in the presence of
thousands? When Francis, our beloved model, the son of Pier Bernardone,
was threatened with his father's curse if he did not turn back from the
path which led to the highest goal, Francis restored all that he had
received from him, except his last garment, and with the exclamation,
'Our Father who art in heaven, not Pier Bernardone,' he made the choice
between his earthly and his heavenly Father. From the former he would
have received in abundance everything that the heart of a child of the
world desires-wealth, paternal love, and the blessing which is said to
build houses on earth. But Francis preferred poverty and contempt, nay,
even his father's curse and the reproach of ingratitude, receiving in
exchange possessions of a nobler nature and more lasting character. You
have heard their names. To obtain them, means to share the bliss of
heaven. And you"--he continued loudly, adopting for the first time a tone
of authoritative severity--"if you really yearned for the greatest
possessions, go to the fortress this very hour, and with the cry in your
heart, though not on your lips, 'Our Father who art in heaven, not my
gracious master and benefactor Rudolph,' inform the Emperor what higher
Lord you have vowed to serve."
This kindled a fierce conflict in Heinz Schorlin's soul, which perhaps
might have ended in favour of a new career and St. Francis, had not
Biberli, ere he reached a conclusion, rushed into the room shouting:
"Seitz Siebenburg, the Mustache, has joined his brothers, and the Knight
of Absbach, with several others--von Hirsdorf, von Streitberg, and
whatever their names may be--have made common cause with them! It is said
that they also expected reinforcements from the Main, in order that the
right to the road----"
"Gossip, or positive news?" interrupted Heinz, drawing himself up to his
full height with the cool composure which he attained most easily when
any serious danger threatened him.
"As positive," replied his follower eagerly, "as that Siebenburg is the
greatest rascal in Germany. You will be robbed of your joust with him,
for he'll mount the block instead of the steed, just as you predicted.
The ladies will drive him from the lists with pins and rods, to say
nothing of the scourging by which knight and squire will silence him. Oh,
my lord, if you only knew!"
"Well?" asked the knight anxiously.
Then Biberli, paying no further heed to his master's orders never to
mention the Ortlieb sisters again in his presence, burst forth
indignantly: "It might move a stone to pity to know the wrong the monster
has done Jungfrau Eva and her pure and virtuous sister, the loyal
betrothed bride of a brave man--and the abominable names bestowed on the
young ladies, whom formerly young and old, hat in hand, called the
beautiful Es."
Heinz stamped his foot on the floor and, half frantic, impetuously
exclaimed, his blood boiling with honest indignation: "May the air he
breathes destroy the slandering scoundrel! May I be flayed on the rack
if----"
Here he was interrupted by a low exclamation of warning from the
Minorite, who perceived in the knight's fierce oaths a lamentable
relapse. Heinz himself felt ashamed of the ungodly imprecations; yet he
could by no means succeed in regaining his former composure as, drawing a
long breath, he continued: "And those city hypocrites, who call
themselves Christians, and build costly cathedrals for the good of their
souls, are not ashamed--yes, holy Father, it is true--basely to deny our
Lord and Saviour, who is Love itself, and deemed even the Magdalen worthy
of His mercy, and rub their hands in fiendish malignity when unpunished
they can sully the white robe of innocence, and drag pious, lovely
simplicity to the pillory."
"That is the very reason, my son," the monk interrupted soothingly, "that
we disciples of the Saint of Assisi go forth to show the deluded what the
Lord requires of them. Therefore leave behind you the dust of the world,
which defiles both body and soul, join us, who did so before you, and
help, as one of our order, to make those who are perishing in sin and
dishonouring the name of Christ better and purer, genuine Christians. In
this hour of stress lay the sword out of your hand, and leave the
steed----"
"I shall ride forth, rely upon it, holy Father," Heinz burst forth
afresh. "With the sky-blue of the gracious Virgin, whom I love, on my
shield and helmet, I will dash like the angel Michael amongst the
Siebenburgs and their followers. And let me tell you, holy Father--you
who were once a knight also--if the Mustache, weltering in his blood at
my feet, prays for mercy, I'll teach him----"
"Son! son!" interrupted the monk again, this time raising his hands
imploringly; but Heinz, paying no heed, exclaimed hoarsely:
"Where did you get this news?"
"From our Berne countryman at the fortress," replied the servant eagerly;
"Brandenstein, Schweppermann, and Heidenab brought the tidings. The
Emperor received them at the gate of the citadel, where he was keeping
watch ere he mounted his steed. He heard him call to the messengers, 'So
our Heinz Schorlin will have a hard nut to crack.'"
"Which he will crush after his own heart!" cried Heinz, with flashing
eyes.
Then, forcing himself to be calm, he exclaimed in broken sentences,
whilst Biberli was helping him put on his armour: "Your wish, reverend
Father, is also mine. The world--the sooner I can rid myself of it the
better; yet what you describe in the most alluring terms is the peace in
your midst, I--I--Never, never will my heart be calm until----"
Here he paused suddenly, struck his breast swiftly and repeatedly with
his fists, and continued eagerly: "Here, Father Benedictus, here are old
and strong demands, which you, too, must once have known ere you offered
the other cheek to the foe. I know not what to call them, but until they
are satisfied I shall never be yours. They must be fulfilled; then, if in
battle and bloodshed I can also forget the love which ever rises again
when I think I have given it the deathblow, if Heaven still desires poor,
heartsick Heinz Schorlin, it shall have him."
The Minorite received the promise with a silent bend of the head. He felt
that he might seriously endanger the fulfilment of his ardent wish to
gain this soul for heaven if he urged Heinz further now. Patiently
awaiting a more fitting season, he therefore contented himself with
questioning him carelessly about the foe and his castles.
The day was hot, and as Biberli laced the gambeson--the thick, quilted
undergarment over which was worn the heavy leather coat covered with
scales and rings--the monk exclaimed: "When the duty which you believe
you owe to the world has been fulfilled, you will gratefully learn, as
one of our order, how pleasant it is to walk with liberated soul in our
light-brown cowl."
But he ought to have repressed the remark, for Heinz cast a glance at him
which expressed his astonishment at being so misunderstood, and answered
with unyielding resolution: "If I long for anything in your order,
reverend Father, it is not for easy tasks, but for the most difficult
burden of all. Your summons to take our Redeemer's cross upon me pleases
me better."
"And I, my son, believe that your words will be inscribed amongst those
which are sure of reward," the monk answered; then with bowed head added
"At that moment you were nearer the kingdom of heaven than the aged
companion of St. Francis."
But perceiving how impatiently Heinz shrugged his shoulders, and
convinced that it would be advisable to leave him to himself for a time,
the old man blessed him with paternal affection and went his way. When
the fiery youth had performed the task which now claimed all his powers,
he hoped to find him more inclined to allow himself to be led farther
along the path which he had entered.
IN THE FIRE OF THE FORGE
A ROMANCE OF OLD NUREMBERG
By Georg Ebers
Volume 6.
CHAPTER V.
The Minorite had gone. Biberli had noticed with delight that his master
had not sought as usual to detain him. The iron now seemed to him hot,
and he thought it would be worth while to swing the hammer.
The danger in which Heinz stood of being drawn into the monastery made
him deeply anxious, and he had already ventured several times to oppose
his design. Life was teaching him to welcome a small evil when it barred
the way to a greater one, and his master's marriage, even with a girl of
far lower station than Eva Ortlieb, would have been sure of his favour,
if only it would have deterred him from the purpose of leaving the world
to which he belonged.
"True," the servitor began, "in such heat it is easier to walk in the
thin cowl than in armour. The holy Father is right there. But when it is
necessary to be nimble, the knight has his dancing dress also. Oh, my
lord, what a sight it was when you were waltzing with the lovely Jungfrau
Eva! Look at Heinz Schorlin, the brave hero of Marchfield, and the girl
with the angel face who is with him!' said those around me, as I was
gazing down from the balcony. And just think--I can't help speaking of it
again--that now respectable people dare to point their fingers at the
sisters and join in the base calumny uttered by a scoundrel!"
Then Heinz fulfilled Biberli's secret longing to be questioned about the
Es and the charges against them, and he forged the iron.
Not from thirst, he said, but to ascertain what fruit had grown from the
hellish seeds sown by Siebenburg, and probably the still worse ones of
the Eysvogel women, he went from tavern to tavern, and there he heard
things which made him clench his fists, and, at the Red Ox, roused him to
such violent protest that he went out of the tap-room faster than he
entered it.
Thereupon, without departing far from the truth, he related what was said
about the beautiful Es in Nuremberg.
It was everywhere positively asserted that a knight belonging to the
Emperor's train had been caught at the Ortlieb mansion, either in a
nocturnal interview or while climbing into the window. Both sisters were
said to be guilty. But the sharpest arrows were aimed at Els, the
betrothed bride of the son of a patrician family, whom many a girl would
have been glad to wed. That she preferred the foreigner, whether a
Bohemian, a Swabian, or even a Swiss, made her error doubly shameful in
the eyes of most persons.
Whenever Biberli had investigated the source of these evil tales, he had
invariably found it to be Seitz Siebenburg, his retainers, the Eysvogel
butler, or some man or maidservant in their employ.
The Vorchtels, who, as he knew from Katterle, would have had the most
reason to cherish resentment against the Ortliebs, had no share in these
slanders.
The shrewd fellow had discovered the truth, for after Seitz Siebenburg
had wandered about in the open air during the storm, he again tried to
see his wife. But the effort was vain. Neither entreaties nor threats
would induce her to open the door. Meanwhile it had grown late and, half
frantic with rage, he went to the Duke of Pomerania's quarters in the
Green Shield to try his luck in gaming. The dice were again moving
rapidly, but no one grasped the box when he offered a stake. No more
insulting rebuff could be imagined, and the repulse which he received
from his peers, and especially the duke, showed him that he was to be
excluded from this circle.
He was taught at the same time that if he answered the challenge of the
Swiss he would not be permitted to enter the lists. Thus he confronted
the impossibility of satisfying a demand of honour, and this terrible
thought induced him to declare war against everything which honour had
hitherto enjoined, and with it upon its guardians.
If they treated him as a robber and a dishonoured man, he would behave
like one; but those who had driven him so far should suffer for it.
During the rest of the night and on the following day, until the gate was
closed, he wandered, goblet in hand, only half conscious of what he was
doing, from tavern to tavern, to tell the guests what he knew about the
beautiful Es; and at every repetition of the accusations, of whose
justice he was again fully convinced, his hatred against the sisters, and
those who were their natural defenders and therefore his foes, increased.
Every time he repeated the old charges an addition increasing the slander
was made and, as if aided by some mysterious ally, it soon happened that
in various places his own inventions were repeated to him by the lips of
others who had heard them from strangers. True, he was often
contradicted, sometimes violently but, on the whole, people believed him
more readily than would have happened in the case of any other person;
for every one admitted that, as the brother-in-law of the older E, he had
a right to express his indignation in words.
Meanwhile his twins often returned to his memory. The thought ought to
have restrained him from such base conduct; but the idea that he was
avenging the wrong inflicted upon their father's honour, and thus upon
theirs, urged him further and further.
Not until a long ride through the forest had sobered him did he see his
conduct in the proper light.
Insult and disgrace would certainly await him in the city. His brothers
would receive him kindly. They were of his own blood and could not help
welcoming his sharp sword. Side by side with them he would fight and, if
it must be, die. A voice within warned him against making common cause
with those who had robbed the family of which he had become a member, yet
he again used the remembrance of his innocent darlings to palliate his
purpose. For their sakes only he desired to go to his death, sword in
hand, like a valiant knight in league with those who were risking their
lives in defence of the ancient privilege of their class. They must not
even suspect that their father had been shut out from the tournament, but
grow up in the conviction that he had fallen as a heroic champion of the
cause of the lesser knights to whom he belonged, and on whose neck the
Emperor had set his foot.
The assurance which Biberli brought Heinz Schorlin that Seitz Siebenburg
had joined those whom he was ordered to punish, placed the task assigned
him by the Emperor in a new and attractive light; but the servant's
report, so far as it concerned the Ortlieb sisters, pierced the inmost
depths of his soul. He alone was to blame for the disgrace which had
fallen upon innocent maidens. By the destruction of the calumny he would
at least atone for a portion of his sin. But this did not suffice. It was
his duty to repair the wrong he had done the sisters. How? That he could
not yet determine; for whilst wielding the executioner's sword in his
master's service all these thoughts must be silenced; he could consider
nothing save to fulfil the task confided to him by his imperial
benefactor and commander in chief, according to his wishes, and show him
that he had chosen wisely in trusting him to "crack the nut" which he
himself had pronounced a hard one. The yearning and renunciation, the
reproaches and doubts which disturbed his life, until recently so easy,
had disgusted him with it. He would not spare it. Yet if he fell he would
be deprived of the possibility of doing anything whatever for those who
through his imprudence had lost their dearest possession--their good
name. Whenever this picture rose before him it sometimes seemed as if Eva
was gazing at him with her large, bright eyes as trustingly as during the
pause in the dancing, and anon he fancied he saw her as she looked at her
mother's consecration in her deep mourning before the altar. At that time
her grief and pain had prevented her from noticing how his gaze rested on
her; yet never had she appeared more desirable, never had he longed more
ardently to clasp her in his arms, console her, and assure her that his
love should teach her to forget her grief, that she was destined to find
new happiness in a union with him.
This had happened to him just as he commenced the struggle for a new
life. Startled, he confessed it to his grey-haired guide, and used the
means which the Minorite advised him to employ to attain forgetfulness
and renunciation, but always in vain. Had he, like St. Francis, rushed
among briers, his blood would not have turned into roses, but doubtless
fresh memories of her whose happiness his guilt had so suddenly and
cruelly destroyed.
For her sake he had already begun to doubt his vocation on the very
threshold of his new career, and did not recover courage until Father
Benedictus, who had communicated with the Abbess Kunigunde, informed him
that Eva was wax in her hands, and within the next few days she would
induce her niece to take the veil.
This news had exerted a deep influence upon the young knight's soul. If
Eva entered the cloister before him, the only strong tie which united him
to the world would be severed, and nothing save the thought of his mother
would prevent his following his vocation. Yet vehement indignation seized
him when he heard from Biberli that the slanderer's malice would force
Eva to seek refuge with the Sisters.
No, a thousand times no! The woman whom he loved should need to seek
refuge from nothing for which Heinz Schorlin's desire and resolve alike
commanded him to make amends.
He must succeed in proving to the whole world that she and her sister
were as pure as they lived in his imagination, either by offering in the
lists the boldest defiance to every one who refused to acknowledge that
both were the most chaste and decorous ladies in the whole world, and
Eva, at the same time, the loveliest and fairest, or by the open
interference of the Emperor or the Burggravine in behalf of the
persecuted sisters, after he had confessed the whole truth to his exalted
patrons.
But when Biberli pointed out the surest way of restoring the endangered
reputation of the woman he loved, and begged him to imagine how much more
beautiful she would look in the white bridal veil than in her mourning
Riese--[Kerchief of fine linen, arranged like a veil]--he ordered him to
keep silence.
The miracle wrought in his behalf forbade him to yearn for happiness and
joy here below. It was intended rather to open his eyes and urge him to
leave the path which led to eternal damnation. It pointed him to the
kingdom of heaven and its bliss, which could be purchased only by severe
sacrifice and the endurance of every grief which the Saviour had taken
upon Himself. But he could at least pay one honour to the maiden to whom
he was so strongly attracted, and whose happiness for life was menaced by
his guilt. When he had assembled his whole force at Schwabach, he would
go into battle with her colour on his helmet and shield. The Queen of
Heaven would not be angry with him if he wore her light blue to atone to
the pure and pious Eva, who was hers even more fully than he himself, for
the wrong inflicted upon her by spiteful malice.
Heinz Schorlin's friends thought the change in his mood a natural
consequence of the events which had befallen him; young Count Gleichen,
his most intimate companion, even looked up to him since his "call" as a
consecrated person.
His grey-haired cousin, Sir Arnold Maier, of Silenen, was a devout man
whose own son led a happy life as a Benedictine monk at Engelberg. The
sign by which Heaven had signified its will to Heinz had made a deep
impression upon him, and though he would have preferred to see him
continue in the career so auspiciously begun, he would have considered it
impious to dissuade him from obeying the summons vouchsafed by the Most
High. So he offered no opposition, and sent by the next courier a letter
to Lady Wendula Schorlin, his young cousin's mother, in which, with
Heinz's knowledge-nay, at his request--he related what her son had
experienced, and entreated her not to withhold him from the vocation of
which God deemed him worthy.
Meanwhile, Biberli wrote to his master's mother in a different strain,
and did not desist from expressing his opinion, to Heinz, and assuring
him that his place was on a battle charger, with his sword in its sheath
or in his hand, rather than in a monastery with a rosary hanging from a
hempen girdle.
This had vexed Heinz--nay, made him seriously angry with the faithful
fellow; and when in full armour he prepared to mount his steed to receive
the last directions of his imperial master, and Biberli asked him on
which horse he should follow, he answered curtly that this time he would
go without him.
Yet when he saw tears fill the eyes of his "true and steadfast"
companion, he patted the significant St. on his cap, and added kindly:
"Never mind, Biber, everything will be unchanged between us till I obey
my summons, and you build your own nest with Katterle."
So Biberli had remained in Nuremberg whilst Heinz Schorlin, after the
Emperor with fatherly kindness had dismissed him, granting him full
authority, set forth at the head of his troops as their commander, to
take the field against the Siebenburgs and their allies.
The servant was permitted to attend him only to the outskirts of the
city.
Before the Spitalthor, Countess Cordula, though she was returning from a
ride into the country, had wheeled her spirited dappled horse and joined
him as familiarly as though she belonged to him. Heinz, who would have
liked best to be alone, and to whom any other companion would have been
more welcome, showed her this plainly enough, but she did not seem to
notice it, and during the whole of their ride together gave her tongue
free rein and, though he often indignantly interrupted her, described
with increasing warmth what the Ortlieb sisters had suffered through his
fault. In doing so she drew so touching a picture of Eva's silent sorrow
that Heinz sometimes longed to thank her, but more frequently to have her
driven away by his men at arms; for he had mounted his horse with the
intention of dividing the time of his ride between pious meditations and
plans for the arrangement of the expedition. What could be more unwelcome
than the persistent loquacity of the countess, who filled his heart and
mind with ideas and wishes that threatened most seriously to imperil his
design?
Cordula plainly perceived how unwillingly he listened. Nay, as Heinz more
and more distinctly, at last even offensively, showed her how little he
desired her society, it only increased the animation of her speech, which
seemed to her not to fail wholly in the influence she desired to exert in
Eva's favour; therefore she remained at his side longer than she had at
first intended. She did not even turn back when they met the young
Duchess Agnes, who with her train was returning to the city from a ride.
The Bohemian princess had known that Heinz would ride through the
Spitalthor at this hour to confront his foe, and had intended that the
meeting with her should seem like a good omen. The thought of wishing him
success on his journey had been a pleasant one. True, Cordula's presence
did not prevent this, but it disturbed her, and she was vexed to find the
countess again at Heinz Schorlin's side.
She showed her displeasure so plainly that her Italian singing mistress,
the elderly spinster Caterina de Celano, took sides with her, and
scornfully asked the countess whether she had brought her curling irons
with her.
But she bit her lips at Cordula's swift retort "O no! Malice meets us on
every road, but in Germany we do not pull one another's hair on the
highway over every venomous or foolish word."
She turned her back on her as she spoke until the duchess had taken leave
of Heinz, and then rode on with him; but as soon as a portion of the road
intervened between her and the countess the young Bohemian exclaimed: "We
must certainly try to save Sir Heinz from this disagreeable shrew!"
"And the saints will aid the good work," the Italian protested, "for they
themselves have a better right to the charming knight. How grave he
looked! Take care, your Highness, he is following, as my nimble cousin
Frangipani did a short time ago, in the footsteps of the Saint of
Assisi."
"But he must not, shall not, go into the monastery!" cried the young
duchess, with childish refractoriness. "The Emperor is opposed to it, and
he, too, does not like the von Montfort's boisterous manner. We will see
whether I cannot accomplish something, Caterina."
Here she stopped. They had again reached the village of Rottenpach, and
in front of the newly built little church stood its pastor, with the
dignitaries of the parish, and the children were scattering flowers in
the path. She checked her Arabian, dismounted, and graciously inspected
the new house of God, the pride of the congregation.
On the way home, just beyond the village, her horse again shied. The
animal had been startled by an old Minorite monk who sat under a crab
apple tree. It was Father Benedictus, who had set out early to anticipate
Heinz and surprise him in his night quarters by his presence. But he had
overestimated his strength, and advanced so slowly that Heinz and his
troopers, from whom he had concealed himself behind a dusty hawthorn
bush, had not seen him. From Schweinau the walk had become difficult,
especially as it was contrary to the teaching of the saint to use a
staff. Many a compassionate peasant, many a miller's lad and Carter, had
offered him a seat on the back of his nag or in his waggon but, without
accepting their friendly offers, he had plodded on with his bare feet.
Perhaps this journey would be his last, but on it he would redeem the
promise which he had made his dying master, to go forth according to the
command of the Saviour, which Francis of Assisi had made his own and that
of his order, to preach and to proclaim, "The kingdom of heaven is at
hand!"
"Without price," ran the words, "have ye received, without price give."
He had no regard for earthly reward, therefore he yearned the more
ardently for the glad knowledge that he had saved a soul for heaven.
He had learned to love Heinz as the saint had formerly loved him, and he
did not grudge him the happiness which, at the knight's age, had fallen
to the lot of the man whose years now numbered eighty. How long he had
been permitted to enjoy this bliss! True, during the last decades it had
been clouded by many a shadow.
He had endured much hardship in the service of his sacred cause, but the
greater the sacrifice he offered the more exquisite was the reward reaped
by his soul. Oh, if this pilgrimage might yield him Heinz Schorlin's vow
to follow his saint and with him the Saviour!--if he might be permitted,
clasping in his the hand of the beloved youth he had saved, to exchange
this world for eternal bliss!
Earth had nothing more to offer; for he who was one of the leaders of his
brotherhood beheld with grief their departure from the paths of their
founder. Poverty, which secures freedom to the body, which knows nothing
of the anxieties of this world and the burden of possession, which
permits the soul to soar unfettered far above the dust--poverty, the
divine bride of St. Francis, was forsaken in many circles of his brother
monks. With property, ease and the longing for secular influence had
stolen into many a monastery. Many shunned the labour which the saint
enjoined upon his disciples, and the old jugs were often filled with new
wine, which he, Benedictus, never tasted, and which the saint rejected as
poison. He was no longer young and strong enough to let his grief and
indignation rage like a purifying thunderstorm amidst these abuses.
But Heinz Schorlin!
If this youth of noble blood, equally gifted in mind and person, whom
Heaven itself had summoned with lightning and thunder, devoted himself
from sincere conviction, with a heart full of youthful enthusiasm, to his
sacred cause--if Heinz, consecrated by him, and fully aware of the real
purposes of the saint, who, also untaught and rich only in knowledge of
the heart, had begun a career so momentous in consequences, announced
himself as a fearless champion of St. Francis's will, then the St. George
had been found who was summoned to slay the dragon, and with his blood
instil new life at last into the monasteries of Germany, then perhaps the
fresh prosperity which he desired for the order was at hand. The larger
number of its recruits came from the lower ranks of the people. Sir Heinz
Schorlin's example would perhaps bring it also, as an elevating element,
the sons of his peers.
So, bathed in perspiration, and often on the point of fainting, he
followed Heinz through the dust of the highway.
Often, when his strength failed, and he sat down by the roadside to take
breath, his soul-life gained a loftier aspiration.
After Heinz rode by without seeing him he continued his way until his
feet grew so heavy that he was forced to sit down beside the road. Then
he imagined that the Saviour Himself came towards him, gazed lovingly
into his face, and turned to beckon some one, Benedictus did not know
whom, heavenward. Suddenly the clouds that had covered the sky parted,
and the old man fancied he heard the song of the troubadour whose soul
had been subdued by love for God, which his friend and master had
addressed to his Redeemer. It must come from the lips of his angels on
high, but he longed to join in the strain. True, his aged lips, rapidly
as they moved, uttered no sound, but he fancied he was sharing in this
song of the soul, glowing with fervent, consuming flames of love,
dedicated to the Saviour, the source of all love:
"Love's flames my kindling heart control,
Love for my Bridegroom fair,
When on my hand he placed the ring,
The Lamb whose fervent love I share
Did pierce my inmost soul,"
the fiery song began, and an absorbing yearning for death and the beloved
Redeemer, whose form had vanished in the sea of flames surging before his
dilated eyes, moved the very depths of his soul as he commenced the
second verse:
"My heart amidst Love's tortures broke,
Slain by the might of Love's keen stroke,
To earth my senseless body sank,
Love's flames my life-blood drank."
With flushed cheeks, utterly borne away from the world and everything
which surrounded him, he raised his arms towards heaven, then they
suddenly fell. Starting up, he passed his hand over his dazzled eyes and
shook his head sorrowfully. Instead of the angels' song, he heard the
beat of horses' hoofs coming nearer and nearer. The open heavens had
closed again; he lay a poor exhausted mortal, with burning brow, beside
the road.
Duchess Agnes, after visiting the new church at Rottenpach, rode past him
on her return to Nuremberg.
Neither she nor her train heeded the old monk. But the Italian who, as
she rode by, had been attracted by the noble features of the aged man,
whose eyes still sparkled with youthful enthusiasm, gazed at him
enquiringly. Her glance met his, and the Minorite's wrinkled features
wore a look of eager enquiry. He longed to rise and ask the name of the
black-eyed lady at the duchess's side. But ere he could stand erect, the
party had passed on.
Disturbed in mind, and scarcely able to set one sore foot before the
other, he dragged himself forward.
Before he reached Rottenpach he met one of the duchess's pages who had
remained at the village forge and was now riding after his mistress.
Father Benedictus called to him, and the boy, awed by the grey-haired
monk, answered his questions, and told him that the lady on the horse
with the white star on its face was the duchess's Italian singing
mistress, Caterina de Celano.
Every drop of blood receded from the Minorite's fever-flushed cheeks, and
the page was about to spring from his saddle to support him, but the monk
waved him back impatiently, and by the exertion of all his strength of
will forced himself to stagger on.
He had just felt happy in the heart of eternal love; but now the
expression of his countenance changed, and his dark, sunken eyes flashed
angrily.
The faded woman beside the duchess bore the name of the lady whose
faithlessness had first induced him to seek rest and forgetfulness in the
peace of the cloister, and led him to despise her whole sex.
The horsewoman must be a granddaughter, daughter, or niece of the woman
who had so basely betrayed him. How much she resembled the traitress, but
she did not understand how to hide her real nature as well; her faded
features wore a somewhat malicious expression. The resentment which he
thought he had conquered again awoke. He would have liked to rush after
her and call her to her face----. Yet what would that avail? How was she
to blame for the treachery of another person, whom perhaps she did not
even know?
Yet he longed to follow her.
His fevered blood urged him on, but his exhausted, aching limbs refused
to serve him. One more violent effort, and sparks flashed before his
eyes, his lips were wet with blood, and he sank gasping on the ground.
After some time he succeeded in dragging himself to the side of the road,
where he lay until a Nuremberg carrier, passing with his team of four
horses, lifted him, with the help of his servant, into his cart and took
him on.
At Schweinau the jolting of the vehicle became unendurable to the
sufferer, and the carrier willingly fulfilled his wish to be taken to the
hospital where mangled criminals, tortured by the rack, were nursed.
There, however, they instantly perceived that his place was not in this
house dedicated to criminal misfortune, and the kind Beguines of
Schweinau took charge of him.
On the way the old monk suffered severely in both soul and body. It
seemed like treason, like a rejection of his pure and pious purposes,
that Heaven itself barred the path along which he was wearily wandering
to win it a soul.
CHAPTER VI.
The entombment of the magnificent coffin of Frau Maria Ortlieb under the
pavement of the family chapel was over. The little group of sympathising
friends had left the church. Only the widower and his daughters remained,
and when he knew that he could no longer be seen by the few who still
lingered in the house of God, he clasped the two girls to his heart with
a suppressed sob.
Never had he experienced such deep sorrow, such anguish of soul. He had
not even been permitted to take leave of his beloved companion with
unmixed grief; fierce resentment had mingled with his trouble.
To remain alone in the house with his daughters after the burial and
answer their questions seemed to him impossible.
The meeting of the Council, which would soon begin, served as a pretence
for leaving them. Eva was to blame for what he had just suffered; but he
knew everything concerning the rumours about the inexperienced girl and
Heinz Schorlin, and there fore was aware that her fault was trivial. To
censure her seemed as difficult as to discuss calmly with her and the
sensible Els what could be done under existing circumstances; besides, he
was firmly convinced that Eva had nothing left except to take, without
delay, the veil for which she had longed from childhood. His sister, the
Abbess Kunigunde, was keeping the door of the convent open. She had
promised the girl to await her at home. In taking leave of his daughters,
he begged them not to wait for him, because the Council were to decide
the fate of the Eysvogel business, and the session might last a long
while.
Then his Els gazed at him with a look of such earnest entreaty that he
nodded, and in a tone of the warmest compassion began: "I shall be more
than glad to aid your Wolff, my dear girl, but he himself told you how
the case stands. What would it avail if I beggared myself and you for the
Eysvogels and their tottering house? I must remain hard now, in order
later to smooth the path for Wolff and you, Els. If Berthold Vorchtel
would make up his mind to join me, it might be different, but he summoned
the Council as a complainant, and if he is the one to overthrow the
reeling structure, who can blame him? We shall see. Whatever I can
reasonably do for the unfortunate family shall be accomplished, my girl."
Then he kissed his older daughter on the forehead, hastily gave the
younger the same caress, and left the chapel. But Els detained him,
whispering: "Whatever wrong was inflicted upon us yesterday, do not let
it prejudice you, father. It was meant neither for her whose peace
nothing can now disturb, nor for you. We alone----"
"You certainly," Herr Ernst interrupted bitterly, "were made to feel how
far superior in virtue they considered themselves to you, who are better
and purer than all of them. But keep up Eva's courage. I have been
talking with your Uncle Pfinzing and your Aunt Christine. You yourself
took them into your confidence, and we will consult together how the
serpent's head is to be crushed."
He turned away as he spoke, but Els went back to her sister, and after a
brief prayer they left the church with bowed heads.
The sedan-chairs were waiting outside. Each was to be borne home
separately, but both preferred, spite of the bright summer weather, to
draw the curtains, that unseen they might weep, and ask themselves how
such wrongs could have been inflicted upon the dead woman and themselves.
The respect of high and low for the Ortlieb family had been most
brilliantly displayed when the body of the son, slain in battle, had been
interred in the chapel of his race. And their mother? How many had held
her dear! to how many she had been kind, loving, and friendly! How great
a sympathy the whole city had shown during her illness, and how many of
all classes had attended the mass for her soul! And the burial which had
just taken place?
True, on her father's account all the members of the Council were
present, but scarcely half the wives had appeared. Their daughters--Els
had counted them--numbered only nine, and but three were included among
her friends. The others had probably come out of curiosity. And the
common people, the artisans, the lower classes, who in countless numbers
had accompanied her brother's coffin to its resting place, and during the
mass for the dead had crowded the spacious nave of St. Sebald's? There
had been now only a scanty group. The nuns from the convent were present,
down to the most humble lay Sister; but they were under great obligations
to her mother, and their abbess was her father's sister. There were few
other women except the old crones from the hospitals and nurseries, who
were never absent when there was an opportunity to weep or to backbite.
In going through the nave of the church into the chapel the sisters had
passed a group of younger lads and maidens, who had nudged one another in
so disrespectful a way, whispering all sorts of things, that Els had
tried to draw Eva past them as swiftly as possible.
Her wish to keep her more sensitive sister from noticing the disagreeable
gestures and insulting words of the cruel youths and girls was gratified.
True, Eva also felt with keen indignation that far too little honour was
paid to her beloved dead; that the blinded people believed the slanderers
who repeated even worse things of her Els than of herself, and made their
poor mother, who had lived and suffered like a saint, atone for what they
imagined were the sins of her daughters; but the jeers and scorn which
had obtruded themselves upon her father and sister from more than one
quarter, in many a form, had entirely escaped her notice. She had
accustomed herself from childhood to indulge in reflections and emotions
apart from the demands of the world. Whatever occupied her mind or soul
absorbed her completely; here she had been wholly engrossed in this
silent intercourse with the departed, and a single glance at the group
assembled in the church had showed her everything which she desired to
know of her surroundings.
Heinz had gone to the field the day before yesterday. Her silent colloquy
concerned him also. How difficult he made it for her to maintain the
resolution which she had formed during the mass for the dead, since he
remained aloof, without giving even the slightest token of remembrance.
True, an inward voice constantly repeated that he could not part from her
any more easily than she from him; but her maidenly pride rebelled
against the neglect with which he grieved her. The defiant desire to
punish him for departing without a word of farewell urged her back to the
convent. She had spent many hours there daily, and in its atmosphere of
peace felt better and happier than in her father's house or any other
spot which she visited. The close association with her aunt, the abbess,
was renewed. True, she had not urged Eva to a definite statement by so
much as a single word, yet she had made her feel plainly how deeply it
would wound her if her pupil should resolve to disappoint the hopes which
she herself had fostered. If Eva refused to take the veil, would not her
kind friend be justified in charging her with unequalled ingratitude? and
whose opinion did she value even half as much, if she excepted her
lover's, whose approval was more to her than that of all the rest of the
world?
He was better than she, and who could tell what important motive kept him
away? Countless worldly wishes had blended with the devotion which she
felt in the convent; and had not the abbess herself taught her to obey,
without regard to individuals or their opinion, the demands of her own
nature, which were in harmony with the will of the Most High? and how
loudly every voice within commanded her to be loyal to her love! She had
made her decision, but offended pride, the memory of the happy, peaceful
hours in the convent and, above all, the fear of grieving the beloved
guide of her childhood, withheld her from the firm and irrevocable
statement to which her nature, averse to hesitation and delay, impelled
her.
The nearer the sedan-chair came to the Ortlieb mansion the faster her
heart beat, for that very day, probably within the next few hours, the
abbess would compel her to choose between her father's house and the
convent.
She was panting for breath and deadly pale when, just after Els's
arrival, she stepped from the chair. It had become intensely hot. Within
the vaulted corridor with its solid, impenetrable walls, a cooler
atmosphere received her, and she hoped to find in her own chamber
fresher, purer air, and--at least for the next few hours--undisturbed
peace.
But what was the meaning of this scene? At her entrance, the conversation
which Els had evidently just commenced with several other women at the
door of the office suddenly ceased. It must be due to consideration for
her; for she had not failed to notice the significant glance with which
her sister looked at her and then removed her finger from her lips.
The abbess, who had been concealed by a wall of chests piled one above
another, now came forward and laid her hand upon the shoulder of a little
elderly woman, who must have been disputing vehemently with the old
housekeeper, Martsche, for she was flushed with excitement, and the
housekeeper's chin still quivered.
Usually Eva paid little heed to the quarrels of the servants, but this
one appeared to have some connection with herself, and the cause could be
no trivial one, since Aunt Kunigunde took part in it.
But she had no sooner approached the other women than the abbess drew her
aside and asked her a few unimportant questions. They were probably
intended to keep her away from the disputants. But Eva knew the little
woman, and wished to learn what offence had been given modest, humble
Widow Vorkler. Her husband had been employed by the Ortlieb firm as a
carrier, who had driven his team of six horses to Milan faithfully until
killed in the Tyrol during an attack by robber knights in the lawless
period before the coronation of the Emperor Rudolph.
With the aid of Herr Ernst Ortlieb, the widow had then set up a little
shop for the sale of wax candles, images of the saints, rosaries, and
modest confirmation gifts, by which means she gained an honest livelihood
for her seven children and herself. Her oldest son, who on account of hip
disease was not fit for hard work, helped her, and the youngest was
Ortel, who had carried Eva's basket on the day of her dead mother's
consecration. Her daughter Metz was also in the Ortlieb's service as
assistant to the chief cook.
When Frau Vorkler had come to see her children, she had scarcely been
able to find words which sufficiently expressed her grateful
appreciation, but to-day she seemed like a different person.
The brief colloquy between the abbess and Eva already appeared to her too
long, and when the former bade her finish her business later with Els and
old Martsche, she angrily declared that, with all due reverence for the
Lady Abbess, she must inform Jungfrau Eva also what compelled her, a
virtuous woman with a grateful heart, to take her children from the
service of the employer for whom her husband had sacrificed his life.
Els, who was eager to conceal the woman's insulting errand from Eva,
tried to silence Frau Vorkler, but she defiantly persisted, and with
redoubled zeal protested that speak she must or her heart would break.
Then she declared that she had been proud to place her children in so
godly a household, but now everything was changed, and though it grieved
her to the soul, she must insist upon taking Metz and Ortel from its
service. She lived by the piety of people who bought candles for the dear
saints and rosaries for praying; but even the most devout had eyes
everywhere, and if it were known that her young children were serving in
a house where such things happened, as alas! were reported through the
whole city concerning the daughters of this family----
Here old Martsche with honest indignation interrupted the excited woman;
but Fran Vorkler would not be silenced, and asked what a poor girl like
her Metz possessed except her good name. How quickly suspicion would rest
on a lass whose respectability was questioned! People had begun to do so
ever since the Ortlieb sisters were called the "beautiful" instead of the
pious and virtuous Es. This showed how such notice of the face and figure
benefited Christian maidens. Yesterday and to-day she had given a
three-farthing candle to her saint as a thank offering that this horror
had not reached their mother's ears. The dead woman had been a truly
devout and noble lady, and her soul would be grateful to her for
impressing upon the minds of her motherless daughters that the path which
they had recklessly entered----
This was too much for Ortel, who, concealed behind a heap of sacks, had
listened to the discussion, and clasping his hands beseechingly, he now
went up to his mother and entreated her to beware of repeating the
slanders of evil-minded people who had dared to cast stones at the
gracious maidens, who were as pure and innocent as their saint herself.
Poor Ortel! His kind young eyes streaming with tears might have softened
a rock; but the enraged candle-dealer misinterpreted his honest emotion,
and he certainly would not have been allowed to go on so far had not rage
and amazement kept her silent. But Frau Vorkler never lost the use of her
tongue long, and what a flood of abuse of the degenerate children of the
time, who forgot the respect and gratitude due to their own mother, she
began to pour forth! But when faithful Endres, who had grown grey in the
Ortlieb service, and under whose orders Ortel was placed to help in
unpacking, commanded her to be silent or leave the house, and told her
son, instead of following her, to stay with his old employer, Frau
Vorkler proceeded to lament over the corruption of the whole world, and
did not fail to deal a few side-thrusts at the two daughters of the
house.
But here also she made little progress, for the abbess led Eva up the
stairs, and the two old family servants, Martsche representing the
guiding mind and Endres the rude strength, made common cause. The latter
upheld Ortel in his refusal to leave the house, and the former declared
that Metz must remain the usual time after giving notice. She would not
help Frau Vorkler to force the poor child into an unequal, miserable
marriage with the old miser to whom she wanted to give her.
This remark was aimed at the master-tailor Seubolt, the guardian of the
Vorkler children, who, though forty years her senior, wanted to make
pretty Metz his wife, and who had also promised the widow to obtain for
his future brother-in-law Ortel an excellent place in the stables of the
German order of military monks. Not outraged morality, but the guardian
and suitor in one person, had induced the candle-dealer to take her
children from their good places in the Ortlieb household. The widow's
fear of having her real motive detected spared the necessity of using
force. But whilst slowly retiring backwards, crab fashion, she shrieked
at her antagonists the threat that her children's guardian, no less a
personage than master-tailor Nickel Seubolt, was a man who would help her
gain her just rights and snatch the endangered souls of Ortel and her
poor young Metz from temporal and eternal destruction in this Sodom and
Gomorrah----
The rest of the burden which oppressed her soul she was forced to confide
to the street. Endres closed the heavy door of the house behind her with
a strength and celerity marvellous in a man of his years.
Ortel was terribly agitated. Soon after his mother's departure he went
with his sister to the woodhouse, where both wept bitterly; for Metz had
given her heart to a young carrier who was expected to return from a trip
to Frankfort the first of July, and would rather have thrown herself into
the Pegnitz than married the rich old tailor to whom she knew her mother
had promised her pretty daughter; whilst her brother, like many youths of
his station, thought that the place of driver of a six-horse wain was the
most delightful calling in the world, and both were warmly attached to
their employer and the family whom they served. And yet both felt that it
was a heavy sin to refuse to obey their mother.
CHAPTER VII.
Eva was spared witnessing the close of this unpleasant incident. The
abbess had led her up the stairs into the sitting-room. St. Clare
herself, she thought, had sent Fran Vorkler to render the choice she
intended to place before her niece that very day easier for Eva.
Even whilst ascending the broad steps she put her arm around her, but in
the apartment, whence the noonday sun had been shut out and they were
greeted with a cool atmosphere perfumed with the fragrance of the
bouquets of roses and mignonette which Eva and the gardener had set in
jars on the mantelpiece early in the morning, the abbess drew her darling
closer to her side, saying, "The world is again showing you its most
disagreeable face, my poor child, ere you bid it farewell."
She kissed her brow and eyes tenderly as she spoke, expecting Eva, as she
had often done when anything troubled her young soul, to return the
caress impulsively, and accept with grateful impetuosity the invitation
to the shelter which she offered; but the vile assault of the coarse
woman who brought to her knowledge what people were thinking and saying
about her produced upon the strange child, who had already given her many
a surprise, an effect precisely opposite to her expectations. No, Eva had
by no means forgotten the pain inflicted by Frau Vorkler's base
accusations; but if whilst in the sedan-chair she had feared that she
should lack courage to inflict upon her beloved aunt and friend so great
a disappointment, she now felt that this dread had been needless, and
that her offended maidenly pride absolved her from consideration for any
person.
With cautious tenderness she released herself from the arms of the
abbess, gazed sorrowfully at her with her large eyes as if beseeching
forgiveness then, as she saw her aunt look at her with pained surprise,
again threw herself on her breast.
Instead of being protectingly embraced by the elder woman, the young girl
clasped her closely to her heart, kissed and patted her with caressing
love, and with the winning charm peculiar to her besought her forgiveness
if she denied herself and her that which she had long desired as the
fairest and noblest goal.
When the abbess interrupted her to represent what awaited her in the
world and in the convent, Eva listened, nestling closely to her side
until she had finished, then sighing as deeply as if her own resolve
caused her the keenest suffering, threw her head back, exclaiming, "Yet,
in spite of everything, I cannot, must not enter the convent now."
Clasping the abbess's hand, she explained what prevented her from
fulfilling the wish of her childhood's guide, which had so long been her
own, extolling with warm, sincere gratitude the quiet happiness and sweet
anticipations enjoyed with her beloved nuns ere love had conquered her.
During the recent days of sorrow she had again sought the path to her
saints and found the greatest solace in prayer; but whenever she uplifted
her heart to the Saviour, whose bride she had once so fervently vowed to
become, the Redeemer had indeed appeared as usual before the eyes of her
soul, but he resembled in form and features Sir Heinz Schorlin, and,
instead of turning her away from the world to divine love, she had
surrendered herself completely to earthly affection. Prayer had become
sin. The saint's song:
"O Love, Love's reign announcing,
Why dost thou wound me so?
Into thy fiercest flames I fling
My heart, my life below."
no longer invited her to give herself up to be fused into divine love,
but merely rendered the need of her own soul clearer, and expressed in
words the yearning of her heart for her lover.
Here her aunt interrupted her with the assurance that all this--she had
had the same experience when, renouncing the love of the noblest and best
of men, she took the veil--would be different, wholly different, when
with St. Clare's aid she had again found the path on which she had
already once so nearly reached heaven. Even now she beheld in imagination
the day when Eva would look back upon the world she had left as if it
were a mere formless mass of clouds. These were no idle words. The
promise was something derived from her own experience.
On her pilgrimage to Rome she had gazed from an Alpine peak and beheld at
her feet nothing save low hills, forests, valleys, and flashing streams,
with here and there a village; but she could distinguish neither human
beings nor animals; a light mist had veiled everything, converting it
into one monotonous surface. But above her head the sky, like a giant
dome free from cloud and mist, arched in a beautiful vault, blue as
turquoise and sapphire. It seemed so close that the eagle soaring near
her might reach it with a few strokes of his pinions. She was steeped in
radiance, and the sun shone down upon her with overpowering brilliancy
like the eye of God.
Close at her side a gay butterfly hovered about the solitary little white
flower which grew from a bare rock on the topmost summit. In the
brilliant light and amidst the solemn silence that butterfly seemed like
a transfigured soul, and aroused the question, Who that was permitted to
live on this glowing height, so near the Most High, could desire to
return to the grey mist below?
So the human soul which soared to the shining height where it was so near
heaven, would blissfully enjoy the purity of the air and the un shadowed
light which bathed it, and all that was passing in the world below would
blend into a single vanquished whole, whose details could no longer be
distinguished. Thus Heinz Schorlin's image would also mingle with the
remainder of the world, lying far below her, to which he belonged. It
should merely incite her to rise nearer and nearer to heaven, to the
radiant light above, to which her soul would mount as easily as the eagle
that before the pilgrim's eyes had vanished in the divine blue and the
golden sunshine.
"So come and dare the flight!" she concluded with warm enthusiasm. "The
wings you need have grown from your soul, you chosen bride of Heaven. Use
them. That which now most repels you from the goal will fall away as the
snake sheds its skin. Like the phoenix rising from its ashes, the
destruction of the little earthly love which even now causes you more
pain than pleasure, will permit the ascent of the great love for Him Who
is Love incarnate, the love which encompasses the lonely butterfly on the
white blossom in the silent, deserted mountain solitude, which lacks no
feather on its wings, no tiniest hair on its feelers, as warmly and
carefully as the vast, unlimited universe whose duration ends only with
eternity."
Eva, with labouring breath, had fairly hung upon the lips of the revered
woman, who at last gazed upwards with dilated eyes like a prophetess.
When she paused the young girl nodded assent. Her teacher and friend
seemed to have crushed her resistance.
Like the eagle which had disappeared before the pilgrim's eyes in the
azure vault of heaven, the radiant light on the pure summit summoned her
pure soul to dare the flight.
The abbess watched with delight the influence of her words upon the soul
of her darling, who, gazing thoughtfully at the floor, now seemed to be
pondering over what she had urged.
But suddenly Eva raised her bowed head, and her eyes, sparkling with a
brighter light, sought those of the abbess.
Her quick intellect had attentively considered what she had heard, and
her vivid power of imagination had enabled her to transfer to reality the
picture which had already half won her over to her friend's wishes.
"No, Aunt Kunigunde, no!" she began, raising her hands as if in repulse.
"Your radiant height strongly allures me also, yet, gladly as I believe
that, for many the world would be easily forgotten above, where no sound
from it reaches us and the mist conceals individual figures from our
eyes, for me, now that love has filled my heart, it would be impossible
to ascend the peak alone and without him.
"Hear me, aunt!
"What was it that attracted me so powerfully from the beginning? At
first, as you know, the hope of making him a combatant for the
possessions which I have learned through you to regard as the highest and
most sacred. Then, when love came, when a new power, heretofore unknown,
awoke within me and--everything must be told--I longed for his wooing and
his embrace, I also felt that our union could take root and put forth
blossoms only in the full harmony of our mutual love for God and the
Saviour. And though since the mass for the dead was celebrated for my
mother--it wounded me, and defiance and the wish to punish him urged me
to put the convent walls between us--no further token of his love has
come, though I know as well as you that he desired to quit the world,
this by no means impairs--nay, it only strengthens--the confidence I feel
that our souls belong to one another as inseparably as though the
sacrament had hallowed our union.
"Therefore I should never succeed in coming so near heaven as you, the
lonely, devout pilgrim, attained on the summit of your mountain peak,
unless he accompanied me in spirit, unless his soul joined mine in the
ascent or the flight. It rests in mine as mine rests in his, and were
they separated both would bleed as if from severed veins. For this
reason, aunt, he can never blend into a uniform mass with the rest of the
world below me; for if I gained the radiant height, he would remain at my
side and gaze with me at the mist-veiled world beneath. He can never
vanish from the eyes of my soul, and so, dear aunt, because I owe it to
him to avoid even the semblance----"
Here she hesitated; for from the adjoining room they heard a man's deep
voice telling Els something in loud, excited tones.
This interruption was welcome to the abbess; she had as yet found no
answer to her niece's startling objection.
Eva answered her questioning glance with the exclamation, "Uncle
Pfinzing!"
"He?" replied the abbess dejectedly. "His opinion has some weight with
you, and this very day, during the burial, he told me how glad he should
be to see you sheltered in the convent from the hateful calumnies caused
by your imprudence!"
"Yet--you will see it directly," the girl declared, "he will surely
understand me when I explain that I would rather endure the worst than
appear to seek refuge from evil tongues in flight. Whoever has expected
Eva Ortlieb to shelter herself from malice behind strong walls will be
mistaken. Heinz is certainly aware of the shameful injustice which has
pursued us, and if he returns he must find me where he left me. I am now
encountering what my dead mother called the forge fire of life, and I
will not shun it like a coward. Heinz, I know, will overthrow the man who
unchained this generation of vipers against us; but if he does not
return, or can bring himself to cast the love that unites us behind him
with the world from which he would fain turn, then, aunt"--and Eva's eyes
flashed brightly with passionate fire, and her clear voice expressed the
firm decision of a vigorous will--"then I will commit our cause to One
who will not suffer falsehood to conquer truth or wrong to triumph over
right. Then, though it should be necessary to walk over red-hot
ploughshares, let the ordeal bear witness for us."
The abbess, startled, yet rejoicing at the fulness of faith flaming in
her darling's passionate speech, approached Eva to soothe her; but
scarcely had she begun to speak when the door opened and Berthold
Pfinzing entered with his older niece.
He was holding Els by the hand, and it was evident that some sorrowful
thought occupied the minds of both.
"Has any new horror happened?" fell in tones of anxious enquiry from
Eva's lips before she even greeted her dearest relative.
"Think of something very bad," was her sister's reply, in a tone so
dejected and mournful, that Eva, with a low cry--"My father!"--pressed
her hand upon her heart.
"Not dead, darling," said the magistrate, stroking her head soothingly
with his short, broad hand, "by all the saints, not even wounded or ill.
Yet the daughter has guessed aright, and I have kept the 'Honourables'
waiting, that I might tell you the news myself; for what may not such
tidings become whilst passing from lip to lip! It is a toad, a very ugly
toad, and I would not permit a dragon to be brought into the house to you
poor things in its place."
He poured all this forth very rapidly, for, notwithstanding the intense
heat, and the burden of business at the Town Hall, he had left it, though
only to do his dear Es a kindness, lie and his worthy wife Christine, the
sister of Herr Ernst Ortlieb and of the abbess, had long been familiar
with all the tales which slander had called to life, and had striven
zealously enough to refute them. What he had now to relate filled him
with honest indignation against the evil tongues, and he knew how deeply
it would excite and grieve Eva, his godchild, who stood especially near
his heart. He would gladly have said a few kind words to her before
beginning his story, but he was obliged to return to the Town Hall
immediately to open the important conference concerning the fate of the
Eysvogel business.
His appearance showed how rapidly he had hurried to the house through the
burning sunshine, for drops of perspiration were trickling down his
broad, low forehead over his plump, smoothshaven cheeks and thick red
neck, in which his small chin vanished as if it were a cushion. Besides,
he constantly raised a large linen handkerchief to his face, and his huge
chest laboured for breath as he hastily repeated to Eva and the abbess
what he had just announced to Els in a few rapid words.
Herr Ernst Ortlieb had gone to the Town Hall, where he attended an
examination in his character as magistrate, and had entered the court
yard to enjoy the cool air for a short time with a few other
"Honourables," in the shady walk near the main gate.
Just then master-tailor Seubolt, the guardian of Ortel and his sister,
who were in service at the Ortlieb mansion, approached the Town Hall. No
one could have supposed that the tall, grey-headed man with the bowed
back, who was evidently nearing sixty, really meant to make a young girl
like Metz Vorkler his wife. Besides, he assumed a very humble, modest
demeanour when, passing through the vaulted entrance of the Town Hall,
which stood open to every citizen, he approached Herr Ernst to ask, with
many bows and humble phrases, for the permission, which he had been
refused at the Ortlieb house, to remove his wards from a place which
their mother, as well as he himself, felt sure--he had supposed that the
"Honourable" would have no objection--would be harmful to them in both
body and soul.
Surprised and indignant, but perfectly calm, Herr Ernst had requested him
to tell him whatever he had to say at a more convenient time. But as the
tailor insisted that the matter would permit no delay, he invited him to
step aside with him, in order not to make the councillors who were with
him witnesses of the unpleasant discussion.
Seubolt, however, seemed to have no greater desire than to be heard by as
many people as possible. Raising his voice to a very loud tone, though he
still maintained an extremely humble manner, he began to give the reasons
which induced him, spite of his deep regret, to remove his wards from the
Ortlieb house. And now, sheltering himself behind frequent repetitions of
"As people say" and "Heaven forbid that I should believe such things," he
began to relate what the most venomous slander had dared to assert
concerning the beautiful Es.
For a time Herr Ernst had forced himself to listen quietly to this
malicious abuse of those whom he held dearest, but at last it became too
much for the quick-tempered man. The tailor had ventured to allude to
Jungfrau Els "who certainly had scarcely given full cause for such evil
slander" in words which caused even the councillors standing near to
contradict him loudly, and induced Herr Pfinzing, who had just come up,
to beckon to the city soldiers. At that instant the blood mounted to the
insulted father's brain, and the misfortune happened; for as the tailor,
with an unexpected gesture of the arm he was flourishing, brushed Herr
Ernst's cap, the latter, fairly insane with rage, snatched the pike from
one of the men who, obeying Herr Pfinzing's signal, were just approaching
the tailor, and with a wild cry struck down the base traducer.
Herr Pfinzing, with the presence of mind characteristic of him, instantly
ordered the beadles to carry the wounded man into the Town Hall, and thus
prevented the luckless deed of violence from creating any excitement.
The few persons in the courtyard had been detained, and perhaps
everything might yet be well. Herr Ernst had instantly delivered himself
up to justice, and instead of being taken to prison like a common
criminal, had been conveyed in a closed sedan-chair to the watch-tower.
The pike had pierced the tailor's shoulder, but the wound did not seem to
be mortal, and Herr Ernst's rash deed might be made good by the payment
of blood-money, though, it is true, on account of the tailor's position
and means, this might be a large sum.
"My horse," said Herr Berthold in conclusion, "was waiting for me, and
brought me here as swiftly as he must carry me back again. But, you poor
things! as for you, my Els, you have a firm nature, and if you insist
upon refusing the invitation to our house, why, wait here to learn
whether your father needs you. You, my little goddaughter Eva, are
provided for. This sorrow, of course, will throw the veil over your fair
head."
The worthy man, as he spoke, laid his hand on her shoulder and looked at
her with a glance which seemed to rely on her assent, but she interrupted
him with the exclamation, "No, uncle! Until you have convinced yourself
that no one will dare assail Eva Ortlieb's honour, do not ask her again
if she desires the protection of the convent."
The magistrate hurriedly passed his huge handkerchief over his face; then
taking Eva's head between his hands, kissed her brow, and--turning the
shrewd, twinkling eyes, which were as round as everything else about his
person, towards the others, said: "Did any one suggest this, or did the
'little saint' have the sensible idea herself?"
When Eva, smiling, pointed to her own forehead, he exclaimed: "My
respects, child. They say that what stirs up there descends from
godfather to godchild, and I'll never put goblet to my lips again if I--"
Here he stopped, and called after Els that he had not meant to hint, for
she was hurrying out to get her uncle something to drink. But ere the
door closed behind her he went on eagerly:
"But to you, my saintly child, I will say: your piety soars far too high
for me to follow with my heavy body; yet on the ride here I, old sinner
that I am, longed--no offence, sister-in-law abbess!--to warn you against
the convent, for the very reason which keeps you away from your saint.
We'll find the gag to stop the mouths of these accursed slanderers
forever, and then, if you want to enter the convent, they shall not say,
when you take the veil, 'Eva Ortlieb is hiding from her own shame and the
tricks with which we frightened her out of the world.' No! All Nuremberg
shall join in the hosanna!"
Then taking the goblet which Els had just filled, he drained it with
great satisfaction, and rushing off, called back to the sisters: "I'll
soon see you again, you brave little Es. My wife is coming to talk over
the matter with you. Don't let that worthless candle-dealer's children
leave the house till their time is up. If you wish to visit your father
in the watch-tower there will be no difficulty. I'll tell the warder.
Only the drawbridge will be raised after sunset. You can provide for his
bodily needs, too, Els. We cannot release him yet; the law must take its
course."
At the door he stopped again and called back into the room: "We can't be
sure. If Frau Vorkler and the tailor's friends make an outcry and molest
you, send at once to the Town Hall. I'll keep my eyes open and give the
necessary orders."
A few minutes after he trotted through the Frauenthor on his clumsy
stallion.
CHAPTER VIII.
The watch-tower was in the northern part of the city, in the corn
magazine of the fortress, and the whole width of Nuremberg must be
traversed to reach it. Even before Herr Pfinzing had left the house the
sisters determined to go to their father, and the abbess approved the
plan. She invited the girls to spend the night at the convent, if they
found the deserted house too lonely, but they did not promise to do so.
Countess Cordula, who was on friendly terms with Eva, also emptied the
vials of her wrath with all the impetuosity of her nature upon Sir Seitz
Siebenburg and the credulity and malice of the people. From the beginning
she had been firmly convinced that the "Mustache," as she now called the
knight in a tone of the most intense aversion, had contrived this base
conspiracy, and her opinion was strengthened by Biberli. Now she would
gladly have torn herself into pieces to mitigate the sisters' hard lot.
She wanted to accompany them to the watch-tower, to have them taken there
in her sedan-chair carried by horses, which had room for several persons,
and at last begged for the favour of being allowed to spend the night in
the room adjoining theirs. If the girls, amidst all these base
suspicions, should find Nuremberg unendurable, she would leave the scene
of the Reichstag with them to-morrow, if necessary, and take them to her
castle in the Vorarlberg. She had other plans for them, too, in her mind,
but lacked time now to explain them to the sisters; they could not obtain
admittance to their father's prison after sundown, and in a few hours the
long summer day would be over.
It was not advisable to use their sedan-chairs adorned with the Ortlieb
coat of arms, which every one knew, so they went on foot with their faces
shrouded by the 'Reise' which was part of their mourning dress; and, in
order not to violate usage, were accompanied by two servants, old
Martsche and Katterle.
From the Fleischbrucke they might have avoided the market-place, but Els
wanted to enquire whether the Eysvogel matter was being discussed. One of
the "Honourables"--all of whom she knew--was always to be found near the
Town Hall, and Eva understood her sister's anxiety and went with her
willingly.
But when they were passing the prison she became frightened.
Through the squares formed by the iron grating in front of the broad
window of the largest one, head after head, hand after hand, was thrust
into the street. The closely cropped heads of the prisoners, many of
which showed mutilations by the hand of the executioner, which had barely
healed, formed, as separated only by the iron bars, they protruded above,
below, and beside one another into the open air, a mosaic picture,
startlingly repulsive in appearance; for savage greed glittered in the
eyes of most, and showed itself in the movements of the long, thin hands
extended for gifts. Bitter need and passionate longing gazed defiantly,
beseechingly, and threateningly at the people who crowded round the
window. Few were silent; they implored the curious and pitying men,
women, and children, who in the presence of their misery rejoiced in
their more favoured lot, for aid in their distress, and rarely in vain;
for many a mother gave her children a loaf to hand to the unfortunates,
and meanwhile impressed on their minds the lesson that they would fare as
badly as the most horrible of the mutilated prisoners unless they were
good and obedient to their parents and teachers.
Street boys held out an apple or a bit of bread, to snatch it away just
as they touched it with their finger-tips, thus playing with them for
their own amusement, but the tribulation of the wretched captives. Then
some man who had seen better days, or a criminal whom sudden passion had
made a murderer, would burst into a rage and, seizing the iron bars,
shake them savagely, whilst the others, shrieking, drew in their heads.
Then fierce curses, threats, and invectives echoed over the market-place
and, screaming aloud, the boys ran back; but they soon resumed their
malicious sport.
Often, it is true, a mother came who placed her gift in the hands of her
child, or a modest old woman, tradesman, or soldier, from motives of
genuine compassion, offered the prisoners a jug of new milk or
strengthening wine. Nor was there any lack of priests or monks who
desired to give the consolations of religion to the pitiable men behind
the bars, but most of them reaped little gratitude; only a few listened
to their exhortations with open hearts, and but too frequently they were
silenced by insults and rude outcries.
Whilst the sisters, attended by their maidservants, were passing these
pitiable people, Frau Tucher, whose daughter had been very ill, sent, for
the love of God, a large basket of freshly baked bread to the prisoners.
One of her servants was distributing it, and they greedily snatched the
welcome gift from his hand. A woman, who was about to give one of the
rolls to the hollow-eyed child in her arms just as a rude fellow who had
lost his ears snatched it, scratched his dirty, freckled face with her
sharp nails, and the sight of the blood which dripped from his lip over
his chin upon the roll was so hideous a spectacle that Eva clung closer
to her sister, who had just put her hand into the pocket hanging from her
belt to give the unfortunates a few shillings, and drew her away with
her.
Both, followed by the two maids, made their way as fast as possible
through the people who had flocked hither in great numbers for a purpose
which the sisters were to learn only too soon.
It was a long time since they had been here, and a few weeks previously
the "Honourables" had had the pillory moved from the other side of the
Town Hall to this spot. Katterle's warning was not heard in the din
around them.
The crowd grew denser every moment, and Eva had already asked her sister
to turn back, when Els saw the man who brought to her father the summons
to the meetings of the Council, and requested him to accompany them
through the throng to the courtyard; but amidst the uproar of shouts and
cries he misunderstood her, and supposing that she wished to witness the
spectacle which had attracted so many, forced a way for the sisters into
the very front rank.
The person who had just been bound in this place of shame was the
barber's widow from the Kotgasse, who had already been here once for
giving lovers an opportunity for secret meetings, and to whom Katterle
had fled for shelter. Bowed by the weight of the stone which had been
hung around her neck, the woman, with outstretched head, looked furiously
around the circle of her tormentors like a wild beast crouched to spring,
and scarcely had the messenger brought the sisters and their servants to
a place near her when, recognising Katterle, she shrieked shrilly to the
crowd that there were the right ones, the dainty folk who, if they did
not belong to a rich family, would be put in the place where, in spite of
the Riese over their faces, with which they mourned for their lost good
name, they had more reason to be than she, who was only the lowly widow
of a barber.
Overwhelmed with horror the girls pressed on, and at Eva's terrified
exclamation, "Let us, O let us go!" the man did his best. But they made
slow progress through the crowd, whose yells, hisses, and catcalls
pursued them to the entrance of the neighbouring Town Hall.
Here the guard, with crossed halberds, kept back the people who were
crowding after the insulted girls, and it was fortunate, for Eva's feet
refused to carry her farther, and her older sister's strength to support
her failed.
Sighing deeply, Els led her to a bench which stood between two pillars,
and then ordered old Martsche, and Katterle, who was trembling in every
limb, to watch Eva till her return.
Before they went on, her sister must have some rest, and Martin Schedel,
the old Clerk of the Council, was the man with whom to obtain it.
She went in search of him as fast as her feet would bear her, and by a
lucky accident met the kind old man, whom she had known from childhood,
on the stairs leading to the Council chamber and the upper offices.
Ernst Ortlieb's unhappy deed, and the story of the base calumnies in
circulation about the unfortunate man's daughters, which he had just
heard from Herr Pfinzing, had filled the worthy old clerk's heart with
pity and indignation; so he eagerly embraced the opportunity afforded to
atone to the young girls for the wrongs committed against them by their
fellow-citizens. Telling the maidservants to wait in the antechamber of
the orphan's court-room, he led the sisters to his own office, helping
Eva up the long flight of stairs with an arm which, though aged, was
still vigorous. After insisting that she should sit in the armchair
before the big desk, and placing wine and water before her, he begged the
young girls to wait until his return. He was obliged to be present at the
meeting, which had probably already begun. The matter in question was the
Eysvogel business, and if Els would remain he could tell her the result.
Then he left them.
Eva, deadly pale, leaned back with closed eyes in the clerk's high chair.
Els bathed her brow with a wet handkerchief, consoling her by
representing how foolish it would be to suffer the lowest of the populace
to destroy her happiness.
Her sister nodded assent, saying: "Did you notice the faces of those
people behind the bars? Most of them, I thought, looked stupid rather
than evil." Here she hesitated, and then added thoughtfully: "Yet they
cannot be wise. These poor creatures seldom obtain any great sum by
thieving and cheating. To what terrible punishments they expose
themselves both in this world and the next! And conscience!"
"Yes, conscience!" Els eagerly repeated. "So long as we can say that we
have done nothing wrong, we can suffer even the worst to be said of us
without grieving."
"Still," sighed Eva, "I feel as if that horrible woman's insults had
sullied me with a stain no water can wash away. What sorrows have come
upon us since our mother died, Els!"
Her sister nodded, and added mournfully: "Our father, my Wolff, your
poor, stricken heart, and below in the Council chamber, Eva, perhaps
whilst we are talking, those who are soon to be my kindred are being
doomed. That is harder to bear, child, than the invectives with which a
wicked woman slanders us. Often I do not know myself where I get the
strength to keep up my courage."
She turned away as she spoke to wipe the tears from her eyes without
being seen; but Eva perceived it, and rose to clasp her in her arms and
whisper words of cheer. Ere she had taken the first step, however, she
started; in rising she had upset the clerk's tin water-pail, which fell
rattling on the floor.
"The water!" she exclaimed sadly, "and my tongue is parched."
"I'll fetch more," said Els consolingly; "Herr Martin brought it from
over yonder."
Opening the door to which she had pointed, she entered a low, spacious
anteroom, in which was a brass fire engine, ladders, pails, and various
other utensils for extinguishing a fire in the building, hung on the
rough plastered wall which separated this room from the office of the
city clerk. The centre of the opposite wall was occupied by two small
windows surmounted by a broad, semicircular arch, and separated by a
short Roman pillar. The sashes of both, whose leaden casings were filled
with little round horn panes, stood wide open. This double window was in
the upper part of the Council chamber, which occupied two stories. To
create a draught this hot day it had been flung wide open, and Els could
distinguish plainly the words uttered below. The first that reached her
was the name: "Wolff Eysvogel."
A burning sensation thrilled her. If she went nearer to the window she
could hear what the Honourables decided concerning the Eysvogel house;
and, overpowered by her ardent desire not to lose a single word of the
discussion which was to determine the happiness of Wolff's life, and
therefore hers, she instantly silenced the voice which admonished her
that listening was wrong. Yet the habit of caring for Eva was so dear to
her, and ruled her with such power, that before listening to what was
passing in the Council chamber below she looked for the water, which she
speedily found, took it to the thirsty girl, and hurriedly told her what
she had discovered in the next room and how she intended to profit by it.
In spite of Eva's entreaty not to do it, she hastened back to the open
window.
The younger sister, though she shook her head, gazed after her with a
significant smile.
To Eva this was no accident.
Perhaps it was her saint herself who, when her sister went to seek
refreshment for her, had guided her to the window. Eva deemed it a boon
to be permitted to find here in solitude the rest needful for her body
which, though usually so strong, had been shaken by horror, and to
struggle and pray for a clear understanding of the many things which
troubled her; for to her prayer was far more than the petition for a
spiritual or earthly blessing; nay, she prayed far less frequently to
implore anything than from yearning for the Most High to whose presence
the wings of prayer raised her. So long as she was absorbed in it, she
felt removed from the world and borne into the abode of God.
Now also, whilst Els was listening, she brought no earthly matter to the
Power who guided the universe as well as her own little individual life,
but merely lost herself in supplication and in her intercourse with the
Omnipotent One, who seemed to her a familiar friend; she forgot what
grieved and troubled her and how she had been pained. But meanwhile the
prediction she had made to the abbess was verified; she felt as if her
lover's soul rose with hers to the pure height where she dwelt, and that
the earthly love which filled her heart and his was but an effluence of
the Eternal Love, whose embodiment to her was God and the Saviour.
The union of herself and Heinz seemed imaged by two streams flowing from
the same great inexhaustible, pure, and beneficent fountain, which, after
having run through separate channels, meet to traverse as a single river
the blooming meadows and keep them fresh and green. God's love, her own,
and his were each separate and yet the same, portions of the great fount
which animated, saved, and blessed her, him, and the whole vast universe.
The spring gushing from her love and his was eternal, and therefore
neither could be exhausted, no matter how much it gave.
But both were still in the world. As he would certainly put forth all his
might to show himself worthy of the confidence placed in him by his
Emperor and master, she too must test her youthful strength in the
arduous conflict which she had begun. Her recent experiences were the
flames of the forge fire of life of which her mother had spoken--and how
pitifully she had endured their glow! This must be changed. She had often
proved that when the body is wearied the soul gains greater power to
soar. Should she not begin to avail herself of this to make her feeble
body obey her will? With compressed lips and clenched hand she resolved
to try.
CHAPTER IX.
Whilst Eva, completely absorbed in herself, was forming this resolution,
Els, panting for breath, stood at the open window under the ceiling of
the Council chamber, gazing down and listening to the sounds from
beneath.
Directly opposite to her was the inscription
"Feldt Urtel auf erden, als ir dort woldt geurtheilt werden," in the
German and Latin languages, and below this motto, urging the magistrates
to justice, was a large fresco representing the unjust judge Sisamnes
being flayed by an executioner in the costume of the Nuremberg
Leben--[Executioner's assistant. Really "Lowen."]--before the eyes of
King Cambyses, in order to cover the judgment seat with his skin. Another
picture represented this lofty throne, on which sat the ruler of Persia
dispensing justice. The subject of a third was the Roman army interrupted
in its march by the order of the Emperor Trajan, that he might have time
to hear a widow's accusation of the murderer of her son and to punish the
criminal.
Els did not bestow a single glance upon these familiar pictures, but
gazed down at the thirteen elderly and the same number of much younger
men, who in their high-backed chairs were holding council together at her
left hand far below her. These were the burgomasters of the city, of whom
an elder and a younger one directed for the space of a month, as
"Questioner," the government of the public affairs of the city and the
business of the "Honourable Council."
At this time the office was filled by Albert Ebner and Jorg Stromer,
whilst in the secret council formed by seven of the older gentlemen, as
the highest executive authority, Hans Schtirstab as the second and
Berthold Vorchtel as first Losunger filled the chief offices.
So this year the deeply offended father held the highest place in the
Council, and in the whole community of Nuremberg he, more than any one
else, would decide the fate of the Eysvogels.
Els knew this, and with an anxious heart saw him gaze earnestly and sadly
at the papers which Martin Schedel, the city clerk, had just brought to
him from a special desk. At his side, in the centre of the table covered
with green cloth, sat the listener's uncle, the magistrate Berthold
Pfinzing, who in the Emperor's name presided over the court of justice.
He also appeared in his character of protector of the Jews, and Samuel
Pfefferkorn, a Hebrew usurer, had just left the hall after an
examination.
Casper Eysvogel was gazing after him with a face white as death. His
handsome head shook as the imperial magistrate, turning to Berthold
Vorchtel, the chief Losunger, said in a tone loud enough to be heard by
all present, "So this is also settled. Herr Casper contracted the great
debt to the Jew without the knowledge of his son and partner, and this
explains to a florin the difference between the accounts of the father
and son. The young man was intentionally kept in the dark about the
greatest danger which threatened the business. To him the situation of
the house must have appeared critical, but by no means hopeless. But for
the Siebenburgs and the other bandits, who transformed the last important
and promising venture of the firm into a great loss, and with the sale of
the landed property, it might perhaps have speedily risen, and under
prudent and skilful management regained its former prosperity. The
enormous sum to which the debt to Samuel Pfefferkorn increased gives the
position of affairs a different aspect. Since, as protector of the Jew, I
must insist upon the payment of this capital with the usual interest, the
old Eysvogel firm will be unable to meet its obligations--nay, its
creditors can be but partially paid. Therefore nothing remains for us to
do save to consider how to protect as far as possible our city and the
citizens who are interested. Yet, in my opinion, the entire firm does not
deserve punishment--only the father, who concealed from his upright son
his own accounts and those of Samuel Pfefferkorn, and--it is hard for me
to say this in Herr Casper's presence;--also, when the peril became
urgent, illegally deprived his business partner of the possibility of
obtaining a correct view of the real situation of affairs. So, in the
Emperor's name, let justice take its course."
These words pronounced the doom of the ancient, great, and wealthy
Eysvogel firm; yet the heart of Els throbbed high with joy when, after a
brief interchange of opinions between the assembled members of the
Council, the imperial magistrate, turning to Herr Vorchtel, again began:
"As Chief Losunger, it would be your place, Herr Berthold, to raise your
voice on the part of the Honourable Council in defence of the accused;
but since we are all aware of the great grief inflicted upon you by the
son of the man in whose favour you would be obliged to speak, we should,
I think, spare you this duty, and transfer it to Herr Hans Schtirstab,
the second Losunger, or to Herr Albert Ebner, the oldest of the governing
burgomasters, who, though equally concerned in this sad case, are less
closely connected with the Eysvogels themselves."
Els uttered a sigh of relief, for both the men named were friendly to
Wolff; but Herr Vorchtel had already risen and began to speak, turning
his wise old head slowly to and fro, and drawing his soft grey beard
through his hand.
He commenced his address as quietly as if he were talking with friends at
his own table, and the tones of his deep voice, as well as the expression
of his finely moulded aged features, exerted a soothing influence upon
his listeners.
Els, with a throbbing heart, felt that nothing which this man advocated
could be wrong, and that whatever he recommended would be sure of
acceptance; for he stood amongst his young and elderly fellow directors
of the Nuremberg republic like an immovably steadfast guardian of duty
and law, who had grown grey in the atmosphere of honesty and honour. Thus
she had imagined the faithful Eckart, thus her own Wolff might look some
day when age had bleached his hair and labour and anxiety had lined his
lofty brow with wrinkles; Berthold Vorchtel, and other "Honourables" who
resembled him; grey-haired Conrad Gross; tall, broad-shouldered Friedrich
Holzschuher, whose long, snow-white hair fell in thick waves to his
shoulders; Ulrich Haller, in whose locks threads of silver were just
appearing, princely in form and bearing; stately Hermann Waldstromer, who
had the keen eyes of a huntsman; the noble Ebner brothers, who would have
attracted attention even in an assembly of knights and counts--nay, the
Emperor Rudolph was probably thinking of the men below when he said that
the Nuremberg Council reminded him of a German oak wood, where firm
reliance could be placed on every noble trunk.
Herr Berthold Vorchtel was just such a noble, reliable tree. Els told
herself so, and though she knew how deeply he was wounded when Wolff
preferred her to his daughter Ursula, and how sorely he mourned his son
Ulrich's death, she was nevertheless convinced that this man would bear
the Eysvogels no grudge for the grief suffered through them, for no word
which was not just and estimable would cross his aged lips.
She was not mistaken; for after Herr Berthold had insisted upon his right
to raise his voice, not in behalf of Herr Casper but for his business
firm and its preservation, he remarked, by way of introduction, that for
the sake of Nuremberg he would advise that the Eysvogel house should not
be abandoned without ceremony to the storm which its chief had aroused
against the ancient, solid structure.
Then he turned to the papers and parchments, to which the city clerk had
just added several books and rolls. His address, frequently interrupted
by references to the documents before him, sounded clear and positive.
The amount of the sums owed by the Eysvogel firm, as well as the names of
its creditors in Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, and Regensburg, Venice, Milan,
Bruges, and other German and foreign cities, formed the most important
portion of his speech. During its progress he frequently seized a bit of
chalk and blackboard, writing rapidly on the green table whole rows of
figures, and the young burgomasters especially exchanged admiring smiles
as the experienced old merchant added and subtracted in an instant sums
for which they themselves would have needed twice as much time.
The figures and names buzzed in the ears of the listener at the window
like the humming of a swarm of gnats. To understand and remember them was
impossible, and she gazed in astonishment at the old man who so clearly
comprehended the confused tangle and drew from it so readily just what he
needed for his purpose.
When he closed, and with a loud "Therefore" began to communicate the
result, she summoned all the mental power she possessed in order to
understand it. She succeeded, but her knees fairly trembled when she
heard the sum which the house was obliged to repay to others.
Yet, when Herr Berthold lastly gave the estimate of the Eysvogel property
in merchandise, buildings, and estates, she was again surprised. She had
not supposed that Wolff's proud family was so wealthy; but the close of
this report brought fresh disappointment, for including the sum which
Herr Casper had borrowed from the Jew Pfefferkorn, the debts of the firm
exceeded its possessions far more than Els had expected from the amount
of its riches.
She was wholly ignorant of the condition of her own father's property;
but she thought she knew that it was far from being enough to suffice
here. And this appeared to be the case, for when Berthold Vorchtel
resumed his speech he alluded to Ernst Ortlieb. In words full of sympathy
he lamented the unprecedented insult which had led him to commit the deed
of violence that prevented his sharing in this consultation. But before
his removal he had given him an important commission. Upon certain
conditions--but only upon them--he would place a considerable portion of
his fortune at his disposal for the settlement of this affair. Still,
large as was the promised sum, it would by no means be sufficient to save
the Eysvogel business from ruin. Yet he, Berthold Vorchtel, was of the
opinion that its fall must be prevented at any cost. The sincerity of
this conviction he intended to prove by the best means at a merchant's
command-the pledge of his own large capital.
These words deeply moved the whole assembly, and Els saw her uncle glance
at the old gentleman with a look which expressed the warm appreciation of
a man of the same mind.
Casper Eysvogel, who, lost in thought, had permitted the statements of
the Losunger, which were mingled with many a bitter censure of his own
conduct, to pass without contradiction--nay, apparently in a
state of apathy in which he was no longer capable of following
details--straightened his bowed figure and gazed enquiringly into Herr
Berthold's face as if he did not venture to trust his own ears; but the
other looked past him, as he added that what he was doing for the
Eysvogel business was due to no consideration for the man who had
hitherto directed it, or his family, but solely on account of the good
city whose business affairs the confidence of the Council had summoned
him to direct, and her commerce, whose prosperity was equally dear to
most of the Honourables around him.
Cries and gestures of assent accompanied the last sentence; but Berthold
Vorchtel recognised the demonstration by remarking that it showed him
that the Council, in the name of the city, would be disposed to do its
share in raising the amount still lacking.
This statement elicited opposition, expressed in several quarters in low
tones, and from one seat loudly, and Herr Berthold heard it. Turning to
Peter Ammon, one of the Eysvogels' principal creditors, who was making
the most animated resistance, he remarked that no one could be more
unwilling than himself to use the means of the community to protect from
the consequences of his conduct a citizen whose own errors had placed him
in a perilous position, but, on the other hand, he would always--and in
this case with special zeal--be ready to aid such a person in spite of
the faults committed, if he believed that he could thus protect the
community from serious injury.
Then he asked permission to make a digression, and being greeted with
cries of "Go on!" from all sides, began in brief, clear sentences to show
how the commerce of Nuremberg from small beginnings had reached its
present prosperity. Instead of the timid, irregular exchange of goods as
far as the Rhine, the Main, and the Danube, regular intercourse with
Venice, Milan, Genoa, Bohemia, and Hungary, Flanders, Brabant, and the
coast of the Baltic had commenced. Trade with the Italian cities, and
through them, even with the Levant, had made its first successful opening
under the Hohenstaufen rule; but during the evil days when the foreign
monarchs had neglected Germany and her welfare, it sustained the most
serious losses. By the election of Rudolph of Hapsburg who, with vigour,
good-will, and intelligence, had devoted his attention to the security of
commerce in the countries over which he reigned, better days for the
merchant had returned, and it was very evident what his work required,
what injured and robbed it of its well-earned reward. Confidence at home
and abroad was the foundation of prosperity, not alone of the Nuremberg
merchant but of trade in general. Under the Hohenstaufen rule their
upright ancestors had so strengthened this confidence that wherever he
went the Nuremberg merchant received respect and confidence above
many--perhaps all others. The insecurity of the roads and of justice in
the lawless times before the election of the Hapsburgs might have
impaired this great blessing; but since Rudolph had wielded the sceptre
with virile energy, made commerce secure, and administered justice,
confidence had also returned, and to maintain it no sacrifice should be
too great. As for him, Berthold Vorchtel, he would not spare himself, and
if he expected the city to imitate him he would know how to answer for
it.
Here he was interrupted by loud shouts of applause; but, without heeding
them, he quietly went on: "And it is necessary to secure confidence in
the Nuremberg merchant in two directions: his honesty and the capital at
his command. Our business friends, far and near, must be permitted to
continue to rely upon our trustworthiness as firmly as upon rock and
iron. If we brought the arrogant Italian to say of us that, amongst the
German cities who were blind, Nuremberg was the one-eyed, we ought now to
force them to number us amongst those who see with both eyes, the honest,
trust-inspiring blue eyes of the German. But to attain this goal we need
the imperial protection, the watchful power of a great and friendly
ruler. The progress which our trade owed to the Hohenstaufen proves this;
the years without an Emperor, on the contrary, showed what threatens our
commerce as soon as we lack this aid. Rights and privileges from
sovereigns smoothed the paths in which we have surpassed others. To
obtain new and more important ones must be our object. From the first
Reichstag which the Emperor Rudolph held here, he has shown that he
esteems us and believes us worthy of his confidence. Many valuable
privileges have revealed this. To maintain this confidence, which is and
will remain the source of the most important favours to Nuremberg, is
enjoined upon us merchants by prudence, upon us directors of the city by
regard for its prosperity. But, my honourable friends, reluctantly as I
do so, I must nevertheless remind you that this confidence, here and
there, has already received a shock through the errors of individuals.
Who could have forgotten the tale of the beautiful cap of the unhappy
Meister Mertein, who has preceded us into the other world? Doubtless it
concerned but one scabby sheep, yet it served to bring the whole flock
into disrepute. Perhaps the fact that it occurred so soon after Rudolph's
election to the sovereignty, during the early days of his residence in
our goodly city, imprinted it so deeply upon our imperial master's
memory. A few hours ago he asked for some information concerning the sad
affair which now occupies our attention, and when I represented that the
public spirit and honesty of my countrymen, fellow-citizens, and
associate members of the Council would prevent it from injuring our trade
at home or abroad, he alluded to that story, by no means in the jesting
way with which he formerly mentioned the vexatious incident that
redounded to the honour of no one more than that of his own shrewdness,
which at that time--seven years ago--was so often blended with mirth."
When the speaker began to allude to this much-discussed incident a smile
had flitted over the features of his listeners, for they remembered it
perfectly, and the story of Emperor Rudolph and the cap was still related
to the honour of the presence of mind of the wise Hapsburg judge.
During the period of the assembly of the princes a Nuremberg citizen had
taken charge of a bag containing two hundred florins for a foreign
merchant who had lodged with him, but when he was asked for the property
entrusted to him denied that he had received it.
This disgraceful occurrence was reported to the Emperor, but he
apparently paid no heed to it, and received Master Mertein, amongst other
citizens who wished to be presented to him. The dishonest man appeared in
a rich gala dress and as, embarrassed by the Emperor's piercing gaze, he
awkwardly twirled his cap--a magnificent article bordered with costly
fur; the sovereign took it from his hand, examined it admiringly and,
with the remark that it would suit even a king, placed it on his own
royal head. Then he approached one after another to exchange a few words
and, as if forgetting that he wore the head-gear, left the apartment to
order a messenger to take the cap at once to its owner's wife, show it to
her as a guarantee of trustworthiness, and ask her to bring the bag which
the foreign merchant had given him to the castle. The woman did so and
the cheat was unmasked.
Everyone present, like Els, was familiar with this story, which wrongly
cast so evil a light upon the uprightness of the citizens of Nuremberg.
Who could fail to be painfully affected by the thought that Rudolph,
during his present stay amongst them, must witness the injury of others
by a Nuremberg merchant? Who could have now opposed Herr Berthold, when
he asked, still more earnestly than before, that the community would do
its share to maintain confidence in the reliability of the Nuremberg
citizens, and especially of the Honourable Council and everyone of its
members?
But when he mentioned the large sum which he himself, and the other which
Ernst Ortlieb intended on certain conditions to devote to the settlement
of this affair, Peter Ammon also withdrew his opposition. The First
Losunger's proposal was unanimously accepted, and also the condition made
by his associate, Ernst Ortlieb. Casper Eysvogel, on whom the resolution
bore most heavily, submitted in silence, shrugging his shoulders.
How high Els's heart throbbed, how she longed to rush down into the
Council chamber and clasp the hand of the noble old man at the green
table, when he said that in consequence of Ernst Ortlieb's
condition--which he also made--the charge of the newly established
Eysvogel business must be transferred from Herr Casper's hands to those
of his son, Herr Wolff, as soon as the imperial pardon permitted him to
leave his hiding-place. He, Berthold Vorchtel, would make no complaint
against him, for he knew that Wolff had been forced to cross swords with
his Ulrich. He had formed this resolution after a severe struggle with
himself; but as a Christian and a fair-minded man he had renounced the
human desire for revenge, and as God had wished to give him a token of
his approval, he had sent to his house a substitute for his dead son.
Fresh cries of approval interrupted this communication, whose meaning Els
did not understand.
Not a word of remonstrance was uttered when the imperial magistrate at
last proposed that Casper Eysvogel and the women of his family should
leave the city and atone for his great offence by ten years in exile. One
of his estates, which he advised the city to buy, could be assigned him
as a residence. Herr Casper's daughter, Frau Isabella Siebenburg, had
already, with her twin sons, found shelter at the Knight Heideck's
castle. Her husband, who had joined his guilty brothers, would speedily
fall into the hands of justice and reap what he had sowed. For the final
settlement of this affair he begged the Honourable Council to appoint
commissioners, whom he would willingly join.
Then Herr Vorchtel again rose and requested his honourable friends to
treat the new head of the house with entire confidence; for from the
books of the firm and the statements which he had made in his
hiding-place and sent to the Council, both he and the city clerk had
become convinced that he was one of the most cautious and upright young
merchants in Nuremberg. Their opinion was also shared by the most
prominent business acquaintances of the house.
This pleased the listener. But whilst the speaker sat down amidst the
eager assent of his associates in office, and Herr Casper Eysvogel,
leaning on the arm of his cousin, Conrad Teufel, left the hall with
tottering steps, utterly crushed, she saw the city clerk Schedel, after a
hasty glance upwards, approach the side door, through which he could
reach the staircase leading to his rooms.
He evidently intended to tell the result of the discussion. But the old
gentleman would need considerable time to reach her, so she again
listened to what was passing below.
She heard her uncle, the magistrate, speak of her father's unfortunate
deed, and tell the Council how the name of Herr Ernst's daughters, who
were held in such honour, had become innocently, through evil gossip, the
talk of the people. Just at that moment the old man's shuffling step
sounded close by the door.
Els stopped listening to hasten towards the messenger of good tidings,
and the old gentleman could scarcely believe his own eyes when he saw the
happiness beaming in the girl's beautiful fresh face, whose anxiety and
pallor had just roused his deep sympathy.
It was scarcely possible that anyone could have anticipated him with the
glad news, and spite of his seventy-two years the city clerk had retained
the keen eyes of youth. When he entered the anteroom with Els and saw the
open window and beside it the white Riese which she had removed in order
to hear better, he released himself from the arm she had passed around
his shoulders, shook his finger threateningly at her, and cried: "It's
fortunate that I find only the Riese, and not the listener, otherwise I
should be compelled to deliver her to the jailer, or even the torturer,
for unwarranted intrusion into the secrets of the honourable Council. I
can hardly institute proceedings against a bit of linen!"
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Welcome a small evil when it barred the way to a greater one
IN THE FIRE OF THE FORGE
A ROMANCE OF OLD NUREMBERG
By Georg Ebers
Volume 7.
CHAPTER X.
A few minutes later the sisters left the Town Hall. Their white Rieses
were wound so closely about their faces that their features were
completely hidden, but the thin material permitted them to see Herr
Vorchtel, leaning upon the arm of the young burgomaster, Hans Nutzel,
leave the Council chamber, where the other Honourables were still
deliberating. Pointing to the old man, the city clerk told Els with a
significant smile that Ursula Vorchtel was engaged to the talented,
attractive young merchant now walking with her father, and that he had
promised Herr Vorchtel to aid him and his younger son in the management
of his extensive business. This was a great pleasure to the noble old
merchant, and when he, the city clerk, met Ursula that morning, spite of
her deep mourning, she again looked out upon the world like the happy
young creature she was. Her new joy had greatly increased her beauty, and
her lover was the very person to maintain it. Herr Schedel thought it
would be pleasant news to Els, too. The young girl pressed his hand
warmly; for these good tidings put the finishing touch to the glad
tidings she had just heard. The reproach which, unjust as it might be,
had spoiled many an hour for Wolff and entailed such fatal consequences,
was now removed, and to her also "Ursel's" altered manner had often
seemed like a silent accusation. She felt grateful, as if it were a
personal joy, for the knowledge that the girl who had believed herself
deserted by Wolff, her own lover, was now a happy betrothed bride.
Ursula's engagement removed a burden from Eva's soul, too, only she did
not understand how a girl whose heart had once opened to a great love
could ever belong to anyone else. Els understood her; nay, in Ursula's
place she would have done the same, if it were only to weave a fresh
flower in her afflicted father's fading garland of joy.
The city clerk accompanied them to the great entrance door of the Town
Hall.
Several jailers and soldiers in the employ of the city were standing
there, and whilst their old friend was promising to do his utmost to
secure Ernst Ortlieb's liberation and recommending the girls to the
protection of one of the watchmen, Eva's cheeks flushed; for a messenger
of the Council had just approached the others, and she heard him utter
the name of Sir Heinz Schorlin and his follower Walther Biberli. Els
listened, too, but whilst her sister in embarrassment pressed her hand
upon her heart, she frankly asked the city clerk what had befallen the
knight and his squire, who was betrothed to her maid. She heard that at
the last meeting of the Council an order had been issued for Biberli's
arrest.
His name must have been brought up during the discussions of the slanders
which had so infamously pursued the Ortlieb sisters, but she could not
enquire how or in what connection, for the sun was already low in the
western sky, and if the girls wished to see their father there was no
time to lose.
Yet, though Katterle had just said that Countess von Montfort was waiting
outside in her great sedan-chair for the young ladies, they were still
detained, for they would not leave the Town Hall without thanking the
city clerk and saying farewell to him. He was still near, but the captain
of the city soldiers had drawn him aside and was telling him something
which seemed to permit no delay, and induced the old gentleman to glance
at the sisters repeatedly.
Eva did not notice it; for Biberli's arrest, which probably had some
connection with Heinz and herself, had awakened a series of anxious
thoughts associated with her lover and his faithful follower. Els
troubled herself only about the events occurring in her immediate
vicinity, and felt perfectly sure that the captain's communications
referred not only to the four itinerant workmen and the three women who
had just been led across the courtyard to the "Hole," and to whom the
speaker pointed several times, but especially to her and her sister.
When the city clerk at last turned to them again, he remarked carelessly
that a disagreeable mob in front of the Ortlieb mansion had been
dispersed, and then, with urgent cordiality, invited the two girls to
spend the night under the protection of his old housekeeper. When they
declined, he assured them that measures would be taken to guard them from
every insult. He had something to tell their uncle, and the communication
appeared to permit no delay, for with a haste very unusual in the
deliberate old gentleman he left the two sisters with a brief farewell.
Meanwhile Countess Cordula had become weary of waiting in the
sedan-chair. She came striding to meet her new friends, attired in a
rustling canary-green silk robe whose train swept the ground, but it was
raised so high in front that the brown hunting-boots encasing her
well-formed feet were distinctly visible. She was swinging her heavy
riding-whip in her hand, and her favourite dogs, two black dachshunds
with yellow spots over their eyes, followed at her heels.
As it was against the rules to bring dogs into the Town Hall, the
doorkeeper tried to stop her, but without paying the slightest attention
to him, she took Els by the hand, beckoned to Eva, and was turning to
leave the path leading to the market-place.
In doing so her eyes fell upon the courtyard, where, just after the Ave
Maria, a motley throng had gathered. Here, guarded by jailers, stood
vagabonds and disreputable men and women, sham blind beggars and
cripples, swindlers, and other tatterdemalions, who had been caught in
illegal practices or without the beggar's sign. In another spot,
dark-robed servants of the Council were discussing official and other
matters. Near the "Hole" a little party of soldiers were resting, passing
from hand to hand the jug of wine bestowed by the Honourable
Council. The "Red Coat"--[Executioner]--was giving orders to his
"Life"--[Executioner's assistant ("Lion")]--as they carried across the
courtyard a new instrument of torture intended for the room adjoining the
Council chamber, where those who refused to make depositions were forced
to it. In a shady corner sat old people, poorly clad women, and
pale-faced children, the city poor, who at this hour received food from
the kitchen of the Town Hall. A few priests and monks were going into the
wing of the building which contained the "Hole," with its various cells
and the largest chamber of torture, to give the consolations of religion
to the prisoners and those tortured by the rack who had not yet been
conveyed to the hospital at Schweinau.
The countess's keen glance wandered from one to another. When they
reached the group of paupers they rested upon a woman with deadly pale,
hollow cheeks, pressing a pitifully emaciated infant to her dry breast,
and her eyes swiftly filled with tears.
"Here," she whispered to old Martsche, taking several gold coins from the
pocket that hung at her belt, "give these to the poorest ones. You are
sensible. Divide it so that several will have a share and the money will
reach the right hands. You can take your time. We need neither you nor
Katterle. Go back to the house. I will carry your young mistresses to
their father and home again. Where I am you need have no fear that harm
will befall them."
Then she turned again towards the "Hole," and seeing the people yelling
and shouting while awaiting imprisonment, she pointed to them with her
whip, saying, "That's a part of the pack which was set upon you. You
shall hear about it presently. But now come."
As she spoke she went before the girls and urged them to step quickly
into the large, handsome sedan-chair, around which an unusual number of
people had assembled, for she wished to avoid any recognition of the
sisters by the curious spectators. The gilded box, borne between two
powerful Brabant horses in such a way that it hung between the tail of
the first and the head of the second, would have had room for a fourth
occupant.
When it moved forward, swaying from side to side, Cordula pointed to the
curtained windows, and said: "Shameful, isn't it? But it is better so,
children. That arch-rascal Siebenburg robbed the people of the little
sense they possessed, and that cat of a candle-dealer, with her mate, the
tailor, or rather his followers, poisoned the minds of the rest. How
quickly it worked! Goodness, it seems to me, acts more slowly. True, your
hot-tempered father spoiled the old rascal's inclination to woo pretty
Metz for a while; but his male and female gossips, aunts, cousins, and
work-people apparently allowed themselves to be persuaded by his future
mother-in-law to the abominable deed, which caused the brawling rabble
you saw in the Town Hall court to content themselves with a hard couch in
the 'Hole' overnight."
"They have done everything bad concerning us, though I don't know exactly
what," cried Els indignantly.
"Wished to do, Miss Wisdom," replied the countess, patting Els's arm
soothingly. "We kept our eyes open, and I helped to put a stop to their
proceedings. The rabble gathered in front of your house, yelling and
shrieking, and when I stepped into your bow-window there was as great an
outcry as if they were trying to bring down the walls of Jericho a second
time. Some boys even flung at me everything they could find in the mire
of the streets. The most delightful articles! There was actually a dead
rat! I can see its tail flying now! Our village lads know how to aim
better. Before the worst came, by the advice of the equerry and our wise
chaplain, whom I consulted, we had done what was necessary, and summoned
the guard at the Frauenthor to our assistance. But the soldiers were in
no great haste; so when matters were going too far, I stepped into the
breach myself, called down to tell them my name, and also showed my
crossbow with an arrow on the string. This had an effect. Only a few
women still continued to load me with horrible abuse. Then the chaplain
came to the window and this restored silence; but, in spite of his
earnest words, not a soul stirred from the spot until the patrol arrived,
dispersed the rabble, and arrested some of them."
Els, who sat by Cordula's side, drew her towards her and kissed her
gratefully; but Eva's eyes had filled with tears of grief at the
beginning of the countess's report of this new insult, and the hostility
of so many of the townsfolk; yet she succeeded in controlling herself.
She would not weep. She had even forced herself to gaze, without the
quiver of an eyelash, at the sorrowful and horrible spectacle outside of
the "Hole." She must cease being a weak child. How true her dying
mother's words had been! To be able to struggle and conquer, she must not
withdraw from life and its influences, which, if she did not spare
herself, promised to transform her into the resolute woman she desired to
become.
She had listened with labouring breath to the speaker's last words, and
when Els embraced Cordula, she raised her little clenched hand,
exclaiming with passionate emotion: "Oh, if I had only been at home with
you! You are brave, Countess, but I, too, would not have shrunk from
them. I would voluntarily have made myself the target for their malice,
and called to their faces that only miserably deluded people or shameless
rascals could throw stones at my Els, who is a thousand times better than
any of them!"
"Or at you, you dear, brave child," added Cordula in an agitated tone.
From the day following the burning of the convent the countess had given
up her whim of winning Heinz Schorlin. She now knew that all her nobler
feelings spoke more loudly in favour of the quiet man who had borne her
out of the flames. Sir Boemund Altrosen's love had proved genuine, and
she would reward him for it; but the heart of the pretty creature
opposite to her was also filled with deep, true love, and she would do
everything in her power for Eva, whom she had loved ever since her
affliction had touched her tender heart.
Both sisters were now aware of Cordula's kind intentions, and the warm
pleasure she displayed when Els told her what the Council had determined,
showed plainly enough that the motherless young countess, who had neither
brother nor sister, clung to the daughters of her host like a third
sister. Old Herr Vorchtel's treatment of the man who had inflicted so
deep a sorrow upon him touched her inmost soul. It was grand, noble; the
Saviour himself would have rejoiced over it. "If it would only please the
good old man," she exclaimed, "I would rather offer him my lips to kiss
than the handsomest young knight."
Though two of Count von Montfort's mounted huntsmen and several
constables accompanied the unusually large and handsome sedan-chair, a
curious crowd had followed it; but the opinion probably prevailed that
the countess's companions were some of her waiting-women. When they
alighted in front of the watch-tower, however, an elderly laundry-maid
who had worked for the Ortliebs recognised the sisters and pointed them
out to the others, protesting that it was hard for a woman of her chaste
spirit to have served in a house where such things could have happened.
Then a tailor's apprentice, who considered the whole of the guild
insulted in the wounded Meister Seubolt, put his fingers to his wide
mouth and emitted a long, shrill whistle; but the next instant a blow
from a powerful fist silenced him. It was young Ortel, who had come to
the watch-tower to seek Herr Ernst and tell him that he and his sister
Metz, spite of their mother and guardian, meant to stay in his service.
His heart's blood would not have been too dear to guard Eva, whom he
instantly recognised, from every insult; but he had no occasion to use
his youthful strength a second time, for the soldiers who guarded the
tower and the city mercenaries drove back the crowd and kept the square
in front of the tower open.
The countess would not be detained long, for the sun had already sunk
behind the towers and western wall of the fortress, and the reflection of
the sunset was tinging the eastern sky with a roseate hue. The warden
really ought to have refused them admittance, for the time during which
he was permitted to take visitors to the imprisoned "Honourable" had
already passed. But for the daughters of Herr Ernst Ortlieb, to whom he
was greatly indebted, he closed his eyes to this fact, and only entreated
them to make their stay brief, for the drawbridge leading to the tower
must be raised when darkness gathered.
The young girls found their father, absorbed in grief as if utterly
crushed, seated at a table on which stood a leaden inkstand with several
sheets of paper. He still held the pen in his hand.
He received his daughters with the exclamation, "You poor, poor
children!" But when Els tried to tell him what had given her so much
pleasure, he interrupted her to accuse himself, with deep sorrow, of
having again permitted sudden passion to master him. Probably this was
the last time; such experiences would cool even the hottest blood. Then
he began to relate what had induced him to raise his hand against the
tailor, and as, in doing so, he recalled the insolent hypocrite's
spiteful manner, he again flew into so violent a rage that the blow which
he dealt the table made the ink splash up and soil both the paper lying
beside it and his own dress, still faultlessly neat even in prison. This
caused fresh wrath, and he furiously crushed the topmost sheet, already
half covered with writing, and hurled it on the floor.
Not until Els stooped to pick it up did he calm himself, saying, with a
shrug of the shoulders, "Who can remain unmoved when the whirlwind of
despair seizes him? When a swarm of hornets attacks a horse, and it
rears, who wonders? And I--What stings and blows has Fate spared me?" Els
ventured to speak soothingly to him, and remind him of God, and the
saints to whom he had made such generous offerings in building the
convent; but this awakened an association, and he asked if it were true
that Eva had refused to take the veil.
She made a silent gesture of assent, expecting another outburst of anger;
but her father only shook his head sorrowfully, clasped her right hand in
both his, and said sadly: "Poor, poor child! But she, she--your
mother--would probably----The last words her dear lips bestowed upon us
concerned you, child, and I believe their meaning----"
Here the warden interrupted him to remind the girls that it was time to
depart; but whilst Els was begging the man for a brief delay, Herr Ernst
looked first at the paper and writing materials, then at his daughters,
and added with quiet decision: "Before you go, you must hear that, in
spite of everything, I did not wholly lose courage, but began to act."
"That is right, dear father," exclaimed Els, and told him briefly and
quickly what the Council had decided, how warmly old Berthold Vorchtel
had interceded for Wolff, and that the management of the business was to
be confided solely to him.
These tidings swiftly and powerfully revived the fading hopes of the
sorely stricken man. He drew up his short figure as if the vigour of
youth had returned, declaring that he now felt sure that this first star
in the dark night would soon be followed by others. "It will now be your
Wolff's opportunity," he exclaimed, "to make amends for much that Fate
But I was commencing something else. Give me that bit of crumpled paper.
I'll look at it again early to-morrow morning; it is a letter to the
Emperor I was composing. Your brother ought not to have given up his
young life on the battlefield for the Crown in vain. He owes me
compensation for the son, you for the brother. He is certainly a
fair-minded man, and therefore will not shut his ears to my complaint.
Just wait, children! And you, my devout Eva, pray to your saint that the
petition, which concerns you also, may effect what I expect."
"And what is that?" asked Eva anxiously. "That the wrong done you, you
poor, deceived child, shall be made good," replied Herr Ernst with
imperious decision.
Eva clasped his hand, pleading warmly and tenderly: "By all that you hold
dear and sacred, I beseech you, father, not to mention me and Sir Heinz
Schorlin in your letter. If he withdrew his love from me, no imperial
decree--"
The veins on the Councillor's brow again swelled with wrath, and though
he did not burst into a passion, he exclaimed in violent excitement: "A
nobleman who declares his love to a chaste Nuremberg maiden of noble
birth assumes thereby a duty which, if unfulfilled, imposes a severe
punishment upon him. This just punishment, at least, the tempter shall
not escape. The Emperor, who proclaimed peace throughout the land and
cleared the highways of the bands of robbers, will consider it his first
duty--"
Here the warden interrupted him by calling from the threshold of the room
that the draw-bridge would be raised and the young ladies must follow him
without delay.
Eva again besought her father not to enter an accusation against the
knight, and Els warmly supported her sister; but their brief, ardent
entreaty produced no effect upon the obstinate man except, after he had
pressed a farewell kiss upon the brows of both, to tell them with
resolute dignity that the night would bring counsel, and he was quite
sure that this time, as usual, he should pursue the right course for the
real good of his dear children.
Hitherto Herr Ernst had indeed proved himself a faithful and prudent head
of his family, but this time his daughters left him with heavy, anxious
hearts.
Fear of her father's intention tortured Eva like a new misfortune, and
Els and the countess also hoped that the petition would go without the
accusation against Heinz.
Whilst the sedan-chair was bearing the girls home few words were
exchanged. Not until they approached the Frauenthor did they enter into a
more animated conversation, which referred principally to Biberli and the
question whether the Honourable Council would call Katterle to account
also, and what could be done to save both from severe punishment. Cordula
had drawn aside the curtain on the right and was gazing into the street,
apparently from curiosity, but really with great anxiety. But Herr
Pfinzing had done his part, and with the exception of several soldiers in
the pay of the city there were few people in sight near the Ortlieb
mansion.
A horse was being led up and down on the opposite side of the courtyard,
and behind the chains stood a sedan-chair with several men, to whom Metz
had just brought from the kitchen a coal of fire to light their torches.
The pretty girl looked as bright as if she felt small concern for the
severe wound of the grey-haired tailor who had chosen her for his wife.
CHAPTER XI.
As the young girls were getting out of their sedan-chair, the Frauenthor,
which was closed at nightfall, opened to admit another whose destination
also seemed to be the Ortlieb mansion.
Katterle was standing in the lower entry with her apron raised to her
face. She had learned that her true and steadfast lover had been carried
to the "Hole," and was waiting here for her mistresses and also for Herr
Pfinzing and his wife, whom old Martsche had conducted to the sittingroom
in the second story. Herr Pfinzing, in her opinion, had as much power as
the Emperor, and his wife was famed all over the city for her charitable
and active kindness. When the noble couple came down Katterle meant to
throw herself on her knees at their feet and beseech them to have mercy
on her betrothed husband. The sisters and Cordula comforted her with the
promise that they would commend Biberli's cause to the magistrate; but as
they went upstairs they again expressed to one another the fear that
Katterle herself would sooner or later follow the man she loved to
prison.
They found Herr Pfinzing and his wife in the sitting-room.
Katterle was not wrong in expecting kindly help from this lady, for a
more benevolent face than hers could scarcely be imagined, and, more
over, Fran Christine certainly did not lack strength to do what she
deemed right. Though not quite so broad as her short, extremely corpulent
husband, she surpassed him in height by several inches, and time had
transformed the pretty, slender, modest girl into a majestic woman. The
slight arch of the nose, the lofty brow, the light down on the upper lip,
and the deep voice even gave her a somewhat imperious aspect. Had it not
been for the kind, faithful eyes, and an extremely pleasant expression
about the mouth, one might have wondered how she could succeed in
inspiring everyone at the first glance with confidence in her helpful
kindness of heart.
Her grey pug had also been brought with her. How could an animal supply
the place of beloved human beings? Yet the pug had become necessary to
her since her son, like so many other young men who belonged to patrician
Nuremberg families, had fallen in the battle of Marchfield, and her
daughter had accompanied her husband to his home in Augsburg. The onerous
duties of her husband's office compelled him to leave her alone a great
deal, and even in her extremely active life there were lonely hours when
she needed a living creature that was faithfully devoted to her.
She was often overburdened with work, for every charitable institution
sought her as a "fosterer." True, in many cases their request was vain.
Whatever she undertook must be faultlessly executed, and the charge of
the orphan children in the city, the Beguines, and the hospital at her
summer residence occupied her sufficiently. During the winter she lived
with her husband at his official quarters in the castle, but as soon as
spring came she longed for her little manor at Schweinau, for she had
taken into the institution erected there for the widows of noble
crusaders, but in which only the last four of these ladies were now
supported, a number of Beguines. These were godly girls and women who did
not wish to submit to convent rules, or did not possess the favour or the
money required for admission.
Without pledging themselves to celibacy or any of the other restrictions
imposed upon the nuns, they desired only, in association with others of
the same mind, to lead a life pleasing in the sight of God and devoted to
Christian charity. Schweinau afforded abundant opportunity for charitable
women to aid suffering fellow-mortals, since it was here that the
unfortunates who had been mutilated by the hands of the executioner and
his assistants, or wounded on the rack, often nearly unto death, were
brought to be bandaged, and as far as possible healed. The Beguines
occupied themselves in nursing them, but had many a conflict with the
spiritual authorities, who preferred the monks and nuns bound by a
monastic vow. The order of St. Francis alone regarded them with favour,
interceded for them, and watched over them with kindly interest, taking
care that they were kept aloof from everything which would expose them to
reproach or blame.
Frau Christine, the Abbess Kunigunde's sister, aided her in this effort,
and the Beguines, to whom the magistrate's wife in no way belonged, but
who had given them a home on her own estate, silently rendered her
obedience when she wished to see undesirable conditions in their common
life removed.
Els, as well as Eva, had long since told Frau Christine, who was equally
dear to both, everything that afforded ground for the shameful calumnies
which had now urged their father to a deed for which he was atoning in
prison.
When, a few hours before, a messenger from her husband informed her of
what had occurred, she had instantly come to the city to see that the
right thing was done, and take the girls thus bereft of their father from
the desolate Ortlieb mansion to her own house. Herr Pfinzing had warmly
approved this plan, and accompanied her to the "Es," as he, too, was fond
of calling his nieces.
When she had been told what motives induced Eva not to confide herself
just now to the protection of the convent, Frau Christine struck her
broad hips, exclaiming, "There's something in blood! The young creature
acts as if her old aunt had thought for her."
Her invitation sounded so loving and cordial, her husband pressed it with
such winning, jovial urgency, and the pug Amicus, whose attachment to Eva
was especially noticeable, supported his mistress's wish with such ardent
zeal, that she called the sisters' attention to his intercession.
Meanwhile the girls had already expressed to each other, with the mute
language of the eyes, their inclination to accept the invitation so
affectionately extended. Els only made the condition that they were not
to go to Schweinau until early the following morning, after their visit
to their father; Eva, on the other hand, desired to go as soon as
possible, gladly and gratefully confessing to her aunt how much more
calmly she would face the future now that she was permitted to be under
her protection.
"Just creep under the old hen's wings, my little chicken; she will keep
you warm," said the kind-hearted woman, kissing Eva. But, as she began to
plan for the removal of the sisters, more visitors were
announced--indeed, several at once; first, Albert Ebner, of the Council,
and his wife, then Frau Clara Loffelholz, who came without her husband,
and the two daughters of the imperial ranger Waldstromer, Els's most
intimate friends. They had come in from the forest-house the day before
to attend Frau Maria Ortlieb's burial. Now, with their mother's
permission, they came to invite the deserted girls to the forest. The
others also begged the sisters to come to them, and so did Councillors
Schurstab, Behaim, Gross, Holzschuher, and Pirckheimer, who came, some
with their wives and some singly, to look after the daughters of their
imprisoned colleague.
The great sitting-room was filled with guests, and the stalwart figures
and shrewd, resolute faces of the men, the kind, good, and usually
pleasing countenances of the women, whose blue eyes beamed with
philanthropic benevolence, though they carried their heads high enough,
afforded a delightful spectacle, and one well calculated to inspire
respect. There could be no doubt that those whose locks were already grey
represented distinguished business houses and were accustomed to manage
great enterprises. There was not a single one whom the title "Honour of
the Family" could not have well befitted; and what cheerful
self-possession echoed in the deep voices of the men, what maternal
kindness in those of the elder women, most of whom also spoke in sonorous
tones!
Els and Eva often cast stolen glances at each other as they greeted the
visitors, thanked them, answered questions, gave explanations, accepted
apologies, received and courteously declined invitations. They did not
comprehend what had produced this sudden change of feeling in so many of
their equals in rank, what had brought them in such numbers at so late an
hour, as if the slightest delay was an offence, to their quiet house,
which that very day had seemed to Frau Vorkler too evil to permit her
children to remain in its service.
The old magistrate and his wife, on the contrary, thought that they knew.
They had helped the sisters to receive the first callers; but when Frau
Barbara Behaim, a cousin of the late Frau Maria, had appeared, they gave
up their post to her, and slipped quietly into the next room to escape
the throng.
There they retired to the niche formed by the deep walls of the broad
central window of the house, and Herr Berthold Pfinzing whispered to his
wife: "There was too much philanthropy and kindness for me in there. A
great deal of honey at once cloys me. But you, prophetess, foresaw what
is now occurring, and I, too, scarcely expected anything different. So
long as one still has a doublet left compassion is in no haste, but when
the last shirt is stripped from the body charity--thank the
saints!--moves faster. We are most ready to help those who, we feel very
sure, are suffering more than they deserve. There are many motherless
children; but young girls who have lost both parents, exposed to every
injustice----"
"Are certainly rare birds," his wife interrupted, "and this will
undoubtedly be of service to the children. But if they are now invited to
the houses of the same worthy folk who, a few hours ago, thought
themselves too good to attend the funeral of their admirable mother, and
anxiously kept their own little daughters away from them, they probably
owe it especially to the right mediators, noble old Vorchtel and
another."
"To-day, if ever, certainly furnished evidence how heavily the testimony
and example of a really estimable man weighs on the scale. The First
Losunger interceded for the children as if they were his own daughters,
attacked the slanderers, and of course I didn't leave him in the lurch."
"Peter Holzschuher declared that you defended them like the Roman
Cicero," cried Frau Christine merrily. "But don't be vexed, dear husband;
no matter how heavily the influence of the two Bertholds--Vorchtel's and
yours--weighed in the balance, nay, had that of a third and a fourth of
the best Councillors been added, what is now taking place before our eyes
and ears would not have happened, if---"
"Well?" asked the magistrate eagerly.
"If," replied the matron in a tone of the firmest conviction, "they had
not all been far from believing, even for a moment, in their inmost souls
the shameful calumny which baseness dared to cast upon those two--just
look more closely."
"Yet if that was really the case--" her husband began to object, but she
eagerly continued: "Many did not utter their better knowledge or faith
because the evil heart believes in wickedness rather than virtue,
especially if their own house contains something--we will say a young
daughter--whose shining purity is thereby brought into a clearer light.
Besides, we ourselves have often been vexed by--let us do honour to the
truth!--by the defiant manner in which your devout godchild--yonder
'little saint'--held aloof in her spiritual arrogance from the companions
of her own age----"
"And then," the corpulent husband added, "two young girls cannot be
called 'the beautiful Es' unpunished in houses which contain a less
comely T, S, and H. Just think of the Katerpecks. There--thank the
saints!--they are taking leave already."
"Don't say anything about them!" said Frau Christine, shaking her finger
threateningly. "They are good, well-behaved children. It was pretty
Ermengarde Muffel yonder by the fireplace who, after the dance at the
Town Hall, assailed your godchild most spitefully with her sharp tongue.
My friend Frau Nutzel heard her."
"Ah, that dance!" said the magistrate, sighing faintly. "But the child
was certainly distinguished in no common way. The Emperor Rudolph himself
looked after her as if an angel had appeared to him. You yourself heard
his sister's opinion of her. Her husband, the old Burgrave, and his son,
handsome Eitelfritz--But you know all that. Half would have been enough
to stir ill-will in many a heart."
"And to turn her pretty little head completely," added his wife.
"That, by our Lady, Christine," protested the magistrate, "that, at
least, did not happen. It ran off from her like water from an oil jar. I
noticed it myself, and the abbess--"
"Your sister," interrupted the matron thoughtfully, "she was the very one
who led her into the path that is not suited for her."
"No, no," the magistrate eagerly asserted. "God did not create a girl,
the mere sight of whom charms so many, to withdraw her from the gaze of
the world."
"Husband! husband!" exclaimed Frau Christine, tapping his arm gaily. "But
there go the Schurstabs and Ebners. What a noise there is in the street
below!"
Her husband looked out of the bow window, pointed down, and asked her to
come and stand beside him. When she had risen he passed his arm around
the slenderest part of her waist, which, however, he could not quite
clasp, and eagerly continued: "Just look! One would think it was a
banquet or a dance. The whole street is filled with sedan-chairs,
servants, and torch-bearers. A few hours ago the constables had hard work
to prevent the deluded people from destroying the house of the profligate
Es, and now one half of the distinguished honourable Councillors come to
pay their homage. Do you know, dear, what pleases the most in all this?"
"Well?" asked Frau Christine, turning her face towards him with a look of
eager enquiry, which showed that she expected to hear something good. But
he nodded slightly, and answered:
"We members of patrician families cling to old customs; each wants to
keep his individuality, as he would share or exchange his escutcheon with
no one. Then, when one surpasses the rest in external things, whatever
name they may bear, no one hastens to imitate him. We men are
independent, rugged fellows. But if the heart and mind of any one of us
are bent upon something really good and which may be said to be pleasing
in the sight of God, and he successfully executes it, then, Christine,
then--I have noticed it in a hundred instances--then the rest rush after
him like sheep after the bellwether."
"And this time you, and the other Berthold, were the leaders," cried Fran
Christine, hastily pressing a kiss upon her old husband's cheek behind
the curtain.
Then she turned back into the dusky chamber, pointed to the open door of
the sitting-room, and said, "just look! If that isn't----There comes
Ursula Vorchtel with her betrothed husband, young Hans Nutzel! What a
fine-looking man the slender youth has become! Ursel--her visit is
probably the greatest pleasure which Els has had during this blessed
hour."
The wise woman was right; for when Ursel held out her hands to her former
friend, whom she had studiously avoided so long, the eyes of both girls
were moist, and Els's cheeks alternately flushed and paled, like the play
of light and shadow on the ground upon a sunny morning in a leafy wood
when the wind sways the tree tops.
What did they not have to say to each other! As soon as they were
unnoticed a moment Ursel kissed her newly regained friend, and whispered,
pointing to her lover, with whom Fran Barbara Behaim was talking: "He
first taught me to know what true love is, and since then I have realised
that it was wrong and foolish for me to be angry with you, my dear Els,
and that Wolff did right to keep his troth, hard as his family made it
for him to do so. Had my Hans met me a little sooner, we should not now
have to mourn our poor Ulrich. I know--for I have tried often enough to
soothe his resentment--how greatly he incensed your lover. Oh, how sad it
all is! But your aunt, the abbess, was right when she told us before our
confirmation, 'When the cross that is imposed upon us weighs too heavily,
an angel often comes, lifts it, and twines it with lovely roses!' That
has been my experience, dear Els; and what great injustice I did you when
I kept out of your way so meanly! I always felt drawn to you. But when
that evil gossip began I turned against them all and bade them be silent
in my presence, for it was all false, base lies. I upheld your Eva, too,
as well as you, though she had been very ungracious whenever we met."
How joyously Els opened her heart to these confessions! How warmly she
interceded for her sister! The girls had passed their arms around each
other, as if they had returned to the days of their childhood, and when
Ursel's lover glanced at his betrothed bride, who, spite of her
well-formed figure and pleasant face, could not be classed amongst the
most beautiful of women, he thought she might compare in attractiveness
with the loveliest maidens, but no one could equal her in kindness of
heart. She saw this in the warm, loving look with which he sought her
pleasant grey eyes, as he approached to remind her that it was time to
go; but beckoning to him, she begged him to wait just a moment longer,
which she employed in whispering to Els: "You should find shelter with
us, and no one else, if my father----Don't think he refused to let me
invite you on account of poor Ulrich, or because he was angry with you.
It's only because----After the session to-day they all praised his noble
heart, and I don't know what else, so loudly and with such exaggeration
that it was too much to believe. If he interceded for the Eysvogel firm
and you poor children, it was only because, as a just man, he could not
do otherwise."
"Oh, Ursel!" Els here interrupted, wishing to join in her father's
praise; but the latter would not listen and eagerly continued:
"No, no, he really felt so. His modesty made him unwilling to awaken the
belief that he asked the betrothed bride of the man--you understand and
her sister into his house, to set an example of Christian reconciliation.
False praise, he says, weighs more heavily than disgrace. He has already
heard more of it than he likes, and therefore, for no other reason, he
does not open his house to you, but upon his counsel and his aid, he bids
me tell you, you can confidently rely."
Then the friends took leave of each other, and Ursula also embraced Eva,
who approached her with expressions of warm gratitude, kissed her, and
said, as she went away, "When next we meet, Miss Ungracious, I hope we
shall no longer turn our backs on each other."
When Ursel had gone with her lover, and most of the others had followed,
Els felt so elated by thankfulness that she did not understand how her
heart, burdened with such great and heavy anxieties, could be capable of
rising to such rapturous delight.
How gladly she would have hastened to Wolff to give him his share of this
feeling! But, even had not new claims constantly pressed upon her, she
could on no account have sought his hiding-place at this hour.
When the last guest and the abbess also had retired, Aunt Christine asked
Els to pack whatever she and her sister needed for the removal to
Schweinau, for Eva was to go there with her at once.
Countess Cordula, who, much as she regretted the necessity of being
separated from her companions, saw that they were right to abandon the
house from which their father had been torn, wanted to help Els, but just
as the two girls were leaving the room a new visitor arrived--Casper
Teufel, of the Council, a cousin of Casper Eysvogel, who had leaned on
his arm for support when he left the session that afternoon.
Els would not have waited for any other guest, but this one, as his first
words revealed, came from the family to which she felt that she belonged,
and the troubled face of the greyhaired, childless widower, who was
usually one of the most jovial of men, as well as the unusually late hour
of his call, indicated so serious a reason for his coming that she
stopped, and with anxious urgency asked what news he had brought.
It was not unexpected, yet his brief report fell heavily on the heart of
Els, which had just ventured to beat gaily and lightly.
Her uncle and aunt, Eva and the countess, also listened to the story.
He had accompanied Casper Eysvogel to his home and remained with him
whilst, overflowing with resentment and vehement, unbridled complaints of
the injustice and despotism to which--owing specially to the hostility
and self-conceit of old Berthold Vorchtel--he had fallen a victim, he
informed Fran Rosalinde and her mother what the Council had determined
concerning his own future and that of his family.
When he finally reported that he himself and the ladies must leave the
house and the city, Countess Rotterbach, with a scornful glance at her
deeply humiliated son-in-law, exclaimed, "This is what comes of throwing
one's self away!" The unfortunate man, already shaken to the inmost
depths of his being, sank on his knees.
Conrad Teufel had instantly placed him in bed and sent for the leech; but
even after they had bathed his head with cold water and bled him he did
not regain consciousness. His left side seemed completely paralysed, and
his tongue could barely lisp a few unintelligible words.
At the leech's desire a Sister of Charity had been sent for. Isabella
Siebenburg, the sufferer's daughter, had already gone with her twin sons,
in obedience to her husband's wish, to Heideck Castle.
She had departed in anger, because she had vainly endeavoured to induce
her mother and grandmother, who opposed her, to speak more kindly of her
husband. When they disparaged the absent man with cruel harshness, she
felt--she had told her cousin so--as if the infants could understand the
insult offered to their father, and, to protect the children even more
than herself, from her husband's feminine foes, she left the falling
house, in spite of the entreaties and burning tears with which, in the
hour of parting, her mother strove to detain her.
Ere her departure she gave her jewels and the silver which her
grandfather had bequeathed to her to Conrad Teufel, to satisfy the most
urgent demands of her husband's creditors. Her father and she had parted
kindly, and he made no attempt to oppose her.
No one except the Sister of Charity was now in attendance upon the old
gentleman; for his wife wept and wailed without finding strength to do
anything, and even reproached her own mother, whom she accused of having
plunged them all into misfortune, and caused the stroke of paralysis from
which her husband was suffering.
The grey-haired countess, the cousin went on, had passed from one attack
of convulsions into another, and when he approached her had shrieked the
words "ingratitude" and "base reward" so shrilly at him, in various
tones, that they were still ringing in his ears.
Everything in the luckless household was out of gear, and its noble
guest, the Duke von Gulich, would feel the consequences, for the servants
had lost their wits too. Spite of the countless men and maids, he had
been obliged to go himself to the pump to get a glass of water for the
sick man, and the fragments of the vase which the grandmother had flung
at him with her own noble hand were still lying on the floor. His name
was Teufel--[devil]--but even in his home in Hades things could scarcely
be worse.
When Herr Teufel at last paused, the magistrate and his wife exchanged a
significant glance, while Eva gazed with deep suspense, and Cordula with
earnest pity, at Els, who had listened to the story fairly panting for
breath.
When she raised her tearful eyes to Herr Pfinzing and Frau Christine,
saying mournfully, "I must beg you to excuse me, my dear aunt and uncle;
you have heard how much my Wolff's father needs me," all saw their
expectations fulfilled.
"Hard, hard!" said the magistrate, patting her on the shoulder. "Yet the
lead with which we burden ourselves from kindly intentions becomes wood,
or at last even feathers."
But Frau Christine was not content with uttering cheering words; she
offered to accompany Els and secure the place to which she was entitled.
Frau Rosalinde had formerly often visited the matron to seek counsel, and
had shown her, with embarrassing plainness, how willingly she admitted
her superior ability. She disliked the old countess--but with whom would
not the self-reliant woman, conscious of her good intentions, have dared
to cope? Since the daughter of the house had left her relatives, the
place beside his father's sick-bed belonged to the son's future wife.
Frau Rosalinde was weak, but not the worst of women. "Just wait, child,"
Aunt Christine concluded, "she will see soon enough what a blessing
enters the house and the sick-room with you. We will try to erect a wall
against the old woman's spite."
Conrad Teufel confessed that he had come with the hope of inducing Els,
who had nursed her own mother so skilfully and patiently, to make so
praiseworthy a resolution. In taking leave he promised to keep a sharp
lookout for her rights, and, if necessary, to show the old she-devil his
own cloven foot.
After he, too, had gone, the preparations for the sisters' departure were
commenced. Whilst Cordula was helping Eva to select the articles she
wished to take to Schweinau, and her older sister, with Katterle's
assistance, was packing the few pieces of clothing she needed as a nurse
in the Eysvogel family, the countess offered to visit Herr Ernst in the
watch-tower early the following morning and tell him what detained his
daughters. Towards evening Eva could come into the city under the
protection of her aunt, who had many claims upon her the next day, and
see the prisoner.
This time, to the surprise of her sister, who had always relieved her of
such cares, Eva herself did the packing. When she had finished she led
the weeping Katterle to her uncle, that she might beg for mercy upon her
lover.
The magistrate was thoroughly aware of the course of affairs, and talked
to the maid with the gentle manner, pervaded with genuine kindness of
heart, which was one of his characteristics. Biberli had already been
subjected to an examination by torture; but even on the rack he had not
said one word about his betrothed bride, and had resolutely denied
everything which could criminate his master. A second trial awaited him 